Just look away From her cold smile I walk away from The one I admire
Border Goth trio The Slashes stare into the flames with their latest single, I Started A Fire, a song that carries the charge of a band stepping into the room with the lights dimmed yet every nerve twitching awake. From the first seconds, melodic guitars carve out its bleak horizon, while the bass pushes forward with purpose and Esteban Rene’s deep vocals pull the song into a place where desire feels dangerous because it knows exactly what it wants.
The San Diego trio has always drawn from more than one map. The Slashes are shaped by the crosscurrents of border-town air, cold-wave chill, rock en español romance, and the kind of nocturnal rock music that seems to find you when the rest of the city has gone quiet. On I Started A Fire, that blend feels especially sharp. Beto Bautista’s bass gives the track its engine, Carlos Robles keeps the drums upbeat and restless, and the production folds in synth and cello touches that widen the frame without softening the bite.
I Started A Fire follows the collapse into destructive infatuation. The beloved remains emotionally distant, yet the speaker keeps moving closer, surrendering to obsession as both trap and purpose. Love becomes a self-inflicted wound, sparked by the singer’s own hand, until escape begins to lose its appeal. By the end, devotion has taken on the shape of an eclipse: permanent, darkly romantic, and strangely peaceful in its damage.
The rhythm keeps pressing ahead, but the atmosphere around it carries a wound. The guitars have a clean, melodic sting, never overplaying their hand, while the low end gives the track its strut through the darkened streets. Esteban Rene sings like someone who has learned that romance and ruin can walk through the same door. His delivery never sounds detached from the drama. He sounds caught inside it, watching the flames rise and deciding, perhaps too late, that the fire is part of the attraction.
That is the strange charm of The Slashes. They make music for the restless, for the doomed romantics, for the people who discover a band at 2 a.m. and wake up still thinking about them. “I Started A Fire” is sleek, dramatic, and alive with border-goth voltage, a song that turns the ache of wanting someone harmful into something you can dance through before the smoke catches up.
Listen to I STARTED A FIRE below and order the single here.
The Slashes play Soda Bar in San Diego on July 28th.
“I’m a lifelong student,” Bruce Hornsby says. “I’m always trying to push what I do into new, exciting vistas, and make a sound I haven’t heard before. That’s the challenge, for me.”
The piano man, today wearing jeans and a blue crew-neck shirt, talking to Classic Rock at his at home in Virginia, is an expressive conversationalist, speaking in long, complete sentences that are often punctuated by side notes and bursts of easy laughter.
He’s not kidding about that “lifelong student” thing. For an artist who’s just turned 70, with decades’ worth of laurels that he could easily rest on, and recycle lucratively – Grammy Award-winning classic hits such as The Way It Is, The Valley Road and Mandolin Rain, collaborations with rock and jazz royalty including Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Sting, Pat Metheny and Jack DeJohnette, not to mention his years as a member of the Grateful Dead – the need to keep moving forward and experimenting is one that Hornsby laughingly describes as taking his career “to the dark side”.
“A lot of my artist friends are out there mining the old gold,” he says. “It’s like: ‘Here’s the set-list for the year’; every night’s the same. I’m just not that person. I understand the idea that popular music is a vehicle for a stroll down memory lane for ninety-plus per cent of the audience. But I’m scratching and clawing for that seven per cent who are interested in some adventure in the music – a place for dissonance and atonality. At the same time, though, those people should realise that I still love to write a simple song, and I do it every record, two or three times.”
His latest album, Indigo Park, fits his mission statement perfectly. There are challenging, extended songs such as Entropy Here (Rust In Peace), Silhouette Shadows, Ecstatic and the title track, which combine rock, jazz, classical and hip-hop with stream-of-consciousness poetic lyrics. But they co-exist easily alongside pared-down, piano-driven songs like Take A Light Strain and North Dakota Slate Roof, which hark back to his mid-80s sound with Bruce Hornsby And The Range.
Hornsby with the Edward Hopper etching Night Shadows, which also appears on the cover of Indigo Park (Image credit: David McClister)
“While I’ve been studying modern classical pieces, like the Ligeti Etudes, I also live in a world of Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan. I’m influenced very literally and specifically,” Hornsby says.
Appropriately for a record with such wide-ranging, disparate inspirations, there’s a lyrical theme running throughout, of time passing and memory. The track that digs deepest into it is the album’s standout, Memory Palace, a quick-pulsing duet with Vampire Weekend main man Ezra Koenig.
“It’s really about my dotage and senescence,” Hornsby says with a smile – those things that make being a lifelong student “a bit more challenging”.
