Crumb and Melody’s Echo Chamber have teamed up for a new single titled ‘Le Temple Volant’. The collaborative track arrives with home video-style video directed by Phil McGill. Watch and listen below.
“I remember the first time I heard Crumb’s music, it was the song ‘Locket’ that blew my mind,” Melody Prochet said in a statement. “I think it kind of enlightened that spark in me that loves music so passionately, and made me reach out to them. The love was mutual and once that door was opened, we had to create something together, it’s been a nice flow of ideas back and forth.”
“[Melody’s] music feels deeply nostalgic and so intertwined with that tender period of first starting the band,” Crumb shared. “When she reached out to us during lockdown expressing her love for our music, it was a surreal and full circle moment. It feels right for this to be our first song with another musical artist… We came together for the first time to film part of the video, which was filmed on Roosevelt Island, with additional filming in New Zealand and Australia.”
‘Le Temple Volant’ follows Crumb’s 2023 singles ‘Dust Bunny’ and ‘Crushxd’. Their latest LP, Ice Melt, arrived in 2021. Melody’s Echo Chamber released her most recent album, Emotional Eternal, last year.
bar italia – the London-based trio of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, and Sam Fenton – have announced their second LP of 2023, The Twits. The follow-up to May’s Tracey Denim, the band’s Matador debut, arrives November 3. Listen to the lead single ‘my little tony’ below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
bar italia recorded The Twits over eight weeks from February 2023 in a makeshift home studio in Mallorca. It was mixed by Marta Salogni, who also worked on Tracey Denim.
The Twits Cover Artwork:
The Twits Tracklist:
1. my little tony
2. Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)
3. twist
4. worlds greatest emoter
5. calm down with me
6. Shoo
7. que suprise
8. Hi fiver
9. Brush w Faith
10. glory hunter
11. sounds like you had to be there
12. Jelsy
13. bibs
Cinema’s most (in)famously boyish cult filmmaker has a midlife crisis. For the latest instalment in a lifelong series of aesthetic reinventions, Harmony Korine returns with Aggro Dr1ft. Shot entirely with an infrared camera, the movie’s a hallucinogenic, deconstructed action film about the final mission of “the world’s greatest assassin” across a dystopian Miami. A barebones narrative stitches together lengthy sequences where characters move with the jank of a glitched-out video game. All dialogue—elliptical, clunky, stilted—mimics the writing and cadence of a Neil Breen movie. It’s Hype Williams’ Belly as a half-remembered dream or a psychedelic PS2 session, take your pick. Korine’s been vocal proclaiming his work revolutionary. In numerous press interviews, he dons a plastic minotaur mask and situates Aggro Dr1ft as an exercise in uncovering the next stage of cinema. Lots of outraged contesters were quick to renounce his bold declarations. At times like this, it’s important to recall how Korine also used to urinate on strangers to provoke them into beating him up on camera. I wouldn’t bother getting riled up refuting his logic.
Despite its eccentricity, Aggro Dr1ft goes down easy. It’s fun and surprisingly mellow (despite the hyper-saturation and occasional ear-piercing falcon screech). While the aesthetic conceit isn’t as complex or radical as Korine suggests, the thermal images summon an uncanny vision of a surreal landscape. The movie’s incredibly juvenile, but that cuts two ways. On one hand, it’s like the crass byproduct of a half-formed brain, conjuring a parodic Grand Theft Auto-type universe where all women are NPC callipygian twerkers. (This isn’t your parents’ Rehearsals for Retirement.) But Aggro Dr1ft also has the self-assuredness of youthful art. There’s no sense of obligation to pacify the conventions of its medium. It indulges a headstrong self-commitment to a very personal aesthetic language.
Korine’s long masqueraded as a Dumb Guy, exaggerating a stoned-clueless persona and downplaying the rigour of his artistry. In conversation with Caveh Zahedi, he responds to all of Zahedi’s references to prototypical maverick poet Arthur Rimbaud with answers about prototypical action hero John Rambo. For Korine, the ideal artist eradicates their own intellect and operates on a purely sensory level. It’s about returning to an instinct of unassuming creativity that’s conditioned out of us. I don’t think it’s possible to make a purely unintellectual film, especially not when you approach it with Harmony Korine’s ironic deliberateness. But at a glance, Aggro Dr1ft defies the intellect. The film’s designed exclusively around “pleasure”, whatever that amorphous term embodies. It’s a sensual experience which, in the Sontagian sense, rejects interpretation. Pleasures takes precedent.
