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Armand Hammer and the Alchemist Announce New Album Mercy
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Armand Hammer and the Alchemist Announce New Album Mercy

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Armand Hammer and the Alchemist are getting back together for a new album. After connecting on 2021’s Haram, they’ll drop Mercy on November 7 via billy woods’ Backwoodz Studioz. The project will feature guest contributions from Earl Sweatshirt, Quelle Chris, Cleo Reed, Pink Siifu, Kapwani, and Silka. See the tracklist and the album artwork, by M. Musgrove, below.

Ahead of the album’s release, on Thursday, October 23, Armand Hammer and the Alchemist will play a show together at Los Angeles’ Lodge Room. The concert takes place after billy woods’ run of dates in Europe and before he starts a new North American leg of his tour.

Armand Hammer—the New York hip-hop duo of billy woods and Elucid—most recently shared We Buy Diabetic Test Strips in 2023. Since then, billy woods has dropped Golliwog, while Elucid did the solo album Revelator.

How billy woods Created His Latest Masterpiece, GOLLIWOG

Mercy:

01 Laraaji
02 Peshawar
03 Calypso Gene [ft. Silka and Cleo Reed]
04 Glue Traps [ft. Quelle Chris]
05 Scandinavia
06 Nil by Mouth
07 Dogeared [ft. Kapwani]
08 Crisis Phone [ft. Pink Siifu]
09 Moonbow
10 No Grabba
11 U Know My Body
12 Longjohns [ft. Quelle Chris and Cleo Reed]
13 California Games [ft. Earl Sweatshirt]
14 Super Nintendo

Armand Hammer The Alchemist Mercy

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Louis Tomlinson "got a really good feeling" about his next album
Music

Louis Tomlinson “got a really good feeling” about his next album

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Louis Tomlinson is teasing his next solo album, saying he’s “got a really, really good feeling” about the project.

  • READ MORE: Louis Tomlinson on finding his artistic identity: “It’ll be an ever-evolving process” 

The soloist and former One Direction member released his second and latest full-length effort, ‘Faith In The Future’, in 2022.

Taking to X/Twitter today (September 10), Tomlinson shared an update with fans about his upcoming third LP.

“Just sat listening to the new record and I’ve got a really, really good feeling this time round!” he wrote. “Can’t wait for you all to hear it!!”

Later, the star hinted that he was “going to play something new” at this year’s edition of his Away From Home indie festival in New York next month. When a fan asked if this would be “only one new song”, Tomlinson replied: “That wouldn’t be fair would it.”

The singer told his followers last week that it was “about time” he played some new material on stage. He said he was “really excited about” his Away From Home ’25 slot, adding: “Got a few surprises. Should be fun.”

Fans have also been speculating over Tomlinson posting numerous question marks on social media, and whether this is a clue about his next era. Check out a selection of posts below.

According to Music-News.COM, Tomlinson previously described his forthcoming new tracks as “sunny” with some “chaos” when asked by a fan what to expect.

When performing at the Lodz Summer Festival in July, he reportedly revealed that he’d “actually finished the next record”.

Tomlinson’s Away From Home Festival 2025 takes place at the Brewery Ommegang in New York on October 4 and 5. Other performers include Lauv, Steve Aoki, Pale Waves and Circa Waves.

Following on from his 2020 debut, ‘Walls’, Tomlinson’s second album was produced by Mike Crossey, who has worked with the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The 1975 and Wolf Alice. The singer co-wrote the record alongside The Music frontman Rob Harvey, and the songwriting and production team Red Triangle.

During an interview with NME in 2022, the singer said he was “definitely” more comfortable with who he was as an artist compared to when he first went solo.

“That has been a process and I think it’ll be an ever-evolving process as well,” Tomlinson explained. “But I definitely feel really comfortable about just following my heart musically and seeing where it gets me.”

You can revisit NME‘s video interview with Tomlinson above.

Over the summer, the singer hit out at online “conspiracy chat” about his personal life. “It’s just too much and too hurtful for me to see!” he wrote on social media.

In 2023, Tomlinson admitted that he felt some “envy” when his former One Direction bandmate Harry Styles first started becoming successful as a soloist.

