On Thursday night (July 17), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to allow President Donald Trump to claw back $9 billion in federal funds, including $1.1 billion to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds the country’s more than 1,500 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) stations. The money had already been allocated to CPB for the next two budget years, but the bill cancels funds the CPB had expected to receive and that the stations were counting on. The Senate approved the rescissions on Wednesday (July 16).

The action has wide-ranging, potentially devastating effects, including on the arts programs PBS and NPR produce, including Austin City Limits (ACL). The longest-running music program in TV history is coming off its 50^th anniversary and for half a century has provided a vital and vigorous home for live performance, featuring music from all genres — Foo Fighters, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles, Coldplay, Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Dolly Parton, Kendrick Lamar and hundreds more.

“This is a kick in the gut, and it really does hurt,” says Terry Lickona, who has served as ACL’s executive producer since 1979. “This comes as a blow, not just for Austin City Limits, of course, but it’s a dark day for public media almost 60 years since [President Lyndon B. Johnson] signed public broadcasting into law.” (Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 in November of that year, creating the CPB, which gave “a stronger voice to educational radio and television by providing new funds for broadcast facilities,” Johnson said. “We want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.”)

Willie Nelson, who performed on the first episode of ACL in 1974, tells Billboard, “Austin City Limits and PBS were and are an essential part of education, understanding, curiosity and empathy, which are the essentials and building blocks of humanity.”

Austin’s local PBS station, known as Austin PBS, produces, funds and owns ACL. The station is expected to lose $3 million from the cuts, Lickona says.

It’s too soon to know how much of that loss of $3 million in federal funding will directly affect ACL, and the equation is further clouded by the fact that PBS Austin and ACL share many staffers. “But what’s important now, more than ever, is we are going to have to lean and lean hard on the support of people who’ve come to depend on our show,” says Lickona, who vows ACL will go on. “We’ve going to have to get that money from somewhere else.” (On average, PBS stations receive around 15% of their annual budgets from federal funding, according to the New York Times, with some stations in rural communities with fewer donor opportunities relying on the federal dollars for a much higher percentage.)

Lickona estimates that 25% of ACL’s operating budget relies on federal funding. For the 51^st season, which is already underway, the budget is around $4 million. This amount represents 20 artist tapings — funneled into 13 episodes —with a budget of around $200,000 per taping, which means ACL will likely need to make up at least $1 million.

This season is already at a budget deficit of $350,000, says Lickona, who has been looking for more underwriters to make up the shortfall. The task is made slightly more difficult because PBS limits the number of national underwriters a show can have, a rule Lickona hopes that PBS will consider changing, considering the federal funding loss.

Lickona is daunted but not deterred. “Nothing lasts 50 years without a lot of struggle and a lot of challenges, financial, political and otherwise,” he says. “We will carry on somehow, because too many people depend on Austin City Limits for these 50 years.”

In addition to funding from corporate and individual donors, ACL also receives money from a licensing agreement with Live Nation for the Austin City Limits festival and, starting last year, funds from the Texas Film Commission. Lickona is unsure what will happen with the state funding following the federal change. “We can’t count on anything as far as that state money goes,” he says.

For now, Lickona says there will be no major changes to ACL and its schedule. “There are no immediate plans to cut back or alter the program in any way, but we will need the continuous support of music lovers and sponsors now more than ever, as well as the support of artists, labels, publicists and managements to stand with us as they have for 50 years,” he says.

Some artists are already stepping up. Before the cuts were announced, Jason Isbell was slated to play an Aug. 21 private fundraiser for Austin PBS, and Lickona is hoping more will help raise funds. “We have done a lot to benefit artists’ careers over the years, and they totally get it and appreciate it, and I think we’re going to have to call upon their support,” he says.

