Sometimes the best new R&B can be hard to find, but there are plenty of great rhythm-and-blues tunes to get into if you have the time to sift through the hundreds of newly released songs every week. So that R&B heads can focus on listening to what they love in its true form, we’ll be offering a digest of the best new R&B songs that fans of the genre should hear every Friday.
Since the last update of this weekly R&B column, we’ve received plenty of music and news from the genre’s artists.
Here are the new releases you need to have your eye on this week:
Jorja Smith — “Loving You / Don’t Let Me Go”
Jorja Smith continues her fairly active 2024 year with the release of two new singles — “Loving You” and “Don’t Let Me Go.” The former features Maverick Sabre for a duet about unconditional love despite the faults of a partner. On the flip side, “Don’t Let Me Go” is a somber record meant to remind a lover of the unique compatibility that exists in their relationship.
Eric Bellinger — “Feelings Never Die”
Eric Bellinger released his ninth album The Rebirth 3: The Party & The Bedroom earlier this year, but the talented singer-songwriter isn’t clocking out of 2024 just yet. He’s back with “Feelings Never Die,” a lively dance number that proclaims the everlasting presence of love even when a relationship dies. It’s the second single from his upcoming It’ll All Make Sense Later album, out November 22.
Mario — “Glad You Came”
Next month, legendary R&B singer Mario will release his sixth album Glad You Came, and ahead of its arrival he shares the album’s title track. “Glad You Came” is driven by the satisfaction of a love’s arrival after yearning for their presence. Glad You Came arrives on December 13.
Phabo — “5000 Degrees” Feat. Josef Lamercier
Phabo is heating things up for his latest single with Josef Lamercier. The duo teams up for “5000 Degrees” which is built on the burning desire that exists between two lovers who are drawn to each other, no matter how hard they may try to resist. “‘5000 Degrees’ paints a picture of both angst and anticipation while out partying with your love interest,” Phabo said in a press release. “No matter where you are in the hemisphere, things have the propensity to get hot and heavy when your muse is setting the tone.”
Dee Gatti — “Proper”
Dee Gatti has had a very active 2024 year, and it continues with “Proper.” The new single is a seductive and sultry tune that Gatti uses to convince a love for another moment of intimacy, one that she promises to make worthwhile. The track arrives with confirmation that Gatti will release a new EP soon.
JayO — WhosDat
Rising British R&B singer steps into the spotlight with his debut project WhosDat. The new effort features seven and guest appearances from Popcaan and Odeal for a body of work that is both sweet and tantalizing thanks to injections of afrobeats and dancehall influences.
Breez Kennedy recently wrapped up a gig as the opening act for Bryson Tiller on his The Legacy Tour and now he’s back with a treat for fans. “Love Language” arrive as uptempo, 2000s R&B-influenced record aimed at a lover Kennedy just wants to figure out. Inquires about her love language are backed with his pleas for her not to “break me down” and bring their relationship to an end.
Byron Juane — A Night About You
North Carolina singer Byron Juane is back with his first project since 2022’s A Little Crazy. His newest effort, A Night About You, delivers nine songs aimed at giving love to the ladies as he speaks of his most endearing moments in love. “Ladies, I see you, I hear you, and I stand with you,” he said in an Instagram post about the project before adding, “let this album be a reminder of your worth and the truth that you are always loved and cherished, no matter the circumstances.”
Oklahoma singer Hylan Starr is back with the deluxe edition of Room To Grown project, released earlier this year. The deluxe adds four new songs and a feature from Solo Lucci to the project that Starr said “is gonna help yall get to know me as a person and why I got room to grow.”
Highlights: “Foreva Rich” Feat. Solo Lucci & “Blessings”
Aaron Page — “Lord Knows”
Connecticut-bred and Houston-based singer Aaron Page has flooded the music world with music this year and he continues with his latest drop “Lord Knows.” The slow-burning record is a passionate message to a love interest as Page paints a picture of what their future could look like if she gives him a chance as they both walk out of the club where they first met.
Myles Lloyd — “Drive Me Crazy”
Montreal singer Myles Lloyd is just a month removed from his What More Can I Say project, but he’s back on the scene with new music for his growing audience. “Drive Me Crazy” arrives as a freeing anthem as Lloyd walks away from a lover who took too long to say they were ready for a relationship. Lloyd closes the chapter with no regrets and sets out to look for better.
Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.
This week saw Dua Lipa squeeze some more radical optimism out of 2024 and a host of Latin stars unite on a single track. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.
Karol G, Feid, DFZM — “+57” Feat. Ovy On The Drums, J Balvin, Maluma, Ryan Castro, and Blessd
Colombia has spawned a bunch of new musical favorites in recent years, and just about all of them link up on the star-studded new song, “+57“: On the track are Karol G, Feid, DFZM, Ovy On The Drums, J Balvin, Maluma, Ryan Castro, and Blessd.
