Lately, the young and incisive Chicago rap great Saba has been working closely with legendary producer and fellow Chicagoan No ID. They’re slowly rolling out the collaborative album From The Private Collection Of Saba And No ID, and we’ve already posted their singles “Back In Office” and “hue_man nature.” Now, they’re back with another one.
Moby is an open book a literally. Few electronic producers across the last several decades have been the focus of such a sustained level of public and press attention the way the 58-year-old mononymous superstar (known in government documents as Richard Melville Hall) has. There’s a lot out there to know about Moby, and much of it he’s made available by his own design: His twin memoirs, 2016’s Porcelain: A Memoir and Then It Fell Apart from 2019, are at turns revelatory, highly entertaining, and straight-up deeply unpleasant to consume. Even as his own ability to be wholly truthful about the past has come under scrutiny (more on that later), his warts-and-all approach to laying out his own personal travails would leave one to believe that, when it comes to reflecting on his recent and distant past, Moby is simply out of stories to tell.
This summer, the Smashing Pumpkins will head out on a gigantic stadium tour with Green Day and Rancid. It’s their highest-profile tour in a very long time, and they’ll do it without guitarist Jeff Schroeder, who joined the band in 2006 and left last year. In January, the Smashing Pumpkins posted a wanted ad for a new guitarist, and more than 10,000 people applied for the position. The band reviewed the submissions and held in-person auditions in Los Angeles. Today, the band announced that LA shredder Kiki Wong will join them on the road.
Chief Keef is coming home. In the early ’10s, the teenage Sosa popularized Chicago drill, and the genre has now swept across the planet. During his rise to fame, though, Keef was constantly in trouble with the law, and his Chicago performances were shut down again and again. For more than a decade, Keef has essentially been banned in Chicago.
Loretta Lynn could write. It takes a rare and difficult-to-quantify set of skills to write a great country song. You need to be able to tell a rich, emotionally resonant story — maybe saccharine, maybe not — in as few words as possible. Those words need to make musical sense, and they need to be written for someone who can inhabit those words. Nashville supports an entire industry of people whose job it is to crank out country songs, and the writers often aren’t the ones singing the songs. That industry has existed for nearly a century, and in that time, there haven’t been many writers sharper than Loretta Lynn.
Most fast-rising rap stars flood the zone, releasing a ton of music and jumping on a ton of other artists’ tracks. Ice Spice has gone the opposite direction. She’s been famous for nearly two years now, but she still hasn’t released a proper album. She debuted a new song at Coachella, but the only single that she’s actually released this year was the “Think U The Shit (Fart)” back in January. Regular collaborator RIOTUSA produces basically all of her music. So it’s pretty notable that Ice Spice just made an appearance on a track from two other New York drill artists.
MAPtley CrA1/4e have been embroiled in a nasty legal battle with their former guitarist Mick Mars, who retired from touring due to an arthritic condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, then sued his bandmates for kicking him out of the band altogether. Mars (real name Robert Alan Deal) was intending to keep recording with the CrA1/4e and doing limited performances, but he’s been replaced by John 5, best known for his work with Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie.
Last night, before headlining this weekend’s second edition of the Las Vegas festival Sick New World, Slipknot played a warmup gig at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA. In doing so, they debuted their new full-time drummer. He was of course wearing a mask, but any Maggot will tell you it’s Eloy Casagrande, who left the long-running Brazilian band Sepultura last month. Casagrande announced his departure from Sepultura in an Instagram post, writing that “decisions needed to be made thinking about new cycles that will come.” By joining Slipknot, Casagrande has finished a weird story about three metal bands basically pulling off a three-team trade.
Today, the reliably hedonistic French blog-house duo Justice return with Hyperdrama, their first new album in eight years. When Justice officially announced the album in January, they led it off with the silky, disco-adjacent track “One Night/All Night,” their first collaboration with Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker. (They also shared the early singles “Generator,” “Incognito,” and the Miguel collab “Saturnine.”) Now that Hyperdrama is finally out, we get to hear the other track that Justice made with Tame Impala.
In November 2022, Christine And The Queens released Redcar les adorables A(c)toiles, which was followed by PARANOAA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE in June 2023 (the former came out on 11/11 and the latter on 6/9; you have to commend that coordination). Today, the French musician is back with a new song called “rentrez chez moi.”
For a while there, Normani Kordei seemed primed for the biggest solo career of all the Fifth Harmony alumni. She had late 2010s hits with Khalid (“Love Lies”) and Sam Smith (“Dancing With A Stranger”). Her 2020 “Motivation” video was a minor sensation online, and the brilliant 2021 Cardi B collab “Wild Side” was a real-deal rap and R&B radio smash. But for reasons not fully comprehensible to those of us who aren’t major-label executives, Normani has been trapped in music industry purgatory for the past few years. She hasn’t released anything since 2022, when she dropped “Fair” and popped up on a Calvin Harris album.
Thom Yorke has scored his first movie since the 2018 Suspiria remake, which was his first stab at composing music for the screen. This time the film is Confidenza, Italian director Daniele Luchetti’s adaptation of Domenico Starnone’s novel.