Reba McEntire was among those who spoke out against the cuts prior to the Senate vote. On July 11, she posted to Instagram, “From my appearances on Austin City Limits in 1987 to South Pacific from Carnegie Hall in 2006, I’ve had a long relationship with PBS,” before calling on people to check out protectmypublicmedia.com to “help keep PBS delivering the incredible programming we all love so much.”  

Lickona doesn’t see ACL pairing with a streaming or cable outlet as PBS stalwart Sesame Street, which in 2015 partnered with HBO, and now Netflix, to premiere episodes before they ran on PBS. “Imagine me walking into the offices back in the day or even today of one of the commercial television networks or streaming services and pitching the idea for a weekly music show that one week might have Kendrick Lamar and the next Dolly Parton and the week after that Samara Joy,” he says. “It’s such an eclectic mix of all different artists, some well-known, some totally obscure and avant-garde. PBS is the only place that a show like ours could exist. We never could have survived in any sort of commercial environment where it’s more about the ratings and revenue.”

As for what Lickona would say to the lawmakers and the current administration that voted for the public broadcasting cuts, he simply says, “They don’t get it…They don’t understand the value that PBS, NPR and public media continue to serve like they have for almost 60 years. Even with a show like Austin City Limits, it goes so far beyond just providing a showcase for music from week to week.” On a broader scale, he mentions the numerous communities, many of them rural, where people don’t have access to or can’t afford subscription streaming services and other paid media.   

“I remember Alan Jackson telling me that he grew up in some rural town in Georgia where they didn’t have any sort of cable TV, and he watched Austin City Limits and saw George Jones and Willie Nelson and people like that, and that inspired him to want to become a country singer,” Lickona continues. “The impact that shows like Sesame Street and the nature programming and public affairs programming have had…It just says to me that the people in Washington, from the White House through Congress, just don’t get it. They don’t understand the value that so many other millions of people have understood and benefited from for all these years.”

U.K. police have announced that Irish rap group Kneecap will not be criminally charged for shouting “Free Palestine” and “‘F— Keir Starmer” during its politically-charged Glastonbury Festival set last month.

Avon and Somerset Police said in a Friday (July 18) update that they’ve closed a previously announced investigation into Kneecap’s packed June 28 set at Glastonbury’s West Holts Stage.

“Detectives sought advice from the Crown Prosecution Service during their enquiries and after that advice, we have made the decision to take no further action on the grounds there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction for any offence,” the police update reads.

Authorities in Avon and Somerset are continuing to investigate fiery remarks made during Bob Vylan’s June 29 Glastonbury set, in which frontman Bobby Vylan (Pascal Robinson-Foster) chanted “death to the IDF,” a reference to the Israeli Defense Forces.

Meanwhile, Kneecap MC Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) still faces a terror charge for a separate show at London’s O2 Forum in November. Video footage from that performance showed Mo Chara shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” and displaying a Hezbollah flag.

Kneecap appeared to allude to these other open matters in a statement reacting to the news of the closed Glastonbury investigation on Friday, writing on the group’s official social media pages, “One element of the political policing intimidation attempt is over.”

“We played a historic set at Glastonbury,” reads Kneecap’s statement. “Every single person who saw our set knew no law was broken, not even close….yet the police saw fit to publicly announce they were opening an investigation.”

 “This is political. This is targeted. This is state intimidation,” the group’s statement continued. “We will continue to fight. We will continue to win.”

The band that sings about having too much time on its hands has been using it wisely in recent years. Circling From Above, out Friday (July 18), is Styx‘s 18th studio album and third in seven years.

What’s driving the group’s output? “Well, we’re always writing,” singer-guitarist Tommy Shaw, Styx’s most prolific composer (alongside former member Dennis DeYoung), tells Billboard during the group’s current Brotherhood of Rock Tour with the Kevin Cronin Band and former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. There’s also a strong partnership with Will Evankovich, who produced 2017’s The Mission, 2021’s Crash of the Crown and this year’s Circling From Above (he became a full-fledged member of the band in 2021).

