Rose Gray has always had a big voice. “I couldn’t control it when I was younger. I didn’t know what to do with it or where to put it,” she says over Zoom from her home in Walthamstow, London. She tried to find an outlet for it in school choirs, then through classical vocal training at a performing arts high school. She thought she’d finally figured it out when, as a teenager, she signed a record deal—but it was only her first taste of the music industry’s poisoned chalice, after she left the deal and then was unable to take any of the 100 or so songs she’d written with her. Following a period of losing herself in the hedonism of London nightlife—including a stint working the door at the legendary nightclub Fabric—she began quietly venturing back into music over the past few years, drip-releasing the odd single and writing for other artists.
Today, she’s finally announced her debut album, Louder, Please. It’s been a long time coming. “It feels really good,” she says, tugging at the sleeves of her Heaven by Marc Jacobs hoodie and smiling. By Gray’s count, the album took two years of writing, followed by six months of mixing, mastering, and figuring out the creative direction. “I’ve been making so much music that I am almost, like, exploding,” she says. “So, to put out an album is going to be…” she trails off. “It’s just nice not to be writing music every day without knowing what’s going to happen with it, or where it’s going to go.”
The list of celebrities who have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in her 2024 presidential bid just keeps on growing, with Barack and Michelle Obama, Sarah Jessica Parker, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonardo DiCaprio all throwing their support behind the Harris/Walz ticket in recent months. But the Harris campaign received perhaps its biggest celebrity boost to date on Friday night, when Beyoncé appeared, with Kelly Rowland, at a major campaign rally in her hometown of Houston, Texas—following an introduction from her mother, Ms. Tina.
Beyonce addressing the Harris/Walz campaign’s Houston rally on October 25.
Photo: Getty Images
After a short set by Willie Nelson earlier in the evening—during which the 91-year-old country icon (and fellow Texas native) performed “On the Road Again” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”—Beyoncé took the stage in a Rosie Huntington-Whiteley X Wardrobe.NYC blazer dress and miniskirt to deliver remarks about the stakes of the 2024 election. “We are at the precipice of an incredible shift—the brink of history,” she said. “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother—a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in. A world where we have the power to control our bodies. A world where we’re not divided…It’s time for America to sing a new song.”
Little Monsters are currently being fed. Not only does Lady Gaga have a starring role in the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux, in which she plays Harley Quinn opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, but she has also just released a concept album in honor of the film. Titled Harlequin, the surprise record, made up of songs featured in the movie, was produced entirely by Gaga and her fiancé, Michael Polansky.
So, to celebrate the new release, who better than a serious Gaga stan (moi) to react to the album in real time? Below, my 15 takeaways from Harlequin.
1. Before we dive in, it’s worth setting up Gaga’s role in Joker a little bit. She plays Lee Quinzel, a deranged fan of the Joker’s who falls in love with him. A press release has described the movie as an “exploration of the raw, emotional complexity of a woman who thrives in chaos, a genre-defying force who cannot be contained.” I am predicting that the music will delve into this twisted love story—the tale of two lonely souls uniting. But who knows!
For members of the BTS Army, June 2025—when all seven members of the acclaimed Korean boy band will finally reunite after serving in the military—can’t come quickly enough. Yet with “I’ll Be There,” a new single from Jin (who completed his service over the summer), the fandom has something else to celebrate.
Like former boy-bander Harry Styles before him, Jin appears to be shifting from pop into the world of rock. As a ’90s baby, it’s no surprise that he has a soft spot for the genre: a playlist of his favorite songs on Spotify includes “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls (as well as selections from The Fray and Styles himself); and prior to enlisting in 2022, the singer released his debut single, “The Astronaut,” co-written with one of his music mentors, Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
Two years later, Jin’s latest single—released ahead of his debut solo album, Happy, out on November 15—continues that trajectory. If with “The Astronaut,” he penned a love letter to his fans (whom he described as his “universe”), in “I’ll Be There,” Jin doubles down on his devotion.
