A key theme of The Beths’ fourth album is that linear progression is an illusion. “I feel like there’s a through line of difficult things happening, and the realization that everything \[is\] not going to keep gradually improving, and that life is often a bit more cyclical, or more of an up-and-down that you’re constantly moving through,” vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes tells Apple Music. “Which sounds like a depressing thought, but it doesn’t feel depressing. It doesn’t feel optimistic either. It’s just what it is.” In the years preceding the album’s creation, Stokes underwent several challenges that reinforced this notion. Having started taking an SSRI to address mental and physical health issues—she’d recently been diagnosed with Graves’ and thyroid eye disease—she found that the medication’s positive impact was countered by a clouding of her ability to write music. “I wasn’t able to write a song,” she explains. “I feel like I lost my internal compass. The SSRI was great for digging me out of the hole I was in, but my writing is so emotionally driven and my gut reactions were so different.” To counter the writer’s block, Stokes read Stephen King’s *On Writing*, *How Big Things Get Done* by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and *Working* by Robert A. Caro. At one point, she spent every morning writing 10 pages of stream-of-consciousness material on a typewriter. “I’d write about stuff I don’t normally like to write about because it’s too painful or close to home, or it makes me feel weird,” she says. “So, I was able to approach some of that stuff and ended up using a lot of that material. I’ve always written emotionally and from my own experience, but it feels like it’s going further than that. It’s definitely gone deeper.” Whether addressing the numbing side effects of the SSRI in the ragged, frenzied “No Joy” or Stokes’ complicated relationship with her mother in the fragile “Mother, Pray for Me,” *Straight Line Was a Lie* maintains the New Zealand quartet’s knack for pairing pop-infused melodies with spirited, jangly indie rock. Here, Stokes takes Apple Music through The Beths’ fourth album, track by track. **“Straight Line Was a Lie”** “Once I’d found the through line, I didn’t think we had a song that summed it up. I was on the bus on the way home after a session of working on the album and sang it into my phone. I don’t normally do the thing where the second verse is just the first verse, but it felt appropriate for it to be circular and feel like a journey you go on again.” **“Mosquitoes”** “It’s mostly about Oakley Creek, which during the \[2023\] Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods got wiped out. It’s a very beloved space. It’s now 2025, and it still hasn’t recovered. There are no paths anymore; it’s kind of grown wild a bit and changed a lot. To some extent, it feels like a lot of life is just being eroded, but nature continues on in a way that’s comforting. You can say Oakley Creek got destroyed, but it didn’t. It’s still there—it’s just different.” **“No Joy”** “It’s about not finding joy in the things that you normally find joy in. It’s weird. You’re not sad, but you’re also not able to find happiness. It’s its own weird purgatory. That came out in the song where it’s a very tense, neurotic riff. Nothing’s very high or very low; everything’s in the middle but trying to make it feel fun despite that. You don’t want the song to make you feel nothing.” **“Metal”** “It’s talking about existing in a human body and all the systems and functions that your body needs. It’s very complicated, and it’s kind of a miracle that it exists. But also, I’m going through all this weird health stuff, and I don’t really feel in control of what is happening in my body and my brain. I was trying to learn about what was going on with the human body and just being frustrated that I didn’t understand it, and the song’s kind of ping-ponging between those two perceptions of yourself.” **“Mother, Pray for Me”** “It’s about my relationship with my mother. She is a first-generation immigrant from Indonesia. We moved to New Zealand when I was four. It’s about our relationship and the gulf of understanding that exists between us, where we don’t really understand each other, and our lives growing up were such different experiences, and this feeling of trying to meet in the middle and understand the other.” **“Til My Heart Stops”** “It’s a very yearning song. I quite often feel like I push people away. It’s very easy to isolate yourself, especially if you’re feeling a bit weird and you can put walls up between you and other people: people that I love, people that I know well, people I wish I knew better. But there is this real desire to be a part of the world and be close with other people and to not have that. The euphoria I want to experience is there at the end of the song, but you have to fight to get to it.” **“Take”** “‘Take’ is really fun to play. It’s kind of hectic and driving. It’s about the call of the void of taking something to help you through when you’re struggling, whatever that is for you, whether it’s drinking, which is the national sport of New Zealand and Australia sometimes. The call of it is very strong. It’s just about coping, I guess.” **“Roundabout”** “It’s quite constructed, more so than our other songs, and a lot more spacious than we normally are, which is kind of scary. We always want to fill every inch of space. It’s about people you’ve known for a very long time and how you love all the different versions of them. People that you’ve known since you were different people, and you know that you’re going to be different people again in the future.” **“Ark of the Covenant”** “That’s a reference to Indiana Jones. It’s like, don’t look at the Ark of the Covenant ’cause if you look at it, your face will melt off. Sometimes you feel like there are things in your brain which you don’t want to visit, things about yourself that you don’t want to address, ’cause they feel terrifying. And then, you look at them, and they’re not the Ark of the Covenant. Your face doesn’t actually melt off. It’s fine.” **“Best Laid Plans”** “It’s just a fun song to finish on. It’s about the fantasy of giving up and indulging yourself in that. You know you can’t, you can never give up, you shouldn’t give up. But sometimes, when something’s hard, you’re just like, ‘But what if I just did it?’ What if I just let go and float away?’ It’s just embodying that feeling as an indulgent fantasy, and then afterwards, you can come back to earth and get it done.”

In the seven years since Dev Hynes last released an album as Blood Orange, the English musician wasn’t exactly twiddling his thumbs. After 2018’s searching *Negro Swan*, the scene veteran released a mixtape (*Angel’s Pulse*) and an EP (*Four Songs*), composed soundtracks for film and TV, and hopped on records with Lorde, Turnstile, and Vampire Weekend. All the while, he contemplated the future of Blood Orange. “I’m always making music,” Hynes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. But before he could release it, he had to answer his own questions: “Why should it exist? What’s the point?” Then Hynes’ mother died in 2023, and the direction for the fifth Blood Orange album, *Essex Honey*, became clear. Set in the county outside London that Hynes once called home, it’s a sublime examination of what “home” even means, refracted in the prism of his elegant hybrid of hazy pop, feather-light funk, and ghosts of post-punk and New Wave. Echoes of distant music memories forge pathways into the past: “Regressing back to times you know/Playing songs you forgot you owned/Change a memory, make it 4/3,” Hynes sings on “Westerberg,” its title a nod to The Replacements’ lead singer and its hook a play on the band’s 1987 track “Alex Chilton.” More Easter eggs are buried in the bass grooves, sax solos, distorted guitars, and orchestral swoons—a Durutti Column sample on “The Field,” an Elliott Smith interpolation sung by Lorde on “Mind Loaded,” a line about writer’s block delivered by Zadie Smith on “Vivid Light.” The prevailing mood is liminal, surrendered between past and present, though in Hynes’ hands, purgatory sounds heavenly.

