February 27th, 2026 3:07am
Almost every time I’ve heard something amazing and wondered what it was over the past few five months, it’s turned out to be Fred Again.
The first half dozen times I heard “Beto’s Horns” was at the gym, where I couldn’t Shazam the music and just had to wonder what was going on with this insane track with the frantic Latin rapping, the blaring Basement Jaxx-y horn riff, the monstrous dubstep drop? The one that speeds up like a panic attack but then unexpectedly spins off into a digital rhumba tangent? The weirdest, most viscerally exciting, most volatile track I’ve heard in a while? I had to know.
I’ve paid some attention to Fred Again in the past, but wasn’t keeping up. As it turns out, over the past year he’s evolved. He’s been rapidly accumulating top-tier tracks. He’s become one of the best artists working today.
What I hear in Fred Again is a mastery of the full vocabulary of electronic music – dubstep, drum and bass, garage and grime, drill, IDM, you name it – plus signature moves pulled from masters like Four Tet, Basement Jaxx, Aphex Twin, Burial, Underworld, Skrillex, and so on. His tracks are energetic and restless, often mixing and matching ideas from all over the map. He’s become very good at making rap records that maximize the energy and impact of the rhyming. He’s got excellent and arty taste, but he’s also clearly driven by a desire to get people excited. He’s in the zone and I want more.
February 26th, 2026 12:47pm
A Thousand Mad Things’ William Barradale wears his icy synth pop and goth influences on his sleeve, to the extent that his most recent singles sound like direct homages to Depeche Mode and The Cure. A lot of artists aim for this, but Barradale actually nails it on a craft level, emulating their particular approaches to melody rather than just over-indexing on the surface level aesthetics like most cold wave acts. “Promises” offsets the jauntiness of “The Lovecats” with an absolutely frigid synth arrangement, with Barradale singing wry lyrics about a torturous breakup in a classic handsome new wave voice. He’s not reinventing any wheels here, but he is making an exceptionally good wheel.
February 25th, 2026 2:33am
The best remixes retain a song’s structure and character but completely makeover its musical wardrobe, resulting in a more stylish and effective version of itself. Wet Leg’s original recording of “Mangetout” was good, but The Dare’s remix is great, amping up its essential sass and spunk by pumping up the bass and tossing in bright retro 80s keyboards. The Dare may not be particularly original – he’s basically redoing the classic DFA remix of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” – but he has good taste and absolutely nailed the execution on this track. Rhian Teasdale’s voice sounds very natural in this context, to the point that I hope this success has some influence on their artistic direction going forward. If she’s going to get increasingly bold and extroverted in her writing and performances, why not take the music further in that direction as well?
February 20th, 2026 2:31pm
It’s a slow jam called “Deep Strokes;” you know what it’s about. But still, I appreciate Ari Lennox’s commitment to a flimsy double entendre. Sure, it’s about painting! Literal painting. Your walls have been looking kinda empty these days! And you know, the body is something like a canvas – of course you want to get some paint on it. Makes sense! Lennox’s kayfabe makes it funny, but also keeps this gorgeous ballad from dipping into “joke song” territory. There might be a wink in the lyrical conceit, but everything else about the song is earnest and straightforwardly sexy.
February 19th, 2026 7:59pm
“Orchestra” is an expression of self-loathing that doubles as a statement of artistic intent. Labrinth says he’s a people pleaser, and that he’s desperate for attention and applause to soothe his fragile ego. He’ll become anything you need him to be, become every player in an orchestra designed to please your ears. He’s a creep, he’s a weirdo, but he’s found exactly what he needs to do to belong here. And he’s very good at it! The song’s spectacular arrangement overwhelms the bitter sentiment, and he’s so good at provoking sensation and providing moments of pure pop thrill that you can easily tune out the sarcasm and misery in the vocals.
February 19th, 2026 2:57am
There’s a sound in this song that first shows up at the 00:02 mark. I’m calling it a “sound” because I don’t know exactly what it is. It’s probably a vocal snippet that’s been processed through a few filters, but who knows. The mysterious quality is part of the allure, a lot of the reason it catches your ear. As it reoccurs, you sorta end up chasing it around the song. It shows up, it fades away, it reappears. It’s like an audio firefly flitting around the negative space of the song.
Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in the music. Arlo Parks is singing about a beautiful moment watching a friend DJ at Under the K Bridge park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The beat is busy, but the song feels still, like she’s trying to inhabit a serene memory indefinitely. “Are you letting go? Do you just want time to freeze?,” she sing. “Well, I think sometimes it’s both, yeah.” She then sings something about knowing she can’t “catch a glimpse of heaven” and take it with her, but I think that’s basically what she’s done with this song.
February 12th, 2026 8:24pm
In comic book art, or at least old-fashioned 20th century comic book art, one of the major roles of the inker is to embellish the penciled layout illustrations so it’s all crisply articulated in ink with subtle variations in line density. A masterful inker adds dimension and weight with precise brush strokes, and often compensates for flaws in the pencil art. It’s a very technical role in the process, but when it’s done right you get an extra bit of soul on the page.
The arrangement and mix of Ora Cogan’s “Honey” makes me think of a well-inked page. There’s a lot of ways the song could’ve sounded ordinary, but everything in the track has a carefully considered weight and dimension. There’s a lot of negative space in the music, making it feel airy and wide open. Every element is beautifully articulated and varied in its implied closeness to the ear, with an emphasis on how Finn Smith’s drums guide the track. I think this sort of balance and nuance is a goal of a lot of producers, but this work can get flattened out in the mastering. This isn’t the case for “Honey,” and so a song that might’ve topped out at “pretty good” based on the solid bones of the songwriting and a lovely vocal performance ends up startlingly beautiful.
February 12th, 2026 3:34am
Holy Fuck made a point of mentioning on their Bandcamp page that the music on their new record was largely recorded live with an emphasis on “improvisation and raw percussion.” It was a good idea for them to say this because it never crossed my mind that industrial funk track like “Evie” could be created with that ethos. They sound like a relentless machine here, like some kind of monster car steamroller tank built to crush everything in its path. Knowing this is more “organic” than I assumed makes me enjoy it a bit more, but not in some “this is more authentic” way. It’s just fun knowing these guys are going this hard and are so totally dialed in. They’re four guys, but they sound like one huge robot.
Recommending this song feels like telling you that I like looking out the window of the Q train when it goes over the Manhattan Bridge, or that I like how thin and soft some of my oldest t-shirts feel on my skin, or how satisfying it is to lie down on a couch when you are truly physically exhausted. Ford isn’t doing anything particularly new or distinctive on this track, but the familiarity is a lot of the appeal. It’s like how repeatedly experiencing perfect little moments doesn’t make them less appealing over time. Like, you’re never going to have a perfect sip of cold water when you’re hot and thirsty and think “why isn’t this a totally new experience?”
February 6th, 2026 5:03pm
Memorials is a duo fronted by Verity Susman, who was a central player in Electrelane back in the 2000s. Memorials has a different dynamic than Electrelane – more streamlined arrangements, a little jazzier in a David Axelrod way here and there – but there’s a lot of overlap in aesthetic, to the point that this could just be labeled new Electrelane material and no one would blink. Susman’s prim vocal tone and dry affect is unmistakable, and the post-Stereolab droning vintage organ/high momentum groove combo on “Cut Glass Hammer” has always been in her wheelhouse. Susman and drummer Matthew Simms aren’t breaking new ground here, but they’re expert craftspeople when it comes to this lane of buzzing English psychedelic music. They’ll make you feel every dynamic shift in your gut as though you’re strapped to the hood of their speeding vehicle.
February 5th, 2026 5:08pm
There’s a lot of humility in the lyrics of “23,” but it’s coming from a place of having been humiliated more than any sort of innate virtue. Chloe Howard sings about feeling like she’s not made any material progress in life, and identifies moments in her past when she fumbled opportunities. This could easily be a miserable song but the tone is fairly bright and funky, and her vocal signals an even balance of snarky cynicism and low-key optimism that something might eventually work out. The arrangement feels very mid to late 00s indie to me – very clean tones, casually groovy in a post-DFA way, slinky but a little silly. It’s a great match for the lyrical sentiment, but maybe that’s just me connecting one bleak recession era to another.
