“Every festival booker has their own process,” says Danny Bell, the founder and booker of San Francisco’s Portola. “Mine is definitely more mad scientist-y than other people’s.”

Bell’s metaphorical lab is a spreadsheet, which he begins tinkering with a year before the festival itself. The sheet allows Bell to see “all the different looks at once,” he says. “You have your money grid, your mock set times, your poster.” He’s made algorithms that let him organize it by an artist’s subgenre, gender, race and home country. There’s one designed around when the sun sets and when there’s full dark. He works to select a group of artists who are unlikely to play any of the same tracks twice over the weekend.

“Can you do it quicker?” Bell, the SVP of talent at Goldenvoice, asks rhetorically while talking to Billboard over Zoom from his office in San Francisco. “For sure. There’s probably a much simpler way, but I do it like this. I want to make sure to have all these different visualizations because this stuff is is important. It all works together.”

From these datasets eventually emerge the lineup and set times for Portola, which since its 2022 debut has become a dance festival circuit standout for putting artists who helped develop the dance/electronic genre alongside many of the moment’s most essential stars and emerging artists. Every year Bell also reserves a set time for a pop icon, a space that in 2025 belongs to Christina Aguilera, who Bell promises will perform “banger after banger.”

While Portola has put a whole host of big names in front of the 40,000-person crowd that gathers at the festival site at San Francisco’s Pier 80 (past headliners have included Flume, The Chemical Brothers, Eric Prydz, Skrillex, Rüfüs du Sol and Justice), this year puts an especially heavy emphasis on “showcasing the legends and pioneers of the scene and some of the most influential people the last 30 years,” Bell says. “This lineup is a real ode to to where the current sounds and state of electronic music came from.”

He’s not being hyperbolic. The fest this weekend (Sept. 20-21) will unpack the influence of the ’90s era U.K. underground via sets from Underworld, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, all of whom bent electronic music to harder, darker and more intense shapes during their heydays. There will also be U.S. artists whose work functioned as inflection points for the development of indie dance and dance punk — namely LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and Moby. The Rapture’s performance comes towards the start of a reunion tour happening fifteen years after the NYC group’s last headlining run. Meanwhile Moby, who hasn’t toured the U.S. extensively in years, will perform with a live band and run through much of his 1999 LP Play, an album whose prolific syncing helped introduce electronic music to a generation of young people living far from clubland.

These acts are matched by several of the moment’s key scene stars, with the lineup’s other big font names being Peggy Gou, Dom Dolla, Mau P and Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo playing as Anti Up.

“We now have fans who’ve been deep in the genre for 15-plus years, but 2010, 2011 and 2012 were the early days of electronic music being popular in the U.S.,” says Bell, who in this era was booking shows for HARD in Los Angeles. “Back then everyone was just learning about these artists for the first time. No one knew if Carl Cox was a new act or a legacy act.”

But with the people who got into dance music in this era now staring down middle age, “people have had enough time to dig deeper into the history and really understand who the pioneers were and where these sounds came from,” says Bell. “That’s allowed acts like The Chemical Brothers and Underworld to have a stronger and larger U.S. fanbase than they had before.”

To wit, a new wave of demand for these acts manifested in The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy both drawing huge crowds at Coachella 2023 and 2025, respectively. Meanwhile Underworld’s Boiler Room set from London has clocked 1.4 million views since it was put online three weeks ago.

“When I started in festivals, the acts that were being played on Spotify Mint [the streamer’s mainstream dance playlist] were like, Alesso and Avicii,” says Bell. “It was all progressive house and some dubstep.”

With Mint now populated by artists like Sammy Virji, Fred again.., Sara Landry, Ki/Ki and Kettama — all of who have played Portola in years past or who will be there this year — Bell says it’s been “really fun and rewarding to see the acts I work with who I’ve considered left of center and really progressing the sound and the scene making their way up the ladder to be the artists Spotify Mint is programming.”

