"Sometimes I think I'm bigger than the sound," Karen O sings on the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs tune "Cheated Hearts," just one of the shockingly great cuts on the YYYs' long-awaited follow-up to Fever to Tell, due in March. (We have a hunch it may be called Like a Warrior, not Coco Beware, which was an Internet hoax.) The Smoking Section got a sneak listen to all eleven tunes, including "Turn Into" -- on which Karen O channels Siouxsie Sioux and Nick Zinner layers his multiple guitar parts with preternatural precision -- as well as "Dudley," "Honeybear" and "Phenomenon," which you should add to your "when I drop acid" playlist as soon as possible. Drummer Brian Chase reports that the band wrote the songs in L.A. during the first half of 2005, but "it wasn't until we got into the studio in Brooklyn that the songs took shape." He adds, "Now that [the songs] are finished, we still don't know what they sound like -- it's been said that music makes audible what gradually becomes visible."

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When Busta Rhymes re-emerges to drop The Big Bang in March, he'll be without his wild dreads, which he totally chopped off after fifteen years. When we ran into him over the holidays, we had to ask, "What the fuck?" "Once I signed my deal in '89," Busta says, "when I got the opportunity to finally generate some revenue, I was like, 'I'm not gonna cut my hair, I'm not gonna comb my shit, I can do what I want.' But one day I was sitting at home watching CSI, and it showed that whatever you were doing at the time they can find out through DNA and hair follicles and all types of shit." After a new record deal with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records and a hard-fought court victory to gain custody of his sons, Busta was looking for a fresh start: "In case one of those CSI motherfuckers wants to test my hair, let me at least grow my hair back with all this new good shit that's happening." Who'd he give his locks to? "My mom."

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OK. 2005 sucked ass, huh? Not for us. In 2005, the Smoking Section caught Neil Young's historic gigs at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, polished off a bottle of Crown Royal with Dave Grohl on a private jet, sang drunken karaoke with Coldplay in Tokyo, saw Bob Dylan eight times, was mistaken for a male porn star by Perry Farrell, drank Scotch at Roger Waters' ridiculous Manhattan apartment, sat poolside at the L.A. Four Seasons with Al Green, surfed with Jack Johnson and late on the night of June 25 ultimately overwhelmed Lars Ulrich in a marathon pingpong match at his Bay Area mansion. But of all our thrills, nothing compared to time spent with two bands: the Strokes, with whom we played poker in the wee hours (and listened to the earliest versions of First Impressions of Earth), and Kings of Leon, with whom we capped a year of mind-bending debauchery by slamming icy shots of Patron to ring in '06. To all, love from the SS.