What exactly is going on in this song? “Peel” doesn’t lay out a clear narrative, but if you add up all the evocative details you get something along the lines of a somewhat hostile erotic fantasy about remaking the body of an “awful stranger” by manually reshaping and removing their flesh. Is it sexual, is it violent? Sure, but I think the main thing here is the expression of an artistic impulse. “I create, I create, I create,” Ella Harris sings in a seductive half-whisper over pulsing keyboards. She’s pulling you in, making it all sound like a good idea, possibly even a very good time.
January 29th, 2026 8:38pm
I think shoegaze is a very forgiving genre in that basic competence can provide satisfying results if you have any affinity for the aesthetic. Artists working in the genre don’t have to work very hard, but at this point, I sorta demand that they do. “What If They Knew” starts off in the “basic competence” zone but gradually builds a lattice of distinct, beautiful, and emotionally potent guitar parts. The vocals barely rise above a whisper, but the blaring accompaniment is like a flood of yearning desire. Girly nail one of the best shoegaze tricks – contrasting an outward shyness with the overwhelming emotions screaming beneath the surface.
Seems a little perverse to give this incredibly sweet R&B song about committing to the love of your life a title spinning off a clever reference to Chase’s acquisition of Washington Mutual Bank in 2008, right? It’s a weird choice, but the song is so open-hearted and vulnerable that I get wanting to put up a little bit of distance with the listener. I mean, Jaymin is basically proposing to his girl in the lyrics!
January 29th, 2026 1:34am
This song is very obviously heavily influenced by Lana Del Rey, but in Baby Nova’s defense, if it actually was a Lana Del Rey song, it’d be among her best. (For real!) And besides that, I’m comfortable with Lana Del Rey being a genre that other artists can work in, in the way that artists like Prince, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, and Joy Division are basically their own genres.
“Do You Like That, Baby?” is a song about a very complicated and sexy dude. Baby Nova largely portrays him as a villain. As she puts it, he’s narcissistic, he’s cold, he’s vicious, he’s a cruel man that can’t care less. He’s got some kind of religious thing going on and that seems to intrigue her, but mostly she’s fixated on how good he is at sex. She loves feeling overwhelmed and submissive to this strange fucked up man, and it comes through in every horny second of this song. She’s not telling you about his faults to say “this is bad for me,” but rather, “this is why he turns me on.”
January 21st, 2026 8:47pm
After a few years exploring very modern electronic sounds, Kim Gordon has circled back to Sonic Youth aesthetic territory without actually sounding like anything Sonic Youth ever made. “Not Today” has a hypnotic motorik groove and woozy shoegaze guitars, both of which I’d say are adjacent to that band’s sound without ever really being something they actually did. This makes the song feel both familiar and slightly off, like a random person you know appearing in your dream in some peculiar context doing something that doesn’t quite make sense outside of dream logic.
And it sounds dreamy too. The music whooshes along, but it’s all velocity and no weight. Gordon is there in the center of it, seeming to holler at the sound passing by her. The lyrics don’t click into narrative, but you get the gist of the feeling whether she’s singing “there’s a hole in my heart” or wondering why Postmates hasn’t delivered her gum.
January 18th, 2026 9:36pm
A lot of rappers have aimed to distill the essence of a crime movie into a song, but I don’t think many have been as successful as A$AP Rocky on “Robbery.” A lot of this comes down to casting – he’s playing suave opposite Doechii, who effortlessly projects slinky grace and sassy confidence on the mic and thrives in storytelling mode. The song, which is built around a Thelonius Monk sample that somehow feels both loose and knotty, takes its time developing Rocky and Doechii’s characters before bringing them together. But the sparks fly once they’re bouncing off each other in a verse, fully coming across as glamorous movie stars in an audio medium.
“Traffic Lights” is at least partly an Atoms for Peace reunion, pulling Thom Yorke back into Flea’s orbit alongside percussionist Mauro Refosco. According to Flea this happened largely because his groove reminded him a lot of what they were doing together in the early 2010s and correctly guessed that Yorke would want in on it.
But Yorke isn’t alone. Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker is here, along with prog drummer Deantoni Parks, Bright Eyes keyboardist Nate Walcott, and Josh Johnson (the sax player, not the comedian). If you’re Flea, you get to stack the decks. The result is about what you could expect from this particular blend of talents: jazz guys offsetting the rock guys’ mild twitchiness with some smooth contours.
Yorke’s vocal presence is fairly understated, almost as though he’s behaving like a polite guest in someone else’s song. I got a similar vibe from his work with Mark Pritchard last year, in which he was also mostly stepping into already composed music. But the muted quality suits the music and the befuddled tone of his lyrics, which use a common Captcha prompt as a starting point for pondering how anyone can prove their humanity in this “upside down” world.
January 16th, 2026 2:16am
Josh Tillman has stopped making sense. “The Old Law” departs from his usual narrative clarity and witty bon mots in favor of scrambled, vaguely unnerving nonsense. It’s psychedelic, but mostly in an acid casualty sort of way. But it’s not exactly gibberish. You can sorta parse all of it – the phrases are almost familiar, the odd juxtapositions are oddly intuitive. It’s like encountering vernacular language from another point in time, probably the not-too-distant future. Consider all the phrases and vocabulary that are common now that would’ve seemed alien 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Are these words from the future?
Cleo Sol may be singing a lot of platitudes in “Fulfill Your Spirit,” but she does so with so much warmth and sincerity that all the cliches ring true. Like, “love comes from within” is corny, but why deny it?
I can’t hear any of the telltale signs, but Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis contributed to the creation of this song in some way. Sault is deliberately opaque about these things, but I’d love to have more insight into this. I wouldn’t associate a jazzy little groove or swirling orchestral string arrangements with them, but it’s not hard to imagine them jumping at the opportunity to do something totally different. If you can compose “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” I am sure you can do just about anything.
January 15th, 2026 3:32am
Shanny Wise’s deadpan affect is central to the Fcukers aesthetic. She’s a cool, aloof, understated presence at the center of otherwise extremely brash and ecstatic music. She’s a little more vulnerable and warm on “L.U.C.K.Y.,” a poppy house banger with lyrics about being grateful for finding a good boyfriend. It’s very sweet, but the emphasis is placed more on her feeling like she’s beaten the odds than on her affection for him. When she sings “you don’t wanna make me cry, make me mad, make me wanna die” on the bridge she seems relieved, but also a little sad that the bar was so low before they met.
When I write about songs in a language other than English I make a point of reading a translation of the lyrics so I have some idea what’s going on there even if it doesn’t have much to do with what I’m responding to musically. I just like to have some context. When I did this for “Cursive,” one line jumped out at me:
Je danse en attendant que le monde disparaisse
I dance while waiting for the world to disappear
It’s the first phrase you hear after a synth part emerges and the energy shifts from anxious and ominous to agitated and frenetic. It sounds incredibly cool, like the song suddenly jump cuts from murky horror film to neon-lit futuristic sci-fi movie. Valentine Caulfield’s vocal part in this section signal defiance whether you understand French or not, but I like knowing that she’s basically asserting her creative power in a world that seems to be collapsing around her.
January 7th, 2026 7:26pm
How’s this for cognitive dissonance – a song about reckoning with self-destructive impulses in relationships that sounds sexy and triumphant. Even if Shanna van Loozenoord is describing abject feelings of shame, fear, and loneliness, the point is that it’s all fueling the thrill of making her love life more tumultous and dramatic. You can sense the undertow of doubt in the music, the pushback of knowing she’s longing for the wrong men and making bad decisions, but it’s not enough to overcome the affect of chic misery.
The most striking thing about “Him&Him&Him” to me, at my age, is how much the groove sounds like early 90s New Jack Swing. It’s a very formative sound for me, but one that’s largely been bred out of R&B as the genre has continuously mutated over the past few decades. The song doesn’t even feel particularly retro – the melody sounds more 00s to me, the bass and lyrics feel more contemporary. But that snappy post-hip hop groove is there, and it lends this song about being extremely boy crazy an extra bit of swagger. It makes you believe that Jae Stephens can have whatever and whomever she wants.
