The Houston Texans made an incredible turnaround in 2023, as new head coach DeMeco Ryans and rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud turned one of the worst teams in the league into a playoff team. After dominating the Browns in the Wild Card, the Texans lost on the road in Baltimore, providing them with a glimpse at what the next step has to look like for them to push their way into the upper echelon of the AFC.
While they’ll get rookie receiver Tank Dell back from injury and Nico Collins was a breakout star late in the year, the receiver position figured to be one of the areas Houston wanted to address this offseason. Many felt they might use their draft pick in a deep receiver class, but they flipped the No. 23 pick to Minnesota earlier this offseason for the No. 42 pick in the second round and the Vikings 2025 second.
On Wednesday, they turned that second round pick they received from the Vikings into an All-Pro receiver, as they agreed to a blockbuster deal with the Bills to acquire Stefon Diggs.
Blockbuster: Bills are finalizing a trade to send four-time Pro-Bowl WR Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans for draft-pick compensation, sources tell ESPN. pic.twitter.com/5tIJGkve6t
Diggs’ frustration in Buffalo had been reported fairly often over the past year-plus, even if he shrugged it off publicly when asked about it. Now, he goes from Josh Allen to Stroud and will give Houston a dynamic receiving corps, with a bonafide No. 1 in Diggs, a big play threat in Dell, and a very strong third option in Collins. This continues an active and, on paper, terrific offseason for Houston, who also signed Danielle Hunter to form one of the best pass rush tandems in the league with Will Anderson.
For the Bills, they now need to completely rework their wide receiver room, as they saw Gabe Davis walk in free agency and have now sent Allen’s top target out to Houston in a trade. One would think they’ll be in the market for a receiver (or two) in this month’s Draft, and with the No. 28 pick and another second next year, could be a candidate to move up for their preferred pass catcher.
When the first Joker film hit theaters, it blew the doors off the box office despite being a Rated-R movie about Batman’s greatest foe that didn’t actually have Batman in it. Naturally, its sequel Joker: Folie à Deux is going to stick to that winning formula as it adds Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn into the mix.
The film has officially locked down an R-rating as it continues the original’s trend of being a dark, twisted exploration of the Clown Prince of Crime that very liberally apes Martin Scorsese.
The musical sequel to 2019’s “Joker,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, has been rated R for “some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality and brief full nudity,” according to the MPA’s daily ratings bulletin. This is in line with the original “Joker,” which was rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images.”
However, amidst all the violence and depravity, the Joker sequel is taking an unexpected swerve by being a full-on “jukebox musical.” Online Joker fans freaked out after learning that the Gaga-starring sequel will include a total of 15 “very well-known songs” including classic show tunes like “That’s Entertainment.”
While director Todd Phillips had teased that the sequel will be a musical, no one fully believed it would go this hard into the genre. It will be interesting to see whether Joker fans will stir up another billion dollar box office now that they know there’s going to be a whole lot of singing and dancing.
Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters on October 4.
Uproxx cover star Conan Gray has been getting fans excited to hear his new album Found Heaven. Now, they don’t have too much longer to wait. After he dropped the lead single “Never Ending Song” last May, he has slowly put out a few more songs — in order to build anticipation for the full project dropping nearly a year later.
Here’s everything to know about what to expect from Gray’s new album.
Release Date
Found Heaven is out 4/5 via Republic Records. Find more information here.
Tracklist
1. “Found Heaven”
2. “Never Ending Song”
3. “Fainted Love”
4. “Lonely Dancers”
5. “Alley Rose”
6. “The Final Fight”
7. “Miss You”
8. “Bourgeoisieses”
9. “Forever With Me”
10. “Eye Of The Night”
11. “Boys & Girls”
12. “Killing Me”
13. “Winner”
Features
As of right now, there are no features on Conan Gray’s new album.
Artwork
Check out the album artwork below.
Republic Records
Singles
So far, Conan Gray has released “Alley Rose,” “Lonely Dancers,” “Killing Me,” “Winner,” and “Never Ending Song” as singles.
