Gorillaz have so far released a couple of singles as part of their Song Machine series, and now the group is back with another one. The latest track is “Aries,” which features clear influence from its featured artists, Georgia and Peter Hook, the co-founder of Joy Division and New Order.

The band’s virtual member Noodle said of the track, “Highly impatient and competitive, many Aries have the fighting spirit of your mythological ruler.”

This is the first new track from the group since they announced last month that the coronavirus pandemic won’t impact Song Machine. The band’s Murdoc said at the time, “Even though large tracts of mankind grind to a halt in the face of this formidable foe, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. And even if a large part of the planet becomes completely bored out of their melons, we will not surrender. We will carry on the struggle. Until the day we can go outside again with open arms, high five, group hug, fist bump, and maybe even French kiss. Until then. We’ve got this, and more importantly the machine remains ON!”

Watch the “Aries” video above.

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

Chef Asma Khan shot to culinary fame when she opened the all-female staffed London eatery Darjeeling Express. Her renown increased even further thanks to an episode in season six of Netflix’s Chef’s Table. With plenty of buzz and some famous fans, the chef used her time in the spotlight wisely — by continuing to fight for women and migrants across the industry.

Then everything changed. Khan had to close her restaurant in March. Rather than running takeout or grocery service, the Darjeeling Express staff isn’t working at all right now (though she vowed to pay everyone’s salaries, no matter what). And with the whole industry in a holding pattern, Khan — like every chef — has concerns about what the industry might look like when it comes back, which parts of it will survive, and how our collective “new normal” will play out.

We caught up with Chef Khan over the weekend to talk about this strange, often-scary moment in history. The conversation also gave her a chance to share her approach to supporting her staff during the shutdown while juxtaposing the U.K. government’s approach versus the U.S.

Since opening, you’ve been a huge advocate of women in the restaurant industry. Can you talk us through how that became such a big part of Darjeeling Express and your work in the restaurant industry?

I realized when I was starting to set up Darjeeling, everyone was so surprised that I was going to set this kitchen up with an all-woman kitchen and crew. I didn’t think it was so unusual when I was setting up the restaurant because all these women had been with me during my supper club days. This was my natural team to cook with and I just thought it was very natural. It was the people’s reaction that made me realize it was something unusual. And it’s not even that I wanted to start off by having an all-female restaurant kitchen, it was the team that started with me. They took the journey with me. These women were nannies from the school where my kids went. We used to do supper clubs together in my house. Then we moved to the pub. And then, when we opened the restaurant, they moved to the restaurant.

What was the reaction you got from that?

I did get a lot of comments from people that I should really get some men in there, some “professionals” in there. Not even for a second did I think that this was something I would even consider. In my heart, I always dreamt and imagined that we would be successful.

I wanted so badly to succeed, to show that it’s possible that the passion and skills of these women, who are home cooks, are on par with anybody who’s learned professionally. We were not different. Yes, we were a lot older and we may not look like all the other chefs working in other restaurants. But I see people by their passion and how much love and desire they have to cook, and this was, for me, the perfect team.

You were then able to make it about more than just your team. You used your voice to start fighting for women and migrants in the kitchen across the industry.

Well, the thing is what triggered this was that a very well-known male chef had been accused of sexual harassment. And an outside agency came in and verified that, yes, it was true that there had been sexual harassment, pretty serious sexual harassment. But the outcome of that decision was that the women who had complained lost their jobs, and he was promoted from head chef to executive chef.

And that just stunned me. Then the response on social media of chefs in the industry — they were having this argument that this was not really a promotion.

Wow.

They were saying being promoted to an executive chef is not really a promotion from a head chef. I was just astounded — is this what this debate was about? What about those three women?

That was a turning point for me. I wrote an article in one of the newspapers without fear. They did warn me that there’s a risk of you being sued. I said, “I have no fear,” because if I just call it out of how unfair it was that these women lost their jobs, even though the harassment was proven — because there was an outside agency, third party, who was neutral and said that, yes, this had happened. If this was seen as okay in an industry — any other industry — there would be a huge outcry over how appalling it was that the decision was made. But the silence, especially from female chefs, was deafening.

There was a lot of kind of… getting together of male chefs in defense of this particular person. That’s when I realized that I need to pick my corner, and I need to fight, not for my own team because we’re okay. Sometimes, occasionally, we argue, of course. It’s not that everything is perfect. Occasionally, we do have problems in our kitchen as well as between the women, but that it is all kitchens. I know there’s no bullying, and I’m there all the time. But this was time for me to lend my voice to the voiceless.

