Pop

28 Aug 2023

7 Biggest Revelations From Ariana Grande’s ‘Yours Truly’ Q&A: Album Covers, New Makeup & More

It’s been 10 years since Ariana Grande emerged as an angel-voiced pop star with her debut record Yours Truly, transforming seemingly overnight from Nickelodeon star to full-blown force to be reckoned with on the charts.

And in celebration of the album’s very first double-digit anniversary, the 30-year-old pop star planned a full week’s worth of surprises for fans who’ve been supporting her since the very beginning. These include a 10th anniversary special edition of Yours Truly, complete with newly recorded live versions of six of the album’s tracks — which Grande also filmed live performances of in London — merch capsules and behind-the-scenes footage. The most revealing part of Yours Truly’s anniversary, though, has been Grande’s two special Q&A videos on TikTok, in which she revealed memories, favorite moments and upcoming projects related to her 2013 LP.

“Happy 10 years of Yours Truly,” she told fans at the beginning of the Q&A, sitting in a corner of the farmhouse where she filmed the six live performances. “Thank you … for supporting me every step along the way, accepting me, loving me, allowing for humanness and everything. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

The star went on to candidly answer questions submitted by fans via Twitter, opening up about writing, recording and releasing Yours Truly (which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200), all while starring as Cat Valentine on Victorious. She also touched on the most important things she learned in the process, making revelations about things she’d do differently today.

“Thanks for being along for the ride, and for being here,” Grande later added. “I’m so grateful for all of you, and how f–king crazy has it been these ten years? So much has happened. So much has happened. So much. Has. Happened.”

Here are seven of the biggest revelations from Grande’s Yours Truly Q&As. (You can check out her full responses on TikTok here and here.)

28 Aug 2023

BTS’ V Drops ‘Scenery,’ ‘Winter Bear’ & ‘Snow Flower’ on Streaming Ahead of Solo Album Release

V‘s solo album, Layover, is almost here! And to celebrate, three of the BTS member’s previous tracks — “Scenery,” “Winter Bear” and “Snow Flower” — were released to streaming on Monday (Aug. 28).

BTS’ management company, Big Hit Music, tweeted the announcement along with links to YouTube. “Taehyung’s comfort songs finally on Spotify,” one fan excitedly shared in the comments section of the post, while another user simply wrote, “HIS MASTERPIECES ARE FINALLY RELEASE[D].”

“Scenery” originally arrived in January of 2019, and marked the BTS vocalist’s first self-composed track. “Winter Bear” followed with a surprise drop in August of that year, while “Snow Flower” — which also features rapper and V’s close friend Peakboy — arrived in December 2020.

Prior to the tracks’ formal release, the three songs were available only via YouTube or SoundCloud. In addition to now being available on U.S. streamers such as Apple Music and Spotify, the songs have also made it to South Korean streaming platforms, including Melon, Genie, VIBE, FLO and Bugs.

The song trio’s arrival comes ahead of the release of V’s upcoming solo album, Layover, which is scheduled for Sept. 8. The set was preceded by singles “Rainy Days” and “Love Me Again,” with tracks “Blue,” “Love Me Again,” “Slow Dancing,” “For Us” and a bonus piano version of “Slow Dancing” also set to appear on the album.

Listen to “Scenery,” “Winter Bear” and “Snow Flower” below.

 

28 Aug 2023

Timbaland Reveals Title For New Collab With Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado

Things are looking up for your Labor Day weekend. After months of teasing, on Monday morning (Aug. 28) Timbaland finally revealed the title of his upcoming single with longtime collaborators Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado. The song, “Keep Going Up!,” is due out on Friday (Sept. 1), just in time to get fans hyped for the three-day holiday weekend.

Tim revealed what looked like the cover art as well, which consists of the blue-fading-to-pink title in balloon letters under the three stars’ names.

The single is the long-awaited follow-up to the trio’s first collab, 2007’s “Give It to Me,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 16 years ago. Last week, Tim posted a teaser video for “Keep Going Up!,” which he captioned “WE BACK,” alongside peeking eyes and exploding head emojis. “Da king has returned!” The tease came a month after his Instagram post in which he and Timberlake hopped on a FaceTime call with Furtado while the pair worked on Tim’s upcoming sixth studio album.

The super producer also announced that his first full-length since 2009’s Shock Value II is due out in November; at press time a title and track list had not yet been announced. All three artists have released new music so far this year, with Timbaland teaming up with BIA in March on “I’m That Bitch,” Furtado dropping the Dom Dolla-assissted “Eat Your Man” in June and Timberlake guesting on a remix of Coco Jones’ “ICU” in July.

Check out the title reveal below.

28 Aug 2023

Troye Sivan & PinkPantheress Tease a Team-Up on ‘Rush’ Remix: ‘Another Successful Manifestation’

After Troye Sivan declared that he was feeling the “Rush,” it looks like PinkPantheress might just be feeling it as well.

