@Cody Douglass

The songs you can’t do without. The more you use Apple Music, the more essential they become. Refreshed every Tuesday.

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In many ways, Kelsea Ballerini is the quintessential millennial country singer. Since her arrival in 2014, she's proven herself a musical polymath whose full-bodied vocals bring together modern pop, R&B, and country with a naturalness that suggests she's been steeped in this blend since birth rather than consciously melding genres together. She's the kind of singer who sounds just as comfortable joining New York EDM duo The Chainsmokers on the club-friendly "This Feeling" as she does tucking into a majestically melodic power ballad like "First Time Again" with country superstar Jason Aldean.

Sam Smith first gained significant traction singing on a pair of dance hits—Disclosure’s 2012 single “Latch” and Naughty Boy’s “La La La” the following year. The London-born singer revealed that elastic falsetto, but didn’t <i>quite</i> hint at the sadness that would define their outrageous success to come. That arrived with “Stay With Me,” on 2014’s Grammy Award-winning <i>In the Lonely Hour</i>, a meditation on unrequited love, and “Too Good at Goodbyes,” from the heartbreak-inspired follow-up <i>The Thrill of It All</I>. This second album saw Smith—by then an Oscar winner for 2015’s Bond theme “Writing’s on the Wall”—open up about instant fame and embrace their status as a gay role model, against a backdrop of stirring, gospel-infused balladry. Smith’s third album should have arrived in early 2020 in the form of <i>To Die For</i>, but, amid the global pandemic, it was delayed, reworked, and renamed with the more sensitive title of <i>Love Goes</i>. “When I look back at <i>Love Goes</i>, it reminds me of the courage it took,” Smith told Apple Music. “Each time I make an album, I learn to like myself a little more. The more I make music, the closer to myself I feel.” Indeed, they very much accomplished that on their fourth album, 2023’s <i>Gloria</i>, which featured “Love Me More” and the transgressive Kim Petras collab “Unholy.” “I don’t want to sound cheesy, but <i>Gloria</i>, for me, is like when a butterfly leaves a cocoon,” Smith said. “That’s what I wanted this record to feel like all the way through. I wanted there to be strength within every single song. I feel like my true artist self has arrived, in a way.” A year later, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of <i>In the Lonely Hour</i>, they reissued the album with a new recording of “Stay With Me,” some of its lyrics rewritten to reflect Smith’s nonbinary identity.