Dominic Fike, Queens of the Stone Age, Mariah Carey and the Releases That Matter Right Now

Friday (Oct. 30) was a loud-guitars, heavy-feelings kind of drop. Dominic Fike put out the album his 2026 hits earned him, Queens of the Stone Age turned the amps down for their ninth, DIIV teamed up with A. G. Cook and Mariah Carey took a second look at Glitter. These are 10 releases from the day worth your time, seven from the headliners and three from newer names, with a new Justice and Gesaffelstein song that landed a day early. Every entry comes with something to press play on.

Dominic Fike, How to Quit Smoking

This was the year Fike belatedly proved himself a pop hitmaker, with the long-running Hot 100 hits “Babydoll” and “White Keys,” and Billboard calls his third album one of the autumn’s most satisfying arrivals even though it shows how unlikely those Top 40 dalliances were: relatively lo-fi and genre-agnostic, mostly gentle and acoustic, with a toe kept in hip-hop through a Danny Brown guest verse and an ODB interpolation. A phone call from the incarcerated rapper Tay-K closes the record, Complex reports. Rolling Stone finds a 30-year-old dad still figuring things out and sticking to the angst and the hooks, like the stammer on “Casting Call”: “I’m sobrie, I’m sobri- I’m sober for right now.”

HOW TO QUIT SMOKINGDominic FikeListen on Apple Music

Queens of the Stone Age, Perfecth

Josh Homme turned to kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, for the band’s ninth album after his recent health problems and personal struggles, Billboard reports. Perfecth runs nine tracks and 36 minutes, the shortest Queens record yet, produced by Homme and Michael Shuman and tracked in studios from New Orleans to Los Angeles. It rocks, but via groove: the ’70s AM boogie of “Insignificant Other,” the acoustic shuffle of “Easy Street,” the southern-fried “Where the Goth Girls At?” “Run Away From the Mob” dates to a 2013 session with Dave Grohl on drums, and “Sunday” was co-written for Iggy Pop’s Post Pop Depression. “What has been shattered is made more beautiful, not less, by the act of repair,” Homme told Billboard Español.

PerfecthQueens of the Stone AgeListen on Apple Music

BigXthaPlug, Better Over Time

After hosting a hip-hop rodeo on 2025’s country-infused I Hope You’re Happy, the Dallas rapper is back in his rap bag, and his guest list is stacked: Leon Thomas, Belly Gang Kushington, Lil Yachty, GloRilla, Loe Shimmy and Ava Max, per Billboard. Rolling Stone calls him “the rare twentysomething mainstream rapper that actually raps,” and hears him wrestle with success: the producers sample the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit,” with Leon Thomas reviving 112’s chorus, while fame and fortune keep turning up as a mirage that can’t mask lifelong pain. The advance single “Burn,” with Ava Max, shows his arena-pop side.

BETTER OVER TIMEBigXthaPlugListen on Apple Music

Gracie Abrams, “Here You Come, There You Go”

The lead track from the deluxe edition of Daughter from Hell is the kind of bonus cut that could repeat her biggest hit’s trick: it grabs you with an opening bass rumble and a line that stops you cold (“Hell froze in my bedroom”), and Billboard hears the extra bite and musical development her fans have wanted. On Halloween she performed it on SNL in Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt and the metal sleeves from his Romeo + Juliet armor, after singing “Hit the Wall” in Claire Danes’ angel costume, Billboard reports. Daughter from Hell debuted at No. 1 in July with 124,000 units, her first chart-topper, and her Look at My Life Tour opens Dec. 2 in Denver.

Daughter from Hell (Deluxe)Gracie AbramsListen on Apple Music

Mariah Carey, Glitter (Deluxe Edition)

Whether you think Glitter is a lost classic or a frivolous misstep, Billboard argues the soundtrack deserves a second look, removed from the tragedies around the film’s September 2001 release. The anniversary deluxe edition adds a second disc of rarities, including her fragile cover of Irene Cara’s “Out Here on My Own” and the original version of lead single “Loverboy,” which lifts from “Firecracker.” In a Reddit AMA marking the 25th anniversary, a fan asked about her long-shelved grunge album, and she answered: “my answer is…#notyet (this is a hint!)”

