Rock
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Queens of the Stone Age will be back on the road next summer after cancelling a run of 2024 shows due to unspecified health issues affecting singer/guitarist Josh Homme. The band called off eight festivals shows on their End Is Nero tour so Homme could fly back to the U.S. for what was described at […]
Inside the inaugural New York edition of the celebrated All Things Go music festival, including exclusive portraits of MUNA, Soccer Mommy, Towa Bird and more performers.
The Cure will gear up for the release of their anticipated new album Songs of a Lost World (Nov. 1) with an intimate show in London for a “Radio 2 in Concert” gig at the BBC Radio Theatre. Fittingly for a band whose whole vibe is spooky to the core, the pre-Halloween show at the […]
Like father, like daughter. Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder made the band’s headlining set at Sunday’s Ohana Festival a family affair when he brought his 16-year-old daughter Harper to sing a very special mash-up. “We’ve had so much diversity on both these stages in the last few days,” Vedder said of the band’s annual three-day event in Dana Point, CA that featured sets from Devo, Maren Morris, Dogstar, Sting, Black Pumas, Alanis Morissette and the Breeders, among many others.
“But I realized it’s been a while since we had a powerful young woman up on stage with us so my pal Harper here is gonna help me out,” proud papa Vedder said with a smile as he looked to his left and got a big grin back from his youngest, who looked appropriately nervous, but resolute. Vedder then began strumming his acoustic guitar and launched into PJ’s signature cover of Wayne Cochran’s 1961 car crash tragic love classic “Last Kiss.”
After dear old dad’s first verse, Harper launched into the first verse of the Swift Fearless track, tentatively singing, “I’m five years old, it’s getting cold, I’ve got my big coat on/ I hear you laugh and look up smiling at you, I run and run/ Past the pumpkin patch and the tractor rides,” her voice gaining confidence as she made her way through, bursting into a huge smile as the audience gave her plenty of love in return.
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Father and daughter continued to trade off vocals, with Harper saying the quiet part out loud when she hit the bridge before the third verse, singing, “I have an excellent father, his strength is making me stronger/ God smiles on my little brother, inside and out/ He’s better than I am/ I grew up in a pretty house and I had space to run/ And I had the best days with you.” Before singing the final line, Harper looked over at her dad and the two shared a loving glance, with Vedder’s pride spreading across his face at the special moment.
As he strummed the final notes, the singer leaned over to give his daughter a shoulder bump, with the teen standing up to plant a kiss on her dad’s head before leaving the stage. Pearl Jam released “Last Kiss” as their 1998 Christmas fan club single; it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, marking the band’s highest-charting single to date.
Back in May Vedder proved his Swiftie bona fides, when the singer talked about attending Swift’s Eras Tour with his wife and two daughters. “She’s an artist who’s respectful of her audience and I know from my daughter that she’s really kind of incredible at planting these little… hidden codes that they can pick up,” he said, while also praising Swift for being “incredibly prolific.”
Click here to watch a video of the performance.
Phish will be back in their happy place in December when they set up shop at New York’s Madison Square Garden From Dec. 28-31. The jam band legends announced the gigs on Tuesday (Oct. 1) in an Instagram post where they noted that the visit will bring their total number of MSG plays to date […]
Oasis are heading back to the U.S., Canada and Mexico next year as part of their Live ‘25 reunion tour, their first run of shows since 2009. The Monday (Sept. 30) announcement of a string of stadium dates in Toronto, Chicago, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Mexico City came with a direct warning shot to some fans: “America. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”
The Manchester band’s turbulent history and mixed response in the U.S. clearly still sticks in the Gallagher brothers’ craws. At their peak, Oasis conquered the U.K., mainland Europe and developed dedicated fan bases in Latin American and Asian markets. In their 28.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, their fans’ top locations include Jakarta (Indonesia), São Paulo (Brazil) and Santiago (Chile) alongside London and Manchester. So why did they never truly crack the States?
Next summer’s reunion tour is as big as Noel and Liam’s egos. Nineteen stadium shows in the U.K. and Ireland sold out within hours during a protracted and controversial ticket sale process that attracted 10 million hopeful buyers. There was no questioning if those shows would sell; the demand indicated that they could have comfortably sold those shows several times over.
