Rock
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Metallica continued its tribute to Mexican bands during their trek in Mexico on Friday (Sept. 28). On their third of four shows in the capital city, the metal legends honored legendary rock band El Tri by performing a unique cover of their famous song “A.D.O.,” once again with bassist Robert Trujillo doing the vocals.
Just as last week, Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett surprised the 65,000 spectators gathered at the GNP Seguros Stadium, according to figures from promoter Ocesa, with their own version of a classic from the Mexican popular songbook. On the first night (Sept. 20), Metallica paid tribute to the norteño music group Los Tucanes de Tijuana by playing the song “La Chona.” Two days later (Sept. 22), they honored the rock band Caifanes with their cumbia hit “La Negra Tomasa.”
“A.D.O.,” by the band led by veteran rocker Alex Lora, refers to the Autobuses de Oriente (ADO) central bus station, one of the largest in the country.
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“Mom, turn on the recorder because #Metallica is singing A.D.O. Long live rock and roll!” tweeted user @Orlas33 on X, paraphrasing Lora, along with a video of the moment.
On Sept. 21, during a private talk by photographer Ross Halfin with a group of Metallica fans attended by Trujillo and Hammett, the bass player of Mexican descent hinted at the possibility of including a song from El Tri as part of the covers they would perform during their shows in Mexico City.
With 55 years of history, El Tri is one of the pioneering bands in the Mexican and Latin American rock scene. It has sold more than 30 million records over the years, and has received four Grammy nominations for best latin rock album. In 2022, Lora received a Latin Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Metallica’s history with Mexico began three decades ago with the tour of their 1991 self-titled album (often referred to as The Black Album), which included five dates at the Palacio de los Deportes in 1993. Since then, the band has maintained a very close relationship with the country, where they recorded their live DVD Orgullo, Pasión y Gloria (2009), which portrays three spectacular nights at the Foro Sol (today GNP Seguros Stadium) in June 2009.
Their fourth and final show in Mexico City as part of their M72 World Tour, which brought them back to the Latin American country after seven years of absence, is Sunday (Sept. 29).
For the four devout Midwesterners that make up Minnesota indie pop-rock band Hippo Campus, touring through major cities like New York wasn’t always as comfortable as it is for them now more than 10 years into their careers — but they’ve always had their ways of coping.
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“I love coming here now,” 30-year-old guitarist Nathan Stocker tells Billboard backstage at the Bowery Ballroom in lower Manhattan, where he and his bandmates were hours away from performing an album-release show Tuesday (Sept. 24). “It used to scare me until I was well into the night, a couple beers deep, just chain smoking. And then it was like ‘Yeah, I love New York!’”
After years of heavy drinking on show nights, Stocker is sober now – and so is the rest of the band, for the most part. There’s still room for some balance; at one point in the show later that night, 29-year-old frontman Jake Luppen asks the crowd to send a shot of whisky to the stage, and when two arrive at the same time, he downs them both as 28-year-old bassist Zach Sutton shakes his head with gentle disapproval. But the quartet’s overall tamer approach to life on the road is just one of many things that’s different about the cult-favorite group in the age of their latest album, Flood, which dropped Sept. 20 via new label Psychic Hotline, having departed Grand Jury Records after their original record deal expired.
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Luppen and 29-year-old drummer Whistler Allen, for instance, both own homes back in their home state, and all four members are in committed relationships (Luppen got engaged over the summer). The group is far from the early 20-somethings who dropped Billboard 200-charting debut album Landmark in 2017 and slept on dirty van floors on tour, and even farther from the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists classmates who first started releasing music together in 2013. Now all pushing 30, Hippo Campus is finally coming out on the other side of years of growing pains, spawned by the natural push and pull of four people who’ve been best friends, bandmates and business partners for more than a decade.
