In the ramp-up to the 2025 yuletide season, one of the upcoming events jumpstarting the holiday spirit is 3 Diamonds Films’ Unexpected Christmas. The rollout ahead of the theatrical film’s Nov. 7 nationwide premiere kicks off today (Oct. 10) with the release of its soundtrack’s same-titled lead single, a soulful ballad performed and produced by October London.

In addition to London, Unexpected Christmas: The Soundtrack includes established and rising artists such as Kevin Ross, Tamar Braxton, Melanie Fiona, K-Ci Hailey, Koryn Hawthorne and Kenyon Dixon performing a 10-track mix of original songs and holiday covers. Ahead of the soundtrack’s Oct. 24 release via 3 Diamonds Entertainment/Platform Sounds, the lead single and another track — “Cold Day” with EJ Jones — are both available now in tandem with the album pre-save.

London produced the soundtrack’s lead single in collaboration with Tripp Caimbridge. Describing the creative inspiration behind the song, London tells Billboard, “I brought in the vision of making something soulful yet classic and then worked with Tripp to craft the lyrics in a way that felt timeless. The words came out of real memories: I wanted the song to feel relatable, like you could hear your own family in it. Then we built on them to give the song that universal Christmas spirit.”

Of the soundtrack’s other instant grat song “Cold Day,” written and produced by Daniel Bryant, Jones notes, “When I first heard the song, it just clicked for me. I locked into the booth and recorded it in 30 minutes.”

Unexpected Christmas the film revolves around the romantic entanglements, family secrets, old rivalries — and love — that ensue when the Scott family comes together for a holiday reunion. The comedy/dramedy stars Lil Rel Howery, Tabitha Brown, DomiNque Perry, Anna Maria Horsford and Regan Gomez. Actor/comedian Howery and Emmy-winning actress/author Brown also doubled as executive producers of the film with Norman Gyamfi. Written by Cassandra Mannand and directed by Michael Vaughn Hernandez, Unexpected Christmas was produced by 3 Diamonds Films co-founders Phil Thornton and Trell Woodberry along with Perri Camper.

“The soundtrack for Unexpected Christmas represents everything I love about music and film coming together,” Thornton, also CEO of 3 Diamonds Entertainment, tells Billboard. “From the gifted artists to the extraordinary writers and producers, everyone poured their creativity into making songs that not only move you but also live naturally within the story. At 3 Diamonds Films, we’re committed to making soundtracks matter again. We want the music to feel like an event in its own right — something that amplifies the film and creates a lasting cultural moment. Unexpected Christmas is the first step in that vision.”

Unexpected Christmas: The Soundtrack track list:

If there’s one thing that Kevin Aviance learned in the last few years, it’s that timing is everything.

Sometimes, the timing takes much longer than he would have thought, like when his 1996 club single “C-nty” became the backbeat for a fan-favorite B-side on Beyoncé’s 2022 album Renaissance. But sometimes, the timing is much more immediate, like when he settled on the title of his new album.

“I remembered seeing a hippopotamus at the zoo, and I was like, ‘They’re so fierce. If you see hippo in the wild, you better run, bitch,” Aviance says, as his glamorous makeup twinkles in the light of his computer screen. “So I said, ‘We’re calling the album Hippopotamus!‘ The next day, Moo Deng was born. And I thought, ‘You cannot write this s–t, b–ch!’”

The album’s title is far from the only thing that feels kismet on Hippopotamus!, Aviance’s first full-length solo album in more than 20 years out Friday (Oct. 10). After helping shape the house and ballroom scenes of New York City in the mid-90s — and earning three Billboard Dance Club Songs No. 1s in the process — Aviance returns a few decades later to his beloved genre, now anointed not only by a pair of pop music’s paragons, but by himself as a vital artist in dance music’s history.

Oscillating between retro-leaning ballroom-inspired singles — including a series of bitch tracks, vogue numbers and interludes — and modern dance songs showing his forward-thinking worldview, Aviance goes out of his way to make Hippopotamus! more than just a victory lap. “I just really wanted it to be authentic,” he says. “It’s really hard to be 57 out here in these streets doing this … but hopefully I’ll be 80 and still doing this, and I hope that the music keeps evolving and teaches me more about myself.”

The process for creating the LP started just over three years ago, shortly after Aviance earned the biggest credit of his career on “Pure/Honey,” the penultimate track of Beyoncé’s house-inspired masterwork Renaissance. Throughout the thundering track, Bey interpolated his vocal from “C-nty” to serve as a piece of the track’s bassline, alongside other prominent ballroom samples from MikeQ, Kevin Jz Prodigy and the late Moi Renee. Even three years later, Aviance vividly remembers how life-altering his 2022 experience felt and still gives the pop superstar all due credit

“I’ve seen a lot of people take from the gay community. I’ve never seen anyone lift up our community, a sub-genre, the Black queens the way she did, where she said, ‘Look at this! Aren’t they talented?’” he recalls, still moved by Beyoncé’s munificence toward him and his people. “I couldn’t even talk about it before, what it meant to me. She is 100 [percent] and her team is 100 [percent], and they have been nothing but so kind and so real.”