Earlier this month, Tems announced her long-awaited debut album, Born In The Wild. The Nigerian singer also debuted a new song called “Love Me JeJe” during her first weekend at Coachella, and today she released it.
Last year, Cornelius released Dream In Dream, his first album in six years. Today, the Japanese avant-pop musician is announcing its follow-up, Ethereal Essence, and sharing the single “Sketch For Spring.”
Jeff Rosenstock has dropped off the Booze Cruise festival, an event that is scheduled to take place in Hamburg, Germany later this spring. Rosenstock was announced as the top-billed headliner for the fest back in March. “After a lot of thought and offline conversations, we will not be playing this years Booze Cruise,” Rosenstock wrote in a statement. “I’m deeply sorry to anyone who was looking forward to seeing us. Free Palestine and stop using our tax dollars to fund fascism and genocide instead of health care.”
Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department, a surprise double album, last week. On Monday night, Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe sat down for a conversation with The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis ahead of the release of their new album Nonetheless. Naturally, Swift came up as a topic of conversation.
David Gilmour has announced Luck AndA Strange, his first new album since 2015’s Rattle That Lock. The Pink Floyd legend will release the LP on Sept. 6, and he’s sharing the lead single “The Piperas Call” today.
Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego sound almost relieved to be playing in their new band, Deerlady. Though neither is a total stranger to the world of indie rock, they’ve both found success in recent years in other musical milieus. Obomsawin, a Berklee-trained bassist and composer, tours the jazz festival circuit as the leader of the Mali Obomsawin Sextet. In 2022, she released an acclaimed free jazz album called Sweet Tooth, which she sang entirely in the Abenaki language. Abrego also has a jazz background that runs through Berklee; she studied guitar performance there before moving on to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she’d eventually become a faculty member. On Greatest Hits, Deerlady’s winkingly titled debut album, those biographies dissolve, and Obomsawin and Abrego tap into something more instinctive.
salute, the plugged-in producer who has been putting out music for more than a decade, has announced a new album, TRUE MAGIC, which will be out in July. It includes collaborations with Disclosure, Karma Kid, Sam Gellaitry, and more, and we’ve already heard its Empress Of-featuring single “system.”
The Get Up Kids have announced a 25th anniversary tour for Something To Write Home About, and they’ll play the album in full each night. The anniversary shows starts with an appearance at Four Chord Music Fest in Pittsburgh at the end of June; the tour picks up in earnest in August, and runs through October culminating in the second wave emo fest Best Friends Forever in Las Vegas.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse kicked off their first tour in five years last night at the Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre in San Diego. Young opened the show with a new version of his classic “Cortez The Killer,” with a lost verse added in.
Last year, Chicago’s very own Sen Morimoto released a new album, Diagnosis. Today, he’s back with some tracks that were written around the same time but left off the final LP. The BONK! EP features four two Sen Morimoto songs and a live take on the LP’s title track that was recorded at WXPN.
Until this week, Corridor hadn’t released an album in half a decade. They’ve made good use of that time. The MontrA(c)al band have always put their own spin on post-punk, mixing a tight, jittery rhythm section with a florid and expansive melodic palette and the firepower to really and truly rock out. Those tendencies remain on new album Mimi, but it’s all elevated into a holographic state, sometimes smeared and blurry, sometimes stunningly crystalline.
Softcult, the duo of Toronto twin siblings Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn, were a Stereogum Band To Watch last year, and they’ll release their new EP Heaven next month. By the time the record comes out, we’ll probably already know all the songs, since Softcult like to drop one track at a time. We’ve already posted the title track, “Haunt You Still,” “Shortest Fuse,” and “Spiralling Out.” Today, they’ve also shared “One Of The Pack,” the fifth advance single from this six-song EP.
Three years ago, New York indie rockers Lightning Bug dropped their album A Color Of The Sky on Fat Possum. Next week, they’ll follow that LP with the entirely self-released new one No Paradise. We’ve posted the early singles “December Song” and “Opus,” and now they’ve released another one.
Two years ago, the soft and incisive Brooklyn indie-folk band Florist released a really good self-titled album. Now, they’re part of the soundtrack for I Saw The TV Glow, the new indie horror film from We’re All Going To The World’s Fair director Jane Schoenbrun. Fred Durst and Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan both act in the movie, and it’s got a score from Alex G, as well as a soundtrack album full of indie rock heavyweights. We’ve already posted Yeule’s cover of the Broken Social Scene classic “Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” and now Florist have shared their contribution.
Mike Pinder, original keyboardist for hugely successful British rockers the Moody Blues, has died. Pinder was the last surviving original member of the band; his former bandmate Denny Laine, also of Wings, passed away a few months ago. John Lodge, who joined the Moody Blues in 1966, broke the news of Pinder’s passing on Twitter. No cause of death has been reported. Pinder was 82.
Earlier this month, the New York trio +/i announced their first new album in a decade, Further Afield, and shared its lead single “Borrowed Time.” Further Afield is out late next month, and today the band is sharing a second new song from it, the 7-minute “Gondolier.”
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