Watching the pure joy of Glastonbury-goers doing the Woke Macarena to CMAT’s anthem “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” at her 2025 performance might make you think Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is having an easy time being a pop star. But the story behind her third album, *EURO-COUNTRY*, released two months later, suggests otherwise. “I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly, and when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else,” CMAT tells Apple Music of the follow-up to 2023’s *Crazymad, for Me*. “It was a very hard album to make for a number of reasons, and it’s a very heavy subject matter. What we were trying to pull off was so difficult that I had a really hard time making it. But that being said, I’m really proud of it,” she says. It’s a big album. While “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” provided the perfect—and well-deserved—pop crossover, complete with viral TikTok dance, CMAT was keen to stay true to her roots and go “full country” on songs like “When a Good Man Cries.” CMAT recorded the album in New York, addressing themes of grief, loss, and “the ambition to be bigger and more important than you currently are,” both in terms of herself and her native Ireland. “In general, I have to work on things on the road when they’re in their infancy,” she says. “But place-wise, I think this album was born of grief and loss and sadness and stuff, and things being put into perspective for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. All of this suffering I endured making it, and now I’m bearing the fruits.” Read on as CMAT talks through *EURO-COUNTRY*, one track at a time. **“Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy”** “I definitely needed something to open up the record that wasn’t my voice. A lot of this album is criticizing Ireland, which is something I love more than anything else in the world. So, I wanted something that captured my love for it and to show people I wasn’t coming from a snotty place. One day, I randomly came across a documentary, and this scene happened. Billy Byrne is about to free a lot of pigeons, and this is a phone call that he makes from a telephone box that’s in the middle of a beach. He sums up everything that I love about Ireland: its weirdness, its beauty, and its warmth.” **“EURO-COUNTRY** “‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bit of a Frankenstein song—I wrote bits of this years ago for a completely different thing. I knew the album was going to be called *EURO-COUNTRY* and then I thought, ‘I’d love a title track for this record.’ Usually, it’s the other way around. The line ‘I feel like Kerry Katona’ came because I have a real fascination with beautiful blondes who are destroyed by the press. I’ve written about Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith in the past, and I think Kerry is another one of those women that was rinsed by the British press, completely fucking unfairly. I really do admire her, and I think she’s very strong.” **“When a Good Man Cries”** “I’m really glad the way those two songs run into each other. That’s one of the most successful bits of the album. I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record was. This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which is, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head. I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ \[‘Lord have mercy’\] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favorite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person.” **“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”** “‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a meditation on irrational hatred and intolerance. It’s based around me getting annoyed every time I saw a poster of Jamie Oliver because when we were on tour, we’d eat a lot of sausage rolls from his branded delis. I don’t actually have any beef with Jamie Oliver, so I’m kind of like, ‘Ciara, you need to stop being a bitch. He’s got kids.’ And then there\'s a stream-of-consciousness section in the bridge where I’m going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch. I think it’s good to be self-critical—I don’t think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder.” **“Tree Six Foive”** “This song has been around for two years, and it used to be called ‘365,’ but there’s a little artist called Charli xcx who released a song with the same name, which is enormous. So, I was like, ‘I can\'t call it that, so I’ll just call it what it is in my phonetic spelling.’ It’s about looking back on my history again and thinking about a time where I made the decision to try and not to be treated badly anymore. I wanted it to be a proper flashback of a song. Even though I don’t have these feelings anymore, it’s a former version of myself that’s doing bad foreshadowing. A stupid song written by a stupid person to illustrate the person that I used to be, I guess.” “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” “If I’m making an album that is so much about capitalism, the cruelty of the modern condition, and how lack of community has made everyone be an asshole, I had to do one song where I was like, ‘I have also been a victim of this.’ The thing that had been rattling around in my head the most was last year, when we were doing festivals, and there were all the comments being nasty to me over my physical appearance and my weight. I remember saying, ‘Let’s make this the most accessible-sounding, biggest, fattest pop song so that loads of people are forced to listen to the most uncomfortable lyrics I’ve ever written.’ Under no circumstances did I think it was going to go anywhere near as big as it did, with Julia Fox doing a little TikTok dance to it, but I knew it would pop off in some way.” **“Ready”** “A lot of people in my life really loved this song, but I didn’t know how I felt about putting it on a record because it felt too optimistic and poppy. And I still don’t really know how I feel about the song, but I really like the place that it occupies in the record. It’s about somebody who is giving up after a period of complete stagnation. I wrote it in a COVID-y time. I’m saying I’m so bored of having depression that I’m going to do something self-destructive but fun because I don’t care anymore.” **“Iceberg”** “This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studious, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’” **“Coronation St.”** “I wrote bits of this when I was 23. Leaving something to sit and marinate in one form for seven years is something I like doing, so it’s like I’m in collaboration with a former version of myself. It’s about jealousy, being stagnant, and feeling like I didn’t get everything I thought I was owed by life. I wanted to capture that deadness and feeling of having nothing happening in your life and really double down with hindsight just how harrowing it was. I used to do a weird job managing and cleaning apartments in Manchester, and one of them overlooked the set of *Coronation Street*. I found it mad that it was fake buildings. I was like, ‘Wow, even Coronation Street’s not real.’” **“Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”** “Weirdly, this is the least profound song on the record. It’s about loss. My friend died, and I had to write the story of us in it because it was the first time I lost someone I was really close with. You make friends with people without thinking much about it, just enjoying their company. And then, when they’re gone, you realize what the point of them was. I only realized how much he meant to me when he died, and so much about his death annoyed me. I felt quite stupid being a touring musician/pop-star person because I was like, ‘What\'s the point in this?’ And then, I went to see the flat we both lived in together, and there was a charger and a Tesla parked outside it, and I remember being so angry about that.” **“Running/Planning”** “I wasn’t going to bring this song to the studio, but we made a draft of it in one night, which sounds almost exactly the same as it does now. It was so instinctive and so immediate. This is another song about ambition, drive, and the downsides of it. I was thinking about how there’s a treadmill of life that you get on when you’re in a heterosexual relationship. You date for a couple of years and then you get engaged, get married, and then you have a baby and live the rest of life. There’s a transactional element to romantic relationships that muddies something that’s otherwise quite beautiful. And also, societal pressures to conform. With conformity comes the weird prejudices against people who don’t \[conform\]. Carving your own path and going against it makes your life so hard.” “Janis Joplining” “‘Janis Joplining’ is a name I’ve given to being self-destructive. What’s weird is that’s not what the song’s about. I just thought it was a good line. Maybe it’s a bit salacious, but I had a crush on a guy who was married, and I realized a lot of it was born of seeing him and his wife interact with each other. Actually, what I was longing for was the community they had formed and their intimacy. It ends the record because after everything I’ve just spoken about, what I want is this egalitarian relationship and to comfortably talk intimately with everyone in the world, and if I can’t have it, then I self-destruct and go Janis Joplining. I wanted to end on a note that sounds like I think I have a solution to all the problems I’ve just spoken about for 45 minutes.

Sabrina Carpenter spent the decade after her debut single, 2014’s “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying,” patiently finding her voice. Her persistence finally paid off in 2024, when the absurdly catchy singles “Espresso” and “Please, Please, Please” launched the former child star into a whole new realm of pop stardom. Her sixth album, August 2024’s *Short n’ Sweet*, reintroduced the pint-sized singer as a sharp-witted diva with a honeyed voice and a fondness for campy innuendo—and earned Carpenter her first two Grammys (Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Pop Solo Performance). Just over a year after *Short n’ Sweet*’s release, the biggest breakout pop star of 2024 fires off its follow-up, *Man’s Best Friend*, which carries on her streak of concise 12-track records that draw from her love of ’70s disco and ooze snarky, self-deprecating charisma. “Oh, boy,” Carpenter chuckles to begin lead single “Manchild,” which taps the usual co-writers (Jack Antonoff and Amy Allen) for a country-tinged ode to the incompetent, unavailable men she can’t seem to shake. Romantic disappointment prevails, though the 26-year-old maintains her sense of humor as she wishes an ex a lifetime of celibacy on “Never Getting Laid” and drunk-dials old flames on the twangy “Go Go Juice.” Steeped in the nostalgic sounds of her heroes (Dolly Parton, the Carpenters, ABBA, the Bee Gees), Carpenter’s lyrics approach the drudgery of modern dating with a wink and a well-timed dirty joke. “I promise none of this is a metaphor,” she sings on the New Jack Swing-inspired “House Tour,” then she carries on: “I just want you to come inside.”

