New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters will not attend the milestone event in Rarotonga, which will celebrate the Cook Islands’ six decades of self-governance in free association with NZ. Photo: RNZ Pacific
Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown told local media he had requested a meeting with New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister regarding the funding pause, but was declined.
It comes as a second round of funding to the realm nation has been paused by Aotearoa, bringing the total funds held to nearly $30 million over two years.
Brown has declined an interview with RNZ Pacific.
In a written statement, a spokesperson for Brown said the government continues to engage in good faith with New Zealand and that discussions are ongoing, “so it would not be appropriate to comment further at this time”.
However, speaking to Cook Islands Television (CITV) in Cook Islands Māori, Brown said he had received criticism for not meeting with New Zealand’s prime minister or foreign minister.
“I want to confirm to you all that I did send a letter to the prime minister of New Zealand and [New Zealand foreign minister] Winston to arrange a meeting between leaders, New Zealand’s leader and myself,” Brown, addressing Cook Islanders direclty, told CITV.
“I wanted to elevate these discussions to the prime minister’s level. But they sent their response, they wanted the discussions to be done between our officials.”
He said the Cook Islands was doing what New Zealand requested by leaving the meeting for officials to come up with solutions.
Uncertainty over what the problem is
The disagreement between the two governments stem from partnership agreements that Cook Islands signed with China at the beginning of the year.
The New Zealand government believed it should have been consulted over the agreements, while Brown disagreed.
Brown told CITV the agreements signed with China are “all over and done with”, and New Zealand has had an in-depth look at them.
“There is a part of the document we signed that [New Zealand] say they have a problem with but they have not been able to confirm with us what exactly it is that they have a problem with.”
Kiwis ‘running’ to Oz, Cook Islands economy ‘all good’
Brown said his government is able to cover the amount that New Zealand has put on pause because of a strong economy, driven by the tourism sector.
He said the money New Zealand had paused would normally be disbursed to education and health.
“Looking to New Zealand, they are having issues with the state of their economy, it’s going backwards, the people are running away from New Zealand for Australia to find better opportunities.
“But our status however, it’s all good, hence we were able to afford to cover the amount of money that we did not receive from New Zealand.”
Relationship between to nations ‘not like it was back in the day’
Brown said the relationship with New Zealand had evolved.
“For our relationship today, it is not like it was back in the day where New Zealand was like a parent, and we were the child,” Brown said.
“We have reached 60 years of self-governance; we are our own people, we have our own land, we have our own ocean, our own being, our relationship now is the relationship between friends, not of a parent and child.”
Brown said he wanted the friendship to grow and not go backwards – where New Zealand spoke for the country on the world stage.
“The younger generations and their young ones, they are able to fulfill roles that were once held by westerners or New Zealand… they can fly our flag, be our voice, out there in the world.”
But Brown said he did not want to change the free-association relationship between the two countries, which he has always maintained. It comes after several calls from New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters for Brown to hold an independence referendum.
“When looking at the state of this relationship, what we are pushing firmly for is that this relationship continues, and is strengthened, continuing on into the future,” Brown said.
Peters’ response
A spokesperson for Peters said they had nothing further to add to a statement issued last week.
Part of it said there had been a series of constructive discussions between New Zealand and Cook Islands officials aimed at remediating the breach of trust.
“However, Prime Minister Mark Brown continues in his public statements and actions to promote a vision of the New Zealand-Cook Islands relationship which is inconsistent with the free association model,” the statement said.
“He appears to wish for the Cook Islands to reap all the benefits of the free association relationship while being subject to none of the mutual responsibilities.”
A spokesperson for Brown in a statement told RNZ the Cook Islands remain committed to the relationship of free association with New Zealand.
Miley Cyrus has released “Dream as One,” a new song that she made for the new movie Avatar: Fire and Ash. Cyrus co-wrote and co-produced the track with Andrew Wyatt and Mark Ronson, and it has additional contributions from Jonathan Wilson, Simon Franglen, Brandon Bost, and others. Listen to “Dream as One (From Avatar: Fire and Ash)” below.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third installment in director James Cameron’s Avatar franchise. It hits U.S. theaters on December 19. The original soundtrack album, featuring composer Simon Franglen’s score, is out the week before, on December 12.
The second Avatar movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, came out in 2022. The Weeknd made an original song, “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength),” for that film. The original Avatar, from 2009, featured Leona Lewis’ “I See You (Theme From Avatar).”
Charli XCX has announced a new album. The follow-up to Brat and its spinoffs is called Wuthering Heights, and it is out on February 13 via Atlantic. Below, listen to a new song from the album called “Chains of Love.”
As the title suggests, Wuthering Heights was born from Charli XCX’s work with Emerald Fennell on the filmmaker’s new adaptation of the famed Emily Brontë novel. “I called Emerald and asked her what she was hoping for from my read of the script,” the British musician explained on Substack. “She coyly suggested ‘A song?’ and I suggested ‘An album?’ because why not? I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar. Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living. I was fucking IN.”
