Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
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This week, Justin Bieber returns with an unexpected new album and an unexpected new sound, Clipse reunites for a triumphant set of new bangers, Deftones re-emerge as potent as ever and much more. Check out all of this week’s picks below.
Justin Bieber, Swag
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It’s about as surprising as surprise drops get — Justin Bieber, one of the 10 greatest pop stars of the 21st century, returning from a four-year absence with a 21-track new set on about 10 hours’ notice. And within a couple tracks of Swag, it’s pretty clear this is Bieber as we’ve never really heard him before — stripped of most of his usual big pop trappings, with a much more organic-sounding, alt-R&B-focused sound aided by recognizable sonic architects like Dijon, Mk.Gee and new primary artistic partner Carter Lang supporting his tender ballads of love and devotion. Fans hoping for an album full of “Sorry”s (or even “Peaches”es) may be disappointed, but Beliebers who never stopped returning to the eerie confessionals of Journals or the hushed intimacy of Changes will undoubtedly be elated.
Clipse, Let God Sort Em Out
The first album for legendary rap duo Clipse in over 15 years, Let God Sort Em Out sees Pusha T and Malice reunited and locked in like the time off was just a long battery recharge. The first two tracks alone show the kind of purpose and focus few rap albums can manage across 10 times that long: opener “The Birds Don’t Sing” finds the brother duo paying heart-rending tribute to a late parent each, while explosive second cut “Chains & Whips” invites the biggest rapper in the world along to take aim at their collective foes — including one obvious common enemy between at least two of them. It helps immensely, of course, that this reunion also includes another crucial member of the extended family: regular producer and occasional hook-singer Pharrell, whose beats invoke the grimy urgency of his ’00s work for the duo without ever sounding like he’s just playing the hits.
BLACKPINK, “Jump”
After the solo bows of all four of its members over the past year — and with heightened global excitement around K-pop girl groups in general, thanks to the runaway success of Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters and its HUNTR/X protagonists — the time couldn’t be much better for a BLACKPINK comeback. And luckily, the quartet has the song to do it with: “JUMP” eschews the slowers, dubsteppier drops that have characterized most of BLACKPINK’s biggest singles for a more frenetic, hardstyle-indebted synth breakdown and quaking beat that feels as exciting as anything the group has ever released. “Are you not entertained?” LISA asks on the second verse, no doubt rhetorically.
Deftones, “My Mind Is a Mountain”
“We’ve been waiting here, patiently/ Locked in this state, clocking our time,” Deftones frontman Chino Moreno howls on the band’s new single. Indeed, “My Mind Is a Mountain” comes five years after the band’s most recent album, 2020’s Ohms, and sees the quintet immediately returning to its strengths: simultaneously lush and punishing guitar grooves over crashing-wave drums, with Moreno’s anguished sensuality tying it all together. The millions of new fans the band has picked up over a half-decade of seemingly perpetual TikTok virality should be thrilled with their first taste of new Deftones.
GIVĒON, Beloved
Following his return to the Billboard Hot 100 this year with both the Teddy Swims collab “Are You Even Real” and his own solo “Twenties,” R&B hitmaker GIVĒON returns this week with the new album Beloved — his first 2022 debut Give or Take. The sound of Beloved is more classic ’70s soul than modern R&B — check out the Al Green horns on “Rather Be” of the Stylistics electric sitar of “Twenties” and “Numb” — but kept fresh by the distinctiveness of GIVĒON’s voice, sonorous, soaring and forever exquisitely pained.
Tyla, “Is It”
The new single from the South African global pop star slithers around a winding beat, with an earworm chorus of Tyla asking “Is it wrong/ That I wanna get right with you?” and a requisite breakdown section that you can already tell is going to make for some highlight moments during live performances. “We outside. We’re catching party vibes,” Tyla told Billboard in June, and “Is It” is strong evidence that those vibes have already been caught.
