This is our seventh iteration of Monthly Discoveries, our recurring series where the Welcome team rounds up and shares what we discovered on the internet this past month.

Paid subscribers can revisit previous six editions here, here, here, here, here, and here.

August’s eclectic assortment includes a rare photograph, a highly customized firearm, a Minecraft experiment, incredible tattoos and short films, standout artworks, and more.

Happy discovering.

3-D Printed Miku animation by Sorao Sakimura

Sorao Sakimura is a Japanese artist whose devotion to anime informs his practice that synthesizes animation, live action, and 3DCGI. For the music video for Hatsune Miku and Saku’s track “Pure,” Sakumuru 3D printed Miku as a physical object, fabricating 332 distinct poses from 1,027 printed components, and then capturing the figure across urban settings in 4,352 stop-motion frames.

ear’s unconventional tour venues

ear are embarking on their U.S. tour this September, notably routing the tour through some of the country’s most unconventional venues. The itinerary includes a New York heliport where a man famously hijacked a helicopter in 1974, a converted armory, and a handful of churches and community art centers.

Sonic Note One by @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2

This custom unconventional firearm is a collaboration between @dieslo999 and @xiaji2tsunagi2. Both are underground designers, with dieslo formerly focusing mostly on garments, and xiaji2 mostly focusing on physical objects. The product shoot for the gun was also great, with models styled as figurines on round bases holding the weapon.

Dolly Parton photo by Bryan Fuller

Bryan Fuller, creator of the television series Hannibal, shared this exceptional photograph of Dolly Parton performing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2016. A strange camera artifact caused Dolly’s silhouette to clip into pure white light, almost as though she were illuminated from within. Fuller described the accident as something that “perfectly captured her essence”.

Tattoos by Kim Daeo

Seoul based tattoo artist Kim Daeo conjures tattoos that blur the lines between common bruises and watercolor freeform art. His practice is defined by an avoidance of pre-planned palettes, instead favoring an intuitive process of mixing and layering colorful inks and water directly into the cartridge. This naturalistic approach produces spontaneous, blended creations.

T-shirts by Shunichi Iwata

Drawing from Utagawa Hiroshige’s famous ukiyo-e landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, Japanese artist Shunichi Iwata recreated all 55 woodblock prints using monotype printmaking on a collection of t-shirts. Ukiyo-e, which translates to “pictures of the floating world,” was a popular Japanese art form during the Edo period. Traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing was an early method of mass-producing fine art and later had a major influence on European modern artists such as Monet and Van Gogh in the 19th century.

Stopmotion Train video by Aarica North

Artist Aarica North shared a frame-by-frame stop-motion video this month of a figurine pirouetting and dancing through the course of a long train journey. Filmed over 15 hours, the piece beautifully captures the passage of time. Its opening sequence was directly inspired by St. Petersburg dancer Vlada Chepkasowa, while the remainder was improvised intuitively. Pay close attention to the minute details, particularly the expressiveness conveyed through the figurine’s shifting hand positions.

Excoriation by Tseng Chien-Ying

Chien-Ying’s Excoriation uses ink, color, and mineral pigments on paper to render a visceral, highly figurative depiction of a pair of very anxious hands. Many commenters felt deeply seen by the work, which depicts excoriation disorder, a psychiatric condition characterized by repetitive skin picking that results in tissue damage and emotional distress.

Furry Guntube Content by @dawgshot_official

@dawgshot_official, or Cooper Harley, is a self proclaimed Furry GunTuber whose most common form of content is a lateral shot of him in a fur suit firing some exotic or souped-up firearm. The breadth of his arsenal is impressive, and he’s quite knowledgeable. One is also naturally interested in the seeming ideological incongruity of his two hobbies.

Flex Decks by Hurt Abdu

Hurt Abdu is a conceptual product designer, and a Monthly Discoveries favorite. Here, he continues his practice of transforming the disposable materials into objects of cultural fetish, this time with a series of Tech Deck-inspired BIC lighter cases equipped with functional wheels. They come in five iterations: Cat, Towlie, Bitch, Raf, and Gaara. On Instagram, he previewed versions referencing cultural cornerstones such as Supreme, YVL, Asspizza, Che, Fakemink, Mowola, and many others. Conveniently, wired earbuds will wrap around the wheels. Also check out his glock stress toys, which he dropped in June.

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• Ken Carson — xperiment - caretunez

• Turnstile — NEVER ENOUGH:VERSIONS

• xaviersobased — “Struggle Gang”

• Chanel Beads — “teenage dream chanel beads remix”

• Tommy Fleece — Plus

• untitled (halo) — “aimee lou wood freestyle”

• Tezzus + diamond* — “Hood of Atlanta”

• underscores — “Unlimited Love + The Peace (Frost Children Remix)”

• Soldier’s Reveal Yourself, Softly at Market Gallery in New York, opening September 1

• Tickets dropped for Printed Matters’s 2026 NY Art Book Fair (featuring 300+ exhibitors from 41 countries) at MoMA PS1 in New York from September 24–27

• Deana Lawson’s Edge Control at Gagosian, featuring photographs and holograms, opening September 10 at 541 West 24th Street in New York

• Christian Marclay’s exhibition at White Cube Paris in Paris from September 9–October 10

• Gagosian at Frieze Seoul at COEX in Seoul from September 2–5, featuring paintings and sculptures by Damien Hirst

• Shigeo Otake’s Inside the White Cube: Agoraphilia at White Cube Hong Kong through August 29

• Interesting campaigns this week: Prada AW25, Gucci Primavera by Michael Chelbin, Celine by Michael Rider, Balenciaga AW26 by Pierpaolo Piccoli

• JW Anderson dropped a “Twisted Denim” collection featuring a twisted silhouette made in Japan from Japanese cotton

• Willy Chavarria collabs with UGG on a biker inspired footwear collection

• Brands are gearing up to prepare for NYFW early next month

Products

• Everything Is Important, Vol. 2, a field guide to NYC’s downtown art scene curated by Mike Brewer and produced by Travis Spinks and Noah Letcavage

• HELIOT EMIL + Alpinestar’s Ignite boots containing spark rods engineered to create sparks when they make contact with the road

• Home Invasion’s Jeffery lamp inspired by Young Thug’s album cover and Alessandro Trincone’s 2016 Japanese-style dress

• BERLIN POSTERS FIRKIN bag by @gorantosic_, made from found posters

• Custom Rick Owens Geobasket mules by @dietsodas

This Week’s Headlines

Iranian state TV aired a tutorial for assassinating Barron Trump

Iranian state television aired a Hitman-style video segment titled “Where and How Should We K*ll Barron Trump?” alleging that they have Trump’s 20-year-old son under tight surveillance, detailing his movements and personal life, and advertising a $10 million bounty for his assassination. The U.S. Secret Service confirmed that the claims are being investigated.

There’s a new underground rap super-collective

Lucy Bedroque, Slayr, Prettifun, and many more have come together to form La Familia. The collective unites a group of artists who have long socialized in a Discord group, and have a history of musical collaboration. La Familia was first teased during a PlaqueBoyMax stream earlier this year, and the official Instagram page debuted this week. Look through their following for a glimpse at the collective’s wider network, with 38+ affiliated artists, producers, and visual creators.

Highlights from the first look at GTA VI’s gameplay

The GTA VI extended look dropped yesterday, offering the first look at gameplay and the most concrete details yet about the game. Highlights include:

• Characters Lucia and Jason will physically change based on players’ habits

• NPCs are set to be more advanced and reactive than ever

• Players can travel together or separately as the two protagonists and build a relationship between them that will affect the story

• The map is reportedly twice the size of GTA V’s and three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2’s

• There’s a more complex six-star wanted system and advanced police recognition

• Stealing cars will be a far more involved process, with techniques varying from vehicle to vehicle.

The robot Olympics were held in Beijing

The five-day World Humanoid Robot Games have just wrapped up, bringing together more than 2,000 humanoid robots to compete in Olympic-style events including running, soccer, tug of war, table tennis, combat, sparring, and long jump. Notably, three robots surpassed Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds, with the top three finishing in 8.64, 8.86, and 9.39 seconds, respectively. The events took a massive toll on the robots, with several falling apart mid-event, and nearly all of them requiring extensive repairs afterward.

Catastrophic flash floods strike Nepal and Tibet

Triggered by a glacial collapse in the Himalayas, devastating flash flooding swept across the Nepal-Tibet border, leaving 579 people dead, and nearly 2,000 others unaccounted for. The initial collapse was large enough to read as a magnitude 5.3 earthquake, and caused water levels to rise up to 9 meters in 30 minutes. Rescue officials are now warning that secondary floods could be an issue, as temporary dams upstream, formed by the debris, could fail in the coming days.

New DJ-rating app is like Letterboxd for nightlife

A new app called “Seen Live” allows users to rate DJ sets and live shows in a Letterboxd or RateYourMusic-esque fashion. Reception is polarized, with many questioning the need to constantly algorithmize everything, particularly live music, while others have shrugged off the app as a useful tool for documenting their personal history. The release speaks to a broader cultural obsession with tracking, cataloguing, and rating everything we consume.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Loro Piana — Digital & E-Commerce Intern (New York, NY)

E-commerce internship supporting Loro Piana North America with a focus on digital marketing, paid media, and website analytics. Responsibilities include managing the e-commerce activation calendar, tracking product launches and marketing campaigns, briefing campaigns across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Pinterest, analyzing site performance, and developing competitive e-commerce reports. Ideal candidate has strong analytical and project management skills, knowledge of digital media and e-commerce, and an interest in luxury fashion and leather goods.
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Full-time editorial internship supporting Canvas Magazine’s editorial team for a three to six-month hybrid contract. Responsibilities include creating social content, pitching and writing articles, conducting interviews, assisting with daily editorial tasks, and attending events as a brand ambassador. Ideal candidate is a recent graduate or has a relevant degree in arts, media, or publishing, with strong writing and social media skills.
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CELINE — Image Assistant Intern (Paris, France)

Six-month image internship supporting CELINE’s design and creation team beginning September 2026. Responsibilities include assisting with image-related projects and supporting the creative team across day-to-day activities. Ideal candidate is interested in fashion imagery, visual culture, and working within a luxury fashion house.
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I don’t like interviews.

          I read one recently with a male and female actor. The woman kept interjecting. ‘Watch your words, they won’t translate over text.’ This left more of an impression with me than anything either of them actually said. Words, especially written words, are sanitized in real time - snatched out of the air and nailed down. Ambiguities and potentialities are stamped out until language becomes less a living thing than a forensic artifact - flattened into evidence, stripped of tone, scent, timing, breath. A sentence stops behaving like weather and starts behaving like built form.

          Everyone changes. We do so all the time. Some change, some growth, requires destruction. I’ve always been interested in destruction, particularly through the lens of plasticity - not in the diluted self-help sense of neuroplasticity, but as the philosopher Catherine Malabou defines it. 

          Plasticity is the capacity to give form, receive form, and destroy form. I’ve had that line memorised since university. I can recite it on command, like a prayer or a threat. People often confuse plasticity with flexibility, but they are almost opposites. Flexibility is passive. Flexible things bend to pressure. Plasticity is generative. It creates. It ruptures. It survives its own destruction by becoming something else. 

