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
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
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