The Weekender #34: Dog Days of Summer
New records, strange movies, baseball miracles, and other things worth your weekend.
Greetings from The Wax Museum, and welcome to The Weekender, where I gather up the records, movies, shows, books, and assorted internet detours I think are worth carrying into the next couple of days.
For this week’s roundup, I’ve got:
two debut albums out today that have immediately jumped near the top of my 2026 pile, including my current song of the year
psychedelic Thai folk music, a bittersweet comeback record, and 25 years of Norwegian jazz weirdness
a wonderfully curated music biopic collection
a new TV adaptation with a “killer” soundtrack
a KEXP set from one of my favorite young bands
a baseball book that helped get me through the first half of a truly miserable Red Sox season before baseball decided to become fun again
and one herculean attempt to rank all 73 Beatles solo albums
This is the first Weekender exclusively for paid subscribers, so thank you for being here. Your $5 a month or $50 a year gets you one of these every Friday, plus the full Wax Museum archive, and $10 off in the Gift Shop. More importantly, it gives me an excuse to spend an unreasonable amount of time digging around for things worth recommending to you.
Enough housekeeping. Let’s get into it.