The Auckland, New Zealand alternative rock duo Balu Brigada are back with their first new music since their breakout 2025 LP Portal, a washed-out, dreamy midtempo indie track titled “BedHead”. The track feels like a perfect middle ground between nostalgia-rooted 2010s summer-adjacent indie rock and modern alternative, keeping the genre fresh with interesting arrangements, chord progressions, and creative production, with the punchy drums, ethereal synths, and fuzzed-out guitars complementing each other in a fantastic way. “BedHead” shows that Portal wasn’t anywhere close to the end; it was just the starting line.
Consisting of brothers Henry and Pierre Beasley, the group is often described as “groove-pop” and is the duo’s first release since their acclaimed debut LP, which amassed over 300 million streams in a year. Their rise has been nothing short of meteoric and unprecedented, with support slots for Twenty One Pilots on their world arena tour and a #1 on the Alternative Airplay charts with their hit “So Cold”. If you haven’t already been listening to Balu Brigada, the second-best time to start is now; it is rare to see a group’s art have such an impact across different audiences as theirs does, and “BedHead” is evidence that their confidence in their distinct sound isn’t fading.
SEPTEMBER 25 – Columbia, MD – All Things Go † 27 – San Diego, CA – CRSSD Fest †
OCTOBER 1 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena * 2 – Portland, OR – Moda Center * 3 – Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Music Festival † 10 – Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Music Festival †
NOVEMBER 21 – Mexico City, MX – Corona Capital CDMX †
Through nearly two decades across multiple acts, there was one itch that frontman Aaron Bruno couldn’t quite scratch: going back to his hardcore roots. Starting his musical career in his teenage years in Los Angeles, Bruno dabbled in all subsects of heavy music before then shifting focus to other genres and getting his big break with a name every household will know: AWOLNATION. The success over the years was evident, but the desire to return to the sweaty hardcore clubs chock-full of people’s undivided attention and unrelenting energy always loomed. So when wind of Tinfed guitarists’ and seasoned studio producer Eric Stenman’s hardcore demos got to Bruno in 2024, The Barbarians of California emerged from the smoke.
With their debut LP, And Now I’m Just Gnashing My Teeth, being an instant statement in the hardcore community, as well as Bruno still finding his footing in the genre he hasn’t touched in decades, making the sophomore record a confident continuation of what had worked before made the most sense. With the lineup additionally consisting of lead guitarist Zach Irons, bassist David Amezcua, and drummer Linden Reed, they step into their new record MEGATONS with more fury, angst, and tongue-in-cheek humor than the last, showing that Barbarians isn’t a one-off; they’re in your face, they’re unapologetically loud, and they are here to stay.
Hit Parader caught up with Bruno to dig into the project, the new record, the upcoming tour, and the joy of going back to your hardcore roots. I don’t say this lightly; if you need some new heavy music in your life, MEGATONS is one of the best places to start.
Cred. Greg Flack
Hit Parader: What’s the most fun thing about being in the Barbarians of California for you?
Aaron Bruno: No one’s asked me that. That’s a great question. There’s so much about it that is fun that it’s insane. I can’t say I’ve had this much fun since I was 16. Musically, I think a lot of it has to do with the pressure being lifted off my shoulders and the weight being lifted off from AWOLNATION into this, because this is still a passion project that has just become serious, but the passion remains. I’m not doing it to feed my career, or start a career, or chase the dragon of success. I’m doing it because I truly love heavy music, and I feel like we’re very good at that, for people with ears to hear this heavy music. So it’s just so rewarding, and to answer your question in a long-winded way.
HP: It seems very rewarding.
AB: Since I was 16, I’ve been chasing the reaction that I’m getting now. From 16, I’m in a punk band, then a hardcore band, then a more rock band, and I don’t want to bore the readers here with my whole documentary story. But then a lot of failures, you mentioned Under the Influence of Giants before we started, Hometown Hero, and then, of course, AWOLNATION, and I hadn’t had any success until AWOLNATION. When that all took off, that was a surprise, and really a miracle, because it wasn’t supposed to, and it did. With that, with the audiences growing, the crowds becoming more intense, I brought a little bit of the hardcore spirit with me, because that’s where I came from.
But then you’re looking at some people in the front row who have never been to a concert in their life. I’ll be eyeing someone who is really drunk in the back, or a mother and a daughter, or a father and a daughter or son and family event, because they all became a bit of, not necessarily the band name is a household name, but certainly I have a couple songs that became household. Can I even say that? Household songs?
HP: I would say so, for sure.
AB: So doing stage dives and bringing that energy, sometimes it worked, but oftentimes I’m like, this is a little too aggressive for the people who are coming to the show. So cut all the way to now, it’s this camaraderie, it’s this understanding where I’m getting the reaction physically from the audience that I’ve been looking for my whole life. And probably the most insanely fun thing about this is that the gentlemen in the band are very, very good musicians, so I could sing a part, I could try to sing every part on the record, or I could just skip out and not, and it’s still entertaining enough because what they’re doing is so impressive.
So to answer your question, I would say the crowd reaction and the shows have been the funnest part of this, and I just feel like I’m playing with house money, because there’s nothing to lose at all. It’s all upside.
HP: That’s awesome. Hardcore shows tend to be very communal, so apart from the specific form of hardcore crowd interaction, what has been your favorite part of the live show compared to other projects?
AB: With this, it’s just a different kind of energy, and it’s not quite as heavy emotionally, I guess. And I think it’s well deserved as far as how intense the fifteen years of AWOLNATION has been, because it’s a lot of pressure, and I love it, and I’ll continue to do that as well. But with Barbarians, it’s kind of just a fun throwdown with a bunch of buddies, and what I’m saying is that at these shows, I can just walk right in, and it’s not a big deal. It’s kind of an understanding that we rarely have barriers.
We did that Deftones show, of course those were in arenas, so that was different because it was such a big event because of them, not because of us, and so we experienced barriers and separation there. But we just played the Roxy, no barrier. We played the Troubadour, no barrier. And this headlining run we’re about to do in fall, I doubt there will be any barriers. I don’t even need a dressing room with this project. I could just be hanging out and then just go play the show.
HP: That’s amazing.
AB: It really is, and I’ll address the hardcore scene too. It’s rooted in hardcore, but we obviously dabble in metal, so I guess it would be metalcore, but labels are insane, and everybody wants to label every different band something. I’m buddies with Brian Garris from Knocked Loose, and we love them, I think they’re the greatest out right now. We hit it off on this cruise we did. AWOL and Barbarians and Knocked Loose played this cruise, and I said, what would you call us? And he said, “Well, I guess it’s metalcore adjacent,” and he adds these comparisons.
But all that to be said, at our shows so far, and I’m still just getting to know the audience, you’ll have kids who are doing classic hardcore dances that have clearly been to a lot of hardcore shows, and people who just like heavy music, whether it be Sepultura, Slayer, and everything in between. So I feel very blessed that so far we’re not pigeonholed as one genre specifically.
Cred. Greg Flack
HP: That’s fair. You were talking about pressure specifically from the AWOL days, and having lived through that pressure following the breakout Megalithic Symphony LP, what experiences from then, going into the second record of AWOL, informed either choices, precautions, or just anything when you were approaching a sophomore album for The Barbarians of California?
AB: They’re so completely different, and even with AWOL, that second record, it was the first time I had followed up success, breakout, freakish success, so there was definitely a different kind of pressure. But I enjoyed that pressure because I knew I had the audience’s attention. So I think a lot of people were thinking, okay, well, what’s he going to do now? And I knew I had that sophomore follow-up, fun seat at the table where I could make a song like “Run” that ended up being, I think, arguably my second most known song, and I just knew I had that moment, so I took my time with it, and that was great. But that being said, I’d made so many albums from the age of 18 all the way into my 30s that it wasn’t really a sophomore album; it was like the seventh album I’d made in my career, just under the name AWOLNATION. So it’s a little different. But with Barbarians [of California], this kind of just feels like an extension of the first record.
Hopefully, hopefully there’s improvements and people find it to be a little better. But you know how this goes: when you discover a band, and you fall in love with their first record, it’s almost impossible to like their second one more. So hopefully it’s just that there’s something for everyone who likes the first record on this one, and until we get tired of doing it, and it isn’t fun, and we don’t seem like we’re on top of our game, it’s all one thing to me.