What happened next?

The irony of it all is that after I wrote in defense of these girls, they came to the Darjeeling Express. I knew the three girls sitting over there crying were “those girls.” But I didn’t walk up to them because I couldn’t do this to them. Then they wrote to me saying, “We came to honor you. We came to honor someone who cared enough.”

That’s when I realized that they were so scared they’d never work again in this industry. Because when everybody is silent, it’s very scary. If your head of your kitchen is a woman, and something like this happens and they’re silent, she may personally find it revolting what happened, but if she does not say anything publicly, that silence is very, very toxic because it makes you feel that if this happened to you, no one would speak up in your defense.

I realized that and thought, “Let me be that voice speaking up for these women, and if it means that I have to deal with a lot of aggression from other people, I can deal with that. I can deal with that because the pain is not personal.”

Do you feel your success with Darjeeling Express and Netflix fueled you?

We’re successful, but for me, the success has to be very much like what my father said about privilege. He taught me that you do not use it for your personal joy and getting money or just individually reaping the benefits of success. I wanted the success of Netflix, the success of the recognition and the accolades that the restaurant got. Then, I wanted to transform that success into a weapon that I could use to talk about what is happening to women and to bring forward other women.

After Netflix, I realized that people would be interested in listening to what I had to say. I thought, “I don’t want that opportunity to do a pop-up in New York with some trendy chef and make a lot of money.” I’m not taking the money to my grave. It’s like when you know you have a speech in front of you, before going to go on stage. You have limited time there. When the spotlight hits you, you say your lines, and then, you get off, and you go back into the wings. This is my time, and the spotlight has hit me, and the lines that I read out are very important. They should not be about me trying to become more famous or networking more or making money. I know I probably sound very idealist, but this is my time to speak for those who didn’t get the time to get on stage.

Then the world changed. You shut down Darjeeling before, arguably, the UK was taking this as seriously as they perhaps should have been. And it’s become obvious that women, minorities, and migrants, they’re the first three groups either forced to the frontline or on the chopping block to get left behind when things like this happen?

Absolutely. Nothing hits home harder than when you saw that the first four people to die in the NHS [National Health Service] in this country were black and Asian men — all migrants — who were working for the NHS. The first nurse who died was a Muslim mother, someone wearing a hijab, a mother of three, who made a career in nursing because she wanted to improve her life.

These things all rip me apart because I understand that it is, again, immigrants, and it is, again, women who have already paid the price with their lives in the health service and in hospitality, too.

What does… all of this look like down the road to you?

When the doors open, it will be a much harsher regime because … of course, all of us are going to lose a lot of money. We’re all going to come back with much tighter budgets. When the money is tight, you will find owners who will squeeze the low paid workers, invariably the low-wage migrant workers who are Black or Asian. The women who are lower down in the pecking order will be made to work extra hours, not being paid for overtime. When there wasn’t a justification for the exploitation of weaker people in kitchens and in our industry, it was already rampant. I’m afraid that a lot of people are going to come back and use what has been very brutal, without a doubt, financially as an excuse.

It’s devastating what’s happened, the closures. To go back in there to pick up the pieces and start again will be difficult. But I hope that this time away will have taught owners of restaurants and chefs and big decision-makers in hospitality about compassion and about community and about survival. I’m hoping that they will come back softer and kinder and less toxic and less hostile and that they see the value of human life because they made it through this, and that other person who they’ve hired has also made it through it.

I hope it will actually bring us, bring the industry up to what it should be — about service, about compassion, about love, and celebrating cuisines. Not about bullying and suppression of a particular gender while also of underpaying people.

You decided to close your doors completely, whereas other restaurant owners have tried to do carryout service or delivery service to varying degrees of success. What was behind your decision to close entirely as opposed to phasing in delivery?

I didn’t want to expose my staff to public transport, which was packed at that time. This is how most people travel in London. I knew that this virus was being transported by people being in close contact. I didn’t want to do that to my staff.

I didn’t want to risk my front-of-house while they were serving in a small restaurant. We’re not the Ritz. We don’t have tables that are far apart. People are very close to each other, and my staff would have to be very close to you to serve, to take your order. I felt that of the people who were coming to my restaurant, some may turn out to be ill and not discover it a week or ten days later — which is already too late for me because they may have infected my staff.

