One of Hollywood’s proudest traditions is nominating big-deal songwriter Diane Warren for the Best Original Song Oscar and then not giving her the award. Last year, Warren broke an Academy record, racking up 17 nominations and zero wins, which means our ranked list of Oscar-nominated Warren songs is woefully out of date. Warren’s last nomination was for “Dear Me,” a Kesha-sung ballad from a documentary called Diane Warren: Relentless. That film’s title has been conclusively proven true, since Warren is now back in the Oscar race.
If you’ve seen a Vampire Weekend, Paramore, or Hayley Williams show in recent years, Brian Robert Jones was the guitarist onstage with the big afro. When not playing sideman for some of the best alt-leaning pop-rockers in the biz, Jones has been working on a behemoth project of his own.
The music industry is facing a moral and existential crisis as AI-generated music becomes increasingly prevalent. The latest development in streaming platforms’ response is that Apple Music will begin labeling AI-generated songs. According to The Hollywood Reporter, an email sent out yesterday announced that AI labels on songs will arrive “later this year,” confirming reports from back in March.
A band who have graced Bloodstock many times, Seething Akira chat to us at this years festival.
We discuss their past at the event, their plans for their most ambitious set yet, who they’d like to see on the bill in 2027 – including The Prodigy, thier future plans and more!
You can listen to the interview below, or jump over to any of the usual streaming services!
After a medical fundraiser was launched in late June, Connie Burton passed away earlier this week. She was the sister of late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton. Continue reading…
Freedom is not the same as improvement, because freedom concerns our relationship to what happens, not merely the circumstances themselves. A prison can be renovated and still remain a prison in the mind. When suffering has organized your habits, loyalties, and sense of self, its removal may feel strangely like a loss. Anger often outlives the conditions that produced it because the body keeps yesterday’s argument alive. So when life improves, there is no commandment that says gratitude must arrive immediately. Sometimes liberation begins with allowing the old anger to exhaust itself, until you discover you no longer need it.
There is something peculiarly German about naming a post-punk record Kleinkunst, a word usually reserved for cabaret, small-stage performance, and other modest forms of cultural production, then filling it with the psychic debris of cities built for industries that have vanished. Mottek87 comes from Duisburg, where structural change is hardly an abstraction.
Zbigniew F. and Jürgen W., longtime friends of Polish descent, formed the duo in 2024 after an evening of drinking beer and listening to records somehow turned into the decision to make one themselves. Their music has retained something of that unceremonious beginning: guitars, bass, programmed drums, sparse synthesizers, and German lyrics delivered with the plainspoken severity of people suspicious of excessive decoration.
The three songs on Kleinkunst: the title track, Oszillation, and Widerstand, concern a particular kind of estrangement, in which a person remains in the same place while everything that once made the place intelligible begins to vanish. Streets endure, buildings survive, names remain attached to maps, yet the internal coordinates have shifted. Mottek87 understand that structural change is experienced privately before it becomes a statistic. One person sees cleaner air and redevelopment; another sees an entire vocabulary of work, class, habit, and belonging becoming obsolete.
The music keeps that anger on a short leash. Prominent guitars recall Escape with Romeo and Pink Turns Blue, while the rhythm section has the economical discipline associated with early German post-punk and the sterner corners of Neue Deutsche Welle. Jürgen W.’s vocals lend the songs a dry Ruhr directness, carrying alienation without theatrical anguish. The arrangements leave considerable open space, which makes every bass movement and guitar phrase feel unusually exposed. Standout track Widerstand in particular has a rousing, sing-song chorus channeling Interpol.
Emotional intelligence sprouts from tension. Blossoms appear where dust once gathered, lungs clear, and the protective armor accumulated over decades becomes increasingly cumbersome. Improvement carries its own insult when it arrives after the world that required such protection has already been dismantled. “Kleinkunst is about realizing that change is not automatically freedom,” says the band. “Sometimes something gets better, and you still need time to stop being angry about it.”
Mottek87 record in a downtown Duisburg apartment with the shutters deliberately closed, sealing themselves off from the city they are attempting to understand. The method suits Kleinkunst. Resistance, in Mottek87’s hands, becomes less a heroic posture than an old reflex whose usefulness has become uncertain: a form of emotional muscle memory inherited from a place that keeps changing faster than its people can decide what they are prepared to surrender.
Yellowcard have shared a new track called ‘Calvary Drive’, which is set to appear on the deluxe edition of their latest album ‘Better Days’.
The song itself feels quintessential Yellowcard in sound and substance. A buoyant piece of timeless pop-punk brimming with nostalgia, longing and endless Summer brightness. Fitting in perfectly with the reflective nature that defined the making of ‘Better Days’, it slots into the tracklisting perfectly.
Though the truth is, it is actually the first song the band put together for the record alongside Travis Barker.
Ryan Key had this to say when explaining the origins of the song:
“‘Calvary Drive’ was the very first demo we worked on with Travis Barker and our friend Nick Long. We were just getting a feel for working together over a weekend and had no idea that this idea would be the spark for what became Better Days. It’s fun to listen back now and hear where we started, and how much the sound evolved from there.”
The deluxe edition of ‘Better Days’ will be released on September 18 via Better Noise. It will include four new songs, including ‘Calvary Drive’.
Here is the tracklisting:
1. Better Days 2. Take What You Want 3. Love Letters Lost (Feat. Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio) 4. honestly i 5. You Broke Me Too (Feat. Avril Lavigne) 6. City of Angels 7. Bedroom Posters 8. Skin Scraped 9. Barely Alive 10. Big Blue Eyes 11. Calvary Drive 12. Hell With Me” (Feat. Steve Aoki) 13. Bedroom Posters”(Feat. Good Charlotte)” 14. Better Days” (Asleep Version)
You can hear one of the new additions now, which is ‘Bedroom Posters’ featuring Good Charlotte.
