Fcukers arrived almost as explosively as the music they create, crashing down in New York City like a supernova to serve up electropop made for late nights and even later mornings. The trio of Shanny Wise, Jackson Walker Lewis, and Ben Scharf first emerged in 2023, but on their debut EP, <i>Baggy$$</i>, which came the following year, they sound like veterans of the indie-sleaze revival prevalent in the hippest corners of New York and across the country.

EP opener “Bon Bon” is a shuffling dance cut built around Scharf’s propulsive percussion and low-end bass wobbles that will shake even the sturdiest club speakers. There’s an intoxicating nihilism reminiscent of turn-of-the-millennium acts like Death from Above 1979 and Basement Jaxx that runs through the track and the entire record. On “Homie Don’t Shake,” which has become a catchphrase of sorts for the band, Wise sings a mantra that might as well be a mission statement for the band: “Silk’s real, leather’s fake, say you’ll DJ at my wake/Blacked out, show up late, ’cause homie don’t shake.”

Summer Walker spent nearly a decade after the release of her 2018 mixtape <i>Last Day of Summer</i> wearing her heart on her sleeve. The R&B powerhouse has invited listeners into her tumultuous world through honest lyricism, storytelling, and diary-like ruminations that chronicle the messiness of romance, self-love, and everything in between. Her 2019 debut album <i>Over It</i> and its 2021 follow-up <i>Still Over It</i> offer a layered narrative of self-discovery as she navigates her ever-evolving perspective on the sobering truths about relationships and emotional boundaries. However, with <i>Finally Over It</i>—the final chapter in the trilogy—she retires the self-proclaimed lover-girl persona and chooses herself, no matter what that looks like to others. Along for the ride is an all-star lineup of guests, including Latto, Mariah the Scientist, Doja Cat, SAILORR, Chris Brown, Anderson .Paak, GloRilla, Sexyy Red, Monaleo, 21 Savage, Brent Faiyaz, Teddy Swims, and frequent collaborator Bryson Tiller.

Across 18 tracks, <i>Finally Over It</i> is divided evenly into two parts, For Better and For Worse, which mirrors the album art’s wedding theme and alludes to the project’s unifying idea: the cynicism that can come from the pursuit of romantic relationships and the choices that are left when love feels impossible. The first half showcases Walker’s ability to save herself from entanglements that no longer serve her (“Robbed You,” “Situationship”). “No,” which interpolates Beyoncé’s 2003 song “Yes,” is about standing firm against one-sided demands: “You want me to cater to you, never tell you no/You want me to lose myself just to keep your home/But the answer’s no.” Yet on “1-800-Heartbreak,” she croons about her loneliness after the end of a relationship. Not every song on the first half deals with fed-up declarations and self-assured boasts. Walker still leans into her lover-girl ways (“Baby,” “Give Me a Reason”) and gives second chances (“Heart of a Woman”), but even the most broken relationships are opportunities to learn something new.

The second half, For Worse, finds Walker giving up on finding unconditional love, trading the idea of a traditional relationship for one that prioritizes material comforts. She ditches the idea of being with her usual type on “FMT” and lets it be known she’s only into men who can provide for her needs financially on the swaggering “Baller,” while keeping her walls up even though she might be falling in love (“Stitch Me Up,” “Allegedly”). Throughout all the ups and downs within the different vignettes Walker explores, there’s solace in knowing that through all the choices depicted—good, bad, and possibly terrible—she emphasizes choosing oneself, for better or for worse.

The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP <i>Okey</i>, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On <i>Big city life</i>, their second studio album (following 2021’s <i>Believer</i>), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen.

On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.

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 <i>My Method Actor</i> things are getting a bit existential. The excitement of her debut—2019’s <i>Miss Universe</i>—and the desire to push against it by doing something totally different with 2022 follow-up <i>PAINLESS</i> had left her in a jarring place when she and her collaborator, producer Wilma Archer, got into the studio. Writing music was not glamorous, it was simply her job and her life. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she says. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?”

