Filipino girl group BINI — made up of Aiah, Colet, Maloi, Gwen, Stacey, Mikha, Jhoanna, and Sheena — join us in the studio for the first time to talk about their early years, how they incorporate Filo culture into their music (OPM = original Filipino music), along with the country’s various dialects. Having initially broken through thanks to 2019’s competition TV show Star Hunt Academy Girls, the eight-piece have released two full lengths and are wowing P-pop fans (and beyond) on the world stage...
Aug 19, 2025•34 min
Meet CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, aka Catriel Guerreiro and Ulises Guerriero, an Argentinian duo who have been buds since finding themselves in the same music school as kids with the same last name. Although the pair first emerged in this iteration back in 2018, it wasn’t until Autumn 2024 when they headed into the NPR offices to reimagine their music for the Tiny Desk Concert format that C&P became a global concern. It’s a performance that forms the basis of their latest EP, PAPOTA, a perfor...
Aug 18, 2025•1 hr 7 min
You might know him from the 2016 viral sensation ‘Dat $tick,’ but Rich Brian is understandably keen to leave that infamy behind. The Indonesian rapper’s been out of the spotlight for six years so we find out what went down (it’s relationship related), his epic new record WHERE IS MY HEAD?, and the meticulous world-building that comes along with it. We also discuss his early years in Indonesia as part of a family Christian rock group, learning English (and pretty much everything) from YouTube, hi...
Aug 15, 2025•1 hr 10 min
If you’re of a certain age you grew up with Alyson Stoner — the dancer in the Missy Elliot video for ‘Work It,’ the little girl in Mike’s Super Short Show, Cheaper by the Dozen, Camp Rock, Step Up, and so many more. For a time they were a Disney darling… until they weren’t. Behind the scenes Stoner was struggling to grow up and find their place in an industry that they didn’t even have ambitions for in the first place. Now retrained in mental health and working hard to improve child labor laws, ...
Aug 13, 2025•1 hr 45 min
Mark Tuan didn’t grow up with dreams of being a singer or K-pop idol — which makes the success he achieved with GOT7 and now as a solo star even more bananas. He joins us in the studio for the first time as a solo artist to talk about everything from his beginnings getting scouted at school in LA to the reality of being a K-pop trainee, juggling school work, vocal and choreo lessons, and learning a new language in a foreign land. The self-described homebody and fan-described Quiet Savage tells u...
Aug 12, 2025•45 min
Manhattan-born Chilean singer Paloma Rocío Castillo Astorga joins us in the studio for the first time to discuss her second album CODiGOS DE MUÑEKA, meaning Girl Codes. Just as her 2021 album, Sueños de Dalí, explores the many facets of Paloma Mami, so this follow-up digs deeper, but finds her in a looser, freer, more confident state of creativity. This time round she opened her up R&B-reggaeton-urbano grooves to collabs with everyone from Puerto Rican superstar Rauw Alejandro to Chilean inn...
Aug 11, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Joining us in the studio, just before he jetted off to New Zealand to film the hotly anticipated new Evil Dead movie, is Hunter Doohan, the 31-year-old Arkansas-born actor that you undoubtedly know best as Tyler Galpin, the barista-turned-Tim Burton monster in Netflix smash Wednesday. He settles in to chat season 2, discussing his character’s evolution — and how one even preps for the role of an orphaned murderous monster-cum-love interest — Lady Gaga joining the cast, his audition with Jenna Or...
Aug 06, 2025•1 hr 16 min
He needs no introduction. He’s in 5 Seconds of Summer. And he also has a solo album to talk about. (If you haven’t heard ‘give me a break!’ ft Waterparks, do so immediately.) So he’s joining us on the couch, all on his own for the first time ever, to talk about SIDEQUEST. Except actually this is the second time solo on our couch. Clifford popped in four months ago to talk about the record, and we get into why we’re doing a little reshoot. In this conversation really runs the gamut: the 29-year-o...
Jul 31, 2025•1 hr 6 min
We caught up with Quadeca a little bit last month when he crashed the Kevin Abstract interview with Love Spells, and thanks to overwhelming demand, here he is solo and in-depth. Still just 24 years old, Quadeca, aka Benjamin Fernando Barajas Lasky, has been extremely online for almost half his life. Starting his YouTube channel back in 2012, putting up Fifa videos, then becoming known as a YouTube rapper, getting in spats with KSI, and eventually swerving into more experimental sonic territory, ...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 13 min
A whole 10 months since she last sat on our couch and Jessie Murph is back — all in pink with a Priscilla Presley bouffant — to talk about her new album Sex Hysteria. It’s a collection that flays with its honesty, filtering the 20-year-old’s relationship experiences — familial, romantic, and otherwise — into lyrics that are searing, sassy, and sad too (‘The Man Who Came Back’ we’re looking at you). There’s some solid good-time bangers too ‘Touch Me Like a Gangster’ and ‘Blue Strips’ with Sexyy R...
