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Pop Star Maria Ellis Celebrates Self-Love with Bold New Track “Conceited”

Maria Ellis is on a mission to redefine self-confidence in her latest single, "Conceited." The track, the lead single from her upcoming EP Ultrabaddie, is an infectious anthem that dares listeners to embrace their self-worth unapologetically. As a pop/R&B sensation, Maria captivates her audience with bold lyrics and a dynamic sound that invites you to sing along while reflecting on your own experiences with self-perception.

Picture yourself in a moment of self-doubt, scrolling through social media, and feeling the pressure to present a perfect image. Now, let Maria's voice resonate in your head: “I’m a bit conceited, loudest when I’m preaching, I mean it, I mean it.” These words encourage a shift in mindset, prompting you to celebrate your individuality rather than shrink in the face of insecurity. As you play "Conceited," let the energetic beats and sultry vocals wash over you, empowering you to step into your light and appreciate your unique qualities.

https://youtu.be/hZrazoXhd7I

With the Y2K-inspired music video for "Conceited," Maria Ellis transports you to a retro-futuristic world that enhances the track's theme of self-empowerment. Imagine vibrant colors and nostalgic visuals framing a narrative of confidence and fun. It’s not just a song; it’s an experience that inspires you to connect with your inner badass. As you watch, consider how the visuals reflect your own journey. What moments in your life have led you to embrace your self-worth?

As the anticipation builds for the full Ultrabaddie EP, fans are encouraged to join the conversation on social media. Share your stories of self-empowerment and tag Maria Ellis as she invites her audience to celebrate their own journeys. With "Conceited" leading the way, this is not just about listening to music; it’s about creating a community where everyone feels empowered to express their true selves.

https://open.spotify.com/track/3AqLi4Kdmb0aCUGUvkMZsw?si=b2ac5e01f555470f

Watch an exclusive clip of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ ‘This Much I Know To Be True’ featuring Marianne Faithfull

NME have an exclusive new clip of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis‘ film This Much I Know To Be True, featuring Marianne Faithfull – check it out below.

READ MORE: This Much I Know To Be True review: an engrossing and intimate portrait of Nick Cave

The film came to cinemas for one night only last month, and the new clip arrives alongside the announcement that This Much I Know To Be True will be available to watch on the MUBI streaming service from July 8.

In the new clip, Faithfull reads the poem ‘Prayer Before Work’ by May Sarton before Cave and Ellis play through ‘Ghosteen’ track ‘Galleon Ship’.

Watch the exclusive clip on NME below.

Reviewing This Much I Know To Be True, NME wrote: “At the core of This Much I Know To Be True are sumptuously-shot performances of choice tracks from the Bad Seeds’ ethereal ‘Ghosteen’ and Cave & Ellis’ lockdown revelation record ‘Carnage’, all filmed in breathtaking arthouse style in an abandoned factory in Bristol.”

The film is a documentary meets performance film that centres around the creative relationship between Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, and looks at the creation of their most recent albums ‘Ghosteen’ and ‘CARNAGE’.

Andrew Dominik, director of the new film, recently spoke to NME about how the movie depicts how far Nick Cave has come in his journey of processing grief, saying that it presents “what Nick has learned over the past six years that he has to pass on to us”.

“Nick has survived and thrived,” said Dominik. “He’s been determined to take Arthur’s death in the most useful way that he can, and to be there for the other people. The Nick from One More Time With Feeling wouldn’t believe that the Nick from This Much I Know To Be True was possible. In that respect, this film is good for you.”

Dominik’s 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling, a devastating portrayal of Cave and his wife Susie dealing with the loss of their teenage son Arthur while the Bad Seeds were completing their 16th album ‘Skeleton Tree’, is also set to come to MUBI on August 6.

This Much I Know To Be True will be streaming exclusively around the world (ex. China) on MUBI from July 8.

Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis announce new album ‘She Walks In Beauty’

Marianne Faithfull has confirmed that she will join forces with The Bad Seeds‘ Warren Ellis on her new album ‘She Walks In Beauty’, marking the singer’s first record since a near-fatal battle with COVID-19 last year.

The new collection of poetry and music is set for release on April 30 via BMG and was recorded shortly before and during the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK, when Faithfull herself contracted the virus.

Featuring contributions from the likes of Nick Cave, Brian Eno and cellist Vincent Segal, the record draws on Faithfull’s love of the English Romantic poets, which she initially developed during her A-Level studies in the 1960s.

Describing the record, Faithfull hailed the efforts of manager Francois Ravard in making it a reality.

“It was Francois who put it together and made it happen,” she said. “And it was him who persuaded Warren to commit, which was really difficult because Warren’s doing so many things.”

Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis (Picture: Press)

Ravard added: “Marianne had a wonderful idea for this poetry record, and she wanted to do it straight away.

“I loved the idea immediately, and I called Head and asked him to go to Marianne to record her readings.

“It took time for him to realise what he could do, but afterwards he said that he’d had one of the best times in his life working on it.”

The record itself sees Faithfull delivering her take on classic poems including Lord Byron’s titular poem, as well as John Keats’ Ode To A Nightingale and Lord Alfred Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot.

“They’ve have been with Marianne her whole life,” said Ellis. “She believes in these texts. That world, she inhabits it, embodies it, and that really comes through. She really means it. It’s no blind reading. And what’s great about hearing them is that she totally takes you with her. It’s inclusive. She’s inviting you into this world with her.

“She does that with a song too. I’ve seen her do things in the studio, deliver a vocal where there’s not one dry eye in the room. And then she’d go, ‘Was that alright?’. She’s got one of those voices. There’s just something about the way she can deliver that is incredibly affecting.”

Check out the tracklis in full below.

1 She Walks in Beauty (Lord Byron)
2 The Bridge of Sighs (Thomas Hood)
3 La Belle Dame sans Merci (John Keats)
4 Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)
5 To Autumn (John Keats)
6 Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
7 The Prelude: Book One Introduction (William Wordsworth)
8 Surprised by Joy (William Wordsworth)
9 To The Moon (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
10 So We’ll Go No More a Roving (Lord Byron)
11 The Lady of Shallot (Lord Alfred Tennyson)

Hear “Burning Moonlight”, from Marianne Faithfull’s posthumous EP

A four track EP of new music by Marianne Faithfull is to be released posthumously on April 12 for Record Store Day.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Released initially as a limited-edition vinyl EP, Burning Moonlight will be available worldwide as a digital EP on June 6. You can hear the title track below.

The four new recordings are inspired by, and have their creative roots in, Faithfull’s first two albums released simultaneously 60 years ago on April 15, 1965. The EP’s executive producer Andrew Batt explains; “It was so unusual to start your career this way, so we decided to bring the music full circle. One side of the EP would be inspired by her debut pop LP Marianne Faithfull while the flip would honour her folk roots on Come My Way.”

Side 1 is a tribute to Marianne’s pop past and opens with the poignant “Burning Moonlight”, which is released today. This moving ballad of resilience and acceptance was inspired by the opening line of her debut single “As Tears Go by’ (“It is the evening of the day”) and is followed by “Love Is” an uplifting homage to her ‘60s pop sound written with her grandson Oscar Dunbar.

Side 2 of the EP reconnects Marianne to her folk background with “Three Kinsmen Bold”, a traditional song learned from her father Glynn Faithfull who had been a formative influence on her folk recordings, and a new interpretation of “She Moved Thru’ The Fair”, a song Faithfull performed throughout her life, and which she first recorded in 1966.

“It’s a good time to look back,” she said after completing the project. “It helps me to remember all the things I’ve done. I can’t say I’m a particularly nostalgic person, but I am enjoying this period of reflection.”

The EP is produced by Head with Rob Ellis, Oscar Dunbar and Andrew Batt, and includes specially commissioned artwork by the acclaimed Australian artist David Frazer.

Head first worked with Faithfull in 2004 on the album Before The Poison. “I’m so happy we found a time when Marianne felt able to write and sing again” he says. “When she asked me to produce these songs, we were all aware that her health had made things difficult but, in true Marianne fashion, she persevered, and I think we were able to go in a new direction again – something she always tried to push herself to do throughout her long career.”

Marianne Faithfull: “It’s a miracle, really…”

From Uncut’s June 2021 issue (Take 289). As she prepares to release her 22nd studio album, She Walks In Beauty, rock’s grand dame discussed recovery, Romantic poetry and how the ’60s weren’t all they were cracked up to be…

The old St Joseph’s Convent School, a red-bricked, broad-lawned building founded by the Sisters of St Marie Madeleine Postel, lies close to the centre of Reading. Marianne Faithfull first came here at the age of eight. By sixth form, her main enthusiasm was English Literature. “I sat somewhere near the middle – near the front, but not exactly at the front,” she says. “It wasn’t a very big class, but it was very important to me.”

This Spring, Faithfull releases her 22nd studio album, She Walks In Beauty, a spoken-word collection of some of her favourite Romantic poetry, scored by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, with contributions from Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal. It is a crowning moment in her career; the product of a long-held ambition to interpret works by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and their contemporaries that she has carried close since St Joseph’s. Cave calls it “the greatest Marianne Faithfull album ever. And that’s saying something.” Ellis, meanwhile, describes it to Uncut as “this incredible thing, this kind of wonder. This little bit of a miracle.”

On a midweek afternoon, Faithfull, 74, is at home in Putney, south-west London, batting away questions about ’60s infamy to recall the formative influence of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and her English teacher, Mrs Simpson.“She was very ordinary, she had white hair and glasses,” she says. “But she was really, really good. I liked her so much, and she taught me all this stuff about the Romantics. She taught me for that first year, and then of course I was torn away, and I was discovered…”

The story of how Marianne Faithfull was discovered – a teenage ingénue fêted by the in-crowd and caught up with the Stones, then duly lost to scandal and addiction, has coloured much of her career. For a long time, the popular imagination carried her as a kind of tragic muse, a victim of her own beauty and the era’s excesses. Later it recast her as a fighter, a treasure, an artist of indefatigable spirit.

Today, she sounds determined and faintly amused. She has a deeply fragrant voice, grown a little hoarse following a serious altercation with Covid that kept her in hospital for several weeks last spring. “I got terribly ill. I don’t really remember it, but apparently I almost died,” she says. “I managed not to die.”

Still, the effects of the illness have lingered – she warns we might have to conduct our interview in segments, to allow her breaks to recalibrate. “It’s been very hard to cope with,” she explains. “Particularly my lungs, because I used to smoke, and I have of course got emphysema or whatever they call it now.” She pauses. “It’s got another name, and that’s the big problem – my memory, and the fatigue. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this! Not the point!”

The point is that before she contracted Covid, Faithfull had begun work on She Walks In Beauty. “When I came out of hospital I finished it,” she says. “I was worried: would I be able to do it? But I was, amazingly enough. It’s a miracle, really. It’s beautiful, because the ones I did post-Covid are very, very vulnerable and that’s kind of lovely.”

FIND THE FULL INTERVIEW FROM UNCUT JUNE 2021/TAKE 289 IN THE ARCHIVE

Marianne Faithfull has died

Marianne Faithfull has died aged 78, at home in London, in the company of her family, according to a statement quoted by BBC News.

THE MARCH 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING WILCO, A FREE WILCO CD, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, PATTERSON HOOD, THE WHITE STRIPES AND MORE IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Faithfull rose to prominence during the 1960s, with the 1964 single “As Tears Go By” and her self-titled debut album the following year. She also starred in a number of films, including The Girl On A Motorcycle (1968), while her relationship with Mick Jagger put her at the heart of the London in-crowd.

She struggled with addiction and homelessness during the 1970s, returning in 1979 with Broken English, which re-established her as a potent musical force.

Faithfull continued to record, enjoying successful creative partnerships with long-term producer Hal Willner as well as Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Her later run of albums included career highlights like Easy Come, Easy Go (2008) and Give My Regards To London (2014).

Her final album, 2021’s She Walks In Beauty, a collaboration with Warren Ellis, found her putting Romantic poetry to music.

Marianne Faithfull Songs of Innocence And Experience, 1965-1995

Throughout her storied life, Marianne Faithfull has been in a tussle with her reputation. Sometimes it looks like a dance. Often, it is more like a fight. Though she’s now revered as an elder stateswoman and a valued collaborator – Warren Ellis is her latest pet – this compilation explores the first two acts of Faithfull’s career.

ORDER NOW: Björk is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

In the clichéd telling of it, Faithfull was manipulated and underestimated, if not exploited, during her pop career, before clambering from the wreckage and finding her own voice. If Faithfull sounded damaged – vocally, she did – the point was underlined. She has dismissed her early recordings as “cheesecake”, though her habitual flintiness has prompted others to diminish her achievements too: in a famously combative interview with Lynn Barber, the journalist tried to extract some small revenge by suggesting that Faithfull was “a singer with one good album”. In which case, why does she continue to fascinate?

The good album in Barber’s reckoning is Broken English. While it’s true that the 1979 LP marked a clear kink in the road and is widely considered to be Faithfull’s masterpiece, it now sounds like a time-stamped product of the new wave era. Those squelching synthesisers go in and out of fashion, but they have a whiff of post-punk cosplay, just as Mark Miller Mundy’s production is identifiably from the Island Records colour chart with its understated insinuations of reggae and roots. What makes the record work is the surprising harshness of Faithfull’s voice colouring the proud alienation of the songs.

The broken English thing is Faithfull, but the album’s title track – here in the 1980 single version – has a lyric which reportedly admonishes Ulrike Meinhof of the terrorist Red Army Faction, though the lyric evinces a more general mood of Cold War world-weariness. The guitar sounds like a bear taking a chainsaw to a barbed wire fence. The actual stand-out from Broken English is “Why’d Ya Do It?”, which is a bit reggae, somewhat rock, a lot Grace Jones (though Jones was still in the business of perfecting her brand of Island ice). “Why’d Ya Do It?” remains an extreme song, with a jealous Faithfull snarling through a litany of sexual grievances (cock-sucking, snatch-spitting, cobwebbed fannies). It’s interesting once, but you wouldn’t want to share a bathroom with it.

This two-disc set spans 1965–95. The title is a neat steal from a book of William Blake’s poems. So what of the cheesecake? What if we ignore the prejudices which came from Faithfull being a symbol of dumb beauty – the “angel with big tits” exploited by Andrew Loog Oldham, the girl in Mick Jagger’s rug – and listen to the songs? They are mannered, certainly. Even Faithfull’s innocence has its duality. The chamber pop songs are very 1960s, while the folk tunes are more knowing in their evocation of olden times.

Faithfull is said to prefer the folkier material, and as a performer she’s smart enough to know that heightened innocence can be chilling. “What Have They Done To The Rain?” adds percussive raindrops to Faithfull’s English rose, and – if you spritz on some sulking – contains the raw ingredients of The Jesus And Mary Chain’s entire career.

Faithfull is less convincing with more famous songs. A live version of “Yesterday” recorded for the BBC Saturday Club doesn’t quite catch the full power of the song’s yearning, and a faintly gothic folk arrangement of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is closer to Peggy Seeger than Roberta Flack, but remains underpowered.

She has better luck with Donovan and Bert Jansch. A pretty, chaste interpretation of “Sunny Goodge Street” (a previously unreleased take) clears some of the fog from Donovan’s song. “Green Are Your Eyes” (Jansch’s “Courting Blues”) has a chilly simplicity to it. “Love can be broken, though no words are spoken,” she sings, suddenly sounding more than girlish. Then there is “Hier Ou Demain”, a playful collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, written for the TV comedy musical Anna. It represents a path not taken.

The mood switches abruptly with “Sister Morphine”, which Faithfull mostly wrote (while having to fight for her credit). It’s an extraordinary lyric, sung from a hospital bed with the scream of an ambulance in the narrator’s ear. Just as it signalled a darkening of Faithfull’s perspective, it became a kind of Frankenstein, haunting her with its drug-soaked morbidity.

And so we come to the songs of experience. Looking backwards, the shadowy corners of Faithfull’s songbook define her image. “Where did it go to, my youth?” she croaks on “Truth Bitter Truth”, while on Tom Waits’ “Strange Weather” producer Hal Willner repurposes her half-spoken narrative style into the manners of a Kurt Weill cabaret. We know about “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan” (a slightly odd electro production) and the cabaret phrasing of “Strange Weather”. But listen to the way Faithfull repoints the Ruben Blades/Lou Reed song “Calm Before The Storm”, diffusing the epic pomposity of Blades’ recording, replacing it with a note of chilly resilience. It’s the Marianne Faithfull thing: stay calm, embrace the storm.

Watch new clip from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s upcoming documentary

A new clip has been shared of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s upcoming film This Much I Know To Be True – check it out below.

READ MORE: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis live in London: Minimal elements for maximum impact

The film will be released in cinemas globally on May 11, with tickets on sale for the screenings now. Grab yours here.

The first clip from This Much I Know To Be True was revealed in February, and saw Cave discuss his own definition of his artistry. A full trailer followed in March.

You can see the latest clip below, in which the pair discuss creating together.

The film, directed by Andrew Dominik, serves as a companion piece to the 2016 music documentary One More Time With Feeling, and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this month.

This Much I Know To Be True will explore Cave and Ellis’ creative relationship and feature songs from their last two studio albums, 2019’s ‘Ghosteen’ (by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) and last year’s ‘Carnage’ (by Cave and Ellis).

It will feature the first ever performances of the albums, filmed in Spring 2021 ahead of their UK tour. The film also features a special appearance by close friend and long-term collaborator, Marianne Faithfull.

It’ll also visit the workshop where Cave is “creating a series of sculptures depicting the life of the Devil”.

Cave and Ellis are providing the score for Andrew Dominik’s forthcoming Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde. The trio previously worked together on the 2007 film The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis share stirring performance from new live film

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have shared a performance from their upcoming film This Much I Know To Be True – watch it below.

The Andrew Dominik-directed movie serves as a companion piece to the 2016 music documentary One More Time With Feeling, and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in March.

READ MORE: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis live in London: Minimal elements for maximum impact

It’ll be released in cinemas globally on May 11, with the first full trailer arriving last month.

Per an official description, the project captures Cave and Ellis’ “exceptional creative relationship as they bring to life songs from albums ‘Ghosteen’ [Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds] and ‘Carnage’ [Nick Cave And Warren Ellis].

Today (April 14) the pair have released a special This Much I Know… performance of ‘Ghosteen Speaks’, which appears on the aforementioned 2019 Bad Seeds album. Tune in here:

The first clip from This Much I Know To Be True arrived in February, and saw Cave discuss his own definition of his artistry.

In the full trailer, Cave said, “We all live our lives dangerously, in a state of jeopardy, at the edge of calamity” while music from ‘Ghosteen’ played in the background.

The film features also features a special appearance by Cave and Ellis’ close friend and long-term collaborator, Marianne Faithfull.

Nice Cave and Warren recently wrapped up a North American headline tour in support of ‘Carnage’, their first-ever US tour as a duo. A run of UK dates took place throughout last September and October.

Watch full trailer for Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ film This Much I Know To Be True

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have shared a first full trailer for their upcoming film This Much I Know To Be True – check it out below.

ORDER NOW: Paul McCartney is on the cover in the latest issue of Uncut

The film will be released in cinemas globally on May 11, with tickets now on sale for the screenings. Grab yours here.

The first clip from This Much I Know To Be True was revealed last month, and saw Cave discuss his own definition of his artistry.

In the full trailer, a voiceover from Cave says: “We all live our lives dangerously, in a state of jeopardy, at the edge of calamity,” as music from Ghosteen plays in the background.

Check out the full trailer below.

The film, directed by Andrew Dominik, serves as a companion piece to the 2016 music documentary One More Time With Feeling, and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this month.

This Much I Know To Be True will explore Cave and Ellis’ creative relationship and feature songs from their last two studio albums, 2019’s Ghosteen (by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) and last year’s Carnage (by Cave and Ellis).

It will feature the first ever performances of the albums, filmed in Spring 2021 ahead of their UK tour. The film features also features a special appearance by close friend and long-term collaborator, Marianne Faithfull.

Cave and Ellis are currently on a North American headline tour in support of Carnage, their first-ever US tour as a duo.

See the remaining dates below.

MARCH
24 – Brooklyn, NY, Kings Theatre
25 – Brooklyn, NY, Kings Theatre
27 – New York, NY, Beacon Theater
28 – New York, NY, Beacon Theater
31 – Toronto, Ontario, Massey Hall

APRIL
2 – Montreal, Quebec, Place des Arts
3 – Montreal, Quebec, Place des Arts

Watch the first preview of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ film ‘This Much I Know To Be True’

The first preview of the forthcoming Nick Cave and Warren Ellis-featuring film This Much I Know To Be True has been released – you can watch the clip below.

The Andrew Dominik-directed film is set for release later this year, and will be a companion piece to the 2016 music documentary One More Time With Feeling. It’ll premiere at the Berlin Film Festival later this month.

READ MORE: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis live in London: Minimal elements for maximum impact

The first clip from This Much I Know To Be True has been released today (February 3), and begins with Cave discussing his own definition of his artistry.

The clip concludes with Ellis conducting a string quartet as Cave performs the track ‘Lavender Fields’ – you can watch the first teaser video for This Much I Know To Be True above.

The film was shot on location in London and Brighton last year, and will “document the duo’s first performances of the albums and feature a special appearance by close friend and long-term collaborator, Marianne Faithfull“ (via Deadline).

It’ll also visit the workshop where Cave is “creating a series of sculptures depicting the life of the Devil”.

Cave and Ellis are providing the score for Dominik’s forthcoming Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde. The trio previously worked together on the 2007 film The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.

‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ singer María Mendiola has died

María Mendiola, best known as one half of Spanish duo Baccara who sang disco anthem ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, has died aged 69.

The singer died on Saturday morning (September 11) in Madrid surrounded by her family. Her death was confirmed by bandmate Cristina Sevilla on Baccara’s official Instagram page.

“How difficult it is for me to publish this,” Sevilla’s post began. “My dear Maria, wonderful artist, but for me above all … My friend, has left us today. Words cannot come out … I can only thank so much love how I have received from her part and tell her what so many times I had the opportunity to say to her in life … I love you.”

Mendiola’s family also released a statement, writing: “She will always be remembered for her love, dedication and respect for the world of music and interpretation. We will always remember her smile.”

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A post shared by BACCARA (@baccaraoficial)

Mendiola formed Baccara in 1977 with another singer, Mayte Mateos, who met when they were both flamenco dancers on the island of Fuerteventura. After being talent-spotted by a record label executive, the duo were signed to RCA Records in the UK.

Their first single, ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, topped the charts in 10 European countries in 1977, including the UK, and has since gone on to become a disco classic. It has sold over 16 million copies to date.

The song was subsequently covered by the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, The Fratellis and Goldfrapp, and earned a new lease of life earlier this summer when the Scottish international football team adopted it as an unofficial anthem at Euro 2020.

“I never thought I’d be in the charts again. I am not young any more but I guess it shows I can still boogie,” Mendiola said at the time. “The Scotland team has reminded people we exist, which is very nice.”

The duo’s 1977 self-titled debut album was released on the heels of ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, becoming an instant success. Its follow-up single, ‘Sorry I’m A Lady’ gave Baccara another Top 10 hit in early 1978.

That same year the duo entered the Eurovision Song Contest with the novelty song ‘Parlez-Vous Français?’. Representing Luxembourg, they took seventh place, losing to Israel’s Izar Cohen and the song ‘A-Ba-Ni-Bi’.

The band would release two more albums, but by the mid-80s Mendiola and Mateos went their separate ways, launching two competing versions of Baccara (called Baccara and New Baccara) who each recorded and toured separately.

Mendiola’s incarnation of the band – New Baccara, featuring co-vocalist Marisa Pérez – scored a trio of club hits in the 1980s with the songs ‘Touch Me’, ‘Fantasy Boy’ and ‘Call Me Up’. They also appeared on the 2004 ITV reality show Hit Me Baby One More Time, in which former pop stars performed their biggest hit along with a cover version.

Pérez stepped away from the band in 2008 after being diagnosed with arthritis, and was replaced by Cristina Sevilla.

Marianne Faithfull doesn’t know if she’ll sing again after COVID-19 battle

Marianne Faithfull has said that her near-fatal battle with coronavirus may have robbed her of the ability to sing.

The 73-year-old artist was hospitalised in March 2020 after developing coronavirus symptoms. After 22 days of treatment, she was discharged from hospital and returned to her London home in April.

Speaking to the LA Times in a new interview, Faithfull admitted that she is still feeling the effects of the virus over a year since her initial hospitalisation.

“The damage has been very bad. It’s my lungs, my memory and fatigue. It couldn’t be worse. I don’t know if I will ever be able to sing again. I have singing practice once a week, and I’m doing my best, but it’s very hard.

“I love touring, and it’s breaking my heart that I might possibly not be able to do it again. But I think there are ways around that, like filming. I might be able to do five shows one day: London, Paris, Berlin and two others. But I won’t be able to travel. I’m in Europe and here I’ll stay. That’s OK. I really am European.”

Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis. Credit: Press

The latest comments from the ’60s icon come after she previously opened up on her close brush with death.

“All I know is that I was in a very dark place – presumably, it was death,” she told The Guardian, adding that once she recovered she read her medical notes and found the phrase “palliative care only”.

Tomorrow (April 30) sees Faithfull releasing her new album ‘She Walks In Beauty’, a collaborative effort with Warren Ellis of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

The new collection of poetry and music was recorded shortly before and during the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK.

Marianne Faithfull: “I managed not to die!”

The new issue of Uncut – in shops now or available to buy online by clicking here, with free P&P for the UK – includes a candid interview with Marianne Faithfull about new album She Walks In Beauty, the latest instalment in her remarkable career as rock’s most regal survivor, completed after her hospitalisation with Covid-19. She tells Laura Barton about recovery, Romantic poetry and how, perhaps, the ’60s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Here’s an extract…

On a midweek afternoon, Faithfull, 74, is at home in Putney, south-west London, batting away questions about ’60s infamy to recall the formative influence of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and her English teacher, Mrs Simpson.“She was very ordinary, she had white hair and glasses,” she says. “But she was really, really good. I liked her so much, and she taught me all this stuff about the Romantics. She taught me for that first year, and then of course I was torn away, and I was discovered…”

She Walks In Beauty, her 22nd studio album, is a spoken-word collection of some of her favourite Romantic poetry, scored by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, with contributions from Nick Cave, Brian Eno and Vincent Ségal. It is a crowning moment in her career; the product of a long-held ambition to interpret works by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and their contemporaries that she has carried close since St Joseph’s. Cave calls it “the greatest Marianne Faithfull album ever. And that’s saying something.” Ellis, meanwhile, describes it to Uncut as “this incredible thing, this kind of wonder. This bit of a little miracle.”

You can read the full interview in the June 2021 issue of Uncut, out now with Bob Dylan on the cover and available to buy direct from us here.

Kendrick Lamar cleans up at the Grammys 2026 see the full list of winners

Kendrick Lamar was the big winner at the 2026 Grammy Awards, picking up a total of five trophies – see the complete list of winners below.

Lamar had gone into the night leading the nominations with nine, and ran out with Record Of The Year for his SZA collaboration ‘Luther’, as well as all four rap-specific categories, thanks to his sixth album ‘GNX’.

His nine nominations had put him two places ahead of Lady Gaga, Jack Antonoff and producer Cirkut, who all sat on seven.

Other major winners were Bad Bunny, who won Album Of The Year for ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’, Billie Eilish, who claimed Song Of The Year for ‘Wildflower’, and Olivia Dean, who won the prestigious Best New Artist prize.

It was also a night of significant political protest, with Bad Bunny giving a fiery anti-ICE speech from the stage, and Eilish and Dean among the others to use the platform to speak out against the Trump administration.