So to answer your question, there are no rules in this band. I can’t even believe we made a full first album, let alone doing a second one now. So it’s just kind of like this great gift that keeps giving.
HP: That’s all you could ask for. In what ways is the sophomore record an extension? Is it sonically a continuation, lyrically a continuation, or were there other spots where you tried to break habit from the first record, or is it literally just going straight from where you left off?
AB: I think we’re just picking up where we left off, and they always say you have your whole life to make your first record, and then six months for the second one, whatever, however that goes. And I’m contradicting my earlier AWOL journey story there, but in this case it still feels like Eric and I have had our whole lives to make all of these songs, because it’s sort of like, oh, what if we did that there? I’ve always wanted to do that, because with heavy music like this, a lot of it is dependent on the ability of the musician.
When we were all in high school bands, with hardcore, you could always tell when there were some bands that didn’t necessarily have the talent, but they had the passion and they had great ideas and great parts, but maybe not necessarily the technical ability to pull off the most extreme version of that. I was in a band where we were limited, I was limited as a singer, as a vocalist, as a thinker lyrically as well. But now I’m around so many great musicians, and I’ve become a producer, and Eric is a great engineer, so if we think of the idea, we can execute it, and that’s just a weapon that I never had before when making heavy music.
HP: So there are no bottlenecks anymore, so to speak; you guys are just ready to go.
AB: Yeah, it’s kind of like AWOLNATION kept boxing, I love boxing, grew up watching Mike Tyson, and heavyweight boxing was a big deal to me. So AWOL feels like classic boxing, and now Barbarians is MMA.
HP: I love that analogy. And you said that hardcore has always been a part of your life, it was where you started back in high school, and that you said in a previous interview that hardcore taught you not just the ethos, but how to start and operate a band, book shows, put flyers out, and overall just an introduction to DIY culture as a whole. With this more modern iteration of hardcore, what aspects of that culture and that ethos do you want to preserve through Barbarians of California?
AB: Well, it’s just so easy to reach people now, and I slugged it out with trying to get people to pay attention to my different bands growing up, whether, like you mentioned, it was flyering different high schools or going to other shows and handing out stuff and learning how to communicate with people, learning how to talk to the cute girl to try to get her to come to the show, or these guys that were wearing striped shirts, or whatever, and everybody else around. That was so difficult, but adventurous and fun, that now, you get to hide behind a phone. So you could kind of do whatever you want, you just have to have a good imagination, and it’s an exciting time in music, in my opinion.
A lot of people complain about social media and the old guard of tastemakers being gone and whatnot, and I realize there are influencers all over the place, but now you can release music, have it completely fail, and then only for someone to do a clever story with that song, only for it to have a second, third, and fourth life and blow up later. So the old guard of needing to be in Rolling Stone, or whichever hip magazine, or even website or blog, doesn’t matter anymore. You just put out music, and I’d like to think that if it’s good enough, enough people will talk about it, or it’ll catch attention. Of course some great songs slip through the cracks, and that’s definitely common as well. But I’d like to think that the karma of good songwriting is on the side of sincerity, and it’ll find its way. It may not be in your lifetime, but it could find its way, and that’s the hope I like to lean into, and optimism.
Back to the DIY question you actually asked, though, we’ve taken that approach. There were a few ways to go about this, or sit around and wait for the cool label or whatever, but you can kind of carve your own path. I do have the luxury of the success of AWOLNATION, but I will say I thought it’d be easier. When we first released “Dopamine Prophecy,” the first song, and then the first record, I thought, however many millions of people knew about AWOLNATION, or at least my songs, I just assumed at least half of them would join the dark side of the Barbarians of California, but it was not the case at all. In fact, it’s almost in reverse. A lot of people are discovering Barbarians, and then eventually going, holy shit, I had no idea it was that guy. And while that has been surprising to me, it’s a more rewarding way to build it brick by brick.
HP: I was reading some of the YouTube comments today, and a few were along the lines of, “Wow, I didn’t even know this guy was in AWOLNATION, this music is great,” which has got to be somewhat of a freeing feeling, to have a separate life outside of it.
AB: Totally. Well, we’ll play these shows, like we just did that tour with Converge and Poison the Well, and I’d walk on stage, and I know that no one knows what I do, or let’s say ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the audience has never seen me on stage before, or if they have, they don’t realize it’s me again. And it’s been so effing fun. It’s almost like a quarterback that had a really nice run, had a couple of Pro Bowl seasons, and then got traded to a new team, has a new uniform, and has a fresh beginning, that kind of thing. That’s a ridiculous analogy, but I think you get the point. So it’s just been so fun walking on stage and throwing down, because I feel like with AWOL, and you can see some of the stuff on YouTube from some of these major festivals we’ve done, I could tell that we were getting a little too ridiculous in the heavy zone, and losing the audience just a bit. But where I came from, it was hard to hide that or suppress that desire to scratch the itch of heaviness, or screaming, or laying into a heavy riff, or whatever.
So this feels almost more comfortable to me, and maybe that’s part of the appeal of AWOL, that there’s a tension and an awkwardness because it’s so vulnerable. Barbarians doesn’t feel vulnerable at all. It feels like I’m in a bar fight with a bunch of friends, hypothetically and lightheartedly, of course [laughs].
Cred. Greg Flack
HP: Fair enough [laughs]. When people describe Barbarians as a hardcore band, and you were discussing how pigeonholing is a very real thing with genres as a whole, you use a lot of electronic touches, the modern fashion sample, the outro to “Really Really Rad,” and then “Shark Out of Water” is just an acoustic track on the record. In your opinion, what thread ties all these tracks together, whether it just be the sound production or just how the music is very inherently Barbarians of California?
AB: I don’t really know yet. Maybe I failed at that, hopefully not.
HP: I would say that they all sound cohesive.
AB: Thank goodness, that’s great. Well, I don’t know, I loved the heavy records that push the limits, I guess I like all music that kind of spreads its wings a bit to cover other grounds. I personally can’t just listen to fifteen songs of full X-rated brutality, musically. Sometimes I want to take a breath, and hopefully this record provides that with some of the segues. Like you mentioned, “Shark Out of Water,” I love Metallica, I love the Black Album. A lot of people try to be purist and say the Black Album isn’t good, and I think it’s great. I also love Refused’s “The Shape of Punk to Come,” and I don’t mean to imply that I’m comparing Megatons to any of these great albums, but we have no, there are no rules with this thing. So as far out as we can go, I’m happy to do so. Sometimes I’m looking at a song, like at the end of “Really Really Rad,” you mentioned the disco part that comes in, and I just didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t really want to end the song there, so I thought, you know what, I have this thing in my head that we could do that’s kind of silly and fun, let’s just try it. And then I thought it was cool. If someone hates that, you could always just turn it and go to the next heavy part [laughs].
HP: [Laughs] Fair. You spent a lot of time being the sole mind behind projects, working with Eric and the rest of the band on these two projects. How has it felt to occupy a slightly different role, co-writing, co-producing inside of a project that you’re still fronting on stage?
AB: Well, there’s certainly a lot less pressure, so I think it frees me up to have even more ideas, whether it’s for a guitar riff or just a vocal cadence, and there’s a lot of help all around me. I’ve said this before, and I’m running the risk of sounding too confident, it’s really easy for us right now, and I bet there is going to come a point where it’s not, and it becomes more of a challenge, maybe if we get bigger or it becomes more of a business. Right now it’s not, we’re just trying not to lose a bunch of money, and so far we’re even, and it’s just a fun experience, but it’s pretty quick and easy.
If Eric has something that sparks an idea, I listen to it, and I know what I like and what I don’t pretty well at this point in my life. He may say something like, that ain’t happening, man, I’m off that, and then we move on to the next idea. But we have a little drawer full of ideas, whether it’s Zach, who’s a psychotically talented guitar player, and Eric’s more of a robotic engineer mind that has these vicious riffs that are a little more calculated, and even our drummer Lyndon has some nice riffs that, even though he’s a drummer, have sparked something.
