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Rising star Gabriel Garzón-Montano, who Drake once sampled (on 2015’s “Jungle“), is gearing up to make his return to music with the follow-up to his critically-hailed 2017 debut album Jardín. The New York-based artist, who is of Columbian and French descent, announced the title and release date of his next album, Agüita, with an adventurous video for the album’s title track, which he previewed earlier this year in a lively session for COLORS.

The video for “Agüita,” shot on-location in Medellin and Pereira, Colombia, uses stunning shots of Garzón-Montano in vibrant locations to bring the song’s thumping, Reggaeton-inspired production to vivid life. He’s joined by a fleet of dancers, who give a further jolt of electricity to the pulsatic instrumental and dyamic visuals.

Of the genre-bending music he’s been creating since Jardín, Garzón-Montano said via press release, “The idea of genre uses fear of failure as a baseline. Genre puts the music in a box. This album is anti-genre. Anti-fear. Anti-box.”

Watch Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s “Agüita” video above and check out the tracklist below.

01. “Tombs”
02. “With a Smile”
03. “Muñeca”
04. “Fields”
05. “Mira My Look”
06. “Moonless”
07. “Someone”
08. “Bloom”
09. “Agüita”
10. “Blue Dot”

Agüita, the album, is due 10/2 on Jagjaguwar/Stones Throw.

This week’s best new pop music saw so many releases that it was almost difficult to choose just ten to award Uproxx’s best new pop stamp of approval. Katy Perry returned with a joyful single off her upcoming record, James Blake releases his second song of the year, and Dominic Fike unveiled more details surrounding his highly-anticipated debut record.

Each week, Uproxx rounds up the best new pop music. Listen up.

Katy Perry — “Smile”

With a big-name artist like Katy Perry releasing the brand-new single “Smile,” its sure to make Uproxx’s best new pop list. The singer is an ode to remembering life’s joys and Perry said she drew from past experiences for inspiration on the single: “I wrote this song when I was coming through one of the darkest periods of my life. When I listen to it now, it’s a great reminder that I made it through. It’s three minutes of energizing hopefulness.”

James Blake — “Are You Even Real?”

James Blake shares his second single of the year with the sublime number “Are You Even Real?” With the track, Blake continues expanding on his experimental electro-pop sound. Beginning slow, Blake evokes a dreamlike state with cascading keys and enveloping harmonies before a leisurely beat compliments the singer’s crooning vocals.

Dominic Fike — “Politics & Violence”

With “Politics & Violence,” Dominic Fike unveiled his debut album’s tracklist and release date. Staying true to his signature style, Fike opens the track with emotive strings and gently croons the chorus before delivering his sultry lyrics over a pounding beat.

Blackbear — “Queen Of Broken Hearts”

Following a collaboration with Ellie Goulding, Blackbear returns with a new single and the announcement of his forthcoming record, Everything Means Nothings. “‘Queen Of Broken Hearts’ is a song that recognizes social media as an evil villain — while looking introspectively at the bright light on my cell phone and the validation addiction,” Blackbear said in a statement. “As well as bringing my other bad habits in relationships & character defects into the light, I am social media and I will break your heart.”

Kaytranada — “Look Easy” Feat. Lucky Daye

Back in March, Kaytranada shared a handful of untitled tracks for an exclusive online DJ set. The songs were the first new music the Canadian producer shared but now Kaytranda is back with an official release. Tapping Lucky Daye, “Look Easy” is a breezy, feel-good track designed to uplift during these trying times.

Faouzia — “How It All Works”

After scoring a high-profile feature on the star-studded soundtrack to SCOOB!, Faouzia offers another glimpse of her intimate songwriting. “’How It All Works Out’ is one of my favourite songs that I’ve ever written,” Faouzia said in a statement. “I wrote this song on my first trip to Sweden and it holds a really special place in my heart. With everything going on in the world right now, I expect this song to have a different meaning for everyone.”

Bazzi — “I Don’t Think I’m Okay”

After his latest heartfelt single, Bazzi takes an introspective turn with “I Don’t Think I’m Okay.” Speaking about struggling with mental health, Bazzi said: “I made this song 8 months ago in a cabin in Big Bear, California. At the time I was going through the lowest yet most introspective time of my life. To be honest, I’m still feeling all the pain I felt back then. I’m still trying to defeat the same addictions & still battling the same demons… I’m not just trying to learn to direct that energy to different places, instead of allowing it to paralyze me emotionally.”

