PUNCH Edit April 21, 2026
Main Card: Ethel Cain, Milan Design Week, Charli XCX + the Internet's sex history
Quick hits
Culture spent the week doing what it does best: turning decline into programming, branding into mythology, and institutional recognition into a slightly belated apology. A federal agency discovered lowriders after several decades of evidence. Luxury houses staged little pilgrimages inside monasteries and churches. Museums, festivals, and pop stars kept finding new ways to turn archives, lore, and side projects into product without technically calling it that. Even the satire had a cleaner business model than half the real media landscape.
Ethel Cain built a Coachella junkyard, then hid Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl grass in it
Ethel Cain’s Coachella set was designed as a “graveyard of American industry,” which is a strong escalation from the usual desert-festival LED wallpaper. Stage designer Oli Colman says the environment leaned into rusted car parts, chain-link fencing, swamp grass, Spanish moss, and power lines to match Cain’s Southern Gothic cosmology, with a weathered scythe doubling as a mic stand. The best detail is pure live-production absurdity: some of the grass came from Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl set, then got burned and painted yellow to look dry enough for Cain’s world. Even her stage dressing now comes with lore, reuse economics, and a little national decline.
InfoWars got the full satire treatment, and the joke is that the business model barely needed exaggeration
The Onion’s fake welcome letter for new InfoWars owner Bryce P. Tetraeder lands because it understands the real genre: not just conspiracy media, but the larger American content economy where panic, scams, supplements, coaching, ads, and pseudo-truth all merge into one diseased revenue funnel. The piece imagines InfoWars as an “infinite virtual surface teeming with ads” and “free radical misinformation,” which is funny mostly because it reads like a mission statement for half the modern internet. The best line of attack is that the site’s future is not ideological purification. It is corporate optimization. Same poison, better monetized.
Milan Design Week became luxury field-trip season for brands that needed a church, a monastery, or at least a bonsai museum
This year’s Milan Design Week looked less like furniture fair programming and more like prestige brand world-building with a venue budget. Gucci staged Demna’s Gucci Memoria inside the Chiostri di San Simpliciano monastery, Aesop turned Milan’s Chiesa del Carmine into “The Factory of Light,” Miu Miu brought back its three-day Literary Club under the theme “Politics of Desire,” Arket and Laila Gohar installed a fruit-and-vegetable carousel at Giardino delle Arti, and Jaipur Rugs showed Kengo Kuma-designed pieces at the Crespi Bonsai Museum. The obvious takeaway is that design week now rewards atmosphere almost as much as objects. Retail is dead; pilgrimage is in. (Gucci)
The internet got its own sexual counter-history, and it comes as a lecture, a black book, and a redistribution scheme
Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet is less “website” than a whole argument with multiple delivery systems. The project exists as a participatory lecture performance and a 700-plus-page artist book, framing the internet not as neutral infrastructure but as a technology shaped by desire, sexualization, censorship, and the under-credited labor of women. The sharpest wrinkle is the economics: 30 percent of book profits are redistributed to cited contributors through what Seu calls “citational splits,” turning footnotes into an actual payment model. Even the archive comes with reparations logic now. (asexualhistoryoftheinternet.com)
Charli XCX’s indie-film detour is less stunt casting than controlled eruption
Pete Ohs’ Erupcja is being sold, inevitably, through the fact that it stars Charli xcx, but the more interesting part is the filmmaking method around her. Ohs says he built the film with actors in sequence, starting from only half an outline and shaping scenes day by day in Warsaw, turning the production into a live collaborative process instead of a locked script exercise. That matters because it makes Charli less a pop-star cameo than one volatile element inside a movie about signs, desire, and the damage of trying to figure out whether you are on the right path without hurting people on the way. Process became the plot.
TV Star shakes retro dust off Britpop on “Out of My Bag”
“Out of My Bag” is TV Star doing revivalism with enough speed and scruff to keep it alive. The Seattle-Tacoma band pushes jangly Britpop, Madchester swing, and garage-pop mess into something that feels more lived-in than costume-party nostalgic. The hook is immediate, but the better sell is the momentum: loose, bright, and just grimy enough around the edges. It is the kind of track that sounds like it showed up already in motion. The single arrived ahead of the band’s debut album Music For Heads, released through Father/Daughter.
The USPS finally put lowriders on stamps, which is one way to admit the culture won
The U.S. Postal Service released a pane of 15 Lowriders Forever stamps on March 13, using five designs to honor a car culture rooted in Mexican American and Chicano communities across the Southwest. Antonio Alcalá art-directed the set with photos by Philip Gordon and Humberto “Beto” Mendoza, plus pinstriping by Danny Alvarado, and the stamps were made wider than usual to better show off the cars’ obsessive detail. What makes the item worth repeating is the institutional reversal: a style once policed, stigmatized, and treated as lowbrow now gets federal heritage treatment at 78 cents a piece. (USPS)
Media Puzzle’s “New Pet” sounds like a sugar rush with bite marks
“New Pet” is Media Puzzle in their most efficient mode: bratty, hooked-up, and slightly unhinged. The track comes off New Racehorse, the band’s April 16 release, and it has that fast, rubbery indie-punk energy where everything feels one shove away from falling apart, but never does. What makes it stick is the tension between sweetness and agitation. It is catchy in a way that feels a little suspicious, like the song is smiling too hard while shaking the furniture. Very good lane for them. The result is messy, bright, and over before your brain fully catches up.