Top 10: These albums inspired profound emotion within me and, more likely than not, caused me to spew nonsense at length to my friends in an attempt to get them to listen

1. Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka

I like to be overwhelmed by music. Perhaps that’s what’s gotten me more into metal, ambient, and experimental traditions ever since I made music a bigger part of my life. On Los Thuthanaka, the Crampton siblings absolutely overwhelm with unruly, unmastered rhythmic recursions that mix today’s fluorescent electronics with the pulsing vitality of indigenous Andean folk traditions. It’s nakedly queer, looking backward to find reinforcement that resistance to today’s bullshit will pay off in the future. Each song has a swagger and reverence that feels less like submission to tradition or like trite joy-as-resistance and much more like a high-concept, tangible alternative future, where music is unbounded. Every time I hear this album, I feel something like optimism, not necessarily because I think it’s gonna “be okay,” but because I’m reassured that any world where artistic production like this is thinkable and doable is one worth enduring.

2. Joanne Robertson - Blurrr

It’s no secret to anyone in my life that I’m easily won over by music that’s pretty, and I would say that the songs on here that feature fellow Glaswegian cellist Oliver Coates fit that bill for me. When I’m casually returning to this album, I’ll often allow myself the sweeter candy of “Always Were” or “Gown” before starting from “Ghost” and letting the album go through one full cycle. But, even the stuff that’s darker or messier, like “Why Me” or “Peaceful,” has a heart-aching beauty that inspires greater reflection in me. Robertson’s songs have this organic quality that comes from her constructive process, pairing poetry and improv across an album of reflective songs that are recorded intimately at home. Every emotion feels like it’s being processed on the spot, which contrasts so heavily with the heavily curated boygenius-adjacent style of feelings-loaded indie rock that I also love while finding myself pulling away. Robertson is working from a much different tradition, but that’s why I encourage anyone who’s in the same boat as me: If indie rock isn’t doing for you what it emotionally once did, then try this.

3. Oklou - Choke enough

What can be said about choke enough that hasn’t? Probably not much. What I’ll say is that I can remember hearing Galore some years ago and liking it well enough. I certainly loved “god’s chariots” and loved how meme-able those eerie entering synths could be. When I saw Oklou open for Caroline Polachek shortly after lockdown orders lifted, I bought the whole product for the first time; she had an infectious personality to go alongside her curiously understated music. With choke enough, you can see that personality shine through while every odd, baroque little number makes an appearance. Every time I listen to “obvious,” I fall in love with more of it: the synthetic clarinet, the bass, the distant utterances of “so obvious.” You can take any song on choke enough and find a new detail to love that’ll change the way you hear the song.

4. Raisa K - Affectionately

If you’re the type to follow everything that Mica Levi is up to, then you’re intimately familiar with the work of Raisa K. Affectionately is her first official solo release in over a decade, and it sounds like something that would come from that experimental London scene, but the curious blend of industrial whirring and deadpan vocal delivery (which gets curiously dissected when Coby Sey joins in on “Stay”) gives the album an unshakeable stiffness that makes it a distinctly un-easy listen. If the London experimental scene that Raisa K lives in, and its cousin scene in Copenhagen, has a certain breeziness, then Raisa K’s Affectionately is practically robotic, capturing that experience of navigating interpersonal conflict while trying to maintain composure. It’s frustrating music, but it’s also super intricate and attractive.

5. OHYUNG - You are always on my mind

I’ve been spinning the club remixes of this album lately, and it’s only deepened my love for “You Are Always On My Mind.” OHYUNG is probably best known for ambient behemoths like Imagine Naked! or as a rising star in the film score scene, but this album feels like the best of all of her talents. She came up as an experimental hip hop-oriented scenester, and you can see that on tracks like “5 strings {lake}” and “im holding close the memory fades.” Her choices of string cycles, percussion loops, and vocal manipulations make each song feel too human to be anything other than synthetic, confusing the mortal with the artificial. There’s little use in differentiating what’s what when so everything is a little bit of both. The album sounds fragile. If one cue goes missed on “no good” or “i swear that i could die rn,” it feels like the song will implode. I like that kind of precarity; it feels more true to life than anything words alone can utter.

6. Wednesday - Bleeds

It’s no surprise to see Wednesday back in my Top 10 list, but I wasn’t expecting it for a while. I loved Bleeds when I first heard it, but it only got more and more attractive as the year went on. Hartzman’s storytelling has an immediacy that makes her songs feel like little movies.. I forgot that, with Wednesday songs, I tend to like them on first listen, but with each subsequent listen, the narratives, lyrics, and riffs take on new meanings for me. With every listen of tearjerker “Elderberry Wine” or favorite-among-friends “Townies,” Hartzman teaches me to value every moment of intrigue around me, to reflect with more care. Hartzman and her bandmates can certainly get rough, even violent, but there’s this benevolent gaze she inhabits that makes you want to look for the brilliant in the grotesque.

7. Safe Mind - Cutting the Stone

I’ve liked, but not loved, the works of both Augustus Muller (1/2 of Boy Harsher) and Cooper B. Handy (LUCY, Taxidermists). Given that, I didn’t anticipate that I’d fall in love with Cutting the Stone. I’m so glad I did. Cutting the Stone features some of Muller’s bounciest production yet, effectively matching Handy’s incandescent delivery. Even as Handy cycles from phrase to phrase, the duo are at their best when they’re showing, not necessarily telling, the emotional tensions that they want to highlight. It’s that tinge of doubt that makes “Standing on Air” feel truly deep, or the odd rhymes chosen on “6’ Pole,” that make the songs feel unique.

8. Klein - Sleep with a Cane

My last two favorite Klein outings have boasted fiery guitars and a better command over noise than far too many modern shoegaze bands. sleep with a cane, on the other hand, is mostly ambient, sprawling at about an hour and a half with tracks like “Family Employment 2008-2014) or “gate of return” that have an iciness that makes me feel very human. If ambient music of the kosmiche variety is good for complementing a drug-altered consciousness, sleep with a cane feels like the kind of ambient music best appreciated dead sober, confronted with the real difficulties and crests of daily persistence.

9. Bodybox - 3

I’ve had some trouble finding metal that I absolutely love this year, but Florida’s Bodybox ticked the boxes of what makes a rewarding heavy music experience for me. On their debut album, 3, the band plays in the slam sandbox that’s been especially popular with both death metal and hardcore audiences (building a bridge few anticipated) with plenty of animalistic chugs and my favorite snare tone of the year. It’s brutal, technical, but immediately catchy. There’s enough beatdown for the hardcore kids and enough slam for the metalheads. I

10. Ben Bondy - XO Salt Lif3

Many of my favorite pop albums come from people whose primary practices lie somewhere else, and Ben Bondy fits that profile. The producer and DJ’s best-known works hang out in the deconstructed world of dubby ambient. With XO Salt Lif3, Bondy’s loose, texture-rich songs coalesce into experimental pop hits, but they morph as soon as they come into form, producing a slippery, perhaps cloudy, take on singer-songwriter music. In my circles, I’ve seen comparisons to untitled (halo) and Oklou, and I see how those can both emerge. It feels queerer than the sum of its parts, complex in its influences but all-too familiar in its affect.

5 more from AD 93: Pitchfork got it right when they crowned AD 93 their label of the year. They were busy this year, and I devoured their output. In addition to Blurrr, these 5 really got me:

1. Quade - The Foel Tower

Another album by a British band making a folksy, sprawling take on melancholic post-rock sounds like a ticket to witness self-indulgence, but Quade does it right. I’m particularly struck by the instrumental passage “Nannerth Ganol,” which feels like a condensing and evaporation of the hefty emotional dictionary from which Quade draws throughout.

2. feeo - Goodness

Goodness goes between motility and icy stillness, coalescing in a weighty brilliance that is impressionistic but emotionally true to experience. I especially love the guitars on “Here,” which put this album in conversation with post-metal singer-songwriters whose penchant for beauty is matched with a need for intense abrasion.

3. Alpha Maid - Is this a queue

If you think the experimental rock people are raving about is sorely missing a groove, then this album is for you. You may know Alpha Maid’s Leisha Thomas from spresso, and that same wry attitude is given room to roam across Is this a queue. I’ll credit Boomkat for identifying this album as being for fans of Black Dice and Klein, and I’ll second it, too.

4. Olan Monk - Songs for Nothing

If you’re reading this, then there’s a strong possibility that you know, and love, the music of Maria Somerville, who just opened for My Bloody Valentine at a near-10,000 person gig in Dublin. She appears on Songs for Nothing, the latest album from Olan Monk. The result is a heavy, shoegaze-y collage that should be heard by all fans of Midwife. If Madeline Johnston is good at approximating the desolation of the American Mountain West, then Monk is similarly talented at bottling the misty melancholy of Ireland’s west coast.

5. james K - Friend

Did you know that shoegaze and trip hop are a big deal right now?

In all seriousness, it would be reasonable to fear that james K (Jamie Krasner) might’ve leaned into today’s hottest retreads on Friend only to fall flat, but she does nothing of the sort. Friend is super cool, super balanced, and bold. Everything is careful.

Scandinavia: Last year’s Danish scene profile was one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written, and Scandinavian indie remained central to my listening this year. Here are 5 obsessions:

1. Smerz - Big city life

Smerz have always been good, and their debut album + three prior EPs all have gems worth spinning. Big city life feels cool and collected all the way through, wandering through the psychedelic experience of urban young adulthood with due trippiness and swagger. They feel like songs made by the effortlessly cool, but every word reveals a painstaking logic that requires careful study, night out after night out. There are definitely some standout hits (“You got time and I got money,” “Feisty,” “Roll the dice”), but I’m convinced by every beat.

2. Spellcaster - The shadow channel

Danish composer H. Hartvig Nielsen is anybard, the protagonist of Spellcaster’s three connected releases. The shadow channel is the third album in a trilogy made up of walkie-talkie transmissions, melodic connective tissue, and indecipherable sonic ephemera. What legible moods form resemble those transmitted over spy movies, where truth and fiction are hard to parse, and where every action or statement is performed with an ulterior motive. Everyone exists as they are, and also, they don’t. In-between-ness is at the core of it all, and it’s absolutely at the core of the shadow channel.

3. MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen - Opening Night

Many big-name musicians have released celebrated albums that toil with the artist’s sense of self as they embark on a life of performances, but MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s album Opening Night feels like the best representation of life as a working musician. What does it feel like to travel to the gig, and what does it feel like to get to “see so much of the world,” only to be confined to a few fixed locations before delivering a solid performance before an audience that’s only tangentially interested in your expression?

4. Anna von Hausswolff - Iconoclasts

Aside from pop and left-field rap, I tend to associate this part of northern Europe with dark, metal/metal-esque music. Anna von Hausswolff’s pop-adjacent post-metal only grew bolder on Iconoclasts, and her voice’s tremendous beauty stood tall with some of her grandest production to date. I often find myself emotional listening to “The Whole Woman,” her collaboration with Iggy Pop.

5. Snuggle - Goodbyehouse

When I interviewed the duo behind Snuggle last year, they were holed up in Berlin, trying their hand at writing proper pop hit to release on their then-nascent project. Vilhelm Strange and Andrea Johansen are veterans of Copenhagen’s indie rock scene, and with Goodbyehouse, they try their hand at music that could be called pop, but it’s naturally shrouded in the kinds of smoky, gazey rock they’ve come to know in their years of performing. It’s a brilliant synthesis that, I think, should put fake freaks like After out of business.

Would-be pop girlies: indie went pop over a decade ago (read Such Great Heights to get the full story), and in a just world, these pop stars would be the main pop girlies of 2025:

1. Gelli Haha - Switcheroo

I used to be really into De Lux, so there’s no way I wasn’t going to like Gelli Haha’s debut, Switcheroo. That said, I like Switcheroo far more than any De Lux project: Angel Abaya’s level of playfulness, emotionality, and toying with doubt make every song come to life and feel relatable in all the wrong ways (complimentary). There’s a defined aesthetic that makes Abaya kind of the Sarah Squirm of music, but all love to Squirm, Gelli Haha feels more clever than shocking. I have a new favorite song after every listen. Some days, it’s “Spit,” and some days, it’s “Pluto isn’t a planet, it’s a restaurant.” But, my money’s on “Bounce House” for video of the year.

2. Ethel Cain - Perverts

Depending on how gay you are, Ethel Cain is definitely a main pop girl. I was completely taken by Cain’s output through Preacher’s Daughter, so I was anxious for what she had next. Of her two big releases this year, I prefer Perverts, a daring exercise in power electronics, drone, and the occasional melodic exercise that has the outlines of both a pop album and a Prurient release. Rarely has any star of this notoriety explored a tradition so far afield and managed to embody it without sacrificing what makes her image, as “Ethel Cain,” function to an audience. I find myself drawn to the title track and “Housofpsychoticwomn” the most; I love the marathon quality of these compositions. They take a pickaxe to my deepest insecurities and split them apart like ore. It’s an addicting feeling.

3. dexter in the newsagent - Time Flies

In any just world, dexter in the newsagent/dexter is a crossover pop girlie, topping the charts in the United Kingdom and United States. South London-based Charmaine Ayoku is, in my opinion, well on her way with this lovelorn and grief-laden mixtape. “Special” became the song of the summer for people looking for musical surprises on Twitter, and the rest of the mixtape offered R&B with a youthful optimism that puts her in conversation with the brighter sides of Brandy and Jojo. dexter is tender, multifaceted, and pensive, but every song has more than enough motion to provide due counterbalance.

4. Erika de Casier - Lifetime

Erika de Casier is arguably the leading figure who’s invigorated the Anglosphere’s interest in Denmark’s left-field pop scene, becoming a favorite among underground popheads at the tail end of the ‘10s and becoming a hitmaker in collaboration with NewJeans and Nick Leon. Her own music is brilliant, if sometimes mired in her preferred references. With Lifetime, de Casier drove head-on into the hazy trip-hop R&B stylings of mid-1990s favorites like Sade and Janet Jackson, delivered with her own understated vocals. They feel like utterances from an angel sent from Cool Heaven. She knows exactly how to make boom-bap drums work for her, and she should ride those into the world of Big Pop.

5. Sudan Archives - The BPM

I’ve kept an eye on Sudan Archives ever since I played “Nont For Sale” on my college radio show, and it’s been extremely satisfying to see her blow up into a beloved underground star. I wasn’t sure if The BPM was going to be for me; the singles felt like unfamiliar gestures that I didn’t think would have the right connective tissue to make sense. I’m glad I was wrong—everything fits together with catchy beats and perfect tempos that inspire you to dance without overshadowing the personality she serves in her vocals.

I cried: It’s important to let it out. Here’s what I chose to listen to while doing that:

1. Mark William Lewis - mark william lewis

There are corners of what American critics might call the London scene that have irked me, and there are other corners that have made their way into my daily listening. Rarely, however, does the oblique music from this space actually tug at my emotions. Enter Mark William Lewis, the evocative guitarist whose dreamy production illuminates his baritone just right. “Ecstatic Heads” gets me every time; Lewis’ voice is mixed with resignation and urgency and his harmonica is deeply affecting.

2. Lucy Liyou - Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name

Liyou returned to her personal archive and found words she’d written in her youth still applied. With a newfound command over her voice and her productive powers, Liyou honors the young woman who penned those lyrics while speaking to her present experience separating from a beloved partner as both prepare for separate moves. You can feel his presence without presence; you can feel the echoes of emotions you felt in your childhood, adolescence, and adulthood crash into each other. Every Video is spiritually profound and an outstanding labor of love between friends who elevate each other’s brilliance.

3. Masma Dream World - PLEASE COME TO ME

I feel like I haven’t seen a ton of love for PLEASE COME TO ME outside of a few outlets (The Wire loved it), but I understand why. It’s a dark, hellish album of recursive, twisted meditations. You can hear the negotiation with demons and nightmares between moments of less charged introspection. I find myself returning to, and being overwhelmed by, the three-song run of Pordeno Me, Seeking Your Protection, and the title track. You get into a trance-ish flow state when you surrender yourself to the album, and I don’t doubt that there are healing qualities embedded throughout.

4. Devin Shaffer - Patience

I tell my friends that, if they want to indulge in music that is openly beautiful, they should give anything Devin Shaffer does a spin. Her take on dreamy, at-times ambient folk is chilly and glistening, absolutely reverent of the talents who came before without sounding at all derivative. Patience is outstanding. Even the interludes are stunners, due moments of reflection and stillness that don’t dispense of the album’s momentum. Shaffer’s songwriting feels more potent than ever, with her and her guitar taking the lead more candidly than before.

5. Rafael Toral - Traveling Light

The first two compositions on Traveling Light have a relatively nebulous form to them, opening the album with a touch of overwhelming emergence before everything coalesces into Toral’s take on familiar forms. Call it a slow Big Bang. They happen to be my favorite pieces on the album, but it’s hard to imagine that they’d stand the same way if they never came to any kind of resolution.

My Heavy Music list: Metal and hardcore feel more divorced from critical analysis than ever, which I fear has allowed the worst detritus to gain exceptional dominance. Heavy music is a broad category, as evidenced by aya and ELUCID’s inclusion in the Roadburn lineup, but I think there’s still an urgent need to identify which albums from the metal and metal-adjacent worlds are making waves. Notice the lack of certain lauded indie-metal labels on here…maybe this was an off year:

1. Kathryn Mohr - Waiting Room

To call what Kathryn Mohr is doing “metal” is absolutely wrong, but Waiting Room shares a lineage with the post-metal singer-songwriters who use the same atmospheric tools to generate oppressive atmospheres. Her music is hypnotic, strange, and cold; when she performs it live, it’s a smudged mess that speaks to a preverbal part of my psyche. There’s nothing not to love about this.

2. Agriculture - The Spiritual Sound

I’ve had a soft spot for Agriculture’s explosive take on black metal/blackgaze for some time, but I wasn’t sure how to take The Spiritual Sound when they dropped “Bodhidharma.” It was pretty cool, but what it highlights about the band isn’t my favorite part of what makes Agriculture, Agriculture. I like melodies that are shrouded in secrecy or beaten into the ground. I like incomprehensible noise passages. The Spiritual Sound has plenty of these, with the right blend of harsh vocals and genuine singing that invoke post-metal (try “Dan’s Love Song” and revel in Dan Meyer’s genuinely lovely voice). I just love this band.

3. Sulfuric Cautery - Killing Spree

Do you want extra bloody, brutal grindcore with snares so booming and growls so guttural you can’t hear the riffs? No? Just me? That’s fine. Sulfuric Cautery put out TWO albums this year, and Killing Spree is about as unhinged as one can get.

4. Dan Meyer - Kneeling

Dan Meyer’s solo work on Kneeling is really only a half-metal album. Side A is unrepentant indie rock that you could play on college radio and find an immediately receptive audience. Listening to “Omen” reminds me so much of what I was hearing in college from garage-adjacent bands. Side B is where you get the metallic works: atmospheric black metal with improvised shrieks. Album closer “A Great Man” should be on my tearjerker list; there is something so jarring about such melancholy, measured piano phrases battling it out with Meyer’s hailstorm shrieks.

5. Shock Narcotic - My Flesh Is Afraid But I Am Not

I’d never encountered Detroit’s Shock Narcotic before, but My Flesh Is Afraid But I Am Not threw me for a total loop. They have the same punk fidelity as a band like Thou, but where Thou is entirely disinterested in being seen as metallic (despite all the metallic things they got going on), Shock Narcotic’s noise punk shows flashes of viscerality you mostly find in grindcore or death metal. There are deadly riffs, hardcore breakdowns, and plenty of guttural nonsense. Where Shock Narcotic overlaps with Thou is in the kinetic energy within every song. “A Mass Suicide In Progress” has to be my favorite, sounding at once like classic death metal and Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack-adjacent hard rock. It’ll fly by if you’re not careful..

Made me believe in indie rock again: I came to be a music obsessive through exploring the archives of indie rock, and I still find myself listening to big names in indie even if I am increasingly finding their music uninteresting. I like having an eye on the culture of indie cred, but it’s a whiny scene full of retreads. These five albums, however, made me fall in love with the scene all over again:

1. Verity Den - Wet Glass

If the idea of being told to check out a shoegaze/dream pop album in late 2025 feels nauseating to you, I understand. It’s been a wild 3-5 years of flanging nonsense. Verity Den is absolutely different, seriously. Their psychedelic take on noisy guitars and cloaked melodies is super refreshing, super spacey, but also great fun. The title track’s guitar melodies are completely infectious and sun-baked. There are dives into politics that feel far from forced; there are noise torrents (like on “Unsolved Mystery”) that feel just as affecting as their impassioned lyrics.

2. Spencer Radcliffe - Ohio Vision

About a year ago, someone in the scene told me that Spencer Radcliffe was preparing new material, but I tried not to think too much of it. I’ve heard many stops-and-starts in the independent sphere, where projects seem to be on the right path but fizzle because of circumstance. I’m grateful that Radcliffe delivered us Ohio Vision. It’s a markedly grown-up, pensive, at-times psychedelic rock album that lets Radcliffe’s mountain-air voice unfurl. When he says “daily driver, runs good, yeah I know what I got,” I feel like I’m driving the Ohio backroads on the way to see family, falling in love with my longtime home again and letting the complicated feelings course through my veins.

3. Kitchen - Blue heeler in ugly snowlight, grey on gray on gray on white

20 of the finest songs ever written by James Keegan, better known as Kitchen, tracking the quotidian anxieties of living on a dying planet while trying to appreciate little curiosities that pop out at DIY shows or in beloved movies. Keegan’s songs have often been clouded by the tricks of occlusion that ‘10s bedroom pop fiends loved (tape hiss, imbalance fuzz-tronics), but this threadbare album is, mostly, just Keegan and his instrumental experiments. They come across with a sincerity and kind eye that has always made Keegan’s music so appealing.

