Welcome to The Weekender, the weekly recommendations exhibit of The Wax Museum. It goes out every Friday for paid subscribers, and about once a season, I unlock one so you free-loaders can see what you’re missing.
This is that one.
If it answers your weekly “what cool shit should I be reading, watching, and listening to?” question, consider a $5 a month or $50 a year upgrade and get one of these every Friday.
And this is a fun one. Jam-packed, emphasis on jams. Thank you for supporting human curation. Let’s get into it.
The Listening Room
Records, songs, and other sounds for your weekend.
Protomartyr - Hotel Usona (2026)
Stream: Bandcamp
Get Vinyl: Gold | Black
The top spot each week is reserved for my favorite new Friday release, and I fully expected M83’s I Wrote You a Letter to take it. Great single, Anthony Gonzalez back in the driver’s seat, easy call. Nope! A bit of a fakeout, as most of the record leans closer to the film-score work Gonzalez has been doing lately. Instead, Protomartyr’s Hotel Usona came along and blew my socks clean off.
This is essential October music: eerie, anxious, dark as hell, and constantly sounding like it knows something bad is coming. Joe Casey imagines America as a decaying hotel, with each of the album’s nine songs opening the door on some different modern nightmare, from AI and deportation to violence, warped patriotism, and the general psychic sludge of being alive right now. Casey remains one of our best wordsmiths, so I recommend listening with Genius open in another tab.
And good lord does this sound huge. Dave Fridmann, the producer behind records by The Flaming Lips, MGMT, Spoon, and plenty more, gives the band a scale and menace that fits the material perfectly. I could easily be convinced this is Protomartyr’s best record front to back.
Orbital - Glastonbury 1994 (2026)
Stream: Bandcamp
Get Vinyl: Yellow and Blue | Black
Orbital’s 1994 Glastonbury set finally gets its first official release today, more than 30 years after helping turn them from a big deal with ravers into a band that rock fans had to pay attention to. Channel 4 broadcast the festival, meaning a lot of people were seeing live electronic music presented on that scale for the first time, and you can hear why it landed: loops and samples being pushed around in real time, songs stretching way past their studio versions, Alison Goldfrapp floating through “Sad But True” and “Are We Here?,” and a closing “Chime” that rips. More than just a great set, it’s a pivotal moment in electronic music history.
The Radio Dept. - Pet Grief (2006)
Stream: Bandcamp
Get Vinyl: Grass Green | “Dinked” Maroon
The Radio Dept. are giving Pet Grief a 20th anniversary vinyl reissue, which is excellent news because this thing has rarely been pressed and buying an old copy required the kind of financial decision you have to discuss with your spouse first.
Their second album is cozy, melancholic, dreamy as hell, all soft synths and shimmering guitars. Around the same time, the band was working on music for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and some of that unused material ended up on Pet Grief. It’s perfect fall music, and now you can own it without spending hundreds of dollars.
Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy’s Balearic Breakfast Vol. 1-5
Boy did I go down a lovely rabbit hole this week, and now I bless you with it.
I was poking around upcoming releases when Balearic Breakfast Vol. 5 caught my eye, presented by Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy. The name sounded familiar, and then it clicked: Murphy is responsible for the excellent remix of The Cure’s “And Nothing Is Forever” from Mixes of a Lost World, a record that gets spun a whole lot around my house.
That sent me looking around, where I found a playlist collecting most of the music from the first four Balearic Breakfast compilations plus the upcoming fifth volume. I hit play and six hours later realized I had barely stopped listening.
If “Balearic” is new to you, the short version is that it grew out of Ibiza DJ culture and casts a wide net: dance music, psychedelia, ambient, disco, cosmic weirdness, sunny pop. Sort of like the SPRITZCORE genre I made up this summer.
Part of what makes these compilations crush is Murphy herself. She came up through college radio at NYU, later became part of David Mancuso’s legendary Loft orbit, and has spent decades DJing. Sequencing is central to her style, and you hear it immediately. Each volume works front to back, but there’s also the fun of stumbling onto a song you’ve never heard, stopping everything, and tossing it into one of your own playlists.
Balearic Breakfast Vol. 5 arrives November 13. Looking at previous volumes on Discogs, these things sell out fast and resell for triple the cost, so if genre-hopping musical sunshine sounds appealing, I’d get that preorder in.
PATIO GROOVES 🍂 Fall 2026
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music
This week was the official start to Fall aka peak patio season! So you would be wise to throw on PATIO GROOVES, 33⅓ songs built for cool mornings, football on TV, drinks outside, and thinking about where the hell the last 20 years went. About half the playlist is from this year, with the rest digging across six decades of hazy memories and seasonal wistfulness.
The Screening Room
Movies, shows, concerts, documentaries, and assorted moving images.
Sub Pop TV
Watch: YouTube
Sub Pop, one of indie rock’s great institutions and now somehow 38 years old, recently turned its YouTube channel into a 24/7 music video stream pulling from the label’s catalog from the ’80s to today. The first two videos I caught were CocoRosie’s “Lemonade” and Band of Horses’ “No One’s Gonna Love You,” two songs I wore out in college, so I was hooked immediately. Stick it on for five minutes and you’re just as likely to get Nirvana, The Shins, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, or some band you forgot you loved.
