2026 Indie pop

The fact that Dijon Duenas had a hand in producing one of 2025’s most anticipated indie-rock releases (Justin Vernon’s two-part Bon Iver opus <i>SABLE, fABLE</i>) and most surprising pop-star comeback (Justin Bieber’s <i>SWAG</i>) speaks to his singular standing in the contemporary musical landscape. Arriving mere weeks after he became every Belieber’s most popular search term, Dijon’s second full-length, <i>Baby</i>, is an open invitation for his recent converts to follow him deeper into his lo-fi underworld—and a reassurance to his longtime fans that he isn’t farming out all his best production ideas to famous guys named Justin.

On the conjoined opening tracks “Baby!” and “Another Baby!,” Dijon comes off as part Prince, part Salvador Dali, rendering his sensuous serenades in pitch-shifting surrealist style, like tapes from a late-night “Paisley Park” session left out to melt in the morning sun. And whether he’s indulging in the sound-collage gospel of “HIGHER!,” the distorted dub-soul of “FIRE!,” or the barking dog-assisted folk ballad “loyal & marie,” Dijon’s real superpower is crafting straight-from-the-heart songs and then throwing them delightfully off-balance, perpetually dropping elements in and out of the mix with a “what does this button do?” sense of mischief.

A glistening, atmospheric alt-R&B debut from the Mk.gee collaborator.

The Atlanta group finds its next gear in melodic ’90s-style indie rock.

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, <i>10,000 gecs</i> puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

Nina Wilson, aka Central Coast-born DJ and producer Ninajirachi, was six or seven songs into writing her debut album when she noticed a through line. “I started to find little points that connected [them] being about my childhood, or being about my computer, so that was when I came up with the title,” she tells Apple Music. “From there, it made it really easy to finish the rest of the tracks because that was my scaffold.”

With some ideas on the album stretching back to voice memos from 2019, Wilson has spent years methodically building a sonic world that incorporates elements of 2000s electroclash (“London Song”), trance (“Infohazard”), and club (“CSIRAC”) into her melodic dance-music blueprint. Also showing through is the influence of early 2010s Australian dance artists such as PNAU, Empire Of The Sun, and Miami Horror, particularly in songs such as “All I Am” and “iPod Touch.” “I guess that’s the palette or the world, but I also didn’t want to be too reverential,” she says. “That’s the music that was most inspiring to me when I started making music, but I’ve definitely wanted to make my own version of it.” Here, Wilson takes Apple Music through <i>I Love My Computer</i>, track by track.

<b>“London Song”</b>
“This was not about anything at first, it was just a voice memo. I wrote the singing part with the extra lyrics, and by that point I had the title of the album and was like, ‘OK, I need to make this about my computer.’ And the way I twisted it was, almost all the places I’ve been overseas is because I made music on a laptop. And that’s what allowed me to go there. So that’s the way I reframed the random voice memo—I would go with you [to London], with my computer that has afforded me that luxury.”

<b>“iPod Touch”</b>
“When I was in high school, I got really into electronic music, but also pretty niche SoundCloud electronic music, and I didn’t have any friends that were into it. It felt like all my favorite songs were my secrets, ’cause I didn’t have anyone to share them with. In that song, there’s a reference to a Porter Robinson track from 2012 that was my favorite song when I was 12 or however old I was.”

<b>“F**k My Computer”</b>
“I use Ableton to produce my music. I was using other software before that, and when I landed on Ableton, I felt like it was the first interface I meshed with and I started becoming really fast. Sometimes, I think, ‘How could I get faster? How could I widen the bandwidth even more?’ It’s just a hardware limitation at this point, I just need to insert my brain into the computer. If we were just one entity, I wouldn’t have to lose ideas in translation.”

<b>“CSIRAC”</b>
“CSIRAC is the first computer in the world to ever [play digital] music. I felt like the album was missing more of a clubby, drummy, DJ moment, and I thought this could be that.”

<b>“Delete”</b>
“The song is about when you have a crush and you post a photo just for them to see it. It’s a little Gatsby-ish, like you put on this big show for just one person to see it. And then you’re like, ‘Have they seen it? Do they think I’m pretty?’ Then it’s the self-awareness of being like, ‘I’m so embarrassing!’”

