“All strip clubs, for me, have been empty shells. Without the girls, it’s mayhem. With them, it’s Narnia”

Vienna-born, New York-based photographer Eva Zar likes to get amongst it. She’s slept with wolves, photographed trans women on horseback in the California desert, and documented 72-hour raves. In her ongoing series God Is a Stripper, she follows the next generation of strippers in NYC. Capturing them not just onstage and in their dressing room, but also in their bedrooms and doing laundry, Zar says the project is about the girls, not just the clubs they dance in. “I was interested in her world outside of the club. Her home, her commute, her life.”

With daydream-like intimacy and a soft focus—sort of like ‘What if Sofia Coppola was interested in baddies?’—Zar renders her subjects as deities, showing stripping’s sacred side.

VICE: Where did your love affair with strip clubs begin?
Eva Zar: I first became interested in strippers when I was doom scrolling TikTok. On my For You Page, a stripper was rating strip clubs in New York City. I immediately fell in love with her. I messaged asking, “Can I photograph you one day?” She responded, “Can you come by the club tonight?”

Tell me about the first club you went to. How did expectations stack up against reality? 
The first was in Queens. While waiting for one of the girls, the bouncer complained about his ex wife. I guess she walked away with the good couch in their divorce. He made me walk through a metal detector and sent me on my way.

All strip clubs, for me, have been empty shells. Without the girls, it’s mayhem. With them, it’s Narnia. They’re able to transform hollow stages into a hidden world that exists parallel to the one outside. I remember one of my girls, Laia, said, “This is a place where you learn to reclaim your sensuality and turn it into power. You learn to speak your truth without shame, transcending fears and transforming them into currency.”

One of the girls remarked that the way you capture them is very “romantic,” and it’s true. Some of the shots make them look like religious icons, almost. What approach did you want to take with the project?
I like that you view my photographs of the girls as iconic, that’s the goal. Strippers are often viewed as objects you can use at your disposal, they’ve certainly been captured that way many times. My goal with God Is a Stripper is to achieve the exact opposite. I’m interested in beauty, glam, magic. I love putting my subjects on a pedestal, making them look and feel like goddesses. In David LaChapelle’s words, “When you take a picture of something, you change the way it’s seen.” I think about that sentiment a lot. 

Tell me more about your thinking behind the title.
The word “God” is so loaded, often tied to organized religion. I think of it more as spirituality, connection, faith. In the strip club, I notice spiritual reminders everywhere. It’s a sticker on a locker that says “the universe is on my side,” a tattoo, a piece of jewelry. I want both the title to reflect and the photographs to visualize that. Many of the girls, myself included, believe in a bigger dream for all of us. We behave like it’s already true, no proof needed. 

“God” is also someone that’s an inspiration, something sacred. It’s important for me to define strippers just as that: icons who inspire through their persistence, strength, intelligence, beauty, and grace.

“I notice spiritual reminders everywhere. It’s a sticker on a locker that says ‘the universe is on my side,’ a tattoo, a piece of jewelry”

The project doesn’t just focus on what’s going on in the club, the camera lingers on the girls afterwards—capturing their commute, their homes, their trips to the laundrette. Why did you want to make that such a big aspect of it?
Totally. It’s always been about the girls first, the strip club becomes one of the backdrops we can play with. It’s like our own little movie set, except it’s real. My first question when thinking about strippers is always, “Girl, what does your life look like outside of these four walls?” I find that so fascinating—these girls live in two worlds. I want to photograph both.

Interestingly, there isn’t a strong aesthetic distinction between the photographs taken inside the club and outside of the club; the vibe is the same because the girls’ energy is what comes across the most.
Exactly, both worlds are part of her. What keeps surprising me is how quickly the girls can turn it on and off, like actresses. And honestly, some of my photographs are staged to some degree. There’s this tradition in documentary photography that you have to capture someone off guard, a candid moment, as an “attempt” to uncover reality. But think about it, we’re a social media-first society. This is reality. Her performance, her pose, the way she does her hair, make-up, nails for my camera… It tells us so much about who she’s trying to be and how she wants to be seen. Sometimes that’s even more honest.

Strip clubs in America often have a geographical reputation—Atlanta, Miami, etc. How would you describe the ‘character’ of strip clubs in New York City, if there is one?
I think what characterizes New York City also defines its strip clubs. It can be gritty and dark, but also very powerful and full of dreams. New Yorkers are true hustlers and we’ll do whatever it takes, no compromise. New York City can be the best and worst place to live in. If you don’t know what you want, it’ll eat you alive. Quickly, and without mercy. But if you know what you’re after, the impossible becomes possible here, those who create on their own terms are my biggest inspiration. Renèe said something that stuck with me: “It’s crazy how New York always puts the perfect people into your path at the right time… us meeting is New York unfolding in the way it always does.”

“What characterizes New York City also defines its strip clubs. It can be gritty and dark, but also very powerful and full of dreams”

Do you have a favorite shot in the project so far? Or a favorite moment?
Each photograph is very special to me, however there’s a moment: Renèe and I were driving up to Harlem. The sun was just setting, we’re on West Side Highway. It felt like one of those movie moments. You’re alive but somehow you’re living out a scene. We’re talking about life, drugs, dreams, clients, sobriety, love—everything and anything, like we’ve known each other forever. Anora by Sean Baker had just come out. I said, you know, I think Sean Baker would like our photographs, for him to see my work would be a dream. Sean is an artist I genuinely look up to, from Tangerine to Florida Project and now Anora. A couple weeks ago, Sean Baker followed my work on Instagram—talk about manifestation. 

Where do you think the project will go next?
I’d love for God Is a Stripper to become a book and an exhibition. It feels like the beginning of something special. It’s the largest body of personal work I’ve created so far and there’s still so much to photograph. In my dream, I’d like the work to live in print, on walls, in spaces where you can sit with it. A little universe we created together. As an artist, you have a longing to transcend and hopefully, my photographs can be that portal into an unseen world.

Follow Eva on Instagram: @evazar

The post The Strippers of New York City, 2025 appeared first on VICE.

Rock bottom is when you stop digging—that’s something you hear in rehabs and 12-step meetings, some real talk demystifying the process of recovery.

The old timers will tell you that long-term sobriety doesn’t necessarily follow the DUI or the divorce, the most catastrophic hangover or humiliating public failure. It often starts on an average day, prompted by nothing other than the thought, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

That day never comes in the Deftones sonic universe. The most important piece of Deftones media, both sonically and visually, is the video for “Change (In the House of Flies),” the lead single from their monumental 2000 album White Pony. There are elements of Eyes Wide Shut, the Boogie Nights pool party, that one time in college everyone drank in the kitchen until 5AM, and a Deftones band practice. The drinking and drugging all happen off screen; there’s a brief bit of dancing and everyone just looks extremely hungover if they’re not asleep. Even as we watch ants crawling around people passed out in the most uncomfortable position possible, it’s one of the most effective ad campaigns for cocaine to ever get played on MTV. 

Most assessments of their rise from rap-metal upstarts to the single most influential contemporary rock band focus on their sonic evolution—how they were able to integrate shoegaze, trip-hop, and quiet storm R&B into metal years ahead of the curve. But these genres are all unified by their sensuality, something glaringly absent from the post-grunge doldrums of the early 2000s, the arch and earnest Obama era, and the alternately circumspect and exploitative current day. The drugs and the sex are illicit and accessible and often impossible to separate from each other. Whether it’s the delirious high or the debilitating comedown, the message remains the same: “I could float here forever.” 

Chino Moreno finally crashed three years ago.

It was a day like any other in 2022, far enough from peak COVID for people to say “back to normal” unironically, even knowing that we’d have to mask up and lock down all over again at a moment’s notice. Deftones knew that dynamic well, having released their ninth album Ohms into a bleak September 2020, and only touring in fits and starts since venues began to open back up a year later.

