Fcukers have only been around for a few years, but they’re off to a blazing start. The duo of Shannon Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis (following the 2024 departure of Ben Scharf) dropped their debut EP Baggy$$ late last year and have collaborated with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Now, Fcukers seem to be at the dawn of a new era, as today (July 22), they released a fresh single, “Play Me.”
Fans have heard this upbeat banger already, as the pair have been working it into their live shows and DJ sets. They didn’t go about it alone, as the track is co-written and produced by Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats). Beyond this, a press release notes to “expect much more from the Fcukers very soon.”
Listen to “Play Me” above and find Fcukers’ upcoming tour dates below.
Fcukers’ 2025 Tour Dates
07/26 — New York, NY @ Ruins at Knockdown Center (DJ set, B2B with The Dare)
07/30 — Chicago, IL @ Lolla Pre-Party (with Barry Can’t Swim)
07/31 — Chicago, IL @ Lollapalooza + Afterparty @ Schubas
08/02 — Los Angeles, CA @ Hard Summer
08/07 — San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
08/08 — San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands
09/06 — Montreal, QC @ Palmosa Festival
09/19 — Hudson, NY @ Basilica Soundscape
09/20 — Philadelphia, PA @ Making Time
09/27 — San Diego, CA @ CRSSD Festival
10/14 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner (with Disclosure)
10/15 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner (with Disclosure)
10/17 — Washington, DC @ The Anthem (with Disclosure)
10/18 — Miami, FL @ III Points
11/17 — Paris, France @ La Bellevilloise
11/18 — Brussels, Belgium @ Botanique
11/20 — Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Tolhuistuin
11/22 — Berlin, Germany @ SchwuZ
11/25 — Manchester, UK @ Gorilla
11/26 — London, UK @ Colour Factory
11/29 — Barcelona, Spain @ Nitsa
The second season of Red Bull’s Spiral Freestyle series has been a real eye-grabber so far. The first episode with Ab-Soul, Big Sean, and Joey Badass sparked a buzzy back-and-forth between coasts, while episode two highlighted the best to ever do it, The LOX.
The newly released third episode takes an even bigger swing, presenting the first-ever all-R&B Spiral Freestyle with singers Alex Isley, Aneesa Strings, Arin Ray, and Joyce Wrice (interestingly enough, they’re all California artists this time). As per usual, the setup involves each artist taking a turn at the mic — over a beat by prolific R&B producer ESTA. — as the camera revolves around the Spiral studio (fun fact: while you may have thought the camera is an automatic rig on a track, it’s actually a living camera person doing all that spinning).
As for what each artist has been up to in 2025: Isley recently signed a deal with Free Lunch Agency, distributed by Warner Records, Arin Ray contributed to Joe Kay’s debut EP If Not Now, Then When?, Wrice has been working on her second album, and Aneesa Strings has had a steady collection of performances.
Watch Red Bull’s first-ever R&B Spiral Freestyle with Alex Isley, Aneesa Strings, Arin Ray, and Joyce Wrice above.
Long Beach singer Giveon is back with a new album, Beloved, and has announced the tour dates to go along with it. In his press release, he promises the Dear Beloved, The Tour will be special, as it’s a reflection of the process of creating songs like “Twenties” and “Rather Be.”
“I think it’s going to be magical because the album was made live, so it’s made to be performed live,” he said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “It’s going to be my best tour. I want to do strings, I want to do horns, I want to do background vocals, so I feel like [I’ll have] a full eight to 10 piece [backing band], depending on how big the stages are. The album is really a movie, it’s a world, and I want the night to feel like that.”
Looking at the venues, he’s definitely getting his wish; he’ll also be supported by Free Nationals, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Sasha Keable. Tickets go on sale Friday, July 25 at 10am local, while the artist presale begins today at 11am PT. You can find more info here.
Beloved is out now via Epic Records. Find more information here.
Giveon Dear Beloved, The Tour Dates
10/01 — Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater *+
10/02 — Vancouver, BC @ Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre *+
10/04 — San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium *+
10/07 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre *+
10/10 — Las Vegas, NV @ BleauLive Theater inside Fontainebleau Las Vegas *+
10/11 — Phoenix, AZ @ Arizona Financial Theatre *+
10/14 — Dallas, TX @ The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory *+
10/15 — Houston, TX @ Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land *+
10/18 — Atlanta, GA @ Synovus Bank Amphitheater at Chastain Park^+
10/20 — Chicago, IL @ Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom ^+
10/23 — Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre ^+
10/25 — Philadelphia, PA @ Freedom Mortgage Pavilion ^+
10/27 — Toronto, ON @ Coca-Cola Coliseum ^+
10/30 — Washington, D.C. @ The Anthem ^+
11/01 — Charlotte, NC @ Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre ^+
11/04 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway ^+
11/06 — New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
* Free Nationals
^ Charlotte Day Wilson
+ Sasha Keable
We got news of a new Mac DeMarco album, Guitar, last month, while also sharing “Home.” Now he has unveiled another new song, the chilled-out “Holy,” as well as a video for it.
