An Honest Review of Taylor Swift's New Album, "The Tortured Poet's Department"
Rolling Stone Future of Music Recap: Meet the Artists Shaping The Music Scene Today
I hate to say it, but all good people admit when they’re wrong. After attending Coachella in 2022, I saw a dying franchise desperately trying to retain its grasp on relevancy. With lackluster Californian crowds who only go for the festival name and not the names headlining, outsiders often wonder why artists treat this as a Mecca for music.
Long gone are the days when girls’ outfits were chosen with Tumblr shots in mind. The bohemian chic style that Vanessa Hudgens, Miley Cyrus, and other attendees made famous began as “Coachella style.”
And when I got a taste of the coveted festival, I was beyond underwhelmed. Sure, the rich and famous were within reach…but I couldn’t have felt further away from them. I ended up with dust in my lungs and a week’s worth of exhaustion.
Celebs stopped attending en masse, the non-festival influencer events like Revolve Festival rose in popularity, and it became abundantly clear that no one cared about the music…it was all about their Instagram posts.
But what I’ve learned from live-streaming Coachella 2024 — and pouring over my social media and consuming every single piece of Coachella content there is — is that Coachella is back in a major way.
Sure, the festival is designed to give you an intense bout of FOMO…but all I kept hearing was how bad everyone thought the lineup was. How no one of note would be in attendance this year. How Coachella was surely done for…until it wasn’t.
It’s been every bit as star-studded and shocking as earlier years. We’ve had earth-shattering performances, surprises left and right, and even reunions…not to mention the iconic American Royal Couple sighting.
We had 5-star performances from headliners like Tyler, The Creator and Doja Cat. Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo via their supergroup, Anti Up, confirmed rumors of a joint album.
After spending the weekend across the country on the wrong coast sobbing to my friends that I opted not to go this year, I put together my must-see lineup.
Here are the five performances I would’ve attended at 2024 Coachella Weekend One.
Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan’s sheer star power has truly been surprising me. With a devout fanbase (just watch her set), you’ll immediately realize that we’re dealing with someone who is about to break through to a different level of stardom.
During her set, you’ll hear essential songs like “Good Luck, Babe!”, “HOT TO GO!”, and “My Kink is Karma.” But what’s more impressive is her stage presence, the way she commands the crowd in avant-garde makeup, big hair, and a bigger personality.
Songs like "Good Hurt" saw a 160% increase on Spotify...Don’t sleep on Chappell Roan. Before you know it, she’ll be performing at a much bigger stage.
Everything Always - John Summit & Dom Dolla
The boys are back in town @domdolla @johnsummit
Watch the 2024 livestream now at https://t.co/j5uIbSOgaa, presented by @nyxcosmetics pic.twitter.com/Ok14VdTygp
— Coachella (@coachella) April 13, 2024
Not enough is said about a house music set at a festival. Sure, the headliners are great and deliver us our fix of rock, pop, or soul. But it’s always been the DJ’s who have my heart at the end of the night. They know how to get you dancing, to feel the beat down to your soul, and forget for a while.
We saw a lot of technical difficulties and underwhelming sets from various artists this weekend…but John Summit and Dom Dolla delivered a borderline flawless collaboration that perfectly exhibited both their greatest hits and EDM essentials.
There’s nothing better than watching an artist truly having fun on stage…so when two friends, Dolla and Summit, come together to display some of the best techno house out there, they do not disappoint.
Soon to be the pregame track for many, Dom Dolla and John Summit are two of the biggest names in house for a reason.
No Doubt
Two words: jaw dropped. Coachella’s Main Stage has reunited long lost bands and supergroups like Blink-182 and Swedish House Mafia…but few have No Doubt’s impact.
After a year of music domination on TikTok, Gwen Stefani, Tom Dumont, Tony Kanal, and Adrian Young took the stage to bring punk rock back in all its glory. In their first performance since 2015, this band has the exact same 1995 energy when they released “Just a Girl.”
Bringing out Gen Z’s very own punk pop princess, Olivia Rodrigo, was a passing of the torch in many ways. Stefani and Rodrigo belted “Bathwater” side by side as Rodrigo sported low rise cargos and an “I <3 ND” tank. "Bathwater" saw a 430% increase in streams on Spotify following the performance.
