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Bruce Springsteen is doubling down on his stance that the United States government is “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous,” even after his remarks on the subject at a Manchester concert infuriated President Donald Trump last week.
One week after criticizing the Trump administration during a speech at his European tour kickoff show in England — leading the twice-impeached POTUS to launch into a series of vitriolic posts targeting him on Truth Social — the Boss has released a Land of Hopes & Dreams EP featuring a recording of the address as its opening track. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” he says in the audio snippet. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
The rocker then dives into 2001’s “Land of Hopes & Dreams,” which is also the name Springsteen’s ongoing tour.
In addition to the politically charged speech, the six-track project also features live takes of the musician and his band performing “Long Walk Home,” “My City of Ruins” and “Chimes of Freedom” in Manchester. There’s also a three-and-a-half-minute recording of Springsteen once again critiquing the state of American politics later in the show.
“In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on American workers, they’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and moral society,” he says in the clip. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.”
The EP comes shortly after Trump responded to Springsteen’s onstage remarks by calling him “highly overrated” and “dumb as a rock” on Truth Social, adding at the time, “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’”
Later, the billionaire accused the “Born in the U.S.A.” singer — along with Beyoncé, Oprah and Bono — of taking part in an “illegal election scam” for Kamala Harris, alleging that he accepted an undisclosed payment from the 2024 Democratic nominee to endorse her for president. (Campaign finance records do not support this claim, and Harris’ campaign has denied paying any artist for their support in last year’s election.)
Trump still hadn’t let the matter go as of Wednesday, when he shared an edited video of himself golfing — and appearing to hit and knock over Springsteen with his ball — on Truth Social hours after the Land of Hopes & Dreams EP dropped.
But despite Trump’s counters, Springsteen hasn’t ever backed down on his firm stance against the president’s policies. The E Street bandleader has long been vocal about his beliefs, telling The Atlantic in 2020 that he believed Trump — who in May 2024 was convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush money trial — to be a “threat to our democracy.”
Also in 2024, Springsteen proudly endorsed Harris and played at a number of her campaign events. He also appeared in an advertisement for the former VP’s campaign, telling viewers, “This election is about a group of folks who want to fundamentally undermine our American way of life … Donald Trump does not understand this country, its history, or what it means to be deeply American.”
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President Donald Trump is once again letting his distaste for Bruce Springsteen be known after the musician slammed him and his administration during two recent concerts.
This time, an altered video Trump shared via his Truth Social platform on Wednesday (May 21) shows the commander in chief in a red Make America Great Again cap as he takes a big swing and hits a ball on the golf course as onlookers cheer him on. The video then cuts to a scene of The Boss walking on stage during a concert, as a white dot representing the golf ball suddenly sails into the shot, hits the musician in the back and knocks him down as audio of onlookers clapping and saying “nice shot” plays. Trump did not caption the video, but also shared it on X.
Billboard has reached out to Springsteen’s reps for comment.
This latest dig at the 20-time Grammy winner comes after Springsteen spoke out against the twice-impeached president on his ongoing tour. “[America] is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” the rocker, who endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, said during his first Land of Hopes and Dreams Tour in Manchester, England, on May 14. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
Trump, who in May 2024 was convicted of 34 felony charges in his hush money trial, responded in a lengthy Truth Social post on May 16 calling the artist “dumb as a rock” and going on to insult his talent. “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare,’” Trump wrote the same day he also insulted Taylor Swift, who also endorsed his opponent in the election. “Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
Springsteen continued his criticism of the president during his May 17 show in Manchester. “In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now,” the musician told concertgoers. “The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
Those same comments from his two concerts are included in a new six-track EP also titled Land of Hopes & Dreams, which arrived on Wednesday.
Since the back-and-forth, the president has called for investigations into Springsteen as well as other stars for allegedly joining in on an what he calls an “illegal election scam” he claims was orchestrated by Harris’ campaign. In May 19 Truth Social posts, Trump accused The Boss, Beyoncé, U2’s Bono as well as Oprah Winfrey of illegally accepting undisclosed payments to appear at the former VP’s rallies and endorse her. FactCheck.org previously disproved those allegations when they first surfaced in 2024.
After Trump initially insulted Springsteen and Swift on May 16, the American Federation of Musicians International stepped up to defend the artists. “The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada will not remain silent as two of our members — Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift — are singled out and personally attacked by the President of the United States,” Tino Gagliardi, the organization’s president, said in part in a statement that day. “Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.”
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A English hard rock band that performs in masks and cloaks is not the type of artist that regularly visits the top of the Billboard 200 — yet anyone who had been paying attention to Sleep Token’s rise over the past few months knew that their fourth studio album, Even in Arcadia, was going to have a strong debut.