Tour
07/11 — Melbourne, Australia @ John Cain Arena
07/13 — Brisbane, Australia @ Fortitude Music Hall
07/17 — Sydney, Australia @ ICC Sydney Theatre
07/19 — Adelaide, Australia @ Spin Off Festival
09/19 — Minneapolis, MN @ Armory
09/21 — Sterling Heights, MI @ Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill
09/23 — Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage
09/25 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
09/30 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
10/01 — Philadelphia, PA @ Highmark Skyline Stage at the Mann
10/03 — Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Amphitheater
10/04 — Atlanta, GA @ Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park
10/06 — Indianapolis, IN @ Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park
10/11 — Las Vegas, NV @ Chelsea Theater at Cosmopolitan
10/13 — Portland, OR @ Alaska Airlines’ Theater of the Clouds
10/15 — Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater
10/17 — San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
10/18 — Inglewood, CA @ Kia Forum
10/20 — Phoenix, AZ @ Arizona Financial Theatre
10/23 — Sugar Land, TX @ Smart Financial Centre
10/25 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center ATX
10/26 — Fort Worth, TX @ Dickies Arena
11/02 — Amsterdam, The Netherlands @ AFAS Live
11/04 — Brussels, Belgium @ Forest National
11/05 — Paris, France @ Zénith Paris la Villette
11/07 — Manchester, UK @ O2 Apollo
11/10 — London, UK @ OVO Arena Wembley
Charli XCX is about to have the clubs on lock this summer. At long last, we finally have more information about her upcoming sixth studio album, Brat. Today (April 3), Charli shared two new songs from Brat — “Club Classics” and “B2B”
On the punchy “Club Classics,” Charli has one simple wish — to dance to floor fillers all throughout the night. On the song’s bridge, she even shouts out some of the DJs and producers who have inspired her throughout her career.
“I wanna dance to A.G. / I wanna dance with George / I wanna dance to SOPHIE / I wanna dance to HudMo,” she says.
“B2B,” meanwhile, is a trippy track with a hypnotic beat switch, over which, Charli dreads the idea of returning to a past love.
In addition to these two new songs, Charli has revealed the album’s tracklist and release date. The album will arrive just in time for the summer, and will surely be a must for pride events and late-night excursions.
You can listen to “Club Classics” and “B2B” above and see the Brat tracklist below.
Charli XCX’s Brat Tracklist
1. “360”
2. “Club Classics”
3. “Sympathy Is A Knife”
4. “I Might Say Something Stupid”
5. “Talk Talk”
6. “Von Dutch”
7. “Everything Is Romantic”
8. “Rewind”
9. “So I”
10. “Girl, So Confusing”
11. “Apple”
12. “B2B”
13. “Mean Girls”
14. “I Think About It All The Time”
15. “365”
Brat is out 6/7 via Atlantic Records. Find more information here.
Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
For a while there, it seemed NxWorries fans would never get a follow-up to Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s 2016 group debut Yes Lawd!. Although the rapper and producer have been teasing a new album since 2022, the wait felt more like torture with each new single (“Where I Go,” “Daydreaming“) that came without news of the new album.
The wait will finally be over soon, as NxWorries announced the title and release date of their new album along with its latest (first?) single. Why Lawd? will be out on June 7 via Stones Throw. The new single is called “86Sentra” and it does not disappoint. It’s got an animated visualizer depicting the duo cruising in the titular car, a groovy, bass-driven beat, and scintillating, swaggering verses from .Paak in classic rap braggart mode.
The gap between NxWorries albums is understandable, as .Paak has been busy for the past few years, what with dropping the Silk Sonic collaboration with Bruno Mars and popping up on seemingly every artists’ singles. In 2023 alone, he collaborated with Cordae (apparently, on enough songs for a full EP), Shafiq Husayn, Jay Rock, and SiR, in addiiton to starting the ball rolling on a new Free Nationals project AND hosting a podcast, .Paak House Radio. With all that going on, it’s kind of a miracle he had time to get Why Lawd? finished in time for the summer. Thank you Lawd!
Why Lawd? is out 6/7 via Stones Throw Records. Get more info here.
