Katie Crutchfield impressed once again in 2024 with her latest Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood. She dropped the project back in March, and now she’s back with “Much Ado About Nothing,” her first new song since the album.
The track also comes with a slice-of-life video directed by Anna St. Louis, which offers a glimpse at what Crutchfield has been up to lately (performing, largely).
Crutchfield just finished a lengthy run of tour dates, which kicked off in April before wrapping up in September. She’s got some plans for 2025, too, as she’s part of a Big Ears Festival lineup that also features ANOHNI And The Johnsons, Jessica Pratt, Helado Negro, and more.
“My first four records are riddled with clues that I was someone who was really struggling with substance issues. When I made Saint Cloud, I was a year sober, and that’s palpable in that record, even if it’s not on-the-nose talking about sobriety. With Tigers Blood, I’ve settled into that part of my life more now, and that’s probably the big through-line between the two records, how being a sober adult is affecting me five years in as opposed to one year in.”
Diddy has applied for bond for a third time, this time with a new legal team. According to TMZ, the music mogul filed his third bid for freedom before trial after adding two new attorneys to his defense. They are Anthony Ricco and Alexandra Shapiro. Ricco was awarded Attorney of the Year by the Metropolitan Black Bar Association in 2008, while Shapiro is an experienced case attorney who served as a law clerk for the US Court Of Appeals.
Diddy was previously denied bail twice; in the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Robyn F. Tarnofsky denied his request over concerns about Diddy’s anger issues and alleged substance abuse, telling him, “Your lawyer asked us to trust you — [I don’t think] you can trust yourself… Your lawyer can’t control you.” His appeal was denied by Andrew L. Carter, due to Diddy’s potential for trying to exert influence over potential witnesses. Carter cited evidence from the prosecution that he’d already contacted witnesses during the investigation into his activities, despite promising a long list of restrictions on his travel and visitation rights.
The music mogul was charged with racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution after a months-long investigation into decades of the supposed illegal activities.
He just seems to have a definite idea of what he wants the Coldplay career arc to be, and it’s not in the vein of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds pumping out their 18th album, or Neil Young his 45th, or Willie Nelson his 153rd. No shade to those guys, as there’s nothing wrong with their approaches: Get that bread for as long as you still can and want to. But, Martin doesn’t see that version of the Coldplay story coming to pass.
I’m not just making stuff up, stirring the pot for clicks as Coldplay gears up to release their 10th album, Moon Music, in a few days (your click is appreciated, though): This is all coming straight from Martin’s mouth.
In 2021, he declared, “Our last proper record will come out in 2025, and after that, I think we will only tour. Maybe we’ll do some collaborative things, but the Coldplay catalog, as it were, finishes then.”
He tweaked his position in 2022, saying, “We’re going to make 12 albums, because it’s a lot to pour everything into making them. I love it and it’s amazing, but it’s very intense, too. I feel like because I know that challenge is finite, making this music doesn’t feel difficult. It feels like, ‘This is what we’re supposed to be doing.’”
That’s the plan he’s sticking to. In a new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe shared on September 30, Martin reiterated, “We are only going to do 12 proper albums and that’s real.” He added:
“It’s really important that we have that limit. First of all, there’s only […] eight Harry Potters, or seven Harry Potters. There’s only 12-and-a-half Beatles albums. There’s about the same Bob Marley, so all of our heroes. And also having that limit means that the quality control is so high right now, and for a song to make it, it’s almost impossible, which is great. And so where we could be kind of coasting, we’re trying to improve.”
Coldplay having a clear finish line in front of them radically changes the band’s mindset and operation, as Martin indicated. Maybe it should change how we look at their output, too.
I was a Coldplay enthusiast, as many were, during the A Rush Of Blood To The Head and X&Y eras. But, as their sound and my personal tastes have changed over the years, I haven’t been feverishly consuming what Martin and company have been making. That’s not to say Coldplay is bad now — so many people still love what they’re doing. It just looks like my personal path has crossed with Coldplay’s trajectory for the last time. I’ve X’d my last Y, I’ve fixed my last you, I’ve clocked my last… “Clocks.”
