Month: September 2021

Sacramento reality rapper Mozzy returns with a new album and the video for its first single. “Straight To The 4th,” which released today at midnight, finds Mozzy waxing nostalgic on his fallen friend Skeemo and giving his directives for what to do upon his own passing: “If I die before I wake, then take me straight to 4th,” he rhymes on the chorus. A helpful flyby shot of a 44th Street sign in Mozzy’s home neighborhood Oak Park elucidates his meaning.

Along with the video for “Straight To The 4th,” Mozzy announced the impending release of his next album, Untreated Trauma, which will be his second of 2021 and fifth project in the last two years. In 2019, he dropped Internal Affairs, while in 2020, he put out two projects, Beyond Bulletproof and Occupational Hazard. The former became his highest-charting project to date, peaking at No. 43 on the Billboard 200. Meanwhile, earlier in 2021, Mozzy teamed up with Compton rapper YG for the collaborative album Kommunity Service, which included the singles “Bompton to Oak Park,” “Perfect Timing” with Blxst, and “Vibe with You” featuring Ty Dolla Sign. Untreated Trauma, set for a September 17 release, will include appearances from Babyface Ray, Celly Ru, E. Mozzy, EST Gee, Kalan.FrFr, and YFN Lucci.

Watch Mozzy’s “Straight To The 4th” video above.

Untreated Trauma is due 9/17 via EMPIRE. You can pre-save it here.

The children of Queens Of The Stone Age leader Josh Homme are apparently looking to keep some distance from their father: According to a TMZ report, Homme’s sons, 10-year-old Orrin and 5-year-old Wolf, have filed for domestic violence restraining orders — through their mother, Brody Dalle — because he is “scary.” The children are seeking restraining orders that would mandate Homme to stay 100 yards away from them and the family dog at all times.

The report indicates the kids are scared Homme will hurt them, and that Homme allegedly yells at Dalle (his ex-wife) and drinks and drives with the children in the car. According to a court filing, Orrin alleges there was a recent incident in which Homme grabbed his private parts, and he accuses his father of “physical abuse, such as flicking his ears, hitting his head, poking his chest and throwing things at him — while calling him fat and allegedly making threats about murdering Brody’s boyfriend.”

Wolf also claims Homme calls his mother curse words, drinks and drives, and grabs the children by their necks and ears. He also says he’s scared when he goes to his father’s home.

Homme’s attorney, Susan Wiesner, tells TMZ, “Ms. Dalle has previously brought these claims to the police, DCFS, and the presiding judge of the family law court, all of whom have declined to take any action based upon these spurious claims.”

Typically, hearing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s name in the news is not a good thing—at least in America. If it’s not because he’s threatening to annihilate us with all the nuclear power he can muster, it’s because he’s torturing and murdering American students or sending Donald Trump sweet, possibly scented, love letters. Which makes the fact that he’s currently making headlines for his newly svelte appearance totally unexpected and kind of bizarre.

On Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel shared some footage of a visibly slimmed down—and tanned—Kim attending a parade in North Korea:

“Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, has been out of sight for quite some time. But he’s back and strutting his stuff at a midnight parade in Pyongyang last night.

Hell-ooo, handsome! He’s like a young Wayne Newton… Somebody had a hot girl summer or something. They think he lost about 44 pounds… new suit, new haircut, tan.

“Rumor is this transformation may have had to do with five new friends he made,” Kimmel continued, while showing a (just for the record: Photoshopped) picture of Kim with the Queer Eye guys.

While Kimmel admitted that Kim is “a monster,” he did seem genuinely happy for the dictator’s horse: “That poor thing was exhausted.”

You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 1:05 mark.

During production for Thor: Love and Thunder earlier in the year, Chris Hemsworth routinely blew up the internet with his ridiculously jacked arms. Those things were so pumped they looked like they were about to explode. At one point, his body double had justifiable concerns about being able to match the actor’s muscles. So with Love and Thunder wrapped, you’d assume Hemsworth would ease up a bit. Guess again.

According to the actor’s Instagram, he’s now heavily into training for Extraction 2, and somehow, he looks even more jacked than ever despite pivoting his workout towards speed and mobility to prepare for the sequel’s brutal fight scenes.

“Gearing up for @netflix Extraction sequel,” Hemsworth wrote in the caption. “Transitioning from heavy weight training to a lot more body weight functional movements concentrating on agility, strength and speed. Give this little work out a go and let the lungs scream for mercy!”

