By the time Black Country, New Road released their sprawling second album *Ants from Up There* in 2022, lead vocalist Isaac Wood had departed the London-based indie experimentalists and a magical first phase of the group had come to a close. Rather than tour those records without their original singer, they rejigged their dynamic and wrote a whole new batch of songs—captured on 2023’s *Live at Bush Hall*—to initiate a new period of the band where vocals and much of the songwriting were led by Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw. It made for an exhilarating fresh start and their third album *Forever Howlong* directly picks up from the momentum of starting over again. “We’d done a lot of touring of the live album and we really wanted to further develop this new lineup and write new songs so we could get them into the set list,” saxophonist Lewis Evans tells Apple Music. “There’s a whole bunch of songs within the album that were written fairly early on as a buffer to the *Live at Bush Hall* songs so we could not have to play the same thing every single night.” That feeling of trying to capture the energy and edginess of a live show runs right through *Forever Howlong*. It’s a record of tightly mapped baroque folk pop, jagged indie explosions, and woodwind-heavy art-rock explorations, and it feels punchier and more contained than their previous work. “\[The songs\] developed way more on the live setting,” says Evans. “Our headspace was to really make sure that all of the songs that were brought into the writing room, to the rehearsal room, were arranged in such a way that the song could be served as well as possible and not adding anything to it that didn’t need to be there.” Drummer Charlie Wayne thinks that, even without the lineup change, the band was always heading towards doing something different. “I think it was always trending in this direction,” he says. “Having the three different singers definitely gave it a different quality, both in terms of the outcome and also in the actual songwriting. Three different perspectives grants you three completely different worlds to dive into and to try and pull together.” Let Evans and Wayne guide you through *Forever Howlong*, track by track. **“Besties”** Lewis Evans: “It’s a great big fanfare opening, really ramshackle and swashbuckling. It’s a great introduction into the new sound. It’s still got this very BCNR musical-communication thing that we have but also feels like a new style. That’s also why it was good to do as the first single, it was a good welcome to the new thing.” **“The Big Spin”** LE: “This was the first of the songs which we’re calling the Holy Trinity on the record, those songs being ‘The Big Spin,’ ‘Besties,’ and ‘Happy Birthday,’ which all came together at a very similar time. May brought this song in. It was much more light-hearted and groovy, and it had this light feel that we haven’t had before as a band. That went on to really inspire Georgia’s writing for ‘Besties,’ which then really inspired Tyler’s writing for ‘Happy Birthday,’ so this was the start of the domino effect of those three pop-ish songs on the record.” **“Socks”** Charlie Wayne: “This was one that we wrote at the beginning of last year. I think we saw Tyler performing a version of it on the piano before we’d thought about it as a band thing. It’s weird because it’s like a mini musical in itself, there are loads of ups and downs, and you can really focus in on the songwriter and the voice, and the band operates around it and expands and contracts. There are moments of real softness and rubato, that the time is moving in and out and it’s not, you’re just focusing in on the piano. Tyler recorded it all in that way, and the band had to try and play around her performance instincts where she allowed herself to just be on the piano playing with it.” **“Salem Sisters”** LE: “I originally wrote this song and sang on it live for a while when I was singing in the band for a short spell. I decided against singing anymore because I just didn’t enjoy it whatsoever. I thought that Tyler would be best suited for singing it. She wrote new lyrics, and it benefits a lot more from her vocals. I wasn’t able to bring what she can to the song. It’s like the closest we get to a ’70s songwriter-y throwback tune on the record I think but it still retains quite a bit of weirdness that I don’t think would exist quite yet in the ’70s. It’s a catchy song.” **“Two Horses”** CW: “This slightly preceded the actual getting under the bonnet and figuring out what the album is. It was the first time that Georgia really felt as though she brought a song specifically for BCNR with the intention of figuring out what her songwriting was going to maybe look like. Georgia had written a pretty good, complete song and all the arrangements had already been thought out. One of the big takeaways in the album is just serving songs and sometimes they don’t need to be these enormous expansive things, no one needs to be playing