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Up a winding mountain road on the edge of Salt Lake City, past snow-dusted pines and freshly shoveled driveways, through a wrought iron gate that opens at the command of an armed guard yawning in a pickup truck, sits a handful of mansions designed like rustic ski resorts — and one that looks like a modernist mall. Another security guard idles at the end of the outlier’s heated driveway, which slopes past a garage where Maybachs and McLarens sit alongside muddy, toddler-sized four-wheelers and a terrarium housing a sleeping bearded dragon. At the front door, an inflatable Santa stands sentry, holding a sign that warns, “Nine Days Until Christmas!”
On a clear day like today, you can look out the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, over the icy swimming pool and presently invisible dirt bike track below, and the entirety of the Salt Lake Valley spreads out before you like an overturned snow globe. Inside, the space is all white and sparsely furnished, decorated with a pair of spindly Christmas trees, a half-dozen painted portraits — in one, a smiling young man feeds his daughter a cheeseburger — and an enormous plaque that glints in the sunlight and reads, “100 RIAA Gold/Platinum Certifications,” and, in larger letters, “YoungBoy Never Broke Again.” Its recipient, who introduces himself as Kentrell, sits quietly beneath it as a motherly woman named Quintina, who is not his mother but his financial adviser, paints his fingernails black.
The neighbors have yet to figure out who exactly it is that moved in just over a year ago: a rail-thin 23-year-old with faded face tattoos and a stable of luxury vehicles that never leave the garage. Should they learn that he is signed to Motown Records and makes music as YoungBoy Never Broke Again, it’s likely they would still draw a blank. (A middle-aged blonde from the mansion next door cranes her neck from the window of her SUV to gawk at the camera crew unloading outside for today’s cover shoot.) And it’s true that the artist born Kentrell DeSean Gaulden, whom fans call YoungBoy or simply YB, has practically zero mainstream presence: He’s not on the radio, scarcely performs live, regularly deactivates his social media accounts and shies away from the press.
Yet in an extreme and emblematic case of streaming-era stardom, YoungBoy is one of the most popular and prolific rappers on the planet. Since breaking out from his hometown of Baton Rouge, La., at age 15 — already sounding like a world-weary veteran who had absorbed a lifetime of pain — he has landed 96 entries on the Billboard Hot 100 and 26 projects on the Billboard 200. (Of the latter, 12 charted in the top 10, and four went to No. 1.) Of the whopping eight full-length projects he released in 2022 alone, five reached the top 10; his latest, January’s I Rest My Case, debuted at No. 9. YoungBoy was the third most-streamed artist in the United States last year (according to Luminate), behind Drake and Taylor Swift, and currently sits at No. 1 on YouTube’s Top Artists page, where he has charted for the last 309 weeks. After deducting a presumed 10% management fee, Billboard estimates YoungBoy’s take-home pay from artist and publishing streaming royalties averaged between $8.7 million and $13.4 million annually over the last three years, depending on the structure of his publishing contract and level of artist royalty his recording contract pays out. The NBA’s coolest young team, the Memphis Grizzlies, warms up to his music almost exclusively.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again photographed on December 16, 2022 in Utah.
Diwang Valdez
He’s known for churning out releases with machine-like efficiency and for the legal battles that have haunted his career from day one, to the extent that both feel like essential components of the art itself. As a public figure, he’s inscrutable, but in song, he comes alive — equal parts outlaw and confidant, commiserating with listeners’ struggles and declaring vendettas in the same breath. And though his path may strike some as counterintuitive, YoungBoy’s perpetual underdog status only galvanizes his die-hard supporters, for whom aggrievement has become a calling card, regularly spamming comment sections in frantic defense of their favorite.
Since moving to Utah, YoungBoy has left his house exactly zero times; an ankle monitor will trigger if he so much as crosses the end of his driveway. After fleeing police, who had stopped him in Los Angeles with a federal warrant stemming from a 2020 arrest — where he was one of 16 people picked up on felony drug and weapons charges at a video shoot — he spent most of 2021 in a Louisiana jail. In October 2021, a judge granted him permission to serve house arrest in Salt Lake City at the request of his lawyers. (Hence the security team, whose presence is to enforce the terms of his incarceration as much as for his protection. Those terms include a limit of three preapproved visitors at a time, turning today’s shoot into an elaborate exercise in consolidation.) The 2020 arrest was the latest in a string of allegations that began when YoungBoy was 15. Last year, he was found not guilty in one of his two federal gun trials; the other is ongoing.
YoungBoy lives here with Jazlyn Mychelle, whom he quietly married in the first week of 2023, and their two children: a 17-month-old named Alice (after his grandmother) and a newborn boy, Klemenza (named for a character in The Godfather whose loyalty the rapper admires). They are the youngest of the 23-year-old YoungBoy’s 10 children. The other eight live with their seven respective mothers. Most people in his position would be counting down the days until freedom, but besides the fact that his “purposeless” car collection is steadily depreciating in value, YoungBoy is in no rush to return to the world. “This is the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says with an expensive-looking smile, having traded his diamond grill for pearly veneers, as his nail polish dries in the sunlight.
Even inside, YoungBoy rarely hangs out upstairs. He usually stays up until dawn in the basement, playing Xbox or recording songs all night, never touching pen to paper — instead, he freestyles line by line according to what’s weighing on his mind. By his estimate, over 1,000 unreleased tracks currently sit in the vaults. His nocturnal tendencies are a “protection thing,” he explains. “It has been like that since I was 15: I’ve got to be somewhere where I actually know no one is inside the room,” he says in a voice I have to lean in to hear, a near whisper that feels worlds away from the fearless squawk that booms out in his songs, hurling threats at a seemingly endless number of enemies. “I like to just stay in one small space where I don’t have to worry about anything that’s not safe.”
For a while, he had a habit of sleeping in the garage — in the Tesla, where he could turn on the heat without fear of death by carbon monoxide poisoning, and where he and his engineer, XO, would sometimes record. Lately, he stays up smoking cigars in the basement — his last remaining vice, he says. “Nighttime, when everybody’s asleep — it’s the most peaceful time ever inside of life to me,” he whispers. “Nighttime, when it’s dark and nothing’s moving but the wildlife and the crooks.” He has seen his share of deer and rabbits scurrying around the property, and though he has yet to spy a bobcat, the security guards have. He watches for intruders, too, a matter of routine. What he likes best is that it’s peaceful here, and that “it’s very far from home.”
Kentrell Gaulden wrote his first song in fourth grade, and he still remembers how it started. He giggles as he launches in: “It goes, ‘P—y n—s always in my face/Bang, bang, bang, there go the murder case.’ And I keep saying it.” Growing up in north Baton Rouge, his mother, an amateur rapper herself under the name Ms. Sherhonda, would bring Kentrell and his older sister to watch her record in a neighbor’s home studio. His father was sentenced to 55 years for armed robbery when he was 8. Years later, when a teenage Gaulden was locked up himself for a 2014 robbery charge, he received a letter from another jail — from his father, telling his son about his own musical dabblings. “I never had a Plan B. This is what I was set on becoming,” YoungBoy says, his narrow frame engulfed in a skull-patterned puffer jacket, a tangle of diamonds flashing underneath. His early songs inspired a school friend to write his own, and YoungBoy smiles remembering the two giddily trading rhymes before class. “But he died,” he adds, barely breaking his gaze. “If I’m not mistaken, they was robbing someone, and as he took off, he met his consequence.”
The Baton Rouge in YoungBoy’s raps is rife with mortal danger, a place where death is an old acquaintance and betrayal lurks around every corner. On 2016’s “38 Baby,” around the time the rapper’s local buzz was going national, YoungBoy half-sang, half-rapped that he “got the law up on my ass, demons up in my dreams,” claiming to not even step in the recording booth unarmed. It was startling to see who was behind such a nihilistic worldview: a gangly teen whose baby face was marked three times across the forehead with scars from a halo brace he wore after breaking his neck as a toddler. Artist Partner Group CEO Mike Caren (who worked for years with YoungBoy’s former label, Atlantic, and the artist’s own Never Broke Again imprint, and remains his publisher), remembers his first time seeing the “38 Baby” video.
“The intensity was so powerful,” Caren recalls. “He was youthful and seasoned at the same time. He had presence, a natural sense of melody, and he painted an entire picture of his world.” A bitter brand of authenticity emerged from the contrast of YoungBoy’s boyishness and the obvious trauma that hovered over him like a black cloud. To hear one of his songs was to listen in on the shockingly intimate confessions of someone forced into adulthood against his will, and to witness his expression catch up to his experience in real time.
You could cherry-pick the history of Louisiana hip-hop and cobble together something like a precedent for YoungBoy: the swampy street tales and prolific output of the labels No Limit and Cash Money; the embrace of balladry, bounce and traumatized blues; the pure indifference to industry protocols. YoungBoy’s early releases gestured to 20-odd years of Baton Rouge rap, from Trill Entertainment’s dark-sided club jams to Kevin Gates’ warbled bloodletting — music that was sometimes about women or money but mostly, and most profoundly, about pain. In recent years, YoungBoy’s rapping has matured into a style that stands apart from his predecessors, veering off into complicated rhythms and electrifying spoken-word diatribes, as on last year’s eight-minute missive “This Not a Song (This for My Supporters),” where he warns listeners not to be fooled by the glamour of gangster rap. Still, the old pain sears through nearly every freestyled verse.
It was his “pain music” in particular that first drew the attention of Kyle “Montana” Claiborne, a wisecracking 36-year-old Baton Rouge native. YoungBoy’s songs were only available on YouTube in 2016 when the two met, and though Montana was twice YoungBoy’s age, the music hit him hard. “I wasn’t a rapper, but I wanted to live like a rapper,” he says, and with no real industry experience, he became the 16-year-old’s right-hand man, driving him hours to play shows for $500 a pop. YoungBoy’s buzz was steadily building on YouTube and Instagram “back when followers was real and organic,” Montana stresses. Meanwhile, he was recording enough music to drop an album per week, propelled by a private urgency.
The Never Broke Again label was created in Montana’s name since YoungBoy was a minor; today, they share ownership of the company, which partnered with Motown in 2021, a year ahead of YoungBoy’s solo deal with the label. In late 2016, the pair traveled to New Orleans to meet in a parking lot with Fee Banks, who had helped Lil Wayne launch his Young Money label and managed Gates into stardom. Banks saw in YoungBoy a similar greatness and immediately took over as his manager.
“YoungBoy was moving fast, but he had a lot of drama attached to him,” Banks recalls. “Soon as I got in touch with him, he went to jail. Anything he got into, we got him out, and every time he got out of jail, he’d gotten bigger. Throughout all the trials and tribulations, we kept it moving, kept recording, kept shooting videos and stayed down.”
YoungBoy’s buzz had caught the ear of another Louisiana native: Bryan “Birdman” Williams, who co-founded Cash Money Records and mentored a young Lil Wayne, among many others. In his signature twang, Williams recalls flying a teenage YoungBoy to Miami, where they recorded daily for two weeks, working on what eventually became their 2021 collaborative album, From the Bayou. “Watching how fast he do music and the value of the music, I saw a lot of similarities between him and Wayne,” he says. “I seen stardom in him, but I knew it was a process.”
Williams made it a mission to impress upon the teenager that he had a choice: the life he was raised in or the music. “I once was somebody like him and had to gamble my life. I wanted to show him that he could really survive off his talent,” he continues. “You could go to jail, or you could die, or you could try to be somebody.” As he does with Wayne, he refers to YoungBoy as a son.
Diwang Valdez
By the time labels had entered a bidding war, YoungBoy was a cult hero with eight mixtapes under his belt. He was also a teenage father of three being tried as an adult for attempted murder, facing a life sentence without parole. He had been apprehended before a show in Austin, accused of a nonfatal Baton Rouge shooting that occurred hours after a friend’s murder; after six months awaiting trial in a Louisiana prison, he ultimately took a plea deal. At his 2017 sentencing — by which point he had committed to a $2 million deal with Atlantic Records — the judge cited his music as a means of “normalizing violence,” one of many recent instances of rap lyrics being used as evidence in criminal proceedings. With your talent, she lectured, comes responsibility. He received a suspended 10-year prison term with three years of probation. More disturbing allegations emerged in the years to follow, including kidnapping, assault and weapons charges tied to a 2018 incident recorded in a hotel hallway showing the rapper attacking his girlfriend.