The 2026 Grammy nominations and winners so far are:

Album of the Year
Bad Bunny – ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ – WINNER
Justin Bieber – ‘Swag’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Man’s Best Friend’
Clipse – ‘Let God Sort Em Out’
Lady Gaga – ‘Mayhem’
Kendrick Lamar – ‘GNX’
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’
Tyler, the Creator – ‘Chromakopia’

Record of the Year
Bad Bunny – ‘DtMF’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Billie Eilish – ‘Wildflower’
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’ – WINNER
Chappell Roan – ‘The Subway’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’

Song of the Year
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’
Bad Bunny – ‘DtMF’
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Billie Eilish – ‘Wildflower’ – WINNER

Best New Artist
Olivia Dean – WINNER
KATSEYE
The Marias
Addison Rae
Sombr
Leon Thomas
Alex Warren
Lola Young

Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical
Amy Allen – WINNER
Edgar Barrera
Jessie Jo Dillon
Tobias Jesso Jr.
Laura Veltz

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical
Dan Auerbach
Cirkut – WINNER
Dijon
Blake Mills
Sounwave

Best Pop Solo Performance
Justin Bieber – ‘Daisies’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Lady Gaga – ‘Disease’
Chappell Roan – ‘The Subway’
Lola Young – ‘Messy’ – WINNER

Best Pop Vocal Album
Justin Bieber – ‘Swag’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Man’s Best Friend’
Miley Cyrus – ‘Something Beautiful’
Lady Gaga – ‘Mayhem’ – WINNER
Teddy Swims – ‘I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2)’

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance
Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande – ‘Defying Gravity’ – WINNER
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’
KATSEYE – ‘Gabriela’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’
SZA with Kendrick Lamar – ‘30 for 30’

Best Dance Pop Recording
Selena Gomez & benny blanco – ‘Bluest Flame’
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’ – WINNER
Zara Larsson – ‘Midnight Sun’
Tate McRae – ‘Just Keep Watching’
PinkPantheress – ‘Illegal’

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album
Laila Biali – ‘Wintersongs’
Jennifer Hudson – ‘The Gift Of Love’
Elton John & Brandi Carlile – ‘Who Believes In Angels?’
Lady Gaga – ‘Harlequin’
Laufey – ‘A Matter Of Time’ – WINNER
Barbra Streisand – ‘The Secret Of Life: Partners, Volume 2’

Best Dance Electronic Album
FKA twigs – ‘Eusexua’ – WINNER
Fred again.. – ‘Ten Days’
PinkPantheress – ‘Fancy That’
Rüfüs Du Sol – ‘Inhale / Exhale’
Skrillex – ‘Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <3>

Best Dance/Electronic Recording
Disclosure & Anderson .Paak – ‘No Cap’
Fred again.., Skepta, & PlaqueBoyMax – ‘Victory Lap’
Kaytranada – ‘Space Invader’
Skrillex – ‘Voltage’
Tame Impala – ‘End of Summer’ – WINNER

Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical
Lady Gaga and Gesaffelstein – ‘Abracadabra (Gesaffelstein remix)’ – WINNER
Mariah Carey and Kaytranada – ‘Don’t Forget About Us’
Soul II Soul – ‘A Dreams A Dream (Ron Trent remix)’
The Chemical Brothers and Chris Lake – ‘Galvanize (Chris Lake remix)’
Hunt/x, Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami – ‘Golden (David Guetta remix)’

Best Rap Album
Clipse – ‘Let God Sort Em Out’
GloRilla – ‘Glorious’
JID – ‘God Does Like Ugly’
Kendrick Lamar – ‘GNX’ – WINNER
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Chromakopia’

Best Rap Song
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Clipse featuring John Legend and Voices of Fire – ‘The Birds Don’t Sing’
Tyler, The Creator featuring GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne – ‘Sticky’
GloRilla – ‘TGIF’
Kendrick Lamar featuring Lefty Gunplay – ‘TV Off’ – WINNER

Best Melodic Rap Performance
Fridayy featuring Meek Mill – ‘Proud Of Me’
JID featuring Ty Dolla $ign & 6Lack – ‘Wholeheartedly’
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’ – WINNER
Terrace Martin and Kenyon Dixon featuring Rapsody – ‘WeMaj’
PartyNextDoor and Drake – ‘Somebody Loves Me’

Best Rap Performance
Cardi B – ‘Outside’
Clipse featuring Kendrick Lamar and Pharrell Williams – ‘Chains & Whips’ – WINNER
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Tyler, The Creator featuring Teezo Touchdown – ‘Darling, I’

Best R&B Album
Givēon – ‘Beloved’
Coco Jones – ‘Why Not More?’
Ledisi – ‘The Crown’
Teyana Taylor – ‘Escape Room’
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’ – WINNER

Best R&B Song
Kehlani – ‘Folded’ – WINNER
Summer Walker – ‘Heart Of A Woman’
Chris Brown Featuring Bryson Tiller – ‘It Depends’
Durand Bernarr – ‘Overqualified’
Leon Thomas – ‘Yes It Is’

Best R&B Performance
Justin Bieber – ‘Yukon’
Chris Brown featuring Bryson Tiller – ‘It Depends’
Kehlani – ‘Folded’ – WINNER
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’ (Live From NPR’s Tiny Desk)
Summer Walker – ‘Heart Of A Woman’

Best Traditional R&B Performance
Durand Bernarr – ‘Here We Are’
Lalah Hathaway – ‘Uptown’
Ledisi – ‘Love You Too’
SZA – ‘Crybaby’
Leon Thomas – ‘Vibes Don’t Lie’ – WINNER

Best Progressive R&B Album
Durand Bernarr – ‘Bloom’ – WINNER
Bilal – ‘Adjust Brightness’
Destin Conrad – ‘Love on Digital’
Flo – ‘Access All Areas’
Terrace Martin & Kenyon Dixon – ‘Come As You Are’

Best Spoken Word Poetry Album
Queen Sheba – ‘A Hurricane in Heels’
Marc Marcel – ‘Black Shaman’
Omari Hardwick & Anthony Hamilton – ‘Pages’
Saul Williams, Carlos Niño & Friends – ‘Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends At Treepeople’
Mad Skillz – ‘Words For Days Vol. 1’ – WINNER

Best Rock Album
Deftones – ‘Private Music’
Haim – ‘I Quit’
Linkin Park – ‘From Zero’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’ – WINNER
Yungblud – ‘Idols’

Best Rock Song
Nine Inch Nails – ‘As Alive As You Need Me To Be’ – WINNER
Sleep Token – ‘Caramel’
Hayley Williams – ‘Glum’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’
Yungblud – ‘Zombie’

Best Metal Performance
Dream Theater – ‘Night Terror’
Ghost – ‘Lachryma’
Sleep Token – ‘Emergence’
Spiritbox – ‘Soft Spine’
Turnstile – ‘Birds’ – WINNER

Best Rock Performance
Amyl and The Sniffers – ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’
Linkin Park – ‘The Emptiness Machine’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’
Hayley Williams – ‘Mirtazapine’
Yungblud – ‘Changes’ (Live From Villa Park, Back To The Beginning) – WINNER

Best Alternative Music Performance
Bon Iver – ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love’
The Cure – ‘Alone’ – WINNER
Turnstile – ‘Seein’ Stars’
Wet Leg – ‘Mangetout’
Hayley Williams – ‘Parachute’

Best Alternative Music Album
Bon Iver – ‘SABLE, fABLE’
The Cure – ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ – WINNER
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Don’t Tap the Glass’
Wet Leg – ‘Moisturizer’
Hayley Williams – ‘Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party’

Best Música Urbana Album
Bad Bunny – ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ – WINNER
J Balvin – ‘Mixteip’
Feid – ‘Ferxxo Vol X: Sagrado’
Nicki Nicole – ‘Naiki’
Trueno – ‘Eub Deluxe;
Yandel – ‘Sinfónico (En Vivo)’

Best Música Mexicana Album (Including Tejano)
Fuerza clada, Grupo Frontera – ‘Mala Mía’
Grupo Frontera – ‘Y Lo Que Viene’
Paola Jara – ‘Sin Rodeos’
Carín León – ‘Palabra De To’s (Seca)’ – WINNER
Bobby Pulido and Friends Una Tuya Y Una Mía – ‘Por La Puerta Grande (En Vivo)’

Best Latin Pop Album
Rauw Alejandro – ‘Cosa Nuestra’
Andrés Cepeda – ‘Bogotá (Deluxe)’
Karol G – ‘Tropicoqueta’
Natalia Lafourcade – ‘Cancionera’ – WINNER
Alejandro Sanz – ‘¿Y ahora qué?’

Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album
Aterciopelados – ‘Genes Rebeldes’
Astropical – ‘Astropical‘
Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso – ‘Papota’ – WINNER
Los Wizzards – ‘Algorhythm’
Fito Paez – ‘Novela’

Best Tropical Latin Album
Rubén Blades, Roberto Delgado & Orquesta – ‘Fotografías’
Gloria Estefan – ‘Raíces’ – WINNER
Grupo Niche – ‘Clásicos 1.0’
Alain Pérez – ‘Bingo’
Gilberto Santa Rosa – ‘Debut y Segunda Tanda, Vol. 2’

Best Jazz Performance
Chick Corea, Christian McBride and Brian Blade – ‘Windows – Live’ – WINNER
Lakecia Benjamin ft. Immanuel Wilkins and Mark Whitfield – ‘Noble Rise’
Samara Joy – ‘Peace Of Mind/Dreams Come True’
Michael Mayo – ‘Four’
Nicole Zuraitis – ‘All Stars Lead To You – Live’

Best Jazz Vocal Album
Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap – ‘Elemental’
Terri Lynne Carrington and Christie Dashiel – ‘We Insist 2025!’
Samara Joy – ‘Portrait’ – WINNER
Michael Mayo – ‘Fly’
Nicole Zuraitis – ‘Live At Vic’s Las Vegas’

Best Traditional Country Album
Charley Crockett – ‘Dollar A Day’
Lukas Nelson – ‘American Romance’
Willie Nelson – ‘Oh What A Beautiful World’
Margo Price – ‘Hard Headed Woman’
Zach Top – ‘Ain’t In It For My Health’ – WINNER

Best Contemporary Country Album
Kelsea Ballerini – ‘Patterns’
Tyler Childers – ‘Snipe Hunter’
Eric Church – ‘Evangeline Vs. The Machine’
Jelly Roll – ‘Beautifully Broken’ – WINNER
Miranda Lambert – ‘Postcards From Texas’

Best Country Solo Performance
Tyler Childers – ‘Nose On The Grindstone’
Shaboozey – ‘Good News’
Chris Stapleton – ‘Bad As I Used To Be’ – WINNER
Zach Top – ‘I Never Lie’
Lainey Wilson – ‘Somewhere Over Laredo’

Best Country Duo/Group Performance
Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton – ‘A Song To Sing’
Reba McEntire, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson – ‘Trailblazer’
Margo Price and Tyler Childers – ‘Love Me Like You Used To Do’
Shaboozey and Jelly Roll – ‘Amen’ – WINNER
George Strait and Chris Stapleton – ‘Honky Tonk Hall Of Fame’

Best Country Song
Tyler Childers – ‘Bitin’ List’ – WINNER
Shaboozey – ‘Good News’
Zach Top – ‘I Never Lie’
Lainey Wilson – ‘Somewhere Over Laredo’
Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton – ‘A Song To Sing’

Best American Roots Performance
Jon Batiste featuring Randy Newman – ‘Lonely Avenue’
I’m With Her – ‘Ancient Light’
Jason Isbell – ‘Crimson And Clay’
Alison Krauss and Union Station – ‘Richmond On The James’
Mavis Staples – ‘Beautiful Strangers’ – WINNER

Best Americana Performance
Sierra Hull – ‘Boom’
Maggie Rose & Grace Potter – ‘Poison In My Well’
Mavis Staples – ‘Godspeed’ – WINNER
Molly Tuttle – ‘That’s Gonna Leave A Mark’
Jesse Welles – ‘Horses’

Best American Roots Song
I’m With Her – ‘Ancient Light’ – WINNER
Jon Batiste – ‘Big Money’
Jason Isbell – ‘Foxes In The Snow’
Jesse Welles – ‘Middle’
Sierra Hull – ‘Spitfire’

Best Americana Album
Jon Batiste – ‘Big Money’ – WINNER
Larkin Poe – ‘Bloom’
Willie Nelson – ‘Last Leaf On The Tree’
Molly Tuttle – ‘So Long Little Miss Sunshine’
Jesse Welles – ‘Middle’

Best Bluegrass Album
Michael Cleveland & Jason Carter – ‘Carter & Cleveland’
Sierra Hull – ‘A Tip Toe High Wire’
Alison Krauss & Union Station – ‘Arcadia’
The Steeldrivers – ‘Outrun’
Billy Strings – ‘Highway Prayers’ – WINNER

Best Traditional Blues Album
Buddy Guy – ‘Ain’t Done With The Blues’ – WINNER
Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’ – ‘Room On The Porch’
Maria Muldaur – ‘One Hour Mama: The Blues Of Victoria Spivey’
Charlie Musselwhite – ‘Look Out Highway’
Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Bobby Rush – ‘Young Fashioned Ways’

Best Contemporary Blues Album
Joe Bonamassa – ‘Breakthrough’
Samantha Fish – ‘Paper Doll’
Eric Gales – ‘A Tribute To LJK’
Robert Randolph – ‘Preacher Kids’ – WINNER
Southern Avenue – ‘Family’

Best Folk Album
Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson – ‘What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow’
Patty Griffin – ‘Crown Of Roses’
I’m With Her – ‘Wild And Clear And Blue’ – WINNER
Jason Isbell – ‘Foxes In The Snow’
Jesse Welles – ‘Under The Powerlines (April 24 – September 24)’

Best Gospel Performance/Song
Kirk Franklin – ‘Do It Again’
Tasha Cobbs Leonard, John Legend – ‘Church’
Jonathan McReynolds & Jamal Roberts – ‘Still’ (Live)
Pastor Mike Jr – ‘Amen’
Cece Winans featuring Shirley Caesar – ‘Come Jesus Come’ – WINNER

Best African Music Performance
Burna Boy – ‘Love’
Davido Featuring Omah Lay – ‘With You’
Eddy Kenzo & Mehran Matin – ‘Hope & Love’
Ayra Starr featuring Wizkid – ‘Gimme Dat’
Tyla – ‘Push 2 Start’ – WINNER

Best Global Music Performance
Bad Bunny – ‘EoO’ – WINNER
Ciro Hurtado – ‘Cantando en el Camino’
Angélique Kidjo – ‘Jerusalema’
Yeisy Rojas – ‘Inmigrante Y Que?’
Shakti – ‘Shrini’s Dream’ (Live)
Anoushka Shankar featuring Alam Khan & Sarathy Korwar – ‘Daybreak’

Best Global Music Album
Siddhant Bhatia – ‘Sounds Of Kumbha’
Burna Boy – ‘No Sign of Weakness’
Youssou N’Dour – ‘Eclairer le monde – Light the World’
Shakti – ‘Mind Explosion’ (50th Anniversary Tour Live)
Anoushka Shankar featuring Alam Khan & Sarathy Korwar – ‘Chapter III: We Return To Light’
Caetano Veloso And Maria Bethânia – ‘Caetano e Bethânia Ao Vivo’ – WINNER

Best Musical Theater Album
‘Buena Vista Social Club’ – WINNER
‘Death Becomes Her’
‘Gypsy’
‘Just In Time’
‘Maybe Happy Ending’

Best Reggae Album
Lila Iké – ‘Treasure Self Love’
Vybz Kartel – ‘Heart & Soul’
Keznamdi – ‘Blxxd & Fyah’ – WINNER
Mortimer – ‘From Within’
Jesse Royal – ‘No Place Like Home’

Best Comedy Album
Bill Burr – ‘Drop Dead Years’
Sarah Silverman – ‘PostMortem’
Ali Wong – ‘Single Lady’
Jamie Foxx – ‘What Had Happened Was…’
Nate Bargatze – ’Your Friend, Nate Bargatze’ – WINNER

Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording
Kathy Garver – Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story
Trevor Noah – Into The Uncut Grass
Ketanji Brown Jackson – Lovely One: A Memoir
Dalai Lama – Meditations: The Reflections Of His Holiness The Dalai Lama – WINNER
Fab Morvan – You Know It’s True: The Real Story Of Milli Vanilli

Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media
Timothée Chalamet – A Complete Unknown
Various Artists – F1® The Album
Various Artists – KPop Demon Hunters
Various Artists – Sinners – WINNER
Various Artists – Wicked

Best Song Written For Visual Media
Nine Inch Nails – ‘As Alive As You Need Me To Be’ (from Tron: Ares)
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’ (from KPop Demon Hunters) – WINNER
Miles Caton – ‘I Lied to You’ (from Sinners)
Elton John and Brandi Carlile – ‘Never Too Late’ (from Elton John: Never Too Late)
Jayme Lawson – ‘Pale, Pale Moon’ (from Sinners)
Rod Wave – ‘Sinners’ (from Sinners)

Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media (Includes Film and Television)
John Powell – How to Train Your Dragon
Theodore Shapiro – Severance: Season 2
Ludwig Göransson – Sinners – WINNER
John Powell & Stephen Schwartz – Wicked
Kris Bowers – The Wild Robot

Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media
Pinar Toprak – Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora
Wilbert Roger II – Helldivers 2
Gordy Haab – Indiana Jones And The Great Circle
Cody Matthew Johnson and Wilbert Roget II – Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card & A Pirate’s Fortune
Austin Wintory – Sword Of The Sea – WINNER

Best Music Video
Sade – ‘Young Lion’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Clipse – ‘So Be It’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’ – WINNER
OK Go – ‘Love’

Best Music Film
Devo – Devo
Raye – Live at the Royal Albert Hall
Diane Warren – Relentless
John Williams – Music by John Williams – WINNER
Pharrell Williams – Piece by Piece

Best Historical Album
Joni Mitchell Archives – Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980) – WINNER
The Making Of Five Leaves Left
Roots Rocking Zimbabwe: The Modern Sound Of Harare Townships 1975-1980 (Analog Africa No. 41)
Super Disco Pirata: De Tepito Para El Mundo 1965-1980 (Analog Africa No. 39)
You Can’t Hip A Square: The Doc Pomus Songwriting Demos

Best Album Cover
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Chromakopia’ (Shaun Llewellyn & Luis “Panch” Perez) – WINNER
Djo – ‘The Crux’ (William Wesley II)
Bad Bunny – ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’ (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio)
Perfume Genius – ‘Glory’ (Cody Critcheloe & Andrew J.S.)
Wet Leg – ‘Moisturizer’ (Hester Chambers, Ellis Durand, Henry Holmes, Matt de Jong, Jamie-James Medina, Joshua Mobaraki & Rhian Teasdale)

Grammys 2026: Check out the full list of nominations

Kendrick Lamar leads the way at the 2026 Grammy nominations with nine nods – see the full list of nominations below.

The Recording Academy announced the full list of nominees on their YouTube channel today (November 7) and the ceremony is due to take place in Los Angeles on February 1, with CBS and Paramount+ set to broadcast the show live.

Lamar leads the way thanks to his sixth album ‘GNX’, which was released last November. His nine nominations put him two places ahead of Lady Gaga, Jack Antonoff and producer Cirkut, who all sit on seven, while Sabrina Carpenter, Leon Thomas, Serban Ghenea and Bad Bunny all have six.

Lamar, Gaga, Carpenter and Bad Bunny are also all up for all three of the ‘major’ Grammy categories – Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year, with Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Tyler, The Creator among the other artists picking up nominations in those categories.

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There are four nominations for ‘Golden’, the hit song from KPop Demon Hunters, while Bon Iver, The Cure, Wet Leg and Hayley Williams will fight it out with Tyler, The Creator for Best Alternative Music Album.

The eligibility period was from August 31, 2024 to August 30, 2025, meaning records released since that date, including Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’, were ineligible.

The 2026 Grammy nominations are:

Album of the Year
Bad Bunny – ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’
Justin Bieber – ‘Swag’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Man’s Best Friend’
Clipse – ‘Let God Sort Em Out’
Lady Gaga – ‘Mayhem’
Kendrick Lamar – ‘GNX’
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’
Tyler, the Creator – ‘Chromakopia’

Record of the Year
Bad Bunny – ‘DtMF’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Billie Eilish – ‘Wildflower’
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’
Chappell Roan – ‘The Subway’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’

Song of the Year
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’
Bad Bunny – ‘DtMF’
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’ (from KPop Demon Hunters)
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Billie Eilish – ‘Wildflower’

Best New Artist
Olivia Dean
KATSEYE
The Marias
Addison Rae
Sombr
Leon Thomas
Alex Warren
Lola Young

Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical
Amy Allen
Edgar Barrera
Jessie Jo Dillon
Tobias Jesso Jr.
Laura Veltz

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical
Dan Auerbach
Cirkut
Dijon
Blake Mills
Sounwave

Best Pop Solo Performance
Justin Bieber – ‘Daisies’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Lady Gaga – ‘Disease’
Chappell Roan – ‘The Subway’
Lola Young – ‘Messy’

Best Pop Vocal Album
Justin Bieber – ‘Swag’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Man’s Best Friend’
Miley Cyrus – ‘Something Beautiful’
Lady Gaga – ‘Mayhem’
Teddy Swims – ‘I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2)’

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance
Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande – ‘Defying Gravity’
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’
KATSEYE – ‘Gabriela’
Rosé and Bruno Mars – ‘APT.’
SZA with Kendrick Lamar – ‘30 for 30’

Best Dance Pop Recording
Selena Gomez & benny blanco – ‘Bluest Flame’
Lady Gaga – ‘Abracadabra’
Zara Larsson – ‘Midnight Sun’
Tate McRae – ‘Just Keep Watching’
PinkPantheress – ‘Illegal’

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album
Laila Biali – ‘Wintersongs’
Jennifer Hudson – ‘The Gift Of Love’
Elton John & Brandi Carlile – ‘Who Believes In Angels?’
Lady Gaga – ‘Harlequin’
Laufey – ‘A Matter Of Time’
Barbra Streisand – ‘The Secret Of Life: Partners, Volume 2’

Best Dance Electronic Album
FKA twigs – ‘Eusexua’
Fred again.. – ‘Ten Days’
PinkPantheress – ‘Fancy That’
Rüfüs Du Sol – ‘Inhale / Exhale’
Skrillex – ‘Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <3>

Best Rap Album
Clipse – ‘Let God Sort Em Out’
GloRilla – ‘Glorious’
JID – ‘God Does Like Ugly’
Kendrick Lamar – ‘GNX’
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Chromakopia’

Best Rap Song
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Clipse featuring John Legend and Voices of Fire – ‘The Birds Don’t Sing’
Tyler, The Creator featuring GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne – ‘Sticky’
GloRilla – ‘TGIF’
Kendrick Lamar featuring Lefty Gunplay – ‘TV Off’

Best Melodic Rap Performance
Fridayy featuring Meek Mill – ‘Proud Of Me’
JID featuring Ty Dolla $ign & 6Lack – ‘Wholeheartedly’
Kendrick Lamar with SZA – ‘Luther’
Terrace Martin and Kenyon Dixon featuring Rapsody – ‘WeMaj’
PartyNextDoor and Drake – ‘Somebody Loves Me’

Best Rap Performance
Cardi B – ‘Outside’
Clipse featuring Kendrick Lamar and Pharrell Williams – ‘Chains & Whips’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
Tyler, The Creator featuring Teezo Touchdown – ‘Darling, I’

Best R&B Album
Givēon – ‘Beloved’
Coco Jones – ‘Why Not More?’
Ledisi – ‘The Crown’
Teyana Taylor – ‘Escape Room’
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’

Best R&B Song
Kehlani – ‘Folded’
Summer Walker – ‘Heart Of A Woman’
Chris Brown Featuring Bryson Tiller – ‘It Depends’
Durand Bernarr – ‘Overqualified’
Leon Thomas – ‘Yes It Is’

Best R&B Performance
Justin Bieber – ‘Yukon’
Chris Brown featuring Bryson Tiller – ‘It Depends’
Kehlani – ‘Folded’
Leon Thomas – ‘Mutt’ (Live From NPR’s Tiny Desk)
Summer Walker – ‘Heart Of A Woman’

Best Traditional R&B Performance
Durand Bernarr – ‘Here We Are’
Lalah Hathaway – ‘Uptown’
Ledisi – ‘Love You Too’
SZA – ‘Crybaby’
Leon Thomas – ‘Vibes Don’t Lie’

Best Progressive R&B Album
Durand Bernarr – ‘Bloom’
Bilal – ‘Adjust Brightness’
Destin Conrad – ‘Love on Digital’
Flo – ‘Access All Areas’
Terrace Martin & Kenyon Dixon – ‘Come As You Are’

Best Rock Album
Deftones – ‘Private Music’
Haim – ‘I Quit’
Linkin Park – ‘From Zero’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’
Yungblud – ‘Idols’

Best Rock Song
Nine Inch Nails – ‘As Alive As You Need Me To Be’
Sleep Token – ‘Caramel’
Hayley Williams – ‘Glum’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’
Yungblud – ‘Zombie’

Best Metal Performance
Dream Theater – ‘Night Terror’
Ghost – ‘Lachryma’
Sleep Token – ‘Emergence’
Spiritbox – ‘Soft Spine’
Turnstile – ‘Birds’

Best Rock Performance
Amyl and The Sniffers – ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’
Linkin Park – ‘The Emptiness Machine’
Turnstile – ‘Never Enough’
Hayley Williams – ‘Mirtazapine’
Yungblud – ‘Changes’ (Live From Villa Park, Back To The Beginning)

Best Alternative Music Performance
Bon Iver – ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love’
The Cure – ‘Alone’
Turnstile – ‘Seein’ Stars’
Wet Leg – ‘Mangetout’
Hayley Williams – ‘Parachute’

Best Alternative Music Album
Bon Iver – ‘SABLE, fABLE’
The Cure – ‘Songs Of A Lost World’
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Don’t Tap the Glass’
Wet Leg – ‘Moisturizer’
Hayley Williams – ‘Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party’

Best Música Urbana Album
Bad Bunny – ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’
J Balvin – ‘Mixteip’
Feid – ‘Ferxxo Vol X: Sagrado’
Nicki Nicole – ‘Naiki’
Trueno – ‘Eub Deluxe;
Yandel – ‘Sinfónico (En Vivo)’

Best Música Mexicana Album (Including Tejano)
Fuerza Regida, Grupo Frontera – ‘Mala Mía’
Grupo Frontera – ‘Y Lo Que Viene’
Paola Jara – ‘Sin Rodeos’
Carín León – ‘Palabra De To’s (Seca)’
Bobby Pulido and Friends Una Tuya Y Una Mía – ‘Por La Puerta Grande (En Vivo)’

Best Latin Pop Album
Rauw Alejandro – ‘Cosa Nuestra’
Andrés Cepeda – ‘Bogotá (Deluxe)’
Karol G – ‘Tropicoqueta’
Natalia Lafourcade – ‘Cancionera’
Alejandro Sanz – ‘¿Y ahora qué?’

Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album
Aterciopelados – ‘Genes Rebeldes’
Astropical – ‘Astropical‘
Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso – ‘Papota’
Los Wizzards – ‘Algorhythm’
Fito Paez – ‘Novela’

Best Tropical Latin Album
Rubén Blades, Roberto Delgado & Orquesta – ‘Fotografías’
Gloria Estefan – ‘Raíces’
Grupo Niche – ‘Clásicos 1.0’
Alain Pérez – ‘Bingo’
Gilberto Santa Rosa – ‘Debut y Segunda Tanda, Vol. 2’

Best Contemporary Country Album
Kelsea Ballerini – ‘Patterns’
Tyler Childers – ‘Snipe Hunter’
Eric Church – ‘Evangeline Vs. The Machine’
Jelly Roll – ‘Beautifully Broken’
Miranda Lambert – ‘Postcards From Texas’

Best Country Solo Performance
Tyler Childers – ‘Nose On The Grindstone’
Shaboozey – ‘Good News’
Chris Stapleton – ‘Bad As I Used To Be’
Zach Top – ‘I Never Lie’
Lainey Wilson – ‘Somewhere Over Laredo’

Best Country Duo/Group Performance
Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton – ‘A Song To Sing’
Reba McEntire, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson – ‘Trailblazer’
Margo Price and Tyler Childers – ‘Love Me Like You Used To Do’
Shaboozey and Jelly Roll – ‘Amen’
George Strait and Chris Stapleton – ‘Honky Tonk Hall Of Fame’

Best Country Song
Tyler Childers – ‘Bitin’ List’
Shaboozey – ‘Good News’
Zach Top – ‘I Never Lie’
Lainey Wilson – ‘Somewhere Over Laredo’
Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton – ‘A Song To Sing’

Best Americana Performance
Sierra Hull – ‘Boom’
Maggie Rose & Grace Potter – ‘Poison In My Well’
Mavis Staples – ‘Godspeed’
Molly Tuttle – ‘That’s Gonna Leave A Mark’
Jesse Welles – ‘Horses’

Best American Roots Song
I’m With Her – ‘Ancient Light’
Jon Batiste – ‘Big Money’
Jason Isbell – ‘Foxes In The Snow’
Jesse Welles – ‘Middle’
Sierra Hull – ‘Spitfire’

Best Americana Album
Jon Batiste – ‘Big Money’
Larkin Poe – ‘Bloom’
Willie Nelson – ‘Last Leaf On The Tree’
Molly Tuttle – ‘So Long Little Miss Sunshine’
Jesse Welles – ‘Middle’

Best Traditional Blues Album
Buddy Guy – ‘Ain’t Done With The Blues’
Taj Mahal & Keb’ Mo’ – ‘Room On The Porch’
Maria Muldaur – ‘One Hour Mama: The Blues Of Victoria Spivey’
Charlie Musselwhite – ‘Look Out Highway’
Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Bobby Rush – ‘Young Fashioned Ways’

Best Contemporary Blues Album
Joe Bonamassa – ‘Breakthrough’
Samantha Fish – ‘Paper Doll’
Eric Gales – ‘A Tribute To LJK’
Robert Randolph – ‘Preacher Kids’
Southern Avenue – ‘Family’

Best Folk Album
Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson – ‘What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow’
Patty Griffin – ‘Crown Of Roses’
I’m With Her – ‘Wild And Clear And Blue’
Jason Isbell – ‘Foxes In The Snow’
Jesse Welles – ‘Under The Powerlines (April 24 – September 24)’

Best Gospel Performance/Song
Kirk Franklin – ‘Do It Again’
Tasha Cobbs Leonard, John Legend – ‘Church’
Jonathan McReynolds & Jamal Roberts – ‘Still’ (Live)
Pastor Mike Jr – ‘Amen’
Cece Winans featuring Shirley Caesar – ‘Come Jesus Come’

Best African Music Performance
Burna Boy – ‘Love’
Davido Featuring Omah Lay – ‘With You’
Eddy Kenzo & Mehran Matin – ‘Hope & Love’
Ayra Starr featuring Wizkid – ‘Gimme Dat’
Tyla – ‘Push 2 Start’

Best Global Music Performance
Bad Bunny – ‘EoO’
Ciro Hurtado – ‘Cantando en el Camino’
Angélique Kidjo – ‘Jerusalema’
Yeisy Rojas – ‘Inmigrante Y Que?’
Shakti – ‘Shrini’s Dream’ (Live)
Anoushka Shankar featuring Alam Khan & Sarathy Korwar – ‘Daybreak’

Best Global Music Album
Siddhant Bhatia – ‘Sounds Of Kumbha’
Burna Boy – ‘No Sign of Weakness’
Youssou N’Dour – ‘Eclairer le monde – Light the World’
Shakti – ‘Mind Explosion’ (50th Anniversary Tour Live)
Anoushka Shankar featuring Alam Khan & Sarathy Korwar – ‘Chapter III: We Return To Light’
Caetano Veloso And Maria Bethânia – ‘Caetano e Bethânia Ao Vivo’

Best Musical Theater Album
‘Buena Vista Social Club’
‘Death Becomes Her’
‘Gypsy’
‘Just In Time’
‘Maybe Happy Ending’

Best Reggae Album
Lila Iké – ‘Treasure Self Love’
Vybz Kartel – ‘Heart & Soul’
Keznamdi – ‘Blxxd & Fyah’
Mortimer – ‘From Within’
Jesse Royal – ‘No Place Like Home’

Best Comedy Album
Bill Burr – ‘Drop Dead Years’
Sarah Silverman – ‘PostMortem’
Ali Wong – ‘Single Lady’
Jamie Foxx – ‘What Had Happened Was…’
Nate Bargatze – ’Your Friend, Nate Bargatze’

Best Audio Book, Narration, and Storytelling Recording
Kathy Garver – Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story
Trevor Noah – Into The Uncut Grass
Ketanji Brown Jackson – Lovely One: A Memoir
Dalai Lama – Meditations: The Reflections Of His Holiness The Dalai Lama
Fab Morvan – You Know It’s True: The Real Story Of Milli Vanilli

Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media
Timothée Chalamet – A Complete Unknown
Various Artists – F1® The Album
Various Artists – KPop Demon Hunters
Various Artists – Sinners
Various Artists – Wicked

Best Song Written For Visual Media
Nine Inch Nails – ‘As Alive As You Need Me To Be’ (from Tron: Ares)
Huntr/x (Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami) – ‘Golden’ (from KPop Demon Hunters)
Miles Caton – ‘I Lied to You’ (from Sinners)
Elton John and Brandi Carlile – ‘Never Too Late’ (from Elton John: Never Too Late)
Jayme Lawson – ‘Pale, Pale Moon’ (from Sinners)
Rod Wave – ‘Sinners’ (from Sinners)

Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media (Includes Film and Television)
John Powell – How to Train Your Dragon
Theodore Shapiro – Severance: Season 2
Ludwig Göransson – Sinners
John Powell & Stephen Schwartz – Wicked
Kris Bowers – The Wild Robot

Best Music Video
Sade – ‘Young Lion’
Sabrina Carpenter – ‘Manchild’
Clipse – ‘So Be It’
Doechii – ‘Anxiety’
OK Go – ‘Love’

Best Music Film
Devo – Devo
Raye – Live at the Royal Albert Hall
Diane Warren – Relentless
John Williams – Music by John Williams
Pharrell Williams – Piece by Piece

Best Album Cover
Tyler, The Creator – ‘Chromakopia’ (Shaun Llewellyn & Luis “Panch” Perez)
Djo – ‘The Crux’ (William Wesley II)
Bad Bunny – ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’ (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio)
Perfume Genius – ‘Glory’ (Cody Critcheloe & Andrew J.S.)
Wet Leg – ‘Moisturizer’ (Hester Chambers, Ellis Durand, Henry Holmes, Matt de Jong, Jamie-James Medina, Joshua Mobaraki & Rhian Teasdale)

‘Black Mirror’ season seven episode details have been revealed

The episode details for the new season of Black Mirror have been revealed today (March 31) by Netflix – check them out below.

Earlier this month (March 13), Netflix took to social media to reveal the new trailer for season seven of the hit show, and it featured clips of previously confirmed actors Peter Capaldi, Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Rashida Jones.

The series will return on April 10 with six new episodes. The cast for the new season was shared last year and along with Capaldi, Giamatti and Jones, it also includes Billy Magnussen (Road House), Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean) and Cristin Milioti (The Penguin).

Now, details of the show’s episodes have been shared, including synopses and cast members, as well as the writers and directors of each episode.

The first episode, titled ‘Common People’, features Jones (Amanda), Chris O’Dowd (Mike), Tracee Ellis Ross (Gaynor) and has been written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw.

A synopsis of the episode says: “When a medical emergency leaves schoolteacher Amanda fighting for her life, her desperate husband Mike signs her up for Rivermind, a high-tech system that will keep her alive – but at a cost…”

[embedded content]

Written by Brooker and directed by Toby Haynes, Netflix revealed the episode follows “confectionary whizz kid Maria” who “is unnerved when her former schoolmate Verity joins the company she works at — because there’s something altogether odd about Verity, something only Maria seems to notice.”

Episode three, ‘Hotel Reverie’, features Issa Rae (Brandy), Emma Corrin (Dorothy), Awkwafina (Kimmy) and Harriet Walter (Judith Keyworth) and has been written by Brooker and directed by Haolu Wang. “A high-tech, unusually immersive remake of a vintage British film sends Hollywood A-list star Brandy Friday into another dimension, where she must stick to the script if she ever wants to make it home,” the synopsis explains.

Episode four, ‘Plaything’, is described as being “in a near-future London” when “an eccentric murder suspect is linked to an unusual video game from the 1990s — a game populated by cute, evolving artificial lifeforms.” This episode, written again by Brooker and directed by David Slade, stars Capaldi (Cameron Walker 2034), Lewis Gribben (Cameron Walker 1994), James Nelson Joyce (DCI Kano), Michele Austin (Jen Minter), Will Poulter (Colin Ritman) and Asim Chaudhry (Mohan Thakur).

don't freak out pic.twitter.com/aOD3sACRZo

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March 31, 2025

Episode five, ‘Eulogy’, is about “An isolated man is introduced to a groundbreaking system that allows its users to literally step inside old photographs — stirring powerful emotions in the process,” and stars Paul Giamatti (Phillip) and Patsy Ferran (The Guide). This episode has been written by Brooker alongside Ella Road and is directed by Chris Barrett and Luke Taylor.

Episode six, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, is a sequel to the classic season four sci-fi adventure opener, ‘USS Callister’. Starring Jesse Plemons as Robert Daly, that episode revolved around the reclusive programmer’s creation of a simulated reality in which he served as a Captain Kirk–like figure commanding a crew based on his real-life co-workers.

Now, a synopsis of the follow up says: “Robert Daly is dead, but now the crew of the USS Callister – led by Captain Nanette Cole – are stranded in an infinite virtual universe, fighting for survival against 30 million players.”

The episode stars Cristin Milioti (Nanette Cole), Jimmi Simpson (James Walton), Billy Magnussen (Karl Plowman), Osy Ikhile (Nate Packer), Milanka Brooks (Elena Tulaska), Paul G. Raymond (Kabir Dudani). It’s been directed by Toby Haynes and a team of writers made up of Brooker, Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges, and Bekka Bowling.

Check out the posters for each episode here:

try to focus pic.twitter.com/0LdZP61C7u

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March 31, 2025

pic.twitter.com/MMHH6lvbqf

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) March 31, 2025

Common People
Bête Noire
Hotel Reverie
Plaything
Eulogy
USS Callister: Into Infinity

Black Mirror returns April 10. pic.twitter.com/MPi6j3XTRd

— Netflix (@netflix) March 31, 2025

Meanwhile, Brooker previously spoke in an interview with Netflix about creating the new season last year.

“Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect,” he said.

“Consequently, this time, alongside some of the more familiar Black Mirror tropes we’ve also got a few new elements, including some I’ve previously sworn blind the show would never do, to stretch the parameters of what a Black Mirror episode even is.”

Black Mirror returned with its sixth season in 2023 after a four-year hiatus that featured an ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers. While season six consisted of five episodes – each clocking in between 40 minutes and well over an hour – season five only ran for three episodes, each of which ran for over an hour.

The anthology show was originally launched on Channel 4, where it stayed for two seasons. Brooker recently revealed that the network effectively “cancelled” the series in his new book, Inside Black Mirror, which prompted the move to Netflix for its third season in 2016.

Since the show moved to Netflix, Black Mirror has featured stars such as Miley Cyrus, (whose house apparently burned down whilst filming her episode), Salma Hayek (who was worried her episode would get her “in trouble”), and Aaron Paul, amongst others.

TRNSMT Festival 2025 reveals Radio 1 Dance Stage line-up

TRNSMT Festival has revealed the full line-up for their Radio 1 Dance Stage for this year’s event – see all the details below.

In December, the festival confirmed that they would be returning to Glasgow Green from July 11-13 for its eighth edition, and after polling festivalgoers on who they would like to see headline, they announced a bill topped by 50 Cent, Biffy Clyro and Snow Patrol.

Now, they have added the acts that will be filling the Radio 1 Dance Stage over the weekend, with 18 artists being added to the stacked bill.

Among the big hitters are BBC Radio 1’s own DJs Jaguar, Arielle Free and Charlie Hedges, who will all be bringing the energy to the beloved Boogie Bar on the Scottish festival grounds.

Crowd watches Natasha Bedingfield perform at TRNSMT Festival 2024. CREDIT: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Jaguar will head up the bill on Friday night with her signature garage-infused set. That day will also see performances from La La, Connor Coates, Big Miz, MARIANNE and Frankie Elyse, who extend TRNSMT’s commitment to supporting local Scottish talent.

Alongside Arielle Free on Saturday will be house/garage producer Nimino, who had a breakout single in 2024 with ‘I Only Smoke When I Drink’. Filling out the stage on Saturday will be Hayley Zalassi, Hannah Opgaard, Dominique and EVA.

“Some of the Radio 1 Dance DJs will be playing alongside homegrown British talent on the stage that fans have always known and loved, but now has a new name. TRNSMT is the perfect place to experience unforgettable performances and the incredible energy of a Scottish crowd, with lots of exciting announcements still to come.”

Alongside the headliners elsewhere at TRANSMT 2025, the likes of Fontaines D.C., The Script, Gracie Abrams, Inhaler, Confidence Man, Kneecap, The Kooks, The Lathums and Wet Leg are set to appear. Other acts include Jamie Webster, Twin Atlantic, Jake Bugg, Sigrid, Wunderhorse, Underworld, Shed Seven and Nina Nesbitt.

Last year, Scots Calvin Harris and Gerry Cinnamon headlined alongside Liam Gallagher, who played ‘Definitely Maybe’ in its entirety as part of the Oasis album’s 30th anniversary celebrations.

Other past headliners have included Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Radiohead, The Killers and The Chemical Brothers.

Watch R.E.M. reunite to play “Pretty Persuasion”

The four original members of R.E.M. reunited on Thursday, February 27 and Friday, February 28 to perform “Pretty Persuasion” at the 400 Watt club in their hometown of Athens, Georgia.

THE APRIL 2025 ISSUE OF UNCUT, STARRING LED ZEPPELIN, JASON ISBELL, BRYAN FERRY, MARIANNE FAITHFULL, THE WATERBOYS, DAVID BOWIE, MADDY PRIOR AND MORE, IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW

Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry took to the stage during two Athens dates on Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy‘s current tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the band’s Fables Of The Reconstruction album.

When Shannon and Narducy played the 40 Watt last year, as part of their Murmur tour, all four members of R.E.M. shared the stage at one point. This year, however, they all appeared on stage together, for “Pretty Persuasion“. “This is a special place where dreams come true,” said Shannon.

The band members also appeared separately or in other configurations at various points during both shows – including “Wendell Gee” (Berry), a cover of Wire‘s “Strange” (Mills), a cover of Pylon’s “Crazy” (Mills) “Find The River” (Mills), “1,000,000” (Mills), “Sitting Still” (Buck, Mills), “Harborcoat” (Buck, Mills), “Second Guessing” (Buck, Mills, Berry), “Cuyahoga” (Buck, Mills, Berry), “Little America” (Buck), and “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” (Buck, Mills).”

On the first night, Lenny Kaye joined for Velvet Underground covers “Femme Fatale” (Buck, Mills) and “There She Goes Again” (Buck).

The line-up also included Jon Wurster (drums), John Stirratt (bass), Dag Juhlin (guitar) and Vijay Tellis-Nayak (keyboards).

Shannon and Narducy bring their Fables tour to the UK later this year. Check here for further details.

You can watch R.E.M. perform “Pretty Persuasion” below…

[embedded content]

… meanwhile here we present a gallery of photos taken by REM’s long-serving manager Bertis Downs and his wife Katherine Downs.

The main image was taken by Karen Ryan.

Photo: Bertis Downs

Edwyn Collins Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation

In the video for “Knowledge”, the first single from Edwyn Collins’ 10th solo album, the clan chief of Postcard Records stands like a monument in the wintery landscape around his home in Helmsdale, on the north-east coast of Scotland. It is a grey day. There is snow on the ground. The joyous gospel harmonies can’t disguise the note of disquiet that leaks from the song. “Knowledge” is about unease, the loss and recovery of fond memories. Knowledge, Collins sings, with a nod to Amazing Grace, “first was lost and now it’s found”. The chorus underlines the point, while the video cuts through subliminal flashes of the singer’s musical trophies, rolling into a series of fast cuts of Collins in his popstar pomp, all arch sideburns and long spear collars. He pouts like Elvis, he machine-guns the audience like Eddie Cochran. “Hard to let my old self go,” Collins sings, repeating the point for emphasis. “So hard…”

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It’s a strange thing, listening to “Knowledge”. It sounds so familiar, as if the melody has been around forever. It is, as Donny and Marie once sang, a little bit country, a little bit rock’n’roll. There is a bit of Memphis, some Nashville and – departing from the Osmonds’ formula – in place of Motown, a little bit of Northern Soul. The mood seems to echo the melody of “Rehab”, a song by Collins’ former comrade in Orange Juice, James Kirk. The more you listen, the more that similarity dissolves. Something else, an old country tune, crackles through the static, then that, too, fizzles in the haar.

“All my life, I draw from music I love,” Collins tells Uncut. “There’s so much to dig into. I used to call it cross-pollinating. I’m influenced and then I influence. On this record it’s the same as always, loads of things inspire me. Soul music, gospel music, country music, synthy pop music, guitar players, everything.”

Before we go forward, it’s worth going back. Such is the myth surrounding Collins’ first band, Orange Juice, that the music tends to get lost. In the traditional shorthand, the Creamola Foam rush of Orange Juice came from a chemical blend of The Velvet Underground and Chic, a formula which gives an entirely misleading sense of what they actually sounded like. Postcard-era Juice delivered their tunes in an adolescent blood-rush, a punk ballyhoo made strange by the vagaries of Collins’ voice. The Juice turned left when they heard the Northern Soul iteration of Vic Godard’s Subway Sect. (Could Vic sing swing? Could Edwyn sing Al Green? The calculation is roughly the same).

As Orange Juice developed, they became a vehicle for Collins’s ambitions, scoring a hit when Collins coaxed a liquid bass line from a Roland TB-303. To this, he added an impression of Nile Rodgers shredding a Burns Nu-Sonic guitar, and lyrical nods to Buzzcocks and Eddie Cochran. Cross-pollinating. This time, the formula worked. “Rip it Up” ripped it up. But, be careful what you wish for. It was fun, and then it wasn’t. Tired, perhaps, of the unglamorous reality of being a pop star in pursuit of a second hit, Collins turned the perversity up to 11. Bit by bit, he exploded the group.

Orange Juice and Postcard need no special pleading. What is less appreciated is the consistency of Collins’ solo career, a long arc in which Collins leaned more directly into his influences, culminating with a worldwide hit with “A Girl Like You”.

There is, of course, a before and an after. Collins suffered two strokes in 2005, which robbed him of the ability to play guitar and, for a time, the power of speech. Through sheer force of will, the singer found his voice in music, and there may be a way in which the familiar patterns of song lyrics act as an aid to communication. Aphasia leaves no room for irony. As Collins sings on the title track, “Back when the words came easily/I had the answer to everything/Revelling in a smart alec comeback.”

With Collins’s post-stroke material, there is no disguising the fact that the words are freighted. In Orange Juice, feyness was an aggressive statement. Now, directness becomes a matter of resilience. For a while, it seemed remarkable that Collins was performing at all. He has moved beyond that. In the song, “Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation” his struggle with articulacy – that feeling of voicelessness – is projected outwards, with a twist on the founding motto of the BBC. “If I can’t talk to you, and you can’t talk to me,” Collins sings, “How shall nation speak unto nation?” He is, to paraphrase “A Girl Like You”, talking allegorically.

If this seems bleak, it doesn’t sound it. Working with his regular collaborators – co-producers Jake Hutton and Sean Read, musicians James Walbourne and Carwyn Ellis, and son Will (on bass) – Collins collates his influences into a carnival of understatement. Less becomes more. Midway through “The Heart Is A Foolish Little Thing” – a fairground waltz of Northern Soul – there’s a thunderous xylophone solo. The winsome “Paper Planes” sounds like a tune that could have been showered in bombast by Roy Orbison or Neil Diamond, but Collins respects the flimsiness of the lyric’s central metaphor and keeps it small, sounding vulnerable rather than operatic. There’s a note of sweet simplicity in “A Little Sign”, childishness even, though the tune does wander into a dub postscript. “Strange Old World” is a montage of twang and punk guitar, a bit 1960s, a bit James Bond, with Collins warbling in a shower stall of reverb “it’s a strange old world, but it’s my world.”

Musically, the tunes blend pop stickiness with sonic experimentation, but there is a strong sense of place. “The Mountains Are My Home” reflects Collins’ move to the highlands. It’s also a traditional roaming song in the style of Glen Campbell, propelled by a train-track rhythm. Has Collins ever sung more sweetly than on “It Must Be Real”? Never with such directness. The way he performs now has the conversational bluntness of Lou Reed refracted, perhaps, through the sunny disposition of Jonathan Richman. “When you love, love, love again, you succeed,” Collins sings on “Rhythm Is My Own World”. When he does admit to doubt, the notion is quickly dispelled. “Sometimes it brings me down,” he sings on “Sound As A Pound”, “the pain inside, but I’m ok.”

Mostly, it’s the sound of optimism turned into a tune, informed by the fresh geography of Collins’s life. It helps that his metaphors can be located on the map, but that shouldn’t diminish their universality. An unlikely highlight is “The Bridge Hotel”, a summery incantation which namechecks the venue where Collins celebrated being made chieftain of the highland games in 2010. “It’s a B&B now,” Collins tells Uncut, “run by a nice guy called Hans.” In the song, the hotel is in the midst of an endless summer day, where “the song thrush sings past 10 o’clock in the evening”. So yes, it’s getting late, but the sun is refusing to set. Edwyn is in his happy place, home again. Not falling, but laughing.

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Uncut’s Best New Albums of 2024

50
OREN AMBARCHI/JOHAN BERTHLING/ANDREAS WERLIIN
Ghosted II
DRAG CITY
2022’s improvised mindmeld between Aussie experimental guitarist Ambarchi and the Swedish jazz rhythm section of Berthling and Werliin proved so successful that the trio reconvened for this lively sequel. Their telepathy now honed, Ghosted II was groovier and hookier than its predecessor, Berthling’s propulsive basslines providing structure and drive for Ambarchi’s shimmering bliss-outs.

THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT FEATURES KATE BUSH, QUINCY JONES, THE WEATHER STATION, THE DAMNED AND OUR ESSENTIAL 2025 PREVIEW – ORDER YOUR COPY NOW

49
STILL HOUSE PLANTS
If I Don’t Make It, I Love U
BISON
The post-rock trio, formed a decade ago at the Glasgow School Of Art, rocketed out of the improv underground with a fissile breakthrough album that recalled Life Without Buildings, Labradford and the slanted, enchanted skronk of Bill Orcutt. But tracks like the standout “Silver Grit Passes Thru My Teeth” were thrillingly all their own work.

48
DAVID GILMOUR
Luck And Strange
SONY
Working with a new producer (Charlie Andrew, notable for his work with prog upstarts Alt-J) and new musicians (including Tom Herbert, bass player with Polar Bear), Gilmour sounded reinvigorated on his fifth solo album – never more so than on a startling cover of the Montgolfier Brothers’ magnificently bleak “Between Two Points”, beautifully sung by his daughter Romany.

47
SARAH DAVACHI
The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir
LATE MUSIC
Her 12th long-player was the most impressive statement yet from the ‘slow music’ figurehead: an exploration of the myth of Orpheus, recorded on four different pipe organs from across the world, not to mention an array of other keyboards and synthesisers, plus choir, trombones, bass clarinets and medieval string instruments. Deep, mysterious and genuinely awe-inspiring.

46
CHARLES LLOYD
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
BLUE NOTE
The flower-power jazz veteran extended his late-career renaissance with this album of mellifluous sax and flute marvels. Released on Lloyd’s 86th birthday, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow sounded as fresh and engaged as any of the new-school spiritual jazz touchstones, with “The Water Is Rising” and “Defiant, Tender Warrior” carrying a subtle yet potent political message.

45
LAURA MARLING
Patterns In Repeat
CHRYSALIS
Written and recorded in stray, snatched moments at home with producer Dom Monks when Marling was “high as fuck” after the birth of her first daughter, Patterns In Repeat charted the journey from postpartum euphoria to deeper questions about family and ageing, mortality and memory. These beautifully fingerpicked lullabies were occasionally graced by the elegant strings of violinist Rob Moose.

44
CHRISTOPHER OWENS
I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair
TRUE PANTHER
Perhaps only former Girls frontman Christopher Owens could imbue an album with so much personal tragedy – heartbreak, homelessness, hospitalisation – and still make it sound uplifting. “I died the day you left me/ I die again every day”, he sang desperately on opener “No Good”, and yet the overriding emotions were joy, redemption and a sense that everything was ultimately OK. A truly life- affirming comeback.

43
RICHARD THOMPSON
Ship To Shore
NEW WEST
On his first album in six years, Thompson sang from the perspective of
a traumatised squaddie (“The Fear Never Leaves You”), a lovestruck Jack Tar (“Singapore Sadie”), and even Donald Trump (“Life’s A Bloody Show”). Throughout all this, he kept his musical compass set on the miraculously consistent course of excellence he’s maintained for six decades now.

42
KIM DEAL
Nobody Loves You More
4AD
The Breeders’ records always contained more stubborn variety than the band’s status as alt.rock hellraisers gave them credit for. On her first ever solo album, Kim Deal expanded those horizons in all directions: from mariachi-tinged swooners to electro-rock thumpers, featuring Brian Wilson’s musical director, as well members of Slint, Savages and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Deal’s unique charisma ensured it all cohered perfectly.

41
PAUL WELLER
66
POLYDOR
1966 may have been the white-hot peak of popular modernism, but 66 the album saw an elegiac mood overtaking the Modfather, with songs like “I Woke Up”, “Sleepy Hollow” and “My Best Friend’s Coat” evoking a Kinksy autumn almanac. Best of a host of co-writes (with Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie, Richard Hawley and Suggs, among others) was “Ship Of Fools”, an unsentimental farewell to the Tories.

40
GRANDADDY
Blu Wav
DANGERBIRD
Inspired by the sound of Patti Page’s 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz”, Jason Lytle returned with an enchanted album of new-wave bluegrass. These were songs of loss, regret and heartbreak in the mall parking lot (“Jukebox App”), the office cubicle (“Watercooler”) and out on the wide-open American highway, with Max Hart’s pedal steel guitar duetting with the burble of analogue arpeggiators – the sound of cosmic consolation.

39
BROWN HORSE
Reservoir
LOOSE MUSIC
You would have got fairly long odds on this year’s best country-rock debut emerging from the fine city of Norwich, but Brown Horse’s assured take on East Angliana made a whole lot of sense. On Reservoir, their gripping vignettes of stolen horses and “feet wet in the mudflats” were delivered by powerful twin vocals, backed up by rousing guitars, fiddle, accordion and pedal steel.

