GoneTrending

Drake continues his redemption tour with another new feature verse, this time on Chino Pacas and Fuerza Regida‘s new single, “Modo Capone.” The title is Spanish for “Capone Mode” and, as he did with Bad Bunny on 2018’s “Mia,” Drake once again sings in Spanish here. Drake’s known for embracing regional and underground musical movements, so it was probably only a matter of time until he delved into música Mexicana. As it turns out, he fits into the style about as well as he does any other — it helps that his presence here is limited to a single verse, while 18-year-old Chino Pacas and Fuerza Regida’s Jesús Ortíz Paz handle most of the vocals until Drake returns for late-song tag.

Música Mexicana has been exploding in popularity in recent years with acts like Fuerza Regida, Peso Pluma, and Grupo Frontera bringing the regional sound to the world to an unexpectedly warm reception. Even established artists like former rapper and pop singer Becky G have embraced the sound, which is why it’s no surprise to see Drake dipping into it in his quest to regain his reputation after his musical altercation with Kendrick Lamar earlier this year.

You can listen to Chino Pacas’ “Modo Capone” with Drake and Fuerza Regida above.

Mk.gee’s plans for global dominance are going accordingly. The “Lonely Fight” musician’s North American tour wing wrapped up without incident. Now, Mk.gee is preparing to set UK and Europe ablaze starting on Halloween day.

Although Mk.gee’s album, Two Star & The Dream Police, was only released in February, he still has a few loosies to share with supporters. Today (October 18), Mk.gee dropped a new self-produced single, “Rockman.”

Mk.gee has certainly proved himself to be a rock star. But the track is a seemingly a tribute to another famed entity. The musically beloved Rockman amplifiers. Although the song’s lyrics don’t bother to mention the technology, as he sings, “Honey, just shut up and ride / Wherever you are / I want it on fire / Keep it up, you started a war / Oh, you can laugh it off / But you started a war.”

However, there is no denying that Mk.gee’s instrumental shredding checks off all the boxing for an electrifying tribute to the Rockman. If he’s done this within the confines of a studio, imagine what he does on stage. Listen to Mk.gee’s new single “Rockman” above and check out his remaining tour dates below.

Mk.gee’s 2024 World Tour Dates

UK & Europe

10/31 — London, UK @ Electric Brixton
11/02 — Paris, FR @ Elysee Montmarte
11/04 — Berlin, DE @ Betonhalle
11/05 — Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso

Australia

12/03 — Brisbane, QLD @ The Triffid
12/05 — Sydney, NSW @ Metro Theatre
12/07 — Melbourne, VIC @ Max Watts

Two Star & The Dream Police is out now via R&R Digital. Find more information here.

Have you ever wondered if the couples on kiss cam are pre-screened? It turns out they’re not! Or at least they weren’t at a recent Olivia Rodrigo concert.

The Guts World Tour is having a memorable time in Australia: first, Rodrigo fell through a stage. Then, on Thursday, she asked two of her fans to kiss for the cameras, not realizing that they’re related.

“You guys are so cute! I have a huge, fun favor to ask. Would you guys give us a kiss on the Guts cam?” she said at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena. The pair immediately looked mortified, as the guy mouthed, “She’s my sister.” Olivia reacted in horror. “She’s your sister! Oh sh*t, never mind, scrap that! F*ck, wow, that hasn’t happened before,” the “Get Him Back!” singer said. “This is the first time! Wow. I feel really bad now. We are going to forget that ever happened!” Rodrigo even apologized on TikTok, writing, “I AM SO SORRY.” It’s like they say: love really is embarrassing.

You can watch the whole incident go down here.

Rodrigo made it nearly 100 concerts on the Guts tour without asking a brother and sister to smooch. Unfortunately for her, there’s still two more shows to go in 2024, followed by a handful of Lollapalooza and rescheduled dates in 2025.

The members of One Direction mean a lot to a lot of people, so the surprising death of Liam Payne this week has really resonated. Maggie Rogers is among Payne’s musical peers who have been impacted by the loss, and she decided to pay tribute by covering 1D’s “Night Changes” while performing at Boston’s TD Garden last night (October 17).

As Billboard notes, before the performance, Rogers told the audience, “This week, in particular, I’ve been thinking how precious life is and how quickly things can change.” After explaining how she learned of Payne’s death will preparing to have dinner with an old friend, she continued, “We’re just about the same age. Any time a public figure, especially a musical peer, slips off, it’s really present and I’ve been sending a bunch of love to my friends and my band the last couple days. […] I wanted to just honor anyone who has been touched by [One Direction’s] music or those songs.”

This comes after Payne’s former bandmates and other figures from the music world have shared tributes of their own. Halsey shared an emotional post on Tumblr, writing in part, “i loved one direction with an all-consuming force when i was younger. it hurts deeply to mourn someone you were a massive fan of as teenager, and became a peer of as an adult. […] as a parent, a fellow artist, and a fan, i simply cannot fathom this untimely loss. my heart goes out to his family, friends, and the fans.”

