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Seeing the 2022 Smokin’ Grooves lineup was the first time I felt real anxiety about catching everything at a music festival I wanted to. From top to bottom, the flyer was stacked with names I had a real investment in, from artists Uproxx currently covers such as Jhene Aiko, Kamasi Washington, Miguel, and The Roots to nostalgic faves like Angie Stone, Bilal, Macy Gray, and Musiq Soulchild. Needless to say, some executive decisions had to be made; about halfway through the fest, I gave up on the “nostalgic faves” portion of the proceedings after rushing back and forth between the two stages set up at LA’s State Historic Park became untenable. By the time TDE singer SiR hit the Smokin’ Grooves stage, I was pretty much parked there for the duration.

To be fair, this is a great problem for most festivals to have, and as an (ahem) older attendee with investments in many of the newer/younger acts like Uproxx cover star Foushee, I’ll admit my predicament was probably unique among festival-goers, who would usually only have a burning need to see a handful of acts and check out the rest out of curiosity. But Smokin’ Grooves was unique among festivals in that it was really the first time I legitimately wanted to see nearly every act on the bill, which speaks to the focus with which the fest’s organizers put that bill together. While suitably eclectic and diverse covering the breadth of hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and soul, the lineup found that distinctive pocket where all those things co-exist.

Unfortunately, that means that the lineup, jam-packed with back-to-back sets requiring full band setups, was a little crowded, and that caused some fraying at the seams holding everything together. Early in the show, a number of acts on the Smokin’ Grooves stage had microphones cut mid-song as they went over their time. The Jupiter stage seemed to handle the transitions more gracefully, allowing bands to play off as the stage turntable wheeled them around to bring the next act on. Even with these measures in place — and to be clear, I love the use of the turntable to get bands set up and onstage in time for their sets — minor delays built up over the course of the festival, resulting in the headliner Erykah Badu‘s set being cut in half due to sound curfew.

Look, I understand the logistics of putting on such a big event, let alone trying to turn a profit, but having any artists getting cut off is a bad look — especially the headliner. Granted, artists can be… let’s just say “stubborn” about the whole “sticking to their time” thing, as well as the whole “showing up on time” thing. It’s an issue that has existed as long as the recording industry has and will likely exist until it collapses. Since we all know this, though, it might be worth festival organizers looking at and eventually accepting the possibility of putting fewer acts on the bill in hopes of allowing more time for the logistical snags that will pop up no matter how well you plan. Artists also hold some responsibility, as well. If the city sends a citation because you couldn’t be bothered to leave the house 20 minutes early, that’s on you. Finally, and this is more of a personal quibble, it’d be nice if festivals brought back hosts who could keep things moving along and cut down on confusion between sets, even when they’re back-to-back.

But these were minor issues in the grand scheme of things. Smokin’ Grooves wound up being my favorite festival since the return of live events, based almost solely on the lineup and the venue. Aside from some of the less experienced artists, nearly every set was put on by veteran performers who knocked it out of the proverbial park. From Blu and Exile, who smartly stuck to mostly Below The Heavens selections, to Jhene Aiko, who graciously paused her set a few times to help distressed fans in the crowd, the vibes throughout the day were immaculate. So was the sequencing of the main stage; part of the reason I decided to stay there was the incredible build after SiR’s set, with Smino, Thundercat, The Internet, Aiko, The Roots, and Miguel, taking the stage and cranking up the energy with each new act.

Sure, it would have been nice to continue bouncing back and forth to the Jupiter stage — and easy, thanks to the simple, picture-perfect layout of the venue (I know it’s a smaller fest, but I sure would like to see way more events at this park). Slum Village and Dead Prez were truly meaningful to me in high school, while Roy Ayers is a legend and Toro Y Moi always puts on a great show. But as I made my way to the rideshare pick-up zone — a bit of a walk, to be sure, one of the only minor drawbacks to the venue — I could still hear the strains of Kamasi Washington’s sax lulling me back. Even too much of a good thing, it turns, can sometimes leave you wanting more.

Last year, composer Danny Elfman teamed up with Nine Inch Nails frontman and the powerhouse of a producer Trent Reznor, who has also been working with Halsey and Health recently. Elfman was churning out remixes of tracks from his recent album Big Mess, so he recruited Xiu Xiu, Zach Hill of Death Grips, and, of course, Reznor for the song “True.”

Today, Elfman is back with another remix with Reznor, this time of the bombastic track “Native Intelligence.” The song is four and a half minutes of pure sensory overload, with layers of culminating, chaotic sounds and disturbingly tactile lyrics: “Taking a bath in cyanide, taking a bath.”

