Category: Viral

The Indiana Pacers parted ways with head coach Nate McMillan following their playoff ouster at the hands of the Miami Heat. While McMillan won a whole lot of games in Nap Town, the team failed to make it out of the first round during his tenure, and as a result, the franchise is heading in a different direction.

The team is reportedly looking into a number of candidates for the position, whether they be highly-regarded assistants like San Antonio’s Becky Hammon and Philadelphia’s Ime Udoka or folks with head coaching experience like David Joerger and current Brooklyn assistant Jacque Vaughn. One interesting name that popped up on Wednesday evening, via Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, is former title-winning guard Chauncey Billups, who is reportedly keen on entering the coaching ranks.

As the Pacers begin preliminary interviews with a number of candidates, Billups and team officials have recently engaged and are planning to talk further about the job, sources said Wednesday.
…
Clippers assistant Ty Lue has discussed with Billups the possibility of him joining Lue as his top assistant coach should he land a head-coaching job this offseason, sources said. But the Pacers present a unique opportunity for Billups, given that it’s not a job — unlike Philadelphia and New Orleans — for which Lue looms as a candidate.

Billups’ name has been floated for both coaching and front office jobs in the past, but nothing has ever come to fruition. He’s a respected name around the sport, and while there are obvious concerns that come with hiring any first-time coach to a role of this magnitude — especially with a team like Indiana that has expectations of making the postseason every year — Billups seems as well-equipped as any ex-player to move into this role.

Although his Golden State Warriors didn’t make it to the NBA Bubble Playoffs in Orlando, it looks like all-star guard Steph Curry is staying in shape with the help of a famous workout partner. A video has surfaced online of the all-NBA player having a shoot-around with rap all-star Drake on the latter’s custom home court.

It’s widely known that Drake absolutely loves hoops and hanging out with NBA players — even causing him to self-quarantine after spending time with Kevin Durant, who also appears in his “Laugh Now Cry Later” video for a hilarious game of one-on-one — so it’s not surprising that he’d have the Bay Area hooper over. However, there does seem to be a competitive edge to the footage, which makes one wonder just how nice Drake thinks he is. You can’t just go around getting in shooting contests with the best three-point shooter ever.

The video also confirms a suspicion among some fans that Drake’s previous game footage may have been edited to remove the misses because that wet ball from his pickup game with Quavo and Justin Bieber is nowhere to be found here. It’s understandable though; when he missed that warmup shot at the Kentucky game, fans wouldn’t let him hear the end of it. The real question here is: Did Drake let Steph hear the upcoming album that is supposedly “90 percent” finished and if so, when do the rest of us get to have something in common with the future Hall-of-Famer?

Watch Steph and Drake trade jumpers above.

The Jussie Smollett saga has continued for over eighteen months, and it’s not over yet. Somehow, it actually seemed to be over in March 2019, when the Cook County prosecutor dropped all criminal charges against Jussie Smollett, two months after he claimed to be the victim of a violent hate crime in Chicago. The reversal was unexpected, given that the Chicago PD held a press conference to publicly rip into Smollett, who they accused of wasting police resources, while the actor’s team maintained that the so-called smoking-gun of a $3,500 check (given to two Nigerian brothers who were Empire extras) actually disproved claims of a staged attack and only proved that the actor hired the brothers for personal training services. Smollett has maintained that he had always been truthful with police, but CBS News reported that Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson was “furious” about the dropped charges.

Well, criminal charges were later restored against Smollett. The actor has since been indicted on charges of lying to law enforcement by a Chicago special prosecutor, to which he pleaded not guilty. TMZ also has the latest updates on a civil case by the City of Chicago against Smollett (they’re looking for evidence that Jussie faked a threatening letter that arrived at Fox studios), and the FBI is refusing to turn over records for that case, due to the ongoing criminal investigation. Yes, it’s a complete cluster of legal proceedings, and Jussie has remained publicly silent for over a year.

The actor decided to open up in a rare statement to Marc Lamont Hill. Smollett explained that his attorneys told him not to speak out, but he has to admit feeling frustrated over a lack of progress, and he feels like “there’s an example being made of someone that did not do what they’re being accused of,” and that Chicago law enforcement “won’t let this go.” The former Empire actor continued:

“It’s been beyond frustrating because to be somebody that’s so outspoken… it’s been difficult to be so quiet. To not be able to say all of the things that you want to say, to not be able to yell from the rooftop… It’s been beyond frustrating. I’m certainly not going rogue. I’m still taking the advice of my attorneys and everything like that. But I just don’t see honestly what staying quiet has really done. Where it has gotten me.”