Early in the writing sessions for Flood, they started going to therapy as a group to help parse the big questions – around the same time as which Stocker quit drinking – and a lot of that introspection bleeds into the 13 tracks on the finished product. On the thrashing ode to anxiety “Paranoid,” Luppen sings, “I wanna give this life all that I havе in me,” and on optimistic album closer “I Got Time,” he muses, “If this is as good as it gets I’ll be more than fine.”
But even as they were each evolving in their personal lives, they found that it was difficult to let go of the songs they were making in the two-year period between their last album, 2022’s LP3, and now. On a self-designated mission to make the best Hippo Campus record ever, they got stuck in an endless loop — writing more than 100 songs, recording them over and over, and arranging multiple versions of their fourth album just to scrap them soon afterward. They thought they might’ve cracked it last summer while on the road, until Luppen declared to the rest of the group that, again, it simply wasn’t good enough.
Realizing they couldn’t keep going as they had been, Hippo Campus left Minnesota to record yet another version of the album, this time at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Tex. They set a 10-day deadline and, with the help of producers Caleb Wright and Brad Cook — and using everyone from Phoenix to Big Thief, Tom Petty and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as reference points — forced themselves to record their parts simultaneously as they would on stage. No listening back to takes. No repeated attempts. Only forward motion.
The result was a set of existential, self-conscious tracks with the same luminous energy and unpredictable melodies Hippo is known for, reinvigorated by the ease with which the analog instrumentation they adhered to in the studio translates to the stage. As much was evident at their New York show Tuesday night, where they played Flood front to back for a palpably excited audience that was already screaming along to the words of songs that had come out just four days prior. At one point, Luppen stops singing to cough — he recovered from COVID-19 last week, but not before having to cancel the band’s scheduled hometown release shows — but their passionate fans have no trouble taking over lead vocals in his place on anthemic single “Everything at Once.”
With touring serving as their main source of income, the group will stay on the road through February, playing theaters and auditoriums across North America and the U.K. along with one festival show in Bangkok. And their fans will follow. One 22-year-old listener, Abby, was camped outside the 9:00 p.m. Bowery performance since the early afternoon to get as close as possible to the stage for what would be her 52nd Hippo Campus show; the next day, she said she’d be traveling to Washington, D.C. to catch her 53rd.
“It’s so rad,” Luppen says of their fans’ devotion. “It always surprises me that anyone would be down to do that for us. That’s a big reason why we keep going, you know? Those people really believe in it, and that allows us to believe in it.”
Below, Billboard catches up with Stocker and Sutton backstage before their show at the Bowery — followed by Luppen and Allen on Zoom the next day – about growing up, ditching bad habits and the messy beauty of starting over:
What were your initial reactions to Jake saying you needed to scrap years of work and start over on Flood?
Sutton: He was the first to verbalize an emotion we were all feeling. We had to be honest about where we were in the process and where we wanted to go from there. But there was a lot of arguing about what to throw away.
Stocker: Jake’s expression of that concern is valid … once that’s brought to our attention, it’s our job to attend to it. But also, it’s like, “God dammit dude — can’t we just say goodbye to this thing and move on?”
Allen: I remember listening to it and feeling excited for the songs, but deep down, I was like, ‘It just needs to get mixed right or something.’ Which tends to be an excuse for something else that’s lacking.
What was missing?
Luppen: It just didn’t sound like we were having fun playing music. We went into the record wanting to make the best Hippo Campus record ever. It immediately put a lot of pressure on the thing. The stakes were so high that, personally, I was stressed out the entire time — second-guessing songs, second-guessing the performances.
Sutton: We were too zoomed in. We’d been chasing these 100 songs for a year in a half. We were like, “We have lost the f–king plot.”
What needed to change for Flood to finally come together?
Allen: We were just so separated most of the time at home. It was rare at a certain point that we were all in the same room. At Sonic Ranch, we were all there — we had to be there. We had to make ourselves experience it, whether we wanted to or not.
Luppen: Hippo Campus, when it’s at its best, is us playing music together in a room. To make the best Hippo Campus record is to capture the feeling that our live shows capture. The best way to do that was to track all together at the same time.
