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Billboard NXT: Bronze Avery Announced Winner in Thrilling Finale
The winner of Billboard NXT – a first-of-its-kind singing competition from Billboard and Samsung Galaxy, designed to discover the next great unsigned artist – has been crowned! After numerous TikTok challenges, the help of celebrity mentors and riveting performances during the Grand Finale event on Tuesday (Dec. 7), Bronze Avery has been announced as Billboard NXT’s winner, earning the victory over multi-talented finalists Amir Brandon and Sophie Marks. All three finalists took the stage at Avalon Hollywood for Billboard NXT’s live finale event on Tuesday night, after weeks of showing off their skills in various TikTok challenges and standing out from the competition’s 12 total contestants. Each finalist performed in front of the Billboard NXT celebrity mentors – Todrick Hall, Anitta, and ...
Exit Interview: IDLES’ Joe Talbot on Crawler, Independent Venues, and Daddy Daycare in 2021
Joe Talbot has two more things he wants to accomplish before the end of 2021: Start working on IDLES‘ fifth album and win a bar fight. “Those two things. That’s it,” he says forcefully with a clap. Sitting on a cozy-looking couch, bearing a white, lightly plaid button-up shirt and thick-framed reading glasses in his Bristol home during our Zoom call, Talbot was taking some much-needed rest with his family in what’s left of the turbulent year of 2021. “Just living calmly … getting ready for the storm that is 2022.” The post-post-post-punkers—or something of that nature—wrote and released their stunning, thrashing, widely acclaimed fourth record Crawler, which was produced by Kenny Beats. In recent months, IDLES performed an exuberant string of shows throughout the U.S., bathed in ...
Top 10 Rap Albums You May Have Missed in 2021
Our 2021 Annual Report continues with our list of the year’s top 10 overlooked rap albums. As 2021 winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2021. You can find it all in one place here. With the colossal amount of rap music that drops every single day of the year, it’s impossible to keep track of new hip-hop releases — let alone listen to them all. Here at Consequence, we’ve kept our favorite albums tucked in our back pockets all year for that very reason. Containing the records we kept going back to long after their release dates, this list is meant to highlight projects that likely flew under the radar for the average fan. It’s tailor-made for that one friend who is constantly complaining about the state of rap music today. Dro...
2021 Producer of the Year The Alchemist Was a Chameleon at Every Turn
Our 2021 Annual Report continues with the announcement of The Alchemist as Our Producer of the Year. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2021. You can find it all in one place here. Whether it’s stacking beats in the lab or hitting the road, The Alchemist spends the majority of his time laser-focused on music. So it took a rare moment of downtime for Consequence to catch up with the prolific producer in late November — when he was still recovering from being sick after coming off a tour of Europe. Not one to stay idle for too long, ALC gamely hopped on Zoom from his Los Angeles studio with a cup of coffee in hand to discuss an outstanding year in which he teamed up with Armand Hammer and Boldy James for Haram and Bo ...
Toss a Coin to The Witcher’s Strong, Straightforward Season 2: Review
The Pitch: In the wake of the battle of Sodden Hill, rumbly-grumbly witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) has finally reunited with the adopted child handed to him by destiny: exiled Princess Cirilla (Freya Allen), last seen trundling around the woods by herself for an entire season. But now, winter has come and it’s time for Geralt to get some R&R at Kaer Morhen, where witchers go to fill up on elixirs and ale and put up their feet till spring. With Ciri in tow, it may well be time to train her into a new witcher (even as the secrets of her true parentage threaten to upend the land). Meanwhile, Geralt’s on-again-off-again sorceress lover Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) finds herself magicless after her explosion of fire “chaos” (read: magic) at the end of last season, first captured by...
And Just Like That… Review: HBO Max Reminds Us Why We Should Never Look Back
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for And Just Like That…, Episode 2, “Little Black Dress.”] The Pitch: The blunt truth of being alive is that there’s no such thing as a happy ending. Everyone has happy and sad moments over the course of their time on this earth, and when the inevitable comes all you can hope for is that it’s not too soon, and that the good outweighed the bad as much as possible. This is an annoying and awful truth, which is just one reason why we’re a culture obsessed with stories, and why the Sex and the City continuation And Just Like That… is both a very welcome trip home to visit old friends, and also an existential crisis in the works. Advertisement A Big Twist: HBO Max deliberately withheld screeners from critics until the moment of the show’s premiere...