This year, Smollett lost a double jeopardy bid, which (if he’d been successful) would have prevented him from being charged twice for the same alleged offense. You can watch his discussion with Hill below.

On August 14, 2000, I started my first grown-up job in media: A general assignment reporter for my hometown daily newspaper, The Appleton Post-Crescent. But what I really wanted to be was a music writer. The gig didn’t explicitly call for music journalism, but it didn’t explicitly exclude it, either. I decided that I was going to make “general assignment reporting” be about interviewing and writing about bands as much as possible. I was 22 years old.

Granted, in small-town Wisconsin, there are not many bands to interview and write about. I’m pretty sure the first “band” I wrote about the Appleton Boychoir, a collective of rosy-cheeked middle-schoolers who stuck to a repertoire of holiday songs for their biggest concert, a “disappointing nod to nostalgia that eschews innovation,” as I postulated in my burgeoning critic brain. Otherwise, I was stuck covering tractor pulls and strawberry festivals most of the time. Occasionally, however, I could talk my editor into letting me do a phoner with some indie rocker who was playing two hours away in Milwaukee or Madison. Like that, I was interrogating bored indie rockers like James McNew of Yo La Tengo, all the while trying and failing not to sound like a nervous hayseed from some no-name newspaper in the Upper Midwest.

Early on, I learned two important facts about the business I had chosen: One, music writing is corny. There’s really no other word to describe it. Asking musicians earnest questions about their art or (even more embarrassing) their feelings is not dignified work. If you think it is, try to explaining music writing to anyone who would never even dream of reading it. (Which, I can tell you from experience, is 99.999 of the world, and a full 100 percent of the people I have ever been related to.) This job, which isn’t even really a real job, does not make sense to normal people with regular lives. Music writers live made-up lives. To do it, you must live in an imaginary world.

That was the first thing I learned. The second thing is that I did not care about any of this. I liked how corny music writing was, because (I guess) I was actually corny myself all along. (Not really a surprise, I’m sorry to admit.) Even when I was stuck on the lowest rung of media, working my tail off for literal years in my 20s trying to craft provocative questions that would compel local choir directors to articulate profound truths about the artistic acumen of “O Tannenbaum,” I loved what I was doing. Each day, I relished the opportunity to hop on the phone with some cooler-than-thou musician — even though I was also terrified at the proposition — in order to thoroughly embarrass myself. Holy crap, I’m talking to the third most famous guy in Yo La Tengo!

Yes, my dream was sad. But it was mine, and I was living it.

Almost exactly one month after I started my first job, on September 13, 2000, Almost Famous arrived in theaters. Obviously, my origin story in music journalism can’t possibly compare to that of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who started his career at Rolling Stone in the 1970s as a teenaged rock scribe whose experiences covering the likes of the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, and The Eagles inspired his deeply autobiographical passion project. (If only we could all direct biopics about ourselves.) But even the most extraordinary careers in rock writing don’t really have anything close to resembling universal appeal.

Upon release, Almost Famous was a box office disappointment. Budgeted at $60 million — add up all the money that every critic has been paid to write every record review in the history of mankind and you won’t come close to hitting $60 million — Almost Famous only made about two-thirds of that. But it won an Oscar for Crowe’s original screenplay, and swiftly became a cult favorite on DVD and beyond. Today, Almost Famous remains firmly entrenched in pop culture, particularly among classic rock heads. Back when touring was still a thing, musicians could quote this movie in tour vans to denote decadence (“I am a golden god!”) or arcane inter-band psychology (“I’m just one of the out-of-focus guys!”). Even if you roll your eyes at it, you know Almost Famous.

Outside of that insular culture, this movie single-handedly transformed “Tiny Dancer” from an Elton John deep cut to one of his most recognized ballads. And Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Lester Bangs made him the most famous rock critic of all time. The qualification here is important — the real Lester Bangs, the star-crossed and largely obscure writer who died tragically in 1982 at the age of 33, is another matter entirely from Hoffman’s idea of Lester Bangs. That’s even true for me, a person who owns two of Bangs’ books and once read a biography about him. In my mind, when I picture that guy, I still imagine PSH wearing a Guess Who T-shirt and pontificating about Jim Morrison being a drunken buffoon.

