Music

Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun Farewell Tour ended in August 2025, but on Friday she’ll be back onstage — in Las Vegas.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is kicking off her first Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. So far, it consists of five dates: April 24, 25 and 29, and May 1 and 2.

Cyndi initially described the show as “an opportunity for fans who missed my Farewell Tour to celebrate one last time.” However, at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in November, she told KABC-TV that she’s hoping to do some things that she wasn’t able to do when she was appearing in a different city every night.
 

“It’s an opportunity, because in Vegas they have all this new technology, and you can do art and music together,” she explained. “And I have this wonderful creative director that I’ve been working with, and we’re kind of like scientists sometimes, and I’m so excited about that.” 

In addition to Vegas, Cyndi has one other performance on her schedule. She’s performing at the Rock In Rio – Lisbon festival in Portugal June 27, where she’ll share a bill with her former tour mate Rod Stewart, as well as Guns N’ Roses, 4 Non Blondes and more.

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It’s a Beautiful Day, as Akon has just released his new studio album. It marks his first full-length project since 2008, though he’s continued to drop music over the years.

“Before I was just doing it to feed the passion,” he tells ABC Audio. “I had so much other stuff going on.” But he says music was something he “couldn’t let go of.”

Now, with more time on his hands, Akon felt ready to fully return to music. 

He says, “Things are freed up and on cruise control to the point where now I can go back to the passion and have fun back doing music again.”

The result is Beautiful Day, a genre- and culture-blending project that dives deeper into international sounds than he’s ever done before. 

“I was sneakin’ it in there. The labels, I had to fight them to put it on,” he says of past music. “Now, I’m like my own label, own distribution, my own mind, own decisions, and I can freely do what I wanna do and how I wanna to do it.”

Like its lead single, the album reflects gratitude and a new outlook on life. 

“I think there’s so much that’s going on in your life that we discount,” Akon says. “We’re so always focused on all the negative things because … they hit you a little harder. … So you find yourself spending more time and attention dealing with those things than you do about all the beautiful things around you that you should be grateful for.”

With age and experience, Akon’s mindset has shifted. He describes the album as a reflection of his growth, and understanding “how everything that happens in your life is supposed to happen.”

“The moment you embrace it all, all your worries, stress … goes away and every day becomes a beautiful day,” Akon says. 

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No need to ask a friend, we can tell you that the new Foo Fighters album is here.

Your Favorite Toy, the 12th studio effort from the “Everlong” outfit, is out now. It’s the follow-up to 2023’s But Here We Are, and arrives after a couple tumultuous years for Dave Grohl and company.

In September 2024, Grohl shared that he’d fathered a child outside his marriage, and the Foos canceled their remaining scheduled show. Then in May 2025, drummer Josh Freese, who’d joined Foo Fighters in 2023 following the 2022 death of Taylor Hawkins, announced that he’d been fired from the band.

The Foos officially reemerged in July 2025 with the single “Today’s Song.” They returned to the live stage in September 2025, which marked the debut of their new drummer, Ilan Rubin, formerly of Nine Inch Nails.

Another new song, “Asking for a Friend,” arrived in October 2025, before the Foos finally announced Your Favorite Toy in February and released its shouty title track. Two more songs, “Caught in the Echo” and “Of All People,” followed.

In addition to working through the tumult in new music, Grohl says he started going to therapy.

“I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks,” Grohl told The Guardian in an interview published in March. “I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions.”

Foo Fighters will celebrate the arrival of Your Favorite Toy on Saturday with a performance on Saturday Night Live UK. They will play a one-off show in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 28, followed by headlining sets at the Welcome to Rockville and BottleRock Napa festivals in May. They’ll launch a full North American stadium tour in August.

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Stephen Sanchez, best known for his hit “Until I Found You,” will release his sophomore album, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, on May 8, and he says that’s the theme of his tour, launching in Paris on Saturday.

Stephen’s first album, Angel Face, was a retro-sounding concept album, while LOVE, LOVE, LOVE is more of a straight-ahead pop album with some retro flavors. On tour, he says there will be no problem mixing those two sounds. “Overall, like when we play our live show, it’s not something that feels terribly similar to the record,” he explains.

“You know, we usually try and make it feel a bit bigger. Like … this is the record sound and this is the show sound. And so I think it’s easy for us to be able to kind of put these worlds together, you know album one and album two. It’s gonna be exciting and lots of lights and colors, and just a celebration of love for sure.”

While all of Stephen’s music has been well received, his retro sound, which you can hear in his latest single “Sweet Love,” may be the reason for his global audience.

“I hear a lot that it just feels accessible to anybody. It doesn’t feel like it leaves anybody out,” he tells ABC Audio.

“People will come up and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m in high school and I listen to it, or my brother who’s in college listens to it or our grandma loves it,'” he adds. “Hearing stuff like that makes me feel really good because, it feels like we’re actually getting to be a part of the world as a whole, and not just like a piece of it.”  

