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Any internet list from the past decade-plus of celebrity pairs who look like each other wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Katy Perry and Zooey Deschanel (for example, here’s a blog post from 2008 that notes the visual similarity between the two). For years, the two have been compared to each other, and now Perry has cleverly made use of that with her new video for “Not The End Of The World.”

The video starts with Perry out for a walk with her baby in a stroller. She passes by Deschanel as the baby drops a stuffed animal in front of her. Looking up from her newspaper, Deschanel unsuccessfully tries to get Perry’s attention. All the while, aliens are getting ready to kidnap Deschanel, who they think is Perry. Once Deschanel is on the alien craft, she tries to explain the mistaken identity, but the extraterrestrials just don’t believe that she’s not Perry. Once she realizes the aliens saved her from a soon-to-be-blown-up Earth, she hatches a plan to rescue the planet.

The single comes from Smile, Perry’s sixth album, which she released this summer. It also appears on her recently released Cosmic Energy EP.

Watch the “Not The End Of The World” video above.

Jumanji is, without question, a Christmas movie. Therefore, you should watch it (the original, not the sort-of sequels… or Zathura: A Space Adventure) this holiday season, and when you do, be sure to remember this story about Robin Williams.

In a recent interview with CBCListen, actor Bradley Pierce, who played Peter in the fantasy-adventure film, recalled how Williams came to his and Kristen Dunst’s defense when producers wanted to film longer than they were (legally) allowed to.

“We were filming the monsoon scene and I think it was day seven or eight in that rain tank,” he said. “We were all in wetsuits, but spending eight hours in the water was really draining. It was coming to the end of the day, and children on set can only be on set for a certain number of hours. Producers approached our parents and said, ‘We’ve only got a half hour left of shooting, is there anyway we can do a little bit of overtime just to get it done?’” It would have saved money to shoot the scene then, but Williams recognized that the children’s’ well-being was more important than a studio saving some dough:

“Robin caught wind of these conversations happening and apparently he pulled the director and producers aside and said, ‘No we’re not doing any extra time. You’re gonna let everyone out of the pool now and we’re going to be come back next week.’ For all the dollars that would have cost, nobody else could have stood up the way he did,” Pierce said. “In addition to being warm and generous and kind, he was also very protective of all of us. He told everyone, ‘we’re done today, time to go home.’”

Jumanji came out in 1995, three years after Aladdin. I don’t know about you, but if I was a kid in 1995 (which I was), I can’t think of anything cooler than the Genie speaking up on my behalf. I hope he did it in the Rodney Dangerfield voice.

(Via CBCListen and People)

On Saturday, Army capped off a 9-2 season with a gutty 10-7 win over Air Force to earn the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy after having beaten Navy the week prior. It wasn’t the best Army team in recent memory, as a rotation of quarterbacks tried their best to lead the way for the triple option attack, never quite finding the explosiveness that offense is capable of, but still finished fourth in the nation in rushing yards per game at 281.

Still, that they cobbled together a schedule as an independent that allowed them to play 11 games, winning nine of them — with one of their losses to AAC champion and top G5 team Cincinnati — was impressive all on its own, and they desperately want a trip to a bowl game. However, with teams being able to opt out of bowl games this season, there are fewer teams available to play than normal, and with the SEC insisting all eligible teams play — including the likes of 2-8 South Carolina — bowls have had to meet contractual demands with them.

As such, Army saw itself on the outside looking in on Sunday when bowl selection got finalized, with a few bowls being canceled that normally would’ve let them in and others filling spots with well below .500 squads from conferences they have contracts with. Army coach Jeff Monken was understandably upset by this development, and laid into the bowl structure as well as teams who decided after late losses to change their tune and opt out of bowl games, leaving Army out in the cold. Monken spoke with ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg about their current status in college football purgatory, and took aim at those that changed their tune late about opting out.

“The bottom line is there were enough people who kept saying, ‘No, we don’t want to play Army, we don’t want to play Army,’” Monken said. “And I’m sure they don’t want to have one week to get ready for the option [offense] or whatever, but our players, we’ve got guys on our team that wouldn’t be invited as walk-ons to the teams we’re getting ready to play. We’ve got guys from California, they didn’t have a Pac-12 walk-on offer, and they are starting for us.

