Every week, the Noisey staff puts together a list of the best and most important albums, mixtapes, and EPs from the past seven days. Sometimes it includes projects we’ve written about on the site already; sometimes it's just made up of great records that we want everyone to hear, but never got the chance to write about. The result is neither comprehensive nor fair. We hope it helps.

Solange: When I Get Home

It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to untangle the threads of a dense, layered Solange record mere hours after it fluttered into the world, so I’ll keep it brief. Never has Solange sounded so comfortable as on these windblown productions that she made largely with longtime collaborator and ambience conjurer John Carroll Kirby. It sounded perfect when I listened in a uber home after a long night out last night, and I look forward to further settling into it, exploring it’s casual, quiet mysteries. —Colin Joyce

2 Chainz: Rap or Go to the League

“Never get the credit I deserve, I dunno If you’re hearing every word,” 2 Chainz spits on his new track “Threat to Society.” And he’s got a point! He contains multitudes; he’s much more than his punchlines, and Rap or Go to the League shows once again that 2 Chainz is the best in the league. This metaphor is fairly on the nose too—the album opens with audio of 2 Chainz being announced as part of the starting lineup at one of his high school basketball games.

Admit it though, you are here in part for punchlines and they’re still here. Example: “Spit cold shit, need Mucinex” on “2 Dollar Bill.”” There are also plenty of casual flexes (i.e. “got a pinky ring that cost $80k” on “Money in the Way”). Over the course of 14 tracks you get the bangers you’ve come to know and love from the artist formerly known as Tity Boi, as well as A+ features from your faves like Travis Scott, Ty Dolla $ign, and Ariana Grande, who recently did her best 2 Chainz interpretation on “7 Rings.” 2 Chainz has nothing to prove here, but Rap or Go to the League is solid evidence that though 2 Chainz had NBA potential, his greatest strength is making really good rap music. — Leslie Horn

Dijon: Sci Fi 1

In the video for “Bad Luck,” the handworn closer on the LA-based songwriter Dijon’s new EP, the whole city of Los Angeles glitters. It’s shot in such a way that every streetlight offers a lensflare, a sea of pearls on the night sky. On some level it’s everyday stuff, you know that no matter how nicely it shimmers, that fourth floor window is just a fluorescent bulb. But in Dijon’s eyes its fantastical.

You can apply that worldview to how Dijon writes in general, and especially to the songs that make up Sci Fi 1—he has this impossible knack for making tiny moments feel totally precious. He talks about luminescence specifically on “Cannonball”—”You’re magnified in light,” he sings at the song’s outset. But he also draws meaning out of other tiny images—the way a wide angle lens rests into a loved one’s hand on “Dog Eyes,” a memory of a staircase he used to run up. This is his biggest power as a songwriter, suffusing all of this with a delirious glow, making magic out of the mundane. You’ll be moved. —Colin Joyce

96 Back: Excitable, Girl

Across 12 tracks, he views dancefloor history through a prism—drawing new colors and shapes out of the resulting refractions. His music is often viewed within the long-tradition of Sheffield’s dancefloor experimenter—it’s where Warp Records, long-running institution of electronic auteurs, was born after all. On some level this is his heritage; his dad Matt Swift was a long-running party promoter in the city. But Excitable, Girl proves that 96 Back is more omnivorous than that. He does draw on what he’s called “poncey IDM” (you can hear some of that in the melodic contortions of “Matryoshka”), but on the whole it’s so much more open-hearted—hands-in-the-air even—than such influences might indicate. He’s got a knack for taking more academic forms and making them feel ascendant. —Colin Joyce, "96 Back’s Noisey Mix Is a Thoughtful Rave"

Scott Gilmore: Two Roomed Motel

Scott Gilmore says that what drives this record, and his music in general, is “a process of exploration.” He arrives at the studio clear-headed, with no plan and no expectations, keen to let the sounds dictate where a given piece might go. In the past, that’s meant a proliferation of wonderfully meandering pieces—loping jams that felt more about the journey than the destination. Two Roomed Motelfeels different though. The songs are still shimmery and diffuse—open and welcoming like those motel rooms— but the loose song particles have condensed into something a bit more song-shaped, a little more fully furnished. —Colin Joyce, "Scott Gilmore's New Album Is the Colorful Work of a True Tinkerer"

Octo Octa: For Lovers

These three long, dreamy tracks from the producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison is, as the title suggest, full of love for the people she holds close. “I Need You” is a slow-building house track built around a desperate yearning. “Bodies Meld Together” is flushed and headspinning, desperate with desire. “Loops for Healing” is a little more spacious—and perhaps less emotionally intense—but it’s no less textured and intimate. When talking about “Bodies Meld Together,” Bouldry-Morrison offered what seems to be statement of intent for the project itself. “Love is important and showing that love to your partners in important,” she told the Fader. “It lets you all become a stronger force together.” You can sense that care in every note. —Colin Joyce

Curved Light: Flow and Return

The crown jewel of the always reliable ambient label Constellation Tatsu’s new batch of tapes (all worth checking on their own merit, by the way) is this new collection of polychromatic compositions by the synthesist Curved Light. Most of the pieces on Flow and Return are pretty short, but the sequences are colorful and detailed, offering plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. You can get lost in the shimmer—even on short interludes like “Glacial Float—which makes it a suitable soundtrack for any inner travels you have planned in the near future. Listen close, then drift away. —Colin Joyce

Bob Vylan: DREAD

Their name’s a hair too cute, but the crushing music that this London band makes is anything but. Self-styled as a hybrid of hardcore and grime, they consciously crib the best bits of both on their new EP DREAD, rapping about isolation and fear over guitar parts that remind me at least a little of the chopped-not-slopped riffing that happens on labels like La Vida Es Un Mus. There’s a lot of artists working right now in the shredded space between rap and noise, but their take’s a little different—leaning more into sounds and energies that are consciously geared at opening the pit up rather than just straight-up crushing your skull. This only makes creaky, paranoid downers like “Die Slow” more impactful—there’s space for them to scream this shit right in your face. —Colin Joyce

Varg: Evanescence (A Love Letter)

The Microsoft Samantha monologue that opens the new record new record from Swedish producer/synthesist Varg ends with a promise: “this is anti-police music.” Some may find it hard to hear that in all the droney passages and relentless gasps, but I’m of a mind that this kind of borderless music is inherently anti-statist. It’s rule-breaking music, ignoring established forms in favor of meandering, blooming passages of melody and static, a radicalness underscored by the cast of collaborators here, which include both a rapper (Bladee) and a noise musician (Puce Mary), colliding on songs that are nominally ambient in nature. It should not be possible, but here it is. It’s liberated music, oriented toward doing the same for others. —Colin Joyce

Angel-Ho: Death Becomes Her

Although her new music is obviously "poppier"—you can hear the influence of artists like Missy Elliott, Grace Jones, and even Kanye West, for example—it is still intrinsically, supernaturally radical. “Pose” is built from sparse, warped electronic beats and punchy bars. “My music is pop, meets the death of pop, meets the death of identity, death of politics, death of everything,” Angel says, laughing. “It’s just a big funeral. It’s [also] the metal rocker chick in me. Metal and rock is so emotional and poetic, and I wanted to bring that sense of poetry into my album.”—Daisy Jones, "Angel-Ho Makes Genuinely Radical Electronic Music"

Durand Jones and the Indications: American Love Call

Durand Jones & The Indications draw from so many threads of soul music so expertly that both their attention to detail and affection for the genre elevate their sophomore LP American Love Call. Originally a creative vessel for friends studying at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, the group has been steadily gaining traction thanks to their raucous live show, solid songwriting, and the one-two vocal punch of Jones and drummer Aaron Frazier. On the album, tracks like “Don’t You Know” feature a lush string arrangement that feel straight out of the Philadelphia Sound where the politically resonant “Morning In America” takes aim at injustice and congress. It’s reverent soul and never comes close to being just a pastiche of a bygone era. —Josh Terry

Glued: Cool Evil

The debut full-length from St. Louis four-piece Glued hits with a nervy and brooding immediacy. Opener “Used To It” is anchored by drummer and lead singer Chelsi Webster, who imbues a bracingly cynical energy throughout with snarling lines like, “will somebody do something? We never heed the call.” The title track, which features vocals from Sean Ballard, highlights the band at their best as it ends with a spiraling and visceral riff. It’s anxious and angular indie rock that can turn from infectious (“Beach Boys”) to menacing (“No Past”). —Josh Terry

Mereba: The Jungle Is the Only Way Out

The Jungle Is the Only Way Out, Mereba’s debut album, is a 38-minute getaway with the power to transport you anywhere Mereba sees fit. Lyricism is the core of the album, as she fills the spaces of the 13-track project with soulful melodies, fast-paced raps, and spoken-word interludes so sharp they sting. “Black Truck,” the only song she didn’t assist in producing herself, bleeds into the poetry of “dodging the devil.” “You stuck dodging the devil the older you get / Youth grants grace, growth grants grit,” she says. If The Jungle Is the Only Way Out, Mereba knows she’s going to have to fight her way to the exit.

Westkust: Westkust

Sweden’s Westkust make lovingly rendered shoegaze that’s simultaneously gorgeous and pummeling, like all good shoegaze. Featuring members of Makthaverskan, the group follow-up their 2015 debut Last Forever (which featured their breakout single “Swirl”) with a lean nine-song collection that rarely wastes a moment or a fuzz pedal. Single “Cotton Skies” is washed with sawing guitars and floating, whimsical vocals from Julia Bjernelind while “Do You Feel It” answers the question with searing distortion. The whole LP is astoundingly sunny, with good vibes emanating from each of these fuzzy pop songs. —Josh Terry

Nonlocal Forecast: Bubble Universe!

Angel Marcloid—a nominally Chicago-based netizen who’s made a handful of incredible and incredibly difficult to categorize records as Fire-Toolz Angelwings Marmalade—introduces a new project indebted to the chintzy jazz they play during station breaks on the Weather Channel. Her take celebrates these sounds—keyboard lines that flutter enthusiastically like birds trapped in a Best Buy, sax-like synthesis, and gated reverb galore—but makes them a little more fantastically. There’s proggy drum breaks, sunny new agey passages, and jittery melodic contortions, the sound of a world a lot more surreal than ours. Catch it during Local on the 8s in the Jupiter Ascending universe. —Colin Joyce

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

On Friday Solange released a beautiful new album in When I Get Home. It's a gorgeous and layered 19 tracks that you'll want to sit with for a while. Which is why it's impressive that, as Solange explains a new interview with i-D that discusses the making of the album, a majority of the tracks were recorded in one take.

What I love so much about recording this record was most of the songs are one-takes. We’d start from the top with me singing a melody and building out chords, just me and click track and then my boy John Key on the drums or keys and John Kirby on the synths. I would then go find the best three minutes of the fifteen. I actually tried to recreate some of my vocals, but the energy wasn’t the same and I had to surrender to that. This album isn’t about vocal performance or just words out loud. I tried to create everything I had to say with sonics and frequency. This is really about the way that I feel. Feelings.

There is plenty more to say about the album, but it's almost certainly best to hear it in Solange's own words. Read the whole interview over at i-D.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Solange closed her last album, A Seat at the Table, with a special message from New Orleans rap mogul Master P. “You know, our great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers that came here—they found some way to find the rhythm,” the 48-year-old rapper said over rambunctious horns reminiscent of Kanye West’s “We Major." “Now, we came here as slaves, but we going out as royalty, and able to show that we are truly the chosen ones.”

“The Chosen Ones,” the album’s final skit, wrapped A Seat at the Table like a bow. It bolstered the ancestral focus of the 20 tracks that preceded it, which included anecdotes from Solange’s parents, Tina and Mathew Knowles. Master P’s remarks even echoed James Baldwin’s famed quote, “Our crown is already bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.” Solange was using her songs to honor debts from ancestors both seen and unseen, producing a powerful statement on what black womanhood felt like at the tail-end of the Obama administration. Her just-released fourth full-length, When I Get Home, picks up where “The Chosen Ones” left off; Solange is still dedicated to showing the regality of black life, but this album is an intimate exploration of her Houston roots and black heritage.

According to a statement on Solange’s BlackPlanet page, the record is “an exploration of origin,” one which starts with a question: “How much of ourselves do we leave at home and how much do we carry with us forever?” Returning to Houston’s Third Ward neighbourhood where she spent her formative years, from her mother’s native New Orleans where she created A Seat at the Table, When I Get Home delves deep into Solange’s lineage. It follows a trajectory similar to her family’s own migration, while also evoking a migration pattern embedded in zydeco culture, which Solange studied prior to its release.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people are getting on horses and trail riding from Texas to Louisiana,” she said in a Billboard interview last year, referencing the tradition where hundreds of black Southerners ride horses through the circuit trails to honour the black Creoles who traveled to Texas for work. The trails, which were once for employment, have now evolved into a cultural incubator for new music and food. “It’s a part of black history you don’t hear about.” In the 33-minute film that accompanies the album, Solange spotlights rural Creoles honouring black cowboy culture, who are on their journey as she embarks on her own. It’s as though she’s made the trip from New Orleans (A Seat at the Table), and is looking to find more answers in Houston (When I Get Home).

A Seat at the Table was a success both culturally and critically, proving an authentic sketch of black womanhood could permeate mainstream conversations—but could Solange do it again? In many ways that album felt like the culmination of her career thus far. It took a total of four years to create, with some songs, like “Cranes in the Sky," written as early as eight years prior to its 2016 release. “Cranes” won a Grammy for Best R&B Performance in 2016, and earned her the distinction of the Harvard Foundation’s Artist of the Year. For many A Seat at the Table was a remedy against daily microaggressions—but what would happen when discrimination got a lot more overt, as it did at Charlottesville’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017?. Donald Trump’s presidency brought what Ta-nehisi Coates has called a “negation to Barack Obama’s legacy.” In the three years since A Seat at the Table, Solange fans were waiting for another salve, but we had no idea how she would do it.

A year ago, Solange mentioned in a Billboard interview she was writing new music in the same house Joni Mitchell frequented in Jamaica. Last October, The New York Times Style Magazine conjured up more speculation. According to writer Ayana Mathis, the album was “imminent this fall” and set to be released “probably sometime soon.” But “soon” didn’t come as quickly as the profile suggested. “The record will likely arrive into the world fully formed at some mysterious and unexpected moment, like a meteor cratering into the culture,” Mathis wrote.

Like a meteor, Solange’s reemergence was hot and hard to miss; the singer moved mischievously, aligning herself with the element of surprise her big sister Beyoncé popularised in 2013—as well as undeniable markers of black culture. Last Tuesday, Solange resurrected BlackPlanet, an early online forum for black communities launched before the millennium. Two days later, she asked fans to call her at 281-330-8004, a number burned into the brains of rap fans by Houston rapper Mike Jones. If you were paying attention, you knew what this meant: Solange was coming.

Released on the cusp of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, When I Get Home continues her intersectional exploration of personal identity. On “Can I Hold the Mic,” Solange makes it clear that she cannot be defined in one way. “I can’t be a singular expression of myself; there’s too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many,” she says. Luckily for us, Solange’s homecoming doesn’t force her to choose.