Allen: Doing what we did at Sonic Ranch is proof that [recording live] is a crucial thing for us, to make ourselves be in an isolated space and just get s–t done. Otherwise, we just get too relaxed or comfortable or lazy.
Will fans ever hear those other 100 songs?
Sutton: I f–king hope so. Those are some of my favorite songs.
Stocker: The large majority of them, probably not.
Sutton: Once a song is considered so heavily and inevitably shelved, it’s hard to go back to that shelf. It’s shouldered with all the disagreements that we had about the song.
Stocker: “You used to f–king hate this one, you want to release it now?” [Laughs.] All the songs we have in the back room collecting dust, those tear at us in a lot of different ways. Because they’re still ours.
What is Flood about for you personally?
Stocker: It’s a line of simple questioning: Am I good enough? Do I love you? Am I a phony?
Sutton: The motif seems like redefining where you are, especially as a group. This is our fourth record: Who are we now? Where do we want to go?
Luppen: Flood is like being naked in a lit room with a mirror held up to you, and being like, “Embrace this.” It’s a testament to all the things we need to be doing to take care of ourselves and live better. Now that we’re into our 30s, we wanted Flood to be the start of the music we make in those years, where you’re not driven by this youthful crazy energy.
How does touring look different for you as you get older?
Stocker: We usually cap it at three weeks now. It’s the longest we’ll go out without a break, just so we can maintain a level of sanity.
Allen: It’s chilled out so much. With [Nathan’s] new sobriety over the last couple of years, that was a big shift on the whole group. 2022 was the grand finale of what it used to be for us on the big LP3 tour. I just remember being at the end of that tour feeling f–king wiped. That was definitely a wakeup call.
Sutton: At our worst, we’d get up at noon, have a beer, then not eat anything until the show. You do what you think you’re supposed to do – “Oh, it’s a party!” — there was a culture that was set by all of us.
Luppen: It was like partying in a Midwestern way, where we’d just get wasted on the bus and watch Harry Potter.
Allen: Now everybody’s chilling, getting in their bus bunk by 11:00 p.m.
Why was sobriety important for the band?
Luppen: We were using alcohol, I think, to numb fatigue or nerves. I have the life that I’ve always dreamed of, and I want to be present and there for it, even if that means I’m riding the waves a little deeper on the ups and the downs. It’s better than just sleepwalking your way through life.
Stocker: With not drinking and having a newfound clarity within my personal life … I became obsessed with fulfilling this vision of myself that I had, which was, ‘If you are going to do this thing, you have to do it the best that you can.’ That meant showing up every day and writing a song if I could. I felt like I had to make up for lost time from being perpetually wasted for 10 years.
Other than sobriety, what did you need to discuss in band therapy?
Sutton: I couldn’t talk to anyone in the band without seeing all the f–king baggage. The biggest disagreement is defining what Hippo Campus is. We all have different answers about the music — mainly how the music’s made — and what the music’s saying.
Stocker: We needed to have conversations about how things had been and how not to go back there, because that was dark and harmful. It was really affirmative in, like, “Okay, yes, we’re still friends, we haven’t done anything to each other that’s irreparable damage or anything like that.” We can reestablish these healthy lines of communication so that, moving forward with this record as friends, individuals, human beings and business partners, we can do this in a healthy way.
Luppen: It was us paying to force ourselves to talk to each other. We all changed a lot over the pandemic in our personal lives, with our partners and everything. On top of that, we’ve been friends since we were 14. In a lot of ways, we were still communicating with each other like we were still in high school. Therapy allowed me to see everybody for where they’re at now.
Why did you change labels to Psychic Hotline when your deal with Grand Jury Records ended?
Luppen: We wanted to try something different this time around. We kind of shopped [Flood] around to a lot of different labels. We talked to majors, we talked to indies. Frankly, it was pretty disappointing. There were a lot of major labels that passed on it, which was confusing for us. We’ve spent 10 years working our asses off building a very organic, sustainable business.
