It’s been seven years since Cardi B’s debut album, 2018’s record-breaking *Invasion of Privacy*, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 with the largest female rap streaming week of all time and made the Bronx superstar the first solo female artist to win the Best Rap Album Grammy. For anybody wondering what she’s been up to in the meantime, allow her to set the record straight: When she wasn’t flexing at Fashion Week, she was mostly holed up in the studio, battling a mean case of writer’s block. “I really went through a crash where nothing was pleasing me—nothing,” the artist born Belcalis Almánzar tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Despite spending more time in the studio than at home, Cardi describes recording song after song that just didn’t feel right while fans clamored for *Invasion of Privacy*’s hotly anticipated follow-up. Rather than brush off the funk, Cardi harnessed the full force of its power on *AM I THE DRAMA?*, her long-awaited sophomore album, named for a revelation after a vain attempt to stay out of the headlines. “For some reason, I’m getting tried even when I’m not saying nothing,” she says. “And it’s like, damn—do drama chase me, or am I just the drama?” Here, the unapologetic MC channels her pent-up aggression into belligerent trap bangers that remind you who’s the “first rap bitch on the cover of *Vogue*.” “I tried to come in peace/They tore me into pieces/Now I gotta RIP it,” she snarls on “Dead,” which opens with a report of a recent crime spree targeting “bloggers, journalists, and, most chillingly, several female rappers” before Summer Walker sings about pulling off her enemies’ lacefronts. “I’m a very colorful person,” Cardi tells Lowe. “But this past year, I feel like something kind of was dying inside of me. My humbleness, me trying so much to be unproblematic, me trying to avoid drama, avoid the disses, avoid the bitches—that’s dying out in me. Because I’m really about to show you, bitch, that you are not fucking with me. The cockiness is being born again.” The attitude comes through on “Imaginary Playerz,” Cardi’s riff on the 1997 JAY-Z classic, which was born on a bad day in the studio during the summer of 2024. “I was really caught in a funk,” she explains. “It was the third, fourth day that I’m sleeping on the couch in the studio. I’m exhausted. I’m pregnant as fuck. And I was just going through some drama in my life, and I just was so tired, so over it.” Trying to lighten the mood, her engineer blasted the JAY-Z original, and a light bulb went off. “I’m like, ‘Yo, imagine if I flip this, but my way,’” she thought, suddenly remembering that she had an awful lot to brag about. Amidst all the *DRAMA*, there are moments of levity—she recruits Selena Gomez, Tyla, and Lourdiz for a trio of sultry R&B bops, flips a Janet Jackson classic for the buoyant “Principal,” and reps her roots on “Bodega Baddie,” a high-octane norteño banger. But first, there are shots to be fired—whether at her so-called peers or at the low-down, dirty dogs she disses over the Triggerman sample on “Outside.” And on “Man of Your Word,” she opens up about the demise of her marriage over mournful steel drums. Between the flexing and the reflecting, *DRAMA* feels like catharsis—and that’s before it ends on 2020’s record-shattering, zeitgeist-capturing “WAP.”