Cordae and Joey Badass just came through with their first-ever collab, “Syrup Sandwiches.” Uproxx’s Aaron Williams notes the song “is exactly what you’d expect of them: lyrically focused, packed to the gills with double entendre, and evocative of a bygone era in rap when beats pulled heavier focus from jazz and funk than drum machine 808s.”
Ab-Soul — “9 Mile”
After 2022’s Herbert, Ab-Soul is back with his latest album, Soul Burger. He called on some friends to help out with this one, including Vince Staples, Doechii, JID, and Ty Dolla Sign.
BadBadNotGood — “Poeira Cósmica” Feat. Tim Bernardes
BadBadNotGood and São Paulo’s Tim Bernardes have apparently built a rapport after Bernardes opened for the band in 2019, at their first show in Brazil: Last week, they linked up on “Poeira Cósmica,” a gorgeous new collab.
Mason unveiled his latest album, 9, earlier this year, and now he has shared his first new song since then. The track is “Hoodrat” and it’s both ethereal and hard-hitting, with its vocally-driven instrumental and Mason’s upbeat lyrical rhythm.
Jorja Smith — “Loving You”
Sometimes it takes a while for something to reach its potential. Take “Loving You,” one of the new songs Jorja Smith dropped last week: She revealed the track is a decade old, but she “rediscovered and revived” it in a recent session, getting it to a state fit for release now.
Ekkstacy — “Seventeen”
Ekkstacy began the year by dropping a self-titled album in January. Now, he’s ending it (maybe, anyway) with more new music. He released “Seventeen” last week and it starts with a delicate guitar-and-vocal combo before blooming into something more raucous and fleshed out.
Jelly Roll landed his first No. 1 album earlier this year with Beautifully Broken. As Stereogum notes, it was apparently a close race between Jelly Roll and Charli XCX’sBrat. Ultimately, Brat ended up at No. 3 that week, behind Rod Wave’s Last Lap.
That apparently wasn’t for a lack of trying from Charli’s camp, though: Jelly Roll appeared on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show recently, and while he didn’t mention Charli directly, he seemed to accuse her team of attempting to rig sales numbers of get Brat to No. 1. He said:
“I won’t say the artist’s name because I know that a lot of artists are disconnected from what’s happening in the business. Because I became as an independent artist the same way that y’all became as an independent media show, we’re a little more hands-on with what’s happening behind the scenes. So I’m kinda keeping up with stuff, and my manager just sits me down. He goes, ‘Look man, I didn’t want you to get in a situation where you was aware what was happening when you start getting in these conversations for No. 1 albums because it’s just real dirty business, like old-school dirty business.’
And there was an artist where Hits Double Daily [sic] projected that they wasn’t even gonna be within 50 [or] 60,000 albums of me and Rod Wave. And then Thursday night, before the Friday count ends, 40,000 albums [snaps] — third-party aggregated site has that. And you’re looking and you’re just like, ‘Yo, that’s just… slimy.’ Now Luminate, who is in charge of counting record sales, rejected these sales, which is how I ended up with the No. 1 album, so that’s the truth.
And here’s the real truth, while we’re doing inside baseball: As far as I’m concerned, I wanna congratulate Rod Wave on having the No. 1 album because he was streamed more than me and the other two artists almost combined in consumption that first week. But we sold more records because we still got a traditional fan base that’ll go to Walmart, Target, you know what I mean? I see so much in it that it made me look at it different. It bummed me out a little bit.”
There is no team that has more celebrities attend their games than the Lakers (the Knicks being a close second), as the courtside seats at L.A. games often go a few rows deep with stars from the world of entertainment. There are the regulars like Jack Nicholson and Denzel Washington, but on any given night you might find an actor from your favorite TV show or movie watching the Lakers play.
That happened to Toronto wing RJ Barrett on Sunday night as the Raptors made their annual trek to Los Angeles. After finishing through contact for an and-1, Barrett turned to the crowd in the corner to celebrate only to find himself face-to-face with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, best known for playing Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones. Barrett realized this mid-celebration and did a literal double take, turned back to Coster-Waldau, pointed, and blurted out “Game of Thrones!” at him before turning around and walking to the free throw line.
It’s a very funny thing to happen in the middle of an NBA game, but also, that’s exactly how I would react if I turned around and was suddenly face-to-face with the guy that played Jaime Lannister. I feel like this is far from the first time someone has pointed at Coster-Waldau and just yelled “Game of Thrones!” at him, as that is by far the role he’s best known for.
As of this writing, Songs Of A Lost World isn’t just the most critically acclaimed Cure album of all time. It’s the most critically acclaimed Cure album by such an insurmountable margin that you’d think it’s the only critically acclaimed Cure album. According to Metacritic, it’s second only to Brat in 2024. Conversely, though Apple Music recently named Disintegration, the band’s consensus masterpiece, one of the 100 best albums ever made, it clocked in at No. 39 in the 1989 Pazz & Jop poll, right behind Don Henley and Aerosmith’s Pump.
