California multi-instrumentalist and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow released her 21st album in 15 years, the largely instrumental electro/hip-hop/funky LP that she wrote and produced herself. PopMatters describes it as a "17-track clinic on creating rhythmic framework that wow you with their complexity and propel you into movement", whereas New Yorker hears it as "fidgety and animated, as if the music is longing to move out of confinement, to vibrate toward something". All Music argues "Muldrow's aim here is to provide listeners with superhero themes that facilitate emboldened movement out of doors".

Pop-country vocalist B.J. Thomas, famous for the 1969 smash 'Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head', written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1969 Paul Newman/Robert Redford Western 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', has died at the age of 78 from lung cancer. Grammy-winning singer had hits in pop, country, and gospel with songs like 'Hooked on a Feeling' and '(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song'. The New York Times looks back at his career.

Medium writer Patsy Fergusson explaines why she liked Linda Lindas' 'Racist, Sexist Boy': "I’m not a fan of punk music. Screaming annoys me. But I loved the song... because it broke so many tired stereotypes.

• I loved that the girls felt safe making that horrible sound
• I loved that their local librarians supported them in doing it
• I loved that they’re so young: 10, 13, 14, and 16
• I loved that the singer screaming the rageful lyrics is Asian, exploding the submissive Asian female stereotype
• And I loved the message in the lyrics: racism and sexism are bad!".

“In the wake of criminalisation, our nighttime and festival industries had become a massive success... It was still rave, at the end of the day. The spirit was still alive and kicking in the people who chose to get fucked up and go dancing together at every possible opportunity” - author and rave veteran Matthew Smith writes in his new photo-book of ​’00s clubs. Music journalist Simon Reynolds goes beyond the obvious: "In the public but intimate setting of the rave, private fantasies that can’t be expressed within the strictures of routine existence are enacted... We see people both losing themselves and finding themselves, building a collective dreamworld under the cover of night”. The Face invites us to step inside 'Full On, No-Stop-All Over'.

Music analyst Bob Lefsetz argues in his latest blog post that mainstream music has become laughable: "Social media is fluid. It changes every day. It’s not so much about creating a track that everybody listens to ad infinitum, but something so outrageous that people take notice, train-wreck value is the most important criterion, you want something the viewers can tweak to their own advantage, utilize to garner views for themselves".

Metal Hammer sees four female influencers on social media who continue to prove metal is still alive. Sophie Lloyd (@sophieguitar_) is a British guitarist whose videos have amassed tens of millions of views; Kiki Wong's (@kikiwongo) cover of 'Blinded By Fear' by At The Gates has racked up a quarter of a million views on Instagram alone – four times higher than the number who actually follow At The Gates on Insta; Yasmine Summan (@yasminesumman) is Metal Hammer and NME journalist hosting On Wednesdays We Wear Black podcast raising awareness of issues facing the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ members of the rock and metal community; Cassyette (@cassyette) says she hopes she can "influence people with the genre of rock and metal to express themselves through music, fashion and make-up, and maybe help people that are struggling with their identity".

Guardian goes into reasons why movie studies are remaking classic rock songs into epic pop songs for movie trailers. Nirvana's 'Something in the Way' got a completely new identity in last summer’s teaser for 'The Batman'. Teaser for Marvel Studios’ 'Eternals' revamps Skeeter Davis’ country ballad 'The End of the World', the preview for 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' took Harry Nilsson’s 'One' and added an arsenal of menacing symphonics, the teaser for The Suicide Squad twisted the easy grooves of Steely Dan’s 'Dirty Work' into pummelling beats and the trailer for last year’s 'Wonder Women 1984' featured an epic reimagining of New Order’s 'Blue Monday'. Will Quiney, the theatrical music supervisor at trailer house GrandSon, explains: “You can create a narrative with your music selection. If you can come up with an amazing idea for a song and have that trailerised in a really cool way that blows them away, you’re going to beat the competition, you’re going to win that trailer.” says . “agrees: “Music is the secret sauce to a great trailer and the best trailer editors know how to make the most of it”.

The guitar industry has been struggling with scandals over illegal logging, resource scarcity and new environmental regulations related to trade in endangered species of trees. The Conversation went on a 6-year-long quest tracing guitar-making across five continents, looking at the timber used and the industry’s environmental dilemmas. A great piece of investigative (music) journalism.

"One of the great parts was he did embrace his age at 50. I thought this project was brilliant and masterful because it allowed him to be him. You see a lot of these legends, they come out with something and it’s just not them. They’re trying to be too cool and too down instead of just being themselves. But music is timeless; music doesn’t have an age limit on it. I think you age yourself when you try to not be yourself. And X just went at it. He said, 'Yo, I’m going to just do me, and that’s it'” - producer Swizz Beatz says in a Complex interview about DMX's final album 'Exodus'. It's the rapper's first new album in nine years, started after DMX’s epic Verzuz battle with Snoop Dogg in July 2020, and done in the course of two months. It has the most features the rapper has ever had on a project in his career - Griselda crew is there, Usher, Alicia Keys, Bono, Jay-Z and Nas.

