Tate McRae is a booked and busy flexible force to be reckoned with. She’s just released her brand new third album, 'So Close To What,' and she’s about to head out on her continent-spanning 2025 'Miss Possessive Tour.' But before all of that she checked in with Audacy’s Bru to chat all about both and more.

Tate last checked in on the heels of releasing her album’s debut track, "It’s ok I’m ok." Leading up to the album’s arrival she dropped two more singles, "2 Hands" and "Sports Car,” before officially releasing her 15-track album on February 21.

Sitting down with Bru on her album’s release day, Tate shared her extreme excitement, mixed with slight hesitation, to scroll through social to gage the response. “It's like such an overstimulating thing because, you're like, I don't want to look at my phone because if I scroll too far, you're bound to see something that's scary,” Tate expressed. “But I've been also wanting to see if the fans like it, so it's been fun.”

Tate has released a steady flow of albums in the last 3 years with 2022’s 'I Used to Think I Could Fly,' 2023’s 'Think Later,' and now 'So Close To What' in 2025. Commending Tate for the grind, and rightfully so, Bru asked her what’s its been like and if she’s had chance to process it at all. Also wondering if it feels like she’s on the same wave as when she put out her first album.

"Well, the first album, that feels like ages ago. I was 17 when I started writing that, and then I took a break from writing or from touring and wrote for a full year, so I felt like that was like a separate thing. But Think Later and this album have been really tight,” Tate noted. “Album, tour, album, and it's just felt natural. I've just been writing a lot, I've been inspired,” she added.

Sharing what is currently motivating her the most right now, Tate said, “last year was the first time that I've ever danced, danced on tour. So to feel that response and be like — ‘oh, this is what I need to do on tour’ — to perform and want to feel good with my dancers on stage… I think that inspired a lot of the writing for this album.”

While we find it hard to remember a time when Tate wasn’t slaying every inch of whatever stage she was occupying with Sean Bankhead choreography, there was a time when she’d just sing, stand, and walk around.

While Tate has more than mastered dancing while singing, running while singing (like Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus) is a difference story. “I'm an awful runner,” Tate admitted, “so honestly just getting on a treadmill, I can't do anything, so singing and running would be a bad idea for me.”

Fun fact — Tate also shared that “bloodonmyhands” and “Like I do,” were the final two tracks written and added to the album. “It kind of felt like it like tied the whole album together and was like the final little bow,” Tate said. “I wrote it in New York like 3 weeks ago, so it was really last minute and it it really was a satisfying feeling.”

Despite being a full fledged Popstar, Tate confessed she has “the worst case of impostor syndrome.” Noting “even last night,” at her album release party, “I was just like I wonder if anyone's gonna show up… like no one's gonna come to a parking lot. And so every time I come on stage and I have like this look on my face where I look really shocked it’s just because I actually genuinely am, like I can't believe people showed up.”

Talking about how the collab with The Kid LAROI came about, well aside from the fact that as boyfriend and girlfriend, it just makes sense Tate shared. “It started because I had another record that he loved and I was like looking for a feature, and he was like, ‘let me just cut a verse on it.’” Noting she’s “been a fan of him for so long,” Tate was obviously down. “So he tracked the verse. Then of course you like analyze everything. We were like, let's try and beat this, and we wrote another song. And yeah, it was a fun process, it was ...

Calling in to chat with Audacy’s Julia, benny blanco shared all about his surprise album with Selena Gomez, 'I Said I Love You First,' detailing how the project came about, and discussing the stories behind the first two singles, plus a whole lot more during an Audacy Check In.

Sharing how the idea for the new album came about, benny revealed, “I think we were just both kind of… just like a little stuck on what we want to do. Selena was talking about not wanting to make music anymore. She felt like she already said everything she's ever wanted to say. And I remember I just had this like a-ha moment where I was like, well, why don't we just do an album together? It would be so fun.”

Noting how he loved it when other musical couples had teamed up on projects, listing off JAY-Z and Beyoncé, and Raw Alejandro and Rosalía as examples, benny thought, “why don't we try?”

“I didn't even know if anyone was gonna hear this,” he went on to admit. “We just made it in our house together, like in our room. And I remember saying like, hey, if this is ever weird, we'll just stop right away.”

As it turns out, it wasn’t weird at all. “It all like flowed out so easily,” benny continued, "and… I feel like through this, I realized how good a partners we were together because… we didn't fight… there was no argument in the studio. All of our ideas came out exactly how we wanted them to, and we had the same intuitions and it was like, if we didn't like something, we both didn't like it. And I don't know, it was kind of like a therapeutic and cathartic experience.”

While the forthcoming album is hardly the first time benny and Selena have worked on music together, aside of Selena’s 2023 summer single “Single Soon,” all the tracks they’ve collaborated on in the past was done as friends. Which according to benny the one major difference between working together before compared to now is that now, “I get to kiss her and we're in love.”

