It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.

*Rarely Do I Dream* is Trevor Powers’ fifth album as Youth Lagoon and second since he reemerged in 2023 with *Heaven Is a Junkyard* after a seven-year break. Finding Powers sifting through the universe he’s created, discovering joy in what others paint as mundane, it begins with a shuffling drum groove and an audio sample taken from a home movie, setting the DIY, homespun tone for the album. “Speed Freak” features a distorted bass melody and clanging drums accented by a dash of cassette-tape hiss. “Parking Lot” is a gorgeous piano ballad that puts its title in a romantic light. “What a parking lot,” he marvels. “Eight little spaces/Don’t let him lose/Let him cruise for the spot.”

On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, the former musical director for Daniel Caesar and Willow Smith grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.

It was over a meal towards the end of touring their second album, *Gigi’s Recovery*, at the end of 2023 that the artistic blueprint for what would become *Blindness* came into being for The Murder Capital. *Gigi’s Recovery* was a mesmeric leap forward for the Irish quintet, the tightly wound post-punk of their 2019 debut, *When I Have Fears*, unfurling into something more wide-screen and dramatic. However, extended bouts of touring, including support slots with heavyweights Pearl Jam and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, had turned The Murder Capital into a dynamically thrilling rock band. They wanted their next move to reflect that. “There’s quite an expansive and indulgent cinematic approach on our second record,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “We went for dinner, and we all came together in agreement that we wanted to inject an urgency and an energy back into the music again. It was probably the first time we had a shared manifesto going into making a record.” It has resulted in an epic but lean rock record, the grooves a little looser-limbed, the hooks sharp—the sound of a band realizing exactly who they are three albums in. “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working,” says McGovern. “We made no demos going into the studio, just phone recordings, and that really refocused us on what the substance of a song actually is, what we’re drawn to and what it means when it’s just those bare things.” Exploring themes of patriotism and nationalism alongside reflections on love and romance, *Blindness* is a gripping listen from start to finish. Let McGovern and guitarist Damien Tuit guide you through it, track by track. **“Moonshot”** Damien Tuit: “We wanted to open the record with this because it just bursts out of the speakers.” James McGovern: “It kicked the door down. It stood for everything that we’d set out to do in the very beginning. As you make a record, you’re brought down all these other garden paths that you don’t expect, but ‘Moonshot’ really just kind of stood for that. It had that exact character.” **“Words Lost Meaning”** DT: “This is an example of us being more than the sum of our parts. Gabe \[bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake\] had the bassline for the verse, and then I got some chords together for the chorus, and then James has this hook. It’s everyone working together, and it came together in a couple hours.” JM: “Months later, we were talking about this tune, and Gabe told us he was having a row with his girlfriend, and he’s not really a man of conflict, so he took some space for himself and went to play some bass and do a bit of writing, and that’s where he wrote this bassline. It’s kind of funny how the subject matter of the song unknowingly became about friction within a relationship itself.” **“Can’t Pretend to Know”** JM: “This has been through many different footings. It was a tune that I started out at home on the acoustic. I felt a love for it pretty quickly and then brought it in, and it went through a few different phases.” DT: “The initial version was slowed down: Pump \[guitarist Cathal Roper\] was doing a Chili Peppers kind of rhythm. When we were in the studio, John \[producer John Congleton\] forced us to push it full tilt. It was one that really grew in the studio.” **“A Distant Life”** DT: “That was written on tour. All the venues on this UK tour were freezing for some reason, and I had my guitar on. I was just plucking away, and James came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s just write a song.’” JM: “We were in transit to one of the many inspiring service stops in the UK, and I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, *Poetry Unbound*, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It’s a beautiful podcast, and he was doing Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bread,’ and she had a line in it about the salt taste of a mouth or something like that, so I nicked that line and started writing in the service station. That night, I went up to Irv \[Tuit’s nickname\], and he had two chords, but it was where he took it.” DT: “I played the first two chords and then just started