Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Teen “Connection”

“Connection” is placid and lovely, with gentle synth tones hovering in the air like a fine pastel mist. Kristina Lieberson’s vocal is exceptionally delicate and intimate as she sings lyrics that get so vulnerable in their declaration of needs and desires that it can feel a little intrusive to listen. The lines that ring out are sweet and romantic – “how your presence brings me comfort, when I’m with you I am at ease” – but a closer listen reveals a love built on insecurity and desperation for approval. I don’t think this is meant to be some kind of ironic twist, though. It’s more just a realistic portrait of love with all the unflattering needs and feelings that drive us to seek out a connection.

Buy it from Amazon.

Unloved “Devils Angels”

Unloved make a kind of exotic, heavily atmospheric groove-based post-trip-hop music that was once ubiquitous in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s but is now somewhat rare. Their new record Heartbreak has a welcome familiarity – not just in evoking a vibe that was very hip when I was younger, but in the way it seems to scramble together aesthetics pulled from decades of cool film soundtracks into music that has the patina of oldness but sounds like no moment in particular. “Devils Angels” is one of their grooviest numbers – a bit sleazy and menacing, but sung with a flirty tone. It’s like a theme song for a femme fatale in a movie from the past about the future we’re living in right now.

Buy it from Amazon.

Ariana Grande “Make Up”

Ariana Grande shines brightest on songs in which her voice seems to hover just above the beat, and chords seems to float around her presence. “Make Up” has the same head-in-the-clouds infatuated tone as the best songs on last year’s Sweetener, but with a little more edge to it. The lyrics about make up sex are cute, but they are just scaffolding for Grande’s impressively nimble and expressive vocal melody. She’s drawing a lot from the vocal syncopation commonly found in rocksteady and dancehall here, but without putting on some horrible faux patois. There’s one melodic bit in the verses that sounds extremely Studio One to me, but I can’t quite figure out whether or not it’s reminding me of a specific song. I just know that I wish I could hear a Studie One legend like Marcia Griffiths, Willie Williams, or Sugar Minott take a crack at singing it. Either way, this approach suits Grande’s voice rather well – she’s very graceful around a beat, and makes parts which require a great deal of focus and breath control sound breezy and casual.

Buy it from Amazon.

Default Genders “Black Pill Skyline”

James Brooks’ lyrics focus on vivid portraits of very contemporary characters, with details so extremely specific that it can make you cringe with recognition even when it’s not even a particularly embarrassing thing. For example, in this song he references the Edith Zimmerman (“that writer from the Hairpin”) profile of Chris Evans and writing trip reports on Erowid, and ends on a semi-ironic “that’s the tea.” Brooks’ tone can get a bit glib, but his empathy is much stronger than his sense of detached irony. Even when he’s singing from the perspective of a bitter, judgmental asshole, he’s not asking you to go “ugh, what an asshole.” He’s more interested in just showing you someone else’s thought processes, and little bits of life that add up to not much other than a dissatisfied person. “Black Pill Skyline,” like all the songs on Main Pop Girl 2019, leans heavily on a very early ‘90s production style, and while that could also feel glib and ironic, it doesn’t quite land that way. Brooks is aware that it can seem that way, but just presents it all with as much sincerity as he can bring to it. It’s not a wink. It’s sustained eye contact.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Lady Lamb “Even In the Tremor”

“Even in the Tremor” has a restless, twitchy feeling to it. It’s not quite an anxious energy – it’s more like having more energy and emotion than feels comfortable, and feeling thwarted in your attempts to shake it off. Lady Lamb sings the song with a tough, confident voice. It’s a very “let’s cut the bullshit” tone, and it’s directed as much outward as it is inward. It seems at first that she’s addressing a romantic partner, but upon closer listening it just sounds like she’s mostly just laying into herself and trying to make sense of both her emotional state and her relationship with the past. The chorus really stands out here: “The future kills the present if I let it.” What a wonderfully ambiguous phrase! I tend to not be a very sentimental person and forget a lot, so it sounds reassuring to me. I can imagine a lot of other people would find that notion totally horrifying.

