Last year, DMV rapper IDK extended his streak of impressive, heady alt-hip-hop albums with Bravado + Intimo. He described the collection of 13 songs as “an introspective dive into identity, perception, and the complexities of modern artistry,” and in 2025, he looks to dive even deeper with Bravado Intimo… (Continued), a deluxe edition including six more songs.
Among them is “Mario Coins,” his latest single, for which he released a straightforward music video earlier today. The video finds a hoodie-clad IDK rapping an elaborate string of tongue-twisting punchlines over a breakbeat-looping instrumental in a suburban alleyway. The simplicity of the treatment mirrors that of the classic video game series from which the song gets its name; after all, what’s more simple (or adaptable) than running from left to right, dodging obstacles and collecting coins? “Mario Coins” also reflects the versatility of the concept and of IDK’s approach to the art; Mario has chased gold across an astonishing variety of gameplay types, from go-kart racing and golf to brawlers and board games.
“Mario Coins” joins IDK’s Denzel Curry collaboration “S.U.” and the breathtaking “Flow” on the extended version of Bravado + Intimo, which previously spawned the singles “Check!” “Denim” with Joey Badass, “Kickin,” and “Tiffany” featuring Gunna.
Everyone’s favorite blue creatures are heading back to the big screen thanks to the upcoming Smurfs movie. So, today (February 21), producers dropped the first musical offering from the Smurfs soundtrack.
Although the film isn’t set to hit theaters until July, Desi Trill, Cardi B, DJ Khaled, Natania, and Subhi are ready to paint the town blue. On their cross-cultural and multi-language track, “Higher Love,” the musicians crafted a vibrant infectious energy to kick off any family-friendly event.
Cardi B opens the record with a hyped verse that played into the Belinda Carlisle “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” sample, rapping: “Everybody need love and I need some too / Diamonds look sad ’cause each one blue / I’m really true heart, tryna be humble / I’m lookin’ like proof that dreams come true like, Make Heaven on Earth, bae, I think you’re perfect / Sweet like desert but do you deserve it?”
DJ Khaled added his overjoyed ad-libs throughout the track. In a statement, he elaborated on those thrilling emotions. “I’m excited to be a part of this iconic collaboration,” he said. “Growing up I remember always watching the ‘Smurfs.’ It feels like a full circle moment now having children of my own who watch the Smurfs as well, and I get to be a part of the soundtrack. I’m excited to work alongside Cardi B, Natania & Subhi on ‘Higher Love’ for this monumental movie soundtrack. It’s inspiring and looking forward to sharing our music with the world.”
Listen to “Higher Love” above.
Smurfs will hit theaters on July 18. The Smurfs soundtrack is expected around that time. Find more information here.
Since last year, A24 has been releasing its most acclaimed films in IMAX, including Uncut Gems, Midsommar, and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Next up: Best Picture winner Moonlight on Thursday, February 27, followed by Spring Breakers on Wednesday, March 19.
The Harmony Korine film is about four college students — played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine — who meet a wannabe gangster named Alien (James Franco) while on spring break. Drugs, sex, violence, and a Britney Spears sing-along ensue.
The one-night-only screening of Spring Breakers comes a few weeks after the 2025 Oscars, where the Gomez-starring Emilia Pérez is up for 13 Oscars. The “Call Me When You Break Up” singer has already won Best Actress, along with her co-stars Zoe Saldaña, Adriana Paz, and the now-canceled Karla Sofía Gascón, at the Cannes Film Festival; she’s also up for Best Actress in a Supporting Role at the BAFTA Awards.
“It was wonderful,” Gomez told IndieWire last year about Spring Breakers. “It was so long ago now, but I think that was one of the moments in my life that I felt like, ‘Oh, this is what art can feel like.’ Not just the typical way I had been doing it my whole career. That’s when I got the bug. So to be honest, I’m just happy to be a part of such an audacious, special, and important movie.”
You can buy tickets for the A24/IMAX screenings here.
