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For my own music, I really like to have endless possibilities,” Spiritbox leader Courtney LaPlante says. The singer believes the metal world is too preoccupied with subgenres — helpful for listeners looking for distinct flavors of heavy music but constricting for acts that want to scribble outside their assigned hard rock lines.
LaPlante says other genres aren’t quite as strict: “Look at the first few records that Doechii made and then look at the next three — there are a lot of polar opposites,” she says. “I feel like there’s a drive for artists for each album or body of work to be its own thing.”
Although Spiritbox trades in modern metalcore, the Canadian quartet has become one of the biggest new hard rock acts of the decade by reaching beyond its sonic boundaries: On its 2021 debut, Eternal Blue, which has earned 230,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate, the band supplemented bone-crunching riffs with hints of synth-pop, prog rock and R&B. The 36-year-old LaPlante, who’s adept at guttural screaming as well as soulful crooning, drives that diverse palette.
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“She’s an encyclopedia of music in general,” says Mike Stringer, Spiritbox’s guitarist and LaPlante’s husband, a few minutes before LaPlante gushes about the latest FKA twigs album and Kate Bush’s back catalog. “We’ve always had this open-door policy of, ‘If we enjoy it and it’s catchy, we’ll probably release it.’ ”
Tsunami Sea, the band’s long-awaited second album, does indeed feature some of its biggest hooks to date as well as some of the group’s most thrash-ready moments, often in the same song. Released March 7 on Pale Chord/Rise Records, the album arrives on a wave of hype, with two consecutive Grammy Award nods for best metal performance and all three of the album’s prerelease tracks — the blistering “Soft Spine,” melodic “Perfect Soul” and electro-tinged “No Loss, No Love” — cracking the top 20 of Hot Hard Rock Songs.
The act opened for bands like Korn, Shinedown and Papa Roach over the past two years but was also tapped by Megan Thee Stallion to remix her song “Cobra” in 2023. Most importantly, manager Jason Mageau says, “They’ve spent the past few years figuring out who they are.”
Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox performs at Alexandra Palace on Feb. 13, 2025 in London.
Alex Bemis
Rising from the ashes of metal group Iwrestledabearonce in 2017, Spiritbox — whose lineup also includes bassist Josh Gilbert and drummer Zev Rosenberg — spent its first four years weathering personnel changes and gathering early singles for EP releases. While the 2020 singles “Blessed Be” and “Holy Roller” went viral online, the pandemic upended the rollout for Eternal Blue, including touring. “At that moment in time, they had played under 10 shows together,” Mageau says. “So we really took our time building that live show, taking some support opportunities and learning from them.”
Spiritbox released two more EPs, 2022’s Rotoscope and 2023’s The Fear of Fear, to tide over fans who were eager for new material as the band played hard rock tours and festivals. Tsunami Sea took roughly two years to write and complete during gaps in that touring schedule, with 30 song ideas whittled down to the most cohesive 11-track project the group could make.
“It was a very intense process near the end, but I think I had a lot more fun writing for this record than I did Eternal Blue,” Stringer says, “and I feel like it has more of an identity to it.” Because the album follows a more extensive touring history, Spiritbox finished the new songs with a better understanding of how they might translate onstage and more consideration of LaPlante’s live vocals. “We know ourselves musically, as we’re getting older and discovering more about what we can actually achieve,” she says. “For the first time now, when we write stuff, I feel confident. It [only] took 20 years.”
LaPlante
Alex Bemis
After performing some prerelease shows in Europe, Spiritbox will begin a spring global headlining tour on April 3 in Dallas and then join Linkin Park for select stadium shows in the summer. When asked about commercial goals for Tsunami Sea — considering that Eternal Blue peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, its follow-up could become the band’s first 10 entry — Mageau shrugs off anything empirical.
“I really want them to just be themselves. They’ve been a support band for two years — let’s show them what we’re made of,” he says. “It’s been all about finding new areas to insert our band into mainstream conversations and try to bring more women into the space, too. When this band first started, the female listenership on Spotify would be, like, 10%. Now we’re in the 30% range of women listening to the band, and [LaPlante] wants that to increase even more.”
For her part, LaPlante says that being among the fast-rising women in metal is a galvanizing force for a band trying to turn its expanding audiences into safe spaces. “I love the fact that I see all different ages and genders at our shows and kids presenting in any way they want,” she says. “They’re not there because I’m a woman and they’re not there despite me being a woman. They all just heard our siren call and we found each other.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Music branding” does not involve stamping horses with band logos (at least not yet). But it does apply to just about anything else in which a commercial entity — from Taco Bell to JPMorganChase — partners with an artist or music company.
Which is why, at the beginning of last year’s Brat Summer, Charli xcx appeared as a 3D hologram activated by White Claw drinkers who aimed their phones at a product logo; why Nike spent in the low seven figures to license Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” for a Super Bowl LIX commercial; why Will Ferrell sang a PayPal jingle set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere”; and why Pinterest set up Coachella “manifest stations” filled with beauty products curated by singer Victoria Monét.
“It can be a tour sponsorship, a social media campaign, a tie-in with a brand’s philanthropic endeavor,” says Marcie Allen, president of MAC Consulting, who has been connecting artists with brands for 30 years and was one of 15 music industry experts who helped Billboard compile its first Branding Power Players list since 2019. “Brand partnerships are bigger than they have ever been because they give companies the ability to break through the noise.”
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There are no metrics that quantify the overall music-branding market, because it’s so multifaceted — from the multimillion-dollar advertising synch business to singer-songwriter RAYE performing intimate concerts at Hilton hotel rooms, footage of which appeared in commercials and social media posts. That said, a hint of its scale can be found in the financial filings of the industry’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, whose worldwide sponsorship revenue has grown from $590.3 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion in 2024. (Advertising and sponsorship amounted to just over 5% of Live Nation’s total revenue last year.)
“We’re seeing brands spending more in music than ever before,” says Russell Wallach, the promoter’s global president of media and sponsorship. He adds that Live Nation research shows 80% of its customers are “interested” in participating with brands at live events. “What brands are doing from an experiential standpoint has been significantly elevated over the last few years.”
Post-pandemic, according to Allen, brands have returned aggressively to the live space — like T-Mobile sponsoring this summer’s Post Malone-Jelly Roll tour.
The synch business, too, has more than rebounded since the pandemic: Global revenue amounted to $400 million in 2020, mostly due to production shutdowns, but it hit $632 million in 2023, according to IFPI. That’s an increase of 58%, from 0.4% of global recording-industry revenue in 2020 to 2.2%. (These numbers don’t include publishing, but they do include film/TV synchs in addition to advertising.) For this year’s Super Bowl, licensed songs cost between $400,000 and $2.5 million on the publishing side alone, music industry sources say, not counting the separate fees for licensing master recordings. According to Brian Monaco, Sony Music Publishing’s president/global chief marketing officer, 50% of this year’s Super Bowl ads, which cost brands a reported $7 million to $8 million apiece, employed synchs.
In the streaming era, brands and music companies are more efficient than ever in using data to align artists’ fan bases with companies’ target demographics, says Rich Yaffa, Universal Music Group’s executive vp of global brands: “When we partner with a brand, our goal is to make fans of our artists fans of their brands.”
Stephanie Miles, Wasserman Music’s head of music brand partnerships, says brands recently have become more willing to work on elaborate activations with artists. One act she declines to name spent months negotiating a fashion shoot and a live event to ensure both artist and brand emphasized the same regional market. “The days of receiving an opportunity that has been completely conceptualized by a brand, and the artist taking it as is, are long gone,” she says.
“Deals are definitely becoming more complicated and sophisticated,” adds Andrew Klein, managing director of AEG’s global partnerships. “It used to be [when] Coca-Cola’s coming out with a new product, [it would] just hand out the can [at concerts] and do a sampling program. They’re now trying to get a lot more return on investment. Yes, they want to sponsor the tour, but they also want to use the music for that artist in a campaign, use [their] name and likeness or tap into their social media.”
Will the good times in music branding continue? It’s hard to say, given President Donald Trump’s unsettling of the economy with layoffs, deportations, tariffs and threats of tariffs in the first weeks of his administration. “We’re starting to see a bit of a spend slowdown,” says Toni Wallace, partner and head of music brand strategy and partnerships at UTA. “There’s no question the demand and opportunity is there; it’s just ‘Let’s see how this first quarter goes.’ ”
It wasn’t long ago that artists, fearing claims of “selling out,” avoided collaborations with major corporations: In the late ’80s, after Pepsi landed Michael Jackson, Madonna and David Bowie in commercials and Whitney Houston sang a Diet Coke jingle, Neil Young responded with the scathing “This Note’s for You”: “Ain’t singing for Pepsi/Ain’t singing for Coke/I don’t sing for nobody/Makes me look like a joke.”
But things have changed: In 1999, Sting refashioned his “Desert Rose” music video into a Jaguar commercial; Bob Dylan licensed “Love Sick” to a Victoria’s Secret spot in 2004; an instrumental portion of Vampire Weekend’s 2019 “Harmony Hall” — an upbeat-sounding tune that nevertheless is about antisemitism — was used in a Choice Hotels TV plug; and last year, Megan Thee Stallion’s colorful 2024 Amazon Music ad included the original track “It’s Prime Day.”
“You had rockers who never wanted to be seen associated with anything: ‘It’s too commercialized,’ ” says Jeff Straughn, Primary Wave’s senior partner/chief brand officer. “Today, it’s ‘How can I sell it?’ ”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
The show was, unequivocally, going off.
In time with the beat, columns of fire blasted from a complicated and expensive-looking stage setup as a litany of dance hits blasted through the speakers of Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, where more than 15,000 people and their approximately 30,000 ears were gathered to hear the music.
