Classic Canadian sketch show SCTV is finally getting its long-promised Netflix documentary, now without original director Martin Scorsese.
SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of will arrive on October 30 courtesy of Jason Hehir, the director of the Michael Jordan docuseries The Last Dance.
Variety reports that the film's description reads, "Through intimate interviews with surviving members of its legendary cast and an emotional reunion in Toronto, the film explores the creative partnership that transformed a small Canadian television production into a cultural phenomenon that launched some of comedy's most celebrated icons."
The film promises to feature rare archival material and untold stories. The reunion mentioned in the description presumably refers to the one that happened in 2018 at Toronto's Elgin Theatre. Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short and Dave Thomas all took part, with Jimmy Kimmel acting as moderator.
At the time of the filming, Scorsese was slated to directed. He's not mentioned in Variety's announcement, however.
Since the reunion was filmed, Flaherty and O'Hara have died. The show's Tony Rosato, Harold Ramis and John Candy had already died prior.
The same day SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of arrives, all of the episodes of Second City Television will be released on Netflix. The entire show is already on Prime Video in Canada., having come to the competing streamer back in March.
This latest doc follows a wave of renewed appreciation for SCTV and its actors. John Candy and Martin Short have already been the subjects of recent documentaries.
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The Instagram algorithm got me here. Who was this woman in an electric blue wig dancing to this floaty synthpop hook in front of a Costco? It wasn't until a subsequent Reels preview sans-wig, set in cottage country, that I recognized the artist as Saturday Night Live's Veronika Slowikowska — the pride of Barrie, ON, which was recently slandered in Sterling Point. Cue the redemption arc.
Slowikowska is, apparently, releasing nostalgic trip-pop in the vein of After under the moniker Me as a Girl. Her new single, "I Don't Know Why I Said That," arrives today in hot pink shades of wistfulness.
Her muted laugh in the drum machine-led intro precedes the relatable titular revelation: "I don't know what I said / I don't know why I said that." As the iridescent synth pads kick in, a little distortion gives the dreamy soundscape some unexpected grit — which falls to the wayside in the aforementioned hook, which is just pure windows-down, arm-waving bliss.
Barrie may have no "vibe," but this song is definitely one!
True Mountain Laurel is what happens when two women are fabulous and talented.
Those comprising this new West Coast Canadian supergroup are Hailey Blais and Sam Lynch. Blais, known for her Polaris Prize long-listed album Wisecrack, is a sharp lyricist whose wit and wisdom greets you at the top of every song. Known for her most recent project Outline, Lynch, meanwhile, is the kind artist who brings herself in her highest, most sensitive form to everything she touches.
True Mountain Laurel is their natural union: two musical forces coming together, possessing the sheer genuine audacity to merge their abilities and share their now-mythologized friendship with us. Angel So Bad's title track is like lightning in a bottle; out of nowhere, it suddenly exists, and feels like it has forever. Its texture squeezes tears out of your eyes.
In fact, the whole album is rich with harmonies that feel like the comforting sound of TV static, mixed in such a way that it tickles a place in your brain that lays dormant. The line, "Bitches contain multitudes," foreshadows a collection of music wrought with diametrically opposed ideas, embodying each and every one of the singer-songwriters' pluralities.
Tracks like "Bird of Prey," "East of Anything" and "Sunny" provide a specificity that makes the listener want to know everything about the events and thought processes that led to their genesis. It's special to hear insecurity considered from the point of view two friends actively chatting. In taking the time to be honest with each other, Lynch and Blais sets us free. We have no choice but to soar with their melodies.
"I Love You, Nicole" in particular makes it feels like these songs are lifted from the dogeared pages of a shared journal. We are of each other, our friends are a part of us and we are a part of them. Putting friendship to song has a glimmering thread of innocence to it that we rarely get to see, capturing the true romance inside traditionally un-romanticized relationships.
Angel So Bad wraps with "The Trial," which contextualizes the record's wisdom. It's been given to us soft and gentle, spoken at times with meme-like proficiency that dumb bitches like myself understand better than being told directly. By the time the last guitar fades out, we are thoroughly mothered by Blais and Lynch's shared experience.
Canadian music is unbelievably lucky to have this duo, this album and these stories, which serve as definitive proof that Vancouver remains a hotbed for unique, special music. True Mountain Laurel make a strong case that we just need to get our friends together and do some vivacious yapping, set it to a dusty, forlornly hopeful folk tune and rise, together.
Angel So Bad leaves me desperately wanting more. Only these two witches know exactly how this all ends — and hopefully they'll choose to continue sharing their musical spells with us.
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Judd Apatow has announced his previously promised documentary about Norm Macdonald. Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald will premiere on Netflix on October 16, Variety reports.
According to the logline, the film traces Macdonald's "rise as the deadpan anchor of Weekend Update to his enduring legacy as a comedian's comedian — a master of the absurd, the dry, and the unexpected."
The film is made up of archival footage and rare photos and videos, following Apatow's previous public call for submissions of material from fans. Macdonald died in 2021 at the age of 61.
Norm is one of a series of comedy docs coming from Netflix in October. Also on the docket is another Apatow doc, this one about comedian Maria Bamford. Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story lands on October 23.
Rounding out the series are SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of (October 30) and Who Is Martin Mull? (October 7).
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Actor Busy Philipps has revealed that she underwent two surgeries to remove a malignant brain tumour.
"I'm grateful that I'm alive," Philipps told People, saying that this has been "the weirdest six months of my life."
Doctors discovered the mass in her brain when the 47-year-old actor underwent a voluntary scan in February of this year, simply because she had heard about the procedure on Instagram. She almost cancelled the appointment due to other commitments, but ended up going through with it after her friend and former Dawson's Creek costar James Van Der Beek died of cancer the day before. Philipps's ex-husband and friend Marc Silverstein advised her to go through with it as a way to honour her late friend.
The initial scan ruled out glioblastoma (the type of brain cancer that killed both Gord Downie and Neil Peart). She underwent a five-hour surgery on March 2. The mass, measuring 2.6 cm, was removed and biopsied, and turned out to be a rare tumour called an oligodendroglioma.
