In 2006, the founders of The Do LaB collective (brothers Jesse, Josh and Dede Flemming) pitched an art installation project to the team at Coachella. After getting the go ahead with barely a week to prepare, The Do LaB community pulled the installation together, but also made sure to bring their decks and sound system. After the festival shut down each night, The Do LaB would turn into a renegade dance party, going till dawn.
Fast forward to today, The Do LaB has carved out its own oasis on the Coachella map. It not only features genre-spanning dance music line-ups like no other, but you’ll also find surprise sets from the likes of RÜFÜS DU SOL, Skrillex, Anderson.Paak… even Billie Eilish. And the other star of the show is The Do LaB’s back stage area, where you’ll find plenty of shade, cold drinks and a chill zone that’s less concerned with celebrity and more about hangs and community.
This segment of Snapped goes out to the artists who made The Do LaB so special this year, elevating their game to keep everyone dancing nonstop through the day and night. In order of appearance below, here are just a few of the many standouts: AQUTIE, Blue DeTiger, Bob Moses, Confidence Man, Flavor Flav (collab with Blue), Henri Bergmann, Kaleena Zanders, Layla Benitez, Levity, Nooriyah, Trixie Mattel and Uncle Waffles.
All images courtesy of Jess Gallo, Makayla Howard and Jamal Eid.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Just over two years ago, we came across a deranged, AI-generated video of famed actor Will Smith indulging in a bowl of spaghetti.
The clip, which went viral at the time, was the stuff of nightmares, with the AI model morphing Smith’s facial features in obscene ways, clearly unable to determine where his body ended and a forkful of sauce-laden pasta began.
But the technology has improved dramatically since then. In a revised clip shared by AI content creator Javi Lopez, a far more recognizable Smith can be seen indulging in a tasty-looking plate of noodles.
Unfortunately, the clip — which was rendered using Google DeepMind’s just-debuted Veo 3 video generation model — includes AI-generated sound as well, exposing us to a horrid soundtrack of squelching and masticating, the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for those suffering from misophonia.
Nonetheless, it’s an impressive tech demo, highlighting how models like Veo 3 are getting eerily close to being able to generate photorealistic video — including believable sound and dialogue.
Just got access to Veo 3 and the first thing I did was try the Will Smith spaghetti test. SOUND ON pic.twitter.com/y0CiZwNxgM
Google unveiled its “state-of-the-art” Veo 3 model earlier this week at its Google I/O 2025 developer conference.
“For the first time, we’re emerging from the silent era of video generation,” said DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis during the event.
Beyond generating photorealistic footage, the feature allows users to “suggest dialogue with a description of how you want it to sound,” according to Hassabis.
A video sequence opening Google’s I/O, which was generated with the tool, shows zoo animals taking over a Wild West town.
Getting access to the model doesn’t come cheap, with the feature currently locked behind Google’s $249.99-per-month AI Ultra plan.
Sample videos circulating on social media are strikingly difficult to differentiate from real life. And the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good or a bad thing. Critics have long rung the alarm bells over tools like Veo 3 putting human video editors out of a job or facilitating a flood of disinformation and propaganda on the internet.
OpenAI’s former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, has long been preparing for artificial general intelligence (AGI), an ill-defined industry term for the point at which human intellect is outpaced by algorithms — and he’s got some wild plans for when that day may come.
According to a researcher who heard the since-resigned company cofounder wax prolific about it during a summer 2023 meeting, an apocalyptic scenario seemed to be a foregone conclusion to Sutskever.
“Once we all get into the bunker…” the chief scientist began.
“I’m sorry,” the researcher interrupted, “the bunker?”
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever said, matter-of-factly. “Of course, it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker.”
As theatrical as that exchange sounds, two other people present for the exchange confirmed that OpenAI’s resident AGI soothsayer — who, notably, claimed months before ChatGPT’s 2022 release that he believes some AI models are “slightly conscious” — did indeed mention a bunker.