That’s why I didn’t do takeaway. The only reason to do that would have been financial, or to have dragged it on to try and kind of continue with the business. I had to let the business go because, for me, the human life of my staff and my customers was far more important. I didn’t want a risk that one of my potentially infected staff could infect an entire restaurant.

At that time, the government was not willing to say anything, was not willing to close anything. So I closed. I promised everybody, “I am not sacking you. I am going to pay you.”

Where would that money come from?

It was going to come from my personal savings. I’ve saved some money for a particular thing. Already, in my mind, I had decided this was going to pay everyone’s wages because I didn’t know what the government was going to do. I wasn’t going to wait because this was like a ticking bomb. I wasn’t going to wait for someone to get sick in the team. The other thing is, I’m very aware that each woman in my kitchen is supporting 15 to 20 people back home, and if that person got sick, or God forbid, was unable to work again…

That’s devastating.

Basically, 15 or 20 people would be starving back in India or Nepal. So I wasn’t going to take that chance because I saw myself as responsible, not just for my own team, but all the dependents of those people, their children, their elderly grandparents, in-laws. Many of them are supporting husbands back at home too. So I had to close and I told everybody then that however hard it’s going to be, I will pay you, and I will not let you down. I’m here, but I want you to go home. I would not allow a dream that began so beautifully to end with tragedy, and this was what scared me.

But, unlike the U.S. (so far), the U.K. has provided serious relief for restaurants, right?

A week after we closed, then the package was announced. Now, my staff is going to go on that package and get 80-percent salary. They’re all very happy because they will be able to support their families as they did before. So, for me, that was the most important thing, that they need to be able to live well in this country, still be able to send back the same amount of money, and it looks like that’s going to continue.

They’re all getting all their supplies from the restaurant because we just had a delivery the day before I closed. So all the stuff that we had, everyone has taken home. We still have cans of oil, which I distribute to all the security staff and the cleaners.

I sleep in peace at night knowing that I did the right thing. I don’t worry looking at my bank balance because I think that what would have really shattered me was making people come back to do takeaways or anything extra and exposing them to infection. That would have been terrible if anything had gone wrong.

I know we’re all in sort of a holding pattern here. What do you see the industry looking like when this does start to come back?

People will lose a lot of restaurants because the reality on the ground is that everybody runs on very, very low margins. All of us in the UK have the staff being covered 80 percent, but there are other costs that we are liable for. Service charges and bank loans, which I’ve just been deferred on for six months. No one is writing them off. These are all temporary measures. As yet, my landlord has said nothing about rent, nothing.

Have you been in contact with your suppliers? How are they faring?

I’ve been in touch with all of them. In early March, actually, when the problem was building up, I wrote to all of them saying that even though I have a 30-day credit, I want to start paying everything now, because we might get into trouble. They were all really grateful. They all sent me their invoices. I paid everybody. I started paying them because I was afraid that something goes wrong, no one’s going to pay them. So I cleared everybody.

I’ve been in touch with all of them. I’ve been speaking to them, and one of them, very kindly, sent me 45 eggs because I jokingly told him that my son wanted omelets. I have a college kid who came back, and he ate everything up in the house. I was just joking with him, and he sent 45 eggs and some vegetables. It was so sweet. But I’m not sure who’s going to survive this thing because I think that a lot of restaurants may not pay them. I know I have, but I’m not sure if others will.

It’s a very difficult time. It’s like a scare where you open your eyes and you’re scared because you don’t know how many you’ll still see standing when this is over.

I think a lot of the nice and the great and the good may go. It’s not necessarily that only the successful ones will survive. It’s not about success anymore. I think those who just had the resilience to see it through, have planned properly, didn’t abandon their staff, do not need to start from scratch again recruiting staff, they will actually come out of this better. They’ll come back with the entire staff who will be motivated and will appreciate the fact that you stood by them through the closures.

With so many artists performing entire concerts from their own living rooms lately, it was only a matter of time before NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series got in on the action. After kicking off the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert series in March with Soccer Mommy, NPR has kept the party going with an eclectic roster of guests including Margo Price, Michael McDonald, and Tank from Tank and The Bangas. The latest addition to the collection is none other than The Roots’ Black Thought, whose performance doubles as the first entry into his own Streams Of Thought series.