One night in prison while YoungBoy was on lockdown (“For no disciplinary reason — it was because of who I was”), he prayed to see his late grandmother one last time. He had lived in her home for much of his childhood, crying on the occasions when he had to return to his mom’s house. Her name, Alice Gaulden, frequently appears in his lyrics, and her massive painted portrait hangs by the fireplace; after our interview, I catch him smiling beneath it in silence, one hand resting on the image of her face. “And I remember, I ain’t crazy — she hugged me. I felt her,” he recalls softly, and despite his serene expression, his legs begin to tremble, at first subtly, then unignorably. “After that, I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I didn’t even care about the situation I was in. I felt like I was secure.”
His grandmother died in 2010, and YoungBoy was sent to a group home. “I used to get beat up inside the group home for no reason,” he continues as the shaking intensifies, though his quiet voice never falters. “The other boys would put their hands on me, and I would look up like, ‘Why are you hitting me, bro? What’d I do?’ It made me discover another side of me that I never glorified or liked. I found out how to be the person that you don’t want to do that with. [Before then], I never understood all the evilness or wrong because I was showered by so much love from this one person.”
By now, YoungBoy is shaking from head to toe with alarming intensity, his jewelry audibly rattling. “It’s not going to stop,” he calmly replies when I suggest we take a break. Quintina, who began as his accountant and now appears to also function as a surrogate mother, kneels beside his chair to hold his hand. “I’m OK,” YoungBoy assures her. Composing himself, though the trembling continues, he focuses his gaze.
“I’m very scared right now,” he confesses. “It’s just natural. I’m not big on people.” For most of his life, expressing or explaining himself has taken place behind a microphone, alone. “I never knew why once I walked on the stage, I could get it done and leave — but I am terrified of people. People are cruel. This is a cruel place.” He swivels in his seat toward the blue and white panorama behind him. “You’ve got to be thankful for it. It’s very beautiful, you know? There’s so much you can experience inside of it. But it is a very cruel place. And it’s not my home.” The smile he cracks has a strange effect — sweetness embedded in a wince.
“I don’t want to know what it means to die — but do we actually die, or do we go on to the real life? What if we’re all just asleep right now?” he wonders aloud as the shaking dies down. “It’s all a big test, I think.”
Diwang Valdez
Perhaps you’re wondering how a Baton Rouge rapper on house arrest finds himself deep in the heart of Mormon country. Those listening closely may have noticed YoungBoy name-dropping Utah’s capital from the beginning: “Take a trip to Salt Lake City, cross the mountain, ’cause that’s called living,” he chirped on “Kickin Sh-t” seven years ago. He first came here as a boy, he explains, as part of a youth outreach group initiative, and became very close with one of its leaders, a Utah native he declines to name, though he mentions she was married at the time to a professional baseball player. Today, he refers to the woman as his mom. “She’s a wonderful person. She’s just there when I need her,” he says softly. “She christened me, if I’m not mistaken, and then she brought me back here to meet her family. When I got here, it was always my goal: I’m going to move here. I’m going to have a home here. This is where my family is going to be.” Courtroom testimony from his 2021 hearing shows his attorneys reasoning that a permanent move to Utah would keep their client away from trouble; after some initial skepticism, the judge agreed.
The past few months of YoungBoy songs are full of curious Utah-isms, like the Book of Mormon passage that opens his video for “Hi Haters” — “Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled about by the everlasting chains of death” — or a recent line mentioning missionaries visiting his home. “I’m surprised they didn’t come in the process of this [interview],” he says when I ask about the latter reference. The first time the Mormon missionaries appeared on his doorstep, weeks ago, YoungBoy instinctively sent them away. Then he had second thoughts: “I wanted help very badly. I needed a friend. And it hit me.”
When they returned, he invited them in, explaining the things about himself he was desperate to change. “It was just cool to see someone with a different mindset that had nothing to do with business or money — just these wonderful souls,” he recounts. He has come to look forward to their daily visits, during which they discuss the Book of Mormon and “make sure my heart is in the right space” for his official baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-day Saints, a rite that forgives past sins through repentance, according to Mormon theology. He’s saving the ceremony for after his ankle monitor is removed. “Even when my negative thoughts come back, when I do want to tell them, ‘Not today,’ I just don’t let nothing stop it,” he says. (Later I learn that during our talk, two carloads of chipper, clean-cut missionaries in their early 20s did, in fact, appear at the property’s gate and were turned away only due to the visitor limit.)
Diwang Valdez
As for whether the missionaries know who he is, YoungBoy doesn’t ask; frankly, it could go either way. He epitomizes “invisible music stardom,” the streaming-era phenomenon in which artists have massive fan bases but relatively minor pop culture footprints, illustrating a disjunction between what’s promoted and what is truly resonating. His particular success is often attributed to his relentless productivity, in some ways more like that of a “content creator” than a traditional musician. “I have never heard of a fan saying that their favorite artist is putting out too much music unless the quality goes down,” says Caren, noting YoungBoy’s impressive consistency.
As for his lack of a ubiquitous hit — for all of his chart-topping full-lengths and 96 Hot 100 entries, the highest YoungBoy has charted as a sole lead artist has been No. 28, for 2020’s “Lil Top” and 2021’s “Bad Morning” — Caren argues he has had them, just not in the places you’d expect. “He moved too fast for the radio. He was always on to the next thing. You can’t stick around and promote the same song for five months when you’re making multiple albums in that time period.” And though his numbers are mighty across all streaming platforms (on Spotify, he has over 17 million monthly listeners), his popularity is most closely associated with YouTube, where his fans first found him, and where he can upload new music directly to his 12.1 million subscribers, bypassing the mainstream industry apparatus entirely.
It was YoungBoy’s peerless work ethic that first grabbed the attention of Motown vp of A&R Kenoe Jordan. The Grammy-nominated producer and fellow Baton Rouge native had monitored the rapper’s career from the jump, impressed by what the teenager and his Never Broke Again label had accomplished with limited resources. “In Louisiana, we have the most talented musicians in the world, but the window of opportunity is very small,” Jordan says from the work-in-progress Never Broke Again headquarters in Houston: half office building, half giant garage full of lethal-looking ATVs and bench press racks. After signing a global joint venture with the Never Broke Again label, Jordan was determined to sign YoungBoy himself, who had voiced frustration with Atlantic in some since-deleted online comments that had some fans petitioning Atlantic to release him from his deal. Jordan announced YoungBoy’s signing with Motown in October 2022, following the completion of his contract with Atlantic.
Jordan calls YoungBoy and company some of the hardest-working people in the industry, known to spring an impromptu album on the label without warning. “His formula is already there,” Jordan adds. “He knows what he wants. You just have to make sure you’re able to deliver on the things that he asks you to do.” YoungBoy’s partners have simply learned to trust him whether or not they see the vision. Montana laughs remembering nights spent driving to undisclosed locations: “He do some of the oddest things, and nobody knows why he’s doing it but him.”
Diwang Valdez
As strategies go, YoungBoy’s makes sense — flood the market, circumvent the system, keep the fans and the algorithms satiated — but it doesn’t entirely explain why he puts out as much music as he does. What analysts would credit to a master plan, YoungBoy describes as a compulsion. “It’s a disease,” he says starkly. “Literally, I cannot help myself. I tell myself sometimes, ‘I’m not going to drop until months from now,’ but it’s addictive. I wish I knew when I was younger how unhealthy this was for me. Whatever type of energy I had inside me, I would’ve pushed it toward something else.” From someone whose music seems like his truest form of release, it’s an astonishing claim. “The music is therapy, but I can’t stop it when I want,” he goes on, sounding almost ashamed. “And the lifestyle is just a big distraction from your real purpose.”
As if some private dam has broken, YoungBoy’s words now spill out urgently. “I’m at a point now in my life where I just know hurting people is not the way, and I feel very manipulated, even at this moment,” he says, his brown eyes flashing. “I was set on being the greatest at what I did and what I spoke about. Man, I was flooded with millions of dollars from the time I was 16 all the way to this point, and I woke up one morning like, ‘Damn. They got me. They made me do their dirty work.’ Man, look at the sh-t I put in these people’s ears.” By “they,” he’s alluding to the rappers he once looked up to as examples of how to live and those who bankroll them. His voice wavers, then steadies. “I think about how many lives I actually am responsible for when it comes to my music. How many girls I got feeling like if you don’t go about a situation that your boyfriend’s bringing on you in his way, you’re wrong? How many people have put this sh-t in their ears and actually went and hurt someone? Or how many kids felt like they needed to tote a gun and walked out the house and toted it the wrong way? Now he’s fixing to sit there and do years of his life that he can’t get back.”
A shiver streaks through him again, rattling his knees. “I was brought up around a lot of f–ked-up sh-t — that’s what I knew, and that’s what I gave back to the world,” YoungBoy continues, spitting out his words like they’re sour. “I was like, ‘F–k the world before they f–k you.’ I was a child, you know? And now I know better, so it ain’t no excuse at all for how I carry on today.” His gaze doesn’t flinch. “It took lots of time to make my music strong enough to get it to where I could captivate you. I promise to clean whatever I can clean, but it’s going to take time, just like it took time for me to get it to that point.” He takes a sharp breath, then whispers: “I was wrong. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
YoungBoy’s music is commonly understood as brooding, ruthless and retaliatory. A running meme shows his fans moving through life with comic aggression: belligerently whipping clean laundry into the basket, holding up a rubber duck at gunpoint in the bath. That’s an oversimplification of the range of his subject matter — family, betrayal, loyalty, loss — but it isn’t entirely off the mark, either; on YouTube, listeners have compiled extensive playlists with titles like “1 Hour of Violent NBA YoungBoy Music (Part 4).” It’s a specter that looms over the bulk of his catalog, from early videos where his teenage friends wave Glocks at the camera to songs like last year’s “I Hate YoungBoy,” where he fires warning shots at half the industry and drops ominous bars like “I’m gon’ be rich inside my casket once my time gone.” It’s tough to imagine what a pacifist YoungBoy song might sound like, much less an entire album of it, and recent attempts at anti-violence messaging haven’t landed the way he intended: “As I start to promote the peace and say, ‘Stop the violence,’ I think I’m inciting a riot,” he rapped on “This Not a Song (This for My Supporters)” last year.
“Pacifist YoungBoy” isn’t fully realized on his latest record, I Rest My Case — his first for Motown, which he dropped with almost no promotion on Jan. 6. (It was the day before his private wedding to Mychelle, a 20-year-old beauty YouTuber who quietly tends to the babies in between posing for a few photos, at his insistence, during the cover shoot.) But it is a step in that direction, an album that mostly traffics in extravagant stunting over buzz-saw synths associated with the EDM/trap hybrid known as rage music. To celebrate its release, YoungBoy invited around 50 giddy fans over for a snowball fight and video shoot, jumping atop his Bentley truck to blast album opener “Black” from the court-approved safety of the driveway. The noisy crowd dispersed only when a couple emerged from next door to request they keep it down. “It’s a lot of old people here, really,” a poncho-clad blonde — the same one who had driven curiously past the house weeks before — cheerfully tells a TikTok reporter. “If he comes and asks, would you spare him a cup of flour?” the TikToker asks. “Of course we would!” she replies.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again photographed on December 16, 2022 in Utah.
Diwang Valdez
I Rest My Case is an obvious departure, lyrically and aesthetically, from what YoungBoy’s fans are used to, and across the internet, early reactions were mixed: Some praised their favorite rapper’s innovation, others longed for the old days. YoungBoy’s previous album, The Last Slimeto, debuted last August at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 108,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate; just five months later, I Rest My Case debuted at No. 9 with 29,000 equivalent album units. “Be completely honest: Do you want YB back on drugs toting guns if it means we gon get that old YB back?” read one Reddit post.
YoungBoy expected this. “I’m very curious to see how the world goes about me now,” he contemplated weeks before in his living room, adding that he tried to avoid the usual mentions of guns, though there are still a few. He has thought a lot about what attracted people to his music until now: “They listened because of who I supposedly was or showed I was and what I rapped about. Now it’s nail polish and face paint, and the music is not the same.” (Lately, alongside the black nails, he and Mychelle like to paint their faces like goth Jokers and skulk around the property at night.) “What if they don’t like me now?” he wonders, fiddling with a diamond pinky ring. “You can’t be on top forever, you know? Because I’m not changing. I will not be provoked, I will not be broken, and I’m not going back to who I used to be. Accept it or not — I ain’t going back.” YoungBoy breaks into a smile. “I’m only going to get more groovy from here.” He’s already preparing his next album, which he’s calling Don’t Try This at Home.
