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, Ed Sheeran is ready to Play, Drake showcases a surprising guest and Twenty One Pilots conclude another story. Check out all of this week’s picks below:

Ed Sheeran, Play 

Following a pair of somber albums in 2023, Ed Sheeran returns to brightly lit pop with Play, which combines explorations of global sounds (the upbeat singles “Azizam” and “Sapphire”), wistful reflections (“Old Phone” and “Heaven”) and more fodder for wedding playlists (“The Vow,” a touching ode to his marriage which actually sounds primed for your vow-renewal gatherings). 

Drake feat. Yeat & Julia Wolf, “Dog House” 

Although Drake and Yeat spend the majority of “Dog House” trading bars about money, sex and power — with Drizzy even quoting his own No. 1 smash “One Dance” at one point — the surprise star here is indie singer-songwriter Julia Wolf, who provides a jolt of energy on the song’s introduction before the zapped beat, and Drake’s chest-thumping boasts, are crashed in.

Twenty One Pilots, Breach 

If 2024’s Clancy didn’t exactly end the multi-album narrative arc that Twenty One Pilots had been crafting for years, then new full-length Breach places a period on this particular journey — while also offering some of the long-running alt-rock duo’s most bruising riffs and immediate hooks to date, climaxing with the five-and-a-half minute centerpiece “Downstairs” in the middle of the track list.

Kali Uchis feat. Ravyn Lenae, “Cry About It!”

A few years after Kali Uchis successfully transcended a viral hit to set up a sturdy mainstream career, Ravyn Lenae is attempting to do the same as “Love Me Not” continues racking up streams by the million; together, the singer-songwriters spin gold together on the hypnotic “Cry About It!,” which pairs Uchis’ sighing harmonies with Lenae’s probing tone, and lets the swaying chorus contain both of their colorful personalities.

John Summit feat. Inéz, “Crystallized” 

Few dance artists have enjoyed multi-year runs as explosive as John Summit in the first half of the 2020s, and the producer continues that success with “Crystallized,” a surprisingly emotional banger in which a propulsive beat and laser-beam synths coalesce around singer Inéz’s vulnerabilities, resulting in some delectable late-summer beat drops.

Editor’s Pick: JADE, That’s Showbiz Baby! 

Although Jade Thirlwall spent over a decade as a member of the great UK girl group Little Mix, That’s Showbiz Baby!, her debut solo album as JADE, is easily the boldest, most forward-thinking project of her career: pre-release singles like “Angel of My Dreams” and “IT Girl” still dazzle in a full-length setting, while deeper cuts like the futuristic R&B track “Glitch” and the disco-adjacent ode to her mother, “Unconditional,” show the breath of JADE’s pop artistry.

Russell Dickerson earns his fifth No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart as “Happen to Me” ascends a place to the top of the tally dated Sept. 20. During the Sept. 5-11 tracking week, the single increased by 18% to 31.6 million audience impressions, according to Luminate.

The song was co-written by Jessie Jo Dillon, Chris LaCorte and Chase McGill. Dickerson co-produced it with Josh Kerr and LaCorte. It’s from Dickerson’s new LP, Famous Back Home (he’s from Union City, Tenn.), which arrived at No. 34 on Top Country Albums (Sept. 6) with 9,000 equivalent album units.

The 38-year-old Dickerson, who is based in Nashville, linked four straight career-starting Country Airplay No. 1s: “Yours” (for two weeks beginning in January 2018); “Blue Tacoma” (one week, October 2018); “Every Little Thing” (one, November 2019); and “Love You Like I Used To” (two, November 2020).

“Happen to Me” follows Dickerson’s “Bones,” which hit No. 36 on Country Airplay last July; “God Gave Me You” (No. 2, November 2023); “She Likes It,” with Jake Scott (No. 16, October 2022); and “Home Sweet” (No. 11, March 2022).

Dickerson’s four-year, nine-month and three-week break between Country Airplay leaders marks the longest since Brad Paisley waited seven years, nine months and three weeks between “Perfect Storm” in 2015 and “Freedom Was a Highway,” with Jimmie Allen, in 2022.

Meanwhile, “Happen to Me” continues crossing over, rising 23-21 on the Adult Pop Airplay chart and reentering Pop Airplay at No. 40 (after reaching No. 39).

Currently on tour, Dickerson makes his next stop on Wallingford, Conn., on Sept. 18.

‘Darlin’ ’ of a Tune

Chase Matthew scores his second career-opening Country Airplay top 10 as “Darlin’,” which he co-authored, pushes 12-10 (17.5 million, up 10%). The Sevierville, Tenn., native, 27, sent his rookie entry, “Love You Again,” to No. 9 last September.

“Darlin’ ” is from Matthew’s album We All Grow Up, released in February 2024.

Earlier this year, at the age of 70, Chandrika Tandon won her first Grammy — and it may not be her last.

After taking home the award in February for best new age, ambient or chant album for her project Triveni, Tandon — a renowned businesswoman, philanthropist and grandmother — is now vying for her third Grammy nomination, but this time in the best global music album category, with a new project called Soul Ecstasy that she quietly released just before the Aug. 30 deadline to submit nominations for the 68th Grammy Awards.

