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DC Comics has a hit on its hands with the “Death Metal” crossover storyline, and it has prompted another sort of crossover: A soundtrack, for which they’ve gotten a handful of great artists to participate. Denzel Curry shared his contribution, “Bad Luck,” last week, and now it’s Manchester Orchestra’s turn.

Today, they’ve released “Never Ending,” a gigantic-sounding rocker with post-rock-like dynamics. The band’s Andy Hull says of the song, “When [executive producer Tyler Bates] reached out about wanting to include us in the soundtrack for this epic comic, this song immediately came to mind. We spent some time with him adding flourishes to the original version and we were really thrilled with how well it turned out.”

Hull, by the way, also voiced Lex Luthor in “Sonic Metalverse,” an animated showcase for the Death Metal series.

Aside from the aforementioned artists, the Death Metal album will also feature contributions from Mastodon, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Rise Against, Idles, Soccer Mommy, and others.

Manchester Orchestra’s latest album, The Million Masks Of God, was released back in April. Hull told Uproxx of it, “We knew we really wanted from the beginning for it to be all connected in a similar way as [2017’s A Black Mile To The Surface], but more thought out, and allowing the songs to fold in on each other. And having repeated melodies and phrases that, at the end of the second song, is the same melody and lyrical nod to the fifth song. That happens all over the record. Throwing out the rule book that we had made for ourselves about even what a song can be. It’s been a really difficult record to pick a single and pick songs to play for people, because I do feel like it’s best served as a whole thing. The album’s the song.”

Dark Nights: Death Metal Soundtrack is out 6/18 via Loma Vista Recordings. Pre-order it here.

The Philadelphia 76ers are 1-1 with the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA’s Eastern Conference semifinals as the series leaves the City of Brotherly Love and heads down south to The Big Peach. To see them off, though, the 76ers’ Phila Unite campaign tapped one of the city’s rising musical stars in Tierra Whack, who shows her hometown pride with a rap shouting out the team’s members like Joel Embid and Tobias Harris in “76.”

Over a marching band-inspired beat that sounds like Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch” had a baby with an HBCU drumline, Tierra flips the stars’ names with wordplay like “Shake Milton makes millions” and “Doc Rivers layin’ up with winners.” The video sees Tierra watching the Sixers play on an old school box TV set, holding up cardboard cutouts of the players’ heads, and showing off her own hoop skills as she dribbles and shoots a jumper on an invisible hoop.

Whack isn’t the only rapper putting on for her city in the series. Migos’ Quavo attended game 1 in Philly, with his over-the-top reactions capturing Twitter’s attention and either amusing or enraging fans (depending on who they were rooting for). Does that mean we’ll see someone like Meek Mill turn up at State Farm Arena to troll Atlanta fans in the same fashion? Let’s hope so; after last year’s bubble, more fan engagement can only be a good thing.

Watch Tierra Whack’s “76” video above.

Any bozo can stumble into success one time. It can be one good idea or a fortuitous set of circumstances or even just dumb luck. Sometimes it’s just magic striking at an opportune moment and, yes, this is where I mention Nick Foles outdueling Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. (Go Birds.) Repeating that success — just once, to bring your grand total of successes to two — is hard. And even then, some people might write you off as a flash in the pan. They’ll say you rode the wave of the first thing, or accuse you of going back to the same well, or whatever else people say, because people can be petty. But do it a third time, and then a fourth, in different ways, with different routes to victory… well, then it gets pretty hard to deny. Then you’re just good. Very good. Possibly even great. This brings us to Mythic Quest.

Mythic Quest dropped its fourth special episode in under two seasons last week. The first one, “A Dark Quiet Death,” featured Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti — not regular castmembers — as video game developers whose project and relationship crumbled over time, and careened between funny and heartbreaking in ways that should be impossible for a half-hour standalone episode. The second one, “Quarantine,” was a freaking triumph, an uplifting and tear-jerking look at a scary early-pandemic world that we were still all coming to terms with. It remains one of the best television episodes I’ve ever seen, regardless of circumstances, but especially given the circumstances. The third one, “Everlight,” dropped between seasons and provided a bookend to “Quarantine” that set things up for the second season, and did some big ambitious work in the field of LARPing, which both a fun thing to watch and a fun collection of words to type.

The latest special episode, titled “Backstory,” flashed all the way back to the 1970s to show one of the supporting characters — C.W., the game’s pretentious and bombastic story maestro, played by F. Murray Abraham — as a young man looking to make a name for himself as a science fiction writer. It was also hilarious in parts and devastating in others. It could also stand alone as its own work, without any knowledge of the rest of the show (although it would help), which, again, is basically a magic trick for a half-hour of storytelling. It featured this line of dialogue, which made sense in context and makes for a terrific screencap without context, too.

