Though much of the Internet has been stuck in a days-long Adele bubble — as she’s released more and more information about the upcoming 25, culminating today in an Xavier Dolan-directed music video — the rest of the music-making globe has continued to spin. Natalie Prass is following up her self-titled debut album with a new EP — Side By Side — which features Grimes (who, incidentally, just teased her own new music on Instagram), Anita Baker and Simon & Garfunkel covers. (She’s doing “The Sound of Silence” — and it’ll be interesting to see how her generally warm tones contrast with the cavernous sadness James Blake recently brought to his cover of the same song). Meanwhile, Araabmuzik and Kelela just released their collaborative track, “Final Hour,” which will appear on the former’s upcoming album, Dream World. Listen over at Pitchfork.
From ‘The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales’
A new study has shown that your tendency to strategically hover by the cheese plate at parties isn’t just due to a general lack of self-control or a deep love of cheese: the stuff is, according to a new study at the University of Michigan, actually addictive. It’s because of a protein called casein, which, as the Telegraph reports, “releases opiates called casomorphins.”
It could be said that Star Wars likely seems addictive, given the fervor surrounding the last trailer, which broke the record set by the first, garnering 128 million YouTube views over the course of a day. Because so many people are giddy with anticipation, people who like to exploit such giddiness seem to be confident they’ve struck gold: currently, someone is attempting to sell tickets to an opening day screening of the film for 10,000 dollars (and all over the web, there are various other slightly more reasonable, but still exorbitant, prices being set.) Star Wars craze has also led to the redesign of a statue of Lenin as Darth Vader in Yuzhne, Ukraine, where communist symbols have been banned.