For their sixth album, hardcore punk collective The Armed purposely started writing without any premeditated ideas. After the conceptual trilogy of their last three albums—2018’s *Only Love*, 2021’s *ULTRAPOP*, and 2023’s *Perfect Saviors*—they decided to focus on urgency over detailed lyrical cohesiveness. “It felt like a new era, like we were leaving something behind,” vocalist and de facto spokesperson Tony Wolski tells Apple Music. “In starting something new, we wanted it to come from a place that was animalistic.” As such, *THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED* is brimming with rage—at consumerism, social media, political divisiveness, post-COVID isolationism, and general disappointment with the direction of society. “When you look at the world writ large, I just don’t understand how this would turn around,” Wolski says. “The levers that could change things in any meaningful way are the people who hold all the power, but they have none of the incentive. So, it’s an overtly negative record. But I do think there’s a glimmer of hope at the end—or at least a lack of hopelessness.” Like The Armed’s previous output, the record features a rotating cast of band members and guest musicians including Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, ex-Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil, Michigan hardcore troupe Prostitute, Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, Rough Francis drummer Urian Hackney, and many more. Below, Wolski comments on each track. **“Well Made Play”** “It’s a very severe opener. We like doing that on all our albums, but the execution is drastically different than our last few openers. I think the band is at its absolute strongest, physically, musically—everything—right now, so I feel like this has added power. Lyrically, it’s about how self-awareness has become the world’s scarcest resource. It’s about the hyper-celebritization of culture, and how that has sort of removed self-awareness from our skills. It’s like we’ve evolved beyond it or something.” **“Purity Drag”** “We wanted to front-load the album with brutality. We’re referencing East Bay hardcore on a lot of these songs, so we just wanted it to feel like one of those albums that we got when we were 14, 15, where it just doesn’t relent. I think this has a chorus you can shout along to, and the song is, I daresay, near danceable. But it has very cynical lyrics about leftist disappointment. It’s about seeing the convictions that you have reduced to social trends. It’s about seeing some of the worst type of people espousing your ideas from wildly sanctimonious perspectives and in very ineffectual ways that will never yield results.” **“Kingbreaker”** “Again, we wanted to front-load the album with rage. My cousin Kenny, who plays bass in the band, this was one of his demos. He originally titled it ‘Optional,’ which was funny because he meant that literally, like, ‘I don’t know if we need to do this.’ It’s basically one bass note shredding for two minutes, and we added a breakdown. Lyrically, the song is about isolation. Post-pandemic, I think we still haven’t pulled out of the fact that everyone lives incredibly siloed lives. The great reintegration that everyone talked about never really happened, at least spiritually.” **“Grace Obscure”** “This is the first bona fide punk song we’ve made in a minute. It’s a just a blistering tempo, a double-time shredder. Meghan O’Neil has been playing with us as a vocalist, and she was the singer of a band called Punch back when we were starting out. I would say that Punch is one of my favorite hardcore bands of all time, and I think that Meghan is probably my favorite hardcore vocalist ever. Her vocals are completely insane. This is one of the first songs that we’ve done with her taking front and center, which is really cool. You can hear some East Bay hardcore here, and the chorus is a not-too-subtle allusion to AFI.” **“Broken Mirror” (feat. Prostitute)** “Similar to ‘Kingbreaker,’ this started as a very primitive, emotionally driven demo. I recorded a super dumb caveman drumbeat. After recording that, I just hit record and made up the chord progression. And I didn’t tune the guitar. Then I came up with the vocals in five or six minutes. The goal was to reduce artistic expression to the most primitive, most immediate version of yourself. Lyrically, it’s very much inspired by a Protomartyr song called ‘Tarpeian Rock’ where they’re just yelling shit that needs to be thrown from the rock. Moe from Prostitute sings on this, and his voice has a lot more gravitas than mine. They’re probably the scariest, most important punk band right now.” **“Sharp Teeth”** “After five brutal songs, to just slam into a Red Hot Chili Peppers-ass song felt hilarious to me. It’s a classic Armed juxtapositional whiplash kind of thing. Urian and Kenny, the rhythm section on this song, hit this unbelievable, heavy groove. In contrast to the grooviness and levity of that instrumental, the lyrics are about the hands-down worst time in my entire life. I don’t want to talk about it, and I wouldn’t have even felt comfortable singing it, but the fact that Cara \[Drolshagen\] is singing this one felt therapeutic. It’s really dark subject matter over a really happy track.” **“I Steal What I Want”** “This one has been around for a long time. I think I wrote this and ‘AN ITERATION,’ which was on *ULTRAPOP*, around the same time. But sometimes we need to get better in order to make a song work. It was almost like a space rock thing originally, but it needed to hit harder. So we made it more rigid, and then Troy \[Van Leeuwen\] recorded those guitar leads that are like equal parts Robert Smith and Adrian Belew, and it just fucking clicked. Lyrically, it’s about trying to enjoy the end of the world and holding on to what you love as everything else falls apart. That idea might be super well-trodden and not particularly original, but holy shit, does it feel authentic to me right now.” **“Local Millionaire”** “I have the distinct memory of Kenny playing me this demo when we were recording the last album and thinking, ‘Oh, man, this song is going to be so fucking sick.’ Everyone needs a song for the haters, and this is our song for the haters. It’s about self-obsession and turning that obsession into hatred for people who you subconsciously see becoming the better version of you. The band METZ was breaking up while we were recording this, so we put those harmonized vocalizations in the background to pay tribute to them. They’re a fucking awesome band, and it feels like something they would do.” **“Gave Up”** “This is probably the most traditional Armed song on the record. I don’t mean that to diminish it, it just feels like it could live on some of our earlier records. It’s a classic Kenny song, and he made the initial prototype of what our compositions sound like. Lyrically, it’s about hollowing yourself out to fit in, which is I think something that every single person alive does and has done to some extent. But it gets out of hand when you turn yourself into an empty vessel for the opinions of others. It touches on rage-bait culture, the clout of consensus, and becoming a human Supreme T-shirt.” **“Heathen”** “I wrote this track, and it took me a minute to be courageous enough to share it with the rest of the band, because there’s a lot of conventional shit in it. But I’m glad I did. Patrick \[Shiroishi\]’s sax playing reminds me of Bowie’s *Blackstar*. Cara and I are both singing dozens of robot harmonies, which makes this weird, fragile, genderless voice. It’s melodramatic as fuck, but I think it’s a really cool moment in the context of this record in particular. On another of our records, it may have blended in more. It’s kind of an emotional soak after all this instantaneous rage.” **“A More Perfect Design”** “We wanted to have a track that just left it all out there. And we wanted to leave no doubt in someone who listened to this that we had given everything we had to it. Converge is one of my favorite bands, and what makes them so unique is the ability to perform in a way that captures that extreme emotion. A lot of extreme music is not successful in that way. It’s extreme, it’s fast, but it’s also clean and technical, and all that stuff can kind of zap the anger or angst. So, this song is very much effect over technique. No one was allowed to tune their instrument before we recorded this. It needed to be catharsis to the point of, like, ‘Oh, shit. Maybe we went too far.’”

