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Kero Kero Bonito have released their new EP, Civilisation II, today, on the one-year anniversary that they wrote one of its songs, “21/04/20,” toward the start of coronavirus lockdown. Like early single “The Princess And The Clock” — which landed on our best songs of the week list — that one is dreamlike and airy, luxuriating in time spent outside while feeling isolated. Those are joined by “Well Rested,” a spacey and throbbing 7-minute odyssey that sounds like it’s being transmitted from 100 years in the future. It’s a good EP! Watch a video for “21/04/20” and listen to Civilisation II below.

Dinosaur Jr. have released another single from their forthcoming record Sweep It Into Space, out this Friday. This song, “Take It Back,” is melancholy but playful, featuring a digital mellotron by J Mascis. It also comes with a wholesome stop-motion animation music video done by Callum Scott-Dyson, who wanted to bring the creature from the album art into life. View the full article

Dinosaur Jr. has been in heavy promo mode lately. The band continued their streak of sharing stellar videos with the release of the animated stop-motion clip for “Take It Back.” It’s the third single/video — following “Garden” and “I Ran Away” — from the band’s Sweep It Into Space, which arrives on April 23 via Jagjaguwar. For the video, director Callum Scott-Dyson said in a statement that he “really wanted to use the creature on the front of the album sleeve for Sweep It Into Space as an inspiration and springboard for its own little adventure, exploring some simple notions of creation, depe

Helmet’s cover of Gang of Four’s “In the Ditch” is the fourth single to hail from the upcoming album The Problem of Leisure: A Celebration of Andy Gill and Gang of Four. This is Helmet’s first new song since 2016. Gill, who died in early 2020, was a fan of Helmet from their early days and had hoped to collaborate with them on a future music project. Page Hamilton from Helmet explained his involvement in the project via a statement, noting: “My old pal Henry Rollins reissued Entertainment! and Solid Gold back in the 90’s and asked me to do liner notes for Solid Gold. I don’t remember what I w

One month from today, the Toronto art-pop singer and composer Lydia Ainsworth will release her new album Sparkles & Debris. On the album, Ainsworth works, for the first time, with the traditional guitar/bass/drums setup, as well as with the electronics that she’s been using since her career began. Ainsworth has already shared the album’s title track and “Parade,” and today, she’s also dropped a new joint called “Cake.” View the full article

Last year, the twitchy and rambunctious London indie rock band Sports Team released their debut album Deep Down Happy, which turned out to be a weird little hit. As detailed in this Stereogum feature, Deep Down Happy debuted at #2 on the UK charts, coming very close to knocking off Lady Gaga, and it also got nominated for the Mercury Prize. The band achieved rare-for-indie rock levels of visibility on the strength of memes and their extremely active WhatsApp community, and they also did it by being pretty good! Today, the band has dropped “Happy (God’s Own Country),” their first single since t

During our interview, Balming Tiger’s Omega Sapien grabs a small glass jar of Tiger Balm (maximum strength) from the desk and holds it up to his computer monitor, while I lift my own jar (original strength) to my laptop’s camera, grinning. If you know, you know: Tiger Balm is a miracle. More specifically, it’s a topical muscle salve. According to the company’s own legend, it was first developed by an herbalist in the Qing Dynasty’s Imperial Court, from camphor and menthol, which lends it a refreshing and strangely addictive sensation. It encourages blood circulation, so athletes use it to reco

Over the past decade, the UK artist Jai Paul has cemented his legend by barely releasing any music at all. Ever since he came out with the supremely promising one-two punch of “BTSTU” and “Jasmine” in 2011 and 2012 — and ever since Drake rapped over “BTSTU” — Paul has gone into full difficult-artist mode, and his releases have been few and far between. An album of demos, uploaded to Bandcamp, was swiftly removed, and that was eight years ago. It finally came out, along with a couple of new songs, in 2019. The Paul Institute, the project of Jai Paul and his brother A.K. Paul, released an EP las

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher—who said he went public after F

We’ve been enjoying the singles from nasimiYu’s new album Potions. Both “Watercolor” and “secretsecret” have showed off a knack for inventive music at the intersection of R&B, pop, and indie rock. The same goes for her minimal new single “White Lightning,” out today. View the full article

Enlarge / Vivaldi's graphic on FLoC. (credit: Vivaldi) Google wants to kill third-party tracking cookies used for ads in Chrome with the "Chrome Privacy Sandbox." Since Google is also the world's largest ad company, though, it's not killing tracking cookies without putting something else in its place. Google's replacement plan is to have Chrome locally build an ad interest profile for you, via a system called "FLoC" (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Rather than having advertisers collect your browsing history to build an individual profile of you on their servers, Google wants to keep that

Rosie Tucker is releasing a new album, Sucker Supreme, at the end of the month. We’ve heard quite a few tracks that’ll appear on it already, including “Habanero” when it was announced last month, and today we’re getting one last single, “Barbara Ann,” named after and inspired by their grandmother. “Barbara Ann, don’t fuck around with a Louisville Slugger under your side of the bed,” Tucker sings on the hook. “No one’s gonna hurt you now.” The song’s flash of memories plays out with crunchy, gliding guitars and a soaring melody. View the full article