Drunk girls traded compliments in line for the bathroom while staffers trying to prevent fire hazards cajoled people to dance in their seats instead of the aisles. It was a proper arena rager, a de facto badge of success for any artist, but particularly so in the world of dance music.
At the center of it all, John Summit — tanned, smiling, his shirt unbuttoned to a chest level that suggested a regular workout routine — threw up heart hands while manning the cockpit of CDJs before him. It was Nov. 16, 2024, the final evening of the producer’s sold-out three-night run at the Forum, shows executed by a 130-person team working overtime. It was just one of the very big moments of Summit’s biggest year to date, and while the set wasn’t even done yet, in his mind it was already over.
“I got too comfortable by the end,” he reflects three months later, “and I was like, ‘This show is done. This is the last one.’ And not because it wasn’t great. I think it was excellent. But I don’t want to write the same movie twice.”
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John Summit performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 15. Get your tickets here.
This sentiment embodies three essential truths about Summit. First and most obviously, that the 30-year-old Illinois native has accomplished quite a lot since emerging from the froth of internet buzz over the last five years. Second, that Summit possesses an almost strangely intense drive, a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that propels him forward even when the thing he has spent a year working on is still happening around him. And third: Summit’s tendency to most often describe his life not in terms of music but cinema. His big shows and capital B bangers are, for example, “big-budget projects, like Marvel,” whereas his smaller, clubbier sets “are A24,” he says, referencing the lauded indie studio. He compares the beginning of his sold-out Madison Square Garden show last summer to an action film, calling the pyro-heavy moment “basically me blowing up onstage. It was very Michael Bay-esque.”
Surveying the public-facing landscape of Summit’s life helps to explain his tendency to process it all in leading-man terms. Through an alchemy of talent, will, hard work and smart decision-making, Summit and his team have pulled off one of dance music’s rarest feats: becoming a hard-ticket juggernaut with a signature sound, big-ass hits and intergenerational appeal.
At the Garden, says Wasserman’s Daisy Hoffman, who represents Summit alongside Ben Shprits, “older adult fans” intermingled with younger ones. “I have 35-year-old friends with kids who are doing a girls’ trip to Vail [Colo.] for his show there, while my 25-year-old sister is following his every move on TikTok.”
A DJ achieving this kind of broad appeal is, today, a bit like spotting a snow leopard in the wild. “It’s very rare,” Shprits says. “It is extremely rare.”
OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.
Ysa Pérez
But it’s also not a fluke: Summit is a confident and adorable hustler with high standards and an intense Midwestern work ethic. “I’m delusional,” he says on a recent balmy Wednesday afternoon in Miami, where he moved to in 2020 to try and make it as a DJ. “I thought the first track I ever made was amazing.”
Since his first release in 2017, he has steadily attracted other believers, with his sprawling business now populated by managers, agents, accountants, label operators, radio pluggers, marketers, production designers, social media experts and the videographer who silently and ceaselessly captures footage as Summit shows me around Miami, a city where he has not only made it, but where he now avoids “super-glamorous spots where I feel like people are just staring at me the whole time.”
Dance superstardom has changed him. Whereas his social channels used to be plastered with drunken shenanigans, Summit now posts a lot about exercising. Hours before we meet, he shares an image of a yoga mat on the balcony of the waterfront condo he bought two years ago. While we chat, he talks about his need for consistent sleep (he tucks in at midnight and wakes up at seven) and more than once references his “personal growth journey.” But while Summit is Evolving with a capital E, his tenacity remains unaltered. After releasing his debut album, Comfort in Chaos, last July, he’s already at work on its follow-up. This summer, he’ll also headline festivals including Movement, Lightning in a Bottle and Bonnaroo; launch an Ibiza residency; and play shows in Australia, Europe and beyond.
“I’m hustling harder than I’ve ever hustled before,” he says, his Chicago accent strong. “The shows are only getting bigger and not just bigger, but better. The team is growing. My record label is growing. I’m working on a second album already, whereas I think most dance artists, especially house artists, don’t even do albums. Every year is crazier and crazier. It would be stupid to slow down when it’s snowballing.”
And yet it all occasionally leaves his head spinning. For example, Summit compares spending the holidays in his native Naperville, Ill., to the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo Baggins returns to the Shire after risking life and limb to destroy the One Ring and finds that while his idyllic homeland is the same as when he left it, he — fundamentally transformed by his quest — is not. “I’ve had the craziest life, toured the whole world, had many adventures and late nights, got into some bad situations,” Summit says. “Then I come back home and everything is the exact same.”
One can see how opening Christmas presents in your parents’ living room in the suburbs might seem surreal after playing for hundreds of thousands of people across multiple continents. But it was in Naperville and nearby Chicago where Summit — then a “kind of nerdy runner” born John Schuster — was first exposed to dance music. It happened while seeing deadmau5 at Lollapalooza in 2011, an experience Summit, then 16, has equated to a sort of spiritual awakening. His subsequent journeys through SoundCloud were exacerbated by a high school love interest. “At first, I was just making music to impress my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “She liked all these DJs, and I was like, ‘I can f–king do this.’ ”
OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.
Ysa Pérez
Summit got serious about DJ’ing and producing while a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. By 2017, he had graduated with a master’s degree in accounting and was working at Ernst & Young while making music in his off-hours. (And, he admits, often during work hours, too.) He sent “dozens of demos” to a flurry of labels, focusing on esteemed U.K. imprints like Toolroom and Defected Records, which specialize in the house and tech house styles he was making.
“It’s no different than applying for 100 jobs when you’re out of college,” Summit says matter-of-factly of sending out demos. Eventually, a few small labels replied with feedback on how he could improve, and by 2018, they had signed a few of his tracks. By this time, Summit was in touch with a young manager named Holt Harmon, who was working with Summit on the release of a track he had made with an artist Harmon was then working with. The pair clicked.
“I had a call with Holt about, like, ‘How is this getting distributed? What’s the marketing strategy?’ I went very exec mode on him,” Summit says. “I think he was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s not just good at music. He gets it and he’s not lazy.’ I thought the same about him.”
Summit became the third artist signed to Metatone, the management company Harmon co-founded alongside Parker Cohen in 2018. But as things picked up for Summit, the pandemic hit. By now, Summit had been fired from Ernst & Young and was back living with his parents. But what might have seemed like a roadblock became something else.
“People saw the pandemic as a time to take their foot off the gas,” Shprits says. “And here you’ve got a 20-something guy on the verge of taking the next step in his career who saw it as an opportunity to do the opposite.”
In the basement, Summit made music and was extremely online, posting production tutorials, doing livestreams and winning people over with what Shprits calls his “unfiltered” personality. (“I would pay $500 to slap a warm bag of wine at a music festival right now,” Summit tweeted in May 2020, the deep days of the pandemic.) By the end of 2020, he had gone from livestreaming from Naperville to playing a b2b set with Gorgon City broadcast from a Chicago rooftop, racking up millions of views and likes along the way with this, as well as other self-deprecating, unapologetic and funny content. You couldn’t help but root for the guy.
Around this time, Summit moved to America’s dance music capital, Miami, with the goal of playing an extended set at the influential nightclub Space. “People didn’t see me as a serious DJ,” he says. “They saw me as someone who might have blown up on TikTok or something. Then I was doing these eight- to 10-hour sets of pretty underground music, not even playing a big vocal record until four or five hours in, kind of just proving like, ‘Yeah, I’m a f–king DJ.’ That was my version of taking on a very serious role.”
The method acting worked. When clubs reopened across the United States, Summit was suddenly selling out 500-capacity rooms in far-flung cities like Tempe, Ariz., often in seconds. He and his team focused on playing as much as they could, wherever they could, and venues eventually got bigger as the social media reach grew. His single and EP releases were largely house and tech house tracks, with his output helping propel the latter subgenre to increasingly bigger audiences, particularly as Summit experimented with bigger and more vocal-forward records, the kind that typically have maximum crossover potential.
His watershed moment came when he released “Where You Are,” a collaboration with power-lunged British singer-songwriter Hayla, in March 2023. “Before putting it out, I was like, ‘This is going to f–k up my entire career because this is a headliner, main-stage song,’ ” he says. “Very few DJs had become successful in the pop lane. It was like, ‘Am I ready for this challenge?’ Then I was like, ‘F–k it. Let’s do it.’ ”
“Where You Are” spent 26 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart; now has 298.7 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate; and was selected as a favorite song of 2023 by another Chicagoland resident, Barack Obama. By December 2023, Summit sold out Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium, moving 21,700 tickets and grossing $1.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.
“Where You Are” and other subsequent belters from Comfort in Chaos have, along with Summit’s general presence in the scene, agitated the dance world’s perpetual push-pull between the commercial and underground, a turf war that has long found artists wanting to play the biggest shows and have the biggest hits without losing the credibility and cool factor of dance’s less overtly capitalist sectors. But Summit wants to do both.
“John’s been very vocal about wanting to bring the underground to a large scale while bringing a production level that no one’s ever seen with this style of music,” Shprits says. “That’s always been the guiding light.”
But even if you’re playing music with underground origins, it’s not necessarily accurate to call yourself an underground artist while playing from atop a laser-shooting platform at the center of a sold-out arena. This is why Summit created Experts Only, the name of both the label on which he, in partnership with Darkroom Records, releases his own and other artists’ music and a party series where he plays lesser-known music (“I feel like I have to be very on the forefront with the records,” he says) for smaller crowds in tighter spaces.
“I look at John Summit and Experts Only as two different things,” Summit says. “John Summit is this grand display, a huge-budget production that shows my art and music from the album, whereas Experts Only is a party brand where me and DJ [friends] do cooler underground cuts … You hear so many artists who blew up that are like, ‘I hate playing my big song every night.’ They wish they could play more experimental stuff. I’m getting the best of both worlds.”