….

“USC, a week ago, was saying, ‘We deserve to be in the College Football Playoff if we go undefeated and win the Pac-12 championship,’” Monken said. “And the Pac-12 was saying, ‘An undefeated Pac-12 team deserves to be considered.’ So they go to the Pac-12 championship against Oregon and lose and they go from wanting to go to the College Football Playoff to not wanting to play at all? I don’t get it. Boise State opted out today. They lost their championship game yesterday. So they went from being their conference champion and representing their conference in a bowl game to opting out? You couldn’t go one more week and play us? It just doesn’t make any sense to me that you can go from wanting to play to not wanting to play in a matter of 12 hours.”

Monken said they had guys in tears knowing they wouldn’t get a bowl game and one last chance to play, a stark reminder of why bowl season does indeed matter beyond the College Football Playoff to so many programs who enter the season fully aware they won’t be competing for a national title.

There are undoubtedly plenty reasons in 2020 not to play in a bowl game, and while Monken praised the SEC for having its 12 teams play the postseason, others have questioned why the league didn’t ask its players for their input as happened elsewhere in college football. Like anything there are two sides to the coin with this right now, as players have dealt with a season unlike any other and played through the significant health risks of a pandemic. For teams that have dealt with outbreaks and positive tests, it’s more than understandable why they might call it a year, but as Monken notes, the teams that went so quickly from wanting to play in a possible big bowl game to opting out after losing a conference title game don’t seem to be making those decisions simply based on health and safety.

Monken said Army will continue to practice and hold out hope for a call this week to serve as a replacement team in a bowl, ready and willing to fill in should a team be a late scratch as has happened plenty this year.

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 an unexpected new set from Eminem and Paul McCartney continuing to be as prolific as ever. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

Eminem — Music To Be Murdered By — Side B (Deluxe Edition)

The final weeks of a year are usually slow as artists usually doing drop anything significant between the time critical year-end lists have been shared and when a new year starts. That didn’t bother Eminem, though, as he decided to release a deluxe edition of Music To Be Murdered By, which includes an album’s worth of new music. As usual, the rapper generated headlines by dropping a lot of names, mentioning everybody from Rihanna to Billie Eilish.

Cupcakke — “How To Rob (Remix)” and “The Gag Is”

Cupcakke spent last week with a giant spoon in her hands as she stirred the pot, first with the release of the diss-heavy “How To Rob (Remix),” on which she called out basically everybody in hip-hop. She found a sparring partner in Sukihana, who responded with a diss of her own. That prompted even more musical feuding from Cupcakke with “The Gag Is,” and that situation remains ongoing.

Paul McCartney — McCartney III

Despite (or rather, because of) the unprecedented (as has been the major keyword) nature of 2020, this year has been a fertile creative period for artists. Among those who busted out some new music was the legendary Paul McCartney, who continued his solo album series without getting in Taylor Swift’s way.

Slowthai — “Thoughts”

Slowthai came into his own as an internationally recognized star in 2020, and to wrap up the year, he’s been starting to look forward to 2021. He’s teased his new album Tyron some, and he continued dropping new music last week with “Thoughts,” which sees him returning to his grime roots after high-profile collaborations with artists like Gorillaz and Disclosure.

Chika — “Gold Medals”

Speaking of up-and-comers who have had big years, Chika did some name-making of her own in 2020. She earned a Best New Artist nomination at the 2021 Grammys, which she references on the Soundcloud art for “Gold Medals” (which is just a Grammy trophy), her celebratory new loosie.

Popp Hunna — “Adderall (Corvette Corvette) (Remix)” Feat. Lil Uzi Vert

Philadelphia rapper Popp Hunna got himself something that has been as enviable as any music achievement in 2020: a TikTok hit. “Adderall (Corvette Corvette)” blew up on the platform this year, so much so that Lil Uzi Vert wanted in and hopped on a remix of the bouncy tune.