When I Get Home feels like the second helping of comfort food. It is a composite of familiar elements used to trigger a memory, best digested after you’ve already scraped your plate clean. Solange’s musings of home arrive quickly on the interlude “S McGregor,” which includes an excerpt of a Vivian Ayers poem performed by the Pulitzer nominee's own daughter, actress and fellow Houston native Phylicia Rashad, formerly known as Claire Huxtable. “I boarded a train, kissed all goodbye / And now my heart knows no delight,” Rashad says. The full version of the poem (“One Status”) finds Ayers growing weary of the South's slow creep, wondering what opportunities will find her in her small town. Like Solange, who left Brooklyn’s fast-pace in 2012, Ayers returns to the quiet town she once fled from. “It’s home / The folks are warm, and most of all / I belong,” Ayers writes. “Down With the Clique,” the next track, follows the warmth in Rashad’s voice with the heat of the Texas sun. “We were rolling up the street / Chasing the delight,” Solange sings. For Solange, it seems like Houston is the home of the “delight.”

Home is a recurring focus on the album but it's Solange's use of repetition that makes the album feel lived in. “Dreams,” a collaboration with Earl Sweatshirt, Raphael Saadiq, and Devin the Dude, sees Solange contemplating the way dreams can shift, unraveling at the seams until they are completely new. For much of the song, she repeats the line, “Dreams, they come a long way, not today.” The repetitive nature of this song, and much of the album, mimics a return home—yielding to patterns that are familiar, like muscle memory. Solange is making it easy for the listener to envision the place she calls home. The singer returns to this design on “Beltway,” a song that is nearly two minutes long but only repeats three phrases: “Don’t,” “You love me,” and “Lone.” The next song, “Exit Scott,” begins with a poem written by Pat Parker. “If it were possible to place you in my brain and let you roam around, in and out my thought waves, you would never have to ask, ‘Why do you love me?’” Solange does let us roam through her brain on When I Get Home, referencing streets of personal significance in Houston (“S McGregor,” “Beltway,” “Exit Scott”) to profess her love for the city. The album is a navigation system to the physical spaces that contributed to her identity.

When Solange isn’t performing a tribute to Houston’s Third Ward, she is celebrating her blackness. The singer’s odes to black life may not be as blatantly put as “Don’t Touch My Hair,” but they’re still stirring. She turns the trope of “CP Time," a stereotype that says black Americans are never on time, upside down on “Binz,” where she professes that her money is never late, although she’d love to sleep in. “Dollars never show up on CP time / I just want to wake up on CP time,” she says. “Almeda” finds Solange singing against a backdrop of drunken, warped percussion, a fitting choice for the brown liquor reference at the start of the song. “Black skin, black braids, black waves, black days, black baes, black things,” she says, after rattling off a laundry list of items found in black households (“Brown skin, brown face, brown leather, brown keys”).

The faith Solange puts in her black experience does not waver. “Black faith can’t be washed away / Not even in that Florida water,” she sings, mentioning the spiritual healing agent she carried with her at last year’s Met Gala. “My Skin My Logo” is the playful result of Solange and Gucci Mane rapping about each other, and their friendly sparring underscores the singer’s unwavering confidence. The title of the song pulls from his final bars—“My skin my logo”—which packs a punch as black consumers continue to boycott Gucci, the fashion house, over an $890 sweater resembling blackface. Solange’s choice to centre the song around Gucci—the person, not the brand—is spot on. Black skin has been deemed inferior by western ideals for centuries, but Solange is rewriting the narrative. Black skin is luxury.

You won’t find another iteration of “Cranes in the Sky” or “Mad” on When I Get Home, and that’s deliberate. A woman’s voice creeps in the midsection of the album with a gentle reminder: “Do nothing without intention.” When I Get Home may not pack the gut punch A Seat at the Table did, but it doesn’t seem like Solange would’ve wanted it any other way. The three-year gap between the albums has brought head-spinning political change, and When I Get Home is a testament to the power of finding ourselves gracefully amid the chaos, like a true descendant of royalty. Just as Solange’s crown was already bought and paid for, When I Get Home is the singer’s deposit for those after her. It’s up to us to wear it.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

2018 was the year of yeehaw. The western Red Dead Redemption 2 was the best-selling video game, a lanky child yodeling in a Walmart counted as one of the music industry’s biggest breakouts, and Kacey Musgraves’ LP Golden Hour would go on win the 2019 Grammy for Album of the Year. This morning, Mac Demarco said giddy up and continued the trend by announcing his fourth official album Here Comes The Cowboy, out May 10. The lead single is called “Nobody,” and features of self-directed video where Demarco dons a cowboy hat and lizard makeup.

If you’re the type person who’s already heard of an artist like Mac Demarco, there’s a good chance his album title sounds vaguely familiar. You’re probably thinking, “whoa, didn’t Mitski, who doesn’t sound like Mac, release a critically acclaimed album in 2018 called Be The Cowboy, an LP that also had a single called “Nobody?” These are all facts. Mitski’s album may be the defining document of last year’s cowboy revival. However, whatever similarities between the titles are purely coincidental, according to both Demarco and Mitski.

Demarco’s publicist (who coincidentally and hilariously, is also Mitski’s representative) told Pitchfork that he chose his album and single title before he even knew of Mitski’s album. For her part, Mitski laughed off the whole thing and tweeted, “I'm 100% sure Mac & I just went fishing in the same part of the collective unconscious! What's wild is we have the same PR, so I LOVE my personal conspiracy theory that she heard the album+track titles but kept quiet thinking maybe some Mac fans will mistakenly find me.” Fortunately, this town is really big enough for both Mitski and Mac Demarco. Watch the video for Mac Demarco’s “Nobody” below.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

In what’s great news for fans of morose and meticulously-arranged indie rock, The National announced their eighth album I Am Easy To Find. It’s out May 17 via 4AD and is the band’s follow-up to their excellent 2017 LP Sleep Well Beast. But this isn’t a typical album announcement for the veteran rockers: the full-length is paired with a 24-minute short film of the same name directed by Mike Mills ( Beginners, 20th Century Women). As a press release states, “The former is not the video for the latter; the latter is not the soundtrack to the former.” The film stars Academy Award-winner Alicia Vikander, features music from the album, and will be out the same day as the album. Watch the trailer below.

To go with the announcement, the National aslo shared lead single “You Had Your Soul With You,” which boasts guest vocals from Gail Ann Dorsey, a longtime touring vocalist for David Bowie. While it’s a pretty buoyant track musically, the lyrics are practically soaked in melancholy with frontman Matt Berninger singing, “And I just can't find a way to forgive myself / I had only one thing left / And I couldn't see it yet.” But it’s Dorsey who shines on the song with her masterfully taking over the third verse.

That collaboration with Dorsey is one of many on the LP with Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Lisa Hannigan, and Mina Tindle also guesting. Berninger explained in a statement, “Yes, there are a lot of women singing on this, but it wasn't because, ‘Oh, let's have more women's voices. It was more, ‘Let's have more of a fabric of people's identities.’ It would have been better to have had other male singers, but my ego wouldn't let that happen.” I Am Easy To Find was produced by Mills and the National and mostly recorded at Long Pond, Hudson Valley, NY.

Listen to “You Had Your Soul With You” below and peruse the National’s upcoming tour dates.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Little Simz is a bit preoccupied. She sits with her phone face-up on the table at a Kings Cross restaurant, nudging the screen every few seconds to make sure she doesn’t lose her data signal. “I’m just tryna… make sure it sends,” she says, crouching close to the tabletop. “I’m literally posting my rehearsals – some pics of what I’ve been working on. It’s exciting. I’ve kind of built my show again from scratch.” Last year, touring her second album Stillness in Wonderland, she found herself stuck in a rut – ”the same live set, the same set” – but now arranging new music, from album Grey Area, invigorates like a splash of ice-cold water. So, before we settle into breakfast, she’s making sure the post sends. When I check my phone later, there it is: a series of photos she took herself, shot in black and white in her rehearsal space.

She’s been shooting a lot of photos, actually. Touring with Gorillaz for about a year, and promoting her own material meant Simz needed a boost; a reminder of the jolt born from a sudden creative itch to scratch. She turned to photography, after noticing offhand how one of her friends, a painter, also had a camera in his studio. “And I was like, ‘oh, I didn’t know you take pictures. That’s sick, man.’ Then maybe the week after, I went and bought that exact same camera.” Simple as that. Ever since, she’s learned to pull herself out of the drudgery of life on tour using her camera. In a sense, it adds a visual element to what she’s done for more than a decade, since primary school: document her life, through rap.

Now, leaning back in our corner booth in a black turtleneck beneath mustard dungarees with her faux locs intertwined in a half ponytail, she’s scanning the menu before she’s off to rehearsals, then a week of promo in both the UK and Europe. Once she’s settled into her plush seat, and looks less anxious about the Insta post (she's immensely polite about the whole thing), we jump into the reason we’re both here: album number three. Grey Area, released last Friday, leans between genres and moods, while sounding like her most personal work to date. Simz reunited with childhood friend Inflo, the sole producer on the album. That’s not to say theirs is the only collaboration you hear, pulsing on righteously angry “Pressure” or cooing dreamily on intimate closing track “Flowers.” Instead, Simz brought on the talents of everyone from Sweden’s Little Dragon to fellow Londoner Cleo Sol (check her out if you’ve not already) and past Inflo collaborator Michael Kiwanuka.

Grey Area straddles Simz’s outward-looking sensibilities – the community of creative people she’s built around her, the influences she’s picked up through her own listening and her travels on the road – with tightly, inward-looking and reflective subject matter. From her mental health, to the strain of touring, to figuring out what exactly the fuck she’ll be doing in her late twenties, Grey Area digs into it all. “I had to re-assess a lot,” she says early in our conversation. “Friendships, personal relationships – all those things had to be looked at differently.” She chose to record this album in London to be close to those bonds. “I’d been travelling so much and it was just too much. It was like, ‘I can’t bear missing people and working myself tirelessly.’ I could see it taking its toll. So I just needed to make an album where I’m pouring out my heart and soul, but I’m also eating properly. Taking care of things that I need to pay close attention to.”

I ask how she considers that process, now it’s in the rear-view mirror somewhat – am I projecting by seeing this as her most reflective album so far? “It was… it was definitely” – and she pauses to chew on her smashed avo on toast with eggs – “a way for me to heal from all the stuff I went through. I think… I just wrote the album from a place of confusion.”

Her voice rises on “confusion,” scrawling a line under it in thick, red marker. How so, I ask? “Umm… just like… things that–” She starts again. “Nothing was making sense,” and her voice cracks as she says this and she pushes the words out in a rush, after all that pausing over what she wanted to articulate. She always speaks in a way that’s calm, slightly husky – even pointed. But it can sometimes take her a few sentences to land on what she really means (perhaps because this is our first meeting; as is so often the case with interviews, she has to ease into it, get used to me). Soon, she gets there, likening Grey Area to “peeling off layers to myself, and feeling like ‘rah – I’m in my mid-twenties. This is strange.’ It was like growing pains, you know? That’s the best way I can describe it.”

Sonically, those growing pains might make you feel aches of your own, though more likely somewhere near your heart. “101 FM” ripples over a floaty, 8-bit and kick-to-the-chest boombap beat, catching Simz in a nostalgic mood. “We used to have dreams of getting out the flats,” she raps at one point, before dropping a “sticking down baby hairs before Insta” punchline later – it’s a classic example of how Simz whips you from a wry smile and joke to an evocative scene from her own life or a story she’s choosing to tell. The megaphoned voice bellowing on “Boss” rides over D’Angelo-like bass guitar lines, while “Wounds” and its strings samples brings to mind Dre anointing a young Eminem with diamond-quality beats. Every track sounds like its own entity.

I notice that Simz sounds a little apologetic about just how many styles she’s managed to cram onto the album’s ten tracks. She remembers how when Inflo (who she calls Flo) first played her clattering, declarative opener “Offence,” “I didn’t really like it,” she says, chuckling. “It was uncomfortable. And it was different, and I wasn’t sure that this was a direction I wanted to go in. But I trusted it,” and the pair went on to make music that echoes long-discarded tracks they’d worked on when Simz was about 12. At one point she mentions how the confusion underpinning the album impacted its almost dizzying variety. “I’m still working out my sound. But I think I’ve come to notice I’m not bound to one. I can dip into jazz, into funk, into hip-hop.” Lyrically, though, “I needed to tap in more,” she adds. “I’ve been making music my whole life, so at this point it’s like, ‘what can I talk about that people haven’t heard from me before?”

She’s not exaggerating. Simz started rapping aged nine, putting music up online and getting on mics wherever she could around London via her star-making youth clubs (I’m talking Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke as other alums). Born Simbi Ajikawo and raised in Holloway by her mother, a devoted foster carer, Simz’s gallons of creative energy needed an outlet. So as a teen she acted too, appearing on TV shows like CBBC’s Spirit Warriors and E4’s Youngers, but music kept drawing her back. By the time she’d started her music technology degree at University of West London, in Ealing, her career was taking off. And she soon realised she couldn’t do both. Quitting uni would show both sides to herself: her ambition, and her insistence on doing things her own way. Really, she’d been like that her whole life. As a child, she remembers, “100% my vibe was ‘I’m just doing my thing,’ literally. And as much as it may be shocking to people that I’m indie and doing music, if you know me from when I was little I’ve always moved in a way that is independent. I’ve always done my own thing. My friends and that, close people, my family, they know this about me: Simbi moves how she wants to move. I’m not following no this and that.”

You can see that in how she’s built a career as an independent artist. But beyond that, Simz has pushed on with unorthodox projects – absolutely loads of EPs, curating a festival, never once changing her sound to please others, slapping away the dreaded “femcee” label – without much initial support from the traditional UK music industry gatekeepers. Yes, she’s received MOBO Award nominations and recognition from ticketing app Dice, for her live shows, plus an Association of Independent Music Award for her 2016 debut album A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons. But it took a good few years for her co-signs to flood in outside the easily siloed world of black music (which now underpins the majority of pop, even when people try to brush it away with an ‘urban’ tag). She still hasn’t received a major award nod.

Even spending a short time in her presence, you clock that she’d rather get on with the work. I mention how Grey Area feels like a snapshot, of her headspace and outlook now. Unlike her past releases, focused on near-fantastical worlds and dream-like states, Grey Area is grounded in today, in London, in her. “It’s funny you say that, cos the other day, I was listening to my oooold music. My Soundcloud stuff, and that. And I was like, ‘oh my days, I proper remember feeling like that.’ I just… remember, you know? As I’ve continued on my journey, I’ve forgotten some things, cos I’m so focused on going forward, going forward, going forward. But what I deeped is that without me even knowing, I’ve been documenting my life for as long as I can remember. And that’s so cool… I’ve had so many streams of thoughts, and I’ve put them all out there.” Sometimes, doing so felt daunting, she adds, but it was all worth it.

Our conversation meanders for a bit, as our food now sits cold on our plates. We discuss how young rappers are now expected to arrive fully-formed, engaging on social media and opening themselves up to public scrutiny without much protection. Since she started so young too, I wonder if she ever takes the time to reflect on what’s she’s accomplished so far, as an independent artist in such a wild wild west industry. It’s a few days shy of her 25th birthday. She pauses for a bit, sipping her juice. “You know what’s mad? Last night, I prayed.” She sounds relaxed now, more at ease. “I was praying for aaaages, it was a long prayer. I was going through points in my life and thanking god for that time when I done that, and done this. And as I was saying it out loud I was like, ‘oh yeah… I’ve done that. I’ve been an award nominee, I’ve played there…’ I can forget those things. Going forward, the next five years, when I’m 30 – and I know I’m chilling now – I’m so excited to grow wiser.”

'Grey Area' is out now on a ton of streaming platforms, and Simz plays a sold-out show at London's Courtyard on Wednesday 6 March before other dates in the UK, North America and Europe.

You can find Tshepo on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

“I looked high and low for fucking, Hannah,” Ryann Donnelly tells me in a sweet American accent with an almost deadpan expression. “High and low, but the fact is there’s not a lot of sex in music videos. There’s a lot of seducing the camera, but not pseudo porno. It’s pretty rare, seeing what you would perceive as penetrative fucking in music video.” I adore the idea of an academic watching hundreds of vidoes on their laptop for the purpose of analysis, squinting for evidence of something going somewhere. But Donnelly is a musician too – she fronted Seattle-based horror punk band Schoolyard Heroes, who were signed to Island Records from 1999 to 2009. The art of the music video is something she's been seriously considering her entire teen and adult life.

It’s hard to pinpoint the first ever time it happened. The original real sex scene was supposedly Marilyn Manson’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses” with then-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood. In terms of acted-sex, one possibility, Donnelly says, is David Bowie’s “China Girl”, although that is just rolling around on a beach. In actuality, she says conspiratorially, “Justify My Love” by Madonna might just be it. The black and white film shot in a hotel room, features a man thrusting on top of the singer. Its references to BDSM, bisexuality, and voyeurism would barely register as a discussion point were it released today, but in 1990, it was banned by MTV and other TV networks. When Madonna was asked by ABC whether she would make more money selling it on VHS rather than airing it, she retorted, “Yeah, so? Lucky me.” Sex sells, but it does more than that.

Donnelly’s first book is a strange thing. Released in April on Repeater, Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion and Music Video is a mix of genres. It’s a tender and corporeal autobiography of what it means to express yourself as a female musician when everything feels bound by the playful but taut restrictions of love, sex and power. It’s also an edited pHd that Donnelly did at Goldsmiths on the topic of sex and gender in music video. So it’s a (very good) Girl In A Band story and a theory book.

To paraphrase Donnelly's personal story, which then informed the study: She's a teenager when she gets romantically involved with her band boyfriend, an overbearing force who orders more wildness in her performance. She channels the full force of confused feelings into live movement and finds sex and self-possession in front of a crowd. How, she wonders, to best translate that to film and picture. When her band is signed by a major label, she starts an intense sexual relationship that continues over many years with an older engaged man, Ian, who is chosen to make their music video. She sends intimate videos to him: necklaces being fastened, ribbons cut around a naked body. Meanwhile Donnelly is left behind while other strange agitators in pop like Lady Gaga reach superstardom.

The book offers rather than argues that music videos have played a fundamental role in revolutionising how we think of sex and gender. “People reference music videos more often than they realise, and in a way that’s discrepant from the music itself,” she says. They’re widely consumed and have interrupted and engaged with our lives to evolve our individual and collective sexual politics. They’ve influenced and been ahead of social change. I’d have agreed with her before having read the book, and after reading, wholeheartedly do. Interestingly, she points out that often the songs themselves are almost innocuous or meaningless. The formula: make a big pop mainstream tune and be allowed subversion or high art in the music video.

It’s significant what the videos en masse, discussed in the book, tackle. To name a few: There is homomasculinity and homofemininity being normalised (the pearl embellishments and angelic appearance of Frank Ocean in “Nikes”; the wild fur and ejaculation fizzy drink in Boody and Le1f’s – “Soda”). There is cyborg feminism (the robotic sexual bodies of Lady Gaga – “You and I”; “Brooke Candy – “Opulence” and countless others) that suggests we can remake ourselves, that bring theatrical qualities of gender into view. There’s the sex education advocated in videos during the AIDS crisis (George Michael – “I Want Your Sex”; Salt-N-Pepa – “Let’s Talk About Sex”; TLC – “Ain’t Too Proud 2 Beg”).

It’s almost totally women and queer people who created the tent pole and iconic videos that Donnelly describes. “Men rarely put themselves in a position where subversion acts as a compromise to their identity rather than a challenging of identity,” she tells me. She refers to 00s mainstream emo and rock/goth bands as the only time really this happened. The camp of Gerard Way in make-up, flicking his long hair and leading a funeral parade in My Chemical Romance’s “Helena”. HIM’s “The Kiss of Dawn” where Ville Valo, equally pale and melancholic takes a traditionally feminine performance. And, of course, there’s Marilyn Manson with the many kinks and almost gender queering of his videos. (But, hey, remember they don’t challenge patriarchal norms explicitly.)

The book comes back multiple times to Lady Gaga. With her videos Gaga repeatedly became the conduit for queer culture to enter the mainstream. It’s a murky reach to say Lady Gaga prepared the mainstream for more queered pop culture, or to say that she is a reason we have openly queer artists. Or to explicitly say her videos were an arguable part of real life LGBTQ progress. But Gaga’s presence is undeniably there. When Donnelly is decoding how to launch herself into pop music with a creative and visual freedom. In traces of later videos, by other women and queer artists.

Almost three decades on from “Justify My Love”, what is the future of sex on video? Donnelly believes artists will lean further into the realm of art film, since platforms like Apple Music and Tidal help us reconsider the formats. She points to Solange, Beyonce and Dev Hynes as examples. “We’re expanding towards film as 'Film' is compromised by, well, how many sequels do we see? It’s so weird. I think there’s a real craving for the art of cinema. I think music videos will get much longer.” As artists like Hayley Kiyoko, Kehlani, King Princess, or Troye Sivan share their sexualities and preferences, that openness converges in body, fashion, performance, song and video in a way that’s more casual. The formula of pop song plus subversive video no longer feels as relevant.

At the end of our interview, after I’ve turned the dictaphone off, Donnelly says perhaps she should watch more Ed Sheeran videos. We verbally roll our eyes and she says that the most daring she’s seen of his features a female boxer love interest (“Shape Of You”). I say I’ll have a look at some. She replies: “If Ed Sheeran is doing anything remotely subversive let me know”.'

Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion and Music Video' is due to be published by Repeater on 16 April 2019, and you can pre-order it here and here.

You can find Hannah on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

“Stella Donnelly: White privileged cunt!” the young songwriter yells across the room, “That’s what headline they’d probably put with this photo!”

It’s mid-December 2018, and the 26-year-old Perth native is imagining how this feature might look if, like her last major interview, her words are once again painfully misinterpreted. As she sits grinning at the camera pointed in her face, the singer-songwriter recalls the horror she felt seeing the misquote in question: A photo of her in a pristine white tennis outfit, ringed with a grossly smarmy caption: “I think I definitely challenge a lot of stereotypes.”

“I nearly died!” she says with an incredulous guffaw.

This tells you a lot about how Donnelly views herself and her work: despite the fact that she’s often positioned as a key voice in Australian music’s new wave of feminist art, she’s keenly aware of the limits and privileges of her experience, and equally keen to avoid overstating her work’s universality. “I am definitely not a voice for women everywhere,” she tells me later. “I’m a white-privileged performer from Australia. How could that voice be related to by everybody?”

In that question lies the paradox of Donnelly’s art: her uniquely Australian (and uniquely Perth-ian) yarns have, over the past year and a half, struck a chord beyond the often hermetically sealed world of antipodean music. Since releasing her debut tape Thrush Metal on the aggressively DIY Melbourne label Healthy Tapes—a one-person operation running out of a tiny Northcote sharehouse—in 2017, Donnelly has won the $25,000 Levi’s Music Prize; showcased at SXSW; been featured in the New York Times; and signed with stalwart indie label Secretly Canadian, which boasts titles in its catalogue from Anohni, Whitney, and Yoko Ono. From its initial 30-tape Bandcamp-only run, Thrush Metal has now amassed just shy of 5.5 million Spotify streams. A small collection of small-scale songs, both lyrically and musically, the praise heaped on Thrush Metal has been manifold. So while she may not be aiming for universality, Donnelly has certainly found herself somewhere in the vicinity.

This is, perhaps, due to a few factors out of her control: It just so happens that Donnelly is coming to prominence at a time when old heroes are being exposed for misogyny and misdeeds, and many listeners alienated by those former deities are looking for new ones. Many found their new hero in Donnelly, who, with songs like “Boys Will Be Boys”—a chilling indictment of rape apologists—and the seething “Mechanical Bull,” about sexist microaggressions, came bolting out of the gate with her feminist credentials pinned to her chest.

Beware of the Dogs, Donnelly’s debut album out this week, complicates this idea of Stella Donnelly, Feminist Rock Saviour. Across the record’s 13 tracks, Donnelly makes good on her assertion that she’s not trying to be the voice of a movement; Beware of the Dogs is first and foremost a personal, intimate document, not the work of someone attempting to capitalize on a moment (not that Donnelly has ever given that impression). If Thrush Metal was brazenly political enough to earn Donnelly her fair share of admirers, Beware of the Dogs, its complex and nuanced companion piece, will be the linchpin that turns them into devotees.

When I meet Donnelly in Melbourne, she is fresh off a red-eye from Perth but in typically livewire form: tired but excitable, bleary but delightfully candid, and vulgar when provoked. There’s an innate warmth about her, a genuine likability that makes it hard to root against her. The few times I have bumped into Donnelly at shows or festivals, she’s always remembered me, and if she’s faking—an inevitability when you’re a touring musician who meets hundreds of people a week—she does a bang-up job of faking it. When you come up in a community as small as Fremantle, kindness is important.

Donnelly was born in Perth but spent a portion of her childhood in Wales, where her mother hails from. She was often surrounded by forms of folk music growing up. She learned guitar from her father, and listened to Billy Bragg on the stereo, from which she learned that she didn’t need to formally train in order to play. Singing, she says, comes from her mother. In Wales, singing is a part of everyday life. “In Australia we don’t just sit down and have a sing along without thinking about it you know?” she says. “Everyone just sings [in Wales]. It’s a normal part of life.”

"I told my parents ‘I’m going to do this music thing, but I’m also going to piss a lot of people off with the things I say online, and I’m not going to stop doing that,’” Donnelly says.

She only spent three years of her life in Wales, but she considers the experience formative. The love of music she developed there stuck with her and paved the way for her baby steps into performance. When she was 16 or so, Donnelly and a friend began busking at a market in Wanneroo, a suburb north of Perth. At one of these shows, the booker for the Wanneroo Tavern—a pub near the markets, “the kind of place where you might win money for eating a giant steak,” according to Donnelly—approached her and asked whether she might like to perform covers at the Tavern. It’s fitting that some of Donnelly’s first shows were at a venue so emblematic of middle Australia’s putrid masculinity and culture, with massive signs reading ‘GROG’ and ‘TUCKER’ on the walls and vaguely colonial-fetishist decor, considering that a decade later she’d be skewering that same culture through her music.

Nearly all the songs on Beware of the Dogs deal with a certain strain of hyper-masculine, nationalist Australian identity that’s all too common across the country. On “Tricks,” she chastises a man with a tattoo of the Southern Cross—a constellation that appears on the Australian flag—who listens to The Kyle and Jackie-O Show, a popular shock-jock radio show. On “Season’s Greetings”, she argues about Australian border policy over dinner; on “You Owe Me”, a greedy pub manager “jerk[s] off to the CCTV” while Donnelly pulls pints of flat VB, the bogan beer of choice. For Donnelly, misogyny and racism are deeply tied to Australia’s noxious patriarchal culture, and she deftly draws the connections.

“I am so sick of people being proud of Australia and thinking we’re completely fine,” she explains. In Donnelly’s eyes, Australia has never been a kind or easygoing country, and she wants people to remember that. “There’s a lot we need to change. I’ve always questioned it. It’s always made me feel sick.”

Donnelly is aware that she doesn’t feel the brunt of the effects of this culture—”I’ve never had any mistreatment because of the color of my skin”—but if she has a platform, she says, she feels a responsibility to use it.

Speaking to Donnelly, you get the sense that finally having the ability to talk her shit and have it heard by thousands of people is just as important as having the music itself heard. “When I [released Thrush Metal] I told my parents ‘I’m going to do this music thing, but I’m also going to piss a lot of people off with the things I say online, and I’m not going to stop doing that,’” she says. “Before I was kinda well known I was already being a shit online and getting into Facebook fights with people, and after I started releasing music it was an even better opportunity to stick the knife in.”

This impulse doesn’t come from any particular malicious facet of Donnelly’s personality. She has never been out to get anybody, and her anger has never been gratuitous. Even “Boys Will Be Boys”—the song that ostensibly brought her to fame—isn’t inherently a protest song, whatever that means. So when publications label it as an “anti-rape culture anthem,” or a song about “putting men in their place” (which this author, regrettably, did once) it feels damaging. “I wrote that song mainly because I had girlfriends trying to ask my friend what she was wearing that night,” she explains. “It’s not a man hating anthem and I hate it when it gets painted like that.”

Such, though, is the curse of making politically prescient music in a time where everything needs to be clickable and quotable: things are bound to get taken out of context. But these songs are as diaristic as they are politically vital, and Donnelly seems intent on not steamrolling one of those characteristics for the sake of the other. If anything, Beware of the Dogs allows her to paint a broader picture; to say that Stella Donnelly, Activist, is the same person as Stella Donnelly, Artist. The clearest example of this comes on Beware of the Dogs’ penultimate track, “Watching Telly”—a dazed, drifting track written on the day Ireland voted for the right to legal abortions, about an abortion Donnelly had when she was younger. The song is subtle, drawing parallels between the power dynamic between an older man and his younger girlfriend (“He was twenty-seven / I was twenty-one / He liked Ernest Hemingway / I liked watching telly”) and the power dynamic between people with uteruses and a patriarchal state that gives itself the right to lay claim over their bodies.

When Donnelly broaches topics like these in conversations, she sounds weary. Her past couple of years has involved her baring her soul for the sake of art and recieving dick pics and troll messages in response. Things are changing, though. Slowly. Beware of the Dogs’ opener, “Old Man,” paints a portrait of the kind of man the #MeToo movement started exposing when it picked up steam in October 2017, a bleached-teeth media type who wants to “take baby out.” The song ends with something akin to a threat, or at least a beautiful, vitriolic kiss-off: “You grabbed me with an open hand/ The world is grabbing back at you.”

“It’s not a ‘get away with everything’ kinda world anymore,” Donnelly tells me of “Old Man,” which she wrote during the height of the #MeToo movement. “I really felt like things were changing, watching all those men drop like flies. It’s finally happening.”

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

If you drive about an hour west of Oslo, Norway, you’ll reach a small, postcard-pretty town called Hokksund. There’s not much there – it’s mainly forest and rivers, with about 8000 residents dotted around in flat, white houses. But there is a high school, a skatepark and one kiosk that opens during busier seasons. Sometimes, people drive up there to visit the local glass factory. Mainly though, it’s just a beautiful place, where nothing ever happens.

Jimi Somewhere – real name Benjamin Schandy – spent the first 16 years of his life in Hokksund. He enjoyed it, but was also bored out of his mind. So as is usual with kids in small towns, Jimi found refuge elsewhere. He learned guitar. Filmed his mates skateboarding. Became obsessed with American pop punk at first, like Blink 182, Greenday, My Chemical Romance. Then later discovered newer hip hop, like Odd Future, Brockhampton, Joey Badass, Mac Miller. He started writing raps. Got into Spike Jonze, the Coppola canon, Wes Anderson. “I’ve taken all these things and combined them to make... me,” he says, now 20.