Deryk — “Call You Out”

New Zealand-based songwriter Deryk makes her musical debut with the earworm “Call You Out.” On the song, Deryk says, “‘Call You Out’ is about the feeling you get when you’ve missed an opportunity to say something you felt you should have said or could have been said if you’d been quick enough. […] There’s a shame and frustration that comes with not standing up for yourself or somebody else when you could have but you just froze, lost for words. You end up brewing for a few days, plotting, questioning whether to call them out, and that exact fury is what inspired the song.”

James Bay — “Chew On My Heart”

Three-time Grammy-nominated singer James Bay makes a splash with his first new single of the year. In a statement, Bay spoke the positive nature of the track: “‘Chew On My Heart’ is a great example of releasing something positive about myself publicly for the first time. It’s an outpouring of love, and that’s a huge theme across this new music. When I come home from tour, I burst through the door and throw my arms around my girl, and she’ll just say, ‘Okay, relax, cool.’ It’s cheesy, but I wrote it from that perspective. It’s the opposite of being guarded.”

Zachary Knowles — “City”

Budding artist Zachary Knowles dives into his feelings on “City.” A reflection of the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, “City” marks a strong effort from the artist, who is the latest signee of the Fader label.

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

People have handled their newfound pandemic lifestyles in various ways. For Karen O, her creative outlet has been painting, and it’s been for a good cause, too. The Year Yeah Yeahs leader has teamed up with Napa Valley winery Ashes & Diamonds for a limited edition collaboration, which will benefit charity.

Karen O and the winery have linked up to create 18 “uniquely individual, hand-painted magnum Rosé bottles,” which are being sold starting today for $250 each. All proceeds will go to The Okra Project, which provides “home-cooked, culturally specific meals, monetary grocery assistance, and food education” to Black Trans people.

Karen O said aside from supporting a worthy cause, this collaboration also gave her an opportunity to be creative, as she hasn’t felt musically inspired during the pandemic:

“I had been yearning to just sit at my desk and paint and draw for years. The part of my brain that I use to make music shut off when the pandemic hit, so this quiet project of falling into a Kenneth Anger-esque fairytale was a nice place to go when I couldn’t go anywhere. Where I could lean my head on the shoulder of Lou Reed’s muse Rachel as the underworld closed in around us, where nymphs have tangled tresses and swim with stilettos, where I could wash and be clean in the smoke and the rain. I’m grateful for the opportunity to support The Okra Project who provide meals and resources to the Black Trans community and thankful for Ashes & Diamonds and The Okra Project and the work they are doing. This little project fed the soul in these troubled times.”

The bottles are currently on sale here.

Right now, Millenials on Twitter are reminiscing about the days of MySpace which means somewhere, millions of Zoomers are making fun of them for being old. With 55.6K tweets, the social media platform is one of the morning’s top trends as people remember a day when the world’s most popular social media platform wasn’t aiding in the erosion of American democracy, and we all, for better or worse, knew a little bit of HTML.

Twitter users are even noting the differences between Myspace co-founder (and everyone’s first friend) Thomas Anderson (aka Tom) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Tom, it appears, has lived a pretty chill life since stepping away from Myspace. According to Business Insider, Tom sold Myspace in 2005 for $580 million dollars and is currently enjoying a life traveling the world and posting wildly vivid photos on his Instagram page, which undoubtedly makes him the coolest person who was ever in your Top 8.

While everyone on Twitter is busy remembering everything that made Myspace great, let’s not forget how much of a mess some people’s pages were (we weren’t all great at coding), how annoying hidden music players were, and just how friendship ruining the Top 8 could actually be. It’s likely that the things that we remember most fondly about the days of Myspace aren’t actually any of the platform’s features, but rather the fact that parents were too out of touch to use it when we were all blissfully unaware teenagers or preteens. If Myspace were around today, just think of how insane those bulletins would be!

That Myspace Music was fire though.

Trevor Daniel got a big-time assist from Selena Gomez last month when she joined him on a new version of his song “Past Life.” Now the two have linked up again, this time on a video for the track.

