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On Christmas day of this year, Tyler, The Creator shared a picture on his Instagram story taken from inside a screening of Call Me By Your Name. The photo shows Timothée Chalamet as Elio Perlman smoking a cigarette, leaning forward. In the scene, Elio is watching the object of his desire – Armie Hammer’s Oliver – dance with a woman at an outdoor bar. Elio is surrounded by his friends, but he’s laser focused. He’s been observing Oliver and considering his attraction to and annoyance with him since the moment he arrived at his parent’s house in the Italian countryside. A few days after this scene takes place, Elio’s mother reads him a story about an unaddressed, unrealized love between a princess and a knight. The knight eventually asks the princess, “Is it better to speak or to die?” Elio says, “I’ll never have the courage to ask a question like that.” His father responds, “I doubt that.” The next day, Elio shows that courage and chooses to tell and show Oliver how he feels. On Tyler, The Creator’s 2017 studio album Flower Boy, which is so thoughtfully compiled it plays out like a story, we see someone in reflection. Tyler considers his success so far and questions what fulfillment is for him. We’re let in on a love unspoken. He wonders why his friends have gone silent and expresses doubts in his fans’ commitment to him as a changing, growing artist and person. He celebrates his change and his artistry, yes, but there’s a gnawing. Isolation, the unhealthy kind, the kind your mother picks up on, is a theme throughout the album. As the story of the record unfolds, Tyler reaches an impasse – his to speak or to die moment. This kinship between Flower Boy and Call Me By Your Name isn’t forced; it’s in the texts. The hazy, languid boredom. The falsity of material fulfillment. The love unspoken and the fear of its unreturn. It’s there.

In the album’s first track, Tyler considers fulfillment, saying, “How many cars can I buy ‘til I run out of drive? How much drive can I have ‘til I run out of road?” and “How many raps can I write ‘til I get me a chain? How many chains can I wear ‘til I’m considered a slave? How many slaves can it be ‘til Nat Turner arise? How many riots can it be ‘til them Black lives matter?” Rex Orange County sings, “I’m gone, and I’m finished. And I ain’t seen my friends in a minute. Guessing nothing lasts forever. Yeah, nothing lasts forever. Nothing sticks together. Sick of sitting in doubt. Please let me figure this out.” This existential itch starts the record.

“Where This Flower Blooms” is Tyler, proud, embracing growth. He talks about sleeping on people’s floors and Rent-A-Center calling to collect. “Now I skrrt, skrrt, skrrt, skrrt in toys I only dreamed that I could afford,” he updates. “Went from statistic to millionaire. CNN doubted ‘cause my skin is dark.” Financially, Tyler’s good, but we get a hint that there’s insecurity elsewhere. “Ain’t nobody fucking with T, but that just may be my ego.” Still, he says, “I rock, I roll, I bloom, I grow.” Fans and critics agree – Flower Boy is a different side to Tyler. In an interview with Stephen Colbert before performing “911,” one of maybe three times he’s given an interview about this era, Stephen asked him, “Some critics say this is the maturing of Tyler, The Creator. Are you growing up finally, Tyler?” Tyler responded, “Probably, but it’s moreso that I just wanted to produce and have people sing and that’s all I wanna listen to. So, I kinda didn’t wanna rap a lot on it, so I kept all my rap verses short and everything I said I made sure was really ridiculously important. I think that’s what people kinda like about it this time around because it’s like nothing funny on it.” Essentially, what he’s saying on this record, contrary to some fans who cry “he’s trolling” at any drop of sincerity, he really fucking means. That’s important.

The first hint of the unspoken love story of this record starts on “Sometimes…,” an intro that features Shane Powers taking a song request from a guy who chooses not to identify himself. Shane asks, “Um, okay, well, since you want to be Mr. Fucking Secret Agent, what song you wanna hear?” There’s a crackle, and then, “The one about me.” Immediately after the requester – the subject of the next song – finishes speaking, we’re dropped into “See You Again,” the stunning single featuring Kali Uchis. Tyler says, “My infatuation is translatin’ to another form of what you call it? Love.” It’s that realization – “Oh, that’s what I’m feeling.” On Twitter, at the start of 2016, Tyler changed his Twitter bio to say, “he exists behind my eyelids.” The line, in less specificity, is included in “See You Again.” He further says, “You don’t understand me, what the fuck do you mean? It’s them rose-tinted cheeks. Yeah, it’s them dirt-colored eyes. Sugar honey iced tea, bumblebee on the scene. Yeah, I’d give up my bakery to have a piece of your pie.” It’s a big, cute pop love song. When Tyler heard it on the radio for the first time, he cried, as documented in his and his friends’s social media. It’s a song of realization and adoration, but not confession. That comes later.

On “Pothole” with Jaden Smith, we return to Tyler’s discontentment with just material possessions. He says, “All my friends talk about their hoes and tenderonies, but all I can show ‘em is a couple cars and more things.” We don’t know why, precisely, Tyler has the distance from his friends with their love, but we can gather, especially with the song that follows, “Garden Shed.” Because of its title and its content, when Flower Boy leaked two weeks ahead of its release date, this song received the most press. This, to many, was like Frank Ocean’s note on Tumblr. Hypnotically, Estelle sings, “Don’t kill a rose before it could bloom. Fly, baby, fly. Out the cocoon.” To love itself or to a person exploring a love they maybe didn’t think they could, this message that comes floating in atop the track is an encouragement, a permission. Tyler sings, “You don’t have to lie. I can smell it in your eyes that there’s something more to say, baby.” He repeatedly says he’s terrible at singing. As a lover of vocalists and their performances, if he’s choosing to sing, there’s a reason. His delivery specifically on “baby” here is of note. He’s a fan of soul and R&B songs about love. This is his attempt. The rap he delivers on this track is startlingly honest and is so economic:

Ayo

Garden shed, garden shed, garden shed, garden shed

For the garden

That is where I was hidin'

That was real love I was in

Ain't no reason to pretend

Garden shed, garden shed, garden shed

Garden shed for the garçons

Them feelings that I was guardin'

Heavy on my mind

All my friends lost

They couldn't read the signs

I didn't wanna talk and tell 'em my location

And they ain't wanna walk

Truth is, since a youth kid, thought it was a phase

Thought it'd be like the phrase; "poof," gone

But, it's still goin' on

Big fan of the beige tan

Polka dot nose, how it goes

Had to keep it on the subwoofer

A couple butterflies wanna float

But I was always like, "Eh"

Barely interested, but bagged just to brag to my boys like, "Bruh"

This is a crucial subject matter

Sensitive like cookin' batter

'Til the temperature that's risin'

Steppin' on that ladder, tryna

Grab the rings of Saturn, I'ma

Planet by the time you hear this

Shit and chatter 'bout the heat

It will not fuckin' matter

In “Garden Shed,” Tyler says it real. This phase wasn’t one, and he’s accepting, “That was real love I was in.” As we see across the album, he feels a disconnect from his friends. They’re not aware of what he’s going through, and they’re not trying to be. Tyler, in turn, doesn’t want to have to be the one to start the conversation. As if anticipating the Reddit comments, he warns, “This is a crucial subject matter.” It makes his words on Colbert’s show mean a new thing. “Garden Shed” is the acceptance, the admission (if we want to use that word) to us, sure, but mainly himself. His rap is intense, but with Estelle’s lines, we’re given hope that what was hidden is becoming allowed, okayed.

At this point in the story of Flower Boy, we’ve received a lot of information about Tyler’s interior, his dilemmas. On tracks, “Boredom” and “911/Mr. Lonely,” we get a vivid and further look into Tyler’s isolation. Recruiting Corinne Bailey Rae, Anna of the North and Rex Orange County, Tyler says, “My friends suck. Fuck ‘em. I’m over ‘em. “Hi, y’all, y’all ain’t hit me all day. What the fuck is the problem? Is it me? ‘Cause I’m not solved I’m …. bored.” The pause and not using the rhyme we expect says something by literally not saying it. He hovers and hints but never names. It’s a tease, and it’s great. He says, “I’ve been in this fuckin’ room so long my eyeballs are turning to dry wall” and, “Bored and getting desperate as hell,” and “My stomach angry and yellin’. I need some food. I could order, but I hate eating solo. Need someone. We can loiter in parking lots as sun sets at the border… I can’t be alone. I been starting to feel like I don’t know anyone.” It’s a brilliantly crafted song, creatively employing the casual tones of all the guest vocalists. Tyler shows us his desperation further on “911 /Mr. Lonely” with Anna of the North, Steve Lacy and Frank Ocean. He’s blunt: “My thirst levels are infinity and beyond.” He says, “Crowd wild out but don’t matter ‘cause you not front row,” and, “Five car garage. Full tank of the gas. But that don’t mean nothing, nothing, nothin’, nothing’ without you shotgun in the passenger. I’m the loneliest man alive, but I keep on dancing to throw ‘em off.” Tyler seems to have a person in mind he’d like in that front row and in that passenger seat, and his desire is getting, yeah, dire. He’s feeling incredibly isolated, lowering the veil, saying, “They say the loudest in the room is weak. That’s what they assume, but I disagree. I say the loudest in the room is prolly the loneliest one in the room (that’s me.)” After dancing around the issue, he explicitly states something he’s exploring throughout Flower Boy. “Crashed the McLaren, bought me a Tesla. I know you sick of me talkin’ ‘bout cars, but what the fuck else do you want from me? That is the only thing keepin’ me company. Purchase some things until I’m annoyed. These items is fillin’ the void. Been fillin’ it for so long, I don’t even know if it’s shit I enjoy. Current battle as an adult. My partner is a shadow.” At the close of the track, the music drops out as Tyler says, “Check in on me sometime. Ask me how I’m really doin’ so I never have to press that 911.” He’s tweeted about how he hates when people approach him with phones before starting a conversation, immediately seeking a photograph and not a word of hello. After his performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk Session, someone in the crowd asks, “What’s on your mind?” Tyler inquires who said it, points to her, and says, “I respect you ‘cause not a lot of people say that to people. Sometimes you just gotta, ‘Hey, what’s on your mind?’ Just talk to people. Some people don’t take the time out to ask somebody what’s on their mind.” He asks her name and says, “I respect the fuck out of you. You on my team during the zombie apocalypse.” He’s interested in that – that authentic, two-way exchange and connection. On Flower Boy, he cries out for it.

On “I Ain’t Got Time!” and “November,” Tyler flexes and reflects on his career. He says, “Had my boys in this bitch, looking like a seminar,” and, “Seven figure conversations with Converse finalized,” and, “Nat Turner would be so proud of me ‘cause all these motherfuckers got they style from me.” Tyler’s aware of the way he’s emulated and, for a realer term, copied, even calling those who follow a little too closely in his footsteps “clones.” Seemingly disconnected, he declares, “Next line will have ‘em like, ‘Woah!.’ I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” Now, obviously, this line headlined the articles writing about his sexuality upon Flower Boy’s leak. To casually slide that into a song that is otherwise bragging, rightfully, about his accomplishments and leadership of a legion of fans and imitators is kind of incredible. It’s a, “You’ve been buying my shit and I’ve been making this money and you’ve been trying to be me for years, and the whole time, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been this.”

“November” is a different mood entirely. Tyler shares his insecurities and worries about his career, wishing for a simpler, happier time. He says, “What if my music too weird for the masses, and I’m only known for tweets more than beats or all my day ones turn to three, fours ‘cause of track seven.” (Track seven is “Garden Shed.) On the last minute of the song, there’s a switch. Over a more sparse, bare background, Tyler says:

I wrote a song about you, I want your opinion

Opposite of my heart rate, it slows down at the ending

'Cause the love I got for you has exceeded appearance, the lyrics are

Matter of fact, I'ma just call you, so you can hear it

If you do answer, I'll play it to state facts

Although I already know the response you gon' say back

At that point I'll hang up, disappear and just stay back

And if you don't, I'll leave a voicemail with the playback

A phone rings, and no one answers. The voicemail kicks in, and we’re on to Tyler’s message. This – after learning about his love and his isolation and his worries and his pride – is our “to speak or to die” moment. He speaks. He sings, actually. “You’ve been on my mind. I’m losing my mind because I hope that we can be more than just friends. Fireworks, I feel like glitter, and every time you come around, I feel like glitter. You’re the one that I needed in my life.” He says, “Baby doll, I hope you agree.” There’s a playful, hopeful bounce to the first half of the song during this gushy confession. Halfway through “Glitter,” though, the song deflates. Tyler loses confidence. He says, “Yeah, look at my face. Look at that joy. This is one-sided,” and, “I’m caught in your quicksand. Please don’t save me.” After a repetition of, “How ya feel?” and, “Scum Fuck Flower Boy,” we hear the recorded voice of a woman saying, “We didn’t get your message, either because you were not speaking or because of a bad connection.” The last word spoken on Flower Boy is an exasperated, “fuck,” from Tyler. A rhythmic instrumental, “Enjoy Right Now, Today,” closes the record.