The long-running children’s music group has a new country album, Wiggle Up, Giddy Up!, on the way, and it includes a new Parton collaboration, “Friends!,” along with a cover of Parton’s “9 To 5,” but tweaked to now be “Counting 1 To 5.”
Parton says in a statement:
“Well, I just wiggled my way out into the Wiggles’ world! I had so much fun being a part of this project, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we have.”
Red Wiggle (Caterina Mete, who has a Parton-inspired tattoo and a daughter named Dolly) said, “Getting to work with my absolute musical hero is beyond surreal. Dolly has inspired me in so many ways, and I know these songs will bring so much happiness to families everywhere.” Blue Wiggle (Anthony Field) added, “Dolly’s music is pure magic. Getting to work with her on these songs is a dream come true. We can’t wait for families everywhere to sing along and share in the joy.”
The album also features Lainey Wilson, Orville Peck, Dasha, Morgan Evans, Jackson Dean, Kaylee Bell, MacKenzie Porter, Troy Cassar-Daley, The Wolfe Brothers, Travis Collins, Lucky Oceans, and Slim Dusty.
Listen to “Friends!” and “Counting 1 To 5” above.
Wiggle Up, Giddy Up! is out 3/7 via The Wiggles/ABC. Find more information here.
The band’s Conor “Deego” Deegan III told NME of the special circumstances behind the song:
“I’m glad it got to see the light of day, because it a special song to us. More so for the way it was written than the song itself, in a weird way. It started life in the presence of [guitarist Carlos O’Connell’s] newborn and it’s just a message for her, you know.
It was really heartwarming. Sometimes as people we can be a bit cynical. The world around us can make you that way if you’re paying attention it. Sometimes optimism feels like a necessary delusion, but with the birth of a new child we were introduced to a really pure and deep beauty and hope that can’t be debated away by anyone jaded or even by ourselves.”
Video director Luna Carmoon also said of the video:
“I love this new track – it’s one of my favorites Fontaines have done and I love that I got to complete the trilogy of videos for it. It was all natural and kind of a surprise that the three videos came together. I’ve got to work with such a beautiful team and was really given the space and breath to create the worlds that automatically came to me when hearing the music.
I feel like we’re living in this weird time where romantic love is being pushed to the side, and sex and love is unvirtuous and no longer what people want to see. I don’t believe that at all. I love that these two people have fallen in love with themselves, and I wanted to see them fall in love with each other.”
Steven and Ian kick off with a brief conversation about the recent SNL50 celebration and whether Sportscast will ever transition to NBA regular season talk. Then they transition to an update on the Fantasy Albums Draft, including a new album from The Murder Capital. After that, they discuss recent festival announcements like Summer Of 99 And Beyond, which features a cavalcade of post-grunge bands. Then they transition to a talk about recent music documentaries about Sly Stone and Luther Vandross.
In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks about the new album from Anxious and Steven reps for the singer-songwriter Sam Moss.
New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 227 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.
When Grady Allen says he had a “superhero lifestyle” in high school, he’s only sorta kidding — fronting a successful touring band is as close as most people get at that age. As Anxious started to make the regular trek from Connecticut to Boston, he’d return to classes on Monday like a smug Clark Kent, “and try to slip something in the conversation like, ‘You guys wouldn’t even believe the weekend I had.’”
From that point, Anxious released an EP on Boston-based hardcore institution Triple B and an album on Boston-based post-hardcore institution Run For Cover. He became friends with the Axe To Grind podcast guys and a protegee to Have Heart/Fiddlehead figurehead Patrick Flynn. Looking back on the career arc of a band he started at age 14, Anxious started to look like a New England pop-punk kid’s completed checklist. That’s exactly why he spent the past two years wondering if Anxious had reached its natural conclusion.
“I had been striving so hard for this thing for so long and had this duality of feeling,” he explains during our Zoom conversation. “I feel like in a lot of ways, I arrived… and then, like, is this all there is?”
