Widely considered a feminist icon, Grammy winner Ani DiFranco is the mother of the DIY movement, being one of the first artists to create her own record label in 1990. While she has been known as the “Little Folksinger,” her music has embraced punk, funk, hip hop, jazz, soul, electronica and even more distant sounds. Her collaborators have included everyone from Utah Phillips to legendary R&B saxophonist Maceo Parker to Prince. She has shared stages with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Kris Kristofferson, Bon Iver, Brand Carlile, Billy Bragg, Michael Franti, Chuck D., and many more. Her most recent albums include 2021’s Revolutionary Love and the July 2022 25th Anniversary Edition reissue of her iconic live album Living In Clip, both on her own label Righteous Babe Records. Her memoir No Walls and the Recurring Dream was released in May 2019 by Viking Books, and was a New York Times Top 10 best seller.

Rejecting the major label system has given her significant creative freedom. She has referenced her staunchly-held independence in song more than once, including in "The Million You Never Made" (Not a Pretty Girl), which discusses the act of turning down a lucrative contract, "The Next Big Thing" (Not So Soft), which describes an imagined meeting with a label head-hunter who evaluates the singer based on her looks, and "Napoleon" (Dilate), which sympathizes sarcastically with an unnamed friend who did sign with a label. After recording with Ani in 1999, Prince described the effects of her independence. "We jammed for four hours and she danced the whole time. We had to quit because she wore us out. After being with her, it dawned on me why she's like that – she's never had a ceiling over her."

Her lyrics are rhythmic and poetic, often autobiographical, and strongly political. “Trickle Down” discusses racism and gentrification, while “To The Teeth” speaks about the need for gun control, and “In or Out” questions society’s traditional sexuality labels. "Play God" has become a battle cry for reproductive rights while “Revolutionary Love” calls for compassion to be the center of social movements. Rolling Stone said of her in 2012, "The world needs more radicals like Ani DiFranco: wry, sexy, as committed to beauty and joy as revolution."

Over the years she's performed at countless benefit concerts, donated songs to many charity albums, and given time and energy to many progressive causes. She has learned from and demonstrated beside Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich. In 2004, she marched in the front row of the March for Women's Lives along with Margaret Cho, Janeane Garofalo, Whoopi Goldberg, and many others, later performing on the main stage. She has beaten the drum for voter registration and turnout with "Vote Dammit" tours in multiple presidential election years, including most recently in 2016. She's currently on the board of Roots of Music, an organization that provides at-risk youth with support and musical education in New Orleans, and the creative council of EMILY’s List, which helps elect pro-choice Democratic women to office.

As an iconic songwriter and social activist, she has been the inspiration for woman artists and entrepreneurs for over two decades. She has been featured on the covers of SPIN, Ms., Relix, High Times, and many others for her music and activism. She is the idol of empowered women who came of age in the 90s and continues to bring younger fans into her fold. From Alice Walker to Amy Schumer, Ani is respected by wordsmiths across milieux and generations. She blazed the trail for self-directed artist careers and has been cited by musicians from Prince to Bon Iver as an inspiration to release their own art outside of the major label system.

Ani has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Grammy for best album package (Evolve), the Woman of Courage Award from the National Organization for Women, the Gay/Lesbian American Music Award for Female Artist of the Year, and the Woody Guthrie Award. At the 2013 Winnipeg Folk Festival she received their prestigious Artistic Achievement Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Winnipeg. In 2017, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from A2IM (a nonprofit trade organization that represents independent record labels) and the Outstanding Achievement for Global Activism Award from A Global Friendship. In 2021 she was named a Champion for Justice by the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

As she watched friends skim stones on Brighton Beach, Paris Paloma felt energy shift. Like heat returning to numb fingertips, life felt like it was taking shape again after a long period of personal trauma. With a diaphanous sheath of lyrics in mind, she went to Bergen, Norway to work on new music. On the three days of the year that it didn’t rain in Europe’s wettest city, among the silvery lakes and mountain peaks, life grew ever brighter. “the warmth” was formed.

“I ate up all the light, it shone through my teeth, I tasted sunbeams emanating from me… it can’t hurt me… now the warmth is returning,” she sings in unfurling harmonies, spectral with full-bodied pop, a determined percussive march building like a personal artillery. This emotional arc would be core to Paris Paloma’s debut album, cacophony.

The Derbyshire-born musician gave the world “labour” in 2023. It was the first song she’d ever fully recorded in a proper studio – early releases like “narcissus” in 2020, 2021 EP cemeteries and socials, and 2023’s “notre dame” were produced in her own bedroom or others’. But early clips she posted with stolen lyrics of “labour” to TikTok had already garnered a curious audience. Its journal-like lyricism and incisive strain of compelling, dark folk-pop skewered the knots of women’s emotional labour, and it immediately became a rallying cry worldwide upon official release. The track broke over 100 million streams on Spotify, cracked the Official UK Singles Chart and US Billboard Chart, and soundtracked tens of thousands of TikToks. It spurred on sold-out shows around the UK, and Paris, armed with a compact slew of songs, travelled to the US and Australia for the festival circuit. “I matured because of ‘labour’,” Paris explains. “As a young artist you’re both protected and limited – you’re putting songs that are so intimate into a void. It’s made me more considerate about how vulnerable these songs are going to be.”

Such vulnerability can be difficult to confront, and all the more to articulate as art, “but I feel very held by my listeners,” Paris says. This symbiotic care between artist and listener is innate within Paris’s devoted fanbase. She’s cultivated a community both online and off: on TikTok, her 400K followers send her videos (of thoughts, song snippets, and tour moments) into six- figure views. Fan-made art and videos analysing her lyrics span social media. She’s also crowdsourced the voices of hundreds of fans for a new version of “labour” to be released. These are roots laid deep, as Paris gains wider recognition from NME to Billboard, as YouTube’s Trending Artist on the Rise and a Breakthrough Artist to Watch 2024 by Amazon.

A graduate of fine art from Goldsmiths University (her first tattoo was a tribute to female surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun), Paris’s creative mediums have influenced each other since she first started writing songs at age 14. Her early releases’ visual identities are crafted from her own fantasy drawings. Now, cacophony is inspired by the creation that comes out of chaos – in 15 tracks, we’re shown Paris as an evocative lyricist who constellates human experiences of grief, love, patriarchy, and trauma with Greek mythology, fantasy, and the literary gothic. The album name is inspired by Stephen Fry’s Mythos, ruminating on the creation myth. “From this chaotic cosmic yawn, creation sprang forth,” Paris explains, “so this is a collection that makes sense of the overwhelming space of my mind where my anxiety, my OCD, and trauma processing lives.” Songwriting is a catharsis and coping mechanism, which she uses to articulate her struggles in real time. The sprawling metaphor of chaos to creation knits the album’s universe together.

“As I began to combine songs, I could see my struggles, the fantasy, the ‘hero’s journey’.” Paris found tracks incidentally informing each other, and so the album has been curated rather than conceptualised to find a natural rhythm akin to Greek theatre staging – or “a quest”, as Paris puts it. “I love linear storytelling, following the protagonist inflected by a journey. Looking back, I can track my own wellbeing, my growth.” Album opener “my mind (now)” and closer “yeti” are opposites: “We start with the turmoil, open up the chaos, scramble back to redemption and healing.” She describes her songwriting as undisciplined, but always begins with lyrics – a starting couplet or image to elucidate. Melody follows.

“My mind has not been silent since you,” she sings vaporously on “my mind (now)”. A haunting fugue draws you in: “What did I do wrong”, across skittering percussion and a glut of trumpets, lanced by crunching guitars and a piercing feral scream. She flexes her songwriting dichotomy, weaving the personal with haunting symbolism – a striking image of strawberry picking while someone else readies their cruelty. “boys, bugs, and men” draws on men’s sadistic behaviours, using natural world imagery to unspool the banalities of a patriarchy that hurts both genders.

“I love the feral, feminine aspects of my music,” says Paris. “Being unapologetically vulnerable feels wild – it's breaking down boundaries, a return to something primal.”

“bones on the beach” is a “turning point”. “I wrote it at a time when I was coming out of survival mode,” she explains. “It starts from exhaustion and wanting the world to stop asking things of you. And as it progresses, there’s a realisation – you will find peace in life when you start living and taking care of yourself.”

Three album tracks – “escape pod”, “last woman on earth”, “bones on the beach” – are her ‘apocalypse trio’. “When it felt like my world was ending,” she says. “last woman on earth” is an emotive, upward contour, about coping with and confronting the ways her voice has been taken away. She leans on dark metaphors to find light. “Women’s wishes for what happens after they die have been consistently dishonoured: from Anne Boleyn to Marilyn Monroe. It's the ultimate show of disrespect,” she says. “It becomes an uplifting point – it shows my growing belief in my own agency.”

“triassic love song” is an aching ode to external love returning to her life, imagery inspired by an archaeological discovery of two fossils of different animal species intertwined. “It’s a tender narrative marker. Love was becoming a healing force, but I was conscious of an end being nigh.”

She matches this with expansive productions – dramatic instrumentation, folk sensibilities, pop at its most cavernous. It makes sense for someone who first picked up a guitar at age 13, enamoured by Ed Sheeran, Bon Iver, and the eclectic sounds of her upbringing from the Motown and jazz her mother played. “my mind (now)” was especially fun to build. Paris recalls: “I didn’t want any structure that could be a ‘life raft’. It has to almost overwhelm you, then pull back. You're a tiny raft in the ocean, you're surely going to go under – but you don't.”

After building a song out on vocals and guitar, her notes app and songbook, she makes a playlist to convey the sonic palette. “as good a reason” was inspired by Alt-J and early Hozier;

“labour” from Glass Animals and Katarina Gimon’s compositions. “I don't know what genre I am. I don’t give it much thought. The second I do, I'll start limiting myself.”

The album spans the breadth of Paris’s vocal range. “my mind (now)” is the first time she’s screamed on record. On “his land” – a melancholic offering about isolation, inspired by the reduction of British public lands – she reaches her lowest tone. In the “last woman on earth” bridge, she belts her highest. “It was really hard to get up there. My songs, age 20, were mumbly and soft. In part it was a tone thing, and in part confidence. Now I write songs and push myself to grow toward it, as opposed to making everything sound the same.”

Worldbuilding is cinched by visual aesthetic – Paris gravitates towards the eerie feminine fashion of Bora Aksu and Simone Rocha, and is styled for stage by Leith Clark. If each song could have a music video, she would. The striking visual for “my mind (now)”, directed by Matt Grass, is darkly fantastical. “I want everyone to see my musical world as I do,” she says. Live performance is vital to her artistry, and Paris has sold out four headline London shows. At every gig, her lyrics are sung directly back at her. “One of the reasons you write is to feel heard,” she says. “It's an audience that wants to know more.” The intimacy of the music remains steadfast as stages get bigger. This summer, she’s keeping up opening for Maisie Peters and will embark on festival season, as well as a UK and European tour.

cacophony is “a stage backdrop”, against which all future music will be positioned. “I’ve chronically released singles and been quite nomadic. I’m excited to set the scene for my world.” She’s already working on the threads of her next album, a Paris Paloma tapestry in motion.

From Mr. 305 to Mr. Worldwide, Armando Christian Perez, aka Pitbull, rose from the streets of Miami to exemplify the American Dream and achieve international success. His relentless work ethic transformed him into a Grammy®-winning global superstar, business entrepreneur, education ambassador and motivational speaker.

Pitbull has landed #1 hits in over 15 countries, sold over 80 million singles, has more than 84 million Facebook/Twitter/Instagram followers and over 13 billion views on YouTube. In addition to the United States, his sold-out world concert tours have taken him to North and South America, Europe and the Far East. He has also completed headlining tours in China and Japan. Along the way in his journey, he has co-headlined with Enrique Iglesias, toured with Britney Spears in the U.K. and Europe, and spoken to thousands as part of Tony Robbins’ motivational seminars.

In between concert dates, Pitbull is writing and recording his first full-length project as an independent artist. The title, Libertad 547, pays tribute to his late father’s successful effortsto bring 547 Cubans to the United States during the Mariel Boat lift in 1980. Slated for release in August on his label, Mr. 305 Records, Inc., Libertad 547 will feature new music, including the current single “No Lo Trates” by Pitbull, Daddy Yankee and Natti Natasha. With more than 70 million views on YouTube, additions to more than 430k global playlists on Spotify, and top 10 placement on playlists throughout Latin America since its release, “No Lo Trates”has become a summer essential.

Pitbull ushered in 2019 with his fifth annual New Year’s Eve event at Bayfront Park in Miami and wrapped another stellar year in 2018 that included scoring the film Gotti, starring John Travolta; having a featured song, “Ocean to Ocean,” on the Aquaman soundtrack; and opening the first iLov305 themed nightlife destination in Biloxi, Mississippi. In 2018, he released his tenth full-length album, Climate Change; completed a second co-headlining U.S. tour with Enrique Iglesias; and released his first-ever Greatest Hits, plus a new Spanish single.

Whether it’s his Voli 305 Vodka, which has its own signature cocktails at multiple Sugar Factory American Brasserie locations, or the fragrance line “Pitbull,” his influence has catapulted. His Las Vegas residency, “Time of Our Lives” at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, has now accomplished multiple consecutive runs that include new dates in spring 2019 at Zappos Theater. In January 2019, Pitbull celebrated the opening of iLov305, a restaurant and nightlife concept on Miami's famed Ocean Drive. Pitbull has signed on to the STX UglyDolls franchise, based on the ubiquitous pop culture Uglydoll characters. Pitbull will write and perform an original song for the UglyDolls movie, slated for release on May 3, and he lends his voice talent to one of the film’s key characters. Norwegian Cruise Line handpicked him as Godfather to Norwegian Escape, one of the most innovative cruise ships ever built. Globalization, his 24/7 commercial-free channel on Sirius XM (Ch.13), has become one of the platform’s fastest-growing channels following its 2015 launch.

Pitbull also serves as ambassador to the Sports Leadership Arts and Management (SLAM!) charter schools he has helped to establish. First opened in the Little Havana section of Miami where he spent some of his youth, SLAM! schools are now located in Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Texas. Always striving to implement its mission to bring relevant experiences to its students, the SLAM! Foundation launched a new initiative in 2019: The first student -run national radiobroadcast on SiriusXM (Ch. 145).

