Table of contents for August/September 2025 in Rolling Stone UK

Zoya Raza-Sheikh Writer Certain legacies stick with you. Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Frank Zappa, to name a few, were transgressors of sound. Their strength of vision sought out a new way to connect us, through music that consumed you. Today, we’re seeing artists and bands fabled as the next big thing: slick lyricists and singer-songwriters peddled as the internet’s “new Taylor Swift”, while revving, rumbling alternative acts, from Bring Me The Horizon to Cameron Winter and Turnstile, are curiously admired for their virtuosity, coolly earmarked as the future of rock. Growing up, I had posters of pop stars and metalheads Blu-tacked to my wall. I’d read every music magazine I could get my hands on, questioning who gets to make or break a legacy. Who promises an artist immortality…

‘IT’S ALWAYS WHEN you’re hungover in Aldi,” laughs Alex Lawther, on a balmy June morning at home in south London. “Or when you’re trying to get on the bus and your card is getting declined and a queue’s forming behind you. That’s when someone will be like: “Hey, you’re that kid from that Black Mirror episode!” The actor — best known for playing twitchy outsiders in The End of the Fucking World, Andor, and yes, one particularly distressing episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian tech anthology — is telling Rolling Stone UK about the peculiarity of being recognised in public. “I’m glad I’ve had it [in] dribs and drabs,” he says, describing how his steady rise through the UK acting ranks since 2010 — a Holby City cameo here, a Franco-English…

WHEN YOU MEET Amaarae, it’s hard not to notice how much deeper her speaking voice is compared with the sweet falsetto she constantly deploys in her music. It’s all intentional: “There’s a sensitivity and a vulnerability that I get to tap into in my music that isn’t very easy for me to express,” she tells me under the shade of a teahouse at the Japanese Garden outside Los Angeles. “Deep down, I’m a sensitive and mushy person.” Amaarae has been thinking a lot about who she really is. She’s currently hard at work on Black Star, her upcoming third album, which sees her diving deeper into her identity as both a woman and an artist. The album title is a triple entendre referencing herself, the Ghanaian flag, and the Black…

They successfully headlined Download, earned a number one album and have over six million monthly listeners. So, how has English rock band Sleep Token won over the alternative music scene and nurtured an exceptionally devoted fanbase? WE ALL HAVE snapshot memories of KISS slathering on theatrical black and white makeup for the stage, and glam metal’s Mötley Crüe showing up with powdered faces and pink cheeks. Alternative bands have never shied away from the circus of costume and aesthetic, but Sleep Token take it a step further. In their case, the masks and cloaks they wear are crucial for maintaining anonymity. The band, with their lead vocalist known only as Vessel, and drummer going by ‘II’, plus two touring musicians, have reached an unprecedented level of commercial fame and success,…

It’s New Year’s Eve, and the roads that lead to Jamaica’s National Stadium are filled with food vendors manning their oil-drum grills. Some sell orange bandanas like the pair Vybz Kartel wore when he walked out of the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre five months earlier, on 31 July 2024. Jamaicans from across the island have taken Knutsford Express buses into Kingston, and foreigners have booked nearly all of the hotel rooms in town to see Freedom Street, Kartel’s first concert since 2011. Inside the open-air arena, which is also home to Jamaica’s soccer team and its annual independence ceremony, fans yell above the vuvuzelas. A little after 11pm, the house lights go down and Kartel rises up from beneath the stage wearing a grey pinstripe suit with gold trimming…

IT WAS GRACE Jones, May 2002, and I was in Brockwell Park. In an age when the internet was in its infancy and social media’s rise was still a few years off, Grace’s presence on stage made an indelible impression on a young me. She hadn’t released an album in 13 years, but Grace’s discography was iconically ingrained in the history of music. I knew of her from watching television interviews or reading about her in magazines. I had listened to her music — mostly the obvious hits at that point — before later diving into her deeper discography. But seeing the Grace Jones on stage, with all the magnetism that she exudes, felt otherworldly. I was a product of 90s rave culture before developing a love of live music,…

WHEN THE PANDEMIC brought the live-music industry to a complete stop in 2020, Bruce Springsteen found himself at home with a lot of free time on his hands. He decided to make good use of it by poring over his massive vault of unreleased music, pulling out seven complete records he shelved between 1983 and 2018, and packaging them together as Tracks II: The Lost Albums, which is out now and features an astounding 74 songs most hardcore fans have never heard. “If you look at them as a group, they’re sort of genres that I haven’t dived into as of yet,” Springsteen says via Zoom from his home in Wellington, Florida, noting that the albums touch on everything from Western swing to Burt Bacharach-inspired 60s pop. “They were all…

