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It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from Tomi Lahren. The Fox News personality has continued to complain about “the Libs” and make easily debunked claims to her 1.6 million followers, naturally, but her recent output hasn’t been on the level of WTF as flight attendants are “Nazis of the air.” That’s the Tomi we know and… “love” is strong, so let’s leave it at “know.” On the Olympics, Lahren recently tweeted, “These crybaby Olympic athletes wouldn’t know oppression if it bit them straight in their whiny behinds,” along with a plug for her appearance on Fox and Friends. She also referred to people as “sheep” without a hint of irony. Lahren is playing the greatest hits, but every so often, she’ll have a whopper of a tweet. In the past 15 hours, there have been two of them.

“Now there’s a variant to the variant?! Wow sounds like a great way to keep fear, control and mail-in voter fraud going forever huh…” Lahren tweeted on Tuesday night, followed by this doozy of a hot take on Wednesday morning: “If you’re willing to go through another economy crushing lock down for ‘health and safety’ but won’t consider a healthy diet and exercise, you’re not serious about your health.”

To recap, Tomi Lahren thinks the Delta variant is part of a Democrat conspiracy theory to keep Republicans out of office through absentee balloting; she also continued to ignore mask mandates in favor of shaming people who want a Big Mac at the end of a long day (it’s worth noting that states with the “highest obesity rates” tend to vote Republican). “Or, you could encourage people to wear a mask and get vaccinated. That would also prevent another lock down,” one Twitter user replied to her tweet, while another pointed out the “healthy” diet of a certain former-president who nearly died from COVID.

Maybe she should go back to posting about sheep…

When Omar Apollo first started music, he was working odd jobs and had to borrow money from a friend to upload his song “Ugotme” on Spotify. The track blew up, earned a spot on several playlists, and effectively launched Apollo’s music career. After dropping his debut LP Apolonio in 2020, Apollo is ready to start a new era. Now taking his Spotify success full-circle, Apollo teamed up with the streaming platform to deliver two songs for their Spotify Singles series.

For his first track, Apollo opted to rework his most recent single “Go Away.” The original version of the song is a swooning ballad about a long distance crush. But for his Spotify Singles version, Apollo leans on Auto-Tune to transform the track into a lo-fi jam. Along with a new version of “Go Away,” Apollo took on an atmospheric cover of The Mamas & The Papas’ iconic song “California Dreamin’.”

About his decision to cover the 1965 track, Apollo said: “I chose that song because I heard it in Chungking Express by Wong Kar-Wai. They played it so many times in the movie that I became obsessed with it. I definitely felt like it was a time machine being at East West [Studios] — it’s cool to know the history behind the song when recording my version.”

Listen to Apollo’s stripped-down “Go Away” and cover of “California Dreamin’” below.

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

Microsoft is trying its best to make Xbox Game Pass the best deal in gaming, with huge acquisitions like Bethesda and adding EA titles to its vast catalog. But Google is attempting to do the same with its mobile gaming hub, and it’s added a number of new titles and features to its Google Play Pass this month as it battles with Apple for mobile gaming supremacy.

The company announced on Friday that it’s adding several mobile games to the subscription service, starting with the mobile version of Tesla vs. Lovecraft, a dual-stick shooter that puts you in the inventor’s shoes as you battle a number of horrible monsters from the H.P. Lovecraft canon.

There are also a new batch of puzzle games to the subscription, which runs $4.99 a month or $29.99 per year. Starman and Who Is Awesome? lead the way there, the former an immersive puzzle game and the latter a two-directional platformer.

You can read the full details about the expansion on Google’s Quicksave blog, as there’s a lot that’s been added in recent weeks. If you’re a big mobile gamer (and have an Android device) it’s a pretty valuable expansion to the program, which already has a lot of titles like the lovely Stardew Valley, Monument Valley, Limbo and others. Google stressed that it’s not just a games platform, with some educator-approved learning apps and Google Play Books included in the package. But titles like Tesla vs. Lovecraft, Cytus II and the Delight Games library are certainly the more notable additions for gamers looking to get the most mobile bang for their buck.

Victor Oladipo is headed back to the Miami Heat. According to report by Shams Charania of The Athletic, Oladipo will sign a free agent contract with the team that traded for him last year with the hopes of getting a work at him before he hit the open market.