In March, Stephen told a fan on Instagram that U.S. tour dates would be coming “soon.”

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Greta Van Fleet’s Jake Kiszka has announced a new signature guitar with Gibson.

The Jake Kiszka SG Standard is inspired by Kiszka’s own beloved 1961 SG.

“The ’61, this particular model, has defined me as a player, and I think I’ve defined it in return,” Kiszka says in a statement.

You can watch Kiszka rock his signature guitar in a video for Gibson, now on YouTube. He’ll also be celebrating the launch with a Q&A event Thursday at the Gibson Garage in Nashville.

The Jake Kiszka SG Standard is on sale for $2,499. For more info, visit Gibson.com.

Greta Van Fleet’s most recent album is 2023’s Starcatcher. Kiszka has since launched a side project called Mirador, which released their debut album in 2025.

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Lena Waithe has announced the release date for the eighth and final season of The Chi. She shared the news with a video teasing what’s to come.

The clip features flashback moments of characters like Tiffany, Victor and Jake, blending scenes from earlier seasons with that of season 8. “Life comes at you fast whether you’re ready for it or not,” says a voice-over. “Everything has to come to an end.”

According to the official logline, season 8 will see The Chi enter its “coldest winter ever,” where “life or death choices must be made.” It adds, “The question becomes, who is willing to make them? Legacy, conflict, joy, and pain. It all collides in the biggest, most emotionally riveting way ever seen this season.”

The series, which premiered in 2018, stars Jacob Latimore, Birgundi Baker, Luke James, Shamon Brown Jr., Michael V. Epps, Hannaha Hall and Jason Weaver. It centers on a group of residents from Chicago’s South Side whose lives become linked through coincidences, tragedy, and a desire for community and redemption. 

Lena previously told Deadline that creating the show was “about owning our narratives and telling our stories with truth, care, nuance and complexity. It was about showing the soul of the South Side — the beauty, the pain, the grit, and the magic that lives in every block, and in every family.”

She said the decision to wrap things up came “after much reflection.”

“I know, for the sake of our story and our characters, it’s the right thing,” she told Deadline. “I am committed to delivering a final season that our Chi Family deserves.”

Season 8 of The Chi will premiere May 22 on Paramount+ with the Premium Plan.

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The new Michael Jackson biopic Micheal opens in theaters Friday, and while Diana Ross was good friend of the singer, she won’t be represented in the film.

Vampire Diaries star Kat Graham was cast to play Ross in the movie, but she revealed on social media that her part of the film has been cut.

“Ahead of the April 24 release of the Michael Jackson film, I want to share that certain legal considerations affected a few scenes, including the ones I filmed with an incredible cast,” she wrote on X. “Unfortunately, those moments are no longer part of the final cut, though the team worked hard to preserve as much of the story as possible.”

Graham didn’t go into detail about the scenes. Variety reported in early April that the film went through $15 million worth of reshoots and cut out scenes pertaining to Jackson’s child molestation accusations because a settlement with one of the singer’s accusers, Jordan Chandler, prevented his portrayal in the film.

Michael stars Michael’s nephew Jaafar Jackson in the title role, with Colman Domingo playing the star’s father, Joe Jackson.

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Niall Horan has released another song from his upcoming album, Dinner Party: “Little More Time.” Niall says it’s his favorite song on the album, adding that it’s about “wanting time to stand still. If you could just press pause and the world would stop yet you could still live within the world like no one was watching.” He explains, “I spend a lot of time away from home. So having found roots and wanting to be at home more, I felt compelled to write a song about the smaller moments and wishing that you could just stay in them.” Dinner Party is out June 5.

If you missed it in theaters, Charlie XCX’s movie The Moment will stream on HBO Max starting on May 29, and on regular HBO at 8 p.m. ET on May 30. Deadline describes it as a fictionalized version of her experiences during brat summer.

VIVA LALISA, the upcoming Las Vegas residency by LISA from BLACKPINK, sold out in under 10 minutes on Thursday. The residency, the first one by a K-pop artist, will take over The Colosseum at Caesars Palace on Nov. 13 and 14, and Nov. 27 and 28.

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A new documentary about blink-182 drummer Travis Barker is set to premiere on Hulu.

The film is called Travis Barker: Louder than Fear and is due out in the summer.

“Travis personally called about this doc to say, ‘I want to tell this story … I was in this plane crash that I walked away from, and it fundamentally changed me,'” Disney executive Rob Mills tells TheWrap.

Barker was a passenger on a plane that crashed in 2008, killing four people. He and his friend Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein were the only survivors. Goldstein later died in 2009.

Barker suffered burns and underwent multiple surgeries. He also developed PTSD from the crash, and dealt with survivor’s guilt.

For a long time after the crash Barker refused to fly and would even take boats to international gigs. Barker’s since started flying again and has credited his wife, Kourtney Kardashian, for the encouragement.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News and Hulu.

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