“There is a group of people — Ilya being one of them — who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture,” the first researcher told Hao. “Literally, a rapture.”
As others who spoke to the author for her forthcoming book “Empire of AI” noted, Sutskever’s AGI obsession had taken on a novel tenor by summer 2023. Aside from his interest in building AGI, he had also become concerned about the way OpenAI was handling the technology it was gestating.
That concern ultimately led the mad scientist, alongside several other members of the company’s board, to oust CEO Sam Altman a few months later, and ultimately to his own departure.
Though Sutskever led the coup, his resolve, according to sources that The Atlantic spoke to, began to crack once he realized OpenAI’s rank-and-file were falling in line behind Altman. He eventually rescinded his opinion that the CEO was not fit to lead in what seems to have been an effort to save his skin — an effort that, in the end, turned out to be fruitless.
Interestingly, Hao also learned that people inside OpenAI had a nickname for the failed coup d’etat: “The Blip.”
Ron and Russell Mael smile indulgently at me like affectionate uncles. “The Sparks Brothers”—as filmmaker Edgar Wright dubbed them in his 2021 documentary—find my flustered, haphazard interview style amusing. I’m usually detached, in control. But on this video call, I feel like I’ve entered both Ron’s and Russell’s homes—and I’m giddy.
Excited and nervous, I stumble through unrelated questions, then apologize for how random I’m being. When I say I’ll try to normalize, they insist, “Please don’t!”
Their impact—what I’m calling “The Sparks Effect”—is a common one. In 54 years of releasing music—their latest album, MAD! (out May 23), is their 28th—Sparks have shaped generations. You don’t just like Sparks, you worship them. One fan recently told me, “If AI could somehow download their brains so Sparks could keep going on and on, that would be amazing. They deserve to live forever.” Had they faced the brothers like I have, they might also be losing it, at least a little.
The cover of Sparks’ new album MAD!
Sparks defy the cliché of dueling brothers in a band. They complement each other—sharp and sly, as their lyrics suggest. Their irreverent song topics turn everyday oddities into sticky earworms. On MAD! alone, there’s an ode to one of L.A.’s most congested freeways, “I-405 Rules,” and another to the humble “JanSport Backpack”—perhaps the least inspired but most durable of bags.
Ron (79) sits in what looks like a dusty museum, eyes shining behind his trademark round glasses. I imagine it as the physical manifestation of his mind. In his home, Russell (76) peers through large tortoiseshell frames, an Elvis figurine and kitschy knick-knacks behind him. I’ve seen these faces across decades and countless brilliant songs. In 2006, when they popped up on Gilmore Girls—same episode as Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Joe Pernice—with Russell flexing and Ron deadpanning at his keyboard, I thought my brain would explode. Since the documentary, it’s felt vindicating to watch Sparks finally get their due.
“A lot of people were really touched by us in a personal way before the film,” Ron tells me. “In one sense, you hope that other people discover the band. But the other thing is, “I want them for myself.” People really enjoy being part of a secret organization. We prefer to have those people disappointed.
“Hate to ruin the novelty, but we’re glad that it happened,” he chuckles.
(Credit: Munachi Osegbu)
I lived by the 405 for nearly 30 years, so I have a special hatred for it. What made you want to write a song about that freeway?
Ron: One evening I went to the Getty Center. I hardly ever see the artwork. It’s more the place itself and the view of Los Angeles from there around dusk time, the traffic moving gave the appearance of being a river, something really flowing—even if it’s flowing slowly at that hour. There’s kind of an inferiority complex for some people in Los Angeles with regard to European monuments or landmarks like rivers that we don’t have. But I think there are things here that are beautiful. We just have to see them in a different light. That was the starting point for that song.
JanSport is probably the most basic, but most enduring, backpack ever made. How did it inspire the song?