There’s also the lineup contingent Bell lovingly and correctly refers to as “the divas.” In 2023 this was Nelly Furtado, who performed her ’00s-defining hits “Turn Off the Light,” “I’m Like a Bird,” “Say It Right” and “Promiscuous.” Last year, Natasha Bedingfield drew a tightly packed crowd that included fellow lineup artist Four Tet, while performing her pop holy trinity of “Pocketful of Sunshine,” “These Words” and “Unwritten.” This year, Aguilera is teed up to deliver her own arsenal of generational anthems.

“She knows what the assignment is,” says Bell — who also places previous Portola artists like Cobrah, Slayyter and Charli xcx in this diva category, a realm of the lineup that will also be filled by Ravyn Lenae this weekend.

Delivering these pop moments has helped Portola carve out a kind of quirky, if-it-feels-good-do-it identity that also manifests on the event’s Instagram, a channel that’s often deliciously unhinged and IYKYK funny.

“That’s another part of the ethos of the festival,” Bell says. “It’s very serious music, but presented in a very unserious way.”

The social media team of ten includes Bell, other staffers at Portola’s producer Goldenvoice (which also puts on Coachella) and a team from the marketing and creative agency Benchmob. The secret sauce is Bell’s longtime friend Dashiell Driscoll, a comedy writer whose resume includes the After Midnight With Taylor Tomlinson and a run at Funny or Die.

“I call him our staff copywriter,” says Bell. “I have him write our e-blasts and captions. Working with a real comedy writer, I can say ‘Hey, we need to tell people we’re 100 days out from the festival,’ and he comes back with 12 different ideas. (The idea the team ultimately went with was a “100 types of people you’ll meet 100 days from now at Portola,” IG carousel featuring 100 photos of many varieties of raver, along with Steve Harvey, Parker Posey, Ariana Grande, dogs, cats, a goose and other individuals with that special flair.)

“Let’s be real,” Bell continues. “There are a ton of festival social media pages and lots of other music pages and accounts that are all kind of similar. Anything I get that looks like something anyone else would post I’m like, ‘Come on, we an do better. Let’s try a little harder.’”

This extra effort extends beyond the internet and even beyond the festival site. Call it the mad scientist in him, but Bell cites a “strange obsession” of “always wanting people to have programming or something to do at all times of the day. I don’t expect everyone to do everything. It’s more just having these options so people can choose their own adventure, whether they want to start early then go to the festival, or go to the festival then to an afterparty.”

This year these afterparties are also happening before the fest. This is Portola’s most robust year of tangential programming, with Portola-blessed clubs nights starting Thursday (Sept. 18) and extending clear through Monday at more than ten local venues. “It’s exciting that we could do upwards of 40,000-plus tickets a day at the festival, plus sell an additional 30,000 tickets for the after shows throughout the weekend,” says Bell.

The goal is also to compliment what’s happening musically with Portola picks of things to do around with, with the festival partnering with a variety of restaurants, clothing shops and fitness centers. “One of Portola’s main concepts is just reminding people about how amazing San Francisco is,” Bell says, “and not just as a city to live and visit, but also as a place to party. We really want to bring the city to life over these four days.”

And yes, Bell is already working on the spreadsheet for next year.

Miley Cyrus has already talked about how one of the new bonus tracks on the just-released deluxe edition of her visual album Something Beautiful was written in honor of her dad, country star Billy Ray Cyrus.

But in an Instagram post on Friday morning (Sept. 19), just hours after the expanded LP dropped, Miley went deeper, explaining that the song was an attempt to heal a rift that had opened up between them. “This song was written as a peace offering for someone I had lost for a time but always loved. In my experience, forgiveness and freedom are one and the same,” she wrote of the soaring ballad featuring two of her dad’s favorite musicians.

