For Kacey Musgraves’ latest act, she’s putting the cowboy hat back on. ‘Middle Of Nowhere’, the Texan artist’s seventh album, unfolds like an old Western film. With Musgraves as its balladeering protagonist, it takes us on a wry, roaming journey through the highs and lows of love and womanhood – from loneliness and “dry spells” to infatuation and disappointment – before arriving at its ultimate destination: back to Musgraves herself.

• READ MORE: No Na: the fiery R&B girl group bringing Indonesia to the world

Stepping back into the saddle – she literally arrived to her Coachella set on horseback last month – this version of Musgraves is the closest we’ve had to her early music in years. From the gently snarky ‘Everybody Wants To Be A Cowboy’ to the liminal dispatch from the desert, ‘Coyote’, this is the steely, stripped-down, bluegrass-inspired storytelling of ‘Same Trailer Different Park’.

A noticeable step away from the psychedelia of ‘Golden Hour’, the fatalism of ‘Star-Crossed’ and the grass-touching spirituality of ‘Deeper Well’, ‘Middle of Nowhere’ trades those albums’ expansiveness for something more pared back: steel guitar, mandolin, a relaxed drawl. Folk musician Gregory Alan Isakov provides a whimsical cameo, while bluegrass darling Billy Strings and country legends Willie Nelson and Miranda Lambert all feature. The influences of Musgraves’ beloved Nelson and longtime mentor John Prine in particular are undeniable, these meandering songs painted with brushes of poeticism and outlaw country.

As its title evokes, ‘Middle Of Nowhere’ flows with a sense of isolation, its unembellished lyrics and sparser sound creating a real feeling of standing alone in the desert. A resolute sense of solitude is the album’s central theme: not quite loneliness but a choiceful, empowered singledom. This is one of Musgraves’ most thematically cohesive records – each track a small statement on choosing yourself, rejecting the unfulfilling and charting your own course. A lovely moment on the title track captures this essence: “It’s just me and me / And that’s all I need”.

The album’s standouts are its forays into Tejano sound. ‘Back On The Wagon’, ‘Uncertain, TX’ and ‘Mexico Honey’ are transportive – dreamy pools in which Musgraves’ honeyed vocals and hazy sensibilities converge with her Texan roots in magical ways. Elsewhere, the twangy, winking ‘Dry Spell’ and camp, catty Lambert duet ‘Horses And Divorces’ are familiar flashes of Musgraves’ quintessential comic bite.

It isn’t flawless: a few tracks blur together in the middle stretch, and some lyrical moments fall flat. But the integrity and conviction behind the creative statement more than compensate. At a time of maximalism and hyperactivity in music, this grounded, assured commitment to songs that sway rather than stomp feels quietly radical. Though it’s called ‘The Middle of Nowhere’, you get the sense that Musgraves is right where she wants to be.

Details

• Record label: Polydor Records/Lost Highway
• Release date: May 1, 2026

The post Kacey Musgraves – ‘Middle Of Nowhere’ review: a country heroine’s journey back to her roots appeared first on NME.

Well, they were really asking for it with that title, weren’t they? With jump-in-your-seat scares, supernatural silliness and a hodgepodge of spooky cinematic references, Hokum is a bubbling Irish stew from West Cork-born writer and director Damian McCarthy. He throws everything into the pot: local folkloric tales of an evil witch, a magic mushroom-gobbling oddball who lives in the woods, a basement that holds dark secrets. The first few slurps go down a treat, but ultimately the clashing flavours overpower one another. Sometimes less is more, y’know?

• Read more: The 10 weirdest horror films of all time

Ohm (Adam Scott) is a successful American author who’s pitched up at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a creepy establishment in rural Ireland. He’s arrived to scatter the ashes of his parents, who honeymooned here decades ago and always longed to return. Before even stepping foot inside the place, he’s encountered a strange apparition and a dead goat. Upon check-in, he finds an old man regaling random young lads with a hair-raising story about the aforementioned witch. Ohm chastises the auld fella, who intones: “There are worse things out there than strangers, yank.”