While the Heat paid a relatively low price to bring Oladipo in from the Houston Rockets, the former All-Star only appeared in four games before the team decided to shut him down. Eventually, it was determined that Oladipo would need to undergo season-ending surgery on his previously torn quadriceps. He’d later go on to say that there were longstanding issues with his original surgery that needed to be corrected by going under the knife one more time.

As Charania noted, signing Oladipo to a deal while he presumably spends most, if not all, of this season rehabbing gives Miami the opportunity to sign him to a substantial contract next summer.

Oladipo has been on a lengthy road to recovery since tearing his quad in early 2019. Since then, he’s suited up for three teams — the Indiana Pacers, the Rockets, and the Heat — but has not quite looked like his former self. It is evident that he believes he’ll be able to get back to that level eventually, and Miami wants to position itself in the event that happens.

Barack Obama is turning the big 6-0 today and the folks at Fox & Friends couldn’t be more excited. Not because it’s the former president’s birthday, but because he was planning to throw a ginormous party in the middle of a pandemic, which is never a good idea. So it gave Steve Doocy and his so-called ‘Friends’ a chance to wax holier than thou about COVID and vaccinations and double standards.

Doocy could hardly contain his excitement when he hypothesized that Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard bash — which had originally included a guest list of 500 that reportedly included the likes of John Legend, Michael Jordan, and George Clooney, plus a staff of 200 to cater to the A-list attendees — could turn into a “super-spreader event.” (Thanks, Dr. Doocy.) But what got the gang really amped was the news that the Obamas are planning to downsize the shindig given due to health concerns over the new COVID Delta variant.

As The New York Times reported, Obama spokeswoman Hannah Hankins released a statement on Wednesday morning to announce that: “Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends. He’s appreciative of others sending their birthday wishes from afar and looks forward to seeing people soon.”

But the gang wasn’t buying it. While Doocy posited that “maybe it was a tone-deaf thing,” according to Mediaite, co-host Lawrence Jones was less generous in his assessment that the revised party plans were simply “Because he got caught!” But the sarcasm didn’t stop there.

After guessing that the party would still likely include “a couple hundred people,” Doocy suggested that “Maybe [Obama] didn’t watch the news. Did he know about this pandemic?”

“The problem is they told us you can’t do that you can’t have your wedding, you can’t have your funeral,” Doocy continued. “But we’re going to have this gigantic opulent party on Martha’s Vineyard for 500 elites and, you know, it was wrong.”

Jones, however, stuck to his guns that “They wouldn’t have changed it if they didn’t get caught.” (Note to Lawrence: It would be very hard to hide 700 people anywhere on Martha’s Vineyard—an island that measures less than 90 square miles—especially under a tent at the home of a former president. So subterfuge was not likely ever part of the plan here.)

Doocy wasn’t about to let the tomfoolery end without getting in the last word though: “So anyway, let’s see if George Clooney’s still going to Martha’s Vineyard,”

You can watch their full performance here.

(Via Mediaite)

Deafheaven have so far surprised fans with the rollout of their upcoming album, Infinite Granite, as singer George Clarke is putting more emphasis on clean, non-screamed vocals these days. This gives the band’s new music a lighter (but still intense) post-rock sound, which is on full display on their latest song, “In Blur,” which also has a strong dream-pop influence. The song is set to be the band’s last pre-album single.

The band’s George Clarke told Apple Music 1’s Hanuman Welch of the song:

“I think it was like the third track that we had really gotten ahold of and really laid the ideas down for. For me, it was the first time that we are really stepping into this new identity, and that came with the vocal experiments. The chorus started out with this bellowing Peter Murphy thing, and that got refined over time. And then we experimented with all these auxiliary vocals, the strange pitch-shifted ooh-ahhs was at the beginning, and, “who are you nows,” towards the end of the track, which was like a big mouth strikes again. We wanted just to bring in strange voices and fill out that idea across the board, have different characters, and I think for the first time really utilizing the vocals in a very creative way. To me it just feels very fresh for us, and I remember feeling that same way when we were making it.”

He also spoke about anticipating the reaction to their changing sound, saying, “We have a rule about not feeling confined at all during the writing process, not saying no to things, trying things out, not letting of anyone other than ourselves dictate what’s happening creatively. Of course, inevitably after we finish records, everyone gets out of the fog and then starts to think, ‘Oh, I wonder how people will respond to this.’ And what [Deafheaven’s Kerry McCoy] always says is, ‘It’s not really our business at the end of the day.’ I think that for us, the only thing that’s really paramount is that we can continue to be inspired and continue to write music that’s inspired, and hopefully our fans see that and come with us. I feel like for a lot of people who are familiar with our music, this will feel like a cool and more natural direction, I think, than maybe what you’d expect.”

