SNL50: The Homecoming Concert — a nearly three-and-a-half-hour extravaganza produced by SNL creator/producer Lorne Michaels and Mark Ronson — took place at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall tonight. The event featured popular musicians young and old who have performed on NBC’s sketch comedy series over the decades, and the audience was filled with people who worked on the show in some form or another, so there were a lot of reaction shots of delighted celebrities. Even many of the commercials starred past SNL characters, and the show is just one part of a the program’s 50th anniversary weekend festivities, which cultivate with a prime time special airing Sunday night.

The title of Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR’s $OME $EXY $ONGS 4 U is supposed to be an exercise in self-referential fun: i.e., “You know us for making sneaky link soundtracks and — surprise — that’s exactly what we’re doing, so we’re going to phrase that concept as straightforwardly and casually as humanly possible.” It’s kinda funny. But the sterility of the music undoes the joke; it’s not an ironic punch as much as an apt description for a collection of tracks that are as disjointed as they are indistinct. They might as well have called it, These Are Our Sexy Songs — Here You Go. While $$$4U delivers on some of the sexy, it’s usually got all the charm and imagination of missionary with the lights off.

For Valentine’s Day, I got you new covers of two Genesis frontmen’s debut solo singles.

New Dawn has arrived. The debut solo album from Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen is out today, setting multiple Guinness World Records in the process. At 100 years and 265 days old, Allen is now certified as the oldest person to release a debut album, surpassing the previous record-holder (Colin Thackery, aged 89 years and 272 days when Love Changes Everything dropped in 2019) by more than a decade. Guinness has also named Allen the oldest person to release an album of new material. The previous record was held by Tony Bennett, who was 95 years and 58 days old when his second collaboration with Lady Gaga, Love For Sale, came out in 2021.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)

Ride guitarist Andy Bell announced a new solo album called Pinball Wanderer only last month. Unlike his previous solo efforts, which were mostly comprised of unearthed ’90s songs, this one is mostly new, and Bell recorded and mixed most of it in a single session. We’ve already heard Bell’s lead single: a cover of the Passions’ “I’m In Love With A German Film Star.” Now, he’s sharing a follow-up, the grooving, horn-laced “apple green ufo,” which comes with a video by Chris Tomsett aka Innerstrings.

Porter Robinson, who once peddled EDM festival fare but has since distanced himself from the bass drop (as heard on last year’s more pop-punk-minded Smile! 😀), stopped by TripleJ’s “Like A Version” this week to cover Fontaines D.C.’s “Favourite.” As a result, the Romance single sounds like something straight out of a Jimmy Eat World or Something Corporate catalog.

Like many hyper-online rappers today, the UK’s fakemink is incredibly prolific; he released dozens of new songs last year, cultivating a distinctive “luxury and dirty” sound. But “Easter Pink,” the new fakemink single out this week, represents a pivot. As Pitchfork points out, the Suzy Sheer-produced track is a blend of “late-aughts bloghouse” and “early-2010s cloud rap,” two sounds that really Take Me Back to a golden era of music blogging. On “Easter Pink,” our limber London emcee deftly rides a tidal wave of surging synths and thumping kick, as if carried along by fog (or foggy memories of Crookers and Gold Panda). I can’t wait to see him perform it at the Fader Fort.

Two years ago indie rock veterans Nina Nastasha and Jeff MacLeod teamed up for a self-titled album under the name Jolie Laide. They’ve got a new LP called Creatures in the queue, now with bandmates Clinton St. John, and Morgan Greenwood in tow. (Kathryn Calder of the New Pornographers also plays keyboards on a few tracks.) Lead single “No Shape I Know” is an eerie and spacious track that shines a spotlight on Nastasha and MacLeod’s impassioned vocals. Listen below.