Kendrick Lamar and SZA are tight. They used to be Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates, and they’ve continued to collaborate since Kendrick launched his own pgLang label, including two tracks on his new zeitgeist-seizing GNX LP. They did one of those celebrity-on-celebrity interviews recently for Harper’s Bazaar. And now they’re heading out on a co-headlining stadium tour.

Welcome to Stereogum’s inaugural Best Songs Of The Year list. Typically in December, our staff members share 10 personal favorite tracks each — which we will still be doing, don’t worry — but after 23 years, we felt it was time to do a collective countdown. This year was stacked with memorable releases: legendary rappers dropped exciting records fueled by heated feuds, beloved bands returned with game-changing singles, and once-underrated pop singers became cultural fixtures with irresistible earworms. We had opinions and, since we kept track of the the best songs every week, we were prepared.

Last week, Shaboozey tied the record. The Virginia artist’s out-of-nowhere crossover-country smash “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” spent its 19th non-consecutive week at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. That’s the same span of time that Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus spent at #1 when “Old Town Road” went supernova in 2019, and it’s three weeks beyond what any other hit has managed in the chart’s 66-year history. But Shaboozey won’t break the record, at least not this week. Kendrick Lamar made sure of that.

The death of the album has been proclaimed many times, and after decades of piracy and point-and-click listening, cohesive bodies of work have indeed lost some of their cultural stature. Yet the long player remains a meaningful art form, the gold standard breathlessly anticipated by fan bases across the genre spectrum. Even the most brainless stans are always screaming at their idols to “drop the album.”

Dec. 9 marks a decade since the release of J. Cole’s hip-hop favorite 2014 Forest Hills Drive. To celebrate, the rapper announced an anniversary show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, taking place next month. Tickets go on sale Wednesday.

Drake is taking even more legal action against his own record label, with a second courthouse filing less than 24 hours after the first.

Last fall, Courtney Love teased a new solo album on TikTok, saying it was “the longest record that’s ever been written in the history of rock, so it better fuckin’ be good, no filler.” It would be the first since 2010’s Nobody’s Daughter, but it still hasn’t arrived. But now the Hole leader is talking about a new LP again.

Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was undeniably one of the biggest songs of the year. It was obvious Lamar won the rap feud when the Drake diss track debuted at #1, Stereogum readers declared it the Song Of The Summer, and it sparked lots of conversation. Now, Drake is suing Universal Music Group and Spotify, claiming they gave the song an unfair boost.

Drake, who was roundly defeated by Kendrick Lamar in their feud this year, has yet to weigh in on Kendrick’s triumphant new album GNX, but he’s still picking fights with people in Kendrick’s vicinity. The latest target of his passive aggression is Steve Lacy, one of many Los Angeles area talents who appeared at Kendrick’s celebratory Pop Out concert on Juneteenth.

Kendrick Lamar released his instant classic album GNX by surprise on Friday, and it’s looking like early highlight “squabble up” will debut at #1 next week. In the meantime, we get a video for the track, this time directed by Calmatic rather than the usual pairing of Kendrick and Dave Free.

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Everyone’s recovering from Kendrick Lamar’s surprise album drop from Friday (Nov. 22). GNX has some namechecks, and Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg, and Nas have responded to theirs.

On Friday (Nov. 22), Kendrick Lamar surprise-dropped the new album GNX. It also happened to be release day for Father John Misty’s Mahashmashana, and many are discussing the similarities of the two musicians’ LP schedules over the years.

Rap music is miraculous. You could be staring down what promises to be a lazy Friday afternoon, the week before a holiday, and then you could glance at your computer and realize that the world has changed. The album that you’ve been waiting on, the one that you didn’t want to presume to expect, could suddenly fall out of the sky — the whole thing just arriving on your phone all at once. Shit could get crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious. It’s that rarest of beasts: the good kind of emergency.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)

Stop whatever you’re doing. Kendrick just dropped. After probably the biggest year of his career, Kendrick Lamar has suddenly, out of nowhere, shared a new surprise album called GNX. It’s out, right now. The whole thing.

One of the most memorable moments of this year was the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, but it doesn’t seem quite over. On “Taylor Made Freestyle,” Drake dissed Lamar for being on the “Bad Blood” remix: “Make another 1 for the Swifties.” The “Not Like Us” rapper is going to do just that, at least according to DJ Snake.

It is once again time to make sense of the Grammy nominations, a practice that assumes the Grammy nominations make sense. They do, to an extent.

