Geese—a band of four 23-year-old longtime pals from Brooklyn and Manhattan—represent such an exciting jolt of rock ’n’ roll possibility that they successfully convinced marquee producer Kenny Beats to change his name in order to work with them. When the members of Geese were still in elementary school, Beats was showing up on increasingly big hip-hop records by Smoke DZA, ScHoolboy Q, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But as he doggedly pursued Geese through 2024 and convinced them to give his new Los Angeles digs a try, they offered a caveat: He should drop the Beats once and for all and just be Kenny Blume. The swap proved worth it. Together, Geese and Blume made one of this year’s truly great rock records, finding an often-hidden seam between old-school indie-rock idiosyncrasy and the mainstream’s explosive power. *Getting Killed* feels like a burst of new life. Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, *Projector*, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling *3D Country*. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when *Heavy Metal*—the brilliant solo debut of singer and leader Cameron Winter, actually released late in 2024—became an unexpected and uncanny breakthrough. Fans of that album may recognize its tunefulness at the start of Geese’s “Cobra,” where lilting keyboards indeed conjure “Love Takes Miles.” Aside from Winter’s singular voice and barbarically blunt lyrics, though, the similarities stop there: *Getting Killed*is a savage and beautiful thing, anchored by the athletic rhythm section of bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin and given a serrated edge by guitarist Emily Green. Where “Islands of Men” moves from a warped Rolling Stones strut into art-rock transcendence, “Bow Down” is nervous and mean start to finish, Winter howling about lost love over an instrumental that feels like heart palpitations. Hinging around howled lines about bombs in cars, opener “Trinidad” indeed lands like a piece of twisted scrap metal. Geese, though, can be tender and exquisite. “Half Real” is an anthem for holding love close as the world tries to chip away at it, while the climactic soul stunner “Au Pays du Cocaine” is a let’s-stay-together update for our era of shared discontent. Geese have recently flamed the eternal embers of rock-savior dialogues, their imaginative but relentless approach suggesting for many talk about the next Strokes or Radiohead. And, sure, that might happen. But more importantly, Geese have simply done what so many great rock bands in the past have done—they’ve learned the lessons of their forebears, ripped them apart, and reordered them in a way that sounds as thrilling to them as to us. “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” Winter warbles on the title track, echoing Neil Young a half-century on. Whether you’re in heaven or hell, it’s hard not to nod at least a little bit of assent to one of rock’s most electrifying new crews and gripping new voices.

Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something,” without quite knowing what. *Michelangelo Dying* forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*, channeling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches,” “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”

“If you understood who I was back then, then you’d understand there was already no box for me,” Rochelle Jordan says of her musical journey in a behind-the-scenes mini-documentary for her album *Through the Wall*. Since her 2011 debut, the Los Angeles-based British Canadian artist has been carving out her own lane, a vintage yet futuristic fusion of ’90s R&B and pop, hip-hop, soul, and electronic music. Jordan’s fascination with the latter stems back to her childhood, when her older brother blasted jungle, drum ’n’ bass, UK garage, house—all shades of dance—in his bedroom, the rhythms seeping through her walls. The album’s title nods to those formative experiences, but it also carries spiritual meaning. Among the obstacles Jordan faced in her career, one of the most challenging was internal: impostor syndrome. As she learned to dismantle those mental barriers and step fully into her power, *Through the Wall* found its roots. Produced mainly by longtime collaborator KLSH (and additionally Byron the Aquarius, Terry Hunter, and DāM FunK), *Through the Wall* bumps like a night in the club, with luxe house grooves that could take dance floors from midnight to sunrise. That sparkling feeling of freedom lives in songs like “Sweet Sensation” and “Close 2 Me,” which radiate the exuberance of living in the moment, whether out with friends or wrapped up with a lover. Slipping into a sing-rap flow, Jordan makes room to flex on “Ladida” and “Around,” her earned braggadocio strutting like it’s dripped head-to-toe in the Versace she name-drops. Even after breakups (“Sum,” “Get It Off”), she’s still thriving, looking fly, and living in her exes’ heads rent-free. *Through the Wall* also pauses to reflect. On “Eyes Shut,” Jordan observes the struggles of those around her, questioning connection in a digital world and seeking purpose. “Got dopamine and can’t feel my soul/I just feel like there’s something more,” she muses. But the title track (“TTW”) asserts her resilience: “When you really wanna push through, okay/Let them say what they want to/Bussin’ through the wall.”