While explaining that Streams Of Thought won’t always consist of musical performances, Thought does make his performance well-worth tuning into as he tears through a breathless rendition of “Thought Vs. Everybody” from his upcoming Streams of Thought Vol. 3 EP, then offers a preview of “Yellow” from his upcoming off-Broadway musical Black No More. The set closes with “Nature Of The Beast,” which also comes from the third Streams Of Thought EP, and features a guest appearance from Portugal. The Man, as well as a callback to “What We Do,” The 1995 Roots single that almost sparked a beef between Black Thought and The Notorious B.I.G.

Thought’s desk is impressive, with Grammys, gold and platinum plaques, and some thought-provoking reading material stacked up behind him, but the rapper is as relaxed as we’ve ever seen him as his lounges in his comfy armchair in socks and slides.

Watch Black Thought’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert above.

Modern Family wrapped up its Emmy-winning, 11-season run last night. Much of the two-part series finale was about change — Mitchell and Cameron move to Missouri, Phil and Claire go on an RV trip, Jay and Gloria head to South America to spend time with her family, etc. — but one thing that stayed the same was the format of the show.

Modern Family is presented as a mockumentary, with the characters speaking to an unseen crew, but as co-creator Christopher Lloyd told Entertainment Weekly, “we didn’t” consider pulling an The Office and presenting the footage as a “real” documentary.

“Look, it’s a valid idea. Obviously, we started out in our pilot having that person be a character. And then the more we thought about, we thought, “That might take the audience out of it.” And then having lived in a mockumentary form without literally a crew for 250 episodes, it felt like it might’ve been to meta or too cute to maybe do that for us,” Lloyd said. “The Office made you aware that they were actual people much more than we did. We were just using it as a technique more than a sort of an actual reality.”

You know what else stayed the same? Manny being annoying. Anyway, Lloyd was also asked what he hopes people will say about Modern Family in the future:

“I hope that they say, ‘Oh, that was a really well-made show. There was care in the writing of it. There was incredible professionalism and talent in the cast, and what it all added up to was a really rich experience of great laughs. I loved spending time with those characters, but also I found myself moved at the end, and that’s like a full meal.’ … The hope is that people remember it as a fuller experience than you sometimes get with a comedy and come back to it for the nourishment that comes from that.”

R.I.P. Modern Family. It’s hard to imagine another broadcast show ever winning Outstanding Comedy Series five years in a row ever again.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Selena Gomez’s Rare was one of the year’s first high-profile album releases, as it came out in early January. Now, a few months later, Gomez has decided to add onto the record with a deluxe edition, which introduces three new songs to the tracklist: “Boyfriend,” “Souvenir,” and “She.” “Feel Me,” which previously appeared as a bonus track on some versions of the album, is also included on the new deluxe edition.

Posting about the album today, Gomez wrote, “I hope you can take a moment to disconnect and dance to the new songs!!” Ahead of the deluxe album’s release, she also shared a message about the song “Boyfriend,” which she says isn’t indicative of her current priorities:

“Many of you know how excited I’ve been to release a song called ‘Boyfriend.’ It’s a lighthearted song about falling down and getting back up time and time again in love, but also knowing that you don’t need anyone other than yourself to be happy. We wrote it long before our current crisis, but in the context of today, I want to be clear that a boyfriend is no where near the top of my list of priorities. Just like the rest of the world, I’m praying for safety, unity, and recovery during this pandemic. Because of that, I’m personally donating to the Plus 1 COVID-19 relief fund as well as donating $1 of every order in my official store to the fund starting now.”

Stream the new deluxe edition of Rare below.

Rare (Deluxe) is out now via Interscope. Get it here.

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My first John Prine show was an accident — I was going to see Emmylou Harris.

It just so happened, Emmylou and a singer I didn’t know were doing a doubleheader in Alabama during the week I was visiting, back in March of 2011, so we bought tickets and plotted the drive to Birmingham. I kept meaning to go on Spotify and learn more about the guy sharing the bill, but grad school is a busy time and I never got around to it. Which means that the first time I ever heard John Prine’s voice, it was live and in person, without a single hint of what I was about to experience: a flummoxing, mesmerizing performer whose presence would be swaggering if it wasn’t so gentle.

Hearing “Sam Stone” (“there’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes”) and “Spanish Pipedream” (“blow up your TV”) or “Souvenirs” for the first time in an half-full Alabama arena sounds like a scene out of a Prine song; encountering his storytelling was like meeting someone from my family I’d always heard about but never known. How is there so much familiarity in his work that everyone who hears it thinks it belongs only to them? What a feat. Returning home with what felt like a secret, I spent my daily long trail runs carefully listening to every single album he’d ever released, settling on 2010’s In Person & On Stage (Live) as the one that felt most like the show where I first encountered him.

