The controversial rapper now known as Ye was due to play two huge shows at St Petersburg’s Gazprom Arena, which now states it cannot host performances for contractual reasons

The St Petersburg stadium that was set to host two concerts by Ye – making the rapper formerly known as Kanye West the biggest western act to play in Russia since start of the Ukraine war – has now said that the concerts will not take place at the venue, although the promoter has stressed that they have not been cancelled.

Gazprom Arena had previously posted on social media saying that “the most influential musical artist of our time” would perform there on 10 and 11 October. “This is no joke!” the post stated. The event sold out immediately, including tickets priced at £1390 ($1896).

The LA-based powerpop project’s triumphant debut is a celebration of low-stakes creativity in the slacker-skater tradition

From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like the Lemonheads, Sugar, the Muffs
Up next Secret to Spare released 18 September

Maybe it’s to do with getting older, maybe it’s to do with the broad-spectrum grimness of it all, but the thrill of low-stakes creativity, of making something for the joy of making it rather than in the hope of making it, feels particularly vital at the moment. And, if the sun-bleached cool of Jawdropped’s music is anything to go by, starting a powerpop project in your 30s will light up this pleasure centre like a dive bar pinball machine.

Following in the footsteps of Michael and Janet Jackson, and Kylie and Dannii Minogue, the Hobert siblings have simultaneously struck pop gold – with no rivalry

The history of rival sibling pop solo acts is a limited but potent one. Most famous, of course, are Michael and Janet Jackson. Kylie and Dannii Minogue, Billie Eilish and Finneas, Beyoncé and Solange, Natasha and Daniel Bedingfield, Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry, Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, and Brandy and Ray J all share the intimate and rare understanding of what it was like to share Lego sets and chart space.

That strange dynamic recently gained a new pairing. The US artists Audrey Hobert, 27, and her younger brother, who performs as Malcolm Todd, 22, have both scored global hits synonymous with the sound of summer 2026.

The South African singer has been a memorable guest artist, but the unhurried, emotional tracks on new album Some Strings Attached show she’s ready for the spotlight

From Cape Town, South Africa
Recommended if you like Summer Walker, SZA, Shekhinah
Up next Some Strings Attached out now

Rowlene Bosman learned to sing in a Cape Town school choir, and the discipline never left her: she is a precision vocalist in a scene that rewards volume. Most South Africans first heard her in 2018, delivering the hook on Nasty C’s SMA – she was the first signing to his Tall Racks label – and the featured artist circuit kept her busy for years. But while South African pop stampeded towards amapiano, Rowlene held her ground as a balladeer, writing slow, confessional R&B in which heartbreak is examined instead of danced away. Her 2020 debut album 11:11, a set of aching, close-quarters soul songs, brought a South African music award nomination for best pop album, and three of her originals – Cupid, Stay and the Nasty C collaboration I Need You – landed on the soundtrack of Netflix’s SA teen crime drama Blood & Water, carrying her voice far beyond home.

The singer said that he was ‘already feeling better’ but forthcoming dates on his mammoth farwell tour will not now go ahead

Rod Stewart has cancelled all coming dates on his farewell tour after undergoing a routine heart procedure.

On 9 August, Stewart, 81, pulled a performance in Ohio at the last minute. After the successful insertion of a coronary stent, he announced that all dates would be cancelled.

Day’s latest album Halo is all high-energy exhaustion, injected with a crushing electroclash chaos that illuminates her insecurities in bright neon

From Los Angeles
Recommended if you like Slayyyter, Charli xcx, Underscores
Up next Halo out now. UK and Ireland tour starts in December

Right now popstar breakthrough and burnout are a hair’s breadth from one another. Enter Tiffany Day, a Wichita-raised artist who first went viral in 2017 when a video of her singing Hallelujah on a school trip blew up online. She spent the subsequent years unsuccessfully chipping away at building on that virality, cycling through acoustic guitar covers and bedroom R&B. Only by channeling her frustrations into this year’s anxiety-ridden sugar rush Halo did Day finally regain her early momentum.

