Month: October 2022

GloRilla is everywhere lately, and that now includes inside the top 10 of Billboard‘s coveted Hot 100 singles chart. The publication revealed Monday (October 3) that the surging star’s “Tomorrow 2” remix with Cardi B debuted at No. 9 on the chart dated October 8. “Tomorrow 2” dropped September 23.

It marks GloRilla’s first single to chart within the Hot 100’s top 10. The achievement comes as GloRilla is still trying to process all the success that’s come her way in 2022. On Saturday (October 1), she tweeted that she’s “been smiling for 6 months straight” two days after she used the platform to share some adversity she had to push through to get here.

Then, GloRilla really couldn’t believe that she already has a track with Cardi. “I have a f*cking damn feature with cardi mf b !!!” she tweeted Saturday. “I just woke up & realized dat.”

“Girl I’m just a girl like you …you finna go so far,” Cardi quote-tweeted back. “You really a breath of fresh air in the game ….we all can’t wait to see what’s next with you and your friends !!!”

GloRilla burst onto the scene with “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” alongside Hitkidd at the beginning of this summer. That led to Yo Gotti signing her to his label, CMG Records. She dropped “Tomorrow” in July as part of CMG’s compilation project, Gangsta Art.

“F.N.F.” hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay Chart in August — her first No. 1 of any kind. Last week’s Hot 100 featured “F.N.F.” at No. 43, spending 17 total weeks on the chart.

More importantly, GloRilla is making an impact outside of the charts. In September, she returned to her former high school and donated $25,000 to its fine arts program. Her Memphis roots were also watered by the Grizzlies tapping her to narrate their hype video for the 2022-23 NBA season.

Early last month, Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” had shot up the Billboard Hot 100 chart into the No. 2 spot behind Harry Styles’ “As It Was.” Styles’ single has been breaking records, most recently becoming the longest running solo No. 1 song in history. It’s officially among the five biggest overall hits in the chart’s history, so for any song to de-throne it, would take some serious firepower.

Steve Lacy was unfazed, posting a screenshot of the chart from a month ago and commenting on how he really wanted that No. 1 spot. “Ok ermmmm ima need this #1!!!!!! as it was? nah AS IT NEED TO BE,” he said on his Instagram Story.

Well now he’s done it. On the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated October 8, “Bad Habit” is the new No. 1 song, sitting firmly above Harry Styles’ “As It Was.” Lacy debuted at No. 100 12 weeks ago and has been making his slow ascent to the top over the past three months.

Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” collaboration debuted at No. 3 while GloRilla and Cardi B also debuted in the Top 10 with their song “Tomorrow 2” coming in at No. 9. Post Malone and Doja Cat’s “I Like You (Happier Song”) and Nicky Youre and Dazy’s “Sunroof” each dropped a spot to No. 4 and No. 5, respectively.

But this week is all about Steve Lacy and the stone cold hit that is “Bad Habit.” The timing is perfect, as he just embarked on his Give You The World Tour this past weekend. Something tells us he might have just earned himself a few more sold-out performances.

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

Yesterday at midnight, Taylor Swift revealed another track off of her upcoming album Midnights. Using a bingo turner, Swift decides which track number gets a title reveal — this most recent round being track three called “Anti-Hero.” However, unlike previous uploads, Swift also posted a separate video, where she shared more about the song’s meaning and relation to her personal life.

“Track 3, ‘Anti-Hero,’ is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” Swift said. “I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. You know, I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized, and that I, you know… not to sound too dark, but, like, I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person. But, don’t feel bad for me. You don’t need to.”

“This song is a real guided tour throughout all the things that I tend to hate about myself,” she continued. “We all hate things about ourselves, and it’s all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we’re going to be this person. So, yeah, I like ‘Anti-Hero’ a lot because I think it’s really honest.”

Many wondered why this song received a separate explainer from Swift. After all, she’s shared six total titles from Midnights so far. There are a few theories, with the most probable one being that “Anti-Hero” is one of the album’s singles. There is also speculation based on the way Swift holds the phone in her videos that the ones turned upside-down are collaborations with other artists. (The phone was turned upside-down for both “Anti-Hero” and “Vigilante Sh*t.”)

In addition to Swift’s track reveal, four limited-edition signed copies of Midnights were uploaded to her store last night — but have since all sold out.

View some of the fan reactions to Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” song reveal below.

Midnights is out 10/21 via Republic. Pre-order it here.

As the resident enthusiast of the Sons of Anarchy franchise (miss you, Dustin), I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk to Charlie Hunnam on Zoom about his new Apple TV+ series, Shantaram. What I received was double the trouble and in the best way.

