Jack Harlow is back in the news again, but it’s not about his controversial Monica rollout this time.
The Kentucky rapper is now making headlines after telling Rolling Stone that he thought Drake was the “best rapper alive” after listening to the Canadian MC’s 2015 album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.
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“I remember vividly this album coming out and me being like, ‘Oh, Drake’s the best rapper alive,’” he recalled. “Right then. It was powerful. Powerful.”
Harlow was also asked what the experience was like when he finally got the chance to work with Drake on their single “Churchhill Downs,” and he seemed to be in awe to have the privilege to watch one of the biggest artists in the world do what they do best.
“It was an amazing experience,” Harlow said. “He recorded the verse in front of me. Watching him work, not punching in, delivering that whole way through. It’s just cool to see a rapper be a rapper and not be some packaged thing that a team is putting together. He’s a rapper. He can perform the act. He can do it. That might sound like a given, but it’s not always like that, I feel like. It’s so cool to see the skillset in real time.”
In other Drake news, the rapper is set to drop his highly anticipated ninth solo album Iceman next month, on May 15. Still no word on a track list or features yet, so we’re not sure if Harlow might reunite with Drizzy.
You can watch the full conversation below.
Zara Larsson gives a lot of credit to Tate McRae for inviting her to open on the Miss Possessive Tour last year, a major steppingstone that helped the Swedish pop star reach her still-unfolding breakout moment in 2026. But at the time, some of her fans questioned why she wasn’t the one headlining major arenas instead of the Canadian hitmaker.
On a new episode of Call Her Daddy posted Wednesday (April 22), Larsson addressed those comments. Starting off by calling McRae “incredible” and noting that their pairing was a “perfect match,” the 28-year-old performer speculated that certain people may have pitted her against her tourmate because she’s “been doing this for longer.”
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“I’m older,” Larsson continued. “And maybe some people felt like I deserved to be in the arena.”
Her response to those people? “I’m like, ‘Well, buy the ticket then,’” Larsson said frankly. “That’s not Tate’s fault.”
The “Midnight Sun” singer opened for McRae for about two months on the Miss Possessive trek, playing arenas such as Madison Square Garden in New York City, the United Center in Chicago and the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. At the very end of the stint, Larsson released what would become her breakthrough album, Midnight Sun, in late September. (She’s now gearing up to drop a deluxe featuring a bevy of guest artists, including Shakira, PinkPantheress, Robyn and more.)
After her final show on the tour, Larsson also shared a photo with McRae on Instagram and wrote, “It’s been strange seeing some people putting us against each other when we’re just two pop girls who love and support each other back stage!”
But on Call Her Daddy, she elaborated, “I think it’s just the nature of how people speak about girls in pop.
“We are similar in the sense that we both dance, although she’s a way better dancer,” Larsson added. “And I do pop, she does pop. I think it’s easier to root for someone who’s an underdog, you know?”
Both performers will be honored at this year’s Billboard Women in Music ceremony, with Larsson set to take home the Breakthrough prize and McRae to receive the Hitmaker recognition.
Watch Larsson’s full interview on Call Her Daddy above.
Olivia Dean kicked off her global The Art of Loving arena tour in Glasgow, Scotland on Wednesday night (April 22). The show at the city’s OVO Hydro is the first of an upcoming slate that will take the London-born artist to some of the biggest venues of her career.
The U.K. leg will see her play six nights at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena alongside dates in Manchester, and then heading to Ireland for shows in Dublin. The tour kick-off saw Dean debut a number of tracks from the Art of Loving live for the first time, including “I’ve Seen It” and “Baby Steps.” Dean performed her sophomore album in full during the 23-track set – see the full setlist for the show below.
Elsewhere, Dean covered a classic from Curtis Mayfield, taking on his 1970 track “Move On Up” for the first time. A number of Dean’s tracks from her debut album Messy were also in the mix, including fan favorites “Ladies Room” and “Dive.”