<b>“ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ”</b>
“It’s a cat symbol. Internally we’ve been calling it ‘Cat Face.’ Or ‘Cat Interlude.’ It’s just an interlude to ‘All I Am.’ Originally, ‘All I Am’ had a long, progressive intro. But when it came to releasing it on its own, it felt too indulgent; it felt too much like two songs in one to work as a single. So I split that intro off to make it its own song.”

<b>“All I Am”</b>
“This was such a special song to make. It was a jam at Ben Lee’s house in LA with Ben, Jenna [McDougall, aka Hevenshe], Alex [Greenwald, Phantom Planet], and Maz [DeVita, WAAX]. We were literally recording anything. Then we had a break, and we had a little bit of a microdose, and had lunch, and then everyone got sleepy. We all got into this meditative state, and I just started looping certain parts of what we’d recorded and added my own elements on top of their audio, and it just built into this dance progression thing. I think a lot of the music I was listening to at the time, like PNAU, really leaked through in that second half of the session where I started working on it on its own.”

<b>“Infohazard”</b>
“I saw this artwork of this girl sitting next to a computer and she was cute, kind of Bratz doll style. And the text said, ‘Help, I’m online and I just saw a beheading.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me when I was a cute girl too.’ It just seemed like an interesting way to make light of what is probably a shared trauma amongst people of my generation. If not a beheading they’ve just been scrolling and been like, ‘Oh, I probably wasn’t meant to see that and I can’t forget about it now.’”

<b>“Battery Death”</b>
“I really wanted to have a halftime, more hip-hop-drums track so it wasn’t all just four-to-the-floor dance music. I think I was reading a lot about battery life, but no one was really talking about battery death. It just sounded like a funny title but worked in with the themes of the album.”

<b>“Sing Good”</b>
“It started as a gibberish jam, and I started mumbling, ‘I can’t really sing.’ I thought, that’s kind of funny. I don’t know if I’ve heard someone write about not being able to sing. I was writing music before I was producing it—like I say in the lyrics, I would get the lyric books of my favorite albums and be like, ‘What’s a verse? What’s a chorus? Oh OK, this is the formula,’ and that’s how I wrote about it. I would just write songs about going to the shops and stuff but never really show them to anyone ’cause I wasn’t a good singer.”

<b>“It’s You” (with daine)</b>
“daine was having a really bad day and we were trying to make music but they weren’t feeling super good. I was a little bit pushy—I was very gentle but I was like, ‘Let’s record something.’ So we just did this one little recording, this one gibberish take, and it ended up being the song. Later, when daine was feeling better, we put lyrics to it and rerecorded it. I’m so glad we pushed it that day.”

<b>“All at Once”</b>
“The verse at the end is about, I’m always at my desk in the dark, always working by myself late at night at the computer—that’s where I get the best work done a lot of the time. I wanted to send off the album with the last devotional nod to everything my computer had done for me, good and bad. It’s allowed me to have this crazy career that I wouldn’t have been allowed to have if I didn’t grow up in this decade. It would have been totally different.”

For the most part, Dry Cleaning likes to make music without talking about it too much beforehand. But the London quartet—vocalist Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton—did discuss one idea when it came to the writing sessions for their third album. This, they decided, should be a record that evokes the sensory overload and hustle and bustle of what it feels like to walk through a city.

As it happens, this was exactly the description that producer Cate Le Bon, also a solo artist and art-pop dynamo in her own right, used as she listened through the band’s demos. Seeking to add a panoramic expanse to the post-punk and angular experimental-rock grooves of their first two albums—2021’s <i>New Long Leg</i> and 2022 follow-up <i>Stumpwork</i>—Dry Cleaning realized they had found the perfect artistic foil. “Cate seemed to understand what we wanted from the record before we could verbalize it or before we even knew what we wanted,” Maynard tells Apple Music. “She seemed to understand where we were at.”

The collaboration has resulted in <i>Secret Love</i>, the band’s most perfectly realized work to date, one that hones everything that’s gone before and emerges more dynamic, immediate, and accessible without the band losing any of their offbeat edge. “We wanted to push the album a bit more sonically,” adds Dowse. “We’re being a bit more expansive and working with some different textures.” Let the four-piece guide you through <i>Secret Love</i>, track by track.