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After years of building a fan base, expanding their lore and inching onto the Billboard charts with increasingly higher peaks, the group kicked off the year by scoring their first career Hot 100 entries, as well as quickly selling out a slew of fall arena dates. When Even in Arcadia was released on May 9, its album tracks flooded streaming charts, a clear sign that the early enthusiasm around the album had coalesced upon its release.
Yet when the dust settled on its debut week, even the most bullish Sleep Token fan had to be pleasantly surprised: Even in Arcadia debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart dated May 24 with 127,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate — good enough to not only score Sleep Token’s biggest chart week ever, but the biggest total for a hard rock album in nearly two years, as well as the largest streaming week ever for a hard rock album. It’s the type of debut that blows away even the most hyped-up prognostications, and immediately makes Sleep Token one of the biggest stories in rock this year.
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The performance of this album cycle has “by far” surpassed expectations, RCA Records COO John Fleckenstein tells Billboard. Sleep Token — which debuted nearly a decade ago and has always remained under cover of anonymity, with band members never revealing their identities or speaking to the press — signed with RCA in early 2024 following the release of third album Take Me Back to Eden. That album became the band’s first to hit the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 16 in May 2023, and produced some of its first songs to hit the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart.
Yet when “Emergence” — the six-and-a-half minute, multi-part prog-metal epic that opened the Arcadia era in March — debuted at No. 57 on the Hot 100 in March, thanks in part to some mind-boggling streaming numbers (9.9 million official U.S. streams from March 14-20, according to Luminate), RCA had to adjust its forecast for the commercial prospects for its host album, says Fleckenstein.
“We knew they were great, and they were potent,” he says. “But when ‘Emergence’ came out, that’s when we saw the reality of where the numbers had gotten to.”
“Emergence” was followed by “Caramel” — a more radio-friendly (yet no less audacious) single that somehow pulls off a fusion of rhythmic pop, shuffling reggaeton and a shrieking metal breakdown — and “Damocles,” Sleep Token’s version of a power ballad with twinkling pianos that morph into thundering guitars. Both of those songs hit the Hot 100 as well, at Nos. 34 and 47, respectively — and the fact that the second and third songs released from Even in Arcadia peaked higher than the first on the Hot 100 indicated to RCA that the host album was going to be a monster.
“Everyday along the path into this album, we were more and more confident that this was a big deal,” says Fleckenstein. “We just don’t see that kind of fan behavior and consistency, in terms of new music coming out.”
When RCA signed Sleep Token last year, Fleckenstein says that the two biggest indicators of the band’s upward trajectory were its rapid growth as a live act — the group leapt from clubs to theaters, and now to arenas, with strong ticket demand for each live run — and the online dedication of its fan base. The London natives have crafted a complex backstory over the year, with Sleep Token leader Vessel speaking of a higher power called Sleep and causing fans to parse through lyrics and messages to unlock new mysteries from their world.
For the band’s new major-label partner, Sleep Token’s anonymity has felt “liberating” as a promotional tool, says Fleckenstein, particularly in an era of artists oversharing on social media platforms. “So much of it is about the art that the band makes,” he notes. “The world that’s being created is being driven by the fans, and as we were building [the rollout] with the band, the part that was so rewarding was that we could not get more clever than this fan base.”
Case in point: in February, before the album cycle had truly started, the band launched a teaser site full of jumbled numbers and letters, which fans quickly found out related to the geographic coordinates of an 18th century monument in England. “It all happened in a blink!” Fleckenstein says with a laugh. “It’s because you’ve got a fan base that is undyingly passionate about this band.”
Now that Even in Arcadia is here, fans’ attention will now turn to how the album will be presented live: Sleep Token will perform the new material for the first time next month at a handful of European festivals before their U.S. arena tour kicks off on Sept. 16. In the meantime, the noise of this album debut has already unlocked opportunities for Sleep Token that aren’t normally reserved for hard rock acts: Vessel was featured as the main image of Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist on release day, for instance, and all 10 of the album’s tracks have made the Hot 100 chart. Combined with Ghost’s new album Skeletá debuting atop the Billboard 200 two weeks prior to Arcadia, a brand of new-school hard rock with baked-in mystique and accessible hooks is experiencing a mainstream boom that’s been years in the making.
“The numbers here are basically in line with high-caliber pop artists, in terms of consumption level,” says Fleckenstein of Sleep Token. “Up until this point, the focus has been on the fan base, and that won’t change — they’re the reason why we’re here… But in a lot of ways, the story from here will probably be that this isn’t some niche thing. There’s definitely a broader awakening here among media and partners that are looking at this in a different kind of way.”
