Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
This week: It’s Over and out for Summer Walker with the third and final album in her signature series, Kelsea Ballerini is taking stock of things with a new EP and Miley Cyrus rises from the ashes with a big soundtrack single.
Summer Walker, Finally Over It
It’s been a four-year wait — but Finally Over It is, well, finally here. The third and presumed final entry in R&B star Summer Walker’s Over It series, the follow-up to 2021’s Still Over It features 18 tracks spread over two discs, and follows a wedding theme — with the two discs titled “For Better” and “For Worse,” and the album art and visuals seeing Walker marrying an elderly white man, implying a hard exit from the world of dating and unsatisfying romantic relationships. The star-studded album features guests ranging from old collaborators Chris Brown, Bryson Tiller and 21 Savage to new friends Sailorr, Brent Faiyaz and Doja Cat, but Walker is arguably still best keeping it simple and solo, as on the unequivocal “No” and the wrenching “Situationship.”
Kelsea Ballerini, Mount Pleasant
Two years after her well-received Rolling Up the Welcome Mat EP — and one year after the full-length Patterns — country star Kelsea Ballerini is back playing the mini-album game with the six-track Mount Pleasant. The abbreviated release is meant “to capture a moment in time,” says Ballerini in a statement, with “six songs I’ve written throughout the summer, marking a chapter of heavy self-examination, longing and stepping further into who I am as a 32-year old woman.” The EP moves quickly but hits hard, with songs of jealousy, heartbreak and frustration written with Ballerini’s typically vivid detail and delivered with her usual bite and tenderness.
Miley Cyrus, “Dream as One”
Miley Cyrus has expressed a particular connection to the themes of the upcoming Avatar sequel Fire and Ash, after losing her Malibu home in the 2018 Woolsey Fire: “Having been personally affected by fire and being rebuilt from the ashes, this project holds profound meaning for me,” Cyrus shared on Instagram, thanking director James Cameron “for the opportunity to turn that experience into musical medicine.” She does so this week with the new ballad “Dream as One,” a stately anthem of love and endurance that refuses to ascribe the concept of “home” to any particular building or place, as Cyrus sings to her partner: “You are my home/ No matter where I go.”
Lewis Capaldi, Survive EP
It’s been a big moment for U.K. pop in the past couple months, with the global breakout of Olivia Dean, a big new RAYE. hit and the return earlier this week of Charli XCX, with two new songs from her upcoming soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation. Into this moment steps Lewis Capaldi, the formerly Billboard Hot 100-topping singer-songwriter and supreme balladeer — who took the better part of the last two years on a break from touring and recording, for the betterment of his mental health — with his four-track Survive EP. There’s no major swerves with the new release — “It’s…… songs,” was Capaldi’s helpful description of the EP on The Graham Norton Show — but it is rousing with its pervasive sense of perseverance, even through heartbreak on the climactic lighter-waver “Almost.”
Jessie Murph, Sex Hysteria (Deluxe)
July’s Sex Hysteria album marked something of a commercial breakthrough for Jessie Murph, making the top 10 of the Billboard 200 — helped by the success of breakout single “Blue Strips.” This week, the retro-minded 15-track set gets an eight-track bonus disc on the set’s official deluxe edition. The new tracks include the gently soulful and rueful “I Stay I Leave I Love I Lose,” the Amy Winehouse-like, hungover and heartbroken “Easy Sunday Living” and the previously released kiss-off “I’m Not There for You” — already another Hot 100 hit for Murph — and should get fans who’ve finally calmed down from the original Hysteria all good and bothered again.
Dominic Fike, “White Keys”
The always-buzzy Dominic Fike has a big weekend coming up, making his debut as one half of Geezer (alongside Kevin Abstract) at Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw festival. In advance of the performance, Fike today shares “White Keys,” a new-old song that was a formerly unofficially released fan favorite, produced by John Cunningham. “I had forgot about this song and the internet somehow dug it up for me,” Fike commented on the playfully shuffling, lightly forlorn mini-banger in an IG post announcing its release. Abstract showed up in that post’s comments to proclaim: “gay boy returns.”
