State Champ Radio Rock
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Thirty Seconds to Mars is back. The group, consisting of brothers Shannon and Jared Leto, revealed on Monday (May 8) that their upcoming sixth studio album, It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day, is set for release this September via Concord Records.
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To celebrate the announcement, the band unveiled the album’s lead single, a powerful, high-energy track called “Stuck.” The accompanying, Jared-directed music video is inspired by the human form and combines high fashion with art for a sleek, minimalistic result.
“Thanks to my incredibly creative mother, my brother and I were instilled with a love for art and photography from a very young age,” Jared said in a press statement. “The video for ‘Stuck,’ our first new song in five years, is a love letter to some of my favorite photographers. Artists who made a very deep impact on me like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Herb Ritts and more. Artists whose work changed the way I saw things and showed me new possibilities at every turn.”
“Stuck” marks Thirty Seconds to Mars’ first new music in five years, and It’s the End of the World follows the group’s 2018 album, America. Later this month, Thirty Seconds to Mars will be taking the main stage at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend and, in August, the band will be making their return to Lollapalooza for the first time since 2006. They’re also set to perform at When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas in October.
Watch the “Stuck” music video below.
Papa Roach reaches No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart for the ninth time as “Cut the Line” lifts to the top of the May 13-dated survey.
“Cut the Line” is the second No. 1 in a row for the veteran rockers, following the one-week reign of “No Apologies” in September 2022.
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The Jacoby Shaddix-fronted band first led Mainstream Rock Airplay for six weeks in 2009 with “Lifeline.” Its career on the tally stretches back to its first entry, “Last Resort,” which hit No. 4 in 2000. The band has notched 25 top 10s on the chart.
“Cut the Line” is Papa Roach’s third No. 1 from its 2022 album Ego Trip, with the set’s first ruler being “Kill the Noise,” for four weeks in late 2021. An additional single, “Stand Up,” peaked at No. 12 in April 2022.
Concurrently, “Cut the Line” holds at its No. 10 high on the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart with 2.6 million audience impressions in the week ending May 4, according to Luminate.
The song also appeared on the multimetric Hot Hard Rock Songs list for one week in March 2022, peaking at No. 19.
Ego Trip debuted at No. 6 on the Top Hard Rock Albums survey in April 2022 and has earned 91,000 equivalent album units to date.
The band has tour dates in the United States and Europe lined up through October, with its next stop May 13 in Las Vegas.
All charts dated May 13 will update Tuesday, May 9, on Billboard.com.
THE ALBUM
An Inbuilt Fault, out Friday (May 5) on Partisan Records.
THE ORIGIN
You wouldn’t recognize the Westerman of 2016. In the earliest days of his life as a professional artist, Will Westerman sported long, curly hair and played folk music that most often earned him comparisons to Nick Drake. By the time he began getting more notoriety, he had totally transformed. Now in his early thirties, he keeps his hair shorn close and wears sleeker clothes, mirroring the evolution of his music.
In the late ‘10s, he began collaborating with the producer and fellow Londoner Bullion, who helped Westerman achieve a more electronic sheen. His early singles — including the breakthrough 2018 track “Confirmation,” which ignited a flurry of blog hype — had an alien quality, singer-songwriter fare put through a strange, otherworldly filter.
Since “Confirmation,” the path has been as circuitous as Westerman’s exploratory songwriting. His debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, was finished and ready for release in 2019, but he alludes to various speed bumps caused by some people who “behaved badly.” Eventually it arrived right in the summer of 2020, with Westerman unable to tour or promote it properly due to the pandemic. Afterwards, he underwent a crisis of faith, wondering whether he wanted to release music anymore. “It took me about a year to get back in the headspace where I thought it was worth making music again,” he admits. “I remembered why all this stuff started in the first place.”