Hunnam and his co-star, Shubham Saraf, possess a chemistry, both onscreen and as friends, that one could bottle and sell. They are a real trip together, bantering and bouncing off each other without missing a beat. They’re so much fun while diving into topics both heady and frivolous. And they’re magnetic while discussing the mammoth project based upon Gregory David Roberts’ same-named book, which follows an Australian bank robber who busts out of prison and lands in the slums of Bombay, where life takes turns both troubling and dazzling. When Charlie’s character, Lin, steps off a bus and meets Shubham’s Prabhu, life will never be the same for either man.

That this series even exists stands as an accomplishment in and of itself, given that Roberts’ book (which Charlie devoured) surfaced in the early aughts, and multiple parties attempted to make a movie out of the 900+ page tome. At a few points, Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp both wanted to star in a Warner Bros. version, which didn’t happen for numerous reasons. We also know what humanity has endured for the past few years, and that situation coincided with Shantaram filming. Those conditions, and the story itself, injected massive chaos to the project, which is something that Charlie and Shubham now reflect upon with a fresh perspective about why this project works now. And it’s an intense, sometimes stressful, but life-affirming ride.

Hunnam, of course, is still inextricably linked to seven seasons of Sons of Anarchy (which the Apple TV+ gods couldn’t help but channel in promotional materials). That’s the case even though Hunnam dove into a wide-ranging movie career and emerged with The Lost City of Z, Crimson Peak, and Papillion under his belt. He’s certainly a world away from Charming in this sprawling odyssey. Hunnam also finds an ideal partner in Shubham, who’s been chipping away in the U.K. at a variety of projects, ranging from TV procedural work to Shakespearean adaptations. In a wonderful twist of fate, they’re now together in Shantaram and to speak with us.

Charlie Hunnam: Hey, how are ya, Kimberly?

Hi Charlie. And I can’t see you, Shubham?

Shubham Saraf: Oh, I’m here somewhere.

There you are. As you can see, I had to make it weird for you guys by wearing a Sons of Anarchy t-shirt.

Charlie: Oh yeah! I appreciate the effort, thank you.

I couldn’t help going there because Apple’s first promo image for Shantaram showed you on a bike, and you’re on a bike (for about a second) in the trailer. You’ve talked about that a little bit, but how do you think the SOA audience will receive this show?

Charlie: [Smiles] I don’t even know who the Sons of Anarchy audience is. I get the sense that it’s actually more diverse than one might think initially from looking at the show. I occasionally go to Comic-Con events to see people, and the fanbase still seems very rabid for that show, but it is incredibly diverse. There’s a lot of young people coming to the show who didn’t see it the first time around, which is great. I hope that the audience shows up. I hope that they don’t show up with too much of an expectation that this is some sort of sequel to Sons of Anarchy. Because although one of the lead characters in both shows looks very similar, I think the comparisons really end for me. And listen, I understand. I’ve been sort-of poking fun at Apple a little bit. Apple’s the biggest, most powerful corporation in the world, so they can handle little old me poking fun at them a little. But I don’t know if that was the smartest idea to release that image because it did create a little bit of an expectation that I’m not quite sure we’re going to be able to deliver on, but I’m not the boss.

Both are dramatic and stressful shows, but it looks like you guys had fun, too.

Charlie: We did.

From the moment your character, Lin, hopped off that bus, and Shubham’s character, Prabhu, walked up to him, there was instant chemistry between you two. Had you guys familiarized beforehand, or did you go in cold?

Shubham: Oh, I hadn’t met Charlie! I hadn’t seen Sons of Anarchy. I still haven’t seen Sons of Anarchy! I hadn’t watched one minute of Charlie Hunnam’s work. I had no idea… [Laughs]… who he was until day one of shooting when we were shooting a kind-of key scene about our relationship, and there was a lot riding on it. Everyone was thinking, “Is this going to work?” It’s one of the main relationships of the heart of the show, and I entered. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do. And then I looked across, and there was another man who had no idea what the hell he was going to do. And I went, “Ahhh, we’re together in this. We both don’t know what to do.” And in that was just love, joy. Yeah, I had the time of my life with Charlie, and I think that’s what translated into the characters. And that’s kind-of the spirit with which we led the entire show. Or at least, I hope it translates because I had the time of my life with that man.

Speaking of life, there’s a quote that comes up near the season’s end. Lin says something to the effect of Shakespeare’s works answering all questions in life. Charlie, I’m bringing up SOA again because that was based upon Hamlet. How accurate do you find the notion that Shakespeare can explain everything?

Charlie: I think the quote is “All of the questions and most of the answers in life can be found in Shakespeare,” right? I don’t know… I like that notion. I have not read Shakespeare as much as I would like at this point. I’ve read, you know, the big titles and seen adaptations, so I’m not unfamiliar with Shakespeare, and obviously, he or they were master writers. So I would subscribe to that.

I like how you say, “They,” but I’m listening.