Yesterday (April 2), Doja Cat unveiled the (revealing) album cover for her upcoming Scarlet deluxe edition, titled Scarlet II: Claude Frollo. One question that might immediately bring to mind is:
Who Is Claude Frollo From Doja Cat’s Scarlet Deluxe?
Frollo is the antagonist from the 1831 French novel The Hunchback Of Notre-Dame (and Disney’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, the animated 1996 film based on the book). Maybe you recognize the Disney version from this commonly used reaction image.
“Because he is like a… is he a tyrant? He’s like a… I feel like it connects to the story of Scarlet in some way. And if you look up his personality traits and who he is and his story, you’ll understand kind of the whole connection. There’s a control aspect, like he just abuses his power and his control and is just dogmatic and is just a total c*nt. And all Esmerelda wanted to do was just be creative and sing and dance, but nasty old Claude Frollo was just having a field day on her, just being awful and a bad guy, stinky man.
And this isn’t about anyone in… there’s not anything very personal happening to me with one person. Claude Frollo doesn’t depict a single person in my life. It’s like a metaphor for the people that creatives endure on a daily basis in a bigger picture, a bigger scale.”
With Dev Patel‘s directorial debut, Monkey Man, set to unleash its fury in theaters this week, the early reviews are here for this wild actioner. While it’s easy to compare Monkey Man to John Wick, Patel adds a far more personal touch and intensity as both the star and director of this brutal little film that leaves everything on the floor. Along with some teeth, blood, and whatever else flies off his enemies.
Dev Patel brings the gonzo chaos for this very impressive writing-directing feature debut, with Jordan Peele on board as a producer; it’s a wildly over-the-top revenge action thriller on the teeming but uncliched streets of Mumbai – doubling as a boisterous satire of Modi-esque nationalism. As the lead performer, Patel shows us some pretty serious martial arts chops, kickboxing and thumping seven shades of ordure out of the punchbag, and then the bad guys – and periodically pausing, of course, attractively dropletted with sweat, to let us get an eyeful of those sculpted abs.
Dev Patel pours his entire self into “Monkey Man.” Some comes over the sides and the mix might not always be right but there’s an undeniable passion here that comes through in a genre that too often feels like it came off an assembly line. The writer, producer, star, director, and guy who broke a few bones filming this one name-checked Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, “The Raid,” Korean action, Bollywood, and much more in his intro, and “Monkey Man” often has that overstuffed quality of a filmmaker who finally got his chance to see his visions on-screen and worried he may never get to do so again.
I suspect, though, that “Monkey Man” may be too glum and plodding for much of the mainstream audience. I kept going in and out of the movie. Yet Patel does one thing superlatively well, and that’s using the film as a pedestal for his downbeat star performance. As Kid, he makes himself, quite deliberately, an unlikely action hero — skinny-muscled and morose, with an anger that simmers almost neurotically. When he finally explodes, it’s with a rage we only half saw coming.
It’s entering an environment in which some explosions, a shootout and a few haymakers here and there will no longer cut it. Everything must be a melee. Nothing less than nonstop beast mode will suffice. Luckily, Patel doesn’t have a problem with this way of thinking. In fact, his goal with his directorial debut is not to beat action moviemakers and A-list asskickers at their own game but to work his way into their ranks. A gleefully anarchic addition to the post-Raid: Redemption, post-John Wick world of mix-and-match fighting styles and adrenalized weapon-play, Patel’s pet project is as much a mash note to a way of presenting bloody-knuckled spectacle as it is a standard thriller.
Sharone Meir’s cinematography has it all. Action scene or not, his visuals are all stunning and textured. Every ounce of the city feels lived in and highly atmospheric. On top of that, the closest Monkey Man comes to putting the viewer in Kid’s shoes is during those action set pieces, in large part thanks to Meir’s intimate and high-energy camerawork and the downright phenomenal stunt work. Patel, Meir, and the stunt team always successfully establish a sense of geography, whether a fight takes place in tight quarters or a more expansive space, and from there, there’s no holding back.
