Karol G bares her soul — and her killer abs — for the latest issue of Playboy, which dropped Tuesday (April 7) featuring the Latin music icon as its cover star.

Striking a number of different sensual poses, Karol G looks strong and glowy in all of the photos she shot for the legacy magazine. Though stripping down for Playboy can be daunting, she told the publication, “The only person I asked if I should do it or not was Sofia Vergara. I called her and told her, ‘If you tell me not to do it, I won’t.’”

“‘Mijita, with that body?’” the Modern Family actress responded, according to Karol G. “When you get to this age, you tell yourself, ‘F–k, why didn’t I pose that one time?’”

The cover comes ahead of this year’s Coachella, which kicks off Friday (April 10). The Colombian musician is set to headline the festival alongside Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Bieber, an opportunity that’s particularly meaningful for Karol.

“They called me and told me — in Spanish — that I was going to be the first Latina to close the festival,” she told Playboy. “I feel like it’s a show for my community, for the world, but it’s a show that’s very much for me.”

On the topic of representing her community, the singer was also candid about her complicated feelings toward condemning ICE, which has been carrying out Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations and raids on immigrant communities since he took office last year. According to her, she’d like to speak out more — but she’s been repeatedly advised not to.

“People will say, ‘It’s better you don’t,’” she told the publication. “Why? Because if you say the thing, maybe the next day you’ll get a call: ‘Hey, we are taking your visa away.’ You become bait, because some people want to show their power.”

“My team would kill me,” she continued. “If I’m being honest with you, it’s something that crosses the line of what I have to do to protect myself. But at the end of the day, what is my role if I’m in this position?”

That said, she’s waiting for the opportunity to arise for her words to make the most impact. “I have a huge stage, and that’s why I want to wait, and if someone was ever to do something to me, I want to stand firmly on my stage for my community,” Karol added. “So that’s why I may have to be more careful, and wait for my turn, and ensure that, through that opportunity, I can talk and represent something more.”

Pop-rock singer-songwriter Bella Kay doesn’t understand why everyone thinks her upbeat-sounding breakout hit “iloveitiloveitiloveit” is a sad song.

As she tells Billboard on a giggly Zoom call in late March just a few days after her 20th birthday, “I put it out, and everyone was like, ‘Oh my god… this is gut-wrenching,’” she says. “I was genuinely like, ‘What? Hold on. I thought it was fun, guys.’”

With Kay’s bright, earnest voice chugging the acoustic guitar-driven track’s momentum forward from start to finish, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” is the winking lament of someone who can’t escape the cycle of a slightly concerning, rollercoaster-like romance — packaged as a carefree love song in which ignoring red flags is thrilling, not self-sabotage. (“I love it when we fight, and I like it when you’re mean,” she admits in the lyrics. “We don’t have to get into what that says about me.”)

“I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, this is a toxic relationship,’” she says. “I look at it as like, ‘Oh!’” — she cheers, smiling and shaking her head wildly, as if she’s in the middle of a rave — “‘This is a toxic relationship!’”

Intentionally heartbreaking or not, the song’s wide-reaching relatability and punchy lyricism launched “iloveitiloveitiloveit” onto the Billboard Hot 100 in February — Kay’s first entry on the chart, which has since reached No. 17. It was officially released in January, but she first posted the chorus on TikTok immediately after writing it in “five minutes” on her guitar in November. Within the next month, she’d finished the lyrics with producer and now-frequent collaborator Alexis Kesselman and settled on its breathless, no-spaces title — despite people “teasing” her for it — to match the chaotic nature of the song.

“The whole point is like, ‘I shouldn’t do this, but I love it,’” she explains with a shrug. “It has to feel stupid and crazy.”

“iloveitiloveitiloveit” came at exactly the right time for Kay. In the spring of 2025, she decided to begin regularly posting music clips on TikTok in hopes of launching a career, despite being two years into a prelaw degree at Texas A&M. “I was so embarrassed,” the Houston native recalls of sharing her first original song snippets on the platform. “My TikToks were getting, like, 30 likes … but I kept going.”

As her fan base took off that summer — largely thanks to viral clips of her moody, stripped-down tracks “Lonely” and “The Sick,” which appear in full on her November 2025 self-released EP sick to my stomach — she signed with Atlantic Records in July and then partnered with Immersive Management’s Adam Mersel and Priscilla Felten in October.

