It’s been a few months since Academy Award and multi-Grammy-winning artist HER released her swooning album Back Of My Mind. She’s currently on tour across the country supporting the album’s release, but she managed to stop by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to share an intimate rendition of her emotive track “For Anyone.”
The performance opened with HER seated at a bedazzled piano and sporting her signature round glasses. Though she was joined by some backup singers and accompanying musicians, her room-filling vocals alone were enough to mesmerize as she sang of closing herself off to love after a particularly painful heartbreak.
Ahead of her performance on The Late Show, HER gave an interview with Vulture where she talked about how many people perceive her as an “industry plant,” a word that’s meant to call out nepotism, but is oftentimes used to discredit the hard work a woman has put in to get where she is in the music industry. “With social media, people think they know everything about success. People see my success now, and they don’t understand the sacrifices, the 15-hour days in the studio, the pressure from my parents to go to college,” she said.
HER went on to explain the work she put in to reach her level of credibility: “For me, I grinded it out kinda like a rapper: I dropped a mixtape, nobody knew who I was, it was a very slow build, and here we are now. The awards shows and all that stuff, that was surprising to me. But I realized, Oh my gosh, I’ve arrived, and in a different way. You don’t need some No. 1 radio single — even though I got that!”
Watch HER perform “For Anyone” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert above.
Back Of My Mind is out now via RCA Records. Get it here.
Michael Bay has been busy as a producer in recent years with A Quiet Place, Bumblebee, and A Quiet Place Part II, but he’s slowed down the pace as a director. In fact, since his last Transformers movie, which of course we all remember is called Transformers: The Last Knight, he’s only directed one explosions-fest: 6 Underground. But he’s returning with the very Michael Bay-looking thriller, Ambulance.
Ambulance stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Will and Jake Gyllenhaal as Danny, adoptive brothers who plan “the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million” to help pay for Will’s wife’s medical bills. “But when their getaway goes spectacularly wrong, the desperate brothers hijack an ambulance with a wounded cop clinging to life and ace EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González) onboard,” according to the official plot summary. “In a high-speed pursuit that never stops, Will and Danny must evade a massive, city-wide law enforcement response, keep their hostages alive, and somehow try not to kill each other, all while executing the most insane escape L.A. has ever seen.”
If the titular vehicle turns out to be Transformer, that would be a Split is an Unbreakable sequel-level twist. Ambulance, which is based on the 2005 Danish thriller Ambulancen by Laurits Munch-Petersen and Lars Andreas Pedersen, opens on February 18, 2022.
Halsey came out with one of the year’s most intriguing pop (or at least pop-adjacent) projects, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, thanks in part to her collaborators, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. Now, the trio is the subject of a new Billboard interview, and in it, Reznor admits that he and Ross were initially intimidated by the idea of working with Halsey.
Reznor says when the possibility of collaborating with Halsey was presented to him, he was concerned that the expectation was for him to adapt his sound into something more pop-friendly:
“We haven’t paid that much attention to popular music in the last few years. I couldn’t name most songs by people in the top 100. It’s not out of being elitist or ‘It’s not cool,’ it just doesn’t feel like it’s for me, and music is a thing that I need to help me figure out who I am. And to come along and work with Halsey, I think initially, we were intimidated. ‘Is it a pop star, and does that mean there are big businesses affiliated with it and it has to feel a certain way?’ We don’t want to f*ck that up, and we’re not out to troll. We were envisioning, to go to [the] worst-case scenario, ‘At some point, someone’s going to talk sense into Halsey that this could be career-sabotaging because it’s not going to be a TikTok track.’ But we were really impressed with [Halsey’s] artistic fearlessness. What matters is good music and having something to say that feels authentic and communicates with people. And on a real level, it’s not filtered through an algorithm or a group-think element weighing in.”
Halsey has spoken extensively about how much she admired Reznor, Ross, and Nine Inch Nails before working with them, and she feels the same way still. After being reminded that they sang “Don’t meet your heroes / They’re all f*cking weirdos” on their Manic track “929,” Halsey said with a laugh, “Thank God this experience has proven me wrong.”
With the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm just a few days away, Larry David stopped by The Rich Eisen Show where he didn’t hold back his thoughts on NFL kickers. The comedic curmudgeon apparently cannot stand the idea that games are being decided by a person who comes off the bench just to kick a ball through goal posts, so he wants both of them gone.
“They’re not football players. I’m sure they’re wonderful people, but they’re not football players!” David said before floating his wild idea to replace field goals. Via Mediaite:
“There’s no need for goal posts! Wouldn’t the game be better without them?” the comedian continued on The Rich Eisen Show. “Why not just have leaping frogs to decide games! See if a frog can leap through a little goal post…why kick it through a goal post?!”
After Eisen tried to talk David out of replacing kickers with leaping frogs, the comedian went even harder on how much he hates the whole concept of field goals.
“Why should one player with this skill… who does nothing but kick a ball, be deciding games when you have 52 other players who are actually playing,” David said. “And this one person, this 53rd person is deciding games? It makes no sense.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 11 premieres October 24 on HBO.
Rep. Matt Gaetz had a pretty wild Wednesday. He (along with Jim Jordan) spent an inordinate amount of time being a distracting nuisance during House Rules Committee hearings regarding Steve Bannon defying a subpoena for the Jan. 6 MAGA coup. In the process, Gaetz tossed up far-right misinformation and generally acted in a far too rambunctious (and not in a good way) manner. Then Gaetz, who is under investigation as an alleged sex trafficker used the word “dramatic” before declaring that the January 6 investigation was a “uniquely Washington obsession.”
That wasn’t all, though, Gaetz also spoke on the House floor, where he made a rather shocking declaration. Via Mediaite (and the above video from Raw Story), he declared that he’s received a death threat and that that the FBI is doing nothing to stop it. “I think someone may be trying to kill me,” he proclaimed. “If they are successful. I would like my constituents and my family to know who stopped their arrest.”
That wasn’t all. Gaetz revealed that he received the threat on Twitter, where a user told him, “I lived in Portland. Portland has ordered a hit on you. I accepted the contract. Have a good day.” Gaetz continued to say that the Capitol Police “recommended his arrest” of this person in D.C., and the Justice Department (according to Gaetz) “refused to do so.”
He wasn’t finished yet. He then suggested that if he were, say, Muslim (“If my name weren’t Gaetz, if it were Omar or Tlaib”), then the Justice Department would do something. Oh boy.
This slogan was the battle cry of the Sega Genesis when it took on video giant Nintendo and began the console wars. With those battles came big selling points to convince people to buy them such as Sega’s blast processing or Nintendo’s Super FX Chip. While these were effective marketing tools, everyone knows at the end of the day the most important thing is the actual video games. Sega had Sonic. Nintendo had Mario. Sega’s version of Mortal Kombat had blood in it, while Nintendo’s needed a cheat code. These differences in console exclusivity was where some of the true battles of the console wars were won and it also set a precedent that video games followed for decades.
Consoles have almost always needed a character to be the face of it. Whether it was a mascot like Mario and Sonic, or a major game like Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation or Halo on the Xbox, these figures played a huge part in not just representing a console, but pushing gamers to one console or the other — or, for some, pushing them to owning them all. The latest Mario game is only going to be on a Nintendo console. The newest Halo was always on the Xbox.
For PlayStation, one of these was God of War. If someone was a huge fan of the God of War series and wanted to play it then they were always going to have to play it on the newest PlayStation. That was the way it worked, until now.
This console generation is no console war. With the Xbox embracing crossplay, Game Pass, and PC Gaming it has shown little interest in getting into a war with PlayStation over exclusives to sell their box. Almost all of their games are available on PC and they’re perfectly content with that. They even let characters they own, like Banjo and Kazooie, make an appearance in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series. On the other side, we have PlayStation telling all of us that it still cares about exclusives, and to its credit, it tries to deliver great PlayStation-only experiences. Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us remain PlayStation only experiences, but for how much longer?
On Wednesday, PlayStation announced plans to port God of War to the PC despite being developed by Sony itself in-house at its Santa Monica Studio. Not only that, but its baseball franchise MLB: The Show recently broke exclusivity and released on Xbox. This would be like if Nintendo ported Mario to the PC. That’s how out of the ordinary it is to see a company do this with a flagship title even as companies further break down the wall of exclusivity.
