I get excited every time a new Weeknd song is released. Earlier this week the Toronto R&B singer posted “King of the Fall,” today’s 12 O’Clock Track, online as a promotion for his upcoming tour of the same name—as I anticipated, it’s really great. It’s a classic Weeknd jam: Abel Tesfaye sounds like a drugged-out, outer space version of Michael Jackson, his sweet croon going on about sex and substance abuse, creating a beautiful and uncomfortable juxtaposition between pretty and depraved....

Elizabeth Dunn We take our time reading the Sunday New York Times. Our reward is deeper thoughts when, inevitably, we start talking back to it. When Benjamin acted like a jerk to you and then utterly charmed the first stranger he ran into, did you think, “He can be so sweet! I must try harder!”? Or did you think, “What a phony asshole!”

Alison Green Yes, this is American Football. Less than two hours after OutKast wrapped up their headlining set at Lollapalooza on Saturday another beloved reunited band took the stage at Beat Kitchen—influential 90s-emo outfit American Football. Singer-guitarist Mike Kinsella said it was the band’s “first public practice” since the group reunited earlier this year behind a deluxe reissue of their 1999 self-titled debut. Their first official performance isn’t happening till next month, when they headline Pygmalion Festival in Champaign-Urbana, and their Beat Kitchen appearance was a secret; Mike Kinsella’s solo project, Owen, was originally billed as the headlining act, and in the middle of the set Kinsella asked if anyone was disappointed they weren’t performing any Owen songs....

Mother Falcon I’ve been looking forward to seeing Omar Souleyman at Millennium Park since the Downtown Sound lineup came out at the end of April. That concert isn’t until Monday, but thankfully there are plenty of other shows to go to in the interim. “A few years ago New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia began to find an audience far afield from her city’s club scene, and her booming popularity among hipsters raised some eyebrows,” writes Miles Raymer....

Chicago: City to See in ’63 In June I named the auditorium of the Museum of Contemporary Art the best underused screening room in Chicago. It seems I may have to revise that assessment—the museum recently screened a 35-millimeter print of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, and it will host three separate film programs in January. On Tuesday at 6 PM, Chicago Film Archives will present a program called City to See, a collection of 16-millimeter documentaries about our lovely metropolis....

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Fox Shoulder pads have never looked so good. A delayed season premiere isn’t always a bad thing: we’re relatively deep into the fall premiere season and, so far, the offerings are so average that it’s a huge relief to see Bob’s Burgers return. Sunday’s season five premiere was a wonderful “welcome back” for fans of the show, and a solid introduction for anyone who’s been dragging their feet. Other episode highlights:...

Courtesy of David Beltran/Starfoxxx Starfoxxx at the Empty Bottle Local-music stalwart David Beltran wears a lot of hats. He cofounded FeelTrip, a collective and record label that once operated out of a cavernous loft in the South Loop—Beltran and his cohorts threw DIY shows featuring the Orwells, Sepalcure, and Dirty Beaches, and the space also included a studio that Yawn and Twin Peaks used to record sessions. Beltran’s also a talented visual artist, and I’m a fan of his Chicago band calendar and his “Feeltrip Lovers” T-shirt, which I wrote about in the 2013 edition of the Reader‘s Best of Chicago....

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court debated the issue of racial discrimination in jury selection. The argument stemmed from a Georgia case in which an all-white jury convicted Timothy Foster, a black man, of murdering an elderly white woman and then sentenced him to death. The killing happened nearly three decades ago, but the defense lawyers didn’t obtain the prosecution’s notes until 2006 through an open-records request. Those notes showed what Foster’s lead attorney characterized as “an arsenal of smoking guns” with regards to evidence of racial discrimination....

One night in February 2016, a group of friends and roommates in Melbourne, Australia, decided to have some fun and play a little music. By the next day they’d recorded and released an EP, Giddy Up, under the name Amyl & the Sniffers—“Amyl” comes from the name of front woman Amy Louise Taylor, and from there the joke is pretty self-explanatory. This scuzzy four-piece is inspired by garage and early punk (specifically the gritty, explosive variety that bubbled up in Australia in the 70s and 80s), the rowdy, straightforward rock of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo, and outlaw country, among other things....

In her short career this 18-year-old vocalist, born in Calumet City as Trinity Home, has shown a considerable gift for blurring lines that other artists take for granted as fixed. Tink has sung R&B over a Chief Keef beat and rapped over Timbaland-style R&B; she’s appeared on the 2014 compilation Boss Shit Only with Atlanta mixtape superstars Migos and Young Thug; and she’s collaborated with avant-club artists such as Fatima Al Qadiri and Junglepussy....

The organizers behind Mamby on the Beach understand electronic music: its history, how it intersects with a panoply of other genres, and its future. The Sunday lineup for the dance-music tent at the annual festival this June included a headlining set by minimal techno titan Richie Hawtin and an opening set from veteran Chicago techno producer and DJ Hiroko Yamamura. She’s as embedded in the local dance scene as anyone can be—she routinely spins at hot spots such as Spybar, Sound Bar, and Smart Bar, and she’s also in with foundational house label Trax (which recently issued a digital compilation, That’s What I Call Trax!...

Chris Abani, Nigerian-born author, newly installed Chicagoan, and professor of English at Northwestern University, is on the same page with: Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole I really love this book, which is about the city of Lagos, but really it’s a book about home and homecoming. [The narrator] is born in Nigeria, in Lagos, and then immigrates to America when he’s a child and spends a lot of his adult life here....

Todd Diederich Chance the Rapper Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • Why to be skeptical about the latest front-page New York Times proclamation that true artificial intelligence is right around the corner? —Steve Bogira • About the woman who ate nothing but food from Starbucks in 2013? (For no apparent reason?) —Brianna Wellen

Atlanta rapper Tauheed Epps, better known as 2 Chainz, has built a career out of recording self-­aggrandizing verses even more outsize than his six-foot, five-inch frame. He litters June’s Pretty Girls Like Trap Music (Def Jam) with rich raps; on the lilting “Rolls Royce Bitch,” Epps explains that his life of luxury is at a different level than most of us can can grasp by telling us about his car’s unusual features (“My doors go that way”)....

Michael R. Schmidt/Sun-Times Media I just read Ben Joravsky’s Bleader post on the ISAT debate in Chicago’s public schools, and I want to add a point that is far from original but can’t be emphasized enough. Teachers didn’t like the ISATs even when they mattered. They interfered with education. Teaching to the test isn’t really teaching, and teachers were taught to teach to the ISATs as if nothing else in the whole school year was half as important....

So many big changes have taken place at the Reader in recent years, from minor masthead shifts to several handovers in ownership. We have new print facilities. (Do you like the new cover stock?) We made new T-shirts. Few changes are likely to be as impactful, however, as the one we’re about to make: the Reader is headed to the south side. Our new offices will allow for many splendiferous wonders, such as the entire workforce of the paper being under one roof and able to communicate without scheduling meetings days in advance, convenient parking facilities, and not having to walk through another newsroom to get to our newsroom, a path that always made me feel a bit like I was walking past the adults’ table at Thanksgiving to get to the kids’ table in the back....