Rock
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Bon Jovi is back! The band dropped its 16th studio album, Forever, on Friday (June 7). The album comes four years after 2020, which was released, as the title suggests, in 2020. The album peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard 200 albums chart upon its release. Frontman Jon Bon Jovi chronicled his difficult journey […]
Twenty One Pilots and Bring Me the Horizon score new No. 1s on Billboard’s rock album charts dated June 8, with the former’s Clancy debuting atop the Top Rock Albums survey and the latter’s Post Human: Next Gen entering atop the Top Hard Rock Albums list.
Clancy bows with 143,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending May 30, according to Luminate. The sum largely encompasses 113,000 album sales and 29,000 streaming-equivalent units. The week is the biggest in units for any title on Top Rock Albums in 2024 and the best since Zach Bryan’s self-titled LP started with 200,000 on the Sept. 9, 2023, survey.
Clancy marks Twenty One Pilots’ fourth Top Rock Albums leader. The duo first led with Blurryface in 2015, followed by 2018’s Trench and 2021’s Scaled and Icy.
The new set also begins at No. 2 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums and Top Alternative Albums, where Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft reigns for a second week (145,000 units).
On the all-genre Billboard 200, Clancy debuts at No. 3, the act’s third top three entry.
The entirety of Clancy’s 13-song tracklist reaches the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, led by “The Craving” at No. 20 with 5.9 million official U.S. streams, 3.9 million radio audience impressions and 1,000 downloads sold. The song, the latest promoted single from the LP, concurrently debuts at Nos. 23 and 40 on Alternative Airplay and Pop Airplay, respectively. Lead single “Overcompensate” peaked at No. 2 on Alternative Airplay in May.
Bring Me the Horizon’s Post Human: Next Gen starts at No. 1 on the Top Hard Rock Albums chart with 19,000 units. It’s the band’s second leader, following That’s the Spirit for a week in 2015.
Post Human: Next Gen also begins at No. 10 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums, marking the Oli Sykes-fronted act’s sixth top 10, all logged since 2010’s There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret.
“Top 10 Statues That Cried Blood,” the new album’s latest radio single, concurrently debuts at No. 1 on Hot Hard Rock Songs with 2.6 million streams and 266,000 airplay audience impressions. It also starts at No. 39 on Mainstream Rock Airplay.
The Plain White T’s are just like everyone else. The group posted a video of them hearing Snowd4y and Drake’s parody remix of their Billboard Hot 100-topping hit song “Hey There Delilah.” And, like the majority of rap fans, they thought “Wah Gwan Delilah” was made using AI, too. Explore See latest videos, charts and […]
Zach Bryan’s “Pink Skies” debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and Hot Rock Songs charts dated June 8, becoming his third leader on each list. The harmonica-infused single bows with 31.6 million official streams, 166,000 radio airplay audience impressions and 10,000 downloads sold in the United States from its May […]
Sublime is back on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart with “Feel Like That,” a collaboration with Stick Figure. The song debuts at No. 35 on the June 8-dated ranking.
“Feel Like That,” which also features credited vocals from late Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell, is the first Alternative Airplay hit credited to Sublime – and not its separate, subsequent iteration Sublime With Rome – since “Doin’ Time,” which hit No. 28 in November 1997.
In between “Doin’ Time” and “Feel Like That,” Sublime With Rome – featuring new vocalist Rome Ramirez – reached the ranking four times in 2011-19, led by the No. 4-peaking “Panic” in 2011.
Sublime With Rome, in addition to Ramirez, initially included previous Sublime members Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh; Gaugh departed in 2011 and Wilson followed earlier this year. Gaugh and Wilson then reformed Sublime with Nowell’s son Jakob on vocals and guitar. “Feel Like That” features both Jakob and Bradley on vocals, the latter via a recording from early 1996. Bradley Nowell died of an overdose that May.
Sublime reunited late last year and has since performed at Coachella.
The original incarnation of Sublime didn’t reach Alternative Airplay until after Nowell’s death. “What I Got” reigned for three weeks beginning in October 1996, while “Santeria” and “Wrong Way” each hit No. 3 in 1997, ahead of the aforementioned “Doin’ Time.”
