What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

“I’ve been realizing that I really made the album that I needed to heal myself,” Kali Uchis tells Apple Music about *Sincerely,* perhaps her most liberating work yet. The Colombian American singer-songwriter’s catalog has never felt slight or frivolous, whether in English or in Spanish. Yet this full-length follow-up to her 2024 *ORQUÍDEAS* dyad presents as something truly unique, arriving roughly a decade after her promising EP debut *Por Vida*. The majority of the songs here began simply as voice notes, fortuitously captured in inspired moments outside of the confines or pressures of a studio setting. “Messages would just feel like they were directly coming through me, and I just had to get them out,” she says. Given such natural creative origins, it should come as little surprise that the actual process behind the album eschewed industry norms altogether, favoring home recording and unconventional settings. And despite the demonstrated level of guest vocal talent at her fingertips, she opted out of features, too. “When you’re making emotional music, you have to actually dig into difficult subjects,” she says, marking a clear distinction between this piece and its star-powered predecessor. As a result, *Sincerely,* feels disarmingly intimate for what is ostensibly a pop album, even one from as consistently adventurous an artist as Uchis. The evocative moments of opener “Heaven Is a Home…” and closer “ILYSMIH” speak on love in grand and sweeping gestures, the passing of her mother and the birth of her son making understandably profound impacts on the work. Influences like Cocteau Twins and Fiona Apple can be felt in all that comes between those bookends. “There’s a lot of grief, but there’s a lot of joy,” she says, describing what seeps through the veil of “Silk Lingerie,” or the vamps of “Territorial.” Excess punctuation on titles like “Lose My Cool,” and “For: You” hint at the flowing prose of her lyrics as it contributes to an even greater whole. “I think it is a celebration of life in its own way,” she says, “in the sense of finding beauty in the pain and taking the good.”

Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always *felt* like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), *The Scholars* is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design. The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.

The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore, and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, *Dogsbody*—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theater melodrama. On its follow-up, *Pirouette*, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.

At the core of every PUP record is the tension between Stefan Babcock’s brutally self-analytical lyrics and the rapturous communal response that their music elicits. And that contrasting quality has become all the more pronounced as the manic Toronto punks have gradually eased off the gas pedal. After expanding their palette with brass sections and electronics on 2022’s high-concept corporate satire *The Unraveling of Puptheband*, they reemerge on *Who Will Look After the Dogs?* with a sharpened musical and lyrical focus, settling comfortably into a post-emo power-pop style that makes Babcock’s bitterest sentiments sound celebratory. Babcock has a knack for framing universal anxieties—be it breakups or the fear of death—in intimate yet irreverent details: The Weezer-esque chugger “Olive Garden” sees him trying to salvage a broken relationship by revisiting the Italian restaurant chain that’s hosted countless high schoolers’ first dates, while the breezy ’90s alt-pop jangle of “Hallways” reveals the morbid inspiration behind the album’s title, when Babcock talks himself off the ledge by declaring, “I can’t die yet/’Cause who will look after the dog?” (And while cataloging his joyless days and sleepless nights, he manages to slip in winking quotes of Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”) But if the entire PUP discography feels like an extended therapy session, then the irresistibly anthemic “Best Revenge” feels like a breakthrough, where the song\'s radiant guitars are matched by an equally sunny outlook: “The best revenge is living well,” Babcock sings, and even if there are days when he can’t fully live up to that promise, he’ll at least have a club full of fans shouting out the song’s ecstatic chorus to keep him on the right path.

What’s in a name? In the case of Yung Lean, what initially registered as a sardonic take on post-ironic internet rap tropes was, in fact, a riff on the Swedish rapper’s given name: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. In the decade-plus since he broke through with 2013’s “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Lean has evolved past his position as Scandinavia’s foremost cloud-rap interpreter, embracing sincerity, transparency, and, more recently, post-punk. (On 2024’s *Psykos*, his first full-length collaboration with Drain Gang CEO Bladee, they channeled Joy Division and The Cure for songs about psychosis and ego death.) The title of his fifth solo album says it all: *Jonatan* is Lean at his rawest, a homecoming after a long, dark night of the soul. Lead single “Forever Yung” plays out like a funeral for his former self: Phoenixes rise from the ashes, masks are taken off, a rickety one-note bassline rattles ahead. A handful of bruised love songs crackle with manic energy and magical-realist details: On “Paranoid Paparazzi,” he raps about pills and lullabies in a voice that sounds like he’s just rolled out of bed, and “Babyface Maniacs” could be the theme song of a future *Badlands* remake: “Infamous murderous couple ridin’ through the drylands/Sugarcane kisses and shotguns, candy cane violence.” But at the emotional crux of *Jonatan* are heavy yet hopeful ballads that put chaos in the rearview—like “Swan Song,” on which Lean singsongs, “I wanna know what it feels like to come down from the trip of a lifetime.”