Watch the “In Blur” video above.

Infinite Granite is out 8/20 via Sargent House. Pre-order it here.

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.

There’s a webcomic, one of those relatable, simply-drawn four-panel stories, in which a little cartoon dog sits at a table sipping from a mug of tea. The house he’s in is on fire, and in the second panel, he finally reacts to his situation: “This is fine,” he insists, although things around him are most certainly not in any way “fine.” The comic, a 2013 strip of the gag-a-day comic Gunshow has since been stripped down to these first two panels and re-shared into cultural ubiquity, a meme detached in many ways from its original context to describe most of our everyday existence in the era of Trump and COVID.

Isaiah Rashad’s new album, The House Is Burning, is very much the audio equivalent of this comic, with Isaiah playing the role of Question Hound, and his lyrics reflecting both of the juxtaposed states in play in the comic. On one hand, there is a creeping, nauseous sense of paranoia and dread. On the other, there is the Chattanooga rapper’s bemused insistence that everything is fine, the denial of the disaster in progress that threatens his very existence. The appeal of The House Is Burning is, yes, in its relatability, the tension between that sense of helplessness in the face of certain doom and our own (pardon) dogged need to press forward as though this is all normal, even though we know it’s not.

In the five years since we last heard from Rashad on the fan-favorite The Sun’s Tirade, the Tennesseean native has lived through his own version of this hell, in part of his own making. In the lead-up to his latest release, he’s been candid about the fires that burned around him; his twin battles with anxiety and addiction led him to nearly imploding his own career, spending nearly all his rap money, and returning home to Chattanooga, where family and friends couldn’t believe that Rashad, a Top Dawg Entertainment employee, was running on fumes and drinking himself to death as a result.

Tracks throughout the album augur this sense of weary, doomed resignation. “Some n****s gon’ die in the cardboard, some n****s gon’ die in the feds,” he observes on the hook to album opener “Darkseid.” On single “Headshots (4r Da Locals),” amidst seemingly celebratory fare about cars with bass and his indefatigable sex appeal, Rashad sneaks in the cutting line “I got a crib bigger than Budapest / And the shots ain’t bringin’ my soldier back,” making the double entendre and stiletto slice of the grim reflection slide by behind the cool glamor of his stolid facade.

However, these gloomy ruminations share equal time and space with party tracks like “Wat U Sed” with TikTok star Doechii and Kal Banks and “From The Garden” with Lil Uzi Vert, where Rashad indulges in the excesses and flexes expected of rap stars of his stature. On “Lay Wit Ya,” the first song he promoted as a single from the album, he calls himself “a cold piece of work” and smears his sweaty come-ons with a fine layer of affected disaffection — some might call this pimping — as he works hard to appear like none of this is work. In reality, all the water rolling off his back may not look like it affects him, but underneath, he’s treading for dear life — a lot like the rest of us.

So there is relief and release in the pure R&B songs that smatter the tracklisting. “Claymore” with Smino finds Rashad finding solace in the temporary company of a string of women — and even that can’t keep him from heeding the siren call of his addictions. He gets even more vulnerable on “Score” with 6lack and SZA as he details his “war scars and more sh*t” for a potential paramour, warning her before she gets too close how likely he is to run. As is usual in Rashad’s discography, the album is sprinkled with references to hip-hop classics and figures like Chad Butler (aka Pimp C) of UGK, for whom a track is named, and callbacks to Goodie Mob’s “Cell Therapy” on “THIB,” reinforcing that relatability factor that has so endeared him to fans.

What results is a portrait of a man on fire, struggling to find inspiration and hope in dire circumstances and coming out on the other side by the sheer will it takes to stop pretending everything is fine. In that comic I mentioned earlier, the part that often gets cut in its ongoing meme-ification is the final two panels, in which Question Hound eventually just melts away from the heat and his own refusal to take action. That’s the key difference here; recognizing that he needed help, Isaiah sought and received it with the support of his TDE cohorts and leadership. The real takeaway from the album isn’t even really on it: The house is burning, but the choice to burn with it is entirely up to you.