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But there will be eyes on this Friday’s (Oct. 4) North American ticket sale. The venues are ambitious: the MetLife Stadium across the Hudson River from New York City can host 82,000 people; the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., on the opposite coast can seat nearly 90,000 (though depending on staging for concerts, those capacities can be lower). Rumors had another date pencilled in for the Boston area’s Gillette Stadium, though this was absent from Monday’s announcement. Perhaps they want to see how it goes. Dynamic pricing will also not be used in the ticket sale process, presumably to boost the volume of sales rather than the value of each ticket.
Jitters behind the scenes would be understandable. The band’s final tour in North America, supporting their 2008 album Dig Out Your Soul, visited venues half the size of these prospective dates. They performed at New York’s 20,000-capacity Madison Square Gardens, but also at Broomfield, Colorado’s relatively modest 6,500-capacity 1stBank Center.
At the height of their fame during 1996, the band was playing to 125,000 people a night at England’s Knebworth House; in the U.S. however, Oasis’ biggest crowds would peak with support slots on U2’s mammoth PopMart tour in 1997. The group’s word-of-mouth appeal rarely translated to sustained and consistent ticket sales.
Oasis have had limited luck on the Billboard charts. None of their eight studio albums ever topped the Billboard 200, their highest entry being 1997’s Be Here Now, which clocked in at No. 2. 1995’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, however, has gone 4 x Platinum according to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). As for singles, “Wonderwall” peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, but the rest never had a sniff beyond “Don’t Look Back In Anger” at No. 55.
Things didn’t get off to a good start. On their debut run of dates in the U.S., the band played an infamous, substance-fueled gig at L.A.’s Whisky A Go Go in 1994. As later recounted in 2016’s documentary Supersonic, the band mistakenly scored crystal meth instead of cocaine which Liam said “just kept us up for f–king days” and resulted in a lackluster performance. The brothers fought on stage – Liam clattered Noel with a tambourine – and following the show Noel temporarily quit the band, disappeared from the touring group and cancelled a handful of shows.
It never really got better. In 1996, Liam failed to show up to a string of dates in the U.S., with Noel claiming that his younger brother instead was house-hunting back in London with then-girlfriend Patsy Kensit. Six years later in 2002, Liam walked off stage during a gig in Florida after losing his voice. The band headlined Coachella that year, but two decades later Liam dubbed that festival “pathetic.”
Noel has put the rocky relationship down to a mutual disconnect. “They couldn’t handle the fact that we didn’t give a f–k about anything,” he said in 2023 of the American market. “That’s the reason we’ve never really had a number one album in America – they wouldn’t go the extra mile for us because we wouldn’t go the extra mile for them.” Competing with the grunge titans of the era – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and more – proved an uphill battle according to Liam: “They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don’t get it.”
But things could be about to change. The reunion tour is already proving to have a cross-generational appeal for Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z alike; for the lattermost, it’ll be the first (and potentially only) time to see the band live. Oasis, for their part, have already struck deals with brands like Levi’s, Urban Outfitters and Amazon in hopes of pushing their name into new spaces. Streams for Oasis material took a healthy bump after the announcement they’d be returning.
The gauntlet has been thrown down; will the U.S. fanbase show up and show out for the much-hyped reunion? When tickets go on sale later this week, we’ll find out.
The Offspring is gearing up to release their 11th studio album, Supercharged, and to celebrate, frontman Dexter Holland discussed the making of the project with Billboard’s Rania Aniftos. “We’ve done ten albums or something, so it’s like, what can you offer? You want to do something that you haven’t done before, but you don’t want […]
Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong knows his enemy, and at the band’s Sept. 20 hometown-adjacent show at Oracle Park in San Francisco he had no problem calling out the man he thinks is a real American idiot.
“We are East Bay. East Bay for life! Green Day, East Bay, forever. We don’t take s–t from people like f–king John Fisher, who sold out the Oakland A’s to Las f–king Vegas,” Armstrong said during the show, according to reports. “I f–king late Las Vegas. It’s the worst sh–hole in America!”
For some context, Armstrong is from Oakland and has been a A’s supporter over the years (see below) and like a lot of East Bay residents, he’s a basket case about the latest major league team leaving his beloved home town. After wrapping their 2023-24 season with a loss to the Seattle Mariners on Sunday, A’s owner Fisher is moving the MLB franchise to Las Vegas, following on the heels of the 2019 exit of the NFL’s Raiders (now the Las Vegas Raiders) and the Golden State Warriors (who moved across the bay to San Francisco in 2019 after 50 years in Oakland).
