Sublime have announced their first album in 30 years. The news comes two years after the band’s Coachella reunion shows, where the late Bradley Nowell’s son Jakob officially joined the lineup. Until the Sun Explodes arrives on June 12 via Atlantic, and the title track is out now along with a music video featuring skateboard icons Christian Hosoi and Omar Hassan. Check it out below.
The new LP includes the previously released single ‘Ensenada’, as well as H.R. of Bad Brains, Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise, G. Love, Skegss, and FIDLAR. “The last Sublime record that will ever be made is Self-Titled,” Nowell said in a press release. “There’s no replacing history, period. Until the Sun Explodes the album is an epilogue, and ‘Until the Sun Explodes’ the single is the epilogue to the epilogue. It is a tribute to the expansive works of Sublime, it is an acknowledgment for all that my father has done for me my entire life, and most importantly it is a thank you. I love you dad, and I owe you my life.”
“This song is the title track of our new album and it expresses the gratitude we all feel as well as our intent for the future of our band and the music we love!” Bud Gaugh commended. “Until the Sun Explodes is our reality. Thank you for enjoying life with us!”
“I am really excited about the album that’s coming out,” Eric Wilson added. “I think it will set the tone for the summer of 2026!”
Until the Sun Explodes Cover Artwork:
Until the Sun Explodes Tracklist:
1. Ensenada
2. Wizard
3. Can’t Miss You
4. Backwards [feat. FIDLAR]
5. Maybe Partying Will Help Pt 1
6. Favorite Songs [feat. Skegss]
7. Personal Hell
8. F.T.R.
9. Evil Men
10. Trey’s Song [feat. H.R. of Bad Brains]
11. Casino Taormina
12. The Problem With That Is It Makes Me Stoked
13. Gangstalker
14. Figueroa
15. Froggy
16. Come Correct [feat. G. Love]
17. What For
18. 247-369 [feat. Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise]
19. Maybe Partying Will Help Pt 2
20. Until the Sun Explodes
21. Thanx Again
By Maria Bregman, a London-based art critic, writer, and curator. She has curated solo exhibitions for Zurab Tsereteli, president of a leading national academy of arts, and her criticism has been published in outlets such as ArtCulture.UK, Creativity’s UK, and international editions of ELLE, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. A member of several professional writers’ and journalists’ unions, her own literary work has been recognised with multiple international awards.
Blending the boundaries of visual and literary art, Olga Puzikova designs spaces of art where the mundane realities of life intersect with the hidden magic of life.
“The sky is blue.” (2026)
In the scene depicted in Olga Puzikova’s “The sky is blue.” (2026), a man is seen in haste walking past a stark and recognizable apartment block. He holds a coffee cup and is bent over in his haste to face whatever unseen burden awaits him in his morning commute. Yet floating above the pavement, unseen by the man in his haste, two cherubs blow trumpets into the cold air. To understand the scene properly, however, one must step to the side of the canvas. There, in archaic script along the side of the canvas itself, is written: “Halt thee, abide a while, cast thine eyes around… behold, and draw thy breath deep.” This is not only a demand upon the viewer but is itself emblematic of Puzikova’s journey as an artist. Born in Samara and currently residing in Dubai, Puzikova’s work is marked by the tremendous displacement of immigration and the personal displacement of motherhood. These kinds of tectonic shifts in life often serve to cleave an artist’s work in two. For Puzikova, however, it seems to have distilled it into something more essential. Having moved away from more broadly hopeful work, Puzikova’s more current work is marked by melancholy.
While moving away from earlier, perhaps more broadly optimistic imagery, she has created a space of melancholic reflection. Her classical training is the scaffolding for what has become a deeply conceptual, almost literary exploration of human fragility.
“Enigmatic City” (2025)
This narrative layering is taken to new depths in “Enigmatic City” (2025). Here, the story of Saint Gerasimos and the lion is enacted on a cotton stage. The imagery is subdued, slightly surreal, and theatrical, perhaps reminiscent of an artist such as Marcel Dzama, while the use of text is reminiscent of Moscow Conceptualism. Puzikova’s use of archaic English is part of her strategy of estrangement. By wrapping her images in phrases such as “fear not, nor be thou dismayed, for thou art not alone,” she creates a space between herself and our casual, throwaway use of language. The words have the weight of incantation, and we are forced into a slow and considered consumption of the image.