Allen: We were told that they loved the record, but there’s just not enough “virality” in the band. It’s proof that they’re not interested in the actual success of a band, they’re just interested in the little spike in numbers that bring in royalties and syncs or whatever the f–k. Then as soon as that band doesn’t provide that same accidental moment, it’s all over.
Luppen: Psychic Hotline is run by our manager [Martin Anderson]. It was the option that allowed us the most freedom and cared the most about the project. It was clear they loved the music and they really understood us on a deep level. We were like, “Let’s just bet on ourselves like we’ve done our entire career and grassroots this motherf–ker.”
Stocker: Having the management side of things already taken care of and having them already be so close to us throughout that creative process, it made sense to bring them in on the label side as well.
What are your goals for the band? Are you actively trying to expand?
Sutton: It would be stupid to say, ‘Still not there yet.’ Like, this is it. To say I want anything more would be so ungrateful. I do always feel very competitive about being the best version of ourselves. I want to be in the same conversation as all the people that influenced me.
Allen: There are still some things we would like to do. We’ve never done a Tiny Desk, or some talk shows.
Stocker: We still have this idea that we want to be the biggest band in the world, but that is not something we’re interested in at the cost of our integrity and our friendships.
Luppen: It’s about preserving what we have at this point and not burning out. When I was younger, I was constantly trying to climb this hill that had no end. The biggest goal we could ever imagine was selling out Red Rocks [in Colorado] when we started the band, and we did that. Playing arenas … that doesn’t sound attractive to us. We’re happy with where we’re at. If more people come in, I’m always grateful for that.
I think there’s a record we have yet to make that really captures everything. We thought maybe it was going to be [Flood], and this one gets closer. But for me it’s about cracking a perfect Hippo record. Every Hippo record we’ve kind of had to learn to love.
But isn’t that kind of the same thought process that got you into the endless writing cycle with Flood?
Luppen: It’s a blessing and a curse. We’re always sort of hungry for something that’s just past what you’re capable of doing. But I do think that is a driving force of what makes Hippo rad. Maybe we’ll never make that record, or maybe we already made that record. Who the f–k knows?
You raise a good point, though. I’m gonna reflect on that.
Linkin Park’s “The Emptiness Machine” bounds two spots to No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay and Mainstream Rock Airplay charts dated Oct. 5.
The song reigns in just its third week on both lists. It completes the quickest trip to No. 1 on Alternative Airplay in nearly two years, dating to the three weeks that Blink-182’s “Edging” took in November 2022. On Mainstream Rock Airplay, it’s the fastest since Metallica’s “Lux Æterna” needed only two weeks in December 2022.
Linkin Park now boasts 13 No. 1s on Alternative Airplay, tying Green Day for the second-most rulers since the chart began in September 1988.
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Most No. 1s, Alternative Airplay:
15, Red Hot Chili Peppers
13, Green Day
13, Linkin Park
12, Cage the Elephant
12, Foo Fighters
10, Twenty One Pilots
8, U2
8, Weezer
7, The Black Keys
7, Imagine Dragons
Linkin Park first reigned in 2001-02 with “In the End.” Prior to “The Emptiness Machine,” it most recently led with “Lost,” for six weeks in March-May 2023. In between its two latest No. 1s, the group’s “Friendly Fire” hit No. 2 this April.
On Mainstream Rock Airplay, “The Emptiness Machine” is Linkin Park’s 11th No. 1, giving the group sole possession of the ninth-most leaders since the chart first published in 1981. The act first led with “Somewhere I Belong” in 2003.
Most No. 1s, Mainstream Rock Airplay:
19, Shinedown
17, Three Days Grace
15, Five Finger Death Punch
14, Foo Fighters
14, Metallica
13, Godsmack
13, Van Halen
12, Disturbed
11, Linkin Park
“The Emptiness Machine” is part of a streak of three No. 1s in a row on the chart for Linkin Park, following “Lost” and “Friendly Fire.” It’s the first such run for the band, after it strung together two straight leaders twice.
