Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.

The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.

With their first two albums, Sports Team captured the frantic, visceral thrills of their live show but they instill a sense of suave order to third effort *Boys These Days*. This is a record where the English indie rockers—who formed in Cambridge in 2016 with a specialism in wry, anthemic observations of Middle Britain—get their groove on by channeling the dapper ’80s stylings of Bryan Ferry and Prefab Sprout. Seeking to make a more intricately crafted studio album without it being anything as dull as that sounds, the six-piece headed to Bergen, Norway to work with girl in red and CMAT producer Matias Tellez. The result is a record that melds the playful thrills and melodious joy of 2020’s *Deep Down Happy* and 2022 follow-up *Gulp!* with a sumptuous, soulful sound that takes in exuberant, sax-assisted indie pop (slick opener “I’m in Love (Subaru)”), Pulp-esque wistfulness (“Maybe When We’re 30”), rollicking fusions of Britpop and Morricone (“Bang Bang Bang”), and freewheeling, melody-heavy sing-alongs (“Condensation”). At their best, they sound like early-’80s Elton John as reworked by *In it for the Money*-era Supergrass. As with their earlier output, though, there is razor-sharp perception lurking within all the cheeky winks to camera, and themes such as the uncertain shift from teenager to adulthood, the weaponization of nostalgia, doom-scrolling, war, and influencers with dogs all crop up over the course of these 10 tracks. In *Boys These Days*, Sports Team have made a grown-up pop record without losing the sense of what made them so exciting in the first place.