          Malabou writes about this in relation to the brain, identity, trauma, and transformation, but I think it applies to everything: architecture, relationships, public image, womanhood, performance, selfhood.

          Form is never final. Identity is not fixed. Personality is not fixed. Belief is not fixed. Some structures collapse slowly. Others detonate all at once. But what interests me is that destruction is not the absence of form - it is itself a form. The outline of something new appears precisely where the old thing breaks apart.

          Plasticity refuses permanence. It refuses the fantasy that a person can be cleanly defined, captured, stabilised, or fully known. Which is probably why interviews make me uncomfortable. This flattening of complex or dangerous realities is the first step towards insisting that people say things they know aren’t true, which eventually leaves us blind to the nature of reality, both awesome and awful. In the second volume of Dune, Lady Jessica of the Bene Gesserit warns Paul Atreides: ‘You will see the beauty, the beauty... and the horror.’ 

I’m just as interested in the horror as I am the beauty.

          I’ve only done one interview. I read it back and couldn’t fully recognize the person they interviewed. But it was nice to be asked. I enjoyed the invitation to self-absorption. For a moment, you’re allowed to speak entirely about yourself. That’s the whole point, so no one can judge you for being self-involved. Still, I can’t be too annoyed. I tend to vacillate. Maybe I mean oscillate.

          God mode to mouse mode and back again. Sometimes I feel (like) everything. Sometimes I feel (like) nothing. I am untethered; I explode and collapse according to my internal state. This can be difficult to engage with. Women are expected to exist within a narrow bandwidth of socially acceptable self-perception.

          Anyway, I was sitting at Chateau Marmont with an art dealer, discussing my furniture. My first show includes furniture. The next seven don’t. I’ve been designing this body of work, and the seven shows that follow, for half a decade. If anything, the more accurate word for me is calculated. Calculation is only considered negative when applied to a person. A calcula-TOR is useful – even essential. A calculated woman is suspicious. The mechanism is the same. Only the context changes. Context is everything. 

          Nudity on a red carpet is abnormal. But so is anything other than nudity in a bathtub. For the record, I like both.

This cycle of work consists of seven pieces over seven years.

          Seven is a magical number. Biblical. Mythological. Mathematical. The ancient Sumerians used it to mean ‘totality.’ There are seven chakras. Seven Holy Sacraments. Seven heavens in Islam. It’s the number of colors in the rainbow. It’s the only number between one and ten that’s neither a factor nor a multiple of any of the others.

          Throughout the history of our species, seven has been used to represent everything and also to signify an outsider, or odd one out, often simultaneously. It’s also the number of books in my favourite series Harry Potter. I’ve always collected things. Facts, mostly. Like a little human computer. When someone mentions a topic or person in conversation, I retrieve a fact I know about it in response. Sometimes it’s exact. Sometimes it’s slightly off.

I think it’s my way of engaging without fully exposing myself. Sort of like submitting an essay in response to a request for an interview.

          The dealer was sweet. Interested. She asked if I could perform at the gallery, as though I were a circus act, as if I have performances sitting ready in my back pocket to produce on command. Maybe she thought I was a lion tamer. I felt flattered, but also misunderstood.

          The piano was too loud, so I couldn’t hear properly. I kept repeating myself, trying to explain the arc of my work in different ways. None of them seemed to land. She was trying to understand the concept of ‘BIO’ and ‘POP.’ I put my Roy Rogers down, looked her directly in the eyes, and said:

“I am pop art!”

          Not because I believe that in any fixed sense. But because when I feel misunderstood, I swing in the opposite direction. God mode. And then, inevitably, mouse mode. At night, I lie awake and feel the weight of existence in a way that has nothing to do with material lack. I feel misunderstood. I wonder if I will ever be known in the way I know myself.

          When I think about interviews nailing down their subjects, I can hear the hammer on the nails. I can see them forming this irregular hexagon, sealing the lid on a coffin. My coffin. And then I’m in that scene from Kill Bill and I gotta get my karate on to punch myself back out of there before I run out of air. I rest my head on my husband’s chest, mindful of his sore shoulder, tears streaming, and I ask him if any of this is worth it. The world feels barren in those moments - like a desert, and I fear that I will never be accepted, never be known. But once my eyes close and the morning brings a change of season and it’s spring again. The grass is green and the flowers have bloomed and I’m back. I used to smoke cigarettes and read The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. A few chapters in I thought, am I being brainwashed? And yes, I was.

          That’s when I realised the power of repetition. Repetition is conditioning. It taught me how easily belief can be constructed. I testified in court recently and I saw an article in Rolling Stone the following day describing me as an “enigmatic performance artist.” I thought, wow, okay. Is that description warranted? I’ve only done one show. I had repeated the idea of ARTIST so many times, so precisely, that it was now reflected back to me as fact. Coronated in print. Or maybe they said it cause I was wearing a pencil skirt. Very enigmatic indeed.

          I’ve been asked to do many major covers as long as ‘something in my life had changed’ (I think you can infer what that means). Interviews. Even a documentary with a major network. They asked to facilitate couples therapy on camera, 

perhaps because any narrative given to the world in a digestible format necessarily involves some degree of fiction.

          For my art show, BIO POP, I worked with a public relations guru for the first time, hoping that this time TMZ wouldn’t simply reduce me to what I wore, or didn’t wear.

          They still did, obviously. She told me I needed to do interviews to explain the work. I agreed at first, but then I didn’t want to, so I had one of the performers dressed like me and answer in my place. At one point the interviewer looked at both of us, and asked: “Are we actually having a conversation?” Which in turn made me go on a rant about consent. That you cannot force someone to speak if they haven’t given it. Which is slightly ironic, because speaking is the premise of an interview. I guess that was my way of saying no.

I didn’t read the questions POSTPOSTPOST sent me.

          Arrogant, maybe, but the whole process belongs to the uncanny. Namely – this issue.

What does the uncanny mean to me?

         It is the moment something is destroyed and reborn into something new and familiar, but at the same time peculiar. My husband and I were reading about bipolar episodes when I came across something an anonymous reddit poster wrote that stayed with me.

          They said bipolar disorder makes you realize your sense of self isn’t tied to your actions, beliefs, or ethics, like everyone thinks it is. Because all of those can dissolve and reconfigure, depending on your state of mind. The only thing that remains consistent, the only thing that might be true, is your ability to reflect on them.

          Interviews structure, distill, repeat, and abridge something that isn’t stable. But you can’t make people digestible like that. It’s not how identity functions. Identity breaks itself. It reforms and renews itself. It contradicts itself. It explodes and collapses.

          Where old forms break, you see in the outline of the new the regenerative power of destruction, which is not the absence of form, but the manifestation of 

new form.

So, no. I won’t give you an interview.

-

Photographer: James Orlando

Artist Collaboration: Biuro

Hair: Jake Gallagher

Makeup: Bianca’s own

Executive Producer: Leo Becerra

Originally written by Bianca Censori in response to an interview inquiry by POSTPOSTPOST.

New Music Releases:

• Feng — Summertime at Camp Lakepine

• diamond* — BLING BØI EP 2: HOSTED BY DJ HOLIDAY (BLING SLIME DELUXE)

• Thirteendegrees° — GHETTO HIPSTER

• Lucy Bedroque — “SPEED DEMON / WHITEHORSEMANNEQUIN”

• skaiwater — “HITUNES”

• Tezzus — “Blue Hunndids”

• prettifun — Pretti Loves U 2

• Ye + Don Toliver — OK (music video)

• Cameron Winter’s Live at Carnegie Hall will be released October 9, featuring three new live compositions

Artworld

• Yung Lean announced his first comprehensive exhibition devoted to his visual-art practice, Collected Works 2016-2026 in Stockholm from September 25th - October 11th

• 502 Bad Gateway’s Error is Shadow at Flux IV in New York through August 30th

• Shapeshifters – Magic in Fashion (group show) at Copenhagen Contemporary in Copenhagen through September 6th

• Camille Henrot’s Paper Planes at Copenhagen Contemporary in Copenhagen through December 31st

• Honor the mundane (Group Show 3) at Komune in New York through August 23rd

Fashion

• Supreme dropped a massive FW26 collection yesterday with collaborations and inspiration across fashion, gaming, skating, art, technology, and culture

• Hedi Slimane gives a rare interview, reflecting on the resurgence of his designs and influence today

• Fugazi and Vans pulled their collaboration due to backlash over confusion surrounding Fugazi being associated with the punk band. The remaining pairs were sold for $5 in NY and LA last weekend

• Erin Magee, Chief Creative Officer of Supreme, is leaving the brand after 22 years

• Octavius la Rosa, one of the foremost Comme des Garçons archivists, is selling some of his rarest pieces collected over the past four decades

Products

• Chief Keef incense holder by Modou

• Beach Bum Bag V2 by Tommy Jack Dover Dier

• 1/1 distressed gemstone watch by Simuero

• Supreme x Jeff Hamilton box logo jacket (limited to 38)

• TD-1 vertical record player by Ruka

This Week’s Headlines

Andrew Tate fans protested his arrest by doing push-ups outside his prison

Outside the Miami detention center where the Tate brothers are being held in a special unit, dozens of supporters gathered to chant and do pushups in protest of the imprisonment of their manosphere idols. Last week, a hearing was postponed to determine whether the brothers should remain in custody as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where they face allegations of rape and human trafficking.

A poorly animated $200 Chinese movie is becoming a viral sensation - and a historic box office hit

Niu Lai, a Chinese animated film, has grossed over $3 million on a reported $200 budget, overtaking Obsession for the highest box-office-to-budget ratio ever reported. The film garnered massive attention in China for being so bad it was funny, a bit like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Reportedly made entirely with free software by a mother-and-son duo, the film was written, animated, and voiced by the pair over the course of five years.

U.S. Army is offering troops four days off to play GTA 6, IF they re-enlist for 2-6 more years

The U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division has been incentivizing soldiers to reenlist for at least 2 years by offering them four days off so that they can play GTA 6. As of the last update, 20 of the 130 eligible soldiers in the Engineering Battalion have reenlisted as a result of the “GTA 6” perk.

Tupac’s murder trial has finally begun

Tupac Shakur’s murder trial has officially begun nearly 30 years after the rapper was fatally shot in Las Vegas in 1996. Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the only person charged in connection with Shakur’s killing, has pleaded not guilty. The case has taken decades to reach trial because investigators had to build sufficient evidence from Davis’s numerous interviews, in which he discussed his alleged involvement, as well as his 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, where he also wrote about the killing.

New study found the most popular emoji for each generation, trends in emoji-use, and more

According to a New York Times investigation that analyzed data from Reddit forums, popular emojis were tracked to examine how different age groups use them. The analysis revealed insights across a range of metrics, including that 😭 was the most popular emoji of 2025, overtaking the traditional laughing emojis, while the emojis that gained popularity fastest were 🗿🥸🥀🫰🏼🇧🇷💔. The key takeaway: emoji trends are heavily influenced by the generation you belong to.

