A federal judge has rejected R. Kelly’s emergency request to be let out of prison due to an alleged jailhouse murder plot against the disgraced R&B star, who’s serving more than 30 years for multiple sex crime convictions.

Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindley, has been petitioning a Chicago court for Kelly’s release since last week, saying prison guards are trying to have the singer (Robert Sylvester Kelly) killed to stop him from uncovering prosecutorial misconduct in his case. Brindley claims jail officials attempted to solicit a fellow inmate to carry out the hit, and that when that didn’t work, they fed Kelly an overdose quantity of sleeping pills and denied him medically-necessary surgery for blood clots.

Prosecutors have dismissed the allegations as a “fanciful conspiracy” and “deeply unserious.” Judge Martha M. Pacold denied the bid for release on Thursday (June 19) without addressing its merits, saying such a request must be brought as a civil rights lawsuit or habeas corpus petition in North Carolina, where Kelly is imprisoned.

“Jurisdictional limitations must be respected even where, as here, a litigant claims that the circumstances are extraordinary,” wrote the judge.

Judge Pacold issued her decision ahead of a hearing that had been set for Friday (June 20), canceling the court date after seemingly learning all she needed to know from voluminous court papers that have been filed on the issue.  

In a statement shared with Billboard on Thursday, Brindley said his team is “not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances.”

“However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life,” Brindley added.

On Friday (June 20), Brindley tried another avenue to convince the Chicago judge to release Kelly: filing a motion for a new trial and asking for emergency bail in the meantime.

The Friday motion reiterates Brindley’s previous allegations that prosecutors unlawfully pressured a witness to testify against Kelly and intercepted Kelly’s communications with his lawyers ahead of his federal trial in Chicago.

“If someone dies in prison, it seems commonplace,” writes Brindley. “With that in mind, it becomes easy to understand how the people who committed this corruption and those that helped cover it up would rather kill a disgraced inmate convicted of sex crimes than face consequences that could ruin their lives and careers.”

The motion repeatedly notes that President Donald Trump is prioritizing rooting out corruption in the justice system. Brindley has publicly asked Trump to pardon Kelly in conjunction with the jailhouse murder plot claims.

A spokesperson for prosecutors did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.

Kelly was convicted in Chicago of child pornography and enticing minors for sex in 2022, one year after a separate federal jury in New York also found the singer guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking

The former R&B star was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the New York conviction and 20 years in the Chicago case, though all but one year of the second sentence will overlap with the first. Both convictions have been upheld on appeal.

Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill have been playing music together for some 48 years, most of them in Simple Minds. Kerr assures us that familiarity has bred fondness; he even says the “parallel story” in the band’s 2023 documentary Everything Is Possible is “the friendship of Charlie and I, which is quite remarkable because usually in long-working relationships in music people hate each other after 20 years. But Charlie and I still go on. There’s a great friendship there.”

Despite that, Kerr tells Billboard that it’s not always a lovefest between frontman and guitarist, either, as Simple Minds is in the midst of its first full-scale North American tour in seven years. “We’re still able to have our rows and our fights. We’re not always on the same page,” Kerr acknowledges, adding with a laugh that, “We had a screaming match last week and everyone around us…. First of all they said, ‘I’ve never heard such a f–kin’ intense screaming match,’ so afterwards Charlie and I felt embarrassed. Y’know, usually it’s not even (about) a thing. You’re not on the same page, and it’s frustrating. Someone will just say the wrong word, and it triggers.

“But here’s the good news; at the end of the day there’s no scars, no wounds. We get up the next day and everything is fine. How amazing that we’re still so passionate about it. How amazing that we still care. How amazing we’re in the rehearsal room, trying to make it as great as it can be for our audience, and how amazing the next day we go to breakfast with each other.”

During its current trek, whose U.S. leg wraps up Saturday (June 22 in Noblesville, Ind.), Kerr, Churchill and the latest incarnation of Simple Minds have been supporting their new concert album — Live in the City of Diamonds, which came out in April — and the 40th anniversary of an eventful 1985 that included: the Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from the hit film The Breakfast Club; a performance at Live Aid that summer; and the band’s best-selling studio album, Once Upon a Time, which came out that fall.

“It was beautiful,” Kerr recalls. “It was so unexpected in a sense. You had the movie, you had the song, Live Aid, MTV, ‘Alive & Kicking’ [a No. 3 Hot 100 hit], the Once Upon a Time album itself…and lo and behold, 40 years later we’re still here talking about it. That’s what 1985 felt like to us.”

