Music Features

Drake waits until the second half of Certified Lover Boy to deploy the gloomy R&B bomb that has been one of his most reliable weapons since Take Care. That album included “Marvins Room,” which found Drake drunk at a club plotting the pettiest of revenges — calling his ex and …

This month, Rob Thomas reunited with Carlos Santana for “Move,” their first new song together since “Smooth.” But as Thomas told Rolling Stone when discussing the making of that single, it’s not the only project he’s been working on during lockdown: He’s also just wrapped up his first Christmas record. …

LVL1’s “FVN!” is a gleeful, galloping combination of house and hip-hop, a hedonistic and bilingual track that romps at more than 130 beats per minute. The instrumental is all stabbing synths and kick-hiss drums, with LVL1 rapping at breakneck speed: “Girls just wanna have fun/I just wanna have sex in …

DaBaby has always been a troll of sorts. In 2017, the rapper showed up at the Austin music festival South by Southwest in a diaper, performing a publicity stunt that poked fun at his chosen rap persona. Now, four years from his introduction to the masses, DaBaby has taken his …

Decades after she and Rita Marley toured with Bob Marley, Marcia Griffiths still does a good impression of the woman she calls Sister Rita marching into her late husband’s dressing room after a show. “’Come on, come on — time to go!’” Griffiths says with a laugh, slapping her hands …

Kabza De Small is a foundational figure in amapiano, a subgenre of South African house music that’s taking over that country and poised to blow up worldwide. Alone and as a part of Scorpion Kings with DJ Maphorisa — a super-producer with Drake and Major Lazer credits, whom Kabza once …

The depressing passage of time recently revealed that Rihanna‘s Anti turned five years old in January, and we’re still anxiously waiting for a follow-up. In a March post commemorating Women’s History Month, Rihanna posted footagefrom the Anti era, and even hinted to a user that new music might be on …

There’s a particular set of scenes in Angélique Kidjo and Yemi Alade’s newest music video that may most resonate with immigrants in the West. A Black laborer does grueling work at a shipping yard for an envelope of cash he designates to send back home; the Western Union paperwork in …

In June of 1965, two young saxophonists, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, gathered at New Jersey’s famed Van Gelder Studio as part of an 11-piece band convened by John Coltrane. At the time, Coltrane was leading his so-called classic quartet, one of the most celebrated bands in jazz, but he …

In 2015, Bryson Tiller reluctantly uploaded a song called “Don’t” to his SoundCloud and all but broke the internet, with millions of streams rolling in within just a few months for a single he’d made at home. That same year, he released his debut album, Trapsoul, making him one of …