So with AWOL it’s all on me, and with this it’s a team effort, and the help is greatly appreciated at this point in my life.
HP: Out of curiosity, you’ve discussed in past interviews about how you want the theme of positivity to be a through message of these projects. I understand that there’s a layer of silliness and sometimes satire throughout the lyricism, but if the listener had to draw one theme, or takeaway from the lyricism off of this record, what would you hope that to be?
AB: You’re catching me at the infancy stage of this thing, so I’m learning what this is as time goes on, in a lot of ways, and I don’t know. I’m just happy people like it. And heavy music is so intense already, and I’d like to think that we’re very heavy, so it feels most natural to sing or scream with a tinge of sarcasm.
Remember, most humor and sarcasm has a bit of truth in it, and again, at this point in my life, I’ve studied so many artists and so many writers, I think it was finally time for me to allow a little bit more playfulness and humor into these lyrics. It doesn’t always work with AWOL, I have to walk a fine line, it doesn’t feel right all the time. But with this stuff, it just feels, I can’t explain it, it feels so, if my voice is in a place, let’s say on a scale of one to ten, if it’s pinging on a ten as far as intensity and aggressiveness, it sometimes just feels overbearing for it also to be a very dark, intense, serious lyric.
Some people pull that off really well with their voice, I find that it just feels too, and I love sports, by the way, and I played a lot of sports, but it feels like jock vibes to me when I hit too dark of a lyric, screaming that hard. Again, some people pull it off really well, it just doesn’t work for my voice, something feels kind of cringe when I hear it back. So I’ve found a way, when I write these lyrics and sing these parts, I’m hoping that the rest of the guys laugh at least once, not like it’s slapstick, but I want it to be so insane and so ridiculous, kind of going all the way back to what I loved about hip-hop in the ’80s, and I was lucky enough to discover it before it became mainstream pop music.
A lot of these guys would just be bragging, and that was the thing they did. LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad” was a big song to me, Public Enemy, a big part of that was to have this bravado and make these ridiculous claims. So I’ve approached it with a bit of that sarcasm, and it’s kind of like, I’m just kidding, but if you love it, I’m serious. You know what I mean?
HP: I love that quote. “I’m just kidding, but if you love it, I’m serious.” That’s fun. If you had to, but if you had to choose a song that felt like a representation of the record, what would you say they were? Or alternatively, what’s the thing you’re most looking forward to for the rest of the year?
AB: Looking forward to the tour, looking forward to these festivals that we’re playing, and as we grow I’m seeing our name climb a little higher on the big flyer. Ever since I was a little kid, that was a thing, in the beginning your name is really small at the bottom, and then as things go and the word spreads, if you’re lucky, it becomes a little higher and higher and higher. So it’s nice to see that growth.
HP: You’re playing Louder [than Life], right?
AB: Yeah, so I’m seeing band names that were big influences and heroes of ours growing up, so that’s incredibly cool. But as far as the record goes, the first song, “Back to the Valley,” is probably my favorite song on the record, if I had to pick one, and the reason is, I’ve been chasing the finale riff of that song my whole life, and I feel like I finally did it. If the world were to erupt tomorrow, I could rest easy knowing that I delivered the one riff I’d been chasing my whole life. Now that I’ve done it, it’s time to rethink and chase another one down, but for the time being, I’m still riding this high, that I feel like one piece, yeah, and then I come in with the most insanely ridiculous line I could think of, and I was trying to channel a Muhammad Ali level of confidence, slash professional wrestling attitude, after the riff. So I don’t know if people take it as just too conceited or understand that it’s just for fun.
I attended the Olivia Dean concert in Minneapolis after managing to get tickets 20 minutes before the concert started. The first song that she sang was “The Art of Loving,” really setting the atmosphere for the rest of the concert. Before fully taking the stage, she started as a silhouette behind a curtain, which really excited the crowd.
Cred. Lola Mansell
I enjoyed the fact that she included personal stories about her life to help us understand her songs better. She even explained that her album The Art of Loving was written as a response to bell hooks’ book All About Love. I loved it when she sang “A Couple Minutes.” I thought that it was the best part of the concert as everyone was engaged. I also thought highlights of the concert were when she was playing guitar and when she sang songs from her past album, Messy, as well, not just The Art of Loving.
She was very engaged with the crowd and was talking to fans. She shared a story of how she went to Paisley Park the previous day and even did a tribute to Prince by covering “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” She also shared that she went to a Twins game and that she was very excited for this Minneapolis show, which she mentioned was her first time performing in Minneapolis. Additionally, her band was amazing, and she really shows appreciation to them and her backup singers as they performed solos during the song “Ladies Room.”
The show was the perfect running time because it wasn’t too long or too short, so you never felt like it was rushed or dragged on too long at any point. I loved the high energy and pacing. Towards the end, the energy shifted from being more intimate and warmer to more high-energy and upbeat. There were even disco balls and confetti, which turned it into a very danceable mood. During this part of the concert, she sang “Ok Love You Bye,” “Dive,” and “Man I Need.”
Cred. Lola Mansell
She also showed her appreciation for immigrants and told a story about her grandmother, and said that the next song she would play is about her. The songs “Echo” and “Time,” which she played from her previous album, were also played midway through the show. She had a very minimalist setup when singing “UFO,” “Touching Toes,” and “I’ve Seen It,” which she shared was about her best friends.
The performance was very warm and had a great atmosphere. I think it is the best concert I’ve ever been to, and she has already established herself as a must-see artist. The whole vibe was impeccable, as evidenced by the energy of the 90 percent female crowd.
Any form of introduction for John Carpenter is redundant at best; the horror/sci-fi master has made and scored a laundry list of works that any other filmmaker would be honored to have made on just one, and at age 78, doesn’t seem to have any signs of taking a break with his creative endeavors and innovations. After waking after a night’s rest, a dream Carpenter had just couldn’t shake his subconscious, and after time, led to arguably one of his most ambitious projects: a full-length graphic novel based on that dream, and a corresponding album meant to score the read. Enlisting the help of long-time musical collaborators and family, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies to help bring the musical vision to life, as well as Sandy King and Sean Sobczak to help bring the literature side to fruition, the result is one of Carpenter’s most interesting, adventurous, and visionary projects to date. Hit Parader got the honor to sit down with John, Cody, and Daniel to discuss everything Cathedral.
Hit Parader: So, just to start off, most bands walk into studios with demos and a rough direction on where they want to go with a project, but you guys started the record with a script and more of a storyline to start. How did day one actually look for you three going into the actual production of the record?
John Carpenter:Day one, well, I had a dream. I told him [points at Daniel Davies] the dream, he said that’s a great idea, and then we decided to score it. I don’t remember what the first piece was for music.
Cred. Courtesy of Storm King Comics
Cody Carpenter: I could be wrong, but I think we had early versions of some of the music.
Daniel Davies: A couple riffs, and we each bring in sketches, we call them sketches. They’re like rough ideas that we then build on. John will say, “Oh, we need something for this scene,” and go write a riff and kind of develop that way, and he paints a picture of what the scene is going to be, and then we just score it based on that.
HP: With the score and the graphic novel coming from that dream, out of curiosity, how long after you woke up from that dream did you start piecing that story together, or was that something that happened far down the road?
JC: Well, I tried to remember the dream, and first of all I thought maybe it was something I had eaten, because it was so, my God, it was elaborate. I usually don’t have dreams like that. But then I think a couple of days went by, and I kept thinking about, well, if I made a movie out of this, who would I star in it? And it went from there, and then I finally told Daniel, and we got on the road. So it was a while, that was like weeks, I guess, before we really started cooking.
HP: In that time that passed, did the story kind of stay intact, or did you find yourself filling in gaps with new ideas that weren’t originally from it?
JC: Well, I don’t know, I think it pretty much stayed intact. I think I invented a couple things on the way, but pretty close to it.
HP: What were the specific challenges or freedoms of scoring a story that you didn’t direct for a movie, but you did write the story of?
JC: They [referring to Daniel and Cody] did most of the work, so it was no challenge at all.
HP: There you go.
JC: Look, our process is really simple. We work from instinct, and we just come up with musical ideas that seek to fit the sequence, or the character, the sequence, the mood, whatever’s required. So we just make music; that’s the joy of all this.
