NCT Dream and NCT 127 member Mark Lee has announced that he is leaving the subunits of K-pop group NCT after a decade with the SM Entertainment acts. The 26-year-old Canadian-born rapper/singer announced his move in a lengthy, emotional note to fans

In a post on Weverse, SM Entertainment confirmed that Mark would be departing the 24-member group exactly 10 years after he first joined the collective, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “After a long period of in-depth discussions with Mark regarding the direction of his future activities and following adequate conversations between both parties, we came to a mutual agreement to conclude his exclusive contract as of April 8. Accordingly, Mark will end all NCT activities, including NCT 127 and NCT DREAM,” the company said.

The statement praised Mark for demonstrating “outstanding abilities” in the group and as a solo act,” saying they “sincerely cheer” him on in his future endeavors. The company also clarified that going forward NCT 127 will continue with seven members — JOHNNY, TAEYONG, YUTA, DOYOUNG, JAEHYUN, JUNGWOO and HAECHAN — and that NCT Dream will move forward with six members — RENJUN, JENO, HAECHAN, JAEMIN, CHENLE and JISUNG.

Mark, who joined SM Entertainment as a trainee in 2012, graduating from the SM Rookies program to the NCT subunit NCT U in 2016 and then quickly moving up to NCT 127 and its fellow subunit NCT Dream, thanked fans for their devotion in his letter, posted in English and Korean on Friday morning. “Out of all the things my heart wants to say right now, I truly wish to say thank you,” he wrote, just days after Lee and his fellow NCT Dream bandmates wrapped up their world tour with a six-show run in Seoul, South Korea.

“Thank you for loving, supporting, and shaping me to become who I am today. I truly believe that our hearts have better sight than our eyes, and what my heart sees right now isn’t a closing door but rather an opening new one.”

He expressed a hope, and some trepidation, about his next chapter — the details of which he did not disclose — saying that he will “never forget the pieces of love and truth” that the band’s fans, known as Czennie, have shared with him. “I’m not playing here, and I am for sure not playing with your guys’ hearts,” he added. “You guys make me want to be a better person, and I hope my decision in life can only become a positive impact to anyone watching. I’m truly and always thinking about you guys … and I’ll really be working very very hard to make it all make sense.”

At press time a spokesperson for the group had not returned Billboard‘s request for further comment.

Lee released his debut solo album, The Firstfirst, in April 2025.

Ivy Queen is hitting the road this summer with her Pride Tour, a 12-city journey that highlights her long-standing connection with the LGBTQ+ community. The Puerto Rican reggaetón stalwart kicks off the U.S. trek on June 4 at Washington, D.C.’s Echostage and will wrap on June 27 at Vertigo Club in Houston, Texas. Stops along the way include Los Angeles, Atlanta, Orlando, and Dallas, with a mix of clubs and theaters as the settings for these intimate, energy-packed shows.

Known for her unapologetic lyrics, and unwavering commitment to authenticity, the genre trailblazer has cultivated a loyal fanbase across generations. A key piece of that following has been the LGBTQ+ community, which has embraced her message of empowerment and individuality since her early days as one of reggaeton’s first female artists. The Pride Tour aims to honor that connection, shining a spotlight on her commitment to inclusivity and self-expression throughout her career.

According to the press release, Pride Tour is described as “a tribute to a community that has sustained this story since its inception,” referencing Ivy Queen’s career foundations in the mid ’90s. “This tour is a statement of identity and pride. No one hides here: the pride of a vibrant community is celebrated without fear. A lover of authentic reggaeton.”

Fans attending the Pride Tour can expect a high-energy setlist, likely featuring her timeless bangers like “La Vida Es Así” and “Quiero Bailar,” as well as newer material from her recent releases. The reggaeton trailblazer has already dropped two singles this year: “Flow de Revista,” a solo effort that arrived in January, and “Cría y Calle,” a hard-hitting collaboration with Boy Wonder CF and Charlee Way, released last month.

Tickets for Ivy Queen’s Pride Tour are available in this link here. See the full tour dates below.

Nick Jonas warmed hearts with his siblings in the warm, fuzzy and silly last year’s A Very Jonas Christmas Movie. But this holiday season, the Jonas Brothers singer and Power Ballad star will crank up the chill factor when he co-stars with Kathryn Newton (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come) in MRC’s holiday horror film White Elephant.

According to Deadline, the film directed by Eli Craig (Clown in a Cornfield) will tell the story of “Eight friends. One prize. Zero trust. Their annual festive holiday gift exchange spirals into a cutthroat game of Christmas carnage.”

Jonas is among the producers through his Powered By Jonas company. At press time no additional information was available about the rest of the cast or a release date. The news of the Christmas creeper movie comes after Jonas premiered his new musical dramedy, Power Ballad, at SXSW earlier this year, a film in which he and Paul Rudd play an unlikely musical duo who rediscover the joy of songwriting together. That movie, directed by John Carney (Once, Sing Street) is slated to be released by Lionsgate on June 5.

