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      Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath Play Final Shows in Birmingham, England

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      Heavy metal fans crossed continents to converge on Birmingham, England, and throw devil horns in honor of the Prince of Darkness and Black Sabbath.They came by the thousands.They dressed in black, with T-shirts featuring crucifixes, dragons and demons.They gathered on Saturday in Birmingham, England, to pay their respects to a figure of almost religious significance in the heavy metal world: Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness.Since Osbourne and his bandmates Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, formed Black Sabbath in Birmingham in 1968, they have been regarded as the fathers of heavy metal.On Saturday, Osbourne, 76, was at the center of “Back to the Beginning,” a 10-hour concert at the Villa Park soccer stadium that he had said would culminate in Black Sabbath’s final stage appearance.Chris Hopkins from Birmingham showing his Black Sabbath tribute tattoo.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesOzzy Osbourne masks.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesAnshul Doshi, center with beard, who lives in England, and an entourage that traveled from India for the concert.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ozzy Osbourne Plays His ‘Final Song’ With Black Sabbath

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      The metal luminary, 76, took the stage with his original bandmates at a farewell festival in his Birmingham, England, hometown on Saturday night.“Look at all this love for heavy metal.”James Hetfield, the guitarist and lead vocalist for Metallica, gazed out at the crowd at Villa Park, a football stadium in Birmingham, England, on Saturday. His band was the last of a slew of headliner-caliber metal acts and seasoned pros in and around the genre to perform ahead of the night’s honoree and hometown hero: Ozzy Osbourne.The gathering, a daylong festival called Back to the Beginning, was designed as both a tribute and a farewell. Osbourne, who has stepped back from live performance amid health issues including Parkinson’s disease and emphysema, played solo for the first time in nearly seven years and then, for the first time since 2005, reunited with all three other original members of his pathbreaking 1970s band Black Sabbath — the guitarist Tony Iommi; the bassist Terence Butler, known as Geezer; and the drummer Bill Ward — for a four-song set.Both performances were billed as career finales at the event, which was organized by Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, along with the Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and streamed worldwide with a two-hour delay.“Metallica is so grateful to be invited here to see all your beautiful faces and celebrate the band Black Sabbath, because without Sabbath there would be no Metallica,” Hetfield continued. “Thank you, boys, for giving us a purpose in life; thank you, Black Sabbath.”Gratitude was a theme throughout the concert, where artists didn’t simply cite Black Sabbath for inspiring them musically, but often credited the group with fostering an entire global subculture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oasis Live Review: The Gallaghers Reunite, Their Songs Still Stomping and Wounds Still Healing

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      The British band, a showcase for the intoxicating but toxic chemistry of the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, performed for the first time in 16 years.It was a few songs into Oasis’s first concert in 16 years and — despite the heavy anticipation, the rabid fan attention, the relief of simply seeing the Gallagher brothers walk onstage together, Liam’s left arm draped over Noel’s shoulder — there was something still tentative in the air at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday night. A crowd of 62,000 fans was vibrating, and cheering and singing along, but still waiting for license to rage.Liam, the band’s frontman and the punchier of the two brothers — Noel, the songwriter and guitarist, is far more dour — seemed to sense the dryness.Turn around, he told the audience. Find someone and throw your arms around them. Hold them tight, he said. Then the band finally located its detonator.That was “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” from its mighty, snarling 1994 debut album, “Definitely Maybe.” The guitars started at maximum sleaze, and Liam began singing the lyrics — about all the fun ways to tune out when life gets boring — with real brio. The crowd, especially down on the stadium floor, began ecstatically hopping in place in little rugby scrums, then erupted out of them as the band peaked at the chorus. Finally, everyone had shaken off their nerves.The New York TimesFor around two hours, Oasis — perhaps the most meaningful and popular British band of the 1990s, and certainly the rowdiest and most fun — toggled back and forth between masculinist ecstasy and a sometimes fumbling search for it in a frills-free and dogged performance. At times, it was pure triumph, the grandest pub singalong fathomable. At other moments, it was a ramble in the dark.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oasis Starts Its World Tour With Cardiff Concert