We’re sitting in a cafe just off Brick Lane, east London. Jimi is drinking a bright green juice the same colour as his homemade t shirt, the back of which reads: “Life was better when I was 17” – lyrics to his most well-known song, “1st Place”. His girlfriend is sitting beside him in a puffa jacket, scrolling through her iPhone and occasionally looking up to laugh at something one of us has said. Her hair is long and purpley violet, while his is faded red. Next to each other, the two of them look especially young and colourful, like teenagers who might be cast in a movie as “teenagers.” “I only got here last night, but I leave tomorrow,” Jimi says, blinking at the sun, making small talk.

Jimi played in a few pop punk bands back in Hokksund. But it wasn’t until he left for boarding school two hours away – along with his childhood best friend Milo Orchis – that he started experimenting and trying out different styles. Milo is a natural producer – he can make clean, atmospheric sounds with rudimentary materials – so he would produce in their dorm, while Jimi would write and sing. “Kevin Abstract put out MTV1987 and I was like, ‘this is the best thing ever’,” Jimi says, looking back. “He made it with his best friend in their bedroom, and it sounded so professional. I was like ‘woah, we can do this.’ He’s probably my biggest influence.”

Clicking through Jimi’s Soundcloud, it can be easy to hear these influences. His 2016 debut EP, Memoria, is full of jangling electric guitar and honey-sweet falsetto, interspersed with the odd rap feature and heavy instrumental breakdown. Like many of the contemporaries he namechecks, Jimi’s sound is loosely defined and cinematic, a product of being online and waywardly soaking up culture. Sometimes it sounds emo or pop punk, other times like hip hop, but often it’s just a mesh of everything, more to do with feeling than any particular style. In “1st Place,” for example, you can hear a conversation between lovers, ocean waves in the background, like a brief snapshot of a bigger story.

In recent years, his music has gotten tighter. His lyrics are more poetic. His voice glossier, more expressive. His beats smoother. “I Shot My Dog,” a new song premiering on Noisey today at the top of this page alongside a new video, which is spliced up with “1st Place”, sounds like a golden-tinged coming-of-age movie, compressed into five and a half minutes. “I shot my dog, they burned the church / I left my home, to my find worth / I miss the friends, I grew up with / They’re all in jobs, or they’ve got kids,” he sings, frustrated, his voice a mixture of Tom Delonge and Matt Champion with a Norwegian twang. It’s a song just as much about growing up as it is wishing you didn’t have to.

Jimi loves movies. While we’re chatting, he takes out his phone and shows me this app called Letterboxd, where users can log and rate everything they’ve watched. It’s basically a social network for cinema nerds. “Here are all my top rated,” he says, flicking past Lost in Translation, Stand By Me, American Beauty, The Favourite. I notice that right at the top is the Spike Jonze movie Her, but confess I haven’t seen it yet. Jimi nearly drops his phone, incredulous. “You haven’t seen it?!” he says, suddenly enthusiastic. “That film is the best! Whenever I watch it I go through all kinds of emotions. It’s funny. It’s heartfelt. It’s… everything.”

The name of his upcoming EP, a 7-track collection called PONYBOY, is a movie reference. It’s named after a character in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 classic The Outsiders. Unlike previous releases, though, PONYBOY was written and recorded in LA. Jimi explains how him and Milo pooled all their money together after high school and flew over for three months, just to see what might happen. While out there, they met another producer, Bearson, who also worked on PONYBOY. They got signed to a label, Next Wave. They even hung out with Kevin Abstract. “We care a lot about projects, we treat everything with an album mentality,” Jimi says. “I’m so happy with how it turned out.”

Photo by Dev Dhunsi

Jimi is a product of his generation. What's weird, is that it doesn’t feel like so long ago that Odd Future were releasing their own mixtapes as free downloads. And it’s been much less time since Brockhampton formed on a Kanye West forum and built their own cult following. Kevin Abstact’s American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story came out in 2016. But Jimi belongs to a even newer era of kids who grew up listening to this stuff, and seeing these people as their idols. And the result is music that fits within the world they created, even though, this time, it's coming from a boy in a small suburban town in Norway, surrounded by trees and lake.

I wonder how Jimi and his girlfriend are going to spend the rest of the day. It’s sunny outside despite being February, so they tell me they might take a walk, maybe look around some cheap thrift stores. They ask if I have any recommendations because I’m wearing an Adidas sweatshirt and stonewashed denim. I tell them it’s so expensive round here, but good luck anyway, and point to the strip of vintage shops down the road. We shake hands and say goodbye, and I leave them finishing off their juices and chatting closely.

Later that night I can’t sleep, so I decide to stick on the Spike Jonze movie Her. Jimi’s right. It does make you feel all kinds of emotions. It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. It’s everything. Then at five in the morning, I rewatch Lost in Translation. The day had begun with me trying to understand the world of Jimi Somewhere, but he had inadvertently pushed me into other worlds, and then other worlds after that. Which maybe is exactly what he’s about anyway.

You can find Daisy on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

In late 1998, Summerteeth was basically finished. Wilco had been shuttling back and forth between the recording of this, their third album, and Mermaid Avenue, a collaboration with Billy Bragg built entirely on the skeletons of unfinished Woodie Guthrie songs. But the Reprise Records executives with the authority to pull the trigger thought something was missing from the record—something that might extend the band’s reach to alternative radio, which at the time was dominated by the likes of Matchbox Twenty and Third Eye Blind.

The band retreated to the studio to record an upbeat single, but the end product was curiously dark. In all fairness, “Can’t Stand It” doesn’t necessarily sound dark. It sounds so bright, in fact, that it practically chirps; it’s full of bells and chimes, adorned with a polished sheen and anchored by one of Jeff Tweedy’s most unshakeable melodies.

But just beneath the surface lurks unease. Tweedy is looking over his shoulder, vaguely paranoid about “speakers speaking in code.” Buoyant as the chorus is, he seems vexed: “No love’s as random as God’s love… I can’t stand it.” The outro is a blunt, repeated refrain: “Your prayers will never be answered again.” It would be hopelessly bleak if it didn’t sound so sunny.

Even with the record label hovering over the band’s shoulder, “Can’t Stand It” failed the Goo Goo Dolls test, sputtering on the radio stations it was meant to storm (it never charted). But the song nonetheless offered a glimpse into the artistic logic that would define the rest of the record. Summerteeth, which was released twenty years ago this week, is a rich, maximalist album that offers listeners a lot to chew on, but its defining constant is the anxiety of Jeff Tweedy—alternatively heartbroken and lovestruck, conciliatory and defiant, impassioned and indifferent, often in the same breath.

He is, in other words, deeply human. And Summerteeth finds him staring down personal demons in a way he never had before. The outro of “A Shot In the Arm,” where he sings, “What you once were isn’t what you want to be anymore,” feels akin to a dam breaking. Pointed, accusatory, but above all, just sad, that confessional approach sets the stage for even more emotive songwriting later, like the relationship-on-the-brink smolder of “At Least That’s What You Said” and the extended therapy session at the core of “Ashes of American Flags.”

The context of this, importantly, was that Tweedy was coming apart at the seams. According to music critic Greg Kot’s 2004 book, Wilco: Learning How To Die, touring had gradually been chipping away at him; as time away from his family accumulated, the grip of depression was tightening. “He was crying, a wreck, recording some of those songs,” drummer Ken Coomer told Kot. Tweedy’s anxieties have served as a fulcrum for plenty of seminal Wilco moments. The agonizing recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—as it was captured in the essential documentary, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart—nearly destroyed the band, culminating in a split from their record label and the firing of Jay Bennett; 2004’s A Ghost Is Born arrived under the specter of a Tweedy rehab stint for depression and addiction to painkillers, which occurred just weeks before the album's release.

In 1998, though, this dynamic was new, and it was dramatically impacting Tweedy’s writing. In Wilco’s early years, Tweedy admitted to Kot, he rarely wrote verses down before recording (an approach later adopted by Lil Wayne). With Summerteeth, though, Tweedy began writing down lyrics, newly inspired by lyrical giants such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. According to the book, the band believed that the renewed focus was paying dividends artistically, but Tweedy was uneasy about the frankness of his songwriting. “When I got home and listened to that session, I didn’t want it to come out,” he told Kot. “I didn’t want people to have to sit through this, because I couldn’t sit through it.”

Tweedy wanted to mask the trauma in technicolor, Pet Sounds-inspired pop, so he sought a partner in Jay Bennett, Wilco’s brilliant multi-instrumentalist, who would later be central to the turmoil on display in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Bennett had been with Wilco from the start, but Tweedy told Kot that their chemistry really blossomed during the making of Summerteeth. “The task became: How to quiet the voice of despair that’s in those songs?” Tweedy said. “Because an album shouldn’t rub anyone’s nose into one person’s problems…That’s where Jay’s expertise in the studio came in. I felt I needed to bury those lyrics safely under glass.”

So Bennett got to work on the burial, stacking vocal harmonies and adding Mellotron, synths, banjo, strings, organ, tambourine—anything that might work. They smothered otherwise simple songs in studio flourishes, brightening them into pop confections without removing the soul at their core. As fruitful as their partnership was, it sharpened tensions with the band members they were sidelining. Coomer was unenthusiastic about the new dynamic. “The band was different,” he told Kot. “There really wasn’t a band, just two guys losing their mind in the studio.”

Turmoil aside, the result is gorgeous and multilayered, an album that embraces the vintage rock and roll foundation of its predecessor, 1996’s Being There, but substantially deepens its reach. Summerteeth only sporadically gestures at the alt country that characterized Tweedy’s first band, Uncle Tupelo, and the first few Wilco records. That sound certainly exists in the album’s DNA, but Summerteeth feels like a calculated move away from that world and into a new one.

This is clear throughout, and notably with “A Shot In the Arm,” which has the melodic instincts of Being There, but little of that album’s restraint. “Arm” is one of the band’s most beloved songs—funny, moving, and vital, careening to its conclusion with more urgency than anything Tweedy had written before. Later, “Pieholden Suite” combines three different movements into one song (an approach later adopted by Travis Scott). The first act, a piano-anchored waltz, swoons as if dancing in the moonlight, while the third is a triumphant horn-driven climax.

Tweedy’s confessional lyrics leap out early on, with the album’s second song, “She’s a Jar.” While it initially feels tender, the song reveals a dark underbelly, particularly in its hushed final moments: “She begs me not to hit her.” It mirrors the red-eyed, intentional (and in retrospect, probably problematic) cruelty of Foxtrot’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” Both songs find Tweedy slipping into character, a nastier version of himself who can transform from moderately upset to enraged without warning. That same ugliness permeates “Via Chicago,” where Tweedy casually muses, “I dreamed about killing you again last night but it felt alright to me.” At its core, the song is simple, but its construction feels precarious, as if it might teeter into chaos. “ELT” splits the difference, melding a dour message (“Every little thing’s gonna tear you apart”) with an exuberant, radio-ready melody.

But the album never feels punishing; its grimmest moments are counterbalanced with glistening, kaleidoscopic pop. Sequenced immediately after the wounded “We’re Just Friends” is “I’m Always In Love,” with its chugging rhythm, squealing synths, and instantly likeable hook. “In a Future Age”’s heavy philosophical ruminations are sandwiched between the shimmering title track and the Elvis Costello-esque “Candyfloss.” Tweedy chants the titular mantra of the buoyant “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway(again)” like a self-help exercise, as if he can make it true by sheer force of will.

Summerteeth is a flawed album, one that wobbles a bit under the weight of its length (almost exactly an hour) and would likely benefit from a leaner tracklist. “My Darling,” a swaying lullaby that reads like a dedication to Tweedy’s son, Spencer, bears good intentions but never rises above a series of whispery platitudes (he doesn’t want him to grow up too fast, and also, he would like the good times to last). “How To Fight Loneliness” stumbles into unapologetic melodrama, and as strong as “A Shot In the Arm” is, no one could credibly argue that its remix, redundantly placed later on in the album’s tracklist, is essential listening.

But the record’s flaws are secondary to its achievements. With their eagerness to shred the playbook with each album, Wilco developed a reputation as “America’s Radiohead” in the early 00s that they upheld for most of the decade; much as that banned shunned the soaring guitar rock of The Bends and OK Computer for the steely electronics of Kid A, Wilco evolved seamlessly from, say, the aloof frostiness of A Ghost Is Born to 2007’s warm, domesticated Sky Blue Sky. That tendency toward reinvention started here. As the years have passed, these inclinations have softened; Wilco’s last few albums, pleasant though they are, never feel particularly ambitious, eschewing Tweedy’s affinity for grand statements and dramatic reinventions.

That early pivot, though—that willingness to venture into uncharted territory—is what makes Wilco a transcendent band rather than merely an admirable one. Examples of that sort of adventurousness are all over Summerteeth, and they would inform everything that came after. You can draw a direct line from Summerteeth’s Mr. Rogers-y sweater vest of a song “When You Wake Up Feeling Old” to the suburbanized balladry of Sky Blue Sky. “Via Chicago”’s spiral into a squall of shrieking, discordant guitar foreshadows the chaos of Foxtrot’s dizzying climactic moment, “Poor Places.” And if you peel back a layer of studio indulgence, almost everything here could be a precursor to the streamlined, digestible folk rock of 2009’s Wilco (The Album).

Wilco has amassed an eye-popping discography: ten studio albums, a live release, a handful of EPs, and five collaborative records. It’s a lot to digest, so some critical analysis takes a shortcut, pitting Foxtrot against everything else. That’s understandable on its face— Foxtrot has a compelling backstory, and is difficult to dispute as their finest work, pound for pound—but is more than a little reductive. The band’s body of work is as deep as it is wide, and Summerteeth prepared Wilco for that longevity, embracing an emotional honesty and studio mastery the band has wielded ever since. Other Wilco albums have offered more coherent statements—more polished, more tonally consistent, more easily digestible. But none crystallized a vision as consistent as Summerteeth did, one that inextricably links Tweedy’s highest personal highs and his lowest lows. That still feels like an honest vision, and probably their truest.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Over the past few months, pop misfit Charli XCX has been pointing her fans towards the Instagram account of a band called Nasty Cherry—a four-piece, all-girl band that seemed to be posting a lot of content but very little music. For a pop star so prone to teasing new projects and collabs with what often seems like very little context or strategy, this seemed par for the course. Still, there was something intriguing about the fact that Charli seemed to have some stake in a band otherwise unrelated to her work; was Charli about to go punk, as she did for a brief period in 2015 with her sophomore album Sucker?

In short: no. But the reality of the situation is a hell of a lot more interesting than that, anyway—today Nasty Cherry make their debut with “Win”, a brash, bratty pop-punk track co-written with Charli and produced by Justin Raisen, who has worked with Charli, Sky Ferreira and Angel Olsen, among others. And while Charli isn’t in the band, she was still involved from its inception: just like Simon Cowell with One Direction, Charli is the mastermind that brought the four members of Nasty Cherry together and pushed them towards making music. Now, they’re signed to Charli’s label Vroom Vroom Recordings. Think of them as Josie and the Pussycats or the Spice Girls, if the Spice Girls lived in LA and loved The Runaways.

Comprised of lead singer Gabby Bechtel, guitarist Chloe Chaidez (also of the band Kitten), bassist Georgia Somary, and drummer Debbie Knox-Hewson (Charli’s drummer from the Sucker days), Nasty Cherry have only been playing together for a couple of months but drip with the kind of natural charisma that’s necessary for the kind of disaffected pop they’re making. “Win,” with its driving central riff and Gabby’s so-over-it lyrics, is a hell of an introduction to the band. It’s one of those pop tracks that’s genius in its simplicity. When I call Nasty Cherry at the LA show they share to ask what it’s about, Debbie’s answer feels blindingly obvious: “It’s about winning, baby!” Read our interview with Nasty Cherry and listen to “Win” above.

