Category: News

Experimental art-rocker Yves Tumor’s 2020 LP Heaven To A Tortured Mind was described by Uproxx’s Philip Cosores as “a masterpiece.” It’s now been less than a year since released eerie-yet-affecting project, and they’re already ready to serve up some new music. The musician returned this week to drop the surprise-released EP The Asymptotical World.

Tumor’s six-track The Asymptotical World project features their recently released song “Jackie” as the opening track. The remainder of the project boasts skittering beats, mind-melting electric guitars, and layered production Tumor has perfected on their previous efforts. Along with dropping the surprise EP, Tumor has expanded their 2021 and 2022 tours, adding a handful of shows to an already packed schedule.

See Tumor’s The Asymptotical World album art, tracklist, and expanded 2021 and 2022 tour dates below.

1. “Jackie”
2. “Crushed Velvet”
3. “Secrecy Is Incredibly Important To The Both of Them”
4. “Tuck” feat. Naked
5. “…And Loyalty Is A Nuisance Child”
6. “Katrina”

09/11 — Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club
09/12 — Chicago, IL @ Chicago IL Pitchfork Festival
09/12 — Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
10/22— Miami, FL @ III Points Festival
10/24— Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West
10/25— Washington, DC @ Union Stage
10/26— NYC @ Webster Hall
10/28— NYC @ Webster Hall
10/29— Philadelphia, PA @ Warehouse On Watts
10/30— Austin, TX @ Levitation
10/31— San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands
11/02— Denver, CO @ Stanley Hotel
11/03— Seattle, WA @ Numos
11/07— Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda
11/08— Los Angeles, CA @ The Fonda
11/13— Las Vegas, NV @ Day N Vegas
11/14— Joshua Tree, CA @ Desert Daze
02/23/2022— Warsaw, PL @ Praga Centrum
02/24/2022 — Prague CZ @ Meet Factory
02/26/2022 — Prague CZ @ Meet Factory
02/28/2022 — Prague CZ @ Meet Factory
03/01/2022 — Amsterdam NL @ Paradiso Noord
03/02/2022 — Gent BE @ Balzaal Vooruit
03/03/2022 — Paris FR @ Trabendo
03/05/2022 — Bristol UK @ Strange Brew (Early Show)
03/05/2022 — Bristol UK @ Strange Brew (Late Show)
03/06/2022 — Glasgow UK @ Stereo
03/07/2022 — Dublin IE @ Whelans
03/08/2022 — London UK @ Electric Brixton
03/09/2022 — Brighton UK @ Chalk
03/10/2022 — Manchester UK @ Yes (Early Show)
03/10/2022 — Manchester UK @ Yes (Late Show)

The Asymptotical World is out now via Warp. Get it here.

Dogs, like their human counterparts, are not always perfect. And that is your fault! No, really. “When I started my journey, I wanted to teach people that there’s no such thing as a bad dog,” says the so-called “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan. But there are bad pet parents—even if they don’t mean to be. For his new NatGeo show Better Human Better Dog, Millan is helping pet parents better understand the connection that dogs have with their humans, and how our actions can influence just how well, or poorly, our pups behave.

The 10-episode series couldn’t come at a better time, as the past year has seen an enormous rise in the number of pet adoptions. And as anyone who has ever rescued a pup knows, the details on where a dog came from and what sort of conditions it lived in are often a guess at best. So building trust with your pooch is the first step in creating a happy home life. But no two dogs are alike, nor are their specific needs. In Better Human Better Dog, Millan will feature some of the toughest and most unique post-pandemic cases he has encountered. According to a press release:

“Transformations include cases like Goliath, a dog that was once so unpredictably aggressive he blocked paramedics from entering his home during a family emergency. He is now a medical companion animal, able to seek assistance when his owner suffers a seizure. Also, follow Insta-famous Ducky the Yorkie as he em‘barks’ on a journey with Cesar to gain comfort and composure with his second owner so that the newlyweds can finally pursue their dreams of starting a family. A rottweiler named Kuma is also transformed from an unstable liability to a calm, confident member of a family with five young children. To complement his efforts, Cesar’s own exotic animal ‘paw’sonal assistants pitch in to assist in the rehabilitation process—including llamas, a parrot and a miniature horse—all full-time residents of the Dog Psychology Center.”

(Those puns are all NatGeo’s.)

Better Human Better Dog will premiere on National Geographic and Nat Geo WILD on Friday, July 30. You can watch the full trailer above.

Foo Fighters have announced that “out of an abundance of caution and concern for the safety of the band” they will be postponing this Saturday’s show date at The Forum in Inglewood, California.

Posting a note to their social media accounts, the band said, “Out of an abundance of caution and concern for the safety of the band, crew, and most of all, the fans, Saturday’s show at the Los Angeles Forum is being postponed to a later date.” The band did not specify who had tested positive. A new date at The Forum will be announced soon, and tickets for the July 17 show will be honored.

The band has been performing live since June 15, notably playing a show at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, California, to a vaccinated audience of 600. They also were the first band to play Madison Square Garden in New York, where they played to a crowd of 15,000, as Billboard notes. Everyone at the MSG show had either been vaccinated or recently tested negative for Covid. After the show, Dave Grohl & Co. posted a triumphant photo to Instagram, captioning, “THANK YOU MADISON SQUARE GARDEN!!! IT WAS A NIGHT WE’LL NEVER FORGET!!! YOU WERE THE LOUDEST @thegarden HAS EVER SEEN!”

Madonna has announced a new concert film, Madame X, documenting her tour of the same name. The documentary will stream on Paramount+ this fall. Directed by Ricardo Gomes, Madame X features footage of the iconic pop singer performing music from her 2019 album of the same name, plus 48 on-stage performers (including Madonna’s children), and the all-female Orquestra Batukadeiras.

Paramount+’s description reads: “Filmed in Lisbon, Portugal, the film captures the pop icon’s rare and rapturous tour performance, hailed by sold-out theatrical audiences worldwide. The unprecedented intimate streaming experience will take viewers on a journey as compelling and audacious as Madonna’s fearless persona, Madame X, a secret agent traveling around the world, changing identities, fighting for freedom and bringing light to dark places.”

“Sharing my vision with global audiences has been profoundly meaningful to me,” Madonna added of the film in a press release. “The opportunity to bring its message and the incandescent artistry of all involved to an even wider audience comes at a time when music is so deeply needed to remind us of the sacred bond of our shared humanity.”

Watch the trailer for Madame X above. Madame X arrives on Paramount+ on 10/8.

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

Former Blink-182 member and current UFO conspiracy theorist Tom DeLonge is set to make his directorial debut with the upcoming film Monsters Of California. Actor Richard Kind, who stars in the film, previously said DeLonge wouldn’t stop talking about UFOs and aliens on set. But, according to DeLonge, that’s not all the film is about. He describes it instead as combining the paranormal and a coming-of-age story riddled with dick jokes.

DeLonge recently sat down with NME for a conversation about his band Angels And Airwaves and Monsters Of California. During the interview, DeLonge was able to give a succinct synopsis of the project:

“About 14 years ago when I started Angels [And Airwaves], I was telling people how we were going to put out books and make movies. Everyone said ‘you’re high, you’re crazy and you’re chasing aliens!’ but I’m just doing the stuff I said I was going to do. Monsters is really the beginning of the mainstream version of what I want to do, which is to put out films that have a much larger appeal that are a lot of fun, that are based on a point of view I have. […] The movie, by the way, is like if Spielberg went back and made an indie [movie] that’s rated R, that’s just paranormal and dick jokes and coming-of-age John Hughes type stuff. So I think people are going to like it, it’s fun.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, DeLonge talked about the possibility of collaborating with Travis Barker. DeLonge said they have recorded some music and hope to one day tour together, but there are too many logistics. “Travis and I, we never really talked about doing a whole album or anything like that, but we do have a song laying around that we did,” he said. “We have talked about not only releasing it, but what would it be like to play shows but everyone’s so busy, how do you do that? How do you assemble the band, get all the songs back up there, figure out where you’re going to tour, when you’re going to tour. Travis has a million things going on, I have a million things going on. It’s not that we don’t want it, but it’s not the priority. It’s a nostalgic, awesome thing, but nostalgic, awesome things don’t really run your life. You’ve got to fit them in.”

Watch DeLonge’s full interview with NME here.

Blink-182 is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Rico Nasty joins genre-bending rock band Love Ghost to indulge her own hard-rock tendencies on the band’s new song “Wolfsbane.” Grinding guitars that shift from punk to metal to trap back a track that dips into folklore and horror iconography to compare being a werewolf to living with a mental health condition. That sounds heady, but between Rico’s devil-may-care demeanor and frontman Finnegan Bell’s deft songwriting, the concept holds up pretty well.

