1critical·Score 100· Viral 95
GANS announce self-titled second album with propulsive new single ‘My God Is A Stranger’: “A cauldron of casual sex and witchcraft”
The duo are heading out on a UK tour next week The post GANS announce self-titled second album with propulsive new single ‘My God Is A Stranger’: “A cauldron of casual sex and witchcraft” appeared first on NME .
Source: NME · Music
Twitter angle
Skip the 'cauldron of casual sex and witchcraft' quote everyone else will pull; lead instead on how theatrical taboo-baiting is quietly becoming the safest marketing play in guitar music right now. Cynical enough to be interesting, safe enough for playlist editors.
LinkedIn angle
Frame the UK tour announcement as proof that mid-tier touring is being rebuilt around small-capacity rooms where atmosphere does the heavy lifting rather than production spend. Position GANS as evidence that cult-scale acts can sustain themselves without chasing arena economics.
2critical·Score 90· Viral 86
🎧 Approved: PROJECTOR
With Brighton quartet PROJECTOR industrial drum machines, angular post-punk and rant-pop share the same space. New track ‘I Need A Lie Down’ was designed to “make people feel sick and culminate in a horrific wall of noise” when played live, which sounds horrible but (at least on record) sounds great
Source: Complete Music Update · Music
Twitter angle
The interesting bit isn't that 'I Need A Lie Down' fails to reproduce its live sickness on record - it's that failing might actually make the band bigger. Recordings become teasers for the gig rather than substitutes for it.
LinkedIn angle
Use PROJECTOR to argue that loudness-as-spectacle is migrating back into grassroots venues while streaming flattens everything anyway. Good talking point for anyone booking independent circuit tours about designing moments records cannot deliver.
3critical·Score 87· Viral 83
Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents
The startup helps developers build AI agents that work over iMessage, SMS/RCS, email, and other messaging platforms. It's a bet that consumers will increasingly use agents instead of downloading apps.
Source: TechCrunch · Tech
Twitter angle
Everyone reads this as apps dying, but really it means discovery gets funnelled through fewer surfaces controlled entirely by chat providers. Ask who owns artist visibility once there's nothing left to download except somebody else's agent.
LinkedIn angle
Photon raises real questions for fan CRM strategy: if conversations move off owned channels onto iMessage and RCS, direct-to-fan data becomes someone else's infrastructure problem. Worth flagging before labels rebuild their whole stack around app-like experiences nobody opens anymore.
4critical·Score 87· Viral 83
A Perfect Circle Announces 2027 North American Tour, Releases New Single
A Perfect Circle has a new single out this week, “To Whom It May Concern,” and new tour dates set for 2027. The New North American headline dates feature Puscifer and The Cult on select shows. “To Whom It May Concern” is A Perfect Circle’s second new single this year and the follow-up to “Starless,” […]
Source: Pollstar · Live-touring
Twitter angle
Announcing 2027 dates during festival season speculation feels like deliberate anti-hype planning rather than momentum-chasing. Interesting test case for whether audiences still respond to long-lead announcements in an algorithmic present tense.
LinkedIn angle
Treat the three-year runway here less as confidence and more as insurance against volatile venue availability and tour costs outpacing ticket prices. Useful precedent to cite whenever clients demand immediate touring ROI language.
5critical·Score 85· Viral 81
An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at based on a brain scan
A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what…
Source: MIT Technology Review · Tech
Twitter angle
Slightly uncomfortable thought worth surfacing alongside breathless mind-reading coverage: audience reaction measurement could soon stop relying on surveys altogether. Ask artists honestly how granular they'd want visualisation tech pointed at fans.
LinkedIn angle
Before celebrating neural prediction tools, push ethical limits: consent frameworks for biometric-adjacent research need building ahead of commercial adoption, especially wherever visual attention feeds creative testing pipelines inside advertising-funded media.