There is a similar resonance here to the use of text over traditional form as deployed by Grayson Perry to examine modern morality, although there is a sense in which Puzikova’s work is more existentially concerned than sociologically.
Her series “Questions and Answers” grapples with the moral and spiritual weight of modern life. In “Once at the Museum,” the writing around the edges of the piece discusses the constant process of “’twixt truth and falsehood, ’twixt faith and forsaking.” It is a heavy subject matter, but it is presented in a surprisingly gentle way.
“Between Hope and Despair”, 2025
In her more representational work, such as “Catcher. (May the seeker be heard).” or “Between Hope and Despair,” there is a stillness and magic to her depictions of landscapes and solitary figures that reminds one of the work of Peter Doig in his more ethereal moments. A lone boat, a ladder leaning against a mysterious terrain; it is archetypal subject matter stripped of its grandeur and left with only its longing.
Puzikova’s current series of work may not scream for attention in a crowded room. It waits instead for those willing to look at it obliquely, to follow the writing around the edges of the canvases, and to see the hidden angels with their trumpets in the margins of our busy world.
By Maria Bregman, a London-based art critic, writer, and curator. She has curated solo exhibitions for Zurab Tsereteli, president of a leading national academy of arts, and her criticism has been published in outlets such as ArtCulture.UK, Creativity’s UK, and international editions of ELLE, Cosmopolitan and Esquire. A member of several professional writers’ and journalists’ unions, her own literary work has been recognised with multiple international awards.
Michelle Alexander is a Canadian-born artist living and working between Montreal and Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Miami, an Associate’s degree in Applied Science from Parsons School of Design, and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Design Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, The Current (Stowe, VT), and galleries at both the University of Miami and SAIC.
Working across image and material, Alexander explores the body’s response to internal tension, examining themes of identity, self-perception, and the complexities of inhabiting one’s own skin. Her practice centres on process — melting, manipulating, and destabilising materials — to make visible what is often unseen, creating spaces that confront discomfort while inviting viewers to recognise themselves within a shared experience.
Her recent sculpture, The Mother. The Sister. The Pressureexemplifies this approach: a skin-like torso constructed from fabric and glue, cinched with staples and layered with delicate tulle inspired by familial wedding dresses. Both fragile and constricted, the work reflects the emotional weight of inherited expectations around womanhood, marriage, and identity. The Pressure was the centrepiece of her curated exhibition Connective Thread, which brought together six women artists to explore the tensions between fragility and resilience within collective female experience.
You studied fashion design at Parsons before going on to do your MFA. How much does that training still live in the work?
It’s still very present. Fashion taught me how garments shape the body and how much pressure lives within something that is meant to look effortless. It also showed me how clothing can both conceal and accentuate the body. That tension between hiding and highlighting the body has stayed with me.
Fashion also trains you to think in terms of seams, tension, structure, and how fabric quietly directs posture and movement. It can restrict the body while altering how it is perceived. That way of thinking about the body never left me.
In my sculptures, garments become stand-ins for the body itself. I stretch them, pin them, harden them, or let them collapse. They carry the memory of being worn and the pressure that comes with it.
Did you always work in three dimensions, or did you come to sculpture from somewhere else?
I actually started in photography, painting, and drawing. Over time, those media began to feel too distant from my body. I wanted the work to exist physically in space, to have weight and tension.
Sculpture allowed me to work more directly with materials that had already lived alongside a body. Once I began building with materials, it felt much closer to how I think and experience the world. Having something physically present in space also creates a kind of confrontation or reckoning. The viewer can’t just look past it. They have to encounter it with their own body.
There’s something very physical about how you work: stapling, cinching, melting. What does that intensity give the work that a more controlled process wouldn’t?
Physicality is important because the work is about pressure and endurance. The process mirrors that. I’m pulling, binding, and stretching materials until they either hold or fail.
The work is deeply informed by its physical process and transformation. It isn’t performance, but the act of making is performative in its own way. There’s a transfer of pressure from my body to work.
