genre dance
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As Little Monsters everywhere gear up for the release of Lady Gaga’s hotly anticipated new album Mayhem, Mother Monster herself is giving them a glimpse of what they can expect from the new LP.
In a new interview for InStyle, Gaga spoke with Spotify’s head of global editorial Sulinna Ong ahead of her Little Monster Press Conference for the streamer. During their conversation, the “Abracadabra” singer shared a sneak preview of two songs — “The Beast” and “Perfect Celebrity,” respectively — that are featured on her new album.
Speaking about “The Beast,” Gaga revealed that the lyrics of the song see her “singing to a werewolf” that represents her. “The lyrics are: ‘You can’t hide who you are, 11:59, your heart’s racin’, you’re growling, and we both know why,’” Gaga revealed. “And somehow that gothic dream is not just about me in a relationship with this person that’s about to turn, but what if I was to just sing it to myself and the beast is Gaga?”
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When talking about “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga mentioned that the concept of “duality” present in both her videos for “Disease” and “Abracadabra” continue in the new track’s lyrics. “The lyric is: ‘I’ve become a notorious being, find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling,” she said. “It’s this idea that we all, in a way, have our real selves and then our clone version that we project to the world. So there’s a lot in Mayhem about multiple yous or multiple mes and what it’s like to have those things be at odds with each other all the time.”
As for the inspiration behind her new project, the singer pointed directly to ballroom culture as a driving force that found its way into the album’s music and lyrics. “I grew up in New York City and I also was a student of Paris Is Burning when I was really, really young. And I was always inspired by the tremendous amount of grace, freedom, expression and joy of ballroom culture,” she said. I was lucky enough to be around some dancers that were a part of that life.”
Gaga continued, adding that she felt it is a “privilege” to be a member of the dance community, and to be embraced by those who have built such lasting institutions. “There are these spaces in the world where there’s an ability for the community to express and experience joy, even when life is not treating them that way,” she explained. “And I am still so inspired by it and to this day, it felt like a relevant thing to bring up in the [“Abracadabra”] video because it’s about resilience. I can’t think of a place where I’ve seen more resilience than in a ballroom.”
The news comes just one week after Gaga unveiled the tracklist for Mayhem (due out March 7 via Interscope), including singles “Disease,” “Abracadabra” and “Die With a Smile,” as well as the two new tracks she teased. Spotify’s Little Monster Press Conference — during which Gaga’s fans will have the opportunity to ask Mother Monster their own questions — is set to take place Thursday, March 6, at 6 p.m. ET, simulcast across Spotify’s social media accounts.
Billboard’s THE STAGE at SXSW is back, and we’re breaking down the star-studded performances for March 2025. Keep watching to learn more! Who are you excited to see perform? Let us know in the comments! Buy your tickets here! Tetris Kelly: We’re getting lit in Austin! Billboard just announced the opening acts to the already […]
This week in dance music: Massive Attack will headline London’s LIDO festival in June with an entirely battery-powered performance, an ongoing legal battle between Sony Music and Ultra Music Publishing escalated with a new lawsuit, Carl Cox exited the Movement 2025 lineup and was replaced by Jeff Mills and Odesza made a 23-minute remix of the Severance score.
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And to all that we add these, the best new dance tracks of the week.
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Mochakk feat. The RAH Band, “From the Stars”
Brazil’s jet-setting party starter makes his Ninja Tune debut with his From the Stars EP, a two-song project led by its title track. A collaboration with England’s The RAH Band, the song is a take on the group’s 1983 bop “Messages From the Stars,” with Mochakk turning up the BPM and the far-out factor on the slinky, sexy but still muscular club update, which balances nicely with its cool after-hours B-side, “Maria.” The mustachioed producer born Pedro Maia calls releasing the EP on Ninja Tune “completely bananas… one of those stamp-of-approval moments” that he’ll celebrate by playing a flurry of shows in his native country as Brazil celebrates carnival later this month. Closer to home, he plays EDC Las Vegas in May.
Röyksopp feat. Robyn, “Do It Again [True Electric]”
11 years after the release of the original, Röyksopp drop an edit of their Robyn collab “Do It Again.” While the original leaned hard into urgency and flirted with heaviness, the new take adds maximum peak hours heft, dialing up the BPM, isolating the vocals in just the right moments and eventually exploding into all-out, all-encompassing dancefloor delirium. The edit is the second track from the Norwegian legends’ tenth studio album, True Electric, coming April 11 on their own Dog Triumph label.