Perhaps the most impressive performance comes from Stefani, who at 54 years of age pranced and throttled around the stage full force. Stefani embodied a whirlwind tornado that gave more stage presence and energy than a 19-year-old. She went full punk rocker mode, and it was gorgeous.
Sabrina Carpenter
I keep reminding my readers that Sabrina Carpenter is the one to watch this year. She’s got all the ingredients of your classic popstar: proven vocal talent (even a stint on Broadway with Renee Rapp in Mean Girls), the opener for Taylor Swift’s legendary Era’s Tour, a past love triangle scandal with aforementioned Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett, and the latest It Boy, Barry Keoghan, falling over his feet for her.
Her Coachella performance only solidified that I’m right. Carpenter understands her audience, and knows how to bring in more fans. She’s candidly witty, overtly sexual in her euphemisms, and yet exudes an innocence and honesty in her music.
For the first time on a Coachella stage, Carpenter was able to belt out her emails i can’t send album. This tell-all set of songs details her relationship with Bassett, her perspective on the backlash, and shares refreshing insights into her life.
She had the cinema, the vocal ability, the wow-factor. No notes.
Lana Del Rey
And while many prominent publications and, most notably, the Recording Academy will continue to turn their noses towards the genius of Lana Del Rey, the world watched anyway. Del Rey’s music has inspired the careers of thousands of budding artists, and it’s rare that she gets such a massive platform to perform it.
Arriving via motorcade, Lana Del Rey took the stage to perform hits like “Summertime Sadness”, “Ride”, and “West Coast” while dancers twirled from poles and swirled around Del Rey.
With guests like Jack Antonoff, Jon Batiste, and the one-and-only Billie Eilish, Del Rey flawlessly integrated tracks like “Ocean Eyes” and her own “Video Games” into her set.
Many will criticize the microphone issues or the lack of energy from the crowd (all factors that were out of the headliner’s control)...but it’s overwhelmingly clear from Lana Del Rey’s performance that her star far outshines any technical difficulties.
Imagine a film about war. Then, imagine a film about journalists. Somehow, Ex Machina’s Alex Garland fashioned one of the most compelling stories of the year by marrying these unlikely premises. Even more unlikely? He convinced A24 to make an action film. Don’t worry, this is not a souped-up Marvel movie. It’s exactly what you’d expect from our favorite indie studio’s first venture into the action genre: subversive, thrilling, and intrepid.
After wowing audiences with films like Ex Machina and 28 Days Later, it’s no surprise that director Alex Garland’s latest dystopian effort is unsettling and awe-inspiring. The highly anticipated film is already rated 93% on Rotten Tomatoes after premiering at SXSW 2024.
At a SXSW panel, Garland gave some insights into what it means to make a movie about the dystopian future that feels so close to being real. While movies like Contagion and Garland’s own 28 Days Later felt prescient at the height of the pandemic, no one could have predicted that. But Civil War feels like a nightmare we’ve all been having for the past decade. It’s comforting, in a way, to know others are experiencing this nightmare too. But it’s dread-inducing to see it play out on screen and think: this is us. This will be us. Soon.
And that’s precisely the state of anxiety Garland wants us in.
“Cinema is inclined towards whatever it's presenting itself, and it’s inclined to not being anti-war,” Garland told the panel at SXSW. “To accurately present the action, it contains adrenaline. And if you add music to that, and you add a certain kind of imagery to that, essentially, it becomes seductive.”
Garland didn’t want to make a sexy war movie. He didn’t want to give us an easy watch.
His solution: making it as disorienting as possible. Unexpected musical moments, atrociously violent cuts of brutality, and gore abound.
“That De La Soul track [that plays during a pivotal scene] had a particular function which was to be jarring and aggressive and speak somehow to the perverse pleasure in what was happening,” Garland explained.
From the score to the cinematography, Garland has managed to make a war movie that does not, in any way, glamorize war. To do that, he had to keep the audience anxious and tense The product: the most stressful watching experience I’ve ever endured. But my god, it was worth it.
