Having traded his rap roots for a more indie guitar sound on 2021’s Drinking With My Smoking Friends, Allday, born Tomas Gaynor, finds himself back on familiar ground on his fifth album. “It made me more interested in rap again,” he tells Apple Music of that temporary stylistic shift. “And so I returned to the stuff I had done.” Veering from his trademark melodic rap (“Too Late”) to mellow R&B drill (“Access”) and even Afrobeat (“One for Me”), Allday’s The Necklace is, however, more than a simple rehash of what’s come before. “I wanted to be a little bit more honest,” the Adelaide-born rapper offers. “Because sometimes I can just keep things murky and metaphorical. I also don’t want to do any more bars about money. Just as a personal challenge. Not that I don’t like bars about money. But just so I could actually consciously write something different.” Written and recorded for the most part in Melbourne, with a few finishing touches added in London, many of the tracks on The Necklace are, he says, inspired by a “relationship going sour and then writing a lot of those songs and trying to get that girl back”. The title of the album alludes to infidelity: “You’ve been messing around with someone you shouldn’t, someone else. And then someone finds a necklace that isn’t theirs. And that’s the symbol for the whole misbehaviour.” Here, Allday walks Apple Music through The Necklace, track by track. “Intro” “I was thinking about the live show and I was like, ‘If people fuck with this, that could be really fun.’ You play that and then show some visuals and then you come out at the start of the next song.” “Toxic” “It might have been Kanye I was listening to; I was like, ‘He says so much stuff that reflects badly on him.’ I was like, ‘I need to just be a bit more honest and open. Instead of just hiding, maybe I have to say some of this stuff.’ Once I was like, ‘I’ve been toxic to every girl I have ever been with’, I was like, ‘OK, this is the mission statement of the album.’ This is really what it’s about. Then, just keeping up that level of honesty.” “Access” “Sometimes kids just send me beats. This guy, Josh O’Brien, sent me crazy loops. I’m not an amazing producer, but sometimes I’ll throw a loop at something. We had this track with a more conventional drill-sounding beat, and then this [loop] just made it a bit more lush.” “Miss You Still” (with Cub Sport) “My producer Simon Lam emailed the producer of Ben Lee’s ‘Cigarettes Will Kill You’ [‘Miss You Still’ features that song’s keyboard hook], and he was kind enough to give us the original keyboard plugin. Actually, it wasn’t a plugin, it was the ’90s, so it was a physical box. I found a picture of Cub Sport at my show in 2013; we hung out then. Then there was some article where someone said, ‘When’s the Cub Sport/Allday feature going to happen?’. That was 2014. Ten years later we actually did it!” “Too Late” “It’s about meeting a girl from the other side of town. It’s kind of a little bit silly, and she’s just like a brat. You don’t have much in common, but she has a pool and stuff. [Laughs.]” “Tarmeka” “Tarmeka was a fan when she was mad young, like 15 or something. On Twitter she asked me, ‘If I get 1000 retweets will you name a song after me?’. And I thought, yeah, she’ll never get that. But then she did it and she got 1000 retweets the next day. She kept being like, ‘When’s my song coming, when’s my song coming?’. I just kept putting it off. Finally, I wrote this song, and we were calling it ‘Qantas’ because I say a bar about Qantas. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna give Qantas the free press.’ So then I was like, ‘This is perfect. This can be named “Tarmeka”.’” “Aussie Accents” “That one was just something fun that we wrote. I’ve always wanted to talk about Adelaide slang because we have some very specific slang, like reverse kind of stuff, negating something by saying ‘real’ afterwards. I was like, ‘I’ve never mentioned that in a song, it could be cool to put that down for the record.’” “Rockstar Games” “‘Rockstar Games’ has a lot of references to the game company Rockstar and their games GTA and Red Dead Redemption. Those are games where you can do anything, and that’s the whole craziness with them. You can just be extreme, you can be good, you can be bad, and I was using that as a metaphor for being a rapper and having the opportunity to go too far.” “Bratz” “I submitted this album [to the record company] before the Charli xcx BRAT album, so obviously it’s gonna have a different connotation now, but I can’t do much about that. If culture has changed, don’t blame me. But it’s just a fun one. I made that one in the UK, listening to a lot of different versions of drill—pop drill, soul drill, whatever you call it. I was just thinking that’d be fun to play live.” “Drip Drop” “I don’t really care what some people say. I’m just going along my merry way and doing what I do. I come from Adelaide, it’s a place where everyone’s a naysayer. So I’ve had to turn off my giving a fuck very early.” “One for Me” (with Kye) “It’s just a fun pop song. Just fun bars, talking about having sex in the toilet. Stuff like that.” “One Track Minded” (with YNG Martyr) “I was looking for a new engineer for this album and I got in with Kieran [Fergusson]. He was like, you’ve got to meet up with YNG Martyr. So we did. I made something for him and he made something for me. I don’t have anything to say on what it’s about. I like some of the Christian biblical references. I grew up Catholic, and that stuff is always there.” “Just a Moment” (with Vetta Borne) “It’s kind of like early 2000s [style], and I was doing some slow bars, kind of like Skepta. Vetta Borne just has the craziest pipes. I had written the melody but I was never going to sing it. I thought of Vetta, and she just killed it.” “Bon Voyage” “It’s [a tribute to] my friend Peezo, who I started out with in Melbourne. He had just moved from Byron, and I had just moved from Adelaide. We worked at a call centre together, he got me the job. He found my first engineer that we both worked with. We lived together, we had this dual path, and he passed away. I had that song for a while just sitting on my computer. I didn’t know if I was going to put it on something or not. My brothers, who were also friends with Peezo, were like, ‘You’ve gotta put that on.’” “Encrusted” “You have to have one song where you’re just doing bars at the end. It’s like the Drake method. Sometimes those are the funnest songs. Like he has ‘Champagne Poetry’; he’s always got them. So I’m like, ‘I can do that’. It’s the thing about rap that you can’t do in other genres necessarily. Like where you can just completely say all the different things you want in no particular order: ‘I want my crown’, ‘I’m the best’, ‘I just did a sick album’. And that’s the song! So that’s why it’s the best genre.”