If the process were too controlled, the work would lose that tension. I want the materials to show strain. Those moments are important to me because they expose the limits of control. The material begins to speak back, and the work starts to carry the pressure it was built under.
How do you know when a piece is finished?
Usually, when the piece reaches a point where it feels like it’s holding something emotionally. I’m looking for a balance where the work feels tense but stable enough to exist.
Often, that moment comes when the material stops resisting me and starts speaking back. When the form begins to feel like a body rather than an object, I know it’s close.
It’s also a process of letting go of traditional ideas of beauty and pushing past my own comfort zone. Sometimes the work only feels finished once I’ve allowed it to become something less controlled or less polished than I initially intended.
The dress in The Pressure carries elements of your mother’s wedding and your sister’s wedding. Did making the work change how you feel about those events, or about your own relationship to that ritual?
It made me realise how layered those objects are. A wedding dress carries a lot of expectations about love, family, and what life should look like. It also carries a lot of pressure around appearance, the expectation that on that day, you embody a flawless version of yourself and perform a kind of idealised perfection.
Working with those references allowed me to hold both the tenderness of those memories and the pressure that sits alongside them. The piece isn’t rejecting those rituals, but it does acknowledge how heavy they can feel. In many ways, it reflects the same pressures I explore throughout my work, the quiet weight placed on bodies to perform an ideal.
Your bio states you “remain stuck with the friction of what happened,” which implies the artwork doesn’t resolve things. Is that frustrating, or is staying stuck the point?
I don’t think the work is meant to resolve anything. If anything, it holds the moment where things remain unresolved.
Staying with that friction feels honest to me. The body doesn’t neatly process pressure or memory. Sometimes it just carries it. You can understand something emotionally and even move through it, but that doesn’t mean the body processes it at the same rate, or even processes it at all.
What you’ve been through stays with you in some form. The pressure doesn’t just disappear. The sculptures reflect that. They sit in that tension rather than offering closure.
What made you want to curate Connective Thread, rather than just participate in it?
Curating it actually came out of the fact that if I hadn’t organised it, the exhibition wouldn’t have existed. I developed the concept, pitched it to the gallery, and reached out to the artists who ultimately participated in the show.
Curating it allowed me to think more intentionally about how different practices speak to each other. I’m interested in how artists carry personal histories and how those experiences surface through material.
Connective Thread brought together artists who were each dealing with the body, identity, or memory in different ways. Seeing those works in conversation created a kind of collective language that felt larger than any one piece.
Are there any artists whose work you keep coming back to?
I often return to artists who treat the body as something both vulnerable and powerful. Joan Semmel is someone whose work I often think about. In many of her paintings, she leaves her head outside the frame, so the viewer sees the body from her perspective rather than as an object. That shift allows the viewer to inhabit the body rather than observe it from a distance.
I also return to Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the quiet power of his work. The way viewers physically engage with his pieces and become part of the work is incredibly moving to me.
Both artists approach the body in very different ways, but they share a sensitivity to how a viewer physically and emotionally encounters the work.
There is a quiet anxiety that many readers carry but rarely admit: we know classic books are important, yet we struggle to finish them.
In a world that celebrates reading as a sign of depth and intellect, not finishing a book can feel like a personal failure. But the reality is far more common than we think.
Recent studies suggest that nearly 3 in 10 people struggle to finish what they read, and many find it difficult to focus for more than a few minutes at a time, according to research by The Reading Agency. Other surveys indicate that more than half of adults haven’t completed a full book in over a year, based on data from WordsRated. Even among people who start books regularly, a significant portion never finish them.
And if finishing an average book is already difficult, what about classic literature?
Thick novels, dense language, unfamiliar cultural contexts — classics often demand a level of patience and attention that feels increasingly out of sync with modern life. It is not uncommon to begin a book like Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick with enthusiasm, only to quietly abandon it a few chapters in.
This creates a paradox.
We believe these works are valuable — even essential — yet we cannot seem to stay with them long enough to experience what makes them so.
But perhaps the problem is not the book.
And perhaps it is not us either.
The hidden value of books we cannot finish
Classic literature is often described as containing something essential about human experience — not just stories, but patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that repeat across time.