Charli XCX also wrote about how she made Wuthering Heights primarily with Finn Keane, the British producer and songwriter formerly known as Easyfun. “From the very start of our process we were discussing the Todd Hayne’s documentary about The Velvet Underground and in particular this one quote from John Cale where he describes that the main sonic rule of creating songs for the band was that all things had to be both ‘elegant and brutal,’” she said. “We started to live by this description as we created songs for the Wuthering Heights album throughout most of this year. Finn came with me on tour and we rented a studio space most days.”
Bangalter is credited as a co-producer and co-writer of “Yoroï,” and he also played bass on the track. A representative for Bangalter told Pitchfork, “Orelsan and Thomas have been friends for some time, and Orelsan invited Thomas to make music together on one song for his latest album.”
Since the end of Daft Punk, in 2021, Bangalter has released numerous projects, including Mythologies, Chiroptera, and a soundtrack EP for Daaaaaalí! He also recently joined Fred Again.. and others for a DJ set in Paris.
More than half a century after forming, roots-rock stalwarts Little Feat have announced the start of their final tour. The Last Farewell Tour kicks off in April with shows across the southern United States, though the band have confirmed a global tour to follow. Scroll down to see Little Feat’s full list of tour dates.
“Playing is the joy and satisfaction of touring, but it comes with the hard part—travel, the endless miles on a bus,” Little Feat shared in a statement. “It’s definitely not an absolute, never-gonna-play again statement. This wind-down will take several years to accomplish, and while it does, Feat will continue to perform and record as long as they are able. It’s a retirement from the travel of touring.”
The Last Farewell Tour’s lineup will feature founding keyboardist Bill Payne alongside guitarists Fred Tackett and Scott Sharrard, bassist Kenny Gradney, percussionist Sam Clayton, and drummer Tony Leone. Paul Barrere, the band’s longtime guitarist and singer, died in 2019.
Little Feat shared their latest album, Strike Up the Band, earlier this year. Alongside the tour announcement, they’ve shared “Feathers and a Smile,” a song written by the band’s late co-founder Lowell George and sung by his daughter, Inara George. Listen to it below.
Revisit Pitchfork’s review of the reissue of Little Feat’s 1978 live album Waiting for Columbus.
Little Feat: The Last Farewell Tour
Little Feat:
01-11-18 Fort Lauderdale, FL – Sandy Beaches Cruise 2026 01-19-22 Fort Lauderdale, FL – The Big Easy Cruise 2026 04-10 Orlando, FL – Plaza Theatre 04-11 Miramar Beach, FL – Joe Bonamassa’s Sound Wave Beach Weekend 2026 04-13 Knoxville, TN – Tennessee Theatre 04-14 Roanoke, VA – Jefferson Center 04-16 Chattanooga, TN – Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium 04-17 Montgomery, AL – Montgomery Performing Arts Center 04-19 Dallas, TX – Majestic Theatre 04-20 Austin, TX – Paramount Theatre 05-03 Houston, TX – 713 Music Hall 05-05 Eureka Springs, AR – City Auditorium 05-06 Kansas City, MO – Uptown Theatre 05-08 Iowa City, IA – Englert Theatre 05-09 St. Charles, IL – Arcada Theatre 05-24 Thornville, OH – Dark Star Jubilee
’90s kids may remember the name Sound Blaster. Now, the sound card maker is back with a modern gadget. Creative’s Re:Imagine is a modular audio hub with a DAC, amplifier, touchscreen, buttons, a scroll wheel, and sliders that can control music, games, and creative workflows. It has audio inputs, outputs, USB-C ports, and even plays retro games.
When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Crowdfunded projects pose a degree of risk for buyers, so be sure to do your research before paying your hard-earned money.
’90s kids may remember the name Sound Blaster. Now, the sound card maker is back with a modern gadget. Creative’s Re:Imagine is a modular audio hub with a DAC, amplifier, touchscreen, buttons, a scroll wheel, and sliders that can control music, games, and creative workflows. It has audio inputs, outputs, USB-C ports, and even plays retro games.
When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Crowdfunded projects pose a degree of risk for buyers, so be sure to do your research before paying your hard-earned money.
Callahan’s last studio album was Ytilaer—or YTI⅃AƎЯ—which he followed with the 2024 live album Resuscitate. The band that played on that record remains in place on My Days of 58: guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and drummer Jim White. Those shows, said Callahan in press materials, showed “that they could handle anything I threw at them.” He added: “Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the thing that keeps me motivated to keep making music. It’s all about listening to yourself and others. A lot of the best parts of a recording are the mistakes—making them into strengths, using them as springboards into something human.”
The album also includes contributions from Richard Bowden (fiddle), Pat Thrasher (piano), Chris Vreeland (bass), Mike St. Clair (trombone), Bill McCullough (pedal steel), Eve Searls (backing vocals), and Jerry DeCicca (tambourine).
Bill Callahan: My Days of 58
My Days of 58:
01 Why Do Men Sing 02 The Man I’m Supposed to Be 03 Pathol O.G. 04 Stepping Out for Air 05 Lonely City 06 Empathy 07 West Texas 08 Computer 09 Lake Winnebago 10 Highway Born 11 And Dream Land 12 The World Is Still
This pocket gadget turns any song into a karaoke backing track. The SinggoX uses AI tech to remove vocals without subscription fees. It works with the press of a button, and has built-in reverb effects. It acts as a Bluetooth receiver for your phone, then connects to a speaker via a 3.5 mm cable. Includes two wireless microphones and a remote control.