Flower Boy is an exquisite body of work. Tyler’s musicality is on display like never before. His production choices are so interesting, and his implantation of all his featured talent shows such care and love. He’s someone who very clearly obsesses over and immensely enjoys constructing music. On sound alone, the record is an achievement. Thematically and lyrically, it’s a gift and a full, generous story.

Flower Boy leaves us thinking the one he loves never hears his message. The voicemail didn’t go through. Looking at his Instagram and listening to verses he’s dropped since the release, it seems that’s no longer the case. In multiple posts, we see a guy with those rose-tinted cheeks and dirt-colored eyes Tyler spoke of in “See You Again” and “Glitter.” This same guy joins Tyler on tour, capturing live performance footage with a camera. In the rare times Tyler goes live on Instagram, he’s in the background, eating Oreos or having objects thrown at him by Tyler. It seems that “unrequited” is no longer the accurate descriptor here. In a freestyle over Jay-Z’s song “4:44” that he calls “Ziplock” that he released following the charting of Flower Boy Tyler says:

What's the point of bein' rich when you wake up alone?

What's the point of goin' home when it ain't nobody there?

Fuck that, I grab my bike and phone home in the air

And I pedal through the city with the wide frame steer

With that tall pale boy that I met last year

Grape, that's what I call him, love, that's what I fall in

Fell in, I ain't like sports growing up, but now I'm ballin'

I guess I'm a late bloomer

In interviews about his book Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman speaks of his intentional dismissal and non-use of labels. He receives criticisms for that. People say Tyler, too, needs to use labels, to specify. People still say “he’s trolling.” When performing live lately, Tyler adds a verse to the “Sometimes…” intro to “See You Again.” He’ll say:

Sometimes, I sit in my room and think about us

You got them long lashes, couldn't get the dirt in em'

Curls on your head look like waves, I'ma surf in em'

Wave at the camera, the paps ask your roll

I evade any answer, but if you ain't a dummy

Shit is laid in these stanzas

Kidnap my feelings, I ain't paying any ransom

I, keep em' like secrets

Might, drive a n**** crazy but I'm, beepin' like, beepin' like, beepin' like pages on a hip waist strainer

Sometimes, I sit in my room

On November 2 of this year, Tyler tweeted, “this is the greatest year of my life.” It seems he’s happy with his choice to speak. For Flower Boy, and him, honestly, I’m glad as well.

Lido Pimienta was interviewed on the CBC news program The National after weeks of being at the center of a controversy. Performing at Halifax Pop Explosion on October 12, Lido asked the men in the room to move to the back to create space for women to come forward. She specified that the women of color in the audience should be at the front, white women behind them, then men. She calls it “rearranging the room.” It’s a practice she often does at her gigs and one that many other artists across genres, dating back decades, have done and do. When a white woman photographing the event got upset by Lido’s request, she became physical with several members at the front of the crowd and yelled, “Why do you hate me because I’m white?” Lido was made aware, stopped her performance and told the woman to leave. Her rearranging is a generous, intentional gesture to give non-binary people, trans women, folks with disabilities, Indigenous women, pregnant women and women of color a safe space where they are centered and celebrated. Still, this simple act created a barrage of press and negativity once people started posting about the show on social media. It makes sense the story went viral; it had all the hallmarks of a viral story in 2017 – a woman doing something people think she shouldn’t, white people being asked to give up something, the insistence that “a post-racial” society is a myth and a piece of culture. Weeks before the Halifax gig, Lido won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize for her 2016 album La Papessa. In her acceptance speech, she said she hoped “the Aryan specimen” who told her to go back to where she came from two weeks after she arrived in Ontario from Colombia was watching her win Canada’s most esteemed music award. She thanked the traditional land owners for allowing her to be a guest on their land. She gave an incredibly moving, radical speech, flanked by her mother and son. For an album entirely in Spanish, La Papessa taking the trophy was historic. Her win marks a newness, a shift in what is Canadian music and even Canadian identity. In a feature on Lido for The Globe and Mail, writer Zosia Bielski wrote, “We’ve officially exited Feistland.” Her speech accepting her award upset some people, and a buzz started online about her comments about white supremacy and settler colonialism. So, when the incident in Halifax happened, horrifyingly yet still predictably, the racists, bigots, sexists, etc.ists of the world started sending Lido death threats and abuse of all sorts. It’s as if they were waiting. Today, if you go on any online article or video about Lido, the thumbs down will greatly exceed the thumbs up, and hate messages will litter the comment sections. One such video is her interview with Ian Hanomansing on The National. At the start, he asks Lido what she would want people unfamiliar with her or her work to know. She says, with thought and a head tilt as she lists each role, “They should know that I am an artist, curator, musician and a mother.” The interviewer doesn’t allow a beat before, “An activist?” She responds, “Sure. Yeah.” There’s not hesitancy in her answer, but it wasn’t in her initial list of descriptors. For someone so intentional, that’s meaningful. He hones in, “And, you know, for a lot of people, the first they heard of you was an incident at a concert in Halifax. What’s your perspective on what happened there?” Lido answers, “Well, I think that people first heard of me because I won the Polaris Prize.” She leans back a bit and laughs. She’s having fun, but she’s also serious. I feel for her here. This type of “intro to” discussion she’s being forced to have because racist people misinterpreted her actions at an event they were not present for is beneath her. She’s there to answer the questions and further amplify her commitment to intentionally inclusive spaces. Her labor is unpaid.

Recently, Lido was interviewed by Loud & Quiet magazine. Here, she spoke to a trend that happens when people assess her work – the assignation of “political.” She said, “I cannot ignore it. It’s just interesting when you live in this hyphen – like Canadian-Colombian-Indigenous-Black – all the hyphens and all the boxes that I can check off in any application or whatever. I am stuck in this hyphen so it doesn’t matter. If I wanna write a song about flowers, it ends up being political, just because of my body, just because of, you know, not singing in English. Everything that I do, whether I like it or not ends up being a political statement, even if I’m just writing about fucking, you know?” She continued, “I think that in 2017, people our age, or millennials or whatever you want to call it, we can’t really escape the political landscape that we’re trying to survive in. I don’t make music that is ‘this is the song that’s going to change the world’, that’s not why I write. I write music that resonates with people that are tired of being pushed around. And, I think, music that people enjoy, and that resonates with folks that are interested in a voice that is not heteronormative. So you know I make songs about polyamory, and impossible love. This is the world that I live in and its not a conscious decision, but it still consciously comes out.”

Lido grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia. When her family’s house would lose power in blackouts, she would perform ABBA songs as entertainment. As she hit early double digits, she was singing in punk and hardcore bands with people a decade her senior. She was immersed in worlds and sounds and thoughts and realities of rebellion and revolution. At her school named after Lyndon B. Johnson, she would receive docked markings for speaking in Spanish instead of English. When she was 19, she moved to London, Ontario, to join her mother who had left Colombia years earlier. Here, she started recording songs she wrote in Colombia and putting them on MySpace for her friends back home to hear. She released an album called Color in 2010, a project made in collaboration with her then-husband and father of her child. She moved to Toronto, started school for art criticism and began working on a new music project that was solely her creation. Life and loss happened, and La Papessa didn’t come out until 2016. When talking to CBC’s q about the difference between Color and La Papessa, she said, “What changed in this album was that I’m talking about separating from baby daddy. I’m talking about the departure of my brother from this physical world. Speaking about domestic violence that I experienced when I first moved to Toronto and I started dating. It’s like two different beasts.” Ahead of the record’s release, Lido told The FADER, “Another thing that changed with this album is that, before, I felt like I was being watched all the time. All these people, these famous people, were wanting me to write songs for them or recommend music. I was like the ‘It Girl’ and that was very distracting, because I wasn’t really paying attention to the music, even. I was riding the wave of being a relevant person without understanding what was happening. With La Papessa the attitude completely changed, because I grew up. That’s what happens when you grow up: You don’t really care about who’s there and who’s not there. I’ve been able to develop my own sound. There’s nothing like it out there. I’m extremely proud of it.”

La Papessa is an extraordinary body of work. In just nine songs clocking in at thirty-eight minutes, she says and does so much. Of the stunning “La Capacidad,” she told q, “’La Capacidad’ is a song I wrote after an abusive relationship that I survived. It’s a song about letting the other person know that love shouldn’t be a life sentence.” In the music video for the track, which she co-directed, she sits down with the video’s models and tells them about when her abusive ex-boyfriend threatened to release nude photos of her and how her mom called him and said to do it because it would make her famous like Kim Kardashian. She talked about how working with her male collaborators added a layer to the song, saying, “They’re three straight men. They see me as their leader. So, it was another healing process of producing this song with men that know when to shut up when I’m talking and that just let me do my thing and trust me. So, I feel very blessed that it started as a very painful process to put the pain into words, but when we perform it, it’s a celebration because people are celebrating with us.” This joy through the pain is common on La Papessa. In talking about the difficult times that forged the record, she said, “Hard times, they come every year, and you just have to keep going.” “Quiero Que Te Vaya Bien” also derives from a difficult place – the dissolution of her marriage. It’s about the end of the end, when you say that you wish the other person well. It’s tough, but she’s concerned with that – that fight into peace. On “Al Unisono Viajan,” she explores her Indigenous identity in conversation with the Indigenous people of Canada. She told q, “’Al Unisono Viajan’ means “they fly away in unison.’ And this is a song about the similar narrative of colonization in the North and South of America. So, it is my love song for my brothers and sisters up here that are Indigenous.” Her radical politics seep into everything. It’s not a statement; it’s just her reality. The “activist” title isn’t assumed, it is inhabited. Summing up the record in her speech at the Polaris Prize, she said, “This album is not in English. This album is not in French. This album honors my brother who passed away in 2013. This album is about breaking up. This album is about getting back on your feet by yourself in the big city with your son and some drawings under your arm. Thank you very much.”

Describing her voice and her multiplicity to Tom Power, she said, “I’ve been blessed with this voice that is a complete mix of repetitive chanting and swag. It is, you know? So, I don’t know, I just feel like I’m the best kind of mix, and I embrace both of the things that I am and all of the things that I am and that I continue to be.” She’s already well into her next project. It’s called Miss Colombia and sees Lido reflecting on her home and the gnarly, insidious shit she ignored or didn’t see when she lived there. She told Jezebel, “I guess I’m ready for my next level. What I see that’s going to happen is that my next album, Miss Colombia, is going to blow up and cross over. I’m telling you right now, it’s going to be the most controversial, the most beautiful album.” I don’t doubt her for a moment.

Ibeyi’s album Ash fades in to a chorus of voices. Lisa-Kaindé Diaz and Naomi Diaz are joined in a repetition: “I carried this for years.” When the percussion kicks off after a minute, the track knocks you square. By the end, you’re part of the ensemble. It’s a song that gets you in place, ready, for what’s ahead. “I Carried This For Years,” is a declaration saying, “Gather ‘round because we’re about to get into it.” Ibeyi deal in community. This shared baggage that’s not rooted in time or place but is present in all of us and in all of our struggles is set down, unpacked and explored. As Michelle Obama says on a sample on Ash’s “No Man Is Big Enough For My Arms,” “Your story is my story.” The twins of Ibeyi believe and create work around this tenant.

For Ash, their second album, the sisters set out to create a record for the stage. Much of their debut was softer, more vocally focused. The songs on Ash were all engineered to bring energy to their live performances and create a specific vibe for themselves and the crowd. Lisa-Kaindé told Stereogum, “We wanted it to be visceral and organic and at the same time we wanted people to enjoy it. That’s the whole point.” The record is a perfect blend of the talents of each sister. In a profile for The FADER, writer Anupa Mistry comments, “…Naomi and Lisa are the least twinlike twins I’ve ever met.” To i-D when discussing what they’re listening to right now, Naomi lists Ms. Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Young MA and reggaeton. Lisa-Kaindé says Oceansize, James Blake and Bon Iver. To NPR, Naomi discussed their identities within their Yoruba belief, saying, “Lisa, she's the daughter of Yemaya, who is the sea, and I'm daughter of Shango, who is thunder. And it's really us. Our characters are really like that.” “We are complementary opposites: melody & rhythm, water & fire, reflection & spontaneity, yin & yang… But we both have one thing in common, we can't live without music. Music binds us,” Naomi told i-D. Their interplay is effortless. They’re two, of course, but when they combine, it’s divine.