False narratives about the so-called decline or demise of New York rap have cropped up so often over the past two decades that, to one of the city’s hip-hop natives, it can feel downright conspiratorial. So it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise that someone like Joey Bada\$$ would eventually step up to address the current iteration of this tiresome talking point. After all, the Pro Era figure made his name by both reveling in and refurbishing the hometown sounds of the golden age, building with his crew while seeing his own star rise. “This thing is a competitive art form,” he tells Apple Music. “For people who’s really passionate about this and passionate about moving that pen, we understand that.” His 2025 opening move “The Ruler’s Back” and its subsequent rap ripostes “Sorry Not Sorry” and “Pardon Me” made his position known and, on some level, put him at perceived odds with certain Los Angeles denizens. “I believe I’m at my best when I’m feeling the heat of another pen,” he says, explaining how the perceived rivalry fueled his craft. But regardless of any animosity or gossip generated amid that back-and-forth, it all led to the release of *Lonely at the Top*, a mixtape that fully transitions the *1999* rapper into his present era. The Chuck Strangers-produced opener “DARK AURA” provides a proper reintroduction, leading swiftly into the confident alliance of Joey with Westside Gunn on the ornate “SWANK WHITE.” In line with the flexibility of the project’s format, the beats sometimes surprise, as with the R&B groover “3 FEET AWAY” and the Neptunes-esque throwback “SUPAFLEE.” Yet even when he’s in more familiar musical territory on “HIGHROLLER” or the Statik Selektah-helmed “BK’S FINEST,” he never sounds stale. NYC pride pervades the project, occasionally amplified by locally sourced guests like A$AP Ferg, Rome Streetz, and Pro Era pal CJ Fly. Given Joey’s lyrical swipes at the West Coast that led to this moment, the presence of TDE mainstay Ab-Soul on “STILL” seems less like a conciliatory olive branch than a slightly subversive act of artistic solidarity, one made even more meaningful by Rapsody’s concurrent feature. “I mean, I’ll say we was trolling, but we had to show people that you can do this,” he says. “And it could be love afterwards—and during, even.”

Don’t be fooled by the brief burst of Beethoven’s Fifth that caps the introductory track on The Hives’ seventh album—Sweden’s most swaggering garage rockers have not entered their symphonic prog phase. It’s just a mischievous misdirection that thrusts us slam-bang into “Enough Is Enough,” whose buzzsaw guitars and spine-cracking backbeat provide intentionally unsubtle echoes of The Hives’ 2000 signature, “Hate to Say I Told You So” (while proving that even in his late forties, lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist isn’t about to retire his nickname). Cramming 13 tracks into 33 minutes, *The Hives Forever Forever The Hives* retains the band’s strict adherence to punk’s loud/fast parameters, even as they reformulate their Molotov-rocktail recipe with liberal doses of synth-spiked indie (“Legalize Living”), Clash-of-’77 valor (“Paint a Picture”), and high-voltage AC/DC riffage (“Bad Call”). As a Y2K-era sensation that’s endured past the quarter-century mark, The Hives have more than earned the right to write their own self-celebratory theme song, and with the needling, New Wavey title track, they deliver the sort of shout-it-out chorus that their crowds will still be chanting long after the house lights go up.

“Heartbreak, gold mine,” Jordan Miller sings at the start of “Touch Myself,” a paean to irrepressible desire that appears partway through The Beaches’ third full-length album. And with those three words, she provides a perfectly succinct snapshot of The Beaches’ trajectory since 2023, when the viral post-breakup anthem “Blame Brett” thrust the Toronto band into the Top 40 pop charts on both sides of the border. With *No Hard Feelings*, The Beaches continue to navigate the emotional minefield of young-adult love with their sense of humor and candor intact. But if their early releases saw them rocking out with ’70s glam swagger, *No Hard Feelings* casts their fine-tuned pop sensibilities in an ’80s goth romanticism, with the shimmering guitars and yearning hooks of tracks like “Touch Myself” and “I Wore You Better” hitting the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Robert Smith and Taylor Swift. And where The Beaches’ breakout single was about trying to move on from a relationship, *No Hard Feelings*’ emotional centerpiece—the synthy soft-rock stunner “Lesbian of the Year”—is a bittersweet account of leaving your past behind completely, with Miller giving voice to keyboardist/guitarist Leandra Earl’s experience of coming out.

If the title of Deftones’ 10th album seems provocative, that’s because it’s supposed to. “I like the exclusivity of the name,” vocalist Chino Moreno tells Apple Music. “It feels restricted, maybe naughty. It has all these connotations. But it was the name of the folder on my desktop where I would put stuff while we were working on all the songs.” Written and recorded over two and a half years in Nashville, Joshua Tree, and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, *private music* sees Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and keyboardist/turntablist Frank Delgado reteaming with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who helmed their 2010 album *Diamond Eyes* and 2012 album *Koi No Yokan*. The album’s first single and leadoff track, “my mind is a mountain,” came out of a studio jam. “It was one of those songs like ‘Change,’” Carpenter says, referencing the band’s signature tune from 2000’s *White Pony*. “We were just in the room messing around, and it started forming.” “I love the fact that it’s bombastic,” Moreno adds. “There’s a push and pull in that song that I really love. It’s heavy, but the one way that we collectively always describe our band is, no matter what style of music it is, we always like to feel that you can nod your head to it. This song has that head-nod thing.” “i think about you all the time” came out of a quiet moment Moreno had on the beach near Shangri-La. “I remember getting up in the morning, walking down the street, jumping in the ocean, coming back in my swim trunks and sitting there in my bare feet with the guitar and just start playing,” he says. “That night, I made a cup of coffee and said, ‘Nick, let’s record that thing I did this morning.’” “milk of the madonna” is a thunderous Deftones banger, with Moreno’s emotional tenor soaring over the band’s swirling, writhing tempest. “infinite source” was the first song written for the album: Carpenter came up with the original idea in Nashville before he, Moreno, and Cunningham completed it on tour. As Moreno points out, *private music* has staying power. “Nothing feels like it was a snapshot of that time and now we’re in a different place,” he says. “Two and a half years after their inception, the songs still feel very much immediate.”

Following the widescreen dream pop of 2021’s *Blue Weekend*, Wolf Alice felt some sonic skin shedding was in order for their fourth album. “We were thinking about what we were doing in a much more calculated way,” bassist Theo Ellis tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I don’t know whether it’s age or whether it’s having done this for the fourth time, but less was more with this record.” Recorded in LA with Adele/Paul McCartney producer Greg Kurstin, *The Clearing* finds the North London four-piece stripping back the alt-rock fuzz and shoegazey FX that had characterized their earlier releases for a more classic sound. One with a warm analog glow and rich FM radio-friendly melodies that positions them closer to ’70s soft rock than the 2010s indie scene from which they broke out. Listen closely, and there are nods to that golden era bubbling up throughout *The Clearing*: drummer Joel Amey’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”-cribbing shuffle on “Leaning Against the Wall,” the ELO/Beach Boys chug that drives “Bread Butter Tea Sugar,” and guitarist Joff Oddie switching between breezy strumming, intricate fingerpicking, and searing melodic lines like *Rumours*-era Lindsey Buckingham. Such echoes reflect the band’s listening habits: a stack of records on heavy rotation in the studio that included Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, and folk-rock outliers Pentangle. “This time, we weren’t afraid to give references. Maybe in the past I felt that I didn’t want to give them because then it would sound like that,” singer Ellie Rowsell says of the band’s touchstones when making *The Clearing*. “But now I felt much braver to say, *this* is my reference. I knew that it was going to sound like us because I understood what we were a bit more.” The wide-open space afforded by *The Clearing*’s musical palette allows Wolf Alice’s finest set of songs to date to shine. Whether it’s “Just Two Girls’” sparkling, disco-flecked pop, Rowsell’s hushed reflections on aging and motherhood on “Play It Out” or “White Horses”—a remarkable interpolation of folk and krautrock that startles without having to turn everything up into the red. “Maybe there are people who are scared of rock music that is soft. ‘Soft rock’ has felt like something I should never say out loud up until now,” reflects Rowsell. “I don’t care. I’m interested in music that you can play live that is energetic and performative without having to be all distortion pedals and shouting and fast and loud. I like that stuff still, but there’s certain songs that we have in our set where I’m like, ‘Why is this an “up” part of the set when it’s just a good acoustic guitar?’ Or, ‘How come I feel like I am giving 100 percent when I’m not stomping around on stage screaming in people’s faces?’”