The fire had been lit — she just needed one song to pour gasoline on the flame. Released on Jan. 11, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” did that in abundance, racking up nearly half a million uses on TikTok to date. “When it started charting, I was like, ‘This is insane,’” Kay says tentatively, as if she still can’t quite believe it herself.

But the most fulfilling evidence, she says, is how loud her fans scream the words back at her when she sings the track at shows. Felten notes that Kay’s performances have been key to the success of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” — particularly her series of free, intimate pop-up concerts in Los Angeles, London, Houston and more cities beginning in November.

“The L.A. show in particular … even though [the song] was unreleased at that time, hearing it in that context — and the word-of-mouth that spread from there — was powerful,” Felten says of the 100-capacity performance. “It was also the first time you were seeing her [in person], because everyone had just known her solely through a phone.”

Mersel adds that Kay dropping “iloveitiloveitiloveit” on a Sunday evening, forgoing the industry-standard Friday release window, has been a strategic win — and one inspired by Kay’s prior farm-to-table delivery of sharing songs straight to social media. “During the school year, when Sunday nights can really be the blues for a lot of kids, it’s a nice little treat before the beginning of the week,” Mersel says, pointing out that the team has stuck with non-Friday releases for Kay’s other singles. “[Fans] felt like they were communicating with her in real time. They didn’t feel like there was a middleman involved.”

Next on the agenda is her first headlining tour through theaters in Europe and North America this spring, plus even more yet-to-be-announced live shows after that. And, if all goes to plan, Kay will release her already nearly complete debut album this summer. She says that the sound and emotional nuance of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” has informed the project more than any other track, recalling with a self-deprecating laugh, “I was talking to Alexis, and I was like, ‘There’s not enough sad songs.’ And she was like, ‘Bella. There’s like one and a half happy songs, and they’re not even really that happy.’”

But just as she did with “iloveitiloveitiloveit,” Kay has her own way of looking at things. “A good sad song to me is always going to be a happy song, just because you feel so understood [by it],” she says. “I want to make sure that I do pop my own way. I don’t want it to be super shiny and polished — I want it to be dirty and real.”

A version of this story appears in the April 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.

Starting in nightlife as a 21-year-old bartender, David Grutman has since built an empire. His company, Groot Hospitality, is behind major nightclubs, restaurants and other assorted hotspots, including LIV in South Beach and Las Vegas (with the latter city also home to LIV Beach at Fontainebleau Las Vegas); Miami’s Gekkō, a restaurant created in partnership with Bad Bunny; and Miami’s Casadonna, Papi Steak, Komodo and more.

Through it all, Grutman has worked with some of the biggest stars of the dance world and beyond. In his new book Take It Personal: How to Succeed by Building Relationships and Playing the Long Game, he writes about how building genuine relationships with artists, managers, agents, consumers and beyond has been a key difference maker in his decadeslong career.

Out April 14, the book features an foreword by Kim Kardashian, who writes that it “isn’t just the story of a man who built a hospitality empire… It’s the story of someone who understands that life is richer when it’s shared. He’s created places where cultures blend, where barriers drop, where people who might never cross paths end up sharing a moment they’ll never forget. That’s powerful. That’s legacy.”

In this exclusive excerpt, Grutman talks about getting in on the ground floor of the careers of artists including Steve Aoki, Alesso and John Summit. (Excerpted from Take It Personal: How to Succeed by Building Relationships and Playing the Long Game by David Grutman, © 2026 by David Grutman. Used with permission of the publisher, Zando, LLC.)

I’m not interested in being the venue where chaos happens. I’m interested in being the venue where people want to be. Where they feel protected. Where they feel respected. That doesn’t come from chasing drama. That comes from building relationships and valuing them.

I think this applies to a lot of businesses. When I work with start-ups, I’m interested in people who are at the top of their games, but I’m not interested in people who are tearing down other businesses. Devaluing relationships is also dangerous in a world where everyone knows everyone. That’s the part that gets lost in the “all press is good press” mindset. People forget that relationships are the real currency in business, which I know I’ve already said in this book ten times and will probably say ten more times before the end of the final chapter. Every time you protect someone’s privacy, every time you choose integrity over attention, you’re investing in that relationship. And those investments pay off. They show up in repeat business, in trust, in long-term loyalty.

