Music Features

Welcome to our weekly rundown of the best new music — featuring big new singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, standout tracks from the new albums by Rauw Alejandro, Wizkid, and Bruce Springsteen, as well as great new songs by Rihanna, Julia Michaels, Nas. Check …

Louis Tomlinson is ready to find his voice as a solo star. His second solo album, Faith in the Future, comes 7 years after the end of One Direction. When he released his excellent solo debut Walls in 2020, he was admirably open about the difficulty of making an album …

K anye West had a shitstorm on his hands. It was mid-September, and tensions had been brewing behind the scenes for months over both his Gap and Adidas partnerships. He was determined to wrestle back control of the empire he had created, feeling he had been excluded from key meetings …

Dana Meyerson, a partner at the publicity firm Biz3, has been on Twitter since its early inception as a widget where users had to text their tweets to publish them. She was introduced to the platform when URB Magazine partnered with Twitter for SXSW in 2007. “There would be a …

O N A SHIVERY, star-filled evening in May, Durk Banks is surrounded by friends, family, and what feels like the entire city of Chicago as he prepares to take the stage for a sold-out show at his hometown’s United Center. It’s the final night on his 7220 tour, and it …

Back in 2007, Sarkodie had a dream — and a problem. He wanted to be a great rapper, but his native tongue, Twi, was not a language many understood, especially outside his hometown of Tema, Ghana. He wasn’t about to be deterred. “I believed that I was able to take …

Mikael Arellano has been a Taylor Swift fan for years, starting when he first heard the superstar’s sophomore album Fearless, which marked the moment the country prodigy began claiming the pop throne. “The first Taylor songs I ever heard were ‘Love Story’ and ‘You Belong With Me,’” Arellano recalls. “Everything …

For Maestro Jason Ikeem Rodgers, the founder and musical director of Orchestra Noir in Atlanta, collaborating with Rick Ross for Red Bull’s global Symphonic series seemed like destiny. The project pairs contemporary musicians with classically trained orchestras, and Rodgers says he grew up on the rapper. When he was younger, …

No Beatles album has a mystique quite like Revolver. John, Paul, George, and Ringo threw all their craziest ideas into their experimental 1966 masterpiece, turning Abbey Road Studios into a hotbed of madcap creative frenzy. Revolver was underrated for many years — especially in America, where the complete album didn’t …

“What happened was, we reached the moon. But lost in space, I think we got there all too soon. But you know what? I’m coming back for you, baby.” That’s the spoken-word bridge to the title track of Carly Rae Jepsen‘s The Loneliest Time, a charming retro-disco duet with one …