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The rant didn’t sit well with a few radio stations in Vegas, as evidence by KOMP 92.3 and X107.5 both announcing that they have banned the group’s music. “KOMP 92.3 has pulled any and all Green Day from our playlist. It’s not us, Billie…it’s you. #vegas4ever,” the station wrote on Instagram in a post that featured a snap of the trio with a slash through the image.
“Sin City heard him loud and clear—and X107.5 is not having it. In response to Armstrong’s inflammatory comments, the station is banning all Green Day music, effective immediately,” 107.5 wrote on its website. The move was confirmed by midday host Carlota, who announced the ban last week, saying, “Maybe he (Billie Joe) should take a look at the city and the people involved in that transaction than talking SMACK about the city of Las Vegas… So we’re breaking up with Green Day completely. Bye Bye, Billie!”
A few days after his Vegas rant, Armstrong posted a picture of himself as a six-year-old playing with a toy car in the sand while rocking an A’s hat. “The athletics leaving Oakland is devastating. I feel for all the fans and the people that will lose their jobs because of greed.. 3 sports teams have left Oakland in the past 5 years Leaving a cultural hole in the east bay hearts and sport,” said Armstrong.
“I DO believe that Oakland will come back from this.. I’ll always remember driving to del Norte bart station taking the train to the games. Some of my favorite memories,” he continued. “My 4th grade teacher used to have the radio on in class so we can hear if Ricky Henderson was going to break the stolen base record. He did. Family friends crazy george Billy Ball.. This one hurts.”
In August, Armstrong first said good riddance to the team when he spray painted a “B” over the Oakland A’s logo at Rogers Centre in Toronto in the first sign of his pique about the team’s move. After wrapping the North American dates on their Saviors Tour, GD are gearing up to take their show on the road to Mexico on Nov. 15 for a show at Corona Capital in Mexico City, then to South Africa, the UAE, Bangkok, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan and Australia in early 2025 before playing a series of festivals in India, Germany and Norway.
A spokesperson for the band had no additional comment on the bans at press time.
Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong slamming the A’s owner and Las Vegas. At his show last night he said “I f—— hate Las Vegas. It’s the worst s—hole in America.” I think he’s in the minority. 43 million visited Vegas last year? @LVCVA #GreenDay 🎥 Gabriel Hernandez pic.twitter.com/6hgM0zw0Yu— Chris Maathuis (@sports8) September 21, 2024
After Billie Joe Armstrong called Las Vegas “the worst s***hole in America,” X107.5 is taking action. 🚫 We’re banning all Green Day music from our station! Carlota announced it this morning—no more Green Day on X107.5! 🙅♂️ https://t.co/Mix88CV1sD— X 107.5 (@X1075LV) September 25, 2024
Europe will get more of The Boss in 2025.
Announced early Tuesday, Oct. 1, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band adds eight new shows to their previously-rescheduled European jaunt – including concerts in England, France, Germany and Spain.
The newly-confirmed dates kick off May 17 with the first of two nights at Co-op Live in Manchester, England.
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All told, Springsteen and Co. will play 12 dates on their 2025 run of the U.K. and Europe, including previously-rescheduled shows in Marseille, Prague and Milan, which were initially called off in May on doctor’s orders, as the rock legend recovered from “vocal issues.”
The announcement of new dates follow the world premiere of the Thom Zimny documentary Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which arrives Oct. 25 on Hulu and Disney+.
After being sidelined for six years because of the global pandemic, and illness, including peptic ulcer issues, the road is calling to Springsteen. The Rock Hall-inducted artist and his band embarks on eight shows in Canada, beginning Oct. 31 in Montreal and running through Nov. 22 in Vancouver. That trek follows the completion of a U.S. tour with a Sept. 15 headlining spot at Sea.Hear.Now. festival in Springsteen’s old Asbury Park stomping grounds in his native New Jersey.
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If his comments during a performance Aug. 23 at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia are anything to go by, Springsteen is just getting started. “We’ve been around for 50 f***ing years, and we ain’t quitting!” he declared. “We ain’t doing no farewell tour bullsh*t! Jesus Christ! No farewell tour for the E Street Band!”