As for Stick Figure, “Feel Like That” is the band’s first Alternative Airplay chart entry, as well as the six-piece’s premiere rank on any Billboard airplay survey. The band first graced a Billboard chart in 2009 when Smoke Stack peaked at No. 8 on Reggae Albums, on which Stick Figure now boasts four No. 1s.
Currently a standalone single, “Feel Like That” also bows at No. 43 on the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart with 801,000 audience impressions in the week ending May 30, according to Luminate. Its first-week download count of 2,000 sparks a No. 8 debut on Rock Digital Song Sales.
Jon Bon Jovi wasn’t sure if his band would ever record another album. The Jersey rock icon whose signature raspy vocals lifted his eponymous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band to global superstardom in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to such iconic hits as “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “It’s My Life” chronicled his long, hard road back from vocal cord surgery in 2022 in the recent Hulu series Thank You, Goodnight – The Bon Jovi Story. And in a new interview with EW he talked how that scary career roadblock helped inspire the band’s new album, Forever, which is out on Friday (June 7).
“I went into this surgery and I had a lot of time on my hands — all I could really do was sit around and start to think about songs,” Bon Jovi told EW. “I started to feel joy again. And we — the collective we, who lived through COVID — we’d all come out of that fog, and we were interacting again. There was a new appreciation for life. And I was having this new appreciation for my body. And it led to all these songs.”
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The result was a 12-track album recorded by Bon Jovi and bandmates keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, bassist Hugh McDonald, guitarist Phil X, percussionist Everett Bradley and rhythm guitarist John Shanks that the singer said the crew recorded in a brisk seven weeks. “Nothing was on delay. It just flowed,” Bon Jovi said of the album that features the soaring “Legendary” and talkbox-assisted “Living Proof,” which he wrote in just two days.
Bon Jovi also dropped in for a chat with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show on Wednesday night (June 6), where he smiled and kept his secrets when the host asked what it was like to be “young and beautiful” on the road in the 1980s. “If I were to write a book it would be called, The Best Time I Never Had,” the 62-year-old silver fox said with a grin, joking that he tells his children that he didn’t party and went straight home after shows.
Bon Jovi credited his bandmates with believing in his dream 40 years ago, saying that the new album got its name after he realized that, “these songs are going to outlive us until long after we’re gone.” He noted that he’s “well on the road to recovery” from the vocal surgery chronicled in the four-part documentary series, joking that now was the time to commemorate the band’s 40th anniversary because he has no idea if he’ll be around for their 50th.
The singer who has dabbled in acting over the years described how he got his big screen chops up as a young rocker after a promoter flew them on a private jet to a gig, after which Bon Jovi says he repeatedly convinced other promoters to celebrate the band’s burgeoning success with their breakthrough Slippery When Wet album by flying them to the next gig… on a private jet.
Colbert also congratulated Bon Jovi on the recent weddings of two of his sons; Jack Bongiovi married Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown in May, just weeks after son Jesse married longtime love Jesse Light in Las Vegas. Asked if he’s ever been pressed into service at a wedding to sing one of his songs, Bon Jovi told a funny story about a friend’s son’s wedding where he was “willing,” but not really looking forward to jumping on stage.
When the trumpet player spontaneously began playing the iconic bass line from “Livin’ on a Prayer,” for what he described as a “Salvation Army” band version of the song, the reluctant vocalist said he “sang the s–t” out of it, as one does.
During the double-segment sit-down, Bon Jovi bragged about the rest stop named after him in New Jersey and his early days working around the corner at the Power Station recording studio. One of his favorite memories from the time when he was a teenager “gofer,” he said, was when he watched David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing “Under Pressure” through the studio window. “I saw them sing that vocal,” he told an astonished Colbert.
Watch Bon Jovi on The Late Show below.