Glitter (Deluxe Edition)Mariah CareyListen on Apple Music

Justice and Gesaffelstein, “Pusher”

The first-ever collaboration between the two Frenchmen is also the second release from Justice’s Grand Theft Auto VI score, following “Flowers in a Hurricane” (our report). It’s seven minutes of what you’d expect, Billboard says: the darkly pummeling synths of Justice’s “Stress” and “Generator” riding the throttling percussion that defines Gesaffelstein, built for an action sequence. “The scope of the game is so large geographically and thematically that it was clear from the beginning the music would also have to be very broad in terms of emotions, genres and textures,” Xavier de Rosnay said in a statement. The game arrives Nov. 19, and the score follows on Dec. 11.

PusherJustice & GesaffelsteinListen on Apple Music

DIIV, ZIRP!

The title stands for Zero Interest Rate Policies, the cheap-money era that enriched a few tech founders, Billboard explains, and the band’s fifth album pairs that anti-capitalist fervor with candy-colored hooks. Pitchfork calls it the pop-crossover move DIIV had resisted for 15 years, with A. G. Cook producing and Zachary Cole Smith’s shoegaze noise now spangled with glitchwork across 11 tracks. It is still doomy, since Smith lost his family’s home to the Los Angeles wildfires, but it also finds, for perhaps the first time, some levity and even optimism. The band’s announcement billed them as avatars of “The New Alternative,” a genre “where a million streams is great, a billion even better and a trillion well within reach.”

ZIRP!DIIVListen on Apple Music

Heathers, Awesome

Heath Michael Thomas is a 23-year-old from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who until recently mostly existed as a TikTok page of crunchy covers, and his debut arrives on Warner, per Pitchfork. He recorded the bulk of the 14 tracks on his own at home, and the music is scrappy, driving garage rock that Pitchfork places somewhere between busted cassette decks blasting Cheap Trick and Sheer Mag. The review reads his fast-track signing as a sign that majors are once again willing to throw money at “random kids who meet the moment,” particularly “when the music is this loose and goofy.”

AwesomeHeathersListen on Apple Music

Brat Star, Southern Ontario Gothic

The Toronto artist and reformed Berlin DJ makes her debut album a Letterboxd-brained collage, as Pitchfork tells it: deadpan chatter-singing in the vein of Sidney Gish, a muted Drain Gang swagger, 2010s pop-radio production and a “Dirty Hokas” that interpolates “Love Story.” Pitchfork’s reviewer calls the 34-year-old “probably the voice of my generation.” “My style is polarizing,” she admits on “David Fincher,” “but doesn’t it work for you?”

Southern Ontario GothicBrat StarListen on Apple Music

TEEKS, Lovers Comet

Five years after his 2021 debut, Something to Feel, the New Zealand soul singer returns with a lush second album that explores love across space, time and sexuality, per Billboard. It features “My Boy” and the *Song of Achilles*-inspired “Overdose,” and Billboard calls it the perfect record to usher in the cozy season.

Lovers CometTEEKSListen on Apple Music

Also on our radar

HorsegiirL’s HARDCORE HEALING EP runs five tracks of gabber, hardcore, trance, a little metal and some country; she told Billboard: “There’s an idea of healing sometimes… where you arrive at this calm state of just like, constant floating. I feel like healing can also be raging and moving quick.” Gigi Perez’s “Favor” is a 5:35 slow-burner from the Sunrise on the Reaping soundtrack, HARDY’s Sides EP ends on a song about school shootings, and Yami Safdie and Maluma’s “Felicidades” is a cumbia-leaning first collaboration.

Added to the High Grailed archive on November 10, 2026.