Only once does YoungBoy remember it snowing in Baton Rouge; here in the mountains this time of year, it sits at least two feet deep daily. After checking briefly on the babies, he lights a cigar and beckons me through the garage and down toward the wooded dirt bike track, yelping for XO to join us. Out here, it’s a postcard: white trees, white mountains, ice blue sky. Everyone’s up to their knees in snow, and no one’s more excited about it than YoungBoy, whose ripped white jeans and jacket have now become camouflage. He points animatedly to where the bike path goes, a clearing where you can do doughnuts. “Five K for a snow angel!” he dares XO, who came hardly prepared in a hoodie and slides. “Just fall back! But at least put your hood on.” XO topples backward into a puff of powder and sweeps out an angel silhouette to YoungBoy’s delight, and the two laugh as they tramp back uphill.
As for what will happen when his ankle monitor is removed, YoungBoy would rather not think about it. No date is currently scheduled for his remaining federal trial, according to an email from his lawyer, because “the government is appealing the court’s ruling on our motion to suppress evidence, and that matter is pending before the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.” They declined to comment on his bail conditions. “The day I walk out this door and am free to do what I want, it’s going to be a lot of doing, or it will be done to me,” YoungBoy says. “So I’m not rushing back to that. I have a family.” He doesn’t plan to leave Utah anytime soon, though eventually, he would like to buy a place with even more land “where no one knows what’s going on on it.” He has spoken previously about his disinterest in touring but might reconsider if the shows were overseas where he could see some new places — he has always wanted to visit the Eiffel Tower, especially since watching Ratatouille. Asked what he looks forward to most, YoungBoy hesitates for a moment. “Change,” he replies softly. “I am very curious of the person who I shall become.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 4, 2023, issue of Billboard.
THE ALBUM
Heavy Heavy, out Friday (Feb. 3) on Ninja Tune
THE ORIGIN
Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings formed Young Fathers in a nightclub in Scotland, and after a series of false starts, including a stint as a “psychedelic boy band,” they honed in their sound on Tape One and Tape Two, a pair of mixtapes recorded with producer Tim London that established them as the kind of band to rap over the “Be My Baby” beat. After winning the Scottish Album of the Year award with Tape Two, they released their debut album, DEAD, in 2014. That year, the album beat out projects from critically beloved acts like FKA Twigs and Damon Albarn to win the Mercury Prize.
From there, the band just kept working, putting out the lower-fi but even more ambitious pop record White Men Are Black Men Too in 2015. After the release of 2018’s relatively streamlined Cocoa Sugar, the pandemic forced a break from touring and recording, but the downtime proved invigorating for the band.
THE SOUND
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Ask Young Fathers what they sound like, and they’re happy to call what they make pop music. There are soaring hooks and efficient song structures. It feels organic while listening, but try describing their sound and it gets a lot more complicated: it’s too intricate to be lo-fi, too raw to be hi-fi, too poppy to be “alternative hip-hop,” too harsh for easy listening. The most frequent comparison is TV on the Radio, but that doesn’t quite work, because Young Fathers aren’t really a rock band, either.
Whatever their sound is, it’s dense – taking elements from various musical genres and cultures, less as a manner of pastiche than what the band members are thinking and feeling at that particular time. While Heavy Heavy is some of their most purely joyful work to date, Hastings doesn’t view that as a deliberate decision.
“We’re not trying to make concept albums,” he explains. “We’re not trying to make anything other than what’s based on the spontaneity that happens when we’re together.”
THE RECORD
Heavy Heavy was named for that aforementioned density: as with previous records, it’s still fairly minimal, but this time what’s there is blown out. The project finds the trio, this time working without their mentor Tim London, honing even further on their sound, which is a mood of simultaneous celebration and paranoia.
On “Drum,” lyrics like “Feel the beat of the drum and go numb/have fun,” co-exist with the lines “They’re gonna get you either way/whether you cry about today or die another day.” Even the sequencing of the album feels like you’re with the band in the studio as they dart between ideas: “Tell Somebody” gradually builds into a sense of euphoric, heavily saturated desperation, right before the unexpected jazz piano on “Geronimo” provides a serene comedown. Meanwhile, there’s a gospel rave-up on “Sink or Swim,” a 6/8 stomp on “I Saw” and the delightfully bizarre, bouzouki-led “Ululation,” where Bankole’s sister, Tapiwa Mambo, takes the lead and vents in Shona.
The last song, “Be Your Lady,” is everything that makes Young Fathers unique in one three-minute blast, alternating between a soulful piano ballad and erratic drum breaks (created by a literal drum machine accident while recording), as the band members take turns shouting, “Can I take 10 pounds worth of loving out of the bank, please?” in different accents. It’s almost zany in its audaciousness, but winds up a loving tribute to Bankole’s different identities as a Black Scottish man. “I switch back and forth in different accents [in conversation] because ] I’ve been able to spend time in Nigeria and the United States. So it’s all a mishmash of that and being born in Scotland.”
THE FUTURE
Bankole admits that “Be Your Lady” is the most challenging new song to pull off in rehearsals: “The drum machine is not really syncopated or in time, and you can’t really catch it!” The trio is planning on bringing their intense live show across Europe in April, including the Roundhouse in London. There are also several songs from the sessions that didn’t make the record – not due to their quality, but because they didn’t fit in the sequencing – so there might even be more music in the pipeline.
THEIR FAVORITE PIECE OF GEAR
Hastings: “EMS Vocoder 2000 are transcendent keyboards.” When asked about real-life synthesizers versus software synths, he continues: “I have them, but usually the whole thing has already been made by things that you can touch. The whole premise is anybody can hit anything in the studio and for soft synths it’s not really the same because it’s more fiddly.”
THE ARTIST THAT THEY THINK NEEDS MORE ATTENTION
Hastings: “I’ve heard the new music that Law Holt has done that’s not out yet, and it’s one of the most radical-sounding things I’ve heard ever. Callum Easter is also a great musician and has great pop albums that have this dark side to it, but they’re still these beautiful pop songs.”
THE THING THAT THEY THINK NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
Hastings: “There should be more creatives. People who are not artists should wake up every morning, look in the f–king mirror, and say ‘I am not an artist’ a hundred times.”
Bankole: “If you work with creative people, it doesn’t automatically make you a creative [person].”
Hastings: “And if you’re not an artist, don’t try to be the artist, and f–king listen to them.”
THE PIECE OF ADVICE THEY BELIEVE EVERY NEW INDIE ARTIST NEEDS TO HEAR:
Hastings: “Being able to describe yourself. ‘Cause the industry is not about to understand you in any f–king way. You have to be able to be precise and even when you are that precise, it still won’t f–king connect. But at least it can convey something.”
Bankole: “I think it’s important to be match-ready, but there is a real thing of over-rehearsing, to the point where you are blocking yourself from being spontaneous, and having room to wiggle about within the moments in the different environment every time.”
It’s August 20, 2020 and the Dogg Days of Summer are still here — the Snoop Dogg Days. While many of us remain in the house waiting out the global pandemic, Snoop Dogg is on the go. The laid-back MC is boarding a private jet en route from Los Angeles to Atlanta, and just as the metallic bird carrying the forever-hustling superstar ascends into the stratosphere, former President Barack Obama sits down with his staff a few thousand miles away. Obama and company go over notes and meeting agenda, then the beloved 44th Head of State puts out the mandate, “Get Snoop Dogg.”
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In a few hours, Obama will be speaking at the virtual Democratic National Convention and he wants Snoop to introduce him to the audience tuning in to watch on the Twitch channel Behind the Rhyme TV.
When Snoop lands late in the afternoon in ATL, he gladly accepts Obama’s invitation (the collaboration at the DNC was abuzz with CNN writers). Later, the Dogg settles in his hotel room, he fires up some smoke and listens to a few selections from his new group on a portable speaker.
“We ain’t announce it yet, but me, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too $hort just made a group cuz,” Snoop says with a grin. “We already started on the album and that s–t is jammin.’ We’re having a ball making it. It’s gonna be big.”
And historic. The teaming up of Mount Westmore is the first time a collective of this magnitude has officially come together in rap. All four MCs have over been dropping hits for at least four decades. This year marks Too $hort’s 40th anniversary in rap, while last April Snoop celebrated the 30th anniversary since he debuted on Dr. Dre’s “Deep Cover.” Cube and 40 came out the Wild Wild West in the ‘80s. Everybody in the group is over the age of 50, and still exudes double energy that is beloved by the culture. Most importantly, they’ve all been friends for years.
Northern California natives 40 and $hort have been Bay Area fixtures both individually and together, ranging from collaborative albums to their mutual affinity for the championship-winning Golden State Warriors. The ties between the Southern Californian half of Mount Westmore run deep too: After all, Snoop took part in the N.W.A reunion in the early 2000s, standing in for the late great Eazy-E alongside Cube and Dre. All four have collaborated as solo acts and performed on the same concert bills throughout the years, too many times in total to count.
The four are so close, assembling Mount Westmore was as easy as making a few phone calls. A few months before Snoop got the call from Obama — when COVID-19 first put the world in lockdown — E-40 needed a distraction from making frequent trips to the kitchen. Ask 40 himself, and he’ll joke that he was eating so much, his refrigerator told him it needed a breather. The legendary rapper’s culinary break would come in the form of making music. His manger put the battery in his back to take advantage of his downtime by teaming up with his iconic brethren.
“That sounds groovy like a drive-in movie,” 40 recalls thinking when the idea of supergroup came up. The Vallejo King of Lingo hit up Ice Cube first. “‘What you think about putting a group together, man?” 40 asked Cube who was “doing a lot of nothin’” himself at home. “Who you talking about?” Cube retorted, thinking 40 was joking around. “Me, you, Too Short and Snoopy,” 40 replied. After a few seconds of processing, Cube responded with two words: “Hell yeah!” “What we gonna call it then?” 40, getting excited, questioned in his signature high pitch. Cube dropped another two words on him: “Mount Westmore.”
The group name was inspired by the great hip-hop debates by media and fans of who belongs on hip-hop’s Mount Rushmore. Two and a half years removed from the pandemic (or as E-40 calls it, “the Plan-Demic”), Too $hort’s compound in LA is serving as headquarters for three quarters of Mount Westmore. While Snoop has been back in the ATL shooting a film and traveling the states on tour, the other group members have been holding down the publicity run duties. It was only four days until the collaborative project Snoop Cube 40 $hort hit streaming services and showcased the West Coast legend’s rap prowess.
Today though, while Cube and Short are waiting on 40 to arrive, the powerful South Central LA street narrator gives some great stories about his Oakland counterpart’s younger days on the come up. Cube relays making calls from the road while they were on tour, playfully teasing him and Dr. Dre because they “were still at home” and weren’t popular enough to perform concerts in different cities yet. Cube also reveals that “A Gangsta’s Fairytale,” off his classic solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, was originally written for Eazy. Cube then further delves into the construction of Mount Westmore.
“When I see his name come across [my phone], I always know he’s gonna say something slick,” the rap hyphenate says about 40. “I always look forward to talking to him, ‘cause you gonna hear some new s–t you ain’t heard before.”
Almost on cue, you can hear 40’s signature squeaky voice in the adjacent room getting closer. In walks 40 Water with a smile and joke to greet everyone. “He has on a Raiders shirt and 49ers pants,” Cube says about 40’s plain black tee and red jeans when seeing his friend. The three laugh simultaneously. “I’m mixing it up!” 40 retorts with a smile.
Although they share a brotherhood, football is one thing the foursome don’t agree upon. A big debate takes over the room when they talk about the New Year’s Eve NFL matchup between the visiting Niners and the Las Vegas Raiders, which 40, Cube and $hort will be attending. E-40’s allegiance is to the Niners, while Cube and Short give him a million reasons why they are going to lose to their team, the Raiders.
When the impromptu hip-hop version of ESPN’s First Take is done, the three peel back some of the layers of their new album. Even though the Mount Westmore members were separated during the COVID outbreak, every MC had a studio in their home, so recording the LP was relatively easy.
“We all got track records for making really good, classic, timeless music,” $hort surmises. “So you gotta trust the process of each individual that they know what they like.”
They all called upon familiar producers that they used throughout their careers, such as Ant Banks, FredWreck, Rick Rock and 40’s son Droop E.
“You gotta find X amount of songs that all four people like at the same time,” $hort explains. “That’s the magic. So it couldn’t be just one producer. We put the word out, the floodgates opened up.”
Every time each member of Westmore got a beat they liked, they sent it to a group text. If none of the three other MCs responded, then the collective knew that track wasn’t it. The songs began to take shape when one or two of the other MCs responded to the group text by sending back the tracks with a verse on it. $hort took charge of keeping track of all the song files.
