Kae Tempest says that *Self Titled* is a record borne out of synchronicity. The South Londoner is a master of many arts—he’s a rapper, poet, spoken word act, novelist, and more—but something didn’t feel right as he approached making what he thought would be his fifth solo album. Seeking an outside take on it, Tempest played some of the songs to Fraser T. Smith, with whom he’d collaborated on the Dave and Adele producer’s Future Utopia project, and Smith’s feedback opened up a whole new way forward. “He just said, ‘This isn’t right for right now, this just isn’t quite it, there’s something else I think that needs to come out of you right now,’” Tempest tells Apple Music. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just park this and come into the studio and let’s see what happens?’” What happened is *Self Titled*, a career peak that takes in menacing hip-hop grooves, jubilant, expansive pop, jagged beats, and bombastic soundscapes. By some margin, it is Tempest’s most ambitious musical work to date. Working with Smith unlocked something. “It brought out the bigness of my sound, my intentionality around songwriting, wanting to be more concise, more driven, wanting bigger sound,” Tempest says. “Fraser is a big songwriter.” The process of making the record, he explains, felt like being swept up in a strong current. “We were just going with it, and the minute we tried to lead and not flow, it wouldn’t quite work. If I tried to get something to happen, it just wouldn’t happen.” *Self Titled* is very much the album that Kae Tempest was meant to make right now. Let Tempest guide you through it, track by track. **“I Stand on the Line”** “This is a statement piece. It’s huge. The orchestral instrumentation, the expansiveness of the sound and the production. This was that moment when I said to Fraser, ‘I want big sound. I want to make big songs,’ and this was his response. Lyrically, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. My natural place when I’m writing lyrics is to write from character perspectives or zoom in on one very specific thing but retain some kind of abstract relationship with the object of the poem or the lyric. But with this, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. I realized this is what appeals to me in songs, when you get this insight into somebody’s truth.” **“Statue in the Square”** “I was wondering whether to follow ‘I Stand on the Line’ with this because, in some ways, they tread some of the same ground lyrically, but in other ways, it’s a one-two punch that is so satisfying. I played Fraser Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ and Run The Jewels. I was like, ‘I just want something so simple, but I want it to be so big, but so clear in each of its parts.’ I liked the idea of creating something on the piano that felt like an old loop but we’re just playing it now in the room. Lyrically, the first draft went on for ages and ages. The verses were really long, but the chorus jumped out and I thought, ‘OK, I know what this song wants me to do now, I just have to minimize and reduce and distill what I’m saying.’” **“Know Yourself”** “In my late teenage years, I was going through some heavy stuff, I felt at a bit of a crossroads. What I understood to be my older self came into my head and basically instructed my younger self to keep writing, to focus on creativity rather than destruction, and to know myself. That older self was what I understood my lyrics were coming from. Each time I wrote lyrics, it was advice I was getting from my older self. As I got older, I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I haven’t gone back, so who the fuck was that?’ Writing ‘Know Yourself,’ I was like, ‘This is the moment, this is when I went back,’ and it’s because that kid did what they did, that I can do what I’m doing. Fraser said, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ because he wrote this beat with Tom Rowlands from The Chemical Brothers. They went to school together but they didn’t see each other for 30 years. Tom went to Fraser’s house, they talked about their lives for about 10 minutes, then Fraser picks up a guitar, Tom’s on a drum machine. He said it was like, ‘Suddenly we’re 15 again.’ So lyrically, I’m talking to my younger self, musically, Fraser’s talking to his younger self.” **“Sunshine on Catford”** “I feel very strongly about dynamic and pace and gradient, I love to position albums and live shows, the journey of it all is very important. The idea is that once you know yourself, then you can know love and then in comes this beautiful love song, it’s like a thank you. It’s just a little gratitude prayer to a beautiful moment. We were blessed with the vocal of the fairy godfather of the album who came and sprinkled a bit of magic Pet Shop Boys dust on the record \[Neil Tennant is a guest vocalist on the track\]. This is a hymn of thanks to the small moments when you are trying to make a life with someone, when things just feel great.” **“Bless the Bold Future”** “The lyric began years ago. I always set myself this rule that I mustn’t write backwards because I thought if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to go forwards. I always went into the studio with a blank notebook and started from wherever I was at. After writing ‘Know Yourself’ and going back and sampling \[an\] old lyric, I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this is the moment where I can go back into older material with this new perspective.’ This lyric had been floating around and I couldn’t let go of it. There was something about it that I thought was interesting. It never quite found its home before, then we found this fucking absolutely rolling monster beat. It was beautiful.” **“Everything All Together”** “In my live show, I like to take a line from each of the songs at some point in the set and weave them all together and start repeating things that people have heard before. It gives this cumulative trance-like power to the whole experience. As the album was finished, I was saying to Fraser, ‘I want to make this kind of master poem,’ so I took a line from each of the songs and wove them together. We got all the session files up and took the horn line from that song, the snare from that song, one little piano part from that song, so there’s something from every single song and we put it on a grid almost like it was artwork rather than music work. We did it by eye rather than listening to it and then pressed play on that loop. It’s like the soul of the album speaking. It tells you everything that you’ve just heard and everything you’re about to hear.” **“Prayers to Whisper”** “This came out of me experimenting with form, four lines and the repeated fifth line three times. Obviously, it’s about something that’s close to my heart, the death of a friend. The chords Fraser found for it were quite somber. I was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ Lyrically and musically, if the two things are going the same way, it’s death. We need uplift in the music. We need celebration. Fraser found these beautiful chords and it felt massive. It felt anthemic, which is how you want it to feel. It’s tough to feel optimistic in the face of somebody leaving, but there is this push and pull, if you lose somebody to something where they were suffering, to illness, to something painful, then there is some sense of release. I wanted the music to embody that and then it became this huge ballad, big pop song.” **“Diagnoses”** “I wanted to make something playful, celebratory, a summer banger about fucking antipsychotics and HRT. Why the fuck not? That’s your life. You still want to fucking dance. You’re still dancing. It’s another example of the lyric and the music pushing against each other. That’s what creates the good feeling. That’s what I like. It’s like, if this is your life, it’s no big deal. It’s a massive deal. You’re fucked. Life is just mental, of course. But at the same time, it’s just your life. And we are all just dealing with the fallout of what we’re in.” **“Hyperdistillation”** “I loved the beat but I was struggling to find the lyrical shape. It’s a love song to London, to my city, and there were these little hooky moments and I was like, ‘I need something in that hook.’ I went to Raven Bush, the string player from Speakers Corner Quartet, and said, ‘Can you write me a violin line that almost sounds like a soaring melody, like a vocal hook?’ He wrote this beautiful string part. It’s amazing, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more of an uplift. Then I remembered \[singer-songwriter\] Connie Constance, who I’d bumped into a few times backstage and who I just love. She came down to the studio and wrote this amazing part. These fractured pieces suddenly came together in this perfect moment, which is what the song’s about.” **“Forever”** “This started as a love song about the uncertainty of a relationship and having this idea that let’s just fucking enjoy this for all that it is. And then Fraser was saying, ‘I know I was encouraging you to tell your story, but actually I feel like now the album needs more of your outward perspective.’ I totally agreed but I’d grown attached to that hook. If I tried to write a song about the world, I would never have written a hook so tender. The way that hook is addressed to a lover enables it to be more honest and truthful about the world, you escape the narrative trap of ‘I’m going to write a song about everything, which means you can write a song about nothing.’” **“Breathe”** “This is when I knew that the album wanted to be born. This was when Fraser had said to me, ‘Tell your story.’ I loved the beat, I wrote it, scribbled it out, went in the studio. This is the first time I did it. I could barely read the paper, my hands were shaking, and it is like a freestyle, wrote it, rapped it, that’s it. I haven’t quite got my head around what it is that I’m even trying to say, but the rush of that feeling, it is irreplaceable. Getting Young Fathers on there was amazing because within the world of that song I’m talking about, when *Everybody Down* \[Tempest’s 2014 Mercury-nominated debut\] came out, they were there, we were labelmates. They’ve been a part of this journey and it felt like a massive blessing to have them there on this song.” **“Till Morning”** “I wanted it to feel like the morning was coming, the sun was coming out, it was getting warmer, it’s getting brighter. When the chords come in at the end, it’s like the light. By the time we’d got our heads around that arrangement, it was two in the morning. I went in to put the vocal on it and I’d been metabolizing the lyric quite a lot and the take that I did was quite angry. Fraser said there was a tenderness in the original guide vocal because I was being very tentative with it. Sometimes, when something’s really new, you don’t even dare to say it, so I went back in and I did it like that. More gentle, more optimistic, more hopeful, more loving, less raging—and what you get is this very beautiful song about survival and about what comes after, about the possibility, a declaration of love. I thought, ‘How lucky I am to have met Fraser and to be in this relationship with somebody who can give a note like that, that can just shine a light on your performance?’”

