Category: News

Lil Wayne has been vocal with his disappointment about not being selected to perform the Super Bowl Halftime Show earlier this year, given that it was in his home state of Louisiana. Not only did Lamar not do the performance, but he didn’t even watch it.

In a new Rolling Stone feature, Wayne noted he didn’t check out Lamar’s performance, but instead played pool and smoked. “Every time I looked, it was nothing that made me want to go inside and see what was going on,” Wayne said.

He also declared he’s no longer interested in performing his own Super Bowl Halftime Show, saying, “They stole that feeling. I don’t want to do it. It was perfect.”

Wayne previously revealed he had spoken to Lamar about the performance, saying, “He saw how much it meant to me, I think that’s all he means. Obviously, he can’t control that, you know? So he didn’t let me down. It ain’t like he can control it or nothing. And also, I’ve spoken to him and I wished him all the best and told him he better kill it.”

Elsewhere in the Rolling Stone feature, it’s noted that among Wayne’s collaborators for his upcoming album, Tha Carter VI, are Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, Andrea Bocelli, Machine Gun Kelly, and U2’s Bono. It’s also revealed that Kanye West produced a track, although it may not end up making the album.

Read the full feature here.

Before Joe Keery started making music as Djo, even before Stranger Things, he was in a band. The “Potion” singer was a member of Post Animal until he left in 2017 to focus on his acting. The sleek psych-rock group has released three albums since then, but now Keery has returned for their upcoming album, Iron.

“When we made [2018’s] When I Think Of You In A Castle, that was near the start of Stranger Things,” Keery explained in a statement. “And now with it kind of coming to an end in my own life, we all felt it’d be great to do something like that again, to go somewhere and be isolated and work on music together. It was a labor of love.”

Post Animal drummer Wesley Toledo added, “We all agreed that even if we went and just hung out, we’d be happy with it. We’re just heartfelt, sentimental, and emotional, but there was a real positivity and optimism among us.” He’s joined in the band by Dalton Allison, Jake Hirshland, Javier Reyes, and Matt Williams.

You can listen to first single “Last Goodbye” above, and check out the Iron album cover and tracklist and Post Animal’s tour dates below.

Post Animal’s Iron Album Cover Artwork

Post Animal’s Iron Tracklist

1. “Malcolm’s Cooking”
2. “Last Goodbye”
3. “Maybe You Have To”
4. “Setting Sun”
5. “Pie In The Sky”
6. “What’s A Good Life”
7. “Main Menu”
8. “Dorien Kregg”
9. “Common Denominator”
10. “Iron”

Post Animal’s 2025 Tour Dates: The Iron Tour

04/19 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren **
04/21 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Rockwell at the Complex **
04/23 — Denver, CO @ The Mission Ballroom **
04/25 — Madison, WI @ The Sylvee **
04/26 — Saint Paul, MN @ Palace Theatre **
04/28 — Detroit, MI @ Masonic Temple Theatre **
04/29 — Toronto, ON @ History **
05/01 — Washington, DC @ The Anthem **
05/02 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner **
05/03 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall **
05/05 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel **
05/06 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel **
05/07 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel **
06/01 — Dublin, Ireland @ 3Olympia **
06/02 — Glasgow, UK @ O2 Academy **
06/03 — Manchester, UK @ O2 Victoria Warehouse **
06/05 — London, UK @ O2 Forum Kentish Town **
06/06 — London, UK @ O2 Forum Kentish Town **
06/07 — London, UK @ O2 Forum Kentish Town **
06/10 — Copenhagen, Denmark @ Poolen **
06/11 — Oslo, Norway @ Sentrum Scene **
06/13 — Stockholm, Sweden @ Annexet **
06/16 — Cologne, Germany @ E-Werk **
06/17 — Berlin, Germany @ Huxleys **
06/18 — Warsaw, Poland @ Progresja **
06/23 — Paris, France @ Élysée Montmartre **
06/24 — Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso **
06/25 — Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso **
11/01 — Detroit, MI @ El Club
11/02 — Toronto, ON @ The Garrison
11/04 — Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair
11/05 — Hamden, CT @ Space Ballroom
11/07 — Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
11/08 — Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
11/10 — Washington, DC @ DC9 Nightclub
11/11 — Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle Back Room
11/13 — Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
11/14 — Nashville, TN @ Third Man Records (Blue Room)
11/15 — Saint Louis, MO @ Off Broadway Nightclub
11/17 — Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon
11/18 — Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
12/03 — Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
12/05 — Dallas, TX @ Dada
12/06 — Austin, TX @ The Parish
12/09 — Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom
12/10 — San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
12/12 — Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
12/13 — Seattle, WA @ Neumos (Barboza)
12/15 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
12/17 — Denver, Co @ Bluebird Theater

