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You can bracket phases in dearALICE’s early career by their hairstyles and outfit choices. When the British K-pop boy band – comprising Blaise Noon, Dexter Greenwood, Olly Quinn, James Sharp and Reese Carter – first appeared on screens last year as part of the BBC documentary Made in Korea: The K-Pop Experience, the members each had next to no knowledge of the dizzying world of K-pop idol training they were about to step into.
We meet the boys at the start of episode one of the series, all baggy, neutral-colored clothing and skin fades; by the end of the six-part series, they’re sporting bleached buzzcuts, curtain bangs, and gravity-defying curls, visibly more confident in themselves and their image. The stylishly shot show follows the group as the five members undergo 100 days of dance and vocal bootcamp in Seoul, South Korea, with the public given a selective peek at the rigours and rewards of this process. Viewers watch the boys, who all grew up in England, also enjoy the country’s nightlife offerings and its diverse cuisine (their moniker was chosen after visiting a restaurant in Itaewon).
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Having been selected from a nationwide casting call, the five-piece trained under a world-beating management team led by Hee Jun Yoon, a director at SM Entertainment, the agency responsible for fostering the careers of many K-pop superstars including Aespa and Red Velvet. To sign dearALICE, they partnered with Kakao Entertainment, US label Gamma and British production company Moon&Back Media with the intention of showing “how cultural diversity drives artistic evolution and creative exchanges,” as the latter’s CAO, Chris Sungsu Lee, tells Billboard U.K.
In the past, achieving fame as a K-pop star has involved years of intensive fitness programmes, with a number of managers previously coming under fire for being exploitative of talent. Such practices led to the widespread strengthening of labour protections for performers last year, according to a report from Yonhap News Agency. SM’s own website makes a subtle nod to previous critique of the industry’s methods by stating its commitment to “setting the gold standard for responsible management in the industry.”
What Made in Korea sought to do, however, was to not offer analysis into the improvements made in the sector, but rather pique the curiosity of an international audience around a model that has generated dozens of influential acts. Previously, non-Korean hopefuls have faced the training machine – BLACKPINK, for example, features members born in New Zealand and Thailand – but the series brought a British group to the forefront for the first time.
“What we’re doing has never previously been done before,” says Noon, speaking over Zoom from a south London rehearsal space. “There’s no rulebook to follow, so we’re discovering all of this ourselves. We’ve been given such a wide exposure, so that we can grasp and take in what we need to help create what dearALICE is becoming, which is a fusion of cultures.”
By taking the super-slick choreography and marketing elements from K-Pop and mashing it with early-‘00s British sounds, dearALICE are arguably creating one of the most compelling fantasy worlds in contemporary pop music. They are fortifying this approach by blowing up their respective lives in order to be the group: diving headfirst into an entirely new way of life and invigorating the boy band model by injecting each calculated move they make with a dose of genuine-seeming curiosity.
They arrive at a time where the prominence of K-pop continues to grow rapidly in the U.K. market. In July, Stray Kids will take over the 65,000-capacity Tottenham Stadium, while SM Entertainment is bringing 14 acts to Twickenham Stadium, on the other side of the British capital, for a mega show in celebration of the firm’s 30th anniversary the month prior (including dearALICE). Last year, Seventeen became the first-ever K-pop act to perform on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
dearALICE have quickly whipped up a fervent following of their own, having recently hosted a meet and greet event at K-lifestyle hotspot at Sokollab in central London. Fans in Atlanta have rallied together to fund electronic billboards in support of the group, while it is also garnering hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms like TikTok and WeVerse.
The question of whether a homegrown act with a major K-pop influence can cross over, and truly take root, in the notoriously discerning British mainstream is more complex. At present, country music and Stateside stars such as Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan continue to rule the roost on the U.K. charts. Not that the boys are too phased by the pressures that lay ahead just yet: “We want to show the world that there is space for a different sort of boy band,” affirms Quinn.
Last month, dearALICE launched on the global stage with “Ariana,” a feisty, neon-hued number that depicts “a guy in a relationship with a girl who’s totally in love with social media,” explains Greenwood. Though their listenership does not belong to any one age group or gender, boy bands have historically loved very specifically, with songs about gently pursuing a girl. With a titular nod to a modern pop icon, “Ariana” flips this precedent, posing questions about all-consuming celebrity obsession and the omnipresence of stan culture in the online world.“The decision to debut dearALICE with this track was a strategic choice to effectively showcase the group’s identity and establish a distinctive presence in the competitive global K-pop market,” explains Sungsu Lee. Its accompanying music video sees the group “showcase their British roots proudly, echoing aesthetics that have been so successful in taking Brit music global,” adds Ben Cook, President of Gamma (UK & Europe).
Union Jack paraphernalia, expansive city vistas, the Tube: Any studious pop fan would be quick to make comparisons between the “Ariana” video and One Direction’s Up All Night era, which was characterized by images of vintage Routemasters and tonal red and white palettes. In the case of dearALICE, images of London are being used to “define them as a Western act,” says Cook, rather than emulate the one-time aesthetic of their most obvious comparison point.
There’s an element, perhaps, to dearALICE’s story about what it means to get boxed in by outside perceptions, and the tenacity needed to flourish in the face of misunderstanding. A cursory scroll through pop-adjacent Reddit forums will bring up lengthy discourse related to the lack of successful boy bands in the past decade. Recent auditions for Simon Cowell’s planned Netflix series were met with a poor turnout, while the passing of One Direction’s Liam Payne last October has brought questions around the mental health and safety of young performers into a renewed focus.
Beyond the wider cultural conversations around the future of the boy band, dearALICE and their team have chosen to reckon with taking a slow burn approach to their output. There was a six-month gap between the broadcast of Made In Korea and “Ariana” being unveiled – although the show’s OST landed in November, topping the U.K.’s Soundtrack Album Chart – leaving some fans wondering if their momentum was at risk of faltering.
Cook says that this was an intentional move, in order to break away from the typically rapid release schedule in K-pop, which can involve frequent comebacks for ‘rookie’ acts, often with new EPs or singles released every few months. “dearALICE are just starting their journey,” he says. “To make amazing music, they need to do things the right way, be true to themselves, really love what they’re doing, and be taken care of. That’s how great art is created.”
He continues: “I appreciate that in the K-pop world, people might expect a new group to follow a certain format or plan. But dearALICE are a bit different. Even though they had incredible K-pop training from the expert SM team in Seoul, they are a Western group. So, we’re helping them grow like Western artists do, which means we’re trying new things and making their own path. They love K-pop and are very influenced by the artform, but don’t purport to be a K-pop band.”
In January, dearALICE took to the stage at SMTown Live in Seoul, alongside scene-leading names including RIIZE and Hyoyeon of Girls’ Generation. Performing in front of 25,000 ticketholders, the set saw the group tightly finesse the relentless choreography it had previously struggled with in the early days of Made In Korea, offering a glimpse of the pristine pop phenomenon they are striving towards becoming in the future.
“The biggest breakthrough we’ve had was proving to ourselves that we could perform on that stage,” Quinn recalls. “It was the ultimate test for us. We felt a lot of responsibility to not mess up in front of that many people, but it really showed [the synergy] we have as a team.”For dearALICE, more new music and spontaneous fan events await in the pipeline as they continue to forge their own unique path in the pop arena. What they’ll make of their mission is an open, vastly exciting question, and it won’t have a simple answer.
Who is Amir “Aura” Khan?
That’s the question everyone has been asking as McNeese State’s Men’s Basketball student manager has been taking March Madness and the Internet by storm with his tunnel walkouts.
Before each game, Aura leads McNeese State into battle, as he wraps a boombox around his neck that blasts various rap songs from rappers like Kodak Black and NBA Youngboy, and walks the Cowboys from the locker room, through the arena tunnel, and onto the basketball court.
The guy has personality as well, and takes his role very seriously. He once said, “If they kept manager stats for rebounding and wiping up wet spots on the court, I’d put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers.”
And look how he keeps himself in shape to be the best team manager in the nation.
The guys is a maniac, telling Sporting News that his fast mopping skills are what separates him from the field. “My quickness,” he told the outlet. “As soon as a player gets down, I’m running towards the wet spot, I’m diving on the floor for everyone, wiping up as quick as I can, but also making sure I get it. [Then] getting up as fast as possible and getting ready for the next one.”
His aura has earned him not only a lifelong nickname, but it’s earned him some paper. Khan is the first student manager to have NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals, and he has them with TickPick, Insomnia Cookies and Buffalo Wild Wings.
Amir Khan, you are officially a pioneer. In the wildest couple of weeks anyone could have, you’ve stayed so humble & true to yourself. First-ever college student manager to ink a NIL deal… 3 deals… all with global brands… in a week! Keep going. You deserve it all✊@amirk_23 pic.twitter.com/hvEernU05Y— Reed Vial (@reed_vial3) March 16, 2025
Here he is letting everyone know what time it is like Shedeur Sanders.
He even has the cheerleader squad wearing socks with his face on them.
The god even takes time to give out some fan love.
If you’re still not convinced, check out this list I put together of some of his best rap moments this season.
I gotta warn you, though. The aura is contagious.
Kodak Black, “No Flockin’”
Curren$y has built a nice life for himself.
The New Orleans rapper, credited with popularizing “lifestyle rap,” is back with Harry Fraud to give fans another glimpse into a day in the life. And while he’s often seen as the godfather of that certain style of rap, he sees himself more as someone who helped give it a name.
“I’m not the founder of lifestyle rap,” he tells Billboard over Zoom. “It’s a [sub]-genre that I think, through me talking about it, maybe helped name that style — and maybe helped cultivate a space for people who wanted to make music but didn’t want to make a certain type of music in order to be successful.”
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Rapping about all the fly s–t you do while smoking the best weed money can buy wasn’t a novel idea when artists like Spitta and his righthand man Wiz Khalifa came along. However, they were able to show a generation of rappers that they can become successful during an era when the rap industry was in a state of flux. He’s been able to build an empire by making the music that he wants to make for the audience he wants to make it for, and his fans have rewarded him by supporting everything he does — whether it’s copping Jet Life merch, buying tickets to his live shows, or interacting with his Starting Line Hobbies page.
