State Champ Radio Pop
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Normani’s debut album Dopamine has finally arrived. Since her group Fifth Harmony decided to go on a hiatus so that members can pursue solo projects, Normani has been preparing for this very moment. “The album marks a bold, new chapter for the 27-year-old artist as she fully embraces and celebrates her sexuality, showcasing her journey […]
Taylor Swift is celebrating her 100th Eras Tour show by confirming her final Eras Tour show.
At the first concert of a three-night stint in Liverpool, England, on Thursday (June 13), Swift let the crowd in on a secret: The seemingly endless Eras Tour has an official end.
“You know, this is actually the 100th show of the tour,” Swift says to wild cheers in fan video of the moment. “That blows my mind. That doesn’t feel like a real statistic to me, because this has definitely been the most exhausting, all-encompassing, but most joyful, most rewarding, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in my life, this tour, these moments with you.
“You know, a lot of you were like, ‘Well, how are you going to celebrate the 100th show?’” Swift continued from the Anfield Stadium stage. “And for me, the celebration of the 100th show means this is the very first time I’ve ever acknowledged to myself and admitted that this tour is going to end in December. Like, that’s it.”
The Eras Tour kicked off at Glendale, Arizona’s State Farm Stadium on March 17, 2023, and the final scheduled concert — which will be the 152nd show, if no new dates are added — is set for Dec. 8 at Vancouver, Canada’s BC Arena.
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“That feels so far away from now, but then again, it feels like we just played our first show on this tour because you have made this so fun for us that we wanted to do 100 shows, 150-something shows that we have on the whole tour,” Swift said. “This tour has really become my entire life. It’s taken over everything. I think I once had hobbies, but I don’t know what they were anymore because all I do when I’m not onstage is sit at home and try to think of clever acoustic song mash-ups and think about what you might want to hear. So when I’m not on the stage, I’m dreaming of being back on the stage with you guys.”
Swift finished her speech by thanking fans for making the effort to be with her as The Eras Tour “reaches triple digits of shows.”
After two more nights in Liverpool, Swift will continue to Cardiff, Wales, for one show, before putting on the first three concerts of an eventual eight nights at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Watch Swift’s full speech below:
Consider the bridge between Bebe Rexha and G-Eazy burned.
Nine years after scoring a top 10 smash together with “Me, Myself & I,” the pop singer took to Instagram Stories on Thursday (June 13) to call out her collaborator, alleging he treated her poorly after the release of their duet in 2015.
“You’re lucky people are liking you again,” Rexha wrote, tagging G-Eazy. “‘Cause I could go in on all the sh–ty things you’ve done and how you treated me after giving you your only real hit.”
The “Meant to Be” musician’s comments came in response to a member of her team asking via text message if she had any interest in shooting social media content with the rapper, a screenshot of which Rexha also posted. “You have my number,” she added. “Why don’t you text me and ask me yourself you stuck up ungrateful loser.”
“Btw the answer is no,” the vocalist concluded. “Hope you good.”
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Billboard has reached out to reps for Rexha and G-Eazy for comment.
It’s probably safe to say the two musicians won’t be working together again any time soon for a follow-up to “Me, Myself & I,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2015 before peaking at No. 7 the following March. In 2017, they teamed up again for “F.F.F.” on Rexha’s EP All Your Fault Pt. 1, which reached No. 51 on the Billboard 200.
The post comes a week after G-Eazy released his new single “Anxiety.” Rexha dropped her latest track “Chase It” at the end of May, days before making headlines for kicking out a concertgoer at her show in Wisconsin for apparently attempting to throw something at her.
“Out, out,” she says in a clip from the concert, which took place one year after Rexha sustained a serious facial injury due to a different fan throwing his phone at her during another show. “Or, if you wanna hit me in the face, I had to press charges for the other guy — I’d love to become richer.”
