Rock
Page: 4
Lest you think of Dave Stewart’s Record Store Day project, Dave Does Dylan, as opportunistic, the hirsute male half of Eurythmics is quick to put the record straight.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“I had no idea when I started doing this that the (A Complete Unknown) movie was coming out and the whole outburst of stuff about Timothée Chalamet and about (Bob) Dylan,” Stewart tells Billboard via Zoom from his studio in Nashville. “These (recordings) have been around before that, and I have had some real interesting, amazing times with (Dylan), so this wasn’t a great stretch for me.”
Dave Does Dylan — out Saturday (April 12) in limited edition and slated for wider release during the summer — features 14 solo acoustic recordings of Dylan tracks such as “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Forever Young,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Visions of Johanna” and more. They’re songs Stewart recorded on his iPhone over time — during breaks in the studio, in his hotel rooms on tour or backstage at gigs. “Whenever I was waiting in-between something, I just started to put an iPhone on a little stick and sing a Bob Dylan song. I was just doing it for fun, and then I would put one up on Instagram every now and then and people would say, ‘Oh, we love this! Why don’t you make an album of this?’
Trending on Billboard
“I didn’t take any of it seriously. Then my management company said, ‘We’d love to put this out on vinyl on Record Store Day.’ I had 24 songs, so then it was, ‘OK, we have to cut it down to fit on an album unless it’s a double album,’ which we didn’t want to do. So we picked these (14), and I think you can hear that I have a deep connection to the songs and you can hear every word, even though we couldn’t really mix them because the guitar and the voice are going down the same mics.”
The set pays tribute to Dylan beyond the music, too. The cover is literally a tip of the cap, with Stewart striking a pose similar to Dylan’s on his 1969 album Nashville Skyline — hat and acoustic guitar included. The package also includes a photo of Stewart and Dylan together during the filming of the latter’s “Blood In My Eyes” video during 1993.
Dylan voiced his support of the project in a statement announcing the album: “Captain Dave is a dreamer and a fearless innovator, a visionary of high order, very delicately tractable on the surface but beneath that, he’s a slamming, thumping, battering ram, very mystical but rational and sensitive when it comes to the hot irons of art forms. An explosive musician, deft guitar player, innately recognizes the genius in other people and puts it into play without being manipulative. With him, there’s mercifully no reality to yesterday. He is incredibly gracious and soulful, can command the ship and steer the course, dragger, trawler or man of war, Captain Dave.”
Stewart’s connection to Dylan’s music is long, as well as deeply felt.
He came to it as a teenager in Sunderland, England, at a time when a broken leg sidelined him from his serious pursuit of soccer. His mother had left the family and his beloved older brother had gone to college. Salvation of sorts came from a package sent by a cousin who’d moved to Memphis; it included pairs of Levi corduroy jeans and a couple of blues albums that Stewart, laid up and “bored out of my mind,” began to play incessantly — followed by Dylan.
“I think it was (1964’s) Another Side of Bob Dylan or something around that,” Stewart recalls. “And it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. And then I realized he obviously was influenced by the blues-type records I had. There’s certain moments in time when you know something happened to you, and that was one of them. I would smoke Thai sticks and lie on my back on the floor and put on Blonde On Blonde or something. All those songs were imprinted on my brain. The general public would probably think, like, ‘Dave Stewart, Eurythmics, singing Bob Dylan songs? Really?’ But when I was a kid, I was singing those songs in folk clubs. I knew them by heart, so on (Dave Does Dylan) I’m playing them like I was in a folk club again.”
Stewart connected with Dylan around 1985, when he was producing the self-titled debut album for former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey. “The phone rang and it was the receptionist in the studio, and she said, ‘Bob Dylan’s on the phone for Dave Stewart,’” he recalls. “I thought it was (Sharkey) just messing about, ’cause he knew I was a massive Bob Dylan fan. So I picked up the phone and went, ‘Feargal….’ And then (Dylan) started talking, and nobody could imitate that voice.”
Dylan proposed a meet-up and that evening he joined Stewart at nearby Thai restaurant for food and sake, then took him to a private Mexican club south of Los Angeles. “We sat there and we were talking in there for ages, and then Bob suggested, ‘Why don’t we make a (video) tomorrow?’” Stewart says with a laugh. “It was already, like, one in the morning, but I rang some people and pulled a thing together at a church right on Highland and we shot ‘Emotionally Yours.’ And then we did another one and we became friends.”