Jul 23, 2025•47 min
It’s been a minute or six years since DJ and internet prankster Dillon Francis dropped by. Since then a lot has happened — endless Vegas residencies, sobriety, and, it seems, he’s developed fatigue of The Drop. Naturally the LA-native is still busy crafting drops: he has a new release with German house DJ Marten Hørger for one, and a whole punk-pop project popping too (no drops there). We also talk about Diplo, his falling out and reconciliation with DJ Snake, the young artists he’s buzzing abou...
Jul 21, 2025•1 hr 9 min
From being a sportsman in his youth to leaving it all behind to be a Kpop trainee, to touring the world with GOT7, to going solo and independent, Jackson Wang’s many phases could fill a memoir and he’s only 31. Fresh from traipsing round Mumbai, India, Jackson joined us again — for the first time in five years — to discuss this new era of his career and his third album MAGICMAN 2. It’s a record preceded by a year off, a necessary reboot, a recalibration — in short, Jackson took control. His soun...
Jul 18, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Keshi joins us IRL in the studio for the first time — last time was peak-pandemic vibes — and it gets real, real fast. He maps his beginnings as an oncology nurse and the moment he decided to make the leap to music and we go deep into his process — now on his latest LP Requiem versus his debut Gabriel — his tricked-out home studio, his abiding John Mayer nerdery (right down to the style of tattoos), and the striking the balance between his public and private spheres. The 30-year-old Houston, Tex...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Lauren Spencer Smith returns to the studio for a third time to talk about her latest LP THE ART OF BEING A MESS. We go deep real fast with the British-born, British Colombia-based, American Idol alum. Just like her music, in conversation the 21-year-old is candid, raw, and funny, unpicking the true-life stories behind ‘IF KARMA DOESN’T GET YOU (I WILL),’ ‘Looking Up,’ ‘things you never say,’ and more. Her emotions are close to the surface; her songs, small exorcisms. The pain of grief, the disap...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Amazon Music is offering Prime members a 4 Month Free Trial of Amazon Music Unlimited! Sign up here: https://www.tryamazonmusic.com/zach and enjoy your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks all summer long! We are so excited to welcome the cast of the latest Zombies installment, Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires: Meg Donnelly as Addison, Milo Manheim as Zed, and new characters Freya Skye as the day walker Nova, and Malachai Barton as Victor, the vampire. We get into the new movie, which takes p...
Jul 11, 2025•53 min
Amazon Music is offering Prime members a 4 Month Free Trial of Amazon Music Unlimited! Sign up here: https://www.tryamazonmusic.com/zach and enjoy your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks all summer long! Dream-pop band The Marías have captivating audiences since their nimble, lush EPs Superclean Vol. I and II, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Led by frontwoman Maria Zardoya’s slinky, sultry vocals and anchored by Josh Conway’s cinematic grooves, their music feels instinctual and familiar, w...
Jul 09, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Amazon Music is offering Prime members a 4 Month Free Trial of Amazon Music Unlimited! Sign up here: https://www.tryamazonmusic.com/zach and enjoy your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks all summer long! Belinda Peregrín Schüll — known mononymously as Belinda, or Beli to her inner circle — has been famous for longer than she’s been alive. The Madrid-born, Mexico City-raised multi-hyphenate first rose to fame acting in telenovelas like Aventuras en el Tiempo and Cómplices Al Rescate (in whi...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Kylie Cantrall is now forever synonymous with the character of Red — the headstrong daughter of the Queen of Hearts — thanks to last year’s smash hit Descendents: The Rise of Red, the latest installment in the Disney Descendents franchise (and of course a new one is on the way). Now 20-years-old, LA-born Kylie has been laser-focused on a career in music, dance, and acting since she started her YouTube channel Hello Kylie, at just eight years old. Joining us in the studio for the first time she w...
Jul 03, 2025•1 hr
Alert! This episode does contain Ironheart spoilers! In the space of eight short years Dominique Thorne has gone from her big break in Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, to starring as RiRi Wiliams in Disney’s Ironheart series, with roles in Judas and the Black Messiah and Wakanda Forever along the way. The Brooklyn-born, Trinidadian has featured in hard-hitting, critically acclaimed smashes at every step. The 27-year-old joins us in the studio for the first...