But this is an album that revels in ruminating on these heavy questions, and we hear an artist—and a person—growing as a result. Teeming with beautiful, accomplished melodies, the album waxes and wanes between scuzzier sounds of frustration and something far more polished and freeing. “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she says. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.”

Across <i>My Method Actor</i>, Yanya dredges through all the feelings and upheavals, realizing that there might not be a linear, clear-cut happy ending. “Maybe it’s about letting go. Maybe there’ll never be a point where I feel totally comfortable on stage—or even being a person,” she says, laughing. “These transformations and realizations will happen so often you can’t let it upturn your whole world every time. You have to take it as it comes.” Read on as she guides us through that journey, track by track.

<b>“Keep on Dancing”</b>
“It feels like an introduction. It nearly didn’t make it to the album—it was going really well but it kind of hit a wall towards the end where it wasn’t leveling up the way some of the other songs were, so we restructured it. It starts by asking lots of questions, it sets up the tone of the record. There’s a bit of anger, a bit of resentment. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be clever, it’s more like a natural flow of ideas. It’s an energy.”

<b>“Like I Say (I runaway)”</b>
“I had a really fun time writing over the initial idea that Will [Archer] had sent me, making all the bits fall in the right place, picking up on the instinctive harmonies and the rhythm of it. The chorus took us both by surprise—it took a while, it felt like it was gonna be really instant but it kept falling on its face. It’s quite a simple structure but the phrasing of it makes it interesting.”

<b>“Method Actor”</b>
“I felt like I was definitely constructing a character in my head, imagining I was in someone else’s life. It was like you’re a flower on the wall, but you’re the narrator at the same time. Feelings of anxiety, social anxiety…it also feels a bit violent to me. There’s a lot of violent imagery and it sounds a bit aggressive. It’s kind of like a dance in the first verse and then the chorus hits you, the guitar wakes you up. It’s quite visceral. There’s always a kind of release that comes with writing something a bit more aggressive. I try not to be an aggressive person, so maybe this is a nice way of letting it out. It feels a bit cathartic.”

<b>“Binding”</b>
“It started with the guitar loop which you hear first. ‘Binding’ was actually the demo name for this, but it really stuck with us because it sounds like a constant loop, constant binding, something twisting and turning. It was really instantly very pretty, and it was enjoyable trying to come up with melodies. It feels like you’re needing something more, wanting something more—something strong to numb the pain, or something stronger to feel. Like you’re numbing yourself on this weird journey. I always imagine it like you’re in a car, and the road’s going on and on and on—and it’s not necessarily an enjoyable journey.”

<b>“Mutations”</b>
“This one, I always imagine a siren—there’s kind of a warning going out. You’re being told to take cover or escape. There’s an urgency in the music and the message. Before the sunset, before the end of the day, before the lights, you need to find a way to disappear or to hide. It’s dark, but in the song you’re either receiving or sending the message—so you’re trying to help somebody, or they’re trying to help you. So there’s something nice about that. But there’s something sinister about the reality the song is set in—it’s very rhythmic, there’s not very many breaks, it’s tight and enclosed.”

<b>“Ready for Sun (touch)”</b>
“The song itself is quite cinematic—it’s sonically quite different to what’s come before, it’s a bit more modern, less grungy. It’s about being ready to step outside again, ready to be less concealed, more exposed. You wanna feel sun on your skin when you’ve been in the shade too long. I say ‘exposed,’ but also it’s about feeling safe enough to come out into the open. It’s wanting to feel touch again, wanting to feel things again. It’s raw feeling, raw emotion.”

<b>“Call It Love”</b>
“I was thinking about a phoenix bursting into flames. Metamorphosis. There’s a lot of talk about flames and fire in this album, but this one definitely fits with the journey themes of the record too. There’s a deep knowing that it’s OK to trust yourself and what you know to be true. It’s being your own guide. You have a sense of self and, even if it’s blurry, you have a center. The overlap of desire and shame, too—how we sometimes feel ashamed of acting on our desires. So the phoenix comes to mind because it’s about allowing your calling to guide you somewhere, to let that consume you and destroy you so you are born out from the ashes. It’s a bit dramatic. But sonically, it’s a lot more chilled out, there’s a groove to the way the guitars intertwine.”