"It is considered malignant, but it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas," Philipps's neuro-oncologist Dr. Alexandra Miller told People. "It's sort of defined as a cancerous tumour based on the ability of the tumour to regrow over time, rather than it looking very malignant under the microscope."
She had more than 40 surgical staples, as well as titanium tacks in her brain to hold her skull in place. In April, while getting Botox, her dermatologist noticed that the incision site didn't look like it should, and she ultimately underwent another surgery on April 27, this time to clear a staph infection and remove one of the tacks in her skull.
"The second surgery really threw me," said Philipps. "I just felt like I was back to square one, and I was really, really upset."
Philipps doesn't need radiation or chemotherapy, and will undergo regular scans to check for recurrence. "She really has a great chance that this may not recur," Neurosurgeon Dr. John Golfinos told People.
Since the surgeries, Philipps has been acting in the upcoming legal drama Cupertino, due to premiere on CBS on October 8.
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Having brought the Mobile Criterion Closet to TIFF last year, Criterion is now establishing a fixed location in Toronto in the form of a brick-and-mortar store in downtown Toronto.
The shop will open at 129 John Street in collaboration with Cinema Cellar, which is Criterion's Canadian distributor. That's just around the corner from both the TIFF Lightbox and Scotiabank Theatre.
The store will be open for TIFF, when Criterion will offer an early look at the upcoming box set The Complete Kubrick, as well as what a press release calls "a Polaroid wall featuring filmmakers, artists, collectors, and movie lovers passing through the shop." The story will carry Criterion films, along with titles from other companies.
Criterion exec Anne Kawalerski said in a statement, "Canada has always been an important part of Criterion's community, and Cinema Cellar is our way of making that concrete — a meaningful and lasting place, not just a presence, and not just for the festival," Anne Kawalerski, Chief Marketing Officer, Criterion. "TIFF is one of the great film moments in the world, and we wanted to show up in a way that reflects what Criterion is — a place to discover, to be transported, and to belong to something. We hope people find films they love here, and find each other."
A press release also notes that Criterion's store responds to a rise in physical media. Exclaim! recently did a story about the CD resurgence. "I've just started getting into buying 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays," Neptoon Records manager Ben Frith said. "That's another format that is rapidly growing as well. It feels like they can't make enough of them to meet demand."
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To be honest, I dreaded the rhinestone ballsack.
A couple days before Kacey Musgraves arrived in Toronto for the second stop on her Middle of Nowhere tour, images emerged showing the Texas country star perched atop a massive, slightly asymmetrical scrotum; a giant pair of glittering truck nuts gliding gracefully above a crowd. Mediated through social media, the bit seemed tacky and gross. In fact, it sort of gave me the ick.
Fortunately, these concerns quickly waned as Musgraves's seven-piece band took the stage, marching toward their instruments like professional wrestlers as AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" blasted through Scotiabank Arena last night (August 24).
Moments later, Musgraves appeared on an elevated secondary stage, designed to evoke a dilapidated trailer somewhere in Texas. Dressed in denim, knee-length boots and a white cowboy hat, with just a splash of glitter on her face, she opened the set with a moving rendition of "Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy," her sturdy voice projecting almost tangible warmth across the venue; her winking charm casting outward like lasso, pulling the adoring audience tightly into her strange, trippy orbit, a place where anything goes.
Musgraves is a beguiling pop star. Equipped with a twangy voice that seems custom-build for country radio, she's spent much of her career challenging the genre's stubborn orthodoxies: infusing her music with elements of disco, folk and gentle psychedelia, peppering her songs with references to drug use and sex.
It's an approach she perfected on 2018's Golden Hour — a sublime country pop record inspired by Sade and Neil Young that won the Grammy for Album of the Year — though it seemed to produce diminishing returns on her two subsequent LPs (2021's underrated breakup album star-crossed and the 2024 snoozefest Deeper Well).
Earlier this year, much to the delight of her fans, Musgraves pivoted back to something resembling pure country music Middle of Nowhere, an album that leans heavily into her Southern roots — which were on full display at Scotiabank Arena as she led her band through a crowd-pleasing setlist, performing from on top of a giant star-shaped stage set within a larger, 360-degree rotating stage that resembled a rodeo arena.
From the get-go, the audience — vaguely progressive and queer, if mostly — was enraptured, belting every word to "Dry Spell," the humorous lead single from Middle of Nowhere about going nearly a year without sex, and swaying along to a warped, slowed-down rendition of the Golden Hour favourite "High Horse."
Midway through the show, Musgraves was joined the stage's centre by her accordion player for a delightful mini-set of Tejano (or Tex-Mex) music, including her Willie Nelson collaboration "Uncertain Texas" and a cover of a song by Tejano supergroup Texas Tornados.
Elevated by a clever set design and immersive visual effects (pyro! fireworks!), the performance felt absorbing but unpredictable. Unlike many other pop artists of her stature, Musgraves does not lean on choreography or costume changes, relying instead on her easy charisma and the strength of her songwriting.
Truth be told, I'd forgotten all about the scrote by the time it finally made an appearance, about three quarters of the way into the show.
"It takes a lot of balls to get up here every night and do what we do," Musgraves said as the testicular mass descended from above. "This is what it looks like when nobody tells me no," she added, before buckling herself into the genital pouch.
Perhaps it was the effects of the mild weed gummy that I ate before the show finally kicking in, but as Musgraves rose for a performance of "Rhinestoned" — a dreamy song about getting high to mask the pain of heartache — the glittering ballbag made perfect sense.
This was not a simple celebration of truck nuts (a common sight in both Texas and Alberta), but a subtle subversion of the aggressively masculine culture they've come to symbolize. Country music is more malleable than you think, the nuts seemed to say. Country music can be far more queer and weird and interesting than whatever the dumbfoundingly popular bro-country guys are making. ("Lesbians love Kacey," Musgraves would later add.)