Jul 02, 2025•49 min
You will know Jenna Davis as the cheeky but saccharine-sweet but totally lethal voice of AI robot M3GAN, now back in M3GAN 2.0. But Davis has been on her grind since she was just 10-years-old, building up her credits not only as a voice actor, but in front of the camera, all the while honing her skills as a singer too. Now, at 21, she’s dropping her debut LP, Where Did That Girl Go?, a sassy country-pop, coming-of-age collection with cuts from the likes of Kelsea Ballerini and plenty of co-write...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Frankie Grande has been on one heck of a journey. From reality shows to Broadway performances, cocaine addiction to eight years sober, wild nights in dark clubs as his alter ego Ferosha to throuples to meeting his hubby line-dancing and having a Star Wars-themed wedding. He joins us on the couch for the first time ever to discuss all this, and go deep on his riotous, smutty, sexy debut album Hotel Rock Bottom — which as Zach rightfully points out, has a song on it for every gay — and features ma...
Jun 27, 2025•1 hr 26 min
Charlotte Lawrence has had a crazy life. The 25-year-old daughter of actor (and music supervisor) Christa Miller (Scrubs, Shrinking) television producer and showrunner Bill (also Scrubs, Ted Lasso, Spin City), Lawrence has grown up in a rarefied environment. The kind of environment where Ed Sheeran can plausibly gift her her first guitar because he showed up at the Lawrence house for her parents’ Sunday night hootenanny. True story. She talks about it. She also talks about what it’s like going o...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 54 min
Calum Hood has always been the quietest, most reticent member of world conquering, chart-topping power-pop band 5 Seconds of Summer, but today we get him on the couch solo — for the first time ever — and it turns out the 29-year-old has plenty to say. His debut solo album ORDER chaos ORDER is an intimate journey during which Hood takes in the whirlwind past 15 years, his first love, his first heartbreak. It’s introspective and it’s raw and it’s the soundtrack to his life. A collaboration with pr...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Actor Emily Alyn Lind joins us in the studio for the first time to talk about the hotly anticipated book-to-screen adaptation We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, which was a bestseller back in 2014, becoming a booktok phenomenon during the pandemic. It’s a series that’s a hotbed of wealth, deception, rivalry, and intrigue, and she unpacks it all for us. And yes, there are some spoilers, so beware! Plus we discuss what it was like growing up in a showbiz family (her mom is an established actor known pr...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 32 min
Benito Skinner is having a moment. The 31-year-old first captured the internet’s attention back in 2018 with his on-point impressions of everyone from the Kardashians to Timothee Chalamet to Billie Eilish, not to mention original characters like Jenni the TMI hairdresser and realtor Deliverance Richards. But all the while, between the online skits and the stand-up nights in Bushwick, he was gestating the script for what is now Prime Video’s Overcompensating. Based on his own experiences as a clo...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 47 min
The last time 28-year-old Kevin Abstract joined us in the studio was as part of BROCKHAMPTON way back in 2019. At that point he was already three solo albums deep (if you include his 2014 mixtape MTV1987), but as the founding member of sprawling, genre-splicing “boyband,” BROCKHAMPTON were still the centripetal force. By 2022 the group which was formed partially with friends in high school and partially via a Kanye West fan forum, were on permanent hiatus. Never say never, the members are still ...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Best known as Lizzie McGuire’s pesky little brother Mike (and his role in Cory in the House), these days Jake Thomas isn’t only an actor, but a director, writer, photographer, Japanese speaker, and Pokemon aficionado with a social media presence that’s both genuine and nostalgic. Now, after working on the video game MindsEye for the better part of five years, utilizing state of the art performance capture technology, the 35-year-old is expanding his skillset again, playing tech billionaire mogul...
Jun 13, 2025•1 hr 24 min
These days she needs no introduction, as the magnetic co-star in Wicked, breathing new life into the character of Elphaba, but Cynthia Erivo has been wowing audiences on the stage and screen (and in the ears) for years. With a knack for inhabiting and redefining iconic characters she’s been Celie in The Color Purple and Harriet Tubman in Harriet, not to mention also playing Aretha Franklin. She’s almost EGOT-status (only the Oscar has eluded her thus far), and now she’s back with her ambitious s...
Jun 11, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Ever since she emerged at the tail-end of the 2000s as Marina and the Diamonds, Marina Diamandis has been a blast of fresh air with her elastic vocals, indelible left-of-center pop hooks, and fantastical world-building. From her playful but probing explorations of female archetypes on second record Electra Heart, to the technicolor disco of Froot, to the apocalyptic pop of Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land, the Welsh-Greek singer is in a state of constant evolution. All of which we get into in thi...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 36 min
Still only 22 Finn Wolfhard is a prolific polymath. An actor, musician, screenwriter, director — he wears all these hats with ease, curiosity and enthusiasm. He first came to prominence playing Mike Wheeler in the much beloved Stranger Things, which wrapped filming last year after five seasons. The Vancouver-born multi-hyphenate talks grieving the end of the series that has taken up half his life, that final day, the special bond with the cast (particularly fellow actor and musician Joe Keery), ...
Jun 06, 2025•1 hr 38 min