Charlie: I have friends that are true students of Shakespeare and incredibly well versed in Shakespeare and able to quote at will, and there’s seldom a situation that we’re in that they won’t find an appropriate quote to hammer me over the head with, so my experience with those people does lend me to believe that there’s some truth in that statement.

Shubham: Or that they’re just pretentious wankers.

Charlie: Right. I wouldn’t call you that, Shubham.

Shubham: Oh, you’ve revealed me! No, I absolutely love Shakespeare. I find, as an actor, that he gets my blood pumping when sometimes, it lies as still as a lake. Even when I don’t realize it, he sort-of brings me to life. And I think the questions and answers that Shakespeare deals with are the ones of limitless humanity. And I think when you’re looking at life on that kind of scale and humanity on that scale… that’s kind-of why I’m an actor. That’s why we do what we do, so yeah, I definitely subscribe to that.

This book is about 20 years old and had quite an adventure being adapted. It was almost a Johnny Depp movie. I feel like everything happens for a reason, so why do you think this show is finally surfacing in 2022?

Charlie: I think it’s exclusively by virtue of the fact that the landscape of media has changed so radically since the book came out. Hollywood and the filmmaking entities were so film-centric twenty-two years ago, whereas now, we’re in this new golden age of television. And this is truly sort of an odyssey story, you know, Greg very densely packs a lot of story into 980 pages. And so it almost was a fool’s errand — and I’m not calling Johnny Depp a fool — it was big challenge to try and distill 980 pages into two hours. I felt when I read the book, coming at it from the perspective of longform storytelling in television, it just seems like a no-brainer that you would try to tackle this beast in fifty hours as opposed to two.

Like you said, there’s a lot here. There’s something funny (to me) that happens throughout, when Lin says that he’s about to leave Bombay. He keeps saying it, and then mayhem breaks out, and it doesn’t happen. It’s so serious, but also humorous, to wonder how that worked while shooting?

Charlie: It was chaos. Chaos ruled the day, in both, the story we were telling and certainly in the process in which we were telling it. It was just mad. We were shooting in India and then we couldn’t shoot in India, and now, we’re in Thailand. We have directors that are set, and then we lose them for some reason. We were block-shooting all twelve episodes, so on any given day, Shubham and I were shooting scenes from Episode 1, scenes from Episode 7, and then a scene from Episode 3, a scene from Episode 12. You know, the last scene, and then let’s go back and do another scene from Episode 1. With three different directors often speaking two different languages, for me, speaking sometimes four different dialects a day. It was insanity.

I’m feeling dizzy just hearing about this.

Charlie: Honestly, I was really nervous. The obstacles that we had to navigate on a daily basis were certainly threatening to inhibit the ultimate quality that we were able to deliver. And I think it was sort-of, by hook or by crook, we managed to deliver something that we’re all very proud of. But I can say that if we are blessed with the opportunity to go and tell another chapter of this, we’ve learned lessons, and we’re gonna capitalize on that, and I think we’re gonna be able to do better next time.

Shubham: I think that spirit of chaos in the process of making it lent, I hope, a kind of delicious quality that kind of trickled down to the pixels and the screen because I think, and Charlie said this, India is like one of the biggest characters of this story, and it’s a place that shouldn’t work. This story shouldn’t work, but somehow, it does. And that was mirrored exactly in how we went about making this happen. There were points where I remember that we thought that we had to stop shooting. We thought, alright, that’s it, and then we drank for twelve hours, and you carried me to bed…

Oh my god, don’t stop there.

Shubham: … I passed out and thought that was the end.

I feel like there’s a good story here.

Shubham: I’m just joking!

Charlie: I did. There’s video evidence. I carried you and put you to bed like I was your father. Laid you down and [laughs] stroked your hair. We were both drunk that night, it was an insane amount of alcohol. It was like a prodigious alcohol session where we drank for fourteen, fifteen hours, and yeah, then I tucked Shubham into bed and went home.

Shubham: And then we carried on filming. It shouldn’t have worked, but somehow it did. And that’s the show, man. That’s what I think it is.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s such a beautiful perspective on the show. I hadn’t sort-of correlated that, but I do think that the chaos probably actually did lend something really positive to the experience.

I would agree. It’s an expansive show, and I’m blown way about what it’s pulled off, especially after previous efforts couldn’t get there.

Charlie: Are you? Oh, thank you.

Very serious about that. Now, in terms of the mental and physical challenges of this show, did you prepare for one side more than the other?

Charlie: Yes, less so than I’m used to [with the physical], and I’m certainly much less excited [about that]. I was more interested in exploring themes and characters and the human condition through acting. I’ve never been particularly interested in the physical element of it, although I have a physical capability that has been recognized, and I supposed I’ve capitalized on. But there was some physical stuff to do. I was trying to keep my weight down, so I wasn’t eating very much through most of it, but mainly it was mental. Greg and Lin are such sophisticated, brilliant, complicated human beings. I spent more of my time trying to understand them than getting my body looking good.