The remix comes from a new collector’s edition box set of Big Mess, which features unreleased collaborations with artists such as Rebekah Del Rio, Fever333, and Blixa Bargeld. It also has a 20-page lyric booklet, an art print signed by Elfman, and a “life-sized light up model of Danny’s peculiar hand.” It’s limited to 1,500 copies. More details can be found here.

Just last month, Nine Inch Nails announced their first tour since late 2018. Their run begins in Raleigh, North Carolina and ends in Cleveland, Ohio, starting next month.

Listen to this newer, crazier version of “Native Intelligence” above.

The Witcher has exploded into one of the most popular franchises in all of gaming. With three mainline games, a TV show, and the books this is a multimedia powerhouse that CD Projekt Red has been able to turn into something even bigger. The video games are beloved with many fans calling The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt one of the best games ever made.

On Monday, new information about the franchise was revealed. A new game in The Witcher franchise has entered development and it will be utilizing a new engine. Unfortunately, that is all we are going to know for the foreseeable future. No timeframe for the game’s release or even a development timeframe was revealed.

This is an exciting moment as we’re moving from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5, beginning a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games. It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant. We’ll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences.

At this point, no further details regarding the game — such as a development time frame or release date — are available.

For now, we’ll just have to assume that the sequel will release once it’s ready. This is for the best, and likely a calculated decision, after CD Projekt Red’s disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077.

Apparently, Kanye West is keeping his promise to continue updating his new album Donda 2 for those fans who purchased it via his Stem Player. This past weekend reportedly brought the latest album update, a new song called “We Did It Kid” featuring Fivio Foreign, who is quickly becoming one of Kanye’s go-to collaborators after the Brooklyn rapper appeared on “Off The Grid” from the original Donda. Since then, they also released “City Of Gods,” which is expected to appear on Fivio’s recently delayed debut album B.I.B.L.E.

Kanye’s Stem Player release strategy has been controversial, receiving criticism from Corey Taylor of the metal band Slipknot and even prompting some fans to simply create a software emulator of the device to avoid its $200 price tag. The Stem Player is a small, circular, touch-sensitive disc that allows fans to adjust the volume on one of four audio tracks, which the accompanying app creates from the original song. This allows listeners to remix tracks on the fly and save their mixes, but there were plenty of fans who felt this functionality wasn’t enough to justify a purchase.

The strategy has also affected Kanye’s standing on Billboard; the magazine has refused to count sales of the Stem Player as album-equivalent units. Kanye celebrated this as a victory but failed to demonstrate how it benefits him other than giving him more ammo for his persecution complex.

Through five months of the 2021-22 NBA season, Zion Williamson has yet to play a game. After undergoing offseason surgery to repair a fractured right foot, Williamson has been sidelined for the New Orleans Pelicans’ first 71 games.

According to a report from The Athletic’s Shams Charania, Williamson’s chances of suiting up this year are slim.

“Sources said Zion Williamson is not expected to return to play this season,” Charania writes. “He is making progress toward on-court work. So far, Williamson has been seen doing stationary shooting and is able to bear weight on his injured foot.”

Charania further explains that with just 11 games remaining for New Orleans, there’s “an improbably tight window” for Williamson to move through the team’s “ramp-up stages,” which spans from “one-on-zero to five-on-five scrimmaging.”

Williamson rejoined the Pelicans two weeks ago after spending a lengthy period of his rehab in Portland, Oregon. Charania notes that the third-year star has been cleared to “gradually progress in basketball activities,” is attending home games and is seemingly “in positive spirits around teammates and coaches.”

Despite Williamson’s injury, amid a number of other intermittent absences, New Orleans finds itself tied for ninth in the Western Conference at 30-41. It has a 2.5 game lead over the 11th-seeded San Antonio Spurs for the final play-in spot and has seen marked improvement since the arrival of CJ McCollum at the trade deadline.

For as many people like Trevor Noah and the Grammy producers who are concerned about Kanye West’s recent troubling behavior, there are others around him even more heavily invested in defending him from the criticism he’s been receiving lately, such as The Game. One of the latter is Chicago rapper GLC, who appeared on Kanye’s first two albums and was one of his closest associates at the start of his career. Like Kanye and Game, GLC posted his defense of the embattled producer on Instagram in the caption of a photo of Ye with his four children.

“@kanyewest is the ultimate father,” he wrote. “He fights for the betterment of his children. I understand that we all have our vices & issues but would you like a dude in & out the rehab in the midst of your children? He aims to have his kids at church & form a relationship with God. He doesn’t want his little girl on social media with make-up on, singing about how she’s in love with an emo girl… The way he is being portrayed in the media is disheartening on many levels especially when it comes to our own people aiming to bring him down. It makes me wonder would the headlines read the same if he wasn’t a Black Man in America?”