“Thank you to Lindsey Buckingham & Mick Fleetwood for bringing magic to the music,” she added of her collaborators, former Fleetwood Mac bandmates guitarist Buckingham and drummer Fleetwood. “This song is for my dad.”

The post was accompanied by what appears to be a new video for the song, in which Cyrus wears a gauzy white headdress and matching diaphanous, flowing gown, as well as a black dress matched with a sparkling black mask. “Oh, I wanna be the one, I wanna be the one/ I wanna be the one, I wanna be the one/ Anywhere you run/ You know I’ll follow/ Anywhere you go, anywhere you go/ You know I’ll follow,” she sings on the track.

The following verse features emotionally raw lyrics about the difficulty of being a caretaker of your heart while wishing freedom for those you love. “Love is not a prison/ I’m not a guard, no/ So even when I’m holding you/ I won’t lock you up,” she sings. “You can come and go as you want/ Would you like to be lonely?/ Your word is all I want.”

Billy Ray has been hyping the song all week, writing on Tuesday (Sept. 16) that he “can’t wait for everyone to hear the whole song!!! It’s amazing!!!!!,” then adding on Friday morning, “Best birthday gift a dad could ever ask for. Thank you @MileyCyrus for ‘Secrets’… a song straight from your heart to mine. The memories we’ve made together mean the world to me, and seeing you soar with your music makes me prouder every single day. Having Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood on this track is pure magic. Here’s some memories through the years with Miley… hope y’all enjoy this as much as I do.”

Speaking on Monica Lewinsky’s podcast in June, Cyrus said writing the song helped her resolve some long-running tensions between her and her father. “I wrote this song about my dad because I wanted him to tell me even though there were secrets, even though I didn’t really want to know,” she said. “I wanted to be the one he felt safe enough to tell me the things that were damning and damaging to the family. I wanted him to think that as a middle child, I’m old enough that I could take some of that.”

The deluxe edition of the album also features another new track, the majestic, jazzy 13-minute mind trip “Lockdown” featuring Talking Heads singer David Byrne.

Listen to “Secrets” below.

“It’s hard, and it’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, I wouldn’t have needed to take these steps in the first place — in terms of sobriety and the album,” Trapper Schoepp tells Billboard of his new album, Osborne, out Friday (Sept. 19) on Blue Élan Records. The Wisconsin-raised singer-songwriter is usually sorted into the ‘Americana’ category and describes himself as a “folk artist” when talking to Billboard, but Osborne is a rock record in both spirit and sound, from its cover art (a flaming electric guitar enters his mouth) to its take-no-prisoners lyrics to the catharsis of his raw yet sweet voice. Even when Osborne dips into country or wraps with a hint of reggae, its songs rip – if only in the sense of ripping off a Band-Aid.

“I wanted to sing about the opioid epidemic as someone who has experienced it firsthand,” he says over a Zoom, sitting in front of a painting he made while at Hazelton Betty Ford clinic in 2024. “I’ve seen the horrors of it firsthand as well.”

While some artists (Jelly Roll, Tyler Childers) are becoming more vocal about the opioid epidemic in America, there aren’t too many musicians writing about opioid addiction, especially considering how widespread the problem is (from Jan. 2021 to June 2024, 43% of overdose deaths in the U.S. involved opioids) and how many artists do talk openly about issues with alcohol or other drugs. With Osborne, Schoepp is hoping to be part of that change. “I think we often speak of sobriety as the act of giving something up. I’m working on reframing quitting as gaining something, whether that’s sanity, health, family,” he shares.

Produced by Mike Viola and Tyler Chester, the album offers a galvanizing portrait of pain, hard-fought recovery and hope over the course of 11 arresting, hard-charging and oftentimes beautifully melodic songs. Recovery may be a constant state, a perpetual work-in-progress, but on Osborne, Schoepp the musician feels fully arrived.

“I’m trying to get in that mindset of thinking about recovery as something that emphasizes liberation,” he explains. “I may have some hard, hard days, but at least I know I’m a better dude.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 800-662-HELP (4357) is available 24/7.