** supporting Djo

Iron is out 7/24 via AWAL. Find more information here.

Aaron Dowdy started writing songs because of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. It started at age 11, when his parents took him to a music festival in their hometown of Bristol, Virginia. The musical duo had recently released their seminal album Time (The Revelator), which young Aaron loved. But it was the song at the end of the set — performed with another famous Americana act, Old Crow Medicine Show — that left the most lasting impression.

“They did a cover of ‘The Weight,’ with everyone taking a verse,” Dowdy, 32, recalled. “It was so ecstatic, and I was like, ‘I have to write a song.’ It just hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Writing songs wasn’t exactly typical in Bristol, for 11-year-olds or anyone else. Even though Bristol is sometimes credited as the home of country music (or a home, anyway) due to The Carter Family’s roots there. But nobody in Dowdy’s peer group was playing music at the time. And as a Jew living in a community where the local synagogue drew just 60 members from a 100-mile radius, he was used to feeling like an outsider. As he saw it, “It was punk to write songs.”

Dowdy’s father — a devotee of Van Morrison and Neil Young who worked at the local chemical plant — encouraged Aaron’s artistic impulses. And he went the extra mile, procuring and setting up home-recording equipment for his son.

“Home recording was part of songwriting from the very beginning for me,” Dowdy said when I reached him in early April. “It wasn’t about playing shows, it wasn’t about having a band, it was about recording. That’s been my whole project for the past 20 years. It wasn’t until the last two records with Fust that I felt like the songs have become coherent enough — and I’ve committed to having a band for the first time in my life — where I’ve committed to playing shows.”

Dowdy is referring to the band he is currently touring with in support of Big Ugly, the excellent album Fust released in March. I caught the six-piece ensemble last week at Minneapolis’ historic rock club 7th Street Entry — a gig Dowdy says he was extra-excited about, and I don’t think that was just stage banter — and they put on a musically rambunctious and spiritually big-hearted show that felt directly descended from that fateful performance of “The Weight” more than two decades ago.

On record, the focal point is squarely on Dowdy’s songs, which marry hearty alt-country music with impressionistic lyrics infused with authentic small-town southern lore. He is especially fond of deploying regional slang that might be confounding to outsiders, starting with the album title (named after one of the record’s best songs), which refers to an unruly, unsightly creek. On stage, however, Fust has a communal band vibe that’s immediately inviting, starting with the interplay between Dowdy and singer/fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, and extending to the lively interjections of pianist (and long-time Dowdy collaborator) Frank Meadows.

Seeing Fust live only made me love Big Ugly more, and it was already one of my favorite albums of early 2025. It sounds like a potential breakthrough for a band that has been active in some form since 2017, when Dowdy — who currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he’s a Ph.D. candidate in literature at Duke University — launched the project as a songwriting vehicle that over time has evolved into a proper band.

There were no expectations of success or even minimal exposure at the start, though that began to change somewhat in the early 2020 when Dowdy hooked up with the rising indie label Dear Life Records, which started putting out MJ Lenderman’s music around the same time. On 2023’s Genevieve, Fust became something more than a home-recording lark, and with Big Ugly, Dowdy’s songwriting and collaboration with the other musicians has achieved full maturity.