When we are overwhelmed, restless, or searching for meaning, books can offer a kind of quiet guidance. Finishing a meaningful book can feel like a form of mental relief — almost like a reset, or even a kind of emotional “massage” for the mind.
But this value is not always immediately visible.
Take Madame Bovary, for example.
At a surface level, it is easy to misunderstand the novel as simply the story of a woman who repeatedly betrays her husband. Without deeper context, Emma Bovary may appear impulsive, selfish, even frustrating.
But the novel becomes something else entirely when we recognize a familiar pattern.
We all know people — or have been those people — who constantly feel that life is unfair. Who believe that if only they had different circumstances, different opportunities, or a different identity, everything would change. Who live in a permanent state of dissatisfaction with the present.
In that sense, Emma Bovary is not distant or abstract.
She is everywhere.
And when we begin to see that, the book changes.
The difficulty, then, is not that the book lacks meaning —
but that we have not yet found the angle through which it becomes meaningful to us.
Maybe it’s not about discipline
It is tempting to explain unfinished books as a failure of discipline. We assume we lack focus, patience, or commitment.
But there is another possibility: maybe we simply have not met the right book at the right moment.
Books are not static objects. They interact with our current state of mind, our experiences, and our questions. A book that feels impossible at one point in life may become deeply resonant at another.
In that sense, not finishing a book is not a failure.
It may simply be a mismatch in timing.
A different way to approach reading
If finishing every book is not the goal, what is?
Perhaps the goal is not to “complete” books, but to enter them — to understand what they are about, what they are trying to say, and whether they speak to us at this moment.
One practical way to do this is to begin with summaries or audio interpretations.
Instead of committing immediately to a long and demanding text, we can first explore its ideas in a lighter form. Platforms like AudiobookHub offer short audio summaries that allow readers to grasp the essence of a book before deciding whether to engage with the full work.
This approach does not replace reading.
It prepares us for it.
Take Frankenstein, for example.
Few would deny its importance, yet many people never finish it. But once we understand its central idea — the creation of life, the consequences of ambition, the tension between creator and creation — the story suddenly feels far more relevant.
In an age defined by artificial intelligence, it is difficult not to see echoes of Frankenstein in contemporary discussions. One might even ask: is modern AI not, in some sense, a new kind of “Frankenstein”?
By first understanding what a book is really about, we reduce the distance between ourselves and the text. What once felt heavy or abstract becomes immediate and recognizable.
Reading as a personal encounter
Ultimately, reading is not a competition, nor a checklist of completed titles.
It is a relationship.
Some books we pass through quickly. Others we return to years later. Some we never finish, yet still carry with us in fragments.
And sometimes, the most important shift is not in the book, but in how we approach it.
We do not need to force ourselves through every page.
We need to find the right entry point.
In that sense, struggling to finish a book is not a sign that something is wrong.
It may simply mean that the conversation between you and that book has not begun — at least not yet.
And when it does, you may find that what once felt unreadable becomes, unexpectedly, essential.
When Gallery A.T. 108 opened at 108 West 25th Street in Chelsea, it announced itself not merely as a new exhibition space but as a considered statement about what contemporary art can do across cultural divides. Central to that statement is Judie Huier Zhao, whose curatorial sensibility and intellectual rigor helped define the gallery’s inaugural exhibition — Presence and Becoming, a solo presentation by scholar-artist Q.X. Wang.
Zhao and gallery founder Annie Teng first met at Sotheby’s, where both moved fluently through the global art world. Teng recognized in Zhao a rare quality: a deep literacy in both Eastern and Western artistic traditions paired with an instinct for nuance. When Teng launched Gallery A.T. 108, she brought Zhao on as a collaborator, trusting her to shape a program that holds scholarly depth and public accessibility in balance.
That balance was evident at the opening, where Zhao moderated a panel discussion with Wang, Teng, and a museum director. The conversation ranged widely: tracing the evolution of ink art from its East Asian classical roots to its contemporary reception in the West, and examining how institutions today navigate the competing demands of cultural stewardship and critical inquiry. Zhao’s questions were precise and generative, drawing out the tensions between tradition and innovation that animate Wang’s practice.
