Music Features

Hip-hop has something for everyone. That’s the beauty of the genre — but in some instances, it reflects ugly realities. Future’s I Never Liked You and Drake and 21 Savage’s Her Loss are two 2022 rap albums that lean on misogynistic tropes, in their marketing and lyrical content, to great …

At the end of every tour of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, country music fans have the opportunity to ascend a small staircase and have their photo taken on the very stage where legends like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash once stood. On this November afternoon, a few gray-haired stragglers of the …

When we publish our rankings of the year’s Best Albums and Best Songs each December, those lists represent the collective effort of dozens of music listeners at Rolling Stone, each with their own distinct likes and dislikes. Everyone hears the year in music a little differently — and in this …

No one brightened up our year quite like NewJeans did with their debut this summer. Formed under ADOR, a new subsidiary of Hybe Corporation, the group brought nostalgic yet experimental and refreshing music, took Nineties and Y2K fashion to the next level, and gave us some truly addicting choreography. Minji, …

So, is Counting Crows‘ melancholy, much-beloved 1996 classic “A Long December” a Christmas song? The band’s frontman, Adam Duritz, has some thoughts. “There’s this big discussion that runs around,” he says on the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. (To hear the whole episode, press play above …

I n the parking lot of a Panera, just off I-95 in Stafford, Virginia, Rick Dunsford climbed into the passenger seat of a white Ford F-350 pick-up. Depending whose account you believe, he was holding either $12,000 or $15,000 in cash. It was late afternoon on a Friday in July …

Give 2022 some credit—any year with Kate Bush crashing Top 40 radio can’t be all bad. So let’s celebrate a superbly crazy year for music, when brilliant tunes kept exploding all over the stylistic map. These are my 25 favorite songs of 2022. (Although many other gems are over on …

What do you recall about the feud between Kanye West and Taylor Swift? Maybe something about a misogynistic lyric in West’s 2016 song “Famous,” or Swift’s subtle-but-scathing swipe at the line at that year’s Grammys — or, later, Kim Kardashian’s claims that the track had Swift’s prior approval. Surely the …

What a year for music—any of my top half-dozen or so could have been Number One some other year. But these are my faves, with pop idols, guitar bangers, rap poets, disco visionaries. All these albums keep giving up new surprises for me. The double-digit years are always pivotal for …

It’s hard to believe Finneas O’Connell — the multi-Grammy winning songwriter, producer, and musician who’s worked with everyone from Justin Bieber to Tove Lo to his younger sister, Billie Eilish — ever doubted a successful career in music; a profession he was motivated to achieve following a Green Day show, …