Why is that so? Maybe it’s because once Coldplay fell out of my sphere, I envisioned an endless stream of albums that eventually reach the stage many legacy artists do with their output: LPs that sound like hollow, AI-generated versions of previous work, released primarily so the band can say they have new music when they go on yet another greatest hits tour. Especially since I’m not particularly invested in what Coldplay is doing now, why bother going down with the ship?
Well, Martin isn’t letting the ship sink: He’s docking it before it starts taking on water. Coldplay’s not rambling on until nobody’s paying attention anymore: They’re telling a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Suddenly, Coldplay’s career arc is contextualized and given a firmer narrative structure. They established themselves with Parachutes. They made aesthetic pivots on the way to global success with A Rush Of Blood To The Head, X&Y, and Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends. Finally, they’ve found consistent comfort with Mylo Xyloto, Ghost Stories, A Head Full Of Dreams, Everyday Life, and Music Of The Spheres, while Moon Music‘s role in this story remains to be seen.
Coldplay stans might take exception with that outline: I, by my own admission, haven’t really been paying attention to that big run of albums I lumped together at the end. The point, though, is that the band isn’t going to Walking Dead themselves from reverence to irrelevance: They have a clear, stated plan to end things on their terms, before overstaying their welcome.
My position is this: A band I once loved is treating their legacy and overarching body of work with care. Armed with a new perspective on an old favorite, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I started caring, too. Maybe I haven’t mylo’d my last xyloto, ghosted my last story, or mooned my last music.
Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.
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Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found
Origami Angel taps into their feelings on Feeling Not Found. The D.C. emo duo, consisting of vocalist-guitarist Ryland Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty, explores everything from the alienation that social media causes, to grieving the death of a beloved family member, to getting lost in a waterfall of information overload as obstinate as the Pokémon HM of the same name. As always, their instrumental prowess remains on full display, with Heagy’s tap-shredding and Doherty’s adroit drumming finding a perfect unity. On their third studio album, Origami Angel evolves their punchy pop-punk once again.
Trace Mountains – Into The Burning Blue
The term “heartland rock” often summons images of endless roadside sprawl paired with dreamy instrumentals and introspective lyrics. Even if you’re not located in, say, the actual heartland, it’s more so an amalgamation of sonic identities than it is a geographic prerequisite. Currently based in New York, LVL UP’s Dave Benton is trying out the heartland rock thing on his new album as Trace Mountains, the Craig Hendrix-assisted Into The Burning Blue. And he pulls it off incredibly well. From the seven-minute opening track “In A Dream” to the War On Drugs-meets-Wild Pink cut “Hard To Accept,” Trace Mountains’ latest record is more than just an experiment with a new style; it’s a total success.
Blood Incantation – “The Stargate”
Absolute Elsewhere, the forthcoming album from Colorado death-metalheads Blood Incantation, is composed of two songs. Then again, both of those songs are about 20 minutes long. In other words, you can listen to half of the new Blood Incantation album – due this Friday – right now in the form of “The Stargate.” Across three discrete movements or, in the parlance of the record, “tablets,” “The Stargate” indulges all the go-to inclinations of a Blood Incantation track: fiery shredding, blast beats, and straight-up demonic vocals.
Fantasy Of A Broken Heart – Feats Of Engineering
As touring members of Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei, Al Nardo and Bailey Wallowitz are accustomed to playing music written by other people. But now they’re here with an album of their own. Feats of Engineering, the debut LP from their project Fantasy Of A Broken Heart, is a feat of incredible songwriting. Nardo and Wallowitz possess a chameleonic ability to rapidly shift from one style to the next without the end result feeling disjointed. In the span of 11 songs (or even a single song), they trail through prog, art-rock, dream-pop, and more.