DeMar DeRozan was born in Compton, California, and spent almost a decade playing for the Toronto Raptors. That combination makes you a significant asset when it comes to the possibly-ongoing beef between Kendrick Lamar, who is from Compton, and Drake, who is from Toronto. DeRozan, who now plays for the Sacramento Kings, made his allegiance clear when he appeared in the music video for Kendrick’s “Not Like Us.” Drake, being Drake, still isn’t happy about that cameo, and made those feelings clear when he attended the Kings/Raptors game in Toronto on Saturday. Following the jersey retirement ceremony for Raptor Vince Carter, TSN asked Drake if he thought DeRozan deserved to have his banner hung up, too: “If you ever put up a DeRozan banner, I’ll go up there and pull it down myself,” he said.

Sometimes you just have to get out of your hometown. For Taylor Swift, that reckoning came when she was merely 14. The burgeoning singer-songwriter, her parents, and her younger brother packed up and relocated from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, to the Nashville suburbs so she could pursue a career in country music. As you know, that all worked out for her. But when that seminal, life-changing move happens when you’ve barely started high school, how do you reinvent yourself later on? Well, you could move to New York.

In April, J. Cole dropped the surprise mixtape Might Delete Later, which included a Kendrick Lamar diss that the rapper later apologized for. Now, he’s back with another unexpected release; this time, it’s a song called “Port Antonio.”

We’re into the fourth quarter of the year, which means we’re starting to get hints about what the Coachella lineup might look like when it’s revealed in early January. According to the industry publication HITS Daily Double, Fred again.. is a “lock” for 2025, but the rest of the lineup’s upper tier remains murky. HITS speculates that a country star with pop appeal —such as Jelly Roll, Morgan Wallen, or the recently Nashville-pilled Post Malone — might take one nighttime slot rather than play the country-focused Stagecoach fest at the same site weeks later. They’re also wondering if someone might step into the sub-headliner special guest spot filled by No Doubt last year and Calvin Harris the year before; we’re wondering whether that’s the spot Fred again.. might fill, but maybe our boy Freddy has grown to full-fledged headliner status now? Travis Scott is another name HITS floated, though I should emphasize that other than Fred again.., they’re just guessing.

Earlier this month, Kendrick Lamar released “Watch The Party Die,” his first song since his massive hit/Drake diss track “Not Like Us.” The cover photo showed a pair of black Air Force 1s, taken from a random eBay listing based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Now, those shoes are going for $75,000.

Earlier this week, Kendrick Lamar was announced as the headliner of next year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. The decision sparked a whole lot of conversation, and much of that conversation revolved around the artist who was not chosen to perform. Next year’s Super Bowl is in New Orleans, the hometown of Lil Wayne, one of the greatest and most impactful rappers in history. It’s not really that common for a Super Bowl Halftime Show to be built around an artist from the host city, though it has happened before. But plenty of Wayne’s rap peers expressed outrage at what they saw as a snub. Early this morning, Lil Wayne went on Instagram Live to talk about the emotional toll that it took on him.

Kendrick Lamar isn’t done releasing new music this year. After spending the first half of 2024 laying waste to Drake, Kendrick was announced as the headliner for the next Super Bowl Halftime Show. Now he’s dropped his first new song since “Not Like Us.”

Sit down, be humble, and watch Kendrick Lamar during the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show. The rapper has been confirmed as 2025’s headliner for the Apple Music-sponsored event, having last appeared alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Mary J. Blige back in 2022. He announced the news in a new teaser clip on YouTube.

You didn’t expect Drake to quietly accept a humiliating loss in the biggest rap feud in recent history, did you? The Boy has kept a relatively low profile since “Not Like Us” became the year’s defining rap anthem, but he hasn’t gone silent. There’s been the Sexyy Red collab with the “BBL Drizzy” sample, the Toronto-specific “Hey There Delilah” parody, and the two tracks on the Camila Cabello album. Last month, Drake put a 100GB data-dump online, including a few new songs that have since been given proper release and become minor chart hits. Apparently, there’s a collaborative album with PartyNextDoor on the way. And now, Drake is sending social-media messages, implying that he’s coming back for another round.

The Democratic National Convention began on Monday at Chicago’s United Center and featured Jason Isbell singing “Something More Than Free.” (James Taylor was supposed to perform too, but he got bumped for time.) Tonight, Patti LaBelle sang “You Are My Friend,” Common performed his Pete Rock collaboration “Fortunate,” then Lil Jon made a surprise appearance during Georgia’s roll call for a performance of his 2013 hit with DJ Snake “Turn Down For What.”