Aviance’s return to the spotlight didn’t stop there — during her Celebration World Tour, Madonna reunited with Aviance on stage three decades after he appeared in her “Secret” video. The pair judged the on-stage voguing competition at her show in Washington D.C., which Aviance cites as another night he will “never forget.”

“I’ve been obsessed with Madonna since I was 14 years old. To go through all the stuff she went through, and all the lives that she saved, Madonna is The One,” Aviance says. “I mean, both of these women just mean everything to me.”

As he performed The CVNTY Tour — a series of unofficial post-Renaissance Tour afterparties where he played high energy DJ sets remixing Beyoncé’s music — Aviance felt the energy from the crowds moving him to get back to making original music. Plus, he felt like “it would be stupid not to” capitalize on the moment.

He got in touch with his former collaborator DJ Gomi, and the pair started working on a couple new songs. But as time went on and the pair kept collaborating on more and more new music, Aviance realized that his original plan to drop a few one-off singles didn’t make sense anymore. “I was like, ‘Am I making an album?’” Aviance recalls. “And Gomi goes, ‘Let’s just keep going, don’t think about it.’”

The process wasn’t always easy. When he and Gomi were working on the album’s lead single “Beautiful,” the two kept going back and forth; Gomi’s initial vision was an old-school, Donna Summers-inspired disco anthem, while Aviance was more interested in bringing a more modern nu-disco sound to the record. The final product, as became a theme on the rest of the album, was a blend of both their ideas.

Other songs on the album proved to be much harder to create. Late album standout “What a Friend” sees Aviance giving his own spin on a traditional gospel hymn, with his voice providing the only melodic line in the song while a set of house beats back him up. When the song proved to be much more difficult than he or Gomi had anticipated, Aviance dug his heels in, saying he “needed” the spiritual track on the album.

“Girl, we worked on that song for about six months. I was trying to bring church to the club, and nothing we were doing was working on this song,” he says with a sigh. The pair finally cracked the code once they brought in a choir of singers NYU to create backing harmonies starting on the second verse, bringing a sense of community to a record about creating shared space. “I told them, ‘Your college tuition was used very well,’” he jokes.

When asked why including a spiritual hymn on his album felt vital, Aviance points to the state of evangelical right-wing politics, saying that he wanted to show that queer people have just as much ownership over belief as those on the right who use it as a cudgel against the community.

“The words that come out of their mouths have nothing to do with The Word, you feel me?” Aviance says. “The church I grew up in never once brought up my gayness. My pastor said, ‘My job here only is to teach you how to speak to God. That’s it.’ That has always been what this is about to me, not the negativity that they like to bring up; that’s not in [the Bible].”

But one song that stands out amongst the rest on Hippopotamus! is unquestionably “Bloodline.” On the penultimate track of the album, Aviance brings together all of the references and influences that helped shape his career and creates a stunning ode to the resilience and power of the LGBTQ+ community of the past, the present and the future.

The track also serves as a tribute to Hector Xtravaganza, a monumental figure in New York’s ballroom community, often referred to as the “grandfather of ballroom.” His co-producer on the song Cherie Lily shared some words the late legend shared with her before his death in December 2018: “We are a family, our bloodline is the music and the melody lives on.”

“I had never heard anything like that before, but it’s the truth,” a tearful Aviance recalls. “If you are a real LGBTQIA+ girl, then you have a fierce soundtrack in your head at all times. It gets us through everything in life. So as soon as I heard those words, I said, ‘Let’s go, this is the song.’”

It’s a fitting way to close out the album (the final track is an updated version of Aviance’s “C-nty”), as Aviance finds himself now looking to his own legacy. At 57 years old, he’s far from done with his career, but as he thinks about other Black queer icons like Sun Ra, Big Mama Thornton and Sylvester, Aviance cannot help but hope that his music can help others the same way that his heroes’ helped him.

“Music saved my life. If I weren’t doing this, I don’t know where I’d be — actually, I know where I’d be, I’d be dead,” he says. “I never stopped doing music this whole time, I’m always putting out a track. But to do an album like this, that we worked so hard to make this album sound like today, was calculated — so that somewhere, someone can play this and hear the message.”

Many things changed for Wet Leg ahead of its second album, Moisturizer — but one constant was acclaimed producer Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Caroline Polachek, Grimes), who returned to the fold after helming the band’s self-titled debut and helped the group’s new lineup unleash its sound.

Below, he reflects on creating the sessions that sculpted the British group’s latest full-length, standout memories from the studio and more.

