Category: News

Before beginning to work on their latest album Physical Thrills, Silversun Pickups had spent the last two years shifting priorities away from music. But when it was time to start the recording process, the LA-based four-piece decided to channel what they needed the most: a friend. “It sits somewhere in between a collection of songs and an imaginary friend,” the band said about Physical Thrills. “A friend that would remind me that in this instance, the whole world was feeling the same way as well. A comforting, playful, sometimes frightened, often delighted friend.”

The resulting project is an uplifting and sprawling 14-track release to offer solace for any mood. With downtempo tracks like the grungy opener “Stillness (Way Beyond),” the wobbly and electrifying “Scared Together,” and the ethereal and wistful “Alone On A Hill,” Physical Thrills is an album that manages to marry early aughts alt-rock with contemporary pop-leaning melodies.

To celebrate the release of their sixth studio album Physical Thrills, guitarist and singer Brian Aubert, bassist Nikki Monninger, drummer Christopher Guanlao, and keyboardist Joe Lester chatted with Uproxx about Prince, The Princess Bride, and scuba diving in our latest Q&A.

What are four words you would use to describe your music?

Nikki: Steep mountains, valleys and thrills.

It’s 2050 and the world hasn’t ended and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?

Brian: Kindly, I hope.

What’s your favorite city in the world to perform?

Christopher: Montreal.

Who’s the person who has most inspired your work, and why?

Brian: Wendy Carlos because her music, while avant-garde, still has hummable melodies that you can connect with.

Where did you eat the best meal of your life?

Nikki: Osheaga Festival, Montreal.

What album do you know every word to?

Nikki: Prince’s Purple Rain.

What was the best concert you’ve ever attended?

Christopher: Supergrass at the Troubadour, standing next to Ewan McGregor, Jude Law, and Danny Boyle.

What is the best outfit for performing and why?

Brian: Anything that doesn’t feel restrictive. It’s always good to stay comfortable.

Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?

Joe: Twitter: Black Metal Cats (@evilbmcats) Instagram: @CatsOnSynthesizersInSpace.

What’s your most frequently played song in the van on tour?

Brian: One time we had a CD-R of Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” stuck in our van CD player for a week.

What’s the last thing you Googled?

Joe: The level up path for a Dwarf Paladin in Dungeons & Dragons.

What album makes for the perfect gift?

Christopher: In honor of Olivia Newton John, the soundtrack to Grease.

Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever crashed while on tour?

Joe: On the floor of a house where a great dane dog lived. He slept with me all night. I was the little spoon.

What’s the story behind your first or favorite tattoo?

Brian: I just got my first tattoo, it’s a rendition of a drawing by the artist Margaret Kilgallen that is very meaningful to my family.

What artists keep you from flipping the channel on the radio?

Christopher: Temple of the Dog.

What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?

Nikki: Brian gave me his 9:30 Club coffee mug after mine broke.

What’s one piece of advice you’d go back in time to give to your 18-year-old self?

Joe: Do not feel like you need to know what you’re supposed to do with your life at 18. It’s an absurd idea, and will only make you feel bad when life inevitably sends you down unexpected paths.

What’s the last show you went to?

Joe: Suzanne Ciani performing in Quadrophic Sound at Zebulon in LA.

What movie can you not resist watching when it’s on TV?

Nikki: Hand’s down, The Princess Bride.

What’s one of your hidden talents?

Christopher: Scuba Diving (60+ dives).

Physical Thrills is out now via New Machine Recordings. Get it here.

Let’s be honest—roommates can be weird. I admit, I was on more than one occasion the weird roommate. I remember in my 20s thinking it would be cool to keep a minifridge in my room … you know, so I’d never have to leave it. That idea became rather short-lived after my roommates angrily showed me the electric bill for the month. Whoops.

As whimsical as sitcoms make it seem, the truth is it can be hard to blend different personalities—one person’s quirk is often another person’s character defect. But still, living with someone else is usually a necessity at some point. If you live in an expensive city, the need could be lifelong. So, learning to embrace it all is probably a good idea. At the very least, some oddball roommates make for some pretty great stories.

“The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon recently asked his Twitter audience to share “something funny, weird or embarrassing” about their roommate as part of his famous #Hashtags segment.

Indeed, the stories people shared were funny, weird and embarrassing (and yes, some were also quite gross), but each relatable in their own way, at least for anyone who has ever had to share their space with a stranger.

Here are a few fun anecdotes that’ll have you laughing … and maybe considering living solo forever.

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Sometimes, having a weird roommate can be kind of cool. Their eccentricity can help bring out our own sense of humor…

“If my roommate and I were going somewhere together and he beat me getting ready, he would play the @Jeopardy theme song at max volume until I walked outside.” – @claydoughrocks

“My roommate would always need to go on a drive to “clear her head” it was actually a couple laps on mario kart.” – @elise_millsssss

… others might instill feelings that are less comedic and more horrific.

“My roommate would cut her toe nails & put the pieces behind the couch. She’d have to gather up the clippings then physically move the couch away from the wall to do this. I had no idea until 6 mos in when I went to vacuum behind the couch & found 50+ clippings.” – @MeesterLizz

“My roommate at college used to wipe his fingerprints away after touching something just in case I was a serial murderer and he would be blamed for it. Needless to say, he wasn’t my roommate for very long.” – @FallonHolic_

And even the most chill roommate can have the oddest food habits.

“Had a roomie who ate my pickles one by one, thinkin I wouldn’t notice. Every day I’d check the fridge & count pickles. not eating them. just monitoring things. Then the roomie acts like I’m weird for counting pickles, but don’t gaslight me bro. Stop eating my pickles.” – @gumgumerson

“My roommate would put black olives in a bowl, put milk on them and eat them like cereal.” – @srgraff

Some weird roommates provide a hilarious, yet compelling case proving that our most instinctive, primal urges to mark territory are still deeply ingrained within us … they’re just so repressed that we find the strangest outlets to assert dominance.

“My old roommate did not want anyone sitting in their special comfy chair after they went to bed. Every night they would remove all the cushions and bring them into their bedroom.” – @PugZLee9

Odds are, there is a lot more going on with whatever peculiar habit you’re witnessing.

“My roommate at college used to make sculptures from his empty beer cans. He made Stonehenge, the White House and the Colosseum. We only realized there was a problem when he started drinking more to make sure he had enough cans to ‘finish the sculpture.’” – Optimist_Eeyore

And sometimes … there simply is no explanation for why mad people do what they do.

“My roommate used to eat acid with me and the last time I saw him he went to the bathroom and I sat underneath a life sized Mickey mouse stuffy and jumped up when he walked by saying ‘hi everybody!’ In a Mickey Mouse voice. He ran out of the apartment never to be seen again.” – @jakemartinjokes

Have you ever had a teacher whose enthusiasm for their subject piqued your interest more than the subject itself?

I had a biology professor in college who would talk in a low almost-whisper most of the time, but when she got excited about mitochondria or cellular respiration or the stages of mitosis, her voice would rise into a loud, high-pitched shriek. While her exuberance didn’t make me fall in love with cellular biology, it did capture my attention and provide some chuckle-worthy entertainment while I was learning.

For people who don’t have a natural inclination toward certain subjects, a passionate teacher can make all the difference.

That’s one reason a video of Texas A&M University (TAMU) physicist Dr. Tatiana Erukhimova explaining how atmospheric pressure works is so delightful.

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Dr. Erukhimova has been teaching at TAMU for more than 20 years and is the co-author of an undergraduate textbook, “Atmospheric Thermodynamics: Elementary Physics and Chemistry.” She is an award-winning educator, and when you see her physics demonstrations shared on TAMU Physics & Astronomy’s YouTube channel, it’s not hard to see why.

When most of us think of atmospheric pressure, we think about the weather. But Erukhimova demonstrates how atmospheric pressure can give a newspaper the power to break a ruler. (Sort of—the person actually breaks the ruler, but the newspaper is the key to enabling it to happen.) This demonstration would be cool on its own, but Erukhimova’s energy is what truly makes the lesson.

Watch and enjoy:

(I may or may not be adding “Did I impress you? NO!” to my regular sayings.)

“Dr. Tatiana” has many similar videos, all of which have the same passion and enthusiasm. Watch her delight in making balloons shrink in liquid nitrogen and then come back to life.

And watch how she describes the “confidence and courage” you need to do a tablecloth inertia demonstration:

So much fun. Three cheers for teachers who make learning fun simply by enthusiastically sharing their wonder at how things work.

And if you want to see more from Dr. Erukhimova, check out her TEDx talk on Physics as a Street Art:

“The Carol Burnett Show” ran from 1967 to 1978 and has been touted as one of the best television series of all time. The cast and guest stars of the show included comedic greats such as Tim Conway, Betty White, Steve Martin, Vicki Lawrence, Dick Van Dyke, Lyle Waggoner, Harvey Korman and others who went on to have long, successful comedy careers.

One firm rule Carol Burnett had on her show was that the actors stay in character. She felt it was especially important not to break character during the “Family” scenes, in which the characters Ed and Eunice Higgins (a married couple) and Mama (Eunice’s mother) would play host to various colorful characters in their home.

“I never wanted to stop and do a retake, because I like our show to be ‘live,’” she wrote in her memoir, as reported by Showbiz Cheat Sheet. “So when the ‘Family’ sketches came along, I was adamant that we never break up in those scenes, because Eunice, Ed, and Mama were, in an odd way, sacred to me. They were real people in real situations, some of which were as sad and pitiful as they were funny, and I didn’t want any of us to break the fourth wall and be out of character.”

It was a noble goal, and one that went right out the window—with Burnett leading the way—in a “Family” sketch during the show’s final season that ended with the entire cast rolling with laughter.

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In the scene, Eunice, Mama, Ed and Mickey (Ed’s employee at the hardware store) are playing “Password” and the word they’re trying to get their partners to guess is “ridiculous.” Eunice (played by Carol Burnett) gives Mickey (played by Tim Conway) the clue word “laughable,” and after pondering for a bit, he says “elephant.”

Eunice scolds him for his bizarre answer, then Conway launches into a wild ad-libbed story about a circus elephant that goes on and on and on.

Burnett is the first one to lose it. The cast barely keeps it together through the sketch.

But that was just one take. Between takes, the director gave the actors a note: The elephant story would be different in the next filming—and good luck.

The next elephant story was even wilder than the first, and Burnett and Dick Van Dyke (who was playing Ed) couldn’t stop themselves from laughing. Conway himself breaks a couple of times, and even Vicki Lawrence (playing Mama), who famously never broke character, had to hide her face for a moment.

Then, just when they finally got themselves composed and Burnett was able to deliver her line, “Go on, Mama,” Lawrence delivered the most perfectly timed a-bomb and the whole cast exploded:

So delightful. And for an added bonus, watch Vicki Lawrence tell the story about how that scene came about:

See the full interview at http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/vicki-lawrence

It’s easy to look back on MoviePass‘s short but impressive reign over the moviegoing experience with nostalgia and a sense of emptiness. It was, after all, too good to last. The monthly subscription service has its flaws, but it wanted to be successful so badly! And it was! Until it wasn’t. And the former CEO feels your pain.

Mitch Lowe, who took over the company in 2017, is releasing a new memoir detailing what exactly went wrong at the once beloved company. “It truly was embarrassing and hurtful,” Lowe said, looking back. “I tried as hard as I could, but I should have tried harder. I should have been more thoughtful, and I should have been more strategic. But I’ve got to live with that.” MoviePass slashed its prices to allow users to see a movie a day for less than $10 a month, which was just too good to be true.

Loew recalled, “The idea behind it was to raise our awareness within the entertainment community. We were desperately trying to build allies. But everything was happening too fast to be able to make well-thought out decisions on where to spend money and what the ultimate benefit would be.”

Lowe says that if they had more resources and most important money, they would have been able to get their act together. “Given enough time and given enough money and some good luck here and there, we could have been a success,” he explained. “But in any plan, you need to be flexible. In hindsight, I didn’t change things fast enough. I was just heads-down trying to solve that day’s issues.”

Despite the issues, Lowe is well aware that the company wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic, so perhaps it’s better that the company went bankrupt beforehand. On the bright side, MoviePass is slated to return in 2022, with some modern adjustments (and a pricer model). Hey, they can’t possibly make the same mistakes twice, can they?

(Via Variety)

Following reports that his Republican colleagues were caught off guard by Lindsey Graham’s nationwide abortion ban, The View‘s new conservative co-host, Alyssa Farah Griffin, joined her GOP counterparts in wondering just what in the heck Graham is up to. Going into the midterm elections, Roe v. Wade being overturned has not done well for Republican candidates. On top of flailing in the polls because of the hot button issue, the loss of abortion access has been a huge motivator for Democratic voters.

Compounding the matter is that most Republicans said that abortion access should be left up to the states, but Graham’s move seemingly suggests that a full-on ban was always in the works. Griffin argued that Graham “threw a total bone to the Democrats.”

Via Mediaite:

It’s bad politics for Republicans. For a long time, my party has argued that states should decide abortion rights. When [Roe v. Wade] was knocked down that was what most of the statements were. This should have always been decided by the states, so Lindsey Graham just went completely rogue by saying this should be federally, we should have a federal restriction on abortion.

Griffin’s reaction to Graham’s abortion ban is surprisingly even-keeled. More importantly, it emphasizes how producers searched long and hard for a replacement for Meghan McCain that didn’t act like, well, Meghan McCain. The former co-host recently bragged to Andy Cohen that it took a year for the show to replace her. In reality, it was that hard to find a conservative who wouldn’t turn the panel into a shouting match with Joy Behar and/or Whoopi Goldberg.

(Via Mediaite)

You know what goes great with a bowl of gazpacho? Some wonton killings. Seven months after Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Nancy Pelosi of running a “gazpacho police” (she, ummm, meant gestapo), the controversial congresswoman’s equally kooky Colorado counterpart has made “wonton killings” a thing.

Lauren Boebert is the latest MAGA Republican to piss pronunciate her worms. While delivering an impassioned Bible reading during a speaking engagement, Boebert became utterly befuddled when she stumbled upon, and over, the phrase “wanton killings.” And instead pronounced it as “wonton” — you know, like the Chinese dumpling.

