Earlier this year, Stereolab unveiled Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first album in 15 years. Today, the avant-pop wizards are back with two new songs, “Fed Up With Your Job” and “Constant And Uniform Movement Unknown.”

Earlier this year, the R&B star Kali Uchis released her album Sincerely. Since then, she’s been touring arenas and sharing stages with some very big surprise guests. Now, there’s another star who could conceivably join her onstage at any moment. Much like Uchis, Ravyn Lenae started out on the artier fringes of the R&B world before finding mainstream fame. Right now, Lenae’s 2024 song “Love Me Not,” a surprise TikTok smash, is sitting comfortably in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. (It’s #8 this week, and it’s gone as high as #5.) This morning, Uchis and Lenae have a new song together.

In 2016, bucolic New Jersey indie rockers Real Estate parted ways with founding guitarist Matt Mondanile amidst a storm of sexual assault allegations against Mondanile. The band quickly replaced him with Julian Lynch, a musician who also makes solo music under his own name. Last month, Lynch announced that he’s leaving Real Estate after finishing his last few shows with them. Yesterday, Real Estate identified the musician who will be taking Lynch’s vacated place.

A new month is upon us, and in pop in 2025 that means one thing: New sensitive dude just dropped. His name, unfortunately, is sombr. His aesthetic is part indie sleaze, part Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. Despite his stage name, his music is not really somber; it’s jaunty radio bait that, if not fully rock, is certainly rock-coded. His lyrics aren’t quite somber either, but they’re definitely pained: His album, I Barely Know Her, presents 10 angles on the girl who broke his heart. Unsurprisingly, he gets mobbed by girls both on stage — see last weekend’s VMA PDA — and in person; one imagines that at least some of his fast-growing fanbase was drawn by the seductive pull of “I can fix him.”

On Sunday night, the MTV Video Music Awards staged a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne, with the young British rocker type Yungblud joining Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry and Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt to perform a medley of Osbourne’s songs. Lots of people wasn’t into it. One of those people was the Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins. In an Instagram post that went viral, Hawkins called the performers and possibly the audience and network executives “a bunch of bellends.” Now, Hawkins’ brother and bandmate Justin, lead singer for the Darkness, has put together a YouTube video explaining why people might thing that Yungblud specifically is a bit of a bellend — or, as he terms it, a “poser.”

Sudan Archives is gearing up for the release of The BPM next month. So far she’s released an enthralling batch of singles including “DEAD,” “MY TYPE,” “YEA YEA YEA,” and “MS. PAC-MAN.” Now, she’s back with “COME AND FIND YOU.”

Oh man, “Yellow,” remember that? Chris Martin running down the beach talking about “look at the stars, look how they shine for you”? Coldplay have certainly had some cheesy moments over the years. You might even argue that “Yellow,” the band’s 2000 breakout hit, was a cheesy moment in itself. I loved it, though. Wisp doesn’t remember any of that because the young shoegaze phenom wasn’t born when “Yellow” came out, but she just covered the song anyway.

When Sabrina Carpenter made her Coachella debut in 2024 — on the same day she released “Espresso” — she was still doing her location-specific “Nonsense” outros. During her late-afternoon main stage set, she sang: “He’s drinkin’ my bath water like it’s red wine/ Coachella, see you back here when I headline!” I guess manifestation works or whatever, because Carpenter, along with Colombian reggaeton-pop star Karol G, are reportedly headlining Coachella 2026.

Lately Chris Baio (Vampire Weekend, Baio) and Mike Greene (Fort Romeau), the duo known as C.Y.M., has emerged from a half-decade of dormancy and begun releasing new singles. They started with a pair of electronic instrumentals, then gave us a Cherry Glazerr collab. All of those songs will be on C.Y.M.’s self-titled debut album, newly announced today for release next month.

Four years ago, Armand Hammer, the consistently great duo of New York rappers ELUCID and billy woods, joined forces with veteran rap producer the Alchemist on the truly staggering album Haram. That felt like a huge moment of recognition for Armand Hammer, and it was the Alchemist meeting them on their own turf, giving them warped, feverish instrumentals and fitting right in with the group’s established canon. Now, Armand Hammer and the Alchemist are running it back.