“In the New York Times science section recently, there was an article about aging memory. It could be summed up like this: you have a lot more information in your head, so you have to sift through a whole lot more mental files to find something. But it will come. It might be twenty seconds later or a day later, but it will come. I like the idea of creating these memory palaces, where you conjure up this building in your head. Like the chorus of that song says: ‘I’m building my memory palace, item placement and long-thought chains/Prime numbers, I’m running in sequence behind the eyes.’”
Hornsby’s musical memory stretches back to his home town of Williamsburg, Virginia, and a particular drive that he took with his brother John in the early 70s.
“We were going to the Hornsby Christmas party, that had become so big you had to wear a name tag to get to know all the second cousins,” he says, laughing. “My brother puts in this tape of Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. It’s funny to think of Elton as somebody who wasn’t mainstream. But that record didn’t have a hit on it, so it was not popular. I remember the song Amoreena came on, and the chills ensued. That was an epiphanic moment for me.”
Prior to that, Hornsby had dreams of becoming a professional basketball player – he’s six-foot-four, tall enough to be an NBA guard. “But I gave up trying to shoot hoops and crash the boards to deal with the piano, all because of Elton, and also Leon Russell, a big influence on me. It’s a pure emotional reaction to music with Elton and Leon. And it’s amazing to me that I got to know and work with both of them eventually.”
The usual apprenticeship with cover bands followed, taking Hornsby through his years at the University of Miami. He played everywhere from hotel bars to cruise ships to bar mitzvahs, honing his chops, delving into every genre. Would he have been content to continue that life as an unknown but steadily gigging professional?
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I was fairly consumed and driven and tunnel-visioned about succeeding. This thing was staring me right in the eyes, and I was just deeply involved and spending the time dealing with the piano. I also had started getting into jazz – Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. Then when I got into songwriting, that became another obsession. The obsessions didn’t allow me to think about the alternative of not breaking through.”
Bruce Hornsby and the Range, 1986 (L-R): Joe Puerta, George Marinelli, John Molo, Bruce Hornsby and David Mansfield (Image credit: Michael Putland/Getty Images)
The obsessions took him all through his twenties, from Williamsburg to Miami to Los Angeles, but still without the holy grail of a record deal. In LA there were a few almosts. He had a short stint as a staff writer for 20th Century Fox. He had a production deal with hit maker David Foster. He played demos for David Geffen, who jumped up and yelled: “Brucey, I want you to make records for me!” But none of that panned out.
“And that was good, because I wasn’t ready,” Hornsby admits. “I had not found my own voice or arrived at my own style. It took me a while. I was a slow learner, I guess. I remember the record labels used to say: ‘He’s gettin’ there.’ I was ‘gettin’ there’ for five years. And I didn’t get signed until I was thirty.”
But all the woodshedding and patience paid off eventually. His debut album, The Way It Is, was one of those that said: ‘This guy is the real thing, and he’s here to stay’. The catchy title track was a worldwide smash hit. Follow-ups Mandolin Rain and Every Little Kiss sealed the deal. And his band The Range, which included multiinstrumentalist David Mansfield, bassist Joe Puerta, drummer John Molo and guitarist George Martinelli, gave his piano-led songs a rousing, big-screen flow of all kinds of American sounds – folk, country, soul, southern rock and more.
The follow-up, 1988’s Scenes From The South Side, which included the singles Valley Road and Jacob’s Ladder, turned Hornsby into an arena act and also a sought-after collaborator. He recalls one of his first extracurricular forays, writing End Of The Innocence with Don Henley, in 1988: “I missed the Eagles’ heyday of the seventies. But I knew and loved Don’s solo records in the eighties – Boys Of Summer, Sunset Grill, Dirty Laundry, all so great. So when Don approached me about writing together, it was an instant yes.”
Hornsby laughs, remembering his first meeting with Henley.
“He went from his mansion on the hill to my twelve-hundred-square-foot house in Van Nuys. We sat down at my piano, and he had some ideas. I had some ideas. Nothing was really clicking, though. So at the end of session, I said: ‘I have this track for a song. I don’t like what I’m writing lyrically on it.’ Don listened and said: ‘Let me take this.’ And he had one of the first cell phones, one of those big honking things. He called me on his way home and said: ‘I’m passing all these corn fields and farm fields, and I’ve written about half the song already!’ It happened fairly quickly.”