Doing both has broadened Summit’s appeal. The underground thing, Shprits says, is “generally attractive to an older demographic that’s experienced with electronic music. Then he has this amazing ability to craft songs that attract your high school and college demographic. Take all of that and then combine it with the personality, the packaging and the A&R’ing from the management and label side, it’s like the perfect big bang.”
And yet, Summit questions what the “hipster snob” John Schuster might think of it all. He recalls firing off “hypercritical” tweets at main-stage dance giants back in the EDM era; he preferred the heady vibes of Michigan’s beloved dance/jam festival Electric Forest and deep cuts like Shiba San’s 2014 house classic, “Okay.” “Now I’m here in those same shoes getting as much s–t talked about me. I think that’s maybe why I can get through it without getting too offended, because that was me doing the s–t-talking.”
CUBEL x The Room jacket and pants, Lost ‘N Found tee, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
But when you read most every social media comment, as Summit says he does, the ability to laugh off insults is helped by what he calls “a good supporting cast.” (He screenshots particularly egregious remarks and sends them to the inner circle for diffusion.) Taking a team approach to his career “is way less lonely,” with every person on the team not only bringing “a Swiss Army knife” of abilities, but together creating a perpetual group hang that’s the antidote to the cycle of loneliness, depression and addiction that has historically plagued dance artists.
Still, he is John Summit of the John Summit project, and his vision is specific. Here in Miami, he has ideas for how he wants to be photographed and filmed. He likes a lot of prep and knowing what the plan is. He’s agreeable and charming. You could also call him bossy — or just someone who knows what he wants.
“For better or for worse, I challenge people around me as much as possible to be at their greatest,” he says. “I’m ever-evolving, and everyone has to be ever-evolving around me.” Cohen says that among the team, Summit is often referred as “the third manager.” Shprits acknowledges that “at many times, John has challenged us to understand where he was going with this and to meet him.”
Summit isn’t quite sure where the drive comes from. “I was fortunate to have a very normal upbringing,” he says, and his parents (his father is a commercial airline pilot and his mother a real estate agent) “are like, ‘You’re doing great. You don’t have to keep pushing.’ I don’t come from an incredibly successful artistic family. There’s no mounting pressure.” At least, not from outside sources.
“This is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he continues. “I can’t let off the gas because the second I do, someone else is going to steam ahead. I’m going to try my best and try to be the best. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
So, for the foreseeable future, Summit shall keep gunning it. After Comfort in Chaos hit No. 39 on the Billboard 200, he’s now at work on a follow-up album that he wants to be “bigger and better.” While he didn’t get any 2025 Grammy nominations after campaigning for them, he says that just gives him “something to strive for.” And while dance music isn’t even a genre that necessitates albums, Summit sees them as meaningful: “I look at some of the greatest artists over the last generations, where album after album, they try to outdo themselves, reinvent themselves.” He takes cues not only from musicians but high-achieving athletes and, naturally, actors, calling Timothée Chalamet’s recent run “f–king incredible” and particularly inspiring.
For the next album, he’s interested in releasing a short movie alongside it. A recent rewatch of the 2014 film Whiplash inspired him to buy a drum kit and, maybe, play percussion on some of his new music. While he “shot my shot” with pop stars like Charli xcx and Dua Lipa by tweeting at them asking to work together (no collaborations have resulted), he says working with this type of artist “is not needed in my career,” given the strong roster of vocalists with “raw talent” like Hayla, Julia Church and more that he has surrounded himself with. He regularly brings out these vocalists during big shows and “f–king loves it” when they get a huge crowd reaction.
Plus, having tried working with a few pop stars, he finds bumping into their limited schedules “very diva-like. And as a diva myself,” he says with a laugh, “there’s only room for one of us.”
OFY top and tee, Lost ‘N Found x Levi’s pants, Rick Owens x Dr. Martens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.
Ysa Pérez
As writing gets underway, he’s also finding that he has grown up a bit since the days when his tagline was “My life is a bender.” (“My bender era walked so brat could run,” he tweets while we have lunch; the sentiment gets 2,500 likes before the plates are cleared.) Comfort in Chaos explored deeper topics than partying, and he says making it was a huge leap in his maturation. A song like his 2022 “In Chicago” (sample lyric: “I’m drunk, I’m high and I’m in Chicago”) “is basically like LMFAO,” he says. “It’s like my ‘Party Rock [Anthem].’ ” Comfort in Chaos, on the other hand, was largely about love and longing. When asked about this subject matter, he acknowledges that “I’m a lover boy” but demurs when asked to expand, saying only, “I tell it through the music, not in interviews.” (If anyone wants to read the tea leaves, the lyrics of Summit’s most recent song, the moody indie dance track “Focus,” inquire, “How’d we get so lost inside of this room?/Watching you turn into someone I never knew/I remember love, but it’s slipping out of view.”)
While Summit works out these big feelings in his new music, he’ll also spend the rest of 2025 headlining major U.S. festivals and touring the world; he and his team are particularly focused on international expansion this year. Outside of Ibiza, he says “there’s really no money” in international shows, but adds that revenue isn’t the point: “I’m young and hungry, and I want to showcase my art with the world.”
It’s all a wild ride, a summer popcorn blockbuster, a journey to Mordor and back. It’s the kind of stuff Summit sometimes thinks about after the workday ends, when “I take an edible and think, ‘Holy s–t, this world is crazy.’ But then I wake up in the morning, snap out of it and get back to it.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
On an overcast winter afternoon in McAllen, Texas, all six members of Grupo Frontera are huddled around an oversize white box, staring gleefully at its contents. They peel back the tissue paper wrapping to reveal a present their stylist has gifted them just a few days shy of Christmas — a mound of plush Polo Ralph Lauren bathrobes, one for each member, with a brassy statement stitched onto the back: “B–ch, I got a Grammy!”
The members of the norteño and cumbia band — which won the Latin Grammy for best norteño album in 2024 — are standing inside their palatial Frontera HQ in McAllen, a home that they purchased last year. Built in the mid-2000s, the sprawling estate is a very particular vision of turn-of-the-21st-century luxury (see: the Tuscan kitchen replete with dark wood cabinetry). A minimalist home recording studio, where the band has laid down several tracks, sits just past the outdoor path wending around the pool and hot tub, in a yard expansive enough to park their fleet of tour buses.
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Privacy and practicality alike spurred the band to centralize its operations here. When its star began rising about three years ago, after its cover of Colombian pop-rockers Morat’s “No Se Va” surged to life-altering virality on TikTok, Grupo Frontera would frequently record music in this South Texas enclave of the Rio Grande Valley where its members grew up and still reside — until some locals figured out where the group was recording and started showing up to the studio unannounced. “People would deadass just open the door, walk in and listen to whatever we were recording,” says frontman Adelaido “Payo” Solís in between sips of a briny michelada. “They would just wait for us to finish. Then we came out, we saw people, and we were like, ‘Hi?’ ”
Grupo Frontera will perform at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Ampitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 14. Get your tickets here.
Crucially, the house is decidedly “party-ful,” as Julian Peña Jr., the band’s affable percussionist and hype man, puts it. Grupo Frontera has held a tequila-fueled carne asada (a barbecue hang) or two here, including a baby shower for accordionist Juan Javier Cantú, who recently welcomed a daughter with his wife. The group — which also includes drummer Carlos Guerrero, bassist Brian Ortega and guitarist/bajo quinto player Beto Acosta — hopes to eventually open up the space for visiting collaborators and friends to crash there. But given that the house is still barely furnished, those plans are on hold for the moment. There aren’t many places to sit, save for a few folding chairs and tables here and there; only a handful of the home’s six bedrooms have mattresses in them propped up against walls. Tellingly, the sole piece of art inside is a framed photograph of the band mugging with superstar Bad Bunny — who collaborated with Grupo Frontera on its Billboard Hot 100 smash “un x100to,” peaking at No. 5 on the chart — splattered with globs of bright paint.
Interior decorating was admittedly low on the band’s priority list in 2024 — a year in which Grupo Frontera released its punchy set Jugando a Que No Pasa Nada, which reached the top 10 of the Top Latin Albums chart. An ambitious tour around the United States, Mexico and one date in Spain followed at amphitheaters and arenas, with shows featuring pyrotechnic flourishes and stretching about two hours. Somehow, Grupo Frontera also found time to release Mala Mía, a joint EP with fellow música mexicana stalwarts and collaborators Fuerza Regida, before the year ended. Then in late November, the group won its first-ever Latin Grammy for its 2023 debut album, El Comienzo.
Brian Ortega
Jasmine Archie
In the three brief years it has been together, Grupo Frontera has transformed from a cohort playing covers at quinceañeras into a Mexican American boy band commanding some of the world’s largest stages — where it’s sometimes accompanied by legends its members looked up to while growing up, like Ramón Ayala, and other huge stars it has now recorded with, like Peso Pluma, Maluma and Nicki Nicole. By melding the norteño and cumbia of their childhoods with their micro-generation’s penchant for embracing genre swerves (most of the band members are young millennials, save for Solís, who’s about to turn 22), Grupo Frontera has helped usher in a new era of música mexicana.
“I feel that they’ve created a powerful movement and opened the path for more bands and for the public to reconnect with a genre that had been under the radar several years,” says Edgar Barrera, the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-winning songwriter who has written dozens of songs for the group and has been a mentor to it. Given that seven of the band’s singles and both of its studio albums have reached the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs and Top Latin Albums charts, respectively, the approach seems to be working.