And for the most part, things then were good for Moreno. Better yet, maybe even serene. In the 25 years since their debut Adrenaline, no Deftones album had been met with a more rapturous reception than Ohms. It wasn’t just from the diehards, either. For most of the previous decade, tastemakers might begrudgingly allow that Deftones were the “nu-metal band it’s OK to like.” They liked Sade and covered Japan. They learned their lesson from “Back to School” and stopped rapping entirely after 2000. Crucially, they did not become born-again Christians. Their side projects dabbled in witch house and lap-pop, not “active rock” power ballads. 

By 2020, a new generation of critics raised on Around the Fur and White Pony lifted Deftones to the rarefied status of The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins, a primary color in alternative rock. An even younger generation turned the insular quintet into something more unexpected: a “big on TikTok” band. After finally escaping the nu-metal tag, Moreno was now subject to inane questions about his thoughts on “baddiecore.” This didn’t happen because of “Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)” or “Change (In the House of Flies),” but deep cuts from their troubled era of Deftones and Saturday Night Wrist, once defined by rampant drug use, divorce, and flagging sales. Moreno had even opened up in interviews about going into therapy. 

While forced into quarantine, Moreno held the common belief that their creativity would blossom, that perhaps Deftones wouldn’t be locked into the Olympian cycle of releasing albums every four years. Instead, he’d head down to his studio, dick around for a little bit, get restless and start drinking before noon. Innumerable hard drives were filled with hours and hours of useless music. “There was probably a lot of depression and alcoholism that was created,” Moreno shares from his home in Portland (in the time since Ohms, he relocated from Bend, the artsy Oregon enclave which proved to be too small and understimulating for his racing mind). “Coming out of the pandemic, I still felt isolated and depressed, you know?”

For nearly 35 years, Chino Moreno always felt like more. And then he decided he’d had enough.

Even if sobriety is the most important thing to happen to Moreno and, consequently, Deftones since Ohms, I don’t want to risk saddling private music with the “sobriety album” label. Similar to the origin story of “Back to School,” Moreno admits that he was inspired to get clean out of spite, just to get people off his back. “I initially started [sobriety] because I wanted to show others that I could not drink, [that] alcohol doesn’t affect me any differently, it’s just part of who I am,” he recalls. “Look at all the success we have, you know what I mean?”

private music is not about bottoming out and hanging onto hard-won wisdom, amends and amnesty, or whatever else we’ve come to expect when an artist returns from the brink. Deftones songs are rarely about anything specific. In 35 years, Moreno has never hunched over an acoustic guitar, having a preconceived notion for a song’s subject matter. As drummer Abe Cunningham puts it, “all our songs are feel songs,” ones that need to have a swing and swagger as pure instrumentals before Moreno records his vocals. The other members of Deftones probably won’t know where the music took Moreno until they hear the final mix. They probably won’t even know the song titles, let alone what they mean—“ecdysis,” “cXz,” and “~metal dream” enter the pantheon of Most Deftones-y Deftones Song Titles, alongside recent inductees “Urantia,” “Geometric Headdress,” and “Goon Squad.”

The name “private music” itself started as a placeholder for a filesharing folder, and in true Moreno fashion, a nod to his more esoteric tastes; he had stumbled across The Private Music of Tangerine Dream and wondered whether something similar could work for Deftones, ultimately realizing it was just a little too pretentious to fully replicate the title. But the phrase “private music” stuck, to reflect their status as one of the world’s biggest cult bands. Witness the chorus of “Locked Club”—“Join the parade or be left out.” As an added bonus, Cunningham appreciates how, “it does sound a tiny bit seedy” (again, there’s a snake on the cover). 

At times, Deftones have regretted the way their album art reflects the music. See: the half-naked women gracing Around the Fur and Saturday Night Wrist, heavy-handed voyeurism that felt more exploitative than erotic. But there’s really something about white animals and this band, right? Consider the horse, owl, and snake on, respectively, White Pony, Diamond Eyes, and private music. All of which are works of clean lines, polish, and accessible hooks, and all of which follow predecessors with more turbulent sonics, born of stormy intraband dynamics. Nearly all Deftones albums react to the one that came before and after the monolithic Ohms, here are the most immediate descriptors of private music: aerodynamic, sleek, virile, whatever comes to mind when you see someone for the first time in five years and they’ve got their shit together. Some of the rave reviews have made the subtext the actual text—critics earnestly describing them as “downtuned daddies of sonic sexiness,” things of that nature. 

This follows naturally from the way Moreno is described by his bandmates: “laser-focused,” “locked in.” There’s a bit in a typically obsequious Zane Lowe interview where Stephen Carpenter praises Moreno’s guitar playing on private music and you can’t see the latter’s reaction; Moreno admits he was beaming, it was the first time he’d ever heard such a compliment. Fittingly, private music is the first Deftones record in over a decade where fans aren’t dissecting Carpenter and Moreno’s relationship from out-of-context interview quotes.

The difference this time around is that when the two are at odds—and that’s inevitable with someone you’ve been friends with since you were 10—they’ve learned to deal with it directly and immediately. Moreno thinks back to a recent rehearsal where he called an audible to run through “Sextape,” one of their most enduring contributions to modern, heavy shoegaze. But when you have a guitar rig as complicated as Carpenter’s, you can’t just call an audible. The tone was off, Moreno gave Carpenter a bemused look, Carpenter scowled back and aired out his frustrations once they were done—“every fucking time we start playing and then you throw a song at me, I’m not ready, don’t have the tone for it,” as Moreno recalls. But it didn’t take long for them to remember the sage words of Allen Iverson: We talkin’ about practice. “It was like something that in the past probably would have blown up,” says Moreno, “or no one would have said nothing and then for the next couple hours, everybody would have been pouting—and we were just laughing about two minutes later.” 

Both have undergone significant life changes since Ohms; Carpenter revealed he’d been diagnosed with Type II diabetes after nearly crashing out on stage at Coachella in 2024 and has since dedicated himself to a healthier, more sustainable diet and exercise regimen befitting someone who plays a nine-string guitar for hours at a time. With the departure of bassist Sergio Vega, Deftones welcomed Fred Sablan into the fold, a San Jose native who followed the band from their earliest days knocking around the Bay Area to the 2019 Dia de Los Deftones festival in San Diego where he first thought, ‘I wish I was in this band.’

Deftones could barely make it through Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster when it was released in 2004, as they went through their most vicious conflicts without a label-funded therapist. Their self-titled album, appearing a year earlier, remains notorious for being their actual cocaine album, as opposed to its predecessor, which merely used a barely veiled euphemism for its title. Though it produced some truly remarkable songs, Deftones is most frequently remembered as the record that cost the band a $1 million penalty for missing label deadlines for deliverables. 

But they did learn lessons about how to properly welcome the replacement for a dearly departed bassist who became an avatar for the early, “good ol’ days.” Rather than hazing Sablan for the crime of not being Chi Cheng, “we were all collectively really happy,” Sablan recalls.  

Deftones would typically describe themselves as “proud” or, more often, some variation of “relieved” when their previous albums were finished. Moreno struggled with the dissonance he felt as Koi No Yokan, Ohms, and even the supposedly “much maligned” Gore were met with rave reviews that didn’t feel commensurate with his experience making them. “There were some times where I felt guilty knowing I could be better… if I focused more and, honestly, cared more about what I was doing, instead of that mentality of just wanting to finish a record for the sake of finishing a record,” he admits. They might be happy to be done with the process, but not happy happy, as they are now: “I haven’t felt that way in a while.”

Some people experience happiness in early sobriety as a “pink cloud,” a euphoric and overly optimistic period that leads to an inevitable crash.

