Le Journal

Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. Check out last week’s roundup here. Song of the Week—Modern Woman: “Dashboard Mary” When Modern Woman’s Sophie Harris sings, you can feel it in your ribs. On “Dashboard Mary,” her voice moves like a sprung trap: taut with pressure, capable of sudden force, and brutal when it snaps. The song unfolds as a charged overnight vignette—age gaps, bad decisions, long drives, the queasy silence of the morning after—rendered with a novelist’s eye for detail and restraint: “She thought that he was regretting, cos his hands on the wheel were blue / If the boy at home had woken and if the Dashboard Mary knew.” The instrumentation thrives on tension and contradiction, gliding between hush and abrasion as violin, saxophone, and rhythm section pull against one another—at least until the song’s final stretch, which is all riotous distortion. Nothing here is smoothed over or moralized; the thrill curdles, the momentum keeps going, and the picture never quite resolves. It’s an utterly gorgeous and brilliantly structured track, possibly one of my favorites of the year thus far (granted, it’s only mid-January, but still). Modern Woman’s debut record, Johnny Dreamworld, is set to release this May, and believe you me, I’m already lining up to hear it. —Casey Epstein-Gross Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” A year ago, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori made a masterpiece together: the psychedelic, structureless Los Thuthanaka. Now Crampton’s first solo full-length since 2024’s Estrella Por Estrella is coming next month. Anata is dedicated to the Andean ceremony of the same name, “where we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans/nature,” according to the liner notes. Crampton has totally redefined the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” is shredded noise captured in trance-y loops and crushing ascending lines. Surges of metal guitar couple with the acoustic backings of charango and ronroco into an overwhelming spate of texture. It’s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean ceremonies where the audio’s bottomed out. The energy of “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” takes me to a different place. It’s not magic but a creative experiment—an explosive, suspended tribute. —Matt Mitchell Mitski: “Where’s My Phone?” Everybody wants to figure Mitski out but nobody can. In the wake of her 2018 breakthrough Be the Cowboy (long before she landed a Billboard Hot 100 spot with “My Love Mine All Mine”), she gave management the keys to socials and has since maintained an enigmatic distance from her adoring audiences who’ve turned her into a patron saint of sad girls (a role which she has vehemently rejected). On the lead single for her eighth album, she’s fighting fruitlessly to de-clutter her mind—jangly guitars and dusty distortion crowding its corners, fogging up the “clear glass” every time she tries to wipe it clean. Mitski plays the in-between Mother to a Maiden and Crone, rounding out the Hecate trio in a music video that lands somewhere between The Haunting of Hill House and Grey Gardens. Following a wordless bridge of backing vocals and a rising tide of strings, Mitski returns to ask once again, “Where did it go?” Over a decade into her strange and unparalleled rise through the ranks of (and beyond) indie fame, it’s a joy to see Mitski revel in meta-madness once again. —Grace Robins-Somerville OHYUNG: “all dolls go to heaven” Between the exquisite You Are Always On My Mind and the delicate dressings of her Sorry, Baby score, OHYUNG was my most important artist of 2025. Lia Ouyang Rusli makes sounds that have stayed so wonderfully present in my body, and…

You shouldn’t bring sweets to a picnic, because, as Malory Archer warned us, that’s how you get ants. In Gingham, you are the ants, and their queens, trying to create chains on the picnic blanket to connect and claim tokens for various types of sweets located at the vertices of the chess-like board. It starts slowly, but space on the blanket becomes tighter as the game progresses, leading to longer chains and bigger stacks of sweets for higher point gains in the last few rounds. Gingham plays two to four players, with one blanket for the two-player game, which uses five sweet types, and another for three or four players, where you use just four sweet types. Each player has a colony of ants and two queens that they’ll use to determine where their ants go. The starting player chooses one of the four sides of the board, which also has a stitch connecting two diagonally-opposed corners, and places their queen at the end of one of the rows on that side. They may then place one of their ants anywhere between the end space and the stitch, but not beyond it. In the first round, players go around the table and each take the same two actions—place a queen, then place an ant. You can place an ant on an empty space or bump someone else’s ant; if you do the latter, they get to move that ant to any empty space on the board, ignoring the stitch. If any player creates a contiguous chain of their own ants between two sweets of the same type, they score one point per ant in the chain. The chains have to be orthogonal, and you score your shortest path, even if you have a longer one that connects the same two tokens. The player then takes one sweet token and stacks it on the other one, replacing the vacated vertex with one or two white sugar cubes. In addition, if the player surrounds any sweet token with their own ants—four ants in the middle of the board, two on the edge, just one in the corners—they can place their own matching token for that sweet type on top of the stack, scoring one point per token covered. You can even grow your stack by chaining it with ants to an unclaimed stack, or steal someone’s stack by surrounding it with your own ants and displacing theirs. You can chain two claimed stacks, but you can’t merge them. Once all players have placed their two queens and placed two ants, the round ends. The player closest to the corner of the board with the stitch in it then becomes the first player in the next round, and turn order proceeds to the next closest player to that corner. The first player in a round gets to choose any of the other three sides of the board to use that round; they can’t reuse the same side. If a player places an ant next to a vertex with a sugarcube on it, they take that, and can use it on a later turn to take a special action costing one to three cubes. Those allow players to break or bend the rules, like placing a queen on a row that’s already occupied, placing an ant beyond the stitch, or moving one of your already-placed ants rather than placing a new one. Play continues until a player reaches 40 points (or 32 in a four-player game, although I missed that when I first played this and we went to 40, welp), and then the game ends immediately. Players then re-score every sweets stack they have covered with one of their claim tokens, with an additional five point bonus to the player with the highest stack of each sweets type. Each leftover sugar cube is worth one point. The best part of Gingham is the last third or so of the game, where chains get longer and competition for spaces and stacks is much tighter, leading to much more direct competition between players. The scoring increases significantly faster at that point, and poor choices earlier in the game can really come back to bite you, as it’s hard to build longer chains late in the game without some of your ants already in position. The start of the game feels quite slow, though, and I think it takes a certain sort of brain to be able to envision…

