Music

Music

DJ Chris Lake posted DMs between him and Kelce re: Lake's remix of " Opalite." In them, Trav calls Lake "a legend 🙌 🙌" and that he loves everything the DJ comes out with. "Caught you and The Fish at Coachella a while back an is still one of my favorite sets of all time," he wrote. When Lake eventually sent the remix over, Kelce responded with 5 exploding head emojis and 6 fire emojis. That's an 11/10.

At only 17 years old, the Eugene, Ore., native Maria Telesheva is already an accordion wizard. I have trouble simply pushing the right button in an elevator. So watching Telesheva's fingers fly gracefully over more than 200 buttons on her bayan, as the instrument is called in Russia, is a thrill. She makes the tightly braided voices in J.S. Bach's thicket of counterpoint sing and dance.

Any composer's relationship to music is intense, but Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose debut opera, Hildegard, receives its world premiere at the LA Opera this week, ratchets that intensity up to a higher, more metaphysical level. When Snider hears music, she says, she sometimes wants to eat it that's how deep the desire goes. She's not traditionally religious, but she has come to see music as a mysterious, divine force within her.

When director Emerald Fennell needed to hire a musician to score her Wuthering Heights adaptation, only one person came to mind: Charli XCX. Not only did the British pop star accept the offer, but she used her soundtrack to capture love in all of its grandiose, moody, and elusive ways. As she described the soundtrack on her Substack, it's a "dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar."

Bendetta's latest single, "Headshot," captures the moment when something shifts: when violent thoughts arise, yet the urge to maintain control prevails. This track navigates themes of anger, boundaries, and the conscious decision to no longer absorb harm without letting it transform you into the one inflicting it. Rather than offering comfort or resolution, "Headshot" demands clarity: it focuses on naming feelings, standing firm within them, and refusing to downplay their significance.

The new album from Joshua Chuquimia Crampton takes its name from the Andean ceremony Anata, which gives thanks for the harvest before the rainy season. Made up of seven dense and distorted instrumentals, the record is the California-based Aymara musician's attempt at capturing the energy of ceremonial music not some rosy, polished version, but how it might sound recorded on a phone, clipping and all.

Jane Remover has released a new song as Venturing. It's called "In The Dark," and it arrives just ahead of the first anniversary of her debut album under the alias, Ghostholding. Check out the song, and its cover art, below. The artist shared her most recent Jane Remover LP, Revengeseekerz, in April 2025, following it up with a surprise EP, ♡, in December.

Like so many 20 year olds before him, Zion Battle found something transcendent in Joshua Tree National Park. Since age 16, Battle had been working towards becoming a musician, studying for a time at CalArts and New York's The New School. Then, in 2024, he left behind his academic training to begin making music as Katzin, exploring a more intimate sound shaped by a healthy love for the bedroom dream pop of early Orchid Tapes releases and the fuzz of 1990s indie rock.

Cupid gets his main-character moment this weekend. We asked New Yorker staffers to help build a playlist befitting his romantic mission. For a classic piece of nineties Brit pop, Oasis's " Slide Away" is basically an absurdly romantic ballad of plain devotion and yearning-which "Wuthering Heights" has established as the emotions of the season. May your Valentine's Day be all about both!- Noreen Plabutong

This is by far the biggest release week of the year so far. Amanda and I highlight 12 new releases below, and Bill tackles another five in Indie Basement, including Cardinals, Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms, The Paranoid Style, the Wall of Voodoo 1983 demos collection, and the expanded reissue of Velocity Girl's ¡Simpatico!. And in addition to these reviews, Dave and I talked a lot about all this new music on today's episode of BV Weekly.

The duo had originally confirmed their sophomore album Top of the Hills back in December 2025, but soon after, they announced that they had shelved the album due to exhaustion from touring. Now, Top of the Hills has been remade as FREE SPIRITS, and they've introduced a dramatic new narrative along with it; according to a press release, the duo underwent a 12-step healing program at a wellness center run by Sting, who they've enlisted as a collaborator and "wellness mentor."

Thundering drums and shredding guitar solos cut through the crowd as pyrotechnics and streamer cannons blast. The energy and production feel like a show at the Hollywood Palladium or the Forum, but we're at Knott's Berry Farm, on the rooftop of a big red doghouse - that is if we can suspend our disbelief for an evening. The educational rock band Jelly of the Month Club along with guest musicians Charlie Brown, Lucy, Schroeder and Linus set up the show's finale

It turns out The X-Files is easily adapted from your favorite '90s paranormal TV adventures into a super silly on-stage sketch show. Kickstand Comedy's fully improvised performance keeps all of your favorite tropes: the will-they-won't-they love story, the monster of the week format, and the runaway conspiracy theories. Starring comedians Tessa Waring and Mo Merrill as Scully and Mulder, expect high sexual tension, audience suggestions, and jump scares even the performers don't know are coming.

This was 1980 or '81, she reckons, just after she'd come off the road playing percussion for the jazz star George Duke; by 1984, she'd become a star herself with the pop hit "The Glamorous Life," which she cut with her mentor Prince and which went to No. 7 on Billboard's Hot 100. Over the decades that followed, Sheila E. went on to record or perform with everyone from Ringo Starr to Beyoncé.

Everything else other than rock, when rock 'n' roll splintered in the '60s, is the roll,

The North American run follows Gaga's previous "Mayhem Ball" outing, which ran in the US and Canada in the summer and fall of 2025 and continued through Europe, Asia, and Australia. The trek, which we deemed as one of the most anticipated tours of 2026, sees Gaga bringing the dark world of her 2025 LP to life with cinematic movements, dazzling costumes and set pieces, and a gothic aesthetic centered around duality.

For years, Angel Du$t was Justice Tripp's balmy reprieve from Trapped Under Ice. When he fronted the Baltimore hardcore band, he cursed out ice queens and swore he'd " stay cold forevermore" to protect his heart. These tormented songs were molded by the trauma and violence that Tripp endured during his hardscrabble upbringing. Angel Du$t's 2014 debut, A.D., with its pink cover art and perky pop-punk sound, showed that he was learning to leave the past behind and warm up a bit.

His first albums under his own name, 1995's Earth & Nightfall and 1996's cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers.

PATIENT FOR THE ENCORE.

A band called Ad Nauseam is dead set on keeping grunge alive in Portland, but no local venue will return their calls to play a show. Like the most iconic grunge acts, Ad Nauseam has deep PNW roots. They deliver sludgy, whining guitar licks and haunting, sandpapery vocals. They've even got an angsty tune called "Scab Pimple" for goodness sake. So why can't they land a gig? Well, it might be because all four band members are between the ages of 10 and 16.

"I don't know," the group's leader, RM, says, "because time has passed. There are a lot of K-pop-related nominees you see in the general field and, really, I want to send big applause for them."

"a widely admired Nashville musician,"

Central Cee has shared a new song "Iceman Freestyle" along with a music video. Directed by Don Prod, the clip tracks the British rapper driving an old Aston Martin, drinks whiskey, and literally digging his own grave. Watch it below. "Iceman Freestyle" is the second solo single Central Cee has released following 2025's Can't Rush Greatness, his debut album on Columbia. The rapper also linked up for a few collaborations last year, including Drake's " Which One " and Sexyy Red's "Guilt Trippin."