Month: April 2021

After a lengthy fan campaign and a touch of self-promotion, LeVar Burton was officially announced as a guest host for Jeopardy! and will finally get a chance to show his stuff at the podium left vacant by the late Alex Trebek. In recent weeks, there’s been a noticeably heightened push for producers to make the beloved television star the permanent host of Jeopardy! as fans continue to cite Burton’s exemplary work in promoting learning and education with his iconic work in Roots, Reading Rainbow, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, a big name is throwing his support behind Burton: Ryan Reynolds.

Following the announcement of Burton’s upcoming guest stint on Jeopardy!, the Deadpool star tweeted, “This needs to be a permanent gig.”

In the meantime, Burton is obviously ecstatic to get a shot at Jeopardy! and he made it a point to thank everyone who signed the fan petition for making it happen. “THANK YOU… to all y’all for your passionate support! I am overjoyed, excited, and eager to be guest-hosting Jeopardy!, and will do my utmost best to live up to your faith you in me,” Burton tweeted. “YOU MADE A DIFFERENCE! Go ahead and take my word for it, this time.”

As evidenced by the fan campaign, Burton has a lot of love in his corner, and that love continued on Wednesday as Star Trek alums, new and old, along with fellow celebs came out of the woodwork to cheer on Burton’s shot as the next host of Jeopardy!.

CJ’s new video “Hit Up” opens with something we’ve rarely seen in a rap video: A disclaimer pronouncing that all the illegal substances depicted are just props used for atmosphere. I’m not completely sure where I stand on rappers breaking kayfabe like this, but it sure got my attention. From there, CJ delivers the usual trappings of the many, many videos he’s dropped so far: The enormous crew shot, plenty of red bandanas, and a lot of fancy footwork as he raps over a spare but explosive drill beat.

It’ll certainly be familiar to anyone who’s seen CJ’s “Whoopty” video — or his explanation of it for Uproxx’s Behind The Video. It seems he’s fond of using his budget as efficiently as possible, so there are few bells or whistles — even his rider consists mainly of water bottles — but the shoot is dynamic enough to get his point across. For reference, check out the videos for his other Loyalty Over Royalty cuts, “Bop,” “Real One,” and “Set.”

Of course, he’s also shown a willingness to switch things up, as he did in his video for deluxe edition track “Lil Freak” with DreamDoll.

Watch CJ’s “Hit Up” video above.

CJ is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It’s obvious that Young Thug is the star of YSL Records’ new compilation Slime Language 2. Throughout the album’s 23 songs, Young Thug — and a squadron of high-profile guest stars — does the majority of the heavy lifting with his charisma and quick twists of wit.

That doesn’t mean that his artists get overshadowed by the star power present. Rather, the star power is Young Thug’s way of casting some halo effect on his expanded roster (four new rappers have joined since the group’s last Slime Language compilation in 2018).

A handful of them do rise to the occasion; YSL veteran Gunna, Lil Keed, and new addition Unfoonk (Thug’s own brother) acquit themselves admirably on the tracks where they’re left to their own devices.

On “Came Out,” Keed does his best to out-Thug Thug, bending and stretching his voice as much as he can, clearly inspired by his label boss’s own vocal contortions. Alongside Thug on “Real,” Unfoonk turns his sandpaper singing voice into a heart-tugging ballad.

And Gunna makes the most of his established chemistry with mega-star Drake on “Solid” and Young Thug on “Ski,” the album’s two most obvious standouts. “Ski” revisits the loopy energy of “Surf” from Thug’s 2019 album So Much Fun, while “Solid” is a murky excursion in the vein of Drake’s own cameo on Future’s 2020 hit “Life Is Good.”

Elsewhere, Slime Language 2 highlights Thug’s transparently generous efforts to put his people on as much as it does his skills as a talent scout. Sorry if that reads kind of negative, but the loyalty is on full display on lackadaisical cuts like “Slatty,” where Yak Gotti and Lil Duke — two of Thug’s longest-tenured signings — turn in forgettable verses to start the project.