Bianca Oblivion feat. Sam Binga, “Hypnø”
Los Angeles-based producer Bianca Oblivion makes her long-form debut with a heater of an EP, Net Werk. The four-track project spans bass, grime, Jersey club and more, with “Hypnø” (a collab with British artist Sam Binga) fusing squelchy strings, a hectic beat and waves of low end into a delicious kind of chaos. Oblivion says she “never wanted to rush into an EP or album until I fully understood myself as a producer and felt that my music could stand alongside the tracks I play in my sets.” The title reflects the global network of friends and collaborators I’ve connected with over the years, all of whom, alongside the many music influences from my childhood, have helped shape this release.” Net Werk is out on the U.K. imprint LuckyMe.
Tripolism & Nandu, “Sunrise”
Danish trio Tripolism and producer Nandu link for the hypnotic “Sunrise,” a track that says right there in the name what part of the set it should be played at. It’s recently been rinsed by acts including the ever chic Keinemusik and has gotten support from other tastemakers, with key ears apparently in thrall with the track’s balance of sunlight-like falsetto and a chant that implores what those of us still dancing at dawn might already feel: “You’re never going home, you’ve got to keep going.” The heater is out on Ultra Records.
Hiver, “Dreamachine“
Be transported to the ’90s afterhours of your mind with this electronica-era influenced dreamscape of a track from Milanese duo Hiver. Out on CircoLoco Records, the track pairs pristine production and clean, soaring strings with a feeling of undertow embodied by the beat and the emotive vocals. Hiver says the song is “a testament to our growth as producers. We’ve invested countless hours in honing our studio skills, experimenting with sound design, and perfecting the production process to craft something that feels authentic and unique. The track reflects our love for the electro sound while pushing boundaries to create something unique.” Also: Do not sleep on the uptempo edit by Romanian master Gerd Janson.
Fans of the show know that getting a job offer related to Severance might be an unsettling proposition, but the gentlemen of Odesza jumped at the opportunity.
“We’re mega-fans,” the duo’s Harrison Mills says of the show, which tracks the bifurcated existences of the employees of Lumon Industries, a mysterious, seemingly nefarious global conglomerate that employs people who’ve chosen to undergo a neural procedure that severs their personal and professional lives, making it so that neither part is aware of the other. After a three-year hiatus, the show’s acclaimed second season launched on Apple TV+ last month.
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Today (Feb. 21), fans of the series are getting a company bonus via a mix of the Severance theme song created by Odesza. The pair — Mills and Clayton Knight — transformed the soundtrack into a 23-minute mix that’s also been looped to form an eight hour piece of music, not coincidentally the same amount of time as a standard 9-5 workday. Hear the 23-minute mix, set to footage from the show, below.
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Upon accepting the remix offer, Mills and Knight were provided with the complete (and then still unreleased) season two episodes, along with the stems of the score created by Teddy Shapiro, who won an Emmy Award for Severance‘s season one soundtrack and returned for season two.
“We wanted to take people on a journey and give a wider breadth of music and play off and reinterpret Teddy’s score in a unique way,” says Mills. “We put different chords under a lot of his melodies, while also trying to stay true to the vibe of the show, which is kind of creepy and subversive. You’re not overtly aware of this dark underbelly.”
Being based in Seattle also helped the duo in the creation process, with the current dark days of winter helping them get in a mental zone that matched the show. Unlike the characters, however, they did not flip the work switch off at the end of the day. “We were literally living and breathing this thing,” says Knight, “going to bed thinking about it, probably too much in the zone.”
Working under a hard deadline — they project had to be completed in just a month — was helpful, as the tight timeline made it so they didn’t overthink decisions or get too in the weeds on what they were doing.
Their final product takes cues from the show — including the signature piano chords from its theme and other sonic moments, like typing — and folds them into a mix that reflects the themes of Severance itself, balancing light and dark moments. Mills describes it as,”lulling you into this false sense of security that it’s all happy and then bringing these darker sounds that creep into it. It’s like beautiful melancholy. There’s sadness, but there’s also surface level joy throughout. We were trying to play with major chords, but then sneak in these weird, kind of dissonant sounds that creep in.”
They agree that the project took inspiration from their own 2020 side project, Bronson, which focused on darker, heavier sounds than the typical Odesza output. The mix was also a natural fit given that, Mill says, “we’ve always been so influenced by film scores and scores in general.” Meetings with Shapiro also instilled confidence, as the composer, Mills continues, “was so open and receptive to us just doing anything… He was such a fun person to bounce our ideas off of and was so receptive to us trying things. It just allowed us to really have fun with it.”