Yet Aggro Dr1ft doesn’t cultivate a passive or escapist pleasure. Its pleasure stems from recognizing its disunity, its disregard for filmic convention, its narrative awkwardness, its disinterest in anything human, cohesive, or easily digestible. Korine asks us to find enjoyment in the demolition of standardized film and narrative language. Adorno and Horkheimer described The Culture Industry as a diversion: a means to deplete workers’ free time and energy, to distract them from their material reality via seamless escapism. Pleasure: weaponized. For no moment is Aggro Dr1ft passive viewing. You can’t freefall into images; they announce their presence loudly. Instead, the film strives for a radical form of pleasure built not on immersion, but confrontation.
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)
Bertrand’s Bonello’s The Beast is a melodrama set at the end of human feeling. Told with vague sci-fi mechanics, the film unveils a technofascist AI-run future. The world is depopulated and barren. Architecture and interior design are minimalist and sterile. It’s a Mark Fisher incarnation of the year 2044, where nightclubs blast throwback hits from 1972. Exhausted by this world without affect, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) undergoes an operation to purge her emotions via submerging her body in a black liquid goo that broadcasts memories from her past lives. Intercutting stories from three of her lives (2044, 2014, and 1910), Bonello reconfigures narrative as a sprawling tapestry uncontained by a single lifespan. Desires persist into next lives, culminating in a vast, history-spanning arc.
The story drastically reinterprets and expands Henry James’ novella The Beast in the Jungle: a simple tragedy about a man’s fatalistic apprehension of a vague, impending calamity. Bonello’s adaptation jumps pastiches at lighting speed. It turns from costume drama romance into disaster movie into surrealist L.A. stalker thriller into dystopian sci-fi. Though eclectic and proudly disunified, Bonello patterns each milieu with ominous recurring motifs (e.g. dolls, pigeons, fortune tellers). This is his most audacious and esoteric movie yet, and that’s without factoring in the interpolations of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. Like James’ story, the movie ends with a crushing irony: a tragedy where the greatest conceivable loss is the ability to feel. Bonello’s a filmmaker keen on dissecting history and its relationship to the present. The Beast, however, turns its sight on a precarious future. At times, the style is grotesquely melodramatic. Yet Bonello’s wielding of melodrama is a natural recourse: a defense against an evolving technological sphere pushing human feeling into obsolesce.
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
La Chimera is a few things: a sun-drenched romp, a tomb-raiding adventure, and a hauntological drama. Set in 1980s Tuscany, the film follows Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a perpetually dishevelled Englishman: equals parts charismatic and curmudgeonly. Released from prison, he reunites with his motley crew of fun-loving grave-robbers raiding Etruscan tombs. He leads the pack with a supernatural ability to spot the locations of tombs buried beneath the soil. For his frivolous gang of thieves, tomb-raiding is about the exhilaration and the spoils. But Arthur has more complex motives; he’s an Orphean figure searching for a legendary gateway to the underworld to find his lost lover, Beniamina.
When he returns from prison, Arthur stays with his lover’s grandmother (Isabella Rossellini), who lives like an Italian Miss Havisham in an anachronistic and antique-laden decaying villa. Rohrwacher’s 1980s Italy is rife with modernization. Yet simultaneously, the past and its relics are the most invaluable commodities. Rohrwacher traces the illicit pathways of the artifact market, where plundered treasures become respectable property on exhibit at the world’s most prestigious galleries. Arthur cannot imagine a future, cannot build new relationships. He’s stuck in a timeloop, in love with a missing woman. In La Chimera, all systems (financial, aesthetic, emotional) are dictated by ghosts of the past, whose hauntings persist even in times of ostensible progress.
