Nate Haduch

Atlanta rap star Takeoff, one third of the Migos, has been shot and killed. TMZ reports that Takeoff was shot at a Houston bowling alley called Billiards & Bowling around 2:30AM today. The shooting reportedly happened during a dice game, when a fight broke out and someone opened fire. Two people were hospitalized, and Takeoff was pronounced dead on the scene. Quavo, who was also there, was unhurt. Takeoff was 28. This is a developing story.

It’s Paramore season again. The Nashville greats will release their new album This Is Why early next year. They’re headlining emo festivals. They’re opening some of Taylor Swift’s stadium shows next year. And now Paramore are announcing their own arena tour and going on TV, reminding the world of why they’re such a big deal in the first place.

Slowcore, like all genres, is nominally ambiguous until you hear it: the glacial pace, the minimalist arrangements, the soft dynamics. Once you combine those elements, something clicks into place. Although they appear in all kinds of music, their union is most prominent in the ever-nebulous slowcore. Low, the Duluth, Minnesota duo consisting of married couple guitarist-vocalist Alan Sparhawk and drummer-vocalist Mimi Parker, are one of the progenitors of the subgenre. In some ways, they define it just as much Nirvana define grunge, My Bloody Valentine define shoegaze, or Rites Of Spring define post-hardcore. Still, Low were always unapologetically Low; they had their own mode of musical expression that no one else could truly emulate.

Rina Sawayama and Billie Eilish don’t necessarily have a ton in common with one another, but they’re both young pop stars who delight in smashing genres together and occasionally indulging in rock ‘n’ roll bombast. Sawayama just came out with her new LP Hold The Girl, and her promotional tour recently brought her to the BBC Live Lounge. Per Live Lounge tradition, Sawayama did a live-in-studio version of one of her own songs, and she also covered somebody else. In this case, that somebody else was Billie Eilish.

In 2016, Adidas announced an “unprecedented new alliance” with Kanye West and his Yeezy brand. At the time, West was already making all kinds of erratic decisions, but his shoes were still selling for crazy amounts of money. For six years, West and Adidas both made a whole lot of money from that partnership, even as West’s public spiral continued. This morning, after weeks of West using every public platform available to him to tell damaging lies and make anti-Semitic statements, Adidas has finally ended that partnership.

Once just three Johns Hopkins students with plans to go into medicine or engineering, Pinkshift are now an essential act in modern pop-punk, and they represent a more progressive vision for the genre in several ways. Vocalist Ashrita Kumar, guitarist Paul Vallejo, and drummer Myron Houngbedji rose to fame over the course of the pandemic, most notably with the track “i’m gonna tell my therapist on you.” The fact that the band is entirely composed of people of color added some much-needed representation to a pop-punk scene that’s historically been predominantly white and male, at a time where audiences were seeking to diversify who they listen to. The 2021 EP Saccharine solidified their stake in the genre.

The second new LP of October released just four days after Ice Death also builds off of recent King Gizzard activity. Laminated Denim is a sequel to (and an anagram of) Made In Timeland. Timeland was initially designed as intermission music for marathon King Gizzard shows. They decided in advance that each of the project’s two songs would be 15 minutes long and set to a 60 bpm metronomic pulse that mimicked a ticking clock, and then they wrote within those constraints. The result was a pair of zonked, shapeshifting instrumentals that included several forays into EDM and felt more like the work of an experimental producer than a festival-slaying rock band. It was not your average King Gizzard record, if “your average King Gizzard record” is even…

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…something that exists.
Laminated Denim is King Gizzard’s attempt at a more collaborative iteration of the Timeland concept, a pair of motorik jams that feel more like cousins to the Ice Death sessions than an outgrowth of Timeland. This time the tempo is ramped up to 120 bpm, giving both songs a speeding-down-the-Autobahn urgency while still snapping into the ticking-clock framework. Mackenzie says the two tracks, “The Land Before Timeland” and “Hypertension,” are among his favorite King Gizzard songs ever. “Sometimes the boundaries you set for yourself kind of force you into a creative place that you wouldn’t have usually gone to or been comfortable with,” he adds.