Chat Pile – “Funny Man”
According to pseudonymic frontman Raygun Busch, the latest Chat Pile single “concerns illusion vs. reality in regards to America and war,” as noted in press materials. The Oklahoma City noise metal group specializes in a battering onslaught of grit and sludge, and Stin’s gnarly basslines and Cap’n Ron’s aggressive drumming convey the seething contempt Busch demonstrates in the chorus. “Outside there’s no mercy,” he bellows, marveling at the cruelty of the American war apparatus.
Liquid Mike – “Crop Circles”
Marquette, Michigan’s greatest export is back. Liquid Mike, still fresh off this year’s early highlight Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, returns with the power-pop-punk one-off single “Crop Circles.” Vocalist Mike Maple’s timbre conjures Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus, a clean, melodic, and emotional through-line that connects Maple immediately to his subjects. Such is the case with “Crop Circles,” a rumination on being a working-class person in the Midwest, a topic Maple himself is familiar with having recently quit his job as a postal worker. If we’re so fortunate, then hopefully that means he has more time to make another Liquid Mike album.
The Cure – “Alone”
“Alone,” the first new Cure song in 16 years, sounds like it has transcended time. There’s a three-plus-minute instrumental intro that recalls the somber sprawl of their 1989 masterpiece Disintegration; there are synths as sulfurous as rainfall; there are guitars that meet the middle point between melody and modulation; and, of course, as there always has been, there’s Robert Smith’s unmistakable voice, rising above the instrumental fog, silhouetted like a distant figure you’ve just noticed has been lurking there the whole time. “This is the end of every song that we sing,” goes the opening lyric, simultaneously alluding to English poet Ernest Dowson and Smith’s own band. “Where did it go,” he sings in the outro. Even as he marvels at the years that have passed him by, he’s still here. And so is the Cure.
Sasami – “Slugger”
The new song from Sasami hits like a 90-mph fastball. “Slugger,” with its poppy panache, marks a distinct, novel sound for Sasami. For 2019’s eponymous record and 2022’s nu-metal-inspired Squeeze, she leaned into an indie-rock styling on the former only to completely subvert it with heavy guitars and piercing screams on the latter. “Slugger,” however, rescinds Sasami’s indie-rock origins in a completely different way: trading them in for an album of hook-heavy, pop-forward bops. After defying expectations on the metal-adjacent Squeeze, she has gone in the wholly opposite direction on her new single. If “Slugger” proves anything, then it’s that Sasami will never allow herself to be defined by someone else. She’s doing this for her own fulfillment.
Wild Pink – “Dulling The Horns”
In just a couple of days, Wild Pink will release their excellent new album, Dulling The Horns. Meanwhile, you can pass the time listening to its also-excellent title track. Ringleader John Ross describes the tune as “a song about moving on” in a press release, and it’s one of the final tracks he wrote for Dulling The Horns. “How can there be / Really nothing in between / That big-ass moon and me,” Ross asks in the song’s denouement. In that great, liminal expanse, Wild Pink is a comfort in contemplating the unknown.
Two Shell – “Everybody Worldwide”
A few months ago, the ever-elusive, eternally enigmatic electronic duo Two Shell leaked their debut album by littering the Boiler Room floor with USB drives. The London producers have always enjoyed messing with their fanbase (and journalists), occasionally to the point where it might read as overly gimmicky. But, fortunately, the music is as fun, free-spirited, and fascinating as it has been since their 2019 EP, Access. “Everybody Worldwide,” the lead single of their forthcoming self-titled LP, proves as much. Its four-on-the-floor kick drum, syncopated synths, and playful starts and stops show that Two Shell are more than just pranksters. They’re making some of the best dance music of the modern age.
Check that out and more in Uproxx’s Best New Pop Music roundup below.
Lady Gaga — “Happy Mistake”
We’ve been down the “Lady Gaga Releases Companion Music For A Blockbuster Film” before. It delivered during her A Star Is Born coronation, and it’s even better with Harlequin. The acoustic ballad “Happy Mistake,” co-written by BloodPop and Gaga, showcases Gaga’s powerhouse vocals. If you’d told me it was on LG7 instead, I’d believe you. “It was all in the image of the character, but also kind of at the very core of her soul, which is really just me,” Gaga told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every character I play, it just has me as the gravity. I am wrestling, on that record, with a lot of feelings about so much that I’ve been through as an artist, everything I went through growing up in the public eye, and the industry since I was a teenager.”
