@Srinika Reddy

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

Created with FreeYourMusic.com where you can transfer playlists to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and others

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

Olivia Rodrigo’s star began its ascent long before <i>SOUR</i>’s release in 2021: She grew up in Temecula, California, taking piano and voice lessons, and she drew on both her acting and musical chops in her first big gigs, the Disney Channel’s series <i>Bizaardvark</i> and then the leading role in Disney+’s <i>High School Musical: The Musical: The Series</i>. Behind the scenes of her budding small-screen career, she wrote, wrote, and wrote some more—in her journals and at the piano, too.</br> “I guess I’d been writing songs forever, like since I could talk, before I could actually write them down on paper,” she tells Apple Music. “But I learned how to play piano when I was nine, and so I started writing songs on piano then. That kind of made it like a real song, I suppose. I think songwriting’s always been my first love, and that’s the thing that I identify the most with and take the most seriously in my life.”</br> By the time she went through a terrible breakup at 17, her notebook and piano were waiting for her. “drivers license,” her debut single, arrived on January 8, 2021, and listeners immediately found themselves rapt in the passenger seat of her post-heartbreak journey. “drivers license” managed to telegraph exactly how Rodrigo felt while tapping into something bigger than her own hurt. When she sings of driving through familiar neighborhoods and reminisces about the plans for the future she made with her ex before he moved on to the next girl, we feel the blinking signals and turns on our own familiar rides home, the accelerations past the memories too raw to revisit. And devastating though it may be, “drivers license” broke hearts and the charts at the same time: It was an immediate No. 1, and soon the world was sobbing along to Rodrigo’s not-so-inner monologue far from the familiar streets of her past.</br> From “drivers license” to pop-punk kiss-off anthem “good 4 u” and the folk-tinged closer, “hope ur ok,” each track on <i>SOUR</i> touched on a different memory or emotion as she stitched her heart back together, verse by verse, earning her 2021 Apple Music Awards for Top Album, Top Song, and Breakthrough Artist. Considering how trauma, grief, loss, fear, anger, and uncertainty weighed heavily on the minds of, well, everyone in 2020 and 2021, it’s no wonder that Rodrigo’s words tapped into something universal and raw that resonated beyond her age group at exactly the right time. It didn’t matter if you were old enough to teach driver’s ed instead of taking it: Everyone could picture themselves sobbing in the car, screaming into a hairbrush in front of a mirror, or releasing the tension of a love gone bad with <i>SOUR</i> blasting through the speakers, and the catharsis that came from that was one she was eager to share.</br> “Even going throughout my daily life, I’ll get a coffee, and some girl’s like, ‘I’m going through a breakup and your records are really, really helping me!’ That means, like, so much more than any number on a screen could ever mean.”

The country world feigned surprise when, after three albums of Music Row-indebted songcraft, Taylor Swift formally embraced pop on 2012’s <i>Red</i>. But no one should have been shocked: Any 14-year-old capable of persuading her parents to move from suburban Pennsylvania to Nashville for her career clearly has ambition to burn. And the thrill of following Swift’s rise has been watching her execute it flawlessly, largely because her melodic intelligence is equal to that ambition. Her early, youthful love songs heralded 2010's newly self-possessed <i>Speak Now</i>—which showed off her scathing wit—and evolved into knowing, ironclad pop fare that held its own against boisterous Max Martin production on <i>1989</i>, her fifth album, titled after her birth year. Throughout, her songwriting has blurred the lines between the public and private, burying enough real-life clues (about, say, scarves and Starbucks) to make clear that only Swift can own her narrative, thank you very much, while still retaining a lyrical elegance. Though 2017’s <i>reputation</i> might have been perceived as a gorgeously constructed piece of dramatic theater—its attendant heroes and villains all real-life characters from Swift's public feuds—all that spectacle proved an attention-grabbing cover for her most romantic album yet. She turned up the romance even more on 2019’s <i>Lover</i>, but it was 2020’s <i>folklore</i> and its companion, <i>evermore</i>—ruminative, relatively lo-fi albums written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic—that earned her the Apple Music Award for Songwriter of the Year. She followed those up in 2022 with <i>Midnights</i>, which she wrote and produced with Jack Antonoff, and described as "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life." In 2023, Swift undertook one of the most ambitious road shows of all time: the multi-year Eras Tour, which saw her presenting new and classic material across more than 100 locales worldwide. It was just one of many reasons she was named Apple Music's Artist of the Year for 2023. Swift returned to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of <i>Midnights</i> for her 11th album, 2024’s <I>THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT</I>. A study in extremes and heightened emotions, the record—which features guest turns from Post Malone and Florence + the Machine—is her most specific, candid, and unsparing work to date.

There's no point denying it: Having your heart broken really, really sucks. Sometimes, during those moments, music is the only thing that can make sense of it all. So we've assembled a set of moving ballads, classic tearjerkers, and recent pop hits to help you through it. Our editors regularly refresh this playlist. If you like a song, add it to your library.

Combining singsongy melodicism, narcotized beats, and a kind of tell-all ugliness that takes share culture to unsettling extremes, emo rap represents a shift in hip-hop values—an attitude in some ways more in tune with the self-effacing nihilism of Kurt Cobain than the street machismo of 50 Cent. The songs here can be intense, bleak, even morbid. But it's hard to talk about what emo rap is without imagining what it could’ve been: Within a few years of the sound’s passage from the underground to the mainstream, three of its most prominent faces—Lil Peep, XXXTENTACION, and Juice WRLD—were gone. Still, as dark as the music can sound, it’s also a place for soul-searching and cathartic honesty, where hip-hop’s biggest artists and its vanguard alike can wear their hearts on their sleeves. Our editors update these selections regularly, so if you hear a track you like, add it to your library.

Art doesn’t just reflect hard times—it sheds light, helps us process. Most of all, it reminds us that we’re not alone even when it feels like we are. In that spirit, here’s a playlist of tracks with lyrics that deal explicitly with mental health issues: the ups, the downs, the crashes, the coping. Our editors update tracks regularly, so if you hear something that helps pull you up—or at least makes a space for you to feel what you need to feel—add it to your library.