And so a more honest or accurate survey of The Cure’s greatness might focus on singles or deep cuts or their many compilations instead; I won’t argue with anyone who discovered The Cure from Staring At The Sea and still views their first Greatest Hits as a definitive work. Just look at that tracklist! Is there anything that isn’t a 10/10? Meanwhile, Rolling Stone once claimed that “Cure albums tend to leak filler like an attic spilling insulation,” and that was 24 years ago, meaning that they were probably including The Head On The Door; Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; and/or Disintegration in that assessment. And while All Music Guide tends to be very generous with legacy bands, they’ve deemed not a single Cure LP worthy of a five-star designation.
Yet, the imperfect nature of The Cure’s albums tends to make listmaking a more exciting proposition than one for a band with readily understood hierarchies — from start to finish, nearly all of them feature canonical pop songs and hidden gems, batsh*t experiments, and throwaways that even Robert Smith has forgotten. They’ve existed in flux at nearly every point in their 45 years, as Robert Smith has threatened to break up The Cure, or at the very least, replace half of the band. For every album we’ve actually heard since Disintegration, Smith has promised at least three times as many. People can and will shape their entire personality around the sonic character of one Cure album and hone that personality around disliking the other ones. If you’re that type of person, you’ll probably either love or loathe my unscientific ranking, but in true Cure fan fashion, you’ll feel it deeply.
14. 4:13 Dream (2008)
Squint and the outline of a solid, if not spectacular, Cure album emerges, the kind they could’ve reliably dropped every four years or so since 2008 instead of following Robert Smith’s “promise three albums, deliver none” plan. Opener “Underneath The Stars” refurbishes “Plainsong” with glistening digital reverb and ticky-tack drum machines, “Sirensong” adds “country shuffle” to the arsenal, while singles “Freakshow” and “Sleep When I’m Dead” did their job of jazzing up 2008 setlists before going the way of “The End Of The World” and “Maybe Someday” into early retirement. Or, squint a little harder and 4:13 Dream is the work of an AI bot trained entirely on Join The Dots. Having no particular agenda aside from “hey, here’s a Cure album” (or, compressing the living sh*t out of 25 guitar tracks on each song), 4:13 Dream begs the question, “Who really wants solid, if not spectacular, from the Cure anyways?” Something’s gotta occupy this spot, but hey, at least it’s the only Cure album where Robert Smith spent the press cycle talking about how much he enjoyed making it.
13. The Cure (2004)
In the fall of 2004, The Cure joined Metallica, Aerosmith, and Janet Jackson as the fourth and final honoree of the short-lived mtv:ICON multimedia extravaganza. It’s literally a lifetime achievement award, but unlike their three predecessors, The Cure were also riding a wave of contemporary influence on vast swaths of radio rock that superficially sounded nothing like them. To wit, they were paid tribute by Blink-182 (a year removed from proving their newfound art-rock ambitions with a Robert Smith cameo on “All Of This”), Deftones, AFI, and… uh, Razorlight. If there ever was a time to reestablish themselves as a vital band, it was on The Cure.
At first glance, they understood the assignment by hiring Ross Robinson, not just the producer behind Korn, Iowa, and Relationship Of Command, but also someone notorious for pushing bands to the brink of madness in the studio; this was obviously not a deterrent for a guy like Robert Smith, who threatens to break up the Cure after basically every album. Yet, not even the most optimistic of Korn or Cure fans could imagine a more stunning start of their nü era as “Lost,” an impossibly tense sludgefeast where Smith sings like he’s trying to break out of a straitjacket. If not the best song they’ve made in the 21st century, it’s easily the most compelling Smith vocal performance. Perhaps it was too much to ask of an entire album in that mode, though “Labyrinth” does make a game attempt at sustaining the mood. Instead… we got a fairly straightforward collection of forgettable variations on “pop Cure” (“The End Of The World,” “I Don’t Know What’s Going On”) and “moody Cure” (“alt.end,” “The Promise”), tied to 2004 not just by its production, but “Us Or Them,” an anti-War On Terror PSA that’s a first-ballot candidate for the worst song to ever appear on a Cure album.
12. Wild Mood Swings (1996)
We’ve had enough laughs at this album’s expense over the past 28 years, so let’s ask ourselves: how do we salvage Wild Mood Swings? One can argue it was doomed by the salsafied lead single “The 13th,” a giddy genre experiment in the lineage of curios like “The Lovecats” or “The Caterpillar” that had no chance to thrive in the post-grunge doldrums of 1996 alt-rock radio. Then again, I’d take it any day over “Mint Car,” which reeked of damage control, or, “what if Robert Smith had to write a ‘happy’ Cure song in ten minutes?” Maybe we cut out a couple tracks at the end that reinforce its victimhood of the typical mid-’90s, CD-stuffing bloat (another detail tying it to its era: guitarist Porl Thompson left to join Page & Plant). Or, maybe just change the album title, which does little to contradict the general consensus that The Cure were verging on self-parody.
