Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best music released in the last week.
This week saw a consistently exciting new album from Dua Lipa and Rihanna’s first guest appearance on a song in a while. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.
Dua Lipa — Future Nostalgia
Dua Lipa kicked off a disco-inspired new era with “Don’t Start Now,” and the stylistic shift paid off, as the song is her highest-charting single in the US thanks to its peak at No. 2. The full Future Nostalgia album is out now, and it is a front-to-back banger fest thanks to songs like the aforementioned lead single, the title track, “Physical,” “Break My Heart,” and the Tove Lo-co-written “Cool.”
Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud
Katie Crutchfield told Uproxx of making her new Waxahatchee album, “I got sober and really focused on that for a year. I think in the past I’ve leaned into making music as a way to help myself heal from things. I tried to not do that with this record. I tried to do the work outside of music and have an identity outside of music. […] I would definitely say that the mood of the album came first, and then the songs swiftly followed. Then it just snowballed from there.”
Read our interview with Crutchfield here.
PartyNextDoor — Partymobile
PartyNextDoor had been quiet for the past few years before he dropped his first new songs in a while, “The News” and the Drake collaboration “Loyal.” A few months later, he’s back with a new album, and while most of the songs don’t have features, he went big when he did include guests: A “Loyal” remix also features Bad Bunny, and Rihanna pops up on “Believe It.”
Nav — “Turks” Feat. Travis Scott and Gunna
Nav’s sophomore album, Bad Habits, arrived a year ago last week, and the rapper celebrated in a big way, dropping the Travis Scott- and Gunna-featuring “Turks.” The track is the fourth collaboration between Nav and Scott, and one of those songs, “Yosemite,” also featured Gunna. On the latest from the trio, Nav raps about his opulent lifestyle, bragging about his valuable jewelry and the time he spends in Turks And Caicos.
Run The Jewels — “Ooh La La”
El-P has been forthcoming with progress updates about Run The Jewels 4, saying recently that while he hopes he doesn’t have to delay the album, he’s not yet sure when it’s coming out. One thing we know for certain is that RTJ dropped a new song last week, “Ooh La La.” Featuring rap icons DJ Premier and Greg Nice, the track previews the album’s Golden Era hip-hop influences.
Nine Inch Nails — Ghosts V-VI
Life has been full of surprises over the past few months, and last week, Trent Reznor provided a positive one: Out of nowhere, he dropped a pair of new Nine Inch Nails albums, Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts. Continuations of the Ghosts series (which improbably served as the origin of 2019’s biggest hit), the records hit different moods. As Reznor put it, “Some of it [is] kind of happy, some not so much.”
Pearl Jam — Gigaton
Uproxx’s Steven Hyden notes that when it comes to Pearl Jam’s latest album, its strength is in its familiarity, especially given the time during which it was released: “My main takeaway from this album is that I am grateful for how familiar it sounds. Yes, Gigaton sounds like a Pearl Jam record. […] During a moment when nothing that we rely upon seems to be working properly, a Pearl Jam record that competently delivers abundant Pearl Jam-ness suddenly seems revolutionary.”
Read our review of Gigaton here.
Bright Eyes — “Persona Non Grata”
Conor Oberst has been teasing a big 2020 for Bright Eyes, and finally, he delivered last week. The group shared “Persona Non Grata,” their first new song in almost a decade, and it’s an appealing teaser for the next album. It’s pure Bright Eyes, but it brings new elements into the mix: The song has some surprisingly appropriate bagpipes, which the band insists “is a first for us.”
Rosalía — “Dolerme”
Social distancing isn’t the easiest thing for everybody to manage, and for those people and others, Rosalía penned a new song, “Dolerme.” It was accompanied by a statement, in which Rosalía said, “I am in quarantine and I have lost track of time a bit because I decided that I was not going to think about it too much and that instead I was going to put my energy and my heart into doing something for others, in my own way.”
Jessie Reyez — Before Love Came To Kill Us
Jessie Reyez is well-established at this point, and part of the reason for that is the co-signs she has received from big-time collaborators. She and Eminem linked up for multiple tracks on Eminem’s Kamikaze, and now Em returns the favor on “Coffin,” from Reyez’s fresh album Before Love Came To Kill Us. The bluesy ballad isn’t exactly Eminem’s natural habitat, but as always, Eminem highlights the track with his idiosyncratic style.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
About two weeks ago, Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard started a new routine: Every day, he would hop on the DCFC YouTube page and perform a livestream concert from his home studio for anybody who wanted to watch. He has kept this up consistently for a good while, but now, he is changing his plans: His livestream series will no longer be daily moving forward, but will instead happen once a week.
Gibbard’s first weekly livestream will take place on Thursday, April 2 at 9 p.m. EST. Presumably, the weekly shows to follow will also be on Thursdays at the same time.
