The Black Keys have landed on an Aug. 8 release date for their 13th album, No Rain, No Flowers, the title track from which is out now. Among the collaborators on the self-produced Easy Eye Sound/Warner project are songwriters Rick Nowels and Daniel Tashian, plus veteran hip-hop producer/keyboardist Scott Storch.
Black Keys guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach previously told SPIN that he and bandmate Patrick Carney used to obsessively watch YouTube videos of Storch “playing all his parts from his productions on piano. He showed up and he was so excited to be in the studio because it’s filled with keyboards here. He said he’d never really recorded with real instruments before — like harpsichords, vibes, tack pianos and stuff. So, he was like a kid in a candy shop. We hit it off and we had a lot of fun.”
The album’s first single, “The Night Before,” emerged as Carney, Auerbach and Tashian played drums, guitar and bass in a circle at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio. “It came together so quickly that we overlooked it,” said Auerbach. “When we were playing the songs we had for people, it was the very last one we played to the record label. As soon as we played it, everyone unanimously said that should be the first single.”
No Rain, No Flowers amounts to some positive fallout surrounding the release of 2024’s Ohio Players and the abrupt cancelation of its supporting tour, during which Auerbach and Carney traded barbs with former manager Irving Azoff. “We put a lot of time into [that] album, and then it came out and some bullshit happened and we had to pivot,” said Carney. “Som we pivoted to where we feel most comfortable, which is back in the studio — make more music and just do it again.”
The Black Keys will be on the road in North America beginning May 23 in Durant, Ok., and have dates on the books through Sept. 20 at Atlanta’s Shaky Knees festival. “The fact we didn’t get to tour last year, we hated it,” Carney admitted. “It sucks for us, sucks for the fans. Also, the circumstances were bullshit. But at the end of the day, we did get to make another album. And it’s something that we’re proud of, and that will be a document that will exist long after we’re gone.”
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Peter Baumann left Tangerine Dream—the pioneering German electronic group founded by the late Edgar Froese—for good in 1977, after helping shape the emotive synth sound found on albums like Phaedra and the soundtrack to Sorcerer. Since Baumann’s departure, Tangerine Dream went on to release something like 75 more studio albums, not including their abundant soundtrack work and live material. Baumann, on the other hand, has produced only a handful of records, most of them from the late-‘70s.
Nightfall, released on May 16, is his second solo album of this century, following 2016’s Machines of Desire. While that album explored the darker side of the silicon romance of his ‘70s output (Daft Punk learned a thing or three from Baumann’s 1979 masterpiece Transharmonic Nights), Nightfall has more of an introspective feel, with Baumann mixing his austere electronic explorations with more natural tones and timbres, including hand percussion, saxophone, guitar, and chirping crickets.
Most of the song titles on Nightfall indicate themes of isolation and disorientation—“Lost in a Pale Blue Sky,” “On the Long Road,” and “A World Apart.” And though the shadowy melodic palette of these tracks does tend toward the sinister, there’s little sense of aimless wandering. Baumann’s keys can be abstract or ambient, foreboding or mechanistic, but he keeps a sense of momentum in play. “On the Long Road” opens with a digital pulse strung between sparse, booming drums, mysterious, rotor-like flapping sounds, and industrial echo. It ends about four minutes later, the pulse still there, after an interlude of buzzing, spidery guitar and xylophone-esque murmurs. Likewise, the nebulous choral layers of “Lost in a Pale Blue Sky” are held together by a booming, intermittent heartbeat, its toll creating a tidal gravity. Baumann’s music may be adrift, but it knows where it’s going.
Nightfall gathers shape as the album progresses, as if following a cycle. “From a Far Land” features an insistent keyboard motif reminiscent of the neon-lit ‘80s, minus that decade’s demonic excess, and a recurring smeared synth tone that provides some ominous drama; if it were a little more up-tempo, it’d sound like the theme to a posh sci-fi thriller. By the time “I’m Sitting Here, Just for a While” arrives, with its probing bass notes and flutelike synth melody, a balance seems to have shifted—the starry void of space has been replaced by the deep well of the inner self. The title track closes the album, with its serene vocal effects and an eerie glow to the rustling wind of the percussion, while the tentative synth melody has a surprisingly spontaneous spark that sticks out among the nocturnal dirges. It’s not enough to prevent the light from vanishing, but Baumann at least makes dusk’s descent feel like a necessary return, providing a haven for the weary and a respite from the disillusions of the day.
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In September 2012 in Kabul, Afghanistan, two young sisters, Parwana and Khorshid were killed by a suicide bomber meant for the American military. Their 8-year-old sister Mursal survived. There were seven Afghans killed including the two little girls. No Americans were harmed.
A couple of years later California muso Lanny Cordola found himself just over the border in Pakistan arranging a charity music event for ‘Peace through Music’. Somehow drawn to that Afghan tragedy, in a then undefined mission he kept reaching out to see if someone could introduce him to the family in Kabul and to meet the little girl who lost both of her sisters.
When they finally met, Mursal drawn to Mr. Lanny’s (as she called him) guitar, asked him to teach her how to play, as did her eager friends… Cordola knew this was a way he could help. He could bring music to the kids.
He went into action mode, calling upon his glitterati of muso friends in California to help, and a year later officially started a music school for girls in Kabul, and a non-profit on their behalf. Initially named Girl with a Guitar, after Mursal, they became The Miraculous Love Kids, and with the school they could safely gather and practice every day. Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland donated 15 guitars, so they were off and running.