The Osborne album is in large part about your addiction and recovery. Did any of the songs pre-date your time in rehab, or did you write the songs after?

I had already written a full country album that I was going to record. I exited Hazelton in May and I had this commitment to record an album in June. It was not in my plans that I was going to go to rehab. This was a drastic measure by way of drastic circumstances. I was in a state of psychosis, mania – I had gone mad. I was like Mulder in an episode of The X-Files where I felt I was on to this greater truth and everyone was out to get me. It was really like this episode of X-Files in my mind.

When I went to rehab, the first night I brought a lot of paper and a pen. I left my cell phone, and I didn’t intend on writing songs. But the first night I got into treatment, I landed in the Osborne unit. And it was so funny, because on the way to Hazelton — on the Amtrak, there — I had texted a picture of Ozzy Osbourne to my friend. It was a quote that he had, it said, “Hazelton, that was a tough one. They don’t f–k around.” And I just laughed. I sent a screenshot to my friend and then lo and behold, I was in the Osborne unit. Which is a letter off from Ozzy’s surname, but the patients there associated it with heavy metal. It just had this heavy metal vibe. With it being tied in a way to Ozzy Osbourne, I used him as this strange spiritual guide and muse to write these songs in my recovery.

So you were writing in the clinic.

A big part of recovery and rehab is writing about your experience. So I wanted to get two birds stoned at once, and just go for it and write stream-of-consciousness. The first night I got there, I wandered around in the woods and I wrote this song “The Osbournes.” When I got out, I sent Mike (Viola) a new song that I’d written. He was like, “What is this? This is totally different, and it’s really good.” (After I was out) we ended up at a church basement in Glendale, California, and it was a surprise to me that it was in a church basement. With Ozzy and the church and all this sort of Satanic exorcism stuff in my head, we joke that the album was like my exorcism. I had to get it all out in one swoop, sort of in atonement for my sins. If you do a lot of drugs, you have to pay the toll. The album is like an open wound that I’m letting everybody see.

“Loaded” is an excellent album opener, and I love the lyric about being handed a loaded gun. Is that a reference to prescriptions?

Yeah, opioid prescriptions. When I was 20 years old, I had spinal decompression surgery, and the best way that they treated all of that at that time was the Sackler brothers’ method: on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel? And you’d go up and you’d say (a number), and they popularized this idea of chronic pain, pain that cannot be cured. You must treat it forever with painkillers. I think painkillers can be of great use to people in hospital settings, but when they’re in everyone’s house, every grandma’s cabinet and kids are going in there and wondering what this is all about, it becomes a problem. Those prescriptions were just like little loaded guns, and I was just slowly killing myself slowly. You rob yourself of growth, especially at a young age, in your twenties.

When about was this happening?

In 2019. It was supposed to be a really good year for me. I published a song with Bob Dylan, my childhood hero, which is amazing. Just amazing. And I was running all over the world and on the BBC and in Rolling Stone and in a spiral of Vicodin and Tramadol, which seemed to keep me level and out of pain. But the irony of pain medication is that it desensitizes you to pain, so you become so much more affected by any sort of pain because of the way you’ve trained your brain with these medications. I was taking them all throughout that and I was real thin, I wasn’t eating. It was supposed to be a celebration, and all these people were congratulating me on what a great success this was– publishing a song with Bob Dylan – and it was probably the most miserable I had ever been in my entire life.

The album was finished well before he died, but it’s an odd coincidence that Ozzy passed a few months before your album was released. Have you mulled that over?

I haven’t thought so much about that specifically, but Ozzy Osbourne was a voice of all of the f–ked-up children of the universe. He was a voice of the vulnerable. He was a voice for all those who didn’t have one. He struggled so much in his life with addiction, and I think for a folk artist (like me) to use him as this spirit guide in this whole process of recovery is definitely a new one. Not to go too coincidental or weird, but when I got home from Hazelton, my best friend sent me a first pressing of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4, and he had no clue I was in the Osborne unit.

