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After rolling out the first slate of international dates in support of her upcoming Tension II album last month, Australian pop superstar Kylie Minogue announced the North American leg of the outing on Thursday (Oct. 3). The 2025 Tension Tour is slated to kick off on March 29 with a gig at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto and take the “Padam Padam” singer to Montreal, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and Denver before winding down with a May 2 show at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
Tickets for Minogue’s biggest tour since 2011 will kick off with an American Express presale for card members on Oct. 8 at 10 a.m. local time (through Oct. 10 at 10 p.m. local time), followed by an artist presale starting on Oct. 9 at 10 a.m., which fans can sign up for now here. The general public onsale will begin at 10 a.m. local on Oct. 11.
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“I am beyond excited to announce the TENSION TOUR 2025. I can’t wait to share beautiful and wild moments with fans all over the world, celebrating the Tension era and more! It’s been an exhilarating ride so far and now, get ready for your close up because I will be calling Lights, Camera, Action … and there will be a whole lot of Padaming!,” Minogue said in a statement.
The 13-track Tension II album, led by the first single “Lights Camera Action,” was released last month, featuring the previously-released dance song “Edge of Saturday Night” with The Blessed Madonna as well as collaborations with Orville Peck, Bebe Rexha and Tove Lo, and Sia.
The North American dates will follow on the heels of the Australian leg that launches with a Feb. 15 show at Perth’s RAC Arena, marking her first home country gig in five years.
Check out the dates for the 2025 North American Tension Tour below.
March 29 – Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena
March 30 – Montreal, QC @ Bell Centre
April 2 – Chicago, IL @ Allstate Arena
April 4 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
April 8 – Washington, DC @ Capital One Arena
April 9 – Boston, MA @ TD Garden
April 11 – Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
April 13 – Orlando, FL @ Kia Center
April 14 – Miami, FL @ Kaseya Center
April 17 – Austin, TX @ Moody Center
April 19 – Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center
April 22 – San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
April 25 – Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
April 26 – Vancouver, BC @ Pacific Coliseum
April 29 – Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
May 2 – Los Angeles, CA @ Crypto.com Arena
Sitting in her childhood bedroom and noodling on her guitar in February 2024, 24-year-old Gigi Perez was thinking about the scope of her songwriting. She’d been ruminating for a while on the idea of a frantic kind of love, and how to connect it to her lyricism. “When that person is so constant in your life, it’s kind of like you fall into it, and you have nothing else to grasp on to,” she tells Billboard. “It came from that desperate place.”
All of a sudden, a line popped into her head: “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” As she kept strumming and writing out new lines to add to the chorus of her growing song, the singer-songwriter realized she wasn’t the only one listening. “My door happened to be open, and my little sister walks by and says, ‘Oh, Gigi, that’s really awesome,’ ” she recalls.
And as the idea has moved from work in progress to completed product, it’s clear that the world feels the same way. After Perez began teasing the track in earnest on her TikTok in the spring, users quickly latched onto the hook, clamoring to hear a full version. They finally got to hear it on July 26, when Perez unveiled “Sailor Song,” a stirring, emotionally raw ballad that sees Perez turning her feelings of longing into a sweeping, queer-coded love song. The song debuted on the Aug. 31-dated Billboard Hot 100 at No. 98, and it has since spent six weeks on the chart, reaching a No. 46 high on the list dated Sept. 28.
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For Perez, the sudden, rapid success of “Sailor Song” feels like a culmination of all the work she’s put into her independent career — and one that enabled her to accept a record deal with Island Records in September. “I feel truly ready for this,” she says. “And I know exactly what I’m looking for.”
Perez walks Billboard through the writing process of “Sailor Song,” explains why she learned how to produce her own work and breaks down what it means to have a queer love song making waves in modern pop culture.
When did you first start working on “Sailor Song”? What was the original idea that led you to making this?
A lot of the process for me is typically just having my guitar and freestyling, and that’s mostly how the songs come — I was in that progression of writing, and I just said, “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” So, I kept going; I had the chorus done that night.
It really just stayed as a chorus for a while, and the lyrics had changed. There were certain little words that changed the meaning of what [the song] was. Once I had written the verses, I pulled a melody from another song I had written and put that into this song. It really is one of those things where it was a puzzle putting it together, but there wasn’t much resistance. Other times, in order to get something like that, you have to really dig for it.
I love a song that is good at creating imagery without having to explicitly spell out the imagery — the use of the sailor as an image almost makes the song feel mythical in scale, which is really effective.
There’s something about this thought — and I don’t know if it’s because I grew up by the water and spent so much time in my childhood at the beach — that little by little, these beach and sea and water themes just kept appearing in my songs. It’s really sweet because I was thinking, “How do you compile the things that are on your heart and that you want to say in a way that makes sense?” It wasn’t until “Sailor Song” that I looked back and was like, “There’s been a whole path being laid subconsciously,” which is very cool.
I was struck by the fact that your voice sounds like it’s in the distance on this track — what did your setup look like when recording and producing “Sailor Song”?
I went into this chapter of my life [feeling] in my soul like I hit a point where I wasn’t collaborating with people because I wanted to, but because I relied on it. There was a lack of expression on the production side, [but] I think things ended up falling together perfectly. I moved back home, and in the same way I taught myself the guitar, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and messaged the collaborators who I really admired to ask them questions about producing. It was a lot of throwing things at the wall and learning little things here and there. Like, how does EQ [equalization] really work? What is a compressor? I was allowed time to really experiment with production and recording. It makes me feel the same way that I felt when I was 17 — that’s something I keep coming back to: That first rush of recording, when I was just doing it with my high school band, and we were just uploading files on Spotify and SoundCloud.
As far as the recording and what happened, I use an SM7 [microphone], and I started doing this thing [while recording my voice] where I do three vocals and I pan [one] a little bit to the left, [one] a little bit to the right and one right in the middle. And then I threw in certain kinds of reverbs that give it a roomy kind of sound. I also have an amazing mixer, Matt Emonson, and he just takes it away from there. I just wanted something that felt really intimate and yet really big.
Once you started teasing this song on TikTok, it blew up and fans were itching to hear the full thing. What was that like for you to witness in real time?