With her instantly recognizable warble, signature dance moves and singular stage presence, it didn’t take long for Shakira to reach icon status after she first found global fame with 2001’s Laundry Service. More than two decades later, it’s now hard to imagine what the modern pop landscape would look like without the Colombian singer, especially […]
LISA is keeping fans on the edges of their seats. Shortly after teasing that her next solo era is imminent, the BLACKPINK star posted what appears to be a snippet of new music on TikTok Thursday (June 13).
In the clip, LISA models a white baby tee and black miniskirt while posing for photos on the beach as boats cruise by behind her. At the end, she can be heard saying faintly, “Baby, I’m a rock star.” The global pop star paired the 14-second video with an original sound labeled “TEASER.”
The uptempo snippet pairs racing percussion with edgy, slightly distorted synths, seemingly a portion of the 27-year-old musician’s next project.
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Needless to say, fans are freaking out. “IM SCREAMING I CANT WAITTT,” one person commented, while another listener wrote, “LISA DONT PLAY WITH US.”
The teaser comes a week after the Thai rapper updated her websites and social media accounts with a cryptic message reading, “Coming soon: LISA.” She also appeared to signal the start of a new era by posting a video on TikTok at the time, paired with a gritty synth beat titled “Coming Soon.”
LISA first dropped her own music in September 2021, releasing the singles “Lalisa” and “Money” via YG Entertainment and Interscope Records. The latter track became the first solo K-pop hit to surpass a billion streams on Spotify in 2023, and its music video recently became the singer’s first to reach a billion views on YouTube.
Also in 2021, LISA joined DJ Snake Ozuna and Megan Thee Stallion on a single titled “SG.” Last year, she hopped on a track with BIGBANG’s Taeyang titled “Shoong!”
LISA and her BLACKPINK bandmates JENNIE, JISOO and ROSÉ are currently on a break from full-band activities following the release of their Billboard 200-topping album Born Pink in 2022. In April, the former signed with RCA Records in anticipation of her upcoming solo efforts, inking a deal that will allow her to retain ownership of her master recordings.
“I’m super excited to be joining the RCA family, and I am confident they are the best team to create a bigger movement in my solo career,” LISA said in a statement at the time. “Looking forward to showing the world everything we have been preparing.”
Check out LISA’s TikTok below.
Kehlani revealed to fans on Thursday (June 13) that sales of shirts promoting their “Next 2 U” single raised more than $555,000 for the Palestinian people, as well as the people of war-torn Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This song is about protection, something that institutions have failed to do for the people of Palestine, Congo, and Sudan,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Wednesday.
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“No one got us the way we got each other,” they added. “Me & my team feel overwhelmed with gratitude for yall showing out for this fundraiser. We’re blessed to say we supported artists in the West Bank while raising money for families in Gaza, Sudan and Congo. We’re blessed to say that we are supported by a community standing on business together. We’re blessed to play a small part in a growing tide towards the truth about Palestine.”
The singer concluded the note by saying, “we’re invincible together and I feel ever so inspired by y’all. THANK you for showing out on the streets of DC, with your dollars, with your labor and organizing, with your bodies blocking business as usual.” The note also featured the phrase “I believe that we will win” and a watermelon emoji, which has become a symbol showing support for the Palestinian people.
The $65 T-shirts for the singer’s latest single were made in Bethlehem and printed in Ramallah, cities that are both in the West Bank. The fundraiser comes as the war between Israel and the militant group Hamas drags into its ninth month following Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which officials said more than 1,200 women, children and men were killed and 250 citizens were taken hostage. Israel’s retaliatory strikes have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians to date according to authorities, while displacing more than one million people and causing what aid groups have called the worst famine in recent history.
In the video for “Next 2 U,” Kehlani placed her solidarity with the Palestinian people front-and-center, with an opening message featuring a poem from Palestinian-American writer Hala Alyan and the message “Long Live the Intifada” — a reference to the two violent uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip aimed at ending Israel’s occupation of those territories. The clip also features the singer and their background dancers waving Palestinian flags and wearing suits accented with keffiyeh scarves. It ends with a message saying that her team included a link to the list of the names of the “thousands of deceased children” killed in Israel’s attack on Gaza provided by Al Jazeera in the video’s description because it was too long to include in the clip.