For others like Moreno, any emotion can be disorienting when you have to sit with it, unanesthetized. This is the lesson of the new album’s skyscraping opener “my mind is a mountain,” which Moreno says was inspired by a mindfulness manual for children and its message that emotions are real and we have to deal with them. It’s a tough thing to grasp in private, even more so when “we no longer regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” plays out in an arena rock show spanning 30 years of music.

The first private music gigs have adhered to the same 20-song setlist, all hits, semi-hits, and a sprinkling of new singles, notably excluding Deftones and Gore, the two albums most associated with Deftones carping at each other in the press. But while Saturday Night Wrist was made under even more fraught circumstances, the Gen-Z embrace of “Cherry Waves” has it forever locked in to the same degree as “My Own Summer (Shove It).” The members of Deftones, all now in their fifties, aren’t dismissive of Spotify and TikTok so much as bemused by them. Yet, for all of the ways algorithms try to strip music discovery of its magic, the randomness by which forgotten tracks become late-breaking hits validates Deftones’ past disdain for protracted album rollouts and A&R meetings about “hearing a single.” After the literal millions spent on marketing campaigns and videos that barely dented MTV, it’s funny that a deep cut like “Cherry Waves” is the reason keyboardist and turntablist Frank Delgado’s children are into his music; he admits that his 15-year-old daughter didn’t get into Deftones until her friends did first. 

This is a common thing now at Deftones meet and greets, figuring out which part of the family unit introduced the band to whom. And, in the near future, maybe it’ll be grandparents. “I do remember a pregnant woman carrying a picture of her mom and dad at a meet and greet years ago,” Cunningham recalls. “Her mom was pregnant and it was all of us holding her mom’s stomach. And now it’s her.”

He takes a beat and smiles. “So, Deftones—a family band.”

Follow Ian Cohen on X @en_cohen

Follow Brandon Bowen on Instagram @brandon.bowen

This is the cover story of the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.

The post Precious Metal: An Interview With Deftones appeared first on VICE.

The Strangest Person I Know is a new VICE column, in which we interview strange people and then ask them who the strangest person they know is so we can interview them too, creating a never-ending daisy chain of spiraling human strangeness in an increasingly square world. You can read the previous edition, about Russia’s foremost enema artist in exile, here.

Next up is Sol, a 26-year-old costume designer, scriptwriter, and performer recommended by last issue’s candidate. Named after an English soccer player who is synonymous with treachery in certain corners of North London, Sol escaped an exurb upbringing and spent their college years dallying with Viennese Actionism before exploding into the capital’s queer underground, gracing raves, club nights, and theaters with performative attempts to grapple with their past through the mediums of horror and pain.

VICE phoned them for a chat.

VICE: Have you always performed solo?
Sol: Pretty much. I respond to things I’m going through, or past trauma that’s lived in me the whole time. That’s what makes it quite dark and uncomfortable for me and whoever’s watching.

What have some of the wilder performances involved?
Body horror, blood, physical endurance… My solo shows have all been about how much the body can take, physically. Now, it’s more about the effect that endurance has on me emotionally and containing that to the point where it then affects the body. Rather than, like, shoving a metal rod up my ass (below, right) or hitting myself with a hammer. 

“In day-to-day life, I’m very reserved.”

I think I saw the metal rod on Instagram. How does the crowd respond to your shows?
I started out performing at club nights and raves, where people are just there to have a good time. I moved away from those spaces: it didn’t feel true to where I was coming from. In more formal theater spaces, people’s reactions are very different. They seem to be uncomfortable and shocked by what’s happening. Performing is the only way I can make sense of my mind, which I think is quite confusing to some people.

That said, you seem different in real life to how you present online.
Yeah, I get this a lot. In my day-to-day life, I’m very different, I’m very reserved.

What’s London like compared to where you grew up?
Where I’m from, people like me just don’t exist. Everyone around me was very traditional—you finished school, you got a job, got a house, had a baby, and that was your life. Even my family, they’re all like that. Since coming to London, my whole life has changed. I’m a completely different person from who I was before.

This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.

The post The Strangest Person I Know: Sol appeared first on VICE.

In his debut feature-length film, Cohen looks at the impact of the decision 30 years on. His 400-pound father Roger is preparing for stomach-reduction surgery, his 85-pound mother Brenda is struggling with anorexia, and his brother Sammy is preparing to follow in his dad’s footsteps after beginning work at The Manor in his teens. Meanwhile, Shawny attempts to sort through the pieces the only way he knows how. While most documentaries set around strip clubs, understandably, tend to focus on the club, The Manor relegates it to scenery, bringing into focus a tragi-comic portrait of the unlikely family behind the scenes.

Originally released in 2013, The Manor opened Hot Docs, won the Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund, and was nominated at the Zurich Film Festival. Here, VICE is running an exclusive uncut version for members only.

Watch it and read our interview with Shawney below.

VICE: Was there a point growing up where you became aware that your life was maybe a bit unorthodox? 
Shawney Cohen: Probably when I was in grade eight and told the other kids about my bar mitzvah present—it was a lap dance. I said it like it was no big deal, but that was me trying to play it cool. Her name was Sparkle, and halfway through I asked her to be my girlfriend. She just giggled. I guess she wasn’t looking for anything serious.

The documentary feels very fly on the wall. Your family seems to be aware of the camera, but not especially conscious of it. Did they know you were making a documentary about them?
At first, I wasn’t sure what my intentions were. I was still figuring out how to be a filmmaker, but knew enough not to force it. Initially, I’d film little tests, and one of them was of my father on the phone. He wasn’t speaking English and it sounded like he was explaining how to bribe cops in the Middle East. He just drifted into the lens, completely unaware of the camera. I’m sure he thought, ‘No one will ever see whatever this idiot son of mine is doing.’ That’s when I realized the best approach was to make a fly-on-the-wall vérité film. 

Films about strip clubs tend to zero in on the dancers and their experiences, whereas in your film, The Manor is simply a backdrop for the family drama. Was there a reason you chose that focus? I wonder if that’s just what it felt like to you? 
It was never a film about a strip club. It was a film about my family, just set in a strip club. When my co-director, Mike Gallay, and the producers decided to really commit to it, it became obvious this could only be a film about my family. I remember telling our executive producer, Laurie Shapiro, that my mom was anorexic, my dad was a couple hundred pounds overweight, and oh, our family also owns a strip club. Laurie just looked at me and said, “How can you not tell that story?” 

Most people probably have an idea of what kind of constitution it takes to work in a strip club, but what kind of constitution does it take to run one? 
A high tolerance for chaos and the ability to see 3.30AM as a reasonable time to discuss inventory. 

What did the dancers typically think of your dad? 
Most of the dancers might not have even known who my dad was. Strip clubs are like train stations, people come and go, sometimes mid-shift. Most dancers were freelancers, working a few nights in our club before moving on to the next place. The club had a handful of regular dancers, but it wasn’t unusual for other dancers to hit five or six clubs in a few weeks. So a lot of the dancers probably just saw my dad as just another figure in the background, watching the hockey game at the end of the bar. 

How do you think growing up in and around a strip club affected your outlook on sex and relationships? 
The answer most people expect is that it completely warped me, that I thought connection came with a cover charge and a two-drink minimum. But honestly, not as much as you might think and not as much as PornHub affects viewers today. It certainly informed my creative aesthetic in film and writing; seeing at close quarters the Bukowski-esque cast of characters that eddied around the strip joint left me with a very gritty sensibility. 

“I was in grade eight and told the other kids about my bar mitzvah present—it was a lap dance. I said it like it was no big deal, but that was me trying to play it cool. Her name was Sparkle, and halfway through I asked her to be my girlfriend. She just giggled. I guess she wasn’t looking for anything serious.”