I was really happy. I feel like I’d gotten to a certain point where I just started enjoying music again in a way that I truly felt like was honoring my happiness. That was the main principle that I felt through being independent and being able to work on music in a different way. And then when I saw that people were really enjoying it, I was like, “That’s so genuinely awesome.” It was a slow burn in terms of getting to where it’s gotten to now but to know that it was something that really pulled on people means everything to me.
One of the things in life that I’ve struggled with — and part of why I decided that I wanted to be an artist — is the feeling of loneliness that comes with the lie that no one understands you. I think about the artists that changed my life in that way, and one of the first gay projects that I had that with was Troye Sivan’s [2015 debut album] Blue Neighbourhood. That changed my life. I couldn’t even imagine that somebody could be there for me during a time when I couldn’t express or understand what I was feeling. I didn’t grow up in a space where that was something that existed, and if it did, it was very taboo. It’s so beautiful now that there’s so much media that really highlights the gay and queer experience. Kids need that. Actually, people in general, not just children. There are still people all around this world [who] live in an online world and escape through music. It’s very special to me that, in any capacity, I could be a part of that.
To that point, it feels like queer messaging in music is having a genuine moment this year where songs that are about queerness are hitting the charts in a major way. What is your reaction to that level of visibility in the mainstream?
I think we’re only scratching the surface right now. Representation is so, so important. It’s the thing that gives people the courage and the ability to dream that you can do whatever. You, as a person, can take up space. I think there’s an identity part of it, and then there’s just the actual human part of it, and those two things are very important to me. Every queer artist is going to share their story and their identity differently. I’m only one person, and my message is only going to connect [with] and reach the people that it’s meant to. That’s why I think it opens up the bridge [for other artists], and I’m really excited to see everything that’s happening in queer music.
You recently signed to Island Records — what has the transition from independent artist to being signed at a major looked like for you so far?
I feel so blessed. It’s been such a weirdly spiritual experience, in terms of things happening behind the scenes. It feels like this thing is really guided. I didn’t know a year ago that any of this would happen, and I think I had a very clear vision where I said, “I’m going to stay independent, and this is the way I’m going to do it.” The fact that that has changed [means] I’m so grateful for all of the experiences that I’ve had over the last few months to lead me to this moment. They’re going to be an amazing home.
A version of this story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Kesha is most definitely not ready to make nice. The “Only Love Can Save Us Now” singer detailed what she described as a scorched earth plan to shake up the music industry’s old guard in a new ELLE magazine profile in which she warned that anyone with “deep, dark secrets” better be ready for a reckoning.
“I don’t believe you can create if you’re not feeling safe,” she told the magazine in detailing a new digital platform she’s working on with help from people in the tech industry that she said will prioritize artist’s safety. “The old guard, they’re falling. The old way of doing everything with secrecy — there’s no future there. So, like, those of you with deep, dark secrets, you better f–king run.”
Her warning to those traditional gatekeepers pulls no punches: “The music industry should be f–king terrified of me,” she said. “Because I’m about to make some major moves and shift this s–t. I really want to dismantle it piece by piece and shine light into every corner. I hope my legacy is making sure it never happens to anybody ever again.”
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Kesha extracted herself from a contract with Dr. Luke following a 2023 settlement in her long-running civil lawsuit against the producer born Lukasz Gottwald over her claims of infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment and assault; Luke denied the claims and reached a settlement with Kesha to dismiss his defamation suit against her last year, with both parties denying any misconduct.
She has since formed her own independent label, Kesha Records, which she said is the first big step in taking back her musical voice after signing with Luke in 2005 when she was 18. “I’m free and it feels good,” she said, noting that she has a reminder on her phone that reads “you’re free.” Kesha is now fully in charge of her music and free to work with any producers and writers she wants, a situation that led to the release of her recent single, the A.G. Cook (Charli XCX) and Zhone (Slayyyter)-produced “Joyride,” a bouncing, horn-spiked party record on which she sings, “Rev my engine til you make it purr/ Keep it kinky, but I come first/ Beep-beep b–ch, I’m outside/ Get in loser, for the joyride.”
Not for nothing, Kesha said “Joyride” was birthed both after the settlement of her Luke suit as well as in the wake of a break-up with someone she felt was “in it for the wrong reasons and was a bit of a starf–ker,” and whose loyalty she assessed in the most Kesha way possible. “I decided to test that theory and took one of my friends instead of him to Taylor Swift’s party. He came over the next day and broke up with me,” she said.
At this point she hasn’t come up with a title for the follow-up to her raw, 2023 fifth studio album, the not-to-subtly titled Gag Order, which marked her final release through RCA Records and Luke’s Kemosabe Records. The words that keep coming to mind as she ponders a name for it are also pointed and telling: freedom, safety, joy.
“This record is my little wild child,” she said, describing Gag Order as a way to give voice to her more painful emotions. “I was really vulnerable. Now I’m really trying to make way for the bad b–ch. I’m giving her the moment — because we need the space to have all the emotions safely. I capture the empowered emotions, so that I can listen back to it when I’m not feeling that way.”
Psyched to be “100 percent in control of everything now,” Kesha said her new music mogul era is allowing her to do all the things: “ideating the song, writing the song, singing the song, comping the song, coproducing the song, marketing the song, designing what I’m wearing for the song.”
As evidenced by the bubbly playful vibe of her recent social media posts, Kesha is leaning into the meaning of her name in Russian (“innocent joy”) because, as she said, “my soul needs this album. I need to reclaim my joy. Because I fought so f–king hard for it.”
She also loves the fact that her fortitude and defiant spirit have clearly helped empower a new generation of strident female pop stars who are embracing their authenticity. “I do have a sense of feeling protective of young women in music. I really hope my joy can stand for others to know that it’s available to them and to not give up,” she said of the singers she often DMs to offer herself up for advice or a kind sounding board. “I enjoy feeling my power, which hasn’t been available to me for a really long time, and I’d love to give that gift to others if I can.”
She specifically shouts out Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp, referring to the latter as the “most genuinely cool, calm, unbothered, iconic pop girlie.” Kesha invited Rapp to perform with her in Brooklyn in Nov. 2023 and Rapp returned the favor at April’s Coachella Festival, where Kesha performed her Billboard Hot 100 topper “Tik Tok,” which pointedly featured a revised line dissing embattled hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was indicted on sex trafficking charges last month amid a dozen lawsuits alleging sexual assault and harassment; Diddy has denied the charges.
