DudeAsInCool

Waxahatchee’s new album Tigers Blood is out at the end of next week. We’ve heard two singles from it already, “Right Back To It” and “Bored,” and both of them made our five best songs of the week list when they came out. Today, Katie Crutchfield is sharing one last advance single from the album, “365.” View the full article

The two brothers thanked the Swifties for tuning in to their podcast every weekView the full article

Joel Martorana and Thomas Elliott, the two members of the Melbourne duo Peace Ritual, are products of the Australian punk universe, but that’s not the kind of music they make. Instead, Peace Ritual’s sound goes for dreamy, pretty skyward jangle. Peace Ritual made a name for themselves with their self-titled 2022 EP, and now they’ve got a new single that they made with a likeminded collaborator. View the full article

Historically, Sting has done pretty well as the singer for a three-piece band. Sting, who just joined Billy Joel onstage in Tampa, can certainly afford to hire more musicians if he wants, but for his next American tour, he’ll go back to his roots, fronting a newly formed power trio. On the Sting 3.0 tour, Sting and his bandmates will play relatively small venues, and maybe they’ll flex some of the anxious, urgent intensity that Sting had with the Police. View the full article

ProlificKid"> “Buffalo was a thriving community where you could lead a nice little middle-class life,” recalls Westside Gunn (real name Alvin Lamar Worthy), the city’s most influential living rap entrepreneur. “But once the crack era hit it fucked up everything, including my mother. Remember, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve seen it all!” View the full article

"There’s going to be songs played that have never been released," he says of 'To Beat the Devil,' a residency kicking off next month inside Chief's 350-seat live venueView the full article

He's got superstars on his side and haters yelling in his ear. That's life for a wildly stylish, genre-smashing rebelView the full article

It appears that Justin Timberlake would very much like to recreate the circa-2007 moment when it seemed like he would become king of all media. In fact, Timberlake seems to be making a running joke out of his inability to recapture that old mojo. Timberlake has a new album and a tour to promote, and when he was on Dakota Johnson’s Saturday Night Live episode in January, the central monologue joke was all about how Timberlake was available for sketches if anyone needed him. Last night, Timberlake pulled something similar on Jimmy Kimmel Live. View the full article

The Detroit-born rapper Boss, the first woman ever signed to Def Jam Records, has died. As HipHopDX reports, Boss’ ’90s rap peers like Bun B and DJ Premier shared the news on social media last night. No cause of death has been reported, but Boss, whose name was sometimes stylized as Bo$$, suffered a stroke in 2017. In 2021, a GoFundMe campaign raised money to help her get a kidney transplant. Boss was 54. View the full article

The fest tells Rolling Stone that Cano had visa issues and that Junior breached his contract. Rancho Humilde accused the fest of being “racist” and using the acts to “sell tickets”View the full article

The 17-time Grammy winner will trek across the U.S. with drummer Chris Maas and guitarist Dominic MillerView the full article

Eric Carmen, the musician most known for the hits “All By Myself” and “Hungry Eyes” and his role as frontman of power-pop band the Raspberries, has died. He passed away in his sleep over the weekend, according to a statement from his wife Amy. Carmen was 74. View the full article

The Cleveland native wrote several hits including "Make Me Lose Control," "All by Myself," and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again"View the full article

"There’s going to be a lot of flavors, not only of regional Mexican music,” he told Rolling Stone in this month's cover storyView the full article

Corey Walker, the only defendant charged as an adult, has argued he told the teen shooter to use a “flower vase” for defense, not a gun View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Liudmila Chernetska/Getty) Airbnb, like hotels and rival vacation rental site Vrbo, will no longer allow hosts to record guests while they're inside the property. Airbnb previously allowed hosts to have disclosed cameras outside the property and in "common areas" inside, but Airbnb's enforcement of the policy and the rules' lack of specificity made camera use troubling for renters. Airbnb announced today that as of April 30, it's "banning the use of indoor security cameras in listings globally as part of efforts to simplify our policy on security cameras and other devices" and to prioritize privacy. Cameras that are turned off but inside the property will also be banned, as are indoor recording devices. Airbnb's updated policy defines cameras and recording devices as "any device that records or transmits video, images, or audio, such as a baby monitor, doorbell camera, or other camera." Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

The group will release Model on May 24View the full article

Karl Wallinger, the former Waterboys multi-instrumentalist who became the sole member of the successful ’80s and ’90s psych-pop project World Party has died. According to a statement from his publicist, Wallinger passed away yesterday. No cause of death has been reported. Wallinger was 66. View the full article

Despite Kanye West’s best efforts to tank his career, his Vultures 1 campaign with Ty Dolla $ign continues to be a commercial success. The album debuted at #1 last month, and now it has yielded a #1 single. View the full article

Big Thief singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker’s new solo album Bright Future is dropping next week, but she’s got another new release out today. A six-song demos collection called i won’t let go of your hand is available now at Bandcamp, to buy but not to stream. All proceeds will go to Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. View the full article