Sony Music Group spent $1.4 billion on music acquisitions in the last six months, according to SMG Chairman Rob Stringer, MBW reports. According to Stringer, by Sony’s calculations - “in just the first four months of this year, music-related M&A and catalog investment activity was over $7 billion”. Sony estimated says that this $7 billion figure was “nearly equal to the total investment activity in the 12 months of 2020”.

"You can't pin this album down from just one song or even three; there's all kinds of different stuff all over the record, and for all the discordant, amelodic stuff, there's also some genuinely beautiful stuff on there" - Brooklyn Vegan writes, somewhat confused, about the new album by the London prog-rock band. Guardian appreciates exactly this "freakish, feverish parade of our inconceivable world and all its extremities, half-measures be damned". Pitchfork describes it as "glorious", because "the chord changes are more elaborate, the rhythms more twisted, the pretty parts prettier, the heavy parts heavier".

"He can rap absurdly well, and he could have a career on that alone, but he doesn’t seem to want it. Instead, he seems to want to exist in a lane that did not exist before him. He’s pulling it off" - Stereogum reviews Mach-Hommy's 'Pray for Haiti', declaring it one of the best rap albums of 2021. Pitchfork appreciates "his razor-sharp bars and an exceptional eye for detail" (tagged it Best new music, grade 8.8).

Over 600 musicians have signed an open letter Musicians for Palestine expressing their support for Palestine and urging their fellow performers to boycott shows in Israel. Signatories include Rage Against the Machine, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Serj Tankian of System of a Down, Run the Jewels, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Black Thought and Questlove of The Roots, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Chromeo, Nicolas Jaar, Noname, and Owen Pallett. In an open letter, the group denounced the recent Israeli attacks against Palestine while demanding “justice, dignity and the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people and all who are fighting colonial dispossession and violence across the planet".

EXIT Festival - which takes place at Novi Sad, Serbia across 8th-11th July - will offer 1,500 coronavirus vaccines to international artists and festivalgoers attending the event this summer, DJ Mag reports. David Guetta, Paul van Dyk, Paul Kalkbrenner, Eric Prydz B2B Four Tet, and Honey Dijon feature in this year's line-up. On the other side of the musical spectrum, the UK Download festival - which will take place from June 18-20 - will allow 10,000 attendees to “mosh, dance and hug”, the Evening Standard reports. All attendees will have to take a lateral flow test at home beforehand, and will also need to send a PCR test by post prior to the event. Only those with negative results will be allowed onto the festival site. Five days after the event, those who went to the festival will have to take a second PCR test, and send it off to the Events Research Programme.

Singer John Davis, the true vocal talent behind notorious pop duo Milli Vanilli, has died from coronavirus at the age of 66, Variety reports. Fronted by Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus, Milli Vanilli sold more than 30 million singles, but were stripped of a Grammy Award after it emerged they lip-synced on hits they had never recorded. Davis and other fellow session singers provided vocals on Millie Vanilli's album 'Girl You Know It's True', which sold 11 million copies, but were only listed as backing singers, with Morvan and Pilatus falsely given credit. After the lip-syncing scandal, Davis and fellow original singer Brad Howell formed The Real Milli Vanilli. In later years Davis performed alongside Morvan as part of their collaborative project Face Meets Voice.

Former Led Zeppelin singer talks in his 'Digging Deep' podcast about how he spent the lockdown cleaning up his house, finding on the way plenty of music he worked on and never released. Plant says there's some "incredible" and "great" music there. He's instructed his kids to make it all available for free "when I kick the bucket".

Mashable explores the incoming reality where artificial intelligence make music. Their main idea is that the evolution of technology always included some kind of progress in music. With AI in music the plus side is - "they're never late. The downside? Creepiness, obviously".

'Afrique Victime' is the new, awesome album by the Touareg guitarist Mdou Moctar who made a list of albums, artists, songs and styles that made him the musician he is now. The Quietus assembled the list, which includes Van Halen, Abdallah Oumbadogou ("the founder, the source of my music"), Khaira Arby ("a golden voice"), Malam Maman Barka ("insanely good, totally insane"), Bob Marley ("a revolutionary and he’s someone who loved peace"), Tinariwen ("you have to write things to encourage people").

