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Yesterday, ASAP Mob founder ASAP Illz noted in his Instagram story that “Plain Jane” rapper and longtime member of ASAP Mob, ASAP Ferg, was no longer a part of the collective. “Ferg ain’t ASAP no more,” he wrote. “Sorry guys. That n**** burnt out, songs dumb trash. Mr. Anthem can’t get right.” Today, Ferg seemingly issued his response to the announcement in a rather obtuse manner. While Ferg didn’t comment directly on ASAP Illz’s comments, he did share a video that was extremely theme appropriate.

Taking a break from playing a game of pickup basketball, Ferg sat on the sidelines and played a clip from Meek Mill’s 2016 Dreams Worth More Than Money track “Cold Hearted.” The song features Diddy speaking in an interlude, giving a classic and very Diddy speech on turncoat friends:

Ayo, it gets f*cked up when your own family start calling you up
Sh*t, money’s the root of all evil
Family start telling you, “You acting different, n****”
You’re goddamn right I’m acting different
With all this motherf*cking money
But then when it comes from your brother, your sister
Your mother, your father, that sh*t hurts you to the core, man
When they start acting like something that you ain’t never motherf*cking seen
You done grew up motherf*cker
They gave birth to you, know what I’m saying?
You got raised, you done played in the park with them
This money thing, this sh*t will f*ck you up, man
You got to watch what you ask for
You sure you want this son? You sure you want this money?

Again, Ferg didn’t say anything directly about the situation, and while it’s kind of a reach to assume that he specifically meant to address his former crewmates’ comments about him with the video — it’s not much of one. Meanwhile, Ferg’s been branching out with his music, specifically tapping into New York’s drill movement with the help of Jay Gwuapo and Lil Wayne on “No Ceilings” and featuring on Nas’ new album King’s Disease alongside Fivio Foreign. He also collaborated with Nicki Minaj on “Move Ya Hips.”

See ASAP Ferg’s mysterious possible response above.

Donovan Mitchell is on the verge of a big payday. One day after the Utah Jazz fell in Game 7 of their first round series to the Denver Nuggets, Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports reports that the extension-eligible Mitchell and the Jazz will hammer out a new max contract right at the start of free agency this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, free agency is slated to begin in mid-October.

As Mitchell explained to Haynes, he had some concerns about potentially getting hurt in the Bubble and jeopardizing that big payday, but they subsided pretty quickly.

“Once my teammates told me they wanted to play, then I was all in. I couldn’t make it all about myself,” Mitchell said. “There are younger guys who aren’t established in this league and needed this time to show their value. It would have been selfish of me to stand in the way of that. I couldn’t let my contract get in the way of the bigger picture. I had to rely on God. If I got hurt, it was God’s will. But I put my trust in Him and didn’t worry about potentially getting injured. That allowed me to go out there and play. My faith was in God.”

The max extension for a player in Mitchell’s situation is projected to be $170 million over five years. While Utah was unable to make it past Denver, the third-year All-Star guard was magnificent in the series, playing perhaps the best stretch of basketball in his young career. Mitchell averaged 36.3 points on 52.9 percent shooting from the field and 51.6 percent shooting for three against the Nuggets while chipping in five rebounds and 4.9 steals in 37.7 minutes a night.

Mitchell isn’t the only major piece to the Jazz’s puzzle that is eligible for a huge payday this fall. Rudy Gobert is eligible for a supermax extension, and there’s no word on how talks are progressing between the big man’s camp and the franchise.

It’s no secret that Post Malone loves Nirvana. Back in April, the musician hosted a benefit livestream concert. But instead of performing his own hits, Posty covered all of his favorite Nirvana tracks. Now, Posty has been seen shredding another tribute to Nirvana, this time in a jam session with his close friends.

