INTERVIEWS
How Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s Complex Bond Creates “Incredible Chemistry”
Siblings fight but—much more importantly—they love each other. That dynamic is at the core of what makes Bebe Rexha and David Guetta such a dominant duo. Rexha and Guetta have an intuitive bond as musicians, the sort of innate ebb and flow typically reserved for lifelong friends. That level of compatibility can cause friction, but the tension is eclipsed by cohesion. The pair have repeatedly churned out smash songs together: “Say My Name” (with J. Balvin), “Hey Mama” (with Nicki Minaj) and, most recently, “I’m Good (Blue).” The chemistry between Rexha and Guetta is world-class, but their journey has been rocky at times. Rexha’s name was originally left off the marquee for “Hey Mama,” a song that—unbeknownst to the general public—w...
20 Questions With Kerri Chandler: How An Obsession With the Club World’s Best Sound Systems Forged the Icon’s Latest Album
Kerri Chandler is an innovator. The legendary DJ and producer, who is looking at 30 years of house music in his rearview, is an out-of-the-box thinker who doesn’t see limitations, just new frontiers. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Case in point, his latest album, the 24-song Spaces and Places — his first since 2008’s Computer Games. Space and Places was not created in Chandler’s elaborate home studio in New Jersey — which is on par with any commercial studio, and leaves quite a few of those marquee locations in its dust. Instead, over the course of two years, Chandler traveled around the globe, recording the songs for Space and Places at clubs in various cities. Printworks and Ministry of Sound in London, The Warehouse Project in Manch...
The ‘Rollercoaster Ride’ of Wild Pink’s ILYSM
We all walk around with the burden that, at some point, we could get cancer. After all, roughly 1.9 million Americans will receive that bad news in 2022 alone. But most people are too busy living their lives to expect it. When John Ross was diagnosed in June 2021, at age 34, he was in the middle of creating new material for Wild Pink, the heartland indie rock project he formed in 2015. He’d started working on these songs four months earlier, almost halfway through making a record, when the disease had spread to his lymph nodes. Although he’s since recovered, having undergone two surgeries last year, Ross is still processing what happened to him. He didn’t want to make an album exclusively about his cancer, especially because he’d already written some of the new material before his prognosi...
Nick Kroll Plans to Work Until He’s “Very Old, Out of Touch, and No Longer Funny at All”
Nick Kroll’s got a lot going on right now: The recent release of his new Netflix standup special Little Big Boy; his supporting role in one of the year’s most discussed films, Don’t Worry Darling; and the upcoming new season of Big Mouth, the animated coming-of-age comedy he co-created with Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett. Not to mention the many, many other projects he’s guest-starred in over the last few years, a list that includes What We Do In the Shadows, Our Flag Means Death, Bob’s Burgers, Dickinson, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. “I’ve been so lucky to be able to be on so many of the shows that I liked,” Kroll tells Consequence. “And it’s something that I’ve tried to work on, to tell those people that I like their show and that if they ever wanted to have me on i...
Avenue 5’s Lenora Crichlow and Zach Woods on Rage, Catharsis, and How COVID Affected the Vibe of Season 2
The HBO sci-fi comedy Avenue 5 has a premise that would also work quite well as a drama — though there are plenty of laughs on set, and stars Lenora Crichlow and Zach Woods confirm that co-star Josh Gad is a major source of them. This is to say, Gad breaks the most, and according to Crichlow, “he makes others break. He’s the breaker and the instigator.” Right now, of course, a few extra laughs sound good. The second season of Armando Iannucci’s follow-up to the Emmy-winning masterpiece Veep continues exploring what happens when a futuristic interstellar pleasure cruise goes horribly wrong, due to technical mishaps and a whole heap of human error. As the crew and passengers face the grim reality of dwindling resources as they remain stranded years away from Earth, there’s a lot of yelling a...
How SLANDER “Thrive” by Leaning On Each Other
SLANDER know first-hand how invaluable a good co-pilot is. The duo of Derek Andersen and Scott Land recently released their debut studio album, Thrive. Released on September 22nd, the record is a culmination of a decade of touring in tandem, co-producing songs and putting their creative heads together. It’s a formula that has brought SLANDER no shortage of success. In fact, brief deviations from their shared journey have been uncomfortable and unwelcome. “When we’re performing, we can lean on each other,” Andersen tells EDM.com. “I think that’s super huge. We’ve both done a couple of solo shows over the course of this journey. Personally, I remember doing a show. Scott was having surgery and I think it was in Thailand a couple of years ago for 25,0...