After 15 years at the top of their game, The High Kings are still selling out venues around the world to an ever- growing army of loyal fans. Having already surpassed a million listeners on Spotify as well as 2 platinum albums in their time, The High Kings are celebrating 15 years together by releasing 15 brand new tracks to their fans as well as a 27 date tour of the USA with “The High Kings XV TOUR” as well as a Double header with ‘Gaelic Storm’

Widely regarded as the standard-bearer for their genre The High Kings continue to surprise and delight and “The High Kings XV TOUR” together with 15 newly reimagined tracks is just the beginning of their electrifying plans for 2023.

In their time together, ‘The High Kings’ have charted across the world and performed for hundreds of thousands of fans, as well as in many prestigious situations including for the Prime Minister of England ( 2011), Barak Obama( 2012) & George W Bush ( 2009 at the White house and at The Pentagon ( 2015)

Notable performances include Glastonbury, the Isle of Wight ( 3 times – headlining in 2015), They appeared in Time Square & also headlined the St Patrick’s Day concert in Trafalgar Square London (2015).

The High Kings continue to set the bar extremely high for Irish folk bands across the world and 2023 will be no different.

Speaking about “The High Kings XV TOUR of the USA 2023” the High Kings said: It’s been an amazing journey so far, and to be celebrating such a milestone with a huge Irish tour is amazing. We can’t wait to bring our brand new stage show, and our new music to our Irish fans – and we have a few surprises too!

Despite coming up in Australia, indie rock band Last Dinosaurs are an international enterprise and have the track record to prove it. Brothers Lachlan and Sean Caskey, along with Michael Sloane, have played sold-out headlining shows and festivals across the US, UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and Australia. The success of studio albums In a Million Years, Wellness, Yumeno Garden, and From Mexico With Love have taken them around the world and back, playing notable festivals like Lollapalooza, Corona Capital, All Things Go Festival, and more alongside artists like Florence + the Machine, Bad Suns, Foals, Matt & Kim, Foster the People, Vacations, and more.

In 2024, The Dinos continued enthralling audiences, launching a cryptic new story in a two-part release, KYORYU. Mimicking the duality of brothers Sean and Lachlan, they chose to each compose one half of the album, giving listeners a true yin and yang experience. Inspired by cyber-punk anime from their Japanese heritage, the brothers craft a space-age narrative around unfettered technological advances and unchecked human greed. The album served as the soundtrack for an accompanying manga comic book release, working with artists Em Niwa (KYO) and Chris Yee (RYU) to detail the dystopian future odyssey.

This year also marks the first vinyl reissue of Last Dinosaurs’ beloved 2018 album Yumeno Garden. Recorded in Japan, the album features live staples and fan favorites like “Eleven,” “Italo Disco,” and “Sense.” To celebrate the release, The Dinos are excited to announce new world tour dates and an alternate version recording featuring Indonesia’s indie rock darlings, Grrrl Gang, the first in a string of special collaborations to follow!

Fiercely rooted in the classics, the girl who left her Kentucky home and high school at 16 to take a job at Dollywood has grown into a woman who embraces the genre’s forward progression. GRAMMY® Award-winning singer-songwriter Carly Pearce lit a fire with her debut album Every Little Thing and the PLATINUM-certified history-making title track, and she hasn’t slowed down since. Pearce’s 3x PLATINUM-certified “I Hope You’re Happy Now" with Lee Brice won both the 2020 CMA Awards Musical Event and 2021 ACM Awards Music Event, plus ACM Single of the Year. Pearce, now a Grand Ole Opry and Kentucky Music Hall of Fame member, has come a long way from the pain she felt writing her critically acclaimed and commercially lauded third studio album 29 which includes Country Radio chart toppers “Never Wanted To Be That Girl” with Ashley McBryde and PLATINUM-certified “What He Didn’t Do.” For the PLATINUM-certified “Never Wanted To Be That Girl,” Pearce picked up her second consecutive ACM Music Event of the Year in 2022 and marked the third duet between two solo women to top Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. The song also took home the 2022 CMA Musical Event of the Year and won a GRAMMY® Award for Best Country Duo/Group Performance, marking Pearce’s first and making history as the first female pairing to win in the category. In 2023, Pearce joined Blake Shelton’s BACK TO THE HONKY TONK TOUR and made her 100th performance at the Grand Ole Opry. As she closed out that pivotal 29 chapter with her first live album 29: Written In Stone (Live From Music City), Pearce now steps into the next chapter of her musical career with the praised release of her latest Top-15-and-rising single “we don’t fight anymore” (featuring Chris Stapleton), which earned her second GRAMMY® nomination for Best Country Duo/Group Performance. Pearce went on to release “country music made me do it,” to critical acclaim, performing the song at the first annual People’s Choice Country Awards and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Last Fall, Pearce wrapped her headline Country Music Made Me Do It Tour, connecting with her fans all across the country. Pearce is currently joining Tim McGraw’s 2024 Standing Room Only Tour as direct support. She released her highly anticipated fourth album, hummingbird, on June 7, continuing to resonate with her honest lyrics and timeless musicality with songs such as the title track “hummingbird,” as well as “my place” and “fault line.” Pearce will head out on her hummingbird 2025 uk/eu tour in February 2025. For tour dates and more, visit CarlyPearce.com.

Forget everything you think you know about Franz Ferdinand. Always Ascending is nothing short of a rebirth. The album’s ten songs are a triumphant recasting of one of our favourite groups, bursting with fresh ideas and vigorous sonic experimentation.

“We wanted this to sound like nothing we made before,” said the band and after listening to the first moments of the title track it’s obvious that’s what they’ve accomplished.

There have been substitutions, but the team is playing stronger than ever. In case you missed the announcement last year, Nick McCarthy (guitar) left to raise his family and Julian Corrie, a much-loved figure in the Glasgow music scene, joined core members Alex Kapranos, Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson.

With reclusive producer Philippe Zdar (Cassius, Phoenix, ‪Beastie Boys), FF have taken a knife to their old canvas, creating an album that is so foreign in its familiarity it could only be current.

“Philippe is someone we’d wanted to work with for a long time.” said Alex “Last time we spoke, he was recording the Beastie Boys. I asked Laurence (Bell, Domino boss) and Cerne (Cannning, manager/svengali) to put us in touch and they said ‘Oh, he’s a bit of an enigma. No-one can trace him. Maybe he’s in Ibiza. Maybe Paris. We don’t know.’ Then I remembered I still had his number, so I texted him and said ‘I’ve always thought we could make a truly great LP together’ and he replied straight back and said ‘Yes! Let’s do it!’”

“We loved working with Philippe. He understands that what is essential is the emotion: the emotion that inspired the song and the emotion that the song inspires in you on hearing it. It’s all that matters. Everything comes from that: the sound, performance, tempo, instrumentation, how far you stand from the mic… everything.”

The LP was mixed at Philippe’s Motorbass studio in Paris, recorded in a couple of weeks at RAK and written over the preceding year somewhere in the west of Scotland.

“We all lived in the one place together. Us and the dog. It’s remote and that’s what we needed. We weren’t just writing an LP. We were creating a band. A sound. A universe. We started from zero: no expectations. It was liberating. From zero, we created this new universe to inhabit: nebulous at first, gradually taking form, until it felt like it had always existed.”

Other characters appear in this story. Dino Bardot (the greatest rockstar Glasgow ever produced) has joined the line-up since they started touring again and Sam Potter, late of Late Of The Pier, hung out with the band in the early stages of the LP.

“Sam’s an inspiring guy. We had great conversations. He knows how to take an idea and break it so you can see the better idea hidden within it.”

“We talked about the purity and naivety our earliest psychedelic experiences: when you imagined what drugs might do to your mind, before there was an opportunity to let them. How the imagined experience is way more powerful than anything actually triggered by a drug could be. Wouldn’t it be glorious to make music that made you feel like that?”

When asked what influences shaped the record, Hardy says “I don’t think we need to mention any,” while Thomson exclaims “Can't really think of any other than Tarka Daal and McEwans Export.” Kapranos does mention re-discovering Greek composer Yiannis Markopoulos’s interpretations of Cretan music on the Rizitika LP:

“Repetitive, trance-inducing, dynamic: my first extra-sensory experiences were from listening to this, before I could walk.”

“Listening to it again, I realized how it was always there. I don’t mean just in my period of experience, but for millennia. It’s ancient music you can trace back to the earliest of human experiences. We have always done this, but there is always a new way of making it. Markopoulos made it new in 1971. We made it new in 2017. The effect has always been the same. We are looking for something that allows us to ascend. To become lighter than our physical presence. To ascend from the emotion of every day. To ascend from what we understand. To ascend and know why we are ascending. To not know why we want to ascend. To be always ascending.”

Armed with this musical mission, the band put purpose to paper. Conceiving a songbook full of tightly scripted screeds and musical paradoxes, brought to vivid life through a confluence of the band’s gift for propulsive, melody-driven musicality and Zdar’s production dexterity.

“So many nights, I couldn't sleep because there were too many ideas flooding each other. Kapranos recalls “I felt like a decapitated gorgon, growing two heads where there had been one. That's why it was so great to work with Julian, Philippe and Sam. Each an extra head to the gorgon. An extra mind. An extra set of snakes spitting venom.”

These ambitious visions can be heard throughout Always Ascending: from the title track’s Penrose Stairs aural illusion constantly rising chord progression, to the “Trap Sabbath via Slackers” of 'Huck and Jim'; the barely-glimpsed backstory that could have been from a William Trevor story in ‘Lois Lane’, to the Tehching Hsieh-inspired 'Paper Cages', the five to the floor odd-count dance beat of ‘Lazy Boy’, to the heartbreaking ‘Slow Don’t Kill Me Slow’.

For all its philosophical conceits, however, it is a visceral experience. It’s intended to hit you in the heart before the brain. These are the sounds of the Parisian night, the exhilaration of an Italian car racing down the autobahn; a feeling of euphoria so pure it could only exist on a knife’s edge, occasionally gliding into euphoric heartcreak.

They wanted this record to sound like no other you’ve heard, never mind any other Franz Ferdinand record. Here it is. Stick it on. Think “What the fuck is that… I LOVE it!”

It’s Always Ascending and it’s out on Friday the 9^th of February.

Niko Moon has really clear memories. Music, cars, school. How much his parents loved each other, created a place where life was an adventure – and what you had was all you needed.

His dad, a drummer turned truck driver, loved old cars. As a boy, he remembers a Falcon, “red interior, and the carpet. The way it smelled.” He used to love to pile in with his dad, riding around, going to get donuts – and listening to music.

Like Prine, Moon’s finger is on simple things that really matter; easy joy and how to find it, loving where you are and finding ways to write about it so everyone – the really smart, the can’t be-bothered – can find their way to the bliss. It’s what Moon seeks to capture and sow in his songs.

Growing up an hour outside of Atlanta, back when it was country not exurbia, life moved at a different pace. People knew each other, took their time, shared a meal on Sunday with their family and pitched in when someone needed a hand.

Moon wanted to extract the essence of growing up in small-town Georgia. Banjo forward, swaggy back beat, guitars that tang as much as twang. Sonic tags, melodies that tumble and moments that embody all the warm welcome and friendliness that defined his life as a kid listening to his mama play Alison Krauss in her car, his debut album GOOD TIME creates an old school sort of country ethos that also drags a bit of Michael Franti, Prine, the Eagles and Outkast through songs that simmer, stir and sizzle in all the right places.

All of it turned out to be more than anyone could’ve bargained for. A musically curious kid, he remembers watching his dad practicing drums in the garage. “I got chills. I couldn’t comprehend how he was doing it,” he remembers. “I was so little, but he was in a touring regional country/rock band, had hair down to his waist. He gave it up, made the decision it was better for his family to just drive. I always respected him for that. You know, he was getting up at 4 a.m. to provide for his family.

That rhythm is shot through every track on GOOD TIME, a self-cultivated positivity starter kit. Whether the staccato/dobro punctuated laundry list of ‘can’ts’ that forms “GOOD AT LOVING YOU,” the double entendre “WAY BACK,” the slinky, finger-snapping “SMALL TOWN STATE OF MIND,” or the strummy philosophy of “WITHOUT SAYIN’ A WORD,” Moon recognizes you can’t have heart without the beat.

If the secret sauce is the alchemy, it’s been years in the slow-steeping. Not only did Moon produce Franti’s acclaimed Stay Human, Vol. 2, he’s been the secret weapon for Zac Brown for almost a decade. In love with music, the young kid caught up with the circus, “back at the Dixie Tavern on Wednesday nights, 200 people with the line wrapped around the bar and across the back. ‘Chicken Fried,’ ‘Toes,’ ‘Free,’ yes, but he would do Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Keith Whitley. And his picking, there’s always a hook built into the chord, even when he’s just playing G, C, D.”

Writing, traveling, seeing the world, Moon absorbed a precision and commitment to music that was exacting, even as it embodied simple pleasures. “Everyone in that band is so good. Spending 10 years watching them arrange and create was intense. Relentlessly authentic and refusing to adapt to other people’s ideas of what you should be was a real lesson.”

Ten years was also spent living the life.

Moon’s latest effort, COASTIN’, is available now.

Since Deftones’ inception, the multiplatinum, Grammy-Winning alternative rock band from Sacramento, CA have quietly been pursuing two paths, delivering songs defined by churning, double-fisted aggression while also testing the boundaries of music by incorporating elements of psychedelia and shoegaze.

The Los Angeles Times wrote of Deftones, “Hard rock thrives on conflict and chaos, and no band has found more beauty and soaring aggression within those ingredients than Deftones.” Deftones have released seven albums to date and have sold over 10 million albums worldwide.

Vocalist/guitarist Chino Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, keyboardist/samplist Frank Delgado, drummer Abe Cunningham and bassist Sergio Vega, just announced that their eighth studio album, Gore, will be released April 8th.