The clip begins with a recording of the two singing the song on a joint Instagram Live broadcast. From there, the shots expand beyond the phone and into macro shots of Gomez and Daniels’ faces. Their heads then transform into expansive nature landscapes, with geologic features like ears and eyelashes looking giant in the background.

The pair sings on the chorus, “Last night was the last night of my past life / Got me here like you could never figure me out / Last night was the last time, was the last time / I never let you figure me out.”

Gomez previously said of hearing the original version of the song, “When I heard the song the first time, I loved the fact that it was kind of like a story about all the things that we tend to hold onto and the patterns that we have. And I’m very, very vocal about my personal experiences, making decisions that aren’t necessarily healthy for me.”

This is the latest output in her busy 2020. She began the year by releasing Rare, which was her first album in over four years. She also dropped a deluxe edition of the album, produced a rom-com, and worked on her own cooking show.

Watch the “Past Life” video above.

Working to change the overtly racist Washington football team name has been an arduous process for many, many people. No one knows this better than activist, journalist, and podcaster Jacqueline Keeler. So, when the word came from various sources on Sunday night that Washington’s management was going to announce that they were finally dropping both the name “R*dsk*ns” and the iconography, I knew I had to reach out for a chat. Keeler, after all, co-founded the #NotYourMascot hashtag back in 2013 that was a big part of why the name was finally changed.

On Monday morning, the team made it official. The R*dsk*ns were no more. I was elated, along with a massive swath of Indian Country. Decades of protesting had finally paid off. A few short hours later, I was on the phone with Keeler talking about how much has been done with #NotYourMascot and how much there’s still left to do.

While the is a big victory for non-racists, there’s still a lot of work to do. There are still huge national teams and small local teams peddling in very racists Indigenous iconography. And we both hope that Washington’s team management taking the first step will be like a domino finally falling so the rest can fall too.

Can you walk us through the creation of #NotYourMascot?

In 2013, I helped co-found Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry. I actually invented the word “mascotry.” I did it with a group of Native parents who I met on Twitter. We were using #ChangeTheName and #ChangeTheMascot as our hashtags. Then suddenly our tweets were being buried, basically. There were all these Twitter accounts from India that were all tweeting out those hashtags and using it to sell real estate in India. And Native people are a small group and we weren’t being heard.

A Cherokee mother from Oklahoma came up with #NotYourMascot and I made the call to use it. We basically had an email list going of people, and a lot of us had some pretty prominent followers on Twitter even though our accounts were not large. For some reason, Chuck D was following me and Yoko Ono. I don’t know why. And so we just messaged them directly and asked them if they would retweet our hashtag to help us out, and a lot of them agreed. I was genuinely surprised.

We decided to do a test run the Saturday before the Super Bowl. We created what we called a “Twitter storm.” Because Natives are such a small percentage of the population, even on Twitter, we basically had to be very concentrated in our efforts to be heard. So we created a tweet list, and then we sent emails out announcing what the hashtag was going to be, and then we released it. Then we trended for the first time that Saturday, and we trended again the following Sunday.

2013 feels like a long time ago. A lot happened in those seven years from online harassment to Dan Synder fighting you pretty hard. What were some of the difficulties you’ve seen over the years?

Well, so we actually developed a lot of our arguments through actually arguing with trolls and Redskins fans. It was interesting. Being Native American and looking Native American, a lot of times white people won’t say things to my face that they may say to each other privately, right? So we are sort of clueless about what they actually think or feel because they conceal it from us.

So Twitter was an opportunity for us to actually see what people actually thought. On Twitter, they were telling us these arguments and their ways of rationalizing that they wouldn’t tell us in real life. So we were able to basically create very short responses to that — because Twitter was still only 140 characters — and really refine our response. And then of course social media really allowed us to coordinate our activities. We ended up keeping tabs on Dan Snyder because after we made some headway, he started fighting us.

How is #NotYourMascot different from #ChangeTheName?

I’d have to say #ChangeTheMascot and #ChangeTheName is a sort of a different thing. Those were coordinated by a Native American billionaire, Ray Halbritter, who hired a white PR guy to run that whole campaign. He paid him several hundred thousand dollars. #NotYourMascot has always been done with no money with just Native parents doing the work on behalf of our children. And also Ray Halbritter is sort of a problematic figure to represent all of us. He actually made it harder for us to be taken seriously because people would write us off as being paid off by him. We didn’t receive any money from Halbritter.