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Cash Cobain Says Jay-Z Told Him He's 'Not Dropping an Album'
Music

Cash Cobain Says Jay-Z Told Him He’s ‘Not Dropping an Album’

by jummy84
written by jummy84

When Jay-Z calls, you pick up the phone. Cash Cobain revealed on Wednesday (Sept. 10) that he received a call from Hov to straighten out the narrative regarding rumors of a new project from the rap mogul being on the horizon, which Cash pushed during his appearance on Billboard Unfiltered Live Sept. 3.

“When I was on the phone with Hov he said that he is absolutely not dropping an album,” Cash wrote to X, along with six laughing-crying emojis. “that messed me up tho.”

Jay is very aware of what’s being said about him in the culture, and the “This is Hov” text message meme came to life for the Bronx rapper.

It all came about after Cash joined Billboard Unfiltered Live alongside Zeddy Will, during which he named Jay-Z as the king of New York, but teased that he heard that the Roc Nation boss was gearing up to release a new project.

“I heard Jay-Z about to drop some s—t. That’s what I heard,” he said at the time. “That’s about to shake the world.”

It’s been eight years since Jay’s last solo album, 4:44, dropped. Primarily produced by No I.D., the set debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 262,000 album units earned in the first week.

There has been fan speculation about a new Jay-Z project being made somewhere in the world, as 2026 would be 30 years since his Reasonable Doubt debut, and the 55-year-old popped out at a handful of dates on wife Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour.

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Justin Bieber: SWAG II Album Review
Music

Justin Bieber: SWAG II Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Tha Carter VI. Jaws: The Revenge. Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. Vultures 2. The cultural landscape is littered with unnecessary sequels, so it is not exactly an effrontery that Justin Bieber has released a follow-up to his alt-leaning SWAG less than two months later, but wow, is it a chore to get through. On SWAG II, redundancy is twofold: It tacks on another 23 tracks to the senior SWAG’s already overlong 21, resulting in over two hours of music between the two volumes and very little to say. The novelty has worn off.

Appealing as it was to hear Bieber adopt the beguiling sonic-stew aesthetic of his collaborators Dijon (who’s back to co-produce six SWAG II tracks) and Mk.gee (who, as last time, lends his services to just one), it is now clear that Bieber’s take is lite-r in every way. It’s less robust, less intense, less blissfully chaotic. The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators (Carter Lang, Dylan “Sir Dylan” Wiggins, and Eddie Benjamin are again behind the boards for the majority of SWAG II). Minor distinctions speak volumes as Bieber’s secondhand sound circles back to the gel-slicked textures of its original source material. Try playing “Open Up Your Heart” alongside Breathe’s 1988 soft-focus adult contemporary smash “How Can I Fall?”; they flow together so well that Bieber is effectively making music that one could peacefully buy adult diapers to.

On its face, SWAG II is fine in small doses. It is not as ignorable as it is interesting, as Brian Eno said about ambient music, but it is pleasantly ignorable. Scrutiny, though, reveals the majority of these songs to be single-sentiment affairs, and many play as sketches. Some have only one verse; “Poppin’ My Shit” features only Bieber on the chorus while Hurricane Chris raps a few bars, concluding with the fawning, “Once I hit, you gon’ get hooked and ain’t gon’ never leave me/Got some friends and they all love Justin Bieber.” What is this, a cabinet meeting?

There are odes, perhaps directed to wife Hailey Bieber, though the treacliest, “I Think You’re Special” casts its message of inner peace more generally. It also squanders the presence of Tems, who is almost relegated to background vocals. There are sexual slow jams, probably also about Hailey Bieber. “You got me singing, I, I, oh man,” is some faint praise Bieber offers in one. There are songs about arguments, and in the most scabrous, “Petting Zoo,” Bieber seethes amid a solo-electric arrangement: “I told you that you fuckin’ with a man/Yeah, I told you I don’t play that shit, no cap/Bitch, I told you I’m not doin’ tit-for-tat, no/Don’t make me say some shit I can’t take back.” At least there’s something courageous in being willing to sound like a total prick in public. Even when he’s being affectionate, there’s sometimes an edge. “Nobody gets to touch you/I do,” he sings, hardly the most romantic definition of monogamy.