In their first decade of existence, Melbourne ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have already produced enough music to last several lifetimes. And it seems like any obstacle that gets thrown their way — lineup changes, a global pandemic, Crohn’s disease — only strengthens their resolve to be the most prolific rock band on the planet. Let’s put it this way: In April, King Gizzard released a mammoth 16-track, 80-minute double album, and that already feels like an afterthought compared to an October that brings three new records released within three weeks of one another. At this point, King Gizzard have essentially become the musical equivalent of a Hello Fresh box showing up on your doorstep every Friday.

A woman recently took to the streets of NYC and walked around for 10 hours. She walked behind someone wearing a hidden camera that captured all of the catcalls and harassment directed toward her during that time…108 incidents in all. This is what it’s like being a woman in public:

At The Awl, John Herrman notes the parallels between a woman on the streets of NYC and a woman spending time on the internet.

But the video works in two ways: It’s also a neat portrayal of what it is like to be a woman talking about gender on the mainstream internet. This became apparent within minutes of publication, at which point the video’s comment section was flooded with furious responses.

A typical post in the YouTube comments thread:

are you fucking kidding me “verbal harassment”? most of all the guys called that woman “beautiful” or said to “have a good day”….it would be harassment if the guys called that woman a “hoe” or “bitch”…you are a fucktard.

On Tumblr, Alex Alvarez neatly dispenses with that sort of “logic”:

To anchor this more concretely, consider the behavior of the men in the video. Take a look at how they seek the woman out to wish her a good morning, despite her not having made eye contact or shown any interest in talking to them. Take a look at how they’re not wishing a good morning to any other person, particularly male people, also walking around. The woman is walking directly behind the man filming her (the camera is hidden in his backpack), and not one of the men shown in the video are seen to be greeting him and wishing him a good day. Just her.

Why is this?

It’s because they don’t care, really whether she has a good day or not. What they care about is letting her know that they have noticed her — her hair, her face, her body, her outfit. They want her to notice that they’ve noticed, and they want her to notice them, however fleetingly.

Tags:Alex Alvarez    gender    John Herrman    NYC    video   

“So fill your lungs with emotion/ You’re just a kid and you’re broken/ Screaming that everything’s unfair.”

Yesterday, the Internet became consumed with rumors that Taylor Swift would play the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show on February 12 after three sources confirmed to Variety that this was, in fact, going to happen. Well, now TMZ has debunked that rumor, reporting that while Swift was asked to perform, she turned the offer down because she didn’t want to perform until she’d finished rerecording all of her first six albums.

Revered free jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders has died. The news was confirmed in a social-media post by Sanders’ record label Luaka Bop, who wrote: “We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away. He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.” Sanders was 81.

Back in March, the electronic producer Sam Shepherd, who releases music as Floating Points, put out a new track called “Vocoder,” which he followed up a couple weeks later with “Grammar.” Now, a few months down the line, he’s back with another new song, “Problems,” which comes with a music video directed by Hamill Industries.

Ghost frontman Papa Emeritus IV threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the White Sox vs. Cleveland Guardians game today. The face-painted frontman is currently touring the US with the Nameless Ghouls in support of this year’s IMPERA, but fortunately found time to stop by Guaranteed Rate Field wearing a full White Sox uniform.

The Beths do not have a gimmick — not even the ever-reliable “our band has no gimmick.” They’re not part of a trendy subgenre or revival; although decades’ worth of poppy guitar music echo through the Auckland quartet’s albums — recalling a constellation of acts you might call power-pop, indie-pop, pop-punk, indie rock, alt-rock, or just plain old pop-rock — they aren’t channeling one particular scene or era. It’s not that the Beths put no thought into how they present their music or that they’re actively avoiding categorization; impeccably nuanced arrangements and savvy bits of punctuation at the seams of their songs suggest they think deeply about their own craft and have studied at the feet of the masters. It’s just that there’s no real elevator pitch beyond this band writes great songs.

Police recovered a handgun early Thursday at Donnelly Field, a location that’s behind schools and a youth center and near the scene of the unsolved murder of a teen.