So, you mentioned you were keeping tabs on Snyder during all of this. What was he getting up to?

Snyder was flying all over the country, giving out money to buy support. And he was doing it pretty secretively. So we were able to immediately go get these stories, put them in the news, and really embarrass him.

On my podcast — the Pollen Nation podcast — last week, I had Frances Danger on to talk about #NotYourMascot history. She’s a Native mother from Oklahoma who was following the situation with Synder. She noticed that he had hired this sort of “vice president of social media” to fight us. She noticed that the guy had deleted his blog after he was hired for this position. So she went through all his old blog posts using the Wayback Machine for like two days, and she found a blog where he was saying really racist things about Native Americans after losing money at a casino. We were able to get that into media. And then within 24 hours of us having that reported on, he resigned.

I don’t know of any other social media campaign in Indian Country that quite worked that way with that level of sort of grassroots support that targeted a billionaire pretty effectively.

One of the things I found that I’ve had to fight against the most is that Washington Post survey they put out a few years ago saying that x-percentage of “Native Americans,” are fine with the Redskins’ name. Even though that poll has been thoroughly debunked, white people still throw it at me every single time this issue comes up.

So before the Washington Post, there was the Annenberg poll as well. The problem with both of those polls was that they allowed the “Native American” respondents to self-identify over the telephone as “Native American” and didn’t take into context the issue of pretendians — people pretending to be Native for whatever reason — and just how common that is. I wrote a piece in response to the survey in The Nation. I examined it pretty closely and it was fact-checked by The Nation and the Washington Post was allowed to respond, of course.

So one of the things I noticed right off the bat was that most of the respondents were from the Deep South. That’s simply not an area where we have a lot of intact tribes because of the Trail of Tears. They are there, but most of them were removed to Oklahoma. So that seemed strange to me. Secondly, most of the respondents were men over 50. We have such a low life expectancy. I mean, by the time my dad was 55, he told me he was the last Native guy left from his high school. Native men die very young. So the idea that a survey of “Native people” would be a lot of men living in Alabama over the age of 50 is just completely ridiculous.

Most Native people live in the far West, and we’re a very young population. Over 50 percent of The Navajo Nation is under the age of 29. Navajo Nation is the largest Native nation in the country. The data really made it pretty evident that it was not a representative sample, and that just calling people over the phone and letting them identify is not legitimate science. A lot of white people will lie about being Native or exaggerate, just like Warren saying, “I have a family story,” but there’s no proof.

Is there a poll out there that is better?

Well, the thing is that there’s only one study — that I know of — that checked to make sure people were Native or not. That was the California State University poll that was done at a powwow. It was the only one where the data seems reasonable to me. It found that 67 percent disapproved.

And I think it really varies too. There is an education level that has to take place even with Indian Country. Here in Oregon, there was a young man, Jay Butler, who really led the fight against mascots. He put together a PowerPoint presentation and talked to a lot of elders in the Portland Native community, and they said that they hadn’t really thought about it that way until they saw Butler’s PowerPoint. It really crystallized the racism for them because there’s a level in which this sort of racism is normalized.

I also think that Dr. Stephanie Fryberg’s study is important. She did it at Stanford where she would ask Native students how they felt about mascots, and then she would expose them to a Native mascot, and then test them afterward. She found was that Native youth who said they were okay with the mascot actually experienced a greater decline in self-esteem after being exposed to a mascot. So simply saying you’re “okay” with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a negative effect on you. It’s a way of coping.

Fryberg and some other researchers funded by the Kellogg Foundation did another study that came out in 2018. They did a lot of focus groups of white people, college-age and older, and they found that only 30 percent of them were sympathetic to the mascot issue or could understand it. So it’s a very different issue in that way. It’s harder to comprehend for white people.

And the University at Buffalo did a whole survey of research back in 2015 and found Native mascots not only promote stereotypes but primarily negative stereotypes. They also found racist mascots increases negative stereotypes of other racial and ethnic groups as well. So it’s pretty harmful in a pluralistic society.

We’re not exactly out of the woods yet. We’ve still got the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Chiefs, the 49ers, Blackhawks. Plus there’s still a chance Synder could screw this up and stick with some sort of Indigenous iconography that allows these bad practices to continue. Do you think Americans can really move on from this?