From the bombastic and epic, to the folky and mystical, Get The Led Out (GTLO) have captured the essence of the recorded music of Led Zeppelin and brought it to the concert stage. The Philadelphia-based group consists of six veteran musicians intent on delivering Led Zeppelin live, like you’ve never heard before. Utilizing the multi-instrumentalists at their disposal, GTLO re-create the songs in all their depth and glory with the studio overdubs that Zeppelin themselves never performed. When you hear three guitars on the album…GTLO delivers three guitarists on stage. No wigs or fake English accents, GTLO brings what the audience wants…a high energy Zeppelin concert with an honest, heart-thumping intensity.

Dubbed by the media as "The American Led Zeppelin," Get The Led Out offers a strong focus on the early years. They also touch on the deeper cuts that were seldom, if ever heard in concert. GTLO also include a special “acoustic set” with Zep favorites such as “Tangerine” and "Hey Hey What Can I Do."

GTLO has amassed a strong national touring history, having performed at major club and PAC venues across the country. GTLO’s approach to their performance of this hallowed catalog is not unlike a classical performance. "Led Zeppelin are sort of the classical composers of the rock era," says lead vocalist Paul Sinclair. "I believe 100 years from now they will be looked at as the Bach or Beethoven of our time. As cliché as it sounds, their music is timeless."

A GTLO concert mimics the “light and shade” that are the embodiment of "The Mighty Zep." Whether it's the passion and fury with which they deliver the blues-soaked, groove-driven rock anthems, it's their attention to detail and nuance that makes a Get The Led Out performance a truly awe-inspiring event!

Get The Led Out include: Paul Sinclair - Lead Vocals, Harmonica; Paul Hammond - Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Mandolin, Theremin; Tommy Zamp - Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Vocals; Eddie Kurek - Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals, Percussion; Derek Smith - Drums, Percussion; and Seth Chrisman - Bass, Vocals

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Rising Belgian-Egyptian musician Tamino is pleased to unveil the details of his second album, Sahar, due out 23^rd September on Communion Records. The grandson of one of Egypt’s most famed singers and film stars, Tamino channels his own lineage, as well as the folk and rock music traditions from the Middle East and Europe for a borderless and timeless record.

To coincide with its announcement, Tamino shares new single ‘Fascination’. Listen HERE

Created in the wake of the international acclaim that followed his debut album Amir, Sahar was born in Tamino’s Antwerp apartment. Already adept at playing guitar and piano, Tamino took up the oud, an Arabic lute, under the mentorship of a Syrian refugee living in Antwerp. The instrument served as a key tool in the songwriting process and provides a melancholic soundscape that is threaded throughout the project. The record is a distillation of Tamino’s solitary reflections, and a product of work with close collaborators including Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, producer/engineer PJ Maertens, and drummer Ruben Vanhoutte.

Tamino’s 2018 breakout debut album Amir was met with widespread acclaim from critics and fans alike. The Antwerp-based musician’s fanbase stretches across the world, from the Middle East to North America, and the album has collected over 126 million streams.

As previously announced, Tamino plays two intimate shows later this month in Paris and London, with both selling out in under five minutes. Later this Autumn, he will take Sahar out on the road, with a tour of North America, followed by a handful of dates in Europe. He headlines London’s KOKO on 24^th November. Tickets go on general sale from 10am local time on Friday 10^th June via www.taminomusic.com. For all pre-sale news, sign up to Tamino’s mailing list at www.tamino.lnk.to/mailinglist

Since going viral with their LA Public Library performance of their song “Racist, Sexist, Boy” the world has watched The Linda Lindas scream about injustice, sing about growing up and exhibit the kind of altruism that is so meaningful to the punk scene. While their evolution as writers, performers and studio geeks is clear on No Obligation, their ethos remain steadfast. The band has released three great album cuts so far, the anxiety filled ”Too Many Things,” the scorcher “Revolution / Resolution,” and the album’s addictive lead single “All In My Head”. With all four musicians each contributing to the writing and lead-singing, the songs are as varied and dynamic as the girls themselves, however the listener always senses the underpinning of both their shared world-view and their bond.

No Obligation, the second full-length album (released on October 11 via Epitaph Records) from The Linda Lindas further advances their unironic, joyful, and exciting trajectory of mashing up L.A. punk with post punk, garage rock, power pop, new wave and rock en español. Written and recorded by the band during spring breaks, winter breaks, and long weekends (Lucia de la Garza and bassist Eloise Wong are still in high school, drummer Mila de la Garza just finished middle school, and Bela Salazar is patiently waiting for them to get done with it already), the new album has been in the works for the last two years whenever they weren’t at school or touring.

The Linda Lindas most recently shared “No Obligation” - the ferocious title track. “I don’t got no obligation,” roars Eloise Wong in the album’s opening song - “just brush off all expectation.” From the first moment of their sophomore release, it is clear that The Linda Lindas are here to defy expectations and challenge the norms.

Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

When Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin was 21 years old, she fell in love. Sure, she’d been in love before, but this time, something was different: “It just felt like a switch had flipped inside my head,” she says. “I realized I had been living a life that was not my own, watching myself from the outside.” As a kid who bounced from town to town growing up, and as a person of color in predominantly white spaces, Berrin had become accustomed to maintaining a constant awareness of how others perceived her—a “split-brain mentality” that she adopted as a necessary means of survival. But now, tumbling through her first queer romance—and her first queer heartbreak—some of that self-separateness began to mend: “Suddenly,” she says, “I was in a body that was mine.”

Of course, displacement can start to feel like a life sentence when even the pop culture you’re trying to escape into doesn’t feel like home. “As a teenager, I was always looking to see myself represented,” Berrin says, “but I never really saw a path drawn out for someone who looked like me.” So she held tight to the glimpses of herself she could catch—from Death Cab For Cutie to Sade; from the camp and synth-pop of Heathers to the pastels and gloomy mellotron of The Virgin Suicides; from John Waters’s take on suburbia to David Lynch’s. “I absorbed everything I could and tried to make a collage that could incorporate every piece of me,” she says—and in the process, she gained a particular appreciation for the heady mix of music and visuals, how a great song could become even greater when woven into an artist’s overall aesthetic. But it wasn’t until Berrin got into punk and grunge—artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, who were both unapologetically outspoken and unapologetically femme—that she knew she had to start a band.

Enter Pom Pom Squad. Berrin first played under the moniker in 2015 after moving to New York to study acting at NYU—though she soon transferred to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music—and it was at those early gigs that she linked up with Shelby Keller (drums), Mari Alé Figeman (bass), and Alex Mercuri (guitar). The group cut their teeth playing packed Brooklyn apartments, but they quickly graduated to packed Brooklyn venues alongside artists like Soccer Mommy, Adult Mom, and Pronoun. Following the release of their sophomore EP Ow, Pom Pom Squad was looking at a packed 2020, with shows at SXSW and opening for The Front Bottoms—but of course, plans changed.

Lost in the free-fall of isolation, Berrin found herself returning to classic, familiar sounds: jazz vocalists like Billie Holiday, the warm tones of MoTown. “It was comforting, listening to music that’s so evocative and cinematic,” she says. “It takes you out of the world for a minute.” At the same time, though, she was confronted daily with the world’s stark reality as protests erupted against police brutality and anti-black racism following the murder of George Floyd. “[The protests] brought to the surface these feelings I’d been stewing on for a long time,” she says, “thinking about the history of American popular music, the way that black artists are constantly erased from the music they pioneered. How rock was invented by a black queer woman—Sister Rosetta Tharpe—but I grew up feeling like I was odd for loving guitar-based music.”

The result of this stymying, galvanizing period—of escaping to come back—is Death of a Cheerleader. Produced Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties and co-produced by Berrin, the album moves through moods like a camera panning across an expertly collaged bedroom wall: a Ronettes drum beat here (“Head Cheerleader”), a Doris Day nod there (“This Couldn’t Happen”), the impossible romance of swelling strings (“Crying”) collapsing into guitar thrash (“Drunk Voicemail”). Here, too, are all the overlapping, contradictory tenets of 21st-century young womanhood—the carnality and the vulnerability, the sugar and the defiance. On “Head Cheerleader,” antsy and anthemic, Berrin promises us that “my worst decisions are the ones I like the best” before she heads under the bleachers, even as she acknowledges moments later that “my feelings always make a fucking fool of me”; on the breathless, punky “Lux” (named for the Virgin Suicides heroine, of course), she boasts feeling “naked without taking off any of my clothes,” and it’s as much a come-on as it is an admission of terrifying exposure, couched in Berrin’s dare-laden drawl.

This tension—between baring oneself and crafting delicious, tongue-in-cheek art—is what drives so much of the foundational queer media to which Death of a Cheerleader pays homage (not in the least its film namesake, But I’m a Cheerleader). On “Second That,” a tumbling acoustic waltz built around a Smokey Robinson quote, Berrin steps out for a moment from behind the elaborate curtain of references she’s constructed with an admission—“I’m sad, I’m just fucking sad,” her voice on the edge of breaking—but then, moments later, she’s back in the anti-bourgeoisie upswing of “Cake,” playfully demanding her fair share. It’s a reminder of the self-affirming power of artifice, of glam, lipstick drawn on in blood. With Death of a Cheerleader, Pom Pom Squad offer a fresh and decidedly queer take on picking up the pieces—from heartbreak, from injustice—and creating yourself anew.

Multi-platinum selling, Grammy nominated singer/songwriter Geoff Tate is best known for his 30-plus years as the creative and driving force behind the progressive metal band Queensryche. Since its inception with Geoff at the helm, Queensryche has sold over 20 million albums worldwide and has performed in upwards of fifty countries. Geoff is regarded as one of the most skilled vocalists in the genre with hundreds of modern, popular artists citing him and his former band as a major influence. Combining social consciousness and expertly crafted lyrics with high-energy, melodically complex music, Queensryche with Geoff Tate at the forefront became internationally recognized as the thinking man's rock band.

The band's first three albums -- their self-titled EP (1983), The Warning (1984) and Rage for Order (1986) -- all hit gold status selling over 500,000 units each. With the release of their landmark concept album Operation: Mindcrime (1988) -- which won critical and popular acclaim and comparisons to the Who's Tommy and Pink Floyd's The Wall -- Queensryche went on to bring their progressive music to sold-out audiences the world over. Following the album's platinum success, Queensryche released Empire, which quickly entered the Top Ten on the Billboard charts, eventually generating sales of more than three million copies. The album featured the hugely popular hit, "Silent Lucidity," which would be the band's first Top Ten single (#9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart). Geoff and the band would ultimately perform the Grammy nominated song live at the Grammy awards accompanied by a supporting orchestra. In all, Queensryche has been nominated for a Grammy four times and has had their music featured in three feature films. In 2006, the band released Operation: Mindcrime II, a scorching sequel to their original 1988 tale of "Rock, Revenge and Redemption." The band would soon hit the road performing both albums back-to-back in their entirety in an incredible theatrical presentation. The spectacle would be captured on Mindcrime at the Moore, a double CD/DVD release so popular that the DVD would debut at #1 on Billboard's Top Music DVD chart and eventually reach gold status. Shortly after the release of that hugely successful set, Queensryche would release another gem in 2007 titled, Sign of the Times: The Best of Queensryche, that featured 17 career-spanning tracks including seven Top 10 hits with a two-CD deluxe Collector's Edition that added fifteen rare and previously unreleased recordings. Later that year, the band found themselves on the fall leg of the highly acclaimed Heaven and Hell Tour with the late, great Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Vinny Appice along with other special guest, Alice Cooper. The year would culminate with the release of Take Cover, an adventurous 11-song collection of covers ranging from Black Sabbath to Broadway. In early 2009, Queensryche released American Soldier (via Atco/Rhino Records), a concept album inspired by the stories of military veterans that examines the consequences of war from the soldier's perspective... yet another effort that will solidify Geoff and the band in rock history. A truly memorable experience, the band met with, and performed for, troops in both the U.S. and the Middle East. In the year 2010, Queensryche would, once again, display their immense creativity by presenting the Queensryche Cabaret, which was heralded as "the first adults-only rock show." In 2011, the band would find themselves celebrating their 30th Anniversary in rock, marking the occasion with the release of Dedicated to Chaos (Roadrunner Records/Loud & Proud) and an extensive support tour. At the end of 2012, Geoff released his first solo album in over a decade titled, Kings & Thieves (InsideOut Music), that was quickly followed by the news of a 25th Anniversary Mindcrime Tour that would encompass the United States in 2013. Also that year, Geoff would release what would be his last album under the Queensryche name, Frequency Unknown (Cleopatra Records), an effort that would feature such guest musicians as Ty Tabor, K.K. Downing, Brad Gillis, Dave Meniketti and Chris Poland along with the members of his version of Queensryche at the time - Rudy Sarzo, Robert Sarzo, Simon Wright, Kelly Gray and Randy Gane. In 2014, it was announced that Geoff and his band mates would be embarking on their farewell tour as Queensryche, with a subsequent announcement stating that Queensryche with original lead singer Geoff Tate would be changing its name to "Operation: Mindcrime" in September for future tours and recordings. By the end of the year, Geoff began working on one of his most ambitious works to date, an entirely new concept album, titled The Key, that would be the first in a trilogy. Released in September of 2015 (Frontiers Music SRL), the debut album examined the question, "What would you do if you discovered the key to changing the way we view the world, the way we look at time, the way we travel, and could essentially change the human condition -- for better or for worse?" Next in the trilogy would be 2016's Resurrection, completed by 2017's The New Reality. All three albums were followed up with international tours that included extensive tours of the United States. Beginning in June of 2018, Geoff and the current line-up of Operation: Mindcrime, will be are hitting the road to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Operation: Mindcrime, performing the 1988 landmark concept album from beginning to end in its entirety... It's a show that Geoff loves to perform and fans love to see, only proving that good music never goes out of style. As always, Geoff looks forward to the musical journey that lies ahead.

SHORT BIO:

"Geoff Tate celebrates the 30th Anniversary of one of the best-selling rock concept albums, Operation:Mindcrime - certified Platinum and named as one of the “100 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums Of All Time”. Come again and follow Nikki through his journey of a corrupt society as he gets involved with a revolutionary group along with Father William, Dr. X and Sister Mary.

Geoff and his electric band will perform the album in its entirety, featuring the hits “Revolution Calling”, “I Don’t Believe In Love” and “Eyes Of A Stranger” along with a greatest hits set featuring “Jet City Woman” “Empire” and the forever signature “Silent Lucidity”.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.

Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.

Warren Zeiders was just 21 years old when he released his debut single, "Ride the Lightning." Rooted in a platinum-selling mix of country storytelling, heartland twang, and larger-than-life rock & roll, "Ride the Lightning" was every bit as electrifying as its title, catapulting Zeiders then a collegiate star athlete, from the sports field to the stage.

That momentum continues with Pretty Little Poison. Delivered on the heels of his 717 Tapes releases and compilation album — a collection of stripped-back singles and EP songs that introduced his powerhouse voice and sharp songwriting — Pretty Little Poison repositions him as Nashville's newest headliner at just 24 years of age. He's amodern country artist for a generation of music fans who don't mind blurring the boundaries between different styles. "I was raised on country, rock, and Christian music," says the Pennsylvania native, who grew up in Hershey before relocating to Tennessee. "That music helped shape me into who I am. I needed this album to touch all of those bases, because if I'm going to create something, I have to believe in it."

Belief has always played a central role in Zeiders’ life. Sitting in the pews of his childhood church, he lifted his voice for the very first time, singing gospel hymns with the rest of the members. He was devoted to his faith, and that devotion also served him well on the lacrosse field, where Zeiders quickly became a star player. The sport taught him accountability, discipline, and an old-fashioned work ethic. It shaped him into a road warrior, too, years before he embarked upon his first tour as a musician. "I played lacrosse all year long for more than a decade," he remembers. "There were so many tournaments in different cities. So many different hotel rooms. It felt a lot like touring, and it taught me about travel, commitment, and hard work at a young age."

Years later, Zeiders found himself on the sidelines, having suffered too many concussions to continue playing lacrosse safely. Fortunately, a new passion was brewing: music. He began playing guitar in his bedroom, picking along to songs by Luke Combs and Chris Stapleton. One night, while out to dinner with his family, a local musician asked the room for song requests. "I asked her to play 'Beautiful Crazy' by Luke Combs, but she didn't know it," says Zeiders, who offered to play the tune himself. The crowd loved his performance. "I went onstage and had an out-of-body experience," he recalls. "In that moment, a lightbulb went off and I thought, 'This is something I should pursue.'"

Not long after, Zeiders recorded an acoustic cover of "Tennessee Whiskey." Overnight, the homemade video went viral on TikTok, where thousands of country lovers became his first fans. He continued releasing music on the platform during the months that followed, alternating between covers of his favorite artists and heartwarming, hook-driven songs that he wrote himself. The reaction was seismic, and things snowballed from there. Before Zeiders had played his first show in a brick-and-mortar venue, his Spotify streams, YouTube views, and social media stats had already climbed into the millions around the world. By the time he played his 100th show — a main stage performance at the Stagecoach Festival in April 2023, months before Pretty Little Poison's release — he'd racked up a staggering 1.4 billion TikTok views, and 1 billion audio streams.

If Zeiders built his audience the old-school way — by taking his music directly to the people, armed with nothing more than his acoustic guitar and gravelly voice — then Pretty Little Poison shows what he can do with an amplified band, two chart-topping producers (Ross Copperman and Bart Butler), and the best music of his songwriting career. The past two years have been a whirlwind period filled with milestones: his first national television appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show; his first national tour, which sold out in 72 hours; his debut performance on the Grand Ole Opry stage; and even his first Top 40 hit on the Billboard charts, all before he began recording the album. Maybe that's why Pretty Little Poison brims with such excitement and self-assurance. "A lot of this album is about a girl, and a lot of it is about me," says Zeiders, who fills the album with honest lyrics about life, love, and lessons learned. "I'm paying tribute to that classic country sound, but I'm keeping things modern, too. At the end of the day, I'm just putting my heart on my sleeve and putting myself onstage."

Zeiders' muscular brand of country music is as broad as his shoulders, which still bear the evidence of a longtime sports career. "God Only Knows" and "Comin' Down High" are southern rock anthems built for summertime parties and backwoods joyrides. Songs like "Painkiller" and "Love's A Leaving" explore the darkness of outlaw country. The bright choruses of "West Texas Weather" and "Some Whiskey" are showcases for his powerhouse vocals, while"Pretty Little Poison" — the album's title track and lead single — is country music at its most cinematic, pairing dusty western textures with a radio-ready refrain. "Inside Your Head," written by eight-time Grammy winner Chris Stapleton, makes room for the lap steel guitars and timeless twang of classic country. For Zeiders, whose viral cover of "Tennessee Whiskey" played such a crucial role in his own rise to success, featuring a Stapleton cut on Pretty Little Poison feels a whole lot like fate. He worked with a number of other songwriters, too, co-writing songs with Eric Paslay, Randy Montana, Ryan Beaver, Lee Thomas Miller, Benjy Davis, Austin Taylor Smith, Jarred Keim, and others.

Zeiders' push into mainstream culture has been nothing short of meteoric. Few young artists can announce a headline show at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium (this Oct 4, ’23) before the release of their major-label debut. Even fewer can generate the genuine excitement that Zeiders summoned with 717 Tapes tracks and magnified with Pretty Little Poison's four advance songs: "Coming Down High," "Inside Your Head," "West Texas Weather," and the title track. Pretty Little Poison is his coming of age, and despite the rapid growth of his music career, Zeiders remains true to his all-American roots.

Warren Zeiders was just 21 years old when he released his debut single, "Ride the Lightning." Rooted in a platinum-selling mix of country storytelling, heartland twang, and larger-than-life rock & roll, "Ride the Lightning" was every bit as electrifying as its title, catapulting Zeiders then a collegiate star athlete, from the sports field to the stage.

That momentum continues with Pretty Little Poison. Delivered on the heels of his 717 Tapes releases and compilation album — a collection of stripped-back singles and EP songs that introduced his powerhouse voice and sharp songwriting — Pretty Little Poison repositions him as Nashville's newest headliner at just 24 years of age. He's amodern country artist for a generation of music fans who don't mind blurring the boundaries between different styles. "I was raised on country, rock, and Christian music," says the Pennsylvania native, who grew up in Hershey before relocating to Tennessee. "That music helped shape me into who I am. I needed this album to touch all of those bases, because if I'm going to create something, I have to believe in it."

Belief has always played a central role in Zeiders’ life. Sitting in the pews of his childhood church, he lifted his voice for the very first time, singing gospel hymns with the rest of the members. He was devoted to his faith, and that devotion also served him well on the lacrosse field, where Zeiders quickly became a star player. The sport taught him accountability, discipline, and an old-fashioned work ethic. It shaped him into a road warrior, too, years before he embarked upon his first tour as a musician. "I played lacrosse all year long for more than a decade," he remembers. "There were so many tournaments in different cities. So many different hotel rooms. It felt a lot like touring, and it taught me about travel, commitment, and hard work at a young age."

Years later, Zeiders found himself on the sidelines, having suffered too many concussions to continue playing lacrosse safely. Fortunately, a new passion was brewing: music. He began playing guitar in his bedroom, picking along to songs by Luke Combs and Chris Stapleton. One night, while out to dinner with his family, a local musician asked the room for song requests. "I asked her to play 'Beautiful Crazy' by Luke Combs, but she didn't know it," says Zeiders, who offered to play the tune himself. The crowd loved his performance. "I went onstage and had an out-of-body experience," he recalls. "In that moment, a lightbulb went off and I thought, 'This is something I should pursue.'"

Not long after, Zeiders recorded an acoustic cover of "Tennessee Whiskey." Overnight, the homemade video went viral on TikTok, where thousands of country lovers became his first fans. He continued releasing music on the platform during the months that followed, alternating between covers of his favorite artists and heartwarming, hook-driven songs that he wrote himself. The reaction was seismic, and things snowballed from there. Before Zeiders had played his first show in a brick-and-mortar venue, his Spotify streams, YouTube views, and social media stats had already climbed into the millions around the world. By the time he played his 100th show — a main stage performance at the Stagecoach Festival in April 2023, months before Pretty Little Poison's release — he'd racked up a staggering 1.4 billion TikTok views, and 1 billion audio streams.

If Zeiders built his audience the old-school way — by taking his music directly to the people, armed with nothing more than his acoustic guitar and gravelly voice — then Pretty Little Poison shows what he can do with an amplified band, two chart-topping producers (Ross Copperman and Bart Butler), and the best music of his songwriting career. The past two years have been a whirlwind period filled with milestones: his first national television appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show; his first national tour, which sold out in 72 hours; his debut performance on the Grand Ole Opry stage; and even his first Top 40 hit on the Billboard charts, all before he began recording the album. Maybe that's why Pretty Little Poison brims with such excitement and self-assurance. "A lot of this album is about a girl, and a lot of it is about me," says Zeiders, who fills the album with honest lyrics about life, love, and lessons learned. "I'm paying tribute to that classic country sound, but I'm keeping things modern, too. At the end of the day, I'm just putting my heart on my sleeve and putting myself onstage."

Zeiders' muscular brand of country music is as broad as his shoulders, which still bear the evidence of a longtime sports career. "God Only Knows" and "Comin' Down High" are southern rock anthems built for summertime parties and backwoods joyrides. Songs like "Painkiller" and "Love's A Leaving" explore the darkness of outlaw country. The bright choruses of "West Texas Weather" and "Some Whiskey" are showcases for his powerhouse vocals, while"Pretty Little Poison" — the album's title track and lead single — is country music at its most cinematic, pairing dusty western textures with a radio-ready refrain. "Inside Your Head," written by eight-time Grammy winner Chris Stapleton, makes room for the lap steel guitars and timeless twang of classic country. For Zeiders, whose viral cover of "Tennessee Whiskey" played such a crucial role in his own rise to success, featuring a Stapleton cut on Pretty Little Poison feels a whole lot like fate. He worked with a number of other songwriters, too, co-writing songs with Eric Paslay, Randy Montana, Ryan Beaver, Lee Thomas Miller, Benjy Davis, Austin Taylor Smith, Jarred Keim, and others.

Zeiders' push into mainstream culture has been nothing short of meteoric. Few young artists can announce a headline show at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium (this Oct 4, ’23) before the release of their major-label debut. Even fewer can generate the genuine excitement that Zeiders summoned with 717 Tapes tracks and magnified with Pretty Little Poison's four advance songs: "Coming Down High," "Inside Your Head," "West Texas Weather," and the title track. Pretty Little Poison is his coming of age, and despite the rapid growth of his music career, Zeiders remains true to his all-American roots.

Aaron Bruno, the de facto leader, songwriter, and creative force behind the Los Angeles-based project AWOLNATION, has spent the better part of two decades steering the band’s ship of pop-friendly electronic and alternative rock to millions of record sales and streams, a handful of chart-topping singles, and countless shows played to adoring fans around the world. From the 2010 debut’s smash “Sail” and the hype of sophomore album Run to 2018’s organic-leaning Here Come the Runts and 2020’s rock-forward Angel Miners & the Lightning Riders, plus a handful of EPs, remixes, and a covers album, Bruno has mined his sonic creativity for an output of music on par with anyone’s from the last two decades. Following the pandemic, Bruno parted ways with his record label in favor of a new self-releasing/distribution partnership, formed a hardcore band called The Barbarians of California, and became a first-time father of twin boys, all before finishing his long-awaited fifth full-length album, The Phantom Five.

The Phantom Five is a collection of ten songs that highlights every different impulse and urge Bruno has learned to master with AWOLNATION in a cohesive, anthemic pastiche of modern music. It functions almost as a “greatest hits” album, in the sense that it offers something for everyone who has followed the band’s arc in its celebrated, shape-shifting way. The first single, “Panoramic View,” stands out with its sincerity on its sleeve; written on piano at the very start of the pandemic, Bruno calls it the sincerest and his favorite song on the album. The upstart, tongue-in-cheek blasts like “Jump Sit Stand March” and “When I Was Young,” the Roy Orbison, oldies-inspired ode to beauty and self-destruction “A Letter to No One,” and the jangly segue “City of Nowhere” calling to mind The Cars and Grandaddy, not to mention guest spots from Dead Sara’s Emily Armstrong and Del the Funky Homosapien, reveal how The Phantom Five is concerned with trying to find one’s way to happiness in a bizarrely upside-down time. Bruno credits the album’s overall sense of maturity plus the up-tempo energy on songs like “Party People,” “I Am Happy,” and “Bang Your Head” to the ecstatic moments of Dad-life he has experienced with his boys, while affixing the record’s ever-present frustration with our modern times to pundits, talking heads, and politicians. The final track, “Outta Here,” is a tremendous sign-off to the album that may in fact also tease at Bruno killing the AWOL engine for good. But while it’s too early to know whether The Phantom Five will be AWOLNATION’s swan song, it’s certain that these ten songs represent the culmination of a long, fulfilling journey and the joy one can find in being free, independent, and true to one’s art, and to oneself.

Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

For Jesse Cook, music has been a journey. Sonically and literally.

“Over the years, I’ve taken my music and tried to cross-pollinate it with music from different parts of the world,” explains the 50-year-old global-guitar virtuoso. “For the (2003) album Nomad, I went to Cairo and recorded with musicians there. On my (2009) record The Rumba Foundation, I went to Colombia, and worked with musicians from Cuba as well. On (1998’s) Vertigo, I went down to Lafayette, La., and recorded with Buckwheat Zydeco. For me, the question has always been: Where did you go? Where did you take your guitar?”

The short answer this time? Nowhere. And everywhere. After two decades of criss-crossing the world in restless pursuit of inspiration, innovation and collaboration, the Paris-born, Toronto-raised Cook changed course for his ninth studio albumOne World, out April, 28th, 2015 on eOne Music Canada. Instead of exotic locales, he stayed home in his studio. Instead of a foreign legion of performers, he relied on his own devices. And instead of exploring cul de sacs of music — flamenco, classical, rumba, world beat, pop, blues or jazz — he united them.

“On this record, it’s not really about going someplace,” he says of the album, whose cover depicts a vast, ancient tree. “The idea is that there really is just one world. If you pull your focus back far enough, you start to see all music as being branches of the same tree. They’re all connected to the same trunk from way back.

