Category: News

Earlier this month, there were rumors flying around that Lorde was gearing up to play a surprise set at this year’s Glastonbury festival. The chatter was so intense that Lorde was asked about it in an interview, and she said, “You know… I’m pretty keen, honestly. I feel like… ’cause the album’s gonna be coming out right around that time. […] I am quite tempted by what’s going on because I’ve got lots of friends playing as well. We’ll see, we’ll see if I can pull some strings and get there.”

It turns out Lorde wasn’t kidding (or the performance was already in place and she was being coy): At Glasto today (June 27), Lorde indeed played a surprise set. Given that her new album Virgin is out today, she performed the whole thing, front to back, before wrapping her set up with a couple of classics: “Ribs” and “Green Light.” Since Lorde hadn’t yet done any performances in support of the album, the set featured the live debut of every Virgin song. Here she is performing “Hammer” and here’s “What Was That.”

Check out the setlist (via setlist.fm) below.

Lorde’s 2025 Glastonbury Setlist

1. “Hammer”
2. “What Was That”
3. “Shapeshifter”
4. “Man Of The Year”
5. “Favourite Daughter”
6. “Current Affairs”
7. “Clearblue”
8. “GRWM”
9. “Broken Glass”
10. “If She Could See Me Now”
11. “David
12. “Ribs”
13. “Green Light”

Virgin is out now via Republic Records. Find more information here.

Steven and Ian begin with a conversation about Virgin, the new album by Lorde out today. Judging by the singles, it’s not clear if this is going to be the comeback she needs. They also talked about Guitar, the new album just announced by Mac DeMarco, his first “proper” record of songs in years.

Then they pivoted to a conversation about the weird state of music in 2025, which already seems like a weaker year than 2024, before they each listed their five favorite releases of the past six months.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 243 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

BigXthaPlug and Shaboozey have done it again. Building on the chemistry they built from their collaboration on Shaboozey’s “Drink Don’t Need No Mix,” they once again team up for another rap-country anthem in “Home.” The two Southern genre benders tackle one of both categories’ favorite topics: the open road, and just how good it feels when the pavement points in the direction of the place you hang your hat.

“I’ve been lost on this highway, tryna figure out life on this road,” X raps, “I lost all the love that I had in my soul, tryna chase everything that was shiny and gold / I ran away from my problems, I know now I’m stuck on this highway with nowhere to go / One day, if I call back, will I get to come home?”

Although BigX had primarily been known for the same sort of smoky Texas rap as his countrymen That Mexican OT and Maxo Kream, he’s begun experimenting with collaborating with country stars in the past year, to great effect. In April, he released the video for “All The Way” with Bailey Zimmerman, while more recently, he dropped an acoustic version of his Jessie Murph collaboration “Holy Ground.” It’s working for him, against all odds, and bringing hip-hop and country music closer together than ever before.

You can listen to “Home” above.

Renee Rapp wreaks havoc in a hotel trying to get Alexandra Shipp’s attention in her hedonistic video for “Mad,” the latest single from her upcoming album, Bite Me.

The video opens with the pair entering the hotel’s elevator in a huff, where the X-Men star determinedly ignores Rapp’s attempts to provoke a reaction. However, her attempts escalate throughout the video, leading to the total destruction of their hotel room during an unhinged party, with dishware being smashed, champagne getting spilled, and Rapp doing her best Sia impression — you know, swinging from a chandelier. It goes about as well as you’d expect, leading to a crash landing for the Mean Girls star.

Prior to “Mad,” Rapp was ready to rumble in the video for “Leave Me Alone,” the first single from Bite Me, which saw her start a sleepover fight club, where the pillows are traded in for boxing gloves, and the makeovers are done by closed fists. Rapp later announced the dates for her North American tour, on which she’ll be accompanied by Ravyn Lenae and Syd.

You can watch the hedonistic video for Renee Rap’s new single “Mad” above.

Bite Me is out 8/1 via Interscope. Find more information here.

Well, here’s a fun surprise. While waiting for news about Lizzo‘s follow-up to her 2022 album Special, fans have been given a new mixtape to hold them over until she’s ready to drop another album.

The tape is called My Face Hurts From Smiling and features 13 all-new tracks, including collaborations with Doja Cat and SZA. On the former, “Still Can’t Fuh,” Lizzo and Doja tease a would-be paramour that he can’t buy their love (or, well… y’know), while on the latter, “IRL,” SZA trade confident verses about self-love and authenticity.

SZA explained her and Lizzo’s friendship in a recent interview, characterizing the Midwestern rapper/singer as very genuine and generous. “Me and Lizzo, we’ve been friends since, like, 2013, but it was very organic and very random,” she said. “One day we were on the same tour, and I was like, ‘We’re about to drive out to Lake Michigan, do you want to come?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ And then we just got drunk and hung out, and we kept doing that, and then our lives and careers progressed, and we kept talking and hanging out. The other day, I went over to her house. My tummy was hurting because I ate too much, and she gave me a muumuu, and we just laid in the yard and did nothing, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what the f*ck friendship is about’.”