It’s a straightforward visual, featuring DeMarco, filming himself from a top-down perspective presumably with a selfie stick, walking around a grassy area, mouthing along with the lyrics, and eating an apple.
I think Guitar is as close to a true representation of where I’m at in my life today as I can manage to put to paper. I’m happy to share this music, and look forward to playing these songs as many places as I’m able.”
Watch the “Holy” video above and find DeMarco’s upcoming tour dates below.
Mac DeMarco’s 2025 & 2026 Tour Dates
08/29/2025 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre * +
08/30/2025 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre = +
08/31/2025 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre + =
09/04/2025 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall =
09/05/2025 — Baltimore, MD @ The Lyric =
09/07/2025 — New York, NY @ Radio City Music Hall = +
09/08/2025 — New York, NY @ Radio City Music Hall + =
09/09/2025 — Boston, MA @ Roadrunner +
09/19/2025 — Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre * +
09/20/2025 — Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre = +
09/22/2025 — Forest Grove, OR @ Grand Lodge =
09/23/2025 — Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre =
09/24/2025 — Vancouver, BC @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre =
09/25/2025 — Olympia, WA @ Capitol Theater: Olympia Film Society =
09/27/2025 — Petaluma, CA @ The Phoenix Theater =
09/28/2025 — Petaluma, CA @ The Phoenix Theater *
09/29/2025 — Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl *
10/21/2025 — Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso =
10/22/2025 — Rotterdam, NL @ Maassilo =
10/25/2025 — Paris, FR @ Salle Pleyel =
10/27/2025 — Prague, CZ @ Lucerna Velky Sal =
10/28/2025 — Hamburg, DE @ Docks =
10/30/2025 — Copenhagen, DK @ VEGA =
10/31/2025 — Stockholm, SE @ Fallan =
11/01/2025 — Oslo, NO @ Sentrum Scene =
11/03/2025 — Berlin, DE @ Columbiahalle =
11/04/2025 — Cologne, DE @ Carlswerk &
11/05/2025 — Brussels, BE @ Cirque Royal &
11/08/2025 — Birmingham, UK @ O2 Academy &
11/09/2025 — Brighton, UK @ Brighton Dome &
11/10/2025 — London, UK @ Eventim Apollo = &
11/12/2025 — Cambridge, UK @ Corn Exchange &
11/13/2025 — Bristol, UK @ The Prospect Building &
11/14/2025 — Manchester, UK @ Aviva Studios &
11/15/2025 — Manchester, UK @ Aviva Studios &
11/17/2025 — Dublin, IE @ National Stadium &
11/18/2025 — Dublin, IE @ National Stadium &
12/02/2025 — Halifax, NS @ Light House &
12/03/2025 — Halifax, NS @ Light House &
12/04/2025 — Moncton, NB @ Tide & Boar &
12/06/2025 — Québec City, QC @ Palais Montcalm &
12/07/2025 — Montreal, QC @ MTelus &
12/08/2025 — Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall &
12/09/2025 — Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall &
12/12/2025 — Winnipeg, MB @ Burton Cummings Theatre *
12/13/2025 — Winnipeg, MB @ Burton Cummings Theatre *
12/15/2025 — Saskatoon, SK @ TCU Place *
12/16/2025 — Edmonton, AB @ Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium *
12/17/2025 — Calgary, AB @ Mac Hall *
12/19/2025 — Victoria, BC @ Royal Theatre *
02/16/2026 — Fukuoka, Japan @ DRUM Be-1
02/17/2026 — Osaka, Japan @ Umeda Club Quattro
02/19/2026 — Kyoto, Japan @ TakuTaku
02/20/2026 — Nagoya, Japan @ Nagoya Club Quattro
02/21/2026 — Tokyo, Japan @ Kanda Square Hall
03/06/2026 — Hong Kong @ Kitty Woo Stadium, Tung Po
05/01/2026 — Las Vegas, NV @ A-LOT at AREA15
05/02/2026 — Salt Lake City, UT @ The Complex
05/03/2026 — Denver, CO @ Mission Ballroom
05/05/2026 — La Vista, NE @ The Astro
05/06/2026 — Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
05/07/2026 — Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed (Fairgrounds)
05/08/2026 — Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre
05/09/2026 — Cleveland, OH @ The Agora
05/11/2026 — Asheville, NC @ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
05/12/2026 — Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
05/13/2026 — Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern
05/16/2026 — Austin, TX @ ACL Live at the Moody Theater
05/18/2026 — Dallas, TX @ Longhorn Ballroom
05/19/2026 — Oklahoma City, OK @ The Criterion
05/21/2026 — Santa Fe, NM @ The Bridge at Santa Fe Brewing
05/22/2026 — Tucson, AZ @ Linda Ronstadt Music Hall
05/23/2026 — San Diego, CA @ Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay
* with Vicky Farewell
+ with Daryl Johns
= with Mock Media
& with Tex Crick
Guitar is out 8/22 via Mac’s Record Label. Find more information here.