“It’s got Odesza energy, but it tries to capture the tone and motifs of the show,” says Knight. “It’s also the first time we haven’t had a vocal element to work with. It uses zero vocals. So it was us going back to our roots in terms of tempo, slowing everything down to keep it more cinematic and keeping it more instrumental, not relying on a lead top line to carry anything and letting the instrumentation speak for itself. It was definitely a different workflow than we’ve done the past, but really fun and exciting.”
The project also arrived at a synergistic moment for the broader Odesza trajectory. The guys wrapped their massive The Last Goodbye tour last July, with the run (named for their 2022 album) spanning 54 shows at 48 venues throughout North America, including headlining sets at festivals like Governors Ball and Bonnaroo. (In 2022 and 2023, the tour grossed $35.8 million and sold 601,000 tickets, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.)
The pair have since been on a break and are just now getting back into album writing mode, with the Severance mix helping them get their musical gears once again turning.
“It was a really nice first stepping stone into what will be our next project, the big album project,” says Knight. “It’s a nice way to get the creative juices flowing again and to jump in without having too many avenues.” He adds that for the foreseeable future, “We’re definitely in writing mode. We have some DJ sets sprinkled throughout the year, but [now] it’s really a focus on studio time and making the next chapter of the Odesza project.”
“We’re experimenting,” Mills adds. “We want to build time to find inspiration and to innovate and just not feel too pressured to just be on another cycle again.”
Given the pressure that their jobs can contain, one wonders if Mills and Knight would ever consider severing their personal and professional lives, like Lumon employees. They laugh at the question. Knight says that while they’d maybe want to forget about “some earlier shows where we played in a hotel lobby, to 20 people looking at their phones,” ultimately they’re happy to be integrated.
“We have the best jobs in the world,” says Knight. “We get to make music and hang out with cool people and make fun projects. There’s really no complaining.”
Billboard announced the opening acts for its The Stage at SXSW concert series during this year’s annual gathering in Austin, TX on Friday (Feb. 21). Joining previously announced headliners Koe Wetzel, Grupo Frontera and John Summit at the concert series at the iconic Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park from March 13-15 are a group of […]
Carl Cox will no longer appear at Movement 2025. A statement posted to the techno producer’s Instagram Story on Thursday (Feb. 20) reads, “I regret to inform you that due to scheduling complications, my show at Movement has been postponed to 2026. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but I promise to make […]
The Osheaga Festival in Parc Jean-Dreapeau in Montreal (Aug. 1-3) announced its 2025 lineup on Wednesday (Feb. 19), which will feature headlining sets from The Killers, Tyler, the Creator and Olivia Rodrigo.
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The stacked-and-packed roster also includes: Glass Animals, Doechii, Dominic Fike, Lucy Dacus, Finneas, Gracie Abrams, The Chainsmokers, The Struts, Future Island, Smino, Tommy Richman, Shaboozey, Kaleo, TV on the Radio, Cage the Elephant, Jamie XX, Royel Otis, The Beaches, Chet Faker, Gigi Perez, Bossman Dlow and Bigxthaplug, among many others.
Tickets for this year’s event will go on sale on Friday (Feb. 21) here; $1 from every ticket will be donated to the Evenko Foundation, which provides musical instruments to schools in Quebec and encourages young people to pursue a life in the performing arts.
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Among the other acts on this year’s roster are: Barry Can’t Swim, Jorja Smith, Artemas, James Hype, Nico Moreno, Måneskin singer Damiano David, Omah Lay, La Femme, Joey Valence & Brae, Wunderhorse, BBNO$, Sammy Virji, Alex Warren, Claude Vonstroke, Good Neighbours, Naomi Sharon, Adam Ten, Whitney, Matt Champion, Isoxo, Marina, Mark Ambor, Amaarae, Loco Dice, The Dare, Jersey, Oden & Fatzo, Ruby Water, Inji and Kenny Mason.
Last year’s Osheaga hosted nearly 150,000 fans at the city’s largest outdoor concert venue, where they took in sets by Noah Kahan, Green Day, SZA, Melanie Martinez, Lil Tjay, Smashing Pumpkins, Martin Garrix, Reneé Rapp, Hozier, Teddy Swims, Teezo Touchdown, Rancid, Chappell Roan, Raye, Tyla, Kevin Abstract, Justice, Jungle and T-Pain.
Check out the 2025 Osheaga Festival poster below.
Sony Music Entertainment is asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against the company by Patrick Moxey‘s Ultra International Music Publishing late last year, claiming the suit was an act of “retaliation” against the major label after it filed its own lawsuit against the publishing outfit two years prior.