Simple Minds was famously ambivalent about recording “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which was written by producer Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff for the John Hughes-directed film. The group had already planned to make an aggressive assault on the U.S. market in the wake of its 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain and was confident “we had songs up our sleeve” for what would become Once Upon a Time.

“Then out of nowhere these phone calls start to come in about this movie, and the record company thinks it would be a good thing to bridge to the next album,” Kerr recalls. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we want to do it,’ then ‘Oh, hang on a minute. They want us to record someone else’s song? That’s not what we do; we’re credible artists. We write our own songs, and we’ve got some good ones in the pipeline, so we’re not sure about that.’ But after meeting the people involved we decided to do it.”

The key, Kerr adds, was that his band found a way to make the song its own. “I’m not taking anything away from the song and Keith and the guys who came up with the music. You can find the demo of the song online; it’s a good little song. But Simple Minds, what we brought to it was 10 years of playing live, and we put our heart and soul into it and we put our lifeblood into the record. It would’ve been a different song if OMD did it, or the Psychedelic Furs — it would’ve been a different record, rather. So it’s not our song, but it is our record.”

Simple Minds will follow the North American tour with a jaunt through Europe, starting June 27 at home in Glasgow, where the band plans to play Once Upon a Time in its entirety. That trek wraps up July 27 in Italy, after which Simple Minds plans to return to working on a new studio album — the follow-up to 2022’s Direction of the Heart — which Kerr, Burchill and company began working on before hitting the road.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of songs up our sleeves,” Kerr says. “They’re not finished yet, but the backing tracks are down, the rough mixes. So we’re excited. People might say, ‘What’s the impetus?’ because obviously records don’t sell like they used to and there’s a limited appeal for new stuff no matter whether you’re Bruce Springsteen or whoever you are. But this is who we are. This is what we do. It just goes on. It’s all about creativity and you have it in you and you’ve got to get it out. That’s the same now as it’s ever been, and for us every time you do something new you’re still using those muscles. It’s like a chapter to a book; it seems to refresh the rest of the story and stops you from calcifying.”

Erykah Badu and The Alchemist are really making an album together, and their first single is finally here.

Badu and the West Coast producer dropped their new song “Next to You” at midnight after she performed Badu Presents: Echos 19 in her hometown of Dallas as part of Forever in Rotation, Amazon Music’s Juneteenth celebration.

According to a press release, the Dallas singer self-executive produced, wrote, composed, arranged and produced the single in collaboration with The Alchemist, who provided the beat from his classic 1999 record “The Realest” featuring the late Prodigy and Kool G Rap from Mobb Deep‘s fourth album, Murda Muzik, for her to flip. And she did just that as she sang about wanting to smoke blunts and hang out after school with a significant other with the beat switching midway as Badu put her own “‘izm on it.”

Erykah recently announced that she will be releasing music independently through her own label, Control FREAQ Records, which was established since 2005, and whose first signee was Jay Electronica, the father of her third child. She has been with Motown since 2007 and hasn’t released a project since the 2015 mixtape But You Can’t Use My Phone.

Starting on Tuesday (June 24) at Billboard Live Osaka, the two legends will be hitting the stage together in a trio of shows in Japan courtesy of Billboard Live for The Abi & Alan Japan Tour. Saturday (June 28) at Billboard Live Tokyo and Monday (June 30) at KT Zepp Yokohama are the other two dates.

Creepy Nuts shared the details of its highly anticipated Creepy Nuts ASIA TOUR 2025 set to take place later this year.

The “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” hip-hop duo’s first-ever Asian tour will start in October and make stops in five cities including Beijing and Seoul. Ticket sales for each venue will begin at different times, so check out the pair’s official website for details.

Also, an exclusive concert viewing package for CLUB Creepy Nuts members, including plane tickets and from Japan, accommodation, local transportation, concert tickets and original merch will be made available for Japan-based fans who wish to attend the tour. Details will be announced soon.

See the dates and venues for the Creepy Nuts ASIA TOUR 2025 below.

Oct. 18 – Seoul, South Korea @ YES24 LIVE HALL
Tickets go on sale July 7 at 8 p.m. JST

Oct. 25 – Taipei, Taiwan @ Legacy TERA
Tickets go on sale July 5 at 12 p.m. JST

Oct. 29 – Hong Kong @ Kitty Woo Stadium TungPo
Tickets go on sale June 30 at 1 p.m. JST

Oct. 31 – Shanghai, China @ Shanghai VAS est
Tickets go on sale June 24 at 3 p.m. JST

Nov. 2 – Beijing, China @ FULLOF Livehouse-FU
Tickets go on sale June 24 at 3 p.m. JST

This article originally appeared on Billboard Japan.