<b>“Hit My Head All Day”</b>
Florence Shaw: “This was one of the first things that we jammed when we were meeting up in May last year. It wasn’t super serious, we were just warming up.”
Lewis Maynard: “One of my favorite things about being in Dry Cleaning is you’re always listening and being aware to what’s happening around you, and you add to it. Nick had a drum machine and then started playing acoustic drums and then Flo started playing harmonica because I found one in my bedroom, even though I don’t think I’ve ever owned one. I just started playing bass and it went from there. I think that sums up Dry Cleaning quite nicely, where ideas come from, which is from anywhere and any moment.”
FS: “A lot of the lyrics came quite late in the day. I was having nerve problems in my arms, and I went to a physio session. It was this nice feeling to relinquish control to someone trustworthy. She was bending my arms around behind my head and stuff to try to get my nerves to wake up, so some of the song was influenced by that, the idea of being manipulated and it sometimes being bad and sometimes being good.”

<b>“Cruise Ship Designer”</b>
FS: “We played it once, a one-off jam that was about 10 minutes long.We listened back to stuff we’d recorded on our phones and I had listened to it a couple of times, and I really liked it so I made a really rough edit of this 10-minute thing down to three minutes on GarageBand and recorded a vocal on it. No one was hugely excited about it. But then Cate was really interested in it. She was the first person to listen through and point it out as something that could make a really great song. She had this vision for backing vocals and everything. I think it’s important that if someone comes along and they’re emphatic about something, it’s kind of dumb to ignore it.”
Nick Buxton: “We realized she was right.”

<b>“My Soul / Half Pint”</b>
Tom Dowse: “I think of Dr. Feelgood when I think of this, or something like The Stranglers or Talking Heads, where you’re just riffing on a feeling, a groove. It’s almost like a conversation between the guitar and the bass parts. It’s got such a nice atmosphere. It’s funny but it’s got a bit of a swagger to it as well. This and ‘Cruise Ship Designer’ are both me trying to be Keith Richards, but without the heroin, or all the skill.”

<b>“Secret Love (Concealed in a Drawing of a Boy)”</b>
NB: “I think we had some initial semblance of this song back in May or June 2024. I thought it was a really beautiful song because it’s quite uplifting but it’s quite fragile. Flo’s put this lovely vocal on the chorus where you’re really challenging yourself to sing in a way you haven’t sung before. That felt very exciting.”
FS: “It’s about a concealment, the way that emotions find their way to the surface even if you’re trying to hide them. The inspiration was the idea of an artist who has secret feelings of love that they can’t show openly but they come out in their drawings. We talked about a lot of different album titles, and in a way, the title gives a new dimension to every song because it can speak to the idea of secret romantic feelings, but also it can almost be like a secret fetish or a secret obsession.”

<b>“Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”</b>
FS: “I showed Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods the demo of this song a few months before we went in to record it properly, and he suggested that there be a sung part at the point where the saxophone comes in—he described it as putting a bow on it. It was a good idea.”
TD: “There’s a ’70s live version of Pentangle doing a song called ‘Wedding Dress’ and unlike the recorded version, it starts on the drums, and the drums are really dance-y. It sounds almost like house music. I think we were approaching it from that way. We’ve never really seen ourselves as solely a post-punk band. That was really just a means to start writing music together, but our influences are much broader.”

<b>“Blood”</b>
TD: “I actually had the guitar parts and made another song in another band, probably like 15 years ago. We started jamming with this around about the time we’d finished [2021’s] <i>New Long Leg</i>. We really liked it but it just didn’t go anywhere, it would hit a brick wall. We even showed it to [producer] John Parish when we were demoing <i>Stumpwork</i>. He was like, ‘This is like a jangle salad.’ He really did not like it at all. We took it to Sonic Studios in Dublin to work on it with the guys from Gilla Band, Alan Duggan and Daniel Fox, and they took a scalpel to it and started to think about it from a different way around.”
NB: “There was a real emphasis on contrast, loud and quiet, and sounds appearing and disappearing and textures. It just seemed like it was an open goal after that, so many things that everyone was trying just seemed to work instantly.”

