After Beyoncé’s “Morning Dew” surprise drop lit up last week’s roundup, Gracie Abrams leads this week’s New Music Friday Guide with Daughter From Hell, her moody third studio album. Introduced by the singles “Hit the Wall” and “Look At My Life,” Daughter From Hell finds the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter reuniting with longtime collaborator Aaron Dessner, while also adding Dan Nigro to the mix.

Between new releases from Grammy-winning reggae and dancehall legend Buju Banton (Too Too Bad), Teflon Don aka Rick Ross (Set in Stone), Afro-house artist Francis Mercier (Lakay), Mexican singer Oscar Maydon (Música en mi Jetski) and The Internet alums Steve Lacy (Oh Yeah?) and Syd (Beard), it’s a particularly packed week for new albums,

Other notable projects arriving this New Music Friday include Mariah Carey (Daydream – 30th Anniversary Edition), Masego (Fix Your Face), Foreigner (In the Eye of the Storm), Waylon Wyatt (Dustpiles), Niko Moon (ROOTS), Mudbaby Ru (Out the Mood), Mike Posner (Crazy Rainbow – EP), Daughtry (There And Back Again), BackRoad Gee (Live in the Flesh), Icewear Vezzo (Rich Off Pints 4), Rome Streetz (Sock It 2 My Pocket) and Nao Yoshioka (self).

Over on the singles side, pop music fave Carly Rae Jepsen leads the way with “After All,” a scintillating taste of the Night side of her forthcoming Day and Night double album. “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” breakout star Bella Kay also shared “I Deserve Better,” a poignant cut from her excellent debut album My Reckless Abandon, which dropped on July 12.

Berlin’s Marlon Hoffstadt dropped his kickdrum-anchored “Get Buck,” Carly Pearce joined forces with Molly Tuttle and Dan Tyminski for “What If You Loved Me,” ascendant Texas rockers Dexter and The Moonrocks shared “If You Could Talk” and country singer-songwriter Wyatt McCubbin released his harmonica-laced “Andy Griffith.”

This New Music Friday also features new tracks from Saucy Santana (“Quiet on the Creek”), Tinashe (“Crash Out”), Kelly Clarkson (“I’d Be Lyin”), Lil Baby (“Dead Fresh”), Pentatonix (“Sacrifice”), Meshell Ndegeocello & Cynthia Erivo (“I Knew You Were Waiting”), Leon Bridges (“Light the Way”), Lauren Alaina & Kane Brown (“Never Been In Love”), Roy Woods (“Brunch”) and Armanii (“World Class”).

Which new release this week is your favorite? Vote — or share your own pick — in Billboard‘s New Music Friday poll below.

Lil Wayne is entering the podcast space. Weezy will be teaming up with WFAN radio host Craig Carton for The Joint Venture, which will air weekly episodes starting on July 22.

The New Orleans rap legend and Carton are set to record the first episode with a live podcast taping at Fanatics Fest NYC on Sunday (July 19) featuring guests like former New York Jets star Darrelle Revis, ex-New York Knicks forward Amar’e Stoudemire and New York Giants Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning.

“The best podcasts feel like you just kicking it with your people, talking the same way you do when nobody’s listening,” Wayne, who previously hosted Young Money Radio on Apple Music, said in a statement. “I’ma light one up with the homie Craig and we gonna talk our sh-t about whatever the day brings. You never know who’s gonna pull up or where the conversation’s gonna go.”

Wayne and Carton seem like an unlikely duo, but the pair have been friends for years. As a massive fan of the Green Bay Packers and Los Angeles Lakers, Weezy can talk sports just as easily as he can spit a verse.

Craig Carton actually had Lil Wayne on his WFAN radio show in March, where Carton called him the “biggest sports fan” he knows.

“There’s nothing better than swapping takes with Wayne on sports, pop culture and a whole host of other topics,” Carton added in a statement. “The Joint Venture show gives us a great excuse to keep doing what we’ve been doing for years, while also having some famous friends stop by and chop it up with us. There’s no better job in the world.”

Before heading to Fanatics Fest NYC, Lil Wayne will continue his tour celebrating 20 years of Tha Carter on Friday (July 17) with a show in Chicago. Weezy’s last album, Tha Carter VI, arrived in June 2025 and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

Icons only! The Rolling Stones cover the latest issue of Billboard, talking about the special guests on their new album Foreign Tongues, thoughts about AI in music, their studio dynamic and more.

For the cover story, I sat down with Mick Jagger at a poolside garden in London and Keith Richards at the Django Jazz Club in Manhattan some 48 hours later. The interviews covered a lot of ground, and there’s only so much room in a magazine cover story – there were a lot of great things they talked about that we just didn’t have space to run in print.

