Celebrating over a decade of friendship and sporadic conversations while touring festivals, band members Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane reconnected with the iconic producer turned fashion creative last summer during his Something In The Water Festival at Virginia Beach in North America.

After multiple songwriting sessions, the two camps went on to record the song together in New York and Paris. The track also features haunting backing vocals from a talented six-piece choir known as Native Vocalists, whose origins hail from Native American Tribes within the Great Northern Plains.

The uplifting, gospel-inspired track had its debut performance at Paris Fashion Week during Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton Menswear Autumn/Winter 2024 runway show on January 16. The band was joined by Pharrell and the Native Vocalists in a special, one-off live set for all 1,300 attendees.

Proving to be a powerful tool for showcasing new music, the runway performance lies in situ with other live debuts curated by the producer. ‘Joy (Unspeakable)’, a collaboration between Williams and gospel choir Voices of Fire, was performed at his first Paris show last June, followed by a performance of ‘Airplane Tickets’ alongside Swae Lee and Rauw Alejandro at his pre-fall 2024 show in Hong Kong last November.

Although some fans might be surprised by the collaboration with the British trio, this isn’t the first time Williams has teamed up with artists from opposite ends of the spectrum, working with the likes of Daft Punk, Calvin Harris, Beck, and Tame Impala.

Williams has also been informally credited as one of the driving forces behind Maggie Rogers’ career, as seen in a viral video of him listening to and praising her song ‘Alaska’ during a music majors’ workshop and masterclass at The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University (NYU).

The renowned London band seem to be choosing their partnerships wisely, honing in on other artists who share a clear mutual respect for music. In October last year, the group teased unsuspecting fans at the Austin City Limits Music Festival by bringing on surprise guest Noah Kahan to perform a simplified rendition of unreleased track ‘Maybe’, another of what appears to be many impressive features on their upcoming album, their first since ‘Delta’ in 2018.

You can listen to the new single ‘Good People’ here.

Olivia Colman, Rob Delaney, Jack Dylan Grazer, Ed Helms, Justice Smith, Kylie Cantrall, Ricardo Hurtado, Marcus Scribner and Zach Galifianakis also provide voiceovers for the film.

The singer expressed that releasing the single for the film is a dream come true. The film follows the character Barney “A socially awkward schoolboy and his malfunctioning digital device Ron”

The singer achieved musical fame in 2010, with his band One Direction aka 1D who are considered the best selling UK boyband”. The band lineup included bandmates, Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson who met when they all entered the ITV series The X Factor.

The band released their debut album Up All Night on 18th November 2011 and achieved number-one success with their single “What Makes You Beautiful” released on September 11th 2011. Malik left the band in 2015 to embark on his solo career and the singer continued in the group with Horan, Styles and Tomlinson.

The singer released his first solo single “Strip That Down” on May 19th 2017 from his debut album LP1 released on December 6th 2019. The single reached number three in the UK Official Singles Charts. The singer counts Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams and Usher as his musical influences and has sold more than 23 million singles with 1D and 3 million solo albums to date.

The single has been described as a feel-good song and a teaser clip of the single was released today via TikTok. The singer stated “I can’t wait for you all to hear Sunshine and to see ‘Ron’s Gone Wrong.’ It has been a lot of fun!”

I am so excited to officially announce that my new single Sunshine is out 27th August and that it’s featured in the @ronsgonewrong movie I can’t wait for you all to hear it, pre-save it now https://t.co/fhhror4AXL@Disney @20thcentury @LSAnimation #RonsGoneWrong pic.twitter.com/vn1HYqWaoM

— Liam (@LiamPayne) August 19, 2021

The singer has not released any solo material since his collaboration single “Naughty List” with Dixie D’ Amelio last October. Making the single “Sunshine” the singers first single release of 2021. The single is set for release on August 27th and the film Ron’s Gone Wrong is set for release this October.

The album itself drops on Friday April 27, and will be Monae’s first project since 2013’s The Electric Lady. The singer recently explained the the five year wait between albums was greatly influenced by the death of her close friend Prince in 2016.

“This was the person that I would literally call and talk to about sounds or: ‘How should I say this? Is this saying too much?’ I just never could imagine a time where I couldn’t pick up the phone or email him, and he’d contact me right back and we’d talk about all these things that I was unsure of” Monae said of the Purple One.

The 14 track album can be seen listed below, and features the likes of Pharrell Williams, Zoe Kravtiz, Grimes, and the Beach Boys’ head  honcho Brian Wilson on the album’s title track.