So it proves. The author, a curmudgeon who’s breathtakingly vicious to a bellboy (Will O’Connell) with dreams of becoming a writer, nevertheless strikes up a rapport with Fiona (Florence Ordesh), another staff member. When Fiona goes missing, Ohm makes it his mission to find her. All fingers point towards wood-dwelling Jerry (David Wilmot), who insists he’s had a vision that suggests her fate may have something to do with the hotel’s eerily sealed-off Honeymoon Suite.

All of this bubbles along pretty nicely for the movie’s first half. McCarthy has said that Hokum “doesn’t take itself too seriously” and indeed he pulls off a good balance of chills and gentle laughs. Scott manages to convey his character’s darker side without making him too dislikeable, so it’s all the funnier when Ohm – whose patience is thin at the best of times – encounters the local weirdos. References to The Shining (the overhead tracking shots of Ohm driving through the Irish countryside, the woman in the haunted room) are a little on-the-nose, perhaps, but do set the film’s enjoyably parodic tone.

Alas, things start to go awry when Ohm finally gets into the Honeymoon Suite. Until then, we’ve seen shadowy glimpses of the witch, with the movie teasing her grand reveal – tension that has carried the story so far. Perhaps something really horrifying happened in the editing room, but the film soon earns its title in the worst way.

A murder mystery collides with a haunted hotel horror until one of them is pretty much forgotten about, resulting in a narrative that feels frustratingly aimless. It actually becomes slightly difficult to make out what’s going on, given that two of the supporting characters are so similar and underdeveloped that it’s hard to tell them apart. And as for the ending: we won’t spoil anything, but the dreaded words “it was all a dream” come to mind. Still, a few of the jump scares are ruthlessly effective and, with its cartoonishly gothic tone, Hokum does what it says on the tin.

The post ‘Hokum’ review: for good and ill, this haunted hotel chiller earns its title appeared first on NME.

“You are the hell that I made for myself,” repeats Lip Critic frontman Bret Kaser on ‘Two Lucks’, the opening track to the band’s second album ‘Theft World’. An anxious, self-lacerating spiral, the song throws you straight into the album’s central tensions of obsession, possession and destruction. As synths buckle and percussion hits like machinery tearing itself apart, Kaser frames desire as something terrifyingly corrosive.

• READ MORE: On The Cover – The unstoppable force of Lip Critic

It’s hard not to draw a line from that mindset to the real-life fan who stole Kaser’s identity and made hundreds of purchases in his name. When the band eventually tracked him down, he was wearing a Five Nights At Freddy’s hoodie and claimed he believed Lip Critic had been hiding coded messages in their music as part of an elaborate scavenger hunt. They recorded him as he explained this imagined mythology, filled with characters, symbols and conspiracies. In response, they scrapped the material they had been working on before and created ‘Theft World’.

That tension runs through every track on the album. Since breaking out of New York’s underground in 2024 with ‘Hex Dealer’, the band have built a reputation for excess, their sound borrowing the abrasiveness of hardcore and throwing it together with electronic textures and post-punk vocals that echo Black Midi at their greatest. And on ‘Theft World’, that signature chaos feels newly focused, the noise mirroring the mental instability and anguish at the album’s core.

Back in 2024, Kaser told NME that their music is “the sound of us trying to make the most visceral, poppy, sweet candy moments and the darkest, disgusting, viscerally gross moments too”. Here, it’s captured on ‘Jackpot’, where a Death Grips-style beat stutters like a casino floor short-circuiting, while the climax reaches Cronenberg levels of gore: “Pull the zippers out / Hidden underneath my skin / Coin pouch and her allowance”. It’s gross and thrilling and weirdly catchy all at once.