“Will and I live close to each other (in Nashville),” Shaw continues, “so we get together a lot and co-write things. But the other guys are great co-writers, too; we’ll get together at my house or at Will’s studio and we’ll start cobbling these pieces together…. Somehow, luckily, we’ve always been able to bring these songs and pieces together and tell a story, and that’s the best thing.”

The California-born Evankovich, who first worked with Shaw on his mid-90s Shaw Blades project with Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, adds that all of the Styx albums he’s been involved with “basically happen organically. There’s stuff Tommy and I were writing at first, and then involving Lawrence (Gowan, singer/keyboardist), they just took off on its own. It wasn’t premeditated. Tommy’s always writing; he’s a very creative guy, and I think finding a new writing partner galvanized his interest. But we do it because we want to do it, not because of how many records we’re gonna sell.”

While there were certainly thematic threads within The Mission and Crash of the Crown, both Shaw and Evankovich are quick to downplay any notions of Circling From Above as a concept album. “No, we’re not trying to make a concept album,” Shaw explains. “We’re just trying to stay on the same track. That’s what interests us, to make it interesting to the person listening to it and tying it all together like that. I think that’s fun.”

Circling From Above does start from a specific idea, however. Shaw — whose avid interest in birds helped put a European starling on the album cover — says the Pink Floyd-esque title track, which slides into the equally proggy first single “Build and Destroy,” was inspired by a continuing interest in outer space. “There’s an app I discovered a while back where you can look up and see all the space junk,” he says. “It blew my mind that all this stuff is floating around up there. Every piece of equipment that’s up there, that’s basically junk, is owned by a country and that country knows where it is and is responsible for it. It’s organized chaos, but it’s a junkyard up there. As we discussed it in the studio we were getting ready to write songs, and that influenced some of the lyrics and ideas kept popping off and we had those two songs that go together.”

Evankovich says the other 11 tracks on Circling From Above are not as interdependent. “Pretty much after that (the album) is its own animal,” he explains. “It becomes like a Beatles’ Rubber Soul, where every song’s a little different.” But, as producer, he sought to create a sonic unity in applying elements of what can be considered classic Styx, helping the band sound more like its rock radio-dominating ‘70s and ‘80s era than it had for a number of years.

“The recipe has always been big harmonies, these car horn-stacked vocals, and the great synthesizers and guitars, and we still adhere pretty much to that recipe,” Evankovich says of the band, which has placed 23 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (including eight top 10s and one No. 1) over the course of its career. “None of it is premeditated; it just kind of falls into the Styx universe by virtue of the fact you have James Young and Chuck Panozzo (co-founders) and Tommy Shaw in addition to the new guard, which is Gowan, Todd Sucherman (drums) Terry (Gowan, bass) and myself.

“When they took that hiatus from Cyclorama, the record industry was in a state of flux and things were a little confusing about selling new music, especially if you’re a vintage band. So these (recent albums) have kind of merged the two; we’re at an age now where the attention span is pretty quick, so we try to compact all the greatness that we can into three- or four-minute songs rather than do those longer, stretched-out songs — which I love, by the way. But this is the mantra now.”

Shaw and Evankovich say Circling From Above is definitely a full-band project — even more than Crash of the Crown, which was conceived and finished during Covid. “When JY plays, you know who it is,” Shaw notes. “Will knows JY (James Young) very well and he knows JY’s style of playing and the types of things that we depend on JY to put into a song, because they’re signature things.” Young makes his mark in particular on the fluid solo for the bouncy, theatrical “King of Love.”

“What’s great is we’re always thinking of each other,” Evankovich says. “We have in our minds that, ‘This is gonna be a great JY guitar solo, this is definitely his vibe,’ or ‘This is a great Tommy spot.’ The song will tell you who we should we feature, and we all want to lift each other up.” Terry Gowan, who had been playing with his brother before being tapped to replace Ricky Phillips after his departure in 2024, added upright bass to the mix on “Blue Eyed Raven” (with Shaw on mandolin) while Panozzo played on the short interlude track “Ease Your Mind.”