Since the musician still can’t play live shows, he’s been linking up with fellow musicians to try his hand at a number of covers. Linking up with YouTuber Jared Dines, Posty and his crew covered a number of songs from likes of Nirvana, Motley Crue, and even Wild Cherry. In a series of clips posted to Instagram by Dines, Malone can be seen wielding an electric guitar and even hopping on the drum kit to assist the group in a very metal cover of Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” and Nirvana’s “Breed.”

The videos were posted over the weekend, but it looks like they may have been filmed months ago, before Malone shaved his head (a look he appears to have stuck with based on recent Instagram posts) and got new tattoos.

Ahead of the jam session, Posty’s Nirvana livestream raised an impressive amount of money to benefit charity. His fans were on board with the covers he chose and the livestream event raised $4.3 million for relief funds, breaking the $1 million mark in just the first hour. The even also received a co-sign from former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselić and even Courtney Love.

Watch Post Malone jam out above.

It’s hard to think about something that’s going to happen in eight years when it’s not really certain what tomorrow will look like. Regardless, the 2028 Summer Olympics are set to descend on Los Angeles in nearly a decade from now, and an event of this scale takes a lot of preparation. So, the City Of Angels Olympic And Paralympic Committee have gotten things started by unveiling the official logo for the 2028 event today. Additionally, they worked with artists to come up with alternate designs, and Billie Eilish was among the participants.

Each of the artists were given the standard “LA28” emblem and told to design their own version of the A. Eilish’s is italicized, green, and features trailing spikes coming out of its left side. Overall, it looks similar to the New Balance logo.

LA28 Coordination Commission Chair Nicole Hoevertsz said of the new base logo, “The emblem perfectly represents the city’s energy, creativity and strong sense of community, whilst also celebrating the Olympic belief of unity in diversity. LA28 continues to create innovative ways to engage Angelenos and people from across the world in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The idea behind the emblem, and the expressions we have seen so far, truly demonstrate that we are stronger together.”

Check out some of the other logos below.

Kanye West’s renewed interest in religion has led him down some pretty odd roads. He recently admitted on Nick Cannon’s podcast that he spent around $50 million on his Sunday Services around the nation, he compared Christians to Michael Jordan during an interview with Vogue last December, he infamously requested his collaborators refrain from sex during the recording process, he brainstormed a “clean” version of TikTok called “Jesus Tok,” and he made whatever this was supposed to be.

But during that same interview with Nick Cannon, he also credited the Man Upstairs with one of his more infamous missteps: His 2009 VMAs outburst in which he crashed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning Best Female Video to snatch the mic and declare Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” one of the “best videos of all time.” As Kanye told Cannon:

If God didn’t want me to run on stage and say, “Beyonce had the best video,” He wouldn’t have sat me in the front row. I would’ve been sitting in the back. He wouldn’t have made it the first award. And [He] wouldn’t have made it so ridiculous of an idea ’cause I had never heard of this person before that night. And “Single Ladies” is, like, one of the greatest videos of all time… And I was only drinking Hennessy because I didn’t want to go to the awards show ’cause it was a set-up!

It’s one hell of an explanation — pun most definitely intended, thank you very much. While he does provide a little more context — certainly, he wasn’t the only person who’d never heard Swift’s “You Belong with Me” before then — we’re going to file this one under “Kanye’s semi-facetious hyperbolic statements that will inevitably be taken wildly out of context.” That said, it’s a moment that helped launch both Swift and West into an entirely new tier of superstardom and at least one of them is actually trying to save this country so maybe it really is God’s plan, and He just works in mysterious ways.

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.

Angel Olsen released her 2016 record My Women on a career high — the album had launched the singer out of her lo-fi indie typecast and landed her across headlines and Album Of The Year lists. But while she was celebrating success, Olsen was also grappling with the repercussions of leaving a long-term relationship. Losing her partner also meant losing some close friends and even a part of herself. As a seasoned songwriter, Olsen processed the breakup the way she knew best: She boarded a plane to the sleepy and evergreen town of Anacortes, Washington to let her heartbreak flow out of her in Phil Elverum’s church-turned-studio.