Heartened by this revelation, I settled happily in for the show's final stretch, a brilliant run of songs including the surprise hit "Mexico Honey" (the closest Musgraves has ever sounded to Lana Del Rey), as well as Golden Hour greats "Slow Burn" and "Space Cowboy."
To close things out, Musgraves indulged in a bit of a fan service, performing her 2013 hit "Follow Your Arrow," followed by a cover of the 1987 George Strait classic "All My Ex's Live in Texas." These landed a little flat for me, but I felt fully satisfied leaving the venue, abuzz with that special post-show energy and drifty visions of rhinestone disco balls swaying off into a pastel-coloured sunset.
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Supporting her sophomore album Jean, West Memphis, AR-born R&B singer-songwriter Yebba has announced a slate of North American tour dates for this fall — including a couple of Canadian concerts in Toronto and Montreal.
The tour kicks off on Canadian soil, with the artist crossing the border to play Toronto's History on October 24 and Montreal's L'Olympia on October 26 before returning stateside to complete the remainder of the trek. As of this writing, she's slated to wrap things up on November 16 in Miami, FL.
Tickets go on general sale this Friday (August 28) at 10 a.m. local time, following various presales starting tomorrow (August 26). See the full itinerary below, and more upcoming Canadian shows by heading over to Concert Central.
Yebba 2026 Tour Dates:
10/24 Toronto, ON - History
10/26 Montreal, QC - L'Olympia
10/28 Boston, MA - Roadrunner
10/30 Philadelphia, PA - The Fillmore
10/31 Washington, D.C. - The Anthem
11/03 Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Paramount
11/05 Richmond, VA - The National
11/07 Charlotte, NC - The Fillmore
11/08 Raleigh, NC - The Ritz
11/10 Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium
11/12 Atlanta, GA - Coca-Cola Roxy
11/16 Miami, FL - The Fillmore
Beloved country music icon, actor, philanthropist and general delight Dolly Parton has died. She was 80.
Parton's nephew, Bryan Seaver, shared the news in a video posted to the star's Instagram account. "I have imagined the heaviness of this moment but haven't truly felt it until now," he said. "It is an honour, an honour that is mixed with absolute pride and great sadness. But the sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light."
UPDATE (8/26, 9:47 a.m. ET): As reported by Consequence, Parton died following a "brief battle with cancer" at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, TN, on Tuesday (August 25). She was surrounded by loved ones, and a small, private service will be held for immediate family members, who have asked fans looking to pay tribute to the legendary singer-songwriter to make a donation to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in lieu of flowers.
A cause of death has not yet been reported, but Parton is said to have passed away "peacefully" in Nashville, TN.
The fourth of 12 children, Parton was born on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, TN. Her family moved to a farm on nearby Locust Ridge — a home she would buy back in the 1980s — when she was a young girl, which inspired her '70s song "My Tennessee Mountain Home."
The heavily Pentecostal area saw Parton brought up in the Church of God, beginning to perform in church at age six before broadening her scope to local radio and TV programs. At seven, she began playing a homemade guitar and, a year later, her uncle gave the singer-songwriter her first real guitar.
Parton recorded her first single, "Puppy Love," at age 13 on Goldband Records and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry, where Johnny Cash encouraged her to follow her instincts in pursuing her music career. The day after she graduated from Sevier County High School, she moved to Nashville, where she quickly signed a songwriting deal with Combine Publishing.
Alongside her frequent co-writer Bill Owens, she penned several charting singles for other artists before signing to Monument Records, where she was initially pitched as a bubblegum pop singer due to her soprano. However, after her uncredited composition of "Put It Off Until Tomorrow" with Bill Phillips went to No. 6 on the country chart in 1966, the label relented and allowed Parton to record country music, releasing her debut album Hello, I'm Dolly in 1967.
Spawning multiple Top 40 hits, the album's success led to Parton being invited to join The Porter Wagoner Show — a creative partnership that would catapult her into the national spotlight and land her a solo deal with RCA. She earned her first No. 1 single with "Joshua" in 1971, with the subsequent decade seeing the release of now-classic hits like "Jolene" and "Coat of Many Colors."
When Parton left The Porter Wagoner Show after seven years, her departure inspired one of the greatest songs of all time, "I Will Always Love You," which hit No. 1 on the country charts in both 1974 and 1982 even before Whitney Houston's version for the soundtrack to The Bodyguard had a 14-week stay at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992.
In 1980, Parton made her cinematic debut alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the blockbuster 9 to 5, with the film's theme song also topping numerous charts. Parton went on to appear in other films like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Rhinestone, Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk and Joyful Noise. During this period, she also recorded the genre-agnostic hit "Islands in the Stream" with Kenny Rogers, and the two toured the world together.
She opened the iconic Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, TN, in 1986, drawing four million visitors annually. This venture allowed Parton to both celebrate her hometown and embrace her entrepreneurial spirit. She also founded the Dollywood Foundation in 1988, which provided scholarships to keep East Tennessee students in school — a mission expanded in 1995 by the establishment of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, which has donated over 300 million books to children around the world.
Her philanthropy also reached new heights when she made sizeable donations to the creation of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine; even Dr. Evil incarnate Jeff Bezos gave Parton $100 million in 2022 to "do good things." That same year, the singer-songwriter was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after originally rejecting their nomination because she had never considered herself a rock artist.
To right that wrong, she quite literally reunited the Beatles on her 2023 rock album Rockstar. In 2025, the singer-songwriter paid tribute to her late husband Carl Dean after he died with a song called "If You Hadn't Been There" before her sister Freida requested prayers for the star during a period of unspecified illness. A biographical musical about Parton's life entitled Hello, I'm Dolly will debut on Broadway later this year.
Back in May, Parton provided a health update, saying she was responding really well to meds and treatment for said unspecified illness, possibly related to recurring kidney stones.
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If you could only hear one song for the rest of eternity, what would it be? And would you be okay hearing it through Jeep Cherokee speakers forever? What food would you bring to a desert island? Who would you want to spend your time with when the world ends? These are some of many existential questions posed by Alexander Ullom's directorial debut, It Ends, which follows four friends embarking on early adulthood, only to have the trip cut short — or rather, extended indefinitely — by a paranormal phenomenon.