1 Dirty Computer [feat. Brian Wilson]
2 Crazy, Classic, Life
3 Take a Byte
4 Jane’s Dream
5 Screwed [feat. Zoë Kravitz]
6 Django Jane
7 PYNK [feat. Grimes]
8 Make Me Feel
9 I Got the Juice [feat. Pharrell Williams]
10 I Like That
11 Stevie’s Dream
12 Don’t Judge Me
13 So Afraid
14 Americans
Three wildly differing singles and videos have already been released in the build to Dirty Computer’s release, in the Prince-heavy ‘Make Me Feel’, the hip-hop influenced ‘Django Jane’, and the dreamy pop song ‘PYNK’ most recently. You can check out the video for that above.

The trio, led by hat-lover-extraordinaire Pharrell Williams, have been dormant for some time, whilst their leader went off to feel like a room without a roof, but posters and adverts seen a Tyler, the Creator’s Camp Flogg Naw festival over the weekend strongly suggest that their return is imminent.

NO_ONE EVER REALLY DIES @NeRdArMy pic.twitter.com/5ic6b5Dy8G

— SHADEZ THE MISFIT (@shadeztm) October 29, 2017

N.E.R.D. ads everywhere pic.twitter.com/N7tzt0TQa5

— pharrell's junebug (@angelAmyV) October 29, 2017

Posters displaying the words ‘No-one Ever Really Dies’ have begun to surface, both at Tyler’s festival, and on the bands various social media pages, clearly playing on the band’s acronym name.

Pharrell himself has been talking about a new N.E.R.D album since as far back as 2015, and further confirmed the group’s plans at ComplexCon in November 2016, during a live recording of his Beats 1 show OTHERtone. After opening a Q&A session with his audience, Williams was quizzed about whether there would be another N.E.R.D album or not.

“The answer is yes” Pharrell responded, to excited applause from his crowd. Pharrell went on to compare N.E.R.D’s creative process to making wine, teasing his audience with the suggestion that the new album would drop “when it’s time.”

Williams also sat down for an interview with the BBC in February, and spoke on the album’s progress, stating that the production was still underway, but that “It’s feeling really good, really special.”

The Official Charts Company today revealed that ‘Ghost Stories’ sold a whopping 168,000 copies in its first week leading to 375,000 copies to date. As a result Coldplay’s sixth studio album had beaten Paolo Nutini’s ‘Caustic Love’ which sold 329,000 copies and Ellie Goulding with ‘Halcyon’ at 275,000 so far this year.

Coldplay have therefore sold 11.1 Million albums in the UK since the millennium when the band released their debut ‘Parachutes’. In fourteen years Cold Play have released sixth studio albums, but it was in 1996 that the band had officially formed. In 1998 Chris Martin and Johnny Buckland released 500 copies of their EP ‘Safety’ but as the vast majority of these were given to friends, family, and to attract the attention of record companies, there were only 50 released to the public which are now known to fetch around more than £2000 on eBay. In nearly twenty years the band have soared to success and with today’s figures it seems they are vastly ubiquitous in the world of popular music.

In the singles list it is Pharrell Williams, despite taking 6th place in the most sold albums, who is still climbing the ladder with his 2013 single ‘Happy’, originally used in the ‘Despicable Me 2’ Soundtrack. This will be the second quarter that ‘Happy’ has remained the most popular single, having only kicked interest in December last year when it was second for the Christmas No.1 spot behind, unsurprisingly, X-Factor Winner Sam Bailey’s ‘Skyscraper’.
His third-million selling UK feat is a heady height for the singer, as he is brushing shoulder to shoulder with the legendary Beatles.

Jess Glynne has also seen success having featured in ‘Rather Be’ with Clean Bandit (no.2), and ‘My Love’ alongside Route 94 (no.6).

The list of Top Ten bestselling albums of 2014 so far is as follows:
1. Coldplay ‘Ghost Stories’ with 375,000 copies.
2. Paolo Nutini ‘Caustic Love’ with 329,000
3. Ellie Goulding ‘Halcyon’ with 275,000
4. Paloma Faith ‘A Perfect Contradiction
5. Sam Smith ‘In the Lonely Hour;
6. Pharrell Williams ‘Girl’
7. Bastille ‘Bad Blood
8. London Grammar ‘If You Wait
9. Beyoncé, ‘Beyoncé
10. Arctic Monkeys, ‘AM’.

Singles List for 2014 so far:
1. Pharrell Williams ‘Happy’
2. Clean Bandit Feat Jess Glynne ‘Rather Be’
3. John Legend ‘All of Me’
4. Pitbull feat Kesha ‘Timber’
5. Mr Probz ‘Waves’
6. Route 94 feat Jess Glynne ‘My Love’
7. Katy Perry feat Juicy J ‘Dark Horse’
8. Sigma ‘Nobody To Love’
9. Kiesza ‘Hideaway’
10. Idina Menzel ‘Hideaway’