Though Roan drew attention for playing to what was described as the biggest daytime crowd in Lollapalooza history this summer, Kesha said she could sense the stress the “Hot To Go” singer was likely feeling during a moment many saw as a dream scenario.
“Kesha was so lovely to me after my Lollapalooza set,” Roan told the magazine. “Because with that huge of a crowd, maybe only five other people there understood what that’s like. Kesha came to talk to me after, and it felt like a big sister was helping me through it. Me and Reneé were crying because we felt like we were seen in a way we never had been before. Kesha has always stood up for women and what she believes in and that’s very inspiring.”
“I try not to listen to pop radio, ever,” Amy Allen proclaims as she scrolls through Spotify on her phone. The singer-songwriter is recapping her recent listening: She has been on a Vince Gill kick; she always has The Cardigans in rotation; she recently discovered Donna Summer’s 1974 single “Lady of the Night”; she’s a fan of indie star Adrianne Lenker of the band Big Thief. Allen goes for early-morning runs on the boardwalks of Venice Beach in Los Angeles near her home, and while she used to soundtrack them with a classic rock playlist, for the past six months she has been blasting ABBA’s greatest hits, starting each morning jogging to “Dancing Queen” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”
Allen has plenty of pop radio classics in her queue — but new pop is never in the mix. “It’s a very concerted effort I make to not do that, and to try to be influenced by things that I love and not what’s current,” Allen explains, “because what’s current now is not going to be current by the time anything I write comes out.”
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Whether she hears today’s biggest hits or not, Allen is now the one doing the influencing when it comes to the shape of current pop. After years of bouncing around the industry and absorbing sonic ideas, the 32-year-old from a small town in Maine has found her niche in studio sessions with superstars, braiding her appreciation of dense lyricism and 2000s bubblegum — “I’ve always loved a big pop chorus and I’ve always loved intricate storytelling,” she says — into an ability to create hits perfectly suited for the TikTok era, but likely to last long beyond it.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, which spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 following its August release, has been Allen’s highest-profile win as a co-writer to date, with three smash singles (“Espresso,” “Taste” and Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Please Please Please”) full of idiosyncratic one-liners that have helped augment Carpenter’s inventive wit and transform her into an arena headliner. Yet Allen’s studio résumé preceding that breakthrough — credits on songs by Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake, Jonas Brothers, Maren Morris, Koe Wetzel and Niall Horan over the past 18 months alone — underline her status as a collaborator who helps A-listers at all stages of their careers land the right level of emotional punch and unlock the viral-ready turns of phrase that will transform a song into not only a hit, but a cultural moment.
“She knows how to articulate feelings in a way that most writers would envy,” says Tate McRae, who tapped Allen for the majority of her 2023 album, Think Later, including its slippery rhythmic-pop hit “Greedy,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100. “I feel incredibly lucky to have written my last album with Amy, and I sincerely look forward to all that is to come together in the future.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Two years after landing her first songwriter of the year, non-classical nomination at the Grammy Awards (she was one of the inaugural nominees for the relatively new honor), Allen seems like a shoo-in to get a nod for the 2025 ceremony — and potentially become the first woman to take home the prize — thanks to the whirlwind success of her past year. Yet her manager, Gabz Landman, points out that, even if Allen is now hitting critical mass, she was a force in the songwriting world years before she was nabbing headlines, now six years removed from co-writing her first Hot 100 No. 1, Halsey’s “Without Me,” and two years after winning an album of the year Grammy for contributing to Harry Styles’ Harry’s House.
“She was an athlete growing up and still runs marathons, and I think a big part of her writing career is this incredible stamina,” says Landman, who’s also a vp of A&R at Warner Chappell Music. “Amy doesn’t quantify or feel proud of things based on chart metrics. She gets contacted by many people to collaborate, and it’s always about whether she’s inspired by [an opportunity] more than ‘What is this person’s standing in the music industry?’ ”
That outlook helps explain why, days after Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet gave Allen a dozen new Hot 100 writing credits, she independently released a self-titled solo album of her own: a 12-song set full of quiet arrangements and understated melodies that sound as far removed from top 40 as possible. The project is the opposite of an iron-hot cash grab — Allen says that some of its songs date back to six years ago, before her songwriting career took off, and they were too meaningful to leave unreleased.
“One of the reasons why I love Amy is because I really see the both-ness in her — she’s a songwriter and she’s a solo artist,” says Jack Antonoff, another studio whiz who also releases his own music with Bleachers. After Antonoff and Allen worked on four songs together for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” he invited her to open for Bleachers overseas during their summer tour. Allen will also support the band at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4.
For Allen, her co-writing career and solo work represent two separate parts of her creativity and manifest through disparate processes. “When I’m writing with and for somebody else, I always start with the chorus — listening back to the great pop songs of the ’60s and ’70s through today, the chorus is the crux of the song,” she says. “When I’m writing by myself, I always start with the first verse and I just tell the story in a through line, start to finish. That helps me keep them separate, and it allows me to still keep falling in love with songwriting all the time.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Allen didn’t know which musical role she wanted to play when she was growing up in Windham, Maine: Her first experience performing was in her older sister’s band, which needed a bassist and tapped Allen, even though she was 9 and had never played the instrument. After kicking around the music scene in nearby Portland as a teenager, Allen went to nursing school at Boston College (“As a mistake,” she quips) before transferring to Berklee College of Music, despite not knowing any theory or even how to read sheet music.
“I was literally failing all of my classes,” Allen recalls, “but I could at least skate by in some of the songwriter classes. The class that helped me the most was actually this poetry class, where we studied great lyricists and poets. Something in my brain clicked about lyric writing, the cadence of rhymes and lines — the little things that might make people roll their eyes and be like, ‘Oh, that’s so songwriter-y.’ ”
After graduating, Allen fronted the pop-rock group Amy & The Engine, playing around New York in the mid-2010s before the band broke up and she committed to sharpening her skills as a solo writer. In late 2017, Allen was packing up for a West Coast move, and in her final New York session, she presented songwriter Micah Premnath with a melodic concept that had been stuck in her head — which, after some lyrical workshopping, morphed into “Back to You,” a top 20 hit for Selena Gomez. Soon after Allen touched down in Los Angeles, she linked with producer-songwriter Louis Bell to help make “Without Me,” then contributed to Styles’ “Adore You,” which turned into his first Pop Airplay chart-topper as a solo artist.