When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Crowdfunded projects pose a degree of risk for buyers, so be sure to do your research before paying your hard-earned money.
This pocket gadget turns any song into a karaoke backing track. The SinggoX uses AI tech to remove vocals without subscription fees. It works with the press of a button, and has built-in reverb effects. It acts as a Bluetooth receiver for your phone, then connects to a speaker via a 3.5 mm cable. Includes two wireless microphones and a remote control.
When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Crowdfunded projects pose a degree of risk for buyers, so be sure to do your research before paying your hard-earned money.
“I’d love to talk to you sometime,” Curran said. “I’ll give you my contact.” He pressed a Secret Service commemorative coin into her palm.
Loomer has described her work by quoting Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” At the memorial, at least in some corners, she was being received with reverence. “People who are entrusted with the life of the President value the work that I’m doing,” she told me. She radiated a sense of weariness that this grand task, of being Trump’s protector and soothsayer, fell to her. “Why is it that I’m the one that has to identify people who are actively working against him?”
One afternoon in September, Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, was scheduled to visit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for a classified oversight briefing and a meeting with Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, the agency’s head. “Why are the Pentagon and IC”—intelligence community—“allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR,” Loomer posted in advance of the visit. “Clearly, a lot of Deep State actors are being given a pass in the Intel community to continue their efforts to sabotage Trump.” Warner’s meeting was abruptly cancelled. “I was in disbelief,” Warner, who is the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “You’ve got an individual that the Trump Administration was reluctant to hire because she was so far out, yet seems to have unbelievable access to call the shots and then brag about it on her social-media feed.” (Loomer told Warner to “cry more, bitch!”)
Loomer had started to attack Warner the previous week, after he visited an ICE detention center. (Members of Congress are allowed to conduct such visits for oversight purposes, but many have been turned away or arrested.) “I don’t follow Ms. Loomer’s tweeting,” Warner told me. “But I was told that she’d gone on a screech for some time, calling me out.” He wasn’t sure whether to categorize her as a “trolling blogger” or a shadow member of the Administration. “When Laura Loomer tweets, Trump’s Cabinet jumps,” he said. Some of Warner’s Republican friends on the Hill had been attacked by her, too. Warner went on, “She’s an equal-opportunity offender.”
By then, Loomer’s interference in government matters had become a regular occurrence. In early April, Mike Waltz, then the national-security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find Loomer sitting across from the President, in the midst of a presentation that questioned the allegiances of a number of members of his National Security Council. After the meeting, Trump hugged Loomer, then promptly fired six members of the N.S.C. He also fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and of U.S. Cyber Command. According to Loomer, Haugh, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Air Force, was close with General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump had appointed and then clashed with during his first term. Wendy Noble, Haugh’s deputy, was also fired; she was apparently connected to another Trump critic, James Clapper, Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence.
Loomer wanted Waltz gone, too—he had been tagged as a neocon who, in her estimation, was contravening Trump’s desires. She was also concerned about his judgment: his deputy, Alex Wong, was married to a career prosecutor who had worked at the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration. A few weeks later, they both departed. Loomer posted, “SCALP.”
According to three people with direct knowledge of Waltz’s ouster, Loomer had nothing to do with it. “It wasn’t working out with him,” someone with close ties to the White House told me. “She ends up getting the credit for it because she’s the one out there talking.” (Weeks before, Waltz had inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat in which members of the Administration were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.) Still, White House officials—and operatives across Washington—have no choice but to deal with her. “I was on an hour-long Zoom call, which probably cost, when you think of how much everyone was getting paid, at least fifty thousand dollars, to talk about what to do about Loomer,” a consultant who works with the Administration told me. Her screeds are routinely cited in major newspapers and footnoted in lawsuits; her targets range from low-level government employees to the Pope. Recently, Loomer posted that an official at Customs and Border Protection was “Anti-Trump, pro-Open Borders, and Pro-DEI.” Three days later: “Now he’s FIRED.” She described Lisa Monaco, Microsoft’s new head of global affairs—and Joe Biden’s Deputy Attorney General—as a “rabid Trump hater,” and demanded that the company’s government contracts, which total billions of dollars, be revoked. “Wait till President Trump sees this,” she wrote. Not long afterward, Trump called for Monaco to be fired. Loomer picked up the baton, tagging Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O. “Are you going to comply? Or continue to be two-faced?” she wrote. “How dare you.”
Under the threat of censorship and other forms of menace (the Trump Administration this year has so far fired the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress and has tried very hard to get the Smithsonian Institution to do its curatorial bidding), some organizations have decided to do nothing at all, as if they could simply pretend that the nation was not about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its birth. “People are terrified,” one art-museum curator told me, not only about what to exhibit but about what to write on labels. She says she keeps asking herself, “Should I just put the stuff on the wall and say, ‘This was made in this period?’ ” Others are opting to un-celebrate and, instead, to denigrate the anniversary, following the logic of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s original introduction to the 1619 Project, which cast the Revolution as regrettable. “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones had written, a claim to which some prominent historians publicly objected, leading the Times to issue a partial correction (“some of the colonists”). One group of historians, for instance, is planning a panel discussion at an academic conference on whether it would be better to “smear” the Revolution than to commemorate it.