The introspective sessions were not only cathartic, but also resulted in Whole New Mess, an album that’s purposefully unpolished and touched with post-breakup melodrama. The collection of songs would stand as the bare-bones blueprint for Olsen’s recent, new age-adjacent record All Mirrors. But Whole New Mess is not a simple collection of demos. It’s an emotional purge, a heartsore reflection of revelations, reveries, and broken promises — both from her ex-lover and from herself. It’s a vulnerable assemblage of reminders of what originally made fans fall in love with the singer’s haunting and poetic 2012 debut full-length Half Way Home. With an intimate look into the journey of self-healing on Whole New Mess, Olsen comes full circle both in her career and personal life.

Apart from two brand-new tracks, Whole New Mess is lyrically identical to All Mirrors. But with the production paired down to a spacious guitar and Olsen’s ethereal voice, the new album could not be further from its predecessor. Where All Mirrors is lush and cinematic, Whole New Mess is sparse and sequestered. “(We Were All Mirrors)” embodies the stark contrast between the two efforts. The song, which would eventually become her opulent All Mirrors title track, opens with Olsen’s listless lyrical delivery. The roomy production leaves the singer sounding physically distant, inching closer until a swell of screeching strings underscores the second verse. “I keep movin’,” she croons, her voice quavering as it lurches over the final word, like she’s convincing herself that moving on is necessary even if she doesn’t quite believe it’s feasible.

Whole New Mess is also devoid of the grandiose synths heard on her last release. Instead, the instrumentals implore listeners to focus on lyricism and confront minute details in Olsen’s delivery, uncovering how she oftentimes repeats choice phrases. She lays out a clear mantra on the album’s title track, one song that doesn’t have an All Mirrors counterpart. Strumming each chord with anguish, Olsen echoes her guitar’s wailing tones and belts out an honest account of her emotional journey. “I stretch my bones out on the floor / I think I really do the change.” Repeating the latter line threefold, Olsen reassures herself that growing from mistakes is possible, though difficult.

Where Whole New Mess departs from All Mirrors, it marks a return to her candid and confessional early catalog. Songs like “Chance (Forever Love)” display emotion through a piercing inflection akin to the throaty-yet-penetrating intonation heard on her debut effort’s “Acrobat” or the Strange Cacti number “Creator/Destroyer.” Similarly, tracks like “Lark Song” call back to Olsen’s lo-fi days, placing her voice at the forefront and drenching it in warm reverb.

Much of the fuzzy production on the record is thanks to location. Aptly recorded in a church, Whole New Mess is Olsen’s sermon on dejected self-understanding. Though it’s not the type of record that can be thrown on to accompany casual dinner party banter, the album curates a type of self-exploration fit for late-night identity crises and stands as Olsen’s masterclass on unguarded songwriting.

Whole New Mess offers the type of vulnerability that’s generally expected from an Olsen album but was missing on All Mirrors. Equally painful and cathartic, Olsen loses herself completely in each song. She wields her voice as a second instrument and experiments with tone, atmosphere, and resonance. The result is an album that parallels Olsen’s early catalog while distinctly displaying her growth as a songwriter, instrumentalist, and overall person.

Whole New Mess is out now via Jagjaguwar. Get it here.

Tiger King isn’t going away anytime soon. Netflix will likely launch some spinoffs, Peacock is working on a scripted series with Kate McKinnon starring as rival/animal activist Carole Baskins, and Baskins is making a ton of money on Cameo, all while the family of Baskins’ late husband, Don Lewis, is still inquiring about his whereabouts. Oh, and Cardi B did not hold back her thoughts on that situation, so expect scrutiny of Baskins to continue, especially since she’s preparing to do Dancing With The Stars.

Yes, it is happening. Baskins even danced with a stuffed tiger for this GMA-based announcement to make 2020 even weirder.

