Joe Warminsky

Thanks for being a member of City Paper! The first line on Halpine’s debut LP, “I’ve got to know if you’ll be around when the big bomb drops down,” doesn’t feel as much like foreboding as a comfortable inevitability. The mostly solo project of Joey Bentley is reminiscent of the type of bedroom recording that became de rigueur in the early Pitchfork era. The sound itself doesn’t suffer from any lo-fi trappings.

Thanks for being a member of City Paper! Though I haven’t had the pleasure of confirming this, I imagine HARDC0RE DR3AMZ is best listened to while wearing a bikini and drugged-up on a dance floor, preferably in a Berlin nightclub or, if possible, aboard a cruise ship. A cruise ship because that’s where the two artists behind this glitchy, hedonistic three-song EP—rapper Rico Nasty,a Prince George’s County native, and German Iraqi producer Boys Noize—met eight years ago.

U.S. and U.K. officials on Thursday announced sanctions against 11 alleged members of the notorious Trickbot cybercrime syndicate, saying that the people were key to the group’s management and procurement efforts. Thursday’s action marks the second time in seven months the two governments have sanctioned members of a cybercrime group that has “ties to Russian intelligence services and has targeted the U.S. Government and U.S. companies,” the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement.