Oasis have joined the star-studded lineup for War Child’s upcoming HELP(2) fundraising album. The reunited Brit pop legends have offered up a live version of a fan favorite from last year’s sold-out global reunion tour, “Acquiesce (Live From Wembley Stadium, 28 September ’25,” for the collection as a stand-alone 7″ single enclosed in the gatefold of the vinyl edition and as a hidden track on the double-CD version; the track will also be available to stream beginning on Friday (March 6).

The inclusion will mark the first physical release of a live recording from Oasis’ 2025 tour, with the recording coming from the final night of the group’s seven-show run at London’s Wembley Stadium on their first tour in 16 years. It’s a return to form for the Gallaghers, who appeared on the original 1995 HELP album, contributing “Fade Away” featuring Johnny Depp and model Kate Moss, on a collection that also featured tracks from The Stone Roses, Radiohead, Massive Attack, Suede, Sinead O’Connor, Blur and The Charlatans, among others.

The upcoming sequel album from the organization whose mission is to protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children impacted by global conflict has already been previewed with tracks from Pulp (“Begging For Change”), Arctic Monkeys (“Opening Night”), Ezra Collective & Greentea Peng (“Helicopters”), Damon Albarn (“Flags”) and the Last Dinner Party (“Let’s Do It Again!”). HELP(2) is due out this Friday.

In addition to the above mentioned, contributors to HELP(2) include: Anna Calvi, Arlo Parks, Arooj Aftab, Bat For Lashes, Beabadoobee, Beck, Beth Gibbons, Big Thief, Black Country, New Road, Cameron Winter, Depeche Mode, Dove Ellis, Ellie Rowsell, English Teacher, Foals, Fontaines D.C., Graham Coxon, Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest, King Krule, Nilüfer Yanya, Olivia Rodrigo, Sampha, Wet Leg and more.

You can understand why Oasis — who have not released a new album since 2008’s Dig Out Your Soul — might be eager to share the recording from their rapturously received 2025 reunion tour. Speaking backstage at the 2025 BRIT Awards over the weekend, chief songwriter/guitarist Noel Gallagher, who took home songwriter of the year awards at the event, told People that last year’s shows were “better than the 90s.”

Gallagher, 58, said his first shows in nearly two decades with formerly estranged brother singer Liam were, “the most incredible thing that any of us have ever done … to come back after all these years, to get No. 1 albums and all that is pretty mad, but we loved every minute and every second of it.”

While rumors have suggested the Gallaghers are making plans for another round of Oasis shows, at press time no information had been announced about future plans.

Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late Neil Sedaka, who died on Feb. 27 at age 86, by diving back into the first of his three No. 1 hits: the irresistible “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

When artists gain renown as singer-songwriters — particularly paradigmatic ones like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen — they’re often most celebrated for their lyrics, and treated as if they were poets who also happen to be musicians. Neil Sedaka became one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the early rock era primarily through his strengths as a melodicist and a vocalist, with the words part of it usually coming through collaboration with trusted partners. Tellingly, most likely the most famous lyric that Sedaka ever penned was scarcely a lyric at all: “Down, dooby-doo-down-down, comma-comma-down….”

By the time of “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” Neil Sedaka was already a well-established hitmaker, both for himself and others. Most of those hits came in conjunction with lyricist Howard Greenfield, who Sedaka had met when the two were teenage music students in New York. The duo started out writing showtune-type songs, but as Fred Bronson writes in The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, pivoted to rock-based pop music after Sedaka and his high school girlfriend Carole Klein (later known as Carole King) heard The Penguins’ “Earth Angel” on a pizza parlor jukebox. Sedaka and Greenfield found some R&B success, and had their first major pop hit when Connie Francis brought their “Stupid Cupid” to the top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958.

After a brief period singing with vocal group the Tokens — later to score a Hot 100 No. 1 hit of their own with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” — Sedaka embarked upon a solo career in the late ’50s, scoring a top 15 breakthrough with “The Diary” in 1959. A brief rough patch followed, but Sedaka rebounded in 1960 with “Oh Carol!” — inspired by his teenage paramour, by then a renowned songwriter in her own right in collaboration with Gerry Goffin — and the hits poured out from there, with “Stairway to Heaven,” “Calendar Girl” and “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen,” all of which followed “Carol” to the top 10.

