INTERVIEWS
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...
Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan on Forging Ahead After the Passing of Andy Fletcher
Depeche Mode experienced the tragic passing of founding member Andy Fletcher in May of this year. On Tuesday (October 4th), the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band announced that it will soldier on with a new album and tour in 2023. The new LP is titled Memento Mori, a Latin term used to describe an object that serves as a reminder of death. Despite the timing of the announcement, the name of the album and its subject matter had already been conceived prior to Fletcher’s passing. In support of the album, which is set to arrive in Spring 2023, Depeche Mode will embark on their first tour in five years, beginning with a North American leg that kicks off March 23rd in Sacramento, California. Tickets go on sale to the general public beginning Friday, October 7th at 10:00 a.m. local time via Tick...
NNAMDÏ’s Not Weird — He’s Wonderfully, Amazingly, Authentically Himself
On Friday (October 7th), pop experimentalist extraordinaire NNAMDÏ will unleash his newest album, Please Have A Seat. The record, his debut for Secretly Canadian, features some of his poppiest, most ear-worm tunes to date while remaining within the weird, outsider approach NNAMDÏ has become known for. But, is it really that weird? For years NNAMDÏ himself would say so, prefacing his music with a quick “it’s kind of weird” whenever sharing it. He even named his 2014 release Feckin Weirdo, and the branding stuck. The word would pop up in interviews and reviews, following the Chicago artist as he continued to make art that was true to himself. “It was kind of like, not a palate cleanser, but something preemptively being like, ‘Okay, it’s weird,’” he tells Consequence. “Just so they go in and ...
Lamb of God’s Omens Are Coming to Light
Real talk? The cumulative weight of changing trends, the major-label system and cruel fate have all failed to cushion Lamb of God’s blunt-force velocity. Their latest, Omens (out on Oct 7), is a throttled-out, high-decibel jetstream with a series of cautionary tales and psychic explorations couched inside its 10 songs. Whether addressing ecological ruin, psychological anguish or detailing the more corrupt aspects of mankind, the band does it with the same physical and emotional fury they’ve thrown down on their eight previous releases. Yet, for many years, frontman D. Randall Blythe was in a well-constructed, triple-riveted, state of denial when fans, critics and rock journalists tagged his band with the m-word. “I never wanted to be in a metal band,” Blythe says over the phone from a hote...
Bandsplain is Back with Road Trip-Worthy Music and Talk
After almost four months off the air, cult music guide Bandsplain is back with new episodes each Thursday. The show went on hiatus when its parent company, Spotify’s Studio 4, disbanded earlier this year. But host Yasi Salek wasn’t ready to quit just yet, so she revived the program via Ringer Podcast Network last week. The first episode of the reboot: a four-hour, part-one crash course on Smashing Pumpkins. Bandsplain maintains its original mission of acquainting outsiders with subculture-spawning groups like Insane Clown Posse and My Chemical Romance. When it started in February 2021, the show operated under a somewhat traditional structure – it switched off between music and talk, but all episodes were roughly an hour long. They did open with an intro song composed and voiced by Bethany ...
Bet the House on Freddie Gibbs
Freddie Gibbs realized his artistic appeal years ago. See the haunted closing lines from “BFK,” the title track of his 2012 mixtape Baby Face Killa: “Got a slug for the judge, bringin’ heat for police / And a book full of sins that I reap when I sleep / Then I wake up, and I put ’em on a beat; how you love that?” It’s a three-line summary of a catalog that now spans three decades: Gibbs menaces authorities while revealing past felonious trespasses have turned his dreams into nightmares. Ever self-aware, he breaks the fourth wall and arches an eyebrow at his audience. He knows that shuttling between conviction and contrition makes him the perfect gangster antihero, a Tony Soprano-like figure whose sins are as captivating as him grappling with them and grasping at redemption. In hindsight, t...