Throughout Ibeyi’s work, there’s a current of acknowledged loss. When the girls were eleven, they lost their father, and in 2013, their sister died following a brain aneurysm. On working with this grief, Lisa-Kaindé told Stereogum, “There’s something about reliving this pain, reliving it every day, and about acknowledging your pain, too, and making it beautiful. That’s what I love about art. I think it’s important to live your pain and do something with it.” On “Away, Away,” Naomi sings, “I feel the pain, feel the pain. But I’m alive, I’m alive.” “Water under the ground. I am water under the ground,” Naomi says on “Waves.” On “When Will I Learn,” Naomi states, “I can’t climb on tall trees. I don’t bend like the reeds. But I can play the drums. I beat on the toms.” Ownership, independence, perseverance are throughout Ash. Life involves loss, and Ibeyi speak to that. Regarding the passing of their sister, whose daughter the song “Valé” is written for, and the tour they embarked on immediately after her death, Lisa told The FADER, “Every night, we dedicated the whole show to her. That is how we deal with it: we play for them. Death is hard when you push it away, because it comes back.”

Ash also deals with what unites us. It opens our hurt, examines it and tells us to carry on. The album’s centerpiece is the over six minute track “Transmission/Michaelion” that features Meshell Ndegeocello. Lisa-Kaindé told Stereogum, “’Transmission’ is so important. Not only saying how you feel, but looking at how people are feeling around you and trying to understand them; finding what links us more than what divides us. Then, learning from our past and learning from other people’s past and learning from history, which is really hard. In the last year of touring [we felt] quite defeated about the world. There are days you wake up where you’re like, ‘I’m so fucking useless. I can’t do anything [to change things]. We’re gonna all die and fuck it.’ But realizing you can’t save the world, that is for sure, but you can do something little [to help people] and that’s still something. There’s a domino effect [of small actions].” Here, they’re dealing with what we all are – what happened and how we do we get out of it? Lisa-Kaindé sings, “Sing, our arms are wide. We climb the walls. Dance on the beats of hearts. One and all,” and, “I’ve been thinking lately how seasons fall apart. Back to the start. Should I share how I feel or bury it inside? Or bury it inside?” It seems, with Ash, the decision to that is clear. 

In interviews, the sisters talk a lot about Nina Simone – her views on freedom, the pain in her music. On Ash, they place themselves in conversation with many women – Claudia Rankine, whose work in Citizen is quoted by Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi’s mother Maya on “Transmission,” Frida Kahlo, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jennifer Clément and Mala Rodríguez. On many songs, a choir bolsters their message. On their use of choirs, Lisa-Kaindé told NPR, “When we were 16 our mother took us to a Yoruba choir, and actually the funny part is we didn't want to go, but when we arrived there we heard the songs for the first time we fell in love with them and it just speaks so deeply to us. And every night we get to sing those chants, every night we get to hear the thousands of people that sang those chants before us, and it's really special.”

The song off Ash that gets the people singing back the most is certainly “Deathless,” which features amazing work from Kamasi Washington. The track tells the story of a run-in Lisa-Kaindé had with a police officer in the Paris subway when she was sixteen years old and on the way to a piano lesson. The officer stopped her, made her take off her socks and shoes, searched her bag and berated her with what are now lyrics in the song: “’Do you smoke? What’s your name? Do you know why I’m here?’” and “’You’re not clean. You might deal. All the same, with that skin.’” Lisa-Kaindé says the officer only stopped when he saw she was carrying Chopin sheet music and a copy of War and Peace. She recalls not understand what happened until talking about it with her mother. “Deathless” is a documentation of that experience and a rallying cry against death and silence and those trying to bring it upon us. Passionately and beautifully, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi discussed the song’s creation on Song Exploder podcast. Lisa-Kaindé said, “We wanted to write this little anthem for everybody, and we wanted to write this song that would be against this feeling of being powerless and small. We wanted a song that would make you feel big and feel full of energy and life and the fire that makes you wanna do something. It’s a way to give hope to people. There’s awful things happening in the world. There’s loads of people getting killed. And then you’re like, ‘Who’s gonna protect me? Those people are supposed to protect all of us, and why are they attacking me?’ There’s nothing worse than that, saying to yourself, ‘It hurts me, but I cannot do anything about it.’ So, ‘Deathless’ is a way to say, ‘You can. We can. We can do something about it. This is not the end of us.’” “Deathless” is almost a taunt. It’s a pounding, stunning achievement.

Ahead of the release of Ash, the sisters visited Beats 1 for an interview with Ebro. His first question was, “Why Ash? Why is that the title?” They responded, as they do, in turn. Naomi said, “Because it’s the first song we recorded, and it’s the last song we have in the album.” Lisa-Kaindé followed, “And also we feel like it opened the way for all the energy of the album. Ashes can fertilize. Ashes can become something. Ashes can turn into life. So, there’s a positivity in this word. That’s why I think we called the album Ash.” Ash is very now. It’s dealing with brokenness but refusing to remain defeated. It’s glaring into the abyss and asking, “and?” Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé collect us and themselves because, ultimately, we do have to keep going.

The opening lines to Sampha’s debut album Process are, “Magnetic light in the blue-high haze. A magnifying glass upon my face.” It seems (and I may totally be projecting here, but I don’t think I am) that Sampha is uneasy with attention. Those who interview him frequently note his soft-spokenness. In photoshoots, he rarely faces the camera straight on. In talking to Noisey about a video he made for Genius dissecting the meaning of his song “Blood On Me,” he spoke on his uncomfortability to give too much away, saying, “I was put on the spot. It was one of those moments. It was cool, but I realised I don't want to just explain the songs to people.”

Right before his album was about to be released to the world, Sampha talked to The Guardian about anticipation. He said, “It’s that thing of not being able to embody something as much as I thought I would when reality comes. I go into shutting-down mode. Maybe I’m not meant to feel excited. Maybe it’s partly that the journey is more important than the destination. The closer you get to something the further away the next stop is.” This is something he repeats to journalists, calling it out as a potential cliché: “"It's not the destination, it's the journey.” There’s truth to clichés, though, yeah? And, after all, his album is called Process. It’s fitting.

After years of being known for his proximity to and work with other artists, he told Interview that he was ready to have people consume a full body of his own work: “I’m excited for people to really get a good sense of me or my intentions. Even if you don’t like it, you’ll be able to hear that I really love music - and I’m trying.” To Billboard, he spoke of Process being about “peaks and valleys” and him letting us see his “interior design.” The title tells us - this is a record of dealing and working through. As he shares, the passing of his mother in 2015 had a tremendous effect on him. Carving out his recording and touring around caring for her, he said losing her was “like losing an arm or a leg.” Most vividly, “(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano” speaks to his relationship with his mother and their home. He sings, “They said that it’s her time, no tears in sight, I kept the feelings close.” The song is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things. I heard it, and it was immediate. It’s so stripped and raw that it stops time a bit. Elsewhere, there are traces of references to his mother and his family. On “What Shouldn’t I Be?,” perhaps the most meditative track on Process, he says, “I should visit my brother, but I haven’t been there in months. I’ve lost connection, signal, to how we were,” and “Family ties – put them ‘round my neck.” Frequently, and almost as a current throughout, we see him working through his anxieties. “Blood On Me” specifically deals with uninterrogated, gnawing fear. In the video, he runs from dogs on a racetrack and through a wheat field, eventually passing out. “Plastic 100°C” also speaks to his nervousness. His mastery of instruments and production only intensify the feelings of dread and discomfort. He told Fact Magazine, “Anxiety has definitely been something I’ve struggled with, a presence in my life that has over time been responsible for me not doing certain things, or being overly cautious when doing them. Not going to the doctors or dentist ‘cos you’re more scared of what they could say than the reality. I get anxious a lot. But music in itself, and playing good shows, they help.” This sharing of his, yes, process is a step in managing and tackling the anxiety. He repeats, loops thoughts as if in dialogue with himself - and we’re hearing it.

This being his first proper full-length project, you might expect it to be a culmination of a lifetime’s ideas and lyrics. It is not. Sampha started afresh for Process. He told Interview, “It’s very much a documentation of the two years it took me to make the album; I didn’t rehash old ideas or go too far back. I didn’t have any melodies that I had since I was 14 or lyrics that I’d had written when I was 21.” Perhaps that’s an ingredient of the magic – the confined time it deals with.

For Apple Music, Kahlil Joseph created a visual accompaniment to the album. It’s one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen, honestly. It’s poetry in a new way and perfectly visualizes the layers of sound and influence and culture that make up Process. The record was already something I treasured, but the film made it into something else entirely - almost spiritual. Filmed in Sierra Leone and London, its dedicated to Sampha’s mother and her and her husband’s journey to England. It’s a beautiful testament.

Junkee asked Sampha what it was like working with Kanye West. He replied, “It was like this osmosis. [His confidence] just manifested itself into me. It was like, it’s alright for me to have an ego! I had a real thing with thinking ‘Why do I have to call myself Sampha? Why do I have to be the face of something?’ I don’t necessarily have to be, but he made me feel comfortable with that.” When Rolling Stone asked him the question people love – the one about working with Kanye and Solange and Drake – he said he learned, “It’s OK to be confident in yourself, to stick to your guns, without necessarily feeling guilt to people you might have let down or going against other people's suggestions." He has a lot to be confident about and proud of, really. This year, Process won the revered Mercury Prize. In his acceptance speech, he showed genuine surprise, dedicating the award to his parents.

Awards are nice, and he deserves many, yes, but it’s the connection people have with Sampha and his music that’s the real thing of note, I think. Because of his openness and generosity in sharing his story about his mother and his dealing, people take in his sounds and words in a different way. He speaks about how people approach him saying how “(No One Knows Me) Like The Piano” helped in their bereavement. Process - it’s his, of course, but he lets it be ours too. It takes a specific type of artist, clued in to something eternal and human, to create tools for healing. On Process, Sampha proves himself to be one of those artists.

In an interview with Vice News explaining the creation of his song “Gwan,” Rostam said, “I want all of my songs to kind of live in the inbetween space between a happy song and a sad song.” Discussing his track “Bike Dream” with The FADER, he told, “I had very specific associations with all of the lyrics that I wrote in the song, but I liked that there was an openness to it. So at once there's a very specific set of associations that I carry, and then I'm trying to communicate something, but it's not specifically one story that I want to tell. I don't need people to hear it only one way. I don't want people to hear it only one way.” In a discussion hosted by OUT Magazine between Rostam and his brother Zal, Zal noted, “I felt a connection to the words and the longing - this otherness that’s on other tracks on your album. I connect to that otherness.” Rostam replied, “That’s a big part of the record, but it’s hard to talk about in some ways. I want people to come to it on their own.” “The intersection between the conventional and the unconventional,” Rostam told Alex Frank in a feature for Vulture, is what he’s searching for in his music. Rostam’s first album, finally released in 2017 after years of rumination and labor, is called Half-Light. It fits. On this record, his years of music making and study aid the creation of wondrous, dreamy, unique soundscapes to home his lyrics of allusions and possibilities and reflections.

Some songs off Half-Light date back to 2011. Of the album’s inception, he told Rolling Stone, “The concept was to make a record where it was vocals and strings at the forefront and then these intricate drum patterns that were blocking in with the vocals and the strings. That was the original concept that dates back to 10 or 11 years ago. But ultimately what made me chase down the songs was that I would get haunted by them; I would make little voice memos on my phone and every once in awhile I'd listen back to them and be like, ‘Fuck, you really have to finish this song. There's gonna be something sad if the world never hears a finished version of this.’” To Billboard, he said, “I had a vision of making a record that was blurring the line between string arrangement and song.”

In interviews, Rostam is measured. Often asked the same questions, he will give the same answers. He’s hesitant to speak too much over his work, not wanting to influence a listener’s experience. In the songwriting process, he took out lines that gave too much specific detail. Still, Half-Light is a record that could only be Rostam’s

His parents own a publishing company called Mage. Their slogan is, “Bridging East and West.” To the New Yorker, Rostam said, “My music is about identity. This album is about identity.” Half-Light, you could say, achieves a variation on his parents’ company’s mission. As a gay son of Iranian immigrants who moved to Washington D.C. to raise their children, Rostam is familiar with the dual – multiple – experiences. His work is, by nature of its existence, a statement. Again to the New Yorker, he said, “Because of who I am, and how open I am, there’s something inherently political about just writing love songs.” Furthering this to Rolling Stone, he said, “To relate it to something that has nothing to do with immigration or the LGBT community, if you ever saw that [2007] Tom Petty documentary [Runnin' Down a Dream], they talk about how much Tom Petty hated his dad and there was some kind of rage that his music was always engaging with and that anger towards his dad and that injustice. There was something that made Tom Petty write the songs that he wrote and there was some fire underneath him. I think we all have that. I'm trying to put that to some good use with the songs that I write. I believe that all music is inherently political. So it would be disingenuous to not make music that was honest to that belief.”