4. Snocaps - Snocaps

As much as I think the Crutchfield sisters can do no wrong, there is a part of me that has sorely missed the punchiness of P.S. Eliot or Swearin’ in a world where a more nakedly country Waxahatchee persists with audiences bigger than ever. To have something like Snocaps, where you can feel Katie pump that energy back up or you can once again enjoy when Alison leads with a more droll affect, reminds me of why I ever aligned myself with the greater indie landscape.

5. Cootie Catcher - Shy at first

In my eyes, Cootie Catcher has been Toronto’s coolest underground indie rock band for some years now, toiling in the Canadian underground alongside labelmates on the undersung Cooked Raw label. Shy at first is propulsive, illuminated twee power pop that has a noisier edge than your typical modern Slumberland outfit, but foregrounding that edge doesn’t sacrifice any of the heart. If you like Bedbug, feeble little horse, and Heavenly, you can find a way into Cootie Catcher.

My Rap List: The major publications that share EOY rap lists have shared polar-opposite favorites (I’m looking at you, Stereogum & Pitchfork), and I think that says a lot of good about the world of rap right now. There’s more than enough good to go around, and every critic has the chance to find what piques their interest. Here’s what piqued mine:

1. Mel V - Chaponomical

By the time “rage” had a name and a scene that could be understood by the critical forces at play, its top players were slowly sanding down the edges. Mel V brings them right back with Chaponomical, blending her Atlanta trap influences with plenty of gunshots and DJ tags thrown out like a warning. It’s a completely infectious energy with a bass and velocity so potent it’ll send you banging your head up and down the same way you might in a good deathcore pit.

2. Lucy Bedroque - Unmusique

I haven’t been able to put this tape down; there’s no one else on the scene this uniquely capable of blending blown-out electronic symphonies across a panoply of digital-native producers with cohesion. I’m completely obsessed with how the electronics and the vocals complement each other on “G6 Anthem,” but you can really see the vocals working at their best on “2010 Justin Bieber.”

3. MexikoDro - Still Goin The EP

Leaning too hard into nostalgic sounds tends to land you right at the bottom of the barrel, but MexikoDro drew the blueprints for plugg; he knows his way around trap better than many of its megastars. Still Goin the EP features some of the finest Atlanta trap stylings that illuminated the radio waves in my college days, but there’s something refreshing about hearing these sounds next to exaltations of simpler, calmer days ahead. “Stuck” and “Marta” let the production sit with the listener for extended loops before he comes in with a patient affect. It’s hard like the Rolexes he buys, but easy on the senses.

4. Rio Da Yung OG - F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through)

After living in an A-market for tours the past two years, it’s been an adjustment to move to Pittsburgh. That adjustment felt crazy when newly freed Rio Da Yung OG announced a 58-night national tour that doesn’t come within three hours of me. Disappointing, for sure, because F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through) is even better than his immediate post-release tape, Free Rio. From the opener, “Different Music,” to my favorite, “Aggressive Flow,” Rio’s best assets are his words, strung together in ways that are goofy, sentimental, and horny within a few flicks of the wrist. For best results, listen in the car on the highway. You’ll have to pay attention to every word and how they flow into each other.

5. Cortisa Star - E.M.O. (Evil Motion Overload)

About this time last year, you might remember a From The Block performance from a then 19-year-old Cortisa Star. Her song “FUN” had all the trappings of regional and internet rap of late delivered with a nonchalance that made it feel like Star is, well, a star. The EP she soon debuted, E.M.O., isn’t necessarily a musical game-changer, but it has the same abrasive glamor that got her all that attention last holiday season. “Call me man, but I don’t give a fuck guess I’m that fuckin’ guy” and “Bein’ super awesome, it’s not somethin’ you misidentify” are the kind of lines that bounce around in your head all day. Are they ingenious bars? Sort of, but the best part of it all is in the delivery.

Did Not Expect To Like As Much As I Did: I love to be pleasantly surprised. I could choose to list my disappointments like my comrades at Endless Scroll, but I’m choosing positivity this year:

1. Austra - Chin Up Buttercup

I’ve never had anything against Austra, but I’ve never completely gotten Austra. The Canadian indie pop artist is very clearly fabulous, but I haven’t found myself gasping at her music the way I have for other left-of-center underground talents. Chin Up Buttercup completely sold me. A few artists have broadened their pop practice to include Y2K-style trance pop as part of their repertoire, and Austra peppers it throughout Chin Up like an expert. “The Hopefulness of Dawn” is a new favorite that I can’t turn off.

2. Geese - Getting Killed

I’ve never been huge on Geese. I didn’t care for Projector or 3D Country, and I kind of thought they’d fade into the depths of the broader indie rock tapestry. I forgot that they’re young and have all the time in the world to reinvent themselves with the help of a vibrant local scene and one of the indie-stry’s most resourced labels. Starting with Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal, I found myself warming up to Geese, and when I finally hit play on Getting Killed, I wasn’t sure if I was more nervous that I’d like it or dislike it. I ended up really liking it, save for “Taxes.” Does becoming a Geese fan in 2025 make me a mark? YES!

3. Cross Record - Crush Me

I think the UK-based artist Emily Cross is very cool, but last year’s album from her band Loma, How Will I Live Without A Body?, felt like their weakest. It had me wondering if Cross and her compatriots still had gas in the tank. With Crush Me, I can confirm that Cross still does, at least. The album itself sounds burdened and tumultuous. “Cutting A Cake” features a bellowing bass and frenetic cello, all thumping against her beautifully stoic vocal performance. Crush Me is full of moments you might expect on a noise rock album or doom track, but they don’t feel out of place among otherwise contemplative performances.

4. Jane Remover - REVENGESEEKERZ

I’m not one of the many people my age (or, really, slightly younger) who stan Jane Remover. I liked Frailty well enough, but I didn’t keep tabs, and I found myself wholly disinterested in Census Designated. Jane Remover won me over entirely this year. Revengeseekerz is a brilliant explosion of digital trickery and alternative rap, becoming one of those defining texts of late-era rage. Their album as Vanishing, Ghostholding, possesses its own brilliance, but I’ll take the unruly energy of Revengeseekerz over that any day.

5. Just Mustard - WE WERE JUST HERE

I’ve never cared about Just Mustard, but WE WERE JUST HERE feels like the slap in the face that’ll get me to reevaluate. The title track and super-propulsive “THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE” are some of the finest noise-rock/’gaze-adjacent music I’ve heard all year. Their post-punk practice has led them to the vast network of electronic messes, with dubstep and industrial passages framing singer Katie Bell’s ethereal exercises. I’ve heard a lot of electro-post-punk that sucks, but this has all the elements working in harmony.

Like all too many of us, I relied on Spotify’s algorithms to spoonfeed new music to me for years; I soaked up my Discover Weekly religiously until it broke and fed me fake music for several weeks straight in late 2020. My Discover Weekly had always been hit-or-miss, anyway. It tended to show me songs by artists I was already following but hadn’t yet saved to my library. However, I have to give kudos to the nonsense algorithm for sharing fanclubwallet’s “Interstate” with me. The three-minute soft heater is as catchy as a Morningwood hit and charming as Frankie Cosmos. “Interstate” was Hannah Judge’s third single as fanclubwallet, the first being a cover of “This Must Be The Place” and the second being the moody, almost gazey “Fike.”

Over time, it’s been fun to watch Judge grow as an artist and stay true to her ideals. Shortly after I started following her, she released “Car Crash in G Major,” which grew into a minor streaming hit that had industry figures pounding on her front door, eager to link with new talent in the post-Clairo, post-mxmtoon, post-Billie Eilish world of “bedroom pop.” The song remains a live favorite more than four years after its initial release. Judge is a longtime music nerd with a particular admiration for Spencer Radcliffe, Hop Along, Owen Ashowrth, and more famous do-it-yourselfers. She and her close ring of collaborating friends held onto their creative vision and DIY ideals while crafting music under the industry’s watchful eye, and their subsequent output, 2021’s Hurt is Boring EP and 2022’s You Have Got To Be Kidding Me, showcase an indie rock singer-songwriter with rich interiority and strong balance between vulnerability + restraint. Their two most recent EPs, 2023’s Small Songs Vol. 1 and 2024’s Our Bodies Paint Traffic Lines, represent a project in transition, growing from a solo endeavor into a proper band.

When I thought of putting this series together, I knew I had to talk to Hannah. I’d organized a feature of Hannah and her growing toy keyboard collection for Slumber Mag just before the Hurt Is Boring rollout, so connecting like this made sense. I have Hurt Is Boring on cassette. Judge is someone who wears her influences and her hopes for the music world on her sleeve, best showcased by the label that she and her partner-in-crime Michael Watson started, Club Records. When we first connected, we were both getting our feet wet as more formal participants in the musical ecosystem. Now, Judge is a multifaceted DIY leader, working overtime to heap love onto her friends in the Ottawa, Ontario scene while her personal musical project matures with her.

DC: One thing I go back to on a regular basis is Small Songs because it reminds me so much of what I listened to in college. It stands out from some of your music because your music is typically more hi-fi and the songs are full length. These are truly short. They remind me of shorter Owen Ashworth hits.

HJ: Loooove him! We played a show together last winter, and he played a bunch of stuff from the new album and I was like YES! Soooo good!

How did you settle on making something like Small Songs?

I knew that we were gonna put out OUR BODIES PAINT TRAFFIC LINES and it would be a full-band EP with the biggest sounding songs, fully produced. So, I thought I kinda wanted to show both ends of the spectrum. I wanted to strip it back to just me, I did all the production, and it kinda is back to my roots. In high school, I used to make really sad instrumental music, no lyrics. I was really inspired by Blithe Field and Teen Suicide/Ricky Eat Acid and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. I had these songs that didn’t feel like they’d fit anywhere else, so I hunkered down in my room when I was depressed at the time. Here’s what it’s like when it’s just me and here’s what it’s like when my best friends in the whole world are all together.

What’s it been like to create and run this label, Club Records, with someone so close to you?

It’s been awesome! Me and Michael started working together on music in 2019, maybe even 2018. They’ve been a big part of fanclubwallet, and when we started they produced and I had never really put out music before. They’ve been putting out music with various bands since like 2014, so they knew how to pitch music and upload to Spotify, stuff I didn’t know how to do. Club Records kind of started because so many people asked how to do this and that and Michael sort of already had one. When I was going through the album cycle, I’d forget things I needed to do, too. So, we thought we should put it out on a website for our own reference and to show our friends. It’s grown from there: Club Records has the resources page, which needs a slight update, but it grew into local bands here in Ottawa – I’ve seen a lot of my favorite bands just stop because it doesn’t go anywhere and they don’t know how to build an online presence. This is kind of selfishly my project for helping my favorite local bands stay afloat and navigate around unspoken boundaries that are hard to find answers for. This has tended to be local bands where we’ve had some creative involvement like production or visuals.

With Club Records, there’s considerable sonic diversity. Do you see that continuing?

I love getting to be involved with more genres of music. Hit us up! Straight-up pop, R&B, deathcore, bring it on.

For as long as I’ve known your work, you’ve championed the Ottawa scene - what has the Ottawa scene given to you, and if you had unlimited resources, what would you want to offer it?

The Ottawa scene has given me the joy of music. I made mix CDs as a kid, but in 2015, I went to my first ever local show at a venue called Gabba Hey, which is about to have their first show since lockdown. I saw Alex G play there, Nicole Dollanganger, and tons of local bands. I think that, if I hadn’t had access to all-ages venues in high school, I wouldn’t have become as involved. I did photography, and I met a guy named David Sklubel and he did Local Ottawa Live! I filmed all these bands and did interviews and got into 19+ shows as a kid with a press pass. I built the confidence to make my own music and show it to other people. It’s given me friendship and music.

With unlimited resources, I’d start my own all-ages venue because we lost so many.

Did you grow up in Ottawa?

I did!

Did you grow up around a lot of music or did you fixate on it at some point?

I was an only child and had no friends; I got bullied a lot. But, I did learn to make jump-cut music videos to like, Katy Perry songs in middle school. So, when I was 11, girls were making videos to Charli XCX / Marina and the Diamonds. Because of these cool YouTuber 15-year-old girls, I found cool music earlier. I spent all my time listening to YouTube recommended stuff. My parents aren’t terribly musical but they were theater majors and they are artistic enough.

I made my mom take me to see Mac Demarco. She left halfway through the concert; she haaaaated him.

I think my parents accompanied me to Beach House and Best Coast; I think they enjoyed them.

I’ve taken my parents to so many concerts. We waited for 10 hours for The Killers. My mom let me see Grimes when I was 16.

I’ve never seen her!

It was the perfect time to see her because she’d just put out Art Angels.

Speaking of Grimes - if I remember correctly, didn’t you keep up with music at university in Montreal?

I moved to Montreal for university. Within a week, some random guy invited me to a show, and we ended up at a DIY venue called The Bog. It was the coolest place I’d ever seen. It was in an apartment building, so you had to wander through the halls, then down to the basement. I mentioned I used to take photos of bands in Ottawa and that I wanted to get involved. I was then at every single show and spent more time there than at college. It was a really great place and I loved that I did that. I felt very safe and included there.

Has it informed how you do things in Ottawa?

I think that being raised on the importance of safe spaces in music venues and accessibility of people, so it’s obvious who to talk to if there’s a problem. Inclusivity as a practice in venues has been important to me. I wish I ran a venue so I could put these into practice more; we don’t do much booking with Club Records.

As a musician and as someone with a chronic illness, you’ve been vocal about disability justice in music. What’s missing these days?

I wish there were more masked events. I know there are some in Ottawa that Debaser is putting on. They’re a really awesome booking agency. I’ve gone to fewer house shows. I don’t feel super great about going to them because I’m always really worried. There’s not a ton of accessible venues in Ottawa right now because so much stuff is closed. SAW Gallery is doing great and Debaser is doing great. In DIY, that stuff could be talked about a little more.

I came across your music the way a lot of people do - my Discover Weekly fed me “Interstate” and I liked that. What was it like being a sort of Spotify unicorn for a minute?

It was super crazy for me. When I started putting out fanclubwallet music, I’d been doing stuff in my old band, Gullet. The goal was always just to get to play house shows. I didn’t expect that anyone would listen to fanclubwallet beyond the Ontario circuit. My dream was to do the Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough, smaller town Canadian circuit. I was also really sick at the time. So, when Interstate got on playlists, Michael banged on the door to announce that I was on these sick playlists. I was like “oh that’s great but it stops there I’m sure.” Then, when “Car Crash” came out, I was in the hospital, and I checked my phone and suddenly I had dozens of emails from record labels - like, what the hell? I appreciated that Michael had some experience with this, so they had some insight. That’s one reason that I do Club Records. I don’t want this to happen to someone and then they sign with the first person they talk to.

Exactly - so many people do that and it doesn’t go the way they think it’s gonna go.

It’s hard when you’re young and excited. You’re young and the coolest thing is to be on a label. But you don’t necessarily know if they’re gonna rob you blind.

You went with a distributor deal instead?

I was super, super lucky. I went with AWAL. It was a good deal; 75% of royalties after recoup go to me and it’s not a long deal. I recouped, we’re good, they were super chill, and they loved that I made all my own music videos. I didn’t want any label to shape me into something that I’m not, so AWAL was great for just letting me do my own thing.

It seems like a good avenue for people who get caught in the streaming world but want to retain creative control. I’ve seen distributors who do label services but distro is their game.

Yeah, like Amuse, I’ve heard good things, too. I was lucky that I could build a good team at the beginning. I had to talk to a lot of people and vet people quickly. That was super overwhelming.

What is your relationship to those songs now?

It feels like it does when Radiohead plays “Creep” whenever we play “Car Crash.” We played a secret house show last year where we started “Okay, this is Car Crash in G Major” and then played it 10x speed, which I’d love to do more but it seems rude.

I still love those songs. If I listen to something like “Come On, Be Cool” it does feel a little cringey.

There did feel like a massive difference between Hurt is Boring and the full-length.

The Hurt is Boring stuff is largely from the Gullet era. I still love all those old songs, and I love “Car Crash,” which is deeply inspired by Casiotone. They feel kind of silly, but I still see myself as similar to who I was when I wrote those.

How did you develop a relationship with the music of, like, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Hop Along?

I sound Casiotone for the Painfully Alone through 8Tracks. I was obsessed with 8Tracks, I loved making playlists. I used to listen to this one that was called “Loitering in the Art Room” and it introduced me to so much cool music. I loved the song “Tonight was a Disaster” my Casiotone, which I think was earlier, and “White Corolla” is my favorite song ever. It’s my jumping-off point for every song that I’ll write for the rest of my life. If I can write a “White Corolla” I’ll be good. For Hop Along, my friend Jonas showed me. He was a graphic novelist and he stayed with us for a while; he taught me about art and showed me good music. He showed me the Hop Along / Queen Ansleis stuff and I thought that this was the kind of music I wanted to make and that I could really do it. There’s such a sense of warmth and community on that album. There’s tons of glockenspiel and dinky little instruments. Frances Quinlan’s songwriting is so interesting; they’re just one of the best storytellers ever. With like, “lo-fi” music, I felt like that kind of stuff made me feel like I could make it someday.

You release music videos comparatively often, and they’re often pretty unserious. Often, there’s play involved. How do you get the vision for your videos?

[It’s funny because] there’s lyrics that are fun and there are lyrics about cutting your skin off; I love to get pretty gross with it. With the music videos, I just listen to the song and I close my eyes and whatever pops into my head is where we end up. I am a cartoon-y person. I make cartoons, so I’ve never thought about going the super-serious route with the videos. The closest I’ve gotten with that is maybe “youve got to be kidding me.” Before working with David, I did those myself, and we’d be making these in one day.

There are two videos with abandoned buildings involved, too.

When I was a teenager, I was big on abandoned houses and urban exploration. I was on some forums for that. For “Fike,” I thought we needed to film it in this abandoned house.

It fits the mood of the song!

I agree!

It’s moodier than many others.

When we play it live, we play it super shoegaze-y. I feel the live version is much better than the recorded version.

Visual arts, comic writing / cartoons are big to your practice. When did you make that a part of your everyday life and how do you keep it part of your everyday life?

Music and art have been intertwined; I’ve always listened to music while making art. I have a problem relinquishing creative control and it’s certainly cheaper to do it myself. For the album, this person I went to high school with, Meredith Smallwood, did the artwork. Labels often help you find artists to work with, but it’s really important to me to curate all of the artistic components. If I don’t know what to draw for something, I always have an artist in mind who I want to draw a representation of it.

Who are some musicians who’ve made you feel like you can create the music you want to make?

Casiotone, Hop Along, Baths - all very much important inspirations. Blithe Field, everything that Spencer Radcliffe has done.

How about visual artists?

Artists: Jonas who often goes by “Goonface” and who wrote The Adventures of Jonas was really inspirational to me. My friends who are artists, like Etta, who plays as toothbrusher2000, is an incredible cartoonist. There’s Meredith Smallwood, of course.

What are you listening to?

“I’m So Serious” by Daryl Johns has kept me going. So good. The new Black Moth Super Rainbow song “Demon’s Glue.” I loved the fantasy of a broken heart album. That album? It’s a 10. I listened to it on a walk home from work and felt like it was life-changing.

What’s work right now?

I work at a community center. I just kinda do Club Records from there.

What’s exciting you about 2025?

There’s definitely more fanclubwallet music. That’s on the record, go ahead and mention it. We have a ton of stuff written. New music is exciting me and I’m working on a graphic novel.

photos courtesy of the artist

Tape Collection Interviews: Lately, I’ve felt “uninspired” as a writer, as you can probably tell from this newsletter’s dormancy. I’m not interested in reacting to what’s talked about on social media on a given day. So, I’m going back to my roots and interviewing artists who’ve got projects in my tape collection. I don’t have as much to say as I thought I did, so I talked to people who might have something to say. Simple enough!

It’s a balm for me: Dylan’s experience of coming into this music online and feeling kinship with people who had stupid, hard-to-quantify feelings that made it onto homespun music resonates with my own. I can remember finding “Jimi Bleachball” by Foxes in Fiction at 16 (via Pandora!) and being completely taken by it. I then remember listening to the album it lives on, Swung From the Branches, and being pretty challenged. It led me to Orchid Tapes’ Tumblr, where I found music by Sam Ray, Rachel Levy, Mat Cothran, Alex G, and so many more before I was out of high school. One month before leaving Cleveland for college, I saw Cothran headline as Elvis Depressedly with Mitski and Gabby’s World opening, all coming from different corners of this nascent, personal, cheesy indie space, and I was permanently hooked. Farewell to the days of swallowing corporate indie on Sirius XMU; there’s something deeper out there.

By the time I sunk my teeth into the bedroom pop universe, itself an uneasy conglomerate of geographies, labels, and musicians, it had exploded into a proper trend with big indie labels like Domino and Run For Cover backing the most popular practitioners. Some artists positioned themselves as singer-songwriters, others as rock bands, others as haunting electronic composers. Their shared reverence for homemade music, do-it-yourself practice, and willingness to, at risk of cringe, “go there” tied them together beyond just shared time and place. Little blogs from Post-Trash to The Le Sigh and tape labels from Birdtapes to Z Tapes kept the fire burning. 