Charly Bliss and Pup — “It’s Christmas And I F*cking Miss You”

Based on its title, the new holiday tune from Charly Bliss and Pup isn’t exactly traditional, but then again, neither is 2020. Charly Bliss’ Eva Hendricks aptly described the track, saying, “We tried to write a song that reflects the absolute insanity of this year and the fact that everyone in the world is stuck missing someone this holiday season and probably feeling a similar combination of emo, angsty, and vulnerable!!!!”

G Herbo — “Statement”

Herbo recently pled not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, charges that he decided to address directly on a new song, “Statement.” He raps on the track, “Let’s talk about them jets, yeah, let’s talk about Jamaica / Ask about me, I ain’t never been a fraud.”

Earthgang and Wale — “Options”

Earthgang already had a tremendous year as the group’s members (and some others) were behind the excellent Spillage Village album. They had one more treat before 2020 wrapped up, though, as they linked up on “Options,” which fans were happy to finally have out after it was teased back in the spring.

D Smoke — “It’s Ok”

Reassuring words won’t be turned away at this point in time, so the ones D Smoke has last week were welcomed. On “It’s Ok,” He offered a timely reminder that while things aren’t the most awesome now, there’s hope for a brighter future ahead. With a new vaccine making the rounds and promising developments in live music, let’s hope he’s right.

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

Back in 2009, Bob Odenkirk — who plays Saul Goodman on both Breaking Bad and its spin-off Better Call Saul — signed on to only make four episodes of Breaking Bad, beginning with the episode “Better Call Saul.”

He was so popular, of course, that Saul Goodman continued to appear on Breaking Bad and eventually Better Call Saul, where he co-stars with Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut. Though Banks and Odenkirk don’t actually share that much screentime, the two characters are not only inextricably linked, but Mike Ehrmantraut probably wouldn’t even exist (and in turn, neither would Better Call Saul) were it not for a scheduling conflict on Bob Odenkirk’s part.

That’s because, in addition to being scheduled for four episodes of Breaking Bad in 2009, Odenkirk was also scheduled for a run of episodes on How I Met Your Mother, where he played Marshall’s boss, Arthur Hobbs. In fact, because of that commitment to How I Met Your Mother, Odenkirk couldn’t do the fourth episode for which he was originally set to appear, so they had to create a new character to fill that void. That character? Mike Ehrmentraut.

“So he owes you, like, 10 percent of his money, right?” Michael Rosenbaum joked with Odenkirk on the Inside of You podcast. “No,” Odenkirk joked back. “I owe him.”

Indeed, Odenkirk has a lot of respect for Jonathan Banks, although he also does one hell of an impression of the famously grumpy actor. “He’s just a f**king tank. He’s one of these guys, one of these great, lifetime actors who has spent his whole life acting the sh*t out of everything.”

That said, Odenkirk admits that Jonathan Banks will “bite you down,” and he’s seen it “many times” on the set of the two shows, though Odenkirk also seems a little envious that Banks has had a little more freedom in the way he delivers lines. “He has less purity toward the lines than I do,” Odenkirk explains. “Partly that might be because his character is more straightforward than Saul. A lot of times my lines are written in a sort of weird, circuitous way that need to be said that way.”

Banks’ lines, however, can change them up a little because it wouldn’t change anything. “He’s just telling people to f**k off, I’m not doing this, or I’m not doing that. He’s a more straightforward character.”

As for Odenkirk’s time on How I Met Your Mother, he has an interesting memory of the place. “Everyone was smiling, and they read their scripts and laughed, and they clapped at the end of the table read, and I was like ‘What the f**k is going on here? Is there someone here that you’re doing a show for?’”

“The more I did the show, the more I realized,” Odenkirk continued, “that they like each other. They liked the show they were on, and they liked each other. That was so weird. It was so f*cking weird. They were so happy. I couldn’t even conceive of it. They were really thankful to be doing this show, years in. It didn’t seem real, but it was.”

“And isn’t that the way it should be,” Odenkirk added, before suggesting that the other person that he saw who actually seemed to enjoy his job, and his life, was Adam Sandler on Saturday Night Live.