But Sedaka wouldn’t top the Hot 100 for the first time until 1962, with the release of “Breaking Up.” The song leads off with that semi-nonsensical vocal hook, which Sedaka thought of as a last-minute addition to the song. He intended to swap in more fleshed-out lyrics but never did; the melodic phrasing of it is so infectious and momentum-building that more logical wording might’ve just slowed it down anyway. Starting immediately with the vocal hook — accompanied only by handclaps, to give the intro a little extra kinetic energy — made “Breaking Up” one of the most immediately striking and memorable pop-rock songs of the early ’60s, a winner by the first mention of its title, which punctuates the end of the intro and introduces the general concept of the song.

An all-time fantastic title, too: Sedaka thought of it before anything else, pitching Greenfield multiple times on the idea of devising an entire song around the phrase. It’s a lyrical truism with the kind of wisdom that feels particularly sagacious only within the context of pop music: Of course breaking up is hard to do, but when expressed by Sedaka at the end of each verse (and the beginning of each bridge) of his pained plea to his partner to “give our love another try,” it feels like hard-earned insight. It also helps that the phrase is long and sturdy enough to be a real lyrical load-bearer — there is no separate chorus to “Breaking Up,” just the verse-ending title mention functioning as the song’s main refrain, but it’s substantive enough on its own to give the song its skeletal structure.

The song is so dominated by its intro — which also continues as a backing vocal throughout the verse — and its title, that its other lyrics are minimal, and relatively unremarkable. The other most memorable parts aren’t the words itself, but the way they’re deployed — like the way Sedaka stretches the last word of “Now I know that it’s true” into three syllables, or how at the end of a relatively patient, stretched-out bridge, Sedaka suddenly gets manic, rushing out an entire “Instead of breaking up/ I wish that we were making up again” sentiment that ends up delaying the return of the main verse by a whole measure. And of course, his double-tracked vocal makes every word of the verse heart-piercing, just by sheer virtue of its masterful two-part harmony.

It all added up to one of the most undeniable pop-rock confections of its era — and one that, at a lean 2:18, didn’t waste a second of its runtime. It quickly took over the summer of 1962 upon its late-June release, taking just seven weeks to rush the top of the Hot 100 dated Aug. 11. It knocked out “Roses Are Red (My Love)” by Bobby Vinton — arguably the pre-eminent crooner of the early ’60s, but one with a much more old-fashioned energy than Sedaka’s youthful Brill Building pop-rock — and lasted a pair of weeks on top, before being deposed by Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (co-penned, incidentally, by Sedaka’s former sweetheart King). Future collaborator Elton John referred to “Breaking Up” as “one of the great songs of all time” in his foreword to the Sedaka biography Rock ‘n’ Roll Survivor, and commented that it “will always be sung.” (Indeed, the song revisited the Hot 100 times multiple times as recorded by other artists, including by vocal group The Happenings in 1968, balladeer Lenny Welch in 1970, and prefab pop outfit The Partridge Family in 1972.)

Sedaka squeezed out another top five hit by year’s end with follow-up “Next Door to an Angel” — which repeated the “Breaking Up” formula to a rather conspicuous degree, right down to the double-tracked vocal verse harmony and “Doo-ba-bop-bop, oh-do-bop, she-down-down” intro. But the hits slowed a little in 1963, as The 4 Seasons, The Beach Boys and Phil Spector-produced girl-group pop took over at top 40’s vanguard. Then, in 1964, The Beatles and the British Invasion hit, and as with many early-’60s hitmakers, Sedaka’s career was never the same: He still scored three top 40 hits in ’63, but as of ’64, he wouldn’t even hit the chart’s top 75 again that decade.