<b>“Evil Evil Idiot”</b>
TD: “This didn’t really come to life until we went to work on it in Dublin with Gilla Band again. They gave it that kind of atmosphere. We wanted that heaviness of desert rock, but without it sounding like us trying to do desert rock.”
FS: “The lyrics came in immediate response to the music. It was this idea of someone who loves burnt food. My dad used to love the taste of burnt sausages. Also, I’d just seen this video of an Italian grandma turning a pepper over on an open hob, putting her hands in the fire. I was like, ‘That’s cool, that has the energy of this type of music.’ It’s like this idea of this fucking sick individual who loves carbonated, weird charcoal in their mouth. And then there’s the extra lyrics about black plastic. We were staying in this grim flat in Dublin that had a lot of plastic utensils in the kitchen, as I have in my own home actually—I’ve thrown them all away though because I read this scary thing about black plastic seeping into food and it being really toxic, which I think has maybe been disproved now.”

<b>“Rocks”</b>
TD: “Again, this came from attempt to do a Rolling Stones-type thing. The riffs are all Keith Richards-inspired. We did do a demo of it to quite a high level but it was quite straightforward, everything was pulling in one direction and that’s not really a Dry Cleaning way of working. There was a band from Los Angeles in the late ’70s, early ’80s called Chrome, a punk band who have this burned-out sci-fi edge to them and when we started to frame it that way, it seemed like it was starting to spark off more energy in our brains.”

<b>“The Cute Things”</b>
TD: “This was one where we accidentally inhabited the spirit of Sheryl Crow.”
LM: “We had to dial it back a little bit.”
TD: “I think half of us were keen to dial it up…”
NB: “It’s kind of a silly song. I was definitely unsure about whether it was going to be on the album or not. I couldn’t tell if it was frivolous or not. But when I would listen to the demo, it’d give me a bit of a chill like, ‘Oh, this is really exciting, all the stuff that’s happening.’ It feels quite an extreme element of the album, it’s quite far off in a corner on its own.”
LM: “It’s a different vibe for the record, and we wanted to cover a lot of ground. We’ve done that on previous records, leaning in different directions, but this one is just a totally different tone for the record.”

<b>“I Need You”</b>
TD: “This is maybe our collective favorite song. I think we’ve had that in our locker for a while and things like ‘Leafy’ and ‘Strong Feelings’ [from <i>New Long Leg</i>] skirt around trying to make these quite tender, ambient sounds into pop songs, quite strange avant-garde pop songs. I think this is probably the best version of that we’ve ever done.”
NB: “There’s loads of really nice textures in it. I think you have to make space for that. You can’t just cram everything in and hope that it’s going to come across. You have to sculpt a world where there’s space for the textures to arrive at your ears. For a band like us that can be very boisterous and loud, sometimes it’s really good to take a step back and do something more minimal.”

<b>“Joy”</b>
NB: “This was the last song we wrote for the album. It’s quite a complicated song because the music is quite uplifting and some of the lyrics are quite uplifting, but I think there is a darkness to it. It’s an interesting song to end the album on because it does present itself as being a positive end note, but there is some wariness to it.”
LM: “It’s the closest we come to planning for a song. We realized we had a couple of weeks or so spare of writing, and we wanted to do something more upbeat.”
TD: “The music for it came together really quickly. Just thinking about something with a bit more energy to it, something that was a bit more on the front foot, almost pop-punk but without being pop-punk. It reminds me of a bit of Guided By Voices or The Kinks. When we were recording it, we tried to keep the chime of The Kinks, the way that the tone of their guitars is so bright and so refreshing.”

Even though HAIM named their fourth studio album—and first since 2020’s <i>Women in Music, Pt. III</i>—<i>I quit</i>, the trio of sisters aren’t quitters. “Quitting can be looked at as giving up in normal circumstances,” bassist/vocalist Este Haim tells Apple Music. “We look at it as a new beginning and betting on yourself. We quit things that don’t serve us anymore.”