Without giving away too much — it's best you go into the film with as little information as possible — after graduation, friends James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth), each saddled with their respective unspoken traumas, set off on a trip back home after not seeing the fourth member of their friendship group, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), for a year. Early on, we see the group's diverging career and life paths, which create marked tension between them as they struggle to maintain their friendship in the next stages of life.
Ullom, who has revealed that there exists a three-hour cut of the film, wastes no time in setting up the premise: the gang turns down a road but miss their turnoff, and it steadily becomes evident that there is no exit. It Ends' foursome perhaps too readily accept their fate (no one bothers to zoom out on Google Maps?), but the reprioritization of the film's runtime allows for more weight assigned to its tenser and more emotional scenes.
Relative newcomers Yoon, Jackson, Toth and Cole put on an amazing show, their performances anchored in for-us-by-us Gen Z culture, with "I shouldn't have smoked that shit" memes and reference to the iPad-baby brainrot game Subway Surfers. Ullom notably also wrote the film, and has earned recognition among horror's other emerging filmmakers as a burgeoning young talent precisely for this reason: his debut is not Gen Z written by millennials, it's an insider's look at what plagues the psyches of young people as they see it — as well as their TikTok-ified sense of humour. This is, of course, the generation whose formative years were spent in apocalyptic lockdown conditions. Obviously they'd laugh off purgatory.
And levity abounds indeed. Despite its relegation to the horror genre, It Ends is much more a psychological thriller. It entirely lacks jump scares (and that's okay), and its entire cast fits inside one vehicle, making its modest budget of $80,000 go relatively far (get it?) with priorities given to dialogue and gorgeous B-roll of the surrounding nature. But the entire plot hinges on its script. James and Tyler cordon the stoic, logistical end of conversations, while Day and Fisher inhabit more emotional thought processes. Interplay between these archetypes leads to genuinely funny moments, breaking the tension that could otherwise drag.
It's natural to assume that a movie about a seemingly never-ending road would drag, but Ullom pulls off a decently surprising ending that also doesn't go over the top. So glad I watched this one right before I head off on an end-of-summer road trip!
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Geese are still touring behind their monumental 2025 album Getting Killed, but frontman Cameron Winter is striking out on his own for a live release. Live at Carnegie Hall arrives October 9 via Partisan Records.
UPDATE (8/25, 12:14 p.m. ET): The Paul Thomas Anderson-directed concert film Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall has now officially been announced. Co-produced by Benny Safdie, the movie will screen in US theatres starting November 20.
Prints of the footage, on 35mm tape, will tour the country through mid-January. There's no word yet on if/when the film — released by Janus Films and Criterion — will be available on streaming, or play in Canadian theatres.
The show took place at the famed New York City venue on December 11, 2025. The 11-song tracklist includes six songs from his 2024 album Heavy Metal, two pre-album singles ("Take It with You" and "Vines") and three new songs ("It All Fell in the River," "Emperor XIII in Shades" and "If You Turn Back Now"). He also performed the Heavy Metal cut "Drinking Age" at the show, but it's missing from this release.
Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were spotted filming the show, but there's still no word on whether or how that footage will be released, since Live at Carnegie Hall is currently audio-only.
The inner sleeve of the vinyl shows Winter making out with Andrew Carnegie. It's available to pre-order here.
Live at Carnegie Hall:
1. It All Fell in the River
2. Try as I May
3. Emperor XIII in Shades
4. The Rolling Stones
5. Love Takes Miles
6. Cancer of the Skull
7. If You Turn Back Now
8. Nina + Field of Cops
9. $0
10. Take It with You
11. Vines
Sabrina Carpenter fans will be able to commemorate one year of Man's Best Friend at a pop-up shop in Toronto this weekend.
Happening August 29, the shop will be open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 80 Atlantic Avenue in Liberty Village. The shop will offer exclusive merch for sale, as well as some fan activations, including a Polaroid photo wall.
The official line-up for the pop-up begins outside of the store at 10 a.m. the morning of the sale. The shop may close early if quantities run out.
See the poster for the pop-up shop below.
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Whitby, ON's Chastity is back with a new album. I Built This Prison Myself arrives November 13 via Dine Alone Records, and is previewed today by the lead single "Misled Youth."
Described by press materials as Brandon Williams's "most narrative work yet," the new record draws upon melodic hardcore, shoegaze and punk influences, and is about the 1976 fire set by a 16-year-old Whitby Psychiatric Hospital patient that burned down the barn on the hospital grounds. Williams imagines the boy behind the fire "not as a symbol of destruction, but as a young person confronting fear, powerlessness, control, and the hope to remain himself."
You can find the tracklist and listen to the lead single below.
I Built This Prison Myself:
- Blink and See God
- Don't Lose the Feeling
- Jesus Christ Superstore
- Misled Youth
- Error of My Ways
- Fighting
- So Alive I Cry
- No One
- Seeing Red
- Making Peace with the Horrors of Being Me
Pre-order I Built This Prison Myself.
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Lord love the one-rapper/one-producer duo album. While the prevailing winds in hip-hop tend to push longer albums with many producers (often within the same song), there's also a booming cottage industry of smaller scale projects (see also: the Alchemist's output over the last few years).
Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats offer everything one would hope for from such a project, with a streamlined, sample-heavy series of soulful summer grooves that strut past in an action-packed 24 minutes.
ii is the follow-up to pair's electric 2020 collab UNLOCKED, and it came out on the same day as Weezer's Gold Album, also produced by Kenny Beats (under his legal name of Kenneth Blume). As Blume makes the unexpected shift into one of the most raw, organic producers of the rock-is-back movement, ii shows that he's still a vital voice in hip-hop who can hang with the best of 'em.
Yves Tumor has been accused of sexual assault and other abusive behaviours by multiple women over the past week. The artist born Sean Lee Bowie has denied the claims, and said that he will be "taking extreme legal action."
The following article contains potentially triggering material relating to sexual assault and violence. If you believe you have experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct and are looking for support, consult the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime to find resources in your area.
