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Moby’s 10 Best Songs
This article originally ran in 2014, but we’re dusting it off for Moby’s birthday on September 11th. This week, Moby returns with his 15th studio album, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, which takes its name from a quote that appears in the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five. In celebration, we decided to re-open the Brooklyn-turned-Los Angeles composer’s exhaustive repertoire and carve out our top 10 favorite songs. What we stumbled upon was a list that we’ll be streaming again and again. Everywhere. Here are Moby’s 10 best songs. 10. “Raining Again” Album: Hotel (2005) The rare, oft-forgotten ambient side of Hotel trumps the actual disc that surfaced in 2005. Still, “Raining Again” still feels like a triumphant win for the pop-oriented DJ. It’s the slide guitar for...
Reboot Review: An Uneven but Entertaining Hollywood Satire
The Pitch: A reboot is considered to be a death knell in the current entertainment landscape, a clear indicator of a risk-averse industry out of original ideas and desperate to recycle old ones to save themselves from major financial loss. Most reboots simply pander and rehash their concepts in order to satisfy their fanbases. Once in a blue moon, though, resurrecting a piece of intellectual property can actually lead to something subversive, a chance to fix poorly aged elements or find fresh, new stories to share with contemporary audiences. Enter young indie filmmaker Hannah Gilman (Rachel Bloom), who wants to reboot the (fictional) 2000s multicam sitcom Step Right Up for Hulu. Instead of repeating all the original’s broad, Full House-inflected humor, however, Hannah envisions the new se...
Song of the Week: Phoenix and Ezra Koenig Hearken Back to the Golden Age of Indie-Pop with “Tonight”
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Phoenix and Ezra Koenig unleash a delightful collab. Phoenix hearken back to the golden age of indie pop — an era they helped define in 2009 with their groundbreaking fourth album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix — on their new song, “Tonight,” the second single from their upcoming album Alpha Zulu (out November 4th). “Tonight” not only features fellow indie icon Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, but some signature Phoenix moves; the rousing hi-hat and tom drum line from “Lasso” returns, the escalating synths of “1901” ...
Rap Song of the Week: Sampa the Great Strikes Out for Herself on “Let Me Be Great”
Rap Song of the Week runs down all the hip-hop tracks you need to hear every Friday. Check out the full playlist here. This week, Sampa the Great shines on “Let Me Be Great,” a standout track from her sophomore album, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. Like many people, Zambian-born poet and rapper Sampa the Great sought refuge at home during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Returning to her place of birth unexpectedly helped free Sampa of some of the heavy expectations she was carrying after the success of her debut album, The Return. “A beautiful thing happened where I got to relocate back home,” she told GRAMMY.com. “As uncertain and scary as it was, I got to work with artists I saw growing up. Then, I got to journey back to the young Sampa, who dreamed of being an artist, and revert to the re...
Love, Death and Trucker Speed: The Murlocs Get Adventurous on Rapscallion
When your primary band has released 20 studio albums in 12 years (with three more to come in the next six weeks), it seems a bit preposterous to also have a side project with five albums and two EPs of its own. Such is the state of affairs for ever-prolific King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard multi-instrumentalists Ambrose Kenny-Smith and Cook Craig, whose sixth album with the Murlocs, Rapscallion, arrives Sept. 16 on ATO Records. For those of us who can barely remain functioning members of the human race on a daily basis, this level of output is, well, staggering. For Kenny-Smith and Craig, it’s basically just business as usual. “I feel like they’re way different bands inherently, because they’re set up differently,” Craig says when asked how he keeps all this music straight in his own hea...
Imen Siar: ‘Being a Muslim Woman in Pop Culture Breaks Boundaries’
I am a proud Muslim woman born in Italy to a family of Moroccan heritage. Growing up, I was bigger than most of the girls my age, and I was the only kid in my school wearing a traditional headscarf, a hijab. Kids kicked me, called me fat, and tried to take off my hijab. I hated myself so much that I self-sabotaged in school, and I had to repeat a grade because I did so poorly. Doing a grade over was a reality check. I had to change. I knew all the teachers, and the good snacks, so I felt like maybe I had knowledge to offer the new kids coming into the school. With this advantage, I decided to fake being confident, and that’s when singing took off for me as I won a prestigious talent show out of many contestants, and had my name in the newspaper! After that, it seemed like everyone wanted t...