Concurrently, “The Emptiness Machine” tops the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart for a third week via 8.6 million audience impressions in the week ending Sept. 26, up 8%, according to Luminate.
The song ruled the most recently published multimetric Hot Hard Rock Songs chart (dated Sept. 28, reflecting the tracking week of Sept. 13-19); in addition to its radio airplay, it earned 8.4 million official U.S. streams and sold 3,000 in that span.
“The Emptiness Machine” is the lead single from From Zero, Linkin Park’s eighth studio album, due Nov. 15. It’s the band’s first full-length with new co-singer Emily Armstrong and drummer Colin Brittain, following the death of singer Chester Bennington in 2017 and departure of longtime drummer Rob Bourdon.
All Billboard charts dated Oct. 5 will update on Billboard.com on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
Soul Asylum frontman Dave Pirner is a proud Minnesotan again after having spent 25 years living in New Orleans. So it’s not surprising he’s watching this year’s presidential campaign with even more interest since a home state horse, Gov. Tim Walz, is representing as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate on the Democratic ticket. (Pirner was born in Green Bay, Wisc., but grew up in Minnesota.)
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“I’m excited about it,” Pirner, who launched his music career in the North Star state drumming for the punk band Loud Fast Rules, tells Billboard from a stop during Soul Asylum’s recent Jubilee Tour with Stone Temple Pilots and Live. “There’s a certain amount of excitement in Minnesota going on. It’s funny to have a dude like that representing Minnesota ’cause he does remind you of a sports dad. There’s that, ‘Oh gosh’ kind of ‘aw shucks’ thing going on. I think it was a good choice because he seems like a nice complement to (Harris) in that good ol’ boy way or something. But he’s progressive and he’s well-liked.”
Pirner does not recall ever having met Walz, a music fan who signed a bill renaming a stretch of the state’s Highway 5 after the late Prince. But Pirner says he’s “ready to go out there and support the home team. Put my name in the hat.”
He’ll have to fit any support appearances into a busy schedule, however. Soul Asylum has concert dates booked into early November, including with the Juliana Hatfield Three, but most importantly the quartet’s 13th studio album, Slowly But Shirley, comes out Sept. 27. The 12-song set is the follow-up to 2020’s Hurry Up and Wait, its debut with Blue Elan Records, and reunites Pirner and company with Steve Jordan, the current Rolling Stones drummer who helmed Soul Asylum’s 1990 album And the Horse they Rode In On, a highly regarded set that was eclipsed two years later by the double-platinum Grave Dancers Union.
“When we first worked with Steve, we weren’t that great,” recalls Pirner, Soul Asylum’s only remaining founding member. “We were still learning how to play together. And since then I’ve sort of embraced most of the things that Steve had passed on to me from back then. So I kinda knew what he wanted and I wanted to give it to him, and I think it came together in a really organic sort of way that I think you can feel on the record — I hope you can, at least. It did mark a progression.”
Pirner adds that what Jordan and the band were looking for was “just excitement and not too much thinking about what you’re doing. It was more like capturing the band playing the songs off of each other and really listening to the other people in the band and trying to come across in a way that it felt new, fresh.” To that end Jordan had the group — Pirner, drummer Michael Bland, guitarist Ryan Smith and bassist Jeremy Tappero — tracking together in the studio to capture the energy and attitude of live music.
“We’ve tried just about every single way to record something over the years,” Pirner notes. “Working on the previous records the home studio became part of the picture, and you could also take things home and work on them. It depends on the song…but in this situation each song was approached with the same sort of method, which was ‘Get out there and play it!’ It was great ’cause watching Steve and Michael work together was one of those musical experiences I kinda live for. Steve is such a player’s player, and he’s such a vibe guy in a way that he understands the concept of trying to capture lightning in a bottle, and I think that’s what we were going for. We didn’t overplay anything and we tried to get things on the third take or so. It came together pretty quickly.”
