INTERVIEWS
Who Wants to Be Sports Entertained?
It’s not every day you get to chat with the Sports Entertainer of the Week. When Chris Jericho joined SPIN for a video chat (we’re over using the “Z” word) on a Sunday, he spent the previous week appearing on two of All Elite Wrestling’s weekly shows, Dynamite (where he threw a fireball at a guy’s head) and Rampage (where he gave himself the aforementioned award for doing it), as well as playing shows with his band Fozzy in Louisiana and Texas, with a gig in Austin a few hours away. Jericho’s current gimmick in AEW — he and his stable of toadies, the Jericho Appreciation Society, declare themselves “sports entertainers” rather than pro wrestlers — trolls AEW fans by invoking Jericho’s former employer, WWE, which strenuously avoids the term “wrestling.” It’s the kind of self-aware shtick th...
Hacks Star Hannah Einbinder On Why Ava Doesn’t Do Standup
One of the best things about this era of television is how many different stories there are about complicated women, with Hacks standing out as the platonic ideal of this. The HBO Max comedy, which won multiple Emmys for its first season, returns for a second season this week, with world-famous comedy star Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) hitting the road with Ava (Hannah Einbinder), her writer/punching bag/adversary. The complicated relationship between the two women continues to drive the action this season, as both find themselves outside of their comfort zone and also caught up in a complex back-and-forth between love and hate. “Our writers have done such an amazing job of creating this world and taking it to places beyond our wildest dreams,” Einbinder tells Consequence about digging into t...
21 Years In, The Black Keys Are Still Boogieing
Few bands comprised of only two members have managed to achieve the unity and spirit that Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have championed as The Black Keys. Now in the 21st year of their lengthy careers in the rock world, Auerbach and Carney have laid an impressive foundation for their band: festival headliners, Grammy winners, radio and sync specialists, and so many more accolades are associated with The Black Keys in 2022. And when Auerbach and Carney reunite to create music, it’s remarkably easy for them to pick up where they left off. “I feel like Pat and I’s relationship might be better than it’s ever been right now,” says Auerbach ahead of the release of The Black Keys’ eleventh(!) studio album, Dropout Boogie (out Friday, May 13th). “I think the longer that we get to make ...
N8NOFACE’s Days of Future Past
The risk of making progressive and prescient art is that you may be unappreciated in your lifetime. But N8NOFACE never cared. Music has been his therapeutic outlet since his teens — a means of coping with drug-fueled risks while sharing grim tales of friends and family who sell and succumb to narcotics in his hometown of Tucson, AZ. After years of accretive but minor recognition, the 46-year-old’s aggressive, anarchic, thugged-out, occasionally depressive and sometimes romantic amalgams of synth-driven punk, rap, minimal wave and rock have spiked in popularity. Every track from Don’t Dial 911, N8’s 2020 Eyedress-produced EP, has hundreds of thousands of plays. He’s sponsored by Joker Brand, the clothing company of esteemed LA photographer Estevan Oriol, touring with punk/rap groups half hi...
Sasha Alex Sloan on the “Authentic Experiences” That Shaped I Blame the World
“Do I dare say I’m proud of this record?” Sasha Alex Sloan asks. “It feels scary to say that out loud.” Chatting with Consequence over the phone, the singer-songwriter seems to hold an extremely tentative optimism around the release of her forthcoming full-length album, I Blame The World (available Friday, May 13th via RCA Records). It’s a quality worth noting, especially when she recently described I Blame the World as a “non-hopeful” album. “I couldn’t write about anything else,” she says, referring to the fork in the road many creatives arrived at throughout the pandemic and in the months of piecing the arts industry back together since: lean into hopeful escapism, or embrace realism. Sloan chose the latter. Advertisement Related Video To her point, the eleven-track collection...
Michelle de Swarte on the Challenges of Yelling at Infants in HBO’s The Baby
Michelle de Swarte isn’t a mother, and she doesn’t play one on TV either. Instead, in the HBO horror-comedy series The Baby, she plays Natasha, a woman whose happily child-free existence gets complicated when a mysterious infant literally lands in her arms. That’d be enough for anyone to handle, but things get even more complicated when Natasha realizes that the baby might be, well, evil. Certainly people keep dying when he’s around. It’s a whole thing. De Swarte didn’t have much acting experience prior to the series — as she tells Consequence, she booked the job thanks to her work as a stand-up. “I speak about myself, my past experiences, and how it informs the decisions that I make now ultimately,” she says of her typical set. “I speak about therapy, living in the States — as I lived out...