You said you sent lyrics to Mike, one of the album’s producers, early in the process. How did you get connected to him?

He was just a mutual friend of someone who worked at a record label I was with. He was like Tommy [Iommi] from Black Sabbath. He really brought this SoCal punk rock edge to the album and played so much of the guitar. He brought synths that he used with The War on Drugs and we had all these really old vintage drum machines, because we wanted to kind of sound like Suicide, the New York band. We wanted to have that flavor with some of the songs where you would sit around an old drum machine and dial it in and then all play live to it with a tape machine going. We recorded to a lot to tape live, to capture the intensity and the spirit of the lyrics.

Suicide — the band — is one of my favorites. That reminds me to ask about the final song on the album, “Suicide Summer.” It’s beautiful, it almost made me cry.

It’s tough. When I wrote it, I made a promise to myself. I was like, “If you’re gonna do this, you have to tell everything. You can’t leave anything out.” That song is inspired by when I came off of opioids and the suicidal ideation would not leave my head. It would not leave my head, and it was just plaguing me. It came out of the worst summer of my life when I was having suicidal ideation that would not lift. I think a lot of people who are in drug recovery have that. And I think a lot of people who are not even in recovery have that suicidal ideation thing. Destigmatizing that as well as issues surrounding addiction is what made me want to go in this direction, because the shame and the stigma and the isolation is what keeps people from asking for help. I do not have it figured out, but I still feel comfortable sharing my truth.

Musically, it’s not too dour.

I recorded a version of it that was very melancholy, and we were gonna go that direction, and then I thought about Toots and the Maytals, who have so many beautiful tracks about dark subjects. I wanted that lift to it, because I wanted it to show that I had made it through that, I’d overcome that part of my journey. It was the last song we recorded. I was sprawled out on a couch and they had put a microphone above me, I was perfectly chill. Mike, Tyler Chester and Bob Dylan’s grandson, Lowell Dylan, who I have a strong connection with. I just laid there and sang this traumatic song.

There’s also a song on the album called “Satan is Real (Satan is a Sackler).” Was there anyone at your label who was like, “hey, can we not mention them by name” or anything like that?

No, everyone is pretty down with it and cool. It’s a play on the Louvin Brothers’ album Satan Is Real. At the end of the song, I mentioned them by name. I mean, they’re total f–kers. They are just responsible for so much pain in America. So much pain. And there was the big lawsuit, the $8 billion settlement [ed. note: the Supreme Court rejected the settlement in 2024, which would have given the settlement money to treatment programs and victims but also shielded the Sackler family from future lawsuits], but no amount of money can account for the pain that they have (caused) for their own personal profit. I’m so glad that they have been shamed in the way that they have. And I’m glad that I can add my two cents.

You talk about going into the album knowing you would be honest and open about everything. Putting it out into the world, you’re having to talk about it again in interviews and of course you’re getting reactions from listeners. How is all that going?

You don’t just get to heal from recovery. There’s no light switch where you say, “I’m good now.” That’s a part of the atonement, paying the toll and coming clean. I think it would have been harder for me at that point to not do this than it would have been to do it. When you have that weight and you have something in you, you want to get it out — that exorcism. Part of healing is being vulnerable and being honest. I’ll tell you that from the little I’ve played these songs live, I have gotten more emails from people who have been in recovery, saying, “Hey, man, I have 35 years. Love the record. Keep going.” The other thing, speaking to long-term recovery, is everyone in recovery wants to get clean, but it’s hard to do the dishes, you know? There’s hard, mundane work outside of putting down the bottle and putting down the pipe. Nobody wants to do the dishes. You have to reprogram your mind and act your way into right thinking. And I’m no expert — I need to emphasize that I’m no expert on any of this — but what I do know is that a drunken horse thief who gets sober is still a horse thief.

