INTERVIEWS
Bad Bunny on Leaving His Mark and Making History In Spanish
Bad Bunny is at the top of his game. In under five years, the Puerto Rican rapper has become the biggest Latin pop star on the planet. His success is transcending cultural and language barriers that can be limiting for Latin acts. He’s mainstream. After making history in December with the first all-Spanish LP to top the Billboard 200, Bad Bunny was announced as 2020’s most-streamed artist on Spotify. Now his 2022 arena tour is already sold out, and he’s the face of multiple brand partnerships, including Cheetos’ Deja Tu Huella campaign. The title translates into “Leaving Your Mark,” and that’s exactly what he’s doing. “I’m always proud to be Latino, to be from Puerto Rico, and to be from the Caribbean, and it’s always an honor to represent that worldwide,” Bad Bunny tells SPIN in Spa...
Mark Ronson Pulls Back the Studio Curtain
When Mark Ronson was working on his namesake AppleTV+ documentary, Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson, there was no shortage of not just internationally acclaimed artists he had access to, but genre sonic pioneers willing to sit down with the super-producer and expose secrets behind some of their biggest songs. Calm, yet exceedingly curious in his interviews, Ronson got legends — like Paul McCartney, Beastie Boys’ Mike D and Ad-Rock, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Questlove of The Roots, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Santigold, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee, Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, and so many, many, many more — to not just go behind the music, but inside it, explaining not only the tricks of their trade, but how the...
Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield Trade “Songwriting Slump” Tips and Discuss Returning to the Stage
Katie Crutchfield was destined to be a Bright Eyes fan. The singer-songwriter, who performs poignant folk-rock as Waxahatchee, recalls the music of Conor Oberst as a crucial turning point in her upbringing as a self-proclaimed outcast in suburban Alabama: “I feel like Bright Eyes had one of the biggest impacts of any band at the time,” Crutchfield tells Consequence by phone from her Kansas City home. It’s serendipitous that nearly twenty years after she first became enamored with albums like Letting Off the Happiness, Fevers and Mirrors, and Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Waxahatchee would be pegged to open for the Bright Eyes show, along with Lucy Dacus, at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium on July 31st. (The emo-folk titans played their first show tog...
Alex Lifeson on Solo Music, Envy of None, ‘Really Cool’ Upcoming Rush Reissue
Alex Lifeson didn’t have some grand master plan for all of this: the glossy-looking website, the big rollout of new music, the subsequent parade of interviews. But the dominos just keep tumbling, and he’s going with the flow. With the launch of his new signature Epiphone electric guitar, the Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess Standard, he finds himself in a rare solo spotlight — probably the most attention he’s faced since Rush retired from touring in 2015. “I stayed away from social media forever,” he tells SPIN. “I really wanted to protect my privacy and wasn’t really interested in doing all the things that are required because I’m generally a lazy person. But now with the Epiphone account, with the demand of creating an Instagram and my own website, I’m going to try to utilize those things an...
Passion, Perseverance, and Propaganda: Behind Pakistan’s Controversial Hunza Verse Music Festival
Before prohibition and religious radicalization under the rule of Zia Ul Haq in 1977, Pakistan’s nightlife was thriving. In the bustling metropolis of Karachi, clubs like Excelsior, Oasis, Samar, and Club 007 openly served alcohol, hosted American jazz musicians like Dizzie Gillespie and Duke Ellington, and attracted professional belly dancers from foreign cities like Beirut, Cairo, Tehran, and Istanbul. Sweeping conservatism shuttered Pakistan’s nightlife, thwarting any chance for dance music to enter the fold. In recent years, however, regional stability and tides of liberalism have birthed interest in electronic music beyond house parties and underground raves. Diplo performed in Islamabad in 2016 before returning in 2018 alongside Valentino Khan and Chrome Sparks for a Pakistani rendit...
Yola Walked Through Fire to Stand for Herself
There’s a staggering sentence in the bio that accompanied the sample of singer-songwriter Yola’s sophomore album, Stand For Myself. In discussing a perspective shift since the release of her 2019 Grammy-nominated debut, Walk Through Fire, she says she was persuaded from being her true self, sharing, “There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed out of my own majesty, but a bitch is back.” With her bright voice, ear-to-ear smile, and face framed with big violet hair, it’s hard to imagine the 38-year-old British songstress as anything other than self-assured, even as she describes what it took for her to get to that place. “A big part of the brainwashing was just white supremacy. We all get the same brainwashing. So if you’re a white person, you’re totally valid in every space, regardle...
