Of the many “huh?” moments in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the biggest “what is happening?” sequence might be Bruce Wayne’s nightmare (or “Knightmare,” as it’s been dubbed online). In it, Earth is now a desolate wasteland, Lois Lane is dead, and after becoming susceptible to Darkseid’s Anti-Life equation, Superman has turned into a violent, tyrannical leader. “She was my world and you took her from me,” Superman tells an unmasked, beat-down Bruce Wayne before gripping his heart, presumably to kill him. That’s when Bruce wakes up, startled by the arrival of a time-traveling Flash.

It’s… a lot, so much so that even director Zack Snyder isn’t entirely sure what’s going on. During a commentary live-stream on Vero for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder recalled, “I guess it’s boring for him waiting for it to decrypt so he fell asleep. Maybe. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a by-product of Flash cracking on the cosmic treadmill or whether it creates some sort of rift where it allows Batman to see into the future. It could be a combo of those things.” It’s not the most help explanation, but at least he’s honest?

Elsewhere in the live-stream, Snyder, of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fame, joked about Batman shooting hired goons with the Batmobile (“I’m sure these guys are fine. They’re going to be 100 percent okay, they’re not going to be dead. Those guys in the car there, they’re 100 percent fine”) and explained the notorious Martha scene. “That’s what the thesis of this thing is, that we’re all humans and that we all connect on a level,” he said. “Our mothers have the same name… That is really sort of this fundamental, ‘We both have a mother, so we are both human.’ Even though Superman is from another planet, his connection to humanity is so clean that Batman is able to re-energize himself.” If only everyone’s mother was named Martha, the world would be less of a “Knightmare.”

(Via WhatCulture)

For many folks, R&B music is about emotions: love and heartbreak are often the primary focuses of the genre. But for Toronto crooner PartyNextDoor, it’s always been an outlet for him to address his lack of attachments, which can read at times like a stubborn refusal to allow himself to become attached. When he first emerged on the scene in the early 2010s which his unromantic version of anti-R&B, he helped spark a revolution (along with his countryman The Weeknd, who also recently released a coldhearted project earlier this year, albeit one with more polished pop leanings) in the sound. He and his fellows redefined the genre for a generation who suddenly had access to Tinder and a whole new vocabulary for relationships, including FWB, situationships, and ghosting.

With his long-awaited new project, PartyMobile, PND doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel. He instead makes tweaks to the formula that has long served him as one of the frontrunners of this newer form of anti-R&B: Ambivalent, arms-distance ballads, dancehall-inflected ruminations on his inability (or his refusal) to form emotional bonds, and filtered-vocals on fractious f*ckboy anthems warning potential paramours of the dangers of getting too attached to him. Its mileage may vary based on how well you relate, but ironically, he may have crafted the perfect project for our socially-distant times — whether mandatory or voluntary.

Take “Savage Anthem,” the divisive album closer. “Don’t hold your breath,” he croaks over downtempo production by fellow OVO Sound OG, 40, “Don’t wait on my love.” It’s sort of thing his boss Drake sings or says all the time. But where Drake usually offers at least a halfhearted justification for why you should not wait on his love — he’s busy, he’s out of town, he’s working, he can’t trust you because of his stardom — Party’s thought process is much more cutthroat: “I put the dirt into dirtbag,” he either boasts or laments (or maybe it’s both), “Gave me your heart, watch me break that.” For Party, heartbreak is just part of the game — a part he has no intention of playing himself.

Speaking of Drake, the original sadboi crooner shows up on “Loyal,” which does double duty as the album’s lead single and its thesis statement, if there is such a thing. “We get it on and then you go” is tucked into the bridge in an otherwise sappy come-on. “I just don’t wanna let go.” PND is lonely (as is Drake), but while he fully expects availability, he doesn’t want anyone to expect reciprocity. Remember when Lauryn Hill sang about that on “The Ex-Factor” 20 years ago? It’s easy to imagine she was singing it to PartyNextDoor — or at least to a man who similarly subscribes to PND’s half-in, half-out philosophy of love in the 21st century.

“Trauma” is as good of an explanation for this behavior as any. Over a deceptively upbeat, almost tropical backdrop, Party speaks to the “trauma” of losing out after investing heavily in a lover who winds up leaving. “Traumatized, I can’t sleep at night,” he worries, “Traumatized, I need you by my side… I’ll never meet a girl like you again.” Isn’t that why we all spend our nights swiping until the wee hours? We all just want some company, but the risk of being hurt always feels way too great — especially when there are so many options out there and so many apps designed to feed our appetites for something quick, something easy, something that feels like something, but won’t feel like losing everything when it turns out to be nothing. We’re all just picking through the wreckage of our most devastating breakups and hoping we never have to go through them again.