Enlarge / Google's Bay View campus was designed with the world's strangest roof line. (credit: Google) Google's swanky new "Bay View" campus apparently has a major problem: bad Wi-Fi. Reuters reports that Google's first self-designed office building has "been plagued for months by inoperable or, at best, spotty Wi-Fi, according to six people familiar with the matter." A Google spokesperson confirmed the problems and said the company is working on fixing them. Bay View opened in May 2022. At launch, Google's VP of Real Estate & Workplace Services, David Radcliffe, said the site "marks the first time we developed one of our own major campuses, and the process gave us the chance to rethink the very idea of an office." The result is a wild tent-like structure with a striking roofline made up of swooping square sections. Of course, it's all made of metal and glass, but the roof shape looks like squares of cloth held up by poles—each square section has high points on the four corners and sags down in the middle. The roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, and Google calls it the "Gradient Canopy." We'll guess the roofline's multiple parabolic sections are great at scattering the Wi-Fi signal. (credit: Google) All those peaks and parabolic ceiling sections apparently aren't great for Wi-Fi propagation, with the Reuters report saying that the roof "swallows broadband like the Bermuda Triangle." Googlers assigned to the building are making do with Ethernet cables, using phones as hotspots, or working outside, where the Wi-Fi is stronger. One anonymous employee told Reuters, "You’d think the world’s leading Internet company would have worked this out." Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The 13- and 15-inch M3 MacBook Air. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) When Apple upgraded its Macs with the M2 chip, some users noticed that storage speeds were actually quite a bit lower than they were in the M1 versions. Both the 256GB M2 MacBook Air and the 512GB M2 MacBook Pro had their storage speeds roughly halved compared to M1 Macs with the same storage capacities. Teardowns revealed that this was because Apple was using fewer physical flash memory chips to provide the same amount of storage. Modern SSDs achieve their high speeds partly by reading from and writing to multiple NAND flash chips simultaneously, a process called "interleaving." When there's only one flash chip to access, speeds go down. Early teardowns of the M3 MacBook Air suggest that Apple may have reversed course here, at least for some Airs. The Max Tech YouTube channel took a 256GB M3 Air apart, showing a pair of 128GB NAND flash chips rather than the single 256GB chip that the M2 Air used. BlackMagic Disk Speed Test performance increases accordingly; read and write speeds for the 256GB M2 Air come in at around 1,600 MB/s, while the M3 Air has read speeds of roughly 2,900 MB/s and write speeds of about 2,100 MB/s. That's roughly in line with the M1 Air's performance. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / Domestically made smartphones were much in evidence at the National People’s Congress in Beijing (credit: Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images) Apple and Tesla cracked China, but now the two largest US consumer companies in the country are experiencing cracks in their own strategies as domestic rivals gain ground and patriotic buying often trumps their allure. Falling market share and sales figures reported this month indicate the two groups face rising competition and the whiplash of US-China geopolitical tensions. Both have turned to discounting to try to maintain their appeal. A shift away from Apple, in particular, has been sharp, spurred on by a top-down campaign to reduce iPhone usage among state employees and the triumphant return of Chinese national champion Huawei, which last year overcame US sanctions to roll out a homegrown smartphone capable of near 5G speeds. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / AMD's depiction of a game playing without FreeSync (left) and with FreeSync (right). (credit: AMD) AMD announced this week that it has ceased FreeSync certification for monitors or TVs whose maximum refresh rates are under 144 Hz. Previously, FreeSync monitors and TVs could have refresh rates as low as 60 Hz, allowing for screens with lower price tags and ones not targeted at serious gaming to carry the variable refresh-rate technology. AMD also boosted the refresh-rate requirements for its higher AdaptiveSync tiers, FreeSync Premium and FreeSync Premium Pro, from 120 Hz to 200 Hz. Here are the new minimum refresh-rate requirements for FreeSync, which haven't changed for laptops. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The bigger Pixel 8 Pro gets the latest AI features. The smaller model does not. (credit: Google) If you believe Google's marketing hype, AI in a phone is really, really important, the best AI is Google's, and the best place to get that AI is Google's flagship smartphone, the Pixel 8. We're five months removed from the launch of the Pixel 8, and that doesn't seem like a justifiable position anymore: Google says its latest AI models can't run on the Pixel 8. Google dropped that news in a Mobile World Congress wrap-up video that was spotted by Mishaal Rahman. At the end of the show in a Q&A session, Googler Terence Zhang, a member of the Gemini-on-Android team, said "[Gemini] Nano will not be coming to the Pixel 8 because of some hardware limitations. It's currently on the Pixel 8 Pro and very recently available on the Samsung S24 family. It'll be coming to more high-end devices in the near future." That is a wild statement. Gemini is Google's latest AI model, and it made a big deal of the launch last month. Gemini comes in a few different sizes, and the smallest "Nano" size is specifically designed to run on smartphones as a much-hyped "on-device AI." The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are Google's flagship smartphones. Google designed the phone and the chip and the AI model and somehow can't make these things play nice together? Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article