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      Liam and Noel Gallagher put aside their brotherly rivalry to play the first date of their band’s long-awaited comeback tour in Cardiff, Wales.They had waited 15 years for this moment, and they couldn’t believe it was happening.Dressed in bucket hats, Adidas tracksuits and other ’90s looks, a boisterous crowd gathered on Friday at the 75,000-capacity Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, to witness one of the unlikeliest reunions in rock music.Oasis was back.For two hours, at least.Around 8:15 p.m. local time, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the two stars of a band whose anthemic hits include “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” swaggered onstage, putting aside decades of brotherly war.Liam had his arm around his older brother’s shoulder, and as the phrase “The Great Wait Is Over” flashed on screens at the back of the stage, the pair strode forward, holding each other’s hands skyward.The ringing chords of the group’s 1995 track “Hello,” which features the refrain “It’s good to be back,” wafted over the crowd, kick-starting a 41-date sold-out world tour that includes two concerts at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.After an opening filled with fraternal joy, the brothers soon reverted to type. For the rest of the set they stood about 30 feet apart and barely glanced at each other. Liam, 52, wearing a black rain jacket, clasped his hands behind his back as he sang upward toward the microphone. Noel, 58, dressed in a blue shirt, stared at his guitar in concentration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kesha Seeks a Chaotic Love, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Foo Fighters, Ethel Cain, Tyler Childers and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Kesha, ‘Red Flag.’Now that Kesha’s lawsuits and record-company contracts are in the past, her first independently released album, “. (Period),” doubles down on her persona as an unruly, thrill-seeking party girl who wants what she wants. In the peppy “Red Flag,” she welcomes chaos and complication over boredom. “I need a certain kind of chemical / It’s dangerous and unforgettable,” she sings, with an edge of Auto-Tune. The track revs up a combination of synth-pop pulsation and hand-clapping trance buildups, an adrenaline rush of romantic disaster.J.I.D. featuring Eminem, ‘Animals (Pt. 1)’The Atlanta rapper J.I.D. — born Destin Route — zooms through a barrage of syllables in the virtuosic “Animals (Pt. 1).” It’s a breakneck boast that juggles rhyme schemes and percussive flows with casual precision: “I’m good at my job / It’s not a walk in the park ’cause I’m in a metropolis / I’m lost in a thought but escaping the darkness.” J.I.D. is confident enough to split the track with a past master of enunciation and internal rhymes, Eminem. He pivots the production from eerily electronic to orchestral, without lessening the beats per minute or syllables per second.Foo Fighters, ‘Today’s Song’“Today’s Song,” the first new Foo Fighters song since 2023, starts as an elegy, then explodes into an exhortation to persevere. “Two sides to a river,” Dave Grohl sings as drums and power chords come crashing in, and, later, “We’ll drown in the middle / Which side are you on?” It’s the band’s latest earnest, uplifting hard-rock anthem, and despite a few rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the feeling comes through.The Reds, Pinks and Purples, ‘What’s the Worst Thing You Heard’The Reds, Pinks and Purples, from San Francisco, merge the 1960s and the 1980s at their most dejected. They share the ringing picked guitars of folk-rock with the bitter tunefulness of the Smiths and the Go-Betweens. On their new album, “The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed,” the song titles are a checklist of pessimism, from artistic careers to life choices: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band,” “You’re Never Safe from Yourself,” “No One Absolves Us in the End.” In “What’s the Worst Thing You Heard?,” rising chords disguise dimming expectations; “I know we’re going to crash,” Glenn Donaldson sings, unconsoled by a brisk beat and a pretty guitar pattern.Ethel Cain, ‘___ Me Eyes’In the new single from Ethel Cain’s album due in August, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” she sings about a troubled fast girl from a small town, potentially a romantic rival in the album’s narrative. “She’s got her makeup done and her high heels on,” the singer observes. “She goes to church straight from the clubs / They say she looks just like her mama before the drugs.” The track’s pulsing synthesizers echo the 1981 Kim Carnes hit “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Cain has covered on tour. But unlike the casual seductress in that song, Cain’s character grows tearful behind her bravado. “They all want to take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home,” Cain wails in a surge of sympathy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Crumbl’s Benson Boone ‘Moonbeam Ice Cream’ Cookies Are a Hit

