Two Australian icons shared a stage in Brighton, England, on Friday (Aug. 1) as Kylie Minogue joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds during the band’s concert at Preston Park to perform their 1995 duet “Where the Wild Roses Grow.”

Minogue appeared midway through the Bad Seeds’ set for the murder-ballad duet, marking the first time the pair had performed the song together live since 2019, when Cave surprised the crowd during Minogue’s legends slot at Glastonbury.

Before that, the two sang it together in 2018 — the last time the Bad Seeds played the song live — as well as in 2013 and on several occasions in the mid-1990s following the release of Murder Ballads.

Minogue reflected on the reunion in an Instagram post after the show. “I’ll forever be your Wild Rose @nickcaveofficial,” she wrote, thanking the Bad Seeds and calling it a “wonderful crowd, wonderful night.” She also credited her white lace dress, complete with wild-rose embellishments, to Susie Cave — Nick Cave’s wife and the designer behind the fashion label The Vampire’s Wife.

Earlier that day, Cave and the Bad Seeds played a surprise rooftop set atop the city’s Resident Music record store, performing four songs. That set included “Train Long-Suffering,” a track from 1985’s The Firstborn Is Dead that had not been performed live in 27 years before the band revived it on their 2026 European tour, along with a cover of T. Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer” that Cave had previously only performed solo.

“Where the Wild Roses Grow” remains one of the most celebrated collaborations in Australian music history. Written by Cave and released as the lead single from the Bad Seeds’ 1996 album Murder Ballads, the duet cast Minogue as the doomed Eliza Day opposite Cave’s murderous narrator — a stark departure from her pop image at the time.

It became Cave’s biggest commercial hit, reaching No. 2 on the ARIA Singles Chart in Australia and No. 11 on the U.K. Singles Chart, and won the 1996 ARIA Award for Song of the Year. The accompanying video, which depicted Minogue lying in a river in a pose evoking Millais’ painting Ophelia, became a fixture on MTV and helped push Murder Ballads to the biggest commercial success of the band’s career.

Minogue, one of the most successful pop artists of her generation, has scored seven entries on the Billboard Hot 100 — including “The Loco-Motion” (No. 3) and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (No. 7) — and 11 titles on the Billboard 200, led by 2001’s Fever at No. 3. Her 2023 single “Padam Padam” won the first Grammy for Best Pop Dance Recording. Cave and the Bad Seeds, meanwhile, continue their 2026 European tour in support of their catalogue, one of the most acclaimed in modern alternative rock.

Rock legend Patti Smith was giddy and almost at a loss for words when she met Friday (July 31) with Pope Leo XIV.

“Hi,” she said softly as she sat down across from Leo at his desk in the Apostolic Palace.

Post-meeting, on Instagram, she had a bit more to say: “This is a moment that shall forever produce a smile,” she wrote of the encounter.

Wearing a crucifix necklace and hair in her trademark braids, Smith has become an increasingly visible presence at the Vatican thanks to her friendship with the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary in the Vatican’s culture ministry.

She has said that while she is not Catholic, she was drawn in particular to Pope Francis and his “gentle, open, and steadfast sense of humanity.”

She also had a thing for Pope John Paul I: Her 1979 tune “Wave” is about a make-believe conversation with the pope who had just died after a 33-day papacy. It begins “Hi. Hi,” uttered in the same breathy voice Smith used with Leo on Friday.

The pope clearly was familiar with the tune. “That was marvelous,” he said.

Earlier this year, Smith performed during the inauguration of the Holy See’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale contemporary art fair. The occasion, May 8, was the anniversary of Leo’s election.

Spadaro, who joined Smith at Friday’s audience, said the encounter between the two Chicago natives was around 40 minutes long. In a text message, he said it “felt more like a conversation between two people discovering they were old friends, sharing memories woven from words and music, dreams, visions, and hopes — both from yesterday and for today.”

He said at the end, Smith said “Bye. Bye.”

Smith met Francis in 2013 and sang for him in 2014. When he died, on April 21, 2025, she wrote a poem on social media, comparing Francis to a dandelion, “humble yet strong.”

