For Cryin' Out Loud! Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 FINNEAS “I think I am a songwriter first, which is always how I’ve felt about myself,” FINNEAS tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. The 27-year-old has already made his name as a producer through his chart-dominating, award-accruing work with his sister Billie Eilish. But when he was finished with his workload for 2023, which included working on Eilish’s blockbuster album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and scoring the Apple TV+ show Disclaimer , he wanted to, as he put it, “dive back into my stuff.” So he went to work in a new space—a studio outside his home laboratory—surrounded by musicians with whom he felt comfortable feeling out new material, flexing his muscles as a producer while also testing out his songwriting chops. That collaborative ease is audible on For Cryin’ Out Loud! , an inviting album that combines soft rock’s slickness and indie’s choppy guitars with unexpected twists like the jittery epilogue to the chilled-out sophisti-pop f
What Do You Believe In? (Deluxe) Album ∙ Pop ∙ 2024 Rag'n'Bone Man Rag’n’Bone Man wanted his third album to bring the joy. The Sussex-born singer-songwriter, aka Rory Charles Graham, came into the writing process in a good place and wanted to share that sense of jubilation. “I thought, ‘I need to make something that makes people smile,’” he tells Apple Music. “Even if I’ve got some deep and strong things to say on this record, I still want the backdrop to be something that’s uplifting.” It’s an approach that has resulted in Graham’s most euphoric collection of songs yet, blending soulful pop, stirring R&B, and stark ballads—with his rich, aching croon lifting these tracks to exhilarating heights. The sense of celebration, he says, is a reflection of how he’s feeling. “I’m not a very introspective writer,” he says. “I give it to you on a plate, it’s always very representative of where I’m at in life at the time.” Let Rag’n’Bone Man take you deeper into What Do You Believe
Whiplash - The 5th Mini Album - EP Album ∙ K-Pop ∙ 2024 aespa Five months after the release of their first studio album Armageddon , which included the megahit “Supernova,” aespa returned with Whiplash . The six-track EP is the girl group’s fifth mini album since their explosive debut on the K-pop scene in 2020, and it continues their reign as the queens of hyperpop hooks. “One look, give ’em whiplash/Beat drop with a big flash,” cool girls Giselle, Karina, Ningning, and Winter express on the title track, an EDM-driven dance track about aespa’s ability to make everyone look twice. Elsewhere on the album, the intentionally abrasive hip-hop dance song “Kill It” is simultaneously a declaration of K-pop dominance and a warning to any haters in the audience (“I’ma shine as I watch the bodies drop”), while the R&B track “Flights, Not Feelings” slows things down to confess a commitment to letting go of negative feelings (“I'm not tryna hurt myself, tryna burn myself”). “Pink Hoodi
Leon Album ∙ R&B/Soul ∙ 2024 Leon Bridges When Leon Bridges made his debut in 2015 with Coming Home , critics and peers alike were amazed by his velvety retro-soul stylings reminiscent of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. Widening his horizons, his third album Gold-Diggers Sound showcased a different side of the Texas crooner, leaving behind the ’50s and ’60s vibe that helped propel him to stardom for a mix of ’80s and ’90s R&B mixed with lush, jazz-inspired live instrumentation. “I kind of always felt like a lone wolf in the industry, and yes, my music is under the umbrella of R&B, but I’ve always felt like I was never fully embraced in that community,” Bridges tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And so it was kind of a thought that ‘Leon’ is the genre, and as far as the whole album is kind of like a window into who I am.” Now, with his self-titled album, Leon Bridges is ready to reintroduce himself and invite his fans into his world. Leon is an intimate and revealing love l
Honey Album ∙ Electronic ∙ 2024 Caribou More than 20 years into his career, Dan Snaith continues to shape-shift as an artist. His sixth proper album as Caribou finds the 46-year-old electronic pop polymath diving headlong into big-room dance sounds, more so than ever before: French-touch-indebted synths, city-flattening wub-wub basslines, and the type of clipped-vocal UK garage melodies that pop artists like PinkPantheress have favored as of late. Snaith is taking clear inspiration from his acclaimed full-length under his dance-floor-focused Daphni moniker, 2022’s Cherry , as well as the recent stadium-pleasing gestures from left-of-center contemporaries Jamie xx and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. The result is the sound of an artist newly invigorated and truly having fun with the music they’re making. Honey isn’t the first time that Snaith has turned his attention towards body-moving music. 2010’s Swim fused techno’s intensity with his career-long penchant for all things psychede
3AM (LA LA LA) Album ∙ Dance ∙ 2024 Confidence Man “We’re very lucky to move here and we’ve been loving it,” Confidence Man’s Sugar Bones—Aidan Moore—tells Apple Music, reflecting on the act’s relocation to London. “[We’re] figuring it out and just having lots of fun in a new place. And it really rubbed off on this album.” Energetically co-fronted by Moore and fellow vocalist Janet Planet (Grace Stephenson) over dynamic, nostalgic backing from producers Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie, Confidence Man taps into that fresh thrill of exploring a new place on its third album. From the nocturnal headiness of the title track to the bratty festival fun of “BREAKBEAT”—on which Planet announces that she’s not dropping the pill in her pocket until she hears the titular rhythmic flourish—the record celebrates partying at any hour in any setting. Read on as Moore takes us behind the scenes on five extra-playful tracks in particular. “WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL FIND?” “This song took a while to p
LYFESTYLE Album ∙ Hip-Hop/Rap ∙ 2024 Yeat The enigma born Noah Olivier Smith—better known as Yeat, to use the word “known” loosely—broke through in 2021 as a maverick of rage-rap. These days, the 24-year-old exists in his own orbit entirely, recording and engineering his own songs that are possibly informed by extraterrestrial wisdom and rife with bizarro ad-lib soundscapes, dystopian-sounding beats, and non sequiturs that could either be profound or total nonsense. (And umlauts inserted where no one has ever dared to insert umlauts before, naturally.) The songs across his deep, curious catalog sound like World War 16 battle cries, or the moment a UFO beam makes contact with a cornfield, or the sound of an old world being replaced with a new one. Yeat’s known (again, loosely) for his strange preoccupations: sui generis slang terms, face-shielding headgear, bells and flutes. LYFESTYLE , his fifth studio album, shows off a handful of new obsessions: telling lies, gazing with wonderment
TYLA + Album ∙ Pop ∙ 2024 Tyla “I've always wanted to be a pop star, but beyond that, I wanted to be an African pop star,” Tyla tells Apple Music. “The roots of my sound are in amapiano music, in South African and African music.” Though the megaviral 2023 single “Water” may have put the South African singer-songwriter on the proverbial map—first as a social media sensation, then as the highest-charting African female soloist ever on Billboard’s Hot 100, earning her the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance—she’s been carefully plotting her path to the top for years. “Since I started experimenting with amapiano, I just feel like it's really helped me get to this point where I created something that is fresh and new, but still familiar and comes from home,” she says. “It's a sound of Africa, and it's something that I couldn't be more proud about.” She weaves through a blend of pop, R&B, amapiano, and Afrobeats (“pop-piano sounds cute,” she admi