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Bring Me the Horizon notches its record-breaking fifth No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart, as “Kool-Aid” bows atop the Jan. 20-dated survey. The song debuts with 2.4 million official U.S. streams and 2,000 downloads sold Jan. 5-11, according to Luminate. The track is the Oli Sykes-fronted rockers’ first release since the departure […]
Paramore has once again pulled out of upcoming performances due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but worry not — it also looks like Hayley Williams, Taylor York and Zac Farro may have new music in the works, implying that the band is still together and thriving.
In a Thursday (Jan. 18) post on Instagram Stories, a straightforward message said that due to “unforeseen circumstances, Paramore can no longer attend and perform at Vive Latino in Mexico City, Festival Estéreo Picnic in Bogotá, and Lollapalooza Brazil in São Paulo.” The statement also clarified that Nashville indie band Kings of Leon is set to replace the popp-rock trio at all three events.
The announcement comes two weeks after Paramore dropped out of this year’s iHeartRadio ALTer EGO show, also “due to unforeseen circumstances.” The band had also wiped their social media accounts clean around that time, leading some fans to worry about the its future.
Their most recent statement, however, said that Paramore “apologizes for any inconvenience” before teasing, “They will see you in the next era.”
Other than that, Paramore hasn’t addressed its withdrawal from shows or commented about what’s in store for the future. The group did, however, recently tease a Talking Heads tribute cover and music video with A24, with Williams unboxing an oversized David Byrne-esque suit jacket in a snippet from the project that ends with the frontwoman singing part of “Burning Down the House.”
The “Simmer” singer, York and Farro are also still set to support several of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows on the trek’s European leg this summer. And as far as any new music goes, Paramore is freshly finished with its contract with Atlantic Records, meaning the band is now a free agent for the first time in 20 years.
“We’ve been really lucky. We always will have gripes — it’s an industry — but we know that we’ve been really lucky,” Williams said prior to the release of Paramore’s most recent album, This is Why, last year. “It’s more just the fact that it’s time to f—ing finish something. And it’s time to know that we’re not doing the same s–t that we’ve been on since we were teenagers. It’s just going to feel so nice to start a new book. You know, like no more chapters of this one. Whole new book. And I’m excited.”
In 2023, a number of rock icons decided to talk about transgender kids and why they disapproved of giving them access to best-practice healthcare to help with their transition. In 2024, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong would like to break that trend.
In a new interview with The Los Angeles Times, the 51-year-old singer called out the conservative-led moral panic surrounding trans kids having access to gender-affirming care, criticizing those who would stand in the way of progress. “I just think they’re f–king close-minded,” he told the publication. “It’s like people are afraid of their children. Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?”
Armstrong elaborated elsewhere, saying that seeing kids get to celebrate their identities earlier in life is a net positive, especially considering that his generation didn’t have that same luxury. “Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ, and there’s more support,” he said. “But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that.”
When speaking about the band’s forthcoming song “Bobby Sox” (in which he nods to his own bisexuality by singing both “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?” and “Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”), Armstrong said it felt “liberating” to be in a place where he could sing about his sexuality. “It became more of a queer singalong.”
While 2023 was a record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ legislation in the U.S., 2024 is already on track to break that record yet again. As of press time, the ACLU is already tracking more than 200 anti-LGBTQ bills in the 2024 legislative session, with 71 of those such bills aimed focused on “healthcare restrictions.”
Green Day, meanwhile, is gearing up for the release of the 14th studio album Saviors on Friday (Jan. 19). In its interview, the band said that the new album centers more plainly on America’s current political strife ahead of the 2024 election, returning to the socially conscious themes of some of their past albums such as American Idiot and Revolution Radio.
“We purposely stayed away from politics [on 2020’s Father of All…] just because everything was such an easy target,” Armstrong said. “We didn’t want to be like this CNN band. And I think in the back of our minds, we knew that MAGA and the divisiveness was gonna be there four years later anyway.”
The 2024 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival will feature headlining sets from The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Chris Stapleton, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Killers and Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals.
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The eight-day fest that takes place across 14 stages over two weekends — April 25-28 and May 2-5 — at the Fair Grounds Race Course, draws nearly half a million music lovers to a sprawling event that includes some of the biggest names in rock, pop, hip-hop, country, funk and jazz, including the usual compliment of homegrown legends.
Among the other acts slated to perform this year are: Hozier, Jon Batiste, Queen Latifah, Vampire Weekend, Greta Van Fleet, Heart, Widespread Panic, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Bonnie Raitt, Earth, Wind & Fire, Celebrating Jimmy Buffett with the Coral Reefer Band, Fantasia, The Revivalists, The Beach Boys, Big Freedia, Kem, Juvenile with Mannie Fresh, Irma Thomas, Joe Bonamassa, Steel Pulse, Cyril Neville, George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Jeffrey Osborne and Rhiannon Giddens, and hundreds more.