I did see a report last week saying that the Washington team wasn’t going to choose a Native mascot, but that remains to be seen. It’ll be interesting. I know the Cleveland Indians are also announcing the same thing, and I’m glad. I was born in Cleveland, and my parents were with the generation that started the fight against Chief Wahoo in the late 1960s. I wrote about it in Salon in an essay called ‘My Life as a Cleveland Indian.’

But yeah, I’m excited. The other teams — the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, Florida State Seminoles, the 49ers — definitely need to change. With all the statutes of Columbus falling and people starting to question the colonial history in California, it seems very problematic to name something after the 49ers. It’s not a harmless thing. I’ve spent time with the survivors of the genocide that happened there. They educated me quite a bit about the role that those “49ers” played in that genocide.

I interviewed a lot of Native folks from Florida State who fought back in the ’90s against that mascot. The Seminole Tribe in Oklahoma issued a statement years ago decrying the whole issue. They don’t want to be mascotted. But, the thing is, the Seminole Tribe in Florida is the one that signed off with the school. They’re a much smaller group because, of course, most of the Seminole were force marched to Oklahoma.

I interviewed tribal members of Seminole in Florida and they felt that the main motivation was getting their casino contract signed by the legislature. So they have a financial interest. Plus, they don’t live in that part of Florida. So they don’t really deal with the problematic mascot and culture that much. But when they have gone up there to the college, they’ve been treated in ways that were really racist.

In the case of Kansas City and Chicago, both of those teams have really tried to turn the Native community against itself by sponsoring things like “Native urban centers” or something and then paying off the board of directors of those Indian centers to turn against the local Native community’s protests of those mascots. They’ve practiced really horrible, divisive politics in order to keep the mascot by dividing the Native community.

So what’s next for #NotYourMascot?

Right now, I’ve been doing a podcast three times a week for Pollen Nation Magazine focusing on how the Native community is dealing with the pandemic. It’s called Indigenous-Centered Conversations Around Coronavirus. And it’s really grown in scope because we’ve had to deal with the COVID-19, the checkpoint fight with the governor of South Dakota, and then, of course, the George Floyd protest, which happened right in the heart of the Native community in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

We want to actually do a whole history of #NotYourMascot going back before 2013. My parents were active in the Cleveland Indian protests back in the ’60s and ’70s. Then there’s Vernon Bellecourt with the work he did in the ’80s and ’90s on the issue. My grandmother’s cousin was a plaintiff on the first Redskins trademark case back in 1999. Then there’s the long term fight in Cleveland within the Native community there with all the local work being done at the school district level. I did a podcast, Not Your Disappearing Indian, where I interviewed a whole bunch of mothers who’ve been working in the communities and at schools trying to get these changes for decades now. There’s a whole history there which I’ve been really privileged to learn about and to meet folks who’ve been in this much longer than I have.

This fight has been going on for a long time…

It’s funny. My husband’s people are from Canada. They fought against the Americans during the Revolutionary War because they didn’t want Americans taking over their land. But they lost and that’s where they’re in Canada. Anyway, his great-grandfather, Hilton Hill, who was the chief at Six Nations, wrote an op-ed back in the ’50s opposing Native mascots.

We led the protests here at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, asking them to stop using Chief Wahoo and the Florida State Seminole and other Native mascots on their gear. And as my son was protesting, I was looking at him and thinking, “God, that’s the third generation of my family to be protesting Chief Wahoo.” Then I saw that op-ed written by my son’s great-great-grandfather, it made me realize that the fight has been even longer than that.

Back in 2017, when white supremacist Richard Spencer was socked in the face by someone wearing all black at Trump’s inauguration, it launched an online debate, “Is it OK to punch a Nazi?”

The essential nature of the debate was whether it was acceptable for people to act violently towards someone with repugnant reviews, even if they were being peaceful. Some suggested people should confront them peacefully by engaging in a debate or at least make them feel uncomfortable being Nazi in public.

Others believed that it is totally fine to punch a Nazi.

The question of how to tolerate the intolerant was put beautifully by a philosopher named Karl Popper in 1945.

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,” he wrote. “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

So, basically, if you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerant will eventually wipe out tolerance.