As the singer exclusively tells Vogue, “I’m excited to be back and I hope my fans love this song as much as I do.” We’re sure they will: While the track’s lyrics are mostly sung in Korean, Jin’s emotions sit right at the surface, especially when he urges, in one catchy chorus: “I swear I will always sing for you. Sing for you, I’ll be there for you.” The song’s closing message is just as heartfelt, with the singer pleading in Korean that should his fans ever feel sad or alone and need to lean on someone, he will “always be there.” The outro, meanwhile, recalls the catchy rhythmic clapping in Anna Kendrick’s hit 2013 song “Cups” from Pitch Perfect.
The accompanying music video shows Jin busking with his band in a parking lot, imagining the BTS star as a humble, up-and-coming talent. In reality, of course, he has already entered the stratosphere.
Though she just released her first single last month, Indigenous singer Tia Wood has been steadily gaining fans since early 2020. The 25-year-old first amassed a following on TikTok, where she often champions her Cree and Salish heritage through songs on the app (she has more than two million followers). Now, she’s ready to bring her unique sound to the mainstream music scene with the release of two new tracks: “Dirt Roads” and “Losing Game”—her first singles since officially signing with Sony Music last year. “It’s been really relieving to finally pour a piece of my heart out into the world after keeping people waiting for so long,” Wood tells Vogue. “I’m so thankful for all the love and support we’ve been getting on these first two tracks. Little Tia cannot believe it still!”
Hailing from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, Wood was always destined to make music. Growing up, she often toured the powwow trails, where she would sing and dance with her family—some of whom are members of the Grammy Award–winning group Northern Cree. After sharing her singing on TikTok, she quickly attracted the attention of Sony Music, becoming one of the first Indigenous women signed to the label. “It was honestly surreal,” says Wood. “I still have trouble processing it sometimes. Growing up with lack of representation made it feel impossible to dream dreams such as this, and to be one of the first Indigenous women signed with my label is something I could’ve only dreamed of as a child.”
Last spring, Tyson found herself in Los Angeles—and at a loose end. The musician and born-and-bred Londoner had initially traveled to the US to perform at South by Southwest. When the offer to crash at a family friend’s annex for six weeks arose, she decided to take it, renting a fancy car—“It was cheap, though, because it’s LA,” she says, with a grin—and meeting up with her close collaborator, musician Oscar Scheller, to start working on some new material at his home studio. Where in London, they’d usually try and squeeze in sessions between their hectic daily lives, spending back-to-back days devoting themselves entirely to writing unlocked something new. “Stepping outside of the daily grind in London allowed me to think in a different way,” Tyson recalls. “I felt inspired in a different way.”
The product of that time can be heard on Tyson’s new EP, Chaos, which arrives on November 15 via the independent London-based label LuckyMe. Across 10 tracks, she showcases the full breadth of her musical identity, flitting from the blend of soulful vocals and clattering two-step beats on the cheeky lead single, “Jumpstart,” to the clipped R&B groove of “Carousel,” on which Tyson sings of seeking joy and escapism in all the wrong places, to the rippling synths and trip-hop percussion on the mournful kiss-off to a lover that is “300Khz.” It’s an impressively self-assured journey through a range of genres made cohesive by Tyson’s starkly confessional lyrics and smooth-as-silk voice.
In the autumn of 2022, Nilüfer Yanya found herself at a crossroads. The British singer-songwriter—whose first two albums of intricate, emotionally charged indie pop had marked her as a fast-rising star with an unusual cross-genre appeal—was finally able to step off the endless hamster wheel of songwriting, recording, promoting, and performing. For the first time in her career, she had the opportunity to press pause and consider her next steps with real clarity of mind.
It was a little daunting. “I think I’ve become more observant of how I work,” Yanya says. “I didn’t want to rush back into writing another album because it’s important to have a breather in between. But I didn’t really have a broader understanding of the process before. Now, by the third album, I kind of get it. I understand my habits a bit more.” Given the challenges facing touring musicians post-pandemic, determining when things felt stable enough for Yanya to take that step back was a trick. “It took a while to get to that point,” she continues. “No creative job is ever super secure. So you really have to feel it from within, without getting too deep. You have to be able to say, ‘No, I’ve got this. This is fine.’ You’re allowed to do that.”