With Styx playing 1977’s triple-platinum The Grand Illusion in its entirety this summer, the group has only been able to work “Build and Destroy” into its live set to date. But it’s looking forward to adding more of the Circling From Above songs into dates later this year, including the Rockin’ in Paradise Cruise during October. “We’ll definitely get to that as soon as August is over,” Evankovich says. “People come to see the great catalog of music the band has, but I think by September we’ll probably work a few new ones in there, probably two or three once we’ve cycled the Grand Illusion album.”

While Circling From Above is just out, the idea of another album is not far from the Styx members’ minds. “It’ll just take an amassing of songs, like it did for The Mission and for Crash of the Crown and for this album,” Evankovich says. “Once there’s three or four and we’ve got a thread going, then we start. It takes a few years because we’re playing 100 shows a year and away from home about 170 days out of the year, so finding the time is always challenging. But it always seems to happen, and I’m confident it probably will again.”

In the world of KPop Demon Hunters, K-pop is a battleground for hearts, minds and souls. And for superpowered girl group HUNTR/X, who face off against their demon rivals Saja Boys, they mostly fight with really good pop songs.

To bring this soundtrack — from the fizzy confection “Soda Pop” to fierce girl crush anthem “Takedown” — to life, it took a village of real K-pop hitmakers: musicians from THEBLACKLABEL, founded by BLACKPINK producer Teddy Park, crafted beats, while the songwriting credits are filled top-to-bottom with names that K-pop fans will recognize. 

“In film musicals, you are often hiring people who specialize in narrative writing,” executive music producer Ian Eisendrath, known for his work on film and Broadway musicals, tells Billboard. “This was interesting because it was sort of the opposite. It was bringing in people from the pop world to write for the film, as opposed to people from the film world to write in the style of K-pop.”

In this fictional universe, both the demon slayers and baddie boyband dominate the charts (even leaving TWICE, who cameo on the soundtrack, in their dust) — so the music ideally had to stand alone as crowd-pleasing pop songs. Maybe that’s why, in our world, too, the two groups have been going up, up, up: the album has risen to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, while HUNTR/X and Saja Boys have flown past IRL peers on the Spotify charts. 

So, how did they fit these specific story beats inside universal pop songs? Korean-American songwriter and vocalist EJAE (who provides the singing voice of Rumi) helped thread that needle on “How It’s Done,” “Golden” and “Your Idol.” “We can all relate to characters, whether they’re superheroes or not,” she says — though she has more in common with the leading HUNTR/X ladies than most. A former K-pop trainee of almost a decade, EJAE, like half-demon Rumi, knows “how it feels having to hide your insecurities.”

“‘Golden’ is a song that I put all my experience into, what I wanted to hear when I was training, because it’s not an easy industry,” she continues. “It’s very competitive. Being perfect is such a big thing while training. So that part, feeling so broken inside, me not aligning and getting dropped, was part of it too. I brought that heartbreak I felt into the lyrics and when I’m singing.”

As with her previous work for some of K-pop’s biggest girl groups (Red Velvet, aespa, NMIXX), songwriting was a team effort; EJAE bounced lyrics back and forth with Mark Sonnenblick, a composer with a background in narrative songwriting. But, whereas many of the writers on the project were used to cranking out demos in fast-paced environments like K-pop songwriting camps, this process was far more iterative — some songs took years to finalize.

“There were a lot of revisions that we wouldn’t typically make for a human artist,” says Stephen Kirk, who is known for producing BTS chart-toppers “Butter” and “Permission to Dance” alongside partner Jenna Andrews. Soaring ballad “Free” came easily for the duo — but the emotional thrust of finale “What It Sounds Like” was harder to nail down. “That was a totally different adventure,” Andrews says. “I think I counted 147 different revisions,” adds Kirk.

