Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
This week, Dua Lipa gets the party re-started, Kendrick Lamar is drinking Haterade, and Gunna drops another zonked-out hit. Check out all of this week’s picks below:
Dua Lipa, Radical Optimism
In the four years since the release of her sophomore album Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa has become an A-list celebrity — popping up in blockbuster films and at fashion shows, owning magazine covers and arena stages — and it’s all thanks to the smashes that came from that disco-revival opus, as well as the one-off singles (like “Cold Heart” and “Dance the Night”) that followed. Lipa’s hits are the engine of her increasing visibility, and Radical Optimism attempts to pile up more W’s while revealing more of the artist behind them: operating over candy-coated dance production and attacking each chorus with full-throated vigor, Lipa sings about desire and betrayal — although sometimes the quieter moments of the album, like on the understated guitar-pop of “Maria,” cut the deepest.
Kendrick Lamar, “6:16 in LA” and “Euphoria”
Kendrick Lamar has had a productive week while staring at a photo of Drake on his bulletin board: as the rap-superstar feud continues, K. Dot has dropped a pair of snarling diss tracks aimed at questioning the very fiber of his opponent’s being. Earlier this week we received…
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