Source: Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum

As if The Mandalorian Season 2 finale wasn’t epic enough, a post-credit scene revealed that that something called The Book of Boba Fett will be hitting Disney+ in December 2021. While fans were pumped for more Boba Fett after the character finally got a chance to be a total badass after 40 long years, that excitement quickly turned to confusion as rumors started spreading that Book of Boba Fett could actually be Season 3 of The Mandalorian, and the show could no longer focus on Pedro Pascal‘s Mando. Thankfully, executive producer Jon Favreau stopped by Good Morning America on Monday to clear things up.

So, first, the good news. The Book of Boba Fett is not Season 3 of The Mandalorian. It is a separate spin-off that will arrive first in December. The bad-ish news is that fans will be waiting a little while longer for more Mando. Favreau also explained why the Book of Boba Fett wasn’t announced during Disney’s Investor Day, which only added to the confusion. “We wanted to hold this back because we didn’t want to spoil the surprise during the big Disney announcement of all the shows when Kathleen Kennedy was up,” Favreau said. As for the production schedule, The Book of Boba Fett is currently filming, and when that wraps, the team will jump to The Mandalorian Season 3. “We’re working on pre-production on that right now.”

You can watch Favreau set the record straight on The Book of Boba Fett below:

To coincide with Favreau’s GMA appearance, Disney+ also revealed the new logo for Book of Boba Fett, and fans will be happy to know that Robert Rodriguez will be involved with the spinoff. He directed Chapter 14: The Tragedy, which featured Boba Fett’s epic comeback as he regained his iconic armor and plowed through Stormtroopers like they were blue milk butter.

It has been three years since fans have had new material from Lorde, but finally, she has made her surprise return. That’s right: @onionringsworldwide, Lorde’s once-secret onion ring review Instagram account, is back.

One of the most fun pop stories of 2017 was the realization that Lorde was running an Instagram account on which she reviewed different onion rings she has eaten. After the account went public, Lorde took it down, explaining to Jimmy Fallon at the time, “Now everyone knows about it and it’ll feel like something I’m doing to crave fame, then people are gonna be throwing onion rings at me on tour and it was gonna turn into a whole thing. It was fun for like five seconds, but I’m still going to keep eating onion rings.”

Lorde’s last post on the account was on June 12, 2017, but over the weekend, she made her first new post in 3.5 years, sharing a photo of an onion ring and writing, “Don’t call it a crumb back…” She reviewed a few onion rings in subsequent posts and revealed in one of them that the first run of her account affected her relationship with the food. She wrote, “I’ve got to be honest with you, this reviewer stopped ordering onion rings after her identity was leaked to the press in the great debacle of 2017. I’d get a smile and a wink from waitstaff– it got embarrassing, you know? But it occurred to me that some things are too good to let the internet spoil.”

Check out Lorde’s new onion ring reviews above and below.

Tobe Nwigwe‘s #cincoriginals and #gettwistedsundays campaign continue with the video for the new single “A Million.” As usual, his wife Fat guest stars in the video, but this time, their adorable babies get to make cameos as well. The monochromatic color scheme of this video returns to the pale mint green of previous entries in the campaign after a few eye-popping departures and Tobe once again raps and sings solo after inviting some amazing guests along in the most recent weeks. On the back half of the video, archival footage showcases Tobe’s rise to fame and the highlights of his stellar 2020, from rapping with Sway to performing on NPR Tiny Desk.

On “A Million,” Tobe celebrates a milestone, singing “I got my first million and it was straight out the mud.” While the focuses on contrasting his prior conditions to his current ones (“I lost some friends while I was broke / But now I got a million”), the second verse sees his remaining true to his character and supporting his people with his newfound seven-figure status (“I brought the whole hood through the door / And now I got a million”).

After breaking out with the viral video for “Try Jesus,” Tobe drew national attention and began working with some of the most noted names in the game. On “Bozos,” he linked with Big KRIT, then he traded verses with two of today’s pound-for-pound best technical rappers Black Thought and Royce Da 5’9″ on “Father Figure.” He and “D Smoke took “Headshots” at haters on their collab, then Houston hometown hero Lil Keke gave his blessing to his potential successor on “Purple Rain Thing.”

Watch “A Million” above.