IT’S A BALMY afternoon in early July and The Last Dinner Party — decked out in an array of white chiffons and silks — are peering down the barrel of a camera lens at a north London studio with an intensity and poise that gives the rightful impression that they’re pros at this sort of thing. Guitarist/vocalist Lizzie Mayland crouches in a powerful, wide-legged pose that evokes the spirit of 70s Bowie, while their bandmates — Abigail Morris, Georgia Davies, Aurora Nishevci and Emily Roberts — cut similarly imposing figures as they flank their friend. But then the imposing mood changes. A quick break is called on set and the sounds of rising US pop star Addison Rae fill the room. Instantly, grins are plastered across the band’s faces as…

‘It’s normally not my vibe to be faceless, but I look a mess, if I’m honest,” laughs Olivia Dean, apologetically channelling the title of her debut album as she speaks from her home in south London. The singer-songwriter, who rocketed into the spotlight two years ago off the back of 2023’s standout debut album release Messy, is currently resting up and nursing a slightly sore throat following an “unbelievable” run of dates opening for Sam Fender at stadiums in London and Newcastle, and later on the day we speak, she will give a sold-out O2 Shepherd’s Bush an early taster of her upcoming second album The Art of Loving ahead of its release on 26 September. “I love playing shows so much,” she enthuses. “It’s the thing that makes me…

WHEN A DIRECTOR arrives at a filming location, they have a lot of important tasks before the real work can begin. Department heads to consult. Actors to prep. Schedules to lock. When Noah Hawley got to Bangkok to direct the first episode of Alien: Earth, he also had to have suits made. “One of the first things I did upon landing was go to a tailor and work up, not a full wardrobe, but a way, through linen and cotton, to try to manage the heat, in a way that was the most stylish and comfortable,” explains Hawley, the always nattily dressed Emmy-winning creator of Fargo and Legion. The bespoke wardrobe serves two purposes. One is that Hawley, 58, believes in dressing for the part when that part involves leadership.…

IF YOU FOUND yourself in east London’s Victoria Park earlier this summer for Outbreak Festival, there’s every chance you may have seen Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks going incognito as thousands of fans watched Turnstile headline the capital’s biggest-ever celebration of hardcore music. The two bands, it’s fair to say, are sonic poles apart. But that day provided Orlando with the chance to soak up a festival in Victoria Park, just two months before a newly reunited Maccabees head there over the August Bank Holiday to play their biggest-ever show at All Points East. The five-piece headlined Glastonbury’s Park Stage this year too (where they brought close friend Florence Welch onstage), but the point very much remains thus: all roads lead to Vicky Park. “It just made me think, ‘This is…

WHENEVER FRIENDS WOULD ask David Balfe how work was going on his new album, he’d tell them the same thing: “I’m just carving the stone.” He’d been using the same phrase for years before to explain how he was moving through tough periods in his life, as if to say: “I’m working on myself. I’m discovering something and I’m chiselling it out.” Carving the Stone, the second album from Balfe’s project For Those I Love, comes four years after the worldwide release of his astonishing, revelatory debut album. For Those I Love had existed in ripped CD form, circulated between Balfe’s friends and family in Dublin, for a few years prior to its discovery by the music industry. It immediately demanded a wide release though after those beyond his inner…

It’s not hard to find James Gunn’s office on the Warner Bros. lot. A huge, glowing Superman “S” symbol beckons from an entrance wall, visible through a glass door from yards away. Gunn, 58, is in his third year as co-CEO of the company’s newly created DC Studios, sharing the title and office with Peter Safran, who handles the business side of the operation. Together, they’re creating a new superhero universe around some very old characters, aiming to finally make Superman and friends (and family, and flying pet) truly competitive with the currently shaky Marvel Cinematic Universe. Gunn is a refugee from that universe, after writing and directing his final MCU movie, 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Superman, released on 11 July, is the first feature film set in…

What’s the worst part of success? Someone once said, “It’s terrible when people are talking about you, and it’s even worse when they’re not talking about you.” Do you have any acting heroes? I’ll go back to the old days, 40s, 50s. I did very much like Spencer Tracy as a performer, because he was always so real. Without putting on false noses and strange accents and all this sort of shit — he was just always present and real. How have you tried to embody that in your work? If the audience believes the words coming out of your mouth, that’s good enough for me. You haven’t done a lot of comedy. What intrigued you about starring in a Naked Gun reboot? I was approached by Seth MacFarlane to…