Tensions peak at ‘Legs in a Snare’, one of the album’s most emotionally exposed moments. Beneath the blown-out production and spiralling repetition, there’s something almost painfully direct in lines like, “So I’m taking down the pictures / And I’m packing up the clothes,” where collapse feels domestic and immediate rather than abstract. Meanwhile, the refrain of ‘200 Bottles On Eviction’ lands cold and indifferent, like a final verdict. By the time Kaser repeats “I lost myself”, the record reaches an acceptance of total vulnerability.

It’s brutally clear that even after your money, privacy and sense of self are taken, life in ‘Theft World’ keeps going, indifferent to whatever you’re feeling. Yet it’s that sense of twisting bleakness into something that sounds thrilling is what makes the album so effective. Lip Critic take the horror of Kaser’s very personal trauma into something strangely communal and alive. Rather than just documenting, they place you right in the centre of the chaos – and you’ve got to sit with it, no matter how weird things get.

Details

• Record label: Partisan Records
• Release date: May 1, 2026

The post Lip Critic – ‘Theft World’ review: a flurry of chaos, paranoia and corrosive desire appeared first on NME.

a sequel for summer blockbuster season? Groundbreaking. But this follow-up to The Devil Wears Prada – which grossed a hefty $326 million and featured an Oscar-nominated Meryl Streep – actually feels quite exciting. If anything, David Frankel’s 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s salty roman à clef has grown in stature over the past two decades.

Biting one-liners like “by all means move at a glacial pace” and “details of your incompetence do not interest me” have entered the pop cultural lexicon. Meanwhile, revisionist thinkpieces have argued that the real villain of the piece wasn’t Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the fearsome magazine editor who terrorised Anne Hathaway‘s unlikely assistant Andy, but Adrian Grenier’s negging boyfriend Nate. Even Vogue boss Anna Wintour, whom Miranda was allegedly based on, has called the film “a fair shot”.

It helps that pretty much everyone – except for Grenier, of course – has returned for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Frankel directs from a script by original screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who finds a just-about-convincing way to reunite Streep’s withering editrice with her ambitious former assistant. However, a full 20 years after imperious Miranda schooled fashion-averse Andy about the significance of cerulean blue, the power dynamic has shifted somewhat.

Miranda is still the revered editor-in-chief of fashion mag Runway, but sales have plummeted since legacy media was overtaken by digital content, and a recent article about a dodgy fast fashion brand has spooked advertisers. Andy, who is now an award-winning but conveniently unemployed investigative journalist, is parachuted in to restore Runway’s gravitas as its new features editor. Can they learn to work together to save an ailing institution that may or may not be based on Vogue? Spoiler: they can, though Brosh McKenna’s screenplay lobs in enough obstacles to justify the two-hour runtime.

Where the original affectionately satirised the fun and frippery of the fashion industry, The Devil Wears Prada 2 often feels like a paean to old-school print media. After her fast fashion fumble, Miranda is forced to take a humiliating meeting with Dior, one of Runway’s top advertisers, which is now headed up by another former assistant, Emily Blunt‘s brittle Emily. When her one-time underling suggests a puff piece about Chanel’s new flagship store to smooth over the cracks, Miranda agrees without batting an eyelid.

The decline of old-school journalism really isn’t funny – ask any writer – but fortunately this film manages to be witty as well as surprisingly pertinent.  The promotion that Miranda is now angling for sounds suspiciously similar to Wintour’s global chief content officer role at Condé Nast. Streep’s queenly editor may be a little less devilish than she was in the Smartphone era, but she’s still capable of giving a scheming rival an absolutely savage dressing down. Hathaway, Blunt and Stanley Tucci, who’s poignant as Miranda’s right-hand man Nigel, also tear into their old roles like interns handed a luxury goody bag.

Kenneth Branagh is barely tested as Miranda’s new husband Stuart but Bridgerton‘s Simone Ashley is suitably aloof as Miranda’s new assistant, Amari. When Andy mentions that she gave away the vintage Chanel she pocketed during her first Runway stint, Amari’s unimpressed look is practically Priestly-esque.