Michael B. Tager, a Baltimore-based writer and Managing Editor of Mason Jar Press, shared a similar scenario on Twitter recently that got a lot of attention. He shared a story of sitting in a punk bar when someone wearing Nazi paraphernalia sat down beside him.

The punk rock scene has always had to deal with the infusion of Nazi types since its beginnings in the late ’70s. Seminal hardcore band Dead Kennedy’s expressed their frustration with the interlopers in their 1981 classic, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”

Nazi Punks Fuck Off

www.youtube.com

In Tager’s story, the bartender shows zero tolerance for Nazis even if they’re being peaceful and he gave a powerful answer why.

via Michael B. Tager

via Michael B. Tager

via Michael B. Tager

via Michael B. Tager

via Michael B. Tager

via Michael B. Tager

During the Spanish Civil War, a famous left-wing propaganda poster showing dead children killed by Francisco Franco’s Nationalists read: “If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.”

via Reddit

It’s a powerful statement that carries importance to this day. If we tolerate intolerant ideologies such as white supremacy, then they will be allowed to flourish. That doesn’t mean society has to be violent, but the enemies of tolerance should be pushed to the periphery of society.

Kick them out of your bars, places of worship, social media feed, neighborhood, school grounds, and politics. Once the Nazis are allowed to openly operate in tolerant society, it’s going to take a lot more than punching to get them out.

While millions took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement last month, just as many (mostly white) people stayed home and watched The Help. The 2011 film, set during Mississippi in the 1960s, shot to the top of Netflix’s most-watched list, despite being widely criticized for embracing the white savior trope.

For that reason, the cast of The Help, which made $216 million worldwide and was nominated for Best Picture (Octavia Spencer won for Best Supporting Actress), has been disassociating themselves from the historical drama. Bryce Dallas Howard recommended “a handful of powerful, essential, masterful films and shows that center Black lives, stories, creators, and/or performers” instead of a movie about racism written and directed by a white dude (based on a book from a white woman), while Viola Davis feels like she “betrayed myself, and my people” for appearing in the proto-Green Book.

“They’re invested in the idea of what it means to be Black, but… it’s catering to the white audience. The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater and they talk about what it meant. They’re not moved by who we were,” David told Vanity Fair about The Help, which was partially filmed a few miles away from the site where Emmett Till was murdered. She continued:

“There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help. But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],” Davis says. The Help, like so many other movies, was “created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.”

The Help is, for the most part, a shit-pie of a movie, but to be fair, without it, there would be no “Oscar winner Octavia Spencer.” That has a nice ring to it. She should be “two-time Oscar winner Octavia Spencer,” thanks to her much meme’d performance in Ma (I’m only half-joking), but at least she has the one. Also, Viola Davis rules.

(Via Vanity Fair)

Despite the ambitions title of Juice WRLD’s posthumous album, Legends Never Die, the late Chicago rapper spends as much time rebelling against the characterization as he does embracing it. It’s a fitting way to close the book on the 22-year-old’s musical career. It’s the album that best represents Juice’s ethos, which lived on the line between petulance and earnestness and thrived on the resulting tension. For better or worse, Legends Never Die is the album Juice WRLD would have wanted to make, which is the highest compliment you could pay to any album like it.

2020 has already seen multiple examples of posthumous releases in hip-hop — too many, to be honest. Mac Miller’s Circles was completed by his co-producer and collaborator Jon Brion, who tried to stick to the vision of what he thought Mac would have wanted from this album. Because Mac’s own discography was so varied, it’s hard to say whether Brion accomplished this. Fleshing out a full mural from a few sketches and notes in the margins can be a dicey proposition and one can only hope to make a project that sounds at least satisfying to fans, if not to the artist’s original vision.

Or, you can go the other way, as 50 Cent did when he took over executive production on Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut album, Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon. While Steven Victor remained mostly at the helm, 50 Cent steered the ship for maximum chart appeal, building out the tracklist with dozens of collaborators who seemed almost algorithmically selected to drive streams. While many of those collaborations may have happened organically were Pop Smoke still alive, the dearth of fellow Brooklyn drill talents smelled funny to some fans, leaving as many questions as answers about Pop’s ultimate goal with his debut.