<b>“Faith’s Late”</b>
“I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are quite intense, so I almost want to avoid it. This one is talking about identity. Even the word ‘faith’ feels quite loaded. It’s about belonging, or not belonging, to somewhere—never feeling like you belong somewhere. Always feeling like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s also about being disappointed in the state of the world, and sort of wanting to give up. But the string arrangement at the end is particularly beautiful, I think. In contrast to the themes, you’re trying to make something beautiful out of something you’d prefer to avoid. And so there’s still life, there’s still beauty, even continuing out of the mess.”

<b>“Made Out of Memory”</b>
“This has a lighter touch. It has an ’80s pop kind of feel production-wise, but the core lyric is based off someone saying how humans are just made up of memories of other people. So when you’re trying to leave somebody behind or breaking up with somebody, if you’re not seeing someone anymore—even a friend or a family member—it’s kind of hacking off a piece of yourself each time. How do you break up with somebody without breaking up with yourself? There’s an art to that.”

<b>“Just a Western”</b>
“I remember Will sent me the guitar ages ago and I really liked it, but nothing was automatically clicking. But I liked the unusual chord pattern. I was thinking of the old Western movies that would come on daytime TV when I was younger. They’d be black-and-white films, cowboys riding off into the sunset. This song has that imagery in it for me; the sunset, something ending. One of the lyrics that jumps out for me is ‘I won’t call in a favour/Won’t do it for free anymore.’ It’s saying you’re not going to do somebody else’s dirty work for them, you’re stating your own new boundaries.”

<b>“Wingspan”</b>
“We were originally trying to make a full song, and it wasn’t really working in a long-form way. Realizing that the song was maybe a condensed version makes it more impactful. I don’t really write short songs like this. A lot of the lyrics are based on this poetry attempt from a couple years ago—so it was like a puzzle coming together, finally having a place for these words to go. It’s about realizing that you’ve ended up somewhere but it’s a port for another place to take off—are arrivals and departures the same thing?”

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

抗癌斗志化作高亢喉音，一腔热血直面往昔苦乐与得失。

The Geese frontperson has a few tricks up his sleeve—starting with the title.

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

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

Soaring, feel-great songs are Good Neighbours’ calling card and their live gigs are full of community and camaraderie. They’d been a duo for less than a year when “Home” went viral on TikTok in early 2024, but Oli Fox and Scott Verrill kept up the momentum and set to work making their debut album, <i>Blue Sky Mentality</i>.

“In a perfect world, there would’ve been more time, because we’ve only really a band for about two years now,” Fox tells Apple Music. “It felt like the least we could do for all the new people that have started to follow us, in terms of putting all the songs in one lovely body of work and get it out there. We’re going to just crack on into album two now.”

The duo, who met when they were working in East London studios next door to each other, make the process sound as relaxing as their songs. “We tried to book a few days out and write stuff and that didn’t really work for us, so I think we did it in a scrappy way,” says Verrill. “A couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, sending voice notes. That worked for us instead of being locked away, trying to force something out.”

Beneath the easygoing exterior that’s reflected in their bouncy sound lie some tough-to-tackle themes. “Ripple” sees them reaching out to a friend sinking into grief, and the uplifting anthem “Keep It Up” was written on a particularly bad day for Fox. “It’s making life’s grittier problems seem a little more manageable and a bit more accessible to talk about,” he says.

Read on as Good Neighbours take you through <i>Blue Sky Mentality</i>, track by track.