“I believe the weirdest ones survive,” Doja Cat sings on “Stranger”—a line that just as easily applies to her unpredictable trajectory as it does a shimmering power ballad for misfits in love. With her world-conquering third album, 2021’s *Planet Her*, Doja Cat completed her evolution from viral internet oddball to full-on pop-rap star. Well, sorta: Ever the contrarian, the musician born Amala Dlamini announced in early 2023 that she was leaving pop music behind; months later, her fourth album, *Scarlet*, showcased her formidable rap skills with flinty songs that rejected the terms of her mainstream success. But when she began to conceptualize her fifth album last year, the pendulum swung the other way. “I think I love talking about love,” Doja tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And I also think music is just such a door for expressing love in its different forms.” On *Vie* (the French word for life, or the phonetic interpretation of the Roman numeral five), Doja pulls up via DeLorean with a whole new sound and style. Artfully grounded in the decadence of the ’80s, she spiffs up songs about love-bombing and limerence with skittering drum machines, punchy basslines, and the occasional sax solo. She channels Queen on “AAAHH MEN!,” an ode to the maddening, demoralizing, irresistible pleasures of men, and brings new jack swing into the 2020s on lead single “Jealous Type.” Naturally, what she called “that ’80s tacky romance sort of spin” demanded Doja’s first meet-up with pop’s premiere nostalgist, Jack Antonoff. “And so it’s the grappling with talking about something personal and creating something fresh, and then getting to know someone new,” she tells Lowe of their collaboration. “All of these things fell together really naturally.” More playful than its predecessor, *Vie* relishes in its campy mood board and dishy subject matter: On “Silly! Fun!,” a punch-drunk R&B throwback about romantic delusion, the honeymoon’s over nearly as soon as it starts (“I know it could be a blast to just pop out a baby/We’re so very silly, getting married in Vegas”). But just because it’s flamboyant doesn’t mean it can’t be deep. “This album really grew from my sessions in therapy, and being so gung-ho on being there twice a week,” she says. “And learning about the human experience and how our brains function subconsciously and consciously.” Meanwhile, she mastered her singing skills—note the chops towards the end of “Jealous Type.” “I feel like I can do a lot more things that I could never do,” she says. “It’s just a more evolved, more mature version of whatever I’ve been doing since the beginning.” High-gloss romance aside, love manifests in other ways. “I think that creativity is love,” Doja tells Lowe. “You risk a lot for love. And so when a musician loves what they do, sometimes that entails things that are kind of uncomfortable and scary. But it doesn’t matter, because you love that thing so much.”
In 2020, Mariah Carey gave her all to one of the most vulnerable works of her career—but for the first time, it wasn’t an album. Her memoir *The Meaning of Mariah Carey* laid bare her feelings about her complicated family life, the myriad successes of her record-breaking career, the joys of motherhood, and more. Though Carey’s an award-winning songwriter and has been known for her prowess with the pen since her 1990 debut, she tells Apple Music that the process of writing *The Meaning of Mariah Carey* unlocked something new for her when it came to plumbing particularly difficult emotional depths for her lyrics. “It definitely did something to me where I was just a little bit more vulnerable, a little bit more exposed, a little bit more able to be myself, regardless,” she says. *Here For It All*, her 16th studio album, is her first project to fully capitalize on this soul-searching, and look no further than the ballads for proof. “Nothing Is Impossible” is an ode to her own resilience (“I dream a greater dream/I fight a greater fight/I overcome it all”), and the grand and sentimental title track is the sort of unabashedly romantic that hits the ear like a love note read aloud (“When you leave/You take a little bit of every fiber that’s embedded in me”). These showstoppers are classically Carey, but so is the album’s robust mix of R&B, hip-hop, disco, gospel, and pop. “I was a little bit worried in the beginning that there were too many different types of records,” she says. “And I was just like, ‘I don’t care.’” Whether she’s vaulting her whistle tones to the heavens (alongside gospel legends The Clark Sisters on “Jesus I Do”), invoking ’90s street swagger with “Type Dangerous” (which samples Eric B. & Rakim’s “Eric B. Is President”), time-traveling with ’70s slow jams (courtesy of the Anderson .Paak collaboration “Play This Song”), or covering a childhood favorite (her take on Paul McCartney’s Wings classic “My Love”), Carey is unapologetically herself and relishing in every note. Read on for her thoughts on each track of *Here For It All*. **“Mi”** “It’s an ode to self-love and self-care. It was just one of those things where it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s still one of those ones that a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, I love this.’ I just visualize me in a hot tub every time.” **“Play This Song” (feat. Anderson .Paak)** “I definitely wanted to work with Anderson because he’s so brilliant and amazing at what he does, which is just being a kick-ass musician. But when we got into the studio, we decided we wanted to do something that was kind of ’70s, and we did give you that kind of vibe. So we started working on ‘Play This Song,’ and it was just one of those ones that I really loved. Working with him in the studio, he’s a great companion in terms of making music.” **“Type Dangerous”** “I was in a restaurant in Aspen, and I was with Andy \[Anderson .Paak\] and a couple of friends. All of a sudden they started playing music and playing different songs. Suddenly ‘Eric B. Is President’ comes on, and I was like, ‘What? I love this song. I haven’t heard this song in forever.’ We went to the studio the next day and started playing around with sampling it, and it’s just on and on from there... I made them play it over and over.” **“Sugar Sweet” (feat. Shenseea and Kehlani)** “I just think \[Shenseea and Kehlani\]’s freedom really shows, and they’re just present; they’re who they are. This makes the record so much younger and more fun, and I just thought it was everything. I’ve never had a trio before with three strong women, and having the ability to do this now, it’s amazing. I love what it speaks on. I love what it speaks to.” **“In Your Feelings”** “It’s one of those ones where you tell a story about something you’ve been through and put it together and you release it. And that’s what we did. People really like the ‘I think you might be getting a little bit too...’—that part. I like it a lot. I wasn’t really trying to say anything. I was just feeling the moment. I didn’t even appreciate it much until we did it and I lived with it for a while.” **“Nothing Is Impossible”** “I was just writing a couple of things, playing around with little ideas and working with my very close friend and musical director Daniel Moore. He was playing on the piano. I was singing along. We were following each other in terms of melody, and then I just took it home and wrote the lyrics. I think it’s one of those ones where I had to be by myself and really just off in my own world writing about these sort of feelings. I think it’s something, if anything, it would help somebody get through something.” **“Confetti & Champagne”** “I guess it’s about somebody that you’re not with anymore, but you’re speaking to them, and that’s it. You don’t really care. That’s the basic ‘Clink, clink, clink, pow/Look at me now.’ That’s basically it.” **“I Won’t Allow It”** “We took a long time writing it—not a long time with the actual words or the music, but it was just over time we produced more and did more. It’s another one with \[.Paak\], and he’s just so great at that type of vibe. There are some kiss-off moments in that. ‘I won’t entertain all your narcissistic ways’ is one of my favorite moments. ‘Should have been more proactive’—these parts just make me laugh.” **“My Love”** “It’s more an homage to my childhood, because I remember being a little girl and riding on the back of a motorcycle with my mother’s friend’s daughter and her boyfriend. This was their song, and they were in love. I’m still hoping that Paul McCartney might play something on it, which would be amazing. He is one of the greatest of all time, ever, and I just asked before I recorded the song, would he mind if I recorded it? I had a conversation with him, and he was like, ‘No, give it a shot, send it to me.’ And I’m like, ‘How do I do this? Because I really want him to be on this song doing background vocals, something.’ I don’t think that’s where he’s at right now, but he might lay something for the deluxe version. I would be thrilled out of my mind. But yeah, if you talk about the emotion when I’m singing it, it’s definitely about finding someone that you really revere and care for.” **“Jesus I Do” (feat. The Clark Sisters)** “I am a humongous Clark Sisters fan. I love their work. Karen Clark’s solo album is just scrumptious and unparalleled. I really was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m in here doing this.’ We wrote it together and sang it together. All the backgrounds that we did, I mean, I’m so inspired by their background vocals that when I get to mix that with mine, it’s something to be healed.” **“Here For It All”** “It’s just special to me; that’s why I put it at the end and named the album after it, because it’s personal to me. It’s not even something I want to even go into every beat of. I love the way it ends and then it doesn’t end. I thought this was going to be my gospel song on this album, because that’s the vibe it’s giving, but we have ‘Jesus I Do,’ so it’s different. I just feel like this is such a ‘Mariah Carey record’ in a way that other songs I’ve done however long ago weren’t, because it’s got a soulfulness to it, just the way that it’s arranged. I just feel like it’s something very personal, but also very like it’s giving this to other people that need to hear something like that.”