Deep cuts from her earliest releases, including “OK Love You Bye,” were also perfomed, as well as “It Isn’t Perfect But It Might Be,” her entry to the soundtrack of the 2025 film Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
“Rein Me In,” a collaboration with Sam Fender that is currently in its eighth week at No. 1 on the U.K. Singles Chart, was not included in the show. Fender and Dean have performed the song only a handful of times together, including at the former’s 80,000-capacity show in London last June.
The U.K. leg continues with a second show in Glasgow on Thursday (April 23). The tour will hit North America from July onwards.
Nick Jonas wants you to get up close and personal.
Following the release of his solo album Sunday Best (via Republic Records), the Jonas Brother announces a special run of intimate shows across six east coast cities this June, all bearing the name A Night With Nick.
A Night With Nick will get underway June 4 at Fallsview Casino Resort in Niagara Falls, NY; visit venues in Hanover, MD; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA, Danville, VA; and wraps up June 13 at Hard Rock in Atlantic City, NJ.
According to reps, Jonas will showcase songs from Sunday Best alongside fan-favorite tracks from his catalog, and more in what will be a limited series of shows.
Sunday Best opened at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 chart, and was led by the single “Gut Punch,” which Jonas debuted live last November while on tour in Las Vegas, and later performed on The Tonight Show.
It’s Jonas’ fifth solo album, and the follow-up to 2021’s Spaceman, which reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200. Since then, he released two albums with brothers Joe and Kevin: 2023’s The Album and 2025’s Greetings From Your Hometown, both of which charted in the top 10.
Later in the year, the JoBro and Power Ballad star will take a sharp turn when he co-stars with Kathryn Newton (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come) in MRC’s holiday horror film White Elephant. According to Deadline, the film directed by Eli Craig (Clown in a Cornfield) will tell the story of “Eight friends. One prize. Zero trust. Their annual festive holiday gift exchange spirals into a cutthroat game of Christmas carnage.” Jonas is among the producers through his Powered By Jonas company.
Go large with the popcorn, because Jonas is slated to co-star in a bunch of big screen projects, including the latest Jumanji sequel from Columbia Pictures, alongside Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black and Kevin Hart, and he’s also on board for the high-stakes thriller Bodyman, from director Gary Fleder (Reacher).
Pre-sales for A Night with Nick begin today, April 23, from 10:00 am ET, and the general ticket on-sale begins Friday, April 24, at 10:00 am ET.
“A Night With Nick” Dates:
June 4 — Fallsview Casino Resort, Niagara Falls, NY
June 6 — The HALL at Live!, Hanover, MD
June 7 — The Fillmore Charlotte, Charlotte, NC
June 10 — Tabernacle, Atlanta, GA
June 11 — The Pantheon at Caesars Virginia, Danville, VA
June 13 — Hard Rock, Atlantic City, NJ
Dark days are in the rearview, the mirrorball is back. Duran Duran’s new era is all disco, baby.
The British new wave legends return with “Free to Love” (via Tape Modern), an ode to the era of party music that exploded from the late ‘70s, when tight rhythm sections collided with funk and glitter on the dancefloor.
If it evokes Chic’s “Good Times,” there’s a reason for that. “Free to Love” is a collaboration with Nile Rodgers, the latest in a working relationship that stretches back to 1984’s “The Reflex,” the first of Duran Duran’s two songs to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (“A View to a Kill” also topped the singles chart in 1985).
On it, frontman Simon Le Bon sings: “Be free to win or lose / do what you want to do / be free to see it through / out there I’m free to love.”
“Free to Love” is accompanied by an official music video, that dropped in the small hours of Thursday, April 23. The live performance clip is framed like a throwback episode of Top of the Pops, the seminal British weekly music chart show on which Duran Duran were regulars in the 1980s. It all plays out with tongues planted firmly in cheeks, though the sight of founding bass player John Taylor with blonde spiky hair would’ve blown Duranie minds back in the day.
