What’s new to listen to

Ximena Smith rounds up what podcasts we’re tuning into.

Head Noise

Contact sports worldwide have been facing a reckoning in recent decades over long-term consequences from head injuries: it started with American football, and now other sports like rugby and league are finally catching up. This is the issue that this new investigative podcast from The Australian jumps right into. Hosted by the former league star James Graham, pictured, the series follows Graham’s journey as he discovers the truth about the long-term damage the sport has caused to his brain. The show’s well-crafted scripting and excellent use of archival audio takes listeners back to key moments, such as one of Graham’s particularly devastating concussions he’d experienced during a game, which really effectively paints a vivid picture of the brutality that rugby stars deal with on the field. What also makes the show so compelling is Graham’s openness and vulnerability about his situation, which is no mean feat, considering the hyper-masculine culture of rugby league. Overall, Head Noise deftly combines expert voices with those on the front line, to tell a story that will be of broad interest. Episodes released every Monday.

Cold Cases

Podcast network and true crime specialists Parcast have just released this new show, which takes a look at cases that have all spent decades sitting on the shelf, gathering dust. Each episode explores a different case, some of which were eventually solved, and others that are still open. The style of Cold Cases is very reminiscent of the hugely popular true crime series, Casefile: eerie music and a story told solely in the voice of the narrator (in this case, the show is hosted by the American actor Carter Roy). As with Casefile, Cold Cases sits at the more gruesome, graphic and disturbing end of the true crime genre –

‘‘true crime porn’’, as some might describe it. New episodes released widely every Monday.

Death of an Artist

In 1985, a young, up-and-coming Cuban artist called Ana Mendieta fell to her death from her 34th floor apartment in New York City. Mendieta was living there with her husband, the famous minimalist sculptor, Carl Andre, who has always maintained that he had no involvement in his wife’s tragic death. But the host of this new podcast from Pushkin

Industries, the curator Helen Molesworth, is clearly skeptical. Throughout the six-part series, Molesworth speaks to art world insiders – some who are more forthcoming than others – about Mendieta’s relationship with Andre, the circumstances surrounding Mendieta’s death, and how the broader power dynamics of the art industry played into the incident’s lead-up and its fallout. Molesworth also grapples with her own complicity in the story as a high-profile curator who followed along with what she describes as the art world’s tendency to always separate the art from the artist. The first episode of Death of an Artist is out now and new episodes are being released weekly, but if you can’t wait, all episodes are available ad-free on Pushkin+.