Yeah, the themes in this show are huge. Alienation and loneliness, but I received the heads up that we’ve got one more question, so I’ll ask both of you this: if you could put Lin and Prabhu into another show or movie, where would you like them to go?

Shubham: Thelma and Louise. I want to see a movie with Thelma and Louise and Prabhu and Lin, escaping from something.

Charlie: And maybe Cheech and Chong. I feel like we could do a good remake of Cheech and Chong.

Shubham: Cheech and Chong!

Charlie: Either in our lives or actually to film it. We could have a good time with that.

‘Shantaram’ premieres on October 14, only on Apple TV.

Danny Masterson is set to face trial next week on three rape charges, but his attorney is already seeking to delay the proceedings until after the mayoral election in Los Angeles. Masterson is a lifelong member of the Church of Scientology, which has become a hot topic in the race between Rick Caruso and Karen Bass. Masterson’s lawyer, Philip Cohen, is particularly concerned with recent ads from Caruso that attack Bass for speaking glowingly of the controversial religion in the past.

According to Cohen, potential jurors are being “inundated” with the ads, which he describes as “inflammatory.” Cohen has petitioned the judge to delay the trial until some time after the election on November 8. Via Variety:

Last week, Rick Caruso began running an ad attacking Karen Bass for praising Scientology during a speech in 2010. The ad includes a quote referring to the church as a “ruthless global scam.” Bass responded by saying that she “absolutely condemn(s) their practices.”

“The public is being inundated with this,” said Masterson’s lawyer, Philip Cohen, at a court hearing on Monday. “It is a significant problem for Mr. Masterson.”

Cohen is also seeking to bar any references to Scientology in the courtroom. “If something needs to come up, it can be called ‘the church,’ ‘the organization,’ ‘a club,’” Cohen said.

Naturally, the prosecution is pushing back against the delay as well as the defense’s accusations of bias against the Church of Scientology, which can be weeded out during jury selection. The prosecution argued that “any potential prejudice could be addressed during questioning of potential jurors.”

(Via Variety)

Crumbl Cookies, a brand started by two cousins in Utah known for their extravagant cookies and eye-catching aesthetic pink boxes, has taken the country by storm in the five years since its inception. The cookie chain is now over 300 bakeries strong across 36 states nationwide with no signs of slowing down. But how much of that is because the cookies actually taste good and not because they’re incredibly Instagram/TikTok-able?

Considering Crumbl drops a new lineup of gourmet cookies every week, opinions across social media are pretty mixed — even amongst die-hard Crumbl fans who anticipate the latest drop as if it’s a fresh pair of AJ 1s.

It’s easy to see why, this week Crumbl’s lineup consists of a caramel apple cookie, a pumpkin roll, something called Aggie blue mint, a peanut butter M&M cookie, pink sugar, and good ‘ol milk chocolate. There is no way all of those cookies are good, right? Some of them don’t even sound like cookies! It seems like the general consensus is that Crumbl cookies are way too expensive (a pack of six will run you over $15) and way too sweet, but I’ve also seen a lot of talk about how they taste like “Play-Doh,” which isn’t sweet at all, but salty — probably more of a texture note, if I had to guess.

Anyway, Crumbl cookies are sometimes so extravagant they don’t even look like cookies anymore, and that seems to be a real turn-off for cookie fans. Here are some of the reactions to their latest drop.

Kanye West has always been fond of trolling the general public, but ever since hanging out with fellow provocateur Donald Trump in 2016, he’s apparently made it his entire personality now. Everything from Kanye’s adoption of the infamous red baseball cap associated with Trump’s racist campaign slogan to his recent social media presence seems built around getting under people’s skin. Considering how certain folks’ political aspirations have devolved into simply “owning the libs” — and that Kanye has seemingly gotten cozier with these types over the years — none of this should be surprising.

I’ll tell you what, though: It sure is infuriating — which is, of course, the goal. Over the weekend, Kanye launched the latest ploy to get attention and needle his critics at his Paris Fashion Week YZY season 9 show. The famously contrarian Kanye was spotted wearing a jacket reading “White Lives Matter” on the back in white block letters, referencing the slogan that arose online in 2013 in wake of the highly publicized murders of unarmed Black Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd.

Kanye often cites unexpected reasoning behind his outrageous fashion statements, so undoubtedly, there’s probably a convoluted rationale for this one, too. Perhaps he is trying to repurpose the slogan, drawing a parallel between the rights struggle for Black Americans and his own fight to end his licensing deals with Adidas and Gap. But aside from being tasteless and tacky, that’d be pretty shortsighted too. Kanye’s misinformed political statements have been hijacked by far-right agitators in the past, and that’s almost certainly going to happen again. Also, Kanye is arguing with corporate executives over the terms of deals he made while throwing tantrums and bullying his business partners’ employees online. That’s a far cry from having his life threatened by racist vigilantes and violent authorities.