Or, since we’re working purely in hypotheticals, imagine an alternate reality where Wild Mood Swings is the exact thing a collection of Cure songs called “Wild Mood Swings” should really be — a hodgepodge of B-sides and alternate takes meant for the real heads, who could rep for “Strange Attraction” and the monolithic angst of “Want,” and the Bowie fanfic of “Club America” as loose gems, rather than flickers of inspiration snuffed out by a half hour of autopilot Cure. Nothing will convince me that Wild Mood Swings is secretly one of the Cure’s better albums, but I’ll settle for “The Top, only 50 percent less weird and 20 minutes longer.”
11. Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
“Boys Don’t Cry,” “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” “Killing An Arab” — all incredible songs and the working definition of “early Cure” for most casual fans. Well, maybe the American ones. As far as this list is concerned, these songs don’t exist. None appear on Three Imaginary Boys, the Cure’s proper debut, released in the UK in 1979. But in their place, you do get a profoundly inessential cover of “Foxy Lady” and deeper-than-deep cuts like “Meat Hook” that provide a more accurate view of what The Cure were in the late ’70s: a spiky, funky post-punk band along the lines of Wire and Gang Of Four, albeit one that actually expressed interest in romance. For the Cure-curious, it’s easily the most shocking album on the list, as everything else that comes after at least has some preview of a band that closed the 1980s as one of the most popular and influential in the world. But even if Three Imaginary Boys feels like an artistic cul-de-sac, it proves that the Cure needed to reinvent themselves a year later because they’d already arrived fully formed.
10. Seventeen Seconds (1980)
To the degree you can sorta feel for a bassist who’s played in at least three very successful bands, you gotta feel for Michael Dempsey. He’s responsible for the lead vocals on the “Foxy Lady” cover and that was the last time Robert Smith let anyone other than himself do that on a Cure song. And while he’s had a pretty good run as a member of The Associates and Roxy Music, he’s probably best known as the collateral damage necessary for The Cure to eventually become a cultural phenomenon. Explaining his ouster prior to Seventeen Seconds, Smith quipped, “[Dempsey] wanted us to be XTC part 2 and — if anything — I wanted us to be [Siouxsie And] The Banshees part 2.”
If anything, Seventeen Seconds might be something closer to Closer — similar to Joy Division’s second and final album, the Cure traded punchy hooks for empty space, conjuring a sense of creeping, inevitable dread rather than missed connections. Though home to a few remarkable singles (“A Forest,” “Play For Today”), Seventeen Seconds is more defined by everything that distinguishes it from Three Imaginary Boys: the unfinished interludes, the eerie instrumentals, the most quiet synthesizer leads ever recorded. Though it lacks the coherence of its visionary successor, Seventeen Seconds still shines as The Cure’s most risky of their many reinventions.
9. Pornography (1982)
Pornography is the cause celebre of the Cure’s fanatical wing, as much for the record itself as what it represents: “dark mode” Cure as an existential reality, rather than an aesthetic choice, the product of a time when Robert Smith wished he was dead, but not as much as he wished the same for his bandmates. If you’re considering Pornography for your top five, it’s almost certainly going to be No. 1. But, while I can only speculate the impact of hearing Pornography in the year that gave us Thriller, Rio, and Toto IV, its reputation as a historically alienating piece of antagonistic art is vastly overstated — “IT DOESN’T MATTER IF WE ALL DIE” is just as fun to sing as anything from “Just Like Heaven,” while “The Hanging Garden” and “The Figurehead” made Smith’s drug-induced paranoia sound like a welcome rather than a warning; though a scathing two-star Rolling Stone review backhandedly praised the Cure as “supremely gifted noisemakers,” it’s the atmospheric deep cuts that fail them here, proof that Robert Smith couldn’t not be a pop star even if he tried. And did they ever try on Pornography.
8. The Top (1984)
I’m sure my 16-year-old self would’ve traded anything to have the near entirety of recorded music available for immediate streaming, for about half the price he paid for Sponge’s Wax Ecstatic. At the same time, I envy how he had to treat his “Boss phase” or “Led Zeppelin phase” or a “Cure phase” like a scavenger hunt, cobbling together a discography in non-sequential order from Columbia House, $9.99 sale racks, or used CD stores. I believe this process enamored me to the small, weird outliers that I was legitimately surprised to see at the local Disc-Go-Round — Around The World In A Day, Tunnel Of Love (this was prior to its contemporary reappraisal), Presence, The Soft Parade… and The Top is very much a small, weird record. Even if The Cure were presumably a very unpleasant band to be around in those days, I’d love to bear witness to the studio sessions where Smith insisted that the supremely bugged out likes of “Bananafishbones” and “Piggy In The Mirror” made the cut.
Though time tends to be kind to most Cure albums, even in retrospect, The Top has been described as “a transitional record of forgettable songs,” “an album obviously recorded under stress, drink, and drugs,” and “the nadir of their catalog.” The more generous assessments land on “a batsh*t, bugf*ck freakout,” certainly warranted since the proto-metal of “Shake Dog Shake” and “Give Me It” are even more frightening than anything on Pornography. And yet, “The Caterpillar” and “Dressing Up” proved every bit as alluring and sensual as the synth-pop experiments of Japanese Whispers. No album from the Cure’s imperial phase is subject to lower expectations than The Top, and none gives a better return on investment — especially if it cost you just $5 at the local Disc-Go-Round.
