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Four of music’s most prominent, groundbreaking producers have teamed up to form a supergroup. 9th Wonder, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and Terrace Martin are veterans of the hip-hop, soul, and jazz worlds, participating in some of the most important projects and collaborating with some of the biggest names in music. Now, they have come together as Dinner Party and released their first single, the powerful and profound “Freeze Tag” with Chicago singer and producer Phoelix.

The group formed during a tour on which Martin and Glasper both participated. Martin and Washington have been friends in the LA jazz scene since high school, and 9th Wonder, despite not being a traditional musician, is connected to all three through various endeavors and mutual collaborators like Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Rapsody, and others. They’ve all collaborated in some capacity in the past, but in 2019, linked up as a group to record an entire album as Dinner Party.

Phoelix is also a producer of some reknown, helping shape the new Chicago sound of rappers like Noname and Saba, and is an accomplished vocalist as well. He contributes impactful lyrics to “Freeze Tag,” speaking to the mood of the current moment in America. “They told me put my hands up behind my head,” he croons. “I think you got the wrong one.”

Watch Dinner Party’s debut video, “Freeze Tag” featuring Phoelix, above. The seven-song Dinner Party album is due 7/10 via Sounds Of Crenshaw/Empire. You can pre-order it here.

In September, Brittany Howard pivoted from her lead role in four-piece group Alabama Shakes to shine as a solo artist. The singer released her debut solo record, Jaime, which melts influences of rock, jazz, and R&B. Since its release, the singer has been gracing late-night television with select performances of her songs. In the past, Howard has stopped by The Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Now, Howard appears on The Tonight Show to give a moving rendition of one of her songs.

For the swaying Fallon performance, Howard tapped a full back-up band and elected to share a rendition of her poignant track “Goat Head,” which describes her experience growing up biracial. The song’s lengthy hook is all instrumental, with Howard’s band providing relaxing tones on a free-flowing keyboard. Just over a minute in, Howard’s vocals cut in. “My mama was brave / To take me outside / ‘Cause mama is white / And daddy is Black / When I first got made / Guess I made these folks mad,” she sings.

Ahead of the singer’s performance on The Tonight Show, Howard teamed up with radio streaming service Sonos Radio for her own curated station. Titled The Encyclopedia Of Brittany, the station features commentary by the singer along with an eclectic mix of music that is prompted by her influences and obsessions.

Watch Brittany Howard perform “Goat Head” on The Tonight Show above.

Jaime is out now via ATO records. Get it here.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

The City Girls are back at full-strength and once again subverting expectations on their latest album, City On Lock — their first release since JT’s release from prison for credit card fraud. The two Miami go-getters haven’t lost a step on their new release, picking up right where they left off on 2018’s Girl Code.

At the heart of their lascivious luxury raps is the understanding that America is an unequal society. As JT says in the larcenous outro from “That Old Man,” these dudes are dumb — the quiet part is that those dummies somehow wound up with all the resources and power. If they’re desperate enough for a taste of affection from women who obviously only want to use them to get a leg up in a man’s world, that’s not the City Girls’ problem.

City On Lock arrives at a critical juncture in the duo’s evolution. They made their bones in early 2018 as a throwback to the fierce, unapologetic thirst trap rap of Miami forebear Trina, spitting blunt punchlines about transactional relationships with men over neck-snapping, high-energy instrumentals. Their brand was simple, but not basic, embracing the same logic that drives BackPage and OnlyFans accounts to this day. If someone is buying, they’re willing to sell.

They were also willing to make money in a more underhanded, Hustlers-esque way: Cracking cards and swiping away to get the glamorous accoutrements they rapped about. The life caught up to them, sending JT — the more lyrically-gifted of the two and the engine of their dreams of rap stardom — to prison for a year and leaving Yung Miami, who had been content to continue trading company for cash, to carry the flag alone.

Miami then got pregnant with her second child — a prospect that once would have derailed the entire enterprise due to the archaic and misogynist rules of the new game they’d chosen to play. Motherhood is already a fraught proposition; for rap starlets whose primary selling point is their sex appeal, it should have been disastrous. But JT came home, coronavirus hit, and sex work experienced a boom as more and more women were forced to turn to quarantine-safe occupations.

The resultant shutdown of normal, everyday life gave City Girls the time they needed to regroup and further normalized their brand of raunchy content. if you’re going to twerk to something on Demon Time, it should be something that feels empowering, not degrading, and that’s exactly what their brand of stripper pole-friendly scammer anthems do. City Girls judo flip the world’s masculine-feminine power imbalance on its head, making those transactions a matter of choice rather than survival.