Stewart went on to film other videos for Dylan and also played on 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded. “We had jam sessions,” Stewart explains. “I have recordings of me and him around the kitchen table in my house in London, at one in the morning or something. To get to witness that happening, making up words on the spot and playing acoustic guitar and drinking tequila or whatever, those are experiences I’ll never forget — especially to have been a kid listening to (Dylan’s) record with a broken leg and my mom leaving home, there was a particularly sort of poignant feeling about it, and so I feel very privileged.
“I don’t know why or how it happened,” Stewart continues. “For some reason people find (Dylan) quite sort of reserved or whatever…but he wasn’t with me at all. At the time you think, ‘Oh, this is wild,’ but now, looking back as I’m older…you go, ‘God, yeah, I had that experience, and many other kinds of experiences with these incredible talents, and I’ll never forget them.’”
Stewart — who filmed an episode of Recorded Live at Analog that will premiere during July on PBS — says there’s a possibility of the other 10 Dylan songs he recorded turning into a second volume of Dave Sings Dylan, perhaps adding more to the pile. “It wasn’t very difficult to record, so, yeah, I may do that,” he says. “With an artist like Bob Dylan people say, ‘What’s your favorite song?’ and it’s impossible. I’ve got, like 99 favorite songs, so it wouldn’t be very hard to do more.”
As for A Complete Unknown, Stewart says that “Timothée Chalamet did a great performance along with the rest of the cast. For me, I felt that it only scratches the surface of Dylan as a songwriter — the spark that set the world on fire, and to this day, has not been equaled in his influence. Nothing since The Canterbury Tales has created such a paradigm shift in people’s idea of what songwriting can or could be.”
Depeche Mode are gearing up to release a full-length feature film chronicling the band’s massive 2023 shows in Mexico City on their Memento Mori tour. Depeche Mode: M, directed by award-winning Mexican filmmaker Fernando Frias (I’m No Longer Here, Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me), is due out later this year. Explore Explore See latest […]
Britpop legends Pulp have shared news of their first album in 24 years. The new LP, More, will be released on June 6 via Rough Trade, and will end their fan’s long wait for a follow-up to 2001’s We Love Life.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The Jarvis Cocker-led band made the announcement on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show on Thursday morning (Apr. 10) and shared the first taster in lead single “Spike Island.” Take a listen below.
Rumours of a new album had swirled in recent years following their reunion shows in 2023. The band split for the first time a year after 2002’s We Love Life, then reunited for a string of shows between 2011 and 2013, before another decade-long hiatus. During the tour they began playing new songs titled “Hymn of the North,” “Background Noise,” “Spike Island,” “My Sex,” and “Farmer’s Market,” all of which will appear on More.
Trending on Billboard
In late 2024, the band announced they had signed a record deal with Rough Trade, following their time on Island Records. The group released a standalone single, “After You,” in 2013.
In an accompanying statement, Cocker said, “Well: when we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called ‘Hymn of the North’ during soundchecks & eventually played it at the end of our second night at Sheffield Arena. This seemed to open the floodgates: we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from the last century.”
He added, “The music for one song was written by [former Pulp member] Richard Hawley. The music for another was written by [All Seeing I band member] Jason Buckle. The Eno family sings backing vocals on a song. There are string arrangements written by Richard Jones and played by the Elysian Collective.
“The album was recorded over 3 weeks by James Ford in Walthamstow, London starting on November 18 2024. This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.” He added in a closing note that “no A.I. was involved during the process.”
The band is currently made up of Cocker, Candida Doyle (keyboards), Nick Banks (drums) and Mark Webber (guitar). Longstanding bass player Steve Mackey, who performed on their hit albums His N Hers (1994) and Different Class (1995), died in 2023 following a short illness.
In the coming months Pulp will play a number of shows in the U.K. including arenas in Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Manchester. They will co-headline a number of shows with LCD Soundsystem later this year in North America.
Pulp’s More tracklist
“Spike Island”“Tina”“Grown Ups”“Slow Jam”“Farmers Market”“My Sex”“Got to Have Love”“Background Noise”“Partial Eclipse”“The Hymn of the North”“A Sunset”
Machine Gun Kelly will see your jokes and raise you more jokes. The rap/rocker took to his Instagram Story on Tuesday (April 8) to double-down on an Onion headline tweaking the new dad just weeks after MGK’s former fiancée, actress Megan Fox, gave birth to the couple’s first child together.
