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Composer Ramin Djawadi on Uncharted and Jamming With The National in Westeros
Ramin Djawadi, the Emmy-winning composer behind the scores for Iron Man, Pacific Rim, and Game of Thrones, isn’t sure that he has a signature sound to his works for film, TV, video games, and more. “I don’t know if I can analyze myself and say, oh, I sound like Ramin,” he tells Consequence. “I can definitely think of other composers when I hear their music, but I’m not sure if I can say it about myself. I don’t know. I think it’s up to others to decide if I have that or not.” While he might not be able to hear what makes it distinctive, Djawadi has nonetheless become quite in demand. His latest film, the Tom Holland-starring adaptation of Uncharted, is now available for rental, and on the horizon this year are two massive TV projects: Djawadi will be returning not just to compose the music...
Better Call Saul Recap: When You Can’t Run Any Further
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6 Episode 3, “Rock and Hard Place.” For our recap of Episode 2, click here] Case Summary While other things happen in the third episode of Better Call Saul, “Rock and Hard Place” should be forever remembered as The Nacho Episode, for very good reason. Nacho isn’t the first series regular to perish over the course of the show’s run — that honor belongs to Chuck McGill (Michael McKean). But Michael Mando delivers a simply staggering performance in his theoretical swan song, facing a fate which might have seemed inevitable from the beginning, but is still heartbreaking to watch. Writer/director Gordon Smith delivers Nacho to his end with an episode so deliberately paced that the dread builds more and more with each de...
The Reissue Section – April 2022
Hey fellas, have ya heard the news? CDs are back! If Rolling Stone, Vice, The Guardian all said so, then it must be gospel, right? If you’re a reader of this section you’re well aware that we’ve always been advocates of the compact disc. Fads come and go, but a passion for owning the music you purchase lastss forever. And with that said, we give you our picks for the best archival titles of this first quarter of 2022. The LemonheadsIt’s A Shame About Ray: 30th Anniversary Edition (Fire Records) The Lemonheads hit 1992 like a beam of sunshine, piercing the dark veil of grunge with their fifth LP It’s A Shame About Ray. And where their early TAANG! Records whirlwinds felt like an expensive J. Crew sweater dragged across the floor of CBGB, Ray is that very shirt after being washed and worn by...
Inside Mad World, the U.K. Record Label Championing Club Culture
In late 2019, London-based duo God Colony began thinking about establishing a record label, formalizing the ideas and projects they had been working on. Over the next few months, founders Thomas Gorton and James Rand were joined by producer Raf Rundell and art director Jacob Chabeaux, and Mad World was born. Almost immediately, though, lockdown measures were announced globally and nightclubs everywhere were forced to close. The culture that had inspired Mad World suddenly faced a more uncertain future than ever before. “I think it made us more compelled to make it really happen,” Gorton tells HYPEBEAST. “Two years on Zoom and having your temperature checked at the pub drives a man mad – you end up doing totally unnecessary things like starting a record label. It was strange to start and th...
Barry’s Anthony Carrigan on Showing a Whole New Side to NoHo Hank in Season 3
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Barry, Season 3, Episode 1, “forgiving jeff.”] It wasn’t perhaps the love story you were expecting to bloom when the dark HBO comedy Barry first premiered, but that just makes it a well-earned and also unexpected delight: Following the events of the Season 2 finale, as seen in the Season 3 premiere, the overwhelmingly cheerful NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) and rival mob leader Cristobal (Michael Irby) are now romantically involved. Of course, Barry is not exactly a show built for happy endings, especially for the confirmed mobsters at its core, but for right now, Carrigan is just happy to play a new dimension to NoHo Hank, one which builds upon the character’s established desire to care for others, but with a whole new edge. “I’m excited t...
Role Model Has Found Love and Wants Everyone to Hear About It
Tucker Pillsbury — better known by his stage name, Role Model — is ready to ditch his indie sad-boy persona for a more optimistic look. The 24-year-old musician told HYPEBEAST that after building a brand off of “being anti-love, hating everyone and not leaving the house,” his new album Rx leans fully into the power of love. “I started the album process at the same time that I fell in love for the first time in my life,” Pillsbury told HYPEBEAST, explaining the shift in his sonic style. “That was something I was always very closed off to my whole life, which I think you can hear in my earlier music. It was something scary to me, always, and when it happens, it hits you like a train.” His private-but-not-secret relationship — teased in his “neverletyougo” music video — is the seedling that h...