Pirner says Slowly But Shirley‘s songs came together in a variety of fashions — some jammed out by the band in rehearsals, others that he “had been working in in ProTools and computers and messing around and cutting pieces of songs together.” One track, “High Road,” has been around “forever” before being finished off this time. The album is a mélange of Soul Asylum styles, from the jangle of “Freak Accident” to the punchy rock of “Freeloader,” “Trial By Fire,” “The Only Thing I’m Missing” and “Makin’ Plans,” to the cool groove of “Waiting on the Lord” and the mellow melodicism of “You Don’t Know Me.” There’s also a funky edge to “Tryin’ Man” and “Sucker Maker,” which Pirner credits to his time in the Big Easy and having Bland, who spent seven years playing with Prince, in the band.
“I think I was subconsciously trying to take things in a direction that was a little more funky or groovy or swingy or whatever — without forgetting that I’m dealing with a four-piece punk rock band,” Pirner explains. “That’s what’s always made punk rock so interesting is it does have this kind of ‘ignorance is bliss’ adventure to it, where it’s gonna come out sounding like your sh-tty band. But sometimes people try things they probably shouldn’t be trying, and something new comes out of that. It’s discovery, which is the beauty of music.”
Pirner is planning on a long cycle for Slowly But Shirley, including more headlining dates before the end of the year and into 2025. “We’ll play at the opening of a letter, as we used to say,” he notes. This year, meanwhile, also marks the 40th anniversary of Say What You Will…, Soul Asylum’s Bob Mould-produced debut album, and Pirner says that the passage of time has not been lost on him.
“It doesn’t get easier,” he acknowledges. “It feels exactly like 40 years. It’s kind of a grind. It’s different when you’re starting out because you’re just excited about everything and you have a much higher tolerance level because everything is new. You’re living a fairly miserable experience, but it’s an adventure. I’m grateful for all of it; it’s just what I do and what I’ve always done and what I love doing. Sometimes it’s not fun at all, but I’m like, ‘Well, this is what I wished for my whole life, so shut up.’ And I much prefer this to digging a hole, I’ll tell ya that.”
Say it is so. Weezer announced on Thursday (Sept. 26) that they are hosting a special two-night screening of a live concert film shot in the midst of the current tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their 1994 debut, commonly referred to as The Blue Album. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See […]
Damiano David feels sorrow no more. The Måneskin frontman has embarked on his first solo project, releasing the song “Silverlines” — produced by Labrinth — on Thursday (Sept. 26).
“This song is a very special story to me,” the Italian artist tells Billboard of the emotional track that begins as a raw, stripped-back melancholy tune that fills with hope as it crescendos. “Sometimes, you hear a song and you think, ‘Oh my god, this song talks about me.’ … It was so amazing for me to get to work with such a huge artist and also on a song that, it’s basically describing my whole journey.”
According to David, singer-songwriter Sarah Hudson was already working on the tune with Labrinth when she came up with the idea to connect the two men and have the Måneskin rocker hop on the track, for which he helped pen the lyrics. And given the opportunity to collaborate with Labrinth — who has worked with the likes of Billie Eilish, The Weeknd, Nicki Minaj and more — he wasn’t about to say no. “If you have the chance to work with Labrinth, you don’t get precious! You just do it!” David laughs, praising his “extremely meticulous” producer and their “very easy” collaboration process. And he’s more than delighted with how “Silverlines” has turned out.
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“It was funny for me how [this] first song was actually, it was, like, all I hoped for,” he marvels of “Silverlines,” which finds him showing a vulnerable side that he had yet to share in his music with Måneskin. “It was like the lyrics are such a message of hope for me because it was exactly what I was aiming for with this record, and now that the record is finished, I look back to that song and it’s like, ‘Wow! That’s basically the last stop of my journey,’ and it’s so funny that it came at the beginning — like [it was] heaven sent.”
