"I’ve spent a lot of my career writing about the 'emo revival' and it often feels like writers who cover this stuff are constantly in defense mode, myself included. I wish it wasn’t such an uphill battle to talk about this type of music compared to the type of indie rock that gets consensus critical acclaim, especially when the music itself isn’t all that different" - Brooklyn Vegan's Andrew Sacher says in the Music Journalism Insider interview about genres being mostly ignored by the mainstream media. "In 2021 so far alone, we’ve seen some big 10th anniversary pieces go up for debut albums by Joyce Manor, Title Fight, and Balance and Composure, and what’s really clear to me, is that people are REALLY reacting positively to these pieces. These are classic albums to a generation of music fans in their early 20s right now, and these albums got basically no press when they came out, outside of punk-specific websites. In 2021, those albums seem a lot more important than a lot of the stuff that had consensus critical acclaim in 2011".

"It was really fun to play and to be in a really great Batman movie. And to be a villain! I put a hallucinogenic in Gotham City’s water supply. I had my own trial. I was in mental asylum, I tried to murder and probably rape Katie Holmes, I got clobbered by Batman. What more can you ask!" - James' Tim Booth says in The New Cue interview about his Batman role. There's also a funny anecdote: "One of my funniest moments from that is I'd go into makeup for hours every day where they put scars on me for two hours. On about the sixth day I'm sitting in a makeup chair and Batman's in there in his regalia. Christian Bale stays in character on set the whole time. He's sitting there in his full Batman outfit, doesn’t say anything to me. Then he finishes his makeup and gets up and he goes and stands behind me and in the Batman voice he says, 'Are you Tim?' 'Yeah…' And he goes, 'From the band James?' 'Yeah…' ''Laid' saved my life. I love that fucking album'. He walked out and I'm sitting there going, ‘Holy shit, Batman likes our album!’ It was one of the funniest and loveliest moments because he stayed in character. When he was in casuals he was Bruce Wayne, which I didn't realise. I had great conversations with him. I hung out with him quite a bit on set. I thought, ‘What a nice man.’ And then later I realised that he was hanging out with me as Bruce Wayne, which was really quite a mind fuck". James release their new album 'All The Colours of You' on June 4.

The Weeknd took home 10 awards at the 2021 Billboard Music Award, including top artist and top male artist, Billboard reports. Pop Smoke won five, including top new artist and BTS and Bad Bunny each earned four. P!nk was honored as the Icon, Drake as the artist of the decade and Trae Tha Truth as the Change Maker.

"Marvellously-named guitarist and vocalist Geordie Greep [is] a soft-spoken 21-year-old who talks while barely moving his lips, dresses offstage like Tony Soprano’s accountant (ie, suited-and-booted ​’90s sharp), and can sing like a man possessed by a menagerie of personalities. Like the band, he contains multitudes" - The Face interview with black midi reads. Their new album 'Cavalcade' is out next week - "this is the eight-songs-wide, full-fathom-deep second record from black midi. Yes, it’s still, fantastically, a record to scare the neighbours".

J. Cole debuted at No. 1 on Billboard 200 chart with his newest album 'The Off-Season', with an impressive 282,000 equivalent album units, Billboard reports. Cole’s record is the largest rap album of the year with his new release more than doubling the first week of Rod Wave’s 'SoulFly' album, as well as the second-biggest […]

The New Yorker is highlighting a selection of their pieces celebrating Bob Dylan's big birthday. "In 'The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds', from 1964, Nat Hentoff visits Dylan in the studio and catches the artist in the first stages of his meteoric recording career. ('Wiry, tense, and boyish, Dylan looks and acts like a fusion of Huck Finn and a young Woody Guthrie. Both onstage and off, he appears to be just barely able to contain his prodigious energy'). In 'The Wanderer', Alex Ross follows Dylan on the road during his Never Ending Tour, which has defined the most recent decades of his seminal performances ('It’s hard to pin down what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his shows cause his songs to mutate, so that no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances, over many decades')".

Navy Blue shares smooth jazzy psychedelic hip-hop 'Ritual' from his surprise-released new album; Curtis Harding shares a warm, conscious soul single with a pretty video for 'Hopeful'; Sa-Roc released s deluxe version of her last year's album, featuring new song 'Re-Birth' with MF Doom on the mic; Jade Bird's 'Different Kinds of Light' is just a nice love song; 'Like I Used To' is slightly 1980s-big-ballad song by Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen; Yoo Doo Right go enjoyably post-rocky on 'Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose'.

Italian competitor Måneskin won Eurovision 2021 with their song 'Zitti E Buoni', a rock song sang in Italian. Singing in French was a thing, since the two closest competitors were France's Barbara Pravi with a big-sounding song 'Voilà' and Switzerland's Gjon's Tears with a grandiose ballad 'Tout l'Univers'. The UK got, all summed-up - zero points!

