Imagine Dragons knew that when Michael Bay wants to talk to you, you drop what you’re doing and take the call.

The Las Vegas band have been touring their debut album, Night Visions, for the past two years, but when Bay reached out about composing a song for the latest installment of his alien-robot franchise, “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” they were eager to contribute.

After watching parts of the film with Bay, lead singer Dan Reynolds said that the idea for the theme for the original song they wrote “Battle Cry” just came to him.

“I said ‘I have this theme idea,’” Reynolds explained in a new featurette. From there, the band wrote the song along with composers Steve Jablonsky and Hans Zimmer. “As we were in the room with them we’d be playing something,” he added, “they would change one note and suddenly it would give this feeling of remorse, or feeling of happiness.”

Since Imagine Dragon’s music is already based on epic, swelling choruses like the one on their Grammy Award Winning single “Radioactive” it makes sense that they connected to the high-energy action of the “Transformers” sci-fi series. “Battle Cry” seems to follow a similar format, building from delicate strings into an enormous, drum-filled chorus—think Coldplay circa Viva La Vida era.

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” hits US on Wednesday, June 26 and “Battle Cry,” which was released as a one-off single on June 2, is available for purchase now.

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Joell Ortiz hasn’t released a solo album since 2011′s Free Agent. He’s put out some freestyles as well as work with Slaughterhouse in the time since, but he knows that his fans are both itching for more solo work and wondering when they’d hear it.

On “House Slippers,” the lead release from his upcoming album of the same name, the Brooklyn native begins to fill in the blanks.

“For those who’ve been wondering what’s going on with Joell Ortiz, it’s a lot, man,” he says to open song, which he recently dropped along with a new video.

Joell then uses the next three minutes of !llmind’s beat to get deeply personal, opening up about struggles and successes of the last few years.

In one of a number of quotables, One Quarter of the Slaughter reflects on battling weight issues and the non-music side of his profession as a musician: “Shaking the hand that’s feeding you, but you hate it/ Disappointed in meetings cause of your weight/ Just imagine this man with your career in his hands/ Giving a f–k about your fans/ He just looking at that black and white/ Seeing you ain’t sell too well/ You trying to tell him that you was on an indie that wasn’t acting right.”

Things have turned though. “Feels like I finally found my house slippers,” he raps to both open and close the track, suggesting a level of comfort with where he’s at — something visually reflected in his lounging at home throughout the ...

At the end of the song “War,” released in January, Common explains the concept behind his upcoming 10th solo album, Nobody’s Smiling.

“Nobody’s Smiling was really a thought that came about because of all the violence that was going on in Chicago,” he said. “It happens in Chicago, but it’s happening around the world in many ways. It may not be to the numbers that’s happening in Chicago, but it’s happening in the inner-cities all over America. It’s really a call to action.”

That call to action continued on Wednesday, when Com released the video for his latest single, “Kingdom.”

The song features Vince Staples, but neither he nor the veteran MC appear in the nearly eight-minute Hype Williams-directed clip. Instead, we follow a young man — whose face is blurred throughout — on his trail from desperation to crime to spoils to arrest.

It plays out like a cautionary tale, which it seems like will be the case for much of Com’s upcoming album, due out on Def Jam on July 22.

Adam Fleischer

I'm serious about these snacks. Catch me @adamfleischer

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There have been a lot of fun things that have come with looking back at J. Cole’s early career, ahead of “RapFix Presents: J. Cole’s The Warm Up – 5 Years Later,” airing later tonight on MTV Jams. Of course, there’s that hilarious clip of Cole (in his “Produce For Jay Z or Die Tryin’” shirt) at Aaron Reid’s party on an episode of “My Super Sweet 16,” and the equally hilarious footage of him talking trash to Hov shortly after signing his deal.

But we haven’t forgotten why we’re here: to celebrate the fifth anniversary of The Warm Up. For many, that mixtape was an introduction to J. Cole. The 22-track project provided a picture of both Jermaine Cole — a recent college graduate struggling to pay loans, raised in North Carolina but living in New York City — and J. Cole — a hungry rapper eager to prove himself.

Cole’s honesty, world view and sharp wit are just some of the elements that made The Warm Up such a standout. Here are nine of our favorite lines on its fifth anniversary.

“Sometimes play the villain, sometimes play the hero/ Sometimes I be Dilla, sometimes I be Preemo/ Sometimes I be feeling, I got a big ego/ Other times a n—a swim around like Nemo” — “Knock Knock”
If Cole’s music is nothing else, it’s a tale of a man with many sides. This line artfully paints that reality.

“Half black other half white like Kid Rock/ Try to tell it to a cizz-op/ ...