The “white child raised by natives” narrative has been a staple of the movie Western probably for as long as the movie Western has existed. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) stands out as the most prominent example. Perhaps the only theme rivaling it for cinematic pervasiveness is the “gruff widower looking for redemption.” That’s who Tom Hanks plays in News of the World, a new film from director Paul Greengrass opening in theaters December 25th (with a Netflix release TBD), an attempt to give us all the iconic Americana of The Searchers with none of the problematic themes or un-PC language.

Like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Tom Hanks’s Jefferson Kyle Kidd is a Civil War veteran from the Confederate side, now traversing an occupied Texas beset by banditry, where embittered, impoverished ex-soldiers often prey on the hardscrabble populace, who in turn resent the twitchy Union soldiers they call “the blues” charged with enforcing the peace — all in the midst of an ongoing war between settlers and Native tribes. Unlike Wayne’s Edwards, Kidd seems to have accepted his lot as one of the vanquished, dutifully carrying around his written loyalty oath to the Union and arming himself with only a “scattergun,” a shotgun filled with birdshot.

The only new twist on the genre here is Kidd’s job, which, as referenced in the title, involves him traveling from town to town getting paid a dime a head to read newspapers to the townspeople. A dime seems a little steep; according to CCR, a Willy & the Poor Boys concert down on the corner only cost a nickel to tap your feet. Anyway, Kidd flatters his audience, saying they’re probably too busy working to stay abreast of world events (“Hey, we get it, you can read, you just don’t want to!”) before regaling them with news of mine collapses, railroad company mergers, and the latest proclamations from President Grant, who the crowd inevitably boos and hoots at like a pro wrestling heel.

One day whilst clompety-clomping down the proverbial dusty trail, Captain Kidd (his parents must’ve loved pirates) comes upon an overturned wagon and a freedman hanging from a tree, presumably lynched by restive ex-Rebs. Amidst the wreckage of the wagon he finds a scared little girl, blonde and blue-eyed with conspicuously fake freckles. Seriously, I would read an entire oral history about the decision to give this already-blonde-and-blue-eyed young girl painted-on Mexican sitcom freckles. Were they worried she wouldn’t read white enough? Nonetheless, despite her obvious caucasity, the girl is clad in buckskins and understands no English. She speaks only subtitled Kiowa.

No one else is around, so it seems Kidd is stuck with her. She’s his responsibility, and no one is buying his reluctance about it. His quest is to get her to someone who can take care of her, which will be no mean feat considering she’s already been kidnapped from her white family by Kiowa, torn from her adopted Kiowa family by soldiers, and shorn of her black guardian by some proto-Klansman. Orphan me once, shame on you…

Again, there isn’t much new to the age-old orphaned settler story, though I suppose News Of The World (adapted from the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles) deserves some credit for covering all the bases of cross-racial kidnapping. Hanks is watchable as always, playing Kidd as an amalgam of Rooster Cogburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, your classic American hero who doesn’t start a fight but is willing to finish one, who stands up for the little guy but doesn’t want to make a big thing out of it. He has compelling chemistry with the girl, played by 12-year-old Helena Zengel, the rare competent and tolerable child actor (probably on account of she’s German, and thus didn’t come through the Disney Channel influencer-building machine), who lovably eats chili with her bare hands and tries to start songs during dinner, as she’s been raised.

From there, News Of The World plays out like an obstacle course, with a fleshed out premise and an obvious ending, where most of the narrative energy expended is in contriving barriers to put between the finished setup and expected resolution. Hanks and Zengel weather them all gamely — bandit attacks, dust storms, learning to use a spoon — but Greengrass (director of United 93, Captain Phillips, and the last three Bourne movies) never quite pulls off the sleight of hand necessary to make us momentarily believe in a different outcome. Thus even his most thrilling contrivances still seem slightly tedious and his ending never feels like “the prestige.”

Since almost everything else in it is a tried-and-true trope, the obvious question becomes, why the news-reading angle? At one point, Kidd and the girl get Shanghai’d by an evil ascotted warlord, who tries to force Kidd to read his propaganda rag about what a great job creator he is to the presumably coerced multicultural workforce at the warlord’s buffalo poaching ring (“Jefferson Beauregard Bezos,” I believe the warlord’s name was). Kidd instead regales them with tales of working-class solidarity and nearly starts a revolution (can I get a “hell yeah?”).