Occasionally the musical universe conjures astonishing success stories that we might never have thought to ask for and had no right to expect. Depending on who you’re talking to, Kneecap, a fiery, sharp and dexterous rap trio from West Belfast who have seen a wild ascent over the past year, might fall into that bracket.

It’s a sentiment clearly shared among the thousands that descended upon London’s OVO Wembley Arena on Thursday night (Sept. 18), an audience that skewed across multiple generations. Since they released their debut project 3CAG in 2018 (their first full-length record, Fine Art, followed last year), it’s been argued that the appeal of Kneecap has been centered as much – if not more – around the collective giddiness they inspire as much as the music itself.

Whichever it is, the concourse felt bulging at the seams with an unending sea of football shirts in varying green hues, keffiyehs draped across shoulders, and Irish accents of every lilt. Everything from Abbey Road-aping poster prints and Kneecap-branded crew socks to sweat bands and tricolour balaclavas could be found at the merch stand. Such was the size of the crowd near the bar, that arena staff were left to direct punters through the jubilant mob with the focus and movements of a team of aircraft marshals.

The build-up to this headline show had been dizzying. Less than a year ago, Kneecap were playing London venues that were merely a fifth of the size compared to OVO Wembley’s 12,500 capacity, but nearly 12 months on and they are one of the most hotly debated acts of 2025, continually garnering headlines (and new fans) the world over.

Over the summer, rapper Mo Chara attended two court hearings over what his bandmate Móglaí Bap has called a “trumped up” terrorism-related offence for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag – a proscribed terror group by U.K. law – in resurfaced footage from a past concert, a charge he denies. Mo Chara is on unconditional bail and will return to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court next week (Sept. 26); the proximity of the upcoming hearing means the band had to cancel their planned U.S. tour this fall.

Kneecap’s vocal and longstanding opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza first brought them global attention back in the spring, after they ended their Coachella set by describing Israel’s military action as a US-funded genocide. In following months, the former X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne called for their US work visas to be revoked, while a number of their U.K. and European summer festival sets were pulled, including TRNSMT in Glasgow.  

Yet they have marched on. Kneecap’s live show continues to be a medium for their message; prior to their set at OVO Wembley, they welcomed Massive Attack members Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall to the stage, who aired a moving anti-war video. Palestine flags were waved across the crowd and draped across seats as a giant one was displayed on screen. Fontaines D.C.’s “I Love You,” a song written about disillusionment and political violence, blared over the speakers in the moments afterwards.

That ineffable charge continued to feel palpable as the lights went down and a thunderous roar went up. “What a year we’ve had,” said Mo Chara a few songs in, making scarce reference to recent events and instead directing his energy towards speaking about the Palestine cause in vivid and passionate language. 

Behind the decks, a mischievous, trigger-happy DJ Próvaí occasionally came in a beat too early, adding an air of levity to the occasion. Kneecap zipped through tracks at high speed: 21 songs in barely an hour. It was a smartly relentless approach that encouraged fans to rearrange themselves into a series of moshpits, egged on by Mo Chara. The frenzied energy carried a show that didn’t have much visual excitement beyond a screen showing animated illustrations, or amorphous blobs of colour during “Rhino Ket.”

In between the roaring maximalism of tracks like “I’m Flush” and “Parful”, there was space for an emotional exchange with longtime collaborator Jelani Blackman, who joined Kneecap for “Harrow Road.” For the rest of the night, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap played the role of solicitous emcees, introducing songs, thanking the crowd for their support and encouraging security to hand out more water to those along the barrier.

Most touching of all was watching the group – known to many as little more than a rowdy, subversive force of nature – pause to highlight and take in the significance of how, as a predominantly Irish language act, they managed to fill out such a vast room. “This means the absolute world to us,” they said repeatedly, standing tall and proud.