With “Free to Love,” Duran Duran appear to have moved on from their Halloween era, which dawned with their 16th and latest album, Danse Macabre, a collection that opened and peaked at No. 4 on the Official U.K. Chart in 2023.
The Rock Hall-inducted British band is locked in for a run of 2026 shows, including a residency next month at Bleaulive at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, arena and festival spots in North America and across Continental Europe, and a headline date July 5 at BTS Hyde Park.
Rodgers, too, has a busy itinerary in the months ahead with concerts booked for the U.K. and Europe, North America and elsewhere.
Duran Duran was arguably the biggest band in the world in the first half of the ‘80s, and have survived, and at times, thrived, when so many of their contemporaries were shafted by the changing sands of music. Along the way, the group has collected every conceivable award, including the Brit Awards’ Lifetime Achievement, two Ivor Novellos, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, two Grammy Awards, and, in 2022, long-overdue induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2024, Le Bon was been named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by King Charles, a salute to his services to music and charity.
Watch the music video below for Duran Duran’s “Free to Love” featuring Nile Rodgers.
No, it’s not a drill: Boards of Canada is all set to release an album of new material.
The electronic music act will crush a decade-plus drought next month with the release of Inferno, an 18-track double album that will spread across 70 minutes.
Inferno‘s tracklist, which can be seen below, doesn’t feature the meditative track “Tape 05,” which BoC and Warp Records dished up last week, an easter egg in an unexpected cryptic social media drip feed.
For BoC’s long-suffering fans, Inferno is a bolt from the blue. The duo’s last album, 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, proved to be their biggest commercial success, based on international chart placings.
Then, deafening quiet. Thirteen years of it.
Only the most hopelessly optimistic BoC fans would’ve anticipated a new era. And yet here we are, with confirmation coming by way of separate social posts, one combining dramatic, but minimal, BoC music, with hexagonal imagery and video cut from a simpler time. It’s sunburnt nostalgia, bottled.
Boards of Canada is comprised of Scottish brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, a universe-building pair that is both enigmatic, secretive and adored by connoisseurs of minimal electronic music.
The siblings rarely give interviews, they’ve performed only a small handful of live shows, mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and their official music videos can be counted on one hand.
BoC’s impact shouldn’t be measured in hits, or streams. Though their fourth and most recent album release, Tomorrow’s Harvest, did set career chart highs for the act. That collection peaked at No. 7 in the United Kingdom, for their first top 10 entry, and at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, their first appearance on the all-genres U.S. albums chart.
A comeback of sorts emerged in 2019 with “XYZ,” a previously-unreleased tune from their Peel Session of July 1998, which appeared on a new Warp Records 30th anniversary package, WXAXRXP Sessions.
Inferno is due out May 29 on special-edition limited red translucent 2LP vinyl in triple gatefold sleeve with 16-page booklet, standard black 2xLP vinyl, as well as CD and digital formats. Check out the Inferno tracklist, and latest BoC social posts below. Pre-order and pre-save at boardsofcanada.com.
Inferno tracklist:
- — “Introit”
- — “Prophecy At 1420 MHz”
- — “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan”
- — “Age Of Capricorn”
- — “Father And Son”
- — “Somewhere Right Now In The Future”
- — “Naraka”
- — “Acts Of Magic”
- — “Memory Death”
- — “The Word Becomes Flesh”
- — “Into The Magic Land”
- — “Blood In The Labyrinth”
- — “Deep Time”
- — “All Reason Departs”
- — “Arena Americanada”
- — “The Process”
- — “You Retreat In Time And Space”
- — “I Saw Through Platonia”
From the baseball field to Sabrinawood, Geena Davis and Madonna have reunited.