The follow-up to their Grammy-nominated opus takes its name from a scene in 1996’s <i>That Thing You Do!</i> where the band’s leader announces his departure by snapping his fingers and sing-talking the words “I quit”—a move the women use regularly as an inside joke. “One day, we were checking the mic and we did it again,” Este adds. “We were like, ‘Wait, should we name our album <i>I quit</i>? Say that again.’ ‘Wait a minute. Should we?’ It took on a life of its own.”

Produced by Rostam and lead vocalist/guitarist Danielle Haim, the band’s latest takes parting shots at the people in their lives who have seemingly done them wrong. (And with single artwork inspired by paparazzi pics—most famously for “Relationships”, a cheeky take on the iconic post-divorce Nicole Kidman photo—the Haims aren’t just speaking to their romantic follies but the celebrity and industry machine at large.) Appropriately, the opening track “Gone” samples the George Michael smash “Freedom! ’90”, setting the tone for the album’s message: liberation from anything and everything that may have restrained them. “I’ll do whatever I want/I’ll see who I wanna see/I’ll fuck off whenever I want/I’ll be whatever I need,” Danielle intones.

Their songs range from groovy (“Down to be wrong”) to nostalgic (“Take me back”), dreamy (“Lucky stars”) and bluesy (“Blood on the street”). “All over me” feels straight out of a ’90s rom-com montage, and “The farm” gives off a Sheryl Crow-infused vibe. The contemplative “Everybody’s trying to figure me out”—co-written by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—also offers a meditation on self-acceptance: “Everybody’s got their own decisions, and I know that I’ve got mine/And I’ll be fine.”

Ultimately, though, the sibling rockers see their new work as fit for the stage, and that’s important to how they create their music, Este explains: “We always think about our live show when we are writing songs, because that’s really where our heart is—playing live.”

<b>“Gone”</b>
Alana Haim: “‘Gone’ was actually the last song that we wrote for this album. We were listening to the album and it felt like we really needed an introduction to the world of <i>I quit</i>. Before ‘Gone’ was written, it felt like it was going into, it needed that breath of, ‘Okay, we’re starting the album.’ We started with that guitar line—I think Danielle had this—and it kind of just came out. I think every songwriter would say this: There’s this spiritual muse that comes into your brain sometimes, and we love that muse. We pray for that muse to kind of let us be the vessel. But we were kind of hanging on this one note, and Danielle just kind of blurted out, ‘Can I have your attention, please?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, we’re starting now.’”

<b>“All over me”</b>
AH: “Maybe other people are very open with their siblings. We are not! I don’t want to know! But when we were making ‘All over me,’ we had fallen into this time where we were all single and we were all having very different experiences, but they were all coming kind of from the same point of view: We were all having these one-night stands and we were all having these crazy-ass stories about these one-night stands. ‘All over me’ kind of just blossomed from that time.”

<b>“Relationships”</b>
Danielle Haim: “This was one of the hardest songs to crack—and honestly, there’s always one on every album. It’s always kind of like our favourite one. ‘The Wire’ was very tough to crack; ‘Want You Back’ was super tough to crack; ‘The Steps’, super, super tough to crack. This is in the same lineage as those. It went through a bunch of different versions, but it’s one of my favourite songs we’ve ever written.”

<b>“Down to be wrong”</b>
DH: “We knew we were writing songs in the studio with Rostam and he’s always so supportive of searching for different sounds. I know we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re making an album,’ but it wasn’t until we wrote that song where we were like, ‘Okay, wow, we have one super down.’ Not to sound weird, but it was just that was the one where we were like, ‘Holy shit, I do think we have a great song here.’ And when we got that chorus, I think it kind of just opened up something within all of us.”
AH: “When we wrote that chorus of just screaming, we were visualising just playing it live and screaming with everybody and getting that weight off your shoulders. It was a very cathartic day in the studio.”

<b>“Take me back”</b>
DH: “Our friend Tobias Jesso Jr. was in the area when we were working on this in the studio. Honestly, we didn’t plan on writing anything; we just wanted to show him an update of what we had been making. He’s from Vancouver, and we somehow got on this conversation about high school, and what we were doing during high school.”
Este Haim: “I’m just going to say, to be fair, all three of us went to the same high school, so we don’t really have any perspective on what it was like to go to school anywhere else.”
AH: “That day, it was filled with so much joy and this nostalgic feeling of reminiscing about that funny time.”

