The Hamilton Hammers have their first-ever player. The club announced today that it’s signed forward Matthew Highmore to a two-year AHL contract, making him the inaugural signing as the team gears up for its first season this October.
Highmore, 30, comes from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and steps into his ninth season of pro hockey. The 5-foot-11, 185-pound forward played 70 games with the Bridgeport Islanders last season, putting up 15 goals and 25 assists for 40 points, third on the team in scoring.
The Hammers open their inaugural season in October 2026 at TD Coliseum. Season seat membership deposits for 2026-27 are available now at HamiltonHammers.com.
The west is calling, and electronic dance music is answering the call. Goldrush returns to Rawhide Western Town with its Midnight Riders edition on September 11-12, and Relentless Beats has stacked the bill with four headliners it’s billing as the four horsemen of dance music. Swedish progressive house producer Alesso, pioneering Canadian DJ Deadmau5, future-funk multi-instrumentalist Griz, and high-energy Dutch anthem-maker Martin Garrix top a festival that turned sold-out crowds out to the old west town in 2025.
The supporting posse runs deep. AC Slater, Airrica, Boogie T, Broken Hill, CID, Deathpact, Delta Heavy, DJ Pauly D, Dømina, Green Velvet, Idemi, It’s Murph, Joust b2b Mongrel, Kaivon, Know Good, Lady Faith, Midnight Tyrannosaurus, Mitis, Ray Volpe, Riordan, Rossy, Rsquared, Silva Bumpa, Sullivan King, Surf Mesa, Valentino Khan, and Zoey808 fill out the across multiple stages, with top-level production framing the western backdrop. More names, plus silent disco and regional talent, land soon.
The pre-show pool party is back too. Held at Gila River Resorts & Casinos minutes from Rawhide, the daytime bash runs Saturday, September 12, from 11 am to 7 pm in partnership with the Oasis Pool Party Series, one of the Valley’s most celebrated. The setup spans 17 cabanas, day beds, stage tables, and a large VIP area with private bars. Benny Benassi headlined the party last year, and this year’s lineup arrives later.
Two-day tickets across GA, GA+, VIP, and Platinum tiers are on sale now, along with extras like shuttle passes, lockers, parking, and hotel packages. Premium options from Gila River Resorts & Casinos at Wild Horse Pass throw in complimentary Oasis Pool Party tickets and festival shuttle service.
A legendary night from 1976 is finally getting its official due. Yes will mark the 50th anniversary of one of their most storied performances with ‘Yes: Live At Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, 17 June 1976’. The show captured the formidable Relayer lineup of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Patrick Moraz playing to a capacity crowd at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The recording catches the band at a creative high point on the “Solo Albums Tour.” After the success of ‘Relayer’ in 1974, the members spent 1975 cutting five individual solo projects, and this 1976 run marked the first time those new arrangements folded into the live set. The result is a snapshot of five players stretching out in every direction at once.
The set balances full-band epics like “The Gates Of Delirium” and “Ritual” with staples including “Siberian Khatru” and “Heart Of The Sunrise.” It also makes room for rare individual spotlights, Anderson’s ethereal selections from ‘Olias of Sunhillow’ and Moraz’s rhythmic explorations from ‘The Story of I’, alongside Howe’s acoustic signature “Clap.” The night closes with a rare run through “I’m Down,” the high-energy classic originally by The Beatles, a fitting jolt to send everyone home.
The quintet was captured mid-tour during a live broadcast on New York’s WNEW-FM. The performance has circulated as one of the band’s most beloved bootlegs for decades, and this release brings it into the catalog officially for the first time.
Joe Lovano hears something new in the air, and he’s named his latest project after it. The saxophone titan has announced ‘Paramount Quartet’, a striking new ECM set that teams him with guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Asante Santi Debriano, and drummer Will Calhoun, the last known for his work in American rock outfit Living Colour. “I feel like at this point I’m on the rise,” Lovano says, brushing past decades of experience and dozens of leader dates. “We’ve arrived at this unique place with this quartet, it’s very special. It’s a new thing. Recording this with Manfred [Eicher] in the studio, I was really thrilled with the way the group continuously developed. And those cats, they play with a real global awareness.”
The group came together by chance. Lovano met Debriano and Calhoun at a 2023 fundraiser for Puerto Rican hurricane relief, and the connection was instant. “Sometimes you meet, and it’s like you’ve known each other your whole life,” he says. “That happened with Will, Asante and I.” Adding Lage was the natural next move, the two having talked about collaborating since Lage played in one of Lovano’s Berklee ensembles around 2006.
The record moves freely across moods. It opens with Charlie Haden’s “First Song,” a refined invocation full of soulful yearning, a tune Lovano fell for while subbing in Haden’s Quartet West years ago. His own compositions carry the rest, from the rubato unisons of “Amsterdam” to the groove-laden post-bop of “Fanfare For Unity,” the extended forms of “The Great Outdoors,” and the easy mid-tempo sway of “Congregation.”
