With rumors percolating for months on fansites, Reddit boards and Twitter, fans of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst got a huge treat last night when the pair dropped an entire album, Better Oblivion Community Center, essentially announcing their partnership for the first time. The pair had kept their plans under wraps for months as they wrote and recorded in Los Angeles in the summer and fall of 2018. Within an hour of the album’s surprise release, the band were performing—for the very first time—on network television, on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (Dead Oceans)

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New York trio Sunflower Bean released their critically acclaimed sophomore album Twentytwo in Blue last year, earning year-end list nods from the likes of Paste, NME and more. Now the band is kicking off 2019 strong with the release of their new EP King Of The Dudes. The EP features lead single “Come For Me,” which marks the band’s Billboard BDS Chart debut, coming in at #37. The band explains, “This EP does not give a fuck. It’s reactionary, and a sharpened response to our times. Death, birth, aggression, addiction, and power…no holds barred.” (Mom + Pop)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Interview & Fashion Shoot with Sunflower Bean.

After migrating to New York City from Uruguay and working in a factory, Juan Wauters turned to music to alleviate his boredom and loneliness. He eventually formed garage act the Beets with a friend from a community college art class, releasing two records on Brooklyn label Captured Tracks. Wauters went solo in 2014 with another two critically acclaimed records on the same label. Now he makes a departure from his almost completely English-sung recordings: his third solo album, La Onda de Juan Pablo (2019), is sung entirely in Spanish and recorded with local musicians throughout Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Chile. Mexico and Puerto Rico. (Captured Tracks)

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Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow comes four years after Are We There, and reckons with the life that gets lived when you put off the small and inevitable maintenance in favor of something more present. Throughout Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten veers towards the driving, dark glimmer moods that have illuminated the edges of her music and pursues them full force, delivering an ambitious album that provokes our most sensitive impulses: reckless affections, spirited nurturing, and tender courage. (Jagjaguwar)

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Winner of four major prizes at Cannes Film Festival 2018 and nominated for a Golden Globe, Belgian director Lucas Dhont’s debut feature Girl is a stunning exploration of identity and society. It follows Lara, a fifteen-year-old girl born in a boy’s body, as she prepares for gender reassignment while striving to become a professional ballerina. (Netflix)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Read our interview with director Lucas Dhont and lead actor Victor Polster.

Director Barry Jenkins follows up his multi-Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016) with If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the 1974 novel of the same name by American writer James Baldwin. A richly layered and atmospheric work set in 1970s Harlem, the film follows wife-to-be Tish as she desperately scrambles to prove her fiancé innocent of a crime he did not commit, while carrying their first child. (Annapurna Pictures)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Barry Jenkins x Ashton Sanders on Moonlight

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 75th Venice Film Festival, The Favourite is a lavish, hilarious period drama film from acclaimed director by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster (2015), The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (2017)). With brilliant performances from Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman (who won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice) the story focuses on the behind-the-scenes politics of the royal court during the reign of Queen Anne in the early 18th century. While England is at war with the French, the frail Queen’s closest friend and a new, extremely ambitious servant battle it out to be court favourites. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos on The Lobster

During his twenty-year stint as a photographer for the National Geographic Society, 300 of Nathan Benn’s photographs were published in National Geographic magazine and numerous books. His 2013 award-winning book, Kodachrome Memory: American Pictures 1972-1990, was published by Powerhouse Books and praised by The Wall St Journal as “timeless and particular.” Benn’s follow up,  A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs, shows the photographer’s home state at the dawn of the 1980s, a time when Florida’s only true constant was change. Benn’s vibrant, idiosyncratic images reflect the charming—and sometimes dangerous— chaos of Florida at the time, a place that came to embody both the quintessence of suburban Americana and the depth of the melting pot, and the source of Benn’s own nostalgic longing. (PowerHouse Books)

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