Bruce Hornsby (right) onstage with the Grateful Dead (Image credit: Larry Busacca/WireImage)
While Hornsby was grateful for his success out of the gate, he was already beginning to be wary of what he calls “the prison of always sounding stylistically the same”. So he kept experimenting, kept saying yes to what might have seemed farflung offers. With jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis he co-wrote Barcelona Mona for the 1992 Olympics. He collaborated with bluegrass titans the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He performed at Farm Aid and the Newport Jazz Festival. Most unexpected of all, he became a member of the Grateful Dead, an association that lasted from 1990 to ’98.
“The Range had opened for them for a few years before, then I started playing with them,” he recalls. “In 1990 I just came in off the streets and started winging it with them at Madison Square Garden, with no rehearsal, which was crazy! Then about three weeks after that we went to Europe.”
As they travelled around on buses, Hornsby found himself seatmates with the bearded guru himself.
“Jerry Garcia and I would always ride side to side, or one seat behind another. We would talk about American traditional music. Jerry was really a walking encyclopedia. Totally immersed in the Harry Smith Anthology Of Folk Music – Clarence Ashley, Doc Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb. I was knowledgeable enough to hold my own in a conversation with him. I was under his tutelage in the best way. It was a beautiful time. Garcia also played guitar on two tracks on our third album.”
Hornsby saw an unexpected side of the Dead’s leader when he stayed at his house one time: “He was showing me around, and we went into this room that had a StairMaster. Jerry said: ‘Let me show you how to use it.’ Garcia on a StairMaster! I’ll never forget it. It’s such a hilarious, beautiful image of him, just trying to be the host. I also used to phone-prank him. And I would fool him quite often. I really miss Garcia. He was quite a guy.”
There’s a continuation of Hornsby’s creative connection to the Dead on his new album Indigo Park, with two songs – Alabama and Might As Well Be Me, Florinda – co-written by Robert Hunter, who passed away in 2019. Hornsby says the collaboration with the reclusive poet-lyricist was a virtual one.
“I never saw him. Not once,” he recalls. “I’d tell him: ‘Hey, I’m coming to town to play in the San Francisco area.’ He’d write me something that said: ‘I only go out for doctors’ visits now. I hardly ever leave the house.’ Anyway, we wrote five songs together, and I cherish them.” Florinda also features the recently passed Dead guitarist Bob Weir on guest vocals.
Another enduring musical link is with Bonnie Raitt. In 1989, Hornsby played on her mid-career comeback album Nick Of Time, playing piano on the Grammy-winning ballad I Can’t Make You Love Me. “They had the songwriter’s demo, by Mike Reid. It was very simple. So I learned the song, and I changed a bit of it to suit my style, I guess you could say. The way I move through the chords, the left hand moves in harmony with the right hand melody. And like so many records that end up being iconic and timeless, it was done very quickly.”
In a piece that this writer did about that song, Mike Reid told me: “Hornsby really played the piano part through his signature filter, and that kicked it up to another level”.
Raitt and Hornsby did two takes and that was it.
As a tribute to Raitt, Hornsby regularly performs the song in his own concerts now. Raitt returned the favour on Indigo Park, adding vocals to Ecstatic.
Hornsby considers Raitt to be one of his few contemporaries who are continuing to evolve.
“When you see her live,” he says, “she will give you what you came for – the old favourites – but she’ll play her modern music too. For instance, Just Like That, the one she won a Song Of The Year Grammy for a couple years ago. That’s a different sound. It’s kind of a folky song, which is not something she’s done a lot. But it’s beautiful. I think, in her own way, she’s pushing her form.”
After a decade in Los Angeles, Hornsby moved back east to his native Williamsburg, Virginia, where he and his wife Kathy still live today.
“It’s hardly a musical Mecca,” he says, “but I love where I live. It’s funny, I can go to LA now and enjoy it more than ever, because it’s populated by all these younger musicians that I hang with – Blake Mills, Ezra Koenig, Chris Dave, Ariel Rechtshaid. I could easily move back and be completely consumed with music, hanging out in hipsterville – Los Feliz, Echo Park – with all these guys.”
But recording Indigo Park with them provided just the musical jolt Hornsby needed: “I’ve found a path to grow old gracefully, with help from some newborn friends.”
Indigo Park continues a particularly productive period for him. Looking back at the past six years, he says he realised he’s “been writing and recording music at a near-constant clip”. And the albums that came out of that were all furthering his mission to find new collaborators and “learn new things”. Among those are Absolute Zero (collaborations with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and veteran jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette); Non-Secure Connection (James Mercer of The Shins, Jamila Woods, Leon Russell); ’Flicted (Ezra Koenig, Danielle Haim); the water-themed concept album Deep Sea Vents, which paired his songwriting with the avant-garde chamber group yMusic.
