Lorde has shared her contribution to A24’s Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. Listen to her rendition of ‘Take Me to the River’, originally written by Al Green before the Talking Heads recorded their version for 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food, below.
In an email newsletter marking the release, Lorde wrote:
Hey you, it’s me
Today my version of “take Me To The River” from the Stop Making Sense compilation comes out. Do you remember the first time you ever heard Talking Heads? I’ll tell you my story.
Ok, it’s 2008. I’m twelve years old, eyes painted black, jaw blasted with acne. My bedroom is a nest of posters, broken toys, street signs. I’ve kissed with tongue.
Something’s happening to me: i am beginning to ooze out in every direction. I feel a constant burning urge to express myself, to draw a map that leads to who l am. I can’t get it right; there’s deep discomfort in this, and I have no choice but to keep trying.
At the same time, I’m realising that if I look at a picture or listen to a song sometimes a surge of feeling will take over my whole body. In this way, I can remove my strange-feeling insides and replace them with whatever I want. I can’t predict what exactly will do this to me, so I have to try everything. Things are either corny, or they’re cool. Occasionally, the thing that replaces my insides is a total mystery to me, not corny or cool but somehow both, and through this feeling I have my first experiences with the divine.
My mother, an artist herself, sees the ooze. She brings her laptop into my room one night and puts on a Youtube video. It’s grainy, 240p at best. In the video I see a band from another time performing on a TV show. The lead singer wears a suit, has high cheekbones and slicked-back dark hair. To his left a blonde girl plays bass. They stand in pools of light. The dark haired man is singing a song about wanting someone, not being sure why. He is a preacher, a controlled fire, a wild animal. He’s moving like ive never seen anyone move, and his eyes are rolling back in his head. He knows how it feels to kiss with tongue. The wifi signal drops in and out from downstairs.
I feel a portal open between me and the screen. Humour, lust, rhythm and ritual course through me. I don’t understand what I’m feeling, but I do understand that the band in the grainy video live with the same strangeness that I do. My palms tingle. My insides are replaced.
This version of the first Talking Heads song I ever heard was done in a few days in Echo Park, L.A. with my friend Jimmy. It’s my interpretation of that pixellated spiritual experience. We did it fast, I didn’t let myself tidy it up too much, it had to feel young and imperfect, the peeling posters, the jaw of acne. It’s beyond a great honour to be part of this compilation. In doing so, I am reaching back through time and pinning something to that kid’s wall.
Hope you like it
Everyone’s Getting Involved also features covers by Miley Cyrus, BADBADNOTGOOD, Blondshell, girl in red, Jean Dawson, Kevin Abstract, the Linda Lindas, Toro y Moi, and more. So far, we’ve heard Paramore’s take on ‘Burning Down the House’ and Teezo Touchdown’s version of ‘Making Flippy Floppy’. A release date for the project has not yet been announced.
It’s 2019, and Jules Gold is just about to get her life together, find fulfillment in her writing career, pen an essay about Jewish-American assimilation, when her sister Poppy arrives at her doorstep, covered in hives, and stays for the foreseeable future. Poppy and Jules bicker — about a paper towel on the floor, about art being dead, about SodaStream’s involvement with Israel apartheid — against a backdrop of insufferable art students, mommy bloggers, the upcoming election, job insecurity that threaten to erupt Jules’ sense of self. Even with the adoption of a three-legged dog named Amy Klobuchar, the girls’ MLM-involved mother threatens to keep them apart, and the girls start to wonder if their confinement is really better for their relationship in the long term.
A hilarious, realistic novel for fans of the shameless desperation and horrors of being alive for fans of HBO’s Girls and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Alexandra Tanner’s relevant, deeply online and shockingly human debut is one whose style will be praised, imitated, and thought about for years to come.
Our Culture caught up with Alexandra Tanner to talk about writing internet realism, being a hater, and sibling dynamics.
Congratulations on the fantastic Worry! How does it feel to have your debut novel out?
Scary! Very scary, very fun. I’m excited. [Early readers] always say something different, which makes it feel like it’s a Rorschach test for what the book is actually about, what things are activated for different people. That’s really cool and gratifying, because that’s what I was trying to do with it.
The novel is so in tune with how it feels to be alive today — the narrative flits from dating mishaps, texting etiquette, political emails, doomsday preppers, and watching videos where people hide mini plastic babies around their school. What was the process like adapting real-life content to a novelistic form?