The Weeknd & Playboi Carti — “Timeless”
Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd’s forthcoming LP, will serve as the final installment of his After Hours/Dawn FM trilogy. The Weeknd has spoken in the past about his plan “to kill The Weeknd” at some point, and if that’s still the plan, he can rest soundly because, as he sings in the second single from Hurry Up Tomorrow, “It don’t matter what they say, I’m timeless.”
Christina Aguilera Feat. Sabrina Carpenter — “What A Girl Wants”
Sabrina Carpenter was three months old when Christina Aguilera released her self-titled debut studio album in August 1999. Aguilera celebrated the LP’s 25th birthday by asking a fully grown and actively blossoming Carpenter to sing “What A Girl Wants” with her. Now, a full-blown Aguilera-Carpenter collaborative album should be mandated in the pop bylaws.
Rosalía Feat. Ralphie Choo — “Omega”
Speaking of celebration, Rosalía commemorated her 32nd birthday by gifting everyone else “Omega” featuring Ralphie Choo. The ballad’s accompanying video was directed by Stillz and captures Rosalía and Choo literally releasing their inhibitions on a rollercoaster. However, the song’s sentiment is more about the sensation found once getting off of life’s metaphorical rollercoaster. “Omega is the end,” Rosalía said in a statement, as per Rolling Stone. “It’s the celebration of having found what you wanted and the security with which one decides to stay. Omega is firmness with the one you love that makes you not want to be anywhere else but there.”
Jon Bellion — “Kid Again”
Jon Bellion’s fingerprints never left pop music. He’s served as the primary producer or songwriter on some of the biggest songs of the past few years, but he hasn’t released solo music since his November 2018 album, Glory Sound Prep. That just changed with “Kid Again,” a triumphant reclamation of his distinct voice now that he’s freed from a restrictive contract. “I am a kid again,” he sings. “I can do anything.” History shows that Bellion can do things other creatives can’t dream of. His next album figures to remind music lovers from whom all of their favorite lyrics and unique beats came.
Kylie Minogue — “Lights Camera Action”
In April, Time named Kylie Minogue among its “100 Most Influential People” of 2024. The Australian pop icon is bolstering her case with Tension II, her upcoming album due out on October 18. “Lights Camera Action” is the latest single, which Minogue said has a “similar kind of hypnotic quality” as “Padam Padam” while speaking with NME. She’s not wrong.
Rauw Alejandro & Mr. NaisGai — “Pasaporte”
Rauw Alejandro’s music videos usually elicit the Martin Scorsese “Absolute Cinema” meme. He tapped Adrien Brody to co-star in “Déjame Entrar,” and “Pasaporte” featuring Mr. NaisGai finds Alejandro bailing on playing a video game to globetrot in luxury. “We just have to enjoy today,” he sings. The Puerto Rican star indulges his every whim throughout the five-minute visual, but perhaps the most exciting frame is saved for the end when he writes “COSA NUESTRA NOV. 15” on a poster. Yes, Cosa Nuestra, his fifth LP, is due out on November 15.
Will Swinton — “Flames”
Fittingly and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Will Swinton’s “Flames” is meant to be blasted at a bonfire. Swinton’s gravelly, warm voice underscores the acoustic-based song’s heart-wrenching sentiments like “Held you in the darkest nights / You held me together in the cold / But the morning brings a different light / Shows you things you never really know.” The hook is a particularly cruel twist to the heart: “And when you left / I kept the pain / Now I only feel alive inside the flame.” The New Zealand breakout will support BabyJake on his Beautiful Blue Collar Boy Tour across North America, beginning on October 14.
Alex Sampson — “Beautiful (In A Dream)”
Alex Sampson came in clutch for cuffing season. “We could be beautiful / Like autumn and the leaves,” the Canadian pop singer-songwriter sings in “Beautiful (In A Dream)” from his freshly released Hopeless Romantic EP. The lilting, gradually upbeat song embodies the project’s title and showcases Sampson’s potential to invade timelines everywhere.