Noisey: How did Nasty Cherry form?
Debbie Knox-Hewson: I knew Charli XCX, I was her drummer, and Georgia was a good friend, and we went on tour with Chloe, who’s in another band, Kitten, and we hired—stole—Gabby, our lead singer. So, Charli XCX really put us together and helped make it possible.

Outside Nasty Cherry, what do the four of you do?
Chloe Chaidez: Now, we’re just making music. We’re living together and write every day and work on what our sound is. I also have a band called Kitten, I’m the singer in that, and I’ve been doing that for about ten years.
Gabby Bechtel: Before this, I was doing mainly modeling and dancing and stuff like that.
Debbie: I’ve been a drummer for a bit more than five years, and now I’m a drummer still.
Georgia Somary: I was a set decorator, designing film sets and doing a bit of performance stuff for friends. A friend of mine made a feature and I was the lead in that, so I’ve been doing performance for pleasure but set decorating for films as my career before this.
Debbie: Georgia couldn’t actually play bass before she joined the band. We didn’t know we needed her, we didn’t know what we were missing in the bass world.

How have all those prior endeavors influenced Nasty Cherry?
Gabby: I think we all came from artistic and musical backgrounds. We bring that to this in how we want our image to look, and our influences in music. Just having pretty visual and vibrant minds has been helpful.
Georgia: I think it’s been a fresh page, as well, because our references are coming from so many different places and there’s so many different influences for us.
Debbie: It was really exciting for me to work with three women who were using this new medium they’d picked and it was new to them as well. Chloe was singing in her other band and now she’s playing guitar for us, and Gabby hadn’t done much singing. I find that really inspiring, and when we go into sessions we’re pretty malleable, and not set in our ways. We’re really open to learning and trying new things.

You said Charli was the connecting factor between the four of you, so what was the actual process of putting the band together?
Debbie: Charli mentioned to me ages ago—when I was playing in Charli’s band it was an all-girl band, and we’d always dreamed of putting together like… well, of being in the Spice Girls, basically, was a huge dream of mine. Charli and I had all these references of what we thought was cool—like, The Craft and Heathers and Spice World and stuff like that. I think she just thought ‘ Well, fuck it, I actually will just put a girl band together.’
Georgia: It’s been a long process, about three years of talking about. Me and Chloe did a session a couple of years ago and it felt really organic how it’s actually come together. She put us together, but it’s been really organic, happening over the last few years. Finally we’ve actually managed to be in the same city at once and make something.
Chloe: I went out with Charli one night and she told me about the idea. That was a few years ago, and now we’re here. Viral!

What’s “Win” about?
Georgia: It’s about winning, baby.
Gabby: It’s about not letting anything get you down, wear you down. Fuck it all. Win.
Georgia: We wrote that with Charli, and it was one of the first songs we wrote all together. She came over and Chloe was rollerskating around the living room playing this riff on her guitar, saying “I need to win, I need to win” and Charli was furiously writing the lyrics on her phone.
Debbie: It’s such a fun fucking song. I think it’s got what could be considered a lot of male energy about it, and I think that’s really cool coming from women—being very fearless in saying what you want and taking it. Gabby reminds me of Bruce Springsteen for some reason.

What reference points were you drawing from when recording “Win”?
Gabby: It started off a bit slower. It was very feels in the beginning, and then we decided to take up the tempo and make it more of an anthem, a feel-good ‘I’m gonna dance in my underwear’ sort of song.

Your visual aesthetic, on Instagram and stuff, draws heavily from this 70s punk rock vibe. What inspired that?
Debbie: I think that inspired it—we’re so into that. I love modern pop and I’m not one of those people sitting in the past, but I really wanted to be part of something that references back to that time period. Those are the people I idolize—The Ramones, The Runaways. I definitely wanted to be part of something that drew on that.
Georgia: A lot of it is just our natural energy coming through.

Most of your fans became familiar with your Instagram and your look before you even started releasing music or playing shows. Why did you decide to launch the band that way?
Chloe: A little tease never hurt.
Georgia: I don’t think we realized how long it’d be before we released music. It was a little premature.

How do you want people to feel when they hear “Win”?
Debbie: Like they’re winners. If there’s an exam you’ve gotta slam, if there’s a guy you gotta break up with… I just want you to listen to it and break up with him.

Nasty Cherry are playing their first headlining show this Friday, March 15 at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles. Buy tickets here.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

During one bored night in 2015, I remember scrolling through the AWFUL RECORDS Soundcloud page. The Atlanta label has a whole load of weirdo rappers and alt-pop artists on its roster – some of them good, some of them better – so it was somewhere I often ended up when I couldn’t sleep. This time, though, I wound up listening to a musician called Tommy Genesis. Her voice was lulling, soft, melodic, even when she was spitting out hard-edged bars. “Why you fucking with me… why you fucking with me…” she whispers on “Shepherd,” her voice hovering and then springing into action over crisp, electric claps.

Tommy wasn’t technically signed to AWFUL (who also looks after ABRA, Slug Christ, Ethereal, and was founded by Father) although people often think she was because they were so closely affiliated back then. They just used to hang out and make music together (Tommy’s from Vancouver, but they’d make it work). And then a few years after those early rap tracks and mixtapes were floating about, she signed a deal with Downtown Records. Her sound got smoother, more emotional, leaning towards R&B at times, and then back to more experimental hip hop; a weird mesh of textures that would ultimately culminate in her self-titled debut album, out in November last year.

But it wasn’t just her music that caught people’s attention. It was her videos and art direction. An early visual for “Execute” shows her sprawled across some dusty train tracks, or else jumping atop cars in a school skirt and Timberland boots. One video, for “Tommy”, sees her rolling around in a bathtub, hair slicked back, chain round her neck, like some kind of mermaid outlaw. A few months ago, she released a short five-minute film called God is Wild, where she inhabits a satanic alter-ego before being reborn as a holy one. She has always been equal parts creative and inventive, overtly sexual but also kind of subtle, like someone who isn't so much pushing boundaries, but showing the viewer she knows where they are, and she could cross them if wanted.

When we meet in person, at The Diner in east London, I find Tommy in a calm and easygoing mood. She greets me with a hug and then we spend a long time debating which milkshakes to order. We're both vegan, but also craving something substantial, so she goes for vanilla soya, while I go for peanut butter with crushed Oreos. We were actually supposed to meet up a week or two beforehand, but she got stuck in traffic and ended up missing it. She's back in London, she says, because she "fucks with Noisey” and wanted to make it work.

Over the next hour or so, we speak about everything, from sculpture to sci-fi fiction books and spacial synaesthesia. Whenever I veer too close to her personal life, though – like her age, or whereabouts in LA she's currently based – she answers with a smile then waits for the next question, as if to say 'it's cool, but I'm not going to tell you'. By the time we say goodbye, I am so full of milkshake I feel sick, almost like vomiting. She tells me to come to her next show, I say I will, and then we go our separate ways, the sky now fully dark outside, our veins full of sugar. Here's everything we get into before then:

Noisey: You played a show at Oslo in London last night? How was it?
Tommy Genesis: I’ve never had a show where so many people were screaming my lyrics, all stuff from the album. When I started out with “God Sent” everyone was like… *starts singing* ‘I’m in my feelings like woah / You cannot come to my show.” London showed up for me. They really fucking showed up.

Siiick. What are your impressions of this city?
I like London and Paris. There’s so much music and art happening, so you can go out and go to a show. We were in the middle of Germany, and it was like, what should we do? I couldn’t even get tacos.

I feel like this place *gestures around The Diner* is going to be a let down for you because you’re so used to real diner food.
No it’s not though, I’m allergic to everything. Fun facts. I like to cook. I make a lot of Indian food, pasta salads, soups.

Hell yeah. So let’s chat about when you went to art school, I’m really interested in that time. What did you study?
I got in for drawing and painting. I took film first then switched to sculpture, so I graduated with a joint major. But sculpture is my love. I went to a conceptual art school, so it was more about theory and art history than it was about learning a technical skill, although you could do that if you wanted to. But I got dropped into this whole new world. Sculpture, installation art, performance art – that's my true love.

But what I found with art is that it’s so hard to have legs, and to walk outside of that world, and be able to pay rent. People always ask me “when did you want to be a musician?” and I never wanted to be a musician. It’s just the thing that clicked and people would pay me for, you know? I do a lot of drawing, and I have all these drawings piled up in my house and my friends are like “give me one, I want one.” They’re all charcoal drawings in these beautiful white frames, glass and white, but I can’t get rid of them. Now I’m thinking… maybe I could sell this collection?

You totally could and should.
Yeah, now that I’ve done other stuff. We live in this weird world where if you put a little bit into something that’s more… marketable, the other things you can do too. I hate for it to be a game like that, but I do keep looking at my drawings and thinking I want to have a show. If you go on my Instagram, some of them are on there. They’re my babies. They're very fast to make, but I just don’t have time. I've been travelling so much.

Do you want to taste some of my milkshake, by the way?
*Takes a sip* Oh shit, yours is good, yours is insane. I might just fuck around and order yours.

Right?! So what things do you think you learned at art school that you’ve brought forward to your music? Do all mediums feel like a similar mode of expression, or not at all?
I don’t have a method to my music, like I do with my art. I’m not like ‘these ideas fit within this structure and relates to history’. I’m way more strict with myself when it comes to art. But with music, I’ll be like ‘it sounds fucked up, but I like it.’ Or ‘it’s kind of jarring, but it’s punk.’ It sounds corny, but music is about feelings.

What’s the one thing you’ve created, visually speaking, that you feel most proud of? That you look at now and think ‘wow... as if that came together.’
I watch the “Execute” video and every now and then. That’s a video I shot with a homie who films skate videos, and I made him tag along with me as we walked around Vancouver. I love that video because it shows my city. Railway tracks. Parking lots with expensive cars that you break into. The forest. The beach. That’s Vancouver. That’s the colour of it. It’s greens and browns. And no one stops you from doing shit. I was jumping up and down on a Jaguar, and no one stopped me.

Haha! That's off your first mixtape World Vision, right? Your more recent stuff is different. Slightly more R&B, a bit more melodic maybe. Would you agree?
I would definitely say it’s more melodic, more sonic. More pop influences for sure. World Vision was three years ago. And it’s like… do you wear the same pants as three years ago? No. Do you have the same hair? Probably not. So three years went by and I was writing so much, but I never put out what I was writing. I went through phases, I just never made them public. And when it came time to put something out, that’s where I was at.

I put no pressure on the album. I didn’t feel stressed. I hope the people who fuck with my old stuff still fuck with it – but this album, it’s not my ‘crowning glory’ album. It’s not my Rihanna Anti. It’s just an album I needed to do to grow. I love it, but it wasn’t thought out, it wasn’t methodical. It was ‘what songs do I like?’ and ‘what songs fit together?'

Yeah, that makes sense.
And then the cover was like... it turned out looking way more explicit than I wanted it to look. There's this idea that there's two parts of me. Everyone's always confused. But I'm not confused. I'm me, and I make art, I make music, and it was about those two worlds synching. And also, it's blue, because I felt like that was the colour of the songs. A deep blue. We call it the 'Tommy Blue'.

Would you say you have synaesthesia?
I don't, but if you were to say like 'what's the aura of this album?', that's the colour of it. Ocean blue with flecks of red.

But I feel like that is synaesthesia. Like, for me, I have it with days of the week for instance. Monday's always red. Tuesday's always green. Wednesday's yellow and so on...
You know how we think of certain months as longer, even though they're mostly the same? In my head, Monday's here *points to a spot on the table*, Tuesday's here, Wednesday's here, Thursday, Friday and then Saturday *points to a longer stretch* and Sunday *points to a longer stretch*. I do that with months too.

I find that stuff so interesting! I think that one is called spacial synaesthesia. Like, for me, the months are on a ladder descending downwards. Then when you reach December, you go back to the top of the ladder.
That's crazy. I don't see it as a ladder, I see it as a circle. It's like endless circles throughout my life, it's not stopping.

I wonder what that says about you.
It's never ending... I guess one day it does.

You never know, we might reincarnate. Are you into the supernatural at all?
No, but I feel like that stuff finds me. I sense certain energies. I grew up in a very spiritual house. But because I grew up Christian, I'm very... anti-conversion? I don't know. I'm not into trying to get other people to get what you believe. I'm so against it that I don't talk about it, unless you bring it up. Who am I to say I'm right? My mind is so brainwashed in so many random ways. Situationally. How I was raised. I probably don't know the actual truth. It's just how I'm wired now. We have different life experiences, and nobody knows. If you think you know, it's because of something you've read, or something you've felt.

I agree with you. What are some books that really changed your way of thinking?
I used to read a lot of sci-fi. You know when you binge-watch a TV show? I binge-read sci-fi. I've read every Philip K Dick. I've read every William Gibson. I've read every Asimov. And it's really helped me, because I always felt like my thoughts were too weird to become a part of any conversation. But then I fell into it and... I love science fiction. William Gibson is actually from Vancouver I think. He'd be drinking coffee at this coffee shop I used to go to. I almost fell over.

Are you as into sci-fi films? What are some of your cult faves?
I watch cartoons, and documentaries when it's important. I love Friends because there's no conflict. I hate conflict. I make myself watch action films and horror and thrillers, and they don't scare me, but it's too much... energy. I can handle everything, but I get too caught up in it, and go through the emotions of everyone. So I like to watch things without conflict. Like The Simpsons.

When you say you get too caught up in the emotions... would you say you were an empath?
What is an empath to you?

So say we were sitting here and you were feeling upset, I'd be able to sense that and feel that from you and your energy, without you necessarily saying it.
I think I'm compassionate. I will change my mood to help your experience. But I don't think it bleeds into me, unless we're really close. But if I don't know you, I'll never take it personally unless it's personal. I'm a pretty big introvert, but I can do the other stuff and it won't affect my real life, I don't carry it with me.

That's a good way to be, I think. Thanks Tommy.

Tommy's on the road throughout the US and in the UK. Peep her tour dates here.

You can find Daisy on Twitter and Chloe on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

I stumbled out of Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax wanting to throw up. A crazed yet cautionary tale of a party gone wrong, the film is supposedly “based on real events that happened in France in winter 1996,” per the film’s title card. One night after rehearsal, a troupe of French dancers preparing to tour America unwind with a celebratory after-party; little do they know, but that the sangria has been spiked with LSD. What ensues is a horrifying night of blood-soaked violence, sexual assault, and painful death that taps into every partygoers’ worst fears. Leaving the theater, I actually felt dosed—and that was fucking terrifying.

And though it’s a scenario that seems extreme on paper, Climax derives its power from an unsettling realism. Images of stumbling through dark, disorienting hallways, the constant bass reverberating into the party’s “chill zones,” and echoes of the inevitable shit-talking that happens during the lulls will ring familiar to any frequent rave-goer. There’s a lengthy, immersive dance intro that draws you into the world of the party itself. Thanks in great part to Noé’s harrowing camerawork, it’s an experience that swallows you whole, even if you know it’s a fantasy.