May 5, 2025, will stand now as a historic benchmark for André 3000. Famously elusive since the split of his iconic Southern hip-hop duo, Outkast, André arrived at the Met Gala—a celebration of Black dandyism that raised a record-setting $31 million—with a massive model of a piano strapped across his back. Beneath a red cap and round glasses, he beamed for red-carpet cameras. The night represented not only the surprising relaunch of his erstwhile fashion line, Benji Bixby, but also the surprising release of *7 piano sketches*, his first full project since his surprise 2023 entry into serene spiritual jazz, *New Blue Sun*. *7 piano sketches* began to take shape a decade ago, when André and his son temporarily lived in a Houston house with spartan furnishings—some TVs, some beds, a piano. Around the time of the final shows of the most-recent Outkast reunion, he began recording little piano pieces and even pondered releasing several as *The Best Worst Rap Album in History*. The liner notes were set to read, “It’s the free-est emotionally and best I’ve felt personally.” But he shelved them, leading first to lingering questions about when he would return to music and, ultimately, to *New Blue Sun*, a stunning break with expectations for one of hip-hop’s best-ever minds. These little pieces—seven tracks, 16 total minutes—perpetuate that break. After a voice offers the track number and title, André feels his way through a theme and variations. Where opener “bluffing in the snow” is a refracted and pensive blues, “hotel lobby pianos” drifts into a confident midtempo stride as voices drift in the background. The record ultimately points toward new directions. After he dances through a smiling melody for a while, “off rhythm laughter” blooms into an exquisite drone. And on closer “i spend all day waiting for the night,” he improvises around a drum machine’s languid march, his sunken-world piano rising to meet the rhythm in the middle. André 3000 continues to push hip-hop expectations off his back, this time with the actual piano strapped to it.

After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.

The Norwegian musician and interdisciplinary artist began unwittingly conceptualizing her ninth album in the solitude of the pandemic, during which she developed a newfound passion for perfume. It was later that Hval gathered that her scent obsession was an answer to that era’s void of intimacy and physicality. This explains the intriguingly lush title, borrowed from a scent of the same name from French perfumer Serge Lutens described as smelling somewhere between cold steel and morning mist. It also explains the record’s ghostly sensuality, rife with sights, smells, and sounds which Hval conjures in their absence—the incandescent buzz of stage lights and scent of spilled beer in rock clubs now shuttered. (“A stage without a show/A hazy silhouette/Around an empty space,” she sings over moody trip-hop on “The artist is absent.”) Here, scent is a portal to another time and place: On “To be a rose,” the smell of cigarettes transports her to her childhood, her mother smoking on the balcony: “Long inhales and long exhales/Performed in choreography/Over our dead-end town.”

There’s a short list of things South Memphis rapper Key Glock never finds himself without: Money. Jewelry. A pistol. The arm of the most beautiful woman in the room. The envy of haters everywhere. We know as much because he tells us over and over again across his wildly fun fifth album, *Glockaveli*. Longtime fans know Glock as a onetime protégé of dearly departed fellow Memphis native Young Dolph. But in the wake of the Paper Route Empire mogul’s death in 2021, Glizzock carved a lane for himself that would have had Dolph smiling big enough to show off the whole of his signature blue-diamond grill. To be specific, Key Glock is having his way across the 18 tracks of *Glockaveli*, never losing sight of the ultimate mission: “I’ma go and get that money, like Dolph told me to,” he raps on “Hallelujah.”