In a series of TikToks posted on Sunday (Aug. 27), Sivan and PinkPantheress teased a new remix of the Australian pop star’s single “Rush,” which appears to feature a verse from the viral singer-songwriter. It started with a clip posted on Sivan’s TikTok, in which he dances to a recent song snippet PinkPantheress shared on her socials, writing, “Wow love this lady’s voice. Would love to sing w her one day.”

Shortly after Sivan posted his hint, PinkPantheress took it a step further in her own TikTok clip. Sharing a screengrab of a July 14 tweet in which she said that Sivan’s “Rush” was “toooooo tooooo good,” the singer-songwriter shared a snippet of what sounded like her own verse on a remixed version of the track. “Another successful manifestation,” she wrote under the original tweet, while her caption seemed to officially confirm the news: “So excited for you guys to hear the rush remix.”

Some eagle-eyed fans on the app immediately linked another potential artist to the upcoming remix — Hyunjin of Stray Kids. Shortly after sharing his teaser with PinkPantheress, Sivan shared a nearly identical clip featuring the K-pop star, including a message that was strikingly similar. “Wow love this guy’s voice,” he wrote. “Would love to sing w him one day.” Meanwhile, over on PinkPantheress’ teaser, fans claimed that they could hear Hyunjin’s voice in the background just before the clip ended. Hyunjin has not teased any participation in the project on his social media.

It wouldn’t be the first time Sivan expressed his love for Hyunjin on the app. In the lead-up to the release of “Rush,” Sivan posted a TikTok asking how to get in touch with the K-pop star next to a thirst trap edit of the Stray Kids singer. But in a later interview, Sivan said that he was “pulling the brakes” on trying to get in touch with Hyunjin after receiving a few scary responses to his lighthearted plea.

Speaking about “Rush” shortly after its release, Sivan told Billboard that the song felt like a first step forward in a very new chapter of his career. “I think I’m just used to putting stuff out to my very safe, immediate audience that I know have my back because they’ve been there for so long and everything,” he said. “This time feels very different for some reason.”

Billboard has reached out to reps for Sivan, PinkPantheress and Stray Kids.

Check out Sivan and PinkPantheress’ TikTok teasers below:

28 Aug 2023

Selena Gomez Reveals She Had to Have Surgery After Breaking Her Hand

Selena Gomez is excited that her new single, “Single Soon,” is poised to make an impressive debut on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. But in response to a fan post on Sunday hyping the predicted top 20 debut, Gomez revealed that she’s psyched, but currently has bigger fish to fry.

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“Broke my hand and had surgery,” Gomez revealed in a response to the post without giving any additional details about the extent or date of the injury. “I don’t care about selling anything. I’m just happy to make music with my friends.” At press time a spokesperson for Gomez had not returned Billboard‘s request for additional details on the injury.

Gomez has been working on her anticipated third studio album and while there is still no update on a release date or title, the Only Murders in the Building star dropped her late summer jam “Single Soon” on Friday, telling her faithful, “Since I’m not quite done with SG3, I wanted to put out a fun little song I wrote a while back that’s perfect for the end of summer.”

Gomez’s most recent full-length album was 2020’s Rare, which was followed up in 2021 with the all-Spanish EP Revalación. After some fans speculated that the new song was possibly aimed at Sel’s ex, The Weeknd (who now goes by his full name, Abel Tesfaye) — who she dated from January to October 2017 — the singer laid the rumors to rest in a comment on Hollywood Life’s Instagram over the weekend, writing, “couldn’t be more false.”

The speculation came after Gomez weighed in on another Weeknd-adjacent story last week, calling an AI reimagining of Abel’s 2016 single “Starboy” featuring her vocals and face on the cover “scary.”

See Gomez’s comment below.

28 Aug 2023

Selena Gomez Responds to Fan Speculation That ‘Single Soon’ Is About The Weeknd

When Selena Gomez sings about the weekend on her new song “Single Soon,” she’s referring to Friday, Saturday and Sunday — not 33-year-old Canadian superstar The Weeknd.

After coming across speculation that the “Blinding Lights” singer inspired her new single — which finds Gomez happily boasting about her plans to break up with a boyfriend and go partying on her own — the 31-year-old pop star promptly shut it down.

“Couldn’t be more false,” she responded to a HollywoodLife Instagram post about the fan speculation.

Gomez and The Weeknd (real name Abel Tesfaye) did date for about 10 months, striking up a romance in 2017 before ending it that same year. But even though they’ve been broken up for almost six years, some listeners thought that certain lyrics in “Single Soon” were disguised nods to the Idol star. For instance, “I don’t wanna see a tear” seems to echo Tesfaye’s 2020 smash “Save Your Tears,” which was also rumored to be about Gomez.