Another lasting part of Almost Famous’ legacy 20 years later is that music writers love to knock it. I say that based on anecdotal evidence, but it seems very common based on the conversations I’ve had about this movie with colleagues over the years. Mention Almost Famous to a person who has been toughing it out in the music journalism gruel factory for way too many years, and she will inevitably roll her eyes, flash a jaundiced smirk, and proceed to fact-check the film for you.

There is no way you could spend several weeks on the road with a boogie-rock band in this day and age, this person will say. Publicists will never let you get away with that. Cameron Crowe in the ’70s — reaches for Robert Draper’s infamously dishy Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History — was “a West Hollywood rendition of Beaver Cleaver” with a reputation for writing glowing profiles about “the genius of rock stars,” not a budding rock ‘n’ roll Edward R. Morrow following Lester Bangs’ advice to be “honest and unmerciful.” Speaking of Bangs, he definitely did not actually say that “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool,” even though that quote is now attributed to him. Most cruelly of all, you will not meet anyone like Penny Lane, the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in real life. Or, if you do, she will not look like Kate Hudson and you will be obliged to report that poor underaged girl to Child Protective Services.

All of this is true. But, again: I do not care about any of this.

When I sat down recently with my DVD copy of Untitled — that’s right, I roll exclusively with the 161-minute “bootleg” cut of Almost Famous — I preemptively cringed at how the movie would play given my own 20th anniversary in media. Surely, spending half of my lifetime grinding out reviews of middling, forgettable albums and doing phoners with aloof musicians who equate music journalists with PR-dispensing mosquitos had fully drained whatever mystical feeling I had about the business for good.

What I found instead is that this movie still works me over like Russell Hammond stroking out the riff to “Fever Dog.”

Let me point out the obvious: Almost Famous is not a documentary. It’s unabashed fantasy, a fairy tale, the Top Gun of music journalism. It’s designed to make writing about music seem like an incredible and envious lifestyle choice. And I say: What’s wrong with that? In a business with so much bleakness, in which dozens of wonderful writers and editors seem to lose their jobs every other month, a little romance is desperately needed. Try to make us look cool? As if. How about making music writing seem fun and even desirable again?

My favorite scene in Almost Famous occurs early on, when young William Miller is left alone with his sister Penny’s record collection. Crowe films the scene like Steven Spielberg tracking Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones discovers the Ark Of The Covenant. It is consciously presented as a life-changing moment when William pulls The Who’s Tommy from the stack of LPs and blisses out to “Sparks.”

Here’s a theory for you to disregard completely: The kid never really leaves the room after that. He will eventually buy more records, and put posters on the wall, and even physically leave that space in order to chronicle the musicians that he loves. But mentally and emotionally, he’s inside that cocoon of sound and warmth. When you decide to become a music writer, that’s the world you aspire to live in, forever.

Here’s something Almost Famous gets absolutely correct: Music writers and musicians have always had a symbiotic relationship. Together, they create a world — maybe the only world — where they can matter. The recurring theme of this movie is that musicians are cool and music journalists are not, which allows the former to seduce and sometimes manipulate the latter. But more subtly, Almost Famous also shows how musicians need music journalists because — unlike virtually everyone else in the music business — writers tend to actually love music. And, therefore, we take musicians as seriously as they take themselves. In the end, we feed each others’ fantasies.

Even in Almost Famous, however, there’s an acknowledgment that this rock world is an illusion. “Realness” is always elusive, whether it’s for Russell at a house party in Topeka or lovestruck William when he’s drawn in by Penny Lane and her silly dreams of escaping to Morocco. “When and where does this ‘real world’ occur?” William wonders during the film’s peak “disillusionment” climax. Soon, Penny will be bounced from the Stillwater tour in exchange for a case of beer. The band dudes that William thought were his friends will throw him under the (figurative) bus. And the real-life Mark Kozelek will creepily ogle high school girls.

But that’s not how Almost Famous ends. Penny Lane does go to Morocco. William and Russell reconcile in the same room where he first fell in love with music. The Stillwater tour bus literally rides into the sunset to the tune of Zeppelin’s “Tangerine.” What you’re left with is the feeling that in spite of all “real” grossness that inevitably goes down in this world, you’ll stick around because of the music. The music is always your escape, the best part of your “real” life.

“If you’re a rock journalist — first, you will never get paid much,” Hoffman as Bangs warned in Almost Famous. “But you will get free records from the record company.” All these years later, that’s enough for me. I mean, I get to sit around all day and listen to music! Yes, this job can be a little dumb. But as fake Lester Bangs once said, the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real.

Dame Diana Rigg, a legendary actress of the stage and screen who became known to millions as sharp-tongued Olenna “The Queen of Thorns” Tyrell on Game of Thrones, has died at age 82. “She died peacefully early this morning. She was at home with her family who have asked for privacy at this difficult time,” her agent said, via BBC.

(Via BBC)

Giannis Antetokounmpo laid out in no uncertain terms that he has no plans on requesting a trade from the Bucks after their latest early playoff exit at the hands of the Miami Heat on Wednesday.

The Bucks have become one of the league’s most dominant regular season teams, but have yet to get over the hump come playoff time in the East, losing a year ago to the Raptors in the conference finals after taking a 2-0 series lead on the eventual champs. This year, they fell in rather stunning fashion in five games to the Heat. Antetokounmpo, who was injured in Game 4 and was unable to play in Game 5 of Milwaukee’s series with Miami, is the focal point of the offseason discourse already in the NBA, as the reigning MVP and DPOY has just one year left on his contract.

It’s possible Antetokounmpo could re-sign with the Bucks this offseason on a supermax extension, putting to rest any notion of his impending departure. However, it’s possible that he lets things play out in Milwaukee for one more year before determining his future with the club, applying pressure on the Bucks front office and ownership to build a championship team around him.

There are a number of decisions to make this offseason to try and build the best possible team around Antetokounmpo for next year, starting with whether Mike Budenholzer — whose playoff rotations continued to be the talk of the series as he limited Giannis and Khris Middleton’s minutes in the first three games, while playing a full 10-man rotation when most teams extend star minutes and tighten their rotation — should stick around. The Bud decision will come down to whether Giannis gives him a thumbs up or thumbs down, and until that is known, it wouldn’t be stunning if the top coaches on the market, namely Ty Lue, hold off on accepting other jobs because the Bucks gig is immediately the most coveted in the league should it open up.

From there, it’s clear that roster changes are necessary. The Bucks desperately need another playmaker and someone capable of creating for themselves alongside Giannis and Middleton. Eric Bledsoe was supposed to be that player, but we now have three years of data saying he’s simply not capable of doing so in the playoffs. The Bucks surely have some regrets about picking Bledsoe over Malcolm Brogdon as their point guard going forward, but now must move on and find a way to address that issue.

The name at the top of everyone’s list of Bucks targets this offseason is Chris Paul, who just led the Oklahoma City Thunder to a stunning playoff berth in the West and pushed Houston to seven games in the first round. It appears, given the departure of Billy Donovan, that the Thunder are now ready to fully embrace a rebuild with their draft assets acquired from the Paul George and Russell Westbrook trade, and that likely means trading Paul and letting Danilo Gallinari walk in free agency.

The fit in Milwaukee would be snug and Paul makes so much sense on and off the court for a Bucks team that could desperately use someone with his skill set, mentality, and leadership at the point guard position. However, a player making a ton of sense for a team doesn’t mean a trade can happen, and it doesn’t take long to find the difficulty in getting CP3 to Wisconsin.

Paul is set to make $41.3 million next season, meaning the Bucks have to cobble together some serious money to make a trade legal. If we (correctly) assume they are not willing to part ways with Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez, the latter of whom also would make no sense for the Thunder to want to acquire, things get very difficult. Here is my best effort at a two-team deal that works financially.

Bucks get: Chris Paul
Thunder get: Eric Bledsoe, George Hill, Ersan Ilyasova, D.J. Wilson, 2020 Indiana first-round pick

I’ll be honest, I have no idea if that’s worth it for the Thunder, who already have a ton of first round picks and don’t need to be adding Bledsoe to a roster when they want to turn things over to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Dennis Schroder. As such, a third team likely needs to be in the mix here to take on Bledsoe and send OKC a younger player with upside for their frontcourt.

Enter, the Orlando Magic.