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The 12-track tape, Never Catch Us, boasts features from up and comer Premo Rice, an old friend in Wiz, as well as Griselda’s Conway the Machine and Rome Streetz, the unique Bruiser Wolf, Fendi P, Dave East, Jay Worthy and DRAM. He and Harry even somehow managed to get Babyface Ray, Styles P and 03 Greedo on the same track.
We talked with Curren$y about how all those tracks came together, plus his car collection, his favorite strains and a whole lot more. Check out our conversation below.
Where you at? In the crib in New Orleans?
I’m outside in the driveway just tending to vehicles. I got the ’64 running. I’m waiting on my homeboy to come do some s—t to the drive shaft for me, I’m about to charge the batteries on the ’77. I’m washing this [Corvette] C8 then I’ma wash this little Japanese BRABUS Benz. I’m just having a driveway day.
You said that Benz is Japanese?
Yeah, this is a BRABUS B6. This car thru and thru is from Japan. See all the markers and s—t.
What’s the difference? It has some different features and s—t?
Gonna pop the hood on this joint and let you see what’s going on, then the case can rest. Nothing say Mercedes, everything all BRABUS’d out. This the only B6 in the in the country. It’s a 1999.
I got this, maybe, like a month ago they got here a month ago, my homeboy Vico from the Patina Collective. He has the biggest Mercedes Benz collection in the world. He has the Sultan of Brunei’s car. He got Princess Diana’s car.
When he wants to sell that Princess Diana whip, you gotta cop that. Imagine getting that s—t just to be able to rap about having Princess Diana’s limo.
You know what? If I got it, bro, I would gift it to someone who I think will hold it down. If I get it, it’s getting smoked in, there’s gonna be french fries in the seats, because of my son Cruz. Imma live with it, so I’ll give it to somebody who going to put it away. I’ll get it for Harry Fraud. I’ll give it to bro.
This is like your eighth, ninth, 10th project with Harry?
I don’t know. I mean it was Cigarette Boats. And then… Yeah, dude, you right. Eight, nine, 10, 11, it’s somewhere around there. You right. It’s probably 10, 11, 12, 13 and then every time we drop one, we do a deluxe. One time we did two. We did The Marina then we did The Director’s Cut, and then we came back with another one within two weeks. And this one here, there’s songs that we didn’t put on this one, so we already set up to drop again immediately. So, if everybody responds how we think they will, we’ll just hurry up and just give it to them and strike while the iron’s hot.
Although you still drop pretty consistently, is it fair to say — and maybe it’s your chemistry with Harry Fraud — but that this felt like vintage Spitta?
That’s exactly what happened, bro. You just go into a different mental space when you deal with certain people — and anytime I work with Harry Fraud, I remember the first time that we ever worked, and that was in the middle of me getting ready to put out Weekend at Burnie’s. And I had just did a little move with with Atlantic and Warner, so my bread was changing a little bit. I was in a different space when we lined up, so I approached those beats with all this new money I had just grabbed. I had a different mindset, and I was attacking s—t.
So, now every time we line up, I feel the same way. I think that’s why I just bought those cars. That’s the BRABUS Benz out there and that yellow 355 Ferrari. Ferrari mode is always Harry Fraud. Whenever I’m f—kin’ around like that. That’s me and bro hangin’.
I peeped that canary yellow Ferrari. What year is that?
Yeah, yeah. 355 F1. It’s a ’99. I wanted that before I got the blue one. That was the one I always wanted, but my manager and s—t — when I bought my Spider, the first one, they was like, “Nah, you can’t get that old ass Ferrari.” It got the flip up lights and s—t. That’s my era. I grew up on Miami Vice. That’s the stuff I want.
I was going to ask about Miami Vice, because of the speed boat on the album artwork.
What I liked most about the show is whenever Crockett would get lost, whenever he would go undercover. Sometimes — I don’t know if he had a mental problem — his character would get lost into being a drug dealer too long, like, “Sonny, you’re still a cop!” They have to wake him up. But every time he’s lost, that motherf—ker lived the life. 3:00 a.m. Ferrari rides. 5:00 a.m. speedboat rides.
Miami Vice never would really show the the bad guys and per se, living large, too much for us to see it and romanticize it — they would make it more about the police work. But whenever Crockett would get lost on the job, he had access to so much, it was just cool to see.
Yeah, it’s funny because my pops used to build model cars, and he used to get mad at me because I always played with the white Testarossa and break it all the time.
You can’t roll them around, man, it’s art. [Laughs.]
Talk about your Starting Line Hobbies Instagram page.
I had been building model cars forever, but when we couldn’t go nowhere during the pandemic, I was like, I ought to figure out what else I could do. I started taking pictures of the ones I was building, and people just kept asking me where I got them from. So I was like, I might as well open an account with the people who I buy the models from, and start a business to sell them to people who wanted to build them because people didn’t really know where to get that kind of stuff from.
That like an art that has kind of died out. When I was little, that stuff was in stores. Used to go in the toy section, get models, paint. You can only find all that online now — or you gotta go to a mom-and-pop hobby shop that’s still holding on.
You also race diecast cars on a track on that page.
It’s a racing league. People who follow it, register and I post all the Hot Wheels you could pick. When I post the season, I do a draft with the cars that are available and I don’t open them beforehand, so nobody knows if they’re fast or not. So you draft your car, name it, and then I @ you every time we get ready to race. I go on Live or I go on Twitch and race them. I’ve been doing that since the pandemic, and that s—t fun as hell.
You be chillin’, man. You got your formula figured out. You make your music, you do your shows.
Yep, and just use that money to keep me in the house. My whole plan was always to make my surroundings comfortable enough to where I didn’t want to leave, because I live in a dangerous city. People always like, “D–n, bro, why you still live here? Why don’t you move? Blah, blah, blah.” But as long as you all you watch how you move around, you’re not gonna make it easy for nobody.
Would you ever get an electric car?
Oh, hell nah. It’s against everything that I stand for. All the electric cars I have are literally right here on this table. I got lowriders. I got a few on-road sports cars, and I got some dirt-track trucks. I built the dirt track around my house. I got an RC track outside, like blazed right through the middle of my lawn. Don’t tell the HOA.
Let’s get back to the tape. You were saying that you were in the zone. So, how did you and Harry work on this? Was it over email? Did you guys link up?
We didn’t link up this time, but we just both knew it was time to do it, and with that urgency, we worked quicker than if we would’ve, pulled up on each other. If I would’ve flown out there, it had been two or three days of just bulls—ting and eating cheeseburgers and just smoking and possibly not even pulling up to the studio.
It was better this way and faster this way — because that’s actually my homeboy, so when we link up, I might not want to work. I might just want to download all of the Mortal Kombat fatalities and do each character’s fatality on the first Mortal Kombat together. Like, “Can we do that today instead of going through the beats?” I feel like it’s equally as productive, because it makes us that much closer.
Yeah, I had interviewed him and Boldy James when they dropped their album and he said that he likes to link up with people in person, but that with you it really didn’t matter, because the chemistry was already there.
It’s actually… I like to do that because with him, I’ll do all the records and then I won’t send them. Like, I’ll put a little clip on Instagram, and he’ll realize I use this beat or that beat. I’m kind of unprofessional with bro, because I’ll record nine records and send him two, and then a week or later I’ll send him two more. I just have so many records. After this project was turned in, I had forgotten about like seven more records. I was like, “Is it too late? Can we add them?” We decided to hold them for part two.
How did the the features come together? The one that surprised me the most was the track with Babyface Ray, Styles P and 03 Greedo.
When I heard that beat, I was just gonna make a verse and a hook. Usually, that’s what I do anyway, if I don’t put somebody else on a song. But I heard all of my homeboys on it in my head. I was like, “Damn bro, go off on this b—ch, but then down the big homie will go off. but damn then dude’ll go off.” So, I was like, “F—k it, just send it to everyone.” And everybody sent their s—t back in a day. Some of them, I sent them done already. Like, “Yo, I put bro on here.”
I’m lucky enough to have friends in the industry. I have people who, if I reach out, they lend a hand instantly. Those are the people that I work with. The first time that me and Rome worked, he flew out here. There’s no way I woulda came back again without putting bro down.
I feel like to a lot of the younger underground, indie guys, you’re the OG now. You help make the blueprint to being independent in the Internet age streaming age.
Motherf—ker’s saw me get all of the s—t that the other motherf—kers have who kind of take the bait or kind of go through the s—t that we don’t want to go through [don’t get to]. You could still have that s—t and stay yourself. And a lot of people would tip they hat to me for — not necessarily for showing them it could be done, but adding reassurance to the thought that they already had, because they already had to be thinking that too. They had that mindset already. Here’s another example of somebody who was thinking that way and turned it into what they wanted to.
Would you ever sign to a major again?
I am a major. I’d sign to the Pelicans. I would do that, but that’s it. [Laughs.]
What advice would you give to someone that wants to be a rapper today? What are the pros and cons of being independent?
You’re gonna have to trust someone in a game where you can’t trust nobody. So, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can handle it all yourself, but then it can only grow to a certain level. You only got two arms, so you’re going to have to entrust some homies, so you gotta keep your circle tight.
And as much as you can do for free, you do it. You know, as far as the resources and the people you got around you. If you know somebody who knows how to work the camera, he might not shoot at the quality of what you need, but grow with him. One: you put one of your homies in motion with a gig, and two: you got a weapon at your disposal every time you need to film, so you could put out as much content as you want.
Content is king. People want to see you brush your teeth. They don’t necessarily want to hear the music. They want to know how many backflips you could do. I show them my Hot Wheel wall. I’m trying to get the first motherf—ker with a million Hot Wheels. They’re like, “Yo, let’s stream it, he needs these dollars.”
This generation of independent artists figured out how to tap in with the fans. We had to figure out what you could do to impact people’s lives outside of the music. And you can also provide some dope merch like a jacket to wear. They can go to a game with a jacket and people will know what artists they represent, who they like. Now you know something about them. Like, if a girl shows up with a Jet Life jacket, you can probably assume that she knows her way around the shoe store. She probably doesn’t smoke trash. Don’t try to pass her no bum weed. Now you know what you’re dealing with.