She also sings on the track, “And the weekend’s almost here,” which some fans may have thought was a reference to Tesfaye’s stage name.

Regardless of who the song’s about, people have been loving Gomez’s return to music via “Single Soon,” which she released Aug. 25 along with a carefree music video. “Y’all have been asking for new music for a while,” she wrote of the track on Instagram a week prior to its release. “Since I’m not quite done with SG3, I wanted to put out a fun little song I wrote a while back that’s perfect for the end of summer.”

One of those fans is none other than Taylor Swift, Gomez’s fellow pop star and longtime BFF. “WHEN UR BESTIE IS THE BESTEST,” Swift wrote on her Instagram Story, sharing a clip from the “Single Soon” music video. “WILL BE DANCING TO THIS FOREVER METHINKS.”

28 Aug 2023

Holly Humberstone Embraces Uncertainty On Her Surefire Debut

Holly Humberstone has a confession. Despite the title of her forthcoming debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black, she has never actually doused her surroundings in darkness. In reality, her bedroom in the London flat she shares with her sister is what she describes as “so girly.”

But when thinking of what she wanted her first album to signify, Humberstone kept considering the memorable debuts that preceded her own. “I feel like so many artists build such a strong world around them and such an identity, and I feel like I’m changing all the time,” the alternative pop artist says. “I’m 23. I probably should sort of know who I am at this point. I just really don’t.”

That familiar uncertainty is not only visualized by the title of the album (out Oct. 13 on Darkroom/Geffen/Polydor Records) but also felt across its 13 songs, which embrace the duality of feeling apprehensive and alive all at once.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, but to me, the album sounds like it’s got two sides to it, like there’s two sides of me that I didn’t realize were coexisting,” Humberstone says. She thinks the consistency comes through in her vulnerability. “There’s something really empowering about being able to share so much of myself with people I don’t know.”

For much of Humberstone’s career, this has been all she knows. She released her debut single, the poignant “Deep End,” in January 2020, just before the world shut down from the pandemic, but worked tirelessly to emerge a household name. She released her first EP, Falling Asleep at the Wheel, in August 2020 on Platoon; after scoring a major-label deal the following year, she released her second EP that fall. By the end of 2021, she had won the BRIT Award for rising star, and by the end of 2022, she had opened on tour for Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red.

For a self-described homebody who grew up in rural Grantham, England — where “there’s nothing f–king going on” — the transition was a bit overwhelming. “You just have to adapt, and writing really helped me,” says Humberstone, who wrote and recorded much of Paint My Bedroom Black in between gigs. She describes songs like lead single “Antichrist” and the dancefloor-ready “Flatlining” as more “extroverted,” while the title track and songs such as “Elvis Impersonators” “feel like wanting to shut things out and be on my own.”

That honesty has bolstered some of Humberstone’s most affecting songs and helped establish her voice — from “Deep End,” about supporting her sister’s mental health, to the more uptempo 2022 single “Scarlett,” which mined her best friend’s one-sided relationship and ultimate breakup. On Paint My Bedroom Black, Humberstone looks inward, writing about her own attempts at relationships and the guilt that accompanies being gone so often.

On “Superbloodmoon,” which features Darkroom labelmate d4vd (marking the first time Humberstone has welcomed a collaborator on one of her own tracks), the pair sing of being far from home. “It’s a cold kind of love, from a distance … It’s a desperate kind of love that I’m missing,” they sing in longing harmony. And on “Kissing in Swimming Pools,” she sings of “wanting to hold down some form of relationship with somebody that I really liked” only to realize (and ultimately admit) how her career challenges that.


https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECydxq6LUss&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent

No matter the production style or vocal delivery of each song, though, Humberstone’s brash honesty puts her in the same class of current stellar songwriters like fellow emerging artist Gracie Abrams and even her idol, Phoebe Bridgers. (Humberstone says the latter’s Stranger in the Alps is one of her most-loved debut albums; when asked whom she would recruit for her own boygenius supergroup, she picks beabadoobee and Arlo Parks, saying that women in music right now “are running the whole show.”)

“Honestly, I think writing my songs is my way of protecting [my personal life] because I can take control and tell the stories how I want them to be told,” she says. Even so, she does worry about its reception. “I low-key hate releasing music,” she nearly whispers. “I love the writing process, and I love having [songs] in my pocket. I feel like it’s my dirty little secret. And then when it goes out, it’s just scary.”

Her best solution so far? Keep writing through it — she’s already thinking of her next project. Coming off sets at Lollapalooza Chicago, Outside Lands and the Reading and Leeds festivals in England, she may even continue her habit of writing on the road.

“It does feel like I’ve poured a lot of myself into [this album], and I am really, really proud of every song,” she says. “I’m just grateful that I am able to make [an album at all], and it sounds really cheesy, but that people will be waiting for it on the other side.”