Bucks get: Chris Paul
Thunder get: Aaron Gordon, George Hill, Khem Birch, D.J. Wilson, 2020 Indiana first-round pick
Magic get: Eric Bledsoe, Ersan Ilyasova, 2021 Milwaukee second-round pick

I’m not totally sure what Aaron Gordon is as a player, which isn’t great six years into a guy’s career, but getting him out of Orlando where I’m pretty confident they have never once maximized his talents is a good start. He’s closer to the timeline OKC is looking to play on and maybe finally playing consistently at the 4-spot in a new place with actual backcourt pieces that can get him the ball he can take a leap. Worst case, he’s only on a deal for two more years and is half as expensive as Paul.

George Hill is a nice, steady hand at backup point guard and also is on a deal that would be pretty easy to move once again when a contender is inevitably looking for backcourt help. Khem Birch is an intriguing young center with some defensive upside who Orlando likely isn’t going to want to invest in once he becomes a free agent, and I’m still a believer in D.J. Wilson as a valuable rotation player given his abilities as a shooter. They add another first round pick for this year, but I really don’t think Presti is too worried about adding picks given they have 24(!!!) draft picks compiled through 2026.

The party here that I’m most worried about is the Magic, but you can make a case that this helps them too. Orlando gets more backcourt help, and for Bledsoe’s postseason problems, he’s been very good in the regular season and is an excellent defender, so he fits right in with what the Magic are doing. He’d be an upgrade from the departing D.J. Augustin at just a tick over the same price tag. He’s also a nice mentor on the floor for Markelle Fultz as a non-shooter who impacts the game in other ways from the point guard position, and the Magic have been rumored to want to deal Gordon for years. Ilyasova is a non-guaranteed contract, so that lets them waive him to save a little money. You take out some of the frontcourt clutter they’ve been dealing with for years and can go forward looking for some wing help that can shoot this offseason.

The list of teams that would make sense to add Bledsoe this offseason is pretty short — Orlando, Detroit, New York, and Chicago, maybe — and aside from the Magic, the other three don’t have a lot to offer in return to make anything work. Paul to Milwaukee makes all the basketball sense in the world, but it is a nightmare to make happen with trying to make a deal that works financially that OKC (and a possible third team) would be interested in. Still, it could happen and the Bucks should do everything in their power to do so, because they still have to sell Giannis on staying and there’d be no doubt Paul would make a huge impact on that and their championship aspirations.

Back in February, when the idea of being stuck indoors for six months was unfathomable, President Trump was publicly saying America was in “good shape” to defend itself from COVID-19. But privately, he was calling the coronavirus “deadly stuff.”

191,000-plus deaths later…

In a series of recorded interviews with journalist Bob Woodward, Trump admitted that he knew weeks before the first recorded American death from COVID-19 that the virus is “more deadly” than the flu. “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people… I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic,” he confessed on March 19, days after declaring a national emergency. But it was already too late.

Trump’s taped conversations quotes made the late-night rounds on Wednesday, with The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah asking, “You didn’t want to create a panic? You didn’t want to create a panic? So what did you want, for people to be very calmly dying in the streets?!” and The Late Late Show‘s James Corden joking, “Thank God none of us panicked. You know, I might have freaked out and stayed inside for six months.” But the funniest quote came from lapdog Tucker Carlson, who came to the president’s defense:

“What is surprising is that Donald Trump participated in making the book. The president sat for repeated interviews with Bob Woodward. Why in the world would he do that? It was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward. Lindsey Graham brokered that meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward and the president. How’d that turn out?”

Carlson continued, “Lindsey Graham is supposed to be a Republican, so why would he do something like that? You would have to ask him.” Nah, I’m good. I’d rather stay focused on the president downplaying the threat of a deadly virus that’s killed nearly 200,000 Americans because he didn’t want to create a Panic! At the Trump Rally.

Here’s the clip, if you can muster the energy.

(Via Newsweek)

Members of One Direction spent some time a couple months ago reflecting on the group’s tenth anniversary. That was essentially all that came of that, as there was no announcement of new music, reunion performances, or any sort of new activity from the group. There are seemingly some fans who are desperate to see that happen, though, as they have taken some drastic measures.

The Late Late Show host James Corden, who has a good working relationship with the group and has had them and their members on his show multiple times, has apparently been receiving a lot of pleas from fans for him to kidnap the group and force them to reunite. This has been a big enough trend, it would seem, for Corden to address it on his show.

