Money. It’s the lifeblood of any business. Without it, you can’t pay your employees, keep the lights on, or do much of anything else. So how can you bring in more revenue for your company? This blog post will discuss five surefire ways to increase your business income and help you reach your financial goals!
1) Increase Your Pricing
One of the most effective ways to bring more revenue to your business is to increase your pricing. With a higher price point, you can generate more money from each sale and ultimately bring in more total revenue. Of course, it’s important to ensure that your prices remain competitive and fair when compared to others in the same industry. Otherwise, customers may be hesitant to purchase from you or could gravitate elsewhere.
When raising prices, keep in mind that there are several ways to accomplish this goal. An across-the-board price increase for all products or services is an effective way. You could also implement a tiered structure for different levels of service, offering lower prices for basic services and higher prices for premium options. Additionally, you could offer product bundles at discounted rates where customers receive multiple items at an overall rate less than what they would pay if they purchased them individually.
It’s also important to find the right balance between quantity discounts and increased pricing because too much of one can mean decreased profits due to lower margins per item or service sold. Offering incentives such as loyalty programs or bulk discounts is a great way to incentivize customers and potentially encourage larger purchases at higher prices while still providing them with great value. When done strategically, increasing pricing can be an incredibly powerful growth tool that helps bring more revenue into your business while still keeping your customers happy and engaged.
2) Upgrade Your Service Offering
Another great way to add more revenue is to upgrade your service offering. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, such as introducing new products or services and expanding the scope of existing ones. Upgrading your services adds value for customers by giving them access to more features and benefits than they would have had with the original product or service. It also helps you stand out from competitors who may not offer the same enhanced level of service.
When upgrading services, it’s important to conduct market research first to ensure that there is demand for the upgraded version before investing resources into developing it. Additionally, make sure that any upgrades you introduce are inline with customer expectations and aligned with your company’s mission and goals.
3) Increase Your Marketing Efforts
Marketing is essential for any business, as it helps you reach more potential customers and generate more sales. To bring in additional revenue, focus on boosting your marketing efforts by utilizing a mix of different channels such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email campaigns, content marketing, and more. Additionally, ensure that you’re targeting the right audiences with the right message to draw them towards your business and ultimately increase your income.
4) Add Additional Revenue Streams
Adding additional revenue streams to your business can be an effective way to bring in extra money without having to significantly increase customer acquisition or conversion rates. Consider offering products or services related to what you already offer, such as webinars, consulting services, eBooks or other digital products. You could also look into affiliate partnerships or sponsorships to bring in more money from brands and companies that share your target audience.
Although it can be time-consuming to establish new revenue streams, the potential upside of increased income can make this effort well worth the investment. Be sure to do your research beforehand so you have a better idea of what additional services would be most beneficial for your business.
5) Offer multiple payment options
Making sure you offer customers multiple payment options is a great way to increase revenue. Offer customers the ability to pay using a contactless card reader, digital wallets, e-checks, wire transfers, or even cryptocurrency. This will help ensure that more people can purchase your products or services as it allows them to choose the most convenient option for their needs. Additionally, offering multiple payment options can make it easier for customers to buy from you without having to leave your website.
In conclusion, there are several ways to increase revenue without increasing customer acquisition. By strategically pricing your products and services, upgrading your service offering, boosting your marketing efforts, adding additional revenue streams, and offering multiple payment options, you can make more money while still keeping your customers happy. Take the time to evaluate what strategies will work best for your business in order to maximize its growth potential.
A good bedtime routine is essential to ensure that you get a quality night’s sleep every evening. But what sort of activity should you do before you go to bed? Everyone’s different, of course, but some activities are proven to result in a better night’s rest and listening to music is one of them.
With that being said, below, we’ll take a look at why listening to music before bed is a good idea, as well as reveal the best genre of music to listen to before sleep.
Should you listen to music before you go to sleep?
As per Betway Insider, listening to music before you go to bed is one of the best things you can do to get a restful night’s sleep. Betway conducted research into how we should be spending our evenings to get the best night’s sleep. Listening to music was fourth on the list of best bedtime activities.