Thirty-four years after starring in A League of Their Own together, Davis and Madonna once again ended up on the same stage, this time at Coachella. The Queen of Pop and the Academy Award-winning actress were reunited when Sabrina Carpenter tapped them to make surprise appearances during her Coachella weekend 2 headlining set on Friday. Davis expressed her excitement over seeing her former co-star by sharing a new photo of the duo to Instagram on Wednesday (April 22). Of course, she referenced their film’s characters in the caption.
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“Mae – so happy to see you again! Love, Dottie,” Davis wrote.
One fan won the comments section by writing of the photo: “I know there’s no crying in baseball but I’m literally crying.”
Both Davis and Madonna played pretty significant roles in the second Sabrinawood — Carpenter’s performance inspired by a reimagined Hollywood. Davis, with dyed blonde hair and in the driver’s seat of a vintage car, portrayed an older version of the “Espresso” singer. While at a fictional drive-in movie theater, “Older Sabrina” delivered a monologue reflecting on how her niece never got to see her as the youthful musician she once was. (In a fitting reference, Carpenter’s weekend 1 older self was portrayed by Davis’ Thelma & Louise co-star Susan Sarandon.)
Madonna’s role in Sabrinawood was very different from Davis’: The fellow blond diva took to the stage to perform the Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers “Like a Prayer” and “Vogue” and a yet-unreleased duet with Carpenter. The same day she hit the stage with the “Please Please Please” singer, Madonna released her new song “I Feel So Free,” the first taste of her upcoming album Confessions II.
The Queen of Pop is inviting us back to the dance floor.
Seven years after the release of her 14th studio album, the Billboard 200 No. 1 Madame X, Madonna is finally dropping her highly anticipated 15th record, Confessions II. After teasing the album and sharing that she is working with her old collaborator Stuart Price, the pop megastar officially announced the new album on April 15.
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Confessions II is a sequel to Madonna’s 2005 Billboard 200 No. 1 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. On top of being her first work in more than half a decade, the new record is also the singer’s first album since her return to Warner Records. The major label announced in September that Madonna would be coming back to where it all began after nearly two decades away. Warner Records became Madonna’s first label after she signed there in 1982. She remained with the label for the first 25 years of her career, during which she released 11 albums, including the original Confessions.
In a now-deleted Instagram post from September, the pop star celebrated her return to Warner Records and teased the new album, writing, “Almost 2 decades later — And it feels like home with Warner Records! Back to music, Back to the Dance Floor, Back to where it all began! COADF – Pt. 2 2026.”
“COADF – Pt. 2” is now officially on the horizon. On April 17, Madonna made a surprise appearance during Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella weekend 2 headlining set to perform “Vogue,” “Like a Prayer” and an unreleased duet with the “Espresso” singer. Following the surprise performance, Madonna released the first song from Confessions II at midnight on April 18.
From the release date to the first taste of music, see everything we know about Confessions II so far below.
James Valentine, the versatile Australian artist, author and broadcaster who was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame as a member of Models, and whose pivot to broadcasting earned him millions of fans and international awards, has died following a battle with cancer. He was 64.
“James passed peacefully at home surrounded by his family, who adored him,” Valentine’s family remarks in a statement, issued Thursday, April 23.
A talented saxophonist with an ear for jazz, Valentine was a prominent recording and touring artist through the 1980s with a string of Australian bands, including Models, Absent Friends, and the Wendy Matthews Band, Jo Camilleri, Stephen Cummings, Kate Ceberano, and others.
Valentine performed on the band’s fourth, and most commercially successful album, Out of Mind, Out of Sight, which peaked at No. 84 on the Billboard 200 in 1986, and logged 18 weeks on the chart. The collection yielded three domestic top 40 hits “Big on Love,” Barbados” and the title track, which reached No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1986, and chalked up 13 weeks on the list.
When Models were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame during a ceremony in Sydney back in 2010, Valentine took his place on stage with his former bandmates. Just days later, co-frontman and bass player James Freud died by suicide, aged 51.