He began by saying he makes it a point to not read comments about himself or the show online, but that he couldn’t ignore the torrent of kidnap-requesting comments he received on various platforms. Corden said, in fact, that the show gets about 300 YouTube comments per week on its videos about him kidnapping One Direction.

The host laid out the logistical challenges of such a kidnapping (especially during a pandemic), and said the begging isn’t helping at all: “The more people ask me to kidnap the boys, the less likely I am to do it. You’re killing any element of surprise, and surprise is a major factor when kidnapping someone. In the history of kidnapping, I don’t think any of them have originated from a fan account suggesting that a crime take place.”

He continues to make his case and shares a highlight reel of the band’s visits to the show, so watch the video above.

Filming Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” video seemed like a relatively low-stakes affair (especially since Cardi spent about $100,000 on coronavirus tests). That said, it wasn’t without its scary moments. There’s a scene in the video where Cardi and Meg are surrounded by snakes, and understandably, that can be an unsettling situation for some. The two definitely had their apprehensions about it, as is shown in a new behind-the-scenes video of the “WAP” shoot.

In the nine-minute clip, Cardi and Offset have a snake handler show them the reptiles, and there’s certainly some discomfort. “That’s a girl? That is a bad b*tch,” Cardi noted. Before that fateful meeting, Cardi and Meg talked about it, with Meg expressing her apprehension: “It was scary. The snake’s big as sh*t. What are we gonna do? When you see how big these snakes is, you’re not about to be doing all that.”

Cardi B previously spoke about a snake moment from the shoot that didn’t make this behind-the-scenes video: One of the snakes peed on her. She said in a recent interview, “One of the scariest parts was the snake scene. I was naked and one of them peed all over me.”

Watch the video above.

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

During the second of three livestreams that UK post-punk quintet Idles were undertaking from London’s famed Abbey Road Studios to help stoke the fires of anticipation for their third full-length Ultra Mono, vocalist Joe Talbot looked each of his bandmates in the eyes and recited a single word.

“Logician. Mediator. Defender. Entertainer,” he intoned. “You ready?”

From there, the group set their collective teeth and claws into a rough, yet rollicking version of “Love Song,” a track found on their 2018 breakthrough album Joy As An Act Of Resistance. But I missed the first minute or so of the song trying to suss out what and why Talbot said that about his friends and collaborators. Nicknames? An inside joke?

“It’s all from Carl Jung’s 16 personality types,” Talbot explained a few days later, speaking over the phone from a rented flat in London. “We all did the test to see what kind of personality we were. I am an Advocate. It’s like reading a mirror. I discovered with the test that I’m introverted. I always projected that onto myself, growing up, that I was selfish. But now I realize I need a lot of time on my own to process certain things to fit among other people.”

This is the way conversations with the members of Idles tend to go. Talbot and his bandmates — guitarists Mark Bowen (Logician) and Lee Kiernan (Mediator), bassist Adam Devonshire (Entertainer), and drummer Jon Beavis (Defender) — would just as soon relay the details of how they create their blunt, scabrous rock as they would their experiences with cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Every word, whether that’s shouted in a microphone on stage, shared with one another, or told to a sleepy journalist dealing with an eight-hour time difference, is carefully and deeply considered.

Take, for example, how the group landed on the core concept of their new album. As with the previous two full-lengths Idles has released to date (2017’s Brutalism and 2018’s Joy), they began with a title: Ultra Mono. It was a phrase Talbot dropped as the band drove to Blackpool for a gig during the long promotional campaign they undertook for Joy. In the van, the five men were wrestling with how their next record would sound. “Would it be natural sounding, going down the routes of ’70s rock?” Bowen remembers. “Or we would head to a more heavy, industrial hip-hop kind of thing?” Talbot turned around in his seat and settled the issue with that two word phrase: ultra mono.

“It set the path forward for the creative process,” Bowen continues. “I think we work so much better when things get narrowed down. If we know we’re working toward a title, if we know we’re working toward these strict concepts, then anything we do, we can go, ‘Is this ultra mono?’”

Prior to Ultra Mono, the connection between title and content is pretty easy to suss out. Their debut is as rigid and imposing as the architectural movement its named for — and as violent and thrashing as its double meaning. And for all the fury and frustration found in its songs about toxic masculinity and the band’s critics, the follow-up feels like the endorphin high that comes after a good cry or a particularly impactful therapy session.