7. Bloodflowers (2000)
All lists like these are subjective and some choices are more subjective than others. For example, my “Cure phase” lasted from about 1997 to 1998, which makes Bloodflowers the first new album I could experience without any received wisdom or preconceptions about its place in the canon. And I loved the thing, as its cushy production, dour mood, and sluggish tempos fit the lifestyle I was experiencing at the time: being a drunk, sad college student. In retrospect, it’s the beginning of The Cure as fan service, with Robert Smith puffing up its hype by describing Bloodflowers as the completion of a trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration. What this really meant is “all the songs are very long,” including “Watching Me Fall,” still the longest Cure song ever at 11-plus minutes. Yet even without the Keystone Ice-tinted glasses of youth, Bloodflowers has its moments — “Maybe Someday” is the rare dark Cure single of the 21st century and a successful one at that, while the bonkers keyboard riff of “39” is their most inspired sonic wrinkle in that same time. Based on the rest of their 2000s output, I was inclined to think that “39” would be the last time Smith truly wrote from the heart, but the rapturous reception of the similarly structured Songs Of A Lost World only goes to show what they left on the table.
6. Songs Of A Lost World (2024)
I’ll just admit it — as of October 31, I wasn’t buying the hype. The new songs held their own against the classics during the Cure’s massive 2023 amphitheater run, but they’d been playing them for years by that point and felt overly reliant on the band’s favorite cheat codes: drawn-out intros, stately tempos, and gleaming synth washes, all while shuffling the deck of their favorite Robert Smith-isms about birds, skies, tears, rain, and “you/I/she said.” When “Alone” announced that Songs Of A Lost World was indeed real and actually coming very soon, it had the shape and feel of a late-career peak… yet, in place of the garish overproduction of The Cure and 4:13 Dream, the instruments on “Alone” sounded oddly plastic and disconnected from each other; it wasn’t a throwback to 1989 so much as 2021, a time when rock bands were regularly recording their albums remotely. I was starting to get the sense that critics were reviewing the album they wanted, not the one they actually got. “If you’re arguing that it’s the Cure’s best since Disintegration, you need to show your work,” Tom Breihan argued in what is still the most even-handed review I’ve seen to this point, and even as someone who loved Bloodflowers, I got the sense that most critics just lacked the vocabulary to reckon with the first better-than-good new Cure album they’ve encountered in their adult lives.
By the end of November 1, I listened to Songs Of A Lost World three consecutive times and couldn’t wait to do the same the next day. I have trouble listening to much else at the moment. I’m uncomfortable suggesting that Robert Smith facing the loss of his father, mother, and older brother makes Songs Of A Lost World feel more emotionally invested and urgent than the similarly hued Bloodflowers, or projecting an unintended political resonance of it dropping four days before an election that has cast a Pornography-like pall over everyone reading this. As much as the Cure have recaptured the sound of their 1980s work, they’ve reanimated the spirit, a desire to give each album a distinct mood that blots out all others in the world. This isn’t something to easily be folded into your day in six-to-eight minute increments; it’s a refuge from the world at large, not a reflection of it, an album that doesn’t teach us to understand death and loss, but to feel it even when the real thing is remote. Perhaps this is all recency bias and Songs Of A Lost World will soon settle into “somewhere in the top half of Cure albums.” Then again, I figured that I’d grow out of the Cure albums that soundtracked my teens and here we are.
5. Faith (1981)
There is none more gray — the cover art, the muted production, a song literally called “All Cats Are Grey.” Indeed, Faith is the literal midpoint between the icy whites of Seventeen Seconds and Pornography‘s pitch black, putting it in a curious spot in a catalog often celebrated for its extremes. But I suppose “their most subtle album” is an extreme of its own and an especially suitable one for an album defined by Robert Smith’s struggles with spiritual ambivalence (and also the only one where critics roundly praised the lyrics). The connoisseur’s choice, an album that doesn’t astound like their bigger and bleaker ones, but still has mysteries to reveal over 40 years later.
4. The Head On The Door (1985)
Perhaps ironically, the Cure’s “pop” albums are the ones that are messy and indulgent, whereas the “brooding” ones are lauded as “focused.” The Head On The Door is the exception that proves this rule, the only conceivable bridge between the preceding years’ drinking, drugging, and dour entropy and the stadium status that awaits. Not that it lacked an element of odd curiosities — see the flamenco and Japanese flourishes of “The Blood” and “Kyoto Song,” the lopsided rhythm of “Six Different Ways,” the onomatopoeic solo of “The Baby Scrams.” But otherwise, there’s “Close To Me,” “A Night Like This,” “Push,” and “In Between Days,” songs composed with such efficiency and intention, it’s impossible to believe that Robert Smith was only one year removed from the psychosis that birthed The Top. There are Cure albums that are more acclaimed, more beloved and even more popular, yet this is the only one that could be confused for a singles collection.