extremely loud all the time. It can just be following the journey.” LE: “This is quite a unique record for us because there’s no one way that we’ve written all the songs. This one is the only time we’ve ever written a song where it was all thought out before it was in the practice room. Georgia had a proper Brian Wilson imagination with this song and she knew exactly how she wanted it to sound. We were like, ‘No, let’s put our own thing on it,’ and then it worked out actually better the way that she decided it in the first place.” **“Mary”** CW: “This is the bit in the album where you can kind of step back from the instrumentation, which can often be a massive focal point of the band. It was a song that was always just going to work with the three vocals. It’s heavily inspired by The Roches. Having very light instrumentation behind it gives you the opportunity to see it as like group storytelling, watching those voices deviate away from each other and then come back.” **“Happy Birthday”** LE: “This was the quickest song to put together. It basically arranged itself. Tyler played us a couple of songs that she’d been writing when she went on a writing retreat in Italy with some friends. She played ‘Happy Birthday,’ which was called ‘Kids’ at the time, but we didn’t want to name it the same as the MGMT song, so we opted for a more famous song. We took it into the rehearsal room and just banged it out in a couple rehearsals, really. It was so satisfying and punchy, it really felt like we were so in the groove at that point. We all knew what the record was. We all knew at that point this song was going to be the thing that completes the album a little bit.” **“For the Cold Country”** LE: “May played this for the first time on the piano, or at the rough outline of it, when we were mixing *Live at Bush Hall*. I remember being like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. How the fuck are we going to make that into a BCNR song?’ We spent the next two years trying to write it, because it is just unwieldy and enormous.” CW: “It didn’t really make sense until we’d gotten into the studio and we felt as though we could place everyone in a small room and then expand out again from there.” LE: “This was one of those songs that really didn’t benefit from us playing it loads live because we realized what was best suited for it was that the first half be this acoustic, really acoustic, warm, woody feeling section that would then open up into a more expansive guitars would turn electric.” **“Nancy Tries to Take the Night”** LE: “This was also an earlier-stage one. Tyler had the whole first half of the song, just the two acoustic guitars and the chorus, the chorus melody thing that happens. The whole minimalist section hadn’t yet been written. We felt like we wanted a new part of the song, and so I wrote this minimalist cell block kind of thing. It was quite inspired by something that I heard on a new Kiran Leonard record. That allowed us to have these two very different sections that are really contrasting.” **“Forever Howlong”** CW: “We started off doing a band arrangement for this and it didn’t quite fit. After speaking about it, May was like, ‘I think maybe it would sound really good if all of us were playing five clarinets as an arrangement,’ which was a cool idea, but maybe slightly impractical. The next best step was five recorders. The beginning of the song is fairly sparse and simple because all of us didn’t know how to properly play the recorder, and it gets more complicated towards the end. The bit at the end, which is a bit like a carousel, is a bit of a victory lap for us because we just all get our individual parts to play because we can all actually play them. The Royal Society of Recorders and Recorder Players should be getting in touch soon.” **“Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”** LE: “This is the oldest song on the record. Georgia brought this in when we were writing *…Bush Hall* stuff in 2022 and because she just wasn’t around enough because of Jockstrap commitments \[Ellery is also one half of Jockstrap\], we didn’t play it. We’d kind of made a half-baked version of it and it was good, but it really wasn’t sitting with the stuff that we were doing on *…Bush Hall*. But then as these songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘The Big Spin’ and ‘Besties’ came about, it really started to make more sense. We were really trying to go for a Neil Young thing on this tune, and the way that it can feel loose, but also there’s a deeper feeling in the pit of your stomach about it that is an unexplainable thing that just grooves. I don’t know if we quite achieved it, but the ending was meant to sound like The Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain.’ I don’t know if we achieved that at all! It ends up its own thing a bit, which is what you aim for when you say you want to have a reference for something—if it ends up not sounding like that, then you’ve won a little bit.”