Allen’s transition from fledgling writer to hit-maker may have been sudden, but she had been studying the greats for a while. She grew up admiring Carole King, John Prine, Dolly Parton and Tom Petty, while also analyzing Max Martin’s pristinely crafted hits for Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. By the time she attended Berklee, Allen had started to identify her favorite studio minds and study their discographies. “I remember listening to my favorite pop songs, and Julia Michaels was behind all of them — it was like, ‘Who is this chick that is soundtracking my college years?’ ” she recalls with a laugh. Now Allen and Michaels share credits on five Short n’ Sweet tracks and sing background vocals together on the song “Coincidence.” (Allen also harmonizes with Carpenter on “Espresso.”)
Amy Allen photographed on August 20, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Like Michaels, Allen has developed a knack for taking straightforward lyrical phrases and contorting them until they stick in your cerebrum — think Carpenter declaring, “That’s that me, espresso,” or McRae exclaiming, “Obvious that you want me, but/I would want myself.” While Allen says she would probably have more 10-second hooks at the ready if she paid closer attention to TikTok, the majority of her biggest co-written choruses have resulted from actual conversations with artists — common ground discovered, then whittled down into universal refrains.
“Production trends turn over and change every six months, in my opinion,” she says. “But I think a great song, if it’s stripped down to guitar and piano, melody and lyric — it doesn’t change a ton.”
With Carpenter — whom Allen started working with for her last album, 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, contributing extra bite to tracks like “Vicious” and “Feather” — Allen has found a confidante and kindred spirit, unafraid to embrace a double entendre or, in the case of the “Please Please Please” chorus, a well-placed “motherf–ker.” Antonoff says that he, Allen and Carpenter knocked out three songs for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” in a single day together at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, often taking breaks to double over in laughter. “The depth of the d-ck jokes just goes on and on,” he says, “and then a song can happen randomly — that’s the magic of a studio space.”
Short n’ Sweet earned 1.2 million equivalent album units in just its first three weeks out, according to Luminate, with 11 of its 12 tracks reaching the Hot 100’s top 40. Allen says there are “so many reasons why I feel like I owe Sabrina my first-born child,” but the album’s commercial success isn’t the biggest one.
“Her musicality and personality blow me away every time that we work together,” she says of Carpenter, “but I’m also so grateful to her because I’ve never gotten to be part of every song on an album before. That’s so in line with what I grew up loving — digging in like that.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Landman notes that one sign of Allen’s growth is her increased involvement in major pop projects beyond a co-write or two: Along with all of Short n’ Sweet, she contributed to six songs on Timberlake’s Everything I Thought It Was, six on Wetzel’s 9 Lives and eight on McRae’s Think Later. Landman chalks that up to two reasons: She picked the right collaborators, and, post-pandemic and post-Zoom sessions, in-person studio hangs have let her personality shine. “She’s had a great rapport with so many artists that have turned into friendships,” Landman says. “And I think that people have noted [that] if you’re winning with somebody, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Allen is heeding that advice as she continues picking up co-writing projects and supporting her self-titled solo debut. Releasing an album under her own name has made her realize that the paths can coexist after previously thinking it impossible. “The last year-and-a-half has made it crystal clear in my brain that I only live once, so why do I have to pick?” she says.
Allen likens the balancing act to the way that any songwriter must find a happy medium between working at a breakneck pace and accruing enough life experiences to have something to write about. Amid a whirlwind professional year, “in terms of taking time off, I’ve done that more this year than any other year in my life,” Allen says. “And I’ve been writing my favorite songs I’ve ever written.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
The back room of New York City’s Heaven Can Wait doesn’t usually have a name, but on a breezy September evening, it has become the “Chaos Room.”
Red streamers, moody lighting and torn-out pieces of notebook paper with the words “I’M YOUR GIRL” scrawled across them adorn the walls. And sitting on a small side table is a portable Studebaker CD player, with a set of instructions set to its side.
“‘I’m really excited to share this project with you all, hope you love it,’” Orla Gartland reads aloud, giggling to herself as she arrives at the final sentence. “‘Please don’t take the CDs.’ God, I hope they read that part.”
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Gartland has good reason to feel protective over the disc — on it is the entirety of her sophomore album, Everybody Needs a Hero (out Oct. 4 via New Friends). She’s invited an intimate group of her stateside fans to come listen to the project and watch her perform stripped-down versions of a few of its tracks. Before the cozy club’s doors even opened, the Irish singer-songwriter had already greeted some of the attendees queued up outside.
“They are so cute,” she says. “Someone made a badge of my face! I was like, ‘Oh my God, you really put that in your badge machine?’ I respect it.”‘
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It’s an auspicious moment for the 29-year-old: since sharing her first cover on YouTube back in the late 2000s, Gartland has spent the last decade-and-change steadily growing a dedicated online following. With a penchant for confessional lyrics speaking directly to the generational experience of growing up online, she’s developed a reputation for her DIY approach to crafting emotionally arresting pop songs.
There’s still much of that homemade spirit present on Everybody Needs a Hero — Gartland is listed as a writer and co-producer on each of the album’s 12 tracks. But the LP trades in the quieter sensibilities of a young woman singing acoustic songs in her bedroom for bold, bombastic pieces of production. Blaring guitars and clashing drums are paired, and piercing synths turn up the volume on Gartland’s alt-pop, making for a dynamic project exploring the inherent chaos of romance.
“When I was younger, I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome, where [I] felt inferior in certain spaces. This time, I was willing to take up more space, willing to commit to things, whether it was a guitar tone or a vocal,” she explains. “I was ready to push myself, and be a bit more indulgent; now I just love the drama more and apologize less.”
Where her critically acclaimed debut album Woman on the Internet leaned into softer, more detached songs about the trials and tribulations of twenty-something life, Gartland aimed to make the entirety of her second album revolve around one of her last long-term relationships, tracking all of its complexity in a single LP. As she explains, “I wanted the good, the bad and the very ugly.”