Which is why Party makes the perfect music for the moment. It’s upbeat and it’s catchy, with the dancehall influences at its foundation giving a veneer of fun and frolic. It’s never enough to cover up the melancholy at each song’s center. The party next door is just a smokescreen for the loneliness of the neighbor throwing it. Party’s relative lack of evolution in this regard belies his institutional role in the music of today — does he sound like Gunna and Young Thug in the moments when he switches from crooning to rapping, or do they sound like him because of his early genre pioneering for hip-hop and R&B? While it’s easy to wish he’d switched up a little, picking livelier production or pushing his topical boundaries just a little — it’s nearly impossible to deny that this is the world we live in now. Everybody’s afraid to commit, everybody’s afraid to evolve, and we’re all just a little both lonely, hoping to connect with someone but always with one foot out the door.

PartyMobile is out now on OVO Sound/Warner Records. Get it here.

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

Spoilers from this week’s The Walking Dead episode will obviously be found below, so here’s your chance to lurch away like a zombie.

For those unfamiliar with The Walking Dead, this week’s episode, “Look at the Flowers,” would be an out-of-context trip, even for anyone already familiar with zombie movies and television shows. Hell, what’s going on now would probably sound bizarre to fans of The Walking Dead who bailed after season seven.

Consider what has gone on the last season and a half: A messed-up cult of nameless wanderers who call themselves The Whisperers wear the skin of zombies over their own faces so that they can blend in and roam with other hordes of zombies, which they use as their own mindless, unkillable armies. A man named Negan — best known for bashing in the heads of two characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbwire he named after his dead wife — ends up joining The Whisperers to take them down from the inside. This requires that he have sex with a bald woman who goes by the name of Alpha while she is wearing a skin mask, which is a turn-on for Negan because she reminds him of his late wife, who died of cancer.

Negan cuts off the head of the bald woman, though he gets tearful about it because (again) the mass murderer in the skin masks reminds him of his late wife. Negan, by the way, used to be a high-school gym teacher. Negan subsequently takes Alpha’s head and plants it on a pike, where it is discovered by Beta, a former world-famous country singer turned Whisperer. WHAT? He removes Alpha’s zombified head from the spike, throws it in a bag, and then distills meaning and direction from the hisses of the decapitated zombie head.

Alpha’s hissing leads Beta to an old dive-bar, where he listens to an old record of his, and psyches himself up to lead another horde of zombies into battle, but not before he removes the skin from Alpha’s face and plants it over half of his own face. The other half of his face is covered by the older, leathered skin of his dead friend from rehab. Now he looks like Zombie Phantom of the Opera.

If disturbing content is what viewers are looking for, there’s plenty of is in this season of The Walking Dead, and with Beta and The Whisperers marching toward Alexandria like they’re in a “Thriller” video, I expect there will be more, if not in next week’s episode, then in the season finale (whenever that airs).

Meanwhile, Carol’s storyline this week largely entailed wrestling with her own demons, and those demons took the form of Alpha, the ghost of whom haunted Carol into a structure that collapses upon her. As a zombie approaches Carol — pinned underneath the wreckage — the ghost of Alpha taunts her about the mistakes of her past. Carol has suffered more losses (mostly children) than maybe anyone else on The Walking Dead, and the ghost of Alpha needles all those sore spots, blaming her for sending Henry away to The Hilltop (which led to his death) and reminding Carol of the time she had to shoot mentally-ill Lizzie for killing her little sister, Mika. All of this, of course, followed the death of her biological daughter, Sophie. The Walking Dead has really done a number on Carol, who committed suicide in the comics. After her sequence with Alpha in “Look at the Flowers,” it’s easy to wonder who she avoided it here.

However, the television Carol pulls herself together just in time to remove herself from the wreckage and violently dispatch with the zombie before heading back to Alexandria, where Daryl is waiting for her, though their relationship is still uneasy and strained, and will likely remain so as long as Connie remains missing.