“I was really trying to show [Indian] classical music in a simpler light — make it more accessible, make it more singable,” Tandon tells Billboard of the album, her seventh, which features 14 classical Indian ragas — melodic frameworks — with complex 6-, 7-, 8-, 10- and 16-beat rhythms. Having built what she describes as a “mini cult following” around her first six albums, now, she says: “I would really love to broaden the audience.”

Blending ancient Vedic verses and Indian classical traditions with vibrant instrumentation and choral arrangements, Soul Ecstasy is part of Tandon’s mission of spreading joy through both economic and emotional empowerment. The eight-song collection was recorded in New York and India with Tandon’s longtime collaborator Pandit Tejendra Narayan Majumdar.

“This album is about giving listeners access to their own joyous state in a blissful way,” says Tandon. “The songs are more high-energy than my past work, and the choral elements invite people to experience that ecstasy together.”

But producing the new album wasn’t easy: To do it, Tandon and her collaborators assembled 75 musicians from Calcutta who played more than 25 different traditional Indian instruments, as well as 16 classical singers whom they trained to sing together as a choir — a tall order and unorthodox idea given that “a lot of Indian music, classical music, is about individual expression.”

Born and raised in India, Tandon now lives in New York, serving as the current artist-in-residence for Young People’s Chorus of New York City. She was the first Indian-American woman to be made partner at consultancy giant McKinsey and Co. and then founded her own Tandon Capital Associates, but studied music at every opportunity, taking vocal lessons in her free time, training between her business meetings with Indian music masters and singing for 10 hours a day on days her daughter was occupied at summer camp. In recent years, she has devoted herself to philanthropy, supporting education and economic empowerment through the Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation, donating $100 million with her husband 10 years ago to establish the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and earning honors that include the Ban-Ki Moon Award for Women’s Empowerment and NYU’s Gallatin Medal. She releases her music through her nonprofit label Soul Chants Music.

To promote her new album, Tandon is planning immersive performances at The Town Hall in New York and Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, where she’ll lead meditation, sing-alongs, and “sacred sound experiences.”

“I want my music to be a beautiful offering to the world,” Tandon reflected. “My prayer is that Soul Ecstasy helps listeners begin their own journey into inner bliss.”

Tandon talked to Billboard about her devoted fanbase, and the goal of traditional Indian music and why Grammy voters and contenders should listen.

You have a cult following, receiving thousands of messages after the release of your Grammy-nominated debut album, Soul Call, in 2009. Who are your fans?

Funnily enough, the 18- to 40-year-old man is my biggest demographic. Which is not what I would expect. There’s a big demographic who like India and Indian classical music. And there’s also a big demographic of that group that likes spiritual music of any kind — anything devotional. The yoga community. I would love to broaden the audience, so that’s part of the idea.

You’ve spent time recording music all over the world, from Lebanon to Brazil. What makes traditional Indian music different?

In Indian music, you have to really settle your mind, because a lot of it is around pitch and resonance. There are a lot of areas around a note, but the best teachers try to get you to the purity of that thin point of the note. That requires your mind to be quiet. I’d walk into a class and the teacher would say, “You know, you’re not here, you’re elsewhere, your mind is distracted. Let’s spend the next 45 minutes on one note.” You do that for 10 minutes and it’s a little boring. By about the 20th minute, you’re in a bit of a zone. And then remaining 10 minutes, you’re in a space of such a peace that you find yourself. So then I said, “Well, this is very interesting. I’ve got to get into meditation. I’ve got to understand why I feel so happy.” Because that’s what was happening. Music helped me find myself. I started writing “love, light, laughter” on every email I wrote.

What can other Grammy contenders take from this album?

If you look at the goal of what Indian music is, what my earliest teachers have told me, from the very beginning is that music is, you do music to find the divine in you. And then, and then they say when you step out of the way, the divine takes over.

Soul Ecstasy is a very important title, and a very important goal, and a state of being that we can always aspire to, because when we reach deep inside us, it’s not just about peace and quiet. There’s a part when you really get to a beautiful, quiet spot and you can really bubble up with joy.

Where do you keep your Grammy that you won for Triveni?

In my prayer room.

Limp Bizkit are back with their first new song in four years and it is a classic Bizkit banger. “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” bursts out of the gate with a funky wah-wah guitar riff before a marching band beat bubbles up and singer Fred Durst launches into a sung-rap tribute to some fallen rock heroes.

“Damn, I miss you Chester/ Sending love from a bass compressor/ Ground control with a soul like Bowie/ And I’ll chop you up if I’m under pressure,” Durst raps in the opening couplet paying homage to late Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington and rock icon David Bowie.

From there, if you can believe it — and if you’ve ever listened to a single Bizkit song before, you can — it gets way, way weirder. 

“Bizkit beats from the pirate band/ Signed this deal with a lobster hand/ Freestyle like a bowling pin/ Flex these bars on a dolphin fin,” Durst raps over the spare backing track. “Life’s too short, but I can’t complain/ Doin’ backflips on a candy cane/ Ride my scooter with a cape at night/ And I’ma high-five me a traffic light.”