In the decade since 2015’s *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside* dropped, Earl Sweatshirt transformed from Odd Future’s mumbly alumnus into one of the most unique hip-hop artists of his generation. The acerbic idiosyncrasies and deceptively lethargic flow that made the ruminative rapper so compelling early on in his run metamorphosed over time to place him in an even less categorizable stratum. More recent work, like 2022’s *SICK!* or the following year’s *VOIR DIRE* with The Alchemist, found him seemingly examining and embracing the possibilities of brevity, doing more by saying less and keeping his projects as concise as they are insular. In line with that apparent methodology, *Live Laugh Love* contains songs that are often quite brief, filling the space provided by his curatorial left-field beat selections with pithy, incisive bars and comparatively looser vocal riffs. Some of these producers have been by his side for a while, namely Black Noi$e and Navy Blue who, respectively, contribute to roughly half the tracks. Apart from a sole instrumental from underground climber Child Actor—the murkily soulful *2 Fast 2 Furious* nod “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!”—the remainder come from Theravada, a New York-based artist who Earl’s fans may recall from *SICK!*’s “Tabula Rasa.” The first four songs here benefit from his beats—from the squirmy filter funk of “gsw vs sac” through the percussive jolts of “Gamma (need the <3).” Yet regardless of who happens to be behind the proverbial boards, *Live Laugh Love* is anchored by Earl’s unconventional appeal and discursive proclivities. “INFATUATION” mixes metaphors as if they were recipes, serving up tastily reconstructed wordplay seasoned with heady poetry. Among the longest songs here, “Live” cautiously raises one of the album’s oft-revisited trope dissections—dying on a hill—before spiraling downwards with a beat-flip to match the mood. The slightly redacted “CRISCO” offers up a fractured narrative flecked with graphic imagery, while “WELL DONE!” subversively flexes in different directions than most rappers could even attempt. On the closing “exhaust,” he comments on both work ethic and something far more personal, vacillating between civil splits and parting words of wisdom, albeit with the occasional Erykah Badu interruption.

As the frontwoman for pop-punk heroes Paramore, Hayley Williams has spent her entire professional life in the major-label system, having first signed to Atlantic Records in 2003 when she was just 15. But following the worldwide arena tour for Paramore’s 2023 album, *This Is Why*, the contract expired, and she returned to her concurrent solo career as a fully independent artist for the first time, completely unburdened by the weight of commercial expectations—and from any conventional notions of what even constitutes a proper album. In August 2025, she dropped a whopping 17 new tracks online at random, inviting fans to create their own playlist permutations. “I really did want to shirk the responsibility,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe at the time. “I was kind of interested in other people’s perspective, also, because there’s just a point where you’re in the eye of that storm, you’re making things, you’re going through shit, and you can’t possibly have perspective.” However, four weeks after that initial data dump, Williams finalized her own version of the tracklist and officially corralled those songs under the title of *Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party*. You can understand why sequencing these tracks was such a daunting task: *Ego Death* feels a lot like listening to five-disc CD changer stocked with ’90s faves on shuffle mode, bounding between fuzzy Breeders-styled odes to anti-depressants (“Mirtazapine”), No Doubt-like tropical-pop mash notes (“Love Me Different”), and pure Alanis-worthy catharsis (“Hard”); she even works the chorus of Bloodhang Gang’s “The Bad Touch” into the grungy folk dirge “Discovery Channel,” transforming the original’s horndog hook into a raw expression of animalistic lust. But while *Ego Death* draws from a kaleidoscopic pop palette, Williams’ punk-rock heart beats loudly throughout, as she takes side-eyed shots at the Nashville establishment on the deceptively breezy title track, while using the gothic trip-hop backdrop and deadpan Lana-esque vocal of “True Believer” to paint a damning portrait of so-called Christians who “pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children.” As a parting gift, Williams appends *Ego Death*’s original 17 loosies with the previously unreleased “Parachute,” which seamlessly folds Williams’ punk past and alt-pop present into a triumphant closer that sounds like Chappell Roan working up the nerve to stage-dive into the pit at Riot Fest.

Like the so-called slackers of early-’90s alt-rock (Beck, Pavement, etc.), Mac DeMarco’s sleight of hand is to make beautiful music without apparently trying—a chiller so chill he doesn’t write songs so much as wait for them to come snuggle up in his lap. *Guitar* is his most quietly striking album since the landmark *Salad Days*, stripping the slimy synth textures and bubbling drum machines out of his early sound to reveal sparse, paper-thin soft rock whose eerie melodies and gently jazzy chord progressions have more in common with ’40s-era pop like The Ink Spots and The Platters than anything from the underground (“Sweeter,” “Nightmare”). “Miracle, reveal yourself to me,” he sings at the beginning of “Holy,” channeling the meditative stillness of a John Lennon demo or early-’70s Al Green. It might sound wimpy at first. Then you realize a sound so naked and dry leaves him nowhere to hide. That’s strength.

Though 2023’s *Everyone’s Crushed* marked a significant breakthrough for experimental New York pop duo Water From Your Eyes, they didn’t change much in recording its 2025 follow-up, *It’s a Beautiful Place*. The band, which consists of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, made the album where they have always recorded: in Amos’ bedroom. The homespun feel doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the sound, though, which finds Water From Your Eyes at their sharpest and most daring. “Life Signs” imagines a middle ground between post-punk and Anticon-style abstract rap. “Nights in Armor” bursts with crunching guitars and a pummeling floor tom, an atmosphere that moves to the background as layers of Brown’s vocals fight for space amid the chaos. No sound, no concept, no lyric is off-limits for the duo, and it’s exhilarating to witness just how many disparate ideas they consistently attempt to fit into traditional and non-traditional pop structures.

After years spent grinding on the DIY circuit under aliases like Mother Marcus and Riley on Fire, the Baltimore musician (born Marcus Brown) took on the Nourished by Time moniker in 2019. He broke through with 2023’s *Erotic Probiotic 2*, his first album as Nourished by Time—a swirl of lo-fi synth-pop, post-punk, funk, and R&B that made capitalist critique sound cool. On his second full-length (released on XL Recordings, as was his 2024 *Catching Chickens* EP), Brown simplifies his sound without sacrificing its freewheeling eccentricities and lyrical nuance. Here, songs about love reveal themselves as songs about surviving and finding meaning in an alienated, oppressive modern world. “Know he’s got a purpose/But he’s always working/Tryna beat the system/Manifest a vision,” he sings on “9 2 5,” which transmutes day-job drudgery into piano-house euphoria. Here and there, shimmers of beauty and absurdity shine through the cracks, like a story of a half-baked psychic reading on “Idiot in the Park.”