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THE SOUND
Part of the power in Westerman’s recent music is the contrast between warped guitars and synth textures, and Westerman himself. He has always had a rich, expressive voice — it can be crystalline, but also not without a smoky huskiness. As a child, Westerman sang in choirs, and recently found solace in revisiting unaccompanied plainsong as a way of reconnecting with the human voice during long stretches of lockdown isolation. It gives him a unique melodic sensibility, where he may wind and surge beyond the lines we usually associate with pop song structures.
Sophomore album An Inbuilt Fault was intended to be serpentine and unpredictable as well. “I wanted it to feel very close, and less sculpted,” Westerman says. “I wanted it to have a breathing quality.” At the time, he was demoing over polyrhythmic loops, experimenting and writing for himself without any expectation of necessarily finishing another album. In addition to the comfort of choral music, he was digging way into krautrock. “It was the sense of freedom, the sound of freeform expression,” he recalls. “It was the music I needed at that time.”
While Westerman’s guitar is still pivotal to his music, An Inbuilt Fault takes the organic/artificial tension of his music to a new extreme, putting his voice to the forefront over a newly percussive backdrop. Abandoning the beats of past recordings, he wanted to embrace playing live in a room with human beings again — once he was finally able to. An Inbuilt Fault ended up being a document of a group of musicians wrestling an elusive sound into being, all tumbling drums and guitars surrounded by all manner of flickering, alluring textures at the songs’ edges.
THE RECORD
With everything on hold, Westerman decided it was time to try a big life change he’d thought about for years — he wanted to move to Athens. Embarking on a “half-baked” plan to live in a van in the Balkans, he started across Europe and stopped to visit his father in rural Italy for a week. Thanks to more COVID lockdowns, he ended up being there for six months.
For all that time, Westerman had very little human interaction aside from seeing his father. He began writing songs again, mostly as a way of keeping himself sane, but eventually saw an album taking shape. When it was time to record, he reached out to Big Thief drummer/producer James Krivchenia — who he’d briefly hit it off with at a show immediately before the pandemic — and with Krivchenia’s touch and ear for percussion, An Inbuilt Fault has that more alive feeling Westerman was looking for.
“I wanted to jump off the cliff creatively,” Westerman says. “I wanted to put myself in an environment that was completely alien to me as a way of trying to grow, to break out of the solipsistic way the music had been forming up until that point.”
That isn’t to say the core ethos of Westerman’s writing was lost in the process. The music unspools and ambles, so it takes longer for these songs to sink into your head, but they don’t leave once they’re there. His melodies are as gorgeous as ever: one of the album’s most simultaneously jarring and transcendent moments is when he slides into the chorus of “Idol:RE-Run,” which happens to wring a hilarious amount of beauty out of the word “motherf–ker.” (“It wakes you up,” he quips.) Meanwhile, “A Lens Turning” uses a dexterous, knotty groove as underpinning for navigating a similarly tangled existential crisis. Closer “Pilot Was A Dancer” has an almost ‘90s alt-rock tone to it, a cathartic burst of guitars as Westerman tells an apocalyptic story about the last human being alive on Earth.
Though Westerman’s songs are inspired by an array of experiences, both his and others, he rarely is autobiographical. At the same time, he acknowledges much of An Inbuilt Fault is traversing relatively dark themes, its title a reflection on our inherent fallibility. At the end of it all, he’s made another striking album that also feels like a hard reset after the ellipsis of 2020. It feels like he’s starting again.
THE FUTURE
Westerman did eventually make it to Athens, and his early days there were wild — things were just reopening, and parties thronged the streets at all hours of the night. One of the singles from An Inbuilt Fault, “CSI: Petralona,” is a rare moment that does derive more directly from Westerman’s actual life, inspired by a “near-death” experience and the kindness of strangers. But since then, it seems he’s settled into his new life in Greece.
“It’s almost the opposite of London,” he muses. “It’s slow-paced. It’s lugubrious chaos. Nothing really works very well but there’s a strange internal logic to it where it does.”