This year’s Jazz Fest will also celebrate the music and culture of Colombia at the Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion, with 17 bands and a variety of artists sharing the unique sights and sounds from the South American nation, including Colombian salsa, cumbia, champeta, vallenato, chirimia, and currulao. There will also be daily parades honoring Colombia’s vibrant carnival spirit, with attendees getting opportunities to meet Indigenous and Afro-Colombian artisans, purchase their crafts and taste traditional Colombian food and drinks, according to a statement announcing the lineup.
Weekend and VIP packages are available here now, with single day tickets slated to go on sale in February; all tickets are subject to additional service fees and handling charges and an account with AXS is required for purchase. This year’s Jazz Fest will also offer a 4-day GA+ weekend pass for the first time, with access to an exclusive GA+ lounge with private restrooms, a full-service bar and shade. There will be a limited supply of 4-day second weekend passes including admission to the May 2 Rolling Stones set, the group’s only announced 2024 North American festival gig.
Stapleton, Killers, .Paak, Batiste and Vampire Weekend are the top line acts for the first weekend (April 25-28), with the Stones, Foo Fighters, Young, Hozier and Queen Latifah topping the list for the second weekend (May 2-5). Click here for the full day-by-day lineup.
Check out the 2024 lineup poster below.
In 2019, Alabama-born country–rock quintet The Red Clay Strays were plugging away at building a core fan base, playing small clubs and festivals around the Southeastern United States in hopes of exposure. “We were a bar band at the time, playing honky-tonks [with] no stability, really just chasing the dream,” harmonicist/guitarist/vocalist Drew Nix says. In the same breath, he acknowledges the toll such commitment took on their romantic partners. “We were like, ‘Our women have the short end of the stick of this. I wonder why they even like us.’”
The notion led Nix and the group’s lead singer Brandon Coleman, along with songwriter Dan Couch, to write “Wondering Why,” the band’s breakthrough hit from their 2022 album Moment of Truth, putting them on the mainstream map.
The bluesy romantic ballad depicts a committed, if unlikely, love story between an upper-class woman and a working-class man. (“I don’t know what happened, but it sure don’t add up on paper/ But when I close my eyes late at night, you can bet I thank my maker,” Coleman croons in the opening verse.) More than a year after its release, “Wondering Why” made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100 — in late December, no less, even amid the typical influx of holiday songs on the all-genre chart. Now, the band’s first entry rises to a new No. 71 high on charts dated Jan. 20 as it builds at radio and streaming.
Composed of Coleman, Nix, Zach Rishel (electric guitar), Andrew Bishop (bass) and John Hall (drums), The Red Clay Strays have been making music since 2016, with most of the group meeting during college or through prior gigs. Crafting an amalgam of rockabilly, gospel, soul, blues and hints of country, Coleman’s barrel-chested vocal and 1950s Johnny Cash-meets-Jerry Lee Lewis onstage aesthetic shape what he refers to as “non-denominational rock’n’roll.”
While crafting its sound in the local circuit, the independent band began to add pieces to its team, including Conway Entertainment Group’s Cody Payne as manager. He first met the group in 2019 as a booking agent and later began working with the group through the company’s management arm, Ontourage Management. As his position continued to grow, so did the group’s fan base within the community and online: by the time the members felt ready to record a debut album, Payne played an instrumental role in igniting crowdfunding efforts to help with the financial struggles of paying for studio time.
“I built it on their website, straight PayPal,” Payne says. Despite not having an official monetary goal in mind, he recalls thinking that $30,000 would be enough to get the job done — and was floored as the total quickly soared past that number. “The first week we did over $50,000; by the end of it we had about $60,000.”
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
Using analog methods at a Huntsville, Ala. studio, the band spent just over a week creating Moment of Truth, which was subsequently self-released in April 2022. Though it was initially met with tepid commercial returns, at the start of the following year, Payne hired Coleman’s younger brother, Matthew — who is also one of the band’s primary songwriters — as a videographer to help grow The Red Clay Strays’ online presence. The band also signed with WME for booking representation in January 2023, and within the span of a few months, announced a series of high-profile opening gigs for Elle King, Eric Church and Dierks Bentley.
In May, the band began taking meetings with a handful of labels, with the members parsing the decision of whether to sign or remain independent — until they met with Thirty Tigers co-founder/president David Macias. “It just made more sense for us,” Coleman says. “Instead of giving us the dog and pony show, David gave us straight advice. There was no pitch. That’s what I wanted to hear. If I’m betting on anybody, I’m betting on us every time.” By September, following months of touring festivals including Lollapalooza and CMA Fest, The Red Clay Strays had officially signed to Thirty Tigers.
