Euphoria’s star power clash
Press tours are often engineered to maximise controversy, well-trodden ground in pastures fine as these. TV and film must scrap for attention against social media’s addictive instant gratification - a highly competitive, expanding ecosystem.
So when it comes to HBO’s hit teen drama Euphoria - the breakout launchpad for stars like Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi - it has served fans aplenty, mostly generated by showrunner Sam Levinson’s decision to leave such a gap between seasons, fueling toxic work environments and the ousting of Barbie Ferreira from the cast.
Yet the conversations amongst pop culture aficionados have been about the perceived chill between Zendaya and Sweeney. Since these stars broke out 7 years ago, both have rocketed: Zendaya via Dune blockbusters and fashion dominance under stylist Law Roach; Sweeney via her own headline-grabbing turns. Fans, poring over The Independent’s verdict of Euphoria as “the most toxic show on TV”, tend to side with Zendaya’s poised restraint. Sweeney, meanwhile, draws flak for wading into culture-war skirmishes - associations her camp appears content to let simmer, even as they fuel the fire.
At the launch event, the pair’s awkward distance spoke volumes, with many observing it as a rift amid Sweeney’s Trump-adjacent whispers. Zendaya’s team, ever image-conscious, skipped joint press entirely - a calculated sidestep that tabloids spun as savvy distancing from potential guilt-by-association. Whether it’s an outright feud or mere professional drift, the optics play into Euphoria’s own lurid vibe.
Sweeney’s provocations have media consensus calling her a lightning rod, while Zendaya’s clean lines earn quiet nods for bulletproof PR. Smart, or just the survivor picking its battles? In press-tour poker, the hand that folds first often wins the pot.
Being a Belieber
There’s a version of Justin Bieber the public hasn’t seen in years, and Coachella is where it came back to life. In the mainstream press, Bieber has earned a reputation as a walking meme, thanks to his subdued attitude towards interviews and public appearances. A prime example is the “it’s not clocking to you” clip from June last year, which exploded online.
During his headlining slot last weekend though, the set brought audiences closer than ever to the teenage Bieber who defined the decade. Midway through, he slipped into that younger self. For an artist whose adult life has been shadowed by tabloid tension, mental health struggles and headlines about conditions like Ramsay-Hunt Syndrome, it played as an intimate exchange between star and crowd.
In true 2026 fashion, online discourse quickly engulfed the sincerity. Bieber ran parts of the set through YouTube - literally propping a laptop in front of the festival masses. It sparked controversy and discussions around his master’s, which remain with Universal Music Group. Fans theorised that by playing his songs through YouTube, he found a creative way to generate revenue from his catalogue.
In practical terms, that’s not how the industry operates - labels grant artists direct access to masters for live use, embargoed or otherwise. The YouTube route was a deliberate choice: loose, referential, a pop star revisiting his legacy via the very platform his audience uses to relive it.
Of course, not everyone is convinced. Comparisons to Sabrina Carpenter’s high energy set have only sharpened the debate around double standards. Say what you want, but the set took audiences back to 2016 - which might have just been the entire point.
Madonna’s Confessions
In the last seven years, Madonna has done the following things: ended her long-running feuds with Lady Gaga and Elton John, drafted and subsequently scrapped a film about her life, mounted her first Greatest Hits tour, inaugurated the Copacabana Beach concert series, appeared on her first-ever podcast, and, perhaps most notably, nearly died. She has not, in this time period, released an album.
The world is a slightly kinder place for older pop stars in 2026. Madonna, maybe the original victim of twenty-first-century ageism and a woman who has been written off more times than she’s been on, has not yet been able to reap the benefits of TikTok’s nostalgic impact on the charts, or the poptimist resurgence that swept Kylie Minogue back to the top five in 2023. So here she is, at last, the original and the best.
Confessions II, a long-teased sequel to her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, was announced on Wednesday in an Instagram post that, at the time of writing, has racked up more than 600k likes. The album’s art direction comes courtesy of the masterminds behind Charli XCX’s Brat and Rosalia’s LUX, smartly placing her within a zeitgeist that she invented in the first place.
Madonna’s critics in the late 2010s obsessed over her perceived trend chasing and her steadfast refusal to “go away, old lady”. In taking the longest break of her career, she’s let people miss her. Looking back at her 2000s zenith, she’s smartly capitalising on Y2K nostalgia while reminding people exactly what she’s always been good at - making people dance.
The Messy Katy Perry Saga Continues
Katy Perry’s career has been on a downward spiral for so long now that it’s hard to remember the times when she was deemed pop’s biggest talent, and has the 151 million records sold to prove it. But with the recent allegations made by Ruby Rose, Perry’s career has taken another beating without ever fully recovering from the previous thrashings of all her controversies.
Rose commented on a post of Perry watching Justin Bieber at Coachella and made the statement, “Katy Perry sexually assaulted me at Spice Market in Melbourne”. It is the same music festival where Perry’s boyfriend/ex-Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was labelled a hypocrite after Perry shared an online photo of him drinking from a red plastic cup, even though Trudeau had banned single-use plastic in Canada while in office.
Since then, Rose has given more details of her experience that night in 2010 and said that Perry exposed herself and rubbed against Rose’s face whilst she was heavily drunk on a wild night out partying with Perry. Perry’s team have described the allegations as “categorically false” - a routine that they will be all too familiar with since this is not the first time Perry has come under fire in this regard.
In 2012, the male model in Perry’s Teenage Dream video accused Perry of pulling down his trousers and exposing himself to a crowd. Anna Kendrick claimed on Conan that Perry had groped her chest without consent. There is of course, the deeply unsettling video of her kissing a 14-year-old boy on one of her music tours. Perry also kissed an American Idol contestant, whom he said made him “uncomfortable”. Just to name a few.
The police have now initiated an investigation into Rose’s accusations. The carousel of Perry crashing and burning and burning some more seems to still be in full swing.
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