HP: Did those characters within the story come from the dream, or was that something that was brought to life after the actual concept was put to paper?
Cred. Courtesy of Storm King Comics
JC: I have to admit something: the story was fleshed out, the characters were fleshed out by Sandy King and Sean Sobczak when they wrote the graphic novel. So they took my kind of an outline, the dream was an outline. It wasn’t full of characterization, it was this girl hero who was avenging her father’s death, and that’s about as far as I got with it. So others brought the thing to life.
HP: Who’s the scariest character in the book that everybody should be keeping an eye out for?
JC: Oh hell, the Dark Lord, the demon. Of course, the bad guy, the ultimate bad guy, he rules the underworld, and he’s coming after you.
HP: And you’ve worked on certain parts of other graphic novels, but this is your first full-length novel. What made this feel like the correct time for you to work on a project like this?
JC: The correct time, well, I’m 78 years old, how much time do I need? I mean, let’s do it now. We may work on more like this, we’ll see.
HP: And the graphic novel based on the dream has a corresponding score, which is arguably the band’s heaviest work to date. Daniel, you said that you didn’t intentionally make a heavy metal record, but it kind of evolved that way. At what point in the process of you guys scoring this did it become clear that Cathedral was tending towards a metal record?
DD: Oh, well, when you hear “abandoned cathedral,” when John described the story, the first thought I had was just thought of heavy guitars, big drums, making it sound like it’s in an abandoned cathedral, and feeling that, and choir, and just low heavy guitars; that’s just what was my first thought. And then a lot of the time John will just say “this needs a heavy riff”, and then I’ll make something, and it just happens to work. And then we need a battle sequence, it just kind of flows that way, and it just sounded good, so we kept going. But it’s not a predetermined thing, we’re just going with the flow of what takes us, and where the story is guiding it.
HP: And with the record supposed to be sequenced with the graphic novel, how intentional was the pacing throughout the novel and the music side as well?
JC: Well, when we’re making music, we make music. When we’re doing the writing in the graphic novel, that’s right; it’s not like a movie where you watch the images and then react to that. We didn’t have that going, we had ideas. For example, this giant creature comes up and bites her, and then we’ll score that. So it was different for us.
HP: And, Cody, you were described by John as the maestro of the group. What were your first thoughts when the record started trending towards the heavier realm? And since your solo work lives closer to the prog and fusion area, did the heavier direction feel like more of a stretch from your original work, or something that you’ve been wanting to explore more?
CC: You know, we all sort of like heavy metal music, so it just sort of felt natural for all of us, including myself. My dad’s a bass player, Daniel’s a guitar player, and I guess I’m the keyboard player, so that’s kind of the metal band right there. We just need Scott [Seiver] on drums.
JC: Yeah, we do.
CC: So it wasn’t too much of a stretch for any of us, it’s something that we love, and it just kind of came out that way.
JC: Plus, we have sections of the songs that go into keyboards, into very atmospheric parts, and we don’t do that, he does that.
CC: Well, we all do it.
DD: Yeah, and we all learn from rock and roll.
HP: Of course, and that ties in exactly to just story and hero arcs as a whole, because if you had an album that was pure metal the entire time, it wouldn’t follow the arc of the story as well.
JC: That’s correct.
DD: Scores are riff-driven, so it’s always there, just how you orchestrate it.
HP: Speaking of orchestration, I’d love to know a little bit more about the other musicians and the other studio time that went into the making of this record.
DD: Oh yeah, well, we had Scott Seaver, who plays in the live band, play on this record doing drums, and then we had a cello, viola, and violin on it, which we haven’t done on our other records.
Cred. Sophie Gransard
HP: But with this being admittedly your first heavier record, were you all consciously drawing from other sources of inspiration, musical or not, or was it purely based on what felt right when certain scenes were being described by John?
JC: My heavy metal inspiration is basically Metallica, I love Metallica. You familiar with that group, right?
HP: Of course.
JC: I’m kidding.
HP: One of the best.
CC: Yeah, although this album may be more heavy metal oriented, you can hear that style through a lot of my dad’s other stuff as well. Even though it’s not guitars and drums and stuff like that, you can feel that same emotion in some of his other stuff, and some of the other Lost Themes stuff that we’ve done together, so it’s not a complete departure from stuff that we’ve done in the past.
HP: An extension of sorts.
CC: Yeah, that’s perfect.
HP: Daniel, for you, with your background with the other projects that you’ve been a part of, like Year Long Disaster, Karma to Burn, did this record give you another outlet to fully express those other roots on Cathedral in a way that you haven’t been able to do in other Lost Themes records?
DD: Maybe, there’s not a thought really behind it, and nothing makes me feel better than loud guitar.
HP: It’s making good music, that’s what matters.
DD: What’s the feeling, and that’s always where we’re starting from. What is the scene, what is the feeling, how do we capture that? And maybe it’s slow and plodding, or it’s heavy and fast, and it’s just all based on instinct. And we have the opportunity to, you just start to see the images, and that’s just what it conjures up.
HP: With all of you guys playing different roles in the creation of the music, how does the division of personality actually play out in the creation of the music?
CC: I think we all trust each other, and we bring out the best in each other and play to our strengths.
JC: You understand, we’ve been together one way or the other for a long time, so there’s a lot of secondhand stuff going on here, and a lot of trust, an amazing amount of trust.
HP: You guys have been working together for so long, and known each other for so long, that I’m assuming it’s become second nature more than anything.
JC: That’s true.
HP: I’d love to know how long the project took once John brought it to you guys, and if there was a scene that was easiest and hardest to score?
DD: Doesn’t feel easy or hard, the whole project felt really inspired and exciting, and we would have an idea, and that would lead to another idea, and then we would get that together and just keep going. It wasn’t hard, it just flowed. It was just over the course of six months, maybe.
HP: Just to start to conclude, you guys have made films, scored them, and now built an entirely new world around what has come from a dream. At this point in your career, do you think Cathedral feels like a culmination of something, or just the start of something new?
JC: This is the start of something new, a brand new. I never thought of this before, what would scoring a graphic novel be? No one’s done that before, so we’re pioneers, so to speak.
DD: Except for the other guy [laughs].
JC: Exactly, exactly. We just love making music, man.
HP: At the end of the day, that’s all that matters, is just making art that you love.
JC: That’s correct.
HP: Amazing. Cathedral is one of the closest things to a new film of yours in years. Is there any dialogue or discussion on bringing the project to life out of the graphic novel sphere?
JC: Well, I am wide open to offers from the major studios. The thing is, Cathedral would be a somewhat expensive project to do, so it wouldn’t be like my other stuff. Most of my movies cost less to make, so. It would be a very grand project, and so far no one’s offered us a lot of money. A limo has not pulled up in front of my house, taking us to Hollywood yet. But we’re waiting for the limo.
Walking from my apartment in Hollywood to the Hollywood Palladium Friday night, the first sign of what I was walking into was the line already wrapped around Sunset Boulevard. We arrived at 5:50, ten minutes before doors, and were apparently late by Poppy-fan standards. People had been waiting for hours. Once the doors opened, they rushed inside to claim their spots against the barricade.
Poppy has always attracted an interesting audience. Before many listeners knew her primarily as a recording artist, her surreal, satirical YouTube presence introduced the Poppy character to a huge internet audience. Walking around the Palladium, I could still see traces of the alternative internet culture that grew up alongside her: black band T-shirts, fishnets, Converse, neon hair, heavy eyeliner and side parts. From where I stood, men and women seemed represented fairly evenly, while teenagers head-banged alongside millennials and older fans. At 24, I somehow found myself surrounded by elder emos, and occasionally feeling like one.
It was also my first time inside the Palladium, which looks remarkably like someone transformed an enormous retro roller rink into a concert venue. Chandeliers and a giant disco ball hang above an open standing floor wrapped by railings and balconies. By the beginning of the first set, that floor was already a sea of black shirts and nodding heads.
San Diego post-hardcore band Thousand Below opened under green lighting and sharp flashes of strobes, pairing melodic vocals with heavier bursts of screaming. Their sound landed somewhere between the pop-punk and emo I grew up with and the considerably heavier direction the rest of the night would take.
