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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 ...
Calum Jacobs’ ‘A New Formation’ Tells How Black Players Shaped Modern Football
When Calum Jacobs started CARICOM magazine in late 2017, he had an ambitious vision for the publication. In a Kickstarter launched for the first issue, Jacobs described the project as “a series of explorative and progressive conversations in the space where the Black-British experience and football intersect,” going on to add that it would “discuss culture, politics, history and contemporary life under the unifying umbrella of football.” After almost five years, and two issues of CARICOM, Jacobs is now poised to take that message to an even larger audience with the launch of his debut book. Titled A New Formation and published by Stormzy and Penguin’s Merky Books, the book expands on Jacobs’ ambition for CARICOM, telling the stories of Black footballers and their influence on the game. Alo...
The Diverse Appeal of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Omnium Gatherum
Australia’s King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are easily among the most prolific and versatile acts of the last couple of decades. They’ve put out nearly two dozen collections since 2012, with several years spawning multiple releases each. Plus, their highly adventurous blends of psychedelic rock, hip-hop, garage rock, metal, ambient, dream pop, and electronic evoke artists as wide-ranging as Pink Floyd, Motörhead, Childish Gambino, Japanese Breakfast, Black Midi, and Tame Impala. Considering their talent and tenacity, it was only a matter of time before they pushed themselves further than ever by creating a double album. Indeed, Omnium Gatherum — which has more in common with 2021’s welcomingly exploratory Butterfly 3000 than it does last month’s avant-garde Made in Timeland — is essen...
On It’s Almost Dry, The Game Pulls Pusha T Back In
Almost every gangster movie or its sequel features a character going legit. Or trying as hard as they can. Scene after scene in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II show Michael Corleone telling anyone who will listen that the Corleone family is walking on the side of the angels after one, two, or a dozen more scores. For Pusha T, his 2018 opus Daytona was his massive score. Push distilled everything about his dope brand of hardcore hip-hop into an almost perfect seven-track piece of work. It’s Almost Dry, due out this Friday (April 22nd), feels like the reflections of a former gangster doing his best to live a regular life. But, to paraphrase the head of the Corleone family, just when Push thinks he’s out, the game pulls him back in. While not as strong as Daytona, It’s Almost Dry is m...