It will be a busy year in the multiplex for Jonas, who is slated to co-star alongside Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black and Kevin Hart in the latest Jumanji sequel from Columbia Pictures. Jonas will also star in the high-stakes thriller Bodyman, from director Gary Fleder (Reacher), described as the story of a longtime bodyguard of an “eccentric billionaire” who unexpectedly inherits his dead boss’ private military company, setting off a violent clash with the man’s family.

In a statement, Fleder called Bodyman a “smart, lean, high-voltage action thriller that gives Nick the chance to show every side of what he can do: the physicality, the intensity and the emotional depth”; Bodyman will also be produced by Powered by Jonas. “I’ve been developing this project for a while and I’m excited to see it come to fruition. Re-teaming with Byron Balasco and director Gary Fleder also makes this project more special to me,” Jonas said in a statement.

Jonas released his first solo album in five years, Sunday Best, in February.

Monsta X opens its next chapter with Unfold, the K-pop act’s third English-language album.

The new collection dropped at midnight, and was accompanied soon after with the official music video for album cut “heal,” a lush, midtempo number that draws on soul and gospel influences.

Unfold is said to be a musical journey “through the messy architecture of the human heart,” tracing the “emotional arc of fracture, distraction, and resolution.”

With the release, Monsta X becomes the first K-pop act to release three full-length albums in English. The lads aren’t mucking about; they full intend to cross borders.

They’re “not simply expanding their global footprint,” reads a statement from reps, “they are solidifying their role as a rare K-pop act that authentically speaks to the U.S. market while maintaining their signature intensity and performance excellence.”

The six-strong outfit has already made several moves in that direction. In 2020, they became just the third K-pop act to reach the Billboard 200 top 10, with their first English album All About Luv, which bowed at No. 5. Then, in 2021, Monsta X dropped their second English album, The Dreaming, peaking at No. 21 on the all-genres list.

Monsta X rung in Christmas 2025 with the Connect X concert movie, which celebrated their 10th anniversary as a group and as a tribute to the journey shared by members Joohoney, I.M., Hyungwon, Kihyun, Minhyuk and Shownu with their fandom, known as MONBEBE.

Earlier in 2025, Joohoney, Hyungwon and Kihyun were the final group members to complete their mandatory South Korean military service, after which time the band hopped back in the studio and released The X EP in September to mark their milestone anniversary.

Unfold houses the previously released “Growing Pains,” and “baby blue,” which Monsta X debuted at iHeartRadio’s 2025 Jingle Ball last December.

Stream Unfold in full below.

Bruce Hornsby says the “origin story” of his new album Indigo Park is “very clear.” And interesting — especially since he wasn’t even planning on making it.

Out today, April 3, Indigo Park follows, and is now part of, one of the most prolific stretches of a recording career that dates back 40 years to Hornsby’s triple-platinum debut (and title track signature hit) The Way It Is. From 2019 he’d released five albums in six years, including Absolute Zero, built from unused instrumental pieces Hornsby composed during his time scoring for Spike Lee, and two collaborations with the New York chamber troupe yMusic.

“I was trying not to write songs,” Hornsby tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in his native Williamsburg, Va. “I’d been so feck and so fertile creatively, so I was kind of burnt with all that — not just with the writing process but burnt with the recording and producing. So I was ready for a break from it all.”

But a new song idea — which became Indigo Park’s reflective and autobiographical title track —  interfered with that plan.

“It just wouldn’t let me go,” Hornsby recalls. “I kept giving it the Heisman, giving it the stiff-arm, but to no avail. After about four or five months into trying to not deal with this and having it come roaring into my head at three in the morning, four in the morning, I finally succumbed to the insistence of this idea and decided, ‘OK, I’ll take a deep dive and write this song.’

“I was getting chills while I was writing it and recording it, and that’s telling you something because you can’t force chills. It either happens or it doesn’t, but when it does happen you need to listen to that. You need to follow the chills.”

And when Hornsby’s opinion of the song was confirmed by his “little coterie of like-minded nerds and geeks whose opinions I trust” — including his brother and onetime lyricist John Hornsby — “it made me go, ‘OK, motherf***er, I guess you have to write nine more.”

With guest appearances from Bonnie Raitt, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Blake Mills, songwriting collaborations with Robert Hunter and one of the last recordings by Bob Weir, Indigo Park is among Hornsby’s most ambitious and stylistically far-reaching of his 22 studio releases. That’s saying something in a catalog that’s played hopscotch between…well, just about every genre imaginable, from pop to contemporary classical and all points in-between. And while he’s at his piano throughout its 10 tracks, the album also finds Hornsby playing a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar — “It’s my Bruce McGuinn” record, he quips, referencing the Byrds co-founder who made the instrument famous — on six of the tunes.

“I’m just interested in pushing the norms and forms of the popular song and make a sound that I haven’t heard before,” explains Hornsby, who co-produced Indigo Park with Tony Berg and Will Maclellan and recorded mostly at legendary Sound City in Van Nuys, CA. “I know that sounds pompous, maybe, but I hope that every third song or so there’s something that’s hopefully gonna bend your ear and take you to a new and adventurous place where you may not have dealt with in the basically white-not universe we live in in popular music.”