<b>“Love you right”</b>
DH: “That was one of the first songs we wrote. ‘Love you right’ came from a drumbeat. I feel like we needed to have this kind of moody, really in-the-pocket drum, like roomy-sounding. I had this whole vision in my head.”
AH: “We’re extremely inspired by the drums. A lot of these songs were birthed out of Danielle cooking on the drums.”

<b>“The farm”</b>
AH: “It was a sombre day in the studio. When we made this album, we were all across the board extremely happy that we were single. But then there are those moments where you have to be self-reflective and you’re in your home alone and you realise that you’re a human being that has emotions, and you’re looking around your house where there’s no noise. You’re just sitting in silence and you realise: You know what? I’m alone. ‘The farm’ is that kind of song where you’re reflecting on that time of being alone. Learning to be okay alone with yourself is the most important lesson you can learn just being alive.”

<b>“Lucky stars”</b>
DH: “It’s a very optimistic song. There were some really amazing times through these last couple of years where we were meeting new people. There were some that just fully came into our lives, maybe for not that long, but it was truly so fun and inspiring. It just was like, wait, this person’s amazing. It’s reflecting on putting yourself out there and then also wondering why some people come into your life and being so thankful for that, but also just kind of being like, ‘Wow, I’m so happy that I met this person.’ Is it in the stars or what, I wonder, or is this just kind of happening?”

<b>“Million years”</b>
AH: “Saying, ‘I’ll carry you on my back even if it takes a million years,’ to me, that is kind of like an ode to my siblings. Anytime I’m feeling low, I’m so lucky that I was born with my two best friends. In [my] low points, I get to call my siblings and they know exactly what to say. It’s an ode to anyone in your life that you’ll have forever, that has your back.”

<b>“Everybody’s trying to figure me out”</b>
DH: “That song’s really close to my heart. It’s probably my favourite one on the album. It started after a bit of a panic attack after tour. I just remember sitting down and writing, ‘Everybody’s trying to figure me out and that’s all right,’ which I think, at the time, I lost track of a bunch of people and got really in my head. I used the whole song as a bit of a mantra to remind myself that I’m okay, and you think you’re going to die, but you’re not going to die. When I’m having a bit of a panic moment, it’s a really helpful mantra.”

<b>“Try to feel my pain”</b>
DH: “It’s a bit like holding up a mirror, maybe to yourself, and maybe a bit to your partner, and realising that sometimes you can feel yourself a bit numb within a relationship. And I think that’s a bit like putting everything on the table and putting a mirror up to it.”

<b>“Spinning”</b>
AH: “The first song that I’ve ever sang lead on—so daunting! I had just started dating someone, and I was so fucking obsessed with that ooey-gooey first four days where you are falling down the rabbit hole. You’re getting calls and you see their name and you get all butterflies and all those ooey-gooey first moments. The relationship lasted very little time after I wrote the song. I fall head first into every relationship; I really throw all caution to the wind. The man that it’s about has no idea. And in the grand scheme of things it was a very insignificant part of my life, but for that moment, it was great. I wish I could bottle the feeling, but it’s now bottled in a song.”

<b>“Cry”</b>
EH: “This is the first song I’ve sung lead on by myself—like Alana said, super daunting. I fashion myself a bass player first and maybe a singer after that. When we came into the studio [that day], I was crying, which is not a rare occurrence. I tend to feel things—maybe not deeper than most people, but I’m a pretty sensitive bitch. I was with someone for almost five years and we left on completely amicable terms, but even when that happens, you’re still mourning the loss of something, almost like having a best friend and then all of a sudden they’re gone. I was talking about it in the studio, and I said his name, and I just burst into tears. I can’t remember what sister it was—it might even have been Rostam—but someone was like, ‘We should probably talk about this with music. Let’s harness this feeling while it’s fresh.’ I had been bottling up a lot of what I was feeling in order to just survive. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through it on tour. Even when I was hearing it in the studio, I just starting crying. So hopefully I’ll get my shit together and get tear duct surgery before that and just plug them up.”