“We were probably a big deal in our heads,” Models drummer Barton Price tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “but James never took it that seriously.” Bandmate Roger Mason adds, “he was a very down-to-earth person. In fact, I’d have to say, annoyingly, he was the most mature one in the band.”
Valentine, it turned out, was a talent in the studio and was magic on the mic. He hosted radio and television programs across the ABC for 30 years, including 20-plus years presenting the 702 ABC Sydney Afternoons radio show.
His inquisitiveness and passion for exploring the matters that make us tick made his show a popular one well outside of Sydney; in 2020, he collected a Bronze Award for Best Two-Way Telephone Talk/Interview Show at the New York Festival’s Radio Awards.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese led tributes to Valentine. “He was someone who was always worth listening to,” Albanese told 702 ABC Sydney. “He was so interesting and he was so full of life. All of our thoughts are with his family and his friends and, indeed, the ABC family today.”
ABC chair Kim Williams depicted Valentine as a “creative polymath,” while New South Wales premier Chris Minns recounted the late artist and presenter’s “quirky, unique way of talking with people in Sydney,” noting “he was both an interested and interesting person, which is unique. He will be hugely missed.”
Australia’s Governor-General Sam Mostyn has revealed that Valentine was last weekend made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), a prestigious award in the national honors system, recognizing exceptional service or achievement.
“His ideas were, as they were on radio, just lovely, gentle, sensible, really important things about how community comes together and how we all have a role to play,” Mostyn explains.
INXS bass player Garry Gary Beers recorded and played in Absent Friends with Valentine. “James was a truly great sax player and a very very decent guy,” he writes in a social post. “I will always remember him as the guy who was always smiling, always happy to be in the moment and a guy you could depend on.”
In March 2024, Valentine told listeners that he’d been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and took a leave of absence to pursue treatment. He returned to the Afternoons slot in 2025, but left once more in June when scans revealed a tumor had been detected in his omentum.
Valentine is survived by his wife Joanne and their two children.
Several of D4vd‘s notable collaborations have been removed from streaming services.
His songs with Holly Humberstone (“Superbloodmoon”), Laufey (“This Is How It Feels”), Kali Uchis (“Crashing”) and Damiano David have all been scrubbed, with Damiano replacing his D4vd-assisted “Tangerine” with a solo version. While news of D4vd’s arrest on first degree murder charges broke last week, it’s unclear when each song was pulled from streamers.
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Back in September of last year, Uchis told fans on Instagram that she and her team were working to get their song “Crashing” removed after news broke that the body of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas was found in the trunk of a Tesla registered to D4vd. “Not my friend i did a song with him which is currently in the process of being taken down given today’s disturbing news,” she told the fan that attempted to call her out about her connection to the singer. Also in September, figure-skating champion Alysa Liu announced that she was removing the Laufey/D4vd collab “This Is How It Feels” from her short form routine following the news of Rivas’ body being discovered.
D4vd’s song “What Are You Waiting For” was also reportedly deleted from the Madden 26 soundtrack, and he was dropped by his label Darkroom/Interscope last year as well.
The only collaboration that appears to still be available on streaming services at press time is a song with The Kid Laroi called “The Line” from Laroi’s 2023 album The First Time.
D4vd (real name: David Anthony Burke) was taken into custody last week and charged with the first degree murder of Rivas, with authorities alleging that the teen threatened to expose their inappropriate sexual relationship just as his music career was starting to take off.
“When she threatened to expose his criminal conduct and devastate his musical career, Burke allegedly murdered her, cut up her body and stuffed her body in two bags that were placed in the front trunk of his car,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in a press release. “This horrific and gruesome murder committed by the charged sexual predator is shocking and appalling. To Celeste’s loved ones, we will get the justice you seek and deserve.”
The Rivas family shared a statement of their own saying that they want justice.
Billboard has reached out to D4vd’s team for comment.