Check out a video of Rogers’ cover above.

Things are about to get real on Cobra Kai after the sixth season began with relatively little battling, well, other than what poor Kenny and Tory had to experience. Both had very different reasons why they didn’t end up fighting for Miyagi-do at the global Sekai Taikai tournament, which began with a face-off at the end of Part 1, and Part 2 will see battles for worldwide karate dominance.

Sekai Taikai is a fictional competition and part of this heightened-reality universe, but an extra bit of fiction doesn’t make the soap-opera aspects of this show any less enjoyable for the target audience. Following the series finale, another The Karate Kid movie will surface, and Cobra Kai showrunners Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg have suggested that a Miyagi spin off is in the cards, but first, a necessary question exists.

When Will Cobra Kai Season 6 Part 2 Premiere?

Following the season’s first five episodes that arrived on July 18, the second part (five more episodes) will debut on November 15.

Deadline recently reported this part’s new cast members, which include Lewis Tan (as Sensei Wolf), Patrick Luwis (as Axel Kovacevic), and Rayna Vallandingham (as Zara Malik). They join Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, Martin Kove, Jacob Bertrand, Mary Mouser, Xolo Maridueña, Tanner Buchanan, Gianni DeCenzo, Dallas Dupree Young, Vanessa Rubio, Courtney Henggeler, and Peyton List to bring this series to a close.

The final five episodes, or Part 3, will add up to a supersized karate season as an undisclosed date in 2025. Send it to the internet.

Since accepting a plea deal in connection to the YSL RICO case, Gunna’s public image has taken a hit.

For some rap fans, they vow to never support him again. But the dozens of sold tour dates (Wun Of Dem Nights Tour, The Bittersweet Tour, The Gift and The Curse shows), millions of streams (One Of Wun and A Gift And A Curse), and recent collaborations with Big Sean, Offset, and Normani proves that he will be just fine without them. Still, every now, and then you need to have a pep-talk with your self in the mirror. Gunna’s latest Turbo-produced single, “Him All Along” is that confidence-boosting chat put to music.

“They was tryna stunt my growth, I was steady chasin’ my goals / N****, why you watchin’? I’m grown, n**** can’t take my throne / Goin’ through the motions, stay strong, he done been him all along / Look at all this money we done grown, lot of different places I done flown,” he raps.

This is just the sort of reassured Gunna fans want to hear especially with set to kick off his Wun Of Dem Nights Tour tomorrow in Washington, DC.

Listen to Gunna’s new single “Him All Along” above.

Lil Durk fans waiting for the Love Songs 4 The Streets 3 project are going to have to wait a while long: The “Monitoring Me” rapper is releasing a whole new album, Deep Thoughts, instead.

To celebrate Deep Thoughts‘ upcoming release, today (October 18), Lil Durk shared a new strikingly personal single, “Opportunist.”

On the DJ Bandz- and Magic-produced record, Durk addresses a supposed opportunist in his inner circle with the help of his late brother DThang. Within the record, Durk incorporates an audio file of DThang discussing his generosity and how others have attempted to exploit it.

“Check this out, I want everybody on this planet right here,” he said. “For real, for real, if you get somethin’ from me, if you get motherf*cker. Listen, I’ll send the guys money ’cause I want to. I motherf*ckin’ give the guys money ’cause I want to. So if you ask me to do somethin’ for you and I do it. Please don’t think it’s a finesse, don’t think you finessin’ DThang, please don’t.”

Later in the song, Durk briefly touched on his very public beefs that eventually took the life of longtime friend and fellow rapper King Von. “When they die, you try to claim ’em to get a name, that sh*t be hot / The last time this war was this big was B.I.G. and Pac / Flowin’ all these drugs through my system, I missed ’em / Postin’ all his lo’s on his finsta, I missed ’em / I don’t take back nothin’ when I say it, when I dissed him / Even though he dead, I read our thread ’cause I miss him,” he rapped.

Listen to “Opportunist” above.

Deep Thoughts is out 11/22 via Alamo. Find more information here.

Last month, Cardi B announced she had given birth to her third child. Aside from being a major moment in Cardi’s personal life, this also seemingly means that she’s ready to put her head down and finish her long-awaited second album.

During an X Spaces broadcast on October 16, Cardi said (as Billboard notes):

“I’m also in LA because I have to do something pertaining the album. I know you guys are gonna be like, ‘What the f*ck, b*tch?’ But it’s something that’s gonna be done really f*cking quick. It’s just gonna be a one-two. I did it when I was pregnant, and nothing came out how I wanted it to come out, so we gotta do it again.