Singer and actor, whose world tour ends next month, told audience in Chicago that she had been quietly planning the move for a long time

Ariana Grande has expanded upon her recent decision to take “a step back from visibility” when her tour ends next month, as a result of what a spokesperson called “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”.

On Monday night during the first show of a three-night run in Chicago, the 33-year-old musician and actor read from notes as she told fans: “The announcement that was made yesterday was not a reactive or impulsive thing. It is something that I had decided to plan quietly, a long time ago.”

After a decade in the pop fringes, Charli xcx’s 2024 album Brat propelled her to global stardom: an acid-green ‘Brat summer’, a Glastonbury headline slot and brat as Collins’ word of the year.

But how do you follow up the album that made you a star?

Charli’s latest album Music, Fashion, Film has now been released – and as Guardian deputy music editor Laura Snapes tells Lucy Hough: it’s a pivot to guitar and a “meta masterpiece about the instability of identity.”

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

​With her roots stretching from the Catholic church to riot grrrl, the US singer-songwriter explains how sobriety and self-analysis powered her classic new Waxahatchee-produced album

The songwriting on Brennan Wedl’s new album is so ironclad that I kept checking the credits to see if any of its songs were actually covers of peak Lucinda Williams tracks that I’d somehow missed. Nope: all originals by a 29-year-old songwriter whose radiant, hooky, tough Americana puts her toe-to-toe with genre godheads such as Williams circa Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, or Sheryl Crow had she grown up playing church basement punk shows; also, a vision of Courtney Love in cowboy boots.

“I love Lucinda’s very earnest way of looking at daily life, and I hoped to achieve that on this record,” says Wedl, calling from her Nashville home, surrounded by vintage magazines and tchotchkes. Wedl is warm and dudely; she answers almost every question with an exuberant “toootally!”. She cites her favourite of her new songs, the absurdly immediate Just Another Daddy Who Did Me Wrong, a bittersweet number that questions her self-destructive appeal. “It’s a very harsh look at reality, but also about how our minds can create so much fantasy around reality. I’m working on not projecting too much on reality these days.”

The annual rundown of Guardian writers picking their most played tracks of the season goes from club-ready pop to sunny tech house

• Check out a Spotify playlist of the choices

Kim Petras’ greatest song to date is also the best outsider country song in recent memory: if Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey could ever put the beef behind them and duet, the dusty gutter romance of Jeep is exactly how you’d want it to sound. The song creates a flyover state love story in a strangely effective union of hyperpop and Americana, creating a windswept fantasy of “doing some middle America shit” with your man: Four Loko-fueled hookups, gas station canoodling and screaming along to rage music beneath the stars. The truly audacious thing is the bridge, a whispered and impressionistic slur that feels like Petras is eight drinks deep, doing donuts in her car until everything blurs. It’s total make-believe, but Petras is so good at making you feel her longing that it gets me choked up. When she recently came out at a Charli xcx show to perform Jeep unannounced, it already felt like an anthem. Owen Myers

(Interscope)
Despite their goth-coded attempts at emotional turbulence, the saccharine songs of Abrams’ third album feel adolescent in their melodrama

Gracie Abrams’ third album is a full-blown crime scene. Across 16 songs, the US songwriter catalogues slip knots, blades, bullets, knives, more knives, ghosts, cages, drugs, car crashes, blood, burial, flaming tyres, choking, burning houses, sinking ships, drowning, more blood, bloody knees and even more knives. It’s called Daughter from Hell to acknowledge how much the 26-year-old frayed her parents’ nerves as a reckless teen, part of a wider theme about working out when to blame others for her pain, and when to accept responsibility. Clearly, there’s a lot of poetic licence involved in dramatising these mature revelations, but the dissonance between Abrams’ goth-coded emotional turbulence and the music’s insistent, quivering prettiness is the real uncrackable case on this bloodless record.