With the success of Lenderman and fellow NC act Wednesday, Dowdy freely admits that Fust now has a shot at a wider audience. I talked to him about that, as well as songwriting, the southern novelists that have influenced him, and the meaning of “fust.” But first, please enjoy what will likely be one of the year’s very best rock songs, “Spangled.”

For almost 10 years now, I’ve seen this cohort of artists and songwriters who are part of what I would call The Bandcamp Generation. I’ve talked to many artists who started out recording songs, and then after they got popular online they formed a band and started playing shows. Basically, the inverse of how it used to work. That’s been Fust’s path.

It was like, “This seems pointless, it’s so big, music’s so wild, no one’s paying attention. Your best friends are writing the best songs you’ve ever heard and we’ll release stuff for you to listen to.” That’s what music was for me for the longest time, and it still is. My best friends are all my favorite songwriters and none of them release their music, it’s just they share it with me on private links. That’s the community I came from — no expectations, or the lowest expectations possible.

My biggest collaborator, Frank, started working with Michael Cormier at Dear Life Records, when they were just starting out as a tape label. Frank sent him some of my weird demos, and Mike really loved them. He was like, “Maybe we’ll put them out on this label I’m starting.” That’s what made the slightest change in things. Nobody in my world had ever been like, “Let’s start a label,” it was just about putting it out on Bandcamp. So, having that little sign-off from Mike at Dear Life was the changing point in a long relationship with recorded music for me.

You mentioned Time (The Revelator) as a childhood touchstone, and there’s a straight line you could draw from that record to your music. Have you always worked in this folk/country/rock vein? Or did you ever have an adolescent “ska period,” or whatever?

I always liked — not to be too crude — really fucked-up music. Like The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu. But I didn’t know how to write music like that. I always wanted things to be more complicated and not in the folk form of “here’s the verse and here’s the chorus.” I shied away from that for a long time. I had a period where we were downloading royalty-free music and trying to write the craziest songs over those. It was always just an experiment of recording, but I think the through line was always a love for song. That’s my form.

Singing along to Van Morrison songs was my real education. Same thing with Neil. Fust is the first time where I felt comfortable letting go of a lot of preconceptions that music has to be this wild thing and really falling back in love with the form of a song, a traditional form that I grew up with and that I’ve always searched for.

As a Ph.D. candidate in literature, you are obviously well-read. What authors influenced you as a lyricist?

Obviously, Faulkner was an early example of somebody that I read in high school. Larry Brown is another southern writer who writes character in a way that I really identify with, where the character doesn’t have to be somebody that is real and it doesn’t even have to be a character that has a lot of inner life. It’s a character who can be a meaning unto itself. Southern literature is always really great at character, and I am looking at character a lot in these songs.

I’m always looking when I’m reading. I’m trying to find what the song is. Robert Stone is somebody I’ve read a lot, and I’m looking at his writing like, “Is there a song that could emulate how he develops character?” The last couple records — I don’t know if you want to call it literary — but it’s using tropes that are shared with literature. I am trying to have the lyrics do something in a way that a novel creates meaning with themes. I don’t want it to be too highbrow, but that’s just naturally where I tend to go.

What most intrigues me about your lyrics is how they derive from this self-contained world. You use a lot of slang and jargon that feels colloquial and southern — phrases repurposed for song titles like “Gateleg” and “Doghole” and “Goat House Blues” and “Big Ugly.” I’m also thinking of the part in “Jody” where you use “heavy” as (I think) a euphemism for “beverage.”

Yeah, it could be. A hard liquor or a Bud. But it’s definitely more than that. There’s an old ballad called “The Frozen Logger” where the logger stirs his coffee with his thumb. It’s an image of a rough and careless physical gesture that, I think, opens up a lot. Calling it “heavy” is one of those words that should unlock more than just the idiom or the colloquial use.

It just makes me think about going to a small-town bar where everybody knows each other. And you walk in as an outsider and the room quiets for a minute. And then they go back to their in-jokes and private stories. Nobody is going to explain anything to you. You just listen and figure it out. Your songs feel like that when you use those local slang terms.