38
DIRTY THREE
Love Changes Everything
BELLA UNION
It’s been another busy year for Warren Ellis, what with the Wild God album and tour, various film soundtracks and his animal sanctuary on Sumatra. Thankfully he also made time to reconvene his much-loved instrumental trio Dirty Three. Inspired by Alice Coltrane, their first music in a decade was an extended improvised suite, unmoored from conventional structures but full of rapture.

37
SHELLAC
To All Trains
TOUCH AND GO
Steve Albini’s unexpected death just days before its release cast a long shadow over To All Trains, but this was the most unsentimental farewell possible, with Shellac’s metallic machine music at its intense, thrilling best. “I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover”, Albini sang on his final exit. “If there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone…”

36
MYRIAM GENDRON
Mayday
THRILL JOCKEY/FEEDING TUBE
Myriam Gendron has made her name as an inspired interpreter of other people’s words – particularly the poems of Dorothy Parker – but Mayday prioritised her own sad, stoical lyrics, sung in both English and French. Jim White and Marisa Anderson applied some subtle shading, though Gendron held fast to her spartan approach – until, right at the end of final song “Berceuse”, all that contained emotion burst out in an ecstatic sax solo by Zoh Amba.

35
BRITTANY HOWARD
What Now
ISLAND
Having successfully established herself as a solo artist with 2019’s raw and personal Jaime, the former Alabama Shake decided it was time to cut loose. What Now was a hard-hitting party record of the type Prince used to make in his prime: funky but thoughtful, and sonically adventurous too: “Another Day” rode a confounding industrial-soul groove, while “Prove It To You” even dabbled in house music.

34
ROSALI
Bite Down
MERGE
After last year’s intriguing solo guitar excursions as Edsel Axle, Rosali Middleman made a triumphant return to the big stage with Bite Down. Featuring staunch backing from Omaha’s Mowed Sound, her fourth album was hard-rocking yet tender, experimental yet anthemic, funny yet sad, exposing the fearless vulnerability of the songwriter behind it all: “I’m letting things come as they may/ Hope you know why I do it this way…”

33
WILLIE NELSON
The Border
LEGACY
At the age of 91, Nelson is still showing few signs of slowing down. This was his 75th album, and his 10th in the last seven years. Rodney Crowell’s two song contributions – the title track and “Many A Long And Lonesome Highway” – struck an ominous tone, but Willie’s restless maverick spirit was still alive on the jauntily madcap “What If I’m Out Of My Mind?”

32
BEAK>
>>>>
INVADA
Beak>’s fourth album turned out to be Geoff Barrow’s swansong with the band, the “mumbling drummer” recently announcing his plan to step down after their current tour. His parting gift was a telling contribution to an album of typically dank Bristolian grooves and ’70s sci-fi dread, but with a surprisingly rich seam of wistful, folky reflection.

31
MABE FRATTI
Sentir Que No Sabes
UNHEARD OF HOPE
Is this pop? Experimental? Post-classical indie jazz? Mexico City-based Guatemalan Mabe Fratti actively embraces such confusion. The title of this album translated as ‘Feel Like You Don’t Know’, which neatly summarised her playful, open-hearted approach, finding kinship with Björk, Julia Holter and fellow cellist Arthur Russell.

30
KIM GORDON
The Collective
MATADOR
Kim Gordon embarked on her seventh decade with an album of savagely satirical sawtooth synthpop, partly inspired by Jennifer Egan’s dystopic novel The Candy House. “Tongues hanging out/ Bodies on the sidewalk/ Driving down Sunset/ Zombie meditation”, she sang on “Psychedelic Orgasm”, like a 21st-century Joan Didion cruising through LA on her way to the apocalypse.

29
OISIN LEECH
Cold Sea
OUTSIDE MUSIC/TREMONE
After a decade-and-a-half in folk duo The Lost Brothers, Dublin’s Oisin Leech announced himself as a singer-songwriter of some distinction with this stunning solo debut. As crisp and clear as the North Atlantic ocean beside which it was recorded, Cold Sea benefitted from the subtle presence of some stellar musicians, namely Steve Gunn, M Ward, Planxty’s Dónal Lunny and Dylan bassist Tony Garnier. But the acute sense of yearning was all Leech’s own.

28
JAKE XERXES FUSSELL
When I’m Called
FAT POSSUM
The discovery of a discarded school journal by the side of a California highway inspired this North Carolina folklorist to make his most enthralling album to date, bringing together songs of wildly disparate origin – Scottish traditionals, Benjamin Britten, cowboy artist Gerald ‘The Maestro’ Gaxiola – for a collection that was not only cohesive but often incredibly moving.

27
ENGLISH TEACHER
This Could Be Texas
ISLAND
The Leeds four-piece delivered one of the most distinctive debuts of the year, a radiant collection of tumbling, twisting prog-pop songs that charted a fiercely lyrical path through the squall of England’s ongoing civil wars. Somewhere at the heart of it, “You Blister My Paint” was an unexpectedly touching ballad, like the sun coming out on a rainy Bank Holiday.

26
MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Loophole
MODERN SKY
The Mick Head renaissance continued with the former Pale Fountains frontman’s third album in seven years, another inspired collection of acoustic reveries set adrift on memory bliss, produced by Bill Ryder-Jones. With “Tout Suite!” and “You Smiled At Me”, he casually crafted the sweetest, most swoonsome love songs of the year.

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25
NALA SINEPHRO
Endlessness
WARP
Sinephro’s blissful 2021 debut Space 1.8 placed the London-based harpist and modular synthesist at the vanguard of the new cosmic jazz movement. This filmic follow-up made fine use of some of the scene’s most expressive players – Sheila Maurice-Grey, Nubya Garcia and Natcyet Wakili among them – but it never felt like a jam session, instead radiating a unanimous sense of wonder and calm.

24
PHOSPHORESCENT
Revelator
VERVE
Matthew Houck’s eighth album as Phosphorescent, and his debut for Verve, was a beautiful refinement of the elegant melancholy he has been steadily crafting since 2013’s Muchacho. A standout was “Poem On The Men’s Room Wall”, which found some respite from the end of the world in a cold beer and the underappreciated erotic charm of Phyllis Diller.

23
HIGH LLAMAS
Hey Panda
DRAG CITY
Turns out you can teach an old Llama new tricks. After three decades of exquisite retro orchestration, Sean O’Hagan took an unexpected left-turn here into digital production and avant-R&B. The results were spectacular, retaining all of O’Hagan’s beloved quirks while allowing guest vocalists like Bonnie “Prince” Billy to indulge their inner pop freak.

22
ALAN SPARHAWK
White Roses, My God
SUB POP
Written and recorded after the loss of wife and bandmate Mimi Parker
in 2022, Sparhawk’s first post-Low release was an astonishing, artful transmutation of grief into cybernetic gospel via the medium of the Helicon VoiceTone pedal. It sounded, on the closing “Project 4 Ever”, like PC Music producing the Book Of Job.

21
JOHN CALE
POPtical Illusion
DOMINO
After the jagged future-shock of last year’s heavily collaborative Mercy, this impressively swift follow-up found Cale in more contemplative mode – though he still sounded more vital than most artists a quarter of his age, dispensing the sagest of wisdoms over dreamily inventive electronic beats: “If you’ve done things you’d wished you’ve never done/ Think of the things you’re going to do tonight…”

20
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
The Past Is Still Alive
NONESUCH
“Say goodbye to America, I wanna see it dissolve,” sang Alynda Segarra on “Colossus Of The Roads” – amid stiff competition, the most devastating track on the ninth Riff Raff album. But on songs like the Conor Oberst collaboration “The World is Dangerous”, they remained committed to making astonishing music while the ship goes down.

19
PETER PERRETT
The Cleansing
DOMINO
Perhaps as astonished as anyone to still be here, the mercurial former Only Ones frontman joked about outstaying his welcome on nagging punk earworms “Do Not Resuscitate” and “I Wanna Go With Dignity”. The irony being, of course, that Perrett was in the form of his life, decrying our morally bankrupt leaders and the evils of WhatsApp in his bone-dry south London drawl.

18
SHABAKA
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
IMPULSE!
Swapping his trusty saxophone for an array of Japanese and South American flutes naturally led Shabaka Hutchings towards more serene waters. But just as you’d hope from the former Comet/Kemet firebreather, he approached this seemingly tranquil music with gripping intensity, the introspective mood matched by guest vocalists including Lianne La Havas and Moses Sumney.

17
JOHNNY BLUE SKIES
Passage Du Desir
HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN
He’s thrown a few curveballs in his time, but country renegade Sturgill Simpson – for it was he – pulled off his greatest trick yet by absconding to Europe and adopting the Johnny Blue Skies moniker to consider the lot of the semi-famous musician from a position of wry remove. Beautifully sung and played, these were also some of the finest songs he’s ever written: soulful, wistful, funny and tender.

16
BILL RYDER-JONES
Iechyd Da
DOMINO
The title is Welsh for ‘good health’, and on his first album in five years the former Coral man set sail from lockdown anguish to calmer waters, buoyed by the kindred spirits of Gal Costa, Echo & The Bunnymen, and – on the gorgeous orchestral interlude “…And The Sea” – the inspired combination of Michael Head and James Joyce.

15
JACK WHITE
No Name
THIRD MAN
“Nothin’ in this world is free”, warned Jack White on No Name’s taut, prowling opener “Old Scratch Blues”. That is, unless you were lucky enough to visit the Third Man store on July 19 to have a copy of this unmarked LP slipped into your bag. But if the release was discreet, the music itself was anything but: a relentless barrage of garage-rock bangers with White in blistering, rabble-rousing form.

14
MDOU MOCTAR
Funeral For Justice
MATADOR
Though recorded thousands of miles from Moctar’s Niger homeland, Funeral For Justice went in hard on both the country’s current leaders (the title track) and its malign colonial overlords (“Oh France”). Suffice to say, this fiery rhetoric was more than matched by some incendiary guitar-playing; while to underline the strength of the songwriting, an acoustic version of the album – Tears Of Injustice – is due early next year.

13
FONTAINES DC
Romance
XL
With their colossal fourth album, the Irish post-punkers hooked up with a new label (XL) and a new producer (James Ford) to venture far from the Dublin cobblestones. They drew on the cityscapes of Tokyo, the fashion sense of Korn and apocalyptic arthouse cinema to create an IMAX-scale album of dystopian lovesongs, fit for the stadiums they increasingly seem destined to fill.

12
JULIA HOLTER
Something In The Room She Moves
DOMINO
When Julia Holter topped this chart in 2015 with Have You In My Wilderness, we described its unique sound as “Aphex Twin meets The Beach Boys”. If anything, this album pushed that glorious dichotomy even further as Holter’s psychedelic nursery rhymes inhabited an alluring fourth-world wonderland full of squelching electronics, stacked voices, fluttering flutes and fretless bass.

11
CASSANDRA JENKINS
My Light, My Destroyer
DEAD OCEANS
Cassandra Jenkins proved that An Overview On Phenomenal Nature was no fluke with a cosmic third album that roamed from Betelgeuse to Aurora, Illinois, via the pet shops of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Throughout, her quizzical sprechstimme and calmly forensic eye rooted her in the reality of everyday heartaches.

10
WAXAHATCHEE
Tigers Blood
ANTI-
“You just settle in like a song with no end”, sang Katie Crutchfield, harmonising beautifully with 2024’s MVP MJ Lenderman on “Right Back To It”, the lead single from her boldest, most accessible record yet. Tigers Blood was an album that saw her burnishing the romantic hooks that always lurked in her songwriting and laying a reasonable claim to being the millennial Lucinda Williams.

9
CINDY LEE
Diamond Jubilee
REALISTIK
Patrick Flegel’s seventh release under his indie-drag alias Cindy Lee was a tour de force of lo-fi Lynchian guitar soul lasting more than two hours. Astonishingly for a 32-track album, there were no space-filling goofs and hardly any drop-off in song quality: witness, around 83 minutes in, the heart-tugging triptych of “To Heal This Wounded Heart”, “Golden Microphone” and “If You Hear Me Crying”.

8
MJ LENDERMAN
Manning Fireworks
ANTI-
Still only 25, Jake “MJ” Lenderman is already wiser than most of us
will ever be. On his fourth solo studio album – he’s also notched up another couple as guitarist for the equally excellent Wednesday – he skilfully deployed classic rock references to paint vivid portraits of smalltown ennui (“How many roads must a man walk down ’til he learns/ He’s just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse ’til it burns”). Great solos, too.

7
THE SMILE
Wall Of Eyes
XL
The first of two terrific albums The Smile released in 2024, emphasising the purple-ness of the patch in which Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner currently find themselves. Here, their agitated rhythms were often wreathed in lush orchestral arrangements, though that only seemed to heighten the ever-present sense of threat (“I am going to count to three/ Keep this shit away from me”). Next stop: a rumoured Radiohead live reunion in 2025…

6
ADRIANNE LENKER
Bright Future
4AD
Lenker’s solo career is the opposite of a diversion from her main gig fronting Big Thief. “Real House” continued the raw, autobiographical tale of “Mythological Beauty” from the band’s 2017 album Capacity, while recent single “Vampire Empire” was presented in a radically different form. Yet beyond these fan-pleasing callbacks and overlaps, there is much to be said for hearing Lenker’s precise melodies and perennially wise words in their most unadorned state.

5
JESSICA PRATT
Here In The Pitch
CITY SLANG
Even when playing these songs live in the flesh at a bewitching Union Chapel gig earlier this year, there remained something apparitional about Jessica Pratt, the ghost of LA’s Gold Star Studios. Ingenious arrangements – brass, Mellotron, Brazilian percussion, whole caverns full of echo – warped these songs so far out of time to be completely discombobulating, yet Pratt’s piercing melodies cut straight to the core.

4
AROOJ AFTAB
Night Reign
VERVE
Keen to puncture the myth of the “Sufi goddess” while maintaining the intense and rarified emotion of 2021 breakthrough Vulture Prince, Aftab found the perfect blend of earthiness and otherworldliness in Night Reign’s rich, seductive ambience. A splash of Auto-Tune here and a filthy bassline there showed that she could bend pop techniques to her will, rather than the other way around. And, oh, that voice…

3
BETH GIBBONS
Lives Outgrown
DOMINO
A decade in the making, released as she was about to turn 60, Beth Gibbons’ solo debut proved worth the wait in gold. Working with producer James Ford, she drew upon all the bitter wisdom of midlife. On songs like “Reaching Out” and “Rewind”, she constructed an awesome orchestra of loss from corrugaphone, recorder, folksong and her indomitable, astonishingly wracked voice.

2
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
Woodland
ANCONY
Thirty years into their musical partnership, Welch and Rawlings released the first original record credited to the two of them. Maybe it was disaster that strengthened their union? Woodland was full of the stuff, from the 2020 tornado that destroyed their studio to an apocalyptic vision of the Mississippi run dry. They’ve certainly never sounded so attuned, their harmonies blending to uncanny effect on the desolate “What We Had” and the closing “Howdy Howdy”.

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1
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Wild God
PIAS
“We’ve all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy”. For the first time since 2016, Nick Cave properly reconvened The Bad Seeds – Thomas Wydler on drums, Martyn Casey on bass, Warren Ellis a one-man orchestrator of chaos and grace – and the result was a surging, storming work of radical, Blakean exuberance. It had the form of the blues but felt more like a rapture, full of “bright, triumphant metaphors of love”, with producer Dave Fridmann arranging the tumult like a man conducting a storm-tossed ocean.

Like so much of Cave’s work since 2016, it was addressed to his lost sons, but there were also heartfelt songs of devotion to his wife (“Final Rescue Attempt”), his dear, departed exes (“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”) and songs of praise for any creator who saw fit to invent Anita Lane’s panties, cinnamon horses and Kris Kristofferson.

Since the mid-1980s, Nick Cave has been trying on the vestments of these lay preachers – Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, the Elvis of “An American Trilogy” – and a large part of the charm has been the gall and gumption of this skinny Aussie goth to assume their orphic mantle. But now the robes finally fit, with Cave returning from the drag of hell to ascend to the heavens like… a prehistoric bird? An awestruck frog? A joyful rabbit? Never mind, never mind. Wild God was Nick Cave’s latest, great, indisputable masterpiece. Amen.

Nick Cave says parents of ‘Love Island’ contestant helped him through tragedy of son’s death

Nick Cave has opened up about how the parents of Love Island contestant Luca helped him and his wife through the “unspeakable” tragedy of losing their son.

Arthur Cave died after he fell from a cliff in Ovingdean, East Sussex in 2015. He was 15 years old.

READ MORE: Warren Ellis on nearly 30 years with Nick Cave – “I’m there for him, whatever he wants”

For the latest entry into his long-running Q&A site Red Hand Files, Cave was asked what the “major difference” is between him and his wife, Susie. In response, the Bad Seeds frontman explained that “Susie watches Love Island, and I don’t”.

He went on to talk about the couple’s connection to a current contestant on the ITV2 reality series, Luca Bish.

“Luca was a school friend of our twins, Arthur and Earl,” Cave wrote. “As a consequence, Susie and I became friends with Luca’s parents, Maria and Michael. Maria is an antique dealer. Michael is a fishmonger. Luca is a fishmonger too.

“After Arthur died, in the early days of that terrible, chaotic first week, Maria turned up on our doorstep with a tray of lasagne and basically looked after us. She barely said anything to us. She made us cups of tea. She cooked for us. She was just there. She was the one constant through a time of horror and confusion, when scores of despairing and commiserating people came and went.”

Nick Cave performing live on stage in 2022 — Nick Cave performs live. CREDIT: Getty

He continued: “We will never forget her kindness. Even in the first week, when the world seemed suddenly and shockingly defined by an unspeakable and distorting cruelty, Maria reminded us that there was good in the world. She also served as a lesson in how to deal with grieving people – you don’t need to say anything, just do something; make them a cup of tea, cook them dinner.

“To this day Michael brings fresh fish around to our house, drops it off and leaves without a word. He pretends to charge us for it, but we know that he doesn’t. These people, Luca’s parents, are as good as people get, and they love their son, Luca.”

Cave concluded: “So, Susie watches Love Island and cheers him on, and hopes that he will win. I also hope that Luca wins, and wins soon, because then I can get the fucking TV back. Love, Nick.”

READ MORE: This Much I Know To Be True review: an engrossing and intimate portrait of Nick Cave

Nick Cave first spoke about losing Arthur during One More Time With Feeling, the 2016 film that delved into “the deeply personal circumstances surrounding the making of ‘Skeleton Tree’“.

In a Red Hand Files post last November, the singer said that he and Susie moved to Los Angeles because Brighton became “too sad” following his son’s death.

In May, Cave’s son Jethro Lazenby died at the age of 31. The musician later thanked fans for sending their “condolences and kind words”, adding that they were “a great source of comfort”.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds played their first show in four years early last month as part of the band’s 2022 summer tour.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds kick off summer tour with first show in four years

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds have started their summer tour – see photos and check out the setlist from their first gig since 2018 below.

READ MORE: This Much I Know To Be True review: an engrossing and intimate portrait of Nick Cave

The band headlined Denmark’s Northside Festival last night (June 2) and treated fans to some special performances including playing ‘Get Ready for Love’ for the first time since 2009, according to notes on SetlistFM.

They also gave ‘Vortex‘, a song recorded in 2006 and shared last year as part of the band’s ‘B-Sides & Rarities Part II’ release, its live debut.

The show comes weeks after Cave‘s son Jethro died at the age of 31. Cave issued a statement to NME at the time saying, “We would be grateful for family privacy at this time.”

Since then, the singer has thanked fans for their support in the wake of his son’s death.

Cave lost another son, Arthur, 15, in 2015 after he fell to his death from a cliff in Brighton.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds at Northside Festival. CREDIT: Gonzales Photo/Alamy Live News

The Bad Seeds’ show last night ushers in a busy summer of festival appearances including the band’s headline show at London’s All Points East on August 28.

They last played the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Canada in 2018 and had a handful of other shows planned before the COVID pandemic scuppered live music.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ setlist for their opening tour show

01. ‘Get Ready For Love’
02. ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’
03. ‘From Her to Eternity’
04. ‘O Children’
05. ‘Jubilee Street’
06. ‘Bright Horses’
07. ‘I Need You’
08. ‘Waiting for You’
09. ‘Carnage’
10. ‘Tupelo’
11. ‘Red Right Hand’
12. ‘The Mercy Seat’
13. ‘The Ship Song’
14. ‘Higgs Boson Blues’
15. ‘City Of Refuge’
16. ‘White Elephant’
17. ‘Into My Arms’
18. ‘Vortex’ (live debut)
19. ‘Ghosteen Speaks’

Meanwhile, NME have an exclusive new clip of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis‘ film This Much I Know To Be True featuring Marianne Faithfull – check it out here.

In the new clip, Faithfull reads the poem ‘Prayer Before Work’ by May Sarton before Cave and Ellis play through ‘Ghosteen’ track ‘Galleon Ship’.

This Much I Know To Be True

Andrew Dominik’s second documentary about Nick Cave begins with a feint worthy of This Is Spinal Tap. “I’ve retrained as a ceramicist,” Cave tells the camera, deadpan, “because it’s no longer viable to be a musician.” And it’s true. Inspired by his collection of Staffordshire pottery, Cave has diversified into trinkets. Not just any trinkets. After a flawed attempt to cast a mantelpiece ornament of a saint boiling in oil, Cave has moved on to a series of 18 figurines telling the story of the Devil. Here is the (unglazed) Devil as a baby.

ORDER NOW: Miles Davis is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Here he is “growing up and doing bold, dangerous things”. Does the camera linger when we get to the Devil killing his first child? It does, then it’s on to the Devil becoming separated from the world through his transgressions, then his remorse, and on – spoiler alert – to the Devil bleeding to death in a lake of blood with white swans, “goat-like things” and women holding torches.

The ceramic devilry in this Repair Shop-style interlude reflects the influence of Covid restrictions on Cave’s touring activity. This Much I Know To Be True is a continuation of Cave/Dominik’s 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling, a haunting film that allowed Cave to address the tragic death of his son Arthur, and showed how he channelled despair into creativity. The intimacy between director and musician remains intact. The core of this film is the creative journey from Ghosteen (grief turned into myth) and Carnage (lockdown isolation, creative communion between Cave and the musically dominant Warren Ellis). Ellis talks of reaching a “meditative state” that “clicks into something transcendent” as he experiments with fractured sounds. Cave puts his more traditional songs aside to respond to Ellis’ wild energy. The musical sequences are impeccably rendered.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who also filmed Cave’s solo lockdown event, Idiot Prayer) has a circular track surrounding the musicians, and after the enforced isolation of Idiot Prayer there is a communal feel to the performances with Cave and Ellis, plus an expanding group of players and singers, reaching an intensity that summons peephole glimpses of religiosity. Marianne Faithfull makes a suitably domineering cameo, removing her oxygen supply to read May Sarton’s Prayer Before Work, an intervention that serves to highlight the way in which Cave’s vocal style has become almost spoken word, fluctuating between sermon and stream-of-consciousness.

Cave is entirely in control throughout, of course, but he uses an interview sequence in the back of a taxi to suggest – or possibly confess – that his life now has “a real sense of meaning” that is not dependent on his work. “I’m much happier than I used to be,” he says, sounding freshly amazed.

Director Andrew Dominik says new Nick Cave film “shows what he has learned about loss”

Andrew Dominik, director of the new film This Much I Know To Be True, has spoken to NME about how the movie depicts how far Nick Cave has come in his journey of processing grief.

READ MORE: This Much I Know To Be True review: an engrossing and intimate portrait of Nick Cave

This Much I Know To Be True, which is in cinemas for one night only tomorrow (Wednesday May 11), is a documentary meets performance film that centres around the creative relationship between Cave and his Bad Seeds bandmate and longtime collaborator Warren Ellis, and looks at the creation of their most recent albums ‘Ghosteen‘ and ‘CARNAGE‘.

Dominik – known for writing and directing films including Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly and the upcoming Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde – explained to NME how he first met Cave back in 1986.

“It was at a drug dealers’ when I was just an innocent little private schoolboy,” he said. “I walked into the living room and there was the prince of darkness, just sitting on the couch watching a documentary about earth worms. I started going out with his girlfriend three months later and that’s how I got to know him. He was my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend so I didn’t want to like him – but god he was good.”

Said ex-girlfriend was the titular Deanna from the classic 1988 Bad Seeds single. Dominik and Cave became friends through talking on the phone before later working together, before Deanna introduced him to Ellis in the ’90s backstage at a Dirty Three concert. After Cave and Ellis wrote the score for The Assassination of Jesse James in 2007, Dominik was later asked to direct 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling – portraying Cave and his wife Susie dealing with the loss of their teenage son Arthur while the Bad Seeds were completing their 16th album ‘Skeleton Tree’.

Director Andrew Dominik in 'This Much I Know To Be True'. Credit: Press — Director Andrew Dominik in ‘This Much I Know To Be True’. Credit: Press

Dominik spoke to NME before news broke this week of the passing of another of Cave’s children, Jethro Lazenby (whom he shared with Beau Lazenby), but explained that One More Time With Feeling showed the early stages Cave and his wife Susie coming to terms with their loss.

“That movie was a practical response to a practical problem,” said Dominik. “One day he went into a newsagents and saw a copy of Mojo and felt physically sick, because he realised that at some point he’d have to promote the record he was working on. How the fuck was he going to do that without talking about Arthur? How could he talk about Arthur with a whole bunch of journalists? I understood what he meant, so his idea was to make a film.”

He continued: “Initially he just wanted to make a performance film, but he knew that it needed to be addresses at some point for context – but how do you do that without it seeming like exploitation? How do you do that without it being ugly? It didn’t occur to us that what Nick was actually doing was brave. It just needed to be addressed because there was no fucking getting away from it.”

READ MORE: Warren Ellis on nearly 30 years with Nick Cave: “I’m there for him, whatever he wants”

Moving on from that part of their lives, Dominik explained how the personal reflections from intimate scenes with Cave in This Much I Know To Be True show “what Nick has learned over the past six years that he has to pass on to us”.

Dominik added: “One More Time With Feeling is trying to be positive and failing. This film really is positive and shows that Nick really has learned something and has something to pass on; as someone who has been struck by lightning. What Nick has to say is very simple. You see him groping in all kinds of directions in One More Time With Feeling, but it’s not a million different paths – it’s one path. That’s the one we show in the film.

“When something like that happens to you, there’s no response but complete authenticity. People respond to authenticity with authenticity. All of a sudden you’re in this together and it makes you love your fellow man. It will happen to all of us.”

One of the focal points of the new film is how Cave handles the questions on his fan Q&A site, The Red Hand Files – which has seen him share advice and personal stories on range of matters from grief and loss to mental health and body positivity, to whether or not he has ever met Nicolas Cage.

“I moved in with Nick at one point and he was writing ‘Ghosteen’ at the time, but what he was really interested in was The Red Hand Files,” said Dominik. “I got to see him create a bunch of them.

“He reads every question that comes into The Red Hand Files, then he picks out whichever ones speak to him more. Generally, if a person’s fucking life has fallen apart or if they’re dealing with something really difficult, then Nick has to answer that question really responsibly because the person deserves it.

“Over the course of the week, I’d see him refine his answer. What I realised is that Nick was using The Red Hand Files to help his own mind to heal. In having to be responsible to others, he has to be responsible to himself. The Red Hand Files were actually an act of self love. I knew I had to have that in the movie and to address that.”

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in 'This Much I Know To Be True'. Credit: Still/Press — Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in ‘This Much I Know To Be True’. Credit: Still/Press

The director also explained how the idea for the film started while Cave and Ellis were initially “trying to figure out what the fuck to do in a pandemic” when they were unable to tour, but soon found focus on their friendship and collaborative relationship.