“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.”

Swedish pop phenom Zara Larsson has spent her career steadily building towards a point of pure dance-floor ecstasy, and her fifth album *Midnight Sun* represents the point where she’s seemingly finally reached the summit. Executive-produced by British dance-pop wizard MNEK, the follow-up to 2024’s *VENUS* is bigger, brasher, and more audacious than its predecessor. A clear point of comparison is the total head-rush pop of fellow Swede Tove Lo, only instead of neon-lit clubs, the locale is the sweltering, sandy beach environ evoked in the indelible “Eurosummer.” Hedonism is the name of the game across *Midnight Sun*: Just check out the zippy synths that stomp down the catwalk of “Hot & Sexy” or the low-riding and “Hollaback Girl”-recalling crunk of “Pretty Ugly.” Even the more subtle moments here—the skyscraping pop of “Blue Moon,” the perfectionist’s-lament sweep of “The Ambition”—feel jam-packed with sound, a true reflection of a pop star pushing her music to the limits and then some.

Listening to Purity Ring’s panoramic synth-pop has always felt a bit like stepping into a futuristic fantasyland, so it makes perfect sense that Megan James and Corin Roddick would envision their self-titled fourth album as the soundtrack to a *Final Fantasy*-style RPG that exists only in their own minds. But while *purity ring* comes loaded with fleet-footed, breakbeat-driven bops (“many lives,” “between you and shadows”) ideal for whipping through levels at warp speed and slaying enemies with militaristic precision, the album’s more manic tracks flow naturally into meditative soundscapes (“part ii,” “mistral”) that reflect the more exploratory aspects of gaming, where you’re content to just wander through and marvel at the digital vistas around you. And even if you’re not a headset-sporting joystick jockey, there’s no resisting the emotional undertow of “imanocean,” where James turns off the pitch-shifting vocal filters and Roddick eases off the electro-freakery to deliver an acoustic-driven, heart-pumping indie-pop anthem.

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.”

Olivia Dean’s follow-up to 2023’s *Messy* suggests she’s anything but. From the radio-friendly uplifter “Nice to Each Other” to the sweeping, late ’60s Dionne Warwick-esque soul of “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” *The Art of Loving* finds Dean self-assured as she slinks freely through R&B and pop. “You can make whatever you want, there’s no rules and that’s such a freeing feeling,” she tells Apple Music’s Rebecca Judd. Dean describes her songwriting on *The Art of Loving* as “real, fresh, and honest” and she makes it sound so easy. It’s no surprise that the overarching theme—love in its different forms—came naturally. “I had the title quite quickly,” she says. “I’ve also been fascinated by love. It’s the one thing that everybody is looking for in their life in some capacity, whether it be friendship, family, romantic, but it’s something that we’re not taught. There’s not a love module in school. It’s this magic thing we’re supposed to know how to do. So I wanted to take a closer look at it and what it means to me and the art of it, the craft of loving someone properly.” The album opens with the instant hit “Nice to Each Other,” the obvious choice for Dean. “As soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the first song. It’s got a Fleetwood Mac guitary feel and it’s cheeky, it’s flirty,” she says. There might be heartbreaks and wistful moments along the way, but Dean leaves listeners in no doubt she’s in a happy place. “How could I not be?” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about touring and what I want to sing live and I want it to be joyful. So I’ve been moving towards joy.”