It’s gonna be amazing and unique because everything I do, it gotta be amazing and unique. I’m sorry for the delay. It’s not gonna be a crazy delay. It’s gonna come out amazing. I’m gonna be out here for nine days.”

Later in the broadcast, she said, “Album is coming really, really soon, announcements is coming really really soon. Things are getting more done now! I’m not pregnant no more.”

While there hasn’t been an album since 2018’s Invasion Of Privacy, she has popped up with new songs here and there, like this year’s “On Dat Money” with Rob49.

Lady Gaga is revving up to release the first single from her new album, the unofficially titled LG7, and it seems to be coming soon.

The “Die With A Smile” singer’s discography was updated on certain streaming services, including Amazon Music, Tidal, and YouTube Music, with seemingly random lowercase letters. For instance, “Dance In The Dark” from The Fame Monster is now “dAnce In The Dark.” Same with “eLectric Chapel” from Born This Way and “eNigma” from Chromatica. It’s seven songs total, but there’s a method to the capitalization madness: the lowercase letters read “disease.”

Is that LG7‘s first single? Or the title of the album? Or maybe it’s “seaside”? (Probably not that one.) We’ll know by the end of the month.

You can see the full list of altered “disease” songs here.

Gaga recently released Harlequin, a companion album to the box office dud Joker: Folie à Deux. “I think they’re all risky,” she said about the album. “Some of these songs, like ‘Get Happy,’ are from the 1930s. We’re in 2024, the song is nearly 100 years old. We focused on deploying slapstick and lyrical changes in reference to Arthur [Fleck]. He made his way into the album as well. The lyric, ‘If a nice guy can lose, what’s it matter if you win?’ — that’s pretty daring, considering who Arthur is, what he’s done, and it’s something the film grapples with. We’re rooting for Arthur, and yet he killed five people.”

There is a new Japandroids album out today. It is called Fate And Alcohol. It is also the final Japandroids album. So now, I will give them their eulogy.

Japandroids are (were) an indie-rock duo from Vancouver. They were composed of Brian King (guitar, lead vocals) and David Prowse (drums, “whoa-oh-oh” vocals). They formed in 2006 and released four studio albums, one live record, and one compilation. In the early 2010s, I loved them intensely. I even started a podcast named after their most famous album. At some point, I transitioned to liking them. And then I shifted again, to my present “fondly remember the period when I used to care about them” status.

It’s customary in situations like these to recall the first time you saw the deceased. For me it was at South By Southwest in 2010. I was at an art gallery somewhere in Austin. Behind the building there was a makeshift stage abutted by a small bar serving free (or maybe it was severely discounted?) drinks. When I arrived, The Rural Alberta Advantage was on stage. I don’t remember any of the other bands on the bill. It’s possible the show was Canadian-themed, but that could just be my mind playing tricks on me. I was, after all, more interested in the drinks than the music.

Then Japandroids went on. They were the reason I was there. I liked their first album, Post-Nothing. And I enjoyed their American TV debut that January on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where they whipped through my favorite song from the record, “Wet Hair.” Now, I was about to hear Brian King holler about going to France to French-kiss some French girls in person.

They were good. Not great. Not revelatory. But good. And instantly sweaty. After the second or third song, they both looked like they had played four quarters against the 1989 Detroit Pistons. King bounded about the stage while sending splatter-buzz guitar licks at the audience, and Prowse bobbed eagerly on his drum kit as he kept erratically perfect time. In my mind, I predicted that they would release exactly one more album, and that album would receive a 6.8 from Pitchfork and instantly evaporate from existence. And that would be the end of Japandroids.

Flash forward two years. I’m sent an advance promo of the second Japandroids record. It’s called Celebration Rock. I put it on and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It sounds like the record I would make if I were in a two-person band from western Canada. They sang about hanging out with buddies like it was a revolutionary act. They wrote about romantic relationships with the fevered intensity of a mid-seventies Bruce Springsteen song. Their instruments collided into one another with the style and grace of a blackout drunk Replacements bootleg. It was like they were trying to recreate the feeling of listening to every cool part from every cool classic rock record, simultaneously, only with limited funds and limited ability.

That was the thing about Japandroids: Even when they were great, they were really just good. But they elevated “just good” to an art form. I’m not going to repeat the tired punk mythos about how “anyone can do this.” But Celebration Rock connected with a certain kind of rock fantasist because Japandroids were ordinary guys who seemed to have stumbled into brilliance. It made you think that anyone could rock this hard with the right combination of self-actualization and intoxication. Even the cover communicated this idea: These dudes didn’t look cool or exotic, they were just two bookish Canucks decked out in scarves and glasses. They were uniquely not special.