“Nature and poetry and the suffering shall miss their champion,” she wrote.

It was Leo’s second encounter with a music legend this week. On Wednesday, Leo attended a concert in his honor by tenor Andrea Bocelli.

The family of Glen Hansard has announced details of the Irish singer-songwriter’s public memorial and funeral following his death.

A public wake for Hansard will be held at the Baroque Chapel at IMMA, Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin on Monday (Aug. 3) from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“Glen will lie in repose for those wishing to pay their respects,” Hansard’s family wrote in a statement released Friday (July 31).

Hansard’s funeral service will take place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday (Aug. 4). The service will be open to the public, though access inside the cathedral will be “extremely limited” due to the large number of mourners expected.

The funeral will also be broadcast live on Irish news outlets RTE News and RIP.IE.

“Music at the funeral will be provided by Glen’s friends and family,” the statement added.

Hansard’s family also asked well-wishers to forgo flowers and gifts in favor of donations to Dublin’s Simon Community, which provides services to people experiencing homelessness, or Ukrainian Action.

“The family kindly asks that the privacy of Glen’s family and friends be respected at this time,” the statement says.

Hansard, the Oscar-winning singer-songwriter and Once star who fronted The Frames and was one half of the duo The Swell Season, died on July 29 following a motorcycle crash near his home in Dublin. He was 56.

Following his death, the beloved Irish troubadour was remembered by dozens of fellow artists, including U2’s Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Billie Eilish, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“Sometimes I would wonder if Glen Hansard really existed…. Seriously, he was such an angelic presence… not otherworldly…in fact, very present this presence… A smiling rascal if you needed him to be… this most musical and mischievous archangel of Ballymun… no airs, plenty of graces,” Bono wrote on X.

Modest Mouse has announced that guitarist Simon O’Connor will not join the band’s upcoming North American tour following allegations that he sent inappropriate social media messages to a minor.

In an Instagram post shared Friday (July 31) and captioned “Upcoming tour update,” the indie rock band revealed that O’Connor will be replaced on the trek by Les Savy Fav guitarist Seth Jabour.

“Simon O’Conner will not be joining us on the upcoming tour,” Modest Mouse wrote in the statement. “The good news is that Seth Jabour of Les Savy Fav will be jumping in to play guitar. We look forward to being out there with you all.”

The band did not provide further details about O’Connor’s status beyond the upcoming tour or indicate whether he remains a member of Modest Mouse. Billboard has reached out to the band’s representatives for comment.

The announcement comes as Modest Mouse prepares to tour in support of its eighth studio album, An Eraser and a Maze, released in June. The North American run begins Aug. 4 at Libbey Bowl in Ojai, California, and wraps Oct. 24 in Sacramento.

O’Connor, who joined Modest Mouse in 2021, was accused in late July by a Reddit user who said they were 17 years old of sending them “an erotic image” and commenting on their “bikini pics.” The user alleged they were 16 years old when the photos referenced were taken.

The guitarist later responded to the allegations in a Reddit post, writing that he “unequivocally” opposes “any sexual behavior towards minors.” He also claimed he mistakenly believed the Reddit user was someone who had repeatedly created fake social media accounts to troll him.

“Throughout my adult life, there has been a person who has popped up from time to time with the intention of, for lack of a better term, messing with me,” O’Connor wrote. “This person creates multiple social media accounts and deletes them… but always posts similar photos that I often recognize from previous accounts.”

He continued, “I assumed that this was the same person I had dealt with before and, with poor judgement, I decided to reach out with a tasteless meme, a sticker that read ‘Simon calls your bluff,’ and an attempt to indicate that I recognized the ‘barrage of likes’ and similar photo content from the previous profiles…. Almost a ‘gotcha.’ After a few minutes, I realized that I had made a mistake and this was not the person who I had dealt with before. I unsent the messages and immediately ceased communication.”

See Modest Mouse’s Instagram post below.