After difficult and ultimately restorative discussions with his stunned bandmates, Allen recommitted to Anxious, but only after doing the one thing that reliably right-sizes people who were hot sh*t in high school: he went to college. Allen enrolled in Boston College, an elite private school about 20 minutes from its urban namesake and seemingly even further removed from its illustrious indie rock history.
“It’s a great school in a million ways, but it’s distinctly not an artistically sensitive place,” Allen notes, as stereotypical weekend plans are, “I have a squash tournament.”
The anonymity was freeing: most of his classmates were indifferent to his musical exploits, or barely aware that he was in a band at all, let alone one that was about to release 2025’s first truly exceptional pop-rock album.
I don’t blame anyone who talks about Bambi as a “big swing” or “leveling up” — it’s a good way to inject a narrative thrust into a second album, and Anxious are doing all of the things expected of a band with a promising debut that still felt like it left something to the imagination. 2022’s Little Green House was exactly the type of album that could prove whether we were in a “post-Turnstile” world, one where tuneful hardcore bands could crossover in ways previously unimaginable two years prior. Watching the video for “In April,” I was struck by how wholesome Anxious looked, like Basement if they were a boy band.
But whereas Little Green House had enough grit to warrant comparisons to Title Fight and Rival Schools, the press materials for Bambi point critics to Third Eye Blind, Blink-182’s self-titled, the diamond-cut clarity of Jimmy Eat World, and the softer side of Smashing Pumpkins (at least to this 40-something dude, “Next Big Star” really does sound like if “Galapagos” was a Bleed American B-side). If it wasn’t for Dante Melucci’s gruff backing vocals or the involvement of Run For Cover, there’d be no reason to mention hardcore in the first place.
So Anxious may very well take the leap, but Allen and Melucci are trying to find solid footing as young adults. While Allen tends to his studies at BC, Melucci recently moved to Philadelphia to do extremely 22-year old things: play in a band, work at a coffee shop, get really into Animal Collective and Bukowski.
“I’m just like him, I just work a sh*tty job and f*ck off for the whole day,” Melucci jokes, taking my call after struggling to find a 30-minute break from his barista gig. It’s the day after the Eagles won the Super Bowl, so he’s basically an essential worker.
The distinction between the two in 2025 is striking; For most of Anxious’ existence, Allen played the CEO role, writing the bulk of the songs, booking the shows, and keeping practice schedules while cycling through a small gym class worth of former bandmates. Melucci, two years his junior, also saw Allen as an older brother figure. The two adolescents initially bonded over — what else? — Blink-182, before Allen introduced him to hardcore music and hardcore ethics. Melucci joined as Anxious’ drummer at age 14, having originally honed his chops playing Freddy in the Broadway performance of School Of Rock; “It’s not really something I talk about unless it comes up,” Melucci notes, explaining that his truest teenage self was “really angsty and angry all the time.”
Within two years, Promo 2019 and Never Better were released on Triple B and the momentum continued despite the pandemic — Anxious opened for The Wonder Years, booked festivals, received positive reviews in mainstream publications, and toured through Europe and Japan. Signing to Run For Cover “was a dream come true,” and Allen was getting paid to hang out with his friends. But he chafed against the expectations of leadership and interpersonal management as the reality of Anxious as a business started to emerge, albeit a business where everyone sleeps in the same hotel room at the end of the workday.
Allen got a preview of what to expect while playing in One Step Closer, the Scranton-based hardcore bruisers that had a nearly identical career arc to Anxious several months in advance: being hailed as “the next Title Fight,” jumping from Triple B to Run For Cover to release their first LP. OSC frontman Ryan Savitski played guitar and contributed backup vocals to Little Green House, while Allen held a similar role on the former’s 2021 debut This Place You Know.
