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With strong albums from veterans Alex G, Japanese Breakfast, and Car Seat Headrest, and killer debuts from newcomers like Lifeguard, 2025 has been packed with great indie rock. In the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, we look back at the year in indie so far, with Simon Vozick-Levinson joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. (To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below.)

Alex G technically just departed the world...

In between standing on business in paparazzi clashes and dodging endless rumors about his personal life, it turns out Justin Bieber was busy in the studio, making a genuinely interesting album. Swag is full of well-chosen collaborators — Gunna, Sexyy Red, Cash Cobain, Lil B, Dijon — confessional lyrics, and even surprisingly self-aware skits recorded with Druski.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, we break down the last few years of Bieber’s life and career, with Jeff Ihaza (who wrote a smart piece on Bieber’s...

Sabrina Carpenter is as good as any current pop star at cultivating controversy and attention — the latest evidence was the now-subsided furor over her absurd Man’s Best Friend album cover, which seems to take cues from Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove. “She’s leaning into it and laughing about it at the same time,” says Angie Martoccio, who profiled Carpenter for her recent Rolling Stone cover story — which revealed that image aside, the singer’s true obsession is music.

“I wasn’t aware that she was a full-on music nerd,...

There was an odd symmetry to the near-simultaneous deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson at age 82 last week. “Both of them poets of summer,” Rob Sheffield says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “Both chroniclers of the American dream in California. Both from pretty much the same era. Both of them also started out very young as musical prodigies, who figured out early that they needed to be in charge of their music.”

As a Bay Area DJ, Sly Stone slipped Bob Dylan and the Beatles into R&b playlists,...

Swedish pop star Zara Larsson’s next album, Midnight Sun, due Sept. 26, will include the confessional track “Ambition,” which she describes as her most honest song — complete with lyrics about comparing herself to other performers as she stares at her phone late at night. “That’s the thing with ambition,” she sings. “Everything’s a competition.”

“ When you’re super-ambitious, I think that’s the blessing and the curse,” she says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “You can have so many amazing things happening to you,...

To get her music back, first Taylor Swift had to re-record it. After a consortium led by Scooter Braun bought the rights to the masters for her first six albums in 2019, much to Swift’s displeasure, she hatched a simple, if wildly labor-intensive plan: Make new Taylor’s Versions of her catalog available, and then ask her massive fanbase to stream them instead of the originals.

No one had ever tried anything like it before, but fans complied by the millions. The strategy worked exactly as intended, devaluing the masters...

“The America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration,” Bruce Springsteen declared from a Manchester, U.K. stage May 14. At the kick-off show of his newly rechristened Land of Hope and Dreams Tour with the E Street Band, Springsteen framed his criticism of Donald Trump in patriotism: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its faults, is...

This year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will induct acts including Soundgarden, Outkast, and the White Stripes — but some huge names from the ballot didn’t make it, most notably Mariah Carey (for the third time!), Oasis, and Phish.

Carey is an undisputed pop legend; Oasis recorded some of the greatest songs of the Nineties and are about to embark on the most-anticipated reunion tour in years; Phish are, well, Phish, a band that’s created a universe of its own, playing arenas decades into their career. So what happened?...

Hardcore Wicked fans have a lot of unshakable opinions, including the widespread belief that the Wizard’s big moment in the first act, the talky “A Sentimental Man,” is the Broadway show’s single worst song. But when Jeff Goldblum stepped in as the Wizard for director Jon M. Chu’s blockbuster film version, he managed to salvage the song in fans’ eyes, playing up the character’s toxic blend of smarm and charisma. “I’ve had a lot of positive anecdotal response like that,” Goldblum says in the new...

How did Jeff Goldblum get one of the world’s biggest pop stars to sing on his new jazz album? As he explains on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Ariana Grande’s lovely take on “I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do)” on Goldblum’s Still Blooming, recorded with his band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, came down to sheer proximity and an unexpected musical kinship. (To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or press play below.

Chappell Roan has taken the title of “The Giver” to heart, gracing fans with album-level promo (Billboards! A secret phone number! An instantly controversial Call Her Daddy interview!) for the Shania-esque stand-alone single. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield join host Brian Hiatt to break down Roan’s strategy, even as they try to figure out whether a new album will be out this year — and if the fan-favorite ballad “The Subway” will be her next single. Spanos points out that...

Metallica’s members are all in their 60s, and their music is way more physically demanding than anything their classic-rock forebears have had to tackle onstage — but lead guitarist Kirk Hammett tells our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast that he doesn’t see retirement on the horizon.

“As long as we have our health and our mind, I think we can just keep on going,” says Hammett, whose new coffee-table book, The Collection: Kirk Hammett, dives into his world-class arsenal of vintage guitars. “Sometimes I forget how old I am,...

How does a truly terrible song end up an otherwise flawless album? Blame ego-appeasing band-politics concessions, drug-fueled studio experiments, songwriters working through a few too many personal demons, and artists who just ran out of songwriting steam a little too soon. Or maybe it all comes down to bad judgment.

In any case, Rolling Stone‘s Andy Greene recently found 50 examples of classic albums with at least one bad song, and he goes through his entire list with host Brian Hiatt on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now.

Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance at Sunday’s Super Bowl was the most-watched in history, with more than 133 million people tuning in — and it also may have been the most uncompromising. In a slot that every previous artist has reserved mostly for greatest hits, Lamar only played bits of two older songs, focusing instead on his excellent new album, Gnx, and his Drake-eviscerating smash, “Not Like Us.”

On the latest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield join host Brian Hiatt to break down the...

Now that the box-office success of A Complete Unknown has achieved the seemingly impossible feat of turning at least a few Gen-z viewers into Bob Dylan stans, Hollywood’s biopic wave is about to turn into a tsunami. Next up is the Bruce Springsteen movie Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White, and four separate Beatles movies from director Sam Mendes. (To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below).

In the new...

Marcus J. Moore, author of 2020’s The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, initially assumed it was too late to follow it with a book about one of his favorite hip-hop groups of all time, De La Soul. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, well, clearly I can’t do that, because there’s already been a book written,'” he says on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now. “And then much to my surprise, there wasn’t one.” (To hear the whole episode,...

Radiohead have had a spy in their midst for years. As his excellent new book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, reveals, bassist Colin Greenwood has been snapping candid, lovely photographs of his bandmates since the early 2000s — in the studio, in dressing rooms, and even, somehow, onstage during the middle of their concerts.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Greenwood — who just finished a tour playing bass with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — talks about his book, looks back at highlights of his years in the band,...

Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, two of the biggest and most interesting pop artists of the past half decade, have a not-so-secret weapon in common: producer and co-writer Daniel Nigro, formerly the frontman of the ’00s band As Tall As Lions. Nigro, who just scored a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year, helped Roan and Rodrigo step off the pop assembly line and sidestep trends, building uncommonly sturdy catalogs of precisely crafted, oft rock-inflected hits.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Nigro shares studio...

Some lessons need to be learned over and over again. When Bob Dylan and the Beatles broke through in the Sixties, they paved the way for generations of artists to write their own songs. But by the early 2000s, the charts had been largely reclaimed by pro songwriters and svengali producers — until a young, putatively country artist named Taylor Swift came along.

As Swift rapidly moved toward pop stardom, guitar always in hand, she started an industry-wide movement toward artists — especially young women — writing about their own lives again. “When...

Decades never start quite on time, pop-culturally speaking, and it’s tempting to say that the Sixties didn’t really kick off until the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, just as “Smells Like Teen Spirt” started the Nineties in 1991. But as David Browne’s new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, suggests, the Sixties’ spirit really began in Greenwich Village, not Liverpool — and the music that really got it going was written by Bob Dylan. In June of 1963, Peter,...

Despite numerous Grammy nominations in the country field, and a Best Country Duo/Group Performance win with Kacey Musgraves for “I Remember Everything,” Zach Bryan says he doesn’t want to be defined as a country music artist.

In an exclusive Rolling Stone interview between Bryan and Bruce Springsteen, the Great American Bar Scene songwriter and the New Jersey working-class hero talked at length about how country music has affected their work. Springsteen cited Hank Williams and Johnny Cash as influences, while Bryan praised Jason Isbell and went on to...

“This world is bullshit,” Chappell Roan recently said, during an extended TikTok rant. “You shouldn’t model your life on what we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself.” All right, fine, that was actually what Fiona Apple said on the VMAs in 1997 — and at the time, Apple’s dissatisfaction with fame briefly threatened to become the essence of her brand, overshadowing the brilliance of her music. But Apple continued creating, and her songs have long since outlasted any passing controversies.

David Gilmour just released a new album, Luck and Strange, and he’s about to kick off his first tour since 2016 — as for any other future career plans, he’s taking it day by day. Might this be his final tour? “Well, it could be, obviously,” he tells Andy Greene in an interview featured in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. Gilmour dwells on mortality on the new album, which he co-wrote with his wife, Polly Samson, and he’s all too aware that we’ve...

“I do want to put a lot of music out there,” D’Angelo told Rolling Stone in 2015, shortly after the release of his acclaimed, long-delayed third album, Black Messiah. “I feel like, in a lot of respects, that I’m just getting started.” He still has yet to release a follow-up, however, and has largely gone quiet since touring behind it. But now, D’Angelo is deep into recording his next album, according to his friend and longtime collaborator Raphael Saadiq.

“D’s in a good space,” Saadiq says on the...

When the original lineup of the legendary R&b band Tony! Toni! Toné! reunited for a tour last year, co-founder and key creative force Raphael Saadiq had high hopes of recording what would have been the band’s first new album since 1996. But now that the tour is over, Saadiq says the new album has been canceled. “We just got overzealous a little bit,” Saadiq says in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “The tour was amazing. We had a beautiful time … We’re just at...

“Too twiddly didn’t really exist to us, in our minds,” guitar legend Steve Howe of Yes says in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, explaining the musical mission of his band — and of prog-rock itself. “There wasn’t really such a thing. If you could play it, then it obviously isn’t too twiddly — because, hang on, you’re playing it! We wanted to sparkle, we wanted a surprise… We were taking untold risks and gambles and playing about with things.”

A new ultra-deluxe box set Yes’ 1971 classic,...

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is much more than a country album — it’s actually a tour through the Black roots of American music that manages to be both thematically rich and stuffed with indelible pop songs, in multiple genres. Kendrick Lamar’s virtuosic “Not Like Us,” meanwhile, completely transcends its status as a killing blow in the Lamar-Drake battle, packing in an astonishing amount of lyrical and musical density — and it’s somehow also the year’s most entertaining, endlessly replayable track.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast,...

On the evening of Feb. 28, 1984, Prince was at home, watching Michael Jackson become the first artist to win eight Grammys in a single night, including Album of the Year for Thriller. When the broadcast was over, Prince turned to Bobby Z, his longtime friend and drummer for the Revolution, and told him, “Next year, that’s gonna be us.”

As both an album and a movie, Purple Rain was still unfinished at that point, but Prince had a good idea of what he had. The very idea of making a movie was inspired,...

There have been many one-of-a-kind historic events over the last two weeks or so, but arguably — arguably! — the most significant is the release of Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World,” her hilariously catastrophic attempt at a comeback single. Thanks to its brain-dead lyrics (“sexy, confident/ so intelligent”), AI-like chorus, and Perry’s startlingly tone-deaf choice to record a “feminist” song with the likes of Dr. Luke, the song prompted near-universal mockery, and instantly flopped.

“Woman’s World” raises many difficult-to-answer questions. Perry has said its video is meant to be satirical — but...

Some summers are just hotter and poppier than others — and summer 2024 is turning out to be a wild one, with way more than its share of pop breakthroughs. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are conquering the world, Shaboozey hit Number One with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and two longer-running artists, Tinashe and Charli Xcx, are having the biggest moments of their careers.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we take a deep look at a summer of pop magic, with Brittany Spanos and Rob Sheffield joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion.

Which Nineties band once dropped $32,000 to buy a dealer’s entire supply of Ecstasy at once? The answer would’ve been hard to guess at the height of their fame, but the culprits were the seemingly clean-cut dudes in Hootie and the Blowfish — who, as frontman Darius Rucker reveals in his excellent new book, Life’s Too Short: A Memoir, could out-party any band you can name. “When I’m dead, I’ll let them study my brain and tell you if I have any serotonin,” Rucker says.

Rucker looks...

Billie Eilish held nothing back in her most recent Rolling Stone cover story — and amidst her many personal revelations, she also went deep on the making of her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. As Finneas, her brother, producer, and co-writer told Rolling Stone‘s Angie Martoccio — in a quote that was immediately picked up everywhere — the pair intended to make an “album-ass album,” their most cohesive statement ever. The songs twist and turn as they go, sometimes moving from balladry to tranced-out dance beats along the way, and...

When Linda Perry started allowing director Don Hardy to film her day-to-day existence, she didn’t realize the cameras would arrive just in time for her life to fall apart. Perry is the singer-songwriter-producer behind 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” Pink’s “Get This Party Started,” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” among other hits — and at first, Hardy was filming her artistic process as she began exploring the idea of writing for herself again. Then her mother got sick and eventually died, and Perry herself faced a diagnosis of breast cancer.

The Offspring’s “Come Out and Play” (you know, the “gotta keep ’em separated” song) was all over MTV in 1994 — with a video that cost all of $5,000. The Nineties were full of unlikely breakthrough acts, but the Offspring were one of the few bands of the era who made it to the mainstream without even leaving their indie label, Epitaph.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Offspring frontman Dexter Holland looks back on his band’s hit-packed 1994 album Smash, which turns 30 this year. Go here for the podcast provider of your choice,...

Kendrick Lamar’s battle with Drake may or may not be over for good, but it’s clear that it was easily one of the greatest hip-hop beefs of all time, producing no fewer than nine separate songs — including Lamar’s current Drake-savaging Number One hit, “Not Like Us.”

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, we look back at the rapid-fire exchange of songs between the two artists, with Andre Gee joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. Go here to find the episode on...

At the very moment Taylormania was hitting preposterous heights, threatening to turn the artist at its center into an untouchable icon, it turns out that the real Taylor Swift was spending her time between glittery three-hour concerts making some of her most fearless art. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology is stuffed with the rawest, angriest, and most unguarded songs of Swift’s career – quite the opposite of the ingratiating, focus-grouped inoffensiveness that a skeptic might expect from an artist at her current level of visibility.

On the new episode...

With a few lines in a guest verse on Future and Metro Boomin’s chart-topping hit “Like That,” Kendrick Lamar ignited his long-simmering cold war with Drake into what’s become the widest-reaching rap beef in years. Since then, it’s all gotten incredibly messy, starting with J. Cole recording an entire diss track about his erstwhile friend Lamar and then deciding to retract it and apologize — a fairly unprecedented move in hip-hop. We trace the whole saga on the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — go...

On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé mixes R&b, country, and some hard-hitting guitars, among many other elements, and as the artist herself is well aware, there used to be a name for that kind of American melange: rock & roll. She slyly acknowledges that fact with two Chuck Berry moments on the album, including a segment of “Maybellene,” his first hit, in which a Black genius helped invent rock & roll via revved-up country.

So, there’s an argument that Cowboy Carter — which the artist has made clear is a “Beyoncé album” rather...

Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock has been known to take as long as eight years between albums, but nearly three decades into his band’s career, he’s ready to pick up the pace. Three years after the release of the well-received The Golden Casket, he’s already recorded enough songs for a new Modest Mouse album with producers including Jacknife Lee and Dave Sardy, and intends to put one out by next spring. “In my early days of putting out records, I wrote music every fucking day,” he tells...

Swifties have known since early February that Taylor Swift has a new album, Tortured Poets Department, due April 19, with some notably provocative song titles (“So Long London,” “But Daddy I Love Him”) and big-name guest stars (Post Malone, Florence Welsh). But since then, information on the album has been scarce, so fans have more than filled the void, passing around possibly fake leaked snippets of songs while pranking each other with both ChatGPT-generated lyrics and a ridiculous viral parody where an AI-generated Taylor sings lines like, “I’m so happy...

Just last summer, experts on the intersection of AI and music told Rolling Stone that it would be years before a tool emerged that could conjure up fully produced songs from a simple text description, given the endless complexities of the finished product. But Suno, a two-year-old start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already pulled it off, vocals included — and their latest model, v3, which is available to the general public as of today, is capable of some truly startling results.

In Rolling Stone‘s feature on Suno, part of...

One of the biggest influences on Ariana Grande’s new album, Eternal Sunshine, turns out be the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. That inspiration isn’t exactly instantly evident within the album’s sleek production and Max Martin-assisted songwriting, but Grande said in an advance listening session for journalists that she had John, Paul, George, and Ringo in mind as she stuffed it full of unexpected melodic twists and half-buried ear candy.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we discuss Grande’s newfound Beatlemania and much more, going...

Welcome to the Beatles Cinematic Universe. Continuing the current wave of music biopics — which just saw its most recent box-office triumph with Bob Marley: One Love — director Sam Mendes (Skyfall) has signed on to helm not one, but four separate Beatles biopics, all due in 2027. The movies, set to begin production next year, will each focus a single Beatle’s perspective, so John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and even Ringo Starr each get a turn in the spotlight.

It might seem like overkill, but as we discuss on the...

From J Noa’s speed-rapping to Gale’s polished pop-rock songwriting to Ralph Choo’s electronic experiments, 2023 was packed with incredible Spanish-language music from artists who aren’t superstars — at least not yet. In the last of our four Rolling Stone Music Now podcast episodes on under-the-radar albums from last year, we dig through multiple nations and genres to find the best lesser-known gems.

Rolling Stone‘s Julyssa Lopez joins host Brian Hiatt for the discussion, picking her favorites from our recent comprehensive list of the year’s top Spanish-language albums,...

Anyone complaining about the state of hip-hop needs only to look beyond the top of the charts, as the latest episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast makes clear. In the episode, Andre Gee breaks down some of his under-the-radar 2023 hip-hop picks, from Zelooperz’ experimental Microphone Fiend to B. Cool Aid’s ultra-vibey Leather Blvd to Nappy Nina’s introspective Mourning Due. To hear the full episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play below.

Also in the episode,...

Joni Mitchell will have a lot of company when she takes the stage on Sunday for her first-ever Grammy Awards performance. Her friend and collaborator Brandi Carlile will be performing alongside her, as will Jacob Collier, Allison Russell, SistaStrings, Lucius, and Blake Mills, according to executive producer Raj Kapoor. As for what they’ll be performing? “It will be a song that I think everybody knows,” Kapoor tells our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, “and if you are a Joni Mitchell fan, it’s the song that you want to hear.

Burna Boy will be the first Afrobeats performer ever to play the Grammys at Sunday night’s ceremony — and he’ll be joined onstage by Brandy and 21 Savage, executive producer Raj Kapoor tells Rolling Stone Music Now. The collaboration will also mark 21 Savage’s Grammy performance debut, while Brandy hasn’t sung on the show since the Nineties. “It’s gonna be huge,” says Kapoor. “It’s gonna get everybody on their feet.”

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Kapoor breaks down what to expect from...

The sessions started at Hollywood, California’s A&m Studios the night of Jan. 28, 1985, and didn’t end until well after sunrise the morning of Jan. 29. By that point, it was clear that nothing quite like “We Are the World” could ever happen again. The Greatest Night in Pop, a new documentary on Netflix, brings it all back to vivid life: co-writers Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie joined by Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and an improbably long list of other superstars, all crammed in...

One of last year’s most unexpected musical twists was the ascent of Zach Bryan, the rootsy singer-songwriter who sounds not unlike Bruce Springsteen or Jason Isbell — and went all the way to Number One on the Hot 100 with the ballad “I Remember Everything,” assisted by Kacey Musgraves. His self-titled fourth album was one of the best country/Americana releases of the year, but it’s only one of the unmissable 2023 releases in that category, from Jason Isbell’s own Weathervanes to Megan Maroney’s Lucky.

In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now,...

Boygenius-mania was only the most visible sign of the fantastic year indie rock had in 2023, with strong albums from newcomers (Blondshell, Kara Jackson), established stars (Mitski) and veterans (Wilco, the National). In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we go through some highlights of the year in indie albums.

Jon Dolan, Angie Martoccio, and Simon Vozick-Levinson join host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. Among many other topics, we touch on Mitski’s surprise hit “My Love Mine All Mine,” which our panelists agree isn’t even the...