The Weekender #33: We're So Back
The Friday grab bag returns with 15 recommendations and some news about what’s next.
The Weekender has been asleep since March, but I am pleased to report that it has been poked with a stick and is alive again.
Even better, it is going weekly.
After 160 issues of The Wax Museum, this remains my favorite exhibit to put together: a Friday grab bag of records, movies, concerts, shows, books, and assorted rabbit holes worth carrying into the weekend. Beginning next Friday, August 7, a new Weekender will arrive every week for paid subscribers.
I’ve been fortunate to see an uptick of readers sign up for a paid sub lately, and I wanted to give those supporters something substantial and reliable in return. At $5 a month or $50 a year, patrons will now get 52 Weekenders a year, full access to the archives, and a $10 Gift Shop coupon. That’s less than a buck per issue.
The regular Wax Museum exhibits are not going anywhere. I’m still publishing two or three free longreads a month, and I don’t take your attention for granted. The fact that you continue to show up and read any of this means the world to me.
This week’s return is open to everyone, and I’ve loaded it up with a full stack of things to listen to, watch, and read. Consider it the Boar’s Head sample at the deli counter before you order the full pound.
Next Friday, the velvet rope goes up. Today, admission is free. Let’s dig in.
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The Listening Room
Records, songs, and other sounds for your weekend.
The Durutti Column – Renascent (2026)
Stream: Bandcamp
Get Vinyl: Deluxe Coke Bottle Green | Yellow
You could say The Weekender is feeling renascent, which is a fancy way of saying active again and, conveniently, the title of The Durutti Column’s 28th (!!) album, their first in 16 years (!!!!). After multiple strokes permanently altered Vini Reilly’s virtuoso guitar playing, I never expected another record, much less one this luminous, achingly beautiful, and quietly strange, a comeback worthy of sitting beside The Return of the Durutti Column and Vini Reilly.
Curió Curió - Curió Curió (2026)
Get Vinyl: Neon Orange | Black
Stream: Bandcamp
The Strokes this, Charli xcx that, my favorite release from last Friday came courtesy of Mr Bongo, a label that apparently keeps a warehouse full of diamonds in the rough. Rio-born singer and actor Luiza Monteiro and German producer Dustin Braun stir MPB, samba, Brazilian jazz-funk, and icy European disco into one high-drama cosmic groove that had me in its pocket instantly.
snag - All The Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn To Dust (2026)
Get Vinyl: Juneberry
Stream: Bandcamp
Milwaukee screamo trio Snag’s third LP, and first for Deathwish, is all panic-stricken screams and pummeling stops and starts until “Juneberry” appears smack in the middle with pedal steel, horns, and layered harmonies, like someone opened the door to a haunted country bar. It could have stuck out like a sore thumb, but instead it’s the album’s emotional core and one of my favorite songs of the year.
fabric presents Mount Kimbie (2026)
Get Vinyl: Black
Stream: Bandcamp
Fun one out today: London institution fabric handed Mount Kimbie the keys to its quarterly mix series, and they came back with 26 tracks built for the club. It is the duo’s most dancefloor-minded release in years, including new originals “Monroe” and “Jomox.” If this is anything like their 2018 DJ-Kicks mix, we’re in for a treat.
Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)
Get Vinyl: Deluxe Box Set | 4 LP Standard
Stream: Bandcamp
It was announced this week that Aphex Twin’s sprawling 2001 double album Drukqs is finally coming back to vinyl on October 30, rescuing physical media sickos from paying the $400 it has been fetching secondhand. Once greeted with mixed reviews, it now feels like one of those records the future had to catch up with, and its return means the entire Aphex Twin catalog is back in print.
Roy Ayers & Ubiquity - He’s Coming (1972)
Get Vinyl: Verve Vault Series
Stream: Spotify
Inspired in part by Jesus Christ Superstar, Roy Ayers’ 1972 jazz-funk sermon has everything you could want: deep basslines, nasty breaks, spoken-word passages, soul harmonies, and “We Live in Brooklyn, Baby,” one of the coolest songs ever committed to tape. It is now back on vinyl through the Verve Vault series, cut all-analog from the original master tapes and pressed on 180-gram vinyl.
The Screening Room
Movies, shows, concerts, documentaries, and assorted moving images.
Five Videos to Remember Glen Hansard
Some deaths hit harder than others. This one did for me. Glen Hansard died this week at 56, and if you ever watched him perform, even through a laptop screen, you know he never seemed capable of giving a song less than everything he had.
I came to know Hansard through The Swell Season, the folk duo he formed with Markéta Irglová, and through Once, the 2007 film they starred in together. Their duet “Falling Slowly” won the Oscar for Best Original Song.
Hansard had a way of taking a song from tender to full-body exorcism. This NPR performance of “When Your Mind’s Made Up” is the best example I know. It spends several minutes tightening the screws, then blows the roof off.