Recently, images of a bruised woman had been circulating on the artist's subreddit. The image appears to show a bite mark on the individual's neck, and the caption disturbingly reads, "Shanti (Yves Tumor) sexually assaulted someone close to me last week. She has told me he forcefully groped her multiple times, bit her neck, held her down and stepped on her head with his shoe, amongst other things. I've known him for years, considered him a friend and I never thought I'd ever have to post something like this. It's been reported to the police, but people should know."
Other allegations emerged after the Reddit post was shared to the platform formerly known as Twitter. Electronic artist Angel Money claimed that Tumor groped her while she was being interviewed, and posted video evidence of the assault.
Additionally, musical artist Kidä — who sang on Tumor's "Lovely Sewer" — alleged via social media that he repeatedly tried to sleep with her while she was touring with him, "emotionally abused his girlfriend who was also on tour," and "berated, mocked and taunted his bandmates constantly."
Kidä posted an alleged screenshot from Tumor's Instagram Story where he wrote that the allegations are "100% untrue and also completely heartbreaking. Will be taking extreme legal action."
Stereogum reports that there have been other accounts of harassment and assault from Tumor that have been shared to his subreddit.
Tumor has upcoming tour dates scheduled with Turnstile next month, which includes a lone Toronto date at Woodbine Park on September 12.
Discretion is advised for the image below.
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Starting this Friday (August 28), songs created entirely by artificial intelligence will be banned from Australia's ARIA Charts, ABC News reports.
In an update to the Charts Code of Practice by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), AI-assisted recordings can still chart — but only if they're "substantially human-made" and raise "no stream or chart manipulation concerns."
ARIA will be able to remove ineligible recordings, alter chart positions and revoke chart awards. Chief Executive Annabelle Herd pointed out that artists were already using AI tools, but music generated wholly by models trained on preexisting human recordings is another story. "This gives everyone who releases music in Australia a clear rule to work to," she said.
Both Fenix Flexin and Tyga have admitted to using AI to create their recent material, with the latter's new album $TARFACE getting a landmark 0.0 Pitchfork score. Spotify has now introduced a badge identifying the profiles of AI-generated "artists," while Apple Music will add "Made with AI" labels later this year.
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Have you ever been to Barrie? The mid-sized city dubbed "the gateway to the North" is about an hour north of Toronto, and, as someone who lived there for four years, I can confirm that while there are far worse places to live, there are certainly way better places to be.
Megan Park's new Prime Video drama Sterling Point seems to hold the same belief, as Episode 3 throws in a subtle dig at the mid city. It comes as Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle) tells her recently discovered sister Annie (Ella Rubin) that she's winterizing her Muskoka cottage so that she'll be able to live there year-round.
When Annie asks if she usually lived somewhere else for the winter, Ramona says she and her late grandfather lived in "this place called Barrie." Annie then wonders what "the vibe" in Barrie is like, to which Ramona replies, "Uh, there's no vibe, really, in Barrie." Annie then apologizes, because "it's a shame" that Barrie is such a sterile place.
It's really too bad the average Sterling Point viewer will never know the epic highs and lows of the Dunlop Street McDonald's, driving down Mapleview on a Saturday afternoon, or enjoying a meal on a chain restaurant patio that's located in the middle of a parking lot. Watch the scene below.
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Montreal trio Afternoon Bike Ride have issued a warning to fellow touring musicians against using the financial services technology company Stripe for merch sales.
Taking to Instagram today, they explained that Stripe had deemed their business risky and banned their account, resulting in card payment sales being refunded from their recent US shows opening for American Football in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Nashville.
The band's attempts to appeal this decision have been "met with a series of AI-ass roadblock responses," they wrote. They're asking any fans who made card purchases from them at those concerts who are now seeing a refund on their credit statements to please consider sending the amount to the band via Venmo (@lia-kurihara) or PayPal (@afternoonbikeride).
"It feels like we're losing thousands of dollars over what is essentially youtube id level security & support," Afternoon Bike Ride continued of Stripe's automatic detection and the nebulous non-answer the company apparently gave them for what it defines as a "risk."
The trio added, "if you're a musician or small business regularly using or planning on using stripe to take payments[,] please be aware that you're leaving yourself vulnerable to losing stock, money & operating costs should they decide at the flip of a switch to (within 5 days of their decision) refund all payments made on their platform."
It goes without saying that being a touring musician in the year 2026 comes with an unprecedented level of difficulty, especially for Canadian artists playing shows stateside amidst endless visa delays, increased costs and ever-growing animosity south of the border.
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For years now, Jane Schoenbrun has investigated how identity is crafted in the flickering shadow of the films and shows we love. We're All Going to the World's Fair offered a lonely and haunting exploration of the worlds and meanings made in the infinite space that the internet carves. I Saw the TV Glow was equally haunting as it charted the delicate fault line between reality and fiction, offering the beautiful idea that in denying art, we deny ourselves.
With their third feature, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a film that considers how horror films form our desires, Schoenbrun becomes a veritable scholar in this specialized field that considers the psyche in the face of art, for better and for worse. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is an objectively good film, but it's also an ample film, more cerebral than visceral, despite its considerations of horniness. Schoenbrun drenches the film in boldly sketched references to the past (both to film and academic theory) that derail the film, ultimately keeping it from reaching the resonance that the director's first two films achieved.
In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a quasi stand-in for Schoenbrun themself. After premiering her debut feature at Sundance to swift and great acclaim, Kris is riding high. Her film, described as Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain, has garnered the attention of important people in Hollywood, who believe that pedestaling Kris, a queer filmmaker, might make them seem "woke" by association. She has been saddled with a dream opportunity: rebooting a Friday the 13th-esque franchise called Camp Miasma, whose monster is a being called Little Death.
The Camp Miasma franchise took a similar trajectory to the real-life Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies, in that it spawned sequel upon sequel, with Little Death trekking through various cities and environments, killing teenage kids and becoming so campy in its insistent bloodlust that it has now accrued a cult following. Kris is obsessed with the series, and as producers hope to resurrect this "zombie IP" in an effort to launch more sequels and rake in more money, Kris sees this as an opportunity to honour the story of Little Death in a way that satisfies her devoted heart.