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Halsey’s ‘BADLANDS’ Top 10 on Five Album Charts After Reissue
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Halsey’s ‘BADLANDS’ Top 10 on Five Album Charts After Reissue

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Halsey’s full-length debut album BADLANDS is back in the top 10 on multiple Billboard album charts following its 10th anniversary reissue. The 2015 set was reissued on Aug. 29 in multiple deluxe formats and reenters the top 10 on Top Album Sales (No. 5), Top Alternative Albums (No. 6), Vinyl Albums (No. 4), Catalog Albums (No. 9) and debuts in the top 10 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums (No. 7).

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All versions of the album, old and new, are combined for tracking and charting purposes.

In the tracking week ending Sept. 4, BADLANDS earned 17,000 equivalent album units in the United States, of which nearly 12,000 are in traditional album sales (about 9,000 in vinyl purchases).

BADLANDS is one of three reentries in the top 10 on the Top Album Sales chart, joined by Sabrina Carpenter’s emails i can’t send (No. 6) and Charli xcx’s how i’m feeling now (No. 8). Meanwhile, the only debut in the region is Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend at No. 1.

Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album (TEA) units and streaming equivalent album (SEA) units.

At No. 1 on Top Album Sales, Man’s Best Friend arrives with 224,000 sold in its first week (the third-largest sales week of 2025 and Carpenter’s best sales week ever). Stray Kids’ KARMA falls to No. 2 (with 53,000, down 82%) after debuting atop the list a week ago. The KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack climbs 5-3 (15,000, down 19%), Deftones’ private music dips 3-4 in its second week (13,000, down 80%) and emails i can’t send reenters at No. 6 (11,000, up 1,766% after a new vinyl variant was released).

Laufey’s A Matter of Time falls 2-7 in its second week (11,000, down 84%), Charli xcx’s how i’m feeling now reenters at No. 8 (9,500, up 2,613% following the release of a fifth anniversary color vinyl variant), KATSEYE’s Beautiful Chaos surges 20-9 (9,000, up 81% following a restock of certain editions of the album at retail) and Carpenter’s chart-topping Short n’ Sweet jumps 30-10 (9,000, up 115% in the wake of Man’s Best Friend’s arrival).  

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Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2 Album Review
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Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2 Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

You would be forgiven if the first couplet had you fooled. On “Iron Man,” the opening song from Supreme Clientele 2—the titles of two masterpieces leveraged, diminished, thrown into the SEO fire—Ghostface Killah headfakes like he really has something. “The stamp on the dope was Ronald Reagan with fronts,” he raps, the kind of absurdist and hyperspecific detail that dotted the crime vignettes from the illustrious first half of his career. “My man ran over his legs, all we heard was the crunch,” the last word accentuated by Foley work you might have heard in a 1950s radio play. It’s enough to recall the rumbling Jeeps, spilled tartar sauce, and glass caskets that launch his oddest, most engrossing stories.

That the rest of “Iron Man,” and the rest of Supreme Clientele 2, falls far short of this standard should not be a surprise; it’s an extraordinary image. And the album is certainly not the nadir for late-period Ghost, who over the last decade has frequently sounded strained and depleted, and who has spent significant time of late writing in staid formats that are poor vehicles for his once phantasmagoric style. It’s sturdy, at times truly fun. But this is also an album that—even when stripped of cynical readings of its commercial proposition and taken on its terms as a creative work—is doomed by the backwards gaze that doubles as its premise.

The one thing that prevents the Reagan-with-fronts line from sounding as if it could be lifted from the original Supreme Clientele is the voice in which it’s delivered. Whether the result of marathon nightclub tours, working with different engineers in new recording software, or simply aging, the “Tasmanian Devil who knows where you can get PCP” vibe of Ghost’s youth is gone, replaced by something gruffer, scratchier, more evocative of your blowhard uncle. Compounding those qualitative changes is the decision, not uniform but frequent enough across SC2, to double his vocals. This all has the effect of making Ghost’s music sound the one thing it never did before: effortful.