When Xbox started releasing games to the PC at the same as the Xbox it didn’t feel like something that was a negative. The majority of PC owners are Microsoft Windows users so these players are still staying within the ecosystem. They’re just using a different kind of box. However, by doing that Xbox has opened a pandora’s box that might be changing video games forever. With the power of Steam and the Epic Games Store on PC, we’re seeing more people opt to have a gaming PC. Instead of ignoring this potential player base, we’re watching more companies embrace them and that is only going to continue. At this point, if someone wants to play every kind of game available to them they can buy a gaming PC because chances are likely that eventually, most games will end up there. Get a PlayStation and gaming PC, and it’s almost a guarantee that someone can play any game imaginable.
PC gaming isn’t the endgame though. That’s still a large barrier to entry there with cost. What this is doing though is beginning a change that is likely necessary for video games to continue growing as a platform. The logical endpoint of all this is the end of console exclusivity. The technology of these boxes is being pushed to its maximum limit. The differences between an Xbox and a PlayStation are smaller than ever in terms of the technical side. This doesn’t mean that they’re the exact same, because they’re not, but the types of games that are being made for these consoles are similar in scope. Fans buy them because that is their console of choice more so than because of games or technology these days. The flagship title or mascot is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Most third-party developers do their best to not force themselves into one company because it limits purchase potential. We’re now starting to see titles developed internally at these console developers do something similar.
If we continue to go down this path then the future of video games may look even weirder as time goes on. The next The Legend of Zelda on an Xbox? Uncharted on the Switch? Gears of War on a PlayStation? It sounds absurd right now, but we can already play Halo and God of War on a PC. Sony released a game in 2020 that can be purchased on the Xbox. It’s already happening. We just have to wait and see how long it takes.
Lil Baby is beginning to develop a habit of not turning in his verses for people’s albums. Last year, he admitted that he was supposed to be featured on Drake’s viral dance hit “Toosie Slide” but didn’t send his verse, missing out on another momentous opportunity. Now, a year later, it looks like he still hasn’t learned his lesson. This time, he missed out on inclusion in Young THug’s new album Punk, where he was originally slated to appear on “Bubbly” — which, incidentally, also features Drake, as well as Travis Scott.
Lil Baby revealed as much in a video he posted on TikTok. In the video, Baby gets edged up by his barber while playing a snippet of the now-unused verse with a voiceover reading the caption: “When Young Thug send you a song for his album and you forget to send it back.”
For what it’s worth, he has been a bit busy of late. Not only is he finally touring for his breakout 2020 album My Turn, that tour also doubles as a showcase for songs from his summer 2021 joint album with Lil Durk, The Voice Of The Heroes. Not to mention, he’s already done countless other features this year, becoming one of hip-hop’s most ubiquitous acts. Still, though, he may want to start setting himself reminders or hire an assistant to remind him to send those verses off.
Kelly Zutrau has always had a special ability to capture the in-between-the lines-moments of relationships in flux. With her band Wet, she’s written songs that are less about relationships falling apart and more about what it takes to keep them together. “Baby you’re the best, we’ll figure out the rest,” she sang on 2016’s gently auto-tuned “You’re The Best.”
“Do whatever you can to make it work and if you can’t, take space from it,” she says over the phone, pulled over at a gas station on I-5 in between the Bay Area and Los Angeles (“Apparently they have extremely good tacos.”)
But the road to the New York band’s third album, Letter Blue, out October 22nd, took a lot of soul-searching for Zutrau and Wet’s other two members, multi-instrumentalist/producer Joe Valle and guitarist Marty Sulkow. In fact, Sulkow left the band before their 2018 album, Still Run, as the band grappled with the dynamics of Zutrau as their leader and core songwriter. But now for Letter Blue, the band returned to that original trio and are now back together just as they were on 2016’s breakthrough Don’t Run.
Some other things have changed as well, namely that the band exited their relationship with the major label Columbia and have put Letter Blue out independently via AWAL. A tight-knit cast of collaborators including Toro y Moi’s “Chaz Bear,” Frank Ocean keyboardist Buddy Ross, Florence + The Machine guitarist Rob Ackroyd, and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes have lent a hand to the album and the result is Wet’s most diverse offering yet. Zutrau’s hallmark emotional pop lyricism is as sharp as ever on songs like “Clementine” and “Blades Of Grass.” But there’s a new edge to songs like “Larabar” and the dance music-inflected, Chaz Bear-produced “Far Cry” that feel like taking the kind of chances that yield innovative pop with room to grow.