He’s already getting a rise out of fans on Twitter, who are… let’s say “disappointed” about the whole situation. You can see some of their responses below.

The night before I call Geoff Rickly, my Twitter timeline is overflowing with photographs and videos of his band Thursday performing with My Chemical Romance in Newark, New Jersey at the Prudential Center. The hometown show was obviously special — Gerard Way joined them to help sing “Jet Black New Year” and Circa Survive’s Anthony Green did the same for “Understanding In A Car Crash.” Still, the next morning when I ask the legendary frontman what’s up, he says, “Nothing much.”

The entire year has been a sort of full-circle moment for Thursday. The long-awaited MCR reunion has been amazing to watch — especially for Rickly, who produced their ferocious first album, 2002’s I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. Meanwhile Thursday is celebrating the 21st anniversary of their own colossal debut Full Collapse with a packed box set featuring 3 LPs, a hardcover book, and a T-shirt. To further commemorate the birthday, Rickly reminisced with Uproxx about the formation of Thursday, the unexpected success of Full Collapse, and what he’s learned since then.

In 1998, you were studying at Rutgers University, where you wrote for literary journals and booked hardcore shows in your basement. What was that like?

I don’t know where to start. The simplest way would be to say that I had ended up getting into this program at Livingston College, which is one of the smaller side campuses at Rutgers. At the time, it was one of the few parts of the state school that taught post-colonialism and Edward Said and I had all these amazing classic poetry classes. I had one course where we read Native Speaker and all these other books; it was called Literature and ‘The Other.’ It was very informative towards what I was. I found this really wonderful thesis advisor for my honors thesis named Miguel Algarín Jr. and he was the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York. He really took me under his wing and was the first one to submit stuff on my behalf to The Paris Review and a bunch of other literary places and had some poems published at the time. I was thinking I was going to be a teacher. I was in the Teach For America program.

I lived maybe 10 blocks off campus. That’s because on the very first day of orientation, before school started, I was wearing a 108 shirt and a bunch of hardcore kids gravitated together and we ended up rooming together in the dorms for the first year. As soon as our second year came around, we all pooled our money and rented a house and started throwing basement shows because the year before we tried to get onto the Rutgers Student Arts Council and the very first thing they said was that Ink & Dagger was banned from ever playing Rutgers. And we were like, ‘They’re pretty much the best hardcore band around so if we can’t do stuff like that then we should just figure out how to do our own shows.’ We knew that some of the guys in Lifetime and Bouncing Souls had done house shows and stuff. We wanted to really go looking for a house that had a good basement that we could really make into something and we threw like three shows a week for years and had some amazing shows that I still remember and think back to. We had a Hot Water Music, Leatherface, Kid Dynamite show that was sort of a legendary one. We had the last Reversal of Man show; they broke up in our basement. Actually, I think they kept playing but they broke up in the basement and half the band left. We had the last You And I show, one of the last Saetia shows. We had tons of people staying there even if they weren’t playing. We made a lot of friends putting on shows and opening our home to people.

How do you think that contributed to Thursday coming to fruition?

That was everything for us. We started the band just so we could play one of those shows — that was kind of the idea. It wasn’t like, ‘We’re gonna start this band and do all this stuff.’ It was like, ‘Let’s just be a house band.’ The way shows were back then, with touring bands, the internet wasn’t such a big presence that they just blew up from out of town. They had to play a bunch of locals to build any kind of awareness in the scene. You would put on local bands to bring a crowd and expose them to the really amazing touring bands, like the Three One G bands, bands like The Locust and GoGoGo Airheart. You would have to build it up for them. So we thought we should start one too because everybody knew us. They knew that we put on shows and they were very supportive of us, so we started wanting to play the shows.

At our first show, somebody came up and asked to put out our 7-inch and we ended up just convincing them to do an album instead. Then we thought: we made all these friends, we could trade shows with them and do a tour for one summer and then it just snowballed in a way that we didn’t really expect. Victory signed us for the second record and then we all took off one year from school and at the end of that year we were planning to go back to school and that’s when all of a sudden out of nowhere MTV started playing “Understanding In A Car Crash.” Our agent said like, ‘Well, next year, you’re gonna be headlining 3,000 capacity shows and they’re gonna all sell out.’ We were like, ‘Wow, really?’ Full Collapse was out for almost a year. We were just about to stop and go back to school when everything happened for us. It sold 700 copies the week it came out. It wasn’t a thing. Already Victory said, ‘You guys are a disappointment.’ It was really strange when it took on a life of its own. We didn’t expect that.

