Table of contents for November 2025 in Rolling Stone

K-POP! OLIVIA! NAS! RANDOM NOTES Why Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, and its soundtrack, are taking over the world and charts (p.11). Five surprising things we learned from Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (p.13). Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan details his return to television with his new sci-fi show, Pluribus (p.13), and we go for a walk with Nobody Wants This co-star Justine Lupe (p.14). Chappell Roan takes New York by storm with her first shows back in the U.S. after a summer in Europe (p.17), and Olivia Rodrigo is bringing back the live album (p.18). Nas talks about his new Legend Has It … album series, which features Slick Rick, Raekwon, and more (p.19). “Artists, in a sense, are superheroes.… They lift people up.”NAS…

As 2025 draws to an end, the year’s biggest albums will feature some familiar names — Morgan, Taylor, Sabrina — and one out-of-nowhere smash. KPop Demon Hunters, the soundtrack to the Netflix animated film about a fictional, evil-slaying girl group, is poised to land in the top 20 of the most-consumed albums in the U.S. As K-pop hits go, the soundtrack has outpaced the genre’s superstar artists, racking up more streams in its first 11 weeks of release than the highest-performing songs by BTS and Blackpink did in theirs. And it’s all been buoyed by a passionate audience that helped to make the movie Netflix’s biggest title ever. That the plot of Demon Hunters centers on superfans — in the movie’s colorful world, Huntr/x use their voices to battle enemy…

It’s late August, and Justine Lupe is driving her black SUV through the winding streets of Woodstock, New York, nibbling on a chocolate chip cookie. Lily, her miniature 13-year-old rescue dog, is on her lap; in the back seat is her one-year-old daughter, Ellis. We just got in the car following a hike, and we’ve been driving for only about a minute before the rented Audi Q5 begins to beep ominously. “It’s saying the vehicle’s key is not detected,” Lupe says. “I’m hoping I didn’t put it on the car and drive [away].” She gasps, realizing that’s exactly what happened, and pulls over. “This is a learning moment,” says Lupe, 36. “This is Morgan.” “We just followed our hearts, you know?” Morgan is Lupe’s character on the hit Netflix series…

Since debuting in 1991 with a feature on Main Source’s “Live at the Barbeque,” Nas has been intent on amplifying New York hip-hop. His first full-length album, Illmatic, was an evolution in hip-hop lyricism, and his top-tier penmanship has powered a catalog of 17 solo albums. He’s always paid respect to pioneers, with hits like 2007’s “Where Are They Now (80s Remix),” allowing trailblazers such as Kool Moe Dee, MC Shan, and Dana Dane to tell their stories. Nas has a new project aimed at honoring more hip-hop legends: Alongside the label Mass Appeal, Nas is dropping the Legend Has It … album series, which includes releases from rap heavyweights Slick Rick, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, and Mobb Deep. A posthumous record from Big L is expected later this fall,…

Taylor Swift has long been obsessed with the showgirl’s life, ever since she was a kid. She was still an ingenue when she wrote “Nothing New,” about her terror of turning 22 and losing her audience. She’s always told stories about heroines whose experiences growing up in America make them feel like performers in their everyday lives, until they can’t tell where the show ends and the girl begins. She tells these stories all over the excellent new The Life of a Showgirl, her sequins-and-glitter glam rush of an album. To the surprise of not a soul on Earth, it’s blown up into the year’s biggest album — and the most polarizing. “I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness,” she sings in “Eldest Daughter” — I love that line…

They didn’t waste a day. In the aftermath of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Donald Trump’s government immediately got to work crafting its road map for cracking down on liberal groups and the president’s domestic foes. According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, within 24 hours of the Kirk shooting, top Trump officials and administration lawyers — at the White House, Justice Department, and so forth — had already put pen to pad, drafting legal memos, writing blueprints for any number of possible executive actions, and prioritizing which liberal organizations and strongholds of the left needed targeting. At the top of these frantic intradepartmental efforts sat Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who personally supplied several names for key targets, as he worked the phones…

For a private detective working in Los Angeles, most investigations tend to follow a predictable pattern. You get a divorce case, or a custody case, and from the time the client pays the retainer, you know what the job will entail. You’ll follow a guy around taking pictures from hotel parking lots, or outside of a club on Sunset, trying to prove he’s having an affair. Or maybe it’s a workers’ comp case. Same thing: You tail a guy, take pictures, prove he’s not really hurt. But the Adam Iza case, it was different from the start. Iza was a computer wiz who’d made millions off crypto. He had called Paramount Investigative Services in November 2021 with what seemed like a straightforward job: He was hoping to recover a stolen…

The Book of Paul This was a great interview [“Paul Mescal Is Trying to Break Your Heart,” October 2025]. I didn’t know too much about Paul Mescal before, but he seems very levelheaded and self-aware. Rooting for him. @ladidaix Required Reading Guys, I need this magazine for educational purposes obv. @nsairaa Staring Into His Soul Shocked by the tone of his eyes, simply magnificent. This photo shoot was surreal. @rubetaria I’m on Fire Sixteen-year-old me is mystified by a Guana Batz shirt making the cover of Rolling Stone. @wehrmanm Shrek Vibes It’s giving wut arhe you dohing in my swamp. @johbiee “Eeeeeeeeeeh, this photo — fuckin’ ’ell.”—@sillyolddaniel She’s the Expert Read Brittany [Spanos] always but definitely when she’s talking girl bands, growing up, and how time can make you look…

Fans who have been waiting for Olivia Rodrigo to announce a follow-up to 2023’s Guts got a different kind of surprise announcement this fall: Instead of new material, Live From Glastonbury (A BBC Recording), out on Dec. 5, documents her recent set at the famed U.K. festival, complete with a cameo by Robert Smith on two Cure songs. But here’s the even more startling thing: She’s releasing … a live album? Who does that anymore? In terms of big-league pop and rock artists, hardly anyone — and even when they do, they barely register. But maybe it’s time for a comeback for releases that offered a you-are-there experience and brought out aspects of a band’s or musician’s work you hadn’t heard in a recording studio. You do remember live albums,…

Florence Welch Fights Pain With a Primal Scream Florence Welch knows the power of the voice all too well. She possesses a singular belt that adds an aching dimension to her rousing, elliptical pop; she headlines festivals and arenas for crowds that shout along with her lyrics in adulation. “I can come here and scream as loud as I want,” she wails on the jaggedly anthemic opening title track of her mononymic project Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream; she’s specifically referring to the transformative nature of live performance in that lyric, but her sixth album goes on to explore the physical and emotional changes one can experience when letting your voice lead the way in letting go. Welch began working on Everybody Scream after experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, a…

“I had no idea other than I live for today.” In Landman, you play Tommy Norris, a deeply stressed-out dealmaker for an oil company. Do you relate to him in any way? I’ve spent periods in my life where I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. Plus, I grew up in Arkansas and Texas, so I know those guys. In two key scenes in the first season, Tommy negotiates with drug dealers while tied to a chair with a burlap sack over his head. How do you think you’d handle that situation in real life? Well, I’ve been closer to that in my real life than I have been to running an oil company, for sure. I’ve probably felt more at home there with the bag on…