Baskins will be joined by Jesse Metcalfe, Nelly, Nev Schulman (Catfish), Johnny Weir (he’s got the moves, so he’s my prediction for winner), Anne Heche, Vernon Davis, Skai Jackson, AJ McLean, and Jeannie Mai (Holey Moley). Even more tellingly, Baskins is only one of four cast members who’ve found fame on Netflix (the other two are Monica Aldama of Cheer and Chrishell Stause of Selling Sunset).

As one can imagine, the reaction to Baskins isn’t very positive on social media. Morbid jokes abound, including imagined scenarios of what Baskins might do if her partner doesn’t help her win the show. Also, people are still looking for justice for (or even the whereabouts of) Don Lewis.

This is gonna get messy, but DWTS loves a good controversy.

(Via Hollywood Reporter)

Adrianne Lenker has been promoting one project or another pretty much non-stop over the past few years. Big Thief released albums in 2016, 2017, and two in 2019, while she had a solo album, Abysskiss, in 2018. She’s keeping the streak alive in 2020, as today, she announces a pair of new albums, Songs and Instrumentals. Lenker also released “Anything,” a lovely and delicate folk tune from Songs.

Lenker shared a note describing the process of recording the albums, which began in April when she retreated to a cabin in western Massachusetts with engineer Phil Weinrobe. She wrote of making the albums, “I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe. ”

Listen to “Anything” above. Below, find the art and tracklists for Songs and Instrumentals, as well as Lenker’s full note about the albums.

1. “Two Reverse”
2. “Ingydar”
3. “Anything”
4. “Forwards Beckon Rebound”
5. “Heavy Focus”
6. “Half Return”
7. “Come”
8. “Zombie Girl”
9. “Not A Lot, Just Forever”
10. “Dragon Eyes”
11. “My Angel”

1. “Music For Indigo”
2. “Mostly Chimes”

“It was early March 2020 and the Big Thief tour had just been cut short, so I flew from Europe to NYC. It just so happened that there was a little cabin available for rent right next door to Zoe and Brian in the mountains in Western MA. So I grabbed my truck and drove out to the country. As I settled into the cabin over the course of a month, I grew really connected to the space itself. The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space . I got a hankering to capture it, so I called my friend Phil and asked ‘How’d you like to get outta the city and make a record that sounds like the inside of an acoustic guitar?’ Phil said ‘100%’ and by the grace of some of our dear friends, we were able to gather the materials needed. Brendan lent us about 45 tape machines. Eli lent us a binaural head (which looked remarkably like Phil), and Shahzad lent us a pile of XLR cables. I drove into the city at 5am on the 20th of April, scooped up Phil and then we filled my truck to the brim as we stopped and gathered the gear along the way back to Massachusetts.

We unloaded all of the equipment into the small cabin and began setting up. Unfortunately, one of the first things that happened was the unstable electricity fried four of our tape machines, including the Otari 8 track. Bill tried to fix it at his shop in Sturbridge, but it was beyond repair.

After almost three weeks of setup and troubleshooting, the studio finally was operating — although the only functioning tape recorder we had was Phil’s battery powered Sony Walkman. We felt at peace with the idea that we might just be recording the whole record on cassette tape, but that would have meant no overdubs, so I’m grateful for the rescue Otari 8 Track that Brendan was able to dig out of storage and deliver to us right before we had lost all hope.

I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time Phil arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe.

Nine of these songs were written freshly during the recording session. We began and closed each day with an improvised acoustic guitar instrumental, and we made a collage of our favorite pieces, which became the first side of the instrumentals album.

I’m grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.”

Songs and Instrumentals are out 10/23 via 4AD. Pre-order them here.

How does an album that is underrated come to be properly seen, decades later, as great? How does an album become underrated in the first place? Who decides these things anyway?

To answer these questions, it’s worthwhile to ponder the story of the 11th LP by The Rolling Stones, Goats Head Soup.