An early reference was Lorde’s “Green Light,” though Kirk and Andrews’ first draft, which headed “super in the direction” of the 2017 Melodrama single, was handily rejected by the studio. “They were like, ‘No, definitely not,’” Kirk laughs. But building off of existing K-pop bangers allowed the global squad to “get on the same page,” Eisendrath says. “We wanted them to do their version, but it helped us, even across language barriers, really communicate what we were going for.”

Below, Eisendrath tells Billboard how he got KPop Demon Hunter’s “stable” of talent to speak the same musical language — and create the year’s biggest K-pop hits in the process. 

How familiar were you with K-pop before working on KPop Demon Hunters?

When BTS came on the scene is when I got into K-pop. I was just sort of immediately struck by the theatricality of it. I feel like K-pop, like a Broadway musical or a film score, has so much going on, so many layers, and there’s such energy and drama to it. I’d always thought it would be amazing to somehow utilize this musical language for narrative function. I just also think K-pop is so well-produced. Everything about the music production to the mix and the mastering — I’ve always been incredibly impressed and excited about that aesthetic.

How did you get brought on to the project?

[President of Sony Pictures Music Group] Spring Aspers called me in fall of ‘22 and said, “We have this incredible new film, early days, it’s going to be a K-pop, music-driven project. THEBLACKLABEL is on board to write songs, but they’re going to need a lot of support in terms of how to make these songs filmic. Also, the directors and producer really need someone to develop musical language, and to figure out how to fit the songs into the narrative.’” So nothing really existed at that point.

I read that while the film was in development, certain songs were temped in. Were those existing K-pop songs?

A lot of it was real K-pop songs. Maggie Kang, one of our directors, grew up steeped in K-pop. That was such a gift for this process because, not only is she a great filmmaker, but she came to it as an absolute lover of this genre of music. So it was really fun to work with her, Chris [Appelhans] and Michelle Wong, our producer, to develop references for every song. We would often have five to 10 references for every song. Sometimes it was, “Hey, check out this group. We really love the drums, the groove here. We love the production colors here.”

I do think, when working with writers outside of film, and from the music industry, references are the absolute clearest way for us all to get on the same page. And what was great was that no one went and just did the reference. We didn’t want that.

Tell me about that team of writers.

We had six to seven writers that we could task with different songs, some even with sections of songs, different elements. Some people wrote the topline and lyrics. Others created music production. We even brought in someone who specialized in more of a theater narrative lyric. Working with all those writers, I think, is what made this have this crazy alchemy. The number of writers on this film definitely exceeds the number of songwriters on most film musical projects — often it’s two people or one person. 

We had the whole team at THEBLACKLABEL, including Teddy [Park], 24, Soulscape, Danny Chung. We had EJAE, who, early on, created the demos and helped us find the sound of HUNTR/X and she ended up writing top line and lyrics for a lot of songs. We had Steven Kirk and Jenna Andrews of [BTS’] “Butter” and “Dynamite” fame, who wrote two of the songs. Lindgren wrote “Takedown,” and then Mark Sonnenblick we brought in to collaborate on lyrics focusing on story and character. We also used people top of the field in K-pop to mix and master the songs.

How would you describe the sound THEBLACKLABEL brought to the soundtrack? When I listened to “How It’s Done” for the first time, I could immediately hear Teddy Park in the production.

It’s totally a THEBLACKLABEL drop, right? It has the hard-hitting beat. It has this incredible synth lead line. We wanted to have a drop like that for “How It’s Done.” THEBLACKLABEL has that all over their work — it’s in BLACKPINK and other songs all the time. We wanted to make sure HUNTR/X had that, so we created space. That might not happen in a normal narrative song, where all they say [on the chorus] is “how it’s done, done, done.” But that’s a THEBLACKLABEL signature. There are definitely BLACKPINK vibes in the score, though I also feel like they did their own thing for us.

How was this process different for the songwriters who are used to K-pop songwriting camps?