Naturally.

By the time the explosive, Beastie Boys-nodding “Hey, ladies” chorus comes around, true Bizkitheads might be having flashbacks to the band’s beloved 2000 Billboard 200 No. 1 album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, which featured similarly absurdist shout-it-out-loud nu-metal anthems such as “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” and “My Way.”

Durst isn’t done climbing to the top of mount weird, also claiming in the lengthy first verse that he got “kicked out of the Trump resort” in a seeming reference to Donald Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago residence. The second verse is no less random, with lyrics about moonwalking on a UFO, dropping bars while brushing teeth and a shout out to legendary 2001 blaxploitation-adjacent comedy Pootie Tang. 

Propelled by one of guitarist Wes Borland’s hypnotic riffs, crunching beats, old-school record scratches and the group’s signature shouty choruses, the whole thing comes crashing to a close with a pummeling final chorus that finally nods to the country star in the title.

“I make this motherf—ker diamond plated/ Makin’ love to Morgan Wallen in an elevator/ I’ll be turnin’ on you b–ches like a generator,” Durst spits over the titanic beat with no context whatsoever for the shout-out to the country chart dominator. 

In keeping with their determination to put the biggest target on their own back, Durst ends with a classic DGAF Bizkit kiss-off, “I’ll be the greatest motherf—ker that you ever hated/ That you ever hated.”

The new single is the first fresh music from the band since 2021’s “Dad Vibes” single from their sixth studio album, Still Sucks. They teased it in their patented jokey fashion last week by pretending to be outraged that L.A. drummer Kristina Rybalchenko “leaked” the song by playing along to it in a video. “Kristina, that’s our new song, it’s now out yet, how did you get that?” an annoyed Durst says in the clip after busting through the door and wagging his finger at her while warning not to post it online.

Listen to “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” below.

A year after Neil Young launched a new backing band called The Chrome Hearts, the rock legend is now facing a surprising new problem: A trademark infringement lawsuit from a decades-old fashion brand with the exact same name.

The case, filed Thursday, comes from Chrome Hearts, a luxury brand that’s been using that name since the late 1980s for apparel, jewelry and accessories. Its lawyers say the name of Young’s new group – which debuted last year and released an album this summer – is clearly infringing the company’s “unique and valuable” name.

“Defendants’ continued use of the confusingly similar [Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts] name in commerce violates Chrome Hearts’ valuable intellectual property rights,” reads the lawsuit, obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Defendants have intentionally and knowingly capitalized off of confusion between the Chrome Hearts [trademarks] and the NYTCH name.”

For decades, Young has toured and recorded off-and-on with the band Crazy Horse, often under the name Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But last year, after he called that group’s summer tour due to an unspecific illness in the band, he debuted out The Chrome Hearts at FarmAid in September. The new group released its debut Talkin to the Trees album in June, and has been on a world tour this summer.

That was all apparently unwelcome news for Chrome Hearts, a Los Angeles-based brand that says it has sold apparel and other goods under that name – often written in a Gothic script with stylized cross – since 1988.

In its lawsuit this week, the company claimed that consumers are going to be confused by Young’s new name — mostly by mistakenly believing that the fashion brand has launched an official sponsored collaboration with the iconic singer.

“The likelihood of confusion is not merely hypothetical,” Chrome Hearts’ lawyers write. “Some clothing and apparel vendors have apparently already mistakenly assumed that there is a connection between NYTCH and Chrome Hearts, and are actively promoting [it.]”

Trademark law doesn’t grant anyone an absolute monopoly on words, and it only protects a brand name to the extent that it’s used on similar goods or services in a way that confuses consumers into falsely thinking there’s a connection. That’s why Delta Air Lines and Delta Faucet can both peacefully co-exist on completely different products.

Would music fans really be misled into thinking there’s connection to a fashion brand when they see “Chrome Hearts” next to Neil Young’s name on an album cover or a concert poster? That could be a difficult case for the company’s lawyers to prove in court. But the use of “Chrome Hearts” on band t-shirts and other similar merchandise might be a closer case.

To support that crucial confusion argument, Chrome Hearts cites several previous collabs with musical artists, including The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Rihanna, Drake, Lou Reed and Cher. The company also says Timothée Chalamet wore a Chrome Hearts leather suit on a red carper last year while promoting his Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”

“The Chrome Hearts brand has become iconic, especially in the fashion and music industries,” the group’s lawyers say. “And that was the intention. From the very beginning, the company placed special emphasis on promoting the Chrome Hearts brand among and with the help of musicians.”

Earlier this summer, Chrome Hearts says it reached out to Young’s team with a letter “respectfully requesting” that he stop using the name. But they say those efforts were unsuccessful – meaning the company “is now forced to bring this complaint to protect its valuable and longstanding intellectual property rights.”

The lawsuit is seeking an injunction that would immediately force Young to stop using the Chrome Hearts name, which the group is currently using each night on its “Love Earth Tour” across Europe and North America. It is also seeking damages, though it did not specify how much.

Representatives for Young and attorneys for Chrome Hearts did not immediately return requests for comment on Friday.