Last spring, Tyson found herself in Los Angeles—and at a loose end. The musician and born-and-bred Londoner had initially traveled to the US to perform at South by Southwest. When the offer to crash at a family friend’s annex for six weeks arose, she decided to take it, renting a fancy car—“It was cheap, though, because it’s LA,” she says, with a grin—and meeting up with her close collaborator, musician Oscar Scheller, to start working on some new material at his home studio. Where in London, they’d usually try and squeeze in sessions between their hectic daily lives, spending back-to-back days devoting themselves entirely to writing unlocked something new. “Stepping outside of the daily grind in London allowed me to think in a different way,” Tyson recalls. “I felt inspired in a different way.”

The product of that time can be heard on Tyson’s new EP, Chaos, which arrives on November 15 via the independent London-based label LuckyMe. Across 10 tracks, she showcases the full breadth of her musical identity, flitting from the blend of soulful vocals and clattering two-step beats on the cheeky lead single, “Jumpstart,” to the clipped R&B groove of “Carousel,” on which Tyson sings of seeking joy and escapism in all the wrong places, to the rippling synths and trip-hop percussion on the mournful kiss-off to a lover that is “300Khz.” It’s an impressively self-assured journey through a range of genres made cohesive by Tyson’s starkly confessional lyrics and smooth-as-silk voice.

In the autumn of 2022, Nilüfer Yanya found herself at a crossroads. The British singer-songwriter—whose first two albums of intricate, emotionally charged indie pop had marked her as a fast-rising star with an unusual cross-genre appeal—was finally able to step off the endless hamster wheel of songwriting, recording, promoting, and performing. For the first time in her career, she had the opportunity to press pause and consider her next steps with real clarity of mind.

It was a little daunting. “I think I’ve become more observant of how I work,” Yanya says. “I didn’t want to rush back into writing another album because it’s important to have a breather in between. But I didn’t really have a broader understanding of the process before. Now, by the third album, I kind of get it. I understand my habits a bit more.” Given the challenges facing touring musicians post-pandemic, determining when things felt stable enough for Yanya to take that step back was a trick. “It took a while to get to that point,” she continues. “No creative job is ever super secure. So you really have to feel it from within, without getting too deep. You have to be able to say, ‘No, I’ve got this. This is fine.’ You’re allowed to do that.”

You can hear the rich rewards of that downtime on Yanya’s breathtaking new album, My Method Actor, released today on her new label Ninja Tune. Across 11 tracks, she doubles down on her signatures: guitar playing that veers from a grungy, reverb-laden fuzz to intricate acoustic noodling; playful percussion that can sound as much like classic rock drumming as it can delicate, syncopated trip-hop; her quietly devastating way with lyrics. (Plus, of course, there’s Yanya’s smoky, androgynous voice, which possesses a searing intimacy that makes you feel like you’re listening in on a secret.) This masterful blending of genres gives the album a quality that sounds slightly out of time, but also, somehow, firmly of the moment.

Back in November 2023, it was reported that a frenzied bidding war was in process to obtain the rights to adapt Britney Spears’s explosive, best-selling memoir The Woman in Me, with the likes of Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Brad Pitt all apparently vying for the honor of bringing the pageturner to the big screen via their various production companies. Now, it seems, that battle is finally over: Universal Pictures has secured the project and Jon M. Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights, and the forthcoming Wicked movies is set to be in the director’s chair.

His involvement suggests that the new film could be a musical rather than a darker drama, as does the fact that the three-time-Oscar-nominated producer of La La Land, Marc Platt, is one of the industry heavyweights who is poised to develop the release. Spears herself previously hinted at the news, writing on X: “Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret project with Marc Platt. He’s always made my favorite movies… stay tuned.” (Yes, fans will be reassured to know that the singer will be involved in the production, too, having worked tirelessly to reclaim a narrative that had been taken away from her decades ago.) Per Vanity Fair, she went with the Universal deal because it “was reportedly in the eight-figure range [and] likely because it also included rights to Spears’s own music catalogue.”