With some distance from London, and from the hubs of the music industry in western Europe and North America, Westerman has found he’s been more clear-headed creatively. He’s come out the other side of questioning his life as a musician revitalized and re-centered. “It remains the same irrespective of whether five people are listening or five thousand,” he says. “The scale is irrelevant in terms of process, and when I remember that it is very helpful. I know I’ll continue to do it now in some capacity, because I know I need to do it.”
To that end, he mentions he’s already close to finishing the recording of another album.
HIS FAVORITE PIECE OF GEAR
“I’ve been using this Meris Hedra pedal. It has three pitch shifters but it’s got secondary functions of delay and feedback. I think you can make a whole record with just a voice and this pedal. It would be an interesting thing to do that as a confined exercise. I don’t really understand it. It’s such a deep piece of equipment I don’t know half of it.”
THE ARTIST THAT HE THINKS NEEDS MORE ATTENTION
“There’s loads. There’s an artist called Clara Mann. She’s almost folk revival, slightly maudlin, sadly beautiful minimalistic guitar singer-songwriter. I really enjoyed listening to that yesterday so I’ll go with that now. That’s a difficult question because there’s literally thousands.”
THE THING THAT HE THINKS NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
“I don’t think there is enough protection for artists — in general in the industry, but particularly for younger artists. There’s a disposability culture, where there isn’t really a huge amount of accountability for the way older people in the industry can exploit the good will or naivety of younger people when they’re offering something. It’s not like designing a washing machine. It’s a different sort of thing.
“I think it would be good that, if [and] when people are exploited through their inexperience, there was some kind of culpability for the people who are doing that. Currently there is none. Seemingly there are very few bodies of people you can go to when things go wrong. Generally the people who carry the financial and emotional burden when those things happen are the people least equipped to do it, and that’s an imbalance that is not right.”
THE PIECE OF ADVICE HE BELIEVES EVERY NEW INDIE ARTIST NEEDS TO HEAR
Westerman pauses for a while, and then says simply: “Keep going.”
He may have sung that he wanted to “rock and roll all night and party every day,” but Kiss singer-guitarist Paul Stanley‘s last few days have been pretty lacking in the “party” department.
After making factually inaccurate comments via Twitter about gender-affirming care for minors earlier this week, Stanley walked back his original statement on Thursday (May 4). “While my thoughts were clear, my words clearly were not,” he wrote.
In his original statement, Stanley forwarded misinformation about gender-affirming care for youths, saying that “irreversible” procedures shouldn’t be performed on children (despite the facts saying that the vast majority of this kind of care is reversible and often medically necessary for trans kids). “There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children into questioning their sexual identification,” Stanley wrote.
But in his new statement, he focused on those currently undergoing the transition process, expressing his admiration for their bravery in being themselves. “Most importantly and above all else, I support those struggling with their sexual identity while enduring constant hostility and those whose path leads them to reassignment surgery,” he said. “It’s hard to fathom the kind of conviction that one must feel to take those steps.”
Closing his new statement, Stanley opted not to clarify his original statement, insisting that social media may not be the best place for genuine discourse. “A paragraph or two will remain far too short to fully convey my thoughts or point of view, so I will leave that for another time and place,” he wrote.
See Stanley’s latest statement below:
Bruce Springsteen got to know the locals during his visit to The Burrow pub in Rathangan, Co. Kildare in Ireland this week ahead of his trio of sold-out shows this weekend at RDS Arena in Dublin. In video posted from a fan account, Springsteen is seen hanging with some townspeople and having a pint.
After saying he hadn’t sung it in a while and might be rusty on the lyrics, the Boss busted into the a cappella first verse of his 1985 Born in the U.S.A. single “My Hometown.” Tapping his hand on the table, he sang, “And running with a dime in my hand/ To the bus stop to pick/ Up a paper for my old man/ I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick/ And steer as we drove through town/ He’d tousle my hair/ And say, ‘son, take a good look around’/ This is your hometown.”
