Rolling Stone May 2022

BAD BUNNY’S LIFE THESE DAYS is one victory lap after another. He kicked off the year by celebrating his 2020 album El Último Tour del Mundo — an ambitious LP inspired by the idea of the last tour on Earth — with an appropriately awesome IRL tour of U.S. arenas. The shows delivered on the album’s live-wire energy with performances of songs like the moody alt-rock anthem “Maldita Pobreza” and the clubby megahit “Dákiti,” and left fans hungry for more. Luckily, Bad Bunny wasn’t even close to done. The tour’s final stop in Miami coincided with the Grammys, where El Último Tour took home the first-ever Best Música Urbana Album trophy; and the Puerto Rican superstar will be back soon for an even bigger U.S. stadium tour that starts in…

IN THE SPRING OF 2020, Julia Cumming felt lost. The pandemic had just shut down live music, disrupting countless livelihoods, and for Sunflower Bean — the New York rock trio with such a ceaseless commitment to performing in bars, clubs, and theaters that they were once named the city’s hardest-working band by a local listings site — it hit with particularly dizzying force. “Those first 10 weeks were bleak,” says Cumming, Sunflower Bean’s bassist and one of two lead singers in the band. “So much of my self-worth was based on being a performer. All the parts of myself that I liked. Having that removed was like an identity crisis.” Stuck at home in Manhattan as the virus raged outside her door, she didn’t know where to begin. Neither did Nick Kivlen,…

EWEN SPENCER spent the late Nineties at the center of a London nightlife boom. Flush with end-of-history optimism and irreverent British snark, a new generation fostered an environment where subcultures could thrive and parties could run wild. Working for the upstart magazine Sleazenation, Spencer spent his weekends snapping photos of late-night euphoria that appeared alongside club listings and reviews in the back pages. More than 20 years later, Spencer has collected his photos from this era in a new book, While You Were Sleeping, 1998-2000. Lately, Spencer says, he’s seen signs of that old energy coming back. “Clubbing now is almost replicating what we’re seeing in these pictures,” he says. “People are harking back to this era.”…

ONE DAY IN MARCH, Anitta woke up, groggy and a little hungover, and found out she was the biggest artist in the world. Her slinky, sex-positive song “Envolver” had just topped Spotify’s global charts, making her the first Brazilian artist to ever reach that spot with a solo single. “My cellphone is going crazy,” Anitta says on a Zoom call from Rio later that day, flashing a radiant smile and sounding a little breathless from all the excitement. “It’s in all the newspapers, the TV news, everything. The whole country is literally, like, stopped.” She was rehearsing for Coachella, where she would again make history, as the first Brazilian artist to perform on the festival’s main stage, and preparing to release her new album, Versions of Me. The album, more than three…

WHEN LUCKY DAYE talks about his album Candydrip, he sounds like a master chef. “I wanted this to be about taste,” says the R&B singer, 36. “You might get supersweet, or you might get supersavory.” The album is split between upbeat pop tunes and slower, sexier numbers. One highlight, “NWA,” isn’t named for the pioneering rap group so much as a feeling about his own experience. “Growing up, when I heard the term ‘NWA,’ I never thought about the group,” he says. “It was the way people perceived me. When I am in the elevator and somebody doesn’t want to get in with me, it’s probably because they are scared of me. People fear the greatness in me.” 10-SECOND BIO HOMETOWN New Orleans AWARD TOUR His 2021 EP, Table for Two, featuring duets…

MOVIE 1. ‘Men’ Filmmaker Alex Garland (Ex Machina) returns with a tale of a woman (Jessie Buckley) grieving a lost loved one in the English countryside. She thinks someone may be stalking her, at which point things take a turn for the terrifying and deeply weird. GAME 2. Quordle For those who find Wordle too easy, Quordle challenges you to solve four Wordles at a time in nine tries. Each guessed word applies to all four puzzles, though each answer is different. It’s an exhilarating mental hellscape. BOOK 3. ‘Anna, the Biography’ A dissection of one of fashion’s most controversial figures and a window into the glossy pages of Vogue, Amy Odell’s definitive Anna Wintour bio balances criticism with understanding and stories of true sadism: Imagine telling Oprah to lose 20 pounds for a cover. PODCAST 4. ‘Punk in Translation:…