The cover art for *Virgin*—an X-ray of a pelvis with a visible IUD—was a far cry from that of Lorde’s bright, beachy third album, 2021’s *Solar Power*, whose sun-soaked, jasmine-scented songs drew from Laurel Canyon folk and Y2K soft rock. Looking back, that album’s free-spirited imagery was a bit idealistic—a projection of how the New Zealand native turned New Yorker wished she could be. Her fourth album, as she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, is a portrait of the 28-year-old singer as she is, without edits or apologies: “Kind of like a photo of yourself that you don’t love, but captures something true about you.” The resulting songs, written between 2023 and 2025, are forthcoming and visceral, trading *Solar Power*’s New Age-chill for beats you can feel in your gut. (It’s her first album since her 2013 debut not co-written and -produced by Jack Antonoff; instead, she shared production duties with the LA-based electronic musician Jim-E Stack.) Surrealist introspection gives way to throbbing bass on opening track “Hammer,” where a walk down Canal Street ripples with psychedelic visions. “I had just come off my birth control, and I could not believe how I was feeling,” Lorde told Lowe about the song’s inception. “Everything was pure possibility. That first sound feels like it’s coming from a very guttural place in the body. My sister said, ‘It sounds like it’s coming from your womb.’” Cue the aura readings, 3 am cigarettes, broken mirrors, pregnancy tests, ego death. On “Man of the Year” and “Favourite Daughter,” questions beget more questions on the subject of what it means to be a woman, and moreover, a woman who’s now been famous for nearly half her life. The latter is at once a love letter to her mother and a meditation on being a teenager thrust into global pop stardom. “There’s been this dynamic for the last 10 to 12 years—and then further back—of wanting so badly to be loved, and to get this approval, and to be the favorite,” she told Lowe. “And it was really moving to me how, even as I was singing this song about my foremost idol and the person who I think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about what a crazy thing it is to have happened to you, what happened to me at 16.” Now the superstar finds freedom in the freefall: “I’ve been up on the pedestal/But tonight I just want to fall,” she sings on the shuffling “Shapeshifter.” “I still don’t know what happens when you put out a record that is like this,” she admitted about the unfiltered portrait *Virgin* presents. But in its full transparency, she arrives at something like peace.

Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, 2024’s *My Method Actor*, found the London singer-songwriter in an existential quandary. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she told Apple Music at the time of its release. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” In writing the LP, she found some of those answers: “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she said. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” A few songs were abandoned in the process, which she undertook with her songwriting partner Wilma Archer. But upon returning from touring *My Method Actor*, Yanya found that some of those ideas deserved revisiting, and they form the *Dancing Shoes* EP. The title might be a little tongue-in-cheek—these four tracks don’t quite suit the club floor—but it does perhaps suggest a desire to dance the blues away. And like all of Yanya’s prior albums, she finds a springy tension between laidback rockers that mask pain with compelling grooves (“Kneel,” “Cold Heart”) and equally affecting, soul-baring pop ballads (“Where to Look,” “Treason”).

