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“I am thrilled to be headlining LA Pride in the Park because it's an incredible opportunity to celebrate love, diversity, and equality,” Martin saidView the full article

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Both artists are on the bill for the California country music festival taking place this weekend, but the long-teased song has yet to be released View the full article

Lately, the young and incisive Chicago rap great Saba has been working closely with legendary producer and fellow Chicagoan No ID. They’re slowly rolling out the collaborative album From The Private Collection Of Saba And No ID, and we’ve already posted their singles “Back In Office” and “hue_man nature.” Now, they’re back with another one. View the full article

Moby is an open book — literally. Few electronic producers across the last several decades have been the focus of such a sustained level of public and press attention the way the 58-year-old mononymous superstar (known in government documents as Richard Melville Hall) has. There’s a lot out there to know about Moby, and much of it he’s made available by his own design: His twin memoirs, 2016’s Porcelain: A Memoir and Then It Fell Apart from 2019, are at turns revelatory, highly entertaining, and straight-up deeply unpleasant to consume. Even as his own ability to be wholly truthful about the past has come under scrutiny (more on that later), his warts-and-all approach to laying out his own personal travails would leave one to believe that, when it comes to reflecting on his recent and distant past, Moby is simply out of stories to tell. View the full article

From North Africa to the Persian Gulf, from Rai to dance-pop to romantic balladsView the full article

"I was a fan of Kiki’s before she submitted her name to be considered — and it’s great that someone of her acumen will be part of our touring family," Corgan says of new member with sizable social media followingView the full article

But the answer stumped all three contestantsView the full article

This summer, the Smashing Pumpkins will head out on a gigantic stadium tour with Green Day and Rancid. It’s their highest-profile tour in a very long time, and they’ll do it without guitarist Jeff Schroeder, who joined the band in 2006 and left last year. In January, the Smashing Pumpkins posted a wanted ad for a new guitarist, and more than 10,000 people applied for the position. The band reviewed the submissions and held in-person auditions in Los Angeles. Today, the band announced that LA shredder Kiki Wong will join them on the road. View the full article

On the latest episode of Rolling Stone's The Breakdown, the Memphis rapper dives into her popular singleView the full article

The Mexican pop star formerly known as Danna Paola opens up about working with Omar Apollo, singing about having a crush on a girl, and deciding to change her nameView the full article

The U.K. singer-songwriter and producer Aaron Dessner talk about her new album: "What would it be like to feel fully?"View the full article

Chief Keef is coming home. In the early ’10s, the teenage Sosa popularized Chicago drill, and the genre has now swept across the planet. During his rise to fame, though, Keef was constantly in trouble with the law, and his Chicago performances were shut down again and again. For more than a decade, Keef has essentially been banned in Chicago. View the full article

"It was really profound and special," says Paul BanksView the full article

Singer also debuts new song "Two Million Secrets" in addition to renditions of singles he penned for Rihanna, Beyoncé and himselfView the full article

Loretta Lynn could write. It takes a rare and difficult-to-quantify set of skills to write a great country song. You need to be able to tell a rich, emotionally resonant story — maybe saccharine, maybe not — in as few words as possible. Those words need to make musical sense, and they need to be written for someone who can inhabit those words. Nashville supports an entire industry of people whose job it is to crank out country songs, and the writers often aren’t the ones singing the songs. That industry has existed for nearly a century, and in that time, there haven’t been many writers sharper than Loretta Lynn. View the full article

Most fast-rising rap stars flood the zone, releasing a ton of music and jumping on a ton of other artists’ tracks. Ice Spice has gone the opposite direction. She’s been famous for nearly two years now, but she still hasn’t released a proper album. She debuted a new song at Coachella, but the only single that she’s actually released this year was the “Think U The Shit (Fart)” back in January. Regular collaborator RIOTUSA produces basically all of her music. So it’s pretty notable that Ice Spice just made an appearance on a track from two other New York drill artists. View the full article

Mötley Crüe have been embroiled in a nasty legal battle with their former guitarist Mick Mars, who retired from touring due to an arthritic condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, then sued his bandmates for kicking him out of the band altogether. Mars (real name Robert Alan Deal) was intending to keep recording with the Crüe and doing limited performances, but he’s been replaced by John 5, best known for his work with Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie. View the full article

Last night, before headlining this weekend’s second edition of the Las Vegas festival Sick New World, Slipknot played a warmup gig at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, CA. In doing so, they debuted their new full-time drummer. He was of course wearing a mask, but any Maggot will tell you it’s Eloy Casagrande, who left the long-running Brazilian band Sepultura last month. Casagrande announced his departure from Sepultura in an Instagram post, writing that “decisions needed to be made thinking about new cycles that will come.” By joining Slipknot, Casagrande has finished a weird story about three metal bands basically pulling off a three-team trade. View the full article