And for a while, I lived happily in my own bubble, wearing grooves in his 2000 classic Souvenirs that I found on vinyl in some record shop, playing the 1971 self-titled album that started it all on loop on my laptop, reading up on how Roger Ebert discovered Prine back when he was just a mailman, and drawing connections to my own life, growing up the daughter of a garbage man. I used to try to mask my dad’s working-class job before finding Prine, but after, my old shame about it seemed to matter far less. Like Prine, my father was a songwriter and a guitar player, but unlike him, never got discovered. I bet there’s a whole lot more golden talent at open mics in towns around the world that never makes it past those tiny bars, even more that never makes it past the living rooms. One thing I always cherished about Prine’s music is the fact that we were lucky to have it all, and my own random introduction to it only deepened that sentiment further.

As I fell in love with John Prine, though, I began to see his influence everywhere. Not only did my idol, Bob Dylan, praise his songwriting skills, but the younger, up-and-coming artists I loved were citing his influence constantly. Foremost among them? An upstart country singer named Kacey Musgraves, who later shared that one of the first songs she wrote after moving to Nashville was “Burn One With John Prine.” Because sometimes life is good and right, the two performed it together in 2015. Well, that’s not quite right — Prine introduces the song with a story of Kacey trying to get stoned with him (unsuccessfully, despite the hints contained in “Illegal Smile,” another classic), and then sits there basking in it while she performs the song. “My idea of heaven, is to burn one with John Prine,” she sings, and later: “I bet that he would understand, just how I feel and who I am.” As the video itself illustrates, she was right.

Actually, Kacey wasn’t the only one who felt that way, and who was held and supported by John’s benevolent gaze and listening ear. His generous spirit bridged generations, as recent collaborations with Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Kacey herself, and Margo Price illustrate. But even before that, Prine was hellbent on working with and elevating his songwriting peers, particularly women. In 2016 he released For Better, Or Worse, a collection of duets with all-female country musicians and folk singers, many of whom don’t enjoy the longevity that their veteran male counterparts do late into their careers. Largely unsung legends like Iris Dement, Kathy Mattea, Lee Ann Womack, Susan Tedeschi, and Alison Krauss are all present on that release, along with newcomers like Holly Williams (Hank Williams’ granddaughter) and Morgane Stapleton (Chris Stapleton’s wife).

He toured frequently with Emmylou Harris, wrote a legendary hit song for Bonnie Raitt, and routinely, thoroughly, and lovingly praised his wife Fiona from the stage, everywhere he went. At a Grammys showcase hosted at the Troubadour in Los Angeles last year, artists as disparate as Dwight Yoakam, Ashley McBryde, Anderson East, Boz Scaggs, Mary Gauthier, and loads more gathered to pay tribute to his songs. Nearly every single one of them had a story about the way a song of his had helped them through, how the experiences he put into writing had made their own life more bearable, better, or richer. His songs were like friends when you didn’t have one, exquisite proof that someone else had been in the same kind of sad, weird, or lonesome situation, and found a way to make something useful, funny, or somber out of it.

Prine was beloved and respected within the songwriting community — young and old — because he treated his peers with the same open-hearted acceptance and tenderness that is present in so many of his songs: Everyone is interesting, anyone can surprise you, and no one is unworthy. In a world where those principles are so rarely upheld, much less lived out for decades, it’s a supreme loss that John Prine is no longer with us. But the seeds he’s sowed with his peers and the next generation are just beginning to grow, and the tree of forgiveness will outlast us all. As that last great album of his is embraced by those who are mourning this loss, it will be comforting to hear the covers of those songs that inevitably emerge. The next generation will keep singing Prine’s songs, because, when he was alive, he already made them ours.

What Stephen King comparisons have you heard about since the pandemic began? Obviously, The Stand sprang to many people’s lips, including James Marsden (who’s starring in CBS All Access’ upcoming reboot). Fortunately, the current disease in question, while deadly, isn’t nearly as fatal as the Captain Trips superflu (which wiped out 99% of the world’s population), which is why King initially pushed back at those comparisons, but that’s not the only King story that bears a resemblance to current times. There’s also The Mist, which sees characters taking refuge (and freaking out inside) a supermarket while unknown, barely invisible horrors lurk outside. And we’re all familiar with the twisted version of cabin fever that struck Jack Torrence in The Shining. Well, King’s done fighting any analogies, and now, he’s talking to NPR about it.

