Year: 2022

20 years after their debut album dropped, The Black Keys will be releasing their 11th studio album, Drop Out Boogie. Arriving on May 13th, the new album was recorded at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studios in Nashville.

The new album features collaborations with ZZ Top’s Billy F. Gibbons, Greg Cartwright of Reigning Sound, and Angelo Petraglia of Kings Of Leon. Cartwright and Petraglia both appear on new single “Wild Child,” which hearkens back to the Midwest blues rock tinged with soul that the duo have ridden to the tune of five Grammy Awards and multiple Platinum records.

“I knew Pat would love working with both of these guys, so we decided we’d give it a shot,” Auerbach added. “It was the first time we’d ever really done that. It was fun as hell. We just sat around a table with acoustic guitars and worked out a song ahead of time.”

Cartwright’s vocals sit slickly alongside Auerbach’s on the hook and the song feels like it’s right out of a roadside blues rock get-down. “The cool thing with Greg is that he wants to approach stuff with a story in mind — there’s a plot, almost,” Carney said.

The Nashville sound has suited the two kids from Akron well. Auerbach has been busy at the locale as of late, producing albums for artists on his label like Yola, Aaron Frazer, and Shannon Shaw. While Carney has been busy in Nashville himself, bringing his Audio Eagle studio on the road, and producing for artists like Tennis and Michelle Branch. “Living in Nashville and making records here has opened both of our minds to that experience a little bit more,” Auerbach said in a statement.

The band have also announced their first tour in three years. There’s 32 tour dates throughout North America beginning in Las Vegas on July 9th and ending in Dallas on October 18th.

Listen to “Wild Child” above and check out the Dropout Boogie album artwork and the band’s full tour dates below.

07/09 — Las Vegas, NV @ MGM Grand Garden Arena
07/11 — Salt Lake City, UT @ USANA Amphitheatre
07/13 — Denver, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre
07/15 — St. Louis, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre St. Louis
07/16 — Indianapolis, IN @ Ruoff Music Center
07/17 — Chicago, IL @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre Tinley Park
07/20 — Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center
07/22 — Jones Beach, NY @ Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater
07/23 — Holmdel, NJ @ PNC Bank Arts Center
07/25 — Columbia, MD @ Merriweather Post Pavilion
07/27 — Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion
07/29 — Boston, MA @ Xfinity Center
07/30 — Philadelphia, PA @ Waterfront Music Pavilion (formerly BB&T Pavilion)
08/24 — West Palm Beach, FL @ iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre
08/25 — Tampa, FL @ MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre
08/27 — Atlanta, GA @ Ameris Bank Amphitheatre
08/28 — Huntsville, AL @ Orion Amphitheatre
08/30 — Charleston, SC @ Credit One Stadium
09/01 — Raleigh, NC @ Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek
09/03 — Cincinnati, OH @ Riverbend Music Center
09/06 — Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage
09/07 — Detroit, MI @ Pine Knob Music Theatre
09/09 — Cuyahoga Falls, OH @ Blossom Music Center
10/02 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
10/03 — Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena
10/05 — Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheatre
10/08 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Forum
10/10 — Phoenix, AZ @ Ak-Chin Pavilion
10/13 — Rogers, AR @ Walmart AMP
10/15 — Houston, TX @ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
10/17 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center ATX
10/18 — Dallas, TX @ Dos Equis Pavilion

Dropout Boogie is out 5/13 via Nonesuch Records. Pre-order it here.

The Black Keys is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It was all of last week when Pat Sajak asked Wheel of Fortune viewers to be nicer to contestants. “It always pains me when nice people come on our show to play a game and win some money and maybe fulfill a lifelong dream, and are then subject to online ridicule when they make a mistake or something goes awry,” the host tweeted, adding, “These are good people in a bad situation under a kind of stress that you can’t begin to appreciate from the comfort of your couch.”

First off, “good people in a bad situation” is an objectively funny way of describing someone who’s trying to win a Dalmatian statue on a syndicated game show. Also, Sajak wasn’t listening to his own advice during Wednesday’s episode: he (hilariously) mocked a contestant for sharing the “most pointless story ever told.”

During the interview portion of the show, Sajak looked at the card for contestant Scott Ingwersen and, with a confused look on his face, said, “Why am I mentioning this? It’s on your card. You had your big toe chopped off. Why are you telling this?”