Presence and Becoming earns its title. Through layered compositions and a restrained yet charged visual language, Wang treats identity and perception not as fixed states but as ongoing processes of negotiation. Zhao’s curatorial framing made those themes legible without reducing them — the exhibition functioned simultaneously as aesthetic experience and critical platform, a forum for thinking through how artistic ideas travel and transform across cultures.
For Zhao, curation is fundamentally relational. Her work moves between artists, collectors, and institutions, building conversations rather than simply organizing objects. The Gallery A.T. 108 debut illustrated how that approach can transform an opening into something more durable: not just a launch, but a proposition about the role of art in a globalized world.
As Chelsea continues to recalibrate its place in the contemporary art landscape, Zhao’s contribution offers a model for how curators can do more than mediate: they can orient. By placing Presence and Becoming within both historical depth and global context, she amplified the artist’s voice while staking out her own position in an ongoing and necessary conversation.
There’s so much music coming out all the time that it’s hard to keep track. On those days when the influx of new tracks is particularly overwhelming, we sift through the noise to bring you a curated list of the most interesting new releases (the best of which will be added to our Best New Songs playlist). Below, check out our track roundup for Wednesday, March 25, 2026.
Gelli Haha – ‘Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep’
Gelli Haha has shared a new song, ‘Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep’, which is as colourful and trippy as its accompanying video. It arrives on the heels of the art-pop singer-songwriter’s debut album, Switcheroo, which landed last year.
Squirrel Flower – ‘Wheels’ [feat. Babehoven and Billie Marten]
Squirrel Flower has teamed up with Babehoven and Billie Marten for the new single ‘Wheels’, and you bet there’s some lovely harmonies in there. “‘Wheels’ was recorded live at 12am in a makeshift recording studio that we built in one day in Door County, WI,” Ella Williams explained. “The final vocal take was the original scratch take, sleepy and loose.”
“While on tour a couple years ago, a gas station attendant said to us, ‘may your wheels stay on the ground,'” she added. “I thought that was so beautiful + it inspired the song while driving through a harrowing snowstorm between Boston and the Hudson Valley in February 2025. I had my Townes Van Zandt live cd playing, and sang this song into my phone mic while listening to Townes, dodging ice on the highway. I really wanted to write a song that let my voice shine in a way that my heavier songs don’t always allow. I got to the Babehoven house in Hudson and played it for Maya. She wrote a stanza (‘You said you wanted/ Something I don’t/ I am always coming/ Just as you go’), helping me finish off the song.”
Two Shell – ‘Smile’
Two Shell have dropped a fired-up new song, ‘Smile’. It’s the A side of a new 12″ single that’s available now as a digital purchase and features the B-side ‘Hands Up’.
Snail Mail – ‘Tractor Beam’
Ahead of the release of her new album Ricochet, Snail Mail has unveiled a new single, ‘Tractor Beam’, which she debuted on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. You can read about the song in our track-by-track review of the record.
Bedouine – ‘Long Way To Fall’
Bedouine has announced a new LP, Neon Summer Skin, with a tender, stirring ballad called ‘Long Way to Fall’. The follow-up to 2021’s Waysides is out June 5. “For my 20s and much of my 30s, I couldn’t sit still,” Bedouine shared. “I was so curious about my own independence that it just didn’t occur to me for the longest time to mourn the past. But after that trip to Saudi Arabia, I came home and was so devastated. I couldn’t place the feeling immediately, but as I started writing, I realized I was processing that I wasn’t ready to stop being somebody’s kid. My family has been split apart time and time again, immigrating between Armenia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. I wanted to document and honor my family’s stories.”
Cheekface – ‘Black Site’
Cheekface have a new album on the way, Podium, previewing it today with the quotable, Killers-referencing ‘Black Site’. “I boycotted everything/ Nothing got better, it only got worse/ And now I don’t know where to buy soap,” vocalist/guitarist Greg Katz deadpans at the start.
Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, SURF GANG – ‘Leadbelly’
Only a few songs on Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE’s upcoming double album, POMPEII / UTILITY, produced entirely by SURF GANG, actually finds the underground rappers teaming up. The woozy new single ‘Leadbelly’ is one of those tracks, and it’s lifted from UTILITY, Earl Sweatshirt’s half of the record.
