Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz.

Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing <i>AR</i>), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “[‘Diet Pepsi’] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.”

Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by <i>Addison</i>—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time.

The songs on <i>Addison</i> are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.”

As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”

The cover art for <i>Virgin</i>—an X-ray of a pelvis with a visible IUD—was a far cry from that of Lorde’s bright, beachy third album, 2021’s <i>Solar Power</i>, whose sun-soaked, jasmine-scented songs drew from Laurel Canyon folk and Y2K soft rock. Looking back, that album’s free-spirited imagery was a bit idealistic—a projection of how the New Zealand native turned New Yorker wished she could be. Her fourth album, as she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, is a portrait of the 28-year-old singer as she is, without edits or apologies: “Kind of like a photo of yourself that you don’t love, but captures something true about you.”

The resulting songs, written between 2023 and 2025, are forthcoming and visceral, trading <i>Solar Power</i>’s New Age-chill for beats you can feel in your gut. (It’s her first album since her 2013 debut not co-written and -produced by Jack Antonoff; instead, she shared production duties with the LA-based electronic musician Jim-E Stack.) Surrealist introspection gives way to throbbing bass on opening track “Hammer,” where a walk down Canal Street ripples with psychedelic visions. “I had just come off my birth control, and I could not believe how I was feeling,” Lorde told Lowe about the song’s inception. “Everything was pure possibility. That first sound feels like it’s coming from a very guttural place in the body. My sister said, ‘It sounds like it’s coming from your womb.’”

Cue the aura readings, 3 am cigarettes, broken mirrors, pregnancy tests, ego death. On “Man of the Year” and “Favourite Daughter,” questions beget more questions on the subject of what it means to be a woman, and moreover, a woman who’s now been famous for nearly half her life. The latter is at once a love letter to her mother and a meditation on being a teenager thrust into global pop stardom. “There’s been this dynamic for the last 10 to 12 years—and then further back—of wanting so badly to be loved, and to get this approval, and to be the favorite,” she told Lowe. “And it was really moving to me how, even as I was singing this song about my foremost idol and the person who I think is the most amazing in the world, I was also singing about what a crazy thing it is to have happened to you, what happened to me at 16.”

Now the superstar finds freedom in the freefall: “I’ve been up on the pedestal/But tonight I just want to fall,” she sings on the shuffling “Shapeshifter.” “I still don’t know what happens when you put out a record that is like this,” she admitted about the unfiltered portrait <i>Virgin</i> presents. But in its full transparency, she arrives at something like peace.

Lorely Rodriguez’s fourth album is a dazzling showcase for her unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance.

1. I LUV IT (feat. Playboi Carti)
2. Chanel No.5
3. pink xoxo
4. HE KNOWS (feat. Lil Nas X)
5. Twentysomethings
6. Dade County Dreaming (feat. JT & Yung Miami)
7. koshi xoxo (feat. BLP Kosher)
8. HOT UPTOWN (feat. Drake)
9. Uuugly
10. DREAM-GIRLS
11. 305tilidie
12. B.O.A.T.
13. pretty when i cry
14. June Gloom

Imagine Dragons’ sixth studio album LOOM represents the pinnacle of their artistic journey of self-discovery and marks the best body of work they’ve ever made. LOOM, produced entirely by Imagine Dragons and their longtime collaborators Mattman and Robin, finds the perfect balance between the classic sounds that have made them superstars and the freshness that brought them joy in the studio. featuring 9 brand new tracks including hit single “Eyes Closed”, LOOM signifies new beginnings on the horizon – the excitement for a new day, moments yet to come.

Billie Eilish的第三张录音室专辑《HIT ME HARD AND SOFT》，由Darkroom/Interscope Records发行，是她迄今为止最大胆的作品，汇集了风格多元却又和谐统一的曲目合集——最好从头到尾完整听遍——正如专辑标题所暗示；新专在歌词与声音上会既有力量又不失温柔地触动你，同时跨越不同音乐流派，不拘泥于流行趋势。在她的哥哥、也是唯一的合作伙伴FINNEAS的帮助下，两人在家乡洛杉矶中一同完成了这张专辑的创作、录制和制作。新专继《WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?》和《Happier Than Ever》两张广受欢迎的专辑之后，进一步拓展了Billie Eilish的音乐世界。
新专将于5月17号发行 共收录10首曲目

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