I’ve seen it play out again and again. The people who chase fast press burn out fast, too. They get one big moment, and then they’re gone. But the ones who nurture relationships? They build empires. They get the callbacks. They get the deals. They get the second and third and tenth opportunities. That’s how you last.

You never know where someone’s going to end up, and remembering that has paid off for me in huge ways. If you treat someone like shit, they remember that, too. But if you always show up with respect, you build something that lasts. You also continue to put it out into the world that you’re a stand-up person and someone people want to know and be in business with.

That’s just been a truth for me from the beginning. One of the best examples of that is my longstanding relationships—personal and professional—with Steve Aoki. He’s been with me since the very beginning—like, nineteen years ago, back when I first opened LIV.

At the time, the kind of music he makes—electronic, indie, whatever you want to call it—was not mainstream the way it is today. Not at all. But we believed in it. We believed in Steve, and we believed in the importance of not just playing what people want to hear now but in trying to predict what they’ll want to hear in six months.

Now, of course, Steve is a household name around the world, and I know he remembers that I’m someone who believed in him before everyone else did. And what’s cool is we’ve both grown over time. There have been moments when my brand was bigger than his, and I used that leverage to help push him up. Now, he’s one of the biggest DJs in the world—still growing, still moving, still killing it—and we share deals and ideas and tips. We’re always checking in, making sure each of us is part of the next opportunity.

That’s what the long game looks like when your relationships are authentic. You’re not just helping someone when it benefits you directly. You’re investing in their future, and they invest in yours. It creates a special relationship where you’re able to vouch for each other’s character—when Steve was getting started, booking gigs as often as he could, he knew I’d always be happy to tell anyone who asked what a great DJ and person he was. In turn, if DJs were wondering about what clubs they should be trying to get into and who in the nightlife world they could trust, someone like Steve is unreservedly able to tell them that David Grutman is a good guy.

I remember when Sebastian Ingrosso from Swedish House Mafia first called me about Alesso. He said, “I have this great kid I’m working with. He doesn’t even have a logo yet, no branding, no nothing. We’re going to have to make it all from scratch.”

I said, “Okay. If you believe in it, I believe in you.” And we did it. I got involved, helped shape the visual identity, the positioning, the whole thing. And now? Alesso is one of the biggest gets in nightlife. Sebastian is someone who has been in my life for a long time—years and years. We’ve both grown in our own ways, but I’ve been there throughout his entire career, and he’s been there for mine. These are relationships built on time, mutual respect, and consistency. That’s the long game again—trusting the people you trust and investing early. I’ve met so many people where I’ve liked their vibe, or their talent, or their product, and that alone is enough for me to want to start to build a relationship.

A lot of people wait until someone has something clear to offer before they invest in the relationship. That, to me, is transactional in the worst way. It’s saying “I’m only trying to build a relationship with you because of what I think you can do for me.” I remember the first time I really noticed the DJ John Summit. He built a huge community of followers online, and every new track he released sparked genuine interaction from that community—likes, comments, real engagement. I knew this was someone worth investing in.

I decided to take a big bet. I signed John to a three-year deal, not because we were following trends but because I saw the potential to create something bigger. My goal wasn’t just to put him on the map—it was to amplify the community he had already built and give him opportunities to grow beyond it. I made sure he was seen alongside people who could elevate his profile: Tom Brady, David Guetta, Lenny Kravitz, Michael Rapino from Live Nation. I captured those moments and shared them widely, letting the world see all the people who were coming to John Summit’s shows. Slowly but surely, it helped position him as one of today’s most influential DJs.

“I don’t know. I really don’t,” Ella Langley considered when asked by Billboard why so many people have gravitated to her smash “Choosin’ Texas,” which adds a fifth week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (dated April 11).

“All of us that wrote it, we talk about that. We love this song. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a very honest point of view, you know, but I hear a lot of honest songs all the time. I tried to add some groove into this record, big singing choruses and big melodic guitar licks that you can remember. I don’t know if it feels nostalgic or sounds like something they hadn’t heard before.”

To Langley’s points, it may be a bit of all of the above.