Recently, Rostam and his mother were featured in a clip for Viceland that saw them at home in D.C. cooking Persian food. His mother spoke about seeing Rostam play Half-Light at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. She said, for her, it was a spiritual experience and that she felt she saw that shared across the crowd. Discussing the crowd at his gigs to the New York Times, Rostam said, “Some people said, ‘I was surprised at how many hetero guys were at your show.’ And other people said, ‘You were definitely the soundtrack to a lot of gay couples making out.’” People, across boundaries of identity, have a reverence for Rostam’s work. What he did on Half-Light, opening up these sounds and references and conjuring these dreamlike sequences of chances and stories, is a tremendous achievement. To give the album up to us for interpretation is an act of generosity he didn’t have to do. Thanks.

Forbes asked Daniel Caesar what he attributed his, seemingly, rapid success to. He answered, “Honestly, man, it’s just the music.” And that’s the real truth. Context is very crucial to my process of loving things. An album can hit me as objectively shit, but if I read something its creator says that I find important, I can mold my distaste into love. That’s not okay with a lot of people, but I’m unconcerned with that. Art is always in an atmosphere to me, and I take it all in. With Freudian, Daniel Caesar’s debut LP, however, I need no context. I know his story, but I don’t need to. Front to back, it’s a masterpiece. It’s my favorite album of the year. Every song is an immediate classic. It’s that shit I can put on when I’m doing anything and just relax into a cohesive, creative, honest body of work. I don’t know any statistics on Shazam, but I can envision people in cafés across the world hearing “We Find Love,” walking over to the speakers and realizing that this song that hit them so immediately is actually from 2017. It’s a timeless creation, Freudian.

Throughout singles and EPs leading up to 2017, Daniel established himself as a fresh voice of contemporary soul. He was raised in the church, and that reverence for its vocals follows his work. Leaving home after high school graduation because he wanted to live outside the rules of his Christian parents, he headed to Toronto to pursue his music of secular themes. He makes it clear that he’s still gracious to his parents, telling q, “I’m here because of that friction we had.” It’s refreshing - and real - to see his rejection of this runaway narrative. That’s him, his music - genuine, away from facade. Still, if god is love, Freudian is a gospel record. He told Ebro for Apple Music that the record tells the complete story of “the most intense relationship” of his life.

The attachment people feel with Freudian is evident. The music is heartfelt, sentimental - a dream. Issa Rae used “Blessed” in her season two finale of Insecure for a reason, you know? Multiple publications have written about the trend of proposing during his gigs, which is very ew to me, but I get it. That shit says something – that they want his music to be forever imprinted into their own love story is of real note. 

The first few times I listened to the album, I couldn’t delineate tracks. The sequencing and thematic and musical ties are so strong that it truly just plays as one immersive experience. That’s part of its magic – the way it enters the air until it goes silent. The features he chose – Kali Uchis, H.E.R., Syd and Charlotte Day Wilson – are such pleasures. To have all your guests women – two queer – is cool. (I use that average word “cool” because I don’t see it as political or a statement, it’s just merely who he wanted, and that is, yeah, cool.)

Freudian feels like a cultural moment. It’s a record that is timestapped and forever. It’ll stand the test of time and be considered one of our generation’s best albums, I’m sure. As he told Forbes, yeah, it really is just the music.

When Cosima was supposed to meet with some suits interested in signing her, she just invited them over to her house. “I put up two demos on SoundCloud and my old manager found them. I was around 20 and had been invited to play for a bunch of A&Rs somewhere in town. But you know what? I just didn’t want to go. I told my old manager I wasn’t going to do it. I just didn’t feel comfortable. Instead, I invited them all to my mum’s house and watch me perform there. After that I signed to Island,” she told M Magazine. She’s directed all of her music videos, telling M, “I had made a video with a director. I wasn’t happy with it – and that’s when my determination kicked in.” In her later teens, she knew she wanted to sing, but she was a bit lost. She told The Line Of Best Fit, “I realised that my voice wasn't doing what I wanted nor needed it to do. What does my voice sound like? Who am I independent of?” She moved to live with her grandparents in Germany and took singing lessons from a retired opera singer. In her 2017 single “Un-Named,” she sings, “I finally called off my search for kings. Why seek when they won’t be found?” On November 20 of this year, she posted a photo on her Instagram from Los Angeles. In it, she’s sat atop a luggage cart, sunglasses on, tongue out. The caption reads, “Fell down 7 times got up 8. <3love u London but I’ve got some shit to take care of” Cosima does things her own way – and what a gift that is, for us. Her songs are interrogative of social expectations for girls and women, rooted in conversations and expressing of shit we just can’t quite utter aloud. In her videos, she imagines lush environments to encapsulate, illuminate and extend her sounds and words.

At the very end of 2016, Cosima released an EP called South of Heaven. To accompany it, she shared a nearly thirty minute visual. In the video description on YouTube, she wrote, “I consider myself very lucky as I am allowed to frame myself in a world where women/artists don't always get to. I learn more with each video I direct because I get to work with teams of people who are passionate and incredible at what they do. A few weeks ago I was going through the Hymns For Him footage before it went into edit, when it struck me that I have all this beautiful footage but can only ever use about 3minutes of it. I couldn't leave it on the cutting room floor so I decided to create a visual mixtape with old and new footage. I hope you enjoy it ❤” This is her world, wholly. It’s so realized and unique that it’s wild to think she’s at the start. Her eye is so specific. To DAZED, she said, “Outside of music, I just want to learn as much as I possibly can about directing – I’m realising how much I love doing it, especially with my team because they are so great. I just want to carry on, because life is short and Trump is president.”

In February of this year, Cosima released a new song called “To Build A House,” a deeply personal track about the relationship between her father and her family. On the song, we’re allowed to see a growth in how she makes allowances for her father. “While you were gone, I washed all the windows so I could get a better view of your return,” becomes, “In the end, I let the windows get dirty. I couldn’t stand to see your absence through the glass.” In the chorus, she sings, “To build a house on quick sand – that’s what you’re asking me to do. To give you the heart you’ve broken – how can that feel alright to you?” It’s, genuinely, one of the most arresting songs I’ve heard. She details it starting as a poem and living, for a long time, unfinished. Upon the release of the track, she wrote about the recording of the song, “I think we captured the exact moment that I finally resolved something that had always felt so open-ended to me. The process of writing this song and sharing those feelings with other people that evening made me feel less alone; so here it is <3.” In the video, which she directed, she’s sat in and leaning out of a car, crying and generally having a moment. Of the video, she told DAZED, “I wanted it to get across the emotion of the song and the feeling of abandonment. The video is me hanging out of a car for three and a half minutes – it’s that feeling of being out of control and acting out, as though you want someone to tell you to get back into the car and look after yourself or that they’ll look after you.”

There’s a storytelling to Cosima’s vocal performances that’s so engaging. It’s unique in a way only an assured vision would permit. Topshop asked her who she listens to, and she replied, “I listen to a lot of Dionne Warwick, Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone – anyone who sings emotionally. If I feel something when they’re singing, that’s someone I should be looking into.” i-D asked her, “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?” She responded, “I just wanted to make people cry. I think it's because I wanted to be Judy Garland and she made me cry, so I've always wanted to make other people feel things.”

Her songs and videos come from scrapbooks and notes she keeps, a practice she started at the age of ten. Of her songwriting process, she told DAZED, “Songwriting for me is a release – I do it to understand things that have happened to me or emotions I feel. I have many notebooks which I write things down in as (they’re) happening, then I’ll sit down, go through it, and start to section everything off and really get into it. I like to have that instant feeling, where you just get the words down as you’re thinking and feeling them.” Keeping scrapbooks as well as notebooks, she told The Beat Juice, “I love a mood board. I am a mood board. I think, firstly, music is an audio image so you need to know where you are describing when you’re singing and writing, and secondly I love film.” “I have a million scrapbooks dating back to when I was 10, and I’ve always been into collages. When I’m writing songs, you know where the feeling comes from and it always comes from a personal emotion, but sometimes I’ll need imagery to trigger a memory, she told Topshop.

In her lyrics, she unpacks harmful aspects of relationship dynamics and unbalanced pressure put on women, saying in one interview to NME, “For a decade of my life I’ve been trying to change – so have all of my friends – and that’s fucked up. You have generations of women who hate themselves and literally do everything to distance themselves from the person they are.” “It was important to create the kind of girl for myself that I would have wanted when I was 14 and confused about what a woman was supposed to be,” she told The Beat Juice. When i-D asked her for the best piece of advice her mother ever gave her, she said, “She once told me that life was too short for one man. That freed up my mind. Go mom!” In “Un-Named,” one of three songs she brought out this year, she says, “You know I really loved you, and I gave you all I had, but you never did much more than throw rocks at my heart.” Maternal advice is great, isn’t it?

Across the entire South of Heaven EP and visual accompaniment, “To Build A House,” “Un-Named,” and her cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” Cosima’s hyperdrama, her theater, is studied, cultivated, original and effective. If the goal was to make us cry, she’s doing it.

On the second verse of the penultimate song on the debut record from Loyle Carner (real name: Ben Coyle-Larner), Ben speaks of his brother, Ryan:

So I tell him, brother, listen, listen, when the sun don't glisten


All the days turn grey and the love goes missing


Hate won't fade and the front row hissing


You're the only one who keeps my heart wishing

On the bridge, he talks about his closeness to his mother:

Call me the son of Jean, my little submarine


Me and my mother, there ain't nothing that can come between

At the end of the song, his mom, Jean Coyle-Larner, reads a poem she wrote about her son:

He was a scribble of a boy, all hair and mischief A two-foot tale of trouble, rhe bee's knees A cartwheeling chatterbox of tricks, completely fearless I had to carry a first aid kit, my band-aid boy I had my heart in my mouth wherever we went He'd do backflips into the pool when he was tiny And the lifeguards would get all stressed out He was a proper Mowgli, he embraced everything Took things apart to see what made them tick Such busy fingers He would empty sugar packets onto the tables In restaurants to draw pictures in He used to draw on anything Fantastical creatures with ferocious fangs And now he draws with words And I find lyrics on my till receipts and bills He was never still and barely slept, so neither did I I could never understand how he could watch TV Upside down while kicking a ball His eyes shone with wonder Music flowed through him like a current He'd upend a stool to use as a microphone Singing away for his grandparents He turned the world upside down and we're richer for it He was and is a complete joy The world is his, that scribble of a boy

The piano in the background of her verse is a sample of a song by her late husband, Ben’s stepdad. The record’s concluding cut is its title track – Yesterday’s Gone. It’s a Britpopish, lo-fi song driven by acoustic guitar, declaring, “Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone. Go outside and see the world is living on. Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.” This isn’t Ben’s song; it’s his dad’s, taken from the same record as the piano in “Sun Of Jean.” On these two tracks and, truly, all across Yesterday’s Gone, we see what’s at the heart of Ben’s music and life – family.

As soon as music from Loyle Carner appeared online, it was evident that something special was going on. From Ben’s early tracks through all his recent shit, that same intense, earnest heart has been at the forefront. On one of his first tracks “Cantona,” Ben memorializes his dad through his favorite footballer. (Still, Ben brings his dad’s Eric Cantona shirt onstage for every performance, what he repeatedly calls “the ultimate sacrifice” since he’s certainly not a Manchester United supporter.) In the music video for “BFG,” a sparse, moving song, Ben stands juggling with his brother sitting on his shoulder. The track ends with both Ben and his brother miming the lyrics: “Everybody says I’m fucking sad. Of course I’m fucking sad, I miss my fucking dad.” Perhaps the most vivid insight into what type of artist (and person) Ben would become came in the “Tierney Terrace” video released back in August 2015. The clip takes us around the home he shares with his mom and brother, showing us their literal interior. We see Ben giving his brother shaving tips. He eats a meal with his mother at the dining table. They all sit on one couch. The song was written after a run-in with his biological father, reflecting on how they made a home in spite of his absence. He says:

Trust, 'cos all I wanted was a fucking man


To tell the fucking truth, hold my fucking hand


Uh, to guide me through the darkness when the others ran


Instead he was sliding and slipping

I didn't understand
I didn't understand-stand, didn't understand


Uh, now every time that motherfucker ran


I didn't understand-stand, didn't understand

With EPs and singles, Ben established himself as a singular voice – with a honed, human vision and sound. But creating a full, complete album was very important to him. “It’s my first full body of work. EPs are cool, but there’s not enough time to push a whole story. I’ve never liked the idea of singles because they don’t tell the whole thing. It’s like being given page 65 of a 300 page book or one chapter out of context. With this, it’s the first time I’ve been able to paint the picture myself, where everything I want to say is there,” he told Clash. To Notion, he said, “[I wanted] to get my own story out more for me so I have something on paper for when I’m older.” And stories, he’s definitely telling. His writing is so immersive and literary and precise, it makes total sense when he talks about his love of Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Benjamin Zephaniah and Malcolm X. Romance, family, fathers - it’s all in the work, and it’s all honest. He’s a sentimentalist, and he owns it, telling Notion, “I’m soft as fuck, man! I don’t see it as an issue at all, know what I mean? I don’t see it as a negative thing. I understand how my emotions work; I think that’s a good thing.” (It is)

Red Bull asked Ben who his biggest inspiration is, and he answered clearly: “My mum is my main one for many reasons – she's like my best friend. She's also a sounding board and the best writer I know. Family is the most important thing for me – I play my brother new shit before anyone else, then I play it for my mum. I'll even rap them new stuff and see what they think. They’re honest and if they like it… then I feel like it’s probably good to go.” On writing, also to Red Bull, he told them, “When I get the right beat, I just sit down and get it cracking! I write most of my stuff at home or in the park near me – that’s where my dad used to go when I was younger, and I like to try and follow that tradition. So I go to the park like he did and look over London, writing and thinking.”