I guess they’re local. It’s one of those things that you forget are local until someone shows that they’re local by saying “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But yeah, a lot of those words — goat house and doghole and gateleg — make you feel like you’re confused from the start. They become expressive unto themselves just because of their nature of being odd or barred from immediate understanding.

You made Big Ugly with Alex Farrar, who has also worked with Wednesday and MJ Lenderman. You are all based in North Carolina, and from the outside it feels like a coherent scene that’s pretty exciting. As someone on the inside, however, do you see it as a scene? Or are you just a bunch of musicians who happen to live in the same general area?

It’s definitely more of a scene than it’s not, but there’s so many elements to it. Like, Jake and Carly are huge. I don’t want to say it’s a fluke because both are incredible. It’s just that they’re huge, so we’re dealing with a different scale there a little bit in terms of visibility and engagement. But there’s no doubt about it that they have made us more legible. Their visibility opened up a kind of legibility for us, for people to be one, what’s going on in that region, and also a kind of comfort with that kind of song and that kind of imagery. I think we are lucky that people really love their music because it seems to oil and soften people’s expectations to maybe also like our music. But I think of them first and foremost as friends, which maybe is what a scene needs, where there’s all these bands and no competition. It doesn’t feel like there’s tension. It feels like we’re friends, and I love to see them and talk with them and hang with them. And it just so happens that we all make music and people are hearing it, and we’re all from North Carolina.

Before I let you go, I have to ask about the band name. When I tell people to listen to Fust, I often get this quizzical look about what, exactly, “fust” is. So: What, exactly, is fust?

I started writing Fust songs in 2017, and I was listening to a lot of private press country records that sounded awful. We were trying to find the strangest, nastiest sounding songs. And then I was like, “I’m going to do a project where I write songs, but it’s going to sound bad. And it’s going to be part of a very minor tradition of home-recorded music.” I needed a name for it, and I wanted something kind of gnarly and ugly. A word that could appear to be offensive, but was not.

I was thinking a lot about my great-grandfather’s house in West Virginia. There’s a smell there, such a weird smell. As a kid, you’d go in, and it would be so disarming at first, this old musty, mildewy smell, and it became the most romantic thing for me. How can this nasty smelling thing become romantic? That’s fust. It’s got a fust. It just means a kind of gnarly old and unused lingering smell that, I think, is romantic. I love that tension between something that’s just not right, a little crude and is yet the romantic ideal.

Big Ugly is out now via Dear Life Records. Find more information here.

Chappell Roan‘s latest single “The Giver” is about, well, giving. “Ain’t no country boy quitter,” she sings. “I get the job done.” It’s this lack of giving from the country boys that made Roan realize she was gay, as she explained on the latest episode of the Las Culturistas podcast.

“The reason I say this is actually a huge reset for people, the way people talk about sex in this day and age is that it has been so divorced from pleasure,” co-host Bowen Yang (no, there is no feud between the two of them over that Moo Deng sketch) said, to which Roan replied, “That is my experience when I hooked up with men. That’s how I knew I was gay.”

When co-host Matt Rogers asked if it never felt like it was for her, the in-love “Good Luck, Babe!” singer explained, “It just felt so performative. To me, when I’m like, okay, service top is that you want to do service even if you don’t want to? I don’t know, I just want to do what my partner makes them feel good, and when I make them feel good, that makes me feel good.”

You can listen to Roan’s episode of Las Culturistas above (be sure to stick around for the part where she talks about being a guinea pig owner — it’s about time we got representation in the media).

Lady Gaga, Green Day, Post Malone, and Travis Scott are the headliners for Coachella this year, and they all took the stage for the first weekend. Now, weekend 2 is coming up, but it looks like it’ll be more like Weeknd 2, as The Weeknd is teasing… something.

