Innehållsförteckning för December 2025 från Rolling Stone

GAGA! HAWKE! OASIS! RANDOM NOTES We look back on Oasis’ wildly successful reunion tour and how it brought out the best in dudes (p.11), and take a walk down memory lane with Ethan Hawke as he revisits career-making roles (p.13). Questlove reflects on his close friend and collaborator D’Angelo in a touching tribute (p.14). Plus, we examine how rap beefs translate to big business (p.16), and the famously prickly Simon Cowell talks about star power, Liam Payne, and his new talent-hunt series, Simon Cowell: The Next Act (p.17). “I do believe that I’ve been nice to everyone I’ve met.”SIMON COWELL FEATURES Rolling Stone’s inaugural Voices of the Year package highlights the artists and entertainers who met the moment in 2025, from cover star Lady Gaga, who’s pushed her artistry to…

Jeff Jarrett traveled from his home in St. Louis to see the kickoff of the Oasis Live ’25 tour in Cardiff, Wales, in July, then to Chicago’s Soldier Field in August. But, for him, no Oasis gig will ever match the early-September night in Pasadena, California, where he saw his favorite band alongside his six-year-old son, Wolf, for the first time. “It was an evening that was as lovely — and as loud — as I hoped it would be,” says Jarrett, 44, a booking agent and artist manager, who proudly recalls watching his son receive first-bumps and high-fives from those seated around them. “When Wolf was singing ‘Acquiesce,’ I laughed like Mr. Burns in The Simpsons: ‘My son loves Oasis. The plan is working.’ ” Fathers and sons. Dads…

‘Howl&Rage’ Maybe Liam Neeson said it best this year, summing up this brutally loathsome moment in history with a line in the Naked Gun reboot. The bumbling son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, he’s a man lost in the modern world, trapped in a time and place he can’t understand. “Electric [cars], huh?” he growls. “I remember when only three things were electric. Eels, chairs, and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago!” Look, we all felt that. This year was a disaster for our morale, our nation, whatever you want to stick an “our” in front of. But what was going on all over our culture, from the high to the low, was the fight against surrender. The fight against caving in to the despair you get watching everything you care…

‘I Have This Endless Curiosity’ You won’t find “Eusexua” in the dictionary. But thanks to shape-shifting artist FKA Twigs, the title of her third studio album — a club-informed sonic landscape both synthetic and sympathetic — is one of those words that, even if you can’t define, you understand its essence. “It’s a pure feeling of being human … a constant state of everything and nothing all at once,” says Twigs, likening the concept to childhood. “As we get older, we’re bogged down by worries and adult responsibilities and phones and emails and work and adverts — the things that consume us and leave us feeling insecure and self-conscious. Eusexua is a break from all of that. It’s like a breath of fresh air.” The same can be said of…

After reinvigorating such iconic franchises as Rocky and Black Panther, Ryan Coogler brought us a vision all his own this year with Sinners — and solidified his status as one of the most important filmmakers of the 21st century. While studios flooded theaters with (often very good!) flips of IP goldmines like Jurassic Park, Minecraft, and Superman, Coogler created a wholly original stew of historical fiction, action, and vampire horror that topped the box office. It also gave audiences food for thought as they watched Sammie, a preacher’s kid and aspiring bluesman in 1930s Mississippi, fight off a multiplying tribe of bloodsuckers led by a cunning Irishman who wants to steal the spiritual power of Sammie’s gift. Sinners was more than a sensation that drove picky viewers off couches and…

‘It Feels Like Nothing Is Ever Enough’ Every generation gets its hangout shows, from Cheers to Friends to How I Met Your Mother to Girls. But there was a notable void for Gen Z — until the arrival last month of I Love LA. Created, written by, and co-starring Rachel Sennott, the HBO series follows four late-twentysomethings making their way in the titular city today, working (sort of), partying, fucking up, and just plain fucking. The two with real jobs work as a talent agent and a celebrity stylist. The other two are an influencer and a professional nepo baby. People speak in astrology and use the word “cunt” as an adjective. They vape and do a lot of coke and a lot of squealing. And if that all sounds…