The Good Fight Cast and Creators on the Final Season: “We Got to Do Everything We Wanted”
The Good Fight star Sarah Steele wants to clear up one rumor she’s heard: Season 6 of the Paramount+ original series does not conclude with everyone dying. “That’s not how it ends,” she tells Consequence via Zoom. “The only show that ends like that is Six Feet Under, which is called Six Feet Under and is about death. But [when I heard the rumor] I was like, ‘that would certainly break the mold.’” “Break the mold” is a turn of phrase that has a lot of applications when talking about The Good Fight, because for six glorious seasons, the Paramount+ spinoff of CBS’s The Good Wife has defied all expectations of what a legal drama can, might, and should do. To put it another way, if rocks did fall and kill the entire cast in the series finale, that would not be the weirdest thing to have h...
Best New Tracks: Ari Lennox, NAV, Roddy Ricch and More
As the week in music comes to a close, HYPEBEAST has rounded up the best projects for the latest installment of Best New Tracks. This week’s list is led by Ari Lennox, NAV and Roddy Ricch with G Herbo and Doe Boy, who released the albums age/sex/location and Demons Protected By Angels and the single “Ghetto Superstar.” Also joining this week’s releases are Bryson Tiller, Sampa The Great, Pink Siifu with Real Bad Man, Chuck Strangers and Peso Garden, Saucy Santana, Sudan Archives, White Girl Wasted and Blood Orange. Ari Lennox – age/sex/location [embedded content] Ari Lennox follows up her 2019 debut album Shea Butter Baby with age/sex/location. The 12-track record features only three guest appearances from Lucky Daye on “Boy Bye,” Chlöe on “Leak It” and Summer Walker on “Qu...
Tour Mates Dirty Honey and Dorothy Talk Life on the Road, the State of Rock, and More
Dirty Honey recently kicked off a North American tour, and were just joined on the bill by Dorothy for the remainder of the outing. There’s a mutual admiration between the two acts, so touring together seems like fate. The tour extends through an October 7th show in Santa Cruz, California, with tickets currently available via Ticketmaster. “It’s exciting,” Dirty Honey singer Marc LaBelle tells Heavy Consequence of the two acts hitting the road together. “We met Dorothy for the first time on a show in Charlotte, North Carolina, and she was nice enough to jump on a show with us when Wolfgang Van Halen had to drop out due to COVID.” He continues, “There’s a ton of respect between both bands. I love her tunes, love what she’s doing, and we know a lot about her band already. She’s really t...
“He Will Always Miss Tim”: The Story of How Avicii’s Dog Was Inherited After His Death
Avicii may be gone, but his intrepid spirit lives on not only through his music, but also his dog, Liam. Intelligent, courageous, reliable—what can be said about Liam that hasn’t already been said of his former owner, an iconic artist whose imagination soundtracks our lives years after his death? The EDM community lost its lifeblood that tragic day in 2018. But Avicii’s fans can find solace in the fact that Liam, one of the last remaining vestiges of the legendary “Levels” producer, is living the high life in Italy. Liam now spends his days frolicking under kaleidoscopic sunsets on a lush property in Milan. It’s here where Liam’s trainer and current owner, Filippo Moretti, is earnestly fulfilling a “promise made to a great ...
Natural Brown Prom Queen Is Sudan Archives’ Brilliant Homecoming
Brittney Parks might be the only artist who can use the phrases “step inside my cottage” and “only bad bitches” in the same verse. The multi-hyphenate alt-R&B musician — better known as Sudan Archives, our September Artist of the Month — uses both of them effortlessly in “Home Maker,” the opening track to her multifarious new album Natural Brown Prom Queen. At once, she paints herself as both the modern hot girl and a timeless Aphrodite. “Home Maker” is a fitting mission statement to Natural Brown Prom Queen, a record that luxuriates in introversion, creature comforts, and the freedom allotted by the places you feel most safe. “Don’t you feel at home when you’re with me?” she repeats in the bridge. There’s a bit of a come-hither wink to it, but also an edge. Rather than playing into th...
Insiders’ guide to real-life crypto OGs: Part 1
Crypto OGs — slang for Original Gangsters — have acquired almost a mythical and godly reputation in an industry populated with libertarians, anti-government rebels, innovators, get-rich-quick scammers, hackers and degen investors with rampant gambling addictions and toxic social media behavior. Who are these OGs exactly? Unlike the rich and powerful in the traditional finance and conventional tech sector, crypto OGs are often protected by a layer of decentralized anonymity in a particularly wild corner of cyberspace. Who deserves this mythical label? The year they got into crypto? Their current net worth? Their lifestyle? Their impact on the industry? How can you separate the randos and wannabes from the OGs? Without further ado, here’s our guide to spotting OGs at any networking par...