You can hear the rich rewards of that downtime on Yanya’s breathtaking new album, My Method Actor, released today on her new label Ninja Tune. Across 11 tracks, she doubles down on her signatures: guitar playing that veers from a grungy, reverb-laden fuzz to intricate acoustic noodling; playful percussion that can sound as much like classic rock drumming as it can delicate, syncopated trip-hop; her quietly devastating way with lyrics. (Plus, of course, there’s Yanya’s smoky, androgynous voice, which possesses a searing intimacy that makes you feel like you’re listening in on a secret.) This masterful blending of genres gives the album a quality that sounds slightly out of time, but also, somehow, firmly of the moment.
Back in November 2023, it was reported that a frenzied bidding war was in process to obtain the rights to adapt Britney Spears’s explosive, best-selling memoir The Woman in Me, with the likes of Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Brad Pitt all apparently vying for the honor of bringing the pageturner to the big screen via their various production companies. Now, it seems, that battle is finally over: Universal Pictures has secured the project and Jon M. Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights, and the forthcoming Wicked movies is set to be in the director’s chair.
His involvement suggests that the new film could be a musical rather than a darker drama, as does the fact that the three-time-Oscar-nominated producer of La La Land, Marc Platt, is one of the industry heavyweights who is poised to develop the release. Spears herself previously hinted at the news, writing on X: “Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret project with Marc Platt. He’s always made my favorite movies… stay tuned.” (Yes, fans will be reassured to know that the singer will be involved in the production, too, having worked tirelessly to reclaim a narrative that had been taken away from her decades ago.) Per Vanity Fair, she went with the Universal deal because it “was reportedly in the eight-figure range [and] likely because it also included rights to Spears’s own music catalogue.”
It’s not yet clear what time period the biopic will cover, though the book on which it’s based traces the Grammy winner’s life and career from her childhood in Louisiana and finding fame with The Mickey Mouse Club to the stratospheric heights of her pop superstardom, her highly publicized relationship with Justin Timberlake, the tabloid scrutiny which precipitated her fall, and the crushing lows of her conservatorship, before she emerged from it in 2021.
All of which to say, it’s a role that is sure to be life-changing for the starlet who ultimately lands it. Among the names being touted for the lead are Sydney Sweeney—honestly, who better to walk down school hallways in pigtails and a shirt tied at the navel crooning “Baby One More Time” than the Euphoria star?—but also Louisiana native Addison Rae, Dove Cameron (who, lest we forget, came within spitting distance of playing Wicked’s Glinda the Good Witch before Ariana Grande went on to snag the part), and Millie Bobby Brown, who, in 2022, told The Drew Barrymore Show: “I want to play a real person and I think, for me… [it] would be Britney Spears. Her story resonates with me. Just growing up in the public eye, watching her videos, watching interviews of her when she was younger… I don’t know her, but when I look at pictures of her, I feel like I could tell her story in the right way.”
You know that feeling of running into your ex’s best friend after your breakup? Now, imagine you’re a multimillionaire pop star and actor, and your ex is also a super-rich, famous actor, and you encounter his bestie—also a famous actor—at the Toronto International Film Festival and have to pretend to be thrilled. Well, Jennifer Lopez is a braver woman than I, because she was seen making the best of just such a situation and chatting it up with her recent ex-husband Ben Affleck’s longtime partner in crime, Matt Damon, at the afterparty for her film Unstoppable.
“Jen and Matt began talking and had a long, deep conversation,” a source reportedly told People, and while I don’t generally trust anonymous sources when it comes to celebrity gossip, I can’t help wondering what these two found to talk about besides Affleck. Without further ado, I present to you 23 potential topics of conversation between Lopez and Damon, absolutely none of which are based in fact or on-the-ground reporting, but all of which could have technically been broached on Friday.
The draft in there.
The bad appetizers being circulated on trays. (Actually, I’m sure nobody in their right mind would be so bold as to serve Jen and Matt a past-its-prime crudité, but has a passed app at a party ever really been good, with the obvious exception of pigs in a blanket?)
The election. (It’s famously coming up!)
The life story of wrestler Anthony Robles, whose path to the NCAA national championships in 2011 is the subject of Unstoppable.
How long that standing ovation for J.Lo’s performance at TIFF actually was.
Having teenage children, and the nightmares contained therein.
Having teenage children who are primed to become nepo babies, and the even-more-vivid nightmares contained therein.
Chappell Roan. (She’s everywhere!)
