New York, London, Paris, Munich

Brock Colyar profiling Charli XCX is the sort of pop energy fans pay for:

"I was like, 'I'm going to make a record that you guys think has no commercial hits on it. Or big songs. Or radio songs. Or streaming songs or whatever,'" she recalls. "'But you need to realize that that doesn't fucking matter. We don't live in that world anymore, and I'm not that artist.'" She doesn't care, she tells me several times, about what she considers the old rules of pop stardom: streaming (except her Spotify numbers are pretty solid), magazine profiles (like this one), talk-show appearances (she was on Seth Meyers with Sivan in April), or awards. But she "wouldn't mind" a Grammy, she admits.

Magdalena Bay's Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin cite Suspiria (1977) as one of several influences on their new album Imaginal Disk:

Tenenbaum: Just the visual and musical mood that comes across. More recently, we’ve been into movies like that. The mood that is conveyed in that movie is very strong through the lighting and through everything about it, so it’s very cool.

Lewin: The music is also funny in that movie. I think it was made by this prog band. But it’s this crazy synth-rock with wailing vocals and this drum thing that just keeps going... I don’t know.

(The soundtrack to the Dario Argento movie is of course by Goblin AKA Back to the Goblin, New Goblin, Goblin Rebirth, the Goblin Keys, the Goblins, and Claudio Simonetti's Goblin.)

Microsoft Control Panel is also having a retro moment:

What's incredible about some of the Control Panels at this point is how far back some of their designs go. You're never more than a double-click away from some piece of UI that has been essentially exactly the same since 1996's Windows NT 4.0, when Microsoft's more-stable NT operating system was refreshed with the same user interface as Windows 95 (modern Windows versions descend from NT, and not 95 or 98). The Control Panel idea is even older, dating all the way back to Windows 1.0 in 1985.