“For example, my strange way of playing guitar is a hybrid of styles. I was a classical guitarist as a kid, and I studied flamenco and then I studied jazz. So there are three musical and guitar traditions in my background. And one of the forms I use, rumba flamenco, is itself a hybrid created in the 1800s when sailors were coming back to Spain from Cuba, having heard these Cuban rhythms. And here I am, 150 years later, taking it and mixing it back with modern music and seeing where it takes me. Music is a constantly evolving thing.”

As is Cook’s creative approach. Despite its humble home-made origins, One World begins another chapter in the multi-tasking artist, composer and producer’s quest. His destination: The digital realm. To create the disc’s emotive melodies, fluid grooves and rich sonic tapestries, he incorporated technology more than ever before. Give credit to his precocious young assistant.

“I have two small children, and my son is forever trying to get on my computer. If I’m in my studio, he’ll come in and sit down and just start pushing buttons and making things happen in the recording program I use. At first I was terrified he would mess things up. But he actually got really good at poking around. I started going, ‘Wow, what’s that? What are you doing? Let me in there!’ I started writing tunes using weird loops and metallic and electronic sounds. And I found myself interested in taking what I do and putting it in a more modern context. I’ve leaned heavily on ancient instruments. But for this record, I put those instruments side by side with modern sounds — unabashedly so.”

What results is the most sonically diverse and distinctive disc in Cook’s vast and varied catalogue, which has earned 11 Juno nominations and one win for 2000’s Free Fall. On these 11 instrumentals, programmed beats and dusty electronic textures are interwoven with syncopated handclaps, deep dubby basslines and popping percussion. Sitars and violin share the space with synthesizers and sound effects. Notes and rhythms dance playfully back and forth between speakers. Naturally, Cook’s masterful guitar work commands centre stage with its elegant balance of subtlety, in-the-moment honesty and blazing technical prowess. But here, it also pivots between worlds — past and future, familiar and fresh, acoustic and electronic — redefined by technology like every element of modern life.

“We’re all involved with our computers in a big way, though we malign them,” laughs Cook. “People complain social media is ruining communication and that people just text instead of call. But love and romance and imagination and art also happen through computers. People fall in love online. People talk to loved ones on Skype. People write great love letters on the computer, create great works of art, great compositions. It has become this integral part of human expression and I wanted to give it a voice in what I was doing.”

And in doing so, the artist who hadn’t planned to travel for this album found himself in the most exotic locale imaginable.

“I wanted to make what I was doing feel like Constantinople, the ancient city that existed between the East and the West. It was the meeting point of all these great cultures — Africa, Europe, Asia, India. I want my music to be that place: The Constantinople of sound. A place where ancient sounds meet with modern ones and pass though that port.”

The journey continues.

A hugely talented singer-songwriter hailing from Luton, London whose profile has risen meteorically in the last year alongside a string of releases mixing Folk, Americana and Pop.

Hugely inspired by a broad range of music he listened to growing up, Myles cites the likes of Green Day, Ben Howard, Labrinth and UK Rap as some of his many influences. Myles cut his teeth with open mic nights and support slots before he released any of his own music and spent time in between classes in the studio honing his craft.

He is an artist who found solace in music to overcome and navigate the complexities of life and situations he couldn't make sense of. Now he is carrying that torch with the mantra 'It's okay to feel, helping the same people who may not have the vocabulary to explain things in their own terms, fostering a community of fans who aren't afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves. As Myles calls it - “Group Therapy.”

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

For Jesse Cook, music has been a journey. Sonically and literally.

“Over the years, I’ve taken my music and tried to cross-pollinate it with music from different parts of the world,” explains the 50-year-old global-guitar virtuoso. “For the (2003) album Nomad, I went to Cairo and recorded with musicians there. On my (2009) record The Rumba Foundation, I went to Colombia, and worked with musicians from Cuba as well. On (1998’s) Vertigo, I went down to Lafayette, La., and recorded with Buckwheat Zydeco. For me, the question has always been: Where did you go? Where did you take your guitar?”

The short answer this time? Nowhere. And everywhere. After two decades of criss-crossing the world in restless pursuit of inspiration, innovation and collaboration, the Paris-born, Toronto-raised Cook changed course for his ninth studio albumOne World, out April, 28th, 2015 on eOne Music Canada. Instead of exotic locales, he stayed home in his studio. Instead of a foreign legion of performers, he relied on his own devices. And instead of exploring cul de sacs of music — flamenco, classical, rumba, world beat, pop, blues or jazz — he united them.

“On this record, it’s not really about going someplace,” he says of the album, whose cover depicts a vast, ancient tree. “The idea is that there really is just one world. If you pull your focus back far enough, you start to see all music as being branches of the same tree. They’re all connected to the same trunk from way back.

“For example, my strange way of playing guitar is a hybrid of styles. I was a classical guitarist as a kid, and I studied flamenco and then I studied jazz. So there are three musical and guitar traditions in my background. And one of the forms I use, rumba flamenco, is itself a hybrid created in the 1800s when sailors were coming back to Spain from Cuba, having heard these Cuban rhythms. And here I am, 150 years later, taking it and mixing it back with modern music and seeing where it takes me. Music is a constantly evolving thing.”

As is Cook’s creative approach. Despite its humble home-made origins, One World begins another chapter in the multi-tasking artist, composer and producer’s quest. His destination: The digital realm. To create the disc’s emotive melodies, fluid grooves and rich sonic tapestries, he incorporated technology more than ever before. Give credit to his precocious young assistant.

“I have two small children, and my son is forever trying to get on my computer. If I’m in my studio, he’ll come in and sit down and just start pushing buttons and making things happen in the recording program I use. At first I was terrified he would mess things up. But he actually got really good at poking around. I started going, ‘Wow, what’s that? What are you doing? Let me in there!’ I started writing tunes using weird loops and metallic and electronic sounds. And I found myself interested in taking what I do and putting it in a more modern context. I’ve leaned heavily on ancient instruments. But for this record, I put those instruments side by side with modern sounds — unabashedly so.”

What results is the most sonically diverse and distinctive disc in Cook’s vast and varied catalogue, which has earned 11 Juno nominations and one win for 2000’s Free Fall. On these 11 instrumentals, programmed beats and dusty electronic textures are interwoven with syncopated handclaps, deep dubby basslines and popping percussion. Sitars and violin share the space with synthesizers and sound effects. Notes and rhythms dance playfully back and forth between speakers. Naturally, Cook’s masterful guitar work commands centre stage with its elegant balance of subtlety, in-the-moment honesty and blazing technical prowess. But here, it also pivots between worlds — past and future, familiar and fresh, acoustic and electronic — redefined by technology like every element of modern life.

“We’re all involved with our computers in a big way, though we malign them,” laughs Cook. “People complain social media is ruining communication and that people just text instead of call. But love and romance and imagination and art also happen through computers. People fall in love online. People talk to loved ones on Skype. People write great love letters on the computer, create great works of art, great compositions. It has become this integral part of human expression and I wanted to give it a voice in what I was doing.”

And in doing so, the artist who hadn’t planned to travel for this album found himself in the most exotic locale imaginable.

“I wanted to make what I was doing feel like Constantinople, the ancient city that existed between the East and the West. It was the meeting point of all these great cultures — Africa, Europe, Asia, India. I want my music to be that place: The Constantinople of sound. A place where ancient sounds meet with modern ones and pass though that port.”

The journey continues.

When pianist Scott Bradlee started the time-twisting musical collective from a basement apartment in Queens, NY, an online, “viral” success story was born —one that quickly led to sold out shows across North America and Europe in the Summer of 2014.

The touring act received rave reviews from industry publications and world-renowned artists alike. In the years that followed, “PMJ” built a reputation as the “Saturday Night Live of Singers” by introducing audiences to dozens of exceptional musical artists —many of whom had been previously overlooked by the modern record industry — and turning them into bonafide stars.

Ten years and two billion views on their YouTube channel later, a Postmodern Jukebox show has become something of an annual musical tradition for hundreds of thousands of dedicated fans all over the world — fans that often show up dressed to the nines in their vintage best, eager to immerse themselves in the experience.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again?

“Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again. Absurdity again. It happens everyday.

“Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through.

“Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again? Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years.

Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Don’t believe everything you see on TV: Olly Murs has been away.

For sure, the singer, songwriter and solid-gold pop star has been all over our screens in recent weeks and months. He’s been front and centre as host of ITV’s Starstruck, helping the public make real their musical dreams, with wing-persons assistance from the likes of Shania Twain, Ronan Keating and Beverley Knight.

Then, he returned to the big swivelly chair on The Voice. Appearing alongside fellow coaches Anne-Marie, Sir Tom Jones and will.i.am in the current run, this is his fifth consecutive season on the hit talent show.

But in the artist world – the world that forged him, where he burnished the creative credentials that makes him an invaluable part of those musical shows – Murs has been off the radar for over four years. For a musician who had four Number One singles and four Number One albums in a near-back-to-back run after bursting onto the scene with his double-platinum self-titled debut in 2010, that’s a big gap.

But as he matter-of-factly admits, after the release of 2018’s sixth album You Know I Know (a double that was half greatest hits, half new tracks) he needed a rest. And a reset. The result is Olly Murs’ most consistent, most ambitious, punchiest, poppiest – and, in places, proudly soppiest – album yet.

It’s the Essex-machine at his happiest, too. How do we know? The clue’s in the title: Marry Me. The answer? Hint: she said yes. But before we get to that…

“I won’t lie,” Murs begins. “I was against doing the hits album. That's why I made it a double album – the songs you know, the songs that I know. Because I just wasn't ready for a hits album at that point in my career.”

As it happened, he then needed time to rebuild himself, personally and professionally. Firstly, after the 2019 You Know I Know tour, this keen footballer needed knee surgery. Secondly, he decided it was time to work with a fresh team, leaving Sony to sign a new record deal with EMI/Universal.

“It was just a weird time for me,” he reflects. “I was still single, personal life was a little bit all over the place… Work life was good, overall, but with that album campaign, my heart wasn't really in it. But my heart's in it now.”

That cardiac boost came from multiple directions. Firstly, Murs’ ears lit up when he was sent a work-in-progress track by songwriter David Stewart. 'Die Of A Broken Heart' needed a second verse, and a proper vocal, but he could hear that this was a smash-in-waiting.

“I went to David’s studio in West London and we got into the writing together. That was really the start and the spearhead of everything. It gave me a direction of where the album could go.”

'Die Of A Broken Heart' would become the first track on the album, and the first single. From the opening notes, you can hear why – this is an instant ear-worm, a one-listen-and-you’re-hooked pop-reggae outlier. As Murs describes it: “It has that steel drum at the intro, which just gets in your head straight away. It has a very Gotye, ‘Somebody I Used to Know’ feel to it, with a touch of The Police – and just a coolness to it. That really excited me.”

So much so that Murs decided to dive deep and commit. Forging an instant connection with Stewart, and with the producer and multi-instrumentalist’s songwriting partner Jessica Agombar, Murs ripped up entirely the creative process that had previously worked brilliantly for him.

“I've done all my albums with lots of producers over the years, predominantly Steve Robson, Claude Kelly, Steve Mac, Wayne Hector, guys I've had great relationships and success with. But David just had a BTS hit with their song ‘Dynamite’, stuff with Jonas Brothers, DNCE, more stuff with BTS, and he'd just done the new Shania Twain record…”

So he jumped in, committing to writing and recording the album solely with David Stewart and Jessica Agombar. “I've never done this before. It felt weird writing with the same people constantly. But I loved the routine, and the consistency. We just kept writing good songs.

“They are in the mix right now,” he continues. “They just had a great vibe and an enthusiasm, and a hunger. They’ve just had a Billboard number one, a number one in over 100 countries. That enthusiasm and energy that I got from them, that was it. That was the start.”

The start, but no starting pistol: Murs was determined not to race to the finish. Even though, again, that was something that had paid dividends in the past.

“Previous albums, I've done them in 12 weeks, 10 weeks, sometimes eight weeks, nonstop, jumping from studio to studio, benefiting from that injection of enthusiasm from someone new, that new producer, that new room – new lunch menu!"

But to craft the tight set of 11 songs that would become Marry Me, he took the best part of two years, working a week here, and a week there.

“And we had space,” he adds. “That’s the best thing about this album: we were patient. We didn't waste time. We took our time. And when it felt good, we finished the song. When it didn't feel good, we moved on. There was no pressure.”

Murs met his partner in 2019, another big change. This life-changing jolt is reflected in another new song. ‘I Found Her’ is a big tune with big energy and a big, soaring synth line.

“I was hearing Eighties-sounding songs in the charts like what The Weeknd was doing,” remembers this keen student of pop music. “That's where that big energy you’re describing came from, all dramatic and Eighties-like. We wrote the song based on my partner – or any woman. She's at the centre of the earth, and all these superheroes are trying to get to her. But if the world ends, at least – at last – I've found her.

“We wanted that bounce in the chorus, and that Jagger or Bowie strut, me with my chest out – I can imagine me in a sequinned onesie,” he hoots, as if storyboarding a video for what is surely a nailed-on single. “Yeah, we had fun writing that one.”

Also bringing the good-time party vibes is ‘Dancing on Cars’, a tune with an exuberant ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’ feel. And if you’re gonna tap into anyone’s funky vibe, Grace Jones is the one, right?

“This is the only one I didn't write. David said, ‘look, I wrote this fucking banger and I think it would work perfectly on the album.’ It's got that, again, modern funk feel – but my granddad would love to dance to it because it's got that old ’70s funk in it, with brass. It just ticks all the boxes. And I like the idea of me dancing on a car!” he hoots, scripting yet another surely inevitable iconic video moment.

Then, after the dancing and the partying, the romance. Rounding out Marry Me is ‘Let Me Just Say’. The album’s closing track is the only ballad, and offers not just a showcase for Murs’ effortlessly classy voice but also for his deepest emotions.

“It was probably the last song we wrote on the album, and you can probably tell at that point I was engaged,” he acknowledges. “So it's almost a story, really – the whole album is the two years leading up to me proposing. This is the final song on the album, and it's written as if the lights are down low, we’re on the dancefloor for our wedding, looking at each other…”

...and, fade to marital bliss. “That's the most open I’ve ever written,” Murs admits, clearly high on being able to honour and immortalise his bride-to-be in this way. “That's genuine love. But as for ‘Marry Me’ itself,” he adds of the finger-snapping, hip-shaking, dance floor-ready title track, “that's more my cheeky side. I’m saying: I think it's time you married me, really!’”