"These are records that stop you in your tracks, that are impeccably recorded and have the two ingredients above all that we exist for: great songs and authenticity" - Chris Sheehan, founder of UK-based Karousel Music, writes in MBW after he launched a new label venture, Buried Treasure. It will be a platform for the "world’s most criminally overlooked artists to finally present their work to a new generation and earn the living they deserve". The first release on Buried Treasure is the UK folk singer-songwriter Matt Deighton.

“A little while before we went into lockdown, a boy in my class came up to me and said that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people. After I told him that I was Chinese, he backed away from me. Eloise and I wrote this song based on that experience” - Mila (10) describes how she and her bandmate Eloise (13) wrote 'Racist Sexist Boys', a song that made their band The Linda Lindas the stars of this week. LA punks are rounded up by Lucia (14) and Bela (16), and they've been playing for two years now. Consequence brings the story of the band.

"It may have been only 10 minutes, but I'll be thinking about my One-to-One Concert with Mario Gotoh for a long time to come" - NPR's Jeff Lunden wrote after attending a concert where there was a musician - and himself. These concerts are the brainchild of German flutist Stephanie Winker and a couple of colleagues, who wanted to create an unusually intimate musical experience. Launched two years ago in Stuttgart, they've been done in Australia, Japan, India, across Europe, and the US, and have proven quite suitable in corona-times

"Apparently, this Eurovision-backed project called American Song Contest will air on NBC in 2022 and feature one 'incredible solo artist, duo, DJ or a band' to perform an original song from each of the 50 states, five U.S. territories, and D.C." - Emily Alford writes in the Jezebel, begging America not to do it! Because - "what concerns me is that America, as is its wont, will take this missive humorlessly, and every armpit of the country will try and send the closest it has to an Ariana Grande or Kacey Musgraves, when they should be giving us Yank versions of Jedward and A.B.B.A. It does make one wonder if the whole of Europe isn’t doing this on purpose for their own mean little amusement".

"Far from impenetrable, the record carries listeners along on sandstorms of driving, infectious rock and roll" - RIFF Magazine reviews the new album by the Touareg guitarist (gave it 9 of 10 stars). Pitchfork branded it Best new music (grade 8.4), arguing it "captures the group’s easy chemistry and explosive energy". Rolling Stone goes idealistic in its review: "This is how free rock & roll should sound". Uncut is equally enthusiastic: "An exhilarating band set that mixes electric and acoustic instrumentation, it’s at once fiercely modern and as ancient as the Niger river". DJ Mag chose it as their Album of the month.

Sarah Neufeld released an intense and dancy 'Tumble Down the Undecided' on her latest album; Florence + The Machine releases a silly little song 'Call Me Cruella' from the Disney live-action film 'Cruella'; black midi share jazz/rock 'Chondromalacia Patella'; Dark Lo & Harry Fraud go lo-fi psychedelic hip-hop on 'Missing Summers'; Wristmeetrazor join together melody and metalcore on 'This Summer's Sorrow Ⅱ: Growing Old In The Waiting Place'; David Bazan is deeply melancholic on 'Your Bearings'.

"That an African American man played a massive and pivotal role in three seminal musical forms seemingly dominated by Caucasian artists – folk rock, prog rock, and proto-punk – is one of the most tragically untold stories in popular music’s history" - Tape Op writes introducing Tom Wilson, the man who produced albums, among many others, by Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, The Animals, Gil Scott-Herron...

"Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Israel — the last time the event took place — was broadcast live in 41 countries and watched by an audience of 182 million, making it the world’s biggest live music event" - Billboard explains big labels' new-found interest in the European yearly pop song contest. By comparison, this year’s Grammy Awards drew 9.2 million viewers, whereas February’s Super Bowl, the biggest U.S. television event annually, drew 96.4 million TV and online viewers.

“Access to water is an ongoing problem in Niger, so at the moment I’m travelling around villages and trying to assist that for people" - Touareg guitarist says in the Dazed interview about his latest album, which he wanted to sound "clean but raw". Live concerts, however, are the thing he loves - "I’ve come to understand through the years that the crowd really is my energy source. The audience gives me courage to go places and hit notes I usually can’t. What happens live is unreproducible”. When not building wells, making music, or playing shows, you can hire him to serenade your wedding or rent his car for a small fee, if you like.

"There’s the producer, songwriter, the entrepreneur, the manager, the composer, and I’m the mom. I’m also just a human being trying to figure out how to best be of service in this world" - Linda Perry, the everything she stated above, tells in the Tape Op interview. She also says that when starting to work with a new artist "the only thing I ask for is for them to be open, honest, and prepared to abandon ego and whatever bullshit they carry", and she worked with P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Alicia Keys, Adele, and Dolly Parton.