Climax—which was co-produced by VICE Studios—was shot in the span of 15 days and finished mere weeks before its Cannes debut. The frenetic energy that permeated its production is evident in the final product, and it’s coupled with a carefully curated soundtrack that would send shivers down any Resident Advisor writer’s spine. In the film, it plays pretty much throughout, mixed by a DJ character played by French ballroom mainstay Kiddy Smile, offering cathartic cuts from the catalogs of Aphex Twin, Daft Punk, Chris Carter, and Dopplereffekt among others. In a conversation with Noisey, Noé says the process of cobbling together this who’s who of a rave soundtrack was one of the most difficult aspects of the film—especially because of all the rights negotiations. But as a party-centric thriller, it should come as no surprise that the sound design—helped in part by none other than Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter—is bar-none. It’s almost as if the subwoofer is its own character.

Without giving too much more away, I’ll just say that you’ll never look at the hypnotism of a four-on-the-floor beat in the same way again. Simply put, Climax can really only be described as a party promoter’s dream film. Though don’t be surprised if you never want to trip at a rave ever again. Read our Q&A with Noé about creating the party of our nightmares, below.

NOISEY: Climax treats both the party and its soundtrack like characters in the story. You could have easily gone down the road of treating the festivities and music as an afterthought to all the drug-induced psychosis, though. Why did decide to do this?
Gaspar Noé: Before shooting the movie, I had a list of, like, three hours of different tracks that we could probably afford. I didn’t want to be denied for financial or legal reasons. In the 80s, many types of dance music used excerpts of previous music, so the record labels cannot license the tracks anymore, because they didn’t pay for the excerpts. In many cases, I knew I wanted to [include] disco tracks from [Giorgio] Moroder, from Cerrone. I also knew [we] would love to [include], like, “Rollin’ & Scratchin’” by Daft Punk and “Windowlicker” by Aphex Twin, and we needed to negotiate all those music rights before shooting. Because once you use people dancing to one track, it’s very hard to replace in post-production, because the dance is hard to synchronize. So as soon as I started pre-producing the movie, we started negotiating the rights.

But once you’re on-set, you see what music excites the dancers, and you also notice [what music could match] for the scenes that you do without music. It’s a surprise. It’s not the one you have in mind that’s works best; it’s another one.

One week before shooting, I was in the car trying to decide locations for the movie, and they were playing [The Rolling Stones’] “Angie” on the radio. Just the melody almost made me cry, and I said, “Wow, this is the music I want for the movie, so melancholic. But we have to find an instrumental version, which does not exist.” At the very last moment, two weeks before Cannes, we managed to get the rights to use the melody. We had to re-record it to put it in the movie.

Also, the record label helped me a lot. The musicians on the record labels liked my previous movies. Also because they knew it was a low-budget movie made in France, they don’t ask for the same amount they’d ask for a big American action movie.

How’d Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter get on board?
I contacted him both for his own music and for the music he did with Daft Punk. I knew that if I put a track by Daft Punk, it had to be from before 96, so it meant the first record, and my favorite track off that was “Rollin’ & Scratchin.’” He also did [the] soundtrack for [my previous film Irreversible, [and] a lot of sound for Enter the Void. He also gave me music for Love. In this case, he created some music for [ Climax, and he found some] old tracks that were never released, like one called “Sangria.” It was an old track he remixed after I asked him for [help with the movie]. The good thing about Thomas is he is not only [a] master of music, but also a great photographer-director. He liked the whole process of shooting, and he came to set. He’s an excellent partner-in-crime. Also, his music is incredible, whether with Daft Punk or by himself.

For example, to start the second part of the movie, I tried other music, but by far the very best track for that scene—the most anguishing one—was the one he did for the movie, and that was “Sangria.”

Speaking of “Sangria,” I’ve never seen a film capture the essence of being on drugs at a rave so well. What went into the process of creating this feeling via sound design?
I’ve been in situations and parties that turned wicked. Sometimes, it’s due to substances...but just people who are very drunk can turn totally crazy. In the case of this movie, I didn’t want to reproduce the reality as seen by someone who was in an altered state-of-consciousness, but I wanted to show it from the outside—with the rave, the sound, the subwoofers, and some camera movements that put you in that state of mind. The result is very anguishing. But I did not want to do an ultra-hip version of Enter the Void, though that was full of psychotic visual effects and sound effects.

Honestly, I definitely thought I was high for part of it.
On the set, none of the dancers were on drugs or alcohol! Just pretending to be. It’s very hard to deal with people who are wasted in front of the camera. I never want anyone to be on drugs and alcohol while I’m shooting.

Was your interest in writing this story also partially influenced by your own experiences?
I’ve never been in such a dramatic situation. [But] it is always painful when you see a couple getting drunk or doing coke, and they start talking to each other [and saying] they want to kill each other. [You can] have people at the bar who are best friends and everything is good, and then some heavy guy comes in and chokes your friend because your friend is drunk, and smash[es] your friend on the face with a bottle, and there’s blood all over the place, and then it turns into a nightmare, and then the whole night gets worse and worse.

Okay. You’ve spoken about drugs being a part of your process before, so I’m curious: Why approach it in a more cautionary, skeptical way with Climax ?
I never promoted drugs. I never was pro-drugs or anti-drugs. You have to be very careful when it comes to drugs, alcohol...We all need to see ourselves from a different perspective; otherwise life is boring. But when you decide to get out of your mind to [a different] perspective and lose control...You can have one or two glasses of wine and it makes you happier and funnier, but the same person after two bottles of wine—and if you had rum or vodka—they turn into monsters.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

On my final day in Boise, Idaho for this year’s Treefort Music Festival, an email fell into my inbox touting a list of “the best festival experiences” money can buy. The summer getaways outlined in the email are million-dollar daydreams, destination holidays designed for rich kids who never got out of the Contiki Tour phase of their lives: you can experience ”glacier raves and midnight sunshine in Iceland,” “party in a 17th century fortress in Serbia,” dance “on the stunning Adriatic Coast.” The lineups of these festivals seem like afterthoughts; one bill sports The Black Eyed Peas and Pussy Riot, while another includes techno giants like Charlotte de Witte and Carl Cox alongside, uh, Greta Van Fleet? At the end of the day, specifics don’t really matter anymore. In 2019, music festivals are a multi-billion dollar industry, and a surefire way of turning under-visited places into tourist destinations.

That email was timely, because Treefort Music Festival happens to be a destination festival in none other than Boise, Idaho. It would be hard to equate the cold, high desert landscape of Boise with glaciers or fortresses—Boise has hot springs and a pretty good jogging track, I’m told—but Treefort, now in its eighth year, is significant for the Boise tourism industry in the same way I’m sure those summer getaways are for Poland or Serbia or Iceland. Sponsored by Idaho Tourism and Boise State University, Treefort takes over Idaho’s capital for five days each spring, shutting down main roads and making use of nearly every venue downtown. Drawing in around 400 bands and 20,000 punters each year, Treefort turns the decidedly sleepy Boise, with its population of 226,000, into a slightly less sleepy haven of art and indie rock. But despite the population swell, this isn’t Indio; its community spirit and idiosyncratic booking (the headliners this year were Toro Y Moi, Liz Phair, Vince Staples and hometown heroes Built to Spill) mean Treefort is a far cry from your average megafestival. The presence of buzzy left-field international artists like Japan’s Chai and Australia’s Divide and Dissolve, too, means there’s a certain trendy oddness to Treefort’s aesthetic.

When Treefort offered to fly me from Australia to Idaho for the festival I was skeptical. There’s something incredibly crass about these kinds of large-scale festivals backed by government agencies to lure in young people, tourism dollars and, perhaps, university enrollments; while they can occasionally be transcendent (I’m thinking of Tasmania’s Mona Foma), I find that a sudden influx of newcomers to a town often highlights the inadequacies of arts funding during the rest of the year. Stuffing venues and turning non-venue spaces into venues for one week feels like an easy way to spend arts budget without having to think long term about the sustainability of a community.

Going in with preconceived notions about the event I’m supposed to be reviewing probably makes me a bad critic, but honestly, find me the critic who doesn’t roll their eyes at the newest festival on the market; the modern music industry is a diseased ouroboros where festival bookers pay top dollar for the artists with the largest streaming numbers and playlist curators give precedence to the artists with the biggest font size on the poster. An algorithm didn’t book Coachella but it might as well have, and you could probably say the same about many of the other major festivals around the world. Slight deviations aside, the posters for Coachella and Lollapalooza and Primavera are basically the same words in different fonts. I’m not trying to sound like the fun police (I love Coachella as much as the next Instagram-obsessed Generation Z deadshit) but there’s a lot wrong with festivals right now. Like new iPhones and Iron Man sequels, you can’t help but gaze upon the newest festival and think “Did we really need another one?”

Fortunately, Treefort Music Festival turned out to be a pleasantly unwieldy experience: a strange and unique celebration of community and culture that, despite my many opinions on The Problem With Festivals, left me feeling a lot warmer on them by the time it was over. I’ve been thinking a lot about what in particular made Treefort feel more special than your bog standard music festival, and have come to the conclusion that the human element of it all—the handmade-ness, the decidedly bizarre and stridently anti-algorithm lineup—created an environment surprising and engaging at every moment.

Photo by Matthew Wordell

In its organization and programming, Treefort strikes somewhere between the industry-focused scramble of Austin, Texas’ SXSW and more traditional festivals that orient around a main stage and other, smaller stages. There’s a large outdoor stage in the center of downtown Boise, but the vast majority of the festival’s programming takes place in Boise’s many venues and bars, meaning that you have to spend a little bit of time walking around the city if you really want to see everything. The lineup leans heavily on the hundreds of unsigned or unknown artists from around the west coast that fill the outer reaches of the bill. These bands usually play a couple of times at different venues, as well as unofficial parties that are free to the public. If it sounds like chaos, that’s because it is; you can hear music nearly everywhere, whether you’re in your hotel or walking through the city. But it also alleviates the stress of trying to see everything. Many of the best acts from the week were ones that I happened upon, rather than ones that I had set out time to see. All of my favorite Treefort 2019 artists, in fact, felt strangely outside what an algorithm might show me in a "Daily Mix" playlist, outside what friends or colleagues might ordinarily recommend. Treefort felt decidedly unfashionable, which is a wonderful, and increasingly rare, trait.

A perfect example of this was Austin band Why Bonnie, my favorite band that I saw at Treefort and one that I undoubtedly would never have heard otherwise. I didn’t intend to see Why Bonnie, but after serendipitously hearing them soundcheck as I walked past an outdoor stage, I decided to catch their final Treefort set. Why Bonnie make low-key indie rock that probably doesn’t have any place in the current zeitgeist, but is wonderful all the same; their music is a kind of winsome, muscular jangle that centers the lyrics of lead singer and guitarist Blair Howerton. With a knack for hooks but no propensity for showiness, Howerton writes with an eye for fine detail, in the style of Real Estate’s Martin Courtney or Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison. Their daytime Treefort set, to a scant handful of people, felt frustratingly under-attended; they are the kind of band that I would love to find an audience. There’s nothing particularly showy about a great quality indie band like Why Bonnie, but because of that it feels like I might not have found them during a more traditional festival.

Other discoveries felt particularly attuned to the part of the world I happened to be in, artists from Boise and the surrounding area who had rarely played outside their hometowns. One such band, Seattle trio Tres Leches, put up a particularly thrilling Saturday evening set on local community radio station Radio Boise’s public stage. Despite playing to a relatively small crowd, Tres Leches went all out, their wonky, melodic, bilingual punk providing an abrasive counterpoint to some of the more straightforward wares being shown at Treefort. The gleeful chaos of the band’s live performance—at one point, lead singer Ulises Mariscal threw his bass onto the stage—spoke to their visible excitement at playing the festival. For a band that’s only really played around such a tight-knit scene, playing a festival a state over can seem like a dream.

Similarly gleeful, although perhaps for not quite the same reason, were Nagoya, Japan four-piece Chai, who played some of the most rapturously received sets of the festival. Chai, touring their second album for Burger Records, Punk (after releasing a series of EPs on Sony Japan), pair a kind of insurrectionary feminist attitude with late 2000s indie aesthetics; their music can be, at times, a dead ringer for Franz Ferdinand, Phoenix, or CSS. Chai’s guiding principle is a concept they call “neo-kawaii”—essentially, an appeal to broaden cultural ideas of what’s cute. Chai’s sets were undoubtedly the most raucous of the festival; trying to get into their packed set at the surreal El Korah Shrine venue, a strange clubhouse with murals of ancient Egypt on the walls, was futile. The lucky few hundred who did pack into the space turned it into a heated, livewire mass, where your only option was to either move or risk getting crushed by the crowd. The reaction to Chai isn’t surprising; the band radiate positivity. Lead singer Kana rarely sports anything other than a wide grin, and it’s hard not to grin back. The language barrier (Chai play all their songs in Japan and only speak enough English between songs to explain neo-kawaii) didn’t seem to be a problem for the Boise audience. By the time they played their final set of the festival on the main stage, it felt like they had been anointed de facto Treefort MVPs; they were the only band across the week called back for an encore.

Photo of Chai at Treefort by Matthew Wordell

The headline sets at Treefort were great, but they often didn’t feel like the main event. Really, though, the attendees of the festival seemed to be up for anything; on night one, a crowd of hundreds snaked around Boise’s Knitting Factory, trying to get in to see Jpegmafia and Vince Staples. The kids who made it into the small, sweaty venue—a little under 1000 capacity, small for a Vince Staples show these days—seemed ecstatic, but those who didn’t make it in weren’t phased. There’s always something else to see, after all. Liz Phair had fun with her unruly Friday night main stage crowd. A group of teens clutching each other and swigging from hip-flasks had congregated at the front of the stage, screaming along to every word. “I was always a rowdy crowd member,” she told the audience, “so I love that you are, too!” Very few sets at Treefort felt high stakes, even the most highly attended ones like Phair and Staples. After his show, Staples tweeted a sweet quip about Boise. “Wow [B]oise Idaho went crazy sold out and still had a line around the corner,” he wrote, “next time we will do two shows and also a potluck style dinner make your best casserole dish!” It’s funny, but after attending Treefort, it doesn’t seem that unlikely.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

If you’ve been lucky enough to catch Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers on their extensive U.S. tour as Better Oblivion Community Center, chances are you’ve caught some pretty excellent cover songs from the band. So far in the run, the duo have performed set highlight renditions of the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait,” Death Cab For Cutie’s “Title and Registration,” and the Killers’ “Human,” among others. But last night at Brooklyn Steel, they played Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga’s “Shallow,” the Grammy and Oscar-winning single from A Star Is Born.

Even though the clip of the performance is a shoddy cell-phone video, it’s easy to tell that the performance was pretty stunning. Oberst serves as perfectly acceptable Bradley Cooper but it’s really Bridgers who steals the show taking her undeniable wail to the next level. Also, this cover has been a long time coming as Bridgers tweeted in February: “petition to make conor do shallow with me on tour.” Watch it below.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

It's hard to believe that baby boomers were once a part of the counterculture that defined the 1960s, participating in the sex and substance experimentation they'd rail against later in life. And if there’s one event that best encapsulates the generation’s hippie past, it’s Woodstock, the three-day festival in the Catskill mountains that drew 400,000 of them together in 1969.

Woodstock holds a special place in our cultural history, and now the festival industry is a billion-dollar business, so it’s no wonder its creators have tried to rebottle the lightning of that magical weekend a number of times over the years. With the PR nightmare of Woodstock ’99 all but forgotten and festival-fatigued millennials tiring of seeing the same artists on every billing, Woodstock’s organizers are pulling out all the stops for a 50th anniversary blowout. Packed with legacy acts like John Fogerty and contemporary icons like Jay-Z, the lineup for the August 16-18, 2019 event dropped last week and was met with mixed reactions. Could a roster so clearly curated to appeal to both the Coachella and “Oldchella” crowds be too weird a mix of artists to appeal to both generations?