The crux of the film is Rohrwacher and O’Connor’s pairing as filmmaker and actor. Rohrwacher’s conception of Arthur is so vivid, the perfect cocktail of suaveness and assholery. O’Connor’s rendition is lived-in, larger-than-life at times, yet also infused with the pathos of lovesick longing. At points, he moves like a reincarnation of Jean-Paul Belmondo: similar faces, erratic physicalities, charismatic gruffness. The accumulated dirt on his ivory suit delivers a better performance than most human actors will this year. It’s a gradual performance, hinging on the revelation that he’s a man prepared to plunge into the deepest depths of the earth to uncover a lost love.
Do Not Expect Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Much from the End of the World is a big Brechtian farce told in literary allusions, rapid-fire vulgarities, and indignation at a labour system that exploits and disregards its workers. Jude’s form is elastic, associative, freewheeling. The film follows Angela (Ilihenca Manolache) as she interviews injured labourers for a role in a workplace safety video. As a side hustle, she records selfie videos as Bobita, her chauvinistic alter ego masked in an Andrew Tate faceswap filter. Her story is regularly interrupted by excerpts from Lucian Bratu’s Angela Keeps Going (1982) and other digressions, including a lengthy and unexpectedly moving montage of memorials for Romanian roadside causalities. It’s a rare moment of sensitivity amongst Jude’s sardonic dispatch from the frontlines of a nonchalant apocalypse.
Do Not Expect Much is very funny. Its humour is both broad and obscure; an extended gag involves Uwe Boll’s boxing match against his critics. Yet it’s a misstep to isolate a core element in Jude’s latest hodgepodge, to centre its irreverence or its sadness. Do Not Expect Much is gleefully disjointed. Jude envisions corporatism as a cannibalizing force which uses the respectability of cinema and “high-art” as a smoke screen for its violence. By flaunting its own aesthetic contradictions, Jude offers a work that —despite its arsenal of ironies—feels like it has nothing to hide.
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest is a detour from the sprawling, monologue-laden drama of Drive My Car and the understated interpersonal encounters of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Evil Does Not Exist opens with its camera tilted towards the sky, pushing forward over a ceiling of treetops. Natural environments overtake character drama. Numerous walking scenes are filmed from the prospective of flora, the camera crouched in a low-angle with out-of-focus stems obstructing the foreground. Hamaguchi expands his penchant for social drama into a broader sphere of non-human life. He crafts a deceptive eco-drama where quaintness morphs into a cryptic scream, both poetic and furious.
Evil Does Not Exist unfolds in Mizubiki Village, a quiet town outside Tokyo. Centred around Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a stoic local handyman, we follow the community’s protest to an urban development company’s attempt to establish a glamping site in Mizubiki Village. As a centerpiece, Hamaguchi stages a townhall meeting captured with Wiseman-esque observational remove. Armed with reason, the villagers object to the glamping site’s shoddy schematics, including a septic tank placement which will pollute the local water supply. Yet conversation is futile. The development’s representatives (one well-intentioned yet naive, the other sinisterly opportunistic) are punching bags hired to absorb the locals’ grievances and offer noncommittal replies. They come from a different world, one of capitalist exploitation and hyperstimulation. The slow-paced, labour-intensive world of Mizubiki Village is an escapist fantasy from their lives of Zoom calls, finance graphs, and dating apps. Yet the destabilizing violence of their glamping project remains abstract to them.
If Drive My Car was about the agonizing quest to be understood, to articulate your unspeakable vulnerabilities to other humans, Evil Does Not Exist imagines a breakdown of communication. Words prove useless, and the film ends with an anguished cry. It’s not enough to be understood when your opposition disregards the sanctity of all life.
Laberint Sequences (Blake Williams)
Blake Williams, the Toronto-based 3D filmmaker, begins Laberint Sequences like a travelogue. We move through the Laberint d’Horta in Barcelona, a tourist-centric maze hedged from 750 metres of cypress trees in the city’s oldest garden. A statue of Eros rests at the maze’s centre, like a reward for its conquering. A maze is a structuralist puzzle, a solvable question where the enjoyment stems from the act of being lost, of aimlessly searching. But Laberint Sequences resists the temptation to metaphorize. Halfway through, Williams destabilizes his own footage, angling and skewing it jaggedly across the screen. The Laberint d’Horta becomes a passage into a different maze. In the second half, Williams repurposes William Cameron Menzies’ The Maze, an early 3D film and Menzies’ directorial swan song. The film’s a gothic highland horror B-movie most memorable for an amphibian plot twist. Laberint Sequences pays homage to the legacy of its own 3D practice, but this isn’t mere tribute. Cutting together footage from The Maze with shots of Deragh Campbell re-dubbing the audio, Williams holds an intertextual séance where old ghosts find new lives.