<b>“Blood on the street”</b>
AH: “On our first album, we had ‘The Wire’. On our third album, we had ‘Hallelujah’. And I think when it came to ‘Blood on the street’, we really wanted a song where we each sing a verse. And me and my siblings grew up jamming together. I will say, we were in a very interesting place mentally when we wrote that song, but it was like this feeling of just being like, to be frank, ‘Fuck you for fucking me over.’ We really did get all of our aggression out. We’ve been playing it live, and that song live is the biggest release.”

<b>“Now it’s time”</b>
AH: “We were just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall when we were making this. Obviously we love U2; we interpolated their guitar riff from ‘Numb’. It was an exchange because U2, they have a song on <i>Songs of Experience</i> called ‘Lights of Home’ where they interpolated Danielle’s guitar riff from ‘My Song 5’. This album really is this beautiful journey of self-exploration for us, of feeling comfortable in your own skin and being okay with just being with yourself. In this song, we’re standing on this solid ground with our six feet of being like, ‘We have now given you every emotion that we felt like in this chapter of our lives—and now we’re on the other end and just we’re complete.’ This feels like the end of this chapter and we can close the book, put it on the shelf and just say, fucking, ‘I quit.’”

Certainly, any Pulp fan who caught the long-dormant Britpop legends on their 2024 reunion tour would’ve been completely satisfied with just hearing the ’90s classics we never thought we’d get to hear performed live again. But the surprise inclusion of some new tunes on the set list made it clear Jarvis Cocker and co. were not interested in being a mere nostalgia act. And now, less than a year later, Pulp has gifted us with a new album—and while it arrives 24 years after their last one, <i>More</i> actually came together with unprecedented expedience. “The previous two Pulp records [2001’s <i>We Love Life</i> and 1998’s <i>This Is Hardcore</i>] had a bit of a concept for them, and that slowed everything down,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “And this time I just thought, let’s not think about it. Let’s do it. And then you’ve got a lot of time to think about it later. Like the rest of your life, for instance.”

With <i>More</i>, Pulp carries on as if the first two decades of the 21st century never happened, restoring their singular balance of disco decadence (“Spike Island,” “Got to Have Love”) and string-swept elegance (“Tina,” “Farmers Market”). As the elder black sheep of Britpop, Pulp always possessed a self-deprecating wit and lived-in wisdom that distinguished them from their more brash, lager-swilling peers, and as such, they were always less interested in glorifying youthful hedonism than probing adult relationships. So they can effortlessly reclaim their role as Britain’s shrewdest observers of social manners and misbehavior even as Cocker has crossed the threshold into his sixties.

<i>More</i> is imbued with the simmering anxieties of a singer who knows he’s not getting any younger: Echoing the streetwise strut of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the urgent “Grown Ups” finds the guy who once sang “Help the Aged” starting to “stress about wrinkles instead of acne” himself, while the Spector-esque splendor of “Background Noise” closes the curtain on a long-term coupling where familiary has curdled into contempt. But even by the group’s sophisticated standards, piano ballad “The Hymn of the North” (featuring Chilly Gonzales) is a breathtaking display of melancholy and majesty that affirms Pulp is still in a different class all their own.

Love, Davina McCall, and making more tunes to play live: Wet Leg’s inspiration for their second album sounds like it came easily, but they had to shift into new territory on <i>moisturizer</i>. Their debut—2022’s <i>Wet Leg</i>—provided 36 minutes of lo-fi hooks, wit, and twentysomething confessions to catapult them into a BRIT- and Grammy-winning swirl of well-deserved hype. After a relentless but enjoyable touring schedule, they decided to escape to a seaside town for two weeks at a time to turn their attention to album number two.

“I think we’re really fortunate we can write in that traditional band setup,” Rhian Teasdale tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “When we stopped touring, we were like, ‘OK, what are we going to play when we go on tour again? Let’s make some tunes.’”

So the band decamped to a house in Southwold, Suffolk and got to work. “There was a kid’s playroom with some LEGO around, so we took the majority of the stuff out and put all of our gear in it,” says guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. “Some days we were like, ‘OK, let’s start at this time and put a shift in.’ And then other times, it was 1 am and all of a sudden we were writing again. It was really cool.”