Buy it from Amazon.

Hand Habits “Placeholder”

“Placeholder” is basically the opposite perspective of R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.” Whereas Michael Stipe sang from the point of view of a cold, manipulative person who toyed with people’s emotions so he could have a “simple prop” to occupy his time, Meg Duffy is the person realizing how little they mean to someone who has used them. The song isn’t angry or even all that sad. It’s more about processing emotions than the feelings themselves. There’s a wistful quality to the music, particularly in the distorted lead guitar lines, but Duffy’s lyrics and vocal performance are cold and logical, like they’re meant to counter this other person with their own icy approach. It sounds like someone who is putting up their guard and hardening their heart. It’s a bit tragic in that way.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Future Punx “Want to Be Wanted”

The lyrical conceit of “Want to Be Wanted” is approaching the basics of human interaction from a scientific standpoint – research, trials, data. It’s a lot of work to explain something very obvious, which is that people need to feel useful and desired. Future Punx play the song in a way that flips the uptight, severe seriousness of Wire-derived punk into a low-key campiness. It’s knowingly silly, but still quite earnest in its thoughts about what motivates people. They’re trying to think clearly and rationally, but can only conclude that desires are inconsistent and confusing. Even in understanding the root of feelings doesn’t make them predictable or sensible.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Snail’s House “プラネット・ガール”

The best elevator pitch I could give you for Snail’s House is that it’s like Discovery-era Daft Punk filtered through the aesthetics of J-Pop. It’s a big, bright, bouncy sound that sounds like pure, earnest optimism. There’s something so wholesome about this – it’s music that sounds like it’s from a world where everything is fun and nothing is creepy.

Buy it from Amazon.

MADMADMAD “Gwarn”

And this one is just the opposite. “Gwarn” has very ‘00s aesthetics, like the DFA and Ed Banger discographies colliding at top speed into a Misshapes party. It’s seedy but glamorous, like a pretty rich kid who’s filthy and gross in designer clothes. It’s fun, but largely because it evokes a world where everything is creepy.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Maren Morris “Girl”

Maren Morris sings with a confident, bold voice that fits comfortably in a range of mainstream styles – country, EDM pop, rock – the way a good vanilla ice cream pairs well with most any dessert. There’s a little bit of twang in her voice, and a dash of soulfulness, and a trace of attitude. She doesn’t have a lot of character, but she can sell a big feeling. “Girl,” a country rock power ballad she wrote with the increasingly prolific producer Greg Kurstin, is a pep-talk anthem that makes the most of vocal gifts. The contours of the song show off different aspects of her voice – grit on the verses, warmth on the bridge, and a go-for-broke passion on the chorus. It would not be surprising if this was deliberately written as a vocal showcase, and as such, I’m pretty sure this will eventually be a karaoke hit. It’s got all the right dynamics, and the utility of lyrics that express a genuine love and concern for a woman who’s down on her luck.

Buy it from Amazon.

I have been laid off from BuzzFeed after working there for six and a half years. I started there as the music editor, but the majority of my time there has been serving as the company’s Director of Quizzes. (Here is a page collecting my favorite quizzes, reviews, interviews, and miscellaneous funny posts.)

BuzzFeed was a fantastic place to work, and the fact that I could mutate my career path so drastically is a good example of the sort of flexibility and creativity that has made the company quite successful. While it is not ideal to be laid off, I can say that I pretty much did everything I wanted to do in my time there, and had been feeling a bit adrift in the recent past. It was time to move on, and sometimes the world has to force your hand.

You might be wondering – wait, why would they lay you off? You were doing the quizzes, and that brings in a lot of money! Well, that is true. But another thing that is true is that a LOT of the site’s overall traffic comes from quizzes and a VERY large portion of that traffic comes from a constant flow of amateur quizzes made by community users. In the recent past, the second highest traffic driver worldwide has been a community user in Michigan who is a teenager in college who, for some reason, makes dozens of quizzes every week. It’s kinda amazing how much revenue-generating traffic the site gets from unpaid community volunteers. So, in a ruthless capitalist way, it makes sense for the company to pivot to having community users create almost all of the quizzes going forward. I understand math. I get it.