This week in rap beefs

• YSL and Nine Vicious’s beef continues to escalate: Nine, who was once believed to be signed to YSL, is continuing to have a public falling out with Young Thug and the label. This week, he encouraged fans at a show to chant “Fuck YSL,” prompting Øway rapper and YSL affiliate Tezzus to respond by declaring Nine “banned” from Atlanta: “He can’t come back to Atlanta, man. It’s over with… ØWay or no way. It’s ØWay/YSL.”

• Matt Proxy and slayr beef also escalated: slayr and Matt Proxy have also continued to beef, mostly over Instagram stories and tweets, with both artists calling each other out for their performative cultural positions and ties to controversial artists (slayr with K-pop band CORTIS, Matt with sleepypuppy77).

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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032c Magazine — Editorial Intern (Berlin, Germany)

Full-time editorial internship supporting 032c Magazine’s print and online editorial team for three to six months beginning September 2026. Responsibilities include researching, fact-checking, and writing articles, copy-editing, managing online content, developing advertorial concepts, and supporting website data analysis. Ideal candidate has a strong writerly voice, deep knowledge of contemporary culture, and an interest in fashion, music, art, or literature.
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Written by Sik Frydas

Video games and music have always been tangled up. Before streaming algorithms sorted sound for us, music discovery often happened with a controller in hand, on a loading screen or mid-level. Many of the most important sounds of the last three decades were first heard this way.

Video games are not only a discovery channel, but a source of inspiration for artists, and a suite of tools for them to use. Grime pioneers produced their earliest melodies on Music 2000, a humble PlayStation music-making game, while producers like Burial have spent careers chasing the feeling of the games they grew up with.

Over time, more and more of those kids who came of age playing video games grew into prominent artists. As a result, the crossover of the music and video game worlds became more deliberate and inventive. Musicians increasingly shape how games sound from the inside, whether they are scoring whole worlds, or premiering exclusive tracks. It’s a bit like our generation’s version of a movie soundtrack.

What has emerged is a rich cultural intersection, where music and video games meet to form a single artistic object. Many of the greatest artists of the past fifty years have lent their talents to video games, or been immortalized in them, and the outcomes have often been remarkable. Here are some of our favorites.

This is part one of a two-part series.

Bladee & James Ferraro made Sanctuary

Last year, Drain Gang’s Bladee and experimental producer James Ferraro joined forces on Sanctuary, an interactive digital poem. The pair created and designed the game together, with Bladee also, naturally, helping score it. The result was a haunting sonic landscape, with distant whirring and whistling layered with Bladee’s distorted voice.

Powered by Microsoft’s Azure AI, it was a text-based adventure in which players navigated a post-apocalyptic labyrinth, conversing with NPCs built on generative AI, each exchange unrepeatable and slightly uncanny. Fittingly for a work about decay, Microsoft eventually killed the project for being too expensive to run.

Machine Girl did the whole Neon White soundtrack

When Ben Esposito, lead designer of breakneck indie platformer Neon White, heard Machine Girl’s 2020 EP RePorpoised Phantasies, he sought out the American electronic duo to compose his game’s entire original soundtrack. It was an inspired match. Neon White is a game about speed, precision, and repetition, where levels are replayed dozens of times in pursuit of a faster finish time, and Machine Girl’s frantic, breakbeat-driven maximalism turned every restart into a rush.

The result was two distinct albums totalling 41 tracks, steeped in turn-of-the-millennium electronica and the crunchy, optimistic futurism of early-2000s console games. For many players, the soundtrack outlived the game itself, which is reflected in its streaming numbers.

Def Jam rappers appearing Def Jam Vendetta

A groundbreaking entry in the crossover hall of fame, Def Jam Vendetta took real-life artists from the Def Jam roster, such as DMX, Ludacris, Method Man, and Redman, and turned them into playable street fighters. With over 40 characters and a soundtrack stacked with classics like ‘Party Up’ and ‘Bring the Pain,’ it treated rappers the way games treat superheroes. No crossover since has matched its swagger.

GTA V’s Radio Dial

GTA V, the second best-selling videogame of all time, bottled the counter-culture of a generation, and its radio dial was a huge part of that. Rockstar understood something simple: listening happens while driving, and if players were going to spend hundreds of hours behind a virtual wheel, the radio had to be well-curated.

Most famously, Frank Ocean hosted his own station, blonded RADIO, alongside producers Vegyn, Roof Access, and Federico Aliprandi, weaving his own ‘Provider’ and ‘Ivy’ together with Aphex Twin’s ‘Flim’ and Jme’s ‘Man Don’t Care.’ Elsewhere on the dial, Flying Lotus ran FlyLo FM, spinning Tyler, The Creator, Outkast, Thundercat, and more.

The tradition looks set to continue: controversial UK media figure Alhan Gencay is rumoured to have a station in the upcoming GTA 6, which would make him perhaps the first podcast-era personality to graduate into open-world radio.

Aphex Twin Everywhere

Richard D. James might be electronic music’s great recluse, but his music gets around plenty in the video game world, appearing across racing, action, and open-world games. ‘Windowlicker’ featured on FlyLo FM, ‘Z Twig’ turned up in GTA IV, ‘CIRKLON3’ landed on the Watch Dogs 2 soundtrack, and a couple of his tracks found a natural home in the WipEout series.

Burial sampled Metal Gear Solid 2

In this case, traffic flowed the other way. Burial, dance music’s celebrated phantom, famously lifted the musical intro from Metal Gear Solid 2 for his era-defining ‘Archangel,’ transforming a stealth game’s menu ambience into one of the most emotionally grasping openings in modern electronic music.

He’s also compared his own music to exploring the misty environments of Silent Hill; rain-slicked, half-abandoned, lit by a dying torch.

Skrillex did the fight intro music for Mortal Kombat X

By 2015, Skrillex was arguably the most recognizable producer in the world, and Mortal Kombat X was a franchise built on maximum impact. Skrillex produced ‘Reptile’s Theme’ for the game, a piece of music engineered for that pivotal moment infighting games: the second before the round starts.

It was also a neat closing of a loop. Skrillex was one the generation of producers that learned about sound design partly through the crunch and snarl of ‘90s arcade games. Here, he gave back to the form.

Brian Eno did the music for Spore

Ambient music’s founding theorist scoring a game about the evolution of life from single cell to interstellar civilization is, on paper, the most Brian Eno thing imaginable. In practice it was even more so. Rather than write fixed cues for Will Wright’s 2008 sim, Eno worked with the game’s audio team on generative systems, so the music assembled itself in response to what the player’s creature was doing.

Eno had spent decades arguing that music could be a system rather than a recording, something that grows and changes on its own terms. With Spore, Eno materialized this.

Everyone x Fortnite

Fortnite has, arguably, become the biggest concert venue on the planet: artists like Marshmello, Travis Scott, and Ariana Grande have each performed in the game.

Musicians such as The Weeknd, Billie Eilish, and EsDeeKid all have wearable skins, with Esdee’s designed by frequent collaborator Kai Ghattaura.

Michael Jackson’s beat-em-up arcade game Moonwalker

In 1990, several videogames based on Michael Jackson’s 1988 film Moonwalker arrived, all gloriously strange. The isometric arcade beat-em-up version had Michael fighting goons with magical energy beams, unleashing screen-clearing dance attacks, and rescuing kidnapped children; the 2D platformer edition sent players searching for children hidden behind doors, inside car boots, and under bushes, and even featured Michael’s pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. The purest artifact of pop-star excess ever committed to a cartridge.

Multiple Artists x WipEout

Few games bridged worlds like WipEout, the anti-gravity racer that brought 90s club culture screaming into British living rooms. Much of the soundtrack was composed by Welsh musician Tim Wright, aka CoLD SToRAGE, but the series became legendary for its licensed music (The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Daft Punk) and its sleek futurist look, courtesy of iconic design group The Designers Republic.

Multiple Artists x Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

For anyone born in the early-to-mid 90s, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater defined not just a generation’s hobbies but their listening habits. Certain tracks are permanently welded to the franchise, none more so than Goldfinger’s “Superman,” the defining anthem of the original game.

Official playlists now place new-era artists like Denzel Curry and Fontaines D.C. alongside A Tribe Called Quest and Motörhead. Few games can claim to have been a generation’s first great mixtape in quite the same way as Pro Skater.

Carlos Rico made a bootleg GTA London

Last summer, Carlos Rico went mega-viral with a mock-up trailer for his imagined GTA London, packed frame-to-frame with references: Ferdi’s “Why you coming fast?”, the Anuvahood traffic warden, and Munya Chawawa’s Unknown P.

Musically, it featured nearly the whole UK scene: Skepta, Jme, D Double E, Central Cee, plus a nod to grime collective Travs Presents. The design details ran just as deep: Virgil Abloh’s Maybach (likely nodding to Skepta’s), the Boy Better Know x Corteiz collab, and Arsenal’s iconic 22/23 green-and-yellow pre-match shirt. For a few days, the most talked-about game in Britain was one nobody would ever be able to play.

Hudson Mohawke made a game for his album

Long before the stadium-sized brass and the Kanye co-signs, Hudson Mohawke marked the release of his 2009 debut Butter with something far sillier: Butterstar Galactica, an official browser pinball game built as a promotional companion to the record. It was lo-fi, the sort of Flash-era curio that arrived, buzzed around the blogs for a fortnight, and vanished.

It also made perfect sense. Butter is an album of sugar-rush synths, chopped R&B and cartoon physics, and a pinball table is arguably its ideal delivery mechanism: bright, chaotic, over in ninety seconds, immediately replayed.

deadmau5 cameo in Goat Simulator

Not every crossover needs to be grand. Coffee Stain’s Goat Simulator, built off physics and bad ideas, tucked deadmau5 into its world as a cameo, complete with the unmistakable mau5head, waiting to be discovered by anyone headbutting their way around the map.

Written By Keaton B McD

Fair ground art is one of the UK’s last remaining folk arts. Pioneered in the 19th century by showmen seeking to stand out from the competition, the form has evolved as rides have, and today stands as its own genre, with its own class of artisans.

In the 1800s, the form was defined by handwritten signage and banners. As rides got bigger, showmen had their sides illustrated with immersive depictions exotic locations and animals. Today, the form is dominated by large-scale airbrushed symbols of pop culture.

Hull Fair, the oldest traveling fun fair in the world, is the perfect case study for this evolving folk art. It started in 1279, and still runs for 2 weeks on a 16 acre strip off Walton Street in Hull, East Yorkshire. It’s one of the most highly regarded fairs in the world. Showmen and visitors alike travel from all parts of the country to attend.

On the facade of each ride is a 4 meter by 3 meter sheet of metal which forms a perfect canvas. Each is painted with a dual purpose.

The first is commercial attraction. Something that will catch your eye. Cross-eyed Eminem, the cast of Tomorrow Never Dies, Britney Spears with red eyes. Their presence creates the allure of celebrity approval, hoping to pull on the wallets of the souls that wander past. Their accuracy (or lack thereof) makes you unsure whether the artist ever laid eyes on the person they are attempting to depict.

The second purpose of these artworks is to elicit an emotive response. Depictions of extreme fear or joy. Eyes bulging, mouths agape, expressions stretched across a face, looks that embody the feeling you’ll get on the ride itself.