One of the funniest parts of “Euphoria,” Kendrick Lamar’s preeminent Drake diss track before “Not Like Us” came along, is the part where he seems to mix up former child actor Haley Joel Osment (of The Sixth Sense/A.I. fame) with the megachurch huckster Joel Osteen (a real-life Righteous Gemstones character). “Am I battlin’ ghost or AI?” Kendrick rapped in the song’s second verse. “N**** feelin’ like Joel Osteen/ Funny, he was in a film called A.I./ And my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him.”

The Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud was this year’s biggest rap event thus far, and it was a cause for a whole lot of excitement among many fans. But certain rap elders have expressed their disapproval of the whole spectacle. Questlove, for instance, posted that it was “wrestling match level mudslinging” and that “Hip Hop Is Truly Dead.” All-time rap great André 3000 doesn’t go as far as Questlove, but he didn’t like it, either.

You, the people, have done your civic duty. The votes are in, and we can now announce the results of our annual Song Of The Summer poll.

A couple of weeks ago, ScHoolboy Q’s North American tour was supposed to start in Toronto, but it was canceled at the last minute, presumably because of enduring tensions between Toronto giant Drake and ScHoolboy Q’s old friend Kendrick Lamar. Drake has an ownership stake in History, the Toronto venue where Q was going to perform, and Q went on to make a lot of social-media jokes about it. Now, the exact same thing has happened with Q’s TDE labelmate SiR, the Inglewood-born R&B singer.

Are you sick of hearing Kendrick Lamar’s chart-topping, culture-saturating, beef-winning Drake diss? So is Steph Curry. Wednesday at the US men’s basketball team’s Olympic warmup game against Serbia in Abu Dhabi, Curry — who paced the team with 24 points — was caught on camera expressing his “Not Like Us” fatigue. While the song was playing in the arena, Curry shouted, “Damn with this song! It’s not the only song in America.” LeBron James, however, spoke up as proxy for those who have not yet grown tired of the track: “It’s not, but I love it.”

Up until now, ScHoolboy Q has only been a peripheral participant in his old comrade Kendrick Lamar’s feud with Drake. Q took part in the Black Hippy reunion at Kendrick’s Pop Out concert, and he made a quick cameo in the great video for Kendrick’s anthem “Not Like Us.” There have also been reports that J. Cole backed out of the feud and apologized after Q advised him that things were about to get personal. Right now, Q is touring behind his new album Blue Lips, and he was scheduled to play Drake’s Toronto hometown tonight. That show has been canceled, and the Drake feud probably has something to do with it.

The feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake may be the big-tent entertainment story of the year, and it’s not going away. Months after the rappers stopped exchanging diss tracks, Kendrick is still taking victory laps, and Drake is still popping up as a punchline at unrelated events like the ESPYs. Now the rivalry has been canonized in two more important ways.

Getting into Metallica’s 1991 self-titled LP, aka the Black Album, is a rite of passage for any young heavy metal fan. It’s been so popular for so long, in fact, that it has now joined an elite club of albums with impossibly lengthy runs on the Billboard 200. As Blabbermouth points out, the Black Album has now become the fourth release to spend 750 nonconsecutive weeks on the chart. It joins Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon (990 weeks) and two best-of compilations, Bob Marley’s Legend (843 weeks) and Journey’s Greatest Hits (813 weeks).

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Mustard is getting ready to release his new album Faith Of A Mustard Seed. Last month, the DJ recruited Travis Scott for the single “Parking Lot,” and on Friday he made his rap debut with “Pray For Me.”

Drake and Serena Williams have history. The tennis legend was the cause of Drake’s 2012 beef with Common — her relationship with Common was ending, and Drake was circling — and back in 2015, Drake was spotted making out with Williams at a fancy dinner. But in 2017, Williams married Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Drake took a shot at Ohanian on “Middle Of The Ocean” from 2022’s Her Loss: “Sidebar, Serena your husband a groupie/ He claim we don’t got a problem but/ No boo, it is like you coming for sushi.” Ohanian later referenced the lyric on Twitter, writing, “The reason I stay winning is because I’m relentless about being the absolute best at whatever I do — including being the best groupie for my wife & daughter.”

Kendrick Lamar keeps rubbing it in. “Not Like Us,” the decisive blow in his feud against Drake, already shot straight to #1 and went down in history as one of the best diss tracks of all time. He performed it five times in a row to close out the Pop Out, the concert he threw on Juneteenth to celebrate his victory and the LA rap scene. And now, on the Fourth of July, he’s released the video.