That theme runs throughout City On Lock, from the high-maintenance demands of “Jobs” to the exacting standards of “Broke N****s” to the overt extravagance of “Flewed Out.” The latter adds a snarky layer of playfulness with its title, which Miami coined as part of their 2018 promotion for the song “Twerk.” After a certain class of fans sniffed and glared down their noses at her unpolished language, she simply made it part of the lexicon, earning her rightful place alongside her partner-in-rhyme.

Make no mistake, though; having JT back is this album’s biggest boon. While Miami shows improvement, JT is the driver of group’s lyrical direction, tossing off jeering wordplay reinforcing her and Miami’s dominant role in their dealings with men. “I’m goin’ in, like a bitch got a curfew,” she sneers on “Broke N****s,” “Don’t got my money? Go back to the bitch that birthed you.”

The pair relishes in their sisterhood even above their hunger for luxury, though, praising each other’s profit prowess on “That’s My Bitch” and inviting Doja Cat along for some slick, salacious “Pussy Talk.” Their bond is, after all, what got them here and what has allowed them to outlast their trials to date — including their most recent test, which perfectly demonstrated the skill with which they can reverse and counter any punch thrown at them.

City Girls weren’t set to release City On Lock just yet when it was leaked late on Juneteenth, quickly spreading across the rap internet. The girls responded by dropping the video for “Jobs,” then the entire album. While the duo expressed frustration at the unplanned leak, they had already turned it into a victory, taking the lemons life handed them and turning them into lemonade. In true City Girls fashion, they’re hustling that lemonade into power, profit, and the potential for another runaway hit, proving they really do have the city — and the rap game — on lock.

City On Lock is out now via Quality Control Music/Motown Records. Get it here.

The closer Better Call Saul gets to the Breaking Bad timeline, the likelier it is that Walter White and/or Jesse Pinkman could appear in a background scene or maybe interact with Hank Schrader, who made his BCS debut in season five. Not that we need a cameo, mind you. Better Call Saul is doing perfectly fine without the Breaking Bad leads; to introduce them in the show’s final season would be putting a hat on a Heisenberg hat.

They were also already in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, and as co-creator Peter Gould told Collider, that (probably) means we’ve seen the last of Walter and Jesse.

“I like to think that we don’t have as much of an obligation to have Walt and Jesse back in Better Call Saul because they’re such a great appearance in El Camino,” he said. “But having said that, I would love to have them back. I’d love to have Bryan direct an episode. I got to write an episode [of Breaking Bad] that Bryan directed and I was on set with him every day, and it was a wonderful experience… And Aaron Paul is possibly the happiest human being I’ve ever met, and he makes everybody around him happy. So yeah, I would love to have them back.” Gould’s comments make it sound like, of the two actors, Paul is more likely to reprise his role, while if Cranston was to return, it would be in a behind-the-scenes capacity. That’s fine. It means more screen time for Lalo.

The final season of Better Call Saul is expected to air next year.

There has been some sort of collaboration between Kanye West and Nicki Minaj in the works for some time now. In late 2018, Kanye teased that he and Minaj had made a song about slut shaming for Yandhi. Then, a few months after that, a Kanye/Minaj collab was further teased on an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Now, the song, titled “New Body,” has become popular on TikTok thanks to a leak of Yandhi. This has made fans thirst for the full song to be officially released, so Minaj gave her followers advice on how to make that happen.

In a now-deleted tweet, Minaj suggested that she doesn’t have control over the song at the moment, so she encouraged her fans to pester Kim Kardashian for the song. Fans have also been hoping for Minaj’s ASAP Ferg collab “Move Ya Hips,” and she addressed that in her tweet as well, writing, “Y’all gotta light up Ferg comments everyday if u want MTH. And light up KIM comments everyday if you want NB,” followed by a shrugging emoji.

Meanwhile, Minaj is having a stellar 2020 so far. She earned her first No. 1 song be featuring on Doja Cat’s “Say So,” and she just got her second chart-topper with her Tekashi 69 collaboration, “Trollz.”

A few weeks ago, Atlanta trap rap pioneer Gucci Mane appeared to be disgruntled with his soon-to-be former label, Atlantic Records, accusing someone at the label of being racist and venting that all artists should go on strike until they receive more favorable record deals. Since then, he’s been using his Twitter to wonder aloud (so to speak) about possibly going independent and feeling as though people wanted to censor him. Yesterday, he promised to reveal his decision on the release date of his new album, So Icy Summer, which he set for July 3.