Then there is his performance of “Fairytale of New York” with Lisa O’Neill and members of The Pogues at Shane MacGowan’s funeral. Shane’s widow and sister eventually leave the pews to dance, and the church turns grief into a wake. It does not get much better than this as a send-off.
Hansard began busking on the streets of Dublin at the age of 13, and even after the Oscar and sold-out concert halls, he never lost the instinct to play for whoever happened to be standing nearby. Here, a family on vacation in Sicily casually stumbles upon an Oscar winner singing in the street.
He also possessed the Irish gift of turning a quick anecdote into a one-man show. This story about meeting Van Morrison is hilarious.
We were lucky to live at the same time as Glen Hansard. I’m grateful so many of these performances were captured, each one proof of how completely he gave himself to music.
Lollapalooza 2026 Livestream
Stream: Hulu and Disney+
Lollapalooza takes over Chicago’s Grant Park this weekend, and those of us without wristbands can still watch from home. Tonight’s run of The Smashing Pumpkins into Charli xcx into Not for Radio is what I’m looking forward to most, and I’ll also be seated for The xx closing out the weekend, hopefully with a new song or two. Go here for the full livestream schedule.
Bon Dylan Full Set at Eaux Claires (Bon Iver Covers Bob Dylan)
Stream: YouTube
After an eight-year hiatus, Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner brought Eaux Claires back to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and the clear highlight was “Bon Dylan,” a 90-minute Bon Iver-and-friends set tearing through Dylan songs from across the decades. The closing run of “All Along the Watchtower” into “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” especially rocks. An official release would be nice, but until then, this full recording will have to do.
For more live Bon Iver, I included VOLUMES: ONE among my 50 favorite records of 2026 so far.
The Yussef Dayes Experience - Live From Cape Town
Stream: YouTube
Yussef Dayes is one of those drummers who can make jazz feel loose, precise, and spiritual. His band features Elijah Fox on keys and Rocco Palladino on bass, son of the great Pino Palladino, and for this Cape Town performance they are joined by the Thanda Choir and Lizwi Choir.
Dayes also understands how to present live music better than almost anyone: beautiful locations, pristine sound, cinematic footage, all dropped onto YouTube for free. After the recent Fuji, Japan set, Live From Cape Town is another one to put on the biggest screen in your house and turn up louder than necessary.
The Reading Room
Books, longreads, interviews, lists, and internet rabbit holes.
Here’s a stack of all the books I’ve read since the last Weekender four months ago. Some I loved, some I didn’t. These are the four I’d press into your hands.
Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (2026)
Back in The Weekender #13, I called Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War “without exaggeration, the scariest book I’ve ever read.” She may have topped it with her latest scenario built around a genetically engineered, airborne strain of bubonic plague, reconstructed through interviews with epidemiologists, intelligence officials, military leaders, scientists, doctors, and policymakers. It moves like a thriller and ends like a nightmare, leaving me in the same fear-filled silence I now associate with finishing an Annie Jacobsen book.
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (1988)
For anyone who wants a summer beach read with a side of existential dread, Joy Williams’ 1988 Florida Keys novel follows Liberty and Willie, young married drifters who break into empty luxury homes, drink the owners’ champagne, sleep in their beds, and move through paradise like ghosts. It is bleak, very funny (the last line of Chapter 1 had me cackling), and full of sentences that make the whole world feel slightly off-center. This is one I’ll be returning to for the rest of my life.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024)
And speaking of writers trying to recover a sense of wonder from a damaged world, meet Cyrus Shams, a newly sober Iranian American poet obsessed with finding a death meaningful enough to justify a life. His mother was one of 290 people killed when the good ol’ U.S. Navy shot down Iran Air Flight 655, and that inherited grief feeds a meditation on mortality, identity, and our desperate need to matter. Akbar is a poet first, and you feel it on every page: sentences dense enough to reread for pleasure, carrying the same aimless wartime ache you’d find in Hemingway or Fitzgerald into a much different kind of American life.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover (1968)
Lastly, a perfect book for the dog days of summer. Henry Waugh is a bored accountant who retreats into an absurdly detailed baseball league of his own creation, complete with dice, scorecards, statistics, player biographies, and 56 seasons of accumulated lore. This is less a baseball novel than a black comedy about solitude, male obsession, and what happens when a harmless private hobby becomes the only world that still makes sense. Office Space meets Moneyball meets Synecdoche, New York, as the players break records, live, die, and carry on while their creator slowly loses his marbles.
A true lost classic, recently rescued by New York Review Books, who will also reissue Coover’s debut The Origin of the Brunists in a future season (take my money!). There are currently a bunch of NYRB titles discounted on Amazon, and I already have more than 10 sitting in my cart, so please send recommendations and/or financial intervention.
Hey, thanks for stopping by The Wax Museum. If you enjoyed your stay, pass this along to a friend whose weekend could use an upgrade.
I’ll be back next week with a massive signed-vinyl livestream and the first Weekender behind the velvet rope.
Until then,
Jared