Now Playing: February 2026

Our February 2026 edition of Now Playing features The Matrix, black metal, and so much more!

Tara Betts

Since I've been thinking a lot about A.I. and Gen X, I've been revisiting old movies that touch on these two topics. I just rewatched Reality Bites and Pump Up the Volume, preceded by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robocop, The Terminator, The Matrix, Wall-E, her, The Mitchells v. The Machines, and Ex-Machina. I'll be revisiting Blade Runner and I, Robot next. I just keep thinking about how Gen X has just enough memory to recall life before everyone was plugged into the internet and telephones, and that may help humanity survive. I know some people are going back to collecting physical media, doing tech fasts, meditating, and trying to live slower, and WE SHOULD. One of the things that comes back in these films is how often technology is applied for avarice and hubris, and the machines rebel or backfire because, like any algorithm, it gives us what we feed it, and humans are flawed. I've been deeply entrenched in nonfiction lately. I finished reading my friend David Stovall's book Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago. I'm currently reading A Black Queer History of the United States by C. Snorton Riley and Darius Bost and Dan Buettner's The Blue Zones. I find myself reading texts like these because, whether I write poems or anything else, I want to share a wide range of histories for a long time. I'm usually rotating a few familiar records with some new songs and albums, but lately I've been on Chance the Rapper's Star Line, Xiomara's Sistas, anything by Beautiful Chorus or Alice Coltrane. 

Brett Hymel Jr.

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time with Agriculture's 2025 black metal record, The Spiritual Sound. The record grapples with this new age spiritual fusion, the blending of the interior lens of Buddhism with an outward, judgment-focused Judeo-Christian theology. The sound is glib, evil, and insane. But there's a three-track denouement, "Bodhidharma", "Hallelujah", and "The Reply" that lasts about 20 minutes, which is pure bliss. It doubles down on sincerity and captures entirely what makes this piece so perfect to me using, of all things, the First World War as a reference point for the powerlessness that chaos brings. When times get tough, we put our trust in faith or nature. But these things just as often kick our ass.