Legends Never Die tries a different tack from either of those. On the interlude “The Man, The Myth, The Legend,” gleaned from interviews with peers and mentors of Juice WRLD, Lil Dicky describes Juice’s process with awestruck glee. Dicky describes the cavalier ease with which Juice knocked out hits, recalling a session in which the 21-year-old recorded two completely different songs over one beat in just two takes, then told producer Benny Blanco, “Just pick whatever version you want.” Perhaps that’s why his posthumous album sounds so quintessentially “Juice WRLD” — because he left behind enough material to work with that each individual session could yield multiple potential hits and because he didn’t seem to be too picky about which made the final cut.

He also has a distinctive and fully-formed sound. Where Mac could noodle and experiment and Pop Smoke defining characteristic was his gruff voice, Juice arrived with the polish of an artist who not only knew exactly what he wanted to do but how to pull it off. Jarrad never used “-type beats” even in the SoundCloud days. He wanted his sound to be like if a Hot Topic grew out of the Calumet Park concrete like a mushroom, inundated with both the sounds of the block and of the emo-rock, scene-kid radio that influenced his vulnerable outlook and drew lawsuits from the bands themselves. That tradition carries through Legends Never Die as Juice continues to explore the range of emotional traumas and relationship drama that inspired the My Chemical Romances of his youth.

The thing about those hits; there are plenty to choose from here each playing with a thread that Juice laid down in previous works, but stretched to a new length, allowing him to truly explore his emotional inclinations. Juice confronts his anxiety on the dirgelike “Titanic,” laments his reliance to codeine on the balladic “Bad Energy,” returns to the dancehall with Trippie Redd on “Tell Me U Luv Me,” falls head over heels alongside Halsey on “Life’s A Mess,” and even takes a respectable swing at a legit pop-punk bop with Marshmello on the surprisingly lighthearted “Come & Go.” While Juice proves as versatile as ever, he also seems to nail down the sequencing issues that plagued his last full-length effort, Death Race For Love. It genuinely sucks not knowing whether that was Juice figuring it out, or external forces paring down his verbosity.

It’s a real shame because the sequencing becomes the star as much as Juice does. While he previously lost focus around the midpoint of past projects, here, the centerpiece song, “Wishing Well,” is a real heartbreaker and leads to some of the emotional high points of the album. Highlighting his tragic youth and hinting at the old soul that may have surprised his detractors — sneaking in that Robotech sample felt like a head nod directed at me personally — “Wishing Well” is a soft rock jam that really takes his drug use to task. “Let’s be for real,” he croons. “If it wasn’t for the pills, I wouldn’t be here / But if I keep taking these pills, I won’t be here.” His awareness of his problem is suffocating. He knew it would eventually lead to his demise, but he just couldn’t stop.

When the album ends on a high note with “Stay High,” “Can’t Die,” and “Man Of The Year,” it seems like the sort of thing Juice might do. “Don’t be sad, celebrate life while you have it,” might be the message. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. After all, there’s no real way to tell us what Juice would really have wanted to say at the end of this project if he knew it would be his last, even if he recognized why. And that’s where Juice WRLD existed: right in the tension between the melancholy and the manic. Legends Never Die keeps that balance alive. Long live Juice WRLD.

Legends Never Die is out now via Grade A Productions/Interscope Records. Get it here.

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

It’s been a while since Justin Bieber last dabbled in his proclivity for rapping, but it looks like he’s found the spark once again thanks to up-and-coming Louisville rapper Jack Harlow. Harlow’s breakout single, “What’s Poppin,” has taken streaming and radio by storm, climbing all the way to the No. 2 position on last week’s Hot 100 chart thanks to a remix featuring DaBaby, Lil Wayne, and Tory Lanez. However, it seems the star-studded guestlist left off someone who would have very much liked to be included. That’s right, Justin Bieber.

Of course, what once might have just been a missed opportunity can be turned into a larger campaign for inclusion on another remix. After all, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” dominated the 2019 charts in part because he kept reconfiguring the track with new guest stars every few weeks, turning it into a running joke that made him one of the most successful new acts in recent memory. While there’s no evidence yet that Harlow reached out to Bieber directly, Justin did post a video of his freestyle over the “What’s Poppin” beat to his Instagram Story, prompting an astonished response from Jack himself.

It’s probably only a matter of time before the two rappers do hook up, but for now, check out Justin Bieber’s “What’s Poppin” freestyle above.

Jack Harlow is an Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.