That’s Craig Mazin, writer of Chernobyl and the Hangover sequels and freshman-year roommate of Ted Cruz (and possessor of a fascinating life), who swung by to write the episode. That’s some kind of trick, too, swooping into a show in its second season and doing a one-off story that somehow both provides depth for a character previously mined mostly for goofs and sets things up for events going forward. It probably helped that the episode was directed by series creator and star Rob McElhenney. Everyone on this show is almost infuriatingly talented.

Yes, that applies to the guest stars of this episode, too, led by Josh Brener, who you probably recognize as Big Head from Silicon Valley, and who absolutely nailed the elements of the character. The bravado, the pettiness, the hurt, and even, to some degree, the F. Murray Abraham of it all, which is saying something because there’s so much of that to grasp. Brener spoke to Uproxx earlier this week to explain how he pulled that off and provided this glance into the character’s soul.

“I think he crafted a self-image that, no matter what, he is unwilling to relinquish,” Brener said. “You are 100% sure of who you are and are unwilling to change or allow in any other version of yourself. Everybody has to be wrong. That’s the only possibility, is that everybody doesn’t see who you actually are, so you just keep insisting upon and insisting upon it until it’s true. That seems to be what C.W. does, is that he, through brute force, just makes it so by whatever means necessary.”

Yeah, that just about says it. And it explains how a man can go from hopeful idealist to heartbroken loner to shameless plagiarist to Renaissance Fair meat salesman, which, as we learn, is the backstory in “Backstory,” and where C.W. was when he was rediscovered. Again, it’s a lot to pack into 30 minutes. Again, it’s cool that the show is willing to take an extended diversion to add depth to an otherwise minor character. Again, it’s incredible it all worked so well.

(Mazin and Brener aren’t the only recognizable faces in the episode, especially if you are me, or watched all the shows I’ve watched over the last couple of decades. One of his coworkers and eventual rivals is played by Michael Cassidy, who appeared in the second season of The O.C. as a Seth Cohen adversary and comic book collaborator named Zach. The other is played by Shelley Hennig, who appeared in an episode of Justified as a grifter and riverboat gambler named Jackie Nevada. I paused mid-episode to look up why both of them looked familiar and I shouted “WHAT?!” both times I found out.)

This is not the first time I’ve gushed about Mythic Quest. It’s not the second time either. It’s at least the third, by my count, and it could easily be the fourth or fifth. There’s a reason for that: Mythic Quest is a good show. It’s a good show when it’s just going about its regular business of being an office comedy about a collection of weirdos and misfits who care deeply about each other even when they don’t admit it. (Big Parks and Recreation vibes here). It’s a good show when it goes out of its way to give you hope in a terrifying real-world crisis. And it’s a good show when it tosses all of that out the window to tell a story that fills in blanks you didn’t even realize existed.

So, yes, Mythic Quest just retained its title of Special Episode Champion this week. But if it keeps doing that, and keeps being this good at its more straightforward episodes, and keeps pulling off this high-wire act of connecting those two things in a way that makes you laugh and cry a little in the same 30 minutes, well… then we’re back to that discussion about repeating success so many times that it becomes undeniable. At some point, we’re going to have to go right ahead and talk about Mythic Quest as one of the best shows on television. I’m ready whenever you are.

Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen forged a beautiful partnership on “Like I Used To,” the soaring single the pair shared last month. It was their first collaboration, and now they’ve made their first joint television appearance, to perform the song on The Tonight Show yesterday. The pre-taped performance wasn’t dissimilar to the song’s video, as it features plenty of side-by-side shots of both artists. They also nailed the performance itself, which sounds true to the studio recording.

Van Etten previously said of the track, “Even though we weren’t super close, I always felt supported by Angel and considered her a peer in this weird world of touring. We highway high-fived many times along the way…. I finally got the courage in June of 2020 to reach out to see if she would want to sing together. I got greedy and quickly sent her a track I had been working on.”

Olsen also added at the time, “I’ve met with Sharon here and there throughout the years and have always felt too shy to ask her what she’s been up to or working on. The song reminded me immediately of getting back to where I started, before music was expected of me, or much was expected of me, a time that remains pure and real in my heart.”

Watch Van Etten and Olsen perform “Like I Used To” on The Tonight Show above.

Although Mariah Carey denied a report that she’d had an “explosive” falling out with longtime business partner Jay-Z over her Roc Nation management, it appears that she has indeed decided to part ways with Roc Nation. Billboard and Variety report Carey has moved from Roc Nation to Range Media Partners, following her former Roc Nation manager Melissa Ruderman, who switched companies in January.