He added, “Farewell to what? A thousand people screaming your name? Get the hell out. I ain’t going anywhere!”
In a review of Springsteen’s Pittsburgh show, Billboard noted Springsteen’s “earth-quaking exuberance” and the band’s ability to deliver “magic moments” night after night. The same energy was palpable in Philadelphia, where the band delivered a set that spanned decades of hits.
Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band 2025 European Tour Dates
May 17 – Manchester, England – Co-op Live – On-sale: Oct. 11 at 10am BST (5 am ET) ticketmaster.co.uk
May 20 – Manchester, England – Co-op Live – On-sale: Oct. 11 at 10am BST (5 am ET) ticketmaster.co.uk
May 24 – Lille, France – Stade Pierre Mauroy – On-sale: Oct. 7 at 10am CEST (4am ET) gdp.fr/en
May 31 – Marseille, France – Orange Velodrome (rescheduled from May 25, 2024) gdp.fr/en
June 4 – Liverpool, England – Anfield Stadium – On-sale: Oct. 11 at 10am BST (5am ET) ticketmaster.co.uk
June 11 – Berlin, Germany – Olympiastadion – On-sale: Oct. 9 at 10am CEST (4am ET) ticketmaster.de
June 15 – Prague, Czech Republic – Airport Letnany (rescheduled from May 28, 2024) ticketmaster.cz
June 18 – Frankfurt, Germany – Deutsche Bank Park – On-sale: Oct. 9 at 10am CEST (4am ET) ticketmaster.de
June 21 – San Sebastian, Spain – Estadio Reale Arena (Anoeta) – On-sale: Oct. 8 at 10am CEST (4am ET) doctormusic.com entradas.com
June 27 – Gelsenkirchen, Germany – Veltins Arena – On-sale: Oct. 9 at 10am CEST (4am ET) ticketmaster.de
June 30 – Milan, Italy – San Siro Stadium (rescheduled from June 1, 2024) ticketmaster.it
July 3 – Milan, Italy – San Siro Stadium (rescheduled from June 3, 2024) ticketmaster.it
After 16 years of waiting for new music from The Cure, the beloved goth rock godheads have going from zero to the end in quick succession. After dropping the broody “Alone” last week, the Robert Smith-fronted band pulled the curtain back a bit more on Monday morning (Sept. 30) with a tantalizing tease of the even more morose “Endsong.”
The 15-second instrumental bit of the track previewed on the band’s Instagram Story was missing Smith’s iconic haunting melancholy vocals, but it leans hard into the English band’s signature turbulent songcraft via layers of chiming guitars, churning drums and an overall foreboding vibe.
Smith talked about the overall feel of their upcoming Songs of a Lost World studio album in a video interview posted on Friday in which the singer said he doesn’t recall there being an “official beginning” to the sessions for their 14th studio album. “Because it’s been kind of drifting in and out of my life for like an awful long time,” said Smith of the long-awaited follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream.
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“I mean, if I have one regret it’s that I said anything at all about it in 2019,” he added of an interview he did five years ago in which he blamed himself for “going back over and redoing them [the songs]” endlessly during a time when he was grieving the losses of his mother, father and brother.
He said he shouldn’t have talked about the album at all back then because the band had just started working on it at that point. “There are various points where I thought, ‘I think we’re gonna make a new album’… and then… for various reasons other things have happened and the idea’s been sort of pushed back.” During the course of the band’s nearly half-century career, Smith said the key to completing a record has been him nailing down both the opening and closing song on a project.
“[If I do that] I think that the album’s halfway done,” he said. “That’s the key for an album.” As proof, after releasing “Alone,” Smith said it was “the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus.”
“Alone” and “Endsong” will appear on Songs of a Lost World, which is due out on Nov. 1 via Capitol Records. The album, whose full track list has not yet been announced, was produced by Smith and Paul Corkett, who also co-produced 2000’s Bloodflowers. It features contributions from Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums), Reeves Gabriel (guitar) and Roger O’Donnell (keyboards); the latter longtime member recently announced that he’d been diagnosed with rare and “aggressive” blood cancer a year ago, but added that “I’m fine and the prognosis is amazing”.
Listen to Smith talk about the new album below.