A perfunctory romantic subplot linking Andy to a bland property developer (Patrick Brammall) should have been edited out and the ending is perhaps a little too sentimental. But this is still a smart and satisfying sequel. The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels like a sleek update on a classic, not a cheap knock-off that falls apart in the wash.

The post ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ review: smart, stylish sequels will never go out of fashion appeared first on NME.

The spotlights at the back of the stage at Alexandra Palace Theatre flash on and off, and the storm that Dove Ellis and his band are conjuring comes to a sudden halt. For a moment, the 1,000-strong crowd stand in complete silence, both enraptured and confused. This is part of the thrill of the Irish musician’s gigs right now – even if you know his debut album ‘Blizzard’ front to back, his setlists are still peppered with unexpected moments and unreleased songs that can catch you off guard.

There are plenty of people in London tonight (April 28) who do know Ellis’ released songs off by heart, too. As quickly becomes apparent after he takes the stage, he’s not an artist whom people like casually. Instead they hang on his every note, taking in the show in stillness and silence, the usual chatter of London crowds muted within the theatre’s resplendent walls.

This fervour around the indie-folk artist is nothing new. It’s been building since he broke through last year with the single ‘To The Sandals’, ‘Pale Song’, and especially ‘Love Is’ – his biggest song to date. Support slots with Geese brought further exposure before ‘Blizzard’ arrived in December, cementing him as a bona fide one to watch. Still, thanks to his habit of swerving most interviews so far, Dove Ellis remains enigmatic.

While for some emerging artists, this zealous response might feel a little overegged, that’s not the case for Ellis. Joined by four musicians on stage who all play multiple instruments, his show is a little ramshackle but entirely intentional and inventive. When the band step on stage at the start of the night, the lights dim completely so that they play most of the first song – ‘Brown Hole’, another unreleased track driven by sweeping viola and the singer’s tremulous voice – through pitch black. Halfway through, Ellis commands, “Lights on”, but rather than a spotlight focusing on him, a window of white light rotates across the stage and the room in front of it, before it switches to overlapping panels of pink, green and blue. It’s an impactful start for an artist so fresh – and an approach that doesn’t let up for the rest of the set.

Tonight’s gig is the second in as many days that Ellis has performed in London, following a show at buzzy venue of the moment The George Tavern the night before. While that show was likely just as special to be at, tonight’s venue feels like a much more ideal setting – one that allows his voice, which has been frequently compared to Jeff Buckley, to truly shine. It makes the beauty in songs like the simple but utterly effective ‘When You Tie Your Hair Up’ even stronger and grander, Ellis’ voice effortlessly reaching swelling, emotional highs. His band, too, make the likes of ‘To The Sandals’ and ‘Love Is’ punchier and spikier, taking the set into bouncier territory.

“They’re all going to leave the stage now,” Ellis says in a rare moment of chat, pointing to his departing bandmates and introducing them one by one. As they head off, he moves to the piano to his right and brings things to a rousing, enthralling finale with ‘Nest Among Stars’. We’d say it’s one of his most beautiful songs yet to be released – a stark but emotional track in which he describes “love jumping around like fleas” – but it’s hard to tell what or how many other gems he’s keeping up his sleeve. As the song comes to a close, he makes a heavy thud on the wood of the piano and walks off stage – a finish (before the encore, at least) that feels fittingly in keeping with the rest of the night: unpredictable and imbued with a little drama.

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Dove Ellis played:

‘Brown Hole’
‘Pale Song’
‘2 Brothers Smoking’
‘When You Tie Your Hair Up’
‘Mozart’
‘Heaven Has No Wings Itself’
Marooning’
‘I’ll Be Gone By Christmas’
‘Feathers, Cash’
‘Little Left Hope’
‘Love Is’
‘To The Sandals’
‘Nest Among Stars’
‘April 14th’
‘Away You Stride’

The post Dove Ellis live in London: a captivating voice appeared first on NME.