Anyway, I am now looking for work! I have two parallel careers, so let me break this up a bit.

• I am looking for work that allows me to continue on with the fairly complex skill set I developed at BuzzFeed. I was in editorial but worked with teams in video, social media, product, engineering, data, business, and creative – quizzes touched almost every part of the company, so I often worked as an internal consultant. A lot of my job involved looking at data and the big picture of what the audience wanted, developing strategy, and encouraging writers to come up with creative ways of entertaining the audience and expanding the range of what we could do.

I worked closely with the tech side of the company in developing new apps, formats, and tools. A huge amount of my job involved constant formal and technical experimentation. A lot of what I did involved understanding human psychology, and how to make things that resonated with people and encouraged them to share results that flattered or amused them. The job involved a deep understanding of semiotics in pop culture and cuisine. A large portion of what I wrote was comedic in nature. I have a very nuanced understanding of a mainstream audience primarily composed of young women, and am almost certainly the world’s foremost expert on online quizzes.

I feel like there’s a lot of applications for all of this in technology, advertising, and media. Probably a lot of other things I haven’t even considered, really. I’m open to anything. If you want to reach out, I’m at perpetua@gmail.com, and here is my LinkedIn page.

• I am in the market to write about music, movies, television, comics, and other pop culture things for whoever is interested in having me. I am also working on a book of music writing and shopping around for an agent and a publisher. Please hit me up if you would like to work with me on any of these things!

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to acknowledge a lot of the key people I’ve worked with over the past several years.

Anjali Patel is probably the most brilliant and impressive person I have ever worked with, and watching her evolve from a shy workaholic into a bold, one-of-a-kind hybrid of writer, artist, and product designer has been a privilege. Cates Holderness, Ryan Broderick, Katie Notopoulos, and Bob Marshall understand the internet better than anyone else on earth. Joanna Borns, Andrea Hickey, Alexis Nedd, Erin Chack, Daniel Kibblesmith, Sam Weiner, Julia Pugachevsky, Nathan W. Pyle, Loryn Brantz, and Matt Bellassai are the funniest writers I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks to Doree Shafrir, Scott Lamb, and Ben Smith for hiring me, and to Summer Anne Burton and Tommy Wesley for keeping me around. Thanks to Julie Gerstein, the best manager I have ever had in my career. Shout out to Tanner Greenring, Jack Shepherd, Dave Stopera, Matt Stopera, Lauren Yapalater, Dorsey Shaw, and Peggy Wang for creating the voice of BuzzFeed. Thanks to Louis Peitzman, Ashly Perez, Jen Lewis, and Heben Nigatu for making quizzes a thing. Much love to Andrew Ziegler, Sarah Aspler, Alana Mohamed, and all the other mindfreaks.

Thank you to Gavon Laessig for personally giving me the news. Thanks to Lisa Tozzi and her army of reporters who do their best to make the world a little better. Thank you to all of the designers and developers and data folks who created the best publishing tools a writer could ever ask for. Thanks to everyone who ever enjoyed anything I ever made and shared it with other people.

Vampire Weekend “Harmony Hall”

The first time Ezra Koenig sang “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die,” it was at the climax of “Finger Back,” on the second side of Modern Vampires of the City. That record was in many ways about the pressure to achieve goals and have experiences on a tight schedule, motivated by a deep fear of aging and the narrowing of one’s options. Every character on the album was terrified that their time was running out, or that they were in some trap they needed to escape.

That line has popped up again in “Harmony Hall,” the first Vampire Weekend single in quite some time. The music is more mellow and graceful, but Koenig’s perspective has shifted. He’s singing about frustration with a complicated world, and the seeming impossibility of separating wealth from power. It’s a song about feeling disillusioned and disappointed, and that phrase – “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die” – feels even more ambivalent than when he sang it the first time. Is he shrugging it all off? Is he going to try to fight it? In the context of the song, he sounds hopeful as he sings it. I hear it as someone trying to find joy in a world he knows is rigged and unfair.