Quiet Light – ‘Postinternetfame’ and ‘Self Tape’
Quiet Light has unveiled two mesmerizing songs, the dreamily infatuated ‘Postinternetfame’ and the more upbeat ‘Self Tape’, from her upcoming mixtape Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2. “’Postinternetfame’ is about loving someone so much that you would do anything to make them stay,” she explained. “Ultimately, however, you know this is out of your control. My muse for this song was someone who really wanted to be famous and would do whatever it took to be famous. My favorite part in the song is when I talk about Jeff Buckley. He was so beautiful and passed so young.”
“There was this really great hill in my neighborhood in Dallas where I grew up. This hill was right next to my house,” she added of ‘Self Tape’. “I would ride my bike up and down this hill. Riding my bike up the hill was a bitch — but riding downhill, well, that was just like heaven. It would be too hot to ride my bike during the day in the Texas summer heat, but at sunset, it was the perfect temperature. This song feels like that. It feels like my first kiss with someone I really wanted. It feels like pure bliss.”
Miki Berenyi Trio – ‘Island of One’
Liush singer Miki Berenyi is back with a hypnotic new song from her Miki Berenyi Trio, ‘Island of One’. “Island of One’ took shape because I became quite obsessed with the track ‘Just a Western’ by Nilüfer Yanya last year, and the Latin-y beat got me inspired,” Berenyi explained. “But I wanted a lively, catchy song to add to our live set, so it ended up less laidback and more 60s-breezy with some driving, scratchy guitars — once all three MB3 members pile in on the embellishments, a song ends up a fair distance from where it started! As ever, recording and production took place in our various home-studio set-ups, and the song was mixed by our brilliant Bella Union labelmate, Paul Gregory…”
“Lyrically, I’m at the age where a lot of my friends have elderly parents who are increasingly reliant on their help,” she continued. “It’s a new phase in a life relationship and can throw up a lot of emotions. But the words apply as much to all manner of family break-ups and the fraying of long-standing friendships. When you’re young, it’s much easier to justify walking away, but I’m acutely aware, as I get older of how important even a thread of connection with people who have shared our lives can be, however difficult those relationships can be to maintain!”
Johanna Samuels – ‘White Limousine’ [feat. Courtney Marie Andrews]
Los Angeles songwriter Johanna Samuels has returned with a new single, ‘White Limousine’, featuring vocals from Courtney Marie Andrews. Marking her signing with Odd Man Out Recordings, it was produced by Jonathan Rado. “It was in a white limousine,” she recalled. “A friend had rented one for her 15th birthday and I felt a pressure rising within myself to be inauthentic that night. I felt a sense of dread come over me, like I was unsafe. I could feel myself growing apart from myself.
“I have found that in the pursuit of art in my adult life, the marketization of the medium and the social setup of the musical community has brought this same feeling up again and again,” she added. “I’ve found myself having to recenter values when I find myself drifting from my authentic heart. I’ve learned that if you don’t make a practice of it, life will recenter your path for you (to remind you who is in charge). This route is oftentimes much less graceful and not as peaceful.”
Hiss Golden Messenger – ‘Shaky Eyes’
Hiss Golden Messenger – the North Carolina-based project of MC Taylor – has shared a driving folk-rock tune, ‘Shaky Eyes’, from his new album I’m People. Opening up about it, Taylor said: “Do we stick with the sure bet? Or, do we gamble on possibility, never knowing how winning is apt to change things we never even considered? Or: Do we drift in the in-between?I grew up in California and big western skies are something that color my dreams still. They make me feel small and ambiguous, and they feel like home. This song is indebted—in title if nothing else—to Lou Mathews’ novel Shaky Town, a piece of work that feels Los Angeles, the Southland, deeply and lovingly. This tune was also written in Santa Fe under a neon mezcal moon.”
Cheekface have announced a new album, Podium, which is set for release on July 28. To mark the news, the Los Angeles trio have shared the nervy, typically quotable ‘Black Site’, alongside a video. Check it out below.