Kris plans to cast Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) in her film. Billy was the final girl in the original Camp Miasma film, and now lives in the remote camp where the first movie was shot. Kris heads to the site to ask Billy if she will star in her reboot film, and over the course of her stay, an intense attraction ignites between the two. As Kris and Billy draw closer and closer to each other, getting entangled in a heady, sticky psychosexual web of desire, lines between fiction and reality blur, as Little Death seems to be awakened by Kris and Billy's feelings, as vibrant and balmy as teenagers' feelings.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma carries its idea of how horror films impact our desires, and how they attract our lust toward their glimmering pictures, relatively legibly. The film is a beautiful depiction of how the movies we love can form our sexual drives, and serves as a rambunctious corollary to I Saw the TV Glow, which explored similar terrain (the evolution of identity in the age of modern film and TV), albeit in a more delicate, gentle and heartbreaking manner.
Einbinder turns in a pitch-perfect performance as the excited Kris, tittering gleefully, often adorably awkwardly, in her obsession with the films and with Billy herself. Anderson is divine as the once-starlet, casting shades of Norma Desmond and Joan Crawford. The two have electric chemistry and perfectly land the script's comedic notes.
But because of the thick layers of its references — to film and to theory — this film, although self-aware in its campiness and schlocky in its horror, loses itself in a rigorous theoretical argumentation, as it follows the diagnosis of the viewer's fantasy as laid down by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws.
Watching it, I felt a bit bummed. The film is almost too dialectically, analytically and referentially controlled. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is replete with references to '80s horror, and to the canon of horror generally, with homages made to Hitchcock, David Lynch and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (Little Death is meant to look like a camera). There is also a salute to the upturning of traditional filmic "gazing" through an embodied consideration of the contemporary masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma (the women gaze back at the gazer, Little Death and us); because of this salute, Schoenbrun also works visually and ideologically with film theory, specifically ideas put forth by Laura Mulvey and Clover, who coined the term "final girl."
There is a lot baked into the immediate layer of the story, with that which ought to be suggested, or perhaps discovered in analysis, often considered explicitly by the film. It's as though the viewer is not trusted to discover meaning. Schoenbrun has directed us to meaning through the flurry of references to past films, and then analyzed their own film as it's unfolding through references to theory.
Schoenbrun juggles ideas in a way that internet discourse around film does, bringing up all those filmic things that mark "good taste" across the rarefied space of online film discourse; everything, all at once. The film tends to feel like a list of good-taste tokens. This wealth of references, of ideas pointing to past ideas, creates a film especially rewarding to a certain kind of viewer: the person who obsessively logs their watches on Letterboxd, who loves to make lists upon lists of movies that others ought to watch; the person who, through this expression of films they watch, wants to control the perception of themselves, and wants to be seen as a bearer of good taste. This referencing work, this talking about everything all at once, is more about the self than it is about the viewer.
What nags at me about Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — and generally about much of this list-making obsession — is that it is so consumed with landing its references that the film's distinct and important ideas around gender and horror get lost. Ironically these very ideas — that is, those not circumscribed by control and open to greater and varying interpretation, open to fruitful analysis — get lost amongst the phantasmagoria of references, which is a shame. Much of this film seems to have been analyzed by the film itself, leaving little work for the viewer. Strangely, in the way that Kris is too in her head when it comes to sex, forgetting how to be in her body, this film is too in its head, neglecting to embody those ideas that make earlier Schoenbrun films unforgettable, that carry those films forward.
This isn't to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a bad film; rather, it's well-wrought, unique, colourful and deftly carried by its leads. But there's something very internet about it, a sense in which it pats itself on its own back for having good taste. In crafting itself as a love letter to classic horror and so incessantly gesturing backwards, it saps itself of the urgency of its forward-moving ideas, becoming paradoxically bloodless, and leaves me wondering whether we might have too many love letters to cinema.
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"I don't want your martial law, I want clean air / I don't want no enemies that ain't even there," Brittany Howard less sings than sighs on "I Feel Hope Coming," capturing the exasperation of reasoning with fascists on a standout track from her band's instantly essential new LP, I Must Be Dreaming.
Alabama Shakes — rhythm guitarist and vocalist extraordinaire Howard, bassist Zac Cockrell and lead guitarist Heath Fogg — broke big pre-Trump 1.0. This long-awaited follow-up will also whisk you away to fully realized worlds of sound and colour, to paraphrase the preceding album's title (thanks in no small part this time to Canuck producer Shawn Everett), while also boasting the band's most urgent lyricism yet.
Apart from singing about hope as if she's an elusive old flame of the same name on "I Feel Hope Coming," Howard also coos about inadequate prayers over Fogg's lushly flaring guitar. Then there's Cockrell, whose bass solo will remind you of an insistent tap on the shoulder.
Howard employs a fittingly different emotion on the even more socially conscious back-end track "American Dream," sneering verses about unattainable peace and freedom amounting to a waking nightmare over Fogg and Cockrell's bluesy playing. A line about consumerism overshadowing progressive mantras like "My body, my choice" makes the song even more meaningful, helping Howard reach a new tier as a writer reflecting the times she's inhabiting.
And while Alabama Shakes prove deft with such much-needed protest songs — a commodity in no short supply during this nefarious administration — the band are also reliable as ever with atmospheric, heart-wrenching anthems about intimacy. On "Another Life," Howard doesn't so much plead about — to reference yet another of their indispensable early hits — not wanting to fight no more, but instead daydreams about asking her beau to try one more hand at their union, albeit in another life.
To mirror that spectrum of emotion, Alabama Shakes' keys chime like a pining lover's eyes might gleam, while the percussion gurgles forth like the splat of falling tears before thudding like a breaking heart. As she wails on the chorus, Howard sounds like a surprisingly fitting heir to Erykah Badu in the era she sang to André 3000, except this time swapping the funk for indie rock-flecked blues.