From 1995 through 2006—that would be Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… through Fishscale and the wildly underrated More Fish—Ghost was the most singular writer in hip-hop, perhaps in its history. The verses could be dense, even labyrinthine, but all carried the energy of ecstatic, impulsive imagination. In the 2010s and early ’20s, this has been replaced by a flood of painfully ordinary material that includes a pair of LPs with Adrian Younge, a half-baked concept record on Tommy Boy, and a smattering of forgettable single-producer collaborations. In addition to the thinning out of his syntax, Ghost’s narrative writing drifted toward longform character sketches scrubbed of nearly all eccentricity and mapped onto predictable plot beats.

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Hot Chip: Joy in Repetition Album Review
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Hot Chip: Joy in Repetition Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

The career retrospective is something of a lost art in the streaming era. But the indietronica institution Hot Chip have tackled theirs with aplomb. True to form for a group that balances earnestness with a finely honed deadpan sensibility, Joy in Repetition encases a few emotional truths within a self-deprecating title. The main reference is the chorus of 2005’s “Over and Over,” the London quintet’s breakthrough single and defining hit. More broadly, the album title captures both the essence of dance music and Hot Chip’s penchant for borrowing: They nicked it from Prince.

To their credit, Hot Chip never hid their debts—they said they were down with Prince from the beginning. The band didn’t set out to be a dance-rock powerhouse that would remix the singles of half the Western world. “We didn’t have the production value to do a Destiny’s Child-style show,” singer Alexis Taylor said in 2016. “And yet, that was the music that was exciting to us. We weren’t referencing the tradition of New Order or Depeche Mode.” They were five young multi-instrumentalists who shared an interest in Black pop and indie rock, a combination that was quickly becoming the default for a generation of hipsters. Their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong, was as overloaded as the fake synth on the cover: soul balladry and back-porch picking, smooth sax solos and tiny-desk techno. It was shaggy and languid and intimate, like the Beta Band if they were into Angie Stone instead of the Stone Roses.

Coming on Strong is the only Hot Chip album not represented here, possibly because it received the deluxe-reissue treatment last year, or because its muted, bedroom-to-blogroll aesthetic—to say nothing of its crazy-ass white-boy lyricism—might slouch in the presence of sturdier company. (It’s spiritually represented by “Look at Where We Are,” a Rodney Jerkins-style ballad from 2012 that’s only R&B by process of elimination.) The press material describes this collection as “less a Best Of, more like a Best Loved”—their most popular live songs, in other words. (Only studio recordings are included: no live versions, and no remixes of their own songs or others’.)The phrasing suggests yet another, more cynical riff on the title: the complacent audience, craving more of the same.

But Hot Chip never fell into that trap, even as they became a pop commodity. Visiting his girlfriend in New York, Taylor happened to run into James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin of DFA Records; Hot Chip signed with DFA soon afterward. The move felt like a fait accompli at the time, and even though Taylor and Joe Goddard remained the band’s producers, 2006’s The Warning had the whiff of DFA’s astringent house style. Going forward, Hot Chip’s timbres were crisper, their mixes were fuller, the saxes now skronked. Soul signifiers took a backseat to gurning electro, a sound the band metabolized with startling ease.

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Ragana and Drowse Announce New Album, Share Song: Listen
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Ragana and Drowse Announce New Album, Share Song: Listen

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Flenser artists Ragana and Drowse have announced a new collaborative album. The Pacific Northwest musicians recorded Ash Souvenir at the Unknown, in Anacortes, Washington, after premiering the material at the Roadburn Festival, in Tilburg, Netherlands. The album is out November 14. Below, listen to excerpts from the opening song, “In Eternal Woods.”

Ragana (the duo of Maria and Noel) released their latest album, Desolation’s Flower, in 2023. The previous year, Drowse (the solo project of Portland, Oregon, musician Kyle Bates) shared Wane Into It.

Read about Desolation’s Flower in “The 37 Best Rock Albums of 2023.”

Ash Souvenir:

01 In Eternal Woods Pts. 1-3
02 After Image
03 In Eternal Woods Pt. 4
04 Ash Souvenir

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Saint Etienne: International Album Review
Music

Saint Etienne: International Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

At the wedding of a childhood friend, my mother got up and danced harder than I’d ever seen in my entire life. The DJ was mixing a fairly aggressive set of Lebanese dabke music, and somehow, between the poignance of the occasion, the beat’s unfamiliar pulse, and the stuttering flash of a strobe light, I caught a glimpse of her as she was at 20 years old. As soon as I registered what I was witnessing, the track broke away and the lights went down. A disco ball glinted across the room and illuminated her face, and though the years had caught up with her, the continuity between her many lives seemed to linger. After what felt like a small eternity, the present reasserted itself with a needle scratch, a roaring crowd, and another pummeling rush of noise.

