Category: News

The first Republican presidential primary debate is in less than a month, on August 23rd. To be eligible, a candidate needs to be polling above “1 percent in three high-quality national polls or a mix of national and early-state polls, between July 1 and Aug. 21, and a minimum of 40,000 donors, with 200 in 20 or more states.” If the deadline was today, Mother’s husband Mike Pence would not be eligible to take part in the debate: the former vice president is barely reaching the first requirement; he’s desperately trying to meet the second.

To gin up support, Pence is… selling shirts with a Trump quote on it? Huh.

The Hill reports that Pence’s online store includes “t-shirts and hats that read ‘too honest,’ a nod to a quote from the 45-page indictment against Trump over his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election, which included pressuring his vice president to reject the results.”

During a call on January 1, 2021, Trump got huffy at Pence after being told there was no constitutional basis for a lawsuit asking a judge to determine whether the veep had the authority to reject electoral votes. When Pence said that “he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper,” Trump allegedly replied, “You’re too honest.” Now you can get it in shirt form! It’s no “Woke Up Sexy As Hell Again,” but it’ll do.

(Via NBC News and The Hill)

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has told the story of having just $7 in his bank account when he was cut from the CFL and began his wrestling career many, many times, even naming his production company Seven Bucks Productions because of it.

Recently, UFC fighter Themba Gorimbo shared that he had just $7 in his bank account when he won his first UFC fight, which naturally made its way to The Rock who sent some support Gorimbo’s way on social media. However, that wasn’t the end of their interaction, as Johnson flew down to Miami to surprise Gorimbo, who has been sleeping upstairs at the gym he trains at, even after winning his first fight. That’s because he used some of that money to build a new water well back home in Zimbabwe, and that act of selflessness inspired The Rock to come out and see Gorimbo in person and take him to a new house that he bought just for the budding MMA fighter.

It’s a very touching video, with the best part being Gorimbo asking why they had photos of Sadio Mane (a striker for Bayern Munich) before realizing it was photos of his family and starting to figure out what was happening as Johnson handed him keys to his new home. This is just the latest effort of The Rock to offer support to folks who are struggling to make it in their careers, as he recently gave a record-setting donation to the SAG-AFTRA relief fund to help actors that will be particularly impacted by the ongoing strike.

So far, Doja Cat has shared “Attention” from her upcoming album, and now we know when further tastes of it are set to arrive (beyond “Paint The Town Red,” which is set to drop tonight): Doja plans to premiere new music during The Victoria’s Secret World Tour.

World Tour is part fashion show, part documentary, and it’s currently scheduled to premiere on Prime Video on September 26.

Of new music, Doja told Harper’s Bazaar, “I don’t want to spoil too much, but like past projects, there’s lots of different energy to songs, plus new sounds that I’ve never explored before. So that is exciting to me, and I can’t wait to put it out.”

Doja also said, “Victoria’s Secret has always been such a fun, go-to brand for me since early on, and I love that I can still say that today. Being a part of a global phenomenon like the Tour has been an incredible experience. My idea of what makes me beautiful, sexy, and confident has evolved so much over the years, but I’ve always known that what matters most is how I feel about myself. To me, sexy is being comfortable in my own skin and celebrating myself for who I am. Being a part of the Tour really helped connect me with that.”

Welcome to SNX DLX, your weekly roundup of the best sneakers to hit the internet. The summer sneaker season keeps on rolling with a good grip of dope releases that’ll please vintage sneaker fans, Jordan heads, and those looking for cutting-edge and futuristic designs. There is a little something for everyone, and that’s what we like to see from the big three sneaker brands.

Sorry to Reebok, Puma, and any other brand that didn’t make the list this time around — there’s always next week!

Highlights from this week include the Dongdan Jordan 5, a low-top version of the classic Black Toe Jordan 1, Storm Reid’s first collaboration with New Balance, an Atlanta-influenced CT302, and Blondey McCoy’s translucent signature Adidas sneaker. There are a lot of sneakers to cover so let’s stop talking about it and just dive into it!