Below, check out a few newsy, fascinating and distinctly Stonesy bits that didn’t make the cover story: you can watch some of these exchanges on YouTube, but a couple of them don’t appear anywhere else but here.

Keeping It Analog

Before the cameras started rolling, Jagger pointed to our film crew and three-camera setup and commented, “Lots of people on set. God, I remember when Billboard was an interview with a notepad.” That prompted me to hold aloft my little red notepad, which I’d actually picked up from London’s Design Museum the previous day. (I wanted to check out an exhibit devoted to Wes Anderson, a filmmaker who coincidentally has done a few Stones needle drops throughout his oeuvre.) “You do have the notepad!” Mick beamed. “So you’re a traditionalist.”

Speaking of traditionalists, Richards, in his interview, revealed he doesn’t even own a cellphone and doesn’t appreciate “the idea of being permanently available for everybody to call up when they feel like it. Nobody thinks, ‘You know, that’s damn rude — he might be writing a song, doing something else.’” I put forth a pretty believable hypothetical: “You got your manager sitting over there [off camera]. Jane [Rose] wants to get in touch with you, how does that happen?” His sly reply: “Well, it doesn’t.” After the interview, Rose took me aside and told me one word: “Landline.”

Covering Amy Winehouse

Talking about their surprisingly effective cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” on Foreign Tongues, Jagger said, “We were looking for a good song to cover from a female vocalist, and we were thinking of early people, and then we said, ‘Let’s do something a bit more recent.’ We alighted on that song. I always liked that song. I could have written it, you know what I mean? Almost. I felt that I could have written that song, because it’s like a minor-key harmonica lead. I just copied the horn lead and played it on harmonica, so it felt very organic.”

“Loved the song. Always thought that Amy was a sad story in many ways, but she was one of the best to come out of England, and probably had so much more potential,” said Richards of Winehouse, whom the Stones shared the stage with at Isle of Wight Festival in 2007 for a cover of the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” (which the Stones recorded on their 1974 album It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll). “I’m not sure who kicked the idea off, whether it was Mick or Andrew [Watt, producer], but we said, ‘Well, you know, we used to, we started off, we were a cover band, basically, so if there’s one you wanted to cover now, what would it be?’ And Amy came out on top.”

Prejudices Against Singers in Hollywood

While interviewing Jagger, I ran something by him that Werner Herzog told Playboy in 2012. For context: Jagger was initially attached to the legendary director’s 1982 masterpiece Fitzcarraldo — in fact, Herzog began filming Fitzcarraldo with Jason Robards as the lead character and Mick Jagger playing his assistant, but Robards became so ill during the famously troubled Peruvian production that he had to drop out of the film. By the time the film was set to résumé with a new star (the mercurial Klaus Kinski), Jagger had to leave for a tour with the Stones; Herzog wrote his character, Wilbur, out of the script. (Herzog’s 1999 documentary My Best Fiend includes footage of Jagger acting with Robards.)

“Jagger is a tragic gap in the history of film,” Herzog told Playboy. “He hasn’t been praised enough as someone who could have been a great actor.”

“Could have been,” noted the ever-alert Jagger, laughing. I asked him if he wished he had more time to pursue acting back in the day.

“Yeah,” Jagger replied. “The thing is, I think if it was now, in this time frame, I would have been able to act a lot more, because there’s not the prejudice against singers. In fact, they take advantage of using the fame of someone in a film. Whereas in the days when I started acting, all the people in film hated you, and it was impossible to get a role — it just wasn’t the thing. Also, they didn’t use music in films either, hardly at all. Now we take it for granted; there’s music almost all the time. So now it’s much easier for singers to get acting parts, but in those days it was impossible. Yeah, it would have been nice to have done more,” he concluded, adding, “Thanks, Werner.”

When I mentioned his phenomenal performance in the 1970 film Performance, he noted, “It was such a long time ago. But I just did a cameo in a silent, black-and-white movie, The Three Incestuous Sisters with three famous actresses [Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley]. It was fun. I was playing a lighthouse keeper. I didn’t have any lines, because it’s a silent film — I didn’t have to worry about the lines.”

What’s Next, Musically — Maybe

“Yes, there’s loads,” Richards said when I asked him if there were songs left over from Foreign Tongues, an album that grew out of leftovers from Hackney Diamonds. “With every record it seems to spawn more than you actually want. All in different states of readiness. You say, ‘This one’s going to take a lot of work, put it on the back burner.’ Others that have just been lying around for ages as a basic idea, and it’s never quite clicked. And then you turn a corner, and there you are — suddenly that other piece you’ve been looking for, and you go, ‘That’s where you are. That’s why I waited.’”

Right before we wrapped, I asked Richards if he might ever do another solo effort, a follow-up to 2015’s acclaimed Crosseyed Heart. “Talking to [drummer] Steve Jordan about that the other day,” he shared. “Not a bad idea.”