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More than six years on from their last studio record, pioneering Australian hip-hop outfit the Hilltop Hoods have announced their new album, Fall From the Light.
Set for release on Aug. 1 via Island Records/UMA, Fall From the Light is the Hilltop Hoods’ ninth album, and their first since the release of 2019’s The Great Expanse.
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They’ve not been resting on their laurels since the release of their last record, however. In 2020, they released one of the first pandemic-influenced songs by way of “I’m Good?” and would later drop singles such as “Show Business” and “A Whole Day’s Night” in 2022.
More recently, 2025 has brought with it the likes of “The Gift” and “Don’t Happy, Be Worry,” which will appear on Fall From the Light alongside 2023’s “Laced Up.”
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“This album has been an exercise in patience,” explained Suffa (aka Matt Lambert). “Six years is a long time between albums, but there’s a good reason for that. There was a lot happening, in the world and in our lives. But it turns out (from my perspective anyway), that time was the album’s strength, not its weakness.
“We’ve never been so thorough, so pedantic with an album before. The result is something that’s been carefully crafted with an extreme attention to detail. It’s an album that we’re really proud of, and a body of music that we can’t wait to share with everyone.”
“We really took our time with this one,” adds Pressure (aka Daniel Smith). “We put more years into it than any other of our albums because we wanted it to be our best work to date. Putting it out after so long feels more monumental and exciting than ever.”
Hilltop Hoods were formed in the South Australian capital of Adelaide in 1994 by Suffa, Pressure, and DJ Debris (aka Barry Francis), and became one of the first Australian hip-hop acts to receive mainstream success with the release of third album The Calling in 2003.
In 2006, they became the first hip-hop group to reach No. 1 on the ARIA charts thanks to The Hard Road – a feat they have achieved with every subsequent album. That year also saw them become the first Australian group in the genre to be nominated for an ARIA Award, with the trio having since won a total of ten awards from 36 nominations to date.
In 2019, the release of The Great Expanse saw the Hilltop Hoods break the record of most chart-topping albums for an Australian band or group, and would later reach one million record sales in their native country that same year.
The group will celebrate the release of their forthcoming album with their Never Coming Home Tour, which sees the band performing across Europe and the U.K. in the summer. They first toured the U.S. in 2014, later returning in 2019, but have not announced any further North American shows as yet.
Ten years on from the release of his acclaimed seventh album, Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens has offered a surprising re-evaluation of the record.
Originally released in March 2015, Carrie & Lowell was Stevens’ first studio album since 2010’s The Age of Adz, and would ultimately peak at No. 10 on the Billboard 200, while topping the Independent and Folk Albums charts, and hitting No. 2 on the Top Alternative and Rock Albums.
Despite the highs of its success, the record was steeped in sadness and misery, with much of its musical and lyrical content being inspired by the 2012 passing of his estranged mother Carrie, and the relationship with his stepfather, Lowell Brams.
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As part of the record’s anniversary reissue, Stevens has collected a batch of demos to accompany its release, pairing it all with an in-depth essay that sees him ruminating on the album’s recording process and his thoughts behind it all.
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Speaking to NPR ahead of the reissue’s arrival this week, Stevens used the opportunity to share a harsh reassessment of the original album, going so far as to label it “evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point.”
“I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless,” he explained. “I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.”
Describing the recording process as “painful, humiliating, and an utter miscarriage of bad intentions” in his essay, Stevens doubles down on his stance, focusing on his mother’s inability to add her own voice into the record’s somewhat voyeuristic narrative.
“I’m kind of embarrassed by this album, to be honest with you,” he explains. “Because I sort of feel like I don’t have any authority over my mother and her life or experience or her death. All I have is speculation and my imagination and my own misery, and in trying to make sense of it all, I kind of felt like it didn’t really resolve anything.”
Continuing his retrospective look back at the record, Stevens is also asked whether he regrets having made the record. “Yeah, I do. I feel bad,” he explains. “It’s just a bummer that my mother’s not alive and can’t speak for herself. What would she say about all this? Maybe she would be proud. I’ll never know.”
