As Luke Combs gears up to release his forthcoming album, The Way I Am, he’s giving fans a glimpse into the project by releasing the 22-song tracklist.

Among the album’s songs is a collaboration with bluegrass icon and 27-time Grammy winner Alison Krauss, who will join Combs on a song called “Ever Mine.” Combs wrote the song with singer-songwriter Hailey Whitters and CMA musician of the year winner Charlie Worsham. Krauss is known for her work leading Alison Krauss and Union Station, and for songs including her rendition of “When You Say Nothing At All,” “The Lucky One” and the Brad Paisley collaboration “Whiskey Lullaby.” In 2025, Krauss and Union Station released their first project in nearly 14 years, when they issued the project Arcadia.

Combs previously teamed up with another bluegrass luminary, Billy Strings, when they released the song “The Great Divide” in 2021.

Another song on the album also has some artist star power to it, as Cody Johnson is a cowriter on “I Ain’t No Cowboy,” along with Combs and Jake Mears.

“Super pumped to share the 22 song track list for my new album The Way I Am that will be out next month,” Combs wrote on Instagram, adding that another of the album’s songs, “Be By You,” will release Feb. 13.

Combs produced the album with Chip Matthews and Jonathan Singleton, and has been steadily previewing the album with a string releases, among them “Back in the Saddle,” which he performed while kicking off the 2025 CMA Awards ceremony in November. He’s also released or previewed songs including “Giving Her Away,” “Sleepless in a Hotel Room” and “Days Like These.”

“Days Like These” is at No. 11 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart, while “Sleepless in a Hotel Room” resides at No. 18 on the Country Airplay chart. Combs has earned 19 No. 1 hits to date on the Country Airplay chart, and has seen four of his albums reach the top of the Top Country Albums chart.

Combs’s album The Way I Am will arrive March 20.

See his Instagram post revealing the tracklist below:

Though the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s of 2026 so far have consisted of some extremely familiar names — Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Harry Styles — this week we see a new name atop the chart: Ella Langley, whose “Choosin’ Texas” climbs 2-1 on the Hot 100 dated Feb. 14. The No. 1 is not just Langley’s first, it’s the first song by a woman ever to top Country Airplay, Country Songs and the Hot 100 at the same time, and one of just a relative handful of songs by a female country artist — particularly one without a duet partner, and one not tied to a movie or other major cultural property — to top the latter chart in its history.

This week on the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, we dig into this historic Hot 100 No. 1, and what it means for both country music and for the Billboard charts in general. Host Andrew Unterberger is joined by country journalist Marissa Moss of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter to discuss how we got here with Ella Langley and “Choosin’ Texas,” what it means that this song broke through to a level that so many of Langley’s female predecessors couldn’t quite get to, and what kind of impact it could have (or could not have) on Nashville moving forward.

Along the way, we address all the many burning questions about this historic moment: Did we see this incredible level of success coming for “Texas”? What about Langley has allowed her to blow up so quickly? How do we feel about the “Ella Fellas” becoming a major part of her fanbase? Do we care about any rumored real-life love triangle behind “Texas”? How should the song’s co-writer/producer (and longtime country legend) Miranda Lambert feel about it topping the Hot 100 when she never even hit the top 10 on her own? And perhaps most importantly: Is Ella Langley ready for true pop stardom, especially if that means having to face more direct questioning about who she is and what she stands for?

Check it out above, and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for weekly discussions every Thursday about all things related to pop stardom! Also subscribe to Don’t Rock the Inbox here, and find Marissa’s excellent book Her Country here.

And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:

Transgender Law Center

Trans Lifeline

Destination Tomorrow

Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe

Also, please consider giving your local congresspeople a call in support of trans rights, with contact information you can find on 5Calls.org.

“The fun thing about being independent is you get to change the rules,” says Bebe Rexha on a car ride back from the airport, having just landed in her native New York.

As the Brooklyn-born pop singer-songwriter barrels down the streets of her home city, she’s also moving toward one of the biggest moments in her career. After years penning hits for other stars such as Rihanna, Eminem and Selena Gomez before embarking on her own path as a soloist — but never feeling like she could fully be herself within the major label machine — Rexha left Warner Records and signed a new partnership deal with EMPIRE earlier this year. And in just two days, she’ll formally launch her next era by dropping what she calls a “supercut” of Dirty Blonde, her upcoming visual album and her first full-length since going independent, on Thursday (Feb. 12).