When The Rolling Stones released Goats Head Soup on August 31, 1973, it was easy to argue that it was a success. An unlikely mix of druggy funk-rock jams and sentimental ballads, it not only swiftly topped the charts in various countries around the world, it also produced a genuine international hit single, “Angie,” that crossed over into the pop space like no other Stones song in years. As a touring act, they performed two successful runs that year in Europe and along the Pacific Rim, playing for several hundred thousand people. With the possible exception of Led Zeppelin, The Stones still seemed like the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.

And yet, in spite of all those statistical signifiers, Goats Head Soup was widely perceived as not only a failure, but as a harbinger of a greater artistic decline. In the press, reviews ranged from qualified praise to open hostility. Rolling Stone gamely admitted that it had initially dismissed Exile On Main St., so the magazine was now prepared to cautiously endorse Goats Head Soup, in spite of reviewer Bud Scoppa’s only intermittent enthusiasm. “If they’ve played it safe this time, their caution has nevertheless reaped some rewards,” he wrote, in anticipation of eventually loving the album. The upstart Creem magazine was naturally more skeptical, calling Soup “future muzak” and backhandedly praising The Stones as a “perfect corporation.” In a separate pan, Creem‘s resident philosopher critic Lester Bangs sniffed, “There is a sadness about The Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous, So what?”

The implication was that The Stones were already over the hill in 1973, the year of glam and Philly Soul, and also the period during which Mick Jagger turned 30. Even critics who reviewed it positively thought of Goats Head Soup strictly as brand management, product delivered in lieu of real inspiration and invention.

When I started reading music books in the late ’80s as a budding grade-school classic-rock student, I found that Creem‘s take on Goats Head Soup had won out over Rolling Stone‘s guarded optimism. Time and again, Goats Head Soup was positioned as a sloppy and ill-considered departure point, a downward spiral from the heights of the “classic” ’68-’72 period that produced Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile On Main St. It formed a trilogy with the band’s other mid-’70s albums, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and Black And Blue, as a bad stretch of road between Exile and the triumphant 1978 comeback LP, Some Girls, as The Records Best Left Ignored By Future Generations.

Even Rolling Stone came to adopt this position. In the first two editions of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which I read religiously as a music ignorant lad, Goats Head Soup was saddled with a pitiful one-star rating, with critic Dave Marsh declaring it “a mistake, a jumble or the beginning of the end.” Around the same time, in the magazine’s comprehensive Illustrated History Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Robert Christgau called Goats Head Soup “musicianly craft at its unheroic norm, terrific by the standards of Foghat or the Doobie Brothers but a nadir for the Rolling Stones.”

As for the band members, they also turned their noses at the poor Soup. In an interview with famous British rock journalist Nick Kent, The Stones’ longtime pianist and unofficial conscience Ian Stewart called it “bloody insipid.” Guitarist Mick Taylor — whose feelings about Goats Head Soup were perhaps tempered by not getting proper credit for co-writing one of the better tracks, “Winter” — referred to it as “not one of my favorite albums.” And then there’s Keith Richards, who has routinely badmouthed Goats Head Soup over the years, including in his iconic 2010 memoir, Life, in which he compares it unfavorably to Exile. In Keith’s view, it was a “marking-time” album crowded with too many sidemen and not quite enough Stones.

In a way, he’s right — ringers like Nicky Hopkins and Billy Preston are all over the album, whereas Bill Wyman plays on only three tracks. Also, Keith himself was slipping into a heroin coma around this time. (An alternate theory is that Exile, which is widely viewed as Keith’s album, was criticized by Mick Jagger as being unfocused, which obliged Keith to slag Goats Head Soup — a Mick album through and through — in return. When Mick years later offered his own criticism of the album, he made sure to pin it on his partner: “I mean, everyone was using drugs, Keith particularly,” he told Rolling Stone in 1995.)

