The last album fans got from Demi Lovato was 2017’s Tell Me You Love Me, and at the moment, the pop singer is in the midst of the largest between-albums gap of her career. She’s about to put an end to it, though, as she recently revealed that her next LP, Dancing With The Devil… The Art Of Starting Over, is set for release on April 2. There’s no tracklist yet, but Lovato has revealed a couple of big-time guests she managed to secure for the record.
A new profile on Lovato from Paper notes the album features a collaboration with Ariana Grande titled “Met Him Last Night.” Furthermore, there’s also a collab with Saweetie called “My GFs Are My BFs,” which is described as “a classic female empowerment anthem.”
In a recent livestream, Lovato explained that the album was initially titled just The Art Of Starting Over, but she later opted to add Dancing With The Devil to emphasize the importance of her upcoming documentary of the same name. Lovato said:
“If you listen to it track by track, if you follow the track listing, it’s kind of actually like the non-official soundtrack to the documentary. Because it really does follow my life over the past couple of years. When we went through the track listing and kind of mapped out how it kind of coincided with my life’s story, it made sense to add the more emotional stuff in the beginning and then transition into The Art Of Starting Over.”
Dancing With The Devil… The Art Of Starting Over is out 4/2 via Island. Pre-order it here.
It was reported in 2019 that the average length of a song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was three-and-a-half minutes and that songs that run for under three minutes are becoming increasingly common. So, in general, songs are getting shorter, but now meditation app Calm and Universal Music Group (UMG) taking things in the opposite direction, as they have announced a series of remixed songs that will push their lengths up to an hour.
This Friday (March 19, which is World Sleep Day), Calm will release seven extended tracks: Ariana Grande’s “Breathin’,” Jhené Aiko’s “While We’re Young,” Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour,” Katy Perry’s “Double Rainbow,” Luis Fonsi’s “Sola,” Post Malone’s “Circles,” and Shawn Mendes’ “Wonder.” For three months, the hour-long tracks will be exclusive to the app, but after that, UMG will be allowed to share the songs to streaming platforms.
Calm co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith told Rolling Stone, “The problem with most music is it’s quite short: When built for the streaming era or even the radio era, it’s three or four minutes long. Even if something is really soothing, you can’t always get into a flow state and drift off to sleep. You have a song for a few minutes and then you go onto the next one and the next one.” He added of the new remixes, “If they’re boring, you’re [less likely] to play them in the first place, and we want your attention. We want you stop thinking about your to-do lists and that silly comment you made at work.”
Courtney Phillips, Calm’s Head of Music also noted, “I was just on a call with an artist’s team talking about tracks. I asked, ‘Would it be cool if he made longer versions?’ And they were like, “Oh my god, he’s been killing us! We keep trying to get him to shorten these down because they’re so long. He would love to make a longer version.’ That’s what we want to be here for. We want to give artists that creative freedom, let them think out of the box and go, ‘Yes! I get to make something really weird, long, and beautiful.” She added, “We didn’t have any comments at all from any of our artists not liking the final mixes. Not one.”
Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.
This week saw a Taylor Swift/Haim reunion and Ariana Grande expanding her latest beloved album. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.
Haim — “Gasoline” Feat. Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift and Haim have a healthy professional relationship, which they extended last week with a Swift-featuring version of “Gasoline.” The collaboration was enough for Swift to proclaim herself the fourth Haim sister, so she has apparently snatched the title from Bernie Sanders.
Ariana Grande — Positions (Deluxe)
Deluxe editions of albums took on a new level of prominence in 2020 and Grande is keeping that going in 2021 with an expanded release of her own. Grande’s new deluxe version of Positions adds five new tracks, including her star-studded remix of “34+35” that features Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion.
Wild Pink — A Billion Little Lights
The band’s John Ross recently spoke with Uproxx about his new album, saying of the just-released effort, “I wanted to have something very lush and just bigger than anything that I’d done before. And I got to play with amazing players, that was my favorite part.”
The Hold Steady — Open Door Policy
The veteran indie rockers recently sat down with Uproxx to review all of their albums, and Craig Finn told us of his band’s latest, “I’m super excited about it, but I’ve struggled to tell people what’s different about it. I think there’s been a continuation of figuring out this six-piece line-up and where everything goes and I think that that’s a huge part of the story. It’s allowed us to be more expansive musically than maybe we have in the past. There’s maybe a little bit more of headphone moments. There’s this weird scraping of guitars, some weird little noises that brought something we haven’t done before.”
Another Michael — New Music And Big Pop
Another Michael’s Nick Sebastiano recently told Uproxx of the band’s free-wheeling new album, “I look back upon it as one work that’s like a big pizza: One song was like the cheese, another song was like the bread. And then we only saw it as that for a while.”
Kaytranada — “Caution”
Kaytranada and TikTok linked up to celebrate Black History Month with the groovy new single “Caution.” Elsewhere this month, TikTok is also set to drop a cover of 1971 gospel song “Like A Ship” by Leon Bridges, as well as a live concert featuring Saweetie, Snoop Dogg, and Tyga.
Curry and Beats highlighted 2020 with their collaborative project Unlocked, and now they’re getting ready to expand upon that effort for 2021. This year will bring a reworked version of the album titled Unlocked 1.5, which they previewed with a new version of “So.Incredible” with Smino and Robert Glasper.
CJ — Loyalty Over Royalty
Staten Island rapper CJ got a major taste of music industry success recently when his single “Whoopty” managed to crack the top ten of the Hot 100 chart. Now he’s dropped his debut project and he builds on his momentum by going at it totally feature-free save for a guest spot from French Montana.
Conan Gray — “Overdrive”
After a breakout 2020, Conan Gray has re-emerged in 2021 with “Overdrive.” Uproxx’s Caitlin White described the track well, calling it “classic, blockbuster pop with huge guitar riffs, soaring vocals, and the kind of chorus that makes you want to roll the windows down and scream it out into the night.”