“They made life hell on Earth with their envy, wonton killings,” Boebert relayed, before stopping to state the obvious: “I don’t know what a wonton killing is. I’m going to have to look that one up. But it sounds interesting. And I don’t think I want to be a part of it.”

It didn’t take long for #WontonKillings to begin trending on Twitter, because how could anyone resist?

Megan Thee Stallion is set to headline the first-ever year of the new LA3C music festival, alongside Snoop Dogg, Maluma, and Seventeen on the lineup. Taking place on December 10 and 11 at Los Angeles’ State Historic Park, the Penske Media-created fest will showcase a range of creators in varied artistic mediums.

Megan will be the headliner on December 10, with Maluma on the second day. A full programming schedule for the new event will be released soon. LA3C — which stands for Los Angeles, the Capital of Culture and Creativity — “aims to connect people and communities by showcasing LA’s range of multicultural food and art from some of the world’s most talented artists,” per Variety (which is ran by Penske Media).

“I have always been inspired by Los Angeles, its people, its vibrancy, its diversity, and its creativity,” the company’s CEO Jay Penske shared in a statement. “We are proudly building an event with a significant long-term vision. Right now, being together in person means so much to us all. Our event will be a place to celebrate and give back to this incredible city and the people who make it so unique.”

“We believe that Los Angeles is a place where people come to pursue their creative passions and a place where talent, diversity and culture thrive,” LA3C’s chief executive Juan Mora added. “Our programming is meant to reflect our community and to create an inclusive environment where all feel welcome.”

While the LA3C had previously been scheduled for December 2021, it was postponed from the pandemic and moved to 2022. There are currently three ticketed tiers available, including GA, GA+, and VIP.

For more information on the festival, tickets, and the full lineup coming soon, visit LA3C’s official website.

Earlier this year, Fred Again.. released a clubby anthem called “Jungle,” and then invited Rico Nasty on for a fiery remix. He’s back today with the announcement of his new album Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), which will arrive later this fall. The lead single “Danielle (Smile On My Face)” is out now.

“Danielle (Smile On My Face)” is a pulsating, restless track that samples “Nice To Have” by 070 Shake, whose real name is notably Danielle Balbuena. The airy vocals add to the ethereal atmosphere; though it’s jittery and upbeat, there is an undertone of melancholy that makes it endearingly bittersweet.

Listen to “Danielle (Smile On My Face)” above. Check out the Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022) tracklist and artwork below.

1. “January 1st 2022”
2. “Eyelar (Shutters)”
3. “Delilah (Pull Me Out of This)”
4. “Kammy (Like I Do)”
5. “Berwyn (All That I Got Is You)”
6. “Bleu (Better With Time)”
7. “Nathan (Still Breathing)”
8. “Danielle (Smile on My Face)”
9. “Kelly (End of a Nightmare)”
10. “Mustafa (Time to Move You)”
11. “Clara (The Night Is Dark)”
12. “Winnie (End of Me)”
13. “September 9th 2022”

Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022) arrives 10/28 via Atlantic Records. Pre-order it here.

Fred Again.. is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

For as much as they claim to dislike each other, there are a bunch of parallels between Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. Here’s one more: After Cardi successfully sued gossip blogger Tasha K for defamation, Nicki has filed her own lawsuit. According to TMZ, the “Super Freaky Girl” rapper has filed the suit against social media personality Nosey Heaux — aka Marley Green — for $75,000 after Green posted a video calling Nicki Minaj a “cokehead.”

In the video, Green says Nicki is “shoving all this cocaine up her nose… Allegedly. But we all know it’s true. F*ck — listen, I can’t even say ‘allegedly’ with that ’cause we all know it’s true. I’m not saying allegedly on that. Nicki Minaj is a cokehead.” Green also reportedly said that Nicki’s one-year-old son “is going to be a rapist, too,” referring to Nicki’s husband Kenneth Petty’s 1995 rape conviction. Earlier this summer, Petty was sentenced to one year of house arrest for failing to update his address on the national sex offenders’ registry when he and Nicki moved to LA in 2019. Nicki and Petty were both sued by Petty’s victim for harassment after allegedly badgering her to recant her 27-year-old testimony.

In her case against Green, Nicki’s lawyers, who were ruthless in their response to the harassment charges against her, were equally vicious in deriding Nosey Heaux, calling her a “nobody” and saying her “main accomplishments in life have been a string of criminal charges, bail jumping and bad debts.” However, they say that her video has gained traction, something Uproxx noted over the past week with “It’s giving coke” appearing in several Twitter threads about Nicki and Cardi both — and even briefly trending. Nicki, meanwhile, maintains that she’s never used cocaine in her life.