The hiatus is officially over. The Killers announced today that they'll drop Battle Born, their first album since 2008's Day & Age, on September 18. And to mark the occasion, the band has delivered a brand-new jam, "Runaways," full of all the epic aw-shucks-iness we've come to expect. Hooray!
He’s growing old like the rest of us, sure, and maybe prone to weepy fits of nostalgia for a bygone era where music was earnest and not controlled by social media, shock value, and fucking stupid neon hats, but there’s still something noble about R. Kelly’s quest to dig up the classics of R&B and process them through his personal branding machine. This project started in earnest in 2009, when he began singing Sam Cooke songs during his sets. Then came the infamous Christmas party where he performed the entirety of Cooke’s 1964 show at the Copacabana, which, in turn, inspired Love Letter, Kelly’s throwback album that featured the single “When a Woman Loves.”
“Super-consistent singles artist” is turning out to be a pretty good look for Nas. “The Don,” the second quasi-leak off Life Is Good (his 10th album, supposedly the last one he owes Def Jam, release date as usual an ephemeral abstraction), is more barreling ‘90s-style fast-rap in the vein of “Nasty,” from last August. That’s a one-hot “Made You Look"-esque-banger-every-eight-months average! (It’s interesting how, after being defined for almost two decades by his willingness or refusal to validate our nostalgia by reminding us of the kid who made Illmatic, the moment he chooses to consciously evoke now is 2002 — although there are way worse templates to build on than “Made You Look,” the highlight of the muddled retrenchment-move God’s Son, right down to that hook, a whole yearbook photo’s worth of dudes yelling Braaaaaavehearts from a roof, as if to scatter pigeons.)
