Olivia Dean’s follow-up to 2023’s <i>Messy</i> suggests she’s anything but. From the radio-friendly uplifter “Nice to Each Other” to the sweeping, late ’60s Dionne Warwick-esque soul of “So Easy (To Fall in Love),” <i>The Art of Loving</i> finds Dean self-assured as she slinks freely through R&B and pop. “You can make whatever you want, there’s no rules and that’s such a freeing feeling,” she tells Apple Music’s Rebecca Judd.

Dean describes her songwriting on <i>The Art of Loving</i> as “real, fresh, and honest” and she makes it sound so easy. It’s no surprise that the overarching theme—love in its different forms—came naturally. “I had the title quite quickly,” she says. “I’ve also been fascinated by love. It’s the one thing that everybody is looking for in their life in some capacity, whether it be friendship, family, romantic, but it’s something that we’re not taught. There’s not a love module in school. It’s this magic thing we’re supposed to know how to do. So I wanted to take a closer look at it and what it means to me and the art of it, the craft of loving someone properly.”

The album opens with the instant hit “Nice to Each Other,” the obvious choice for Dean. “As soon as I wrote it, I knew it was going to be the first song. It’s got a Fleetwood Mac guitary feel and it’s cheeky, it’s flirty,” she says. There might be heartbreaks and wistful moments along the way, but Dean leaves listeners in no doubt she’s in a happy place. “How could I not be?” she says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about touring and what I want to sing live and I want it to be joyful. So I’ve been moving towards joy.”

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s <i>to hell with it</i>, and her first studio album, 2023’s <i>Heaven knows</i>. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.”

She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, <i>Fancy That</i>—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name).

Basement Jaxx’s first album, <i>Remedy</i>, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?”

As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

Named after the French word for the rustle of silk, Frou Frou's debut album exudes cool, stylish elegance. Singer Imogene Heap's soft, whispery vocals intone dreamy lyrics of doomed romances and slow recoveries. The songs are penned by Heap and her partner, producer Guy Sigsworth (Björk, Madonna), who manned the board on Heap's 1998 solo album I Megaphone. Even the mighty Brian Eno gets into the act, with a cowriting credit on the soul-bearing "Hear Me Out." In fact, all 11 tracks deal with love and fractured relationships, hauntingly beautiful both in their stark emotional content and the equally sparse arrangements that showcase Heap's ethereal voice, which she uses as a subtle weapon, much like Joni Mitchell circa 1970's Ladies of the Canyon, with the same heart-stopping yet effortless octave leaps.

One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting <i>The Crow</i> reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). <i>EUSEXUA</i>, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, <i>Caprisongs</i>), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style.

The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from <i>EUSEXUA</i>’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.

英国创作女歌手Lily Allen的第四张录音室专辑《No Shame》确定在2018年夏季发行。

FKA Twigs announced Thursday that her mixtape Caprisongs — her first collection of new music since 2019’s Magdalene — will be released on Friday, Jan. 14. "CAPRISONGS is my journey back to myself through my amazing collaborators and friends,” the singer wrote of the mixtape on Instagram. “CAPRISONGS… it’s bronzer in the sink, alco pop on the side, a cherry lolly, apple juice when ur thirsty, friends in the park, your favourite person, that one sentence somebody said to you that changed everything, a club pre-game, your bestie who is always late but brings the most to the party, meeting a friend at the airport, just togetherness.”FKA Twigs also shared the mixtape’s 17-song tracklist, cover art, and guest list, with artists like Jorja Smith, Daniel Caesar, Shygirl, Rema, and Dystopia appearing. Caprisongs also boasts the previously released single “Tears in the Club,” featuring the Weeknd.“It’s my stubborn caprisun ass telling me to work thru my pain by delivering at work, don’t think just go studio and create,” she continued. Prior to Caprisongs and “Tears in the Club,” FKA Twigs returned to music after a two-year hiatus with “Measure of a Man,” which featured on The King’s Man soundtrack.

Track 1 written by the Arctic Monkeys.
Produced by Jim Abbiss and recorded by Laurence Brazil at Mayfair studios, London.
Mixed by Jim Abbiss and Barny at Olympic Studios, London.
Published by EMI Music Publishing Ltd.
Track 2 written by The Little Flames (Copyright Control)
Track 3 words and music by Van McCoy (Copyright 1972). EMI Blackwood Music Inc - EMI Songs Ltd.
The second B-side, Baby, I'm Yours is a cover of the Barabara Lewis song. It's a collaboration with the 747s, a band the Monkeys met when working in a London studio.the song took me by surprise most of all, a song which sounds as if it could have jumped off an old 50s record.
3. Baby I'm Yours
还是他们粗神经的青春荷尔蒙
还是神经粗大的样子
还是1969喜欢的很活泼的感觉
不过翻唱一个老女人的歌
倒让人认为他们的温柔

WE'RE SO EXCITED TO SHARE WITH YOU THE NEWS THAT OUR SECOND RECORD 'COEXIST' WILL BE RELEASED ON SEPTEMBER 10TH. AFTER A LONG TIME ON THE ROAD, WE TOOK A BREAK, CREATED OUR OWN STUDIO AND WROTE THESE NEW SONGS THAT WE'RE SO LOOKING FORWARD TO PLAYING TO YOU. WE WILL BE TOURING THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER AND BEYOND, AND HOPE TO PLAY SOMEWHERE NEAR YOU SOON. XX THE XX

英国斯里兰卡裔说唱女皇M.I.A.将于2022年重磅回归，发行她的第六张个人录音室专辑《MATA》。据悉，第一支单曲已确定将会在五月底释出。
（该条目为数字发行版本。）