While promoting his new collection of short stories, If It Bleeds (which is Holly Gibney focused for you fans of The Outsider), King says that he keeps hearing, “Gee, it’s like we’re living in a Stephen King story.” His answer: “And my only response to that is, ‘I’m sorry.’”

That’s a more than fair response, since King can’t even log onto Twitter these days without seeing comparisons. It’s gotta feel like a lot to him, like it does for everyone else. Still, he states, that a situation like this was inevitable. “There was never any question that in our society, where travel is a staple of daily life,” he reasoned. “[T]hat sooner or later, there was going to be a virus that was going to communicate to the public at large.”

The horror icon admits that he’s experiencing cabin fever, too, along with the “gnawing anxiety” that horror awaits outside our homes. He also revealed that he’s changed a few things in the book that he’s currently writing, since it was set in 2020. It actually includes a few characters who go on a cruise in 2020, so that got pushed back to 2019. “I don’t think anybody’s going on cruise ships this year,” he supposed. Unfortunately, people continued to do just that and are still stuck on those massive floating cities full of the virus, so that’s a different type of horror show. But King made a wise move by bumping that event into the past because, in the future, cruising may not exist.

We’re living in scary times, but here’s a recent King tweet that might bring a smile.

(Via NPR)

After Killing Eve introduced us to its compelling cat-and-mouse game a few seasons ago, success threatened to become the show’s own worst enemy. The very title of the series, after all, meant that at some point, Jodie Comer’s assassin would presumably take out Sandra Oh’s MI6 agent. The first season finale managed to stave off this threat when Eve pulled a surprise stabbing move on Villanelle, but how long could the show sustain that sense of urgency, and those wild collisions that everyone has come to expect from the central relationship’s gravitational pull? Well, the sophomore season began splendidly, but some folks inevitably expressed disappointment by the season’s end. That’s where it gets tricky. Even though I felt that the show remained better than 90-ish% of current TV drams, the debut season was so on-the-mark that some of the show’s momentum unavoidably slowed. Then Villanelle tried to do what the title said she’d do, and two more seasons were greenlit while no one knew Eve’s ultimate fate. So, gauntlet thrown?

One has to respect the chutzpah involved with greenlighting those additional seasons. It was almost as if BBC America gave the naysayers the finger, as if to challenge skeptical viewers who can’t possibly see how this show could continue. A large (and vocal) contingent of loyalists do remain, and the show’s most prominent pairing has continued to feel hypnotic enough to make people look forward to more. Still, one cannot deny that third seasons are prone to be make-or-break points when many successful series must make some tough choices to stay afloat. Given Villanelle’s harsh decision at the end of the year, the show put itself in an extraordinarily difficult position. Even more so than most other third seasons, which, like I said, is already bound to be a vulnerable point.

Let’s make one thing clear: Eve and Villanelle’s dynamic, if both of them are to stay alive — and the trailers made clear that Eve survived what went down in Rome — can only ride the cat-and-mouse game so far. Dragging that out, full-on, through a third season would be exhausting, so there’s no room for a True Detective-style attempt to go back-to-basics in an effort to re-bottle lightning. That method churned out a respectable product for HBO, though not a magical one, and BBC America resists that temptation with Killing Eve. Instead, it tweaks itself to survive through (at least) year four.

Mainly, Killing Eve accepts the challenge by diving inward and reflecting upon itself. It does not struggle to maintain the game. It doesn’t even try to make the cat and mouse get along like Season 2 did. All of that would be too played-out to sustain in an engaging way. And this is where Killing Eve decides to start running a marathon, rather than a sprint. So, the flashier aspects of the show still exist, but they’re fueled differently. This might make the show less exhilarating for some viewers, but overall, there’s a more solid construction. It really was the wisest way to go to keep these characters going and, in the process, to give the people want they demand: more Villanelle and Eve. That’s what we get, but the show also turns into more of an ensemble team effort, which is very cool. Oh, and the writing’s still chock full of biting humor and morbid coping mechanisms.

As always, the show’s stills are best posted without context, but let’s just say that these two are coping differently with their trauma.

Unfortunately, I cannot say too much about what actually transpires without spoiling a ton of what happens this season. And I can’t wait to talk more about the events that take place with you fine people, but for now, these loose ends will have to do:

– The first several episodes are kind-of The Villanelle Show. That doesn’t mean that Eve isn’t on the scene. She’s definitely around and receives plenty of face time, but she’s muted, worn out in a sense, physically and psychologically, while attempting to recover from what went down in Rome. Whereas Villanelle’s personality grows ever more amplified (she’s got career goals now, y’all) and contextualized, including her own bottle episode mid-season. You may or may not appreciate the additional information — I did, and the payoffs from that episode don’t feel forced or unearned.