Ron: I make no value judgments. I just write them. But it’s seeing some stylish people in foreign countries wearing that backpack. It used to be so utilitarian. It kind of floated into it being: what if that was the symbol of a girl leaving a guy? That image of her, not even seeing her, but seeing that backpack was a signal of depression for him.
Your sources of song inspiration are fascinating.
Ron: Some things aren’t based on any specific incident. They just come to you. We’ve been lucky over the years that if you stay open, ideas show up, even during those frustrating stretches when nothing seems to happen. They can hit at the strangest times.
1970. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
What has it been like writing and recording albums in your home studio?
Ron: In the ancient past, record companies were more generous with their recording budgets, and we would go into very expensive studios. It’s fun to spend that money. But the one thing is you had to be prepared when you went in. We would usually be well rehearsed, and there weren’t many alterations you could make once the recording started. One big advantage of the way we work now is we have so much flexibility in fooling around with the form of a song, or even starting from nothing where in the past that wouldn’t have even been possible. We don’t feel at all defensive either about the sound quality. The way things are technologically now, we’re able to do the same thing sonically that you can do in a big studio. It just doesn’t look as impressive.
You’ve worked with some great producers over the years. What lessons from them still stick with you?
Russell: We got a good education from a lot of the best that there are. From Tony Visconti, amazing producer, both his taste and his sensibility in music is pretty in line with ours. He’s an amazing musician. He’s an amazing technical engineer as well. Just having the support of those people—they’re not doing it in a way to stroke you, but just that they really encourage the eccentricity of what we’re doing, and don’t want to sand off the edges—has been really supportive. Giorgio Moroder is a different kind of producer, but he has his uniqueness and specialties that he brings to his recordings, in a completely different way than Tony Visconti. Even Todd Rundgren was another one. He not only produced our first album, but was the first person to acknowledge Sparks, to give us a record deal where we could make our first album. He was another one, almost like Tony Visconti, that didn’t want to change what we were, but he thought maybe the fidelity of our recordings could be enhanced, and he could help out that way. But he totally wanted to keep the demos that we presented to him, the final versions, to not stray off course from that. It’s learning things like that.
The songwriting thing, with someone like Muff Winwood, who did the Kimono My House album, he’s a different kind of guy, where he’s less coming at it from a musical way. It’s more a sensibility and a feeling and an encouragement of what you’re doing, pushing you to do the maximum that he thinks that you can do, saying, “Maybe there’s one more really great song for this album. Could you try to do it?” You’re hurt, because if you read into that, maybe you’re thinking, “Gosh, what’s wrong with the ones we’ve already presented?”
All those different producers, in the way they work, we learned how to be our own bosses, to take the things we’ve learned, and saying, “Maybe we need one more song to really make the album really strong,” as opposed to taking the easy route and saying, “That’s finished and it’s good enough as it is.”
Russell (left) and Ron, 1982. The shot was used for the cover of their 11th studio album, ‘Angst In My Pants’. (Credit: Eric Blum/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
How did the producers help shape your perspective on your work?
Ron: That’s the hardest thing. Before, somebody else could do that. But we have to almost step outside of ourselves and try to be as objective as we can about things. It’s impossible when it’s you doing the thing, especially something that involves a certain measure of creativity. But we try as best we can to view things in a dispassionate way, knowing that, in the end, it’s going to make the strongest statement. For us, that’s the important thing, that the statement be bold and strong and striking. You get a feeling after a while when that’s happening for you.
Does the brotherly connection make creating music as Sparks easier?
Russell: We both have the same unspoken, unwritten goal for what Sparks should be. There’s not a conflict about what we should be doing. That’s a baseline for working. You don’t have to explain anything. We’re in agreement on the direction. Our roles don’t overlap at all within the band, so that isn’t an issue. We tend to rely on our own sense about what everything should be. It’s the easiest way to work.
Is there a creative medium you haven’t tried yet that you’d like to explore?