Grupo Frontera’s success story is all the more astonishing considering the unorthodox decisions its members have made along the way. For one thing, they have no interest in moving from the relatively quiet McAllen (population: roughly 150,000) to a Latin music metropolis like Miami or Los Angeles to be closer to potential opportunities. “We really take it to heart when they say, ‘Keep your feet on the ground,’ ” Guerrero says. “Us being humble is what’s going to take us farther.”
Adelaido “Payo” Solís
Jasmine Archie
Julian Peña Jr.
Jasmine Archie
Instead, they’re bullish about staying close to home in the valley, a region that has made national headlines recently as one of the areas the Trump administration has targeted for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The Rio Grande Valley is also home to Intocable, one of the most successful norteño bands ever, and the region has historically produced talented musicians and even a handful of breakthrough stars — Bobby Pulido, Duelo and Freddy Fender among them — in spite of lacking the infrastructure that helps groups take the next big step.
In another unlikely turn, the band has released its music independently; indie label VHR Music put out its debut album, and the band self-released Jugando. But don’t mistake these decisions for ambivalence — the group is wary of staying in the same place, metaphorically speaking. “It’s not OK for you to be too comfortable and feel like what you’re doing right now is going to work out forever,” Solís says. And now Grupo Frontera finds itself at a new crossroads as it strategizes how to reach the next level of stardom — specifically, expanding its audience beyond the United States and Mexico, bringing its heart-tugging cumbias to new ears.
“We want to go someday to Japan,” Cantú says. “Any place we could play that’s different. Brazil is a goal we have … We want to put out our Mexican roots to the whole world.”
Grupo Frontera’s origin story is bound up in TikTok’s inscrutable algorithm. In early 2022, one of its first singles, the ebullient “No Se Va,” became ubiquitous on the platform, debuting at No. 50 on Hot Latin Songs and eventually climbing to the top 10. The guys had just started playing music together during off-hours from their day jobs as car dealership finance managers and ranchers. They cobbled together early videos for a few hundred dollars and learned about the music industry by searching “how to” tutorials on YouTube. When the TikTok spotlight suddenly shone on them, they seized the moment. The act soon started working with Barrera, and in mere months, it had released another hit, then another. “If it wasn’t for TikTok when we released ‘No Se Va,’ it probably would have stayed in our hometown of the valley,” Solís says.
Barrera — who has written and produced for megastars including Shakira and Maluma — has a distinctive sensibility that has no doubt helped Grupo Frontera’s sound evolve over the years. His guidance was a boon in those early days, and he especially helped the act see a bigger picture. “We were thinking about, ‘How do we do the biggest wedding here in the valley?’ And [Barrera] goes, ‘Wedding? How can you do the biggest stadiums in the whole world? That’s how you have to think,’ ” Peña remembers. “And we’re like, ‘All right, let’s think that way.’ And then little by little, when we would release a song, we would do it thinking that this song was going to go viral, this song was going to help us out. And it would work.”
From left: Beto Acosta, Julian Peña Jr., Juan Javier Cantú, Carlos Guerrero, Brian Ortega, and Adelaido “Payo” Solís of Grupo Frontera photographed December 20, 2024 in McAllen, Texas.
Jasmine Archie
It’s been practically three years to the day since Grupo Frontera first went nuclear on TikTok, back when talk of an outright ban wasn’t imminent. Yet some of the band members deleted their personal TikTok accounts recently and haven’t redownloaded the app since it returned online in mid-January following a brief ban. (The band’s professional TikTok is still active.) They don’t exactly miss it, personally. “I feel like I’m a new man,” Cantú says with a smile. These days, Solís has focused the attention he would have spent scrolling through TikTok on Splice, an app for sampling and creating songs. While Solís doesn’t consider himself a gloomy person, he admittedly gravitates toward “melancholy, sad, depressing chords” while writing. “That’s what inspires me, to be honest: those sadder chords.”
While Solís’ voice is his main instrument, he occasionally plays guitar, piano and accordion by ear. He’d like to get better at nailing down exactly what he wants to hear from the instrument he’s playing so those sounds can aid him with songwriting — something he has been doing more of since last year’s Jugando (where he was credited with co-writing the song “Ibiza,” which is about wanting to give a lover anything their heart desires).
Though Barrera has written most of Grupo Frontera’s songs so far, along with other writers like Ríos, the band feared becoming complacent by always yielding those creative duties to someone else. “We were comfortable with the fact that [Barrera] would send us a song and that’s it,” Solís says. “But at a certain point, we felt like we weren’t working for it.” The group started inviting other songwriters into the mix, and Solís began chipping in more after a generative writing camp with Barrera.
The band sees taking calculated sonic risks as pivotal to its next phase. In late January, for instance, Grupo Frontera hopped on a song with Spanish icon Alejandro Sanz, “Hoy no me siento bien,” that marked two milestones: It was the group’s first-ever salsa tune and its farthest-afield collaborator to date. “I’m not too sure if a bajo quinto has ever played salsa before, but Beto was trying his best,” Solís jokes. Unlike the band’s usual fare, the song doesn’t address being in (or out of) love, either. “But I love the message,” Solís says. “It’s like, ‘Today, I don’t feel OK and that’s OK.’ ”
“Yeah, like feeling bad is OK, too,” Cantú interjects. “That’s badass.”
Juan Javier Cantú
Jasmine Archie
Carlos Guerrero
Jasmine Archie
On its recent collaborative EP with Fuerza Regida, Grupo Frontera moved in yet another direction: trying corridos imbued with a Tejano bent, along with its cumbias. While these projects have been well-received commercial successes, the prospect of potentially not hitting the mark, and perhaps even failing, doesn’t seem to deter the act. “That’s what we want to do — to tell the world that Frontera can collaborate with different artists and that we could also make different styles of music,” Cantú says. “That’s our goal, most likely, for this year. Not to get away from cumbia or norteño — that’s our base. But also like, ‘Hey, we could also play and sing this.’ ”
The morning after catching a transatlantic flight from Spain, the members of Grupo Frontera arrive at a local sports club in McAllen with rackets in tow. They’re here to play padel, a sport resembling tennis and squash, that they got hooked on thanks to its low chance of injury. As they arrive one by one, the guys seem in good spirits if a bit bleary-eyed. They begin warming up by bouncing balls against glass walls surrounding the court. Acosta arrives last, strolling in with a sheepish grin. “The tardy one,” the band’s publicist says with an eye roll. “You can put that in the article.”
Since only four players can be on the court at any given time, the men rotate sets. Acosta rolls up one pant leg to get his head in the game, then forcefully serves the yellow ball. It lands with a thwack on the court’s blue turf, and Cantú bursts out singing the keyboard riff from “The Final Countdown.” S–t-talking abounds. Guerrero, who suffered an injury after missing the last step of some stairs, is moving with some hesitation — but after playing a few focused rounds, he and Acosta win the impromptu tournament.
While they might be opponents on the court at this moment, they tend to operate as a single organism in the band’s day-to-day decision-making. They use a democratic process and any arguments are cleared up directly: “When one person is wrong, the rest of the group notices it and they just tell them straight up,” Solís says.
Solís sees a through line between the band’s padel habit and the heightened energy it unleashed on last year’s Live Nation-promoted Jugando tour. In 2023, when it first started touring extensively, Solís admits that he would tend to stay in the same spot while singing onstage. “Then this year, I would, like, run around and jump across the stage and stuff.” The guys start chortling, talking over one another as they consider how they might elevate their stage presence in 2025: “Backflips! Shirtless concerts! Splits!”
Should the band realize its stadium dreams, the group’s penchant for showmanship will likely still need to be amped up further. “The show needs an upgrade on the technical and musical sides,” explains Raymond Acosta, the director of talent management at Habibi who works with the band there. (The band has been signed to the management division of Rimas Entertainment since 2023.) “The larger space demands a greater offering to fans. It has to be a unique experience where fans feel part of something bigger than just a show. It’s a challenge to connect with every single person in that stadium.” But as Acosta sees it, a band like Grupo Frontera is up for that challenge: The act “can attract all types of crowds, which makes a significant difference.”
Beto Acosta
Jasmine Archie
For the moment, Grupo Frontera is embarking on something else it has never done before: taking a monthlong break to recalibrate from its breakneck touring schedule, right before delving into writing new music. The last item on its calendar in December involves distributing free holiday toys for a block party at Edinburg, Texas’ Bert Ogden Arena, where it held a spur-of-the-moment free performance for the community.
Grupo Frontera is cognizant of how it represents the Rio Grande Valley both out on the road and at home. And while it has always eschewed any talk of politics, it has inherently become part of any discussion of where the band comes from, as the U.S.-Mexico border is now a flash point for discussions about immigration, xenophobia and racism. When I ask in December if they’ve been feeling the reverberations of this particular political moment — with the vocally anti-immigrant Trump administration then about to enter the White House — and if their fans approach them wanting to talk about politics, the band deflects. “I mean, our group name, Grupo Frontera, I think it feels natural for people to be like, ‘You’re from the border,’ stuff like that,” Guerrero says. “We always try to keep that private.” Peña chimes in, saying that they strive to “talk about music, that’s it.” (Their publicist shuts down any further discussion of the topic.)
But recently, the band had to answer for a political controversy of its own, when a video of Solís’ grandmother (known as “La Abuela Frontera” online) dancing to “Y.M.C.A.,” a song that Trump played frequently on the campaign trail, circulated online. Coupled with a now-deleted TikTok video of the band jamming to the same song, it prompted outrage from fans who perceived it as the group celebrating Trump’s election win. The backlash has since led to boycotts and a petition calling for Grupo Frontera to be taken off the lineup for Sueños, a Chicago musical festival where it’s slated to perform in May.