What you got planned for 420?
I’m on the road, man, my tour starts two days before 420. You know who you can’t find for 420? Me, Wiz, Devin the Dude, Cypress Hill, Smoke DZA. That’s a blessing to know that if we ever fell off and had to survive on only one check, you know one that’s guaranteed to come every year. [Laughs.]
Even if you’re working, do you have a ritual on 420?
Nah, I would have one if I didn’t smoke regularly, if it wasn’t what I did with everything I do. I would have a special 420 blanket with a neck hole cut out of it, so I could just put it on and sit in a Morocco room with pillows all over the floor and watch Cheech and Chong movies. That’s just the life anyway.
Do you have a favorite stoner movie?
I like Nice Dreams, because the opening sequence has some lowriders coming over the hill, so I dug that. I really like [Cheech & Chong] movies because they had good cars in them.
How did you react when you watched Nice Dreams for the first time and seen Pee-Wee Herman coked up?
Bro, I don’t think people around me understood what we was getting. It was like jumping into a time machine. We not supposed to even get this? That’s what I’m going to do when I get done washing these cars. I know what I’m doing today. Also, as clichéd as it may be, Half Baked was amazing for a lot of reasons. Half Baked was good to me when I didn’t smoke weed. I had the VHS.
Do you have any favorite strains?
All of my own. Andretti OG, Grape Jelly, Bourbon Street Brunch, Berry Beignet.
I haven’t tried any of those. Are they in dispensaries?
Yeah, in select ones. We’re kind of a boutique brand because we’re trying to keep it as true to form. What we managed to do was track down some of the genetics and growers from when weed was weed. You’re from the time, so you was there when Sour Diesel hit. It’s not like it died down, it’s just that other people began to grow and cut corners.
There’s so many different names now, you have to check which strains they were made from.
Absolutely, and that’s what I’m telling you. It’s like the coke or anything else, they stepping on it, they start f—king with the lights to make it look a certain way when it when it reaches a bud and sh—t, and it’s not real. And in a lot of the motherf—kers who do that don’t even smoke. It’s like when Bape got f—ked up and n—as became Bape dealers. They didn’t even wear the s—t, but they knew you wanted it. It’s like Pit Bull puppies, bro. The weed got f—ked up, just like the dogs got f—ked up. They start looking bad, breathing crazy. That’s what happened with the weed.
So, all we did was go back to those growers and let them do exactly what they were doing with the newest technology. Let us know what you would have in your dream grow, and what you would do, and then we provide it for ’em and we get the best s—t.
There’s an article came out last year about the dude who invented Sour Diesel. He made it legit now. He makes the original New York Sour Diesel, and he’s selling it to dispensaries.
And the other dude. You knew about Chemdawg [Greg Krzanowski]? Him too.
I’ve been seeing Chemdawg around too, so that makes sense. That’s the sh—t we used to read about in High Times.
Yeah, and they had to sit in the shadows to do interviews. They couldn’t be Berner (founder of Cookies). They wasn’t out at in Berner’s time. They couldn’t just stand in front of the sh—t and say, “I made this,” but they still have enough youth in their bones to grab some cash and see what’s going on in the industry. They’re legends to people like us who keep it 100 and know that these new strains aren’t necessarily new strains, it’s just people not keeping it funky with the genetics. We haven’t been alive long enough for a motherf—ker to have grew some unheard of s—t like come on, dawg. The Earth been making tomatoes from the beginning.
They inventing strains like they invented broccoli.
Come on, man, you got it, dude. But that’s what they’ll tell you.
I wanted to just get back to the cars a little bit more. How many do you have now? Are you over 40?
Yeah, it got out of hand. It’s not 50, though. I would know for sure if I had 50 cars. I’m around like 46 cars right now.
And you drive all of them? Do you have a rotation? Like you would do with sneakers.
I’ll just change the whole front of the house. I got eight of them at my house, and then my mom lives right across the street, and she got four of them in her driveway. She be driving them too — or does she have her own rotation? She got a rotation alright. She gets a new Benz every Christmas. That’s what she gets. She got lowriders in her driveway. She always thinks she’s gonna hit the switches with her leg, so she doesn’t really get in them. But, what I’ll do is, [I] have some of the homies to take cars back and forth to the warehouse.
You switch the rotation up depending on how you feeling.
How many movies did I watch? What era do I think it is? The newer cars are always from my management and my staff. They bought that Corvette C8 for my birthday. I had the first convertible C8 that existed. The one that they used for all the promo when they wasn’t selling it, that’s the car that I have. The Rolls Royce Cullinan is dope because you could just have somebody drive it. I got a Wraith, but I kind of felt like a d—k driving that motherf—ker to a f—king Walmart to go Hot Wheel hunting. I put the Wraith at the warehouse, because I look like an a—hole with two cars worth a million dollars.
How does it feel, though? To be able to cop and drive all these cars.
It feels like Grand Theft Auto, bro. I knew my life would be like this, because I felt too connected to that kind of s—t. I don’t know how to say it, but people have visions and ideas of what they life gonna be, and you gotta believe them, because they mean that s—t. The s—t is tangible. The s—t is not from Mars, you don’t have to go to f—king planet Saturn to get a f—king Lamborghini.
You mentioned that being around Cash Money early on helped you.
Hell yeah. Just seeing motherf—kers do that. from No Limit to Cash Money. There was game I picked up when I started moving with Dame Dash and them in New York, too. Listening to the stories he would tell me from the golden era. It’s like, “Damn, off rap, off making words rhyme, you were able to do this?”
You got Wiz on this project, and people always excited when you guys link up…
Yeah, man, because that’s my brother. We went from from zero to this. We both had record deals with majors and stepped away. Had people looking at us like we didn’t know what we were doing, telling us what they would have did if they had a record deal, and we still did our thing.
Have you been paying attention to his freestyles these last couple months?
Yeah, it’s good stuff. The work that he’s doing was actually beneficial to me, because I never changed. I never stopped. I always did this. And my bro had achieved mega stardom; things got to change, you gotta move a certain way, people kind of can’t just have access to your art that much, and things come into play, so I understand. But to then have a resurgence and kind of show that you ain’t going nowhere either is good.
And then it benefits me, because by me reaching out to collaborate — it’s nothing to us, because that’s what we do — but it’s everything to the people who grew up and put themselves together based on the music we was putting out. That’s what makes it count so much.
You guys ever plan on doing another tape together?
Yeah, man, we got enough records already. Between him and Larry [June], I got like 35 records.
People like to compare you to Larry too.
Yeah, that’s my man. We done did a gang of work together. We got an album worth of music too. I’m not the founder of lifestyle rap. It’s a [sub]-genre that I think, through me talking about it, maybe helped name that style, and maybe helped cultivate a space for people who wanted to make music but didn’t want to make a certain type of music in order to be successful. As long as they do it the right way, it’s good with me.
Max B is your favorite rapper…
Yeah, he’s supposed to be touching down in seven months.
Are you hoping to work with him when he comes home?
Yeah, man, no pressure. You know how people try to gatekeep music? What happened with me was, my listeners gatekept my music, because they didn’t want other people to be on it too. I didn’t gatekeep Max B’s music. I knew through promoting and telling people about it — they would love it — but what happens with me is, the higher-ups, they borrow from me a lot. I don’t get upset, but people who are further up in the game, they pay attention to what we do, and then they do it. They did that with [Max B] too. It’s like, “Yo, you didn’t even know Max B, bro.”
So, these people are going to be clamoring to collaborate with him — and you gotta let it happen, because they’re going to pay so much to do it, because they paying for the love and for that affiliation because they know they slept on Max. So, I want him to make all of that money. Get all that bread and then come f—k with me.
Do you have a favorite song or tape of his?
“Cake and Eat It Too.” That’s my favorite song. I will listen to that song from here to Houston.
Billy Corgan has spent over three decades reshaping alternative rock, carving out a legacy as bold and uncompromising as his music.
From the dreamy haze of Siamese Dream to the sprawling ambition of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—a No. 1 Billboard 200 smash—his work plays like a fever-dream diary, each album a restless search for meaning in a world that refuses to stay still.
With The Magnificent Others, The Smashing Pumpkins frontman’s latest foray into long-form storytelling, Corgan channels that same restless curiosity into candid, unfiltered conversations with some of music’s most fascinating figures. Featuring legends like Diane Warren, Gene Simmons, Sharon Osbourne, Tom Morello and Wolfgang Van Halen, the podcast isn’t just a name-drop fest—it’s a deep dive into music’s untold stories.
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“It’s really not that different from how I am in my personal life,” Corgan tells Billboard. “I’ve been lucky enough through the years to talk to so many well-known and successful people, and so it’s not that different to what I would ask if I was just sitting around a dinner table.”
“Some people take umbrage with the fact that I insert myself or tell stories, but that’s just how I talk,” he continues. “I don’t do this professionally—I didn’t go to school for it. It’s not like I wrote for a fanzine for five years before jumping in. I went straight to the highest level, talking to some of the most famous people in the world.”
Fans have noticed the difference. “My favorite compliment was people writing me saying, ‘I haven’t heard an interview like that for Gene Simmons in 25 years.’”
His approach has led to moments that even surprise him. In a recent episode with Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter revealed that, after writing over 1,500 songs, her process is still entirely instinctual.
“I expected some kind of formula, but she just said, ‘I feel it. I’m looking for that song that makes the hair rise up on your arm,’” Corgan explains “It’s very similar to Rick Rubin—Rick will openly say, ‘I don’t know anything about recording. I only know what I’m attracted to and what makes me feel something.’
“So here are two people at the top of their field who don’t have an intellectual overlay to their work. They trust their instincts, and somehow that translates to the common public in a way that’s more universal than anything I’ve ever done. And that shocks me—like, how do you just roll out of bed and know what the right song is?”
For Corgan, these conversations aren’t just about craft—they’re about legacy. He’s spent his entire career pushing against the weight of his own past, sometimes at great personal cost.