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Billie Joe Armstrong knows a thing or two about what it takes to rock a stadium crowd. So when the Green Day singer/guitarist attended one of Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour shows in Lyon, France at Groupama Stadium over the weekend he came away super-impressed by… well, all of it. The punk veteran posted a pic […]
A superstar group of rock icons will be featured on an upcoming tribute album honoring Jesse Malin as the beloved punk troubadour continues his recovery from a spinal stroke he suffered last year that left him partially paralyzed. Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin is due out on Sept. 20 and will feature Bruce Springsteen, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, late MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer (with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart), Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello and many more.
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In a statement, D Generation singer and solo performer Malin, 57, said, “As always in my songs, the themes are all there — transcendence, positivity and global unity through music. This is what I love to do, and I’m going to do everything I can to keep doing it.” All proceeds from the album will go to Malin’s Sweet Relief artist fund.
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The album honoring the New York punk stalwart whose gutter poetry songwriting acumen has long made him a favorite among fellow songsmiths will also feature contributions from the Hold Steady, the Replacements/GNR’s Tommy Stinson, Counting Crows, Dinosaur Jr., the Wallflowers, Spoon, the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, Frank Turner and Rancid.
Malin revealed that. he suffered a spinal cord stroke while out to dinner with a friend in New York’s East Village in May 2023 that left him paralyzed from the waist down. When his insurance did not cover the significant medical bills he incurred, a Sweet Relief fundraiser was started to help with long-term care.
The album’s first single, the Bleachers’ “Prisoners of Paradise,” is out now and you can pre-order the album here. “Prisoners” originally appeared on Malin’s third solo studio album, 2007’s Glitter in the Gutter, which featured contributions from Springsteen, Wallflower’s Jakob Dylan, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett.
In an Instagram post, Malin said the song has always been one of his favorites, describing it as being about “new beginnings and rebirth… letting the past crumble and starting fresh.”
In a video update from Malin posted in March, the singer said he’d been receiving treatment and undergoing extensive physical therapy in Buenos Aires, Argentina for several weeks and that the doctors “are seeing some progress and I push forward every single day nonstop.” At the time he said he really missed playing music and was hoping to get back to it this fall. “It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through to say the least . You guys take care of each other please and don’t forget me,” he wrote.
A full track listing for the album has not yet been released.
Watch the “Prisoners of Paradise” visualizer below.
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Before Russell Crowe became an Oscar-winning actor starring in such films as A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator and L.A. Confidential, he was a musician. Crowe picked up his first guitar when he was six and has always made music alongside his more famous day job.
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The Australian performer will release his newest album, Prose and Cons, with his band Indoor Garden Party on Friday (June 7). This is not some vanity project, he tells Billboard. “This is an actual band of musicians. They play together,” he says. “We feel things out, we work out what works best and then we go and play them live and if another opportunity comes up, we discuss in our next rehearsal and adjust accordingly.”
The album is based in rock, but strays into other genres on such tunes as the fiery revival stomp, “Let Your Light Shine” or the country-tinged anthem, “Time & Kindness.”
The set came together over a multi-year period. “It’s been like a five-year process since we started playing around with the songs,” he says. “Probably of the original 11 or 12 songs I thought I was going to record, there’s maybe one or two that survived and the rest are songs that have come along.”
Crowe did the interview from his home studio in Australia, in front of a wall of classic guitars spanning the 1950s through the 1970s that he has acquired over the years, including a candy-apple red Fender Stratocaster “that’s played on a few Billboard Top 10 singles in its time,” he said.
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In addition to pulling one of those guitars down when he’s feeling inspired, Crowe met a luthier who now makes bespoke custom guitars for him and his friends. “We’re doing some insane things, man. One of the guitars we made is purely out of woods from Australia,” he says. “We made that for Ed Sheeran and gave it to him. He just turned around, grabbed it and sang a song which I’ve got on video. And that song, which hadn’t been released, two months later was like at the top of the charts around the world.”
Crowe and the band will embark on his first U.S. tour in more than a dozen years in August and the hand-picked stops will include Los Angeles’ acclaimed Whisky-A-Go-Go. Before Crowe hits the U.S., the band will have embark on a short European jaunt that includes the prestigious Glastonbury Festival in England alongside headliners SZA, Coldplay and Dua Lipa. The festival takes place June 26-30.
Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood posted a lengthy note on Tuesday (June 4) in response to renewed criticism for his long-running collaboration with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa after the pair played a show in Israel on May 26 in the midst of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Greenwood wrote that he’s playing festivals across Europe this summer with the band Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis, noting that people are asking him why.
The guitarist has been collaborating with Tassa and releasing music with him since 2008, saying that he thinks an artistic collaboration that combines Arab and Jewish musicians is “worthwhile… And one that reminds everyone that the Jewish cultural roots in countries like Iraq and Yemen go back for thousands of years.”
The letter posted on X came after the pair played a show at the Barby Club in Tel Aviv last week, where they performed songs from their 2023 album Jarak Qaribak (Your Neighbor Is Your Friend), which features collaborations with artists from Beirut, Cairo and Ramallah. After the gig, the Jewish Chronicle reported that the BDS movement threatened to boycott Radiohead.
The movement, whose initial stand for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, is a Palestinian-led effort to pressure Israel to withdraw from occupied territories and offer full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens while applying pressure to end investments in Israeli businesses and encourage sanctions against the Jewish state.
The BDS movement posted a message on Twitter after the show that read: “We call for peaceful, creative pressure on @radiohead to convincingly distance itself from this blatant complicity in the crime of crimes, or face grassroots measures.”
Greenwood reacted in his letter by noting that Tassa’s grandfather was one of the most famous Iraqi composers as part of the Al Kuwaity brothers, whose songs he said are still staples on Arab radio stations. “Others choose to believe this kind of project is unjustifiable, and are urging the silencing of this — or any — artistic effort made by Israeli Jews,” Greenwood wrote.
“But I can’t join that call: the silencing of Israeli filmmakers/musicians/dancers when their work tour abroad — especially when it’s at the urging of their fellow Western film makers/musicians/artists — feels unprogressive to me. Not least because it’s these people that are invariably the most progressive members of any society,” he continued.
The Tel Aviv show came after Greenwood was spotted at a protest in Israel calling for the release of the remaining 120 hostages being held by Hamas after the militant group’s murderous surprise Oct. 7 assault on Israel in which more than 1,200 Israeli men, women and children were murdered, sexually assaulted and attacked and more than 250 hostages were taken according to Israeli authorities. Israel launched a counter-attack aimed at eradicating Hamas that has now lasted eight months and resulted in the deaths of more than 36,000 Palestinians and injuries to more than 86,000 according to Palestinian authorities, as well as the destruction of much of the infrastructure in Gaza.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Greenwood is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan, whose family lost a nephew who was called up to military service after the war began. Three days after Hamas’ attack, Greenwood tweeted, “Condolences to the families of the innocent concert goers, children and civilians of all ages murdered, raped or abducted in these massacres. It’s impossible not to despair.”
The Post reported that during the gig Tassa said, “there are musicians here, not politicians… music has always worked wonders, may we know better days and may everyone return safely.”
Greenwood wrote that he was grateful to be working with the many musicians he’s met while working on the collaborative project, “all of whom strike me as much braver — and taking far more of a principled risk — than those who are trying to shut us down, or who are now attempting to ascribe a sinister ulterior motivation to the band’s existence. There isn’t one: we are musicians honouring a shared culture, and I’ve been involved in this for nearly 20 years now.”
President Biden has been pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire proposal to end the war that has displaced more than a million Palestinians, with the U.S. commander in chief telling Time magazine this week that there is “every reason” for people to draw the conclusion that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political self-preservation as he faces calls for new elections. A number of artists have also urgently called for an immediate ceasefire, including Paramore, Dua Lipa and Renée Rapp.
Greenwood ended the note by stressing that no art is as “‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us. How can it be? But doing nothing seems a worse option. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”
He said that the latter is why he’s making music with this band, welcoming listeners to disagree with or ignore what they’re doing. “But I hope you now understand what the true motivation is, and can react to the music without suspicion or hate,” he said.
See Greenwood’s full letter below.