In response, the band wrote in a statement that “Grupo Frontera has NO affiliation nor alliance with any political party that’s against immigrants and the Latino community. Like many of you, our families and [group] members have fought and struggled for a better future, and we will always take our people’s side, defending our roots and values. It’s important you know that the opinions of our friends and family don’t represent Grupo Frontera. We are immigrants, we are from the border, and Grupo Frontera will always be by and for the people.” The band also posted a video in late February stating that the “Y.M.C.A.” video had been part of a routine it had on its last tour, where it danced to a different song before each show; in it, Acosta lamented how a swirl of “fake news” had been “putting us against our own people.”
As they see it, their main obligation is to elevate the valley in the eyes of the world, especially the musicians who hail from their same stomping grounds. “There’s a lot of talent,” Guerrero says of musicians in the valley. “Better than us,” Acosta adds. To them, what prevents musicians from making a successful living in music here is a lack of recording studios — but they want to leave behind a “trail for everybody to do it,” Cantú says. That might eventually involve having bands record at their own studio. As the guys see it, it’s not so much that they “made it” out of the valley, but rather that they’re “trying to make the valley grow,” as Solís puts it.
It was that same kind of support that first convinced Grupo Frontera to stay independent, after hearing cautionary tales from Acosta’s brother and other local musicians who had signed unfavorable record deals. Since then, it has made as much of an effort to learn the back end of the music business as it does fine-tuning chord progressions, often seeking Barrera’s counsel. Even after it was first approached by a few big labels, the band had “a gut feeling that it was not the right choice at the time,” Cantú says, a smile growing across his face. “And it worked out pretty good.”
The members believe these incremental steps, along with their unconventional approach, will take them where they eventually plan to be. “We’re trying to become superstars,” Peña says. “Something that 30 years from now, somebody’s going to look back [and say], ‘Dude, you remember Frontera?’ ”
A while back, Peña recalls, someone in Grupo Frontera (he doesn’t remember who) mentioned wanting to become like AC/DC or Queen — a timeless band steeped in mythos. At first, Peña scoffed at the idea. “I remember saying, ‘Dude, shut up. Like, what the hell?’ ” he says. “And now I think about it like, ‘Why not?’ I mean, why can’t we be that?”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
“It was an uncomfortable song to play my mom,” Leon Thomas admits of “Mutt,” a flirtatious track that mentions the urge to “pop a shroom to re-create the feeling.” “Mutt” marked the Grammy-winning songwriter’s first Billboard Hot 100 entry as a recording artist, following years of behind-the-scenes work that includes hits for Ariana Grande, SZA and more. And his mother loved it, too. “She told me this is going to be one of my biggest records. She spoke into existence.”
For Thomas, 31 — the Brooklyn-bred son of Black Rock Coalition parents, and the grandson of the late opera singer John Anthony — music and family have always been intertwined. His parents, who frequented CBGB, laid the musical foundation for the rock-infused soul he explores on Mutt, his sophomore album released last September.
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Since then, he supported Blxst on tour and embarked on his own headlining trek — but February in particular solidified Thomas’ turn from songwriting savant to front-facing R&B star. “Mutt” entered the Hot 100 on the Feb. 8 chart (and reaches a new No. 67 peak on the March 8-dated list); he made his live-TV debut with the song on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the same week; and then performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk later that month, where he dedicated 2022 single “Breaking Point” to his recently deceased grandfather (Thomas attended his funeral directly after the taping). “He was the anchor to my journey,” says Thomas. “I can tell he was with me musically.”
Leon Thomas
Raymond Alva
While his past month looks like a whirlwind of success, Thomas’ breakthrough has been nearly two decades in the making. At 13, with Broadway runs in The Lion King, The Color Purple and Caroline, Or Change under his belt, Thomas signed his first deal with Columbia Records. “I was walking into the boardroom playing Stevie Wonder covers and in-depth love songs,” he reflects with a laugh. “They were like, ‘What we gon’ do with this? Did you even hit puberty?’” Around that time, he made his theatrical debut in the 2007 film August Rush, which led to a Nickelodeon development deal that landed him roles on shows from The Backyardigans to Victorious.
As the deal was nearing its end and Victorious approached its 2013 series finale, Thomas explored his options, and received advice from Republic Records’ Wendy Goldstein, who was the label’s senior vp of A&R at the time. “Journeying through your twenties is you becoming everything that you need from everybody else,” she told him. “Those words stuck with me on some Spider-Man s–t,” he says today.
He spent the better part of the next decade learning the independent scene, studying under Babyface and Boi-1da (and by extension, Drake’s camp), and was briefly signed to Alex da Kid’s KIDinaKORNER. He met manager Jonathan Azu in 2019 and became the first act on his Culture Collective roster. Two years later, he landed a record deal with Ty Dolla $ign and Motown Records’ joint venture, EZMNY, after running into A&R Shawn Barron on a grocery run.
“I was kind of scared because signing under an artist can be either heaven or hell,” says Thomas. “Luckily, I’m stomping around in heaven right now.”
During his time at Motown, Thomas has experienced several different leadership regimes following restructurings by parent company Universal Music Group. Now under Capitol Music Group chairman/CEO Tom March — who Thomas says “gets my vision and is down to support real music” — he was able to execute his ideal album rollout for Mutt.
The campaign kicked off last August — a year after his debut full-length, Electric Dusk — with the release of the album’s title track. A funky R&B midtempo tune that nods to Enchantment’s “Silly Love Song” by way of a Bootsy Collins-esque bassline, “Mutt” was the product of Thomas’ desire to “have a record that shows what I’m about: live music, funk and vulnerability.” Written in 2022, Thomas crafted “Mutt” on his living room floor while microdosing psychedelics and watching his dog and cat fight. “I saw the similarities between us and how we have good intentions but don’t always do the right thing,” he told Billboard last year.
The single’s steady chart climb is largely due to Thomas and Azu’s “all ships rise” business approach. Instead of exhausting resources on one song, they banked on word-of-mouth from his live performances to help people discover “Mutt” along with the rest of the album.
“We [noticed] the crowd’s reaction when ‘Mutt’ would play: the phones were always up, but they would really come out for ‘Mutt,’” says Azu. The song continued naturally gaining traction in R&B circles with those familiar with Thomas’ songwriting and production work. “Everybody knows how dangerous he is in the studio with other people’s work,” Azu adds.
Jonathan Azu (left) and Leon Thomas at the 2024 Grammy Awards.
Courtesy of Culture Collective
Thomas launched a 13-date headlining tour in October at intimate venues across the U.S., and the trek doubled as a way to promote himself at radio. “A lot of program directors are just outside the Victorious demographic, but the people in the studios and offices are within that demographic, and so are [their] children,” says Azu. “Doing [that] work is so important for the foundation to go for adds.”
As “Mutt” climbs at three different Billboard airplay rankings (R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and Adult R&B Airplay, where it hits a No. 7 best on the March 8 chart), Thomas is playing the long game. “I loved seeing how Lizzo kept promoting her hits and didn’t stop believing in them,” he says. A deluxe edition of Mutt is also in the works, and Thomas mentions potential collaborations with Kehlani, Big Sean and Halle Bailey in the hopper, in addition to a previously teased team-up with Stormzy. Plus, there’s a song on which Thomas plays every instrument.
“There [are] sides to me that I haven’t shown the world yet, so I’m spoon-feeding them,” Thomas says. “You need to hide the medicine in the candy. This deluxe is me stepping deeper into my purpose.”
A version of this story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
On the brick wall facing the Pittsburg Hot Links parking lot, a mural memorializes the small East Texas town’s most famous citizens, including Mean Gene the Hot Link King and Homer Jones, the New York Giants receiver who invented spiking the football after a touchdown.
Soon enough, Pittsburg native Koe Wetzel could be right up there with them. “Maybe [after] a couple more No. 1s,” Wetzel muses as he looks up at those faces. He sounds dubious that he has earned his spot quite yet, but the 32-year-old singer-songwriter is well on his way. His breakthrough hit about a volatile relationship, “High Road” with Jessie Murph, spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in December and January. “I know the folks who own the place,” he adds with a laugh. “I might go buy some watercolors and paint it myself.”
Koe Wetzel performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 13. Get your tickets here.
Wetzel may not believe he’s a local legend yet, but it’s clear that here in his hometown, his star status is confirmed. As he strides across the crosswalk Abbey Road-style in historic Downtown Pittsburg at 8:30 a.m., a fan sticks his head out of a store door and yells “My hero!” his way. Wetzel left Pittsburg (population: 4,335) when he was 18 to attend Tarleton State University in Stephensville, Texas, on a football scholarship as a linebacker. He now lives outside Fort Worth, but his roots run through his gritty brand of country rock, which he delivers in a powerful twang that draws on the long tradition of Texas outlaw country and confessional storytellers like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark.
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“Koe is the epitome of an artist that is writing his own narrative,” Jelly Roll tells Billboard of Wetzel, whom he toured with in 2022 on the wryly titled Role Models outing. “He’s not writing what everyone else writes. He’s not trying to write another person’s narrative; he’s writing the way he naturally feels. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time — since his first project.”
Whatever he’s singing about — turbulent romances, getting busted for drunk driving or popping pills to get to sleep after a show — in song and conversation, Wetzel is unashamedly himself, with no apologies and no regrets, just like his namesake, country rabble-rouser David Allan Coe. “I was probably conceived to a David Allan Coe song,” he speculates. (His full name is Ropyr Madison Koe Wetzel; “My mom was pretty indecisive,” he says with a playful shake of his head at the multiple names.)