Great question. I dunno, that was kind of the project of this book when I set out to write it. I wanted it to feel as moment-to-moment as I could. I wanted it to feel like you just dropped into someone’s life and you’re just along with them for a year or so. I wanted to write a book that was some sort of internet diary, just a log of what I did all day, and that was what I was playing around with before I started writing Worry. Then I was like, ‘Maybe I should write a novel with plot and characters and structure instead of just a log of my Instagram activity.’ But going in with that mindset, wanting it to be as steeped as possible in the drudgery of the day-to-day, especially on the internet and when you’re sharing a space that’s feeling more and more uncomfortable, when you’re up against someone who knows you really well and exploring the contours of that.
That’s interesting about the internet diary — was it hard to put yourself away from the page? Step back, leave Jules there, and be a real person?
Yeah! I’ve been thinking about this for several months now, because when I finally wrapped up the editorial process last spring and I was done revising, when the book was set, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I did this method act-y thing where I was so in it, and I was thinking through her so much.’ She is close to me, in a lot of ways. I think that’s a path to writing something that feels really true, to put yourself on the page. But you can’t! It’s an impossible task. So I wound up in this weird liminal space, thinking more like her, but trying to make her think more like me… It did get really blurry. I don’t want to say, ‘I’ve been in character for three years!’ That’s not the situation at all. But she’s so reactionary and angry and much more doom-pilled than I am. I think I took a little bit of that on, and have been trying to have ten minutes a day where I sit and think about that.
I feel that one of the novel’s unspoken themes is the idea that it’s so funny to be a person right now. There’s so many conflicting viewpoints trying to grab our attention, and now that we can pay attention to everything at once, it blurs together in this bizarre soup. Did you find it easy or hard to condense everything into satirical writing?
I don’t know if it’s so much about ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ so much as, what do you pay attention to? Getting an email one minute that’s like, ‘Fund abortion, get swag!’ and the next minute, you’re getting a call from your parent or sibling who’s in crisis, and your work is harassing you about a minor detail that makes you defensive. I think it was painting that picture of when everything collides in on you, what does it create in the moment, and what does it create in the long-term? How is the texture of what a day for a normal person looks like now — eroding our senses of self, our ability to concentrate, do deep, attentive work in any part of our lives, relationships, professional lives, creative lives. It is all just soup, and we’re drowning in soup. I often have the feeling where I can’t get to a point of peace or quiet or stillness; it’s getting harder and harder.
So many weird things are happening in the world right now, and then yesterday, I got an email that was an interview opportunity about a tennis fashionista. It’s like, ‘read the room!’
Tennis fashionista! It’s very bizarre. Everyone needs to have a brand statement on everything. Compared with people who are like, ‘My book launch is today’ or ‘I have a story out in this magazine.’ It’s this whole economy. Because I’m plugged into ‘Literary Twitter’ or whatever — people have to promote themselves, people have to do the legwork of turning yourself into a character. But what is your persona, and how is it slotting into the horrors of the world, which are now on our screens 24 hours a day?
The first piece I ever read from you was your Jewish Currents essay, where you describe your ‘mommies’ on Instagram, who promote anti-Semetic theories, protest the 2020 lockdowns, all while next to beautiful photos promoting chunky scarves for fall. I’m so happy the themes of this essay made its way into the novel, as Jules is similarly obsessed with her anti-vax mommies. Talk a little bit about integrating this nonfiction work in the book.
I started writing this book in late 2019, and I had been seeing some mommies online, late 2019, early 2020. It was all a laugh. When I was writing further and further into the novel and making them a part of it, it was no longer this cute thing, this funny plot device — it was suddenly this huge part of my consciousness everyday. I couldn’t put the brakes on and be like, ‘I’ve seen enough for today. I’m gonna put this down.’ Between trying to turn it into a fictive narrative, I became really frustrated and felt like I had to write something right now, about what this is doing to my brain. There’s no fact anymore, which I feel is a very 2017 statement to even make, that we’re post-fact, but the more it becomes an accessory to that, to consumerism, to ‘buy my chunky scarf, also, the Holocaust didn’t happen.’ We’re not built to respond to that! It was a wild time, and I had to get it out to a nonfiction form. And writing the essay and seeing that it got a big response and people were interested in a way that felt… ‘Is everyone not doing this all day, every day? Am I one of a small contingent?’ I definitely am not the only person doing that all day during 2020, but it still felt rare in some way, and now it feels a little less rare.
It’s also so horrifying that it’s near-impossible to look away from. You can get into some dark corners of the internet where you just can’t believe humans act this way, and, as a result, all you want to hear is what they’ll say next. It really warps your perception. You always have to see who the next annoying person is.
