El Problema
Today, I’m sharing a selection of photos from my recent trip to PR! You can see them here, and here’s a bonus one just for the newsletter.
Nothing big upcoming in the immediate, but thank you to everyone who came to the Overheard show at Union Pool, Ben Seretan and Fraternal Twin for playing alongside us, and my friend Marco for hopping on drums at the absolute last minute to sub in for our beloved Lenny, who was unfortunately ill and couldn’t make it. Marco and I have been working on a secret project of our own, and I can’t wait to have something more than phone recordings to show for it. 🐎
Misc. stuff I’m loving:
Movies:
Cinema Paradiso [1988, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore]. Movies are good.
Mickey 17 [2025, dir. Bong Joon-ho]. Capitalism is bad.
Music:
A big list of stuff I’m listening to lately.
DARKSIDE’s Nothing;
Michael J. Blood’s Spaces In Between;
Shygirl’s Club Shy Room 2 EP;
Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift;
trauma ray’s Chameleon;
GEE LEE’s DJ set Take A Break;
Open Head’s What is Success;
Hamilton Leithauser’s This Side of the Island;
revisiting Deafheaven’s album Sunbather (the new remix is bad, listen to the old one);
Ben Seretan’s Youth Pastoral (was so cool to play a show where I heard some of those songs live!);
and finally, I finished making the playlist The Decade According to Will LaPorte 2020-2029 Part 1, and you can listen to it here. I will have a lot more to say about that soon.
Reading:
I finished Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist and will have a lot more to say about that soon. This is related to the previous thing I mentioned having a lot more to say about soon.
Chainsaw Man is crazy good this week.
Podcasts:
A friend of mine has recently caved and started making a podcast again; this time it’s a show about celebrity breakups called Unrequited! Their episode on Ethan Slater, Ariana Grande and the drama on the set of Wicked was really fun (and also kinda sad).
Switched on Pop has a really great ep called ‘Bad Bunny’s Love Letter to Puerto Rico,’ all about the incredible album DTMF.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but you know, emails can be a two way street. If you have any questions for me, fire away.
Thanks,
Will