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.
December 2nd, 2025 6:21pm
The first time I saw Model/Actriz live I was surprised to learn that a lot of the sounds I assumed were coming from “electronic” instruments were in fact being played on guitar by Jack Wetmore. Of course, this is a guitar running through various pedals and devices, so it’s effectively a more traditional conduit for “electronic music,” but the physicality does change the feel significantly. There’s an immediacy and implied violence in how Wetmore plays guitar, and it adds to the malevolent atmosphere of a track like “Diva.” Cole Haden’s vocal relies on this tension in the spoken verses; the most mundane details of his European travelogue imbued with a sense that something could go terribly wrong at any moment. But the feeling is more about (homo)eroticism than terror, and the sung chorus flips a very Korn-ish melody and vocal affect into a specifically masculine expression of sexual vulnerability.
Brad Stank owes a lot of his aesthetics to King Krule and Mac DeMarco, but even compared to the stoned, drowsy vibe of those guys, Stank’s music feels like the result of gobbling Benadryl and high potency weed gummies like a bag of Skittles. “Chenci” is a slo-mo ballad with the frequencies pushed to extremes – womb-like bass, guitar treble rendered like squiggles of neon light. I’m particularly fond of the way he doubles his low-register lead vocals with a sensual high harmony on the “I’ll change, I’ll change” chorus. It’s relatively subtle in the mix, but the contrast opens up the heart of the song.
December 1st, 2025 11:24pm
Unlike most Wolf Alice tracks, Ellie Rowsell doesn’t take the lead on “White Horses,” yet the song still showcases one of her most inspired vocal performances. The primary vocal is handled by drummer Joel Amey, who sings introspective lyrics about not knowing a chunk of his family lineage due to his mother being adopted. His vocal is cool and rhythmic, locked in with his driving beat and the brightly ringing guitar chords. Rowsell goes for contrast, belting out the emotional core of the song – “know who I am, that’s important to me” – in a distinctly B-52’s-esque harmony, right on down to her pinched timbre sounding just like Cindy Wilson. It’s a bold choice that seemingly comes out of nowhere, though it’s not exactly unprecedented – the rolling rhythm and circular acoustic riff isn’t far off from R.E.M.’s “Me In Honey,” which featured Kate Pierson wailing in a similar way on the chorus.
November 21st, 2025 6:16pm
Olivia Dean sold out four nights at Madison Square Garden this week, an extremely impressive feat for a singer who just recently played four shows there as the opening act for Sabrina Carpenter. It’s a real perspective-shifter – Dean is substantially more popular than she seemed, and the market for lovelorn classic-style R&B is clearly stronger than ever. (Also take note of Giveon’s show at MSG, and Cleo Sol selling out three nights at Radio City Music Hall.)
Dean has a lot of very good songs, but I figure a lot of her success comes down to how easily and effortlessly she fills a void in the pop landscape where Adele and Amy Winehouse used to be. Her music isn’t nearly as sexy, but I think she’s also tapping into some of Sade’s appeal as well. But it’s that distinctly British form of R&B classicism – elegant and immaculate, a little bit prim and mannered. If you nail this aesthetic in the right cultural moment, the sky’s the limit.
“Let Alone the One You Love” sounds like musical signifiers from many eras of R&B blurring together into something uncannily familiar and vaguely modern. It’s a ballad about romantic disappointment, of trying to come to terms with realizing the person you thought was “The One” was not who you made them out to be. It’s written like a negotiation with that person, who is simultaneously checked out but holding on. I like that twist on the narrative, and the way Dean has to navigate through such delicate emotions.
“Magic Number” has the vibe of an artsy-cute late 00s/early 10s indie song that got licensed to death, and you will know exactly what I mean by this as soon as you put this on. It sounds so much like it’s already been popular that I get a powerful deja vu sensation every time I hear it, like my brain is trying to Mandela Effect it into an iPod ad in 2008. I feel like maybe I’m being too glib and selling this band short, but this is what my brain is screaming every time I play this song, and I’m pretty sure in a more earnest sense this means Chinese American Bear hit their target in making it.
November 19th, 2025 9:57pm
Grizzly Bear recently played a run of shows in New York City, their first gigs in a long time. I didn’t attend, but their reemergence prompted me to listen to their albums Veckatimest and Shields for the first time in ages. My major takeaway was that Grizzly Bear is much more my sort of thing now than when those records first came out in 2009 and 2012. Those albums have subtle charms – the melodies are lovely but understated, the vocals are light on character but very strong with harmony and nuanced phrasing, and the most striking aspect of the music is consistently how beautifully and organically the sounds are captured and mixed. I would’ve identified these strengths in my late 20s, but I wouldn’t have valued them quite so highly. I wanted oomph and big personalities then, in part because that’s just a lot easier to write about.
I say this because Packaging, a duo of musicians from Seattle and Denver, share a lot of positive qualities with Grizzly Bear. And this being the case, they’re also not easy to write about! Their debut pulls together a lot of tasteful influences and shows off a lot of well-articulated musical ideas, but there’s not a lot of personality in the vocals. This isn’t a bad thing – the vocals sound nice, they suit the songs, a bigger singer would likely disrupt the careful balance of the production. And it’s clear to me that the sound is the point of this music. Sure, there’s lyrics and recurring themes, but I seems clear to me that when these guys were working on “Water’s Edge,” they spent a lot more time thinking about the particular tone of the central keyboard and the exact brightness of the arpeggiated acoustic guitar part. These are certainly the elements that suck me in and linger in my mind, and even when it comes to the vocals, I’m thinking about the contrast between the dry takes on the verses and the touch of reverb on the bridge.