JADE — “Midnight Cowboy”
Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall ensures you know she’s just JADE in her solo career with “Midnight Cowboy,” as she confidently croons, “I’m a real wild b*tch, yeah, I’m mental / I’m the ride of your life, not a rental / I’m the editor, call me Mr Enninful.” The sultry single was co-written by RAYE, and Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who, Sex Education) voices the intro. “Midnight Cowboy” follows “Angel Of My Dreams,” her debut solo single from July. JADE’s impressive stretch will continue with “Fantasy” on October 18.
No one was shedding any teardrops over a Taylor Swift-signed guitar that was destroyed as a protest (?) against something (??) — because she probably didn’t sign it. On Monday, footage circulated of a white-haired guy at the Ellis County Wild Game Dinner in Waxahachie, Texas, paying $4,000 for a guitar autographed by the “All Too Well” singer, and hitting it with a hammer. He also pretended to pull a Phoebe Bridgers and smash it on the ground.
But a Swiftie who goes by @kubaswift on X noticed something about the auction listing. “I found the listing for this $4,000 ‘Autographed Guitar’ only to find out the signed element is a signed photo from a Midnights vinyl someone has cut out and glued onto a custom guitar,” they wrote. “0 brain cells.”
In the replies, @kubaswift added, “I clocked that fake guitar design straight off the bat and looked into it further cause I knew she hadn’t signed any Eras Tour ones at least only to find out it was a signed insert from a Midnights vinyl you can even see the cut off where they snipped the signature I mean.”
Assuming this is accurate (and it seems likely considering the number of “signed” instruments on eBay), the guy in the video paid $4,000 to destroy a guitar with a photo of a real autograph.
Ellis County Wild Game spokesperson Craig Meier talked to WFAA about the uproar over the guitar smash. “It has been surprising to me how big of a deal people are making it out to be. It wasn’t meant to be mean or malicious,” he said. “He was just making a lighthearted statement showing disapproval of people in the entertainment industry trying to influence politics.”
I think we can all agree that thinking about the early days of lockdown isn’t a particularly fun or constructive activity. Four years on, it’s still hard to process the traumatic strangeness of normal everyday life being put on pause while we all became medium-term shut-ins. The plans that were made and then unmade, the experiences that you didn’t even know you were missing, the life that was unlived — it’s too much to take in, even now.
In the grand scheme of things, missing out on a concert might not amount to much in this context. But for the sake of conversation: The show I’m saddest about not seeing in 2020 is Sturgill Simpson’s truncated Sound & Fury tour, which began in January and like everything else ground to a halt in early March, about a month before it was originally scheduled to hit my town. I had been eagerly anticipating that night for months, ever since downloading a bootleg recording of a gig from the previous fall in Washington D.C., part of a pre-tour warm-up club tour. The music on that tape was thick, gnarly and above all furious, which matched Sturgill’s personal temperament at the time. When I interviewed him in February 2020, he talked about the tour with palpable dread. His previous road campaign in 2017 drove him to substance abuse, he confessed. He also pledged he would never do a “big tour” like this ever again. So, when the Sound & Fury tour was subsequently canceled, I suspect that Sturgill was the opposite of disappointed.
Flash forward to 2024. Sturgill is back on the road, and he has apparently broken the “no more big tours” pledge. Or maybe not — since Sturgill made that promise and this jaunt — dubbed the Why Not? tour — is official billed as a “Johnny Blue Skies” show. No matter. The semantics are irrelevant. What matters is that Sturgill Simpson is playing live again and his current tour is 2024’s most musically thrilling and flat-out life-affirming live experience.