“Celebrity culture basically influences the zeitgeist to the point where if you don’t play along, something’s wrong with you,” he reflects. What followed was a period of exile where he felt stripped of status and dismissed in ways that undermined his accomplishments.
“There was a period where I completely resisted nostalgia, and I was punished for it,” he admits. Punished in a way that was actually very cruel. Not only was I stripped of my celebrity or my status, I was sort of mocked. The best way I could explain it, if you and I were just sitting around a table, is they tried to take away from me the things that I actually did, right? It wasn’t enough that I wrote those songs and didn’t want to play them—it was like, ‘We’re not even sure he wrote those songs.’”
Eventually, he found peace with it. He realized that celebrating his past didn’t mean being trapped by it.
“I found some kind of balance in there, where I can play the songs that people want to hear—and by the way, I wrote them, so it doesn’t hurt me,” he says. “At the same time, I can balance it with new material. And once I found that balance in the last six, seven years, it’s been super positive energy around me, around the band, around the shows. So I feel very good that I made the right decision, because I do want people to have a good time.
“For every person that wants to talk about Siamese Dream, there’s just as many people that want to talk to me about the album that didn’t sell—because the album was good, it just didn’t sell,” he says. “But in the pop world, it’s sell or not sell. Sell or don’t exist. That’s a Faustian bargain.”
The fracturing of musical culture particularly fascinates him. Where The Smashing Pumpkins emerged in an era when alternative rock briefly became the mainstream – with Corgan appearing on magazine covers alongside other alternative figureheads – today’s landscape is infinitely more splintered.
“People use the term ‘digital ghetto,’ and I think what they mean is that things exist in a particular zip code digitally,” he explains. “You could drop a name that all your friends know as the hottest thing in the world, and your five neighbors would be like, ‘Who?’”
He contrasts this with his formative years, when cultural touchstones were truly universal. “I sat at tables in 1986 where grandma was debating Madonna. Because what Madonna did on MTV, everybody saw it. That’s not how it was in the ’80s or the ’90s. Everybody knew Madonna.”
“I don’t know if the pop stars of today, outside of maybe Taylor Swift,” he says, explaining, “Her future will probably look a lot like Madonna’s, in that it will have a very long tail, and they’ll follow her until the end. But for a lot of the rest of them? I don’t think we have any idea what’s going to happen.”
And, of course, there’s Britney. “I think it’s fair to call Britney the prototypical pop siren of the 21st century. Britney set the f—ing new template,” he declares.
For Corgan, his own legacy isn’t just a professional concern—it’s personal. He wants to make sure his children understand his place in the world.
“My son was surprised when I told him not everyone likes my music,” Corgan says, laughing. “I told him, ‘Look, it’s cool. Not everybody likes what Daddy does, but a lot of people do.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, I think you’re the best.’”
“I want my son to understand my perspective of my musical and artistic life, so that when he encounters other people’s opinions of me, he’ll have formed his own version of it,” he explains.
But beyond sentimentality, he’s thinking about the long-term future of his work. “I want to make sure that if anything happens to me, my affairs are put in order in a way that my children cannot only benefit from my hard work but also know what to do with it,” he says.
“There’s at least 100 unreleased songs. And I think I’ve released 350 or so at this point. So understanding that those are valuable things—they have to be protected like works of art.”
At this point in his career, Corgan isn’t chasing approval or trying to rewrite the past. He’s found his balance—honoring the legacy he’s built while continuing to explore what’s next. Shortly after the conversation, he announced A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, a reimagining of the landmark album as an opera, set to debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Nov. 21.
“People associate me so strongly with the Pumpkins,” he reflects. “It’s hard for them to imagine me apart from it.”
On Thursday, March 6, Hamilton Leithauser kicked off his annual residency at Cafe Carlyle, the intimate posh supper club known primarily for its Marcel Vertès murals, martinis and cabaret and jazz performances by Peter Cincotti, Jeff Goldblum, Sandra Bernhard and others. The residency, which The Walkmen frontman began as an against-the-grain lark — he skipped 2020 because of the pandemic — has grown into a hot ticket. This time around, Leithauser will perform 15 dates through March 29 (his most ever), and unveil some surprises along the way.
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Opening night took place on eve of the release of Leithauser’s new album, This Side of the Island, a hook-heavy pop-rock record that he co-produced with his wife Anna Stumpf (who also plays keyboards in the band), and an assist from his friend, The National’s Aaron Dessner. This Side of the Island is a more concise and conceptual effort, compared to his last full-length, 2020’s The Loves of Your Life, which is a masterpiece of musical storytelling. And initial chart results for the single, “Knockin’ Heart,” indicate the new music is resonating: The song is currently No. 16 on Adult Alternative Airplay chart for a second week — Leithauser’s highest peak yet on the chart. “Knockin’ Heart’ also debuted at No. 42 on Rock & Alternative Airplay, Leithauser’s first time on that chart.
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If the crowd’s response to Leithauser’s opening-night performance is any indication, “Knockin’ Heart” won’t be the only song from This Side of the Island to chart. Here were some of the evening’s highlights.
More New Songs (And They Didn’t Come Easy)
Leithauser previewed three new tunes on This Side of the Island at last year’s residency: “Fistful of Flowers,” “What Do I Think?” and “Ocean Roar,” an ode to his late friend, the singer-songwriter and producer Richard Swift. This time, the audience got to hear all nine of the album’s songs, along with music from his past albums, such as “In A Blackout,” “A 1,000 Times” and “The Garbage Men.”
Leithauser says the album’s title was sparked when his two daughters read Jean Craighead George’s young adult novel, My Side of the Mountain — about a boy who runs away from his parents home in New York City and learns to survive in the Catskill Mountains. “It’s another way of saying, ‘From my perspective,’” he explains, adding he was “very isolated” when he was writing and recording This Side of the Island at his studio, the Struggle Hut. It’s an appropriate name given the length of time he wrestled with the music. “I literally recorded the piano and guitar “Fist of Flowers” when Barack Obama was president. This was at my old apartment, which I sold in 2017.”
Leithauser has no explanation for his delays. “If I knew, I would be so happy to know how to avoid it next time,” he says. “I had been working by myself for so many years, and I didn’t know what I had. When you’re really trying to finish something and you can’t it’s so frustrating. It gets kind of scary because your livelihood depends on it. You’re like, ‘What am I doing with myself? I’m wasting my life here.’
“I fought through it,” he continues, “and at the very end went upstate to work for one and a half days with my friend Aaron Dessner. He was the only outside person I had ever played anything for — even my wife. It could have been one of those moments where he could be like, ‘Dude, this ain’t happening. Just go to law school.’”
Instead, Dessner “was so complimentary, excited about it, and he wanted to play on some of it,” Leithauser says. “I was like, ‘Please, anything to change my perception, change my idea of what it is.’ He started putting little things on it and added a modern sound.” Leithauser left Dessner’s studio confident that This Side of the Island was ready to be released. “I was like, ‘Man, I want people to hear this.’”
Leithauser Goes Electric
An electric guitar has always featured in Leithauser’s Carlyle shows, but it’s usually played by one of his band members — most recently by master of subtlety Larry Oliver – while the man himself strummed an acoustic six-string. On this run, Leithauser’s breaking out his black 1961 Fender Jazzmaster and 1960 mapleglo natural Rickenbacker Capri 360 to reproduce the bright rock sound of This Side of the Island. Although he told the crowd that ear plugs were available, the volume was suited to the room, and it was a gas to see the packed crowd rocking out in sportcoats and evening wear as they sipped their martinis and goblets of wine.
A Rockin’ Wedding Standard?
“Knockin’ Heart”‘s lyrics and Leithauser’s full-throttle performance of it on the record makes it sound like fervent pledge of unconditional love: “From the courtship to the chapel, from the branches to the apple, to the elegy in the bone yard — you’ll be knockin’ in my heart.” Told that the song could be a wedding-reception staple, given the right band or DJ, Leithauser laughs. “I’d love to go to that wedding,” he says, adding that while the song’s message is, “I’ll love you through time. Actually, the person in the song can’t get through to the person they’re looking for. The idea is there’s a guy driving home from the party. He’s stoned and drunk and wishing he can say this to the person. But the person is not there.”
A (Psycho) Killer Cover
Leithauser’s Carlyle sets always include at least one cover, and on March 6, he chose the Talking Heads classic “Heaven” — which, he says, is one of his all-time favorite songs. (He also said elsewhere that he listened to Fear of Music, which includes that song, a lot while making This Side of the Island.) The choice was all the more appropriate, because former Heads frontman David Byrne has recruited Leithauser for his latest project. “It’s crazy,” Leithauser says. “When he contacted me, I thought I was being punked.”
Surprise Guests
Opening night belonged solely to Leithauser — as an ad-hoc record-release show should be — but he says that “a lot of well-known musicians are going to be coming out over the course or the four weeks” to join in on the fun. He’s keeping the names under wraps, “Because I want them to be surprising.”
Leithauser is the Kevin Bacon of indie rock, with a deep network of friendships with other musicians, so the surprises should be genuinely surprising. At his March 8 show, J Mascis was Leithauser’s special guest, and imagining the Dinosaur Jr. frontman at a strait-laced place like Cafe Carlye is mind-blowing on its own.
BLACKPINK already accomplished the hard part. Over the past half-decade, the quartet has transcended the boundaries between K-pop and the global mainstream in ways that no other girl group had done before, turning the momentum from their 2010s singles and projects into a 2020s breakthrough, particularly in North America.
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Since 2020, BLACKPINK has released a pair of albums, including their first Billboard 200-topper, 2022’s Born Pink; collaborated with Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and Cardi B, among others; become the highest-charting Korean girl group in Hot 100 history, with a total of five top 40 entries; and racked up several Western awards, including a Billboard Music Award and multiple MTV VMAs. Their commercial might in the U.S. was best demonstrated with their live show, which had reached stadium levels by 2023 and included a headlining gig at Coachella that year, making BLACKPINK the first K-pop act in that night-capping slot.
All of which is to say: JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ have climbed a mountain together that no other commercial act like them has conquered before. Over the past six months, however, they’ve all set out to achieve something different — this time separately, and all roughly at the same time.