Over the next six years they moved around different buildings in Kabul, from a stark military barracks to above a supermarket, where the power would go off and an explosion, so they moved to another place… Always bare bones buildings, grassroots, but the girls would eagerly gather after regular school, and they were driven.
Life was relatively good. They were happy, they were learning guitar and English, and Cordola paid them to show up through the foundation he’d created. It encouraged them, and also discouraged them from having to sell sunflower seeds or beg on the streets.
Lanny Cordola, founder of the Miraculous Love Kids
Cordola had found a new mission in life, and he wanted to give them a global voice. The London Times had called him, flatteringly, the ‘guitar god of Kabul’. He enlisted his friend Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, and virtually, over Zoom, they played and recorded “Love and Mercy.” It was 2018.
By 2020 they were singing the Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’ alongside Kathy Valentine and Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave, a huge supporter of the girls. In May 2021 they released Steve Miller’s track ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ with Sammy Hagar singing into his iPhone. You may have seen the girls on Good Morning America or TMZ.
Their musical progression was outstanding, and they continued to make videos.
They didn’t realize it at the time, but things were relatively wonderful then, meeting in the rundown hot dusty rooms in Kabul, a couple of fans if the electricity was on, surrounded by broken windows, or at the national monument above Kabul where they gathered sometimes, and from other places they made their videos. Occasionally, a bomb would go off in the distance.
The girls didn’t understand the magnitude of what they were doing–it was all for fun. They had no idea who these musicians were that they were collaborating with. They just loved to play guitar. Cordola and his excellent network of friends had found global recognition for the girls. Remarkable considering.
Things in Afghanistan had been slowly progressing. Before they went barreling backwards.
In August 2021, Cordola took a plane out of Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan to renew his visa in Islamabad. Unbeknownst to him, he’d taken the last plane out before the Taliban swooped in to take control of Kabul, after the US military’s sudden mass withdrawal.
The Taliban hate music. They really hate it. It’s a threat to their regime. No joy allowed. They started capturing, beating, and torturing musicians, and artists, going house to house. The girls’ lives were in danger. Cordola instructed them via video call from Pakistan to smash their guitars and went into overdrive on an evacuation plan for them to escape.
The Miraculous Love Kids
I managed to talk to one of the girls, Jellybean, as she’s affectionately called, briefly. The Taliban had taken over, she and the girls were hiding and waiting. Still sounding optimistic, and hopeful, her English surprisingly good from six years of learning song lyrics. She was one of the first girls to come to the Miraculous House as they call it. Suddenly banished from school in her birth country and having to go out in a face veil, and never alone in the street. She learnt the hard way, with a Taliban gun pushed in her face.
Getting out of Afghanistan was complex, yet Jellybean managed to and arrived in Pakistan by April 2022, the others soon followed via precarious smuggling routes, Cordola paying for their guides. Running for their lives, with the risk of getting caught by the Taliban and harassment from border guards at the other end.
Not exactly met with open arms, yet it was the lesser of two harms at the time. What could they do but try to carry on, hold together and wait. Pakistan having its own political unrest (increasing as I’m writing this).
The girls kept on with their music regardless. And Cordola continued raising funds through miraculouslovekids.org, paying for rent, expenses, medicine, food, and books.
By 2023 nine of the girls were living in Islamabad, Pakistan “three separate homes close to each other – six family units, nine girls and twenty family members.” Cordola proudly told me for an article I wrote for WONDERLUST.
The Miraculous Love Kids released their last video shot in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, ‘I Won’t Back Down’, with Blake Shelton singing from the comfort of his studio, probably in Nashville, and these immensely brave girls thousands of miles away, high up in the hot dusty ruins of Kabul, Afghanistan. Two visual panels in a duet, a song in harmony, together yet far apart.
Cordola’s tenacity in improving the girls’ lives and teaching them music grabbed the attention of a further slew of renowned musicians, who have jumped on board to help, from the enigmatic Matt Sorum (G n’ R, Hollywood Vampires), to Beth Gibbons of Portishead, Nick Cave, Nils Lofgren, Rami Jaffee, Beth Hart, Nancy Sinatra, Gilby Clark, Nandi Bushell, Kathy Valentine, Joe Walsh, Chad Kroeger from Nickelback, and more. Sia just sent them a video message after they covered her empowerment song “Unstoppable”. Roger Daltrey is working with them, and so is Peter Gabriel. They just premiered an incredible version of “Red Rain”.
Cordola managed to get some of the girls into the US last year, four of them, including Mursal and her family. Four went back to Afghanistan mid 2023, and a further four are in hiding in Islamabad in Pakistan, as he works to find a safe outlet for them.
Those in the US are now at the mercy of Trump’s agenda and his Executive Order of January 20, 2025, effectively halting all refugee admissions (including, shamefully, those under Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) for Afghans who assisted U.S. forces).
As of May 2025, Afghan refugees in the US are facing vast challenges due to the suspension of the Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). It’s political bullshit playing with the lives of innocents. Children stuck between borders, their lives on hold, and just when they thought they were safe. They’d had a plan.
Lanny has been in Pakistan the past eight months with the girls and their families. They’ve had to go underground once again, the Pakistani police offering $20 to any local who gives up information on Afghans. The girls and their families are living in two rooms. Eighteen of them, families included. They can’t go out, they can’t go to the park, they can’t be visible. They’ve been in hiding for many weeks now that the Pakistani authorities are rounding up and sending Afghans back to their country and Taliban rule.