Shubh’s rise has happened faster than he could have ever expected. In a quiet moment, Shubh softly remarks in Punjabi, “I didn’t think I would ever chart.”

He’s done more than that. The 27-year-old Brampton, Ontario-based Punjabi artist has become one of the most talked-about names in global music, amassing over 3 billion total streams across platforms, a fiercely loyal fanbase and a debut North American tour on the horizon, including arena dates in Oakland, Vancouver and Toronto. That’s all without a label or a single dollar spent on ads.

Around him, a pair of his close friends and Brampton housemates, Prince and Vicky, and his longtime manager, Shivam Malhotra, lean in, smiling – not just because the comment is modest, but because the reality couldn’t be more different.

This is his first interview. It’s the first time he’s publicly reflecting on a journey that, in just a few years, has taken him from scribbling verses in a notebook to performing on arena stages across North America.

His breakthrough came when his debut album, Still Rollin, debuted at No. 16 on the Billboard Canadian Albums Chart in June 2023 and his sophomore album, Sicario, entered the Top 25 at No. 24 in January 2025. When he speaks to Billboard Canada, his single “Supreme” is making a splash on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100 chart following a No. 13 debut for the 2024 single “King Shit.”

But today, Shubh isn’t on stage, thinking about charts, or in the recording studio. He’s seated calmly at the studio for his first cover shoot for Billboard Canada, surrounded by the same team that’s been with him since day one. He answers slowly and thoughtfully, sometimes in Punjabi and sometimes in English. His friends and manager step in to help translate and interpret, not because he can’t speak the language, but because he’s never done this before and wants to express his clearest feelings.

Long before his tracks topped charts or racked up hundreds of millions of streams, Shubh was just a teenager filling notebooks with verses.

“I started writing when I was really young,” he recalls. “I’ve been writing for 12 to 13 years. I’ve always carried notebooks – almost like diaries – and that writing became the foundation of everything.” At the time, music wasn’t a professional ambition for Shubh. It was an outlet, a private ritual shaped by observation, emotion and self-reflection.

Today, that introspective process has evolved into a discography that’s earned him billions of streams, including nearly 400 million streams for his breakout single “No Love” and over 370 million for “Cheques.”

More than ten years later, that habit hasn’t faded. He still carries notebooks and pens wherever he goes, staying connected to the handwritten process that shaped his earliest songs. To this day, all of his songs begin on paper first.

Shubh’s path to this moment didn’t follow a script of a typical success story. He didn’t go chasing viral fame or visibility. In fact, much like fellow Toronto artist The Weeknd, he kept his face and his identity hidden in the early stages, letting the music speak entirely for itself. There were no flashy rollouts or trend-driven moves. Instead, he spent those years in quiet focus, writing relentlessly, experimenting with sounds and perfecting each track in solitude.

“My aim wasn’t attention, it was precision,” the singer says.

Much of that focus and clarity comes from where it all began. Growing up in Punjab, Shubh was surrounded by music at home, often hearing his father sing during family gatherings or daily routines. His father and older brother (Ravneet Singh, a well-known actor and singer) have been his biggest inspirations. They’re still in India, and he carries those memories with him everywhere. It’s that sense of home, that emotional imprint from his upbringing, that continues to drive him. It’s the quiet force behind the fire in his work.

In 2014, Shubh moved to Canada to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering at Sheridan College. “I came here as a student on a study visa,” he says. The early days weren’t easy. “I was a little bit nervous.”

Like many international students, he juggled homesickness, new responsibilities and the weight of starting over. Music wasn’t the goal then. It was more of a quiet companion. It wasn’t until 2021 that he decided to release his first song. His debut track “We Rollin” dropped without a music video and no press push. He didn’t even show his whole face, wearing a scarf over his nose and mouth. He wanted his music to reach people first.

And it did. Within weeks, the song was blowing up globally, with fans reaching out from countries like Japan and across Latin America. Now, “We Rollin” has surpassed 265 million views on YouTube alone, becoming the spark that launched Shubh into international recognition.

That initial wave of love changed everything. “That first song made me realize something special was happening.” But Shubh didn’t run to capitalize on it. He stayed in the studio, quietly focused on making better songs. “Sometimes I take two to three months to make just one song,” he explains.