The optimal word here is joy. I saw Sturgill last week at one of the dumpier venues in the Twin Cities area, and for three hours he played 31 songs with his brilliant band and positively radiated ebullience. The music just poured out of these guys like well-aged bourbon into a well-worn tumbler — honky-tonk stompers, revved-up electric bluegrass, stoned southern rock, duel-guitar psychedelic jams. They played originals from throughout Sturgill’s catalog with muscular authority, successfully merging the traditional country and soul sounds of the early records with the gut-punch rock of the Sound & Fury era. And they skillfully inserted covers that acted as signposts acknowledging where this music comes from: The Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” Procol Harum’s “A White Shade Of Pale,” an absolutely apocalyptic version of The Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” and Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which merged seamlessly with Sturgill’s own gently weeping guitar elegy, “One For The Road.”
It was the best show I’ve seen all year, and possibly in the past few years. It was one of those nights where you might think, I’m clearly exaggerating how good this was, this has to be a “rose colored glasses” situation. But I know it’s not, because you can stream (or download) the shows on this tour as you’re walking back to your car in the parking lot. Sure enough, I am listening to this show as I type this, and it plays like the live album of my dreams: A little Waylon Live, a little Live At Fillmore East, a little Absolutely Live, a little Rock Of Ages, a little Europe 72. The good shit, in other words.
Let’s circle back to the optimal word: Joy. It’s not a feeling that comes through on Passage du Desir, Sturgill’s studio debut as Johnny Blue Skies released this summer. Passage contains some of the loveliest music the man has made. It radiates more beauty than any album in his catalog, with the possible exception of 2016’s fatherhood opus, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth. But the overall tone is desolate, even mournful. Many listeners picked up on themes of marital discord and mid-life angst recurring in the lyrics. As someone who has tried (and often failed) not to go overboard with armchair psychology when perusing an album’s liner notes, I’m wary of speculating on those particulars. But Passage Du Desir undeniably is concerned with loss, and the struggle to recognize one’s own identity when what has defined you has gone missing.
In light of this tour, I wonder if that sense of loss wasn’t romantic in nature so much as musical. Sturgill has talked recently about how he almost lost his voice in the past few years. He even lost of his love of playing. In a recent interview with the British music magazine Uncut, he says a switch flipped in his mind when he was invited to sit in at the annual Dead Ahead festival, and was tasked with learning dozens of Grateful Dead songs. “I wasn’t really familiar with them, because in my early twenties in Kentucky there was a jam band scene which I dismissed as unstructured noodling, and I lumped the Dead into that,” he told the magazine. But after looking at the songs, “I thought, why is this so easy? It’s almost like I could anticipate where Jerry was going. And it was because Jerry played folk, country, bluegrass and blues, the same way I play guitar.”
Once he got home, “all I could think about was playing guitar for 10 hours a day again. I called my booking agent and said, ‘I wanna go on tour.”
That’s what I’m talking about: Joy. Listening to these shows — you can hear them all on Nugs.net — I hear one long and cathartic exhale, a sigh of relief after an extended period of stress and depression that comes when one finally realizes that life’s simple pleasures are still there to be had. Like getting together with friends and absolutely whipping ass for three hours every night.
Special attention must be paid to Sturgill’s band, one of the finest units you’ll see on the road this year. Their excellent ensemble playing aside, there’s a narrative here as well about rediscovery and reconciliation with the muse. Two of the players, guitarist Laur Joamets and bassist Kevin Black, are back with Sturgill after departing in the mid-2010s. And then there’s stalwart drummer Miles Miller, who has been with the man since the beginning of his ascent more than a decade ago.
The newcomer, keyboardist Robbie Crowell, might very well be the MVP. Equally adept at the barroom boogie-woogie of “Life Of Sin” and the more interstellar tones gliding through “Right Kind Of Dream,” the man can also take out a saxophone in the middle of “All Said And Done” like he’s Garth Hudson bringing “It Makes No Difference” home in The Last Waltz.