Even those cultural organizations, from historic houses to public-school districts and universities, that have decided to do something for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth appear to be doing considerably less than they did for the two-hundredth. For the bicentennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot blockbuster exhibit on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; critics may have found it tacky, but it became a hugely successful travelling show. For 2026, the Met is planning to display, in the American Wing, thirty-two works from its own collection; one colleague of mine referred to putting on this exhibit as effectively “staging a die-in.” A frustrated curator told me that this modest scale is all the Met can do because “Look at the moment we’re in.”
Another option is to try to capture this moment. The New York Public Library’s bicentennial exhibit, “The American Idea,” displayed the Bay Psalm Book, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, but for next year the library is planning to ask visitors to reflect on the meaning of the anniversary, and to archive their answers. In the nineteen-seventies, National Public Radio, with generous funding from the N.E.H., staged a yearlong series of three-hour Saturday-morning call-in programs called the “American Issues Radio Forum.” Given that the Trump Administration has gutted the N.E.H., defunded NPR, and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s difficult to see how public media can mount anything as ambitious as was achieved a half century ago. A spokesman for NPR told me that its two-hundred-and-fiftieth agenda is “still in the planning phase.”
A year, these days, is a lifetime. In 2024, the Declaration House in Philadelphia—a bicentennial-era reconstruction of the building where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—installed “The Descendants of Monticello,” a hauntingly beautiful and provocative work by the artist Sonya Clark. Clark placed large video monitors behind the building’s windows, turned outward toward the street, so that passersby were met by the filmed and photographed eyes of the descendants of the people Jefferson enslaved, including his own descendants by way of Sally Hemings. Declaration House is part of Independence National Historical Park; under the new regime, no Park Service site will be allowed to display any exhibit that does the essential work of scrutinizing the relationship between liberty and slavery in American history, or the relationship between Native nations and the federal government, because to do so is now considered advancing a “corrosive ideology.” The President’s House Site, built atop the foundations of the mansion where George Washington resided while in Philadelphia, has been asked to review panels describing the lives of nine people who lived there as Washington’s property, owing to the Administration’s requirement that any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” be removed. Under this logic, to note that Washington owned slaves is to disparage him but to pretend that those nine people never existed comes at no cost to their memory. (Online, citizens have been archiving signs slated for destruction under the hashtag #SaveOurSigns.)
The hurdles facing museums and other institutions make it particularly impressive that many have already launched or are about to launch remarkably thoughtful two-hundred-and-fiftieth exhibits and activities. This month, History Colorado will open an N.E.H.-funded exhibit called “Moments That Made US,” featuring artifacts that mark turning points in American history, including Nixon’s tape recorder, the inkwell that Grant and Lee used to sign the surrender at Appomattox, one of the first copies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo printed in Mexico, and some moon rocks brought to Earth on Apollo 11 in 1969. Jason Hanson, History Colorado’s effervescent chief creative officer, told me that he thinks of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American and what we want it to be going forward.” He also thinks that it’s easier to be sunny about the two-hundred-and-fiftieth outside the original thirteen colonies, which he calls the “OG13.” “We are ready for an American history that doesn’t always say, ‘The meaning of this event is this,’ ” Hanson told me. “We are having an argument in the country about the meaning of events.” He’s up for it. He’s likewise excited about the state’s plan to commemorate the nation’s birthday, which is also Colorado’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, by organizing teams to climb the state’s fourteeners, mountains taller than fourteen thousand feet. (Climbing mountains turns out to be wonderfully semiquincentennial. “Climb the Mountain, Discover America” is the slogan for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth used by Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home, which will be unveiling a new center for history and citizenship.)
Back on the edge of the Atlantic, another early stunner is “The Declaration’s Journey,” which opened on October 18th at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution and traces the travels of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence across centuries and continents. “We tell the story of the Revolution all the time,” the exhibit’s curator, Philip Mead, told me. (Mead is a former doctoral student of mine, and I should be clear that I’ve got about as much distance from this topic as a letter has from an envelope.) He said, “You know what they say about stories? There are two plots. A stranger comes to town, or a man goes on a trip. We’re telling those two stories here. The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.” The exhibit opens, by way of prologue, with two borrowed artifacts: the wooden Windsor chair in which Jefferson is believed to have written the Declaration, on loan from the American Philosophical Society, and a rusted metal prison bench, on loan from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, from which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.