– Several regulars who previously haven’t received much fleshing-out get that treatment now, and it’s wonderful to see this show written as more of an ensemble, rather than players rotating around a central pair. We learn more about Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) and Kenny (Sean Delaney). Carolyn (Fiona Shaw)’s also now got a daughter, Geraldine (Gemma Whelan from Game Of Thrones), on the scene, and a newly revealed Twelve member, Dasha (Harriet Walter), is shaking things up real good. Sadly, Eve’s long-suffering husband, Niko (Owen McDonnell), is still very much suffering. There are a lot of threads are floating around in this season! It’s definitely not dull.

– Keeping with tradition, the show’s installed a new lead writer, Suzanne Heathcote, who’s best known for Fear The Walking Dead. That might not inspire confidence, but Heathcote’s experience helps turn this into an ensemble show. There are also some brazenly sharp lines of dialogue on tap, like “when a bullet goes though you, it leaves something behind.” Viewers know that more than one player on this show can benefit from that reasoning. Of course, no one can replace the wit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first-season writing, but the show’s still got an admirable edge.

This third season burns as brightly as always even if it does so less intensely. It succeeds by pulling away from a lot of what made the show stellar, but the show mines new potential from secondary relationships and fresh characters. So, Killing Eve is still as mesmerizing as it used to be, but in a different way, with fewer shocks to the system. The show’s passion still exists, it’s just not so in your face as it has been previously. And fans won’t want to walk away from this show’s commitment to keeping the gang together.

The third season of BBC America’s ‘Killing Eve’ premieres on Sunday, April 12 at 8:00 PM EST and will be simulcast on AMC. You can still catch up on seasons 1 and 2 on Hulu.

When The Strokes released their debut album in the fall of 2001, there were two ways to read the title. The common approach was Is THIS It, as in, is this the next great American rock band? But now, it’s more like Is This IT, as, is this all there is? That is the question at the heart of this band’s entire career. It’s what makes them great, and also what makes them seem like they’re never great enough.

With the possible exception of Weezer, no fanbase for a contemporary rock group derives as much pleasure from being perpetually disappointed as those of us who love The Strokes. From the start with Is This It, The Strokes were accused of being trust-fund kids ripping off the legends of NYC rock. With Room On Fire, they were criticized for ripping off their “classic” and “one of a kind” debut. With First Impressions Of Earth, people felt the band had drifted too far from the now unimpeachable standard of the first two albums. (Like Weezer, The Strokes will be haunted by the “first two albums” benchmark from here on out.) With Angles, The Strokes were now supposedly “less engaged” than they had been on First Impressions. With Comedown Machine, they were apparently even less engaged than they were on Angles.

To follow this band is to constantly feel that what they’re doing falls short of your expectations. What this means is that how The Strokes disappoint us in the present will inevitably become a gold standard against which the next way The Strokes disappoint us will be measured. Every new record makes the old ones sound better. That’s their process.

Which brings us to the latest Strokes LP, their first in seven years, The New Abnormal. It occurred to me while listening to this album that The Strokes aren’t merely a band that I love to feel disappointed in. They’re actually a band that makes records about disappointment, particularly that specific sort of dissatisfaction that derives from an inability to accept what you have because you’ve been sold a fantasy of something better. The very rot at the heart of the American dream. That’s where The Strokes live.

The “first two albums” Strokes were presented as a fantasy of New York City cool right as that archetype was lost to the 20th century in the wake of 9/11. It was the same mirage that compelled so many people to move there in the aughts, only to find they were relocating to a billionaires’ sandbox where everybody else was increasingly squeezed. You can be mad at the inequities of our sociopolitical systems, or you can be mad at The Strokes. Being mad at The Strokes was easier and more fun.

As they pivoted to being a mainstream rock band, they signified how guitar-based music was being squeezed out of pop music’s sandbox. The Strokes, once again, failed to “save” rock music. As their once-indomitable friendship seemed to crumble around the time of Angles, The Strokes might’ve become a metaphor for your own collapsing social circle at the onset of middle age. If The Strokes can’t keep the old gang together, how can I be expected to keep up with my drinking buddies now that I have all these kids? Each step of the way, the specter of the recent past — which didn’t even all that great at the time — suddenly appears more desirable. This feedback loop of near-sighted nostalgia is a defense mechanism against a future that you suspect will only be worse. This is also where The Strokes live.