When trap entered the mainstream in the late 2000s, it was uniformly serious business; now it can sound as playful and dreamy as anything we call “indie” or “pop,” and we have producers like Pi’erre Bourne to thank. His rapping has gotten better, but his beats are still the draw, a buffet of video game blips and accordion riffs (“La Loi, C’est La Loi”), drums that rumble like toy tanks, and melodies as sweet and light as the breeze through his extremely expensive hotel curtains (“JBH”), more *Looney Tunes* than *Gangsta Grillz*. Even his sexual conquests are framed as fairy tales (“Rapunzel”). He’s having fun with it—and why not?

Emotional directness has always been part and parcel of the Laura Stevenson experience—but on *Late Great*, the Long Island-hailing singer-songwriter digs even deeper within as she chronicles the dissolution of a long-term relationship. “There were a lot of changes in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “I had to rebuild, and it was really difficult. The aftermath was having to navigate the world as a person on my own—which was difficult, because I was partnered for my entire adult life.” These 12 songs, imbued with the rich lyricism and melodic punch she’s long been known for, came together as Stevenson dealt with the wreckage amidst navigating continuing education, parenthood, and the expectations of agelessness that come with being a full-time musician. “When you’re in a band, you never really feel like a grown-up,” she laughs. “Your future thinking is not that clear. All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m a grown up, and I don’t know what is going on.” This period of change emboldened Stevenson to take charge in new ways with her studio collaborators, which included pop-punk compatriot Jeff Rosenstock, Real Estate drummer Sammi Niss, and producer John Agnello. “In the past, I wasn’t as vocal about things that I didn’t want—I’m a total people-pleaser, a peacekeeper,” she says. “This time around, I was pretty uncompromising about what I wanted. I sat with this one in a way that I never had before. I don’t think anything ever will be exactly the way you want it to be—but it was as close to what I really want as I’ve ever gotten.” Below, Stevenson tells the story behind each song on *Late Great*. **“#1”** “I wrote this song a long time ago. I was playing it while opening for Murder By Death in 2016, and I was like, ‘Their fans are gonna hate me if I play my little quiet songs.’ So I made it more boisterous than it was intended, and then I hated it and I put it away for a long time. When I was coming back to it, I kept hearing Roy Orbison singing the chorus—and I love a real schmaltzy chorus, so I leaned harder into that. Then I felt like it needed to be over-the-top, so I asked Jeff Rosenstock to add some orchestration—and it was exactly what I wanted. I felt like if it wasn’t huge, then it would be stupider somehow—so it had to be really stupid to the point where it was good, and we got there.” **“I Want to Remember It All”** “When I was writing this song, I was like, ‘Is this already a song?’ I felt like it worked *too* well—it couldn’t possibly be my idea. It’s a song about when things happen in your life that are supposed to happen. My daughter’s here, and every moment of my life that led up to her birth has been the exact right thing that needed to happen to make sure that this very specific human being was made. There were a lot of painful things that happened in the past couple of years, but I want to remember everything. I’ll take the painful stuff if I can have all the beautiful things.” **“Honey”** “Sonically and lyrically, it’s a weaving together of similar ideas. Part of it is about the relationship that I was in, part of it is about love in general, and part of it is about singing to someone I hadn’t even met. It’s love in a bunch of different forms, and then I wove it all together. I’m barely singing to anyone—I might be singing to myself, who knows.” **“Not Us”** “This one’s really sad. I’d never heard a song about this topic, which is when you’re in a relationship and watching everybody else around you break up, and you’re like, ‘That’ll never happen to us—we’re perfect.’ It’s not schadenfreude, but with each relationship that dies around you, for some reason it draws you closer. But then it does happen, and you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I didn’t see that coming.’ How did we get there? Did we just let it fall apart because we didn’t think about it? We just thought it would always work.” **“I Couldn’t Sleep”** “This one is about me getting back out there—I’ve never been single in my entire life. That was scary. Then I was seeing someone, and I felt absolutely nothing—and I was, like, actually happy, because it just didn’t feel right. But then you feel like, ‘Am I broken?’ And that’s scary too, but it’s okay. I just thought it was such a good song, and it makes sense with this chapter in my life where I’m just trying to figure out what is going on—what love is, how to love. This is the truth, and that’s how I’ve always been with the things that I make. I don’t censor it.” **“Short and Sweet”** “It’s about being back in the world again and making yourself vulnerable, and being afraid of that. I’m working as a music therapist, and I work with older populations at an assisted living facility sometimes. I sing that song ‘L-O-V-E,’ and the end of the song goes, ‘Take my heart, but please don’t break it.’ I had a long talk with the folks at the assisted living facility about that lyric, and how that’s such a scary thing—and that’s what love is. So the song is about that, and not being ready for that, because it’s a scary prospect.” **“Can I Fly for Free?”** “I was in Queens seeing Paul Simon, and I had an existential crisis about my life—and also about my physical safety at that moment, because it was a poorly organized operation, there were no clear exits, and I was really scared that the crowd was gonna go crazy and everybody was gonna die. But also, I was feeling a little suffocated in my life. I wasn’t making choices based on what I wanted, and I was going along with things and pretty freaked out. It was like this weird, pivotal, scary moment, and I remember looking up and the moon was coming up so low in the sky, and this Spirit Airlines plane flew past the moon in this way that I’m always gonna have in my mind. The title is kind of a joke, because I mention Spirit Airlines, so it’d be nice to have like some sort of sponsorship.” **“Domino”** “This is about another attempt at love. It’s about knowing something is going to end—and end badly—but also knowing that it was never really real in the first place. It’s another attempt at love, but then you want to go back in a time machine and just be in that place where you felt good for a second, even though you know that everything was bad. When something’s ending, you wish for that ‘ignorance is bliss’ situation, but you can’t get it.” **“Instant Comfort”** “This one’s about being out in the world again—getting burned, and getting burned bad. It’s about knowing what I represented to someone instead of what I actually was, and feeling a little used in that regard, which is scary, and hard. Musically, I was really excited about this one because I borrowed a mandolin from my work. I used a lot of really chime-y instruments, like a 12-string guitar and a couple of other acoustic guitars, to get a really bright-sounding guitar sound that I was looking for. I sat with it a lot in the aftermath to get a layered sound that I couldn’t really describe when we were in the studio, so I did it myself, and sometimes that’s the way to do it.” **“Middle Love”** “I wrote this one on piano very quickly. It’s about a moment in time where you’re dropped into a scene and looking around. It’s very special when those songs happen, because it’s like a short story but you’re not given all the characters or context and you have to figure it out. In this one, it’s two people sitting in a notary’s office, separating. Their driver’s licenses are sitting there, and they’re seeing pictures of themselves in the past from a couple of years prior. They’re looking back at them like, ‘Would you have believed that you’d be sitting there right now in the future?’” **“Late Great”** “I had a friend tell me that this one is their favorite one, and I was like, ‘Really?’ I mean, when I was writing it, I was like, ‘This is a good song.’ But when I was going through the instrumentation, something got lost there for me and I fell out of love with it. But now I’m starting to fall back in love with it, because I’ve been playing it by myself the way that I wrote it. Thematically, it sums the whole album up: I’m doing it on my own, but I’m figuring it out. It’s the only song that has a real positive message.” **“#1 (2)”** “This song is my favorite. I felt like the record needed something, and then it just found its way to the end of the record. A lot had changed during recording, and I had a lot of time to reflect on how crazy and sad everything was. I needed some sort of closure from the whole experience, so I wrote this one about mending the heaviness of it all. There’ll always be grief there, and I do feel like the song really works well in bringing everything full circle.”

Don’t let her sweetness fool you: Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline has more insights about the inner struggles of sensitive young people than most of her indie-pop peers. Or, hey, do let it fool you—getting fooled is part of what being young is about. “I think it’s funny not to learn my lesson/And keep on acting like I’m 27,” she sings from her perch of infinite wisdom at age 31 (“Porcelain”), having confessed two minutes earlier, “I can’t go a day without touching my fucking telephone” (“Bitch Heart”). The music is more sophisticated than her 2010s K Records-style scrawls (listen to the ’70s soft-pop of “Vanity”) but never so sophisticated it gets in the way of her lyrics, which hit like little pinpricks. If it’s true, why make it more complicated?

