Your weekend binge-list is here

Apr 15, 2021

Unless you’ve been waiting eight long years for a new album from The Offspring, today’s most important release is from London Grammar. Big things are expected from the Nottingham indie-pop act across this year and next. The trio has booked a Spark Arena show for March 5, and new single California Soil suggests the Hannah Reid-fronted group is more than ready to play the biggest arenas they can find. The new album, which goes by the same name, is already getting great reviews, with NME calling it “fresher, revitalised and more confident than ever”. You can decide for yourself from today.

If you’ve got a Playstation 5, this month’s free Playstation Plus game is Oddworld: Soulstorm, and while it’s had mixed reviews, I’m enjoying this crazy platform caper and its supercharged graphics. For Playstation 4 owners, you can enjoy Days Gone, a formulaic but fun post-apocalyptic zombie romp.
I spent the better part of this week working my way through This is a Robbery, the new true crime doco on Netflix. I’d already heard a podcast on the same topic - a brazen, multi-million dollar 1990 heist from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum - but this is definitely the superior story. Choose this over that spectacular shocker The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.

Rap fans should still be streaming all the DMX albums you can after the rapper’s sad death last week. I’ve certainly heard a few tracks blasting around the mean streets of Te Atatu Peninsula lately. But there are also new rap albums to listen to as well: check out Brockhampton’s surprisingly mature Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, apparently the first of two final albums the collective’s releasing this year; and I’ve been turning up the volume on AG Club’s Fuck Your Expectations, Part I, a Bay Area collective bringing the noise.

This week, the New Zealand crime caper Conning the Con came to a close, a gripping yarn about a woman who turned the tables on a man she’d been dating and had just loaned $300,000 to. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but there are some pretty incredible twists and turns in this - and is proof that you should carry a microphone with you every where you go. You never know when you might stumble upon a podcast idea. Stream it here.
If you want an ultra-violent romp with Bob Odenkirk, Nobody is still on in theatres and is an absolute blast. Time it right and you can send the kids into Raya and the Last Dragon or Tom & Jerry. Failing all that, you can just watch the Fast & Furious 9 trailer over and over again, because it is ridiculous…

Boiler Room with Chris Schulz.