MC Abdul is a twelve-year-old rapper from Gaza who came into the spotlight with his short rap from war zone over Eminem beat. "All we want is #peace" - the boy said, adding - "music is what keeps me going".

"Hope too resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked" - Nick Cave wrote deeply humanistic on his The Red Hand Files blog.

"I want people to feel what I’m going through, even if they aren’t experiencing the same shit. Like I’m growing up in my music, I’m still learning a lot, still understanding what death really means" - Brooklyn drill rapper says to Pitchfork reporter, who spent a day with the 22-year-old, going from a barber to a studio. BB looks back at Pop Smoke: "He really changed the game... He was always telling me it’s cool making drill for the streets, but once you start seeing the world it makes you want to be bigger than the streets".

There will only be one winner at the Eurovision 2021 on Saturday evening in Rotterdam, however, the Guardian found some other winners, in the "good", "bad" and "weird" categories. One of the stand-outs is Jeangu Macrooy, the Dutch contender, born in former Dutch colony Suriname and now living in the Netherlands, who elegantly criticises colonialism while singing in both English and Suriname’s Sranan Tongo language.

Classically trained violinist Ezinma played with Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Mac Miller, as well as with Beyoncé at her historic Coachella set, but her solo career really took off when she filmed herself playing along to Future's 'Mask Off'. The video went viral and landed Ezinma a deal with Decca Records, who recently released her debut EP, 'Classical Bae' - which puts a new spin on Beethoven's 'Fifth Symphony' and Bach's 'G Major Prelude', amongst others. BBC talked to the musician.

Music impacts blood pressure, body chemistry, brain rhythms, heart rate, body temperature, psychological attitude and a host of other factors. which makes it an audio-steroid, Ted Gioia argues examining the role of music in athletic performances. The research of professor Costas I. Karageorghis has shown the value of music in building team cohesion, creating dissociative mindsets that may reduce pain or fatigue, and almost any other sports parameter imaginable. USA Track & Field, the governing body regulating the sport, saw music as a threat - it imposed a ban in 2006 on headsets and portable audio players at races “to prevent runners from having a competitive edge".

Sober 21 is a free PDF zine with essays by, and interviews with, sober musicians like Brad Truax (Interpol), Cait O’Riordan (The Pogues), Darryl “D.M.C” McDaniels (Run-DMC), John Grant, Mix Master Mike (Beastie Boys), Nile Rodgers (Chic), Peter Hook, Moby and others. Zine's goal is to "help other alcoholic/drug-addicted musicians see the amazing freedom, and benefit to our art, that we found in sobriety by sharing our own experiences".

“There was a 360 portal and you could go step on stage with them, and you could pick your camera angles” - Christian Guirnalda, director of Verizon’s 5G Labs, told Rolling Stone about the recent Black Pumas show, recorded at company's Los Angeles 5G Labs. Producers filmed in 4K video on a camera connected to Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, which can create a “visually lossless” experience that “eliminates the side effects of image compression that’s visible to the naked eye”. There was no postproduction, either - all the visuals were rendered in real time. Rolling Stone believes this is the future, even after the live shows return.

“It really comes down to WHO is at these events" - DJ Cakewals says to DJ Mag about clubbing events coming back in the US, in light of the pandemic slowing down there. It's the nuances that will matter: "How serious is the crowd and promoter taking precautions? And for how long? Will the security or person [in charge of] monitoring the crowd just get lazy after a couple hours? Hold each other accountable, even if it’s uncomfortable!”.

"I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career, and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track” - Sinead O'Connor writes in her memoir 'Remembering' about tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II, which essentially killed her career. When she became a pop star - “the media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act. It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl", she says to the New York Times in an interview.

Amaro Freitas shares a Brazilian bossa-nova jazz smoothie 'Baquaqua'; cabaret-punk is pretty much an accurate description for Callum Easter's 'What You Think?'; Jorja Smith's 'Time's shortness is made up for with her great voice; dubby dream-pop meets electronica on 'Lost and Found' by Corbu and Doves' Jimi Goodwin; John Grant continues his streak of great songs which announce his new album, the latest one is a dramatic take on masculinity called 'Billy'; Anthetic start at ambient, end up at dark electro with 'Scope'.

"When you are working with bands, who have no concept of time, you have to have lots of patience. I usually describe my job as 90% sitting in hotels lobbies waiting for people to turn up and 10% photography" - photographer Kevin Cummins says in The New Cue interview. He talks about his 71-track 4CD compilation 'Caught Beneath The Landslide: The Other Side of Britpop and the ‘90s', accompanying his latest photo-book 'While We Were Getting High: Britpop and the ‘90s'. A bit of advice he would give his teenage self - "be confident. Always listen and learn".