After the lockdown-encouraged bout of productivity that spawned two albums in 14 months—2020’s *A Celebration of Endings* and *The Myth of the Happily Ever After* (2021)—Biffy Clyro slipped into a period of inactivity and uncertainty. Wearied by the joyless experiences of COVID, the trio ended their 2022 tour with the decision to take some time out to rest and reflect on what should be next for Biffy—if anything. Singer/guitarist Simon Neil indulged in some creative throat-clearing, hawking up the abrasive, pummeling metal of 2023’s *Rivers of Heresy*, the debut album by his rock supergroup Empire State Bastard. As much as he enjoyed making and touring that record though, he found himself missing melody and the consuming hooks that had elevated the Kilmarnock trio—completed by brothers Ben (drums) and James Johnston (bass)—into one of Britain’s biggest rock bands across their nine albums. Neil began to write new Biffy songs at the piano, the first full one to emerge being the tender “Goodbye,” which sits at the midpoint of this album. A song about needing to distance yourself from loved ones to remind yourself why you love them, it reveals how the three of them were able to escape their own individual doubts about the band to make one of their strongest records to date. Neil has pitched the album as one that contemplates relationships and thoughts that endure through our lives, and allusions to the brotherhood of Biffy regularly emerge. If the title of “Woe Is Me, Wow Is You” speaks to that rare kind of band who have managed to ascend to rock stardom without ever taking themselves too seriously, then its content is all about the trio’s teak-tough bond. It was written by Neil as an account of their time together, and the vulnerability of the verses evaporates as the chorus erupts with “We believe in the concept/We defy the impossible…This ship is built to last.” Biffy aren’t just doing this for their love of each other though. They’ve often interrogated the purpose of an album before making one—lest they ever start churning out records just because that’s what they’re *supposed* to do. So while they prove characteristically adept at transitioning from fierce riffs and jittery time signatures to choruses that sound like sun blistering through rain clouds (“A Little Love,” “Two People in Love”), they continue to test the boundaries of festival-headlining rock. “It’s Chemical!” is what happens when Biffy bend big beat, baggy, and Britpop to their will and “Dearest Amygdala” nods so strongly to glossy ’80s pop, it demands to be played on a keytar with your suit sleeves rolled up.
“Let me introduce myself/I’ve been lost in the dark/I don’t stay in one place/I have many names,” the musician Adam Andrzejewski (formerly McIlwee) sings over wistful pedal steel on “I Just Moved Here.” You’d think the singer-songwriter would need no introduction, having been active in the music scene for two decades now. But the Pennsylvania native has evolved over the years, tapping the deep well of the zeitgeist: For eight years, he sang and played guitar in the post-hardcore band Tigers Jaw, then coined the Wicca Phase moniker and co-founded the GothBoiClique collective, whose murky underground aesthetic seeped into the mainstream. On *Mossy Oak Shadow*, the prolific artist ventures out of his comfort zone and into what he calls “mystical folk rock.” Here, roads are lonely, horizons are endless, hearts are heavy, and thunder rolls in over the darkened plains. But familiar motifs tie rootsy songs like “Enchantment” and “Meet Me Anywhere” (a duet with Ethel Cain, with whom he collaborated on her 2021 EP *Inbred*) to Wicca Phase’s past work: Portals appear in the moonlight, revelations arrive in solitude.
Maybe it was a coincidence that Sloan announced their 14th album in June 2025 with a jubilant group-hug sing-along—“Live Forever”—that shares its name with a certain Oasis classic, right at a time when the Gallaghers were about to embark on their reunion tour blitz. And perhaps it was Sloan’s cheeky way of acknowledging that they have indeed been doing this forever (or 35 years, at least) without pause, resurfacing every two to three years with a fresh batch of power-pop whoppers that effortlessly hit the sweet spot between ’60s psych melody and ’70s hard-rock muscle. Like its immediate predecessors (2018’s *12* and 2022’s *Steady*), *Based on the Best Seller* is a 12-song set whose airtight execution can obscure the vast aesthetic terrain covered by the band’s four songwriters, be it Patrick Pentland’s switchblade-glam stomper “So Far Down,” Chris Murphy’s *Pet Sounds* pastiche “Fortune Teller,” Jay Ferguson’s countrified charmer “Collect Yourself,” or Andrew Scott’s acid-fried rocker “No Damn Fears.” As Murphy sings on the aforementioned “Live Forever,” “The ’90s nostalgia that you feel is nothing compared to what’s to come,” and *Based on the Best Seller* adds another exciting new chapter to Canadian rock’s greatest never-ending story.
When Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat, the New York indie duo that makes up Cafuné, released “Tek It” in 2019, they had no idea it would forever change the course of their band. The surprise hit proved to have staying power, too: Lil Uzi Vert sampled the song on their 2023 single “Red Moon.” Their 2025 album *Bite Reality* finds the band moving away from the polished electropop of that single and their 2023 collection *Love Songs for the End*. On *Bite Reality*, the drums are live, the guitars crunch and yelp, Schat’s vocals practically reach out from the speakers and shake the listener. The songwriting remains tidy, but the sound is more untamed than on early releases. Even the album’s more ethereal moments, like the shoegaze-inspired rock of “Stupid Justice” or the heartbroken balladry of “Avid Athlete,” possess an urgency that proudly bares frayed edges.
*CHOROPHOBIA* means fear of dancing, something that Dutch duo Weval admit to suffering from when they were younger. But it’s an anxiety that Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers conquered for the release of their fourth album, the follow-up to 2023’s *Remember*. “We said to each other, ‘Let’s make a dance record,’” Scholte Albers tells Apple Music. “Before, we’d never dared do it and always made ‘listening’ records. But we got a lot of energy from the idea and the creative process became way more fluid.” It’s definitely a dance record, with 11 tracks that veer from “MOVEMENT,” which evokes the spirit of 3 am at a 1990 rave, to the synth-heavy hypnotizer “HEAD FIRST,” before smashing everyone’s resolve to sit down with the KILIMANJARO-featuring wig-out “OPEN UP THAT DOOR.” “We were always afraid of making a dance tune, and we wanted to see if we could change up the process,” says Coolen. “All our previous records were made with unlimited time and we loved that, but instead of looking at a track for three years, working on it almost every month to see if it gets any better, we found an urgency in our writing. For the first record \[2016’s *Weval*\], we only had one synthesizer and now we have so many tools and friends and vocalists to reach out to.” The sense of urgency was, in part, brought about by Scholte Albers’ packed schedule. While making the album, he was also writing, directing, and scoring his first feature film, *Straf*, which he describes as “dark, but full-on comedy.” As if that wasn’t enough, they directed the video for “OPEN UP THAT DOOR” themselves. “I think that week was super crazy because we had to finish the record on Monday, produce the music video, and shoot it on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we played fabric in London,” says Scholte Albers. Read on and don’t be afraid to dance as Weval takes you through each track on *CHOROPHOBIA*. **“CHOROPHOBIA”** Merijn Scholte Albers: “I think we finished 90 percent of the record, or maybe we thought it was 100 percent finished, and I played these chords on the piano just for fun. We thought it would be nice to have an element of the fear in the record, and then Harm plugged in the mic and started singing with this crazy granulator machine, with super weird delays.” Harm Coolen: “We’re admitting that we’re a little bit afraid of dancing, so we wanted to lean into that fear. It was funny that multiple people noticed the sound at the end and said, ‘Did you sample “Toxic” from Britney Spears?’ Sometimes, you think nobody listens to our own little nerdy stuff, and then suddenly people notice all those little details.” MSA: “Let’s make it clear: We didn’t sample Britney Spears.” **“MOVING ON”** MSA: “This was one of the first tracks when we realized we wanted to make the more cheerful, outgoing dance stuff. We talked about the BPM being an average of 125. I played this track in the slower tempo and then we sped it up and it sounded so funky. And Harm started singing on it. It was such a fun process and I think you can hear that. There are so many elements because we were like, ‘Oh, this is also nice. This is also nice.’ We had this whole studio built, but those parts are from my phone. We put it in the analog synths and then it sounds super rich and layered. But it all started with just a phone app. That’s a nice thing with the record: It’s really cheap stuff combined with rich analog synths.” **“MOVEMENT”** MSA: “This track has a bassline which we took from a very old track of ours, ‘The Most,’ and then it was played live. So we pitched it and re-edited it, but then we played it in clubs with only the bassline, with the kick drum underneath, and it always worked because it’s such a happy beat. I love how the drum sounds—I’m proud of the snappiness of it. Sometimes, you create a drum track and then you still have to polish it. But I also discovered that if you choose the right samples, you don’t have to mix the hell out of it.” HC: “Because we’d been playing it in the DJ sets, we realized we should finish it—and not in a subtle, calm way. We kept that energy. So this was a good example where the people on the dance floor told us to put it on the record.” **“JUST FRIENDS”** HC: “This was a funny one. I was pretty busy running the ship on the days when Merijn was shooting his movie and I’d make music in the evenings. Instead of approaching it like work, I treated it like playing a video game. I had this habit of spending evenings on the couch, starting new songs with no pressure. And I started this little idea of playing with the chords, but it was 11 pm and I wanted to go to bed. My phone wasn’t around and I almost left it, but I grabbed it and the first thing I subconsciously sing is the lyrics of this song. We used the little recordings from that iPhone and dubbed them with a proper mic. The next day, Merijn said, ‘Oh, you made something super nice.’ And I said, ‘Huh? Is that so?’” **“HEAD FIRST” (feat. Nsanshi)** MSA: “We had this really funny session with KILIMANJARO because he arrived at the studio and he brought his brother, Michael \[the artist/producer Nsanshi\]. Harm immediately gave them two mics and was blasting instrumental tracks, and they were going for it. We recorded three hours of crazy stuff and there was this small bit of a fun, shouting thing from his brother. Because we’ve never made tracks with those kind of vocals, we immediately got super energetic.” HC: “When Josh \[KILIMANJARO\] and Michael came over, it was like they were playing a sport together. Michael gave all the energy and we said, ‘Cool. Let’s take this and build something around it.’” **“DOPAMINE”** MSA: “This one started when I finished all the shooting days for the movie and I was exhausted, so I took some time off, but then I felt the itch to go to the studio because I didn’t make music for a long time.” HC: “A long time—that’s a month for you. I think when Merijn started this initial idea, we did more DJ sets again and we felt that wild energy during them. But it’s such a nice form of wildness. We were reinventing what we wanted to do in our DJ sets because we tend to love super chill, mellow music. Then we had the idea of bringing more of that bold wildness into our studio process. ‘DOPAMINE’ has such a dry-sounding hook, it has a sort of comedy element to it.” MSA: “I saw Jamie xx playing it in a big stadium, and that’s super nice that a track like that goes to a lot of places outside of our life and DJ shows.” **“THIS IS…”** HC: “This is such a fun little ingredient to kick off the second round. The first time I flipped the vinyl, I didn’t know which side I chose because I didn’t look at it, but I heard the beginning of ‘CHOROPHOBIA’ and I was like, ‘Oh yes. This is the B-side.’” **“BETTER”** MSA: “When we’d finished the demo for ‘BETTER,’ we thought it was a super joyful, groovy, dancey, disco-y vibe, so we said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ I always saw it as one of the tracks that really fits on this concept, without knowing that we were going to make ‘DOPAMINE,’ ‘HEAD FIRST,’ and all this other stuff.” HC: “This was a good example of us wanting to get out of our comfort zone and write with other people, which was exciting. I went to \[singer-songwriter\] Richard Orofino’s apartment in New York and we wrote for two hours straight. It’s cool to learn so much about writing with other people. Merijn and me are used to going so deep into the rabbit holes, which I love, but it was cool to be with a stranger saying, ‘Let’s try to make a song after an hour.’ Merijn took that demo to the US and remixed it into this more funky—and better—track we have now.” **“OPEN UP THAT DOOR” (feat. KILIMANJARO)** MSA: “This was some of the most fun we had in the studio with KILIMANJARO and it’s also inspired by DJing. I think he actually sang this hook on ‘DOPAMINE,’ but we loved it so much and we thought it was such a fun vocal to play around with that we made it into a new track. It had the gibberish kind of singing from his brother underneath the whole track, which was so groovy and fun to hear.” HC: “We always wanted to make a music video and with this song, KILIMANJARO’s delivery and the lyrics, we came up with the idea. What if it’s about the fact that you’re afraid of dancing? The character has an extroverted side when he’s talking and then suddenly it becomes a dance party and he has a problem. We collaborated with a friend of ours, Bear Damen, who made videos for James Blake and \[Benny Sings with\] Mac DeMarco. For us, it was a full-circle moment to make this little film, and it was so heavy in terms of time because Merijn still had his movie to finish, but we’re really glad we did it.” **“MERCATOR”** MSA: “This track is an ode to the place where we had all these house parties in Mercator Square, Amsterdam. We play it live at every show now, so that’s a sign that it works on the dance floor and we get so much back from the audience when the kick and the snare drops. It’s a bit more on the emotional side, but that’s why we started making music—when we went to clubs ourselves more than 10 years ago, we experienced the feeling of having goosebumps while dancing.” HC: “Mercator Square was a hub where all our friends just could ring the door and step in. We wrote a part of this record based on this picture of a friend of ours preparing for a house party. He’s DJing in a silly setup, with one hand on a bag of chips and the other on this old-school computer mouse selecting songs.” **“FREE”** HC: “This track also started on that couch and I wrote it with my phone. I thought the initial vocal lines sounded a bit R&B-ish, but a bit cheesy with my voice. The lyrics aren’t the most abstract, but it didn’t really work with my vocals so we asked Megan de Klerk, who’s a friend of ours, to give it a try. We had her input on the vocals as well as the lyrics and ended up with more of that ’90s feel. The reference for it was that song from *The Beach*, All Saints’ ‘Pure Shores,’ You can’t bring everybody on tour, but I’m up for getting a new spin and trying it with Megan on stage where we can. I’d 100 percent love to dive into this again.”
Scan the tracklist for Patrick Watson’s ninth studio album, and it appears to be a typical duets record, with the Montreal indie icon appearing alongside an array of female voices. But in this case, the casting wasn’t so much a novelty as a necessity. In 2023, Watson ruptured a vocal cord and completely lost his ability to speak and sing—and, at the time, the damage appeared to be permanent. As a Band-Aid solution, he outsourced the songs he was working on to a dream-team roster of vocalists that runs the gamut from famous Canadian chanteuses (Charlotte Cardin) to European Instagram discoveries (Parisian singer Solann). However, even after his voice miraculously returned to normal, he was too enamored with the concept to not see it through. Given his steady side hustle as a film composer, Watson has always brought a cinematic sensibility to his records, and on *Uh Oh*, that quality is amplified by the presence of guest singers who transform each song into a magic-realist vignette: “House on Fire” is a he-said/she-said portrait of domestic unrest with Martha Wainwright that’s intensified by a hair-raising string arrangement; “Ami imaginaire” is a match-up with Quebecois maverick Klô Pelgag that smears their francophone vocals over a jittery electronic pulse. But where the opener, “Silencio,” sees Watson directly addressing his health setback (“I think you like me better since I lost my voice,” he cheekily sings), the aftershocks of that experience are felt most acutely in the bittersweet title track, whose darkest-before-the-dawn sentiments are mirrored by the song’s slow march from fragile folk serenade to brassy, ticket-tape spectacle.