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This Friday (Mar. 7), JENNIE will release her debut album, RUBY, one week after LISA released her own, Alter Ego. Jisoo released her debut solo mini-album, Amortage, two weeks before that, and while ROSÉ issued her own debut album, Rosie, in December, its singles have been promoted throughout early 2025, including with a handful of live performances. Members of pop collectives releasing solo projects after their original groups achieved mainstream success is a practice that stretches back decades, from The Beatles to the Jackson 5 to the Spice Girls to One Direction. Yet we’ve never seen every member of a group attempt to establish themselves as individual stars quite so simultaneously, four voices flooding the zone across a three-month span.
To some degree, BLACKPINK’s members launching solo music at the same time can be chalked up to a scheduling quirk, based on when studio material is completed and promotional opportunities arise; each member is working with a different U.S. major label partner (Columbia for JENNIE, RCA for LISA, Warner for JISOO and Atlantic for ROSÉ), who all have their own plans for how to most effectively roll out a debut project. And because BLACKPINK’s return as a collective is imminent, with a new world tour scheduled to kick off in early July, those respective teams have been working with limited time frames to set up solo eras.
Still — that’s a lot of BLACKPINK solo projects, being released very close to one another. The output could risk alienating casual fans, whose music consumption might be cannibalized by competing projects from members of the same group. BLACKPINK fans were always going to support these solo endeavors, but JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ are trying to establish their own voices, and build individual fan bases. Even if they’re not in competition with each other, they are competing to command an unfamiliar listener’s attention.
Yet as these solo releases have played out over the past few months, the BLACKPINK members have not drowned each other out. Instead, this onslaught may have been the best thing for the group’s four stars — and also, for the group itself.
Let’s start with the biggest crossover hit of the solo releases so far: “APT.,” ROSÉ’s fizzy pop-rock chant-along alongside Bruno Mars, has become a legitimate smash in the U.S. and worldwide. Upon its October release, “APT.” became the first top 10 hit on the Hot 100 for any K-pop female act, and has since spent multiple months in the upper frame of the chart, along with reaching No. 1 on the Global 200 chart and staying there for a record 16 total weeks (and counting).
That huge single has been complemented by other chart achievements from the BLACKPINK members: ROSÉ’s debut album Rosie bowed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in December, while LISA has notched three Hot 100 hits from her Alter Ego project thus far, the same number as JENNIE from her RUBY album. Both of those albums have a solid shot at following Rosie into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 over the next two weeks.
The commercial wins have been accompanied by enviable co-signs and pop culture showcases. Just as ROSÉ corralled Mars for a team-up, LISA’s Alter Ego features collaborations with Future, Tyla, Megan Thee Stallion and Rosalía, among others; its lead track, “Born Again,” has guest spots by Doja Cat and Raye, both of whom joined LISA at the Oscars last Sunday, where they performed a medley of James Bond theme songs in front of nearly 20 million viewers. Meanwhile, JENNIE has already released collaborations with Doechii and Dominic Fike from RUBY, and the album’s track list also includes Dua Lipa, Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis.
JENNIE’s most successful single with a North American artist, “One of the Girls” with The Weeknd, resulted from her supporting turn on The Idol last year; a few months later, LISA is co-starring on the current season of The White Lotus. Along with different fashion spotlights and TV performances, the appearances in high-profile HBO dramas has helped increase the members’ visibility in the States – they’re more familiar to U.S. audiences now, totally outside the K-pop purview.
Those opportunities would be valuable at any pace, but combined with the rapidity of these solo rollouts, the BLACKPINK members have worked toward a type of ubiquity that has no doubt shaken some unfamiliar listeners awake. Did you know that in each of the past five weeks, Spotify’s flagship new-release playlist New Music Friday has had a song by a BLACKPINK member in the first five slots? They have highlighted songs like JENNIE’S “Love Hangover” with Fike, JISOO’s “Earthquake” and LISA’s “Fxck Up the World” with Future — and with RUBY out this Friday, that streak is all but certain to continue for a sixth consecutive frame.
Part of the reason why this rising-tide, all-boats model can work for the BLACKPINK members has to do with the circumstances of the group itself. These solo projects are taking place during a pause in group activity, not a hiatus; this is not a situation like an *NSYNC or a Destiny’s Child, in which one member of a group is clearly poised to ascend to solo fame and leave their cohorts behind, and it’s also not like a One Direction or a Fifth Harmony, in which one member has abruptly split to start their own career, while the others have to figure out how and when to catch up.
Instead, these concurrent rollouts have acted as a stopgap that’s been creatively fulfilling and drama-free — especially since a date has already been set for everyone to return to the BLACKPINK mothership for a world tour. In this way, the solo endeavors have functioned similarly to the group’s fellow K-pop superstars BTS (whose staggered military obligations has caused a more sprawling timeline of solo projects, but the promise of an eventual return remains), but also recalls rap groups of the late 20th century, whose members would peel off to record solo albums before linking back up for a group project. BLACKPINK probably didn’t examine the similarities between themselves and a post-36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan, but that has unwittingly become a highly successful model.
In any regard, the members have offered nothing but praise for what their group mates have accomplished on their own. “We know each other so well and know how much energy we have to put into every single project,” Lisa told Billboard late last year. “So we want to support and say, ‘You did really well!’ … This is what we all wanted to do, so I just wanted to say that I really do love their songs.”
Ultimately, this release strategy has created a balance — giving each member room to shine on their own, and the overlapping campaigns underlining their different music styles. Alter Ego demonstrated LISA’s pop-rap versatility, JENNIE’S advance RUBY singles underlined her effortlessly cool hook deployment, JISOO’s Amortage was defined by a graceful pop sensibility, and ROSÉ’s Rosie took a playful approach to radio-ready singer-songwriter fare. Longtime BLACKPINK fans had located the nuances in the four members’ approaches – but when stacked separately against one another, their singular talents were made more evident to a wider audience. A generation removed from each Spice Girl getting tagged with a different look and nickname, the BLACKPINK members have gotten to establish their personas by more artistic, and less reductive, means.
And soon, those personas will have the opportunity to live in front of stadium audiences. With the BLACKPINK world tour kickoff less than four months away, we’ll see how the recent solo material is incorporated into the group’s live show. Beyond that, future BLACKPINK studio output will be driven by four women who have had their confidence grow as artists and performers, and whose respective skill sets have been given room to expand and strengthen. BLACKPINK was already huge before this recent period of solo releases, but there’s no doubt that they’ve scooped up at least some new fans for the collective with their individual efforts — new fans of “Apt.” or Amortage or Alter Ego diving further down the rabbit hole, and becoming full-blown BLINKs.
The show was, unequivocally, going off.
In time with the beat, columns of fire blasted from a complicated and expensive-looking stage setup as a litany of dance hits blasted through the speakers of Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, where more than 15,000 people and their approximately 30,000 ears were gathered to hear the music.
Drunk girls traded compliments in line for the bathroom while staffers trying to prevent fire hazards cajoled people to dance in their seats instead of the aisles. It was a proper arena rager, a de facto badge of success for any artist, but particularly so in the world of dance music.
At the center of it all, John Summit — tanned, smiling, his shirt unbuttoned to a chest level that suggested a regular workout routine — threw up heart hands while manning the cockpit of CDJs before him. It was Nov. 16, 2024, the final evening of the producer’s sold-out three-night run at the Forum, shows executed by a 130-person team working overtime. It was just one of the very big moments of Summit’s biggest year to date, and while the set wasn’t even done yet, in his mind it was already over.
“I got too comfortable by the end,” he reflects three months later, “and I was like, ‘This show is done. This is the last one.’ And not because it wasn’t great. I think it was excellent. But I don’t want to write the same movie twice.”
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John Summit performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 15. Get your tickets here.
This sentiment embodies three essential truths about Summit. First and most obviously, that the 30-year-old Illinois native has accomplished quite a lot since emerging from the froth of internet buzz over the last five years. Second, that Summit possesses an almost strangely intense drive, a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that propels him forward even when the thing he has spent a year working on is still happening around him. And third: Summit’s tendency to most often describe his life not in terms of music but cinema. His big shows and capital B bangers are, for example, “big-budget projects, like Marvel,” whereas his smaller, clubbier sets “are A24,” he says, referencing the lauded indie studio. He compares the beginning of his sold-out Madison Square Garden show last summer to an action film, calling the pyro-heavy moment “basically me blowing up onstage. It was very Michael Bay-esque.”
Surveying the public-facing landscape of Summit’s life helps to explain his tendency to process it all in leading-man terms. Through an alchemy of talent, will, hard work and smart decision-making, Summit and his team have pulled off one of dance music’s rarest feats: becoming a hard-ticket juggernaut with a signature sound, big-ass hits and intergenerational appeal.
At the Garden, says Wasserman’s Daisy Hoffman, who represents Summit alongside Ben Shprits, “older adult fans” intermingled with younger ones. “I have 35-year-old friends with kids who are doing a girls’ trip to Vail [Colo.] for his show there, while my 25-year-old sister is following his every move on TikTok.”
A DJ achieving this kind of broad appeal is, today, a bit like spotting a snow leopard in the wild. “It’s very rare,” Shprits says. “It is extremely rare.”
OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.
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But it’s also not a fluke: Summit is a confident and adorable hustler with high standards and an intense Midwestern work ethic. “I’m delusional,” he says on a recent balmy Wednesday afternoon in Miami, where he moved to in 2020 to try and make it as a DJ. “I thought the first track I ever made was amazing.”
Since his first release in 2017, he has steadily attracted other believers, with his sprawling business now populated by managers, agents, accountants, label operators, radio pluggers, marketers, production designers, social media experts and the videographer who silently and ceaselessly captures footage as Summit shows me around Miami, a city where he has not only made it, but where he now avoids “super-glamorous spots where I feel like people are just staring at me the whole time.”
