Joshua Bote

Even the most beloved, adventurous rappers of the 2010s succumb to trends — in this case, Chance the Rapper must have scrolled for a little too long on TikTok and gotten a few ideas.

A photo of Lizzo and Charli XCX emerged yesterday, attached with the astronomical claim that the two are "'bout 2 save pop music." "Blame It on Your Love" is the outcome, a divine experiment and a pop nerd's dream come to life — featuring two of the genre's most beloved.

This week's episode of All Songs Considered is a show of contrasts — cotton-candy pop one moment (from mxmtoon), raging punk sung in Farsi the next (from Khiis) — and then calming, instrumental, prog rock courtesy The Quiet Temple. For All Songs Considered's nearly 20 years, we've tried to live up to our namesake and on this show, we consider more drastic ends of the song spectrum than we have in recent memory.

Between the Avalanches and Pink Floyd, there's no shortage of animal noises transformed into artful music. Dark Morph, a one-off collaboration between Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi and Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff, promises to explore the ramifications of ongoing environmental collapse to the oceans and its inhabitants.

The arbitrary boundaries dividing music into genres, localities and charts have all but eroded. This month's collection of songs is a small, but tremendous, piece of proof.

Appropriately timed for spring, this month's selection of best albums is tethered together by the spirit of evolution. On Orange, the prodigious, Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw offers a blossoming rendition of string quartet music, while Glen Hansard has opened up his lovely acoustic palette to color it with newfound, worldly flourish on This Wild Willing.

It's time: The Black Keys are ready to both rock and roll once more. The duo of Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach has unveiled its ninth studio album, titled (on-the-nose) "Let's Rock," due out June 28 on Easy Eye/Nonesuch.

With a promise of more elemental, stripped-down blues-rock, the band has also released a new single, "Eagle Birds." "The record is like a homage to electric guitar," says Patrick Carney, the band's drummer, in a statement. "We took a simple approach and trimmed all the fat like we used to."

Lil Dicky unveiled the absolutely star-studded, possibly not safe for work animated music video for his charity single "Earth" — featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as a human and Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Halsey, Bad Bunny, PSY, Zac Brown, Miley Cyrus, Sia, Snoop Dogg and countless other celebrities as animals pitching in to save Earth.

Mere days after Coachella 2019 — where the specter of Beyoncé's grand performance last year loomed large — Bey premiered Homecoming: A Beyoncé Film on Netflix.

It sort of stood to reason that after winning multiple Grammys this decade — including one for Album of the Year — Beck would retire to the cushy corners of modern alt-rock. As a testament to that, he even collaborated with Cage the Elephant earlier this year. But Beck, ever the disruptor of standards, took a pivot into left-field. He's announced a new album, Hyperspace, as well as a new single, "Saw Lightning" today. It's due out, according to a press release, "at an as yet undetermined point in the space time continuum."

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify and Apple playlists at the bottom of the page.

Guava Island, Childish Gambino's long-awaited new project, has finally arrived. Hot off a headlining Coachella performance Friday night, Guava Island is the proverbial cherry on top of Donald Glover's wildly successful year as a rapper, following his first Billboard No.

Now in its 19th year, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is more than a music festival, or even a lifestyle. It's a capital-M moment that seems to stop the world. (And not entirely because Beyoncé willed it so last year.) Beyond the experience of bearing witness to celebrities of the A- and D-lists as they drench themselves in sweat and dust while gorging on trendy cuisine and novelty cocktails, Coachella's influence extends far beyond the festival grounds of Indio, California.

Beyoncé's history-making performance at 2018's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is the gift that keeps on giving. Homecoming — billed as "A Film By Beyoncé" — is Queen Bey's latest concert documentary, unveiling a close-up perspective at the often-guarded pop superstar in the midst of preparing for her headlining festival performance.

On this day, we are truly blessed. Spring is in the air, the LA Times just eviscerated the New York Times as an April Fools' gag. And, more importantly, Carly Rae Jepsen has announced a brand new album. (It's not an April Fools' gag, we swear.)

A meditative quality lingers over our favorite tracks from March. U.K. rapper Dave crafted a 11-minute opus to an acquaintance, grappling at once with toxic masculinity, domestic violence and the cathartic value of therapy. LA rock star-on-waiting SASAMI wades into a solitary quest for universal connection. Caleb Burhans shares his entrancing tribute to the late Jason Molina. And Amanda Palmer unleashed a grand treatise on the human condition.