The buffalo camp scene is News Of The World‘s most interesting interlude and its clearest hint at a theme, but unfortunately it’s also probably its least well-executed sequence, and thematically, something of a one-off. I would’ve loved to watch Tom Hanks go from town to town inciting labor revolutions with his freckle-faced sidekick, but News Of The World clearly didn’t want to be that movie.

Instead it comes off more like a neoliberal hall of horrors, where the white hero (a reformed Confederate who has seen the error of his ways) triumphs over racists, white nationalists, human traffickers, nature, income inequality, and environmental degradation (the last two as represented by the buffalo camp). Which he does so by reading legacy media to ignorant rural peoples with the assistance of offscreen brown people (okay I exaggerate, the Kiowa did show up once to give him a horse). Grrr, democracy dies in darkness!

Like neoliberalism itself, News Of The World is better than many alternatives, but ultimately disappointing in its lacks for any unifying message, or at least any beyond “don’t be like them.” “Be decent” would’ve been a worthy cause, and perfect for the uncommonly decent Tom Hanks, but News Of The World is a little scattershot and brings with it an implied smugness. America’s Dad literally reads the newspaper to ignorant townsfolk. “But isn’t this fake news?” they ask.

To which he assures them, “No, son, this news is all very real.”

Ah, well, glad we cleared that up.

‘News Of The World’ is in theaters on Christmas Day. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

This essay appears as part of the 2020 Uproxx Music Critics Poll.

The year is 2023. You’re at a festival, any festival. Just pick one. The one you missed the most in 2020. Let’s say this festival is called Nardwuar’s Doot Doola Doot Doo (Doot Doo!) Festival sponsored by Bang Energy, which doesn’t presently exist but goddamn that’s a good idea and someone should definitely pay me for it. The 2023 headliners are Megan Thee Stallion, Haim, Blink-182 with Tom DeLonge (a one-night-only reunion), a post-Jesus and post-Trump Kanye, Rico Nasty, 100 Gecs, Post Malone backed by Fleet Foxes, and the master of modern mosh himself, Lil Uzi Vert.

With Uzi next up on the mainstage, you made the random but ultimately well-timed decision twenty minutes earlier to accept a stranger’s invitation for a few licks of molly off their surely shared finger, washing it down with gulps of crisp Bang. The stage lights drop, and you hear the intro to “Baby Pluto” cascading over the crowd.

Welcome to Eternal Atake…

Suddenly, you think back to the first time you heard Eternal Atake and are struck with a deep existential pang. As the molly kicks in, you ascend with Bang wings and turn to your friend, trading the icky/hickey/sticky/picky/busy lines from the song while embracing the anonymity of this burgeoning mosh pit.

Sure, this meticulously imagined scenario still feels eons away from being a possibility. But that’s a key part of a mid-pandemic spin of Eternal Atake.

The album, after being relentlessly teased with admirable-in-hindsight calculation since 2018, finally worked its way into our collective bloodstream on March 6. Within days, any hope of ascending with a crowd of thousands as soon as Uzi dropped “Baby Pluto” were dashed, though we all clung to a blind optimism that had us believing ascension was merely paused. “We’ll ascend later in the summer,” we thought. As masks became commonplace among fellow brain-possessors, and as a failed steak salesman sewed a sinewy promotional campaign in support of hoax-ifying it all, we shifted again. “We’ll surely ascend in the fall,” we told each other.

Had to get ready for war…

Yet here we are in December, still on pause.

In retrospect, it’s fitting that a key inspiration point for both the aesthetic and conceptual aspect of the Eternal Atake experience was a religious cult — Heaven’s Gate — built on the idea that one could graduate from “the Human Evolutionary Level” through death to achieve entry on a space vessel they believed was following Comet Hale-Bopp.

At this stage in the extended Eternal Atake rollout, we were under the impression that the album cover — as seen above — would draw heavily from logos and statements from the Heaven’s Gate canon. At one point, Uzi had changed his Instagram profile picture to a photo of the cult’s co-founder Marshall Applewhite.