Over the course of Hull Fair’s history, many stylistic eras have been showcased on the sides of its rides, from Rococo Revival, to Neo-classicism, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Its art mirrored significant societal changes, including the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the birth of pop culture. The style has also evolved through advances in artistic tools: first from the brush to the airbrush, and now to digital artwork and vinyl wraps.

Each ride is traditionally passed down through generations, but the artist behind them often becomes forgotten or lost as parts are added or removed throughout seasons, and tastes and trends change. Showmen generally consider the artists they hire to be commercial necessities. For this reason, little record has been kept of the craftspeople behind the folk art.

One contemporary exception is Paul Wright. He began working in 1980, and is one of the pioneers of 21st century fair ground art. He was a master of the airbrush and one of the first to begin pulling his references from modern pop culture. He was the most sought-after fair ground artist in the country up until his death in 2019.

My brother and I are grew up near Hull, and have a strange relationship with the fair. We don’t enjoy rides, but were lured in by the multi-sensory cinematic dreamscape of the fair. Every year we document different aspects of the fair, as research for a feature film we’re working on.

The first years research materialized in a 216 page book focusing specifically on the art work, featuring numerous rides and the available history on each of their art, though many of the artists remain unknown. The book is called Hull fair: art on the ride and is available via our production company ‘Iron Clown.’

We’re also working on a second study on Hull fair, based around the prize stalls, that will be released in early 2027. We would like to thank all the showmen and artists who have continued to allow us to document their life work and family legacies.

Credits: Photography: @keaton_b_mcd and @__cheeb__; Produced by: @ironclown; Design assistance: @lolaprdesign

The Roundups

Music

New Releases:

Yung Lean — “Robotboy”

Feng — “Fake Friends”

underscores — “The Peace” (music video)

MGNA Crrrta — “Deadtome”

Tezzus — “Øyster”

diamond* — “FERRARI”

Artworld

• A potential upcoming Yung Lean art show titled Jonatan Leandoer Håstad Collected Works 2016 - 2026 is being teased

• Uffe Isolotto’s IMPOTENZA curated by Edoardo Monti at Palazzo Monti in Italy through December 18th

• Check out “The Last Museum”, a free online search engine which lets you search through over 6.3 million artworks from 3,679 museums

• Hashimoto Contemporary’s amuse-bouche (group show) in New York opening August 15th

• Slawn recruited 12 cultural figures to make 12 custom 1:1 Rolex collabs

Fashion

• Levi’s to release a rare, highly sought after pair of WW2-era 501s from 1942

• Dior dropped a stunning hand-painted, ’90s anime-inspired short that references the fashion house’s history through its Miss Dior character

• Luxury fashion is increasingly reimagining cars as art, from Louis Vuitton and Singer’s redesigned Porsche 911s and Ronnie Fieg’s rebuilt vintage BMWs to BMW’s exhibition of 20 artist-reinterpreted Art Cars.

• Rei Kawakubo transformed the Paris Comme des Garçons store into a sculptural art installation for AW26, featuring a striking crimson-red interior

• Hermès created vegetable chandeliers in collaboration with Studio Boum and Flur London

Products

• Bootleg Bob Marley shorts by Te Kiero Mucho

• Logos of the early Ufology Scene book by Studio AKA (restock next week)

• Bape’s Japanese exclusive collectible cards

• AW2002 Junya Watanabe ‘Jewel Encrusted’ white leather pointed toe mules sold by Alex Maxamenko

• Louis Vuitton’s Magnolia Record Player featuring a turntable designed atop of two subwoofers

• La Fam x Filling Pieces’ striped loafer

This Week’s Headlines

Apple is releasing a foldable iPhone

According to reports from Bloomberg and prominent tech insiders, Apple is finally preparing to launch the foldable iPhone, rumored to be called “iPhone Ultra.” Expected to debut at Apple’s annual September event, the device would reportedly fold book-style. Bloomberg also reports that Apple is sufficiently confident in the category to already be planning second- and third-generation versions of the device.

Pitchfork gave Tyga’s AI album a 0, their first in two decades

Pitchfork just gave Tyga’s new album $tarface a 0.0, its first score that low in nearly two decades. Tyga, who is signed to the same label as Fenix Flexin and collaborated with him on a track earlier this year, defended his use of AI with a familiar “adapt or die” philosophy, arguing, “It’s no different than when Auto-Tune came out.” The CEO of Treblo (the AI software used on Fenix Flexin’s track) has claimed that a majority of Tyga’s album was “almost certainly” created using Treblo.

NBA YoungBoy has moved to South Korea and says he’s never coming back

In a recent interview with Funny Marco, NBA YoungBoy revealed that he has moved to South Korea indefinitely. When he moved, he had never visited the country. As to whether he’d return to the U.S. (where he had been living on a mansion ranch in Utah called “Gravedigger Mountain”) YoungBoy responded, “never in life.” Reasons for the move include his experiences in and out of jail, as well as ongoing heart health issues.

Another TikTok creepypasta is being made into a movie

Following the massive success of Backrooms, one of the most famous creepypastas, Jeff the Killer, is being adapted into a feature film, developed by surrealist TikTok creator Savannah Moss. This is part of a growing trend of internet horror IP being adapted into major studio releases, with other notable examples including The Mandela Catalogue, Cartoon Cat, and Siren Head. Online many wonder how this short (rather poorly written1) short story will fare as a full film adaptation.

Trump snuck out of Turkey in a catering cart

After attending a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, this July, U.S. intelligence services identified a credible threat from Iran, causing them to secretly move Trump from Air Force One to a C-32A VIP jet, concealed inside an airport catering cart. The press remained aboard Air Force One, while Trump’s jet flew separately to Britain.

A feature film set at Rolling Loud is coming out, and a ton of rappers are in it

The trailer for Rolling Loud The Movie just dropped. Starring Owen Wilson as a high-strung father who sneaks his 13-year-old son into Rolling Loud Miami and then loses him, the film features rappers including Travis Scott, Ski Mask The Slump God, Sexyy Red, and Ty Dolla $ign. Director Jeremy Garelick was inspired to write the film after briefly losing his own son at Rolling Loud in the past. Parts of the film were actually shot during Rolling Loud 2024, where Wilson appeared onstage with Scott.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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For a few years now, London has been the defining source of new underground sound. It’s a social scene more than an industry one, an incestuous swamp of musical talent where relationships, albums, and bands form and dissolve as quickly as clouds in the sky, or smoke rings off a cigarette.

Many of these bedroom collaborations never see the light of day. But sometimes they stick. More rarely, they produce something truly special.

Team Werewolf is among the worthy. A new supergroup of underground auteurs composed of:

• Ike from Bassvictim

• Leo from Worldpeace DMT

• Isobel (a talented vocalist with no known prior projects)

“I loved them,” Isobel recounts her first impressions of Ike and Leo, which were made when she serendipitously ended up recording music at their house one afternoon, “but I also hated them in a weird way that was important. I was like, I don’t ever want to see them again, but I know that if I do, my life will change.”

This meeting, and the love-hate tension it provoked, resulted in a relationship (Ike and Isobel) and a band (Team Werewolf). They spent much of January recording covers together, often working so late into the night that they would all crash in the same bed.

After Ike and Leo got evicted due to noise complaints (something that keeps happening to them for some reason), Ike went to Florida to set up a temporary studio at his mom’s house. Leo, escaping a breakup in the city, soon followed, seeking studio therapy.

What followed was a manic creative push that cemented their status as a band, and resulted in their first EP, an exclusive first taste of which is available below. The video for their lead single, ‘Bedhead,’ was filmed in 20 minutes at a Sarasota, Florida beach drum circle they stumbled upon.

Ike expresses the group sentiment from the trip: “Why is this so easy?”

For each Team Werewolf track, there is a spiritual trail-blazer among the trio. It is not like Bassvictim, and it is not like Worldpeace DMT. Both Ike and Leo see it as an opportunity to create music that lies outside the scope of their existing groups.

Here’s how they described the music they make:

Ike: “The most fire aux run of music that’s just vibes, not one vibe you get tired of.”

Leo: “Music people would actually put on in a social situation.”

Isobel: “Schizo DJ, trying to make it work for the whole car.”

Listen for yourself, and offer a description in the comments. Perhaps that will become the official label.

Werewolf EP

1. TUNDRA .6.wav

2. Track 2 .10.wav

3. Bedhead (final?).wav

4. Untrust Us final.wav

+ a music video on our YouTube

Hong Kong is a poster child for cultural stagnation.

You can walk around the city and practically smell the rot: in nightclubs on the verge of collapse, resuscitated each weekend by bankers buying table service; in the expressions of cake-faced nepo babies, plastered on magazine covers littered around the city; or in the “raves,” hosted near the Victoria Harbor, playing cheugy European House charging 2,000 HKD (US $250) for admission.

It wasn’t always like this. In previous decades, the city was a cultural hotspot, birthing film auteurs like Wong Kar-wai and global media bibles like Hypebeast, and housing a street style scene that led Nigo to open BAPE’s first international branch in the city’s Central District.

So steep was Hong Kong’s fall from creative glory that it features in a chapter of W. David Marx’s Blank Space, an explainer for cultural stagnation in the 21st century. The city is a focal point for Marx’s argument that today, “numerical aspiration,” rather than taste or tradition, defines culture.

Hong Kong is, as Marx might put it, a “blank space”: a former creative epicenter descending into cultural stagnation.

But “blank spaces” are also clean slates. Void of any interesting mainstream culture, in Hong Kong today, there’s finally a thirst for the new again.

With the retreat of the British influence in Hong Kong, and two decades until the city’s full integration into China, it’s an open question: what will define the city’s next era of culture?

The answer lies in Hong Kong’s independent scenes, where an emerging underground, invigorated by a frustration with the state of local culture, is blooming. Grassroots projects and community spaces abound. A scrappy DIY attitude is the scene’s defining trait, a necessary ethos for the arts in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

You can catch whiffs of the city’s transformation in Hong Kong’s Western District, where, in the same half-mile radius of roughly ten Buddhist shrines, stands MÖTH Radio, the city’s only livestreamed DJ show and the biggest incubator for underground music talent.

On a Sunday afternoon, I’m sitting on Turkish rugs inside a room painted completely in blue, where Ahura Mazda, an Iranian DJ and producer and a co-founder of MÖTH, is giving me a sneak peek of a new EP, featuring samples of firing bullets, slowed and transformed into a soothing melody.

“I practice Buddhism,” he says. “People have this misconception that Buddhist ideology is all about suffering. But it’s actually about acknowledging suffering so you can transform it.”

Some years ago, MÖTH operated as a party collective, throwing semi-legal raves in industrial warehouses around the city. The organization later had a brief stint running a live radio show in a cramped corner of a scene-y haircut studio, &Space. Now, they host DJ sets from a blue-painted booth in the blue-painted room, which, for the last year or so, has served as the scene’s music aggregator, where both city-defining cross-genres and rising young DJs are platformed.

Their archive is packed with idiosyncratic mixes, like the British drum ‘n bass crossed with Cantonese pop mixed by Justin Lim or JUST BEE, the neuro-funk and jungle of Gargoyle Girlfriend, or “cunty femme rap” from Southwest Asia and North Africa, played by Ahura himself with fellow DJ Shahmaran.

