Aurelia Butler

Onstage at the cozy Chelsea club Racket in May, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist had an important announcement.“Ladies and gentlemen!” the frontman shouted to the mess of bopping heads and airborne limbs gathered before him. “Due to an unfortunate rift in the time-space continuum, it has been 11 years since the Hives played New York.” He tossed his arms triumphantly in the air, as if landing a triple axel. “We are back!” The crowd gleefully erupted.The Hives, a five-piece punk band from Sweden, released five studio albums from 1997 to 2012, making their biggest splash with the single “Hate to Say I Told You So” — a garage-rock gem that spent 11 weeks on the Hot 100 when the group’s second LP, “Veni Vidi Vicious,” arrived in the United States in 2002.The band got swept into the “rock revival” of the moment alongside the White Stripes and the Vines. But they had already made their name onstage, where their arsenal includes matching black-and-white suits and instruments, Almqvist’s high kicks and charming provocations, roadies dressed like ninjas and a guitarist called Nicholaus Arson who sneers, crowd surfs and dramatically blows on his curled fingers as he flicks picks into the crowd.“They’re probably the best live band I’ve ever seen,” said Max Kuehn, the drummer of the California surf-punk band Fidlar, who was honored when the Hives took his group on the road for its first national tour. “If you go to a lot of shows,” he added, “you can really tell the difference of just how tight their songs are and how rehearsed everything is.”Though the Hives continued to play concerts every year since the arrival of “Lex Hives” in 2012, they had no fresh music to offer — until now. On Friday they will unleash “The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons,” 12 new tracks filled with head-snapping riffs and shout-along choruses led by the explosive single “Bogus Operandi.”“There was a lot of time where we didn’t have songs,” Almqvist said as the quintet gathered at a rooftop restaurant in Manhattan two days after the Racket show, dressed ­­— you guessed it — in matching Hives daywear, white denim jackets with black shirts and jeans. “It was like a slow, 10-year-long panic,” he joked with a slight accent, adding a dose of classic Hives bravado: “It was never an outright panic because we continued to be so immensely popular worldwide.”“But,” he added, “it sucks being in a good band that doesn’t make new music.”The Hives, from left: The Johan and Only, Vigilante Carlstroem, Pelle Almqvist, Chris Dangerous and Nicholaus Arson.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesThe Hives have never seemed at risk of running out of steam. Almqvist and Arson, brothers born a year apart, grew up in Fagersta, a small city a two-hour drive from Stockholm, where they soaked up every punk record they could get their hands on ­— trading tapes, scraping together money for imports, taking in pals’ rejects. “That’s how we found the Sonics,” Arson said. A friend handed the LP over, “and it kind of blew our minds.” The guitarist rattled off a list of acts that had made an impact on them: the New Bomb Turks, the Oblivians, the Remains, the Misfits, the Dead Kennedys, “a lot of ’60s music.”The original band — the brothers plus the guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem, the drummer Chris Dangerous and the bassist Dr. Matt Destruction — came together in the ’90s when the members were in their teens, and “the mosh pit thing was big for us,” Almqvist said. “Going nuts and falling over each other was for us always a part of the concert experience. If the crowd wasn’t doing that, it didn’t feel interesting.”Showmanship was a priority from day one. “I think before we were good, we were entertaining,” added Almqvist, who is known for his strutting and agitating. (In June, he split his head open with a swinging mic.) “People who didn’t like us would still watch us doing whatever we were doing, because no one kind of knew what was going to happen.”The music was fast; Almqvist’s wit matched it. “We grew up on 50 percent punk and 50 percent stand-up comedy,” Arson said, including “Saturday Night Live” reruns on MTV and VHS tapes of Eddie Murphy specials.Before they could afford props, the Hives thrifted black and white clothes, painted a guitar and made their own light-up sign that blazed onstage, giving them heat rash. Almqvist estimates they played 500 shows in their first suits. “They smelled so bad,” Dangerous said, “when we walked onstage at the end of the tour, the audience stepped back.”But the efforts paid off. The Scottish music business icon Alan McGee became an early supporter, putting out a greatest hits of sorts called “Your New Favourite Band” in 2001, which brought the Hives wider attention from listeners and U.S. record labels.Interscope reportedly paid millions to secure the band (the Hives still won’t confirm the amount) and gave them creative control. “They created a buzz on their own, a subculture,” Jimmy Iovine, then the label’s chairman, told Spin for a 2004 cover story. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”The group stuck to its formula on “Tyrannosaurus Hives” from 2004 — 12 songs, less than 30 minutes — and stretched out on “The Black and White Album” three years later, which featured production from hitmakers including Pharrell Williams and Jacknife Lee. “We were probably the last rock band to have a big budget,” Almqvist quipped. “We almost owe it to rock ’n’ roll to use it,” he recalled thinking. (They went independent and self-produced “Lex Hives” in 2012.)The Hives were continually presented with unlikely opportunities, which they wholeheartedly embraced: recording a Christmas song with Cyndi Lauper, licensing “Tick Tick Boom” for a Nike commercial, taking on challenging assignments opening for both Maroon 5 and Pink in arenas across the U.S.“We have to go and find people who hadn’t heard us before. And you want to be able to turn over a crowd,” Arson said. “It’s a way of keeping your tools sharp.”Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist among an enthusiastic crowd in Sweden.Betina Garcia for The New York TimesBut new songs — at least, new songs up to Hives standards — weren’t flowing. When the pandemic hit, the band ruled out remote recording and turned to a fellow Swede: the producer Patrik Berger, whose credits include Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and hits by Charli XCX. Berger had started out in a punk band called Snuffed by the Yakuza and is “a proper music nerd,” Arson said; the Hives trusted his judgment.“They played me some demos just to hear like, which of these, like, hundred songs do you think would fit on a record?” Berger said in a phone interview. “My role,” he explained, was “getting them in the room and start having fun with these songs again and not overthink it so much.”The result is a classic Hives album filled with boasts, powder-keg energy and punk angst. (“They say that life’s for living/But life as we know it’s a stick up,” Almqvist croons on “Stick Up.”) “Countdown to Shutdown” is built on a bouncing bass line by The Johan and Only, who replaced Destruction in 2013. “What Did I Ever Do to You?” originated on a hybrid instrument — an organ, guitar, drum machine and microphone — that Almqvist picked up on Swedish Craigslist for $400, which included the patent.The album’s title is a nod to some Hives mythology — that they are the creation of a Svengali named Randy Fitzsimmons, who writes all their songs. In truth, the band labors over every track. “They turn every stone,” Berger said, “a little bit like working a Rubik’s cube, trying to figure out how can we make this as good as possible?”The band’s absence from recording coincided with a drop-off in rock’s cultural and commercial might, a fact that provided Almqvist with an easy layup: “I’m just saying that the Hives don’t release a record for 10 years, rock becomes completely unpopular,” he said. “Coincidence? We think not.”Onstage at Racket, Almqvist assured everyone that the new songs would soon be their favorites, and presided over the controlled chaos like an exacting but lovable school master.“Everybody shut up for one second,” he ordered as the crowd clapped slightly offbeat to the breakdown of “Hate to Say I Told You So.” The room went silent. “And now,” he said, “we restart.” The audience laughed, obeyed and joyfully threw themselves in the air. More

This year’s Bard Music Festival explores the work and context of a composer who strove to make art “an expression of the whole life of the community.”Perhaps more music festivals should open with a singalong.At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a thronging audience was, shall we say, encouraged to join the Bard Festival Chorale in a rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is simple, elegant and, as it turns out, satisfying to warble your way through.That was, largely, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be of use, who saw his search for beauty through music as a collective and communal act, who wrote not only for himself, but also for his time, his place, his countrymen.“The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,” he wrote in 1912. “He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”But does this music have anything to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s staunchest advocates feared for the future of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its nearer relation to contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it more quickly, the New York Times critic Olin Downes critic predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.Some of Vaughan Williams’s works do still speak today, above all the remarkable triptych of symphonies through which he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to encase the carnage of his era in sound: the biting, terrifying Fourth, a sour reminder of the Great War that had its premiere in 1935; the uneasy, bleak Sixth, finished in 1948 and an immediate sensation; the desperate yearning of the wartime Fifth, his insistent declaration that a better world was still possible. While others may think of the Fifth as naïve, I find it almost Brahmsian in its consolation and sincerity.But as Vaughan Williams’s supporters often point out, he composed in such a range of forms and styles that even if one of his scores falters at the ear, there is a decent chance that another will break through. Don’t like the Vaughan Williams of “The Lark Ascending”? Try Vaughan Williams the urbane Neo-Classicist, or Vaughan Williams the mordant modernist — or so the argument goes.Danny Driver, left, and Piers Lane were the soloists in Vaughan Williams’s two-piano revision of his Piano Concerto in C.Matt DineFor the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.If anything, Vaughan Williams got a little lost in the bravura breadth of the programming on the first weekend, though he is less likely to after the second, which will feature an exceedingly rare production of his Falstaff opera, “Sir John in Love,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” and the Symphony No. 8, as well as a smattering of works for smaller ensembles. Of the six concerts I heard, one surveyed the popular music of Vaughan Williams’s time, with which he appeared to have barely a tenuous connection, while two were dedicated to his scores alone.Three other performances roamed the contexts in which he worked, and they were outstanding, an ideal fusion of intellectual insight and musical integrity. The first, introduced by the musicologist Eric Saylor, sketched out the dominance of Brahms in turn-of-the-century British composition, through Parry, Stanford, Bruch and the like; another, with winking commentary from Adams, looked at art songs. The third investigated the fraught relationship between Britain and France at either side of World War I, focusing on the influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams during their lessons in 1907 and ’08. As the tenor Nicholas Phan, the pianist Piers Lane and the Ariel Quartet showed with a cutting “On Wenlock Edge,” a cycle of Housman poems that Vaughan Williams completed in 1909, the Englishman was no copycat, but he learned much from Ravel about how to refine a mood.Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece. The players of The Orchestra Now, a training ensemble at Bard, played creditably in the two concerts that they contributed to as well.But in those, alas, the old Botstein dilemma came to the fore. The conductor bows to nobody in his zeal for neglected art, nor in the taste for intellectual provocation that was amply on show in remarks here, but he can lack the insight and technique that would allow the overlooked truly to shine.Such was most detrimentally the case in a program that tried to present Vaughan Williams as an experimentalist, through three works from the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Job,” the terse “masque for dancing” (that is, ballet) that was inspired by the illustrations of William Blake; the unwieldy, postwar revision for two pianos of the awkward Piano Concerto in C, valiantly tackled by Lane and Danny Driver; and the Fourth Symphony. The readings were competent, to be sure, but not specific enough in their details, especially in the Fourth, which plodded along rather than piercing the air. The edge that makes these works so bold was blunted, the intellectual argument softened.But Vaughan Williams, at least, still had something to say. More

The rapper’s “Utopia,” his first album since his Astroworld Festival in Houston turned tragic in 2021, opens with the equivalent of 496,000 sales in the United States.Almost two years ago, the career of the rap star Travis Scott had seemed in doubt after the catastrophe of his Astroworld Festival in Houston, where 10 people were crushed to death and hundreds more were injured.The authorities investigated Scott’s role, but in June prosecutors announced that a grand jury had declined to indict Scott and two festival officials. A number of civil lawsuits against Scott and festival organizers, however, remain pending.That cloud was no deterrent to Scott’s fans, who have sent the rapper’s latest album, “Utopia,” straight to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. It had the equivalent of 496,000 sales in the United States, including 331 million streams and 252,000 copies sold as complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. That was by far the biggest opening for any hip-hop album this year.Scott gave an album-release concert on Monday at the Circus Maximus in Rome, which featured a surprise guest: Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who was making his first live appearance after he made a series of antisemitic remarks last fall. Those incidents resulted in his being largely exiled from the music business, and his lucrative fashion partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga were canceled.When Scott released his last album, “Astroworld,” in 2018, he was one of the music world’s kings of “bundling” — selling fans an album that came with concert tickets or, particularly in Scott’s case, merchandise like T-shirts, key chains and hats. Industry complaints that the practice was distorting the charts grew loud enough that in 2020 Billboard largely ceased counting bundles on its charts. But fans kept buying music-plus-collectibles packages, and three months ago Billboard tweaked its rules once again, allowing what it calls “fan packs”: physical copies of an album with a single merchandise item.Scott’s “Utopia” was released in a variety of collectible CD and vinyl variants, including 15 deluxe boxed sets and what Billboard deemed two compliant fan packs (a CD or vinyl LP that came with a single item of branded merchandise). Of the 252,000 copies “Utopia” sold in album form, 111,000 were digital downloads, 63,000 were CDs and 79,000 were vinyl LPs, which Billboard said is the biggest week of vinyl sales for any R&B or hip-hop album since at least 1991.Also this week, Post Malone opens at No. 2 with “Austin,” which had the equivalent of 113,000 sales, including 101 million streams. Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 3, the “Barbie” soundtrack is No. 4 and Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5.On the Hot 100 singles chart, Wallen’s “Last Night” returns to No. 1 for a 15th time, while Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which rode a wave of controversy and media coverage to the top spot for a single week, falls to No. 21 with big drops in streaming and download sales. More

The rapper, now known as Ye, had not performed live since a series of antisemitic comments last year led to rebukes in music and fashion.Ye, the rap star formerly known as Kanye West, on Monday made his first concert appearance after a series of antisemitic remarks on social media and in interviews last year, which led to his alienation from the music industry and loss of lucrative fashion deals with Adidas, Gap and Balenciaga.Ye’s return to the stage came as a guest during a livestreamed album-release concert by Travis Scott at Circus Maximus, the park in central Rome that in ancient times was the site of a giant stadium where chariot races and other entertainment took place.Scott, a protégé of Ye’s, brought his mentor out during a concert to celebrate his chart-topping new album, “Utopia.” With Scott dressed in white and Ye all in black — initially with a hood and mask, which didn’t stay on for long — they performed two Ye songs together: “Praise God,” from his 2021 album “Donda,” and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” a Kanye West classic from his 2007 album “Graduation.”“There is no ‘Utopia’ without Kanye West,” Scott told the crowd. “There is no Travis Scott without Kanye West. There is no Rome without Kanye West.”After years of erratic and controversial behavior, Ye finally crossed a line with the music and fashion industries last fall, after he showed up at Paris Fashion Week in a shirt that read “White Lives Matter,” and then tweeted that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” That led to his expulsion from social media, his ejection from the Creative Artists Agency and the loss of his Yeezy brand sneaker and fashion design partnerships. The deal with Adidas had been especially valuable, contributing more than 10 percent of the $2 billion in profit that the company made in 2021.Despite widespread condemnations, Ye doubled down on his comments. Last December, he joined “Infowars,” the online talk show hosted by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who has been ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion for promulgating lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. On that show, Ye said, “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis,” and “I do love Hitler.”Ye had largely kept a low profile since then, though last week Twitter restored Ye’s account. It had been suspended a day after the Infowars interview, with Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter — which has now been rebranded as X — saying that Ye had “violated our rule against incitement to violence.”Before the Rome appearance, Ye’s last concert was in Miami in February 2022, promoting his album “Donda 2.” More