It’s been over two years since Teddy Swims released his breakout hit single “Lose Control” in June 2023, and since then, it has gradually become one of the biggest songs ever. Swims’ hit only ended up spending a week at No. 1 (in March 2024), but it has stuck around the Billboard Hot 100 chart for much longer than that.
Behind “Lose Control” on the all-time list are Glass Animals’ “Heat Wave” with 91 weeks, The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” with 90 weeks, Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” with 87 weeks, Awolnation’s “Sail” at 79 weeks, and Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” which has charted for 77 weeks and is still working its way up the all-time ranks now.
The run of “Lose Control” started just about from the very bottom, when it debuted at No. 99 on the chart dated August 26, 2023. On the latest chart, it’s still at No. 9. In total, it has spent 70 weeks in the top 10, and has reached No. 1 on the Radio Songs, Digital Song Sales, Adult Contemporary, Adult Pop Airplay, Adult R&B Airplay, and Pop Airplay charts.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are critical parts of Fleetwood Mac, so it can be easy to forget that they joined the group relatively late into its life: The first LP on which they appeared as band members was the group’s 1975 self-titled album, their tenth overall. Before that, the two were actually a duo and they released one album together, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks.
The release has been referred to as a “lost album,” and Nicks and Buckingham have mostly left the project behind: It’s not on streaming platforms and per Discogs, it was never even officially released on CD.
It looks like the album might be getting another chance, though.
A few days ago, Nicks and Buckingham shared matching lyrics from their song “Frozen Love” on Instagram (here and here). Now, a billboard has been spotted, featuring the album’s cover art and teasing a September 19 release date, seemingly confirming the album is getting reissued.
Nicks spoke about the album in a 2011 interview, saying, “Lindsey and I were coming to the end of our relationship, and I’d met someone else. […] This was a year after Buckingham Nicks came out, which had gotten critical acclaim but Polydor dropped us like a rock. So we were back to square one. It was the only time I ever felt music might not work out. I talked to my parents about going back to school, because I was tired of being a cleaning lady, a waitress, and a rock’n’roll star at the same time. We were really poor. […] But by the end of that year, Mick Fleetwood had asked us to join Fleetwood Mac, sight unseen. Keith Olsen had played him Buckingham Nicks, and told him Lindsey and I came as a pair.”
Not that long ago, Ryan Davis was “stuck in this rut of being in this noisy, drunk basement rock band.” He says this while discussing his unlikely path to “rising star” status at the age of 40 before the release of New Threats From The Soul, the excellent forthcoming album (due July 25) with his stalwart backing group, The Roadhouse Band. When I caught up with him over Zoom, the Louisville-based singer-songwriter was staying at a family cabin in Kentucky, enjoying some seclusion before the record drops. Only I was interrupting his idyll. An indie-rock lifer, Davis for years has been an obscure cult figure with a small following drawn to his witty, wordy, and wandering country-rock songs. But these days, he’s talking to more and more people like me, a confirmation of his newfound “critics’ darling” status.
Things were different during his “noisy, drunk basement rock band” era in the 2010s. Back then, he fronted State Champion, an outfit whose fan base was much richer in quality than quantity. One supporter was David Berman, the late great Silver Jews frontman, who declared that Davis was “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going.” Davis, a Berman devotee who runs his own record label called Sophomore Lounge, put that quote on a promotional sticker and stuck it on State Champion’s album covers. (It was the beginning of constant Berman comparisons that he now regards with serious ambivalence. More on that later.)
Another fan was a teenaged aspiring musician named Jake Lenderman, who haunted State Champion shows and solicited Davis for songwriting advice. “I was first introduced to Ryan’s music when I was probably 17 or 18,” Lenderman recalls now. He opened for State Champion a year later, and remained a loyal Davis acolyte. “At first the words stuck out to me, like ‘Jeff Foxworthy in a serious role,” he says, quoting the 2018 song “Lifetime Sentence.” “I knew that even though I didn’t quite understand what the song was about at the time, I could learn a lot from him.”
Several years later, after Lenderman started calling himself MJ on the way to becoming indie-famous, he paid it forward and invited Davis and his band to open shows on 2024’s Manning Fireworks tour. Suddenly, for this audience, he was a “new” artist. Davis’ big break, as it were, coincided with him disbanding State Champion and taking up with the Roadhouse crew, a move that he says has allowed for greater experimentation with sounds beyond the usual indie-Americana wheelhouse. A former teenaged skate punk who attended art college in Chicago, Davis grew up listening to “MC Hammer and Kris Kross and whatever was on mainstream hip-hop radio or MTV.” He eventually pivoted to George Jones and Johnny Paycheck records in his 20s, but his hip-hop past is still detectable on New Threats From The Soul, which includes at least one lyrical reference to A Tribe Called Quest song and a shockingly logical drum-and-bass breakdown played on guitars and fiddles.
“I just didn’t want there to be any rules,” he explains. “If there is anything I have succeeded at with this new project, it’s been that. The freedom of it has been really liberating and really satisfying.”
Even when Davis appears to work with more traditional song forms, like the rousing New Soul highlight “The Simple Joy” (which has backing vocals by Will Oldham, the Adam Duritz to Davis’ Jakob Dylan), his songs frequently surprise with sly one liners that smuggle pathos inside jokey Trojan horses. “My skull was a dunk tank clown for some schoolyard lass to chastise,” he drawls in one line. “I learned that time was not my friend or foe / more like one of the guys from work,” goes another.
Davis’ songs go on (and on) like that, like an extended serio-comic monologue accented by occasional pedal-steel licks. The shortest track on New Threats is just under six minutes; the longest is nearly 12. That one is called “Mutilation Springs,” and it includes references to “sarcophagus mornings,” “hair metal afternoons,” and “forsaken punks” who “flip for police force work and worse.” He might come off like a show-off if the songs weren’t so authentically conversational or genuinely, pleasingly weird. The lyrics frequently address the challenges of standing up to omnipresent loneliness and discouragement while searching for rare moments of grace. But they’re also about how our malfunctioning brains process the world around us in real time, as a series of warped similes and counterintuitive metaphors that are simultaneously funny and tragic. He’s like John Prine if John Prine had tried to write “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” each time he picked up a guitar.
During our interview, Davis showed me a journal where he puts lyrics as they come to him. “I don’t write songs over the course of years and then say, ‘Oh, this one will work for the record,” he explains. “I say, ‘I need to make a new record,’ and then I sit down and I start playing chords and I say, ‘Okay, I really like this line.’” It’s an obsessive, uneasy process that involves color coding certain phases as he stitches his Frankenstein compositions together.
“I was jokingly describing it to someone recently,” he says, “as the scene in the movie where the FBI agent has all the tack boards and he’s got maps and clues and photos and rants of notes, and there’s a red string. That’s literally how writing songs is for me”
In our interview, we talked about songwriting, country music, being compared to David Berman, and whether he can live up to his own press release.
I am pro-wordy songs, but it’s rare for someone now to write an 11- or 12-minute song with as many verses as your songs have. There are seven tracks on this record, but there are enough lyrics for 14.
For me, it’s all just what the song needs to be. If “Free From The Guillotine,” for example, was missing one refrain, I feel like the whole thing would’ve just fallen apart.
I envy people that can just sit down after work with a guitar and say, “I wrote about my day.” The process is very difficult for me in a way that making art isn’t, I don’t struggle to make visual art at all. I draw every day. I sit down and it’s just like a faucet. It just comes out of me. But songwriting is such a temperamental thing. I have to come out here two and a half hours away from my house to just have one moment of clarity. I also treat every record like it’s the last, because whatever muse is forcing me to do this at age 40, it might not always be there. So I try to just take it seriously and put the effort in and make the exact records I want to make.
I was thinking about something you said in an interview about how Louisville isn’t quite the South and it’s not quite the Midwest. And I wonder how that informs your songwriting. Do you claim a regional identity?
If I said I was from the South, somebody from Georgia would laugh. And if I said I was from the Midwest, my partner who’s from rural northern Iowa would make fun of me. It’s just a region that no one wants to claim. It’s weird, but I think it’s definitely got its own identity and it certainly has informed me as a writer and sort of my narrative voice. I don’t know if I’d be making the music I’m making if I was from any other place, I guess.
Listening to your music, it does sound like a hybrid of Southern and Midwest flavors. It’s where indie rock meets country music.
There’s always been, historically, this pipeline from Louisville to Chicago, where a lot of the Louisville bands would go record with Steve Albini. I know part of Freakwater lived in Chicago and I think Slint lived in Chicago, and there was always kind of this Thrill Jockey/Drag City/Touch And Go Louisville connection. That predated my musical history, of course, but a lot of those influences hit me at an impressionable age. And I went on to live in Chicago for five or six years, so it’s not like I’m this true mid-southern personality. I lived in Chicago for a lot of my formative years, so I think the Midwestern thing really bleeds in.
How did you become interested in country music?
My mom was really into country and folk music. She had John Prine records and Jerry Jeff Walker records and George Jones records. I would see them in our house, but we never really had a turntable. We didn’t spend a lot of time listening to that kind of music. A lot of my earliest moments are of riding around and listening to what my parents were listening to. It was Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers and Warren Zevon and Dire Straits.
When I got to the age where I was starting to play guitar, I felt connected to country music in some way. I sat down to write a song and the first one that came out felt like something that would’ve been influenced by John Prine, even though I hadn’t really listened to much music like that at that time. Maybe it was just in my blood or something.
Living in Chicago, did alt-country have any impact on you?
I have nothing against alt-country, but it’s never been something that anyone gave me access to at a young enough age to where it really informed what I was doing at all. I didn’t hear Wilco until a couple of years into touring with State Champion. I didn’t hear Drive-By Truckers until probably the last five years. People would always say, “Your band is obviously influenced by Whiskeytown or Uncle Tupelo” and all these bands that I literally never heard before. I think it’s because I was coming at it from the same angle that those guys did, which is that I grew up listening to punk music and then I eventually listened to country music.
You also talked about listening to a lot of rap music as a kid. And I can detect that influence, just by how many words you’re able to fit into your songs.
It’s all interconnected through skateboard culture. I grew up obsessed with skateboarding, so I was finding out about the Wu-Tang Clan at the same time as I was finding out about the Dead Kennedys. It was all a little bit after when those things originally happened. But I was just a sponge and I was soaking it all up. I can’t help but think that whatever I was listening to in eighth and ninth grade is still informing how I write a song to this day.
I was actually wondering if the song title “Monte Carlo/No Limits” was a nod to Master P and No Limit Records.
Master P was hugely influential to me. He actually spends a lot of time in Louisville. His son played for the basketball team for a few years. No Limit and SST and all these people that were basically just making these little underground empires out of the trunks of their car, I was informed by them when I started doing Sophomore Lounge. But that song being called “No Limits”? It isn’t really in reference to that. It was actually more in reference to the Bob Dylan song “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.”
You’ve been putting out records for a while now, but this is the first time you’ve gotten significant mainstream attention. Has that changed the stakes for this record in your mind?
I’m not saying this in a self-pitying way, but having no one really give a shit for so long, I think you become your own judge, jury, and executioner. Now that I’m turning 40, I’m not really looking to an audience to help me to decide what kind of record to make.
This record was really hard to write and at multiple points, I almost abandoned it. It just wasn’t up to my own standard. But at no point was I thinking about whether it’d be as big of a success as the last one. At the end of the day, I just feel like I’m alone in the room. I want the shows to be better and I want to have better tours with my friends and it’d be nice to not have to work other jobs at some point in my life. But I feel pretty centered.
You also seem to have good timing. In the 2010s, State Champion was on an island. But now, there are a lot of indie acts working in the country-rock lane.
The whole Lenderman thing is just such a fluke in a good way. The fact that he would always be at our shows when he was literally a kid, I think, in his teens, and come up to me wearing my T-shirt and telling me he liked my band and asking me how to write songs and what I was reading. And I was always nice to him because we felt on the same level as anybody that was at our shows. And we kept those conversations going. When his whole thing blew up, he really just took me up with him and put us on that tour.
Not even in my own mind, but in the eyes of others, there is this sort of stable of bands making alternative country music or whatever you want to call it. I think the timing of it’s good, but like I said, I never grew up listening to Steve Earle. I never grew up wanting to be that guy that just is making this beautiful, sad, poetic music with an acoustic guitar at a coffee shop or something.
I do love songwriting. I deeply love it, and it is priority number one. But I also listen to so many different kinds of music and I’m so passionate about so many things and I just am not interested in trying to just be the trope of, like, Jason Isbell or Tyler Childers. I have nothing but respect for those people, but I just don’t identify with it. Maybe I’m shooting myself in the foot a little. But at the end of the day, if I wasn’t being truly me — which is the only thing I’ve ever known how to do — I think it would be transparent that I was trying to do something that I’m not really qualified to do.
A part of this that’s sort of the elephant in the room is that since David died, there’s been a lot of interest in people wanting there to be a new David, which is very weird.
I was going to ask about that.
When I was in State Champion, I was actively listening to the Silver Jews and trying to figure out how to write songs like that, whereas I’ve not listened to those records since David died. But it’s not been until now that people want to talk about the Berman thing. And it’s just so interesting to me because no one ever used to compare State Champion to the Silver Jews.
I think it’s a comparison people make because of the sound of your voice, which is similar to Berman, and the country-rock milieu you operate in. And there’s the fact that Berman praised your writing. It seems like an obvious comparison to make. But like you said, there is something else going on, where Berman now is like Hank Williams for the current generation of songwriters. An icon who died tragically young that everyone now seems to point to as the ultimate purveyor of the form.
I guess what I’m saying is I always ripped him off. But for some reason, now I’m part of this pack of people who are ripping off Berman where it’s like, I’m not even thinking about David Berman anymore. It’s actually a topic that I don’t even like to talk about too much because it’s complicated, and it’s personal. We were close to him at the end, and some of the people in State Champion were helping him with that tour. And when he died, it was just the twist of the knife and the end of that band. It’s still hard to talk about and think about, but it’s just so weird to me now that it’s all coming back and that’s what every review wants to talk about.
I must imagine that being compared to the guy many consider the greatest songwriter of his generation is a big compliment. At the same time, nobody wants to be compared to somebody else. You always want to be your own person. It’s positive, and also a prison.
I think that’s a good way of putting it. But yeah, I can’t complain. I’m the one that put a quote of his on a sticker on the front of my record. Maybe I dug my own grave with that, but I think it’s ultimately a good thing. I’ve never really talked about this before, but we tried out to be the Purple Mountains band. We jammed with Berman, learned the songs, and hung out with him for a few hours. There’s video of it somewhere, and we were pretty close to the fire. Our violin player was the tour manager, and we were supposed to play some of those shows, and it was just all infighting and stressful in an interpersonal way. And then when he died, it was just kind of like, what’s the point of any of this?
This is a jokey question, but it’s also a serious one: In the press release, Nathan Salsburg calls you one of the greatest songwriters of your generation. Do you agree with him?
[smiles] I don’t, no. The label boss in me decided to put that on a hype sticker. It feels so gross to put it on my own record. But that’s the thing with putting out your own music — you have to be a salesman when you really want to just be the guy out here in the cabin making stuff for someone else to have to deal with.
I think I’m a good songwriter, and I’m an idiosyncratic one in that I do a thing that is very much me and is maybe unique. But I don’t think songwriting or music-making in any way is a competition or that it needs to be thought of in terms of whether Jake [Lenderman] can write a better song than me or if I can write a better song than Cameron Winter, any of these people that everyone’s talking about right now. I think we’re all just in it together and trying to make fun shit happen.
New Threats From The Soul is out 7/25 via Sophomore Lounge. Find more information here.
Summer is a time for taking your foot off the pedal, letting life slow down and pausing to enjoy everything that Mother Nature has to offer — which equates to adventures, road trips, PTO and life on the go. What does this mean for snacking? Products that will satiate an appetite stoked by activity and sun while still being portable. The sort of stuff you can throw in a cooler — think cold, frozen, light and hydrating, over rich and hearty.
One recent trend we love is how much frozen fruit has become ingrained in the snacking zeitgeist, whether that’s in its pure form, pulverized for your smoothie routine, covered in chocolate for your late night sweet tooth, covered in citric acid and sour sugar for your sour tooth or marbled into mini pearls like a fruit version of Dippin Dots — frozen fruit is definitely having a moment and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
So for the steamy months and climbing temperatures; we’re sharing a roundup of snacks and beverages that can tag along in your (ideally temperature-regulated) backpack, suitcase, 2-wheel or 4-wheel vehicle that also satisfy that craving for a pick me up, cool me down or whatever works for you when it comes to busting that summer heat fatigue.
If you’re a frequent visitor to the seltzer aisle, you’ve probably tried or noticed Spindrift at this point. What you may not know is they actually originally started making fruit sodas, and years after cancelling them in favor of seltzers, they’re back! If you’re able to find them locally, trying all the new fountain-soda inspired flavors wouldn’t be a futile endeavor (we also loved their sharp and not very sweet take on Shirley Temple), but Grape Freeze is the best of the bunch. Lacking the sugary sweetness you’d expect from a traditional grape soda, or any sodas, Spindrift’s Grape Freeze is more of a seltzer plus – there is smidgenly sweet fruit juice and citrus tartness with ideal carbonation ratio, but no cavities will form from routine consumption.
Spindrift’s Grape Freeze is a tasty beverage primed for Summer heat and fits snugly in pockets, coozies and coolers.
Back in the day, the little red Sun-Maid raisins boxes went in lunches nationwide and were pretty much the only readily available and easily accessible dried fruit treat. If your parents were health nuts, you could buy a bag of apricots, dried peaches, or prunes but you also would need to wear a diaper to school to be prepared for any collateral damage. Craisins came along later on, but Sun-Maid’s raisin cultural cachet was tough to transcend.
