Rock
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Your perfect Halloween soundtrack has just arrived courtesy of Duran Duran. The veteran new wave group dropped their delightfully devilish cover of the Talking Heads’ 1977 classic “Psycho Killer” on Tuesday (Oct. 24). The song — which features bass from Måneskin’s Victoria De Angelis — appears on their upcoming 13-song Dance Macabre album, which features […]
Green Day announced the release date for their 14th full-length studio album, Saviors, on Tuesday (Oct. 24), revealing that the collection will drop via Reprise/Warner Records on Jan. 19, 2024. The follow-up to 2020’s Father of All Motherf–kers was recorded by singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirt and drummer Tré Cool in London and Los Angeles and marks a reunion with longtime producer Rob Cavallo.
The trio advanced the album with the strident “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which they debuted live last weekend during a sold-out club show at the 800-capacity Fremont in Las Vegas, as well as at back-to-back headlining performances at the city’s When We Were Young festival.
“As soon we cut it, we said, `Okay, that’s going first,’” Billie Joe Armstrong said in a statement about the topical song that was one of the final ones tracked during the Saviors session. He described the single as “a look at the way the traditional American Dream doesn’t work for a lot of people — in fact, it’s hurting a lot of people.”
The accompanying black and white video that dropped on Tuesday is timed perfectly for Halloween, with the band rocking corpse makeup as they play to a crowd of punk rock zombies in the Brendan Walter/Ryan Baxley-directed clip. “People on the street/ Unemployed and obsolete/ Did you ever learn to read the ransom note/ Don’t want no huddled masses/ TikTok and taxes/ Under the over pass/ Sleeping in broken glass,” Billie Joe sings on the track.
“Saviors is an invitation into Green Day’s brain, their collective spirit as a band, and an understanding of friendship, culture and legacy of the last 30 plus years. It’s raw and emotional. Funny and disturbing. It’s a laugh at the pain, weep in the happiness kind of record,” the group said in an Instagram announcing the project.
“Honesty and vulnerability,” they added, explaining that the album is about, “Power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph. disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility.”
In addition to “American Dream,” Green Day debuted “Look Ma, No Brains!” at the Las Vegas club show that celebrated the 30th anniversary of their Cavallo-produced breakthrough album, Dookie. They also announced during the show that they are hitting the road next year for a stadium tour featuring support from Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Linda Lindas.
Watch the “American Dream” video and see Green Day’s album announce below.
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Blink-182 is returning to North America one more time. Just days after the release of the trio’s new album, Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker have announced plans to bring their new songs on the road in North America next year. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and […]
The title of the U.S. version of the Rolling Stones’ first album was England’s Newest Hit Makers – but that was almost 60 years ago. Their latest is Hackney Diamonds, a polished, straightforward return to rock n’ roll from a band that helped define it. In between, the Stones released 24 albums, went through three guitarists and have had enough diva arguments to fill several books and documentaries. Leaving no stone unturned, Billboard rolled back the pages to shine a light through the past, darkly.Street Fighting Band
Reviewing the band’s U.S. debut single, “Not Fade Away,” in the April 11, 1964, issue, Billboard hailed “another hot GB group that proves how deep the R&B roots have gone over there.” “The Redcoats Are Coming” declared a June 6, 1964, headline of an impending Stones tour; in that same issue, a full-page ad trumpeted, “Watch the Rolling Stones crush The Beatles!” In smaller text: “This space has been given, in the public interest, by an advertiser.”
Paint It, Wack
By the Nov. 22, 1969, issue, the Stones had notched five No. 1s on the Hot 100 (of an eventual eight), but Billboard had a heart of stone when it came to their tour. The show worked, “but more because of who they were than what they did,” we wrote. “[Mick] Jagger’s theatrics became trite at times to an audience much older than the teeny boppers who flocked to see him in 1966.” And we must have been out of our heads in the June 12, 1971, issue, where we erroneously reported that “Wild Horses” featured “Keith Richards taking the lead” vocal.
The Last Time?
Billboard was hip to the Stones by the release of Some Girls, saluting their “diffuse yet coherent sense of rhythm and urban angst” in the June 17, 1978, magazine. In the same issue, Billboard embraced what has now become a 45-year tradition: predicting the end of the band. “Also note major tour. Possibly the last.”
Sympathy for the Regional Promoter
The Dec. 9, 1989, Billboard reported on the band’s game-changing Steel Wheels tour, for which the group embraced sponsorships and “a national promotion arrangement,” which “alarmed top regional tour promoters.” In a Billboard interview, Jagger dismissed the concerns: “I like seeing the most efficient way of doing business … It’s not a charity.” Richards agreed — “What do they want, a pension?” — but admitted to being amused by the flood of Stones-branded clothing. “I’m in the rag trade here,” he said.