The Strokes, in fact, have internalized this common cultural malady as brilliantly as any artists I can think of. I mean this as a compliment: The New Abnormal might be the first time they’ve done it on purpose.

When it was announced that The Strokes were working with Rick Rubin, it was natural to assume that The New Abnormal would be a deliberate evocation of Is This It. Failing that, perhaps Rubin would hand Julian Casablancas an acoustic guitar and encourage him to do dirge-y covers of Soundgarden and Danzig tunes. But The New Abnormal, thankfully, is not that. It sounds, in fact, like an amalgam of the ’80s synth-pop and stoner-experimental chicanery of the previous two Strokes albums. It also reprises the batting average of those LPs: Four undeniable bangers, and five weird and bombastic sorta ballads in which Casablancas addresses his own profound Strokes disappointment in bizarre, fascinating ways. Put another way, The New Abnormal has been consciously constructed to be another “disappointing Strokes album” that will sound better in about three years.

First, the bangers: You’ve already heard three of them. The album’s first single, “At The Door,” is a delightfully strange synthesizer warble that never fully turns into a classic-sounding Strokes song, instead wallowing in the sonic murk of Casablancas’ other band, The Voidz. The next single, “Bad Decisions,” is both a gooey confection and a massive overcorrection, evoking new-wave era ear candy like Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” and Modern English’s “I Melt With You” with such obviousness that Idol was granted a co-writing credit. The third single, “Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus,” exists in a similar Stranger Things zone, though Casablancas acts out his discontent closer to the surface: “I want new friends, but they don’t want me.”

My favorite track on The New Abnormal, “The Adults Are Talking,” is also the song that sounds most like the old Strokes. The band premiered it in May 2019, at a show in Los Angeles. About a year before that, Casablancas gave an interview to New York magazine in which he said that The Strokes were not “where my focus is.” He also compared himself to Natalie Portman, who makes both brilliant movies like Annihilation that buck mainstream convention (The Voidz in this analogy) as well as popular crap like Thor “that are more pay-the-bills” (guess who?).

Given that The Strokes reportedly have been pondering their sixth album since 2016, Casablancas felt this way two years into the project, and about a year before unveiling one of the best songs to come out of The New Abnormal. For most bands, this would be described as a troubling contradiction. But the peculiar genius of Julian Casablancas is that he wrote a fantastic Strokes song about being bored with The Strokes — not just his boredom, but also our universal, existential boredom with everything that is symbolized by The Strokes.

“The Adults Are Talking” gives you everything you could want if you love Is This It — the guitars interlock perfectly, the drums sound as if they’re being played by a cyborg with limited technical proficiency, and the bass part appears to have been copied note-for-note from Unknown Pleasures. Meanwhile Casablancas details the impossibility of being a Stroke in 2020: “They will blame us, crucify, and shame us / We can’t help it if we are a problem / We are trying hard to get your attention / Climbing up your wall.”

Casablancas picks up this thread in the back half of the record, which is darker, less melodic, and (I assume) probably closer to his heart. “Not trying to build no dynasty,” he sings on “At The Door.” “But we’ve lost this game / so many times before.” On “Not The Same Anymore,” a languid dream-pop ballad that Casablancas drives into a ditch with his histrionic vocals, he bellows, “And now it’s time to show up / Late again I can’t grow up / And now it’s on me they’ve given up.”

Your patience for this sort of thing will depend on how much you have invested in The Strokes saga. But, personally, I appreciate how these guys are leaning into their age. They aren’t trying to sound like the long-lost leather-jacketed masters of the universe that we remember. You bear every inch of their accumulated milage on The New Abnormal. The rock ‘n’ roll life has finally rubbed away the lingering rich-kid stink. It suits them.

On the album-closing “Ode To The Mets” — a reference to another perennial NYC disappointment — Casablancas affects a Sinatra-like posture as he launches into his version of “My Way.” “Gone now are the old times,” he croons, after motioning to Fab to pick up the pace. He speaks of old friends that are now forgotten, and old ways that have been left behind. “The only thing that’s left is us / So pardon the silence that you’re hearing / Is turning into a deafening painful shameful roar.” It’s the sound of The Strokes getting older, and us getting older, too.

The New Abnormal is out tomorrow on RCA. Get it here.