Music News
R.I.P. Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder Dies at 73
Florian Schneider, co-founding member of Germany’s electronic music group Kraftwerk, has died at the age of 73. A representative for the band said Schneider had been battling cancer. Schneider founded Kraftwerk alongside Ralf Hütter in 1970, after meeting at the Academy of Arts in Remscheid in Düsseldorf. The pair were part of Germany’s experimental music underground scene, initially playing together as members of a group called Organisation. However, after Schneider became interested in synthesizers, the duo began recording music under the name Kraftwerk. Their initial two studio albums — Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 — consisted of free-form experimental recordings, created using guitar, bass, drums, organ, flute, and violin, and later distorted with audio-tape manipulation and multiple dubb...
Florence and The Machine Perform Digital Met Gala Concert: Watch
Grab your biggest sunglasses and get dressed in your finest garments: Florence and the Machine have announced they will perform a live digital benefit concert for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The livestream, dubbed “A Moment with the Met”, will take place this Monday, May 4th at 6:00 p.m. ET on Vogue’s YouTube channel. Watch below. The Met Gala traditionally takes place on the first Monday in May, but because of the pandemic, this year’s event has been canceled. In its place, this livestream will seek to raise funds for the Costume Institute and A Common Thread. In addition to a live set by Florence and the Machine, fashion designer Virgil Abloh will perform a DJ set, Vogue will recount previous Met Galas, and new videos will be released featuring Cardi B, Naomi Campbell, Liv Tyler...
Jehnny Beth Shares New Song “Heroine”: Stream
Jehnny Beth’s debut solo album, To Love Is to Live, sounds like it will be a heavy affair. Early singles have all been various levels of intense, from the sensual pulse of “Flower”, to the ominous stalk of “Innocence”, to the thunderous spasms of “I’m the Man”. However, the album’s latest preview, “Heroine”, brings a more melodic air to the affair. To be fair, the Savages singer hasn’t taken her foot off the post-punk pedal for this one — not at all. But with warped jazz horns and undulating baking vocals swirling together over propellant drums, there’s a more hypnotic thrust here. It’s coupled with lyrics that, as Beth explained in a press release, owe a lot to the galvanizing of her collaborators: “When I think of this song, I think of Romy from the xx strangling my neck with her hands i...
Rock Concert to Take Place in Arkansas Next Week With “Pod” Seating and Temperature Checks
On Monday, Missouri Governor Mike Parson officially gave the okay for concerts to return to parts of the state — though few venues or artists were ready to make the risky move in the middle of the pandemic. Similarly, beginning on May 18th, the state of Arkansas will allow live events to resume, and already one concert is on the books. Bishop Gunn singer/guitarist Travis McCready has announced a limited-capacity concert taking place at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Arkansas next Friday. Perhaps a preview of what’s to come for future live events across the country, Ticketmaster is listing tickets broken down into “fan pods,” blocks of seats set six feet apart that must be purchased in groups of two to 12. The venue boasts a 1,100-person capacity, but has slashed it by 80%, with only 229 se...
Lil Tjay Drops “Ice Cold” Verses About Quarantining on New Song: Stream
New York rapper Lil Tjay has returned with his first new solo single of the year. It’s called “Ice Cold” and it’s arrived with a new music video in tow, too. Update: Lil Tjay has announced the impending release of a new mixtape, State of Emergency, due out on May 8th. Lil Tjay has helped re-popularize Auto-Tune in hip-hop with tracks like his Polo G collaboration “First Place” or his 2019 album True 2 Myself, and he doesn’t step away from the effect here either. As it turns out, he dropped “Ice Cold” as birthday gift to himself to celebrate turning 19 years old earlier this week. “Ice Cold” is an of-the-moment single that’s as mellow as it is catchy. Over a straightforward beat, Lil Tjay sing-raps about losing his mind during the coronavirus pandemic and how exhausting it is experiencing t...
Amanda Palmer Uses Patreon to Announce Separation From Neil Gaiman
The Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer and fantasy author Neil Gaiman have separated. On Sunday night, Palmer broke the news on her Patreon by revealing that Gaiman is living in the UK while she and their son quarantine in New Zealand. On Monday morning, Gaiman took to Twitter to express surprise at her sharing the news without his consent and he requested privacy moving forward. Allegedly an influx of queries regarding Gaiman’s location prompted Palmer to write the Patreon post and make it public, as she assumed that “he’s finally told the internet that he’s left New Zealand.” Palmer confirmed that she’s in lockdown in New Zealand with their four-year-old son, Ash, and said that their break-up is not a result of COVID-19 or lockdown. “All I can say is that I’m heartbroken, I really a...
