State Champ Radio Pop
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Sir Rod Stewart called off his planned residency show at the Colosseum in Las Vegas on Sunday night (June 1) just hours before set time due to an unspecified illness. The 80-year-old singer pulled out of the show around 6 p.m. local time, with less than four hours to go, according to the Las Vegas […]
Alex Warren and Jelly Roll went all the way back to the Middle Ages in a music video for their new single “Bloodline.” Released Friday (May 30), the clip begins with Warren barricaded inside a medieval tavern. According to a brawny extra, there’s apparently a dangerous war raging outside. “The enemy shall be upon us […]
The last week of May is coming to a close, and it’s shaped up to be a big one for pop music releases. Miley Cyrus leads the charge with a full album of new music that dropped Friday (May 30), Something Beautiful, featuring the singles “End of the World” and “More to Lose.” The high-energy […]
Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
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This week, Miley Cyrus finds new pop beauty, Lorde upends expectations and Tate McRae revs up for F1. Check out all of this week’s picks below:
Miley Cyrus, Something Beautiful
Drawing upon classic pop influences while also letting her freak flag fly, Miley Cyrus offers a singular accomplishment on Something Beautiful — moving on from 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation, which included the biggest hit of her career in “Flowers,” with her most satisfying front-to-back listen to date, unbothered with trying to recreate radio success but still finding revealing hooks along the way.
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Lorde, “Man of the Year”
In the past, Lorde has liked to preview a new album with an uptempo lead single and a ballad-leaning follow-up — think Melodrama with “Green Light” and “Liability,” or Solar Power with the title track and “Stoned at the Nail Salon” — but “Man of the Year,” which comes after the fleet-footed “What Was That,” is actually a red herring, starting off as a sparse reflection over bass plucks but then widening its stance, and ending with a fuzzed-out boom.
Tate McRae, “Just Keep Watching”
Continuing a year in which she’s leveled up as a pop star — as well as a week where she earned her first career Hot 100 chart-topper, alongside Morgan Wallen on “What I Want” — Tate McRae hops into the F1 soundtrack mobile with “Just Keep Watching,” a fast-moving club track with the type of quick-twitch percussion that could inspire more kinetic choreography if McRae incorporates the song into her live show.
Leon Thomas, MUTT Deluxe: HEEL
“MUTT” may have marked Leon Thomas’ arrival as a compelling new voice in popular R&B, its host album of the same name was just as sumptuous as its standout hit; now, MUTT contains even more acrobatic vocal takes by Thomas on its deluxe edition, which includes team-ups with Kehlani and Big Sean, as well as engrossing new solo cuts like “HEEL” and “NOT FAIR.”
Mt. Joy, Hope We Have Fun
The 2020s have seen indie rock quintet Mt. Joy continuously graduate to bigger touring venues, culminating in a Madison Square Garden headlining gig on their last live trek — and instead of simply acting as another excuse for the group to hit the road, new album Hope We Have Fun translates the band’s live energy to the studio, with songs like “Highway Queen” and “Pink Lady” jangling forward with blissed-out style.
Clipse, “Ace Trumpets”
In the 2000s, Virginia hip-hop duo Clipse would regularly release Pharrell Williams-produced bangers that made their listeners scrunch up their noses in delight; then, Malice quit music to explore religion, and his brother Pusha T moved on to solo stardom. Now, Clipse (and Pharrell) are back, recapturing the magic on “Ace Trumpets,” the head-knocking first track from long-awaited new album, Let God Sort Em Out.
Ava Max, “Lovin Myself”
Across pop hits like “Sweet But Psycho,” “My Head & My Heart” and “Kings & Queens,” Ava Max has prioritized electro-pop fun while offering a streak of self-empowerment; new single “Lovin Myself” doubles down on the second half of that equation, with the singer declaring, “I don’t need nobody, I’m lovin’ myself!” as warm synths rain down on her voice.