Today, the dried fruit market has expanded greatly and includes just about every type of fruit you can find under the sun (pun-intended). Cue Sun-Maid’s Farmstand Reserve line, a selection of premium dried fruits packaged for your snacking or lunching pleasure – the Dried Mixed Berries variety is particularly delicious, featuring not just craisins but also Bing cherries and blueberries. The dried Bing cherries and blueberries are both plumper and juicier than you expected from typical dried berries and in that same vein, feel like a special treat. And we all deserve special treats on the daily, don’t we?
Think of this like an elevated version of Lunchables — Olli has taken the pains of pairing and packaging 3 perfectly complementary items in one for your pleasure (examples are Pepperoni & Mozzarella, Calabrese & Asiago or Chipotle & Monterey Jack all with the same crackers) and when there are so many choices, every option is a winner.
Our personal favorite is Sopressata & Cheddar – the mild but rich cheddar pairs perfectly with the umami-forward and more aggressive Sopressata! Olli’s snack packs can save a hangry moment on a trip, be on deck for light snacking or even a mini-meal when you need a power up.
Firehook and chili crunch-makers Fly By Jing have teamed up for a special chili-infused snack.
The snack strikes the perfect balance with the Fly By Jing-collab Chili Crackers. The flatbread like snack doesn’t overpower the palate but help to ensure a nice spiced accent to whatever else you’re eating it with.
Firehook has injected the chili crunch flavor into the flour, creating a unique spicy flatbread that’s subtle enough to enjoy with veggies, dips and cured meats while being not so spicy that they make you reach for the Tums.
Tru Fru’s chocolate-covered raspberries are straight-up addictive, mostly due to their berry-like bite-sized shape and crunchy texture. The outer chocolate provides a sweet richness and serves as a binder for the inner berry portion.
What the flock is Flock? It’s chicken skin in a bag! As unappetizing as that word combination is, if your family hasn’t fought over the chicken skin anytime a roasted chicken is served is it even a real family? Flock mediates those squabbles with bags of reserves, plainly seasoned but full of protein and fatty richness. The crunch factor is on full display and the seasoning though plain, does not overpower or overwhelm the natural umami poultry flavor.
Bobo’s Peace Oat Pie bites are one of those packaged treats you see at convenience store and instantly recoil. A dry packaged pie bite filled with some sort of potentially gross fruit filling? No thanks. Well at Uproxx, we don’t turn our noses — or tastebuds — up to new snacks. Bobo’s Peach Oat Pie bites offer a perfect bite size flavor and carb grenade. Gluten, non-GMO and vegan, Bobo’s deftly packs a ton of peach flavor, texture and actual fruit into these chewy, moist bites.
Anything bite size is automatically better than the original, think Butterfinger BB’s, the York Peppermint Patty or Reese’s Bites. Enter Edward Marc’s Girl Scout Thin Mint bites (officially sanctioned, thanks for asking).
These remixed Thin Mints pack the cookie crunch of the Girl Scout original with a coating of mint cream around the cookie core, mimicking the cookie in candy form with a chocolatey outer layer, and a waxy sweetness that conjures the childhood wonder of sampling thin mints and feeling that coolness of mint in the back of your mouth for the first time.
Haribo wasn’t messing around with the Burner bag — a perfect medley of classics like the sour sugar dusted cola bottles, sour color rings, sour twin cherry branches, sour grapefruit sticks, and two differently flavored sour ring-shaped gummies of unknown origins. If you’re in Frankenstein mode (the sort of snacker that likes to dissect and reassemble before consumption) then Haribo’s Burner bag is a choose your own adventure in sour Haribo gummy format.
The Burner Bag gummies offer that gummy bounce we expect from Haribo, in a mix of classic flavors. But hey Haribo — where are the sour bears at? Get them in this mix ASAP!
Coldplay is the talk of the music world at the moment, after cameras at their concert inadvertently caught Andy Byron, now-former CEO of data operations startup Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the company’s chief people officer, holding each other intimately and having an affair. Coldplay later nodded to the moment, saying at their next show, “We’d like to say hello to some of you in the crowd. How we’re gonna do that is we’re gonna use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. So please, if you haven’t done your makeup, do your makeup now.”
“Do we have any lovebirds in the house? Don’t worry, we ain’t got any of that Coldplay snidey f*cking camera sh*t. Doesn’t matter to us who you’re f*cking mingling with, or tingling with… fingering with. None of our f*cking business. This one’s for the lovebirds, anyway.”
Tyler, The Creator is on a generational roll right now. Since 2017’s Flower Boy, each of his albums have introduced outstanding new sounds, aesthetics, and personas to his oeuvre, and each one has been warmly received by both critics and fans. He’s won multiple Grammys, sold out arena tours, and with each release, effortlessly topped the Billboard 200.