In April, 100,000 Afghans were deported from Pakistan – sent back to the Taliban and an unknown future. Pakistan has deported almost a million Afghans since 2023.
Around 10,000 are still in Pakistan, with US cases in limbo because Trump blocked them.
Shawn VanDiver, who heads #AfghanEvac, says it’s outrageous and stresses the need for the US government to honor its commitments to these refugees. He’s also appealed to the government of Pakistan to give the refugees more time. Asmat Ullah Shah, the Chief Commissioner for Afghan Refugees in Islamabad says that Afghans waiting for resettlement hold no legal status under Pakistani law.
The humanitarians in this story are the musicians who have stood up for these girls by sharing their music, talent and fame to uplift the situation.
18-year-old Yasemin, aka Jellybean, 16-year-old Zakia, 14-year-old Shukriya, and seven-year-old Uzra and their families sit in tenacious hope.
So many children in Afghanistan only know a life of extremes, running from extremists, of unbridled/perpetual violence by savages. Cordola’s hoping to get them asylum anywhere now, if not the US, then the UK, or Canada, other locations. He told me this morning from Pakistan, “Peter Gabriel has jumped in to do what he can, and is trying to get them into Belfast which is a UNESCO city of music—an organization called Beyond Skin is also helping, and the girls just released their video of “Red Rain”, and a new video with Roger Daltrey and Brian Wilson comes out next week”. He’s also in touch with the US Embassy in Islamabad, but they’re just taking orders from DC.
Cordola hasn’t been back to Afghanistan since he left. A friend went back and was arrested and thrown in Taliban jail.
Certain people have metaphorical blood on their hands. Trump’s suspension of refugee admissions has upended the lives of thousands of Afghan refugees and the communities trying to support them. In Connecticut, organizations like Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) and Jewish Family Services (JFS) have been gutted—losing critical funding, laying off staff, and closing their doors just when they’re needed most. In Virginia and Maryland, at least 42 Afghan families have received eviction notices, left to face homelessness after the government withdrew the rental aid it once promised. And far from American shores, some 1,200 Afghans who risked everything to help U.S. forces are still stranded at a base in Qatar, waiting—abandoned in bureaucratic limbo.
Cordola told me the latest news this morning that a judge had ordered those who had been approved for entering the U.S. and who had a scheduled flight, were to be relocated there in the next two weeks. If Trump complies—which is anyone’s guess. His mind changes daily.
The Miraculous Love Kids—so aptly named for all they’ve been through—just released “Love and Mercy” with Roger Daltrey and Brian Wilson. While the situation in Pakistan is increasingly tense, with stifling heat, the odd earthquake, and now war with India, with bombs landing close to where the girls are staying, they keep on keeping on.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Fifteen years ago, before becoming a multi-platinum selling pop star, Geoffrey Royce Rojas, known professionally as Prince Royce, launched his career with a unique cover. Reflecting his Dominican roots, the then 20-year-old New Yorker reimagined Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” with a bachata arrangement sung in Spanglish. Now, at 36, Prince Royce is returning to the formula that made him famous with his eighth album Eterno. The 13-track LP includes his bachata versions of classics by the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac, the Backstreet Boys, and more.
“I want to take people to those moments from back in the day when music was really just music and people were having fun,” he tells SPIN. “I also want them to hear my story, what I’ve taken from songs, and what vibe I would sing them in. To be able to do that and keep some of this music alive while also blending the culture behind these songs with my Latin culture is the ultimate goal.”
With “Stand By Me,” Prince Royce solidified his multicultural sound, blending the tropical genre of bachata from the Dominican Republic with elements of the pop, R&B, and hip-hop music that he grew up on. In 2017, Colombian superstar Shakira tapped him for her bachata track, “Deja Vu.” While known for bringing that genre to the forefront, Prince Royce has also explored sounds like Latin trap with Bad Bunny and Becky G, reggaeton with Maluma, EDM with Selena Gomez, and even Mexican corridos with Gabito Ballesteros.
As he continues to make his way towards global icon status, Prince Royce is revisiting the songbook of the legends that came before him. Eterno, which translates to “Eternal” in English, includes covers of “How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees, “I Want it That Way” by the Backstreet Boys, and “Can’t Help Falling In Love” by Elvis Presley. Prince Royce also pushes bachata to new places with his colorful remakes of classics like “Yesterday” by the Beatles, “Killing Me Softly” by Roberta Flack, and the rock-infused “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac.
Just like 15 years ago, Prince Royce has a knack for bridging cultures, genres, and generations in his music.
It’s been 15 years since you released your cover of “Stand By Me.” What would you say is your secret to career longevity?
I really just look at this as a job. I think at the beginning a young artist sees this as party or rockstar vibes and there are opportunities for that. [Laughs.] Once I started seeing this as a very serious job, I saw that things were more grounded or that things would last. In this job, you’re always on. You’re always working. Even when you’re going to the beach and you get asked for a photo, or there’s paparazzi or cameras, you’re working. There’s going to be fun things in between, but if I got to wake up at 4:00 or 6:00 in the morning, I got to do it. I’ve matured so much as a person, as an artist, as a songwriter—and I’m still always learning.
(Credit: Antonio Ajam)
You’re known for your many bachata hits. What has it meant for you to have helped push that genre into the mainstream?