<b>“Keep It Up”</b>
Oli Fox: “Scott was in the studio and I came in to moan about being fired from my fourth part-time job in a coffee shop. I was honestly useless—I couldn’t make a coffee to save my life, and I didn’t know anything about beans. I really wanted to do music, but couldn’t find any way to make it financially viable. Scott had those piano chords running that you hear in the beginning of the track, so I took them into the studio and started wailing down the mic. Immediately, it created this vibe where me and Scott were like, ‘Actually, this feels like something special.’ It was uplifting, but you knew there was a grit and a grain of truth in the lyric as well.”

<b>“Skipping Stones”</b>
Scott Verrill: “We started this one together. It was a chance for us to lean into production, get a little more electronic and have some fun on the music side.”
OF: “We grew up loving Passion Pit and MGMT, and the more you dig into those people, you realize they’re baring all with their lyrics as well. I guess that’s something you don’t really pick up on when you’re younger.”
SV: “When we were making the project, we weren’t down, but we were a bit fed up and struggling to make ends meet, and then this became exciting and positive and a chance to make something that uplifted us a bit.”

<b>“Ripple”</b>
OF: “We started this before we knew that Good Neighbours was going to be a band. My friend had been really struggling to talk about his dad—who was like my second dad—passing. He was like, ‘I feel like every time I bring that up, it’s like I drag you down with me.’ For me, it was quite the opposite. I remember saying to him, ‘Oh well, whenever you come up for air, come and have a chat.’ That phrase started this image in my head of how grief can feel like you’re being submerged, and no one else can understand you because they’re all on the surface. I sent Scott the demo, and he flipped it on its head and, in true Good Neighbours fashion, made it into this optimistic-feeling track. I really love the juxtaposition of what the production does and what the message says.”

<b>“found u/me”</b>
SV: “Listening back to the album a few times, it felt like it was such high-energy and very indie and splashy, so we thought we’d try something that was a bit more heartfelt and organic. It was the last song we wrote for the album, and it popped out really quickly. We’re quite comfortable with a love song if it feels right, and this did.”
OF: “Yeah, we’re quite shameless. It’s OK to be in love, guys.”

<b>“Walk Walk Walk”</b>
OF: “We were lucky enough to work with Justin Tranter, who’s written some ridiculously good songs [for Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, and Justin Bieber]. Everything from the 2010s onwards. As songwriters growing up, it’s a dream to go and work with someone like that. Justin was awesome, and we wanted to create that college party sound of the noughties, where we’ve watched videos of Yeasayer, MGMT, and The Go! Team. Having a proper soaring synth melody has always been something we’ve aspired to do, but we needed to caveat that with a pretty solid pop song on the top. Justin brought those words out of us. It was like going back to school, working with someone like that, but we learned so much in one day. That song just goes off live.”

<b>“Kids Can’t Sleep”</b>
SV: “We wrote this in LA. It was a weird time, because we arrived on the day of the fires [in early 2025] and everything kicking off, so we flew into the chaos. It was born out of hiding away from the fires and feeling a bit weird about everything going on.”
OF: “I’d been seeing loads online of people trying to come forward to talk about their mental health and older people were like, ‘Oh, this snowflake generation.’ I was filled with rage at that time, and then we arrived in LA and literally the world was on fire, so that’s what we’re talking about in the chorus. It’s a cry for a bit of normality again.”

<b>“Home”</b>
OF: “‘Home’ was written around the time of losing my mate’s dad. I went back to London a day early, and I saw my girlfriend at the time and hugged her outside the station, and my whole body relaxed for the first time in three days. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe home can also be within your mate or your best friend.’ That was an epiphany for me. The next day, me and Scott happened to be in the studio and it completely fell out word for word, so there was obviously something that needed to be said.”
SV: “We never imagined one of our songs would go viral, so it caught us off guard. It was wild—the only reason we stuck it up online is because one of our friends persuaded us to use TikTok. So there was no big plan, it was an accident.”