And today, he’s extended that run with the release of his ninth studio album, Don’t Tap The Glass. What’s crazy is he only announced the project three days prior to its release while still on tour for his last one, Chromakopia. While I praised his rollout and release strategy for that album at the time, the fact that he doubled down just shows his belief in doing things his own way.
What truly gasts my flabbers about it all, though, is that Tyler might be the only artist to come from hip-hop who gets to do this. By “this,” I don’t only mean play fast and loose with album releases and promotion schedules, but also to so wildly experiment with sonics and visuals in an increasingly risk-averse creative climate. The endless pursuit of shareholder value and growth has stymied practically any sort of exploration in the musical landscape (especially at Tyler’s echelon) in recent years, but the Hawthorne, California native remains mysteriously, thankfully immune.
And his successes should be a wake-up call to the corporate commercial interests that seek to exploit art and entertainment for capitalistic purposes. Tyler, The Creator is what you get when you let the creators (ahem) be creative.
To be fairer to the spreadsheet surfers than they’d ever be to any of us working stiffs, I get it. Predictability of return on investment, in their minds, largely depends upon replicable wins. If it works, do it again ’til it doesn’t. Taking risks is a sucker’s game; Leaps of faith could leave you free-falling with no parachute. But the music industry has never really operated by conventional wisdom and regular-people logic; It’s Looney Tunes rules a lot of the time.
Just consider the foundation on which hip-hop, the baseline for Tyler’s musical influences, began; kids with the first digital musical equipment, much of it of dubious provenance, using that equipment “wrong” to invent record scratching, sampling, dub tapes, and rapping where singing had powered so much of popular music. Then, when the prevailing style was party rap, here comes gangsta rap. Then, when gangsta rap dominated the scene, Kanye West appeared to turn the business on its ear. Then came his musical progeny, both direct and indirect.
Tyler is just one of those, a musical omnivore just as likely to sample an obscure European jazz sample to spit vicious battle raps over as he is to bang out a bewildering synth symphony and sing about making his earth shake with an incomprehensible verse from one of rap’s maddest mad scientists. On Don’t Tap The Glass, he says, he wanted to encourage young Black men especially to be able to dance, to move their bodies again (I’ve written about this before) in a world of intense surveillance and increased scrutiny.
On this new album, he goes from ’80s LA freestyle (perhaps inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s similar excavation on GNX) on “Sugar On My Tongue” to Zapp-like funk-R&B a track later on “Sucka Free” (Troutman would be proud), from ’90s Atlanta bass on “Don’t You Worry Baby” to a straight-up drum-n-bass breakdown on “I’ll Take Care Of You” sprinkled by the HBCU trap of 106 & Park faves Crime Mob. It’s a living museum of Black music from the past four decades, freewheeling its way through the various scenes that made us move our bodies to release the stresses of life. There’s no better time for it: There’s a lot to be stressed about these days.
But the confusing part is why only Tyler is allowed to be this free, this untethered from financial considerations, to… well… play the way he does. Listening to this, I racked my brain for another artist to have come from hip-hop who’s gotten the same sort of leeway to be their eclectic self, to put the full range of their influences on display in the past two decades. I got Beyoncé and maybeJanelle Monáe. Even at their most expansive, artists like Drake, Kanye West, and Kendrick Lamar have only ever gotten to rap over “weird” beats that nod to Black-birthed genres like house, techno, freestyle, and DnB.
For a while, acts like Outkast could tool around with different styles, and more recently, acts like Channel Tres, IDK, Leikeli47, and PinkPantheress get to experiment with nostalgic sounds while flying under the radar. But Black music has always encompassed far more sounds than just R&B and rap, gospel, and jazz. And while “cohesion” has become a turnkey for assessing albums as bodies of work, it would be so nice if more artists were allowed to be like Tyler, The Creator and just… create.
Going back to Beyoncé for a second, remember when she dropped Cowboy Carter with the insistence that it wasn’t a “country” album, because she wanted folks to embrace the breadth of Black influence on Americana and pop culture? Tyler, The Creator is the proof of concept. Let artists — especially Black artists and specifically those you are dying to classify as just rappers — stretch their creative wings as far as they’ll go without making a “concept album” like Lil Yachty’s rock album Let’s Start Here or Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind.
As Tyler himself said on Twitter just after announcing Don’t Tap The Glass, “Y’all better get them expectations and hopes down, this ain’t no concept nothing.” And it’s not. It’s an expression of a concept, that creators create — they create what they need, and what they see that the world needs, in a moment in time, whether that’s a message of hope and solidarity, a physically driven emotional catharsis, or just the permission to be everything you are without reservations.
Don’t Tap The Glass is out now via Columbia Records. Find more information here.
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