On February 14th, 2025, Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear, his internationally acclaimed second album, will be available as a single LP for its 10th anniversary along with a digital-only companion release of demos that were initially released on cassette in 2015.  The digital companion piece (“I Love You, Honeybear Demos, etc.” ) also includes a solo acoustic performance of Nirvana’s ”Heart Shaped Box” recorded for SiriusXM during the …Honeybear cycle.  While his excellent debut, Fear Fun, would “introduce” the world to the singer and songwriter, it was the love and brutal honesty showcased in I Love You, Honeybear that would elevate Father John Misty’s career. The album became his most successful release to date.
 
Tillman wrote the following for the album’s release: “I Love You, Honeybear is a concept album about a guy named Josh Tillman who spends quite a bit of time banging his head against walls, cultivating weak ties with strangers, and generally avoiding intimacy at all costs. This all serves to fuel a version of himself that his self-loathing narcissism can deal with. We see him engaging in all manner of regrettable behavior…
 
“My ambition, aside from making an indulgent, soulful, and epic sound worthy of the subject matter, was to address the sensuality of fear, the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy, and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons in my own voice. Blammo” (Read full bio here).
 
Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear debuted at number 17 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. It appeared on over 70 year-end lists for 2015, with “Album of the Year” honors from the likes of PASTE, Time Out New York, Under The Radar, GQ (UK), and Drowned in Sound with additional Top 20 placements from the likes of Billboard, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Exclaim, BBC, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone. The album would also earn “Best of the Decade” notices from the likes of Pitchfork, PASTE, NME, Aquarium Drunkard, and Consequence of Sound. Last week, I Love You, Honeybear made Rolling Stone’s  The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century list.
 
The success of Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear led to incredible late-night performances of album tracks “Bored in the USA” on The Late Show with David Letterman, “True Affection” on Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Chateau Lobby (#4 For Two Virgins)” on Later…with Jools Holland, “I Love You, Honeybear” on Conan, “The Ideal Husband” on Jimmy Kimmel Live’s outdoor stage, and “Holy Shit” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Father John Misty also earned a 2016 Brit Award nomination for “Best International Male Solo Artist” alongside Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and The Weeknd. 
 
I Love You, Honeybear single LP edition is available to preorder worldwide from Sub Pop. LP preorders from Sub Pop Mega Mart in North America, Mega Mart 2 in the UK and EU, Father John Misty’s Official Website, and select independent retailers worldwide will receive the limited Loser edition on Pearlescent Red vinyl. There is also a Coke Bottle Clear vinyl available in Canada (all vinyl colors available while stock lasts!). As for the aforementioned I Love You, Honeybear demos, those will also be available on all DSPs on February 14th.
 
Also in February, Father John Misty will begin his international headline touring in support of Mahashmashana, his acclaimed new album from 2024, which begins February 12th in Chattanooga, TN at The Signal and runs through Wednesday, April 16th in London, UK at eartH Theatre (Rough Trade Outstore).
 

 
Mahashmashana and its singles have also seen placement on “Best of 2024” lists from the likes of The New Yorker, Variety, The Ringer, Vogue, Under the Radar, Uproxx, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, The AV Club, PASTE, Consequence of Sound, PopMatters, GQ (UK), Philadelphia Inquirer, Pitchfork, New York Times, and more. Recently, Tillman sat for an interview with The Jokermen Podcast, which you can listen to here.
 
Mahashmashana is now available CD/LP/DSPs in North America from Father John Misty’s official merch stores in the US and EU, megamart.subpop.com, Bella Union (UK/EU), and independent retailers worldwide. The Mahashmashana album cover artwork is from Joe Roberts (LSD World Peace).

On April 4th, Greek Artist Σtella (pronounced Stella) will release her mesmerizing new record Adagio on CD/LP/DSPs from Sub Pop. Adagio is a pop record that feels like a warm blanket; it swaddles its listeners with nylon-string guitars, featherlight percussion, psychedelic keyboards, and staccato drums. Written and recorded over the span of five years with a consortium of international collaborators, including !!!’s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest, and time. The album was produced by Σtella and mixed by Edmund Irwin-Singer. Though the bulk of it is sung in English, as all her records have been, Σtella also delivers her first two songs in Greek, “Omorfo Mou,” and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakellariou’s “Ta Vimata.”