It’s a blessing. It feels good to see that I really made a mark with my name and that I’ve made an impact in a true way for the genre and the Dominican Republic. They named a street after me in New York. It really does feel like I’ve had a big impact. I’m just honored and grateful to my fans and the people that have given me the opportunity to make that kind of impact.
Throughout your career you’ve also worked with artists from other genres like Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, Becky G, and Maluma. What have you taken away from those collaborations?
It’s been great and I also learn from each one of them, whether it’s how they write, how they sing, or just the recording process. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to unite fan bases and cultures. We’re all different but with music, we can become one. Even though we’re all Latino or Hispanic, we’re still from different countries. We eat different foods. We speak in different slang. It’s all Spanish, but we’re still from different places. I love collaborating and doing fusions. I like to educate myself on other people’s cultures too. When I get together with artists, it’s a collaboration between cultures and fan bases.
How do you feel about being seen as a sex symbol?
I was always a shy dude growing up and as I started singing, I started working on my “sex symbol” stuff more. [Laughs.] I was always very skinny, so I went to the gym. It’s cool to see that people show you love. I also just like having fun with it. I don’t think I’m “the man” or anything, but at the shows it’s fun to see the reaction when I take off my shirt and throw it. It’s all entertainment. I’m all about entertaining and having people have a good time, so whatever opportunity I see to give people what they want to see and what they want to hear, I’ll do it. If you come to my meet and greets, I’ll hug everyone the same way and I’ll let everyone freak out the same way. I’ll show love to everyone in the same way. At the end of the day, we’re all humans. I definitely know that many of my fans belong to the LGBTQ+ community and I’m here to sing to everyone. It’s love is love type of vibes.
Prince Royce in Miami on October 17, 2024 — (Credit: Alexander Tamargo/Telemundo via Getty Images)
Now let’s get into the stories behind some of the songs on Eterno. What is the story behind your cover of the Beatles’ “Yesterday”?
I wanted to record it in 2009. It’s a song that I feel is so simple yet so deep. It’s a song I wanted to record then and I always told myself if I ever do a project or album with covers, I was going to include “Yesterday.” That cover is a little more bolero because the original song was kind of acoustic, so I wanted to keep that vibe. That’s probably the only one on the album with acoustic and raw vibes.
“How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees?
It’s always been one of my mom’s favorites. She said when she hears that song, it reminds of when she first came to America and when she was working at a factory. That song and those types of songs would play at the factory and the mall when she would go shopping. It’s a very unique and iconic song too, so I wanted to have it in for sure. That was one of the most different because in bachata, you don’t really hear those types of background vocals or chord changes. There’s low notes. It was cool to take bachata out of its comfort zone and do a song like this.
Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way”?
I wanted a little rock vibe. I had first heard this song playing Guitar Hero back in the day on Xbox. I had Guitar Hero on Xbox and “Go Your Own Way” was one of my favorite records to play. I remember I had my skateboard phase in New York and I would go skateboarding in Queens and I’d play this song. I’m not singing in the normal sweet voice I usually sing in, so it was a very different song for me to do. We do like a bachata and electric guitar fusion, so I think it’s a fun record. It’ll be fun to sing live and close the show with.
As someone that grew up to see when the Backstreet Boys were on top of the world, what was the experience like to cover “I Want it That Way”?
Every song on the album is much older than this one. That was the one I enjoyed recording the most. It’s one of my favorites because I could identify with that one most. I recorded so many background vocals. Obviously, I’m one artist and there were five artists on the original track, so I had to dissect each harmony and try to replicate every background vocal that they did. I’m really proud of that one.
How did you turn Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” into a bachata song?
That was probably the hardest one to record actually. If you listen to the original Elvis Presley song, it’s just so slow. What I would usually do is I would take the original vocal and put it on a bachata track on it and see how it sounded. With this one, the original vocal wouldn’t work because it was just so slow. The original chorus didn’t fit too well in bachata, so I made a new verse that kind of gave it that bachata vibe. That one was a little complicated to do, but I thought it was such an iconic song. It’s a song that plays in romantic movie scenes or plays at weddings, so I thought it would be cool if this could be a wedding song in Spanish. I tried my best to try to make it into a bachata song.
What do you want to accomplish next with your career?
We’re definitely going to go on tour either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. I like that this album bought me some more time to continue working on original music because I always take way too long doing original music. I hope to continue to keep learning and growing. I like to push myself and to keep doing new things. I hope to continue to reach other countries that perhaps don’t know about my music and also to keep revisiting the places that have shown me love. I’m excited to keep working and to keep touching hearts around the world.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Jack Kirby was a comic book superhero. As an artist and writer, he was the essential creator or co-creator behind entire worlds of heroes and villains, interstellar conflicts and what has become billion-dollar franchises. Without him, we would never have known the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, the Hulk, Thor, Dr. Doom, Silver Surfer, and the X-Men, among many others.
Those names have been a dominant force in mainstream Hollywood for most of the last dozen years, but the Kirby creative spark that birthed these characters in the pages of Marvel Comics remains as strange and fascinating as ever.
“I see people larger than life. That’s the only way I can draw them,” Kirby said in a video interview a year before his death in 1994. “Superheroes came very naturally. That particular form of drawing seemed to represent my ideal of what I like about men and women in general.”
His life and work are the subject of the just-opened Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity, a comprehensive retrospective at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It traces the evolution from his earliest work before World War II to his time helping create the Marvel Universe, his later psychedelic comics interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a fruitful and mind-expanding period at DC Comics, where he enjoyed greater creative freedom and introduced the cosmic villain Darkseid.