To better gauge Woodstock 50’s allure, we talked to Boomers who attended the original weekend back in ’69. They were happy to share their opinions on the lineup’s artists, how they imagine the two weekends will compare, and whether or not this nostalgia trip is something they’d attend.

“I have no idea who most of these artists are, to be honest. I saw Melanie is going to be there. The Dead are doing it and they didn’t even play at the original. Country Joe is coming but without the Fish. This is going to appeal to a different generation.”

“The amenities will probably be better [at Woodstock 50]. I hope kids avail themselves of the medics. At the original, I was walking around limping and knew I had something in my foot so I went to the medical tent and got a thorn removed that was already abscessing.”

“The food will likely be better too. There wasn’t enough food at the original. Joan Baez brought this thing of blue cheese with her backstage and nobody was eating it, so when she went on, she just threw it out to the crowd and everyone just began fighting for pieces, they were so hungry.”

“I don’t know if they’re selling VIP tickets to this one. The people I know would want to come with a trailer on site and get more of a luxury experience. I’m not going to go hang out for three days in the mud. I’ll pass.”

- Lois Weiss, New York, NY

I’m somewhat impressed. Going up this lineup, there’s only a few names I recognize from my era. You got Santana, Robert Plant, Fogerty, Melanie. Younger acts? Like I say, I’m very versed in music. I listen to Spotify all the time. Killers, Lumineers, I know a lot of these bands. Maggie Rogers, I like. You got Portugal the Man, Gary Clark Jr.—love him. And on day 3, who doesn’t know Jay-Z, Imaginary Dragons [sic], and Halsey? Again, these are people I listen to. I’m into a lot of different music. A few of these… Larkin Poe—I have no idea who that is.”

“To be honest with you, going to concerts, there’s always a lot of fighting. There was alcohol up there [at the original Woodstock], and I’m only 16 years old. I experimented with pot and whatnot. I’m not saying I was an angel, but that’s as far as I went as far as drugs were concerned. People just pass all sorts of stuff out to you at these concerts, though. But if you gave me three free tickets, no, I wouldn’t go. I’d be more fearful of the way kids are now. You look at somebody the wrong way, they’re gonna pick a fight with you.”

It was a hell of an experience, though, and I hope people get to experience something like what I did.

- Chuck Iasillo, West Chester, NY

Image courtesy of Arthur Edelmann

“As I look through these names, of course there are people like Miley Cyrus and such who are famous now. The older names I’m like wow, they’re going to be there? They’re still playing? Who knew? Country Joe, Canned Heat was there. There’s a lot of people here I don’t know, though. It’s really nice that there’s a lot of people that are a part of that old generation as well as new people because music has changed a lot in 50 years, that’s for sure.”

“Part of the fun of that kind of concert is you’re going to see a lot of people you don’t know. Let’s say you go to see David Crosby and Friends, but you end up staying to see the band after, Dawes, or Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. My feeling is that if you love music, you’re going to love some of this other music.”

“Our generation, the Baby Boom generation, there was a lot of us, and this is the first time we all showed up for something, so it was a total surprise. Nobody knew what to expect. I remember sitting in my car looking out over the whole crowd and it was kind of mind-blowing when the radio came on and said “Woodstock has been temporarily declared the second-largest city in the state and is being classified as a disaster zone.” It’s hard for me to imagine it happening again, having that many people camped out somewhere.”

“I’m sure the new one will have amenities that we didn’t have, especially for hygiene and sanitation. It was pretty sparse. After two or three days we were starting to need a shower and I asked around for one and somebody said, “no, there’s no shower, but there’s this pond over there where you can go skinny dipping.” So, we go down to that pond, and I’ll just say I’d like that pond in my heaven. I’ve never seen that many naked women in my life and I’ll never see that many again.”

“I don’t think they hand out drugs today like they did back then. I remember sitting in this school bus with half the seats taken out and mattresses in the back and this guy comes down the aisle telling his menu, “mescaline, LSD,” and whatever else was around. And that was the first time I ever tripped. Thought I’d be a hot-shot and just take it.”

- Arthur Edelmann, Eugene, Oregon

Image courtesy of Arthur Edelmann

“An impressive lineup, although I confess that I am not familiar with all of the artists. Seems the organizers were aiming to please a wide demographic.

I feel it is important to hear music live, not streamed, and so I am in favor of the performing artist and the audience support.

When the original Woodstock happened, it was at a time and place that was absolutely exploding musically. I don’t think that can ever be replicated, and we honor that time by not trying to duplicate, rather we can reflect upon the magic that was, and then support new artists who have something to say about our lives and times.

And so, I will not go to the 50th anniversary, but I do look back fondly at my time at Woodstock when I was this fourteen-year-old Canadian girl, who unknowingly found herself at The Farm, wandering around on my own, feeling safe in the embrace of the music and the people who were so in love with life, and the hope that the world was ready for change.”

- Brenda Stevenson, Village of Sturgeon Point, Ontario

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Bertsch (far right)

“I don’t know any of these new guys, and I’m someone with music always on! Portugal—there’s one. Janelle Monae, I love her. A lot of these people are rappers, aren’t they? I knew every single one of the bands at the first concert. I loved them all. This one, I know maybe not even half. I’m 71 now. These aren’t my people.”

“I went to the first one because I was a hippie. I was a bus person. I went with Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm. I see this one is scheduled for all the way in August, whereas, with the first one, I hooked up with Wavy and the Merry Pranksters with like two days’ notice.”

“If I was going to go, it’d be to day one. The second day, The Dead’s playing and I lived with The Grateful Dead and was not a big fan. They’re all gone anyway. We were at the overdose tent for a while. We all got overdosed. I don’t remember a lot of the first one, but I do remember it being magical. This doesn’t look magical to me. It looks too planned. It reminds me of Coachella, which Woodstock was not like.”

- Jeanne Bertsch, Los Angeles, CA

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

Rapper Nipsey Hussle has reportedly died, after being shot outside his clothing shop in Los Angeles on Sunday 31 March. The city mayor's Crisis Response Team confirmed the tragic news on Sunday evening. Hussle was 33 years old.

A strong member of his community, Hussle (born Ermias Ashgedom) was known not just for his music – which included a series of acclaimed mixtapes, as well as the famous YG collaboration "FDT" (aka Fuck Donald Trump) – but also his investments in the people and businesses of the Crenshaw area of LA.

Hussle had just purchased the L-shaped plaza where his clothing store, Marathon Clothing, was located. In February 2019, Forbes reported that self-made millionaire Hussle and his business partner had purchased the lot for "a couple million" and had plans to turn it into a six-storey residential building, with a revamped shopping area below. It was the next step in Hussle's entrepreneurial career, which at one point saw him sell a mixtape for $100 (Jay Z bought 100 copies).

His debut album Victory Lap received a nomination for best rap album at this year's Grammy Awards, sliding in next to records from Cardi B, Mac Miller, Pusha T and Travis Scott. Drake, who won a Grammy that evening and collaborated with Hussle in 2009, took to Instagram with a tribute. "My whole energy is just at a low right now hearing this. We just linked for the first time in years and said we were gonna do a new song this summer cause it had been too long," he wrote. "You were having the best run and I was so happy watching from distance fam nobody ever talks down on your name you were a real one to your people and to the rest of us."

The Canadian rapper was one of many global stars to react to Nipsey Hussle's death, proof of his impact close to home and far beyond. While on stage in Buenos Aires, fellow south Los Angeles resident Kendrick Lamar led a moment of silence, describing Nipsey Hussle as "our brother, our warrior, our soldier."

Rihanna, J Cole, Meek Mill and Chance The Rapper are among many other names to pay their respects. Hussle was one of three victims in the shooting and the LAPD are currently looking for a suspect. The city's mayor took to Twitter to condemn the violence, stating: "Our hearts are with the loved ones of Nipsey Hussle and everyone touched by this awful tragedy. LA is hurt deeply each time a young life is lost to senseless gun violence."

You can find Noisey on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.

In January when Kim Kardashian tweeted a photo of Timothée Chalamet, Kid Cudi, Pete Davidson, and Kanye West at a dinner table, fans of the crew desperately wanted to be a fly on the wall at Nobu Malibu. We may not know the entire scoop, but thanks to Pete Davidson we're one step closer to some intel. During Vanity Fair's Take a Lie Detector Test, Davidson and Machine Gun Kelly take turns interviewing each other while hooked up to a polygraph test. Kelly asks Davidson who picked up the check, and the Saturday Night Live cast member is glad to set the record straight. "I did," he said through a smirk. "I want people to know this." No lies detected.

According to Davidson, the dinner was originally between him and Cudi, but that didn't stop Kanye from ordering the most expensive things on the menu. "Kanye kept ordering the whole entire time," Davidson told Kelly. "I didn't know he was coming and I already put my card down to pay because I thought it was just me and Cudi and then Chalamet showed up and Kanye showed up and I was like, 'Oh fuck.' Then I had to book two more gigs in Ohio." Machine Gun Kelly is asking the burning questions we all want to know when he asks if 'Ye's a dessert guy (because ice cream can't possibly be the only thing that makes him happy ). "He's an order the fucking everything because I can and then we all have one bite, maybe... because fuck you... guy."

Davidson doesn't give us the entire rundown on the night, but he's dropping enough breadcrumbs to conclude that Kanye probably isn't the best date. Not only did he show up to dinner unexpected, but by ordering some of the most expensive things on the menu and barely eating them he committed a cardinal sin. Yeah, all of this checks out.

Kristin Corry is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey US.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

When Maximum Rocknroll announced in mid-January that it would cease publication of its print zine following the May issue—ending at #432 to be exact—there was swift public outcry from punks around the world. As expected, plenty of reminiscing ensued online, which is exactly where all future MRR content would be housed from that point forward.

Longtime Maximum Rocknroll devotees praised the zine and its volunteer bean counters for listening to and reviewing every shitty demo cassette they got mailed—especially considering that so many of those reviews represented the first pieces of press for fledgling punk bands. Even more so, they waxed poetic about how MRR and its founder, the late Tim Yohannan, worked to connect underground and under-recognized scenes from one zip code to the next, encouraging the discovery of like-minded (and approachable) musicians, label founders, music writers, and zine nerds.

That last bit is key, of course. Maximum Rocknroll was founded by outsiders, for outsiders, and so much of its mission over the 36 years of its print existence has been to empower the latter group by exposing it to networks of subcultures that adhere to a similar code of defiance. And, in turn, to facilitate relationships between those networks.

In the early 90s, the zine went one step further by converting what it describes as its "relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands and scenes from every inhabited continent of the globe" into the most crucial guide of touring resources for the touring punk band without any resources whatsoever. Over the next decade, copies of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life could be found in every rickety 80s conversion van coasting through Ohio with a U-Haul in tow and a Minor Threat sticker clinging to its back window. Just ask Beto about it.

The origins of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life can be traced back to the June 1989 issue of Maximum Rocknroll (#73) in which Kamala Parks wrote a column titled, "Book Your Own Fucking Tour." In it, Parks, who was both a regular contributor and "shitworker" for MRR in the 80s, as well as a cofounder of Berkley's 924 Gilman St., a storied all-ages punk venue, went through the tips and processes she used to book tours for Bay Area bands like Operation Ivy, Neurosis, and Crimpshine.

Broken down into seven distinct steps—such as "Step 1: Getting connections with all the happening people in the world of Punk Rock" and "Step 4: Start calling for Chrissakes!"—the column championed etiquette, preparation, and organization by way of "lots and lots" of forms (even though forms are "very unpunky"). At the end, the powers that be at Maximum Rocknroll also included an announcement in which they wondered aloud about running a section in each issue that would list "bookers and their cities and phone numbers, as well as whether it’s a club or not, all-ages or not." Bookers would be encouraged to send in postcards with their pertinent info and to do so each month so that MRR could keep track of turnover. Bands would be encouraged to send in both good and bad comments about those bookers.

The monthly "Book Your Own Fuckin' Tour" section of Maximum Rocknroll grew into a massive undertaking that required its own pressing. Book Your Own Fuckin' Life debuted with its 1992 edition and did more than just offer contact info for bookers. It provided listings of other bands, labels, venues, radio stations, distributors, record and book stores, zines, and other miscellaneous tools—per state, per province, and per country. There were now thousands of real phone numbers to call real humans, and there were real addresses to mail real music to real mailboxes. For the cover price of a buck, your band ostensibly had all it needed to book its own tour.

"I definitely had copies of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life before I had copies of Maximum Rocknroll," remembers Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! and the Devouring Mothers. "It was this holy grail of information, particularly in south Florida. I specifically remember getting the contact for the Legion of Doom in Columbus and thinking 'I have their address now and can send them a tape.' It was how I got ahold of ABC No Rio for the first time. The resource of like, 'There’s the fucking address.'"

"I remember seeing a copy at this record store in Rapid City, South Dakota. At that point, we didn't know anybody, so it was cool just to see an opportunity to book shows in other places," explains Kody Templeman, from Wyoming bands the Lillingtons and Teenage Bottlerocket. "I was stoked on it. When the next issue came out, we put our stuff in there and used that to book pretty much all of the first Lillingtons tour." (Their listing is in the '96 edition.)

"[The members of Chisel] all went to college in Indiana and started making friends in the Chicago punk scene, but as far as touring goes, Book Your Own Fuckin' Life got us out and around the Midwest," explains Ted Leo of Chisel, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, and The Both. "We knew where shows were happening, we just didn’t know who to talk to. The great thing about Book Your Own Fuckin' Life was all the people in it who didn't work at clubs and weren't inundated with demos. They were just invested in having a scene and making things happen."

Some of those people were also volunteering to collect and slog through the mailbags of listings that came in after the zine put out its annual call. While Book Your Own Fuckin' Life was shepherded by Maximum Rocknroll, a collaborator was enlisted every year to help co-present the next issue in return for a little bit of money, some shared distribution, and exposure alongside the MRR anti-brand. The only tricky thing was that "co-present" primarily boiled down to being responsible for piecing the whole thing together in the most digestible and comprehensible way possible—typos be damned.

Minneapolis-based anarcho-punk collective Profane Existence, which exists to this day, took on the unenviable task that first year. They also began the tradition of including a foreword detailing how laborious and painstaking the process of wading through thousands of sometimes-legible postcards truly was. Indeed, looking back at those 65 pages of listings from the '92 edition and finding entries from the likes of Screeching Weasel, Born Against, and Rancid (the last of which includes a home phone number for "Lint," a.k.a. Tim Armstrong), the effort remains very appreciated.

As one of several laborers who toiled through the '94 edition of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, Melanie Walski was a privileged recipient of her very own foreword. The fun screed begins, simply, "I didn’t know exactly what the hell I was going to live through when I agreed to work on this thing. It really sucked." She wrote it as a part of Rocco Publishing, a tiny Chicago-based operation that mostly released small runs of zines and 45s and partnered with MRR to work on the third issue of BYOFL. [Full disclosure: the former head of Vice Media’s documentary films unit Jason Mojica was a co-founder of Rocco and the point person while working on the issue.]

"We were all like 20 years old. I was at SIU-Carbondale then and remember being home and picking up just dozens and dozens of postcards that people would send in," says Walski, now a professor of literacy at Northern Illinois University. "We'd enter them into this big old desktop computer that Jason had. No one really had computers. Pretty much anyone who sent in something, as long as they met the criteria—the ethos of the whole thing—they got in."