In one way, Abrams has had an outsized influence on pop. Her early bedroom songs inspired Olivia Rodrigo to write Drivers License, which kickstarted the former Disney star’s dazzlingly quick and continuing act of self-redefinition. Mostly, though, Abrams is the sum of her influences: you needn’t listen hard to clock Lorde’s vocal harmonies, Phoebe Bridgers’ intimacy or the tightly packed storytelling of Taylor Swift, who had Abrams support on the Eras tour. In Swift she also shares a producer in the National’s Aaron Dessner, a collaborator in Bon Iver (his jump-scare falsetto appears on two songs here, and he plays all over the record), and certainly a sound in Folklore’s pearlescent acoustics, injected with a whisper of stomp-clap vigour. That mix of melodrama and songs sung like secrets means Abrams’ audience skews young: her music carries the sensation of being the only person in the world grappling with huge emotions, as life often feels in adolescence. For anyone older, her music can feel a little starter pack.

Housesharing brought the south London trio’s sounds – classical vocals, violin, clubby production – together as they bled through the walls, to shapeshifting effect

From South London
Recommended if you like FKA twigs, James K, Anysia Kim
Up next Debut album Underlight out now

There are many ways to deconstruct club music. On Bristol label Illegal Data, releases might take explosive approaches to scary (Ship Sket) and whimsical (Mun Sing) extremes. More recently, the same label finds Stolen Velour, Floco and Aria SL filling the club chest-high with liquid: you hear elements sink, dissolve, or float past serenely on the surface.

The Irish fiddler brings pop exuberance to traditional songs that range from disco to haunting a cappella with a fearless sense of genre fluidity

From Carlow, Ireland
Recommended if you like The Mary Wallopers, Chappell Roan, Anohni
Up next SlutTrad EP out now, UK and Ireland tour starts in October

At a recent London show, SexyTadhg – real name Tadhg Griffin – appeared in a glittering pink corset, channelling high-camp cabaret. And then, they started playing the fiddle.

After exchanging vows with Travis Kelce, the workaholic pop star probably won’t be staying home to admire the wedding silverware

No speculation is too harebrained when it comes to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding. Are they getting married at the gigantic Madison Square Garden arena? What initially sounded mad is apparently quite true. Will she perform? Will Paul McCartney? All bets are off – and given the level of secrecy, maybe we’ll never actually know what does happen.

Only one recent report has made me go: yeah, as if. Gossip site DeuxMoi claims that Swift recently met 50 country radio execs to pitch an alleged upcoming country album, a return to her roots 20 years after she started in the genre. This strikes me as potentially true: even the world’s biggest pop star will glad-hand when needed, as it usually is in the always-traditional Nashville industry. But the report also claimed the rumoured album – Swift’s 13th, famously her lucky number – would be her last “for a while”, presumably because of her impending nuptials. So much of the discussion around the couple’s wedding is focused on what it will mean for Swift’s job. Will she take a break to “enjoy” marriage? Will it change her ambition? Will her songwriting suffer?

Laura Snapes is the Guardian’s deputy music editor

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The co-writer of enduring hits such as YMCA and Macho Man, who struggled with drug use and legal issues for years, passed away after ‘short but aggressive illness’

Victor Willis, the lead singer of the Village People, has died age 74. The group shared the news in a statement: “Victor passed on Monday 30 June 2026 of a short but aggressive illness,” they said. “Privacy is requested.”

The writer of what were widely accepted as canonical gay anthems in YMCA and Macho Man – also performed in costumes of hyper-masculine male stereotypes – Willis refuted the idea that YMCA was a gay anthem and threatened to sue “each and every news organisation” that made the claim.

