Indie + POP2025

Even in the throes of heartbreak, ROLE MODEL’s Tucker Pillsbury can’t help but write golden, luminous hooks. On his sophomore full-length, <i>Kansas Anymore</i>, he sings of love, sometimes, but mostly of love lost. He’s a broken spirit, looking for a way forward, and this angst is perfectly opposed by the sugary sweet deliveries he sprinkles throughout the project.

Take opener “Writing’s on the Wall,” which finds Pillsbury nursing his wounds, unable to explain to his father that his feelings are different from the way his old man felt. “Dad’s on the phone and he’s lecturing me/’Bout a girl that he met when he was 19,” he sings a cappella, before pulsing drums and crunching acoustic guitar chords transport the singer to the rolling hills of Laurel Canyon circa 1970.

On “Superglue,” Pillsbury finds himself in the middle of a fling turned serious, employing stripped-back instrumentation that allows him plenty of room to outline the narrative stakes. “I can make it complicated,” he threatens, before knowing emotions will only cause harm: “You just want a little TLC.” Throughout <i>Kansas Anymore</i>, Tucker Pillsbury is loving the wrong person at the wrong time, wanting dinner when they want coffee, or thwarting off a desperate partner he thought to be a friend.

Summer Walker helps out on the Florida singer’s lovelorn EP.

Endlessly talented sonic nonconformist Saya Gray reveals plans for her debut album SAYA, set for release on February 21, 2025 via Dirty Hit.

Since her first project release, the critically-acclaimed 19 MASTERS, only a couple years ago, Saya Gray has become globally defined by the undefinable – an artist whose work is limitless, beguiling, intimate, exhilarating and truly unlike any other musician releasing songs right now. It’s easy to call something “one of one;” it’s harder to live it, breathe it, encapsulate it, and share it with the world: Saya Gray embodies that rarified space and invites everyone in. SAYA finally came after the dissolution of a troubled romantic entanglement; Gray booked a flight to Japan in the fall of 2023. And like a feel-good movie protagonist, Gray detangled herself from the outstanding psychic ties by journeying solo on a cross-country road trip.

Moved by the vastness of albums by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as well as her Canadian folk forebear, Joni Mitchell, Gray kept an acoustic guitar in the passenger’s seat, just in case inspiration would strike. In recording SAYA, Gray sanded and fine tuned the rough edges of records past into more cohesive works of melodic folk songcraft.

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’”

On her fourth solo album, <i>Forever Is a Feeling</i>, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On <i>Forever</i>, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it.

Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise.

Writing <i>Forever</i> brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

<i>Rarely Do I Dream</i> is Trevor Powers’ fifth album as Youth Lagoon and second since he reemerged in 2023 with <i>Heaven Is a Junkyard</i> after a seven-year break. Finding Powers sifting through the universe he’s created, discovering joy in what others paint as mundane, it begins with a shuffling drum groove and an audio sample taken from a home movie, setting the DIY, homespun tone for the album. “Speed Freak” features a distorted bass melody and clanging drums accented by a dash of cassette-tape hiss. “Parking Lot” is a gorgeous piano ballad that puts its title in a romantic light. “What a parking lot,” he marvels. “Eight little spaces/Don’t let him lose/Let him cruise for the spot.”

For his third album under the banner of Everything Is Recorded, producer and XL Recordings founder Richard Russell had nothing smaller than the very existence of humanity on his mind. On <i>Richard Russell Is Temporary</i> he taps a lengthy, wide-ranging list of collaborators—including Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Sampha, Oscar-nominated actor Samantha Morton, and Kamasi Washington—to strip down their sounds and face life’s fragility head-on.

While that existential uncertainty hangs over much of the sparse landscape of <i>Richard Russell Is Temporary</i>, unifying its many voices, so does the prospect of life beyond Earth. “‘Spirit,’ I think, is probably the simplest way of [saying] it,” said Russell. “So, when David Bowie passes away, everyone’s distraught because it turns out he’s temporary—but we shouldn’t be too surprised by that. We know that what he’s done is permanent. The influence of it, the love, the inspiration is there forever.”

That ideal comes to the fore on the Callahan collaboration “Norm,” which pays tribute to the late cult-hero comic Norm MacDonald, and samples him riffing on mortality during a 2011 performance: “When the fuckin’ sickle of death is over my goddamn neck, I’m gonna be so cowardly. I’m afraid of going on Ferris wheels,” MacDonald cracks in irascible fashion, before Callahan swoops back in to note that his “voice and face live on” even after his 2021 death. Sampling his honesty about life’s last chapters was a reminder, Russell says, that “the humor is so important to everything—the humor is the sanity, just in life generally.”

<i>Richard Russell Is Temporary</i> is a rare feat, an all-star album that feels born from a collective spirit of creativity and curiosity. “I don’t want to speak for any of my collaborators,” Russell says. “I got the feeling they were really enjoying participating in this project. Maybe that’s because they’ve all got their own careers, and your career comes with pressure—you’ve got to think about everything. In a situation like this, you don’t have to, because I’ve got to think about it. So, you get to come in the room and do it.”

If you’re surprised that <i>Pink Elephant</i>, the first album by Arcade Fire in three tumultuous years, begins with a cinematic three-minute drone that summons the deep-space sounds of Morton Subotnick, check the credits. Alongside Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, Daniel Lanois—a fellow Canadian who has applied a near-magical touch to records by U2, Bob Dylan, and Brian Eno for nearly half a century—co-produced the band’s seventh album, speckling it with stereo delays and assorted abstractions. In fact, that opener, “Open Your Heart or Die Trying,” is but one of three instrumentals on this 10-track record. Where “Beyond Salvation” embeds scrambled samples amid a fantastic glissando, “She Cries Diamond Rain” is a celestial hum.

These wordless pieces from the famously righteous Montreal-based outfit suggest a band trying to reimagine its future in the present, trying to feel its way forward after personnel and personal complications since 2022’s <i>WE</i>. The title track is a web of misgivings, Butler looking at the world and making mental traps of everything he encounters. During first single “Year of the Snake,” Lanois calls back to several of the techniques he used to make <i>The Joshua Tree</i> feel both anxious and epic as Chassagne and Butler deliver a fraught duet about where they head from here. “If you feel strange, it’s probably good,” they repeat, alternately delivering that last line like it soothes or stings.

They experiment with a handful of new modes here, from the dark dancing of “Circle of Trust” to the arcing acoustic grandeur of “Ride or Die.” But they finally dig into their bygone glory days for closer “Stuck in My Head,” where throbbing bass and unrelenting drums push Butler to deal with his baggage, to figure out what happens next. “Clean up your head/Get the fuck out of bed,” he shouts over and over at the climax, like Springsteen stuck in a punk paroxysm. “Clean up your heart.”