Locale in Belmar NJ that lent its name to a noted rock-'n'-roll band / FRI 8-11-23 / Names of three czars of Bulgaria / Music genre for Lorde and Lana Del Rey / Hyperbole from someone who's dreaming big / Turner once big in the music industry

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: OAKS Park (5A: London's ___ Park, near Epsom Downs) —

Oaks Park is a public park in Carshalton in the London Borough of Sutton. It is bounded on the south by Croydon Lane (A2022), and on the east by Woodmansterne Road; smaller roads lie to west and north. [...] The estate lent its name to the Oaks horserace which was inaugurated by the Earl in 1779 and is run annually during the Derby meeting at Epsom Downs Racecourse, about 4 miles to the west. The original Oaks Race ran from Barrow Hedges, north of The Oaks and through Oaks Park before heading west to approximately the site of the current Epsom Downs Racecourse. Part of the off-road route still exists. (wikipedia)

Two good answers ("THE SKY'S THE LIMIT!" / "YOU WON'T REGRET IT!") with a lot of Yawn in between. Not enough marquee punch to really get off the ground. And it opens so badly—with a faux-chummy corporate slogan for a company whose dystopian "smart devices" essentially have much of the world voluntarily treating a powerful surveillance company like a friendly household assistant—that the puzzle would've needed a whole lot of oomph to recover. Whereas it only has, like, two oomphs. Nothing really wrong with this puzzle (besides the repulsive 1-Across). It's just not that interesting. It tries to do a little pasta dance there in the NE, but for me all that does is detract from from the only really interesting Down in the whole puzzle. Loved seeing POMODORO, but OLIVEOIL is the equivalent of EPEE where eight-letter answers are concerned, so I don't know that the corner is really elevated by pretending that you meant for those two answers to be thematically complementary. I mean, it's a cute coincidence, but that's all it is. And as for OREOCONE, I have no idea what that even is. All I know is that once again, as with 1-Across, the puzzle is back to trying to get its "relevance" and "currency" from corporations—in this case, by just mining every damn product in the OREO line. You're welcome, Nabisco. Is the cone made of Oreo? Is there an entire frozen dessert product called the OREOCONE? The more you look at it, the more it looks like a steroid ... something you'd put on a LESION. Have I not seen a pharmaceutical ad for an eczema treatment called OREOCONE? Seems plausible. If you think OREOCONE is a silly name for a prescription drug, brother, you haven't been anywhere near the pharmaceutical ad universe. Here's part of a subreddit entitled "Worst Drug Brand Name" (which I lifted from this article on weird prescription drug names in Philadelphia magazine):