In the nearly five years since *Wish Me Well 3* dropped, YFN Lucci found himself stuck in a veritable morass of legal woes, not the least of which being a high-profile RICO case. These are the sorts of circumstances that derail rap careers, sometimes irreversibly. Thankfully, the Atlanta hitmaker behind “Everyday We Lit” and “Wet” emerged at the start of 2025 as a free man, culminating in a homecoming arena concert that summer and, now, a long-awaited new album. *ALREADY LEGEND.*—note the definitive period—proves that he’s as capable as he ever was at making melodic, street-level hip-hop, a now ubiquitous style he undeniably helped to popularize in the 2010s. With opener “PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH./ROBOCOP.,” Lucci slips right back in where he’s long fit in, addressing his situation without dwelling too deeply on it. He repeatedly resurfaces the topic of imprisonment throughout the album, bewildered at being so rich while stuck inside a cell on “LOOK WHAT I DID.” He’s returned to life on the outside with a reflective perspectlve, one conveyed well on “COSTLY.” and the previously released “JAN. 31st (MY TRUTH).” Beyond his own struggles, navigating the carceral system also means losing connections to friends and loved ones caught up in it, something he illustrates with sorrow and righteous frustration on “UNDENIABLE.” Considering Lucci’s preexisting penchant for turn-up anthems, he makes sure that *ALREADY LEGEND.* doesn’t stay exclusively in the pain-rap space. Luxury and lust make for obvious bedfellows on “BIRTHDAY.” and “USED TO IT.,” for instance. Still, it’s hard not to notice how the past half decade has reshaped him as a lyricist, his tribulations now meaningful fodder for his art.
For over 15 years, Cardo Got Wings has been quietly building an infallible production résumé in hip-hop, establishing himself as a go-to collaborator for superstars and underground MCs alike. While his 2024 debut *MADeMAN* showcased his own skills as an MC, his second solo outing *SIGAN VIENDO* finds him wholly behind the boards, curating a lineup of new and familiar voices, all of whom seem enamored to be rhyming over his production. YoDogg, WIDNICK, born bad!, Oodaredevil, and BBYKOBE—to name but a few—are hardly household names, but they sound near destined for stardom over Cardo Got Wings production. “I was trying to play normal and cordial, but fuck it, I’m proud of my shit,” emerging Detroit MC NASAAN declares on “lately.” Naturally. *SIGAN VIENDO* largely spotlights MCs at the beginning of their journeys, but not even someone as established as Lil Yachty (“beans”) could miss the chance to get off on a characteristically menacing Cardo beat.
Since LAZER DIM 700 sparked excitement and debate with late 2024’s *KEEPIN IT CLOUDY*, his momentum has hardly slowed. Scarcely three months after dropping the subsequent *Sins Aloud*, the prolific Georgia native returns with the like-minded *GANGWAY*. His signature style—a fidelity-fractured mélange of intense sub-bass frequencies, hypnotic synth sequences, and free-associative bars—persists across a baker’s dozen new tracks. On cuts like “Pro Mag” and “Fart 808,” his approach remains as radical as when he initially emerged—rapid-fire lines delivered with a casual drawl. His connection to Atlanta’s historic trap past is anything but vestigial on “MIDDLE OF CAR,” “Protect da brand,” and “Shoutout dat boy,” each track begging for a classic mixtape DJ drop. Indeed, once listeners get past the extremity of the noisy instrumentals, his links to 2010s hip-hop steadily reveal themselves like little mysteries, with echoes of Harlem’s A$AP and Southside Chicago drillers creeping through “Pints” and “OXY.”