‘Black Site’ follows the previously released single ‘Hostile Street’. While making the new album, Cheekface’s collaborative circle expanded to include Teddy Roxpin (known for his work with Mac Miller), Skatune Network’s Jer Hunter, Elise Okusami of Oceanator, and more.
Duffy, the Welsh singer who stepped out of the public eye after being abducted, held captive for weeks, and raped, will tell her story in a new Hulu Original documentary for Disney+. It marks the first time she will discuss the horrific experience on-camera after opening up about it in an essay published in 2020.
Announcing the documentary at the television festival Series Mania on Wednesday, Disney+ head of content Angela Jain called it “really powerful project.” Jain added, “She has entrusted us with her story, so we really have a huge responsibility to handle this with care and sensitivity, because she’s speaking about what happened to her for the first time.”
The film’s director, Gill Callan, said in a press release: “Duffy’s life has been shaped by success and fame, but equally by pain, defiance, and an irrepressible sense of self. I’m drawn to the tension between vulnerability and confidence in her story and how a person can be deeply affected by their experiences, yet still find a powerful, expressive voice that is unmistakably hers.”
Spring is here, and the vases are out! Whether you’re cutting from the garden or picking up a bunch on the way home, the right vessel makes all the difference. From funky sculptural forms to quietly functional pieces, here are four ceramicists worth appreciating:
Sasha Court
Sasha Court is a ceramicist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who hand-builds voluminous stoneware vessels using the coil technique, working from the bottom up without a plan. She treats each form as a canvas for experimental glaze work, leaning into drips, textures and the charm that comes with building by hand.
Jennifer King (Jenking Studio) works out of Los Angeles making functional and sculptural ceramics populated with characters, faces, florals, insects and animals. Her vessels have a wonderfully uneven, hand-built quality to them — nothing is perfectly balanced, and that is entirely the point.
Vanessa Lim Shu Yi is a London-based ceramicist originally from Singapore, whose wheel-thrown pieces play with traditional forms with a contemporary edge. Drawing on her East and South East Asian heritage, her work is clean and considered, with subtle glaze finishes and a satisfying smoothness that makes them irresistible.
Trained as an art historian, Frances Palmer has been making ceramics from her Connecticut studio since 1987, working across porcelain, earthenware and terracotta. Her ribbed, fluted, folded, adorned pieces are wonderfully tactile.
There was a time when Lindsey Jordan harboured the illusion that she could only write in her Maryland childhood bedroom, where she made the songs that brought her indie fame right on the cusp of adulthood. Penning much of her last Snail Mail album, Valentine, in her parents’ house, if only due to the pandemic, fed into that creative suspicion. She was probably in the same place when she read an interview that mentioned Kim Deal using her first big Pixies paycheck to buy a house, setting that goal early in her career. She’d fulfilled it by the time she was in the process of making her latest record, Ricochet, dodging any impulse to write somewhere more nostalgically familiar. Working with Aron Kobayashi Ritch, the bassist and producer of New York’s Momma, it finds her transposing a period of self-imposed yet heavenly isolation into her most comfortably subdued songs to date. There’s still a delicate tension gnawing beneath the surface, as solitude’s gorgeous quiet borders on obsessive dissocation. Jordan, though, will go a long way to dance around it.
1. Tractor Beam
The jangly guitars that chime in at the start of Ricochet are luminous but not quite radiant, retaining their clean, measured tone as the rest of the instrumentation rushes in. It’s reflective of Jordan’s overall headspace, her sky-gazing optimism tempered by the emotional gravity of a doomed relationship. Even in her dissociation, the music keeps spinning upward, a whole string section swirling around her as she stresses the last words of the final line: “But you can’t find anyone else like me.”
2. My Maker
Instead of getting more abstract, Jordan’s preoccupation with mortality becomes a practical endeavour: “I wanna fly a plane to heaven,” begins ‘My Maker’, though in the accompanying video she rides in a hot air balloon. Despite lines like “What if nothing matters?” she confidently avoids accusations of nihilism, delivering the line “Tonight I’m gonna my maker” with more conviction than you’d expect. She makes sure to colour in the edges of the production with synth and guitar squiggles that propel the song’s stratospheric alt-rock. Waiting around to die rarely sounds so plainly wondrous.