<i>moisturizer</i> finds the band once again teaming up with producer Dan Carey and repeatedly nailing the perfect three-minute song on 12 tight tracks. They admit they give away more of themselves than they did on <i>Wet Leg</i>. While “catch these fists” has a strong message about reclaiming personal space, they stray into more romantic territory elsewhere. Hester Chambers wrote “don’t speak” for Mobaraki, who’s also her partner, but she subverted the idea. “She wrote me a song from me to her, which is really cheeky,” he says.

“CPR” captures the feeling of infatuation, while “davina mccall” and “11: 21” sum up more secure, longer-term love, which are themes Teasdale had avoided before this album. “I’d never even attempted writing any kind of lyrics that were to do with love,” she says. “I had this rule when I was younger to just not even use the word ‘love.’ I was really hesitant because I felt like there were so many love songs out there. Also, it didn’t feel very authentic. When I was younger, I don’t think I really did know love, so I was just pulling out cliche after cliche.”

On <i>moisturizer</i>, Wet Leg sound as vital and adventurous as they did on their debut—but there’s a new assurance creeping in too. “Our position as a band is to just constantly be surprised that people still want to listen to it,” says Mobaraki. “I don’t know if the imposter syndrome goes or it’s like you turn it into something else. It’s a way of not being like, ‘Everyone’s telling us that we’re amazing. That means that we are amazing.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Huh, let’s do another song. I like that one. Let’s do another one.’ I think we’ve developed and grown and we’re different now. We’re giving ourselves permission to take up space.”

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. <i>Getting Killed</i> feels like a burst of new life.

Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, <i>Projector</i>, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling <i>3D Country</i>. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when <i>Heavy Metal</i>—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: <i>Getting Killed</i>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.

FKA twigs Teases New Album Eusexua Afterglow
FKA twigs is going to be releasing more new music very soon. The singer just finished her tour in support of Eusexua with a performance at Lowlands, and she told the crowd at the Dutch festival about a project called Eusexua Afterglow. “I am full and abundant and ready to give birth, FKA twigs said. “Her name is Afterglow, and my labor shall commence next month.” Representatives for FKA twigs confirmed to Pitchfork that Eusexua Afterglow is “not a deluxe version, but rather a whole new album.”

The idea behind Sharon Van Etten’s seventh album, and her first as part of a band, arrived while gearing up to tour in support of her 2022 LP, <i>We've Been Going About This All Wrong</i>. Van Etten was mesmerized by the live band experience during rehearsals and decided to include her group in the writing process for what eventually became the first album from Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory. Featuring Jorge Balbi, Devra Hoff, and Teeny Lieberson, this 2025 album is a rich and cosmic tapestry of shoegaze, indie rock, and deep-fried country soul. In expanding her POV to include other perspectives, Van Etten has crafted her most sonically diverse effort to date. Though instrumentation bounces between these different styles, the lyrics find the artist in her wheelhouse, interested in life and mortality, modern addiction to screens, and the disconnect that is inherent in the way we communicate with others and ourselves.

If Westside Cowboy’s name and origin story—the band started out by playing Hank Williams and Lonnie Donegan covers—hadn’t already sent you there, then “Britainicana,” the Manchester four-piece’s own description of their sound, should set your expectations for something rootsy and pastoral on their second EP. That’s most explicitly delivered on the back-porch hymnal of closing track “In the Morning.” But elsewhere, the 2025 winners of Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition bear the names of pillars of UK and US indie rock just as vividly on their sleeves.

The way opener “Strange Taxidermy” patiently swells from an astral hum to a swampy, psychedelic crescendo suggests Spiritualized, while echoes of Sonic Youth reverberate through the juxtaposition of insouciance and urgency on “Can’t See.” And there’s a kinship with Pavement in how all these lo-fi songs seem to spill out of them, brimful of ideas and melody. “The world is waiting for you/You don’t need a head start,” sings guitarist/singer Reuben Haycocks on “Can’t See.” On this assured showing, Westside Cowboy could be addressing themselves.