Meanwhile, Howard soulfully brays about "what-ifs" and "shoulda-beens" on "Garden" before slipping into a gripping speak-singing cadence, marrying jazz and blues like a million-dollar matchmaker. What's more, "How Love's Supposed to Go" has dissonant sliding notes that capture the chaos of courtship, while her distorted vocals and strained upper register sear with yearning.
Then there's opener "Tea Time," which kicks off the album with muffled, shuffling drums that begin to boom and echo as Howard sings about longing to go home, back to a river where flowers grow, her voice haunted by a deep ache. On the subsequent, similarly named "Time," Fogg has a blistering solo, with feedback-drenched shredding to follow on "Waist Deep," marrying the intensity of his guitar lines with Howard's unmistakably emotive vocals and the truth they're speaking to power.
From musicianship to introspection, immersive production to well-timed political critiques, I Must Be Dreaming is the long-awaited Alabama Shakes follow-up fans have been dreaming of.
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Everybody disable your autocorrect, because Queens of the Stone Age have detailed their new album: Perfecth will be out October 30 on Matador Records (not on September 30, as a teaser recently suggested). A video for the single "Insignificant Other" is out now.
The album was self-produced by QOTSA bandmates Josh Homme and Michael Schuman. About Perfecth 's curious title, Homme said that the misspelling is intended to highlight how perfection doesn't actually exist. "Nothing in this world is perfect, but everything seems to be 'perfecth,'" he said in a statement. "And that title is funny when you're in a group, but it ain't so funny when you're alone."
It was made with the "broken is beautiful" philosophy of kintsugi, with "Insignificant Other" being captured on just the second take.
Watch the video for that song below, directed by Chapman Baehler. A character named Big Chongus embodies the idea of "perfecth," and a press release teases, "Find out if Big Chongus finds the perfect home." You leave Big Chongus out of this!
Perfecth also includes the recent single "Easy Street." Scroll past the video below to see the tracklist, as well as the band's upcoming tour schedule. They have Canadian shows opening for the Foo Fighters this September.
Perfecth:
1. It's Only Love
2. Insignificant Other
3. Where the Goth Girls At?
4. Mono
5. From the Cliff
6. Sunday
7. Easy Street
8. Phantom Limb
9. Run Away from the Mob
Queens of the Stone Age 2026 Tour Dates:
09/15 Regina, SK - Mosaic Stadium ^
09/17 Edmonton, AB - Commonwealth Stadium ^
09/20 Vancouver, BC - BC Place ^
09/24 Louisville, KY - Bourbon & Beyond Festival
09/26 Las Vegas, NV - Allegiant Stadium ^
10/04 Sacramento, CA - Aftershock Festival
10/24 Reykjavík, Iceland - Laugardalshöll
11/25 Tokyo, Japan - Zepp Haneda
11/26 Nagoya, Japan - Zepp Nagoya
11/28 Osaka, Japan - Zepp Namba
12/02 Singapore - Star Theatre
12/08 Adelaide, Australia - The Drive
12/11 Hobart, Australia - My State Bank Arena
12/13 Melbourne, Australia - Rod Laver Arena
12/15 Sydney, Australia - Qudos Bank Arena
12/16 Newcastle, Australia - Newcastle Entertainment Center
12/18 Brisbane, Australia - Brisbane Entertainment Center
12/20 Auckland, New Zealand - Spark Arena
^ with Foo Fighters
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Vancouver singer-songwriter Dan Mangan has launched Malcontent, a new online tool to help artists crowdsource social media content from fans.
"I started building it because I had this idea for a mechanism where folks could request songs at shows by sending me videos," Mangan tells Exclaim! "I figured that it might be a fun way to promote the upcoming shows, promote the songs, and it felt cozy in that community-building kind of way that I've always enjoyed."
Fans could film a new video, or upload something from their device. This would then be converted into the most compatible video format for both social media and video editing software, and then placed in a gallery for Mangan to browse. He could then download the videos, or upload them directly to social media, along with the uploader's social media handles to allow for tagging and crossposting.
"Making art rules. Making content sucks. We help you crowdsource content so you don't have to dream it up," reads the mission statement on Malcontent's homepage.
"My initial use case was just being an artist, taking requests, or sourcing live show footage," Mangan explains. "People post Instagram Stories with clips of my shows, and I can't tell you how much time I've spent painstakingly screengrabbing those clips so I can post them. Crazy making. I put up an IG story asking for clips from past shows and in, 24 hours — until the story expired — people uploaded 43 videos."
Mangan (who previously co-founded the "Airbnb for concerts" platform Side Door, which shuttered in 2025 after eight years) is a self-described "obsessive" when it comes to new projects, so he began adding features to his initial idea. "I realized that it was becoming pretty cool and I hadn't seen another tool like it out there, though there probably are some," he says. "I like that it's tailor made for me to actually use in my own professional life, so I think it'd be helpful to other artists."
Malcontent is free to use and only requires an email to sign up. There are also paid tiers for users who want to store their uploads on the server, since that's the part of the venture that costs Mangan money. He's not explicitly branding as "Dan Mangan's app," and the website's only mention of his name is in the terms of service.
"What's interesting is that I instantly got a bunch of feedback from folks saying that they could use it for other things," he noted. "Festivals or conferences could source footage from attendees. Venues could source footage from ticketholders. NGOs, politicians or businesses of various sorts could use it to source testimonials."
Check out Malcontent here.
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A particular laziness permeates the ensemble friendship comedy that assumes casting four funny actors constitutes characterization. Spa Weekend assembles Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau and Anna Faris, four performers whose individual comic abilities should make them an easy group to root for, but writer-director duo Jon Lucas and Scott Moore mistake collective charisma for chemistry. It's a consequential mistake for a film whose premise depends on convincing us not only that these women were once close, but also that there's something between them worth recovering.
Jane (Mann), Coco (Buteau) and Sophie (Faris) arrive at a luxury resort for a long-overdue girls' weekend, only to unexpectedly reunite with Mel (Fisher), the estranged fourth member of their once-inseparable group. Her reappearance brings old resentments and buried secrets with it, turning a restorative weekend into a series of confrontations and contrived comic disasters.