3. Wish (1992)
Whenever rave reviews of Songs Of A Lost World want to show they mean business, they’ll typically include something along the lines of, “their best album since Wish.” We’re talking about one of the most influential and beloved active bands of the past half century putting out their best work in over 30 years. This is not like Rolling Stone repeating the same “their best since Achtung Baby/Automatic For The People” trope every time U2 or R.E.M. made a new record after 1991. And yet, read it more closely, and it’s not as raving of a rave as it initially appears: their best album since Wish doesn’t translate into it being necessarily better than Wish. Setting the bar at Bloodflowers just doesn’t have the same impact, does it?
Point being that Wish has served as the consensus pick for the Cure’s last truly great album, albeit one that rarely is placed on the same echelon as their ’80s work. Frankly, I can’t understand why — yes, Robert Smith has tried to distance himself from “Friday I’m In Love,” and it’s gained the reputation as a Cure song for people who don’t really like The Cure, but I find that it’s aged extremely well, especially as every attempt at a “pop” song since then has been a watered-down version of “Just Like Heaven.” Meanwhile, songs as distinct as the dreamlike “High” and the roiling “From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea” suggest the Cure were both a precursor and participant within Madchester, and though Wish is often cast as a more frivolous follow-up to Disintegration, “Open” and “A Letter To Elise” are every bit as grandiose as anything on its more esteemed predecessor.
2. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
There’s a good argument to be made that Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is the Cure’s best album and an irrefutable argument that it’s the best place to start. With 18 songs and nearly as many identities, Kiss Me provides a treasure map for the novice — those taken by the raging excess of “The Kiss” and “Torture” should head directly to Pornography, “Just Like Heaven” and “Why Can’t I Be You?” solidifies their reputation as a definitive ’80s pop band for shut-ins, “Hot Hot Hot!!!” and “The Perfect Girl” hint at the more playful, dance-inflected pop they’d make in the ’90s, whereas the exotic interludes of “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” and “The Snakepit.” Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me belongs in the rarefied echelon of London Calling; Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness; Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; The White Album; Life After Death; Songs In The Key Of Life — legacy artists making double-LPs at the peak of their powers that are somehow so sprawling and consistently excellent that even the B-sides could’ve been a classic in their own right.
1. Disintegration (1989)
To the surprise of no one, I share the following opinion of my Indiecast cohost Steven Hyden: The Cure was meant to be listened to on CD. There’s a musicological argument, that their commercial peak overlaps almost exactly with that of the compact disc, and that those shiny silver discs are best suited for their the proudly uncanny warmth that suffuses their most beloved work — this is a band that could easily afford real horns and strings but always seemed to prefer the synth versions. Of course, I’m probably just biased because for years, I stared at those garish covers through a cracked jewel cover and fast-forwarded through the skips on “Wendy Time” that afflicted my scratched copy of Wish.
Now, I imagine that there will be an endlessly renewable resource of teenagers who will hear Disintegration for the first time on the sh*ttiest earbuds while absentmindedly scrolling through TikTok and have their minds completely blown all the same. I will also argue that they should spend the $50 or so it would cost to buy a used copy of Disintegration and a Discman for a superior sonic experience. If not, I’ll do them a favor and reprint a part of the liner notes and consider it essential work because it will never, ever appear on any streaming service: “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO PLAY LOUD SO TURN IT UP.” I don’t recall seeing that in any other Cure album insert.
Following Robert Smith’s advice does help bring out the synth overdubs and tangled guitar harmonies that get muddied at lower volumes. That’s not really what he was getting at. Disintegration is not meant for casual listening. It is not an album that grows on you. Nor is it merely a Wall Of Sound. It sucks you in, draws a thick border around itself, and leaves you incapable of considering anything outside of it.
If this all sounds like rockist rationale, to elevate The Album over the singles that made The Cure multi-generational icons, that is also by design. As he approached his 30th birthday, Robert Smith had become a pop star and pop-goth lookbook and had also recently gotten married…and yet, he found himself aimless, depressed, and in constant conflict with his bandmates, wondering what he really had to show for it all. Equally inspired by LSD and his premature midlife crisis, Smith aspired to create the irrefutable masterpiece that was missing from his catalog, the kind that he believed most artists at his level had already achieved by 25.
But is Disintegration the monolithic opus that Smith thought he was making? Yes, it’s 72 minutes long and sonically unified in a way that previous high watermarks Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and The Head On The Door conscientiously avoid. And yet, Disintegration doesn’t rank this high because it’s the most coherent or the darkest or serious or even the longest The Cure album. It doesn’t even come down to “it has the best songs” or “it has their best production,” though that’s a part of it. Rather, it’s how all of it sounds romantic in the truest sense of the word, regardless of how much emotional territory it covers. The diversity in mood is actually the most underrated aspect of Disintegration — there’s the earnest devotion of “Lovesong” and the thrill of the new on “Fascination Street,” the playful acid trip of “Lullaby” and the abject despair of the title track, “Prayers For Rain” and the slow-motion sunrise of “Plainsong,” all of it suffused with such a deep longing and beauty and belief that you have no choice to turn all the way the f*ck up and submit.