Dance superstardom has changed him. Whereas his social channels used to be plastered with drunken shenanigans, Summit now posts a lot about exercising. Hours before we meet, he shares an image of a yoga mat on the balcony of the waterfront condo he bought two years ago. While we chat, he talks about his need for consistent sleep (he tucks in at midnight and wakes up at seven) and more than once references his “personal growth journey.” But while Summit is Evolving with a capital E, his tenacity remains unaltered. After releasing his debut album, Comfort in Chaos, last July, he’s already at work on its follow-up. This summer, he’ll also headline festivals including Movement, Lightning in a Bottle and Bonnaroo; launch an Ibiza residency; and play shows in Australia, Europe and beyond.
“I’m hustling harder than I’ve ever hustled before,” he says, his Chicago accent strong. “The shows are only getting bigger and not just bigger, but better. The team is growing. My record label is growing. I’m working on a second album already, whereas I think most dance artists, especially house artists, don’t even do albums. Every year is crazier and crazier. It would be stupid to slow down when it’s snowballing.”
And yet it all occasionally leaves his head spinning. For example, Summit compares spending the holidays in his native Naperville, Ill., to the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo Baggins returns to the Shire after risking life and limb to destroy the One Ring and finds that while his idyllic homeland is the same as when he left it, he — fundamentally transformed by his quest — is not. “I’ve had the craziest life, toured the whole world, had many adventures and late nights, got into some bad situations,” Summit says. “Then I come back home and everything is the exact same.”
One can see how opening Christmas presents in your parents’ living room in the suburbs might seem surreal after playing for hundreds of thousands of people across multiple continents. But it was in Naperville and nearby Chicago where Summit — then a “kind of nerdy runner” born John Schuster — was first exposed to dance music. It happened while seeing deadmau5 at Lollapalooza in 2011, an experience Summit, then 16, has equated to a sort of spiritual awakening. His subsequent journeys through SoundCloud were exacerbated by a high school love interest. “At first, I was just making music to impress my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “She liked all these DJs, and I was like, ‘I can f–king do this.’ ”
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Ysa Pérez
Summit got serious about DJ’ing and producing while a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. By 2017, he had graduated with a master’s degree in accounting and was working at Ernst & Young while making music in his off-hours. (And, he admits, often during work hours, too.) He sent “dozens of demos” to a flurry of labels, focusing on esteemed U.K. imprints like Toolroom and Defected Records, which specialize in the house and tech house styles he was making.
“It’s no different than applying for 100 jobs when you’re out of college,” Summit says matter-of-factly of sending out demos. Eventually, a few small labels replied with feedback on how he could improve, and by 2018, they had signed a few of his tracks. By this time, Summit was in touch with a young manager named Holt Harmon, who was working with Summit on the release of a track he had made with an artist Harmon was then working with. The pair clicked.
“I had a call with Holt about, like, ‘How is this getting distributed? What’s the marketing strategy?’ I went very exec mode on him,” Summit says. “I think he was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s not just good at music. He gets it and he’s not lazy.’ I thought the same about him.”
Summit became the third artist signed to Metatone, the management company Harmon co-founded alongside Parker Cohen in 2018. But as things picked up for Summit, the pandemic hit. By now, Summit had been fired from Ernst & Young and was back living with his parents. But what might have seemed like a roadblock became something else.
“People saw the pandemic as a time to take their foot off the gas,” Shprits says. “And here you’ve got a 20-something guy on the verge of taking the next step in his career who saw it as an opportunity to do the opposite.”
In the basement, Summit made music and was extremely online, posting production tutorials, doing livestreams and winning people over with what Shprits calls his “unfiltered” personality. (“I would pay $500 to slap a warm bag of wine at a music festival right now,” Summit tweeted in May 2020, the deep days of the pandemic.) By the end of 2020, he had gone from livestreaming from Naperville to playing a b2b set with Gorgon City broadcast from a Chicago rooftop, racking up millions of views and likes along the way with this, as well as other self-deprecating, unapologetic and funny content. You couldn’t help but root for the guy.
Around this time, Summit moved to America’s dance music capital, Miami, with the goal of playing an extended set at the influential nightclub Space. “People didn’t see me as a serious DJ,” he says. “They saw me as someone who might have blown up on TikTok or something. Then I was doing these eight- to 10-hour sets of pretty underground music, not even playing a big vocal record until four or five hours in, kind of just proving like, ‘Yeah, I’m a f–king DJ.’ That was my version of taking on a very serious role.”
The method acting worked. When clubs reopened across the United States, Summit was suddenly selling out 500-capacity rooms in far-flung cities like Tempe, Ariz., often in seconds. He and his team focused on playing as much as they could, wherever they could, and venues eventually got bigger as the social media reach grew. His single and EP releases were largely house and tech house tracks, with his output helping propel the latter subgenre to increasingly bigger audiences, particularly as Summit experimented with bigger and more vocal-forward records, the kind that typically have maximum crossover potential.
His watershed moment came when he released “Where You Are,” a collaboration with power-lunged British singer-songwriter Hayla, in March 2023. “Before putting it out, I was like, ‘This is going to f–k up my entire career because this is a headliner, main-stage song,’ ” he says. “Very few DJs had become successful in the pop lane. It was like, ‘Am I ready for this challenge?’ Then I was like, ‘F–k it. Let’s do it.’ ”
“Where You Are” spent 26 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart; now has 298.7 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate; and was selected as a favorite song of 2023 by another Chicagoland resident, Barack Obama. By December 2023, Summit sold out Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium, moving 21,700 tickets and grossing $1.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.
“Where You Are” and other subsequent belters from Comfort in Chaos have, along with Summit’s general presence in the scene, agitated the dance world’s perpetual push-pull between the commercial and underground, a turf war that has long found artists wanting to play the biggest shows and have the biggest hits without losing the credibility and cool factor of dance’s less overtly capitalist sectors. But Summit wants to do both.
“John’s been very vocal about wanting to bring the underground to a large scale while bringing a production level that no one’s ever seen with this style of music,” Shprits says. “That’s always been the guiding light.”
But even if you’re playing music with underground origins, it’s not necessarily accurate to call yourself an underground artist while playing from atop a laser-shooting platform at the center of a sold-out arena. This is why Summit created Experts Only, the name of both the label on which he, in partnership with Darkroom Records, releases his own and other artists’ music and a party series where he plays lesser-known music (“I feel like I have to be very on the forefront with the records,” he says) for smaller crowds in tighter spaces.
“I look at John Summit and Experts Only as two different things,” Summit says. “John Summit is this grand display, a huge-budget production that shows my art and music from the album, whereas Experts Only is a party brand where me and DJ [friends] do cooler underground cuts … You hear so many artists who blew up that are like, ‘I hate playing my big song every night.’ They wish they could play more experimental stuff. I’m getting the best of both worlds.”
Doing both has broadened Summit’s appeal. The underground thing, Shprits says, is “generally attractive to an older demographic that’s experienced with electronic music. Then he has this amazing ability to craft songs that attract your high school and college demographic. Take all of that and then combine it with the personality, the packaging and the A&R’ing from the management and label side, it’s like the perfect big bang.”
And yet, Summit questions what the “hipster snob” John Schuster might think of it all. He recalls firing off “hypercritical” tweets at main-stage dance giants back in the EDM era; he preferred the heady vibes of Michigan’s beloved dance/jam festival Electric Forest and deep cuts like Shiba San’s 2014 house classic, “Okay.” “Now I’m here in those same shoes getting as much s–t talked about me. I think that’s maybe why I can get through it without getting too offended, because that was me doing the s–t-talking.”
CUBEL x The Room jacket and pants, Lost ‘N Found tee, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
But when you read most every social media comment, as Summit says he does, the ability to laugh off insults is helped by what he calls “a good supporting cast.” (He screenshots particularly egregious remarks and sends them to the inner circle for diffusion.) Taking a team approach to his career “is way less lonely,” with every person on the team not only bringing “a Swiss Army knife” of abilities, but together creating a perpetual group hang that’s the antidote to the cycle of loneliness, depression and addiction that has historically plagued dance artists.
Still, he is John Summit of the John Summit project, and his vision is specific. Here in Miami, he has ideas for how he wants to be photographed and filmed. He likes a lot of prep and knowing what the plan is. He’s agreeable and charming. You could also call him bossy — or just someone who knows what he wants.
“For better or for worse, I challenge people around me as much as possible to be at their greatest,” he says. “I’m ever-evolving, and everyone has to be ever-evolving around me.” Cohen says that among the team, Summit is often referred as “the third manager.” Shprits acknowledges that “at many times, John has challenged us to understand where he was going with this and to meet him.”
Summit isn’t quite sure where the drive comes from. “I was fortunate to have a very normal upbringing,” he says, and his parents (his father is a commercial airline pilot and his mother a real estate agent) “are like, ‘You’re doing great. You don’t have to keep pushing.’ I don’t come from an incredibly successful artistic family. There’s no mounting pressure.” At least, not from outside sources.
“This is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he continues. “I can’t let off the gas because the second I do, someone else is going to steam ahead. I’m going to try my best and try to be the best. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
So, for the foreseeable future, Summit shall keep gunning it. After Comfort in Chaos hit No. 39 on the Billboard 200, he’s now at work on a follow-up album that he wants to be “bigger and better.” While he didn’t get any 2025 Grammy nominations after campaigning for them, he says that just gives him “something to strive for.” And while dance music isn’t even a genre that necessitates albums, Summit sees them as meaningful: “I look at some of the greatest artists over the last generations, where album after album, they try to outdo themselves, reinvent themselves.” He takes cues not only from musicians but high-achieving athletes and, naturally, actors, calling Timothée Chalamet’s recent run “f–king incredible” and particularly inspiring.
For the next album, he’s interested in releasing a short movie alongside it. A recent rewatch of the 2014 film Whiplash inspired him to buy a drum kit and, maybe, play percussion on some of his new music. While he “shot my shot” with pop stars like Charli xcx and Dua Lipa by tweeting at them asking to work together (no collaborations have resulted), he says working with this type of artist “is not needed in my career,” given the strong roster of vocalists with “raw talent” like Hayla, Julia Church and more that he has surrounded himself with. He regularly brings out these vocalists during big shows and “f–king loves it” when they get a huge crowd reaction.
Plus, having tried working with a few pop stars, he finds bumping into their limited schedules “very diva-like. And as a diva myself,” he says with a laugh, “there’s only room for one of us.”