The Lil Uzi Vert-featuring “Proud Of You,” another clear standout, also wears out its welcome by the time Young Kayo’s verse comes in, and Kayo does very little to save it. On “I Like” with Coi Leray, Karlae — Thug’s longtime girlfriend — swings between lightweight crooning and upbeat rapping but gets washed out by her guest star and undermined by generic rhymes (at one point, she quotes Muhammad Ali out of context, making me wince at the Citizen Kane of it all).

T-Shyne shows off multiple flows on “Warrior,” as well as some Young Thug-ish ad-libs, impressing by virtue of his flow’s polish, if not his bars (guest rapper Big Sean steals the show). Strick’s laid-back verse alongside Kid Cudi on “Moon Man” is a slow-burner, with a creeping, “grows on you” quality. These are two of the label’s vets, so it makes sense they have the most technical skill and experience, if not very much to say.

HiDoraah and Dolly White, Thug’s sisters, put forth dry efforts on their respective solo tracks, underscoring the gift and the curse of the YSL co-sign. Thug seems to be a great person, creating opportunities for his friends and families by leveraging his status as one of hip-hop’s biggest draws after years of uncertain footing and controversial reception.

It means a lot that he’d put his reputation — something he fought for and earned over the course of a decade of old-head snipes about his clothes, flow, and rumored sexuality — on the line for his folks. But we’ve likely heard the best from the label in projects like Wunna and Trapped On Cleveland 3 — there’s a reason Keed and Gunna have received the most commercial success to date.

By calling in so many famous friends for support, Thug does put his artists in a position to receive a lot of attention, but perhaps they’d have been better off keeping things more self-contained, giving YSL’s roster more space to showcase their standalone work. The contrast the guests unintentionally create between truly creative, self-sufficient artists and the still-developing talents of Thug’s musical mafia casts the latter in a less favorable light than they should want at the moment.

But there are bright spots and there’s always room for improvement, even among the less original members of the collective. And at least they can be assured they’ve got the support of their head honcho, which is a lot more than many, many rappers signed to other rappers can say — a blessing that may pan out as they work to forge their own paths beyond Young Thug’s footprints in the sand.

Slime Language 2 is out now Young Stoner Life Records / 300 Entertainment. Get it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Over the course of the pandemic, Jeffrey Dean Morgan received the surprising news that neither he nor anyone else involved with The Walking Dead necessarily expected: AMC would be ending the series after 11 seasons. There’s still a possibility that Morgan’s character will get his own spin-off so that the actor can continue in The Walking Dead universe, but just in case the forthcoming season is his last, Morgan has not been shy about getting his family involved.

In fact, even before The Walking Dead cast Morgan’s wife, Hilarie Burton, in the Negan-centered 10th season finale, “Here’s Negan,” Morgan and Burton had already cozied up to AMC by starring in their own chat show, Friday Night with the Morgans, if only to keep AMC fans entertained during the production shutdown.

Now Morgan is bringing another family member into the fold. This time, it’s Morgan’s son, Gus, who will make his acting debut on The Walking Dead. Gus is only 11 years old, but Morgan was very happy to show off his son as a zombie in a Season 11 episode of the series.

“My kid. Just a peek,” Morgan posted on Instagram. “As a dad, I have to say, I’d be hard pressed to remember a time I’ve been more proud of this dude. Can’t wait for y’all to see him in action.”

Gus’s mom, Hilarie Burton, also commented on the post. “I love my apocalyptic dudes,” she wrote.

Shooting on the final season is expected to last a full year. A couple of weeks ago, Morgan said that they were only on the third episode, so expect Gus Morgan to appear fairly early on in the final season, which kicks off with eight episodes on August 22nd.

Ahead of hosting the Independent Spirit Awards, SNL cast member Melissa Villaseñor virtually dropped by Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss her array of impressions. (Here she is doing Lady Gaga and John Mulaney.) “Are there any impressions you’ve done this year that you particularly enjoy doing?” host Seth Meyers asked her. Villaseñor singled out her Dolly Parton, an impression that was “growing in my soul because I found her audio book, Dream More, when I was quarantining alone and listened to her music a lot. It took a while to get it,” but by last December, “I was ready to talk as Dolly.”