Then LANDMVRKS came out. I had never heard the French metalcore band before, and I will be listening to them again.
The Marseille group played with the kind of precision that makes heavy music feel athletic. Screams collided with melody, synths and rapid, almost rap-like vocal cadences before dropping into huge halftime breakdowns. At points, their sound reminded me of what might happen if Stromae crashed headfirst into System of a Down.
The entire band seemed in motion. Members traded positions and microphones, added their own screams and thrashed across the stage while vocalist Florent Salfati moved between screaming, melody and rhythmic delivery. When he told the floor to split during “Sulfur,” bodies cleared the center and crashed back together as crowd surfers moved overhead. By the end of their set, I had unexpectedly discovered both a band and a corner of French metal I hadn’t known I needed.
Cred. Ana Massard
Around 9:10, smoke swallowed the stage as Poppy’s musicians emerged wearing expressionless masks. Poppy appeared between them, corseted and draped in white and blue, with puffed sleeves and an almost storybook femininity. She looked somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and a porcelain doll in a horror movie.
Then she screamed.
Poppy can SCREAM. I knew that from her recordings, but hearing it fill the Palladium was different. Her vocals were strong throughout the night, moving from airy whispers and clear melodic singing into full force screams over heavily distorted guitars and pounding drums. After two opening acts already rooted in screamed vocals and breakdowns, Poppy didn’t sound like a pop artist experimenting with somebody else’s genre. She sounded completely at home in it.
The band behind her was heavy in the most physical sense. Layers of distorted guitar and bass filled the room while the drums seemed to hit you in the chest. Additional backing vocals thickened the sound, but Poppy’s voice stayed clear at its center. There was weight to the arrangements without losing the melodies underneath them.
Cred. Ana Massard
Poppy also spent a significant portion of the show playing guitar, switching between a metallic silver electric and a stark white acoustic. Watching her move between vocalist, guitarist and frontwoman made the musical evolution of Poppy much easier to understand in person. The character was still there, but the music itself was driving the show.
The “Constantly Nowhere Tour” comes behind her 2026 album Empty Hands, but the set moved through several stages of the heavier sound she has developed over the years. “Concrete” brought the strange sweetness and brutality of I Disagree into the room. “Scary Mask” arrived under psychedelic lighting before red strobes and underlighting turned the doll-like figure at center stage into something closer to the girl crawling out of the television in The Ring. “BLOODMONEY,” one of my personal highlights, had the room clapping along in unison.
The production kept changing the shape of the stage around her. Blue and white light disappeared into red strobes, smoke rolled across the musicians, and psychedelic patterns flashed behind Poppy. Ominous synth drones filled the spaces between songs before another distorted guitar cut through them. Poppy spoke surprisingly little during those transitions, but she didn’t need to. Any pause lasting more than a few seconds was swallowed by chants of “Poppy! Poppy!”
The audience clapped, screamed, head-banged and moshed throughout the set with remarkably little prompting. The middle of the Palladium stayed in motion while people only feet away could stand at the perimeter and simply watch. You could throw yourself into the pit or stay outside it without feeling disconnected from what was happening.
Some fans were apparently willing to endure more than others. Partway through the set, I watched a man cross a large stretch of the Palladium floor looking increasingly desperate. He passed the exit toward the bathrooms and instead made a beeline for the trash can directly beneath the railing where I was standing. After narrowly avoiding vomiting on everyone around him, he straightened himself out, announced, “I’m good,” and immediately ran back into the crowd.
Cred. Ana Massard
Apparently, even nausea wasn’t worth missing Poppy.
What impressed me almost as much as the constant audience response was how quickly Poppy could raise the temperature of a crowd that had already been moshing all night. Near the end of the set, after keeping her stage banter minimal for most of the performance, she finally addressed the floor directly and told them to split. The reaction was immediate. A crowd that had already spent the night colliding snapped back to attention, bodies clearing the center before surging together again with renewed force. When Poppy finally called for more energy, the whole floor seemed to switch on at once.
As an artist myself, the performance clarified what has always interested me about Poppy. Her earliest internet work used artificiality, exaggerated femininity, control and discomfort as part of the art itself. Her music now occupies a very different space from the world in which many people first discovered her but seeing her live made those versions of Poppy feel much less separate.
Her creative range has expanded without erasing what was underneath it. The femininity, horror and theatricality are still there; now they sit alongside strong live vocals, heavily distorted guitars, crushing drums and a performer completely comfortable screaming at the center of it all.
Cred. Ana Massard
By the end of the night, blue glitter and confetti were falling over a floor that had barely stopped moving for the last hour. She never played “I Disagree,” my favorite Poppy song, but I forgive her.
Walking home through Hollywood, I kept thinking about how easy it is to divide Poppy’s career into separate eras: internet personality, pop artist, alternative artist, metal artist. Seeing her live made those distinctions feel almost beside the point. Nothing about the performance felt like an artist trying to outrun an old version of herself. Instead, Poppy seems to keep finding new places to take the same creative instincts.
If you know Poppy primarily from one of those earlier eras, that might be the best reason to see her now. The “Constantly Nowhere Tour is heavy, strange and genuinely fun, with a live band that hits hard, vocals that are even better in the room and an audience willing to mosh for an hour, or apparently throw up in a trash can rather than miss a song.
After all the characters, genre shifts and transformations, maybe the simplest takeaway is also the most fitting.
Lollapalooza 2026 returned to Grant Park in Chicago this past weekend, and while it may be in the rearview mirrors for some, I am still processing the experience. It was my first year in attendance at the festival, and being from Los Angeles myself, I’ve heard bits and pieces about the music-driven extravaganza that takes place during the region’s most desirable months.
But if there was one thing I noticed on my own volition, it was that the people here are no ordinary festival people. Lollapalooza has carefully cultivated a community that extends beyond the park’s 319 acres and spills into the city streets, the after-shows, the glamorous pre- and post-parties, and even the outskirts—the “cornfields,” they say—reinforcing that a festival is not defined by its stages, but by the people who fill the space between them.
On Wednesday evening, I touched down at Chicago O’Hare, and I’m rushing off the plane because one of my best friends of 15 years, Amanda, has flown in from New York to meet me. We’ve always bonded over our shared love of music—as many do. We were together when we saw All Time Low for the first time at 14 (when she crowd-surfed for the first time), and Trey Songz at 16, when I got so high off a blunt, I bummed from two random French girls that I thought my stomach was going to explode. And here we are, together working in our respective music-related fields, meeting up to go to one of North America’s biggest music festivals. Best of all, we are staying with the third part of our trio, who lives just on the fringes of Chicago in Michigan City.
Lorde – Cred. Charles Reagan
The plan was simple: we would wake up, work and take the train to the festival in the evening. After, we’d check out the after-shows for our favorite artists and split a rideshare home. At least, that is how we planned it. Thursday night at Lollapalooza—from what I heard—was great. John Summit apparently crushed his hometown headlining debut, Lorde brought out Charli XCX for “Girl, So Confusing,” Sombr was joined by boy band-to-the-gods 5 Seconds of Summer, and the testy Midwestern weather withheld its sunny skies from afternoon until close.
We, unfortunately, were stuck to the seats of the South Shore Line, playing 20 questions because, may the odds be ever in our favor, the train completely broke down. “I’ve never seen this happen before,” the conductor said in earnest. No amount of begging would retract the steel doors, so we sat scanning minute-long snippets of the first day’s sets.
When we were finally released, after being paraded across hot train tracks, my friends and I arrived just in time for Finn Wolfhard’s after-show at Subterranean. Tall, lanky and with uninhibited confidence, the Stranger Things actor lit up the cozy venue with stellar stage presence and epic electric guitar skills—backed by a band that even included a violinist. The crowd was clued into his new album, Fire From The Hip, which was released a few weeks prior, but he was still sure to play all his hits from his barely year-long career as a professional musician. “If I don’t move and I can’t see/I choose the latter, choose the latter,” he belted in all its alt-rock glory.