The two bands naturally, and regularly, toured together, but a rift would become inevitable as each one’s success put greater demands on its members. Anxious blinked first, deciding that Savitski wasn’t in a position to juggle both of his roles. It was a heartbreaking call for Allen, knowing that Savitski often viewed Anxious as a safe haven from the more contentious interband dynamic of his main gig. One Step Closer soon responded in kind — “I was not kicked out of One Step Closer, but I was not invited to come back,” Allen shrugs.
All of that bolstered Allen’s encroaching disillusion with the ultimatums and binaries of hardcore — in short, the belief that you’re completely in or completely out. And yet, he soon discovered that his own assumptions about a life in hardcore were just as based in dogma rather than reality.
While he was considering the future of Anxious, Allen leaned on the elder statesmen for guidance. Patrick Flynn is a god to New England hardcore kids and a Mr. Flynn to others; He can play “the biggest hardcore show ever” to 10,000 kids in a Worcester parking lot and return to his day job as a high school history teacher months later.
“When I was in school, I really wanted to be doing the band and when I was in the band, I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m over this, I want to be back in school,’” Allen recalls being told, the point being that, “existing in different spaces doesn’t create a consistent satisfaction, but they can fuel each other.”
Yet, while it’s understandable for fellow artists to empathize, Allen didn’t truly feel comfortable taking a step back until he spoke to his bosses at Run For Cover, the people who stand to gain the most from a second Anxious album.
“These [are] people who have invested money and energy and after one record, I’m going ‘I don’t know if I want this,’” Allen remembers. “They were very understanding and delivered a similar message of, ‘you know this doesn’t have to be all that you are.’”
Allen took that advice to heart, perhaps in the most literal way possible — along with Flynn, he’s now the second Boston College history major on Run For Cover. Though the strained relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt served as inspiration for the ebullient power-pop of “Jacy,” don’t expect The Monitor any time soon. While Allen is drawn to the small moments of humanity underlying Great Events, his academic path was also one borne of practicality — “I’ve been told by the professors, ‘I’ve never met somebody who’s so bad at math or science.’”
In a role reversal of their earliest days, Melucci became the one “squeezing harder on the band and feeling like it had to be everything,” while Allen harbored simmering ambivalence. “I love getting to do music, I love getting paid to go on tour however much or little that is. And it was difficult because I felt like [Grady] wanted the opposite.”
Even in his previous supporting role, Melucci wrote with the main intention of impressing his discerning co-vocalist; With Bambi, the band’s life was riding on him meeting that goal. Though his voice is rawer and rougher than Allen’s, Melucci brought in the more artful sonic flourishes — in an example of classic emo-blockbuster sequencing, Melucci drops a mid-album, symphonic ballad laced with falsetto, a tribute to his age-appropriate fixation on Pet Sounds. The billowy summer jam “Some Girls” isn’t a reference to the Rolling Stones, but rather a convoluted reference to Animal Collective’s biggest hit (it’s a long story).
Squint a certain way and Bambi is a meta concept album, a chance for Allen to rewrite his own history: While scrolling through old phone memos in a hotel room, he announced, “we should’ve named the band Bambi,” though I imagine they’d probably end up with Anxious anyways after a Disney cease and desist. The revved-up opener “Never Said” is Allen’s kiss off to sanctimonious scenesters, a theme that Anxious revisits on deceptively chipper singles “Head & Spine” and “Counting Sheep.” But the real story is embodied in the closing, while the closing “I’ll Be Around” can be read as Melucci and Allen reaffirming their friendship within a newly democratic songwriting dynamic that balances the latter’s directness with the former’s more abstract and evocative lyricism. Even if every song is, in its own way, about Anxious growing up, they’re not going to write anything as literal as “Growing Up Song” anymore.
“I think I learned a lesson about letting things develop into whatever they become, as opposed to setting specific goals,” Allen explains, dropping the anxiety of being Anxious to become the band they’re meant to be.
Bambi is out now via Run For Cover. Find more information here.
One item from that collection has caught the attention of music fans on social media, though, prompting several to tag St. Louis rapper Smino in posts about a piece from Wilson’s collection. So what’s going here?
