For Cryin' Out Loud! Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 FINNEAS “I think I am a songwriter first, which is always how I’ve felt about myself,” FINNEAS tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. The 27-year-old has already made his name as a producer through his chart-dominating, award-accruing work with his sister Billie Eilish. But when he was finished with his workload for 2023, which included working on Eilish’s blockbuster album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and scoring the Apple TV+ show Disclaimer , he wanted to, as he put it, “dive back into my stuff.” So he went to work in a new space—a studio outside his home laboratory—surrounded by musicians with whom he felt comfortable feeling out new material, flexing his muscles as a producer while also testing out his songwriting chops. That collaborative ease is audible on For Cryin’ Out Loud! , an inviting album that combines soft rock’s slickness and indie’s choppy guitars with unexpected twists like the jittery epilogue to the chilled-out sophisti-pop f
The Forest Is The Path Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Snow Patrol Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody says the band’s new record was a process of two extremes. The first was the group’s initial attempt at making an eighth album, an undertaking that hit a dead end and left the indie-rock trio from Northern Ireland wondering where to go next. “It was genuinely nobody’s fault,” Lightbody tells Apple Music. “It was a constellation of things but it was a chaotic mess and we were very stressed. We were also on a deadline—technically, the record should’ve come out a year earlier. We now know never to work to a deadline again, because that’s no way to make art.” Lightbody and bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid regrouped and gave it another go. In Stormzy and Adele producer Fraser T. Smith, they found a collaborator who made the creation of The Forest Is the Path feel like a comparative walk in the park. “The second time we made it was so calm and it all filtered down from the way Fraser not