Later in the interview, Meyers asked to hear Villaseñor’s impressions of Natalie Portman (“Thank you so much. No one’s ever impersonated me before. I always thought that I had nothing special. I thought I was kind of boring,” she said in her best Natalie voice) and Kristen Wiig. Her Wiig is so good that Meyers responded with a “woah! woah!” and had trouble composing himself. She even nailed the awkward little laugh that Wiig does. Villaseñor actually auditioned for SNL “with a silly bit about Kristen Wiig about to go sky diving and she’s just in the plane like…” You know what? You should just watch the clip above (beginning 6:30 in). You have to hear the voice to get the full effect.

The 36th Independent Spirit Awards air tonight at 10 p.m. ET on IFC and AMC+.

This week, after nearly 24 years since the last film, Mortal Kombat returns as a movie franchise, all rebooted and having nothing to do with the last movie except, I guess, all the characters and all of their specific attributes. I have seen the new film, but as I’m writing this, the embargo on that hasn’t lifted yet. So, in the meantime, I decided to go back and watch the 1995 film directed by Paul WS Anderson, which means, yes, I saw the new film before I saw the original. At this point I don’t think it will be giving too much away to say I liked the new film better than the original, but going back and watching the original film is like taking a swig of “pure ‘90s xtreme” juice. It might just be the most ‘90s thing I’ve ever seen. Honestly the whole time I was watching it I kept thinking of Tim Robinson’s “Z-Shirt” SNL sketch. In retrospect the 1995 Mortal Kombat is kind of hilarious as a parody of itself.

If you have no idea what “Z-Shirt” is, it’s a 2013 SNL sketch starring Tim Robinson and Kevin Hart, filmed in that quintessential ‘90s xtreme style with a lot of neon colors and a lot of screaming into the camera in an xtreme way. Tim Robinson is hyping his new Z-Shirt as Kevin Hart starts at the top of the alphabet and asks him if it’s every other letter of shirt, eventually leading to Robinson becoming increasingly annoyed and just giving up. There might be no better parody of that aspect of ‘90s culture, even though no one really acted like that in real life unless they were trying to sell you some sort of soft drink.

Anyway, the entire running time of the 1995 Mortal Kombat is like this. It is not a particularly good movie, but, in retrospect, it did kind of make me wish I had enjoyed the ‘90s more. This style always annoyed me back then, but now knowing that (a) it was pretty harmless and (b) that it wouldn’t last, I do wish I had embraced it more for all its goofiness. This movie literally ends with our heroes being confronted by a new villain and Christopher Lambert’s Lord Raiden exclaiming, xtremely, “I don’t think so!” Most of the characters in this movie are just there to say catchphrases and to scream into the camera as if they have a Z-Shirt to sell, at least they do right before they snap an opponents neck, or whatever.

And here’s the really weird thing about doing a new Mortal Kombat movie – and I was trying to think of specific examples of this – but is there another reboot where the instructions are basically, “Okay, here is your group of characters and they all have very specific looks and attributes. Now make a movie with these characters, which has already been done, so I guess just introduce them in a different order and a different way”? Even with superheroes like Spider-Man or Batman, when their movies are rebooted at least different villains are used. This just seems like a static group of characters that really can’t be changed all that much. Most reboots feature one main character or team, and the people around him or her or that team are different. There just seems something uniquely difficult about rebooting a property like Mortal Kombat where the characters are famous as a group, but not really individually.

It’s notable that the 1995 Mortal Kombat was only Paul WS Anderson’s second movie and his first with any kind of a budget. And that Mortal Kombat would launch a career where Anderson would go on to make many, many movies that make a lot of money but critics don’t seem to like very much. (Though, it’s hard not to appreciate what Anderson has done as a whole with his career, because the movies he’s made are very much his movies, even though there are very few of them I can sit down and watch and actually enjoy, no matter how many people try to convince me otherwise.) But there is something uniquely innocent about his Mortal Kombat. When Anderson talks about Mortal Kombat now, he seems to have fairly positive memories of the whole thing. And between Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter (which came out eight months before), their successes at the box office launched the next 25 years of movies based on video games, for better or for worse.