“I think the process was dope, because when you layer it like that, the next person is actually building on what the last one said,” $hort says. “As opposed to we all sitting in the studio and we’re gonna make this song one day while we’re here. This was different. You had a little moment to sit at home. I’ll listen to what 40 did or listen to what Snoop did. ‘All right, so he said all that, I’m gonna come with this.’”
The spirit of the Mount Westmore project lies in its versatility. The four members weren’t afraid to rhyme on soundscapes that may have been out of their wheelhouses. There was just one agreed upon mandate: Each MC had to bring their signature style to the table.
“It’s fun to be in a group,” Cube certifies. “This is my third group; N.W.A, Westside Connection and now Mount Westmore. It’s always fun, because you’re not carrying the whole load. You got f–kin’ Hall of Famers you can pass it to. That could be a point where you relax — but with us, we don’t relax. We know we’re all going to be on point and show each other why we’re here. We don’t take each other for granted. We all know we gotta shine.”
Snoop Cube 40 $hort has slappers throughout. The supergroup goes anthemic right out the gate with “California,” they touch the clubs with “Too Big” (with Dr. Dre speaking on the intro) and “Lace You Up” gives unapologetic real talk advice to the younger generation. “How Many” broaches the subject of snitching, and on “Nice Day,” Ice Cube discusses how people tried to cancel him for being in contact with the Trump administration.
“In 2020 they was trying to cancel me,” Cube describes of the song that was made right after the controversy. “So to me, it was to get it off my chest on how I was feeling. A lot of people got their political team, or people they want to be down with. I ain’t got no team politically. I don’t care about Democrats or the Republicans. All I care about is, are we winning as Black people? Are they breaking bread or are they helping us make our lives better?”
Cube came under fire because he presented his “Contract With Black America,” an economic plan for financial reform for Black Americans to the Democrats as well as the Republicans. Some people blew it out of proportion and accused Cube of working with Donald Trump, which he clarified as being untrue. He simply wanted Black people to get a higher percentage of the wealth in America and wanted to get information to see what both parties were going to do for the Black community.
“It was cool to have a record to be able to get s–t off like that, ‘cause everything I said in that record is true,” Cube continues. “Look at the type of people trying to cancel [you]. That’ll let you know what you’re dealing with. It is a lot of gatekeepers out here who want to push the status quo cause somehow, some way, they get paid off of it. Those are the ones that want to cancel you. Not the ones that are going through it and want a different way. Not the ones trying to figure out how to break [the destructive] mental and political cycle that we’re under.”
Mount Westmore look to do just that, whether it be overtly or subtly. Bigger than any statement they could make artistically, the aligning of Snoop, Cube, 40 and $hort shows the entire Black community that four kings can come together, put egos and politics to the side, build on friendships and form a business. Mount Westmore isn’t just a group name: The four have officially started a LLC with the same name, making them an actual corporation. They all promise big deals between their crew, as well as tours and more music, of course.
The collection of legends made in excess of 50 songs for their current project, and only 16 were chosen for the final tracklist. While a few of the remaining records will be rationed out for their various solo efforts, $hort promises at least one follow-up Rushmore LP, more than likely two.
“If I sat here right now and said, ‘Let’s go in the studio’ and I played you 20 songs that didn’t make the album, you would be like, ‘What the f–k? Why the f–k that ain’t on there?’” $hort details. “You would be mad. We got some s–t. The next level, it’s going to continue. It’s gotta be no less than two albums. Easily three.”
“We’re the most fun group in hip-hop right now,” Cube attests. “Ain’t nobody having more fun than us. It’s a good story for hip-hop in the sea of tragedy [going on right now]. This is a feel-good story in a lot of ways. Hearing our record, the sh-t is fun. It feels fun and we’re showing the youngsters, this is how you can do it. It’s important. This ain’t a record. This is a movement.”
Cheers to that. Before everyone leaves out, 40 pulls out two bottles of his Earl Stevens Sweet Red Wine and makes everyone repeat after him as he gives his “traditional toast.”
“I ain’t above you,” Cube and $hort say following their partner’s lead. “I ain’t below you. But I’m right beside you.”
Is there anything more delicious and envy-inducing than poring over a “highest-paid DJs” list? The thought of earning millions by providing people with music to dance to — off a USB stick, no less — comes with its own special degree of fascination.
The truth is, the percentage of upper-echelon DJs annually earning seven-plus figures is tiny, about 1%. The next tier of DJs comes in at about 100 times less than that amount at minimum, according to an established promoter. Indeed, most DJs whose names grace the top half of festival flyers are earning a living wage — but only if they’re sensible.
Most DJs are generally stratified into earning $500/$2,000/$5,000/$10,000 per club gig and between $2,000/$5,000/$10,000/$25,000 per festival gig. Meanwhile, festival headliners can command over $100,000, with multiple factors contributing to this jump.
“At this level, performance fees aren’t always determined as a simple dollar value per show,” says Saleem Amode of Amode Agency regarding festival headliners. “Agents, promoters and artist teams evaluate metrics like touring history, ticket history [and] region exclusivity. Of course, the music and recent content comes into play to determine the estimated value and risk of a fee offer. The costs of putting on the event itself are the large[st] factor in determining the risk for the promoter.”
Such dollar amounts are also just gross earnings, before the DJ has paid their agent, manager, business manager, lawyer and flight and hotel costs — which are increasingly being covered by artists’ fees rather than the promoter. After taxes, a DJ’s net pay is often less than 40% of their fee.
“There is a public misunderstanding of how much money DJs are making,” says Orlando Higginbottom, professionally known as producer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. “You can do the math on the back of a postcard. If you’re a DJ who is grossing $20,000 a month, what you’re ending up with is $10,000. No one’s going to turn up their nose at that, but a $120,000 annual salary is not the celebrity lifestyle people think DJs are having. It’s not rich money. It’s not house (in L.A.) money. It’s rent money.”
These earnings also don’t come with health insurance, unemployment insurance, retirement plans, human resources support or even job security. “DJs are CEOs of their own company — even if no one views them that way,” says Higginbottom. As such, the unsexy parts of the business are often left to DJs to set up for themselves — or not.
This situation is not exclusive to DJs, but artists across the board. Steve Braines, who manages producer Maya Jane Coles, shares, “I took over a touring rock artist’s career and he filed for bankruptcy. During that time, he was still trying to buy jewelry and had never bought a house despite the huge amounts previously earned.
“There is a sense sometimes that the money will last forever,” Braines continues, “but it’s such a tiny percentage of touring artists that’s true of. DJs also have that same time period of being hot, and then it decays for many. If you can afford to buy a house, buy one, and also get a pension, just as a teacher, doctor or anyone else would. Ultimately, objectively, it’s a job, and the bank doesn’t care how you make your money.”
Though widespread touring has since resumed, the pandemic brought the instability of the profession into even sharper focus for a lot of DJs, particularly because many weren’t eligible for unemployment. Billboard spoke with several about how they’re working to establish a secure future for themselves — even if/when the money in their chosen field dries up.
Put your money in higher-yield accounts
As a headlining artist who says he’s very prudent with his money, 12th Planet (born John Dadzie) exercises the tried-and-true practice of putting aside 25% of his earnings. This percentage is put into certificates of deposit (CDs), which have a fixed term length that typically falls between three months and five years. Though most of these accounts assess penalties for withdrawing your money before the end of the term, they earn a higher interest rate than a conventional savings account. Other options are money market accounts that pay interest based on the market rate, or bonds, for which the issuer pays back the principal plus interest after a set time period.
“It took me a long time to learn that when your money just sits in the bank, you’re actually losing on it,” says Dadzie. “Once I learned that, I moved everything over to other types of accounts. I’m not doing anything aggressive. … I’d rather post a positive 1% or 2% than a negative risky 10%.”
After taking on a business manager early in his career and a wealth manager soon after, Dadzie began putting his money into individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401Ks, which are personal pension accounts. The funds in these types of accounts cannot be touched until maturity, which is usually what would be considered “retirement age.” He also recommends starting a retirement plan early, saying “Not only does that money go to you, but it also goes against taxes paid to the government and can move you from being in the highest tax bracket.”
Keep your overhead low
Jennifer Lee, professionally known as TOKiMONSTA, experienced not just the slowdown of the pandemic, but the slowdown of her entire life after brain surgeries to treat Moyamoya disease in 2016. Lee says keeping her spending in proportion to her earnings was a key factor in weathering these unforeseen occurrences.
“It’s being cognizant of how much money you’re making, and how much money you’re spending on a monthly basis,” she says. “A lot of very successful people spend a lot of money and have massive teams and multiple employees. People who have a high overhead are spending that money even when they’re not touring. My operation is fairly simple with two full-time employees. When I’m 60, I don’t know if I [will] want to, or will be able to, DJ every single weekend. I have to set up my whole lifestyle so I’m comfortable at that age.” (She adds that she’s also put her money in investment portfolios.)
Diversify your financial interests
Brothers Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, who have topped DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs list multiple times — have diversified their finances into multiple arenas. Together, they have a company encompassing artist services, booking and management in a joint venture with their own manager, Nick Royaards, and Michiel Beers, the co-founder of Belgium mega-fest Tomorrowland. They also have their Smash the House record label and its various sub-labels, and each have their own clothing line and were early investors in esports and entertainment company FaZe Clan. Vegas’ particular funding focus is on content creation via his production company, which is focused on the development of films, television series, graphic novels and books.
“Most of my investments go to something I have control over,” says Vegas. “When the pandemic started, I was trying so many different things, because I was a bit scared shows weren’t coming back. There are a lot of people with beautiful decks and crazy ideas and promises. You need to be able to filter out what is going to work, and even then, it’s always risky. It’s about surrounding yourself with people who know what they’re doing or making sure you yourself know what you’re doing.”
Pioneering DJ Richie Hawtin famously invested in the electronic digital download store Beatport early on, a move he considers one of his best. Currently, his Plus8 Equity Partners venture capital firm, which he started with partners John Acquaviva and Rishi Patel, has an investment portfolio that includes Splice, Subpac, Landr, Lynq, Rap Tech Studios and other creative entertainment technology disruptors. As he puts it, the venture allows him to “re-invest back into our own culture.”
Barry Ashworth of Dub Pistols has had his share of financial knockbacks over his more than three-decade career. He went from a $1.5 million record deal for the second Dub Pistols album, Six Million Ways To Live and making $25,000 per remix — which he was doing at a clip of three a day — to his accounts being overdrawn.
After a five-year stretch of living gig-to-gig, Ashworth began making wiser moves, including starting up a healthy Dub Pistols merchandise business. This extends beyond conventional clothing and paraphernalia into a range of branded CBD oil, Minirig portable speakers and pale ale. The latter three items have a high sell-through rate and are manufactured, produced and distributed by companies Ashworth has partnered with. They provide him with wholly passive income.
Ashworth also purchased the U.K.’s Mucky Weekender Festival, which is growing under his leadership and is looking to expand into additional events. When he was unable to source a tour bus amidst the pandemic shortages, he purchased a couple to rent out and launched a touring logistics company. Says Ashworth of his various ventures, “It’s taking every little opportunity you see and feeling confident enough to do it.”
Invest in real estate (if you can afford it)
Property is one of the mainstay investments for DJs, as globally, real estate rarely drops in value. Most DJs purchase their own home(s) as soon as they can afford to. Rental property is the next step for those who can extend to that option. Producer Nicole Moudaber stepped into the rental arena back in 2003 when she bought an estate in Ibiza, upgrading it to a villa aimed at weekly rentals.
“It was like a hotel operation,” says Moudaber. “I did that for 10 years in Ibiza and gained an understanding of architecture and property management. I bought a place in Miami, but I panicked and sold it during COVID. I lost my nerve. I’m mourning it. But lesson learned: Never panic when there’s a crash in the market, and that goes for people who invest in stocks as well.”
Hawtin has also invested in a few real estate properties with significant financial rewards, a move he says is “definitely not as sexy or exciting as sitting with engineers dreaming up new creative tech, but definitely safe and secure.”
If DJs have the disposable income, investing in building development projects can have a significant return, particularly if you invest a large sum. This is what Ashworth has done in the UK. “Property developers are building flats, renovating flats. They need money to do it,” he says. “The return has been quite ludicrous.”
Consider self-releasing your music
Like most DJs, Moudaber owns her own record label, In the Mood, as does Ashworth with Cyclone Records, Lee with Young Art Records and Higginbottom with Nice Age. While DJs owning their own record label is a default of the dance music community, the real value is in owning your music.