“There’s a level of vulnerability that I never reached and a level of honesty that I never managed to reach not because I was not being honest in the other songs,” he adds. “I had to dig deeper into myself in order to even get to this information and then be able to transform it into music.”
David explains that part of the reason he had not yet shared this more personal side of him in Måneskin was because he wanted to respect the band’s strong identity — which he credits as part of its success — and also the “role that was assigned to him,” but it wasn’t showing him as a whole person. “At one point I started to really suffer this very partial point of view of myself that I myself was giving to the world … I knew that I was the one choosing only to express that,” he shares, emphasizing that he takes responsibility for that, and is now, with his solo work, revealing a fuller picture of who Damiano David is. “Literally my brain and my body rebelled to me and forced me to actually kind of cut me open, cut myself open and show myself to the world.”
And that honesty is right there in his favorite lyrics from “Silverlines”: A smile/ I welcome you/ A darkness/ I’ve long forgotten you/ And peace belongs to me. “That’s what happened. This is the part that I share with the audience — it’s the public part of the work I’ve done,” explains David, who moved to Los Angeles in January, where he spent a few months by himself to figure out his priorities. “I of course did a lot of personal work and personal growing, and I cut some things out of my life and I replaced [them] with new, healthier, more beautiful ones. I think now things are better.”
Helping him pull back the curtain is the accompanying music video for “Silverlines,” a theatrical visual directed by Nono + Rodrigo that shows first the struggle, then the endless possibilities that await David. “One of the main topics of the whole thing is like, more than having the world,” he shares. “For me, it’s more like, from now on, it’s a white sheet and I’m able to actually … make my visuals become reality.”
And now that he’s sharing a closer look at himself with his solo music, the vocalist is excited to see what’s on the horizon, though nabbing a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 for “Silverlines” may not be at the top of his list. “I don’t want to be like a hypocrite and say I don’t care about the charts because of course I care! Everybody cares!” he admits. “But at the same time, the goal of this song is not topping the charts. I’m introducing myself to the world, so I don’t expect to be first from the first day. Actually, I don’t expect to be first any time. But I’m just very glad I have the opportunity to do this, and the results will come.”
Check out Damiano David’s debut solo song, “Silverlines,” and its video below:
On Thursday (Sept. 26), just two days before the third annual Soundside Music Festival, headliner Foo Fighters dropped off the lineup. “Foo Fighters will no longer be appearing at this weekend’s Soundside Music Festival,” read a statement on the band’s official Instagram account. The cancellation comes just two weeks after frontman Dave Grohl revealed on […]
The long wait is over: The Cure have released their new song in over 16 years and confirmed the release date for their upcoming 14th album.
“Alone” will appear on the upcoming LP Songs From a Lost World, which is set to be released Nov 1, 2024 via Polydor/Fiction. Listen to the track below.
The track appeared as the opening song on the band’s Shows of a Lost World global tour throughout 2022 and 2023. The album has been long in the making, with its original release dates mooted for 2019. The album’s tracklist will be revealed in the coming weeks on the band’s social media channels.
Speaking about the song, frontman Robert Smith said that “Alone” 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.”
He added: “I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem Dregs by the English poet Ernest Dowson. That was the moment when I knew the song – and the album – were real.”
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Songs From a Lost World was produced by Smith and Paul Corkett, who co-produced The Cure’s 2000 album Bloodflowers. The album features contributions from Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums), Reeves Gabriel (guitar) and Roger O’Donnell (keyboards). The latter recently announced he’d been diagnosed with rare and “aggressive” blood cancer a year ago, but added that “I’m fine and the prognosis is amazing”.
In recent weeks the band had been teasing the release of Songs From a Lost World to fans via mystery postcards and puzzles. Smith has been revealing details of the LP for many years, and speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2019, he blamed himself for some of the delays. “I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly. At some point, I have to say that’s it. It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” Smith added.
“I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me. It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like Disintegration, I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.”
