If you’re anything like us, we see an interesting headline during our daily scroll—pause to read it—but then keep scrolling without reading the actual story. So at the end of each week, we’re rounding up all the buzziest, news-worthy headlines you might have missed. Think of it like the “saved” feature on Instagram but for news instead of aesthetically pleasing photos. This is what you missed.

#1

Lorde Returns with Virgin
The last thing we heard from Lorde was a sunny dispatch from the beaches of her native New Zealand, where the 28-year-old singer-songwriter had hunkered down during the pandemic. “Can you reach me?” she teased back then, “No! You can’t!”

Four years later, Lorde is back with Virgin. She’s living in and loving New York City, like a few other pop luminaries these days. She’s embraced MDMA for both therapeutic and recreational purposes. She’s wrestling with heavy shit, like gender identity, sexuality and getting older. If Solar Power saw her lounging on a deck chair, drink in hand, the Lorde on Virgin is in constant motion, prowling the streets of her adopted city, letting us in on late night conversations and blasting late night cigarettes. We couldn’t reach Lorde four years ago. On Virgin, we can see her bones.

#2

Cardi B, Drama Queen
Speaking of returns, attitude, and “New York” as an adjective, Cardi B has announced the long -awaited follow up to her beloved 2018 debut Invasion of Privacy. The New York rapper hasn’t exactly been absent from the scene since then – has anyone released a song quite like “WAP” since? – but she has taken her time on a full-length followup. The rhetorically-titled Am I the Drama? arrives in September and if the rumbling, shit-talk anthem “Outside” is any indication, Cardi remains in fighting form.

#3

Animal Collective’s Astral Projection
Once the merry pranksters of 2000s indie, Animal Collective are an institution now. That’s not a bad thing; the Baltimore psych heroes have continued to release interesting music well into their third decade of existence. True to form, new single “Love on the Big Screen” is a solid slice of woozy pop with a little garage band grit thrown in for good measure. It’s everything you’ve come to expect from AnnCo: bright, catchy, and a little fried.

#4

Blood Orange Surveys “the Field”
Since his mid-2010s pop-auteur peak, Dev Hynes has spent a lot of time straddling the pop and art worlds, penning sparse, droning film scores for movies like Queen and Slim and Master Gardner and performing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He’s also collaborated with some of the biggest pop stars on the planet, including (hey, would you look at that!) Lorde on this week’s Virgin. It makes sense then, that “The Field,” his first single under his Blood Orange moniker since 2022, is both a melancholic piece of orchestral music and chock full of buzzy guests. In this case, Hynes ropes in Caroline Polachek, Tariq Al-Sabir and Daniel Caesar, who harmonize beautifully together over strings and a skittering drum-and-bass beat. However, Hynes’ most surprising guest is Vini Reilly of the cult post-punk band The Durutti Column, whose 1998 track “Sing to Me” forms the bedrock of the song.

#5

Sarah McLachlan Feels Like Home
Here’s a fun one. Canadian music legend and emotional terrorist Sarah McLachlan has announced Better Broken, her first album in 9 years. Longtime McLachlan heads know her as a ruthless tearjerker, but I don’t expect any waterworks from from the album’s lead single and title track. Instead, we have a cozy ballad about the virtues of self-acceptance that manages to exude warmth without giving you the warm-and-fuzzies. A lot of that is down to McLachlan’s one-of-a-kind voice, the steadiest and most resolute of her generation of pop songstresses. It’s good to have her back.