Back when I was covering the Columbus music scene, Way Yes — who played Afropop-influenced electronic pop with shades of Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend among other buzz-band forebears — were one of my favorite local bands. Sometimes those treasures from your home city remain buried within local lore, but Way Yes made it far enough outside of their localized bubble to be covered on this website long before I worked here.

The xx have been in and out of the studio for years working on the follow-up to 2017’s I See You, but all three members haven’t done a show together since the summer of 2018. They did, however, get together onstage at Jamie xx gigs a couple times last year, a feat they repeated at the LIDO Festival in London’s Victoria Park Saturday.

Kevin Abstract might not be talking to his old Brockhampton bandmates anymore, but he’s staying quite active on the solo music front. Abstract announced his new solo album Blush and shared its lead single “Geezer,” which sounds like some Sublime-influenced acoustic beach pop to slot into late ’90s MTV rotation alongside Sugar Ray. He already streamed the album live on Twitch Saturday, and now he’s used another gamer-friendly platform to drop a complementary release.

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival has turned into a venue for musicians debuting their visual albums. Turnstile did it with Turnstile: Never Enough Thursday night, and Miley Cyrus followed on Friday with the premiere of her Something Beautiful film, the accompaniment to her excellent album of the same name, at the Beacon Theatre. At the Cyrus shindig, there was some minor drama due to some very confused ticket-buyers who thought she was going to a very different kind of event.

Cultural treasures like to hang out together sometimes. Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen have shared stages a number of times over the years — in London, New York, New Jersey, Glastonbury. Last year, McCartney gently roasted Springsteen while presenting him with the Ivor Novello Awards’ Academy fellowship. And this week, it happened again, this time in McCartney’s Liverpool hometown.

What a festival. It’s not just the booking, even though the booking is cool as hell. The people who put together the Primavera Sound Festival know how to pull in huge stars and spiky critical-favorite types, and it might be the only fest where you can see Chappell Roan and Chat Pile within an hour of one another. You can wander into a club space next to one of the rows of food vendors and find people freaking out to a set from a Brazilian funk DJ. You can see tons of artists, from tons of different places and genres and sensibilities, having truly gratifying career moments. That’s amazing, but it’s not really what sets Primavera apart. There’s other stuff to consider, too.

Robbie Williams is getting ready to release Britpop, his first studio album in almost decade. Here’s a good way to promote it: Going out on a big tour, and unexpectedly reuniting all of the original members of 5ive for the first time in 25 years, which he did last night (June 6) in London.

In 2021, two underground extreme-music drum specialists got together to form a duo with the hard-ass name Manslaughter 777. Lee Buford, from the Body and Sightless Pit, and Zac Jones, from MSC and Braveyoung, joined forces to make unpredictable beat music that draws on rave and hip-hop influences. They released a debut album called World Vision Perfect Harmony. Since then Jones has become the drummer for Nothing, but that hasn’t gotten in the way of another Manslaughter 777 record. Their sophomore LP arrives this summer.

High Moon Records has announced The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967, the earliest known live recording of the pioneering ’60s band Sly & The Family Stone. “I Gotta Go Now (Up On The Floor) / Funky Broadway” is out now as a single.

The metal-leaning label Magnetic Eye has a long-running series called Redux, in which tons of different underground artists pay homage to titans of the form. Yesterday, Magnetic Eye release two Ramones tribute albums, both of which were curated by the Italian-Swiss audio engineer Marc Urselli. One of the compilations is entirely dedicated to the Ramones’ classic 1976 self-titled debut, and the other includes a bunch of tracks from across the band’s career. The two albums contain tons of surprising one-off collaborations, and the most surprising of them might be the team of grindcore pioneers Napalm Death and Sonic Youth pioneer Thurston Moore.