There is nothing inherently wrong with how familiar this is; a friendship comedy with women doesn't need to reinvent the genre when its relationships prove specific enough to make familiar territory feel new. The pleasure of a friendship comedy always exists in the private languages, petty grievances and accumulated knowledge that make decades of intimacy feel lived-in rather than conveniently explained. But Spa Weekend spends far more time telling us these women have a history than allowing us to see it.
The film repeatedly returns to the maxim that "every friend group has a friend that everybody secretly hates," a joke that becomes revealing of how Spa Weekend understands friendship: as a collection of types rather than relationships between specific people. Each woman occupies her designated role until her subplot reveals that — surprise! — more lurks beneath the surface.
Coco is particularly ill-served by this approach. The film saddles Buteau with a version of the "angry Black woman" archetype so blunt that the film seems to believe acknowledging the stereotype absolves it of using it, which of course it doesn't. Naming a trope while continuing to structure a character around it is not subversion by any means. What makes this particularly frustrating is that Buteau gives the film its best comic performance, finding timing and intensity in lines that rarely deserve either.
Despite Buteau's strength in intensity, volume prevails as Spa Weekend's governing comic principle. A goat-yoga class becomes pandemonium, minor misunderstandings become screaming matches, and every inconvenience metastasizes into another, louder set piece. Even visually, Lucas and Moore rarely find much beyond jumping between close-ups as though proximity might generate comic rhythm. The escalation becomes relentless but rarely accumulative. The movie falls into the fallacy that bigger and louder automatically means funnier.
Strangely, for a film ostensibly celebrating the sustaining power of female friendship, Spa Weekend is far more convincing when it turns to romance. Coco chemistry with Roger (Dominic Ona-Ariki) feels authentic, which makes their reconciliation plausible. Their problems exist alongside genuine affection rather than in place of it. Even Jane generates more immediate chemistry with the resort's yoga instructor, Kai (Adam Demos), than with the women she has supposedly known for decades. For a movie so eager to insist on the irreplaceable value of female friendship, it's remarkably bad at imagining that friendship as a relationship worth investing in on its own terms.
Plenty of movies have been made about women discovering that friendship has survived the compromises of adulthood. Spa Weekend offers the inverse: four women insist they share decades of history while the film supplies almost no evidence of it. Friendship is treated as a premise rather than a relationship, which might explain why, by the time everyone has screamed, confessed and reconciled, these women still feel like they have only just met.
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Despite the fact that Harry Potter should very much stay in the past where it belongs, HBO is still making that new TV series no one asked for. After it was announced earlier this month that he would take on the role of Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, Nicholas Hoult has now exited the show and will be replaced by Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington.
As Deadline reports, Harington will now step in due to Hoult's "scheduling issues." HBO had to work around two pre-existing projects belonging to the latter actor, and when the filming of Lockhart's scenes had to shift within the series' Season 2 schedule, it was no longer feasible.
Obviously, Hoult faced backlash when his casting as Lockhart was announced, given Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's inflammatory and nefarious opinions about the trans community and gender essentialism. Rowling is serving as an executive producer on the HBO show, and it's not as if the Superman star is hurting for work.
Then, on the other hand, there's Harington. Although this is technically a recasting, he previously voiced Lockhart in 2025's Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions audiobooks.
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Who could've predicted this? More than a year since Rogers Stadium had its opening as Toronto's (temporary) largest outdoor concert venue, fans are still mixing it up with the city's other stadium, the very similarly named Rogers Centre.
Over the weekend, the biggest K-pop band in the world, BTS, touched down in Canada for the first time in almost a decade for two back-to-back nights at Rogers Stadium, more than 10 years on from their Toronto debut at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in 2015.
It was quite the event, with a near-cancellation due to a massive summer storm forcing a brief abandonment of the bleachers — but the show went on, and everything ended triumphantly with ARMY members living their best lives, singing along with their idols in the pouring rain. Well, the ones that made it to the right place, anyway.
On the r/Toronto subreddit yesterday (August 23), u/AmountFragrant8750 made a post entitled "Rogers Centre vs Rogers Stadium is genuinely ruining people's night, and Live Nation should've seen this coming."
The poster had apparently been in line for Ed Sheeran's concert at the Rogers Centre on Saturday (August 22) night, and witnessed numerous BTS fans show up to the wrong venue. "The amount of people who showed up thinking they were in the right place was honestly kind of heartbreaking to watch," they wrote. "You'd see the confusion on their faces first, then the slow realization that they weren't at Roger's [sic] Stadium, then that scramble to figure out how they were even going to get to Downsview in time."
I can only imagine the crushing feeling of showing up to see BTS and then finding out the one performing there is actually Ed Sheeran. Toronto is the only Canadian stop on the BTS world tour, so many folks came in from outside of the city. And even if they hadn't, the amount of money they spent on the tickets — and possibly a peak-time Uber trip to have a shot in hell of not missing the show — was likely exorbitant.
While many baseball fans in particular still can't help but call it the SkyDome, it at least makes sense for the Rogers Centre to bear the telecommunications giant's name, when the company owns the Toronto Blue Jays — but does Rogers really need the advertising? We all know the drill: you have your phone plan with Bell or Rogers for however long it takes for them to no longer be willing to offer you a good deal, and then you switch to the other one, occasionally throwing in a stint with Telus, Koodo or Freedom Mobile for good measure.
As we near the end of Rogers Stadium's second season of an approximate five-year-run before it's demolished and Northcrest Developments transforms the industrial land of the former Downsview Airport into new neighbourhoods, some might think it's too late to do anything about the confusion between the two venues — but it certainly seems necessary. Perhaps we can make Oasis's designation of its "stupid fucking stands that were built 30 minutes ago" stick? Or Coldplay's "weird stadium in the middle of nowhere"?
Or, yeah, we could just go back to calling the other one the SkyDome — especially since there's now also a Rogers Centre in Ottawa (plus Rogers Arena in Vancouver and Rogers Place in Edmonton, for those following along at home).
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