Making that ‘difficult’ second album can’t be made any easier when you’re made out to be a terrorist and enemy of the state. Being put on trial in front of the world would break most bands. Do you let the shitstorm smash you against the rocks? Or do you sail on with that almighty wind behind you?

For the headline-grabbing Belfast controversy-mongers Kneecap, the stakes couldn’t be much higher. While it was their statements and stunts to spotlight the plight of Palestine and call out the actions of the Israeli state that landed them in hot water, their Beastie Boys-esque approach to big tunes and hedonism has led naysayers to write their music off as little more than shit-stirring noise about sex, drugs, wanking, fucking around, and finding out.

• READ MORE: Kneecap on The Cover – giving peace, protest and partying a chance

Their barnstorming debut album ‘Fine Art’ had all of that in spades but also made for a Trojan Horse statement on the Irish condition of keeping your language, identity and ambition alive in the shadow on post-colonialism (all explored in their bafflingly good self-titled biopic). But now, can they make a record with the weight to match all this attention and hysteria?

The title track of ‘Fenian’ says it all: a party-starting rave-rap rager that sees Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí reclaim the often-derogatory term as a badge of honour, pride and community, all delivered with a wink and a “Tiochfaidh ár lá” (“our day will come”). The political thread of the record runs from the woozy Massive Attack-esque opener ‘Éire go Deo’ honouring past champions of the Irish language creating “a movement that is going from strength to strength all over the country”, through the hip-hop-noir of ‘Smugglers & Scholars’ showing the real Ireland in the face of “poetry and clovers”, to ‘Occupied 6’’s oppressive portrait of life under the Troubles.

‘Carnival’ tackles the “double standard of the highest degree” of Mo Chara being rolled out in court and the band becoming a distraction (“every day in the news, me and Kneecap are not the story, a genocide is happening”), while the industrial banger ‘Liars Tale’ tears down “Netanyahu’s bitch and genocide armer” Keir Starmer – asking why it should take three lads from Ireland to be “doing the politicians jobs that they’re trying to avoid”. They plant the focus back on Gaza with the album’s real triumph on the simply titled ‘Palestine’: a collab with Ramallah-based rapper Fawzi, delivered with a heartfelt and direct candour that “we won’t stop until everyone is free”.

It’s a deeply personal album, too. The DnB rush of ‘Headcase’ warns of the perfect storm of booze, addiction, pressure and no opportunities back home, the trip-hop sigh of ‘Cocaine Hill’ dreamily drifts through Mo Chara’s drug-fuelled insomnia, and the ‘90s rap bounce of ‘Cold At The Top’ asks what you’re really left with when the bag is done. You get to peer beneath the balaclava and get to know the real Kneecap a little more, especially on the beating human heart of the album, ‘Irish Goodbye’ – a devastating reflection on Móglaí Bap’s mother’s depression and taking her own life, and a thank you for inspiring his courage. A lush collab with Kae Tempest, the album closer ends with the tender and heartfelt question: “How come it’s always the best of us that can’t bear to be?” 

Produced by Dan Carey (Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, Foals), ‘Fenian’ is a spraypainted brick wall of consistency, amplifying the adventure of The Prodigy and Burial, seamlessly but tastefully hopping genres while keeping the vibe up to retain Kneecap’s knack for having a good time to illuminate the hard times. Put all the rage-bait headlines aside and what you’re left with is a solid, progressive and fearless album from a group that could just as easily be dicking around instead of making music that matters. In that sense at least, their day has come.

Details

• Release date: May 01, 2026
• Record label: Heavenly

The post Kneecap – ‘Fenian’ review: headline-grabbing trio reach power and maturity appeared first on NME.

Returnal, released in 2021, blended a deep literacy of arcade style coin op games with the looping timelines of the modern roguelike subgenre. It’s a fiendishly compelling formula that Returnal‘s spiritual successor Saros takes even further.