It’s sure to have them dancing – if not proposing – in the aisles next year, when Olly Murs gets back on tour. Last time round he sold 180,000 tickets for UK arenas in 2019. He’s determined to go bigger, better, louder next time in a show that will, he thinks, open with another new track. The Greatest Showman-esque ‘The Best Night of Your Life’ features strings by the legendary Mike Batt (who also appears on two other tracks), and the larky lyrics reference songs by other great showmen he rates, notably Elton John and Robbie Williams. "I can already see me on stage doing that one," nods this natural-born stage performer.

To celebrate 40 years as a solo artist, Alison Moyet releases Key, a collection of 16 reworked singles and deep cuts, alongside two brand new tracks

It is, says Alison Moyet, quite remarkable to think that she’s been singing for “some serious years”. She formed her first band at 16 in Basildon, was in Yazoo at 20 and released her first solo album Alf at 23. In the four decades since Alf, Moyet’s solo work has been defined not only by her refusal to repeat herself, but by that extraordinary voice: still recognisable in an instant, still capable of stopping you in your tracks, a voice big enough to fill a stadium and yet intimate enough to make you feel as though she’s singing just for you.

Key is a blazing showcase of the depth and breadth of Moyet’s song writing ability that unlocks who she is as a creative artist. With nine studio solo albums to choose from to celebrate her fortieth year as a solo artist, Moyet wanted “to look at the trajectory of those decades and explore songs that, in their original form, were never fully realised or have had their relevance to me altered by time.”

There are inevitably certain songs Moyet won’t sing again simply because they “don’t resonate with me anymore.” Perhaps because she was on the cusp of adulthood when she originally sang them or hadn’t yet had her heart broken. Perhaps they are cover songs that she “doesn’t recognise as part of my language now.” No matter: for Key she took to the studio with Sean McGhee, her long-standing musical director for live shows and producer and arranger across all the songs on the new album. It was a gargantuan task which included readdressing fan favourites such as Love Resurrection and All Cried Out, both from Alf. Meanwhile, Is This Love?, from the 1986 album Raindancing, co-written with Dave Stewart and featured in the BAFTA-nominated film All of Us Strangers, has been reworked as a giant shimmering ballad.

In Yazoo, Moyet largely wrote on her own, with the exception of Situation and State Farm, which were crafted with Vince Clarke. As a solo artist, she has collaborated with myriad songwriters and producers. Working with Steve Jolley and Tony Swain on Alf was “a new and interesting experience unhindered by the burden of experience”, but it was her significant work with Pete Glenister that would identify her melodic and lyrical imperatives as a solo artist. “Pete is a supremely talented fellow who constructs sublime chord progressions and is a truly fine writer.” The Insects, producers of 2002’s Hometime, later created a perfect sound bed to showcase the Moyet/Glenister songs. “That was my first personal experience of finding synergy on an album; it was an important career shape shifter.”

It was, however, with Guy Sigsworth that Moyet found her perfect foil. “In many ways he has been reward for my dogged endurance. I’m totally unbound when working with Guy. He writes tracks that I then write songs to. No ‘what to do?’ No preamble. A creative trust. We allow each our own language.” The two albums made with Sigsworth – the minutes from 2013 and Other from 2017 – Moyet considers highlights of her career. Key includes two reworkings from those records, All Signs of Life and Filigree. “My work with Guy needed to be referenced, but didn’t demand alteration. That said, Sean has arranged an exquisite take on Filigree quite unlike all the rest. It’s a song about perseverance, which is really quite fitting.”

The two new songs on Key – the lavish Such Small Ale and exquisite pop of The Impervious Me – were written respectively with Sean McGhee and co-writers Richard Oakes and John Garden. “I wanted to write the new material with Sean because so very much of him is on Key. He produced and arranged all 18 tracks. A ridiculous polymath.”

With touring stalled by the lockdown years – Moyet enrolled at Brighton University and graduated with a first-class degree in Fine Art Printmaking BA (Hons) in the summer of 2023 – she is keen to take Key on the road. “Live work really matters to me,” she says. “I can’t dial in a performance. I love the physical feeling that singing gives me. It’s totally primal and euphoric. On stage I remember how to connect with myself.”

Key distils 40 years of music making, presenting a cohesive overview of a long and dazzling journey. “I hope this collection will be the key to those unopened doors. Let yourself in.”

Allison Russell — poet, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, activist, and co-founder of Our Native Daughters and Birds of Chicago — embarks upon her next chapter in The Returner, a body-shaking, mind-expanding, soulful expression of Black liberation, Black love, of Black self-respect. Written and co-produced by Allison along with dim star (her partner JT Nero and Drew Lindsay), The Returner was recorded over Solstice week in December 2022 at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles, CA. It features Russell's "Rainbow Coalition" band of all female musicians along with special guest appearances from the legendary Wendy & Lisa, Brandi Carlile, Brandy Clark, and Hozier.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Alan Jackson is one of the most successful and respected singer-songwriters in music. He is in the elite company of Paul McCartney and John Lennon among songwriters who’ve written more than 20 songs that they’ve recorded and taken to the top of the charts. Jackson is one of the 10 best-selling artists since the inception of SoundScan, ranking alongside the likes of Eminem and Metallica. His current single, “You Go Your Way,” is from his chart-topping album, Thirty Miles West, which was released June 5.

Jackson has sold nearly 60 million albums worldwide, topped the country singles charts 35 times, and scored more than 50 Top-10 hits. He has written or co-written 24 of his 35 #1 hit singles. Jackson is a 18-time ACM Award winner, a 16-time CMA Award recipient, and a two-time Grammy-winning artist whose songwriting has earned him the prestigious ASCAP Founders Award and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame as a 2011 Songwriter/Artist inductee.

Alan Jackson is one of the most successful and respected singer-songwriters in music. He is in the elite company of Paul McCartney and John Lennon among songwriters who’ve written more than 20 songs that they’ve recorded and taken to the top of the charts. Jackson is one of the 10 best-selling artists since the inception of SoundScan, ranking alongside the likes of Eminem and Metallica. His current single, “You Go Your Way,” is from his chart-topping album, Thirty Miles West, which was released June 5.

Jackson has sold nearly 60 million albums worldwide, topped the country singles charts 35 times, and scored more than 50 Top-10 hits. He has written or co-written 24 of his 35 #1 hit singles. Jackson is a 18-time ACM Award winner, a 16-time CMA Award recipient, and a two-time Grammy-winning artist whose songwriting has earned him the prestigious ASCAP Founders Award and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame as a 2011 Songwriter/Artist inductee.

Alan Jackson is one of the most successful and respected singer-songwriters in music. He is in the elite company of Paul McCartney and John Lennon among songwriters who’ve written more than 20 songs that they’ve recorded and taken to the top of the charts. Jackson is one of the 10 best-selling artists since the inception of SoundScan, ranking alongside the likes of Eminem and Metallica. His current single, “You Go Your Way,” is from his chart-topping album, Thirty Miles West, which was released June 5.

Jackson has sold nearly 60 million albums worldwide, topped the country singles charts 35 times, and scored more than 50 Top-10 hits. He has written or co-written 24 of his 35 #1 hit singles. Jackson is a 18-time ACM Award winner, a 16-time CMA Award recipient, and a two-time Grammy-winning artist whose songwriting has earned him the prestigious ASCAP Founders Award and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame as a 2011 Songwriter/Artist inductee.

A Country phenomenon with major star power and massive talent to match, Megan Moroney is the rare artist to earn icon status soon after breaking onto the scene. With over 1.5 BILLION total global streams to date, the Georgia-bred singer/songwriter kicked off the latest era of her formidable career with her critically acclaimed sophomore album Am I Okay?: a July 2024 release that debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200, emerged as the year’s third-biggest debut from a female Country artist, and won rave reviews from many of the music world’s leading publications (including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Variety, Billboard, American Songwriter, and more). Featuring the Emo Cowgirl’s post-breakup ballad “No Caller ID” — a track that shattered the record for the biggest Country female song debut in streams in the U.S. — Am I Okay? continues the meteoric rise first set in motion with “Tennessee Orange,” a 2X PLATINUM #1 hit included on her 2023 blockbuster debut Lucky. Soon after Lucky’s arrival, Moroney began amassing a steady stream of accolades, including winning Breakthrough Female Video of the Year at the 2023 CMT Music Awards, MusicRow’s Breakout Artist of the Year at the 2024 CountryBreakout Awards, and New Female Artist of the Year at the 59th ACM Awards (where she reigned as the most nominated female artist with SIX NODS), in addition to racking up nominations from the CMA, iHeart, CMT Music, and Billboard Music Awards. With her live experience including selling out three consecutive headline tours, playing stadiums across the country as support for Kenny Chesney, and taking the stage at high-profile festivals like Stagecoach and Lollapalooza, Moroney will head overseas in September for the GEORGIA GIRL TOUR — a 15-date headlining run bringing her notoriously dazzling live show to audiences all over the UK and Europe.

Hippo Campus were sitting in the green room of a sold-out amphitheater show at the start of the Summer of 2023 when they realized they had a major problem. Their fourth LP simply wasn’t good enough. Singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band’s work as they rolled around the country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. The soul wasn’t there, obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition to make the best Hippo Campus LP ever, adeeper and more profound record that reflected how their lives were changing.

They’d committed to that vow with longtime producer and collaborator Caleb Wright a little more than a year earlier, soon after a party where they celebrated the release of LP3. That very night, the call came that a longtime friend had unexpectedly died. They started this band as kids and enjoyed quick momentum, their thrill-a-minute live shows and charismatically experimental pop albums creating almost-instant, avid attention. But this was Hippo Campus’ first close brush with death; as adulthood encroached, the actual call of mortality reminded them of the stakes of art, friendship, and life.

So they committed to doing something major, even if it meant taking five years to do it. They took the task seriously, too: getting sober for an entirely improvisational session at North Carolina’s Drop of Sun months later, regularly attending therapy as a full band, writing more than 100 songs in only a year. That was all well and good, until Luppen and, really, all of Hippo Campus decided they didn’t actually like what they were making. Life and work had been dark in their orbit for a second—death and dejection, addiction and anxiety. This uneasy epiphany wasn’t helping.

So that night, in the dressing room, they called an audible. They were going to start over. Three months later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with Wright and producer Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border. They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they could commit at last. And Cook, in turn, gave them an edict of no second guessing or listening back, only forward momentum. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half a decade to make—Flood, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever made.

You can immediately hear as much in a pair of wondrous songs toward the end, when the love-lost-and-found sing-along “Forget It” fades into the bittersweet and beautiful ache of “Closer,” a gem about trying and maybe failing to surrender your trust to someone else. This is a band that has learned to grow up by learning to let go. When Hippo Campus finally stopped trying to force the issue of making a masterpiece, they tapped intersecting veins of vulnerability and urgency, walking away with 13 tracks that reckon with their uncanny lives through at least that many totally absorbing hooks.

During the last several years, Hippo Campus has had to navigate the tougher wages of success. They are, of course, grateful that a pop band they named on the lark of some psychology lesson blew up, but it certainly eliminated the segue from adolescence to adulthood that most of us enjoy in relative privacy. How could they survive inside and alongside this thing they had created and had outgrown them? And what’s more, how could they endure the vagaries of the music industry, so that they didn’t let a disappointing tour or disspiriting release demoralize them? Or, to ask the cumulative question, how do four people connected so intimately for so long grow as individuals while preserving the bond that makes what they do so special? Or is that actually too much to ask?

For a minute there, the answer seemed possibly like yes. But soon after that improvisational session, the band returned to its own Minneapolis studio and dug in. They stumbled upon “Everything at Once,” with Nathan Stocker’s tricky little guitar lope becoming the basis for the slowly rising rhythm of drummer Whistler Allen and bassist Zach Sutton. Stepping outside for some space, Luppen quickly penned a thesis of self-criticism and self-forgiveness. Being less than the expectations of an industry, a family, or a faith are totally normal, he suggests in an anthem of empowerment that is almost casual. He gives himself the grace of being human: “You gotta lay down sometimes, be patient sometimes,” Luppen sings, layers of lean vocals crisscrossing one another like light beams. “And feel everything at once.”

That is precisely what Hippo Campus do best on Flood—feel everything and transmute it all into songs that are inescapable. Take “Brand New,” three minutes of brilliantly coiled pop, its spring-loaded rhythm lifting a guitar line built from pin pricks skyward. It’s about being ruined by the letdown of a failed relationship and then finding a way forward, toward something so good you haven’t even imagined it yet. It sounds that way, too. There’s the completely compulsive “Tooth Fairy,” a quick-moving meditation on the confusion of interpersonal dynamics. Hippo Campus smear bits of gentle psychedelia around a rhythm, riff, and hook that have the sleek lines of a sports car; the result is a dynamic wonder, a song that feels emphatic at the start but reaches full triumph by the end. Inspired by staring down cycles of addiction too long without taking steps to break them, “Corduroy” finds the space between a bummer country blues and a sweetly devotional waltz. Its vows of love, trust, and doubt are buoyed and also undercut by its slow rises and falls, a musical portrait of trying to take that difficult next step.

The sentiments on Flood are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band of longtime best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you it’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’s written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everything at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every second of LP4.

Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him through his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness. (Also, is there any other refrain ever that manages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound so catchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what Hippo Campus have done with Flood after realizing it doesn’t take a lifetime—or, well, five years—to do just that.

Generating millions of plays weekly on her videos, Alexandra Kay commands the attention of country music fans. With a voice reminiscent of Dolly Parton, Alison Kraus and Leanne Womack, AK is bringing country music back to its roots. Growing up about 40 minutes from St. Louis Missouri in Waterloo, Illinois Alexandra began writing songs at the age of 15 as a way to cope with being a teenager, her first loves and finding herself. Alexandra started working in the entertainment business at a young age by booking commercials and voice-over work. While performing in multiple musical theater productions, Alexandra decided to try her luck as a contestant on American Idol in 2011.