Well, it feels so good to hate. It feels so good to share with your friends.
It does!
It feels so easy to have a thread with your friend where you’re just sending the worst posts, back and forth, forever, because it’s so accessible. What’s harder to access is that there’s no solution. Instagram is part of a large corporation that has a monopoly on our time. As soon as we put our phone down, it sends us a notification, ‘Here’s what you might have missed.’ There’s no answer.
I was also curious about the decision to set the book in 2019. The sole thing that seems to tie the novel back to that era is their dog, named Amy Klobuchar. Why did you decide to put the plot there?
I think in 2019, there were these little shockwaves of insanity that became so much bigger post-2020 and especially now — I hesitate to say we’re at the peak because I think we’re only gonna keep going up and up. But 2019 felt like I could do this narrative thing where Jules is a little bit of a Cassandra [in Greek myth] in a way, where she sees it happening and can’t predict how much worse things are going to get. Because 2019, I remember looking at election stuff, looking at people’s real desperation for something good to happen. Some kind of, ‘We had a crazy few years, and now we’re back on track!’ And realizing, of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Then Super Tuesday happened, and Covid was here… we were just off the rails for good. It was that last bastion of things maybe being okay. But I think the characters in Worry sense that it won’t happen. Which probably isn’t fair — I don’t know I had that sense in 2019. But now that we’re on the other side of history, they do, a little bit.
The book hinges around this messy and chaotic relationship between two sisters, Jules and Poppy, who find themselves living together in New York for a year. How did these two characters start to form in your mind?
I think it’s so based on my relationship with my younger sibling, it was just this dramatic exercise in pulling us towards these extremes. What if my personality was completely amplified, and what if my sibling’s personality was completely amplified. Of course, doing that thought exercise and trying to put it on a page… it sounds so corny, and writerly, and dumb, but they do take on lives of their own, and they start moving in ways that are unpredictable. You flesh out the bounds of what these two characters can do for each other.
As someone with a Jewish mother, I completely found a home with Jules and Poppy’s. But their mother is so overbearing, and usually pits the two girls against each other, even saying that the sisters living together will never work out. What did you want to explore with this character?
I think it’s a little bit of their psychology at work — it’s almost not about their mom specifically, but about their feeling of being untethered and unsafe in the world and wanting someone who can comfort you and tell you what to do, and they’re clearly not getting that from their mother, who I think is on a different planet. I think some of that is satire, when you leave home, for a lot of people, when you come to New York and you find a different set of priorities and politics and rhythm of life, you start to feel like the place you left is kind of… is it in the same plane of reality I am? Are these people in this wormhole? I wanted to play that up, and their mother reflects their great insecurities about the limitations of having a relationship with someone in your family that can grow and change.
The girls have an awful Thanksgiving at their parents’ Floridian house, where Poppy calls one of her mother’s friends a Nazi after she starts talking about the ‘deep state.’ Why do you think being around their family sets the girls on edge so much?
I think any holiday is… [laughs] I dunno, I love the holidays with my family, but you’re bringing together people who haven’t been together in a really long time, and I think over the last few years, there’s been a sense of… ‘These gatherings are a moment for us to call each other in… Talk to your uncle, get him to accept that human life has value…’ I think carrying the weight of that into an interaction with people who have no interest in doing that is a failed project. It’s partly that, and it’s partly just… When you look at your parents’ choices, and who they form alliances with in your absence, it can be baffling. I think [the siblings] are hurt and angry and they feel the pressure to make a statement at Thanksgiving.
We’ve spoken about this on Twitter, but I absolutely loved the parallels between Worry and other well-written hyperreal shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls. The bickering between the two sisters is especially reminiscent. Did this series inspire parts of the novel, and what other media shaped how you wanted to write it?
This is a book that’s really informed by television, and I’m really drawn to it. The first time I saw Girls, I was in my early 20s, and I just moved to New York, and I was like, ‘This isn’t what my life or my friends’ lives look like at all.’ Then I rewatched it last year, and was like, ‘That’s exactly what our lives were like.’ It captured our lives so completely that we didn’t even see it, when we were in it. I really respect that. It unleashed so much, it brought in these characters… When Hannah stabs her eardrum, and has to stab the other one, for balance, I think about that once a week. To see dysfunction like that, on television, it was really groundbreaking. But Curb Your Enthusiasm was also huge, in terms of thinking about social irritation and frustration. And these existential questions of why we behave like this and why we hold each other to niceties that are eroding our souls and getting into these little moments of frustration in order to look at larger patterns of how we fuck each other up. Curb was huge for that.