While many artists find it tempting to sign a big figure recording or publishing deal at the start of their career, for the long game this choice is not always optimal. Higginbottom found this out the hard way when he signed to Universal Music in the early part of his career. His takeaway from his experience is, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to release through a label, unless you do a very, very good deal and you are getting your masters back in five years or something.”
Higginbottom considers his music an investment, and the only way to retain that investment for the long-term is to self-release it. “That,” he says, “is your pension, your money flow and your passive income.”
“There’s loads of money to be made through streaming, but you have to own the masters,” he continues, “Look how rich the record labels are. Look how much money there is out there. Artists just don’t know how to access it. From streaming, you could make a few hundred, a few thousand or $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 a month. If you sign with a major label, you’re never going to see it. If you sign with an indie on a 50/50 deal, you’ll see it eventually. Eighty-five percent of my income was through touring. When we lost touring for two years during COVID, that royalty income saved my business.”
Set up different LLCs for each aspect of your business
In a further safety move, Higginbottom recommends setting up different LLCs for each section of an artist’s professional activities. For example, one for touring, one for royalties from your own releases, one for income from songwriting for others. This way, if an artist ends up being liable for something that happens during one of their shows, they won’t get cleared out of their entire income — just the touring LLC. Additionally, when one of the LLCs is having a lull, it can be propped up by the others.
“It’s really hard to make enough as a musician to save or invest,” says Lee. I’m always grateful to be in [the music business] for as long as I have, but I’m very aware of the lack of stability that comes with entertainment, and I’ve steered my career in the direction of stability. You never know when the rug can get pulled out from under you.”
Since her 2014 breakthrough, the Grammy-nominated “Ex’s and Oh’s,” Elle King has blazed her own trail with determined ferocity, melding elements of punk, rock, country and folk through hits like the banjo-fueled “America’s Sweetheart” and “Shame.”
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Her music has topped Billboard charts in four genres — but now, she’s building upon her two previous Billboard Country Airplay chart-toppers with her country debut album, Come Get Your Wife, out Friday (Jan. 27) on RCA Records/Columbia Nashville.
“I came from the rock and pop and alternative world and was brought into country when I was singing with Dierks [Bentley] — but from the beginning, I was like, ‘This is more rock n’ roll than rock n’ roll,’” King tells Billboard, seated onstage at Nashville’s “Mother Church,” the historic Ryman Auditorium. “I’m addicted to country, because it’s the most fun and rock n’ roll ever. Even the way I dress — like ‘50s Western and rockabilly — that still seems rock n’ roll to me.”
Her previous country chart leaders also signify a co-sign from two of the genre’s most respected artists: 2016’s “Different for Girls” with Bentley (which won a CMA Awards for vocal event of the year) and 2021’s “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)” with Miranda Lambert. The latter became the first female-only collaboration to ascend to the pinnacle of the Country Airplay chart since 1993.
“Drunk” is included on this album, while she also reunites with Bentley on “Worth a Shot,” a song King says Bentley had initially considered for his own album. (King and Bentley are both managed by Red Light’s Mary Hilliard Harrington.)
“I would never want to give anything less than 110% to making music, let alone country music that I care so much about and that has brought so much great joy to my life,” King says of the Ross Copperman-produced project. “I asked my team to send me some songs, and a bunch of stuff got sent to me that was written for women and I didn’t necessarily connect with it. I said, ‘Send me songs written for men … send me songs Dierks didn’t cut,’ just kind of jokingly.”
“Ross said, ‘Well, Dierks just finished his album and ‘Worth a Shot’ didn’t make the record.’ I said, ‘Great, ‘cause it’s for me!’” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t put out a country album and not at least have something on there that is a nod to Dierks, or to give respect to the person who changed my life and who showed me the most rock n’ roll I’ve ever seen in my life, which is country music. Country music has given me these incredible opportunities.”
She co-produced the project with Copperman and co-wrote eight of the album’s dozen tracks. King calls the album “a love letter” to her childhood Ohio roots (most notably on the opening track “Ohio”) — or as she recalls, “just being that strange, awkward, funny girl who loves to sing and doesn’t really fit in.”
Though King is the daughter of Hollywood actor Rob Schneider and model London King, she primarily spent her childhood in Ohio with her mom and stepfather. She began writing songs at age 13, inspired by the music of Hank Williams and Otis Redding. She fell in love with the banjo after seeing a local folk band utilizing the instrument to create a propulsive, decidedly non-bluegrass sound.
That swirl of influences permeates the new album. “Tulsa” (featuring Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne on guitar and Ashley McBryde on background vocals) offers a brash rebuff to a cheating lover, set against a freewheeling, swampy rhythm. She showcases her bluegrass leanings in the tight-knit harmonies, mandolin and fiddle of “Blacked Out.”
Alongside bawdy rockers, the album also includes the song “Lucky,” inspired by her son, Lucky Levi, whom she and her partner Dan Tooker welcomed just over a year ago.
“Becoming a mother has rocked my world,” King says. “My son is just this beautiful ball of light and energy. Becoming a parent has made me grow in gratitude and empathy. I have a lot more forgiveness for the world, but also a lot more things I demand from the world. I’m proud that we get to call Nashville home. There is this sense of community with so many artists and creatives.”
King says her previous work with Lambert and Bentley helped ease her transition into the genre. “You know what’s crazy? I have such bad anxiety, and country music has just really helped me,” she says. “I didn’t have anxiety around making the country record. I had full confidence in my experience, in my voice, in the narrative. I’m finally comfortable and open about being vulnerable.
She says the notion of crafting a music video with reigning ACM entertainer of the Year (and ACM Triple Crown winner) Lambert helped her approach music videos differently.
“In the past, music videos for me were kind of a big level of anxiety and absolute dread, personally. I put a lot of pressure on myself on how I looked, how my body looked. [For the ‘Drunk’ video] I knew I wanted it to be fun, and Miranda is one of the funniest, most amazing people I’ve ever met. So I said, ‘Let’s play characters.’ I can only speak for me, but I know if I don’t have this pressure of being ‘Elle King,’ and like drinking water for three days to try and make my face look skinny so I can get one , it’s just insane the amount of pressure that people put on themselves. So I said, ‘If we play characters, I guarantee you’ll get a wild performance out of us and you guys will love the video.’ And we won video of the year at the ACMs.”
The video for “Try Jesus,” directed by The Righteous Gemstones’ Edi Patterson, continues that creative bent, set in a discount store and featuring King again portraying a range of characters in some pretty outrageous scenarios (including in a scene covered in baked beans) — but also striving to fight against various insecurities to find happiness.
“There was a great layer of intent put into every layer of this,” she says. “I wanted to play different characters, because ultimately, every relationship is a mirror. I’ve always felt that the biggest hurdle blocking my own success or my joy or a healthy relationship, even a healthy relationship with self, was me. The last year and a half, I’ve been trying to work through the layers of doubt, guilt. Now, I feel more comfortable to take a layer off and show myself more. I do like to stay up late. Yes, I talk shit and run my mouth. But I’m also a warm, loving person.”
King is also still recovering after a slip on a set of stairs in November that left her with a concussion and forced the cancellation of some radio shows.
“I’m doing so much better,” she says. “I feel like I was forced to take a bit of time and slow down. I tried to play some shows and it was overwhelming. It was a really scary experience. With brain injuries, like any injury, you need time to heal. I’m 100% on the mend. I’m doing physical therapy and I’ve had so much support, but I’m doing so much better.”
In recent years, she’s become known not only for her unvarnished truth-telling, both onstage and on record, but also for her bold fashion sense, hitting the stage and red carpets in an array of bright colors, fringe, attention-grabbing hats and plenty of sparkle. “I love old-school, outlaw country, crazy appliqué stuff,” she says, adding that fashion, too, has been part of her creative and emotional journey.
“I didn’t think about it until now, but maybe I felt that if I dress so loudly, I’m actually kind of hiding behind it in a way, that I’m protecting myself. It was being another character, like in my videos. Until recently, that character is someone I felt like I had to turn up to help me overcome the anxiety of, ‘You don’t look like them. How are you gonna stand next to them? You have to stand next to Miranda. She’s so beautiful, she looks good in anything.’ But there is no one size that you have to be to express yourself in clothes or with fashion. You can be absolutely any size and find something that makes you feel beautiful. Me being bold with some of my outfits helped me find comfort in my body.”
As she gears up for her A-Freakin-Men Tour to launch next month, King says fans can still expect the electric personality, full-throttle vocals and bold stage wear she’s known for.
“I’ll still wear wild things. I love the showmanship of it — the rhinestones and fringe — that is all part of the stuff that sucks you into a performance.”
See King’s video interview with Billboard below:
At the height of lockdown, SG Lewis did something unusual for an artist, even by pandemic standards: He finished his first full-length studio album, then immediately began making his second.
On a Zoom call two days before the 2022 Christmas holiday, Lewis admits with a laugh that he always intended to take a break from producing after wrapping that debut, 2021’s times, acknowledging that traditional touring cycles would “almost dictate a break from the studio anyway.”
But neither touring nor anything else in that period were traditional. If they had been, Lewis’ latest, AudioLust & HigherLove, simply “never would’ve been made.” Out Friday (Jan. 27) via Astralwerks after a six-month rollout, the sophomore album is one Lewis says he “just had to make — not just conceptually or lyrically, but as a singer-songwriter, because there was always that kind of question mark over that side of what I do.”
The process was fruitful, with Lewis (managed by Grant Motion of Motion Management) recently appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and on the announced lineup for this April’s Coachella festival, in addition to headlining shows at the Brooklyn Mirage and The Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.
“There was a lot of ground to cover and we needed the timeline to allow us to hit all these touchpoints,” Astralwerks President Toby Andrews tells Billboard. “In addition to that, we felt the album had a lot to offer fans with different features and themes, so we wanted a chance to showcase as much of the great music on the album as possible in the run-up.”
That Lewis, 28, questioned how he could unite what prior to the making of AudioLust &HigherLove existed as two relatively discrete parts of himself — one part producer (he calls production his “comfort zone”) and one part singer-songwriter — reflects the sense of introspection that not only informs this album, but distinguishes it from his debut.
Released in February of 2021, times, was a concept album born from Lewis’ study of the late ‘70s in New York and the rise of disco — inspired in part by Tim Lawrence’s text, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Music Culture, 1970-1979. Despite being released during clubland’s pandemic-era dark night of the soul, times won him high praise, hitting No. 11 on Billboard‘s Dance/Electronic Albums chart and raising his profile, even as he was stuck promoting it from his living room.
“My life was very uneventful,” he recalls. “I would close the laptop and go and sit in the TV room.”
It’s reasonable then that while times looked back at a past decade, AudioLust & HigherLove gazes inward, operating from a decidedly “internal, personal” place — “a more complicated vantage point from which to work” he says.
“Something I learned in the creation of this album is that it’s a lot easier to point to other people and eras and styles and be like, ‘Look at this, isn’t this great?’ and to present it to people through your lens. But to turn the lens on yourself and be like, ‘This is what’s going on’ is actually a more difficult thing to do, for me personally. I’ve never been an oversharer.”
SG Lewis
Lauretta Suter
As a dichotomous study of love, AudioLust & HigherLove certainly calls for a new level of confession. AudioLust, “is the darker, lusty, infatuated, short-lived and ego-driven version of love,” Lewis says. The album’s second half is “a much deeper, actualized and fulfilled version of love,” which begins with track nine, “Epiphany.”
The LP’s theme materialized arrived subconsciously and somewhat slowly as Lewis did something many others were also doing during the pandemic: taking stock of their interpersonal relationships, both platonic and romantic.
“With the nature of my work and travel and how crazy the last few years had been, I hadn’t had any time to reflect on personal relationships, and I just started to think about patterns and the way that not only myself — but how we all interact in love and relationships,” he says. “I just started to divide [them] into these two worlds.”
It feels like there’s more to the story to which he alludes, but Lewis, at once candid and coy, does not volunteer specifics, instead redirecting towards the general. “I noticed that even in pop culture and music and movies, there were two versions of love and romance: one of them being sort of rushed and toxic and lust-orientated, and the other being a very actualized, fulfilled romantic version of it.”
Lewis acknowledges that the question of “Why concept records?” seems to follow him. AudioLust & HigherLove is his third conceptually driven project. Long before times was even an idea, he experimented with concept via his Dusk, Dark, Dawn series, on which he captured the sound and feel of an evening out via phases chronicled across three EPs. Released between 2018 and 2019, this triptych yielded early fan favorites like “Hurting” (featuring AlunaGeorge) and “Throwaway” with Clairo. (The former hit its apex on the Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart at No. 9, where it stayed for a total of 20 weeks.)