The survey revealed that listening to music actually produced the longest night’s sleep, with respondents only waking up for 17 minutes throughout the night. With regard to sleep quality, participants scored an average of 87%,
What sort of music should you listen to before you go to bed?
The key is to choose music that is relaxing and calms your brain. Worthy choices include chill-out music, classical songs, acoustic tracks, and lullabies.
Instrumental, slow-paced songs work well, as you’re not going to be distracted by vocals or lyrics. Orchestral music and piano music are popular choices.
We’ve also seen that Strauss, Mozart, and other classic tunes can lower your blood pressure more than the likes of pop music can. You can read about vocal pop through the decades here.
If you prefer to listen to modern tracks, there are plenty of options available. Spotify recently revealed that Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran is the most popular song choice found in sleep playlists created by users. Other modern singers that made the cut include John Legend, Ellie Goulding, and Sam Smith.
No matter what style of music you choose in the end, there is a common theme when it comes to choosing the best music for sleep, and this is a slow tempo. If you want to relax, you should look for songs that have 60 BPM, which stands for beats per minute.
If you choose a song that’s fast-paced, it’s only going to stimulate your mind and body, which is the complete opposite of what you need to be doing before going to sleep.
Enjoy a better night’s sleep with some relaxing music before you go to bed
As you can see, listening to music before bed is one of the best things you can do to ensure you get a full night’s worth of sleep. However, the genre of music does matter. The last thing you want to listen to is energetic music that will energise you and awaken your senses. Instead, it’s important to choose music that will relax you and help you to drift off into a restful sleep.
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Madison Cunningham grew up performing along with her four sisters in church, where her father was a worship pastor. She started playing guitar at age seven and formed her first band while in high school in Orange County, but it wasn’t until after graduating that she discovered influences such as the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. She cut her first EP with producer and longtime collaborator Tyler Chester, who went on to work on her 2019 debut Who Are You Now, the 2020 covers EP Wednesday, and her latest LP, Revealer. Following its release last September, Cunningham toured extensively in support of the album – which earned her the Grammy for Best Folk Album – and recently shared a new version of the track ‘Hospital’ featuring Remi Wolf. Cunningham’s songwriting naturally lends itself to mystery, particularly on Revealer, whose searching, wildly imaginative arrangements reward repeated listens and whose emotional resonance has deepened over time. Ιts 11 tracks often center around and bend ideas of personal freedom and growth in ways that can be dark, playful, and defiant, but Cunningham always manages to land someplace earnest.
Ahead of her show at London’s Barbican on March 8 for International Women’s Day, we caught up with Madison Cunningham for our Artist Spotlight series to talk about Revealer, her relationship to the songs, live performance, and more.
It’s almost been half a year since Revealer came out, and you’ve had the space to really sit with the songs and take in people’s response. Do you feel like the months have flown by?
Yeah, it’s so strange. Making the record took about two years in total, and then to just have it be out for everybody to hear and digest and make opinions of – it’s strange and it’s liberating. I always forget that there’s always still more work to be done for it. It’s easy get caught in celebration of it or the grind of touring it, and then I’m reminded, “Oh yeah, this is this whole body of work that I spent years pouring myself into.” I myself am not ready to move on yet, but mentally, I think I’ve just been trying to trying to put both feet on the ground in terms of writing and opening up my mind to new ideas again. And that feels great, too, because it feels like I’m able to turn the page, in a way. It has been a lot of work, to not only make record but then promote it and all the things following.
I’m sure you get asked a lot about your process, which is something that involves stringing many different ideas together. At this stage, are there still parts of these songs whose meaning continues to reveal itself to you?
That’s the beauty of songs and what they tend to do if you step out of the way – if you’re not too heavy-handed with the the songwriting process. I think that allows some room for people to create other narratives inside of it, and also for the narratives to change to you. I feel like a lot of the songs have done that in hindsight, taken on different colors and shapes. ‘In from Japan’ is one of those tunes for me, because it takes on different angles for me depending on how I sing it, how I feel it. Sometimes it feels very desperate to me and other times it feels incredibly liberated, and I love being able to sing that song from either place. I don’t have many songs where I’m like, “I’ve got to really put on a smile for this one.” I think most of the time, at least in this body of work, those songs exist where my emotions usually are resting at. They’re usually pretty true to who I am and where I’m at in an emotional sense.
