Chris DeVille

Back in 1999, Disney’s Hollywood Studios — the Orlando theme park formerly known as MGM Studios, part of the sprawling Walt Disney World complex — launched an Aerosmith-themed rollercoaster. A quarter-century later, the Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster is getting a rebrand.

Kendrick Lamar released his instant classic album GNX by surprise on Friday, and it’s looking like early highlight “squabble up” will debut at #1 next week. In the meantime, we get a video for the track, this time directed by Calmatic rather than the usual pairing of Kendrick and Dave Free.

Drake, who was roundly defeated by Kendrick Lamar in their feud this year, has yet to weigh in on Kendrick’s triumphant new album GNX, but he’s still picking fights with people in Kendrick’s vicinity. The latest target of his passive aggression is Steve Lacy, one of many Los Angeles area talents who appeared at Kendrick’s celebratory Pop Out concert on Juneteenth.

Lana Del Rey has been teasing a country album called Lasso since February, but she recently suggested it might be more of an Americana feel, and it might not be called Lasso. Today we learn that, indeed, the project has a new title. It’s also got a release date. According to a post on Del Rey’s Instagram account, The Right Person Will Stay will be out nearly six months from now, on May 21.

Lately U2 have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of their 2004 album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb with a reissue and an entire alternate LP. But the band is not totally fixated on the rearview. Today the Edge was a guest on Jo Wiley’s BBC Radio 2 show to promote the Atomic Bomb festivities, and he shared some intel on U2’s new music.

On the new Count Your Lucky Stars split.

He also inserted a deliberately inaccurate scene into his own biopic.

Bartees Strange is in the middle of rolling out his new album Horror, but he’s taking a break from that today to give us a great new holiday single. “Xmas” finds Strange tapping into that Mk.gee/1975 guitar sound and borrowing some melodic phrasing from Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” in service of pure, uncut seasonal melancholia. “Yeah, it’s Christmas/ And you don’t even want me at all,” he sings on the chorus. “Wonderin’ if you’ll ever call/ Christmas at the end of the world.” It sounds like an alternate-universe ’90s pop song, and it rules.

Hear an alternate version of "Handshake Drugs" and get all the details.

The Vermont rocker Greg Freeman has been growing in stature lately, in large part thanks to the slow-burn success of his 2022 debut album I Looked Out. (His ripping performance at our Austin party this year did not hurt.) Today Freeman has announced his signing to Canvasback/Transgressive Records, who’ll reissue I Looked Out in with two bonus tracks. The digital reissue is out now, with the physical to follow in January.

Mistyheads can exhale. The album we’ve been waiting for is here.

Over the past two decades, Alec Ounsworth has continued to steadily release new music under the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah name, most recently 2021’s New Fragility. But Ounsworth also realizes that most people with an interest in Clap Your Hands are strictly conversant with the band’s self-titled 2005 debut album, the self-released stunner that became one of the great blog-rock success stories. So when the album turned 10 in 2015, CYSHY did an anniversary tour. And now that it’s turning 20 next year, Ounsworth is doing it again.

The Philadelphia band 22º Halo have been at it for a few years now, but they’re first crossing my radar with Lily Of The Valley, the spectacular new album they released last week. I discovered it through the new edition of Chicago music journalist Josh Terry’s excellent weekly newsletter, No Expectations, to which you should definitely subscribe if you like indie rock, indie folk, and various rootsy, jammy, meditative permutations therein.

Last time we heard from the mathy and emotive Brooklyn indie band Peaer was five years ago, when they released their album A Healthy Earth. Today the group is back with a new single called “Just Because,” which proves they’ve still got it after a half-decade away. The song is full of guitar action both delicate and explosive, and Peter Katz haunts that sonic landscape with a downcast charisma. Fittingly for the first song back from a long-dormant act, his lyrics are addressing someone who’s transformed: “Do you miss the way it was? Did you change just because?” It’s an excellent song, so listen below.

And stream the noisy Lancaster, PA band's debut album 'Content.'

My Chemical Romance performed their 2006 blockbuster The Black Parade in full at When We Were Young this fall, and that practice will carry on across America this fall. The band has announced a summer 2025 stadium tour at which they’ll once again play through the whole LP, as well as other catalog highlights, with an impressive slate of opening acts.

Hear the gorgeously noisy "Route 9 Magic."

Chalamet spoke extensively with Zane Lowe about his preparation for 'A Complete Unknown.'

One of the best music festivals in the world has ceased to exist. Pitchfork Music Festival announced today that its flagship Chicago event will not return for 2025, ending a two-decade run that brought some of the greatest artists in the world to Union Park.

Shaboozey’s historic run on the Hot 100 continues this week. “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” the Virginian country and hip-hop artist’s genre-jumbling, J-Kwon-interpolating super smash, is #1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a 17th nonconsecutive week, Billboard reports. That gives “A Bar Song” sole possession of the second-longest streak atop the chart.