“This is the first time that there’s been a proper career retrospective of this scale in a major American institution for an American comic book creator,” says Patrick A. Reed, a pop culture historian and comics scholar who was one of two independent curators behind the show.
“Kirby is one of the most important American artists of the last 100 years in any medium,” adds his co-curator Ben Saunders, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, and editor of the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection books series. “It would be difficult to name a 20th century artist who’s had an influence across so many fields now in the 21st century. His fame and his reputation are greater now than it has been at any point since his death.”
The curators expect the show to travel around the country once the Skirball exhibition closes March 1, 2026. Among its rare treasures are all 22 original pages drawn by Kirby from X-Men issue No. 7. Alongside the large selection of original art, the show has artifacts like his U.S. Army uniform from World War II, his typewriter and ink bottles, family snapshots and other items gathered from multiple collectors and family members.
One of the visitors last week was Øystein Runde, a Norwegian comics artist and writer who happened to be in Los Angeles for a wedding. “I almost cried when I discovered yesterday that there was a Kirby exhibition in L.A. just when I was visiting,” he said in the gallery. “I was like, holy shit!”
Runde wore T-shirt that featured his own drawing of David Lynch, inspired by the filmmaker’s death in January. He calls himself a “genre jumper,” and his comics work has ranged from body horror to reimagining the 18th century playwright Henrik Ibsen as part of a team battling against a zombie invasion. As he examined the original Kirby drawings behind glass on the walls, Runde took many detailed pictures with his camera.
“Oh my God. Look at this thing,” he said, leaning toward an old Marvel comics page. “It’s so exciting for me as a craftsman to see his thought processes in his different phases. This is the real deal.”
Kirby’s artwork showed a dramatic expansion in scale over the decades. During his time at Marvel and after, he drew with an increasingly bold and recognizable style, depicting his figures as more formidable and god-like, constructed from block-like shapes and deep shadow.
“He’s both a stylist and a narrative storyteller,” says Saunders. “But then he also starts to get interested in things that are not narrative, but are just pattern, pure form. And I think one reason that he seems to need bigger panels and bigger pages as the career progresses, is that there’s something obsessive about the pattern making and almost delirious drawing that he’s getting into.”
Street Code, Circa 1983, Pencils by Jack Kirby. (Courtesy of Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center)
Kirby’s lasting influence can be seen in modern titles like Erik Larsen’s The Savage Dragon, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, and Gødland, created by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli. But his presence is also felt in the work of novelists Michael Chabon and Rick Moody, filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and the Wachowskis, and the hip-hop visionary MF Doom. And this July in theaters, The Fantastic Four: First Steps will offer a retro retelling of the superhero team’s story, as directed by Matt Shakman (WandaVision).
“He’s the ‘King of Comics,’” says Michele Urton, the Skirball’s organizing curator, quoting Kirby’s nickname. As a former editor at Top Cow Comics herself, Urton points to “the way he’s thinking about space and perspective, and then the way he’s really breaking away from traditional comics and putting together things that didn’t look like anything else that was on the newsstand at the time.”
The Kirby show is the first of three exhibitions devoted to American comics creators at the center. That history fits the Skirball’s mission of celebrating and exploring the Jewish experience. Born Jacob Kurtzberg on New York’s Lower East Side to immigrant parents from Austria, Kirby would sometimes use his art as a setting for meaningful comment on urgent current affairs.
In 1940, he co-created Captain America with writer Joe Simon, and on the cover of issue No. 1, “Cap” is shown punching Adolph Hitler in the face, as a bullet bounces off of his Stars-and-Stripes shield. Scattered around Der Führer and his minions are suggestions of the real-life threat from Nazi Germany, including something labeled “Sabotage plans for U.S.A.”
The first issue of Captain America Comics landed on newsstands in December 1940, a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into the war. At the time, there were still strong public feelings for staying out of that war. But in 1939, American Nazis held a now-notorious rally inside Madison Square Garden that didn’t go unnoticed by Kirby and Simon.
“The Nazis came and threw a party in their neighborhood. How could they not react to that?,” asks Saunders.
After the war, Kirby and Simon also pioneered the first comics devoted to true romance and true crime, but the artist ultimately returned to superheroes, touching a popular nerve in 1961 with the Fantastic Four. In that work for Marvel, he co-created many lasting characters with writer-editor Stan Lee.
Decades after Captain America, Kirby co-created the Black Panther in the pages of The Fantastic Four in the summer of 1966, at a time of agitation for civil rights progress. The Black Panther was depicted as royalty in the nation of Wakanda, a technologically advanced society, and was an early example of Afrofuturism.
At the Skirball show is one of the sleek superhero uniforms from the acclaimed 2018 movie Black Panther, starring Chadwick Boseman, which won an Oscar for best costume design for Ruth E. Carter. There is also an early concept drawing of the Black Panther (aka “T’Challa”) that shows him in a very different light, with a more colorful costume, and less of the warrior he became.
When Kirby moved to Thousand Oaks, California, it coincided with a break with Marvel and his leap to rival publisher DC Comics. He would bounce between the leading comic book companies for his remaining years. At Marvel, he created a 1976 comic adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, eight years after the film’s release. It was wildly experimental and a demonstration of what Saunders describes as a period of when “technology and divinity start to overlap in his imagination.”
