Category: 5. Entertainment

Joseph Dewey

Joseph Dewey

Joseph Dewey

Taylor Swift is officially entering her next era, with the superstar announcing her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, during a teaser for an upcoming special episode of Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast on Wednesday.

The new album — her 12th studio effort since her 2006 debut — marks Swift’s first new project since releasing The Tortured Poets Department in April 2024. Just over a year later, that album is already six-times-platinum, according to the RIAA, and it was nominated for album of the year at the 67th Grammy Awards.

Earlier on Monday, a countdown started on Swift’s official website, with it expiring at 12:12 p.m. ET. At that time, a new teaser for the upcoming New Heights episode — which will feature the pop superstar as a guest — dropped on her Instagram.

New Heights teased Swift’s special appearance on the podcast earlier Monday, confirming a special guest online and posting an anonymous silhouette. The podcast later confirmed on Instagram that Swift was in fact the special guest.

Swift has kept a low profile in 2025 compared to the past several years since she wrapped her record-breaking Eras Tour at the end of 2024. Though she made waves back in May when she announced that she’d finally secured the purchase of the rights to her early master recordings. That ended one of the most contentious disputes in music business history, which had begun when music executive Scooter Braun bought the rights to Swift’s first five albums via an acquisition of her former record label Big Machine in 2019. (Braun sold her masters to Shamrock Capital a year later, with Swift making a deal with the company this year.)

“This was a business deal to them, but I really felt like they saw it for what was to me: my memories and my sweat and my handwriting and my decades of dreams,” Swift said of the deal at the time.

Still, even as that controversy courted drama, Swift turned it into a lucrative chapter in her career with the “Taylor’s Versions” of her original albums, which helped elevate her superstardom and, in several cases, outsold the originals.

Like all of Swift’s releases, the new album will almost assuredly be a chart monster as well, as she is perhaps the only artist left in the business who could reliably sell a million units in one week alone. (2022’s Midnights debuted with over 1.5 million units sold in its first week, while last year’s The Tortured Poets Department opened with a massive 2.6 million units.)

Last year Sharon Van Etten crossed the ocean searching for ghosts. Her destination was London and a recording studio that was once a church and had, in another life, belonged to Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics. The American indie superstar planned to soak up the funereal atmosphere and make an album as glamorously grey as England in the rain. There was only one problem.

“We actually had sunny weather in London,” she says, laughing as she adds that she made the best of these challenging circumstances as she set up shop at the Church Studios, in Crouch End, with all “the light coming in. We were trying to conjure as many ghosts as we could.”

Van Etten reduces other songwriters to giddy superlatives. Her fans include The National, Fiona Apple and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, all of whom have collaborated with her or covered her work. (She also has a side gig as an actor, appearing in the cult Netflix show The OA, as well as making a musical cameo in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.) Fans will be out in force when she tours Ireland this month with her new project, Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory.

As Van Etten dials in by video link, it’s clear she has chosen the perfect setting for her conversation with The Irish Times: the basement of her parents’ house, in suburban New Jersey, from where she talks about the bands she listened to as an angst-ridden adolescent: dandies of doom such as The Cure, Joy Division and Nine Inch Nails.

“I remember closing my door and upsetting my mother, being very introspective – in some ways gloomy for no reason,” she says.” I was definitely an angsty teenager.”

She has held on tightly to her love of those artists, but it has taken until now for her to directly reference them in her songwriting. Written and recorded with her touring bandmates, and steeped in the drizzle of the 1980s, the London-made LP – also called Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory – is a stately synth-pop odyssey that gives off a cool glow of mannered melancholia.

It’s a brilliantly bleak ghost-train ride, ripe with secrets that reveal more of themselves with each repeated listen. There is also a wonderful tension between the textures of the album – those vintage synths and ever-collapsing Cure-style guitars – and lyrics that are very much rooted in Van Etten’s experience as a millennial woman with a family and ageing parents.

It’s the perfect blend of teenage nostalgia and the dull ache of growing older and realising the things you took for granted about life, and your place in it, won’t be around forever. Your kids will grow up, your parents will get old and you, too, will finally reach the end of the line.

She gets right to the point on Live Forever, the album’s New Order-playing-at-your-wake opening track, on which she wonders about immortality and if it would be worth the price. “Who wants to live forever?” she howls. “It doesn’t matter.” The song is about having the courage to accept that all things will pass.

“I had read this article about a medical study being done in the UK where they were doing these experiments on mice. They were injecting them with the serum that reversed the ageing process by replicating the cells that normally die, causing ageing,” she says.

“And so we got into this philosophical conversation: if you could live forever, would you? And why? What would the world look like? It would be overpopulated with people. Why would you want to live that long? The whole purpose of life is death and coming to terms with that.”

Van Etten had to build her career the hard way. Born in New Jersey, she started writing songs in earnest while studying at college in Tennessee and working as a music booker on the side. Her boyfriend at the time disapproved: he would break her instruments and tell her she didn’t have the talent to make it.

The trauma of the relationship and of the break-up fuelled her early albums. “Never let myself love like that again,” she sang on her second LP, Epic, from 2010, a record that showcased both her darkly expressive voice and her ability to craft songs that build and build, like a dam forever threatening to burst.

Returning to New York, she then worked with Aaron Dessner of The National on Tramp, her widely lauded breakout album.

A decade later, music continues to be an outlet for Van Etten’s hopes and fears. So much else has changed. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Zeke Hutchins – once her drummer, now her manager – and their eight-year-old son.

With its political tensions and apocalyptic wildfires, the city has its challenges, she acknowledges, but she wonders if it’s all that different from anywhere else nowadays.

“It’s spreading across the whole world. I feel we have these environmental catastrophes everywhere now – fires, tornadoes. When you think of the war that’s going on, the famine that’s going on. Even if you’re living on the east coast [of the US] you have hurricanes, woods over-run with ticks. Nature is pissed off right now. And it’s coming in at all sides.”

She tries to look at the positives. Life is hard, but in LA she has found a group of like-minded souls. “Los Angeles has had a horrific year – couple of years. Especially now, in the political climate, it’s pretty intense.

“What I’ve been seeing is communities showing up and being strong and resilient in the face of disaster. There is that to be hopeful about. I love LA. I have a beautiful community and support network of musicians and friends. There’s this dark undertone, but it’s such a beautiful place.”

Last November Van Etten and her fellow singer Ezra Furman covered a Sinéad O’Connor song, Feel So Different, the first track from the late artist’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, as part of the Transa project celebrating the trans community.

It’s largely faithful to O’Connor’s original: Van Etten says her goal was to honour the song rather than to reinvent it. She also wanted to express her admiration for O’Connor, an artist who spoke up when others remained silent, whether about clerical abuse or misogyny in the music industry.

“People didn’t know how to deal with mental health, and they also took advantage of her,” Van Etten says. “She always spoke up and represented the underdog, and was always a political activist, from my understanding of her beliefs.

“And she suffered quite a lot as a child. She went through a lot, she lived through a lot, and was able to make beautiful music out of it, and also speak her mind about what she believed in.”

Van Etten, who is in her mid-40s, recently said she worried that Attachment Theory might be regarded as a middle-aged folly. But this isn’t the first time she has had to grapple with her place in the music industry and whether it has room for her.

“I remember when I was first looking for a label. I was in my late 20s, early 30s. And [record companies] were, like, ‘I don’t know if anyone wants to sign a 30-year-old.’ What year is this? You don’t want to sign a 30-year-old? Because, I guess, the older you get the more thoughtful you get in your touring choices.”

The industry wants young artists not simply because they’re fresh-faced and full of energy. They are also more malleable and prepared to work to the bone, unlike someone with more life experience. “You say yes to everything in your 20s, which I did,” Van Etten says.

She adds that her label, Jagjaguwar, is artist-driven and artist-led. “Also, my manager is my husband. We’ve all grown together in this industry that is constantly changing. It is harder, the industry, outside of who I work with. That is what I observe.

“I feel older. It doesn’t affect what I want to make and how I want to work or how I want people to experience our music. It’s just a fact of life. I’m a mom and I’m a musician, and I’m figuring out the balance of how I want to live my life.”

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory is released by Jagjaguwar. The band play Cork Opera House on Tuesday, August 19th; Mandela Hall, Belfast, on Wednesday, August 20th; and Collins Barracks, Dublin, on Thursday, August 21st, as part of the Wider Than Pictures series

Taylor Swift has announced her next album, The Life of a Showgirl.