following where he was going vocally, and that was that—the song pretty much done.” **“Born into the Fight”** DT: “We fucked around with a couple of different time signatures on this. You have to do that on one song every album before you go back to the time signature you can play in. This was Pump working his magic. Those were his chords, and it’s always nice when he’s playing keys because he just adds a different dimension.” JM: “I was really enjoying writing about rejection of faith and exploring that, having conversations with the lads about their experience of growing up in Ireland and saying prayers in class and all those things. There was a good tinder there that we wanted to keep exploring.” **“Love of Country”** DT: “We were jamming in the room in Dublin, and James was writing in his notebook, and then we stopped, and he read us out this poem and the room was just silent. We were like, ‘Yeah, that feels great.’” JM: “I know a lot of artists say this, but sometimes you are writing, and it does feel like you’re observing it a bit. The whole poem came out fully formed, really. I don’t think I edited anything in it. It was something that I’ve wanted to express for a long time. It’s not just the fact that we’ve just seen the riots in Dublin, or it’s not just the fact that there’s a hyper fixation on national ideologies globally now. It’s also feeling, as a kid, the anti-British sentiment on the playground or all these things and feeling rubbed up the wrong way by that stuff, this kind of ownership over land. It all seems to have come together into this tune in some way, as a small part of that conversation.” **“The Fall”** JM: “This was the first thing in my lyric notebook from this whole record. I’d written them in Cologne on tour. I remember all us really buzzing on the chords for this tune. We had a really good time playing it in our road-testing shows that we did at the MOTH Club in London and The Grand Social in Dublin. People were absolutely going mad for it, so it had something—we just had to put it together. It’s about how no one can change you but yourself, no matter what you’re going through, really.” **“Death of a Giant”** DT: “We were in Dublin, and Shane MacGowan’s funeral was on \[in December 2023\]. We all went and watched the hearse go by in the streets and then went straight into the room, and James just put some words about it to the music.” JM: “It just so happened that the procession was that day. We were just there to pay our respects. I think if the Irish do anything well, they celebrate death well. There was a real beauty to everything about the hearse, these black horses—the most majestic horses you’ve ever seen—and the young marching band. I didn’t really grow up on too much of The Pogues or Shane MacGowan’s work; it was only in my early twenties and starting this band, hanging out with mates and other bands, that I started to get into the breadth of his work. You could feel it that day with people singing on the street that there’s just something about him. I think, through all of his personal struggles, he as an artist really had his finger around the pulse of humanity more accurately than a lot of artists—and with such vulnerability and \[as\] a real true romantic as well. It’s nice to tip our cap in the only way we really can.” **“Swallow”** DT: “This began in my apartment with a loop, and James came over, added his part. Pump came over another day and added a part, edited it together, and then we sort of had demo-itis with it for a long time. One of the big lessons doing this album in the studio was trying to be kind to the music—something I think we struggled with generally. It’s difficult when you’re writing music—being gentle with how you critique and how you try and mold it and how you collaborate, because when you’re writing an album in the way we do—which is real true collaboration where we’re all bringing in stuff—there’s going to be some stuff that you don’t see for a long time.” JM: “That was me. I couldn’t see this song’s place in our world, but by the time it started to get recorded, I understood it. I had a great struggle with seeing this tune. Now I love it when I listen to the record.” **“That Feeling”** JM: “This was a really exciting one because it just fell out of a jam. We were in London in our studio in Holloway \[north London\]. We came back from a lunch break or something, picked up the instruments, started playing together, and there was ‘That Feeling’ almost in its entirety.” DT: “This one might be the only one that was born from a true jam on this album.” **“Trailing a Wing”** JM: “There’s a sweetness to this. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it’s there. It’s also a funny one. We played a show in Belfast, and I was out for dinner with my couple of cousins and aunties and stuff up there. We were in a Thai restaurant, and an actor who will remain unnamed walked into the restaurant, and my aunt said, ‘There’s that fella, he’s always trailing a wing.’ So, I was like, ‘What does that mean?!’ Obviously, he just cheats on his wife loads, but I thought it was a beautiful adage!”