Ingwersen explained:

“It’s important to know that when I was 12 years old, I was riding a 10-speed bike with flip-flops, and I fell and completely cut off the top of my toe. The next car that came by were two paramedics that were on their way to their job, and they said, ‘It’s just a laceration.’ But I didn’t know what that was, so it freaked me out even more. And my toe is reattached, and I just want to say thank you to them 30 years later.”

Sajak could barely hide his disgust. “That may have been the most pointless story ever told,” he said. “And you told it, Scott. Congratulations to you.” Some Wheel fans on Twitter were insulted by the host’s response to Ingwersen’s tale (“Pat Sajak is such an a**hole who says to someone ‘that’s the most pointless story ever’ when someone is opening up on National TV???” reads one), but he’s not wrong: that story went nowhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So…

You can watch the clip from the episode here.

(Via Yahoo!)

X AE A-XII Musk, the son of Grimes and Elon Musk, was born in early 2020. That was the pair’s first child together, but now we know he wasn’t their last: In a new Vanity Fair interview, Grimes revealed (initially on accident) that she and Musk had a second baby together, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.

In the feature, writer Devin Gordon notes he heard the “unmistakable” sound of a baby crying in another room while talking with Grimes in her home. He then geared up to “ask the strangest question of my career” and asked Grimes if she had another baby. Grimes replied, “I’m not at liberty to speak on these things. Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff… X is out there. His situation is like that. But, yeah, I don’t know.”

Gordon continues to write, “She’s rattled, and I’m mortified by even accidentally making a woman — a new mother, no less — feel exposed and vulnerable. I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can’t pretend I don’t know she’s got a secret baby with the world’s wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me here.”

Grimes then shook her head and confirmed the new bundle of joy, saying, “She’s a little colicky, too [laughs]. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Due to health complications during Grimes’ first pregnancy, she and Musk had their second child via a surrogate. Later, Grimes texted Gordon, “Her full name is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.” She’s also referred to by her nickname, Y.

Gordon explains the name:

“Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is ‘the unknown. People fear it but truly it’s the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.’ She texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl — ‘sigh-deer-ee-el’ — which she calls ‘a more elven’ spelling of sidereal, ‘the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time.’ It’s also a nod to her favorite Lord Of The Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who ‘chooses to abdicate the ring.’ […]

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it — Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago — and if she ever decides to change it, her mother will be first in line to help her choose a new one. She’s already got dozens of ideas. She might even change it herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Sailor Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it’s a little boring.

‘I was fighting for Odysseus Musk,’ she writes. ‘A girl named Odysseus is my dream.’”

Grimes also described the status of her and Musk’s relationship; The two were reported last September to be “semi-separated.” Now, Grimes says, “There’s no real word for it. I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time… We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it. […] This is the best it’s ever been… We just need to be free.”

Furthermore, it appears Exa Dark Sideræl Musk won’t be the Grimes and Musk’s last child together, as she noted, “We’ve always wanted at least three or four.”

Read the full Vanity Fair feature here.

The season of scammers is upon us, and Hulu has entered the ring with their Elizabeth Holmes scripted series, The Dropout. The show follows the tumultuous story of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who duped the science community, along with the rest of the world, when she made false promises about the company’s mission and technology. The series dropped its first three episodes on March 3rd, with the rest of the episodes premiering weekly on Thursdays through April 7th. The season will consist of eight episodes.

Amanda Seyfried joined the cast after Kate McKinnon dropped out (no pun intended) of the project last year. Seyfried plays Holmes, complete with her bizarre accent (not as bizarre as Anna Delvey, of course) who drops out of Standford to pursue a biotech company that never really got off the ground, though Holmes somehow navigated the press to make it seem like she was making scientific breakthroughs. Holmes had promised to change the way blood tests were performed and analyzed, but it all turned out to be fake.

In an interview with UPROXX, director Michael Showalter said Holmes’ story is so fascinating and heartbreaking because people wanted her to be right and real, but she was faking the whole time. “You have The New York Times putting her on the cover of the Sunday magazine and you have every single news outlet fawning over her, and you have major international figures getting in line to shake her hand and sing her praises and all of this stuff. There was nothing there. They never got it off the ground. It’s not just like it was close. They were faking it.”

The first three episodes of The Dropout are streaming on Hulu and Starz on Disney+ now, with new episodes every Thursday.

Kanye West has spent a lot of the newish year attacking Pete Davidson, be it through songs, videos, or posts on Instagram. The rapper is far from pleased that the SNL comedian who is now with Kim Kardashian, Kanye’s ex-wife and mother of his four children. Recently he released a claymation video for “Eazy,” his collaboration with The Game, which shows Kanye putting a hit on Pete, But apparently that wasn’t enough to show his disdain towards Pete. Now, the two have returned with a second video for the same song, in which Pete is yet again the victim.