There’s a scene I love towards the end where you’ve got all this stuff going on with your family and you’re sitting in a chair opposite two strippers who are waiting for the club to get going, probably thinking about their own issues. Everyone is silent. What was your own relationship like to the dancers?
People seem fascinated by the idea of working in a strip club, but really, it’s a job like any other, and a bar job at that, just with cheaper lighting and more body glitter. The same drama, the same gossip. People complained about not making enough money, someone stealing their customer, and why Sheila gets to bring her teacup chihuahua to work like it’s an emotional support handbag. But really, everyone’s just trying to pay rent and convince themselves tomorrow will be different. 

There’s a certain sadness to strip clubs in that respect. What do you think you’ve learned from spending so much time working in one? What role do you think they play in society—in small towns in particular? 
One slow night, I ended up talking to a divorce attorney over martinis. I’d never met him before, but he had that calm, seen-it-all look people get when they’ve spent their lives untangling other people’s disasters. He told me cheating accounts for 59.6 percent of divorces. Then he said something that stuck: Would you rather your partner get a few lap dances from someone they’ll never see again, or fall in love with their co-worker? Hard to argue with that logic. And it goes both ways, on male stripper nights the champagne room is a madhouse. So yes, there’s sadness in strip clubs. But there’s also honesty. People go there chasing connection, even when they know it’s temporary.

Early in the film you mention you weren’t comfortable working at The Manor, but you’d been there a while. There’s a sense throughout the film of people being sort of resigned to their roles, or their flaws, and trying to make the best of things. Do you think that’s a small-town mentality thing, something specific to your family, or maybe a mix of both?
My unease with working at the strip club was due to the fact that it was weirdly comfortable, and that can be a trap. Do you stay where life feels familiar, or risk leaving to chase something uncertain? In a family business, everyone has their place, and mine just didn’t fit anymore. I wanted to make films, but it took me a long time to admit that meant walking away. 

Your parents have a tense but close relationship. How did they feel watching it?
Before the film was released, I rented a fancy theater in Toronto I couldn’t really afford so my parents could watch it all alone. Just the two of them, sitting in the middle row of an empty room. I had no idea what to expect. When the credits rolled, my mother turned to my father and said, “Roger, that’s exactly you.” Mission accomplished. 

It’s tricky work, narrativizing your own family. Were there any particular concerns you had while putting the film together? 
My biggest concern was how much truth my family could actually handle. Turning them into characters sometimes felt like this weird kind of cinéma vérité betrayal, even if it came from love. In the end, I figured honesty was the only fair move; to show everyone, myself included, as we really were. Flawed, funny, and just trying to hold it together. 

“There’s sadness in strip clubs. But there’s also honesty. People go there chasing connection, even when they know it’s temporary.”

The documentary was made 12 years ago. Where is everyone? What, if anything, has changed since you made it? 
My father and brother are still running The Manor. My dad never did sell it. I moved on and kept making films. In 2021, my mother relapsed and passed away. The pandemic was hard on her. I miss her every day, especially the small things I used to take for granted.

How do you feel about the film, looking back?
So many emotions, looking back. The feature version played all over the world and I’ll always remember being on stage for the Q&As with my mother at the Zurich film festival or Hot Docs in Toronto. Incredible memories. In many ways the production taught me how to be a filmmaker—some of the vérité experiments I tried during production I still use in my work today. But I’m also glad I didn’t take my father’s advice and make a sequel. 

The end scene of you all having dinner together is great. Could you tell me a bit about the day that was shot? 
We shot so many dinners over the course of months, so I’m not even sure when that scene was shot. By then everyone was so used to the camera it just felt like another family dinner. It wasn’t until the edit that I saw how much quiet, accidental beauty was in that moment. The whole experience made me fall in love with vérité filmmaking, with the way real life sneaks up on you when you stop trying to stage it. Maybe that’s why the film still connects with people.

Follow Emma on X: @emmaggarland

Shawney Cohen is part of Toronto’s “video store generation” of filmmakers, raised on VHS rentals and late fees. He studied visual effects and digital media in college and got his start on Zack Snyder’s first film in 2004. For much of his career, he produced content for Vice Media, helping make VICE.com a household name. His feature directing debut, The Manor, opened Hot Docs, won the Tribeca Film Institute Documentary Fund, and was nominated at the Zurich Film Festival. He went on to direct Dopesick and Rat Park and has written, produced, and directed for Hulu, Discovery, CBC, Paramount, FOX, and Amazon.

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Remote viewing is the act of perceiving things that are happening elsewhere, both in space and in time, entirely via the power of the mind. These events could be unfolding in near-futures or ancient pasts. At the shop down the road or maybe on the outskirts of Vladivostok. During the Cold War, the Pentagon spent millions on remote viewing, funding a program eventually known as Stargate to test psychics’ abilities in the area; researchers on the project like Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ controversially claimed success rates exceeding 65 percent. On the other hand, you can also watch a six-minute YouTube clip of British mesmerist Derren Brown seemingly debunking the practice as little more than cold reading and educated guesswork.

So is this really quantum tunneling, or a trick of the mind?

Recently, I’ve been served up a glut of remote-viewing content via predatory social media algorithms identifying me as a likely audience, almost certainly caused by my depressingly insatiable consumption of UFOlogy truthseekers ‘n’ grifters videos. Now that Jacques Vallee’s musings on the para-psychological component of UFO encounters is back in vogue and we have organizations like Skywatcher out in the desert using “psionics” to call down UAPs, psychic phenomena is firmly back on the paranormal content-creator menu. 

Riding this digital swell is an organization called the Future Forecasting Group, which bills itself as “the best non-military remote-viewing team in the world.” Among FFG’s ranks is one Dick Allgire, who’s revered as a pioneer within the remote-viewing community. Dick was a TV news anchor when he first heard about remote viewing in 1996, on Art Bell’s legendary late-night radio phone-in show Coast to Coast AM. At that point, he began to lead a “double life,” working as a reporter by day and honing his remote-viewing skills by night. 

I called Dick to see if his remote-viewing abilities give him any optimism for the future of humanity.

VICE: How did you get started with the Future Forecasting Group?
Dick Allgire: I was a mainstream TV news anchor for 34 years. A very ‘buttoned-down’ guy in a suit and tie, working in Salt Lake City and Honolulu. Then, I met a retired Green Beret named Glenn Wheaton, who’d worked as a remote viewer for U.S. Army Special Forces Intelligence. He trained me, at no cost, for many years. Remote viewing is a skill that can be developed. We all have a subconscious awareness that is immersed in a soup of a greater field of consciousness.

After that, I worked for a time with a group called Farsight Institute, on projects looking at things like Area 51, the JFK assassination, 9/11, what really happened to Hitler, Atlantis, and other weird mysteries. Some of my work caught the attention of some rather influential people, who I won’t identify, who recruited me to form the Future Forecasting Group. 

What’s the purpose of the FFG?
To create a place for talented remote viewers to work safely, with protocols that ensure the validity of that work and staff that can analyze it well. As well as exploring ancient mysteries, we’re striving to predict future changes to our civilization.

Dick, I’m gonna lay it on the line: It’s pretty grim out there. In your work, do you foresee any reasons for humanity to be cheerful?
Things are going to get crazy over the next two years. We’re at the end of the current financial system, so it’s going to be rough for a while. It’ll be a time of “hyper novelty.” Those who embrace hyper-novelty will do well. I know young people are worried about not being able to own a house or save money. But this is a time of tremendous opportunity.

What kinds of opportunities?
Blockchain will make everyday transactions easier, seamless, done beneath the surface. If you own a car, you’ll let it become a taxi while you’re not using it. While you’re asleep, your car will drive itself to pick someone up and they will pay you digital tokens for the use of it. 

Robots are going to do all the difficult, low-paying work.

“It’ll be a time of ‘hyper novelty.’ Those who embrace hyper-novelty will do well.”