In the coastal town of Bray, south of Dublin, the site of Ms. O’Connor’s last Irish home, mourners gathered to pay their respects to the singer.At the close of a life poised between tradition and rebellion, Ireland gave Sinéad O’Connor a send-off on Tuesday that embraced both.In keeping with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, in Bray, County Wicklow.But many of those who gathered, or who left her tributes, brought a spirit more in keeping with her life as a rebel who took on the establishment — most notably the Roman Catholic Church — and who spoke up for the oppressed. Among the signs left in front of her family home was one that read “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “GAY PRIDE” and “REFUGEES WELCOME.”At noon, the cortege reached Ms O’Connor’s former home on Bray’s seaside promenade. The crowd broke into prolonged applause, with some raising fists in salute. Many were in tears. Earlier, as thousands of people waited for her cortege to pass alongside the small town’s seaside promenade, a classic Volkswagen van draped in rainbow and Rastafarian flags had played a selection of her music from speakers. The playlist mixed her rock and pop hits with her renditions of Irish traditional ballads, including “The Foggy Dew.”Ms. O’Connor, who was found dead in her London apartment last month, converted to Islam in 2018, and her family will give her a Muslim burial on Tuesday. While the family wished to keep the funeral private, they invited the public to come to Bray for a last farewell.Some of those lining the streets — suddenly sunny after days of gray skies — were avid music fans. Others were activists, and there were also abuse survivors who had drawn strength from Ms. O’Connor’s openness about her own experience of childhood trauma. Dave Sharp, who said he had spent years in care homes and been the victim of abuse, traveled to Bray from Glasgow on Monday.“We didn’t have much notice but I’d promised myself that I’d be there for her,” he said. “Sinéad O’Connor is one of the bravest women I’ve ever known of. She not only put her life and career on the line, but she was ahead of her time.”The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, will attend the funeral with his wife, Sabrina.“The outpouring of grief and appreciation of the life and work of Sinéad O’Connor demonstrates the profound impact which she had on the Irish people,” he said in a statement. Speaking of her “immense heroism” and the pain it caused her, he added: “That is why all those who are seeking to make a fist of their life, combining its different dimensions in their own way, can feel so free to express their grief at her loss.”In accordance with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, on the seaside promenade in Bray.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersIn recent days, among a rolling wave of tributes, a creative agency temporarily augmented a World War II territorial marker on nearby Bray Head to celebrate the singer. Where once it said “Eire” — Irish for Ireland — to warn belligerent aircraft that they were approaching neutral Irish territory, the giant sign now says “Eire 🤍 Sinéad.”Passionate and often controversial, Ms. O’Connor had slowly become, in the eyes of many, a national treasure, a woman who spoke up for the weak and oppressed, and who took an early stand against the abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere.Her public struggles with mental health inspired protective feelings in fans and supporters, and added to the grief at news of her untimely death at age 56. Although an autopsy has been completed in London, no cause of death has yet been given.Ms. O’Connor, performing in Avenches, Switzerland, in 2008, had become a national treasure in the eyes of many.Ennio Leanza/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the weekend, performers and crowds came together at summer music festivals around the island to sing some of the musician’s most beloved songs, such as “Mandinka,” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.”The week before, the crowd fell silent, then applauded, at Ireland’s biggest sporting occasion, the inter-county Gaelic football final in Dublin’s 80,000-capacity Croke Park, as the big screens played the famous video of her version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”Even the church, famously the target of her anger, has paid respects. Speaking last week, before the annual ancient pilgrimage to climb Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland, the Catholic primate of Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, said he had heard many stories about her kindness.“Clearly her own trauma and her own personal experiences made her a very compassionate person who reached out to the marginalized — she had real empathy,” he said. “God rest her troubled soul.”Flowers, messages and gifts were piled in front of Ms. O’Connor’s former home, many paying tribute to her empathy and the causes she supported.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters More