Music Features

At the turn of the millennium, the battle lines in the boy-band wars were fairly clear. You were either on Team Backstreet Boys or Team ‘NSync. Some fans took a Switzerland-like stance and professed equal love for both groups, but they were mostly full of shit. Everyone had a favorite. …

A journalist is often waiting indeterminately for an interviewee to come on a Zoom call or enter a label office; you’re rarely in their living room waiting for them to come out of their bedroom. But here I am in French Montana’s Manhattan apartment after his assistant Kam invites me …

Normani’s debut album is finally coming! Fans went into a frenzy on Feb. 21 when the R&B star announced that she’ll be releasing her debut album. It’s called Dopamine. While an exact release date has yet to be announced, the singer teased that fans can expect the new music at …

For Jakob Nowell, turning 28 was a major milestone. It’s the same age his father, Bradley Nowell, was when he died, leaving behind both his band, Sublime, and his infant son. So there’s a certain poetry to the fact that this is the year Jakob is taking over as the …

On the morning of Feb. 6, “Drake” was trending on X (formerly known as Twitter); not too unusual for one of the world’s most successful rappers. The reason, though, turned out to be extremely unusual for the pop star and reverberated across the internet for a week – what looked …

It took three days, but one of the stars of the case involving allegedly stolen handwritten lyrics from the Eagles’ Hotel California album emerged Friday. And it wasn’t Don Henley or any of the other band members over the decades: It was paper. On Friday, glimpses of the yellow pads …

Since debuting in 2015, TWICE have been going strong as a nine-member group with a bond like no other, which is a feat in itself. We first met in Korea during the pandemic, right before the release of their EP Taste of Love. Since then, TWICE have skyrocketed: They have …

On a bright Saturday morning in the summer of 1963, 13-year-old Carolyn Crawford walked onto the stage of Detroit’s Fox Theatre and sat behind a piano. She had to bring her A game to this performance, the finals of the Tip-Top Talent Contest, hosted by a local gospel and R&B …

It started with a failed math course. “I failed the same class three times,” RaiNao says over Zoom. “The third time, I said, ‘No, this is not for me.’” So, around 2014, the singer-songwriter born Naomi Ramirez quit her biology major at the University of Puerto Rico and gave up …

When it comes to truth in advertising, few albums this year are going to top Lil Jon’s just-released Total Meditation. Not remotely hip hop, the music is instead a soothing sonic bath akin to what one would hear in a massage-therapy room at a spa. As those tracks wash over …