Music’s ability to suspend, sustain, and reverse time is one of its most powerful and mysterious qualities. The philosopher Susanne Langer believed that this property of “time made audible” was essential to the colorful, parallel dimensions that music can conjure. It also helps explain the wormhole effect, in which moments (and even years) can be compressed into a handful of notes and sprung again in an instant. Few musicians have understood these dynamics as masterfully as Saint Etienne. Since the early 1990s, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell have mapped the elements of dance music onto a listener’s most tender feelings of longing, optimism, and nostalgia. A song like early masterpiece “Avenue” echoes through the ages in real time, capturing a love affair in the crossfade between young abandon and adult knowingness. The only thing more remarkable than the track’s panorama of swirling memory and conflicted feeling is how brilliantly and consistently the band was able to conjure it throughout its records.

Over the course of more than three decades, Saint Etienne have matured with their music, and they have mostly used this longevity to their advantage. But for every song that’s grappled with an adult overview of human experience, on recent records they’ve struck a world-weary note, as though aware that more yesterdays than tomorrows await the three middle-aged musicians. With their 13th and final album, International, Saint Etienne aim to go out on top, with one more blaze of fun and passion in the spirit of their best work. It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.

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Lucrecia Dalt: A Danger to Ourselves Album Review
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Lucrecia Dalt: A Danger to Ourselves Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

On July 7, 2025, Lucrecia Dalt’s heart stopped. She had suffered a severe epileptic seizure, and eight seconds would pass before it resumed beating. The next day, the Colombian musician released “caes,” the third single from her breathtaking new album A Danger to Ourselves—a song that suggests, she says, “that the sublime can be reached through surrendering to the act of falling.” For two days after her near-death experience, she soared, so overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings that she wondered if she had actually died and was experiencing the afterlife. She hadn’t, of course, and the world that wowed her was the same one she occupied before her heart had stopped. She had just surrendered to the fall.

“Caes,” a gorgeously harmonic duet with Amor Muere’s Camille Mandoki, draws inspiration from the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the model Evelyn McHale, two women whose fatal falls remain intertwined with the artworks connected to them. McHale’s final photograph, “The Most Beautiful Suicide,” was taken by Robert Wiles and repurposed by Andy Warhol, while Mendieta’s haunting multimedia series Siluetas presaged her tragic end. Dalt’s tumble was decidedly more metaphorical; after years on the road, juggling multiple projects while touring the world, she moved to New Mexico and fell in love.

Lucrecia Dalt: Alien Among Us

The path of Lucrecia Dalt’s career over the past 20 years has been serpentine, growing from electronic-tinged synth pop into various sonic abstractions, embodying beasts, spirits, and the earth itself before reimagining the boleros of her youth through the lens of science fiction. Each experiment felt distinct, yet they all shared a similar detachment; building her records around fantastical characters and surrealistic concepts, she maintained a semblance of distance between her art and her personal life. Her latest work obliterates that gap.

Most of A Danger to Ourselves was written and recorded in New Mexico at the home studio of her partner, David Sylvian, the veteran British art-rocker, and its content captures the intense exchange of new love. Dalt says the record emerged after “spending enough time in the abyssal realm of erotic delirium.” This time, rather than invoking mythical creatures, she says, “the lyrics function as declarations, or odes, and the most personal truths I have explored to date are found within those lines.” It’s the most exposed she’s ever been on record.

The album opens with their duet “cosa rara,” a deceptively buoyant investigation of lust built upon dynamic drum loops from Alex Lázaro, who also gave ¡Ay! its rhythmic backbone, that shrink and expand, building and releasing tension. The new lovers swirl around one another amid breathy harmonies, scattered flexatone, and the screech of Sylvian’s guitar. Enveloped by their own desire, they succumb to it, their minds and bodies disassembled and rearranged. The climax is a car crash; Sylvian’s gravelly baritone narrates the final, refractory verse with post-coital clarity, the bliss of surrender tempered by unease.

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