The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.

In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”

Even listeners familiar with Dan Bejar’s trip can find first encounters with a new album forbidding, a door slammed in your face when you’d shown up looking for a good time. A misty buffet of variety-show pop (“Dan’s Boogie”), Bowie-style glam (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”), and fake tropical jazz (“Cataract Time”), *Dan’s Boogie* is—like a lot of his albums since 2011’s *Kaputt*—both featherlight and impenetrably dense, filled with chintzy musical touches (the maudlin piano runs on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”) and lyrical asides so flatly stated that the words strain against their meaning (“The Ignoramus of Love”: “I remix horses”). He’s funny, he’s surprising, he’s (ugh) “literate,” but most of all, you get the sense that he’s always nudging himself toward the unknown—a quality that commands respect when a lazier man would settle for a like.

The tale of Sonny Moore’s career is a long and unpredictable one: Emo kid from LA makes a name as leader of a screamo band, then pivots in the late 2000s to effectively redefine dubstep for millions of raging revelers at the exact moment the EDM economy exploded. Early 2010s EPs like *Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites* are now considered canon; along the way, he had a hand in some of the best pure pop tunes of the decade, scored a Harmony Korine film (2012’s *Spring Breakers*), and circled back to reunite with his old band, From First to Last. But for his outsized impact on the past two decades of pop culture, his studio albums have been few and, well, not always far between. Nine years passed between his full-length debut, 2014’s *Recess*, and his second album, 2023’s *Quest for Fire*; one day later, he released his third album, *Don’t Get Too Close*. Naturally, it follows that the roguish superproducer would drop his fourth album out of the sky with no warning on April Fools’ Day. But the appeal of the so-called “brostep” disrupter has long been his ability to balance his prankster impulses with technical wizardry and boundary-pushing ideas. And though the title’s all-caps rant is delivered with a wink, there is a case for *F\*CK U SKRILLEX...* as a work of bona fide pop art. In this case, replace soup cans with DJ drops, which Skrillex incorporates gratuitously in a way you might call avant-garde as the album’s 34 tracks gallop into one another, then disappear just as you’ve started to wrap your head around them. Cacophonous Brazilian phonk wails into classic dubstep, hardcore techno, trance, and less-than-a-minute bursts of pop-EDM perfection. Meanwhile, increasingly unhinged Trap-A-holics-type DJ drops hint playfully at Skrillex’s mindset at this juncture in his career. “REJECT SOCIETY! RETURN TO NATURE!” bellows one such drop over the mystic-sounding “KORABU,” which crams six collaborators into two minutes (among them Drain Gang affiliates Whitearmor and Varg2™). “I SOLD MY SOUL TO GIVE YOU THIS SONG!” proclaims another one on “ZEET NOISE,” whose breakneck beat is co-produced by Boys Noize and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. “THIS BEAT DROP HAS BEEN SEIZED BY ATLANTIC RECORDS AND HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH SILENCE!” the cartoonish voice announces a minute into “BIGGY BAP” before the build-up ratchets back and the narration continues: “MY LIFE IS IN SHAMBLES! I HAVE SEVERE DEPRESSION!” Yet on “VOLTAGE,” the Platonic ideal of “filthy dubstep” erupts into a sentimental chorus: “Gotta believe there’s something more!” Of course, that’s before our ringleader brings things back to earth on closing track “AZASU” with a hearty thank-you to “the unknown graffiti artist who vandalized our wall,” as pictured on the album cover. These days, you never know where you might stumble upon a bold new work of pop art.

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

Great Grandpa’s third album almost didn’t happen. While working on the follow-up to 2019’s *Four of Arrows*, the five-piece drifted apart, with non-band life taking over and the members scattering from their onetime home base of Seattle to further-flung corners of the globe. But fate intervened, and in 2023 the group threw out what they’d been working on and began creating what would become *Patience, Moonbeam*. The album’s ambitious nature becomes immediately apparent with the opening interlude “Sleep,” a brief yet potent string piece that condenses the story arc of a night’s slumber into less than 40 seconds. But *Patience, Moonbeam* packages its aspirations in a collection that has the surface vibe of slacker-pop, with easygoing rhythms, instantly hummable hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, making its sudden left turns and emotional peaks hit even harder. Take “Ladybug,” which at its outset meshes Great Grandpa’s chilled-out acoustic guitars with the ultra-processed vocals and buzzy synths that define hyperpop. That segues into a more traditional indie-rock shuffle. Lead vocalist Al Menne’s winsome wail free-associates pop-culture images—Donald Glover on the cover of *GQ*, a line snatched from “All You Need Is Love”—before the digitally refracted voice rises up again: “I wish I could feel that good,” it laments, over and over, the mechanized voice conveying genuine longing for a world that should exist somewhere. It’s a wild combination, but Great Grandpa’s ability to bring together those disparate elements and inject them with full-band emotionalism makes everything come together. *Patience, Moonbeam* is full of moments where Great Grandpa explodes in glorious, and at times heartbreaking, fashion. “Task” shapeshifts from hiccuping chaos into a longing hymn; “Kid” reflects on guitarist Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin losing their first pregnancy, all the while knowing that mourning is something not to be rushed. It’s a record defined by wonder and possibility, and it was made by a band that came back together just in the nick of time.