You can listen to Lizzo’s My Face Hurts From Smiling mixtape here.

Two of pop music’s biggest breakout stars of the past year have joined forces to deliver an emotive duet. Alex Warren‘s “On My Mind” finds him paired with Rosé of Blackpink for a nostalgic ballad about being unable to let go after a breakup. “You showed up graceful and casually / Our love was what it had to be / You showed up like you’re still attached to me / Our love was what it had to be,” they sing.

The song’s high-concept video finds some pretty nifty ways to pair them in shots, even though it’s pretty clear they filmed their parts at different times. An early transition sees Warren peering into a dollhouse, and as the camera zooms in, we see Rosé inside; when the point of view changes to hers, we see Warren through the window, looking like a giant. The final shots use split screens of the two singers on opposite sides of a wall, as if they were neighbors in an apartment building with no fourth wall.

Warren’s had a big year to date; his single “Ordinary” became one of the few new songs to breakthrough all the way to the top of the Hot 100. Meanwhile, Rosé followed up the runaway success of “APT.” by announcing more Bruno Mars collaborations, as well as an appearance on the F1 soundtrack.

You can watch Alex Warren’s “On My Mind” video featuring Rosé above.

TDE rapper Ray Vaughn is having one heck of a week. The same day that he was announced as one of XXL‘s 2025 Freshman class, it was also revealed that he’d signed a distribution deal with RCA Records, which also distributed his labelmate SZA’s last two albums.

The Long Beach native celebrates his run of excellence and blessings with the boisterous video for “Look @ God,” from his TDE debut, The Good, The Bad, The Dollar Menu. The video finds Ray and his clique grabbing lunch at Poly Burger, across the street from Long Beach Polytechnic High School (Jackrabbits, what’s up!), before cruising up PCH to get down at a house party in the hills. Lyrically, the song revels in Ray’s recent successes, rapping, “From the windows to the wall / County checks and the EBT cards / Could be worse if I woke up, y’all / Could be worse if I wasn’t Top Dawg / Look at God, look at God / Every second of my life, I’ma ball.”

Prior to all the news from the past week, casual listeners may have believed that his claim to fame was his back-and-forth with Joey Badass this spring, in which Ray took up for fellow South LA denizen Kendrick Lamar, who brought him out during the Kendrick And Friends concert last year. Now, there’s plenty more for those fans to talk about, but those of us who have been rooting for him from the beginning saw all this coming a long time ago.

Watch Ray Vaughn’s “Look @ God” video above.

The Good, The Bad, The Dollar Menu is out now via Top Dawg Entertainment. Get it here.

Earlier this month, Kehlani released their new single, “Folded,” marking the beginning of their next era in the wake of 2024’s Crash. The song finds Kehlani flip-flopping between wanting to move on from a relationship and continuing it, instructing their ex-lover to pick up their things and go before they “fold.”

In the alluring music video for the single, which Kehlani released today, they fittingly run a dry cleaning shop called Nini’s Fluff ‘n’ Fold, where a line of women waits to drop off their laundry while Kehlani rings them up at the register. However, once they takes the hampers to the back of the shop, the visuals shift to present a fantastical representation of the process, with Kehlani and a team of dancers doing sensual choreography with full hampers and gliding over a pool of water.

Although Kehlani has yet to officially announce the next project, fans have had plenty of new music over the past year. After the release of Crash, Kehlani followed up with While We Wait 2, which offered another 14 tracks to hold their fans over until the next album. That project now looks like it’ll be coming sometime this year, and with “Folded” already generating a buzz, you can bet the album will continue Kehlani’s run of excellence.

Watch Kehlani’s “Folded” video above.

Who says Black people don’t love musicals?

Well, according to the algorithms over the past week — both digital and universal — a lot of people, including us.

Through conversations with friends in person and on social media, and through TikTok’s curated feed, this point came up repeatedly over Juneteenth weekend. But a counterargument was equally prevalent; pointing out that musical theater has roots and branches throughout Black history and culture, as do so many other aspects of American pop culture. Those roots extend to nearly a century worth of musical movies, which disprove the above theory; Black people really do love musicals.

On Sunday (June 22), Bob The Drag Queen posted a YouTube video in which the popular Drag Race veteran posed the question “why do Black people hate musicals?” to both a roundtable panel of commentators and folks out in the real world, a la “man on the street” segments. In the video’s intro , Bob recalls encountering experiences in which friends, family, neighbors, and the like declared their distaste for musicals, joking that a Pew Research poll found that “97% of Black people in America believe that Broadway musicals are… ‘some white people sh*t’.”

While Bob’s joke is clearly meant to be a lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek generalization, there have, however, been a number of commentaries on the double meanings of “the Great White Way,” including in The New York Times and Broadway trade publication Playbill, noting the overwhelming lack of representation in traditional productions. Even one of the most successful production of the past decade, Hamilton, went out of its way to cast almost exclusively people of color as a rejection and indictment of that standard.