With Matthew’s help, the band began to upload an influx of clips, largely consisting of live performances, to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. “He was putting out reels and social numbers kept going up,” Payne says. “Wondering Why” has soundtracked more than 71,000 TikTok videos to date, along with a lyric video for the song that has compiled more than 2.5 million YouTube views.
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In the time since, “Wondering Why” has grown across formats and genres: on charts dated Jan. 20, the breakthrough hit holds at highs on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts, reaches a new No. 19 best on Adult Alternative Airplay and sits at No. 22 on Hot Country Songs. Labels have again reached out, says Payne, though the band has no plans to move from Thirty Tigers.
Additionally, despite plans to release a follow-up project by early summer, the recent chart success has spurred second thoughts to “let ‘Wondering Why’ and Moment of Truth breathe a bit,” Payne adds. When the new album does arrive, it’ll boast production from Dave Cobb, thanks to Conway Entertainment Group’s Brandon Mauldin setting things in motion with mutual connection Shooter Jennings. “Since we’ve started, the goal from day one was to work with Dave Cobb,” Coleman says. “The fact that it actually happened is surreal.”
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
From left: Drew Nix, John Hall, Brandon Coleman, Andrew Bishop and Zach Rishel of The Red Clay Strays with their manager Cody Payne (third from left) in Red Rocks, CO.
Macie B. Coleman
In the meantime, the band will continue its Way Too Long headlining tour, in addition to more festival dates, including Boston Calling and Hinterland. Coleman knows as the hype for “Wondering Why” mounts, so too may the pressure to follow it up while the iron is hot — but he’s keeping his cool amid the band’s breakthrough moment.
“Everybody yelling at us to play it from the beginning of the show is kind of crazy, but it’s cool. I’m thankful for the recognition, but I always have it in my mind that people [go] viral for a month or two, then the next thing comes along.”
A version of this story will appear in the Jan. 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Green Day singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong has a herculean talent for taking the personal and making it universal. The 51-year-old pop-punk icon has spent more than three decades translating his fiery thoughts and emotions into anthems that make the band’s fans feel seen as they shout along.
On the group’s latest single, the punk bossa nova “Dilemma,” Armstrong tackles his alcohol addiction and trip to rehab in such clear-eyed lyrics as, “I was sober, now I’m drunk again/ I’m in trouble and in love again/ I don’t want to be a dead man walking… Welcome to my nightmare/ Where dreams go to disappear/ Sit around in rehab/ Feeling like a lab rat.”
“It definitely deals with mental health and addiction,” Armstrong told People magazine about the song from the band’s new album, Saviors, due out Friday (Jan. 19). “When I say, ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ that could be looked at two different ways. It could be someone going, ‘F-k, yeah. I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ at a party, or it could be someone that’s fallen. That’s what it means to me, anyway.”
Armstrong went to rehab in 2012 in the wake of a bizarre onstage meltdown at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas during which he ranted about the group’s time being cut and smashed his guitar. On Howard Stern’s SiriusXm radio show on Wednesday morning (Jan. 17), Armstrong said he’d been sober for “five years and I thought that I could go back and be like a normal drinker again. And I think I was for a little bit and then it just escalated. It got to a point where I was physically and mentally drained and I just felt terrible. I got tired of feeling tired.”
The singer told Stern “Dilemma” was written while he was drinking and that it’s one of the most honest songs he’s ever penned. “There’s like no metaphor or anything like that,” he said. Armstrong has been detailing his struggles with anxiety and substance use since the earliest days of Green Day’s career as a snotty, snarling trio on the Berkeley, CA underground punk scene in the early 1990s. He most famously did so on their 1994 major label debut, Dookie on the hit “Basket Case,” in which the singer chronicled his crippling anxiety attacks, as well as on “Geek Stink Breath” from their 1995 follow-up, Insomniac, in which he detailed the harsh effects of methamphetamine use on his body.
Now sober, Armstrong said he no longer drinks and did not enter a program to deal with what appears to have been a relapse following his 2012 rehab stint. “I ended up being around a bunch of really good friends that don’t drink,” he told People. “There’s a lot more sober people — I’ve noticed that, and maybe because I was the only one that was hammered before, that now I notice that people are more sober now, and it was just something that I was unaware of, because I was s—tfaced or something.”
The married father of two sons — fellow musicians Joey, 28, and Jakob, 25 — said his sobriety is helping him feel more present for his family, which includes his wife of 29 years, Adrienne. “For me, alcohol gets in the way of everything, from my relationship with my family to just trying to get a good night’s sleep. It gets in the way of my happiness,” he told People. “So that’s why really I wanted to quit, and I was done. So with the friends that I have, I’m still able to go out and go listen to some music, see some band or go to a party — and it’s still a fun, sexy kind of evening, even though there’s no alcohol.”