Mast-Del (Maryam Tafakory)
Iranian experimental filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s Mast-Del is a visual poem about desire and censorship. It’s a narrative work where on-screen text describes the tender pillow talk between two women in bed. One shares a memory of a forbidden date with a man in Tehran years ago and the repressive state violence they incurred. As the end credits proudly announce, Mast-Del is a film produced without funding indebted to its inventory of visual sources. Against ambient luminary Sara Davachi’s haunting score, Tafakory builds a montage of abstraction, mixing original footage with re-interpreted clips from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Not unlike fellow Wavelengths film Laberint Sequences, Mast-Del proves the infinite possibilities of an image to conjure new meanings through modulation and recontextualization. It’s also a film about the intersection of art and authoritarian regimes, recognizing how oppression is deployed in equal parts across the human body and its culture.
Viji has shared a new single, ‘Karaoke’, alongside an accompanying visual. It’s taken from the London-based artist’s debut album So Vanilla, which was led by the song ‘Sedative’ and comes out October 27 via Speedy Wunderground. Check out the Claryn Chong-directed clip below.
“’Karaoke’ is a song that came out of a silly 10 min jam at the end of a writing session,” Viji explained in a statement. “I remember picking up the bass and just riffing with some filthy low-end sounds. Dan (Carey) felt the magic and we recorded 3 or 4 minutes of us going for it, followed by some guide vocals inspired by shouty Japanese punk songs I like. What the lyrics actually turned into is such a time stamp of what I was going through at that very moment.”
“The video is a collaboration with director Claryn Chong, whose made my sexy nightmares come to life,” Viji continued. “As an homage to where the album So Vanilla was recorded, we filmed the video on Streatham high street in London. Speedy Wunderground central!”
On her 2019 self-titled album as Vagabon, Laetitia Tamko traded the guitar-based indie rock stylings of 2017’s Infinite Worlds for a world of rich, evocative electronica. More than a sonic departure, though, the album showcased an artist capable of expanding her sound while retaining the tender intimacy of her earlier material, an evolution that continues on her latest effort, Sorry I Haven’t Called. Following the death of her best friend in 2021, Tamko wrote and produced the majority of the record in Germany, where she reconnected with, and sought ways to channel, her love of dance music. The result is the kind of upbeat, vibrant pop record that doesn’t feel detached from grief but creates a comforting space around it, tapping into a whirlwind of emotions without letting them overwhelm. “I don’t think I’m escaping,” Tamko sings on the opening track ‘Can I Talk My Shit?’, which features backing vocals from Julie Byrne, of all people. “I’m going to a place I know.” Around the making of Sorry I Haven’t Called, that place happened to be a dark club where, if you wanted to cry, you could do it in the company of others – and loud music.
While the indie rock songwriting of Vagabon’s debut was often billed as confessional, Tamko is veering away from that description, too, making songs that are emotive and conversational without strictly documenting her personal life. In press materials, she calls the album “completely euphoric,” explaining, “It’s because things were dark that this record is so full of life and energy.” But she still favours honesty, pairing the simple, effective hooks of the record’s first half in particular with clear, direct lyricism: “Can I be honest? I’ve been in the house spinning out,” she admits early on, before opening ‘You Know How’ with the question, “Honestly, how’ve you been?” Tamko allows herself to savour small, unexpected joys rather than letting fear overshadow them, which brings an air of lightness to these songs that feels precious and uncritical. It’s a direction that feels in line with the sophomore album from Arlo Parks or Clairo’s work with Rostam Batmanglij, who co-produced Sorry I Haven’t Called withTamko in Los Angeles. But this record is also more outwardly sensual than anything on My Soft Machine or Immunity, dipping into sultry R&B on ‘Made Out With Your Best Friend’ in a way that feels genuinely invigorating.