We caught up with Zutrau to talk about the ins and outs of Letter Blue and why she’s happy with an album for the first time in a very long time. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What went into bringing the three of you back together again as a band and to make this album?
Me and Marty hung out and talked for the first time in a while a couple years ago and then the three of us slowly started being friends again. It wasn’t like we weren’t friends, but we just weren’t really in touch for a good two years. We started hanging out again and it was so natural because everyone had kinda worked through a lot of stuff. We realized that we really missed making music together and were like “Let’s do a session!” and then “Alright, now let’s do another one. Ok now let’s run all of these songs together.” I think for me it felt like it was necessary to make an album that was fun and came from the same place that the music started from. A place with no expectations, no major label expectations. Something that I liked and that was fun to make and that was really important to me. So it made sense that we had a return to form.
I know that you had to overcome some inherent issues with the way you looked at the band. You and Joe kept doing your thing and split with Marty and you were able to overcome that I guess?
It’s just not easy, because we had been working together for ten years. It’s really hard to work with anyone — especially close friends — when boundaries are blurred. We took some space and I’m really grateful that we came back together, because I think that’s what a lot of the album is about: Taking stock in the last 10 years and taking a look at what you got out of it and what you have to show for it.
The best part of it after learning a lot is about these relationships with these people that you’ve toured the world with, is that they might drive you crazy, annoy you more than anyone. But they also know you better than anyone, you really love each other and have this unique experience of the world together. That’s a big part of the underlying themes.
You’ve written pretty literally about some of the band relationships on Still Run and obviously always about romantic relationships. What do you think it takes to make relationships work?
Just an acceptance that things are very imperfect and always in a constant state of change and flexibility; they just go through phases. You might not be talking to someone one year and then something happens and you come back together. And it’s not just about trying to solve relationships, but more about just being in them and figuring out each other’s boundaries. Do whatever you can to make it work and if you can’t, take space from it. I think no relationship feels good all the time. I think rarely there’s even a relationship that feels good most of the time [laughs]. Something I’m realizing as I get older, is that I’m so grateful to have people in my life that I’ve known for like 10 or 15 or even 20 years, that know me through these different stages in life. You don’t get that many more friends like that in life, who knew you in high school or during your first romantic relationship. So you want to hold on to those if you can.
So then is this why you’re most comfortable with this lineup of the band?
Yeah! We know each other really well and have been through a lot of conflicts between the three of us over the years so we know how to recover from them. You know, to know how to fight with someone is a good thing to have in a relationship. But I love the way it sounds when the three of us play together and that’s why we made the band in the first place. The way Marty plays guitar is such a big part of the sound of Wet and it’s so obvious now that he’s back playing live and it’s clicking for me a lot more.
This is the first album you’re releasing independently. What was different about that process creatively?
There were a lot of good things about being on Columbia, but it was just getting to a point where it wasn’t working for us creatively. There was a lot of changeover, so the people we had been working with had been swapped out with new people who didn’t necessarily know us or weren’t really aligned with what we wanted to make. You have these big budgets, but you don’t always have access to them and you have to plead your case as to why you need X, Y, and Z. And it’s just this long, bureaucratic process that probably does work for some people — like really big artists. But it just stopped working for us and when we asked to leave, they let us. And it was a pretty easy transition as it was clear that the relationship wasn’t really working anymore.
So on this third album, there was no other reason to make it than to make something that was intuitive and creative and coming from a real place of needing to make music and wanting it to feel good to us. Something I would stand by no matter the commercial reception it had. I think it’s okay to be focused on making money but for this, it was one of those things that if you want to make money, you should go into a different type of work, cause that’s not why you’re making music [laughs] I had to identify what I love about it, because a lot of this wasn’t working for me. I was miserable and close to quitting. And then there were these things that are amazing, with other artists and my bandmates and making stuff intuitively. We basically just paid to make it ourselves, with very little money, and then found a small independent label. They give you a little bit of money, but you have A LOT more control and that’s what I wanted. The freedom to move quickly…like “I want to go in the studio with this person tomorrow,” so just get in touch directly, do it and figure it out later.