Jules is first employed at BookSmarts, a study guide service, then Starlab, where she writes quippy internet-ready astrological horoscopes. There’s this great paragraph where she hates leaving her apartment every day to go to the office, which I thought had a great parallel to recent sentiment around remote work. Why do you think she gravitates towards jobs that are sort of leisurely, where she can write but not think too hard about what she’s doing?
I think that’s what she wants. I think she comes from a place of extreme privilege and has been taught that the height of luxury is to do nothing, sit back and let the world come to you. It’s hard for her to recognize that, ‘Oh, if I did something, if I cared about something, it might be easier on a day-to-day basis to perform at my job, or to nurture my friendships.’ I think the work she does, and that search for something she can blow off more and more of, it’s this form of self-destruction and shuttering the opportunities available for her.
So finally, what’s next for you? Do you want to continue writing fiction or go with more nonfiction work?
I wanna write everything! I love writing novels, but in the run-up to this, I’m writing some stories, which I haven’t done in five or six years, I’m writing some essays. I really wanna get good at writing the essay. The essay, to me, is the purest, more exciting form. Every time I read a really good essay, I’m like, ‘I’ll never be able to do that, I’m not enough of an intellectual.’ So I want to become more of an intellectual.
Bored at My Grandma’s House, the project of Leeds-based musician Amber Strawbridge, has released a new single, ‘How Do You See the World?’. It’s set to appear on her upcoming debut LP Show & Tell, arriving June 7, alongside the previously shared ‘Inhibitions’ and the title track. Take a listen below.
“HDYSTW is a song I wrote about humanity’s greed, ignorance and lack of accountability surrounding the state of the world we live in,” Strawbridge explained in a statement. “It’s about how we as humans still prioritise material goods, wealth and power rather than sustainability within society – even when all the facts, stats and evidence highlighting our negative impact and its dangers are handed to us on a plate. It’s me questioning how big we really are in the grand scope of life and predicting mother nature’s rightful comeback.”
SeeYouSpaceCowboy have teamed up with Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante for ‘To the Dance Floor for Shelter’, the latest single from the post-hardcore band’s upcoming LP Coup De Grâce. It follows ‘Respite for a Tragic Tale’ (featuing iRis.EXE), ‘Silhouettes in Motion’, ‘Rhythm and Rapture’ (with nothing,nowhere.), and ‘Chewing the Scenery’. Check it out below.
“This song is our little ode to the emo songs that we were all obsessed with growing up, we wanted something that would almost feel cinematic in nature and felt like it carried you through from the piano in the beginning to the journey through the middle to the climax,” the band said in a statement. “It’s a song that Courtney’s vocals beautifully fit into as a voice that leads you to that destructive end.”
Curses, the project of Berlin-based producer Luca Venezia, is back with a new song called ‘Elegant Death’, marking his signing with Italians Do It Better. Give it a listen below.
“Death has a looming, dark reputation, it’s always there, but embracing the elegance in its romantic ceremony, and aesthetic of funerals in Italy is something that has always captured me,” Venezia explained in a statement. “Especially being raised half Italian between NYC and Sicily. There is a beauty in the legacy of a person’s story that death leaves behind. The power of a new chapter, shedding old skin to discover a new.”
He continued: “In the last few years, I’ve had to face the reality that all of us eventually die. I’ve lost many friends, family members have passed, and overcoming the fear of death has allowed me to appreciate the present, the importance of now, creating life memories through music, to be remembered beyond when that time comes to eventually say goodbye.”
youbet, the project of Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Nick Llobet, has shared a new single called ‘Nurture’. Lifted from their upcoming album Way to Be, the track arrives with a video directed and animated by Sabrina Nichols. Check it out below.
Way to Be will be released on May 10 via Hardly Art. So far, it’s been previewed by the singles ‘Seeds of Evil’ and ‘Carsick’.
One of the inspirations behind Julia Holter’s Something in the Room She Moves is French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous’ 1996 essay ‘Writing Blind’, which explores the relationship between her writing, creativity, and the night. “What we call the day prevents me from seeing,” it begins. “Solar daylight blinds me to the visionary day. The blaze of day prevents me from hearing. From seeing and hearing. From hearing myself. Along with me. Along with you. Along with the mysteries.” To write is to go looking for the secrets hidden in broad daylight, what Cixous calls “the skin of light.” In another essay from the same book, Stigmata, Cixous compares writing to music, the night vibrating in its frequencies: “I see with my ears, I advance into the bosom of the world, hands in front, capturing the music with my palms, until something breathes under the pen’s beak.” It is that something Holter is after and refers to on her new album – not only for its intensity, but because she understands it is “the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed,” as Virginia Wolf wrote.