Lil Uzi Vert turned a scrapped festival set into a celebration on Friday (July 31), surprising fans with a new EP on their 31st birthday hours after a last-minute Lollapalooza cancellation.

The eight-track project, Maverick “Almost Forever,” is the Philadelphia rapper’s first release in two years, and arrives with cover art depicting a young Uzi alongside their grandmother.

The drop landed on a date with history in Uzi’s catalogue: exactly a decade earlier, on July 31, 2016, they released The Perfect LUV Tape, which debuted at No. 55 on the Billboard 200 and has since been certified gold by the RIAA. Uzi had teased new material as recently as mid-July, sharing an Instagram Story showing work on a studio project.

The release followed the abrupt cancellation of Uzi’s Lollapalooza set at Grant Park in Chicago, where they had been slated to perform Friday evening ahead of headliner Charli XCX.

Lollapalooza’s official statement attributed the cancellation to “weather issues,” and NBC Chicago separately reported the cancellation was tied to the heavy rain and stormy conditions that swept the area throughout the day. Zara Larsson was moved up to fill the slot.

The birthday release extends a run that has made Uzi one of the most commercially dominant hip-hop artists of their generation. They have topped the Billboard 200 three times — with Eternal Atake (2020), its deluxe reissue Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2 (2020) and Pink Tape (2023) — and scored a Hot 100 No. 1 as a featured artist on Migos’ “Bad and Boujee” in 2017. Their own “XO Tour Llif3” reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and is certified diamond by the RIAA.

Maverick “Almost Forever” arrives as Lollapalooza 2026 continues through Aug. 2 at Grant Park, with Smashing Pumpkins, Mustard and Yungblud among the acts who performed Friday.

Smashing Pumpkins turned their Lollapalooza headline set into a generational summit on Thursday (July 31), with Billy Corgan bringing out Olivia Rodrigo and Yungblud as surprise guests for a pair of nineties deep cuts in Chicago.

The set marked the Chicago-bred band’s first Lollapalooza headlining slot in 32 years — they last played the festival in 1994, during its original touring incarnation, on a bill alongside the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest and Green Day. Corgan, a lifelong Chicagoan, had spent the week leading up to the performance staging a hometown celebration dubbed “Pumpkinpalooza,” including a sold-out underplay show at the 2,500-capacity Riviera Theatre, a merch pop-up near Grant Park, and a roving version of Madame Zuzu’s, the teahouse he owns with wife Chloé Mendel.

Yungblud arrived first onstage, taking his spot less than an hour after his own festival set to sing “Luna,” the closing track from the band’s 1993 breakthrough Siamese Dream. The British rocker, dressed in black to match Corgan, handled the song’s soaring falsetto as Corgan backed him on guitar. “This is a f—ing dream come true,” Yungblud told the crowd.

Rodrigo followed, introduced by Corgan as “a very, very special guest.” She appeared in a sheer dress and knee-high stockings to sing “Thirty-Three,” the fifth single from the band’s 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with Corgan switching to acoustic guitar as the stage was bathed in red light.

The pairings carried a certain lineage. Rodrigo has been open about the influence nineties alt-rock had on her sound, and both guests represent chart eras the Pumpkins helped make possible. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness remains the band’s commercial high point — it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1995 with 246,500 first-week units, the only Pumpkins album ever to top the chart, and was certified diamond by the RIAA for sales exceeding 10 million.

Its singles ran deep: “1979” became the band’s biggest Hot 100 hit at No. 12 and their only No. 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, while “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” won the 1997 Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. The album earned seven Grammy nominations in all. Siamese Dream, the source of “Luna,” has been certified four-times platinum.

Rodrigo, for her part, arrived as one of the defining pop breakouts of the decade. Her 2021 debut SOUR and its 2023 follow-up GUTS both entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1, and she has scored multiple Hot 100 chart-toppers, including “Drivers License,” “Good 4 U” and “Vampire.” Yungblud has been threading the same alternative lineage: he won his first Grammy earlier this year, for Best Rock Performance, for his rendition of “Changes” at Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell Black Sabbath concert, and his Aerosmith collaboration EP One More Time reached the top 10 of the Billboard 200 in November.