Have you seen anything beyond that?
In the future, we’ll all be categorized as either a ‘consumer,’ a ‘participant,’ or a ‘producer.’ You don’t want to be a consumer. That means you’ll get a Universal Basic Income and won’t be allowed too much comfort or access to nice places. A participant will be what we used to call the middle class. If you are someone who produces things and generates income you’ll have a much better level of access to good things and places. One way to ensure you’re going to move comfortably into the new system is to have some wealth in cryptocurrencies. Here is a tip: [redacted] Did I mention that I am not authorized to give financial advice?

You have now. What about climate change?
We’ve done a few remote viewings on climate change, and big things are happening. We are picking up on dramatic weather episodes, flooding, more fires, and other catastrophic events. The sun has a big impact on global climate, and we’re entering a portion of the galaxy where galactic energy is affecting the sun. These are cycles that have repeated for many tens of thousands of years. The earth is going to go through some upheaval but it’ll survive and renew. It’s billions of years old. Life will continue.

Won’t all this mean less personal freedom? 
The new system will be more constraining, but will require less annoyance. It will certainly reduce crime. I think there will be less racial tension, but maybe there will be some class tension. I did a remote viewing where I saw people in 50 years looking back at us and thinking, ‘Those people were crazy! They all had these big automobiles, and they would sit in them endlessly in traffic, burning gasoline and not moving.’ They saw us as wasteful and living out of harmony with both technology and nature.

I think a lot of people feel that way about society now; I guess it’s heartening to know these attitudes might become more prevalent. 
It’s going to be a fun ride. One last thing. Remote viewing is real. I do it as honestly and legitimately as I can. I wouldn’t be part of the FFG if I didn’t know that it helps people. It should be said that being a remote viewer doesn’t make one omniscient. You glimpse things that are disjointed and fragmented. Sometimes we’re just wrong. We’re not Nostradamus!

This is the second installment of a new VICE column called THE WOO, and was published in the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.

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Here’s some wisdom I learned burning myself out trying to make a million pounds in 90 days.

‘Old Money’ Is Fringe In The U.S.

As part of this experiment, I moved from London to New York. Once I was embedded in venture capitalist, investor, and private equity circles, I fast realized how passé old money is in the U.S.—unlike in the UK, the money men really aren’t impressed by it.

What I found chasing money in the U.S. is a culture unperturbed by the nouveau riche. For example, I followed a money man into the bowels of a $25,000-a-night hotel room, and the carpets were eerily similar to those in the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, a place that according to its listings site is next due to host “the UK’s dedicated roads and highways trade show.” Their version of ‘old money’ is this Mayflower-stemming East Coast thing that is more bizarre and suspicious, stuffed into decaying members’ clubs in Midtown. They do not respect legacy or class. What this means is that conversations around it are less wrapped up in identity. It is much more open but also much more grotesque, which leads me to…

If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get

One of the most mortifying experiences of my life was, as part of a still-unreleased project from a few years ago, asking friends for not insignificant lumps of cash towards a scheme. If I remember being at those coffee tables, on those sofas, or at those bars, I feel like taking a full bite out of my bottom lip. At the end of this journey, however, I can safely say that I no longer have the same issue. My first strategy for making a million was simply to get in the room with very wealthy people and flat-out ask them for it. I had a certain level of delusion that, if I could simply look the billionaire in the eye and shake their hand, I could reason with them and convince them I was worth their money. I did this with multi-billionaire Jim McKelvey, who was perfectly lovely, but did essentially laugh in my face. I needed to be taken seriously…

You Can Buy An Article About Yourself In Forbes

I needed to change the terms of my pitch for hedge funds or wealthy individuals to buy a piece of my company, which I had decided to name Drops. The idea behind it was a company that does controversial stunts and sells limited edition items off the back of them. Something similar to Supreme flogging house bricks emblazoned with their logo or MSCHF selling out 666 pairs of “Satan Shoes,” each containing a drop of artist Lil Nas X’s blood, for $1,000.

The problem was that, when I was talking with these folks, they would invariably google me and find evidence of my back catalog, containing gems like “How I Made TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant” or “I Pushed ‘All You Can Eat’ Restaurants to Their Absolute Limits.” So what I found out you can do is to contact a third-party agency and pay for an article about yourself in Forbes. I managed to do this with the following article: ‘How One Entrepreneur Turned Viral Success Into a Global Empire.’ As you can see, it references my global empire and my intention to open clothing outlets all over the world. All total horseshit. But from here on in, I could quote “As seen in Forbes” on my website. I officially had Money Man credibility.

Selling Educational Classes is A Racket

When I was younger in the 1990s, my parents got dragged into an infamous pyramid scheme by a charming man selling them the idea of financial security. They were desperate, and they went for it. And seemingly, today, this hasn’t changed. One of the sure fire strategies to money making in the hustle-culture sphere that you’ll find is to sell classes teaching an audience to become successful themselves. People like Luke Belmar or Tai Lopez brag about how much money there is to be made in this. So I thought I’d try it. I wrote a 3-hour educational class called “Million Dollar Ideas” where I attempted to teach the viewer how to get rich through the method of ideas. My collaborator Tristan Cross built a platform to sell the class for £100 a pop. My other collaborator Dan Lucchesi edited the class together. We released a trailer that showed me tricking an art collector into buying a stick for £500. After releasing this clip, 2 million people watched. I was convinced I would be rich. 

In the first 24 hours after release, we sold one single class.

Always Claim A Win

Throughout the process of making the film and trying to become a millionaire in 90 days, I failed a lot. The fashion brand we made named Ethical Sweatshop made £10,000 from sales, despite being covered by GQ, but this was nowhere near enough in this specific context. I did some work for a crypto company to shill their meme coin, and that fell apart. Finally, my educational class was a quiet humiliation. Yet there was something I noticed spending time with my fellow money men that I felt was quite unique. It didn’t matter how humiliating or objectively bad the business failures they endured were, they would claim it as a win. It was always fantastic. There was always room to pivot. So, prepping for my final roll of the dice – auctioning off 10% of my lifetime earnings to a room filled with money people – I decided to take a leaf from their book. To sell all my endeavours as raging successes. And this strategy eventually led to a piece of paper which would make me a millionaire.

How I Made A Million In 90 Days airs October 16^th on Channel 4 at 10PM.

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Its second series arrives on BBC Three this week. We find Kwabs at the helm of a regency drama, with his Uncle Claude’s admonishment for selling out at the end of series 1 still ringing in his ears. His mate Amy is working for a new, superficially progressive production company, but is regularly overlooked for a white girl cosplaying with terrible braids and even worse ideas. Meanwhile, new parents Funmi and Maurice continue to annoy each other in the way that only couples truly in love can, battling extortionate nursery fees and the allure of sleep and takeaways on date night. There’s an even greater assuredness to Dreaming Whilst Black this time round, with jokes that land big and loud, and a cast of characters that feel lived in. It’s written with the attention and care of a love letter to your sweet one.

VICE caught up with Adjani to talk about the show’s setting, Kwabena’s inner voice, why you can’t catch a whine to Giggs, and more.

VICE: I’m from Edmonton, in North London, where much of Dreaming Whilst Black is set. The ends doesn’t get much shine. So, why Edmonton?
Adjani: I’m from Jamaica but my aunts and cousins grew up in Edmonton! It’s an area I’m historically from. We could’ve set the show in the stereotypical places: Peckham, Hackney, Brixton. Even Tottenham. But I was like, ‘Nah, darg! Edmonton doesn’t get no love ‘pon the screen.’ So we set the ting on ends, innit. That’s why Kwabena titled his short film The Nine [a reference to Edmonton’s post code].

Edmonton’s Caribbean community is very deep rooted, and the elders in the show like Uncle Claude remind me of so many men I knew growing up. Series 1 ends with Claude admonishing Kwabena for, what he perceives, is selling out. How does that affect Kwabena moving into series 2?
Yeah, his uncle tells him he sold out his family for “the white man praise,” for industry acceptance. That hurts Kwabena, because it wasn’t his intention. And he’s always intended to do the right thing. He carries that with him into series 2, where even though he’s now getting opportunities because of this film, he doesn’t want to make the same mistake. He’s trying to avoid exploitation at all costs. But that obviously has its own consequences.