Early this morning, Gucci again logged in to ask fans whether he should renew with contract with Atlantic, although the question seemed more rhetorical when he tweeted it. “Should I renew contract with @Atlantic records or go independent?” he queried, promising a “big press conference July 3rd” and asking “who should do interviews???”

Gucci has been associated with Atlantic Records since 2016, beginning with the studio album Everybody Looking and including 10 projects in that time for an impressive clip of around two projects a year for the last four years. While he never did reveal what his disagreement with Atlantic Records was over, no one can say that the partnership hasn’t been productive. However, as one of the more prolific and successful independent artists in hip-hop, Gucci likely knows he can do it on his own should need be.

Whatever the case, we’ll all find out when So Icy Summer drops on 7/3.

Gucci Mane is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

On June 26, 1945, delegates from 50 countries gathered in the Herbst Theater auditorium in San Francisco.

They were there to sign the U.N. Charter, a treaty that, in its 19 chapters and 111 articles, founded and established a world organization devoted to saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” It would do so by maintaining international peace and security, strengthening international law, expanding human rights, and promoting social progress and better standards of life.

On that day, World War II was not even yet over — that day wouldn’t come until September 2nd, 1945 when the Japanese surrendered — but it established an organization that, as one of its first endeavors, helped distribute lifesaving supplies and medicines to countries reeling from disease, injury and the trauma of war.

And that would be far from its first milestone towards creating a healthier world. Improving health around the world has always been a key priority of the U.N.

In fact, when diplomats met to create the organization, one of the very first things they discussed was setting up a global health agency, something they did just three years later when, on April 7, 1948, they established the World Health Organization (WHO) with the mission to help deliver on the promise of health for all. It tackles infectious disease, reduces preventable deaths for girls and women, and improves access to safe water and sanitation; it fights for the rights of people with disabilities and mental health issues; and it strengthens health systems.

Now in 2020, the UN though WHO is once again providing lifesaving equipment and supplies to more than 130 countries — leading the global fight against COVID-19.

WHO is just one of the big leaps that the U.N. has taken towards improving global health. Here are a few of the many other accomplishments it has made:

1946: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is founded to help provide support and relief to children living in countries impacted by war.

1950s: This is the golden age of antibiotics discovery and implementation, helping fight such diseases as bacterial meningitis (which was fatal for children 90% of the time before), strep throat, and the spread of ear infections to the brain.

1969: The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) begins operations to empower women to decide if and when they have a family, to improve childbirth safety, and help children reach their potential.

1979: Smallpox is eradicated after a 12-year WHO global vaccination campaign with global partners.

1988: The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is established. Since then, polio cases have decreased by 99% because of access to immunizations.

2000: The largest-ever gathering of world leaders issues the Millennium Declaration, which lays out eight aspirational goals. Three of those goals are specifically designed to spur progress in child health, maternal health and combating disease.

2001: The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is created to help fight the three largest infectious disease killers in the world through global cooperation.

2006: The number of children who die before their fifth birthday declines below 10 million for the first time.

2015: All U.N. Member States adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. One of those goals is to ensure health and well-being for everyone everywhere.

2018: WHO, the World Meteorological Organization, the UN Convention on Climate Change and UN Environment hold the first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

2019: 190 U.N. Member States adopt the historic political declaration on Universal Health Coverage at the UN General Assembly identifying ways to make health for all a reality.

UNICEF/Carolina Cabral

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the UN Charter’s signing, there is still a lot of work to be done.

At least half the world’s population is still without access to essential health services. Even though half as many under-5s die now than before 2000, still 5.4m children die before their fifth birthday each year. Racial and economic disparities are still rampant in healthcare, affecting maternal mortality rates, access to care, and quality of treatment. The proportion of mothers who do not survive childbirth is 14 percent higher in developing nations. And now, COVID-19 has created one of the most pressing public health crises we’ve experienced in the last century.

The pandemic is threatening to erode and reverse current progress, and yet, in May, President Trump announced the US’s plans to end its relationship with WHO. This move could hamper the world’s response to the virus, including vaccine development, science and information sharing, resource mobilization, and efforts to mitigate the impact of the virus on the most vulnerable. It also jeopardizes hard-won gains on diseases like polio, putting progress at risk.

If we don’t defeat COVID-19 everywhere, we won’t be safe anywhere — and we can only beat it by working together.

It will take action from everyone to build stable and fair health systems that challenge misinformation, invest in vaccines, and strengthen relief from disease outbreaks.