“The most important thing right now is I’ve just been more motivated than ever,” she says. “I just feel like it’s a rebirth, you know? It’s the resurrection.”

As Rexha tells Billboard over the phone, the idea behind the supercut — which pieces together 20-second snippets of all 13 pulsing, EDM-infused tracks on the project and their accompanying music videos like a movie trailer — was to “cater to how fans consider music today.” The format allows listeners to pick out which songs they’re most excited for ahead of time, and, should they choose, become a part of the rollout by clipping, remixing or editing the preview footage.

“I just wanted to give every song its chance,” she says, noting that, essentially, every track on the Dirty Blonde will be treated like a single. “I worked so hard on this album. It’s been three years now, and every song is so important me. They’re like your babies, you know? I don’t want to be conformed by a certain sound or certain boundaries.”

Rexha last dropped an album in 2023, with that year’s Bebe performing slightly better than its 2021 predecessor, Better Mistakes, but not by much. The former peaked at No. 132 on the Billboard 200 while the latter reached No. 140, both well short of her 2018 debut album’s No. 13 high on the chart. Other than serving as a home to her 2022 “I’m Good (Blue)” duet with David Guetta, which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been streamed more than 2 billion times on Spotify, Bebe didn’t exactly give Rexha what her fans think is a long overdue Main Pop Girl moment.

But, then again, the four-time Grammy nominee says it also wasn’t the most authentic showcase of her identity as an artist to begin with.

“I feel like a lot of people, they saw me through this lens of when I was trying to be, like, this perfect, clean-girl pop star,” Rexha explains. “When you’re signed to a major, it’s a little bit stressful, you know? ‘Cause you’re trying to always make everybody else happy. A lot of the big songs that I had, too, were always in my computer — I’d always written them — and they were all basically ‘No’s’ from whichever label I was at.”

“Honestly, I haven’t been able to show [this] side of me until now,” she adds. “Now I have a label, EMPIRE, that just is allowing me to be myself purely, and they celebrate that, and that’s really cool.”

Billboard has reached out to Warner for comment.

Feeling nothing but support from the San Francisco distribution company’s founder, Ghazi, its president, Tina Davis — whom Rexha says she first met at age 17 at a Pace University/Grammy career day — and the rest of the EMPIRE team, the musician says she finally feels free to “pay homage to that messy girl” raised by Albanian parents in New York. She references her upbringing in the Dirty Blonde supercut, especially during opening number “Chica Chica,” which finds her speaking Albanian and smoking cigarettes on a front lawn with older, bare-beer-bellied men.

“I was like, ‘You know what? We need to bring my culture into this,’” Rexha recalls.
”So we got all the guys out with the plastic chairs, similar to how I grew up. Everybody’s like, ‘You either have to fit New York, or you have to fit the perfect clean pop star, or you have to fit super-cultural.’ And I’m like, why can’t I do all of it?”

“She has an ability to craft records that resonate globally,” Ghazi said in a January statement. “What excites us most is that she’s still evolving.”

If there were ever a time for her to finally break free of the proverbial “khia asylum” — semi-problematic internet speak for artists who spend indefinite periods of time grasping at cultural relevance, a label many have cast upon Rexha — it’s with the release of Dirty Blonde on June 12. In the meantime, Rexha is having fun trolling people online about it, at one point jokingly asking for help escaping pop-star purgatory in a voice note she posted on X (“I heard Sabrina [Carpenter] got out. Zara [Larsson], Charli [xcx], they left. They never looked back. And my fat a–, flop a– is still in here,” she said at the time.)

In the past, Rexha admits that the “khia asylum” narrative hurt her feelings, but now, she thinks it’s “fun” and prefers to be “in on the joke.” Plus, she knows more than anyone online ever could how prior industry struggles may have prevented her from ascending to top levels of superstardom like some of her peers — which isn’t to say she’s had any shortage of major successes. Rexha has notched 13 entries on the Hot 100 — four of which were top 10s — and has written countless more for other artists. Meanwhile, her 2017 collaboration with Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be,” remains the record holder for longest time spent at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart at 50 weeks total.