What were your expectations before heading into the studio?

When we did the first record together, no one was quite expecting what was going to happen. The second time around, they weren’t working in an imaginary space, and they knew that people were going to be listening to it. They didn’t want to repeat themselves and wanted a darker, slower, heavier sound.

How did bringing the full band into the studio influence the sessions?

Everyone had contributed to the writing of the songs, so the whole band had a deeper knowledge of not just what their parts were, but what the songs meant and how they were constructed. The playing really benefited from that.

How did they interact in the studio?

They’d toured so much that the mechanics of playing together were so down and they’re super tight, but it’d gone beyond that — they’re almost telepathic! These new songs hadn’t been overrehearsed and they were still fresh. The band were still at a point where they were excited to play it.

How do you approach each session?

I definitely adapt [my methods] for different artists. It has a lot to do with the personalities. I don’t like to have a set process that I stick to every record. I’ve got a technique in the studio which is to try and avoid playing the same song over and over again. If we’re recording, I’d package songs into groups of two or three, so you never have that repetition of hammering a song until it’s lost its light. Everything was fresh because of that and I think it shows in the record. You can hear things being discovered in the playing. Sometimes I’ll try and limit the number of sounds and equipment each musician can use. I think one of the pitfalls can be people just adding and adding layers and I like things to be clear.

What song are you particularly proud of?

I already liked the demo to “Davina McCall,” but when we started tracking it in the studio it started sounding so heartwarming. When Rhian [Teasdale] did her first vocal track, I actually started crying. It was a really funny moment. I thought it was so beautiful and I kind of lost it.

Was it a fun process?

Both records have had an intense feeling of being on holiday. We recorded ­[Moisturizer] in Brighton, away from where they lived and my usual studio in London; we’d all cycle into the studio together and have lots of fun. Hester [Chambers, guitarist] put it really well: About halfway through, she was like, “I feel nostalgic for now. I’m already missing it.” And I knew exactly what she meant.

This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.

When President Donald Trump fired the Kennedy Center’s longtime president and chairman in February and installed himself as chairman, two musicians who had been artistic advisers to the center and the National Symphony Orchestra, opera star Renée Fleming and rock pianist Ben Folds, resigned, and one fourth of the orchestra’s subscribers canceled their subscriptions in protest.  

But Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra’s director and one of the world’s most sought-after conductors, stayed on, extending his contract in March by four years, and will serve as music director and principal conductor until 2031, the orchestra’s centennial year. He says he has more to accomplish with the NSO, and for the most part he has received praise for providing stability during a time of upheaval.  

“I respect people who think differently,” says Noseda, an admirer of the late, politically active Leonard Bernstein, who composed the music for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971 and was known to court controversy. “But today is not the time to make speeches. I have responsibilities.” 

Noseda is music director of another orchestra, though, and one that is purposely political – or, more specifically, geopolitical. That ensemble is the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra, or PCYO, made up of 80 young musicians from three Caucasus nations, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and five neighboring countries, Ukraine, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Moldova. The PCYO performs every September in Georgia, as a central element of a music festival in Tsinandali, about 65 miles from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Georgia is considered a safe, hospitable country, but the region is rife with conflict, and the traditional enmity between, say, Turkey and Armenia, seems utterly irrelevant when young people from those countries make music together. Thus, the PCYO is not merely an orchestra, but a peace project. 

The festival attracts world-class soloists and chamber ensembles from all over the world – this year, pianists Sir András Schiff and Nikolai Lugansky, cellist Misha Maisky, and the Jerusalem Quartet were among the performers. Many of these A-list artists come to support the humanitarian mission of the festival, and are invariably impressed with the level of playing of the orchestra. Noseda has been music director of the PCYO since its inception in 2019. Because of COVID, the ensemble was suspended in 2020 and 2021. In five seasons at the helm, Noseda has helped mold the PCYO into a professional-level orchestra, a feat all the more remarkable considering it is open to musicians from only a handful of countries. 

Billboard caught up with Noseda at the Tsinandali Festival, held this year between Sept. 4 and 14, and spoke to him and members of the PYCO about music and coexistence. 

The PYCO concerts this season featured symphonies of Shostakovich, Beethoven, Mahler and Brahms, and concertos of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven and Dvořák, with Lugansky, Maisky, violinist Marc Bouchkov, pianist Behzod Abduraimov and cellist Pablo Ferrández as soloists. The Brahms symphony – No. 3 in F major – was originally slated to be guest-conducted by Kent Nagano, but Nagano had to cancel for health reasons, and Noseda stepped in, late in the game. He was impressed with the results. “From the quality of the rehearsal, I thought I knew what to expect,” Noseda says, “but the performance went even beyond my expectations.” The concert, in the festival’s 1,200-seat seat covered amphitheater, drew a standing ovation. 