Russell: We have a new movie musical project we’ve been working on for a little bit now, that’s the next thing after the new Sparks album. A little over a year ago, we had another amazing bit of luck. We had read an interview with John Woo, the director, saying he wanted to do a musical. Knowing what his films are like, we just said, “That’s weird and really odd. We’ve got to contact him.” Turns out he lives in L.A. and that same week, he was sitting in our studio listening to the whole two hours of this project. He said, “This is amazing. I want to direct it.” Since then, we’ve been working with him to refine some little elements in the screenplay we’ve done. We’re hoping that’s going to get greenlit soon so we can start on it.
Ron: We got a lot of confidence, both from theAnnette project and also from The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman. We would feel less comfortable if we were to do just a soundtrack for a film, but we really feel comfortable doing something that’s wall-to-wall singing for two hours. We wouldn’t give up doing Sparks songs, but it really helps in a musical sense, in a different way.
(Credit: Munachi Osegbu)
Did Edgar Wright’s documentary lead to your music being discovered by new fans or rediscovered by old ones?
Ron: We had previous offers to do a documentary, and we never wanted to do it. One of the reasons we wanted to work with Ed, there’s the thing of him being a great director, but also, his view was that there wasn’t a “golden age.” All the albums have a certain strength to them. Sometimes things get buried just because of lack of commercial success. But he didn’t need to be sold. That was definitely a selling point for us. Rather than saying, we’ll emphasize this decade, and then a little addendum is the rest, he wanted to treat everything, and I think it had an effect.
Russell: It also liberated us in our live shows to do some really obscure songs that we still like a lot from albums that were maybe not that well known. We know now that Sparks fans and people coming to see us, they’re surprised at hearing something they wouldn’t have expected. We found that they sonically fit into what we’re doing now. There’s not a distinction. If someone comes and doesn’t know our whole history, maybe they won’t even know exactly what era something is. It’s really fun for us.
You’re about to embark on a massive world tour starting June 8. After seeing your 20-song hometown Hollywood Bowl show in 2023, I’m curious—how do you maintain the stamina for performances like that?
Russell: Caring is the first step. You want to be able to present yourself on stage in the way that if people have heard your records, and they know who you are, that you sound like how you sound on record. It’s a task, because there’s a physiological thing, singers especially, over time, ranges get narrower. You have to combat that sort of thing. I try doing as much cardio stuff as I can do, because it all helps your breathing. Singing is all about breathing. Then, leading a really boring life where you don’t do anything. No smoking and things like that. Common sense and maybe good luck along the way too.
I’ve seen you outshine every act at festivals. What’s your secret? Ron: Even after having done it for quite a long time, we really enjoy what we’re doing. You can’t fool people in that sense. It seems kind of haphazard, sometimes unsafe, but we really are disciplined in what we do. The documentary showed the discipline of writing, but we’re disciplined in the live shows too, to try and not let down those songs by a presentation that’s kind of substandard. We feel we have an obligation to have the live show match the quality of the album as best as we can. We’re fortunate enough to play with great musicians that really embody what we would like to do. You can’t guarantee it 100%, things happen from night to night, but we try to be prepared for every kind of situation.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
By now, most of us should be vaguely aware that artificial intelligence is hungry for power.
Even if you don’t know the exact numbers, the charge that “AI is bad for the environment” is well-documented, bubbling from sources ranging from mainstream press to pop-science YouTube channels to tech trade media.
Still, the AI industry as we know it today is young. Though startups and big tech firms have been plugging away on large language models (LLMs) since the 2010s, the release of consumer generative AI in late 2022 brought about a huge increase in AI adoption, leading to an unprecedented “AI boom.”
In under three years, AI has come to dominate global tech spending in ways researchers are just starting to quantify. In 2024, for example, AI companies nabbed 45 percent of all US venture capital tech investments, up from only nine percent in 2022. Medium-term, big-name consultant firms like McKinsey expect AI infrastructure spending to grow to $6.7 trillion by 2030; compare this to just $450 billion in 2022.