There are a few legitimate listings from eventual rockstar bands like A.F.I. and Jimmy Eat World. The latter includes the home address of a young Jim Adkins in Mesa, Arizona, accompanied by the excellent description: "Strongly influenced by MTX, Radon, and Horace Pinker, but don't let those fool you." Another particularly bizarre gem from that '94 issue is for Cook County Hospital in Chicago that reads, "If you’re broke, they have to fix you. If you have a Dr. at home to vouch for you, they will give you free meds." The address and phone number were also included.

"There was so much inaccurate or incomplete information," Walski recalls. "Just trying to locate stuff without the internet, a place where you can just type in 'St. Louis zip code'... I don't remember exactly how we did it but I do remember having physical books of zip codes. It was a big job."

The Book Your Own Fuckin' Life Walski worked on with Rocco had doubled in size from the '92 edition that Profane Existence compiled. Containing a total of 137 pages of listings—and several more pages of ads—the '94 guide even today feels like it was a hefty resource for not only the touring bands, but the kids ready and willing to book basements and VFW halls in their own backwoods and unfrequented towns. A quick scan of the "Promoters & Venues" reveals listings for a brick-and-mortar Pizza Express in San Carlos, Arizona ("The only place where cops yell 'Turn It Up!'"), as well as a spot in Shreveport, Louisiana, called "Jeff's Place" that you have to imagine is no more than the place where Jeff lives.

"I remember being surprised at just how many individual kids were putting on shows in houses and basements. That really impressed me," Walski says. "Kids, not adults. Teenagers were taking these chances, saying, 'You can come and stay at my house.' Trusting each other because everyone shared a certain code."

Thanks to Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, that code spread fast—nearly too fast. As more and more bands ventured outside their localized scenes, spider-webbing subcultures together across North America and other parts of the globe, the resulting tours often presented some entertaining hurdles. Or they flat-out resembled varying degrees of hell. It depended on your threshold for pain.

Booking a three-week tour a couple months in advance seems like the perfectly responsible (maybe too responsible!) approach for any punk band, but when you set out to drive across several time zones, all the while relying on ambitious teenagers to secure proper venues with working electricity, things can get hairy.

For Laura Jane Grace, the first month-long Against Me! tour—which she booked entirely through Book Your Own Fuckin' Life and zine and band pen pals—was actually an entertaining sort of ride: "There was an unreliability that brought a sense of adventure to it. Imagine leaving a cell phone inside some punkhouse and whoever happens to pick it up is who you're booking the show through. They might not even live there by the time the tour rolled around. There was a good chance you'd show up and nobody had any idea a show was happening."

"I believe our first out-of-state punkhouse show was at the Pink House in North Carolina. It was set up by Aaron Cometbus and booked through Book Your Own Fuckin' Life. We showed up and it was seven or eight other bands. You played for five or six songs. And I was happy to play those five or six songs."

Kody Templeman laughs about the first Lillingtons tour, recalling his adventure a little differently: "I'm sure there were plenty of people who were just like, 'Fuck yeah, man, I'm going to put a listing in Book Your Own Fuckin' Life so I can book some bands.' A lot of places were Odd Fellows Halls, and a lot of times shows got shut down by the cops. We'd roll up somewhere and it was like, 'Yeah, we got shut down last week.' You had to call in advance to get directions. It was kind of a crapshoot whether someone would even pick up. You spent a lot of time at the gas station on the payphone with your calling card."

With every new 90s edition of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life, the listings continued to balloon as the underground became exponentially more self-aware. The '96 edition featured 138 pages, while the '99 edition topped out at 153 pages. A lot of those extra listings seemed to have come from bands, distributors, or zines located in originally underrepresented states like Wyoming (see Templeman above) or Rhode Island, as well as countries like Yugoslavia and Argentina (there are a load of Argentina listings). Scenes were no doubt being bolstered or even established as copies of BYOFL landed in the hands of enterprising punks.

As each edition grew in size, the high art of compiling it became increasingly difficult. Rich Black, who formerly put out a long-tenured punk zine in Long Island called Under the Volcano, admits he almost apprehensively accepted the gig of co-presenting the 1997 edition of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life (#6 to those keeping track).

"Maybe it was an appeal in Maximum Rocknroll that said, 'Hey, we're still waiting for someone to collaborate.' It was really out of desperation to bring something into the world that I thought should exist," explains Black. "There was somewhere around 4,500 listings, with the majority of them coming through snail mail. It was a shitshow, but a good shitshow."

Aside from keeping the ship afloat, Black, who after working a union gig for nearly 30 years now puts in hours at a friend's area wine shop, says he was constantly putting out small fires. For instance, he used WordPerfect as opposed to a Mac-compatible word processor preferred by Maximum Rocknroll—so sorting the listings became a nightmare ("I thought I'd just be able to press a button and it would be sorted"). At one point an entire mailbag of postcards disappeared, forcing him to request an extension from Tim Yohannan ("He definitely wanted to call me a fucking asshole"). Submissions came in well after the deadline, followed closely by people complaining about not getting into the issue ("You’re not prepared for that. Like, 'Hey, the deadline was four months ago'"). And then, of course, was the never-ending delight of dealing with hateful listings, both from straight-up Nazis and from bands, bookers, and labels who love holding grudges.

As the 90s plowed forward—a decade blissfully unaware of the looming ubiquity of the internet—annual copies of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life began to seem all but guaranteed, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of short-term "shitworkers" like Black and Walski. Their gumption, however, was not replicated by anyone on the '98 edition, which was simply never published.

The guide triumphantly returned in 1999, even more flush with listings. Compiled by a collection of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life advocates that deemed itself the Amoeba Collective, it now not only sported a web address—where listings could be added or edited at will—it also resembled a punk directory more than ever before. The immense '99 edition reads like a phone book, one in which every high school punk band felt it a rite of passage to submit its name, address, and phone number so that it could confirm its own existence. Some of the bands that had been using the guide for years began to notice that its stronger connections were being run ragged.

"We shortly realized after that first tour of using Book Your Own Fuckin' Life is that it was sort of a tapped-out resource," Laura Jane Grace says. "Every single contact in there had been hit up by so many people. Some of them were well worn and burnt out."

For the late-90s musicians that had already been touring for years, the most important relationships began to materialize as the ones they had forged over those first few tours. Though admittedly imperfect, Book Your Own Fuckin' Life had provided an initial network for punks and hardcore kids who shared similar ideologies—which is exactly what it set out to do. Bands had been empowered to venture outside of their local scenes and connect with bands and bookers from other scenes. And now many of them could take it from there.

"Years later, when Chisel did our first US tour, I'm pretty sure I was still in touch with people I met through that first Midwest tour. Your network just gradually expands as you meet more people," Ted Leo says. "We got shows outside of using Book Your Own Fuckin' Life by not being afraid to talk to people in bands, give them your number, or slide them a demo. We slipped a demo to Seam from Chicago once, and they called us and were just like, 'We're doing a week around the middle south if you’re interested.'"

Templeman figured that contacting bands in cities The Lillingtons wanted to play was the most effective route to getting a show: "I got to be buddies with Bill [Morrisette] from Scooby Don't who's in Dillinger Four now. I would just call him for shows in Minneapolis. Brian Peterson was a booker for the Fireside in Chicago. We ended up getting to know him pretty well. If Book Your Own Fuckin' Life hadn't been around, who knows how far we would've taken the band."

As Book Your Own Fuckin' Life entered the new millennium and the Internet’s endless booking alternatives came into clearer view, those in charge decided to cut the band listings out of print all together. The edition in 2002, which was again compiled by the Amoeba Collective, features a foreword directing all punks to the BYOFL website. With the band listings migrating online-only, the issue itself slimmed down to 101 pages (with way fewer ads). While Book Your Own Fuckin' Life still contained helpful lists of distributors, promoters, and labels, the fact that you could no longer flip to the South Dakota page to see what punk bands with very bad punk-band names are actually from South Dakota felt antithetical to its mission.

Eventually, the advent of MySpace in 2003, as well as the inevitable deluge of online music message boards spelled the end for the print copies of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life. The guide went totally online before inevitably dying its slow death. The site continued to be updated till 2011, which is exactly where it stayed updated until the www.byofl.org address went kaput altogether. And just like that, BYOFL had become a punk relic of a pre-internet age. But that didn't mean it had lost all of its value.

Hether Fortune—a solo artist who previously played in Wax Idols and White Lung—admits that though Book Your Own Fuckin' Life wasn't so much a part of her generation, she still found inspiration in its mission: "I grew up in rural Michigan—so for context the record store I went to in East Lansing called Flat, Black & Circular was like a 45-minute drive. I used to go there all the time as a teenager. One day there was an issue of Book Your Own Fuckin' Life from the 90s. It was massive. I started looking through it and remember being overwhelmed by how many options there were out there. Even if it was outdated, I was like, 'Oh wow, people really do this stuff. By themselves.'"

"I lived in the middle of nowhere. Actually nowhere. There was nothing to do other than hitch rides to shows two hours away in Detroit or sit on the internet," Fortune explains. "The idea had not yet occurred to me that I could create my own thing until I started seeing those zines and found out it was online. Then I was like, "Oh, that’s what you do. You create your own thing wherever you are, whatever you're doing, and that’s how you build a community.'"

So she booked a show 15 minutes from her house. It was 80s-themed and featured around eight bands. "I had drum-and-bass DJs, metalcore bands, emo bands. It was very ambitious." According to Fortune, it was also a wild success. Kids from her high school came because they were excited to have something to do nearby, and in the same way Laura Jane Grace was perfectly happy to travel to North Carolina to play five songs at the Pink House as one of seven bands on a bill, the bands Fortune booked through MySpace were no doubt equally stoked.

In 2019, the heyday of BYOFL feels far gone. Still, the systematic, almost patient approach with which it was compiled and utilized—whether that involved sifting through mailbags of unreadable postcard after unreadable postcard, or crushing your parents' long-distance bill by calling venue after venue in state after state—was nothing if not do-it-yourself. And that still matters to many.

"I definitely look back with rose-colored glasses at the charm of the pre-internet world and a lot of things that were so fun about discovery and personal connection that seemed to take that little bit of extra effort to make," says Ted Leo. "That world is probably not going to come around again. At the same time we still try to bring a lot of young bands out on tour. I talk to them and know what they’re like as people—and they don’t seem to lack something."

Similarly, Laura Jane Grace supported and embodied the spirit of the squats and punkhouses in her early Against Me! years, once noting in a song that the band’s "arenas are just basements and bookstores across an underground America."

"You'd just end up playing the most random places. Some kid’s house in Des Moines, Iowa. A room above a garage where teenage kids are literally throwing themselves through drywall. Everyone's out of their minds on something." she says. "And you’re like, 'How did we get here? Where are we going tomorrow?' You'd play your show, get to stay there, hang out, and drink malt liquor—then onto the next one. It was the best."

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Traditionally, British festivals are centred on mud, camping, and being so consistently drunk that you eventually just give up and vomit down yourself watching Jet (why is it always Jet) at 4PM on the Sunday. But this era – the time of "BUTTSCRATCHER," of Hunter wellies, of lads trying to set fire to tents in Yellow Camp on the last night of Reading – is coming to an end, as all things must.

In many ways, this is a good thing. Music festivals have been responding to changing tastes for years now, meaning that line-ups have become far less rock-centric. Whatever music you’re into, in 2019 there’s probably a place for you to get fucked up in a field listening to it, and I think that’s beautiful. But festivals as a concept are also changing in line with how we live now. They’re moving away from centring on music in the hope of getting as many untapped groups as possible to spend money.

Millennials in particular are susceptible to the “experience economy,” targeted by marketers to pay for adult play areas and coffee liqueur-tasting in order to show everyone on social media the cool places we’re going and ever-more outlandish crap we’re doing. As such, festivals – annual jewels in the crown of that experience economy – are changing and expanding beyond music to recognise that.

The other day, I got a press release for “The world’s first running, music and adventure festival,” and was hit by the realisation festivals are no longer just for people who are there to get a) pissed and b) sunstroke. Festivals are now also for the vile individuals who were good at the bleep test and think that “fun run” is a charity event and not an oxymoron. This is because the general rule has become this: if you can Instagram it, there’s a festival for it.

As such, 2019 will see events like a festival taking place on top of Europe’s largest skiable glacier, and, another edition of Jamie Oliver and Alex James' Big Feastival. It’s only going to get more ridiculous (not to mention more expensive), so I thought I’d get a slice of the sweet cash pie by thinking up some Dynamic New Ideas for Memorable Festival Experiences. I would like to say at this juncture that I am open to financial offers.

The Big Brunch

“With more and more millennials choosing brunch over homeownership, summer 2019 will see the launch of The Big Brunch, an immersive brunch festival. For three days in the Oxfordshire countryside this August, the trendiest meal on the menu will be celebrated with live panels, mimosa demonstrations, and an amazing soundtrack of 'Inhale/Exhale' by NAO pouring out of speakers slightly too loud to talk over, over and over again, for an authentic brunch experience.

VIP tickets include an image taken by this one waiter whose uncanny knack for flattering brunch snaps often captioned 'Sunday with the gang gang' has made him one of the most in-demand names in contemporary photography.”

These lovely people were actually protesting a new drug law outside Parliament in 2015. Soon, that'll be a festival too (Photo: Chris Bethell)

Mummapalooza

“Festival with mum in 2019 at Mummapalooza, the UK’s largest ever gathering of mums*. Michael Bublé, the cast of The Greatest Showman, and The Concept of Going On and On About How Someone’s Left a Spoon on the Side headline, with an amazing selection of attractions like demos on how to Have It All by conveniently buying 14 essential products, and Looking at Philip Schofield and Doing Weird Sighs: Live!

*This statistic is subject to change as we get numbers back on the attendance figures for the 2017 opening of a Tesco Superstore in Coventry.”

Toboggan Fest!

“In 2016, Suggs found a new passion in life: tobogganing. Blending his two great loves – sledging and music – he founded Toboggan Fest!, which will see its inaugural event taking place at the Tamworth Snowdome this July. Designed for those after the thrill of the slopes even in the height of summer, attendees can sled and donut (skiing is banned at Suggs’ personal request) to a soundtrack of Madness and, to be honest, so far nobody else. Suggs just really loves tobogganing. This festival exists because Suggs, a public figure, just really loves tobogganing.”

Work²

“If you’re a young go-getter who works hard and plays even harder, you’ll love Work². Opening its revolving door for the first time ever in 2019, it’s the only UK festival celebrating millennial work culture.

Immerse yourself in our Open Plan Office Arena, where you can complete real tasks, and get around the festival – based in the City of London – on real, social media-friendly red London buses (which also get stuck in traffic for hours at a time!) for the authentic commute experience. With an enviable Huel bar, and a food selection of Boots meal deals, and those bentos from Wasabi that inexplicably end up costing a tenner once you’ve got a Diet Coke as well, Work² is not to be missed!"

Instagram: The Festival

“If you LOVE festivals but HATE bands, Instagram: The Festival is for you! We provide the bits of music festivals that your followers are dying to see – such as a field for you to stand in while having your photo taken, and an extremely far-away stage that doesn’t really show up in phone photos but will look alright on your grid – without any of the actual festival-going! You'll find glitter painting (biodegradable glitter! #oneplanet for a discount) and flower crowns on site, and state of the art big screens from which you can film blurry live performances with awful sound quality for your Story. Get your tickets today.”

@hiyalauren