“I know that these records may not be for everyone,” he says. “But it’s always been the prison that an old-time nostalgic fan wants to hold you in – the prison of making the same record over and over. I’m trying to push the form and find new ways of writing a popular song.”
And what does he hope his fans will take from Indigo Park?
“I hope I’m not pissing off too many of my old fans, but I probably am,” he says with a smile. “But really, I hope that they’ll discern an attempt at deep musicianship that also has a bit of a lighter element, along with something of some depth – a bit of folk music-meets-some of the more dissonant modern classical areas out there. Mostly, I just hope that something moves them. There are several songs on this record that gave me chills while I was writing them. And that’s what I would wish for any record I’ve ever made. That it moves me, and, in turn, that people are moved by it.”
Indigo Park is out now via Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers.
I push my fingers into my eyes to ease the tension
There was a stretch at the turn of the millennium when music videos seemed convinced that the subconscious had a television set of its own. Ashtrays glowed like religious relics, scratched film stock became emotional punctuation, and every cut suggested that somebody had stayed awake for three days trying to explain the inside of their skull. Jakarta’s GHO$$ tap into that visual bloodstream with 666, a dark-pop and trip-hop fever dream directed by Mellow Splice that feels less interested in nostalgia than in proving those old tricks still possess enough voltage to rattle the nerves.
Formed in 2014, GHO$$ have spent years threading together dark pop, trip-hop, alternative music, and the smoky residue of ’90s R&B and hip-hop into their own unique fusion. Their debut full-length, The Whitest Blackout, serves as the conceptual counterpart to 2017’s The Blackest Whiteout. Where the earlier release dwelled in disappearance, this record searches for the painful return of consciousness after trauma, asking what recovery looks like once the lights come back on and reveal the wreckage waiting in the room.
666 burrows into that uneasy territory with boom-bap drums, jazz-tinted instrumentation, deep bass, and vinyl scratching inspired by Geoff Barrow’s work with Portishead. There is some of Massive Attack’s narcotic weight in the low end and Tricky’s paranoid intimacy in the vocals, while the beat carries the dusty snap of a forgotten hip-hop twelve-inch. Elsewhere, GHO$$ share Gorillaz’s appetite for collapsing genre boundaries and The Avalanches’ sense that discarded textures can be reassembled into strange new emotional machinery.
The accompanying video translates that emotional static into a kaleidoscope of tactile images. Performance footage collides with boiling oil, burning cigarettes, flashing strobes, and psychedelic textures that appear for only an instant before dissolving into the next collision. Shot by Moses Sihombing and Hafizh Armynazrie, the photography treats ordinary objects as psychological evidence. A cigarette becomes a countdown. Bubbling oil resembles a mind overheating under pressure. Every flash interrupts the previous image before certainty has time to settle.
Mellow Splice’s editing functions like memory itself: fractured, repetitive, occasionally absurd, forever interrupting the present with another sensation. The pacing keeps the eye alert without collapsing into random excess, finding an exhilarating balance between precision and delirium. It recalls the inventive visual language that filled MTV and MuchMusic during the late ’90s and early 2000s, when directors happily raided experimental cinema, skate videos, photocopiers, horror films, and television static for inspiration.
Watch the video for 666 below:
Listen to 666 below and order The Whitest Blackouthere.
One Tribe Nation will make its highly anticipated Los Angeles live debut on Saturday, July 25 at The Bluesadelic Sessions Live at The Den Studios. Led by guitarist and musical director Michael Sanders and featuring Grammy Award-winning vocalist Corey Glover of Living Colour, the performance marks the first Los Angeles appearance of the band’s powerhouse new lineup and serves as an early preview of their forthcoming third studio album, Estado Dorado. The set will feature an explosive mix of original music alongside bold reinterpretations of songs by Living Colour, Santana, Curtis Mayfield, Sly & The Family Stone and other legendary artists.
The collaboration between Sanders and Glover grew out of friendship and shared songwriting instincts. After hearing one of Sanders’s unfinished songs through a mutual friend, Glover immediately connected with the material. Since then, the pair have written multiple songs together, recorded new music, and developed a creative partnership that has become the foundation of One Tribe Nation’s next chapter.
“As a young black rock kid, those guys were gods to us,” says Sanders. “Working with Corey has been one of those surreal full-circle moments. The first song we wrote together sounded like we’d been making music together for years.”