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
“Megan Fox Confirms She and New Baby Will Co-Parent Machine Gun Kelly,” read the lightly teasing headline, which MGK re-posted along with three laughing crying emoji. That same reel featured a re-post of footage of the rapper performing his 2024 Trippie Redd collab “Beauty,” with a caption that paid tribute to his first-born, 15-year-old daughter Casie Colson Baker. “the girl dad was performing his rap song ‘beauty’ at his birthday party on April 22, 2024, and his daughter casie was vibing to it. she knows it’s a bop,” it read.
In another slide, Kelly hangs with Casie and implores her not to read the comments on one of his performance videos. “Why? They’re not bad,” she says, as he frets, “I know but of them, just like, I see certain words and I’m like, ‘aaaahhh.’”
Trending on Billboard
In an Insta post titled “dad.,” Kelly, 34, appears in a series of selfies in which he wears all black outfits, goofs around with Casie, shows off his Rolls Royce and hangs with pals Travis Barker, Camila Cabello and Atlantic Records VP of A&R Keith “Keefa” Parker aka “Keefa Black.”
Fox gave birth to her fourth child — she has three others with former husband Brian Austin Green — on March 27. To date the formerly engaged pair have posted some face-obscured photos of their newborn daughter’s and not much else. But last month Kelly threw cold water on suggestions that they’d named their little girl “celestial seed.”
The confusion came after MGK announced in an Instagram post that he and Fox, 38, had welcomed their first child along with a picture of his daughter gripping his fingers, writing, “She’s finally here!! our little celestial seed. 3/27/25.” After headlines suggested that the baby’s name was actually “Celestial Seed,” MGK clarified in his Stories, “wait guys… her name isn’t ‘Celestial Seed’ [crying laughing emoji] her mom is gonna tell you the name when we’re ready.”
Metallica dropped the first trailer for their upcoming fan-focused documentary on Tuesday (April 8). Metallica Saved My Life, directed by the band’s longtime collaborator, Grammy-winner Jonas Åkerlund, will be screened in select cities on the band’s ongoing M72 world tour.
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
In a statement, the group wrote, “Not quite finished yet, we want YOU to be among the first to see our latest film project by award-winning director Jonas Åkerlund, all about the lifeblood of this band: the fans. This documentary explores our world through the lives of fans who have supported each other through highs, lows, trials, and triumphs for over four decades.”
In the one-minute preview, drummer Lars Ulrich states, “Metallica is a state of mind” over mournful piano as the band’s other members begin the sentence “Metallica is…” as a series of fans offer up their thoughts on what the group means to them. “Unapologetically real, and vulnerable,” says one man, while a woman adds, “hope, freedom, escape.”
Trending on Billboard
A montage of long-time die-hards then open up about how the band gave them an identity as they describe themselves, variously, as a “dork… loner… a weirdo,” with one Black fan recalling how people would ask him, “why are you listening to this white people music?”
“I wanna hear ’em, I wanna hear ’em all,” singer/guitarist James Hetfield says of the variety of stories in the film directed by Åkerlund, who was also behind the camera for their 1998 video “Turn the Page,” as well as 1999’s “Whiskey in the Jar” and 2016’s “ManUNkind.” “Whatever you want to put on that… religion, cult, family, whatever label. I don’t care. It’s a gathering of like-minded people that are there to celebrate life.”
In a statement the band said, “As a few of you may know, we’ve been working behind the scenes the last couple of years on a new film that will be released later this year starring you guys! Metallica Saved My Life explores our world through the lives of fans who have supported each other through highs, lows, trials and triumphs for over four decades. And yeah, we’re in it a little bit too.” The full doc, which will feature all four band members as well as actor Jason Momoa, is slated for release later this year.
Click here to find out more details about the locations and dates for the North American screenings of the unfinished film from April through June, which will be phone-free and have a two ticket per person limit.
Metallica will get back on the road for the continuation of the M72 tour on April 19 at the JMA Wireless Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. This week the band also announced a collaboration with the American Red Cross for blood drives on their upcoming 2025 U.S. dates. Donors of all blood types are encouraged to make an appointment to give by clicking here; donors must be 17 in most states (or 16 with parental consent where allowed by state law) and weigh at least 110 pounds and be in general good health to be eligible to donate.
Check out the trailer for Metallica Saved My Life below.
A slot on the 1994 Lollapalooza lineup was almost relegated to Green Day‘s boulevard of broken dreams when festival founder Perry Farrell supposedly tried to block the band from performing — after which frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and his bandmates eventually got the last laugh when they did end up joining the tour 30 years ago.
In excerpts from Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour’s new book, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, published by People on Tuesday (April 8), the “American Idiot” singer recounts the story of how Farrell — apparently writing the punk rockers off as a “boy band” — pushed back against Green Day’s inclusion on the ’94 traveling festival’s bill.