Lewis says he “finds it very difficult to finish a project without a set concept,” adding that grouping 12 or so songs with no common thread is “more of a crazy concept” to him by comparison.
To suss out AudioLust & HigherLove’s conceptual bent, he played the role of spectator to his own work. “It was really just sitting there and waiting for that thing to appear,” he recalls. “I would say I was maybe halfway through before I really had the concept dialed and was like, ‘Okay, here’s what is happening in front of me.’”
This clarity cracked open the previously “purely internalized” writing process, paving the way for Lewis to begin categorizing music based on feeling — and later, to open the door to an intimate number of artist features, with the album’s five guests including Tove Lo (their collab “Call on Me” also surfaces on the Swedish songstress’ 2022 studio album, Dirt Femme), Charlotte Day Wilson and Channel Tres (memorable for his appearance on “Impact,” from times), with Ty Dolla $ign and Lucky Daye (who previously lent his vocals to times’ “Feed The Fire”) rounding out the short-for-a-dance-album guest list.
For context, Lewis sang on only four of times’ 10 songs, at the time of the album’s release saying this work helped him understand how to use his voice as an instrument. The experience was not for naught — of AudioLust & HigherLove’s 15 tracks, Lewis sings on the 10 that do not feature another vocalist or are not purely instrumental.
Writing the new record has inspired reflection of binaries beyond love and lust: SG Lewis, the artist, and Sam Lewis, as he’s known when the lights go up. Via Zoom, both are unassuming and approachable, warm and receptive without being glib.
When the conversation turns to more personal matters (the stuff of Sam’s world), SG is open but reticent: He gets to take some time off for the holidays, mentioning only that he and his girlfriend will fly to London to see his family. If Sam wears his heart on his sleeve, as he seems to, SG is its arbiter. This is where the boundary between performer and person is clearest.
Yet, despite SG’s efforts to draw a line between these two parts of himself, it invariably still blurs, making Sam’s acute self-awareness, deeply feeling nature, high emotional intelligence, sharp wit and wry sense of humor apparent. (“The best part about DJing a party is that my socially anxious ass doesn’t have to talk to anyone,” he tweeted at the start of January).
The dynamic between SG and Sam also called for a system of lyrical checks and balances during the writer process of AudioLust &Higherlove. The process instilled him with a “fascination” and a “newfound sort of respect for singer-songwriters whose craft is to bear their soul lyrically.” “It’s a huge thing to share with people,” he adds, gesturing (naturally, some might say) to Taylor Swift.
Considering this aim, it doesn’t hurt that AudioLust & HigherLove is heavily influenced by yacht rock, that famously breezy and often confessional brand of soft rock popularized by artists like The Doobie Brothers, Toto and Steely Dan. Songs with the classification tend to be light and laid-back, polished and generally upbeat, without putting on airs or taking things too seriously.
The genre’s “commitment to delivering the sentiment of a song” and “full commitment to grand statements” appealed to Lewis, who sought to lyrically emulate this say-it-with-your-chest ethos. This strategy yields intensely vulnerable songs professing feelings that can be difficult to verbalize: I can’t stop thinking about you, I’m falling in love with you, our flame is dying, it’s over.
“You take a chorus from something like Toto’s ‘Africa’ and it’s just soaring and arms out, it’s very proclamative,” he says. “‘Lifetime’ is kind of like that, it’s a very heart-on-sleeve love song. I think I would’ve been scared of something that outwardly expressive in the past, out of the fear of someone being like, ‘Ooh, that’s a lot,’ or ‘Wow, that’s a corny thing to say.’”
AudioLust & HigherLove writing sessions were hosted at two residential recording studios in the U.K.: Decoy Residential, set in the verdure of the Suffolk countryside, and Angelic Recording Studio, perched on a rural hill 90 minutes outside of London. Lewis likens these residential experiences to academies for professional soccer players, where “everything that isn’t swinging their leg at the ball and getting better at that is taken care of” — food, laundry and everything in between.
AudioLust & HigherLove was crafted over six one-month stints at these studios, which he shared with keyboardist Ruben James, guitarist Jay Mooncie and co-writer Ed Drewett. (Andrews of Astralwerks notes the “demand for the world that [Lewis] inhabits — that bridges the alternative, electronic and pop space, along with acts like Bob Moses, ZHU and even RÜFÜS DU SOL – puts electronic music and the areas that surround it in the U.S. at a really exciting stage.”)
In sessions, Lewis refrained from touching his laptop until they’d made something potent, but not production-heavy. This approach would absorb most of the day and is the reason why AudioLust & HigherLove comprises mostly audio and analogue sounds, with very few software instruments.
“We would make music for 14 hours, minus eating and just conversation and other things,” he says. “Sometimes we’d finish at 10:00 p.m. and other times, we’d finish at 5:00 a.m., depending on whether the magic had kind of appeared. There really wasn’t much else going on.”
Between sessions, Lewis found release in two complementary pastimes: fishing and drinking whiskey. With the rod he’d purchased upon arriving at the studio in one hand and a bottle in the other, he’d head out to the lake next to the studio and catch fish. (He always threw them back.)
“I think at first the engineers thought I was mental,” he recalls, “and then after a while, they got into it and started joining me.”
It’s not been lost on Lewis that the experience of crafting AudioLust & HigherLove in these rural-but-intense settings was also rare and special. He can’t imagine it happening again anytime soon, for understandably, it would require him to hit the pause button on just about everything now happening in his life.
Suffice to say, he caught something good.
Harv has envisioned this day for years. The producer-songwriter — known for his work with artists like Justin Bieber, Skrillex and Normani — is launching a solo career with his debut single, “Losses,” he exclusively reveals to Billboard.
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Due out Friday (Jan. 27) through Range Music Partners, “Losses,” featuring Kyle, is the culmination of a long-held belief and patient pursuit. “You don’t care about the losses / Losses, yeah, the losses / You say you got too many options,” Kyle sings on the ethereal, silky single. And as Kyle dissects a love lost, Harv commands the bass and drums — he has done this forever, long before he became Bieber’s bassist in 2009, but the camera angle has shifted.
“I don’t want to get too far away from letting the world know that I’m actually a musician,” the artist born Bernard Harvey tells Billboard. “I want the 12-year-old kid that wants to play bass to look at ‘Losses’ like, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’”
Growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, Harv relentlessly practiced the bass, cello and piano — fueled at home by his mother, a pianist and minister of music at Corinthian Baptist Church, as well as by “old-school heroes” like Prince and Rick James. Harv vividly recalls attending a Destiny’s Child concert at 15 years old, but not because of Beyoncé. “It’s me and my brother versus 20,000 girls screaming for Destiny’s Child, who are amazing, but me and my brother were locked in on the band,” he recalls. “Every time the bass player did something, I was just like, ‘Whoa.’”
Harv proclaimed at his high school lunch table that he’d one day play in front of 90,000 people, and then slowly stacked his wins, from a music technology scholarship for Alabama State University to his first major placement on Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” once he’d moved to Atlanta, where he was introduced to Bieber in 2009. Since then, Harv has toured the world several times over with Bieber and We The Band — “If you want to be the best, you gotta put yourself around the best,” he says of his arena-ready bass work — while gradually transitioning to producing and songwriting.
After contributing to a handful of Bieber album tracks, as well as to songs by artists like Omarion and Sevyn Streeter, Harv’s co-production credit on Bieber’s Grammy-nominated No. 1 smash “Peaches,” featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon, felt like a final puzzle piece in 2021. “I control what I want to do with my music now, as opposed to coming out prematurely and not having the respect or the legs,” he says. “It’s the perfect time right now.”
In early 2022, an unassuming six-hour studio session with Kyle led to “Losses.” That night, Harv played the track for his wife, Felisha, and two months later, he selected it as his debut single. “When you listen to ‘Losses,’ immediately, you think [of] a relationship where you may give more than you’re receiving,” he says. “It’s not reciprocated, and the person doesn’t care about you losing, but it can be anything in life. Musicians go through a lot. We put our all in, and [in] this music business, sometimes it doesn’t give you the same thing that you put into it.”
He plans to take the same organic approach to his solo career moving forward, in order to identify which sessions will generate the best songs without placing unnecessary pressure on results. “You can have a few good songs, but I want to have a long career,” says Harv. “I want to be 50 and have people look at me how they look at Quincy Jones. Like, ‘Oh, he’s one of those guys. He’s not just here for a summer.’ No, I’m here for the long haul.”
A key to the success of Måneskin is their musical eclecticism. They can cover a ‘60s tune like the Four Seasons’ “Beggin’” or a 2000s hit like The Killers’ “Somebody Told Me,” and bring each into their own style — while at other times, channeling the White Stripes or Red Hot Chili Peppers. And while the Italian quartet possesses standard rock band qualities that have endeared them to old-school audiences and radio programmers, they also flaunt their individual personalities, gender fluidity and knack for showmanship in a way that encourages young listeners and TikTok users to hop aboard the bandwagon, too.
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Måneskin’s exuberant cover of “Beggin’” blew up around the world in 2021, four years after the band first performed the cover. Since then, original tunes like “Supermodel” and “Mammamia” have earned millions of streams, the band opened for The Rolling Stones before headlining in the U.S. last fall, and in a few weeks they might take home the best new artist Grammy. Yet Rush!, their third album out this Friday (Jan. 20), carries the weight of expectation as their first full-length since stepping foot on the global stage.
The contributions of Max Martin on multiple tracks suggests a major pop bid, but Rush! spans the punk energy of “Kool Kids,” the balladry of “The Loneliest” and the groove-ready rock of “Gossip,” which features a guitar solo from Tom Morello. The album revels in the diversity of its four perspectives. As bassist Victoria De Angelis notes, “We don’t have actually similar tastes at all. We all have very different tastes and music backgrounds, so we influence each other in the writing process.”
While color-coordinated in chic brown and tan outfits, the four members of Måneskin – De Angelis, singer Damiano David, guitarist Thomas Raggi and drummer Ethan Torchio – sat down with Billboard for a Zoom discussion on their music, ethos and chemistry. (Note: this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
While you’ve had a fairly even split between English and Italian lyrics on your past releases, the majority of Rush! is in English, with only three songs being sung in Italian. Is this a strategy to get you to a larger audience?
Damiano: It’s not a strategy. Basically, when we started being a band and writing songs, we started writing in English, because 90% of our influences are not strictly English, but English-sounding. We had to learn how to write music in Italian because we never thought about it. But then we got big in Italy, and we had to start doing it – and also because it’s our language and we want to do it. But now we finally had the chance to make almost the whole album in English, because it’s like going back to our beginning. It’s what we are most used to doing.
Victoria: We really never forced it. It’s always been quite natural and in the moment. We do what we feel. I think also because we wrote most of the record while we were in the U.S., so we were getting inspired and seeing a lot of shows there, meeting artists and stuff.
“Beggin’” has over a billion views on YouTube now. How has its success influenced what you’ve been trying to do since then? Have you felt pressure to follow that up?
Damiano: No, I think that for us we managed to take only the best part out of it, because that song drove behind all the other songs and all the catalog. Fortunately, it was not just that song. It [the success] happened while we were thinking about this new record, so we just thought that drive could only make us our music more open and reach more people. It just gave us more hype to write the album, because we knew that this time, it was going to be different.
On your first album, Damiano wrote nearly all of the songs. The second album was a group effort. And then on Rush! you brought in outside songwriters and producers, like Sly and Rami Yacoub. What was that process like this time?
Damiano: We just wanted to shuffle the cards this time. We have played together for more than eight years. We just got to a point where we thought that we were able to put the band’s signature on every song. But we were also able to embrace not just one direction, but keep it more random, and follow each one’s different tastes and let each one of us lead in different songs. So writing the songs was easier. But then it was harder to pick [a track list], because with this method we wrote many, many more songs. We wrote like 60 songs, so it was very hard to pick these 17.
Ethan: If it were limitless, we would have done a record with 50 tracks.
You worked with Max Martin on four of these tracks. What was that experience like?
Victoria: This thing he’s known for, pop, is what drew us to him, because we want to try something different and to be stimulated in a different way. We’re used to doing music in our vision, and we know how it is to get in the studio and jam, the four of us. We still do it and we’ve done it on a bunch of songs on the record, but we also wanted to try something new.
We were very curious about this match because we love doing covers – “Beggin’” is a pop song. We play them and make them in a completely new flavor and version. So that was the match that we wanted to try with him, to get a bit of his pop sensibility and advice, but then take it and turn into who we are and make it more dirty and sound like us. I think he really understood what we wanted.