Below is Hit Songs Deconstructed’s look at three key factors that have helped “Choosin’ Texas” — which Langley cowrote with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor and coproduced with Lambert and Ben West — dominate from Texas to Tennessee and beyond.

Rolling Rhythm & Gentle Sway 

“Choosin’ Texas” features a rolling, conversational rhythm and gentle sway, shaped by the push and pull between held notes and quicker syllabic bursts. First established by the guitar hook in the intro, this lilting feel reappears in key vocal lines across the song, subtly linking the instrumental hook and vocal melody in a way listeners are more likely to feel than consciously notice.

The result is a song that feels especially cohesive, familiar and memorable as it unfolds. It also lends the track a subtle two-step sway, making lyrics like “two-steppin’ ’round the room” feel especially natural. And when that rhythmic pattern is strategically broken at pivotal moments, such as leading into the chorus and spotlighting the “he’s choosin’ Texas, I can tell” hook at the end, the payoff lands even harder.

Space & Restraint Deepen Emotional Pull

Rather than forcing the heartbreak, “Choosin’ Texas” lets it unfold with an easy realism. Key lines are given room to breathe and Langley’s even-keeled delivery keeps the emotion grounded instead of oversold.

That restraint makes the song feel more believable, allowing the heartache to hit in a way that feels authentic and easy to connect with.

Fresh Take on a Familiar Theme 

“Choosin’ Texas” gives a classic love-triangle story a clever twist by framing it as a rivalry between two states. Rooted in imagery like Smoky Mountain rain, Hank Williams tunes and Memphis blues, the narrator’s world is distinctly Tennessee, while the other woman is never even named — she’s simply Texas.

As the song unfolds, the emotion feels less like a sudden loss and more like an inevitable one, as if he was always being pulled back to where he belonged. That idea comes into even sharper focus with the I-40 reference, which places that emotional divide on the very highway connecting their two worlds.

This framing gives the lyric a distinctly country identity while keeping its emotional core — losing someone whose heart was always headed elsewhere — universally relatable and refreshingly original.

David and Yael Penn co-founded Hit Songs Deconstructed. In 2023, Hit Songs Deconstructed and fellow song analysis platform MyPart publicly launched ChartCipher, an AI-powered platform analyzing a deeper scope of hit songs, as defined by Billboard’s charts.

Lasso has signed with Interscope Records for distribution, Billboard can exclusively announce on Tuesday (April 7). 

Both Nir Seroussi, president of Interscope Capitol Miami, and Walter Kolm, CEO of WK Entertainment, who signed Lasso for management in 2024, were present at the signing. 

“Signing with Interscope is a dream I’ve had my whole life,” the prolific Venezuelan singer-songwriter said in a press statement. “Seeing my name next to that logo is incredibly exciting for me. The fact that Nir, someone I truly admire in this industry, took interest in my project makes me very happy. I haven’t felt this excited about the future of my career in years.”

Seroussi, who was Billboard’s 2025 Latin Power Players Executive of the Year, added: “We’re thrilled to welcome Lasso to the Interscope family. He’s a truly special artist with a rare gift for turning personal stories into songs that connect deeply. What he’s delivered on this new album is exceptional — easily the best work of his career — and we can’t wait for the world to hear it.”

Marking a new chapter in Lasso’s career and international expansion, the news comes on the heels of the Latin pop star releasing his first single of 2026, called “p0rn0grafía.” The smooth, pop-rock song is the first preview of Lasso’s forthcoming sixth studio album following last year’s set Malcriado, which was nominated for best pop/rock album at the 2025 Latin Grammys.

Born Andres Vicente Lazo Uslar, the former Billboard Latin Artist on the Rise discovered his passion for music at the age of 11 and has been releasing music professionally since 2012. He entered the Billboard charts for the first time in 2022 when “Ojos Marrones” — fueled by its massive success on social media — peaked at No. 66 on the Billboard Global 200 chart and at No. 39 on the Billboard Global Excl. US chart. That same year, the song peaked at No. 15 on Latin Pop Airplay. The sweet, ultra-viral track also won the Latin Grammy for best pop/rock song at the 24th annual awards ceremony.

In the past year, Lasso has released a streak of notable collaborations, including with Ha*Ash, Ximena Sariñana and Piso 21.