Surviving Heaven’s Gate members, as you may recall, even went as far as to publicly condemn Uzi’s 2018 references to the group in an emailed statement to Genius.

“[Uzi] us using and adapting our copyrights and trademarks without our permission and the infringement will be taken up with our attorneys,” a rep said at the time. “This is not fair use or parody, it is a direct and clear infringement.”

By the time the album arrived, the cover had changed. Gone were the more direct Heaven’s Gate nods, yes, but in their place stood the striking depiction of a welcome daydream inside which we could later thrive.

Because as pandemic weeks turned to pandemic months, and as many of us came to the realization that we may very well not see our friends and families for the rest of the year, losing ourselves in thoughts of what might await us beyond this planet felt pretty f*cking good.

Push me to the edge
All my friends are dead

The Eternal Atake journey drops the curtain (save for bonus tracks “Futsal Shuffle 2020” and the Backstreet Boys-flipping “That Way”) with the deceptively grounding “P2,” a sequel to his flagship 2017 single, “XO TOUR Llif3.” The still-ubiquitous megahit took on the kind of life of its own that’s impossible for an artist to outrun, even if they wanted to, and cemented Uzi among the most defining creators of a generation. But instead of ignoring his biggest song, and one of the most popular songs in recent memory, Uzi chose to face its legacy head-on.

As “XO TOUR Llif3” and “P2” producer TM88 explained to me when asked for the sequel’s origin story, Uzi simply wanted to give fans an update on where he was at in his life while using a familiar palette as a jumping-off point. This cathartic do-over, he said, had a certain magic to it.

“I wanted to do whatever Uzi wanted to come up with,” TM88, who has a new project on the horizon with Pi’erre Bourne, said. “He wanted to do a continuation of ‘XO TOUR Llif3’ with more details to show where he’s at now. [The process] was just talking to him on and off throughout last year. He called me up and was like ‘Let’s do it’ and we stayed on the phone for hours just working on the record and then we magically came up with ‘P2.’”

The album, as Uzi himself confirmed shortly after its release, is intentionally divided into three six-song chapters. The first chapter sees Uzi’s Baby Pluto character in full force, while the subsequent Renzi chapter balances that let’s-leave-Earth energy with more introspection. “Bust Me” notably ends with Uzi tapping on what’s believed to be an escape button of some sort.

“You are now leaving EA, the Dark World,” a voice informs both Uzi and the listener. After “Prices,” the final six-song chapter gives us a slew of decidedly 2016-nodding entries, including this segment’s centerpiece “P2.”

Lyrically, “P2” sees Uzi in a similarly reflective space as “XO TOUR Llif3,” albeit with the newfound benefit of passed time. “I don’t wanna get older,” Uzi sings. “I’m still livin’ in my last year.”

After spending 10 months on pause with Eternal Atake in high rotation, we’re all living in the last year, thinking back — sometimes with anger, more often than not with intravenous sadness — to the private promises we made to ourselves about how 2020 would be different. Better, even. It remains to be seen if 2021 or even 2022 can feasibly house all our respective do-overs, but — for now, at least — this writer has a feeling in his stomach that feels remarkably like, dare I say it, measured hope. (Either that or I’ve had too much wine).

At any rate, think back, if you can, to that theoretical 2023 edition of Nardwuar’s Doot Doola Doot Doo (Doot Doo!) Festival sponsored by Bang Energy. As Uzi finishes his set with a Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World throwback in the form of “Money Longer,” the stage goes dark.

While pondering additional finger-in-mouth sessions prior to Uzi’s inevitable encore, a spaceship not unlike the one featured on the Eternal Atake cover makes a rough landing nearby, at which point an extraterrestrial being emerges with a message. After explaining that their craft had previously circled the festival earlier that night to catch the blink-182 reunion set, the being invites the audience to join them on their journey home.

“A fresh start,” the being says. “Light years away from this heap of pain,” the being promises. But for the first time in years, you aren’t tempted. “I’ll stay,” you tell yourself.

After all, Uzi still has to play “Silly Watch.”

Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.