Over the past few months, Kehlani is among the artists who’ve been speaking out in support of the Palestinian people, posting an Insta video in May — which has since been removed — in which she called out her “highly f–king platformed” peers for not commenting on the war, saying “You can’t speak? Disgusting… It’s f–k Israel. It’s f–k Zionism. And it’s f–k a lot of ya’ll too.” Her comments have been supported by rapper Macklemore, who recently released his pro-Palestinian protest song “Hind’s Hall,” named for the Hamilton Hall building at Columbia University that students occupied in April and renamed in honor of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Check out Kehlani’s post below.
Jin has made his first public appearance following the completion of his mandatory service in the South Korean military, taking the stage Thursday (June 13) at the 2024 BTS Festa, where he personally greeted ARMY by giving hugs to 1,000 fans. Held in Seoul in honor of the boy band’s 11-year anniversary, the event featured […]
Coldplay are gearing up to launch their Moon Music era. On Thursday (June 13) the band announced that the first single from their upcoming follow-up to 2021’s Music of the Spheres, “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” will drop on June 21. The tease featured the song’s unwieldy title across the face of a waning planet with a colorful corona […]
Over the last few months, Chappell Roan has gone from being a slow-rising pop up-and-comer to becoming one of the most talked-about names in music. As great as that may be, even Roan is feeling a little overwhelmed with her new level of fame. During her Midwest Princess Tour stop in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday […]
When RIIZE goes out to dinner, it’s a 20-person affair.
On this particular Sunday evening, the pioneering South Korean mega-label SM Entertainment has reserved a private room at a hot spot in Los Angeles’ Koreatown popular with music artists for its new boy band. The six members file in around a long table — along with an SM-associated translator (who is occasionally assisted by two other team members), a publicist from RCA Records (an SM partner for RIIZE), a veteran manager from Seoul and eight additional crew members who sit in a nearby booth.
The Korean group is in town for its RIIZING DAY Fan-Con Tour tomorrow — a “fan-concert” where the group intersperses choreographed performances of its own K-pop hits with casual games, informal onstage chats among themselves and special covers of both K-pop classics and global boy band hits, like One Direction’s “One Thing.” It’s RIIZE’s first time headlining a show in the United States, but its third group visit to L.A. Before the May 20 concert, the group flew here in August to attend the city’s annual KCON K-pop mega-fest and also filmed two music videos in town: the jovial “Memories” (a pre-debut single that generated buzz for the group that month) and its official debut single, “Get a Guitar,” a slick, bubblegum earworm released in both Korean and English that’s now RIIZE’s most streamed song globally, with 219.6 million official on-demand streams since its September release, according to Luminate.
“Not even a year has passed since our debut, but so much has happened,” says RIIZE’s youngest member, 20-year-old Anton, as his bandmates nibble on naan bread and citrus-splashed hamachi crudo. “Back then, our group was, like, innocent, you know? Now, we’ve sort of adjusted to traveling and visiting other countries.”
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Shotaro
Munachi Osegbu
Sungchan
Munachi Osegbu
In fact, RIIZE’s members weren’t totally green when the group made its official debut on Sept. 4, 2023, through K-pop giant SM in a partnership with RCA. Shotaro and Sungchan had previously debuted in NCT, the ambitious boy band project that SM launched in 2016, becoming its two newest members in 2020 and contributing to Resonance, Pt. 1, NCT’s highest-charting Billboard 200 release. Two years later, SM’s board of directors moved to terminate the company’s production contract with founder Lee Soo-Man (from whom SM gets its name) in 2022 in an effort to shift SM away from Lee’s creative authority. In May 2023, Korean multimedia conglomerate Kakao became the company’s largest shareholder after a heated bidding war with K-pop titan HYBE (which initially bought Lee’s stake in the company but then sold it to Kakao during a tender offer) for access to SM’s nearly 30 years of K-pop glory, including an extensive catalog, dedicated divisions for nonmusic opportunities like acting, technology and the metaverse, as well as dozens of active artists — soon to include its newest addition, RIIZE.