The New Orleans-born cousins (Ruby da Cherry and Scrim) have little in the way of crossover hits or mainstream press. But since emerging on SoundCloud in 2014 with their depressive, Memphis-inspired blend of horrorcore, witch house, and emo rap, the duo’s nihilism has proved surprisingly potent—their Grey Day Tour was the third-highest-grossing rap tour of 2024. On their fifth album, *THY KINGDOM COME* (a modest catalog, until you count the additional nine mixtapes and 30-plus EPs they’ve released in just over a decade), $uicideboy$ mostly stick to their bread and butter: themes of addiction and abjection, morose yet baroque titles, and the rap game’s bleakest flexes. (“Smokin’ on shit that smell like body rot,” they chant on BONES collab “Now and at the Hour of Our Death.”) But occasionally, a bit of levity creeps in, be it a jubilant sample of a NOLA bounce classic (Big Freedia’s “Gin in My System”) on “Napoleon” or the ’80s-R&B gloss on the otherwise grim “Full of Grace (I Refuse to Tend My Own Grave).”

Throughout his career, the rapid-spitting rapper BabyTron has married his love of hip-hop with his devotion to the NBA. There was *Sleeve Nash* in 2020, the original *Luka Troncic* in 2021, and on 2023’s *MegaTron 2* he had a song called “90’s Bulls.” The second edition of the *Luka Troncic* series kicks off with “Luka Magic,” a cut that nods to the Los Angeles Laker and his point-guard predecessor, Magic Johnson. Tron isn’t focused only on superstars, though: On that song in particular, he mentions veteran role player Kyle Kuzma. “77” pays tribute to Luka Doncic’s number and features a joyous throwback beat that plays with Detroit’s early techno roots. Focus too much on hooping, though, and you’ll miss the real star of *Luka Troncic 2*: BabyTron himself.