Multiple people have accused Arcade Fire’s Win Butler of sexual misconduct. In a lengthy report published by Pitchfork, three women have come forward accusing Butler of having inappropriate sexual relationships with them; they were all between 18 and 23 at the start of those interactions, which reportedly took place during overlapping periods from 2016 to 2020 when the singer was between 36 and 39.

Brandy will star in a new horror film from A24 called The Front Room, which will be directed and written by Max and Sam Eggers — the brothers of Robert Eggers of The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The Witch fame. As Variety reports, the movie “follows a young, newly pregnant couple forced to take in an ailing stepmother who has long been estranged from the family.” It’s based on a short story by Susan Hill. Also in the cast are Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap, and Neal Huff.

The stoner metal gods Sleep are bringing their swan song Dopesmoker to streaming platforms this Friday, and they’re releasing two new physical variants of the album in tandem with Third Man Records. One of those variants is your standard black vinyl situation and can be pre-ordered starting Friday. The other variant includes “pure, unadulterated, authentic cannabis leaves” from Doghouse Farms Premium Cannabis encapsulated in PVC. That’s right: They pressed weed into their album.

Live at Bonnaroo, Manchester, TN, USA, June 17rd 2022
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard returned to the festival for the second time to play a triumphant late-night set at That tent.
Stu MacKenzie led his band of maniacal Australian musicians through a vigorous jam of music mash-ups that borrowed from nearly every rock sub-genre. From the classic rock of Jethro Tull to punk rock icons The Clash, the band mixes the classic sounds into their own brew of complex rocking jam music. Songs like “The Dripping Tap” from the group’s latest Omnium Gatherum had the tent full of enthusiastic fans in a dance frenzy.
Recorded by: Sam Joseph, Nico Wilson and Gaspard Demulemeester. Mixed by Stu Mackenzie

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Indie crime drama “Emily the Criminal” clicks because of Aubrey Plaza. Not enough can be said about her subtlety, or how much she does with a sneer or a shift of her large, luminous eyes.

Last month, Alvvays finally announced a new album, Blue Rev, their follow-up to 2017’s Antisocialites. Its lead single, “Pharmacist,” topped our best songs of the week list. Today, they’re back with another new song, the fuzzy and satisfyingly blown-out “Easy On Your Own?” On it, Molly Rankin sings about feeling disaffected and worrying about the future. “I dropped out of college/ Education’s a dull knife/ If you don’t believe in the lettered life/ Then maybe this is our only try,” go its opening lines. And toward the end: “I waited so long for you/ Wasted some of the best years of my life/ And I wanted to see it through this time.” Listen below.

Peter Valentine, the artist and eccentric whose Cambridgeport home became a landmark for its bright colors and otherworldly wisdom, died Tuesday at his home, according to Michael Monestime of the Central Square Business Improvement District.

Few people know the real Beyoncé, for two reasons. One is that, much like other legendary pop stars of her ilk, she's a master of reinvention. The second is tha..

It’s that time again! At a couple of points every year, former United States President Barack Obama, or perhaps the social-media team employed by former United States President Barack Obama, likes to remind certain Americans of a time when they could pretend that the leader of the free world was a cool guy. To that end, Obama posts playlists of his favorite music, presenting the fantasy that this guy is out here listening to Turnstile or Brent Faiyaz or Moneybagg Yo or whatever. And now he’s done it again!

Carly Rae Jepsen has announced a new album called The Loneliest Time, which will be out on October 21. Its the follow-up the 2019’s Dedicated and its accompanying Side B, which arrived the following year. The album announcement was preceded by the very good lead single “Western Wind,” which was produced by Rostam Batmanglij. Other collaborators teased in the Loneliest Time press release include Tavish Crowe, Bullion, Captain Cuts, John Hill, Kyle Shearer, and Alex Hope.

Kelly Clarkson loves Radiohead. She’s made that clear. Every day, Clarkson opens her daytime talk show The Kelly Clarkson Show by singing a cover. In the past, she’s already taken on entry-level Radiohead classics like “Creep” and “Karma Police.” With those done, Clarkson is now getting into the deep cuts. Today, Clarkson and her band took “Exit Music (For A Film),” and it ruled.