With that approach came an understanding of what Gartland felt was missing in a lot of pop music: nuance. “I think some pop music has a tendency to dumb things down, to be honest. It’s either ‘I love you,’ or ‘I want to break up with you,’ or ‘I’m so much better without you,’” she says. “My experience is so much more mushy and conflicted than that, and I’m much more interested in that as an idea. All of these feelings can co-exist, they do not cancel each other out.”
Throughout the 12-song LP, Gartland deftly handles themes of baggage (“Late to the Party”), self-doubt (“Backseat Driver”), manic decision-making (“Three Words Away”), being the messy one in the relationship (“Little Chaos”) and much more. When constructing the tracklist, she says that she thought about the “seasons” of a relationship, from the “reluctance and excitement” of spring, all the way through to the “humbling moments of embracing the darkness” in winter.
That thematic approach marks a pointed departure from Gartland’s past work. Starting in 2009, Gartland — then a 14-year-old living Drumcondra, a Northern suburb of Dublin — started posting cover songs to YouTube. Armed with only with a guitar, a camera and her distinct voice, Gartland covered everyone from Natalie Imbruglia and Fleetwood Mac to Lorde and Charli XCX before graduating to releases of her original songs.
Where most people look back on their earliest days on the internet with utter embarrassment, Gartland feels a sense of pride. Sure, there are some old videos that make her cringe (“I really thought everyone needed to hear my Nelly Furtado cover,” she winces), but she acknowledges that her time spent as a self-described “YouTube girlie” molded her into the artist she is now.
“At one point I really resented the YouTube stigma — I was worried that I wasn’t going to be taken seriously,” she says. “But I realized that, at least with putting music online, you are the master of your own destiny. It’s not like going on The Voice or American Idol; those shows are great for the right kinds of artists, but you have so little autonomy in how you are presented. I feel very grateful, even more so in hindsight, that it’s been a slow, steady marathon, not a sprint. I feel so lucky to have been in control.”
Moving to London at age 18, Gartland began to pursue her artistry professionally in what she lovingly refers to as the “garage years” of her career. “If you think about the trope of a band practicing in their garage, that’s what that was,” she says. “You get to have your garage years before you get to play your first live show. But when you grow up on YouTube, your garage years are online and readily available for everyone to see, which can be weird!”
During that time, Gartland met and befriended Lauren Aquilina, a fellow artist with a YouTube following looking to find a career in the music business. Aquilina would go on to live with Gartland for five years while breaking into the music industry as a sought-after songwriter, working with artists including Demi Lovato, Rina Sawayama, LE SSERAFIM, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and others.
Despite their shared aspirations, Gartland says that before she began working on Everybody Needs a Hero, she never wrote with her former roommate. “I have never been more nervous to ask anyone to write a song with me, because the closeness can make it harder,” she says. “It actually turned out to be just the most effortless thing in the world — you skip the whole ‘getting acquainted’ phase, where this person just knows your humor, they know the chords that you like. You get to feel very heard.”
Orla Gartland
Finnegan Travers
As Gartland began releasing a string of singles and EPs in the mid-2010s, she decided to start a Patreon for her fans, creating a curated community where experimentation was encouraged. For the last seven years, Gartland has been releasing one demo per month to her loyal subscribers, a move she says proved to be the most beneficial collaboration of her career.
“Sometimes [the feedback from fans] is like, ‘This is great,’ and other times it’s like, ‘The second verse could be better,’” she explains. “I’m up for their critiques, because those are the people that I want to come to shows. I want them to feel like they’re a part of the process.”
While the development of an engaged fan community has been crucial to the rising singer-songwriter’s success, Gartland admits that audience growth was something she rarely found herself strategizing about. What sets her fandom apart, she says, is the importance she places on the people who already follow her.
“I have a strong sense of what the people who already listen to my music want. I care about them the most,” she explains. “If I manage to catch some passing traffic and it grows a little bit, then great. But I think my response is to listen to the audience I have.”
Gartland experienced the highs of finding viral success in 2022, when her song “Why Am I Like This?” received a prominent sync on the first season of Netflix’s Heartstopper, soundtracking an episode-closing scene in which main character Nick (Kit Connor) begins to question his sexuality. The song quickly picked up steam online, earning Gartland her first entry on a Billboard chart when the track peaked at No. 4 on the Top TV Songs chart in April 2022.
But Gartland still flinches at the idea of the immediate, viral fame that apps like TikTok can occasionally provide to artists. “I’ve had a couple friends who had big surges of attention in one way or another, and it seems like that can be really hard,” she says.
Though the singer has a steady presence on the app, she says that she tries to keep the social media facets of her job at an arm’s length. “You cannot be an independent artist and be above doing a few TikToks,” she says with a sigh. “Even though I grew up online to a degree, some of it feels like work. Some of it I really have to motivate myself to do. But, I see [TikTok] as a useful tool more than anything else.”
As she considers the role of TikTok in the modern music business, Gartland mimes a U-shape in front of her face. “I see the whole album cycle as a horseshoe. The bits that I love are at the top,” she says, pointing to the upper prongs of the invisible arc. “That’s writing, recording and being in the studio on one side, and then touring at the end once everyone’s heard it.” Her fingers then follow the horseshoe down to its lowest curve. “It’s everything in between that feels difficult — filming myself miming a song I’ve listened to one million times can get very annoying.”
After spending 2023 working with her friends Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown in the glam-pop supergroup FIZZ, Gartland had a renewed taste for the dramatic. Working in a band proved to be an important learning experience for Gartland, and a welcome break from the pure ego of a solo career.
“With my own music, there’s this very direct ownership to it all. You have nothing to hide behind, and you’re thinking about yourself a lot, which feels very odd,” she explains. “There was something really fun about FIZZ — the goal was literally to just have fun and be theatrical, be camp. There was almost a cockiness to it that feels so much easier. The otherness of it made it much easier to lean in.”
While she reached one end of the horseshoe with FIZZ in 2023 — the group played multiple festivals and embarked on a 7-date U.K. tour — Gartland found herself at the other end in her solo career. Teaming up with Aquilina, her longtime co-producer Tom Stafford and FIZZ co-producer Peter Miles, Gartland began to craft her sophomore opus.