Listening to *MAD!*—the 28th studio album by Sparks, the fraternal duo of Ron and Russell Mael—it can be difficult to remember that they have been a band for more than half a century, with both brothers now on the doorstep of 80. Pairing aggressive programming and vivid electronic textures with sharp rock-band backing, these 12 songs are edgy, canny, and electrifying, eternal trademarks of Sparks’ music that have only sharpened with time. And that has been intentional, confirms Russell. “When you’ve had 28 albums, you want to impress yourself, that you can still do things that are modern-sounding, not like a band with a 28-album history,” he tells Apple Music. “We work hard at trying to do things that are provocative, lyrically and sonically.” The Maels talk about the process behind and inspiration for each track. **“Do Things My Own Way”** Russell Mael: “‘Do Things My Own Way’ is probably the mantra that Sparks has pursued for our entire career, from day one, when Todd Rundgren was the only person to acknowledge Sparks’ capabilities. We were turned down by a million labels, but he said you should always do things your own way. He said that, even on our very first album, we’d created our own universe, and we should continue on that way.” Ron Mael: “This is really the first song written for the album. We don’t carry over older, unused material onto a new album, so we start from scratch. After we recorded all these songs, it seemed fitting that it be in first place, because it is an overall statement of the album and Sparks.” **“JanSport Backpack”** Ron Mael: “We realize the practical uses of a JanSport, but we were in Tokyo and saw quite a few fashionable young ladies who were wearing JanSport backpacks. That isn’t a luxury brand, but they were wearing it as a style statement. That image stuck with us, and we tried to work backward to see how we could use it in a song. So, there’s a girl who’s breaking up with a guy, and the image he has is her walking away with a JanSport backpack. We have much confidence that, on Apple Music, you won’t find another song about JanSport backpacks.” **“Hit Me, Baby”** Russell Mael: “This is someone hoping it’s a nightmare, but the reality is that they are living this nightmare that we all are. We’re in Paris now, so it’s refreshing to not have “that man” in your face all the time, like when you’re in the States. The song obliquely references the hopelessness of the situation all around, but we didn’t want to be so blatant as to spell it out exactly. It can be about anyone else’s own situation, where they’re having a bad time that they hope goes away.” Ron Mael: “It was written in a more general sense before the election, but it became obvious that, even subconsciously, it had a more specific meaning. We like details in songs, but it’s important for us to have lyrics that don’t only reflect a particular subject, that they have a broader subtext. But it still took on a more specific meaning after the election.” **“Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab”** Russell Mael: “It’s a guy who is trying to impress his partner by taking her to this fine hotel and running a tab in hopes of swaying her. But the guy doesn’t have the means to pay for the extravagant tastes, so he gets thrown into prison at Rikers Island. But he says it’s all worth it, because he’s hoping she’ll come to visit him there.” Ron Mael: “In the distant past, we only wrote a song, then brought it in to record. We still work that way, but we also have the luxury, since Russell has a studio at his place, of just going into the studio and starting without any kind of preconception. We get a more varied approach, and this is one song that was done from the studio standpoint, then working backwards to figure out a melody and lyrics.” **“My Devotion”** Russell Mael: “Some people have tried to look deeper into it and say, ‘Well, surely it can’t just be a really nice love song.’ But, no, it’s just a really nice love song. We hope that, lyrically, it’s charming, with the guy’s devotion being so strong that he’s written her name on his shoe and is even thinking of getting a tattoo. It’s one of my favorite lines on the album.” **“Don’t Dog It”** Ron Mael: “With the line ‘Shake it thusly and you’ll see the light,’ we like having words from two different worlds. ‘Shake it’ is a cliché in a million songs, but ‘thusly’ is such a formal word. They are in conflict as far as the tone, but it’s a formal way to suggest something carnal. We like butting up together, so to speak, words. It’s a Shakespeare thing applied to hip-hop expression. We’re also encouraging movement as a way to fight. The person is seeking help, and the advice that they’re given isn’t something deep and intellectual. It’s ‘shake it thusly.’” **“In Daylight”** Ron Mael: “For most of us, darkness is more advantageous to our opportunities for romantic advancement, let’s say. In so many of our songs, the instrumentation and singing are very direct, even if it’s musically complex. We often attempt to make songs aggressive, but this one was a little more diffuse. There’s an atmosphere here, and it feels blurred, which is the feeling of being between daylight and darkness.” **“I-405 Rules”** Russell Mael: “There’s some sincerity to the image of the I-405 having a beauty in its own way, especially if you look at it at night, when thousands of cars are bumper to bumper, and you see the red taillights. It’s a sea of red, especially if you’re above the freeway, say, at the Getty Center. Lots of other major cities in the world have this beautiful river—the Seine, the Thames, the Sumida. But we don’t have that, except when, once a year, it rains in LA, when it even starts to look like a river. The I-405 is our contribution to the great rivers of the world. This song is also so sonically in your face that it’s overly dramatic for the subject matter, and we like that it goes counter to what we’re singing about.” **“A Long Red Light”** Russell Mael: “We like this song a lot, because it’s not a typical song structure. It’s a piece that evolves over time with a simple subject—waiting for a red light to hopefully turn green someday. Over time, it shifts musically, and, toward the end of it, you can sense the frustration that the light is still red. It turns into this big chorale, with a lot of voices and orchestral drums coming in. The situation becomes really urgent, and we like that in a song that deals with a small situation, a red light that everyone’s been to. That was challenging for us in a positive way.” **“Drowned in a Sea of Tears”** Russell Mael: “It is a devastating relationship breakup song. There’s been pop songs throughout history that have had the theme of drowning. We wanted to find another way of doing that. This one is really melodic, and, in contrast to ‘A Long Red Light,’ it’s a verse and a chorus kicking in a big way.” **“A Little Bit of Light Banter”** Ron Mael: “We see it as this couple that feels that they’re different from other couples that do need all these in-depth discussions. This couple is happy to do something that’s the opposite of that, and they feel a closeness because they just share this love of light banter. They don’t care what the neighbors think, and hopefully it comes across as charming, for a couple that feels they’re outside of the world of heavy-duty discussions. The advice that we’re given is that we’re supposed to read and discuss Kafka at night, but it’s not always wise advice.” **“Lord Have Mercy”** Russell Mael: “It is another take on a relationship. While this woman is asleep, her partner hears her singing this melody, and it’s so beautiful for him to hear. He’s heard melodies from buskers on the street that were OK. He’s heard melodies from various times and periods. But this melody he’s overhearing from this woman in her sleep becomes something so striking and profound for him.” Ron Mael: “He’s not necessarily a believer, but the beauty of her singing while she’s half-asleep has captivated him so much. He hears what she’s singing not in a lyrical sense about religion and being converted, but he just finds beauty in what she’s singing and hopes it continues forever.”

The Portland rapper broke through in 2016 with the carefree “Caroline” as an eager student of André 3000 and Tyler, The Creator, then spent the next almost-decade finding his own voice: witty but searching, with a penchant for bright, bubbly beats. Now 31, Aminé is ready for a long, five-star vacation on his third studio album, *13 Months of Sunshine*, his first since 2020’s existential *Limbo*. (In the years between, he dabbled in hyperpop on 2021’s *TWOPOINTFIVE* and collaborated with Kaytranada on 2023’s *KAYTRAMINÉ*.) He’s in his deep-house bag on “Familiar” and “Vacay,” on which he finds himself two spritzes deep, “out of office” email in effect, draped in a hotel robe, “on my Dua Lipa.” He jets across the pond on “Arc de Triomphe,” skating over a UK garage shuffle that samples The Streets. But it’s not all affogatos and plunge pools: On Leon Thomas duet “New Flower!” he recalls his days as an intern for Complex and Def Jam, remembering being sent to fetch sandwiches for Big Sean. And after a beat switch on Afrobeats bop “13MOS,” he dives deep into his Ethiopian and Eritrean family legacy: “I was named after my grandfather/So, I can’t put shame to the name I’m proud of.”