By the time he got kicked out of college his sophomore year for “having too good a time,” Wetzel was already playing shows and focused more on music than books. “Being a Texas artist, you can tour year-round here in Texas. A lot of people do and make a damn good living at it,” he says. “Coming up, that was kind of my main goal and pretty much my only goal.”
Koe Wetzel photographed January 22, 2025 in Pittsburg, Texas.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Jeb Hurt, who has managed Wetzel since 2019, recalls seeing him at a 300-capacity venue in San Marcos, Texas, in 2016. “If there were 200 there, 125 of them were college girls, and they were crammed against the stage screaming every word back to the band,” he says. Hurt, then a booking agent, quickly signed Wetzel, whose audiences grew exponentially through word-of-mouth. “If it was 200 people, the next time there were 400, then 800,” Hurt says. “Next thing you know, we’re in 5,000-cap venues in 24 months.”
Now, Wetzel — who signed with Columbia Records in 2020 — is building his audience around the rest of the country and the world. He toured in Europe last year and will play Australia in March. “It used to be about having a good time, making rent, making gas money to get to the next show,” Wetzel reflects. “And now it’s completely different. It’s wild to see where it’s come from and where we’re at.”
While his act is still built around raising hell onstage, Wetzel has realized that by sharing his own often unsettling stories, he’s helping others feel less alone. “Whenever I see those people sing the songs back or I’m meeting them and [they’re] telling me that what I told them saved their life — they were going to off themselves — that is really special,” Wetzel says, his voice growing thick with emotion. “I didn’t know that it was going to be that way, but now that it is, it’s opened up my mind and my eyes … This isn’t about just taking care of the family anymore and setting everybody up. It’s more about helping these folks live life. But they’re helping me as well. Without them, I’d be out pouring concrete.”
When Wetzel began working on his current album, 2024’s 9 Lives, with Columbia senior vp of A&R Ben Maddahi, his relationship with the label was bruised. “We’d had a bumpy road in our first few album cycles with Columbia,” Hurt says. “Some people left pretty consistently, and so by the time we got to Ben, there was kind of a sense of exhaustion on our [part] of just another A&R person being thrown our way.”
That’s not to say he hadn’t achieved some level of success. After releasing three albums independently, Wetzel had put out two more through the label, including his cheekily titled Columbia debut, Sellout. That and his second album, 2022’s Hell Paso, had together registered eight songs in the top 40 of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, and the latter set reached No. 3 on Top Country Albums.
Columbia Records chairman/CEO Ron Perry asked Maddahi, who had worked with pop forces like Sia, Flo Rida and Charlie Puth, to meet with Wetzel. “Ron said something to the effect of, ‘He sells tons of tickets and has a die-hard fan base … We have really high hopes for him, but for some reason this hasn’t worked so far,’ ” Maddahi says.
In June 2023, Maddahi flew to Fort Worth to see Wetzel perform a sold-out show at the 14,000-capacity Dickies Arena. “He had an entire arena of people shouting out every word from the nosebleeds to the front row,” Maddahi recalls. “I came back [to the office] saying, ‘This guy’s a superstar.’ ”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Maddahi next flew to a show in Modesto, Calif., after which he and Wetzel had a heart-to-heart about the next album. “I wanted to slow things down,” says Wetzel, who was listening to acts like ambient pop band Cigarettes After Sex. “I didn’t want the super-edgy guitars, really loud drums.”
Maddahi paired him with Gabe Simon, best known for co-producing Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and brought in several new co-writers, including Amy Allen, who won the 2024 Grammy Award for songwriter of the year and has written hits for Sabrina Carpenter and Harry Styles. It was during a writers camp with Allen and several other songwriters that the midtempo “High Road,” about a tempestuous, dysfunctional relationship, was born.
He and Maddahi immediately thought of Jessie Murph, whom Wetzel had co-written with before, to join him on “High Road,” and when she sent over a verse, “she killed it,” Wetzel recalls. Columbia partnered with RECORDS Nashville to work the song to country radio, and its ascent began.
“He’s very true to himself, and the songs he writes are exactly how he is, which is something I respect a lot,” Murph says of Wetzel. “When I first heard ‘High Road,’ it felt very nostalgic to me. It felt like a song I could’ve heard when I was a kid, which I loved.” To thank Murph, Wetzel bought her a pistol engraved with their names and the song’s title that took three months to make. “I felt it was really Texas of me,” he says proudly.
9 Lives’ cover is a photograph of the double-wide trailer Wetzel lived in with his parents until he was 12. It’s abandoned now and has fallen into disrepair, with broken slats on the wood steps and prickly bushes growing over the front porch. But inside, it’s still full of books, video tapes, pots and pans, photos of his maternal and paternal great-grandparents and a CD of Miranda Lambert’s 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Long gone are the posters that hung on Wetzel’s bedroom walls of his first crush, teen pop star JoJo, and legendary slugger Mark McGwire. The last inhabitant he remembers was his uncle, who died several years ago. He’s not sure who’s living there now, if anyone. Standing inside, he surmises, “I think it’s just a big ol’ family of raccoons.”
His father was a truck driver who shifted into construction when Wetzel was around 11, enabling the family to build a house on the land and move out of the trailer. His mother was a bank teller and a singer who often took Wetzel along to her gigs. He remembers, at age 5, grabbing his dad’s old Hummingbird guitar that was down to two or three strings, “being in my Spider-Man underwear and feeling like I was playing to a million people. Looking back now, it’s like a dream come true.”
Koe Wetzel photographed January 22, 2025 in Pittsburg, Texas.
Eric Ryan Anderson
As a teen, he loved ’90s country, especially acts like the rough-hewn Kentucky Headhunters. But he also loved Nirvana, so much so that at 12 he asked for tickets to see the band for Christmas — and his parents had to break the news that not only was the band not together, but Kurt Cobain had been dead for a decade. “Nirvana had a huge impact,” he says. “I think that resonates with the way I play music — the big guitars, the catchy melodic hooks.”
The trailer sits on 100 acres of land that his great-grandfather bought in the 1930s. Wetzel’s family had gotten behind on the taxes and risked losing it until he bought and paid off the property in 2021. “This land means so much to me and my family. I never wanted anyone else to have it,” he says. While he doesn’t see living on it again himself, he plans to add some cows and, “hopefully, raising a family and having them come out here.”
That family is expanding soon: Wetzel and his girlfriend, Bailey Fisher, are expecting a baby girl in June, news they would announce on social media a few weeks after our interview. “We dated in college, and the last two years resparked everything,” Wetzel explains, then adds with typical candor, “It’s not some random chick I knocked up. I mean, we’re excited as hell. I’m scared as f–k … I’m getting older, I’m growing out of the college party lifestyle I’ve been on the last 10 years … They say there’s always a time to grow up and get your s–t together, and my stuff is not together by no means at all, [but] it’s a lot different than what it was.”
In a corner of Koe Wetzel’s Riot Room stands Dirty Sancho. The nonworking mechanical bull, named for the first Professional Bull Riders bull Wetzel bought (he now owns eight) is just one piece of his personal memorabilia decorating the 7,000-square-foot bar and nightclub Wetzel opened in Fort Worth’s Cultural District in 2023. “We’ve had to sew his head back on a couple of times,” he says of Dirty Sancho. “He’s seen some s–t.”
Wetzel opened the Fort Worth bar, in part, so he would have a place to “drink and party and not worry about people putting me in jail at night,” he says, sitting on a stool in the Riot Room sipping tequila over ice. (A second Riot Room will open in Houston later this year, with hopes of more locations to follow.)
He’s not kidding around. His boisterous “February 28, 2016” from 2016’s Noise Complaint chronicles the night he was arrested for drunk driving, describing how in his inebriated state he just wants to find someone “sober enough to take me to Taco Bell.” The song has become an anthem for his fans, so much so that they’ve made Feb. 28 unofficial Koe Wetzel Day. On that day this year, he released a live album culled from 2024’s Damn Near Normal tour to thank his fans and dropped by the bar to play a few songs live, but he winces a little when he talks about the tune.
“Whenever we play it, I’m very grateful for what it’s done for us, but I’m kind of like, ‘F–k,’ ” he says. He doesn’t hate the song, exactly — it’s just that he’s in a very different place at 32 than he was when he wrote it at 24. “I’m not that person as an artist anymore,” he says. “I’m not that person just having a good time.”
Eric Ryan Anderson
He has different regrets about “Drunk Driving” from 2020’s Sellout. In a catalog of dark songs, it’s one of Wetzel’s darkest: The narrator is driving drunk and trying to outrun his sins as he sings, “Everybody’s got to die somehow/Why not me right now.” It was Wetzel’s attempt to put himself in the mindset of some friends who had died in drunk driving accidents, and, looking back, he wishes he had named it something else. “The song’s not about condoning drunk driving or anything like that,” he says. “It’s a very emotional song.”
Then there’s Hell Paso track “Cabo,” which he swears is a true story about spending money on hookers and blow in the Mexican resort town. The crowd goes crazy when he plays it, he says, but he admits, “Me and Mama haven’t really talked about that one. I know it’s not her favorite by far.” (His mother and father do have plenty of other favorites and frequently come to his gigs: “I think they cry every damn show, her and my pops,” he says. “They’re crying, singing all the words. They’re proud of their baby boy.”)
The connection his fans have to some of Wetzel’s older, often brutally honest lyrics can lead to the misperception that he’s “some f–king hellion,” says Wetzel, who quit counting his number of tattoos at 36. “I feel like most of my music came from whenever I was going balls to the wall, and it’s just kind of not who I am anymore. I can still run it with the best of them, but I feel like they make their opinion of me before they get to meet me, and sometimes that sucks.”
Still, he admits that 1 p.m. Koe and 4 a.m. Koe are two different people. “That’s rock star Koe. He’s kind of a d–k,” he says of the late-night version. “He’s a lot of fun, but he can get out of hand really f–king fast.”