“Ultimately—and I only discovered this after the whole album was written—this album is about opening yourself up to a lover, or a person, or the entire world, giving them every single part of yourself,” Laufey tells Apple Music about her third album, *A Matter of Time*. “It’s about acknowledging that it’s just a matter of time until you find out every single part of me.” She began working on the project while touring behind her breakthrough album *Bewitched* in 2024, inspired by a host of factors—particularly balancing her hectic schedule as an in-demand pop star with falling in love for the first time. Laufey worked on *A Matter of Time* with her longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart and new creative partner Aaron Dessner (of The National and Big Red Machine, and a regular collaborator of Taylor Swift’s). “It was that new experience that I was craving for an album,” she says. “I wanted to be so careful for this album about staying true to myself, and staying true to my roots, and staying true to my philosophy, which is ultimately keeping jazz music and classical music alive through my own music. But I was craving a level of speed and shine and newness for this album, and I knew I had to find one partner to work with who would bring that out in me.”

Though Westside Gunn’s attention these days seems largely focused on growing his 4th Rope pro wrestling brand, he can’t seem to stay away from the mic in 2025. With two new releases already under his championship belt, as well as noteworthy collabs with the likes of Doechii and JID, the auspicious arrival of *HEELS HAVE EYES 2* ensures that Griselda’s head honcho stays inextricable from the year’s rap conversation. While the kayfabe-centric series’ initial installment featured no less than WWE’s Ted DiBiase on its cover, this considerably lengthier sequel swaps in Virgil, another iconic in-ring figure whose memorable late-’80s/early ’90s storylines had him either aligned or at odds with the Million Dollar Man. Such choices reflect the world-building his fans have come to expect from him, and returning producers like Conductor Williams and Denny Laflare on deck reinforce the lineage this project plays in his wider discography. Its title reflecting the titular superstar’s shocking bad-guy turn, “HEEL CENA” finds Gunn canonically shrouded in villainous boasts and deeply jazzy vibes. The gloomy “GLOWREALAH” calls back to several thematic hallmarks in his lyrical mix, while “MANDELA” brightens things up without sacrificing his signature fixations. A handful of Griselda familiars come through with fly verses of their own, from veritable veteran Benny the Butcher on the ominous “POWER HOUSE HOBBS” to the more recent affiliate Brother Tom Sos on “AMIRA KITCHEN.” Both narco rap go-to Stove God Cooks and Buffalo mainstay Eastside Flip feature on “BRIKOLAI VOLKOFF,” the former with a profane hook and the latter with a characteristically freestyle coda. And as for that parting Hulk Hogan homage on “LOVE YOU PT. 2,” you know Flygod had to do it.

When Kid Cudi spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2022, Cudi was contemplating closing the door on music entirely. “The Kid Cudi stuff, I think I want to put it on the back burner and chill out with that,” he said. “I think I want to be done with it.” Fifteen years deep into his uncompromising career, he’d scored a handful of megahits, pioneered the melody-driven style that’s defined the past 15 years of hip-hop, and secured his spot among the blog era’s Mount Rushmore. Then he got bored. Three years later, Cudi’s reinspired and happier than ever, following up 2024’s pair of trap-inspired albums—*INSANO* and *INSANO (NITRO MEGA)*—with a record he bills as his first-ever pop album. “I just felt like I needed to drastically make a creative leap in my career,” he tells Lowe in 2025. “I mean, people know that I’m a risk-taker, and I felt like the last five years, I hadn’t really been pushing myself.” Approaching his 11th solo album, *Free*, he asked himself a question: “What does the world not have right now that I can provide?” The answer, it turns out, was hope. The Cleveland native has never shied away from vulnerability, candidly sharing his struggles with depression over the years. On *Free*, the newlywed (he married Lola Abecassis Sartore in June 2025) testifies that it does, in fact, get better. Here he swings for the fences with pop-punk chords, massive hooks, and the occasional dubstep drop as he fights for happiness in the face of fear. “Turns out I had control of my own Truman Show,” he howls over the driving beat of “Truman Show.” And on the lighters-in-the-sky anthem “Neverland” (which he sang to his wife on their wedding day) he swoons: “My heart’s skipping/The scales tipping/It’s called living/And I could get used to it.” Introduced to the world at the age of 24, the 41-year-old rapper never pictured himself making it this far. “When I was younger, I never imagined myself in my forties—I didn’t see past 30 for me,” he tells Lowe. “And it’s just a beautiful thing to have this album as a direct representation of the joy and peace that I feel.” He recalls being overcome with emotion when recording “Salt Water,” which he closes by addressing his audience directly: “Yes, my life has been one hell of a ride,” he says, ditching his signature melodies for spoken word. “There was a time where happiness was a very far-off and distant thing for me to acquire. But I made it out of that darkness. I saw the light.”

Ghostface Killah captured lightning in a bottle with *Supreme Clientele*, his supernatural 2000 sophomore solo effort. The album is heralded as a classic, as both his best and as one of the greatest to come from the Wu-Tang Clan. Months after the album’s 25th anniversary, he released a sequel that satisfyingly lives up to the original, part of the seven-record Legend Has It campaign by Nas’ Mass Appeal Records. Recreating the feeling of the 2000s is one thing, but it’s another to actually have old records from decades ago that still hit—and several of the songs here, like “Windows” and the second single, “Metaphysics,” are gems that Ghost has kept in the vault for decades while awaiting the right occasion. Aside from literal relics, Ghost is still in touch with his strengths that made the original so great. “Iron Man” and “Georgy Porgy” are stuffed with his distinctive brand of frenetic, cinematic street storytelling, recollecting robberies with raps as agile as they’ve been in years. Other songs take their time: “4th Disciple” somberly stretches the final moments with a comrade after a deadly shootout, and “The Trial” creates a scene with Raekwon, Method Man, GZA, and Reek da Villian as characters in a courtroom. “Break Beat” and “Beat Box” faithfully emulate the aesthetic of the ’80s hip-hop that he grew up in. And Ghost still knows his way around a soul sample, sometimes letting them play all the way through to extract every ounce of emotion from them. On “The Zoom,” he raps alongside sampled vocals by Lionel Richie, painting a peaceful scene of reading *Roots* author Alex Haley at the pool, with a gorgeous woman by his side. “This shit touch my soul,” he says at the start of the song. “You know I got an old soul.” That might be the case, but his rhymes are ageless.