Oddly enough, bedroom pop’s turning point came when The Le Sigh was planning to retire its coverage. Toward the end of the short-lived but influential blog’s life, its editors compiled their third compilation of female and non-binary musicians on clear cassettes with the help of Father/Daughter Records (in this scene, the cassette was everything; the recorded tape hiss on top of the tape hiss that came from playing the recording doubled the warmth). The comp featured demos, b-sides, and loosies from blog favorites like Fern Mayo, Katie Dey, Florry’s Francie Cool and Remember Sports’ Addie Pray. It also featured a new song from Boston-based Claire Cottrill, better known as Clairo, called “Pretty Girl.” 

I was gallivanting around Europe at the time, on a break from American indie culture, studying feminist theory with a bunch of liberal arts students. So, I wasn’t aware that “Pretty Girl” took on a life of its own after the comp’s release. Today, the video young Cottrill made for it in her room is achingly close to 100 million views. The young DIY enthusiast, with the help of savvy folks in her orbit, inked deals with management, a label, and more. Cottrill is two albums plus several EPs, loosies, and features into an alt pop career that has careened between sounds. But, her shadow over bedroom pop loomed so large, it couldn’t help but alter its course permanently.

If you read Dylan’s piece while listening to “Pretty Girl,” you can pick out the specific components that make Cottrill’s song prototypical bedroom pop. The plainspoken, low-fidelity vocals, chintzy keyboard, and bedroom visuals check the boxes. Plus, it’s a catchy tune, hard not to love. Another early hit, “Flaming Hot Cheetos,” is rife with bedroom-pop-keys and sincere vocals. But, both songs feel a good distance removed from The Microphones of 15 years prior or even Frankie Cosmos. Cottrill and her collaborators dabbled more heavily in downtempo, R&B, and hip hop, which was on its own trajectory toward all things chill and minimalist. A coterie of stoner-friendly downtempo R&B-informed pop artists seemed to grow to prominence at once around Clairo: Cuco, boy pablo, beabadoobee, Rex Orange County, BENEE…the list goes on. While these musicians are all doing something different and have their own distinct histories, geographies, and scenes of origin, their proximity is not unlike that of the lo-fi bedroom pop scene Dylan describes, but there are a few key differences.

Once a thing in music, whether it’s a sound, artist, genre or whatever, becomes a thing, the suits find ways to keep that thing propped up. At Spotify, that might look like new playlists, either genre primers or curatorial ventures like Lorem or POLLEN. On YouTube, that might look like David Dean Burkhart pivoting from publishing found-footage music videos on YouTube to posting dozens of favorite songs with their accompanying album art per week in full collaboration with publicists. This switch coinciding with the gradual, then all-at-once, shift in the aesthetics of “lo-fi bedroom pop” reinforced the shift’s inevitability. Playlists and YouTube aggregators—Burkhart, thelazylazyme, and i’m cyborg but that’s ok, among others—shared single after single from rising artists in this space, reinforcing to newer, younger, and broader audiences what the bedroom pop sound would be at the close of the 2010s. By the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, when BENEE and Gus Dapperton’s bubblegum Billie Eilish song “Supalonely” became the song to use on Tik Tok, bedroom pop’s transition was functionally complete. Some of early lo-fi bedroom pop’s favorite practitioners had fallen in disgrace, others had pivoted towards entirely different music-making practices commensurate with their newfound budgets. The garden wasn’t being tended.

It would be one thing to lament the genre’s transition to a different sound. I’ve seen plenty of Twitter tears poured over that. For several reasons, I don’t especially care. Some of the music is quite good (listen to waterbaby) and genres have always been porous. But now, in 2024, I look back at some of these rising stars and wonder where they’re at. For a hot minute now, it seemed like the boy pablos, mxmtooms, chloe moriondos, and Frances Forevers of the world were going to be the defining alternative acts of the 2020s. While they all have music careers that are nothing to sneeze at, the truth is much more complicated, especially as the industry forgoes artist development with the expectation that the young upstarts they find on Tik Tok will be ready-made performers and record slingers. To the dismay of industry heads, of course, they’re just as human as the last batch of musicians who rode a hype wave.

In 2020, NBC and other major news aggregators’ curiosity about bedroom pop felt like a watershed moment for the genre, but today, bedroom pop feels somewhat bygone. The upper echelons of the music industry are pushing their pop stars farther than ever before and regional rap has had a moment, culminating in the unlikely celebrity of Ice Spice. Bedroom pop will always have an outsized space in the streaming world, whether it be on YouTube or Spotify, but its place in the conversation is sort of quiet, kind of like the sounds it makes. The subgenre in the indie-major crossover space right now, however, is shoegaze. Eli Enis has been a fierce cataloguer of America’s growing shoegaze scenes and the tidal wave of shoegaze and hazy slowcore that has had Tik Tok in a tizzy. The winds are changing course.

What’s happening with shoegaze and slowcore feels not unlike bedroom pop: devotees of the critically adored subgenres like Blue Smiley and Horse Jumper of Love are cult favorites, and boundary-pushers like They Are Gutting A Body Of Water are getting more and more attention. Frontman Doug Dulgarian’s reactions on Twitter to TAGABOW’s newfound attention and the constant chatter about what a trailblazer he is of “Philly shoegaze” are met with an uneasiness I can remember Sam Ray embodying a decade ago when he was so ascendant in bedroom pop, a label he didn’t really take on himself. There’s extremely exciting new music being made in this space. Bands like feeble little horse, Full Body 2, A Country Western, Spirit of the Beehive, Knifeplay, trauma ray, Bleary Eyed, and the adjacent but wholly different bands with which they play from @ to Wednesday are all really onto something. While this is unfolding, the industry is latching onto Whirr-inspired bedroom shoegaze projects from young viral upstarts like quannnic, Wisp, flyingfish, julie, and so many more. Their definition of shoegaze or slowcore, and how they make it, differs meaningfully from prior generations. It’s inspired uneasiness from shoegaze musicians and critics alike, but that skepticism is nothing compared to the enthusiasm being poured onto these new musicians.

What their influence will do to the genre’s memory and present position is basically impossible to know, but I fear it will follow the same trajectory as bedroom pop. Hopefully, all of these young musicians can grow into the writers and performers they aspire to be and dazzle audiences for generations to come, setting the agenda for the alternative scene with every single and album. But, I don’t have faith in the industry to support that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these young musicians pivot towards making music that’s more true to their own form a la Jane Remover or even Girlpool before their split. There will be a postmortem like Dylan’s for the late ‘10s/early ‘20s shoegaze scene when it inevitably wanes in favor of something else. Young fans will find themselves disoriented as the modes of gazing their favorite artists’ chose due to necessity or reverence for the subculture’s originators, from A.R. Kane to my bloody valentine, are replicated with an unseemly cleanliness. It won’t offer the same emotional resonance; it’s not equipped to do so. 

Spotify already has playlists like side effects and IRL Angel to help catalyze the transition from subculture to…well, the purgatory of whatever bedroom pop is now. Everything feels like a death knell after what happened to the first scene I loved, so hopefully I’m wrong, but also, I feel like this is the natural life cycle of hype. It’ll be exciting to see how the artists I love continue to make music that’s true to them. That’s all I could ever want, as a fan and a critic.

Here is a list of favorite projects from that time, place, and sonic space. Some are active today, some are not, some under different auspices, none of them sound quite the same, and all a privilege to return to:

bedbug

if i die in mississippi

Infinity Crush

Boosegumps

RL

Mouse Trap

Foxes In Fiction

Happy Trendy

Euphoria Again

Fog Lake

Spencer Radcliffe

Mister Lies

Yohuna

Emily Reo

Ghost Orchard

Brittle Brian

bulldog eyes

Hello Shark

Told Slant

i tried to run away when i was 6

wished bone

Shelf Life

German Error Message

cyberbully mom club

…and more, but i’m almost at max length

Wednesday at Union Transfer, 1/17/2024

Where were you on January 17th? I was playing Stardew Valley when Eric sent me media reporter Max Tani’s post containing the Anna Wintour-signed memo announcing that Pitchfork would be subsumed by GQ. I looked at it, winced, and went back to playing before scrolling Twitter 45 minutes later to see the slew of layoff announcements, tweet-length elegies, and interpretations as to why this happened. A few short hours later, with a weird thought cloud clogging up airspace in my lungs, I went to Union Transfer with my partner Eric, an occasional Pitchfork contributor, to see the first show of Wednesday and Hotline TNT’s winter tour. It did not elide me that both bands received Best New Music accolades from the blog and that they helped fan both bands’ upward trajectories to the heights they’re seeing. That includes, of course, the time they gave Twin Plagues a 7.4, a high score that still managed to ruffle the feathers of people who thought it was a guaranteed 9. Not that it matters, but I think 7.4 is reasonable, if not even a tad high by their methodology. That’s coming from a certified Twin Plagues enjoyer and Tiffany Blue vinyl owner.

As we watched outlets like MTV News, Buzzfeed News, Bandcamp Daily and more either cease or (dramatically) curtail their operations/staffing, I felt like an outlet like Pitchfork might be vulnerable to downsizing, but nothing quite like this. The longtime independent blog that eventually came under Conde Nast ownership in 2015 started in 1996 and grew to be synonymous with music criticism as other outlets fell away or changed course, namely through their daily album reviews with accompanying scores out of a possible 10 point zero. While its journalistic focus has always felt ahead of the game on music, it felt especially potent in these past few years, with greater attention paid to music from the Global South and a dedicated hip-hop column. After years of music media rockism that even Pitchfork played a role in, it felt like someone in big media was at least paying lip service to global musical cultures. I felt personally illuminated in a way I haven’t in a while, even if the blog served as an imperfect discovery platform. After years of kind of treading water, I was discovering again thanks to not only their publications, but their writers, staff and freelance, who maintained their own online presences.

People much smarter than me have provided strong analysis as to why this likely happened (union busting) and what this means for the practice of criticism (nothing good), for the work of women and people of color in musical culture (less), and more. Even among people who lightly clowned on Pitchfork and its readership, there’s a general consensus (aside from people who want their definition of indie rock to reign supreme, as it might have, but not because of Pitchfork but, I think, because of Apple) that a desiccated Pitchfork isn’t good for music media at large. I look at my own inbox and see exciting promotions from noise artists, forward-thinking punks, extreme metal bands, and more, and wonder where the hell I can pitch any of them. While there are some places, the reality is that they’re dwindling, and the little money they can scrounge up isn’t going towards critics in the age of access journalism. This is the same media landscape that offered full-time positions to journalists who are fans of Taylor Swift or Beyonce to write paeans to both stars full-time when the staff writer job at a critical publication is nearly extinct.

On my end, as someone who contributes to a handful of sites and who pitched Pitchfork a grand total of 12 times (no luck, but onward we push), I’m struck to see the rest of music have to continue on even as coverage opportunities evaporate. Not only do the bands keep playing and recording and touring, but their publicists keep sending emails, press releases, private streams. We’re about to hear some of the best work from my favorites, like The Umbrellas, Moor Mother, Astrid Sonne, Waxahatchee, Ben Frost…the list is endless. That’s what I want to focus on again. I’m tired of approaching albums and thinking about what to do with them, other than celebrate them with what platform I have.

Over the last semester, my output shrank to once a month. This semester, I’m bringing it back up to twice a month. Then, I graduate from urban planning school in May. I will keep doing twice a month until I can’t handle it or feel like I can sustain more. I tried to make this a longform-only platform; truth is, I don’t always have a longread in me. I shouldn’t force that. Forcing myself to have those kinds of takes sounds like nonsense.

Either way, I speak for myself and a lot of fellow bloggers I admire, from Our Band Could Be Your Wife, Step One of A Plan, I Enjoy Music, Inbox Infinity, No Expectations, and literally so many more, when I say that shit feels so weird in music media right now and we are grateful for the little podiums we have to share our favorite media with subscribers. I never thought of myself as a person who’d have any. You’re an intrepid few.

Speaking of platforms: the plan, for now, is to migrate everything off Substack. This platform has a Nazi problem. It’s also, in all honestly, not as user-friendly on my end as I am told other platforms are. The good news: you don’t have to do anything. I can migrate you all over.

So what am I listening to? What excites me, musically, in 2024?

The Umbrellas - Fairweather Friend

Vintage-inspired jangle pop that lives in a twee neighborhood. I saw them play in late 2021 in Ohio; it was one of my favorite performances of the whole year at an otherwise not-great show. The new album comes out next week and it’s super, super satisfying. It’s an outstanding follow-up to their debut self-titled album, a true Slumberland Records knockout.

Moor Mother - The Great Bailout

I haven’t even heard this one yet. It drops March 8th and I’ve yet to ask for an advance stream. I’m too scared. Moor Mother, Kyle Kidd, Mary Lattimore, Raia Was, Lonnie Holley, Aaron Dilloway, Vijay Iyer and more all on one album…I just know this one is going to hurt me. Maybe you read what I wrote on the last Raia Was LP Captain Obvious; more importantly, you should listen to it. Same goes for everything Kyle Kidd has ever done, like their own solo album and Mourning [A] BLKstar.

Astrid Sonne - Great Doubt

There’s a nonzero chance that, if you’re reading this, you were really into ML Buch’s 2023 album Suntub, are excited for Erika de Casier’s next album, or are otherwise charmed by Smerz. There’s something going on in Scandinavian alt-pop that has acts all over the world calling in help to get that special something. London-based Copenhagen-originating Astrid Sonne has built a name for herself as the experimental violist of this bunch, and her upcoming album Great Doubt is totally, totally sick. “Do you wanna” is already one of my favorite songs of the year and I have no reason to believe it won’t be come December.

Gerycz/Powers/Rolin - Activator

Cleveland experimental is a very special kind of experimental, to me, and not just because I lived there for over 20 years. This trio — Jayson Gerycz, Jen Powers, Matthew Rolin — is one of the finest sets of instrumental collaborators this side of the Mississippi. Partially improvised and partially structured, Activator sees the bursts of drumming and swells of dulcimer reach new corners of beauty I hadn’t yet seen myself. This album is already out; let it wash over you.

Armbruster - Can I Sit Here

Many know Dear Life Records for helping to break out MJ Lenderman and Florry to wider audiences. There’s little doubt that the rock, country, and other lyric-driven records that Dear Life puts out have a special appeal to the Heads out there. I really, really like to go to Dear Life Records for all kinds of instrumental music, too. In Armbruster, the sound art project of Troy, NY-based Connor Armbruster, they have something extremely special in Can I Sit Here. The composer distorted the shit out of his electric violin to create a sound panoply that sounds somewhere between drone metal and gentle ambient, weighty but not enraging, cathartic but not bloody. It is a warm, messy album written in the wake of death, and it feels like it. It feels contemplative and mournful. It feels, of course, reflective. It feels unbelievable.

Music exists. That’s what I’m choosing to believe, now and for however long it continues to do so.

My setup as I publish this at Caphe Roasters in northeastern Philly. Our internet is out today.

I was going to quit. I wasn’t going to quit because I was upset with music or anything like that, but I was getting tired. I made the right choice to go to graduate school in my preferred field, city planning, but I wasn’t prepared for what kind of mental toll it would take on me, or the physical manifestations that decline would have. I took a hard look at what I could take off my plate and writing about music was right there. The onetime hobby had become a side hustle that compiled school stress. 

But I couldn’t, and didn’t, follow through with that resolution. I’m glad for that.

I rolled back a few things, of course. I wrote considerably less for a few small blogs, ones I still read daily. But, compared to what I wanted to accomplish with other outlets and, eventually, my own little e-newsletter, I felt excited to dive in more closely. What I’ve gotten to do with Paste as a freelancer, for example, has surprised me. As editor Matt Mitchell grew comfortable in their role and we developed more rapport, I could see the possibilities widen. I think what Paste has been able to accomplish in the music vertical is considerable; what role I might have played with my reviews, especially, in elaborating their curatorial vision feels meaningful for the readers and for myself as a writer. Thank you, Matt!

As a music fan, I can feel myself gravitating, again, away from the indie rock backbone I’d built in college and closer to experimental, electronic, and neoclassical experiences. I think, with Paste, I’ve been able to explore that which is familiar and novel to me, exacting my adjudicating eye on indie rock staples like Slow Pulp or Fenne Lily while tackling electronic oddballs like Kate NV or Laurel Halo. Even better, I’ve gotten to wed the two influences through features on progressive output from Mandy, Indiana, and L’Rain, two of my absolute favorites this year. As we come to understand indie rock’s specific influence on media between, like, 2005 and 2015, I think I better understand my place in its influential web. I came of age at the middle and tail end of that period; its influence in 2023 is still substantial but much different. Media is, kind of, adapting. 

I also think I have a stronger idea of what organized, for-profit media can actually accomplish, and I have a stronger idea of what that means for people who want to write. It was hard when I felt like I’d found a new avenue through which to share music writing the way I knew how in MTV News and it shuttered, leaving what content I’d prepared for them without a home (luckily, my feeble little horse interview was rehomed at Paste). It was even harder for the folks who’d been working to make the site the success that it was. We still hate the pursuit of growth for growth’s sake. The gradual enshittification of all kinds of platforms, including music media, is giving life a new grossness. On social media, it looks like making the platform experience less enjoyable in for users who are connected to other users and communities they’ve built all in service of profit. On a music media site, that looks like overloading the site’s usability with ads and turning to generative AI for content because what readers remain are attached to the site. It’s infected all corners of music media and permanently destroyed full-time jobs. I’m curious to see how criticism will adapt.

It’s clearer now that holding your own critical platform is essential to facilitating the progress I want to make as a writer. Blogs aren’t there to make it happen for me; you’re kind of supposed to arrive with a beat.  It’s incumbent upon me to generate my own platform, but I have to put that second to establishing the urban planning career I still intend to have. So, when my social media is private, or my newsletter doesn’t update for a few weeks (sorry), I know I’m not helping myself in that arena. I know it makes bigger platforms reticent to look at me as a person with an independent voice. I could get frustrated by that, but the more I follow writers who absolutely have their own independent voice, a critical lens, and a level of sophistication in their interaction with music that I want for myself, I understand what’s on me and what isn’t (check out some new favorites).

It’s through that platform that I’ve been able to elaborate some of everyday concerns in music and urbanism (the fundraising machine in schools, nightlife and transit, and more), and especially in the music space, I’ve gone deeper in a couple of the musical curiosities I have and hope to explore more cohesively. Take my interviews with salvia palth for Paste and sign crushes motorist for this newsletter. I’m curious to unpack the history and echoes of the “bedroom pop” scene I was enamored with at the end of high school and early in college; I think they have a greater impact than is fully understood. Celebrities like Alex G and Clairo emerged from those spaces, albeit much differently. The story of “bedroom pop” is a part of the story of streaming, celebrity-making, of “honesty” in music, of peculiarities in stylistic revivals (think Duster’s obscene popularity among the youths). It’s a familiar story with its own quirks; every microgenre has a story like it. Understanding the origins and echoes of a stylistic and cultural impulse is essential for understanding the next one, the next one, and the next one. I think Eli Enis’s exploration of the online “shoegaze” scene is a companion to this phenomenon, one where young people are turning to what technologies and sounds are available to them to channel their emotions because angsty music they can relate to is not being made in the industry at present.

Following writers who have expertise in music that’s unfamiliar to me, especially from locations far from where I live, has been huge over the last few months. I have an excitement for music I haven’t had in a while. Getting to enjoy music from DJ K, Duke, or Ninety One has reinvigorated my appreciation for music discovery. There’s a whole world of music out there, and I don’t have to ignore it just because it’s unfamiliar. It’s essential to my practice as a writer and fan to engage with wholly unfamiliar material and learn how to talk about it meaningfully. There’s a great crop of writers and fans who’ve helped me do that just by posting what’s got them excited. That’s a kind of engagement with music you can’t replicate in the magazines.

I will keep doing this thing, whatever it is, in 2024. I’ll write a bio for you. I’ll review that album. I’ll pitch you. Perhaps I won’t do it daily or even weekly, I never have, but I want to use what skills I have to uplift music that means something. Let’s see how that goes.

And for good measure, here’s a graphic representation of 100 of my favorite albums this year (top 25% or so if what I listened to). I removed several Philadelphia or Cleveland-affiliated albums from friends; they’ll be getting their own newsletter post.

Me @ Crosslegged’s release show, Purgatory BK (pc: Eric Bennett)

Every year, musicians release more music than I could possibly listen to, yet I try to listen to at least 400 new albums a year. I can’t even endorse that as a way to interact with music, but it beats what the streaming model really encourages: constantly replaying and replaying your most popular favorite album. My good friend and esteemed colleague Miranda Reinert astutely linked streaming with “stan culture,” something I’ve been trying to resist within myself by, frankly, overconsuming music. 

However, that “overconsumption” means I come across dozens and dozens of albums that never seem to enter the orbit of consciousness in which my friends navigate. Every fall, I spend extra time reaching through my inbox to enjoy albums I missed over the prior months, and I come across projects that deserve way more than I’d initially given them. So, after a long silence on this newsletter, I’m bringing 11 of those to the table, Patrick Lyons style, and I hope you get a kick out of them, too.

Raia Was - Captain Obvious (Switch Hit Records, October 5th)

FFO: Kate Bush, Wet, Bat For Lashes

I first encountered Raia Was in 2021 when Jessica MacLeish wrote a feature with her for Slumber Mag in advance of her first record, Angel I’m Frightened. I thought her voice was enchanted, but for one reason or another, the album itself didn’t stick with me long. The New York-based avant pop artist lets piano, electronics, and her silvery voice do all the work on her sophomore full-length, Captain Obvious, and it’s full of catchy, dramatic, memorable pop. “If You’re Asking (I’m Offering)” remains my favorite, but “Tough To Love,” “Playing God Again,” “Won’t Shy Away,” and more songs are completely unforgettable. I’ve been showing this one to anyone who will listen. It’s hit after hit of naked beauty that would sound perfect in a pivotal moment on a TV drama (her song “You Are” happens to have been featured in Euphoria).