The songs that gleam and sparkle, ‘Sun Girl’ and ‘Spinning’, stand out, making them the obvious choices for singles. But even they are coloured by the improvisational qualities and playful fluidity of Holter’s musical approach. ‘Sun Girl’ is the most pop-focused track on the album, capturing a warmth it almost instinctively, but gleefully, jerks away from, meandering into a celestial melody for the chorus and towards the chaos that hovers in the spaces between. It toes the line between the childlike and the dreamlike, which Holter interprets as a state of rapture. ‘Spinning’, the album’s euphoric centerpiece, is even more unnerved, itching to replace the blinding force of light with that of darkness, where imagination can run wild: “Believe in night that breathes alone/ Distinct at night/ Swoop in to fill my arms/ At night.” The lyrics of ‘These Morning’ ambiguously hint at human conflict, but Holter takes the opportunity to luxuriate in the languor of the night in which she has escaped, where words become blurred and drift like time, slowly and incomprehensibly.
Though steeped in abstraction, there is a stark physicality to Something in the Room She Moves, which stands as one of the most sensual and somatic works in Holter’s career. Though the music glides in different directions, she never strays from the central goal of “evoking the body’s internal sound world.” ‘Evening Mood’ features a sample of an ultrasound session Holter recorded when she was still pregnant with her daughter while mirroring the surge of oxytocin that floods the mother’s system; the rush is what music gorgeously conveys, but the heartbeat provides the reason. “Am I listening close, my love?” she sings, not leaning forward so much as tuning into the rhythm of bodies existing and growing together. The intimacy is so simple and natural that all Holter needs is a single phrase to create one of the album’s most striking moments, vocalizing the title of ‘Meyou’ in a way that renders the merging of the two subjects as a meditative dance. In the cover art by Holter’s childhood friend, the artist Christina Quarles, you can’t quite tell if the figures are embracing or battling; here, there’s no such question.
Whether breezy, dizzying, soothing, or bombastic, Holter’s output has always been immersive, and her latest is, too; what she does differently is remove the distance from the people, spaces, and ideas she interacts with. Straying from the maximalism of the singles, ‘Materia’ is just Holter and her Wurlitzer, an affecting composition despite its elusive poetry, while ‘Ocean’ builds an entire soundscape out of the aquatic elements permeating the record. She’s not observing a body of water or the room she finds herself in; she inhabits and burrows deep inside them, pacing with what the title track describes as “frantic wonder.” “In the past my records were more focused on the past or the future, about love from afar, as maybe more of an ethereal thing,” Holter remarked in an interview. But Something in the Room sees the present as an endless stream – of days and nights, of unresolved mysteries, of love and grief entwined – and keeps its hands outstretched for everything that passes through it. “Heaven can’t take my love,” she pleads on ‘Talking to the Whisper’, the arrangement rumbling and shrieking at the thought, yet not quite restrained by it. It’s a nocturnal record that doesn’t fear the morning ahead, ending with an ode to “my love waking up my every day.” Holter guides us along each passage; all you have to do is listen.
Beyoncé has revealed the tracklist for her new album Act II: Cowboy Carter, which arrives on Friday (March 29). It includes the rumored cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ and an appearance from Willie Nelson on a song called ‘Smoke Hour’. Along with the promotional singles ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ and ’16 Carriages’, it also features tracks with titles such as ‘Spaghetti’, ‘The Linda Martell Show’, ‘Riverdance’, ‘Tyrant’, and ‘Dolly P’. Check out the tracklist poster below.
Arab Strap have released ‘Strawberry Moon’, the latest preview of their upcoming LP, which is titled I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍. It follows previous entries ‘Bliss’ and ‘Allatonceness’. The accompanying visual, created with David Arthur, marks the first time the duo of Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton have appeared in a video together in almost 25 years. “Aye, it’s been a while,” Moffatt commented, “So we thought we should go all out – costumes, make-up, special effects, acting, mobility scooter and all.” Watch and listen below.
“Lyrically, it’s maybe the most personal song on the album,” Moffat added of the track. “About a period when I wasn’t doing very well, both mentally and physically. I was walking with a cane and in pain most of the time, and drowning my sorrows too, trapped at home and watching the phases of the moon through a window. The moon always seems to pop up in my lyrics, and the song’s a sort of secular hymn in praise of her constant change. She’s always a comfort, always hopeful, and always makes me smile.”
