Relevant Magazine

Julien Baker has been writing about God in public since she was 19. Prayer, doubt, addiction, grace and self-loathing — usually inside the same verse — and never once packaged as inspirational. She also hasn’t made a record on her own in five years. That looks like it’s about to change. This week Baker started leaving clues where people would find them. She made a brand-new Instagram account, separate from the one she already has. It follows exactly three people. One is her.

Nobody buys a ticket to a 2000s rock festival expecting a worship service. They went for “Higher” — and then Scott Stapp started talking. Creed closed out the three-day Velocity Festival on Sunday night at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa (the actual movie site, cornfield and all). About 50 minutes into the set, before the band played “What’s This Life For,” Stapp stopped and told the crowd what he’d decided this life was for.

This week Cory Asbury joins us. He walked away from worship music five years ago—we talk about what pulled him back and why it's different this time. His new worship record, Outsing the Angels, is out September 18. In Slices, Jesse brings up the Tesla Cyber Cab, which is now driving around Austin with no steering wheel, no rearview mirror and no brake pedal, and the federal government has questions.

Jury duty is where you find out the legal system is run by regular people. People with jobs, opinions and, occasionally, a hazy memory of a movie they saw once. Which is roughly how Reese Witherspoon ended up running a jury room in Beverly Hills. Not because she volunteered. Because the other jurors were fairly confident she’d been to law school. She has not been to law school. “I did not want to do jury duty,” she told Graham Norton in January of last year.

Chelsea Plank did not want “The Cost Is a Joy” on this album. The song came out of a writing session with Cam Giddens and Austin Shuffit, who produces for the group, and when the session ended, what Plank had was an acoustic demo. For her, that’s close to useless. “I need a fully produced-out track at the end of a writing session,” she said.

M83 built one of the most maximalist sounds in modern indie. The widescreen synths of Midnight City still turn up in trailers, despite being 15 years old. The tenth M83 record, announced today, is aiming somewhere else entirely. I Wrote You a Letter is out September 25, and Anthony Gonzalez has been unusually direct about why he made it the way he made it. “This record reflects my state of mind over the past few years,” he said. “I’m deeply disillusioned by the world we’re living in.

A Christian missionary camp was evicted from Burning Man on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday the story going around online was that Black Rock City had thrown out a group of believers for preaching about Jesus. That isn’t what happened. The camp, Shift the Atmosphere, was escorted off the playa by law enforcement around 10 p.m. on Sept. 1. Camp member John Hinerman posted videos to Instagram alleging the group was discriminated against for its religion and given three hours to pack up.

Ask Gable Price if his band is a Christian band, and for a long time, the answer was a shrug. “In Q&As on tour — are you guys a Christian band? I don’t know,” he told RELEVANT. “Just really beating around the bush, because we didn’t want to be pigeonholed.” Not anymore. “I’m ready to stop beating around the bush,” he said. “I write about Jesus so often in my music. I write about God. I write about heaven in songs.” It wasn’t always this complicated.

The American church has always had a thing for celebrity — but something shifted over the past five years. We used to point to cool megachurch pastors befriending high-profile believers as proof that Christianity still had cultural pull. Then came a stretch of very public pastoral scandals — resignations, affairs, whole ministries unraveling in real time — and the shine wore off fast. The allure of charismatic pastors in designer clothes started to feel less like access and more like a mirage.

For years, Zelda fans have passed around a very strange piece of Nintendo history: Link, kneeling in a cathedral, head bowed in front of a crucifix. It looks like the kind of image someone would make as a joke and post to Reddit. Except it’s real. The image comes from Kamigami no Triforce, Nintendo’s official Japanese guidebook for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which was published alongside the game in 1991.