In the meantime, Daryl and Negan also had an adventure together, and by that I mean, Daryl is angry that Negan didn’t kill Alpha soon enough, and he remains deeply skeptical of Negan’s motives, at least until a couple of Whisperers stumble upon them and treat Negan as their new Alpha. Negan — who had been handcuffed by Daryl — does not use the opportunity to kill Daryl, but rather to save him from the Whisperers, which earns Negan Daryl’s begrudging respect. “[Alpha] took it too far,” Negan tells Daryl. “You don’t kill people for no reason, and you do not kill kids.”

“Is that supposed to make me like you?” Daryl asks?

“No,” Negan responds. “But what about my winning personality?”

Silent grunt.

I think, Daryl and Negan may someday become reluctant friends. We’re only two seasons away now from the Negan/Daryl bromance!

Additional Notes

— Eugene, Yumiko, and Ezekiel’s storyline is more about setting up next season than it is about resolving The Whisperers’ arc. They meet Princess on the way to Charleston, which signals the next — and final — arc from the comics, The Commonwealth. Meanwhile, Ezekiel is struggling with his cancer.

— Carol and Daryl are really hard on Negan for taking too long to kill Alpha, which I think is unfair. It takes time to earn someone’s trust, sleep with them, destroy an entire community together, and then cut off their head!

— The title of Beta’s real-life country album is Half Moon, which is interesting considering what his face looks like by the end of the episode.

— Ghost Alpha mentioned Carols’ ex-husband Ed Peletier. It’s been a long time since that season 1 character has been mentioned.

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Griselda Records’ Conway The Machine followed up his 2019 project Look What What I Became today with the release of Lulu, a seven-song EP produced entirely by The Alchemist. The EP features appearances from Schoolboy Q and Queens rap legend Cormega and haunting, hardcore beats from the mind of the veteran LA producer. The complete project landed just three days after the lead single, “Shoot Sideways” with Schoolboy Q.

The Griselda rapper recently collaborated with producer Big Ghost Ltd. on the nine-song album Griselda Ghost in October, just a month after releasing Look What What I Became. Those two releases, along with Eif 2: Eat What U Kill and Everybody Is F.O.O.D. 3, brought the number of solo releases from Conway in 2019 to four — not including his contribution to Griselda’s group debut, WWCD. It’s probably safe to say that Conway is one of the busiest rappers in the game today.

Lulu was also accompanied with an exclusive collaboration with Dutch streetwear brand Patta. The collection includes a security jacket with the album art on the back, a snapback cap, and an exclusive vinyl of the record. You can learn more about the collaboration at Patta’s blog here.

Lulu is out now on ALC / Empire. Get it here.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Across the globe, artists are postponing and canceling shows, suspending promotional campaigns, and pushing their albums back. But last week, Dua Lipa did the opposite. While it might be more in line with the pop audience’s love of breathless exaggeration to call this act heroic, in a lot of ways, it felt like a vote of confidence that the listening public desperately needed. Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was slated for release this coming Friday, April 3, but when the world began to shift drastically due to social distancing required to halt the global spread of Coronavirus, Lipa didn’t postpone her album, she pushed it up.

Released a week early this past Friday, March 27, the widely-anticipated follow-up to her self-titled 2017 debut, Future Nostalgia features the kind of shimmering, dance-floor bops that can instantly elevate the mood of irritated, exhausted, and isolated people everywhere. It’s one of the most solid wall-to-wall pop albums of the last few years, as each of these eleven tracks has its own mood and style, but each song still blends seamlessly in with the others. Future Nostalgia feels like an aesthetic as much as an album, channeling ‘80s pop like “Physical” right alongside and neon-tinted high-tempo bangers like “Hallucinate.”

Rising to prominence off the swaggering, single-minded get-the-f*ck-over-him banger “No Rules,” Lipa’s take on the brokenhearted pop star protagonist was all cure, no symptoms. Her brisk, no-nonsense prescription for getting rid of the man who can’t commit but wants to keep hooking up anyway struck a chord with a generation raised on casual sex and aloof dismissals. Following that up with an aloof dismissal of her own, in the towering and bombastic “IDGAF,” Lipa proved that regardless of the BPM, listeners were enthralled with her approach.

Future Nostalgia doubles down on all that breakup ammunition, particularly on the lead single “Don’t Start Now,” and another early release, “Break My Heart,” but also stretches out into pure horniness, a perfect complement to the European disco vibes scattered across the record. “Physical” is a cousin to her Calvin Harris collab “One Kiss,” but goes a lot farther than needing a single peck on the lips, and “Good In Bed” is the ideal ode to hate sex, channeling early Kate Nash insolence and just a hint of twee. It’s been a good year, so far, for pop music, but we haven’t gotten anything this devoted to the thrilling rush of physical lust. While everyone is locked away and barred from contact with others, nothing could be hotter.