In the new “Eazy” video, the rappers opt for an animated look that features the skinned monkey that appeared on the song’s cover art. The trio takes a trip through Los Angeles in a Maybach where they visit a tattoo parlor and church. They also stop by a courtroom, where Kanye and his crew turn up as he raps, “N****, we havin’ the best divorce ever / If we go to court, we’ll go to court together.” As the song comes to a close, Kanye sends the skinned monkey to attack a man with his face blurred out while rocking a hoodie that says “Skete,” a name that Kanye has often used to refer to Davidson. As the attack goes down, Kanye raps, “God saved me from that crash / Just so I can beat Pete Davidson’s ass.”

You can watch the new video for “Eazy” above.

The Houston Rockets entered Wednesday night with the NBA’s second-worst record, having won just one of their last 14 games, but with the scuffling Lakers coming to town, the young Rockets saw an opportunity to make a bit of a name for themselves and pounced, beating L.A. 139-130 in overtime — causing James Worthy to call it “a new low” for the Lakers, which is quite the bar to clear this season.

That overtime period featured a 10-0 run to open things up by the Rockets, led by Jalen Green who finished with 32 points in one of his best games as a rookie.

After the game, Green was interviewed on the Rockets broadcast and asked about how the Rockets approached that overtime that allowed them to jump on the Lakers and take control, to which he divulged their fairly simple game plan: “Attack Melo. Put him in isolation.”

As you can see in the highlight cutup the Rockets posted above, the Rockets certainly followed that game plan for much of the period, trying to put the veteran forward in as many actions as possible. Carmelo was far from the only Laker to have a rough defensive game, as evidenced by allowing 139 points to the Rockets, but it’s part of the conundrum for the Lakers coaching staff as to how they put together lineups when so many of their best offensive players are defensive liabilities, while their best defenders collapse the spacing for LeBron James and Russell Westbrook.

On this night, they rolled with an offensive lineup in overtime and the Rockets simply out-gunned them, with Green giving us a rare, somewhat painfully honest quote about Houston’s target when the Lakers were on defense.

The Los Angeles Lakers lost again on Wednesday night, falling to 28-37 on the season, failing to pickup any cushion on a Pelicans team that lost to the lowly Orlando Magic earlier in the evening.

The Lakers likewise faced off against one of the league’s worst teams as they paid the Rockets a visit in Houston, and while their stars performed much better on the offensive end — LeBron James had 23 points, 12 assists, and 14 rebounds and Russell Westbrook had 30 points, six assists, and eight rebounds — they were conscientious objectors to the concept of defense, allowing the Rockets to pour on 139 points in what became an overtime win.

Jalen Green had one of his best games as a pro, scoring 32 points in the win, as the second overall pick from last June embraced the stage of playing the Lakers and took over to start the overtime period. In overtime, Houston opened things up with a 10-0 run, which included a three-pointer from Kevin Porter Jr. that was waved off after review because the shot clock had expired, to bury the Lakers almost immediately after the extra period started.

It was a disastrous performance from a team that has had a number of those this season, and after the game James Worthy summed it up best on the Lakers postgame show stating matter of factly that “I didn’t think we could hit a new low, but we hit a new low tonight.”

I think my favorite part of Worthy’s remarks are him closing simply with “they don’t seem to believe in anything [they’re doing],” because if you were to ask someone to describe the ethos of this Lakers team, nihilism certainly would have to be up there. Worthy on the postgame show has often been a more entertaining watch this season than the Lakers themselves, and tonight even he seemed more defeated than usual by what transpired in Houston.

There has been quite a divide on the internet since Tiger King premiered. Some people (like Cardi B) became invested in the story, which followed Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin’s well-known feud in the exotic animal community, while others didn’t really care about the story at all. No matter what side you are on, it’s clear that the Tiger King saga made enough of an impact to spark several lively internet debates and multiple shows on the matter. One show is Joe vs. Carole, which just premiered on Peacock.

Starring John Cameron Mitchell and SNL star Kate McKinnon as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin respectively, the series explores the complex history between the two rivals, which ultimately leads to Joe Exotic plotting to have Baskin murdered (Exotic is currently serving jail time, though he has been trying to get out for some time). But, as with all dramatizations of true crime, the show begs the question: is the show actually good?

