Tabla de contenidos para May 2024 en Rolling Stone

COVER STORY It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Billie Eilish! Aidan Zamiri Photographer When Aidan Zamiri asked Billie Eilish if she’d be up for incorporating harness work into the photo shoot for this issue’s cover story (p. 42), he found that she was already trained in aerial dancing. “I had no idea,” says the Glasgow-born photographer, marveling at the coincidence. Zamiri has explored his interest in “[making] something impossible happen” with forward-thinking musicians like Caroline Polachek and FKA Twigs in the past — and this star turned out to be particularly down to experiment. “Billie was really interested in things that made us question the perspective,” he says. Spencer Singer Stylist For Spencer Singer, collaboration is the key to nailing a project. He worked closely with Zamiri to…

YOU WOULD BE FORGIVEN FOR mistaking Hannah Einbinder for Ava Daniels, the character she plays on HBO’s Hacks. The actor shares certain similarities with the comedy writer she’s portrayed for two seasons now, like their dry delivery, which leaves you less than 100 percent sure of whether they’re fucking with you until they crack a smirk and let you in on the joke. That’s not all, though. “We’re both the same age, and we have the same face and body, of course,” Einbinder shares. “She looks exactly like me. That’s some Inside the Actors Studio stuff, a look behind the curtain.” See also: Dry delivery. But really, Einbinder, 28, found widespread recognition (including twin Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy nominations) in her mid-twenties with Hacks, the same age that Ava…

THERE WAS NO HOTTER event at SXSW this year than Peso Pluma’s headlining set on the second night of ROLLING STONE’s Future of Music showcase. People lined up around multiple city blocks in Austin to see the música mexicana superstar — including one dedicated fan who was there at 4 a.m. the morning before the show and later got to meet his hero. Peso’s unforgettable performance was a highlight of our second annual showcase, which brought some of the coolest names in music to ACL Live at the Moody Theater over four nights in March. (Full disclosure: ROLLING STONE’s parent company, P-MRC, acquired a 50 percent stake in the SXSW festival in 2021.)…

AS ANTHONY D’AMATO PREPS backstage at Sony Hall in midtown Manhattan, it’s hard not to notice his six-foot height, horn-rimmed glasses — and the name “Amy” in large black letters on the side of his head. It’s not a tattoo, just black liquid eyeliner easy to wash off, but it suits the occasion. In a few minutes, the New Jerseyan and his 12-piece band will walk onstage, take their places beneath an LED sign lit up with Amy Winehouse’s first name and a simulation of her signature beehive, and play her Back to Black album start to finish — and hardly for the first time, either. “I really never imagined that it would become something that I would have done maybe 200 times at this point,” says D’Amato, who…

DRUGS NEVER SEEMED like a problem to Elvie Shane. Dabbling in cocaine, meth, and heroin were all part of the future country singer’s college days in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Even when he got hooked on speed, the dangers didn’t seem real. “We just thought we were having fun and catching a buzz,” says Shane. “It wasn’t until I started seeing my friends drop like flies that I realized we were playing with fire.” That was before the opioid crisis ravaged Shane’s home state of Kentucky and small towns across the U.S., like the one where he grew up: Caneyville, population just more than 500. “Hard drugs were a big-city problem,” Shane recalls. “The word ‘overdose’ was very, very rare.” Today, drug overdoses kill more than 100,000 people annually in…

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORtez was in a car talking with her staffers about legislation and casually scrolling through her X mentions when she saw the photo. It was the end of February, and after spending most of the week in D.C., she was looking forward to flying down to Orlando to see her mom after a work event. But everything left her mind once she saw the picture: a digitally altered image of someone forcing her to put her mouth on their genitals. Adrenaline coursed through her, and her first thought was “I need to get this off my screen.” She closed out of it, shaken. “There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” the congresswoman tells me. It’s a few days after she saw…