On his ninth album under the Revocation banner, guitarist, vocalist, and mastermind Dave Davidson explores the worship of technology, the cultish idolatry of tech innovators, and the disturbing outcomes AI may have in store for humanity. Joining Davidson and longtime drummer Ash Pearson on *New Gods, New Masters* are new bassist Alex Weber and new guitarist Harry Lannon, who uphold the band’s high standards of extreme metal proficiency. *New Gods, New Masters* is death metal at its most visceral and complex, as evidenced by songs like the body-horror-themed track “Cronenberged” (featuring Jonny Davy of Job for a Cowboy), the monstrous title track, and lead single “Confines of Infinity” (featuring Travis Ryan of Cattle Decapitation). Elsewhere, Israeli guitar wizard Gilad Hekselman lends some guest shredding to the dizzying instrumental “The All Seeing,” and Gorguts main man Luc Lemay makes a vocal cameo on closer “Buried Epoch.”

In 2024, Bright Eyes’ inimitable figurehead Conor Oberst lent his distinctively black-and-blue vocals to “The World is Dangerous,” a dusky and ruminative tune from Alynda Segarra’s eighth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff, *The Past is Still Alive*. Clearly, the collab rubbed off on Oberst, whose EP *Kids Table*—a follow-up to 2024’s Bright Eyes album *Five Dice, All Threes*—finds him creatively melding with Segarra directly (the languid, slide guitar-laden, and exquisitely Bright Eyes-y “Dyslexic Palindrome”) while taking a seeming inspiration from their own folk-rock travelogues. With lyrical invectives against hipsters, Ronald Reagan, and various clothing retailers, “1st World Blues” has a first-wave ska feel that makes you think, if only for a second, that Oberst has busted out a porkpie hat and two-tone suit in the studio. Meanwhile, the string-laden opening title track offers a jauntier spin on Bright Eyes’ grandiose 2020s work, showcasing a project that is still constantly evolving even as its leader’s legend continues to grow.

“Hello, stranger,” Neko Case sings off the top of her eighth album, and it’s a welcome reintroduction, given that *Neon Grey Midnight Green* arrives seven years after its predecessor. Case spent a good chunk of her time away writing her best-selling memoir, *The Harder I Fight the More I Love You*, a no-holds-barred account of her hardscrabble upbringing, and in a sense, *Neon Grey Midnight Green* feels like a continuation of that introspective work. As the first entirely self-produced album of her career, it provides an unfiltered glimpse into her musical mind, where she conjures a surrealist swirl of classic-country balladry, lush ’60s orchestral pop, dissonant punk, and avant-garde experimentation. It’s also a profoundly personal record, informed by the deaths of some longtime indie-rock allies: On “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” she pays tribute to Flat Duo Jets lead vocalist Dexter Romweber with a baroque piano lullaby that gives way to a lovingly nostalgic invocation of the “Down Down Baby” clapping-game sing-along. On the equally haunting and heavenly “Match-Lit,” she and guest Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire summon the spirit of The Sadies’ Dallas Good by quoting a song they all bonded over, the Mickey & Sylvia/Everlys standard “Love Is Strange.” At times, *Neon Grey Midnight Green*’s dream-state logic leads Case into bizarre uncharted territory: The theatrical spoken-word jazz poem “Tomboy Gold” is a lot closer to Laurie Anderson than Loretta Lynn. But while such outré excursions mark *Neon Grey Midnight Green* as the most eccentric entry in Case’s canon to date, the album is ultimately anchored by towering, string-swept torch songs—like “Wreck” and “An Ice Age”—that make a convincing case for Case’s gale-force voice to be recognized as the eighth wonder of the world.

Taking several pages from fellow Brits Sleep Token’s hype-generating playbook, PRESIDENT is an anonymous UK collective that fuses modern metal with dancey electronics and R&B textures. The title of their debut EP, *King of Terrors*, is a biblical reference (Job 18:14) and an allusion to the death of the wicked that plays out across six songs steeped in programmed beats, industrial textures, and singing styles that range from screamo to modern R&B cadences. The skittering “RAGE” was inspired by Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”; leadoff track “In the Name of the Father” is metalcore electronica that isn’t afraid of Auto-Tune, and “Dionysus” delivers a Deftones-esque guitar crush interspersed with cool-breeze verses and a plaintive chorus.

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.