Before kicking off the Liv Morgan World Tour, and before becoming the first Women’s Crown Jewel Champion, the current Women’s World Champion sat at home nursing a dislocated shoulder. As Liv Morgan recovered for six months throughout 2023, she says she had a moment of clarity.
Over the first decade of her career, she’d allowed her ring work to speak for itself. During her time away, Morgan took a step back and felt like she had lacked a true voice or character. As she plotted her return to the ring, she created the Liv Morgan Revenge Tour built around the realities of her injury, while envisioning a path back to the top of the WWE mountain.
“The Liv Morgan Revenge Tour,” Morgan tells Uproxx Sports, “gave me such a purpose.”
Some of the best stories in professional wrestling have been at least somewhat based in reality, and the way Morgan was injured gave her a motive, direction, and something so personal and true, that it allowed her for the first time in her career to really sink her teeth into a story.
“Rhea (Ripley) really did dislocate my shoulder,” Morgan says. “I really sat home for six months watching her ascend to the top of the division. And so it was all really personal to me, and I used all that to come back and do exactly to her what she did to me. But I did that and more.”
While she’s navigated trying to find her character throughout a decade in WWE, elements of who Morgan is as a person have helped her continue to chip away at this dream. Her drive, passion, wanting to learn as much as she can, and desire to give herself an opportunity to see what she could achieve has brought her this far.
“(My time away) just gave me the time and space that I needed to really settle into my own, which brought out the best version of Liv Morgan than we’ve seen thus far,” Morgan says.
The last seven months have been a whirlwind for Morgan. She kicked off the Raw after WrestleMania 40 with a beatdown of Ripley that would alter the trajectory of her career. A legitimate shoulder injury suffered in the melee forced Ripley to relinquish the title and led to Morgan beating Becky Lynch for the belt. That win kickstarted the pivotal run of her career, with new twists and turns added by the month.
“I like to believe that everything happens for a reason. Even if you don’t know the reason, I know that’s so cliche, but I really live my life by that. And so even when things happen that I feel are bizarre or even unfortunate things, I always tend to think that on the other side of it, it is going to be for a greater purpose,” Morgan says.
“There’s so much beauty in the madness and it’s cool to be able to pivot and adjust when things aren’t going the way we anticipated it, because we took something that was supposed to be great and we made it even greater. And so I just think that the stars are aligned and everything is happening exactly as it should.”
Morgan has embraced the “crazy, messy love triangle” that’s followed her dynamic with Dominic Mysterio and Ripley, “whether they love to hate us or hate to love us.” Mysterio switched allegiances, Morgan joined the Judgement Day while Ripley was ousted, Raquel Rodriguez returned to join her side, and Ripley recently suffered another injury that will sideline her for the foreseeable future.
Paired alongside Mysterio and thus far able to hold off Ripley, Morgan isn’t just matching the status quo for a world champion — she’s literally doing things that haven’t been done before.
The latest in her evolution from charting a Revenge Tour to creating a Liv Morgan World Tour came with a championship-worthy diamond ring, after claiming the first-ever Women’s Crown Jewel Championship in a win over Nia Jax last week.
“It means so much to me on so many different levels,” Morgan continues. “We’ve made history in Saudi Arabia. We had the very first women’s title match for the Women’s Crown Jewel Championship. And that is so much progress. I feel like since I’ve started in WWE, all I’ve wanted to do is really carve my own path and see how great I could become. And the fact that I’ve made history and the first and only Women’s Crown Jewel Champion, I am just so proud and so honored. And I just hope that I do it justice.”
The opportunities are endless for where Morgan goes from here. She’s open to the idea of a second Evolution all-women’s wrestling show, with a loaded roster across Raw, Smackdown, and NXT.
“I don’t think we need our own show to be more prestigious,” Morgan says. “I think we are prestigious and I think people tune in specifically for the women’s segments and for women’s wrestling. But to give the fans what they want is why I would love to have another all women’s show in Evolution part 2.”
A WrestleMania main event is something that’s eluded Morgan across her career, but calls it the pinnacle of wrestling in WWE and is without a doubt an accomplishment she’d love to check off her bucket list.
“You can’t get any bigger, higher, better, more prestigious than main eventing WrestleMania,” Morgan says. “I spend a lot of my life dreaming and hoping and wishing. And I’ve been fortunate and lucky and blessed enough to have a lot of those things come true. So yes, main eventing WrestleMania is definitely on my list. With whom, I don’t know what that looks like or what it is but I hope that we can find out together.”
Morgan can accomplish just about anything because at this very moment she genuinely has the faith and belief that she can. As she continues to build upon her second world title run, the Liv Morgan we see onscreen every week couldn’t be any more different than the one that was Smackdown Champion two years ago.
“It’s just a different Liv Morgan. The Liv Morgan that won the SmackDown Championship from Ronda Rousey, that girl she was just happy to be there. She maybe didn’t even see herself or believe in herself as a champion yet. She was a girl with just a pipe dream, cash in her briefcase at the right moment in the right time,” Morgan says.