Editor’s Pick: Yeule, Evangelic Girl is a Gun
If Yeule’s 2022 album Glitch Princess was their critical breakthrough, Evangelic Girl is a Gun is the first time we receive a full glimpse of the daring singer-songwriter: the hyperpop from years past has morphed into trip-hop, alt-rock and affecting balladry, but across the most vulnerable lyricism of Yeule’s career, they still toss out mesmerizing pop ideas, as their song craft serves as a foundation for their roaming spirit.
Sabrina Carpenter will have plenty of support when she takes the stage for her two BST Hyde Park shows this summer. The two massive gigs will kick off on July 5 with a sold out show featuring support from Clairo, Beabadoobee, Amber Mark, Luvcat, Ider, Sofy, Dellaxoz, the Tulips and Sola.
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Carpenter be back the next night (July 6) with Clairo in tow as well, along with Olivia Dean, Amber Mark, Chloe Qisha, Ider, Miso Extra, Tanner Adell, Dellaxoz and The Tulips. You can also see Carpenter in Fortnight, where she will take over the Festival Jam Stage for the Dance With Sabrina interactive music experience beginning today (May 30) at 3 p.m. ET through June 16 at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Carpenter is part of a massive lineup for this summer’s BST Hyde Park gigs, which will also include Olivia Rodrigo taking the stage on June 27 with support from The Last Dinner Party, Girl in Red, Flowerlove, Between Friends, Caity Baser, Katie Gregson-Macleod, Ruti, Florence Road, Aziya and Déyyess.
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Other BST headliners include Zach Bryan — with Dermot Kennedy, Mt. Joy, Gabrielle Aplin, Turnpike Troubadours, Ole 60, Willow Avalon and others joining him on June 28 and 29 — as well as Noah Kahan (July 4) with Gracie Abrams, Finneas, Gigi Perez, Paris Paloma and more and Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts (July 11) with Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Van Morrison, Amble, Alice Merton, Naima Bock and others.
The BST shows will also include headliners Stevie Wonder (July 12) and Jeff Lynne’s ELO (July 13).
Check out the Carpenter BST Hyde Park show poster below.
Benson Boone has announced a run of arena dates in the U.K. and Ireland later this fall. The U.S. star’s run will kick off at Belfast’s SSE Arena on Oct. 23, before heading to Dublin’s 3Arena, the Co-op Live Arena in Manchester, Glasgow’s OVO Hydro, the Utilita Arena in Birmingham and closing with a two-night […]
Ranking the songs of a visual album can feel a bit like ranking scenes of a film — and yet, favorites always emerge. The scene that makes you weep, the one that motivates and inspires, or the one that reclaims power. With Something Beautiful, the ambitious and glamorous ninth album from superstar Miley Cyrus, she […]
In her seventh season of The Kelly Clarkson Show, the pop-star host finally covered Bonnie Tyler‘s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — a song that many consider to be the ultimate karaoke ballad — for her popular Kellyoke segment. Clarkson stayed true to the 1983 original for her two-minute cover on Thursday’s (May 29) episode, […]
It was the Year of Hootie: With grunge tailing off, country getting huge and top 40 starting to drift to a mellower and rootsier middle, an unassuming group of good-time frat-rockers became the biggest thing in 1995 popular music. After the mid-1994 release of Cracked Rear View started to spread from the Carolinas to the rest of the country, Hootie & the Blowfish dominated 1995 from front to back, with three top 10 hits, a guest (sort-of) appearance on the year’s hottest TV show, over 10 million in sales and nearly as many annoying questions about the band’s name. But within a couple years, the band’s quick fall from pop stardom would prove just as dramatic and difficult-to-explain as its rise.
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On this week’s Vintage Pop Stardom episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Billboard managing editor Christine Werthman, a member of the Blowfish’s school since ’95, to talk about the band’s unquestioned peak year of pop stardom. We talk about the many cultural and musical factors that led to the Hootie takeover — and still how improbable the sheer size and scope of it ended up being — as well as why it ultimately wasn’t built to last, and whether the band deserves better than they got in terms of their legacy in both rock and pop music.