<b>“Small Town”</b>
SV: “This is more of a scenic one for us, painting a picture instead of a specific story. I think it feels like the opening scene of a coming-of-age movie.”
OF: “There was one person I never got over, and it was quite a young breakup when I first moved to London. It was about knowing that you were maybe the problem in the relationship, but realizing it four years too late. I think when you go through your first proper heartbreak, London suddenly becomes the tiniest village ever and everyone knows about it. So it was all about drawing a parallel between the small town that I’m actually from and how London can shrink when something goes awry.”

<b>“Starry Eyed”</b>
OF: “We wrote this on tour with Foster the People when we were 70 percent into finishing our album and we felt like we had a lot of bangers and high-octane songs. Then we were working with Joe Janiak [writer and producer for Lewis Capaldi, Ellie Goulding, and Sigrid], who’s more of a friend than a collaborator. I’d hung out with him before in LA, and he had this weird banjo that had been restrung with nylon strings, and it’s the instrument that plays throughout the track. Scott played the first three chords and we wrote the whole melody. I was like, ‘Actually, for once, rather than just layering it up, let’s keep this as stripped as we can and just tell a fun love story.’ People have really resonated with ‘Starry Eyed’ because it’s so different to the rest of our stuff.”

<b>“People Need People”</b>
OF: “‘People Need People’ has always gone down quite well live, so it felt right for the album. It sets up <i>Blue Sky Mentality</i>. We had the demo and we didn’t do anything with it, but when we decided we were going to make an album we revisited it.”
SV: “I remember when we did the chorus, we were like, ‘Oh, this feels like a <i>FIFA</i> [the video game series] song.’ And then we found out the other day it was on <i>FIFA</i> [<i>FC26</i>] and we were like, ‘Great!’ It’s the second track we’ve had on there [after ‘Daisies’] and they asked us back, which we’ve been told is a rare thing.”

<b>“Left Hand Man”</b>
SV: “We started this on a writing trip in Cornwall. It was a noodle that turned into this fun song, and for us it’s almost an interlude. It’s a chance to breathe on the album, rather than have a load of loud noises being shoved in your face.”
OF: “Obviously, making a big song is the funnest thing to do, but when you put them all on an album together you’re like, ‘Oh no, this is quite sensory overload for people.’ So it was fun to write some smaller moments to bring the listener back down to earth.”

<b>“Suburbs”</b>
SV: “We’re both from the suburbs [Fox is from Essex and Verrill just outside Croydon, South London], and I think it’s a weird feeling, being on the outskirts, with all these music and art scenes in London that you’re not really a part of. You grow up just wanting to be a part of it, and even now we’re in the circles, it makes you more grateful for where you came from.”
OF: “I lived in quite a rural area and it was hard growing up wanting to chase your dreams. Most people from my area have very honest jobs, so you don’t come across many people that are like, ‘I want to go sing and dance on a stage.’ It’s nice to come back and feel like I proved a younger version of myself wrong.”

<b>“Wonderful Life”</b>
OF: “We were working on this the week that ‘Home’ went viral. The whole album touches on the idea that life’s going to be a rocky ride, but boil it all down and we’re so lucky to be here. At the time, I’d seen this thing from Brian Cox [the physicist] talking about how we’re on a planet, and we’re all technically made up of stardust. He was like, ‘That in itself is so ridiculous. What more could you possibly want?’ So on the days where you miss your bus or get fired from your job, it’s crap in the moment, but when you zoom out, it means absolutely nothing in terms of how lucky you are to just be here in the first place. That was a cry to myself, and also to all of our friends that were going through the mill at the time, because they’re awesome people.”

<b>“The Buzz”</b>
OF: “I think we impressed ourselves making ‘The Buzz’ because we’ve only ever made really big shiny things and that one felt like, ‘Oh, we are actually half-decent songwriters that can just write good songs.’ So it was nice to not shower something in production.”
SV: “When it came to the last track on the album, it was between ‘found u/me’ and ‘The Buzz.’ On our favorite bands’ albums there’s always been the ballad, and we felt like we’d not nailed that before, so we wanted to tackle it. We both have a soft spot for the song.”