On Instagram last night (April 16), The Weeknd teased a “Ferris wheel takeover,” having something to do with his upcoming album and/or film Hurry Up Tomorrow, for April 18, 19, and 20. “SEE YOU IN THE DESERT,” he wrote in the caption. He has yet to offer any clarity on just what specifically a “Ferris wheel takeover” will entail.

Either way, this will be his first Coachella appearance in a couple years, since he was a special guest during Metro Boomin’s set in 2023. He was previously a headliner in 2022 (alongside Swedish House Mafia) and 2018.

As for things we know more about, The Weeknd recently announced a new run of After Hours Til Dawn tour dates for North America that launch in May. Check them out below.

The Weeknd’s 2025 Tour Dates: After Hours Til Dawn

05/09 — Phoenix, AZ @ State Farm Stadium
05/24 — Detroit, MI @ Ford Field
05/30 — Chicago, IL @ Soldier Field Stadium
06/05 — East Rutherford, NJ @ MetLife Stadium
06/10 — Foxborough, MA @ Gillette Stadium
06/14 — Minneapolis, MN @ U.S. Bank Stadium
06/21 — Denver, CO @ Empower Field at Mile High
06/25 — Inglewood, CA @ SoFi Stadium*
06/26 — Inglewood, CA @ SoFi Stadium*
07/05 — Las Vegas, NV @ Allegiant Stadium
07/08 — Santa Clara, CA @ Levi’s Stadium
07/12 — Seattle, WA @ Lumen Field
07/15 — Vancouver, BC @ BC Place
07/19 — Edmonton, AB @ Commonwealth Stadium
07/24 — Montréal, QC @ Parc Jean Drapeau
07/27 — Toronto, ON @ Rogers Centre
07/28 — Toronto, ON @ Rogers Centre
07/30 — Philadelphia, PA @ Lincoln Financial Field
08/02 — Landover, MD @ Northwest Stadium
08/12 — Nashville, TN @ Nissan Stadium
08/15 — Miami, FL @ Hard Rock Stadium
08/21 — Atlanta, GA @ Mercedes-Benz Stadium
08/24 — Orlando, FL @ Camping World Stadium
08/27 — Arlington, TX @ AT&T Stadium
08/30 — Houston, TX @ NRG Stadium
09/03 — San Antonio, TX @ Alamodome

* without Playboi Carti

Well, here’s a shocker. No, truly, my gasteds are flabbered. You could knock me over with a feather. ABC News reports something that anyone with a toddler’s grasp of pattern of recognition could have predicted: Fyre Festival 2 has been “postponed” by its creator Billy McFarland.

At least this time, McFarland and co. didn’t wait until partygoers had already arrived to the destination venue; according to ABC, ticket holders (heh) were sent an email today, 45 days before the festival’s target dates from May 30 to June 2, announcing the postponement. “The event has been postponed, and a new date will be announced,” it read. “We have issued you a refund. Once the new date is announced, at that time, you can repurchase if it works for your schedule.”

The refund is also a first; for those who don’t remember, or were perhaps sucker enough to fall for the same hustle twice, the first Fyre Festival went down in flames (metaphorically speaking) in 2017 after its clientele of … let’s say “less-than-skeptical” influencers arrived in the Bahamas to find that artists had pulled out, the promised luxury accommodations fittingly turned out to be disaster tents, and the gourmet meals were downgraded to sad cheese sandwiches on styrofoam plates.

In the wake of that first disaster, McFarland was convicted of wire fraud and served time in prison, federal laws were updated to mandate more transparency from online influencers, and this guy became a celebrity for what he admitted he was willing to do in not one, but two competing documentaries about the entire flimflam. None of that stopped some people from still springing $1,400 for tickets to Fyre 2 (maybe hoping to cash in on the inevitable film rights?).

However, officials overseeing Isla Mujeres, Mexico, where the new festival was supposedly billed to take place, denied granting permission for such an event, even going as far as notifying curious researchers via Twitter: “The municipal government of Playa del Carmen, informs that no event with that name will be held in our city. After a responsible review of the situation, it was confirmed that there is no registration, planning or conditions that indicate the realization of such an event in the municipality.” Although McFarland did his best to refute these findings, his credibility is rightfully shot in that department.

As of this writing, no new date has yet been announced for Fyre 2, which hopefully means someone over there has figured out that the logistics required for such an undertaking are more of a marathon than a sprint. Not saying he can’t, or even that he shouldn’t try to make up for his mistakes in 2017, but Billy simply must put a lot more time, thought, and resources into this endeavor than he apparently has to date.

Handsome demon hunters are all the rage right now on streaming, and Netflix‘s Devil May Cry is no exception. The action-adventure game adaptation landed on the streaming service less than two weeks ago (with the fanciful “The Gates of Hell open” phrasing and everything), and the show’s ascension to the Top 10 lists went so swiftly that thoughts immediately began to shift to a potential followup for hired gun Dante (Johnny Yong Bosch) regarding continued conflict between demonic and human worlds.

Will There Be A Devil May Cry Season 2?

Yes. That was fast, right?

The Tudum blog delivered the good news with showrunner Adi Shankar confirmed to be back for the next round after the season finale ended with a cliffhanger. That is to say, although The White Rabbit has been defeated, Dante has been carted off by Darkcom and cryogenically frozen. Exactly how long the show will leave him like that before either Lady or Dante’s twin, Vergil, busts him out remains to be seen.

Regardless of how long the wait for the second season will be, a swift renewal is always welcome news to an eager viewership, especially after fandoms have frequently felt burned by Netflix’s non-renewals of beloved properties. Yep, there’s no “grand delusion” here, only “sweet fortune,” thank goodnesss.

Devil May Cry also stars Kevin Conry, Scout Taylor-Compton, Hoon Lee, and Chris Coppola. The entire first season is now streaming.

21-year-old genre experimentalist 2hollis has announced the dates for the North American tour promoting his new debut album, Star. After touring with Atlanta breakout artist Ken Carson in 2024, and giving a mini-tour in January, 2hollis is set to headline 24 dates after the summer festival season, including two nights in New York at Terminal 5 performing songs like “Afraid” and “Style.”

Tickets for the tour go on-sale on Friday, April 18th at 10AM local time. You can find more info here. You can see the dates below.

2hollis’ new album Star is out now via Interscope. You can find more info here.

9/19/2025 – San Diego, CA @ SOMA San Diego
9/20/2025 – Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl
9/21/2025 – Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
9/26/2025 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
9/27/2025 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater
9/28/2025 – Seattle, WA @ Showbox SoDo
10/1/2025 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
10/3/2025 – Detroit, MI @ Royal Oak Music Hall
10/4/2025 – Toronto, ON @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre
10/6/2025 – Montreal, QC @ MTELUS
10/7/2025 – Boston, MA @ Roadrunner
10/8/2025 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5
10/9/2025 – New York, NY @ Terminal 5
10/11/2025 – Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall
10/12/2025 – Richmond, VA @ The National
10/14/2025 – Silver Spring, MD @ The Fillmore Silver Spring
10/15/2025 – Raleigh, NC @ The Ritz
10/16/2025 – Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern
10/19/2025 – St. Petersburg, FL @ Jannus Live
10/21/2025 – Houston, TX @ 713 Music Hall
10/22/2025 – Dallas, TX @ The Factory in Deep Ellum
10/23/2025 – Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater
10/24/2025 – San Antonio, TX @ The Aztec Theatre

In 2022, Ethel Cain released Preacher’s Daughter. Her debut was one of the most acclaimed albums of the year, yet it failed to chart. Fast-forward three years, and Preacher’s Daughter is currently No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 200 after finally being released on vinyl, just behind albums from Sabrina Carpenter, Morgan Wallen, and Bad Bunny. That makes her the first openly trans artist with a top-10 album in the chart’s decades-long history.

In a world where too many musicians stick to PR-approved scripts and try to game the algorithm, Cain is openly advocating to “#KillMoreCEOs” and releasing an anti-fame album titled Perverts — and she’s bigger than ever for it.

If you’ve never listened to Ethel Cain (the musical moniker of 27-year-old Hayden Silas Anhedönia) before and need a place to start, I would suggest “American Teenager.” The Obama-approved “fake pop song” is a haunting deconstruction of the American dream; if Perverts is her Metal Machine Music, this is her Nebraska. It’s also a key bit of lore in the “Ethel Cain Cinematic Universe,” but you don’t need a deep understanding of Cain’s fictional murderer Isaiah Abram to enjoy the violently buzzing “August Underground.” Or the painful “Hard Times.” Or the apocalyptic guitar solo in “Strangers.”

Preacher’s Daughter is resonating on a global scale in part because it’s immersive. It’s the kind of carefully-crafted, world-building album that’s made to be listened to in its eternity, with a narrative that speaks to people (especially queer folks) who have experienced grief and trauma. Even if you can’t relate to the specifics, you’ll be blown away by the overall experience.

Cain’s music is also a welcome and appealing contrast to the kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe-style winking irony that has taken over so much of culture. She wrote about this in a viral Tumblr post:

nobody takes anything f*cking seriously anymore. it makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because i am constantly bombarded by jokes constantly. it’s not even just me, i see it with literally every artist across multiple genres and mediums. and listen, i LOVE to laugh and i love funny sh*t but like. we are in an irony epidemic. there is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times. the number of times i have to read the same stupid sh*t like “yes you ate that like isaiah ate ethel” over and over, it makes me SO mad. it’s not everyone obviously but it’s such a huge portion of the people who engage with me online and in real life that it’s truly inescapable. i feel like no matter what i make or what i do, it will always get turned into a f*cking joke. it’s genuinely so embarrassing.

Ethel Cain makes music that’s meant to envelop you, not be turned into a meme. I’ve seen concern among long-time fans that her recent surge in popularity could bring out the same people who meow at Mitski concerts (someone who knows a thing or two about the complications of standom). But Cain — who has a new album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, coming out in August — doesn’t come across as an artist who bothers herself with pandering to the masses; she’s uncompromising in her creative vision.

I’ve only seen Ethel Cain live once. It was in 2023 at Utah’s fantastic Kilby Block Party. She was set to perform on Sunday evening, an unenviable timeslot during a three-day music festival. By that point, many attendees are already considering when to leave; there’s maybe enough energy for the headliner, but that’s about it. Yet despite the less-than-ideal scheduling, Cain drew one of the biggest crowds I saw all weekend.

Cain already had her fans at indie-leaning festivals; now the rest of the world is catching up.

Tom Hardy as a jaded detective. Timothy Olyphant as an underground baddie. The Raid franchise director and Gangs of London co-creator debuting the first project from an “exclusive deal” with Netflix. That’s Havoc in a nutshell.

This project has been several years in the making, which might seem like a long time since Hardy was locked into the role four dang years ago, and that would be a fair judgment. However, gears have been turning more slowly in Hollywood than usual while the double-strike’s effects still work themselves out, and Tom Hardy projects are almost always worth the wait, so although MobLand is currently giving Paramount Plus viewers a nice dose of Gangster Hardy, those who want to see him on the other side of the law (in a complicated way) have an inquiry.

When Does Tom Hardy’s Havoc Premiere On Netflix?

April 25. That’s when the magic will happen with an adrenaline rush (phrased as a “a high octane action thriller” by the streaming service) that will run for 105 minutes. From the synopsis:

Walker (Tom Hardy) is a bruised detective fighting his way through the criminal underworld threatening to engulf his entire city. In the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, Walker finds himself with a number of factions on his tail; a vengeful crime syndicate, a crooked politician, as well as his fellow cops. When attempting to rescue the politician’s estranged son, whose involvement in the drug deal starts to unravel a deep web of corruption and conspiracy, he is forced to confront the demons of his past.

Is there a brand new trailer, too? You know it: