The front page of New Music Friday was crowded. Underneath it sat a rap record you cannot stream, two projects escaping a paywall, three soul singles on imprints you have to squint to see, and the Roots ending twelve years of silence.

Lil’ Kim will celebrate 30 years of Hard Core with her first orchestral performance at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. The bigger story is what the concert says about hip-hop’s move into repertory, preservation and institutional spaces.

Nineteen months late and five hours announced, The Documentary 3 arrived with Drake on the hook, Kendrick's camp on the defensive and a posthumous Drakeo the Ruler verse nobody is talking about.

Six R&B releases, six different ideas of what the genre is for. Cleo Sol drops fifteen songs in silence, Lucky Daye recruits a Grammy winner, and Erykah Badu finally names a date.

Claude Kelly and Chuck Harmony have spent years helping shape major pop and R&B records. With Louis York's The Heart of the Matter now set for November 6, their own artist career moves back to the foreground.

Five albums that would each lead a normal Friday landed on the same one. Our listening order, and the reasoning behind it.

Carey reopened the Glitter story with a Rochelle Jordan remix, a confirmed October 30 reissue date and the album's first vinyl pressing in 25 years.

Steve Lacy's first headline run in four years covers 27 cities from Minneapolis on Sept. 27 to Vancouver on Nov. 30, with Radio City, Red Rocks and the Hollywood Bowl on the routing. Full dates, plus how a kid producing on an iPhone in Compton got here.

Copyright law hands every artist one chance to cancel a deal they signed decades ago. Here is the calendar, the trapdoor, and the fight over how much of the world comes back with it.

Seven years after “RNP” revealed their chemistry, Cordae and Anderson .Paak are finally turning one of hip-hop’s most natural recurring partnerships into a full album.

Janet Jackson will film a career-spanning concert movie in December marking forty years of Control. Inside the album, the chart records, the contracts, the 2004 fallout and the run that followed.

Ye spends almost the entire "OK" video as a corpse on a mortuary table. Don Toliver revives him, Bianca Censori built the room, and the release calendar is doing the rest.