Swift is known for dropping hints and clues for her fans ahead of announcements and this one was no different. On Monday night, a countdown to 12.12am eastern time on 12 August appeared on her website, transformed to a glittering orange. On Instagram, Taylor Nation – a branch of Swift’s official marketing team – shared a carousel of 12 images from the Eras Tour, writing in the caption: “Thinking about when she said ‘See you next era…’”

It was also announced that Swift will appear on her partner Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights on Wednesday. Eagle-eyed Swifties noticed the silhouette of Swift was taken from her Variety Directors on Directors appearance, which premiered on 12 December 2022. The Variety recording was connected to All Too Well: The Short Film, which was released on 12 November 2021.

At 12.12am Swift’s website briefly crashed, before reappearing with scant details about The Life of a Showgirl.

The album has no confirmed release date yet; Swift’s website states that it will be shipped before 13 October, with the caveat: “**THIS IS NOT THE RELEASE DATE, OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED**.”

The 35-year-old is among the world’s bestselling musicians, selling an estimated 200 million records globally and holds the record for most number one albums in the US by a female artist in history. Her global Eras tour became the first billion-dollar tour in history, selling 2.4m tickets in a single day, and made more than US$2bn over 21 months. Forbes estimated Swift earned $10m-$13m (£8m-£10m) a night.

Her last album, 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, set a streaming record on Spotify – 300m in one day and 1bn in five – and made her the first artist in history to secure the top 14 spots on the Billboard Hot 100.

In May, Swift bought back the master recordings to her first six albums, giving her control over her entire catalogue for the first time. The singer signed with her first label, Big Machine, in 2005, at the age of 15, giving them the rights to her master recordings. In 2019, label head Scott Borchetta sold those six albums to music executive Scooter Braun, who sold them to the private equity firm Shamrock Capital for a reported $300m.

To regain control over her catalogue after the sale to Braun – and to devalue his investment – Swift embarked on a project to rerecord all six albums, rebranding each one as “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding “From the Vault” tracks from the original songwriting sessions that hadn’t made it on to the original albums.

“I almost stopped thinking it could ever happen, after 20 years of having the carrot dangled and then yanked away,” she wrote in a letter to fans in May, after buying her catalogue back from Shamrock Capital. “But that’s all in the past now. All of the music I’ve ever made … now belongs … to me.”

Reputation and Swift’s self-titled debut album, from 2006, are the only albums not to be rerecorded, with fans speculating as to their possible release dates for years.

Despite the project now being essentially redundant, it is likely both will have a Taylor’s Version released anyway as Swift remains one of the biggest and most lucrative musical acts in the history of music.

Golden, the breakout song from animated film KPop Demon Hunters, has clinched the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 – bagging yet another record for the Netflix summer flick.

The film, about K-pop girl band Huntr/x who uses music to protect humans from demons, has become Netflix’s most-watched animated film since its release in June.

It is the ninth song associated with K-pop to take the top spot on the Hot 100 – and the first by female singers.

The upbeat hit clocked nearly 32 million official streams in the first week of August, according to Billboard.

“Unlike other animated films, where songs are often added as a filler or commercial hook, the music here was woven into the narrative in a way that enhanced it rather than distracted,” Maggie Kang, the Korean-Canadian co-director of the film, previously told the BBC.

Golden is not the only track from the movie that has achieved commercial success. Coming in at number eight on the Hot 100 is the song Your Idol by Saja Boys, the fictional rivals of Huntr/x.

Both Golden and Your Idol topped US Spotify charts in July shortly after the film’s release, beating real life K-pop bands BTS and Blackpink.

Earlier this month, Golden climbed to the number one spot in the Official UK Singles Chart – becoming only the second K-pop single to do so, after South Korean rapper Psy’s Gangnam Style in 2012.

Official Charts CEO Martin Talbot said that this represented “another landmark moment for the globally dominating South Korean genre”.

“For the many music fans who have been to their enormous concerts, bought their merch and streamed their iconic songs, this will forever be the summer of Oasis – but K-pop’s superstars are certainly giving the Gallaghers a run for their money,” he said.

The track, sung by Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami, debuted at number 81 on the Hot 100 on 5 July, before steadily climbing to the top of the chart.

Ejae, who also co-wrote the track, previously told BBC Newsbeat the team had known Golden would be a “banger” – though the song’s massive success still came as a surprise.

“It’s like I’m surfing for the first time and a big wave just came through,” she said.

The film Kpop Demon Hunters has also become a massive hit for Netflix, becoming its fourth-most watched movie of all time within weeks of its release.

US reports say the streaming platform is considering turning it into a franchise with several sequels, hoping to replicate the success of Disney’s Frozen.

Miriam Margolyes is ensconced in the garden room of a fancy Edinburgh hotel, framed by tasteful greenery and smiling for a fan who wants a selfie. Apple-cheeked and foul-mouthed, she is gracious with the passing stranger, though she warns me later: “If somebody pisses me off, I’ll say: ‘Now listen to me, I’m 84!’” She pauses. “But I don’t see why they should!” she adds with a laugh.

Margolyes is returning to Edinburgh for the second year running with an upgraded version of her acclaimed showcase based on the characters of Charles Dickens, her favourite author. “Same old cunt, even older,” reads the flyer. “It could be the last time, but don’t bank on it!”

The Edinburgh festival fringe is world-famous for the diversity of its acts, but industry and media attention is easily distracted and the appetite for bold new talent and fresh voices often equates – deliberately or otherwise – with youth. Yet this year offers a “brigade of old gits”, as the actor Andy Linden says, some of them veterans such as Margolyes who first performed there with Cambridge University Footlights in 1963, and others remarkably making their debuts in their 70s and 80s.

“I’m very lucky,” says Margolyes, whose legion of fans straddle generations and have delighted in her performances in Blackadder, Harry Potter and her appearances on The Graham Norton Show. “There’s relatively few people of my age still working.” And there is “nothing like a live audience”, she adds: “It’s like a kiss, it’s a caress.”

“I just enjoy doing it so much,” she continues, running through some of the characters she brings to the stage with “shape-shifting flair”, as one reviewer put it. “My favourites like Mrs Gamp, Miss Havisham, I think I’m a perfect person to give voice to these amazing creations of which there were very many. So it’s a bit of a wank, really,” she concludes cheerily.

Margolyes describes an “immediate feeling of joy and competence” when she steps out in front of an audience these days. Has she always felt as if she knows what she’s doing on stage? “No, it has come with time. What I am conscious of now is that people know who I am and that is really relatively recent.”

Just as confidence comes with age, so does a responsibility to use her profile to speak out on behalf of those who don’t have such a platform. Most recently Margolyes, who is Jewish, has faced a backlash for her strident criticism of the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza.

“People say: ‘You’re just an actor, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’ Well, that is a point of view. I don’t happen to share that. I think that if you have a chance to make an impact for good, to change things, then you should. I think it’s an absolute requirement, and people don’t, out of fear sometimes. They are afraid of being cancelled. You can’t cancel me!” she says.

Just off a flight from Australia, where she lives part-time with her partner, and suffering from “punishing” jet lag along with a recent back injury, Margolyes admits that life on the road can be tiring. “I’m gathering my powers and I will deliver, but it is a struggle.”

Also appearing at Edinburgh this year is Linden, a veteran character actor and one of Margolyes’s Harry Potter co-stars, who played the horcrux thief Mundungus Fletcher. This year marks the 40th anniversary of his Edinburgh debut in 1985. Now 71, when Linden last performed at the festival in 2022, he suffered a big respiratory attack and ended up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Having been told by his doctor in no uncertain terms that “next time it happens I’d need a hearse not an ambulance”, Linden is embarking on his first booze- and cigarette-free festival as he returns with Baxter vs the Bookies, a show he wrote and performs himself, charting the fortunes of an ageing horse-racing tipster bamboozled by modern technology.

“In the past we gloriously defiled ourselves one way or another, but as the years unfold experience takes a hand,” he says with some forbearance. “Edinburgh is the Grand National, not a five-furlong sprint and whether you’re young or old you’ve got to pace yourself.”

Linden’s advice for performers of any age is to take a few days off during the run: “Edinburgh can be very insular so try to do something a little different, go up the coast. I go to the football and watch Hearts or Hibs. Don’t do 30 days nonstop.”

The festival has changed mightily in scale since he first performed here, and has become “fiercely competitive”. But ageism is not a concern for Linden: the “brigade of old gits” he is referring to includes Ivor Dembina, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Mark Thomas.

“You don’t retire from the profession,” he says, “the profession retires you.” And until that happens, he plans to start work in October on a new character project about a boxing cornerman.

Others are making their debut here. I come to the Assembly Rooms bar to meet two women who are sitting poised on high stools. Vivienne Powell, 76, has just emerged from the first performance of her solo show Diva, about an opera singer with dementia battling to reclaim her memories through music. Christine Thynne, 82, a retired physiotherapist who took her first dance class at 68, is embarking on the first full run of her choreographed performance These Mechanisms.

It’s a physically challenging dance piece involving scaffolding planks and stepladders. Does Thynne rub up against expectations of how a woman of her age ought to behave or what she is even capable of? She laughs. “At 82, people say: ‘You shouldn’t be going up a stepladder, somebody else should be changing the lightbulbs!’”

Powell adds: “Our society is pretty ageist, in a lot of ways. Older people can be quite dismissed for what they can contribute, particularly women. So, to be doing our own shows at the fringe at a more mature age is pretty amazing.”

Thynne concurs: “When you look back over the programmes of past years, I don’t know that there have been many elderly women who have done a full show.”

Yet the pair remain largely unfazed by their own trajectories. “It can be quite common with women”, Powell argues, “who don’t come into themselves until their 40s or 50s. And they discover talents, interests that they didn’t know they had. They start a whole new chapter of their lives.” Having worked as a teacher while raising her three children in Sydney, Australia, latterly as a single parent, Powell gave her first professional opera recital in her early 40s and later acted on stage, in TV and film in Los Angeles.

Do Powell and Thynne believe they are braver as performers because of their age and experience? “Definitely,” insists Powell. “You take more creative risks.”

“My piece is completely about creative risks,” agrees Thynne. “From the beginning where I’m lying on a scaffolding plank and turning over its width. That’s the essence of the creativity, because the audience wonder what is going to happen next, then they realise: this isn’t an elderly person, this is an exciting piece of work.”

There should be no age limit to creativity, says Powell. Her advice to those still contemplating their next chapter is straightforward: “Follow your heart, do what you love.” She raises one finger for emphasis: “And don’t settle.”

Thynne says: “Even if you’re bringing up children and juggling all these different things and the ups and downs of life, still follow your dream. And be very, very positive about that!”

Both women’s grandchildren will see their shows. Powell reads hers a George Eliot quote: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Margolyes and Dickens: More Best Bits is at Pentland theatre at Pleasance at EICC until 24 August. Baxter vs the Bookies is at Gilded Balloon Patter House until 25 August. Diva is at Assembly Rooms, Drawing Room, until 24 August. These Mechanisms is at Dance Base until 20 August

Hailey Bieber has spent some “perfect” time with her close pals Kylie Jenner and Kendall Jenner over the weekend.

The model took to her Instagram account on Monday, August 11, to share some insights into her well-spent weekend, at the Kylie Cosmetics founder’s 28th birthday celebartions.

In the candid post, she dumped photos of herself enjoying a warm, cozy weekend.

The first snap of the carousel featured Hailey sitting on a bench in a laid-back position, wearing a white mini dress with red dots on it.

She also posted a snap of her painting, in which she drew her face with yellow petals around. The painting appears to have been drawn at Kylie’s birthday bash as the reality star also posted a video of herself drawing the same painting.

One of the photos in the series showed a snap of a FaceTime screen which read, “Kendall is unavailable,” with an ostrich picture set as a profile picture of Kendall’s FaceTime ID.

Hailey also posted a snap of herself in an outdoor setting while stretching her body in casual attire, donning black loose trousers and a light blue crop top.

This came after Kylie posted a series of snaps and videos from her intimate birthday celebrations. In one of her videos, when the beauty mogul was seen blowing the candles on her raspberry cake, Hailey and her husband Justin Bieber could be seen, as the Rhode owner captured memories on her phone.

Fresh off the back of new album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Ethel Cain has expanded her global tour into 2026 with dates in Australia and New Zealand.

Taking place throughout February 2026, the forthcoming shows will be Cain’s first of the year and will launch with a headline date at Auckland Town Hall in New Zealand before heading west to Australia. The five-date tour will feature two headline dates in Melbourne before one-off shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Fremantle.

Cain’s visit to New Zealand will mark her first appearance in the country, while it will be her second time in Australia, having made her debut in 2023 as part of the RISING, Vivid Live and Dark MOFO festivals.

The announcement of new tour dates comes just days after the release of Cain’s second studio album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You on Friday (Aug. 8). 

The album is a thematic prequel to Cain’s 2022 debut, Preacher’s Daughter, which reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200 in April following its first vinyl release. Its recent physical issue also resulted in peaks atop the Top Alternative Albums chart, the all-genre Top Album Sales list, the Vinyl Albums chart, and No. 2 placings on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums and Top Rock Albums charts.

The musical moniker of Hayden Anhedönia, a recent interview revealed that the Ethel Cain project has reached a thematic conclusion with the release of the nascent record.

“Preacher’s Daughter was speaking on my experiences in the church and as a child, and dealing with an environment you are subjected to and can escape from and all those fears,” Anhedönia told Popcast last month. “Willoughby Tucker is more of my insecurities and frustrations and fears and inadequacies and all of that in love. And so it’s just as personal, just on a different tip.

“But all of this, since the debut, has to do with Ethel Cain, the granddaughter’s character. So we are now, after this record is over, officially closing that chapter.

“I built Ethel Cain, the granddaughter’s character, now based off of, now, 27 years of life,” she added. “I have to go back out now and live and get more experience.”

Cain will launch the Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour in Seattle on Tuesday (Aug. 12) ahead of dates throughout North America, the U.K. and Europe, which are scheduled until mid-November.

Ethel Cain: The Willoughby Tucker Forever Tour, Australia & New Zealand Dates

Feb. 14 – Auckland Town Hall, Auckland, NZ
Feb. 16 – Palais Theatre, Melbourne, VIC
Feb. 17 – Palais Theatre, Melbourne, VIC
Feb. 21 – Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, NSW
Feb. 25 – The Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, QLD
Feb. 28 – Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, WA

Taylor Swift is back and live from…Travis Kelce’s podcast studio in Kansas City? It’s true! Revealed tonight on the New Heights Instagram account, Swift will be joining her boyfriend and Chiefs’ tight end (and presumably his brother, Jason) for a very special episode.

If you’re into the Swiftaverse, this may be considered one of the many Easter eggs the singer has been dropping as of late. First came a post by Taylor Nation, the official Instagram of Swift’s management team, which shared a 12-image carousel of the singer in orange ensembles to the sound of 2020’s “August.” The caption? “Thinking about when she said ‘See you next era…’” This was 14 hours ago.

Next (a mere 13 hours ago!), the New Heights Instagram teased a special episode with a “VERY” special guest—capitalization directly pulled from the caption and possibly written by Swift’s own boyfriend. The comments were filled with fans who recognized the shape of that cutout—certain it was Swift herself. And of course, it was revealed to be the singer just moments ago through a video.

One thing we certainly noticed? The orange font overlay—another Easter egg if Swiftie lore is to be believed. The star’s also forgone her classic red lip for something much different… would we dare even say, orangey?

So are we getting TS12? Just 32 minutes of the two flirting while brother Jason watches on? A special appearance by cats Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson, and Benjamin Button? (PLEASE!) Only time will tell—tune in this Wednesday at 7 p.m.

Josh Brolin is tired of “all the same shit” that’s on streamers, so that’s why he boarded Zach Cregger‘s Weapons.

The Oscar-nominated actor recently shared with Collider how the horror mystery pic is the solution to all the boring content he said is currently offered on streaming services.

“You’re looking for great filmmakers, and you’re hoping that there’s another new good filmmaker out there,” he said. “Right now, with so much content, you’re just watching things on whatever streaming service you’re on, and you’re just going, ‘Fuck, why is this so boring, man? Why?’ And just go to the next thing. It’s all the same shit.”

Brolin added of Weapons, “And then somebody not only takes the horror genre, but then fucks with it and then does something on the edge of absurdity, and it’s sort of humorous, so it’s keeping you off-[balance] enough for him to have an emotional impact, ultimately.”

The film, which also stars Julia Garner, follows a community in chaos after all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time. The small town is then left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance. Weapons not only won over critics and audiences but also came in more than $10 million ahead of expectations for its opening weekend with $42.5 million.

Cregger previously told The Hollywood Reporter that “it seems like horror is one of the few outlets for real creativity right now on a big scale.”

“Without horror, you go to the theater, and you get people in tights for $200 million, and there’s not a lot of room for risk in those movies. And no shade, I’m all for entertainment, entertaining. But, it’s a shame that there’s not a lot of room for anything else,” the Barbarian director continued. “I love horror, my creative tuning fork resonates strong with horror, so I’m lucky in that regard. I dearly wish that we could have cool, edgy weird comedies back in the movie theaters. Or dramatic fare for adults in the theater. I feel like there’s not a lot of movies for grown-ups anymore.”