Well, yeah, probably. The thing is, Kanye seems to be mostly expressing those sorts of doubts to deflect from the very problematic behavior he’s been exhibiting lately — a lot longer than just the past few months when he ramped up attacks on his ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He continues to lash out at anyone who seems to want to help him, and he paints any consequences of his own actions — such as getting suspended by Instagram — as persecution enacted on a supposedly free thinker who is mostly just regurgitating red-pill, right-wing talking points. It sounds like what Kanye, GLC, and the rest of Kanye’s yes-men really want is free reign for him to do and say whatever he wants — no matter how much potential harm it might be doing to his kids, who probably wouldn’t enjoy most of this media scrutiny either.

Early on in X, A24’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre-meets-porn throwback, an aspiring French New Wave-loving filmmaker explains to his prudish (for now) boom mic operator girlfriend why he’s interested in shooting an “adult feature.” He’s part of the sweaty drive from Houston to a farmhouse in middle-of-nowhere Texas because he wants to prove that it’s “possible to make a good dirty movie.”

This weekend, we got two of them. It’s about time.

X is director Ti West’s first movie since 2016’s In a Valley of Violence, and best movie since 2009’s The House of the Devil, a deliberate homage to the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. X, with its grindhouse delights, also feels like it’s from a different era: it’s grainy, grisly, and most of all, sexy in a way that you rarely get nowadays in a wide-release movie (2,865 screens with an impressive $4.4 million opening weekend).

I’m not trying to go all “back in my day” on you (mostly because “my day” was, like American Pie and Eurotrip), but I feel the same way as Steven Soderbergh when it comes to the superhero movies that have dominated Hollywood for the past 15 years: “Nobody’s f*cking!” Contemporary blockbusters are largely sex-less affairs with the occasional outlier, like every time Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz share the screen in The Batman; meanwhile, everybody’s f*cking in X. There’s boobs and butts, and because it’s the 1970s, probably another b-word that rhymes with “tush,” although we don’t see any of those. X is “only” rated R, after all.

Another R-rated feature that was released this weekend was Deep Water, the long-delayed “mid-budget adult sex thriller” from director Adrian Lyne starring former real-life lovebirds Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. In his review, our own Mike Ryan wrote, “To the point that Deep Water makes no sense, it’s impossible to make heads or tails out of character motivations, and there’s no real resolution or payoff to anything, yet I enjoyed this trashy dumb thing more than I ever thought I would.” I couldn’t agree more.

Whether it’s Ben Affleck in Gone Girl-mode repeatedly saying “the snails are not for eating” (add a “clapping hands” emoji between every word for maximum effect) and looking uncomfortable on a bicycle, or Ana de Armas having her own “Zou Bisou Bisou” moment and picking a pubic hair out of her mouth, Deep Water is a sleazy blast. I only wish it had been released not on Hulu, but in theaters like X: the off-the-charts camp levels are more fun in a communal setting. If there isn’t already a Deep Water drinking game, there needs to be one. “Take a shot every time Ben Affleck looks sad while staring at Ana de Armas flirting with another dude.” You’d be drunk in 20 minutes.

X and Deep Water couldn’t have less to do with each other (one’s an old-school slasher; the other has a little girl driving her mom crazy because she won’t stop playing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” on the Alexa — guess which is which!), other than they’re both fun, sexy times. We’re already in the golden age of phallic shenanigans… maybe sleaze is making a comeback, too? That’s the vibe shift we all need.

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 new music this week.

This week saw Coi Leray and Nicki Minaj drop the collaboration that almost didn’t exist and Charli XCX go full pop mode with a new album. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

For more music recommendations, check out our Listen To This section, as well as our Indie Mixtape and Pop Life newsletters.

Coi Leray and Nicki Minaj — “Blick Blick”

“Blick Blick” almost didn’t happen, or at least not as it was released last week featuring Nicki Minaj. The good news, though, is that it did, as the pair dropped their braggadocios meet-up a few days ago. Uproxx’s Wongo Okon says on the single, Leray and Minaj “are a taunting duo that flexes their status and fires some shots at the competition, all without fear of being defeated at any point.”

Charli XCX — “Every Rule”

While Charli XCX spent the lead-up to Crash flexing how pop-focused the now-released album is, she kinda went against that with her final pre-album single, “Every Rule.” There’s no upbeat, in-your-face pop hook here, but rather, an emotional collaboration with AG Cook and Oneohtrix Point Never that shows even when Charli is in pop star mode, she hasn’t fully left her alternative instincts behind.

Normani — “Fair”

After generating some attention with a clothes-free teaser, Normani capped last week by dropping her latest single, “Fair.” On the tune, Normani gets vulnerable as she sings about her struggles with moving on after the conclusion of a relationship.