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And of course, along the way, we ask all the big questions about Hootie & the Blowfish’s year as the big men on the pop-rock campus: Why did so many critics love to hate on Hootie? Is “Hold My Hand” more anthemic or simplistic? Did the SportsCenter anchors in the “Only Wanna Be With You” video go a little too hard with the catchphrases? Was an invisible Hootie cameo worth more to a ’90s sitcom than another band actually showing up? And of course: What kind of career could Hootie & the Blowfish have had if they had just gone with a different band name a decade earlier?
Check it out above — along with a YouTube playlist of some of the most important moments from Hootie’s 1995, all of which are discussed in the podcast — and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for weekly discussions every Thursday about all things related to pop stardom!
And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:
Transgender Law Center
Trans Lifeline
Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe
Also, please consider giving your local congresspeople a call in support of trans rights, with contact information you can find on 5Calls.org — and if you’re in the D.C. area this weekend (May 30-31), definitely check out Liberation Weekend, a music festival supporting trans rights with an incredible lineup of trans artists and allies.
Lorde has never been afraid of catharsis. The singer, literally, strips it down in the new video for her entrancing single “Man of the Year,” offering an unadorned version of herself as revealing as the song’s lyrics. In the striking visual directed by Grant Singer that dropped on Thursday morning (May 29), the 28-year-old vocalist is caught in close up, before the camera pans out to show her sitting on a stool in an empty loft while wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Glidin’ through on my bike, glidin’ through/ Like new from my recent ego death/ Sirens sing overnight, violent, sweet music/ You met me at a really strange time in my life/ Take my knife and I cut the cord,” she sings in a loud whisper over a gently plucked bass guitar. As she describes becoming “someone else,” someone she says is “more like myself,” Lorde strips off her shirt and covers her breasts with electrical tape in the prelude to a thrashing dance routine on a pile of sand spread out in a corner of the loft.
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The song co-produced by Lorde and Jim-E Stack — her main collaborator on the upcoming Virgin album due out on June 27 — builds from the alluring, subtle bass accompaniment to a noisy rumble as burbling keyboards and distant drums bubble up alongside cello from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes.
“Who’s gon’ love me like this?/ Oh-oh, oh, who could give me lightness?/ Way he flow down through me/ Love me like this/ Now I’m broken open/ Let’s hear it for the man of the year,” she sings on the chorus of second song released so far from the LP. “Man of the Year” follows April’s “What Was That,” which debuted at No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. In an Instagram post previewing the second single last week, Lorde wrote that it was an “offering from really deep inside me,” calling it the “song I’m proudest of on Virgin.”
In a recent Rolling Stone cover story, Lorde discussed writing “Man of the Year” after stopping her birth control for the first time since she was a teenager and realizing that her gender felt more fluid than she’d previously realized. Just before writing the song, she said she taped her own chest with duct tape — as in the video — in an effort to reach a vision of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment,” she told RS.
“I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she added. “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.” The unadorned “Man of the Year” look was previewed at this year’s Met Gala, where Lorde wore a strapless, slate-colored strip of fabric across her chest that she told Vogue was an “Easter egg” that “really represents where I’m at gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman kind of vibe.”
In addition to the song and video, Lorde also revealed the track list for her anticipated follow-up to 2021’s Solar Power. Among the songs on the album are: “Hammer,” “Shapeshifter,” “Favourite Daughter,” “Current Affairs,” “Clearblue,” “GRWM,” “Broken Glass,” “If She Could See Me Now” and “David.”
Lorce will launch the Ultrasound world tour on September 17 at the Moody Center in Austin, TX on an outing that will feature special guests Blood Orange, The Japanese House, Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Empress Of, co-producer Jim-E Stack and Oklou on select dates.
Watch the “Man of the Year” video and check out the Virgin tracklist reveal below.