Ultra Mono is a little more difficult to explain. In part, it refers to the singularity of purpose of any band — various talents and personalities joining forces to create a unified sound. But it’s also, according to Bowen, distilling the music down to its essence. “Everything was written around one part,” he says, “so we can make that part as loud as possible. It changed what we do. If you listen to Brutalism or Joy, the guitars are all over the place. It gives it a kind of power and energy and presence. Whereas this new way, where we’re all locked in is a new form of power. We’re all unified. We’re this one engine that’s pounding on the door.” Or as Talbot sings on the album’s second single, “Grounds,” “Do you hear that thunder? / That’s the sound of strength in numbers.”

There’s also a lot of open space within Ultra Mono. Guitars and drums lock in for short controlled bursts rather than the slashing and pounding of previous recordings. That allows Devonshire’s bass to pull focus throughout, riding an upward trajectory on the vicious opener “War” or giving “Reigns” its Killing Joke-like pulse.

Though the band sounds entirely comfortable in this new mode, it took some time for them to get there. Working around their packed touring schedule last year, Idles stumbled at first to cohere around this ultra mono concept. It wasn’t until two weeks before the group was set to go into the studio that it all cohered. From there, the songs came in a flurry, with Talbot writing most of his lyrics moments before he was set to record them.

That first thought/best thought approach does help explain some of the more awkward lyrical turns on Ultra Mono, like “I wanna cater for the haters / eat shit” in “The Lovers” or the pop culture references that run through “Mr. Motivator” (“Like Kathleen Hanna with bear claws grabbing Trump by the pussy”). But it fits in well with the immediacy and discourteous quality of the music.

“I was questioning myself about this,” Talbot says of his writing style. “‘Why do I do that? What is it about that that works so well?’ And I realized it’s the momentary flow of it. I allow the song to write itself really. My subconscious is listening to it until it becomes a part of me. ‘War,’ to me, sounds like inner conflict. So, it’s called ‘War.’ Of course it is. And everything around it is written.”

As he’s proven over the band’s three albums, Talbot has a lot to shout about. His country is pulling itself apart in the wake of Brexit. Other bands and some critics have responded to Idles’ success by poking suspiciously at their sincerity and their middle-class backgrounds. Racism and sexism and homophobia are still running rampant around the globe. He sings about it all through gritted teeth and with clenched fists.

But while the band is part of a wave of other volatile British post-punk acts like Shame and Fontaines DC, what truly distinguishes Idles are those songs where Talbot is at his most revealing. “June,” a centerpiece of Joy, dealt with the stillborn death of the singer’s daughter Agatha. And on the closing two tracks of Ultra Mono, Talbot is unabashedly gentle. While the band fumes and spits behind him on “Danke,” he returns again and again to this couplet: “True love will find you in the end / You will find out just who was your friend.”

To see this duality in action, dial up the clip of Idles performing “Never Fight A Man With A Perm” at last year’s Mercury Prize award ceremony. As it begins, Talbot is stalking the lip of the stage, stomping down his right foot as if trying to crush the entire building under his boot. But he quickly stops and, with a small hand wave, quietly says, “Congratulations, everyone.” It’s a dramatic and amazing switch flip, and one that Talbot is entirely aware of.

“If you look at the most tender moments in your life,” he says, “when you’ve been the most sincere and loving to someone, they’re the most violent, potent, and memorable moments. People confuse tenderness with softness. Tenderness can be something that cuts through everything else like an explosion. Stamping my feet comes from love and empathy as much as it does anger and shame. I’m definitely violent on stage but that comes from all sorts of emotions. Sadness, loss, love, lust. Sometimes I’m just hungry.”

Talbot is certainly itching to stomp around a stage again — something he might not be able to do until next May when Idles set off for an already sold-out run of shows in the UK and Ireland — but he’s embracing this surplus of downtime with grace. Sure, there’s preliminary discussions about album No. 4, but more importantly, he gets more hours to spend with his daughter. And, true to his personality type, it gives him the chance to process how Idles spent nearly a decade building their collective muscles so they could weather the whirlwind of the past three years.

“That meant we weren’t making loads of mistakes under the microscope,” Talbot says. “We had room to breathe and to learn about what we wanted to do and who we were as a band. We just plowed through and worked really hard for our own sake. We only did it because we loved it and because we wanted to.”

Ultra Mono is out on September 25 via Partisan. Get it here.