Kevin Morby Captures the Present
Kevin Morby grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb roughly 20 minutes outside of downtown Kansas City. We’ve both lived here at different points in time, and as we chat in Union Station, a historic landmark in the heart of the city, we instantly make connections over high schools, street intersections, and formative memories. The indie-folk singer-songwriter has used places as a leitmotif throughout his music, and his fascination with them is evident. Many of his records draw direct inspiration from them. His debut album, 2013’s Harlem River, explores his move to New York City; 2016’s Singing Saw tethers itself to Los Angeles, where Morby moved after New York; 2020’s Sundowner pays tribute to Morby’s home in Kansas City and his eventual return to it. There’s something poetic about...
BIBI Reflects on Her Debut Coachella Performance, Teases “Weird, Dark and Twisted” New Era
K-pop soloist BIBI could be described as a free spirit, but that feels a bit too reductive for an artist as ever-evolving as her. BIBI pulls from hip-hop, R&B, and pop sounds as she pleases, and describes her music as her “weird, dark, and twisted” way of expressing herself. Following a highly buzzed-about debut set at Coachella, BIBI sat down with Consequence to reflect on this moment in her career — a moment that only seems to be setting her up for more adventures. BIBI was part of the 88rising Head In the Clouds stage at Coachella. In reflecting on her time at Coachella Valley, two things prominently stand out: the desert dust, and getting to spend time with her fellow 88rising artists. “It was really overwhelming,” she says of her time at the festival, recalling the sheer size...
Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe on Creating the Dark, Funky X Soundtrack
The horror film fandom has been on the edge of its seat for X, director Ti West’s first full-length feature since his 2016 Western In a Valley of Violence. The A24 film is more than a love letter to the greatest horror films of all time — it paves a creative, innovative, and shocking path all of its own. The same can be said of its score, which was created in a collaboration between legendary horror composer Tyler Bates and goth rock queen Chelsea Wolfe, alongside composer/producer Ben Chisholm. X’s accompanying lush score is perfect for the envelope-pushing, star-studded film. Set in 1979, X tells the story of a group of aspiring filmmakers and stars (including Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, and Kid Cudi) who head deep into rural Texas to create the ultimate porn film. Things take...
Andrew Garfield and the Under the Banner of Heaven Cast on Navigating the “Rough Seas” of Mormonism and Murder
When writer Dustin Lance Black first approached adapting the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven, it was as a potential feature film — an idea that the star-studded cast of the new limited series from FX now sees as laughable. In fact, star Daisy Edgar-Jones literally laughs a little when talking to Consequence about it: “It would not be possible. This is such a rich story, there’s so much to unpack, and fitting that into an hour and a half would not happen.” Clocking in at seven episodes, Under the Banner of Heaven is a true crime story of the darkest sort, tracking the investigation into the murder of Brenda Lafferty (Edgar-Jones) and her infant daughter in 1984. Starring Andrew Garfield as lead detective Jeb Pyre, the motivation for these murders, we learn, is tied up in the fa...
Not Your Average Joe
The comedian Joe List is set to premiere his newest special, entitled This Year’s Material, on his popular YouTube channel, continuing a trend of DIY releases, such as Mark Normand’s Out to Lunch, Shane Gillis’s Live in Austin, as well as List’s own excellent 2020 set I Hate Myself. Each of those specials have garnered millions of views, not due to any sort of controversial material that would attract otherwise disinterested lookie-loos, but from hundreds of hours of road-tested material that has captured the attention of those of us only interested in punchlines. It is the opinion of this writer that Joe List is, pound-for-pound, the best working stand-up comic in America. His self-deprecating nature (“I Hate Myself” is both a title and common phrase for List) belies a novelistic detail f...
“Feel Safe to Be Yourself”: How SOFI TUKKER’s Sophomore Album Speaks to the Power of Positivity
What do Larry Bird, tennis, and persimmons have in common? They’re three of the many motifs that comprise the DNA of SOFI TUKKER‘s long-awaited sophomore album, WET TENNIS, which is out now after appearing in our list of the top 22 electronic albums to come out in 2022. Considering the fact that their debut album, the Grammy-nominated Treehouse, was released in 2018, it’s safe to say that Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern of SOFI TUKKER have evolved both individually and as a pair over the past four years. And WET TENNIS is not only a testament to that growth, but also an intricate statement on liberation and self-empowerment. There are three levels to the album’s title: the “WET” part, the “TENNIS” part, and the full acronym. &...