Eric Ryan Anderson
He has somewhat curbed his drinking, including switching from whiskey to tequila. On his Damn Near Normal tour last year, he and some of his bandmates had a ritual: “An hour before the show, we’ll drink a bottle of tequila. If I start earlier, then the show will be s–t, but if I start just after 5 p.m. and kind of drink a couple beers, bottle of tequila, then it’s like the right amount. You get onstage, everything’s smooth sailing, and it feels good.”
He has also changed his after-show routine, hopping straight on the bus as soon as the concert is over. “They took the after-parties away from me. I go shower on the bus, put my comfy clothes on, drink a couple beers, watch a movie, and I was in bed by midnight, 1 o’clock,” he says before admitting: “Honestly, I kind of enjoyed it. I sounded better than I ever had because I was taking care of myself a little bit more.”
Koe Wetzel’s lake house is haunted by a ghost his two younger sisters have named Irene. There’s an underwater cemetery about 100 yards away in the lake, but no one knows if there’s any connection. Irene causes all kinds of mischief, Wetzel says, including throwing bottles off the bar and turning on the TV. “You’ll see her walking the balcony up here every now and then,” he says, describing an opaque apparition. “She kind of f–ks with new people who stay here.” As if on cue, the closed front door suddenly swings wide open on its own.
Irene’s presence notwithstanding, “it’s a safe haven for me,” Wetzel says of this place on Pittsburg’s outskirts. With its spotty cell service, he can unplug, write and relax. “I bought it for us to make more memories,” he says of his friends and family, who come to grill and hang out on his five boats.
The walls on one side are lined with RIAA plaques — 12 of his songs have been certified gold or platinum — while the rest are covered with fish, bird and deer mounts, including deer killed by three generations of Wetzel men. But pride of place goes to an alligator skull on a sideboard; Wetzel killed the reptile with a buck knife during COVID-19 isolation in Matagorda Bay, Texas. “I got in the water, Steve Irwin’d him a little bit,” he says, sipping a Busch Light and pointing to a photo of him sitting astride the alligator. “Cool story to tell but my mom hates that story. She don’t like it when I do dumb s–t. She worries about her baby way too much.”
Eric Ryan Anderson
There’s also a photo of him with a giant catfish he caught with his bare hands — known as noodling — in the lake. His biggest catch has been 62 pounds, which he and his buddies tagged and tossed back. Asked whether killing a bear with a bow and arrow or having a five-week No. 1 is more satisfying, Wetzel pauses to give the question considerable thought, then decides: “Adrenaline-wise, killing a bear with a bow. Accomplishment-wise, a five-week No. 1.”
For all his love of hunting and fishing, those subjects haven’t found their way into Wetzel’s music. “I feel like I was put here to write about relationships gone bad or going good. Real-world stuff, I guess,” he says. “Not saying that hunting is not. It’s a huge part of my life and I love it to death, but I just guess I haven’t figured out what I wanted to say about it yet.”
Yet as he begins working on new music, Wetzel, who will tour this year with HARDY and Morgan Wallen, as well as play Stagecoach and other festivals, says he’s increasingly finding that all his passions are intertwined.
“I feel like every time I’m [writing], it peels back a layer of who I am. I find something that I didn’t know was there,” he says. “Whenever you get the song completed, there’s no more holes in it. There’s nothing else you could do for that song. It’s like, ‘Man, this is insane. This is really cool.’ It’s almost like the noodling and the hunting for me: It’s something that I feel like I’ll never master, but it’s what keeps me coming back and back. It’s a cool deal.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
From Usher’s Super Bowl showcase to the most musically talented Met, appearances related to major sporting events helped artists across genres — and at different career points — earn sizable streaming gains in 2024. (All data according to Luminate.)
And the trend has continued so far in 2025: Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show on Feb. 9 was a major boost for the rapper.
UsherSuper Bowl LVIII (Feb. 11)
The combination of Usher’s career-spanning medley during his spectacular Super Bowl halftime show and the release of his album Coming Home two days earlier helped his streaming catalog skyrocket 299% compared with the previous week, with his 2004 smash “Yeah!” among the biggest gainers.
Jennifer HudsonNBA All-Star Game (Feb. 18)
The R&B veteran’s halftime show medley of her songs “Remission” and “I Got This” at Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse helped give her catalog a 4% boost in weekly streams.
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Candelita“OMG” On-Field Performance (June 28)
New Yorks Mets infielder Jose Iglesias moonlights as the recording artist Candelita, and his live debut of his single “OMG” following a Mets game at Citi Field helped the song move over 1,000 weekly downloads and top the Latin Digital Song Sales chart.
Gojira2024 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony (July 26)
Lady Gaga and Céline Dion were among the stars helping ring in the Summer Games in Paris, but French rockers Gojira grabbed headlines by becoming the first metal band to perform at the Olympics. Its catalog earned a 283% streaming bump over the next four days in the process.
Kavinsky2024 Summer Olympics Closing Ceremony (Aug. 11)
As athletes said au revoir to Paris by joining Phoenix, Air and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig onstage, French producer Kavinsky dropped his 2010 synthwave single “Nightcall,” causing a Shazam sensation and boosting the track’s streams by 74%.
BeyoncéNFL Christmas Day Halftime Show (Dec. 25)
During Netflix’s first NFL Christmas showcase, Queen Bey presented songs from her Cowboy Carter album live for the first time at NRG Stadium in her hometown of Houston — and the album shot from 7.4 million weekly streams to 17.6 million during the following week, up 137%.
Kendrick LamarSuper Bowl LIX
Kendrick Lamar was already one of the world’s most-streamed artists, but his riveting halftime show at Super Bowl LIX on Sunday (Feb. 9) helped his biggest hits — and his entire discography — climb even higher. On Feb. 10, the day after his performance at New Orleans’ Caesars Superdome, Lamar’s streaming catalog earned 70.9 million official U.S. on-demand streams — a 153% increase from the previous Monday’s total (27.5 million on Feb. 3), according to Luminate. Similar spikes occurred for halftime highlights “Squabble Up” (up 159% in daily streams) and “TV Off” (up 139%), while “Not Like Us” earned an even greater uptick (up 222%); meanwhile, Lamar’s costar SZA, who joined him on two songs during the showcase, saw her own streaming catalog soar, up 58% to 30.3 million streams on the day after the big game.
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
The NBA All-Star Game — where the greats from the league’s two conferences face off every February — has been a staple of every professional basketball season since 1951 (outside of 1999, due to the lockout-shortened season). But as Carlton Myers, the NBA’s senior vp/head of live production and entertainment points out, “The NBA is […]
In the same way every pro sports championship run looks a little different, so do the ways teams integrate music into their winning formulas. For some, it’s finding the perfect locker room jam; for others, its giving new meaning to the music of a hometown hero.
But for all of them, music provides an X factor that could well make the difference on game day.
Boston Celtics2024 NBA Champions
BIA at halftime of game two of the 2024 NBA Finals in Boston on June 9, 2024.
Adam Glanzman/Getty Images
Widely considered the most successful franchise in NBA history, the Celtics called on their community during the 2023-24 season when competing for their now league-leading 18th championship. For the season’s marketing campaign, Different Here, “We wanted to focus on showcasing local musical artists and what makes Boston’s culture different,” says Carley Lenahan, Celtics director of live production and entertainment. “Connecting with our community and fans is integral to the support they show the Celtics, and the support and energy from our fans during a championship run is everything.”
On opening night of the 2023-24 season, the Celtics launched their Local Artist Halftime Series with performances by Boston-based hip-hop stars Esoteric and Latrell James and Roxbury native Oompa. “During a championship run, the home court advantage is key to a successful series, and we understand how important it is that the players can feed off the atmosphere and energy in the arena,” Lenahan says. Throughout the season, the nine artists from the Boston area were featured across seven Local Artist Halftime Series shows, culminating in Medford, Mass., native BIA’s performance at game two of the NBA Finals.
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“As a lifelong Celtics fan, I’ve been going to games since I was 10,” BIA says. “The opportunity to perform my music on the iconic parquet floor in front of my hometown crowd and my all-time favorite team was truly an honor and a full-circle moment.”
Kansas City Chiefs2023 and 2024 Super Bowl Winners
Mecole Hardman Jr. (second from right) celebrates with Patrick Mahomes (right), Travis Kelce (second from left) and Jawaan Taylor (far left) after catching the game-winning touchdown pass at the 2024 Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas on Feb. 11, 2024.
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Many sports franchises lean on hometown artists to galvanize their teams, but the Kansas City Chiefs find musical inspiration in a different place: their locker room.
Amid the run-ups to the Chiefs’ back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 2023 and 2024, artists like 50 Cent, Future and YoungBoy Never Broke Again were constantly on shuffle to motivate the team during marquee postseason matchups. “I feel like in-season, it’s kind of a variety. We got multiple artists [that we listen to] depending on who is new and who is hot then,” Chiefs All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie says. “The postseason, we get back to the classics. We go old school.”
According to McDuffie, one new song has made its way through the cracks since the team won it all last year: BossMan Dlow’s “Get In With Me,” which has become a beloved anthem for players and coaches alike in the locker room. A close second? “Tweaker,” the current viral hit from LiAngelo “G3 GELO” Ball (himself a former pro-baller). But only two players have the privilege of managing the team’s turn-up tunes. “We’re strict on who can control the aux,” McDuffie says. “Most of the time, it’s either Jawaan Taylor or Chris Jones.”
Los Angeles Dodgers2024 MLB World Series Winners
Ice Cube opened game two of the 2024 World Series in Los Angeles on Oct. 26, 2024.