That kind of passion exists because Patel knows how to captivate an audience both onscreen and now, as we can see, behind the camera, as well. It would be easy to make this your next John Wick obsession and make it all about a simple revenge story, but Monkey Man has elevated the idea of what a story like this should be.
Patel makes a fine hero. The actor is a consistently charming presence whose capabilities have only grown since Skins and his breakthrough role in Slumdog. In Monkey Man, he delivers a mature performance on par with his work in David Lowery’s The Green Knight. Similar to Gawain, the Kid is out to prove the depth of his moral courage. Much of his commitment is tested through fight scenes in the first and third acts, which demonstrate Patel’s confidence as a director.
The Louisiana-set HBO series, which ran for seven seasons, was about a lot of things: vampire, inconsistent Southern accents, etc. But it was mostly about sex scenes that would make you go “WTF.” Anna Paquin, who played Sookie, opened up about what it was like getting naked on camera, especially once her co-star husband Stephen Moyer (Bill) started directing episodes.
“Stephen cut his teeth directing [on True Blood],” she told the New York Post, “and by season three or four, it would be like, ‘Hi honey, who are you f*cking on camera today?’” Moyer added, “There was actually a day where we were walking from our trailers, [Alexander Skarsgård] and Anna and another actor, and we were all working in dressing gowns going toward our stages. It got to a point where I was about to go to one stage and Anna and Alex to another and I was just like, ‘Go for it, guys, good luck, have a good time, make it look good.’”
“Steve directed us in a rather explicit sex scene,” she said, “so when you ask if it is awkward to shoot a movie with your husband, the bar for awkward is set terribly high in our household, not to mention on that show in general.
Moyer’s advice to Joe Manganiello, who played werewolf Alcide, during a season seven episode he directed: “Joe, you can do it, mate. It’s OK, grab it, you can do it.” Forget true blood. That’s true love right there.
Paquin and Moyer worked together again in the indie-drama A Bit of Light, which she starred in and he directed. It comes out on April 5.
After the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, she’s been sending out flowers to those who played a part in inspiring her. A few days ago, Mickey Guyton revealed on social media that she was one of the recipients.
Now, Bey’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” collaborator Jack White has shared that she also sent him a very sweet gift.
White posted on Instagram yesterday (April 2) a photo of the large white roses she sent. “I hope you are well,” the card from Beyoncé reads. “I just wanted you to know how much you inspired me on this record.”
“What a sweet gesture to receive here in Nashville this morning from the talented and gracious @beyonce celebrating her new Cowboy Carter album,” White captioned. “Much love and respect to you Madam, and thank you kindly. Keep making beautiful and powerful music, nobody sings like you.”
This post also comes after fan speculation about what Beyoncé will do for the final Act III album of her trilogy — since Renaissance pulled from dance music and Cowboy Carter is country. Many suspect that she might end it with a rock-inspired album, in which case, White could possibly make another appearance for part two of their incredible collab from Lemonade.
Check out White’s post about his gift from Beyoncé above.
Rebel Wilson isn’t holding back. Yesterday (April 2), her memoir Rebel Rising hit shelves, and in the book, she shares about her experiences as an Australian actress.
She notes that she got her start in Hollywood playing self-deprecating, plus-size characters — her breakthrough being Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect — but said she started getting taken more seriously after she lost a significant amount of weight. But before then, Wilson said a certain singer would avoid her at events, believing that others may confuse the two.
“Some actresses would get offended if I called them plus-size in this book, so I have to be careful with what I say. This is why, I think, Adele hates me,” Wilson said. “There was a moment when she was bigger, and some people would confuse us for one another… I am assuming, because to be fair I’ve never asked her.”
Wilson noted that she and Adele have run into each other at events, however, Adele has “always quickly” walked away from her.
“As if my fatness might rub off on her if I were near her for more than thirty seconds,” said Wilson. “That she didn’t like being compared to ‘Fat Amy,’”
Elsewhere in the book, Wilson shares about an uncomfortable experience with actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who has since denied the accusations shared in Rebel Rising.
At the time of writing, Adele has not responded to Wilson’s account.
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Bills receive 2025 second-round pick via Minnesota.
