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Rb Hip Hop

Usher’s King of R&B Crown Fits Perfectly on ‘Coming Home’ Album: Stream It Now

The Super Bowl LVIII halftime performer's ninth LP is proof that he's still got game.

Usher

Usher

Bellamy Brewster

Usher is firmly in his zone on his long-awaited ninth album, Coming Home. The 45-year-old R&B veteran who is gearing up to take the stage for the halftime show at Sunday’s (Feb. 11) Super Bowl LVIII dropped the 20-track, guest-packed collection on Friday morning (Feb. 9) and it is everything you’d want from the “Yeah!” singer.

On his first studio album since 2016’s Hard II Love, Usher serves up all the low-boil seductive jams you’d expect, from the simmering not-together-but-it’s-fine single “Good Good” with Summer Walker and 21 Savage to the bubbling miss-you-much ballad “Kissing Strangers,” on which he croons, “How we go from strangers kissing to kissing strangers?”


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After opening with the finger-snap, Michael Jackson-meets-Afrobeats Burna Boy collab “Coming Home,” Usher shows love to his hometown in the Billy Joel-interpolating, Latto-featuring “A-Town Girl,” which flips the Piano Man’s tony East Coast-repping 1983 hit “Uptown Girl” into a dirty south homage to a woman who knows how to twerk and skate.

There is, of course, plenty of heartbreak (the brooding “Cold Blooded” with The-Dream), disco-fueled confident swagger (“Big”), Eurosynth midtempo exhortations to keep the party going (“Keep on Dancin'”) and straight-up all-night-long sex jams (“Stone Kold Freak”).

The collection is packed with a parade of guest vocalists and rappers, from the meditative H.E.R. collab on “Risk It All” from The Color Purple soundtrack, to the seductive “Ruin” with Nigerian rapper/producer Pheelz, on which serial seducer Usher laments that his ex “ruined me for everybody,” even as he boasts that other women keep blowing up his phone. The album ends with the remix of Usher’s collab with K-pop icon Jung Kook from BTS on the latter’s earworm single, “Standing Next to You.”

And, not to worry, Ush has plenty of slow jams for those couple skates (“I Love U,” “Please U,” “Luckiest Man”) on the collection as well. Super Bowl LVIII will take place on Feb. 11 at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas and air on CBS and stream on Paramount+, Sling TV, Hulu+Live TV and FuboTV.

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Stream Coming Home below.

This article was originally published by Billboard U.S.

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Kneecap Blasts Norwegian Government at Oslo Festival, Accusing It of Funding ‘Genocide’ Against Palestinians
Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Mo Chara, DJ Provaí and Móglaí Bap of Kneecap performs on the West Holts Stage during during day four of Glastonbury Festival 2025 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 28, 2025 in Glastonbury, England.

Music News

Kneecap Blasts Norwegian Government at Oslo Festival, Accusing It of Funding ‘Genocide’ Against Palestinians

The Irish rap trio went after the Norwegian government over its investments, which are currently under scrutiny, at Øyafestivalen.

Irish rap group Kneecap – which has drawn a storm of criticism, support, attention and legal action over the past half-year – continued to speak out about the war in Gaza during an afternoon set at the Øyafestivalen in Oslo, Norway, on Friday (Aug. 8).

Right before the trio of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí took the stage, an English-language white-text-on-black-background message played on a video screen, accusing the Norwegian government of “enabling” the “genocide” against the Palestinian people via investments held in the county’s sovereign wealth fund (referenced as “oil pension fund” in the message). “Over 80,000 people have been murdered by Israel in 21 months,” the band’s message continued. “Free Palestine.” The message was greeted readily by a cheering audience. Most estimates (including those from health officials in the area) place the Palestinian death toll at more than 60,000. That number does not distinguish between civilians and Hamas militants. An estimated 18,500 of those killed were children.

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