Counter-Strike 2 was released on September 27, 2023. A new engine, changed behavior of smoke grenades, and an improved system for scoring actions on the server are just some of the changes. If you want to be as successful as pro player Nikola “NiKo” Kovač from G2 Esports, you’ll definitely want to train hard and learn the ins and outs of CS2. In this article from Volodymyr Timkiv, you will learn about tips for playing CS2. You can also explore NiKo, s1mple, and faze CS2 stats on the Profilerr platform.
What Is Counter-Strike 2
This is a new part of an online team game about the confrontation between special forces and terrorists. There are different modes in CS2, but the main one is “team to team”. Players use virtual money to buy weapons at the beginning of the round. After each death, you have to take up the weapon again.
Battles take place on different maps, and victory conditions depend on the team and the selected map. CS has a hostage mode in which terrorists must prevent special forces from releasing and removing people from a certain territory. But most players prefer maps with bomb placement. In this mode, terrorists must place a bomb at one of two points on the map, and special forces must prevent them from doing this. The terrorists will win if the bomb explodes. And the special forces will win if the bomb can be defused or the round time runs out.
Killing the entire opposing team will also bring victory. Moreover, you can be reborn after death in normal mode only with the start of a new round. And dying in CS2 is very easy. By the way, the average monthly number of CS 2 players in December 2023 exceeded 750,000. Here are tips to help you succeed in the game.
Be sure to play with good headphones
The ability to listen to enemies in CS is no less important than accurate shooting. If you want to be useful on the battlefield, use high-quality headphones, preferably with a microphone, to notify your team about enemy actions in time.
This advice is relevant for most team games, but especially so in the case of Counter-Strike. The cost of death here is high: to revive in the main game mode you will have to wait until the start of the next round. If you let your team down, there will be less money to buy weapons.
Use The Shift Key
Those players who can remain silent in the right situations, but notify their teammates in time, have an advantage. To avoid being heard, hold down the Shift button. This will switch your character to walking. An important benefit of moving quietly is a more stable sight.
If you’re approaching a potential hot spot on the map, it’s best to step up and proceed with caution. There is no point in moving in a squat, it is very slow. And your opponents will definitely hear you running. The ability to quickly switch between different types of movement is very important.
Understand The terms – This Is Important For Orientation
In the days of CS 1.6, different places on the map did not have labels, so the community itself invented labels for tunnels, rooms, and other spaces in locations. The main points are bomb sites, so-called A and B.
In Counter-Strike 2, everything is simpler – even the mini-map has symbols. But you still need to know the location. This way you will understand what to do in different situations. For example, when one of your teammates shouts that there is a sniper at the gate or an enemy with a bomb is coming through the tunnel to B.
Use Your Environment to Your Advantage
Each map has plenty of cover and other advantageous positions. Counter-Strike is a popular cyber discipline. Because of this, developers approach the design of locations and important objects on them very carefully.
All maps have been studied inside and out a long time ago. You will not be able to open any new profitable points. Work with what you already have. Carefully study locations and important positions.
Be a Team Player
Nobody likes solo players in team games, and they have a really hard time in Counter-Strike. Mistakes like throwing a stun grenade at the feet of your comrades are not forgiven here. If you don’t contribute, you may be kicked out of the match.
The rules here are standard for all online team games. Tell your teammates important information, cover them, and act together. Feel free to use a microphone.
Be More Active
The faster you purchase weapons and run to the desired position, the less likely you are to be killed there. The fastest option for purchasing the necessary guns is to use hotkeys. By default, the magazine opens with the B button, and the weapon category is selected by numbers.
Remember that movement speed is affected by the weight of the weapon in your hands. To move as quickly as possible, take a knife. And don’t forget to cut corners wherever you can.
This is where the skill of precise jumping will come in handy. If you decide to quickly fly out of an ambush and change cover to get closer to the enemy, do a crouch jump. This is a mid-flight squat.
This will make it harder for you to get hit. Another option is to jump with a strafe when you press the right or left button while in flight. This way you can change the direction of the jump and further confuse your opponents.
Final Thoughts
These are the simplest tips that will still allow you to improve your communication with your teammates and movement around the map. We recommend training regularly and studying the experience of pro players. You can get valuable information about settings in CS2 on Profilerr. The service is available around the clock wherever you are – in Toronto (Canada) or Chicago (USA).