• READ MORE: ‘Pragmata’ review: ‘The Last Of Us’ meets ‘Alien’ in surprisingly wholesome space horror

You play as Arjun Devraj, crew member of the Echelon IV and an enforcer for Soltari, a hegemonic megacorp engaged in the standard sci fi enterprise of interstellar colonisation. Galactic domination has hit a bit of a snag, however, on their latest claim, Carcosa. Saros offers no real preamble, throwing you straight into a Groundhog Day-in-space nightmare. Carcosa is procedurally regenerating itself with gleeful abandon, while periodic golden eclipses send crew members mad – a condition reminiscent of the cultish astronauts in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

The mission must continue, though. Players are in thrall to a sassily authoritarian AI called Primary, Soltari’s managerial representative on the ground, who isn’t willing to sacrifice the company’s return on investment. Arjun has his own agenda, hunting a woman from his past.

Gameplay-wise, Saros improves on Returnal in just about every conceivable way. Developer Housemarque’s genius lies in their knowing translation of some of the medium’s oldest formal traditions into high-production values and modern shooter sensibilities.

Take the enemies: from tentacled robots to beasts red in tooth and claw, they are defined by the patterns of the glowing orbs they emit. Be prepared to react to steeplechase fences, closing walls, skipping ropes, sprinklers or, in the case of the magnificent bosses, turret guns and Death Star beams. Each colour of orb demands a different response: blue can be shielded and you’ll need to swing fists for red. When an eclipse descends, amping up enemy power and environmental hazards, these orbs turn yellow and begin corrupting your health bar permanently.

Arjun has his own armoury to draw on which includes perfectly tuned pistols, shotguns and rifles that offer secondary modes at a half-press of the PS5’s L2. He zips about at a faster clip than Returnal’s protagonist Selene – and combined with jump pads and a later-acquired grapple, Housemarque’s combat dance is pretty perfect.

Quality of life changes over Returnal are plentiful and welcome too. Perhaps the most significant is biome teleportation – a chance to skip the roguelike tradition of repeating the first section to reach later ones. Artefacts temporarily increase Arjun’s proficiency run to run, but a skill tree also furnishes him with a permanent set of power-ups. Carcosan modifiers act like Hades‘ pacts of punishment, but with positive influences too – such as increased weapon damage. Together, these systems give the player free reign over difficulty: Returnal‘s veterans will be warming up their thumbs for self-inflicted pain.

For those who valued Returnal’s solitary weirdness, isolation and creeping madness, the new cast of sci-fi crew members can feel a bit more conventional. This isn’t a charge against the story itself, but a simpler point about the proliferation of voices competing for the player’s attention. What is lost, when a teammate comes barking in over the radio, is a sense of the wondrous – a loss compounded by the vibrant beauty of Carcosa itself: epic monoliths, spiralling towers, cavernous mines, at times rivalling the best of cosmic Nintendo adventure Metroid. Occasionally, you may yearn for the stoic silence of that franchise’s quiet hero Samus.

‘Saros’ is out April 30 on PlayStation 5

The post ‘Saros’ review: ballsy successor to modern cult classic ‘Returnal’ appeared first on NME.

D espite the attendant controversy and a reportedly chaotic production – more on that later – this Michael Jackson biopic could clean up at the box office. It’s currently tracking for a $60million opening weekend in North America, which would beat the $51million debut of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. It’s hard not to view that glossy blockbuster as the blueprint for Michael, not least because the two movies share a producer, Graham King.

Michael’s other producers are John Branca and John McClain, the co-executors of Jackson’s estate. Their goal is to showcase his sparkling discography. Jackson may be the tarnished King Of Pop but he’s still big business. Nearly 17 years after his death, he racks up more monthly Spotify streams than any other non-living artist. 