Bell explained as much to Rolling Stone, saying, “I wanted to write a song about werewolves but from a mental health perspective. I wanted to write about something that you wish you could change and you have to fight every day. But unfortunately, it’s what you become — whether that’s mental illness, demons, addiction, etc. It’s for the listener to decide.”

For her part, Rico gave an enthusiastic co-sign. “‘Wolfsbane’ wanted to get me in my rock bag,” she said. “I love when bands want to bring me into their world and let me rock out. The production behind this song is fire. It gives two different vibes when the beat switches, bringing a hard-rock element.” Longtime Rico fans will certainly enjoy her indulging her punk-rock proclivities as she does on “OHFR?” from her own debut album Nightmare Vacation, but more recently she’s been going pop with songs like “Magic.”

Listen to Love Ghost’s “Wolfsbane” featuring Rico Nasty above.

Rico Nasty is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Tucker Carlson’s apparently duplicitous ways recently gained the spotlight when The New York Times‘ Ben Smith reported that the Fox News host is secretly “a great source” for unsavory stories about Donald Trump. Don’t forget, though, that he’s also a master deflector. In response to Smith’s inquiries (mentioned in the article) about whether Tucker’s received the Covid-19 vaccination (which he vilifies on-air), Tucker deflected with a question about Smith’s sex life. And now, it seems that Tucker’s vigorous on-air support of Trump (including the whole insurrection subject) might be an illusion, too.

At the very least, Tucker seems like he opportunistically hopped aboard the Trump train in an extreme way, if some resurfaced remarks are any indication. The Washington Post has unearthed some 1999 remarks that Tucker made to fellow Slate blogger Evan Smith. The conversation revolved around the possibility of Trump entering the 2000 presidential race under the Reform Party. Smith initially called Trump “repulsive,” and Tucker agreed while doubling down, bigly. Via Slate:

“I’d love to add something even meaner to your description of Donald Trump — he’s the sort of person I want to keep kicking once he’s down — but I don’t think I can. You’ve said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet. What a wonderfully pithy, accurate sentence. Congratulations.”

Interestingly enough, Insider contacted Fox News for comment and received a response that pointed towards a 2016 Politico column penned by Tucker, who called Trump “imperfect,” although he was a fan of his populist ways. And it appears that Tucker decided to seize upon that wave, too, and he’s not giving up anytime soon. All those wild rants about UFOs, sprinkled with pro-Trump rhetoric, made Tucker Carlson Tonight the top-rated show during last quarter’s cable-news competition. He’s wildly veered out of reality, but why would he ever change course now?

(Via Slate, Washington Post & Insider)

In the days, weeks, and months following Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, you didn’t have to be Freud to notice that the lame-duck president wasn’t ready to relinquish power—and would stop at nothing to try and keep his tiny orange hands on the nuclear button. But as New York Magazine notes, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley was actually so concerned by Trump’s unpredictable behavior and attempts at power-grabbing that he issued a warning to his colleagues that the 45th president of the United States was starting to sound an awful lot like Adolf Hitler.

The story comes courtesy of a new book, I Alone Can Fix It, co-penned by Washington Post colleagues Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The book recounts how just days ahead of the January 6th Capitol riots, Milley was concerned about the potential threat Trump posed to our democracy and warned that the president seemed to be right at the edge of his own “Reichstag moment.”

According to the book, Milley received a call one week after the 2020 election from an “old friend” who sought to warn him that the MAGA faction was attempting to “overturn the government.” Initially, Milley dismissed the claim, telling his aides, “They may try, but they’re not going to f*cking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.” But as Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day loomed closer, and Trump’s repeated attempts to actually, yep, overturn the election kept failing, Milley became a bit more concerned. As Ben Jacobs writes for New York:

Still, Milley was disturbed by the sight of Trump supporters rallying to his cause in November, calling them “Brownshirts in the streets.” Leonnig and Rucker wrote that Milley “believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military.” The general likened the U.S. to Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he said, referring to the arson attack on Germany’s Parliament that Hitler used as a pretext to assume absolute power and destroy democracy.

On January 6, Milley watched with disgust as Trump addressed his supporters. Soon after Trump finished speaking, a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the presidential election by a joint session of Congress—and many promised to return for Biden’s inauguration. “These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley said a week after the attack on the Capitol.

Following Biden’s inauguration, and the official ousting of Trump from the White House, former First Lady Michelle Obama apparently asked Milley how he was feeling about the change in leadership. “No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley told her.