The first time we met him was at our show, where it really shines through what kind of band and energy we have and like. It was very easy in the studio, because he got it, and respected our identity and who we are. It was just like a school – understanding a different way of doing stuff. He has years of experience, so he really gave us some good advice.
Ethan: He’s so caring. … Something I really learned from him are the rules in the music writing process. You can follow them, you can not follow them. It’s a choice. But I learned this for him.
What was the most unusual process this time around?
Victoria: Basically, we would always just go in the studio and jam. I think we learned what was very useful was just to record all the jamming. Tom Morello literally jams for five hours, records everything, and then he listens back to five hours of recording and finds all the small, cool parts he has played. Then he picks the best ones and makes the song out of it. That was a really cool way of doing it.
Ethan: You need patience.
Thomas: Exactly. Because if you stay in that moment, really natural, you can take the best part with the best energy.
Your younger fans love how you embrace gender fluidity, at a time where, in both Italy and America, LGBTQ+ rights and protections are still an issue.
Damiano: Yeah, sure. I think [Italy] is still a few years later than USA because, like everything we import in Italy, it takes a few years to start. But things are starting to change. People are starting to build a situation where it’s possible to think about changing things. And there’s always more and more people, especially of our age or slightly older, 20, 30, that are creating communities and groups and are speaking up about things that have not spoken up for too many years. I think we’re in a good place right now.
In 2021, you did a TV performance in Poland, a country that is more religiously conservative. How did the Polish TV censors respond to the kiss between Damiano and Thomas at the end of that performance?
Damiano: You could see all the people of the same age of us were super hyped, and all the parents were like, “Oh, s—t, what’s going on? Do I like it? Should I like it? Should I not like it?” Half and half, as always.
Victoria: I think that moment has a really big meaning for our audience there, from all the people from the community, because there’s really a lack of representation and they face a lot of issues. Even now in Italy, as you said in America, it’s still a s—t situation, where people struggle for their rights and everything. So it’s never to be taken for granted anywhere, but especially there everyone was literally telling us, “It’s so homophobic here, you can’t even walk with your girlfriend or boyfriend or wear what you want.” That’s why we wanted to make a statement about it. I think it meant a lot for fans, so that was the most important thing.
What’s the most personal song on the new album for you?
Thomas: “Gossip,” because I wrote the main riff one day when we went in the studio in L.A., and I remember that we took that main riff on the Dropbox of the old songs. We said, “Okay, this is a really cool riff and good riff,” but after another session, I remember that we just took the main riff that became “Gossip” with Morello and the other stuff. I was very happy at the time.
Victoria: I’d say “Kool Kids,” because it was one of the first songs we wrote, and it was one of the first riffs I came up with, so I’m very proud of that riff. I love that we had the courage to make such a powerful, strong, punk song in a mainstream record nowadays.
Ethan: Victoria stole the one that I want to say. So I’m gonna say another one, “Read Your Diary,” because I love the harmonic progression that Thomas has done. I also like the drums a lot. How they sound in the song is very cool.
Damiano: “Timezone.” I think it’s not the easiest song, but the easiest to read. There’s no metaphors, it’s very clear what I’m saying. I’m not trying to hide behind double meanings. It’s just a circle of thoughts, without any censorship.
It was a break, not a breakup. But the way the screaming, flailing fans — ranging from teens to those teetering on the brink of middle age — at New York’s sold-out Beacon Theatre are reacting to frontwoman Hayley Williams, guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro ripping through their spiky new single, “This Is Why,” you’d think Paramore had just risen from the dead.
“It’s funny — everyone always thinks we’ve broken up,” Williams says. It’s a week before the Nov. 13, 2022, Beacon show, and the members of the trailblazing pop-punk band are seated on shabby vintage chairs in an old house in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park on a sunny afternoon. “It’s always like, ‘Will they or won’t they come back?’ ”
“Love to keep ’em guessing,” Farro quips.
“It surprises us every time,” adds York.
“At this point, I don’t understand how we’re still doing it,” Williams continues. “Because it just feels like against all odds every single time — which, honestly, I feel like we’re the most annoying band in the world because it’s always like, ‘Oh, we overcame this, and now we’re making this album.’ ”
Williams, 34; Farro, 32; and York, 33, met as kids with musical ambitions and Christian roots in Franklin, Tenn. Over the next two decades, as Paramore, they released five albums and survived internal band drama, from lineup changes to lawsuits, any of which could have sounded the death knell. But the group’s sixth album, This Is Why — a tight, post-punk juggernaut that zeroes in on pandemic-fueled anxieties, scheduled for release Feb. 10 — marks the first time the lineup has been consistent between two albums, as well as the end of its contract with Atlantic Records, the only label the band has ever known.
“It feels surreal,” York says.
“We’ve been really lucky,” says Williams. “We always will have gripes — it’s an industry — but we know that we’ve been really lucky. It’s more just the fact that it’s time to f–king finish something. And it’s time to know that we’re not doing the same sh-t that we’ve been on since we were teenagers. It’s just going to feel so nice to start a new book. You know, like no more chapters of this one. Whole new book. And I’m excited.”
Paramore’s relationship with Atlantic started in 2004, when Williams met with executive Julie Greenwald, then a recent arrival from Island Def Jam, and signed to the label. Although originally pitched as a solo artist, Williams had a different idea for her future.
“I walked away from the conversation understanding how important a band was for her,” says Greenwald, now chairman/CEO of Atlantic Music Group. “It wasn’t initially presented that way by the A&R people, but once I sat down with her, oh yeah, it definitely became super clear what the path was.”
The first iteration of Paramore — Williams, brothers Zac and Josh Farro, and bassist Jeremy Davis — officially formed the same year, and Greenwald thought that seminal alternative label Fueled by Ramen (an Atlantic imprint then led by John Janick and home to groups like Fall Out Boy and The Academy Is…) would make a good fit for the budding rocker and her band. “This chick should not be marketed as a pop chick. This chick was definitely a rock chick,” Greenwald recalls thinking. “And the demos were extraordinary: She had an unbelievable voice, but she definitely had a point of view at a very young age, and it was super exciting.”
“It was never going to just be Hayley. It was always about the band,” confirms Mark Mercado, who has managed the group since 2004. Fueled by Ramen released Paramore’s pop-punk-driven debut, All We Know Is Falling, in 2005, and even at that nascent stage, the band was already seeing members come and go. (York was involved from day one, but he only became a full-time member in 2009.)
York (left) wears a Nanushka shirt, Todd Snyder jacket, Nudie Jeans, and Dr. Martens shoes. Williams (center) wears a Maryam Nassir Zahed shirt, Tanner Fletcher skirt, Yuhan Wang tights, Hereu shoes, and Agmes and UNOde50 rings. Farro (right) wears a Paul Smith jacket, COS pants, and Duke + Dexter shoes.
Meredith Jenks
Paramore’s fame exploded with its sophomore effort, the hook- and hit-laden Riot!, now a triple-platinum album with a permanent home in the pop-rock canon of the 2000s. The 2007 release moved the young band up the male-dominated lineup of the traveling Vans Warped Tour, securing it a main-stage slot just two years after debuting on the festival’s female-fronted Shiragirl Stage. By 2008, the group was big enough that when the soundtrack for the anticipated film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight needed an original lead single, Paramore got the call and contributed “Decode,” which earned Williams, Josh and York a Grammy nomination in 2009.
Despite that success, the group couldn’t avoid near-constant lineup changes as its members grew up in the public eye, working out — or not working out — their differences while navigating stardom and young adulthood. “We didn’t have the perspective of [choosing to be here],” Farro says. “We were like, ‘Why are we playing Boston again?’ You’re 14. I literally would be onstage and be like, ‘I can’t wait to eat Taco Bell after this.’ ”
“Or you have to do schoolwork when you get offstage,” Williams says.
Farro and his older brother made a high-profile, acrimonious exit in 2010 (which Josh detailed in a now notorious blog post, citing the band’s label deal and a lack of shared values), but in 2016, Williams and York, the last members standing, asked Zac Farro to come back and play drums on Paramore’s fifth album, After Laughter. In the studio, the lineup clicked.
“It felt very new because I had been only used to being in this band with my brother when we were young,” Farro says. “There was this freedom that we felt to finally be just the three of us, and there was so much acceptance to just be real people.”
That sentiment carried over to After Laughter. As the band embraced a sleeker synth-pop style, Williams’ lyrics revealed her struggles with depression and anxiety amid the dissolution of her marriage to her longtime partner, Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory. About a year following After Laughter’s mid-2017 release, and as they finished a grueling world tour, the group chose honesty once again — and admitted to itself that it needed to take a break.
“They sat me down and said, ‘We’re going to take a break, but this time, we’re going to take a break because we want to,’ ” Mercado says. “It was a good moment for them.”
“I think at different points [in the After Laughter era] — for me, after my divorce, [and] Taylor had some things happen with family — there were moments of, ‘We really need to take a moment, a breather,’ ” Williams says. “But the craziest part about taking the break was, it’s like we really had agency over that choice. We really knew that we were doing it to preserve something.” Rather than being a warning sign of internal strife, “It was more like, ‘We just need to experience being adult people back at home [in Nashville] and have routines and a different type of normalcy that is not normal for us.’ ”
Paramore ended its After Laughter touring in Nashville in September 2018, then took time off — well, kind of. Farro put out a new album under his solo project, HalfNoise, while Williams released her first solo album, Petals for Armor, produced by York with Farro guesting on drums for two tracks, in May 2020. “Simmer,” the album’s first single, arrived in January 2020, and on March 5, Williams announced her first-ever solo tour. “She wasn’t excited about touring it, but we sold out shows, the whole thing,” Mercado says. “So when the pandemic hit, we were like, ‘Well, it looks like you won’t be touring it.’ ”
Instead, Paramore’s members spent spring 2020 like many people did: They hung out in small bubbles of family and friends, took long walks, Zoomed into therapy sessions, marched for racial justice and had heavy conversations about the state of the world.
“It was cool to know that everyone in the world was doing the exact same thing, which was nothing,” Farro says. “I have a huge fear of missing out, so I didn’t really have that because I was doing exactly what everybody else was doing. It felt kind of connected.”
“I have the opposite,” Williams says. “I just want to go home all the time.” Home was a “little, sweet, post-divorce house” that Farro calls The Batcave due to an unfortunate infestation of bats when Williams first moved in. Somewhere between having her mom over for tea and hanging out with her goldendoodle, Alf, Williams started thinking about new Paramore music.
Talks about ending Paramore’s break started in 2021. “I was talking about it on my back porch,” Farro remembers.
“You remember that conversation. I don’t even remember it,” York admits.
“Taylor and I got the inflatable pool,” Farro continues. “We always have tough conversations in a pool in my backyard.”
As Farro recalls, York broached the subject by mentioning that Williams was thinking about writing Paramore songs again. (In September, York and Williams confirmed they were dating, though they have not commented on the relationship since.) “You kind of were mediating between getting a pulse from everybody. And I was like, ‘I don’t even like you guys anymore,’ ” he jokes, making his bandmates laugh. “No, it was like, ‘Yeah, what does that look like?’ ”
Williams, Farro and York rented an East Nashville studio in June 2021, and though playing together again at first felt intimidating, making an album was “always the intention,” York says.
Starting the process was especially challenging for Farro, who had co-written a handful of Paramore tracks but had never been a primary songwriter. “I was like, ‘I don’t know. You guys have a whole system now; you did a whole record.’ And then Taylor, especially with the writing, was like, ‘Dude, come and help. I’d love some help.’ ”
The band wrote the album’s closing track, “Thick Skull,” a marked sonic departure from After Laughter, on day one. “It had these shades of a few different eras of us being music fans, loving heavy, drone-y, almost shoegaze-y moments,” says Williams, also citing York’s clashing guitar patterns, Farro’s thunderous bursts of drumming and even her own rare piano playing on the song. “I was like, ‘Man, this sounds like a band I would love.’ ”
Williams wears a Heureuh jacket, Orseund Iris shirt, Techin shorts, Jeffrey Campbell shoes, Fang earrings, and Ikaia and PDPAOLA rings.
Meredith Jenks
The album’s first song — the frenetic, title-track lead single, released in September — came last, but it provided the band with the project’s thesis. “The ‘this’ of it all is, I think, alluding to everything that gets talked about on the album,” says Williams of This Is Why’s topics, which range from men who are not held accountable for their actions (“Big Man Little Dignity”) to the endless parade of bad news during the pandemic (“The News”). The outside noise, as well as the privacy the band’s members rediscovered during the break, made it hard to fathom a return to the spotlight. As Williams shouts on the title track, “This is why I don’t leave the house!”
