music

On April 6, Charli XCX announced her intention to try an experiment. Over the course of the next five weeks, she’d create a brand-new album — including meeting the demands of music videos and promotion — all entirely from scratch while self-isolating. The end result of that period of creativity is finally here: As promised, it’s called How I’m Feeling Now, and it’s simply a vision. The album comes loaded with the singles “Claws,” “Forever,” and “I Finally Understand,” all trademark future-pop looks at her life in quarantine that also saw her embracing more stream-of-consciousness lyrics she shared with fans in real time as she was making them. The other eight songs here range from insanely catchy (“7 Years”) and sugary...

We’re stuck inside, and there’s no shortage of articles covering how quarantine is making people feel a way about love and intimacy, or creating a general longing for a sense of connection. Jessie Ware’s “Save a Kiss” is the electric bop that gets where we are right now. “High anticipation, it’s an emotional trap,” the song begins over a synth-pop beat, and your heart starts to race. “Save a kiss for me tonight, wait for me no compromise,” the chorus rings. By now, you’re twirling, texting the lyrics to your lover, or both. Either way, in the age of social distancing, we’re all hoping someone will “save a little bit of your lovin’” for us, even if we can’t say for how long. —Virginia Lowman You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating...

Future, known supporter of masks during an unprecedented global time where they’re more needed than ever before, had originally titled his eighth studio album Life Is Good. “It’s about life and being good and just enjoying life,” he told XXL earlier this year. That album is officially out as of today (May 15), including a new video for “Tycoon.” But it is no longer titled Life Is Good. Instead, Future retitled it High Off Life this week, just before he dropped it. “When you get to this point in your life, when you’ve had success, you wanna continue having success,” he told Zane Lowe in conjunction with the release. You can see it in the video for “Tycoon,” billed as a “desert cut,” which indeed features Future, i...

Reporting by Alissa Godwin In this age of self-isolation and quarantine, it’s never been more important to check in on each other and to connect. This goes for artists, too, who have been social distancing alongside us: livestreaming concerts and hangouts, creating their own talk shows, and… well, that’s what we want them to tell us, with Remote Access. Homemade music videos have become a necessity in the age of self-isolation and quarantine, but thanks to innovators like Lennon Stella, they don’t have to look homemade. Her recent visual for “Fear of Being Alone” is moody and artistic, following the 20-year-old singer as she poses and contorts around an empty room. Most rag-tag DIY creations often don’t rise to this aesthetic level. But Stella̵...

On Sunday night (May 17), Taylor Swift brought her Lover album to life during the ABC broadcast of her City of Lover Concert, an album celebration she filmed last September in Paris. If you didn’t tune in, you’re in luck: Select tracks from the show are now streaming. You can also watch the entire performance right now on both Hulu and Disney+. The songs currently available to stream include Lover cuts “Cornelia Street,” “Daylight,” “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” “Lover,” “Me!,” “The Archer,” “You Need to Calm Down,” and “The Man.” The show, captured on September 9, 2019 at L’Olympia Bruno Coquatrix, marked the live debuts of these Lover cuts. Setlist.FM reveals that the show saw ...

“This video is dedicated to touching.” That’s how Harry Styles‘s bleary-eyed new clip for “Watermelon Sugar” begins, and in perfect Styles fashion, it escalates from there. He’s got a watermelon, you see, and he’s touching it. Well, first he’s not — and then he is, and then he really is. And now he’s eating it. The whole thing’s a vision of ecstasy and summer haze that eventually culminates in what I feel most comfortable calling a fruit orgy. It’s not quite that cheap, though; this is Harry Styles we’re talking about. Rather, it’s a celebration of pleasure that, by the time it wraps, harkens back to his 2017 “Kiwi” video, reminding us of the man’s own sagely words from before his second a...

Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber debuted their stay-at-home serenade “Stuck With U” earlier this month with a charming video that mashed up home-quarantine videos from fans and celebrity friends, and with positive change in mind. With proceeds from sales and streams going to the children of COVID-19 frontline responders via grant funding and scholarships, the single-for-a-good-cause quickly struck a chord with listeners, and on Monday (May 18), Billboard announced that the track has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The achievement marks Grande’s third time leading the chart, Bieber’s sixth, and their first together; it is also both singers’ third song on the Hot 100. Notably, only industry giants Mariah Carey and Drake (who m...