F=1/T

SABLE, - EP Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Bon Iver Justin Vernon was just a few years removed from self-releasing his now legendary debut—2007’s   For Emma, Forever Ago , recorded in wintry solitude—when he won an actual Grammy Award for its more polished follow-up in 2012. He’d become famous enough to watch his backstory become a punchline and his likeness parodied by Justin Timberlake on   Saturday Night Live . (Timberlake would attempt to borrow the same mystique for his 2018 album,   Man of the Woods .) You can understand why Vernon would want to change the subject for a time. For nearly a decade, he’s obscured some part of himself, hidden behind symbols and numbers, bandannas and bandmates, vocoders and vast collages of bleep and bloop—not to mention a still astonishing list of celebrity collaborators to whom he’s been more than happy to cede the limelight, Taylor Swift chief among them. The three-song   SABLE,   EP is immediately notable because it finds Vernon running it back, retu

King Gnu Dome Tour THE GREATEST UNKNOWN at TOKYO DOME Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 King Gnu

Moon Music (Full Moon Edition) Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Coldplay

The New Sound Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Geordie Greep UK rock polymaths black midi accomplished so much in such a short time—and at such a young age—that the group’s sudden announcement of their indefinite hiatus in 2024 couldn’t help but raise questions. Geordie Greep’s solo debut   The New Sound   doesn’t so much provide answers as it does multiple pathways forward. black midi acolytes will recognize a few stylistic touches here and there that have carried over to Greep’s boundless musical map: jazz fusion breakdowns; multi-suite songwriting indebted to prog’s knotty weirdness; and Greep’s increasing penchant for all-caps storytelling, which previously reared its head on black midi’s swan-song-for-now   Hellfire   in 2022. Otherwise,   The New Sound   lives up to its title by reintroducing Greep as a musically omnivorous showman, as he leaps into the spotlight with outsized bravado and a wild-eyed sense of sonic fearlessness. Featuring an expansive cast of supporting players and ses

Changes All The Time Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 James Bay

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 Last Flight Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Public Service Broadcasting

Smitten Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Pale Waves On their second album, 2021’s   Who Am I? , and follow-up   Unwanted   (2022), Pale Waves presented a tough, punk-pop- and rock-informed exterior for singer Heather Baron-Gracie’s emotionally bare confessionals. Fourth album   Smitten , however, finds the Manchester quartet back wandering through the gothic spires and ethereal dream pop that had marked 2018 debut   My Mind Makes Noises . Epic, swooning, and romantic, the likes of “Perfume,” “Gravity,” and “Seeing Stars” sparkle with an iridescent color palette, blending shades of jangling ’80s indie pop, Cure-like atmospherics, and lush, Cocteau Twins-inspired washes of sound. “I wanted this record to sound very British,” Baron-Gracie tells Apple Music. “The visuals of the album came first for me before the music. I wanted it to look grand, like the English countryside, and romantic and feminine and just beautiful. That came before any of the music. Once I had that imagery, I moved on to th

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

My Method Actor Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Nilüfer Yanya The idea of method acting is that you “become” the character you’re playing and the lines between self and acting dissolve. On Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, she’s been considering how that relates to her own work. “There’s a parallel between not acting anymore and my relationship with music and writing and performing,” the London singer-songwriter says. “I don’t really feel like I do a performance, so I don’t really feel like I’m trying to be someone else. That’s why I find performing quite challenging sometimes because I just have to be myself on stage; there’s no costume or masks that I put on.” Maybe that’s why on   My Method Actor   things are getting a bit existential. The excitement of her debut—2019’s   Miss Universe —and the desire to push against it by doing something totally different with 2022 follow-up   PAINLESS   had left her in a jarring place when she and her collaborator, producer Wilma Archer, got into the studio

Hear Everything Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 sleeply

The Alexander Technique Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Rex Orange County “It’s mostly about trying to find peace and be well,” says Alex O’Connor.