This story originally appeared in the Aug. 26, 2023, issue of Billboard.

28 Aug 2023

Elton John ‘Back Home and in Good Health’ After Hospitalization for Fall

Elton John is back at home after spending the night in a French hospital following a fall. A spokesperson for the 76-year-old singer who recently completed his yearslong Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour confirmed to Billboard on Monday morning (Aug. 28) that following a slip at his home in the south of France on Sunday, “Elton visited the local hospital as a precautionary measure.”

The source added that following check-ups, John was “immediately discharged this morning and is now back at home and in good health.” Sir Elton, who has walked with a visible limp for several years, assured fans he was okay after a tabloid claimed he was “frail” alonside a picture of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer behind helped into a wheelchair at an airport in Germany last June. At the time, John said after a “rousing” two-and-a-half hour show he arrived at a closed Leipzig airport and faced an “extremely long walk” to his plane.

So, he said, he accepted a wheelchair ride to rest his hip; a previous hip injury had caused the postponement of his world tour due to a fall that doctors suggested required surgery. John wrapped the Yellow Brick tour in July after kicking it off in 2018 and, following a COVID-19 delay in 2020, picking it back up last year. After 330 shows that grossed a record $939.1 million and played to six million fans, John took sole control of the title of the highest-grossing tour in Billboard Boxscore history, besting pal Ed Sheeran’s two-year Divide Tour, which is at No. 2 with $776 million in grosses and attendance of 8.9 million.

27 Aug 2023

Adele Stops Show to Scold Security Bothering a Fan: ‘Can You Leave Him Alone, Please?’

Adele will stop singing to stand up for her fans.

The superstar paused her Las Vegas concert in the middle of performing “Water Under the Bridge” Saturday night (Aug. 26) to question what was happening in the crowd at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.

“What is going on there with that young fan who’s been bothered so much since I came on for standing up?” she called out to the Weekends With Adele audience, as seen in fan footage from the show. “What’s going on with him? Yes, you, with your hand up, yes you!”

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“Why are you all bothering him?” she asked. “Can you leave him alone, please? They won’t bother you anymore, darling. You enjoy the show. Leave him alone.”

She then addressed the rest of her fans in attendance, saying, “Sorry, guys. He’s been bothered the whole show by security and other people sitting behind him. He’s here to have fun. All of you are here to have fun.”

“Let’s start again,” Adele announced, and the band started from the top of “Water Under the Bridge.”

Taylor Swift also came to a fan’s defense in the middle of a performance on her current tour. At her May 13 Eras Tour stop in Philadelphia, Swift interrupted her performance of “Bad Blood” to shout “She’s fine!” and “She wasn’t doing anything!” between song lyrics. “Hey! Stop!” she yelled out to a reportedly aggressive security guard, before continuing on with the song.

Watch Adele’s moment in Vegas below.

27 Aug 2023

Fans Choose Miley Cyrus’ ‘Used to Be Young’ as This Week’s Favorite New Music

Miley Cyrus‘ latest song “Used to Be Young” has topped this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (Aug. 25) on Billboard, choosing the 30-year-old superstar singer’s reflective single as their favorite new music release of the past week.

“Used to Be Young” brought in nearly 42% of the vote, beating out new music by Selena Gomez (“Single Soon”), BLACKPINK (“The Girls”), Ariana Grande (Yours Truly 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition), Zach Bryan (Zach Bryan), and others.

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The past decade of Cyrus’ life has been filled with highs, lows and criticisms — all for public consumption. Such is the subject of her latest ballad, “Used to Be Young.” The vulnerable track sees the Disney Channel alum reflecting on her headline-worthy past, while allowing herself much needed forgiveness to move on to the next phase of her life.

“You tell me time has done changed me / That’s fine, I had a good run,” she admits, tapping into the pop balladry that she’s utilized her entire career, from “The Climb” to “Wrecking Ball” to “Flowers.”

Cyrus gave some insight into writing the song in an Instagram post revealing the lyrics, writing, “I have spent the last 18 months painting a sonic picture of my perspective to share with you. The time has arrived to release a song that I could perfect forever. Although my work is done, this song will continue to write itself everyday. The fact it remains unfinished is a part of its beauty. That is my life at this moment … unfinished yet complete.”

“Used To Be Young” marks the singer’s first piece of new music since the release of her eighth album, Endless Summer Vacation, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in March, and arrived alongside its own Backyard Sessions via Disney+.

Trailing behind “Used to Be Young” on the poll is Gomez’s new track “Single Soon,” which brought in 33% of the vote. The Rare Beauty founder shows off her fun and flirty side on the song, as she muses on the many ways to break up with her lover — notes, phone calls and ghosting are all options — so she can be carefree, untethered and most importantly, unbothered.

See the final results of this week’s new music release poll below.