A lot has changed for guitarist Royel Maddell and vocalist/guitarist Otis Pavlovic—collectively, Sydney duo Royel Otis—since their 2024 debut album, *PRATTS & PAIN*. On the back of that record and viral covers of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” and The Cranberries’ “Linger” they were propelled headfirst into a blur of overseas touring, high-profile festivals, and late-night TV appearances. That constant roadwork shaped album number two, *hickey*. “We were definitely more aware of how songs would come across when we played them live,” Maddell tells Apple Music. “We spent so much more time in front of crowds.” The experience, adds Pavlovic, contributed to the “simplicity” of the songs on *hickey*. Simple the songs may be, but sonically the album is a more diverse and textured effort than its predecessor, be it in the lush vocal harmonies of “come on home,” the joyous synths in “who’s your boyfriend,” the ’90s slacker vibe of “moody,” the ’80s-inspired pulse of “say something,” or the sumptuous, floating guitars that color “dancing with myself.” A by-product of what Pavlovic says was a desire to “not have any walls or boundaries with whatever we were trying to make,” the diversity also stems from the rich array of collaborators: Amy Allen (Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles); Jungle’s Lydia Kitto and Josh Lloyd-Watson; Omer Fedi (Lil Nas X, Sam Smith); Blake Slatkin (SZA, Justin Bieber); and Julian Bunetta (Teddy Swims, One Direction). Throughout, the duo’s dreamy musical optimism is contrasted by Pavlovic’s melancholy vocals, a neat vehicle for one of the album’s key themes, also inspired by the realities of life on the road. “There’s a few songs about saying goodbyes and missing people,” says Maddell. “I guess we were losing relationships.” Here, Maddell and Pavlovic walk Apple Music through *hickey*, track by track. **“i hate this tune”** Royel Maddell: “We wrote those lyrics for a different song, sitting in a pub drinking Guinness when we were recording *PRATTS & PAIN*. We made this instrumental track in Palm Springs with Blake and Omer and were trying to think of vocals, and then Otis started singing the lyrics we did in the UK.” Otis Pavlovic: “For some reason there’s a few songs, probably for both of us, that come on and remind us of a specific time or person. Can’t listen to it.” RM: “You love the song but you can’t not think of that time or person.” **“moody”** RM: “It’s kind of about a toxic relationship, not a girl in particular. The guy, the person singing, is the moody one as well ’cause they’re constantly saying something negative. We wrote that with Amy Allen.” **“good times”** OP: “That was the first song we did with Josh from Jungle. It just came out of an old demo we had. When you first meet someone and do a session, you’ve got to just break the ice and do something, and it’s the first idea we worked on. It is uplifting but then in the chorus it says, ‘In good times I doubt myself in front of you.’” RM: “It sounds fun but it’s negative.” **“torn jeans”** RM: “We did that with Chris Collins, and it was three guitar lines that I had and we just ended up weaving some vocals and stuff over it.” OP: “Just admiring someone’s torn jeans.” RM: “Just admiring the imperfections.” **“come on home”** RM: “It’s kind of about being far away from someone. Not really having control of where you are or where you could be. That was with Josh and Lydia from Jungle as well. Those harmonies are very Lydia-ish.” **“who’s your boyfriend”** RM: “The chords are really standard but we wanted to make them as least standard as possible, so added a capo to the guitar and tried to play them as weird as possible so it’s hard for people to figure out. Sonically, we were going for a mix between modern Cure and Joy Division. I don’t think we got anywhere close to either but that’s what we were going for.” **“car”** OP: “We did that one with Omer and Blake. We were talking about being with someone and trying to end \[the relationship\], but also not.” RM: “Not wanting the good parts to end.” OP: “\[And\] doing it in cars, which is something we’ve both experienced before, trying to break up in a car.” RM: “It’s weird wanting to break up with someone in a car because it’s claustrophobic and you’re in this small room. Why didn’t you just do it outdoors?” **“shut up”** OP: “We did this one with Blake Slatkin. It was the last song we did on the album. It came as a Hail Mary. That one is saying you don’t want someone to go away. Just shut up, don’t go away.” RM: “It’s also super dreamy, so it’s funny calling it ‘shut up.’” **“dancing with myself”** RM: “We went in wanting a disco Fleetwood Mac.” OP: “We wrote it in sections and you can kind of tell.” RM: “It’s \[about\] letting yourself be free and not worrying about what other people are thinking.” **“say something”** RM: “When we were planning on working with Blake and Omer, they asked what kind of song we want to make and as a joke, I said, ‘Take on Me’ by a-ha. That drumbeat is kind of a reference to ‘Take on Me.’” **“she’s got a gun”** OP: “We were doing it with Josh after working on ‘good times,’ just seeing what happens with it, throwing ideas down over the bassline. And I remember for the chorus we slowed the song down and sung stuff really slow to see what would happen, and the chorus melody came out of it. I don’t think we would have had that without doing that.” **“more to lose”** OP: “We’ve attempted to put melodies over that piano line since the start of the band.” RM: “Five years! We did it with Julian Bunetta and Omer. We were in Julian’s place in Calabasas, having fun making cocktails, and I just started playing it on the piano. Every time I sit at a piano I play it and just pray someone comes up with something. And that’s what happened.” **“jazz burger”** RM: “Jazz burger is a real thing. It’s from Jitlada in LA, this Thai restaurant, and you can get different levels of spiciness. We only went with four out of 10. It was so spicy my chest became mutated. I had this lump on my chest that was like a rhinoceros horn. And then we got ice cream and went back into the studio and made that.” OP: “Royel and I had just come from Sydney and said goodbye to some friends and some relationships.” RM: “It’s probably the realest song \[on the album\] with the fakest name; the most unrelated name.”

On 2024’s *Samurai*, Lupe Fiasco gave his fans exactly what they wanted. Reuniting with longtime producer Soundtrakk (of “Kick, Push” and “Superstar” fame) for their second consecutive full-length collaboration, following *DRILL MUSIC IN ZION*, he kept his high-level rap songcraft at the fore on the acclaimed album. This EP-length companion expands upon that project somewhat, with some additional material including a few choice remixes featuring his Samurai Tour opening act, singer Troy Tyler. At first, the reworked version of the title track seems a rather nuanced revisiting, yet its final minute and a half gives the groove a more pronounced R&B feel with Tyler’s take on the hook. A similar thing happens with “Bigfoot,” where their vocal interplay elevates an already surging chorus. As for the newer songs, “SOS” delivers the masterly lyricism that people expect from Lupe, his running commentary and intricate metaphors buoying the divinely jazzy, ATCQ-esque beat.

The past few years have been trying for the former member of Migos, which officially disbanded in 2023 after the tragic death of Takeoff in 2022. But hardship has shaped Offset’s path from the beginning, going back to his incarceration during Migos’ big break in 2013. “With me personally, adversity made me focus,” the 33-year-old rapper tells Apple Music’s Ebro Darden. “I’ve learned to just brush it off.” His debut solo album, *FATHER OF 4*, arrived in 2019, but 2023’s *SET IT OFF* marked Offset’s first venture with Migos in the rearview. On his third solo album, the rapper born Kiari Cephus sets aside his alias to dig a little deeper. “I named my album *KIARI* because it’s like me looking at myself in the mirror—my real life, how far I’ve come and what I’ve done, the good and the bad, the mistakes,” he tells Ebro. After seven years of marriage, Offset’s ex-wife, Cardi B, filed for divorce in August 2024. Through the drama, he sought solace in the booth. “I just wanted to focus on the music,” he tells Ebro. “And as soon as I did it, I seen the results.” The 18 tracks of *KIARI* show Offset at his most soul-searching, without sacrificing the technical precision he’s been known for since his scene-stealing turn on 2016’s “Bad and Boujee.” Moody samples add to the gravity, from the flip of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” on “Pills” to “Bodies” with JID, which throws a curveball by interpolating Drowning Pool’s “Bodies.” (“I like the element of surprise on the records,” Offset told Ebro of the collaboration.) On “Move On,” Offset officially closes the book on his relationship with Cardi: “I’m trying to move on in peace,” he sings on the hook. As for a future reconciliation with Quavo for a Takeoff tribute album, Offset tells Ebro, “It’s possible. We just building us first.” Still, he scatters tributes to Takeoff throughout *KIARI*, recollecting the trio’s early days on “Prada Myself” and recruiting John Legend for the poignant hook of “Never Let Go”: “I lost my brother, but I gained an angel.”

ADÉLA refuses to be tamed. She first turned heads on the *Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE* documentary series, pairing powerhouse performances with an outspoken demeanor that kept online discourse buzzing long after the show ended. In her next act as a solo artist, the Slovakia-born, LA-based singer and dancer channels that fearlessness into her debut EP, *The Provocateur*. Across seven songs, she distills her experiences chasing stardom into maximalist electro-pop—sometimes dark and jagged, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, but always bold and unflinchingly honest. “Superscar” delivers chilling commentary on industry exploitation—“Maybe I should count myself so lucky, so lucky/All these dirty hands they wanna touch me, so touch me,” she sings—while Britney-esque club thumper “SexOnTheBeat” flips hypersexualization on its head, its chopped moans giving the track a self-aware edge. On the Grimes-produced “Machine Girl,” she turns her gaze to the audience, calling out their thirst for drama. And over the industrial churn of “FinallyApologizing,” ADÉLA leaves parasocial haters no doubt: “You won’t get what you want from me.”

