Rock
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Foo Fighters score their 14th career No. 1 – and third in a row, a first for the band – on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “The Glass,” which jumps to the top of the April 13-dated tally.
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“The Glass” follows reigns for “Rescued” beginning last May and “Under You” last September.
Foo Fighters link three straight rulers after the Dave Grohl-led act previously packaged two in a row four times, with “Rope” and “Walk” (2011); “Something From Nothing” and “Congregation” (2014-15); “Run” and “The Sky Is a Neighborhood” (2017); and “Waiting on a War” and “Making a Fire” (2021).
In all, Foo Fighters now boast 14 No. 1s, tying the group with Five Finger Death Punch for the third-most in the chart’s history, which dates to 1981.
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Most No. 1s, Mainstream Rock Airplay:19, Shinedown17, Three Days Grace14, Five Finger Death Punch14, Foo Fighters13, Metallica13, Van Halen12, Disturbed12, Godsmack
Foo Fighters first reached Mainstream Rock Airplay in 1995 with “This Is a Call,” which peaked at No. 6. They first led with “Best of You” in 2005.
Concurrently, “The Glass” shatters the top 10 barrier on Alternative Airplay, rising 11-9. It’s the band’s chart-leading 31st top 10, dating to the list’s 1988 premiere.
Most Top 10s, Alternative Airplay:31, Foo Fighters28, Red Hot Chili Peppers26, Green Day23, U221, Weezer20, Pearl Jam19, Linkin Park18, The Offspring17, Muse17, The Smashing Pumpkins
The track ranks at No. 24 on Adult Alternative Airplay (after reaching No. 11 in early March). On the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, it remains at No. 6 (after hitting No. 5) with 5.7 million audience impressions March 29-April 4, up 1%, according to Luminate.
On the most recent multimetric Hot Hard Rock Songs list (dated April 6, reflecting data March 22-28), “The Glass” placed at No. 5. In addition to its radio airplay, the song earned 166,000 official U.S. streams in that span.
“The Glass” is the third single, following “Rescued” and “Under You,” from But Here We Are, Foo Fighters’ 11th studio album. The set debuted at No. 1 on the Top Alternative Albums chart in June 2023 and has earned 168,000 equivalent album units to date.
All Billboard charts dated April 13 will update on Billboard.com Tuesday, April 9.
It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain died, and his only child — daughter Frances Bean Cobain — took to Instagram on Friday (April 5) to honor her dad and her journey with grief over the course of her life. “His mom Wendy would often press my hands to her cheeks & say, with a […]
When Kurt Cobain passed away on April 8, 1994, Nirvana‘s historic time together was cut painfully short. There’s no telling what the blond-haired, gritty-voiced frontman and bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic could’ve accomplished in the years after they released what ended up being their final album, the Billboard 200-topping In Utero. What is for […]
When Prince released Musicology in 2004, it was hailed as a comeback — and greeted with a few sighs of relief. The Purple One’s previous albums had either been too conceptual (The Rainbow Children, 2001) or uncommercial (N·E·W·S and Xpectation, both 2003, were fully instrumental) for most listeners, so when he delivered a party album of old-school funk, critics and fans were thrilled to press play.
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The album netted him two Grammys and a No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 – his first album to reach that peak since 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls. Even better, the ensuing Musicology Live 2004ever tour found the icon delivering lengthy, hit-filled sets with a loose warmth you didn’t always get from Prince on stage. (The album was also sold as part of each ticket to the tour, with the LP’s cost baked into the ticket price.)
For the album’s 20th anniversary, NPG Records and Paisley Park Enterprises, in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment, are releasing his rare B-side “United States of Division” to streaming platforms for the first time. Previously available as an mp3 download to members of Prince’s NPG Music Club, “United States of Division” is a six-minute soul-funk jam that tackles the Iraq War, America’s dwindling global reputation and internal social divisions.
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Musically, Musicology received a warm welcome – and in hindsight, it’s one of Prince’s best latter-day albums, with the title track and the hilarious “Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance” being particular standouts. But its release strategy had people in the industry a bit confused.