Sharing a few things he thinks will surprise us about the album, benny expressed, clarifying he doesn’t mean lyrically, noting, “she’s always raw in what she's saying. But some of the production is like really pulled back… almost like acoustic like… or it'll be one piano and her, you know. And then obviously there's still like the bops and stuff on there too, but I think it was really cool to try out new things that maybe she's never done before."

“I think people will be surprised that maybe some of the stuff we're talking about," he continued, “It’s about everything. You know, I really want people to take the journey. I don't want to say too much because it's definitely a journey from the beginning, from how it opens up until how it ends.”

Speaking of — how it ends — “Scared of Loving You,” the album’s lead single is actually the last song on the album. Sharing the reason they chose to release that one first, benny said, “I think I just wanted to start by saying like, ‘here's how we feel right now… this is how we feel right now in this moment.’ And then let's go backwards.”

“You know… Selena has been through so much and this song really showed — ‘Hey, I'm not scared of loving you right now, I am scared of losing you.’ And just like everyone else, you do a bunch of things in your life and then you're sitting there and you're like — ‘Oh, I'm really scared to jump into this new thing because if I do, that means I'm giving myself to a person again and like that means the potential for heartbreak again’”, benny added.

Sharing how they were both “a little hesitant to go into it,” once they did, “then you're like, ‘oh my God… I have so much to live for now… Wait, holy s***, don't leave me.'”

Sharing the story behind their second single, “Call Me When You Break Up,” featuring Gracie Abrams, benny revealed he’d previously worked with Gracie on “some of the first music she ever made.. and then I put her on my album in like 2020 or somethi ...

Host Abe Kanan recently welcomed frontman David Draiman of Disturbed for a special Audacy Check In, just before the band hits the road on their North American trek in celebration of 25 years since the release of their debut album, 'The Sickness.'

Looking back at 25 years of ‘The Sickness,’ Abe remembers vividly purchasing Disturbed's debut CD at Tower Records, which happened to have two concert tickets stuffed inside for the release party at Chicago’s Metro.

“We put ‘em in there,” Draiman admits. “We were trying to get people to come. It was kind of an important show, you know what I mean? So, giving them away, selling them… we weren't about making money at the time. We weren't about selling our own tickets, we’d give them away. We didn't care.”

"We just wanted bodies in the room and we were definitely our own street team in many ways,” he explains. “If there were four shows going on in Chicago at a given night, if there was one at the Aragon, one at the UIC Pavilion, one at United Center, we'd hit them all. The band would split up with all of our promotional materials and, to me, that was always the easiest way to get directly to the fans. Here are the fans coming out of another great rock show… ‘Well, here, if you want some more of this… different flavors, same kind of family, come on over and check us out. It fostered this great sense of community… this great sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, and I loved it. Those days were really, really magical days back then.”

Touching on the artists he’s looked up to over the years David tells us, “I definitely had a tremendous amount of inspiration from guys like Jonathan Davis. That first Korn record was massive for me. Chino Moreno from the Deftones, you know, both those guys wielding rhythm in their vocal deliveries the way that they did were hugely inspirational for me. Guys like Maynard James Keenan from TOOL, you know, those first couple TOOL records, his power, his resonance, his ethereal nature to his vocal delivery. All those guys were definitely huge influences, in addition to The Aussies, the Hatfields, you know, the Dickinsons, the Dios of the world. They definitely were a huge part of who we became and who I became, for sure.”

David also spoke about missing the adventure that at one time came with being a music fan; Traveling to record stores, searching for the album you wanted to buy, waiting in line for concert tickets -- “I feel that we have a generation of fans that unfortunately will never ever get to experience that,” he says. “We've become so detached and so disconnected from everything with the help of technology. You know, we don't have physical packaging anymore. I used to really get into getting records, opening them up, reading all the liner notes. Who were they thanking? Who was behind it, you know, what inspired them? What were the lyrics, what were they saying? What were they trying to make me think? Al of that. And I think a lot of that is now lost.”

“I think our tendency to consume faster and faster, and more and more rapidly and our attention span, which gets shorter and shorter over the course of time, in many ways, it's enabled so much more music to get on the table and to be heard,” he adds. “But on another level, there's so much that's getting missed, and there are opportunities that will never ever be able to be duplicated or replicated that really do feel bad that people won't ever get to experience.”

“I miss a lot about the old days. I missed the vibe of the old days. I missed the sense of rock community that we had back in the old days for sure,” David says. “Everything that we alluded to, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this 25th anniversary run. It's a ton of nostalgia in a bag… It's gonna be massive. I’m very, very excited about it, very excited about both halves of the bill. Incredibly strong, from Sevendust and Three Days Grace, to Nothing More a ...