As Years Go By
Drummer Charlie Watts died in 2021 at age 80, but the band had been reckoning with his mortality during sessions for 2005 album A Bigger Bang as Watts endured cancer treatment. “There’s suddenly Mick and I looking at each other and going, ‘Possibly we’re the only two left of the originals,’” Richards said in the Aug. 6, 2005, issue. But “you don’t talk about that sh-t, you know?” By then, the Glimmer Twins were getting along glowingly. “There are too many pluses for an odd minus to get in the way,” Richards continued. “Maybe it’s called growing up.”
Travis Barker is the latest celebrity to be transformed into a wax figure for Madame Tussauds, as unveiled Sunday (Oct. 22) at the museum’s Las Vegas location.
Fitted with clothes donated by Barker himself — including a leather jacket, boots, pants and studded belt — the Blink-182 drummer’s statue looks to be one of Madame Tussauds’ most realistic-looking figures to date. His tattoos were replicated perfectly, as were his dark eyebrows and bright blue eyes.
“I’m honored, I’m flattered, I’m shocked,” the musician said at the unveiling ceremony, where he posed for pictures with his wax twin. “It looks so f–king real.”
Barker’s figure even features some of his signature silver jewelry, including his nose rings, chain necklace and wedding ring, which represents his marriage to Kourtney Kardashian. The Poosh founder — who is currently expecting the couple’s first child together — wasn’t in attendance at her husband’s wax figure debut, but the drummer was spotted showing her his duplicate over FaceTime.
The “All The Small Things” artist later posted some of his own photos with his wax lookalike on Instagram, writing, “Come say hi to my clone @madametussaudsusa.”
According to the press release, Barker worked closely with the Madame Tussauds team of sculptors, colorists, hairdressers and stylists to produce his wax figure, which is now the most-tattooed installment ever created by the museum. Each of his 100-plus tats was closely matched using 3D scanning, with the stenciling and coloring processes taking approximately nine weeks total.
Barker and Kardashian, who both have kids from past relationships, are on their way to becoming parents once again. The couple recently experienced a health scare regarding the pregnancy, which led Blink-182 to postpone a few overseas shows “due to an urgent family matter” as the drummer raced home to be with the reality star as she underwent urgent fetal surgery.
“That experience opened my eyes to a whole new world of pregnancy that I didn’t know about in the past,” Kardashian recalled of the incident in an interview with Vogue. “It was terrifying … I’ve finally been able to let go of the fear and worry that everybody else put in us because of this pregnancy.”
See more photos from the unveiling of Travis Barker’s wax figure below:
Neil Young surprised fans on Friday (Oct. 20) when he announced that he’s unveiling a new album, Before and After, on Dec. 8. The album will feature an “eclectic” fresh takes of Young’s favorites lesser-known tracks from his songwriting vault, per a press release. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole […]
Green Day fans began to notice on Oct. 9 that something was up on the band’s Instagram. Longtime lovers of Easter eggs and secret tracks, the veteran rockers posted a photo of a concert bill depicting a zombie with two dates for Las Vegas’ When We Were Young Festival (Oct. 20 and 21) preceded by […]
The Revivalists score their second consecutive No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart with “Good Old Days,” which lifts to the top of the Oct. 28-dated survey. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The track becomes the band’s fourth Adult Alternative Airplay No. 1. It follows […]
Fifty-nine years after Decca Records proclaimed England’s Newest Hit Makers had arrived on American soil, the Rolling Stones returned to the United States on Thursday (Oct. 19) to launch their latest album, Hackney Diamonds.
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“It seems we always launch our albums in New York,” Mick Jagger told the crowd at the Racket, an intimate New York City venue that’s taken over the Highline Ballroom space. “We’ve done it in a blimp. We’ve done it on a flatbed truck going down 5th avenue,” he said, reading from a Teleprompter. “We were missing launches so much that we had to make another album and come back and re-launch it.”
The Andrew Watt-co-produced Hackney Diamonds has been a long time coming, with the rock n’ roll legends hashing it as early as their 2016 blues covers album Blue & Lonesome. It’s their 26th album released in America, and first since the death of drummer Charlie Watts. But the launch party was filled with the reckless, live-for-the-moment energy that characterizes classic LPs from Out of Our Heads to Sticky Fingers.
During their seven-song set – which kicked off with “Shattered,” the Stones’ punk/disco dispatch from NYC hedonism in the late ‘70s – it was abundantly clear that the Rolling Stones did, in fact, need to make another album, if only to play it live. While it’s unlikely that Diamonds joints will become live staples in the vein of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Tumbling Dice” (both performed at the show), tackling new songs such as “Angry” and “Bite My Head Off” clearly gave Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood the hopeful expectancy that comes with performing material that isn’t an easy slam-dunk in the vein of “Flash.” As a result, they sold the hell of the new stuff, ripping through the new songs with an urgency that’s bound to get lost when you’re doing a song for the 500th time.
For a Stones underplay in a New York venue of a few hundred people, the crowd was naturally dotted with celebrities: Jimmy Fallon, Mary Kate Olsen, Chris Rock, Daniel Craig, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Questlove (the pre- and post-show DJ) were all present. Costello nodded along sagely to the music and exchanged bon mots with wife Krall; Fallon headbanged and sang along; Olsen took a smoke break.