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, who began his career shooting music videos before levelling up with blockbusters such as 2014’s The Equalizer, Michael is a much safer movie than it might have been. According to a recent Variety report, the third act was supposed to explore how Jackson was impacted by multiple allegations of child molestation in the ’90s and beyond. However, Jackson’s estate reportedly had to fork out for reshoots after it emerged that the singer’s out-of-court settlement with Jordan Chandler, the first of his accusers, included a clause barring Chandler from being depicted on screen. Whatever the truth behind the alleged reshoots, Michael is no career-spanning biopic.

It means that Jackson’s story essentially ends in the early ’80s. ‘Thriller’ has become the best-selling album of all time but the tabloids have yet to brand him “Wacko Jacko”. Instead, the film’s dramatic tension comes from his fractious relationship with his father Joe (Colman Domingo), an exacting ‘dadager’ who beats young Michael (Juliano Krue Valdi) with a belt.

Fuqua’s film skips through Michael’s early hits with The Jackson 5 – ‘ABC’, ‘I’ll Be There’, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ – before focusing on his solo breakthrough via 1978’s ‘Off The Wall’ album. Now played with convincing mannerisms and vocal inflections by Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s real-life nephew, the singer gradually extricates himself from his father’s shadow. 

Along the way, there are frequent reminders of Jackson’s genius. The highlight of the entire film is a dazzling recreation of his ‘Billie Jean’ performance at 1983’s Motown 25 special, during which he performed the moonwalk for the first time. Insights into his creative process are a little less forensic: after Jackson tells manager Branca (Miles Teller) that he wants to be the world’s biggest artist, he goes away and writes the songs that make this happen: ‘Beat It’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. But was it really that easy?

Throughout, the efficient script by John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall) paints the singer as a benevolent but driven manchild who visits sick kids – and adults – in hospital. There are hints that Jackson’s fondness for cosmetic surgery could become a problem but it’s bizarre that his most famous sibling, Janet Jackson, is never even mentioned.

So, Michael feels like a job well done: it’s a slick, accessible advert for Jackson’s incredible imperial phase. But if the singer’s estate wanna be startin’ somethin’ bigger like a film franchise, they’ll have their work cut out.

The post ‘Michael’ review: safe, shiny reminder of the King Of Pop’s musical genius appeared first on NME.

In 2024, Baby Reindeer exploded onto TV screens and dominated the global consciousness in a way few series have. For first-time showrunner Richard Gadd, there were bucketloads of awards, endless talk show appearances and even high-profile court cases to deal with. See, the main buzz about Baby Reindeer (beyond a gripping portrayal of sexual assault, depression and substance abuse) had to do with its semi-autobiographical origins. And when social media sleuths tracked down the real-life inspiration for monstrous villain-stalker Martha, she sued for $170m. Legally, Gadd’s still not allowed to talk about the details.

This is probably why Half Man, his new project, is completely fictional. Set largely in Scotland across several decades, the six-episode BBC miniseries follows two totally different step-brothers. Niall, the younger, exists at the mercy of his school bullies. Terrorised for being nerdy and gentle, he is also gay but firmly in the closet. He’s most terrified of revealing this secret to psychopathic (and homophobic) elder sibling Ruben, recently released from a juvenile detention centre for biting off someone’s nose.

After Ruben dispatches Niall’s classroom tormentors at the point of a switchblade, they become friends. Well, sort of. Ruben runs extremely hot, liable to explode into a violent rage at the merest irritation and treats Niall as you would a beloved family dog. Fondly but never equally. Occasionally, this dynamic tips over into outright abuse. When Ruben – under the impression he is rewarding Niall – brings home a girlfriend for him to forcibly lose his virginity with, it is one of the most harrowing sequences you will see all year. Despite this, Niall retains a tenderness towards Ruben that leads him to excuse his repeatedly horrendous behaviour as they grow up together.