That being the case, research on AI’s climate and environmental impacts can seem vague and scattered, as analysts race to establish concrete environmental trends in the extraordinary explosion of the AI industry.
A new survey by MIT Technology Review is trying to change that. The authors spoke to two dozen AI experts working to uncover the tech’s climate impact, combed “hundreds of pages” of data and reports, and probed the top developers of LLM tools in order to provide a “comprehensive look” at the industry’s impact.
“Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes,” the authors wrote. That led them to start small, looking at the energy use of a single LLM query.
Beginning with text-based LLMs, they found that model size directly predicted energy demand, as bigger LLMs use more chips — and therefore more energy — to process questions. While smaller models like Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B used roughly 57 joules per response (or 114 joules when the authors factored for cooling power and other energy needs), larger units needed 3,353 joules (or 6,706), or in MIT Tech‘s point of reference, enough to run a microwave for eight seconds.
Image-generating AI models, like Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, needed 1,141 joules (or 2,282) on average to spit out a standard 1024 x 1024 pixel image — the type that are rapidly strangling the internet. Doubling the quality of the image likewise doubles the energy use to 4,402 joules, worth over five seconds of microwave warming time, still less than the largest language bot.
Video generation is where the sparks really start flying. The lowest-quality AI video software, a nine-month old version of Code Carbon, took an eye-watering 109,000 joules to spew out a low-quality, 8fps film — “more like a GIF than a video,” the authors noted.
Better models use a lot more. With a recent update, that same tool takes 3.4 million joules to spit out a five-second, 16fps video, equivalent to running a microwave for over an hour.
Whether any of those numbers amount to a lot or a little is open to debate. Running the microwave for a few seconds isn’t much, but if everybody starts doing so hundreds of times a day — or in the case of video, for hours at a time — it’ll make a huge impact in the world’s power consumption. And of course, the AI industry is currently trending toward models that use more power, not less.
Zooming out, the MIT Tech survey also highlights some concerning trends.
One is the overall rise in power use correlating to the rise of AI. While data center power use remained mostly steady across the US between 2005 and 2017, their power consumption doubled by 2023, our first full year with mass-market AI.
As of 2024, 4.4 percent of all energy consumed in the US went toward data centers. Meanwhile, data centers’ carbon intensity — the amount of iceberg-melting exhaust spewed relative to energy used — became 48 percent higher than the US average.
All that said, the MIT authors have a few caveats.
First, we can’t look under the hood at closed-source AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and most of the leading AI titans have declined to join in on good-faith climate mapping initiatives like AI Energy Score. Until that changes, any attempt to map such a company’s climate impact is a stab in the dark at best.
In addition, the survey’s writers note that data centers are not inherently bad for the environment. “If all data centers were hooked up to solar panels and ran only when the Sun was shining, the world would be talking a lot less about AI’s energy consumption,” they wrote. But unfortunately, “that’s not the case.”
In countries like the US, the energy grid used to power data centers is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, and surging demand for immediate energy are only making that worse. For example, the authors point to Elon Musk’s xAI data center outside of Memphis, which is is using 35 methane gas generators to keep its chips humming, rather than wait for approval to draw from the civilian power grid.
Unless the industry is made to adopt strategies to mitigate AI’s climate impact — like those outlined in the Paris AI Action Declaration — this will just be the beginning of a devastating rise in climate-altering emissions.
Apple’s AI: Efficiency, Privacy, and Seamless Integration
Apple’s success has been built upon a meticulous fusion of hardware, software, and services, consistently shaping how people interact with technology while championing user privacy. However, the recent explosion in artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, presents a new paradigm. While the company is often perceived as playing catch-up to rivals who have rapidly deployed high-profile AI models, this view may not fully account for Apple’s foundational advantages and its deliberate, ecosystem-centric approach to innovation. The critical question is whether Apple can navigate this rapidly evolving AI landscape, integrating sophisticated intelligence deeply into its products without compromising its core values or its users’ trust.