There have even been informal, yet still insightful polls pointing to the belief that a majority of Black folks at least claim to dislike musicals, often citing all the usual concerns. They say the songs break their immersion in the story, that it’s “unrealistic” for people to “spontaneously” break out in song and choreographed dance when confronted with strong emotions, or that the style of music is simply not appealing to their personal sensibilities.

These concerns aren’t exclusive to Black folks; The Ringer noted a couple of years ago that, as Hollywood musicals proliferate, with studios returning to the old standards that once supported the entire industry, their marketing departments are going to great lengths to hide the fact that films will feature characters singing and dancing. Consider the rollouts for films like Mean Girls, Wonka, and most relevantly here, The Color Purple. There seems to be a fear that if the musical aspect is played up in trailers, no one will go see the movies.

But here’s where that fear falls apart; people — especially Black people, as we’ll see in a moment — absolutely LOVE musicals. They are an indelible part of our cultural history and one of the ties that binds us together. The Wiz is often cited as one of the cherished family viewing traditions by nostalgic commenters on social media apps, as is Dreamgirls. Both movies made stars of some of their featured companies; a young Michael Jackson’s performance is widely considered a standout of the former, while one could argue that Jennifer Hudson’s infamous, viral “spirit tunnel” would never have happened without the latter.

How many of us grew up on the animated films of the Disney Renaissance: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King? Yes, those films and other staples of the ’90s might have featured traditional Broadway songwriting, but when it came time to release single versions of their hit, show-stopping songs, Black singers like Peabo Bryson (Aladdin‘s “A Whole New World” with Regina Belle and “Beauty And The Beast” with Celine Dion) and Vanessa Williams (Pocahantas‘ “Colors Of The Wind”) were tapped to give them a soulful flair.

Disney Plus has a whole documentary about the cultural impact of A Goofy Movie, with its New Jack Swing-inspired pop star Power Line voiced by Tevin Campbell; Donald Glover’s Atlanta dedicated a whole episode of its final season to the same concept (arguably providing the inspiration for the more official version released this year). And even though the recent musical version of The Color Purple fell short of commercial expectations, those who did go see it, loved it; audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of “A”, and 92% of filmgoers gave it a positive score according to PostTrak.

More contemporarily, Wicked not only became the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2024, with similar audience responses, but it was also the subject of pop-cultural memes and trends that saw poor Cynthia Erivo deluged with fan reproductions of her “Defying Gravity” “warcry.” The song was nominated for a BET Her award, and Erivo’s performance earned her Best Actress at that award show; clearly, Black folks loved Wicked.

Another musical that audiences — mainly Black ones — loved: Sinners. Perhaps that characterization of the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2025 surprises you, but along with a riveting crime drama and a truly incisive horror film, Sinners is also one hell of a musical. As author and culture critic Jason Pargin pointed out on his TikTok (months after the film’s release, mind you, proving its staying power for all kinds of audiences), Sinners is structured as a musical; he notes that the film’s centerpiece, showstopping musical scene hits right at the hour mark — just as it would in any other musical.

As with many stereotypes — maybe even most of them — it seems there isn’t much to this one other than the stereotype perpetuating itself through its repetition (and perhaps some folks just being unwilling to do a little self-examination). After all, nearly all of us have at least one song rattling around in our heads from a musical stage show or Hollywood film. For me, it’s “Good Morning” from “Singin’ In The Rain,” but I knew the song long before I’d ever seen the movie. For as long as I can remember, its infuriatingly catchy chorus had been used as a jingle for the local hip-hop station’s Big Boy In The Morning radio show. If you ever thought Black people don’t love musicals, consider this your wake-up call.

We are now hours away from the release of Lorde’s latest album, Virgin. As the world waits to hear it, some people close to her have naturally already gotten a listen. Perhaps surprisingly, though, one of those people is Jack Harlow. He and Lorde don’t seem to have a known working or personal relationship, but it sounds like he was happy to hear some pre-release Lorde tunes.

In a new Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe, discussing her song “Hammer,” Lorde said, “It’s, like, funny to me, it’s fun. Like, I’m sort of making myself laugh.” She continued:

“Jack Harlow was working at Electric Lady [Studios in New York] when we were there towards the end of the record and somehow ended up getting most of the album played to him. It was a very funny, cool link. He’s such a sweetheart. But he was like, ‘Your bars are…’ He was like, ‘These are bars!’ [laughs] I was like, ‘Your words, not mine.’”

She concluded, “But it just is this sort of rolling cadence and physicality and within that, I’m trying to make myself laugh, I’m trying to make my eyebrow raise, I’m trying to kind of… I don’t know, just keep it feeling super alive.”

Watch the full interview above.

Virgin is out 6/27 via Republic Records. Find more information here.