Jen Affleck, the Mormon MomTok influencer who proudly claims Ben as her husband’s second cousin.
Mormon MomTok in general.
Water.
Rihanna showing up at Alaïa’s NYFW Show. (This is a universal topic of interest, right?)
The 2003 mob rom-com Gigli, and how it might have benefited from Damon’s co-producer input.
Jen’s juiciest stories from this summer in the Hamptons. (After all, she knows any gossip given to Damon will get back to Affleck.)
Why nobody in Hollywood can get work.
A top-secret plan to get Hollywood back to work. (If these two can’t do it, nobody can!)
J.Lo’s 2019 Oscars snub for Hustlers. (If I were her, I would talk about this constantly. I’m not even her, and I still talk about this constantly!)
Their respective upbringings in the Bronx and Boston.
The best places to get bagels in the Bronx and Boston. (Spoiler: There are no good bagels in Boston, and the best ones in the Bronx are at Empire Bagels, but I’m sure they figured that out together.)
Each other’s hand softness (in a totally platonic way. Bro code!).
Taylor Swift, as a general concept, but also as a specific person who is currently in New York.
Ben Affleck’s current relationship status and mental state, in that order.
Lets be so for real: taxes. (Why do I feel like this is the main topic of conversation for all rich people?)
If you told me a year ago that a 26-year-old singer would help me redefine my identity as a middle-aged mom, I’d have thrown my neck cream at you. It all happened unexpectedly. One morning, the kids in school, I sat at my laptop drinking in the stillness of my house. In between my go-to singer-songwriters who stroked my low-grade depression as a result of nine years of parenting, there Chappell Roan appeared. Before her, the last thing you’d hear me say is “touch me, baby”—I’m touched out. I’d prefer everyone to leave me alone. And yet, after I somehow manifested Roan on Spotify, she pleaded these words in the voice of a wise, soulful old songbird, and I couldn’t help but sing along.
My life at 43, with two young kids, is vastly different than it was in my 20s. Ask any mom if she’s the same person she was just out of college, and she will surely pause to longingly remember the freedom and fireworks of those days. As one friend, who just had her third child, recently told me: “Getting into a Toyota Sienna is like getting into a hot nightclub.” In other words, our kinks have gone from making out in bars to weighted blankets and seltzer. Yet as I hungrily continued listening to Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, I was reminded that beneath the extra padding around my midsection, the spider veins, the stiff hip, the pure exhaustion, the whiplash of hormonal shifts, that 20-something version of myself was still there. Even more startling was Roan’s ability to reflect my current reality back to me, allowing me to see that these two different versions of myself could live in tandem.
When I asked Maggie Downs, who is 48 and the mother of a 10-year-old, why she loves Roan so much, she brought up the balancing act that all mothers perform—taking care of others while also trying to nurture ourselves and remember who we are. “Chappell’s music/personae suggest that many roles can coexist. This doesn’t have to be a balancing act at all; we can contain multitudes,” says Downs. As Roan sings about stretching herself across four states, from small-town Missouri to Los Angeles, in her song “California,” moms are stretching themselves across their households—one hand brushing hair, one hand typing on a laptop to build her career, one foot pushing dirty laundry closer to the hamper, the other foot wiping up a booger-like residue left on the floor from a child’s slime kit. And rising from the ashes of our exhaustion from childrearing (and carrying the mental load for our partners) is a raging yearning for empowerment. As the climbing strings at the start of “Femininomenon” surrender to what sounds like the beating of all of our hearts, Roan asks us if we know what we want and need. And does it happen? “No!” A chorus of female voices ring out. And then the beat drops, the cowbells clang, we stop folding the laundry, and we dance out our frustration.
Somehow, Roan has already embraced the lessons most of us don’t learn until our 40s or 50s. When she refused to make a video for “Good Luck, Babe” due to exhaustion from touring, tired perimenopausal and menopausal moms everywhere shouted amen to saying no. There was also her social media plea for fans to respect her space when she’s out in public, one that infuriated the people who insisted a loss of autonomy and privacy is part of her job as a celebrity. Similar expectations are cast on mothers, except instead of icons we are martyrs: Our bodies, our time and energy, belong to our families. We chose to be mothers, and so we have no right to complain about being touched out or needing more alone time.