The hesitation to call the liminal, jazz-like blobs of sound on *That Wasn’t a Dream* “ambient music” comes down to detail: Anything so precise and obviously intentional requires—or at least rewards—a little more engagement. Palladino is a fretless bass player with a mile-long resume that includes D’Angelo, Adele, and The Who; Mills is a guitarist and producer whose subtle experimentalism has made him in demand across the underground and mainstream both as a session and live player (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan) and a producer (Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast). Together, they bridge the polite weirdness of fusion and smooth jazz with the hybrids of newer labels like International Anthem, conjuring micro-bits of bossa nova (“I Laugh in the Mouth of the Lion”), funk (“Taka”), and pastoral folk (“That Was a Dream”) that unspool like hold music for interdimensional phone calls—the background, made foreground.

There’s some heavy reverse psychology at play in Ava Max’s third album, from the fake petition posted on DontClickPlayOnAvaMax.com (which led to a snippet of an unreleased single) to Max’s bewildering disappearance from social media in the weeks leading up to its release. Cosmic-brain marketing strategy or otherwise, the “Sweet but Psycho” singer follows up 2023’s *Diamonds & Dancefloors* with 12 tracks that split the difference between ’80s synth-pop, ’90s Eurodance, early career Gaga, and *Blackout*-era Britney. She toasts to blissful independence on “Lovin Myself” and “Sucks to Be My Ex” and goes blue jeans and apple pie mode (while channeling a-ha) for “Wet, Hot American Dream.” And over the title track’s four-on-the-floor thump, Max puts on shades, pops her collar, and reveals the trollish title’s full meaning: “If you didn’t come to dance/DJ, don’t click that.”

In 2024, Three Days Grace surprised their fans by welcoming original vocalist Adam Gontier back into the fold. The singer had left in 2013, prompting the multiplatinum Canadian rock group to bring in Matt Walst, younger brother of bassist Brad Walst, to fill the vacant lead vocalist position. After three successful albums with Walst at the helm, Three Days Grace are back with *Alienation*, their first with two lead singers. “During the pandemic, Matt and Brad were talking about the idea of me coming back,” Gontier tells Apple Music. “Brad brought it to me, and it seemed like the right time. I had a lot of life to live over the past 10 years to get to the place I’m at now, which is a good place. So the timing just seemed perfect.” As Matt Walst tells it, the transition from one lead vocalist to two was less difficult than it might seem. “It was actually pretty effortless,” he says. “We got in a room and started writing this record and it just happened so easily. It didn’t take a lot of effort to make it work.” Lyrically, Three Days Grace returned to the theme of isolation that they’ve touched upon consistently since their 2003 debut. “The idea of feeling isolated and feeling like you’re on your own, even when you’re in a group of people, we’ve written about that a lot over the years,” Gontier says. “I think it’s something we all tend to feel at some point.” Below, he and Walst discuss each track. **“Dominate”** Matt Walst: “We have a song called ‘The Mountain’ from 2018, and it’s like a sports anthem. We wanted to write another anthem that you could play in the dressing room or work out to. We played Scotland a few years back, and between every song the crowd would chant, ‘Here we, here we, here we effing go. Here we...’ It was so cool, and I thought it’d be great to put that in a song. Finally, I had my chance.” **“Apologies”** Adam Gontier: “Our drummer Neil \[Sanderson\] started this one with Dan Lancaster, one of the producers of this album. Dan brought in a few different things that we wouldn’t normally do when we’re writing, and I think you can hear that on ‘Apologies.’ It’s a little bit outside the norm for us, because the verses feel a little poppier and then it’s got a pretty deep, heavy chorus. Lyrically, it’s about people around you offering to help in certain situations when you don’t necessarily feel like you deserve that help. I know I’ve been in that state quite a few times.” **“Mayday”** Walst: “‘Mayday’ is about the state of the world and how crazy and confusing it is and not knowing who’s piloting the plane. It’s like you’re on this flight and nobody’s at the wheel.” **“Kill Me Fast”** Gontier: “It’s another one we worked on with Dan Lancaster, and another one that’s outside of the norm for us. Lyrically, it’s about being in a relationship with somebody that you feel has one foot out the door but they’re still dragging you along. The song is saying, ‘If you’re going to leave, just do it and quit dragging me along for the ride.’” **“In Waves”** Gontier: “Over the last bunch of years, we’ve all lost people in our lives that we love, and ‘In Waves’ is about that. It’s about still feeling that loss around you, feeling that person around you still, and not necessarily being able to let it go—always feeling their presence or hearing their voice. It’s a pretty personal song, and it’s definitely one of my favorites on the album.” **“Alienation”** Gontier: “I feel like ‘Alienation’ is a song that could have been on our \[2006\] album *One-X*. It’s got classic Three Days Grace vibes. Lyrically, it’s that whole thing about feeling isolated and alienated that I was talking about earlier. It’s one of those things a lot of people go through and can relate to. When I first started writing music at 14 years old, I was listening to bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden and Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam, so that whole vibe, and their theme of isolation, was a big influence.” **“Never Ordinary”** Walst: “‘Never Ordinary’ is just about finding somebody and being outcasts together, always being different or outsiders, but breaking through and just being who you are no matter what the situation.” **“Deathwish”** Walst: “This is about not worrying about tomorrow and living in the moment and not really caring what happens the next day. I feel like I used to live in that world a lot in my earlier days in my music career, when I was just partying and just going all out.” Gontier: “Yeah, we all used to do that. It’s like Matt said in an earlier interview: Probably when we were sponsored by Jägermeister. We used to just go mad without any regard for tomorrow.” **“Don’t Wanna Go Home Tonight”** Gontier: “We all really love this one. It has an older, vintage feel to it, and that was the goal. I remember driving around the small town that we lived in—Norwood, Ontario, a town of 1,500 people—driving around back roads there, just smoking joints and not caring about anything else. The song is sort of an homage to that, because we just don’t do that anymore. But those were good times, man.” **“In Cold Blood”** Gontier: It’s a song we wrote about a relationship. It usually takes two people to mess something up. You’re letting your love die together. You’re both killing it in cold blood.” **“The Power”** Gontier: “This is also a relationship song. It’s about feeling like you’re powerless because you’re so deep in the relationship and that person has so much power over you. The song is about that realization of ‘I don’t want that anymore. You have all the power, and I need to take it back.’ So it’s about getting out of that relationship to get your power back, get your freedom back.” **“Another Relapse”** Gontier: “Way back before the band was even signed, I had my issues, and I battled addiction and stuff. And it’s still a constant thing. It’s always there. So, the song is kind of self-explanatory in that way—just being aware of relapse and what it means. I was in and out of rehabs and in and out of using so many times over the years, but thankfully not anymore. Musically, this song is a little bit different too, so we thought it was a good closer for the album.”