Apollo Vermouth - Forever Back There (self-released, July 14th)

FFO: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Foxes In Fiction, Kara-Lis Coverdale

As Apollo Vermouth, Milwaukee’s Alisa Rodriguez has made haunting, grief-inflected ambient music living in the nebulous space between drone and pop, as if her songs are ‘80s ballads who’ve decayed over several half-lives. Her last Apollo Vermouth album, Crashing into Nowhere, found a logical home on legendary DIY/dream-pop oriented label Orchid Tapes. Now, six years later, Rodriguez has reinvigorated the Apollo Vermouth project with Forever Back There, another collection of spectral drones that sound like subdued neighbors to pop. Tracks like “Forever Back There” feel akin to Basinski while “Second Evening” feels like a melting OPN entry. If you like ambient/experimental music, you cannot miss this one.

Zoon - Bekka Ma’iingan (Paper Bag Records, April 28th)

FFO: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, OMBIGIIZI, Divide & Dissolve

In the States, we tend to overlook a lot of the best of Canadian independent music. For any number of reasons, it just doesn’t break through the noise, save for Grimes, Arcade Fire, or Alvvays. Coincidentally, Canada is also home to some of the most vital creative scenes for indigenous creators, which I can’t help but wonder if linked to their more robust system of funding the arts. Enter Daniel Monkman, better known as Zoon, a Toronto-based Ojibway-speaking abstract shoegazer, whose solo work and contribution to moccasin-gaze duo Status/Non-Status has pushed boundaries not unlike Divide & Dissolve in the Southern hemisphere. Their sophomore album, Bekka Ma’iingan, is star-studded, featuring Owen Pallett, Lee Ranaldo, and more. It’s a glorious mess of guitar, strings, and human identity. Striking, beautiful, challenging.

Me:You - Field Tapes In Der Trash (American Dreams Records, April 21st)

FFO: L’Rain, keiyaA, Mourning [A] BLKstar

A handful of my subscribers on here are fellow Cleveland-born heads, so chances are strong you’ve seen the members of Me:You making waves one way or another. LaToya Kent and RA Washington are best known as co-founders of Mourning [A] BLKstar, the Afrofuturist collective of singers and instrumentalists dropping forward-thinking beats, soulful horns, and captivating vocals imagining a better, liberated future. As Me:You, their experimental mix of post-punk and R&B is equal parts ghostly and groovy. On Field Tapes In Der Trash, their recordings shimmy through thin air like a fine mist, confusing and captivating like avant-pop from centuries not yet seen. Kent says “we wanted it to sound dirty as fuck,” and in a way, it does: it sticks to your body like an unrecognized entity, implicating you in the futures the duo charts. 

Harvey Waters - Guilt, Avoidance (self-released, April 7th)

FFO: Bedbug, Blithe Field, Melaina Kol

I think the past few years have proven that there’s a meaningful resurgence of the gloomy “bedroom pop” that was once inescapably trendy, or perhaps it never really went away. Strong fanbases for projects like Sundots, waveform*, and Kitchen suggest that such interior music has a bright future. My favorite entry into this sonic space this year has come from Chicago’s Harvey Waters. The project’s frontperson, Daniel Keyes, emailed me this album directly, and I gave the new album a shot when I realized so many bands I admire follow the band’s Instagram. I wasn’t disappointed: the synthesis of slacker rock, shoegaze, even ambient rock on here is like catnip for someone like me, who was practically raised on Joy Void output. It’s beautifully arranged, bringing in keys of all kinds (synth, piano, organ) to give the bummer music the flourishes it can handle. Rewarding AND punishing.

Landowner - Escape the Compound (Born Yesterday Records, July 21st)

FFO: Stuck, Dumb, Lithics

I’ve never been one to turn down upbeat post-punk, so this Landowner album scratches a serious itch for me. “Damning Evidence” is a song that, honestly, makes me laugh. As lead singer Dan Shaw sings seemingly through his nose “Damning evidence, this is damning evidence,” I can’t help but imagine a sneering prosecutor bluffing with their whole chest. “Your fate is with the courts,” he announces. “Floodwatch” is bait for me, too; there’s something awfully funny about imagining a lifted Ford F-150 stuck in the floodwaters because of an arrogant motorist thinking the truck can handle it. Escape the Compound is full of memorable vignettes like this, delivered in a danceable allegro and guitars that bob and weave with expertise. It’s too much fun. 

PAL - PALS (self-released, August 11th)

FFO: Snõõper, Spread Joy, Dry Cleaning’s first EPs

Even funnier than Escape the Compound is the debut tape from Cleveland’s newest art punk sensation, PAL. The silly young trio makes egg punk with just the right amount of chintzy. Whether they’re imagining a fast food superhero on “Burger Boy,” something that sounds like an improved Ariel Pink post-punk foray, or pleading with sanitation workers to help them dispose of memory on “Garbage Man,” they’re comical without sacrificing an ounce of instrumental tightness. Easily, my favorite is “Safety Corridor,” a dry, midtempo song about the thrills of giving road head in the Ohio Highway Safety Corridor, an allegedly more policed part of the interstate (I’ve never seen a cop car in the Safety Corridor). Right now, I’d kill to see them play at Happy Dog while snacking on tater tots and washing them down with a $2 Genesee Cream.

JOBS - Soft Sounds (Ramp Local, September 29th)

FFO: Guerilla Toss, Palm, Floatie

Ramp Local is, easily, one of my favorite record labels (hey Jake!). Whenever I get an email with a new Ramp Local release, I never know how it’s gonna sound. If it’s a JOBS release (which Ramp Local has helped birth four), I definitely don’t know how it’s gonna sound. A terrifying amalgamation of synthesizer, samplers, effects, drums, JOBS twists pop into forms not yet seen on this planet. Soft Sounds is, in part, an album examining the voyeuristic quality of description and its failures to capture what’s actually being described. With that in mind, I’ll describe it as such: challenging, disorienting, alarming, satisfying. There’s something about being taken into the JOBS sonic universe that feels like a massage. Massages are often understood as tranquil experiences, and they are, but part of what makes a massage so satisfying is the unexpected movements and pressure points that deliver untold dopamine releases. JOBS flicks those pressure points in your mind, the ones that most music has no way to access. 

Ava Mirzadegan - Dark Dark Blue (Team Love Records, November 3rd)

FFO: Yours Are The Only Ears, ther, skirts

Every year, I find singer-songwriters contributing to the solo folk tradition with a freshness that makes me believe in solo work again. This year, fellow Philadelphian Ava Mirzadegan helped make that happen for me. You may know Ava for her work organizing the Bandcamp United union, her music as Pen Palindrome, or her curation of oof records (Highnoon, Carmen Canedo, h. pruz). Now, she releases music under her own name, and when I saw her play alongside ther (a dear friend whose music is a must-hear) at Little Red Library, I was completely blown away. Many of the songs she played at that summer show appear on Dark Dark Blue, including the deeply beautiful closer, “Sleeping Through the Afternoon.” Even the sub-2 minute cuts, “Katharine Knows” and “She’s Still,” pack a serious punch. Keep an eye out for more Ava, and also hire her!

Crosslegged - Another Blue (self-released, January 27th)

FFO: Björk, Ava Luna, Christelle Bofale

Keba Robinson’s first album in seven years as Crosslegged, Another Blue, takes her already boundary-transcending alternative pop to grander heights. Whether it’s on the groovy opener “Heaven Is Real,” psychedelic “Automatic,” or meditative “Only In The,” there really isn’t a moment on this album that comes close to boring. Robinson’s voice sits in the range of Björk and feels guided by the same convictions, towards a divine and feminine creative energy that is guided by message more than the strictures of song. It’s soulful and cosmic, not unlike early Tune-Yards, but with an unprecedented cool factor. Eric and I were lucky enough to go to New York and hear her perform Another Blue selections live, and Robinson’s voice is just as dazzling, if not more, in person as it is on tape. 

Vines - Birthday Party (self-released, August 18th)

FFO: Imogen Heap, Karima Walker, Julianna Barwick

Vines is Cassie Wieland, a Brooklyn-based composer whose affinity for the vocoder helped form this gorgeous ambient avant-pop album. Wieland’s distorted voice is layered like a choir of angels, often completely unsupported before she lets the piano, violin, drums, and/or saxophone quartet have their turns. The music is lush and vulnerable, ambient without being lost to total abstraction. She repeats simple phrases: “I’ll fall apart if I need to, I don’t mind.” It’s that repetition that gets the real weight of emotion lodged in your chest, as a listener, bearing witness to Wieland’s sparse, wintry landscape. The songs feel like fragments of whole thought exercises, brief shots into the emotional tapestries she weaves, but they feel whole enough that, as a listener, you gain a sense of understanding. It’s just enough to get on her wavelength, and not a drop more. It’s that kind of brevity that keeps me coming back for more, more, more.

I’m more interested in the bands/albums with which I was obsessed but forgot about entirely. Whose music was I blasting at 13 or 14 that I left behind? When I wrote for my college radio station, I tried to compile a short list (the piece leaves a lot to be desired, but the spirit’s there). Now, almost 7 years after I wrote that list, I thought I’d revisit a few of the acts on that list as well as a few others from my personal history who I left back in my high school cusp. How did they come into my life, and why didn’t they stay there?

I ingratiated myself in the annals of alternative rock at about 14, so circa 2010/11. Ink has been spilled about the various aesthetic changes going on around this time: post-punk revival already reached its apex, chamber-pop collectives were starting to spin out better solo projects than group LPs, and chillwave/beach-adjacent sounds ameliorated the pain recent graduates endured in the financial crisis. I wanted a life as perfectly bright and ornate as a Wes Anderson film and I pursued music that I thought fit that lifestyle. And these are some of the musicians I thought I’d be following well into adulthood:

1. Ra Ra Riot

Before I signed up to use any streaming platform (including Pandora), I used YouTube to find new music. At 14, I’d log on, watch my favorite Best Coast or Vampire Weekend video, and make little click-ventures for myself listening to whatever the algorithm (at that time) thought I’d like. Back then, the YouTube algorithm wasn’t a scary monster that sent everyone to Nazi channels. Or maybe it did, but I was in my own world. I don’t know.

Either way, one day it told me to listen to “Oh, La” by Ra Ra Riot and I was immediately hooked. One of the standout tracks from their 2008 album The Rhumb Line, “Oh, La” was full of 2010s-cusp Devon-bait: prominent strings, propulsive hi-hat, a voice that wanders a line between youthful and mature. I based my first Pandora radio station around Ra Ra Riot. I tried listening to The Rhumb Line again around Christmas of 2021, wincing with each song (especially at their cover of “Suspended in Gaffa,” my favorite Kate Bush song). But, I’d be lying if I said that listening to “Oh, La” or “Dying Is Fine” isn’t fun when you’re driving on rural highways in the fall on the way to an apple orchard. 

Two Door Cinema Club

My eighth and ninth grade years were banner years for the Northern Irish band. In 2011, my ninth grade year, the band played for a sold-out crowd at Beachland Ballroom in my hometown of Cleveland, a 500-cap room (huge by Cleveland standards). No, I was not in that crowd, as much as I would’ve liked to be. The band has an undeniable appeal: danceable rock taking the poppiest of post-punk revival with a healthy dose of electronics to give it a little shine. They were my friends’ biggest obsession at the time, and I’d sipped that Kool-Aid, too.

In particular, my sister dug the song “Undercover Martyn” off their 2010 debut album Tourist History. As I go back to it now, I agree it’s the best on the album. I think Gen Z/Gen Alpha knows this, too, since it keeps popping up in contemporary memes. As I listen back to the album as a whole, I understand its context much better: big names in indie rock had been bumping post-punk and art rock in any number of permutations (think Foals, Editors, We Were Promised Jetpacks), and Two Door Cinema Club, while maybe a bit late to the game, took it to its poppiest extreme. 

Andrew Bird

When I was about 15, Pandora made absolutely sure I was aware of Andrew Bird’s 2007 album Armchair Apocrypha. I first heard the track “Heretics,” with its twee-adjacent, pop-inflected guitar line that he layers with violin (naturally). It didn’t take long before I was YouTube-ing “Spare-Ohs,” “Plasticities,” and “Yawny at the Apocalypse.” Songs from Armchair often came on rotation at the restaurant where I worked senior year, a sit-down pizza chain where the Cincinnati-based owner would curate playlists for all the restaurants.

Andrew Bird is someone who I left behind but still check in on when he drops a new release (which he does often). I can remember listening to 2022’s Inside Problems and thinking it was just lovely. His tours go crazy and critics still seem warm to him. It’s a bit of a shame that I look at that as if it were impossibly anomalous. A career in writing, recording, and releasing music doesn’t need to fizzle out in your first few years of relevancy. If anything, people are finding new and meaningful ways to stay relevant, even if those ways don’t look like Andrew Bird – continuing to tour and drop new music to an adoring fanbase.

Foster the People

The sound of the summer in Lakewood, Ohio, during the transition from middle to high school was, undoubtedly, the sound of Foster the People. The band has Ohio roots via Mark Foster, who grew up in the suburbs between Cleveland and Akron and sang in Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus (so, if you don’t like FtP, blame them). Their 2011 debut album Torches spawned one especially massive hit, “Pumped Up Kicks,” but you could also find me strutting down the street bumping “Helena Beat” or “Houdini” at the tail end of the summer when I started high school.

I wanted to say that, when I go back to Torches, that I don’t hate it, but I do. I have enough fondness of “Pumped Up Kicks” not to hate it entirely, but whatever was going on in the synth-pop realm that informed this album is just awful. It’s true that successful pop figures out how to repeat the same phrases to get something stuck in your head, the level of repetitiveness within each track on Torches, down to its base production, lends itself to quick annoyance. Torches is as dated as the Nissan subcompact cars that used “Don’t Stop (Color on the Walls” as their background song.

The Black Keys

For a while, The Black Keys had won the hearts of critics and awards shows, making abundantly clear that alternative rock (however you define it) wasn’t just the domain of blogosphere freaks. The Akron, Ohio-originating duo had a great 2000s, but their entries at the start of the 2010s — 2010’s Brothers and 2011’s El Camino — made them cross-generational household names. I remember attending their 2012 arena date in Cleveland (yes, their hometown show) with my father; I was more excited for Arctic Monkeys. In a way, I guess that was prescient: the British band’s 2013 album AM is still, today, more of a sensation than any Black Keys album, at least with ordinary people. 

I don’t know what it was about The Black Keys’ bluesy delivery that kept people coming back for more, but I know it’s central to their appeal. Any blues rock riff has the power to strike an American to the core, but why The Black Keys? As someone whose fandom for this band evaporated quickly, I’ve somewhat refused to investigate why. Doesn’t help that Patrick Carney is, well, who he is. Dan Auerbach, arguably, is more famous as a producer, working closely with Lana Del Rey, Cage The Elephant, Shannon & the Clams, Robert Finley, and more icons. 

Editors

I don’t remember exactly how I found this band in the eighth grade, but I know it was that year. The PIAS-signed post-punk freaks dropped their album In This Light And On This Evening in early 2010 and I thought their creepy, synth-laden tunes were genius. I loved “The Boxer,” “Walk the Fleet Road,” “You Don’t Know Love,” and the title track with a fervor. That Christmas, I asked for two CDs: this and High Violet. I can still listen to High Violet and enjoy myself. I can’t, however, listen to In This Light.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, I still kind of like “Walk the Fleet Road.” But it’s wild to listen to this wave of brand name post-punk and think about all the bands today who are doing it much, much better. At one level, the music is deeply emotional, but it comes across as theatrical rather than raw in any meaningful way. Crafting darkwave with a pathos-heavy vocal performance is bound to sound like weird Broadway. I have kept my distance from this band since then. Maybe I’ll report back on that subject.

Radical Face

Towards the end of middle school and into early high school, a certain strain of big indie folk had seeped into the water. Mumford & Sons had already burst onto the scene as a major-label success story. People were no longer satisfied by Edison bulb light fixtures, opting to get the iconic light source tattooed on their extremities. One of those folk-dream pop-electronica releases that got my ass was Radical Face’s 2007 album, Ghost. 

I don’t remember where I first heard the song “Welcome Home,” but it was everywhere — commercials, end credits, MTV shows, promotional ads for universities — and upon re-listening, it still goes. Those rapid handclaps pair quite nicely with Ben Cooper’s hushed vocals and rapid-fire strumming. Besides “Welcome Home,” I loved “Glory” and “Wrapped in Piano Strings” the most. At a certain level, I think this kind of folktronica is still beautiful. I don’t know many musicians today who can make it convincingly, though. 

Bon Iver

This is the newsletter where I admit that I haven’t listened to Bon Iver seriously since I was very young. That’s not really something I take pride in. I remember being 15, loving the songs “Skinny Love,” “Flume,” and “Holocene,” thinking they contained unprecedented profundity. Upon revisiting For Emma, Forever Ago and the self-titled, I can’t pretend that Justin Vernon’s music is my favorite — but of all the bands I revisited for this little piece, I revisited his last, and his music is a breath of fresh air. He has a brilliant mind for arrangement and strong lyrics, even if I’m not entirely able to get past his voice.

Bon Iver remains a crowd pleaser to this day, even for snobs (sometimes). What has inspired me to keep Bon Iver in the past has mostly been personal — this was a shared favorite artist between myself and one of the last girls I ever dated before coming out as gay. We’re adults now with our own lives, but music associated with loaded adolescent memories can still sting. That’s not Justin Vernon’s fault. But his singing voice kind of is his fault. I don’t think he does a bad job with it at all, but it doesn’t sit as pleasantly in my ears as it does in others’.

When planners think about music scenes, what they tend to think about is the economic value they offer to their cities. Music festivals are more about tourist dollars than about the artists being showcased. Nuisance reforms are more about supporting for-profit venues than ensuring easy access to practice/performance space. I got rancid vibes reading the APA Planning Advisory Service’s Quicknotes earlier this month as an expert in the city planning field elaborated on “Music Policy and Planning.” 

In the brief for practitioners, the author emphasizes the economic value that a healthy music scene creates by getting people into bars, identifying a city with cultural capital, and attracting visitors looking to get a glimpse at the scene. Examples from Huntsville, New Orleans, Des Moines, Fort Worth, Madison, and more prove that economic developers are interested in music: they’re interested in restoring historic venues, they’re interested in achieving gender and racial parity in community festival talent, and they’re interested in hosting music & tech conferences. 

These are worthwhile initiatives, undoubtedly. But they miss what musicians and fans know is hurting the music scene: the city is not an affordable place to live. For musicians who populate the annals of music blogs big and small, skyrocketing housing costs, gentrification, and the ballooning of police budgets are bigger threats to music scenes than anything else. These are spaces where planners have failed bigtime. While many urban planners get into the profession with an interest in promoting housing affordability, for example, the reality of the planning profession is that everyone in the city wants to see luxury developments go up so that they can provide tax revenue…that is, after the abatements they use to lure in such developments expire. They help city police departments assess the feasibility of felling a forest to build a training center. They chase employers who promise a large quantity of jobs with little question as to the quality or sustainability of those jobs. 

In the pursuit of tax revenue and political brownie points, planners often lose sight of what makes a city successful. When planners see a problem emerge, they examine their community’s zoning codes and economic development strategies to try and fix the problem directly with city resources. But, arguably, hiring a diverse lineup for family-friendly community fairs doesn’t lead to the sustainability of a local music scene (and what is considered family-friendly often comes at the expense of queer musicians and musicians of color, anyway). Planners’ best tactics for supporting music scenes are, arguably, to massage the zoning code and advocate for policies that ensure that musicians have safe, accessible spaces and affordable homes. If the city would like to hire musicians for their local events or play host to a music festival, excellent. There are meaningful material and fringe benefits that come from these investments. But these aren’t going to “solve” local music. We already know that the industry is broken and our cities are broken. Fix the cities and, hopefully, art can Happen.

Festival Report: Making Time

It Got Wet

At the last minute, I opted to buy a weekend pass to Making Time, a festival highlighting the best in electronic and experimental, with everyone from new age royalty to the best next DJs. The festival is in Philly at Fort Mifflin, a historic site on the Delaware River near the Schuylkill’s mouth. It’s flanked by the airport, wastewater treatment plant, and other industry. But that weekend, none of it mattered: it was time to execute our transcendental plan. BTW – everything at Making Time is called “transcendental.” Go over there to get your transcendental merch. Around the corner is the transcendental water bottle refill station. I think everyone’s in on the joke. I still laugh at it.

Unfortunately, the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia (not to be confused with Hurricane Ophelia, which hit Ireland of all places in 2017) came for Philly. Fort Mifflin is on filled marshland. It’s at a super low elevation, no more than 40 feet above sea level, with many parts dipping to fewer than 10 feet high. Throughout Fort Mifflin, the earth has been shuffled around to contain the wetlands, but when the rain comes, water can’t easily infiltrate the wet ground. It didn’t take long for the festival to get muddy, and by Saturday, performance spaces in the fort’s interior were flooded. 

None of that stopped people from enjoying sets from rising solo artists like Romy, fresh off the release of her debut non-xx album Mid Air, and house legend Maurice Fulton. Elsewhere, ambient favorites like Rachika Nayar, Julianna Barwick, Mary Lattimore, and Laraaji dazzled crowds. I saw Kate NV in a dark stone room. But wherever there were people, the ground softened, and by Sunday, most of the festival grounds were roped off. I saw some intrepid festivalgoers dancing specifically in the mud, trying to get dirty. I still had a great time. I intend to go back and pray for clearer skies. Shoutout to Ted, Skye, Laura, Austin, Dylan, Nat, Mac, and other friends I encountered this weekend!

Praying that a joint Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick set means a joint album in the future.

What am I listening to?

Guitar music from Florida:

Experimental punk n B from Cleveland:

And, of course, Grouper.

Being designated “gifted and talented” is arbitrary. School districts that have an accelerated track often test kids young, separate low- and high-scoring students, and keep it that way, often, through middle school to prepare kids to follow an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate program in high school. It’s well-established that these high-scorers are whiter and wealthier than the average schoolkid. Effectively, their Advanced Placement coursework subsidizes their postsecondary education. An AP exam costs a lot less than a college course. Yet another wealth transfer. 

Emily Yacina, PhilaMOCA, 2022

Now that I’m back in school (grad school specifically), I do find myself “regressing” every fall, in a way, like those “former gifted kids.” It’s different, though: every fall, I find myself regressing to high school and college music favorites. Whether it’s the ambient pop of Foxes in Fiction, the catchy utterances of Happy Trendy, or some pre-Domino Alex G, I’m drawn back into the feelings of crisp possibilities I felt when I first listened to these musicians. There is something especially intoxicating about listening to Brown Horse with leaves underfoot on a brick footpath. When the weather cools a bit more, I’ll dive even deeper.

The Orchid Tapes beat was huge for me in high school, easily one of my first forays into non-corporate music.It hit me at a time in my life when I was at my weariest: 6:30 am at Relay for Life. I’d spent the whole night awake, most of it pacing the track with whichever high school organization I represented. Foxes in Fiction’s “Jimi Bleachball” came up on my Pandora (I haven’t logged onto Pandora since high school, come to think of it) and it was catnip for me. The whole album, Swung from The Branches, wasn’t my first brush with ambient electronic music (arguably, that was Freescha’s Kids Fill The Floor), but it was pivotal. It’s human-scale, emotionally potent music, and it was perfect for 16-year-old me. Now, at 27, I feel many of those same feelings, but they’ve evolved. 

This introspective style of music, bedroom pop, has a lot of sounds: electropop, songwriter folk, fuzzy slacker rock. Some of the then-biggest names in the wave made experimental pop or occupied the midpoint between ambient and dance. The sound’s textures, deriving often from directly recording to tape, earned it the designation of “lo-fi.” After a quick couple years of overuse, “lo-fi bedroom pop” was a term critics were ready to discard by 2016. At another level, I think shoegaze and slowcore will get that way, too, even if the sounds never go away. The sounds of bedroom pop never went away – just look at the popularity of early Alex G the long-defunct Cyberbully Mom Club. 

I don’t think I’ll ever not be fixated on the evolution of “bedroom pop” from something that denoted a certain introspective, homespun, sometimes overtextured indie practice that often emanated from Silent Barn into the massive downtempo movement it became. Its most immediate bridge, Clairo, cut her teeth making miniature electropop in Boston DIY, is less a pioneer and more of a popularizer; someone whose witty musings and minimalist style inspired more players in the industry to find others like her. This blissed-out, low-energy sound feels like it’s been rebuked recently on all fronts. On the DIY side, controversy brewed when critics didn’t take to Emily Yacina’s Remember the Silver, and on the rising pop side, critics almost gleefully dunked on boy pablo’s Wachito Rico. But perhaps the biggest album that relied on gentle, blissed-out sound was Lorde’s Solar Power, which polarized critics. To me, it’s a miss. I didn’t hate it, but it lacked the texture or intimacy that makes closely held music so appealing. 

These bedroom tinkerers are the musicians whose songs will populate my fall playlists. They did when I was in college, and they will for a long time coming. I can’t deny that fall is a time when I do feel a certain type of way. But it’s still fuck “former gifted kids.”

I had a Hyundai stolen this summer that way. In July 2021, I bought a used Hyundai Sonata when my previous car, a 2005 station wagon I bought from my aunt, died on my 25th birthday. It was the first car I ever bought in a dealership and the first car I ever financed. The market for used cars was awful; supply chain issues jacked up new car prices, sending more buyers into the used car market. If you needed wheels, you needed to act fast. I lived in Cleveland; I needed wheels. I can remember haggling with my salesman, a bright-eyed 21-year-old, over the down payment: I wanted to drop a larger one than he wanted me to; he wanted to lock me in a larger loan. In the end, I just needed wheels. We came to an agreement. Almost two years to the day after purchase, I found the space where I left my car empty, save for a pile of broken glass, and began the month-long process of recovering and evaluating the car to determine if I could keep it. After a month, my insurance’s appraiser deemed the car a total loss. The bill to fix it myself was well beyond something I take on. I’ve been lucky: many insurers are seeking technicalities to avoid payouts on these vehicles since there have been so many.

The Hyundai Sonata in Question

For at least a year now, I’ve had a vague awareness of the flaw and subsequent car thefts, but I didn’t have a great awareness of what to do about it. I understood that there were steering wheel locks out there for a couple hundred bucks a pop, but I felt incensed that I’d have to drop so much cash because of a manufacturing flaw. Police departments nationwide have gotten a handful of locks from the manufacturers to give out, but the events aren’t well publicized, nor do they even have that many locks to offer (100 per distinct in Philadelphia seems low). Unbeknownst to me, Hyundai dealerships offered software upgrades on qualifying models for free. Ultimately, the manufacturer’s efforts have been minimal, treated more like a PR fire than a consumer safety issue, and local safety regulators act much the same. There’s no sign of a recall of these vehicles because the regulating bodies claim they will only issue recalls for safety issues that arise from normal use — any safety issues that arrive from dangerous or unlawful activity is apparently none of their concern. It’s a great way to shrug it all off. After all, there are millions of these cars on the road. They’re entry-level models, realistically the only cars many people can buy new or gently used, especially in the era of wage stagnation.

Reporting on the “Kia Boys” phenomenon has mostly stayed in the purview of local news, the last people who I’d trust to talk about this issue with any nuance. On the basics, they’re more or less correct: most people stealing these cars are young and Black, often too young to be licensed, and many of them do find out how to steal the cars from social media. Usually, it’s just for a joyride until the car won’t run anymore (when you mess with the ignition like this, usually the battery doesn’t last much longer). More concerning is that many are crashed and totaled, sometimes resulting in injury or death. But the “Kia Boys” are hardly a “gang” like many media are calling them; any time a cop or news anchor suggests as much should be treated as inflammatory. Disregard that. Realistically, the Kia Boys’ nonsense is a standard “performance crime,” something done to draw attention, and they’ve been a part of human life for as long as there’s been crime. The fact that we can perform for each other this easily online is new and concerning, but it’s not an entirely new phenomenon.

Busted steering column

What should be the most interesting is where it’s happening the most. While it’s happening all over the country, much of the reporting I find is from Milwaukee (the city where the trend traces back to), Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus. While American cities have a time-honored tradition of racial segregation, still enforced by the police under pretext, northern and western post-industrial cities have it real bad. There’s evidence to suggest that segregation is more persistent in northern cities. The outsized role that cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Philadelphia had in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and their outsized backlash, reinforce time and time again that white supremacy and Black oppression are inherent components of the American state. In the 21st century, white supremacy in these cities looks like escalating police militarization, urban gentrification, public school defunding, welfare reform, mass incarceration, financial exclusion, persistent homelessness…you get the gist. It feels like an awful coincidence that the Kia & Hyundai flaw was discovered and popularized in Milwaukee first, a heavily segregated city in the upper Midwest that also served as the setting for Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted, a contemporary must for bleeding-heart liberals. It’s a good read, demonstrating the excessive, reverberating violence that comes with tenant eviction and its particularly pernicious effects on Black households in segregated cities. It’s a bit lax on some landlords, arguably, but it does a good job showing the contemporary nexus of owners, managers, officials, renters, etc who characterize the modern rental economy. It’s a multi-actor extractive process, with tenants squarely at the bottom. 

Milwaukee also happens to be one of the most exciting cities for underground hip-hop seen in years. For Pitchfork, Alphonse Pierre has kept up with the Milwaukee scene for a while, documenting its unique maximalism, DIY festivities, and growing stars. Rising favorites like Lakeyah, Certified Trapper, Bigfrank414, AyooLii, and more have helped solidify a sound and ecosystem distinct to the Great Lakes city. Local labels, promoters, comedians, videographers, podcasters, and more have played a huge role in creating a whole apparatus through which the scene can ascend. It reminds me of all the players in Cleveland’s growing rap scene, itself another focal point of avant-garde DIY hip-hop. In these northern cities, where Black communities have been under distinct siege and surveillance from white leaders and police for decades, DIY is the way of life. Exclusion from the formal economy, resource extraction, and 24-hour full-frontal assault from an increasingly angry police state do, literally, keep communities down. That includes artistic communities and youth.

In places like Milwaukee, Cleveland, or Philadelphia, where segregation leads to isolation and surveillance, it’s abundantly clear that the prevailing norms that inform the mainstream power structures are bogus at best, evil at worst. It’s in situations like these, where people recognize and respond to their oppression, that communities form their own norms. If society’s stacked against you, why not steal that car anyway? They made it so easy. In what I would still consider a highly problematic clickbait documentary, YouTuber Tommy G chats with a couple of “Kia Boys” about the appeal of stealing them: it’s good fun that wins them approval from peers. It’s kind of an excellent “fuck you,” a way to take control for a moment from a society that’s hell-bent on extracting resources out of you and dispose of you to keep the racial, spatial, capitalistic order stable. 

Widely shared still from the “documentary”

Couple that with a pandemic that shuttered the local schools, already cash-strapped, sending young people back home to endure trauma. COVID-19 tore through Black communities quickly, largely because Black households were likely to have “essential workers” in the household. In the States, these workers ranged from medical staff to line cooks to transit operators and beyond. Most of these workers were forced to work with limited protection from the virus and no ability to take time off should they get sick without serious financial consequences. This hyper-exposure crossed with health challenges that often arise from the minority stress and poverty made COVID-19 extra deadly in Black communities. The kids that were forced to stay home, too often without sufficient resources to stay engaged in education, sought alternative modes of entertainment and community-building. The greater society wasn’t offering anything. 

The YouTube documentary also shows what the local news won’t: most Kias and Hyundais are stolen locally. The aforementioned documentary features a quick conversation with a woman whose car had been stolen, so she was driving a much older Nissan with significant body damage. It was her next best option in a city where she needs a car to take care of her needs. As is typical, most crime in the city is crime of opportunity; people steal from their neighbors, and in these abused neighborhoods, people whose cars are stolen are left with few resources for recovery. In YouTube comment threads, tweets, and on any social media, you can find stories of low-income seniors, single parents, and first-time car buyers opting for these models and being financially stranded when they’re stolen. This is just as true in Philadelphia, where everyone is packed near each other, and Black neighborhoods in West Philadelphia were routinely abused and cleared in the latter half of the 20th century so the universities, and their students, could sprawl. But, of course, the local media gets its best ratings when stoking fear in the majority-white suburbs, unsubtly convincing a quietly prejudiced public that Black citydwellers are coming to steal their hard-earned property for perverse reasons. That’s not what’s happening. I don’t see much of any media out there trying to understand this phenomenon beyond that dangerous fiction.

Also emerging from the Milwaukee rap scene are viral tracks featuring the occasional verse or album cover sporting Kias. “If I see a Kia then I’m taking your shit,” starts an especially catchy hit from young rappers Marry Mac and Shawn P, a guaranteed find on any Kia Boys-themed user-generated Spotify playlist (I like this one). There’s Pce Bj’s 2021 album Rack Racing, featuring the hit “Kia/Hyundai Boy Anthem.” Interspersed in these playlists, which have modest but sizable followings, are hits from Milwaukee’s biggest players, few of which actually touch the actual Kia/Hyundai nonsense, but whose beats are endemic to this burgeoning scene, copycatted and deep fried by young hands. Rappers are going to rap about what’s going on; Kia and Hyundai imagery is a new set of signifiers showing a distinct kind of youth culture. While youth culture is often misrepresented to unlock conservative impulses in cautious parents, the things that Black youth do are especially pathologized. White kids in the suburbs cause all kinds of havoc, but what they do, what images they share, what music they make, etc. don’t tend to result in carceral moral panics. There’s no doubt that joyriding in a damaged car is dangerous — and there’ve been lots of crashes and some deaths associated with Kia Boys type thefts — but instituting a moral panic across the country about Black  families will only exacerbate both the underlying problems and their current manifestation. 

Kind of obsessed with this cover

With all the talk about Kia and Hyundai thefts, there are questions about how to stop it. The Kia Boys documentary seems to suggest that harsh prison sentences are the way to go; I profoundly disagree. Incarceration doesn’t work. It’s rooted in white supremacist tactics of gaining and enforcing domination and extraction.. I can’t really imagine any other way these thefts will go down other than these cars ceasing to be aroun City after city is suing the South Korean conglomerate that manufactures these cars, citing the extra resources they’ve needed to deal with the car thefts. Chicago’s suit calls out how Kia and Hyundai thefts have exposed primarily working class motorists to financial ruind. The companies involved seem unmotivated to connect with car owners about upgrades to which they’re entitled. The makings of young people exploiting these manufacturing deficits goes back centuries. Unless Washington is planning to execute the massive wealth transfer owed to Black Americans, close the prisons, and restore public facilities in Black neighborhoods, I can’t comprehend why any Kia Boy would stop. News anchors will claim these Kia Boys run the streets, and unaffiliated neighbors have every right to be worried, but when it comes to the real levers of power, the Kia Boys are on the losing end, and that’s by design. It’s only really worth it to go after the companies who cut corners. They’re the ones who hold power and they’re the ones who are, at this point, getting away with but the most meager cuts to their bottom line. 

In my ideal world, car ownership isn’t a necessity, or even all that desirable. I can get around without a car in Philadelphia pretty well, but sometimes, it’s necessary. I can’t imagine trying to commute to the suburban office parks that more firms are choosing without a car. I couldn’t move without a vehicle, so I rented cargo vans from U-Haul. Not all of Philadelphia is easily connected via transit, so my daily life has shrunk. My family is still in Cleveland, a city that’s even harder to get around without a car. Ever since Urban Renewal, we’ve been living in cities where private automobile use is subsidized with cheap roadways and free parking. Transit has suffered and curtailed its offerings. As long as car dependency is a reality in most American cities, vehicle thefts will be more than just an inconvenience; they’ll be emotionally charged and generate economic precarity. In a few weeks’ time, you might see me driving a cheaper car; I’m a graduate student, I’m not sure if I can afford a car of the same quality as I could when I was working full-time, full year. I’d love to wait a year to buy again, but I’m not sure. And, if you couldn’t tell, the whole theft thing has been on my mind a lot. I took a risk by going back to school, accepting some financial precarity with the hope that it pays off down the road. It doesn’t feel good. And I know it’s been happening to my friends, too; it feels especially weird to be at this early point in our adult lives, driving our first practical cars we bought ourselves, and get let down by a multibillion dollar conglomerate. It’s the kind of shit that makes you want to throw in the towel.

The best rap scenes aren’t just the ones with the more variegated social infrastructure designed to promote the scene, although that’s absolutely necessary for any music scene. Innovative rap scenes keep up with the times and highlight subjects that are relevant. To the racist, alarmist media, Kia Boys rap is another sign of degeneracy. In reality, it’s a sign that young people are making, sharing, and consuming music with imagery that’s relevant to them in that moment. It’s a way to traffic in a shared lexicon. Everyone who’s listening is in on it. Naturally, it’s going to happen alongside everything else that’s happening in the city’s rap scene. I’m not a seasoned rap critic, so take this with a grain of salt, but I doubt that the Kia Boys-themed music is going to have the same staying power as other boundary-pushing rap coming out of Milwaukee. But, it’s wild to see the music of up-and-coming hitmakers like Certified Trapper on these Kia-themed playlists. That Milwaukee would be an epicenter of experimental rap and experimental car theft is a sign that it’s a city where people are actively seeking out innovative, perhaps even daring ways of expressing themselves.

The salesman who sold me my Hyundai called me the day after mine was stolen to wish me a happy birthday. I told him never to call me again.

Anyone who’s been through the youth orchestra industrial complex will tell you the trajectory is much the same. You start lessons with teachers who mold your skills and prepare you for auditions, you perform with school orchestras desperate to play familiar showstoppers on a budget, you attend summer string camps, you audition for regional and state honors ensembles, and maybe eventually you land a coveted spot in an institutional youth orchestra. At every step in this process, the path is drawn for you; there are standards in the canon to study and master. It can feel constricting. But, maybe when you’re through that process, and rigorous conservatory training and advanced degrees, you can branch out as a performer into more esoteric spaces.

This is the part of my experience as a youth orchestra kid I couldn’t quite articulate in my essay for Bandcamp. As much as I enjoyed learning the legendary concerti from the likes of Dittersdorf, Dragonetti, Capuzzi, et al, I did, at times, feel lost in the world of classical tradition. What brief glimpses I did steal of today’s dissonant, challenging contemporary music stimulated and intimidated me. Plus, learning what it took to compose my own music sounded like a daunting task between college-prep coursework and existing expectations from the youth orchestra world. I played in one of those institutional youth orchestras as a high school senior; it remains a highlight of my time as an instrumentalist and it was, for me at the time, a huge commitment. Entertaining the possibilities of experimental music or composition felt like a wrong turn.

But whenever I listen to musicians who’ve pushed their classical training to sublime experiments (think Sarah Davachi, Louise Bock, Georg Friedrich Haas), I again feel some kind of loss. While there’s little doubt that anyone can pursue understanding a musical tradition on independent time, I think about the lack of institutions that let young people know what’s possible with classical training. At 14 or 15, I had no idea that there was this experimental music universe out there. I wasn’t aware of performers like JACK Quartet. I didn’t have the confidence to look into, or study, the electroacoustic tradition. A mix of doubt and unawareness kept me from discovering what was possible. I played in the classical tradition until I didn’t have easy bass access, never really cultivating a terribly independent or forward-thinking practice as an instrumentalist.

Now, when I listen to experimental/art music that’s heavy on strings, I feel a slight grief. I think about Bjork and her music school in Reykjavik, where the works of John Cage were a part of her youth curriculum. I suppose there’s never a bad time to pick up an instrument and learn how to make “noise,” but even then, I think the narrow focus of the youth orchestra circuit is a problem. There’s talk about the whiteness and maleness of the canon that is vital, and will hopefully continue to play a role long-term in the classical world. But, I also hope there is a push to represent more experimental ways of making music. If you’re interested in making music like Brian Eno, what can you learn on your current instrument-of-choice? What possibility is there for a youth modular synth ensemble? Wouldn’t it be better if we learned this in school?

Making a living as a musician is challenging, but for some contemporary classical/experimental traditions, there’s a niche to be found in the fine arts realm that can’t be discounted. The funding sources available and the institutions that could support a contemporary classical experimentalist outstrip the trappings of indie rock. It’s hard to get into, but it’s a pathway that students deserve to learn. Adhering to strict classical traditions may be a great way to guarantee that orchestral students can play the hits for their parents well enough to convince them to donate to Music Boosters. And, practically, for any musician, it’s important to learn the staples. But, it’s not the only pursuit, and all budding instrumentalists should be encouraged the dabble in the dark art of the avant-garde.

What Am I Listening To?

Cole Pulice - If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture (super futuristic experimental longform jazz)

The Big Net - Like Dogs (indie rock, folk, post-Americana, members of Lightning Bug)

It made me reflect on my own first “review,” a laudatory report on Beach House’s beloved 2015 album, Depression Cherry. I’d been following the album cycle since “Sparks” dropped mid-summer; I learned of its release while driving home from a particularly grueling shift at a pizza joint in town. I wept, partially out of exhaustion. I was 18 and I desperately wanted out of my hometown. I was obsessed with “Sparks;” even after the rest of the album dropped, I mostly wanted to hear “Sparks.” 

This was the same summer where I saw two of my favorite concerts I’ve seen to date: Elvis Depressedly/Mitski/Gabby’s World/Small Wood House and Mr. Twin Sister/Moon King/Sammy Slims, both at Mahall’s. Having a venue like that on the same block as my parents’ house proved too convenient for me. The all-ages shows here enabled my habits of finding, obsessing, and identifying with a new indie-band-of-the month. I took that personality to Kenyon College that fall.

Kenyon’s an easy place for a music obsessive. There’s a student-run venue on campus, a radio station where it’s not competitive to get a show slot, an onsite recording studio, and, importantly, a student-run music blog. I was involved, in varying capacities, in all of these, minus the studio. Discovering, sharing, and evaluating music became a round-the-clock hobby for me. It’s at WKCO’s blog that I started writing content: album reviews, longform pieces, themed playlists, the like. I was an extremely casual reader of other blogs, so when it came to writing something like an album review, I really didn’t have much exposure to the “review” as a process. But I tried!

I couldn’t have been more excited to contribute a Depression Cherry review. Ever since discovering Beach House in 2012 through hits like “Myth,” “Zebra,” and “Lazuli,” then seeing them perform with Wild Nothing, I’d been obsessed. I still am. Their approach to dream pop is an intoxicating mix of beauty and haunt. Victoria Legrand’s contralto is hypnotic. She and her collaborator Alex Scally have identified a sweet spot in dream pop: how to make the music feel cinematic on record and immersive in live settings with universally appealing hooks that do not overshadow the depth of their craft. Their live performances are subtle, even mysterious, reinforcing the primacy of craft. When I last saw them in 2022 in Pittsburgh, I was just as transfixed as I had been ten years prior.