You can’t help but long for Kwabena’s inner voice to come to the surface in series 1. In series 2, he seems to achieve that at moments in his professional life. But in his personal life, he still struggles. Why is that?
He always bats between confidence and fear, courage and fear. Now we see him step out in the professional world a bit more. He’s a director, he’s more confident because he has authority. He’s not the boss, but he’s a lot of people’s boss. Whereas in his personal life, things are pretty much still the same. He has the same relationships with his elder family members, he still has the same relationship with Vanessa. When someone feels empowered, they exercise it. And I guess professionally he’s been given that power, he feels able to speak up just a bit more. Whereas personally, all the stakes are still the same so he doesn’t quite feel as confident. 

You’ve lived with the character for a long time now. How different is the Kwabena you initially dreamt up for the web series to the one we see on screen now?
I think the first iteration of the character was probably just a variation of myself, that we tweaked enough so it could be funnier. Now, Kwabena feels like a whole person, who I watch and I’m like, ‘Why are you doing that?’ When I watch the show now, I don’t see myself at all. I feel connected because I play him, but not connected to me personally anymore. But we started out in a very similar place.

When you spoke to VICE back in 2021, you spoke about the intention of not just writing for the Black community, but to the Black community. As the show has grown, how do you, as a team of writers, hold onto that intention? Does it become easier, or throw up more challenges?
It requires work, and it requires care. And yes, care sometimes requires more work. But that’s something you have to be intentional about. We want our community to watch our show, but we also want our community to be cared for. I’d feel the same way if I was writing something about my child, you know? It’s harder to do it intentionally and with love, but I care about them so I will always put in that extra effort. As the show gets bigger, the demands get greater, for better humor, for higher stakes, it would be easier to fall into tired, simpler narratives that don’t require care. But that extra care is worth it.

I think that’s why audiences responded to series 1 in that way. It’s so interesting I said that in 2021, because the show could’ve come out and everyone said, ‘This is shit!’ But the fact audiences loved it is, in part, because they felt the care. And I think we’ve put more love into series 2, to all the characters, the generation above Kwabena, the women characters. We tried to not treat any characters, big or small, as props or plot conveniences. We tried to make them all feel whole.

The show’s portrayal of Black women is definitely a place where that care and intention shines through. How do you make sure that aspect is executed properly?
I think every writer should think about their blindspots. I’m a Black man, so we covered our blindspots by hiring Black women. Not just one, but multiple. In positions of power. Our script editor is a Black woman. Two of the four writers on the show are Black women. Our producer is a Black woman. Our editor’s assistant is a Black woman. We watched an episode and she came in and was like, ‘Yo, you need to change that take.’ I was like, ‘Why? The performance is fine.’ She said, ‘No! Her wig line is showing.’ She paused the take, and if you really looked, you could see it. Obviously, I’m not looking for that. I was just watching the performance. But she noticed that. If she wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have seen it. The show would’ve come out. And Twitter would’ve popped off about how we had a Black girl with her lace front just out like that. I literally would not have known. You have to cover your blindspots, no matter what they are, to make sure the thing you’re trying to do is being done properly, and is being vetted by people who it actually impacts.

And to finish, having seen series 2, I wanted to ask an especially heavy question: Why can’t you catch a whine to Giggs?
[Laughs] Because lyrically it just doesn’t make sense! And we had this debate because we wrote the line, and was like, ‘Right, what’s the tune?’ We chose “Look What the Cat Dragged In” because sonically it’s a bop! But realistically, you’re only whining to this song if you’re really pressed [desperate]. Not because the song denotes it. The song does not dictate you do so. Man dem should just relax until that segment comes. The whining segment will come. Stop being so excited.

Dreaming Whilst Black series 2 launches at 22.10 on Thursday October 9 on BBC Three & BBC iPlayer. All episodes will be available as a boxset on BBC iPlayer and you can catch up on series 1 now.

@RKazandjian

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The 90s, as Carroll’s eye-popping new photo collection reminds us, was a decade of mess and life and culture poised on a tantalizing cusp. The X-Files, ‘Girl Power,’ Tamagotchis, and Mr. Blobby vied for the public’s attention alongside solemn newsreel footage about CFC cans, glue-sniffing, and the Srebrenica massacre. It’s defined as much by memories of people dancing in the ruins of the Berlin Wall as it is by the screeching call of dial-up modems.

The London-born, LA-based author, whose Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs series has sold over a million copies, considers the 90s his “coming-of-age decade.” But his 336-page web of sourced images and reflections is not just nostalgia porn but also a roadmap to the present. “We think everything we’re facing today is new, and that it’s spiraling out of control as the world falls apart,” he tells VICE. “But history repeats. Humans are the same. And we’re going to make the same mistakes and right choices as we’ve always done.”

The book is Carroll’s attempt to make sense of the chaos of the present by charting the creative trends, socio-political shifts, and pop-culture touchpoints that guided us into the new millennium. Ahead of its October release via Thames & Hudson, the author shared some of his broad observations with VICE.

VICE: I recognize this image from Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in Their Bedrooms series, which captured American teens from all different backgrounds in their own, self-made environments. What does this snapshot tell us about the 90s?
Henry Carroll: Teenagers are the product of [their surroundings], but they’re also the ones that are going to shape the future. An explosion of media in the 90s meant that people could surround themselves with artifacts that mirrored their identities. This image captures, among other things, a time when creative Black voices in America were starting to have a powerful influence—from Michael Jordan and mainstream hip-hop artists to publications like Ebony.

You describe Berlin as “a hotbed of ecstatic culture” in the book. Why was Germany such an interesting place to be in the 90s in general?
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it signified the end of the Cold War—but also the destruction of a 28-year barrier between Western hedonism and communist repression. The youth, who had been educated on contraband circulating in East Germany, were suddenly able to do what they wanted. They were primed to just go nuts.

If you were young and you wanted to have a party or squat in the middle of the city, there were now all these industrial buildings that had been neglected due to the poor economy in the Cold War. It was like a tectonic movement. Clubs like Berlin’s Tresor sprang up in old banks, factories, and warehouses. There was suddenly this infrastructure for raves and parties, and Berlin became an epicenter for LGBT Europe.

What broad, sweeping 90s trends affected the daily lives of queer people in the West?
During the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 80s, Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were resistant to addressing the hysteria and discrimination attached to gay men, in particular. But by the mid-90s, even as the death tolls were at their peaks, more treatments were finally starting to come through, and the public was becoming better educated. It wasn’t something you could hide, but it became a part of society that was accepted.

What are we looking at here? Are these fashion commercials or something else?
No, this is KAWS. It’s 90s street art. Banksy’s first work appeared in Bristol in 1997, but at the same time, KAWS was doing something very different [in New York]. He would open up bus shelter posters at night, paint characters on the fashion adverts, and then lock them up again behind the perspex, where they would just sit to become talking points. It wasn’t DKNY doing this—he was co-opting their brand to create something postmodern and new.

How were photographers like Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller changing visual culture in the 90s?
In the 80s, fashion photography was a polished, high-budget art form of gloss and glam—but we were going into a recession, and so the party was very much over for a little while. This hungry new generation of photographers was coming of age in the 90s, and shooting their friends on the street with point-and-shoot cameras, using a lot of flash, and weaving everything in with them going out and partying. It was a visual language that was a response to their circumstances.

Then, you had this rise in print media with new magazines like Vice and Raygun. Their budgets were pretty tight, but they were determined to establish a new look and attitude, and they naturally elevated that aesthetic and those authentic new creative voices. It was a convergence of economics, frustration, and photography as this accessible, instant means of expression.