“Candle” is sung from the POV of an actual candle, which leads to some good extended metaphors about dripping wax and time to burn. But the interesting thing to me is how Asha Lorenz anthropomorphizes this inanimate object but retains its total indifference. She filters that into her vocal performance, singing the jaunty melody with a bit of haughty attitude, and clearly having some fun spitting out the “I’m a cunt, I’ll be a cunt again” refrain.
November 13th, 2025 8:06pm
Dan Snaith started releasing dance music as Daphni to differentiate it from his psychedelic indie project Caribou. This is not uncommon in electronic music, and of course, it’s very common for authors to have pen names for different genres in publishing. But as Caribou has evolved to sound more like Daphni, it was probably inevitable that Daphni would end up sounding more like Caribou. And so here we are…Daphni featuring Caribou, the Snaith singularity.
So what is this great synthesis of Snaith and Snaith? Basically, it just means that he sings on this song, and he hasn’t sung on other Daphni tracks. Otherwise he’s off in the deep end of French filter house in the vein of Daft Punk and Alan Braxe, very far from established Caribou territory. “Waiting So Long” is a particularly great track in this genre, with a relaxed groove and airy Snaith vocal breezing over a drum track that gently swings from ultra chill to mega hype.
November 13th, 2025 3:16am
Robyn’s first solo single in ages is asking a philosophical question: If we know that an ecstatic feeling is – on a biological level – just a shift in brain chemistry, is that chemical reaction all it is? Or is the stimulation – attraction, lust, love, excitement – the real force, and the dopamine is just responding and doing its job? This is a Robyn song, so you know where she stands. She’s about the drama, the humanity, the total surrender to love even if it’s humiliating. She’s about the magic of attraction and a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, right?
November 12th, 2025 12:52am
This is Shudder to Think’s first single since 1998. Aside from a few brief reunion shows, they’ve been broken up longer than Sabrina Carpenter or anyone in Geese has been alive.
I imagine it can be tricky to come up with new material after that much time apart. How could you not be self-conscious about it? How do you sound like Shudder to Think again, and what does that mean to you now?
And which version of Shudder to Think should you sound like? The proto-emo Dischord Records version, the twitchy quasi-prog Pony Express Record version, the smoothed out neo-glam 50,000 BC version? Do you risk putting off old heads–likely the only people paying attention–and do something radically different?
And can you still do it? Craig Wedren and Nathan Larson have been making music for film and television for decades now, and have become stylistic chameleons. Maybe they’ve grown too accustomed to creative independence to write together again?
It could be any of these neurotic brainworms, or maybe it’s just like riding a bike. Shudder to Think could have had these anxieties, but “Thirst Walk” sounds like they’re riding the bike.
“Thirst Walk” sounds exactly like Shudder to Think, as though there could be no other outcome of Wedren and Larson and drummer Adam Wade making music together. They answer the question of which version of the band to be by being all three at once. Wedren’s voice soars, swoons, swirls, and somehow winks. The rhythm is as jagged and spiky as a song can get while retaining a suave glammy strut. And there’s a few new moves in the mix – a cheeky little solo towards the end that’s as flirty as Wedren’s singing, and bit of vocoder that seems tossed in for the element of surprise.
So really, it’s more than “like riding a bike again.” It’s like they got back on it and immediately starting doing flamboyant BMX tricks.
October 30th, 2025 7:12pm
Many years ago a musician pointed out to me that a lot of 90s indie and alt music is built on a crude and funk-less variation of a funk breakbeat, and it comes up in a lot of bands you wouldn’t immediately think of, like Pavement. But the more obvious variation on this sound – which in many cases was derived from samples or drum machines – was all over the late 90s, and has come back in a big way over the past couple years.
“Eyes Closed” is a great example of this aesthetic, to the point that it very plausibly sounds like it could have dropped around 1999 or 2000. In this sense it’s a chronal head-spinner – the 2020s version of the late 90s version of mid 60s psychedelic rock. But this is how musical tradition works, right? You cycle through iterations through generations, collecting signifiers along the way, and eventually you end up with a weird combination that feels perfect. Like, this basically sounds like if Broadcast has made their own “Tomorrow Never Knows” but with a more aggressively funky bass player. What’s not to love?
“The Deal” was surely written and recorded well before D’Angelo passed away, but it’s hard to listen to it without sensing his ghost lurking in the ample negative space on this track. It’s hard to imagine he’s not a direct reference point for this particular song – there’s an obvious melodic and rhythmic debt to “Untitled,” but it’s also just that general loose feel and overwhelming sensuality. St Panther get some of that D’Angelo feel but they’re playing in a tighter pocket. I think that’s mainly because the sentiment of this song needs a tiny bit of nervous energy. As the title suggests, there’s a negotiation going on here, and the emotional stakes are very, very high.
October 29th, 2025 7:15pm
This song is basically Night Tapes offering us another ride on the “6 Underground,” and how could I possibly decline? Many have tried to emulate this mid-90s neon-lit trip-hop vibe but they get it just right, and I like the way the lyrics Iris Vesek sings come off as shallow until you listen a bit closer and notice the way she’s poking holes in the affectations she’s evoking. She’s trying to take a symbol, embody it, and then change what the symbol means.
Hether are iterating on musical ideas laid out over a decade ago by artists like Tame Impala, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Mac DeMarco. While those acts have since moved on to different sounds, Hether continue to delve deeper into a distinctly 2010s style of stoner funk, but with a bit more warmth, sensuality, and light jazziness to set them apart. There’s also a touch of androgyny in their vocals, which emphasizes the sensitivity and delicate romantic spirit at the core of a song like “Fake It with You.”