Why Attendees of This Fiji Music Festival Leave the Island With “Feelings They Can’t Quite Articulate”
Whether it’s to a faraway beach or your couch for a weeklong Netflix bender, we all take vacations. But when was the last time you went somewhere that actually changed your life? This year will see the eighth edition of the dance music festival Your Paradise on Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean typically frequented by digital nomads and affluent honeymooners. One of the world’s top destination fests, it’s more akin to a scene out of Nearest to Heaven than a rave. Your Paradise, which returns December 10-16, is what happens when daydreams shed their quixotic layers and become reality. Just a few of the sights and sounds you’ll experience at the festival include breezy beach yoga sessions, sun-kissed Catamaran rides ...
easy life Break Down New Album MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE… Track By Track: Exclusive
Track by Track is a recurring feature series in which artists share the story behind every song on their latest release. Today, easy life break down their new album, MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE… There’s something comforting about easy life‘s homespun sound: the drums are crisp and worn, the keys and guitars flutter in a dreamy glow, and frontman Murray Matravers rounds out the band’s energy with clever, intimate verses, stuck halfway between hip-hop and indie rock. As far as bedroom pop goes, easy life have been major champions of the vibe-centric formula since their 2018 debut mixtape, Creature Habits. But now, easy life have moved far beyond their bedrooms to a breezy, escapist world for their second album, MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE…, out Friday, October 7th. The Leicester quintet, rounded ou...
Ozuna on His New Album OZUTOCHI and Official FIFA World Cup Soundtrack Song: “I Said, ‘Yo! Let’s Go!’”
Ozuna worked on a lot of songs for his new album, Ozutochi, out today (Friday, October 7th). “I took two years to prepare,” Ozuna tells Consequence, “And I had 75, 65 songs. I get only 18 songs for this album… so it was difficult.” But fret not: the 18 songs he did select for Ozutochi show the Latin superstar at his very best. His signature tenor and stylish deliveries are on full display, and whether he’s starting the party or crooning through love songs, his unshakeable star power looms large. It’s been a significant rise throughout the last five years for the Puerto Rican-born singer, songwriter, and rapper — if you aren’t as familiar with Ozuna’s signature voice, you may have heard his remix to “Te Boté,” a reggaeton smash that reached massive levels of po...
Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir on Creating the Music You Do (or Don’t) Notice for Cate Blanchett and Todd Field in Tár
Little Children director Todd Field’s return to film, the acclaimed drama Tár, was worth the wait. A haunting descent into the psyche of a composer/conductor (Cate Blanchett) whose ambitions get derailed by her past and present foibles, the film presents a lush soundscape that includes many layers, from the original composition that Lydia Tár is struggling to create, to the lush symphonies of Mahler, to the uneasy underlying score created by Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker). Field brought Hildur onto the project very early on — “I think I was like the second person to join the project after Cate,” she tells Consequence via Zoom — and she says that when she first read the script, she felt like the writer/director had authentically captured a lot about the modern-day world o...
Alvvays Faced Down Challenges (and Came Out Better for Them) to Make Blue Rev
It took five years for Alvvays to release a follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2017 album Antisocialites, but the Toronto-based band didn’t intend to be away for quite so long. The odyssey to get to their third album, Blue Rev (out now via Polyvinyl and Transgressive), was rife with setbacks and challenges. In fact, Alvvays had planned for Blue Rev to come out shortly after Antisocialites. “We were hoping to get a jump on it, because there was such a long gap between our first two [records],” vocalist Molly Rankin tells SPIN from her home in Toronto. Rankin and lead guitarist/co-songwriter/significant other Alec O’Hanley began writing the album in 2018, but the band — which generally doesn’t write on the road — was constantly touring in support of their second record. Then Rankin’s ap...
Martin Gore on Depeche Mode’s Forthcoming Album and Tour
Depeche Mode co-founder Martin Gore bursts into laughter, amused by the international flavor: a British band with a French name whose members live in the U.S. (frontman Dave Gahan in New York, Gore in Santa Barbara, Calif.) doing press from Germany about its upcoming Latin-titled record. “We’re multicultural!” Gore exclaims, throwing his hands in the air playfully. Gore is speaking to SPIN over Zoom from his hotel room in Berlin, where Depeche Mode held a live-streamed press conference on Tuesday to announce its new album, Memento Mori, and an accompanying world tour. The album will be released in late March, with the tour kicking off March 23 in Sacramento, Calif. The synth-rockers, whose last record, Spirit, was released in 2017, initially set the internet abuzz in August when they poste...