“Instead of Musicology, Prince should have gone back into his catalog and named his new album Controversy. That is what he is once again stirring up as he distributes Musicology free to fans at his shows,” reported the May 8, 2004, issue of Billboard. “Nielsen SoundScan is counting those copies as sales. Of the 191,000 copies of Musicology Nielsen SoundScan tracked for the week ending April 18, 12,600 — 6% — were counted from his April 21 concert in Columbia, S.C.”
Despite some questioning the strategy’s efficacy or fairness, it proved influential – dozens of acts would follow suit in the ensuing years until Billboard stopped counting album sales that were part of ticket bundles in 2020.
Read our preliminary ranking of Vampire Weekend’s first album in five years.
Five Finger Death Punch released the digital deluxe version of their 2022 album AfterLife on Friday (April), which features four new bonus tracks. Among those freshies is an unexpected collab with late Ruff Ryders rapper DMX.
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The song, “This Is the Way,” comes complete with a video directed by X’s longtime collaborator Hype Williams, which mixes black and white performance footage of FFDP with photos, cartoon images and memorial murals of DMX. “Ya’ll heard it through the grapevine (what’s that?)/ Expect I’m gonna take mine/ Name of the game is get in where you fit in (what?)/ Dog, I fit in at the beginning,” DMX growls in the first verse in his signature rough-edged style.
“Music is meant to be universal and without boundaries, and it starts at the top with us, the artists,” said FFDP guitarist Zoltan Bathory in a statement. “We have always embraced the mixing of genres, whether it be the remake of LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ featuring Tech N9ne as a guest, or our collaboration with blues warrior Kenny Wayne Shepherd, country star Brantley Gilbert, and Brian May, the legendary guitarist of Queen, on the song ‘Blue on Black.’”
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The release did not mention when the DMX vocals were recorded, but Bathory added that the idea of a collab with the “X Gon Give It To Ya” MC had been “in discussion for years, and it was a long and winding road to turn this particular item on our wish list into reality. He was a lyrical warrior, a true original who spoke his mind incorruptibly.” The guitarist said the group had always considered DMX the “metalhead of hip-hop” because of the rapper’s “aggressive, raw, and untamed” style.
“He growled and snarled, aiming to rattle some cages–an attitude we share, as Five Finger Death Punch has always been drawn to the fearless and the real,” he said. “It made all the sense in the world, but today this is more than just a song; it’s a salute to a legend, a way to honor DMX’s memory.” DMX died in April 2021 at age 50 after experiencing a heart attack triggerd by a drug overdose.
The digital deluxe edition also features three acoustic versions of the album tracks “The End,” “Judgement Day” and “Thanks For Asking.” FFDP will tour Europe this summer on a headlining tour featuring Ice Nine Kills before joining Metallica as the opening act on a run of the rock icons’ European stadium shows.
Watch the “This Is the Way” video below.
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It has been more than four years since Nine Inch Nails released their last album, 2020’s Ghost VI: Locusts. But lest you thought that NIN mastermind Trent Reznor and longtime musical foil Atticus Ross have spent those years just chilling out, the pair revealed in a new interview with GQ that, in fact, they have an avalanche of new projects in the pipeline.
Many of the various and sundry things on tap will funnel through the new multimedia company the duo started, With Teeth, which the magazine said is built around storytelling in a number of disciplines, including fashion, an upcoming music festival and a deal with Epic Games for “something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite.”
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Most excitingly for NIN fans, though, is the news that all that scoring work has gotten the pair excited about a new studio album. Reznor said that scoring “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”
Now, however, Ross said he feels, “excited about starting on the next record… I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”
With Teeth, which Reznor and Ross pieced together over the past two years with their longtime art director John Crawford and producer Jonathan Pavesi, is meant to help the men find new ways to explore NIN IP. According to GQ, the idea was, “what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle — ‘we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be,’” which the mag noted would not be a biopic.
In addition, the two are developing a TV series with The Bear creator Christopher Storer, as well as a film with veteran horror director Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep).
