If you know two things about guitarist/singer Tom DeLonge you are aware that he has been in and out of Blink-182 several times over the years and that he is super obsessed with aliens and UFOs. So much so that according to his former bandmate in side project Angels & Airwaves, current Foo Fighters drummer Ilan Rubin, he is prone to casually busting out alien autopsy pics at the weirdest times.

Including, it turns out, at Rubin’s 2020 wedding.

In a recent interview on the Go With Elmo podcast, Rubin told a mind-blowing story about DeLonge sharing a picture of what he said was a deceased E.T. to the drummer and another one of his former bosses, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor.

“When my wife and I got married, we finish the ceremony. Everyone kind of goes to the reception or whatever, and she and I go up to the suite for her to kind of get out of the wedding dress and having some champagne,” Rubin told host Elmo Lovano earlier this week. “And we finally get down to the reception, where the first two people I see are Tom and Trent.”

Noting that DeLonge is a “really tall guy” and that at 6’4″ he’s hovering over the 5’7″ Reznor, Rubin said he noticed that DeLonge has his phone out. “I know how this goes: ‘Hey, check this out.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What is he possibly showing him right now?,’” Rubin said, aware that DeLonge loves to share his unique outer space knowledge with friends. “Then I go straight up to them like, ‘Hey guys, how’s it going?’ Tom’s like, ‘Dude, congratulations. I’ll see you in a bit, I’m going to get a drink.’”

Rubin then asked Reznor what DeLonge had shared with him. “He’s like, ‘that dude just showed me a dead alien,’” Reznor confided. “Nobody else could conduct themselves in that way and it be normal, but he’s [Tom’s] just so unapologetically him. It’s infectious. It’s great. I’ll always remember that.”

As Rubin said, the story would be out of this world if it were about anyone else, but DeLonge has a long fascination with all things space and extraterrestrial, including his founding of the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, dedicated to studying UFOs. DeLonge described what he said was his first contact with aliens in a Papermag interview in 2015, where he said that during a camping trip at a secret base on the flight path to the legendary Area 51 in Nevada, he felt a “strange phenomenon” and thought, “OK, they’re at our campsite, they’re not here to hurt us, they’re talking about shit, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. But they’re working on something.”

In 2020, the Pentagon declassified three videos allegedly showing unexplained aerial phenomenon that DeLonge had released through TTSA in 2017. Also in 2017, DeLonge received the UFO Researcher of the Year award from OpenMinds.tv.

Watch Rubin tell his wedding reception alien encounter story below.

The Prince estate has reached a settlement with singer Apollonia, ending their dispute over who owns legal rights to the name made famous by the movie Purple Rain.

After years of fighting, Prince’s estate and Apollonia (born Patty Kotero) both withdrew their dueling trademark cases against each other on Wednesday (April 8). Apollonia’s lawyer, Daniel Cislo, told Billboard that the matter has been confidentially settled.

“Apollonia is very happy with the results, and that the parties can continue to honor the legacy of Prince and his musical genius,” said Cislo. “In a time of so much conflict, it is very good to see people coming together to resolve their dispute.”

Lawyers for the Prince estate did not return a request for comment on the resolution.

The dispute dates back to 2018, two years after Prince’s sudden death by fentanyl overdose. The star’s estate filed paperwork to trademark “Apollonia 6,” the name of a Prince-founded girl group led by Apollonia, but were rejected because Apollonia herself already owned the intellectual property.

The Prince estate petitioned the U.S. trademark office to cancel Apollonia’s ownership, leading to years of legal proceedings between the two sides. Apollonia then moved the fighting to federal court last summer with a lawsuit accusing the estate of trying to “steal” her name.

Prince’s estate called the lawsuit “frivolous” and said its goal was to peacefully co-exist with Apollonia. A hearing on the estate’s motion to dismiss was coming up this Friday (April 10) in Los Angeles before the settlement was reached.

The estate has now dropped its trademark cancellation petition, which was one of the terms sought by Apollonia in her lawsuit. It’s not clear whether the settlement also includes any financial payments or further ground rules for the ownership of the Apollonia name going forward.

Apollonia rose to fame playing a character of the same name in Purple Rain. Her song from the 1984 movie, “Sex Shooter,” spent six weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. In the years since, Apollonia has used the moniker for music releases, acting credits and a podcast hosting gig.

Prince’s lucrative estate, meanwhile, is managed by the business entity Paisley Park Enterprises. The star died without a will, leading to years of probate court infighting before Paisley Park’s assets were split in 2022 between Prince’s heirs and another entity controlled by Primary Wave.

KATSEYE gave their EYEKONS fan group plenty to look forward to on Thursday (April) when the HYBE K-pop girl group dropped their beat crazy new single, “Pink Up.” In addition to being a fresh track for the now five-piece crew to perform at their upcoming Coachella Festival debut this weekend, the song is the first one without OG member Manon Bannerman, who recently went on temporary hiatus to “focus on her health and well-being.”

“One day, soon, the world’s gonna end/ I’m gonna make out with my new bestest friends/ I wanna live large, right before it all burns down/ Up, up, pinky up/ Go hard like we’re robbin’ the Louvre/ We Mona Lisa with a cute attitude/ I wanna get high right before we’re in the ground,” members Daniela Avanzini and Megan Skiendiel sing on the hyper pop song’s first chorus in the video in which the group show off their fierce nail art while, naturally, putting those pinkies up to take a sip of tea.