Today, you can watch the captivating new video for the album’s title track, “Adagio,” which was Directed by Debora Maité. Click here to watch.
 
Adagio follows the release of her 2022 Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, which has catapulted her beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners and has secured key licensing placements in the MAX show Industry and an online H&M Clothing commercial.
 
Adagio is now available to preorder from Sub Pop. LP preorders from the Sub Pop Mega Mart (North America), Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU), and independent retailers worldwide will receive the album on Clear Pink vinyl in North America and white vinyl in the EU.
 
More about Σtella’s Adagio
 
Almost as soon as Stella Chronopoulou began writing Adagio, her fifth album as Σtella, she knew the time had finally come to sing in Greek, her native tongue. It would be a first. She started the record almost by accident in 2019, during an 11-hour boat ride to the island of Anafi. Σtella had recently gone through a patch of personal turmoil and needed a break from home. On the ferry, she pulled out her cell phone as the boat clipped through the Mediterranean and began with a simple melody, steadily piecing together a rough instrumental. As psychedelic keyboards twinkled and swayed above staccato drums, the track suggested some deep exhalation, as if Σtella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She understood the words would eventually need to be in Greek, given how and where she’d written it, the mood of the moment. But she wasn’t ready yet, or in a rush.
 
Σtella, after all, grew up in a slow place. Truth be told, she wasn’t very far away from the hubbub of Athens, Greece, living just above the historic city in a relatively rural suburb. When her father bought land there several decades ago, his friends joked wolves may eat him. For Σtella, though, it was an idyll: The sounds of passing goats woke her most mornings. She and her friends played unfettered in empty streets, not worried about cars or permission. At night, doors remained unlocked. The living felt easy.
 
But during the last decade, life has steadily become busier for Σtella, who now lives near downtown Athens. She has become one of modern Greece’s most popular musical exports, with five sophisticated and playful pop albums rendered with international élan. After releasing her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she soon catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, of course, but Σtella still sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth.
 
That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancing Adagio. Borrowing its name, of course, from the term for music that’s meant to be played slowly, Adagio is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, its nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling its listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of international collaborators including !!!’s Rafael Cohen and British songwriter Gabriel Stebbing, Adagio is a 27-minute meditation on love and desire, rest and time. Though the bulk of it is indeed sung in English, as all her records have been, Σtella also delivers her first two songs in Greek here—“Omorfo Mou,” the one that began on the boat, and a cover of a 1969 cult classic of the Greek New Wave, Litsa Sakelariou’s “Ta Vimata.” It is a sign of the self-assurance that radiates throughout these tender and smitten little tunes.
 
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Σtella opted to try some new approaches to writing. Upon the suggestion of a mutual friend, she began exchanging emails with !!!’s Cohen (working now under the name Las Palabras), each sharing links to records and sounds they loved. There was an instant chemistry, and they penned five songs through Zoom and email. (They’ve yet to meet.) Three of them provide the framework for Adagio. There’s “Baby Brazil,” a suave tune about falling for someone, about letting go of the need to control everything. Together, Cohen and Σtella found a spellbinding intersection of Tropicalia, disco, and yé-yé. Pushing and pulling between verses of nylon-stringed guitars and choruses where soft strings and electronics rise like bioluminescent tides, “80 Days” suggests giving into desire and into this song’s sweet sweep.
 
But the pair’s hallmark here is the opening title cut, “Adagio,” where Σtella sings to the concept of slowness like some long-lost lover. “I want you to know I hear you, Adagio” she offers over gentle samba percussion and jangling chords. “Why you’re tormenting me?” Her guitar solo then cuts through it with a Wes Montgomery verve, curling like a finger that beckons an object of desire. Maybe it seems strange to write a love song to the idea of slowing down, but who hasn’t felt that way in our era of instant everything—the desire to step back and let the world just come to you? When Σtella sings here, it’s hard not to long for that same state of grace. You can hear it again in the mesmerizing instrumental “Corfu” and the sashaying love song “Can I Say,” written in memoriam for Σtella’s stolen bike.
 