He then looked at the fans gathered in his family’s ancestral home and led them in the chorus of, “this is your hometown,” telling them afterwards, “you guys, I’m firing the E Street Band and I’m hiring you.”
Springsteen made another stop as well, visiting former Pogues singer Shane MacGowan’s home in Dublin, captured in a sweet pic posted by the beloved singer’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke.
“It was really really exciting and monumentally inspiring to spend time with @springsteen yesterday,” she wrote in the caption to the pic of Springsteen smiling at a seated MacGowan. “He radiates a very very beautiful energy, he is like an embodied angel! It’s great to see that someone can find work that they are lit up with and that they can spend their whole life lifting peoples spirits through their work and stay so enthusiastic and energetic and full of gratitude and grace and appreciation for the work and for everything and everyone in their life… It is also wonderful to see that a person can be extremely successful in his field and still massively generous in his administration for other musicians and writers. Extreme kudos and gratitude for the visit to me and @shanemacgowanofficial ! Really looking forward to the gig!”
Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing RDS Arena tonight (May 5), Sunday and Tuesday.
Check out the fan video and Clarke’s post below.
The late pop superstar Prince will have a highway named after him in his home state, following a vote by Minnesota lawmakers Thursday (May 4).
The Senate vote was 55-5 to rename the highway that runs past Prince’s Paisley Park museum and studios. Among those watching was his oldest sister, Sharon Nelson. The bill passed the House unanimously last month on the seventh anniversary of Prince’s death, and now goes to Gov. Tim Walz, who is expected to sign.
Purple signs will soon go up along a seven-mile stretch of State Highway 5 in the Minneapolis suburbs of Chanhassen and Eden Prairie — designating it the Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway. Prince’s friends and fans are footing the bill, said the lead sponsor, Republican Sen. Julia Coleman, of Waconia.
“Prince was a true genius, a visionary artist who pushed the boundaries of music and cultures in ways that will never be forgotten,” Coleman told her fellow senators. “His influence can be heard in the work of countless musicians who came after him, and his legacy continues to inspire new generations of artists to this day.”
Paisley Park, where Prince lived and recorded, now draws visitors from around the world.
Paisley Park is also where Prince died on April 21, 2016, of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 57. The 65,000-square-foot complex in Chanhassen is now a museum run by his estate as well as an event venue and recording studio.
Sharon Nelson told reporters her brother’s music will live forever, and that his spirit “sneaks up on me sometimes.” And she urged fans to take the tour and see his 3,000 shoes on display.
The idea to name the highway after Prince came three years ago from Mark Webster, a longtime friend of the star who works security at Paisley Park. He was among the fans who gathered at the Minnesota Capitol to celebrate the vote. He said they’ll find a date that works for fans soon for the signs to go up.
Prince’s birthday was June 7, but he didn’t celebrate birthdays because he was a Jehovah’s Witness.
The singer, songwriter, arranger and instrumentalist broke through in the late 1970s and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. He created hits including “Little Red Corvette,” ″Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry,” and sold more than 100 million records worldwide.
Several years ago, Prince’s 1984 “Purple Rain” was added by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.
After a six-year legal battle that consumed tens of millions of dollars, the Internal Revenue Service and the estate administrator put the value of his estate at $156.4 million. Since Prince died without a will, his six surviving siblings at the time of his death were designated as his heirs. The three youngest eventually sold most of their interests to the music company Primary Wave.
During Howard Stern’s trip to Miami this week to help open SiriusXM’s new studios, he sat down with his old pal Jon Bon Jovi for some serious talk about rock and roll. In between his incessant complaining about being forced by his bosses to leave the house after working from home for the past three years, Stern took time to ask Bon Jovi singer Jon Bon Jovi to play one of his favorite games: who is the greatest guitarist of all time?