Here’s a link to that review.

Terrible title. The review itself reads like a book report. It’s unfortunate. But I can hear my excitement. I was, first and foremost, impressed by Depression Cherry’s track ordering. I still think it’s perfect. “Levitation,” with its gradual opening and perpetual crescendo, is one of the strongest openers of the 2010s. Starting a dream pop record with refrains of “there’s a place I’d like to take you” is like catnip for college stoners. I celebrated just about every track, especially “Wildflower,” whose beat I still find really alluring, and I shat on “Bluebird” for whatever reason. Today, it’s not my favorite, but I’d be pressed to find true fault in it, and I think its subdued, eerie character fits well in the track ordering. 

I spent maybe too much of the review commenting on how Depression Cherry is, arguably, “smaller” than Teen Dream or Bloom. Thanks, in part, to the use of live drums on Bloom especially, the prior two Sub Pop albums were big, bold, cathartic experiences, way more dramatic than anything on their self-titled or Devotion. It filled up the room at a time when indie rock and indie rock with this kind of drama was beloved. After touring Bloom, Beach House took their time making Depression Cherry, waiting for creativity to strike them in the right light, and reduced the live drums’ influence. Where they appear, they act more like a foundation than a visible component of sonic architecture. It was a smart choice. The indie world’s fascination with smaller and smaller sounds bled into pop in a fascinating way. The favored music of the mid-’10s just wasn’t that big. Subtleties and interiorities caught ears. Depression Cherry had just the right amount of subtlety.

I had no way of knowing then that Depression Cherry would be the social media sensation it would eventually become. As I write this, “Space Song” is just 640,000 streams away from 800 million, most of which came in the last two years when Tik Tok users found the song ideal for portraying dramatic irony of emotion. Much like “Lazuli” and other Beach House hits, their arpeggiated synths beget a sense of wonder. Nowadays, if you ask me which track is the masterpiece off Depression Cherry, I’m more likely to say “PPP:” Legrand’s ballad-like vocals are immediately calming and the last minute-and-a-half of sweeping instrumentals and “ahhs” are just gorgeous. This is the sound of a band who understands they’ve struck a nerve: beloved by critics, indieheads, and enthusiastic young throngs alike, Beach House can command a room with something as woozy as dream pop. 

Today, I mostly revisit Depression Cherry when I want to do a whole dive on Beach House. The album, like the rest of the Beach House discography, floods me with memories of high school and early college. As admirable as the craft on songs like “Norway” and “The Hours” are, I’m not interested in coexisting with those memories all that often. I’m in my nostalgia-is-toxic era.

It was at WKCO that I got enthusiastic about listening to an album, reading up on its context, and trying to share an honest evaluation from my perspective. Slowly, I got better at it. I still feel my reviewing chops strengthening over time; even my first paid review feels kind of elementary. The bulk of music writing I’ve actually done is still with Slumber Mag and I’m grateful that the editors there pushed for a more personal, diaristic form of writing. It’s a different way of engaging. Reviews are hard to write; criticism is a form of expression that requires careful study, trial, and arguably, error. I have to imagine that it’s embarrassing to commit any of those “errors” on a large platform.

I’m writing this on August 3rd, a day when a major blog dropped a critical review of an influential artist’s first solo album. The artists’ fans, a crowd which includes other figureheads of Big Indie, came together on X (ugh) to denounce criticism and publications that specialize in it. It gained traction; this line of thinking always does. Whether it’s coming from a major figurehead like Halsey or Lizzo (lol) or someone who emerged from the indie sphere, anti-critical stances gather steam from audiences who want to see their favorite musicians celebrated. That’s a reasonable thing to want. But it’s not a reasonable thing to expect.

I’ve read reviews that I think are “bad:” reviews that are clearly influenced by racism and/or misogyny, reviews that willfully misinterpret lyrics, reviews that refuse to engage with the context of an album, and not all of these reviews are critical. Sometimes, a badly written review is quite reverent. That’s all to say: this review isn’t badly written. The evaluations are honest, reasonable conjectures. It’s written responsibly. 

I’m not necessarily going to sit here and say that I hope to, personally, spend the rest of my waking days writing album reviews. It’s fun, but it’s not always my favorite way to engage with music writing. But, even in this exercise, I had some fun looking back at my own bad writing and reflecting on Depression Cherry’s trajectory. Today, Beach House is as close to a household name as you might expect from a contemporary Sub Pop artist. It’s just cool to see.

What am I listening to now?

Apollo Vermouth - Forever Back There (ambient, drone, field recording)

Being Dead - When Horses Would Run (rock, art pop)

Subscribe now

Made my annual trip to The Freeze in Logan Square on Sunday night.

I’ve gone to this festival for the past three years, in part, as a much-needed getaway that lets me see the bevy of college buddies who settled in Chicago after graduation. My partner, Eric, has accompanied me twice now, which has been crucial for the required show-off-your-boo-to-your-buddies ritual. Aside from the festival, there are usually bar outings, brunches, and parties in my social network to attend. This year, that included drinks at Best Intentions to celebrate my birthday, brunch at Same Day Cafe where we bore witness to Lori Lightfoot, and a Shabbat party right on Humboldt Park. We ate at The Freeze on a hot summer night. We like Chicago.

Pitchfork Festival offers a curious mix of artists who’ve graced the blog’s pages over, usually, the past few years. Eric and I like to play a game of guessing which BNM-earners will grace the festival stage, and largely, we got it right: we were thrilled to see Grace Ives, Julia Jacklin, Rachika Nayar, Soul Glo, and other blog favorites hit the stage. There were surprises: a set from Youth Lagoon, who’d end up releasing one of the summer’s favorites; Bon Iver, rumored to be substitute-headlining for someone else (D’Angelo, who would’ve interrupted the otherwise white headlining roster); Nourished by Time, a recent favorite who we’d seen open for Dry Cleaning and will soon open for Vagabon.

Grace Ives, a must-see wherever you are.

We managed to get there all three days, spending almost the entire afternoon and evening at the festival, catching the following acts (some briefly, some for their whole set):

Friday: Nourished by Time, Sen Morimoto, Grace Ives, Youth Lagoon, Nation of Language, Perfume Genius, Alvvays (sue us, we skipped The Smile)

Saturday: Deeper, (lightning delay), Black Belt Eagle Scout, MJ Lenderman, (really bad lightning delay), one Julia Jacklin song (thanks to the lightning delay), King Krule, Weyes Blood, Big Thief. I caught two Charlotte Adigery & Bolis Pupul songs from a distance.

Sunday: rescheduled Palm, Ariel Zetina, Rachika Nayar (playing with Maria BC & Issei Herr…I mean DAMN), Florist, Illuminati Hotties, Koffee, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Kelela (sue us, we skipped Bon Iver. We wanted ice cream.)

Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal interviewing Rachika Nayar (center) and her co-performers, Issei Herr (left) and Maria BC (right)

On Friday, my favorite set was probably Grace Ives. She’s the queen of getting a little silly with it, blending forward-thinking pop with the front-camera comedy we’ve been watching on Twitter all too much. She’d taken a fall the night before at Sleeping Village, but with her trusty Orange Gatorade, she still got silly with it. The Vocoder came out again. She covered Blitzkrieg Bop, but with her own verses.

For Saturday, my favorite set had to be Black Belt Eagle Scout. The Weyes Blood & Big Thief sets were very special, but I’d never seen KP play before, and her music simply hits. Hearing “Soft Stud” live ruled; I cried. Her latest album, The Land, The Water, The Sky is a masterpiece that features prominently. Her stage presence is outstanding. Of course, losing out on Vagabon and Snail Mail hurt me, though.

Lastly, on Sunday, I had a ton of fun at Kelela (patron saint of bangs, Joan of Arc of tube tops), but I have to highlight Rachika Nayar’s set, because I’m me. Ever since stumbling across her first solo single on the NNA Tapes Bandcamp in 2021, I’ve been overtaken by her music. Heaven Come Crashing is a brilliant follow-up to her debut, and getting on stage with Maria BC and Issei Herr, whose music I’ve also come to love, meant seeing all my favs on one stage. I stood at the barricade with Eli Winter. Every drop hit better than the last. Keep an eye on all three of these artists. But also: Palm forever.

Pitchfork Festival is also a chance to connect with the human iterations of online figures I’ve come to enjoy: other writers, publicists, musicians, and fans who I know almost entirely from Twitter. As much as we resent being there, it’s so easy. We’re so spread out. I appreciate how festivals bring us together like that.

Jessica and Eric taking a much-needed sit on Sunday.

Festivals have an odd place in today’s urban landscape. While cities are, indeed, looking for sustainable “economic development” through giving developers and businesses different incentives (read: tax breaks) to set up shop within their borders, that might only go so far for a built-out city like Chicago. Ever since the advent of the modern Olympics or the World’s Fair, mega-events have played a fraught role in urban politics, leading to rapid-dashes of public works that, often, destabilize the city’s poorest residents to get them out of view of visitors. READ: Nolympics

Pitchfork isn’t a mega-event, but it warrants redirection of resources. Extra buses grace the 9 line at the festival’s end. A massive public park west of the Loop is commandeered for a long weekend. Over three years in community development, I planned roughly a dozen community events, ranging from neighborhood pop-ups to regional festivals. They’ve become paramount to neighborhood identity, yes, but also as fundraisers. Community development organizations that aren’t banks or government entities have to get pretty creative with their fundraising, and festivals offer revenue through sponsorships large (title sponsorships) and small (vendor fees). Operating a 5K race or a beer garden suddenly becomes a way to make money to help an at-risk resident make key home repairs. Over time, those festivals become entrenched, steeped in “tradition,” even if those traditions are but a decade old. It becomes yet anther avenue through which local actors wield influence.

Music festival politics are uniquely interesting. We’ve all discoursed on the neo-coloniality of Fyre Festival or the differential experiences by gender at Woodstock ‘99. In Chicago, festival dynamics are especially fraught surrounding Riot Fest, a larger, punk-oriented festival in Douglass Park. Douglass Park has a larger footprint in a westside neighborhood, with dozens of local residents organizing to get the festival out of the neighborhood (read). Riot Fest moved to Douglass Park nearly a decade ago after constant pushback from its Humboldt Park neighbors. Community groups around Douglass Park identify Riot Fest’s presence, and the presence of other festivals that close the park from public use for up to 40 days, as a harbinger of gentrification.

Anti-gentrification was one of the greater Humboldt Park area’s motivations for pushing the festival out, too. But, it would be particularly hard to look at the current state of the neighborhood, especially near the Park itself, and call it “ungentrified.” Residents in the historically Puerto Rican neighborhood report rising rents and a higher cost of living amid redevelopment in the neighborhood. What role that festivals have, or don’t have, in the realm of gentrification is up for debate. At one level, I suspect that festival siting choices are signs of changes already happening. It’s exceedingly difficult to justify to investors and city governments why a festival should get permits in a disinvested neighborhood. But there’s little doubt that events attended, largely, by white people with disposable income (including the less-squabbled-over Pitchfork Music Festival) collect support from institutions hungry for tourism dollars. Local communities rarely see those dollars come back to benefit them. Who does? Restauranteurs, AirBnB hosts, Uber managers (not drivers), airlines, municipal tax coffers, festival management.

In today’s Attention Economy (to bring back David A. Banks), events play an outsized role in local economies, especially in post-industrial cities. While most festivals skirt under the radar as events where organizers and communities get along just fine, festivals and mega-events will continue to bump against neighbors. Mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics are especially stunning and worrisome. As long as musicians and the industry looks to festivals for networking and performances, festival organizers and music professionals have a duty to organize the most just event possible. What does an anti-capitalist music festival look like? What does a proper anti-racist music festival look like? I don’t know. But it’s worth figuring out.

Thank you, Brady and Gus, for letting us crash again :)

What am I listening to?

Agriculture by Agriculture

In the Light of the Blistering Moon by How Strange It Is

Subscribe now

To no one’s surprise, very online gay guys are talking about it on Twitter. In between work calls, I’m reading your tweets (and not saying anything). I think they’re funny! And some of you are really, really serious. I recommend waiting a few hours before posting serious thoughts about a hot topic. It’s saved my ass a few times.

My initial reaction was mild disappointment with the song’s length, 2-and-a-half minutes, the hallmark of a bridgeless track. That’s what we have here. The verses are somewhat mumbled, not unusual for Sivan’s work, and the Village People-style backing vocals and layered Sivans on the chorus are crystal clear, making it obvious that the song is meant to be hollered to only on that chorus. If you want to sing along to those verses, fine, but you better read the closed captions on the video first.

The video that came with it is almost four minutes long and just beautiful. With XY Magazine lighting, reminiscent of an era where the queers gathered at piers, Troye and dozens of professional dancers fly around in cute outfits, kiss each other, rub all up on one another, being hot and stuff. Innuendo be damned, the lyrics are direct. It’s kind of refreshing. It’s hedonistic. It doesn’t necessarily promise much. Just, god willing, a good time.

Am I obsessed with it? No. But it’s been fun watching people to go to bat for what is, in all probability, another minor hit from a pop star who’s perpetually rising, at least in the American market. While his Spotify bio leads with his streaming numbers (22 billion overall is massive), that figure pales in comparison to the regular residents of the Top 40 charts. In the US, he’s had one single break into the Top 40, “YOUTH,” a song I can’t stand. He makes a home in dance pop, a style that does exceedingly well with the gays, but hasn’t produced too many new massive hitmakers as it competes with hip-hop and other wildly popular genres for American attention.

My partner asked, “Is America ready for a twink popstar?” I don’t know. We mulled over the question after listening to Pop Pantheon’s episode on Kim Petras multiple times, where DJ Louis XIV and Jason Frank aptly ask to what degree transphobia has kept Kim Petras from megastardom. Her recent ascendance has a lot to do with Sam Smith, a Liberace-like figure, whose characteristically unscandalous song “Unholy” netted the pair a US Billboard #1 placement, double platinum status, and a Grammy. Kim’s bubblegum dance-pop of the late 2010s was the soundtrack to my end-of-college days, an opulent feast of colorful vibes fit for parties with my friends (before they, a largely straight crowd, inevitably turned the dial back towards “Mr. Brightside.”) Trailblazing as Smith may be for being themselves, what queerness one can uncover in their music is buried deep, much like Liberace’s entire deal. A proper queer can take one look at Liberace and know, but his audience, one that couldn’t or wouldn’t conceptualize a gay sensibility, didn’t care, letting him rise to ubiquity. The “Stay With Me” singer, I think, managed to unlock the straight audience with their early anthems that way. It’s what makes the barrage of homo- and transphobic hate they’re receiving on social media as of late that much more alarming to visualize. Transphobia and homophobia are different beasts, but like all forms of oppression, they’re intimately entangled, so it’ll be something to watch Troye’s career trajectory as he embraces sexuality even more, well, nakedly.

What do I make of the body diversity on the “Rush” music video? Before I can even think about that, let me ask the people who bring it up in utter sincerity if they’re doing it in good faith. Were you already annoyed by the single’s marketing campaign? Do you, like me, find most of Troye’s music cloying? Do you spend hours and hours on Scruff thirsting after hairy muscle daddies? If you want a bear-forward Troye music video, I get it, but also like…your own preferences are showing. And your weaponizing of fat dancers, who are out there working in a fatphobic climate, is not helping.

What’s been even funnier is watching the comparisons between “Rush” and “Padam Padam,” the nearly two-month-old lead single from Kylie Minogue’s upcoming 16th album, Tension. Troye and Kylie are in wildly different points in their careers. Troye, 28, is a pop star on the rise, (not quite) 3 studio albums in, who is really only recently in the throes of reinventing his pop persona, something that megastars often have to do regularly. Kylie, 55, is an international sensation through and through who has toured the world over a dozen times on myriad hit singles. Is “Padam Padam,” which dropped two weeks before Pride Month in what I think was a stroke of marketing genius, good? I like it. It’s inane. It’s not that sexy. Kylie recorded the lyrics with an icy clarity; she clearly wanted listeners to hang onto every word. It’s certainly not in her top 10, or even top 30. But, I think what “Padam Padam” and “Rush” are each doing are so different, and represent such separate stages of a pop career, that to compare them sonically would be a critical nightmare. But, I’ve seen a number of Padam-haters breathe a sigh of relief now that “Rush” is everywhere. Your long nightmare is over. FWIW, I see “Rush” having a much longer afterlife than “Padam Padam.” “Padam” felt like a cash grab. To an extent, that’s what’s has kept me enamored. It’s promises absolutely nothing revolutionary. It’s a head-empty anthem. Kylie performed it a million times over Pride month on huge stages and exclusive clubs. It’ll be on her roster for a while. But she doesn’t need another critical masterpiece. Fever has made her a permanent megastar; Impossible Princess, then calmly liked, is finally gaining proper recognition as the high-concept, quietly revolutionary album it is. “Padam” is freedom from something, “Rush” is freedom to.

For months, Troye’s been teasing this song; he knew it was a banger. He has a keen ear. Dropping sultry Tik Toks and suggestive video stills was a brilliant way to keep people talking. It seemed like the track was never going to come out, and when it did, it (largely) didn’t disappoint. My timeline is split between people who love it and people who don’t. But either way, people are talking. The critics adore it. Troye doesn’t care if you get it. You’re talking about it. That’s what matters.

What am I listening to?

I’m so glad you asked! Here’s where I’ll drop some album recommendations.

Julie Byrne - The Greater Wings

Beverly Glenn-Copeland - The Ones Ahead (forthcoming; been spinning those singles all damn day)

Choir Boy, Now That’s Class, 2019

In the fall of 2017, I went to Europe. I participated in the indulgent ritual of study abroad in the first semester of my junior year, having grown sick of the tiny college town I’d been inhabiting and curious to see how I could make it work somewhere much different. It didn’t hurt that going to Europe had such a meaningful impact on my financial aid I was, effectively, paid to go to Europe, and the lump sum from school in my account covered the net cost for my next three semesters. It was, effectively, cheaper to go to Europe than stay in Ohio.

But, I knew that I’d miss my radio show. It was the thing keeping me tethered to my music obsession. At the time, I relied almost entirely on my Discover Weekly and influencer-curated Spotify playlists (specifically David Dean Burkhart’s Compact Cassette playlist) to feed me new music. Discovery through shows at my on-campus venue or from social media wasn’t happening at the speed or ease I wanted. As much as I look back on that reliance and chastise myself a little, I have to thank Burkhart for helping me find Choir Boy. He included “Two Lips” on a special Halloween edition of the playlist, which I gobbled up enthusiastically at a student café in Prague while reading about gender (probably). It was heavy on goth, post-punk, synthwave, and other eerie genres. Adam Klopp’s unsettlingly angelic voice was a strong fit.

Since the mid-2010s, Choir Boy has been making a goth & punk-inspired synthpop that puts them in conversation with everyone from John Maus (I know, I know) to Bryan Ferry. Their debut, Passive With Desire, came out on Team Love in 2016, the Conor Oberst-curated label and onetime home for Tilly and the Wall that also served as a launchpad for Long Beard, Joanna Sternberg, and Yours are the Only Ears. Between “Dark Room,” “Hellmouth,” “Blood Moon,” and more, Passive showcased, above all else, Adam’s voice, which he honed as a member of Northeast Ohio’s youth choruses. But, the lyricism and hypnotic, hazy instrumental backings match Adam’s unusual delivery. In 2017, the band moved to Dais Records, the strongest purveyors of today’s goth, industrial, and synth punk. It’s a match made in heaven. Dais dropped the Sunday Light EP, a sleeper hit in their discography. The band’s 2020 album, Gathering Swans, offers some of the band’s catchiest songs (“Toxic Eye,” “Complainer”, “Shatter”) alongside more esoteric, moving compositions (“Gathering Swans,” “St. Angela Merici”). Before the band dropped “Complainer,” I’d spent weeks listening to FKA twigs’ Magdalene on repeat, so I was grateful that something could snap me out of it.

Since 2019, I’ve been lucky enough to see the Salt Lake City-based band play four times: twice in 2019, once headlining and once opening for Ceremony, at Now That’s Class in Cleveland (nka No Class), once at Grog Shop in 2022, again in Cleveland, and as of last week, once at Johnny Brenda’s in Philly. Every performance they offer is class: aided and abetted by Michael Paulsen (guitar), Chaz Costello (bass), and Jeff Kleinman (keys and sax), audiences of all persuasions are easily enraptured, especially by Adam’s scary enthusiastic vocal delivery. If you think his voice sounds unusual in recording, it’s really unique live. And that guy can belt.

At this point in my life, I don’t think I have a “favorite” band; there are too many and I oscillate between favorites all the time. But Choir Boy is my most recent favorite band. Between 2017 and 2020, they dominated my listening habits, alongside Mr. Twin Sister, Tess Roby, and TOPS.

This Philly show felt really special, and not just because Adam performed a good chunk of “Nites Like This” an octave higher than usual, an already high place in any man’s vocal range.

At all three shows in Cleveland, I needed my car to get there. I’m a lifelong west-sider (minus 9 months in Little Italy), so Grog Shop was a 20-30 minute drive there. Before I worked there, it wasn’t uncommon for me not to get to the gig because it felt far and I felt lazy. Getting to Class on transit was vaguely reliable if I really wanted to, but the RTA didn’t have renewable fare cards and I had immediate car access and it’s a 7-minute drive.