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      With help from social media, Crumbl’s Benson Boone-inspired Moonbeam Ice Cream has received an extended run.If the singer Benson Boone were a cookie, he’d taste, in this reporter’s opinion, unpleasant. The flavor would be cloyingly sweet and frosted with notes of lemon, berry and an unnameable processed aftertaste that lingers on the tongue as if you’ve just woken up and have yet to brush your teeth.Or, at the very least, that’s what a Crumbl cookie inspired by one of Mr. Boone’s songs tastes like.Still, that hasn’t stopped people from popping into the nearest Crumbl — of which there are more than 1,000 locations across the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada — to purchase Benson Boone’s Moonbeam Ice Cream Cookie, a collaboration between the sweet treat company and the artist.Mr. Boone, a singer who quit “American Idol” in 2021 and found mainstream fame soon after, is perhaps best known for backflipping off pianos in tight jumpsuits while performing his hit “Beautiful Things.” (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, borrowed the particular blue, sequined suit Mr. Boone wore for the 2025 Grammy Awards while he serenaded his wife at her birthday party earlier this year. He did not do a backflip.)Benson Boone is perhaps best known for backflipping during performances.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters“Mystical Magical,” another song by Mr. Boone, was the inspiration for the cookie thanks to the lyric “you can feel like moonbeam ice cream, taking off your bluejeans.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Judas Priest Members on Ozzy Osbourne

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      As the Prince of Darkness prepares for his final concert with Black Sabbath, admirers including Lars Ulrich, Lita Ford and Billy Corgan extol his virtues.Ozzy Osbourne has persisted for so long in pop culture, and re-emerged in so many different guises — including fiendish hard-rock ringleader and bewildered Beverly Hills dad — that it’s easy to lose sight of the core of his fame. His bone-chilling work with Black Sabbath in the ’70s up through his surprisingly nuanced solo material in the ’80s and beyond have helped define the sound and persona of the heavy-metal frontman.Despite a pair of well-received recent albums, Osbourne performances have been scarce in recent years, as he has battled health issues including Parkinson’s disease and emphysema. On Saturday, at a daylong event in his Birmingham, England hometown, the 76-year-old musician will appear both solo and with his original Black Sabbath bandmates — the guitarist Tony Iommi; the bassist Terence Butler, known as Geezer; and the drummer Bill Ward — at what’s being billed as his last-ever concert.The lineup for the event — dreamed up by Sharon Osbourne, his wife and manager — reads like a roll call of some of the biggest names in metal and hard rock, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer and Tool. Its musical director is Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.Ashley Landis/Associated Press“I can tell you that if we weren’t invited to play, I would find a way to be there anyway, even if I had to sneak in under the fence line,” the Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that if there was no Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica.”Ulrich’s sense of debt to Osbourne is widely shared, both in the worlds of heavy guitar-based music and far beyond. “Ozzy is one of the most remarkable singers and performers of our time,” Elton John, who was a guest on Osbourne’s 2020 album, “Ordinary Man,” wrote in an email. “He has an amazing voice and has done so much for metal.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Oasis Stayed on People’s Minds (by Fighting Online)

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      The band hasn’t played a show since 2009, but the quarreling Gallaghers kept their names in the news by mastering the art of the troll, on social media and beyond.Oasis is back, but in some senses it never left.The Manchester band, whose anthemic songs and sharp-tongued antics helped define the 1990s Britpop era, will return to the stage Friday in Cardiff, Wales, kicking off a global stadium tour. These will be the first Oasis shows since 2009, when the guitarist and primary songwriter Noel Gallagher quit the group, proclaiming that he could no longer stand to work with Liam Gallagher, the lead singer. The brothers, long known for their brawling, have not performed together since, yet they’ve rarely ceded the spotlight.“They definitely successfully kept themselves in the public eye during the whole breakup period,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor.The key to their continued relevance hasn’t just been enduring songs like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova,” but an uncanny ability to keep their famous bickering top of mind using modern tools that didn’t exist when the band’s 1994 debut arrived: social media and blogs.In the absence of Oasis, the Gallaghers released solo music, but also a barrage of insults and barbs via Liam’s eccentric social media posts and Noel’s dryly provocative interviews, all of it breathlessly documented, aggregated and amplified by British tabloids and the online music press. For listeners who discovered the band after it broke up, this constant hum of comedy and conflict has been a glimpse of the Oasis experience — a more potent distillation of the group’s essence than musical offshoots like Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.Noel Gallagher has mostly reserved his frank remarks for interviews, naming his price for an Oasis reunion or doling out insults off the cuff.Luke Brennan/Getty Images“The only little bits you could get of Oasis — it was their Twitter presence, it was their viral silliness, just their boneheaded attacks at each other online,” said Aidan O’Connell, 26, drummer for the Chicago indie-rock band Smut.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More