“My first project dropped when I was 21 and I was fresh out of uni. Half the things I know now, I didn’t know then,” Kojey Radical tells Apple Music. The multidimensional artist—poet/rapper/musician—has done a lot of growing since emerging in 2014, not least in the three years between the 2022 release of his debut album *Reason to Smile* and this tightly plotted follow-up. Having ascended to new heights of success (BRIT, Ivor Novello, and Mercury Prize nominations), this record finds Radical caught in the liminal space between two worlds and struggling to feel at home in either one. Inspired by a star-studded, imposter-syndrome-inducing Fashion Week afterparty and a birthday celebration for a close childhood friend that highlighted a rift in their relationship he had been too busy to even notice, *Don’t Look Down* is Radical’s attempt to reconcile the disconnect. “I think it’s documenting a time in my life that I would call a transition into real adulthood,” he says. “There’s still a lot of my life that I’m figuring out, and maybe because of the way we’ve all been conditioned to think, there was a guilt in the fact that I hadn’t.” Over the course of the album’s runtime, he dives deep into the core conflicts plaguing his spirit: the artifice of fame; pleasure-seeking and its pitfalls; the pressure to uphold his responsibilities as a friend, a father, a voice for his community. The narrative places him in yet another party environment, occurring in a loop that closes out with Radical locked in a bathroom listening to a voice note from his son in the final seconds of reverential tearjerker “Baby Boy,” forming a seamless connection to opening track “Knock Knock,” where he is summoned back to the festivities and the cycle begins anew. “The bottom half of the album is kind of addressing all these personal relationships that were established in the first half, but seeing the reality of how some of them turn out,” says Radical. “It’s like the duality of some things you can fix, some things you can’t fix, but I guess the most eternal bond is the one between me and my son. \[This album\] is me writing to him, but also writing to myself and wanting to leave a reminder of what this all was, and why, and that it was all for him.” Read on, as Radical takes us through *Don’t Look Down*, track by track. **“Knock Knock”** “\[The other voice on this track\] is my boy, Kwoli Black. He’s a UK rapper and one of my more recent best friends. It’s very hard to make close friendships in adulthood, but we’ve managed to build quite a tight brotherly bond. I wanted to include his voice, because that would’ve been him at the door. The poem itself is kind of the prelude to the album. Life was starting to feel like this party had been thrown for me and I didn’t know. I was like, ‘Why is everyone trying to celebrate me? Why do I deserve this?’ And then, ‘What does it mean when people *haven’t* turned up to celebrate me? Why am I watching those people and not thanking the people that are here? Why don’t I feel at home anywhere?’ It’s asking these questions so we can answer them throughout the album.” **“Rotation”** “This is me stepping out into the party, but then using it as a way of narrating the times that we’re in now. ‘Did the most for minimum wages/Took a little debt for syllabus pages.’ It’s like we go from this institution to that institution and everything’s in a circle. Even me—this internal dialogue of ‘I want to vibes too. I want to shoobs it up, I want to smoke it up, I want to drink it up,’ but at the same time, I’ve got something to say…and not being sure if people even want to hear me say that. It’s like being conscious almost becomes this prison when actually we’re all conscious of what we’re doing and when we’re doing it. But I think some people are given the gift of being able to articulate it and it’s like, ‘Do I use that or do I not?’ I like to juxtapose moments of confusion or angst with music that we can dance to and celebrate to, so the message is hidden in the funk drums and this innate groove that makes you want to move immediately.” **“Rule One” (feat. Bawo)** “The concept for the song actually came from this show that I did many, many moons ago. It was an Afro-punk show. They had the rules for the party by the side of the stage and it was like, ‘No homophobia, no racism, no this, no that.’ As an image, it always stuck with me. Even in this gathering of rejoicing and celebrating, there are still rules of engagement. There are still ways that we have to handle ourselves. There’s a lot of responsibility you feel music-wise to drive that, but also again, make music that people can just vibe to and feel themselves to and feel empowered to. So I think ‘Rule One’ is just me setting the precedent for dos and don’ts.” **“Drinking My Water” (feat. MNEK)** “At any kind of big function, unless I’m ready for the dance floor, I like being out of the way. I like observing and seeing what’s going on. Especially when you can’t bring your people. You have to make acquaintances with people like, ‘OK, we’ll ride out these next three hours together, because we don’t know no one else here.’ That’s this song for me. And life is different for me now. I feel alien to the people around me. If I jump on a call with my bredrins and everyone’s chit-chatting about a normal life, how am I supposed to say, ‘Oh, I just did this campaign, met that person, got paid this much, went to sleep…’? It’s a reminder that I’m quiet, but I’m not sad. I’m fine. I call it an introvert anthem.” **“Long Day” (feat. Dende)** “I was indulging in the fruits that came with the labor, and some fruit is great for you and some fruit isn’t. I was spending a lot of time eating fruit that should have been forbidden. The indulgence is pleasure and a lot of the time, we’re just pleasure-seeking. It becomes a crutch, or the answer to a long day, and you realize that your whole energy towards it is toxic \[too\]. The interlude at the end where I’m talking to Kwoli mimics conversations we’ve had in real life where I’ll be in that long-day state of mind. It leads into ‘On Call’ which is the story of me trying to understand if I like love or if I love love.” **“On Call” (feat. James Vickery)** “I wanted to a play on ‘Ms. Fat Booty’ by Mos Def \[the artist now known as Yasiin Bey\]. I’m doing a lot of ‘Ms. Fat Booty’ references where I’m having a conversation with a woman called Love, who’s the embodiment of love throughout the album. As I meet her, she’s very quick to be like, ‘I see through you,’ and the idea of her seeing through me almost becomes the challenge. She’s got to be on call, because she’s someone I can feel vulnerable in front of. I’ve always wanted to do a storyteller-style song like that, because I grew up on so much hip-hop that really took me on a journey. James Vickery slid on that hook and everything about it is just reminiscent of something I hold dear to me, in terms of hip-hop.” **“Expensive” (feat. Planet Giza)** “The Pocket Queen is an amazing drummer from America. She works with Swindle and she had given us these drum grooves. ‘Expensive’ was one and ‘Conversations’ was another. As soon as we heard it, it was like, ‘There’s something about this that’s immediate and sexy,’ and everything started to build itself. It’s going to sound crazy, but I wanted to give women the chance to feel like Alesha Dixon in the N.E.R.D ‘She Wants to Move’ video. That was my whole goal with this record. How do I give the listener that feeling of: the show is stopped, the lights are on, shock out, no one cares, do what you’re doing?” **“Problems” (feat. Cristale)** “Now we’re at the midpoint of the album, where we’ve looked at how the change of lifestyle leads you to overindulge in things that aren’t really tangible. They’re just fleeting moments that make you feel all the endorphins of moving in the right direction, but nothing’s figured out. How do you even explain to somebody what your problems are when you’re in this middle point of success? In the grand scheme of things, my wants and needs are very simple, but to get there is a very complicated process. Yes, I’m happy and I’m working and I’m successful, but I feel like I should be saying more, doing more, I shouldn’t be around certain people, I need to lock in, I need to cut people off. It’s creating a party out of this angst and taking it to church a little bit.” **“Conversation”** “We’re into the angsty part of the album. The rat race of life. Trying to understand the transition between your twenties and your thirties and put what that feels like into audio format. Having to be a provider, an understander, and an activist all in one day, because the powers that be aren’t doing what they need to be doing for us. Everything’s more visual, we can see it. One story is somebody getting glammed up to go out, the next one is children being lost in wars. We’re so desensitized to it. The speed makes you feel like you’re tapping away at that speed. Next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing. When are we going to stop to talk about it? When do we have this conversation?” **“Communication” (feat. Benjamin AD)** “Ben’s interlude is like stepping outside the party for a second. The wind hits you and it’s like, ‘Rah. Life does go on.’ There’s so many things I’ve missed out on. People still hold space, but they don’t see the grind I’ve been on. You don’t realize how long you’ve been inside until you step outside. And sometimes you’re afraid to see that the party continues even after you leave.” **“Life of the Party”** “The second verse was written about a trip that I took to Sydney. The promoter asked me to do a paid walk-through at this club. It’s just gyal everywhere. I know they don’t know whose section they’re in, so I’m just walking around, normal, ‘Hi everyone, how are you doing, my name’s Kojey,’ but I’ve not said it’s my section. Then they bring over this Patron and it’s got my name in sparklers. So now all these gyal clock this is my section and everyone’s energy changes. And I can’t blame them, because they’re looking