Today, the reliably hedonistic French blog-house duo Justice return with Hyperdrama, their first new album in eight years. When Justice officially announced the album in January, they led it off with the silky, disco-adjacent track “One Night/All Night,” their first collaboration with Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker. (They also shared the early singles “Generator,” “Incognito,” and the Miguel collab “Saturnine.”) Now that Hyperdrama is finally out, we get to hear the other track that Justice made with Tame Impala. View the full article

Enlarge / Tech brands love hollering about the purported thrills of AI these days. (credit: Getty) Logitech announced a new mouse last week. A company rep reached out to inform Ars of Logitech’s “newest wireless mouse.” The gadget’s product page reads the same as of this writing. I’ve had good experience with Logitech mice, especially wireless ones, one of which I'm using now. So I was keen to learn what Logitech might have done to improve on its previous wireless mouse designs. A quieter click? A new shape to better accommodate my overworked right hand? Multiple onboard profiles in a business-ready design? I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

The HMD Pulse base model. [credit: HMD ] HMD has been known as the manufacturer of Nokia-branded phones for years now, but now the company wants to start selling phones under its own brand. The first is the "HMD Pulse" line, a series of three low-end phones that are headed for Europe. The US is getting an HMD-branded phone, too—the HMD Vibe—but that won't be out until May. Europe's getting the 140-euro HMD Pulse, 160-euro Pulse+, and the 180-euro Pulse Pro. If you can't tell from the prices, these are destined for Europe for now, but if you convert them to USD, that's about $150, $170, and $190, respectively. With only $20 between tiers, there isn't a huge difference from one model to the next. They all have bottom-of-the-barrel Unisoc T606 SoCs. That's a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, an ARM Mali-G57 MP1, and it's 4G only. Previously, HMD used this chip in the 2023 HMD Nokia G22. They also all have 90 Hz, 6.65-inch, 1612×720 LCDs, 128GB of storage, and 5,000 mAh batteries. As for the differences, the base model has 4GB of RAM, a 13 MP main rear camera, an 8 MP front camera, and 10 W wired charging. The Plus model upgrades to a 50 MP main camera, while the Pro model has 6GB of RAM, a 50 MP main camera, 50 MP front camera, and 20 W wired charging. There is a second lens camera on the back, but it appears to be only a 2 MP "depth sensor" on all models. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / Ubuntu has come a long way over nearly 20 years, to the point where you can now render 3D Ubuntu coffee mugs and family pictures in a video announcing the 2024 spring release. (credit: Canonical) History might consider the most important aspect of Ubuntu 24.04 to be something that it doesn't have: vulnerabilities to the XZ backdoor that nearly took over the global Linux scene. Betas, and the final release of Ubuntu 24.04, a long-term support (LTS) release of the venerable Linux distribution, were delayed, as backing firm Canonical worked in early April 2024 to rebuild every binary included in the release. xz Utils, an almost ubiquitous data-compression package on Unix-like systems, had been compromised through a long-term and elaborate supply-chain attack, discovered only because a Microsoft engineer noted some oddities with SSH performance on a Debian system. Ubuntu, along with just about every other regularly updating software platform, had a lot of work to do this month. Canonical's Ubuntu 24.04 release video, noting 20 years of Ubuntu releases. I always liked the brown. What is actually new in Ubuntu 24.04, or "Noble Numbat?" Quite a bit, especially if you're the type who sticks to LTS releases. The big new changes are a very slick new installer, using the same Subiquity back-end as the Server releases, and redesigned with a whole new front-end in Flutter. ZFS encryption is back as a default install option, along with hardware-backed (i.e., TPM) full-disk encryption, plus more guidance for people looking to dual-boot with Windows setups and BitLocker. Netplan 1.0 is the default network configuration tool now. And the default installation is "Minimal," as introduced in 23.10. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the company’s first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly. Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time. Ahead of the chips' launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices. Dubbed the Snapdragon X Plus, it shares a lot in common with the flagship Snapdragon X Elite. The Snapdragon X Plus includes 10 CPU cores instead of the Elite’s 12, though the more noticeable change is its lack of support for clock-speed boosting; the chip’s 3.4 GHz base frequency is as fast as it goes, where the Elite chips can boost two cores to 4.2 GHz and one core up to 4.3 GHz, depending on the specific model. Qualcomm also rates the X Plus’ integrated GPU at 3.8 TFLOPs, down from the X Elite’s maximum of 4.6 TFLOPs. Aside from those high-level FLOP numbers, we still know very little about how the GPU will be configured; we also don’t know the ratio of “big” and “little” CPU cores. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) “Gadgets aren’t fun anymore,” sighed my wife, watching me tap away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the couch with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch. And it’s true: The smartphone has all but eliminated entire classes of gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 players, GPS maps, and even flashlights. But arguably no style of gadget has been so thoroughly superseded as the personal digital assistant, the handheld computer that dominated the late '90s and early 2000s. The PDA even set the template for how its smartphone successors would render it obsolete, moving from simple personal information management to encompass games, messaging, music, and photos. But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and how they paved the way for what we use now. Read 92 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article