3. Light on Our Feet
Possibly the most romantic song in the Snail Mail catalog contains no hint of frustration or regret – in a natural progression from ‘My Maker’, not even the thought of dying can spread her bliss thin. Anchored by a featherlight guitar and low-end-filling violin, the singer fixates on the carnival lights dancing around her lover’s eyes, but they aren’t star-crossed so much as moon-bound: when it’s all over, the ballet simply continues up in space. “Fantasy is pulling at the seams,” she admits at one point, but not enough to tear the song apart.
4. Cruise
What was that about a lack of frustration? “Sick with a rage I can’t contain,” she sings, “Sweeter than candy in my veins.” Jordan’s affinity for sentimental ‘90s rock – she covered Goo Goo Dolls’ ‘Iris’ way before it was in vogue – bears its mark on ‘Cruise’, especially with its big studio drums. But none of those signifiers overshadow her persistent desire to float away, to rid the body of its illnesses and just wander, if only for a moment.
5. Agony Freak
You bet the song called ‘Agony Freak’ takes more than a few cues from nu metal, from scratch effects to a doomy, distorted bridge. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” Jordan said in press materials, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” Her chorus, for all its angst, is still pure ear candy, daring the titular villain to twist around her like it’s the only viable compromise.
6. Dead End
Jordan may not be bathing in her own agony anymore, but she remembers the days when she used to like they’re happening right now. “And the sound of your rain/ Brings down the perennial rain,” she sings on ‘Dead End’, sounding celestial even when she’s looking back on her teenage years. She used to park in a cul-de-sac and smoke with friends, the press release informs us, but Jordan’s lyric is naturally more potent: “You’re burned in my heart, old friend,” though the implied whatever you do burns, too. As the album’s lead single and centerpiece, it’s still the song that’s most reminiscent of producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s main band, Momma, and you wish its shoegazey sound trickled down to more of the songs.
7. Butterfly
The album’s possibly most nostalgic song is followed by the strongest proof of Snail Mail’s increasingly nuanced songwriting: taking a simple premise – the butterfly as a symbol of fragility – and threading it into a journey. Halfway through, the promise of anaesthesia fuels a punky bridge that crashes out into a daze of guitars, over which Jordan bemoans, “You want a trip?” It’s a far more pernicious glimpse of transcendence, of wanting to feel alive to mask the facts of your living.
8. Nowhere
Inspired by Laura Gilpin’s 1977 poem ‘The Two-Headed Calf’, this is another song about the clear sky making her – begging her, in this case – to slip away. She treats that liminality like a delicate secret: “Nobody can know/ The junction of sleeping and being in limbo,” she sings in an especially catchy chorus. Dreamily, of course, she lets us in on it.
9. Hell
There are moments on ‘Hell’ where Jordan’s voice is nearly unrecognizable, as she uses the verses of the song to showcase the expressive range it’s acquired since undergoing intensive speech therapy. That confidence bleeds into the lyrics, which betray no amount of self-pity in addressing estranged friendships. The hook even explodes into another gauzy bridge, as if projecting her words into the sky for the alienated others to see: “Are you wasted? Being on your own?”
10. Ricochet
There’s a point where the fantasy shatters and the romance is in the rubble, and this is it. All the maudlin sensibilities of Richochet don’t fully click until the title track and its stark specificity, precisely the moment when she sings: “You can’t stop now/ My little cliché/ ‘Til you’ve sold out/ All over LA.” The nothingness of the afterlife seems enticing then, its eroded time and infinite possibilities. The strings mirror the couple’s dynamic down on the earth, best captured by the single word that gives the album its name.
11. Reverie
The self-imposed isolation makes sense on the closer, where Jordan refreshingly balances her swooning resolution (“If loved is all we’ll ever be, then we’ll bask in our reverie”) with genuinely funny lines (“Older, now I’ve realized/ All my heroes are nothing more than socialites/ Fuck them too.”) Even if selling out all over LA means ending up at parties with “soulless zombies” where it’s all about the cash, Jordan sighs, there’s still no doubt they can make the night count. Besides, there’s always the afterparty.