On the album’s closing, cathartic title track, Gartland arrives at something of a thesis statement. Over loud, fuzzy guitars, Gartland narrates a story of trying and failing to look brave in front of her ex, finally crumbling and asking for support as they navigate their breakup. “Honey, I don’t have much time/ My parachute has come untied/ I need you to hold me/ Stroke my hair and tell me it’ll be alright,” Gartland sings on the emotionally raw chorus.
“I’d been thinking a lot about superheroes at the time — not in the Marvel sense, but in the sense that I observe in myself and in a lot of my female friends this want to do it all,” she explains of the song. “This wanting to be a great friend to everyone, and to be good with your family, and thriving in your career and everything else. I liked the idea of the self-appointed hero; this slightly manic girl trying to do it all, and saving everyone but herself.”
As an artist who spent much of her creative life showing others what “doing it yourself” can look like, Gartland acknowledges that the “self-appointed hero” can easily serve as a stand-in for herself. But as she looks ahead in her career, the singer says she’s not interested in becoming pop music’s new champion, especially if that means signing to a major label. Thanks to the work of artists like Taylor Swift, Gartland says she doesn’t feel the pressure to sign anywhere offering her anything less than ideal terms.
“I think in a post-Taylor’s Version world, the signal-boosting of what it actually means to own your own masters, what it means to be locked into a record contract, to be shelved — all of this jargon is out there now, and it’s really good for artists,” she says. “You’re seeing it happen now with RAYE, where there are all of these artists who are really proudly independent and thriving, and I’m just really happy to see it.”
That same concept, she says, applies to the trajectory of Gartland’s future career aspirations. “I would much rather have a slow rise at a glacial, snail’s pace, as long as it’s heading in the right direction and it’s sticking around,” she offers. “If I can do it on my own terms, then that’s f–king excellent.”
Fat Joe’s commitment to healthcare price transparency is unwavering. With 32 days until the presidential election, the Bronx native is launching a PSA calling on elected officials to stop the price gouging and “robbing all of us.”
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The 54-year-old is looking to bring the power back to the people and is putting pressure on those in office. Teaming up with unions, workers and employers, Fat Joe’s healthcare price transparency PSA went live on Thursday (Oct. 3).
“To every elected official and politician in America, the people stand united,desperate for you to listen,” he says in the spot. “If you’re not advocating for prices and transparency in healthcare, you’re compromising every single American across this country.”
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Joe continues: “Because when we can’t see prices, hospitals, insurers, and their middlemen charge us whatever they want. Our very own healthcare system is robbing all of us. We just need the prices. That’s how our economy works!”
With more than 100 million Americans mired in medical debt, the “Lean Back” rapper hopes to see political leaders take a more honest approach when it comes to crafting a more affordable health care system.
“If you want to do right by workers, employers, and unions, then you’ve gotta to do right by the people they represent and the families who depend upon them,” Joe, 54, (born Joseph Cartagena) demands. “And we gotta hear it. Prices now! Power to the Patients.”
Fat Joe’s latest PSA is part of an ongoing advocacy campaign with Power to the Patients looking to garner even more momentum toward significant legislative change for Americans. Before leaving office in 2021, President Donald Trump’s executive order went into effect requiring hospitals to make prices of health services publicly available.
President Joe Biden followed-up with an executive order of his own in 2023 demanding that the Department of Health and Human Services enforce it. However, a nonprofit called Patient Rights Advocate discovered that most American hospitals are refusing to comply with the rules outlined.
Watch the clip below.
Three decades after its original run on the Billboard Hot 100, Alphaville’s “Forever Young” is No. 1 on a Billboard chart, reigning over the TikTok Billboard Top 50 tally dated Oct. 5.
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The TikTok Billboard Top 50 is a weekly ranking of the most popular songs on TikTok in the United States based on creations, video views and user engagement. The latest chart reflects activity from Sept. 23-29. Activity on TikTok is not included in Billboard charts except for the TikTok Billboard Top 50.
“Forever Young” sported its original Hot 100 run over a three-week period in spring 1985, during which it peaked at No. 93. It returned to the ranking in 1988-89 following a re-release, rising as high as No. 65 in December 1988. 2024 marks the song’s 40-year anniversary, as it was released on Alphaville’s self-titled debut album in September 1984.
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Alphaville has reigned on a Billboard chart once before; “Big in Japan” topped Dance Club Songs for two weeks in 1984.
“Forever Young” ties Jordan Adetunji’s “Kehlani” for the longest amount of weeks between TikTok Billboard Top 50 debut and first week at No. 1 since the list’s September 2023 inception. It reigns in its 10th week on the survey after initially debuting on the Aug. 3 ranking. It had reached a new peak of No. 2 on the Sept. 28 chart.
The song is used in a variety of ways on TikTok. Trends include edits of fictional characters (many of whom died young), inward-looking content about aging and reminiscing about younger days, a choreographed theme where one creator picks up the other and spins them around while spraying a water bottle in slow motion, and more.
Over the last few weeks, “Forever Young” has also returned to Billboard’s Alternative Digital Song Sales charts thanks to the TikTok resurgence; it appears at No. 10 on the latest survey via 1,000 downloads in the week ending Sept. 26, according to Luminate. It also pulled 2.1 million official U.S. streams in that span.
The TikTok Billboard Top 50 coronation of “Forever Young” comes ahead of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter’s “By the Sea,” from the soundtrack to the 2007 film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which vaults 32-2 in its second week on the chart.
The trend on the 17-year-old song? Generally lip-synching to the song’s opening “Ooh, Mr. Todd/ I’m so happy/ I could eat you up, I really could” lyric, while others skip the lip-synching and simply kiss someone or something to Bonham-Carter’s cues from the tune.
Another debut from the Sept. 28 chart, NLE Choppa and 41‘s “Or What,” ranks within the top three for the first time, jumping 44-3, mostly via lip-synching uploads. The song was released Sept. 6 and earned 3.2 million streams in the week ending Sept. 26, up 73%.
Odetari’s “Keep Up” (No. 14), leaps into the top four, rising 14-4 in its second week on the list. It ties Odetari’s top-performing song on the tally, equaling the No. 4 peak of “I Love You Hoe,” co-billed with 9Lives, in September 2023.
