@Ian Cook

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

Whether it’s a weekday morning or Saturday night, get going with this personalised mix of upbeat music. Refreshed every Monday.

Toto stormed out of the L.A. music scene in the ‘70s with the fiery overdrive and bouncing piano of their burner “Hold the Line”. Soon after, they filed the rough edges off their sound and began crafting dreamy soft rock hits. Their pop leanings are clear on the funky glitz of “Pamela”, with its high-gloss production and dazzling synths, and shine even brighter through the dense instrumentation and punchy horn blasts of “Rosanna”. But it's “Africa”, with its toe-tapping percussion and soaring chorus, that will make you hit repeat.

In 2005, the actor/screenwriter J.D. Ryznar wrote, directed and produced a TV series for the Los Angeles short-film festival Channel 101 called Yacht Rock. The idea was to tell comically overblown backstories about the creation of a strain of ultra-smooth music from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins—to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 description of obscenity, you know it when you hear it. As entertainingly corny as some of the tracks here are, they also represent some of the era’s more serious songwriting efforts, exploring themes of longing and regret with a muted tension not even the slickest production could fully smooth over—a sense of contrast and depth the music doesn’t always get due credit for. Interestingly, as mainstream as these tracks were, their richest second life came in the form of 2010s electronic subgenres like vaporwave, which took the soft-focus quality of the music to surreal extremes. For now, though, lock in, settle down and surrender to the breeze.

Between their bluesy swagger and David Coverdale's banshee wails, Whitesnake make pop-metal with a commanding edge that few of their peers have matched. The neo-Zeppelin stomp 'n' roll “Still of the Night” and the riff-fuelled arena anthem “Here I Go Again” became hits thanks to the band's unique ability to balance hooks with fierce playing. The roots of this fierceness go back to the Brits' early years; they spent their first decade bashing out lean, snarling hard rock like 1980's “Fool for Your Loving” before becoming superstars in the late '80s.