Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to New Music Friday’s most essential releases each week — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
Last week, we featured Lady Gaga & Doechii, The Strokes and KATSEYE.
This week, Olivia Rodrigo swerves wtih her third album’s misleadingly titled first single, sombr straps on the vocoder, Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize make their partnership streaming-official — plus much more. Check out all of this week’s picks below.
Olivia Rodrigo, “Drop Dead”
Few artists can command as much attention and interest with the start of a new album era as Olivia Rodrigo, whose sense of quality control and purposefulness with her music is almost without peer among the new pop star class of this decade. So all eyes and ears will certainly be on “Drop Dead” this week, as the first taste of June’s upcoming You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love LP. And despite having a title that would seem to place it in line with the furious heartbreak of prior lead singles “Drivers License” and “Vampire,” “Drop Dead” quickly turns out to be a misdirect: The song is a lush and swoony but still propulsive love song about a first-night’s infatuation (as in “Kiss me and I might drop dead”), with The Cure’s namechecked (and previously Rodrigo-covered) “Just Like Heaven” providing its guiding light. The new sound and vibe should get fans even more pumped for OR3, and seems all but certain to be one of the year’s biggest and most acclaimed pop-rock songs.
sombr, “Potential”
sombr debuted his new single at his then-untitled Weekend One Coachella performance, flanked with a number of ballerinas (who he referred to as the “sombrinas”), teasing that the song would be out Apr. 17. Well, here we are, and here it is: “Potential” features more of the discofied sound sombr has been exploring since last year’s hit “12 to 12,” with more heartbroken lyrics, a callback to his 2025 mega-success (“It was a difficult breakup/ But I wrote some songs that got me famous”) and some Random Access Memories Daft Punk-style vocoder warbling. Another winner, basically. (And yes, that is The Summer I Turned Pretty‘s Gavin Casegano starring alongside sombr and U.K. influencer Madeline Argy in the video; guy just can’t keep himself away from love triangle situations.)
Nine Inch Noize, Nine Inch Noize
If you couldn’t make it out to the desert to catch Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize‘s collaborative set as Nine Inch Noize at Coachella last weekend, no worries — you’ve got one more chance to catch them this Saturday. And failing that, we’ve also now got Nine Inch Noize, the self-titled team-up album that essentially recreates the set they delivered to the rabid Sahara Tent crowd on Saturday, with audible fan noise to help convey the live excitement. The tracklist includes new spins on NIN classics like “Closer” and “Copy of A,” as well as on fan favorites like “She’s Gone Away” and the Soft Cell cover “Memorabilia,” and closes with “As Alive as You Need Me to Be” from TRON: Ares, the teamup’s 2025 rock airplay hit. “Listen LOUD,” NIN’s Trent Reznor advises in a press release, and rightly so.
Lana Del Rey, “First Light”
A Lana Del Rey James Bond theme?? Well…. sort of. “First Light” is LDR’s theme to the new Bond video game of the same name, with no accompanying film yet in the offing. Still, don’t expect her to pull up short on the epicness as a result: “First Light” goes impossibly hard with the strings, trumpets and overall drama, as Del Rey really sinks her teeth into the part — even having fun with the video game soundtrack part of it, with lyrics like “Dying just to know whether you’ll play your life like a game,” and a constant refrain of her asking “Will you play?” We’re kind of intrigued, now.
Tyla feat. Zara Larsson, “She Did It Again”
“Close enough, welcome back ‘Can’t Remember to Forget You’” reads the top comment on the r/Popheads thread for the new Tyla and Zara Larsson collab “She Did It Again.” It makes sense as a comp to the Shakira and Rihanna near-classic, both with the geographically disparate teamup of South African star Tyla with Swedish phenom Zara Larsson, and the song’s fun and flirty music video. Given the two hitmakers’ penchant for going viral, this one is almost certain to catch fire at some point, and the song’s chewy chorus and frisky chemistry make it more than just an algorithmic hit.
Rosalía, LUX (Complete Works)
Want more of Rosalía‘s LUX? Of course you do: As sumptuous and satisfying as Rosalía’s 2025 opus was — our staff’s No. 2-rated album for the entire year — there’s always room for more of her towering vocals and soul-stirring arrangements in our lives. This week’s Complete Works digital reissue of the album adds three new songs previously only available on the album’s physical edition, as well as a “Francotidora” version of original album highlight “Dios es un Stalker.” The most notable of the bunch is likely the soaring “Focu ‘Ranni,” with its Passion Pit-like garbled-vocal refrain and its gorgeous climax, sung in Sicilian.
