Given her experience working with a host of talented artists like Lady Gaga and Rhymefest, and her own talent as a resident DJ, we asked Samantha Ronson to rank her five favorite party-starting tracks. Her list includes DMX and Beyoncé, as well as an appearance from her brother, Mark Ronson.

The Saga Continues is the best Wu Tang-related effort since 2010’s Wu-Massacre, while Long Island punks Iron Chic channel the loss of their founding guitarist into an explosive third album. These plus Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile, King Krule, and more in this week’s notable releases.

MF Doom is one of the most enigmatic rappers of all time, an artist whose turn-of-the-millennium hot streak ranks up there with any of the all-time greats. Since then, he’s drifted between various collaborative projects and collapsed plans, which is why, despite the intense promise of his supposed collaborative LP…

In a recent Q&A for Billboard, St. Vincent’s Annie Clark talked about why, despite her recent foray into filmmaking, she’s not all that interested in acting in front of the camera. “I don’t mind the performance aspect of it, because that’s kind of interesting,” she explains. “But I really don’t like the lack of…

New Jersey duo The Front Bottoms—Brian Sella and Mat Uychich—have spent years eluding genre, with “folk punk” about as close (or far off) as it gets. Its newest LP, Going Grey, is another artful and intentional dodge, at turns bopping and contemplative, synth-y, and cathartic, where caustic declarations like “I hate…

The defining question regarding any new Beck album is which Beck he’ll be. Will it be the sad, contemplative Beck of mopey masterpieces like Sea Change and the Grammy-winning Morning Phase? Or will the party-starter behind Odelay poke his head out, armed with nonsensical phrases and looped beats? The long, long runway…

On The Blueprint, the album that cemented JAY-Z’s status as the biggest rapper of his era, he boasted that he was “leading the league in at least six statistical categories right now: best flow, most consistent, realest stories, most charisma, I set the most trends… And my interviews are hotter.” He was right: It was…

The Kid marks a new career high for Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, while Kelela’s first proper album feels watered down. These plus Wolf Parade, Liam Gallagher, and more in the week’s notable releases.

According to WhoSampled, that endlessly useful resource for determining which artists should probably be sued, bits of Blade Runner have been paid homage to—and straight-up pilfered—more than 80 times in the past 35 years, turning up in works from everyone from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Rutger Hauer’s…

My son is 7, and he recently discovered—via his 8-year-old friend—the joys of Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” the smash hit that entered the zeitgeist in late 2014 and never really left. It’s one of those songs that just completely dominated, winning Record Of The Year at the Grammys and selling a jillion copies.…

Like most music fans, we at The A.V. Club are all saddened by the news of Tom Petty’s death yesterday. It’s always a good time to visit his extensive catalog, but today it seems exceptionally appropriate, in order to honor the man who ruled rock radio before some of us were even alive, and who wrote the tracks that…

Tom Petty—the influential singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who achieved great success both as a solo artist and with his band Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—has died. Petty was rushed to the hospital late last night after being found unconscious and in full cardiac arrest at his Malibu home; he was taken…

Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to review sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…