The secret to Aya Sinclair’s uneasy mix of harsh noise and club music is its intimacy: No matter how blown out or mechanistic it gets, you always feel the presence of a regular old person behind it. The product of a teenage diet of Aphex Twin and Autechre on one hand and screamo and nu metal on the other, *hexed!* is, first and foremost, a therapeutic endeavor, fragile and balladic here (“droplets”), ragey there (“I am the pipe I hit myself with”), beautiful (“peach”) and spooky (“Time at the Bar”), and above all, extreme. And for music Sinclair has said was in some respects about her sobriety, it’s refreshingly funny (“off to the ESSO”). She isn’t reflecting on her nightmarish bad times—she’s bringing them back to life with clarity and power.

For their first album in seven years, and first as a trio, the British folk-rockers Mumford & Sons went back to their roots. *RUSHMERE*, their fifth album, is named after the pub in southwest London where Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane, and Ben Lovett first got to know each other as friends and eventual creative collaborators. They were humble days, coming years before tracks like “Little Lion Man” helped define a strand of optimistic folk pop that dominated the early 2010s and influenced 2020s stadium-fillers like Noah Kahan and Zach Bryan. *RUSHMERE* pulls back from the pomp and splendor of folk-rock stardom and gets back to basics: furiously played guitars and rousing vocal harmonies, with Marcus Mumford’s sincere, resolute burr leading the way. Produced by Nashville straight-shooter Dave Cobb, who’s known for his unfussy, song-forward approach to the studio, *RUSHMERE* places the powerful songwriting and strong musical chemistry of Mumford & Sons front and center. “Monochrome” is a hushed hymn to a long-gone muse, with Mumford rueful about time’s passage yet generous to someone who has faded to “monochrome out of sight.” The stirring “Surrender” is propelled by stomps and strummed strings, moving briskly forward even as Mumford sings of his world-weariness. “Blood on the Page,” a collaboration with next-generation folk-rocker Madison Cunningham, is delicate and ghostly in a way that amplifies the pain in its lyrics. “Time, don’t let us down again/’Cause I won’t wait,” the trio wails near the end of the title track, with ferocious banjos driving home the plea’s urgency. It’s a sly callback to “I Will Wait,” the 2012 song that cemented Mumford & Sons as leaders of the 2010s’ folk-rock vanguard. But it’s also a signal of the urgency and hope underpinning *RUSHMERE*, making it a taut, potent statement of reintroduction that doubles as a declaration of intent to stick around.

Since the early 2010s, the shadowy British collective Snapped Ankles has been raging against 21st-century malaise with harsh electronics and urgent beats. Clad in ghillie suits—outfits designed to resemble moss-covered foliage and other curios of nature—that seem more suited for hiding in a post-apocalyptic landscape than the present day, they create cracked anthems that feel like dispatches from a ruined future. Their fifth album’s title, which is borrowed from a 2010 collection of American author Alice Walker’s poetry, sums up how Snapped Ankles defy what they view as a complacent world. *Hard Times Furious Dancing* is not just their latest manifesto, though; it’s a noisy, up-front invitation to join the group’s pseudonymous members on the dance floor as they bellow big, society-shaping questions like “How we gonna pay the rent?” and “What happened to humanity?” Snapped Ankles combine the fitful rhythms of post-punk with a battery of synths that flutter and strobe, offering a glaring reflection for the confusion and unease outlined in the group’s sloganlike lyrics. At times, they echo their forebears from the ’70s and ’80s, updating the musical tracts of then with added noise and maximized vexation that’s appropriate to the present day. “Personal Responsibilities” tilts a crooked finger toward “very large corporations” amid a clamor that recalls British art-rock legends The Fall, while the grinding arpeggiated synths of the tech-skeptic call “Smart World” bring to mind Tubeway Army’s existentially bothered 1979 single “Are \'Friends\' Electric?” “Hard times require furious dancing,” Walker wrote in the preface to her poetry collection 15 years ago. “Each of us is the proof.” Snapped Ankles bear out that declaration with music that is furious in both intent and execution, fueled by wrath and ready to command an audience to seethe and spit alongside them.