Over the course of the 2020s, the Miami-based DJ and producer has situated himself at the forefront of Magic City’s more forward-thinking club scene—both for his solo work, which synthesizes underground club textures with Latin American and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and for his collaborations with Spanish pop experimentalist ROSALÍA and rising reggaetón star Isabella Lovestory. On his debut album *A Tropical Entropy*, inspired by Joan Didion’s 1987 book *Miami* and released on the Colombian dance label TraTraTrax, León swathes the sun-bleached sounds of reggaetón, dembow, and dancehall in hazy reverb and synth pads, elaborating on the micro-genre he’s coined “arquitectronica.” Ela Minus collab “Ghost Orchid” evokes a dream of reggaetón from long ago and far away, and the sublime “Bikini” with Erika de Casier channels the feeling of an endless South Florida sunset.

When an artist christens herself Gelli Haha and kicks off her debut album with a perky synth-pop number called “Funny Music,” it’s clear she’s not taking herself too seriously. And with *Switcheroo*, the LA singer born Angel Abaya successfully translates the irreverent theatrics and technicolor pageantry of her buzz-building live performances into an immersive play-at-home musical experience. Welcome to (as one track dubs it) the “Gelliverse,” an all-night party where the venue deploys every trick—dry ice, foam baths, confetti cannons—to amplify the sense of dance-floor delirium. “Spit” channels the indie-sleaziest 2000s electro with *Yo Gabba Gabba!*-level participatory exuberance; “Tiramisu” is jacked-up ’90s house spiked with Le Tigre attitude. *Switcheroo* is the sort of non-stop hit parade that offers nary a chance for a breather—but, in lieu of a bathroom break, Gelli delivers an extended NSFW monologue about urinating into a jar in front of her friends at a party (“Piss Artist”) without skipping a dirty-disco beat.

The singing, rapping, flute-playing polymath spent the three years since 2022’s *Special* courting unexpected controversy and flirting in social media posts with quitting music entirely. After mostly laying low throughout the turbulence, Lizzo emerged in February 2025 with a rock-inspired new single and an announcement of her fifth album, both titled *Love in Real Life*. But first, a bit of raucous, freewheeling fun: With three days’ notice in late June, she revealed a surprise 13-track mixtape whose artwork shows the singer grinning from ear to ear and flipping the double bird. The project came together just as spontaneously. “I did this shit in three motherfucking days, bitch!” she crows on “DITTO,” before adding: “You’re welcome!” From the jump, *MY FACE HURTS FROM SMILING* stands in stark contrast to the posi-vibes-only pop-rap that skyrocketed the 37-year-old singer into the mainstream circa 2019. “Bitch, I’m mad! Bitch, I’m pissed off!” she bellows on intro “CRASHOUT” before letting loose a 35-minute barrage of blistering, boisterous trap music. But her formidable Southern rap skills come as no surprise to those who heard her unofficial TikTok remix of PLUTO and YKNIECE’s 2025 viral hit “WHIM WHAMIEE,” which appears here as the rowdy “YITTY ON YO TITTYS (FREESTYLE).” Over grimy, bouncy beats from the likes of Zaytoven and Tay Keith, Lizzo sounds like she’s having more fun than she’s had in years: firing shots at the haters, turning up with her girls, and interpolating trap throwbacks. (“NEW MISTAKES” is likely the only song of 2025 to interpolate both Boosie Badazz and “Für Elise.”) She’s joined by Doja Cat on “STILL CAN’T FUH” and SZA on “IRL” for a pair of bratty bad-bitch symposiums. “I can’t let no comment section ever fuck with my vibe,” she spits on the latter duet. It’s a lesson to take heed of for 2025: Why be mad when you can throw ass and touch grass instead?