The band adapts to anything, dropping to chamber-music quiet on “The Call” and lighting up “Fanfare For Unity” with electricity. Lovano adds his own dimension by switching instruments mid-song, moving between tenor sax, tarogato, and soprano as the music calls for it. The interplay is constant and alive.
Lovano is effusive about his bandmates. “Will Calhoun has a way of playing that is so expansive and beautiful in so many directions,” he says, going on to praise Debriano’s Panamanian roots and his history with Archie Shepp and Randy Weston, and calling Lage among the most gifted players in the music. The set marks Lage’s first recording for ECM, and his solos throughout are agile and precise, full of harmonic double stops and elegant phrasing that lock right into Lovano’s winding lines.
The two go back decades, ever since Lovano met a teenage Lage at a McCoy Tyner gig at Yoshi’s in California in the early 2000s. That history shows in the music’s ease. The set’s other non-original, Wayne Shorter’s “Lady Day,” gets a graceful reading, with Lovano breathing fresh life into a melody he first heard on Shorter’s ‘Soothsayer’. “Just the theme alone is haunting,” he says. “There’s so much possibility in the harmonies and the harmonic rhythm.”
Recorded in February 2025 at La Buissonne Studios in Southern France and produced by Manfred Eicher, ‘Paramount Quartet’ captures four players locking into something rare.
Amyl and the Sniffers prove they can level a room with nobody in it. Recorded at Soundpark Studios in Melbourne in October 2021 for the celebrated “KEXP at Home” series, the Australian punk firebrands rip through a set built on the snarling energy that has turned them into a global phenomenon, with vocalist Amy Taylor at her magnetic, wonderfully chaotic best. The setlist leans on their then-recent album ‘Comfort to Me’, with “Guided By Angels,” “Hertz,” and “Security” delivered at ferocious intensity, Dec Martens’ gritty riffs locking in with the driving rhythm section of Bryce Wilson and Gus Romer. An interview with KEXP’s Troy Nelson rounds it out, offering a window into the band’s creative process and a pure, unapologetic dose of rock and roll.
Jessie Mazin is pulling the curtain back on her debut, trading studio polish for something quieter and closer. The rising folk and alternative pop voice has released ‘untitled.jpeg (Live From Medium Sized Backyard)’, a live acoustic set out now via Atlantic. The release follows the runaway success of her Medium Sized Backyard performance, which racked up more than 1.7 million views and made the case for hearing these songs stripped to the bone.
The EP captures a raw, intimate side of Mazin’s work across stripped-back takes on three songs from ‘untitled.jpeg’, including the breakout “the man with money in his hands,” plus “the precipice” and “alive.” She also folds in a reimagined cover of Calvin Harris’ “How Deep Is Your Love,” reshaping a dance-floor anthem into something hushed and personal.
The original ‘untitled.jpeg’, produced by Carlos de la Garza and Adam Melchor, follows Mazin through political unrest, heartbreak, and the emotional disorientation of early adulthood, all filtered through the lens of a generation raised online. Having grown up on the internet, she channels that digital coming-of-age into every track, charting the move from online adolescence to adult reality. The title nods to both the permanence and the performance of life lived on screen.
Critics caught on fast. Ones to Watch called the record a meeting with Mazin at her most vulnerable and her most unapologetic, bold and willing to divide. The live versions only sharpen that intimacy, letting her voice carry the room.
untitled.jpeg (Live From Medium Sized Backyard) Tracklist:
“the man with money in his hands” (Live from Medium Sized Backyard)
“the precipice” (Live from Medium Sized Backyard)
“alive” (Live from Medium Sized Backyard)
“How Deep is Your Love” (Live from Medium Sized Backyard)
The roots of this run back years. Fleming and Fleck first floated the idea of an Appalachian album when they met, then let it sit until 2023, when they finally pulled it off the back burner and into the studio. “I was fascinated by the long, trans-Atlantic history of American and Appalachian folk music from an early age,” shares Fleming. “The themes of loss in songs like ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’ were perfect for my teen melancholy. I have always felt that the direct simplicity of this tradition is universal.”
Recorded in Nashville with Fleck producing, the album surrounds the duo with world-class players and a guest list to match. The pair announced the project in March with lead single “In The Pines,” featuring 11-time Grammy winner Dolly Parton, then followed last month with “My Epitaph,” featuring three-time Grammy winner Aoife O’Donovan. Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, and Sarah Jarosz all turn up across the tracklist. The focus track, “The Scarlet Tide” with Vince Gill, lands as one of the record’s warmest moments.