The current lineup draws from across decades of acclaimed work in rock, funk, jazz, soul, Latin music and pop. Corey Glover (vocals) is the Grammy Award-winning frontman of Living Colour, known worldwide for the classic “Cult of Personality” and decades of acclaimed international touring. Uriah Duffy (bass) is the former bassist for Whitesnake and an in-demand touring and session musician who has performed with Christina Aguilera and The Family Stone. Christian Pepin (percussion) is a two-time Grammy Award winner whose credits include Gilberto Santa Rosa and Kamasi Washington.
Dave Schulz (keyboards) brings a career spanning Berlin, Goo Goo Dolls and English Beat. David Cowan (drums) has recorded and performed with Lalah Hathaway, Sheila E., Common and Les McCann across jazz, funk, R&B and rock. Ben Thomas (vocals), former frontman of X-Zappa Plays Zappa, adds an extraordinary second voice celebrated for its range across progressive rock, funk, jazz and soul. Founder Michael Sanders (guitar) rounds out the lineup with a career that includes work alongside Nickelback, Flo Rida and Dyoxen, as well as collaborations with members of Santana, The Rolling Stones, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Zac Brown Band.
Together, One Tribe Nation embodies the multicultural spirit of Los Angeles through an electrifying blend of Afro-Latin rhythms, funk, rock, soul, jazz and world music — designed as an immersive live celebration of musicianship, diversity and community. The July 25 Los Angeles debut offers fans the first opportunity to experience the new lineup’s chemistry as the band prepares to release Estado Dorado later this year.
On “Cannonball,” Caryn Ganz, a pop music journalist, talks about “Expectations,” her favorite song on Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.”
Bill Ward has disclosed that he now travels primarily by wheelchair in airports and public venues, sharing a candid health update with fans nearly one year after the death of his longtime Black Sabbath bandmate Ozzy Osbourne.
The 78-year-old Black Sabbath drummer shared a photo of himself seated in a wheelchair and addressed the subject directly in a social media statement: “Dear Friends, Fans, Families, and people I’ve not met yet, I’m announcing today somewhat sadly but nonetheless truthfully, that I’ve reached a place where publicly more and more I need to use a wheelchair, mostly in airports, or public events. I can still walk, let there be no doubt, but I can’t walk very far without needing to rest, meaning I need to sit down. We started using the wheelchair about 18 months ago, mostly in airports.”
“I became 78 years old on May 5th 2026. I was a long distance walker, I’ve walked in many different parts of the world, and I’m still a drummer. I can still play pretty good for 78 years old. My talents and ambitions, and my unyielding need to be artful, and to play drums, is still as strong as it was so many years ago now. I’m just saying if you see me in a wheelchair, I’m just catching a ride, I’m not in retirement or ill or giving up, or any of those thoughts that ignite when we see people in wheelchairs.”
“I’m making myself public and transparent about my new transport, and letting you know I’m OK. If you see me in the airports or visiting friends in the music arenas or theatres say hi, I don’t bite, I’ll just look different, as pictured here.”
“Much love to you all and I’ll keep rocking until I’m dead. Rock forever and ever. And the secrets we hide, can be dangerous to our health, I’m letting transparency prevail, with love and progression.”
The original lineup of Black Sabbath — Ward, Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler — played its final concert last summer. Dubbed “Back to the Beginning,” the charity show was held at Villa Park in Birmingham, United Kingdom on July 5, 2025. After Osbourne’s death, Ward shared an emotional tribute in which he said the legendary heavy metal singer is “forever in my heart.” “Where will I find you now? In the memories, our unspoken embraces, our missed phone calls, no, you’re forever in my heart,” Ward wrote. “Deepest condolences to Sharon and all family members. RIP. Sincere regrets to all the fans. Never goodbye. Thank you forever.”
Accountable Beasts, Ward’s first solo album in 18 years, was released in 2015 via iTunes. The record featured Ward’s drumming on seven of its nine tracks, alongside contributions from longtime collaborators Keith Lynch (guitar, keyboards), Paul Ill (bass) and Ronnie Ciago (drums), plus drummer Walter Earl and an array of session singers, including Ward’s daughter Emily.
In May 2012, Ward announced he was declining to join his former Sabbath bandmates for scheduled recording and touring commitments, citing a contractual dispute. Producer Rick Rubin suggested Ginger Baker (Cream) as a replacement for the LP recording sessions — a suggestion Iommi shot down immediately — before ultimately enlisting Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine. Ozzy later said Ward “needed to own up” that he did not have the physical capacity to pull off the tour, adding that the band had explored the option of bringing a second drummer on the road to share duties with Ward — a scenario Iommi confirmed in 2017 during a question-and-answer session about the band’s Ten Year War box set.