Released in mid-July, “Keep Up” has exploded in recent weeks thanks to a dance trend. It concurrently hits a new peak of No. 6 on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, accumulating 5.8 million streams, up 39%, as the ranking’s greatest gainer in that metric.
IV of Spades’ “Come Inside of My Heart,” the previous No. 3 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50, rounds out the top five, while Ken Carson’s “Overseas” jumps 23-6 in its second week, nearly six months after its April release.
Carson’s TikTok success with “Overseas” is owed mostly to lip synchs, usually to the song’s lyric of “That boy repeat everything he hear like a parrot, he a b–ch/ The last b–ch I broke up with slit her wrist.”
“Overseas” earned 3.2 million streams in the week ending Sept. 26, a gain of 7%.
Two more songs hit the top 10 of the TikTok Billboard Top 50 for the first time: Freak Nasty’s “Da’ Dip” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” at Nos. 7-9, respectively. “Or What” is led by lip synchs and “Da’ Dip” by a dance trend (notable since the song, which peaked on the Hot 100 at No. 15 in 1997, is inherently named for a dance), while “Deja Vu” gains from the “and suddenly” trend.
See the full TikTok Billboard Top 50 here. You can also tune in each Friday to SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio (channel 4) to hear the premiere of the chart’s top 10 countdown at 3 p.m. ET, with reruns heard throughout the week.
Four women have been there for Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez and Travis Kelce on their respective rises to superstardom over the years, and they aren’t their agents, managers or publicists. They’re their moms.
Tina Knowles, Maggie Baird, Mandy Teefey and Donna Kelce got a rare moment in the spotlight on Thursday (Oct. 3) with the publication of Glamour‘s new Women of the Year cover story, which features all four of the women posing together. In a group discussion, the quartet opened up about the best and worst parts of parenting kids who become globally famous, from watching their children perform in front of thousands of people to feeling limited on when and where they can go without being bombarded by fans and paparazzi.
At one point, Knowles and Teefey — moms to Bey and the Wizards of Waverly Place alum, respectively — bonded over making sure their daughters didn’t turn into divas despite finding fame as teenagers.
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“We had some moments where I was like, ‘Listen, they can pick up their own suitcases,’” Knowles recalled of the “Break My Soul” singer. “’You look people in the eye, say hello, don’t turn into a diva. That’s not going to work here.’ You have to teach your kids that … because everybody’s trying to handle everything for them and kissing their butts sometimes. And I am like, ‘No, no, no, you’re not helpless.’”
Teefey had a similar story about Gomez. “She was getting out of the trailer, and there was an umbrella, and they were holding it for her, and then they were bringing her food and all this stuff,” the producer told the other three moms. “I was like, ‘She can hold her own umbrella.’ She needs to learn how to pump her own gas in her car. She needs to be a person first.”
Baird — mom to the “Bad Guy” musician as well as producer Finneas — and NFL matriarch Kelce also found common ground when talking about their family’s home lives pre-fame. “My husband and I are working class actors,” Support + Feed founder Baird said. “We eked out a meager living, and it afforded us a lot of time with our kids, which was awesome. But the industry is primarily people like us or even people not even like us who couldn’t even do that. So when all of this happened to our kids, we’d never been on that side of it.”
“It was like, ‘Oh, Billie is a nepo baby,’” Baird added of the internet’s past response to finding out she was an actress. “And I’m like, ‘Did you know that I got that episode of Friends because I was about to lose my health insurance?’”
“I was a commercial banker for a bank in several different states,” said Kelce, who shares both Travis and retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce with ex-husband Ed Kelce. “I was a major breadwinner in the family… My husband and I knew that our marriage was not working, but we stayed together for the kids. Ours was a very friendly relationship. So, we could do that and make sure that their life was normal as possible.”
The interview comes as the Kansas City Chiefs tight end is at peak levels of fame, thanks in large part to his romance with Taylor Swift. The same could be said for Bey, Gomez and Eilish as well, with the Destiny’s Child star garnering Grammy buzz for her latest Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, the Rare Beauty founder recently crossing into billionaire status and the “Happier Than Ever” artist embarking on a global arena tour over the weekend.
After the Glamour cover story came out, Gomez shared it on her Instagram Story and wrote, “Congratulations mommy.”
See Knowles, Baird, Teefey and Donna Kelce on the cover of Glamour below.
On Thursday (Oct. 3), one day before first-round voting opens for the 67th annual Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy released its 2024 Membership Report. The most eye-popping statistic: 66% of the current Grammys electorate has joined since the Recording Academy introduced its new membership model in June 2019. Under that model, the academy invites large new member classes to join, with an eye on boosting the numbers of women, people of color and people under 40 in the academy.
Thus, the voting membership that delivered album, record and song of the year to Adele in 2017 and those same three awards to Bruno Mars in 2018 is much different today. We started to see a shift in voting patterns in February 2019, even before the new membership model was introduced, when Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” became the first hip-hop hit to win record or song of the year. (It won both.) That same year, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour won album of the year.
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Since 2019, approximately 8,700 creators have become voting members of the Recording Academy. Of that total, more than 2,000 joined just this year. There are now more than 13,000 total voting members, according to the Academy.
Other key takeaways from the report include:
Boosting Numbers of Women
In 2019, the Recording Academy set an ambitious goal to add 2,500 women voting members by 2025. With a year to go, the Academy has already surpassed this goal, adding more than 3,000 women voting members. Since 2019, the percentage of women voting members has grown by 27%.
Increasing Racial Diversity
The Academy reports that the percentage of people of color has grown by 65% since 2019 among voting members. Since 2019:
The percentage of Black or African American+ members has grown by 90%.
The percentage of Hispanic or Latin+ members has grown by 43%.
The percentage of AAPI+ (Asian American or Pacific Islander) members has doubled, reflecting a 100% increase.
The current voting membership, counting the new voting members added this year, is 49% white or Caucasian; 38% people of color; and 13% prefer not to disclose or unknown. That “people of color” slice breaks down like this: 19% Black or African American+; 10% Hispanic or Latin+; 4% Asian or Pacific Islander; 2% prefer to self-describe; and other smaller slices.
The current voting membership is 66% men; 28% women; 6% prefer not to disclose/unknown; and other, smaller slices.