“They were supposed to go on a year-long tour with a big band and 12 back-up singers to pull off the vocals off ‘Ghosteen’,” said Dominik. “Then COVID happened and they had to think up things to do. I think Nick was just at home, bored, thinking, ‘Let’s get together and have a play-date’.”

“They’d literally just made ‘CARNAGE’, just a couple of weeks before I went over there and shot it. That and his relationship with Warren was just what was happening at the moment.”

Asked about why Cave and Ellis make such a good creative match, Dominik replied: “They adore each other; they’re family. It’s a two-way street. They’re both adorable guys, and to know them is to love them.

“Nick’s one of the greatest songwriters in the world. If you’re going to be somebody’s sideman, and Warren usurped that position to have his name on the poster and movie, but there’s no one better to do it for than Nick Cave. All Warren says about Nick is that there’s a lightning that follows him around. Combined, Nick and Warren create a third thing that they both find incredibly valuable and fun.

“They make it look easy, and maybe it is for them, but it can’t be like that for everyone. What’s incredible about them is the courage that they have creatively to put themselves in situations of complete vulnerability – where they don’t know if what they’re doing is any good. That’s very brave.”

Another highlight of the film comes when the duo invite Marianne Faithfull into their performance to read a poem, which Ellis then reverses and turns into a sample for a backing track on ‘Galleon Ship’ from ‘Ghosteen’.

“In the film, it’s clear that Marianne is closer to the end than we are – but to see the spirit with which she’s living life in all of her defiant glory is really moving,” said Dominik. It’s not easy to read a 19th Century poem and just make every word glow. We were lucky to have Marianne Faithfull.”

He added: “It sounds like the voice of eternity; this constant thing whispering at you. That song is about the heroism of love. When you know what you can lose, to love someone is really heroic. Nick has realised that you can lose everything.”

This Much I Know To Be True is in cinemas for one night only on Wednesday May 11. Tickets and screening information are available here. Read the NME review of the film here.

The Bad Seeds are currently set for a long string of tour dates throughout the summer.

Faith, Hope & Carnage, a new book from Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan, follows on September 20.

Here are all the winners from the Grammys 2022 rolling list

The Grammys 2022 takes place tonight (April 3) in Las Vegas, with performances from the likes of Silk Sonic, BTS, Lady Gaga, Olivia Rodrigo and more lined up.

The main bulk of the awards will be handed out at the pre-telecast ceremony, which will be broadcast on the Grammys website and YouTube channel.

Then, at 8pm EST (1am BST), the main ceremony will air and hand out the biggest trophies of the night, including Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, Album Of The Year and Best New Artist.

Going into the event, Jon Batiste leads the nominations with 11 nods, while Justin Bieber follows on eight. Doja Cat, Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish all have seven nominations each.

A tribute to Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins will also be staged following the iconic musician’s death last week (March 25). Foo Fighters were scheduled to perform at the ceremony, but have since pulled out, as well as cancelling their planned touring schedule.

The full list of nominees for the Grammys 2022 is below – winners will be highlighted in bold as they are announced.

Record of the Year

ABBA – ‘I Still Have Faith In You’
Jon Batiste – ‘Freedom’
Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga – ‘I Get A Kick Out of You’
Justin Bieber, Daniel Cesar, Giveon – ‘Peaches’
Brandi Carlile – ‘Right on Time’
Doja Cat, SZA – ‘Kiss Me More’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Lil Nas X – ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Drivers License’
Silk Sonic – ‘Leave The Door Open’

Album of the Year

Jon Batiste – ‘We Are’
Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga – ‘Love For Sale’
Justin Bieber – ‘Justice (Triple Chucks Deluxe)’
Doja Cat – ‘Planet Her (Deluxe)’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Sour’
Lil Nas X – ‘Montero’
H.E.R. – ‘Back Of My Mind’
Kanye West – ‘Donda’
Taylor Swift – ‘Evermore’

Song of the Year

Ed Sheeran – ‘Bad Habits’
Alicia Keys, Brandi Carlile – ‘A Beautiful Noise’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Drivers License’
H.E.R. – ‘Fight For You’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Doja Cat, SZA – ‘Kiss Me More’
Silk Sonic – ‘Leave The Door Open’
Lil Nas X – ‘Montero (Call Me by Your Name)’
Justin Bieber, Daniel Cesar, Giveon – ‘Peaches’
Brandi Carlile – ‘Right On Time’

Best New Artist

Arooj Aftab
Jimmie Allen
Baby Keem
Finneas
Glass Animals
Japanese Breakfast
The Kid Laroi
Arlo Parks
Olivia Rodrigo
Saweetie

Best Pop Solo Performance

Justin Bieber – ‘Anyone’
Brandi Carlile – ‘Right On Time’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Ariana Grande – ‘Positions’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Drivers License’

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance

Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga – ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’
Justin Bieber & Benny Blanco – ‘Lonely’
BTS – ‘Butter’
Coldplay – ‘Higher Power’
Doja Cat Featuring SZA – ‘Kiss Me More’

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album

Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga – ‘Love For Sale’
Norah Jones – ’Til We Meet Again (Live)’
Tori Kelly – ‘A Tori Kelly Christmas’
Ledisi – ‘Ledisi Sings Nina’
Willie Nelson – ‘That’s Life’
Dolly Parton – ‘A Holly Dolly Christmas’

Best Pop Vocal Album

Justin Bieber – ‘Justice (Triple Chucks Deluxe)’
Doja Cat – ‘Planet Her (Deluxe)’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Ariana Grande – ‘Positions’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Sour’

Best Rock Performance

AC/DC – ‘Shot In The Dark’
Black Pumas – ‘Know You Better (Live From Capitol Studio A)’
Chris Cornell – ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’
Deftones – ‘Ohms’
Foo Fighters – ‘Making A Fire’

Best Metal Performance

Deftones – ‘Genesis’
Dream Theater – ‘The Alien’
Gojira – ‘Amazonia’
Mastodon – ‘Pushing The Tides’
Rob Zombie – ‘The Triumph Of King Freak (A Crypt Of Preservation And Superstition)’

Olivia Rodrigo. Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for MRC

Best Rock Song

Rivers Cuomo, Ashley Gorley, Ben Johnson & Ilsey Juber – ‘All My Favourite Songs’ (Weezer)
Caleb Followill, Jared Followill, Matthew Followill & Nathan Followill – ‘The Bandit’ (Kings Of Leon)
Wolfgang Van Halen – ‘Distance’ (Mammoth WVH)
Paul McCartney – ‘Find My Way’
Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett & Pat Smear – ‘Waiting On A War’ (Foo Fighters)

Best Rock Album

AC/DC – ‘Power Up’
Black Pumas – ‘Capitol Cuts – Live From Studio A’
Chris Cornell – ‘No One Sings Like You Anymore Vol. 1’
Foo Fighters – ‘Medicine At Midnight’
Paul McCartney – ‘McCartney III’

Best Dance/Electronic Recording

Afrojack & David Guetta – ‘Hero’
Ólafur Arnalds, Bonobo – ‘Loom’
James Blake – ‘Before’
Bonobo, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs – ‘Heartbreak’
Caribou – ‘You Can Do It’
Rüfüs du Sol – ‘Alive’ – winner
Tiësto – ‘The Business’

Best Dance/Electronic Music Album

Black Coffee – Subconsciously’ – winner
ILLENIUM – ‘Fallen Numbers’
Major Lazer – ‘Music Is The Weapon (Reloaded)’
Marshmello – ‘Shockwave’
Sylvan Esso – ‘Free Love’
Ten City – ‘Judgement’

Best Alternative Music Album

Fleet Foxes – ‘Shore’
Halsey – ‘If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power’
Japanese Breakfast – ‘Jubilee’
Arlo Parks – ‘Collapsed In Sunbeams’
St. Vincent – ‘Daddy’s Home’

Best R&B Performance

Snoh Aalegra – ‘Lost You’
Justin Bieber, Daniel Cesar, Giveon – ‘Peaches’
H.E.R. – ‘Damage’
Silk Sonic – ‘Leave the Door Open’
Jazmine Sullivan – ‘Pick Up Your Feelings’

Best Progressive R&B Album

Eric Bellinger – ‘New Light’
Cory Henry – ‘Something To Say’
Hiatus Kaiyote – ‘Mood Valiant’
Lucky Daye – ‘Table For Two’
Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder & Kamasi Washington – ‘Dinner Party: Dessert’
Masego – ‘Studying Abroad: Extended Stay’

Best Traditional R&B Performance

Jon Batiste – ‘I Need You’
BJ The Chicago Kid, PJ Morton & Kenyon Dixon Featuring Charlie Bereal – ‘Bring It On Home To Me’
Leon Bridges Featuring Robert Glasper – ‘Born Again’
H.E.R. – ‘Fight For You’
Lucky Daye Featuring Yebba – ‘How Much Can A Heart Take’

Best R&B Song

Anthony Clemons Jr., Jeff Gitelman, H.E.R., Carl McCormick & Tiara Thomas – ‘Damage’ (H.E.R.)
Jacob Collier, Carter Lang, Carlos Munoz, Solána Rowe & Christopher Ruelas – ‘Good Days’ (SZA)
Giveon Evans, Maneesh, Sevn Thomas & Varren Wade – ‘Heartbreak Anniversary’ (Giveon)
Denisia “Blue June” Andrews, Audra Mae Butts, Kyle Coleman, Brittany “Chi” Coney, Michael Holmes & Jazmine Sullivan – ‘Pick Up Your Feelings’ (Jazmine Sullivan)

Best R&B Album

Snoh Aalegra – ‘Temporary Highs In The Violet Skies’
Jon Batiste – ‘We Are’
Leon Bridges – ‘Gold-Diggers Sound’
H.E.R. – ‘Back Of My Mind’
Jazmine Sullivan – ‘Heaux Tales’

Justin Bieber performs at the Beverly Hilton on New Year’s Eve 2020. CREDIT: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images

Best Traditional R&B Performance

Jon Batiste – ‘I Need You’
BJ the Chicago Kid, PJ Morton, Kenyon Dixon, Charlie Bereal – ‘Bring It On Home’
Leon Bridges, Robert Glasper – ‘Born Again’
H.E.R. – ‘Fight for You’
Lucky Dave, Yebba – ‘How Much Can A Heart Take’

Best Rap Performance

Baby Keem, Kendrick Lamar – ‘Family Ties’
Cardi B – ‘Up’
J. Cole, 21 Savage & Morray – ’My Life’
Drake, Future, Young Thug – ‘Way Too Sexy’
Megan Thee Stallion – ‘Thot Shit’

Best Rap Album

J. Cole – ‘The Off-Season’
Drake – ‘Certified Lover Boy’
Nas – ‘King’s Disease 2’
Tyler, the Creator – ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’
Kanye West – ‘Donda’

Best Melodic Rap Performance

J. Cole, Lil Baby – ‘Pride Is The Devil’
Doja Cat – ‘Need to Know’
Lil Nas X, Jack Harlow – ‘Industry Baby’
Tyler, the Creator Featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Ty Dolla $ign – ‘WusYaName’
Kanye West, The Weekend, Lil Baby – ‘Hurricane’

Best Rap Song

DMX, Jay-Z, Nas – ‘Bath Salts’
Saweetie, Doja Cat – ‘Best Friend’
Baby Keem, Kendrick Lamar – ‘Family Ties’
Kanye West, Jay-Z – ‘Jail’
J. Cole, 21 Savage & Morray – ‘My Life’

Best Latin Pop or Urban Album

Pablo Alborán – ‘Vértigo’
Paula Arenas – ‘Mis Amores’
Ricardo Arjona – ‘Hecho A La Antigua’
Camilo – ‘Mis Manos’
Alex Cuba – ‘Mendó’
Selena Gomez – ‘Revelación’

Best American Roots Performance

Jon Batiste – ‘Cry’ – winner
Billy Strings – ‘Love and Regret’
The Blind Boys of Alabama and Bela Fleck – ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free’
Brandy Clark Featuring Brandi Carlile – ‘Same Devil’
Allison Russell – ‘Nightflyer’

Best American Roots Song

Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi – ‘Avalon’
Valerie June Featuring Carla Thomas – ‘Call Me A Fool’
Jon Batiste – ‘Cry’ – winner
Yola – ‘Diamond Studded Shoes’
Allison Russell – ‘Nightflyer’

Best Americana Album

Jackson Browne – ‘Downhill From Everywhere’
John Hiatt with the Jerry Douglas Band – ‘Leftover Feelings’
Los Lobos – ‘Native Sons’ – winner
Allison Russell – ‘Outside Child’
Yola – ‘Stand for Myself’

Best Bluegrass Album

Billy Strings – ‘Renewal’
Béla Fleck – ‘My Bluegrass Heart’ – winner
The Infamous Stringdusters – ‘A Tribute To Bill Monroe’
Sturgill Simpson – ‘Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions)’
Rhonda Vincent – ‘Music Is What I See’

Best Traditional Blues Album

Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite – ‘100 Years of Blues’
Blues Traveler – ‘Traveler’s Blues’
Cedric Burnside – ‘I Be Trying’ – winner
Guy Davis – ‘Be Ready When I Call You’
Kim Watson – ‘Take Me Back’

Doja Cat performing at Lollapalooza Brasil on March 25, 2022. Credit: Mauricio Santana/Getty Images.

Best Contemporary Blues Album

The Black Keys Featuring Eric Deaton and Kenny Brown – ‘Delta Kream’
Joe Bonamassa – ‘Royal Tea’
Shemekia Copeland – ‘Uncivil War’
Steve Cropper – ‘Fire It Up’
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram – ‘662’ – winner

Best Folk Album

Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘One Night Lonely (Live)’
Tyler Childers – ‘Long Violent History’
Madison Cunningham – ‘Wednesday (Extended Edition)’
Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi – ‘They’re Calling Me Home’ – winner
Sarah Jarosz – ‘Blue Heron Suite’

Best Regional Roots Music Album

Sean Ardoin and Kreole Rock and Soul – ‘Live In New Orleans!’
Big Chief Monk Boudreaux – ‘Bloodstains and Teardrops’
Chia Wa – ‘My People’
Corey Ledet Zydaco – ‘Corey Ledet Zydaco’
Kalani Pe’a – ‘Kau Ka Pe’a’ – winner

Best Reggae Album

Etana – ‘Pamoja’
Gramps Morgan – ‘Positive Vibration’
Sean Paul – ‘Live N Livin’
Jesse Royal – Royal Soja – ‘Beauty In the Silence’ – winner
Spice – ’10’

Best Global Music Album

Rocky Dawuni – ‘Voice of Bunbon Vol. 1.’
Daniel Ho & Friends – ‘East West Players Presents: Daniel Ho & Friends Live In Concert’
Angélique Kidjo – ‘Mother Nature’ – winner
Femi Kuti, Made Kuti – ‘Legacy +’
Wizkid – ‘Made in Lagos: Deluxe Edition’

Best New Age Album

Will Ackerman, Jeff Oster, Tom Eaton – ‘Brothers’
Stewart Copeland, Ricky Kej – ‘Divine Tides’ – winner
Wouter Kellerman, David Arkenstone – ‘Pangaea’
Opium Moon – ‘Night + Day’
Laura Sullivan – ‘Pieces of Forever’

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

The Marías – ‘Cinema’
Yebba – ‘Dawn’
Low – ‘Hey What’
Tony Bennet, Lady Gaga – ‘Love For Sale’
Pino Palladino, Blake Mills – ‘Notes With Attachments’

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical

Jack Antonoff
Rogét Chahayed
Mike Elizondo
Hit-Boy
Ricky Reed

Best Remixed Recording

Soul II Soul – ‘Back to Life (Booka T Kings of Soul Satta Dub)’
Papa Roach – ‘Born for Greatness (Cymek Remix)’
K. D. Lang – ‘Constant Craving (Fashionably Late Remix)’
Zedd, Griff – ‘Inside Out (3Scape Drm Remix)’
Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande – ‘Met Him Last Night (Dave Audé Remix)’
Deftones – ‘Passenger (Mike Shinoda Remix)’
PVA – ‘Talks (Mura Masa Remix)’

Best Immersive Audio Album (63rd Grammy)

Stemmeklang – ‘Bolstad: Tomba Sonora’
Booka Shade – ‘Dear Future Self (Dolby Atmos Mixes)’
Tove Ramio-Ystad, Cantus – ‘Fryd’
Alain Mallet – ‘Mutt Slang II: A Wake of Sorrows Engulfed in Rage’
Jim R. Keene, the United States Army Field Band – ‘Soundtrack of the American Soldier’ – winner

Billie Eilish pauses concert to help fan — Billie Eilish. Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Best Immersive Audio Album

Alicia Keys – ‘Alicia’
Patricia Barber – ‘Clique’
Harry Styles – ‘Fine Line’
Steven Wilson – ‘The Future Bites’
Anne Karin Sundal-Ask, Det Norske Jentekor – ‘Stille Grender’

Best Engineered Album, Classical

Sérgio Assad, Clarice Assad, Third Coast Percussion – ‘Archetypes’
Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax – ‘Beethoven Cello Sonatas: Hope Amid Tears’
Manfred Honeck, Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra – ‘Beethoven Symphony No. 9’
Chanticleer – ‘Chanticleer Sings Christmas’
Gustavo Dudamel, Fernando Malvar-Ruiz, Luke McEndarfer, Robert Istad, Grant Gershon, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, Los Angeles Master Chorale, National Children’s Chorus, Pacific Chorale, Los Angeles Philharmonic – ‘Mahler: Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand’

Best Contemporary Instrumental Album

Randy Brecker, Eric Marienthal – ‘Double Dealin’’
Rachel Eckroth – ‘The Garden’
Taylor Eigsti – ‘Tree Falls’
Steve Gadd Band – ‘At Blue Note Tokyo’
Mark Lettieri – ‘Deep: The Baritone Sessions, Vol. 2’

Best Country Solo Performance

Luke Combs – ‘Forever After All’
Mickey Guyton – ‘Remember Her Name’
Jason Isbell – ‘All I Do Is Drive’
Kacey Musgraves – ‘Camera Roll’
Chris Stapleton – ‘You Should Probably Leave’ – winner

Best Country Duo/Group Performance

Jason Aldean & Carrie Underwood – ‘If I Didn’t Love You’
Brothers Osborne – ‘Younger Me’ – winner
Dan + Shay – ‘Glad You Exist’
Ryan Hurd & Maren Morris – ‘Chasing After You’
Elle King & Miranda Lambert – ‘Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)’

Best Country Song

Jessie Jo Dillon, Maren Morris, Jimmy Robbins & Laura Veltz – ‘Better Than We Found It’ (Maren Morris)
Ian Fitchuk, Kacey Musgraves & Daniel Tashian – ‘Camera Roll’ (Kacey Musgraves)
Dave Cobb, J.T. Cure, Derek Mixon & Chris Stapleton – ‘Cold’ (Chris Stapleton) – winner
Zach Crowell, Ashley Gorley & Thomas Rhett – ‘Country Again’ (Thomas Rhett)
Cameron Bartolini, Walker Hayes, Josh Jenkins & Shane Stevens – ‘Fancy Like’ (Walker Hayes)
Mickey Guyton, Blake Hubbard, Jarrod Ingram & Parker Welling – ‘Remember Her Name’ (Mickey Guyton)

Best Country Album

Brothers Osborne – ‘Skeletons’
Mickey Guyton – ‘Remember Her Name’
Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall & Jack Ingram – ‘The Marfa Tapes’
Sturgill Simpson – ‘The Ballad Of Dood & Juanita’
Chris Stapleton – ‘Starting Over’

Best Improvised Jazz Solo

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah – ‘Sackodougou’
Kenny Barron – ‘Kick Those Feet’
Jon Batiste – ‘Bigger Than Us’
Terence Blanchard – ‘Absence’
Chick Corea ‘Humpty Dumpty (Set 2)’ – winner

Best Jazz Vocal Album

The Baylor Project – ‘Generations’
Kurt Elling & Charlie Hunter – ‘SuperBlue’
Nnenna Freelon – ‘Time Traveller’
Gretchen Parlato – ‘Flor’
Esperanza Spalding – ‘Songwrights Apothecary Lab’

Best Jazz Instrumental Album

Jon Batiste – ‘Jazz Selections: Music From And Inspired By Soul’
Terence Blanchard Featuring The E Collective And The Turtle Island Quartet – ‘Absence’
Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette & Gonzalo Rubalcaba – ‘Skyline’ – winner
Chick Corea, John Patitucci & Dave Weckl – ‘Akoustic Band LIVE’
Pat Metheny – ‘Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV)’

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

The Count Basie Orchestra Directed By Scotty Barnhart – ‘Live At Birdland!’
Jazzmeia Horn And Her Noble Force – ‘Dear Love’
Christian McBride Big Band – ‘For Jimmy, Wes And Oliver’ – winner
Sun Ra Arkestra – ‘Swirling’
Yellowjackets + WDR Big Band – ‘Jackets XL’

j cole rwanda basketball africa — J Cole (Picture: Jeff Hahne/Getty Images)

Best Latin Jazz Album

Eliane Elias With Chick Corea and Chucho Valdés – ‘Mirror Mirror’ – winner
Carlos Henriquez – ‘The South Bronx Story’
Arturo O’Farrill & The Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra – ‘Virtual Birdland’
Dafnis Prieto Sextet – ‘Transparency’
Miguel Zenón & Luis Perdomo – ‘El Arte Del Bolero’

Best Gospel Performance/Song

Dante Bowe Featuring Steffany Gretzinger & Chandler Moore; Dante Bowe, Tywan Mack, Jeff Schneeweis & Mitch Wong – ‘Voice Of God’
Dante Bowe; Dante Bowe & Ben Schofield – ‘Joyful’
Anthony Brown & Group Therapy; Anthony Brown & Darryl Woodson – ‘Help’
CeCe Winans – ‘Never Lost’
Elevation Worship & Maverick City Music; Dante Bowe, Chris Brown, Steven Furtick, Tiffany Hudson, Brandon Lake & Chandler Moore – ‘Wait On You’

Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song

Kirk Franklin & Lil Baby; Kirk Franklin, Dominique Jones, Cynthia Nunn & Justin Smith – ‘We Win’
H.E.R. & Tauren Wells; Josiah Bassey, Dernst Emile & H.E.R. – ‘Hold Us Together (Hope Mix)’
Chandler Moore & KJ Scriven; Jonathan Jay, Nathan Jess & Chandler Moore – ‘Man Of Your Word’
CeCe Winans; Dwan Hill, Kyle Lee, CeCe Winans & Mitch Wong – ‘Believe For It’
Elevation Worship & Maverick City Music Featuring Chandler Moore & Naomi Raine; Chris Brown, Steven Furtick, Chandler Moore & Naomi Raine – ‘Jireh’

Best Gospel Album

Jekalyn Carr – ‘Changing Your Story’
Tasha Cobbs Leonard – ‘Royalty: Live At The Ryman’
Maverick City Music – ‘Jubilee: Juneteenth Edition’
Jonathan McReynolds & Mali Music – ‘Jonny X Mali: Live In LA’
CeCe Winans – ‘Believe For It’

Best Contemporary Christian Music Album

Natalie Grant – ‘No Stranger’
Israel & New Breed – ‘Feels Like Home Vol. 2’
Kari Jobe – ‘The Blessing (Live)’
Tauren Wells – ‘Citizen Of Heaven (Live)’
Elevation Worship & Maverick City Music – ‘Old Church Basement’

Best Roots Gospel Album

Harry Connick, Jr. – ‘Alone With My Faith’
Gaither Vocal Band – ‘That’s Gospel, Brother’
Ernie Haase & Signature Sound – ‘Keeping On’
The Isaacs – ‘Songs For The Times’
Carrie Underwood – ‘My Savior’

Best Música Urbana Album

Rauw Alejandro – ‘Afrodisíaco’
Bad Bunny – ‘El Último Tour Del Mundo’
J Balvin – ‘Jose’
KAROL G – ‘KG0516’
Kali Uchis – ‘Sin Miedo (Del Amor Y Otros Demonios) 8’

Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album

Bomba Estéreo – ‘Deja’
Diamante Eléctrico – ‘Mira Lo Que Me Hiciste Hacer (Deluxe Edition)’
Juanes – ‘Origen’
Nathy Peluso – ‘Calambre’
C. Tangana – ‘El Madrileño’
Zoé – ‘Sonidos De Karmática Resonancia’

Best Regional Mexican Music Album (Including Tejano)

Aida Cuevas – ‘Antología De La Musica Ranchera, Vol. 2’
Vicente Fernández – ‘A Bis 80’s’
Mon Laferte – ‘Seis’
Natalia Lafourcade – ‘Un Canto Por México, Vol. II’
Christian Nodal – ‘Ayayay! (Súper Deluxe)’

Best Tropical Latin Album

Rubén Blades y Roberto Delgado & Orquesta – ‘Salswing!’
El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico – ‘En Cuarentena’
Aymée Nuviola – ‘Sin Salsa No Hay Paraíso’
Gilberto Santa Rosa – ‘Colegas’
Tony Succar – ‘Live In Peru’

bts festa 2020 group concept photo hybe big hit music — BTS. Credit: HYBE

Best Global Music Performance

Arooj Aftab – ‘Mohabbat’ – winner
Angelique Kidjo & Burna Boy – ‘Do Yourself’
Femi Kuti – ‘Pà Pá Pà’
Yo-Yo Ma & Angelique Kidjo – ‘Blewu’
WizKid Featuring Tems – ‘Essence’

Best Children’s Music Album

123 Andrés – ‘Actívate’
1 Tribe Collective – ‘All One Tribe’
Pierce Freelon – ‘Black To The Future’
Falu – ‘A Colorful World’
Lucky Diaz And The Family Jam Band – ‘Crayon Kids’

Best Spoken Word Album

LeVar Burton – ‘Aftermath’
Don Cheadle – ‘Carry On: Reflections For A New Generation From John Lewis’
J. Ivy – ‘Catching Dreams: Live At Fort Knox Chicago’
Dave Chappelle & Amir Sulaiman – ‘8:46’
Barack Obama – ‘A Promised Land’

Best Comedy Album

Lavell Crawford – ‘The Comedy Vaccine’
Chelsea Handler – ‘Evolution’
Louis C.K. – ‘Sincerely Louis CK’
Lewis Black – ‘Thanks For Risking Your Life’
Nate Bargatze – ‘The Greatest Average American’
Kevin Hart – ‘Zero F***s Given’

Best Musical Theater Album

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Nick Lloyd Webber & Greg Wells, producers; Andrew Lloyd Webber & David Zippel, composers/lyricists – ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella’ (Original Album Cast)
Burt Bacharach, Michael Croiter, Ben Hartman & Steven Sater, producers; Burt Bacharach, composer; Steven Sater – ‘Burt Bacharach and Steven Sater’s Some Lovers’ (World Premiere Cast)
Simon Hale, Conor McPherson & Dean Sharenow, producers (Bob Dylan, composer & lyricist) – ‘Girl From The North Country’ (Original Broadway Cast)
Cameron Mackintosh, Lee McCutcheon & Stephen Metcalfe, producers (Claude-Michel Schönberg, composer; Alain Boublil, John Caird, Herbert Kretzmer, Jean-Marc Natel & Trevor Nunn, lyricists) – ‘Les Misérables: The Staged Concert (The Sensational 2020 Live Recording)’
Daniel C. Levine, Michael J Moritz Jr, Bryan Perri & Stephen Schwartz, producers (Stephen Schwartz, composer & lyricist) – ‘Stephen Schwartz’s Snapshots’ (World Premiere Cast)
Emily Bear, producer; Abigail Barlow & Emily Bear, composers/lyricists – ‘The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical’ – winner

Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media

Various Artists – ‘Cruella’
Various Artists – ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
Various Artists – ‘In The Heights’
Various Artists – ‘One Night In Miami…’
Various Artists – ‘Schmigadoon! Episode 1’
Jennifer Hudson – ‘Respect’
Andra Day – ‘The United States Vs. Billie Holiday’ – winner

Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media

Kris Bowers – ‘Bridgerton’
Hans Zimmer – ‘Dune’
Ludwig Göransson – ‘The Mandalorian: Season 2 – Vol. 2 (Chapters 13-16)’
Carlos Rafael Rivera – ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ – winner
Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – ‘Soul’ – winner

Best Song Written For Visual Media

Kristen Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez, songwriters (Kristen Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez Featuring Kathryn Hahn, Eric Bradley, Greg Whipple, Jasper Randall & Gerald White) – ‘Agatha All Along [From WandaVision: Episode 7]’
Bo Burnham, songwriter (Bo Burnham) – ‘All Eyes On Me [From Inside]’ – winner
Alecia Moore, Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, songwriters (P!nk) – ‘All I Know So Far [From P!NK: All I Know So Far]’
Dernst Emile II, H.E.R. & Tiara Thomas, songwriters (H.E.R.) – ‘Fight For You [From Judas And The Black Messiah]’
Jamie Hartman, Jennifer Hudson & Carole King, songwriters (Jennifer Hudson) – ‘Here I Am (Singing My Way Home) [From Respect]’
Sam Ashworth & Leslie Odom, Jr., songwriters (Leslie Odom, Jr.) – ‘Speak Now [From One Night In Miami…]’

Best Instrumental Composition

Brandee Younger – ‘Beautiful Is Black’
Tom Nazziola – ‘Cat And Mouse’
Vince Mendoza & Czech National Symphony Orchestra Featuring Antonio Sánchez & Derrick Hodge – ‘Concerto For Orchestra: Finale’
Arturo O’Farrill & The Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble – ‘Dreaming In Lions: Dreaming In Lions’
Lyle Mays – ‘Eberhard’ – winner

Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella

Bill O’Connell, arranger (Richard Baratta) – ‘Chopsticks’
Robin Smith, arranger (HAUSER, London Symphony Orchestra & Robin Smith) – ‘For The Love Of A Princess (From “Braveheart”)’
Emile Mosseri, arranger (Emile Mosseri) – ‘Infinite Love’
Charlie Rosen & Jake Silverman, arrangers (The 8-Bit Big Band Featuring Button Masher) – ‘Meta Knight’s Revenge (From “Kirby Superstar”)’ – winner
Gabriela Quintero & Rodrigo Sanchez, arrangers (Rodrigo y Gabriela) – ‘The Struggle Within’

Silk Sonic. CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals

Ólafur Arnalds, arranger (Ólafur Arnalds & Josin) – ‘The Bottom Line’
Tehillah Alphonso, arranger (Tonality & Alexander Lloyd Blake) – ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
Jacob Collier – ‘The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)’
Cody Fry – ‘Eleanor Rigby’
Vince Mendoza, arranger (Vince Mendoza, Czech National Symphony Orchestra & Julia Bullock) – ‘To The Edge Of Longing (Edit Version)’ – winner

Best Recording Package

Sarah Dodds & Shauna Dodds, art directors (Reckless Kelly) – ‘American Jackpot / American Girls’
Nick Cave & Tom Hingston, art directors (Nick Cave & Warren Ellis) – ‘Carnage’
Li Jheng Han & Yu, Wei, art directors (2nd Generation Falangao Singing Group & The Chairman Crossover Big Band) – ‘Pakelang’
Dayle Doyle, art director (Matt Berninger) – ‘Serpentine Prison’
Xiao Qing Yang, art director (Soul Of Ears) – ‘Zeta’

Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package

Darren Evans, Dhani Harrison & Olivia Harrison, art directors (George Harrison) – ‘All Things Must Pass: 50th Anniversary Edition’
Lordess Foudre & Christopher Leckie, art directors (Soccer Mommy) – ‘Color Theory’
Simon Moore, art director (Steven Wilson) – ‘The Future Bites (Limited Edition Box Set)’
Dan Calderwood & Jon King, art directors (Gang Of Four) – ’77-81’
Ramón Coronado & Marshall Rake, art directors (Mac Miller) – ‘Swimming In Circles’

Best Album Notes

Ann-Katrin Zimmermann, album notes writer (Sunwook Kim) – ‘Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas’
Ricky Riccardi, album notes writer (Louis Armstrong) – ‘The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia And RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-1966’
Kevin Howes, album notes writer (Willie Dunn) – ‘Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology’
David Giovannoni, Richard Martin & Stephan Puille, album notes writers (Various Artists) – ‘Etching The Voice: Emile Berliner And The First Commercial Gramophone Discs, 1889-1895’
Robert Marovich, album notes writer (Various Artists) – ‘The King Of Gospel Music: The Life And Music Of Reverend James Cleveland’

Best Historical Album

Robert Russ, compilation producer; Nancy Conforti, Andreas K. Meyer & Jennifer Nulsen, mastering engineers (Marian Anderson) – ‘Beyond The Music: Her Complete RCA Victor Recordings’
Meagan Hennessey & Richard Martin, compilation producers; Richard Martin, mastering engineer (Various Artists) – ‘Etching The Voice: Emile Berliner And The First Commercial Gramophone Discs, 1889-1895’
April Ledbetter, Steven Lance Ledbetter & Jonathan Ward, compilation producers; Michael Graves, mastering engineer (Various Artists) – ‘Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History Of The World’s Music’
Patrick Milligan & Joni Mitchell, compilation producers; Bernie Grundman, mastering engineer (Joni Mitchell) – ‘Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967)’
Trevor Guy, Michael Howe & Kirk Johnson, compilation producers; Bernie Grundman, mastering engineer (Prince) – ‘Sign O’ The Times (Super Deluxe Edition)’

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

Josh Conway, Marvin Figueroa, Josh Gudwin, Neal H Pogue & Ethan Shumaker, engineers; Joe LaPorta, mastering engineer (The Marías) – ‘Cinema’
Thomas Brenneck, Zach Brown, Elton “L10MixedIt” Chueng, Riccardo Damian, Tom Elmhirst, Jens Jungkurth, Todd Monfalcone, John Rooney & Smino, engineers; Randy Merrill, mastering engineer (Yebba) – ‘Dawn’
BJ Burton, engineer; BJ Burton, mastering engineer (Low) – ‘Hey What’
Dae Bennett, Josh Coleman & Billy Cumella, engineers; Greg Calbi & Steve Fallone, mastering engineers (Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga) – ‘Love For Sale’
Joseph Lorge & Blake Mills, engineers; Greg Koller, mastering engineer (Pino Palladino & Blake Mills) – ‘Notes With Attachments’

Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical

Jack Antonoff
Rogét Chahayed
Mike Elizondo
Hit-Boy
Ricky Reed

Best Remixed Recording

Booker T, remixer (Soul II Soul) – ‘Back To Life (Booker T Kings Of Soul Satta Dub)’
Spencer Bastin, remixer (Papa Roach) – ‘Born For Greatness (Cymek Remix)’
Tracy Young, remixer (K.D. Lang) – ‘Constant Craving (Fashionably Late Remix)’
3SCAPE DRM, remixer (Zedd & Griff) – ‘Inside Out (3SCAPE DRM Remix)’
Dave Audé, remixer (Demi Lovato & Ariana Grande) – ‘Met Him Last Night (Dave Audé Remix)’
Mike Shinoda, remixer (Deftones) – ‘Passenger (Mike Shinoda Remix)’
Alexander Crossan, remixer (PVA) – ‘Talks (Mura Masa Remix)’

Best Immersive Audio Album

George Massenburg & Eric Schilling, immersive mix engineers; Michael Romanowski, immersive mastering engineer; Ann Mincieli, immersive producer (Alicia Keys) – ‘Alicia’
Jim Anderson & Ulrike Schwarz, immersive mix engineers; Bob Ludwig, immersive mastering engineer; Jim Anderson, immersive producer (Patricia Barber) – ‘Clique’
Greg Penny, immersive mix engineer; Greg Penny, immersive mastering engineer; Greg Penny, immersive producer (Harry Styles) – ‘Fine Line’
Jake Fields & Steven Wilson, immersive mix engineers; Bob Ludwig, immersive mastering engineer; Steven Wilson, immersive producer (Steven Wilson) – ‘The Future Bites’
Morten Lindberg, immersive mix engineer; Morten Lindberg, immersive mastering engineer; Morten Lindberg, immersive producer (Anne Karin Sundal-Ask & Det Norske Jentekor) – ‘Stille Grender’

Producer Of The Year, Classical

Blanton Alspaugh
Steven Epstein
David Frost
Elaine Martone
Judith Sherman

Lady Gaga House Of Gucci — Lady Gaga at the premiere for ‘House Of Gucci’. CREDIT: Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage

Best Orchestral Performance

Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor (Nashville Symphony Orchestra) – ‘Adams: My Father Knew Charles Ives; Harmonielehre’
Manfred Honeck, conductor (Mendelssohn Choir Of Pittsburgh & Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra) – ‘Beethoven: Symphony No. 9’
Nico Muhly, conductor (San Francisco Symphony) – ‘Muhly: Throughline’
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor (Philadelphia Orchestra) – ‘Price: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3’
Thomas Dausgaard, conductor (Seattle Symphony Orchestra) – ‘Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Scriabin: The Poem Of Ecstasy’

Best Opera Recording

Susanna Mälkki, conductor; Mika Kares & Szilvia Vörös; Robert Suff, producer (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra) – ‘Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle’
Karen Kamensek, conductor; J’Nai Bridges, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Zachary James & Dísella Lárusdóttir; David Frost, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus) – ‘Glass: Akhnaten’
Simon Rattle, conductor; Sophia Burgos, Lucy Crowe, Gerald Finley, Peter Hoare, Anna Lapkovskaja, Paulina Malefane, Jan Martinik & Hanno Müller-Brachmann; Andrew Cornall, producer (London Symphony Orchestra; London Symphony Chorus & LSO Discovery Voices) – ‘Janáček: Cunning Little Vixen’
Corrado Rovaris, conductor; Johnathan McCullough; James Darrah & John Toia, producers (The Opera Philadelphia Orchestra) – ‘Little: Soldier Songs’
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Karen Cargill, Isabel Leonard, Karita Mattila, Erin Morley & Adrianne Pieczonka; David Frost, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus) – ‘Poulenc: Dialogues Des Carmélites’

Best Choral Performance

Matthew Guard, conductor (Jonas Budris, Carrie Cheron, Fiona Gillespie, Nathan Hodgson, Helen Karloski, Enrico Lagasca, Megan Roth, Alissa Ruth Suver & Dana Whiteside; Skylark Vocal Ensemble) – ‘It’s A Long Way’
Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Grant Gershon, Robert Istad, Fernando Malvar-Ruiz & Luke McEndarfer, chorus masters (Leah Crocetto, Mihoko Fujimura, Ryan McKinny, Erin Morley, Tamara Mumford, Simon O’Neill, Morris Robinson & Tamara Wilson; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, Los Angeles Master Chorale, National Children’s Chorus & Pacific Chorale) – ‘Mahler: Symphony No. 8, ‘Symphony Of A Thousand’’
Donald Nally, conductor (International Contemporary Ensemble & Quicksilver; The Crossing) – ‘Rising w/The Crossing’
Kaspars Putniņš, conductor; Heli Jürgenson, chorus master (Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) – ‘Schnittke: Choir Concerto; Three Sacred Hymns; Pärt: Seven Magnificat-Antiphons’
Benedict Sheehan, conductor (Michael Hawes, Timothy Parsons & Jason Thoms; The Saint Tikhon Choir) – ‘Sheehan: Liturgy Of Saint John Chrysostom’
Craig Hella Johnson, conductor (Estelí Gomez; Austin Guitar Quartet, Douglas Harvey, Los Angeles Guitar Quartet & Texas Guitar Quartet; Conspirare) – ‘The Singing Guitar’

Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance

JACK Quartet – ‘Adams, John Luther: Lines Made By Walking’
Sandbox Percussion – ‘Akiho: Seven Pillars’
Sérgio Assad, Clarice Assad & Third Coast Percussion – ‘Archetypes’
Yo-Yo Ma & Emanuel Ax – ‘Beethoven: Cello Sonatas – Hope Amid Tears’
Imani Winds – ‘Bruits’

Best Classical Instrumental Solo

Jennifer Koh – ‘Alone Together’
Simone Dinnerstein – ‘An American Mosaic’
Augustin Hadelich – ‘Bach: Sonatas & Partitas’
Gil Shaham; Eric Jacobsen, conductor (The Knights) – ‘Beethoven & Brahms: Violin Concertos’
Mak Grgić – ‘Mak Bach’
Curtis Stewart – ‘Of Power’

Best Classical Solo Vocal Album

Laura Strickling; Joy Schreier, pianist – ‘Confessions’
Will Liverman; Paul Sánchez, pianist – ‘Dreams Of A New Day – Songs By Black Composers’
Sangeeta Kaur & Hila Plitmann (Virginie D’Avezac De Castera, Lili Haydn, Wouter Kellerman, Nadeem Majdalany, Eru Matsumoto & Emilio D. Miler) – ‘Mythologies’
Joyce DiDonato; Yannick Nézet-Séguin, pianist – ‘Schubert: Winterreise’
Jamie Barton; Jake Heggie, pianist (Matt Haimovitz) – ‘Unexpected Shadows’

Best Classical Compendium

AGAVE & Reginald L. Mobley; Geoffrey Silver, producer – ‘American Originals – A New World, A New Canon’
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; Jack Vad, producer – ‘Berg: Violin Concerto; Seven Early Songs & Three Pieces For Orchestra’
Timo Andres & Ian Rosenbaum; Mike Tierney, producer – ‘Cerrone: The Arching Path’
Chick Corea; Chick Corea & Birnie Kirsh, producers – ‘Plays’
Amy Andersson, conductor; Amy Andersson, Mark Mattson & Lolita Ritmanis, producers – ‘Women Warriors – The Voices Of Change’

Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Andy Akiho, composer (Sandbox Percussion) – ‘Akiho: Seven Pillars’
Louis Andriessen, composer (Esa-Pekka Salonen, Nora Fischer & Los Angeles Philharmonic) – ‘Andriessen: The Only One’
Clarice Assad, Sérgio Assad, Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin & David Skidmore, composers (Sérgio Assad, Clarice Assad & Third Coast Percussion) – ‘Assad, Clarice & Sérgio, Connors, Dillon, Martin & Skidmore: Archetypes’
Jon Batiste, composer (Jon Batiste) – ‘Batiste: Movement 11’
Caroline Shaw, composer (Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish & Sō Percussion) – ‘Shaw: Narrow Sea’

Best Music Video

AC/DC – ‘Short In The Dark’
Jon Batiste – ‘Freedom’
Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga – ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’
Justin Bieber Featuring Daniel Caesar & Giveon – ‘Peaches’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever’
Lil Nas X – ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’
Olivia Rodrigo – ‘Good 4 U’

Best Music Film

Bo Burnham – ‘Inside’
David Byrne – ‘David Byrne’s American Utopia’
Billie Eilish – ‘Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter To Los Angeles’
Jimi Hendrix – ‘Music, Money, Madness…Jimi Hendrix In Maui’
Various Artists – ‘Summer Of Soul’

11 Albums You Might’ve Missed In 2021

Another year plagued by both hope and uncertainty. Another year soundtracked by artists trying to process the same.

Throughout 2021, we kept up with the biggest music releases every Friday, becoming Certified Lover Boys and good denizens of Planet Her. We felt both happier than ever and sour in equal measure. We processed a lot of strange feelings we've unfortunately come to know all too well.

But in between, we fell in love with some other favorites, ones that soundtracked the more ponderous or quieter or brasher or more symphonic moments that made 2021 the year it was. You might've missed them, but in time, maybe you'll come to love them, too — or maybe you already do. As MTV News did last year, here are the 2021 albums that made sense to us.

Little Simz: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxfGQ2AJHGk

Disclaimer: If you missed this one, you probably weren't paying attention. The 65-minute sprawling multi-genre opus from London rapper Simbiatu "Simbi" Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, a.k.a Little Simz, ranked high on several year-end lists, and its bombastic and probing opener “Introvert,” got a big boost soundtracking a grandiose Civil War combat scene in the final season of Dickinson. It's easy to hear why it works. To begin the epic suite, Simz lets huge brass and marching-band snare drums set the scene. When she enters spitting bars a minute later, she paints a portrait already hinted at by the action-ready musicality: "There's a war inside, I hear battle cries," she says. For the next five minutes, "Introvert" does everything it can to undermine its own title: Even as she ruminates ("I sabotage what we are trying to build / 'Cause of feelings I keep inside"), Simz emboldens herself to speak as loudly as she can ("But it's time to reveal"). And this is just track one. From there, the album dips into silken R&B ("Woman"), vintage grooves ("Standing Ovation"), pop-single dominance ("Speed"), and a series of interludes that actually justify the ever-expanding runtimes of albums in the streaming era. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Simz's fourth album, is an undeniably British one — there's even an interlude called "The Rapper That Came to Tea" — but its message is universal and transatlantic. Its imposing, highly orchestral sound is designed to fill concert halls wherever Simz might travel. —Patrick Hosken
JMIN: Homecoming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDxVbi9GpSA

“Everywhere I go, I just feel so trapped,” JMIN states at the top of his debut EP’s opening track. “I been really fucked up / I can’t go back.” The desire to look forward, find freedom, and in the process find himself is the red thread of the K-hip-hop newcomer’s debut project, Homecoming, an electrifying snapshot of the life of a young artist on the rise as he searches for balance between past and present, mind and matter, and home and homeland. “I used to bе nothing, I only caused trouble / Mama, I'm sorry I caused you this pain,” he admits on “You and Me.” “I'm gеtting the money, it's coming in bundles / Remember those days I would sit in the rain?” In a brief 18 minutes, Homecoming packs a strong punch. Effortlessly ebbing and flowing between topics such as mental health (“Don’t Worry”), ambition (“Dedication”), love lost (“Tryna Find Your Love”), and success found (“Want Me,” “Wave”), JMIN expresses the messy, complicated, ever-changing feelings of a 21-year-old just trying to figure his shit out, and he does so by putting pen to paper. At the crux of its being, his music is just that: storytelling. Homecoming tells the beginning of JMIN’s story with clarity, brevity, and a whole lot of dedication. —Sarina Bhutani
Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince

https://youtu.be/iRZ98HX1MO8

Vulture Prince opens with “Baghon Main,” a reinterpretation of a folk song Brooklyn’s Arooj Aftab first recorded for her 2014 debut album, Bird Under Water. Where the Pakistan-born composer’s earlier rendition was a sprawling arrangement of groaning accordions and drum flashes, this update is stripped of its more decorative embellishments, down to soft violin cries, twinkling harp, and Aftab’s precisely sustained intonations. It’s a haunting touchstone for a sublime collection of sparse tracks that have been hollowed out by grief. Named for a Parsi funeral rite where bodies are left out to be consumed by scavengers, Vulture Prince is dedicated to Aftab’s younger brother Maher, who passed away while she was recording the album. Yet in its minimalist attention to detail, there are occasional moments of surprise that surmount the mournful tension, as Aftab pulls elements from Western jazz and the traditional ghazals of her homeland; a Rumi love poem, for example, finds an unlikely home atop a reggae beat on “Last Night.” Lingering throughout is the meticulous intensity of Aftab’s voice: Even when singing about a sadness so great it could swallow the stars (“Mohabbat”), she gathers the strength to move forward. —Coco Romack
Inhaler: It Won't Always Be Like This

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ7TeO4VP_k

On "My Honest Face," 22-year-old Elijah Hewson is troubled in speaking his truth. He's listing excuses as to why, but one feels most accurate: "There's just a certain culture when you're young." It’s a cheap, boyish cop-out, but it's also not; there is a certain weightlessness to being young and freewheeling life, before you realize just how capable you are of harm, to others and to yourself. "Why does it hurt me so much?" he questions on "Totally," begging of a failing relationship. It’s like the pain is happening for the first time, like you've realized that life isn't so weightless anymore. But Inhaler’s It Won’t Always Be Like This, a loud, raucous indie debut, also knows that sometimes, you just have to let shit go — that the heart-tearing cycle of losing and finding yourself gets better with time. The album's best track, "Who's Your Money On (Plastic House)," is a shameless ask for a second chance after a full ego death. "I'll put myself on the line," Hewson proclaims, admitting he wasn't ready the first time, still knowing their "plastic house is built on sand." It's boldly asking, even when the thing is doomed to hurt, to try again anyway. —Terron Moore
Jodi: Blue Heron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqbE2QWCgaM

"Does this party stress you out?" Nick Levine asks near the beginning of Blue Heron, the debut LP from their rootsy and earthy Chicago project Jodi. It fits: Blue Heron is a spare album. Broadly speaking, its 12 rustling tracks fall into the minimal country/folk categories, and ghostly pedal steel drifts in and out of frame like a swaying bough. The mood Levine operates in will be familiar to fans of their former band Pinegrove and the work of Phil Elverum. What this collection requires isn't so much patience but stillness — an attempt to quiet yourself to receive what singer-songwriter Levine presents in pastoral songs titled "River Rocks," "Hawks," and the gorgeously unspooling title tune. The reward is a singular voice spanning the ache of all four seasons ("It's wintertime / Time to see all your buddies / Where'd everybody go?"), the perils of purely feeling low ("Tonight I'm a slug / Lay around and get stepped on"), and requests that might as well be directed at the world at large ("Can we go slowly?"). On the lean Blue Heron, small moments quickly become events: A fuzzy guitar chord sounds like a thunderclap, and natural imagery — "Great blue heron in the lake swimming" — is rendered in crystalline clarity, like the massive bird tattoo on Levine's back that marks the album's cover. —Patrick Hosken
Vince Staples: Vince Staples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fiyUR9N_uk

On Vince Staples’s dreary, drawling fourth album, all his friends are dead or in jail. So he’s obsessed with own demise: His city burns, shots are always ringing out, and no amount of money, sex, security, or faith can satisfy the looming threats. "I could die tonight, so today, I'ma go get paid," he decides on "Sundown Town." The idea that Staples is a world-famous rapper is irrelevant. He’s still from Compton; we are always and forever products of our environments. Opener “Are You With That” masterfully mixes the inevitability of death with the guilt of survival, but maybe he states it most simply on “The Shining” when he says, "We dying broke and live with broken hearts." These realities of growing up in this concrete jungle aren't to be glorified, nor are they to be pitied. They just are. And maybe there's sadness in that resignation, but there's strength in it, too. —Terron Moore
Cassandra Jenkins: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW8XoovSlsM

Clocking in at just under 32 minutes, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature proves you don’t need a Red (Taylor’s Version) running time to pack an emotional punch. Always leave your listeners wanting more; that’s exactly what Cassandra Jenkins accomplishes on her second album. The seven songs are cold yet cozy, familiar like a heartbreak. The third track in the collection, “Hard Drive,” which best sums up the album’s mood, serves Suzanne Vega vibes with its spoken-word storytelling and meandering, sparse, jazzy sound. The closer, “The Ramble,” is an aural Xanax — serene yet sweeping, perfect for a solo winter hike through nature or as the soundtrack to a Terrence Malick movie. The song ends with birds chirping, welcoming a new day, reminding us, as another stressful year comes to a close, to look to the sky, and as Jenkins suggested on "Hard Drive,” to close your eyes and “just breathe.” An Overview on Phenomenal Nature is indeed phenomenal. —Chris Rudolph
Huron John: Cartoon Therapy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGm6PuQ84pk

At the center of Huron John’s sophomore effort Cartoon Therapy is noise — beautiful, blinding, and baffling noise. With synthesizers, vocoders, and kitschy samples at his disposal, the Chicago-based indie artist blends an expansive base of musical influences – including Tyler, the Creator, whom he shouts out on “Trapped in a Lava Lamp” — to make music that speaks to the internet generation. His new record finds its lyrical roots in quarantine, heartbreak, mental health, youth, and nostalgia, living at the intersection of what it’s like having to exist lost in all of the above at all times. Opener “Common Ground” sets the tone with a deceivingly chill beat supporting self-deprecating jabs before he quickly assures us, “I’m alright” on the groovy “Huron Disko” (which begs the question: “Do you think that Harry and Draco ever tried to stop the beef?”). He has his crying-at-the-party moment (“Troy Bolton”), goes existential on “Cosmic Opera (Death Is Not the End),” gets lost in a disco memory on “Arthur,” and finds closure on “Children of the Sun,” never forgetting his tie-dyed, neon-soaked lens. All I’ve got to say is, “Yo, Huron! Did you have to go that hard?” —Carson Mlnarik
Parannoul: To See the Next Part of the Dream

https://youtu.be/gb9Qqt75rzg

The underground sensation surrounding Parannoul has been stoked in part by the indie Korean artist’s bid to remain mostly anonymous. One story is that they are a student living in Seoul, making crunchy shoegaze late at night from their bedroom, though they’ve disclosed little else in faceless interviews or musings published to Bandcamp, where their lo-fi music was shared before going wide on streaming platforms earlier this year. The gaps in their biography might be filled by To See the Next Part of the Dream, their dreamy sophomore collection, which was written about an “active loser” who aspires to be a rock star, despite the fact the 21-year-old character can’t sing or play guitar. An insecure delivery feels apt for a narrative like this; the atmosphere Parannoul conjures is all haze and mist, with murmured, pared-back vocals like a shy instrument within the sweltering noise. They mumble hopelessly about time wasted, as on the standout opener "Beautiful World," but it's easy to lose yourself in the analog textures between the fizzing guitars and math-rock drums, the background chatter and the nostalgic rumbling of train cars, just as it can be tempting to give in to melancholy. The sounds here may be unknowable, but the themes are well-trodden: the emotional pulls of youth, the pain of wanting something more. —Coco Romack
PinkPantheress: To Hell With It

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Szr5Dcwn4Y

If 2021 really was the year when we couldn't stop looking back, consider 20-year-old London artist PinkPantheress an emissary for time travel. Nostalgia is one of her most potent weapons, and on a typical song, she pulls a snippet of something from the past — say the twinkly guitar part from Linkin Park's "Forgotten" — for a minute or two of sheer celebration. Consider it a digital bath, a sonic immersion in a familiar sound tweaked just enough to give it new relevance. She doesn't linger; the songs are over before the reference point becomes stale, and her gentle vocals are the perfect vessel for the soft ache of her lyrics ("I'm obsessed with you in a way I can't believe / When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?"). Part of the formula for her success is this brevity of form (unsurprisingly, her music traveled far on TikTok) and the fact that To Hell With It, her debut mixtape, requires only 19 minutes of your time to fully experience it. But across its brief runtime, the collection's excursions into jungle, drum and bass, and other glitchy and beloved British subgenres help propel it out of the realm of novelty to become transformational. The nostalgia is real — the cover art for "Passion" is the iconic Windows XP rolling landscape background — but these songs are not gimmicks. Even as she evokes indelible '90s house landmarks, PinkPantheress sounds like no one else. —Patrick Hosken
Mariah the Scientist: Ry Ry World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgu3RayqsE8

"Who's your favorite girl?" Mariah the Scientist asks at the close of Ry Ry World's first track. Then: "I wish I could be her." This longing to position yourself closer to someone openly doing you wrong is the crux of her second full-length album, a brisk 28 minutes of spacey synths and twittering trap drums as she floats through a galaxy of undeserving men, seeking a safe place to land. "And I dream to be a fool," she wails on "RIP," one of the only times her voice rises above humble self-contemplation, "that way you wouldn't know that I knew what you do." She considers every option: debating her motivations on "Brain," finding new fuckboys on "Walked In," murdering her ex on "Revenge." But the through-line is the loneliness of struggle love, the isolating feeling of not being enough, the vital need to feel a little more respected and a little less alone. Ry Ry World is often trying to accept pain as romance, but on "2 You," she's burying the past to find her own peace. “Look at what we made,” she sweetly declares of the wreckage, perhaps to him, but mostly to herself. “Sure was beautiful.” —Terron Moore

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss Raise The Roof

All too often a star-crossed collaboration can end up diminishing both parties, but when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss came together for 2007’s multi-award-winning Raising Sand, it had the opposite effect. The record’s rich and subtle readings of deep blues and country cuts allowed Plant to finally slip the rock god shackles, paving the way to Band Of Joy and Sensational Space Shifters, while Krauss was exposed to an audience outside her bluegrass fanbase. Now, 14 years later, the pair have reunited with producer T-Bone Burnett for belated follow-up Raise The Roof, which burnishes the diamond, confirming that even if Raising Sand was serendipitous it was certainly no fluke.