People talk about songwriting as something that’s often aspirational, and the thing that a lot of performers strive toward, especially songwriters who have a complicated relationship with performing, is greater confidence. What I like about a song like ‘In From Japan’ is that you can interpret the line “No one’s holding you back now” in different ways, and you said that you can sing it from different angles. Having come out the other side, do you find yourself leaning more on one side when you’re performing it now?
It’s one of my favorite songs to perform live, and I think the way that it sort of leans musically brings out a confidence and excitement in me. So just from a purely musical standpoint, I really feel like I can get behind that that tune, and I really enjoy playing it. I feel like that line in particular, “No one’s holding you back now,” depending on where I’m at – my confidence or lack of confidence – sometimes that line can read as passive aggressive to me, in terms, “This is all yours, what are you gonna do with it? No one’s telling you what to do, so make it good.” Or it’s incredibly just, “You got this. Don’t freak out.” Any time that song comes up in the set list, I get excited because I generally feel like it’s true for me, no matter what angle, what mood I’m in or coming from. Maybe in ten years I’ll have a different perspective on it.
Sometimes the songs take on new life in a more literal sense, and you recently got to rework ‘Hospital’ with Remi Wolf and Ethan Gruska. How did the collaboration come about, and what did it mean for you to revisit the track?
That song already had so many different versions, and the the one that made it on the album was the third iteration of it. I feel like there’s this sort of madness that’sbrewing in the song, and then it kind of reels itself in, which was a purposeful artistic decision. And then I felt like I really want to make like the sort of crazy hospital version of it, where basically in my mind the patient starts running the hospital, and there’s like a “no doctors” kind of vibe. I was thinking who could help this come to life and that idea come across, and Ethan was someone I thought of because I love his production. And then I thought of Remi. We were recent online friends, we were talking a bit back and forth and we got coffee. I was apparent to me, I was like, “I think we’re going to be a fit.” Our second time ever hanging out was was making that tune and hanging out. It just was so free-flowing and exciting and fun, and we laughed a lot. That, to me, is a recipe for success.
Are there any songs that still remain a bit of a mystery to you?
I think ‘Collider Particles’ is one of those spacey, mystical tunes to me that, I know the angle that I was singing from, but sometimes the rest of it remains a little bit ambiguous, which I love. And I still believe it, because I relate to the feeling that it’s portraying, but it’s definitely me singing from a place of being a little bit inside of myself and naturally melancholic. It’s sort of me just having a conversation with a friend – I’m singing from the perspective of the friend talking to me, if that makes sense. It was a fun world to create for that tune.
We talk about songs feeling like intimate conversations, but is this idea of playing with the perspective of who’s doing the talking something you find yourself more and more drawn to?
Yeah, the joy of it is getting to sit in different seats and getting to to view this stage, if you will, from different angles. Or even getting to play different characters – the power of it is also getting to inhabit other people’s perspectives. In talking to my friends a lot and being observant, that tends to to happen, and if you’re an empathetic person, it’s a lot easier to put yourself in somebody’s choose and into somebody’s perspective that might differ from your own. I think that’s where great and interesting songwriting comes from, is being able to sympathize and empathize with others.
There’s a line on ‘All I’ve Ever Known’ – “I’m a daughter to the mystery but a servant to strain” – that seems relevant to what we’re talking about. It’s interesting how you describe your relationship to abstract concepts on that song.
I kind of forgot about that line. But when I wrote it, it meant a lot to me because I definitely feel that – this sort of push-and-pull with these big overarching ideas, where it’s like I feel welcomed by these things that I don’t understand and also estranged from them. That tends to be a theme every day in my life[laughs] – just kind of wondering where I stand on things, what I’m able to understand, and it’s a constant inner dialogue.
You have an upcoming show at the Barbican on March 8 celebrating International Women’s Day. How are you feeling?
I’m truly excited because the Barbican is a beautiful space, and I played there once back in 2019 opening for Andrew Bird. I wanted to go back because it sounds beautiful in there, and all the women who are supporting – I’m so excited to hear all those incredible artists. I haven’t done an event to commemorate International Women’s Day before, and I feel like there’s going to be a weight to it because of that. I’m really looking forward to it.