You can learn more about these goals by checking out “Voice Our Future” — an immersive and interactive reality experience exploring the then, now, and next of some of the most critical challenges of our times. You can also further the reach of your voice by taking the one-minute survey to help inform the UN’s thinking and priorities.

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The 2019-2020 NBA season came to an abrupt halt on March 11 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the season effectively three-quarters of the way through, many storylines, records-to-be, and developing comebacks were left in the lurch; all the bizarre, beautiful, and too-absorbing minutiae of the league halted. This is a look back at the most compelling of those suspended narratives in an attempt to figure out what could have been while reconciling, maybe wrenchingly, that however the season concludes, this will be a year in basketball that never fully happened. Welcome to Year None.

Oh, but they’re fun aren’t they? Lemon-bright and clarifying. A team that, tired of waiting to be ready, decided to play its own game. They refused to be bullied and then OK Boomer’d Andre Iguodala, and it only made their sweetness grow. It isn’t cloying, how honeyed they are with one another, it springs from kindness over the occasionally ingratiating models teams can take on. Less one prominent — obvious in salary, seniority or reputation — leader, they’ve all taken the time and energy to step up and would have stayed a Grind City best kept secret if they weren’t so happily fond of being flashy.

The first time I touched down in Memphis the plane banked low over the (now Bass Pro) Pyramid that sits to the east of the where the Mississippi River coils into the city, the late-afternoon sun sinking molten and heavy to the west. The sun’s light on the Pyramid bouncing directly up from the dark, shifting glass on all four sides of the structure to glance off the plane’s dipped wing and be delivered into the cabin in a dizzying, entirely blinding light. Even when, out of the necessity of safety, the plane changed course and the light winked out, we were all temporarily struck, dazed and blinded with sun spots scorched into our sights, wondering would this be permanent and smiling all the same. The Memphis Grizzlies are like that.

Let’s start small. Dillon Brooks plays like he is permanently running downhill and that when he gets there, a small trampoline is waiting. He has a fumbling, top-heavy energy of a nearly extinct from the league big man, but the tightly wound coordination to control it. Coming down the lane he throws his weight out with every step, swinging his elbows, clearing space and once he has it, an unobstructed look or a fresh-ploughed path he plants his feet, hops up, maybe lands and pogos again, swinging his arms like a helicopter the entire time, to deliver the ball not right into the basket but on a sweeping arc that catches your breath until it sails and sinks. It could be an infuriating sequence every time if you did not trust him, and his teammates do. Because when the ball clanks from all that extra velocity Brooks creates with every added step, he is right under it to grab his own rebound, try it again, an exhausting effort he never seems to tire of as he clears 22, 27, 32 points per game.

On a roster that as a rule never tires, adrenaline finds a corporal form in Jaren Jackson Jr. Like the tendency that lays in wait for all of us when presented with the option to cleanly lose or draw, Jackson Jr. likes to push. He has a tendency to work past himself, pushing into an elevated state of assurance where doubt and taking a breath are banished. Occasionally this ends in him being brick-walled in the paint between bigs he neglected to clock the size of, but more often than not it has him pulling up in the pocket, or out way deep mid-court, the momentum from his last rushing steps instantly diverted into his hands that fling the ball up, away, to float down in slow motion through the net and the hearts of the defenders who have turned to watch, forlorn.

The fountain of youth that blasts through this team as if affixed to a dad’s new power washer has scoured a bright new ceiling for the Toronto-tenured Jonas Valanciunas. Always steady, in the past occasionally to his detriment, the big and beloved Lithuanian has found a new versatility in the steadying role he can play for a group that can’t bear to downshift. His first year in Memphis Valanciunas averaged the highest scoring of his career, 19.9 per game, and where he has gently tapered off this year he’s made up for it at the rim, with career best averages in offensive and defensive rebounding. Valanciunas was always a player who thrived when his role was to look out for his shooters, to sweep his whole body into territorial space-making, and there are near endless options now for who needs his physicality on a team so long and green.