It’s not yet clear what time period the biopic will cover, though the book on which it’s based traces the Grammy winner’s life and career from her childhood in Louisiana and finding fame with The Mickey Mouse Club to the stratospheric heights of her pop superstardom, her highly publicized relationship with Justin Timberlake, the tabloid scrutiny which precipitated her fall, and the crushing lows of her conservatorship, before she emerged from it in 2021.

All of which to say, it’s a role that is sure to be life-changing for the starlet who ultimately lands it. Among the names being touted for the lead are Sydney Sweeney—honestly, who better to walk down school hallways in pigtails and a shirt tied at the navel crooning “Baby One More Time” than the Euphoria star?—but also Louisiana native Addison Rae, Dove Cameron (who, lest we forget, came within spitting distance of playing Wicked’s Glinda the Good Witch before Ariana Grande went on to snag the part), and Millie Bobby Brown, who, in 2022, told The Drew Barrymore Show: “I want to play a real person and I think, for me… [it] would be Britney Spears. Her story resonates with me. Just growing up in the public eye, watching her videos, watching interviews of her when she was younger… I don’t know her, but when I look at pictures of her, I feel like I could tell her story in the right way.”

You know that feeling of running into your ex’s best friend after your breakup? Now, imagine you’re a multimillionaire pop star and actor, and your ex is also a super-rich, famous actor, and you encounter his bestie—also a famous actor—at the Toronto International Film Festival and have to pretend to be thrilled. Well, Jennifer Lopez is a braver woman than I, because she was seen making the best of just such a situation and chatting it up with her recent ex-husband Ben Affleck’s longtime partner in crime, Matt Damon, at the afterparty for her film Unstoppable.

“Jen and Matt began talking and had a long, deep conversation,” a source reportedly told People, and while I don’t generally trust anonymous sources when it comes to celebrity gossip, I can’t help wondering what these two found to talk about besides Affleck. Without further ado, I present to you 23 potential topics of conversation between Lopez and Damon, absolutely none of which are based in fact or on-the-ground reporting, but all of which could have technically been broached on Friday.

1. The draft in there.
2. The bad appetizers being circulated on trays. (Actually, I’m sure nobody in their right mind would be so bold as to serve Jen and Matt a past-its-prime crudité, but has a passed app at a party ever really been good, with the obvious exception of pigs in a blanket?)
3. The election. (It’s famously coming up!)
4. The life story of wrestler Anthony Robles, whose path to the NCAA national championships in 2011 is the subject of Unstoppable.
5. How long that standing ovation for J.Lo’s performance at TIFF actually was.
6. Having teenage children, and the nightmares contained therein.
7. Having teenage children who are primed to become nepo babies, and the even-more-vivid nightmares contained therein.
8. Chappell Roan. (She’s everywhere!)
9. Jen Affleck, the Mormon MomTok influencer who proudly claims Ben as her husband’s second cousin.
10. Mormon MomTok in general.
11. Water.
12. Rihanna showing up at Alaïa’s NYFW Show. (This is a universal topic of interest, right?)
13. The 2003 mob rom-com Gigli, and how it might have benefited from Damon’s co-producer input.
14. Jen’s juiciest stories from this summer in the Hamptons. (After all, she knows any gossip given to Damon will get back to Affleck.)
15. Why nobody in Hollywood can get work.
16. A top-secret plan to get Hollywood back to work. (If these two can’t do it, nobody can!)
17. J.Lo’s 2019 Oscars snub for Hustlers. (If I were her, I would talk about this constantly. I’m not even her, and I still talk about this constantly!)
18. Their respective upbringings in the Bronx and Boston.
19. The best places to get bagels in the Bronx and Boston. (Spoiler: There are no good bagels in Boston, and the best ones in the Bronx are at Empire Bagels, but I’m sure they figured that out together.)
20. Each other’s hand softness (in a totally platonic way. Bro code!).
21. Taylor Swift, as a general concept, but also as a specific person who is currently in New York.
22. Ben Affleck’s current relationship status and mental state, in that order.
23. Lets be so for real: taxes. (Why do I feel like this is the main topic of conversation for all rich people?)