Like its 2024 predecessor *Pinball*, part of the appeal of *Pinball II* is hearing MIKE step out of the fog of his own introspection and do something a little more sociable. Make no mistake: This is not straightforward rap music. But where *tears of joy*-era MIKE (age 20) sounded hell-bent on unburdening his soul, here he seems not only content with rapping for rap’s sake but resplendent in it. He pulls together West Coast breeziness (“Splat!”), Detroit bounce (“#74,” “WYC4”), weird Cubist R&B (“Dolemite”), and DMV dreamscapes (the Niontay feature “Shaq & Kobe”) with a free-associative joy that manages to be both fun and totally nonlinear. As for his collaborator, you guess he picked the name because of how hard he bubbles.

Since he signed to Def Jam at the end of 2021, Benny’s projects have been a mix of underground grit and mainstream appeal—a tough line to walk, but one he walks in style. At seven tracks in 20 minutes, *Excelsior* captures the gruff thrills of the equally brief *The Plugs I Met* series, pairing him with a marquee’s worth of midtempo, heritage-coded, narco-rap heroes including *Plugs* producer Harry Fraud (“Sign Language”), Styles P (“Toxic”), and Boldy James (the exceptionally titled “Duffel Bag Hottie’s Revenge”). You know what they say: You can take the boy out of the street, but…

A broken clock is right twice a day, and a new Boldy James album comes twice a month. Well, not quite, but few rappers have ever been on a run as prolific as the Detroit MC has been in 2025. What makes the barrage of releases so special, however, is the high-quality raps he serves up again and again. On his May 2025 release with LA producer Real Bad Man, *Conversational Pieces*, he keeps the good times rolling like the luxury whips he loves to rap about. Much like the duo’s 2020 collaboration, *Real Bad Boldy*, James and Real Bad Man have an almost telepathic chemistry on *Conversational Pieces*. Whether spitting about cruising the streets late at night on “Tap the Brakes Twice” or luxury vacations on “Aspen,” Boldy floats atop stripped-down beats. It’s a fine line the artists effortlessly walk, balancing minimalism and charisma with an intoxicating nonchalance. It’s a personality Boldy has embodied on this generational run, and lord knows he’s had the practice.

After an extremely groovy detour with 2022’s disco-leaning *Second Nature*, Brooklyn indie-pop group Lucius’ self-titled fifth album—their first for the storied record label Fantasy—finds the quartet returning to the pastoral folk-rock sounds that marked their 2018 compilation *Nudes* as well as their recent countrified collaborations with folks like Brandy Clark, The Killers, and Brandi Carlile. The snappy “Gold Rush” is laden with deep-fried guitar licks and swaggering vocals from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, while Grammy-nominated West Coast folkie Madison Cunningham throws in on the toe-tapping ray of sunshine that is “Impressions.” As Lucius have become pop’s most able collaborators, Lucius similarly casts a big tent of contributors: indie-rockers like Luke Temple and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith lend a hand with instrumentation, while prior collaborator Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs lends his guitar heroics to the pulse of “Old Tape.” The record is at once a return to what Lucius have done best for the last 15 years and a reflection of their always-surprising journey into new sonic territory.