But while the carefree springiness of Tamko’s approach as a whole is refreshing, the album benefits more from the vulnerability and atmospheric textures that seep through its best tracks, from the confrontational ‘Do Your Worst’ to the introspective ‘Autobahn’. Though the exuberance of ‘Lexicon’ is so low-key it almost breezes by without leaving much of an impact or distinctly registering as a Vagabon song, the tracks that follow are more naturally expressive in their arrangement: Jack Mclaine’s synth and drum programming on ‘Passing Me By’ are colourfully layered, and the gentle warmth of ‘Nothing to Lose’ melts away frustration to make way for a big revelation (“I want so much more than I’ve ever asked for before”). ‘It’s a Crisis’ might have quickly sounded stale were it not for Tamko’s subtle synth flourishes and the sudden addition of a saxophone, played by Henry Solomon to haunting effect.
By the time we get to the end, what should be Sorry I Haven’t Called‘s most familiar-sounding moment becomes its most surprising. Closer ‘Anti-Fuck’ calls back to Vagabon’s debut by bringing guitars back to the fore, embracing uncertainty on a record that exudes confidence at every turn. But though not quite “completely euphoric,” you get the sense it’s informed by the energy of the rest of the record, like returning to the same place, after a shitload of change, an entirely different person. You wish the album traced more of that journey instead of hinting at it, but it creates excitement for where Tamko will be taking things next; for a record so assured and hook-focused, it feels weirdly transitional. “Am I wrong to decide the last thing I want/ Is unknown,” she sings, but if the rising wave of distortion is what that space sounds like, who wouldn’t want to stay in it a little longer?
The making of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film Godzilla has been extensively documented for English language markets—in books such as Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski’s Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa, in Issue #10 of Godziszewski’s magazine Japanese Giants, in bonus features on various home media releases, etc. Through these studies, much attention has been granted to the film’s main creators (director Honda, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, composer Akira Ifukube, and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya), though other talents, while frequently acknowledged, haven’t received equal exposure. Among these collaborators is Shigeru Kayama, the prolific science fiction author Tanaka hired to cultivate a narrative from the concept of a monster besieging civilization.
A former economics student and bureaucrat, Kayama (1904-1975) had several poems and fiction pieces to his credit when Tanaka recruited him for Godzilla and throughout the remainder of his life published hundreds of short stories and novels. That said, his international obscurity remains unsurprising: a mere sample of his output’s presently available in English; and while his story established much of Godzilla’s structure and ideas, the actual shooting script was penned by Honda and scenarist Takeo Murata. For all these reasons, he’s remained a marginalized figure in the west, even among entrenched fans of Japanese science fiction.
But now, University of Minnesota Press and translator Jeffrey Angles have delivered a small remedy via the two-novella volume Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. Published in Japan in July 1955—shortly after the first Godzilla sequel, Motoyoshi Oda’s Godzilla Raids Again (for which Kayama also penned a foundational story), premiered in theaters—the text consists of Kayama adapting the films, with increments of his imagination sprinkled throughout. In what might be of disappointment to some, the author’s original stories for both projects aren’t included, but his novelizations capture the postwar science fiction framework that made the movies fascinating; and for genre fans there’s the pleasure of seeing familiar material reinterpreted (to varying degrees) by one of Godzilla’s overlooked creators.
Of the two novellas, Godzilla is the most engaging. While the narrative structure remains largely the same, Kayama changes up the dramatis personae and, in some respects, improves upon the film. For all its nightmarish imagery and emotional power, Honda’s Godzilla fell short of masterpiece status due to its prosaic lead, Ogata (played by Akira Takarada, whose truly memorable genre roles emerged when Japanese science fiction flourished in the 1960s). More often a witness to crucial scenes than a dramatic participant, Ogata paled against the conflicted people around him—namely Emiko Yamane and the forlorn Dr. Serizawa, whose trust the former betrayed to save Japan.
In Kayama’s novella, however, Ogata’s demoted to a supporting role, with protagonist reins granted to Shinkichi, the islander orphaned by Godzilla. By placing one of the monster’s victims at center stage, Kayama creates a more engaging hero whose response to continuous assaults on Japan—and whose qualms with hopes of preserving Godzilla for science—emotionally resonate, as there’s personal history involved. The author likewise does a better job emphasizing Shinkichi’s hatred for the monster (a logical character beat that seemed oddly wasted in the movie) and develops a more well-rounded relationship between his hero and Emiko (introducing them as childhood friends who met during a wartime evacuation).
