Music Today: Bruno Mars One Week From History, Deafheaven’s Nuclear Surprise, and Nickelback’s 2027 World Tour

Friday in music belongs to the drop-day scrum — and we’ve already got today’s New Music Friday covered, from Pitbull’s Pitcoin to Greta Van Fleet’s Palace for the People. But the wildest release of the day didn’t come from any promo calendar. It came out of nowhere, it’s about nuclear weapons, and it rips. Here’s everything that matters on a genuinely loaded Friday.

Deafheaven just dropped a surprise EP about the bomb. No rollout, no countdown, no cryptic billboard — the San Francisco black-metal band surprise-released the three-song EP At Work in the Fields of the Bomb today, on streaming and in vinyl variants through the band’s webstore. This is not the shimmering blackgaze of their biggest records. Produced by Arthur Rizk, the EP is ferocious, raw black metal — closer in spirit to Beherit and Immortal than to Envy or the Cascadian scene, and a direct descendant of their 2019 standalone ripper “Black Brick.” If you thought Deafheaven had left the extremity behind, this is your correction.

The concept is the heavyweight part. The title and idea are borrowed from Robert Del Tredici’s photo book documenting the ordinary places and ordinary people involved in nuclear weapons production — the EP explores the contrast between the bomb’s unimaginable consequences and the mundane, clock-in-clock-out actions that make it possible. That’s a bleak and brilliant frame for a Friday surprise drop, and it arrives with real visual muscle: the lead track “Hunter” has a short film made by the band’s own George Clarke with director Nico Poalillo of Pulse Films and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. The video premiered at 10 a.m. ET this morning.

Context matters here. Deafheaven are riding the high of 2025’s Lonely People With Power, their Roadrunner Records debut, which landed on year-end best lists from Rolling Stone, The Ringer, Stereogum, Consequence, Paste, Revolver, Decibel, Flood and The Needle Drop, with singles “Magnolia,” “Heathen” and “Winona.” They’re in the middle of a U.S. tour with Mastodon right now — tonight they play the Fox Theatre in Oakland, and the fall run wraps at Sick New World in Fort Worth on October 24. So a band with a full tour calendar and a career-high album still found time to make the heaviest thing they’ve done in years and throw it on the internet on a Friday morning. Surprise releases only land when the music is undeniable. This one is.

Nickelback is going around the world in 2027. The Canadian rockers announced the Everything Under the Sun world tour this morning, in support of their 11th studio album Everything Under the Sun, out October 30 via Virgin Music Group — their first record since 2022’s Get Rollin’. Don Broco opens the shows.

The North American leg starts February 6, 2027 at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena and runs through the spring, with the date that matters most to us: April 16, 2027 at T-Mobile Arena here in Las Vegas. The band then crosses the Atlantic for a U.K. and Europe leg from May 22 through July 13, 2027, and Australia gets its leg in October 2027. The ticketing calendar is tight: artist presale starts Tuesday, October 13 at 10 a.m., a Verizon presale runs October 13–15 on select shows, and the general on-sale is Friday, October 16 at 10 a.m. local time.

Say what you want about Nickelback — and everyone has — but the numbers don’t lie. They’re one of the best-selling rock acts of the century, they sell arenas on every continent without breaking a sweat, and a Vegas arena date in April 2027 is going to move real tickets. Def Leppard announced their own 45-date 2027 arena run earlier this week, and now this: 2027 is quietly stacking up to be the year legacy rock takes the arenas back.

Leon Bridges starts his next era in Vegas. The Fort Worth soul singer announced the 2027 Happiness Anytime Tour in support of his fifth album Happiness Anytime, out September 25 via Columbia Records and produced by Jungle’s J Lloyd and Lydia Kitto. And the very first night — April 7, 2027 — is The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan, right here in Las Vegas.

The routing from there: April 23 at Dickies Arena in his Fort Worth hometown, April 27 at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, May 1 at Madison Square Garden in New York, a break, then a summer leg that resumes July 16 in Charlotte and closes September 29 in Phoenix. The support lineup rotates by leg and reads like a festival bill: The Womack Sisters, Rachel Chinouriri, El Michels Affair, Kokoroko, and Peter Cat Recording Co. Two details worth loving: artist presale starts October 13 at 10 a.m. local (sign up on his site), general on-sale October 16 at 10 a.m. local via Ticketmaster — and one dollar from every ticket on all headline shows goes to The Big Good, the 501(c)(3) Bridges co-founded with football coach Gary Patterson to serve Texas.

Opening a tour in Vegas is a power move, not an accident. Vegas rooms are where promoters and the industry actually watch — if your show can hold a Cosmopolitan crowd, it can hold anywhere. Bridges is betting his whole album cycle on that room on night one. That tells you everything about how confident this camp is.

Paul Simon’s comeback gets the live-album treatment. Out today: Paul Simon: The Quiet Celebration Concert, a nearly two-hour live album documenting one of the most remarkable comebacks in recent music history. Simon came back to the stage after hearing loss — a loss that had pushed him into retirement — and this record, available as a 3-LP vinyl set, a 2-CD package, and on digital and streaming, is the proof it worked.

The setlist is the draw. It opens with the 33-minute Seven Psalms piece rearranged for live performance, then runs through “Graceland,” “The Boxer,” “Slip Slidin’ Away,” “The Sound of Silence” and a stack of deep cuts, with the lead live track being the “Under African Skies” duet with Edie Brickell. The band is a murderers’ row — Steve Gadd on drums, Bakithi Kumalo on bass, Mark Stewart — recorded by Biff Dawes and mixed by Kyle Crusham, captured after a 58-date U.S. tour whose concert film debuted on Disney+ and Hulu. Rolling Stone called the tour production a victory lap. With this album, it’s a victory lap you can own.

Chart watch: Bruno Mars, one week out. The tie is official: “I Just Might” has spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, matching Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther” for the longest reign in the chart’s 68-year history. (We broke down the full math yesterday.) What’s new today is the spoiler alert. Next week’s chart — dated October 17, tracking streaming, airplay and sales from October 2 through today — is the one that decides it. A 32nd week at No. 1 makes Mars the outright record holder. But there’s a threat: Drake’s HABIBTI deluxe edition dropped October 2, sending fresh tracks into next week’s ranking, per Billboard’s Chart Beat. And remember — “I Just Might” and Drake’s “Janice STFU” have owned the chart’s top two spots for 18 straight weeks. The only person who can spoil Bruno Mars’s record right now is Drake. That’s a chart race worth watching.

Friday’s drop list, rapid-fire. Today’s New Music Friday is one of the year’s most stacked: Pitbull’s Pitcoin, Troye Sivan’s “She’s the Best,” Greta Van Fleet’s Palace for the People, Remi Wolf, Dominic Fike, the Pet Shop Boys, Sheryl Crow’s “Pick You Up,” Chase & Status, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lil Mosey, Lainey Wilson and Slayyyter. Go get fed.