“There’s so much that you can’t tell people,” she tells Billboard of past obstacles behind the scenes. “But, look: I’ve had hits, I’ve written so many hits for other people, and… no matter what happens, the internet, [at least] they’re talking about me. Like, what are you gonna do? Cry and sit in my house all day and just be depressed? No, f–k that.

“I’m like, ‘I’ve been here,’” Rexha adds. “It’s been almost 10 over 10 years. I’ve been doing this s–t. And I’m not going anywhere.”

Check out Rexha’s Dirty Blonde supercut below.

A federal judge has rejected Martin Shkreli’s attempt to sue the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA over the group’s one-of-a-kind album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, ruling that the maneuver violated basic court rules.

Shkreli filed court papers last week aimed at pulling RZA (Robert Diggs) and Wu-Tang producer Cilvaringz (Tarik Azzougarh) into his long-running battle with PleasrDAO, an art collective that paid $4 million to buy the album after Shkreli forfeited it to prosecutors.

But in a pair of short response rulings, the judge overseeing the case now says Shkreli wasn’t actually allowed to sue RZA in the case – at least not via the specific legal procedures his lawyers employed.

“Shkreli raises purported ‘counterclaims’ against Robert ‘RZA’ Diggs and Tarik ‘Cilvaringz’ Azzougarh,” Judge Pamela K. Chen writes in a Feb. 6 order. “However, counterclaims can only be asserted against an opposing party — here, the only one is PleasrDao. Furthermore, to the extent Shkreli intended to assert cross-claims, those can only made as to co-defendants, of which there are none here.”

Shkreli wants to pull RZA into the litigation because he says the Wu-Tang leader improperly sold part of the rights to the famed album to PleasrDao despite the fact that they were already contractually promised to him – what his lawyers call a “duplicate sale.”

After this week’s rejection, it’s unclear if Shkreli’s legal team will still attempt to pursue those claims. He could potentially file a so-called “third party complaint,” a legal vehicle sometimes used to add new parties to an existing lawsuit. Or he could simply file a separate case against RZA over the double-sale controversy. But either option would face its own procedural hurdles. His attorney did not return a request for comment.

Shaolin was published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. The legendary album came with bizarre legal stipulations, most notably that it couldn’t be released to the general public until 2103 – making it one of hip hop’s enduring mysteries.

Shkreli purchased the album at auction in 2015, shortly before he became the infamous “Pharma Bro” who spiked the price of AIDS drugs. But after he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited it to prosecutors to help pay a huge restitution sentence. Pleasr then bought Shaolin from the government in 2021 – and has spent the last few years trying to monetize it with blockchain offerings and private listening parties.

Pleasr launched the legal battle with Shkreli in 2024, after he made threats to release the album on the internet. And last year, a federal judge said Pleasr’s case could move ahead toward trial, ruling that Shaolin might qualify as a “trade secret” that Shkreli had essentially stolen.

Shkreli has been trying to pull RZA and Cilvaringz into the case for months. In October, he asked Judge Chen to force them to join the case, calling them “indispensable parties” to the dispute. But the judge denied that request last month, ruling that it was “astonishingly devoid of support.” So last week, he went a step further and simply sued them, doing so by filing a countersuit against Pleasr that named the two artists as co-defendants.

In it, he claimed his original deal with RZA and Cilvaringz to purchase of Shaolin gave him 50 percent of the copyright to the album immediately and promised him the other 50 percent in 2103. Instead, he said Wu-Tang had turned around and sold that share to Pleasr.

“On a date 88 years after its execution, the Wu-Tang Defendants are obligated to transfer the remaining 50% of the copyrights to Shkreli,” his lawyers write. “Now, PleasrDAO has alleged that it purchased this same interest from the Wu-Tang defendants.”

But in a ruling on Wednesday, citing her earlier decision that Shkreli’s lawyers “improperly asserted” those claims, Judge Chen closed the door on them: “the clerk of the court is respectfully directed to remove Diggs and Azzougarh as counter-defendants from the docket.”