The guest spots capped a week of nineties nostalgia. At a Lollapalooza aftershow earlier in the run, the Pumpkins brought out actor Barry Williams — Greg from The Brady Bunch — to perform the sitcom’s Seventies novelty hit “It’s a Sunshine Day,” and reunited with former touring bassist Melissa Auf der Maur for “The Everlasting Gaze,” from 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.

The band now turns to its most ambitious outing in years: The Rats in the Cage tour, launching Sept. 30 in Columbus, Ohio, built around a set marking the 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness alongside a career-spanning second act.

During a recent appearance on Talk With Flee, Cam’ron and co-host Sen City were talking about sample clearances when Sen brought up Killa’s “Pull It” collab with DMX, and asked if he had any memorable stories he was willing to share about the late rapper.

That’s when Cam could barely keep himself together as he told a story about the time the two were staying in a hotel and X had allegedly set up a fight between his dog and a raccoon. “I was filming Paid in Full the same time he was filming [Cradle 2 the Grave] with Jet Li,” he began by saying, “We were both staying in the same hotel at the same time in Connecticut. And he had a dog, I can’t remember if it was Boomer or not — rest in peace, Boomer, you know he loved Boomer — but he had a dog in the hotel with him and we kept bumping into each other. And he’s like, ‘Yo, bro, what you doing later?’ And I’m like, ‘I just gotta film, I’ll be back’ and he said, ‘Oh, aight, good. You gonna be done by 7?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll be back’ and he said, ‘Oh, cool, 7:30 we gonna be at the back of the hotel. Boomer is gonna fight this raccoon.’” [Ed. note: Billboard does not endorse animal fights. PETA considers staged animal fighting to be “cruel.”]

Adding, “How do you know where a raccoon gonna be at, at 7:30? How’d you set this match up with your dog and a raccoon to fight a n—a at 7:30 to where all parties are gonna be available to fight this raccoon.”

He then continued by saying that he ran into DMX the next day where he learned that the dog won the bout in easy fashion. “Then I remember seeing him the next day and he was like, ‘Yo, where you was at?’ I said, ‘I forgot all about it, X. What happened? He f—ked him up?’ He said, ‘Yeah, he f—ked him up. A f—kin’ raccoon can’t fuck with my n—a.’”

“That’s probably the No. 1 story out of all the stories with DMX that stands out to me,” he continued. “This n—a knew where a raccoon was gonna be at, at a particular time, and he had everybody set up to see the fight. I actually missed it, but I heard that his dog won and s—t.”

You can watch the full episode below.

On “Girl, So Confusing,” Charli xcx and Lorde worked it out on the remix — and at Lollapalooza 2026, they worked it out on the stage.

After making a cameo at the New Zealand native’s headlining set in Chicago on Thursday (July 30), Charli shared a post on Instagram commemorating the surprise duet, writing, “the more we do this the more special it feels <3”

“love you ella,” she continued, captioning photos of herself and Lorde backstage at the festival and performing the Brat remix track. “congrats on headlining and ty for bringing me out!!!! ps i headline lolla tonight… im excited ;)”

In the comments, Lorde wrote, “Take care of it tn”

“U the f–kin one,” the “Royals” singer added.

Though the collaboration disrupted the internet when it dropped in 2024, Charli and Lorde have only sung it together live a handful of times. The two gave the remix its live debut at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in September 2024, when Charli brought out Lorde during her co-headlining show with Troye Sivan. When the British dance-pop star performed it at Coachella in 2025, Lorde joined her in the desert to assist, later inviting Charli to sing it with her during an Ultrasound World Tour stop in Los Angeles.

The two women’s ability to perform the “Girl, So Confusing” remix speaks to how far they’ve come since they first teamed up on the song. In her 2024 Billboard cover story, Charli told senior writer Kristin Robinson that she originally penned it about ambiguous, unspoken tension she felt with Lorde.