A similar effect is trickling down to pop fans, too. “There are people that haven’t discovered this band yet, because they haven’t been part of the lore and they perceive it as metal, which may not be their genre of choice,” Fleckenstein says. “But it’s great music. And I think that’s going to be the road ahead.”
Three decades after composing the iconic Windows 95 startup jingle, Brian Eno has published an open letter to Microsoft, calling out the company for selling technology to Israel amid the country’s highly criticized war against Hamas.
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In a statement titled “Not in My Name: An Open Letter to Microsoft From Brian Eno” posted to Instagram Wednesday (My 21), the producer began by writing, “In the mid-1990s, I was asked to compose a short piece of music for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system.”
“Millions — possibly even billions — of people have since heard that short startup chime, which represented a gateway to a promising technological future,” he continued. “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”
Eno’s words come a few days after Microsoft acknowledged in an unsigned blogpost that it sold advanced artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli military — as well as aided in efforts to locate and rescue Israeli hostages — amid the war in Gaza. Violence has run rampant in the city ever since Hamas attacked and killed about 1,200 Israeli people while taking more than 250 hostage on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing war against the terrorist group has since led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In February, the Associated Press released an investigative report that found the Israeli military used Microsoft’s Azure platform to transcribe, translate and process intelligence gathered through mass surveillance in its war efforts, among other previously unreported details about the company’s partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
After hearing concerns about its reported relationship with Israel from employees and members of the public, the tech giant stated in its blogpost that an internal review had been conducted. “We have found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct,” it reads. “It is important to acknowledge that Microsoft does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.”
Regardless, Eno says the company has an “ethical responsibility” to suspend its business relationship with Israel. “These ‘services’ support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts and increasing numbers of governments from around the world as genocidal,” he wrote. “Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual.’ It is complicity.”
The musician ended his letter by pledging to donate the fee he originally received for his Windows 95 composition to support for victims of attacks in Gaza. “If a sound can signal a real change,” he concluded, “let it be this one.”
Billboard has reached out to Microsoft for comment about Eno’s open letter.
The composer has been an important figure in Microsoft’s history for 30 years now, with his ethereal seconds-long theme soundtracking the startup process of countless people’s very first home computers all over the world. In 2025, the U.S. Library of Congress added the jingle to its National Recording Registry, which documents and preserves nationally significant recordings.
See Eno’s full statement below.
This year, Kacey Musgraves will be honored with the Songwriter Icon award at the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) annual meeting. The NMPA will also honor longtime Nashville hitmaker Rhett Akins as its Non-Performing Songwriter Icon Award recipient this year for his three decades of contributions to country music, including songs performed by Brooks & Dunn, Blake Shelton, Thomas Rhett, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and more. The meeting will also feature a keynote conversation with Apple Music head Oliver Schusser.
The NMPA annual meeting, which will take place at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on June 11 in New York, is known in the business as a state of the union for the music publishing sector each year and a gathering place for its top executives to mingle. Along with honoring some of the top songwriters in the industry, NMPA president/CEO David Israelite also gives a speech at each meeting, detailing how the publishing business is doing.
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Israelite has also been known to drop groundbreaking news every year in this speech. Last year, he targeted Spotify for cutting payments to songwriters and publishers by about 40% and announced his plan to send sending an official complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as letters to the attorneys general of nine states and a list of consumer groups — urging them to stop Spotify’s efforts to bundle music and audiobooks into its premium tiers. That built on top of previous news that the NMPA had sent a cease and desist notice to Spotify for alleged unlicensed lyrics, video and podcast content on the platform, and thatthe Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) had sued Spotify. (In January, the MLC’s case was dismissed by a judge who said Spotify’s move to cut payments was supported by “unambiguous” regulations. The MLC said it plans to keep fighting.)
Other previous bombshell announcements have included major copyright infringement lawsuits against Roblox, Twitter and more, and legal action against 100 different apps for allegedly skimming music from digital services without a license.
This year’s annual meeting will include a special segment dedicated to the Billboard Songwriter Awards, which were scheduled to take place during Grammy week but were postponed due to the Los Angeles wildfires. The award recipients will be announced at the event.
“We are thrilled to honor Kacey Musgraves whose music has always been driven by lyric and melody,” says Israelite. “A consummate songwriter, she is a successful solo hitmaker and renowned collaborator. Additionally, we look forward to celebrating the career of Rhett Akins whose songwriting has been central to the growth of country music.
“We are particularly excited to feature the Billboard Songwriter Awards after our GRAMMY Week event was postponed. The honorees are incredibly deserving, and it will be a phenomenal special segment of the program.
“Finally, Oliver Schusser has been an innovator throughout his career and we are eager to get his perspective on the myriad of opportunities and challenges for digital services in the streaming economy.”
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