The forthcoming anniversary edition of Carrie & Lowell also includes a demo version of the track “Mystery of Love,” of which a studio version would later appear on the soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, ultimately scoring a nomination for best original song at the 2018 Academy Awards, and best song written for visual media at the 2019 Grammys.
On Tuesday’s (May 27) season 20 premiere of America’s Got Talent, judge Simon Cowell was blown away by a Brazilian crew that combined LED technology and dance for a simply mesmerizing show. The troupe is called Light Wire, and their show has to be seen to be believed. The movements of four dancers onstage cascade […]
It was fitting for Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez to hit the stage at Monday’s American Music Awards at Las Vegas’ Fontainebleau, since both have found a second home in Sin City. Jackson has a current residency at Resorts World, which kicked off in December and has dates scheduled through September. Lopez is returning to […]
Jessie Murph had the ultimate girls night and turned the party up even more inviting Sexyy Red into the fold for the “Blue Strips (Remix).” The hedonistic visual arrived on Tuesday (May 27) as Big Sexyy, Jessie and their girl gang hit the town to indulge on everything the nightlife has to offer. The emerging […]
After collecting multiple hits across Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart and Latin Airplay charts, Beéle makes his first appearance on the albums rankings as Borondo. The Colombian singer-songwriter’s debut set launches on the Top Latin Albums (at No. 10) and Top Latin Rhythm Albums (at No. 4) lists, dated May 31.
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Borondo, a 26-track album, was released May 15 on Hear This Music/5020 Records. The set starts at No. 10 on Top Latin Albums with 11,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in the tracking week ending May 22, according to Luminate.
During the tracking week of May 16-22, Borondo‘s debut was driven primarily by streaming activity, with the album’s songs generating 17 million official on-demand streams. Meanwhile, the remainder of the total-week sum came from a minimal contribution of album sales and track-equivalent units. (Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album.)
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Further, Borondo’s entrance marks a breakthrough for Puerto Rican indie label Hear This Music—founded by DJ Luian and Mambo Kingz— achieving its first performance and top 10 on any Billboard albums tally since its formation in 2015 (the imprint has earned 20 entries on the Hot Latin Songs chart, including three top 10s).
The set was previewed by one charting song: “Mi Refe,” with Ovy on The Drums, peaked at No. 8 on Latin Rhythm Airplay in April.
Prince Royce, Mora & Sebastian Yatra Achieve Top 10 Success: Elsewhere on the Latin albums charts, three other Latin artists leave a mark this week, starting with Prince Royce, whose album Eterno debuts at No. 3 on the Top Tropical Albums chart, his eighth straight top 10 since the 54-week ruler album Prince Royce in 2010.
Eterno, a collection of 20th century English hits turned-bilingual bachatas, becomes the Hot Shot debut of the week on Top Tropical Albums with 3,000 equivalent album units earned during the tracking week ending May 22. The album’s songs generated 1.9 million official on-demand streams in its first week.
“How Deep Is Your Love” is the only song that previewed the album; it hits new peaks on the overall Latin Airplay (No. 5) and Tropical Airplay (No. 4) charts after a 35% boost in audience impressions, to 7 million.
Puerto Rican Mora secures his fifth top 10 on the Top Latin Rhythm Albums chart with Lo Mismo De Siempre, as the album bows at No. 9 with 7,000 equivalent album units, also largely from streaming activity (9.8 million official on-demand streams in its opening week).
The Rimas-released set, dropped on an off-cycle Sunday, May 18, thus, debuts on the chart with only five days of activity (the chart’s tracking week runs Friday through Thursday).
Lastly, Sebastian Yatra’s Milagro starts at No. 9 on Top Latin Pop Albums with 2,000 equivalent album units. The 17-track album, released May 18 on Universal Music Latino/UMLE, generated 2.3 million official streams during the same period. It becomes Yatra’s fourth top 10 on the tally.
