Tyla Knows She’s Black, Guys. She Doesn’t Know Why People Say Otherwise
![](https://variety.com/wp-content/themes/pmc-variety-2020/assets/public/lazyload-fallback.gif)
As we celebrate the biggest songs of 2023 and the hitmakers behind them, one thing is certain: Everyone here is a winner. Read more about the big years in music for SZA, Sabrina Carpenter, Boygenius and more.
SZA is vigorously scrolling. “I never have topics before I start a song,” she says about her creative process, late one August night, high…
The three singer-songwriters who make up Boygenius are musing about what they did and didn’t intend to accomplish when they went into the studio…
In Olivia Rodrigo’s new song for “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” the 20-year-old singer-songwriter exclaims, “I’m here, I’m there, I’m…
Picking his proudest moment from the past year is not easy for Metro Boomin. The super-producer has been on quite a run since releasing…
Turning points are nothing new for Miley Cyrus, who reinvents herself with nearly every album cycle. But 2023 truly represented a new chapter. She…
The fact that Peso Pluma has become a driving force in the growth in popularity of regional Mexican music is a sign of how…
At the time that he had begun recording tracks that would make his sprawling 2022 third album “American Heartbreak,” Zach Bryan had already become…
Sabrina Carpenter would be the first to admit that “Emails I Can’t Send,” her fifth and most recent album, was like going back to…
Whether it’s a soundtrack, a score or a song placement, there are countless wrong ways to do music for film and so few ways…
Around the time that Toosii came up with his viral smash “Favorite Song,” he was largely recording ideas for songs instead of putting pen…
Reports of Maren Morris leaving country music have been greatly exaggerated. “You don’t fight for what you don’t love,” says Morris over Zoom during…
What part of fast in “Fast Car” did anyone not understand? Country superstar Luke Combs’ cover of the 1988 Tracy Chapman classic proved to…
For the past seven years, Variety has honored the top songs of the year and the Hitmakers behind them, with a special issue of…
It’s obvious from SZA’s music that she has a wide range of influences, from classic R&B to Joni Mitchell, jazz to pop-punk and beyond.…
Michael “Finatik” Mule and Isaac “Zac” De Boni, better known as the production duo FnZ, were scouring YouTube for fresh sounds when a clip…
A densely layered multimedia project that combines music, comic book art, holograms and mini-movies, Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” is wildly ambitious. That scope…
The latest episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast features Aaron Dessner — the man Swifties are indebted to for collaborating on big chunks of…
Who should be counted as country music’s currently most successful songwriter? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could come up with a metric…
Back in February, Pedro Tovar, frontman of Eslabon Armado, posted a short clip of himself grooving to the group’s song “Ella Baila Sola” (“She…