For anyone furious about the state of the world, the London band offer a welcome – and unsparing – blast of catharsis

From South London
Recommended if you like Converge, Trap Them, Misery Index
Up next No One Is Coming to Save Us released 25 September, touring the UK from 26 September

Burner are the extreme musicians we need. They’re observing the world around them, they’re furious about what they see and they don’t feel much hope for the future. Much like the rest of us.

Over the past two decades, Taylor Swift has changed the music industry, and how we think about girlhood. From songs like Fifteen about first love and heartbreak to introspective tracks like Mirrorball from Folklore, Swift has chronicled the emotional lives of young women in a way few artists have. Her music says that the experiences of girlhood deserve to be immortalized. But as fans celebrate her upcoming marriage and the 20th anniversary of her debut album, Carter Sherman and the Guardian's deputy music editor, Laura Snapes, ask: is she leaving that stage of her life behind, and if so, what's in store for her next era?

• 20 ways Taylor Swift remade pop culture in her image (2026)

• Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’ (2019)

Correction note added 26 June 2026: This video incorrectly says Taylor Swift's jet has burned hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel since March. The figure is actually reported to be tens of thousands of gallons.

(Dead Oceans)
The US singer took years away from public life after her silvery balladry reshaped pop. Her return is an ornate reinvention

Since her Boygenius supergroup with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus went on hiatus in February 2024, Phoebe Bridgers has taken a wholehearted break from life in the public eye. Who could blame her? Bridgers became a figure of invasive parasocial behaviour from fans after her spooked, sad second album, 2020’s Punisher, resonated with life under lockdown and made her a superstar. In recent years, young women making introspective and ornate indie-rock songs have risen to startling, pop star levels of fame and scrutiny – and none more so than Bridgers and her peer Mitski. When Bridgers was rumoured to be engaged in 2022, fans possessed by her devastating music rued her happiness; when she started a new relationship, the gossip mill churned. In 2023, she castigated the so-called fans who aggressed her in an airport while on the way to her father’s funeral.

Even her recent analogue return has prompted reactions that might have a less self-possessed artist wondering why they bother. Last month, mysterious posters started appearing in small towns across the US advertising surprise $1 Bridgers shows in intimate venues later that night, before a concluding gig at New York’s gigantic Madison Square Garden. Phones were banned, along with any kind of recording device, including pen and paper, to stop audience members from writing down lyrics from her third album and sharing them online. The backlash to this – some fans accused her of ableism – prompted its own backlash, a tiresome Russian doll of discourse that’s still dragging on.

She has won acclaim and countless awards for her body-tapping, raspberry-blowing music. Now she has spent 15 years making her boldest work yet – an epic about birth, infancy and adolescence

It took Camille 15 years to make her new album. The Sound of Milk is a triple record, each part documenting a distinct stage of the French musician’s experience raising two kids with composer Clément Ducol: Naissance is from 2015, Enfance 2020 and Adolescence 2025. She could have put each one out when it was complete, she says, but realised she wasn’t ready. Her son and daughter, now teenagers, “were too little, and I would have felt too exposed to talk about it because it’s about beauty, joy, it’s very deep,” says Camille, calling from her home in the French countryside. “I needed to be able to step back and look at the journey. I needed to feel grounded enough to release it in a world that does not respect children and mothers.”

On the surface, much of Camille’s sixth album may sound very sweet. Naissance features no real instruments – it’s essentially a field recording of raising babies, all gurgles and found sound. Known for her vocal experimentation – beatboxing, raspberries – Camille saw it as a manifesto freeing singing from how disembodied it can be in pop. “As a woman, music is about a way of living,” she says. “It’s about breathing, being with my kids, singing along with what’s going on around me in an open world.” She calls Enfance a “pocket musical”: similarly atmospheric, it’s full of the kinds of ditties parents make up when they’re teaching kids about stairs and the washing machine – raising everyday maternal expressions up as art, I suggest. “I like what you’re saying,” she says. “All families are pieces of art. We create our values, our worlds, a way of talking to each other.”