Ruderman was Carey’s day-to-day manager in 2005 when the star was managed by Benny Medina, handling the rollout for the 2005 album The Emancipation of Mimi. At Roc Nation, Ruderman helped put together deals for Carey’s Las Vegas residencies, the publishing contract that led to the bestselling memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and a TV deal with Apple. Ruderman joined the recently formed Range Media Partners just a few short months after its launch in September last year.

The rumor that Mariah had switched management was first hinted at in a report in British tabloid The Sun, which wrote that a meeting between Carey and Jay-Z “did not go well at all” after the two disagreed on rollout plans for a more R&B-centered album. However, Mariah took the tabloid to task in a tweet recalling the success of Mariah and Jay’s no.1 hit “Heartbreaker.”

“The only ‘explosive’ situation I’d ever ‘get into’ with Hov is a creative tangent, such as our #1 song ‘Heartbreaker!!’” she wrote. “To the people who make up these lies I say ‘Poof! —Vamoose, sonofa*****”!’”

Though he has only appeared in three episodes, 91-year-old veteran actor Ed Asner has had a memorable role in the Karate Kid sequel series, Cobra Kai, playing the step-father to William Zabka’s Johnny Lawrence. In fact, Asner not only appeared in the first episode of Cobra Kai, but his scene was the first one that Zabka shot for the series. It didn’t go exactly as Zabka thought it might, as he relayed to Marc Maron on this week’s WTF podcast.

“My first scene on the show was with Ed Asner, who took me to school,” Anser told Maron, who has also worked with Asner in the past. “He plays my estranged Dad, and we’re doing rehearsal, and he calls me over and he says, ‘Is there anything else I can give you.’ And I say, ‘No, you’re doing great. How about you? Is there anything I can give you?”

“And [Anser] goes, ‘Oh go f**k yourself.’”

“He did it in character,” Zabka said, “and he rattled me, and he. got me in this place, and I’m like, ‘Sh*t! Did Ed Asner really say that to me? But no, he was doing this device, which he does all the time off-camera.”

It was a hell of a way to kick off the new series, but at least according to Maron, Zabka nailed the role of middle-aged Johnny Lawrence. “This seemed like the reasonable evolution of that guy,” Maron said. “Just going to, like, high school reunions. There’s an element of that guy on his best behavior can’t hide that he’s pissed off and beaten. But the thing wouldn’t work unless you were empathetic, which is a testament to your acting … that character was an a**hole, and he’s still an a**hole. But he’s sad.”

For fans of Cobra Kai, it’s a great podcast episode, full of gems about the series and Zabka’s experience. Zabka also revealed, for instance, that his experience at Cons has changed dramatically since Cobra Kai. “It’s a trip. I love it now because up until Cobra Kai I was the table that the dads would walk up and go, ‘I just want my kid to meet you. This guy was the biggest a**hole. Nice to meet you.’ And they would walk away. Now, I got people coming up and going, ‘Hey, I love you on the show. Johnny is cool now.’”

In fact, it was during of those conventions in Florida that Zabka had to reveal to Martin Kove — who plays John Kreese — that the series had been greenlit without Kove’s immediate involvement. “I had to break it to him outside this bar. It was rainy at night and he was about to go to his room. And I was like, ‘Hey I need to tell you about something that’s going on right now it’s a thing called’ Cobra Kai.’”

Kove was happy to hear it but didn’t understand why he hadn’t been notified yet. “He was like, ‘Well, when do I come on? When’s my part?’ and I go, ‘Well they’re gonna call you but I think it’s like the end of episode 10.’ He was like, ‘Why the end? Why can’t I come in the middle? Why can’t I come in episode two? Have them call me.’”

Of course, they eventually did bring him in, and now Kove is the primary antagonist on the series, at least until Terry Silver arrives in Season Four, which will debut on Netflix later this year.

Source: WTF with Marc Maron

Last year, Jensen Ackles officially made the jump from Supernatural to plain ol’ supe when he announced he was joining Amazon Prime’s The Boys as Soldier Boy, a name very hard to say with a straight face. However, while we now have our first look at him in his superhero get-up, we still have many questions about just what brand of crooked Ackles’ caped crusader will assuredly be. While we won’t know exactly what levels of glory and gore to expect from him until he graces our screens next year, we do know a bit more about just want The Boys costume designer wants him to get across to viewers, and a lot more about what role he played in the comics.

Solider Boy’s look was first revealed in an exclusive feature with Entertainment Weekly, where Amazon shared an image of Ackles with the publication as well as a comment from The Boys costume designer Laura Jean Shannon.