The last of his daily broadcasts came yesterday (March 29), and like he did the previous Sunday, last night’s stream consisted only of covers. He began with a rendition of R.E.M.’s “Half A World Away,” and from there, he also performed songs by The Cure, Morrissey, Hall & Oates, The Magnetic Fields, Neil Young, Kris Kristofferson, and Spiritualized.
Check out the full setlist from Gibbard’s latest performance below.
1. R.E.M. — “Half A World Away”
2. The Cure — “Just Like Heaven”
3. Morrissey — “Everyday Is Like Sunday”
4. Hall & Oates — “Out Of Touch”
5. The Magnetic Fields — “Strange Powers”
6. Neil Young — “Harvest Moon”
7. Kris Kristofferson — “Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends”
8. Spiritualized — “Hold On”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.
Across the globe, artists are postponing and canceling shows, suspending promotional campaigns, and pushing their albums back. But last week, Dua Lipa did the opposite. While it might be more in line with the pop audience’s love of breathless exaggeration to call this act heroic, in a lot of ways, it felt like a vote of confidence that the listening public desperately needed. Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was slated for release this coming Friday, April 3, but when the world began to shift drastically due to social distancing required to halt the global spread of Coronavirus, Lipa didn’t postpone her album, she pushed it up.
Released a week early this past Friday, March 27, the widely-anticipated follow-up to her self-titled 2017 debut, Future Nostalgia features the kind of shimmering, dance-floor bops that can instantly elevate the mood of irritated, exhausted, and isolated people everywhere. It’s one of the most solid wall-to-wall pop albums of the last few years, as each of these eleven tracks has its own mood and style, but each song still blends seamlessly in with the others. Future Nostalgia feels like an aesthetic as much as an album, channeling ‘80s pop like “Physical” right alongside and neon-tinted high-tempo bangers like “Hallucinate.”
Rising to prominence off the swaggering, single-minded get-the-f*ck-over-him banger “No Rules,” Lipa’s take on the brokenhearted pop star protagonist was all cure, no symptoms. Her brisk, no-nonsense prescription for getting rid of the man who can’t commit but wants to keep hooking up anyway struck a chord with a generation raised on casual sex and aloof dismissals. Following that up with an aloof dismissal of her own, in the towering and bombastic “IDGAF,” Lipa proved that regardless of the BPM, listeners were enthralled with her approach.
Future Nostalgia doubles down on all that breakup ammunition, particularly on the lead single “Don’t Start Now,” and another early release, “Break My Heart,” but also stretches out into pure horniness, a perfect complement to the European disco vibes scattered across the record. “Physical” is a cousin to her Calvin Harris collab “One Kiss,” but goes a lot farther than needing a single peck on the lips, and “Good In Bed” is the ideal ode to hate sex, channeling early Kate Nash insolence and just a hint of twee. It’s been a good year, so far, for pop music, but we haven’t gotten anything this devoted to the thrilling rush of physical lust. While everyone is locked away and barred from contact with others, nothing could be hotter.
Interestingly enough, Lipa is the rare global pop star in the social media era who has (mostly) managed to keep her actual personal life out of the spotlight while her star continues to rise. Between Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next love triangles, Taylor Swift’s album about her real-life Lover, and Beyonce’s dissection of her marriage, the public has come to expect some of a massive star’s IRL love life to animate their music, but Dua is making hits without including any details about her inspirations.
As I listened to her new album this weekend in utter isolation, not driving up and down Sunset Blvd, not blasting it on speakers with friends around, this separation actually offered a welcome distance. Being sick and fearful for the physical health of those I love makes the emotional drama of celebrity relationships feel pale and meaningless, so it’s a relief that this album sidesteps all of that, and still manages to deliver fascinating, endlessly repeatable pop songs full of drama and grace.
And speaking of the latter, sex isn’t the only topic of conversation here, as the album’s concluding track is a mic drop about the excuses our culture routinely makes for the toxic behavior of men, on “Boys Will Be Boys,” where Lipa concludes: “And girls will be women.” The girls who are hurt and abused by the boys who grow up under that blanket excuse become adults, too, and are left with the burden of processing their trauma, falling into the same cycles, and trying to heal. Thankfully, in Dua’s world, a sense of sex-positive strength comes through much stronger than the hearbreak of before – proof that growth and healing isn’t just possible, but is worth celebrating.
Heroic or not, this sleek, electropop album is a cohesive meditation on no-strings horniness and bucking the systems that are set up to hold women, in particular, down. Even just days into listening, it sounds like the kind of album that will invoke nostalgia, in the future, when we remember what it felt like to live in isolation, and the implacable disco-pop that kept us afloat.
Future Nostalgia is out now via Warner Music. Get it here.
Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Griselda Records’ Conway The Machine followed up his 2019 project Look What What I Became today with the release of Lulu, a seven-song EP produced entirely by The Alchemist. The EP features appearances from Schoolboy Q and Queens rap legend Cormega and haunting, hardcore beats from the mind of the veteran LA producer. The complete project landed just three days after the lead single, “Shoot Sideways” with Schoolboy Q.
The Griselda rapper recently collaborated with producer Big Ghost Ltd. on the nine-song album Griselda Ghost in October, just a month after releasing Look What What I Became. Those two releases, along with Eif 2: Eat What U Kill and Everybody Is F.O.O.D. 3, brought the number of solo releases from Conway in 2019 to four — not including his contribution to Griselda’s group debut, WWCD. It’s probably safe to say that Conway is one of the busiest rappers in the game today.
Lulu was also accompanied with an exclusive collaboration with Dutch streetwear brand Patta. The collection includes a security jacket with the album art on the back, a snapback cap, and an exclusive vinyl of the record. You can learn more about the collaboration at Patta’s blog here.
Lulu is out now on ALC / Empire. Get it here.
It didn’t take too long for Dave Grohl to launch Foo Fighters following Kurt Cobain’s death and the subsequent disbandment of Nirvana. While some Nirvana fans were surely happy to have new music from the band’s members, that didn’t apply to all of them. In fact, Grohl says he got a lot of hate for Foo Fighters at first, but naturally, that only made him want to pursue the band even more.
In the recently published May issue of Mojo, Grohl said of the reactions to his then-new music and his mindset at the time, “[Some Nirvana fans were] like, ‘How dare you be in a band again? Your music is f*cking sh*t and that was a real band and you’re not.’ It’s like, you really think that’s gonna stop me? It only makes me wanna f*cking do it more, y’know. So, you can keep it coming if you want, but I don’t give a f*ck.”
The new MOJO has a Foo Fighters world exclusive, a CD of ’90s alt-rock nuggets, Art Garfunkel, Jarvis Cocker, Margo Price, John Entwistle, Pearl Jam, Jesus & Mary Chain, Black Crowes, Psychedelic Furs and much more. Have a copy delivered to your door: https://t.co/fvmGDufSYk pic.twitter.com/nahEol05nL
— MOJO Magazine (@MOJOmagazine) March 12, 2020
He went on to make the obvious admission that his time in Nirvana was an important factor in Foo Fighters’ success, saying, “I’ve never been afraid to say that if it weren’t for Nirvana, the Foo Fighters wouldn’t be in the same position that we’re in now. We had an advantage right out of the gate that there was an interest in the band because of that. I mean, it’s obvious.”
Meanwhile, Grohl has been taking time to work on non-musical endeavors recently, as he has started writing a series of short stories.
Kenny Rogers deserved better. But, then again, I guess we all deserve a little better right now. So, with things currently how they are, it’s unfortunate, but not terribly surprising, that Kenny Rogers’ passing was greeted with an almost collective ambivalence. Which just goes to prove how dire the circumstances are now because Rogers was a giant and such a huge part of popular culture in past decades.
Yes, most people know him for his duet with Dolly Parton, “Islands in the Stream.” Or for both singing and staring about a cardplayer who knew when to stop playing. (For me, the strangest entry into Rogers canon is the song “Coward of the County,” which has some seriously disturbing lyrics for such a mainstream song.)
But, I think there’s a sweet spot era of people who were first introduced to Kenny Rogers via his acting in movies like the 1982 racecar driving motion picture, Six Pack. Now, Six Pack was one of those movies that played on HBO pretty much nonstop in the early days of HBO. And as a latchkey kid, only child, and now member of the *New Greatest Generation, yes, I watched Six Pack many, many, many times.
*There’s been an unusual amount of pieces written lately about the heroism of Gen X because we are used to isolating ourselves and not being particularly needy or social. Look, if someone wants to send accolades my way because instead of “going outside” after school I’d go home and play Excitebike, I’ll certainly take them. It didn’t feel particulary heroic at the time, but I guess someone had to defeat Soda Popinski. But it also feels a little disingenuous to proclaim Gen X is good at anything, really. This seems out of character. So, please, just leave me alone and let me watch Six Pack in peace.
I’m always fascinated when a movie isn’t on streaming, it’s not even available to purchase on iTunes (or whatever it’s called these days), but it is available in full, through multiple sources, for free on YouTube. Does this mean the rights holder has just given up? Basically the effort to put this on some sort of streaming platform isn’t worth the trouble and if people really want to watch it so bad, well, have at it? Anyway, after scouring every other possible option, I watched a, let’s say, “serviceable” version on YouTube.
I have to say, for a movie I watched repeatedly as a little kid, I remember very little about Six Pack. The opening scene – which shows us down-on-his-luck race car driver Brewster Baker, solemnly driving along with his race car in tow – opens with my favorite Kenny Rogers song, “Love Will Turn You Around,” which immediately made me feel a rare emotion called “happiness.” And the good news is, somehow this song plays three times during the duration of Six Pack. This is not a complaint!