January 6th, 2026 6:00pm
“Church” is mainly a song about pop fandom, and the joy and community that comes from obsessing over an icon and their music. This subject has come up in pop before, but the twist here is that Jade is offering herself up for this idolatry:
“While the world burns, let me see you work
Down on your knees, let me be your church”
It also sounds like she’s asking to receive oral sex. In either case, she’s inviting worship.
The verses present this as a full circle moment, starting from feeling inspired by drag and Beyoncé to attaining her own stardom and “carrying the wisdom that was passed down on to me.” I like the way this extends the “church” metaphor to the notion that pop stars are like clergy. If Beyoncé is the Pope of Pop, Jade is a young priest who finally has her own church.
The lyrical angle is clever, but “Church” mainly won me over for purely musical reasons. I love the contours of the melody, particularly in that “while the world burns, let me see you work” ramp up to the chorus. The production by Mark Schick and Pablo Bowman – who co-produced Jade’s breakout song “Angel of My Dreams” – is highly dynamic without making the composition feel cluttered or uneven. They simply refuse to let the song have any dull moments, and find all the right moments to ramp up the energy and intensity.
January 2nd, 2026 3:37pm
I heard “Where Is My Husband” at least a dozen times at the gym before I knew what it was, and because I was preoccupied, didn’t have my phone on me, and couldn’t make out any of the lyrics, I couldn’t easily look it up or Shazam it.
It immediately caught my attention because I’ve been hoping for years – nearly multiple decades – that the huge hyperkinetic go-go Rich Harrison drum sound from Amerie’s “1 Thing,” Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love,” and Missy Elliott’s “Can’t Stop” would come back in style. It’s here and back on the charts, but this time around it’s the work of the young producer Mike Sabath rather than Harrison. (I hope Harrison isn’t too bitter about this, because it fully sounds like his work.) Sabath has been working with mid-tier pop stars for a while now, and was also responsible for Jade’s oddly assymetrical banger “Angel of My Dreams.”
I eventually identified “Where Is My Husband” while putting together the 2025 survey, but even then I didn’t really have a firm handle on the lyrical POV. Given the title and the supercharged manic energy of the arrangement, I assumed this was a song about getting cheated on by your spouse, or at least being paranoid about this happening. It’s a logical conclusion given how many songs are about that sort of thing, but no, this is actually more of a “loneliness epidemic” Hinge-core song.
Raye is frustrated and eager to settle down with someone who loves her, but can’t find the right man. She’s terrified that she’s running out of time and may die alone, and the bug-eyed urgency of the music is driven in part by a ticking biological clock. She’s holding on to her faith that there’s someone for her out there, but her resentment about waiting for this happen is stronger than her romanticism. “Why is this beautiful man waiting for me to get old?,” she sings. “Why he already testing my patience?” The dark feelings creep up on her and neuroses drive the song, but you can feel her refusal to back down from what she wants so badly.
December 3rd, 2025 6:09pm
“Witch Dance” was written about Florence Welch’s experience of nearly dying as a result of an ectopic pregnancy. “The closest I came to death was trying to make life, and you don’t get that without desire,” she told Zane Lowe on Apple Music. The song tangles sex and death into knots, starting with an opening scene in which she’s fucking the personification of death, whose “blackberry mouth” tastes like life. Welch has been exploring themes of desire, faith, and nature through her entire career but she’s rarely been so lascivious and primal. The lyrics play out like a dark fairytale, but she keeps the song grounded in equal measures of lust and loss, buzzing with a profound connection to the cycle of life.
There’s a touch of Fugazi in the opening bit of “Life Signs,” which is mostly notable to me in how rarely I hear any band approach a Fugazi-type groove. The song shifts gears pretty quickly and keeps moving from there, creating a restless and gnarly backdrop for Rachel Brown’s monotone monologue. It’s the perfect sound for itchy lyrics about feeling uncomfortable and out of place in nearly any setting – “I’m unfulfilled, I’m in a beautiful place, yeah, it’s so sad in this beautiful place.” Brown reaches for sung higher notes on the chorus hook, but only gets so high, as though they hit a ceiling for their feeling a bit too soon.