Just days before Kakao became majority shareholder, SM CEO Jang Cheol-Hyuk revealed that as part of a company restructuring, NCT — originally pitched as a group with infinite members splintered into localized subunits worldwide — would no longer infinitely expand and that Shotaro and Sungchan would leave to debut in a new group, joining previously announced SM Rookies (the company’s team of trainees) Eunseok and Seunghan, along with other Korean and American members. In July 2023, excitement mounted when K-pop media outlets reported that the son of acclaimed Korean singer-songwriter-producer Yoon Sang — later revealed to be Anton — would also join the project.
Finally, on July 27, 2023, SM introduced RIIZE. The group (whose name is a portmanteau of “rise” and “realize”) launched its Instagram with 27 photos — casual selfies and mirror pics without the flashy fashion, perfect makeup or glossy finishes that often characterize K-pop photo shoots even on social media — revealing the seven-member lineup of Shotaro, Eunseok, Sungchan, Wonbin, Seunghan, Sohee and Anton. (Six are at dinner tonight; in November, SM placed Seunghan on “indefinite suspension,” though he is still listed as a RIIZE member on the label’s website.)
RIIZE has sought to present itself as more down-to-earth — a noticeable change from previous, high-concept SM artist launches like the supernatural-inspired boy band EXO; the girl group aespa, which sings about straddling the real and virtual worlds; and other larger-than-life K-pop idols the label has served up since the late 1990s. RIIZE describes its music as “emotional pop,” a phrase it uses, Anton says, “because we hope that people can relate to it emotionally. The members all do, and I think that’s what our fans want from us as well.”
Clockwise from top left: Wonbin, Shotaro, Eunseok, Sungchan, Anton, and Sohee.
Munachi Osegbu
But RIIZE differs from other K-pop outfits in ways that go beyond the aesthetic or concept. For one, its social media approach is far more hands-on than that of its contemporaries, who tend to have marketing-approved captions; @riize_official sprinkles comments across fans’ TikTok accounts. The members also filmed the #GetAGuitarChallenge with influencers including Merrick Hanna (who has 32.5 million followers on TikTok), reacted to tasting Indonesian snacks with Jerome Polin (8.2 million followers on Instagram) and shot charming content with South Korea’s most prominent openly gay celebrity, the tastemaker Hong Seok-Cheon, who predicted Wonbin as a “face” to watch in 2024.
“We have a concept called ‘real-time odyssey,’” Eunseok explains. “We post a lot of pictures of our daily life and intimate [moments] on social media.” Anton clarifies: “We don’t really think of it as a concept — we’re just trying to show our authentic selves.”
Unlike many of its peers, RIIZE also does not have a designated “leader,” even if the Tokyo-raised Shotaro — at 23, the group’s eldest and only Japanese member — naturally steps up. At dinner, he ensures everyone around him (including this reporter) has water and their drink of choice. He’s the first to speak at the meal and divulges the most about his musical tastes; Sam Smith is a favorite. To his left is his fellow ex-NCT member, Seoul-born Sungchan, 22, whose beaming smile helped him become a host of the weekly K-pop performance TV program Inkigayo while he was in NCT. One day, he hopes Pharrell Williams will collaborate on a track for RIIZE. Shotaro likens Sungchan to the color sky blue because he has “a very clear heart… and is very innocent.”
Sohee
Munachi Osegbu
Wonbin
Munachi Osegbu
RIIZE’s four other members sit across from the duo. Born and raised in Seoul, Eunseok, 23, prefers calm ballads and the music of Ed Sheeran. While his outside demeanor matches his musical taste, his bandmates reveal he has a more lighthearted side: As Sohee describes, Eunseok is known for giving “very random and fantastical” nonsensical nicknames to everyone he meets. Anton calls them “basically video-game character names,” which makes everyone laugh.