Now, I live in West Philadelphia, a quick walk away from the Market Frankford line. Often called the “el” since it’s above ground for most of its journey, the Market Frankford goes from the inner ring suburb of Upper Darby all the way to Frankford, a northeast Philadelphia neighborhood that marks the transition from the old, dense city to a slightly younger, slightly more suburban city. Johnny Brenda’s is right on the el. I wrapped up a Zoom call to record Girl’s Room, grabbed my wallet & keys, and hopped on the el with more than enough time to catch the opener, Philly’s Night Sins. When Choir Boy closed out their show with “Complainer,” it was easy to dart out the side door and get back on the train towards West Philly. It was all so easy.

I don’t have too much to offer intellectually on the matter. I’m just grateful I live in a city with functional transit. I’ve used the trolleys, the buses, and both metro trains to get to shows. I don’t need my car if I don’t want it. And it feels so, so good to leave it behind.

Not in the mood to check my spelling. I’ll deal with it later.

Subscribe now

Back in May, Paste Magazine published my favorite piece of music writing I’ve done: a feature celebrating the 10 year anniversary of salvia palth’s melanchole in conversation with Daniel Johann Lines, the guy behind the viral sadness soundtrack. We chatted about cult internet fame, the trajectory of “bedroom pop,” and looked at the crop of young DIY musicians making music in the same tradition. They, too, are young artists fostering a kind of virality amongst themselves, uploading homespun albums, garnering thousands of streams, and networking with small tape labels to make limited-run merch before they’ve even played a show. They come from all over: mage tears is English, cottonwood firing squad is from California, and the person I’m chatting with, Liam McCay of sign crushes motorist, hails from Ireland.

When I chat with Liam, he’s in his bedroom, guitars in sight, as well as posters for My Bloody Valentine and Frank Ocean. At 18, he’s in the middle of his graduating exams, looking at the future and considering university while figuring out how to keep music a part of his life. It feels wild to know that the prolific emotional slowcore musician is such a young figure. While sign crushes motorist is his most-streamed project, garnering 1.3 million monthly Spotify listeners since he released i’ll be okay in August of 2022, Liam is the brain behind a variety of similar but subtly different projects that have also infiltrated the streaming economy. Projects like hold, miserable teens club, make his ribs show, take care, birth day, and more are finding their way onto Spotify editorial playlists, especially side effects, the dedicated sad indie playlist featuring everyone from DIY microcelebrities like Bedlocked and sundots to major acts like King Krule and boygenius. The Pinegrove song that just gained a new viral life, “Need 2,” has prominent placement.

I came of age on this kind of sad music. salvia palth and I are roughly the same age; we found ourselves drawn to, among other things, the music of people like Sam Ray and Mat Cothran. While their music is genuinely too different for direct comparison, I think they scratched a similar itch, picking at the scabs of extreme emotion and desolation with their distinctive approaches. For me and thousands of other teens like me, their music became a gateway to related artists of all kinds, like Foxes in Fiction (curator of Orchid Tapes), Nicole Dollanganger, Alex G, and even Mitski, who I saw open for Elvis Depressedly with Gabby’s World in 2015. At one level, it feels like “bedroom pop” is dead; the labels who dabbled in that sandbox like Double Double Whammy and Run For Cover have their new focal points, and the tape labels and blogs who specialized in these bedroom pop scenes have also drifted away, victims of their curators’ need to find a stable living. 

So when I found that young musicians still made trudging, nakedly emotional bedroom pop from home, uploaded it, and gained the admiration of thousands, sometimes millions of listeners worldwide, I realized that just because the labels and the blogs have moved on, it doesn’t mean that the listenership has. With new generations of indieheads who’ve had an expansive internet and a musical economy shaped extensively by the streaming era, and a network of like-minded tape labels like Gizzmoix, Hunkofplastic, Semi Collective, and more archiving the globalized digital scene, what we called “lo-fi bedroom pop” 10 years ago has a new life. And as we explore Liam’s latest album as sign crushes motorist, Hurting, we can see just how that has emerged for him.

Liam encountered bedroom pop and DIY production in 2019 and, like many, found himself inspired by the idea that moving, affecting indie music can rise from simple home production. As a younger teen, making music seemed an arduous process. It was revolutionary to realize that it doesn’t have to be. Towards the end of 2020, as he learned guitar, the world of slowcore hit Liam like a ton of bricks. The work of titans like Duster or the late Apistat Commander spoke to him both in how they made him feel and how their style sounded accessible, like something he might be able to replicate. A lot of bedroom pop starts out this way: a young fan with something to say finds an aesthetic they like and seeks to make it their own.

Liam found his preferred aesthetic on the internet, noting: “there’s not much of a slowcore scene in Ireland that I can think of.” He first heard Duster’s smash hit “Inside Out” while looking for some music to accompany an Instagram real, declaring: “this is class.” He listened to the growing Duster discography, moving on from there to Coma Cinema and Teen Suicide, and he freely, if sheepishly, admits to finding a breadth of slowcore favorites scrolling Tik Tok. Duster, especially, has become synonymous with slowcore thanks to their popularity with young listeners on Instagram and Tik Tok. Liam’s curiosity led him to Cooking and other like-sounding Philadelphia bands. 

“When I started releasing music, I put it out under the name Moon Water, and I had a whole plan: this year, I’ll put out the EP, then I’ll put out some singles next year, and finally the album so I’ll get traction,” Liam explains. “Then, maybe about six months in, I was going through a rough patch while recording new songs. So, I diverted and made a new project that reflected how I was feeling under the name hold. That was my first ‘side project.’” He made it’ll pass hastily in 2021, just looking to nurture an impulse. To his surprise, a track ended up on a popular playlist, collecting thousands of listens. He realized that his strict plan wasn’t necessary to gather an audience. He kept making new albums under different names, blurring the line between main project and side projects entirely. As of 2023, Liam has 10 projects. His releases under sign crushes motorist, Take Care, and Birth Day remain his most popular, collecting millions of streams each. While many of their releases center on similar themes like growing up, deep doldrums, and incandescent love, their approaches vary subtly. Birth Day is more squarely an indie rock project, Roaming leans more into dream pop, and sign crushes motorist is the ideal midpoint between Dusterian slowcore and Teen Suicide’s depression rock. 

That hold EP turned out to be pivotal for Liam’s creative energy: “When I first got a few hundred listeners on the hold project, it really kept me going. If a few hundred people like what I’m doing, maybe a few thousand more will, too.” His unconventional approach and nakedly emotion has helped him identify and grow an audience. “I do have a little bit of impostor syndrome over it,” Liam admits. “It just doesn’t feel real.” And, to an extent, it’s hard to believe: the music is good, undoubtedly, but it’s hard to predict what’s going to get listeners’ attention. But, it’s also true that slowcore’s been having a moment lately: Tik Tok’s twin fascination with Duster and Alex G, someone who doesn’t play in the slowcore sandbox but exists somewhere adjacent, has helped musicians like Liam get attention. The users who love Duster and Alex G seem more likely to go on deep dives to find something else that’s special. In the age of the algorithm, repeated plays reinforce the idea that you’re promotable. Every play on one Liam project has the potential to uplift all Liam projects. It all makes sense.

For Liam, the impetus to write Hurting and release it under the sign crushes motorist name is organic: he’s had an emotionally taxing several months. He didn’t decide he was going to write another album, but based on his mood and the genres he felt like exploring, he realized he was, effectively, making another sign crushes motorist album. There are strong parallels: on i’ll be okay, “loser monologue” functions as a spoken-word break, and hurting has one, too, entitled “Manifesto.” It’s a terrifying bummer: “It’s kind of rough, it was from a really dark place,” Liam explains. If there’s anything Liam isn’t afraid to do, it’s externalize the depth of his emotions.

Over ten tracks, Hurting brings the warm guitar tones from i’ll be okay back. “Start” begins with the slow, fuzzy guitar loops that made i’ll be okay so memorable, before Liam’s gentle vocals and minimalist percussion help guide the song along. “Gentle” is a one-minute meditation between the guitar and a gorgeous field recording, complete with bird calls and water sounds that give the album room to breathe. To me, the biggest standouts are the album’s two longest tracks, “Wedding Night” and “Death Of A Heart,” spaces where Liam has more room to let his sound sprawl. The vocal layering on “Wedding Night” immediately reminds me of melanchole. “Death Of A Heart” is bolder, with Liam in a higher register supported by a distinct suite of percussion and ominous stirrings, way more reminiscent of Teen Suicide or even Jordaan Mason than Duster.

I ask Liam what he wants his fan to know and he offers a few things: one, it’s going to be okay. Two, he quietly loves when people don’t know that all the projects are his and when they find out on their own. He never intended to create intrigue, but he thanks everyone for giving him a chance. The DIY labels (Gizzmoix, Dying Dutchman, and Hunkofplastic, to name a few) that have come to specialize in lo-fi indie rock, Liam’s preferred medium, as well as emo, hardcore, and other youth-heavy genres have given Liam the chance to press his music to tape and vinyl without signing his masters away. This ecosystem of independent musicians and labels is remarkable, making manifest the passion projects of primarily young artists on physical media. 

I hope to return to this “scene” of sorts on a regular basis. The music and the ethos are admirable, and the way that “sad” music thrives on Spotify both piques my interest as someone who grew up on it, too, and raises my eyebrow as someone wary of how streaming platforms harness moods to keep listeners listening. I also find myself fascinated with the world of young music fans who’ve grown attached to bands like Duster, Panchiko, and homespun lo-fi music. It’s clear that young people are looking for something different than what the Top 40 radio and Big Indie is serving. What does that mean for the artists, new and young, caught up in this ecosystem? How does social media reinforce it all?

I strongly encourage you to listen to Hurting as well as Liam’s other projects, all of which can be found on streaming. I’ll link you to Liam’s playlist of his personal favorite works. That’s how I pieced together that the force behind all these despondent projects was one intrepid soul.

The fearsome foursome of Endless Scroll just revealed their top ten favorite releases of 2023 so far. Ranking episodes are always fun! We can debate the merits of ranking things (I tend to think that, after a top 10, it’s somewhat pointless), we can force ourselves to think critically about why some releases hit just a little harder than others, or we can just consume the content. I like to consume the content.

Honorable mentions include any project from a Philly artist I spend time with regularly, like ther’s a horrid whisper echoes in a palace of endless joy, Swim Camp’s Steel Country, or Greg Mendez’s self-titled LP. Philly is a special city where I have been wildly lucky to meet talented musicians who push feverishly for a stronger music community.

Onto the goods: 

10. Indigo de Souza - All of This Will End (Saddle Creek, 4/28)

The follow-up to de Souza’s Saddle Creek breakout record, Any Shape You Take, April’s All of This Will End excited me from its first announcement. Critically, the lead single “Younger and Dumber” was a home run (and remains my favorite, due to crying a lot), but between my friends, it was a splitter: it’s a more restrained, park-and-bark ballad. While it has a brilliant climax, it’s one of de Souza’s more understated songs, one with a clear message, one that sets the stage for a record that is vulnerable, sometimes downright therapeutic, without succumbing to the tragedies of manufactured vulnerability. It’s clear that de Souza has been through it. And she finds novel forms of expression: dance pop, post-doom, and, of course, indie rock. While she careens between styles, she never foregoes what makes her unique: that voice, that delivery, that directness. It’s immediately appealing. Whether this is as strong as Any Shape You Take is, for some, an unsettled question, one that doesn’t literally matter, but is fun to ponder. The artist who de Souza is growing into has grace, power, and an incandescence like no other. And, seeing her play this one live really lodged it in my head.

9. Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (Mute, 3/10)

The pop musings of Radical Romantics are easily upsetting, even for an album so nakedly dedicated to diverse forms of love. While The Knife was always left-of-center, Karin Dreijer’s increasingly queer solo work as Fever Ray really goes for it. As soon as the first single dropped, this was destined to be the alt-pop album of the season, one where critics and my quirky gay oomfs could find common ground. Once “Kandy” dropped, I was hooked: the hypnotic synths, percussion, and vocals bounced around my head for days straight, becoming one of my preferred daily listens. “Shiver” is just as freakishly alluring, and “Even It Out” is the parenting anthem I didn’t know I wanted. Radical Romantics is abrasive and expressive. It’s pop, but it’s ready for the drippy atmosphere of the clubs. At some times sexy, other times quirky, and at all times subversive, it simply fucks me up every time. 

8. Debby Friday - GOOD LUCK (Sub Pop, 3/24)

When “So Hard to Tell,” the lead single off GOOD LUCK dropped, I had no idea who Debby Friday was. The Canadian DJ-cum-producer was outside of my purview, but she shot right into it with this song, itself a departure from her usual stylings, because her voice was as beguiling as a siren. “So Hard to Tell” definitely fits on GOOD LUCK, but the rest of Friday’s must is more on the club-ready pop end of the spectrum. While the rat race of Toronto nightlife threatened to derail her, Friday knows that it gave her the chops and taste she has, and she puts those to work on the album. I once saw “I Got It” described as “pussyslay,” and you can really feel it. “What A Man,” with its angular (yes, angular) guitars, has the punk charm that plays beautifully against spots of rap, industrial, and dance. It’s sweaty music, tailor made for the evenings out. I would give anything to hear this record live.

7. feeble little horse - Girl With Fish (Saddle Creek, 6/9)

Listening to feeble little horse is a lot of fun. This was true from the beginning, with feeble little horse’s self-released EP, modern tourism. Karly Hartzman told me about feeble little horse shortly after the band dropped Hayday, the collection of terrifying earworms featuring Lydia Slocum’s nonchalant lyrics, dozens of layers of processing, and samples. It was a defining new release out of Julia’s War, the tape label that Doug Dulgarian of They Are Gutting A Body Of Water manages that continues to overwhelm with noisy, sometimes downright bombastic collections. While not a Philly band, feeble little horse, a quartet of exceedingly young but well-versed musicians, has become a key figure in defining the Philadelphia sound. While obscurity, art rock, and occlusion are part and parcel of the current sound, sometimes called “Philly shoegaze,” it’s also often hook-laden, bringing the best of slacker rock and pop into the world of noise. Girl with Fish is an album confirming that this band is the real deal. Pop hits like “Pocket” and “Paces” are just as earworm-y as “Chores” and “Termites,” and novel ventures like “Tin Man” and “Healing” showcase the band’s versatility. With a co-sign from Saddle Creek and placements on arguably normie Spotify playlists like Lorem, feeble little horse has been on an aggressively quick ascent, having successfully tapped a sound and a mission (put pop music into pretentious people’s ears) that makes for a good story. The band is taking some much-needed rest.

6. Mandy, Indiana: I’ve seen a way (Fire Talk, 5/19)

When indie label Fire Talk announced that the first official Mandy, Indiana LP was on the way, I didn’t actually pay it much mind. I was obsessed with the song “Alien 3” when it dropped in 2021 in advance of their … EP, so I knew I’d like the album. I wasn’t prepared to love it. From the eerie pop opener, “Love Theme (4K VHS),” to the dance-ready “Drag [Crashed]” and “Peach Fuzz,” I have trouble finding fault in this album. Genealogically, the band is closer to British noise rock bands like Gilla Band than to harsh noise acts, but their command of abrasive sounds paired with Valentine Caulfield’s politically charged French language lyrics is immediately arresting. Each song is an experience in and of itself, tapping into a distinct sensory palette. And they didn’t record drums in a cave for the bit, or for the press: they did it because they’re dangerously curious about how they can make their sound just a little different. This is another album where the hype around it is to be believed: this is Mandy, Indiana at their most supercharged. If you liked …, you will love this album.

5. @ - Mind Palace Music (Carpark, 2/17)

I didn’t know whether I should include this in my 2023 list because, to me, this is a 2021 album. Lead single “Letters” reached my ears in January 2021, immediately grabbing my ears with the gorgeous vocal harmonies between Victoria Rose and herself + Victoria Rose and her collaborator in @, Stone Filipczak. And yes, she’s the Victoria Rose of Brittle Brian fame (and if you liked Verisune in th bedroom pop days, you’ll like 2022’s Biodiesel). 9733, the Connecticut tape label & social network run by members of waveform*, pressed the freak folk album onto a hot pink tape. Between “Letters,” “My Garden,” “Star Game,” and, even more lately, “Friendship Is Frequency,” I had to have that tape. I do have it. And now, thanks to Carpark’s deal to sign the duo, I have it in olive green vinyl. @ is a miracle find for me; they make a kind of music I would have never sought after myself. As I revisit the album, I find baroque moments like “Boxwood Lane” even more endearing than I did in 2021. I know this album crossed way more critics’ ears this time around (Ian Cohen, I saw your tweets, and Nina Corcoran, I read your review), so I figured I had to celebrate this album this year. It made my top 20 in 2021; it just might do that again in 2023. I’m willing to let that happen.

4. Midwife / Vyva Melinkolya - Orbweaving (The Flenser, 5/12)

Midwife (Madeline Johnston) is quickly ascending my list of all-time favorite artists. She is the best artist out there when it comes to portraying grief and despondence, emotions that are inescapable. Midwife’s distant vocals, which sound as if they emanate from the aging PA system of a dollar store, suggest heavenliness. Her collaborative friendship with Vyva Melinkolya (Angel Diaz), the shoegazer and Ethel Cain collaborator, makes complete sense. Midwife’s devastating project has been informed by doom, slowcore, shoegaze, and more; Melinkolya is the onetime moderator of one of Facebook’s largest shoegaze and dream pop meme pages with a rich back catalog (and, rumor has it, more cooking). They know how to weaponize distortion to produce tears. Lead single “NMP” is 8 minutes of weighty bargaining, increasingly desperate, growing more and more hypnotic by the phrase. “Hounds of Heaven,” for a shoegaze track, is an earworm; there’s something of a hook in this track, it’s so repeatable. While some (ELI ENIS) think that the title track, a 12-minute atmospheric ambient composition, is a boring letdown, I see it more as a devastating anticlimax, a study in vastness after four tracks devoted to the desert-inspired devastation Midwife & Melinkolya portray expertfully. Everything that they can say about the emotions they want to express has been said in those first four tracks, so on “Orbweaving,” they let abstraction do the talking. It’s like listening to Apollo Vermouth or Tim Hecker after an exorcism. Orbweaving is a cry listen for me; I think it will be for years to come.

3. Khanate - To Be Cruel (Sacred Bones, 5/19)

This spring, in a surprise that shocked the alternative metal community (objective freaks), Khanate dropped a three-track collection, an hour of music, entitled To Be Cruel. The extreme doom supergroup hadn’t released an album in 14 years; they indicated at no time their intent to come together once again. Their reign of terror was thought to be a relic of the 2000s. It’s not over. To Be Cruel is exactly the kind of thing a freak like me loves: continuous guitar feedback, glacial tempo, and harsh screeches that unfold into intelligible language over excruciating minutes. My personal favorite is “It Wants To Fly,” a gruesome, terrorizing number as Alan Dubin states: “It starts with a wince / You can look away / But I think you should see / Under the skin / That crawls.” I’ve been really drawn to this variety of music lately: extremely slow, extremely heavy, extremely expressive doom metal. Khanate are masters of feedback. Durbin’s lyrical delivery is the kind of cathartic that goes beyond individual emotions and more towards transcending senses of anxiety. There is no better release.

2. Wednesday - Rat Saw God (Dead Oceans, 4/7)

Wednesday is a band that I was wrong about. I didn’t really get them at first listen. I tried I Was Trying To Describe You to Someone, their 2020 Orindal Records debut, and I thought it was a bit much. But, I believed in the inherent correctness of Orindal Records and in Slumber Mag, one of their earliest champions, and nervously embraced their 2021 breakout album, Twin Plagues, upon its announcement. When the first singles for Twin Plagues came out, I found myself really into them; during the album rollout, I waited for the other shoe to drop, something that would, again, perturb me just too much. At the same time, my friends and critics started singing their praises in unison, including one Lizzie Manno, my Cleveland showgoing buddy, who used her platform at Paste to sound the alarm that this band was onto something. I fell in love with Twin Plagues upon its release, allowing myself to be hypnotized by Karly Hartzman’s unique voice on songs like “Cody’s Only” and really loving their propulsive brand of shoegaze exemplified on “Three Sisters.” Xandy Chelmis’s work on the steel and their dancing with aesthetics endemic to their North Carolina upbringing added a folksy charm that, on Rat Saw God, the band leaned into entirely. Rat Saw God is the expertful welding of shoegaze and country in a form that feels true to the band’s vantage point. Hartzman’s vivid lyrics are the real star. It makes sense for a track like “Chosen To Deserve” to be the lead single; it’s undeniably country but still slams like a shoegaze track, with Hartzman portraying the sacred ritual of confessing your past sins to a new connection. It’s a task I’ve attempted before. It’s intimidating to give an account of oneself, their regrets, their chequers without scaring them off. But it’s got to be done. Hartzman makes it sound beautiful. “Bull Believer” often leaves me in tears; I want to yell like that. “Bath County” is stupid catchy. Even tracks that felt understated, like “TV in the Gas Pump,” have become stars to me. I was fortunate enough to receive the advance of this upon announcement; my partner Eric did, too. We listened that night and, from our respective bedrooms, texted each other song titles in all capitals, often preceded by “WOW” or “HOLY SHIT,” just because each song blew us away. I still get that sensation. I hope never to lose it.