Especially after the album cycle is kind of over, right? How different was the album cycle in those days compared to now?

They would say it was 18 months as an album cycle, but that was if anything was happening. We had put out a video with our own money that nobody played. We’d gotten a few tours but some nights we would win over the crowd and some nights we wouldn’t. It was really hit or miss. We had spent a long time touring where we were playing basements and VFW halls and kitchens and living rooms and having lots of shows fall through because we didn’t have cell phones. We’d drive 10 hours and get there and there’d be nobody there and someone’s like, ‘Oh, nobody called you?’ And we’re just like, ‘Well, no, but even if they called us at home we wouldn’t have known in the last 20 hours.’

So much else was going on. We were home for a day and then 9/11 happened. We all kind of thought like, ‘Well, I guess our year’s just about up.’ It wasn’t like we were gonna stop making music, it was just like, ‘Yeah, this will be a thing on the side that we do sometimes when we’re not doing the rest of our lives.’ And then it took off and most of us never really looked back.

Along with the kitchen, where was the weirdest place that you played?

We played an attic on the third floor of this house but to get the amps and stuff up we had to go up three flights of a spiral staircase and that was pretty strange. We got asked to play a showcase for booking agents while we were in L.A. So we were playing all these DIY shows and we were like, ‘Sure, we’ll go play wherever.’ We showed up and it was a strip club with a stage that cleared at 11 A.M. so we could do it. There was so little room at the strip club that we had to set our amps up on different levels and one of them was in a dancing cage. That was pretty weird.

The kitchen was strange, especially because there was one person watching it. It was the person who booked the show. We were like, ‘Okay, nobody’s gonna watch us.’ Then as soon as we finished, we opened the door and there was a house party going on in the living room. There were like 30 people in the living room. It wasn’t even like they had to pay to come see us, they just decided not to. We also ended up playing what we thought was a basement show that we realized that the guy who booked it failed to tell us it was a high school.

That’s an interesting vibe for a high school kegger.

Yeah, they really hated us. They ended up chasing us out of the basement and saying that they were going to send us back to the swamps of New Jersey. I appreciated that turn of phrase.

I feel like the pipeline of wanting to be an English teacher and ending up in a post-hardcore band is very common. It’s a little strange to me because I feel like most people listen to post-hardcore music for the sound but most of the lyricists are very into poetry. What do you make of that?

I think the post- genres like post-punk and post-hardcore are both very concerned with deconstructing things and there’s a certain academic slant to it. I think that it appeals to people who have been in rigorous academic fields. It’s really easy to lose track of the visceral nature of what hardcore is supposed to do for you and even more so just that connecting force of music; it’s really easy to want to make it such an exercise that it pushes people deeply out of the communion with the music. So for better or worse, I think that’s why these kinds of people are drawn to it. I certainly know what you mean — I have a ton of friends who are teachers.

I actually got into Thursday because my high school guidance counselor showed me you guys. I wore an emo band t-shirt once and he pulled me into his office and showed me Thursday’s music.

I love that. Yeah, we’re definitely guidance counselor-core.

That happened within the past decade. How does it feel to know that even though Full Collapse is obviously very of its time it’s still being passed down through generations?

It’s a really interesting phenomenon because it is so directly tied to time and place. It’s hyperspecific about where and when it’s taking place. I think that you can get specific enough that things take on their own strange little universality. It’s like period pieces having their thing where it’s like, ‘Isn’t it amazing that in these different circumstances, I still see myself?’ I’ve always appreciated that and that’s the lens that I’ve tried to write through — a sort of hyperspecificity for the most part. When I was a kid, my mom was really into U2 and we used to go see them all the time. I got exposed to a lot of great bands who were opening for U2. I loved them but at the time I was young and into hip-hop, being a tristate area kid. Hip-hop was the thing that was happening and I really gravitated towards Nas and the records Illmatic and It Was Written. I really started to notice that U2 was gesturing towards a universal emotional theme. It’s extremely broad and I thought it was amazing that they could make it work. But I also really loved that Nas was able to have every detail so finely carved that you could just see where he lives and what his life was that I — a suburban white kid in New Jersey — 100% felt like I related to this hyperspecific New York upbringing.

I just really admired that and I wondered if I was ever in a band that had these soaring themes that you would expect to be completely universal, like “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” or something like that, if instead, I wrote the lyrics to be hyperspecific. I wondered what it would do. For War All The Time, that was the exercise for me and I had already been doing it whether I realized it or not on Full Collapse. And our A&R guy on War All The Time was like, ‘I love Full Collapse; it’s so much like Bruce Springsteen,’ and I had never listened to Bruce Springsteen. Growing up in New Jersey, that was like music for cops. I just didn’t get it. It wasn’t of my time. I was like, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t speak to me.’ But as I got older and started reading his lyrics instead of listening to music, I started to understand what our A&R guy was talking about. It was a similar project — this like big, anthemic thing about these incredibly specific people who sometimes were just characters. They weren’t even first-person experiences.