Rewatch Our Live Twitch Interview With Descendents Ahead of the Release of 9th & Walnut
Almost exactly two months ago, Bill Stevenson and Milo Aukerman of the Descendents joined our Twitch stream for a very special episode of our weekly rock ‘n roll interview show/therapy session, Noise Pollution. Normally, our streams stay on Twitch for the limit of two weeks and then disappear into the ether, but today, we brought back the very special appearance by the punk rock legends ahead of the release of their new album, 9th & Walnut (out July 23 via Epitaph Records). The album, which was recorded in both 2002 and 2020, features 18 of the band’s earliest songs from the late 1970s and is the final recording from late guitarist Frank Navetta as well as a decades-in-the-making reunion with both Navetta and original bassist Tony Lombardo. In the hour-long Twitch stream, Stevenso...
How Sensorium Galaxy Is Adopting EDM to Spearhead the Next Generation of Virtual Entertainment
Sensorium Galaxy’s behind-the scenes teasers are about to become the highlight reel of the live music industry. Despite devastating economic impact to the broader sector, the past 15 months could not have proven to be a better case study for one of the most powerful emerging startups at the intersection of music and tech. The stars are beginning to align for Sensorium Galaxy, a next-generation concert platform where users can explore virtual worlds while enjoying performances from their favorite artists in industry-leading, triple-A quality. The company has yet to launch its first digital concert environment, PRISM, but will do so later this year. Even so, a cascade of high quality teasers and headline generating talent acquisitions have hit the public eye over t...
Bartees Strange on Independent Venue Week, Upcoming Music
“I’m ready to move on to the next thing,” Bartees Strange tells SPIN. It’s a logical impulse, especially since his debut LP, 2020’s Live Forever, restlessly shuffles through genres — indie-rock, folk, emo, hip-hop, soul — like playing cards. October also wasn’t the most optimal time for a life-changing career move: With COVID-19 grinding live music to a halt, Strange couldn’t organically advance the momentum of his late-night spots or year-end accolades. Not that he’s complaining. “I’m just grateful,” he says. “Going into the pandemic, I was working a full-time job and trying to figure out how to do music more. Now I look at my calendar and it’s just music stuff. It’s incredible.” But now, knee-deep into recording another album, and with an actual tour launching in September, he’s ready to...
Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez on Navigating the Pandemic, 2021 Tour, and New Music
Coheed and Cambria have kept busy during the past year, between launching a coffee line, collaborating with Rick Springfield on the song “Jessie’s Girl 2”, doing Twitch streams, and working on some musical side projects. “We each tried to be creative in our own unique ways apart from each other and navigate the isolation as best we knew how,” frontman Claudio Sanchez tells Heavy Consequence. Sanchez caught up with Heavy Consequence to discuss Coheed and Cambria’s upcoming tour with The Used, how he and the band navigated the pandemic, and various other projects. He also gave us a hint as to what fans can expect as far as new Coheed music. Advertisement Related Video Pick up tickets to Coheed and Cambria’s tour with The Used via Ticketmaster, and purchase Coheed’s line of Coffee Roasters pr...
Like Post-Hardcore Wine, Fiddlehead Is Getting Better With Age
Pat Flynn knows the nightmare of being in a full-time band. He’s lived on the road and in studios. He’s depended on album sales to pay his bills. And he’s watched as the need for commercial viability and stable income helped to tear apart his 2000s hardcore band Have Heart after they’d finally risen out of the Massachusetts punk scene. But that’s only part of why the Fiddlehead vocalist maintains his day job as a history teacher. In addition to providing a financial backbone for him, it’s the perfect excuse for only touring on weekends and school vacations. Of course, it also helps that he can connect with both his students and his younger fans because he still very much remembers being the problematic teenager who founded Have Heart nearly 20 years ago. “I [was] a very troubled teenager w...
Don Krez Opens Up About His New Single, Post-Pandemic Mindset, and Love for His Fans
Electronic music artist Don Krez is primed for a year as roaring as his new single, the heavy-hitting trap banger “Bernie Sanders.” Having worked with the likes of Ski Mask The Slump God, Smokepurpp, and the late XXXTENTACION, among other major hip-hop artists, Krez is no stranger to heavy-hitting sonics. “Bernie Sanders” belongs on the mainstage, a head-banging ode to the politician and inspired by the ubiquitous “Cold Bernie” meme. The track kicks off with haunting keys, which sound as if they were plucked out of a Chucky film. They lead into an eerie bassline, which eventually builds and culminates in a robust trap trap that turns back the clock to the genre’s SoundCloud boom of yesteryear. We caught up with Krez about the in...