In my own book, I referred to Goats Head Soup a great “bad” album, meaning I really love it in spite of its weaknesses. (Or, rather, because of its weaknesses, as listening to a band like The Stones fall apart will always be more interesting than hearing a typical band at their relatively meager best.) But now I wonder if this album really is “bad” at all, or if I simply read too many rock books telling me it was bad during my formative years. After all, whenever I put on Goats Head Soup now, it just sounds like a great “great” album. So many of the tracks stand up superbly well: “100 years Ago,” “Coming Down Again,” “Winter,” and “Star Star,” along with the hits “Angie” and “Heartbreaker (Doo Doo Doo Doo).” If Keith Richards has internalized all that criticism of Goats Head Soup, maybe I did, too.

I bring all this up because there’s a new box set coming out on Friday that attempts to rescue Goats Head Soup, once and for all, from its bad historical reputation. The case made in the liner notes — this is a “lost album” that’s “been sitting in front of you all along” — is the sort of intriguing revisionism that’s become increasingly common in the classic rock reissue market.

This expansive Goats Head Soup reissue — outfitted with the de rigueur selection of outtakes, demos, and live tracks — is part of a mini-trend of using the box-set format to reassess formerly maligned albums, a gambit that has similarly worked for the likes of Don’t Tell A Soul by The Replacements and Monster by R.E.M. If you instinctively recoil at the thought of reconsidering a record you decided long ago is garbage, it’s worth pondering how putting certain “garbage” albums in a newly reverent context can change what those albums mean, providing a new way to hear music that was formerly drowned out by so many entrenched and infinitely reiterated opinions.

In the case of Goats Head Soup, the outtakes don’t add a whole lot to the picture, as enjoyable as they are. The much-ballyhooed “Scarlet” basically is a studio jam with Jimmy Page, which (clearly) is awesome even if the song itself doesn’t amount to much. Two other previously unheard tracks, the cowbell-mad “All The Rage” and the funk-rock workout “Criss Cross,” are better if not exactly essential. For serious Stones-heads, the demos portion of the box set will disappoint for what’s not included, namely embryonic versions of tracks like “Waiting On A Friend,” “Tops,” and “Short and Curlies” that wound up on subsequent records. The Soup sessions, which commenced in November 1972 at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston, Jamaica — Wyman remembers their space as being “little bigger than an out-house” — were, contrary to the slovenly reputation of the album, highly productive, helping to lay the groundwork for future Stones releases over nearly a decade. But the box set’s rather stingy pick of outtakes doesn’t really reflect that.

The live album Brussels Affair, originally issued in 2011 and then taken out of circulation ahead of this box set, is another story entirely. Compiled from two shows performed during the European tour, Brussels Affair for a time was due to come out after Goats Head Soup. (When plans to add some studio cuts to the live tracks resulted in enough material for an entirely new studio LP, It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, the live album was scuttled.) As it is now, nearly 50 years later, Brussels Affair dispels the notion that The Stones were simply on auto-pilot in 1973. On the contrary, they were still very near the peak of their powers as a live act, stretching out like never before on jammy versions of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Midnight Rambler” — at nearly 13 minutes, it goes on longer than even the Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! cut — while also energetically tearing into the murk of the Exile material and the funk of the Goats Head Soup songs. (Keith, as always, remained agnostic, supposedly pulling a knife on Billy Preston at one show for playing his organ too loud.) While it’s not quite as good as Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Brussels Affair outclasses every other official Stones live LP.

But the main attraction here, as it should be, is the album itself. All these years later, Goats Head Soup benefits from not having the generational baggage that boomer critics projected on it in the moment. In 1973, The Rolling Stones were an avatar for larger cultural disappointments — if the utopian aspirations of the ’60s never came to fruition, that had to mean that The Stones were frauds, too. This idea is echoed over and over in contemporary assessments of Goats Heads Soup. It colors the assertion that this album marks the point when they became merely a “professional” band and stopped being a revolutionary one.