Big Thief - Live at The Opera House at 7A Ranch, Wimberley, TX, Nov 6, 2025
Watch: YouTube
Big Thief are one of our great live bands, and I especially love when they lean more rock than folk, which is what Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia do here. Everything about this set hits: the mix, the visuals, the sound, the band absolutely cooking. Highlights abound, but I especially dug the eight-minute, jammed-out “Not” and the new track “Muscle Memory,” expected to land on their upcoming 29-song triple album Horsepower, which they recently played in full at the Ryman. Just an incredible document of a band in its prime.
Watch Johnny Blue Skies All Tour Long
Stream: Nugs
Speaking of live bands in their prime, is anyone doing it like Sturgill Simpson right now? Sheesh. He’s currently out on an arena tour under the Johnny Blue Skies name, and every show is being streamed on Nugs, with each night hovering around 30 songs and three hours of jams and no two setlists the same. The first 15 minutes of the Denver show above should tell you pretty quickly what kind of run he’s on. Next livestream is October 2 in Nashville, so save the date.
The Films of Lance Oppenheim
More than two years ago, back in The Weekender #14, I called Lance Oppenheim “one of our most exciting documentarians” after Ren Faire, Spermworld, and Some Kind of Heaven. Feeling pretty good about that one! Oppenheim is somehow still only 30, and today he releases his first narrative feature, Primetime, with Robert Pattinson playing To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in what looks like a dark examination of reality TV, exploitation, and the race for ratings. Pattinson is already getting Best Actor chatter, and this is what I’ll be seeing this weekend.
Then on October 16, Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder give us You Can See Everything, the nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary they somehow made in secret, beginning with Fielder moving in with Holmes and her partner 34 days before she reported to prison. It premiered as a surprise at Telluride and immediately became one of the buzziest documentaries of the year, so yes, I’ll be there for that too.
In the meantime, go backwards: Ren Faire and SPERMWORLD are both excellent, and Some Kind of Heaven, his beautiful, bizarre portrait of life in The Villages, remains one of my favorite documentaries of the decade. This kid is on a ridiculous run.
The Reading Room
Books, longreads, interviews, lists, and internet rabbit holes.
Brut (2026) and Running The Light (2020) by Sam Tallent
Comedian Sam Tallent’s debut novel, Running the Light, is still the best fictionalized representation of stand-up comedy I’ve read, a pitch-black road novel I devoured five years ago and haven’t forgotten since. Now he’s back with Brut, a thriller about an ex-Marine turned hitman named Beaujolais who gets handed one final job. Tallent writes with this nasty, visceral, cinematic energy that can be funny one page and deeply ugly the next, with plenty of Cormac McCarthy DNA running through it. Tallent is officially two-for-two.
The Second Coming of Steely Dan by Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone (1977)
Steely Dan’s masterpiece Aja turned 49 this week, which is as good an excuse as any to revisit seven songs of perfection I never get sick of. And thanks to Jake Malooley for putting this 3,000-word Rolling Stone piece by Cameron Crowe on my radar, written after he interviewed Walter Becker and Donald Fagen on Aja’s release day in 1977. It’s full of great stories, sharp little details, and a nice snapshot of where Steely Dan were at that moment, all written with Crowe’s usual charm. Expanding Dan has the full piece available to download.
Treat Spotify Like a Public Utility by Ramsay Eyre in The Nation
While everyone is suddenly kicking around the idea of AI regulation, here’s an idea for government intervention I can actually get behind: Spotify. Ramsay Eyre makes the case in The Nation that streaming platforms have become less like record stores and more like utilities, massive pieces of infrastructure connecting nearly every musician to nearly every listener, and maybe we should start regulating them that way. Here’s one of the most interesting ideas from the piece:
With the political will to do so, policymakers could build a publicly owned streaming platform to rival and economically discipline the private platforms through competition, while providing an excellent public service—just like public libraries. Today, public libraries in cities such as Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Salt Lake City, Utah, have already built streaming platforms that, if scaled up with the resources of a national institution like the Library of Congress, could build a public streaming platform with the capacity to compete with the giants. Without the need to deliver returns to shareholders—only to fairly compensate the musicians who provide the raw material for such a venture to succeed—a public platform could offer service on better terms and fairer prices than the private ones.
The Wax Museum’s Book Club | September 2026
A quick check-in on The Wax Museum’s Book Club pick for September: John Steinbeck’s classic East of Eden, which we’re reading ahead of the Florence Pugh-starring Netflix series dropping next week. Boy is this so much better than I remember from high school. Not exactly shocking, considering I mostly remember high school English as being tired. It’s just a massive, beautifully written saga of family dysfunction and biblical symbolism, and I can’t wait to see how it ends because I genuinely do not remember.
For October, we’re heading back to the 1930s for some cosmic horror. I’ll announce the pick in the next Weekender, so sign up and come read something unsettling with us.
Lastly, the great Kevin Alexander of On Repeat Records interviewed me about my vinyl auctions on Whatnot. It’s a fun conversation and worth a read if you’re curious about this little Twitch-meets-eBay corner of the internet.
My next show is hopefully next week, and the theme is movie soundtracks, with around 50 records I love going up for auction. Very stoked for that one.
Hey, thanks for stopping by.
The Weekender drops every Friday for paid subscribers. Your $5 a month or $50 a year gets you 52 of these a year, plus the full archive and $10 off in the Gift Shop. More importantly, it gives me an excuse to spend an unreasonable amount of time digging for things worth recommending to you.
Until next time,
Jared