Are there any things you can share that are inspiring you at the moment?
I’ve been doing a lot of podcast listening, and to one podcast in particular called You’re Wrong About. The host is so incredible, I’m totally hooked. And then I’ve been listening to this record by Daniel Rossen, You Belong There, I’ve been just drinking that up. And Sahar by Tamino, I listen to that record all the time. Those are those are the three things that have been keeping me inspired.
In terms of new music, I assume you’re still in the very early stages of the process?
Yeah, still very early stages, just because touring is such a hard state for me to write in, and we did so much of that last year. I’m shifting gears, and it always takes a minute to turn the whole ship around. But I’ve been excited and I’ve been reading, just trying to soak up ideas and what other people are up to.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Orson Ortman is magnetic, charming, and can easily attract those who spend just a moment in his orbit — he’s also a scammer. Ezra Green, the protagonist of Rafael Frumkin’s latest novel Confidence, meets him at Last Chance Camp, a sort of juvie for kids who need to be reformed. Ezra isn’t a stand-up citizen either — he has online friends who think he’s a young woman named Ingrid with a perfect boyfriend — but when the two get together after the camp ends, their plans to make money kick into high gear, fueled by their budding relationship.
They sell sneakers, get into Cryptocurrency, comfort lonely rich wives of senators, but their breakthrough comes when Orson comes up with ‘Synthesis’, a completely fake procedure that is supposed to alleviate the mind of its troubles all by placing your hands on the sides of your head. They team up with investors to create technology that does nothing, and their company, NuLife, follows. While Orson grows into something of a star and attracts movie stars and publicity while expanding his business venture, Ezra can’t help but feel lost in his shadow, and the NuLife bubble comes dangerously close to bursting.
Our Culture talked with Rafael about queer narratives in literature, real-life scammer inspirations, and the benefits of the placebo effect.
Congrats on your new novel! It’s been about 5 years since your debut, and you’ve gone through some really important personal changes since then — did any of this influence how you set about writing this second work?
Yeah, actually. I actually just wrote an essay about this — my world really opened up when I came out as trans. The first novel, I care very much about it and it’s very dear to me, but I thought I was cishet, and then I thought I was cis and gay, and I was just figuring myself out and I was very young. That novel doesn’t have a lot of queer characters — there’s one trans and queer character, who ended up getting a lot of attention and people liked them the most. That should be telling, right? But then I ended up coming out and figuring myself out, and right around the same time I was like, ‘I want to write a queer novel, and I want queerness to be a part of it, whether or not it’s about queerness or it’s incidental, I just want to feature it in some way.’ Then Confidence happened, and it feels more natural to me to have that element in it than not.
One of the talking points I was interested in is that usually when people write queer stories, it’s a very rose-colored view of their lives, where everyone’s good and pure. We have drastic opposites of that with books like A Little Life, but I liked that you weren’t afraid to paint these scammers as bad, and not all stories involving queer people have to be romantic and perfect.
My publicist and my editor and I have been talking a lot about this, just kind of how to conceptualize the book in the landscape of queer literature. I think that it’s about queerness being incidental to these characters — they are queer, and in a romantic relationship. But, right, they’re not necessarily good people, or rather, you’re rooting for them, and there’s goodness in them, but there’s a Robinhood quality because they get really selfish. All of that’s going on.
I wanted to add an extra dimension to the queer character, because when you talk about A Little Life, it’s a great book but it has so much trauma in it. Jude’s story is about him being queer, and the trauma of coming out and this sexual violence perpetrated against him. In this case, bad stuff does happen, but it’s not on that level, and it’s not necessarily about the queerness. That’s what I wanted it to be — I wanted queerness to be a feature, not a bug.
Ezra meets Orson at Last Chance Camp, and he’s this mesmerizing and attractive character — he has this way of talking to people. How did you come up with this person?