Ultra International Music Publishing and Ultra Music Publishing Europe brought the lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment and its subsidiaries — including Ultra Records, which Moxey sold his remaining 50% share of to Sony in 2021 — last November over allegations of copyright infringement, claiming Sony and its affiliates had been using Ultra Publishing’s compositions without a license. Filed in New York federal court, the complaint alleged that Ultra Publishing had conducted an audit finding that Sony had been underpaying royalties to the publisher and its songwriters “for years” — but that after bringing the results of the audit to Sony’s attention, the major label “failed” and “refuse[d]” to pay Ultra Publishing the royalties it was due.
Ultra Publishing claimed that after Sony’s alleged refusal, it ceased granting the music giant licenses to the company’s compositions, but that Sony nonetheless continued uploading tracks featuring Ultra Publishing-owned compositions to streaming services and selling them as digital downloads and physical releases, among other exploitations. The lawsuit concerned more than 50,000 compositions by artists including Ed Sheeran, Madonna, Rihanna and others.
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In its response, filed on Monday (Feb. 17) by attorney Tal Dickstein, Sony Music called the lawsuit “an ill-conceived effort by Plaintiffs — two music publishing companies owned by Patrick Moxey — to retaliate against” Sony Music for an earlier lawsuit it filed against Ultra Publishing for the continued use of the Ultra name. In that complaint, filed in November 2022, Sony attested that Moxey had signed away his rights to the Ultra trademark after selling the company his remaining stake in Ultra Records, which he founded in 1995.
Sony claims Ultra Publishing attempted to justify the “nefarious timing” of its own lawsuit — which allegedly dropped the day before the trial for the trademark lawsuit began — “by claiming this lawsuit stems from an audit of the music publishing royalties that Sony Music Entertainment paid to Plaintiffs.” However, Sony alleges that the audit in question, “which involved payments made by Sony Music Entertainment to Plaintiffs through 2016,” was in fact “settled in principle years ago for a small fraction of the amount claimed, and Plaintiffs never pursued those audit claims any further.”
Sony’s filing goes on to say that it and Ultra Publishing “continued working together after the audit was settled, with Sony Music Entertainment paying publishing royalties on the musical compositions that were the subject of the audit without objection from Plaintiffs, and working to license and pay the corresponding publishing royalties for well over a thousand other compositions owned in whole or in part by Plaintiffs.”
“Sony Music Entertainment’s licensing practices are both appropriate and entirely consistent with the licensing practices of every other leading record label that releases new sound recordings, including record labels that Moxey himself controlled in the past and currently owns,” the filing continues. “Moreover, Plaintiffs’ own songwriters and producers continue to write songs and collaborate with SME artists with the intention and expectation that the resulting sound recordings incorporating the underlying musical compositions will be commercially released — underscoring the obvious question of whether Plaintiffs’ attempted boycott of SME is in their songwriters’ best interest.”
An attorney for Ultra International Music Publishing did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s request for comment.
Justin Timberlake, BTS’ J-Hope, Gracie Abrams, Raye and Benson Boone are among the headliners for 2025’s Lollapalooza Berlin. Among the other acts slated to perform on July 12 and 13 at Olympic Park and the Olympic Stadium in Berlin are: Armin Van Burren, Brutalismus 3000, Ive, The Last Dinner Party, Dom Dolla, John Summit, Artemas, Shaboozey, Royel Otis, Ashnikko, Magdalena Bay, Sofi Tukker, Bigxthaplug and Mark Ambor, among many others.
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Tickets for the festival are on sale now.
Lollapalooza Berlin was the first European extension of the beloved Lolla brand, first touching down in 2015, shifting between a series of different venues before finding its permanent home in the Olympic Park in the heart of Berlin.
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Last year’s fest featured a similarly eclectic lineup topped by Sam Smith, Martin Garrix, Burna Boy, OneRepublic, Seventeen, The Chainsmokers and solo sets from former One Direction band mates Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson.
The 2025 Berlin edition will also host Mother Mother, Mahmut Orhan, Argy, Mark Ambor, Bunt., Nora En Pure, Miss Monique, Anna, Flo, Joey Valence & Brae, Neil Frances Present Club NF, Benjamin Ingrosso and Wasia Project, among others. The set from J-Hope will come following the conclusion of the K-pop superstar’s Hope on the Stage 2025 solo world tour, which will kick off on Feb. 28 with the first of two shows at KSPO Dome in Seoul, South Korea before jumping to the Barclays Center in New York and winding down on June 1 with the second of two shows at the Kyocera Dome Osaka in Osaka, Japan.
Check out the poster for the 2025 Lollapalooza Berlin festival below.
A lawsuit accusing Bassnectar (born Lorin Ashton) of sexually abusing three underage girls has been settled ahead of trial. According to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Tennessee on Tuesday (Feb. 18), the case against the electronic music producer was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled, after the two sides reached […]