It wasn’t until Friday night that we were boots-on-ground in the festival, and we were already off to a better start because A) our train didn’t break and B) we remembered to buy rain ponchos. As expected, the forecast called for a very wet evening, but first, we were able to catch a few minutes of Not for Radio’s ethereal set: a mossy, fairy-like garden land that frontwoman María Zardoya commanded with her airy vocals.
Nettspend – Cred. Nathan Zucker
Like any festival, you’re already on the move before the last lyric, and trekking across Grant Park is not for the weak. All the way at Tito’s Stage, my friend and I decided to indulge our curiosity at Nettspend’s set and were fascinated by the way that the rapper was able to captivate the shirtless throng by essentially mumbling into the microphone for 45 minutes. I attempted to push through the masses but was immediately deterred when fans started throwing drinks.
That was one of the only experiences during my first Lollapalooza I could even mark as unpleasant, and even so, as I pushed away from the stage, the many “excuse me’s” and “so sorry about that’s” that followed were a consistent reminder that this is not a typical festival we’re dealing with. Maybe my view of festivals is skewed by the influencer-ridden, frenzy-filled battlegrounds that the big leagues have become (Coachella, for one), but Lollapalooza has some of the friendliest people around, and it makes it nearly impossible to have a bad time.
While we were disappointed not to have been a part of the thousands gathered for Zara Larsson’s girl-powered set or catching Yungblud bringing a diehard fan onto stage, we did make it by the skin of our teeth to Charli XCX—and the whole experience was pure poetry. She looked razor-sharp in a trench coat as she strutted down the catwalk, but the real showstopper was in collaboration with Mother Nature herself. The stage fell silent, and the sky darkened when the forecasted rain finally began to pour. As the audience wrestled into their plasticky ponchos, “I think I’m gonna die in this house” blared from the speakers, and it was hauntingly beautiful.
What else was important about the festival was that every corner of Grant Park catered to a different crowd, and somehow they all fit together under the same festival umbrella. That included families, too. I cracked the joke to my friend a few times that we should drop her off at Kidzapalooza—yes, a designated stage where children can live out their dreams of being festival-goers—but there really were parents who felt secure enough to bring toddlers into the mix. I’m not sure I would after later seeing a video of a bag of urine being crowd-surfed out of the audience, but to each their own.
For me, Saturday’s biggest takeaway wasn’t a singular performance: it was how often the festival reminded us that thousands of strangers could still find ways to connect. Crater-sized puddles of muddy slosh encouraged respectful tiptoeing as strangers tried to avoid splashing one another, though plenty of people simply embraced the mess. Elsewhere in the park, a lesbian mud wrestling ring reportedly broke out—exactly as enthusiastic as you’d expect.
That same sense of togetherness carried over once the music started. We began with Geese, where Cameron Winter quickly won over a devoted crowd. “This song is about adversity,” he crooned, and with no further explanation. In the few songs I caught, it was enough to completely understand the hype around the band that’s been unfairly labeled an industry plant.
Olivia Dean – Cred. Greg Noire
We barely had to pivot to catch headliner Olivia Dean grace the nearby stage with all her British charm and jazzy ballads. She prefaced the next song she was about to perform, “Carmen,” a ballad she wrote in tribute to her immigrant grandmother—and really, for any immigrant out there. But the overarching message of the set, and quite frankly, the entire festival was this: “I don’t know how we’ve become so fearful of each other,” Dean preached. “We’re all just people.”
To which Lollapalooza is a refreshing reminder. Complete strangers were holding open porta-potty doors for each other, stopping in their tracks to take group photos, lending lighters, voluntarily scooting over so you could get a better view of the set you’ve waited months to see. It feels like nowhere else, let alone the loud, overstimulating metropolis that is a music festival, can bring this out of people anymore. But it did, and if I were an artist lucky enough to perform here, I’d certainly be feeling the love.
As our Saturday came to a close, we accomplished the impossible: seeing not two, but three acts, all scheduled at the same time. We sprinted through the sea of Olivia Dean fans to end up in a neon wonderland of sweaty dancing for Disco Lines and ultimately landed at JENNIE, who governed the stage with expertly in-sync backup dancers.
To cap off the night, because nothing ever just ends at Grant Park with Lollapalooza, we made our way across town to The Salt Shed. Here, 5 Seconds of Summer had drawn an incredulous block-wrapping line to see the recently resurrected boy band for themselves. The show wasn’t just the band’s pop-punk-fueled bangers like “She Looks So Perfect”; instead, the four-piece went a different route with a DJ set fusing popular songs with their own hits—and eventually throwing blow-up doll replicas of themselves into the crowd, because why not?
And somehow, the night wasn’t done surprising us yet. It came from an Uber driver who told me if I guessed which 70s artist was playing on the radio, he’d give us the ride for free. Spoiler: it was Stevie Wonder, I did get it right, and he really did cancel the ride so we wouldn’t have to pay. “I’m a man of my word,” he assured us.
INJI – Cred. Chad Wadsworth
By Sunday, the crowds were still going strong — rushing into the park as the rain finally cleared. We were particularly excited to catch banker-turned-party-girl-music maker INJI for her high-energy set in the heat of the day. Racing onto the stage in a pink toy car, she brought out all the theatrics and catchy lyrics that made her songs like “Bellydancing” and “Gaslight” go completely viral on TikTok.
Back-to-back on the T-Mobile Stage, we experienced MUNA’s infectious indie pop sound transitioning into Beabadoobee’s grungey lo-fi tracks, which were really one of the festival’s highs. And while we heard Tate McRae closed out her Sunday night set by dipping herself in gold, my posse had already crammed into the South Shore Line alongside the many glitter-tinged, slightly damp and heavily exhausted Lolla-goers ready to get the best sleep of our lives. We thought we were, too, until we missed our stop and ended up miles away in the cornfields of Indiana. But in a rare change of fate, a lovely woman and her daughter were willing to rescue us, no questions asked.
Others might not see Lollapalooza through the same rose-colored glasses as I did, but I personally think the air of this festival is different. It could be the drugs, or the disorientation that lowers your inhibitions, but I’d argue the magic beyond the music is that, for four days, friends reunite, artists truly connect with their fans and the whole city falls into a kind of symbiotic psychosis where, in an era that often feels increasingly self-focused, everyone genuinely wants each other to have a good time.
Nearly three decades into their career, Death Cab for Cutie took the stage on August 2 and 3 at the legendary Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The Greek hosted two nights for the “I Built You a Tower” tour, and I’m in for night two in section three.
Each stop on the tour so far seems to have a different “surprise” opening song, and tonight’s was a mini stripped-down version of “Full of Stars,” before they launched into the upbeat and cruise-worthy “Riptide” that properly kicked off the show with momentum. The minimal stage look had vertical LED panels that lit up behind the band and cycled through different shades of cool blues and vibrant reds throughout the show. While the visuals occasionally painted a city skyline, they also drifted between walls of fire and sad boy raindrops that complemented their sound quite well.
The band had an honest and humble respect for their catalog. They played a significant number of hits as the 24-song set mainly features the new album while tastefully dipping into Transatlanticism, Plans, and Narrow Stairs. Frontman Ben Gibbard’s presence is astounding. His signature vocal is a hot metal iron that is stamped forever into the indie rock genre. Upon hearing one note, you know for certain that it’s Death Cab or The Postal Service (Gibbard’s beloved side project). And it magically hasn’t changed in the slightest over two decades, countless albums, and massive world tours. Some of the songs he sang tonight are likely considered “ancient text” to him now, but he executed as the cuts came out yesterday, and it all still hurts.
There’s a signature purity in his voice that accompanies lyrics contemplating God and existence with words like “I wanna know the measure from Here to Forever…And I want to feel the pressure of God or whatever,”. And of course, the yearning. The Cuties have always managed to sound romantically devastated in a sophisticated and clever way that still lays their hearts out in the street with lyrics like, “And here I rest where disappointment and regret collide, lying awake at night.”
Gibbard moved swimmingly through the set, alternating between a pair of Fender electrics, what appeared to be a Jazzmaster or maybe a Mustang, and a Telecaster before stepping behind the keys for a few of the new album’s leading tracks. For one song, he even performed with no instruments, “Trap Door,” just mic in hand, owning the stage in his traditional lead singer role.