But, today, the 1995 Mortal Kombat doesn’t really resemble what video game movies would eventually become. Again, it’s more a time capsule of the 1990s than it is about video games. It really feels like every character in Mortal Kombat should at least be drinking a Mountain Dew. Or should be talking about Dan Cortese. Or, at the very least, should be selling us a Z-Shirt. So, if you ever need a break from reality and must revisit the mid-1990s, just for a couple of hours, just know that Paul WS Anderson’s Mortal Kombat is always waiting for you. Just first open an xtreme Mountain Dew.

‘Mortal Kombat’ releases in theaters and MBO Max this weekend. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Featuring appearances from Q-Tip and Young Thug, Cordae’s new four-song EP Just Until… gives fans a light listen as they await his full-length follow-up to 2019’s The Lost Boy. After teasing the project on social media Tuesday, he delivered as promised at midnight this morning, delivering the tape to the overjoyed reactions of fans on Twitter.

Within minutes, Cordae’s name was among the various trending topics as fans discussed the new project, with most of the attention lavished onto “Wassup,” the project’s collaboration with Young Thug. Over a rumbling beat produced by 18YOMAN, LEN 20, and Take a Daytrip, the two rappers employ a back-and-forth delivery which had fans comparing them to iconic duos like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.

Meanwhile, Cordae’s relationship with Naomi Osaka also takes center stage at multiple points throughout the project, as he references her tennis star status and even suggests she dropped out of a tournament to meet his grandmother.

On Tuesday, Cordae mentioned that the album — which he’s been working on since 2020, according to his interview with Lil Wayne last year — is nearly finished. Whether it’ll contain more material like these “throwaways” or his Roddy Ricch-featuring single “Gifted” remains to be seen. Listen to Just Until… below.

Cordae is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did issue a poorly-worded reaction to Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin’s all-counts conviction for George Floyd’s killing. There’s no disputing that one, but on the other end of the spectrum, Fox and Friends is going on a multi-day streak of things that should not be said about the subject of curbing police brutality. On Thursday morning, the Fox News morning show took on the recent fatal police shootings of Daunte Wright (in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota) and Ma’Khia Bryant (in Columbus, Ohio) in a segment about “The Future Of Policing.”

This was quite a segment, which included co-host Ainsley Earhardt reading off a list of protest-related instances including at Ohio State university, where “the students are gathering… to demand that the school cut ties with Columbus police.” She also (of course) sprinkled in some talk of vandalism before getting to people shouting at police. “In Minnesota, protesters were yelling at police ‘get the blank out,’” Earhardt declared. “And in New York at that local restaurant, ‘we don’t want you here.’”

Kilmeade’s solution: “Do you know what? You should be barred from… anyone who says that, you are no longer allowed to use 911” He then added, “Let’s just hope, in your life, you never need a police officer.”

Steve Doocy has been notably absent from the show for several days, and he’s actually been a moderating force against tantrum-throwing Kilmeade these days. However, co-host Pete Hegseth didn’t do the same, and in fact, he’s all in with Kilmeade’s perspective. “All that’s gonna mean is less cops and more crime. The equation is quite, quite simple. Maybe that’s what they want.”

Fleetwood Mac had themselves a moment last year, as the group enjoyed a revival in popularity thanks to a viral TikTok video. The band hasn’t toured since 2019, but once they’re able to perform again, Mick Fleetwood would love to reunite with Lindsay Buckingham, who was fired from the group in 2018.

In an interview with The Times, Fleetwood said:

“Strange things can happen. I look at Fleetwood Mac as a huge family. Everyone plays an important role in our history, even someone like [early ’70s] guitarist Bob Welch, who was huge and sometimes gets forgotten. [Lindsey Buckingham’s] position in Fleetwood Mac will, for obvious reasons, never been forgotten, as it should never be forgotten. My vision of things happening in the future is really far-reaching. Would I love to think that [reunion] could happen? Yeah. I’d love to think that all of us could be healed, and also respect the people who are in the band, Neil Finn and Michael Campbell.”