In Jonathan Demme’s film “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne wore an oversized suit while performing “Girlfriend Is Better.”Photograph from Collection Christophel / Alamy
In subsequent years, the influence of Afrobeat—an expansive term for music that combines West African polyrhythms, particularly from Nigeria and Ghana, with elements of jazz and funk—became increasingly palpable in Byrne’s writing. In 2018, the Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo released a track-by-track remake of “Remain in Light,” Talking Heads’ fourth album, from 1980. When I interviewed her that year, Kidjo told me that she was drawn to the record in part because, when she heard the single “Once in a Lifetime” at a party, she presumed it was by African musicians. “That music brought me back home, without me understanding what the Talking Heads were about,” she said. Byrne said that he never worried too much about potential accusations of cultural appropriation. (Incidentally, “Remain in Light” preceded Paul Simon’s “Graceland” by six years.) “I didn’t think about it all that much, because we weren’t directly copying anything,” Byrne said. “There was an obvious influence, and I made that clear.” When “Remain in Light” was released, he provided critics with a short bibliography, including books on Haitian voodoo and African musical idioms. “People thought it was very pretentious at the time,” he recalled, laughing. “But it encouraged people to challenge us with those kinds of questions.”
One day, I asked Byrne if, when the band was starting out, he would have known what to say if someone had asked him what type of music he played—or, actually, if he knew how to answer that question now. He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t know how to answer it.”
In 1984, Talking Heads released “Stop Making Sense,” a concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie opens with Byrne walking onstage carrying an acoustic guitar and a boom box, which he places on the floor. He looks gaunt, almost haunted; his affect is erratic, chilly. “Hi,” he says flatly. “I’ve got a tape I want to play.”
Over a prerecorded beat, Byrne launches into “Psycho Killer.” In a review of the film in this magazine, Pauline Kael described Byrne as having a “withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality,” adding, “He’s an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modernist mode of scary, catatonic irony.” (To be clear, she loved the film, which she called “close to perfection.”) “Stop Making Sense” is extraordinary on its surface, but if you rewatch it enough you’ll start noticing spontaneous flashes of unmediated humanity that, collectively, do something nutritive for the soul—the moment, say, about four minutes into “Girlfriend Is Better,” when Byrne holds the microphone out to a gaffer clutching a light, who leans forward and very calmly says the words “Stop making sense,” or, about three minutes into “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” when the rhythm guitarist Alex Weir whips around to look at the keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Worrell, who is not in focus, does this glorious little snaky dance, a flawless expression of pleasure. For me, “Stop Making Sense”—possibly the entire nineteen-eighties—peaks with the band’s performance of “Burning Down the House.” By then, Byrne has been joined onstage by the rest of Talking Heads, as well as Weir, Worrell, the percussionist Steve Scales, and the vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt. At the start of the second verse, Scales turns to the camera and sticks out his tongue. “Strange but not a stranger / I’m an ordinary guy!” Byrne shouts. Watching it, I suddenly feel as though I could lift a small car. Demme lingers on Weir, who is clearly having the time of his life; there’s a moment, not long before the end of the song, when Byrne and Weir start dancing together, running in place, kicking their knees up, and then they exchange the sort of look—pure rapture, a kind of impeccable joy—that I’ve only ever seen on the faces of small children when a beloved parent returns home and throws open the front door.
Photograph by David LaChapelle for The New Yorker
For “Girlfriend Is Better,” Byrne puts on the enormous suit that makes his head appear tiny. Even now, forty-one years later, the look is striking. In a “self-interview” that accompanied the film, Byrne said that he liked the proportions of the suit because “music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head,” and that he liked the phrase “Stop making sense” because it’s “good advice.” There is, of course, a strong current of senselessness running through the film. During “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” the band’s most sparsely arranged song, and also its most tender, Byrne dances with a floor lamp. “That’s a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities,” Byrne once said of its lyrics. That might be true in some technical way. Or it’s possible that love itself doesn’t have any narrative qualities. Cumulatively, the language adds up to something:
When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case.” The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents’ sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. “It felt very adult,” Johnson told me recently. “Very creepy.” The story takes place at a grand country house where the guests have an unfortunate habit of dying, or nearly dying, under seemingly unrelated circumstances. A hunting accident. A poisoning. A bullet to the head.
The book was not only a dynamite mystery; it also represented a kind of magic trick. Although it was published at the end of Christie’s life, she wrote the manuscript in the middle of her career, in the nineteen-forties. Then, in a twist worthy of Poirot, she sealed it away in a bank vault for thirty years, insuring that it was kept secret. As her popularity waned, she suddenly produced—voilà!—a book written at the height of her powers. The novel was, Johnson said, “very mysterious and awesome, and very, very weird.” Soon, he was bingeing Christie novels two or three at a time. He once walked into a fire hydrant while reading one.
In Los Angeles, earlier this year, Johnson’s normally mild countenance grew animated as he recounted the plot of “Curtain.” “Do you want it spoiled?” he asked. “Do you really?” We were sitting in the sunlit offices of his production company, T-Street, surrounded by shelves filled with trinkets: a hollow Bible concealing a cigar, an engraved knife. On the wall was a print by the eighteenth-century artist Matthias Buchinger, who was born without hands or legs, from the collection of the late magician Ricky Jay. Johnson, who is short, with a salt-and-pepper beard, has a nerdy, understated demeanor. He was dressed casually, in the type of short-sleeved button-down you might wear to a family barbecue. He believes that people-pleasing leads well into directing. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake him for a particularly nice I.T. guy.