What is Civil War (2023) about?
@moviesaretherapy Civil War review #fyp #foryou #movies ♬ original sound - Kit Lazer
Civil War is set in a not-too-distant future when California and Texas have seceded, and the ensuing civil war has caused chaos across the United States. A team of war photographers and journalists make a dangerous journey to Washington DC with the goal of interviewing the President before American democracy falls.
It stars Kirsten Dunst in a career-best performance as jaded photojournalist Lee, alongside Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, and Jesse Plemons.
It’s a war movie. An action movie. A morbid road trip movie. But above all, it’s a nuanced ode to journalists. “I wanted to make journalists the hero,” said Garland. “In any kind of free country or, let's say, democracy, journalists are not a luxury, they're a necessity. They are absolutely as important as the judiciary, the executive, or the legislature, and they are literally as important as a free press that is respected and trusted. Now, journalists have done some of the work to be distrusted themselves. But a lot of other interested parties have been complicit in making them untrusted. And I think it's unhealthy. And I think it's wrong. So I wanted to put journalism at the heart of it.”
Though the characters are complex and flawed, we spend enough time with them in a van to cause us to not just love them, but respect them. We believe in them. We believe in their work. If the film’s action doesn’t manage to seduce us, we are seduced by the characters’ prevailing idealism in such dire times.
It’s prescient, too, to be celebrating war journalists — people with nothing to protect them but cameras and press vests — in the current global climate. Garland could not have anticipated Civil War would be released at a time when many of us are quite familiar with the names of press journalists across the world — Motaz, Bisan, Plestia. Outfitted with far less ego and equipment than the journalists in this film, the reality of journalists in Palestine is impossible not to recall while watching Civil War. It adds another thread of reality to the film that makes it all the more effective.
Is Civil War (2023) good?
Civil War pulls off Garland’s intended feat of creating an unequivocally anti-war war movie. But it’s by no means flat or didactic. The tapestry of scenes the characters encounter keeps the film moving. With each stop they make and each new character we meet, we learn something new about this world — and about ourselves.
This is perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of Civil War. It tells us about ourselves.
Garland shows us ourselves in the characters, in the polarized nation, and in the scenes of atrocity, the film never shies away from. “The first season of The Handmaid's Tale did something very interesting, which was it had bits of imagery that would seem shocking. But as you're watching them, you realize there was a real-world allegory or parallel. We basically did the same thing,” revealed Garland.
“The scenes are referencing moments from the real world. But not, it's important to say, exceptional moments. Moments that you would expect in any war. And in a way, that's part of the point. I think it was necessary to do that if one is going to be anti-war. Some of the sanitizing might pollute the message.”
The film is also tremendously evocative emotionally because it is so immersive. The film offers the audience the chance to feel like it’s behind the camera by following the photographers and revealing the shots the characters “take” during the film. And to get the shot, we go with them into the line of fire.
This is where I make my plea: you must watch Civil War in IMAX. Wrapped in the giant screen and surrounded by the full power of a fantastic soundtrack, this was the most immersive watching experience of my life — even more than any 3D film I’ve ever seen or Oppenheimer … sorry, Christopher Nolan. As if we needed the movie to feel more real, IMAX puts you right in the thick of it.
Ultimately, Civil War isn’t really a warning — it doesn’t make political moralizations. But it’s a call to action. Or a call to remembering. It urges us to appreciate, above all, perspective and truth.
Civil War has its wide release on April 12, 2024. Prepare your nerves. Watch the trailer here:
Breaking news: it's Friday. So that means we have a whole week's worth of new music. After Billie Eilish basically broke the internet by announcing a new album this week, everyone's wondering who else is gearing up to release some future Grammy nominees. My guess? Harry Styles. (Or is that just a wish?)
Either way, we have to focus on the present. While I'm overly ecstatic for it to be the weekend, I'm also equally excited to be listening to all these songs on Spotify. Plus, Coachella starts today, and I know a lot of you are going to need to add some songs to your pregame playlists.
As always, I've combed through every New Music Friday playlist, I've read all the press releases, and I've done my own research. Here are some of the best new songs to listen to that were released today. Let's get listening!