OFY top and tee, Lost ‘N Found x Levi’s pants, Rick Owens x Dr. Martens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
As writing gets underway, he’s also finding that he has grown up a bit since the days when his tagline was “My life is a bender.” (“My bender era walked so brat could run,” he tweets while we have lunch; the sentiment gets 2,500 likes before the plates are cleared.) Comfort in Chaos explored deeper topics than partying, and he says making it was a huge leap in his maturation. A song like his 2022 “In Chicago” (sample lyric: “I’m drunk, I’m high and I’m in Chicago”) “is basically like LMFAO,” he says. “It’s like my ‘Party Rock [Anthem].’ ” Comfort in Chaos, on the other hand, was largely about love and longing. When asked about this subject matter, he acknowledges that “I’m a lover boy” but demurs when asked to expand, saying only, “I tell it through the music, not in interviews.” (If anyone wants to read the tea leaves, the lyrics of Summit’s most recent song, the moody indie dance track “Focus,” inquire, “How’d we get so lost inside of this room?/Watching you turn into someone I never knew/I remember love, but it’s slipping out of view.”)
While Summit works out these big feelings in his new music, he’ll also spend the rest of 2025 headlining major U.S. festivals and touring the world; he and his team are particularly focused on international expansion this year. Outside of Ibiza, he says “there’s really no money” in international shows, but adds that revenue isn’t the point: “I’m young and hungry, and I want to showcase my art with the world.”
It’s all a wild ride, a summer popcorn blockbuster, a journey to Mordor and back. It’s the kind of stuff Summit sometimes thinks about after the workday ends, when “I take an edible and think, ‘Holy s–t, this world is crazy.’ But then I wake up in the morning, snap out of it and get back to it.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
From the moment she blasted onto the pop scene in 2008, Lady Gaga became a lightning rod for public speculation.
Every inch of her persona — her outfits, her lyrics, her anatomy — was scrutinized by fans, critics and media outlets alike. When new projects were announced, speculation would follow; what would Gaga do this time? When some of those projects fell commercially short of the stratospheric bar she’d set at the foundation of her career, that speculation curdled into declarations: Gaga’s reign as pop music’s paragon must be over.
Nearly two decades after that industry-reshaping debut, the pop icon is still struggling to manage the weight of those expectations. “Ever since my first album, I did listen to what people would say. ‘Will she outdo herself? Can she top herself? Can she live up to this? She needs to evolve, she hasn’t changed enough,’” Gaga tells Billboard. “There was a lot of noise.”
When it came time for her to embark on creating her seventh studio album, that noise hadn’t gone away. Fans, who had dubbed the untitled project “LG7,” were sharing wishlists of what they wanted to see Gaga do next. What genre would she tackle this time? Would there be high-profile features? Could the long-awaited continuation of “Telephone” finally materialize?
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Sitting in a New York hotel’s conference room, Gaga’s shoulders relax. “Taking the pressure off myself helped me to value what I feel really matters about me as a person,” she says, her face softening. “When you put your artistry first, and then you take the other stuff away … it gave me so much dignity. And I didn’t realize how much I was craving that.”
Mayhem, Gaga’s long-awaited new album (out Friday, March 7 via Interscope Records), doesn’t concern itself with expectations. It does play with them, though, changing up the sonic and thematic spaces it occupies before it can be boiled down into a single idea. In a musical landscape concerned with “album eras,” Mayhem refuses to be easily categorized. Ranging from grinding industrial techno one moment to soulful, heartfelt balladry the next, Mayhem makes its title a thesis statement — the throughline is disorder.
That pandemonium was established early in the process of making the album, thanks to Gaga’s own sense of experimentation in the studio. When setting out to write and record her new project, the singer says she found herself taking a piecemeal approach to her creative process, a welcome change from past efforts.
“There have been times in my career where I had an idea in terms of how to conceptually approach a record. But I would say that this album, from start to finish, was like pieces coming together,” she says. “I did not want to turn it into anything artificial, I really wanted to allow myself to just follow the music. By doing that, it started to slowly remind me of my earlier work.”
As she began piecing her music together, Gaga created a mantra for her work on the album: “Go with the chaos.” Instead of laboring under the expectation of finding a sonic or thematic subject, she instead opted to embrace the tumult itself and see where it took her.
Part of that process involved bringing in a new suite of collaborators — working closely with co-executive producer Andrew Watt and collaborators like Cirkut and Gesaffelstein, Gaga went about crafting an album that sounded like her while still bringing something fresh to the mix. As Cirkut explained to Billboard in November 2024, that wasn’t always easy to balance in the studio. “Do you do something so different that you move away from the things that you are known for?” he asked. “But if you just do the same thing that you’ve been known for, does that end up feeling like a ‘more-of-the-same’ type situation?”
Gaga says that she found herself leaning hard into her own intuition during the recording process. “I think what I look for in collaborators are people that will uphold me as a woman in the studio and follow my vision,” she explains. “I tried musically to work with people that I could push myself with — so that it wouldn’t be exactly what you’ve heard from me before, but there is the DNA of my approach to pop music.”
That approach to her pop sound pays off in spades throughout Mayhem. On early highlight “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga takes the ruminations on fame that she made a career out of and twists the knife that little bit deeper. Serving as a kind of mirror image to 2009’s “Paparazzi,” “Perfect Celebrity” puts much of the onus back on Gaga as she examines why she fought for fame so vigorously. “I’m made of plastic like a human doll/ You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all,” she sings. “I talk in circles because my brain it aches/ You say ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate.”
“I had this feeling inside myself of, ‘You can’t write about that. You can’t show this part of yourself.’ And then I was like, ‘No … embrace it, what do you want to say?’” Gaga recalls of the writing process. “It became complicated so quickly; owning that I wanted to be a star, and that it did bring a lot of complication to my life. So then, it’s also that anger that I felt towards myself, that I brought this on myself.”
She takes a beat before continuing. “I was nervous to put it on the album. But part of Mayhem is that I just put it all out there,” she says.
That’s not to say all of Mayhem is shrouded in darkness — later tracks on the album, like the campy disco banger “Zombieboy,” show Gaga shrugging off that self-seriousness to embrace pure pop hedonism. “Part of my personal mayhem is that it’s fun, and that’s why I keep doing it,” she says. “That’s what makes it complicated — it is dark, and it pulls me away from myself, but it’s also the best time. It’s that point where you’re at the party, and you’re totally numbing out, and you’ve fully accepted that by the morning you are not going to feel well, but you’re fully in it.”
As experimental and twisted as Mayhem gets, it’s clear that the early teases of the album have struck a chord with global audiences. “Die With a Smile,” the project’s closing track featuring Bruno Mars, spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — that’s the second longest stay any of the star’s singles have held in the chart’s top slot, just one week behind her 2011 behemoth “Born This Way.” Meanwhile, “Abracadabra” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart — where it remained for three weeks, — and continues to float around the Hot 100’s top 40.
Gaga is still in awe at both tracks’ immediate success. “I am really grateful, and I am really beside myself,” she says. “I never expect anything like this, because you never know, all you can do is your best. This is really a true honor and privilege.”
Along with becoming one of the biggest hits of her career, “Die With a Smile” also earned Gaga her 14th Grammy — she took home the 2025 trophy for best pop duo/group performance alongside Mars. When she took to the stage at the February ceremony, though, Gaga made sure that she shared her win with the trans community, reminding the audience at home that “trans people are not invisible” and that they “deserve love.”
Looking at the current administration’s ongoing attacks against the trans community, Gaga doesn’t mince her words. “I think it is abysmal, and horrible, and violent and wrong,” she offers, matter-of-factly. “I just want to extend all of my love and gratitude to the trans community for showing us so much strength and love.”
She often shares that same sentiment about her fanbase, the Little Monsters, whom Gaga credits with “having this conversation [with me] through art and fashion and politics for a long time.” While her fans have always been active and outspoken in their support for her, Mother Monster has noticed a shift in her following as of late.
“I’ve seen Little Monsters be so amazing for almost 20 years. I haven’t seen us like this in a long time,” she says, pointing to the swath of videos fans have shared across apps like TikTok and Instagram learning her choreography and creating new art out of her music. “Between the dancing, the makeup. the hair, the costumes, it gives me so much life, and I am really honored. All I ever want to do is make something that you press play and you feel good for the duration of the record, and maybe you play it again.”
That activation on her base’s part may have something to do with a similar activation on the singer’s part — fans on TikTok have noticed how frequently Gaga comments on fan-made videos, with some even referring to the phenomenon as “conjuring” Gaga.
“That is me,” Gaga confirms about her TikTok comments, smiling. “That’s the way we always were — it just wasn’t to this extent, because we didn’t have the same tools to talk to each other.” After a pause, a look of incredulity crosses Gaga’s face. “I just … how could I not? I always say that I have the best seat in the house, because I get to watch the fans.”
With her fans fired up for a new album, her singles finding massive global success and her meticulously-crafted album ready to release, Gaga takes one last look at a career’s worth of expectations before dismissing them. “I do think that I felt a lot of pressure, over the years, to prove myself as a musician,” she says. “And that sometimes stopped me from having fun. So, I tried to have a lot of fun making this record.”
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The Jazz and Soul music giant Roy Ayers has passed away. He was 84.
Variety reports that the Jazz vibraphonist’s family confirmed that he passed away on Tuesday, March 4, after a “long illness.”
“It is with great sadness that the family of legendary vibraphonist, composer, and producer Roy Ayers announce his passing which occurred on March 4, 2025 in New York City after a long illness,” reads the Ayers family’s statement. “He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed. A celebration of Roy’s life will be forthcoming.”
Ayers is perhaps best known for his song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine,” from his 1976 album of the same name, which has been sampled countless times by Hip-Hop and R&B musicians. Ayers often credited Mary J. Blige’s 1994 “My Life,” which liberally samples the aforementioned song, with reviving his career and enriching his bank account.