If that charge sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because music critics tend to eventually turn against bands who linger on into middle age. All criticism is autobiography, after all, and writing about legacy acts often reveals the insecurity that music critics have about their own relevance. But for The Stones, it was especially difficult because they were among the first rock bands ever to actually grow old. And on Goats Head Soup, specifically, they dared to sing about aging while also sounding like they were worn out. Tempos slightly lag, even on the fast songs. The keyboards and guitars blur in and out of focus. Jagger sounds either mournful or contemptuous. More than ever before, The Stones actually seem vulnerable, even fragile.

I imagine that was particularly galling for boomers, the most Peter Pan-obsessed of all generations. It was just easier to dismiss Goats Head Soup as a “safe” retreat than to contend with their super-human decadent princes staggering fearfully into adulthood. But in its own way, a song like “100 Years Ago” is risky, because Jagger admits that he’s no longer a young man and wishes he still was: “Sometimes it’s wise not to grow up,” he sighs. And yet you have no choice but to do it. Goats Head Soup is where they finally accepted this.

Everywhere you turn on Goats Head Soup, the bleakness of the grown-up world looms. The romantic ballad “Angie” is a breakup song in which true love is crushed by the logistical impracticality of incompatible lives. “Winter” uses the titular season as a metaphor for a time when “a lotta love is burned out,” likening the early ’70s to a frigid wasteland. Again, this was not a band that usually expressed any misgivings about their sins or triumphs. After the supposed moral reckoning of Altamont, they put out their two most gloriously amoral albums, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St. Contrast that with Goats Head Soup, which contains at least two tracks — “Coming Down Again” and “Heartbreaker” — that can be loosely described as anti-drug (or at least “drug wary”). Who could believe this? The Rolling Stones, of all bands, was sick and tired of the rock ‘n’ roll life. Even the requisite “life on the road” party jam, “Star Star,” cynically depicts backstage trysts as a series of cold, passionless transactions between the haves and wannabe haves. The song rocks, but the lyrics hardly depict a world that you would want to live in. If Exile is about raging against the dying of the light, then Goats Head Soup is simply the dying of the light.

If you grew up with The Stones in the ’60s and early ’70s, I can imagine how much of a bummer Goats Head Soup must have felt in the moment. But for those of us who came along later, and without the generational baggage, Goats Head Soup has an incredible, melancholic beauty. Yes, the band is exhausted. But the album itself is about exhaustion; they were either too honest or too tired to not foreground it. And that resonates now in 2020 more profoundly than, say, an untouchable classic made by indestructible millionaire rock stars in the south of France. For all the well-worn mythology around this band, the Goats Head Soup post-apocalyptic Rolling Stones — the band who felt old before their time, and sensed that their lives might have already peaked — feels newly, hauntingly fresh.

Goats Head Soup will be reissued on Friday via Polydor/Interscope/UMe. Get it here.

It’s easy to forget that Game of Thrones was Kit Harington’s first credited on-screen role. The biggest TV show of all-time? Not a bad way to kick off your career. But what’s next for the King of the North, now that the length of his hair is no longer breaking news? Harington plays Black Knight in Marvel’s recently-retitled Eternals, and he also stars in the new season of Netflix’s Criminal, the trailer for which was released on Wednesday.

Criminal — which should not be confused with Criminal Minds — is an anthology series where each episode centering around one case. “Four new cases, four new suspects, one room that changes everything,” the Netflix tagline reads. “It’s about how someone reacts when a photo is put down in front of them or what happens when the air conditioning in the room goes off. It becomes about the environment and about the about the human interaction between the cops and the detectives,” creator Jim Field-Smith explained. Harington stars in one episode where his character is accused of manipulating a woman, while Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda), Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe), and Kunal Nayyar (The Big Bang Theory) appear in the other three.

Criminal season two premieres on Netflix on September 16.