Musicians in the PCYO are between the ages of 18 and 28. A half-dozen members – violinists Ailin Akyner from Kazakhstan; Grigori Ambartsumian from Ukraine; Ece Canay from Turkey; and Dominic-Lucian Drutac from Moldova; along with cellist Lale Efendiev from Turkey; and double-bassist Alexander Vasilioglo from Moldova — gathered in a practice room for an interview with Billboard. The musicians spoke adoringly of Noseda, who, they say, has all their names committed to memory, despite the considerable turnover – 30 percent of the musicians this year were newcomers. “It’s like he’s looking through the eyes of every single orchestra member,” says Canay. 

Noseda is by no means the sole reason for the achievements of the PCYO. The young artists receive coaching from a staff made up almost entirely of first chair players at major orchestras. Italian conductor Claudio Vandelli travels from city to city throughout the region to audition prospective new members. Vandelli, who is quite possibly the most astute talent scout in the business, also selects the young orchestral musicians who perform at the midsummer festival in Verbier, Switzerland, from around 1,500 applicants per annum. He estimates he hears around 300 applicants each year for the PCYO, but that orchestra is officially open to eight countries (Uzbekistan may next year become the ninth), whereas the young artists at Verbier represent at least 60 different nationalities. Vandelli says occasional exceptions are made for the PCYO, to fill some key slots – this season, for instance, one of the bassoonists was a young woman from Spain. And every year one or more Russians have been discreetly invited to participate. 

Asked whether there was any political tension within the PYCO, the six members in the interview panel were unanimous: never. “We are all aware of the mission here,” Canay says. Some musicians carry scars of war. Ambartsumian, the Ukrainian violinist, says he lives in Dusseldorf with his mother and brother, and has not seen his father, who remains in Ukraine, for three years. On the day of the Russian invasion, he says, “we were awakened at 5 in the morning by explosions. A bomb destroyed our neighbor’s house next door. Even after I moved [to Germany], I couldn’t sleep calmly for months. Any sound – a ring, a clock – could trigger me.” 

“Sometimes I would like to talk about these kind of things with my friends here,” says Efendiev, the Turkish cellist, “but, like Grigori, they might have PTSD, and I want to be respectful.” 

The historic Tsinandali estate, where the festival takes place – a bucolic 12 acres of parkland that the French novelist Alexandre Dumas compared to paradise – seems the perfect refuge for young people from countries in conflict. Georgia has a long history of invasions over the millennia – most recently in 2008, when Russia seized 20% of Georgian land in a five-day war – but the country is peace-loving, and maintains a warm and tolerant spirit. Here, Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Orthodox Christians coexist. Mosques and synagogues are meters away from one another. 

Georgia has been free of armed conflict since 2008, but there is anxiety about further Russian intervention. Between last year’s festival and this year’s edition, the pro-Russian anti-West political party, Georgian Dream, won a general election that was criticized for irregularities by international observers. Following the election, negotiations by Georgia to join the European Union were suspended, despite the initiative’s popularity. Throughout Tbilisi, the street signs and names of establishments are in Georgian and English, and pro-EU graffiti is omnipresent. On October 4, Georgian Dream solidified its power by sweeping local elections. Tens of thousands of Georgians rallied in Tbilisi to protest the results, and police used water cannons to push back protesters who tried to storm the presidential palace. 

Georgian Dream was a topic of private conversation at this year’s festival, but only once did the controversy bubble to the surface. Hungarian-born pianist András Schiff, known for political outspokenness – he has refused to perform in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine – gave a solo recital on September 6 at the festival’s 600-seat chamber music hall. He apologized for speaking to the audience in English, but said he cannot converse in Georgian, then added, “I could speak to you in Russian, but I might get into trouble.” The comment was greeted by some members of the audience with applause. 

Though some Georgians are anxious about the future, George Ramishvili, founder and chairman of Silk Road Group, a media conglomerate, conveys nothing but optimism. Ramishvili is the principal architect of the Tsinandali Festival.  He has already made large investments – the amphitheater, chamber hall, and a hotel with practice rooms for the PCYO were all his doing – and his next project on the Tsinandali estate is a $5 million indoor concert hall, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. On Sept. 15, the day after the festival ended, Ramishvili presided over the opening of another Silk Road property, the Telegraph, a new luxury hotel in Tbilisi, complete with a jazz club and a rooftop “Rolling Stone” bar. To mark the opening, Nik West performed on the rooftop and the Stanley Clarke Trio gave a concert at the jazz club. 

Noseda also exudes optimism, and says of the festival, “we are already planning the next three years.” To underscore that the PCYO mission of coexistence is working, he confirmed the juiciest bit of gossip at this year’s festival – namely, that two PCYO musicians, one Russian and the other Ukrainian, had become romantically involved. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he says. “That is the way the world should work.”