“Beck,” Bon Jovi said without hesitation during the surprise studio pop-in. “Jeff Beck,” he confirmed of the legendary guitarist who died in January at 78 as a surprised Stern rattled off the list of artists he expected the singer to mention, including Jimi Hendrix. “Jimi Hendrix, would of course be in the starting lineup, but you put me on the spot,” said Bon Jovi. Stern’s inquisition went on, with the host dropping names including Eddie Van Halen and Prince, with the latter seconded by Bon Jovi’s wife, Dorothea.
“Eddie, Prince… all different, but I was in the room with Jeff Beck when he took a guitar out of a cardboard box with a rented amplifier and no pedals and created that sound when we did the ‘Young Guns’ record and he was my guitar player,” Bon Jovi said of the solo Young Guns II soundtrack collab with Beck on the 1990 Billboard No. 1 hit “Blaze of Glory.”
“I sat there flabbergasted because Jeff Beck did things with his fingers, with his thumb that would blow your mind,” Bon Jovi recalled, then listing Hendrix, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler as greats as well, noting that while all stellar, it really comes down to their songwriting ability as well.
The guitar talk came after Stern’s wife, Beth, arrived with her surprise guests in the spanking new studio, with the host welcoming the couple in, then promptly insisting on the lascivious details of how they celebrated their 34th wedding anniversary. Dorothea then admitted that Jon was always the cutest boy in high school while the rocker reminisced about his long friendship with fellow New Jersey icon Bruce Springsteen, including the first time they played together when Bon Jovi was just 17-years-old.
The old pals — Stern very reluctantly inducted Bon Jovi into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in 2018 — also reminisced about the recent hourslong car ride they took at Jon’s insistence to get Stern out of the house after his extended COVID lockdown.
Check out Bon Jovi talking Beck, their three-hour dar ride and more below.
Ozzy Osbourne had to make the heartbreaking decision to retire from touring early this year due to a series of health issues, effectively ending a half century of road dog raging. But in a new interview in Metal Hammer magazine conducted by two of his biggest fans — Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D — Ozzy revealed that he’s determined to keep rocking, even if it’s on four wheels.
“I mean, doing a live show is what I live for. I’ve had to cancel my [2023] European tour but I’m determined,” Ozzy told the pair. “I’ve gotta do more gigs if I have to get someone to wheel me out there. I mean, you can’t retire from this game. It’s not a job, it’s a f–king passion. I don’t know how to do anything else. The thought of sitting in my house all day… I’m a road dog, you know? I’ve been doing it f–king 55 years. It’s the best thing to have ever happened to me.”
In February, Osbourne posted a note to fans on social media, saying, “This is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to share with my loyal fans…” In it, he announced that his touring days have come to an end and that his rescheduled European/UK tour dates have been canceled. “Believe me when I say that the thought of disappointing my fans really f—s me up, more than you will ever know. My team is currently coming up with ideas for where I will be able to perform without having to travel from city to city or country to country.”
Ozzy previously revealed that though his voice is “fine,” after three major operations, stem cell surgeries and other procedures to deal with a spinal injury he suffered four years ago he can no longer deal with life on the road.
It didn’t take long for his team to figure out a way for the 74-year-old metal icon to get back at it, though. His name was at the top of the list in March when the lineup for the inaugural three-night Power Trip metal festival was announced. The Goldenvoice-promoted event will take place in the Coachella Valley in Indio, CA and feature three nights of killer double bills, including Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden, AC/DC sharing the stage with Ozzy on night two and Metallica and Tool closing things out on Oct. 8.
On Instagram, the D revealed that when the magazine asked them to pick their dream interview for a special edition they of course said it had to be Ozzy. “Ozzy was my introduction to heavy metal music,” singer/guitarist Jack Black said. “I bought Blizzard of Ozz back in the early 80’s and it changed my life… once I had the flavour, once I got the taste of Ozzy, it was like getting the taste of blood on your tongue. I couldn’t shake it. Then I went back to his roots and checked out Black Sabbath… Black Sabbath invented metal.”