The best part for Armstrong, he said, was that he can wake up the next day and he might be a bit tired, but “now there’s no shame and hangover and all that s–t. I feel really good.”
Green Day’s visit to Stern’s studio also included Armstrong laughing as he listened to a recording of him singing a sweet song as a five-year-old and the singer’s emotional backstage meet weird with Eddie Van Halen in 2007, during which the late Van Halen guitarist cried and shredded on his guitar as they spoke.
Watch Armstrong talk about “Dilemma” with Stern and watch the video for the song below.
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If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 800-662-HELP (4357) is available 24/7.
If you missed last year’s big screen re-release of the Talking Heads‘ landmark 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense you’re in luck. The movie will be back in select theaters in the U.S., Canada and U.K. starting Jan. 27 after its well-received 2023 4K re-release. The latest reboot is thanks to independent film company A24 […]
One of Green Day’s fan-favorite hits was almost a 5 Seconds of Summer song.
In celebration of their upcoming 14th studio album, Saviors, out on Friday (Jan. 19), Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong looked back on some of the band’s biggest tracks with People this week, where he revealed the interesting origin story of “Still Breathing,” which is featured on the 2016 album, Revolution Radio.
“There’s a band called 5 Seconds of Summer who wanted me to write a song for them,” Armstrong shared. “All of a sudden I was writing the lyrics, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s no f—ing way I’m giving these guys this song.’ There’s all those [lyrics] where it’s the last moment of someone’s life — it’s so intense. It’s just a song about being a survivor.”
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“Cause I’m still breathing on my own / My head’s above the rain and roses / Making my way away / My way to you,” Armstong sings in the chorus of the song, which peaked at No. 11 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart.
Saviors, which will be released via Reprise/Warner Records, is a follow-up to 2020’s Father of All Motherf–kers and was recorded by Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirt and drummer Tré Cool in London and Los Angeles, marking a reunion with longtime producer Rob Cavallo.
“Saviors is an invitation into Green Day’s brain, their collective spirit as a band, and an understanding of friendship, culture and legacy of the last 30 plus years. It’s raw and emotional. Funny and disturbing. It’s a laugh at the pain, weep in the happiness kind of record,” the group said in an Instagram announcing the project.
“Honesty and vulnerability,” they added, noting that the album is about, “Power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph. disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility.”
Gavin Rossdale paid homage to the 30th anniversary of his band Bush on The Tonight Show on Tuesday night (Jan. 16) by throwing it back to (near) the beginning. Taking the stage alone in front of a stack of amps and wearing all black, backlit by green floodlights, Rossdale strummed out buzzy chords backed by a string quartet.
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“It’s not my time, to wonder why/ Everything gone white, everything’s grey/ Now you’re here, now you’re away/ I don’t want this, remember that/ I’ll never forget, where you’re at,” Rossdale in his signature gravely voice, strumming along before dropping his guitar out to sing much of the second verse of the 1994 single a cappella.
For those old enough to remember, the performance was a throwback nod to the band’s first visit to the Tonight Show in 1996, when Jay Leno was behind the desk. As with Tuesday’s run-through, at the time Rossdale appeared by himself on stage, surrounded by a forest of candelabras and a string quartet to perform the song from the band’s multi-platinum 1994 debut album, Sixteen Stone; “Glycerine” peaked at No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 20 weeks on the chart.
The band — with Rossdale as the only original member — will celebrate their 30th anniversary this summer on a 32-date North American tour, Bush — Loaded: The Greatest Hits Tour. The outing slated to kick off on July 26 at the Hayden Homes Amphitheater in Bend, OR will feature support from Alice In Chains guitarist and solo act Jerry Cantrell and Candlebox and more guests to be announced soon.
Loaded The Greatest Hits 1994-2023 — Bush’s first-ever hits collection — is out now, compiling the band’s seven No. 1 singles, the new track “Nowhere to Go but Everywhere” and a studio cover of the Beatles’ “Come Together.” Among the beloved hits on the collection are: “Everything Zen,” “Little Things,” “Comedown,” “Glycerine,” “Machinehead,” “Swallowed” and “Greedy Fly.”
Watch Bush on The Tonight Show below.
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If you happen to wander into the Rockefeller Center subway station in New York on Tuesday night (Jan. 16) and caught a glimpse of a pretty decent Green Day cover band rocking for some beer money you probably should have pushed to the front. As it turns out, the veteran pop-punk trio went underground with […]