The collaboration already hit the stage this month, with debut performances at Nashville’s historic Grand Ole Opry and Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, backed by Fleck’s all-star band My Bluegrass Heart and joined by Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. More dates follow through the year, including marquee nights at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Carnegie Hall, with album guests dropping in along the way.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard turned the final night of their Lisbon residency into a full-blown showcase of everything that makes them one of the most relentless live acts going. On May 20, 2025, the Australian psychedelic outfit led by Stu Mackenzie capped a three-day Portugal stay with the third night at Coliseu dos Recreios, a historic 2,800-capacity room in central Lisbon. The set pulled from recent releases including ‘Flight b741’ (2024) and ran through their signature blend of garage rock, psychedelia, and krautrock motorik, with Ambrose Kenny-Smith and Cook Craig’s guitar riffs riding Michael Cavanagh’s drums and Mackenzie’s vocal intensity into one long, hypnotic jam. Captured professionally and released as part of the official bootleg ‘Live in Lisbon ’25’, the recording catches the group at full strength, and it ranks among the standout European tour moments of the year.
More than 20 legends are converging on the Jersey Shore for one of the most ambitious concert bills of the year. Music America: The Songs that Shaped Us takes over Oceanfirst Bank Center at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, on June 4-5, a two-night celebration of 250 years of American music tied to the country’s upcoming July 4 milestone.
The lineup reads like a survey of the whole American songbook. Jon Bon Jovi, Jackson Browne, Rosanne Cash, Kenny Chesney, Gary Clark Jr., Dion, Dropkick Murphys, Shemekia Copeland, Valerie June, Keb’ Mo’, Nils Lofgren, Darlene Love, Public Enemy, David Sancious, Bruce Springsteen, Tony Trischka and Sister Sadie, Mavis Staples, Trombone Shorty and the New Breed Brass Band, Stevie Van Zandt, and Jimmie Vaughan are all on the bill.
Stevie Van Zandt’s The Disciples of Soul handle house band duties, anchoring the whole sprawling thing.
The format is built for discovery. Each performer takes on landmark songs pulled from American music history, with blues, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, folk, jazz, country, and gospel all represented. Narration sets up every performance, framing the artist, the song, and the genre before a note plays. Hearing Public Enemy and Mavis Staples and Dropkick Murphys under one roof is the kind of programming that makes a night unforgettable.
The shows lead into the June 7 opening of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, and the man behind both is plain about the mission. “Music America: The Songs that Shaped Us is a journey through American music history,” said Robert Santelli, executive director of the Springsteen Center and the concerts’ executive producer. “The concerts reflect everything the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music stands for: the power of music to bring people together, the rich and diverse treasury of American music as a mirror of our national culture, and the inspiration to think about our shared history in these divisive times.”
In January 2021, a 17-year-old former Disney actress released a piano ballad about driving past an ex’s house, and the world stopped to listen. “Drivers License” charted everywhere at once. Within its first week, the song reached number one on the Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music global song charts, and it sat atop the Billboard Hot 100 for over eight weeks, making Olivia Rodrigo the youngest artist in history to achieve that with a debut single. Chart records tell part of the story. The bigger story is what came next: Rodrigo became, almost overnight, the voice a generation had been waiting to hear.
What made her connection so immediate was authenticity in an era that prizes it. In a time where authenticity and relatability reign supreme, Rodrigo stands out as an artist who speaks directly to the experiences and emotions of her fellow Gen Zers in ways previous generations of artists haven’t quite captured. Her debut album Sour, fueled by hits like “good 4 u” and “deja vu,” landed like a diary read aloud. As Allmusic’s Heather Phares put it, Rodrigo nails what it’s like to be 17, heartbroken, and frustrated, and updates the traditions of the sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued songwriters before her for Generation Z. For young listeners, her songs feel like personal diaries set to music, dominating Spotify playlists, TikTok trends, and late-night scroll sessions.
The deeper magic is how she gives shape to anxieties her audience can’t always name. Sour blew up in 2021 because it connected with Gen Zers traumatized by a pandemic, school shootings, and an uncertain economic future, and she channels that internal trauma in subtle ways, like the insecurity of comparing herself to others on social media and always coming up short in “jealousy, jealousy.” She articulates heartbreak, mental health struggles, and the pressures of social media in songs like “jealousy, jealousy” and “brutal,” helping her audience navigate modern anxieties. The industry took note: the 2022 Grammys gave Rodrigo three awards, including Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal Album for Sour.
She also showed range fast. Two years later, her sophomore album Guts took a more humorous and unserious approach, proving she’s more than a single-mood artist. Where her debut centers on her first teenage heartbreak, Guts navigates the aftermath — new exes, new flames, new insecurities, with a perspective that has shifted significantly. She stepped firmly beyond the music, too, using her platform pointedly: she advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive rights, condemning the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during her 2022 Glastonbury performance. The artist who sings about heartbreak speaks to a generation’s politics as well.
Put it all together and you see why Rodrigo matters beyond the streaming numbers. She arrives at the exact moment her listeners want someone to scream along with — fluent in their humor, their aesthetics, and their hope. She resonates with Gen Z for her relatability and vulnerability, while also finding a fanbase among older listeners. In a music industry hungry for its next defining artists, Olivia Rodrigo answers the question simply by being honest. She captures a generation by sounding exactly like it.