Buy it from Amazon.

Deerhunter “What Happens to People?”

“What Happens to People?” is light and brisk, with a melody that seems to float quickly by on a stiff breeze. Bradford Cox sings with a tone that’s half wistful and half distracted, like a fleeting thought about someone he’s fallen out of touch with has an entirely hijacked his mind. There’s a running theme of passivity through all of Cox’s work, but here it extends out to the whole world – life is a thing that happens to you, people are things that come and go around you. Everything is a chaotic drama that’s spinning on around you, and if you weren’t there, it wouldn’t matter too much. He seems so distant here, this guy on the outside of everyone just looking on as things happen to other people. They fall apart, they give up, they disappear, and there’s nothing he can do for them.

Buy it from Amazon.

James Blake “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”

I always like the love songs that do their best to approximate the feeling the author is experiencing. “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow” is mostly James Blake singing about being perfectly in synch with his girlfriend, while the music softly glitches around him, as if it’s the rest of the world just outside their shared wavelength. It’s sweet and romantic, but makes an odd swerve in the middle as the music seems to abruptly click back to the start and goes off on a more neurotic lyrical tangent before returning to the blissful main theme. It’s an unusual decision that breaks the spell of the song, but allows for a deeper context for its sentiment. It’s also a reminder that even in that perfect euphoric flow, this is a guy who’s still very much in his head about this experience.

Buy it from Amazon.

Maggie Rogers “The Knife”

The tension in the verses of “The Knife” is subtle and elegant – there’s a swing to the groove, and as the syncopation gets busier the overall effect of the bass and percussion is rather light and slinky. The trick of the song is making you feel comfortable in that groove before moving you into a cathartic release in the chorus that makes you realize in retrospect that you’d been wound so tightly. This is mirrored in the lyrics, in which Maggie Rogers sings about a sudden epiphany that’s rattled her psyche, and about then letting loose on the dance floor. The emphasis of the song both musically and thematically is placed on the verses rather than the chorus, with the heavy implication that the really important thing here is the epiphany, not the release. The release is great, sure, but it’s all about the process leading to the reward.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Scary Jokes “Community Gardens”

Liz Lehman’s previous record as The Scary Jokes was delightfully melodic and agonizingly neurotic, something like a feminine equivalent to Kevin Barnes’ music as Of Montreal. Three years later, Lehman remains a natural with melody and is no less angsty, but has further developed their style beyond obvious reference points. BURN PYGMALION!!! is a cleaner, less frenzied record that tells a complicated love story about an entertainment journalist and her movie star girlfriend that sometimes seems like it’s actually about reconciling one’s own introverted and extroverted impulses.

“Community Gardens” opens the record by laying out the record’s emotional themes, but not so much its plot. Lehman’s vocal tone is incredibly warm, but the phrasing is crisp and precise – it’s like someone who is trying to ingratiate the listener, but also stick to an agenda. The lyrics are fantastic, opening with self-deprecation and fear, but quickly moving on to imparting two crucial pieces of wisdom. First, that “despair is less abundant in those who understand how to plant their hearts in community gardens.” Yes, this is a good way of putting it! The second point is bigger – the world may be fucked over by the decisions of powerful and capricious men, but there’s at least a lesson to learn from their arrogance and hubris. Lehman is not much of an optimist, but it’s hard not to hear the genuine hope in this song.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Broadcast “Before We Begin”

Trish Keenan was a deeply shy woman who sang everything with an ambiguous tone, as if the Mona Lisa was fronting a psychedelic pop band. Conflicting emotions and ideas overlapped in her songs, but in a very tidy way. She was precise in her phrasing, and expressed as much as she could in small, low-key utterances. She made her shyness a strength in her music, particularly in the way her reserved quality suggested an emotional depth that canceled out the potential irony or kitsch in Broadcast’s taste for mid-20th century nostalgia.