If you talk to Florence Welch on any given day, it’s safe to assume she’s feeling a little anxious. “Anxiety is the constant hum of my life,” she says. “Then I step out onstage, and it goes away.” ● Luckily, that’s where she is right now: draped in a long white dress, sitting comfortably in front of a 150-person audience at New York’s beautiful Cherry Lane Theatre, a storied downtown venue known as the birthplace of off-Broadway theater. It’s a week before the release of Everybody Scream, the excellent sixth album she made with her band, Florence + the Machine, and Welch is here for the first-ever live edition of the Rolling Stone Interview, the magazine’s long-running deep-dive conversation series. (The interview is also the first-ever video podcast version of…

“We’re not here to just push and achieve.” What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? I don’t think I ever got the advice I needed at the time I needed it. At drama school, they told me I had no talent. I don’t think there would have been anything people could say to help me through some of those times. I should have been seeing a shrink. It was years before I could afford to. Consequently, I’m still in therapy, trying to make up for lost time. If you could go back, what advice would you give that young woman? I don’t know that I would tell her anything. I think I’d just give her a hug. You’ve been part of three major sci-fi/fantasy film franchises in Alien, Ghostbusters, and…

GREG SWALES Photographer For his first Rolling Stone cover shoot, photographer Greg Swales had a thoughtful approach: He wrote out his plan to use a red, white, and black color palette and explained how he felt each shade relates to cover star Lady Gaga. With the color black, Swales conceptualized “a black bird opening its wings,” he says. Swales shared the idea with Gaga on a call prior to the shoot, and the pair immediately connected. “She told me she had also been having these visualizations of black birds,” Swales recalls. From that moment, the showstopping portraits were inevitable. “I just knew after that call it was going to be an experience of artists creating together,” he says. RENE EBERSOLE Environmental Journalist Over the course of a year, award-winning journalist…

In Netflix’s talent-hunt show Simon Cowell: The Next Act, due in December, a guy best known for issuing stern judgments from behind a desk reveals himself as a loving dad with no shortage of anxiety. “I am very worried — I think we’re gonna fail,” Cowell, the former American Idol/X Factor judge and veteran record exec, says in the show after audition sign-ups are initially anemic. The series, which traces the formation of a new boy band, also proves that the fundamental formula somehow still works — there’s always an unknown kid out there who can unleash talent so raw and obvious that even Cowell breaks character. “ I’m trying to keep a poker face on and not smile,” he says, “but I couldn’t help myself.” So why put yourself…

‘Slamming the Door on Ageism’ It took 16 years, but they did it: Pusha T and Malice, a.k.a. Terrence Thornton and Gene Thornton Jr., a.k.a. the Clipse, reunited for their first album since 2009 and flipped the world of hip-hop on its head. Let God Sort Em Out, the precisely engineered monument to their own eternal dopeness that the two brothers released in July, breaks many unwritten rules. It’s a lyrics-first project, with more emphasis on verbal craftsmanship than catchy hooks, that nonetheless hit the Billboard 200’s top five, matching their highest-ever position on that chart, back in 2002; it’s an album of startling maturity and vulnerability from a duo once more accustomed to boasting; and perhaps most of all, it’s a must-listen, endlessly replayable set of songs from two…

‘There’s No Script’ For more than a decade, Joe Budden, host of The Joe Budden Podcast, has been a fixture on the rap internet, most recognizable for his, uh, passionate commentary about all things hip-hop. Historically, his rants have existed on a gradient of intensity from visibly annoyed to existentially pissed off (like in his famous interview with a teenage Lil Yachty, who was unaware of what the term “360 deal” meant). In person, however, Budden has a surprising air of Zen. He speaks in a calm, measured tone, even as he tells me about the rush-hour traffic into Manhattan from his home base in New Jersey. Budden first found fame as a rapper in the early 2000s, and is probably best known for his chart-topping hit “Pump It Up.”…

‘Can You Root for Someone Annoying?’ When Cole Escola first conceived their Broadway play Oh, Mary! in 2009, the premise was simple: How did Mary Todd Lincoln feel after the death of her husband, the 16th president of the United States? It was to be in the style of Nancy Meyers, all flowy white linen and second chances at love. But the play that scored Escola a Tony Award this year was much more of its time — and its creator’s mischievous mind. Taking place during the last days of Mary’s marriage, the madcap story morphed the first lady into a crazed alcoholic with a desperate love of cabaret. This Mary drunk-vomits into a bucket, mean-girl taunts her female minder, and lusts after her hunky acting coach while her husband…