The actor also detailed his intense training routine, which apparently makes your triceps the size of a freaking Thanksgiving turkey:

3 minute boxing round (cardio)
50 squats (lower body)
40 sit thrus (mobility)
20 reps for each (core)exercise
25 push ups (upper body)
Rest 2 minutes 4 sets in total

But don’t take our word for it, you can see Hemsworth getting super jacked below:

(Via Chris Hemsworth on Instagram)

It’s been four years since the last Paul Thomas Anderson movie, his masterpiece Phantom Thread, but his new one is coming soon. And if you were lucky enough to be in Los Angeles or London this week, you might have seen the first trailer. According to the Film Stage, the first teasers for Licorice Pizza (I am not a hungry boy for licorice pizza), previously titled Soggy Bottom, played in select repertory cinemas.

Premiering in front of screenings of American Graffiti and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America at London’s Prince Charles Cinema, the 35mm trailer then screened last night at LA’s New Beverly between the double feature of Kiss Me Deadly and Repo Men, as well as at the American Cinematheque before a screening of Strangers on a Strain and at the Aereo before Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!.

A new PTA trailer debuting in front of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America? Chef’s kiss. “Licorice Pizza” was the name of a Southern California-based record store chain in the 1970s, when the film is set. (It’s also an Abbott and Costello reference: “Well, we could sprinkle cornstarch on the bottom and sell them as Licorice Pizzas.”)

Those in attendance did their best to describe the ~vibe~ of the teaser:

Licorice Pizza, which stars Bradley Cooper, Cooper Hoffman (that’s Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son), Benny Safdie, Alana Haim (one of the Haim sisters), Maya Rudolph, Tom Waits, and Skyler Gisondo, opens in select theaters on November 26 before a wide release on December 25. Other movies out this Christmas: Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Matrix Resurrections, Sing 2, and on Netflix, Don’t Look Up.

(Via the Film Stage)

Maybe it was the popularity of the Silhouette Challenge that planted the seed for Pepsi’s newest campaign with its sample of ’50s star Paul Anka alongside the sultry vocals of modern pop phenom Doja Cat. In the new ad, which promotes the brand’s new “soda shop” line of flavors, Doja Cat again takes on a retro classic, but this time adds another layer of meta flair with a cover of Olivia Newton-John’s Grease showstopper “You’re The One I Want.”

Recreating a handful of scenes from the ’70s film with the ’50s aesthetic, the new ad puts a modern spin on both, updating the rock-and-roll style music with glittering contemporary pop and utilizing a multicultural cast of greasers and preps. Meanwhile, despite taking on the role of Sandy, it turns out Doja’s mission isn’t so much hooking up with Danny, but getting her well-manicured hands on his can of Pepsi.

In an interview with Billboard about the new campaign, the MTV VMA host admitted having trouble locking down the vocal approach on the classic. “I sing, but I feel like I have a lot of trouble singing certain things, even my own songs,” she said. “This was one of those songs where I had to really push and find different parts of my singing ability to make it happen.”

“Back then, music was so different and so carefully done. It wasn’t just loops and beats, which is why I feel like this was a bit harder for me. I can’t believe I was able to kind of hit some of those notes because it’s a very difficult song to sing. I’m happy about it.”

Watch Doja Cat cover “You’re The One I Want” for Pepsi above.

This week, Steve and Ian are getting ready for festival season. Pitchfork Festival is finally here, featuring sets from Dogleg, Oso Oso, and Bartees Strange and marking the tripling of the fest’s notorious “token DIY/emo” acts. This year, festival season arrives in the fall, which leads into a question from a listener asking which albums are indicative of the changing of the leaves for our two hosts.

This week’s episode is centered around Minnesota trio Low, who has been regularly releasing music over the last 30 years or so. Recently, Low’s consistent catalogue was starting to feel like they were tapering off, but their thirteenth studio album, Hey What, has them back in the saddle for their best collection of songs in recent memory. Perhaps this is the result of the prominence of the vocals on this album — where the voices were frequently buried amid the glitchy instrumentation on previous efforts, Hey What has the dual vocalists front and center, often cutting through the musical mayhem behind them.

In this week’s Recommendation Corner, Ian is plugging 2012, the new album from Pittsburgh band Brightside. Meanwhile, Steve wants to bring your attention to the forthcoming album from Irish post-punk band Silverbacks.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 56 on Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Rifle-Republican Lauren Boebert (R-CO) never ceases to amaze over how willing she is to step in it on Twitter. From her praise of the Taliban to really odd Siri questions and rude pronoun discussions, she never manages to sound, well, like an empathetic human being. The backlash to her tweets remains consistently fierce, yet Boebert either doesn’t look at her notifications, or she doesn’t mind. Well, she actually did delete her tweeted thoughts that confused Samuel Adams with John Adams, but that was an exception.

For the most part, Boebert is like the Energizer Bunny Who Does Not Care, and she’s all kinds of upset about the fencing around the U.S. Capitol. That protective wiring, obviously, is a response to the January 6 insurrection and a preventative measure ahead of the September 18 right-wing rally that has Capitol Police to reveal how they’ve bracing for violence, but Boebert remains incredibly offended at the thought of fencing.

“Open Borders Nancy Pelosi is getting ready to put the Capitol Fence back up,” the Shooters Grill owner tweeted. “Nothing says ‘The People’s House’ quite like razor wire.”

This tweet coincided with a tweet from Marina Zimmerman, a Colorado “blue-collar conservative” candidate, who tweeted about how strange it is that Boebert is angry about preventative measures at the U.S. Capitol. Zimmerman then suggested that “#BoebertELee” (so named for the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee) should trend as a new Boebert nickname.

Well, the suggestion worked like a charm. Jokes about “the Battle of Shooters Grill” began to circulate like wildfire, along with tweets that aimed to point out to Boebert that the wiring is in place “so your fellow Confederates can’t kill more cops.” And with that, people were off to the Twitter races.

No doubt, Boebert will dust herself off and come back swinging.

For the last four NFL seasons, we’ve picked games in this space and, well, the 2021 season is here. We’re back for another run. Week 1 is already underway at the time of this post, but Sunday and Monday bring every football handicapper’s dream of a full slate. For those unfamiliar, our central tenet is to find value, often in zigging when others zag. That usually leads to underdogs (and Unders when we veer into the totals market), and it sometimes presents hideous situations where you simply have to hold your nose.

With that quick introduction out of the way, let’s take a peek back at our record in 2020.

• Last Week (Super Bowl): 3-2
• 2020 Season: 54-46-2

Come get these winners.

Pittsburgh Steelers (+6.5) over Buffalo Bills

The Bills are very popular and likely very good. The Steelers ended last season with a giant thud and there are questions about their offense. Naturally, we’re taking Pittsburgh. Mike Tomlin is fantastic as an underdog, sporting a 40-21-3 record against the spread when getting points, and I do trust Pittsburgh’s defense. Buffalo is rightly favored, but this number is a touch high in what could become a slugfest.

Arizona Cardinals (+3) over Tennessee Titans

I’ll admit, the Cardinals have been kryptonite at times in this space, but we’re doing it again. Arizona is undervalued in the market in my view, and old pal Kliff Kingsbury has done his best work as an underdog on the road. Moreover, this is a bit of a fade of Tennessee, particularly on the defensive side of the ball.

New York Giants (+3) over Denver Broncos

Denver’s defense could be quite good and I’ve always been supportive of Teddy Bridgewater. I still think this number is too high for the Broncos as a road favorite. New York should at least be frisky defensively and, with a total in the low 40’s, the full field goal is nice to have.

New Orleans Saints (+3.5) over Green Bay Packers

At one point in the offseason, the Saints were a field goal favorite in this game. A lot has changed since then, including the venue of the contest, which has been moved to Jacksonville. New Orleans is easy to sleep on without Drew Brees but, um, the drop-off from Brees to Jameis Winston may be nil, and the Saints are still pretty loaded from a roster standpoint. I get why the Packers are favored, but more than a field goal? Give me the candy.

Las Vegas Raiders (+4) over Baltimore Ravens

This is hideous, but it’s right. Baltimore is the better team, but they are down a starting cornerback and their top two running backs. Las Vegas can score (12-3-1 to the Over last season), and should be able to hang around in front of their home faithful. Play the number, not the teams.

So far, Ed Sheeran has shared a couple singles to usher in his new = era: “Bad Habits” and “Visiting Hours.” Today, he returns with a third, “Shivers,” which comes with a surreal video co-starring actress AnnaSophia Robb.

The clip begins with the two bashfully encountering each other in a diner before entering into a variety of surreal and mostly awkward courtship scenarios, from Sheeran riding a train with Robb’s face on the front of it, Thomas The Tank Engine style. There are also moments where Sheeran finds himself in what can only be an Elton John tribute.

It was also announced this morning that Sheeran will be performing the new single at the VMAs this Sunday.

Sheeran previously said of his upcoming album, “= (Equals) is a really personal record and one that means a lot to me. My life changed greatly over the past few years — I got married, became a father, experienced loss, and I reflect on these topics over the course of the album. I see it as my coming-of-age record, and I can’t wait to share this next chapter with you.”

Watch the “Shivers” video above.

= is out 10/29 via Atlantic Records. Pre-order it here.

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