One inspiration is Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley — he’s this super handsome, ultra privileged person who moves through the world with such ease, but there’s this darkness to him that Orson shares, but maybe in a different capacity. Dickie ends up being murdered, and his story ends, but it’s different for Orson — his charisma just balloons and he becomes this cult leader. In addition to Dickie in terms of handsomeness and charisma, I was also thinking almost like a Steve Jobs figure. Though Orson doesn’t have that technology, Orson’s stuff is purely fake, but he’s able to have this cult of personality.
Another inspiration, and this comes with a huge caveat — the inspiration for his cult, not his personality, was Keith Raniere and the NXIVM cult. It started as this ‘executive success program’, this way to help people be more successful in business and their lives. It was like Scientology, they were attracting all these movie stars, and underneath, he was running this sex cult and controlling all these women. He’s this pernicious, repugnant, garbage human being. So Orson wasn’t modeled on him, but the concept of NXIVM specifically, the executive success programs, is what gave rise to NuLife. That was percolating in my head — I had just seen The Vow — and I was thinking, ‘All these scammers are boomers. I want to think of Millenial scammers: Elizabeth Holmes, Billy McFarland, Anna Delvey.’ Okay, let’s add Orson Ortman to that!
At the beginning of the book the duo goes through all of these petty scams like designing feminist T-shirts or swindling online friends to believe that Ezra is a girl whose boyfriend is Orson. Did you have fun coming up with all of these tricks?
Oh, yeah, it was an absolute delight. I was thinking of The Sting and Paper Moon, films like that, where you have people perpetrating these petty scams. I was thinking, ‘How can I update these for the 21st century?’ They still do the change-counting stuff, but they have their own fake Etsy, they mess around with Cryptocurrency. I think I had the most fun with the Jamie DeCroix honeypot scam, where Orson is the bait, and they end up scamming them out of house and home. It was so fun for me, and if I were to do it again, I’d probably add even more.
So, the big turning point is when the two come up with Synthesis, a pseudo-mental-health scam that relies on the basics of crowdwork, spirituality, and the desire to want to become better. How did you go about forming this idea?
There’s definitely a lot of Scientology around that — the idea of going clear, the idea of auditing. But Scientology has this really menacing aspect, where auditing is meant to get dirt on you. But Synthesis is purely a scam, it doesn’t want to get dirt on you or screw you over. It just wants to get your money and for you to believe you’re enlightened. It’s not super sinister, it’s just a typical scam. But the idea definitely came from the fictionalized version of Scientology in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie, The Master, where they undergo hypnosis. Also hypnotherapy — which is a real thing and can be very healing — but if you have a charlatan practicing it, then you can just go in all kinds of directions.
I also felt that because it’s a placebo, and the people Orson does it on want it to work so bad, it’s almost as if believing you’re better is as good as it being true. Obviously it’s not doing anything, but if they feel different… it might be real!
Right, yeah, they feel better but it’s a total placebo situation. That’s kind of what gets Orson thinking, and he starts to buy his own bullshit. He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m doing good, I’m helping these people and giving them this beautiful spiritual message.’ And Ezra knows the whole time that it’s absolute garbage. But Orson has bought into the scam — he’s scamming himself, almost, at that point. But you’re right, if you take the sugar pill, and you believe your depression has been cured, it’s kind of the power of suggestion.
Orson gradually detaches from Ezra and gravitates towards Emily, a movie star acting as his girlfriend, and the reader doesn’t really know if this is a front for the company or not. What do you think Orson’s mindset is like, where his heart is attached to Ezra but his mind must be fixated on the company?
Orson is definitely pansexual — that’s my new definitive statement on Orson. It’s a combination of a lot of things — he mentions to Ezra that they can’t sleep in the same hotel room, as it’d be suspicious, but he’s also buying into this homophobic respectability. And Emily is just ideal, right, she’s this beautiful movie star, and if he can attach himself to her, he can get so much credibility. But I think that for Orson, though he cares about both of these people, he’s more in love with Ezra than he is with Emily. There’s a poly element, too. He’s definitely doing a lot of this for appearances, he’s using people, but he also cares about them, so it’s really complex. I’ve had people come up to me, saying, ‘Oh, Orson’s scamming Ezra, it’s a love scam,’ but it’s not quite that. There’s a connection that’s not insignificant between the two.