For the first three songs of the night, Lady Gaga was on the sidelines, but when the Stones came out for their encore, she was front and center, delivering their new collaborative track “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” easily the highlight of the night. Wearing a red-and-black sequined body suit, Gaga traded full-throated vocal runs with Jagger on gospel-tinged track. You might not expect an 80-year-old who’s had heart valve replacement surgery to be able to go toe-to-toe with an artist who is probably the most effortlessly talented live performer of our era, but Jagger was clearly jazzed by the energy of the crowd, the pinch-me enthusiasm of Gaga and the jolt of performing new material.
Who knows how much longer the Stones can roll on, but based on their NYC album launch party, we’re lucky that England’s veteran hitmakers haven’t yet called it a day.
Going from the underground to Michael Jackson-level fame overnight is mind-melting for anyone. But for the scruffy 20-something punk rockers in Nirvana it was even more disorienting, and life-changing than they could have ever imagined.
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In an exclusive Billboard preview of next week’s episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the former late night talker sits down with living Nirvana members drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic to discuss the effects of going from touring in a van to topping the charts.
O’Brien notes that there was just a three-day gap between when Nirvana’s second, and final, major label album, In Utero, dropped in September 1993 and the kick-off of his original late night talk show on NBC, Late Night With Conan O’Brien. “I remembered the music on the album — because I was such a huge fan — being background music to the terror and the weirdness of me starting a late night show from complete obscurity,” says O’Brien, who is also joined by In Utero producer/engineer Steve Albini for the chat celebrating the album’s 30th anniversary.
“That’s similar to the Nirvana experience I would imagine,” says Grohl, who recalls that he was just 21 when the band suddenly became massive in 1991 upon the release of their axis-tilting major label debut, Nevermind; Novoselic was 25, Cobain was 24. “We were kids and so when you talk about the amount of time that’s gone by to me it’s not even so much about the years, it’s about the experiences that just kind of led, one after another, going from three kids that were basically living or touring out of a van to then becoming a huge band.”
Grohl says that the divisive 1993 follow-up turned into the “uncomfortable soundtrack” to that transition from obscurity to intense scrutiny, with the band living in a totally “different world” during the sessions for that album than they were just 16 months earlier.
Trying to put the leap into perspective, Novoselic says that Geffen Records had such modest expectations for Nevermind that it initially printed only 50,000 CD copies. O’Brien adds that he spoke to someone who worked at the label at the time who noted that when the album with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as its lead single blew up Geffen had to stop printing copies of titles by all its other artists to go full-born on Nevermind.
The three-year period between when Nevermind dropped and singer Kurt Cobain‘s death by suicide in April 1994 felt like “10 years,” according to Novoselic, with Albini putting a button on the chaotic whirlwind by describing how Nirvana went from being “couch surfers to being the biggest band ever in the world” in a span of 18 months.
The problem, O’Brien posits, is that Nirvana came out of the punk scene, where he suggests that flossy displays of wealth and success were considered anathema to the ethos of the DIY culture. Albini, however, pushes back against what he says is a notion often espoused by those outside the scene that punks consider success to be “bad and evil.” It’s worth noting that Cobain was an avowed admirer of he Beatles and that the retro video for the Nevermind single “In Bloom” was an homage to Beatlemania.
“I have never experienced that genuinely from anybody in the punk scene that wasn’t purely an expression of jealousy,” Albini says, adding that, for the most part, Nirvana’s fans wanted them to become successful and beloved. O’Brien clarifies that he was thinking more of the immense pride the band had in topping the charts — Nevermind went from selling 6,000 copies in its first week to hitting No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart in January 1992, pushing Michael Jackson’s Bad from the top spot — combined with a WTF? feeling from the band at their historic ascent.
“Before we made the record Nevermind we were pretty much living in squalor,” says Grohl, describing the tiny “f—ing disgusting” apartment he shared with Cobain that was covered in corndog sticks and cigarettes. “I would have done anything to have my own apartment and to be able to do that through making music.”
And, to be fair, the Foo Fighters frontman says he didn’t have $1 million in his bank account overnight when success came, but rather suddenly his per diem was a lordly $15 per day, enough for two packs of cigarettes. Grohl also says he didn’t feel conflicted or harbor any shame in helping to pay off his mother’s house or buying her a car with his newfound cashflow.
“I think the reason why I didn’t feel personally conflicted was because I knew the band hadn’t done anything outside of our true selves to get there,” Grohl says.
The full interview with the trio will debut on Monday (Oct. 23) on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, with an extended version including music slated to debut that same day at 6 p.m. ET on SiriusXm’s Lithium (channel 34); additional broadcasts (all ET) will take place on Oct. 23 at 9 p.m.; Oct. 24 at 10 a.m.; Oct. 25 at 12 a.m. and 1 p.m.; Oct. 26 at 5 p.m.; Oct. 27 at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.; Oct. 28 at 2 p.m. and Oct. 29 at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Watch the preview of Grohl, Novoselic and Albini on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend below.
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