“I think the difference between a ‘producer album’ and a ‘singer-songwriter album’ in the traditional artist sense is that you’re really trying to bring people into a feeling,” SG Lewis tells Apple Music. On his rapturous third studio album, the DJ/producer invites the audience to share in an emotion he has been experiencing for as long as he has been listening to and making music—albeit one he only recently learned there was a word for, after spending a summer immersed in the history of Ibiza. “In a lot of the music I make, I like to make references to different time periods or different eras of music, and I was kind of like, ‘What is the reason that I feel drawn to these different eras that I wasn’t a part of?’ It’s not nostalgia, because I wasn’t alive for it,” he says. “Is there a term for feeling nostalgia for something you haven’t experienced?” The term Lewis was searching for would became the title of the record: *Anemoia*. Building on the idea of Ibiza as “a partying promised land, where all the shame and all the shackles of society didn’t exist,” he rendered the concept as a dream-within-a-dream-like reimagining of nightlife on the island during the ’90s. “I was pairing these nostalgic sounds that are very familiar to people, and are classic in a sense, with songwriters and voices and stories that are modern—but then also trying to find a through line in the production that tied those things together into what I interpreted as the sound of anemoia,” he says. *Anemoia* may keep a longing eye on the past, but the idealized fantasies conjured by tracks like the wistfully haunting “Feelings Gone” or bubbling rave anthem “Devotion” capture just as much of the current cultural moment—something Lewis was conscious of preserving as the record began to take shape. “If there’s any kind of deeper purpose to dance music, to me, it’s escapism,” he says. “Retrospectively, I want this album to create the feeling of anemoia for people who perhaps weren’t around or weren’t old enough to experience clubbing now, and the sound of the album and things I’m drawing on are all very escapist because there’s a lot of reasons to feel scared and worried about the future. I’m trying to create a sonic world people can escape into, or soundtrack their escapism and deliver them from whatever hardship they’re facing. That’s the mission.” Read on to find out more as he takes us through *Anemoia*, track by track. **“Memory”** “I knew that the word ‘anemoia’ is not a familiar word. I didn’t know what it meant before I Googled it, and also that no one knows how to pronounce it. So I wanted to build a track that was like a sonic introduction to the world which the album was going to inhabit, but then also be able to put on some audio that would introduce people to the concept of anemoia because it was not self-explanatory. The whole purpose of ‘Memory’ is just to introduce people to the feeling of the album—the euphoria, and this kind of bittersweetness, the chords, the sound—and also the literal concept.” **“Feelings Gone” (with London Grammar)** “For years I had this instrumental that I’d started in LA with my friend, J Moon. It was something that I was playing in DJ sets, and it had this feeling which was like bittersweet, but also the build of it and the drums having a slightly Balearic feeling to them. It was the first thing I made that I was like, ‘Oh, this is like the sound of the album…’ But the only voice I could hear on it in my head was Hannah’s \[Hannah Reid of London Grammar\]. There’s a depth to her voice and her songwriting that adds such emotional weight. Sometimes, dance music, especially pop dance music, can feel disposable but I just felt that Hannah and the band would really create a track that had depth. Rather than referencing what was happening in ’90s Ibiza, ‘Feelings Gone’ is my projection. If I was looking at those photos, what’s playing in my head?” **“Sugar” (with Shygirl)** “Shygirl and I started this song on the same day that we started ‘mr useless,’ which was a song that we did for her project \[2024’s *Club Shy* EP\]. So we had this other demo and I got Shygirl down and we finished off the song structure and stuff, and then TEED \[Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs\] added the synth line. We really wanted ‘Sugar’ to feel like one of those 2000s Hedkandi, ’90s trance, super-pop dance records where they’re just like an overflow of serotonin and joy—for every decision to be very bright and very pop.” **“Transition” (with RAHH)** “The summer that ended up making this album exist, I spent a lot of time in Ibiza and I played Pacha I lot. It’s the oldest club on the island, it has so much history. There’s a sound of Pacha and it’s this 2000s, super-compressed drums, funky basslines, French Touch—I wanted to create a song that is a nod to that. I’d heard RAHH on a couple of records so we got together, and she’s an incredible songwriter. She is able