Born in Lima, Peru, Sofia Kourtesis moved to Germany at 17 with dreams of studying film, and to escape her former home’s conservative views. In a way, the Berlin-based producer approaches her music like a filmmaker, layering textures, field recordings, and emotion into lush songs that move and breathe. Her work blends the political with the personal, as on her 2023 debut *Madres*, which sampled anti-homophobia protest chants and was dedicated to her mother and the surgeon who saved her mother’s life. *Volver* is a statement of joy, defiance, and resistance, as Kourtesis celebrates the LGBT+ communities—especially trans women—who inspire her activism and art. The bittersweet mood of “Corazón,” which laments distance, brightens with “Unidos,” a vivid disco-house collaboration with Daphni (aka Caribou’s Dan Snaith) turned mantra: “You got everything you need/You never let them get you down.” Layers of percussive rhythms keep spirits high on “Ballumbrosio,” its commanding groove and warm vocals conjuring scenes of communal joy, like people dancing around a fire. Kourtesis closes the EP with the bright and sweetly tender “Sisters,” a song about embracing her community, even from an ocean away.

Few pairings in modern hip-hop history have had the impact of Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist. More than just another timely rapper-producer duo project, 2020’s *Alfredo* differed in tone from the former’s critically acclaimed collabs with Madlib and the latter’s work with Action Bronson, Boldy James, and Earl Sweatshirt. However, capturing the unique magic of a confirmed classic a second time around has challenged many in this genre, as so many middling sequels show. In this case, though, both artists rise to the proverbial occasion with cinematic flair, changing the thematic crime scenery from mafioso to yakuza along the way. Simply titled *Alfredo 2*, their recorded reunion draws from a corresponding short film released ahead of the album drop, the narrative playing up their perceived distance only to bring them back together in dramatic fashion. Even without that context, these 14 songs showcase what makes their partnership so dynamic. Gibbs is downright gripping from the get-go, riding the gleaming groove of “1995” with cocksure bars likening him and his cohort to *Lethal Weapon* heroes Riggs and Murtaugh. That attitude persists on the defiant “Skinny Suge II” and the profane “Lemon Pepper Steppers,” both backed by airy, jazz-inflected production. His way with words remains poetically brash, vividly detailing his point of view on cuts like “Gas Station Sushi” and “Mar-a-Lago.” Yet as good as these verses would sound even over some pretty basic boom-bap, Alchemist’s instrumentals elevate the proceedings without fail. His ability to cultivate and maintain a vibe is all but unparalelled, putting listeners at ease with the hazy comforts of “I Still Love H.E.R.” and “Jean Claude.” Elsewhere, he exercises an extraordinary restraint with the soul of “Shangri La,” never letting the samples overpower the MC.

Indie rock songwriter Indigo De Souza finds the deep mysteries of the unknown equal parts intriguing and terrifying on her fourth album, *Precipice*. She walks up to the edge and neither leaps nor retreats, but rather looks with a curiosity that moves from fascinated to morbid at a moment’s notice. Throughout *Precipice*, De Souza gazes at the future and gives its uncertainty her full attention. Take “Crying Over Nothing,” a playful shuffle that dazzles with shimmering synths and De Souza’s near falsetto. On the track, she recalls taking all day to respond to texts, the pain in moving on from a relationship, the physical ache that comes alongside the dissolution of love. She’s in limbo. Elsewhere, she urges herself towards some sort of equilibrium on standout cut “Be Like the Water.” Over handclaps, DIY percussion, and Rhodes piano chords, De Souza encourages her subject to move through this world with joy and adaptability, leaning on deceptively simple advice: “Be like the water/Go where you’re going.”

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s *New Threats from the Soul* is the kind of funny, rambling, junk-shop-scouring, bumper-sticker-talking, dollar-draft-guzzling daydream on which minor indie legends are born. The songs here unfurl with the workmanlike self-pity of ’90s country (“New Threats from the Soul”) or Springsteen anthems on salaries not yet adjusted for inflation (“Monte Carlo / No Limits”), dappled with Casio flutes and drum machines whose not-quite prime-time textures only go to fill in the blanks where Davis’ walls of lyrics drop off. His characters are hopeless wrecks redeemed only (and then only occasionally) by their insistence to get up off their dumb asses and try again, and yet reveal in that dumbass insistence something beautiful, or at least true. “The Spanish moss, it weeps in mourning of/Not only personal but also planetary loss/Not just for the bloodshed, but, by god, for what the Bloody Marys cost,” he sings on the opening of “Mutilation Springs.” Then there’s eight more minutes. Call it busy doin’ nothing.