When Rico Nasty proclaims, “I don’t sound like anyone, these bitches sound like me” on *LETHAL* highlight “BUTTERFLY KISSES,” she has a point. She’s one of the earliest luminaries of the rap-meets-metal marriage that has surfaced over the last decade-plus, and she’s arguably the best at merging those worlds too. The Prince George’s County, Maryland, native has blended a unique variety of chaotic rage-rap since her entry into the music industry in the mid-2010s, and she backs it up with mosh-heavy live shows, mercurial hairdos, and eccentric fashion sense. But since feeling restricted by her persona after the release of 2022’s *Las Ruinas*, she switched things up: She left the major-label system, signed to indie outfit Fueled by Ramen (the label that exalted bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco), and enlisted Imad Royal (The Chainsmokers, Panic! At the Disco) as the executive producer for her next record. Many of her fans already associate her with creating on her own terms, but *LETHAL*<> is even more freewheeling than usual. “SOUL SNATCHER” finds her mutating between a half-dozen rap voices while boasting about her sexual prowess, “SMOKE BREAK” is full of guttural metal screams, “PINK” glows with bubbly femininity, and “CRASH” is a catchy pop-rock cut. The album is sonically unpredictable, but her unbridled confidence and chameleonic versatility hold everything together. Rico Nasty takes time for reflection as well: “SMILE” is a tender ode to her teenage son, and “YOU COULD NEVER” is a career retrospective that shows her earnestly proud of all she’s persevered. “When I reflect back, I know I’m blessed/I’ma be myself, you could be the rest,” she says on the latter. It’s an approach that’s proven effective for Rico, time and time again.

Whether it’s Merrill Garbus’ megaphone vocals, her righteously indignant messaging, or the percussive rhythms thundering beneath them, Tune-Yards have never trafficked in subtlety. But with their sixth album, the creative partnership of Garbus and bass-playing hubby Nate Brenner delivers its most clearly articulated statement to date. *Better Dreaming* is the duo’s fiercely funky response to spending several years cooped up (first with the pandemic, then with a newborn), and a defiantly optimistic affront to a world descending into chaos and rage. Featuring guest giggles from their offspring, “Limelight” is a joyous jam with a pronounced P-Funk vibe, while the clattering disco-house workout “How Big Is the Rainbow” is an instant LGBTQ+ anthem that you can imagine being blasted at Pride parties around the world for years to come. But *Better Dreaming* acknowledges that staying positive in a world mired in negativity requires constant diligence and self-care, and with “Get Through,” Garbus delivers an inspirational soul serenade to keep us racing toward the light: “We don’t know how we get through,” she sings, “but we do.”

You’ll probably recognize the general sounds and styles on Ezra Furman’s 10th album: Beatles-y psych-folk (“Sudden Storm”), quasi-industrial ’90s pop (“Submission”), soft-focus disco (“You Hurt Me I Hate You”), and Springsteen-style garage (“Power of the Moon”). What’s great about Furman is the way she manages to make all these familiar, almost stock forms feel idiosyncratic by pushing them to their expressive limits. Like great karaoke, the key to her performances isn’t the way she pulls things together but the way she falls so joyfully, dramatically, performatively apart, queering the edges of pop tradition until it frays at the seams.

Lido Pimienta doesn’t put out music very often—she averages one album roughly every five years—but the Colombian-born, Toronto-based auteur ensures that every release is a game-changing, 180-degree heel turn that rewards your patience and alters your perception of her artistry. Even in a discography that spans the electronic avant-pop experiments of 2016’s Polaris Music Prize-winning *La Papessa* and the Afro Colombian roots-music explorations of 2020’s *Miss Colombia*, *La Belleza* (Spanish for “the beauty”) is distinguished by its sheer audacity. Inspired by the film scores of Czech composer Luboš Fišer, *La Belleza* sees Pimienta dive headlong into the world of classical music, with the help of Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, producer/string arranger Owen Pallett, and a backing choir that veers between Gregorian chants and castrati trills. But Pimienta uses these European musical traditions in service of deeply personal meditations on love and identity, paying tribute to her homeland on the harp-plucked lullaby “Mango,” addressing the reconciliation with her almost-ex-husband on the stirring serenade “¿Quién Tiene La Luz (El Perdón),” and smuggling Caribbean rhythms into the orchestra pit on “El Dembow del Tiempo.” But even non-Spanish-speaking listeners will get easily swept up in *La Belleza*’s overwhelming emotional power. Pimienta was already a force of nature, but when backed by the earthquaking militaristic march of “Aun Te Quiero,” she sounds truly omnipotent.