to deliver these vocals that have the power and soul of a classic house vocal, but it’s not delivered in a way that feels like pastiche. A lot of the album leans more into that kind of bittersweetness. I love that feeling, but when I sat back and listened to everything, I wanted a record that did the opposite. ‘Transition’ is a call to arms, the kind of dance record that I play out at peak times.” **“Devotion” (with Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs)** “TEED is one of my best friends in the world, but he still remains a musical hero of mine. He is someone I get a lot of help and advice from, so it only felt right to have him collaborate on the album. This was an instrumental we started together. We tried a bunch of different ideas and vocals, and eventually, I was like, ‘Why don’t you just sing on it?’ It’s very euphoric in a classic ’90s piano house way. When I think of acid house and the UK rave movement scene, I think about those ’90s rave piano tracks. It doesn’t matter where you are or how long you’ve been playing, when you reach that piano breakdown, the sound of those beats coming in provides such a moment of lights-on euphoria.” **“Past Life”** “This is really a breather in what is otherwise a very dance-oriented album. In any album or extended format like this, I do think that a change in tempo is a relief. So I wrote this hook that induced a sort of dreamlike state. The whole thing is supposed to be from the perspective of someone dreaming about another time in the past and what that might’ve been like. Just creating a moment of reflection and a sonic change from the pace and euphoria of the rest of the album.” **“Back of My Mind”** “I use my vocal in a way that is a lot more direct and front-on than I have done in the past—there’s less reverb, less effects—and I think that there’s a story and a deep emotion to it. All my favorite club music has that element. Whether it’s Robyn, ‘Dancing on My Own’ or Kings of Tomorrow, ‘Finally,’ those songs are designed for the club and an environment that’s very hedonistic and kind of momentary, but they have a depth and a story, and I think that gives them the longevity and the purpose. The initial idea was less dance-y—it came from listening to Radiohead, the verse was very meandering, kind of like Thom Yorke, trying to be cool—and it was like the euphoria got added and it got beefed up. Now that I’m playing it live, I can see people connecting to the lyrics. I hadn’t heard that phrase used in a dance record but it’s a very universal feeling.” **“Another Place” (with Frances)** “Frances is a long-term collaborator of mine, we went to university together. She’s primarily a songwriter now, and we did some great songs for this record, but she’s so musically gifted and has the most incredible vocal so I asked her if she would feature on this. I really wanted to create the end-of-night, 4 am, sort of slight comedown, emotional breakbeat song. The ‘Think’ break \[the much-sampled drum break topped with ‘Woo! Yeah!’ from Lyn Collins’ ‘Think (About It)’\] is sampled in this. I wanted to trigger that feeling of anemoia for people who aren’t tuned in to the names of different breaks where they’re like, ‘Where do I know this from?’ and because it’s such an iconic break and so synonymous with rave and dance music, the ‘Think’ break does that for a lot of people. I think that’s a fun emotion to play with.” **“Fallen Apart”** “I wrote the original six years ago, very quickly, after someone that I worked with really hurt my feelings. It was like a note that I’d written down, just like, ‘I’m not going to forget that’ and it sat on my hard drive for ages but there was never really a home for it. I played it to TEED, and we spent a day working on it, beefing it up and turning it into what it became. It’s funny because it sounds like a romantic breakup song, and I think, eventually, I changed some of the lyrics to allow it to resonate in that way, but it really came from a platonic falling out.” **“Baby Blue” (with Oliver Sim)** “I met Oliver in LA when I was working on this record and we did two sessions—one for my album, one for his. We didn’t come away with songs we wanted to put out, but we immediately got on well. I had this instrumental I’d worked on with my friend Karma Kid, and we just spent a day trying to make these end-of-night, disco-edit kind of instrumentals. I found this sample, Wess Machine, ‘Hard Luck’ and the intro just had this two-bar loop. I resampled it and added elements to it, made it work in a modern club setting. I sent it to Oliver, and he was out but said, ‘Give me five minutes…’ Five minutes later, he sends a voice note and he’d written the hook. He was like, ‘I just went in the toilet and wrote this.’ I was gobsmacked. So then he came down to my garden and we recorded it. Wrote a little verse and it was done. His voice is so warm and rich and beautiful. He’s a very special human being.”