Alexandra Kay started working in hip hop and R&B in early 2012. Using the platform Nelly created, AK sewed herself into the St. Louis music scene. Working with notable STL artists such as Nelly and Huey Alexandra created enough buzz to sign an independent record deal with Nettwork Entertainment in 2013. AK’s first single “No More” was a radio hit spending three weeks at #1 on the New Music Weekly Top 40 pop chart, also scoring at the top of Hot AC and Hot 100 charts.

Starting her country music career independently at 22, Alexandra began recording cover videos of many 90’s country music favorites and posting them on her Facebook fan page, going viral dozens of times. Since taking social media by storm Alexandra Kay has collaborated with some of the most iconic names in the music industry like Randy Travis, Tim McGraw, and Scott Stapp of Creed.

Alexandra Kay joined Tim McGraw, Russell Dickerson, and Brandon Davis on the McGraw Tour 2022 amphitheater tour. The tour began Friday, April 29, 2022 in Rogers, AR and ended in Mansfield, MA on June 4, 2022. Alexandra also shared the stage with with country greats Tracy Lawrence and Clay Walker in 2022. In 2023 Alexandra Kay performed at C2C 2023 in London, England for the first time as well as headlined her own sold out out show in Manchester.

Alexandra has proved that artists can captivate audiences around the world and turn the social media recognition into an adoring fan base.

Widely considered one of the biggest pop-stars around the world, Kylie Minogue songs have awarded her incredible career spanning more than two decades. Kylie Minogue's best-known songs include: 'Can’t Get You Out of My Head', 'All The Lovers', 'Spinning Around', 'I Should Be So Lucky' and many others. Kylie Minogue's setlist ranges from dance floor fillers, to powerhouse ballads, set against dramatic stage production and perfectly choregraphed routines. Kylie Minogue UK tours never fail to pull out all the stops as she travels around some of the largest and most spectacular arenas.

Kylie Minogue, currently on a high with her new track 'Dancing', will bring her extraordinary creativity as a live performer back to the stage this autumn when she plays a UK and Ireland tour. Kylie, who always raises the bar with her live performances, promises a brand-new extravaganza for this production which will be centred around her new album 'Golden', although of course her amazing back catalogue will be embraced.

Kylie Minogue OBE shot to fame after starring in Australian soap opera ‘Neighbours,’ since then she has managed an incredible career as both a singer-songwriter and actress. Widely known as both the Princess of Pop and the Goddess of Pop, recognised as the highest selling Australia artist of all time (ARIA.) As of 2015, Kylie has achieved worldwide record sales of more than 80 million worldwide, a figure which continues to grow.

Since then she has released eleven studio albums, two live CDs, eight live concert DVD's, plus her Greatest Hits and the Ultimate Kylie double album and multiple video packages. This is of course in addition to almost 50 singles released internationally, all of which have been hits.

Kylie's 11th studio album 'Aphrodite' generated huge levels of excitement even before release, and the first single, 'All the Lovers' has been hailed as 'one of the best Kylie songs ever' (News Of The World). Aphrodite sees Kylie collaborating with an impressive array of talent from the pop and dance worlds including: Calvin Harris, Jake Shears, Sebastian Ingrosso (Swedish House Mafia) Nerina Pallot, Cutfather, Nervo & Tim Rice-Oxley. The maestro that is Stuart Price executive produced the album and Music Week declared that 'Aphrodite has seen Kylie Minogue return to her uplifting dance-pop best'!

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Widely considered one of the biggest pop-stars around the world, Kylie Minogue songs have awarded her incredible career spanning more than two decades. Kylie Minogue's best-known songs include: 'Can’t Get You Out of My Head', 'All The Lovers', 'Spinning Around', 'I Should Be So Lucky' and many others. Kylie Minogue's setlist ranges from dance floor fillers, to powerhouse ballads, set against dramatic stage production and perfectly choregraphed routines. Kylie Minogue UK tours never fail to pull out all the stops as she travels around some of the largest and most spectacular arenas.

Kylie Minogue, currently on a high with her new track 'Dancing', will bring her extraordinary creativity as a live performer back to the stage this autumn when she plays a UK and Ireland tour. Kylie, who always raises the bar with her live performances, promises a brand-new extravaganza for this production which will be centred around her new album 'Golden', although of course her amazing back catalogue will be embraced.

Kylie Minogue OBE shot to fame after starring in Australian soap opera ‘Neighbours,’ since then she has managed an incredible career as both a singer-songwriter and actress. Widely known as both the Princess of Pop and the Goddess of Pop, recognised as the highest selling Australia artist of all time (ARIA.) As of 2015, Kylie has achieved worldwide record sales of more than 80 million worldwide, a figure which continues to grow.

Since then she has released eleven studio albums, two live CDs, eight live concert DVD's, plus her Greatest Hits and the Ultimate Kylie double album and multiple video packages. This is of course in addition to almost 50 singles released internationally, all of which have been hits.

Kylie's 11th studio album 'Aphrodite' generated huge levels of excitement even before release, and the first single, 'All the Lovers' has been hailed as 'one of the best Kylie songs ever' (News Of The World). Aphrodite sees Kylie collaborating with an impressive array of talent from the pop and dance worlds including: Calvin Harris, Jake Shears, Sebastian Ingrosso (Swedish House Mafia) Nerina Pallot, Cutfather, Nervo & Tim Rice-Oxley. The maestro that is Stuart Price executive produced the album and Music Week declared that 'Aphrodite has seen Kylie Minogue return to her uplifting dance-pop best'!

IMAGINE DRAGONS ÅKER UT PÅ OMFATTANDE EUROPATURNÉ – ÅTERVÄNDER TILL SVERIGE 2025

Äntligen kan Grammy-belönade och multiplatinasäljande Imagine Dragons meddela att de tar
med LOOM World Tour till Europa nästa år! Stadionturnén följer upp bandets kritikerrosade
album LOOM som släpptes i somras och kommer att besöka 16 länder runtom Europa. Den 5
juni återvänder Imagine Dragons till Sverige för en efterlängtad konsert på Tele2 Arena i
Stockholm!

Nästa år tar Imagine Dragons med sin tokhyllade turné LOOM World Tour till Europa.
Stadionturnén kommer att besöka 16 länder, bland annat Estland, Tjeckien, Italien, Spanien,
Frankrike, Nederländerna och den 5 juni har turen kommer till Sverige.

Tidigare i somras släppte Imagine Dragons sitt efterlängtade sjätte album LOOM. Albumet
representerar höjdpunkten i deras konstnärliga resa och anses vara deras bästa verk hittills.
LOOM, som är helt producerat av Imagine Dragons tillsammans med de svenska hitmakarna
och långvariga samarbetspartnerna Mattman och Robin, hittar den perfekta balansen mellan de
klassiska sounds som gjort dem till superstjärnor en nytänkande kreativitet.

“Imagine Dragons are flying higher than ever ….Ten years after their commercial breakthrough,
the Las Vegas rockers are still scoring real crossover hits, playing to packed houses, and playing
a U2-esque long game” - Billboard

“Imagine Dragons still know how to efficiently stomp stadiums into rubble…The alt-rock band
remains reliably, radioactively enormous” - Rolling Stone
“Imagine Dragons is one of the few remaining mega acts filling arenas with a real-life electric
guitar loud and visible onstage.” - The Washington Post
EUROPATURNÉ

Om Imagine Dragons
Imagine Dragons fortsätter att omdefiniera rockmusiken i det nuvarande århundradet. De säljer
ut arenor, skapar mäktiga anthems och slår rekord gång på gång.

Det diamantcertifierade och
GRAMMY-belönade Las Vegas-baserade bandet är ett av de största rockbanden i världen. Med
en försäljning på över 74 miljoner album och över 160 miljarder streams, sticker de ut som “the
only band in history to earn four RIAA Diamond singles”: Radioactive (16x-platinacertifierad),
Believer (13x-platina), Thunder (12x-platina) och Demons (11x-platina).

Sedan deras debut 2009 har de haft fem raka top 10 album på Billboard Top 200 med Night
Visions (2012), Smoke + Mirrors (2015), Evolve (2017), Origins (2018) och Mercury – Act 1
(2021).

Med releasen Mercury – Act 2 (2022) avslutade de sitt första dubbelalbum, producerat
av legendariska Rick Rubin. Hitlåten Bones från Mercury – Act 2 nådde första plats på
Alternative Radio och finns kvar på Spotifys Global Top 50.

Imagine Dragons dominerar radio och är ett av endast fyra band som har haft flera topp 5
singlar i rad på Alternative Radio.

De skrev även historia på Spotify när Bad Liar blev deras
tionde låt att passera en miljard streams. Bandet är nu det med flest låtar som nått över en
miljard streams på plattformen.

Dessutom har deras musikvideor till Thunder och Believer över
2 miljarder visningar på YouTuber, medan Radioactive och Demons överstigit en miljard
visningar.

Bandet har samarbetat med artister som Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Avicii och
filmkompositören Hans Zimmer. De har även samlat in miljontals dollar för olika ändamål,
inklusive deras barncancerstiftelse Tyler Robinson Foundation och frontmannen Dan Reynolds’
LOVELOUD Foundation, som stödjer HBTQ+-ungdomar. 2022 blev de utsedda till ambassadörer
för UNITED 24 av Ukrainas president Volodymyr Zelensky, för att stödja humanitärt arbete i
Ukraina.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Over the past four decades — give or take a decade break — the illustrious and critically acclaimed Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) have sold over 40 million records worldwide, establishing them as electronic synthesiser pioneers and one of Britain’s best-loved pop groups. Their 13 long players include benchmark-raising classics Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1980), Organisation (1980), Architecture & Morality (1981), and Dazzle Ships (1983). OMD conquered the United States, and yielded the 1986 hit, "If You Leave" from the Pretty In Pink Soundtrack. They have also achieved 12 top 20 hits on the UK Singles Chart, as well as three top 20 hits on the US Billboard Hot 100.

Following the recent celebration of their 40th anniversary, OMD returned last year with their first new studio album since 2017's highly praised The Punishment Of Luxury, a record entitled Bauhaus Staircase (released via White Noise through The Orchard). The record is regarded as OMD's most explicitly political record and the crowning achievement of their desire to be both Stockhausen and Abba - born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when, as Andy McCluskey admits: "I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom."

Predominantly written, recorded, and mixed by both McCluskey and Paul Humphreys (who has recently become a second-time father), Bauhaus Staircase’s other main external influence was David Watts, mainly known as a rock producer who helmed Sheffield band The Reytons’ recent No 1 album and mixed two tracks on the new OMD record. With Bauhaus Staircase, OMD have created a landmark album worthy of their finest work, showing a duo who are still perfectly in sync 45 years after their first gig at legendary Liverpool club Eric’s. "I’m very happy with what we’ve done on this record," McCluskey summarizes. "I’m comfortable if this is OMD’s last statement."

In celebration of their new LP, OMD have also returned to the stage, headlining North America in the Fall of 2024.

"We are so excited to be able to tour again with a brand new album to showcase,” says Andy McCluskey. “It's been six years since we learned new songs for live performances. The songs from Bauhaus Staircase will fit beautifully into our setlist - we just have to choose which five to play, as we have to treat people to the hits as well!"

Riley Green has been compelling Country music fans to raise a drink, shed a tear, and, above all, celebrate where they are from, since his self-titled EP in 2018 debuted with Big Machine Label Group. His songs like the No. 1 PLATINUM hit “There Was This Girl,” the 2X-PLATINUM-certified heart-tugger “I Wish Grandpas Never Died,” and his chart-topping collab with Thomas Rhett, “Half of Me,” have made the Academy of Country Music’s 2020 New Male Artist of the Year synonymous with what Country music does best: making listeners feel something with his no-gimmick, relatable writing and classic feel.

A huge 2023 for the avid sports fan, former athlete (Jacksonville State University quarterback) and outdoorsman, Green secured his third No. 1 single “Different ‘Round Here (Ft. Luke Combs),” played to an average of 65,000 fans each night as direct support on massive tours for Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen and released his latest full-length studio album Ain’t My Last Rodeo. The Dann Huff-produced album features his current Top 25-and-climbing single “Damn Good Day To Leave,” and gave a deeper look into the life of good ol’ boy who still lives in his hometown of Jacksonville, AL.

Currently riding a wave of massive success that grows stronger each day, 2024 has been a rocket for Green. He released his Way Out Here EP, which included two solo writes that had critics and fans alike gushing (the poignant “Jesus Saves” and the sultry “Worst Way,” which sparked a frenzy on the internet), the humorous tune “Rather Be,” as well as the wildly viral “you look like you love me” with Ella Langley, which has also taken social media by storm. He played for the biggest Country crowd in UK history (on his first trip across the pond no less), headlined his own (largely sold out) amphitheater tour, hosted his own festival, became one of only three Country artists to grace the cover of Cigar & Spirits and has become one of the most buzzed-about artists in Nashville. With another project on its way this fall, it’s clear, “there’s no slowing down for Riley Green” (Pollstar). See tour dates and learn more at RileyGreenMusic.com.

Over the past four decades — give or take a decade break — the illustrious and critically acclaimed Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) have sold over 40 million records worldwide, establishing them as electronic synthesiser pioneers and one of Britain’s best-loved pop groups. Their 13 long players include benchmark-raising classics Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1980), Organisation (1980), Architecture & Morality (1981), and Dazzle Ships (1983). OMD conquered the United States, and yielded the 1986 hit, "If You Leave" from the Pretty In Pink Soundtrack. They have also achieved 12 top 20 hits on the UK Singles Chart, as well as three top 20 hits on the US Billboard Hot 100.

Following the recent celebration of their 40th anniversary, OMD returned last year with their first new studio album since 2017's highly praised The Punishment Of Luxury, a record entitled Bauhaus Staircase (released via White Noise through The Orchard). The record is regarded as OMD's most explicitly political record and the crowning achievement of their desire to be both Stockhausen and Abba - born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when, as Andy McCluskey admits: "I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom."

Predominantly written, recorded, and mixed by both McCluskey and Paul Humphreys (who has recently become a second-time father), Bauhaus Staircase’s other main external influence was David Watts, mainly known as a rock producer who helmed Sheffield band The Reytons’ recent No 1 album and mixed two tracks on the new OMD record. With Bauhaus Staircase, OMD have created a landmark album worthy of their finest work, showing a duo who are still perfectly in sync 45 years after their first gig at legendary Liverpool club Eric’s. "I’m very happy with what we’ve done on this record," McCluskey summarizes. "I’m comfortable if this is OMD’s last statement."

In celebration of their new LP, OMD have also returned to the stage, headlining North America in the Fall of 2024.

"We are so excited to be able to tour again with a brand new album to showcase,” says Andy McCluskey. “It's been six years since we learned new songs for live performances. The songs from Bauhaus Staircase will fit beautifully into our setlist - we just have to choose which five to play, as we have to treat people to the hits as well!"

Over the past four decades — give or take a decade break — the illustrious and critically acclaimed Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) have sold over 40 million records worldwide, establishing them as electronic synthesiser pioneers and one of Britain’s best-loved pop groups. Their 13 long players include benchmark-raising classics Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1980), Organisation (1980), Architecture & Morality (1981), and Dazzle Ships (1983). OMD conquered the United States, and yielded the 1986 hit, "If You Leave" from the Pretty In Pink Soundtrack. They have also achieved 12 top 20 hits on the UK Singles Chart, as well as three top 20 hits on the US Billboard Hot 100.

Following the recent celebration of their 40th anniversary, OMD returned last year with their first new studio album since 2017's highly praised The Punishment Of Luxury, a record entitled Bauhaus Staircase (released via White Noise through The Orchard). The record is regarded as OMD's most explicitly political record and the crowning achievement of their desire to be both Stockhausen and Abba - born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when, as Andy McCluskey admits: "I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom."

Predominantly written, recorded, and mixed by both McCluskey and Paul Humphreys (who has recently become a second-time father), Bauhaus Staircase’s other main external influence was David Watts, mainly known as a rock producer who helmed Sheffield band The Reytons’ recent No 1 album and mixed two tracks on the new OMD record. With Bauhaus Staircase, OMD have created a landmark album worthy of their finest work, showing a duo who are still perfectly in sync 45 years after their first gig at legendary Liverpool club Eric’s. "I’m very happy with what we’ve done on this record," McCluskey summarizes. "I’m comfortable if this is OMD’s last statement."

In celebration of their new LP, OMD have also returned to the stage, headlining North America in the Fall of 2024.

"We are so excited to be able to tour again with a brand new album to showcase,” says Andy McCluskey. “It's been six years since we learned new songs for live performances. The songs from Bauhaus Staircase will fit beautifully into our setlist - we just have to choose which five to play, as we have to treat people to the hits as well!"

RÜFÜS DU SOL have emerged as one of the world’s preeminent live electronic acts. The Australian three-piece, known formerly to the world as just RÜFÜS, have thus far won the world over with two platinum-certified albums, ATLAS and Bloom , with a much-anticipated third on the way.

Comprised of members Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George and James Hunt, RÜFÜS DU SOL first made their break in 2013, when their debut album, ATLAS , reached #1 in Australia. Their sophomore follow-up, 2016’s Bloom , subsequently hit #1 as well, transforming them from national heroes into a rising global phenomenon.

The album, which produced such iconic singles as “You Were Right” and “Innerbloom,” notably spawned a momentous two-year tour, including a milestone appearance at Coachella in 2016.

Now residing in Los Angeles, RÜFÜS DU SOL have spent the past year finishing their third album, largely influenced by the stark desert landscapes of California and their experiences on the road. With a new record on the horizon and a standout two-year tour at their backs, RÜFÜS DU SOL have entered a new era of their career.

“It feels like a new RÜFÜS,” the trio says. “We’re excited about this new music. We’re ambitious as ever.”

PLATINUM-selling Thomas Rhett leads the pack as one of country music’s elite new artists with the fastest rising single of his career, the Top 5 GOLD certified upbeat breakup anthem “Crash And Burn” from his upcoming sophomore release TANGLED UP out Sept. 25 (The Valory Music Co.). As "one of country music's most successful – and divisive – new artists" (The Guardian), the new music follows his debut album IT GOES LIKE THIS, which spawned three consecutive No. one hits, making him Billboard’s first male country artist to do so from a debut album in over two decades. The CMA and ACM “New Artist of the Year” nominee initially garnered attention as a gifted songwriter with credits including hits by Florida Georgia Line, Jason Aldean and Lee Brice. It is his “high-energy all the way” (El Paso Times) live show that has “the audience dancing all the way up in the rafters of the stadium” (Billboard) that continues to catch the attention of critics out on the road. For tour dates and more visit, thomasrhett.com.

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

“This whole album is me, who I am and how I want to be seen as an artist,” says Dua Lipa. “I want people to really get to know me, so the album is everything that has happened in my life so far, and every song tells a different story.”

She may be young, but Lipa has plenty of stories to tell. The London-born child of Kosovar parents, she has already been nominated for awards by the BBC and MTV Europe, and was a finalist for the prestigious “Critics’ Choice” prize at the Brit Awards. She also won Best New Artist at the NME Awards, and two European Border Breakers Awards—she was one of only ten global recipients of the EBBA—including the night’s biggest prize, the “Public Choice” award, voted on by fans.

Her strong presence onstage (indicated by her European Festival Award for Best Newcomer of the Year) immediately separates her from so many emerging pop acts. But with 3.5 million in global sales, it’s her singles that have rapidly established her as a rising star—"Be the One" reached the Top Ten in a dozen European territories, "Hotter Than Hell" hit the Top Twenty in the UK, and “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” climbed into Billboard’s Top 25 in the US. All of this, mind you, before putting out her first album.

Now, with the release of Dua Lipa, she reveals the full range of her ambitions—not just the dance-floor fire of her singles, but also a more introspective side. “I’ve been describing it as ‘dark pop’ because people have only heard the pop moments, but there are some really dark, singer-songwriter parts that I’m excited about,” she says.

Before Lipa was born, her father was a pop star in his native Kosovo; growing up, she absorbed the music of his favorite artists—Radiohead, Oasis, Stereophonics, Sting. Meanwhile, she was still a regular pop-obsessed kid, singing along to Destiny’s Child and S Club 7 (“stuff that you’d listen with your friends”) and especially Nelly and Pink. Those singers stood out, she says, for their “coolness and honesty—it was pop music, but there was something real about it.”

She attended the Sylvia Young Theater School until she was 11, when she and her family moved back to Kosovo, a country which she considers much more complex than its war-torn image. “Kosovo is changing and evolving so much,” she says. “It’s still very poor, there’s lot of places that are really run-down, but every time I go back there’s something new and better happening. There’s so much talent there, and people are starting to find out about it.”

Encouraged by a teacher who would make her perform Alicia Keys and Toni Braxton hits in school, Lipa began to think about singing—which had always been her “playground dream”—more seriously, and convinced her parents to let her move back to London when she was 15. Living with friends, she made it through high school, but failed her first year of A Levels as partying took priority over attendance.

Too ashamed to tell her friends (“I felt so bad, I just wanted to cover it up”), Lipa applied the same tenacity that has propelled her career ever since: She found an intensive one-year study program, got straight As, and was accepted into four universities. Though she wanted to prove that she could meet these academic challenges, her commitment to her music and her vision never wavered.

“I always told myself never to have a plan B - I feel like that's also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing now, because I have never thought about doing anything else.”

Lipa was working in a restaurant, recording covers and posting them on social media, trying to find a way into the music business, when she was noticed on the street by a modeling agency. “Some of my friends were doing it,” she says. “But I was never put up for any good jobs, just random salons and whatever. And they said ‘If you want to do this properly, you need to lose a lot of weight.’ I tried to do it at first, but it made me very unhappy and caused me a lot of issues, a lot of body confidence problems. Modeling sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t a successful thing for me.”

"Every woman should have the privilege to love their body and feel sexy just the way they are,” she continues. “Being able to spread that message and to support all my girls who need to be told they’re fucking hot and that they don’t need to change for anyone inspires me and makes me feel I am exactly where I need to be.”

One thing the agency did accomplish, though, was securing Lipa an audition for a commercial for The X Factor—and when her voice appeared in the ad, she eventually drew the attention of a management team working with Lana Del Rey. She signed a deal that allowed her to quit the restaurant and go from working on demos in her spare moments to focusing on recording.

“I always had a really clear idea of what I liked and what I didn’t, which made the process easier,” she says. During her years in Kosovo, she became a huge hip-hop fan; a Method Man/Redman show was her first concert. “I wanted to bring in my love for hip-hop and find some middle ground,’ she says. “Lyrically, the songs have more of a flow—especially ‘Bad Together’ and ‘Last Dance,’ where it’s really fast-paced, like I’m singing a rap but I have a pop chorus. That was always the goal.”

Lipa says that “Hotter Than Hell,” written before she got signed, was the first time she felt in command of her songwriting, but points to “Garden of Eden” as a turning point. “It kind of wrote itself,” she says. “All I had to do was set it off and be open and honest, and the story just happened.”

While recording Dua Lipa in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, she was rapidly learning the fearlessness and confidence necessary to write great songs. She says that more personal songs like “Genesis” and “No Goodbyes” indicate where her life is right now.

Lipa recently concluded her first tour, opening for Troye Sivan in the US and headlining dates of her own in the UK. Other than a brief panic attack during her very first show (“luckily people found it endearing, but I was terrified,” she says), performing live quickly became comfortable territory. “I can really be creative and let loose onstage,” she says. “Be really free, just go for it and enjoy it, and get lost in what I’m doing.” The critics instantly took notice: NPR said that she “hypnotized” on stage, while Idolator called her “completely badass” and SPIN raved “she’s headliner material—catch her while you can.”

Perhaps the most emotional experience in Dua Lipa’s young career was her triumphant return to Kosovo for a concert last summer. The appearance drew an astonishing 18,000 fans, and the singer needed a police escort to get from her family’s residence to the venue. “It was the craziest moment of my life,” she says. “Just so insane and so much fun.”

She used the proceeds from the homecoming show to create the Sunny Hill Foundation, named for the neighborhood where her parents reside. “We’re going to give to different charities every month for the youth of Kosovo,” she says. “I just want to do my part, because they’ve done so much for me there.”

This kind of hands-on involvement carries over to Lipa’s relationship with her fans, including close communication on social media and collaborations with her followers on merchandise design. A small group of dedicated Twitter followers rapidly grew into a community too big to keep up with as much as she would like. “We talk about all kinds of things on Twitter, though it’s getting harder now to reply to everything,” she says. “They can tell my moods from my tweets—they ask if I’m feeling OK.

The songs on Dua Lipa announce the arrival of a new force in pop—irresistible on the dance floor, thoughtful under closer inspection, constantly discovering creative possibilities. “I’ve grown a lot as a writer,” Lipa says. “It used to take me a really long time to write a song, but now it’s easier to be more open and say what I’m thinking without having to filter or hide from the people I’m in the room with. Just learning who I am and being able to tell a story.”

Imperial Recordings is excited to announce the release of José González ‘s new record, Vestiges & Claws. The album, his first in seven years, is out on February 17 and was produced by González in his home as well as Svenska Grammofonstudion, both in Gothenburg, Sweden. It consists of years’ worth of musical sketches that in other hands might naturally sprawl wildly in sound and style, but on Vestiges & Claws González has created a collection of songs that cohere just about perfectly, ensuring his position as one of the most important artists of his generation.

“It was no doubt a conscious decision to work without a producer,” said González. “I didn’t want this to be too polished, or too ‘in your face.’ Most of all, it’s fun to be in complete control of the artistic aspect. Also, I was inspired by and picked up a lot of tricks from the producers I have worked with in the past. I like to use distortion and let things be a little overdriven, which gives things a warmer sound. Sometimes people complain that my music is too muddled, but I really do not want a modern crisp sound. I’d much rather aim somewhere between Shuggie Otis and Simon & Garfunkel.”

The result is an album that is less purist, less strict. One can find traces of inspired protest songs and eccentric folk rock on Vestiges & Claws: staccato grooves and rhythms, frustration and optimism. It’s a collection that is simultaneously confident, free and uncertain.

González said, “I started out thinking that I wanted to continue in the same minimalistic style as on my two previous records, but once I started the actual recordings I soon realized that most of the songs turned out better with added guitars and a more beat-like percussion, and with more backing vocals.”

González has been far from idle in the seven years since the release of his last solo record, In Our Nature. Besides making two Junip albums and touring the world both solo and with the band, González has been active in the studio in various contexts. One project in 2013 was José’s input to the The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty soundtrack, directed by and starring Ben Stiller. Besides previously released José and Junip songs, the film also contains exclusively written material as well as an interpretation of John Lennon’s “#9 Dream.” Earlier this autumn, the AIDS awareness group, Red Hot Organization, released the compilation Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell, where González and guests play a very groovy, sax-laden version of Russell’s “This Is How We Walk On The Moon.” During this time, his song “Far Away” won the “Best Song in A Game” at the Spike Video Awards and Rolling Stone named Junip’s “In Every Direction” a Top 50 single of 2010.

Vestiges & Claws is, however, the first album where he has chosen to include exclusively original material, largely revolving around ideas of civilization, humanism and solidarity.

“I think that might be where there is some sort of common thread on this new record: The zoomed out eye on humanity on a small pale blue dot in a cold, sparse and unfriendly space. The amazing fact that we are here at all, an aim to encourage us to understand ourselves and to make the best of the one life we know we have — after birth and before death. And also, I’ve been okay with using rhymes this time,” González said with a smile. He added, “In general I think that the lyrics are clearer this time. And a little less self-pitying.”

Where Veneer and In Our Nature, might have sounded sparse and barren in parts, Vestiges & Clawshas an altogether new feeling to it, at once warmer and darker than before. He talks about how he’s found inspiration in sprawling 70′s Brazilian productions, American folk rock and West African desert blues this time. And how he’s decided to waive the principle of having everything on the album reproducible in a live context.

González summed it up, “I’ve focused more on the role of being a producer this time around. I’ve spent more time thinking of what’s best for the song and the recording.”

A deep, artful thinker whose singular approach to song writing and sonics sets him worlds apart, José González is in a class by himself. He has a voice. He has a sound. He has a point of view.Vestiges & Claws – musically gorgeous, strikingly profound in lyric — has a unique and quietly visceral power that is as an outstanding addition to what is now an impressive body of work. The album is, without question, the most highly anticipated of his career.