The Who Kick Off 2022 North American Tour in Florida: Recap + Setlist
When it comes to playing guitar, Pete Townshend makes it look easy. Noodling up and down the frets and whipping his right arm about for a round of his signature windmills, he still looks every bit the rock star who once dramatically smashed his instrument onstage in a bid to outperform Jimi Hendrix at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. “This is what I do,” boasted The Who’s mastermind at the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida on Friday night (April 22nd), as he kicked into the recognizable guitar groove of the band’s “Who Are You.” It was the ninth song from a cathartic 24-song set on the first night of “The Who Hits Back!” tour (grab tickets via Ticketmaster), and the band’s first proper concert in more than two years. The setlist mirrored that of 2019’s “Moving On!” tour, and for good rea...
Kiernan Shipka and Diane Kruger on How Real Hollywood Can Be Just as Brutal as Swimming With Sharks
Kiernan Shipka has some unconventional advice for getting to know a new co-star — do drugs with them. Or pretend to do drugs with them, as she tells Consequence. The Mad Men and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina alum stars with Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds, National Treasure) in Swimming With Sharks, a six-episode limited series that was originally produced to debut on the dearly departed streaming service Quibi. After Quibi shut down literally as the series was finishing up production, it (along with other Quibi series) was rescued by the Roku Channel for distribution. Based on the acclaimed 1994 indie film about a young assistant dealing with a tyrannical Hollywood boss, creator Kathleen Robertson flipped the genders of the leads to introduce the character of Lou Simms (Shipka), an as...
Song of the Week: The Smile Embrace Dramatic Balladry on “Free In the Knowledge”
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, The Smile unleash a devastating, melancholy rumination on living with the consequences of the world around us. It’s as if Thom Yorke decided about a decade ago to commit himself to releasing some of the most devastating music of his career — which is kind of like a Carolina Reaper deciding to be spicier, or the Mariana Trench deciding that it’s not quite deep enough. There’s “Dawn Chorus” from his 2019 solo record ANIMA, “Unmade” from the Suspiria soundtrack, and pretty much everything off of Radiohead’s ...
The 50 Best Albums of 1972
Last year, when helping assemble SPIN‘s 50 Best Albums of 1971, I wondered if that year could have been popular music’s absolute peak. Now I’m asking myself that same question all over again. As I built a spreadsheet for 1972, gathering our writers’ votes alongside my own weird choices, I was once again struck by how many bronze-cast classics came out that year: LPs from David Bowie, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, The Allman Brothers Band, Yes, Stevie Wonder, Roxy Music, and on and on. Run down basically every genre – glam, soul, prog, art rock, Southern rock, metal, folk, MPB — and you’ll find the very best shit, whether eternally famous or sadly obscure. (My poor spreadsheet, swelling each day, originally had hundreds of worthy records. But you have to start chopping eventually.) Here’s wher...
We Own This City Is a Comprehensive, Heartbreaking Account of a City in Ruins: Review
The Pitch: The tragic death of Freddie Gray in 2015 while in police custody was a watershed moment for Baltimore; Black communities and activists erupted in protest against the overwhelming presence of (and abuse by) Baltimore Police Department officers, who frequently dispensed justice at the end of a baton. And in 2017, the city saw the closest thing that’s come to accountability, with the arrests of the members of BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force — a unit specifically tasked with taking guns and drugs off the streets of Baltimore, but who instead used their institutional power to enrich themselves. Drugs planted in cars to justify arrests, seized cash going missing, violent crackdowns on anyone who looks at them funny: it was just another day on the job, particularly for the GTTF’s hothe...
Fontaines D.C. Are at the Height of Their Powers With Skinty Fia
Only four years ago, Fontaines D.C. released their first set of singles — one of which being “Boys In The Better Land,” an anthemic romp about the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side. Now, the boys of Fontaines D.C. have moved to London to see for themselves. For their brilliant third album, Skinty Fia—which is undoubtedly their most complex and nuanced album yet—the Irish rockers are digging even deeper into their Irish identity, looking both outward and inward, and offering empathetic observations and plainspoken truths. The expansive sound that Fontaines D.C. employs on Skinty Fia (out Friday, April 22nd) is a logical advancement from 2020’s Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, but the storytelling throughout points to a band totally unafraid of the unknown. “There ...