There was a misconception about Celebration Rock in the media that shaped how Japandroids were written about and contextualized forever afterward. They were looked at as a party band, because the songs were, well, celebratory. But Celebration Rock did not take place in the present tense. They were talking about their past lives. Or “Younger Us,” to quote the album’s pivotal track. King and Prowse were both 29, which is the age when your sense memory of high school and college starts to fade. Eventually, you can only remember what happened back then, but you no longer feel what it’s like to be young. Most of us react to this by pouting melodramatically about “becoming old” as our thirties loom. Japandroids reacted by making Celebration Rock, an orgasm of last-ditch adolescent sentiment preserved in amber.

I was five years older than Japandroids, and I adopted their orgasm of last-ditch adolescent sentiment as my own. When the tour was announced and I saw that they were playing in my area one month before my first child was due to be born, it seemed almost too perfect. This is my last show of pre-fatherhood? Oh, and it’s also taking place on the first day of summer? The circumstances were simply absurd. The circumstances were simply a Japandroids song.

The concert was … not good. The songs sounded about 35 percent less powerful in person. And they stopped after each one for what felt like five minutes, as King painstakingly re-tuned his guitar and spouted interminable patter. It was as if the schism between reality and fantasy concealed by the album was finally revealed on stage. The truth about Celebration Rock is that it wasn’t what it sounded like, which is two guys bashing out eight songs over a six-pack in just one or two takes. It actually took an eternity to make and might not have come out at all if not for a record label edict. King, in particular, was a perfectionist who worked at a snail’s pace. Ultimately, the album he and Prowse made was, weirdly, a studio construction, like if Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had labored for months and spent millions to make Aja sound like Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash.

Five years later, I saw them again. It was an interview for the podcast I named after Celebration Rock, on the tour bus their new label, Anti-, presumably paid for. Most of the questions were about their new LP, Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, which was dinged in some quarters of the critical community for feeling anachronistic in our bad, new Trump Era. I thought this criticism was preposterous then, and I think it’s preposterous now. It’s like complaining about how Deadpool & Wolverine did not thoughtfully address the Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict.

But to be fair, my review of Near To The Wild Heart Of Life has not aged well, either. “To put it in Springsteen terms,” I wrote, “Celebration Rock is Born To Run, and Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is The River.” Is Near To The Wild Heart Of Life really Japandroids’ version of The River? I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t listened to it since 2017. Japandroids for me was still the band that made Celebration Rock.

I’m stalling on getting to the end of the story. So, here it is: Fate And Alcohol is the first Japandroids album since then. There will be no tour bus interviews this time, as there is no tour. All we have is the record. And that leaves only one relevant question: If you loved Celebration Rock, do you need to hear Fate And Alcohol?

Let me put it this way: How you feel about this album will hinge on how you feel about going to your own high school reunion. Are you interested in seeing your old classmates decades later, or would you rather preserve the memory and pretend that those people (and you) never got any older? I fall solidly in the former camp, but professional obligation nevertheless required me to violate my personal code for Fate And Alcohol.

It’s a clumsy record. The sins of their past — try-hard corniness and conspicuous self-consciousness, which are evident even on Celebration Rock — have not abated. The songs are (still) populated by starry-eyed fellas and the ladies who love them beyond all logic and reason. I’m thinking specifically of “Positively 34th Street,” in which King sings, from the perspective of one of those ladies, “I don’t bet on boys / they just love you, leave you blue / but make it to my doorstep, I might roll the dice on you.” In the immortal words of Roger Murtaugh: I’m getting too old for this shit.

And yet, in spite of everything, Fear And Alcohol moved me. The critical flaw in the makeup of Japandroids as a creative vehicle is that it was designed to do one thing — make Celebration Rock — and not mature or evolve one iota beyond that. But they lurch forward anyway on this record, and even if it’s not always (or often) successful it feels nevertheless courageous. The bravado and romanticism are still there, but it’s shadowed this time by a recovering addict’s fragility. “You’re not dead, just dehydrated,” King sings in “Alice,” and you can practically feel his fists locked in a white-knuckle grip.

My feelings about this record were inevitably informed by the recent profile written by my friend and colleague Ian Cohen, in which King talks candidly about his newfound sobriety. “Our fans have this image of us at the top of the ‘dudes rock’ pyramid. Escapism has always been a big part of our appeal and I think they take comfort in the idea that at any given moment Dave and I are out there somewhere dudes-rocking together,” King says in the article. “Whereas in reality, we live in different countries, thousands of miles apart, and rarely see each other. There was definitely a long stretch of our lives where we were daily dudes-rockers, but those days are behind us.”

If Celebration Rock was about distilling youthful emotions into musical form as they rapidly slip from your heart, Fate And Alcohol is about outliving the fantasy and finally putting it behind you. This is necessary in life, and decidedly less than thrilling in rock. But at some juncture, life must take precedence. For them, and for us, too.

And with that, we must bid Japandroids adieu. We all loved in your shadow, dudes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, whoa-oh-oh.