Dua Lipa announced her third studio album, titled Radical Optimism

Ariana Grande is used to being in the spotlight, but over time, she’s gotten savvy at playing it. The pop star’s seventh studio album <I>eternal sunshine</I>—a lightly conceptual riff on the head-spinning 2004 film starring Jim Carrey, of whom Grande has said she’s a lifelong fan—feels like a mind game itself, blurring the lines between real-life references and theatrical bits. It arrives in the middle of a whirlwind tabloid-packed stretch—Grande married, divorced, and scored a starring role in Hollywood’s big-screen adaptation of <I>Wicked</I>—and she knows fans have questions. What’s true? What’s real? Ari gives a lot of things on this album, but answers aren’t one of them, a cunning reminder of how little transparency celebrities actually owe us. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Grande leans into the project’s thematic murkiness. “true story,” she says, is “an untrue story based on all untrue events,” and when asked about her own experience with the Saturn return, an astrology milestone referenced in the album’s only interlude, she shrugs. “It was chill. Nothing changed. Pretty uneventful.” She says she finds freedom in art because “you can really pull from anywhere,” and she describes the film as another “lovely costume” to wear. Her answers have flickers of defiance that feel like power. Whoever said albums had to be tidy, or true? “It doesn’t have to be an everlasting love story,” she tells Lowe. “Love is complicated. Showcasing both sides of it is what I tried to [do].” If there’s one thing these tracks make clear, it’s that she’s still Ari on the mic—she’s still hitting those high highs (“eternal sunshine”); still finding release on the dance floor (“yes, and?”); still sifting gold out of ’90s R&B (“the boy is mine”), a sequel to the leaked 2023 track “fantasize.” Her favorite? “imperfect for you,” a tribute to the friends who make up her inner circle. “We’re so lucky to have loved ones who are accepting and real with us no matter what,” she says. “We live in a time where everything is boiled down, but that song demands room for nuance, humanness, and complexity.”

“The main theme of the record is desperation; you don’t hear an unreliable narrator but someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don’t.” Geordie Greep Geordie Greep (guitarist and vocalist in black midi) today announces his debut solo album ‘The New Sound’ and shares its first single ‘Holy, Holy’. Following three astonishing albums with black midi, most recently 2023’s ‘Hellfire’, and almost non-stop worldwide tours for near-on five years, Geordie Greep has somehow found time to record his first solo album ‘The New Sound’, an album that has allowed him scope to explore creative ideas like never before. It boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time. Geordie Greep; “With recording ‘The New Sound’, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. And with every impulse I had, I was able to completely follow it through to its conclusion. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it's good to do something else, to let go of things.” Over thirty session musicians were involved in the making of the album, on two continents, in São Paulo and London. Geordie Greep; “Some of the tracks we had recorded already, elsewhere, but it just wasn’t right, so we re-recorded them with new people. Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days. Then we did the overdubs later, in London.” Geordie Greep has had plenty of practice with black midi over the years in performing musical and lyrical Cruyff turns, full of stop-starts, blasts and bangs and whispered soliloquies. Here the method is employed to ask: what part of the narrative should we listeners believe, or take as our emotional crutch? The mercurial, insouciant tone set in ‘Terra’, or the gruesome imagery it is juxtaposed with? After all, Greep tells us, this is the story of “the museum of human suffering.” Consider, too, the strange emotional undulations created in ‘Through a War’, where the music makes a very polished stab at aping a soul revue; or a salsa class. It’s there to give colour to a set of imaginings which include cannibalism, being boiled alive, and a woman giving birth to a goat. You’re never quite sure when, or whether, you are supposed to be shocked; or laugh. Even if, as with the latter, Geordie Greep gives us the punchline; “And that’s how I spent my adolescence.” Street life is all around: the listener is thrown into a world of cafes, bars and clubs, visit theatres, cabarets and strange museums, or rented rooms. Here we see our heroes carry out a series of naughty assignations, military cosplay or socio-economic triumphs. Greep; “I was often thinking of walking through a city, and thinking about a million dollars, showing that kind of feeling, you know?” Taking on The New Sound in its entirety can feel like you are trying to cross Piccadilly Circus after a skinful. Single ‘Holy Holy’ is possibly the best example: has urbane romantic fantasy ever sounded this way? Probably not since Noël Coward. This story of an imaginary liaison in a nightclub is soundtracked by ’noughties indie pop chords and bravura Latin big band arrangements - including a three-piano attack (Steinway, Bechstein, electric). ‘Motorbike’ sees a change in vocal duties: as bassist and album producer Seth ‘Shank’ Evans starts up a doleful soliloquy about not getting what he wants. It’s certainly an album that fully engages the listener, throughout the eleven tracks. Greep; “I was worried about the length in terms of not overblowing it. But I’m also really bloody bored of listening to music and, for better or worse, knowing in advance what it means or what it’s trying to do. All my favourite music is about the listener coming to terms with what is going on. My favourite singers, like Peter Hammill or Nat King Cole, are literally one of a kind. I love that. Especially with lyrics, where you’re not sure what they’re going on about, but you know it’s not just abstract thoughts.” What next? Could we see The New Sound as a live concept or is the album going to stay forever in our collective imagination? Greep; “My plan is to ‘do a Keith Jarrett thing’, have a different group of session musicians in a different place and lean into the fact that we’re not going to get it the same.” How can anything ever be ‘the same’ with Greep at the helm?