Still drawing from the canon of jangly, guitar-centric 1980s college rock, the Melbourne band’s latest infuses the easygoing vibe with nuanced political songwriting.

Most bands are distinguished by their frontperson; Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are distinguished by the absence of one. The Melbourne indie rock band has three guitarists who alternate lead vocals—Fran Keaney, Tom Russo, and Joe White—and while they’re all capable singers, none is a natural made-for-the-spotlight type. Between their personable, if modest, voices and the relentless, high-octane jangle of the guitars, the effect is like one of those periodic R.E.M. songs where the bassist sings lead, except Michael Stipe doesn’t return after it’s over. It’s just always a different guy who’s not Michael Stipe up next.

While vocals may be something of an afterthought for this band, the guitars themselves are anything but. They’re Rolling Blackouts’ reason for being, and they spout from every crevice of the group’s third album, Endless Rooms, like jets in an especially luxurious whirlpool tub. The album never stops paying off with fidgety riffs, voluptuous tones, and sparkling flourishes. Though the band’s purview remains 1980s college rock, they mine so many shades and distinct variations that each song feels like a pull of a slot machine. Wound by nervous, frenzied guitars, “Tidal River” teeters with the volatile edge of Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen, while “Blue Eye Lake,” with its accents of post-punk and psychedelia, conjures the nocturnal shimmer of the Church. “Dive Deep,” meanwhile, takes a turn toward the glammy with the record’s slickest, showiest lead guitar heroics. For a band that arrived so fully formed, their sound has only continued to grow richer, the details around its edges more articulated.

This crazily luxurious, firework-packed double-bill makes so many impeccable choices that it would be the ideal way to end the franchise. How will it follow it for season five?

Stranger Things season four was already bigger and better than anything the show had done before. It was clearly more expensively produced, with a larger cast and a surer sense of why all the monsters, heroes and hangers-on were there. The double-bill denouement – held back for a month by Netflix to allow hype to build – is more expansive still. It’s crazily, luxuriously sprawling, running to nearly four hours, and does everything fans could have expected plus several dollops more. But if it hasn’t quite overstretched itself yet, you do wonder where Stranger Things can possibly go from here.

Where were we? In Hawkins, Indiana, in 1986, waiting for a gang of plucky teens to mount a final assault on Vecna, the demon who roams a dank dimension beneath the town. Psychic superheroine Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) has unlocked memories from a childhood spent in a secure facility for kids with strange powers, revealing that she opened up the interdimensional portal while confronting One, a murderous fellow inmate, thus turning him into the vengeful Vecna. A group of sympathetic adults, meanwhile, are stuck in a grimy Soviet Union prison, battling a creature left over from a previous season.

A showdown looms – but hey, we’ve got four hours, there’s no rush. And so season four’s last two episodes are surprisingly talky, giving almost every character a tender, watershed two-hander with a significant other. Lost love is lamented, halting young love gets closer to being properly expressed, and the show’s barely discernible – although fans who pore over every scene have certainly discerned it – hints about Will (Noah Schnapp) being gay become something more overt during his moving speech about learning to live with being “different”.

The Apex Legends maker has a reputation for sucking money out of the things people love

It’s been a while since Electronic Arts was the video game villain of the moment, but on Thursday the FIFA publisher sucked up all the oxygen in the room thanks to a bad joke made even worse by the company’s cutthroat history. If there’s one gaming mega corporation out there who shouldn’t have been taking casual shots at single-player games, it’s the one with a track record of shutting down the studios that make them, and jamming multiplayer releases full of microtransactions and loot boxes.

“They’re a 10 but they only like playing single-player games,” EA posted at 7:33 p.m. It was a play on a meme that first blew up on TikTok at the start of June, and was already losing steam on Twitter by late last week. It also quickly invited heaps of scorn. “Understandable you are unfamiliar with the concept of 10s,” responded Forbes’ Paul Tassi. “You made Anthem. Just saying a fact here,” replied the Washington Post’s Gene Park.