“It was going to be [Japanese noise band] Boredoms on the first half, and us on the second half as the opening band,” Armstrong recalls. “And then all of a sudden, [Farrell] comes back in and he’s like, ‘I don’t want them on the bill.’”
Trending on Billboard
Calling Farrell’s dislike of his group “disappointing,” as Green Day had looked up to the festival pioneer, Armstrong adds, “I think that made us want to play even more, actually, because we wanted to prove that he had his head very far up his own a–.”
“I can’t think of a single time that Perry pushed back or vetoed a band — except for Green Day,” remembers stage manager Rubeli, who eventually found a way to convince Farrell to let the group onto the lineup. “To Perry’s credit, I was able to go through [Green Day’s] history in the Bay Area and how they had released indie records and eventually he said, ‘Okay, they can do half the tour, but I want the Boredoms on the other half.’”
Lollapalooza would have been just three years old in 1994, with Farrell starting the now-iconic music event in ’91 as a small farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction that quickly evolved into what it is today: one of the world’s biggest annual popular music festivals with multiple iterations across the world. After finally winning their place on the bill, Green Day got the last laugh against Farrell when Armstrong dedicated the band’s Dookie track “Chump” to him onstage.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not going to take any f—ing sh– from anybody,” Armstrong recalls in Bienstock and Beaujour’s book. “I’m not going to take any sh– from anybody as much as Perry Farrell’s not going to take any sh– from anybody.’ He had minions that would come up and say, ‘Perry Farrell’s really angry that you dedicated “Chump” to him.’ And I’m like, ‘Tell him to stop acting like one.’”
“But I never met the guy until we played Woodstock ’94,” he adds. “He was there and we shook hands.”
Lollapalooza has come a long way since its days as a fringe gathering place for alternative rock and other developing genres. Some of the biggest names in music now play the event every year, with this year’s Chicago iteration expecting Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Tyler, the Creator as headliners in addition to dozens more performers on the lineup.
And in 2010, Green Day’s beginnings with the festival came full-circle when the band headlined alongside Lady Gaga, Soundgarden, Arcade Fire, The Strokes and Phoenix.
Legendary Seattle rock club The Crocodile is opening its new waterfront concert series with the spooky guitar sounds of Hermanos Gutiérrez. Oodalalee: Concerts at Pier 62 will take place at Seattle’s Waterfront Park, south of the famous Pike Place market and managed by the non-profit Friends of Waterfront Park. Oodalalee marks the first large-scale, ticketed […]
When they relocated to New York in 2023, Pierre and Henry Beasley of alt-pop duo Balu Brigada certainly didn’t expect they’d end up sounding like a Big Apple band from 20 years earlier.
“I used to be kind of cynical of that idea,” Henry says of the notion of a band’s music sounding like the place where it’s made. But as the brothers — originally from Auckland, New Zealand — started to record their new album in Harlem, they had to acknowledge that it didn’t sound like the music they had been making seven time zones over.
“You can hear the difference between [how the] aggression and tension and grit comes out in New York — and then New Zealand’s rolling hills kind of giving you a little more space to breathe,” Henry explains. (“More beachy vibes,” Pierre adds.)
Trending on Billboard
Ashley Markle
It is one of those more aggressive, tense and gritty songs that has taken Balu Brigada from a cult act trying to find its major-label footing stateside — the brothers signed to both Warner Music Australasia and Atlantic Records simultaneously in 2022 — to chart-topping radio hitmakers. “So Cold,” a spiky, slinky and above all Strokes-y single the duo released in June 2024, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart in March — a ranking more often dominated by legacy acts than a breakout outfit like Balu Brigada.
“So Cold” slotting in so easily in retro-dominated alt-rock radio playlists hardly happened by accident. Pierre recalls he and Henry (both multi-instrumentalists who share singing duties) loading up their YouTube accounts with videos of bands like The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand for inspiration while creating the song, which Pierre says originally had more of a The Police feel. “[We were watching] those guys playing big festivals, and having these big guitar riffs that people chant,” he recalls. “We leaned into that.”
Still, it took more than the spirits of such frontmen as Julian Casablancas and Alex Kapranos to turn the song into a No. 1 hit. First, the band posted an Instagram reel of “So Cold” in spring 2024, with a red jumpsuit-clad Pierre playing the bass while sitting in his Auckland bedroom. The clip caught fire on social media and attracted a ton of industry attention.