Josh Radnor and Ben Lee Cover Viral Song “I Wonder What’s Inside Your Butthole”: Watch
Musicians have been getting creative in all sorts of ways while stuck at home during quarantine. Out of all their viral videos, though, the best one has come from a musically inclined toddler named Jolee Dunn who performed a very, very original song called “I Wonder What’s Inside Your Butthole”. Now, Ben Lee and Josh Radnor have shared their own cover version. Over the weekend, Dunn released her blitzed childhood banger by way of her mother’s Twitter account. “Quite honestly, it slaps,” Lisa Rieffel-Dunn said when sharing the video. In the clip, her daughter can be seen jumping up and down, guitar in hand, while she sings her one-hit wonder track: “I wonder what’s inside your butthole/ Maybe there is astronauts/ Maybe there is aliens/ All inside your butthole/ What’s inside your butth...
Grimes and Elon Musk Welcome Baby Boy
Grimes and Elon Musk welcomed a healthy baby boy into the world on Monday. Musk shared the news on his Twitter account, revealing that “mom & baby all good.” He tweeted that the baby is named “X Æ A-12 Musk”, which fans are theorizing translates to either “Ash” or “Sasha”. (The Æ is an e-ligature pronounced ‘ash’; when you combine the X, ‘ash’ and A, you get Sasha.) Meanwhile, “A-12” appears to be a reference to the Lockheed A-12 OXCART, a reconnaissance aircraft built for the CIA. The codename for the A-12 is “Archangel”. Grimes also has an album called Art Angels. So, the little baby’s full name could be Ash or Sasha Archangel Musk. Elon liked a tweet suggesting as much. Along with the name, Musk shared two photos of the baby. You can see them below. Grimes and Musk have be...
Dirty Projectors Announce EP Series, Share New Song “Lose Your Love”: Stream
Felicia Douglass and Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, photo by Jason Frank Rothenberg Dirty Projectors have announced a new EP called Flight Tower that’s due out June 26th via Domino. As it turns out, it’s the second installment in a five-EP series that the band will roll out over the course of 2020. To celebrate the reveal, they’ve released a new single called “Lose Your Love” and an accompanying music video. For the series, each EP will feature a different band member on lead vocals. Windows Open, which came out in March, saw Maia Friedman leading the way. The upcoming Flight Tower follows keyboardist-percussionist Felicia Douglass through four new songs. The next two installments will see Kristin Slipp and frontman Dave Longstreth each taking the reigns individually, with the fifth ...
Liam Gallagher and Mark Lanegan Are Fighting on Twitter About Something That Happened 24 Years Ago
Liam Gallagher is in a Twitter fight with someone not named Noel. As Stereogum point outs, the Oasis singer currently finds himself in a tiff with another famous alt-rock singer, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, and it’s over something that literally happened 24 years ago. In his new memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep, Lanegan reveals that Screaming Trees and Oasis were supposed to tour together in 1996, but that plan fell apart after Gallagher mocked the name of Lanegan’s band by calling them “Howling Branches”. In response, Lanegan told Gallagher to “Fuck off, you stupid fucking idiot.” They apparently then set a date and time to have an actual physical fight, but Gallagher “had quit and bailed before I could have a go at him… That phony motherfucker had pissed his pants and gone...
July Talk Share the Origins of New Song “Identical Love”: Stream
In our new music feature Origins, musicians give fans an inside look at the some of the inspirations behind their latest song. Today, July Talk tell us how they found their “Identical Love”. “I want to be changed/ I want to be rearranged,” go the first lines on July Talk’s new album, Pray for It. The words set the tone for the whole effort, as the Toronto rock outfit set out to find renewal in rebirth — both for themselves personally and their band’s sound. Both types of restoration are denoted in the LP’s latest single and opening track, “Identical Love”. Though known for their snarling indie rock, “Identical Love” shows July Talk operating with a gentler touch. Synths beat like a pulse in the chest of someone slowly reaching out to their lover in a profound moment of truth. A glorious sa...
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever Share New Song “Falling Thunder” and Video: Stream
Next month, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are set to drop their sophomore album, Sideways to New Italy. In the video for the album’s latest single, “Falling Thunder”, the Melbourne outfit return to old Italy, the place of singer/guitarist Tom Russo and bassist Joe Russo’s ancestral heritage. Th intention of the video was to juxtapose shots of Italy with an Italian-founded venue in Melbourne. However, as Tom Russo explained in a press release, things didn’t exactly go as planned: “Our friend Jamieson Moore shot the footage of Sicily, Sardinia, and the Aeolian Islands on her phone while on vacation last year. The Aeolian Islands is also where my and Joe Russo’s ancestors are from. We were also planning to shoot the band playing in Eolian Hall in Melbourne (it’s a community hall founde...