Why do these websites look so cool?
Between 1994 and 1997, the number of websites increased from 3,000 to over 1 million. But creators could choose from only 256 background colors—and if you wanted to put a hyperlink in there, it had to be blue, underlined, and in Times New Roman font. Today, we see these typefaces and pixellated backgrounds through this nostalgic lens, but there was really no such thing as ‘web design.’ Websites could only look like that.

And why do these screenshots look so mental? 
This was a kind of online artwork. Mark Napier created his own browser where, as you clicked through websites, they’d layer on top of each other. And so you’d get these juxtapositions of everything from porn sites to CNN. He was seeing this information overload and confusion, and thinking ‘How are we going to deal with this access to everything?’ He caught onto that pretty early. 

One of my favorite parts of the book is the section where you zone in on the prevalence of the blue-sky-and-wispy-clouds motif, found in everything from The Simpsons to the Windows 95 logo. What does it symbolize?
This image represents a lot of those aspects of photography I was talking about before. Youth culture. Shot outside. Zero budget. Fish and chips. But it also encapsulates a motif that was everywhere in the 90s. For Microsoft, the blue sky was a symbol of freedom. But it was also locking us into cubicle culture and sucking us into screens. Books like Infinite Jest and movies like The Truman Show then started using this image more cynically, to critique the illusion of freedom. It was a kind of warning, in a way.

Why do these kids look so vibey?
There was this real cross-exchange of culture and style in the 90s, with technology and video games from Japan colliding with fashion from the West. FRUITS magazine documented that convergence as it was taking place. You can even kind of see that video game influence being weaved into the magazine logo.

Harajuku, in Tokyo, was this photographer’s hunting ground—a place that young people exploring their fashion identity used as a catwalk before the big mainstream brands moved in towards Y2K. If you look at the clothes these kids were wearing, it was a very layered and unique mix of references. And it was this back-and-forth conversation of East and West that was creating this new aesthetic.

Follow James on X @jamesbalmont

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They signed to Fearless Records at the end of the summer. Their debut LP, A Lesson In Romantics, dropped in 2007. Almost immediately, Mayday Parade was catapulted to pop-punk stardom. They toured with All Time Low, Paramore, Every Avenue, The Maine, The Academy Is…, Motion City Soundtrack, and more genre contemporaries. Since then, they played Warped Tour eight times—in 2006, 2007, and 2008, then every two years from 2010 until 2018.

Mayday Parade’s Legacy Begins At a Warped Tour Stop In Jacksonville

With Warped Tour back for its 30th anniversary, Mayday Parade have returned to their roots. In June, they played the D.C. dates, and are slated to play Orlando in November. Reflection and nostalgia are big for Mayday Parade right now. They’re celebrating 20 years, sliding neatly into the annals of pop-punk history with so many other legacy bands of the time. While the kids today yearn for the 2000s-era emo/pop-punk scene they never had through festivals like When We Were Young, here’s a reminder that a lot of those bands are still alive and kicking.

Sure, it’s not the same as it was when any of these bands could still fit their entire fanbase in a basement instead of a sold out stadium. But the essence of the scene hangs around, shrouds the next wave of pop-punks in its familiar embrace.

This is what Mayday Parade are still holding onto, 20 years and counting into their career. With the October 3 release of the second installment of their anniversary trilogy album, Sad, they are basking in the warm light of nostalgia. The first part of the trilogy, Sweet, dropped in April. At its heart, it takes longtime fans back to what they first loved about Mayday Parade.

Mayday Parade Celebrate 20 Years With Reminiscent Trilogy of Albums

Mayday Parade kicked off their Three Cheers for Twenty Years Tour in April, concluding the U.S. leg in June. They played several dates in Australia, before ending the tour in the Philippines in September. This month, they’re hitting the road again as support for All Time Low. They’ve filled this role a few times over the past two decades.

“I feel like, as crazy as this sounds, putting together the set for all of this touring is like the first time for me that I feel like I’ve really stopped and looked back at everything that we’ve done,” says Mayday Parade vocalist Derek Sanders, speaking to me through Zoom. “We’ve always been just moving forward.”

I ask Sanders what it means to be in the same band for 20 years. How does it feel to still be in the position to make new music and tour, often alongside friends they’ve made during their career?

“Even when we started this band in 2005 and I was 19 years old, it was always ‘What is the next year [going to] look like? What are we doing? What are our goals?'” he says. Mayday Parade has certainly maintained this attitude of “constant moving forward,” says Sanders.

How To Move Forward While Still Looking Back

“This year it’s been really interesting to reflect and look back and build this set [while on tour],” he continues. “It’s pretty amazing everything that we’ve been able to do and the fact that we’re still here doing it and at the level that we are. These were the biggest headline shows that we’ve ever done, 20 years into this band. That’s just something that doesn’t happen a whole lot, I imagine. And the fact that it’s the five of us in the band [who] have been there since the very beginning is also super rare and something that I’m super proud of.”

That pride and gratitude also extends to longtime fans who continue to support their favorite band.

“It means so much to still be able to do this and still have people that care enough about us doing it to show up and listen to the new music,” Sanders says. “It’s incredibly humbling, and we’re super grateful.”

How The 20th Anniversary Trilogy Album Came Together

“We were in the studio,” Sanders says when asked how the new album came to be, “and what ended up becoming part one, Sweet, was originally supposed to be half of our next album. It would have been our eighth full length album, and the plan was to record seven or eight songs and then go in later and finish the album.

“And while were were in the studio, we kind of had the realization that, oh, this will be coming out in 2025, which is our 20-year mark as a band,” he continues. “We just kind of started thinking, what if we went for something a little bit bigger … or tried to do something a bit more grand than we’ve ever done before. We figured that collection of music we were recording, instead of being half of an album, would just be part one. And then we’d go in and do part two and part three, and obviously it’s a pretty ambitious project for us anyway, but it’s been really cool.”

Mayday Parade stepped out of their comfort zone for their celebratory trilogy. Sanders notes that, after so long, things start to feel like a pattern—”you write and record an album and put it out and tour for two years and then sort of repeat that cycle over and over again.”

Here, though, the band is balancing touring with so much new music. They’re attempting to celebrate their legacy but not become complacent in familiarity. But, more than that, “It’s a long period of time that’s exciting,” says Sanders, “and we have new stuff in the pipeline. It’s definitely exciting.”

The Theme of Mayday parade’s Trilogy is That There is No Theme

“It’s tough whenever you get into the studio and everyone’s ideas sort of come together,” Sanders admits, after I’ve asked him to break the trilogy down to its essential themes. This is both a difficult and a simple question—the easy answer is, it has no theme. The hard answer is, it has no theme.

“The strongest songs and the ones that everyone’s most excited about sort of make their way to the top and don’t always align with whatever the vision might have been,” says Sanders. “So I feel like they didn’t come out as themed as we had originally intended them to.”

Still, the songs are strong, he says, and the albums are solid. Overall, Mayday Parade is excited and proud of what they’ve created here.

“I feel like, to me, each [album] has a real sense of nostalgia to it,” he continues, “and I thin a lot of that probably has to do with us hitting this 20-year mark as a band and looking back for the first time ever. It’s kind of hard being in that mindset, to not create music that feels a bit nostalgic. So at its core that’s what I feel like I can pull the most from each of these releases, you know, they feel like Mayday Parade, and they feel like what we’ve continued to do, which is built upon our established sound and vibe.

“But [we’ve also tried] to push ourselves into a new direction as well,” he adds, “but with a real sense of nostalgia to these songs.”

Yeah Nostalgia is Cool, But What About When It Feels Weird?

Nostalgia can be a double-edged sword—one edge is super cool, but the other edge feels weird sometimes. It’s easy to get lost in the rose tint of the past, romanticizing things that really shouldn’t be romanticized. 2000s pop-punk had its warts, and occasionally there’s an aversion to discussing them out loud. Mayday Parade, meanwhile, acknowledges the double-edge of nostalgia while also celebrating it for what it is.