The cover of Yesterday’s Gone is a black and white photograph taken in the back garden of the family’s house. In it is everyone who’s made and making him. He told Interview Magazine, “Yeah, it’s like an extended family photo, so everybody who’s made the album possible, and built me as the man I am now. There’s my manager there, a couple of my best friends, my little brother, the people who do my PR, my booking agent, everybody who’s helped further me to this part. It’s important, because there are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes that people don’t necessarily know about, or get the praise that they deserve for. For me, it was important to say thank you to all those people. I wouldn’t have been like this if I’d have done it on my own.” Simply and perfectly, Ben told Notion, “I just wanted [the album] to sound like home.”

At Glastonbury this summer, after performing “Sun Of Jean,” he invited his mom out onto the stage. She wasn’t there to do her verse. Ben just wanted her there to receive the love and praise he knows she deserves. The crowd erupted. His Facebook profile photo is, currently, a shot of them on that stage, their arms around each other, Ben in his dad’s Cantona jersey. A family, literally, taking center stage.

“Am I vital if my heart is idle? Am I doomed?” “If lovelessness is godlessness, will you cast me to the wayside?” “Cradle me so I can see if I’m doomed.” Moses Sumney, his song “Doomed,” and the album it’s off – Aromanticism ­ - fuck me all the way up. I could say it better, maybe, but that’s just what’s happening. I listen to music pretty much all day, every day. Shit makes me cry and feel, but I rarely ever relate. I can recognize – “Oh, that’s a nice song about love!” and “Wow, they are really going through it in that breakup, huh?” Very infrequently, staggeringly rarely, do I hear something and think, “Ah, yeah, that’s me.” What Moses explores on this, his debut record, is me all damn over. It’s not neat or fun casual convo, but the interrogation of loneliness and solitude and incapacity for romantic love is something that is very #relatable to me. Heartless folk rarely get our songs, so, atop appreciating the record as the gorgeous, nuanced thing of music it is, I’m thankful for its objective.

To accompany the release of the album, Moses posted a note on his Tumblr. In it, he says something that could come from my diary if I kept one and was a more elegant writer: “Many of the origin stories about the inception of our species establish this blueprint for coexistence – that every body has an equal and opposite body, a destined companion without which we are incomplete. Our modern construct of romance still upholds this paradigm; romantic love is the paramount prize of existence. But what if I can’t access that prize?” He further writes, “This isn’t protest music, however, as much as it is process music. It’s the 2am sweat you wake up in, processing that lonesomeness might not just be a transitory hallway you’re passing through en route to inevitable partnership.” (Everything I read about him discussing the album makes me pause and sigh a little nervously) He jokingly/yet seriously suggests, “Alternative titles for Aromanticism could be: Narcissus; Don’t Touch Me; Please Touch Me; Sure, Let’s Touch Each Other but Please Leave Right After We Cum; Grey A; It’s Not You, It’s Me; It’s Not You – Actually, It’s Not Anyone; It’s Not Me, It’s My Childhood.”

Journalists love that he made this record. They – people, in general, really - get wild uncomfortable by the shit Moses is saying – both on the actual record and in discussing it. Me? I relish. I want to print out all his interviews and tape them across my walls to remind myself that, “Yeah, it’s cool.” A smattering of quotes from various conversations give deep, full detail to Aromanticism and make me scream in accordance, so here are some:

+ “When you tell people, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever fall in love with anyone’, one of the first things they say is, ‘Oh you’ll find someone’, which is so patronizing.” “Why can’t I know that? And why can’t I challenge it critically? I needed to release a work in order to have it be a conversation.”

+ “One of the many manifestations of social oppression is the idea that you have to prove that you’re one of the good ones, in order for humanity to be extended to you and people that look like you. Whereas I don’t have to prove anything and it should be OK to be anything. It should be OK to fit into the stereotype and it should be OK to not fit into the stereotype.”

+ “I wanted to write music that acknowledged the complexity of desiring something that maybe you didn’t have or something you didn’t fully relate to, or just for recognizing you’re on the periphery of something but not in a way that implies you’re too cool for it or too good for it. I wanted to be really honest.”

+ “Societal norms around romance to me felt really constricting and very narrow, especially for a time that feels like it’s so obsessed with dismantling societal practices that are considered the right way to do anything. But I feel like the conversation around romance was still stiff. I wanted to observe that, obviously through my personal life, but I was thinking about it in a social way. And to just kind of write about something that no one else is really writing about. Obviously people have written about dark shit or sad feelings or whatever forever, but I wanted to contextualize it in a way that felt new.”

+ “Saying the words ‘the world needs more love’ — using those words as a political device to imply that love all round is going to produce equality — is ignorant and unrealistic. The problem with the world is not that people who are different don’t have enough ‘love’ for each other. The problem is that the people with power insist on using it, and maintaining it for themselves. Ultimately, when people say ‘we need more love,’ what they are telling oppressed people is that they need to love the person that’s killing them. And what do they have to gain from that? A clear conscience? Some promise that in the afterlife, after they’ve been murdered by the people taking resources from them, that they’ll go to heaven because they have warmth in their hearts? It [goes back to] what we were talking about earlier with “Quarrel” — someone can love you and still be oppressing you, still not listen to your voice. Emphasizing love is a waste of time. What we need to emphasize is the dissemination of power, and a deconstruction of hierarchical structures that keep people at the bottom, and keep others at the top.”

+ “I think that romance is very obviously a political tool, and a capitalist device. I’ve even thought recently, it’s quite good for the economy: the amount people spend on weddings and gifts. Also, [romance] just can’t be separated from a patriarchal structure — like the idea that in a homosexual couple, one person is the masculine, and the other is the feminine. Ultimately we keep going back to those two figures on the wedding cake as the archetype, even for alternative relationships.”

+ “When you’re conditioned to look at something as normal, the sadness that can come from not being able to obtain that is super taxing on your mental health… It’s really unhealthy, the idea that you need another half to make you whole, but also I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to totally self-isolate. There needs to be a balance, and I don’t think there is, currently.”

Aromanticism was a long time coming, and it’s wholly his. He hesitated working with labels because he wanted the control. His sound isn’t definable. It’s this AND that. The dismissal of genre enhances his message to tremendous effect. Lyrically, it’s all concise. He has a degree in poetry that aids in his writing. His voice floats and takes you everywhere. When he sings, “Can I tell you a secret?” on “Plastic,” you’re on the edge of whatever you’re on, shouting, “YES!”

The record is only thirty-four minutes long, but it feels both longer and somehow so fucking brief. To Stereogum, he said, “I just want people to know it’s OK to be alone. I’m not saying it’s easy or it’s too difficult, because it can be both. I’m saying it’s an option. It’s not a choice that has to last forever either. I just want people explore being alone if they feel it suits them. There is more to life than who you’re with.” I tend to stray from sentiment, but it means a lot. This shit’s a journey – we can all agree. Aromanticism is my companion.

On September 27, 2016, when he was seventeen, Declan McKenna went on Later… with Jools Holland to play his song “Isombard.” At the end of the performance, he threw off his buttoned shirt to show a white tee with the words, “Give 17 Year Old The Vote.” Crucial elections were coming, and he felt frustrated being too young to vote for what would be his future. Coup De Main Magazine asked him why he felt so strongly that seventeen-year-olds should be able to vote. He responded, “They are going to have to live with the decisions just as long as anyone else has to, and I think the idea of youth and ignorance, all that sort of stuff is just straight wrong. I didn’t get to vote in the Brexit vote, I didn’t get to vote in the last election, and I felt kinda bummed out after both of those.” During the general election, he made his support of Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn well known, telling Source Magazine, “I think it’s important for me to try and get, at least those who can vote in my fan base, voting because I think there is a definite problem with young people not getting their votes in compared to older people. I think we need to, with this election more than ever, because it is so rushed and quite tactical in some ways. We need to make our voices heard more so than ever before so I’m going to keep promoting it.”

At the age of fifteen, Declan won Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition for his song “Brazil.” The track criticized FIFA for its corruption and destruction of the environment when it held its World Cup there in 2014. “I heard you sold the Amazon to show the country that you’re from is where the world should want to be,” he opens. It’s a cheeky and impressive song of arrival – both lyrically and sonically. The song gained him headlines, television performance slots and condescending news interviews. He became the newest recipient of the “Oh, wow, young people caring about things, how novel!” award that adults who hate their kids and don’t understand the Internet dole. Because of “Brazil” and the subsequent singles Declan released addressing social issues, he frequently gets asked about his role as A Voice Of A Generation (a title that, we all know, isn’t fucking real). To this, he told DIY, “There’s so much happening in this generation. So many different voices to be heard or that need to be heard more. Until all those voices can have their say, it’d be unfair of me to take on that title and be what people want me to be.” This is a theme on his debut record What Do You Think About The Car?

In an interview with FaceCulture, describing his songwriting, he simply said, “I just point out things I don’t like, generally.” He expanded to The Evening Standard, “I guess I haven’t had that much happen in my life that has been really awful or significant, but I like writing songs so I just look elsewhere.” To Source Magazine, he said, “I just write about what I write about – it depends, a lot of the time it can be political or social issues if people want to call it that. It’s kind of been part of my life growing up around a lot of media and being shown all sorts of different things that happen around the world. It all just comes into your song writing at some point and in the last couple of years just writing about the things that come out. Things that I’m passionate about, things I talk to my friends about all that sort of stuff, it stems from all over the place. I like to talk about stuff I actually care about when I’m writing songs.”

In the video for one of the album’s singles called “The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home,” Declan features friends and other young people sharing their thoughts on their generation and their disillusionment with those in charge. This is Declan giving space and platform. About the video, he told London In Stereo, “As cheesy as the concept of the song and video is, it’s just about gathering a group of people – just normal kids, none of the acting or big production or anything – and letting them talk. I could make an artsy video with some kind of deep meaning behind it, but the song is about wanting to have young people’s views highlighted, so I just thought: “fuck it.’”

The album is really astounding. He released many singles and previews leading up to its release that I worried I would be burned out before it even dropped. I wasn’t. When I first listened to it on its July 21 release, it felt fresh and new. The way he writes songs is so classic and immediate that it almost plays like a record you discovered in your parents’ collection that still holds up - except that it’s actually written by your classmate or little cousin. There’s a bit of ABBA and David Bowie, two of his favorites, all around the songs. The choruses are big, and you want to yell them. Lyrically, it’s earnest yet playful – songs have double or triple meanings. The “you” is sometimes us, other times him. He frequently is speaking to authority figures, political leaders, like on “Brazil,” “Isombard,” “I Am Everyone Else,” and “Bethlehem.” On “Paracetemal,” a single he brought out in 2016 with a stunning accompanying video by Matt Lambert, we see Declan exploring the violence that ignorance causes. Upon the release of the music video, he wrote a piece for The Guardian detailing how the death of Leelah Alcorn inspired him to create the song. It’s political in that it’s personal. He told The Evening Standard, “I was playing a show in San Diego, standing by the merchandise stand afterwards, and this kid came up to me, just said: ‘Thank you for Paracetamol,’ and started crying.” When Coup De Main Magazine asked him what his ideal relationship with his fans would be. He responded, “That’s an interesting question... I guess in an ideal world I could just put out songs whenever, and everyone would listen, then when I play the shows they would all turn up to the shows and then after the show we can all just hang out and go out to a pub!”

What Do You Think About The Car? is special for many reasons. That he knows the power and knowledge and desire of his generation and speaks to that – and highlights the ongoing conversations  – is a very noteworthy thing. He’s commenting on what outrages him, and he’s still growing. “Humongous,” one of the last tracks written for the album, sees him claiming more of himself and rejecting other people’s perceptions of him. In a zine that came with the physical version of his album, he talked about the album track “Why Do You Feel So Down?,” saying, “It’s a lot of things. I think I was just 16 when I started on this one. I was a confused baby.”

He’s eighteen now, so, yeah, his vote counts, but his work is clearly and thankfully not over.

In a video interview with Maggie Rogers on FaceCulture’s YouTube channel from March of this year, the host starts by saying, “So, what I want to start with is, you grew up around music—“ She interjects, “Well, that’s not really true.” Later, he asks if she had expectations about the music industry. She replies, “I studied the music industry, and I studied this field. And so, I knew what it entailed while I was going into it. My expectations basically… Yeah, everything I expected from being a musician has mostly been true. I find I get to make a lot less music than I thought that I would.” The interviewer suggests, “Just because of doing things like this?” She responds, “Yeah.” To Entertainment Weekly, she clarifies a myth about Pharrell Williams’s reaction to her song in the video that went viral: “I think it’s important to note that Pharrell did not cry. It’s very flattering that people want to add that detail, but there were no tears.” She did not know that he would be in her class that day. The songs that comprise her EP Now That The Light Is Fading were written in a three-week span during her senior year of college. At the age of seventeen, she decided that she wanted to pursue a career in music. She attended an intensive five-week course at Berklee College of Music in Boston, winning her session’s songwriting contest. At her boarding school, she made a makeshift studio where she wrote, produced and engineered her first full-length album The Echo. That record and another – 2014’s Blood Ballet – are both still available for purchase on Bandcamp. At NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, she studied the music industry, studio engineering and music production. Maggie Rogers did not arrive on June 1, 2016, the day the video of her and Pharrell was posted on Reddit. That’s just when we saw her.

There’s this myth that people buy into with her – that she’s some fresh-faced ingénue who Pharrell Williams found and the Internet made. It’s sexist, of course, but it’s also just fucking tedious. And incorrect. Reading and watching interviews with her, she spends a good deal of time answering questions about her interactions with Pharrell and clearing up misconceptions about who she is, where she comes from and what her art is. As someone who interned at Spin and ELLE with Lizzy Goodman, the author of the book Meet Me in the Bathroom telling the oral history of rock bands in New York City in the aughts, she’s familiar with artist mythology and its many gendered, diminishing qualities. When i-D asked her if she enjoys artist mythologies, she responded, “No. I'm really interested in stories, and the truth. I'm really interested in memoir… I'm way more interested in what actually happened over alter-egos and mythologies.” When asked if it’s exciting to have her own mythology, she said, “I think it's more exciting for you then it is for me. I didn't really choose that, or orchestrate it, so it's probably more exciting for the press. For me, it's neither exciting or boring, it just is what happened.” To ELLE, regarding this narrative built up around her, she said, "There's something about that that's so fucking dainty. It skips over the fact that I made my work." Factually, she was in a viral video with one of the generation’s most venerated and successful artists, and he seemed to really fuck with her song. Someone posted that video on Reddit, and it went viral. Less than a week later, she signed a licensing deal with Capitol Records. That’s just the story. To extrapolate from that is ahistoric and lazy.

Now That The Light Is Fading sees Maggie moving away from the sounds of her previous records. Here, inspired by her time in Berlin and France where she saw a similarity between the meditation she felt on the dancefloor and what she experiences on a hike, she’s playing with a dancier sound while still maintaining her roots in folk and natural imagery. Of her discovered reverence for dance music, she told Junkee, “There was so much joy, and it felt like this incredible form of mental health.” She told World Cafe that she didn’t change the way she wrote, she just added beats behind folk songs. Across the project, there are samples from her surroundings: her patting her jeans, voices in a marketplace, trees falling, rattlesnakes, a mourning dove. The EP is a real achievement and statement of singular vision. It’s earned her international acclaim and set her out on long months of gigging – all for songs she created to graduate from a program at NYU. It’s impressive. She told ELLE, "The treatments for the music videos I wrote when I was in school, along with a 15-page business plan, and a timeline, and merch designs. We've pretty much followed all of it—just on a way bigger scale." She’s been ready for this.

In a feature in The Village Voice, she said, “My entire life I have felt this incredible sense of predestination.” It’s not cocky, it’s just facts. In an interview for MTV, Meredith Graves asked, “What can we expect from you next?” Maggie responded, “I don’t know. You can consistently expect that I’m gonna make exactly what I wanna make, and I don’t know that is yet.” On September 20 of this year, she released a song called “Split Stones,” a track she also wrote in college. In an accompanying note, she said it’s serving as a goodbye, for the time being. “In all my years of creating, one thing has always been true: the music is always there, you just have to be still enough to listen. It’s time to take stock, check in, to find out who I am now, and to learn to tell the story of what it was to be me then,” she wrote. To Rolling Stone around the time of the EP’s release, she said, "I spent last summer having weird label dinners with 50-year-old men. There are a lot of things worse to be than the 'Pharrell girl.' I hope that'll wear off. I really want to make a great record, like my Rumours or Thriller.” Internet or not, Pharrell questions or not, wack mythology or not, Maggie will be here, doing her work. That’s the important part.

Kele Okereke knew he needed to get out of nighclubs. After promoting his solo record Trick in sweaty, late-night sets, he needed a breather. He told The Guardian, “It was incredibly enjoyable connecting with people on that level, but there was a point where I started to miss the intimacy of just performing by myself. I was starting to miss the guitar. You have to be careful with dance music because you can start to think it's the only way to make music.” In an interview with The i Newspaper, Kele, in discussing his move away from east London, said, “I needed a change of scene. I couldn’t walk around Shoreditch without bumping into someone I knew. I was fed up with the grey and people vomiting in the streets. I wanted some green and some anonymity, to insulate myself from the world.” He and his partner decided they were going to have a child, and it was time to put some things in the past, reconnect with roots and plan for the future. This whole process is detailed, with such beauty, on his 2017 record Fatherland. He told the NME, “Writing these songs and expressing these words and feelings, it’s something that’s vital for me. I’m recognising I’m entering into a different part of my life.”

To The Guardian, he detailed, “The style came to me when I thought it would be nice to make an album full of lullabies for my daughter. That was really how the album started - I wanted everything to just be my guitar and a voice. As the project went on it got bigger, I worked with other musicians. But I wanted to make songs that I could sing to her easily.” When discussing the influences of Fatherland, Kele cites Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Still In Love With You by Al Green. In pretty much every interview with Kele, questions arise about the “departure” in sound from his work with Bloc Party, a band whose albums and aesthetic are often pinned to a very specific cultural moment. When Attitude asked him about sound and genre, he responded, “I don’t give it too much thought and I don’t give it too much care. The fun thing about being a creative person is seeing how ideas come together. I’m not super reverential about certain disciplines. If I’m going to make a folk singer-songwriter album, how can I do it and still be me? If I’m going to make a tech-house electronic album, how do I do it and still be authentically me? That’s the only game plan really. It is just trying to make sure I’m still authentically expressing myself even though the backdrop might have changed.” His detachment from trend is inspiring. When The Guardian asked him how the music industry has changed during his time in it, he echoes his ambivalence, “Has the music scene changed for the better? I don't know so much about the current scene, I live in a bit of a bubble. I have my corner of the world and I'm allowed to do what I want to do. I don't go to gigs much anymore. If I go out it's mainly to clubs where you're surrounded by people who look and think like you. So I couldn't say what the boardrooms of labels look like - the ethnic make up of the people who make decisions about who to promote. I imagine it's still very much a white boys club. It definitely felt like that at the start of our career and I imagine not much has changed but I might be wrong.” Fatherland – and all of Kele’s work, really – is special because its made in this silo. This is what he decided to do because he wanted to do it. It’s simple, but it’s still really fucking rare.

Kele says that the first seeds of Fatherland developed while he was traveling with his dad to Nigeria to see his grandmother before she passed. He told Love Is Pop, “…the place is technically my home. It’s where my parents were born, and it’s where my family and my ancestors are from. It’s my Fatherland. This act of going to Nigeria, it just seemed like a very prescient title. It seemed to work on lots of different levels.” Fatherland’s “Yemaya” and “Road to Ibadan” most clearly ring of the trip to Nigeria. On “Road to Ibadan,” we get a travel log of his journey with his father. Kele told The i Newspaper, “It was important knowing that I was going to become a father to have the chance to correct some of issues in my relationship with my dad. Becoming a father has changed our relationship quite profoundly. It is nice to see the circle of life.” It’s a wonderful song about reconnection and home. In the past, Kele has spoken about the difficulties of his relationship with his father. Here, he sings, “I warned you I would be distant, but you coax and you charm, like a clearing in the trees.” Further, he wonders, “Do I start to see you in the furrow of my brow?” Kele has only visited Nigeria several times in his life, but he still acknowledges it as a home. In “Road To Ibadan,” we see another type of home and roots acknowledged. It’s moving, and gorgeously conveyed. “Yemaya” has Kele asking Yemaya, the Yoruba mother goddess often looked to during pregnancies, for wisdom and guidance, saying, “Oh, Yemaya, I’m listening to you.”

Elsewhere on the record, Kele revisits old relationships. On a duet with Olly Alexander, he meets up with a past lover to check to see if things are fully over. Olly asks, “Well, do you think about me still? Are you happy and fulfilled? Will I always have a cut that doesn’t heal?” “What could I say to have made you stay?” he wonders on the quiet and stunning “Portrait.” Corinne Bailey Rae shares a song and album highlight on “Versions Of Us,” a song that meets a couple at a desperate strain. “Will we make it though the year? We’re doing all the things we said we’d never do. Bickering behind closed doors. Now, the truth might hurt but lies are worse. Turn to face me. What have I become to you?” It’s a stirring, exceptional song. It’s a clearing of the air, a forced bridging of a muted gap. It’s a common concern on this record – drawing a line under things. Perhaps the most obvious song that deals with this necessity to move on is the single “Streets Been Talkin.’” In it, Kele says, “By now you should have known that all that glitters is not gold. And there are times we must say, ‘no.’ Our fathers warned us so,” and “I’m trying to kick a habit. Oh, Xanthi, can’t you see what these years have done to me? It’s bad.” This move is in actions and attitudes, yeah, but it’s also geographical: “From the palace of Versailles to the streets of Peckham Rye.” “Songs like ‘Streets Been Talkin,’’ ‘Do U Right,’ and ‘Portrait’ seem to be about saying ‘goodbye’ to aspects of my life, or the person I was. That's what Fatherland feels like to me, really. It feels like the ending of a chapter and the starting of a new chapter.” Savannah, his daughter and the recipient of the song named after her, is a main character in this new chapter. “The New Year Party” has Kele settling in, talking to a lover on the phone during an eventful party, suggesting, “Let’s make a pact to never spend the new year apart.” There’s the past with its people, and there’s the future with its. As he says on “Royal Rein,” “all eras come to an end.” Indeed.

There’s been some confusion about when Fatherland was written – some people assume it was after the birth of Savannah and documents Kele’s experiences being a new dad. The songs, however, were written in preparation for the birth. Because of the past content of Bloc Party’s work, fans and journalists expected a record reflecting the current political times, specifically a Brexit UK and Trump America. To this, Kele told The Guardian, “It's odd with me because Fatherland was recorded in the summer of 2016, so although there were rumblings on the horizon I didn't think that we would be in this position. I didn't think he would actually become president. So it feels slightly odd to release Fatherland now because the vibe is quite chilled, but I don't feel chilled. I feel the opposite of chilled. What I'm working on now is going to very much express that anger.” They asked him if fatherhood has changed his worldview. He said, “What I'm writing now for the next project is more concerned about the world we're living in right now, and, like many people, I'm quite frightened about the world we're living now and we're going to be leaving to our children. So yes, I guess becoming a father has changed my perspective, if I'm honest.” In time, it seems, we’ll get that politically charged record. For now, we have Fatherland – a quiet, intimate, honest look at making space for new birth, both literal and metaphorical.

When MUNA went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show to perform their single “I Know A Place” on February 6 of this year, they did a thing. After the song’s bridge, lead singer and main lyricist Katie Gavin added an extra bit to the song. “Even if our skin or our gods look different, I believe all human life is significant. I throw my arms open wide in resistance. He’s not my leader even if he’s my president.” Then, she tweaked the final chorus’s lyrics from, “I know a place we can go,” to, “Let’s build a place we can go.” It was seventeen days after the inauguration of Donald Trump and around a week after the introduction of his attempted Muslim ban and the responsive airport protests, and MUNA made a statement that resonated – with their fans and beyond. Today, it’s rare for an article or interview with the band to not talk about the performance. i-D recently asked the band about it, and Katie responded, “We knew a long time in advance that we'd be playing on the show around album release, so we decided that we couldn't not do something. We asked if we could bring this message to the show with the understanding that if they said no we'd just do it anyway. But they said yes and it showed us that there are a lot of people who want to do something but just don't know what to do, and if you bring them an opportunity that they can simply say yes to, then, honestly, it's really easy.” They gave further detail to LADYGUNN Magazine: “We all tried to center ourselves before that performance. We were in the trailer and we had a moment to ourselves. We took the moment to recognize that this wasn’t an event to drive our egos; it was bigger than that. It was supposed to be a message saying that we have a deep privilege to share; we went there with that intention.” See, this was a moment, undoubtedly. They were a new band, making their television debut, and they used it to send a message of solidarity and community to minority groups feeling the weight of the new administration. That’s cool and big, but it’s also just them. They make music for these people – disenfranchised, oppressed, othered folk – already. They weren’t hopping on anything; they were already there.