All charts (dated May 31, 2025) will update on Billboard.com tomorrow, May 28 (a day later than usual due to the Memorial Day holiday May 26). For all chart news, you can follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.
50 Cent isn’t letting up on his self-appointed coverage of the Diddy trial, and he continues to have fun with AI to help with his trolling. This time around, the Queens rapper and filmmaker reacted on social media to his name being mentioned during Diddy’s ex-assistant Capricorn Clark’s testimony on Tuesday morning (May 27), during […]
SZA is giving props to Tate McRae after she covered “F2F” from SZA’s SOS album. On her Instagram Story Tuesday (May 27), the “Kill Bill” musician reposted a video of the Canadian pop star singing the track during a pre-show soundcheck in Paris. Though the original song finds SZA belting angsty lyrics over head-banging electric […]
Lorde is getting ready to ask some tough questions on her new single “Man of the Year,” which the singer announced is coming out Wednesday (May 28) while dropping a music video teaser on Instagram.
In a clip from the visual posted one day prior to the track’s release, a topless Lorde spins around in a swivel chair and looks down at her bare chest. “Who’s gonna love me like this?” she sings in a snippet of the song. “Who could get me like this, when he flow down through me?”
“M.O.T.Y. Tomorrow late New York time,” the New Zealand native captioned the post. “Written in blood.”
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The teaser comes more than a week after Lorde first announced that “Man of the Year” would serve as the second single from June-slated album Virgin, following lead track “What Was That,” which dropped in April. In her recent Rolling Stone cover story, the Grammy winner shared that she wrote “Man of the Year” about her own broadening gender identity, which she says fell into place after she stopped taking oral contraceptives.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she told the publication. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”
Just before writing “Man of the Year” — which Lorde has also said is her “favorite” track on Virgin — the star taped her chest down with duct tape in an effort to realize a vision of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment,” she told Rolling Stone. She appears that way on the cover art for “Man of the Year,” wearing nothing but the silver tape and a pair of jeans.
Elsewhere in the interview, Lorde confirmed that she still uses “she” and “her” pronouns, but some days feels more like a man than a woman. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this … She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’” she recalled to the publciation. “I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”
See Lorde’s “Man of the Year” teaser below.
Since its release, Teddy Swims‘ breakthrough hit has never once lost control over its place on the Billboard Hot 100. And this week, “Lose Control” became the song with the longest-ever run on the U.S. singles chart, something the musician celebrated on Instagram Tuesday (May 27).
Sharing the news on his Story, an excited Swims began by simply saying, “Let’s go!!!!!!”
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The star also wrote that the feat was achieved “BY GOD” before shouting out Warner Records CEO and co-chairman Aaron Bay-Schuck. “FOREVER GRATEFUL FOR YOUR STEADY GRACE LOVE AND LEADERSHIP,” the musician gushed.
Swims’ accomplishment comes about two years after he first released “Lose Control” in June 2023, with the track later appearing on his debut album, I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 1). On the Hot 100 listing dated May 23, 2025, the hit logs its 92nd week on the chart, surpassing Glass Animals’ prior record for most weeks spent on the ranking with “Heat Waves.”
“Lose Control” also now holds the record for longest stay in the chart’s top 10, logging its 63rd week in the echelon.
“When it was finished, I was showing everybody before the song came out,” the Georgia native reflected on writing the song to Billboard in 2023. “I just felt that energy, like, ;This is lighting in a bottle.’ I knew this was going to change my life.”
In addition to collecting new records, Swims also got some new ink this week. The day prior to his chart feat, the star shared a video on his Story of himself at a tattoo parlor, where an artist stenciled on a portrait of none other than Joe Dirt, the mullet-sporting janitor played by David Spade in the 2001 film of the same name.
Swims is fresh off of the January release of his new album I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2), which reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200. He’s currently on tour in support of the LP, with his next shows set for Radio City Music Hall in New York City on May 27 and 28.