Interestingly enough, Lipa is the rare global pop star in the social media era who has (mostly) managed to keep her actual personal life out of the spotlight while her star continues to rise. Between Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next love triangles, Taylor Swift’s album about her real-life Lover, and Beyonce’s dissection of her marriage, the public has come to expect some of a massive star’s IRL love life to animate their music, but Dua is making hits without including any details about her inspirations.

As I listened to her new album this weekend in utter isolation, not driving up and down Sunset Blvd, not blasting it on speakers with friends around, this separation actually offered a welcome distance. Being sick and fearful for the physical health of those I love makes the emotional drama of celebrity relationships feel pale and meaningless, so it’s a relief that this album sidesteps all of that, and still manages to deliver fascinating, endlessly repeatable pop songs full of drama and grace.

And speaking of the latter, sex isn’t the only topic of conversation here, as the album’s concluding track is a mic drop about the excuses our culture routinely makes for the toxic behavior of men, on “Boys Will Be Boys,” where Lipa concludes: “And girls will be women.” The girls who are hurt and abused by the boys who grow up under that blanket excuse become adults, too, and are left with the burden of processing their trauma, falling into the same cycles, and trying to heal. Thankfully, in Dua’s world, a sense of sex-positive strength comes through much stronger than the hearbreak of before – proof that growth and healing isn’t just possible, but is worth celebrating.

Heroic or not, this sleek, electropop album is a cohesive meditation on no-strings horniness and bucking the systems that are set up to hold women, in particular, down. Even just days into listening, it sounds like the kind of album that will invoke nostalgia, in the future, when we remember what it felt like to live in isolation, and the implacable disco-pop that kept us afloat.

Future Nostalgia is out now via Warner Music. Get it here.

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

About two weeks ago, Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard started a new routine: Every day, he would hop on the DCFC YouTube page and perform a livestream concert from his home studio for anybody who wanted to watch. He has kept this up consistently for a good while, but now, he is changing his plans: His livestream series will no longer be daily moving forward, but will instead happen once a week.

Gibbard’s first weekly livestream will take place on Thursday, April 2 at 9 p.m. EST. Presumably, the weekly shows to follow will also be on Thursdays at the same time.

The last of his daily broadcasts came yesterday (March 29), and like he did the previous Sunday, last night’s stream consisted only of covers. He began with a rendition of R.E.M.’s “Half A World Away,” and from there, he also performed songs by The Cure, Morrissey, Hall & Oates, The Magnetic Fields, Neil Young, Kris Kristofferson, and Spiritualized.

Check out the full setlist from Gibbard’s latest performance below.

1. R.E.M. — “Half A World Away”
2. The Cure — “Just Like Heaven”
3. Morrissey — “Everyday Is Like Sunday”
4. Hall & Oates — “Out Of Touch”
5. The Magnetic Fields — “Strange Powers”
6. Neil Young — “Harvest Moon”
7. Kris Kristofferson — “Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends”
8. Spiritualized — “Hold On”

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

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best music released in the last week.

This week saw a consistently exciting new album from Dua Lipa and Rihanna’s first guest appearance on a song in a while. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Dua Lipa — Future Nostalgia

Dua Lipa kicked off a disco-inspired new era with “Don’t Start Now,” and the stylistic shift paid off, as the song is her highest-charting single in the US thanks to its peak at No. 2. The full Future Nostalgia album is out now, and it is a front-to-back banger fest thanks to songs like the aforementioned lead single, the title track, “Physical,” “Break My Heart,” and the Tove Lo-co-written “Cool.”

Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud

Katie Crutchfield told Uproxx of making her new Waxahatchee album, “I got sober and really focused on that for a year. I think in the past I’ve leaned into making music as a way to help myself heal from things. I tried to not do that with this record. I tried to do the work outside of music and have an identity outside of music. […] I would definitely say that the mood of the album came first, and then the songs swiftly followed. Then it just snowballed from there.”

Read our interview with Crutchfield here.

