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.

I Quit is the upcoming fourth studio album by American rock band Haim. It is scheduled to be released on June 20, 2025, in the United States by Columbia Records and internationally by Polydor Records, as their first studio album in five years, following Women in Music Pt. III (2020).

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.”

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s <i>to hell with it</i>, and her first studio album, 2023’s <i>Heaven knows</i>. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.”

She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, <i>Fancy That</i>—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name).

Basement Jaxx’s first album, <i>Remedy</i>, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?”

As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

Karly-Marina Loaiza (born July 17, 1994), known professionally as Kali Uchis (/ˈuːtʃis/ OO-chees), is a American singer and songwriter. She debuted in the music industry with her 2012 mixtape, Drunken Babble, which was described as "genre-defying"

The decorated pop songwriter arrives in the spotlight with a full-length debut whose plush R&B and live-band arrangements strike a tone that’s classic, sexy, and understated.