IN THE VIDEO for Dua Lipa’s Barbie hit, “Dance the Night,” an enormous disco ball crashes onto the floor, the bottom half of its mirrors shattering into a million pieces. In an interview, her collaborator Mark Ronson theorized that it signified the end of Lipa’s disco era, putting a bow on 2020’s now-classic Future Nostalgia. Released during the pandemic, that blockbuster LP turned Lipa into a household name and ushered a disco revival into the pop galaxy. The present was bleak, but Future Nostalgia promised one hell of a good time. Four years later, Lipa has finally released her highly-anticipated new album, Radical Optimism. The cover art features her out in the ocean, appearing calm despite a looming great white shark. She says the album title refers to “the…

When did you decideto write a memoir? I started five or six years ago. I was at this transitional point in my life — it was before Bikini Kill and Le Tigre started playing again — and I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do next. I felt like I had to just write everything down that had happened, for myself, so I could move on to the next step. I needed to leave the Nineties behind. You’re so vulnerable and open in the book, particularly about the times you were sexually assaulted. Are you nervous about all that being out there? Not really. It’s not my problem. The people who did those things to me, they can have it now. I’m not going to hold their…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS MARIE ULVEN is not a chill person. Over the course of lunch at a slick New York spot packed with women in expensive-looking black athleisure, she swings between aping Taylor Swift’s arm flex on “The Man” from the Eras Tour — a move that Ulven, who opened for a few of those dates last summer, knows all about — and clutching her chest, breathless. “I’m just trying to deal with my anxiety when it comes,” she says. “Right now, my heart really hurts.” Ulven’s not having a heart attack, thank God. Sometimes, the Norwegian artist known as Girl in Red can just get a little overwhelmed. And with good reason. Today, no one at this swish eatery recognizes the young woman in the…

THE FIRST THING you notice about Ncuti Gatwa is his smile. Whether as a young, anxious queer teen in Netflix’s Sex Education, one of the many Kens in Barbie, the latest actor to play the lead character in Doctor Who — or even on a slightly pixelated Zoom screen — when Gatwa flashes those pearly whites, it is impossible to look at anything else. His expression radiates joy so pure and uncut it’s as much a superpower as the Doctor’s ability to travel through time or regenerate into new forms. It’s also exactly what Doctor Who producer Russell T. Davies was looking for when he began creating this 15th Doctor, long before Gatwa came in to audition. In 2005, Davies revived the British sci-fi TV institution from an extended…

OMAR APOLLO IS looking at himself through Zoom as he tries on the beige Sherpa jacket he just bought. “You fuck with it?” he asks. It’s hard not to fuck with everything the Mexican American alt-R&B star does. Apollo dropped his debut album, Ivory, in April 2022, blew up with its ultra-sentimental song “Evergreen,” and followed that success by touring with SZA last year. Recently, he’s been dipping into fashion. (A massive billboard of him dripped in the luxury designer Loewe looms over Sunset Boulevard in L.A.) Apollo is back in L.A. these days, putting the finishing touches on his upcoming album, out in the summer. He’s experimenting with jazz, house, and other genres, and he tells me it’s the best music he’s ever made. And, nah, he’s not…

SCROLLING THROUGH FACEBOOK one day in October 2017, wildlife photographer Melissa Groo seethed when she saw Heather Keepers had posted another image to Instagram of herself kissing a cougar, with the hashtags #coolestjobintheworld, #luckiestgirlintheworld. Keepers, petite with long brown hair, blue-green eyes, and tattoos of constellations on her arms, was the face of an industry Groo despises: photography game farms, where captive exotic animals are kept to model for photo shoots. For nine years, Keepers was the head trainer at one of the nation’s top photography ranches, Triple D Wildlife in Kalispell, Montana. Triple D’s animals have starred in films produced by National Geographic, Disney, Nature, and the BBC, according to the company’s website. They’ve also posed for calendars and ads, and they appear in countless Instagram posts. In…