The piece describes the surprisingly predictable hours the longtime best friends and business partners keep, with each showing up to 58-year-old father of five Reznor’s backyard L.A. studio Monday through Friday to work on their various ventures from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. without fail. “We show up. We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to f–k around,” Reznor said of Oscar-winning duo’s discipline.
Among the other projects on tap are the completion of the score for Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film Queer, as well as one for the director’s sports love triangle drama Challengers (out April 26), which stars Zendaya. Of the latter, Reznor said Guadagnino’s marching orders included a suggestion along the lines of “what if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?” The duo are also finishing the score for the upcoming Scott Derrickson sci-fi thriller The Gorge starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller.
But wait, there’s more!
Reznor also said they are working on a short film with the artist Susanne Deeken, a clothing line due to launch this summer called Memory Fade and the unnamed music festival, which the singer said NIN plan to “debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people”; a new record label is slated to launch around the same time as the festival.
Check out the GQ cover below.
On Thursday, April 4, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band delivered its first of two headlining shows at Los Angeles’ The Forum — and it was a rousing, and lengthy, experience. The trek, which kicked off mid-March in Phoenix (after being rescheduled from 2023 due to Springsteen’s peptic ulcer disease) has already produced headline-worthy […]
It might be time to refer to the Beatles as the Bey-tles from here on out! On Thursday (April 4), Sir Paul McCartney took to his Instagram page to share a lengthy message lauding Beyoncé‘s cover of The Fab Four’s “Blackbird,” which appears on her brand new Cowboy Carter album.
“I am so happy with @beyonce’s version of my song ‘Blackbird,” he wrote in a caption of a carousel comprised of a photo of the two artists and the standard Cowboy Carter artwork. “I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place. I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out. You are going to love it!”
“Blackbird,” stylized as “Blackbiird” on Beyoncé’s new LP, reimagines the acoustic original with additional bass, orchestral flourishes and lush harmonies (and lead vocals on the final verse) from a quartet of ascendant Black women in country music, including Tanner Adell, Reyna Roberts, Brittney Spencer and Tiera Kennedy.
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McCartney spoke about the civil rights bent he alluded in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, a 1997 Barry Miles-penned biography of the Beatles. In the book, McCartney explains that “I had in mind a [Black] woman, rather than a bird. Those were the days of the civil rights movement, which all of us cared passionately about, so this was really a song from me to a [Black] woman, experiencing these problems in the States: ‘Let me encourage you to keep trying, to keep your faith; there is hope.’”
McCartney — whose original master recording is used in Beyoncé’s version, according to Variety — also revealed that he had the chance to speak with the pop icon about her take on “Blackbird.”
“I spoke to her on FaceTime and she thanked me for writing it and letting her do it,” wrote McCartney, who attended Beyoncé’s record-breaking Renaissance World Tour last year. “I told her the pleasure was all mine and I thought she had done a killer version of the song. When I saw the footage on the television in the early 60s of the black girls being turned away from school, I found it shocking and I can’t believe that still in these days there are places where this kind of thing is happening right now. Anything my song and Beyoncé’s fabulous version can do to ease racial tension would be a great thing and makes me very proud.”
“Blackbiird,” the second track on Bey’s already-record-breaking Cowboy Carter, is one of two covers on the LP. Elsewhere on the sprawling 27-tack album, Beyoncé takes on Dolly Parton’s seminal “Jolene,” rewriting the song to be a more seamless fit for a “Creole banjee b–ch from Lousianne.”
In 2022, with Renaissance lead single “Break My Soul” entering the Billboard Hot 100‘s top 10 for the first time, Beyoncé became the first woman in Billboard history to ever tally at least 20 top 10 hits as soloist and 10 or more top 10s as a member of a group. The only other two artists to accomplish such a feat? None other than Michael Jackson and McCartney.
The Beatles’ original version of “Blackbird” appeared on their eponymous 1968 LP — commonly referred to as The White Album — which spent nine weeks atop the Billboard 200. Recently, Emmy-winning documentarian Ken Burns compared Cowboy Carter to The White Album, citing both records’ extensive exploration of different musical genres.
Check out Sir Paul’s sweet Instagram message about Beyoncé’s “Blackbiird” below.