The 21-year-old Canadian multi-hyphenate has barely stopped to take a breath since kindergarten: She began intensive dance training at age six, scored a record deal at 16, and tied for top nominee for the 2025 JUNO Awards. Her third studio album arrives just a few months after the end of her 2024 world tour in support of her sophomore album, 2023’s *THINK LATER*. “Being on tour for a year feels like a million years—you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I have been gone for a lifetime,’” McRae tells Apple Music, though naturally she used the time as a learning opportunity. “Being onstage every night and analyzing yourself that much, you become uber-aware of yourself and what’s going on.” She began paying closer attention to exactly what kind of songs inspired her to move, what beats triggered her dancers to get—in a word—“nasty.” *So Close to What* is not exactly a club record—more like a pop record you can viscerally feel, conducive to the kind of choreo that makes a killer stage show. Prominent on McRae’s mood board were Timbaland and The Neptunes, whose kinetic productions made the aughts feel like the future. Echoes of sparkly, club-friendly 2000s R&B abound: “bloodonmyhands” recruits Flo Milli for a Miami bass throwback, while “Purple lace bra” lands somewhere between The-Dream’s *Love vs. Money* and Lana Del Rey’s *Born to Die* (which checks out, given the latter album’s producer, Emile Haynie, among the credits). And on “Sports car,” McRae and co-writer Julia Michaels found unlikely inspiration in a 2005 crunk classic. “\[Michaels\] had been dying to reference the Ying Yang Twins’ ‘The Whisper Song,’ and I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” she says. Sure enough, the concept worked. The secret to writing her most grown-up album to date, as McRae explains, was a writer’s room that skewed heavily towards women (including Michaels and songwriter Amy Allen). “With music and finding perspective on situations, no one quite understands like another girl,” McRae explains. “You need another girl to know exactly what we’ve gone through and to know what it actually feels like in order to write a song. When you’re in a writing session, you have to be one brain together, and if it’s not that, that’s when chaos happens,” she went on. “It is so liberating to be with other girls and talk about things that are so frustrating and then feel so satisfied and accomplished after.”

Louie Pastel and Felix actually hail from Los Angeles, borrowing their name from the title of Wim Wenders’ 1984 road movie. But beyond showing their movie-geek bona fides, the choice also speaks to their fondness for juxtaposing elements that might not typically go together—let’s say, West Coast G-funk and sneering punk rock, which they meld seamlessly on “Dogma 25,” where they deliver the odd cinephiliac bar (“Stanley Kubrick, how I’m making a scene”) in matching growls that do Tumblr-era Tyler, the Creator justice. Since their 2018 debut EP, *I’ll Get My Revenge in Hell*, the duo have earned comparisons to alternative rap groups like Death Grips and clipping. But *They Left Me With the Sword*, their third official EP, suggests that they’re equally inspired by blog-era cult faves The Cool Kids, whose retro-futuristic minimalism they channel on “Holy Spinal Fluid” and “El Camino.” (The latter, with its vocoder balladry and tight lyricism, showcases the pair at their best.)

Over the past 25 years, Killswitch Engage has spread a message of positivity and unity through aggressive music. And while the Massachusetts metalcore band has written its share of breakup songs and tales of personal turmoil, *This Consequence* is probably its darkest and most political album to date. “I dig that we’re kind of known as the metal band with a positive twist,” guitarist and producer Adam Dutkiewicz tells Apple Music. “But I like that we get a little darker in some of the songs on this record. It definitely feels like a fresher album to me because of the variation in topics. Not everything’s about cheering up and getting through something with positivity this time.” Indeed, tracks like “Abandon Us” and “Discordant Nation” speak to our turbulent times, while “Aftermath” sees vocalist Jesse Leach singing about rebuilding after the pandemic. Elsewhere, “Broken Glass” and “The Fall of Us” are two of the heaviest songs Killswitch has ever written, while singles “Forever Aligned” and “I Believe” maintain the band’s trademark positivity and soaring choruses. Below, Dutkiewicz comments on each track. **“Abandon Us”** “That’s a song I wrote, a perfect example of me writing a full song and then showing it to the guys, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, cool. Let’s use this.’ I think the topics within the song are pretty cool. It feels a bit more political than anything we’ve ever done. And we like aggressive opening songs on records—something to just come out of the gates fast.” **“Discordant Nation”** “This came from a demo that Joel \[Stroetzel\], our other guitar player, wrote. I feel like it kind of alludes to Testament, which is a band he loves. We heard it and just thought it kicked ass. I think Joel and I may have worked on the bridge together on that song. Lyrically, it’s about the use of fear as a means of control.” **“Aftermath”** “Our drummer Justin \[Foley\] wrote this one. I think we might’ve changed some guitar parts a little bit, just because we’re the guitar players, dammit! But it’s mostly J-Fo. I think Jesse’s lyrics stemmed from the idea of picking up the pieces of your life after going through something like COVID. Some people were so affected by what happened with the world shutting down and people losing their jobs.” **“Forever Aligned”** “Lyrically, this one’s right up there with what we’re known for. It’s about the positivity of people being together and the importance of unity, especially through your close relationships. Musically, I’m pretty sure I wrote that whole thing. It was one of those situations where I came up with a riff and turned it into a whole song within a few hours.” **“I Believe”** “Another song that fits right in with what we’re known for. I love the positivity in the lyrics. I feel like it’s a good message to put out there nowadays: Everybody just respect each other and take care of each other. And that song was all Joel. He wrote the whole thing. He came up with a demo and just spit the whole thing out.” **“Where It Dies”** “I wrote this as sort of an old-school hardcore intro going into a thrash-type song. I think Jesse’s lyrics are about a broken relationship or an abusive relationship—and cutting that relationship off.” **“Collusion”** “It’s funny—this is a song I wrote for our last album, *Atonement*. We actually recorded it, too, but Jesse never wrote lyrics to it. When it came time to do this album, I was like, ‘Hey, we still have this song if you wanna use it.’ So, it ended up on this record instead. And I’m glad it did, because I think it’s got a cool personality.” **“The Fall of Us”** “The funny story about this one is that I’ve got a side project with Corpsegrinder Fisher, the singer of Cannibal Corpse, and I originally wrote this for that project. But then I showed it to the Killswitch guys one day, and they were like, ‘Can we use this?’ So, we did. But it was originally meant for Serpentine Dominion. I think you can tell, too. It just feels a little more grindy and death metal-y.” **“Broken Glass”** “This is another one written by Justin, our drummer, and I think that’s why it feels so different. I don’t necessarily think it’s something that Joel and I would come up with. I love how quickly the song’s over with, too—it’s just *boom*, and then it’s done. But musically, it feels different from anything we’ve done in the past.” **“Requiem”** “This song was written by Joel, and it’s in that old-school 6/8 metal vibe that he loves so much. It’s kind of throwback, like ‘Discordant Nation,’ which he also wrote. For some reason, Jesse was having a hard time coming up with a chorus that felt good for him to sing. We spent so much time beating up on it and then figured it probably wouldn’t make the record. But then, one day, I tried singing the chorus, and it just felt better for some reason. It’s weird how things like that work out. You just try a different voice, and it feels more natural.”

If anyone knows something about *FESTIVAL SEASON*, it’s SAINt JHN, the Brooklyn-hailing singer and MC whose “Roses (Imanbek Remix)” has been tearing down electro festivals since its release back in 2018. JHN, though, is an artist whose creative practice extends way beyond single genre. He shows off his range on *FESTIVAL SEASON*, singing and rapping over rage-rap production (“Body on Me,” “4 the Gangsters”), ATL-centric trap music (“Stones!!!,” “Poppin,” “Real Hustler”), pop punk (“Who’s Ex Wife Is This”), pool-party techno (“Glitching”), soca-influenced house (“Loneliness”)—and, because even the greatest parties need a breather, a power ballad (“Never Met Superman”). It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter which festival you choose to attend: SAINt JHN is going to be there.

With a Basia Bulat album, you know exactly what you’re going to get, but you’re never really sure of how you’re going to get it. Once the autoharp-plucking folk phenom of the mid-2000s Montreal indie explosion, Bulat has since applied her heartfelt songcraft to ’60s girl-group gold sounds (2016’s *Good Advice*) and string-quartet reimaginations (2022’s *The Garden*), but her stylistic explorations are always anchored by a radiant voice that projects equal amounts of strength and sensitivity. Her seventh album was largely born from solo songwriting sessions and MIDI experiments conducted in her apartment in the dead of night and embraces the sort of free-spirited approach that results when you’re liberated from the demands of the waking world. With the opening duo of “My Angel” and “Baby,” Bulat takes a shot of “Espresso” and embraces her inner disco diva, while the song that actually references “disco” in its title—”Disco Polo”—is a loving tribute to the namesake dance/folk hybrid popular in her ancestral homeland of Poland. But the exquisite string arrangements—courtesy of Dua Lipa collaborator Drew Jurecka—serve as the connective tissue between the album’s mirror-ball-twirling highs and its calming comedowns, like the elegant piano ballad “Right Now” and dreamy country odyssey “The Moon.”