On the whole, these early episodes are pretty average. Mitchell Robertson gives Niall a downtrodden quality, which makes him sympathetic but frustrating to root for. Whereas Stuart Campbell, who plays Ruben, mostly just shouts and swings his fists around.

Much better are the later episodes, when Jamie Bell and Gadd himself step in as thirty-something versions of the two lads. Then Gadd’s knack for creating complex, compelling characters really comes to the fore. Niall, it turns out, has a vindictive streak of his own – and Ruben’s assumed wickedness gets examined through the lens of mental illness, rather than simple good and bad. Their toxic relationship develops into a chess-like revenge game, where one’s successes and failures impact the other, slowly unravelling their motivations. It’s a bit like the classic Japanese film Rashomon, where the same story is told from different, contradictory points of view. Though in this case, the truth is self-evident – it’s more about untangling blame, guilt and at what point traumatised men should take responsibility for their actions.

Ultimately, Gadd’s served up another unpleasantly captivating drama about a flawed victim and the psychologically unstable figure that haunts them. Baby Reindeer fans will drink it down.

‘Half Man’ is streaming now on BBC iPlayer. Episodes drop weekly on Fridays

The post ‘Half Man’ review: more dark and addictive drama from ‘Baby Reindeer’ creator Richard Gadd appeared first on NME.

For the past two decades, Dave Grohl has always had a hook on which to hang each new Foo Fighters record. ‘In Your Honor’ was a hard-and-soft double album, while follow-up ‘Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace’ condensed those two sides into a single disc. Seeking authenticity, they cut ‘Wasting Light’ in Grohl’s garage, before recording eight songs in eight different cities for ‘Sonic Highways’. ‘Concrete and Gold’ pivoted to pop; ‘Medicine at Midnight’ aimed for a broad stylistic palette; ‘But Here We Are’ reckoned with unthinkable grief.

• READ MORE: ‘Look Outside Your Window’ review: Slipknot members harness a different type of fear on their long-lost album
  

Ahead of ‘Your Favorite Toy’, though, Grohl has been more taciturn. One of the few remarks he’s made on the record about this 12th Foo Fighters album is that “it feels new”, which is curious, because it sounds like the Foo Fighters of old. Its closest stylistic cousin within the band’s catalogue is their self-titled debut, written and almost entirely recorded alone by Grohl as he was sifting through the post-grunge wreckage of Nirvana.

At its best, ‘Your Favorite Toy’ broils with the same kind of exposed-nerve punk energy as the band’s earliest iteration did. The riff-driven swagger of the title track is a case in point, as is the scorching, angry ‘Of All People’, which evokes 1995 single ‘I’ll Stick Around’ – its lyrical target not Courtney Love, but a drug dealer Grohl knew in the ’90s who miraculously escaped the death and chaos they helped sow.

‘Spit Shine’ and ‘Amen, Caveman’ are further standouts, hauling the listener along with their breakneck pace while cleverly imbuing a hard rock instrumental palette with infectious melody. This is their first album with new drummer Ilan Rubin, formerly of Nine Inch Nails, and he passes the audition with flying colours; the best tracks tend to be the ones on which his thunderous percussive work is setting the pace.

Vocally, Grohl has rediscovered his roar, but lyricism has never been his strongest suit, and much of it here is throwaway; those looking for signs of where his head is at after his infidelity scandal two years ago will be largely disappointed. But a fascinating exception is ‘Child Actor’, on which Grohl – who’s come to relish the spotlight after 30 years as the Foos’ frontman – unflinchingly examines his need for validation; it is the sound of somebody who has knocked themselves off their own perch searching for answers in the mirror.

‘Your Favorite Toy’ is a few more tracks of that depth away from being the most vital Foo Fighters record since 1997’s ‘The Colour and the Shape’. For now, at least, they have remembered that no-frills punk, played fast and loud, suits them much better than middle-of-the-road dad-rock.

Details

• Record label: Roswell Records/Columbia Records
• Release date: April 24, 2026

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