“Ooh, we’re screaming from cloud nine/ No one can touch us if they tried/ Ooh, but it’s a state of mind/ I-I-I-I bet it goes like this/ It’s a state of mind/ We’re screaming from cloud nine,” they all sing defiantly before dipping into the “Pin-pinky up” chorus on the tune that at points sounds like a video game soundtrack cranked up to double speed.

“Pinky Up” was written by Justin Tranter (Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande) and the group began teasing it on March 30 via a cryptic video in which the Mona Lisa brings a steaming cup of tea up to her mouth, with her little finger extended just so. The followed it up the next day with another head-scratcher with no taste of the music in which a KATSEYE-themed claw machine pulls a sword out of a pile of jewelry-wearing stuffed animals, revealing the release date for the single.

All those images show up in the video, with the visual keeping that vibe going, as the women are surrounded by a forest of plushies and lounge around in their usual colorful, outré outfits, which include glittery knee-high boots for a minibike burn-out in an office and patterned mini skirts for a sweaty dance party. Near the end, they slip into matching shaggy blonde wigs and sip some more in a bland hotel ballroom while wearing clear white smocks with furry accents over glittery blue bodysuits.

“Pinky Up” dropped on the eve of KATSEYE’s Coachella debut on Friday (April 10), which will be their latest show without Bannerman, following gigs at Lollapalooza Argentina and Lollapalooza Chile last month.

The group, kind of, discussed their interpersonal dynamics in a new NYLON cover story that took place before Manon announced her leave-taking. “Being in a group, it’s just about good communication and setting good boundaries and building a friendship, but also work relationship, and always remembering that it’s a shared goal that we have,” Manon told the magazine, which noted that current members Yoonchae Jeung, Sophia Laforteza, Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj and Megan Skiendiel declined to answer additional questions about Manon’s hiatus when the news broke of after the initial interview was completed.

Watch the “Pinky Up” video below.

Melanie Martinez’s Hades is No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart dated April 11, bowing atop the latest survey with 84,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in the week ending April 2, according to Luminate.

Of that sum, 63,000 units are via album sales, including 28,000 from the vinyl configuration, which begets a No. 2 start on the Vinyl Albums tally, behind Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) Bully (32,000).

Martinez previously reigned on Top Rock & Alternative Albums with Portals, which led for two weeks in 2023.

Additionally, Hades debuts at No. 1 on Top Alternative Albums, Martinez’s fourth No. 1, following reigns for Cry Baby (2015) and K-12 (2019) in addition to the aforementioned Portals and Hades.

Martinez moves into a four-way tie alongside Billie Eilish, Lorde and Paramore for the most No. 1s on Top Alternative Albums by women or women-led acts since the chart’s 2007 inception. Only two such acts have more: Lana Del Rey (seven, also the top mark among any act) and Florence + The Machine (five).

Hades concurrently starts at No. 3 on the all-genre Billboard 200, her third time in the chart’s top three; Portals remains her best via its No. 2 bow.

Eight songs from Hades appear on the April 11-dated Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, led by “Possession,” which re-enters at No. 33 (after premiering at No. 11 in February). It earned 1.8 million official U.S. streams. The album’s top debut of the week, meanwhile, belongs to “Uncanny Valley” (No. 37; 1.6 million streams).

Ziggy Marley is staying true to himself and looking toward the bright side.

In this episode of Billboard‘s Take Us Out, Ziggy Marley brings host Tetris Kelly to Crossroads, a cozy vegan restaurant in Los Angeles for healthy bites and discourse. Over their meal, the duo talk about Marley’s upcoming album, collecting vinyl and being vulnerable in music. Of course, being that the musician picked a vegan restaurant, Kelly starts the conversation by asking how long Marley has followed the vegan diet.

“I’m only vegan part-time,” Marley jokes. “I’m healthy all the time, but I’m vegan part-time.”

Once his vegan status is established, the two dive into the music chat. Marley is releasing his new album, Brightside, in an unconventional way. The LP will be released exclusively as physical copies on on Record Store Day, April 18, and will not be available digitally until May 1. He attributes his decision to release his album this way to seeing how music was made when he was growing up, especially with his father, the late legend Bob Marley.

“I grew up around seeing records being manufactured, vinyl from the conception to the final product,” Marley explains. “That process and the quality and the discipline that is behind it. So I wanted to kind of push this record in that way.”

He says that this approach is different from how people do music today. Today, Marley says, music is cheaper, easier and faster to make. He wanted to make Brightside “the slow way.”

Kelly then asks Marley, an avid vinyl collector, what the most important record in his collection is.

“The most important vinyl is the first vinyl I bought,” Marley says before naming an album that was surely many collectors’ first: Thriller. “The first time I had my own money, then I was like, ‘Yeah, man, I’m going to the record store and buy a record.’”

The conversation then turns toward the themes that Marley explores in Brightside, with a focus on the album being his most personal to date. Marley shares why he wanted to be honest in this project and what inspired him to write the new songs on it. One inspiration came from being on set for his father’s 2024 biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, which he produced.

“[I was] also getting some sparks of creativity, you know, being on a movie set,” Marley says. He then shares that he crafted the deeply personal songs on the album over time, but there was one day in particular during which he really took a look inside and tried to understand why some of the music he was writing was sad.

“One day I was really feeling like s–t and I was like, ‘Why do I let the world trouble me?’” he shares. “The state of the world is oppressive. And that is the battle really. The battle is how we free our mind from that oppression.”

To hear Marley talk about the making of Brightside, his favorite vegan dishes at a Los Angeles institution and his thoughts on F1, watch the full Take Us Out above.