Early translations of Kirby’s Marvel stories and characters were low-budget and frequently ridiculous. On one screen in the show, a video loop shows the history of Kirby’s heroes brought to life – from a 1944 Captain America movie serial to a Fantastic Four TV cartoon series, the big-budget Avengers films to the appearance of Darkseid in Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021.
While his sometime collaborator Lee lived to see most of these stories come to life in hugely successful Hollywood movies over the last two decades, Kirby did not. He died of heart failure at age 76 in his Southern California hilltop home.
“It’s hard for me to imagine that Jack wouldn’t love the movies. He never lost faith in the mainstream,” says Saunders.
In 2025, modern audiences largely know these characters first through the films, which may overshadow the original work that made the movie and streaming shows possible. But the curators of Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity remain confident Kirby’s work will always shine through the hype.
“Kirby’s books are selling month in, month out,” says Reed. “More people know his work now than ever before. The awareness of him as the creative force is growing. I do think there is a danger at times that the modern interpretations can overshadow the classic things, but I also think those new interpretations provide the gateway. They tend to lead people back to the source material. If people resonate with it, they want to find more.”
Grammy-winning artist Laufey teams with the National’s Aaron Dessner on her upcoming album, A Matter of Time, which will be released Aug. 22 on Vingolf Recordings/AWAL. Following last month’s arrival of first single “Silver Lining,” another new track, “Tough Luck,” is out today (May 15).
Laufey, whose name is pronounced lay-vay, calls it “is a fiery song about love gone wrong. I wanted to reveal an angrier side of myself — a side that this unfortunate relationship brought out in me.” In April, the artist performed “Silver Lining” as a surprise with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil during their Coachella set.
A Matter of Time is the follow-up to 2023’s Bewitched, which won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In addition to Dessner, who is revered for his production work with Taylor Swift, Sharon Van Etten and Ed Sheeran, the album features longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart.
“People expect a pretty façade of girly clothes, fantastical stories, and romantic music,” Laufey says. “This time, I was interested in seeing how I could draw out the most flawed parts of myself and look at them directly in the mirror.”
The artist has a handful of summer performances scheduled with orchestras, beginning July 30 in Norfolk, Va., and continuing to Chautauqua, N.Y., Cuyahoga Falls, Oh., and Saratoga Springs, N.Y. through Aug. 9.
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Bruce Springsteen slammed U.S. president Donald Trump as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” last night (May 14) before he and the E Street Band had even struck a note at their summer European tour opener in Co-Op Live in Manchester, England.
“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” the artist said prior to “Land of Hope and Dreams.” “Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”
Later, before “House of a Thousand Guitars,” he noted that “the last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people” is “you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. At the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”
The Boss then spoke at length when introducing “My City of Ruins” about the “very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.”
“In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death,” he added. “This is happening now. In my country they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”
“A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” he said. “They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American. The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people. So, we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said: ‘in this world there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.”
The Springsteen tour continues through early July. Last night’s show wrapped with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” which the artist hadn’t played live since 1988.
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When I am introduced to Charlie Burchill, Simple Minds’ guitarist, the first thing he asks me is, “Where are you from?” It’s a complicated question for me to answer, but it doesn’t surprise me that he’s curious about it. In an early scene of the Simple Minds documentary, Simple Minds: Everything is Possible (viewable in BBC iPlayer and receiving its theatrical release on June 13), Charlie’s musical other half, the group’s vocalist, Jim Kerr, is in a library in their hometown of Glasgow, Scotland. Jim shares how he was encouraged by his father to read, and how invariably, his choices veered toward titles that were about traveling to foreign lands.
A few minutes later, when I am introduced to Jim, he also immediately asks me where I am from. I proceed to give my complicated response, the middle part of which involves the years I lived in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. I leave out Simple Minds’ lifesaving impact on me during that time, which still continues. We have to know each other a little better before that reveal.
It doesn’t take long for me to feel like Jim and Charlie have absorbed me into their two-person ecosystem. Their friendship was established over half a century ago and has only become stronger with time. They followed each other to the municipality of Taormina in Sicily (the location of The White Lotus Season Two) where they set up residence. Jim owns a scenic boutique hotel in Taormina, Hotel Villa Angela, where its popularity makes getting a booking there difficult to secure. (I know, I tried.) I ask if they live near each other and Jim says, “Throw stones” as he mimes the action, then chuckles at the fact that after all these decades, he and Charlie are still attached at the hip.
Jim and Charlie have always had wanderlust. Even Jim’s owning a hotel is a key symbol of being on the move. “That’s a great word,” Jim says. “For some people, the world ends at the bottom of the street. For us, that’s where it begins.”
As soon as they were old enough, Jim and Charlie went hitchhiking. They found themselves at the Verona Arena, a Roman amphitheatre in Northern Italy where they slept in the archways. In 1989, Simple Minds played Verona Arena, and this summer, they will perform there again.
“One of the reasons the band is still attractive to us is it is escapist,” says Jim. “I don’t know what we’re leaving behind, or what we’re running away from, or towards, but that’s as much why we wanted to be in the band as the music.”
This year marks several milestones for Simple Minds, which, at this point only includes Jim and Charlie from the original lineup. There is the aforementioned documentary, the ruby anniversary of their landmark album,Once Upon a Time whose deluxe editions include “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which they performed onJimmy Kimmel Live earlier this evening. Plus, the extensive “Alive and Kicking Tour” with support from Soft Cell and Modern English, as well as a live double album released in April,Live in the City of Diamonds, recorded at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome during the group’s 2024 global tour.