Where Brooks and Jackson Jr. blunder very capably into your heart and Valanciunas protects it, Kyle Anderson is loitering around outside, waiting to be let in. It feels strange to refer to any one player on this very young team as old guard, but Anderson is. The year Anderson was meant to get comfortable instead became an overhaul. The roster was jettisoned around him, coach included, its anchor points of Marc Gasol and Mike Conley heaved up, traded north and west. Anderson learned his habits in the Spurs system and this season’s run and gleeful gun Grizzlies can make his six years in the league, even compared to some of his more seasoned teammates, feel almost antiquated. Almost. His fundamentals serve him, the ones he took from San Antonio. He is a helper, understands spacing and angles and where he best fits in most plays. If wingspans can be subtle then his 7’3” worth of one is a sleeper. Where he seems slow by virtue of the cranked up velocity around him he can at least reach to rebound and worry any incoming offender. Still, these Grizzlies don’t amble, they need to run, and Anderson may prove the last inflection in a bygone Tennessee accent eventually shed for the voice of this future generation.

At the fore of that expeditious era is Ja Morant. Twenty years old and torqued with joy, Morant was exactly who the Grizzlies wanted when they drafted him 2nd, and who the team needed to pull its plan together. But where they wanted someone to perhaps ease into play, Morant instead bounded, impervious to slow growth as much as to gravity. Where he became immediately a new model of player is where his delight and control collide. The gear he operates in does not typically lend to control, to hairpin execution within second split by pressure, but Morant funnels each moment through an existential ice luge, giving his already deft handles a chilling control. Morant went unscouted in high school, discovered by chance at a camp when an assistant coach from Murray State went in search of a vending machine to score an overpriced bag of chips from. He plays with the simultaneous joy of someone who recognizes luck but also understands inherently its runway. That at some point, you’re going to have to conjure your own. Morant was always going to be a wonder, but the more unbelievable fact is that we get to watch.

Watching him, you feel your heart heave and shudder, your doubts contract. He has made the most curmudgeonly analysts and recalcitrant critics lead with their eyes, the rest of us force sharp breath through clenched teeth as he soars, saturnalian, as far as physics will let him push before yanking him hard back down to earth. With Morant you are at every moment as elated as you are afraid for the unfortunate circumstance of his bones, as breakable as our own more sheepish skeletons.

The full extent of his fearlessness is on display when he falls. His body connecting with hardwood a taunt he takes one step further by lying there, prone, making Mr. Olympia poses. As many half court lobs that come magnetized to his two waiting hands, body laying in wait mid-air, as many dunks that seem to see him accelerate to the rim with arms bent back behind his head, no tactile way to increase his speed but speed increasing all the same, it is maybe the way that he does not shy from colliding with the floor that embodies what this team is and will be. A certain invincibility of youth, yes, but the rote wisdom of where the very rules of the game, its form and physics, can be pressed, nudged and broken. One big slogan writ large by Morant, by the Grizzlies in gameplay, in how guys engage with one another and protectively come for those who don’t get it, is Why wait?

If you reserved any empathy for Iguodala these past few months then please, release it. Spend it elsewhere or stash it for later. He made himself a martyr, that was what he had set out to do all along, but where his own self-sacrifice turned on him was where he least expected, in rookies and those he felt automatically junior calling him — correctly — out. The core value of this team, that flourishes where they’ve miscalculated a should-be win or run themselves ragged, is showing up for each other. It is where they thrive and how you know they are here for a longer run than this season’s meteoric showing. Iguodala never understood that, because he never made himself available to either the team or its players. He felt he was owed a respect on the standing of his quantified experience alone. Brooks was the first to be asked about the veterans absence and his answer should have been clarifying enough, “First time I seen him was on TV talking about us. It doesn’t even matter. Andre Iguodala is a great player. I feel like he’s doing the right thing for his career. But we don’t really care.” And why should they? What mattered to the team minus Iguodala was showing up, the physicality of being there.

Brooks, in the vein of what it means to be a Grizzly, ran with it, “A guy on our team that doesn’t want to be on our team, I can’t wait ’til we find a way to trade him so we can play him and show him what Memphis really about.”

It was funny! It was also the kind of biting honesty that can be so rare in the hierarchal trappings of the league. To make a threat about sitting out your presence has to be missed, but Iguodala’s never was. In what Brooks said and Morant and others later echoed, they were already looking at the interruption as brief and had their sights set past it, if anything annoyed by the dead weight of Iguodala’s contract and attempts at trying to turn it into something it never was — a hindrance on their potential.

In all the teams that had their seasons and stories sidetracked this year with the lurching pause and even more untenable return to play, it is the Grizzlies and the sudden snuffing of their quickening joy that we should feel protective of, even though they will bounce back the fastest in whatever form this season or the next will manifest as. They are a young team in collective age as much as their history, a legacy impatient to unfurl full tilt, and this year will prove another temper to their resiliency, a blip for a group already putting mile after breathless and joyful mile behind them.