Indie + POP2025

Even when she’s rejecting therapists’ advice and flipping the bird to exes’ exes, BANKS sounds positively revitalized on her fifth studio album <i>Off With Her Head</i>. Jillian Banks’ follow-up to 2022’s <i>Serpentina</i> largely jettisons the smoky balladry that marked its predecessor in favor of sharp, skipping electro-pop—representing something of a full-circle back to her star-making 2014 debut, <i>Goddess</i>. The callback is more than skin-deep, as BANKS brings back several key collaborators from her early days—including UK dance impresarios like Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and Lil Silva, as well as moody alt-R&B auteur SOHN—to pitch in when it comes to <i>Off With Her Head</i>’s sonically multifarious production. A few new friends join in, too: Sampha’s unmistakable vocals mark the pulsing pop of “Make It Up,” while the ascendant rap superstar Doechii brings her fiery personality on “I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend” with unmistakable lyrical bon mots like “Wrap a bow around your coffin like it’s Christmas.”

After an extremely groovy detour with 2022’s disco-leaning <i>Second Nature</i>, Brooklyn indie-pop group Lucius’ self-titled fifth album—their first for the storied record label Fantasy—finds the quartet returning to the pastoral folk-rock sounds that marked their 2018 compilation <i>Nudes</i> as well as their recent countrified collaborations with folks like Brandy Clark, The Killers, and Brandi Carlile. The snappy “Gold Rush” is laden with deep-fried guitar licks and swaggering vocals from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, while Grammy-nominated West Coast folkie Madison Cunningham throws in on the toe-tapping ray of sunshine that is “Impressions.”

As Lucius have become pop’s most able collaborators, Lucius similarly casts a big tent of contributors: indie-rockers like Luke Temple and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith lend a hand with instrumentation, while prior collaborator Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs lends his guitar heroics to the pulse of “Old Tape.” The record is at once a return to what Lucius have done best for the last 15 years and a reflection of their always-surprising journey into new sonic territory.

Rebecca Black continues to rewrite her myth in real time. Since becoming famous overnight as a teenager with her 2011 viral smash “Friday,” the Los Angeles singer has spent nearly a decade proving she’s more than a novelty. If her 2023 debut album, <i>Let Her Burn</i>, was an untamed exploration of sound, <i>SALVATION</i> is where she sharpens her vision. The EP’s title came to Black on a subway ride in London, sparking a fascination with salvation—not just as a religious concept, but as a personal reckoning. “<i>SALVATION</i> is based around this idea of letting some of the less-safe, less-poised, less-sweet versions of myself into my world,” she tells Apple Music. She amplifies, and sometimes even embraces, those once-buried versions of herself with newfound fearlessness, declaring on the title track, “I love being disgusting,” before a defiant retort: “I don’t need you to save me/I already saved myself.”

Leaning into Black’s self-described “unhinged” instincts also unlocked bolder production choices, from layering a perky chorus over walloping techno on “Sugar Water Cyanide” to the whip-cracking, laser-strobing rave of “TRUST!” Yet, for all its bravado, <i>SALVATION</i> also demands a deeper vulnerability. “Tears in My Pocket” finds intimacy in fragility, while “Do You Even Think About Me?” digs into unresolved heartbreak. Where the latter lingers in longing, “Twist the Knife” bites back, its sweeping orchestration fueling Black at her most vengeful and dramatic. “As I was letting these more dangerous parts of myself be shown, it almost felt like a protective mechanism,” she says. “Because if I make it larger than it is, it feels less naked.” Read on as Black breaks down <i>SALVATION</i>’s core tracks.

<b>“Salvation”</b>
“It felt really energizing to explore this really sexy, really unafraid, very direct version of myself that I hadn’t before. The song is all about taking ownership of the version of yourself you are, regardless of whether anybody else understands. I like juxtaposition. There’s a bit of rapping happening—that, against a super melodic, ultra-harmonized chorus that feels to-the-bones of the pop that I grew up with in the mid-2010s, was really nostalgic for me. It felt right, given it’s basically a song about being gay as fuck.”

<b>“TRUST!”</b>
“‘TRUST!’ felt daring. It felt like the least seriously I had ever taken myself. Genuinely, if I had known three years ago that I would have a song where the chorus is, ‘Ooh, la la, get me going like ga ga ga,’ I would’ve been so afraid that people would’ve gone, ‘Is this bitch fucking stupid? She thinks she can do “Friday” and then do this, and we’re going to treat it seriously?’ That felt like a moment of freedom where there was something really exciting and invigorating. It felt like a banger instantly.”

<b>“Sugar Water Cyanide”</b>
“I forget what [co-writers Jesse Saint John, Nightfeelings] and I were listening to or how we landed on the idea, but it was the first time in a while that I had started writing a song without a lot of prior thought around it. I wanted to make something that felt really visceral, and really sexy, and really fun. I knew that I wanted to take a big risk sonically that day. We landed on this juxtaposition of this very sugary-sweet verse with this truly deathly chorus. It felt like the most emblematic version of me I could put in a song. Lyrically, it felt so fun to create an energy that wasn’t the story of meeting someone or an experience. It was just about a feeling and trying to put words to that in the most Rebecca way possible.”

<b>“Tears in My Pocket”</b>
“‘Tears’ felt like such an informative first song for the rest of the project. Something else I wanted to explore was minimalism and space and silence in songs. It was the first time I felt like I had successfully done that without losing energy, because I didn’t want [this project] to be soft. I wanted to create something bright and in your face, and that has the same level of impact—maybe even more—as a song that has a thousand elements of production. This was probably the first time I left a session on the day with an almost-finished song. That was also a big practice for me, learning not to touch whatever we first landed on.”

The Israeli alt-pop singer brings more sass and style to her third album.

Having spent five years signposting the direction of her musical journey with a consistent flow of subtly evolving EP releases, LA-based singer-songwriter Claire Chicha—aka spill tab—has arrived at her destination: her debut album, <i>ANGIE</i>. “I think I’ve always had this goal where I’m trying to represent myself the fullest of my ability in a two-minute song, and I think I’ve been realizing through the process of EPs that that’s not possible,” Chicha told Apple Music 1’s Hanuman Welch. “I do feel like this album, as much as I possibly could, represents not only where I’m from, but where I want to go and the music that I’m listening to now, the music that I’ve been listening to for the past 10 years.”

Chicha’s work draws inspiration from myriad sources, blending her appreciation for R&B, electropop, rock, jazz, and more into a unique wash of dreamlike alt-pop, roughened round the edges with unexpected synth embellishments as showcased on tracks like “Athlete” or the bold distortion that scuffs through “De Guerre.” “It speaks to the conversation between the digital and organic and the destruction and the rebuilding that comes with just feeding a sound back and forth, from an analog synth into a computer back into a pedal,” said Chicha, who co-wrote and produced the bulk of the record with John Hill (FKA twigs, Charli xcx) and Solomonophonic (SZA, Remi Wolf). “Those conversations, musically, are what make me the most excited about musicmaking. So to me, this album is that conversation in action, but also shows my evolution with that music and production, and being able to work with all these incredible collaborators has just made me a better artist.”

Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. <i>Instant Holograms on Metal Film</i> finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises.

“Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.

Wry observations on love, longing, and the romance of a rail replacement.

The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, <i>Dogsbody</i>—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theatre melodrama. On its follow-up, <i>Pirouette</i>, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.

Dreamy, jazz-inflected, bilingual indie pop from the NYC artist.

Hopelessly romantic alt-pop with retro flair from the wistful indie trio.

The cover art for <i>Virgin</i>—an X-ray of a pelvis with a visible IUD—was a far cry from that of Lorde’s bright, beachy third album, 2021’s <i>Solar Power</i>, whose sun-soaked, jasmine-scented songs drew from Laurel Canyon folk and Y2K soft rock. Looking back, that album’s free-spirited imagery was a bit idealistic—a projection of how the New Zealand native turned New Yorker wished she could be. Her fourth album, as she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, is a portrait of the 28-year-old singer as she is, without edits or apologies: “Kind of like a photo of yourself that you don’t love, but captures something true about you.”

The resulting songs, written between 2023 and 2025, are forthcoming and visceral, trading <i>Solar Power</i>’s New Age-chill for beats you can feel in your gut. (It’s her first album since her 2013 debut not co-written and -produced by Jack Antonoff; instead, she shared production duties with the LA-based electronic musician Jim-E Stack.) Surrealist introspection gives way to throbbing bass on opening track “Hammer,” where a walk down Canal Street ripples with psychedelic visions. “I had just come off my birth control, and I could not believe how I was feeling,” Lorde told Lowe about the song’s inception. “Everything was pure possibility. That first sound feels like it’s coming from a very guttural place in the body. My sister said, ‘It sounds like it’s coming from your womb.’”

Cue the aura readings, 3 am cigarettes, broken mirrors, pregnancy tests, ego death. On “Man of the Year” and “Favourite Daughter,” questions beget more questions on the subject of what it means to be a woman, and moreover, a woman who’s now been famous for nearly half her life. The latter is at once a love letter to her mother and a meditation on being a teenager thrust into global pop stardom. “There’s been this dynamic for the last 10 to 12 years—and then further back—of wanting so badly to be loved, and to get this approval, and to be the favorite,” she told Lowe. “And it was really moving to me how, even as I was singing this song about my foremost idol and the person who I think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about what a crazy thing it is to have happened to you, what happened to me at 16.”

Now the superstar finds freedom in the freefall: “I’ve been up on the pedestal/But tonight I just want to fall,” she sings on the shuffling “Shapeshifter.” “I still don’t know what happens when you put out a record that is like this,” she admitted about the unfiltered portrait <i>Virgin</i> presents. But in its full transparency, she arrives at something like peace.

Back to the future with noughties-styled R&B, garage and techno.