I feel like Ezra’s true self is revealed through his resistance to getting medical attention – he feels this anxiety about his condition but doesn’t take anyone’s advice. Is he too caught up in the company to really pay attention, or is this indicative of a larger flaw of his?
It’s a combination of things. Right, he’s wrapped up in the company, but he’s also wanting to be strong. It’s a Silicon Valley thing, he’s like, ‘No, I’m not seeking medical attention, I’m just gonna take these gold flakes and hope it all works out.’ That said, I think non-Western medicine is fantastic, and Western medicine is lacking in a lot of ways, and there are all kinds of curative properties like teas and herbs that are very real, but Ezra is going towards the trendy stuff: the green shakes, the Elizabeth Holmes-type stuff. Chiefly because he does want to keep up those appearances. He’s in intense denial, and he’s thinking, ‘If I get this treatment, I’m conceding.’ He gets the eye drops, and he feels he’s losing to this weakness, and wants to believe that with willpower, he can overcome it. There’s definitely a rugged individualism happening there, a hypercapitalism ideal. Those are certainly flaws of his but it’s also wrapped up in his love for Orson, so it’s more complex.
Great segue — why do you think Ezra keeps himself attached to Orson after everything they’ve been through, knowing that the company is a fraud?
The simple answer is that Ezra is just head-over-heels in love. It’s like limerence, not lust — he’s obsessed, and he wants the love to be requited, but it’s not always. He doesn’t give up on Orson because he senses this connection, and there’s so much evidence in the book for this connection, especially when they’re doing their early scams. I think that Ezra’s desire to not give up is what really fuels that desire to keep on financing Orson’s cult and his operations. I can’t imagine Ezra moving on. And he doesn’t have to, because he thinks this guy is the love of his life. He’ll just doggedly pursue him — it might take Orson dying or just being permanently out of commision in some way for him to give up.
A big portion of the book takes place in the fictional island of Urmau, where there’s a battle between two factions as to whether NuLife is right for the country’s development. Why did you want to delve into politics and international relations?
I think global capitalism is a huge ill, because with it comes white supremacy, the degradation of women and queer and trans folks, so there’s this huge cancer affecting the earth, and I wanted that to be a part of the novel, because the novel is so about capitalism in all its forms, and conning in all its forms, using and abusing and manipulating people. Like you said, these are not good guys. I wanted to take it to Urmau because I was thinking about all these major corporations that have offshored themselves and are doing business in China, or South America, and all over. Their business, whether they’re manufacturing toys or military-grade arms, is affecting the people in that place, and they’re being used and underpaid. Another good example of this is Apple in China — there are people in tough situations because it’s gonna make Apple and Boeing and whomever a quick buck.
The political tensions in Urmau, I wanted it to escalate quickly and have it be about tensions in the country. There’s this conservative faction rebelling against the liberal capitalist faction, and NuLife is at the center of it. Orson is sort of a god. And this is stuff that’s happened before all over the world with US imperialism and global capitalism. I wanted to add chiefly, anti-Blackness and anti-POC really fuels this phenomenon, because these are the people who are being abused and underpaid and put in sweatshops and awful situations the most. All of that is big and far-reaching and I don’t know if I quite get there in the book, but that’s what was happening in my brain.
Finally, what’s next? I know you already have a short story collection coming out next year, but are you working on any projects right now?
Yeah! You never know if it’s gonna materialize, but I’m actually working on a book about a trans nomad who travels the country looking for his dog, and accidentally gets wrapped up in international espionage. So that’s the next project that will hopefully turn into something.
superviolet is the new project from Steven Ciolek of the Ohio band Sidekicks, who announced they had broken up late last year. Today, he’s announcing its debut album, Infinite Spring, which will be out April 21 via Lame-O Records. Check out the lead single ‘Overrater’, which comes with a video directed by Kosoma Jensen, below.
“The Sidekicks started when I was 15, when I was just starting to write music. So having an idea, bringing it to practice, and having the band turn it into something was just how I learned to make songs,” Ciolek explained in a press release. “But I always would have ideas in my mind of doing things a different way or exploring certain things on my own. So when we stopped, I wanted to just have a clean slate to try and have a new songwriting project. The idea behind Infinite Spring as an album was to try to capture that feeling of openness or possibility or growth.”
