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Hip-Hop Lives Here
Chance the Rapper‘s long-awaited sophomore album, Star Line Gallery, finally has a release date… ballpark.
The Chicago rapper took to Instagram Live on Friday (December 22) to make the announcement, and also had a bit of fun at his followers’ expense.
“My album’s coming out next spring!” he said, while noting that there were only “about 500 people” in the live online session.
“Nobody loves it when I’m doin’ good work, for real!” he snarked. Check out the clip below.
Chance The Rapper announces 2024 release timeframe for long awaited "Star Line Gallery"https://t.co/3Yh0bOWXIApic.twitter.com/F4BaZtyBxE
— HipHopDX (@HipHopDX) December 22, 2023
Chance the Rapper has been hyping up Star Line Gallery for quite some time, though fans hadn’t had any sort of timeline on its release until now.
Over the summer, the Acid Rap hitmaker hyped up his upcoming LP with full confidence, writing: “It’s merched I got the best next album outta all the n-ggas that have a next album [three weeping emojis].”
“Merched” is Chicago slang for “proven,” so Chance seems fully confident in the statement. This is a particularly bold claim considering his full-length release was widely panned by fans and the media.
However, he has since dropped a string of successful singles, as well as a joint project with Jeremih, so an impactful comeback via the upcoming Star Line Gallery is indeed likely.
In early June, the Chi-town native phoned in to Audacy Check In to provide an update on the follow-up to 2019’s The Big Day.
“It’s one of my proudest projects in terms of writing and artistic vision,” he said. “There’s an immense amount of work to be done with it. But it’s cool ’cause I feel like the love and intentionality that goes into making each physical art piece allows me to show people in these museum spaces what I’m working on as I go, the highs and the lows, kind of like a preview to the project…”
The album title shares its name with Chance and Vic Mensa’s festival in Ghana. The Black Star Line Festival took place in Accra’s Black Star Square, also known as Independence Square, in early January 2023.
During an interview on Sway in the Morning last year, he broke down the deeper meaning behind Star Line Gallery.
“I was inspired by Marcus Garvey in the early 1900s, 1919 through actually 1922, so 100 years ago now,” he said. “He started and ran this very important, integral shipping line. He had a fleet of ships, these giant ocean liners which are the size of cruise ships, that he owned and funded with common Black folks’ money.”
He continued: “But what he did with it was he created a trade route between the United States, all of the Black islands and the continent of Africa, and that created a network of people where people from all over the world were interconnected and working with each other and taking trips together and created this connectivity that didn’t exist before.”
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Lady Gaga has officially wrapped her ‘Mayhem Ball’ tour, pulling in an impressive $419.5million (£340m) and securing its place as one of the top ten highest grossing tours by a female artist ever.
The final show took place last week on April 13, bringing a full year of performances across five continents to a close. Based on data submitted to Billboard Boxscore, the tour earned $419.5 million overall and moved close to two million tickets.
Billboard separated the run into two parts. The official ‘Mayhem Ball’ kicked off on July 16, 2025 in Las Vegas, traveling through North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan before finishing at Madison Square Garden.
Before the main run began, Gaga also performed two shows in Mexico City and four in Singapore. Around that same period, she headlined both weekends of Coachella and delivered a record setting free concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Taking all of those appearances into account, it is estimated that Gaga performed in front of more than 4.5 million fans over the past year. ‘The Mayhem Ball’ now stands as her highest grossing tour to date. Beyond that personal milestone, it ranks among the biggest tours of the 2020s and sits within the top ten highest grossing pop tours ever, making it the largest pop tour since The Eras Tour.
The tour was built around her album ‘Mayhem’, which marked her eighth project to win a Grammy. NME awarded it four stars, writing that, “ultimately, ‘Mayhem’ feels like a great Gaga album because it’s just so much fun.
“At times, it’s a bit like reconnecting with an old friend who makes sense even when they seem to be chatting nonsense. Seventeen years after she broke through with ‘Just Dance’, Lady Gaga remains pop’s foremost agent of impeccably crafted chaos.”
The album also landed at number 19 on NME’s best albums of 2025 list, while ‘Abracadabra’ was placed at number 20 in their songs of the year ranking.
When Gaga brought ‘Mayhem’ to London, NME gave the live show a five star review. “Her capacity for ideas and invention comes to life on the stage,” it said. “Never one to hold back, the theatrical pop auteur is in world building mode, creating a fantastical, camp horror universe within the arena that sees her do battle with another version of herself, at times flanked by skeletons, witches and plague doctors.”
Looking at other major tours, Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ run was named the highest grossing tour of 2025, finishing ahead of Oasis’ reunion tour even though the Manchester group sold more tickets.
That 32 show run lasted through July and, according to Pollstar, brought in $407.6million (£305.5million) while selling 1,596,165 tickets at an average price of $255.36 (£189.16).
Oasis’ ‘Live ‘25’ tour ranked second, with 36 shows generating $405.4million (£300.3million). With a lower average ticket cost of $181.93 (£134.76), Liam and Noel Gallagher and the band actually moved the most tickets of the year, totaling 2,228,471.
Other top earners included Coldplay’s ‘Music Of The Spheres’ tour, which grossed $390million (£289million) in 2025 with an average ticket price of $133.80 (£99.10), along with the joint tour from Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which earned $358million (£265million).
Back in 2024, Taylor Swift’s career spanning ‘Eras’ tour set a new benchmark by reaching a record $2billion in ticket sales.
Even halfway through its run, Swift had already broken records by becoming the first artist to surpass $1billion (£796million) from a single tour. At the time, projections already suggested it would end up as the highest earning tour ever.
It was later confirmed that the global run generated a total of $2,077,618,725 (£1.6billion) in ticket sales, according to the New York Times.
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