The premise of Six Pack, about six orphans who join Brewster Baker’s racing team, is a lot weirder than I remember. Well, at least when I was a kid it didn’t seem that crazy that me and five other friends my age would just hang out with Kenny Rogers and race cars. He seemed like a cool guy! But, now, from the other side, if I were a rival race car driver and Brewster Baker is just hanging out with six kids all the time, it would raise some questions.
Also, I had no idea two of the kids would turn into famous people. Diane Lane and Anthony Michael Hall make up a third of the “Six Pack orphans” who Baker meets after they steal his engine. It turns out a corrupt Texas sheriff (hm, I wonder where that idea came from), played by *Barry Corbin, was making them do this.
(*We don’t talk about Barry Corbin enough. What a run he had in the early ‘80s – pretty much playing the same variation of a tough-talking character with a southern drawl. And you probably know him best as General Beringer in WarGames. You know, the guy who gets to tell Dabney Coleman, “your new defense system sucks.” Anyway, I just looked him up and he’s still acting. I don’t have time to write a whole “In appreciation of Barry Corbin” piece (though, with no new movies, check in with me in a few weeks), so, for now, let this serve as an “appreciation of Barry Corbin” paragraph.)
Anyway, as it turns out, Six Pack is a perfectly pleasant movie. For a movie where not a whole heck of a lot happens, I was enjoying my time watching it. Good clean fun! They all live happily ever after at the end. Isn’t that what any of us want right now? Well, I guess except for the theft. And when the kids break Brewster out of jail at gunpoint. But, hey, these are scrappy orphans, they had to do what they had to do.
(Here’s a strange thing: In the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of movies had television spinoffs, which was always weird because it usually ignores the events of the movie and had an entirely new cast. M*A*S*H* is probably the most famous version of this phenomenon. Anyway, it seems they tried to do this with Six Pack, only with Don Johnson(!) playing Brewster Baker and Joaquin Phoenix(!!) as one of the “six pack.” Sadly, this wasn’t picked up.
For a million reasons, I wish last week had just been devoted to remembering Kenny Rogers. So, this is my small part in remembering Rogers again. And this is especially for us noble Generation X latchkey kids who are helping to save the world by staying home and watching Six Pack once again, just like we used to. (Barf.)
You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
HBO’s Last Week Tonight suspended full-on production (along with the rest of late-night TV, and much of overall TV, and most of the world) as social distancing became the name of the coronavirus-smashing game. We last saw John Oliver two weeks ago when he took on the disease a second time after his initial segment issued advice and warnings that largely went unheeded. Oliver returned to the air this week without his live audience for a 1-on-1 style discussion with viewers at home. The absence of customary punctual laughter in the background might be unsettling, but Oliver took the necessary step of evaluating how leaders are botching the pandemic response.
It must be noted that Oliver singled out the heroes of this ongoing disaster. Those would primarily be the hospital staff members who are fighting for supplies, although Oliver recognizes that medical facilities did contribute to the current scarcity that springboarded off their efficiency movements. Still, he holds governments (most urgently, President Trump) for the slow (and accusatory) response to the pleas for ventilators. Not only that, but Oliver is begging officials to realize that it’s objectively “way too soon” to consider rolling back social distancing, which won’t save the economy:
“Relaxing social distancing right now isn’t just trading one bad outcome for another. It’s trading one bad outcome for both bad outcomes. It’s sh*tting on your cake and choking on it too.”
Further, Oliver bashed Trump for accusing journalists of wanting to destroy his poll numbers when they posed valid questions about the pandemic response:
“Oh, for f*ck’s sake! No one is thinking about you. These guidelines did not revolve around you. For once, something has come along that is more toxic and more threatening than this president, and somehow, he’s got fucking stage envy. And look, I know this isn’t exactly the first time that I’ve criticized Donald Trump, but I can’t tell you how much I was rooting for him to do this better. Handling a crisis well is not inherently political.”
Sadly, there was no place in this segment for much of Oliver’s usual levity, other than his admission at the beginning that self-isolation is digging into all of us. He highlighted how mass graves in some countries will be visible from space and how Kentucky’s outraged governor, Andy Beshear, revealed how someone tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a “Coronavirus party.” Oliver reassured people that they really didn’t need to worry about their hairstyles during this pandemic because no one should care about looks right now, and he trashed the absurdity of right-wingers (who he called a “f*cking death cult”) that seriously want people to sacrifice their lives for the economy.
Most of all, though, Oliver urges people to be patient, since waiting out the virus in self-isolation is the main method of halting its destruction. He, too, looks forward to good times, like when he can finally be irritated by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo again. That time will come, but only if we continue our current social distancing ways.