“He gets into that shell, and he only comes out when it’s ready,” the artist’s manager Malhotra explains. For instance, the mixing process for his 2022 single “Baller,” one of his most iconic tracks, was so intense, it reached 29 versions before he was ready to put it out. “We did 28 mixes,” Shubh says, cracking a rare smile. “The 29th was okay, I guess. I still didn’t like it.” He only released it, he adds, because “deadlines” forced his hand.

Shubh puts his music through a rigorous test. He listens to each track hundreds of times. If he’s still not tired of it after 200 plays, that’s when he knows it’s ready for the world.

“Some of his songs average eight streams per user on Spotify,” Malhotra points out. “The industry standard is two or three – that’s more than double. It shows people aren’t just listening once, they’re coming back again and again.”

But it’s not just the replay value that sets him apart. Shubh isn’t just focused on lyrics and production. He’s also expanding the vocabulary of Punjabi music. “Every time, I try to bring something fresh,” he says.

A clear example is “One Love,” a reggae-leaning track inspired by Bob Marley’s legacy. “I used to listen to Bob Marley. Yeah, big Marley fan,” he says. The track, which dropped without a music video, has already crossed 400 million streams on Spotify.

Next on his radar? “I think I’ll try rock in the next two to three months,” he says. It’s not a stretch – he already performs live with a full band and skips backing tracks entirely. “I don’t believe in doing minus,” he says. “Everything is done live, start to finish.”

Musically, Shubh’s influences span decades and continents: Eminem, 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., 50 Cent, Dr. Dre. He speaks about them with deep respect, connecting their influence to his own path. Being in Toronto exposed him to global music culture, and Drake – another hometown hero – has had a huge impact. “I’ve seen how an entire culture has been built around Drake,” he says.

Living in Toronto has helped shape a global sound that can cross borders. Even though Shubh sings in Punjabi, the themes in his music – migration, longing, identity, his journey, perseverance – resonate far beyond the diaspora. “I write about what it feels like to leave home, move to a new country, and figure things out alone,” he explains. “It’s something a lot of people can relate to.” Fans who don’t understand the language still find something real in the flow and production. “People feel the vibe.”

He’s incredibly selective about what he puts out. No matter how polished a track is, if it doesn’t sit right with him, he won’t release it. That personal compass is why Shubh’s fans trust him. “For me, my fans are like family,” he says. “I reply to them online. I see everything.”

Despite avoiding public events and the spotlight, he’s always connected, just on his own terms. “Shubh has never spent a dollar on ads or marketing,” Malhotra says. “Everything has grown organically.”

Now, he’s preparing for his first North American tour, and he’s skipping the usual small venues to perform in massive arenas. “I never expected this,” he admits. “But I’m very happy that we’re performing in arenas.” The first venue? Oakland Arena on August 22, followed by Rogers Arena in Vancouver on August 23, and then Scotiabank Arena on September 5, where some of his heroes, including Eminem, have performed. He finishes the tour at the Prudential Center in New Jersey on September 7.

Shubh had never even been to a concert before stepping on stage for his sold-out show at Indigo at the O2 in London in 2023. “My voice was shaking,” he remembers. “I was very hyped up, but it also humbled me down.”

The surreal experience of performing live for the first time, without ever having seen a show from the audience’s side, marked a memorable moment in his journey.

He was supposed to go on a 2023 tour of India, but it was cancelled after backlash against a social media post he felt was politically misinterpreted. At the time, Shubh called the cancelled shows “disheartening,” and he’s been conceptualizing how to make his concerts even stronger since.

A short tour in Australia and New Zealand the same year brought him to major venues – something he’s looking to build on in Canada and the U.S.

Now that he’s ready to embark on his first North American tour, he’s been putting serious thought into every detail of his live shows: stage setup, sound, lighting, all of it. “I’m building something really special,” he says. “It’s never been done before in our scene.” The tour is a statement. As an independent artist, he wants to pave the way for others. “If I can buy a beat for $80 and get 300 million streams out of it, I believe anyone can do it,” Shubh says simply.

Now, Shubh already has his sights set even higher. “After this, I want to go to stadiums,” he says. “Then, I want to pack entire cities. That’s the vision.”

It’s clear he’s already thinking well beyond the present. Not because he’s in a hurry, but because he knows where this could go. He’s seen what happens when you lead your life creatively and with sincerity. He’s living proof that letting the music take center stage can open doors.

One phrase he keeps returning to during the conversation is simple but powerful: “keep trying, keep hustling, be consistent.” As he puts it, “If you bring honesty to your work, anything is possible.”

This Billboard Canada cover story originally appeared on Billboard Canada.