The Beautifully Unpredictable Duality of James Blake
Before he was the Grammy-winning musical chameleon he is today, James Blake found himself in a constant state of emotional camouflage. Like any prodigious musician on the come-up, the pressure to be “cool” hovered like a black cloud, following him from party to party. And his moods changed like quicksilver, leading to a bit of an identity crisis, says Blake, whose titular track from his scintillating Before EP was recently nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Dance/Electronic Recording. “I’ve always felt slightly on the outside of things. In any scene I was ever in, I was always on the outside looking in,” Blake tells EDM.com. “And I think it took me a long time to realize that there was no scene, you know? There was no being outside looking in...
‘A Long December’ Always Gives Me Reason to Believe
December is a month of traditions. A myriad religious observances, baked goods, decorations and familial obligations. We all have our conventions, taking time to mark the calendar as it leaves while we look forward to the one incoming. For many years I’ve held onto one tradition that gets me through, something that allows me to process the feelings I’ve held inside over the year, flushing them from my system as I make room for the challenges that a new year brings. On December 1, as early in the morning as possible, I pop on “A Long December,” which as you probably know was the second single from Counting Crows’ 1996 sophomore album Recovering the Satellites. I first heard Counting Crows on a mixtape I stole from my older sister, one that some would-be suitor made for her to express the th...
Three Musicians Took 100 Years of Climate Change Data and Turned Them Into Songs
Climate change is causing the planet to evolve at an alarming rate. Thanks to musicians and instructors at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, climate change can also be heard. Musicians from Full Sail have teamed up with USA Today to construct music based on more than 100 years of data on climate change in various U.S. states, including Arkansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa. The data found that east of the Rocky Mountains more rain was falling than ever before, but in the west rain is becoming more scarce. Each composer approached the project differently with various musicalities. They all used real rain sounds throughout their pieces. Pennsylvania by Dr. Timothy Stulman In Dr. Stulman’s composition, he used a melodic line that represented p...
Artist of the Month TOMORROW X TOGETHER on Connecting Through Their Music: “We Want Our Fans to Be Proud”
We’re taking a break from our 2021 Annual Report to recognize our last Artist of the Month of the year! AOTM is an accolade given to an up-and-coming artist or group who is poised for the big time. In December 2021, we recognize K-pop act TOMORROW X TOGETHER, who continue to solidify themselves as 4th-generation leaders in the genre. Throughout 2021, TOMORROW X TOGETHER was frozen in time. The K-pop group (whose name is often shortened to TXT) burst onto the international scene with a remarkable debut in 2019 and quickly amassed a no-skips reputation. The still very young group was poised to explode in 2020 — when the world, of course, came to a screeching halt. It must have been somewhat frustrating for the five members — Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Hueningkai — but if that’s th...
The Wire Star Sonja Sohn on Wanting to Give Back to Baltimore With Her New HBO Documentary The Slow Hustle
The Slow Hustle is a story about corruption and a story about persistence. The HBO documentary, directed by Sonja Sohn, is technically focused on the unsolved murder of Baltimore police detective Sean Suiter. But the story that emerges is a portrait of a police force so weighed down by corruption and other issues that it’s incapable of finding the truth behind what happened to one of its own — raising the question of what function the police serves in our society. The project is Sohn’s second documentary, following the 2017 film Baltimore Rising, which she directed after spending time in Baltimore after the uprising that occurred after Freddie Gray’s death — though it hadn’t originally been her idea to direct that film. Instead, after getting to know some of the activists involved in the u...
Don’t Look Up Is a Smug Satire About the End of the World: Review
The Pitch: What would happen if you found out the world was ending and — get this — no one in power was going to do anything about it? That’s the discovery that Michigan State astronomers Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) make, right after scoping out a nine-kilometer comet that’s about to slam into the Earth in six months’ time. Their entreaties to the aloof President of the United States (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic failson Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill) fall on deaf ears; they’ll cling to even the .01% chance the two Midwestern hayseeds are wrong. To drum up public support for any effort to deflect the comet, Mindy and Dibiasky go on a whirlwind media tour that takes them from the smug, peppy cohosts of a morning talk show called the Dai...
