“There was basically an urgency to this record. It came out of me in this furious burst,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of Florence + the Machine’s sixth full-length. “And it’s one of those records where if I hadn’t have put it out now, it never would’ve come out because I think how I felt about things is so specific to this moment in time, and this roared out of me. It was made almost like a coping mechanism.”

That moment in time began for Welch during the <i>Dance Fever</i> tour. “I actually ended up having a ectopic miscarriage onstage that was dangerous, and that I had to be hospitalized for, and I had to have immediate surgery because I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen,” she explains. Her health crisis and ensuing feelings fueled <i>Everybody Scream</i>, which offers a haunting yet cathartic experience for both the singer and those listening. “I felt so out of control of my body, it was interesting,” she says. “I looked into themes of witchcraft, and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft, and folk horror, and myths.”

Infusing those elements throughout the album, Welch wails, warbles, belts—and, yes, screams—with emotional clarity and appropriately witchy charisma while getting quality assistance in the form of Mitski, Aaron Dessner, and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen. The title track muses on fame and pushing through the pain to perform: “But look at me run myself ragged/Blood on the stage/But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” Conjuring up a bacchanalian forest rave, “Witch Dance” casts a spell with its heated pace and Welch’s breathy chants. And for the singer, “Perfume and Milk” helps alleviate her own agony. “It was about healing and having watched seasons change and having watched other things growing and then returning to the earth and a sense that I was also part of that nature and part of that cycle,” she says.

<i>Everybody Scream</i> ends with the stirring “And Love,” striking a hopeful note: “Peace is coming” she repeats on the ballad. “Let this one be the one that comes true,” she says. “Let this one be the one that is realized in the world. I think the songs are always three steps ahead of me. It’s been that way my whole life.”

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.”

Daniel Caesar’s new album ‘Son of Spergy’ is dropping in 2025 🚨💿

For ROSALÍA, her fourth full-length album <i>LUX</i> only has “little pieces” of her in the lyrics of its songs—and she prefers it that way. “I think the best fiction has this blurry line, the sweet spot between what’s personal and what’s universal, what’s detailed and what’s abstract, what’s implicit and what’s explicit,” the Spanish star tells Apple Music. “It’s both. Because I wrote it, there has to be some sort of truth for me in it. But at the same time, I think it’s much more about the other than about myself.”

The “other,” in this case, is a group of saints—Saint Rose of Lima, Anandamayi Ma, Hildegard von Bingen, Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya, and other martyrs across cultures, centuries, and continents—that ROSALÍA voraciously studied in the wake of her third album, 2022’s <i>MOTOMAMI</i>. Instead of immediately writing about the emotional turmoil she’d weathered in its aftermath—a period that included the end of her engagement to former collaborator Rauw Alejandro—she found the muses of her next project in theology books. After immersing herself in the stories of these women of faith, ROSALÍA blended their experiences, and their tongues, with hers. “Where did they come from? What was the language that would be spoken there?” she says. “There were a lot of women that were extremely interesting to me that were nuns, they were poets. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to read what they actually wrote. I’m going to try to explain these stories.’”

Across <i>LUX</i>, ROSALÍA sings in multiple languages—her native Spanish and Catalan, but also Arabic, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian, and German, among others—to invoke these saints while telling stories of flower-strewn funerals, doomed romance, unrequited love, and crises of faith in multiple forms. If 2018’s <i>EL MAL QUERER</i> introduced her singular fusion of flamenco and pop to the world, and <i>MOTOMAMI</i> brought reggaetón into the mix, <i>LUX</i> builds on that work from a high-drama, operatic foundation, one that pairs her lyrical intensity with vocal prowess and orchestral flourish. A cajón and handclaps blend seamlessly with urbano bass, Auto-Tune, and somber strings, often with many or all of these elements weaving throughout the same track (as they do on “De Madrugá”). Her voice soars over each flamenco run with ease (“La Rumba Del Perdón”), only to growl over sinister cello (“Porcelana”), breathlessly trip through a softly strummed waltz (“La Perla”), or reach the rafters of any grand opera house (the exquisite “Reliquia”; her version of an aria, “Mio Cristo Piange Diamante”; the severe and surreal “Berghain,” which features Björk and Yves Tumor).

ROSALÍA worked with the London Symphony Orchestra to give <i>LUX</i> the symphonic heft it deserves, and at times, the gravity of the undertaking felt insurmountable. “I definitely had chills so many times while recording vocals,” she says. “I don’t think I ever cried so much making an album. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much recording vocals. I think that I didn’t maybe want to go through this before. I was like, ‘I’m not ready.’ I know I had to do an album like this, but I wasn’t ready.”

Whether or not she realized it at the time, she was, indeed, ready for <i>LUX</i> and all it entails. It’s the destination she’s been writing towards, uninhibited by instrumentation, devastation, or language. “<i>MOTOMAMI</i> was minimalist,” she says. “This is maximalism.”

A quick shot of genre-fluid alt-pop energy from the Chinese artist.

Lily Allen Releasing First New Album in Seven Years, West End Girl, This Week
Lily Allen has announced her first album in seven years: West End Girl is out this Friday, October 24, via BMG. Its 14 songs were mostly written by Allen and her musical director, Blue May, and the pair executive-produced the LP alongside Seb Chew and Kito. Below, check out Spanish artist Nieves González’s cover art.
In a press release, Allen said, “I’m nervous. The record is vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before—certainly not over the course of a whole album. I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now. At the same time, I’ve used shared experiences as the basis for songs which try to delve into why we humans behave as we do, so the record is a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be. In that respect I think it’s very much an album about the complexities of relationships and how we all navigate them. It’s a story…”
Since her last album, 2018’s No Shame, Allen has appeared in various West End London theater productions and co-founded the podcast Miss Me.

A cult pop classic, Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album, Emotion, turns 10. Originally released in 2015 Emotion was a pivotal album in Jepsen’s career and re-launched her as an indie pop darling. Celebrate the 10th anniversary of Emotion with 4 unreleased vault tracks, plus 2 brand-new remixes!

Fresh off the worldwide success of Natural Brown Prom Queen, Sudan Archives levelled up, evolving from a hands-on DIY artist to executive producer of her third album – her most ambitious record to date. Recorded in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, THE BPM is this innovative artist’s most club-forward music yet, with Sudan Archives taking a dancefloor-ready approach to her unique brand of violin-infused music.

Kelela Mizanekristos is an American singer. She made her debut in the music industry with the release of her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me.