Simple Minds in the ’80s. (Credit: Virginia Turbett/Redferns)
A click through the tour section on Simple Minds’ site and it’s apparent the group have played live every year, pretty much, since their start. The number of tour dates have ramped up in recent years, with no fallow years. “Usually you take a break,” says Charlie, “But there is such a demand. It just seemed to grow. Last couple of years there has been a lot of touring. But it was great because it opened up a window where we could spend more time here [in the U.S.].”
Last year, Simple Minds dominated the Southern California festival Cruel World, which took them by surprise. “We’ve got fans and college radio was really good to us back in the day, but I couldn’t believe it when we turned up there,” Jim recalls. “There were a lot of acts on. I thought once we start playing, because I’m confident of the band, people will come from the other stages. Forty-five minutes before we went on, people were waiting as far as I could see.”
This year, Simple Minds’ North American tour kicks off May 16 and goes for five weeks. “It’s blown our minds that we’re getting a chance to come back to work, and so extensively,” Jim admits. “We didn’t work as hard as we could in America, or as hard as we should have, and we regretted that. We didn’t think we’d get a chance again. We’re getting a bit of a chance now. We know what we’re doing live, and we’ve got to do it for a lot more people.”
Since their inception in the late 1970s, Simple Minds have released almost 20 studio albums, with less than a handful of years between each one. There was an ongoing evolution in the group’s sound, especially over the course of the first few albums from post punk and new wave to stadium-ready songs.
“The year before punk rock, the idea that you would dare to form a band or start your own fashion label or do your own documentary or do your own fanzine, you just didn’t do that,” says Jim. “But suddenly this punk came along with the homemade ethic. Anyone could give it a go. For about six months, we were in this punk band. It was a pretty lousy attempt. We knew that wasn’t right. But at the heart, there’s something that works. We’ve gone to the same pubs and the same clubs and people didn’t go crazy. But when we played, people would go crazy. That was the oxygen.”
Arena Ciudad de México on May 7, 2025 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Credit: Medios y Media/Getty Images)
“The diversity of music in the ’80s, a lot of color and imagination,” says Charlie. “No fear of melody.”
It wasn’t until their fourth double album, Sons & Fascination/Sister Feelings Calls, that Simple Minds made any significant inroads outside of the U.K. In the U.S., the group became household names in 1985 with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from the teen classic movie The Breakfast Club. It was a No. 1 hit for the group, and the song they are best known for. The group’s resistance to recording the song, which was not written by them, is the stuff of legend as laid out in SPIN’s oral history of the song.
“Sometimes it comes across that we’re ungrateful at the opportunity that the song gave us,” says Jim (who still hasn’t seen The Breakfast Club outside of a rough cut, nor has Charlie). “We felt guilty about the success of it. It took three hours to do. Let’s just do it. Record company will get off our back. It’ll be a B-side or a bonus track or something.”
In my experience with high school students, if there is ever a chance for them to watch a film, their first choice is, invariably, The Breakfast Club—even 40 years later. I tell Jim and Charlie this and confirm that it is, in fact, a good movie. But if they relent and watch it, then they wouldn’t be able to say that they’ve never seen the final version, which is kind of gangster.
Once Upon a Time, the album on which “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” appears, cracked the top 10 in the U.S. When Simple Minds perform the song on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the multigenerational, multicultural crowd instantly sings along when Jim points the microphone in their direction. The song ignited Simple Minds’ career stateside.The three subsequent singles from Once Upon a Time all landed in the top 30.
It’s not these chart and commercial achievements from which Jim gets his confidence, which he has in abundance, and he is comfortable owning it and he acknowledges that. “What I am above anything else is an enthusiast,” Jim explains one of the sources of his confidence. “Because I’m not a musician and never wanted to be one, it’s all magic to me. But I know when I feel it. There is a certainty that comes with it. It’s a humbling feeling. I was more confident than the guys. They were still working it out, but the hair at the back of my neck would be standing up. If I feel it, they’re going to get it.
About the other source of his confidence he adds, “Every time we played, people would go crazy. I wish everybody could, even once, feel as we get to feel, even before we play a note. You would feel 10 feet taller. As soon as the gig is over, you turn into a shrinking guy. But when you’re up there, pumped up and the music is doing it all for you. Everything changes.”
My growing up experience could not be more different from Jim’s and Charlie’s. When their first album was released in 1979, the Islamic Revolution has taken its firm hold on Iran where I was living at the time. Three years later was when I heard, and saw, my first Simple Minds song, “Promised You a Miracle,” from New Gold Dream (81, 82, 83, 84), taped off Top of the Pops on a bootleg Betamax. It’s electropop deliciousness resonated strongly with me and Simple Minds were added to my collection of musical lifelines.
At this point in our conversation, I feel comfortable sharing this with Jim and Charlie. From Everything is Possible, I saw how and where they grew up, in “post-industrial wasteland” Glasgow, in tower blocks. This is far removed from the privileged mix of Western sensibilities and Middle Eastern traditions with which I grew up. But we have the library in common, as well as reading, music, traveling, and supportive parents.
Jim tells me a great saying of his mother’s: “You’re not better than anyone else, but nobody’s better than you.” And he recounts the first time he heard the Doors, and how he felt hearing Jim Morrison’s voice speaking from a distant California. “I remember being transfixed and feeling that connection with this other Jim from so far away.”