Back in 2018 the HIRS Collective released Friends. Lovers. Favorites., their fast and furious debut full-length that stuffed in collaborations with Laura Jane Grace, Marissa Paternoster, Alice Bag, Martin Crudo, and Sadie Switchblade into 15 raging minutes. View the full article

Enlarge (credit: CHUYN / Getty Images) Hackers backed by nation-states are exploiting critical vulnerabilities in the Pulse Secure VPN to bypass two-factor authentication protections and gain stealthy access to networks belonging to a raft of organizations in the US Defense industry and elsewhere, researchers said. At least one of the security flaws is a zero-day, meaning it was unknown to Pulse Secure developers and most of the research world when hackers began actively exploiting it, security firm Mandiant said in a blog post published Tuesday. Besides CVE-2021-22893, as the zero-day is

(Almost) everything about the new M1 iMac in a nutshell. [credit: Apple ] Apple announced iMac updates today at its event in Brooklyn, New York. As expected, the updates improve the desktop's performance with new processors while maintaining the design we've known iMacs to have for the past couple of years. Apple says the new system was designed from the ground up around the M1 system on a chip (SoC), allowing for a much smaller motherboard and cooling system than that seen in the com

The new iPad Pro. It looks just like the old iPad Pro. [credit: Apple ] Apple took the virtual stage at its "Spring Loaded" event today to announce an update to the iPad Pro. The big surprise is that the new iPad Pros have the M1 SoC, just like full-blown Mac computers. Apple says the eight-core CPU will deliver 50 percent faster performance compared to the previous iPad Pro, and the eight-core GPU delivers up to 40 percent faster graphics performance. Storage is faster, too, with a

Enlarge The Apple TV 4K set-top box will receive some needed upgrades, including to the remote. Today at an event largely focused on the new M1-powered iMacs and iPad Pros, Apple told attending press and livestream viewers that a new model of the Apple TV 4K will begin shipping with the A12 Bionic CPU inside it. The previous model introduced in 2017 included the A10X. The A10X was a system-on-a-chip that included several components including a CPU and GPU; it was included in Apple's 2017 iPad Pro tablets and was based on the same architecture as the iPhone. (The iPhone chips lack the X or

Carolyn Wolfman-Estrada, engineering program manager at Apple, presents AirTags (with one visible in her right hand). [credit: Apple ] In a now-rare announcement of a completely new product category, Apple today introduced AirTags, a Tile-like personal location device. AirTags can be placed in or on personal possessions to be tracked with the Find My app (formerly Find My iPhone) on iPhones, iPads, or Macs. Users can then find those devices, including those detected by any other Apple

For the stoner’s holiday that is April 20, the Foo Fighters shared a trippy animated video for their tune “Chasing Birds.” The clip sees Dave Grohl and company performing, while the singer/guitarist sees “trails” and meets a talking cactus in the clip’s desert landscape. While the lyrics for “Chasing Birds” include “Chasing birds / To get high / I’m never coming down,” it’s not an overt drug song, but the visuals are perfect for those who do enjoy some green, which is legal in Grohl’s adopted home state of California. His bandmates also find themselves melting, falling into a chasm, seeing

The Chicago band Axis: Sova started out playing spacey but raw garage rock, but they’ve been moving around stylistically over the years. Two years ago, the band released the playfully psychedelic album Shampoo You. Today, the band has announced that they’ll release the new EP Fractal in a couple of weeks, and they’ve dropped the way-out lead single “(Don’t Wanna Have That) Dream.” View the full article

Kurt Vile has been a Matador recording artist ever since 2009, when the storied indie rock label released Vile’s Childish Prodigy album. Over the past 12 years, Vile has released six albums on Matador. Vile’s whole shambolic, laid-back everyman vibe seemed like a perfect match for a label that has long specialized in shambolic, laid-back everyman types. But no longer. Today, Billboard reports that Kurt Vile has left Matador for the Universal-distributed Verve Records. Next year, he’ll release his major-label debut. View the full article

Longstanding folk punks AJJ are back with a cover of Guided By Voices’ Alien Lanes classic “Motor Away” and a song titled “I Wanna Be Your Dog 2,” which I guess is a sequel to the Stooges’ groovy hit. This follows their existential record from last year, Good Luck Everybody, as well as covers of Silver Jews and Mount Eerie. View the full article

“The last time I did my cards was right after New Year’s,” Mia Berrin tells me over the phone on a dreary Wednesday. In 2019, when I last interviewed Berrin, the leader of the Brooklyn-based group Pom Pom Squad, she read our Tarot cards in a cemetery. A lot has changed in the two years since. “I pulled a Major Arcana, which is a sign of an important change,” Berrin says of her recent reading. “It was The Hermit. The symbol of needing some time to isolate and be with yourself and reflect on what you’re supposed to do away from everybody else’s intentions. It’s funny because it was right after I

The HTC Air VR headset, dolled up in a fitness-specific fit. HTC's next major product-reveal event is looming in May, but for at least one of its upcoming VR products, the surprise has been spoiled—by an award, of all things. The IF World Design Guide Awards, held in Germany for decades and bestowed upon many disciplines, released its latest pool of winners earlier this month. It's unclear when HTC's new "Vive Air" VR headset was uploaded to IF World's awards list, but its appearance began making the rounds on Monday after images appeared on Discord ch