Two episodes into Off Campus, the Prime Video hockey-romance drama that’s become a gargantuan streaming hit, lead characters Hannah and Garrett are hanging out, looking at a laptop. The two of them have been deep into a fake-dating plot: Hannah has promised to tutor Garrett, a star hockey player, and in exchange, he’ll pretend to be her boyfriend to make her crush jealous. But at this point in the series, they’re starting to get closer — and Hannah, a music student, wants to show Garrett a band she absolutely loves. “Wait, have you heard of the Beaches?” she asks. “Their Coachella set will change your life.”
She’s talking about the real-life Canadian band known for their insanely catchy choruses and huge, soaring melodies (she’s also referencing their actual Coachella performance in 2025). Later, as Garrett realizes he has feelings for her, he pulls up the band’s Spotify and plays one of their songs. The effervescent opening of “Edge of the Earth,” a song the Beaches released on their 2023 album Blame My Ex, starts to play and closes out the episode. It’s become a favorite needle drop for fans of the show and an anthem that represents the Hannah-Garrett love story — and the boost has made the band go wildly viral.
“I’ve had all of my close friends reach out to be like, ‘This is so massive! I can’t believe you are on the show. I keep hearing your song all over Spotify playlists that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected you guys to be on,’” singer Jordan Miller tells Rolling Stone. The show creators had reached out and proposed different ways the song could be used before settling on the scene where Hannah shares the band with Garrett.
“We had heard about it initially and then they told us that it was going to be a script like that,” Miller remembers. “Over the next couple months, we kept hearing from people about the Off Campus show coming out, and everyone’s like, ‘This show’s gonna be really huge!’ And then when it happened and everything started to go as insane as it did, we were all really shocked. It’s just been an absolute rollercoaster.”
This isn’t the band’s first brush with viral fame. “Blame Brett,” also from their 2023 album, found an audience all over TikTok and social media and is now a crowd favorite at their live shows. But “Edge of the Earth” has quickly become the band’s most streamed song, seeing 5.53 million streams in the last seven days and a total 888 percent streaming bump across all platforms. Their entire catalogue got a 75 percent boost.
While the buzz around the song has been unexpected, Miller says she always felt “Edge of the Earth” had potential. “I’m not surprised it was Edge of the Earth, because that’s always been one of my favorite songs on that record, and I always had a feeling that it just needed the right moment to really land with people,” she says. “It’s a really important song for us, because it’s our first sort of queer love story song.”
The song, she explains, was inspired by a previous relationship guitarist and keyboardist Leandra Earl had been in. “Leandra came out during COVID and she started to get messages from our queer fans being like, ‘How come there aren’t any queer love songs or queer songs in general in any of your catalog?’ And Leandra brought it up to me and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s crazy. I’m bisexual, you’re gay. We should absolutely be writing about it from this perspective,” Miller says. “It was really important for us to land it and make sure that we came up with something that portrayed a really beautiful relationship.”
To Miller, these cycles show how songs can take off when artists least expect them to. “I was talking to Kid Cudi about this actually not too long ago. I think ‘Maui Wowie’ was 10 years old when it just started to go viral again last year. And then ‘Party 4 U’ by Charli XCX, I think that was like five years old. The nature of TikTok and the way things are sort of streaming, you can have a hit that comes that has like a second life.”
Miller admits she’s the only person in the band who hasn’t watched the entire series yet, mostly because she recently got a puppy that’s kept her busy the last several weeks. “I’m excited to dig in this week and thank God nobody spoiled too much for me, but I’m really pumped. I did watch the scene where they give our band a shout out, of course,” she says. Her bandmates have torn through all eight episodes already. “”I’m looking forward to the show spending more time on Dean and Allie because I ship them hard,” Leandra tells Rolling Stone.
The band has tons more in store in the upcoming months: They’re releasing a deluxe version of their latest LP No Hard Feelings next week and are playing All Things Go. They’re also working on a ton of music. “Me and Leandra went through some breakups in the fall and in the early winter. I sort of started a new relationship and I’d really like to not write a breakup album,” Miller says with a laugh. ‘I’d like to write less of a Stevie Nicks song and more of a Christine McVie song.” Only time will tell if those songs will offer a backdrop for new shows and love stories.
Ken Casey stuck around after the show in San Diego, California, talking to members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Some of the challenge-coin haul.
The band started as a bet. “My band has a show in three weeks,” Casey’s coworker told him in 1996. “I dare you to open for us.”John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Dropkick Murphys (from left): Casey, DaRosa, Webster, Kelly, Rheault, Brennan, and Lynch John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Casey is largely the voice of the band, but the other members back him up. “We’re so lucky he’s the mouthpiece,” says Brennan, left. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Only the Irish can take a song about death and destruction, famine, alcoholism, and raise a glass like it’s an anthem,” says Casey. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Anytime it feels like things are about to plateau for us, something gives us a little bump,” says guitarist Lynch. “It feels exciting. It feels dangerous. It feels like doing something.” John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.