A new production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet will be soundtracked by Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief will see “Shakespeare’s words and Radiohead’s album illuminate oneanother in thrilling new ways as the music becomes a critical part of the narrative” a press release reveals. The production will include a cast of 20 musicians and actors performing the album live onstage during the play.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has collaborated with Tony and Olivier award-winner Christine Jones and Olivier award-winner Steven Hoggett for the production.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief will premiere at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, in Manchester on Apr 27 and will run there until May 18, 2025. The production then transfers to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon, England from June 4 – 28, 2025. Tickets for the production go on sale on October 2; more details can be found here.
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Speaking about the new arrangements of Hail To The Thief, Yorke said in a statement that it was an “interesting and intimidating challenge”. He added: “Adapting the original music of Hail To The Thief for live performance with the actors on stage to tell this story that is forever being told, using its familiarity and sounds, pulling them into and out of context, seeing what chimes with the underlying grief and paranoia of Hamlet, using the music as a ‘presence’ in the room, watching how it collides with the action and the text. Ghosting one against the other.”
Hail To The Thief was released in 2003 by the British band amidst the fallout of the invasion of Iraq and was critical of President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’ following 9/11. The album landed at No.3 on the Billboard 200 and at No.1 on the U.K.’s Official Album Charts and its artwork, which is incorporated in the play’s promotional poster, was created by frequent collaborator Stanley Donwood.
Speaking in 2003, Yorke said that the album’s lyrical content was influenced by “the rise of doublethink and the rise of general intolerance and madness, and feeling very much like individuals were totally out of control of the situation” and that “the force of the music gave me licence I think to explore all these things, really”. It spawned three singles, “2+2=5”, “Go To Sleep” and “There, There”.
Jones, who has previously collaborated with Hoggett on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the stage adaptation of Green Day’s American Idiot said that William Shakespeare’s play, written between 1599 and 1601, aligned with their love of Radiohead’s record.
“Paying attention to the lyrics, I became aware of how many songs from Hail to the Thief speak to the themes of the play,” Jones says. “There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album. For years I’ve wanted to see the play and album collide in a piece of theatre; eventually I shared the idea with Thom, who was intrigued.
Radiohead released their most recent album A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016 and the band members have worked on new projects ever since. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s The Smile will release their third studio album Cutouts on XL Recordings on Oct 4.
The band’s bassist Colin Greenwood recently revealed that the band had recently reconvened to rehearse but shared no news of imminent music.
In less than a month, a genre-spanning batch of legends will join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of its Class of 2024. On Wednesday (Sept. 25) morning, the Rock Hall revealed the list of performers and presenters who will be on hand at the Oct. 19 ceremony.
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Take a deep breath: Busta Rhymes, Dr. Dre, Demi Lovato, Dua Lipa, Ella Mai, James Taylor, Jelly Roll, Julia Roberts, Keith Urban, Kenny Chesney, Lucky Daye, Mac McAnally, Method Man, Roger Daltrey, Sammy Hagar, Slash and The Roots will all be present at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, Ohio (which isn’t too far from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Cleveland headquarters).
It’s not yet known which performers and presenters are attached to which 2024 Rock Hall inductees. The Class of 2024 includes Mary J. Blige, Cher, Dave Matthews Band, Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & the Gang, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest in the performers category. In the musical influence category, Alexis Korner, John Mayall and “Big Mama” Thornton will be inducted; all three pioneers are deceased, with Mayall dying at the age of 90 this July, just three months after his induction was announced.
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Additionally, Jimmy Buffett, MC5, Dionne Warwick and Norman Whitfield enter the Rock Hall in the musical excellence category. Suzanne de Passe will be given the Ahmet Ertegun Award.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s 2024 induction ceremony will livestream on Disney+ on Oct. 19 at 7 p.m. ET. ABC will air a primetime special featuring the evening’s biggest moments on Jan. 1, 2025, at 8 p.m. ET, which will be available on Disney+ and Hulu on Jan. 2.