Check out the Metal Hammer cover below.
Live Nation announced the return of Concert Week on Thursday morning (May 4), the $25 all-in ticket deal that will cover more than 3,800 shows across North America this year. The week-long annual program will offer limited-time low-dough tickets specials for shows by more than 300 acts, including gigs by Janet Jackson, Fall Out Boy, Don Toliver, Maroon 5, Shania Twain, Snoop Dogg and more.
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Between May 10-16, fans can click here to see the full list of available shows, filtered by the events, venues or artists; on the site fans can also search for the closest city with a participating gig. Tickets will be available beginning with Verizon and Rakuten presales, with the both kicking off on May 9 at 10 a.m. ET through 11:59 p.m. local time.
Among the lengthy list of other acts participating in Concert Week are: 5 Seconds of Summer, The Offspring, Garbage and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, the Outlaw Music Festival, Pantera, Hayley Kiyoko, Ghost, P!nk, Pepe Aguilar, Pentatonix, Avenged Sevenfold, Bebe Rexha, Beck & Phoenix, Hunter Hayes, Incubus, Jason Aldean, Rob Zombie & Alice Cooper, Rod Stewart, Boy George & Culture Club, Jelly Roll, Keith Urban, Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa, Santana, Sam Hunt, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Brooks & Dunn, Charlie Puth, Def Leppard & Motley Crue, LL Cool J, Luke Bryan, Weezer, The Smashing Pumpkins, Maneskin, Louis Tomlinson, Miranda Lambert, Wizkid, Wu-Tang Clan and Nas and more.
Concert Week ticket will be available on a limited-time, while supplies last basis, with tickets including all fees upfront in the $25 cost; any taxes will be added at checkout as applicable in each city, state or venue. Click here to see the full list of participating events.
Foo Fighters retake sole ownership of the most top 10s in the history of Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart as “Rescued” leaps from No. 18 to No. 5 on the May 6-dated tally.
“Rescued” launches into the top 10 in its second week on the list and after its first full tracking frame (April 21-27); it was released April 19 and its first two days of availability contributed toward the previous, April 29-dated chart.
The song is Foo Fighters’ 29th Alternative Airplay top 10, the most since the chart began in 1988. Previously, the band was tied with Red Hot Chili Peppers with 28 apiece after the latter scored a string of three top 10s from early 2022 through the No. 10-peaking “The Drummer” this February.
Most Top 10s, Alternative Airplay:
29, Foo Fighters
28, Red Hot Chili Peppers
24, Green Day
23, U2
21, Weezer
19, Pearl Jam
18, Linkin Park
18, The Offspring
17, Muse
17, The Smashing Pumpkins
Each of Foo Fighters’ last five charted singles on Alternative Airplay has hit the top 10, beginning with “Shame Shame,” which peaked at No. 10 in 2020. Prior to “Rescued,” the band last appeared with “Love Dies Young,” which reached No. 6 in March 2022.
By hitting No. 5, “Rescued” is Foo Fighters’ top-charting song on Alternative Airplay in eight years, matching the No. 5 peak of “Congregation” in May 2015. Their most recent No. 1 is “Something From Nothing,” which ruled for eight weeks beginning in December 2014.
Concurrently, “Rescued” shoots 20-11 on Mainstream Rock Airplay and debuts at No. 40 on Adult Alternative Airplay. On the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, the song lifts 3-2 with 7.9 million audience impressions, a 62% boost, according to Luminate.
The impact of “Rescued” is found on other Billboard charts, too. Most notably, it jumps 7-2 on the multimetric Hot Hard Rock Songs survey, with 1.6 million official U.S. streams and 1,000 downloads sold, in addition to its radio audience.
“Rescued” is the lead single from But Here We Are, Foo Fighters’ 11th studio album and first since the March 2022 death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins. The set is due June 2.