He added: “The songwriting process felt more all over the place than it had in the past. It was pretty unhurried. A lot of times with a band there’s just sort of inherently a style that you’re going to fall into, whereas with this I felt like I could try any random idea. The Sidekicks also played a lot of shows and so considering whether or not a song would work live was a big part of it. But playing live really didn’t inform what I was writing at all this time.”
Infinite Spring Tracklist:
1. Angels On The Ground
2. Blue Bower
3. Big Songbirds Don’t Cry
4. Good Ghost
5. Dream Dating
6. Long Drive
7. Locket
8. Overrater
9. Infinite Spring
10. Wave Back
The Menzingers have released a new single called ‘Bad Actors’. The track was written during sessions for the band’s sixth LP, 2019’s Hello Exile. “It’s one of the last songs we wrote for the album and finished it in the studio,” singer/guitarist Tom May explained in a statement. “It’s an ode to a dear old friend that passed.” Listen to it below.
A crowd stampede broke out at a GloRilla show in Rochester, New York on Sunday night (March 5), leaving one person dead and nine others injured, The Associated Press reports.
Rochester police lieutenant Nicholas Adams told CNN that officers arrived at around 11 pm following false reports of a shooting at Main Street Armory theater, where GloRilla was performing with Memphis rapper Finesse2tymes. Although they found no evidence to suggest a shooting had occurred, “the injuries appear to be as a result of a large crowd pushing towards the exits following accounts of individuals hearing what they believed to be gunshots,” Adams said.
A 33-year-old woman was killed in the incident and two other women remain in hospital in a critical condition. Seven others were also treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
“I’m just now hearing about what happened wtf,” GloRilla tweeted late Sunday night. “Praying everybody is ok.”
I’m just now hearing about what happened wtf 😢😢😢praying everybody is ok 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Barrie has released a new track from her upcoming 5K EP. It’s called ‘Empty’, and it follows the previously shared single ‘Races’. Give it a listen below.
“‘Empty’ is me reflecting on and getting angry about how so many of my thoughts aren’t my own; it’s a hazy mix of taste and ideas printed on my brain by my culture, my upbringing, people around me while in any impressionable age,” Barrie explained in a press release. “I’ve been trying to take back ownership of my thoughts, and access what I actually think and feel. I have to take responsibility for the things inside my head. The song started with the line “there is no act to private / that I don’t want you to like it,” which encapsulates the sentiment. It didn’t end up fitting in the song, but that kind of constant confusion of your own thoughts with other people’s thoughts is at the heart of it.”
The Tallest Man on Earth has released ‘Henry St.’, the title track from his forthcoming album. Following lead offering ‘Every Little Heart’, the song arrives with an accompanying visual filmed in Amsterdam, the second in a trilogy of videos directed by Jeroen Dankers for the record. Watch and listen below.
Commenting on the new single, Kristian Matsson said in a statement: “As individuals, we’re told that we should strive for success. But when we have it, it doesn’t solve anything. The song is about stepping away and thinking: why am I actually doing this?”
He added, “It’s the low point and the turnaround: the other songs are a reminder that I will always be a stubborn optimist, even at the darkest of times.” He was about to record the track as a solo piece, until Phil Cook came in on his first day in the studio. “I had Phil basically hanging over my shoulders at the piano while we were playing, and then he recorded it. He improvised that beautiful outro. When he did, our jaws dropped––I was in tears.”
Billie Marten has shared ‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’, the final advance single from her upcoming album Drop Cherries. It follows the previously unveiled tracks ‘Nothing But Mine’ and ‘This Is How We Move’. Check it out below.
Speaking about ‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’, Marten said in a statement: “This is very much a cruiser. One to turn up really loud on the long drive out of town or back home. I wrote the chorus way before the verse, had it for months and whenever I’d pick up a guitar it would reappear. The sentiment expresses a deep sense of homecoming, arrival at where you’d like to be, and also a slight implausibility of discovering a new era of gladness. I truly adore the band’s playing on this, so sweet, so natural, so alive.”