“Before We Begin” is an expression of cautious optimism that makes the most of the ambiguity in Keenan’s voice. She sings her melodies with sweetness and a touch of melancholy – earnestly hoping for the best, but prepared for disaster. In a way, this is a song about how arbitrary beginnings and endings, like the change of one year to another, give us a way of shaping our personal narratives and opening us up to opportunities to have a fresh start. The loveliest part of the melody expresses the most hopeful thought in the song – “it’s in tomorrow, fortune or sorrow / wait, you may win.” It’s a very reassuring sentiment. A guarantee of success and joy would ring hollow, but put in this way, it feels like a more real possibility.

Buy it from Amazon.

Every year I make a survey collection intended to represent the scope and tone of music over the course of 12 months. This year’s survey comes in two forms: A sprawling 500+ song playlist that gives what I believe to be the most accurate summary of music in 2018, and an abridged version of the playlist that is half as long and more focused on my taste and what I believe to be essential, even when it’s music I don’t particularly like. The latter version is also available as a download, as per usual.

Here is the full version of the survey…

…and here is the abridged version.

One of the major goals I have in making these survey mixes, including the versions covering the 80s and the 90s, is showing the full context for music in any given year, and proving how even in what seems like a “bad year for music,” there are always still a lot of great songs. I would categorize 2018 as one of the worst years for music I’ve lived through, but then I look at this survey and see so much quality material! The culture around music may be depressing and oppressive right now, but you can’t ever stop artists from doing wonderful things. I hope you find more to love than to dislike in this year’s set.

DOWNLOAD PART 1

Lana Del Rey “Mariners Apartment Complex” / Soccer Mommy “Your Dog” / Taylor Swift “Delicate” / Ariana Grande “R.E.M.” / Gorillaz “Humility” / Playboi Carti feat. Lil Uzi Vert “Shoota” / Pusha T “If You Know You Know” / Valee feat. Jeremih “Womp Womp” / XXXTENTACION “Moonlight” / Travis Scott feat. Drake “Sicko Mode (Skrillex Remix)” / DJ Koze “Lord Knows” / Kanye West “Ghost Town” / Kids See Ghosts “Freee (Ghost Town, Pt 2)” / Jean Grae & Quelle Chris “Gold Purple Orange” / NoName “Self” / Smoke DZA feat. Joey Bada$$ “The Mood” / No Joy & Sonic Boom “Obsession” / Janelle Monaé “Make Me Feel” / Of Montreal “Sophie Calle Private Game/Every Person Is A Pussy, Every Pussy Is A Star” / Caroline Rose “Jeannie Becomes A Mom” / Miss World “Oh Honey” / U.S. Girls “Incidental Boogie” / Insecure Men “Mekong Glitter” / Drake “Nice for What” / Nicki Minaj “Chun-Li” / Cardi B “Bickenhead” / Sophie “Immaterial” / Red Velvet “All Right” / Amanda Shires “Eve’s Daughter” / Lucy Dacus “Addictions” / Zizi Raimondi “Folly Dolly” / Father John Misty “Mr. Tillman” / Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Solid Silk” / St. Vincent “Hang On Me” / Arctic Monkeys “Star Treatment” / The Internet “Come Over” / Anderson Paak “Smile/Petty” / Maggie Rogers “Fallingwater” / Twice “Deja Vu” / Shawn Mendes “Nervous” / Vince Staples “Don’t Get Chipped” / Jay Rock feat. Kendrick Lamar “Wow Freestyle” / Famous Dex “Japan” / Grace Vonderkuhn “Worry” / Teyana Taylor feat. Kanye West “Hurry” / Khalid feat. Swae Lee “The Ways” / Kali Uchis “Flight 22” / Me’Shell NdegéOcello “Sensitivity” / Adrian Younge & Linear Labs “Silhouette Dreams” / Jorga Smith “Lost & Found” / Amber Navran “Lastaya Love” / Charlotte Day Wilson “Doubt” / Ali Shaheed Muhammed & Adrian Younge feat. CeeLo Green “Questions” / Spiritualized “A Perfect Miracle” / Beach House “Pay No Mind” / Deerhunter “Death In Midsummer” / Kurt Vile “Bassackwards” / Makaya McCraven “The Newbies Lift Off” / Everything Is Recorded feat. Sampha, Ibeyi, Wiki, and Kamasi Washington “Mountains of Gold” / Tirzah “Do You Know”