As much as his Griselda affiliation connects him with a Buffalo, NY state of mind, Boldy James remains a Detroit rapper through and through. Coming amid a fast-and-furious run of new releases from the prodigious spitter, *Hommage* rightfully centers him in his hometown both physically and sonically. With the help of Antt Beatz, producer behind favorites by 42 Dugg and Icewear Vezzo, he shares his astutely local vision of the city on cuts like “Concrete Connie” and “Super Mario.” Even the track titles themselves reflect the rapper’s clever brand of lyricism, as cuts like the exultant “Brick James” and “Himothy Mcveigh” contain his all-but-patented blend of narco knowledge drops and street king statements. As expected, the guest list is rightfully restricted to residents, with Baby Money giving nothing but straight talk on the booming “Off the Richter” and BandGang Lonnie Bands trading tight verses off with Boldy on the melancholic “Met Me.”

The producer born Brian Piñeyro has spent the past decade forging his own serpentine lane in underground dance music, recontextualizing reggaetón’s iconic dembow rhythm as something heady and ethereal, though no less sensual. Past releases have seen Python incorporate elements of dub, deep house, and shoegaze for tracks that fill the dance floor while floating just above it. But on his first solo release since 2022’s *Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2* EP (and his first for XL Records), the producer reintroduces himself as a vocalist, too, murmuring sweet nothings on tracks like the IDM-inspired “Marry Me Maia” and the slinky “Coquine.” Elsewhere, he links with club luminaries worldwide—Honduran reggaetón sensation Isabella Lovestory, London rapper Jawnino, and NYC nightlife hero Total Freedom, who co-produces the euphoric “Elio’s Lived Behind My House Forever.”

Will Smith has heard the chatter. So much of it, in fact, that the armchair punditry he apes on his *Based on a True Story* opener, “Int. Barbershop - Day,” sounds like it could be a field recording from any number of Black American gathering spaces. “Who the fuck Will Smith think he is?/And that boy damn crazy how he raising them kids,” goes a particularly cartoony quip. But that’s the beauty of Smith’s creative practice. Whether as star of television’s groundbreaking *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*, hunky lead of rom-coms like *Hitch*, and even action flicks like the *Bad Boys* franchise, Smith has never had a problem poking fun at himself. But keep playing…and he’ll get serious quick. Which is exactly what happens on *Based on a True Story*, Smith’s first body of work following 2022’s infamous Chris Rock/Oscars altercation and his first full-length album since 2005’s *Lost and Found*. Once he gets the jokes out of the way, Smith is out to remind us that he can still rap, and maybe more importantly, that he’s one of the greatest entertainers of all time. The album is Smith doing him to the fullest extent of his abilities, reveling in a storied legacy of acting and rapping (“You Lookin’ For Me?,” “Bulletproof,” “Tantrum”), while affirming his faith and the respect he has for his status as a role model (“Beautiful Scars,” “Make It Look Easy,” “You Can Make It”). It’s no light lift, but as he states on “Work of Art,” he’s built for it: “Ima king no denying this/Every limit, I’m defying it/Everybody wanna be a lion/Until it’s time to do lion shit,” he raps. Say what you want about Will Smith—you probably already have—but if you let him tell the story, there’s gonna be a little bit of boasting and a whole of gratitude. And that’s as close to the truth as we’re gonna get.**