The eight-episode series has a pretty talented cast, with Kyle MacLachlan as Howard Baskin, Dean Winters as Jeff Lowe, Nat Wolff as Travis Maldonado, and William Fichtner as Rick Kirkham. Many fans flocked to Twitter to share their reactions and they seemingly came to two conclusions: one is that Kate McKinnon is actually a great actress and the second is that the CGI tigers are NOT very convincing. Also, Kyle MacLachlan is a treasure. Here’s what the people are saying:

On Tuesday, the Parental Rights in Education bill — dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its many critics — passed in Florida’s Senate and House. The bill, which prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, has been denounced for potentially harming queer youth, who already face discrimination and lack of representation. The bill is expected to be signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, a grown man caught on video bullying students.

In the days before the bill was passed, employees at Disney, which effectively has its own fiefdom in the Sunshine State, pushed for CEO Bob Chapek to do something, anything. He did very little. Now, before the law is signed, some Disney staffers have taken an extra step. As per Variety, a statement attributed to “the LGBTQIA+ employees of Pixar, and their allies” was made public, which reveals some troubling practices at the House of Mouse.

Among the claims is that Disney execs have demanded cuts of “nearly every moment of overtly gay affection … regardless of when there is protest from both the creative teams and executive leadership at Pixar.” The letter goes on:

“We at Pixar have personally witnessed beautiful stories, full of diverse characters, come back from Disney corporate reviews shaved down to crumbs of what they once were … Even if creating LGBTQIA+ content was the answer to fixing the discriminatory legislation in the world, we are being barred from creating it.”

To date, there has been only a small smattering of LGBTQIA+ characters or even moments in Disney-owned movies and shows. The 2020 Pixar film Onward featured a character, voiced by Lena Waithe, alluding to a girlfriend, but that was it. (The moment got the movie banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while the version in Russia changed “girlfriend” to “partner.”) The most explicit film on the subject is Pixar’s short Out, which concerns a man struggling to come out to his parents.

After Disney’s staffers began demanding Chapek do his best to stop the “Don’t Say Gall” bill — including no longer donating to lawmakers who voted for it — the CEO issued an internal memo that refused to take a political side. What he did suggest was that the “biggest impact” the company can make was in “creating a more inclusive world is through the inspiring content we produce.”

Alas, and with scant exceptions, historically the company has not exactly done that. And now the employees are revolting.

On top of the group’s damning statement, the Human Rights Campaign, which was one of the group’s Chapek revealed would receive money in support of LGBTQIA+ causes, has said they will deny Disney’s donation. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the group said that will change if Disney works with activists to “ensure that dangerous proposals, like Florida’s Don’t Say Gay or Trans bill, don’t become dangerous laws, and if they do, to work to get them off the books.”

(Via Variety and THR)

At the end of this week, Lil Durk will release his first solo project in a little over a year. The Chicago rapper’s seventh album, 7220, is set to arrive this Friday, and it serves as his follow-up to 2020’s The Voice. In the almost 15 months between these works, Durk has remained fairly active, working with artists like Drake, DJ Khaled, Nardo Wick, Meek Mill, and more. He even teamed up with Lil Baby for their joint album Voice Of The Heroes. But now time for Durk to shine on his own.

With just a few days left until 7220 arrives, Durk took a moment to unveil its tracklist. Listeners will be able to enjoy 17 tracks, including the previously released singles “AHHH HA,” “Pissed Me Off,” and “Broadway Girls.” The album will also feature guest appearances from Future, Gunna, Summer Walker, and Morgan Wallen.

Durk recently joined Lucky Daye for “NWA,” which will appear on Daye’s sophomore album, Candy Drip, which also drops on Friday.

You can view the cover art for 7220 above and its tracklist below.

1. “Started From”
2. “Headtaps”
3. “AHHH HA”
4. “Shootout” @ My Crib
5. “Golden Child”
6. “No Interviews”
7. “Petty Too” Feat. Future
8. “Barbarian”
9. “What Happened To Virgil” Feat. Gunna
10. “Grow Up / Keep It On Speaker”
11. “Smoking & Thinking”
12. “Blocklist”
13. “Difference Is” Feat. Summer Walker
14. “Federal Nightmares”
15. “Love Dior Banks”
16. “Pissed Me Off”
17. “Broadway Girls” Feat. Morgan Wallen

7220 is out 3/11 via Alamo Records/Sony Music Entertainment. You can pre-save it here.

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