On his fifth album under the name Igorrr, French composer Gautier Serre explores the eternal struggle between good and evil through his own avant-garde mix of black metal, baroque music, industrial, and trip-hop. Featuring an international cast of virtuoso musicians led by drummer Rémi Serafino, mezzo-soprano Marthe Alexandre, and a 15-person choir, *Amen* also boasts guest appearances from Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle (on “Blastbeat Falafel”) and Scott Ian of Anthrax (on “Mustard Mucous”). In addition to traditional metal and classical instrumentation, Serre incorporates unconventional instruments like theremin and dungchen—a nine-foot Tibetan trumpet (on “Infestis”)—alongside non-instrument noisemakers including an anvil, a giant saw blade, and even an excavator (on “Headbutt”). “For me, the word ‘amen’ has a couple of different meanings,” he tells Apple Music when asked about the album title. “It’s a reference to the amen break from jungle and breakbeat, a track with a break inside that’s pitched and sped up. The amen break is an important part of my musical journey that’s opened a lot of doors. On top of that, ‘amen’ of course has a spiritual meaning. One of the colors I like to have in Igorrr is sacred music, baroque and classical. This is another important part of my musical journey.” Below, Serre details each track, often with a synesthetic description. **“Daemoni”** “This is very much an evil track. For me, as a synesthetic person, it has very much a red color in the sound. The evil distortion fades into a brutal industrial track—really heavy, really dark. This part of the track morphs into traditional baroque voices and classical guitar, the kind of melodic track I often do in Igorrr. This leads to the third section, an explosive part with a very black-metal riff at the end.” **“Headbutt”** “I always loved the piano as an instrument, and I am a big fan of Chopin. I wanted to do something with his influence, but I didn’t want to do a symphonic metal track. This is more like a virtuoso classic color of piano joined together with death metal. It turned the piano into a rhythmic instrument. I called it ‘Headbutt’ because, initially, the last notes was me giving a headbutt to the piano keys. But then, I wanted to make the track stronger, more forceful. There was an excavator in the garden, and I thought, ‘Let’s try it.’ I actually filmed the moment we did this, and you see it in the video for the song.” **“Limbo”** “I think this track has been the longest in the process because I started writing it during the first lockdown of the pandemic. For me, ‘Limbo’ is the battle between the good and the bad—the good being the classical guitar and the wonderful female vocals. Then there is this wave of negativity that comes back into your life, and you’re trying to keep your head above water all the time. That’s what happens in the second half of the track when the singer sings during the metal parts. We can feel that she’s singing with her head just over the water and everything else is negativity and brutality, the endless battle between the good and the bad.” **“Blastbeat Falafel”** “I’m a big fan of metal, and I’m a big fan of Asian music, but they obviously do not join together easily. This track tries to find the common points between both of these excellent worlds. It started with a stupid riff with an uncommon time signature. When we played in Mesa, Arizona, we met Trey Spruance, and we spent the night talking about music and drinking beers. I played him the badly recorded guitar riff on my phone, and he said he really loved it. A couple of months later, I sent him a more advanced version of the track, and he recorded his part. It sounds marvelous.” **“ADHD”** “It’s an adventurous track. The subject is a condition that many people around me have, and so I try to talk about this with music. It starts with dots of color in the white, in the silence. It’s easy music at first. Then it starts to create a rhythm that you’re not supposed to understand at the beginning. You think it’s random. It’s the expression of a simple idea that seems difficult if you can’t think about it correctly, like ADHD people. But then it gets crazier and crazier, very complex. There are many ideas everywhere, many little details. It took me years to mix it perfectly. At the end, there’s a headbang-able riff, and if you put headphones on and turn it up, you can hear the drummer screaming in the chaos.” **“2020”** “This short track is dissonant, not nice to hear. It’s chaotic and unpleasant, just like the year 2020 for me and many others. It’s the perfect expression of how I felt then.” **“Mustard Mucous”** “This track has the technical vibe I call ‘ninja metal.’ It’s really hard to play with the drums and guitar, with opposite notes really fast and changing position pretty often. The track is very heavy and well-produced, so I wanted to add something that was the opposite of that. I played a recorder, the least heavy instrument on Earth. I don’t know how to play flutes, so I decided to do it and not correct it, to have the bad to contrast the good. On top of that, Scott Ian from Anthrax plays on the track. I didn’t ask him at first because I was afraid he would say no.” **“Infestis”** “The track is something I wanted to do for years. It has the cinematic vibe in the sound design and very black-metal vibes. We also used the dungchen, a huge Himalayan trumpet used for ceremonies and stuff, so it has a very spiritual color. The one I used, if I remember, was like five meters. I mixed in some analog distortion to keep it together and give it a point of view that was something darker than just metal.” **“Ancient Sun”** “The form of this track is much more like a trip-hop track than a metal track. It’s an easy way to exit from ‘Infestis’ because it’s the same color. After the chaos of ‘Infestis,’ you feel you are still underground. You don’t see the light. It has that feeling of having no positive vibe that you can see. ‘Ancient Sun’ gives a really nice breath of fresh air for the album. And I used traditional voices for the track, not baroque voices, because it’s much more human, more grounded in the earth.” **“Pure Disproportionate Black and White Nihilism”** “I recorded this track in the normal way for Igorrr, but I used an anvil to smash the snare drum to get that metallic tail. So, you hear the drum and then, one millisecond later, you hear the metallic resonance of the anvil. On this track, you will also hear the giant saw blade that I use as a gong. It talks about when you are surrounded by people who don’t understand that you feel the things around you very, very intensely. Sometimes you need a giant let-go, and this track is something you can use to liberate yourself from all the negativity around you.” **“Étude n°120”** “It’s a little piece of baroque music that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. If you get through to this point of the album, well done—here’s a nice little gift. It’s the perfect link between ‘Disproportionate’ and the last track, ‘Silence.’” **“Silence”** “This is the death of the album. You can hear the beauty and the beast, the good and the bad. You have this beautiful piano and beautiful voice that get along together perfectly. It\'s very harmonic, very well-in-tune, very beautiful. The strings around it make it even more united and balanced. Then the drums start, and you feel something is wrong: Why is there so much noise? For me, the song symbolizes the disease that we find pretty often in this world: Beauty doesn’t last long. There is always something to break it.”
Joy Crookes emerges from a long period of personal tumult that followed the release of her acclaimed debut album *Skin* (2021) with a different outlook on life and a striking record, *Juniper*, marking the beginning of a new chapter for the South London-born singer-songwriter. “I know we’ve got problems/That’s just family/And God knows what we carry from our history,” she sings on “Mother,” bold, punctuating percussion building up and breaking into twinkling piano riffs as she draws connecting lines through the generations. Relationships and their rippling effects are central to *Juniper*: “House with a Pool” narrates an abusive scenario in soulful, melancholic tones; “Paris” explores how bittersweet memories have altered her perception of the city of love; and sensual, slow-burn “Carmen” holds up a mirror to Crookes’ relationship with herself. Star turns come from Vince Staples, who contributes a poetic eight-bar evaluation of jealous rivals to “Pass the Salt,” and Kano, offering the other side of the equation to Crookes’ raw calculation of heartbreak on “Mathematics.” (Listeners may also recognize the resonant backing vocals on warm, retro groove “Somebody to You” as belonging to alt-rock singer-songwriter Sam Fender.) But, of course, it is Crookes herself that shines the brightest, cutting straight to the heart of her expressions and observations with scathing acerbity and exercising the versatility of her distinctive, malleable voice to evocative effect.
The third album from the Brooklyn-born pop provocateur took shape during a period of upheaval: In one turbulent summer, the artist born Mikaela Straus left her longtime label, her Los Angeles apartment, and her four-year relationship. Instead of fighting the chaos, the musician embraced it, resulting in what could ostensibly be called a breakup album. But on *Girl Violence*, King Princess swaggers rather than sulks, streamlining her formerly eclectic sound for a slinky, sexy deep dive into the havoc women wreak upon each other’s lives. “Why does nobody mention that girls can be violent?” she growls on the title track, concluding: “I hate it, but I kinda like it.” After moving back to NYC in 2023, Straus began working with a pair of Brooklyn-based producers: Jacob Portrait of the psych-rock band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Joe Pincus, who’d made beats for SZA and Doechii. Together, the trio crafted a sound steeped in late-’90s electronica and reverb-heavy rock, using heartbreak as a springboard for questions about human nature. Doo-wop meets dream pop on “Girls,” a slow-burner for the down-bad on which Straus yowls in her smokiest rasp: “To let you back in/That would be violence/That would be chaos/I wanna try it.” Luckily, all that drama builds character. On “Origin,” a sultry downtempo number, she begins to get her groove back: “I’ve had to face fire, fight fear/And spend a lot of time in the mirror/And I’m cool, I’m weirder/I’m hot, I’m deeper/I’m starting to feel myself again.”