In 1979 — at the tail end of punk’s first wave and the start of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister — a small but restless group of creatives would congregate every Tuesday at the Blitz Club. Rejecting mainstream society and the parameters of existing subculture, these bright young talents — dubbed the Blitz Kids and New Romantics — would go on to revolutionise popular culture with their eccentric fashions and experimental music. Although it existed for just 18 months and was only large enough for 50 people, the Blitz Club inspired a new wave of glamour and launched the careers of Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Marilyn and Visage, as well as a long list of designers, artists, filmmakers and writers. Described by Tim Marlow, director and CEO of the…

IF YOU HAD been one of the two other shoppers browsing the trinkets at the empty Sherman Oaks Antique Mall in California in early April, you probably would have seen a couple who looked like they’d time-travelled from the Renaissance. They were staring at a two-headed, taxidermied rodent with a cowboy hat. “How do you ethically source a two-headed rat?” asks Lance Shipp, reading a disclaimer above the dressed-up dead animals. “They can’t be real, right?” “I don’t know how to feel about this,” says his partner, Michelle Buzz, looking at a two-headed rabbit wearing a ruffled clown collar just like the one she has on right now. (Buzz is also wearing powder-blue tights and bloomers. She’s hard to miss.) Despite our pit stop at this booth, we’re not here…

BILLY WOODS didn’t intend to make his latest solo album. The MC tells me that he initially planned to work on something new with Elucid, his partner in the duo Armand Hammer. But scheduling conflicts guided him towards something different from that, or from past projects like 2023’s Maps (his concept album with producer Kenny Segal) and 2022’s Aethi opes (produced entirely by Preservation). The result was Golliwog — the latest chapter in an ever-growing catalogue that’s made Woods a darling of underground-rap-heads. “I knew it was my first multiple-producer product in a long time,” he says. “I knew that I had more connections than ever before. So, I tried to cast a wide net.” Woods utilised his expanded network to procure beats from El-P, the Alchemist, Steel Tipped Dove,…

HERE’S WHERE IT lands. My name is Drew Thomson, and I am the founding member of a little band from Canada with two names: Single Mothers/SM Worldwide. One of the reasons we started going by SM Worldwide is that I was tired of explaining the name Single Mothers. I was raised by a single mother, and at the time of the band’s formation, so was everyone else. It was an homage. Being in a band, only ever having what felt like half of what you needed, I don’t know. That’s where the name came from. We’ve been around for longer than anyone thought possible, including me. I struggle even saying we’re a band. We’re more of a collective. We’ve had something like 40 different iterations. Almost every one of our…

It’s an early May afternoon in Washington, D.C., and as a group of demonstrators gather outside the Capitol protesting cuts to Medicaid, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in her congressional office, excitedly pulling bright pink, blue and yellow yarns out of her bag. “I am knitting a cardigan; I call it my Fruity Pebble sweater,” says Ocasio-Cortez, holding the colourful jumble against her black dress. The congresswoman has recently started knitting as an alternative to doomscrolling. “This is a practice that forces me to slow down. In a moment like this, when there’s so much chaos, it is designed to basically just wear our nervous system down raw, so we are then overwhelmed, paralysed and have to accept whatever new development there is going on that day.” Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger…

ALL GROWN-UP A 70s rock vibe makes for a sublime fourth Wolf Alice album Wolf Alice The Clearing RCA Records THE GLORIOUS AND sweeping strings that open Wolf Alice’s fourth album are the first hint at the sense of freedom that defines The Clearing. After becoming one of the UK’s biggest and best new bands with 2015 debut My Love is Cool and follow-up Visions of a Life, the band took another step forwards with 2021’s Blue Weekend, a divine third album that also left its scars. Blue Weekend was a revelation of an album, one that grappled with the tumult of your late twenties. On The Clearing, with the band all now in their thirties, they bask in the self-understanding that can come with ageing, and the work they’ve…

Converse to canvas Converse is teaming up with boundary-pushing designer Feng Chen Wang once again for a head-turning take on the Chuck 70 trainer. Inspired by the rich Chinese ceramic tradition of Jian ware, this limited-edition drop transforms the classic shoe into a wearable piece of art. Think layered textures, burnished finishes and graphics that echo handcrafted pottery, all grounded in a two-in-one silhouette that creates the illusion of a trainer within a trainer. More than a shoe, it’s a collector’s item for streetwear fans.  fengchenwang.com…