Air Jordan 5 Low Dongdan

Price: $190

Jordan Brand looked to Beijing for inspiration for its latest Jordan 5 colorway. The Dongdan, named after Sunset Dongdan Tournament and court, features a jet-black nubuck upper with a speckled midsole in contrasting soft pink, white stitching, and embroidered details at the hell and tongue. Underfoot, the Dongfan features a translucent Pink Rise outsole and a matching lace tie.

The Air Jordan 5 Low Dongdan is set to drop on August 3rd at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $190. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.

Nike Air More Uptempo x AMBUSH Vivid Sulfur and Limestone

Price: $190

Label head Yoon Ahn is bringing her AMBUSH brand to Nike once again for a utilitarian reimagining of the Air More Uptempo. Dressed in a Vivid Sulfur and Limestone colorway that is lifted from the aesthetic of the brand’s latest apparel line, this Air More sports a luxe leather upper with Ambush branding and a jeweled swoosh at the heel.

I don’t know how Yoon Ahn did it, but somehow she managed to make one of Nike’s loudest designs somehow look subdued and minimal.

The Nike Air More Uptempo x AMBUSH Vivid Sulfur and Limestone is set to drop on August 4th at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $190. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.

Nike Air Jordan 1 Black Toe

Price: $140

This week you can score one of the most iconic Jordan colorways of all time on a low-top version of arguably the most iconic Jordan of all time — the Jordan 1 Black Toe.

Featuring a white leather upper with black paneling and a crimson red heel piece, outsole, and laces, this release represents a piece of sneaker history. It’s the sneaker and colorway that kicked off the Jordan lineage, and if you’ve always loved the design but for whatever reason can’t rock high tops, this is your chance to shine!

The Nike Air Jordan 1 Black Toe is set to drop on August 4th at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $140. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.

Storm Reid x New Balance CT302

Price: $109.99

New Balance celeb collaborations are a bit few and far between but when they do link up with a personality, the design is always on point (see the Action Bronson Baklavas). Case in point, this team-up with actress and producer Storm Reid (The Last of Us, Euphoria) which utilizes the CT302 and infuses it with a bit of Atlanta flavor.

Inspired by street fashion from the early 2000s Atlanta scene, the CT302 sports a nylon upper, hairy suede ’N’ logo, and neutral suede accents with Storm Reid branding at the tongue label.

The Storm Reid x New Balance CT302 is set to drop on August 4th at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $109.99. Pick up a pair via the New Balance webstore.

Nike Air Jordan 13 Wolf Grey

Price: $200

The Nike Air Jordan 13 is luxury footwear at its finest. To celebrate the sneaker’s 25th anniversary, Nike is giving the design a new World Grey colorway which helps to show off the dimpled leather upper better than any colorway the shoe has ever had. The monochromatic upper is adorned with University Red details at the outsole with tongue, with an embroidered Jumpman logo and that iconic back heel hologram.

The Nike Air Jordan 13 Wolf Grey is set to drop on August 5th at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $200. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.

Adidas Trae Young 3 Arctic Night/Core Black

Price: $140

Trae Young’s latest for Adidas is one part stealthy, one part psychedelic. And if those two descriptors seem at odds with one another, it’s because they are, but they make a hell of a beautiful contrast! The Trae Young 3 sports a textile upper dyed in Adidas Arctic Night colorway atop a swirling psychedelic midsole that features BOOST and Lightstrike cushioning, offering a soft and bouncy step.

The Adidas Trae Young 3 Arctic Night/Core Black is set to drop on August 3rd at 12:00 AM PDT for a retail price of $140. Pick up a pair via the Adidas webstore.

Adidas Blondey Pro Model ADV

Price: $130

Pro Skater and UK style icon Blondey McCoy is back with his latest Adidas collaboration, which this time isn’t just a new translucent colorway of a classic Adidas silhouette, it’s a translucent colorway of his own silhouette, The Blondey Pro Model. Dude loves his translucent uppers, what can we say?

The sneaker features a TPU upper in a shade of Night Indigo with gold metallic synthetic three stripes and branding, a high-top cut design, and custom Blondey sockliner art.

The Adidas Blondey Pro Model ADV is set to drop on August 5th at 7:00 AM PDT for a retail price of $130. Pick up a pair via the Adidas CONFIRMED app.