ORDER NOW: Bruce Springsteen and the review of 2021 feature in the latest issue of Uncut

As with its predecessor, the magic of Raise The Roof comes with the interaction of three elements: the voices of the two principles and the way they subtly enhance and embellish each other’s performances; the songs, drawn from a deep well of Americana that takes in blues, soul and country but sprinkled with gothic British folk courtesy of Plant; and the intricate but unobtrusive arrangements that Burnett ekes from a gifted band supplemented by unshowy turns from the likes of Buddy Miller, Bill Frisell, Emmylou Harris and David Hidalgo.

Each song seems subtle, even sparse, but with repeated listens the complexity of the arrangements starts to astound. Raise The Roof can sometimes feel like an impeccable and impossible feat of elaborate construction, an Escher illustration or Jenga tower of overlapping interests that would collapse in a heap if a single element were removed. Take The Everly Brothers’ “The Price Of Love”, one of the more familiar tunes on the album. Don and Phil placed the harmonies front and centre, backed by paint-stripper harmonica and a rumbling rockabilly rhythm. This band came at it askance, slowed down and spread out, with the melody crawling into view like Lawrence Of Arabia trudging through the desert. When the guitar solo arrives it sounds like an elephant ice-skating. The vocals are just as fascinating: Krauss on lead seems to be taking the tune in one direction, until Plant joins the chorus like a ghostly echo, pushing the song into a different dimension.

As you might expect, the vocals offer constant delight throughout. It’s rare for Plant and Krauss to tackle any song as a straight duet – opener “Quattro (World Drifts In)” by Calexico is one notable exception, introducing both singers as well as the album’s desert-stripped mescaline-trip ethereal vibe. More usually, one of the singers will take lead – but not always the one you might expect. Plant is a folk freak, so perhaps you might expect him to tackle Anne Briggs’s “Go Your Way”, but it’s still strange to hear Robert Plant of all people singing from the perspective of a woman left at home, mending clothes, cooking food and pondering if her man has gone to war. The austerity of Briggs’ original is transformed into something with more jangle, and Plant’s delivery is from the heart; he might be the most unlikely homemaker in the history of rock, but when he creaks “I want to die” you can well believe it. It’s Plant’s best single moment on the record.

Then shortly after comes Bert Jansch’s “It Don’t Bother Me”, another Plant favourite but this time with Krauss on lead, her clear and mesmeric vocals rubbing against Marc Ribot’s spidery lead and the song’s metallic drone but ironing out some of Jansch’s wrinkles without weakening the meaning. Plant’s harmonies add definition, but it is Jay Bellerose’s fine drumming that brings this one home. Bellerose plays on every track and Ribot all but one; the core band is rounded out by either Viktor Krauss (Alison’s brother) or Dennis Crouch on bass and multi-instrumentalists Russell Pahl and Jeff Taylor, with additional contributions from Burnett himself.

The band’s ability to weave between genres without sounding like anything other than themselves is impressive. When Krauss takes sensual lead on a lush version of Merle Haggard’s understated gem “Going Where The Lonely Go”, the band’s relaxed Nashville mode is one of the few times they seem to be anywhere near a comfort zone. Lucinda Williams’ “Can’t Let Go” (written by Randy Weekes) – with Plant on lead – has the band imitating The Shadows or Link Wray; it follows immediately from Plant’s reading of “Searchin’ For My Baby”, originally a million-seller on Chess by Bobbie Moore and here delivered as a straight soul ballad but with no sense of jarring dislocation as the band effortlessly switch between styles. Allen Toussaint’s “Trouble With My Lover” was originally a classic northern soul track sung by Betty Harris; the Raise The Roof version has more of a desert strut, with Bellerose’s percussion running through it like a heartbeat. The vocal is also markedly different. Where Harris was sharing her pain with the word in a belting soul style, Krauss seems to be talking to herself, internalising the emotion until she gets to the sultry refrain “when he puts his arms around me…” when the suppressed passion explodes into outright lust, supplemented by Plant’s seductive echo.

Krauss’s other stand-out performance is on “Last Kind Words Blues”, a stunning country blues written by the mysterious Geeshie Wiley, a blueswoman who cut six sides in 1930 but about whom little is known. Krauss comes at it like bluegrass, bold and true and pure, highlighting the spiritual side of secular blues and emphasising the stark poetry of the lyrics: “If I get killed, if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul/I prefer just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole”. It’ll send a shiver down the spine.

Plant’s chance to channel the blues comes on “You Led Me To The Wrong”, originally a white country blues by Ola Belle Reed. Plant’s pent-up desire to unleash the inner rock god contrasts neatly with Burnett’s mysterious arrangement, where the only man allowed to let rip is Stuart Duncan on fiddle. That restraint is what makes it work, allowing the song to escape blues rock clichés and focus on the ambiguous lyrics, which – like almost every song on the record – is about love gone bad. The narrator is awaiting execution after shooting his best friend over a love affair – “a man has to fight, for what he thinks is right, even if it puts him in the ground”. One of the small pleasures on Raise The Roof is the way Plant and Krauss frequently swap gender roles; this one is slightly more complicated as Reed was a woman singing from the perspective of a man, and Plant now restores the male gaze.

The album’s one non-cover is another blues piece, “High And Lonesome”, one of the album’s rockier moments. Plant shares a writing credit with T-Bone Burnett having contributed lyrics for a song that developed from Burnett’s improvised riff. It’s the most Zep-worthy moment on the record but still slots neatly among the other songs in terms of sensibility and sound, partly thanks to the way Krauss’s wily harmony undercuts the main vocal.

Raise The Roof closes with another heavier track, “Somebody Was Watching Over Me”, which has Emmylou Harris on backing vocals and was written by singer-songwriter Brenda Burns. The track was recorded as wizened blues by Pop Staples on his 2015 posthumous record produced with Jeff Tweedy. The original – very different – version was recorded by Maria Muldaur as a gospel number with Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples on backing vocals. There’s something significant in the way a single song and songwriter can touch on so many genres of American roots music, and the version on Raise The Roof sits somewhere between the two previous recordings, with Plant and Krauss delivering it almost as a duet, their first since the album’s scene-setting opener. Between those two tracks, much emotional and musical territory has been covered. Let’s hope it isn’t another 14 years until the next one.

The Best Of 2021 Halftime Report

First off, a gentle reminder that our excellent new issue of Uncut is in the shops now, featuring Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic on Nirvana, plus Sly Stone, Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse, Altın Gün, Grateful Dead, The Jam, Will Sergeant, Rodney Crowell, Sparks, Rodrigo Amarante and more. Full details about the new Uncut are here, in case you missed them.

As is tradition abound now, I tried to round up my favourite albums from so far; specifically releases from January until the end of June. I’ve listed them here in (roughly) order of release – just to be painfully clear, this is very much my personal choice and is in no way representative of the Uncut writers in general.

UPDATE! Okay, a quick couple of amendments. Firstly, I’ve removed one of the duplicate entries for The Coral and also added two albums I can’t believe I forgot to include: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’ Carnage (thanks for the spot, Robert Franks) and also Field Works’ Cedars.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner

ORDER NOW: The August 2021 issue of Uncut

1. Black Country, New Road – For The First Time (Ninja Tune)
2. The Weather Station – Ignorance (Fat Possum)
3. Ryan Dugre – Three Rivers (11A)
4. Altın Gün – Yol (Giltterbeat)
5. Sunburned Hand Of The Man – Pick A Day To Die (Three Lobed)
6. Ryley Walker + Kikagaku Moyo – Deep Friend Grandeur (Husky Pants)
7. Cory Hanson – Pale Horse Rider (Drag City)
8. Teenage Fanclub – Endless Arcade (PeMa)
9. SUSS – Promise (Northern Spy)
10. Israel Nash – Topaz (Loose)
11. Jane Weaver – Flock (Fire)
12. Julien Baker – Little Oblivions (Matador)
13. Natalie Bergman – Mercy (Third Man)
14. Tindersticks – Distractions (City Slang)
15. Lael Neale – Acquainted With Night (Sub Pop)
16. Besnard Lakes – Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings (Full Time Hobby)
17. Elori Saxl – The Blue Of Distance (Western Vinyl)
18. Chuck Johnson – The Cinder Grove (VDSQ)
19. Bobby Lee – Origin Myths (Natural Histories Records)
20. Mason Lindahl – Kissing Rosy In The Rain (Tompkins Square)
21. Valerie June – The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers (Fantasy)
22. Renée Reed – Renée Reed (Keeled Scales)
23. Hiss Golden Messenger – Quietly Blowing It (Merge)
24. Janet Simpson – Safe Distance (Cornelius Chapel Records)
25. Julius Eastman – Femenine performed by ensemble 0 (Sub Rosa)
26. Marianne Faithfull with Warren Ellis – She Walks In Beauty (BMG)
27. Dinosaur Jr – Sweep It Into Space (Jagjaguwar)
28. Rhiannon Giddens – They’re Calling Me Home (Nonesuch)
29. Jakob Bro, Arve Henriksen, Jorge Rossy – Uma Elmo (ECM)
30. Satomimagae – Hanazono (RVNG Intl/Guruguru Brain)
31. Ballaké Sissoko – Djouru (Nø Førmat!)
32. Whitney K – Maryland (Maple Death Records)
33. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra – Promises (Luaka Bop)
34. Four Tet – Parallel (Text)
35. Pino Palladino & Blake Mills – Notes With Attachments (New Deal / Impulse!)
36. Dean McPhee – Witch’s Ladder (Hood Faire/Cargo)
37. The Coral – Coral Island (Run On Records/Modern Sky UK)
38. Angel Bat Dawid & The Brotherhood – Live (International Anthem)
39. Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Superwolves (Domino)
40. Rose City Band – Earth Trip (Thrill Jockey)
41. Ryley Walker – Course In Fable (Husky Pants)
42. Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band – Rare Dreams: Solar Live 2.27.18 (Cafe Oto)
43. Natural Information Society With Evan Parker – Descension (Out Of Our Constrictions (Aguirre Records)
44. Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble – NOW (International Anthem)
45. Sarah Louise – Earth Bow (Earth Bow)
46. Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime (Matador)
47. Lucy Dacus – Home Video (Matador)
48. Lamchop – Showtunes (City Slang)
49. Joana Serrat – Hardcore From The Heart (Loose)
50. Andrew Tuttle & Padang Food Tigers – A Cassowary Apart (Bedroom Suck Records)
51. BLK JKS – Abantu/Before Humans (Glitterbest)
52. Daniel Bachman – Axacan (Three Lobed)
53. Six Organs Of Admittance – The Veiled Sea (Three Lobed)
54. Marisa Anderson/William Tyler – Lost Futures (Thrill Jockey)
55. Dorothea Paas – Anything Can’t Happen (Telephone Explosion)
56. Shabason, Krgovich & Harris – Florence (idée fixe)
57. David Grubbs & Ryley Walker – Fight Of Flight Simulator (Takuroku)
58. Chuck Johnson – Alpenglow (Bandcamp)
59. Faye Webster – I Know I’m Funny ha ha (Secretly Canadian)
60. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Carnage (Goliath)
61. Melt – Blank Gloss (Kompakt)
62. Brooklyn Raga Massive – Quarantine Dreams (Bandcamp)
63. Arooj Aftab – Vulture Prince (New Amsterdam Records)
64. Amaro Freitas – Sankofa (Far Out)
65. Birds Of Maya – Valdez (Drag City)
66. Marina Allen – Candlepower (Fire)
67. Sault – Nine (Forever Living Originals)
68. Field Works – Cedars (Temporary Residence)

Miley Cyrus And Maren Morris Slay ‘Dancing Queen’ Cover In Matching Magenta

Miley Cyrus and Maren Morris are digging the “Dancing Queen” during Pride Month.

On Wednesday (June 23), Miley posted a sneak-peek clip of her and Morris performing a cover of the iconic ABBA hit for the Miley Cyrus Presents Stand By You concert. Both are donning matching a magenta wardrobe, and Cyrus refers to her singing partner as “Queen Maren” at one point.

https://twitter.com/MileyCyrus/status/1407667255530360832?s=20

The one-hour Pride concert, previously hosted and filmed at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville for vaccinated attendees on June 8, will be streaming exclusively on Peacock this coming Friday (June 25) at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET.

Cyrus asked her fans to give cover suggestions for her to perform. Another song Cyrus covered in the event is Cher’s “Believe,” which she posted in full online. There will also be updates on other classic hits by Madonna (“Music,” “Express Yourself,” and "Like a Prayer”), Cyndi Lauper (“True Colors”) and Mariah Carey (“We Belong Together”).

https://youtu.be/G46CwUscRpA

Cyrus shows her love for the LGBTQ+ community in a performance of her 11-year-old song “My Heart Beats For Love” from her album Can’t Be Tamed, writing in a caption that she “will never give up on the fight for justice, equality, & acceptance for everyone.”

https://twitter.com/MileyCyrus/status/1407047400603230211?s=20

The Stand By You event also spotlights other country artists who are either members or allies of the LGBTQ+ community. These include the music group Little Big Town, duo Brothers Osborne, Orville Peck, and Mickey Guyton, who are all performing as well.

In addition to posting several sneak peeks of the concert, Cyrus has been quite busy lately. On Tuesday (June 22), she dropped a Metallica cover of “Nothing Else Matters,” a major all-star collaboration with the band’s own bassist Robert Tujillo, Elton John, producer and musician Watt, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer Chad Smith. The cover will be included in the companion set of the 30th anniversary of Metallica’s Black Album.

https://youtu.be/DqoQY9bobow

“Honored to be in the company of some of the greatest to ever do it,” she wrote on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQbGzdwJh9n/

Cyrus revealed back in October to Interview magazine she is also working on her own Metallica cover album, but a release date, tracklist, and title have yet to be announced.

Uncut June 2021

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR

Bob Dylan (plus our exclusive Dylan covers CD), Paul Weller, Marianne Faithfull, Stephen Stills, Spiritualized, Can, The Strokes, Matt Sweeney & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, James, UB40, My Bloody Valentine, the Plastic Ono Band and Sun Ra all feature in the new Uncut, dated June 2021 and in UK shops from April 15 or available to buy online now. As always, the issue comes with a free CD, this time an exclusive album of all-new Dylan covers and a previously unreleased track by the man himself.

BOB DYLAN: To celebrate his upcoming 80th birthday, we’ve asked friends, collaborator and admirers – including Paul McCartney, Robbie Robertson, Jackson Browne, Roger McGuinn, Jeff Tweedy, Van Morrison, Graham Nash, Kris Kristofferson, Elton John, Peggy Seeger, Roger Daltrey and Richard Thompson – to share their most memorable Dylan encounters with us. Spanning six decades, these remarkable stories shed new light on rock’s most capricious and elusive genius.

OUR FREE CD! DYLAN REVISITED: 14 incredible Bob Dylan covers recorded especially for Uncut by The Flaming Lips, Low, Richard Thompson, Courtney Marie Andrews, Cowboy Junkies, Weyes Blood, Jason Lytle, Fatoumata Diawara, The Weather Station and more, plus a previously unreleased track, “Too Late (Acoustic Version)”, from Dylan himself.

This issue of Uncut is available to buy by clicking here – with FREE delivery to the UK and reduced delivery charges for the rest of the world.

Inside the issue, you’ll find:

PAUL WELLER: His new record, Fat Pop (Volume 1), is our Album Of The Month, and the Modfather also chats to us at length about online opinions, nature in bloom and making music in lockdown. “I don’t overthink things…”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: After being hospitalised with Covid-19, rock’s most regal survivor went on to finish She Walks With Beauty with Warren Ellis. Here, she tells Uncut about recovery, Romantic poetry and how, perhaps, the ’60s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. “I really wasn’t a good muse…”

STEPHEN STILLS: The guitarist and singer-songwriter updates us on his life now, future plans, the new CSNY Deja Vu reissue, and his long friendship with Neil Young. “He was pretty hard to catch, but he’s still my best mate.”

SPIRITUALIZED: Jason Pierce answers your questions on spacesuits, Spacemen 3, memoirs, hedonism and more

CAN: As a new series of live albums highlights the group’s wild, incantatory performances, Irmin Schmidt and other eyewitnesses chart Can’s progress from the Croydon Greyhound to balmy nights in Arles, via freak-noise meltdowns and the the right kind of “psychic environment”…

MATT SWEENEY & BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY: Reuniting after 16 years, these two old friends tell Uncut about their new album Superwolves, the impact of David Berman and David Blaine on their work, and the influence of The Wizard Of Oz. “That’s my working motto,” laughs Will Oldham, “‘Get comfortable with the apocalypse…'”

JAMES: As they prepare to release a new album, All The Colours Of You, after having weathered the pandemic and personal loss, Uncut finds Tim Booth and his cohorts “still yearning for answers”

UB40: The making of “Food For Thought”

ST VINCENT: New album Daddy’s Gone is reviewed at length, while Annie Clark sheds light on the making of the record and why “every Steely Dan record” is key to some of her cherished memories

CLICK HERE TO GET THE NEW UNCUT DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR

In our expansive reviews section, we take a look at new records from Paul Weller, Mdou Moctar, St Vincent, Tony Joe White, Sons Of Kemet, Gruff Rhys, The Black Keys, Van Morrison, Iceage, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dorothea Paas and more, and archival releases from CSNY, Can, My Bloody Valentine, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, Sharon Van Etten, Cath & Phil Tyler, Chuck Berry and others. We catch Waxahatchee and Osees live online; among the films, DVDs and TV programmes reviewed are Black Bear, Creation Stories, Sisters With Transistors, New Order’s Education Entertainment Recreation and Madness’ Before We Was We; while in books there’s Tracy Thorn, Rickie Lee Jones and Joel Selvin.

Our front section, meanwhile, features The National, Karen Dalton, Damon Locks, Polly Paulusma and Magic Roundabout while, at the end of the magazine, Earl Slick reveals the records that have soundtracked his life.

You can pick up a copy of Uncut in the usual places, where open. But otherwise, readers all over the world can order a copy from here.

For more information on all the different ways to keep reading Uncut during lockdown, click here.

Uncut’s Best New Albums Of 2020

50 MARGO PRICE
That’s How Rumors Get Started
LOMA VISTA
Recording in Hollywood with Sturgill Simpson in the producer’s chair, the Midwest farmer’s daughter tried her hand at a West Coast pop album for her third LP. Rather than country confessionals, then, here were 10 songs taking in Heartbreakers-esque new wave, gospel and prime Fleetwood Mac. Complete with a more oblique, lyrical voice from Price, the result was another step forward for a musician who respects tradition but has never been shackled by it.

49 GWENIFER RAYMOND
Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain
TOMPKINS SQUARE
A fearsome live performer, foregoing chat for instrumental acoustic guitar intensity, Gwenifer Raymond in 2020 made the album that gave recorded shape to her uncompromising approach. Grown in ambition, if not noticeably in length from her 2018 debut, Garth Mountain drew both on the rabbit skulls and damp moss of British folk horror, and also a compositional wisdom that broadened the horizon of her American Primitive twang.

48 THE NECKS
Three
ReR MEGACORP
Normally, The Necks appear to simply roll up to the studio, record an hour’s music, and roll out. For this entertaining and accessible album, the Australian acoustic improvising trio (“jazz” doesn’t get it somehow) split their work into three 20-minute compositions. “Bloom”, a rattling yet spacious noise, threw back to the mesmeric charms of their classic Drive By. “Lovelock” explored creepier post-industrial ambience, while “Further” again returned to a groovy, percussive chatter.

47 WORKING MEN’S CLUB
Working Men’s Club
HEAVENLY
Like LCD Soundsystem or Fat White Family before them, this Todmorden collective combine dance rhythms and post-punk awkwardness to fine effect. They were signed as a guitar band, but swiftly reconfigured for this, their debut, with some of its best tracks growing from frontman Sydney Minsky-Sargeant’s electronic demos. With Sheffield legend Ross Orton producing, the likes of “White Rooms And People” and “Valleys” suggested Mark E Smith collaborating with New Order.

46 ROGER & BRIAN ENO
Mixing Colours
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOFON
The brothers Eno have long exchanged music files, but it was only this year that the policy resulted in a full-length album. Obviously with this being an ambient album where all the tracks are named after naturally occurring colours, a part of you possibly imagines that this must be like listening to posh paint dry. In fact, it’s a lovely partnership that harmonises beautifully with recent Brian work – some of the reverberations familiar, but the tunes a pleasing set of frosted miniatures. A companion mini-album, Luminous, was also quietly radiant.

45 BRIGHT EYES
Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was
DEAD OCEANS
From the experimental opener “Pageturners Rag” to the gospel-tinged “Comet Song”, the trio’s first record since 2011’s The People’s Key recalled the opulent, unhinged creativity of their magnum opus, 2002’s Lifted…. Among these 14 tracks, there were electronic oddities (“Pan And Broom”), synthy new wave pop songs (“Mariana Trench”) and atmospheric piano ballads, the whole thing tied together by Conor Oberst’s playful, melancholic words.

44 EDDIE CHACON
Pleasure, Joy And Happiness
DAY END
Almost three decades after Charles & Eddie’s “Would I Lie To You?”, the duo’s surviving half returned with this masterful record of adventurous electronic R&B. It’s no grandstanding reappearance; rather, the mood is beautifully low-key, with keyboards warm and woozy, percussion subtle and mostly electronic, and Chacon’s voice tender and emotive. Underlining his status – that of a cult legend finally coming in from the cold – production came from John Carroll Kirby, collaborator with Frank Ocean and Solange.

43 SARAH DAVACHI
Cantus, Descant
LATE MUSIC
In 2020, Davachi offered strong private work from lockdown – her lo-fi “Gathers” cassette a set of site-specific works in progress – and two further EPs, but this album felt like it was the most substantial statement of her year. Geological of pace, these organ/keyboard drones were immersive in scale, contemplative in nature, and joined Davachi’s canon as a deeply empathetic work of haunting secular power. The singing was a new development, which hinted at new avenues to be explored – some of them Lynchian.

42 RÓISÍN MURPHY
Róisín Machine
SKINT/BMG
The former Moloko singer emerged as one of the heroes of lockdown, her exuberant living-room livestream – complete with impressively styled-out pratfall – putting other artists’ acoustic performances to shame. Subsequent album Róisín Machine felt like her definitive statement, a joyous update of classic disco and house manoeuvres, injected with maverick charisma and the emotion of hard-won experience.

41 KEELEY FORSYTH
Debris
THE LEAF LABEL
As an actor, Keeley Forsyth may be known to you from her appearances in popular dramas like TV’s Happy Valley. Her voice, centre stage in this startling collection of songs, will be less familiar. Powerful and individual, Debris is as otherworldly in sound as Anonhi, but as drawn irresistibly to craggy outcrops as that performer is to the dancefloor. Arranged for string section or discreet laptronics, Forsyth’s songs sit like statuary: starkly and impressively against
the landscape.

40 BRIGID DAWSON & THE MOTHERS NETWORK
Ballet Of Apes
CASTLE FACE
A sometime member of John Dwyer’s Oh Sees, Brigid Dawson delivered in July a solo debut that displayed some of that band’s enjoyment of antique sounds (deep reverbs, sedate organ) but pursued them into far quieter realms. A stately singer-songwriter album poised between folky, countrified and chamber modes, the album in its later stages (check out the title track) expanded out into a warm and reflective jazz.

39 THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS
Made Of Rain
COOKING VINYL
One of the year’s most welcome surprises, the Furs’ first studio album in 29 years was every bit as good as ’80s high points like Talk Talk Talk and Forever Now. Realising that radical reinvention at this point in the career may not be necessary, Made Of Rain brought into focus the band’s gifts for twin saxophone-and-guitar attack, impressionistic lyrics and the wonderfully sardonic delivery of frontman Richard Butler.

38 BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN
Bonny Light Horseman
37d03d
Brought together by Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner, this collaborative project from Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D Johnson, and Josh Kaufman reinterpreted the traditional songbook for our perilous times. Drawing from English, Irish and Appalachian folk music, the trio recast lover’s laments, war ballads and more as existential, eternal dramas, full of humanity and heartbreak. The trio’s spacious arrangements, harmony choruses and subtle embellishments amplified the songs’ emotional punch.

37 SPARKS
A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip
BMG
“So much now needs addressing,” sang Russell Mael on Sparks’s 24th album. “So much is depressing…” The brothers, unsurprisingly, took it upon themselves to set the world to rights on these 14 songs: their tongue-in-cheek targets included modern technology (“iPhone”), suburban obsessions (“Lawnmower”) and even poor Igor Fyodorovich (“Stravinsky’s Only Hit”). The warmth and humanity at the heart of the Maels’ work, not to mention their operatic, day-glo tunes, ensured that Drip stands as one of the duo’s recent high-water marks.

36 DESTROYER
Have We Met
DEAD OCEANS
Dan Bejar’s 13th album as Destroyer was his most accessible to date, polishing the plush synthpop of 2011’s Kaputt to a glimmering sheen. Lyrically, of course, it remained a postmodern puzzle – “a circus mongrel sniffing for clues” – but once you’d tuned into his frequency, Bejar revealed visions of apocalyptic dread and heart-rending poignancy, all wrapped up in the continuing belief that music is the one true religion, expressed via knowing winks to The Smiths and New Order.

35 SHABAKA & THE ANCESTORS
We Are Sent Here By History
IMPULSE!
Cementing his status as a modern-day jazz kingpin, this is Shabaka Hutchings’ third consecutive entry in Uncut’s annual Top 50, each with a different band. But whereas Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming pinned you to the wall with their kinetic intensity, this second team-up with South African ensemble The Ancestors was an earthy and solemn affair, Hutchings’ snaking sax providing an insistent counterpoint to Siyabonga Mthembu’s revolutionary poetry.

34 ROSE CITY BAND
Summerlong
THRILL JOCKEY
A solo project by Ripley Johnson from Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo, RCB have mapped the lesser-spotted genealogical link between the road music of German motorik, Canned Heat and trucker country. In this context, this year’s Summerlong felt like an agreeable rest stop, with lazy slide guitars and a nod to funk offsetting the moments – like the dust-kicking “Real Long Gone” –in which Johnson showed off some tidy Bakersfield chops.

33 BANANAGUN
The True Story Of Bananagun
FULL TIME HOBBY
Helmed by Nicholas Van Bakel, this Melbourne troupe are following the tropical psychedelic path hacked out by Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and others. Their debut showed that they share a manic energy and restless creativity with their compatriots in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, yet their influences also stretched to The Incredible String Band, Fela Kuti and Dorothy Ashby on the turbo-charged “People Talk Too Much” and acid-funk groover “Freak Machine”.