I think that hyper-specificity contributes to why your fan base has been sticking around for so long; it helped listeners form a bond.

I think that’s true. I think there are also some probably simpler factors, like Thursday having a profound impact on all the other bands that were coming out at the time, even more so than we did on music listeners at the time. The waves that have rippled out from all the bands that came after — like Taking Back Sunday and My Chemical Romance — have made Thursday, in retrospect, a more important band. It’s sort of like Sonic Youth being a great band on their own but also when Nirvana blew up suddenly Sonic Youth looked even more important in the rearview. We’ve benefited from that. I think we’ve also benefited from emo becoming such a big thing and we’re one of the few bands that can loosely fit into that category that’s not totally childish songs about girls breaking your heart or whatever. There’s a little more to it. And in the last 20 years, the youth movements have become a lot more interested in things that we’ve been talking about for a couple of decades. It’s been a confluence of events that has reflected on Thursday in a really good light. We’re really lucky that that’s happened.

It’s a very rare situation that an emo band’s music ages well, but your music has.

It does age well. It’s also interesting because I have a lot of friends who are culture writers and it’s sort of cool now for artists on Twitter to tell writers to go f*ck themselves or whatever if they don’t like what they wrote. But I’ve always just been more curious about like, ‘Oh, that’s a criticism of this thing that I’m in a part of.’ I’m in this corner of this emo thing and I remember when Jessica Hopper wrote Where The Girls Aren’t. I had known Jessica a little bit and so I had to go find her and talk to her about it. It’s always thrilled me to know what other people are thinking about my peers who I respect — I just want to learn and I feel like that has really helped. We’ve always tried to engage with the people who are thinking about music deeply, people like Hanif Abdurraqib. I want to do better. That’s why I do this — I want to keep learning and growing. We just take it really seriously. I know that’s stupid and people used to lob that at us as a criticism like, ‘Those guys are so serious.’ I’m not self-serious but I do take music and art really seriously. To me, they’re the life-saving piece of the human experience. It’s the part of culture where we can connect.

What do you think you’ve learned since the release of Full Collapse?

I think the main thing that I’ve learned is that you have a vision for what you want to make and for what you think will be special about your music and you put in all these intentions into what it should be and then a lot of the time if it does catch on and people like it, they like it for other reasons that you didn’t see in the music. We plan meticulously — Thursday is meticulous about how it approaches making music and we try to minimize the accidents that happen. And often when people love it, they love it for accidental things. I think people love Full Collapse because of the innocence of the record and even my limited ability as a singer back then versus now where I’m actually a pretty good singer. That was something that people really attached to — that the singer wasn’t perfect and he sounded like a kid that was trying to figure things out rather than somebody telling you how the world is. I just think there are certain things that you just can’t plan for in music that will determine whether or not people relate to it.

I think a lot of artists make the mistake of trying to control the perception of their art, and they’re afraid of it being interpreted in different ways. Were you afraid of that at first?

Yeah, nobody wants to be misunderstood. But now I’ve come to see that it’s not a misunderstanding. It’s a different appreciation of the music. I think it’s good to leave a little bit of space in the intention. Give people a doorway that they can walk through and see themselves in the music and see the things that they love in the music. I think sometimes adding maybe one layer of ambiguity or one place where you can slip in and make a song on your own — that misunderstanding is really good. A lot of the time, the art that lasts lasts because people misunderstood it and made it their own and said, ‘This is why this song is so important to me.’ And it’s really important not to correct people.

I was trying to be hyperspecific, but a lot of things were oblique or a metaphor through an image-based language and people were able to misinterpret — not even misinterpret, just reinterpret — those images in ways that were compelling. Sometimes I’ll read somebody’s interpretation of the song and think, ‘I wish I was that smart when I wrote that’ or ‘It’s so cool that’s in there just accidentally.’ That’s something I’ve learned — the listener brings so much to music that lasts. It’s like the listener is that last piece.

The Full Collapse anniversary box set arrives 10/28 via Craft Recordings. Pre-order it here.

Exploration and video games go hand in hand in many ways. While a lot of really great games push the player along a linear path, many of our favorites, and ones that we all talk about well after the credits roll, are the games that allow us to venture out into a unique world and create own experiences through exploration. It’s a tried and true method, but one that really feels amazing when it’s perfected. So far in 2022 we have three very distinct examples of exactly that.

This isn’t meant to be a theme of the year type post, but instead a chance to look back on a few games that have really left an impact by giving players something they really want. A chance to explore and discover on their own. Each game has done so in its own unique way and all of them have come from a different developer so everyone out there should be able to play at least one of these games.

Elden Ring

Elden Ring is not a particularly approachable game by any means because of its difficulty, but that hasn’t stopped it being a game where millions of players went into a notoriously difficult genre, bashed their head into a wall, and forced their way through its challenges. Why did they do that? Because they wanted to explore the world that From Soft had created. A world where over every hill there is something new for the player to discover.

The sense of wonder that Elden Ring creates is really unmatched. There is always something for the player to do, always a new place to explore, and always a new boss to take on. Despite the world being inexplicably huge, there is no part of it that felt empty. It’s extremely dense and what this created was a world where players all felt like they were discovering new things on their own and they would then rush to the internet to talk about it with others. Being on places like Twitter was really fun for Elden Ring when it first came out because everyone was discovering something new for the first time, and then there would be discussion around it.

Is this kind of exploration new? Not really. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did something similar where it made the fun of the game be less about the plot and more about the exploration, but Elden Ring took that concept, threw some Dark Souls paint on it, and made one of the most beloved games of the year through exploration.

Tunic

There are many different ways that games try to have players explore, but the most common one is to put something interesting somewhere and make the player interested to go look at it. Tunic meanwhile approached exploration from an entirely different standpoint. It threw the player on a beach, started playing some music, and then told them to go figure it out themself. There is very little guidance in Tunic, forcing the player to explore not out of curiosity but instead to learn about the world they’re in. What is their mission? What are they trying to accomplish? All of that is learned through exploration.

Of course, throwing the player in a world without at least a tiny bit of guidance would leave them frustrated so it does need to create the curiosity to learn. Tunic manages to create curiosity through its NES style guidebook. Very little of it is readable to the player because it’s written in a language none of us can understand, but as the player collects pieces of it they learn more about everything. They’re completing the puzzle. Eventually, with every piece of the guide in hand, the player can unlock the true ending to the game in one of the most extravagant puzzles we’ve personally ever seen.

Tunic’s inspirations are obvious. The Legend of Zelda and FEZ are the most obvious ones, but few games perfect the idea of exploration in this way. When you explore the world of Tunic you’re not doing so to clear some achievement, or fill out a map, but just because you want to. Like we said about Elden Ring, the fun of Tunic is in the discovery.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 came out for the Switch back in July and it has not taken over the world of video games. It has a very dedicated niche audience and that audience really loves this game. You can include the person writing these words in that audience, but it’s kind of a shame that the game hasn’t caught on more because the world of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is marvelous. On the surface, it doesn’t do anything different from the previous games of the franchise. It rewards the player for exploring, completing side quests, and finding new places. It removes irritants like grinding by showing the player that if they just play the game naturally they will find all they need, and if they walk off the beaten path then they’ll receive extra goodies because of it.

The way Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is different from its predecessors though is not only how its streamlined many aspects of the previous games, but how it drip drops in new things for the player as they explore this massive world. They can’t immediately climb because they haven’t learned how yet, or they don’t have the skills necessary to go to that new place because they haven’t completed a specific quest yet. This may sound annoying to people who want to just go out and explore everything they can from the start, but by forcing the player to wait to explore every facet of every area they’re also giving the player reason to explore them again later on. When you return to these new areas there is no longer just new quests to do, but new places to explore as well. It makes returning to areas feel less like backtracking and more like a new opportunity.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes a proven and successful formula for exploration and makes it better than it ever was before. Not only does it continue to reward players for choosing to explore, but it’s now given them the opportunity to treat each return to a previous area like it’s a new experience. Discovery and exploration should be fun and it makes sure that the feeling of fun never leaves.

On Monday morning, The View tackled Donald Trump’s recent racist attack on Mitch McConnell’s wife, which involved the former president referring to the former Secretary of Transportation as “Coco Chow” in a post on Truth Social. It was as racially charged as it gets, but as Alyssa Farah Griffin revealed, it’s nothing compared to what Trump is like behind closed doors.

As co-host Ana Navarro ripped Trump for being “a racist before he was president,” Griffin owned up to the fact that she should’ve known better before joining his administration as White House communications director. Griffin, who’s now permanently filling Meghan McCain’s old seat, said she hoped to see a better version of Trump when she agreed to work for him. That obviously did not happen.

Via Mediaite:

“I’m guilty as somebody who hoped to see the best in him, hoped he had a vision, and he wasn’t as bad as the worst of what we saw,” she replied.

She then revealed Trump is far worse behind closed doors: “But I’m here to tell you guys at home, like, he is worse than you what see. He is worse than when he tweets out — or truths out — on social media. This is not what our country deserves. We are too divided.”

Griffin then dropped another shocker by revealing that she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 because of his attacks on the Gold Star family of Khzir Kahn. However, that didn’t stop Griffin from joining his administration, which she now clearly regrets.

(Via Mediaite)