“*Golden Wolf* shares a new insight into DOPE LEMON’s life and universe, and we’re really proud of this one,” Angus Stone tells Apple Music. The vocalist and multi-instrumentalist founded DOPE LEMON in 2016 as a solo venture away from his brother-sister indie-pop duo, Angus & Julia Stone. “For us, each album is like peering through a window into a house with different rooms filled with magical ornaments and paintings. Each window marks a chapter as an album of DOPE LEMON, and *Golden Wolf* sits perfectly alongside everything we’ve created.” If 2023 predecessor *Kimosabè* reflected on Stone’s youth and the forces that shaped him, this new chapter looks to the future, wrestling with what may lie ahead. Exhibit A is the title track, a fuzzy, indie-rock meditation on spirituality that considers the afterlife and what, or who, helps the transition from this world to the next. Elsewhere, *Golden Wolf* maintains DOPE LEMON’s commitment to woozy, ethereal indie rock, veering from blissful sun-soaked jams (“She’s All Time” featuring Nina Nesbitt) to smoky nocturnal grooves (“Electric Green Lambo”), with added dashes of hypnotic psychedelia (“Yamasuki – Yama Yama”) and epic jam band excursions (“Dust of a Thousand Stars”). Here, Stone takes Apple Music through DOPE LEMON’s fifth album, track by track. **“John Belushi”** “The only VHS we had growing up was *The Blues Brothers*, and apparently I’d watch it all the time. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and all the most incredible artists on Earth, still to this day, I discovered through that film. The song is about someone who gave so much love and burned so bright and, like all things that burn bright, eventually they fall hard. The rise and fall of the greats—great people, or great things that were created. When it hits the chorus it’s about letting that person know that they don’t have to go it alone: ‘I’m going to give you all my love.’” **“Sugarcat”** “‘Sugarcat’ is based on a slinky, jangly, cool little kitty that sneaks in and out of windows and is always in the right place at the right time and has an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life, but has to sometimes pull off a heist to acquire them. He is a lover’s lover and likes staying up late, drinking martinis with his other kitty cat friends and riding spaceships to other galaxies.” **“Electric Green Lambo”** “‘Electric Green Lambo’ is one of those nights where you walk into the casino, you pass the billionaires’ cars—the Lambo or the Ferrari—and all the neon lights, it’s all glowing in this ethereal way. There’s all the beautiful carpets and velvet drapes, and it feels like you’re walking into this alternate universe of energy outside of yourself, and it opens these pathways that can bring out the wilder side of you. The wild side could be good or bad. ‘The wolf in the long grass’ is one of the lyrics that can explain it in a metaphorical way. It’s leaning into that dark side of enjoying those one-off nights.” **“Golden Wolf”** “Conceptually, ‘Golden Wolf’ is talking about our finality and mortality and what happens when we come to the end of what this is here on Earth. When you get to that place, what pulls you through to the other side? What do you take with you, what do you leave behind? Will you pick up the pieces that you think will help you be that better version of yourself? For me, spiritually, the golden wolf is a spirit animal or entity that would take me through to the other side.” **“Yamasuki – Yama Yama”** “I was watching a film \[*The Gentlemen*\] by Guy Ritchie and there was a really dope scene where the original of this song came on, and it was an instrumental. I started singing along while I was watching the film and got in contact with the original writer, and he allowed me to put my take on this beautiful song, which became ‘Yamasuki.’” **“We Solid Gold”** “‘We Solid Gold’ is a love story of a songwriter falling in love with a smalltown coastal girl. When they’re together nothing else matters and they’re solid gold. When it all starts falling downhill, he’ll make sure he’s always there for her. It’s a quintessential fairy-tale sort of song.” **“She’s All Time” (feat. Nina Nesbitt)** “‘She’s All Time’ was recorded at Sugarcane Mountain Studios. There’s a pool with a bar, and it’s one of those places where it can feel like you could be in Jamaica drinking a rum cocktail by the sea. This song is just about kicking back with a good crew and having a fun night together. I’ve always been a big admirer of Nina Nesbitt, so I contacted her to sing on this song, and it worked out really well.” **“Maggie’s Moonshine”** “‘Maggie’s Moonshine’ is about falling into a trance and falling in love with someone in a night. Watching the way they move in the moonlight. Being enamored and almost turned to stone through their charm. I guess it’s one of those, ‘you’re out in the fields sipping on moonshine around the bonfire’ experiences, and there’s a certain sort of *Twin Peaks* spiral that Maggie takes you down. And that, in a way, is moonshine in itself.” **“On the 45”** “‘On the 45’ is a song about a rich girl. She’s always in the right place at the right time, she always gets to hang out, be lazy in the backseat, smoking cigarettes, driving through the desert on the 45 to the next party, and doesn’t have a care in the world. She’s a very lovable character, but everyone is jealous of her free will and how easily things come to her. We love her for that.” **“Dust of a Thousand Stars”** “Writing it was like a psychedelic experience, almost like hopping in an elevator and entering a different level of subconsciousness, almost like \[Apple Original series\] *Severance*. Creating it, we all became lost in what it was that we were doing and the jam went for an hour. We cut it back to seven minutes, and we were so stoned, all I could say at the end was, ‘I’m the dust of a thousand burnt-up stars.’ We’re all made up of stars, and it’s such a beautiful and cool thing to remember that we’re everything and nothing at all.”