1. Nicole Dollangager - Married in Mount Airy (s/r, 1/6)

It’s hard to believe that the album that would become my favorite of the year would come so early. In this case, Nicole Bell, who plays as Nicole Dollanganger, released Marred in Mount Airy quietly and independently on January 6th, 2023.She’d been teasing a new album for, at that point, over two years. With her primary collaborator, Matthew Tomasi, Bell composed a macabre, fully-formed exercise in mangled Americana; southern gothic pop with midcentury roots, exploring shame, desolation, freedom, love, and lust with exhilarating, pensive production. As she released singles, I fell in love with them each differently: “Whispering Glades” caught my attention for but a moment before fading out of my glance; “Gold Satin Dreamer” took hold like talons deep into my skin; “Runnin’ Free” sounded nice but I didn’t get hooked. In context, though, every single song is a standout. The album cuts are, also, undeniable heaters: “Dogwood” is poised to be my most listened-to after the spellbinding opener “Married in Mount Airy” and my original favorite, “Bad Man,” a frequent cry-listen for me in the wintertime. Much like how Preacher’s Daughter won me over with drudging tempos and ghastly narratives, Marred in Mount Airy overflows with portraits of lives gone awry, love overtopping, and the underbelly of girlhood and romance. The record is best listened to multiple times in a row, as “I’ll Wait For Your Call” loops back into “Married in Mount Airy.” As disquieting as the emotional landscapes are on the album, you’ll want to stay in them for at least a few hours for the full effect; it’s hard to just go back to reality after hearing Bell’s unique voice guide you through the horrors and wonders she needs you to see. Over her decade-long career, which started with independent releases popularized on Tumblr, Bell’s output has stayed true to form, always the perfect soundtrack for a soft grunge blog, but her focal points have evolved with her own curiosities. Once a Run For Cover act during their era of scooping up bedroom pop starlets, now Bell appears at her most comfortable writing, recording, producing, and releasing her work on her own schedule, free from the obligations of a label, a publicist, a manager. Her fans remain as devoted as ever. What appeals to me, the most, about Dollanganger’s production, her vocals, and her narratives are the emotions she manages to excavate with each listen. I don’t know how she does it. But, I often find myself scared, desperate, and longing for a few things by the time I’m done with a Nicole Dollanganger record. Whether that’s some kind of love or freedom from its grasp, Married in Mount Airy leaves me wanting, needing. It makes going back for another listening so, so satisfying.

I’m gay (derogatory). Ten years ago, I was petrified of saying that out loud (silly), but now it feels more like a running joke. My friend Ivan likes to point out to me, specifically, all the things he does to listen to and support gay people. Ivan, thank you. 

I’ve spent the better part of my adult years embedded in indie & DIY spaces, especially ones where sexual orientation is incidental and not central to the experience. Now, out in the West Philly scene, it feels like a queer identity is a prerequisite to participation (and, duh, it should be). But, even at basement shows out here, and definitely at shows in Cleveland, I was often the only gay boy in the room, and at others I have been the only queer in the room. 

So, whenever I come across another gay guy in an indie rock space, whether they play in the band or work for a label or whatever, I still get a sense of surprise. There are lots, but once in a while I look around and I think…what are you doing here? 

Yes, I had the PWR BTTM crewneck c. 2016

But, it’s June, the month where we’re proud of ourselves for various things. And, coincidentally or intentionally, my inbox has been alight this spring with albums touching on gay themes, gay experiences, gay homosexuality; it feels as if they’re finally letting people with my vocal range sing about boys since the demise of PWR BTTM. There’s Man on Man’s Provincetown, Seán Barna’s An Evening at Macri Park, and Logan Lynn’s forthcoming EP, Distracted. 

There’s something exciting about getting these in my promo inbox. I pretend like I’m above wanting representation (and, in many parts of public life, I am represented — sometimes overrepresented). But for as much as these albums promise, I keep feeling let down. Sometimes, I think the lyrics are trite, sometimes I think the subject matter is boring, flavor-of-the-moment gay guy discourse that pops up way too regularly. 

But, I have to imagine that for an artist like, say, Roddie Bottum, who’s endured the straightness of the alt-rock world for entirely too long, making loudly gay rock has a healing quality. I like the riffs on Provincetown. I like the spirit. But it feels weird in a way that I can’t wrap my head around. Maybe it’s the years I spent in isolation away from a queer community at the dawn of COVID that has me feeling alien when I listen to that album, or Macri Park, or anything from Distracted. Maybe I’m hesitant to see the liberatory potential in an album from my corner of the universe after the swift and righteous cancellation of PWR BTTM (whose music I returned to for this piece and, woof…I was wearing rose-colored glasses). Disappointments, hangups, and projections aside, one Pride season record really stood out to me:

Life on the Edge of You, Lontalius

Kartel, 2023

Queer media that works in subtleties can feel stunted and boring. Whether the subject is a gay TV character whose romantic escapades are watered down to sweet nothings or reality competition shows that promote their sponsors better than liberatory politics, there is a looming dissatisfaction with LGBTQ+ representation in media. Too often, the fun details of queer life are hidden to keep the media artifact “palatable” to “Middle America” (a much more heterogeneous place than execs are used to) or the artifact is so commercialized that every gay moment feels like a cynical ploy for attention.

Life on the Edge of You is not stunted; it is not boring. It’s gentle, caring, and sometimes, yes, subtle. Compared to previous Lontalius records, the queer piece is less subtle than usual; his singer-songwriter approach has lent itself well to “sad indie,” which can get gay, but on Life, Johnston starts from that gay vantage point. “Zachary,” for example, is propulsive and alluring, a fun exercise for Johnston to imagine being attracted to a car guy. Johnston’s approach to indie pop is still understated and his pension for gloom still manifests, but Life is a rejuvenating, unclumsy exercise in queer artmaking, written with deliberation and intricate emotion. 

It’s just what I’ve needed: music in a sonic palette I like, appeals to the arsenal of emotions made manifest in queer everyday living, a record where an artist’s sexuality, a sexuality that looks like mine, is paramount to the record’s appeal but that doesn’t overstate the impact it expects to have. Every piece of art has a politics. Life on the Edge of You has a politics; some if it is easy to see, some of it not as much. What appeals to me is that Lontalius appears aware of just how much of a political statement it is and is not to be gay and make the art he makes; he makes no grand promises of what the album will accomplish. Sonically, lyrically, thematically, Life on the Edge of You grabs me and feels true.

Also, I Saw Wednesday This Weekend

For the second time in my young life, I saw the band Wednesday. If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar, but just in case: they’re a North Carolina-based 5-piece band fronted by Karly Hartzman, previously the vocalist of Diva Sweetly, featuring Jake Lenderman (of MJ fame) and Xandy Chelmis, their ace in the hole, a pedal steel maestro who pushes the instrument to its limits. Over three studio albums and a covers compilation in rapid succession, Wednesday has grabbed indie rock by the neck with their terrifying mix of shoegaze and country, a natural byproduct of life in the southern US and a fascination with alternative rock movements. Hartzman’s deft vocals, which oscillate between her chest voice and head voice with controlled chaos, deliver haunting lyrics that update Southern Gothic for the 2020s. Lenderman’s solo work, a fuzzy, country-inflicted brand of slacker rock, exists in symbiosis with Wednesday’s work; fans of one inevitably become fans of the other.

The first time I saw Wednesday, it was in the Mahall’s locker room, a defunct DIY space in the entertainment megaplex that was, essentially, an alcove near the basement lanes. They performed alongside two local bands, including one brand new band, and it seemed like at least one-third of the audience was there to support their friends and duck out. Wednesday played hits from their first two albums, I Was Trying to Explain You to Someone and Twin Plagues, for an audience of 20some gazers, standing at attention. Their first two albums are especially heavy on the shredding; the sound bled into the ten bowling lanes adjacent to the locker room. It hurt. And it was legendary.

Wednesday, Mahall’s, November 2021

That was then. Now, in June of 2023, Wednesday is 9 weeks into a world tour of their Dead Oceans debut, Rat Saw God. They played Union Transfer with their touring opener, Tenci, and the long-defunct band All Dogs, who came together specifically to play this show (and, yes, they were everything I wanted and more). I wondered how the growing band would do on ticket sales or on filling the space, both with sound and with energy.

They rose to the occasion easily.

Wednesday, Union Transfer, June 2023

Union Transfer holds 1,200 people, and it certainly felt like all 1,200 showed up. In this big ol’ room, Wednesday commands a presence easily; Hartzman’s stage banter is balanced, funny, and quick. She shouted out her sister’s boyfriend and Dan Wriggins on their respective Master’s Degrees. Where the Wednesday sound was extreme, painful, and all-consuming in the Mahall’s basement (a positive experience, if you’re me), in Union Transfer, the band’s bigness fills the space towards the top of what it can handle, but within a safe range. Their high-energy shreddage inspired push pits galore. At Mahall’s, they looked sheepishly grateful for everyone who stayed; at Union Transfer, the band was in their element, still grateful, but deservedly confident. It was breathtaking.

And, yes, I cried a little bit during “Chosen to Deserve” and “Bull Believer.”

A playlist of Wednesday’s full set can be found HERE

Exterior rendering of the entry to “The Roxy,” the 800-capacity performance space to be within Mahall’s

When I was 15, my family moved across town. For the prior seven years, we’d been living in a residential-only neighborhood in Lakewood that was so cut-off from the rest of Lakewood that my middle school buddies and I walked 20 minutes to visit Dollar Tree and McDonald’s for afternoon fun. It was entirely more house than we needed, so we moved onto the proper Lakewood grid, sharing a block with the near-century-old Mahall’s 20 Lanes, a staple of the Madison Avenue corridor in Lakewood’s southeast quadrant. At that time, it was an old man’s bar and pool hall, with each game of bowling so cheap, it was easy for my buddies and I to get lanes with what little spare cash we had on our persons. As a big space, it could accommodate a variety of DIY events. The vibe was what you made of it, but it wasn’t easy to make one.

The year I turned 15, and the year my family moved to the southeast side, was also the year that Mahall’s came under new ownership. Young, alternative investors who came from a family of entrepreneurs in Canton settled in the then economically slumped Lakewood and saw extensive potential in Mahall’s. They essentially formalized the place: the bar space became a proper bar & grill with locally renowned fried chicken, the pool hall and locker room became performance spaces for year-round music, putting Mahall’s in conversation with established clubs like Grog Shop and Beachland Ballroom, and the 20 lanes, 10 upstairs and 10 downstairs, remained a key asset that brought people in time after time. As a teenager, it made for very easy nightlife. With the money I started making from babysitting gigs and, eventually, a formal job, I had fun visiting Mahall’s for shows: I saw Mitski open for Elvis Depressedly here. I saw Mr. Twin Sister, arguably my favorite band, for the second time here. Over school breaks, I was lucky to catch Florist, Hello Shark, and Palehound performing in the locker room. 

Hello Shark, Anna McClellan, Told Slant coheadline tour, 2017

Especially since I finished college, Mahall’s has undergone a modest but noticeable transformation. Over time, an independent promotions, management, and entertainment group BravoArtist fully acquired the business, working with existing staff (many of whom have worked there since the first change) on new concepts: a ‘70s-inspired cocktail bar in the locker room space (which sent DIY-style shows to the upstairs apartment space, halving capacity), occasional vintage clothing pop-ups that have become a staple of the lobby experience, and extensive themed dance nights dedicated to pop idols and the pop-punk generation. Over time, it has felt like the concerts Mahall’s attracts are narrower in scope, with a large presence of emo, pop-punk, and alternative rock shows or themed nights. Some of the BravoArtist leadership also dabble in the music industry, so it would make sense that their connections in a specific array of scenes would have a home at the space.

All of this history to say: my friends think Mahall’s is corny. To an extent, it’s not beating the allegations: the growing importance of dance parties dedicated to the king and queen of corny, Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, along with a frequent, and well-trafficked, emo night attract partygoers looking to steep themselves in nostalgia. It’s not as cheap to bowl there as it once was. And the slight lean of the booking towards emo and pop punk doesn’t sit well with Cleveland’s otherwise flourishing experimental scenes. It’s a weird city full of hardcore, art punk, harsh noise, and other fucked up shit. You can hear that right alongside more palatable indie rock at Happy Dog or No Class. And all of that used to have more of a presence at Mahall’s.

Now, as the business looks ahead, Mahall’s is ready to double down on live entertainment, trading its upstairs lanes for an 800-capacity auditorium space accessible from its east side, directly abutting my favorite gas station in Lakewood (real heads know that LKWD 1 STOP is always a couple cents cheaper). Specifically, the auditorium space will be known as The Roxy, an homage to the dance hall that used to occupy this space in the olden days of Mahall’s (it really is 100 years old). Personally, I’ll reserve judgment on the programming and the choice to rid the space of half its bowling lanes — every take I have on that is entirely personal, and in all honesty, I think an event venue this size has good potential — but there’s something about The Roxy, and Mahall’s looking towards its dance hall past, that I think is undeniably corny.

David A. Banks is a geographer and poster I admire whose latest book, The City Authentic: How The Attention Economy Builds Urban America, is still on my to-read list. But, I’ve enjoyed his essays and podcast appearances where he waxes on how mid-sized cities gun for youth attention and investment. In the 21st century, the post-industrial city must constantly market itself, attracting residents and visitors by promising some truly “authentic” experience — authenticity, of course, having been problematized in tourism studies. As deindustrialized, economically hollowed-out cities become social media influencers, actors in the city look to celebrate its prosperous past by, perhaps, naming the new luxury apartment building The Hat Factory or the hot wedding venue The Screw Factory (a building which is still, partially, used for industrial purposes). Buildings and businesses are named for what they used to have, back when urban centers were sites of production. Now, the only reliable form of production noticeable in these centers is some kind of social reproduction, where lifestyles and social hierarchies are reproduced through cycles of gentrification. In Lakewood, home of “The Roxy,” gentrification looks like fewer affordable housing options than ever, with more seniors and low-income folks pushed to extremes. The streetcar suburb once housed hundreds of steady industrial jobs; today, not so much.

By christening their new major performance & event space The Roxy, Mahall’s upholds The City Authentic paradigm, throwing it back to an era when Cleveland made things. In the generations since The Roxy’s original heyday, the city has embraced Urban Renewal, intentionally permitted its Black neighborhoods to burn to the ground, and fed real estate to major hospitals while its residents choke on polluted air and eat whatever cheap food is left to buy in the neighborhood, all while surveilled by cops from 8 different forces.. Increasingly, the Cleveland experience is dipolar: a city of accumulating white wealth and decreasing Black stability. 

Mahall’s choice to name their new space The Roxy isn’t offensive because of this. It’s mostly just silly. Just as the surrounding community grows more wealthy, ostentatious, and homogeneous, Mahall’s is making presumably sensible business decisions to keep up with a changing economy, the attention economy. Installing a state-of-the-art concert space is fine. Changing with the times and following where the money is makes perfect sense as a business. My nightlife spots don’t have to stay just as they were when I was younger. But to call this a return-to-form, the authentic Mahall’s experience, is just silly.

Me and my friend Arbela with Mat Cothran, 2015

Since hearing this song in October 2021, I’ve openly lamented how I’ve minimized the bass’s position in my life. The classical bass served as my primary tactile relationship to music for 11 years. The Cleveland suburb I grew up in, Lakewood, had an unusually strong music program, bolstered by a proportionally high tax burden on small homes and gifts from an alumnus who’d struck it big as a distributor of oil & gas equipment. It was that tycoon’s initial investment that gave the orchestral program its crown jewel: The Lakewood Project, a high-school rock orchestra featuring electric strings, acoustic strings to support them, and a rhythm section with all the usual components of a rock band.

LP debuted in 2003 with the help of an enterprising music faculty and the “Eddie Van Halen of the violin world,” Mark Wood. Wood, a founding member of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and inventor of the solid-body electric violin, is a wild amalgamation: a Julliard-trained violinist with a Freddie Mercury haircut who’s played with Celine Dion and Billy Joel, Wood is a man of terrifying skill and savvy. The Lakewood Project proved just one brief detour in Wood’s international fame as a rock violinist. Much like TSO, Wood’s music is, well, dramatic:

This vision of an electrified rock-band-slash-youth-orchestra celebrated 20 years of existence this past weekend, and I traveled back to Cleveland to play as an alumnus. I played with the ensemble from 2011-2015, spending the whole time in the back corner as an acoustic bassist. The weekend was fun and low-stakes: I came back, in large part, to reunite with a cellist friend from the c/o 2013, Moira, who still lives in Cleveland but has been incredibly busy with medical school. Picking up bass performance again on hits like The Who’s “Who Are You” and Kansas’ “Carry On My Wayward Son” felt more campy than serious. The alum and the current LP high schoolers delighted an audience of parents, donors, and family members. I caught up with a couple old friends.

The Lakewood Project is loaded with memories for me dating back to (sigh) 2005. My family moved back to Lakewood after a brief stint in exurban Columbus (ew), this time enrolling us in public school after having gotten a glimpse at the disintegrating Catholic schools in my kindergarten year. Lakewood Project performed a set at a festival decommissioning a redundant elementary school. I was in second grade. The high schoolers on stage looked like Disney Channel stars, with immaculate stage presence, colorful outfits, and cheery smiles.

2005 clip of The Lakewood Project performing a Mark Wood original, “Strike the Match,” one of the ensemble’s audience-pleaser hits.

Where some young homosexuals fall in love with musical theater or pop stars, I fell in love with this. And when I got it, I made the most of it. Playing in the ensemble let me connect with friends I still maintain today, like Chelsea, who first showed me Mr. Twin Sister and with whom I saw Beach House in Pittsburgh last year. I played with my style to increase my confidence, I helped arrange music for small ensembles, I tried out for youth orchestras all over and played in several. It became a “thing” for me.”

The youth orchestra industrial complex comes to an end at some point, not without some major stressors. I spent senior year leveraging my bass performance skills for college scholarships. I learned one of the bass standards for a senior recital.

The annual 4th of July show is a bit of an ordeal. This was my last performance with the ensemble, until this past Sunday.

I kept playing with my college orchestra to get some fine arts credits, and I even practiced regularly my first semester. But, without the intense regiment of both the traditional youth orchestra circuit and this weird, exciting ensemble, I didn’t have much motivation. I went to college for a more typical career; playing music felt like a chapter of my life that was meant to end. Even though our music teachers encouraged us to keep playing in some capacity, with Lakewood Project boasting that 80% of alumni continue to play their instruments in some capacity, the realities of daily life and the expense, both in money and space, of the upright bass exacerbated my laziness. I fell away from playing in any capacity and just recently decided I have to restore my tactile relationship with music. I’m taking bass guitar lessons from a neighbor.

Lakewood is a weird place that’s in flux. As a city, it’s undergoing a resurgence of interest from buyers and developers with a renewed interest in dense, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, mixed-income towns. Given the price elevation, I would say that, since my high school graduation especially, Lakewood has undergone gentrification: massive upsets in real estate values, prices, and development interests that have severe implications for low-income residents. Lakewood was always in a privileged place as a suburb outside city limits but with urban amenities. Many who chose to raise families here did so under the guise of distrusting suburbia and looking for something alternative. The city isn’t as homogenous as some of its neighbors, but to call it truly diverse might be a stretch.

At the end of the day, the biggest beneficiaries of Lakewood’s services, and the kids who get extra attention in the school district, tend to be whiter and richer. Some come from families in estates along the Great Lakes that are worth millions. What Lakewood promises a student from Edgewater Drive differed greatly from a student in an overcrowded Bird Town apartment. As Lakewood increasingly becomes a playground for rich, young upstarts who want urban living but don’t want to take a chance on Cleveland Metropolitan School District, it needs to invest in affordable housing, transit, and basic systems home repairs.

By Rocket Mortage’s metrics, houses in my hometown have sold for nearly 10% higher than they did last year. This is on trend with the last 10 or so years; just after the Great Recession, it wasn’t rare to get a quality home for between $110,000 and $150,000.

The Lakewood Project’s allure is relatively unchanged in this climate. If anything, that Lakewood boasts having an ensemble like this among its more traditional extracurriculars plus an urban built environment has made the schools more appealing. As long as the high school has a rock orchestra, it’s alt. It’s not like raising your kids in the cookie-cutter suburbs. It’s a more authentic lifestyle with a more expressive, creative school. Right?

I had more fun in Lakewood Project than I give it credit for. I am more confident now than I was when I started. But I think a lot about the exceptionalism that Lakewood residents express for their hometown and wonder how that attitude contributes to Lakewood’s ongoing gentrification. The actual process of gentrification isn’t just about shifting vibes, shifting prices —— it’s about market forces and government policy coming together to increase real estate values, send poorer, nonwhite residents to outlying areas, and generate a cityscape with amenities geared towards a largely white upper middle class. With its strong-enough public schools and mixed-use corridors that abut large blocks of mostly single-family homes, Lakewood didn’t have to do too much to attract investment from people looking for arbitrage opportunities. The city was already mostly white, but it was poorer and the homes were showing their age. The transformation was quick and it’s ongoing. All that is happening while music is taking a back seat at the elementary level in Lakewood as the district seeks to be competitive in STEM with neighboring districts. Any opportunity to generate more future Amazon and Raytheon employees should be taken :)

As for my tactile relationship with music? I think that reflecting on it, revisiting Lakewood Project, an ensemble I somewhat resented for most of my time in it, and noodling on two different kinds of basses has me pretty excited. While my skills are super rusty now, I think they’re salvageable. The youth orchestra industrial complex, which churns out hyperserious kids who may or may not be cut out for professional musicianship, is behind me. The weird politics of The Lakewood Project, with its conflicts between members, leaders, parents, and more (there are plenty), needn’t affect my desire to play. I can claim a healthy relationship with instrumental performance on my own time; I don’t need to be a part of anyone or any place’s legacy.

I played.