Future of Music

Over four nights in March, Rolling Stone’s Future of Music showcase at SXSW brought the stars of tomorrow to Austin’s famed ACL Live at the Moody Theater. Each night, the 2,750-seat venue was packed — not just inside, but outside, too. Ahead of the second night’s bill, which was topped by música mexicana superstar Peso Pluma, lines of fans stretched for blocks, including, reportedly, the longest line in SXSW history. (One fan got in line at 4 a.m. for a show that didn’t start for more than 14 hours; he later got to…

There are few people on planet Earth who can rap as fast as J Noa — and even fewer who actually have something to say. On her 2023 debut EP, Autodidactica, the 18-year-old MC from the 5 de Abril barrio in San Cristóbal, Dominican Republic, showcased one of the most nimble flows in rap of any language, along with a penchant for strings-laden throwback beats and a modern perspective. Beyond merely precocious, her voice carries the weight of one who’s seen some things and lived to tell about them.  The frenetic,…

Pink plastic cows and fake aqua-blue trucks decorated the lobby of the Wiltern during the last night of Chappell Roan’s U.S. Midwest Princess Tour in November. Her fans — donning sparkly devil horns and bedazzled bralettes decorated with hearts — posed for photos in front of the backdrops as they made their way into the art deco Los Angeles venue, where death-dropping drag queens lip-synced on stage. “The Wiltern… It doesn’t feel like a gay club, you know what I mean? It’s proper. It’s very fancy,” Roan, 26, says.…

Wyatt Flores can pinpoint the exact moment he says the party ended in country music. After a decade-plus of tailgating, beer-drinking songs clogging up playlists, the pandemic struck and forced artists and fans alike indoors with their thoughts. And shit got real, fast. “They got trapped inside of wherever they were and they had a lot of time to sit down and think, and that flustered up their minds,” Flores says. “People felt emotions that they hadn’t felt before.” Emotional songwriting just happened to be…

Young Nudy has been a rotation mainstay for diehard fans of Atlanta rap for years. But he’s on the verge of crossover stardom after the ascent of “Peaches & Eggplants,” a delectably titled single with his cousin 21 Savage that peaked at Number Seven on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart last fall. The single from Nudy’s Gumbo album is buoyed by a pulsing, synth-driven beat and an irresistible “boaw, boaw, boaw” ad-lib that blew up on TikTok. Over the phone, Nudy says that the song’s success just might be…

Preceded by a crew of gymnasts who shot fire — and themselves — high in the air, Black Sherif earned a hero’s welcome when he took the stage at the El-Wak Stadium in Accra, Ghana, to headline the AfroFuture festival last December. The event, which has become one of the hallmarks of winter celebrations in West Africa, attracted roughly 40,000 attendees across its two days, according to its founder. Black Sherif was the sole Ghanaian artist to headline, and he stands as one his country’s brightest stars thanks to his…

THE STREETS LEADING up to the Lab Studios, a recording complex in Miami’s lush Coconut Grove neighborhood, are full of bright, iridescent peacocks. Peso Pluma has set up a weeklong writing camp here in late January to work on his new album, which, he reveals later, is called Éxodo and will be out this summer. It’s almost too fitting that a bunch of decadent birds with stately, metallic feathers are sashaying down the pavement. After all, the Mexican artist, whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, has…

Peso Pluma, Flo Milli, Teezo Touchdown, Young Miko, Faye Webster, and others will grace the stage at Austin’s famed ACL Live at the Moody Theater for Rolling Stone’s weeklong Future of Music showcase at South by Southwest. The four-night concert series will take place between March 12 and March 15, featuring artists from around the world and across the genre spectrum. Texas MC Teezo Touchdown will headline night one, March 12, which will also feature performances from Brooklyn’s own Lola Brooke, Detroit punchline…