In 2019, Johnson tried his own hand at a murder mystery with the film “Knives Out.” Close-quartered and stylish, the movie begins at a Gothic New England mansion where the wealthy patriarch Harlan Thrombey has been found with his throat slit. Harlan has an avaricious family, each member of which has something to gain from his death. Like Christie’s novels, the film is a study of its time. The Thrombeys argue bitterly about politics, money, and immigration. (“Alt-right troll,” Harlan’s granddaughter says to her cousin. “Liberal snowflake,” he responds.) Like Christie, Johnson gave his mystery a detective with a high regard for his own intellect: the Southern gentleman Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. The film was a surprise hit with critics and audiences. The Guardian called it “deliciously entertaining.”
At fifty-one, Johnson is a Hollywood rarity: a writer-director with a singular vision, able to turn his oddball, idiosyncratic stories—written by hand, in moleskin notebooks—into blockbuster hits. He flits among genres, creating intricate, puzzle-like plots that reward multiple viewings. The success of “Knives Out” cemented Johnson’s status as an Agatha Christie for the Netflix age. Natasha Lyonne, who stars in his mystery TV series, “Poker Face,” told me, “His plots are all right there in his mind’s eye.” In the writers’ room, he will quietly flesh out inventive killings while others are discussing home renovations, then reveal them with a flourish. Craig said, of Johnson, “He’s always playing 4-D chess.”
Today (November 7) is a big day for Hayley Williams. Physical editions of Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, the Paramore leader’s third solo studio album, are out now, and they include two songs that were not initially released on digital streaming platforms. Williams shared one of them, “Good Ol’ Days,” online last month, and now she’s released the other. Check out “Showbiz,” produced by co-writer Daniel James, below.
In and out of the studio, I felt myself existing in a world bigger than my house in Brooklyn. I wrote in different libraries all over LA, trying to figure out what to say in these songs. Somehow, this time around, I felt safer out in the world than I did holed up in my nest. Like trying to be a good person while surrounded by new places and people was a more secure plan than trying to change all alone at home. I felt safe getting lost, driving with friends, driving alone. Stopping in random motels and going down wrong roads felt way less dangerous than the life of falling, flailing and sneaking around I had gotten so used to in New York. Out in the open, in the wild, on the road, there was nowhere for me to hide. Nothing to steal. Nothing to chase. It’s a proper antidote to self-inflicted isolation and sedation.
This music feels more real to me than anything I’ve made before. I’ve played more instruments in the past year making this record than I’ve played in the majority of my life. I’ve let my heart and my hands work freely. I wanted to live in LA alone. I lived in LA alone. I wanted people to trust me. I tried to be open and treat people with more sincerity. I learned how to drive. I drove. The sky expanded around me and reminded me that I was not, in fact, the center of the universe. Just a small part of it. Thank god.
This era of my life feels like freedom. There’s still some shrapnel on the ground from my chaotic years, but it doesn’t drag me down so much. I think I can hear this in the music. The songs I’ve made feel spacious, clear and confident. I feel their darkness, but also their buzzing energy to keep moving. The music is serious, but also bursting with joy. I talk more these days, I say yes to plans, fall in love with strangers and try to fix the things I break. I’ve been on a road, and I’m a confident driver (maybe to a fault). I’m not lonely, I’m alive and I’m laughing, and I feel my heart beat really fast, and it doesn’t scare me like it used to. I’m really here, and I’m trying not to hide or bail.
Bass: some speakers have it, and some don’t. It’s like charisma or generational wealth, except probably less important in determining your future. I’ve never personally found bass to be the most important metric for whether a wireless Bluetooth speaker is worth the money, but I’m fully aware that not everyone shares the same taste in bass as me, and even so, when it’s there in force, I can still appreciate it.
The problem is, especially when it comes to Bluetooth speakers of the portable variety, bringing the bass is harder than it sounds. There’s a reason why, in your home theater, the low end is usually incumbent on a big-ass subwoofer, which is a dedicated box kept separate from everything else. Bass is hard to generate without a large enough speaker that can move high volumes of air and generate proper low-end frequencies. It’s just physics. And as you might imagine, given what I just laid out, devising a portable speaker that can do that is no easy task.
It’s not easy, but it can be done, apparently, and the $500 Brane X portable Bluetooth speaker is living proof.
Brane X
The Brane X speaker has a huge amount of bass, but lacks in the app department.
The Brane X, though you may have never heard of it, is making a lofty claim. Brane claims this is the “first portable speaker with a true subwoofer built in.” If you’re like me, your alarm bells are probably going off; if it were possible, why hasn’t anyone done it before? That’s what I thought too, until I heard the Brane X for myself, or more specifically, felt how it shook the table I put it on.
The Brane X delivers on its promise, and it’s using some nifty engineering to do so. Inside this speaker, Brane says it’s using a proprietary tech called Repel-Attract Drivers (RAD), which uses magnets (however they work) to “cancel internal air pressure forces that inhibit deep bass in other portable speakers.” The result is a portable speaker that moves enough air to deliver real, woofer-level low end.