‘I Won’t Sell Out for Clickbait’ ‘Wait, Kit, what was that headline again?” Marc Maron is sitting cross-legged on the porch of his house in Glen-dale, California, calling out to his girlfriend. A muffled voice from just outside the video-call frame says something, and the 62-year-old stand-up cracks up. “ ‘Marc Maron Pioneers Not Having a Podcast.’ That’s funny.” Here’s another joke, albeit less ha-ha: Maron spent decades as a comic working venues ranging from laundromats to Largo, as well as doing a brief stint in political talk radio. He felt his career had hit a brick wall. Then a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity: He revolutionized modern media. For the past 16 years, Maron ran his groundbreaking podcast, WTF With Marc Maron, from various home garages…

In October, Rolling Stone’s third-annual Musicians on Musicians event took over New York’s historic Beacon Theatre for a night filled with wall-shaking sing-alongs and insightful conversations. The show, which was part of a five-city tour that took place earlier this year, featured paired live interviews with our November cover stars Hayley Williams and Jack Antonoff, as well as María Zardoya of the Marías and Role Model. Both duos chopped it up with the evening’s host, Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson, and put on spectacular performances. Role Model joined Zardoya onstage for a moving rendition of the Marías’ “No One Noticed,” then got everyone in the theater on their feet with his hit “Sally When the Wine Runs Out.” To close the show, Williams and Antonoff showed off their musical…

When I was awoken on the morning of Tuesday, October 14th, I stared at the phone. No call that early is good news. I braced myself. I knew … but I didn’t know. Sigh. But I knew. He was one of the last pure artists in Black music. I had one propitious foot in the fight beside D’Angelo, another irresolute one in the “maybe it’s time for him to go home, Ahmir” shoe. D himself told me in our last convo at Sloan Kettering, “I’m hanging on, brotha … but today was hard … y’know?” I know, man … I know. Truthfully, I wasn’t ready for that gut punch. I’d been bracing for it for some 25 years — since the deluge of Voodoo in 2000. I always had a…

Every year Bad Bunny gets bigger, with new records broken and more gains made — and yet his career in 2025 feels like a massively historic moment, even for him. The Puerto Rican star kicked things off in January by releasing Debí Tirar Más Fotos. A deeply felt compendium filled with memories, love, and longing for his home island, it also traces political issues like displacement and gentrification. His masterful use of sonic traditions, blending Puerto Rican bomba and plena into pop creations, didn’t just help the album ricochet up the charts (it spent more than 20 weeks in the Billboard 200’s Top 10) — it drew a new blueprint for the future of Latin music. It also set the scene for another groundbreaking concept: No Me Quiero Ir de…

‘Stoned and Paying Attention’ ‘The Studio,” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s affectionate take on Hollywood, revolves around movie exec Matt Remick, played by Rogen, an angsty film nerd who’s finally climbed to the top of the greasy pole only to learn that his make-or-break project is a Kool-Aid movie. Remick, who fancies himself an artist, pays Martin Scorsese millions for a script he’s written about the Jonestown massacre, where hundreds die after a cult leader compels them to drink a poisoned version of said powdered drink. But the concept is vetoed by his boss. In the end, Remick caves, buries Marty’s script, and opts for a movie written and directed by Nick Stoller (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors fame), where the Kool-Aid Man hangs out with a box of…

‘Bringing a Piece of Home’ Despite the many peaks in Karol G’s career since she broke out of the music scene in Medellín (where she began performing as a teenager and playing the quinceañera circuit with fellow locals like J Balvin), the 34-year-old singer still exudes a near-breathless incredulity when describing a few of the milestones she hit this year. “I’ve done legendary stages that never in my life I imagined I’d perform in, like the Vatican or Crazy Horse or at Vic-toria’s Secret,” she says, every word vibrating with glee. Those moments — Karol duetting with Andrea Bocelli in St. Peter’s Square or taking over the legendary Parisian cabaret — were all in some way or another the result of Tropicoqueta, the gamble of an album she released in…

Recently, while promoting her new album, Lux, Rosalía recorded a TikTok Live that shows her in her car, tearing through the night-slicked streets of Madrid, blasting Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro overture on her sound system while meeting fans on her way to the iconic and opulent Plaza del Callao. Normally, a moment like that would feel slight, mundane, and almost unremarkable, but somehow those couple of seconds — a modern-day pop star at the wheel, whirring through frenzied intersections with one of music’s most lasting compositions backing her every move — capture the entire ethos of her masterful new album. Let’s be clear: Lux sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now, and it’s an album no other pop star could have made. Rosalía has proven herself to…