It sounds like you got to a dark place that you were describing where you almost quit. I know you were featured on other people’s tracks… like that DJDS track “New Grave” with Kevin Drew, which really hit me like a freight train. DId stuff like that keep you going?
Yes, exactly! That track and being on the Toro y Moi record (“Monte Carlo”) and Rostam’s record (“Half-Light”). I was finding that to be so loose and free. You hit on something in the studio and there it is. It was moving a lot more quickly and creatively. That sorta inspired the process of the next album. I wanted to work with Chaz and Buddy Ross — who I had done some sessions with – and I wanted to keep it really tight, with few close collaborators. Have it be more collaborative and less precious. Less defining “Who are we?” or “What does Wet sound like?” Just let it be what it was going to be and trust myself. And I trust in this small group of collaborators. I know them really well and they’re all really talented. And I’m really happy with the album and I don’t usually feel that way.
Tell me about “Far Cry” and working with Chaz on that track, cause it sounds different from any Wet track I’ve ever heard.
That was one of the first songs that came together for the record. Right when I got off of tour, I wanted to get back in the studio with him. We met when he asked me to be on his album and then he came to a show and we went on tour with him and then started writing together. We wrote “Far Cry” and also “Only One” together and he really helped us shape the beginning sound of this album. Like, wanting to have some dance influence, which you hear on “Far Cry” and letting it be a heavy song, but also feel good at the same time. How it mirrors living with those two emotional states. Cause that can be what it feels like sometimes in these layered relationships that can be both sad and happy and that’s what we were going for there.
Do you feel like you’re still building your body of work and where you want to take this? Is the future still very much a work in progress?
Totally. It’s constantly evolving and changing and the world keeps changing so much. And I mean, we’re already working on another record. I’m always writing, I always want to be writing. It’s something that I do to work through my experiences of the world. But I do feel like with some of the collaborators we worked with on this album and the fact that it was the three of us again, we’re gonna keep heading in that direction.
On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump surprised the tech world by announcing his long-threatened social media platform, Truth Social, but he also apparently surprised another more serious group of people: the platform’s investors. According to a new report from the New York Times, the venture capital company, Digital World Acquisition, was not aware that the former president would be directly involved with Truth Social, which is kind of an important factor. Via Raw Story:
“The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague,” the Times reports. “The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.”
Trump’s involvement is obviously a double-edged sword. While the former president still has a large number of supporters and a prominent place as the de facto head of the Republican Party, he’s also banned from Facebook and Twitter for riling up that base and sending them storming into the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Before you cut a check for $300 million, you should probably get more specifics from the guy whose spent the better part of the year claiming that he really won the 2020 election (when he did not).
Case in point, he announced Truth Social by essentially accusing Twitter of working with the Taliban: “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump wrote in his press release. “This is unacceptable.”
Coldplay is fresh off the release of their new album Music Of The Spheres, and now, their current endeavor is a week-long residency on The Late Late Show. They’ve performed on the program every night this week, and so far, they’ve chosen to highlight the collaborative tracks from the new record: They linked up with Selena Gomez for “Let Somebody Go” on Monday, and on Tuesday, they performed “My Universe” but without BTS.
Coldplay was back on the show and they again opted to perform a joint effort, this time having We Are King and Jacob Collier join them on “Human Heart” (which is titled with just a heart emoji on streaming services). The performance was decidedly focused on the four singers’ vocals, as it was just Martin, Collier, and We Are King’s Amber and Paris Strother on the stage for the meditative song.
Coldplay previously said of the track, “We love the way that sound shaped up with all the stacked layers of vocals; it’s almost like a modern-sounding gospel song in some ways. Sometimes as a musician, it’s my job to step in and say, ‘Actually, the best course of action for me is to not play anything at all, because what we created here has a much more unique sound.’ You have to take your ego out of the picture and understand that the best job you can do is leave something alone. Because then it allows the other songs around it to sound bigger and fuller.”
Watch Coldplay, We Are King, and Collier perform “Human Heart” above.
Music Of The Spheres is out now via Parlophone. Get it here.
Coldplay is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
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