32 THE FLAMING LIPS
American Head
BELLA UNION
After a decade of experimentation, the Lips returned to more graceful, accessible songwriting on their 16th LP. Kacey Musgraves was along for the ride as the group examined what it means to be an ‘American band’; but the album truly succeeded because Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd were looking back wistfully and openly on their teenage years and the troubles experienced by them and their wayward relatives. Their finest since Yoshimi…

31 AFEL BOCOUM
Lindé
WORLD CIRCUIT
“Our social security is music,” the singer-songwriter told Uncut earlier this year. “That’s all we’ve got left.” On perhaps his finest album, and something of a spiritual follow-up to his 1999 debut Alkibar, Bocoum summoned up Mali’s traditional music to call for unity in his troubled country. With Damon Albarn co-producing, though, it wasn’t all trad: there were electric guitars, Joan Wasser on violin and drumming from Tony Allen in oneof his final performances.

30 CORNERSHOP
England Is A Garden
AMPLE PLAY
Perfectly timed to deodorise an unpleasant waft of bad vibes across the nation, England Is A Garden was the best album in nigh on two decades from this perennially undervalued British institution. Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers’ winning recipe for
lifting spirits involved a singular combination of flute funk, Punjabi folk and Bolan boogie, topped off with a jaunty ska singalong about racial profiling.

29 SONGHOY BLUES
Optimisme
TRANSGRESSIVE
With producer Matt Sweeney encouraging the band to up the tempos and power, Bamako’s greatest rock group hit hard on their stripped-down third album. The piledriving rhythms and distorted riffs, sometimes akin to Thin Lizzy jamming with Ali Farke Touré, were immediately thrilling, but the melodies and vocals ultimately proved more infectious; meanwhile, the translated lyrics showed Songhoy to be a positive and revolutionary force for change in Mali.

28 LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Good Souls Better Angels
HIGHWAY 20/THIRTY TIGERS
Although Williams returned to live in Nashville this year, her 14th studio album was anything but comfortable: here, recording live in the studio with her road band, the singer and songwriter was snarling and passionate, whether dressing down Trump on “Man Without A Soul” or searching for strength on the closing, seven-and-a-half-minute “Good Souls”, her voice earthier and more emotive than ever. 41 years on from her debut, Williams remains utterly compelling.

27 KEVIN MORBY
Sundowner
MARE/WOODSIST
Hard to imagine a more likeable singer-songwriter mode than that presented by Kevin Morby. On Sundowner, his horizontal and lightly-conceptual sixth, the sometime Woods man inhabits the croon of Nashville Skyline, the bibulous wisdom of Leonard Cohen, even (on “Wander”) the lilt of Kendrick Lamar – all while never endangering his own voice. This was calm and meditative guitar songwriting, quietly focused on the quiet bummer at its heart.

26 ROLLING BLACKOUTS CF
Sideways To New Italy
SUB POP
After the rush of their debut, Rolling Blackouts felt no inclination to slow down. Still dealing in brisk, melodic indie rock, instead the band deepened their impact: the lyrical touches in their suburban dramas more telling; the piling of melodies still more effective. Fran Kearney’s continuing ability to nail formative experience (“Cameo”, “Sunglasses At The Wedding”) grew in confidence, while guitarists Joe White and Tom Russo nailed their first classics.

25 NUBYA GARCIA
Source
CONCORD JAZZ
Acknowledged as a key instigator of the new UK jazz explosion, the Camden-born saxophonist finally got around to releasing her terrific solo debut this year after telling contributions to albums by Maisha, Nérija and others. Her generous, soulful tone already well-established, she set about exploring her Caribbean heritage, deftly folding in elements of dub, soca and cumbia.

24 MOSES SUMNEY
Græ
JAGJAGUWAR
Released in two parts in the first half of this year, Sumney’s second album left behind the muted, stripped-back feel of
his 2017 debut, Aromanticism, for a bold, maximalist explosion of colour. Spanning 20 songs, and featuring contributions from Daniel Lopatin, James Blake and Jill Scott, Græ found Sumney impressively combining his stellar vocals with explosive electronics, avant-garde textures, orchestral and jazz arrangements and moody funk.

23 PAUL WELLER
On Sunset
ISLAND
If the Weller of 2018 continued to draw strength, in his own way, from English folk traditions, string arrangements and what we might call “the Nick Drake vibe”, this year’s model cast the net far wider. Oh yes, there was still “Ploughman”, an oo-arrr Ronnie Lane romp, but elsewhere Wellers past and future collided as he investigated funk and soul, even (on tunes like the great “More”) German motorik. Staunch.

22 FIONA APPLE
Fetch The Bolt Cutters
EPIC/CLEAN SLATE
Eight years after The Idler Wheel…, Apple returned with this loose and magnificent fifth album. With much of it recorded by Apple herself at her Venice Beach home, and featuring copious percussion and the barking of her beloved dogs, …Bolt Cutters was raw and emotive; like, say, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, that rough setting proved to be the perfect backdrop for Apple’s dynamic voice and her compelling songs of struggle and hope.

21 JAMES ELKINGTON
Ever-Roving Eye
PARADISE OF BACHELORS
The Chicago-based English guitarist has, like his friend Joan Shelley, found new areas to explore in that most over-mined tradition, acoustic singer-songwriting. On his second solo album, assisted by the likes of Spencer Tweedy and The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, Elkington mixed the swinging picking of Nick Drake and John Renbourn with his own wry and subtle musings. The title track, meanwhile, introduced dronier, more psychedelic leanings.

20 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Letter To You
COLUMBIA
Back with the E Street Band for the first time on record since 2014, Letter To You was – in Steve Van Zandt’s words – “the fourth part of an autobiographical summation of [Springsteen’s] life”, after his memoir, the Broadway show and Western Stars album. The dominant themes here were faith, music and comradeship – delivered in euphoric, stadium-sized chunks by his reinvigorated cohorts. The addition of three previously unrecorded early-’70s songs neatly emphasised the ongoing nature of Springsteen’s musical mission.

19 BRIGID MAE POWER
Head Above The Water
FIRE
Since her 2016 debut, I Told You The Truth, Power has been combining folk music with defiant, confessional songwriting and haunting, musical drones. For her third album, the addition of a modest-sized band brought warmth and extra texture to her songs, blending elements of jazz, country and even psychedelia with her voice – otherworldly, hypnotic and as powerfully transcendent as ever.

18 FRAZEY FORD
U Kin B The Sun
ARTS AND CRAFTS
As a songwriter, the former Be Good Tanya has built upon her intimate version of Southern soul, investing U Kin B The Sun with sun-lit piano-driven grooves and a folk-country lilt. Although this album came freighted with Ford’s personal emotions – the death of her brother, her fractious relationship with her parents, break-ups – her positivity endured. “There is beauty in this world/So hold it any way you know how,” she sang. Amen.

17 SAULT
Untitled (Black Is)
FOREVER LIVING ORIGINALS
Having released two intriguing albums in 2019, the anonymous neo-soul collective – believed to include Michael Kiwanuka collaborator Dean “Inflo” Josiah, plus vocalists Cleo Sol and Melissa “Kid Sister” Young – really seized the day with this urgent 20-track opus, written in response to the killing of George Floyd and released just three weeks later on the Juneteenth holiday. A multifaceted work of elegant defiance, they followed it up in September with the equally essential Untitled (Rise).

16 STEPHEN MALKMUS
Traditional Techniques
DOMINO
“Top of the bill in Blackpool/Come and see us shred…” The eighth Malkmus album drew deeply and delightfully on some of his own traditional techniques: chiefly wry observation. Elsewhere, though, it curated a virtual festival in British folk-rock circa 1969/70. 12-string guitars, flute and nods to Eastern modes gave the whole a slightly dank Led Zeppelin III vibe that was customarily deadpan and irresistible.

15 FONTAINES DC
A Hero’s Death
PARTISAN
After the bright promise of their debut, the Dublin band’s second album showed a darker flowering of their talents into a rowdy and percussive post-punk. Kudos then to hyperactive FDC singer Grian Chatten – the romantic hero of this particular drama – in particular for locating the melodies that would turn this reverberating guitar abstraction into something epic and memorable.

14 COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS
Old Flowers
LOOSE/FAT POSSUM
Having spent half a lifetime crafting elegant and delicate songs, the prolific Andrews reached a creative peak with Old Flowers, her seventh album. Ostensibly a break-up record – “you can’t water old flowers” – Andrews delivered her ruminations on lost love against a backdrop of gospel-inflected country-soul. Her message was forgiveness and compassion, delivered with understated grace, her voice moving elegantly from zen-like acceptance to trembling tenderness.

13 TAME IMPALA
The Slow Rush
WARP
Kevin Parker’s journey from slacker guitar burnout to laptop Brian Wilson has been one of the stranger and more enthralling stories of the last decade or so. The first Tame Impala album for five years found Parker almost precisely halfway between Air (1970s soft-rock tunes and diaphanous atmospheres) and Daft Punk (buzzing noises, driving beats). Soft to the touch sonically, the sweetness of the tunes helped the Frank Ocean-style confessionals at Parker’s sad disco slip down even easier.

12 MOSES BOYD
Dark Matter
EXODUS
The title’s double meaning – reflecting Moses Boyd’s interest in both astronomy and the plight of the African diaspora – also alluded to an intriguing duality in the music. Boyd is a producer as well as a virtuoso jazz drummer, and the Mercury-nominated Dark Matter expertly combined fiery live takes with programmed beats and synthy atmospherics. The result sometimes brought to mind ’80s Miles Davis or Jeff Mills’ recent EP with Tony Allen, but with a distinct London edge that tilted towards UK garage and broken beat.

11 JASON ISBELL
Reunions
SOUTHEASTERN
Now seven albums into his solo career, Isbell continued the purple patch that began on 2013’s Southeastern with what might be his richest, subtlest album to date. His loyal group The 400 Unit played a blinder, their performances funky and spacious on opener “What’ve I Done To Help” and sensitive on the atmospheric “River” and “St Peter’s Autograph”; yet it’s Isbell’s songs, both politically and emotionally aware, that were the real jewels here.

10 LAURA MARLING
Song For Our Daughter
CHRYSALIS/PARTISAN
After her exploratory Lump project with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay, Marling tiptoed back to a sort of classicism for her seventh record: while influences include Leonard Cohen on “Alexandra” and Paul McCartney on “Blow By Blow”, the stately sophistication of these 10 songs was testament to Marling’s talents alone. There were no reinventions here, just the songwriter stripped back to the essence of her art.

9 SHIRLEY COLLINS
Heart’s Ease
DOMINO
Eighty-five years young, England’s greatest living folk singer here truly regained the voice that sat dormant for decades, making a record that stood up to her late-’60s and early-’70s marvels. Collins is still an adventurer, too: she tried out a few songs written by her nephew and ex-husband alongside the trad.arr tunes, while the closing “Crowlink” bravely placed her among field recordings and experimental electronic drones.

8 JARV IS…
Beyond The Pale
ROUGH TRADE
Forming a bona fide band for the first time since Pulp’s dissolution in 2002 clearly reinvigorated Jarvis Cocker. On this debut LP, he and his group – including Serafina Steer and Jason Buckle – presented seven epic songs that touched on krautrock, house and dub, and were developed and recorded at live gigs over the past couple of years. Above it all, Cocker examined our cave-dwelling past, the curse of nostalgia and the detritus of broken lives on some of his deepest lyrics.

7 BILL CALLAHAN
Gold Record
DRAG CITY
Many of Callahan’s albums seem to come with difficult labours, but Gold Record, his second album in two years, almost waltzed in, feeling fresh and natural. It’s been an organic transition for the songwriter, now very much the settled and happy family man, and though some may pine for that tortured misanthrope of the Smog years, the likes of “Pigeons”, “Ry Cooder” and “As I Wander” were pinnacles of wry wisdom and storytelling.

6 WAXAHATCHEE
Saint Cloud
MERGE
Sobriety brought Katie Crutchfield back to her Americana roots on this, her fifth album. Like Lucinda Williams, one of her inspirations, here she filtered country through a gnarlier indie lens, singing of her struggles with recovery, growing up and relationships. Eventually, on “Witches”, a lilting, harmony-laden highlight of this subtly phenomenal record, Crutchfield discovered that the struggle is the point of it all.

5 THUNDERCAT
It Is What It Is
WARP
Bass virtuoso and Kendrick veteran Stephen Bruner continued his journey into the furthest reaches of exploded fusion. Seeming to chronicle the boom-bust cycle of a love affair, his fourth album was composed of short pieces (the better, perhaps, to accommodate busy electronica, hard ’70s grooves and sweet soft rock) but visionary and unified in scope, floating on Thundercat’s falsetto and the sweetly candid nature of his lyrics. Joining him on the mind-expanding mission were guest stars Steve Arrington and the idiosyncratic rapper Lil B.

4 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
The New OK
ANTI-
Events in 2020 moved so fast that the year needed two Drive-By Truckers albums to tackle them all: The Unraveling in late January and The New OK in December. Both albums were full of fury about the state of America, addressing school shootings, the demonisation of immigrants, the opioid addiction and sundry madness from the American Scream. Following 2016’s American Band, Drive-By Truckers have gone from being a great band to an important one: we need them now, more than ever.

3 PHOEBE BRIDGERS
Punisher
DEAD OCEANS
The finest songwriters develop their own singular voice, and Los Angeles’ Phoebe Bridgers has certainly done that in the six years since her first single. Like, say, Bill Callahan or frequent collaborator Conor Oberst, her musings on sex and death flow organically but with a rare power and playfulness. Her second album Punisher was her strongest work to date, the hallucinatory mix of electronics and eerie chamber folk propelling highlights such as the title track, “Chinese Satellite” and “Moon Song”.

2 FLEET FOXES
Shore
ANTI-
A wonderful surprise, not just because of its sudden appearance on the autumn equinox, but because Robin Pecknold sounded like a man reborn, matching the wide-eyed folksy innocence of the Fleet Foxes’ classic debut to gleaming pop production. Despite lyrics touching on isolation, depression and loss – “Sunblind” paid tribute to Richard Swift, David Berman and others very much missed – Shore was relentlessly sunny and optimistic, a celebration of nature both wild and human.

1 BOB DYLAN
Rough And Rowdy Ways
COLUMBIA
If nothing else, 2020 has proven how resilient music can be. Despite the vicissitudes of the pandemic, hearteningly, good music has found a way to endure – on record at least. As our poll demonstrates, our team of writers have zoned in on the rich seam of creativity running through 2020, finding comfort in familiar friends like Fleet Foxes, Bill Callahan, Drive-By Truckers (twice), Stephen Malkmus and Paul Weller while also searching diligently for the new and innovative: Sault, Nubya Garcia, Sarah Davchi and Bananagun among them. Some songwriters have released their best records yet – Frazey Ford, Brigid Mae Power, Courtney Marie Andrews, Phoebe Bridgers – while artists who we considered newcomers just a short while ago, such as Fontaines DC, Margo Price and Shabaka Hutchings, have settled themselves firmly at our top table.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that the artist who defined 2020 for us was Bob Dylan – hitting the No 1 spot for a record-setting third time in our Albums Of The Year. Heralded by “Murder Most Foul” in March – an elegiac, 17-minute song ostensibly about the assassination of John F Kennedy – Rough And Rowdy Ways was a ferocious, urgent, marauding album that felt almost supernaturally relevant to the present. Arguably, of course, Dylan’s most prized albums have always arrived at fraught moments. But with this, his 39th studio album, he seemed to have found new, invigorating ways of illuminating American history and reflecting it against the present day. The ghosts of the 20th century – Buster Keaton, Walt Whitman and General Patton among them – coexisted with spirits from earlier civilisations, all of whom had something to say, in their own oblique ways, about today. Dylan’s point? History is cyclical; societies emerge, flourish, decline. Not bad going, then, for a man last seen peddling his own brand of whiskey.

What Rough And Rowdy Ways ultimately demonstrated, though, was Dylan’s continuing capacity – as he approaches his 80th birthday – to confound and delight us. Who else is there, this far into their careers, who has that ability? A remarkable achievement; a remarkable album. “The last of the best/ You can bury the rest”, he sang on “False Prophet”. He wasn’t far off.

WWE Fires Alarming Number Of Superstars

WWE has released Kurt Angle, Rusev, Rowan, Lio Rush, Sarah Logan, Karl Anderson, Luke Gallows, and more.

We’re just one week removed from WrestleMania 36, which was the most unique WrestleMania in history, and already the WWE is making a major personnel change.

As the company continues to film episodes of Monday Night RAW and Friday Night Smackdown on a closed set during the coronavirus pandemic, it appears as though they have been forced to cut costs.

As reported by WWE.com, a number of wrestlers are now without a job after a series of lay-offs were announced today. The majority of superstars could have seen this coming — like EC3, Primo, and Epico who have not been on television in months — but other releases are a bit more surprising.

JP Yim/Getty Images

“WWE has come to terms on the release of Kurt Angle, Rusev (Miroslav Barnyashev), Drake Maverick (James Curtin), Zack Ryder (Matthew Cardona), Curt Hawkins (Brian Myers), Karl Anderson (Chad Allegra), Luke Gallows (Drew Hankinson), Heath Slater (Heath Miller), Eric Young (Jeremy Fritz), Rowan (Joseph Ruud), Sarah Logan (Sarah Rowe), No Way Jose (Levis Valenzuela), Mike Chioda, Mike Kanellis (Mike Bennett), Maria Kanellis, EC3 (Michael Hutter), Aiden English (Matthew Rehwoldt), Lio Rush (Lionel Green), Primo (Edwin Colon) and Epico (Orlando Colon Nieves). We wish them all the best in their future endeavors,” announced the company in a press release today.

Of the announced firings, some of the most surprising names listed are Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows, who appeared at WrestleMania 36 during AJ Styles’ match with The Undertaker. Rowan was also involved in a televised storyline for weeks, squashing his opponents in quick order as he appeared to receive a mini-push. Rusev has not been utilized correctly in years, so this gives him a chance to start fresh with a new company. Maybe AEW?

What do you think of the releases?

FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP Getty Images

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R&Bieber: "Yummy" Is Uninspiring But Packaged To Sell

Justin Bieber’s hiatus, return and musical direction moving forward as his album looms.

The last time Justin Bieber released a solo single or a studio album, Obama was still President, we all thought Jon Snow was dead, and Kobe Bryant was the star of the Los Angeles Laker (not LeBron James). Seems like ages ago, right? Needless to say, a lot has changed since then – one thing that hasn’t is the Biebs’ ability to serenade with the best of them. We’re lightyear’s away from the world that Bieber gave Purpose, his highly successful fourth project, yet out of the proverbial time capsule, he emerges ready to marvel fans once again with his vivacious vocals.

R&Bieber: "Yummy" Is Uninspiring But Packaged To Sell

Bieber attends the fight between KSI and Logan Paul at the Staples Center, November 2019 – Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images

Purpose amassed Bieber three no. 1 singles, propelling him in the most rarified of air. But that kind of altitude could rattle anyone – so albeit for a time, the starlet allowed the world of music to eclipse him. He vanished from the scene for a better part of the decade. Bieber’s hiatus is almost two years longer than Adele – who went missing for three and a half trips around the sun after the birth of her child. Upon returning, though, she would release her defining no. 1 single “Hello,” a gem from her recording-setting album 25. The project would go on to become the highest-selling debut of all-time.

Usher, Bieber’s mentor, took a hiatus of his own in 2001. This before releasing 8701, a legendary albumthat went on to sell almost 5 million copies in the United States alone and go 4-times platinum, Usher’s sabbatical spanned four years. So there is a playbook for Bieber to return and return with a vengeance. When addressing if he thought the time off would hurt his career, Usher told MTV, “I feel what’s meant for me will wait for me.”

So could the blue-eyed, heartthrob reengineer this type of success after a half-decade album drought?

Since we’ve last seen Bieber, he’s gone through a very public breakup with Selena Gomez, beef with The Weeknd, canceled the final leg of his Purpose World Tour, and married Hailey Baldwin. He’s also tussled with his mental health and drug abuse. At length, he’s spoken about devotion to God and taking a stance against racism. Bieber has grown a great deal over the past half a decade, but before the song’s official release, many pondered how his sound would evolve. Furthermore, what would the now-married pop mogul have to say?

R&Bieber: "Yummy" Is Uninspiring But Packaged To Sell

Bieber and his wife Hailey attend 2019 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs between the Boston Bruins and the Toronto Maple Leafs – Omar Rawlings/Getty Images

In a December 24th Instagram video, Justin said, “As humans, we are imperfect. My past, my mistakes, all the things that I’ve been through, I believe that I’m right where I’m supposed to be and God has me right where he wants me. I feel like this is different than the previous albums just because of where I’m at in my life. I’m excited to perform it and to tour it. We all have different stories. I’m just excited to share mine.”

Bieber officially announced his new single “Yummy,” alongside the album’s trailerand hints of a tour to follow. If that wasn’t enough to sputter the hype vehicle, Justin released a trailer on New Year’s Eve announcing his 10-episode YouTube Originals documentary series.

This isn’t the teenage bubblegum version of Justin Bieber (not even close), and the miles traveled since his early success show resoundingly on “Yummy.” It’s a stark contrast to the Mickey-Mousery of older records like “One Time,” which he released in 2009 and was the antithesis of Bieber Mania.

“Your world is my world

And my fight is your fight

My breath is your breath

And your heart (is my heart)

You’re my one love

My one heart

My one life for sure

Let me tell you one time (girl I love, girl I love you)”

“Yummy” comparatively is a seductive and graphically descriptive sonnet to sexual innuendo. His delivery registers like a snake charmer’s hypnotizing command of sound, eventually making your shoulders bounce. The lyrics are pretty straightforward but few can bellow and belt on a number like the Beibs. There isn’t a whole lot of substance on the record but that’s not really what you sign up for pressing play on a Beiber track. He seems like he’s trying to fit his music into the box of current trends. Uninspiring but packaged to sell.

“Yeah, you got that yummy-yum

That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy

Yeah, you got that yummy-yum

That yummy-yum, that yummy-yummy

Say the word, on my way

Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe

Any night, any day

Say the word, on my way

Yeah babe, yeah babe, yeah babe

In the mornin’ or the late

Say the word, on my way”

The song is Produced by Kid Culture, Sasha Sirota, and frequent collaborator Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd. Other works produced by Poo Bear include 112’s “Peaches & Cream,” “Dance With Me,” Usher’s “Superstar,” Danity Kane’s “Sleep On It” and Mariah Carey‘s “The Distance.” The trio unite to engineer a sound that is four tablespoons airy chimes and bells, one cup reverberating baseline and a dash of high-hat sprinkled with a kick for flavor. Blended together and married to Beiber’s rich voice, the beat makes for a body-rocking, intoxicating delectable.

“Yummy” is a flare gun, lighting up the sky but packing just enough flavorless punch to keep your attention. While it is pretty to look at, the song seems most effective in building hype for this long-awaited album. As Popcorn as “Yummy” appears, it has all the fixings of a commercial smash. Catchy, sexy, fun – the track is a satisfying appetizer for Beiber faithful who have likely grown with the singer and are ready for the accelerated explicitness of the lyrics. The instrumental sounds fluffy enough to grace a 10-year old’s, skating rink birthday party playlist with lyrics raunchy enough to be played in the strip club. In all, “Yummy,” loses its sweetness rather quickly. Despite some moderate criticisms, the song tastes just good enough, and starved “beliebers” will gobble it up.

Responding to a Forbesarticle, the Grammy award winner coined his new sound R&Beiber.

The pop sensation has taken detours into country, EDM and even reggae with the likes of Billie Ellish and Ed Sheeran. But his roots will always be Pop and R&B. Since being discovered and mentored by Usher, who no doubt influenced his musical palette, style, and persona, the singer has flourished. Beiber once referred to himself and Usher as a “dynamic duo.” To denote this, days ago their collaboration “Somebody To Love” surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify. Usher’s influence can be heard in Beiber’s vocal delivery. The way he floats in and out of keys sometimes racing up to falsetto’s top floor before parachuting back down in an auspicious display of range and ocular command. Usher’s longterm vision for the singer has been in the works since the early 2010s. He said this about an adolescent Bieber even back then:

“I think he posses the confidence that you have to have as an artist. The talent that you [all] have yet to discover is what I notice more than anything. His ability to play guitar, play the drums, sing while playing the piano – these are all elements that speak to artistry. When you think of a long term story, you can’t just think about what you can do with a hit record, or what you can do with a great video – you have to think about an entire career.”

Is this is the Justin Bieber Usher envisioned all those years ago? Is there still potential untapped or has the arguable King of R&B’s protege peaked only to now be on an inevitable and treacherously mediocre skid down the slope of success? Opposite what gravity feels like for the rest of us, a journey down the mountain is always harder than the climb for a fading star.

The Hip-hop scene wrapped their arms around a young and budding Beiber as the 13-year-old initially traipsed from his rise to the pedestal of stardom, given his co-sign from Usher. Later, his 2013 album Journals had characteristics of R&B influence. An example of this comes on, “All That Matters” a swaggy and smooth single off the memento. As the singer has grown, he’s developed more and more of an edge; in and outside of the studio. In years past, Beiber has gotten features from the likes of Lil Wayne, Migos, and even Future who joined him on “What’s Hannin.” To boot, he’s appeared on a number Hip-Hop and R&B records himself – riding shotgun for tracks like Drake’s “One Dance” remix, DJ Khaled’s “I’m the One,” or the remix to “Foreign” from Trey Songz. The new album features Ty Dolla, Post Malone, and Kelani – so we’re sure the composition will exude an R&B, Hip-hop aroma.

R&Bieber: "Yummy" Is Uninspiring But Packaged To Sell

Bieber and Post Malone backstage at Coachella 2018 – Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Bieber’s new album and the tour will garner millions of “Beliebers” reciting his songs and consuming mountains of his content, inevitably. The project will probably produce massive commercial success. So far, “Yummy” is the album-catapulting single of the decade. I mean the decade is only four days old, but that counts for something, right?

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The 2026 Grammy nominations and winners so far are:

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The 2026 Grammy nominations are:

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Record of the Year

Album of the Year

Song of the Year

Best New Artist

Best Pop Solo Performance

Best Pop Duo/Group Performance

Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album

Best Pop Vocal Album

Best Rock Performance

Best Metal Performance

Best Rock Song

Best Rock Album

Best Dance/Electronic Recording

Best Dance/Electronic Music Album

Best Alternative Music Album

Best R&B Performance

Best Progressive R&B Album

Best Traditional R&B Performance

Best R&B Song

Best R&B Album

Best Traditional R&B Performance

Best Rap Performance

Best Rap Album

Best Melodic Rap Performance

Best Rap Song

Best Latin Pop or Urban Album

Best American Roots Performance

Best American Roots Song

Best Americana Album

Best Bluegrass Album

Best Traditional Blues Album

Best Contemporary Blues Album

Best Folk Album

Best Regional Roots Music Album

Best Reggae Album

Best Global Music Album

Best New Age Album

Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

Producer of the Year, Non-Classical

Best Remixed Recording

Best Immersive Audio Album (63rd Grammy)

Best Immersive Audio Album

Best Engineered Album, Classical

Best Contemporary Instrumental Album

Best Country Solo Performance

Best Country Duo/Group Performance

Best Country Song

Best Country Album

Best Improvised Jazz Solo

Best Jazz Vocal Album

Best Jazz Instrumental Album

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album

Best Latin Jazz Album

Best Gospel Performance/Song

Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song

Best Gospel Album

Best Contemporary Christian Music Album

Best Roots Gospel Album

Best Música Urbana Album

Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album

Best Regional Mexican Music Album (Including Tejano)

Best Tropical Latin Album

Best Global Music Performance

Best Children’s Music Album

Best Spoken Word Album

Best Comedy Album

Best Musical Theater Album

Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media

Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media

Best Song Written For Visual Media

Best Instrumental Composition

Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella

Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals