Pop
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RAYE made her Saturday Night Live debut, performing songs from her Brith Award-winning debut album. During the Kristen Wiig-hosted episode on April 6, the London-born singer-songwriter passionately delivered “Escapism” and “Worth It,” which appear on her 2023 studio release, My 21st Century Blues. RAYE opened her SNL musical guest debut with a stirring performance of […]
Taylor Swift is counting down the days until the release of her new album. On Saturday (April 6), the 34-year-old pop superstar used her lucky number to remind Swifties that there are only 13 days left until the arrival of her highly anticipated album, The Tortured Poets Department. The “Cruel Summer” singer took to her […]
Kelly Clarkson paid homage to a classic during The Kelly Clarkson Show.
For the episode’s Kellyoke segment on Friday (April 5), the 41-year-old pop star and TV personality performed an awe-inspiring rendition of Judy Garland‘s “Over the Rainbow.”
Donning a long-sleeved black dress, Clarkson captivated her audience with a passionate delivery of The Wizard of the Oz ballad, originally performed by Garland in the 1939 film.
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“Away above the chimney tops/ That’s where you’ll find me,” the Grammy winner belted out while backed on guitar by Jaco Caraco.
The beautiful performance ended with a flash of rainbow-colored lights in the background as the crowd cheered approvingly.
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“Please put this on the next Kellyoke album so I can dance to it at my wedding,” one fan wrote in the comments section on YouTube.
Another added, “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!!! Ok, Judy Garland is the Standard and no one will ever beat her, but (for me) this is the BEST VERSION of the many, many, many, many, many covers we all have heard!!! OF COURSE IT HAD TO BE KC!!!!”
“I think Judy would be proud of this. Knowing her legacy still lives on in this rendition made me smile,” a third user wrote.
“Over the Rainbow” holds special meaning for Clarkson. During an appearance on Today in 2017, she revealed that she often sings the 20th-century standard to her children, River Rose, 9, and Remington “Remy” Alexander, 7. The singer shares the kids with her ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock.
“She’ll always cut me off and go, ‘Birds, mommy, birds.’ She always wants me to get to the bird part,” Clarkson said during the interview.
Watch Clarkson cover “Over the Rainbow” below.
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The morning of the Guts World Tour’s first night at Madison Square Garden, a perplexing, 4.8-level earthquake tore through New York City. Minutes later, the famed arena tweeted from its official account, “that was just the earth prepping for Olivia Rodrigo tonight.” That was exactly right, as far as the 21-year-old pop star’s fans were […]
Billie Eilish may have just pioneered an incredibly effective social media growth tactic with one simple move on Instagram.
According to CrowdTangle, the 22-year-old pop star gained 7 million new followers in just a two-day span. The spike comes after Eilish added all 100-million-plus followers to her “Close Friends” Story, where she’s been posting cryptic teasers for her upcoming third studio album this week.
The data tracking company found that, between Wednesday (April 3) and Thursday (April 4), 3.17 million people pressed “Follow” on the “What Was I Made For?” singer’s account in order to join her exclusive Story-viewing pool. Between Thursday and Friday (April 5), 3.9 million more users tagged along.
In total, Eilish saw a growth of 6.4% on the platform.
The posts the singer has been sharing on her Close Friends outlet have included fuzzy fragments of artwork, most of them awash in blue hues. The aesthetic of the pictures matches certain billboards that have popped up in New York and Los Angeles this week, displaying what many fans feel certain are lyrics from Eilish’s next LP.
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One of them, for instance, blasted in bright blue lettering, “She’s the headlights I’m the deer.” Others read, “I try to live in black and white,” and “Did I cross the line?”
The nine-time Grammy winner hasn’t dropped an album since 2021’s Happier Than Ever, which followed her 2019 debut When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Both records spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Ahead of her new era, Eilish spoke about her sustainability efforts in an interview with Billboard. After one of her quotes from the article about the wastefulness of releasing too many vinyl variants was misinterpreted by countless fans online, she took to Instagram Stories to clarify, “I wasn’t singling anyone out.”
“These are industry-wide systemic issues,” she added at the time. “when it comes to variants, so many artists release them – including ME! which i clearly state in the article.”
Fans may have been on to something when they theorized that Taylor Swift‘s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, was inspired by the five stages of grief. Ahead of the LP’s April 19 release, the pop star shared a quintet of playlists she personally curated for Apple Music on Friday (April 5), each of them featuring songs from her first 10 albums representing a distinct phase of heartbreak.
Four of the playlists are named after the taglines of previously announced deluxe editions, with the fifth one dubbed “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” after one of the song titles on Tortured Poets. Firstly, the “I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life” roundup features tracks such as “Style” and “Treacherous,” designed by the 14-time Grammy winner to embody the “denail” stage.
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“This is a list of songs about getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion,” she said in a statement. “Results may vary.”
Secondly, anger is soundtracked by a playlist called “You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad,” including “Vigilante Shit,” “Bad Blood,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and more. “These songs all have one thing in common: I wrote them while feeling anger,” Swift continued. “Over the years, I’ve learned that anger can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, but the healthiest way that it manifests itself in my life is when I can write a song about it, and then oftentimes, that helps me get past it.”
Next up in the “Five Stages of Heartbreak” — modeled after Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ famous five stages of grief theory — is bargaining. For this phase, Swift gathered tracks like “Soon You’ll Get Better,” “Say Don’t Go” and “This Is Me Trying” in a playlist titled “Am I Allowed to Cry?”
“This playlist takes you through the songs that I’ve written when I was in the bargaining stage, times when you’re trying to make deals with yourself or someone that you care about,” the “Anti-Hero” singer explained. “You’re trying to make things better, you’re oftentimes feeling really desperate, because oftentimes we have a gut intuition that tells us things are not going to go the way that we hope, which makes us more desperate, which makes us bargain more.”
The fourth stage is depression, encapsulated by Swift on songs such as “Champagne Problems,” “We Were Happy” and “Forever Winter” on her “Old Habits Die Screaming” playlist. “We’re going to be exploring the feelings of depression that often lace their way through my songs,” she added. “While these things are really, really hard to go through, I often feel like when I’m either listening to songs or writing songs that deal with this intensity of loss and hopelessness, usually that’s in the phase where I’m close to getting past that feeling.”
Finally, Swift’s “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” playlist — which matches the name of track 13 on Tortured Poets — marks the last stage of grief/heartbreak, aka acceptance. “Here we finally find acceptance and can start moving forward from loss or heartbreak,” Tay said of the mix, which ropes in songs including “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” “Closure,” “Now That We Don’t Talk” and “Long Story Short.”
“These songs represent making room for more good in your life, making that choice because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too,” Swift added.
Swift is currently taking a two-month break from her global Eras Tour trek to prepare for the release of her 11th studio album, which she first announced while accepting best pop vocal at the 2024 Grammys for her previous LP, Midnights. Since then, she’s shared the new project’s main cover plus details on the four deluxe editions, as well as confirming that Post Malone and Florence + The Machine are both featured on the album.
Listen to all five of Swift’s Apple Music playlists ahead of The Tortured Poets Department here.
The old JoJo Siwa can’t come to the phone right now. The 20-year-old singer released her new dance pop song “Karma” on Friday (April 5), along with a truly wild music video for the upbeat track that marks an extreme departure from the kid-friendly persona she’s played since finding Dance Moms fame in 2015. The […]
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, J. Cole fires back, Vampire Weekend get heavenly and Doja Cat returns with more fire. Check out all of this week’s picks below:
J. Cole, Might Delete Later
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Much like it was with Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You two weeks earlier, the immediate emphasis on J. Cole’s new surprise project Might Delete Later will be on a short burst of disses: on the final song, “7 Minute Drill,” Cole claps back at Kendrick Lamar’s “Like That” venom by taking shots at K. Dot’s reputation and discography. However, “7 Minute Drill” is just the coda of an unexpected return that will leave longtime Cole fans excited and satisfied, complete with inspired guest spot selections — the slow-rolling opener “Pricey,” for instance, features Gucci Mane, Ari Lennox and a hook from the always-great Young Dro.
Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us
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Vampire Weekend has long transcended the late-‘00s indie-rock explosion and moved on to arena headliner status in the decade that followed, but fifth album Only God Was Above Us nods to the subtler pleasures of their self-titled debut, as well as the muted colors of 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City. Songs like “Classical,” “The Surfer” and “Connect” capture a band reflecting on what makes them great while also aging with grace — Only God Was Above Us could be called a course correction from 2019’s more expansive Father of the Bride, but the lessons from that album have also been folded in here as Vampire Weekend keeps moving forward.
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Doja Cat, Scarlet 2 CLAUDE
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With the Scarlet era another monster success for Doja Cat, thanks in part to smash hits like “Paint the Town Red” and “Agora Hills,” the Scarlet 2 CLAUDE deluxe edition could have been a chest-thumping victory lap — but instead, Doja brings seven more songs of heat, further twisting her futuristic pop approach and offering up more radio fodder than leftovers. The strongest new track is “MASC,” a spacious breakup lamentation that fully unleashes Teezo Touchdown, although “URRRGE!!!!!!!!!” with A$AP Rocky is the type of delightfully unhinged rap track that Doja fully embraced on the original Scarlet.
Bryson Tiller, Bryson Tiller
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The recent success of “Whatever She Wants,” which became Bryson Tiller’s first solo top 20 hit on the Hot 100 since his breakthrough single “Don’t,” has acted as an exclamation point on a consistently excellent studio run, as Tiller has remained at the top of the R&B songwriting game while occasionally crossing over to hip-hop and pop platforms. His new self-titled album is brimming with heartily crooned sexual innuendos, a cocktail of ecstasy and regret that Tiller fans will have on repeat — although recent best new artist winner Victoria Monét nearly steals the show with some raucous wordplay on “Persuasion.”
Young Miko, att.
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While artists like Bizarrap and Feid have offered co-signs to Young Miko — and helped the Puerto Rican trap artist score some of her biggest hits to date — new album att. represents the moment that the rising star stands on her own two feet and showcases just how far-reaching her vision of modern Latin music can become. Although Miko often moves quickly over sizzling beats, she can operate efficiently on dance tracks, sing impressively in more heartfelt moments and cede the floor graciously whenever a guest star does pop by; in other words, she has no glaring weaknesses on att., and album opener “Rookie of the Year” is aptly titled.
Editor’s Pick: Kehlani, “After Hours”
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Summer is quickly approaching, and we are already thinking about which singles will define the hottest season… and just like that, Kehlani returns with her first solo release since 2022’s Blue Water Road, and immediately throws her hat in the ring. “After Hours” effervesces in its dance floor beguile, as Kehlani lifts Cordel “Scatta” Burrell’s “Coolie Dance Rhythm” and re-imagines the classic as a siren cry: “Why don’t you stay here after hours?” she beckons, the power of her voice and the swirl of the production making it difficult to detach from the single until its breathless conclusion.
Britney Spears was in a reflective mood on Thursday (April 4) when she posted a throwback video featuring her ex-husband Sam Asghari. In the clip, the former couple work through some sexy choreography, with Spears — wearing tiny white shorts and a bra top — getting spun in circles and hopping onto the waist of […]
Doja Cat‘s Scarlet era continues. The 28-year-old superstar unveiled the deluxe edition of her fourth studio album on Friday (April 5), dubbing the expanded version Scarlet II: Claude Frollo, named after the villainous character from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The new album features seven new tracks, including “Masc,” “Acknowledge Me,” “Head High,” “Gang,” “Rider,” […]