Then, of course, there’s Sturgill. Not to belabor the point, but he is having a goddamn ball on stage these days. He’s smiling wide, he’s standing on amps, and he appears intent on destroying every audience standing before him. (The army jacket he donned on stage underlined the “joyful warrior” posture.) The show I saw ended with “Call To Arms,” which at nearly 14 minutes was also the longest number of the night. Every second of that was earned, with Sturgill imploring his band to play harder and louder and faster. Then the band drifted into a space-rock jam, with Joamets sending slide-guitar lines to the outer rings of Saturn. Right when nirvana was about to be achieved, Sturgill steered the song back into “harder and louder and faster” territory, guiding the band to an overpowering climax of sound. It was part Jerry Garcia in 1972, and part the E Street Band on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour. Like I said: Live album of my dreams.
That night, you could sense that Sturgill simply did not want to leave the stage. What had once been a public prison — and a facilitator of personal bad behavior — had been reclaimed as a forum of celebration. I didn’t want to leave, either. I wanted to follow these guys to the next show in Kentucky. Alas, I was able to do it virtually by listening to the live recording online. In Kentucky, they played even longer: 38 songs over three and a half hours. They did Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” which I wish I had seen in person. And they tinkered with perhaps the show-stopping sequence of the St. Paul show — the progression from an instrumental jam on ZZ Top’s “La Grange” to “A Good Look” to the titanic “L.A. Woman.” In Kentucky, they put “La Grange” in the middle, which was nice but didn’t have the same sense of crazy momentum.
Nevertheless, the joy was still there. And the joy is what counts. When it first appeared on Sound & Fury, “A Good Look” registered as a bleakly cynical pisstake on the music business and Sturgill’s belief (or conviction) that he would not be part of it for much longer. “Well then, how’re you gonna eat when you’re bitin’ the hand? / Well, you know they don’t like it when you take a stand / So enjoy it while you can / And say hi to all the boys in the band / ‘Cause it’s all over now / Just a flash in the pan.”
But on stage, “A Good Look” is now the sound of guys playing like nobody is watching. It’s just pals bashing away in a garage. Are The Doors cool? Who cares? When we play it, it rules. Sturgill called it the Why Not? tour for a reason: Why not choose life? Who not rock? Why not be great?
Yesterday (September 30), the Young Thug racketeering trial featured yet another explosive twist after the judge presiding over the proceedings lit into the prosecutors for presenting such a sloppy case. However, despite this, the defense’s request for a mistrial has been denied yet again, as the trial enters its 139th day.
Judge Paige Reese Whitaker appeared to be fed up with Chief Assistant District Attorney Adriane Love’s behavior for the past month, saying, “It is baffling to me that somebody with the number of years of experience that you have, time after time after time, continues to seemingly and purposefully hide the ball to the extent you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can.
“I really don’t want to believe that it is purposeful, but honestly, after a certain number of times, you start to wonder how can it be anything but that,” she continued. “Unless it is just that you are so unorganized that you are throwing this case together as you try it.”
Bartees Strange unveiled a new single, “Lie 95,” this summer. At the time, a press release noted the song “heralds a new era,” and now we know more about that: Today (October 1), Bartees announced Horror, a new album.
He also unveiled the Americana-leaning new single “Sober,” but don’t necessarily expect that to reflect the aesthetic of the whole album: A press release calls the project Bartees’ “most ambitious, wide-ranging project to date.”
Bartees says of the song:
“This song is about falling short in a relationship, over and over and drinking because of it. I think this is something a lot of people can probably relate to. Being in love, but not being the best at showing it or feeling successful within it. And being afraid that this is something you’ll always deal with because you never really saw a better example of how love works.”
He also says of the album:
“In a way I think I made this record to reach out to people who may feel afraid of things in their lives too. For me it’s love, locations, cosmic bad luck, or that feeling of doom that I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. I think that it’s easier to navigate the horrors and strangeness of life once you realize that everyone around you feels the same. This album is just me trying to connect. I’m trying to shrink the size of the world. I’m trying to feel close — so I’m less afraid.”
Watch the “Sober” video above and find the Horror cover art and tracklist below, along with Bartees Strange’s upcoming tour dates.
02/13/2025 — Los Angeles, CA @ Paramount
02/15/2025 — Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
02/19/2025 — New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
02/26/2025 — London, UK @ Oslo Hackney
Horror is out 2/14/2025 via 4AD. Find more information here.
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