Tyler Childers has never been one to play it safe, crafting traditionally informed, bluegrass-tinged country music with an expansive sense of what the genre can be. On this seventh full-length studio album from the Lawrence County, KY, native, Childers goes even bigger and bolder, recruiting superproducer and noted spiritual seeker Rick Rubin to helm a kaleidoscopic collection of wild, weird songs. *Snipe Hunter* opens with “Eatin’ Big Time,” a freewheeling rocker that takes its title from a phrase Childers and his band The Food Stamps deploy to mark milestones and celebrate successes. With a lyric as wild as his wailing vocal—there’s a verse about shooting and then skinning a man in a “motherfucking mansion”—it’s a fitting entry into this new world Childers built. “Bitin’ List” gets right to the point, opening with the line “To put it plain, I just don’t like you” while The Food Stamps sink their teeth into an old-time-adjacent arrangement. “Tirtha Yatra” pairs spiritual musings with a swinging beat, as Childers waxes poetic on the Bhagavad Gita. And longtime fan favorite “Oneida,” a staple of Childers’ live sets since 2017, gets its long-awaited studio treatment, bridging the gap between the burgeoning days of his career and this obvious high point.

Last year, the Baton Rouge rapper’s relative silence spoke volumes. After a staggeringly prolific run in the previous years (one album and six mixtapes in 2022, two albums and two mixtapes in 2023), YoungBoy released just one record in 2024. Days before the intended release of his seventh album, *I Just Got a Lot on My Shoulders*, he was arrested on a number of charges, and he spent much of that year in a Utah county jail before receiving a 27-month prison sentence after accepting a plea deal in a federal gun case that had been ongoing for years. It was the latest in a seemingly endless series of setbacks for the rapper, whose “Legal issues” section on Wikipedia is nearly as long as the one for “Career.” YoungBoy’s 2025 has so far been much brighter, beginning with his release on probation in April after years of house arrest. Then, on May 28, he was granted a presidential pardon, ending the lengthy legal battle that had hampered his career for half a decade. This explains the newfound swell of patriotism at play in the title of his eighth studio album, *MASA* (short for *Make America Slime Again*), as well as in the triumphant “XXX,” which opens with “The Star-Spangled Banner” wailed on electric guitar before YB crows: “The police watching, but they ain’t gonna stop me!” The album’s 30 tracks are brighter than its world-weary predecessor, veering between bouncy Louisiana street rap (“Diesel”) and power ballads (“Cold World”). But he finds room here and there for a bit of introspection regarding his recent years: “Never knew how hard it’d get/Never knew it’d come to this,” he singsongs on “Where I Been” before concluding: “After all, I’m amazed that I conquered it.”

Roy Woods’ 2015 debut EP is a time capsule of an era when OVO Sound’s moody aesthetic was permeating pop culture like a late-night fog, and the words “(feat. Drake)” were a fail-safe cheat code to stardom. Woods was still in his teens when he signed to OVO and cut *Exis*, and though the EP establishes the trap&B stylistic template and thematic girl-trouble terrain Woods would refer to throughout his career, his performances here exude a raw, hungry spirit that would eventually give way to a more intensely introspective tone on later releases. When his echo-drenched vocals start poking through the woozy production of the opener, “Innocence,” it’s like an impatient kid trying to bust his way out of the womb, while “Unleashed” sees him ducking and weaving around a slow-stalking trap beat with pugilistic fervor. But the record’s breakthrough single, “Drama,” is an eternal emblem of Peak OVO, with Woods’ yearning, uncannily Weeknd-esque lead vocal giving way to a butter-smooth guest feature from Drizzy himself, before their two voices intertwine on the song’s earworm hook. In the years following *Exis*’ release, Woods distanced himself from the project, claiming it represented a snapshot of a teenage phase he had little desire to revisit. But this 10th-anniversary edition sees him coming to terms with his past by adding a trio of tracks from his SoundCloud archive, including “Done with You,” his plaintive rendition of Kodak Black’s 2014 single “SKRT.”

Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album contains several very distinct through lines. “The songs are us experiencing things that we mostly experienced together or with real-life narration of, ‘This is what’s happening in my life,’” guitarist/vocalist Jeanie Pilkington tells Apple Music. “They’re songs that come from our shared brain and heart, and individual brains and hearts.” Given that some were composed during the Melbourne band’s extensive national and overseas touring, adjusting to life on the road is another clear theme, particularly in songs such as “Mary’s Playing the Harp.” “A few of them were written in that transition between \[touring\] not being a part of our lives and starting to tour, and starting to make sense of going to weird places to perform and how that feels,” says Pilkington. Adds guitarist/vocalist Heide Peverelle: “I write a lot on the road and a lot of the songs reference feelings of being on tour.” It was during one of those tours, supporting English songwriter Ben Howard on an Australian and New Zealand run in 2024, that the trio stopped by Auckland’s Roundhead Studios to record “God’s a Different Sword” with producer Tom Healy, who would go on to helm the full record. They were drawn to the studio for its equipment. “They have a tape machine, and we had decided we wanted to work on tape for this record,” says Peverelle. The analog recording accentuates the trio’s astonishingly warm vocal harmonies (all recorded live), which sit atop their dreamy, pastoral folk and occasional flourishes of lo-fi electric guitar. “It’s us on a plate,” says Peverelle. “It feels like our hearts are very open.” Here, Pilkington, Peverelle, and vocalist/guitarist Gracie Sinclair take Apple Music through *Now Would Be a Good Time*, track by track. **“God’s a Different Sword”** Heide Peverelle: “When I brought that to the group to arrange and tweak, it felt like an introduction to how we wanted to go sonically. It’s just about the euphoria and optimism you feel \[at\] the end of a breakup, starting afresh.” Gracie Sinclair: “It signifies that feeling of having your own hands back on the wheel. And you’re like, I’m driving my life now.” **“Hotel TV”** Jeanie Pilkington: “It’s about a relationship going bad. Gracie wrote the hook when we were in a hotel in Brisbane, our first time staying out of Melbourne to do music, needing some rest. We needed a fucking break. It really resonated with the rest of the song, ’cause that’s what I was trying to say—I needed to step away, because I was in this suffocated environment that is that hotel room, but also that relationship.” **“The Actor”** HP: “The story is very true; it’s quite a literal song. When you start dating someone, and even if you’ve been married to someone, \[you can\] still not really know them. I think it’s about that and the mask you wear when you’re in a relationship, and if shit gets hard and it crumbles.” JP: “It’s short and it’s punchy. I think it represents a downward spiral that happens very quickly, before you can even catch yourself.” **“Moth Song”** JP: “People think it’s me talking to my bandmates.” GS: “It’s me talking to myself. I’m Gracie and I’m singing, so I say my own name. ‘Moth Song’ is about losing the plot. It’s about wanting more from the relationships that you have around you and feeling very heartbroken and very alone in that. I was sitting on the train feeling very sorry for myself for some reason, and daydreaming and imagining all these moths filling the train carriage, and that’s what I’m talking about in the chorus—I was imagining the train doors opening and all these moths going up into the sky like confetti. That’s a nice release.” **“I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)”** GS: “It’s the closer to the A-side of the record.” JP: “It’s like a breathing point. Originally, we were going to open the record with this because, for a long time, we opened our set with it when we played live—it’s a great way to shut up the room. But it felt a little bit somber to open \[the album\] like that. Now, it’s this really nice point where, if you’re listening on vinyl, it closes out the first side. The B-side of the record is a bit darker and rocks a bit harder.” **“Cathode Ray”** GS: “This was the last song on the record to get finished. It’s about frustration in a relationship, and when you love someone and you feel like you just can’t get through to them. And you really want to and you want to see them come undone.” **“Foreign Bird”** JP: “\[It’s about\] trying to force yourself to do something and then stopping to realize, hang on, why the hell am I doing this, I don’t want to? And just trying to pull yourself out of your own habits.” **“That’s All She Wrote”** HP: “I spent a lot of time in Northeast Victoria and I was really picturing that part of the world when I was writing it. Each verse and chorus feels like it has a time stamp for me—the first verse is a few years ago, and the middle is more recently and again with the last verse. There’s a clear picture in my mind of each scenario \[and\] specific relationships I had.” **“Sarah”** HP: “It’s a breakup song. We really went back and forth about whether it would be on the record ’cause it felt overly earnest. We wanted to really try and bring down the earnestness with the more rocky guitar vibe.” **“Mary’s Playing the Harp”** JP: “It’s a song about being on tour and being heartbroken, and watching a Mary Lattimore set at a festival in Thirroul and thinking about someone I was going to have to see that I really missed, but also was really dreading what that was going to feel like. We did this superlong tour a couple of years ago through regional Australia and it was a real time of peaks and valleys. Some weird experiences, some bad experiences, just trying to figure out how to live on the road and how isolating that can be. A weird thing to experience as a very young woman or femme person, and all those things came into play.”