Music Features

Welcome to ourweeklyrundown ofthe best new music — featuring big singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, H.E.R. returns with a triumphant single, Lana Del Rey gives into fanfare with the surprise release of a B-side, Bad Bunny experiments with a new genre, Post Malone doesn’t …

To mix sports metaphors, H.E.R.’s new song “The Journey,” which will soundtrack ESPN’s broadcasts of the NBA Finals, is a big swing — an old-school, hyper-melodic, live-instrument-driven ballad. And for H.E.R., who sees a gap between the energy of her live shows and her recorded output to date, it’s the …

Far too often, the rap community doesn’t embrace the full scope of literature the way we should. Artists might champion books of advice on ascending through capitalism, but we too rarely reference probing, disruptive writers like the great Toni Morrison, who asked questions of us that we’re too afraid to …

“This is that shit right here, that’s the GOAT!” Tony Shhnow is looking at a portrait of Lil Wayne on the fourth floor of the Fotografiska Museum in New York. Strolling through the museum’s “Conscious, Unconscious” hip-hop exhibit, draped in a black-and-pink plaid-jacket-and-pants combo, he’s been reserved, taking in famous …

There’s something so beautifully weird about the triumphant return of the Cure. It’s a crazy moment for fans — of all the fandoms in pop history, this is one of the most bizarrely long-lived, open-ended, multigenerational, cheerfully unkillable. Robert Smith and his crew of English gloom gods are hitting the …

On Tuesday, Google announced an update to its policy on inactive accounts, explaining that starting in December, the data on accounts that have been inactive for at least two years will be subject to deletion. In a statement, the company said the move was a safety measure. “Our internal analysis …

In the summer of 1989, Paul McCartney hit the road for the first time as a solo artist. The Wings tours of the Seventies had featured only a smattering of Beatles songs, but this time around he was going to play nearly 20 a night. Pulling this off would require …

In the ever-evolving youth-culture carnival that was MTV in the late Eighties and Nineties, MTV News anchor Kurt Loder was the one constant, as well as the network’s only indicator that being a grown-up might actually be cool. With MTV News officially ending its 36-year run last week, Loder —also …

Liz Phair will mark the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Exile in Guyville, with a new tour this fall, where she will play the album in its entirety — alongside additional hits — backed by a full band. The 18-city trek kicks off on Nov. 7 in El …

Kurt Loder, the original MTV News anchor (and a longtime Rolling Stone writer) was both taken aback and pleased by the outpouring of affection he received online this week after MTV News officially ended its 36-year run. “I think a lot of those people are just remembering their own youth,” …