Another Musical Hot House

Two of those “out there” moments come from his collaborations with Hunter, who passed away 2019; they mark the last of five songs the two wrote together from 2008. “‘Alabama’ is a totally wild song lyrically,” Hornsby notes. “It’s completely whacky, and I love it. And it made me feel like, ‘OK, here are these lyrics that are definitely atypical, so I need to write atypical music…something as crazy as the words,” drawing inspiration from Austrian classical pianist and composer Arnold Schoenberg. Hornsby also tapped sources such as Elliott Carter, Gyorgy Ligeti and Dmitri Shostakovich on other Indigo Park tracks, while “Silhouette Shadows” comes from another unused instrumental cue written for a Lee film.

“Modern classical music has been informing my music for quite awhile,” he notes.

Having Weir, who passed away back in January, on the album was particularly meaningful for Hornsby, who played as an adjunct of the Grateful Dead during the early ’90s and was part of the spin-off band the Other Ones as well as the Fare Thee Well 50th anniversary concerts in 2015. “Well, of course; it deepens the situation,” Hornsby acknowledges. Weir recorded his part for “Might As Well Be Me, Florinda,” the other Hunter co-write, during May of 2025, and Hornsby remembers that “we were all so happy about it when he sang it down to us at Sound City.

“Weir`s performance is fairly unbridled in the best way, kind of unhinged in a fantastic way, which of course fits the song,” he says. “I’d heard little rumblings about him having some health problems…then nothing, then all of sudden, gone. The same thing happened with (Bill) Walton, and with Robbie Robertson. That throws you.

“(Weir) was always so busy. We were on the phone and I said, ‘Man, you’re always here, you’re there, playing with the National Symphony, the London Symphony, doing these symphonic Dead concerts. Why?’ He said, ‘Man, I just don’t know how much time I have left, and I want to get as much in as I can’ — which, of course, at this point feels (prophetic).”

Mortality, or at least aging, is on Hornsby’s mind throughout Indigo Park as well, with songs that wax nostalgic and sentimental, as well as pensive — and even celebratory, as he sings in the title track, “Oh let these days be your delight…It’s only life, and life is enough/So whatever, it’s life and life only.”

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got this song, and it has a little bit to do with sort of aging and hopefully getting to be a little less of an idiot and a little smarter about things as you get older, ’cause you have a better perspective,” he explains. “That sent me heading into this idea that, ‘OK, I’m just going to write about where I am now.’ It’s the story of the record.”

The fun component, meanwhile, surfaces in the Raitt-featuring “Ecstatic,” a rhythmic, poetic track drawn from AAU basketball cheers — and even featuring the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team chanting and dancing in its music video. It’s not necessarily a musical environment you’d expect to find Raitt, but Hornsby said, “She did a great job. She heard it and was like, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting this.’ She said, ‘It’s so you,‘ maybe because of the sports origin story, but she’s so good on it.

“When she sent it down, we just went crazy. (Berg) got her on the speaker phone and we’re all exulting and he said to her, ‘Bonnie, I’ve always loved you, but now I’m in love with you…’”

The Way It Was…And Still Is

Though certainly a different kind of album, Indigo Park comes out almost 40 years to the date of The Way It Is, whose chart-topping title track put Hornsby on the map, winning the Grammy Award for best new artist, after a tenure in Sheena Easton’s band. Hornsby has often said that he finds his earlier releases “unlistenable” — “Mostly because I’m not a fan of that singer,” he says — but he appreciates what it meant for his career.

“The mass of the world knows me for that one song,” he acknowledges. “In America I was sort of a four- or five-hit wonder, but in the rest of the world it’s that song. Even (Don Henley’s) ‘The End of the Innocence’ wasn’t that big abroad. What I really feel in this area is that they missed the best part. I feel like I’ve continued to grow and develop through the years, evolve. I’ve just never allowed myself to be shackled in that prison people would like to place me in.

“Let`s face it; people go to a concert because they like more than few songs by the artist, and they go hoping or, mostly, expecting to hear faithful interpretations that help them stroll down memory lane. I totally get it, but it’s a creative prison. I’ve never been constrained by that idea. So I get nasty letters all the time, nasty Facebook screeds, and I’ve learned to live with that for 40 years now.”

Unafraid of stoking that ire again, Hornsby and his band, the Noisemakers, return to the road just after Indigo Park’s release, on April 9 in Cincinnati, with dates currently booked into October. He’s also been working with friend Jeff Daniels on music for a new play. And, as unintentional as the new album’s genesis, Hornsby may have a next venture in his sights already.

“I’ve just about written a song about an artificial friend, inspired by the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Klara and the Sun, and I kinda like this one,” he says. “It feels like a Beatles/Beach Boys thing, with some interesting chord movement. I can almost sit there and play it for someone so…maybe that’s the start of something.”

Stream Indigo Park below.