Le Journal

Ever heard of the song “Jag vet, du är inte min” by the up-and-coming artist Jacub? Yeah, me neither—but that just means we’re not Swedish. The folk-pop crooner has quietly become Sweden’s biggest song of 2026, racking up more than five million Spotify streams in a matter of weeks, all on the strength of a finger-picked guitar, a wounded chorus, and a man sadly realizing his late-night situationship is not, in fact, endgame. So who is this mysterious Jacub, anyway? As luck would have it, “he” is less tortured singer-songwriter and more group project: a virtual frontman built by a team of executives at Danish company Stellar Music, including staffers from its AI department, with both the voice and chunks of the composition generated by machine-learning tools. Stellar, for its part, would really prefer you not call Jacub “fake.” Their line is that they’re not some shadowy tech bros pressing “sad guitar ballad” on a dashboard and going home early; they insist Jacub is the product of human songwriters and producers using AI as a mere “tool” in a “human-controlled creative process,” as if the algorithm is just another plug-in on the pedalboard. The feelings are real, they say, because the people behind the project are real. (As for whether Jacub is a real person, they replied “that depends on how you define the term,” which really does not bode well for the future of either music or humanity. For the record, the standard definition usually involves a heart, a pulse, and the ability to die, but I digress.) It’s a neat bit of rhetorical aikido: if the heartbreak comes from humans, who cares if the voice, the sound, and the words all belong to a dataset with good enunciation? As it turns out, Sweden cares. The same week Jacub was sitting at the top of Spotify’s local Top 50, the country’s official chart body quietly benched the song. Under rules laid out by IFPI Sweden, a song that’s “mainly AI-generated” is simply not eligible for the national singles chart, no matter how many times it gets streamed by heartbroken teens in Gothenburg. The track can live on playlists, rack up royalties, soundtrack breakups—what it cannot do is show up next to human artists on the one list the industry still treats like a historical record. It’s just about the bare minimum, but it’s still a rare, faintly admirable line in the sand. Billboard, feel free to follow suit. Spotify, however, does not give a flying fuck—which should surprise no one, considering this is the same platform that had no qualms about auto-playing an ICE recruitment ad between two indie songs and calling it “discoverability.” If the numbers go up, the numbers go up—and the song stays up. Whether the artist exists is, apparently, a philosophical question best left unanswered so long as the money’s good. Still, there’s something quietly relieving about Sweden’s refusal to play along. Not because it solves anything—AI music is not going anywhere, as much as we’d like it to—but because it acknowledges that charts are supposed to mean something, even if that something is becoming (like the word “person,” apparently) increasingly hard to define. Streams can be automated, voices can be synthesized, heartbreak can be reverse-engineered, but a chart, at least in theory, is a record of whose voice is actually heard. For now, Sweden has decided that if you want to be counted, you have to exist. Which feels like a low bar. And yet. Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at casey@pastemagazine.com.

Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike Live is coming to the land of off-brand Elmo impersonators and competing chocolate megacorp stores. No, not Las Vegas—it’s already been there—but Times Square. After stops in Vegas and London, Tatum shared on Instagram this morning that the stage show he created and directed is coming to New York City. Performances for the New York edition of Magic Mike Live are scheduled to begin on October 8 with an official opening of October 22. Broadway World reports that the show will take place in a custom-built and newly renovated venue one block from Times Square, though it doesn’t name the space specifically. “This all started as a crazy idea 10 years ago and look at it now,” Tatum says in a statement shared with the site. “When we were coming up with the concept for our original show, we first came to the streets of New York City where I hid in a secret confession booth we set up in Midtown and asked women what they really want. Not just in a show, but in life. They shared some deeply powerful things. That insight helped us create our shows in Vegas, London and all over the world. With 10 years of experience and surrounding ourselves with a team of strong and creative women, we’re now coming back to where it all started in New York.” Magic Mike Live is billed as a “next-level, 360-degree live experience inspired by the hit films” blending dance, athleticism, comedy, and music, seating the audience in the middle of the venue while a cast of dancers performs around and above them. Tickets for the show start at $59 with VIP packages starting at $249. Sebastian Melo Taivera, who appeared in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, will star as Mike in the New York production, along with a large ensemble of dancers. If Mike can make it here, he can presumably make it in most other major markets!

Since its creation, Studio Colorido has been one of the rare anime studios almost entirely focused on standalone films, putting out a run of pleasant, visually impressive pictures that largely fail to coalesce into anything particularly lasting. After adapting author Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway (probably their best film thus far), the animation house delivered a run of originals distributed on Netflix, including A Whisker Away, Drifting Home, and My Oni Girl. The studio’s latest effort for the streamer is Cosmic Princess Kaguya!, a music-focused film that mixes one of the oldest Japanese folktales—The Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter, about a princess who comes from the moon—with the contemporary, VTuber-fueled, cute-anime-girl industrial complex. It’s a strange combo, delivered in an all-out charm offensive. Ultimately, it makes for an agreeable watch that’s bolstered by fluid character animation, fantastic vocal performances, and a likable group of characters, but it also falls victim to Studio Colorido’s persistent problem: It lacks the dramatic propulsion required to fully crack through the stratosphere. The by-the-numbers opening of Cosmic Princess Kaguya! gives way to a bonkers second half that’s missing a critical piece of romantic clarity, coming so close to something otherworldly that it winds up being more frustrating than if it simply exploded on the launch pad. Cosmic Princess Kaguya! centers on chronically overscheduled high schooler Iroha Sakayori (Anna Nagase), a straight-A honor roll student who excels at everything she does. She’s popular, gets great grades, and is a skilled musician. But despite her outward composure, she’s just barely keeping it all together. She’s estranged from her mother and living alone, meaning that, on top of her studies, she works a part-time job to pay rent and save for college. Things get even more complicated when a cosmic baby suddenly materializes inside a bamboo shoot-like telephone pole (a reference to the original folktale). Iroha begrudgingly takes care of the kid, who grows up so fast that she doesn’t even have time to file a police report, and names the alien Kaguya (Yuko Natsuyoshi) after that fable’s lunar princess. Much like her namesake, Kaguya escaped the moon to live a more eventful life on Earth. Obsessed with getting the “good” ending that the original princess never had—in her story, the lunar denizens descend, defeat the humans, and take her back to the moon—the chaotic Kaguya tries to live every day to the fullest. Eventually, she teams up with Iroha to win a streamer competition that will allow both of them to play in a concert alongside the AI idol Yachiyo Runami (Saori Hayami), whom Iroha hopelessly crushes on. Despite the implicit tragedy at the heart of the source material, Cosmic Princess Kaguya! begins in a largely bubbly mood as its central pair attempt to become the biggest VTubers around (sapphic undertones and all). That high energy starts with the music, and the soundtrack of this film about e-idol culture is largely up to snuff. Smooth dance choreography and earworm melodies sell a sparkly atmosphere filled with aesthetic razzle-dazzle that will have otaku waving glowsticks for their oshi. A series of buoyant pop jams don’t quite appear often enough to call this a musical, but they’re still a worthy payoff for all the hype behind these in-universe artists, each performance further sold by impressive character animation. Kaguya is relentlessly energetic, so happy to have escaped from her birdcage that she’s all rhythmically swinging limbs and gesticulations. Meanwhile, Iroha is much more reserved, her tension and stress expressed in baggy eyes and furrowed glances at her extraterrestrial tormentor, confirming her status as a teen who probably somehow has a stomach ulcer. It’s rare for a scene to pass without at least a few impressive bits of ostentatious character animation, often in ways that skew comedic, making for plenty of moment-to-moment…

Tori Amos has announced her 18th studio album, In Times of Dragons, due out May 1 via Universal/Fontana. True to form, it’s not a quiet return: the record arrives framed as a sweeping, politically charged allegory, complete with dragons, tyrants, and a familiar Amos-ian fusion of the mythic and the painfully real. In Times of Dragons follows a busy and unusually wide-ranging few years for Amos. After 2021’s Ocean to Ocean, she released Tori and the Muses, the soundtrack to her New York Times-bestselling children’s book of the same name, which earned a Grammy nomination in 2025. That project underscored her ongoing interest in mythmaking and storytelling—an impulse that now returns, sharpened and politicized, in her new studio work. In a press release, Amos describes In Times of Dragons as “a metaphorical story about the fight for Democracy over Tyranny,” positioning the album as a response to what she calls the real-time erosion of democratic structures in the U.S. The project continues her decades-long practice of turning personal, political, and spiritual upheaval into narrative song cycles—less topical commentary than symbolic confrontation. The album’s newly unveiled cover art leans into that sense of ritual and timelessness. Created in collaboration with photographer Kasia Wozniak and stylist Karen Binns, the images were produced using a vintage RA-4 photographic process, with direct paper positives shot on a large-format camera. The result is tactile and deliberate, mirroring the album’s themes of endurance, resistance, and transformation. Amos will support In Times of Dragons with a 35-date U.S. summer tour beginning in July, with stops in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Austin, Philadelphia, and a headlining performance at Red Rocks, among others. She’ll be joined once again by longtime collaborators Jon Evans (bass, musical director) and Ash Soan (drums), along with backing vocalists Liv Gibson, Deni Hlavinka, and Hadley Kennary. An exclusive artist pre-sale begins January 21 at 10 a.m. local time via toriamos.com, followed by a general on-sale January 23. The announcement follows a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack to Amos’ children’s book Tori and the Muses, and marks her first full-length studio album since 2021’s Ocean to Ocean. With In Times of Dragons, Amos once again reaches for myth not as escape, but as a way of naming the moment—reminding us that when the language of politics fails, symbolism still knows how to bite. See the album cover below and check out tour dates here