Adidas Superstar 82 Crystal White

Price: $140

I’ll admit that I have a soft spot for 80s sneaker silhouettes, particularly of the Adidas variety. Call me crazy but I’ll take an Adidas Campus 80 over a Nike Air Force 1 any day of the week, hell, even over a Jordan 1. There is just something about 80s Adidas that speaks to me, so this week’s Adidas Superstar 82 Crystal White colorway feels like it’s specifically for me, so I’m closing out SNX with it.

Featuring a leather upper, leather lining, rubber outsole, and tri-color design, the Adidas Superstar is admittedly nothing special in terms of build. It doesn’t have comfort-focused midsoles and lacks a mix of interesting fabric choices, but it looks dope, and sometimes that’s all that matters. That combination of white leather, clear blue three stripes and heel piece, a cream midsole, and vintage green tongue branding just works!

The Adidas Superstar 82 Crystal White is set to drop on August 3rd at 7:00 AM PDT for a retail price of $140. Pick up a pair via the Adidas webstore.

A 26-year-old woman took to Reddit to share a potential discovery about her 34-year-old husband that had her “absolutely shaking.”

Here’s the gist: the couple had known each other for three years and had been married for six months. Everything was going swimmingly until they stopped at a gas station on a road trip and the woman noticed her husband had Instagram on his phone—something he had adamantly never wanted.

“I opened up his phone and decided to check what it was,” the woman wrote. “Upon opening it I found messages with a teenage girl.”

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The poster added that while she only saw a couple of messages sent by her husband, the ones she did see were “I love you,” “I can’t wait to see you again,” and telling the girl, obviously between 14 and 16-years-old, that she looked “beautiful.”

Fearing the worst, she concluded, “The fact he was cheating on me didn’t even register in my brain and it was more so the fact that he was texting these things to someone underage. I did not have the chance to look further because he came back within 10 minutes. I don’t know what to do. I am terrified, betrayed, and disgusted.”

Readers seemed to only add to her alarm with less-than-sound advice, suggesting she secretly take photos of the messages before he came back, or even going so far as to steal his phone and drive off in the car without him.

Perhaps the more rational tip was to not confront her husband until they had made it to a safe (public) location, which she did end up following, though it was excruciating. They sat together for a full four additional hours on the road, as she faked being sick to avoid being affectionate with her husband.

“I know I should go along with it and pretend for my sake, but I physically can’t bring myself to,” she lamented.

Finally, after not being able to take it anymore, the woman confronted her husband in their hotel room. And here’s where our story takes a more uplifting turn.

“I told him I found his messages on Instagram,” wrote the original poster in an update. “He immediately started apologizing and saying he wanted to tell me sooner but couldn’t find the time. He was apologizing but not as intensely as what he could have done. So I confronted him about that and said ‘what a lousy apology coming from a pedophile.’”

Shocked, and more than a little hurt, the husband then revealed that the 15-year-old was his daughter.

Apparently, the teen (named Sarah) reached out to the man a year prior via Facebook saying that he was her father—her mother being a woman he was in a brief and fleeting relationship with at 18 and who had one day disappeared.

Six months later, the man confirmed he was in fact the father…just as the couple was getting married. Not wanting to stress his partner out with the news and wanting to protect his daughter from her “strict” mother, he forged their relationship in secret on Instagram. He even showed his wife moments when Sarah called him “dad” and wished him a “Happy Father’s Day.”

Granted, this Reddit story is impossible to prove as true, but as wild as it is, it’s not hard to see how such a misunderstanding could occur. We don’t want to assume the worst of our loved ones, but it is human instinct to detect any possible danger. That, combined with unbridled imagination, makes it easy to jump to conclusions. Plus, the advice she received in the comments probably only added to her paranoia.

Similarly, though honesty is paramount to keeping a healthy relationship, there’s no easy way of breaking that kind of news. So, while it might have been best for the husband to come clean early, it’s also easy to see how the anxiety of not wanting to ruin a marriage that had only just begun might have prevented him from feeling brave enough to do so.

In other words—if we are to assume this situation did actually happen, mistakes were made on both sides, but a compassionate view can see where each side is coming from.

Luckily, the woman concluded the saga by taking accountability and showing true remorse for her actions. Both partners ended up showing empathy for the other, and understood “why the course of events played out this way.”

Whether or not this story did happen, it’s easy to see how it could happen. And it still contains a valuable lesson about transparency, discernment and above all, forgiveness.

These Meg movies should be a lot more fun than they actually are. The first one had a couple of fun scenes, and was competent enough, but also felt a little long and dreary and should be way more stupid for a movie about a prehistoric shark eating people. But, it also made half a billion dollars on what seems like, now, a pretty modest budget of only $150 million or so.

So here we are with Meg 2: The Trench, a movie apparently shot with cameras that give it that oh so desired washed out look instead of having actual colors. Oh, now, the characters in the movie talk about all the wonderful colors down in the aforementioned Trench, but we, the audience, only get washed out gray. It’s a dismal looking movie, which is appropriate because it sets the tone for the actual plot.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, “Um, it’s a movie about a giant shark, who cares, just have fun!” Yeah, that’s exactly what i tried to do, but Meg 2: The Trench commits the worst sin a movie about a giant prehistoric shark can make: it’s kind of boring. I went in looking for an audacious good time and, instead, I got a movie about rock smugglers.

After an opening depicting CGI prehistoric life eating each other, we get to Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor back in action … on some sort of cargo ship that’s illegally dumping radioactive waste. Jonas is there to stop them, but immediately fails and has to be rescued. But what this scene sets up is … well, nothing. It serves no purpose whatsoever in Meg 2: The Trench‘s already bloated two hour running time. I take that back, it sets up one thing. Since this movie, like the first, is co-produced by China, we learn through a line of dialogue that the Chinese government really cares about protecting the oceans that I’m sure had to be shoehorned into this movie somehow.

Jiuming (Wu Jing), has developed a submersible craft capable of traveling through the area that divides the rest of the world from the Trench where all the prehistoric creatures want to live. Why do they want to go there? You know, it doesn’t matter. And it wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t go there and it sounds like a fun thing to watch. Well, it’s at this point I knew we were in trouble when, instead of fighting sea creatures, our team encounters a mining colony roughly five miles below sea level. You see, some of the stones down there are very rare and worth a lot of money. (Statham’s character literally says, “Did you say ‘b’? As in billion?”)

So for some ungodly reason I will never understand, most of this movie takes place on an abandoned underwater mining colony as the surviving members of the team try to figure a way to get back to the surface, while also fighting militant underwater miners. Oh, yes, one by one a few team members get killed. But it’s kind of startling how quickly the pain and anguish subsides so the characters can make a few jokes and have a laugh. One character in particular has a very grizzly and horrifying death and the surviving characters scream in anguish for about 30 seconds. A couple minutes later everyone is laughing and these dead characters are never mentioned again. The tone of Meg 2: The Trench is its biggest enemy. At its heart it wants to be “dumb fun.” But someone involved in production (I’m going to guess it’s a country’s government) doesn’t want that and there’s a lot more taking things seriously in this movie than there needs to be.

This is a drab movie. And, somehow, was directed by Ben Wheatley, which sounds made up. It would be like if all of a sudden, with little fanfare, Jim Jarmusch decided to direct The Pope’s Exorcist 2. (Okay, I’d watch that.) And look, I’m not the biggest fan of Wheatley’s movies (to be fair, a lot of people are), but his movies certainly aren’t drab. That’s what I don’t understand. I thought a Ben Wheatley Meg movie might actually be interesting. It is not.

Meg 2: The Trench finally picks up a bit during the last 20 minutes or so when they wind up at a resort named Fun Island. Why this movie didn’t just go straight to Fun Island and skip all the nonsense about the rock smugglers is beyond me. But by the time they get there, it’s too late. If Meg 2: The Trench had this kind of energy throughout, maybe there’s some “dumb fun” to be had, but the life has already been sucked out of the room by this point. To the point I kind of started feeling sorry for the Megs. I wasn’t necessarily rooting for the Megs, I just felt bad they didn’t get to be in a better or dumber movie.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The footnotes of hip-hop are filled with stories of rivalries and enemies. East Coast vs. West Coast beefs, debates over production styles, artists inking other artists to labels, only for the deal to fall flat… So much of hip-hop is animated by these sorts of stories, from its inception to 2023. Sales figures get pushed against one another (remember Kanye vs. 50?), underdogs take swipes at kings (a tale as old as time), MCs are accused of ghostwriting (or worse, employing ghostwriters), others are painted as frauds.

Hip-hop is a game of enemies, and even corporations have used this characterization – who can forget Arby’s employing Pusha T to take a shot at McDonald’s? Despite this, though, it’s unfair to highlight rap’s history of rivals without highlighting how crucial mentorships have been to the history of the game. For every beef, there are five successful relationships between master and apprentice, rising star, and graceful vet.

Because so much of rap music began as an oral tradition, one passed down through storytelling, mythmaking, and the act of observing others create, it makes sense that the genre’s foundations are built upon this idea of the transfer of knowledge. Flows are stolen and beats are mimicked, but rap is partially built on this idea of picking and choosing which ideas to take from where.

Sampling, after all, is the literal act of taking a snippet of sound and recontextualizing it. The mentor-mentee relationship is mutually beneficial. One, the mentee gets access to knowledge and an audience otherwise unobtainable, while the mentor makes an investment in the future, leaving a part of their DNA in another artist to carry the torch long after they’re gone. To celebrate 50 years of hip-hop, here are five of the most impactful mentor-mentee relationships in the history of the game:

Kanye West and No I.D.

Long before Kanye West was the most polarizing figure in rap – well, long before he was the most polarizing figure in rap this time and the time before and the time before that — he was an aspiring producer, as so many know. He was, famously, making five beats a day for three summers, looking for an in to the rap game. The scene is early ’90s Chicago. Producer No I.D. was working with Common, who was beginning to make some noise as the new voice in Chicago. Kanye and I.D.’s moms were friends, and the two beatmakers were introduced. No I.D. immediately spotted Kanye’s talent, even managing the wildly skilled artist for a bit. While that relationship didn’t last, their friendship did, which Kanye eventually memorialized in song, even outlining the importance of mentors. On “Big Brother” from 2007’s Graduation, he raps, “My big brother was B.I.G.’s brother / Used to be Dame and Biggs’ brother / Who was Hip Hop brother, who was No I.D. friend / No I.D. my mentor, now let the story begin.”

Eminem/Dr. Dre and 50 Cent

50 Cent was — at one time in the not-too-distant past — the biggest rap superstar on the planet. His debut album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, reshaped the way hip-hop captured the public imagination. He made hits for the streets and hits for the club, blending the two in such a way that his songs were both instantly familiar yet entirely unique to his story. Of course, 50 carried massive amounts of innate talent, but it also helped that he had two of rap’s biggest superstars on his side. He was mentored by Dr. Dre and Eminem, who helped sculpt him into the icon he became on Get Rich. It helped to have two of the biggest influencers in rap on your side. Who can forget the music video for “In Da Club,” which features an absolutely jacked 50 engineering himself in a lab, seemingly turning himself into an indestructible behemoth? The reveal, though, shows Eminem and Dre in white lab coats, facilitating the entire training camp. Even they were in on the joke that they had created a monster, though now it’s clear that 50 was likely destined for stardom regardless.

Birdman and Lil Wayne

Lil Wayne’s Young Money empire wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for Birdman and his game-changing Cash Money enterprise. Before Weezy, Drake, and Nicki took over the industry, Birdman was offering up game to the hustling, rising New Orleans nightmare. Birdman and Weezy first linked up when the latter was only eight years old, and Wayne signed his first deal with Birdman’s label four years later – before he was even a teenager. That deal was for a project with B.G., and two years later Wayne joined the Hot Boyz with B.G., Juvenile, and Young Turk. Of course, it was Wayne’s solo career that turned Cash Money from a regional favorite to an international sensation, but much of Weezy’s success is due to Birdman‘s belief in him as an artist and entrepreneur. In an interview with New Orleans’ Q93 Radio, Birdman broke down the depth of their relationship, saying, “Before I had a child, Wayne and all of them were my children, you heard me? Wayne to me is my son—my first-born son—and that’s what it do for me. That’s my life, that’s my love and that’s my thing. That’s my lil’ son. I love him to death.”

Eazy-E and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

Eazy-E signed the melodically inclined Cleveland, Ohio rap group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony while on tour in the early 1990s, shortly after the group had chased him across the country hoping to encounter the former N.W.A. legend. Working with the group allowed Eazy an opportunity back onto rap’s mountaintop through Ruthless Records, his clearest path to influence after his West Coast group had fallen apart. Bone Thugs’ 1994 EP, Creepin’ On Ah Come Up features Eazy’s fingerprints throughout, and while Eazy died tragically in 1995, the group’s biggest hit, 1996’s “Tha Crossroads,” was dedicated to the late star. Ironically enough, Eazy was attracted to working with Bone Thugs because they were tighter than N.W.A. ever was. In a 2015 VIBE story, Krayzie Bone recalled something Eazy shared with him: “One thing he used to trip off of was how close Bone was because back then when one of us would get up to go to the bathroom the other four would follow. One day, E told us, ‘Man, if N.W.A. would have been as tight as y’all nobody would have never came between us.’”

Shock G and Tupac Shakur

2Pac didn’t get his start in the rap world on the mic. Instead, he began his career as a dancer and road crew associate with dirty-rap pioneers Digital Underground. The group, led by the inimitable Shock G, landed a massive hit with “The Humpty Dance,” and it was during this time that Tupac was reportedly carrying the group’s crates of vinyl to performances. Fast forward two years and 2Pac was featured on the group’s single “Same Song.” Fast forward four more months and Shakur’s Interscope Records debut landed on shelves. Shock G also lent his professional ear to 2Pac’s work, producing his breakthrough single “I Get Around” and serving as co-producer on Pac’s debut album 2Pacalypse Now. At the premiere of the 2017 movie All Eyez On Me, Shock G (who has since tragically passed as well), reflected on Tupac’s philosophy on life, saying, “He was ready, he knew he was done here. On to his next planet, on to his next adventure, maybe he was reincarnated on Earth, who knows? But Pac wasn’t worried about death. He was not scared of death and neither am I.”

It turns out that mentees can end up leading teachers too.

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

Drake has been busy on the It’s All A Blur Tour with 21 Savage. He’s catching bras from audience members and inviting J. Cole on stage to surprise fans.

At the seventh New York City stop on the tour, which took place on July 26, Drake revealed details about For All The Dogs, an album he first teased in June.

“Make new friends. If you drink, drink some liquor. If you smoke, smoke some weed. And if you like somebody, like my dad says, keep f*cking,” he said. “I will be back soon. I have an album dropping for you in, like, two weeks or some sh*t. But until then, just know, you’re always with me and I’m always thinking of you. Everything I do is for you. Every time I step in that booth, I hope I make you proud.”

When Drake released his poetry book Titles Ruin Everything: A Stream Of Consciousness, he also revealed that he would be sharing a new LP For All The Dogs. A QR code showed a message from Drake: “I made an album to go with the book,” it read. “They say they miss the old Drake girl don’t tempt me.” Subtext below read “FOR ALL THE DOGS.”

Sometimes the best new R&B can be hard to find, but there are plenty of great rhythm-and-blues tunes to get into if you have the time to sift through the hundreds of newly released songs every week. So that R&B heads can focus on listening to what they really love in its true form, we’ll be offering a digest of the best new R&B songs that fans of the genre should hear every Friday.

Since the last update of this weekly R&B and Afrobeats column, we’ve received plenty of music and news from the genre’s artists.

Burna Boy announced his upcoming album I Told Them with a star-studded video for “Big 7” and Steve Lacy delivered a nauseating look into post-breakup recovery in his “Helmet” video. John Legend was announced as a Neopets brand ambassador while Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour proved to have a big boost for Chicago’s local economy after two shows there. Elsewhere, Ari Lennox celebrated seven months of sobriety and Beyoncé and Amazon Music released another Renaissance Tour merch collection.

Here are some more releases on the new music front that you should check out:

Roy Woods — Mixed Emotions

The last time Roy Woods delivered an album was in 2017 with Say Less and the last time we received a project from him was 2020 thanks to his Dem Times EP. Thankfully, that drought is over with the release of his sophomore album Mixed Emotions. With 17 songs and features from Coi Leray, Jada Kingdom, and Vory, Roy Woods returns to form and proves that a few years off isn’t enough to make him slip from his game.