He also noted that when the band does decide to call it quits for good, he’d like for them to do it in a “classy” way: “We’ve all been shocked that life can change so very quickly, but you’re talking to the dude who never gives up. We are still a band. We have not broken up. And here we are. I hope we can do something with dignity, that will make sense for all of us, and the will to go forward is there. In the story of Fleetwood Mac, the last tour was not meant to be the last tour. If that became clear — and it could — I would hope to find a classy way to say goodbye. Because one thing we’ve all learnt with Fleetwood Mac is that there are no absolutes at all.”

Find the full interview here.

For the past 15 years, Manchester Orchestra has been one of the most popular emo bands on the planet. The one person who has been there every step of the way is founding singer-songwriter Andy Hull, who started the band when he was in his teens and has charted his own growing-up process with each album.

Manchester Orchestra has also matured a lot over the years, evolving from an intense and volatile post-hardcore outfit on albums like 2009’s Mean Everything To Nothing to the expansive and philosophical indie rock of their latest, The Million Masks Of God, which drops next week. Along the way, they’ve managed to somehow grow their audience while retaining committed fans who connected with the early records as teenagers, including famous acolytes like Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker.

“Even though everything did well at that time, it wasn’t really accepted by critics and ‘cool’ people,” Hull recently mused about his back catalogue, “and that totally worked in our favor, because it still holds up. It sounds, to me, pretty timeless.”

That doesn’t mean those albums were easy to make. Ahead of the release of The Million Masks Of God, a song cycle inspired by the death of guitarist Robert McDowell’s father, Hull reflected on every Manchester Orchestra LP, candidly breaking down the myriad fascinating dramas that marked the process of making each record.

I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child (2006)

Obviously the first thing I remember about that record is how young I was. My voice, when I listen back to that record, I can just hear the youth. My voice actually hadn’t fully changed yet. I just sound really youthful, and I remember it being very difficult. I cared a whole lot about it.

Robert didn’t play on that record. He was an intern at the studio, and joined the band. Basically, we had a guitar player quit, and say that he wanted to join another band while we were making that record. And he’s like, “I’ll finish out the thing, then I can’t play any more shows with you guys.” I had been friends with Robert for a couple years, making music with him in his basement. But he was 16, and I was 19, which is pretty wild to look back on. I was still trying to figure out fucking everything, really. It was the first time we’d ever recorded live. That was pretty foreign to me.

But we didn’t have a label, so there wasn’t pressure. The pressure was all self-imposed. The eight full-band songs on that record were the eight full-band songs the four of us knew how to play. There were no other options. It’s these eight rock songs, and then these three delicate pieces — “I Can Feel Your Pain,” “Sleeper 1972,” and “Don’t Let Them See You Cry.” The acoustic songs on that record were recorded in this enormous freezer that the studio had as an iso booth. So, I would go in there and track 10 or 15 of these solo songs that I had floating around, and we picked those and went from there.

I remember being really surprised that people liked it immediately, and it started to spread in a really organic way. I didn’t really see it happening. I still really like those songs. And I like playing those songs — I’m not embarrassed, lyrically, about those songs, which is helpful. I was still searching around the same parking lots I’m searching around now. I think I just have more matured equipment philosophically. But I like what I was writing about.

Mean Everything To Nothing (2009)

I had gotten married, and then I immediately started writing this record and recording it. My wife and I — I was 21, and she was 22 — had zero idea of what we were doing in our lives. We hadn’t lived together before. There was a tension there that was always kind of brewing. I think that mixed with a crisis of faith and just freaking out. It’s pretty obvious when you listen to that record. Immediately, I let you know what I’m going through at that time. I was just obsessed with stuff like Pinkerton, and this idea of, “How do you make records that are super, super raw, but sound really great and big?”

I had no idea what music production was. By the time that first record came out, and then we just beat it into the ground touring, over and over and over, I started to understand what I was capable of doing, and wanted to spread my wings on the production side of it. I definitely felt like I had something to prove with Mean Everything To Nothing, since the first one had been so unexpectedly well-received. There’s always the fear of the sophomore slump. It’s like, “How do we just destroy that altogether?” Create something that just, in my opinion, blew the first one out of the water.

By the time it came for us to pick a producer, we landed on Joe Chiccarelli, who was on an incredible streak at that time. He’d just worked on the third Shins record, Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket, that second Raconteurs record, and Icky Thump by the White Stripes. So, we were like, “Oh, shit, this guy wants to work with us? Let’s do it!” We didn’t know that we were then entering Joe’s world, which was 25 takes of every single song. Zero room in the initial recording for experimentation. It was all about getting the live thing to where he wouldn’t even need to add anything else. The whole time, I’m thinking, “Man, there’s so much more to this record that we’re not getting here.”

I was pretty dumb as well at the time. When we went down to Atlanta to finish it, Joe left, and I just wouldn’t get back to anybody. Wouldn’t talk to the label, just kept working on this record. Joe would leave these voicemails like, “Where are you?” I wouldn’t call him back, which is terrible. But, I just knew that I had to “save it,” in my mind. So, we brought in Dan Hannon from the last record, and he then let me go crazy. Added all the stuff that I want to add.

Joe did end up coming back. Joe and the band would work from 10:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and then I would work from 11:00 p.m. to the next morning. I brought in an engineer, and put in background vocals, new lead vocals, and added instrumentation. The engineers that I was bringing in were not respectful of ProTools at all, and so they’d come in the next morning and it was like a madman had been there for 10 hours, destroying the organization of all these files. They’d have to sift through all the shit that I’d done.

It ended up, though, being one of my favorite things we’ve done, because it feels like that time to me. It took me a long time to listen back to that record, and actually enjoy it. I remember waiting to do a lot of the vocals until I had gotten sick, so that I could have this really raspy scream, and that’s all over that record. I was smoking so many cigs, too, so it sounds like I’m 35 on that record, and I’m 21.

Simple Math (2011)

We were on a version of Columbia for Mean Everything called Canvasback. Two weeks later, the guy who runs Canvasback was let go from Columbia, and moved from Columbia over to Atlantic with Canvasback. Columbia said, “You can take every band with you except Manchester. They stay.”

So, we now have no real champion. We had a guy that we loved, Jay Harren. But he was an A&R guy, with not a ton of pull. We were sort of lost on an island out there. The good part of that was, they let us make the record that we wanted to make. There was nobody ever checking in on a single, for better or for worse. I felt I was really starting to come into my production brain, and so was Rob. That was the first record me and Rob really got our hands on together.

You can tell it’s pretty dramatic, and you notice how wide we wanted it to go. It was like, “Man, we can afford to have strings!” After Mean Everything, which felt like a pretty punishing record at times, this was a chance to get beautiful, and it was the first record where we stretched as far as we could possibly stretch to see what kind of genres and sounds we could dip our toes into.

England was really great to us. Australia was really great to us on that record, too. But the label was never behind it. The main two guys at that label, Rob Stringer, who ran the whole thing, and then Steve Barnett, who was the president of Columbia, were both really big supporters of our band. But they also were managing Beyonce records, so it wasn’t like they could put all their attention and focus on Simple Math.

I’ll never forget being in the office at Columbia, and playing them the record, and the radio team just having these blank stares on their faces. They had no idea what to do. I was like, “I have a pretty good idea: I think this song ‘Pensacola’ is really catchy.” And, they were like, “No, no, no, it can’t be that, there’s no real chorus to it. We should do ‘Simple Math’ and then also the next week release ‘April Fool,’ so that nobody knows what the single is.”

Cope and Hope (2013)

Cope and Hope ended up being the great palate-cleansers and, really, I think the end of phase one for the band, because they were made with no label. Nobody was telling us what to do. We built our own studio, and started just hacking away at these songs. It felt like the last opportunity to make a record that we always wanted to make, which was just really smart, straightforward, melodic rock songs, and not deviating from that path.

Cope is our “fuck you” record. We knew we wouldn’t get a lot of radio play because nothing was sounding like that on the radio. But we were hearing Thermals records that were super melodic, and really poppy, and engaging, but also really fuzzy. Cope is like that idea.

We got some backlash on Cope, because it didn’t sound as pretty or as clear as the other records. But it also burst through a little more in an interesting way. The shows started to get a little bigger. Even though it was a polarizing record for some people, it did seem to open another door for us.

First we did Cope, and then we did Hope at the same time. We were recording these two albums knowing Cope will come first, and then we were going to release this angelic sibling. Which was really cool, to be able to go back and re-record songs. We were just basically using every tool that we possibly had on those two records.

A Black Mile To The Surface (2017)

There wasn’t a clear idea of what the next step should be, and then that all changed when we made Swiss Army Man. We worked on that for 13 months, so it also gave us time to step away from Manchester and not really worry about it. That was the turning point. I think that when it came time to work on the next record, we had all these different tools in our toolbox, and just mentally could look at the records in a different way.

When we were making A Black Mile, it really felt like it was our first record again, in a cool way. The idea was like, “We’ve learned a ton from these four records we’ve just made, the biggest thing being that we don’t need to rush. Let’s do it right, and make sure every rock is turned, and we can be proud of the thing at the end of the day.” I do think our maturity level, and the way we were all communicating with each other, felt way healthier, even though it was really hard to make. Tthere weren’t arguments or fights during that record. It was more that we were in the trenches trying to be honest with each other when stuff wasn’t working, but not being an asshole about it.

Wilco is one of my favorite bands. I like every song of theirs, whether it’s a rock song or a folk song. I was like, “Why can’t I have that?” I was not going to worry about whether a song was rocking enough, or if it’s basically a folk song at its very core, because I love that kind of music.

I wasn’t the center of my universe anymore on that record, even thematically. The record’s about me, but that record’s also about my daughter, and my parents, and my grandparents, and my daughter’s daughter, and the impending doom of all of it. The fear of that. You know, you’re a dad, you can kind of go down those wormholes of like, “Oh no, I can’t stop time!”

The Million Masks Of God (2021)

It was the happiest that we’ve ever been making an album by far. It was also the saddest because of Robert’s dad’s passing, and the themes on the record and just how heavy all of it was. There was just a really healthy bond between the four guys in the band, and Catherine Marks, and Ethan Guska, who was a really incredible addition to the whole process.

When we were finishing the record at Sound City, where Ethan works a lot, it was us in the B room, and Bob Dylan in the A room finishing his record. I’ll just say this, the vibe was pretty tense. It was just Bob Dylan people everywhere. We were sharing the same common area, but it was like, “Okay, I’m not supposed to be in here.” Even though we were paying a day rate to be here, we shouldn’t be here.

A big part, sonically, going into it, was I knew that I wanted for us to experiment with drums and percussion a lot more, and bring an element that I love about Clinic records and Radiohead records. How do we do that without just sampling stuff over top of the drums? Because our drummer’s so great that I want him to have the tools to be able to actually organically write something.

We ended up building this crazy Frankenstein drum kit that had a bunch of triggers and sounds that we were picking out. We would then record the MIDI data from the drums when we were tracking them, and then assign the MIDI data to other instruments. There’s parts on this record where there’s a keyboard part, but that keyboard part was actually played by Tim on the toms, and we just assigned notes and sounds to it. We liked this weird science experiment process of it.

We knew we really wanted from the beginning for it to be all connected in a similar way as Black Mile, but more thought out, and allowing the songs to fold in on each other. And having repeated melodies and phrases that, at the end of the second song, is the same melody and lyrical nod to the fifth song. That happens all over the record. Throwing out the rule book that we had made for ourselves about even what a song can be. It’s been a really difficult record to pick a single and pick songs to play for people, because I do feel like it’s best served as a whole thing. The album’s the song.

The Million Masks Of God is out on April 30 via Loma Vista. Get it here.