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Apple’s prowess in custom silicon development offers a unique platform for powerful, on-device AI experiences that could reinforce its privacy commitments. Yet, the company contends with the shadow of its perennially critiqued voice assistant, intense competition from more agile AI-focused entities, and recent internal reorganizations within its AI divisions. Ultimately, Apple’s ability to redefine its user experience with genuinely useful and seamlessly embedded AI, rather than merely reacting to industry trends, will determine its future standing in an increasingly intelligent, interconnected world.
Decoding the Job Boards: Apple’s AI Priorities in Plain View
Before turning to the job boards, a personal disclosure: I use Apple kit every day and therefore want the firm’s AI push to succeed. Luckily, the company is not short of ammunition. Cash and near‑cash holdings sit at roughly $156 billion, with $29.9 billion immediately available and last year’s net income of $93.7 billion replenishing the pile. Given that industry adoption of advanced AI tooling is just warming up, even a laggard can still overtake the field if it executes ruthlessly – an execution story that begins with who it hires.
As one of the most influential technology companies in the world, understanding the talent Apple is cultivating for its AI endeavors offers a crucial window into its strategic priorities. To that end, I recently carefully examined every AI-related job posting at Apple as of mid-May 2025, categorizing them to discern areas of intense focus. The following sections detail these findings across Core AI Technologies, Application Domains, and AI Infrastructure & Operations.
Core AI Technologies As I read the postings, Apple’s center of gravity is unmistakably computer vision: nearly twice as many roles here as in any other core track, a signal that facial recognition, 3D perception, and spatial media will keep driving both iPhone cameras and Vision Pro. The next tier – generative diffusion models and large language models – shows Cupertino racing to close the gap with frontier labs while preserving its signature on-device privacy: job specs call for compact diffusion pipelines and retrieval-augmented LLMs tuned for Apple Silicon. Far fewer job postings mention multimodal or reinforcement learning, yet those that do sit at the intersection of AR/VR and autonomous services, hinting at agentic experiences that blend sight, sound, and intent. For builders, the message is clear: optimize your own models for low-latency vision and text generation on edge hardware, because Apple’s platform APIs will privilege workloads that run efficiently on the A-series and M-series chips.
Apple is putting AI to work where it moves revenue or developer velocity. About 45% of openings target engineer-facing tools – LLM-assisted code synthesis, BI and analytics, and Neural Engine compiler co-design – suggesting that the company sees internal productivity as a force-multiplier. Commerce, advertising, and analytics come next, pointing to sharper personalization across retail, App Store, and media services. It’s interesting to note how many roles address customer support and geospatial intelligence: think Siri-guided troubleshooting and continuously self-healing Maps, both underpinned by generative chat or autonomous map updates. Smaller but strategic pushes – AR/VR, health, and summarization – indicate Apple’s intent to weave AI into emerging product lines. Practitioners shipping on iOS or visionOS should expect first-party APIs that expose recommendation, summarization, and conversational primitives, all instrumented for privacy budgeting and on-device fallback.
Behind the scenes, Apple is building a cloud-to-edge backbone that rivals any hyperscaler. The largest hiring bucket is distributed systems, with Kubernetes-based inference services and hybrid deployment frameworks pointing to a future where the same model hops from data center to handset transparently. Nearly as many roles land in evaluation and ML pipelines, underscoring Apple’s obsession with shipping only what it can measure for bias, latency, and battery impact. The presence of dedicated teams for model optimization, observability, and hardware–software co-design tells me Apple will keep maximizing the computational throughput of its Neural Engine while offering external developers automated quantization and profiling hooks. Finally, a non-trivial slice of postings sits under Responsible AI – regulatory compliance, alignment tooling, and privacy safeguards – so expect guardrails to be baked into the platform rather than bolted on. For teams integrating with Apple’s ecosystem, operational excellence, energy awareness, and conformance to these guardrails won’t be optional – they will be the entry ticket.