In writing the script for Godzilla, Honda and Murata consciously attenuated Kayama’s political content, which more explicitly indicted the United States and their atomic tests. Allowed to tell the story his way again, Kayama devotes plenty of page space in his novella to Cold War paranoia. Characters speculate early-narrative shipping disasters are the handiwork of “an airplane or a Soviet submarine”; others suggest that, were these calamities the start of a new war, “enemy forces” would be targeting American military craft stationed in Japan. Kayama likewise goes further in detailing social responses to Godzilla; one subplot concerns a cult whose founder deifies the creature and actively torments the monster’s victims. All the while, the author keeps physical descriptions of Godzilla to a minimum (though noting his skin glows from radiation exposure), and admittedly fumbles in contextualizing his behavior.
Godzilla makes a grand reveal gnawing on livestock and plucking a woman from the ground—suggesting his rampages are driven by hunger (as in Kayama’s original story, wherein the beast attacked Tokyo to devour zoo animals and civilians). In the novella, however, this apparent motive’s swiftly abandoned, replaced by the film counterpart’s insatiable urge to destroy. Godzilla’s city rampages feature him vaporizing people rather than devouring them, plowing through buildings instead of scouring for their fleshy occupants; and when confronted by the military he puts up a fight before returning to the ocean. The results combine the best parts of two distinct visions of Godzilla—one as a ravenous carnivore, the other a walking embodiment of destruction—even if his intent becomes muddled along the way.
That said, Kayama retains the most crucial part of Godzilla’s original persona. As one character so eloquently states in both film and book, “Godzilla himself is the hydrogen bomb hanging over Japan right now.” Throughout, the characters compare the creature’s wrath to wartime events such as the atomic bombing of Nagasaki: a metaphor carried along by scenes of radioactive contamination and survivors dying of it. Director Ishiro Honda had witnessed Japan’s devastation returning from war service; and as Kayama admits in his opening prologue, he too felt concern over the proliferation of nuclear technology, fearing that should such weapons be used again “it wouldn’t just be big metropolises like Tokyo and Osaka that would be destroyed. The entire Earth would likely be laid waste.” This passionate stance—this use of monster as metaphor—renders Godzilla both a captivating read and an excellent companion piece to the Honda classic.
Sadly, Godzilla Raids Again, while a diverting piece of entertainment, is weaker on all fronts, taking its source film’s awkwardly structured narrative and doing little to improve upon or even distinguish it. On the positive side: Kayama recycles the movie’s depiction of working-class people rebuilding their lives after a (war-like) calamity and on that level is worth acknowledging as postwar literature; however, the author fails to deepen the characters or remedy narrative mistakes—e.g., introducing the spiky quadruped Anguirus as a rival monster and killing it off well before the drama ends. Changes this time are inconsequential (e.g., Anguirus can shoot atomic rays, but doesn’t use this ability to influence his scenes’ outcome), giving Godzilla Raids Again a coldly predictable feel. Jeffrey Angles’s concluding essay in the book notes that Kayama refused involvement with Godzilla following this project, claiming the monster living on constituted “a tacit approval of the hydrogen bomb.” One also suspects from this slavishly faithful second novella that he’d simply run out of ideas.
The remainder of Angles’s essay is tremendous, packed with details on Kayama’s life and early Godzilla media—including a little-discussed radio adaptation that preceded the 1954 film in release. He also delves into the challenges of converting the original Japanese into English (e.g., excessive onomatopoeias; we learn merimeri, for instance, originally stood in for the sound of crumbling buildings) and throughout the book provides informative footnotes delineating cultural observations and Japanese writing techniques. Notwithstanding one historical error in his essay (claiming Godzilla was the most expensive Japanese film at the time of its release, when its budget in fact was usurped by two other 1954 releases: Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto), Angles’s contributions will be immeasurably useful to those interested in Shigeru Kayama and the beginnings of a pop culture icon. In an age where the vast majority of fandom clamors aggressively for overpriced plastic, Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again is a treasure not to be missed.