“This Liv Morgan is the most confident version of herself so far. This Liv Morgan knows her worth. This Liv Morgan knows she’s the greatest women’s champion of all time. This Liv Morgan knows she’s untouchable. This Liv Morgan knows she has the most dominant faction in all of WWE by her side. That’s the difference.”
A new era of Lil Nas X is upon us. In October, he declared he’d be dropping new music in November, and now he’s getting more specific.
Yesterday (November 10), he teased “Dreamboy” (the title of an album, perhaps?) saying that “phase 1” begins on November 11. This came after he announced a new song called “Light Again” would be released this week.
Nas shared a demo version of “Light Again” back in March and said at the time, “I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to have this sh*t up, or I don’t know what my CEO thinks right now, or whatever. […] Bro, these last couple years have been crazy, ’cause I’ve made so much music and I just want to release music. I just want to release music, but expectations are just like… insane. Like, I can’t even have fun. I just want to f*ckin’ have fun with this sh*t. I don’t even give a f*ck about all the other sh*t. Of course I want to, like, be No. 1 all the time, I want every song to go up, and I want you to go crazy. But it’s like, at the same time, I want to f*ckin’ have fun. I want to go and live life, I just want to make music. I don’t want to have to do crazy sh*t all the time. I want to make music, I want to f*ckin’ have fun, I want to live.”
In general, the feeling about paparazzi is that as a famous person, they’re just a group of people who have to deal with, an annoyance, just part of the lifestyle. People don’t often have their backs, but Taylor Swift did this weekend.
A video shows Swift in the back halls of Arrowhead Stadium, to watch Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Denver Broncos. In the clip, Swift is being driven in a golf cart, and as she gets up, a security guard sternly tells gathered paparazzi, “Guys, stay back, stay back.” Swift then prompts the guard to treat the paps with more kindness, saying, “Stay back, please.”
Speaking of Swift and Kelce, the pair made it onto a recent episode of Jeopardy!: The clue read, “Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? is hosted by this man who’s maybe more famous as a BF than as a 3-time Super Bowl champ,” and a contestant correctly responded with Kelce.
In other Swift-related news, Tyler The Creator clapped back at some of her fans who tried to “cancel” him, writing, “”I got Swifties all mad at me with their racist ass,” he said. “Bringing up old lyrics, b*tch, go listen to ‘Tron Cat,’ I don’t give a f*ck. They gonna bring out the old me.”
The Oklahoma City Thunder entered Sunday tied with the Suns for the top spot in the Western Conference, and figured to face a stiff test with the red-hot Golden State Warriors in town. OKC got off to a strong start, taking a 33-26 lead after the first quarter, but there was some considerable concern about their star big man as Chet Holmgren had to be helped off the floor and into the locker room after landing hard on his right hip after contesting an Andrew Wiggins layup attempt at the rim (watch here).
Holmgren slams down onto the hardwood and immediately grabbed at his right hip in pain. He was ultimately helped off the floor and into the tunnel without putting any weight on his right leg by a pair of Thunder staffers. Holmgren has gotten off to a tremendous start to his sophomore campaign, averaging 18.2 points, 9.2 rebounds, and 2.9 blocks per game coming into Sunday’s contest, asserting himself as a serious threat for DPOY with his work protecting the rim for the league’s best defense so far.
The Thunder will hope Holmgren’s injury was just a painful fall and not something more serious that could lead to an extended absence, as they are already incredibly thin at the center position with Isaiah Hartenstein still out with a fractured hand.
UPDATE: Holmgren was ruled out for the game with what the Thunder officially called a right hip injury.
The Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics have had two very different starts to the season, as the defending champs have picked up where they left off with another strong beginning to their repeat bid, while the Bucks have been one of the NBA’s worst teams despite having a healthy Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It has not been the kind of start Milwaukee envisioned, and they were hoping to kickstart a turnaround on Sunday when they played host to the Celtics with a chance to alleviate some of the panic about the team’s start by beating one of the league’s best. As they’ve done on a few occasions this season, the Bucks came out hot, scoring 40 in the first quarter to take a double-digit lead, but couldn’t maintain that offensive output, scoring just 38 in the entire second half to see the Celtics pull ahead and pull away for a 113-107 win.
During the game, Giannis and Jaylen Brown had an interesting exchange, as Antetokounmpo elbowed Brown in the head on a post move and then hit Brown with a fake handshake as they went back down the court, which Brown didn’t seem to appreciate.
After the game, Brown gave some brief, but unfiltered thoughts on the exchange. “Giannis is a child,” Brown dead-panned. “I’m just focused on helping my team get a win, and that’s what we did tonight.”
Giannis certainly wasn’t the chief culprit for the Bucks struggles on Sunday, as he had 43 points and 13 rebounds, but this kind of silly exchange doesn’t quite land as well with fans when the team is falling to 2-8 on the season, with the only team worse than them in the East being the Embiid-less Sixers.
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