I Alone Can Fix It will be released on July 20, 2021.

(Via New York Magazine)

John Mayer’s new album Sob Rock is set to drop in less than 24 hours, and ahead of then, he sat down for a big conversation about it with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. During their chat, he explained why he views the new album as a “sh*tpost.”

He said:

“What I would love other people to understand is that there is no more reason to have to adhere to any given idea of cool. Especially post-pandemic, which, for the first time in anyone’s lives, stopped the clock on hyper-modern day trade of culture. And so for me, I went, ‘Well, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. And in fact, I can make a record that’s, in some way, provocative, if not antagonizing,’ right? And then I did what I thought was going to be antagonizing, and this is the most important part of the conversation, I think, creatively. You may just have to dress up your intentions to make something different. And call it by a name that no one else is going to call it after it’s made, and for me it was like, ‘I want to get in trouble. I want someone to tell me this is sh*t.’

And I made a record that, to me at the time, only in a way to coax something out of me that I wouldn’t have normally done, sh*tpost a record. It’s called Sob Rock because it’s a sh*tpost. But more importantly, it’s what I thought was a sh*tpost, and this gets down to where artists sit in front of you and play you what they think is their garbage, and you go, ‘That’s the best thing I ever heard you play.’ It makes a mockery of their interpretation of the experience, which is just enough to break out of the mold and make something unique.”

He went on to say that part of the inspiration behind the album was his need to do something different, saying, “The reason you have to is because I never want to be that artist who runs out of paint colors and begins to just make the same songs over and over again. If you’re lucky enough to be 20 years in, you do have to deal with the fact that, wow, these paint colors they want me to use, it’s another blue painting. It’s another blue painting with a white stripe. It’s another blue painting with a white tree. It’s another blue painting with a white car. So for me, I’m only interested if I get to put new paints on the canvas. And if my way of doing it at this time was, literally no one’s looking. This one’s called Sob Rock because you just would never have imagined that was the name of the record.”

Watch the full interview above.

Sob Rock is out 7/16 via Columbia. Pre-order it here.

Donald Trump has a habit of downplaying many of the most terrible things he’s ever said or done with the “I was only joking” excuse. But the former president has never been known for his rapier wit—nor for enjoying being the butt of other people’s jokes. So it was hardly surprising when he tweeted his annoyance at late-night shows like SNL for making fun, or when he attempted to get the DOJ to investigate these late-night comedy shows for… making jokes. But Trump wasn’t the only one complaining: Many of Trump’s unhinged MAGA faithful took a cue from their leader and bombarded the FCC to complain about all the Trump-ribbing happening on Saturday Night Live—a show that’s been poking fun at politicians of all ideological stripe for almost 50 years.

As VICE reports, Trump supporters logged a whopping 360 pages of complaints against NBC, SNL, and other comedians who dared to mock the former president and his endless series of gaffes while occupying the White House. While some of the complaints were as eloquent and to-the-point as Trump himself—”a tv show snl nbc”—others offered quite a bit more food for thought.

A couple of key moments inspired the most amount of MAGA-produced vitriol, like when Michael Che referred to the 45th president as a “bitch” and a “cracker” during his “Weekend Update” segment. Here’s just a sampling of those responses:

“Michael Che referred to the President as a ‘cracker.’ This racial slur is offensive to every non-racist American regardless of race, ethnicity, or skin color.”

Got it.

“A host of Saturday Night Live referred to the President of the United States as a “bitch” and a “cracker” on live television. That type of language has no place on public cable TV, especially on a program that so many families enjoy.”

Families?!

“SNL’s derogatory “Cracker” and “Bitch” comments about President Trump are atrocious and I will no longer be watching SNL at all—nor my children—now or ever.”

Who are these kids watching SNL with their parents? Who are these parents watching SNL with their kids?

“What happened on SNL last Saturday where they called Trump a ‘cracker’ and a ‘bitch’ is completely unacceptable. To see if it’s acceptable, simply think if someone said that about President Obama. How can people keep getting away with this indecency?”

Pretty sure Obama wouldn’t have given a sh*t. And most definitely would not have tweeted about it.

“SNL continues to use racial terms which incites violence and hate speech. SNL should be removed from television completely for being racist. Example: calling white people ‘crackers.’”

Using “racial terms” to incite violence and hate speech? That sounds familiar. This person should be a writer for SNL.

You can read all 360 pages of hilarious quotes and complaints on Government Attic.

(Via VICE)