Leon Thomas — “Breaking Point (Remix)” Feat. Victoria Monet

With the release of “Breaking Point” in December, Leon Thomas’ career reached a long overdue new level and he hasn’t looked back since. He just announced the release date of his official debut album Electric Dusk (August 18) and returned with a remix of “Breaking Point” with Victoria Monet. On it, Monét provides the female perspective that complements Thomas’ own account of a relationship falling apart.

Adekunle Gold — Tequila Ever After

In a rather surprising turnaround, Nigerian afrobeats singer Adekunle Gold checked back into the music world with Tequila Ever After, his second album in as many years. This project supplies help from Zinoleesky, Odumodublvck, Coco Jones, Simi, Khalid, Pharrell, Nile Rodgers, and others for an 18-track body of work that’s dedicated to enjoying life whether it be with a drink in hand or in one’s most sober state.

Jordan Hawkins — “Bad Gurl”

For Jordan Hawkins, there’s no slowing down anytime, and his recent releases prove that. “Bad Gurl” lands as his second single in as months, while joining a list of other collaborations and solo singles that date back to the end of 2022. “Bad Gurl” flaunts the versatility of the North Carolina singer whose voice roars as far and free as the guitar riffs that accompany it. Once again, this is your warning to tap in with Jordan Hawkins and his discography.

Jaz Karis — “Back 2 U”

Just a few months after releasing her Dear Jaz project, Jaz Karis is back in action with her new record “Back 2 U.” The upbeat dance track taps into elements of EDM to create a track dedicated to finding the spark in an old love that she’s ready to return to. It’s a song that Karis admits “took me out of my comfort zone,” but it was worth it as it showcases her versatility and growing talents.

Tori Kelly — Tori

Earlier this year, Tori Kelly announced a return to her R&B roots with the release of her “Missing U” record. That return is now complete with her Tori EP. Through seven songs, listeners are taken on a journey that displays Tori’s wideranging artistry as the EP blends R&B with pop, afrobeats, dance, and more at different turns.

Tyla — “Water”

South African singer Tyla continues her run of infectious dance releases with her latest single “Water.” On it, her vocals soar over the amapiano-leaning production as she pleads for a one-of-a-kind adventure with a new lover in her life.

Byron Juane — “Bands On You”

North Carolina singer Byron Juane returns with another offering in his silky smooth “Bands On You” single. Here, Juane is more than willing to spend some money on a woman of his liking. Though his vocals are enough to serenade the lady of his choice, his desire to spoil her as well is certainly something that helps his case.

Zae France — “Give It Up”

Ahead of Rhythm N Backwoods Szn II, North Carolina singer Zae France delivers his latest single “Give It Up.” Here, France is done playing games with a new lover and asks that they match their energy so that they can experience the best of each other.

Kizz Daniel — Maverick

His first album since 2020’s King Of Love, legendary afrobeats singer Kizz Daniel returns with his latest body of work, Maverick. Through 20 songs and features from Becky G., Blaqbonez, Tekno, and others, Daniel is keeping things simple with this project. ” I don’t want to prove anything to anyone on this body of work,” he says in a press release. “The only thing that kept coming to my mind when we were making this album was pretty much that I want to do me, and what I know how to do, I want to make music the way I want to make music.”

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

Jason Momoa is nothing if not the proprietor of boundless, infectious enthusiasm. Whether he’s rocking out to Metallica or taking a naked bike ride or showering in a Sprouts parking lot or propping up Shark Week or pulling a Tawny Kitaen, he never does anything halfway, and that apparently means that his birthday would be better than anyone could imagine for 4-4.

That also includes making people envious while he enjoys snow as much of the U.S. sweats it out at 108 degree temps. According to PEOPLE, Momoa headed to New Zealand, where he was able to take a dip in a hot tub while surrounded by falling snowflakes. That’s not the worst way to get away while most of his industry is shut down due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

At some point, Momoa will be seen on the big screen again for Aquaman 2, although he seems pretty content to keep selling his aluminum-bottled water brand on Instagram. When one cannot put put Jason Momoa in every movie due to a strike, at least he keeps his sense of humor going. Does he ever get tired, though? I need to take a nap after merely witnessing all that energy.

(Via PEOPLE)