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Noel Gallagher, the former guitar player and singer-songwriter for the iconic rock band Oasis and current frontman for his eponymous rock group Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, is at peace. For the once-bad boy of Brit Pop, known as much for his altercations as hit songs, a sense of self-security has settled in. Truth be told, he’s something of a joy to talk to—calm, thoughtful, clear-headed. And these same adjectives could be used to describe Gallagher and company’s new LP, Council Skies, which is set to drop on Friday (June 2). The new record showcases the artist’s knack for composition, tone, and magnetism. The titular single is like a blue sky and a wide-open highway forward. For the songwriter, age has brought wisdom and a sense of satisfaction.

Sometimes—even if you’ve elevated to the pinnacle of your craft and your work has been heard by billions of people—it can still be difficult to get out of bed. There can be a sense that nothing is good enough. For the award-winning performer, singer, and songwriter Idina Menzel, this dichotomous existence has too often been a reality. Menzel, she says, struggles with internal pressure, rarely feeling satiated. It’s what’s pushed her to become a star on Broadway, in movies, on television, and with her music. But it can be a lot. Sometimes she wonders if it’s a “chicken or the egg” thing.

For someone who is a harsh self-critic, Menzel has become known for the epic lift-the-weight-off-your-shoulders songs like, “Let It Go,” from the Pixar movie, Frozen. Did that song become so successful because Menzel, herself, needed to hear it? Perhaps the relationship she has with art can be summed up in Menzel’s new song, “Funny Kind of Lonely,” from her forthcoming new LP, Drama Queen. It’s a funny kind of lonely / giving into love, she sings. The song and her latest single, “Move,” highlight the lively new dance record, which is out on August 18. 

All Rob Thomas wanted to do was be a “jobber.” For the future hitmaker, when he and his teenage band, Fair Warning, got a gig at the Sheraton Hotel in Vero Beach, Florida, he thought they’d made it. And soon, Thomas realized, booking gigs was something he could do. Wanted to do. While the hotel job was cut short due to beer theft, Thomas knew he was onto something. It wasn’t about fame, just a living. If he wound up being in a “really great wedding band one day,” that would have been enough, he says.

Thomas, who grew up “more sensitive” than other kids, loved music. He was the one who remembered song titles and lyrics. Growing up in South Carolina and then Florida, he heard Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. At the skate parks, which he favored, he heard Michael Jackson and KISS. He also loved the bands from the second British Invasion like the Cure and Joy Division. Today, Thomas and his band Matchbox Twenty are known like those he grew up on. And their latest record, Where The Light Goes, out Friday (May 26), will assuredly be spun worldwide—including weddings. 

Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos is the embodiment of the phrase the one who is “not busy being born is busy dying.” Seemingly every second of the day, compounded weekly, monthly, yearly, Mendoza Ramos is learning, growing, changing. It’s an organic process that mirrors their very entry into songwriting.

When they were 18 years old, Mendoza Ramos would play a friend’s guitar at their house. There, Mendoza Ramos learned a few chords and a few strumming patterns. Suddenly a life that included music as much as air or water now had a fresh avenue to travel toward expression. For Mendoza Ramos, who was born to Mexican parents who played music in the house endlessly, music is as much an extension of time and space as it is a product of work. And it’s with this backdrop that their new album, Lucha, with their band, Y La Bamba, finds listeners on Friday (April 28). The record is as lush and complex as its creator. A prism of seemingly disparate sound beams that coalesce into a churning galaxy.  

To know guitar player, songwriter, and performer Malina Moye is to know her positive torrent of energy. Truly, the expression “lightning in a bottle” fits Moye aptly. Born into a musical family, the left-handed Moye got her first guitar at 9 years old and flipped it over and upside down so she could play it comfortably. At 12 years old, she started a family band with her siblings. Her bass-playing father and singing mother taught her what to look for when seeing other artists on stage or when parsing their writing. 

Santana, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Mozart were all early influences. But with all that, Moye knew that one day she wanted to find who she was as a solo artist. So, she moved to Los Angeles with just $20 in her pocket. She slept in her car and hunted pennies to have enough for sandwiches. But she made it through. Today, she’s a Billboard chart-topping artist and a killer national anthem player ahead of Minnesota Vikings football games. And Moye’s latest accomplishment is her new album, Dirty, which dropped officially on March 17. 

When Leslie Feist was five-years-old, there was a rule at the dinner table. Her mom laid down the law. No singing during meals! Otherwise, the future four-time Grammy nominee wouldn’t stop humming around the house, so her mom had to institute the dinnertime directive.

Feist’s singing got to be so common that her brother would hide little cassette recorders around their home because she would sing stream-of-consciousness melodies so often. Then he would “torture” her by playing it all back. But her ambition paid off. She started choir when she was six, even going to an elementary school that focused on it. That prepared her for perhaps the most serendipitous moment of her early career. Feist, whose newest album, Multitudes, arrives Friday (April 14), says she began going to punk shows and one day in high school a few girls approached her about it. They’d seen her at the gigs. So, they offered her the chance to sing in their band.