MUNA, made up of Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson, released their debut full-length record About U in February. The songs that comprise it are, people call them, “dark pop.” They’re feminist, queer poetry of struggle and survival and reflection. They hit you in a wave, taking you to a place you’ve been or are currently, without forcing your hand. The language the band use is so specific to liberation-focused work that, inherently, they are anthems. To i-D, discussing the band’s resonance with the current times, Naomi said, “I think we were afraid of being a political band or a queer band, but we decided to be ourselves and talk about the things that are important to us. And then the world toppled in on itself a little bit and people started relating to us... maybe they were more open to it, or maybe they just needed it more.” To LADYGUNN, Katie stated, “They [the songs] were mostly written about personal crazy times we had. But it’s kind of eerie how it becomes emotionally relevant in that way. The ultimate goal was to touch everyone and make them feel the songs, the music, and the art.”

The band are aware of how their listeners intake their music. To The Line of Best Fit, Katie said, “When I think of a location attached to the album, I think of bedrooms.” They know that they make songs of interior thought. “I love seeing people working on themselves and using our music to do that,” Katie told DuJour. Of their aim, she continued, “We hope people feel empowered and capable of expressing themselves in new ways. Maybe gain some language about what they’re going through with our lyrics. I love when people tell me how they didn’t have the words for what they were feeling but our songs delivered them.” 

In an interview with Katrina Lat for Live In Limbo, she asked the group about a label people apply to their music – “queer pop.” Naomi accepted it, saying, “It’s all good. We’re cool with the labels. They’re irrelevant, but we’re cool with them.” They get that people need their songs, and if they need to call it a thing to make it significant to them, that’s fine. People can listen to their songs as #theresistance, but, already, they were songs of resistance. MUNA don’t resonate with the times; the times resonate with MUNA, and, in a year when reaction was artificialized to be current, it’s good to know the artists who’ve already been here, doing the work of truth.

This September while she was in Los Angeles, Marlene wrote, in a series of tweets, “Why does everyone in LA trying/claiming to have as many professions as possible?? I'm not sure I trust you being good at all that tbh #chill Like, are you a model just cause you take selfies for you ig? Is that how this LA thing works? Then let me give you my LA version of who I am and what I do... In LA i'm a singer, songwriter, producer, director, stylist, seemstress, MUA, graphic designer, model, actress, cook AND human. Did you get that? Or do you want me to repeat? Well to make it easier, let's just say I'm an artist. Ok bye.” The thing here is, Marlene actually is all those things. It’s not a stunt; it’s just a fact. Her art, it’s hers, and she’s doing the work for it.

She grew up in a small town, Jönköping, far away from the city. “I… think that growing up in a small city where no one was really cool or famous or anything shaped me… We were always out biking or picking flowers in the woods all days and didn’t really care about anything else, if you know what I mean,” she told Galore. She voiced to Bon Magazine that she has neither the time nor the patience for major labels, saying that, yeah, the money of a label and their ability to easily get songs playlisted would be nice but, ultimately, she’d have to give up too much control. On April 5 of this year, she tweeted, “I’ve been working very hard, since I release my music on my own label. I am so tired right now but I love it! Haha. It’s so worth it.” When Harper’s Bazaar premiered her music video for “Next To Me,” she said, “I asked Adrian Wigerdal, an incredible photographer in Sweden and someone that I’ve worked with a lot, if he would be up for making a really stripped-down video, just him and I. No director, no stylist, no make up artist, no producer or anything. We had to be really creative and work with what we had. I always love challenges like that!” She ends her comments with, “DIY FTW.” In April, across her social media, she shared a picture of a bouquet of flowers she received with a note, in Swedish, saying, “Congrats and long live your independence.” Marlene’s total authorship and say over everything she’s doing makes her music the utterly special thing it is.

This year, Marlene released a collection of songs called Sweet and a single “Miss You A Little.” She’s making pop unlike anyone else. She pulls inspiration from all across the map, citing Solange, Kanye, Janet, Frank, Jhené Aiko, Ariana, Niki & The Dove and Devonté Hynes as influencing her sound and approach. She told Galore that one of her top played songs on Spotify is Alicia Keys’s “In Common,” which, when you experience Marlene’s pop, makes total sense. She stated, “I’ve developed a lot since my last EP, and I’m trying really hard to be more minimalistic in general than I was before. I’ve learned a lot about letting music breathe and to let it have some air. I want my voice to have the main role. I’ve been super inspired by dance music the past years, like the UK underground scene with two-step and other 90’s vibes. I’ve also been super inspired by gospel music and older soul music.”

The songs on Sweet are about the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new one with someone she met on the day of her breakup, after her own gig. "I just expected myself to be single for... I don’t know how many years! It was overwhelming. It feels weird to talk about love, because it’s the foundation in everyone’s life. I was supposed to focus on myself after that breakup - 'Now I’m just going to go into the music full-time, and spend all of my energy on myself!' But I just got into that new relationship, and it was crazy. And really good. I just had to write about that,” she told Billboard. To Galore, she detailed, “’Next to Me,’ ‘New Love,’ ‘Aurora’ and ‘All I Want’ are all about falling in love with someone, and about those first days or months when everything’s new and you know too little about this person, but you still know that all you wanna do is to be with him or her. I played a lot with that scene of waking up next to someone after the first night together, in a new bed that feels like home and where you feel safe. Like you’ve made it through a rough and dark winter and then you wake up to the first day of spring and you realize you’ve made it through.” Of another song off Sweet, she said, “I wrote ‘Beautiful Life’ when I really wanted to break free from everything and do things for myself, so that’s the ‘breaking free song.’ A duet with a pitched down Ji Nilsson, the track is a glorious, hopeful slice. She sings, “You know that I want you, but I need my freedom,” and “When we’re in the right place and in the right time, you and me will have that beautiful life.” “Sweet,” she tells,” is that post-breakup anthem. That, “Oh, shit, I’m moving along from that hurt, and I’m gonna be okay, wow!” She sings, “I just wanna have a good time. I’ve learned the beauty of a goodbye.” It’s a glittery, summery thing that sounds like the experience it’s describing. Sweet dropped at the start of June, and its place as a summer soundtrack was already written. On Instagram, after the project was out, she wrote, “Thanks for all the love on the EP - I'm completely overwhelmed. I've read every comment, every dm, every tweet, every mention and it's gone straight to my little heart that now feels like cotton candy.” The love for Sweet was so real that she’s currently nominated for “Pop Of The Year” at the P3 Guld Awards. Expressing her thanks on Instagram, she once again drove home how much this means to her as an independent artist: “I'M NOMINATED FOR ‘POP OF THE YEAR’ for my EP ‘Sweet’ at the @p3guld awards ! ! ! Can't really describe how much I appreciate this and how proud & happy I am. You should have seen my tears when I found out about this... For an independent artist like me this feels huge. Thank you to everyone involved in making the ‘Sweet’ EP with me. You know how much I appreciate you all? I'm forever grateful.”

This refrain of thanks is common on her social media. She knows it’s a rare thing she is – an independent pop maker who produces and writes her own material. Her success is a testament to her uncompromise. On October 13, she thanked us again. “Thank you soooo much for all the overwhelming love on ‘Miss You A Little’! Your words are more valuable than gold to me. You have no idea... Releasing music on your own label is fucking awesome but sometimes I just feel so vulnerable and don't know if I might be the only one who understands myself and my music and if it will make sense to anybody else, but then I get your response, your love and I feel like I'm connected to you and that's all I need to continue.” “Miss You A Little” is, in my ears, her greatest achievement to date. It’s a damn epic and earning her, such deserved, praise.

On November 5, she gave us a hint of what’s to come in a post on Instagram. “I have so many songs to write! I have a document in my phone where I collect all of my ideas and fragments of lyrics and concepts of songs that I come up with during the days, that I'll use when I sit down to write. That document has 75 sentences/ideas atm just waiting to be turned into full songs. All I want to do right now is to lock myself in to the studio and write write write wriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite!” Knowing her work ethic and singular, unrelenting vision, we’ll get those songs. She says a full album is coming next year. After this year, with her artistry coming into masterful focus, I’m sure it’ll be a classic.

LÉON is a songwriter. It’s factual, but I mean it in an elevated sense. The way Amy Winehouse, Burt Bacharach, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks and Janis Joplin are songwriters is the way LÉON is a songwriter. People write because they need to, and people write because they need to. There are songs, and there are songs, you know? As a listener, there’s shit you play in the background while you work on a task because you gotta have some noise, and then there’s the shit you desperately hit play on because you’re feeling a way and the only way to access the depth of the emotion and have some catharsis is to blast something by someone who gets it in a way no one else does. LÉON needs to write songs, and she makes those latter type.

A child of musical parents, she grew up with yearly birthday gifts of The Beatles or The Beach Boys records. She learned and imitated all of Stevie Wonder’s riffs and had a deep fascination with Janis Joplin. By the age of seven, she was making her own songs. Around the high school time, she was songwriting and serving as lead vocalist for a large soul/jazz band. After getting into the prestigious (only thirty applicants are admitted to the school) Musikmakarna in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, where students are given studios to find themselves as artists, she left the band. The school is located on the sea and often so cold and dreary that instructors write chalkboard reminders to the students to take vitamins, making it, really, the ideal place to have to hunker down and define yourself. Here is where, it seems, LÉON was born.  She met Agrin Rahmani, her producer, at the school, and they started to collaborate on pop songs. One day, they said fuck it and uploaded one called “Tired of Talking” to Soundcloud. Of the day of the upload, LÉON told C-Heads Magazine, “It’s funny. We were drinking beer in a park and we had a few hundred plays and we were like ‘Yeah! Bring it in!’ And then I don’t know what happened, but something happened. I did not expect that at all.” Something happened, indeed. Buzz, meetings, a signing. Her debut EP Treasure came out on October 23, 2015.

Now, in 2017, we’re sitting with a trilogy of works - Treasure, For You and Surround Me, the second and third both being released this year. The songs are honest and urgent. They’re somehow vague yet specific – all necessary. They’re songs. Whens she describes them, she keeps a bit back. We’re not getting dates and times when you ask her about a particular lyric, but we can get a brief of what occurred. We’re not owed anything, and it’s fine because it’s all in the work. To C-Heads Magazine she said, “I just went through all the feels and sometimes I’m not always good at talking about feelings. I found friends later on in my early twenties who made me become better at talking about emotions, but I tend to put everything into songs.” To Flaunt, she tells, “I’m writing for myself, and I don’t really think about the fact that other people will hear it,” yet, “I love knowing people relate to my music. It assures me that I’m not a crazy person. It’s nice to have people tell me that I’m not alone.”

The songs on For You read as conversations after a relationship’s conclusion. Closure is liquid, and LÉON explores that so beautifully here. There are questions you wanna ask, but you can’t or won’t. There are things you want to hear – validation you need – that you won’t get. On the title track, she starts with, “I’m all up in these feelings.” She states, “You found someone, someone new. Someone who could fuck ya better.” It bristles because, oftentimes, it’s true. She asks, “Tell me, was I special?” It’s that peace of mind you need but can’t get, the words that go unasked. On “Sleep Deprived,” she’s stuck on a relationship that passed. “Sometimes I think of us before it all got bad. It left me long ago, that kind of love we had.” There’s some movement onward, but a retained resentment. “Don’t wanna hold a grudge, still it is hard sometimes. So, if you settle down, I’m gonna burn your house.” It’s the type of lyric you’d scream at the gig because, yeah, you’re over that relationship but you’re also not. There’s no finite end to this shit, and she gets that so profoundly. Of “Liar,” she told TIME, “It’s basically about how a lot of people judge people who are in relationships if somebody is unfaithful. It’s easier to judge somebody and think that the person is weak. Everything is not black and white; it’s not easy. It’s about being torn, somewhere in between, and not knowing if you should stay or if you should go.” She sings, “I’ve asked a thousand times just for one reason. If it’s love, it is rough. Why am I not enough?” When people leave our lives, we wanna know if we meant anything. It’s natural. We’re all busy people and choosing to invest in someone isn’t a light thing. On the last track, “Think About You,” she documents the way conversation shifts in the after. “Your words, they burn. I read it twice, the way you write is different. You’re cold, and it’s cruel acting like I am someone you never knew.”

On Surround Me, she told The Last Magazine, “The songs I put on this EP are all songs that I wrote this year, so they still feel very fresh for me emotionally.” “No Goodbyes” seems to put further words to sentiments expressed on For You. She sings, “I am no good at goodbyes. I never was, and I don’t know why. Tell me, tell me that it was love. That it was real. Remember all that you have me if you still want me.” On “I Believe In Us,” a stunner and favorite of mine, she takes a step back. She’s addressing, reassuring. “What is it I’m seeing? Boy, is that defeat? Words can be deceiving. Baby, look at me.” Again, here we have a dialogue that’s needed, questions that require answers. Of “Body,” she told Milk, “I guess I was feeling pretty nostalgic. I started thinking of a summer a few years ago, when I used to be working as a waitress. I think a lot of people have experienced that super intense ‘summer love’ that you know, deep down, will never last. But when it’s over it feels like it’s the biggest heartbreak you’ll ever go through.” Less forlorn, there’s a playfulness to this. Still, she has questions, “Tell me something, was it ever love? You said this city never felt like home. If I see you, will it feel the same, or will you miss me? Or was it a game?” To conclude the EP, she places a song that is markedly different in tone from her others. Here, there’s a hint of carefreeness, of living in the moment. Of not needing answers. Describing the song, she said, “It’s about feeling free and letting go in ‘the heat of the moment’. I feel like everyone’s been in a situation where you’ve decided to stay home alone, but then something happens and you change your mind and end up having the craziest night out.” We’re on a journey with her in this song, expertly portrayed in the video. She sings, “Wasn’t gonna go out. I was gonna stay in. Another Friday night on my own. Then I started drinking. My phone started ringing. I got my shit and walked out the door.” She calls it her favorite song. There’s levity, hope here.

In general, of her work, LÉON told FaceCulture, ““There’s a lot of confrontation in my songs that I usually didn’t use in real life. So, I felt like I could confront people in my lyrics.” The great, classic songs do that, I think. They’re the ones where, when something happens or you feel a way, you know you need to hear that particular song. There’s a release when you play it and sing along. She’s saying it, but so am I. LÉON writes her songs because she needs them, but so do we.

If their story was a film, it would forever be my favorite. It has all my ideal elements: slow burn romance, music, travel and gay leads. Tim Nelson and Sam “Bolan” Netterfield met at school. Bolan’s mother recalls her son coming home one day and telling her he met a boy who played the piano really well and that he wanted to learn to play like him. Tim and Bolan became fast friends. They started spending more and more time together and eventually playing music together. The group – since 2013, called Cub Sport – took off. Buzzy EPs turned into hit singles turned into a highly anticipated debut album. Cub Sport, made up of, yes, Tim and Bolan but also bassist Zoe Davis and drummer Dan Puusaari, was officially a successful project. The band was together a lot, recording and touring and promoting, and Tim and Bolan were spending pretty much all their time together. Both admit now that, at the level they could have clocked or allowed it, they realized quite early on in their friendship that they were in love with each other, but, both raised in super religious environments, were not willing or ready to address that let alone their gayness. While on tour in America during 2016, however, things unsaid finally were spoken. They describe it all much better, and it makes me swoon, so here are some quotes:

Tim to OUT Magazine:

“I went on a writing trip in the middle of 2015 for about a month and I missed Bolan (Sam) so much. I started to recognise that I was in love with him, but I had a lot of fear and denial to work through. In the middle of 2016, we went on a two-month overseas tour. Being away from the reminders and restrictions of normal life back home was really instrumental in us feeling like we had the freedom to explore and pursue what had been building between us.

The Orlando attack happened while we were on tour in the U.S. and it was not only a reminder of how fleeting our time on earth can be, but a big wakeup call that if we just embraced who we really were we could also try to help inspire and encourage young queer people facing the same internal battles we were both experiencing. We went to Pride festival in Denver around the same time and the atmosphere was really supportive and beautiful.”

Bolan to The Guardian, discussing the impact Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life had on his relationship with Tim:

“I think I had buried so deeply within me what I really wanted that it took me seeing it play out in fiction to actually have the clarity and perspective to look at my own situation and give me strength to realise that life is too short not to follow… I think I realised early in the book I was drawing direct correlation with those characters and with myself, then seeing one character die really shook me. I was suddenly hit with the notion that if Tim was to die, how could I have not said something. I realised I had to put everything on the line and I was willing to potentially jeopardise and lose our friendship to get everything that I suddenly realised I wanted and needed.”

On the final night of their American tour in that summer of 2016, after a long night of partying and celebrating, Bolan, as told to The Guardian, finally addressed his feelings to Tim. He recalled saying, “’I don’t want this to ruin our friendship but I want to be with you, I love you and I want to be with you forever,’ and then Tim started to cry and said, ‘So do I.’” It’s adorable and happy and lovely. Bolan, in an interview with triple j about their relationship, said, “We fell in love over the course of about eight years.” That’s some fucking cinematic shit.

They’ve been so generous in sharing the personal details of their story. It influences their sophomore record BATS that they self-released this year (we’re getting to that), but it also is a generous, helpful decision to be so open. This year in Australia’s clusterfuck of a marriage equality “debate,” a lot of queer kids were left confused and isolated and scared. To see Bolan and Tim happy and proud, as they’ve said, meant a lot to their young fans. Beyond the adorable story of it all, it’s been for good.

Now, the record. BATS, sonically, is a shift from Cub Sport’s previous work. Tim, the lyricist and vocalist for the group, cites A Seat At The Table and Blonde as huge inspiration for the project. Content wise, the record documents their romance. To Notion, Tim said, “It more-or-less follows my personal journey from the moment I admitted to myself that I was gay, to coming to terms with being in love with my best friend/bandmate Bolan (Sam), finally acknowledging the situation a year later and to then coming out and getting together.” He further told Music-News, “Bolan’s and my story rolls out over this list of songs, more-or-less in this order – ‘Chasin’,’ ‘Look After Me’, ‘Crush,’ ‘Solo III,’ ‘Bats,’ ‘Give It To Me (Like You Mean It),’ ‘O Lord’ and ‘Banyo Blue.’” And if you read the lyrics to those tracks, the details – starkly honest and evocative – are all there.

“Chasin’” was the song Tim wrote after returning from his trips to Los Angeles and London to write, when he realized his feelings for Bolan. He said he wrote it without fully understanding what it was saying at the time. Now, it’s clear. It’s a song about fear and confusion. “I’m trying to be honest and live deliberately. Is it delusional to think that I can do this? Time always makes me doubt what’s coming out me.” To Notion, Tim said, “Sam had heard ‘Chasin’’ in its original demo form for about nine months before we actually had the conversation. He said he already knew what it was about so I guess that helped inform him that what he was feeling was reciprocated, even though I hadn’t had the courage to say it out loud in words.”

On “Look After Me,” Tim is sensing something. “There’s something in the way you look at me like I’ve never done wrong.” It’s visceral – that, “I think maybe he feels this way because I see this look in his eyes, but am I just seeing things because I want to see things or am I seeing the truth?” It’s a rhythmic, interior processing.

“Crush” sees that post-tour, mid-celebration conversation when they first opened up to each other. “And you whisper to me 'Why are you crying?’ I think it's from the years of trying to try and push you from me. I didn't know who I was meant to be. Did I crush you with the things I wouldn't say? Did I hurt you on the way? How am I so lucky that you waited for me.” We’re there, hearing and seeing this moment. It’s a lot.

“Solo III” is, indeed, inspired by Frank Ocean’s songs on Blonde. “We keep blazin', playing ‘Solo,’ and now we've got our song. And I believe in me and you. We make each other strong. And here it is, my first love song. It didn't even take that long. Now I'm not laying solo.” This marks a first – them, honest and together, celebrating their love and its newness. To Junkee, Tim shared the importance Blonde and “Solo” played in their relationship: “That album came out pretty soon after [we got together] and for the first few times, every time we got to ‘Solo’ I would cry. I was like, ‘I can’t believe I get to have what we’ve got.’ It immediately became our song, but the lyrics didn’t match up with our situation at all, and so I wanted to take from that and make it out own. And I think the melody’s just different enough that we could get away with using it.” Tim asks, “Oh, what did I do, do I deserve you?” This line’s a reminder that, yeah, we’re getting the timeline of their relationship, but Tim is writing these songs. We’re getting his feelings on what’s going on here – the disbelief, the joy.

“Bats,” if you’re a fan of the pair’s Snapchats, makes total sense. For the unacquainted, Tim clarified to Music-News: “The house we were living in when I recorded BATS was just up the hill from a creek that had a huge colony of bats living along its banks. Bolan and I would walk our dogs down there each evening and watch the bats fill the sky (usually soundtracked by Frank Ocean – ‘White Ferrari’ playing off my phone). I’d often put it on my Snapchat story and one day someone from Texas replied and said that they’d see the same thing there. It inspired the opening lyrics of the song ‘Bats.’ ‘Bats in the sky, it looks like Texas. I like this time because it reminds us we can be anywhere, that doesn’t change us, nothing can change us now.’ ‘Bats’ the song felt like it really represented the vibe/story of the album which is why we decided to make it the title track. There was always something exciting and emotive about seeing thousands of bats fill the sky and I wanted that visual to represent the collection of songs.” The lyrics refer to “Solo” and Tim’s overseas writing trips again, saying, “I've been on flights. I've seen some sights, but I didn't feel it. Just there to write. If I fly again, it won't be solo 'cause that got me so low.” “Bats” is a quiet, peaceful celebration of their togetherness and inseparability. He says, “You’re the reason that I keep on tryin.”

The next song on their timeline is the record’s most chilled track. Co-written and featuring vocals from Sarah Blasko (an eternal favorite of mine), “Give It To Me (Like You Mean It)” is a flat-out love song. An adoration song, even. “I like that light on your face. You are my favourite place.” “I could just watch you move. Everything you do just makes me…” It could be cringe, but, fuck, it isn’t. It’s really rather beautiful.

“O Lord” is the first single they chose to bring out ahead of BATS. It was a brave choice seeing as the first thirty-seven seconds are Tim and Bolan harmonizing without any instruments, but it was also a way of announcing, “Hey, things are a bit different now.” The visuals for the track are as stunning as the song, showing Tim and Bolan embracing in some muted neony, pastelish colors. This is their “radical softness.” This is the Solange influence. Tim told The FADER, “This video challenges everything I grew up believing about masculinity, beauty and homosexuality — it's super liberating to create this video and feel free from judgment, both internally and externally.” Lyrically, this marks a step away from the portrayal of the new, intense love. Tim says, “I was free to be my true self, I was finally in a relationship with the love of my life and I had full love and support from my friends and family, but what I didn’t expect was the realisation that when you get everything you’ve ever wanted you suddenly have everything to lose. This song ended up being my way of grappling with those feelings.” To the world, as a return, as an inviting in, as a reinvention of sound and style, “O Lord” really fucking works.

“Banyo Blue,” the final track on the standard version of BATS, leaves us with the most updated glimpse into their relationship. This is them settled. This is, “Yeah, the world is really intense and not wonderful, but, here, with each other and choosing each other, we’re gonna be good.” Tim asks, “Can we be a story throughout the ages?” He says, “I write about you. I could go on for pages,” and “I just kind of feel like I have found my light. The rest’s not perfect, but it’s fine when you’re tight.” Here, this love that they have so damn graciously shared with us and painstakingly and beautifully documented for us, is good. It’s ongoing and it’s committed. The confusion and shame of the past is gone, and shit’s still bad elsewhere, but in this honesty and in this sharing, they’re gonna be okay. (Since the recording of BATS, Tim and Bolan got engaged and are getting married next year, a thing they can now legally do because Australia just legalized marriage equality [s/o to queer Australians dragged through that dehumanizing process, btw])  I’m emotional.

Now, I gush. The details of Tim and Bolan’s story make the record a living, immersive, gripping experience. It’s truly the shit great films and novels are made of. If you don’t know what every song’s about, it’s still a moving work. In an essay he penned for The Line Of Best Fit, Tim said, “For me, getting to a place where I could really connect with myself and write, unguarded, from the heart has been a journey that has taken me over a decade.” I truly love their past material. Their first full-length album This Is Our Vice is a record I still listen to every week, without skipping a song. The songwriting is clever and the lyrics are insightful. But, here with BATS and (again) the brave decision to share their story and illuminate the details of each song, there’s something else happening. It’s, as they dubbed, truly some “radical softness.” Tim said, “BATS is a product of queer love and I hope it can be a comfort and encouragement for the LGBTQI community and our allies during this time.” It is.