“We got so many crazy calls just from this one reel,” says Goldie Management’s Amy Goldsmith, who’s been with the band since seeing them play at a New Zealand barbecue in the late 2010s. “[Recording Academy CEO] Harvey Mason jr even rung [about] the boys and was like, ‘What is this band? I’m so excited about them.’ ”
Henry (left) and Pierre Beasley of Balu Brigada photographed March 19, 2025 in New York.
Ashley Markle
The reel also soon got the attention of Chris Woltman, longtime manager of alt-pop superstars Twenty One Pilots. “It was pretty obvious that [‘So Cold’ was] a smash,” he says of his first impression. That inspired him to dig deeper into the band’s streaming catalog — which includes a steady run of singles dating back to 2016, along with 2019’s Almost Feel Good Mixtape and EPs I Should Be Home (2021) and Find a Way (2013).
“I quickly found out over the next couple of days that it wasn’t just one song — they’d been writing these amazing tracks,” recalls Woltman. “It raised this question of, ‘This is an amazing song, and there’s all these other amazing songs. How can this band not be getting noticed?’ ”
From there, Woltman not only signed the band to his and Twenty One Pilots frontman Tyler Joseph’s newly launched ARRO label, but hitched Balu Brigada to the Pilots’ then-upcoming Clancy worldwide arena tour. (ARRO has an artist venture with Atlantic for Balu Brigada, but Woltman says the label is otherwise independent.)
“We all came together and said, “There is something really compelling going on: They’re making great music. They have a vision that we think can be driven with discovery with our fanbase; they have a song in ‘So Cold’ that is the tip of the spear. If we come in and are their greatest advocate [and introduce] them to the Twenty One Pilots fanbase… we thought, ‘You know what, let’s give this a shot.’ ”
Despite the risk of attaching a relatively unproven band to such a major tour, they quickly demonstrated themselves to Woltman as highly capable: “I think what they just needed is a little bit of time on the field,” he says.
They got that playing time in the form of 66 shows, taking them all over North America, Latin America, Oceania and Europe, and putting them in front of over a million total Twenty One Pilots fans — known as Clikkies — who quickly took to the junior alt-pop duo. “There’s something special about the way that the fanbase has adopted Henry and Pierre,” Goldsmith says. “I think with the passion that the Clikkies have, they’ve [taken to Balu Brigada as] kind of like, ‘These are our new baby-band boys.’”
In the meantime, “So Cold” was starting to catch on at streaming services — helped by a music video with some winkingly White Stripes-influenced fashion and camera zooms, and a September synch in soccer video game EA Sports FC 25, after which the song’s weekly streams doubled. (To date, it has 12.2 million on-demand official U.S. streams through April 3, according to Luminate.) And Woltman and the team started pushing the song to alternative radio, sensing an opportunity to expand its success there. “In the alternative mix today, I think that radio still plays a role,” he says. “ ‘So Cold’ felt like it could be a big alternative radio track.”
Ashley Markle
A few weeks after Balu Brigada brought “So Cold” to Jimmy Kimmel Live! — the duo’s first appearance on American television — the song topped the Alternative Airplay chart dated March 29, in its 24th week on the listing. Woltman sees its success as validation of a long-term strategy that was nearly a year in the making.
“None of this is about an overnight moment,” he says, “as is always the case when you’re trying to build a legitimate alternative rock band. It’s not about a song; it’s not about a TikTok moment; it’s not about an influencer moment — it’s about the everything else.”
Currently, Pierre and Henry are putting the finishing touches on their debut album, expected later this year, which takes the band to new territory — including “some real emotional sensitive jams” and “some real obnoxious like pseudo-EDM stompers,” Henry says. But even though they’re nearly a year removed from the release of “So Cold,” and getting a step closer to their Strokes and White Stripes fantasies with their own upcoming headlining U.S. tour, they’re still enjoying following their breakout hit on its way up.
“Every day, it’s hitting a new peak,” Pierre says. “We’re both proud to watch our baby continue to be recognized.”
A version of this story appears in the April 19, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Turnstile has announced its first album in four years: Never Enough, the long-awaited follow-up to the hardcore band’s 2021 breakthrough Glow On, will be released on June 6, the band revealed on Tuesday (April 8). Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In addition, Turnstile shared a preview […]
Blink-182 announced the dates for their 2025 Missionary Impossible U.S. tour on Tuesday morning (April 8). The late summer/fall trek will hit arenas, amphitheaters and stadiums across the country. The Live Nation-promoted outing is slated to kick off on Aug. 28 at the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, FL and will include stops in Tampa, […]