Monday Roundup Mix

featuring Dua Lipa, Charly Bliss, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, and more!

Hi, happy Monday! Pop Girl Spring rolls on with Dua Lipa’s new album, Radical Optimism, out this past Friday. I like it! Nothing may ever top Future Nostalgia, but I think there are some really fun things here (and also her voice has never sounded better).

More than anything else, I have been listening to the score from Challengers a lot over the past few weeks. To borrow a phrase from friend of the newsletter, Julia, Challengers is “very sexy, very cool!” The best movie going experience I’ve had in years! Zendaya is A Star as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy whose career is cut short by an injury, and Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are perfect as the two professional tennis players battling each other for a championship as well as for Tashi’s (and each other’s) affections. I was not entirely sure what I was getting into here since the last Luca Guadagnino movie I saw was Call Me By Your Name, but this was the opposite of that. Instead of weeping at a final scene set to a Sufjan Stevens song, I was gasping at a final scene set to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score.

The score of Challengers is loud, energetic, and at certain points completely frantic, adding to the high-stakes nature of the tennis match that frames the movie’s narrative. The dissonance between the score - big, booming, fast-paced techno - and the sounds of an actual tennis match - silence minus the thwack of a ball and the occasional yell of a player - is very compelling. The music does a great job of capturing the intensity of a sport which from the outside can read as very polite and composed.

The reality is that tennis is a selfish sport - there’s not much opportunity for camaraderie or team spirit - and is as much a mental game as a physical one. It doesn’t matter how much natural talent you have, if you cannot bounce back after a mistake, if you cannot believe you are going to win, then you will not win. This mentality creates and encourages really intense, often times mean, players. In my tennis playing years, I witnessed many boys scream and throw racquets and storm off courts during PRACTICE at our afterschool tennis clinic. I played many girls who blatantly cheated and fought over points during tournament and high school matches. Any of these moments could have been set to the Challengers score and been believable. I do not miss living it, but the world of competitive tennis sure makes for a good story!

Challengers is an Amazon production, so it will eventually be streaming on Prime, but do yourself a favor and go see this in a theater!!!

I’ve included “Yeah x10” from Challengers on today’s mix plus an early favorite from Dua Lipa and new music from Charly Bliss, Caroline Polachek, WILLOW, and more! And even though it was on a mix a few weeks ago, I also threw “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter on here as it is the leading contender for Song of the Summer. Everyone needs to be off-book ASAP, so study up!

Thanks for being here, for reading, and for listening! If you enjoy Made You a Mix, please share with a friend!