Well, the piece in question is a hoodie with silk or satin lining in the hood. As Wilson explained, “My mom didn’t want me to wear bonnets in airports anymore,” so she implored the Nike design team to create a piece that would protect her hair and preserve her hairstyles without having to wear the usual accessories (bonnets, du-rags, and the like) in public — which is frowned upon by some of our elders for making us look “ghetto,” “ratchet,” or otherwise unkempt or unprofessional (not that it matters to some people, who will never see us as anything but).
One of the coolest details in A’Ja Wilson’s Nike collection is the satin lined hoodie. A’ja says her mom didn’t want her wearing her bonnet in the airport anymore so she made her own signature hoodie for her hair instead. pic.twitter.com/pPZm2vjZph
However, Smino has long offered a silk-lined hoodie of his own, named after a track from his star-making debut album, blkswn, “Silk Pillows.” The flirtatious song finds Smino offering a silk pillowcase for his adult sleepover companion, a gesture of thoughtfulness that also suggests sexy times ahead. He incorporated the idea into his merch line, and has been selling the “Silk Pillow” hoodies for around five years. The piece consistently sells out, and let me tell you, it was a pain in the butt to finally get one (and so worth it).
Fans pointing out that Smino had the idea first (“Smino, you will always be famous,” wrote one. “Smino deserved more for this when he dropped his designs years back,” echoed another) seemingly want the artist to get some credit before the Nike versions hit retailers and his contributions are inevitably forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time a big brand “borrowed” an idea from a smaller designer and outscaled them to outsell them. And hey, for what it’s worth, Smi’s got a brand-new color in his own Silk Pillow hoodies right now, and he’s even giving some away. You gotta respect the originators.
While his former Migos bandmate Offset is apparently hashing out his relationship issues in his music, Quavo has gone an alternate route, getting back to basics on his latest single, “Trappa Rappa.”
Rather than taunting an ex or presenting himself as a scorned lover/ladies’ man, Quavo embraces the dualities of being a superstar from the wrong side of the tracks on the song, contrasting his current successes with the dirt his associates in North Atlanta have to do to survive.
The video likewise displays this duality, with a split screen positioning Quavo as the polar opposite of the grime time activities on the other end of the screen — right up until they find common ground (which takes the form of a luxury car bridging the gap, a clever visual trick that shows the two sides aren’t as far apart as they may seem.
“Trappa Rappa” constitutes a bit of a return to form for Quavo, whose last two singles, “Fly” with rocker Lenny Kravitz, and “Georgia Ways” with country crooner Luke Bryan and genre straddler Teddy Swims, saw him try out some new sounds in an effort to tap into a broader market. But, as they say, you can always come home, and street-certified trap rap will always be Quavo’s comfort zone. “Trappa Rappa” is a winner.
Houston rap-crooner Don Toliver is barely more than six months removed from his last release, the motorcyle club-themed Hardstone Psycho, but he’s already back with a new sound. This time around, he dips into his “LV Bag” for a bouncy new palette, bringing a couple of unexpected guest stars along for the ride: J-Hope of BTS, preparing to release his solo album, and Pharrell Williams, fresh off the release of his Lego documentary/biopic.
Toliver’s been mighty productive of late; in addition to a deluxe edition of Hardstone Psycho, the past few months have also brought Don Toliver features on tracks from Toro Y Moi (“Madonna” from Hole Erth) and SZA, who added him to the deluxe version of Lana, the deluxe version of SOS (he appears on “Used“). Yeah, I know; that makes no sense. But who cares? Rules are all made up and artists like Don Toliver, SZA, and Toro never really followed them to begin with.
Meanwhile, guest artist J-Hope is off on his first-ever solo tour without the rest of the Bangtan Boys, kicking off his road show in native Seoul before hitting stages in New York, Manila, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and more.
Listen to Don Toliver’s “LV Bag” featuring J-Hope and Pharrell above.
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