As for the crowd – I’ve been strongly disagreeing with the live Reddit threads. The audience was a mix of elder millennials and baby Gen X who were definitely fangirling as much as an indie rock crowd can. By no measure was the crowd boring or unenthused. The fans were respectful, adoring and appropriate. Maybe you guys were moshing to “Title and Registration” back in 05, but I was busy typing their lyrics into my MySpace bulletins and hoping someone would ask if I was okay. From where I was sitting (not standing), I had a clear view of GA, where I saw maybe two or three people jumping up and down with their hands up, which seemed welcome from what I could observe. Personally, I found it refreshing to be in a crowd that knew when to sing along and when to just listen. It left room for Gibbard’s voice to shine without competing with thousands of fans trying to match every lyric. There’s certainly a time and place for both kinds of experiences.
It wasn’t until “Black Sun,” where the band takes the liberty of an a cappella final chorus, with “How could something so fair, be so cruel, when this black sun revolved, around you,” that we hear this modest whisper-like sing-along from the crowd. It didn’t stem from unfamiliarity with the material, but rather from the die-hard crowd’s adoration and genuine respect for the band. The crowd was as crooked as teeth, with a mix of fans standing and sitting throughout the show. I myself was a little too shy to stand with my section split between the two (but was absolutely moved by the music to stand and sway if I had the courage to).
Another highlight of the show was during “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive,” with the lyrics, “You wanna teach, but you can’t be taught / I wanna sell, but not be bought,” that hit even harder in the current landscape of 2026.
There’s an underlying and somewhat mythical fear in the indie rock world when it comes to the concept of “selling out.” To Girlsplain that, it’s when new and emerging groups hit a level of success where they could potentially make a dire decision to compromise on their signature sound in order to appeal to the masses. And sure, there’s a universe where the band could have done something incredibly blasphemous and featured radio divas on lead singles and went full “Death Cab For Capital One” or something, but that’s simply not the case for the Cuties. Outside of collaborating with indie hit producer Rich Costey in 2014, following Chris Walla’s departure from the group, a collaboration that resulted in one of the band’s more significant creative shifts with Kintsugi, the group stayed true to their sound while reading the room on their fanbase and still continues to evolve on their own terms.
A melody of spotlights gathered to center stage for a well-placed acoustic performance of “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” between some of the leading tracks from their new album. The whole crowd sang along again at an appropriate non-performative volume that was truly music to my ears. That moment most certainly brought me back to my iPod Shuffle days of staring out the window of my family car on the way to school, missing someone who won’t exist for another couple of decades.
The set finished strong with “Here to Forever” and “Soul Meets Body.” Both had the crowd swaying and swooning. They returned to the stage for a very understood and expected four-song encore, which the entire crowd stood for. The grand finale was “Transatlanticism,” the title track from their most notable album. Outside of a few remarks about the heat wave in recent stops for the tour, Gibbard kept his live banter short, sweet, and gracious. Echoes of the final reprise “I need you so much closer” were under everyone’s breath on the walk out of the show, at least for me.
The Latin takeover at Hard Summer 2026 wasn’t coming; it had already arrived. As a first-time attendee, emerging Latin artist and lover of music, I watched multiple Latin artists command the stage with confidence, proving the festival’s sound is evolving in real time. Their performances reflected something much bigger than individual sets: the rise of genre-blending music, a new era of bilingual representation, and a festival culture and integration that increasingly embrace Latin artists as main-stage forces rather than special additions.
Tokischa – Cred. Jordan Sabillo
If 2026 has shown us anything, it’s that Latin artists aren’t a side note on the biggest stages. They’re central to them. As a fiery Latina, it feels impossible not to notice the movement. Everywhere I look, we’re no longer asking for a seat at the table; we’re helping build it. It feels like 2026 has been one milestone after another. Bad Bunny kicked off the year by taking home the Grammy’s Album of the Year, followed by his history-making Super Bowl halftime performance. Then came Karol G taking over Coachella’s main stage on Sunday night, proving Latin artists belong at the center of the biggest festivals in the world. And now, watching Kali Uchis headline Hard Summer, alongside Tokischa’s boundary-pushing daytime set, I couldn’t help but see it as another chapter in the same story. These aren’t one-off single victory moments anymore; they’re part of a larger cultural shift that’s redefining what the future of mainstream music looks and sounds like. To me, this isn’t just representation; it’s Latin excellence on the world’s biggest stages and festivals.
Growing up in Long Island, New York, I experienced festivals like Governors Ball in the heart of New York City before venturing to Boston Calling in Massachusetts during my college years. After moving to Los Angeles in 2020, I attended Southern California’s festival scene, like Coachella. Especially coming from a musical and artistic background myself, I’ve always been fascinated by the multitude of worlds that music festivals create. Like any festival, Hard Summer had its own energy, but what stood out to me most wasn’t the atmosphere, it was the music. The festival was easy to navigate, which made it simple to catch multiple sets throughout the day. Set in the heart of Los Angeles, the city’s cultural mix was reflected in the lineup and audience, making the performances feel even more impactful. As both an artist and a fan, they’ve always represented more than just live performances, they’re places where culture, creativity and community collide. And if I’m being honest, standing in those crowds this past weekend, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like to one day perform on a stage that size, sharing my own music with thousands of people.
Cred. Jake West
Being a fiery Latin New Yorker Latina moving between English and Spanish, between American pop, R&B, hip-hop and the Latin music that underscored family life, it taught me to live in both at once. A decade or two ago, those worlds felt more separate. Selena Quintanilla envisioned a future where they weren’t, working to bridge cultures and speak to more than one audience. Artists like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, and others kept opening doors. What struck me at Hard Summer was how easy it felt. Not a niche, not a trend, just normal. Artists bring every part of themselves and are met exactly where they are. For me, being there as an audience member and as an emerging bilingual artist, that was iconic.
For me, this story is personal. I’m a first-generation Costa Rican-American, coming from immigrant parents, raised in Long Island, New York, and now based in Los Angeles as an independent singer-songwriter, producer, and journalist. My music reflects the same duality I’ve lived my entire life, blending American pop and R&B with Latin pop, Latin R&B, Afrobeat, house, and reggaetón. I’ve never been interested in fitting neatly into one genre. Instead, I’m drawn to pushing boundaries, writing unapologetically honest lyrics, and creating records that move between cultures as naturally as I do. My artistry is built around bold colors, striking visuals, statement fashion, and a fearless sense of self-expression that celebrates femininity, sensuality, and confidence. Every song, photoshoot, visualizer, performance, and creative decision is intentionally curated to tell one cohesive story – The Kelly Vargas story. As an independent artist, I’ve learned to wear every hat, creative director, strategist, manager, marketer, and performer, building my career from the ground up while staying true to my vision. That’s why walking through Hard Summer this year felt so fun. I wasn’t just watching a festival evolve; I was watching the kind of genre-defying, bilingual artistry I’ve always believed can take center stage. So, consider this my love letter to Latin America, the artists, the culture, and the community that continue to redefine the sound of global music.
Madison Square Garden was locked and loaded this past Saturday, August 1st, ready for RUSH! This was the third show of the sold-out, four-show residency at MSG, part of their “50 Something” tour. As fans piled in, you could feel the energy and excitement fill the arena. You felt this the most as the entire venue started cheering at exactly 7:30, when the show was scheduled to start. As the lights dropped, the show began with a short film with a storyline of three fans trying to find Rush in a haunted house. Well, Rush was found, and as the film finished, they went right into “Xanadu” to open the set. Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee set the tone for the evening with a grand entry as they each sported their double-neck guitar and bass. As I looked out into the crowd, almost every person on the floor was air drumming along to the song. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but as a drummer and a massive fan of the late Neil Peart, nothing could have made me happier. It’s beautiful to witness how much of an impact his drumming has had on so many people.
Cred. @emilioherce
Anika Niles, the woman of the hour, was on point! Every fill and groove was executed with so much precision and power for the entire three-hour-long set. Geddy and Alex made the right decision by bringing her onboard. To take on Neil’s drum parts is no easy task. He is looked at by many to be one of the greatest drummers ever, but Anika honored him sufficiently. She has all my respect and admiration. One highlight from the show has to be how loud the crowd roared after Anika absolutely nailed the iconic ’Tom Sawyer’ drum fills. It shows that Rush fans have truly embraced her, as they should. No one will ever replace Neil, but thanks to her taking on this role, fans are able to experience Rush live again. Throughout the show, you could see Anika and Geddy exchange smiles and smirks, giving off a lighthearted vibe. It truly seemed like the band was so happy to be there. From the audience’s perspective, seeing the way the band interacted with each other, it almost felt like you were just sitting in on them having a jam session. This energy is infectious and inspiring. Rush also added another new member for this tour. Taking care of keys as well as backing vocals was Loren Gold.
What made this show even more special was that on this exact day 11 years ago, Neil Peart played his last show with Rush. They paid tribute to Neil at multiple points during the set. The band first played “Bravado” to honor “the Professor,” along with playing recordings of him talking about how important music and drumming were to him and how it became his identity. Later in the set, they jammed out “Time Stand Still” also in his honor. Before this particular tribute, they played other recordings of Neil explaining his style of playing and his thought process while drumming, which I found to be really insightful. Neil described himself as someone who liked to be well planned but also enjoyed spontaneity by comparing his style to “a well-packed suitcase with an undecided destination.” Saying, you can be prepared and have everything you need for wherever you may end. I really enjoyed hearing his insight on this and found his analogy to be in total alignment with his musical expression.
Cred. @emilioherce
On this night, Rush performed two sets. The first set consisted of their hits “Anthem,” “Subdivisions,” “The Spirit of Radio,” etc. In the second set, they played their 1981 album, Moving Pictures, in its entirety. This is one of my favorite Rush records, so I was extremely grateful I was able to experience this particular show. Hearing these songs live, just like the way I listen to them at home, was a thrill. I have never been to a show where the band played an album in its entirety, so it was definitely a new and unique experience. The band finished off night three at MSG with an encore of “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” and “Working Man.” This served as such a great wrap to the night; they got the crowd amped up one last time before taking a bow and leaving the stage.
This was a show of a lifetime, and if you go to any shows this year, this absolutely has to be one of them. It was a night full of energy and passion from both the band and the audience. It’s incredible seeing Rush still making history 50-something years later.
In Hit Parader Issue #8, Taylor Momsen opens up like never before. On the cover, the Pretty Reckless frontwoman reflects on Dear God, the most personal album of her career, revealing why she sees herself as a songwriter before a singer, how grief and life experiences shaped the record, and why she’s no longer interested in… Read more →
Metallica’s fifth studio album, Metallica, turns 35 years old today. The self-titled record was released on August 12, 1991, and has become one of the most recognizable and loved albums of all time. Filled with many of Metallica’s most well-known songs, including “Enter Sandman” and “Nothing Else Matters,” this record has stood the test of time. We’ll celebrate this historic album today by revisiting the Hit Parader interview with Lars Ulrich during the release cycle for The Black Album.
Metallica – All Guns Blazing
By Mike Gitter
Portrait of Metallica. ‘‘Let’s put it this way,” Lars Ulrich, the man never at a loss for words, starts in. “Y’know, when you start a project, and the tunnel is way long and it’s blacker than night at the other side… well, now it’s less black.”
Ensconced in a Southern California recording studio since October, Metallica’s loquacious skinsman is getting a bit antsy to see the San Franciscan power metal quartet finish up work on the long awaited, still-untitled Metalli-album number five.
It does get really tedious,’’ Lars admits of the meticulous rhythm tracking that’s been the bane of the band’s existence for months now, “but I guess no one gets as messed up about these things as we do. When we make a record, we’re notorious for spending a hella long time making it solid; building the foundations, the drums, the basic rhythm guitars. Just over the past three weeks, things have started to pick up. James (Hetfield) has started to put a lot of the guitars on the record that really color it up with melodies and harmonies. He’s finally finished some of the basic vocals, too. We’ve just gotten to the stage where the songs start to speak for themselves—it’s like one huge second wind.”
Ulrich is eager to chatter away concerning the latest Metalli-doings. He still speaks in the same intense tones, the same undeniable enthusiasm he did in younger, hungrier days. To him, the band is still an all-consuming passion, an obsession from which even the distractions of nearby Hollywood can’t deter him.
“You know what’s weird about recording in Los Angeles instead of Denmark?” the Danish-born drummer poses. ‘‘It’s been a lot more intense than anything we’ve done in the past.” For the first time in nearly six years, the Metallidudes have eschewed their time-honored tradition of recording in snowy Copenhagen with producer Flemming Rasmussen. They’ve opted instead for Los Angeles’ sunnier climes and a fresh approach to knob-twiddling from Motley Crue/Bon Jovi/Cult producer Bob Rock. Still, you aren’t likely to see them hangin’ at the Rainbow, the Whiskey, the usual Hollywood watering holes. “Sure, you’ve got to allow yourself the freedom to go out drinking . . . and the misery of coming in the next morning with a hangover!,” Ulrich laughs. ‘‘We’re putting in six-day weeks with 12- to 14-hour days! It’s weird, but there are a lot fewer distractions this time around, a lot less screwing around or clocking out at six while we’re in the middle of something. This is perhaps the most concentrated and hardest we’ve ever worked.
‘‘Y’know, I don’t even consider it real work.” When asked how the band and producer Rock have been getting along, Lars grins.
“Well, we’re no longer telling him ‘No,’ the minute he brings up a new idea—Ha! That was the joke we had with him. Only now, since we’re finishing up with the vocals, an area that’s really his specialty, ideas are really starting to come to the fore. One of the most important things he did from the beginning was basically making us feel comfortable and confident with what we were doing—not spewing a bunch of shit at us about how we were going to do it his way.”
“We’re the kind of band that has never experienced working with someone like Bob before,” Ulrich continues. “Flemming had a great ear for technical stuff, running the board, the tape machines, but Flemming would never do anything like tell me to put some cymbals in for dynamics. Bob is great like that, and everything he does, he does as a suggestion. So what if he’s done this thing with Bon Jovi, that thing with Motley Crue, the other thing with Loverboy? He’s very clued into what this band’s about. He has a lot of respect for this band. We’re very stubborn, I’ll be the first to admit that. We don’t easily trust anyone but ourselves, but Bob has enough of an understanding of our vibe to let him in. He’s won our trust.”
Lars rattles off a litany of new Metalli-tunes: “‘Wherever I May Roam’, ‘My Friend of Misery’, ‘The God That Failed’, ‘Of Wolves and Men’, ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Sad But True’, ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, ‘The Unforgiven’, ‘Through the Never’, and ‘The Struggle Within’. There’s no great all-encompassing theme to the record,’’ Ulrich mentions. “The last record was very politically oriented. Master of Puppets was very concerned with themes of manipulation. That isn’t the case this time around. This record’s a lot more personal, much in the same vein as Ride the Lightning dealing with fears, thoughts and emotions.”
What’s the best way of describing it? “Simplistic,’’ Ulrich smiles. ‘‘Here’s a guitar riff, a verse, a chorus and that’s it. Just like, let’s say, Kill ‘Em All, where it’s one mighty guitar riff after another without 25 middle parts and lots of excess screwing around. It’s still rough around the edges in a very cool way and it’s still packed to the gills with attitude. It bleeds ‘tude.”
Can we expect a mellowed-out, more commercially acceptable Metallica than last heard on their double platinum . . . And Justice For All opus?
Lars gets pissed.
“Look, I’m not going to try to defend it. The bottom line is that this is the only thing that still felt like a challenge to us. It’s really a challenge to write a song that doesn’t have fourteen tempo changes in the middle because that’s what we’ve spent the past three albums trying to do. It’s almost weird for us writing a song that goes straight from the second chorus into the guitar solo. If that means it’s more accessible, I’m sorry. Sure, if ‘more accessible’ means not going into Emerson, Lake & Palmer Revisited in the middle of a song, I guess it is ‘more accessible.’ I don’t think having shorter songs necessarily means we’ve sold out. Look, I stopped trying to defend this band the day we formed nine years ago.
“This album feels right,” the drummer insists. “It’s the sharp turn that needed to be taken in order for us to be excited about Metallica album number five—that would have really been selling both our fans and ourselves short.