PartyNextDoor — Partymobile

PartyNextDoor had been quiet for the past few years before he dropped his first new songs in a while, “The News” and the Drake collaboration “Loyal.” A few months later, he’s back with a new album, and while most of the songs don’t have features, he went big when he did include guests: A “Loyal” remix also features Bad Bunny, and Rihanna pops up on “Believe It.”

Nav — “Turks” Feat. Travis Scott and Gunna

Nav’s sophomore album, Bad Habits, arrived a year ago last week, and the rapper celebrated in a big way, dropping the Travis Scott- and Gunna-featuring “Turks.” The track is the fourth collaboration between Nav and Scott, and one of those songs, “Yosemite,” also featured Gunna. On the latest from the trio, Nav raps about his opulent lifestyle, bragging about his valuable jewelry and the time he spends in Turks And Caicos.

Run The Jewels — “Ooh La La”

El-P has been forthcoming with progress updates about Run The Jewels 4, saying recently that while he hopes he doesn’t have to delay the album, he’s not yet sure when it’s coming out. One thing we know for certain is that RTJ dropped a new song last week, “Ooh La La.” Featuring rap icons DJ Premier and Greg Nice, the track previews the album’s Golden Era hip-hop influences.

Nine Inch Nails — Ghosts V-VI

Life has been full of surprises over the past few months, and last week, Trent Reznor provided a positive one: Out of nowhere, he dropped a pair of new Nine Inch Nails albums, Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts. Continuations of the Ghosts series (which improbably served as the origin of 2019’s biggest hit), the records hit different moods. As Reznor put it, “Some of it [is] kind of happy, some not so much.”

Pearl Jam — Gigaton

Uproxx’s Steven Hyden notes that when it comes to Pearl Jam’s latest album, its strength is in its familiarity, especially given the time during which it was released: “My main takeaway from this album is that I am grateful for how familiar it sounds. Yes, Gigaton sounds like a Pearl Jam record. […] During a moment when nothing that we rely upon seems to be working properly, a Pearl Jam record that competently delivers abundant Pearl Jam-ness suddenly seems revolutionary.”

Read our review of Gigaton here.

Bright Eyes — “Persona Non Grata”

Conor Oberst has been teasing a big 2020 for Bright Eyes, and finally, he delivered last week. The group shared “Persona Non Grata,” their first new song in almost a decade, and it’s an appealing teaser for the next album. It’s pure Bright Eyes, but it brings new elements into the mix: The song has some surprisingly appropriate bagpipes, which the band insists “is a first for us.”

Rosalía — “Dolerme”

Social distancing isn’t the easiest thing for everybody to manage, and for those people and others, Rosalía penned a new song, “Dolerme.” It was accompanied by a statement, in which Rosalía said, “I am in quarantine and I have lost track of time a bit because I decided that I was not going to think about it too much and that instead I was going to put my energy and my heart into doing something for others, in my own way.”

Jessie Reyez — Before Love Came To Kill Us

Jessie Reyez is well-established at this point, and part of the reason for that is the co-signs she has received from big-time collaborators. She and Eminem linked up for multiple tracks on Eminem’s Kamikaze, and now Em returns the favor on “Coffin,” from Reyez’s fresh album Before Love Came To Kill Us. The bluesy ballad isn’t exactly Eminem’s natural habitat, but as always, Eminem highlights the track with his idiosyncratic style.

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

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It didn’t take too long for Dave Grohl to launch Foo Fighters following Kurt Cobain’s death and the subsequent disbandment of Nirvana. While some Nirvana fans were surely happy to have new music from the band’s members, that didn’t apply to all of them. In fact, Grohl says he got a lot of hate for Foo Fighters at first, but naturally, that only made him want to pursue the band even more.

In the recently published May issue of Mojo, Grohl said of the reactions to his then-new music and his mindset at the time, “[Some Nirvana fans were] like, ‘How dare you be in a band again? Your music is f*cking sh*t and that was a real band and you’re not.’ It’s like, you really think that’s gonna stop me? It only makes me wanna f*cking do it more, y’know. So, you can keep it coming if you want, but I don’t give a f*ck.”

He went on to make the obvious admission that his time in Nirvana was an important factor in Foo Fighters’ success, saying, “I’ve never been afraid to say that if it weren’t for Nirvana, the Foo Fighters wouldn’t be in the same position that we’re in now. We had an advantage right out of the gate that there was an interest in the band because of that. I mean, it’s obvious.”

Meanwhile, Grohl has been taking time to work on non-musical endeavors recently, as he has started writing a series of short stories.