“I was in Bangkok, sitting in a restaurant with three 20-year-old Chinese guys,” Charlie shares. “One of them decided to chat to me to practice his English. When I said I was from Glasgow. He said, ‘Our favorite bands are from Glasgow: Mogwai, Texas,’ and one of the other guys says, ‘Simple Minds.’ I asked him what his favorite album was and he said, ‘Street Fighting Years.’ I asked my manager, who’s been to China, ‘Why would these 20-year-old Chinese guys be interested in an album we did in 1989?’ and he said that was the first year that China was closed.”
There are many insights like these in Everything is Possible. The Simple Minds stories have been told for almost 50 years, but it’s different seeing it put together in this way. The cultural context is invaluable. The input from the likes of Bob Geldof, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, as well as music industry icons Richard Branson, Jimmy Iovine, managers, producers, and radio presenters, gives the Simple Minds story even more perspective. The best parts, however, are when the film follows Jim and Charlie around. It’s heartwarming to see Charlie visiting a guitar shop in Glasgow. It’s a delight to hear Jim speaking to a local restaurateur in Taormina, in flawless Italian.
“We weren’t really interested in ourselves,” says Jim. “We went through things without trying to analyze them. But recently we’ve been asking, ‘Why did we do that? What was the real thinking? What was the explanation?’ There wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a strategy. We were just living it, 24 hours a day, nothing else in our lives, at least for the first 10 years. If we didn’t do a documentary, someone else would do it. We’ve got no intention of stopping working, but we’re tidying things up.”
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Oasis fans got a reality check yesterday (May 13) when the band’s co-manager, Alec McKinlay, told Music Week that not only is there no new album to accompany the band’s upcoming first tour in 16 years, but that the highly anticipated, sold-out jaunt itself would be “the last time around.”
Last year, Oasis singer Liam Gallagher teased fans that a new album was already finished, but that is apparently not the case in reality. “This is very much the last time around, as [group member] Noel [Gallager]’s made clear in the press,” McKinlay said. “It’s a chance for fans who haven’t seen the band to see them, or at least for some of them to. But no, there’s no plan for any new music.”
McKinlay confirmed reports that the tour was planned in absolute secrecy to deter leaks. “We’d obviously been planning it for a while and the moment when it went live was a little bit of a step into the unknown in terms of how big the reaction would be,” he admitted. “When it all hit home, it was just phenomenal. The reaction was very much one of, ‘finally, some good news after all the nonsense that’s been going on in the world.’”
The tour begins July 4 in Cardiff, Wales, and includes more than 40 shows around the world, but will not be extended beyond that, per McKinlay. “Probably the biggest and most pleasing surprise of the reunion announcement is how huge it was internationally,” McKinlay said. “Honestly, we knew it would be big [in the U.K.], and that doesn’t take much intuition. But looking outside the U.K., we knew they had a strong fanbase. We were quite cautious about what that would mean when it came to people actually buying tickets, but we were just bowled over by how huge it was. We could have sold out half-a-dozen Rose Bowls in Pasadena and probably eight MetLife stadiums in New York in a day. We saw the ticket stats. We were watching what was happening and the demand was way beyond our expectations.”
As previously reported, the Gallaghers chose producer Steven Knight and directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace to helm a film about the reunion. Knight is a BAFTA- and Oscar-nominated multi-hyphenate who created Peaky Blinders and is also the co-creator of the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? franchise. Among his music-themed projects are the U.K. ska documentary This Town and the Angelina Jolie-starring Maria Callas biopic Maria.
Southern and Lovelace are best known for the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits and adapting former SPIN writer Lizzy Goodman’s 2000s-era New York music scene book Meet Me in the Bathroom into a film.
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Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will spotlight their fellow film and TV composers and also perform at the first Future Ruins festival, which will be held Nov. 8 at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. “It’s about giving people who are, literally, the best in the world at taking audiences on an emotional ride via music the opportunity to tell new stories in an interesting live setting,” Reznor says of the event.
The stacked lineup includes Cristobal Tapia de Veer (Babygirl, Smile, The White Lotus), Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow (Ex Machina, Civil War), Danny Elfman (Batman, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas), Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin (Suspiria, Profondo Rosso/Deep Red, Dawn of the Dead), Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker, Chernobyl, A Haunting in Venice), a performance of Howard Shore’s score of David Cronenberg’s Crash, Isobel Waller-Bridge (Munich: The Edge of War, Emma., Black Mirror), John Carpenter (Halloween, They Live, The Thing), Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things, Lost in the Night), Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore), Questlove presenting the score works of Curtis Mayfield, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Candyman, Master, Telemarketers), Tamar-kali (Mudbound, Shirley, The Assistant), Terence Blanchard (BlacKkKlansman, Malcolm X, Inside Man) and Hauschka (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave, Lion).
Reznor and Ross will also perform material from their numerous award-winning scores, including The Social Network, Soul, Challengers, Watchmen and Gone Girl. Tickets go on sale May 21.
“There’s no headliner. There’s no hierarchy. This is a stacked lineup of visionaries doing something you might not see again,” Reznor and Ross say.
Meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails’ first tour in three years will get underway June 15 in Dublin and run through Sept. 18 in Los Angeles. Reznor and Ross are also following in the footsteps of electronic music legends Wendy Carlos and Daft Punk by scoring the third film in the Tron franchise, Tron: Ares, which will be released Oct. 10.
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