Part of the scene’s openness to experimentation is the sheer lack of capital-C Cultural Institutions, which means few gatekeepers exist. But without the support institutions provide, “the turnover of people and ideas is so high,” Ahura says. “People get bored really easily. You need to keep things exciting to actually survive.”

Limited resources and Hong Kong’s quick-changing nature have forced MÖTH to survive via non-commercial means: rent is supported by community donations on Patreon and by paid DJ classes taught by MÖTH’s staff (I’m told they’re fully booked for most of summer). All excess funds are used to support MÖTH’s non-profit initiatives, which teach DJ-ing to the city’s underserved communities, like asylum seekers or to middle-aged migrant workers from Indonesia and the Philippines.

“There’s always resistance to what we do. People in Hong Kong cannot believe that projects like this can exist without a profit incentive,” Ahura says.

Hong Kong is, by some metrics, the “most expensive city in the world.” With mountainous and coastal geography, flat land is scarce, and the rent in the city is among the most expensive internationally. Independent artists often find themselves competing with conglomerates, dilettantes with debutantes, for space to hang out and be creative.

“I always complain about how there aren’t enough third spaces,” Saloni, a volunteer at MÖTH, says. “Just having a place where you can just sit down, chill, and not be expected to pay money—money hinders a lot of people from having fun and making friends.”

Economic conditions like these trickle into the city’s new-gen party culture. It doesn’t occur in nightclubs—which are too expensive for young people to rent—but industrial warehouses, forests, mountains, the concrete pavements underneath highways, and the many islands far from the city center. Allegedly, one party recently took place in an abandoned hotel.

That scrappiness and penchant for improvisation manifest in Heath, a mall that concentrates much of Hong Kong’s youth culture.

Heath sits underneath Chungking Mansions, the setting for Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, two Wong Kar-wai films that attracted Nigo to the city two decades ago. You descend an escalator into the stuffy basement with low pipe ceilings, teeming with young creatives.

In the middle of the mall, demarcated by glass walls, is a segment called The Garage, where the unpainted concrete floor houses events of all kinds. Music collective Bad Times Disco throws vinyl-only raves where DJs wear lettuce earrings, Zine Coop gathers Filipina migrant workers and Iranian refugees to publish works in an indie print fair, and local designers and labels like CHRISTIAN STONE, Nilmance, and YAT PIT might come together for a boutique fashion pop-up.

In earlier months, the space was used by traveling gallery N+—a tongue-in-cheek spinoff of the city’s biggest gallery, M+, by artist Louie Jaubere and curator Renee Lui—for an exhibit that once drew a run-in with the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD).

There’s also a regular Garage Sale, Heath’s signature market of “secondhand goods from people with better taste than you,” where I personally came across an unopened Coca-Cola can from 2001 (price: free) and a possibly cursed copy of The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black.

The goal, primarily, is to serve under-resourced artists in the city: “You’re young, you probably have a full-time job and you’re pursuing art on the side, and you don’t have money to rent a studio,” says Kenny Li, Director of Culture for Heath Mall. And as is the case in most Chinese families, particularly if you’re a downwardly mobile artist, “you’re [probably] living with family. These are the people who need a space to try new concepts and ideas that they couldn’t if they needed to pay rent.”

Yes, there isn’t much to go around in a city where “numerical aspiration, rather than tradition” defines culture. But it also means even the smallest acts have an outsized effect: “[Sometimes] you wish that you could go to London or Berlin and be part of the scene, but here you’re really shaping its identity,” one scenester, Tanya Gurka Kwok, says. “And it takes guts to do that.”

Tanya adds, “Even if Hong Kong’s the world’s most expensive city, we can still do things. We can still allow culture to achieve critical mass.”

“Critical Mass” just so happens to be the moniker of a new creative community in the city, and perhaps the only in Hong Kong to unite Gen Z artists of all kinds into one experimental space. Their signature event is a bi-monthly “House Party,” with open decks and community members (most often) playing doomscroll-y internet pop or UK Garage, hosted on Wednesdays after work hours at The Garage in Heath.

But Critical Mass also puts on an biannual exhibition, where rave artist Smileyworld or grassroots streetwear brand Bolder Boiz might hang posters or T-shirts for sale and display.

At “ALT TOWN,” a recent iteration of the exhibit, scenesters new and (slightly) old came together in conversation for a panel on the state of local culture: the panel featured “East-meets-West” rave fixture Arthur Bray, Hypebeast-editor-turned-agency-meister Eugene Kan, as well as LOVELESS and Baby Diwata—the DJs behind the femme hardcore music phenomenon Panic Library.

But much like Heath, Critical Mass’ operations are a bit scrappy. They travel around the city, hosting chess nights at scene-y bars like Rootdown or *actual* raves—DIY and affordably priced—along the harbor. All this amounts to a future of creativity that looks less like Soho House, more like a “traveling third space.”

“I think the most exciting part about what we do is we’re not backed by anyone,” says Sunny Kim, Critical Mass’ founder. For Sunny and his other team members—Tanya, Ivana Duong, and Alex Lendrum—there’s a real feeling that being creative in this city creates a shared underdog experience, where collaboration becomes a necessity.

“We have a level of radical optimism behind everything that we do,” says Ivana.

Does that capture the mood of the local scene? At least for me, it does. Hong Kong, once slumbering towards irrelevance, now feels like it has woken up, and decided to reimagine itself once more.

The Roundups

Music

New Releases:

• Nino Paid — Somewhere Over the Rainbow

• Eera + Sacred holes — “Crossed Up (Sacred holes remix)”

• Lil Uzi Vert — Maverick “Almost Forever” EP

• fakemink — “Love is a Dog from Hell.”

• Destroy Lonely — “MONSTER”

• DJ Corpmane — Satan And Jesus Are Fighting...Fighting Over Me

• Diiv + A.G. Cook — “The Fountain”

• Thirteendegrees — JEUNE OG

Artworld

• Yoshitomo Nara will open his first major solo exhibit in New York in almost a decade at David Zwirner

• Met acquired a small Leonordo da Vinci painting Madonna of the Yarnwinder (ca. 1500)

• Nick Angelo’s Edifice II at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery in New York through August 15th

• Horário Nombre (group show) at A MAIOR in Viseu, Portugal through September 27th

• Eva and Franco Mattes’ Freedom closed last week at Osh Projects in London

• Outside (group show of over 70 artists) at Karma gallery in Maine, through September 6th

Fashion

• John Galliano is the 2027 Met Gala Theme

• Copenhagen Fashion Week occurred this week

• Chanel is still the hottest brand according to the Lyst index, Miu Miu, Dior, Saint Laurent, and Gucci follow

• Denim Tears dropped their FW26 collection

• Christie’s to auction The Devil Wears Prada 2 items

• Stone Island dropped a documentary “The Calm and the Chaos” on the metal and hardcore scene

Products

• Boxer gloves by Gekka Sanctuary + greco

• Sacred Sarge figurine by @snotnose6

• Some Notes on the Military Jacket book by Yoon

• Rock and silver fence bangle by Shana Cave

• Basketcase Gallery dropped a Geese merch collection

This Week’s Headlines

MySpace is coming back

Brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook have announced that they will relaunch the iconic early 2000s social media platform MySpace. Their reboot is being framed as anti-doomscrolling and anti-algorithm, prioritizing user-controlled personal pages and featuring nostalgic features like HTML profile customization, chronological feeds, and the “Top 8” friends ranking system.

John Galliano is the 2027 Met Gala Theme

The 2027 Met Gala theme has been announced as John Galliano: Horizons. The choice had led to renewed discussion about Galliano’s antisemitic comments in 2010, which led to his firing from Dior and subsequent industry exile, before his 2014 return to Margiela. A press release from the Met states that the exhibition considers “how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.” Only two previous Met Gala themes have focused on a single living designer as a solo subject: Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo.

GTA VI gameplay footage is premiering on Netflix

Three months ahead of the release of GTA VI, fans will finally get their first official glimpse at gameplay later this month, in an exclusive Netflix premiere on August 27, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. ET. A wider release will follow six hours later. After years of fake leaks and speculation surrounding the game, the reveal will finally pull back the curtain on one of the most anticipated titles in gaming history, which has been in development for the past 12 years.

Addison Rae’s father faked his own death

Monty Lopez, father of Addison Rae, is known for his bizarre attention-seeking antics. This week, he posted photos from the ER on his Instagram Story before tweeting an obituary-style message written in the third person. Several outlets reported his death. But then, an hour later, Lopez posted Drake’s “Shabang” on his Instagram Story. In other news, Addison Rae received a Fortnite skin this week.

A tech startup just invented painless tattoos

Startup Cipher-X has announced a new tattooing process that is fast, permanent, and, most significantly, painless. The technique uses a patch embedded with microneedles, which are pressed onto the skin and left in place for 15 minutes. The pigment develops over the following days, gradually revealing the small finished tattoo. The technology is still in its infancy, and tattoo fads are common, so it’ll be interesting to see if it will stick around.

Lab monkey prices are booming

Amid increasing biotech and drug development competition between China and the U.S., the price of lab monkeys in China has more than doubled over the past year, to an average of $26,000. The spike echoes the surge in lab monkey prices during COVID-19, when shrinking supply amidst high demand drove costs upward. However, this latest increase reflects a different trend: China’s growing role as a leader in innovative drug development and an increasingly important destination for clinical trials.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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JACQUEMUS — Junior Graphic Designer (Paris, France)

Full-time design role supporting JACQUEMUS’ visual identity across digital and physical platforms. Responsibilities include adapting campaign assets, creating social media graphics, preparing production files, and supporting editorial and marketing materials. Ideal candidate has strong Adobe Creative Suite skills, graphic design experience, and an interest in luxury fashion.
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Pack. Records — Digital Marketing Intern (Remote)

Remote music marketing internship supporting artist campaigns through creator outreach, cultural research, and social media strategy. Responsibilities include managing UGC campaigns, researching creators, tracking campaign performance, editing short-form content, and identifying trends across TikTok and Instagram. Ideal candidate is deeply connected to internet culture, music discovery, and emerging digital trends.
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Looking as far back as the 1300s, we saw that the impact was transformative and generative:

• Popular artists and styles were rejected.

• Art markets, put under strain, had to find new (or old) patrons.

• Art became darker, reflecting new economic anxieties.

When we wrote the article, it looked like we might be headed for a global recession. Instead, the stock market rallied and set new records. Some think this is being driven by an AI / tech bubble.

So now we’re asking the inverse question: how do economic bubbles impact art and culture?

We went looking for an answer in five periods when a bubble drove intense and unsustainable economic growth: the 1630s Dutch Tulip Boom, the Roaring Twenties, the Asset Price Bubble in 1980s Japan, the Dot-Com bubble, and the Global Housing Market Bubble.

And we found the following through lines:

• The proliferation of slop

• Futurist aesthetics

• The popularization of new genres

• Critique

• Art mirroring the technologies, assets, or financial logic fueling the bubble

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Each bubble has its own story, and its own culture. They have produced enduring works of art, and have a lot to teach us about the relationship between culture and the economy.

Understanding the cultural productions of bubble economies also offers us insight into whether our current economic run is a bubble or sustainable, so we’ll end the piece with an analysis of this question, through the lens of our contemporary cultural output.

Read on for the full picture.

DUTCH TULIP BOOM (1630s)

The Dutch ‘Tulip Mania’ is often considered the first asset bubble, and came during a period of general prosperity in the Netherlands known as the Dutch Golden Age.

During this time tulips were regarded as status symbols, and as the general income level rose, the newly rich became obsessed with them. Speculating middlemen entered the market, driving prices up, until they crashed in 1637. By that point, certain bulbs were going for four times the annual salary for skilled artisans.

In general, artistic output of the Dutch Golden Age was superb, but focusing specifically on the period surrounding the bubble, there are several trends we should pay attention to.

New patrons buying bad landscapes (slop)

This was due to the changing makeup of the art market. Previously, the church and certain societal elite were the primary patrons, but thanks to economic upturn, a merchant class that often displayed a much more common taste was now financially empowered to buy art themselves.

This is not to say all merchants were commissioning slop, just that, in general, this new class of buyers was not aesthetically discerning. Mainly, they wanted landscapes and genre paintings. There were also more of them, meaning more space in the market for middling artists to make a living.

Tulip still lifes (mirroring)

Still lives depicting the coveted flower were very popular at the time. In many cases, these were cheaper than buying a bulb. In a bubble, luxury items get so expensive that to satisfy their desire for them, the masses are forced to accept their artistic reproduction.

The Vanitas subgenre (critique / new genres)

Some artists, attuned to the economic madness around them, embeded in their work a critique of the bubble culture. The result was the emergence of the Vanitas subgenre, wherein symbols of luxury are juxtaposed with symbols of death, such as skulls and decaying fruit.

THE ROARING TWENTIES (1920s)

Nothing gets the US economy cooking quite like the end of a World War. The years following the end of WWI were years of expansion and industry in America, facilitated by easy access to credit, and inflated by stock market speculation.

During recessions, culture displays a general skepticism about modernity and the future; in bubbles, the inverse happens. Optimism is the tone of the day. The Roaring Twenties was highly optimistic, and art from the period reflected it.

Art Deco (futurism / mirroring)

Art Deco was an aesthetic celebration of the industrial technology that was making the Roaring Twenties possible. It was sleek, geometric, and mechanistic. It incorporated new materials like chrome plating and stainless steel. It remixed a number of international styles in a modern way to create something that was a blatant break from the past.

Art Deco is a prime example of an aesthetic that aesthetically references the underlying technology fueling the bubble it emerged in. Positive associations with mechanistic automation, and the new materials it could produce at scale, bled into the public’s attitude toward Art Deco. Psychologically, not dissimilar to the Dutch wanting Tulips hanging on their walls.

The Great Gatsby (critique)

The Roaring Twenties gave us one of the great social critiques of American history: The Great Gatsby. This 1925 novel by Fitzgerald is a searing indictment of the decadent opulence and moral decay of the age.

Art Deco’s industrial optimism and Gatsby’s moralizing reflect two sides of bubble cultures. At the root, there is often real economic gain accruing from genuine innovation. But the optimism this creates goes too far, money circulates too freely, and people succumb to a kind of hysterical hedonism.

The Jazz Age (new genres)

The Roaring Twenties has another name: The Jazz Age. Jazz was not the only form of black expression that gained popularity during this period. The Harlem Renaissance was at the heart of the emergence, and represented a great unlocking of creative talent that had concentrated as a result of the Great Migration. Bubbles, when they are able to relieve financial pressures, can often serve this unlocking function.

Rise of pulp fiction and magazines (slop)

With advances in industrial automation and mass production, printing became cheaper than ever in the 20’s. As a result, pulp magazines and pulp fiction exploded, creating a massive amount of poorly written novels and magazines. Much like today’s AI boom, the same technological innovations driving economic growth also enabled an unprecedented wave of of mass-produced slop.

THE JAPANESE ASSET PRICE BUBBLE (1980s)

At one point during the Japanese Asset Price Bubble of the 1980s, the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were worth more than all the real estate in California combined. Reckless lending and very loose monetary policy, among other things, injected the Japanese economy with an immensity of cash.

City Pop (new genres / mirroring)

City Pop was a genre of music that peaked in the 80s, and can be considered the soundtrack to the era. It was music that sounded like wealth, a cosmopolitan blend of funk, synth-pop, and jazz. The western influence of the genre reflected the globalization of the national culture at the period.

Anime explosion (new genres / critique / slop)

The ready availability of cash at this time made it possible to fund very expensive animation projects. Many of the pinnacle creative achievements of the form, such as Akira and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, were created during this period.

But embedded in some of these projects were critiques of the very paradigm that produced them. Akira, for instance, deals directly with the social outcomes of corruption and governmental inside baseball, both of which were rampant in Japan’s bubble economy.

Trash-tier anime was the other side of this coin. Plotless and nonsensical OVAs, produced by well-funded individuals with no experience, were common.

Bubble Architecture & Design (futurism)

Real estate and renovation are two of the first things that arrive in the mind of anyone handed an unexpected windfall. Construction and design projects were plentiful in ‘80s Japan, and were aesthetically very distinct from the preceding era, which was focused on efficiency and functionality. The architecture of the period was heavily ornamented and drew directly on vibrant postmodern aesthetic trends. The interior design was surreal and futuristic. Japan thought the future had arrived, and built an environment that reflected that.

DOT-COM BUBBLE (1990s)

This is the bubble that most closely resembles today’s conditions. A new technology promised revolutionary changes, and the money believed it. A 600% stock market surge, some of that funding genuine paradigm shifts (like Microsoft and Oracle), some of it funding nothing at all (like Pets.com). It was another moment when the future was promised. Like most promises, it was fulfilled only partially.

Y2K aesthetics (futurism)

While it might feel retro to us today, the aesthetic wave now referred to as Y2K was, at the time, driven by a collective excitement about the future, and a desire to imagine what that future would look like. The answer was shiny, blobby, smooth, sometimes chrome or metallic (not all that unlike Art Deco in some ways), colorful, and often housed on a digital interface.

Net.art (new genres / mirroring)

The Dot-Com bubble is unique in that, in addition to money, it also gave the arts an entirely new medium to work in. Net.art was the result. Using the internet as its canvas, and thematically interested in the interactivity the internet promised (browsers, HTML, and hyperlinks were all common elements), Net.art was a blatant reproduction of the technology that was, in many cases, funding its purchase.

The YBAs and Shock Art (mirroring / slop)

The Young British Artists (YBAs), a loose conglomerate of artists that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, might be the quintessential art movement of Dot-Com bubble. As a whole, these artists were highly entrepreneurial. They looked at art as a business. This worked well at the time, because art buyers were increasingly seeing art in the same light. So when the YBAs produced massive sensational heavily-reported exhibitions, that for all intents and purposes looked like great art, a massive amount of money chased the appearance. This led to a lot of bad art being purchased for large sums, although some great work resulted as well. This was the period that gave us the mega-gallery1.

THE GLOBAL HOUSING AND CREDIT BUBBLE (2000s)

Another monetary policy bubble, an economy propped up by easy credit, where if you could fog up a mirror, you could get a home loan. While a tone of escapist hedonism was palpable in the social sphere, the booming banking sector and general financialization of society were the bubble’s enduring changes. Never before had life and culture become so centrally about money. When the bubble popped, and created the 2008 recession, this attitude persisted, and still shapes cultural attitudes today.

Overinflation of art’s price (mirroring / slop)

Sometimes referred to as the ‘rococo period of contemporary art’, the fine art world became ornamental and decadent. The massively scaled art antics of the YBAs echoed into the most popular art of the period, with artists like Hirst and Jeff Koons achieving new heights of profitability.

New hedge fund billionaires inflated the prices for the work of living artists, with some estimates saying prices were up 800% in the period. During this era, the mega-artist became a CEO. Automated processes increased. Big artists hired entire studio teams to run artistic production in the mode of an assembly line.

Street Art Response (social critique)

This commercial state of affairs did not go uncritiqued. The artist who, especially in hindsight, defined this era was Banksy, whose street-site, graffiti-adjacent pieces critiqued (at least vaguely) the state of the financial obsessiveness of the times. The work of other street artists, like KAWS or Shepard Fairey (best known for his OBEY graphic), even if not as directly critical, was still a response to the new functionings of the capitalist art market, and stemmed from a feeling of alienation from the white box gallery world.

McMansion Architecture (slop)

This bubble also gave us an enduring symbol of poor taste and performative size: the McMansion. Architecturally criminal, very large, and purchased hand over fist by the class of newly rich, the style of these homes is sometimes referred to as ‘neo-eclectic’ because they mix (without much thought devoted to the harmony of this mixture) many different aesthetic styles. Perhaps nothing speaks to the effect of new money on the look of our environment as well as these homes do.

Frutiger Aero (futurism)

Replacing the futurism of Y2K was Frutiger Aero. An eco-oriented aesthetic imagining of the future, largely deployed by the companies shaping the digital world with an interest in promoting the idea that technology could co-exist in harmony with nature.

AND TODAY’S BUBBLE:

There are differing perspectives about whether we’re in a bubble today. We’re facing revolutionary technological change, peddled by a handful of companies that are not yet profitable. Money is moving circularly, with investments often being paid back in the form of product purchase.

But there is no denying the possible usefulness of AI, and unlike companies in the Dot-Com era, those garnering massive valuations today do, for the most part, seem to be reporting real revenue.

Looking then to today’s cultural output, let’s see whether any of our expected themes pertain to today

Slop

Alas, baseline slop levels are very high these days. Uniquely, the very technology that is driving today’s maybe-bubble has unlocked the easy production of slop. It is this mechanism, more than exploding buying power in a newly rich group of patrons (those getting rich off of the AI bubble seem mostly indifferent to art), that is driving today’s slopification.

Determination: ambiguous

Futurist aesthetics

If anything, it feels like we’re seeing the opposite in the incessant nostalgia-fueled reheating of past aesthetics. Part of the issue might be that we struggle to imagine a future today. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one that would complicate any futurist project2.

Determination: not a bubble

New genres

Certainly the case in music, where the long-term fallout of hyperpop’s brief explosion has delivered us a revitalized electronic music crossover space, and subgenre classifications from electroclash to laptop twee are popping into and out of existence like fireworks.

Determination: bubble

Critique

Most people are not happy about AI, artists in particular. Many artists are positioning their work as inherently anti-AI, but this is a framing (and marketing) decision more than a direct critique of AI. It is also difficult to untangle a specifically bubble-fueled critique from the glut of critique-oriented art has been made in the 2020s. There is a palpable and specific distaste for the new tech elite, but that new distaste feels mostly social, rather than formalized into focused artistic expression.

Meanwhile, there is also a quiet incorporation of AI into a lot of today’s art. It’s everywhere if you look closely. “RUBBERZ” is one of the most obvious examples.

Determination: ambiguous

Mirroring assets, tech, financial logics

An easy yes. From AI art, to VR dynamic-world immersive installations, to the rise of systems art, to art that meets the popular demand of instantaneous production.

Determination: bubble

Whether we are in a bubble or not, it is undeniable that it does not feel like we’re in one. The distribution of the gains, thus far, has been almost completely one-sided. Only those directly involved in the industries, or with portfolios heavily exposed to them, have benefited.

This is not to diminish the extent to which the rapid growth of the AI sector is propping up the stock market. But even those with 401k that will collapse if this bubble pops probably don’t feel, right now, like they’re living in flush times. The truth is that the contemporary American economy is so organized that most people most of the time feel like they’re just scraping by.

This is the worst case for art. Relief and freedom can be good for creativity. A shattered life can be good for creativity. A terminally ill life that requires all of your effort just to hold together is almost always terrible for creativity.

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This is our sixth iteration of Monthly Discoveries, our recurring series where the Welcome team rounds up and shares the creative work that stood out to us over the past month.

Paid subscribers can revisit previous five editions here, here, here, here, and here.

July’s discoveries were, as usual, diverse: a grandson thirst trapping while watching Pulp Fiction with his grandmother, zombie virus tattoos, a car hood transformed into an antique shop, a Nike Foamposite bong, knot-shaped derby shoes, Britney Spears’ rainbow plaid hair, Pokémon cards overloaded with internet ephemera, a sweater stained with 72 hand-popped maraschino cherries, rare glowing Walter Van Beirendonck pieces, and much more.

Happy discovering.

Movie night with yiayia by Aris Navarro

A Twitter post shared by Aris Navro compellingly combines a thirst trap with a wholesome moment of intergenerational relaxation, watching Pulp Fiction with his grandmother. His collection of photos carries the nostalgic feel of early Flickr, reminiscent of the candid domestic snapshots that defined the platform 20 years ago.

Zombie virus tattoos by @tattsilky

Silky’s signature style of tattooing uses the aesthetic of decay to create enduring pieces that resemble discolored bruises, infection, or zombie bites. The artist specializes in this veiny style, using a mix of red, yellow, purple, and grey tones, to create a strikingly realistic effect. A recurring motifs is a bruised heart.

XXX lighter collection by @worldscoolest

Featuring iconic photos of various provocative female celebrities such as Pamela Anderson, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, and many others, alongside recurring motifs of stars, teeth, and the UK flag, @worldscoolest’s lighter collection is a case study in curation.

Help, my scissors aren’t working by Double

Help, My Scissors Aren’t Working is a painting by French artist Double. A hand gripping an object is considered one of the most difficult forms to accurately depict, and it is done well here. The artwork demonstrates an adept understanding of shape language, and the eye embedded in the scissors is a striking detail

Car shop picture by Shay Gallagher

Taken in Psyrri, Athens, Gallagher’s photo captured a man selling an eclectic assortment of antiques and curios on the hood of his car, including baroque mirrors, bronze candle holders, crosses, pipes, daggers, spoons, jewelry and other oddities. In the comments, another user replied with a nearly identical photo of the same car shop setup from a month ago.

Ceramic sculpture by Naomi Gilon

Naomi Gilon’s new shoe prototype is “inspired by the feeling of your foot being caught by the monster hiding under your bed at night.” The wearable ceramic sculpture’s clawed talons mimic disfigured toes, wrapping around the wearer’s feet. Throughout the slides of her Instagram post, viewers can follow the creation process, from the initial clay mold, to the painted pre-firing stage, and finally to the polished, glossy black finished piece.

Chainsaw Man painting by @alchemitsu

The painting, which depicts in alternative art style a domestic scene from Fujimoto’s acclimated anime Chainsaw Man, provides a more grounded interpretation of what the show would look like in real life. Many commenters said it looks like a Mexican or Filipino version of the main character Denji. Power is hiding two slices of tomatoes, canonically as selfish as always. Peer into his design process here.

Music by diamond*

Part of the ØWay collective and signed to Young Thug’s YSL Records, diamond* stands out as one of the most promising young artists in the scene, creating music with energy that mainstream rap is sorely missing right now. He first connected with fellow ØWay artist Tezzus after driving an hour to buy marijuana, a chance encounter that helped spark their creative partnership. His solo mixtape Bling Slime Vøl. 1, released last month, features appearances from Young Thug and Pz’. You can see diamond* live, alongside other ØWay artists, on Young Thug’s upcoming The New Generation tour.

🐜 🐜 🐜 by Isabella Cotier

Isabella Cotier is an artist whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, Gucci, Harpers Bazar, and many more publications. 🐜 🐜 🐜 is an colorful oil pastel and Indian ink piece depicting a supine cockroach being swarmed by black ants. The work’s sketch-like quality, combined with its red, green, and yellow color palette, creates an unexpected resemblance to a Pan-African flag.

20 portraits of myself crying by Margot Peer

Margot Peer is a RISD artist and multimedia creator whose practice spans painting, stitching, screen printing, typewriting, sticker art, charcoal, colored pencils, and more. Her latest work, 20 portraits of myself crying, is an intricate tapestry composed of 12,375 stitches and 29 colors. Despite the absence of any clearly defined tears in the portraits, Peer’s precise attention to detail captures expressions of anguish that are instantly recognizable as crying selfies.

You’re halfway through our monthly discoveries. To access the rest of the list, as well as all of our past and future discoveries (and much more), become a paid subscriber to Welcome Magazine

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The Roundups

Music

New Releases:

• Arca — XXXXX

• The Crying Nudes — DJ

• Teezus + Warhol.ss — “Middle of July”

• Ninajirachi + Porter Robinson — “WannaCry”

• Edward Skeletrix + Elijah Walker + matt proxy + Current Joys — “I cannot hear what you’re saying”

• Mica Levi + Klein — turn up

• HariRoc — THE SQUIDFATHER 2

Artworld

• Illuminati and Edward Skeletrix’s live exhibit Analytica occurred this week, with music from Weiland

• Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s from here to ear v.26 at MAAT gallery in Lisbon until August 31st

• Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition at Foundation Beyeler in Switzerland through September 31st

• BMW ART CARS - 20 Artists, 50 Years of Innovation at BMW Welt in Munich through August 31, 2026

• Amanda Ba’s Flakken Change Ceremony curated by SAP Magazine at Market Gallery in New York opening August 1st

• Ash Fure’s ANIMAL [a listening gym] at Pioneer Works in New York through August 9th

Fashion

• Jared John Leonard drops new collection, “English Gardens”

• AWGE will drop their first collection ever for Spring/Summer 2026

• Cactus Jack drops an Odyssey inspired merch collection

• Levi’s and Satisfy drops a pair of jeans engineered to rock climb

• Karl Lagerfeld opens a cafe in Amsterdam

Products

• Aphex Twin’s Drukqs is getting a 25th anniversary reissue, with boxes, vinyl, cassette, and CD pressings

• 1/1 Dragon tees by The Blank Traveler

• Hand painted bleach skull shorts by Nolan Mottle

• Silk scarves by Rue De Serves

• Various custom 1/1 pieces by Claire Besco

• Nike’s Air Zoom Hyperslide equipped with heating and vibration massaging

• Blurry grenade lighter case by @unv4ulted

This Week’s Headlines

More than a dozen major rappers got hacked this week

A group of hackers targeted Frank Ocean, Ye, Drake, Playboi Carti, Kendrick Lamar, Ken Carson, Destroy Lonely, XXXTentacion, Nine Vicious, Che, Tyler The Creator, Michael Jackson, and several other artists this week. Using common music distribution exploits, they uploaded a mix of shitpost tracks and unreleased leaks across artists’ official distribution channels, including YouTube, Apple Music, and Discord. The most significant breach affected Playboi Carti, with more than 20 of his most popular leaked songs appearing on his official YouTube channel. Additionally, “Not Like Us” was uploaded to Kendrick’s YouTube.

Schools are implementing pepper-spraying drone security guards

This year, a few schools in Georgia, Florida, and Colorado will be implementing experimental non lethal pepper-spraying drones. The drones are designed to reach any location on campus in under 15 seconds, and are also equipped with remote piloting, blast sirens, the ability to smash glass windows, and fly at 50mph. Many online are questioning whether military grade equipment belongs in schools.

HBO’s is reformatting its famous shows into reels

You will soon be able to watch your favorite HBO shows in a Reels-style format on “HBO Max Shorts.” The announcement has been met with widespread disdain, with many calling it another (bad) sign of the times. Others have reluctantly defended it as a necessary move to introduce younger audiences to high-quality programming and compete with algorithmic slop.

Meet the newest micro-genre: “UK Poo”

On a no-longer-niche corner of TikTok, a new genre dubbed “UK Poo” has been flooding people’s feeds. Coined on Twitter by @cashyams, the term refers to a subset of low-quality UK rap characterized by awkward, tactless melodic delivery, iPhone-shot videos, and neon-colored lyric captions. While “UK Poo” applies specifically to British music, equally terrible Instagram Reel rappers have become increasingly common, with algorithms often rewarding them through hate engagement. Just look at this guy “rapping” over Lucki’s “Sunset” every day for the past few weeks.

Actually, Gen Z isn’t sober at all

Contrary to popular narratives from recent years, Gen Z are in fact drinking as much as older generations, as well as drinking more cocktails than any other generation. Additionally, recent data from the federal National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that in 2025, weed overtook alcohol or cigarettes as being the most popular daily drug.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Aidan Zamiri — Part-Time Personal / Creative Assistant (London, UK)

Music video director Aidan Zamiri is hiring a London-based part-time Personal / Creative Assistant. Applicants should email a CV and cover letter. Creative industry experience and strong organizational skills are a plus.

Apply

Partisan Records — International Marketing Coordinator (Berlin, Germany)

Partisan Records is hiring an International Marketing Coordinator to support global artist campaigns across marketing, touring, streaming, press, and digital. Looking for at least one year of music industry experience and strong organizational skills. Initial six-month contract.

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Office Magazine — Writing Intern (New York, NY)

Office Magazine is seeking a NYC-based Writing Intern for its August–October internship program. Applicants should email a brief introduction, resume, and optional writing samples or bylines. College credit available.

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Jil Sander — Intern Graphic & Print Designer (Milan, Italy)

Jil Sander is seeking a Graphic & Print Design Intern to support the creative team across ready-to-wear collections, print development, research, and fabric design. Looking for strong Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator skills with a passion for fashion and graphics.

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This is a companion piece to our Merch Favorites.

If you’ve spent time on the Internet, you’ve seen insane artist merchandise. (See the Ice Spice airfryer, which was unfortunately confirmed as a Twitter hoax.)

Ridiculous merch objects like these are often engineered to make waves on social media. In the last decade…

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In Japan, visible tattoos can cost you entry to a restaurant or the gym, an apartment, or even your job. The cultural stigma around ink, stemming from its deep association with the Yakuza, results in a quiet exclusion from normal life that predates and outlives BURST Magazine.

BURST (1995-2005) was Japan’s premier tattoo magazine. And because a tattoo is the mark of an outlaw in Japan, through documenting tattoos, BURST ended up documenting a range of fringe subcultures, from bikers, to punks, to gangsters.

Where the rest of Japan covered up, BURST embraced the bodies of society’s outcasts, depicting the taboo from the inside. It began as a biker magazine, before branching into covering body modification, tattooing, crime, and drug culture. It’s art direction and visual identity came from a design team called “PISS&JUNK”.

We scanned from two issues: September 1999 and February 2000.

WARNING: Some of the following images are graphic. Reader discretion advised. All scans from the Welcome Magazine archive.

To see the other half of the scans, and access the rest of our Archive Dive series, become a paid subscriber to Welcome Magazine

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The Roundups

Music

New Releases:

• WorldPeace DMT — Flowers Powers

• Frost Children — Frost Fest Mixtape

• Charli XCX —Music, Film, Fashion

• The Strokes — Reality Awaits

• Romulus — “PALETA”

• 2hollis — “Hurt”

• Danny L Harle + Doss —Crystallise Divergence

• the sound chalk makes — Re:mix

Artworld

• Brent Mckeever’s Look at Setarah in London through September 5th

• Campus Gallery’s Terror Campaign at O Town House in Los Angeles through July 26th

• Poyen Wang’s Nightstroll at MoMA Ps1 in New York through August 17th

• Skulptur Projekte 3.0 (group show) at Beau Travail in Stockholm through August 29th

• Brianna Perry’s Confessional Poetry at TG through August 16th and Fantasy in Japan at Matthew Brown Gallery through August 8th

• Nan Goldin to debut a new film scored by Mica Levi in London later this year

Fashion

• Yohji Yamamoto’s never published sketches are going public

• Barry Jenkins directed a 60 second film titled Simple Stories for Prada FW26, featuring a myriad of celebrity cameos

• Acne Studios’s party in Paris for their new issue of Acne Paper where servers wore horse masks commissioned by Karine Marques Ferreira

• Dior is planning on staging a pre FW27 show this December in Dublin (first show in Ireland ever)

Products

• First look at Netspend x Vans collab

• Jacquemus x Timberland 3-Eye lug boat shoe

• CPU Chair by @ex__soup

• Feinmann F01 Noctua Edition gaming mouse equipped with a cooling fan

• Tommy Jack Dovier’s Beach Bums 2.0 sandals

• Kids Love Gaite x Doublet’s loafers

• Augemental’s Mouthpad, a trackpad which allows you to drive with your tongue

• Hex nut rings by Cibili

This Week’s Headlines

Two OpenAI models went rogue and escaped a cybersecurity test

OpenAI revealed that two of its models, GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more advanced pre-release model, carried out a cyberattack on a secure Hugging Face database during what was supposed to be a controlled cybersecurity test. The models were operating with safety filters removed to test their ability. They discovered and used a previously unknown weakness, which was later identified by Hugging Face’s security team, proving that models can attack real-world systems without access to source code, and highlighting the need for stronger cybersecurity defenses as AI continues to develop.

Travis Scott is about to start making movies and TV shows

After making his acting debut playing “The Bard” in The Odyssey (and creating an original closing credits song with James Blake and Ludwig Göransson), Travis Scott is expanding Cactus Jack into Hollywood, signing a deal with Paramount to develop future movies, television, theater and experiential projects under his creative company. This explains why Scott was reportedly waking up at 5AM to shadow Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey set.

Lebron signs with the 76ers

At 41 years old, basketball’s greatest player is leaving the Los Angeles Lakers, to sign a 2 year, $8 million contract with the Philadelphia 76ers alongside fellow All-Stars Jaylen Brown, Tyrese Maxey, and Joel Embiid. James said he reached his decision after reflecting on whether he still loved the game and whether he had more to give. Ultimately, he decided that he does.

Diddy got in a fight in jail, moved to solitary confinement

According to a report from TMZ, Diddy allegedly got into an altercation with another inmate after being dissed, leading to an exchanging of blows before being broken up by prison security. According to the source, Diddy was then placed in solitary confinement. When reached out to, Fort Dix stated that they could not disclose any information regarding the incident.

Scientists engineered a plant that can produce five different psychedelics

A team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute engineered a tobacco plant called Nicotiana benthamiana to produce DMT, psilocybin, psilocin, 5-MeO-DMT, and bufotenin simultaneously, by inserting genes from a mix of animals, fungi, and plants. The research aims to create more sustainable and efficient methods for producing psychedelics for the study of their potential therapeutic uses.

The Canadian wildfires keep getting worse

According to reports, nearly 900 active wildfires are currently burning across Canada, with nearly 4,000 fires this year alone scorching more than 3 million hectares. Thick smoke has drifted across the U.S. East Coast and Midwest over the past week, casting an apocalyptic orange haze across the sky. A similar phenomenon occurred in 2023, a record-breaking year for Canadian wildfires, when smoke blanketed parts of the U.S., creating orange skylines and hazardous air quality. Most wildfires are started by lightning strikes, which account for an estimated 92% of the total area burned due to increasingly dry forest conditions.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

Miu Miu — Footwear Product Development Intern (Montevarchi, Italy)

Product development internship supporting Miu Miu’s footwear collections. Responsibilities include analyzing technical drawings, managing product information, updating catalogs, and collaborating with design and production teams. Ideal candidate has a background in fashion with strong interest in footwear development and luxury craftsmanship.
Apply

Morning FYI / Our Zora — Hardware Fund Grant (Remote)

Funding opportunity supporting creators building physical technology products. Two winners will receive £5,000 to prototype, produce, market, or launch hardware projects. Ideal applicants are innovators developing new physical technologies and looking for support bringing concepts into the world.
Apply

Smosh — Various Creative Roles (Los Angeles, CA)

Digital entertainment opportunities across Smosh’s comedy, gaming, and content teams. Openings include Producer, Camera Team Intern, Graphic Design Intern, Brand Partnership Intern, Programming Intern, Art Department Intern, and Director of Graphic Design. Ideal candidates are passionate about online media, comedy, and digital storytelling.
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There is a problem with music. It has to do with the fact that, if you go to a live show tonight, almost everything you hear will be prerecorded. Today, “Live” = a backing track playing on large speakers, while an artist half-sings along on an elevated surface.

“Glorified Karaoke,” Leo deems it. We’re speaking t…

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Interview by Mikail Haroon

Today, an artist is no longer someone who makes something in a specific medium. An artist is a multimedia creative project: a look, a tone, a set of references, a stable of collaborators, a personality, and a surrounding discourse, all conveyed through a digital presence.

The internet has raised a gener…

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Artists have long been saddled with the task of ‘making sense’ of the world ‘today.’ Many accept the burden with enthusiasm. Usually they end up reproducing the aesthetic and conceptual trends of yesterday, a failure the art community will happily celebrate depending on the precise way that yesterday is presented.

When …

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The Roundups

Music

New Releases:

• Matt Proxy —— “teenage genius 3”

• Yuke —- Cheetah World 3

• B0YG1RL —— “On The Radar Freestyle”

• Eartheater —— Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message

• jackzebra —— “Blessed”

• Molly Santana + Chy Cartier —— “Walk”

Artworld

• Jill Miller’s HARD RESET: An Eco-Humiliation Ritual at Telematic Media Arts in San Francisco through August 22

• The Thorn Stigmata and The Faded Branch of The Crown at Pangée in Montreal through August 22nd

• Keith Mayeron’s Peanuts Skating Under the Galaxies at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado through July 30

• Esteban Jefferson + Wiki’s Ancient History at Market Gallery in New York through July 16th

• 252 Broome St. at Triest in New York through July 18th

• Next week: Campus’s Terror Campaign (group show) at O-Town House Gallery in Los Angeles, CA through July 26th

Additionally:

• Artist (@taylirxl) made a horse out of barbed wire as a memorial for his horse that died from cancer

• World Stress Test by @damn__true presents Earth as a stretched image under constant tension

Fashion

• Brands begin initial preparation gearing up for New York Fashion week

• Vivienne Westwood launches new FW26 campaign, captured by Jurgen Teller

• Brandon Tan has been appointed as GQ’s Global Fashion Director

• Bottega Veneta appoints LVMH Fragrance Executive Romain Spitzer As CEO

• Sciparelli announces first store ever, set to open in California

Products

• Double cup cowboy boots by Lourdes NYC

• Experimental reversed heels by Yichun Liu

• Calfskin geometry set by Chanel

• Charred Yakisugi speakers by Studio Amber

• New collection by Vincent Boily-Chatelain

This Week’s Headlines

There is a new “Bling Ring” targeting underground rappers

In a Bling Ring-esque plot, both Lucki and Bleood were robbed at their Los Angeles homes this week. Bleood was reportedly targeted earlier in the week by three armed men who stole roughly $200,000 worth of items, including clothing, electronics, and jewelry, while he was recording in his home studio. Lucki was not home when burglars broke in and ransacked his residence, making off with an estimated $500,000 worth of personal belongings. No arrests have been made, and suspects in both robberies remain unidentified.

The baby is Messi bathing in this photo 19 years ago will be facing him in the World Cup Finals

Nearly 19 years after a UNICEF fundraising photoshoot in which a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathed a five-month-old Lamine Yamal, the two are set to face each other in the World Cup final. Largely unknown until Yamal’s father shared them in 2024, the photos have resurfaced amid Yamal’s meteoric rise. It’s a juxtaposition so surreal that many online initially assumed the photos were AI-generated. (Photo by Joan Monfort.)

PinkPantheress is making her acting debut directed by the guys who made Everything Everywhere All at Once

PinkPantheress will make her acting debut in a new secret film directed by The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, best known for Everything Everywhere All at Once. Details remain tightly under wraps, with only a November 2027 theatrical release confirmed.

Charlie Kirk statue is coming to Times Square

Handcrafted by Italian sculptor Sergio Furnari, a statue of Charlie Kirk is set to be unveiled in Times Square on September 10, exactly one year to the minute after his assassination. Furnari has spent the past year creating the monument, insisting it be installed in Times Square, which he describes as “the center of the universe.” According to the project’s GoFundMe, he reportedly sold his apartment to help finance the sculpture.

NASA is recruiting people to simulate living on Mars for year

NASA is recruiting volunteers for a yearlong simulated space mission designed to study how humans adapt to life beyond Earth. Beginning in August 2027 at a Houston Space Center facility, participants will live inside a mock lunar and Martian habitat, complete with simulated spacewalks and rover operations, and navigate challenges like using a non-flushable toilet.

University of Silicon Valley is giving applicants scholarship money for their video game achievements

Gamers can receive up to $15,000 a year in scholarships at the University of Silicon Valley, based on their specific achievements in certain games. Eligible titles include Elden Ring, RuneScape, Dark Souls, Hades, Final Fantasy XIV, Cuphead, World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Lost Ark, and Genshin Impact, among others.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Classifieds

Exciting opportunities, employment and otherwise

424 — Full Time Sales Associate / Store Manager (Los Angeles, CA)

Lead sales, clienteling, store operations, inventory, and visual merchandising at 424’s Los Angeles flagship. Looking for 3+ years of luxury or contemporary retail experience, strong clienteling skills, and a sharp understanding of the streetwear landscape. Full-time, weekends required.

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FADER Label — A&R Coordinator (Brooklyn, NY)

Entry-level A&R Coordinator position to support talent discovery, artist development, and project coordination. The role works closely with the GM of FADER Music Group to identify emerging artists and help guide releases from signing through launch.

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Print Center New York — Curatorial Associate (New York, NY)

Part-time curatorial role supporting exhibitions, publications, and public programming at Print Center New York. Responsibilities include developing exhibitions, conducting research, editing written materials, and working with artists and collaborators. Ideal candidate has curatorial experience, strong writing skills, and knowledge of contemporary art.
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