We spent about three years working on these songs. The first year was spent beating out what these songs needed to be, for story, for character, for music, vibe and how that all fits together. Because you’re not just thinking of a song, you’re thinking of a musical arc for the whole film. So that work was going on one side, then on the other side, it was figuring out how we can all work together in the way that all of these writers work best. And it was actually a really gratifying process, because we all had to learn how to speak each other’s language. 

Because animation is able to be developed very organically, we had to just keep iterating on the songs. I know that was an experience that all the songwriters both enjoyed and became exhausted by. We didn’t stop until everyone was happy.

There’s a mix of English and Korean in the songs. Was that always the plan? Was there ever a discussion to make the songs solely in English?

It happens all the time in K-pop songs, and we all loved that. The bulk of the writers on these songs are Korean, and it was really important that we were honoring and centering the film on that culture. There was never really any blowback, and that was always the goal, like, let’s interpolate both languages as much as possible. Often, we would lean towards English on the things that, if the audience didn’t understand this, then they wouldn’t understand the film. Some stuff just sounded amazing in Korean and some stuff sounded amazing in English. [It] was sort of like, “What’s the most appealing flavor?”

How did TWICE come to be involved with the soundtrack? 

Dana [Sano, from Republic Records,] and Spring really went on a quest to figure out who our partner should be. TWICE was their first choice, and they opened up that relationship and made the collaboration possible. We were all just so thrilled that they wanted to do it. Not only are we obsessed with them as a group and their music, but they’re also just so in the center of K-pop right now. It felt authenticating when they wanted to be part of this. Like, “Phew, we are creating songs that these K-pop groups feel are K-pop songs they want to perform.”

There’s a moment in the film where the Saja Boys are introduced and EXO’s “Love Me Right” plays. Then there’s this great K-drama spoof moment with “Love, Maybe” by MeloMance, originally from the Business Proposal soundtrack.

Maggie and Chris wanted something everybody knew — the EXO — when the Saja Boys appeared, then to go to that K-drama easter egg moment where they fall in love. That was in the film before I worked on it. There are those things that are evergreen, that never go away because you just can’t imagine them not being there. 

I was very nervous about that, though. Chris and Maggie remember, I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if we should do that, because we can’t steal away from whatever the Saja Boys sing.” Looking back, I think it was just real fear. Like, how are you going to beat the EXO song? But I do feel the three work well and the first two build to “Soda Pop” in such a satisfying way.

The response to this film has been incredible. Were you surprised to see the music take off on the charts? 

Totally. I’ve loved these songs, and I think all the people who worked on them have loved them, but you just never know how something’s going to do. I’ve worked on films I thought were going to be mega hits and they weren’t, and others that I thought weren’t going to be and were. It’s so thrilling that people are hearing the songs in two ways. Some are loving the film, and the film is making the songs hits, and then some people are just encountering the songs, and the songs are making the film hit.

Why do you think it’s connecting with audiences so well?

On one hand, people who love and know K-pop are loving these songs because they are new K-pop songs, right? I think they’re also responding visually to the film and feeling like, “Yeah, I’ve been to a concert like that. Yes, I know a girl group like that. I know a K-pop idol like that.” They know this world, and it’s feeling authentic and true to them.

And then I think there are a ton of people who probably wouldn’t have encountered K-pop had they not seen the film, and they are so drawn to the story and the characters. The film impacts them on an emotional level, whether it’s excitement, or deep ache, or being moved at the end when Rumi finally finds her voice.

Netflix is planning to submit “Golden” for Oscars consideration. How does that make you feel?

That’s really gratifying because, out of any song in the film, that one had the most [options] written for that spot. It took a long, long time to find. It was literally the last song that we locked up, [we were] creating a new bridge for it in December and recording in January. What I’m excited about is that it’s doing it all. It’s a K-pop song, it’s a performance song, and then it’s got an internal monologue in the middle of it all. And people are just loving and embracing it as a pop song.