“It’s at odds with what we love to do,” she says. “And I think all those thoughts swirling in my head is what the ‘this’ is about.”
Williams also turned the lens inward on the post-punk “C’est Comme Ça,” where she speaks in a disaffected voice, “In a single year, I’ve aged 100/My social life, a chiropractic appointment,” then confesses, “Getting better is boring.”
“It’s so difficult once you’re on the path — like, you’re doing therapy, or maybe you’ve started taking medication, or maybe you’ve lost some toxic relationships and you’re trying to have better boundaries,” she says. “But if you’re — I have PTSD — addicted to survival, at a certain point, when things are healthy, it’s really devastatingly boring. And it makes you feel like, ‘I’m never going to have healthy relationships because some part of me is seeking out a shadow or always looking for the thing that’s going to go wrong.’ There’s not ever peace.”
Paramore has delved into relationships, social dynamics and mental health in its lyrics before, but the new album adds a decidedly political bent. “Everything is political, and it’s either politicized to a degree that maybe isn’t fair or it just inherently is political,” Williams observes. “Even if I tried to not say one word about anything political [on the album], I think it was just in the DNA. It was in every conversation.”
Farro wears a Sandro hat, Tanner Fletcher vest, COS pants, and Gentle Monster glasses.
Meredith Jenks
Despite the promising recording sessions, anxiety still crept in. “I was like, ‘What do people want from us? What are they going to expect?’ ” says Williams. In the years since the trio’s break began, pop-punk had made a startling mainstream comeback, with artists old and new participating in the resurgence. My Chemical Romance announced a reunion show in 2019 and a full tour in 2020, which was delayed until 2022 due to the pandemic. By then, even the genre forefathers in Blink-182 had announced a return to the road in its best-known lineup, and Paramore’s streaming numbers continued to climb, as they had since 2020.
The plays continued to rise in 2021, especially around the time when TikTok users started creating mashups of Olivia Rodrigo’s Billboard Hot 100-topping “good 4 u” – a conspicuous throwback to Paramore’s mid-aughts brand of pop-punk – and the group’s own brash 2007 hit “Misery Business,” released when Rodrigo was 4 years old. (The songs’ undeniable similarities earned Paramore a late writing credit on Rodrigo’s hit.)
Paramore has been a perennial staple on the rock and alternative charts, but the band has never achieved the pop standard of domination, only cracking the top 10 of the Hot 100 once, with the Grammy-winning “Ain’t It Fun” peaking at No. 10 in 2014. “Misery Business” topped out at No. 26 in 2008, making it the group’s fourth-highest showing on the chart out of 11 total appearances to date.
Williams wrote “Misery Business” when she was a teenager, and before playing the vengeful track at Paramore’s last show in 2018, she announced that it would be “the last time for a really long time” that the band would perform it. (Its lyrical content, pitting woman against woman over a man’s affection, has not aged well.) But with renewed interest in the song (and its influential blend of emo and pop-punk) from younger listeners, Williams reinstated it in 2022, performing an acoustic version alongside Billie Eilish at Coachella. “Misery Business” also made it onto the band’s fall setlists, though Williams introduced it at the Beacon with a disclaimer: “This song is about misogyny.”
The song’s resurrection, as well as pop-punk’s, came as a surprise to the group. “There’s all this sh-t happening on TikTok with our songs and young artists that are kind of reclaiming [emo and pop-punk culture], and there’s this resurgence of emo or whatever — which is also like, that’s another weird conversation because we never really felt like we fit anywhere,” Williams says. “But then this thing was happening, and we were part of the swell.”
“All of a sudden, they wanted to call us [part of] the scene now,” Farro says.
“Yeah,” says Williams, “all of a sudden, they wanted to claim us.”
York wears a Corridor jacket, Nudie jeans, and T.U.K. shoes.
Meredith Jenks
For the band’s first shows in four years, its agent, UTA’s Ken Fermaglich, booked a combination of intimate venues and festivals, allowing the band to “get the cobwebs off and kind of get them back to being on the road,” Fermaglich says. Knowing that the album would not be out until February and that the group would later announce an arena tour, the team “had to be mindful of the fact that we didn’t want to do too much and play too big of places too early.”
One of Paramore’s biggest fall gigs was headlining When We Were Young, the Las Vegas festival held over two weekends in October that treated emo and pop-punk fans to a lineup of Warped Tour royalty including My Chemical Romance, Jimmy Eat World and The Used. The event’s immediate sellout prompted promoters to add two more identical days and served as another sign of pop-punk’s new, growing audience — and the continued passion of its existing one. But Paramore’s members had mixed feelings about returning to that scene.
“Everyone’s just trying to remember better days, and I’m sitting there like, ‘They weren’t that much better,’ ” Williams says. She articulated those thoughts during Paramore’s When We Were Young set, telling the crowd that the scene had not always been a safe place “if you were different, if you were a young woman, if you were a person of color, if you were queer, and that’s really f–ked up if you think about it because this was supposed to be the safe place, wasn’t it?”
“We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams says today, reflecting on that speech. “But I think what I felt was a mixture of vindication and also a lot of anger. I was really surprised that I had so much anger well up in me because I was like, ‘Wait a minute. They’re treating us like a prize now,’ but like, Fat Mike [of NOFX] used to tell people that I gave good rim jobs onstage when I was 19 years old. I do not think that that’s punk. I don’t think that’s the essence of punk. And I feel strongly that without young women, people of color and also the queer community, I just think we would still be where we were then.
“It felt like justification to be able to have the mic and to be one of the last bands that played,” she continues. “We hung out with My Chem a few minutes before we went on [on] the last weekend, and I think they feel very similarly about how they were received. And what it comes down to is that the fans are the ones with the power because otherwise, us and My Chem wouldn’t have been headlining that thing. And I think that’s beautiful.”
“It’s kind of like people see us like [The] Princess Diaries,” Farro explains. “They didn’t see the beauty, but we threw off the glasses.”
In the middle of the Beacon Theatre show, Williams realizes that she has danced her way so far downstage that she now feels distant from the rest of Paramore. Suddenly sheepish, she drags her mic stand backward, telling the audience that she must return to the “safe space” closer to her bandmates.
Though Williams is clearly still its frontwoman, Paramore very much remains a group project. The high comfort level among its current lineup is evident whether one has spent an hour or years with the band — Farro’s humor, York’s quiet focus and Williams’ leadership skills maintain a balance that puts all three at ease, whether they’re discussing the tumultuous past or the wide-open future.
That’s true onstage and in the studio as well. The mid-2000s pop-punk heyday may not be a time Paramore relishes revisiting, but the band takes pride in its back catalog, playing songs from all five of its previously released albums on its fall tour, much to fans’ delight. Still, Williams, York and Farro are ready to keep moving ahead, as they have consistently done on their records for nearly two decades, surrounded by people they trust.
“When you listen to Riot!, and even getting into Brand New Eyes, you get a flavor,” Williams says. “And it’s really what we became known for, right? But when we write things that simply feel like that, we’re so bored. And it’s not challenging enough. And we don’t feel like we’ve grown.” This Is Why is the latest reflection of that quest for growth, both sonically and emotionally, as the band that has always seemed in flux finally appears settled.
“What I see is that the three of them together are really the best that they’ve ever been,” Mercado says. “They truly make joint decisions. They truly hear each other out.”
Williams (left) wears a Heureuh jacket, Orseund Iris shirt, Fang earrings, and Ikaia and PDPAOLA rings. Farro (center) wears a Nanushka shirt, A Personal Note 73 pants, Gentle Monster glasses, and Vitaly necklace. York (right) wears a Corridor jacket.
Meredith Jenks
Brendan Yates, frontman of Baltimore hardcore band Turnstile, witnessed the band’s chemistry firsthand when he directed the “This Is Why” music video. “It’s very cool to see a band that you love and respect so much really be extremely down to earth, and also very in touch with themselves and in touch with what they’re making and care about that,” he says.
A fan of the band since he was a teenager — 2009’s Brand New Eyes and 2013’s “Ain’t It Fun” (“That’s one of the best songs of all time”) are his favorite Paramore album and song, respectively — Yates commends the group’s ability to evolve. “They truly progress and mature and develop throughout every album,” he says. “They just do a great job of making the music reflect their growth as people. A great band is when you can very confidently make the music reflect the time that they’re in. I’m excited to see this new album do that for them in this era of Paramore.”
Fans new and old will get to experience Paramore’s fresh vision this year at the band’s dates in Europe and North and South America. On top of headlining arenas in 29 U.S. cities, it will top festival bills (Atlantic City’s inaugural Adjacent Festival, Alabama’s Hangout Fest) and open Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour at its March kickoff show in Arizona.
“When we were 19, [Swift] told me — she was a country singer at that point — that she wanted to be like Carole King,” Williams recalls. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s a crazy thing to say,’ you know? Because we were kids. And I’ll be damned, this woman, she’s crossing genres and bleeding over into other aspects of pop culture, and she’s helping to shape it at the very least.” Opening for her now “is really huge. It’s a big deal that we even got thought of, you know? So I’m stoked. We can’t wait.”
“Having Paramore join me on tour is such an honor,” Swift says. “We came up alongside each other as Nashville teenagers writing our own music, so it feels insanely special to kick off the tour together nearly two decades later. I just remember being constantly floored and inspired by their writing, originality and artistic integrity. Hayley is such a riveting performer because she’s so multifaceted — bold and playful and ferocious and completely in command. It’s a dream come true to join forces like this.”
York (left) wears a Corridor shirt, Nudie jeans, and Dr. Martins boots. Williams (center) wears a Tanner Fletcher jacket, Everlane vest, Sandy Liang pants, Vagabond shoes, Agmes earrings, Ikaia, and Pdpaola and Vitaly rings. Farro (right) wears a Sandro hat, Tanner Fletcher vest, COS pants, and Gentle Monster glasses.
Meredith Jenks
As excited as they are to get back on the road starting in February and release new music, “it feels scary,” Williams says. “You know that you’re doing the thing that you feel is right because you’re just kind of following your passion or your instinct, but you also never know what’s going to hit and land the right way. We’re lucky that we’ve never relied on being a specific type of success, whether that be chart success or radio success. Because at the end of the day, there’s a connection and a relationship with the people that have grown up supporting and loving the band with us. So we trust that.”
“They’re the biggest they’ve ever been, and now they’re a free agent, for what it’s worth, after this record,” Mercado says. “I told them the other day, ‘I think you guys are just a force. I can’t stop it. People can’t stop it. Bandmates can’t stop it. You’re just a force, and you’ve got a message and a fan base that just believes in what you’re doing. And that’s all you need.’ And it’s cool to see that 18 years later.”
And anyone wondering what this newfound free agency means can rest assured: Though the band isn’t fielding other label offers right now, Paramore plans to keep making music.
“Free agents,” Farro says. “That’s our next record name.”
“Zac has been saying since we were in the studio,” Williams adds, “ ‘This is the season of us not resisting.’ ”
When Miley Cyrus announced that she would be kicking off 2023 with the release of “Flowers,” a new single to precede her forthcoming album Endless Summer Vacation, the news was exciting on two levels: a new Cyrus single was coming, but perhaps more importantly, a new Cyrus lead single was coming.
After all, Cyrus has spent the majority of her recording career deploying lead singles as hints to upcoming shifts in her sound and style, with clear demarcations between album eras and the tweaks in public persona that the pop superstar adopts for each. From her Disney days — when songs like “See You Again” and “7 Things” pointed toward the commercial aspirations of the teen star — to the devil-may-care flare-ups of her Can’t Be Tamed and Bangerz periods, the first five years of Cyrus’ career featured sharp pivots in sound and attitude, often to denote how “adult” how projects at the time should be considered.
As Cyrus continued to evolve, full-length explorations of psychedelica, country-pop and retro-rock were given coming attractions befitting their sounds. Now, “Flowers” nods toward where Cyrus, currently one of popular music’s most fascinating shape-shifters, is headed next.
So which lead singles illustrate Cyrus’ pop power most effectively, especially now that there’s a new one to consider? All eight of Cyrus’ lead singles have their charms — truly, not a flat-out dud in the bunch — but some of her songs excel as both previews of their host albums and standalone gems in her catalog. And while it’s still early days for “Flowers,” we tried our best to consider its place among Cyrus’ lead singles to date, and humbly rank the new track among the seven that have stood tall for years. (One note before we begin: 2015’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz did not have an official radio single as an independent release, but it does have a song that’s considered its lead single, so that’s the one we ranked.)
Here are Miley Cyrus’ lead singles, ranked.