As AI invades more creative spaces, whether we ask it to or not, a coalition of actors, musicians, writers, and other artists have shared a new statement with a blunt message: stealing isn’t innovation. “America’s creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. But rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators’ work to build AI platforms without authorization or regard for copyright law,” reads the statement. “Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theft – plain and simple. A better way exists – through licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators’ rights are respected.” The letter has already received about 700 signatures, according to Deadline. Some of the names we recognized, in no particular order, include Vince Gilligan, Winnie Holzman, OK Go, Olivia Munn, Cyndi Lauper, Jennifer Hudson, They Might Be Giants, Sean Astin, George Saunders, Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Bell, R.E.M., Alex Winter, Cate Blanchett, Chaka Khan, Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, and Fran Drescher. The question of AI theft has been circulating for years now and likely isn’t going away any time soon. While massive companies like Disney have the option to enter into lucrative deals with OpenAI (after dubbing a rival AI company a “bottomless pit of plagiarism”) the majority of actors, novelists, and whoever else does not have this option. Last year, a group of writers brought a lawsuit against Anthropic AI, alleging that the tech used their copyrighted writing without permission or payment to train its Claude model. The company settled that lawsuit in August.

“The difference between a poison and a cure is the dose,” forest witch Selveig (Toby Poser) tells the skeptical father of a dying young woman in the horror film Mother Of Flies. This concept can be applied in both science and magic, and Mother Of Flies is informed by both Western medicine and occult practice, syncretizing these opposing forces by filtering them through its creators’ personal experiences with illness. The result is occult horror as potent as the snake venom in one of Selveig’s dreadful “cures.” Specifically, writer-directors John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser draw parallels between the powerful chemicals used in chemotherapy and the baneful magic of its title character, a necromancer who offers a college student a last-ditch treatment for her terminal cancer. Selveig first contacts Mickey (Zelda Adams) in a dream, a fact that Mickey declines to share with her dad Jake (John Adams) until they’re already at the witch’s Baba Yaga-esque hut. He wouldn’t have agreed to drive her there if he knew; she’s skeptical herself, but given her recent diagnosis, she has nothing left to lose. Selveig’s “cure” will take three days, and will be extremely painful. It will require Mickey to wade into the rot and decay that fuels Selveig’s power, confronting her own mortality in the process. Mother Of Flies accompanies the two step-by-step through the ritual, which is informed both by actual occult practices and Selveig’s fictional backstory. Selveig loves death. She’s intimate with it, both emotionally and physically. Poser gives herself completely to this strange, serious character, and her commitment is key to what makes the film work. The woods are an invaluable asset as well. As in their films Hellbender and Where The Devil Roams, the filmmakers favor a high-contrast look that renders the forest in saturated shades of green punctuated with eye-singing orange. The colors of death—bruised purple, deoxygenated blue—are similarly vivid, giving shots of maggots writhing in a pool of decomposing flesh an undeniable Gothic beauty. Images of bones and blood and corpses abound, and the overall vibe is like a heavy-metal music video in the best way possible. This is accompanied by an emotional gravity that comes from the film’s real-world context. Poser and John Adams are a married couple, and Zelda their daughter; together with older daughter Lulu Adams (who plays a small role as a hotel clerk), they’ve been making movies together for over a decade, developing their style as they go. Mother Of Flies is a new high for this tight-knit unit, drawing power from their own story as a family: Both Poser and John Adams are cancer survivors, and they have transformed that painful experience into an awesome work of art. An Adams family production is an inherently DIY affair: The writing, directing, editing, producing, cinematography, sound design, camera operation. costume design, set design, and set building for Mother Of Flies were all handled by Poser, Adams, and their children, who also make up the film’s core cast. (Even the doom-rock soundtrack was composed in-house by H6LLB6ND6R, a contender for the world’s coolest family band.) Combined with a minimal budget, this does mean the film has a few technical limitations. But getting hung up on those moments where the sound mix or video compositing are rough around the edges is missing the point. In a world where film production is increasingly consolidated into the hands of a few risk-adverse corporate entities, the Adams family embodies the spirit of true independent filmmaking. That wouldn’t matter if they weren’t doing it well, however, and Mother Of Flies outdoes many of its more well-funded peers in terms of both audacity and emotion. This is no paean to witchcraft as pop-feminist empowerment: Solveig’s magic is dark and dangerous, and the film is unblinking in terms of its relationship with death. Midway through their ordeal, Mickey asks her father what he will do if Solveig’s…