The Apple AI Playbook: Efficiency, Privacy, and Integration
Apple’s hiring leaves little doubt: the company is architecting an edge‑first AI stack. Openings for vision and perception engineers outnumber every other discipline, signalling that spatial media, advanced photography, and sensor‑rich wearables will remain the crown jewels of its roadmap. At the same time, new roles in distributed systems, model evaluation, and energy profiling point to a pipeline that trains in the data center, distills models, and ships models slim enough to live inside a phone’s power envelope.
For developers and vendors, the brief is equally clear. Tools that compress weights, automate quantization, or enforce privacy at compile‑time will slide neatly into Apple’s value chain, while cloud‑heavy experiences will run into tighter API gates and sterner latency ceilings. The safest bet is to treat the A‑ and M‑series chips as the primary runtime: design models that wake instantly, respect user‑data boundaries, and degrade gracefully when offline.
Looking ahead, expect this playbook to ripple across Apple’s portfolio – custom silicon for glasses and AirPods, a hybrid server tier powered by in‑house accelerators, and a measured drip of “Apple Intelligence” features that appear only when the metrics are green. The cadence is slower than headline‑driven peers, but if it works the industry’s question will shift from “How big is your model?” to “How much of it can you carry in your pocket?”
Miley Cyrus has revealed the first trailer for the film companion to her upcoming album Something Beautiful, which is due May 30 from Columbia Records. The “one-of-a-kind cinematic experience” will take place for one night only in North America on June 12, with an international release to follow on June 26 from Trafalgar Releasing and Sony Music Vision.
Directed by Cyrus, Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter, Something Beautiful will premiere June 6 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It was produced by Cyrus, XYZ Films and Panos Cosmatos.
Cyrus calls Something Beautiful “my dream project come true — fashion, film and original music coexisting in harmony. My co-creators are all geniuses in their own right: from the masters of sound, Shawn Everett and Alan Meyerson, to one of cinema’s most unique directors, Panos Cosmatos, serving as a producer. Each collaborator has used their expertise to make this fantasy a reality.”
As for the 13-track proper album version of Something Beautiful, it includes guest appearances by Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard and model Naomi Campbell. The pre-release single “End of the World” has performed the best of several other previews, having garnered nearly 50 million Spotify streams so far.
Something Beautiful is the follow-up to 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation, which hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200. It spawned the monster chart-topping single “Flowers,” which won Record of the Year and Best Solo Pop Performance at the 2024 Grammys.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Darude is ringing in 25 years of “Sandstorm” by turning Helsinki into a real-life playground for fans of the track that defined a generation.
The event, simply dubbed the “Sandstorm Run,” invites participants to jog, sprint or stride along a six-kilometer route mapped directly through the sites made famous in the track’s iconic turn-of-the-century music video.
Scheduled for August 31st, just under a week before the Finnish leg of Darude’s “STORM 25 World Tour,” the run starts and ends in Kaivopuisto, a coastal park that locals and longtime fans will recognize from the video’s early chase scene. From there, runners will make their way through southern Helsinki, including a pass by the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral.
Darude himself will be onsite for the event, cheering participants on and serving as a judge for its costume contest, which encourages runners to dress in the spirit of the “Sandstorm” video. Prizes for the best outfits—awarded in individual, pair and team categories—include a meet-and-greet with Darude, group photo and tickets to the “STORM 25” concert at Kattilahalli.
“It’s amazing to celebrate my career right where it all began,” Darude said in a statement. “The ‘Sandstorm’ video is still watched around the world, and it’s incredible to see it come alive again through the runners. I hope as many people as possible join us to have fun and get moving.”
The event is being organized by Vauhtisammakko, a local fitness services company. Early-bird registration is available through June 30th for €39, with standard pricing kicking in July 1st at €59.
You can find more details about the “Sandstorm Run” and register here.
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