Sabrina Carpenter- "Espresso"
Sabrina Carpenter is having herself a year. Ahead of her first Coachella performance this weekend, she releases "Espresso", a fun-loving hit single that makes you want to lose all your worries and just move. Carpenter is having fun with her life, and it reflects her music. Written in Paris, she was in her traveler mindset just appreciating what the world had to offer. One of my favorite releases today, "Espresso" is a certified banger.
Sabrina told Zane Lowe,
"I don't think I've ever gone into writing an upbeat, confident record being like, "I really want to write an upbeat, confident record." I have to be in that headspace and I have to be in that mood. And this was one of those times in my life where it was just like, I just thought I was the shit in the moment."
Perrie- "Forget About Us"
Perrie Edwards may not be a familiar name by any means...formerly a leading member of Little Mix, Edwards' vocal power set her apart from the crowd early on. "Forget About Us" is Perrie's debut single as a solo artist, a pivotal song that's both upbeat in melody and melancholic in lyricism.
Written alongside Ed Sheeran, she reminds us in the same track that although relationships don't always last, they're still dynamic moments in our lives that shape who we are. Edwards says,
“I look back on past relationships and do think happily about those times. Do I want to be there now? No. It didn’t work out that way and if it was supposed to be it would have happened. Relationships have been a huge part of my life and they've made me who I am now. I think it’s a nice sentiment to be honest about and it’s super relatable.”
Peter McPoland- "Speed of the Sound (of you)"
Peter McPoland is a one-of-a-kind talent in the music industry. A special force who can write, produce, and record a record by himself and have it sound flawless, McPoland has an ear for a hit track. As his prowess grows, the songs get better...which is exactly the case with "Speed of the Sound (of you)."
McPoland's first song of 2024 doesn't disappoint by any means. It's a bop that's worthy of playing over and over. Unique in its own way, Peter McPoland delivers yet another earworm-y song.
Dua Lipa- "Illusion"
I'm getting a bit upset with Dua Lipa for not releasing any sort of ballad and declaring that her album would sound different than the rest...however, I can't deny that her disco-pop style is great for partying. Although she hasn't strayed far from her usual style, Lipa shows us she knows what it takes for a chart-topping record...and she's sticking with what works.
"Illusion" is every bit the 80's workout sound you know and love.
Future, Metro Boomin- "We Still Don't Trust You"
Metro Boomin is the Jack Antonoff of rap, if that makes sense. A highly regarded producer and creator who can work with the best-of-the best and create a Grammy-nominated album every single time. Every time you hear that iconic "Metro Boomin want some more" intro, you know you're getting a banger.
"We Still Don't Trust You" is an absolute vibe. A song I could see myself driving on the highway to at midnight, it's more beat-heavy than about lyricism. Plus, a few melodies from The Weeknd make this even more of a brooding, moody tune that just works.
Maggie Rogers- "The Kill"
Maggie Rogers has gone for the kill with her new album, Don't Forget Me. A songwriter to her core, Maggie Rogers is highly regarded as one of the best indie alt stars of our generation. This album deserves its own separate article, but "The Kill" is one of her best submissions.
About a relationship that has gone sour, Maggie Rogers reflects on how things used to be good...but now they're just going for the kill.
Chlöe- "Boy Bye"
Chlöe delivers an electric breakup anthem with "Boy Bye." I immediately added this to my playlist because the song encapsulates being so done with a partner, needing to leave them because they don't treat you right. She bids her boy bye with this upbeat R&B track, telling him to go back to his mother because she won't even cry.
It makes me even more excited for her debut album, In Pieces. The world is in desperate need of an R&B diva who isn't afraid to tell it like it is...and I think we've found her.
Suki Waterhouse- "Fun"
New mother, Suki Waterhouse, is wasting no time getting back to her music. In "My Fun", she yearns for a partner who loves her like she loves having her fun. A folksy rock track that is reminiscent of classic greats like The Beatles, "My Fun" is the perfect ending to this playlist.
Fun loving, scream worthy, "My Fun" is an easy listen. Suki Waterhouse makes no mistakes with her music.
Listen To Our Full Playlist Here:
POPULAR NEWS
