Sunday Reserve: Mac Miller's Divine Feminine at 10, Mariah Carey's Glitter Vinyl Reissue

Sunday Reserve: Mac Miller's Divine Feminine at 10, Mariah Carey's Glitter Vinyl Reissue

Sunday Reserve: Mac Miller's Divine Feminine Turns 10, Mariah's Glitter Finally Gets Justice

Plus Fontaines D.C. go colder and stranger, Celine Dion's catalog comes to pearly white vinyl, and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium hits 20.

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Sunday's stacked. Mac Miller's The Divine Feminine turns 10. Mariah's Glitter gets the vindication it deserves. Fontaines D.C. go colder and stranger. Lock them in.

The Big Ones

Mac Miller — The Divine Feminine (10th Anniversary) [3LP]
One of the most pivotal moments in Mac Miller's career of constant reinvention. After doubling down on rap prowess with GO:OD AM, Mac stunned fans with an audacious pivot — a concept album exploring the power of love and the sacred energy of women. Pitchfork called it his most intoxicating release yet, and its embrace of his singing voice and genre-agnostic songwriting foreshadowed the evolution that would define Swimming. This 10th anniversary edition features three previously-unreleased songs from the original sessions, with features from Ariana Grande, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, and Ty Dolla $ign. Pressed to 3LP with printed inner sleeves — available in Milky Clear + Ruby Indie Exclusive or standard Apple + Fruit Punch + Black Ice. A landmark reborn. $49.98.

Mariah Carey — Glitter (Soundtrack, 25th Anniversary Vinyl Reissue) [Midnight Purple 2LP]
Lambs, this one's for us — and it comes with a story worth telling in full.

By 2001, Mariah Carey was three years removed from her divorce from Tommy Mottola, the Sony Music chief who had signed her at 18, married her at 23, and by most accounts — including her own, in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey — kept a suffocating grip on her career throughout their marriage. Glitter was supposed to be her declaration of independence: a self-starring film and its soundtrack, her first major release for Virgin Records after walking away from Sony, set in the New York club scene of the early '80s that had shaped her as a kid. It was meant to be a victory lap. Instead, it became one of the most talked-about entertainment-industry grudge matches of the era.

The trouble started with the lead single, "Loverboy." Carey's team had built the track around a sample of Yellow Magic Orchestra's 1978 synthpop cut "Firecracker" — a song that, according to its own publisher, had never been sampled by anyone before. Carey's camp called first to license it. According to that same publisher, it was only weeks later that another camp called asking for the identical sample: Jennifer Lopez's team, for a song called "I'm Real," off Lopez's sophomore album J.Lo. The timing was not lost on anyone — least of all Carey, who has said she believed Mottola, who was overseeing Lopez's career at Sony at the time, had a hand in steering the same rare, previously-untouched sample straight into a rival's hands.

It gets more pointed. Producer Irv Gotti, who helmed the remix of Lopez's "I'm Real" featuring Ja Rule, later told XXL magazine that Mottola called him personally and asked him to put Ja Rule on Lopez's remix — a request Gotti found strange, he said, because he had just finished producing "If We," a duet between Carey and Ja Rule for the Glitter soundtrack, built around the same call-and-response structure Lopez's remix would go on to use. "Immediately I knew what he was doing," Gotti recalled, "because we just finished the Mariah record."

With Lopez's version already locked in and set to release first, Carey couldn't use "Firecracker" anymore — the song had already been shot into scenes of the Glitter film itself, so there wasn't even time to reshoot around a fix. Her team scrambled and found a new foundation: Cameo's 1986 funk classic "Candy," a total tonal left turn that ended up defining the song. Carey didn't just license the sample — she brought Cameo frontman Larry Blackmon into the "Loverboy" video himself, drag-racing alongside Da Brat in one of the era's more memorably strange music-video images.

Lopez's "I'm Real" dropped first and went to No. 1. When "Loverboy" arrived weeks later, it stalled at No. 2 — ending Carey's run of eleven consecutive chart-topping singles, a streak that had defined most of her career to that point. Billboard's review at the time called it "dangerously close to self-sabotage." Carey, exhausted from the film shoot and the fallout, has said this period led directly into a public breakdown that summer. And then, on September 11, 2001, the Glitter soundtrack was released — the single worst possible day for anyone to be paying attention to a pop album. The film flopped weeks later. Both were savaged by critics almost on principle.

But Carey got a few things right in the end. She had the last word on "Firecracker" itself: the official "Loverboy" remix, featuring Da Brat, interpolates the exact melody Lopez's camp had taken, with Da Brat rapping directly at the situation — "Hate on me as much as you want to / You can't do what the fuck I do / Bitches be emulating me daily" — over the very sample she'd been forced to give up. And for all the noise, "Loverboy" ended up the best-selling single of 2001 in the United States. Carey has said as much herself, closing the chapter in her memoir with exactly that fact.

The reappraisal took nearly two decades. In 2018, fans launched #JusticeForGlitter, and the campaign actually worked — the soundtrack shot back to No. 1 on iTunes, seventeen years after its release, on the strength of people simply deciding to go back and listen to it properly. Carey herself now celebrates the album without irony, and critics who once piled on have gone back and called it some of her most interesting, funk-and-disco-indebted work. What was framed as her lowest point turned out to be a genuinely underrated pop-R&B record that got caught in a fight that had nothing to do with the music.

This 25th anniversary pressing — the first vinyl reissue of Glitter since 2001 — lands on midnight purple wax. "Loverboy," "Didn't Mean to Turn You On," and the euphoric "Don't Stop (Funkin' 4 Jamaica)" all sound exactly as good as the people who were right about this record the whole time always said they did. Vindication never sounded so good.

Fontaines D.C. — Dopamine Chamber [LP]
The Dublin five-piece's fifth album — colder, stranger, more synthetic than ever. Following the platinum breakthrough of Romance, Dopamine Chamber moves away from guitars into a mind-altering exploration of how pleasure mutates amid collapse. Produced by James Ford, led by "Marianne." Out October 16.

Celine Dion — Falling Into You [Pearly White 2LP, Import]
Grammy Album of the Year on pearly white — part of Celine's entire catalog now being reissued in matching pearly white vinyl. "Because You Loved Me," forever.

Also Up for Preorder

A decade of Mac Miller's boldest pivot, a soundtrack finally getting the credit it always deserved, and Fontaines D.C. going somewhere entirely new. Lock these in before they're gone.

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— Drowned World Records

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