“Then the day before the record came out, I left her a voice note,” Charli said at the time. “[Lorde] replied straight away and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I’m so sorry.’ And then was like, ‘You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.’ I didn’t even ask her. She brought it up.”

“I love that we truly did work it out on the remix,” Lorde added in the same article. “Only Charli could make that happen. She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said.”

As Charli noted in her post, she will now take the baton from Lorde and headline night two of this year’s Lolla on Friday (July 31), following sets from Zara Larsson, Lil Uzi Vert, Yungblud, Mustard and more. The festival goes all weekend, featuring respective night three and night four headliners Olivia Dean and Tate McRae.

Charli is fresh off the release of her new album, Music, Fashion, Film, which dropped July 24. Lorde’s most recent LP, Virgin, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 last year.

Bright lights, damp smells, electronic sounds bouncing from the walls. For Generation X, video game arcades were the gateway to dance parties.

PNAU made the leap. And somehow, that trip is fused into AHHCade, the electronic duo’s seventh studio album, out today (July 31) via Sydney-based indie label etcetc, part of TMRW Music.

“We started out this record trying to do something different and trying to make darker music,” co-founder Nick Littlemore explains in a sitdown chat with Billboard. “We talked about the idea of making it quite industrial, going back to my roots.”

That didn’t quite end up happening.

Instead, PNAU, the project of high school buddies Littlemore and Peter Mayes, reached deep into the memory banks, and those formative, dingy rooms that sucked up our pocket money and triggered dopamine dumps.

“Arcades were such an exciting place as kids. I don’t know if they were safe spaces, but they were exciting and they gave us a window to a future that other generations didn’t have,” Littlemore explains. In an earlier, simpler life, the young generation was “going to the arcades, making mixtapes for friends, representing yourself on your pencil case.”

Playing the “Spacies,” as Aussies of a certain vintage have in their vernacular, “the fact they weren’t necessarily that safe is a bit like going to raves. They were the precursor to going into other dark rooms, with dodgy foods being sold somewhere. And blinking lights, mad sounds. And very electronic. You were interfacing with it.”

Those sensory overload rooms were the first to enable youngsters to get a buzz by burying their faces in screens. “Music isn’t work; you don’t work music. Arcades, it’s a play time, isn’t it?,” Littlemore reckons. “There’s a playfulness to it.”

Playtime was “naive back then in a beautiful way. I never want to lose that.”

The new collection houses the previously-released belter “Tu Corazon (Your Heart)” featuring Mexican rock act The Warning; the bubbly single “Nirvana” with EARTHGANG and sadMONTH; and the new single “Serotonin,” which features Kurtis Wells and arrives today. Other features include Master Peace, Kungs, MEDUZA, Maleigh Zan, The Flints, LATASHA, and Marieme.

PNAU formed in Sydney in the mid-1990s, the golden era of Australia’s underground electronic music scene. Their debut album, Sambanova, dropped in 1999, and won an ARIA Award for best dance release. More would come, as would AIR Awards. Long-overdue international recognition came when PNAU joined forces with Elton John on the Rocket Man’s 2012 remix album Good Morning to the Night, which went to No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart. PNAU and Elton teamed up again for the 2021 remix “Cold Heart” with Dua Lipa, and landed a bonafide global monster.

PNAU will support the new release with a national tour, kicking off Sept. 19 for Brisbane’s Night at the Parkland event. Littlemore, one half of Empire of the Sun, is a reluctant touring artist. “I want to wind up my personal touring by the end of the year. Ideally. I tried to do it last year. But I would like to move just purely into production and composition,” he insists. “I’ve been making a classical album, with an amazing arranger, and all these modular synths. Oh, my God. No one’s gonna listen to her, but I’m really enjoying making it.”

Littlemore admits he and Mayes and have “100s of songs and ideas” on standby. “Songs are spells. They’re wishes and they’re spells, and you want to put good spells in the universe,” he insists. “There are enough bad spells out there, anyway.”

AHHCade brings some balance to the equation. Eleven good spells, a half-hour playtime.

Stream it in full below.