“There’s so much happiness and sadness to [nostalgia] at the same time,” says Sanders. “That’s a big part of all that when I’m at When We Were Young or Warped Tour or a lot of these things that feel like they’re heavily nostalgia-based. There’s this side of it that’s joyful and makes you happy, but there’s also this sort of sadness, I think, that’s a lot of where the rise of all this sort or comes from.

“Perhaps a lot of it has to do with, you know, the world continues to be more complicated and crazy,” he continues. “And thinking back to 20 years ago when everything just seemed a whole lot more simple and the future looked brighter. And music is just so powerful. The music that people were into at that time can really bring you back, and it kind of does that for a lot of people, more so than any other art form. There’s a whole lot to it, but we’re just happy to be a part of it in some way, for sure.”

Warped Tour Put Mayday Parade On the Map, But Would It Ever Feel The Same?

With the return of Warped Tour to celebrate its own anniversary, I ask Sanders about the differences between participating in 2006 for the first time and playing it now, in 2025, when it feels more like a festival than a tried and true tour.

“[Warped Tour] has so much to do with us sort of building a lot of momentum right out of the gate,” he says. “And then of course we played it six or seven times or whatever it was, and those were some of the best summers of my life. I feel like we owe a lot of our success to that tour.

“Obviously, yeah, it’s definitely different,” he adds, speaking about current Warped Tour. “Out of all the things that we’ve done as a band, Warped Tour is an extremely unique experience, whenever it was what it used to be, the full tour and everything. There’s really just nothing like it.

“And obviously we’re very stoked that they’re doing what they’re doing right now, but it feels more like a Riot Fest or When We Were Young. Just sort of any one of these big pop-punk festivals.”

New Warped Tour, Same Vibes

Really, there was no way Warped Tour could go back to its old formula; those days are in the past now.

“There’s no way to replicate that,” Sanders explains. “The grind of what Warped Tour was and being on the road, doing the whole North America tour, not knowing what time you’re going to play each day until the morning of. Which of course, they can’t really set it up that way when it’s just a one-off festival.”

The format may not be the same, but Sanders clarifies that the vibes were still there.

“Just in general,” he says, “the D.C. one, the vibes were great. It was [great] to be around a lot of those friends and people that we’ve known for so long and hadn’t seen for a long time. It feels really special to be there and be a part of it. But, yeah, it’s never going to be quite the same as what it was.”

Three Cheers For Twenty Years, And For Twenty More After That

Mayday Parade will most likely be releasing the currently unnamed third installment of their trilogy sometime next year. In 2007, they’ll celebrate the 20th anniversary of A Lesson In Romantics. Sanders says they might do a full album tour, which they did for the 10th anniversary. Or they might put a new spin on it, he’s not sure yet. There’s time to think about that, anyway.

For now, there’s When We Were Young coming soon, and Warped Tour in November. There’s also the support slot with All Time Low to look forward to. Sanders says this is a fun break from headlining. The band is excited to get on the road with their old pals (Sanders says there are always “really good vibes in the room” when they play with All Time Low).

“We’re all just feeling the love,” says Sanders near the end of our chat, “and the fact that we’re still here doing this is something that we’re incredibly grateful for. We try our best to put as much as we can into this, [but] it gets complicated the longer you do it.”

The guys in Mayday Parade all have families now, he says. There are things in their personal lives that can get in the way or cause setbacks. With such an unpredictable career path, things can get difficult quickly.

However, says Sanders, “It’s just kind of all good things. We’re happy to be here doing it … We kind of realize how that’s not always the case, and we’re grateful that it still is easy. We want to keep on working at it and have it make sense for as long as we can.”

Photo by Eli Ritter

The post From Warped Tour and Back Again: 20 ‘Sweet,’ ‘Sad’ Years of Mayday Parade (Exclusive) appeared first on VICE.

Patrick McGraw insists he has no place being in the literary world—and when he starts to tell you about his life, you kind of understand what he means.

Born in Sechelt, Canada, where he was raised by his brothers, McGraw was a high school dropout. Yet in his late teens, he won a place at one of Europe’s most prestigious architecture colleges. His classmates in London were the children of oligarchs, chauffeured to lectures as he struggled with living costs. McGraw couldn’t afford to finish his studies and ended up in New York City, where he launched his magazine, Heavy Traffic. In the space of five years, it’s become one of the only literary magazines worth reading.

Though he’s published some of the best novelists of the last four decades—Lynne Tillman, Chris Kraus, Bud Smith, Sean Thor Conroe—McGraw gravitates to unknown writers, often molding their work through close edits. Artists and architects contribute regularly, setting Heavy Traffic apart from trends such as Alt Lit—which McGraw categorizes as “a cesspool, a morass”—and autofiction. The magazine’s design is at least as singular: later issues have no photographs or illustrations, just text with the magazine’s first story beginning on the cover, distinctive details that come courtesy of English graphic designer Richard Turley.

With no formal training, McGraw’s first writing was “filled with mistakes a child would make.” This outsider aspect is inherent to Heavy Traffic, which combines the intellectual introspection of European prose with a carnivalesque attitude that feels distinctly American. Every category of drug use was represented in the magazine’s origins. “Pharmaceuticals, coke, opiates; each person involved had a different pet drug. Doing a boatload of drugs is a palliative to the monastic life you have to lead to be a writer,” asserts McGraw, who’s now sober.

Since launching in 2020, Heavy Traffic has often been mentioned in the same breath as Dimes Square, the downtown Manhattan scene which, depending on who you ask, is either the return of the literal Brownshirts, or just another “authenticity psyop,” to borrow a line from the magazine’s second issue. McGraw hates this association—“I would rather kill myself than think any more about Dimes Square”—insisting that the mag has a purity which sets it apart.

“Heavy Traffic transcends whatever contemporary bullshit we happen to be going through. Someone wrote a brilliant piece that touched on Ukraine, but I won’t publish anything too temporal,” he explains. “Most magazines exist to be of their time; I want to take the long view.” 

As Heavy Traffic doesn’t run adverts, the main source of income comes from sales. This year, a New York Times article about it (“A Magazine, Hard to Define, Draws a Contrarian Crowd”) touched on the subject of patrons—could these include Randian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has reportedly funded events connected to Dimes Square, or indeed the CIA, which is said to have historic ties to the Paris Review? “It’s just so funny that people think the CIA or Thiel would be the worst sources of funding, especially in a city as gluttonous as New York, but all of our funding has come from the most milquetoast art places—I wish it were more exciting than that.”

Last winter, McGraw took Heavy Traffic on a tour of Europe, including stops in London, Paris, and Berlin: “I was in this relationship that was ending so everything was colored by that, a dark night of the soul condensed into a week.”

Surrounded by silent City workers—“just this level of introspection, grayness, and Englishness I’d forgotten existed”—McGraw’s train from Heathrow set the tone for his entire trip. Though the events went well (the London reading had a fizz that’s rare for the city), this time he found Berlin the “most depressing place I’ve been in my life.” He retreated to his friend’s apartment, staying there until his flight three days later. He was so eager to leave, he arrived at the airport seven hours early.

Back on American soil, McGraw started writing the story of his teenage years and how he ended up living with his brothers. The resulting memoir (“I hate that term, obviously”) will cover the period during the 2000s when he developed his “almost autistic view” of words, growing up obsessed with New York and books about the city’s architecture.

Now that he calls it home, he’s started seeing stories in the brickwork. “If you want to get a building done, you sell a developer a narrative [about] what it’s going to do for the community,” he explains, “but the reality is extremely dark; there’s blood money, destruction, and gentrification.” For McGraw, literature and architecture are both dying mediums, yet writing, narrativization, and fiction remain more important than ever. “Writing is able to deal with the dark realities of how we’re living today,” he says.

This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here, or pick up the summer issue as one-off purchase here.

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