BTS' new single 'Butter' broke the record for the most viewed YouTube music video in its first 24 hours with 108,200,000 views on Friday, May 21. After the single dropped on Spotify it garnered 11,042,335 global streams in just one day, breaking the record for the most streamed track on Spotify in the first 24 hours, Guinness World Records reports. Also, as of 27 April 2021, the music of BTS had been streamed 16.3 billion times on Spotify, breaking the record for the most streamed act on Spotify.

Spotify announced its new Fresh Finds program, which will spotlight indie musicians in marketing campaigns and equip them with a variety of educational tools, Music Ally reports. The program is a spin-off of the Fresh Finds playlist, which has added more than 25,000 emerging artists since its launch five years ago. In 2021, about half of the artists added to the playlist previously had fewer than 21,000 monthly listeners, but the average artist sees their listens increase by 108% in the month after being playlist, according to Spotify. The first four Fresh Finds program artists are Wallice, Unusual Demont, Julia Wolf, and EKKSTACY. For now, the Fresh Finds program is U.S.-only, but Spotify is expanding the reach of the Fresh Finds playlists, adding new regional versions in 13 territories including the U.K., South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as other parts of Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

New Hampshire police have published a warrant for the arrest of Marilyn Manson on two counts of simple assault, regarding a spitting incident involving a videographer at a concert in August 2019, the New York Times reports. Manson's lawyer Howard King said that a venue videographer had asked for more than $35,000 “after a small amount of spit came into contact with their arm. After we asked for evidence of any alleged damages, we never received a reply". The misdemeanor claim can carry a jail sentence of up to one year and a $2,000 fine. Manson, real name Brian Warner, has been accused of sexual and mental abuse by two former romantic partners, Evan Rachel Wood and Esme Bianco.

TikTok is launching TikTok Radio this summer, a full-time SiriusXM music channel, Music Business Worldwide reports. It will be available in vehicles and as a streaming channel on the SiriusXM App, desktop, and all connected devices. TikTok Radio is pitched as a radio version of TikTok’s For You page, a discovery tool for trending videos, and it will be presented by TikTok creators, tastemakers, and DJs.

"A time machine through the origins of metal music, its connection to darkness and decadence, the lifestyle of many of its followers and how its upped the ante on the phrase 'sex, drugs and rock n’ roll'" - reads the introduction to 'Backstaged: The Devil in Metal' podcast. The latest episode goes into the originators - Black Sabbath.

To make it easier to navigate their expansive archives, Pitchfork has created the Reviews Explorer, an interactive tool designed to help you discover new albums, rediscover old ones. Type an artist’s name into the search bar, select that artist from the dropdown menu, and see their reviews, plus reviews of similar artists, arranged by rating in a graphic interface. You can also filter the results to show which album recommendations are designated as “Best New Music” releases, and sort reviews by date.

"There’s a vast array of different kinds of Dylan covers: R&B singers love relaxing into the contours of 'Lay Lady Lay'; country singers like his rootsy stuff; indie-rockers key into his sad side; heroic rock singers love scaling the peaks of open-ended classics - like 'It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue' or 'Like a Rolling Stone' - finding their own way to make new meanings amidst the intersecting, and often contradictory, emotions and ideas that can roil around within one Dylan song" - Rolling Stone writes introducing their selection of 80 best Bob Dylan covers, from Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, and the Byrds to William Shatner, Adele, and the Roots.

The number of artists making $25,000 on Twitch has grown 16x since the pandemic started. For those making $50,000 or more, the median viewership is 183 fans, which makes for $274 per fan - Twitch’s VP Head of Music, Tracy Chan, said on the Trapital podcast. He also talked about how artists make money on the platform, finding 100 True Fans, and the creator economy. Chan also worked at Spotify and YouTube to build their creator platforms.

Megadeth have parted ways with their original bassist and co-founder David Ellefson amid allegations of sexual impropriety, Next Mosh reports. Sexually explicit video of Ellefson, age 56, masturbating and photos of flirtatious exchanges with a woman surfaced online earlier this month. At the time, rumors spread online that he had been grooming an underage fan. He vehemently denied the accusations and posted a statement from the woman he claimed he had sent the material to who said she was of age the whole time they were in contact.

Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood presented their new band, The Smile, during a surprise appearance at Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm webcast on Saturday, NME reports. The band of true greats also featurs jazz drummer Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet. The Smile revealed their existence hours before the livestream officially kicked off.

"The band offers us a contrasted 'Skeleton Lake' between darkness and softness, oppression and deliverance, but also heaviness and soaring sonorities that only strengthen their seizing basis made of an ageless duality" - Acta Infernalis reviews the new album by the Finnish melodic death metal/doom metal/goth band Hanging Garden. Metal Trenches argues "the beautiful and somber atmosphere is at its highest level", whereas Metal Temple hears the whole band collaborating "so finely to enrich the music of the band, from black screams to death growls to hyper clean vocals, even to whispers, a fair amount of each".