Harry How/Getty Images
The 2024 MLB World Series faceoff between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees couldn’t have been more high stakes. And to commemorate the East-West matchup between two of the biggest sports markets, the MLB tapped two beloved music stars — New York native Fat Joe and Los Angeles icon Ice Cube — to perform at their respective home fields.
Following a 1-0 series lead against the Yankees, Cube performed his 1993 classic “It Was a Good Day” from the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium. Rocking Dodgers gear from head to toe, his performance enlivened the home team, which not only secured a game-two win but the overall series in five games. All-Star Kiké Hernández thanked Cube during the team’s championship celebration at Dodger Stadium, telling the thousands of fans in attendance, “Ice Cube came out with his performance in game two, and we didn’t even play [because] we already won it.”
“As a lifelong Dodgers fan who grew up watching them battle from the ’70s to the ’80s, that was a next-level dream come true,” Ice Cube tells Billboard. “To feel the energy of 52,000 fans going wild was otherworldly and contagious. You could feel it in the air. The crowd, the players — everybody was hyped. It was the perfect recipe for a win, and we all knew it at that moment.”
New York Liberty2024 WNBA Champions
Fat Joe at halftime of game five of the 2024 WNBA Finals in New York on Oct. 20, 2024.
Sarah Stier/Getty Images
Following a devastating championship loss the year prior, the WNBA team entered the 2024 season determined to bounce back — and understood the critical role its fans would play in that journey. Those hometown supporters turned out to include not only the spirited crowds flocking to Barclays Center for games, but local hip-hop legends like Fat Joe, Ja Rule and Jadakiss.
“Everything we do needs to have a through line of authenticity,” says Liberty chief brand officer Shana Stephenson, who spent the season recruiting homegrown New York talent to perform at home games. “Sometimes, there might be a pop artist who is a big name at the moment, but I might not want to book them because I don’t know if our crowd will resonate with their sound.”
After dominating the regular season and securing home court advantage throughout the WNBA playoffs, Stephenson leveraged her love for hip-hop to propel the team’s championship run. With its title hopes hanging in the balance, Stephenson enlisted the help of Liberty fan and basketball aficionado Fat Joe to ignite the energy for the crucial game five.
“Everybody knows ‘Lean Back,’ right? My dad can sing it. He leans back when it comes on. That’s an anthem,” Stephenson says.
In the end, her plan was a key element in helping the team achieve its historic championship win in October. “That’s the beautiful thing about music and sports: It can unite people in a beautiful and powerful way,” Fat Joe says. “One time for the Liberty Ladies.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of BIllboard.
When WWE Superstar Damian Priest learned that one of the biggest matches of his career would be held in Puerto Rico, he was overjoyed. For Priest, who was raised in Vega Baja, a small town just 26 miles from San Juan, it was more than a match — it was a long-awaited homecoming. But for this no-holds-barred San Juan Street Fight, the former World Heavyweight Champion would be lacing up his boots to face an unusual opponent: one of music’s brightest stars and arguably Puerto Rico’s favorite son, Bad Bunny.
“Here he is doing all these moves and being able to take them,” Priest recalls of the May 6, 2023, barn burner, where he lost by pinfall. “The fact that he could take all these hits and get back up — and I know he was in a lot of pain — that drive to succeed and entertain, he has it, like we all do.”
Bad Bunny actually made his WWE debut in January 2021, at the Royal Rumble in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he faced off against former WWE and UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar. That April, he showcased more daredevil moves and aerial tactics — and turned skeptics into believers — at WrestleMania. And since then, he has continued to solidify his heavyweight status in the wrestling world with his unwavering passion for the craft.
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“Music and WWE have always run parallel,” Priest says. “When I describe how to make it in this business through the grind and the struggle, it’s always easier to explain it to musicians because they get it. It’s the same grind. You start performing in front of little to nobody in these greasy clubs, try to get noticed and then build up a reputation and a bit of a following. Hopefully, you get noticed by a record label or an artist who puts you on a tour, [and] it’s the same thing here.”
Bad Bunny and Damian Priest wrestle during the WWE Backlash at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on May 6, 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Gladys Vega/ Getty Images
Though the WWE has been around for 70 years, the wrestling conglomerate is enjoying a renaissance — and the music industry has played a significant role in its post-pandemic resurgence. WWE president Nick Khan, who joined the company in 2020, has been at the forefront, connecting the dots between music and the WWE by bringing artists like Bad Bunny, Travis Scott, Metro Boomin, Cardi B, Meek Mill, Jelly Roll and Sexyy Red to collaborate with the company. Whether through actual matches, live TV segments or commercials for future premium live events, the strategic pairing has brought a fresh and diverse audience to WWE while elevating these artists’ status in the wrestling world.
In early January, WWE officially partnered with Netflix to present Monday Night Raw, its 34-year-old flagship show and the longest-running weekly episodic program without reruns in TV history. (The show most recently aired on USA Network from 2005 through the end of 2024.) The three-hour star-packed extravaganza featured wrestling immortals The Rock, John Cena and Hulk Hogan, and celebrities from Vanessa Hudgens and Tiffany Haddish to Travis Scott, Wale and Blxst attended. But unlike his peers, Scott wasn’t just a spectator — he escorted WWE Superstar Jey Uso ahead of his match. Scott — whom WWE chief content officer Paul Levesque (aka wrestler Triple H) gifted a Hardcore Championship belt during the rapper’s ComplexCon performance last November — wore the title draped around his shoulders and fed off the crowd’s electric energy as his own “Fein” reverberated throughout Los Angeles’ Intuit Dome. Sunglasses on and joint in hand, Scott sauntered out alongside Uso with the aura of a ’90s wrestler — a picture-perfect moment for both stars.
“The energy out there was crazy,” Scott tells Billboard. “I was talking to Triple H and was like, ‘Yo. This s–t is wild.’ In my shows, I try to create that maximum energy level and have the people feel they can reach the highest level of ecstasy as far as being happy and free. And in those environments — things like wrestling, and even in sports where the characters can be so free and create this livelihood for kids, adults and families — it’s dope.”
“When I found out I was coming out with Travis, I asked him, ‘Are you ready? Because this s–t is about to pop off,’ ” Uso adds. “I just didn’t expect that the brother was about to light one up before we walked out. He can do what he wants to do.”
This wasn’t the first time Uso had rubbed shoulders with a hip-hop superstar. Last April, at WrestleMania 40, he and Lil Wayne walked down the entranceway together at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field before a roaring crowd as the rapper’s “A Milli” and Uso’s entrance theme, “Main Event Ish,” played. It was a surreal moment for Uso: Before his WWE debut in 2007, he’d wrestled on the independent circuit alongside his twin brother, Jimmy, and they’d chosen Wayne’s 2004 hit “Go DJ” as their entrance music.
“We all grew up on Wayne in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Uso says. “I’m talking about when he was with Hot Boyz and all that. It’s crazy how life comes full circle.” Before they walked out, Uso even cajoled Wayne into wearing some Uso merchandise: “He was real dope and cool with everything. He asked if I needed anything from him, and I said, ‘S–t, brother. Can you wear these “YEET” glasses for me? Here, put these on.’ ”
As artists rush to step inside the squared circle, wrestlers are moving with similar intention toward recording studios. Compelling entrance songs are vital in developing their characters, and since the ’90s, revered WWE Superstars like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock and The Undertaker have placed fans in a choke hold with not only their iconic visual presentation but also their magnetic theme music. At the heart of those entrance songs is former WWE composer Jim Johnston, who used popular ’90s genres like hip-hop and rock to create songs based on the wrestlers’ characters.
For Austin, famously known as “The Texas Rattlesnake,” his hard-rocking entrance song, “I Won’t Do What You Tell Me,” became known for its glass-shattering sound effects. Austin didn’t record vocals for it, but Cena, whose earlier wrestling persona was a punchline-driven rapper, stepped inside the booth and rapped his “The Time Is Now.” That bold move paved the way for future superstars like Uso and Priest to infuse their entrances with their own personalities, adding a fun new element for fans to enjoy.
“It helps to have someone like [Slayer’s] Kerry King play guitar on my track,” says Priest, whose character has a darker, goth-like personality. “It’s pretty cool. While doing my own vocals on my song is pretty simple, it’s cool because it comes from me and what I wanted to say and feel during certain moments. People can bop their heads to it, and it adds to that aura.”
Bad Bunny, representing Latino World Order, takes the ring as he prepares to wrestle Dominik Mysterio during the WWE SmackDown at Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot on May 5, 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Gladys Vega/ Getty Images
Uso’s hip-hop-influenced “Main Event Ish” is arguably the WWE’s most popular entrance song, with a simple but fiery hook (“It’s just me, Uce”), his unbridled energy and sharp ad-libs. His signature wave — now a staple at all WWE shows where he’s competing, in which he climbs the top rope and waves his hands up and down, controlling the crowd like a hip-hop maestro — accompanies the song.
“I flew to New York one day, sat [down with the writing team], put it together, knocked it out and it was on TV the next week,” Uso says of the track. “I knew I wanted to get on there and bring the energy. We always been musical, my whole family. We got hidden talents the world don’t know about.”
And as WWE enters WrestleMania season — with arguably its deepest roster since the ’90s — more musicians are looking to walk down the entrance ramp and pose a challenge, just like Bad Bunny first did four years ago. Fortunately for Bad Bunny, he had a great teacher in Priest, who, prior to their one-on-one showdown in Puerto Rico, served as his in-ring mentor and tag-team partner at WrestleMania 37, where they were victorious.
“A good match with another good wrestler is expected,” Priest says. “What I did with Bad Bunny was magic because nobody expected it. That’s not something you get to do all the time. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance again.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.