I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes again, but trust me, whatever is happening inside this speaker really works. To test the Brane X out, I connected my phone via Bluetooth and played a few different genres of music. To be honest, the speaker performed well on all of them, even genres where I don’t necessarily look for bass, like folk rock. In genres where you may want to hear more low end, like jazz, the Brane X literally shook Gizmodo’s coffee table, where I unceremoniously test lots of speakers. Again, bass isn’t the most important part of a Bluetooth speaker, in my opinion, but if it’s something you look for in a speaker, you are not going to have to try very hard to find it.
And if you somehow are still yearning for more bass, there’s a dedicated bass button on top of the speaker that lets you cycle through low, medium, and high levels. I tried all three and landed on medium as a good default since it highlighted the subwoofer without shaking my actual brain like the high setting does. The low setting, on the other hand, reins it in just a little too much, and then I feel like I’m getting just a little under what I know the speaker can do.
The best news, outside of a heavy amount of bass, is that it sounds good across the frequency spectrum, too. The Brane X feels fairly free of distortion at higher volumes, pushing 50% and above, and the soundstage (partially because of the subwoofer) registers as big and beefy. Listening to a remaster of The Replacements’ “Swingin’ Party,” I was really pleased with the ratio of vocals to music, and Magdalena Bay’s “2 Wheel Drive” really popped out of this speaker in a way I’ve not heard before, with bass blending perfectly with synths and airy, reverb-filled vocals. Seriously, if you’re often listening to electronic music, you’re going to love this thing.
Also, you’ll be happy to know that the Brane X supports hi-res formats, including SBC, AAC, aptX, and aptX HD, so you’re not always stuck streaming via regular Bluetooth, which compresses and degrades audio quality. It may seem wild to spend $500 on a portable Bluetooth speaker, and maybe it is, but in this case, at least the sound quality feels representative of the price.
How portable is it really?
You might be wondering how portable a speaker that crams a whole subwoofer inside could really be, and if you are wondering that, I don’t blame you. The answer? More portable than you might think, but also not nearly as portable as some others without a state-of-the-art woofer inside. Altogether, the Brane X weighs 7.7 pounds, which probably isn’t going to break any backs, but also ain’t nothin’ when it comes to the portable Bluetooth speaker label. For reference, the Bose SoundLink Plus, which at least makes an effort at tackling the Brane X in the bass department, weighs 3.37 pounds.
This isn’t a 1:1 comparison in a lot of ways since Bose’s SoundLink Plus isn’t using novel tech to cram a subwoofer inside, but it’s still worth noting given the fact that the SoundLink Plus does pack a pretty bassy punch. Let me just be clear here: if portability is a huge factor for you, this probably isn’t the speaker you’re looking for. If you’re okay with a bit of a hefty boy, then by all means, proceed. The good news, either way, is that Brane does a handle made from a flexible plastic that can be pushed down, out of sight, to wrap around the speaker when not in use.
On top of being heavy, the speaker is also a bit tall (about 6.1 inches high), but a fairly standard width at 9.3 inches. The design is round, kind of oval, and it looks like a little bread oven, which is neither offensive nor appealing to the eye for me. If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t necessarily want to carry the Brane X around in a backpack or a tote, but if you really wanted to transport it to a party or a friend’s house, you definitely could. In that way, it meets the definition of portable, but this is by no means the speaker that you’re going to want to bring on vacation or cart around in a backpack all day. In fact, I did actually carry the Brane X to and from work in a backpack and can attest to the heft.
The brains inside the Brane X
For $500, the Brane X should come with some nice-to-have features, and it does… on paper. One thing that might catch your attention if you have a smart home or use voice assistants regularly is that the speaker comes with Amazon’s Alexa built in. To activate Alexa on the speaker, you’ll need to download the Brane app and then link your Amazon account, and then you can use the speaker as you would any other smart speaker.
The good news is that, after messing around with the Brane X app for quite a while to get the speaker connected to Wi-Fi, it does work (pro tip: hold down the Bluetooth button on top of the speaker for a few seconds to activate the Wi-Fi pairing process). The problem is, the Alexa built-in feature on the Brane X is technically no longer supported, since Amazon has actually stopped adding any new third-party devices into the Alexa Built-In program, according to Brane. A spokesperson from Brane told me that the Brane X is grandfathered in, which means that the feature still technically works, but it’s not exactly ideal if you’re looking for feature longevity.
Another somewhat deflating realization is that, while you can use Alexa on the Brane X, you cannot sync Spotify if that happens to be your streaming service of choice, nor can you sync Apple Music. Instead, if you want to launch music on the speaker using the Alexa voice assistant, you’re relegated to Amazon Music, which is limiting. To make matters worse, a “Streaming” option inside the Brane app seems to suggest that you’re able to connect your preferred streaming service, but this, I’m told, is not the case due to “technical issues.”
As long as we’re talking about the app, it’s also worth noting that, while there are some features that you may want to use in this speaker’s companion app, like a 5-band EQ or adjusting the LED brightness, it’s pretty barebones overall. As far as companion apps go in personal audio products, the Brane X app is not the most functional (you can tell just from how barebones the UI looks), which may not matter for lots of people, but is a little deflating considering, again, this speaker costs $500.
The rest of the speaker works just fine. There is an array of touch-sensitive buttons on top for volume, bass adjustment, Bluetooth, turning the speaker mic on/off, and activating Alexa. Battery life is advertised as being 12 hours for moderate volumes, which feels accurate based on my testing. That’s not going to win any medals in the Bluetooth speaker Olympics, but it’s not horrible considering this thing has a subwoofer inside. On the back, there’s a physical power button, a 3.5mm aux in, and an AC power port for the included power adapter. Nothing mind-blowing here, and it all works just fine.
Spending $500 on a portable Bluetooth speaker is a big ask, so you’re probably wondering if a speaker like this could possibly be worth the price. The answer is… maybe, but only for the right person. That person, in my opinion, is someone who is really keyed in on bass in particular. If you’re left feeling like other Bluetooth speakers just aren’t giving you enough in the low-end department, the Brane X may be your holy grail. This speaker delivers on its promise of shoving a whole woofer inside a relatively portable form factor, and the rest of the sound (frequencies in the midrange and high range) also pulls its weight. Sound-wise, this speaker isn’t phoning it in, which is the main thing you want in a speaker.
The downside is that, if bass isn’t your number one priority, there are other Bluetooth speakers that have great sound, cost less, and blow the Brane X out of the water in terms of companion apps, looks, and portability (Bose’s SoundLink Plus, for example). So, for the right person (bass heads), the Brane X may be the smart choice, huge price tag be damned, but for everyone else, there’s just too much competition to really make it make sense. Don’t get me wrong, actually managing to shove a subwoofer inside a portable Bluetooth speaker is cool, but at the end of the day, you might be just as happy (and less poor) with something less cutting-edge.
Albarn wrote “The God of Lying” with Idles frontman Joe Talbot. He recorded it in London and Devon, England, and Mumbai, with bansuri player Ajay Prasanna and percussionist Viraj Acharya. In a statement, Gorillaz’s fictional frontman, 2D, said, “Can I tell you a secret? Doubt is very tiring but questioning things is really good for you.”
The Mountain is out March 20. The follow-up to 2023’s Cracker Island includes recent singles “The Happy Dictator” (featuring Sparks) and “The Manifesto” (featuring Trueno and the late D12 rapper Proof).
Cabin in the Sky is the first album from De La Soul since the 2023 death of David Jude Jolicoeur, the founding member who was also known as Trugoy, Dave, and Trugoy the Dove. It features contributions from producers DJ Premier, Super Dave, and Pete Rock, as well as guests Killer Mike, Little Dragon’s Yukimi, Common, Nas, and the Roots’ Black Thought.
“Cabin in the Sky lives in that space between loss and light,” Posdnuos said in a press release. “It’s about the pain we carry and the joy that somehow still finds us. This album is therapy and celebration at the same time. There’s a vulnerability in these songs, because everything we’ve been through has brought us to this moment, to this album, honoring what we’ve lost and lifting up what still remains. That duality. That’s life, and that’s De La.”
In an additional statement to Pitchfork, Posdnuos explained that he and Maseo started working on Cabin in the Sky in February 2025 after Mass Appeal’s Peter Bittenbender approached them about participating in the label’s “Legend Has It” campaign.
“We had some music, of course, with Dave’s voice on it, like ‘Good Health,’ that was produced by Supa Dave West,” Posdnuous said, “‘The Package,’ which was produced by Pete Rock, which was originally supposed to be a part of an idea for an album we had called Premium Soul on the Rocks that would have been exclusively produced by Pete and Premier. And then we had the song ‘Pattycake,’ which was produced by Jake One. That was just something we had did a while back.”
“So those are the tracks we chose to use,” he continued. “At first, with some of the tracks we did have with Dave’s voice on it, we thought to maybe have certain producers now make music to it, but then we just realized, you know what, let’s leave those tracks as is. With the energy that Dave had written to that track, let’s allow that marriage to still exist.”
Washington, D.C., post-hardcore quintet Shudder to Think have shared their first new music in nearly 30 years. Their comeback arrives in the shape of two new songs, “Thirst Walk” and “Playback,” which will get a vinyl release as a 7″ single on Dischord Records. Give those songs a listen below.
“The new songs are the first of a trove of new songs we’re working on together, all of which feel very much like Shudder to Think,” said lead vocalist Craig Wedren in a press statement. “To keep things playful and raw-ish, we have been doing almost everything ourselves in my backyard studio (Pink Ape Studios, Los Angeles) with some remote overdubbing from our various home studios. What you hear is us, together, hard at play!”
Shudder to Think’s most recent album, 50,000 B.C., came out in 1997. They followed it with a handful of original scores for the movies High Art, First Love, Last Rites, and Velvet Goldmine, as well as a live album.
Shudder to Think are in the midst of their first tour in 17 years, featuring the band’s same lineup as their Pony Express Record era, which was their fifth album and major label debut; Wedren is on lead vocals and guitar; Jherek Bischoff is on bass; Nathan Larson and Clint Walsh play guitar; and Adam Wade is on drums. There are four more shows left to go on this live run, including stops in Portland, Oregon; Seattle; San Francisco; and Los Angeles.