Nao released her debut album, 2016’s *For All We Know*, to universal acclaim, but it was her 2018 follow-up effort, *Saturn*, that saw the stars truly align for the Nottingham-born, East London-raised singer-songwriter. Drawing inspiration from the tumult of her first Saturn return—a concept astrologers explain as a transitional life stage that recurs every 27 years or so—the record was a Mercury Prize- and Grammy Award-nominated triumph. *Jupiter*, the de facto sequel to *Saturn*, picks up with Nao seven years, two children, and one life-changing diagnosis later. Much has changed. “When I wrote *Saturn* I was in my Saturn return and going through a difficult time because I had gone through a breakup, and then I got an autoimmune condition called chronic fatigue syndrome,” she tells Apple Music. “I became a mother in that time, so that seven- or eight-year period was really difficult because I was ill for most of it. I went on a big healing journey and mostly recovered. And I felt like when I came to make this album and I saw that Jupiter was the planet of joy, growth, and good fortune, I was like, ‘You know what? I feel like after everything I’ve been through and come out the other end, I feel like Jupiter is the perfect way to symbolize that.’ So it is the sister album to *Saturn*, I would say.” Nao first felt the “itch” to get back in the studio two years after the release of her third album, *And Then Life Was Beautiful* (2021). By her own admission, “the tunes were basically not very good,” and it took another year for her to find her rhythm again. “I was just out of practice,” she says. “I didn’t know what the theme was when I started writing, but I knew I was ready to start trying. That’s a really important part of creativity—you don’t need to have the full plan, you just follow your ideas through and see what happens, and usually it all falls into place. Once the engine got going, all these records were written in quite a short space of time.” *Jupiter* may owe its thematic identity to the cosmos, but the radiant, sun-drenched energy infused in every beat and harmony comes from a purely terrestrial source. “I was recovering from my autoimmune condition when this record finally started coming together, and being in the sun was a really important part of that,” Nao says. “I moved to LA with my partner and my kids for six months, and I ended up doing a lot of the work there. I created the vibe with LOXE and Stint, who I’ve worked with before on all my previous records, and I would just invite musicians and songwriters to come in throughout the days.” Weaving those cohesive threads into contributions from a host of new collaborators—among them Toby Gad, the songwriter behind hits for superstars including Beyoncé and John Legend—has resulted in Nao’s most self-assured body of work to date. Effervescent pop songs like “Happy People” and the cool, sparkling groove of “Poolside” blend seamlessly with the open-hearted lyricism of “30 Something” or the exquisitely minimal balladry of “Light Years.” Even “Elevate,” which leans more towards the neo-soul/R&B soundscape of previous records, has been spiked with something fresh—an electrifying guitar solo that marks the track as a highlight in an album packed full of them. The unifying factor tying this “eclectic, but consistent” package together, of course, is Jupiter itself. As Nao explains: “\[I want\] this album to find anybody that wants hope at the end of struggle. Something really cool about Jupiter is that it’s usually the planet you can see when you look up to the moon—it’s visible, so it’s always kind of hovering around us. I like the idea that we can just look up and know that good things are quite close by—we just have to keep going.” **“Wildflowers”** “I sort of imagined the program *Euphoria* when I was creating ‘Wildflowers.’ It’s this ode to time running out and fuck it, let’s just live. Let’s fall in love 100% and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t, but we lived life fully and we loved deeply. There’s this idea that we’re always getting older and older and it’s so important to be present and to live 100% of every day. We touched briefly on anxiety as well—I feel like it’s come on in the last few years, I’ve never had it before. Definitely something I need to spend time working through, but I don’t believe I’ll have it forever. And I think that idea is also a way of helping me get out of my head a little bit and stop overthinking things, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to.” **“Elevate”** “This was written from a place similar to ‘Wildflowers.’ That moment where you do find someone and you fall in love and the rush of that early stage of a relationship when everything’s just amazing and even basic tasks, just like walking to the shop, feel so much fun. It does feel like a bit of a drug or whatever, and I know that that stage wears off for a lot of us, but it’s just trying to capture that moment in a song.” **“Happy People”** “‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, no matter how small it is. I think that when you get older you kind of shed a lot of things: friends or community or family that you don’t necessarily connect with anymore. The kind of people that are in my tribe are quite eccentric personalities. I feel like if I was to put them all together in the room, it would be like, ‘What is going on here?’ But they are friends that feel like family to me. My social world is quite small, and just finding contentment in that—it might be small, but it’s meaningful.” **“Light Years”** “I wrote ‘Light Years’ and I was like, ‘Oh, it feels like a really beautiful song. It feels really reminiscent of another lifetime or like an orbit.’ That was the moment where I was like, ‘I love this song. I think it’s fantastic.’ It’s this big song about love and meeting someone and knowing that you would wait for them in any realm, in any time and place. And obviously it’s got this nod to space within the song—that led me to Jupiter, which is where I found the concept and the theme. That was the real beginning of the album.” **“We All Win”** “If ‘Happy People’ is about finding your tribe, ‘We All Win’ is also about trying to bring each other up as well. How can we help and do things for each other that mean something? It’s this idea that if I win, you win too, so it’s about bringing each other up, leaving no one behind. A lot of my friends are musicians, so I feel like when someone’s making it, you feel a sense of guilt. I felt almost uncomfortable with making it, and I felt like a way of combatting that is to include people.” **“Poolside”** “This is supposed to be pure joy. Just pure fun. It’s probably the most pop-sounding record I’ve ever done. I studied jazz for four years and the culture of that was anti anything commercial, so I think I carried that with me for quite a long time. But I love commercial music. When I started ‘Poolside,’ it wasn’t my intention for it to come out that way, but it did, and I made peace with it and I was like, ‘This is kind of fire, actually.’ So in the spirit of Jupiter and joy, ‘Poolside’ made it on the record because that’s what I feel it brings.” **“30 Something”** “Coming into my thirties and not being well for a lot of it was an interesting transition. I love this song because I feel like it’s telling the story really clearly. And obviously before I was 30, I was healthy and well and living life in a way that I could absolutely do, so there was this nostalgia of holding on to being in my twenties or younger. This song is about acceptance of where I am at the moment and making peace with that… and I think I’ve definitely got there.” **“Just Dive”** “I’m in a place where I’m working on trying to find as much joy in everything that I’m doing, so ‘Just Dive’ is about taking a risk, taking the plunge, doing things in life that scare you, but doing it anyway. It’s a promise to myself in the future. I’d like to take a year out to travel with my kids. I know that might not sound risky, but I do rely a lot on \[my\] community to help me, especially with my health condition, so going at it, just my kids and my partner for a year, with no community, that’s risky for me. It sounds so small, but I\'m hoping just to do it anyway.” **“Jupiter”** “Perhaps ‘Jupiter’ has a similar message to ‘Elevate’: Finding someone that you love and who loves you and feeling like it’s taking you to another ether, and you want to stay there and not come down from it… but we always do.” **“All Of Me”** “Every album needs a sexy number. A late-night number. ‘All Of Me’ is that song. Once you hear the chorus and the bassline come together and it invokes that particular mood, you can’t help but go with it. It could be this deeply sad, heartbreaking song, it doesn’t matter who’s in the room, if the song calls for that, I’m happy to explore it. So it’s the same for a sexy number as well—if the song calls for it, I’m happy to go there.” **“Better Days”** “For me, ‘Better Days’ is a song about someone that I was close to or that I have a fractured relationship with. The chorus says it all—that I’m just waiting for a better day when it’s not so fractious and things settle themselves. I’m sure a lot of listeners can relate to that. I rarely imagine that people don’t have a fractious relationship with a sibling or a father or a cousin or a friend, but at least want it to be better. So it’s a hopeful song that this relationship can finally heal at some point.”