Arcade Fire — “The Lightning I, II”

Last week had two major Arcade Fire headlines: Will Butler revealed he left the band last year, and a few days before that, the band dropped a new single, “Lightning I, II.” Butler’s on this song, as he left the band after their new album, We, was completed. As for what the tune’s like, it’s classic, epic rock Arcade Fire.

Ethan Gruska and Bon Iver — “So Unimportant”

Ethan Gruska, perhaps best known in recent years as a Phoebe Bridgers collaborator, has added another esteemed name to his Rolodex, as he and Bon Iver linked up on “So Unimportant” last week. While Justin Vernon is clearly the bigger name here, he was actually pretty starstruck to get to work on the song with Gruska, as he said in a statement, “It’s not often that something IMMEDIATELY grasps you where you stand as his music did. It only happens a few times in one’s life.”

Fivio Foreign — “Magic City” Feat. Quavo

Fivio Foreign feels like he needs more time to work on his debut album B.I.B.L.E., since he announced last week he was delaying its release. While that news might be a downer, he came through last week with “Magic City,” a Quavo collaboration on which the rappers confidently make it rain at the strip club.

Rosalía — “Candy”

Rosalía has one of the headlining album releases last week with Motomami, which she immediately preceded with the pre-album single “Candy.” While it’s rhythmic as many of her songs are, this one comes at it in a calmer way, sounding almost ambient in some moments and captivating in all of them.

Juice WRLD — “Sometimes”

There’s apparently still some Juice WRLD posthumous material left in the tank, as last week brought a new song, “Sometimes.” The song arrived as an update to his Fighting Demons album and it’s a dark, brooding tune as he sings about the issues his substance abuse has brought him.

The Smile — “Skrtng On The Surface”

It’s currently Radiohead season… sort of. The band hasn’t announced a follow-up to 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, but Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s side project The Smile has been getting after it lately. They dropped a new single last week, “Skrtng On The Surface,” which Uproxx’s Adrian Spinelli reckons “might just be the best offering yet from this enigmatic supergroup.”

King Princess — “For My Friends”

Cheap Queen came out in 2019 and now it appears King Princess is gearing up for her second LP. She hasn’t formally announced it yet, but she’s dropped a number of singles since that album, including last week’s “For My Friends,” an evocative alt-pop tune on which King Princess reckons with how much of a handful she can be.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

As Moon Knight gets closer to its premiere on Disney+, director Mohamed Diab has been opening up about how important it was to him that the Marvel series focuses on Egyptian representation. In the process, he also expressed disappointment over the upcoming Black Adam film starring The Rock, which Diab feels squandered a significant opportunity to feature Egyptian talent.

“I was really annoyed with DC when they set Black Adam in a fictional middle eastern country as an excuse to cast non-Egyptians, when it was obviously meant to be in Egypt,” Diab said in an interview with Filfan (translated by Comic Book). While Diab understood that Black Adam is simply sticking to the source material, he’s of the opinion that representation should’ve been a higher concern:

“Representation opportunities shouldn’t be wasted… But it’s not a full mistake since it’s based on an iteration of the comics that doesn’t mention Egypt.” He added, “I wanted to showcase Egyptian talents as much as I could. Every culture should be represented by its people so I hired actors, an editor, a costume designer, an art director & a composer who are all Egyptian.”

Diab also confirmed that Oscar Isaac‘s character, Marc Spector, will be Jewish in the Disney+ series despite reports to the contrary. “The journey that Marc Spector is on during our whole show is: Who am I?” Diab said before explaining that’s a universal theme we all deal with on a “day-to-day basis.”

Moon Knight premieres March 30 on Disney+. Black Adam hits theaters October 21.

(Via Comic Book)

In 2017, Uproxx premiered “Revelatory,” the lead single of Caracara’s debut Summer Megalith. They’ve since released the 2019 explosive EP Better which caught people’s attention, including Indiecast‘s own Ian Cohen who interviewed them for Stereogum. They also did an Audiotree live session that pushed them even further in the indie rock scene. After announcing their Will Yip-produced sophomore effort New Preoccupations (As The Gods Descend) last month, the band have unleashed a powerful new single, “Colorglut” today, which features Circa Survive’s Anthony Green.

About the album, vocalist Will Lindsay said: “I think what people will be able to hear in this record, and what we hope to say, is that this isn’t a totally dark and dismal record. We didn’t want to make a druggy emo record about recovery. What we really wanted to show, and what anybody trying to quit substances knows, is this is what makes it so hard: that there are these incredible, rapturous highs that exist in concert with the use of the substance that can’t be uncoupled from it, but aren’t invalidated by it. Just because it ended with you needing to stop does not mean that you can’t celebrate those beautiful memories that you did make.”

Listen to “Colorglut” above.

New Preoccupations (As The Gods Descend) arrives 3/25 via Memory Music. Pre-order it here.