The House Is Burning is out now on TDE/Warner Records. Get it here.

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

Well padwans, it’s time to either start saving or start becoming one with the force really fast. Disney World’s Star Wars resort is nearly open for business and the only way anyone is getting in is with several pretty pennies or some serious Jedi mind tricks. Disney has officially revealed the price sheet for their upcoming Galactic Cruiser resort, and it starts at a shocking $4,809 for one room that can be shared by up to two people for two nights. Good news is, if you’re a family of four needing two rooms for the two-night package, you’ll encounter some savings and will wind up only paying… $6,000.

I suppose to give Disney some credit, the resort is pretty damn cool. It boasts itself as a completely immersive experience, where “you are the hero” and can write your own Star Wars story. According to the website’s description:

“You and your group will embark on a first-of-its-kind Star Wars adventure that’s your own. It’s the most immersive Star Wars story ever created — one where you live a bespoke experience and journey further into a Star Wars adventure than you ever dreamed possible… Throughout the ship, you’ll interact with an eclectic collection of characters, sit down to exotic galactic cuisine and perhaps even plot a secret mission together… As the itinerary continues, you’ll take the story further and deeper. Choose your path. Seek out the inner workings of the legendary starship, learn the traditional art of wielding a lightsaber, and even jump on a transport to the planet Batuu — where your mission continues at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge!”

Each of the three two-night packages includes your stay at the resort, as well as all meals, “exclusive experiences, missions and activities,” valet parking, and entry to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the part of the park that contains Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Meaning yes, if you want to visit the rest of the parks, you have to spend even more. In addition, the resort doesn’t provide you with any space-ready clothing but encourages you to wear your own “galactic favorites,” so get ready to buy all new threads or be walking past Stormtroopers in kakis and flip flops.

After having her breakout moment arrive during a global pandemic, Olivia Rodrigo was first taken aback by her fame. Help eventually arrived when she got some sage advice in the form of a tweet from a fellow star: Cardi B. Rodrigo appreciated Cardi’s words so much that she turned it into wall art.

Rodrigo recently sat down with GQ for a lengthy profile where she discussed her abrupt rise to fame. The profile mentioned how Cardi’s tweet sits in a white frame and is the only thing on her new apartment’s bedroom wall. Rodrigo noted she was overjoyed when she saw Cardi’s kind words.

“I honestly bawled,” she said. “I literally saw it and cried. I was like, ‘Thanks, Cardi. I’m not going to listen to bullsh*t.”

Rodrigo said she enjoys her new apartment, but moving out of her parent’s home was definitely a bit of a learning curve, saying, “I love living alone. I also just don’t know how to take care of myself, though. I don’t know what to buy from the grocery store or how to clean up after myself, I realized. It’s been a learning experience.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Rodrigo said she specifically asked her Sour producer Daniel Nigro to not watch her Disney+ series when they were working on the project. “I’ve always just wanted to be taken seriously as a singer-songwriter — not that being an actor takes away from that at all,” she said. “I wanted him to know me for me and not the side character that I was playing. I also just get really self-conscious about stuff like that, on a human level. I hate it when my friends listen to my songs or watch anything related.”

Read the full GQ profile here.

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

A few weeks ago, Unknown Mortal Orchestra shared a buzzy new bit of pysch-pop, “Weekend Run,” and now they’ve shared yet another new single. Two new songs in a row definitely seems to indicate the band is gearing up for another new album, though no announcement has come yet.

“That Life” follows in the footsteps of the first single, it’s more sunny funk accompanied by a very intricate puppet video. The puppet in the clip was created by puppeteer and fabricator Laura Manns, who has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on shows like The Muppets and Sesame Street.

Speaking of the new track, the band’s Ruban Nielson explained that he was equally inspired by Where’s Waldo? and a Hieronymus Bosch painting. “I saw this painting by Hieronymus Bosch called ‘The Garden Of Earthly Delights’ and in the painting there was a mixture of crazy stuff going on, representing heaven, earth, and hell,” he said. “When I was writing this song, ‘That Life,’ I was imaging the same kind of Where’s Waldo (or Where’s Wally as we call it in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK) of contrasting scenes and multiple characters all engaged in that same perverse mixture of luxury, reverie, damnation, in the landscape of America. Somewhere on holiday under a vengeful sun.”

Check out the new song above and stay tuned for more new music coming soon.