Three years after their standout collaboration on the 2022 track “Hollow,” singer-songwriter Emma Louise and producer Flume return with a full album that highlights how much the two Australian creators value unpredictable textures and approaches. Flume has built his career on bending the expected contours of big-tent dance music, while Louise dramatically pitched down her vocals for the entirety of her 2018 album *Lilac Everything*. On *DUMB*, the pair embrace such feats of flux in perfect harmony. The opening “All of the Worlds” contrasts Louise’s soft, digitally stuttered vocals with crunchy beats, before leaning into programmed melodies that evoke a rainbow of eight-bit video game sounds. Squelching flourishes and asides punctuate these tracks without overshadowing the sincere emotions behind what Louise is singing. On the beats-bruised piano ballad “Monsoon,” she asks over and over if the song’s subject thinks about her. As she similarly bares her soul on “Brand New,” her quiet confiding is countered with a pulse that grows ever more clubby and insistent with time. Not every track is laced with so much stimuli, however: “Stay” is the most streamlined turn here, with quieter melodic and rhythmic cues hugging close to Louise’s high, breathy pleas to figure things out tonight.

*IVE SECRET* is the second Korean mini album of 2025 for IVE, the K-pop girl group known for hits like “LOVE DIVE” and “After LIKE.” As the title suggests, the six-track album is an exploration of the lesser-known, complex emotions behind the glossy facade of the fourth-generation team, composed of members Gaeul, Yujin, Rei, Wonyoung, Liz, and Leeseo. Sonically, this means a more subdued sound for IVE. Gone are the soaring choruses of “I AM” and “REBEL HEART.” Instead, dreamy lead single “XOXZ” builds to a rap-chant chorus of the title slang, created to mean “I love you, good night, see you in my dreams.” IVE pairs the low-key chorus with a lulling, melodic “ooh-ooh, ooh,” a subtle and powerful reminder of their vocal prowess. The album’s “secret” theme is more explicit in tracks like “Dear, My Feelings,” a song about looking back at old diary entries with fondness, and “♥beats,” a laidback electropop bop about love explored on a digital landscape. Wonyoung participated in writing the lyrics for “XOXZ,” while Liz co-wrote the lyrics for “Midnight Kiss,” a midtempo pop ballad about missing a lover.

You could say that BigXthaPlug has always been country, from his deep Dallas drawl to the cowboy hat he rocked in the video for one of his earliest hits, 2022’s “Texas.” But his first official foray into country as a genre was in April 2025 with “All the Way,” a duet with rising country star Bailey Zimmerman featuring trap drums and steel guitar. With his hypnotic voice and over-the-top charisma, BigX has spent the past few years establishing himself as a bona fide star. But “All the Way” was the biggest hit to date for both BigX and Zimmerman. Throughout the 2020s, the lines between country and rap have blurred: Morgan Wallen and Lil Durk scored a hit with their 2021 collab “Broadway Girls,” onetime rappers like Jelly Roll and Post Malone have been embraced by Nashville, and the biggest song of 2024 was Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” a twangy rework of an old ringtone rap hit. With his third album, *I Hope You’re Happy*, BigX straddles that line with a foot firmly planted in each terrain. Besides a pair of interludes, each track features a duet with a country star, mostly centered around country music’s favorite topic: heartache. Speaking to Thomas Rhett on Apple Music Radio, BigX explained his methodology for choosing the album’s nine features: “The way I went about it, I looked for anybody who I felt like had some type of soul in them.” Hence the assist from Jelly Roll on the bittersweet “Box Me Up,” or the bluesy hook from Darius Rucker on the title track. Alabama’s Ella Langley is gorgeously petty on “Hell at Night,” an ode to taking the low road. (“It’s just one of those situations where you could tell two people was going through some of the same things, just in their own separate ways,” said BigX of the collaboration.) But on the Thomas Rhett duet “Long Nights,” BigX takes a moment to appreciate how far he’s come: “I thank God like every day, ’cause, shit, he helped me find my purpose/I was hurting/I went from hearing shots to hearing fans behind those curtains/So I know that it’s working.”

When North Carolina indie stalwarts Superchunk emerged from a nine-year hiatus in 2010, they forged a dignified way for pogo-happy indie bands to channel the sprung energy that made sense in their twenties into ideas that make sense in their forties and fifties. On the other side of starting to raise families and pursue other work, the entire notion of what it meant to be in a band at such a big age became both text and subtext and set a gold standard for the second time in their existence. On their fifth album since regrouping, Superchunk continue to find ways to meet the moment while never sounding like anything but themselves. Just as 2018’s *What a Time to Be Alive* mined Trump 1.0-era righteous fury for some of the most urgent music of their career and 2022’s *Wild Loneliness* used the pandemic’s isolation to contemplate environmental, societal, and emotional ruin, *Songs in the Key of Yikes* embraces and embodies the nauseous mix of despair and nihilism and abandon that defines 2025. At first glance, the tracklist reads like a cry for help from singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan (“No Hope,” “Everybody Dies,” “Climb the Walls,” etc.), but the eminently catchy “Care Less” moves past an easy slogan to serve as an operator’s manual for anyone who is both trying to stay informed about the ongoing collapse while trying to find space to tune it out and make use of whatever time is left (“Don’t make me remember/What I can’t forget”). “Is It Making You Feel Something” (which joins the pantheon of question-titled Superchunk songs alongside “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” “Does Your Hometown Care?,” “What Do You Look Forward To?,” and “The Question Is How Fast”) feels like an argument for the role of art, any art, amid the spiral. For all of Superchunk’s remarkable longevity and consistency, *Yikes* marks the band’s first on-record personnel change in 34 years with the departure of seemingly omnipresent drummer Jon Wurster and Laura King stepping in to lay down the sickness. Yet even a potentially convulsive change like this barely feels like a ripple in the final product, only reasserting Superchunk’s knack for not just weathering storms but being a refuge from them.

Manhattan’s own indie-sleaze poster boy Harrison Smith blew up with 2022’s “Girls,” a hedonistic nod to dance-punk’s mid-aughts salad days—but also for his semi-regular Freakquencies parties, which The Dare would DJ alongside fellow party-starters (Doss, Danny L Harle, Frost Children). Since “Girls,” the DJ, producer, and one-man electroclash band has released his debut full-length (2024’s *What’s Wrong With New York?*), performed “Guess” with Charli xcx live on the Grammys stage, and brought Freakquencies to clubs across the globe. On *Freakquencies: Volume 1*, the bon vivant briefly steps out from his role as band frontperson for four tracks of house for the heads, from the acid groove of “Kick” to the Ed Banger-esque euphoria of “Exhilaration.”

“This is a warning: Your time is up,” announced Mariah the Scientist in the trailer for her fourth album, *HEARTS SOLD SEPARATELY*. “We will not be led by heartless womanizers. We are more than soldiers. We are heartbeats in a world of hollow men, defenders of a cause worth living and dying for. This is for the lovers.” Since her debut album, 2019’s *MASTER*, romantic drama has been the Georgia native’s muse, as she unpacks the complexities of disappointment and desire with an old soul and a light touch. Drawing from the classics of ’80s R&B, when slow jams by the likes of Sade and Babyface ruled the radio, *HEARTS SOLD SEPARATELY* harkens back to a smoother, sexier time, though there’s a tinge of melancholy to singles like “Burning Blue” and the Kali Uchis duet “Is It a Crime.” The pair of singles represent the 27-year-old singer’s biggest hits to date. “I tried new things with my voice,” she tells Apple Music. “I tried new vibes. New perspectives.” As for what’s changed personally since 2023’s *To Be Eaten Alive*—after four years of her highly publicized relationship with Young Thug, during most of which he was incarcerated, the rapper was released in October 2024. Mariah delves into the situation on “Sacrifice,” the wistful opening track. “When you love somebody, you make sacrifices,” she says. “There was a point in time when there was a lot of distance in my relationship, and I feel like I had to make that sacrifice.” Amidst the sea of love songs floats one self-reliance anthem: “All along, it was me, myself, and I,” the self-professed loner sings on “More.”