The reunited blink-182 lineup of Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, and Travis Barker have announced their new album ONE MORE TIME… The trio’s first album together since 2011’s Neighborhoods will arrive on October 20 via Columbia, and its title track comes out on Thursday (October 21) at 10am ET. Check out a teaser trailer, featuring clips from the band’s upcoming interview with Zane Lowe, below.
Produced by Barker, ONE MORE TIME… was recorded during blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour, which kicked off with a surprise set at Coachella in April. It spans 17 new tracks that “capture the band at the top of their game, layering in themes of tragedy, triumph and most importantly, brotherhood,” according to a press release. So far, they’ve previewed it with the song ‘Edging’, which was released in October.
Following Neighbourhoods, blink-182 made two albums with guitarist Matt Skiba, 2016’s California and 2019’s Nine.
ONE MORE TIME… Tracklist:
1. Anthem Part 3
2. Dance With Me
3. Fell in Love
4. Terrified
5. One More Time
6. More Than You Know
7. Turn This Off!
8. When We Were Young
9. Edging
10. You Don’t Know What You’ve Got
11. Blink Wave
12. Bad News
13. Hurt (Interlude)
14. Turpentine
15. Fuck Face
16. Other Side
17. Childhood
Portland, OR-based artist Laura Veirs has announced a new album called Phone Orphans. The follow-up to last year’s Found Light comes out November 3 via her own Raven Marching Band Records. Lead single ‘Rocks of Time’, which is out today, “was written about my beloved brother and devoted uncle Scott Veirs,” Veirs explained. Check it out below.
Veirs made the 14-track LP by sorting through 8 years worth of voice memos on her phone. “It feels good, on my 50th birthday and after 30 years of writing songs, to bring these ‘Phone Orphans’ into the light,” Veirs said in a press release. “These songs have been hiding out on my phone, some of them for over eight years. They are about my family, my lovers and me. I recorded them alone in my living room into my voice memo app. I like their relaxed feel. These songs were mastered but we made no edits to the recordings. I hope you enjoy this intimate glimpse into my artistic process. All songs by me except ‘Up is a Nice Place to Be’ by Rosalie Sorrels and ‘The Archers’ with lyrics adapted from a poem by Federico García Lorca.”
Phone Orphans Cover Artwork:
Phone Orphans Tracklist:
1. Creatures of a Day
2. If You Could Hold Someone
3. Rocks of Time
4. Tree Climber
5. Up Is a Nice Place to Be
6. The Archers
7. Tiger Ocean Instrumental
8. Smoke Song
9. Valentine
10. Magnolia Sphere
11. Swan Dive
12. Next One, Maybe
13. Piano Improv
14. Beautiful Dreams
Model/Actriz have released a new single, ‘Winnipesaukee’. It follows the band’s debut album Dogsbody, which came out in February. Give it a listen below.
“‘Winnipesaukee’ was among the collection of songs recorded for Dogsbody while working with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets in 2021…” frontman Cole Haden explained in a statement. “It’s a mainstay in our live shows, and we still see it as a relevant and poignant companion to the rest of Dogsbody. I initially used the word “Winnipesaukee” (as in the lake in New Hampshire) as a placeholder while writing the lyrics because I knew I needed a single, repeatable, five-syllable, proper noun as the chorus. Although I’ve never been to this lake before, I couldn’t find another word that sounded more right to my ears than ‘Winnipesaukee’, so the place I’m describing in this song is not based in New Hampshire, but instead is a snowy place I was daydreaming about walking across alone.”
Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have Big Thief’s infectious, heartwarming new single ‘Born for Loving You’; Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Will Anybody Ever Love Me?’, in which warm, gloriously enveloping instrumentation provides a home for the song’s titular despair; Yumi Zouma’s dreamy yet propulsive new single ‘KPR’; IAN SWEET’s caustic yet devastating new track ‘Emergency Contact’; ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’, a striking, relatable highlight off Mitski’s seventh album; Wild Nothing’s shimmery new song ‘Suburban Solutions’; and ‘Uh Oh’, a haunting, twitchy preview of Truth Club’s sophomore LP.