A few years after that boat ride across the Mediterranean, Σtella finally revisited the instrumental she had written on board. She’d always resisted writing and singing in Greek because its words often felt too heavy and intense, the tone not suited to her lilting songs. Still, she knew this one had to be Greek. She thought about the beautiful phrase “Omorfo Mou,” a common pledge of Greek adoration that loosely translates into “my beautiful one.” It soon became a song of want and longing, the antithesis of the way she felt back on the boat, when she was getting away from rather than going toward anything. What’s more, its swaggering rhythm only emerges after Σtella’s winning cover of “Ta Vimata.” The bass and percussion bounce beneath her curling voice, faithful and new, linking her to a lineage of sophisticated Greek pop and the country’s famed New Wave. Two circles close with these two songs, a kind of dual homecoming.
 
Start to finish, Σtella sounds more at ease and comfortable than she’s ever been on Adagio. No, these fetching songs will not slow her career or grant her that title track’s wish. Still, for half an hour, Adagio does add an extra measure of warmth to the world, with time loosening its grip even if it doesn’t slow down.

Σtella
Adagio
 
Track Listing:
1. Adagio
2. Ta Vimata
3. Omorfo Mou
4. Baby Brazil feat. Las Palabras
5. Can I Say
6. 80 Days
7. Too Poor
8. Corfu
9. Caravan

On March 14th, 2025, Sub Pop will release Clipping’s sixth album, Dead Channel Sky, the group’s long-awaited Cyberpunk and Hip Hop project. The album features the previously released tracks “Run It” and “Keep Pushing,” along with the highlights “Welcome Home Warrior (Feat. Aesop Rock),” “Code,” and today’s offering, “Change the Channel.”
 
Dead Channel Sky also features guest appearances from Nels Cline, Bitpanic, Tia Nomore, and Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras, and was produced and mixed by Clipping and Steve Kaplan and mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering. Dead Channel Sky follows the release of the group’s acclaimed horrorcore series Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), also available from Sub Pop.
 
In the coming days, Clipping will also share the intense official video for “Change the Channel” directed by Merawi Gerima. 
 
Clipping are also announcing headlining North American tour dates in support of Dead Channel Sky, which begins March 14th with a hometown show in Los Angeles at The Echoplex and May 3rd in Sacramento at Goldfield. Clipping will appear at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival on Saturday, March 29th, 2025. Please find a complete list of dates below.
 

 
Dead Channel Sky will be available on CD/2xLP/DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com (US) and Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU) and your local record store will receive the limited Loser edition vinyl on Emerald/Forest Green Ghostly Mashup (North America) and Neon Pink (UK/Europe). There is also a Silver vinyl edition available from independent retailer Rough Trade in the US and UK (All limited edition vinyl colors are available while stock lasts!). The Dead Channel Sky album art was created by Designers Republic.
 

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called Clipping “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.
 
In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.
 
Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.
 
Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? After all, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.
 
On Dead Channel Sky, Clipping texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of the 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.
 
Clipping are very story-oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since the band’s conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards (one of science fiction’s top literary prizes), and a novella spun-off from their music was nominated for a third. As Clipping, they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists as they have fellow rappers. Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” as well the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior.” Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose a line from the classic Dutch hardcore track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.
 
Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Everything is very important!

Clipping
Dead Channel Sky
 
CD + Digital Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Dominator
3. Change the Channel
4. Run It
5. Go
6. Simple Degradation (Plucks 1-13) (with Bitpanic)
7. Code
8. Dodger
9. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
10. Scams (feat. Tia Nomore)
11. Keep Pushing
12. “From Bright Bodies” (Interlude)
13. Mood Organ
14. Polaroids
15. Simple Degradation (Plucks 14-18) (with Bitpanic)
16. Madcap
17. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (feat. Cartel Madras)
18. “And You Called” (Interlude)
19. Welcome Home Warrior (feat. Aesop Rock)
20. Ask What Happened
 
2xLP Tracklisting:
A1. Intro
A2. Dominator
A3. Change the Channel
A4. Run It
A5. Go
B1. Code
B2. Dodger
B3. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
B4. Scams (ft. Tia Nomore)
C1. Keep Pushing
C2. Mood Organ
C3. Polaroids
C4. Madcap
D1. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (ft. Cartel Madras)
D2. Welcome Home Warrior (ft. Aesop Rock)
D3. Ask What Happened