The 22-year-old Wonbin — or “Dark Bean,” as Eunseok has dubbed him, to the rest of RIIZE’s amusement — was born in Seoul but raised in South Korea’s southern port city of Ulsan; he digs Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience-era singles like “Mirrors” and “Suit & Tie.” Baby-faced powerhouse vocalist Sohee, 20, grew up in Siheung, located in the country’s most populous province, Gyeonggi; he is not only “really bright,” Anton explains, “[but] his mindset is always really positive as well.”
Last is Anton, 20, son of singer Yoon Sang and the actress Shim Hye-Jin. While Anton has appeared on South Korean TV since childhood (Yoon Sang is based in South Korea), he was born in Boston and raised in New Jersey; growing up in the United States fostered his appetite for music discovery and exploration, which ultimately became the foundation for his K-pop career. “I don’t really think I have a favorite artist per se,” he says, soft-spoken but self-assured. “I just like to explore as many genres [as I can] and try to listen to a lot of different music even if I don’t understand the language. People who enjoy K-pop might not understand Korean.”
From left: Anton, Sohee, Wonbin, Eunseok, Shotaro, and Sungchan of RIIZE photographed May 21, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Munachi Osegbu
Anton’s musical philosophy encapsulates the growing mindset of the young audience with whom RIIZE, as well as SM and RCA, hope to connect. As U.S. listeners become increasingly interested in foreign-language music, RIIZE has earned 37.8 million official U.S. on-demand streams — contributing to 641.2 million globally — according to Luminate. And it hopes to continue expanding its fan base (known as BRIIZE, pronounced “breeze”) with the June 17 release of RIIZING – The 1st Mini Album. Its new single, “Boom Boom Bass,” incorporates the same hooky energy of “Get a Guitar” while adding shimmery disco vibes and an irresistible bassline. Sungchan and Wonbin both say it’s their favorite RIIZE song yet.
After five different K-pop releases topped the Billboard 200 last year, driven by K-pop fans’ love of physical product and labels delivering collectible album packages in multiple versions, RCA Records COO John Fleckenstein says the label is “absolutely focused on delivering physical versions for RIIZE” in the United States — but as just one way to elevate the group’s presence.
“The vision behind our global partnership was to marry what both our companies do best across all areas to bring additional opportunities, reach, resources and growth to support RIIZE,” Fleckenstein adds. “Our passion lies in exploring the intersection of music, art, culture and then connecting that to an audience. SM have been incredible partners who truly understand the market.”
Eunseok
Munachi Osegbu
Anton
Munachi Osegbu
As the members of RIIZE dip into Basque cheesecakes for dessert, they share their personal goals for the future, both near and distant. They hope that “Boom Boom Bass” can crack multiple Billboard charts and are looking forward to their first original Japanese-language single, “Lucky,” due in July, calling it “a perfect song for the summer.” Shotaro dreams of someday performing at the Super Bowl and the Billboard Music Awards.
RIIZE wants fans to understand that the Fan-Con Tour is only the beginning, and that the members plan to visit many countries. When Shotaro and Anton burst into tears during the band’s two sold-out dates at Tokyo’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium arena in May, it brought new meaning to the group’s “emotional pop” — and conveyed how much RIIZE wants an offline fan connection that is as strong as its online one.
“I really did not plan on crying whatsoever,” Anton reflects. “That was our biggest concert to date, and seeing the fans far away holding up our signs and stuff was just sort of overwhelming.” At the concert the day after dinner, the members manage not to break into tears — but their performance is no less heartfelt. Amid heart-stopping choreography, Anton pauses to address the audience. “We’ll work hard,” he says, “to become a RIIZE that BRIIZE can be proud of.”