Also a composer and record producer, Ayers’ deep and rich catalog of music has long been mined for samples that got flipped into new beats that hipped a new generation of listeners to his grooves. Some of those recognizable songs include “We Live In Brooklyn, Baby,” “Searching,” and “Running Away,” where were in turn chopped and massaged into new works from the like of Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Mos Def, Kendrick Lamar. A Tribe Called Quest and many, many more. Also notable was Ayers’ crafting of the soundtrack to the Blaxploitation classic Coffy, which stars Pam Grier.
One of this writers favorites was Ayers connecting with The Roots on their “Proceed II.”
Rest in powerful peace Roy Ayers.
This story is developing.
If there’s a current “big three” when it comes to different styles of Caribbean music, it’s probably reggae, dancehall and soca. Between Buju Banton’s Stateside return and Vybz Kartel’s release from prison and subsequent Freedom Street bonanza, reggae and dancehall, respectively, earned much-needed boosts to their global profiles thanks to the massive legacy of those Jamaican giants. Now, it’s soca’s turn – and Trinidad is leading the charge.
Led by a slew of joyous, anthemic hits – including leading road march contenders from Bunji Garlin (“Carry It”) and Machel Montano’s (“Pardy”) – this season’s soca anthems are connecting with audiences in a very special way. After soca band Kes played a sold-out concert at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount last year (Dec. 14), the crowd spilled out into the streets, belting out Destra and Montano’s classic “It’s Carnival,” despite the sub-20-degree weather. Last month, Montano timed the release of “Pardy” for the same week he made history with the first-ever soca set for NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series.
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Meanwhile, Trinidadian-born rap megastar Nicki Minaj joined forces with Trinidad Killa for a soca-flavored track called “Eskimo,” and she recently teased a remix of Garlin’s infectious “Carry It.” And, of course, there’s no legitimate discussion of 2025 soca that doesn’t include Yung Bredda’s “The Greatest Bend Over” and Full Blown’s culture-quaking “Big Links” riddim.
On March 3 and 4, tens of thousands of revelers will parade in the streets across Trinidad, honoring the centuries-old Afrocentric celebrations that evolved into today’s Carnival festivities. In addition to the liberating mayhem of J’ouvert morning’s Stink & Dutty Mas and the extravagant costumes of Pretty Mas, Trinidad Carnival also incorporates traditional elements steeped in the island’s rich and sacred history. The national stickfighting competition honors Kalinda martial art and the annual reenactment of the Kambulé riots – a series of 1880s protests against colonial police’s efforts to restrict certain freedoms and aspects of culture – keep history at the center of the celebration.
Of course, music is also an integral part of Trinidad Carnival, with a slew of competitions providing unforgettable entertainment, including Calypso Monarch, Soca Monarch, the King and Queen of the Bands, Panorama, the Carnival Road March. Before the winners of those competitions are decided – particularly Soca Monarch and the Carnival Road March – producers and artists spent the months leading up to Carnival dropping their best swings at the season’s defining soca anthems.
On Sunday (March 2), Montano, who already boasts six International Soca Monarch wins and 10 Road March victories, won his first-ever Chutney Soca Monarch title with “Pepper Vine.” Montano came up short at Calypso Monarch, landing in fifth place with “Bet Meh” behind Helon Francis’ “To Whom It May Be” — as did Yung Bredda, who placed third with “We Rise,” his first-ever showing at a Calypso Monarch final.
Bredda has quickly emerged as one of the defining voices of soca this year with “The Greatest Bend Over,” his take on Full Blown’s “Big Links” riddim, which dropped late last year (Dec. 2, 2024). A Trini star who plays both soca and calypso music, Beedd recently appeared in Billboard’s weekly “Trending Up” column thanks to the steadily rising Stateside streaming totals for “Bend Over.” His sweet, perfect-for-all-ages track is joined by contributions from Montana (“The Truth”) and Kes (“No Sweetness”), as well as “Good Spirits,” the first song penned to the riddim and a notable step into the spotlight for Full Blown as recording artists.
“One day we were messing with some different melodies and exchanging ideas; I would do the music and Kevon would do the writing,” recalls Kory Hart, one-half of Full Blown, from the very studio in which the sibling duo crafted the “Big Links” riddim. “The public sees the highs more than anything else, but we’ve been through a lot of difficult periods. That’s where ‘Good Spirits’ really came from.”
After cutting “Good Spirits,” the brothers decided to make it a riddim because “it helps when people see a big name like Machel Montano as the lead artist.” Full Blown — the Trini sibling production duo of Kory and Kevon Hart — has been working with Montano for over 15 years now, so their collaboration was as natural as it was inevitably great. A later session with Kes at producer Tano’s studio led to “No Sweetness,” which would have been the final song on the riddim if not for the duo’s nagging feeling that they needed Yung Bredda on it as well. Full Blown initially brought the 24-year-old entertainer to the studio “because [they] wanted somebody who would write their own song, so that [they] wouldn’t have to do so.”
Once he heard the riddim, Bredda wanted the duo to write the song, so the collaboration was “put on the shelf for a second.” After sitting with the riddim for a few more weeks, Kevon started sketching out an idea for “The Greatest Bend Over” while his brother was out, and Kory helped structure the song when he returned. Accented by its notable incorporation of zess, a Trinidadian dancehall subgenre, the composition and resounding success of the “Big Links” riddim epitomize Full Blown’s commitment to crafting soca that’s steeped in tradition and unafraid to push forward into new sonic territories.
“The introduction is dominated by the tabla, a percussion instrument that’s the identifying mark of zess,” explains Hart. “It would be a typical groovy soca beat without it. Zess has a very large following among the youth in Trinidad, but [those artists] have been struggling to be accepted by mainstream Trini music – which is soca. For us, this was a very clever way of combining the two and showing the Zess artists that they do what we do, just in a different way.”
In addition to the “Big Links” riddim, Lady Lava’s “Ring Finger” is also making waves across the Caribbean diaspora. A Trini recording artist and poet, Lady Lava has been making music since 2008, cultivating a unique lane characterized by lyrics of female empowerment. With her career back on the upswing after a down period marked by the quick succession of her first pregnancy and the COVID-19 pandemic, Lady Lava is seizing her moment – and courting new fans like Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B.
“You don’t have a ring, then you don’t have a mister,” she proclaims over Aaron Duncan’s thumping “Summer Steam” riddim. A musical reminder to never let a no-good man pull the wool over your eyes, “Ring Finger” is a soca anthem for women by a woman – one that stands out from the scores of odes to wining women sung by male soca artists.
It’s that feminist bent that’s allowed “Ring Finger” to enjoy such marked longevity: The song was a local hit when it first dropped in summer 2024, but TikTok virality over the fall and the winter kept wind in its sails. The official “Ring Finger” TikTok sound plays in over 22,000 posts, and the audio from a live performance soundtracks a further 13,000 posts. Last month (Feb. 19), Lava graced On the Radar with “Ring Finger,” marking a rare soca number on the buzzy live performance platform. By infusing contemporary soca instrumentation with brash lyricism sourced from her poetry background and the femme-forward approach of female dancehall giants like ’90s and ‘00s hitmaker Lady Saw, Lady Lava is ushering in a new era of soca for a younger audience.
“I still write a poem about everything,” she says. “If I wanted to tell somebody something, I would write it in a poem. Music is me putting poem to riddims, that’s how my style of writing does be like that. I like to rhyme and use metaphors and compare things that totally don’t have anything to do with each other just to get people thinking.”
Getting people to think beyond grooving to the music is also the primary goal for Tendaji, a Trinidadian singer, songwriter, and music who bridges traditional calypso and modern soca. With a musical profile anchored by the drums and lavways (call-and-response chants) that soundtracked stickfighting competition, Tendanji is perhaps one of the most fearless Trinidad recording artists when it comes to centering history in the music.
His most recent release, “Doh Cry,” features a music video that showcases the stickfighting tradition in a cinematic, black-and-white aesthetic. At the end of the song, Tendaji calls out the names of stickfighting warriors of eras past, including King Kali, King Bara, King David and King Stokely, honoring their influence and highlighting how stickfighting connects the Trinidad of today to its Afro-Indigenous roots. He built the song with Rishi Mahato of Maha Productions, a prominent chutney music producer who brought some of those elements to the “strongly African, strongly Jouvay energy” of “Doh Kry,” a reminder that “Trinidad is not just one sound,” as Tendaji stresses.
“There’s a lot of music out there for Pretty Feathers Mass. There’s a lot of music out there to wine and jam on Carnival Tuesday, but there ain’t nothing for the jab jab, the blue devils, the stick fighters, etc.” he says. “When Carnival Monday comes, we ain’t looking for flowers music. We want to get into character. We want to go down inside weself. Carnival has a ritualistic element, and because of my history and involvement in the character mas so much, I try to make music that reps them as well.”
Whether through composition, lyrics or presentation, Full Blown, Lady Lava and Tendaji are all making incredible strides in defining the future of soca – especially as the genre eyes a potential global crossover moment off the back of this season’s biggest hits. Notting Hill Carnival is still several months away, for example, but “The Greatest Bend Over” has already gotten so much traction in the U.K. that it would have entered the country’s Afrobeats charts, had it fit the appropriate sonic profile, according to a phone conversation Full Blown had with BBC Radio 1Xtra personnel two weeks ago. All three acts agree that the “crossover” will happen with foreign listeners meeting Trini soca artists on their turf. The era of concessions is over.
“I think we’re getting braver in terms of saying things the way we say it. I don’t know if Afrobeats’ [success] helped with that, but we sing it all the time down here and don’t even know what they’re saying all the time. But it sounds good,” says Hart. “I think the same thing will happen with us and our Trini dialect. Our ‘crossover hits’ have been very few and far between. We’re starting to see that soca has more appeal.”
As the music industry marches further into this era of increased globalization, different styles and genres that may have taken a backseat in past eras now have an opportunity to lead the charge. Trinidad is churning out soca hits that will hopefully lay the foundation for future bouyon crossover hits from St. Lucia and Dominica.
“Even the Jamaicans — who, oftentimes, we wish we were in their shoes so we could have our genres recognized — are looking to soca now because they believe that soca is the next thing,” Hart proclaims. “Our confidence is building; we’re finding our voice and our space and realizing that if we keep it up consistently, the world will catch up to us eventually.”