for their opportunity to even have a taste of whatever lifestyle they think this is. And none of it’s real. I’m sat here surrounded by what is unequivocally fake love, thinking back to everything I know from back home. I’m from an estate in Hackney—I want to be around my people. But no one’s here. It’s just me. It’s that feeling of being the center of attention, but also feeling isolated by that attention. And not being able to talk about how that makes you feel is even more isolating.” **“Breathe” (feat. Col3trane)** “That’s the crash out. And when I crash out it’s like bravado because the ego takes over. None of you could tell me nothing. So it’s that crescendo of ego and isolation. You can hear the children’s choir out there and the voices from everywhere almost feel like they’re taunting you. And even though I’ve got this moment to breathe, there’s still one person I want to talk to. As much as I’ve got all this stuff around me, I’m still looking for Love. I met her before. I ain’t even acknowledged her since I met her. But guess who I’m going to call when I’m all drunk and dizzy or whatever? And it happens at the end of the song. I want to talk to this person that has very clearly seen through me and seen through all of this, but since I met her—and it was done this way on purpose—we ain’t heard from her. Until it feels like everything’s on top of me.” **“Curtains” (feat. SOLOMON)** “It starts like, ‘I really do love this person. I love you…(bitch). Like, damn, why you make me feel these feelings! Ugh!’ But then I’m sat there and I’m trying to ask myself, ‘What did I do to show this person that I felt that way?’ And I’m running out of answers every next line. Even down to moments when I could have said it and I didn’t say it. This is openly as raw as I can sing what was happening with that, and how left it went because of me. This might be the only opportunity that I get to say it that way, because I know even the person in question doesn’t want to hear it. The song ends like, ‘If you ever hear this, just call me, because I would rather say this to you than say it on a song. But as long as I’ve said it, it’s been said.’ A lot of the time, these are things that are reminders to me to be like, ‘All right, your mistakes have allowed you to make a beautiful song out of it, but repeating these mistakes makes this who you are.’ Anyway, she’s heard the song. She hated it.” **“Comfortable” (feat. Jaz Karis)** “I was trying to write this as the welcome-back-to-the-streets accountability anthem, where I’ve had this conversation with Love and realized I didn’t do enough to show Love that she was loved, and now I’ve lost Love. Sometimes people hear that song and think I’m saying that she’d done something wrong and I got too comfortable. No. I did something wrong by getting too comfortable. I cared just enough to feel let down by the fact that we can’t work this out. And it’s like, ‘Well, I tried and trying wasn’t enough and that’s OK, I’ll just have to go back to the old me.’ That’s always our first reaction: I’ll give up, I’ll just go back to it then. That’s getting too comfortable in leaning into your flaws and not acknowledging that you need to do something about it.” **“Everyday”** “Another super vulnerable one. We’re talking about, in the midst of loss, you fall back on your vices. A lot of my vices were there to help me deal with my own personal insecurities, so you have these verses where I’m kind of self-examining and breaking myself down. And a lot of people thought I was still talking about Love when they first heard this song. Nope. That chorus is about my dealer. Love doesn’t always have to be a person. Sometimes love can be a vice. Creating these songs that everybody can sing together is how I escaped from the loneliness of all these feelings. ‘Everyday’ never takes me more than 10 seconds to teach a crowd, and by the time the chorus comes around everyone can sing it with me.” **“Baby Boy” (feat. Ghetts, Chrissi)** “I was sat with \[producer\] Owen Cutts and we were talking for two hours about the reality of entering a co-parent situation and the effects that has on you, trying to choose your own happiness, so you can still be the best parent you can be, as opposed to being that reflection of parents that we saw that stayed unhappy and took that out on their children in weird ways. Being able to get the perspective from an older father, Ghetts, for me is like…it’s him talking to his son, but also, everything that I wish my dad would have pulled up and said to me. And Owen did the big one on that. He made sure everybody that worked on the record were dads themselves. From instrumentation to lyrics it’s written with the intention of being a real, genuine checkpoint for fatherhood. I wanted it to be this moment that feels like a resolve on a lot of the topics that were brought up the album. And the answer to what my idea of home is: my son’s voice. That always snaps it back into the reality of all this make-believe. This is your real life. Come back here.”