“Soldier Boy is the original badass. Our goal was to highlight a bygone era of overt masculinity and grit. With that pedigree we dove headfirst into baking in an all-American quality grounded in a military soldier’s practicality with a heavy dose of old school cowboy swagger. We knew that the actor had to have Steve McQueen looks and chops with a John Wayne attitude, luckily Jensen Ackles embodies all of that.”

Now you might have noticed some words and phrases in there — phrases such as “bygone era,” “all-American,” and “military soldier” — that when coupled with the shield Soldier Boy is holding invoke the image of a certain star-spangled Avenger, and that’s no coincidence. The Boys creators Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson designed Soldier Boy based on the Marvel hero Captain America, but whereas Captain America serves as an optimistic representation of American values, Soldier Boy is more of a glass-half-empty interpretation.

Much like Captain America, Soldier Boy served the United States during World War II, dodging bullets all while maintaining a can-do attitude that — surprisingly enough — is authentic. However, something far more important about Soldier Boy isn’t quite so genuine: his service record. In the comics, Billy Butcher states he is certain Soldier Boy didn’t actually serve in the war. In time, we come to discover this is kind-of-sort-of true. While perhaps the first Soldier Boy did, “Soldier Boy” is not one person but is rather a legacy title passed down to a new man when the former Soldier Boy dies, which, if we know The Boys, might just be an all too apt commentary on how America sees soldier as dispensable. In the show, it’s likely we’ll see the third incarnation of the character portrayed.

When it comes to what super powers Soldier Boy has, it is once again apt to compare him to Captain America. Much like Cap’ he possesses super human strength, wields a shield, and has great weapons skills. However, one of Captain America’s more crucial skills Soldier Boy does lack is any semblance of bravery. Despite how genuine his “golly gee-whiz” safe-for-work heroic act is, Soldier Boy is a coward who will serve any one with power greater than his own, which primarily includes — you guessed it — Homelander.

You see, Soldier Boy is the leader of the super group Payback, which you might quickly realize is a play on Avengers. While Payback is an older group than the Seven, since the Seven was created Payback’s reputation has grown considerably less impressive, leading Soldier Boy to yearn to abandon Payback and earn a spot on the Seven. To do so, Soldier Boy would do just about anything to please Homelander, including mass murder and having sex with him — an incident that’s part of a larger and very explicit movement the show has said they’ll be tackling next season. Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news here to any Team Dean fans, but it really doesn’t look like Ackles is here to jump in and save the day.

While the exact details of what Ackles will be doing in season 3 have yet to be revealed, the showrunners stated his character will allow them to “tell a little bit about the history of America and how we ended up in the current fraught position that we’re in.” It looks like we’re in for an even bumpier ride this next time around, folks.

Within hours of WandaVision hitting Disney+, Marvel fans started running wild with theories that Mephisto was the “Big Bad” manipulating the show’s strange events from behind the scenes. (Heck, we even got in on the action.) However, as the series came to its emotional climax, Marvel’s version of the Devil was nowhere to be found because, at the end of the day, it was nothing more than a fan theory. In fact, WandaVision‘s creator, Jac Schaeffer, didn’t even know who Mephisto was until she saw the speculation spreading like wildfire online as the show was airing.

With Loki‘s first episode now available on Disney+, the creative team behind the Trickster God’s new series are already getting ahead of the Mephisto rumors and shutting down the image that started it all: that stained glass window. Back in December 2020, Marvel unveiled a trailer for Loki, which included a scene from the first episode where the Devil is depicted in a stained glass window. It’s plain as day, and it was an impetus for the Mephisto rumors that started plaguing WandaVision. Fans just assumed that Mephisto was going to be in Loki, so it only makes sense that Marvel would slowly tease his arrival. Not so much.

In an interview ahead of Loki‘s premiere, director Kate Herron explained that the stained glass window never had anything to do with Mephisto and is actually a reference to the show’s main character. Via Entertainment Tonight:

“It’s honestly just a super weird coincidence. Like, it’s genuinely a reference to Loki — the horns, he was cast out of heaven, that’s what it’s a reference to. Because we filmed that a long time before– I think WandaVision must have been in post when we filmed that. I did see all the stuff about that online and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be interesting.’ [Laughs] But no, it’s more relevant to the themes of our show and it’s not a nod to that character.”

And there you have it. Despite what WandaVision taught us, the devil is not in the details. At least, not literally.