Too Much Jazz. Not Enough Country
By genre, the current voting membership is 27% pop; 19% jazz; 17% R&B; 17% rock; 13% American roots; 13% alternative; 12% classical; 10% global music; 10% Latin music; 10% other; 10% rap; 9% dance/electronic; 9% country; 8% gospel/Christian; 8% visual media; 7% contemporary instrumental; 5% new age; 4% children’s; 4% musical theatre; 3% reggae; 3% spoken word; and 1% comedy. (Members could select more than one genre.)
Jazz and classical are overrepresented, relative to their share of the music market. Country lags behind its share of the music market.
By area of specialization, the current voting membership is 46% songwriters/composers; 33% producers; 33% instrumentalists; 32% vocalists; 19% engineers; 12% arrangers; 6% other; 4% music video; 3% album packaging; 3% album notes writers; 2% music supervisors; 2% conductors; 2% spoken word.
In a letter accompanying the release of the report, Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in part: “The Recording Academy membership has never been more reflective of the music community than it is today. It has more women, more People of Color, and a broad representation of diverse genres and crafts. But we’re not just celebrating numbers. Our organization has been fundamentally transformed by this extraordinary infusion of new talent, making us an unquestionably better, stronger, more successful, and more impactful organization.
“And we’re not done yet. Even though we’ve made huge strides towards creating a diverse and representative membership body, there is still much work to be done. We want to recruit more young voters, because the future of music is in their hands. We want to see an increase in the percentage of women and people of color, because our goal must always be to accurately represent our community.
“And as we globalize our mission, we want a membership body that reflects every corner of the music world.”
Mason added some specifics in an interview with Billboard this week. “It’s been a very intentional effort to try and make sure that our membership is the most relevant, the most diverse. …We’re not just trying to build numbers. We’re looking at, what is the music community made up of? … A big goal for us is to make sure that we’re matching or coming close to the community that makes music. That’s not the same as the general population of our country. We know that R&B/hip-hop is roughly 33%-34% of all music created and consumed. We know what the numbers are for Latin music, women, and other groups. We have a rough idea of what the numbers feel like.”
On July 26, Mason sent a pointed letter, via email, to the Academy’s voting members, “It’s about the current year and the quality of the work, period!,” he implored. “There should be no other rationale for voting. If you are taking into account an artist’s older work, or their reputation, or race, or gender, what label they are on, who their manager is, how many friends participated in the project, or anything else like that, you’re not doing your job.”
Talking to Billboard, Mason expressed a little more sympathy for members who may be inclined to take other factors into account, though he again said he hoped the focus would be on the music. “Voters have their own ideas around how they vote and what they chose to vote for and we want to give them some latitude to be able to do that but it’s my hope and I believe it’s the Academy’s desire that our voters will evaluate the music based on the merit of that music exclusively. It’s not about past sins [of the academy]. It’s not about genre representation. It’s really about the quality of the music. My hope is that people listen to the music and evaluate it based on the merits.”
At another point in the conversation, he said “The whole idea of this membership [drive] is not just to hit numbers, it’s to try to get the right results and the right outcome.”
Asked to be more specific about that statement, Mason said, “I’m not saying the positive result is any specific album or genre winning any specific award. I’m just looking for accuracy and relevance and making sure the outcomes are reflective of what’s happening in music. I don’t care what genre that is. I’m definitely not looking at making reparations [for past Grammy outcomes]. I’m just saying the outcomes for our academy … are all driven by our membership and if we have the right membership, we’re a better organization.”
First-round voting for the Grammy Awards opens on Friday Oct. 4 at 9 a.m. PT, and closes on Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. PT. Grammy nominees will be announced on Nov. 8. Final-round voting will be held from Dec. 12 to Jan. 3. All voting members, including those welcomed in the 2024 new class, are eligible to participate in the voting process. The 67th annual Grammy Awards will be held on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The host has yet to be named. Trevor Noah hosted the last four Grammy telecasts.
The 66th annual Grammy Awards were held on Sunday, Feb. 4. Ben Winston, Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins were executive producers. Hamish Hamilton directed. The show received a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding variety program (live), but lost to The Oscars (which was also executive produced by Kapoor). The Recording Academy has yet to announce the host, producer or director of the 2025 show.
Mexican music merges with rap in Fuerza Regida‘s groundbreaking new project. The entrepreneurs of the San Bernardino band announced their inaugural Don’t Fall In Love Fest on Thursday (Oct. 3), a nod to their latest Jersey corridos album Pero No Te Enamores — an album that blends Jersey club and hip-hop with a corridos bélicos mindset.
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A homecoming of sorts, the Nov. 2 event at the NOS Event Center will be Fuerza Regida’s first performance in their hometown of San Bernardino since 2018.
The festival that the group will headline showcase a dynamic array of stars from both the OG Cali rap scene, hip-hop new heads and Latin music superstars. The lineup includes high-profile names such as Lil Baby, Kodak Black, and Luis R Conriquez, alongside Chino Pacas, Sexy Red, Xavi, and Clave Especial. Also gracing the stage will be Los Rieleros del Norte, Mi Banda El Mexicano, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Too $hort, Roberto Tapia, Larry Hernandez, MC Magic, Baby Bash, and Lil Rob.
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Additionally, another major headliner will be revealed on Monday (Oct. 7).
“I wanted to do something big for San Bernardino,” said Fuerza Regida frontman JOP (real name Jesús Ortiz Paz) in a press release. “I’m bringing hope to the city with this festival.”
The SoCal band have earned plenty of critical praise. The group are finalists for eight 2024 Billboard Latin Music Awards, including Artist of the Year, Top Latin Album of the Year and Regional Mexican Album of the Year for their 2023 Pa Las Baby’s Y La Belikeada, and more. Additionally, JOP is up for Songwriter of the Year and Producer of the Year. Last year, the quintet made Billboard history by becoming the first Latin band ever to be crowned No. 1 on the Top Artists – Duo/Group list of Billboard‘s year-end charts.
See the full lineup below:
JOP will star on the The Sony Music Publishing Icon panel, presented by Sony Music Publishing during the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Week, taking place on October 14-18 at the Fillmore Miami Beach. Get your tickets here.