Title: “Break Up the Band” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a well-known pop duo.
Answer: Roxette
puzzle untimed; meta untimed (Matt)
Just 178 right answers when I began on Sunday afternoon around 4 PM ET, so pretty tough. Took Jangler 23 minutes, so I thought…hey, if he can do it, so can I! //sarcasm
Not many long entries in the grid, so this looks like a “big-picture pattern” meta, and it indeed turned out to be so. Four 9s on the downs but nothing longer than that, so something intricate is going on here. But what?
First thing I noticed was the word “Tesla” in adjacent 8s (long for this grid) ROADSTER (14-D) and GASOLINE, clued as [Original Tesla model with an allegedly soon-to-be-launched second generation]. I just saw a Tesla video tonight with a new version of the car that doesn’t even have a steering wheel! Things are moving too fast for me lately…anyway, then there’s adjacent GASOLINE at 37-D clued as [Bad thing to try to put in a Tesla]. Those of us of a certain age will remember the hair-metal band Tesla from the 1980s, so, combined with the title “Break Up the Band,” I thought this was worth looking into. And imagine my meta antennae freaking out when I saw that the adjacent GA and ER from those two entries spell car term GEAR when read across! Surely on the right track…
…except not, totally unintended (and indeed unnoticed) by our Meta Maestro and his team. Wow.
Stepping away from the crazy after a few minutes, I began to wonder what “break up the band” meant. I napped in my office for about 10 minutes, got up, walked over to my desk, and saw it right away: NERVE and ANNA in the first column sound out Nirvana, separated by a word. The other work just the same, taking only the columns that contain 3 entries (not 2) so that another word can separate them (“break up the band”). An elegant way to signal which columns to use and which to ignore! They are:
Column 1: Nirvana, NERVE + ANNA
Column 4: Toto, TOW + TOE
Column 5: Oasis, AWAY + SIS
Column 8: Aerosmith, EROS + MYTH. Nice one!
Column 11: Kansas, CAN+ SUSS
Column 12: U2, YEW + TOO
Column 15: Foreigner, FORE + INNER
Clearly on the right path, but now what? Well, let’s look at those dastardly entries that are breaking up our bands!
Between NERVE and ANNA = ROAM
Between TOE and TOW = ODDS
Between AWAY and SIS = COP
Between EROS and MYTH = KAHLO
Between CAN and SUS = SOY
Between YEW and TOO = EARS
Between FORE and INNER = TEAR
Those the music-y sort-of-a-term ROCK SET. But more importantly, keeping with the homonym theme they spell contest answer ROXETTE, the Swedish super-duo who ruled the pop world in the early to mid 1990s with a string of catchy tunes.
What a lovely meta! 4.75 stars. Original, cleanly executed, fun.
I got absolutely nowhere on this one (which is too bad because I love ROXETTE — their songs are incredibly catchy, and Marie Fredriksson, the female singer in the duo, was a phenomenal singer). I didn’t start trying to solve until Thursday, and there were so few correct responses at that point that I knew it probably was going to be a miss for me so I didn’t try too hard. This puzzle is very clever, but there’s no way I would have gotten it even if I had spent a lot more time on it.
I got the meta for May this year, which is the first time I’ve gotten past April, but I’ve still got a long way to go before I successfully solve the whole year! But it’s a lot of fun, and I thank Pete and his team for bringing the Music Metas to us!
I would love to know if the constructors attempted to fit BEET + ONO + ELS into the grid to make the O…
Thanks Matt!
186 correct this month…And the highest rated puzzle we’ve done all year (at least from our user ratings)…
@Louis D – we did not!
It’s a very clever meta that I came nowhere close to solving.
This is my second full year of MMMM puzzles. While I have enjoyed solving the puzzles, the metas overall seem harder than the 2023 metas. That’s sucked out some of the fun.
On the other hand, your Imagine Dragons meta is one of my favorite crossword puzzles ever.
I’m looking forward to doing better next year. Thanks!