If that had been the end of Neil Sedaka’s chart run, there would have been no shame in it. He still finished the ’60s with 10 top 20 hits, including six top 10s and a No. 1 in “Breaking Up,” plus additional hits co-penned for Connie Francis, Jimmy Clanton and even The 5th Dimension at decade’s end. As it turned out, it was just the first act: Sedaka was due for a major career revival in the mid ’70s, including another pair of No. 1s — which we’ll get to in this column later in the week — and a top 10 recording of his signature ’60s hit, recasting “Breaking Up” as a piano ballad, and adding a new Tony Bennett-like intro vamp (“You tell me that you’re leaving/ I can’t believe it’s true…”). But even before that new addition, Sedaka couldn’t resist starting the recording with a familiar sound from the early ’60s, providing crucial context before quickly fading out: “Do-do-do-down, dooby-doo-down-down, comma-comma…”

Tomorrow, Forever No. 1 looks at Sedaka’s second No. 1 — and first in 13 years — the ballad “Laughter in the Rain.”

Cardi B’s easily distracted these days. The Grammy-winning rapper took a brief pause during a recent stop on her Little Miss Drama Tour to let the crowd know she’s enforcing a no-fighting policy, but for a different reason than most would think.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please don’t fight because when y’all fight … I’m nosy. I want to see it,” she joked about being unable to focus on her own performance after seeing an altercation in the audience, like she’s back in high school.

Cardi continued: “That distracts me from the performance and then I f—k up. And then I go all over the internet, f—king up my moves because I wanted to see the fight. So please, no fighting. Do it after the show.”

Whether it’s been Cardi bringing out Tyla and Kehlani, taking a spill on stage in Las Vegas or calling out ICE, the Bronx native’s first headlining trek has been a headline-snatching affair, and she’s just getting started.

Following her performance in Phoenix over the weekend, Cardi took to X on Monday (March 2) to clarify that her mini-speeches introducing certain songs aren’t necessarily shots directed at people in her life.

“Dear blogs, when I perform a song I always introduce the song with a lil razzle dazzle,” she wrote. “Not everything is a shot or personal. I’m actually repeating lyrics from the songs…Relax.”

The Little Miss Drama Tour continues this week with a Texas triangle takeover, as Cardi will be making stops in Houston, Austin and Dallas before heading to Denver.

K-pop icons TOMORROW X TOGETHER have set the release date for their upcoming eighth mini album, 7TH YEAR: A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns. The follow-up to last summer’s fourth full-length studio album, The Star Chapter: TOGETHER, is slated for release on April 13.

The news was announced via an arty 1:45-long teaser video in Korean. “The concept trailer delivers a visceral portrayal of inner anxiety, weaving the members’ striking visuals with the evocative imagery of thorns and a solitary thorn figure,” read a statement. “It is anchored by a poignant narration of lyrics from ‘Thorn Tree’ by the legendary Korean folk duo Poet and Village Chief, deepening its emotional resonance. This central thorn motif continues through the concept photos, serving as a prelude to the introspective growth and unfiltered artistry that define the quintet’s new chapter.”

The video opens with the image of a bright pink, leafless tree against a white wall as a soft voice says [translation via Google Translate], “Inside me, there are so many of me. There is no rest for you. Inside me are vain wishes. There is no place for you to be comfortable. Inside me, I can’t help it. Me too. Taking away your resting place.”

The black and white images include shots of members YEONJUN, SOOBIN, BEOMGYU, HEUNINGKAI and TAEHYUN tumbling through a white void dressed in all-black as well as the thorn-covered shadow lurking around in the clip titled “When the wind stopped for a moment in the thornbush.” The seemingly unrelated scenes then pile up: a solitary woman eating a meal alone, a shirtless man working out, birds chirping and flying in ominous flocks and various glimpses of sad-looking people interspersed with a stark shot of the tree surrounded by pink smoke, with the spike figure at the center of it all.

TXT’s fourth mini album, 2022’s minisode 2: Thursday’s Child, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and spent 14 weeks on the chart, while their fifth mini-album, The Name Chapter: TEMPTATION, debuted at the top of the chart. Last year’s seventh mini album, The Star Chapter: SANCTUARY, debuted at No. 2 and July’s The Star Chapter: TOGETHER debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album tally.

More information about the album’s tracklist will be released soon.

Watch the TOMORROW X TOGETHER teaser video below.