“I wanted to start putting hints to people through this classic era, the salsa sounds, the Puerto Rican immigration,” Rauw Alejandro tells Apple Music about returning to the world of his inventive and mature 2024 album *Cosa Nuestra*. “And through that journey, I found so many things, and so many sounds, that it was impossible to put it in just one project.” Framed as more of a prequel than a sequel, *Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0* moves even further away from the groundbreaking futurism of the preceding *SATURNO* era of his career. “I just went deep in my story as a Puerto Rican,” he says. In doing so, the Latin superstar’s style shifts closer to the very Caribbean essence from which he first emerged, a deliberate choice that provides the album with a profoundly unique sound with robust cultural roots. The forms presented here exist both within and beyond genre, with immersive songs like “Caribeño” and “NÁUFRAGOS” rendering well-worn terminology like “fusion” rather useless. “I always study everything before I’m going to jump into it, any type of sound or music,” Alejandro says. “I like to learn a little bit \[of\] the history.” Whether swinging to salsa on “FALSEDAD” or basking in bachata on “SILENCIO,” he seems consistently at home, sonically and otherwise. The spiritual and the secular become one on his sublimely tropical “GuabanSexxx,” while polyrhythmic percussion elevates the intricate love song “Carita Linda.” From pop-savvy Puerto Rican singer De La Rose to Dominican rap shapeshifter Jey One, the guests who occasionally enter Alejandro’s *Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0* zone contribute in ways simultaneously familiar and fresh. For instance, Wisin and Ñengo Flow naturally bring perreo power to “CONTRABANDO,” yet the underlying groove goes beyond the standard reggaetón mode. Even when he reaches beyond the Caribbean, as with Nigerian singer Ayra Starr on the Afrobeats-inflected “Santa” or Chilean alt-pop act Mon Laferte on “Callejón de los Secretos,” it all fits within the space he’s so carefully constructed. “I didn’t know where this journey was going to take me,” he says. “You keep growing as an artist, as a person.”
After “act ii: date @ 8” hit, nothing was the same for 4batz. That major viral moment sent the Dallas singer hurtling into the spotlight, collaborating with stars like Drake, Lil Baby, and USHER, to name just a few. Endeared to ’90s-meets-2000s R&B aesthetics yet skillfully refurbished with modern Southern hip-hop appeal, 2024’s *u made me a st4r* provided a more complete picture of the type of artist he aimed to be. “I just was dealing with a lot of pressure going in my last project,” he tells Apple Music. “I had to settle down and remind myself that I could still do this.” For his follow-up *Still Shinin*, sporting solid features from Texas rappers Maxo Kream and Zillionaire Doe, his endeavors to self-define and self-assess continue to progress in his favor. “We from Texas, so it hit different,” he says. “We showing y’all the culture right now, man.” With Swishahouse co-founder and Chopstars DJ OG Ron C frequently popping in as a mixtape-styled host, the project furthers 4batz’s episodic escapades via the grindset romantics of “act x: n da mornin” and the lusty versatility of “act xiii: my lil shootah.” Production-wise, a woozy gloss coats just about every track, applying an ethereal, otherworldly quality to “act xiv: twerksongggg” and the knowing throwback “act xii: big on u.”