(Via Entertainment Tonight)

After taking a bit of time off, Megan Thee Stallion is back from her brief hiatus. She’s dropping “Thot Sh*t” this week, and soon, she’ll be back in the classroom: In partnership with the Roc Nation School Of Music, Sports, And Entertainment at Long Island University, she will be offering a full-tuition, four-year scholarship to one lucky student. The deadline to apply for the scholarship is July 15 and interested students can apply here.

Additionally, Megan will participate in Long Island University’s “Industry Expert Speaker Series,” where she will “delve deeper into her industry expertise” for Roc Nation School Of Music, Sports, And Entertainment students.

Meg says in a statement, “Getting an education is incredibly important to me. I still have academic goals that I want to achieve, so if I can use my resources to open doors and create opportunities for at least one student, then it’s a victory. It’s important that we encourage our students to pursue their passions and put them in positions to become the next game changer in whichever fields they choose.”

Megan is truly dedicated to academics: Alongside her mega-successful music career, she is also currently studying Health Care Administration at Texas Southern University.

Megan Thee Stallion is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

(SPOILERS for Disney+’s Loki and the MCU will be found below.)

It’s about damn time that Loki‘s now atoning for his time crimes on Disney+. The show’s premiere episode began the entertaining-yet-complicated process of explaining the multiverse, which apparently is where the MCU wants to be, big time, going into the future. Sure, we already had to know that this would happen, given that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the title of the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring sequel to come. And to a lesser extent, Kevin Feige linking up the MCU and the FOX superhero universes in WandaVision may have been a move in the same direction.

Yet what matters, for the moment, is that Loki is here to explain all the multiverse stuff, and Luke Wilson is doing a lot of that heavy expositional lifting. He’s not done yet, either, nor are the other Time Variance Authority’s employees, who are adding useful and not-so-useful bits along the way. Marvel fans received a shock with that Infinity-Stone joke (that many fans felt was a gut punch regarding Black Widow), and the show ended with a mystery. Why on Earth Midgard did this series take a side trip to Oklahoma?

Let’s review what led up to this moment, and that includes a conversation between Loki and Wilson’s TVA Agent, Mobius, who’s seeking to protect the Sacred Timeline, which Loki disturbed by snatching the Tesseract at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It’s very important to remember that the Loki in this Disney+ show — and he is referred to as a “Variant” — is not the same Loki who Thanos killed in Avengers: Infinity War, so there are no time shenanigans at least for that detail. Yet we’ve long since known that Loki is capable, as the God of Mischief, of replicating himself all over the place, so how does that tie into the show’s trip to 1858 Salina, Oklahoma?

That’s part of the mystery here. Mobius tells Loki that “fugitive variants” have been killing Minutemen at various points in time. He adds, “The variant we’re hunting is… you.” That can be taken in a few ways. It’s clear that Mobius, who engages with Loki in a buddy-cop dynamic, wants time-criminal Loki to help track down an even worse time-offender, one who is killing TVA representatives. That’s a risky proposition. It’s also possible, however, that Mobius is as crafty as Loki is, and he’s perfectly aware that he needs to beat Loki at his own game while hiding an ulterior motive.

Before we can think about those possibilities for too long, the episode’s final scene blips to Oklahoma around the time of the oil rush, where Minutemen noted that there’s an “anachronistic” (out of time and place) artifact in the field, which is “early third millennial,” for what it’s worth. A Minuteman wonders if some “jackass” used a time machine to come back and steal oil, and then a mysterious figure (obviously, a variant) drops a lantern and sets the oil field on fire, torching the group.

Weird. All of it. Oklahoma is now part of the MCU (and that’s canon, so the Sooner State is really on the map now), and who knows if the state will mean anything at all in the grand scheme of Loki. Yet it’s a dramatic note with which to end the premiere, which earlier detailed variant-murders in 1548 France. There’s no telling whether a variant purposefully used the Oklahoma setting because it’d be really easy to kill TVA agents who are standing atop oil. Yet this was an effective way for the variant to easily nab the TVA device that would have “reset” the timeline.

As for whether there’s any other significance to this venue, that’s still left in the open. I would guess that Loki doesn’t want to dive deep into the history of Salina (and any Civil War implications), and that this is more of a case of wanting to bring a firefight into the show because that’s a big visual moment. Also, yeah, Salina was the first place in Oklahoma where oil was discovered (by accident) in 1859. If I was a variant who wanted the TVA to mistake me for a “jackass” who simply wanted to steal oil before its official discovery, then sure, I’d make a trip to Salina, too. Yes, it appears that this was simply a ruse to fool the TVA and easily dispense with several agents, but hopefully, we’ll receive clearer answers next week.

Disney+’s ‘Loki’ will stream new episodes on Wednesdays.