DOWNLOAD PART 2

Earl Sweatshirt “Shattered Dreams” / Action Bronson “Prince Charming” / Ari Lennox “No One” / Diana Gordon “Wolverine” / Mariah Carey “A No No” / Natalie Prass “Short Court Style” / Caroline Says “Sweet Home Alabama” / Yo La Tengo “Polynesia #1” / Jerry Paper “Your Cocoon” / Okkervil River “Famous Tracheotomies” / The Rock*A*Teens “Go Tell Everybody” / Flasher “Pressure” / Jeff Rosenstock “Beating My Head Against A Wall” / Bad Bad Hats “Makes Me Nervous” / Astronauts, Etc. “Symbol Land” / Fog Lake “I’ll Be Around” / Gerard Way “Getting Down the Germs” / Karen Meat “Overdwelled” / Magic Potion “Shock Proof” / George Clanton “Make It Forever” / Mormor “Whatever Comes to Mind” / Electric Six “(It’s Gets) (A Little) Jumpy” / Margaret Glaspy “Before We Were Together” / Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper “Shallow” / Mark Ronson & Miley Cyrus “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart” / Trippie Redd “How You Feel” / Hit-Boy “Out the Window” / Childish Gambino “This Is America” / N.E.R.D. feat. Rihanna and Drake “Lemon (Drake Remix)” / Camila Cabello “Inside Out” / Troye Sivan “My My My!” / Public Memory “The Line” / Matthew Dear “Echo” / Thom Yorke “Has Ended” / Lil Peep “4 Gold Chains” / Sheck Wes “Mo Bamba” / Smino feat. Mick Jenkins “New Coupe, Who Dis?” / Post Malone feat. Ty Dolla $ign “Psycho” / CupcaKKe “Duck Duck Goose” / Saweetie feat. Kehlani “ICY GRL (Bae Mix)” / CZARFACE & MF DOOM “Captain Crunch” / Cavern of Anti-Matter “Solarised Sound” / The Smashing Pumpkins “Solara” / Nine Inch Nails “Ahead of Ourselves” / Interpol “If You Really Love Nothing” / Negative Gemini “You Weren’t There Anymore” / Pressa feat. Lil Uzi Vert “420 in London” / A$AP Rocky “Changes” / H.E.R. “Can’t Help Me” / Kamasi Washington “Show Us the Way” / Christina Aguilera “Like I Do” / Georgia Anne Muldrow “Overload” / James Blake “Don’t Miss It” / Louis Cole “When You’re Ugly” / Jake Shears “Big Bushy Mustache” / Pistol Annies “Got My Name Changed Back” / MGMT “She Works Out Too Much” / Speedy Ortiz “You Hate the Title” / Robyn “Ever Again” / Anchorsong “Testimony”

DOWNLOAD PART 3

Metro Boomin feat. 21 Savage “10 Freaky Girls” / Kodak Black feat. Travis Scott and Offset “ZEZE” / Lil Wayne feat. Kendrick Lamar “Mona Lisa” / Tierra Whack “Cable Guy” / Doja Cat “MOOO!” / Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z “Lovehappy” / Ella Mai “Boo’d Up” / Nao “Another Lifetime” / Nadine “Pews” / Juice WRLD “Armed and Dangerous” / G-Eazy feat. Blac Youngsta and BlocBoy JB “Drop” / Oh Sees “Sentient Oona” / Car Seat Headrest “Cute Thing” / Lithics “Still Forms” / Cat Power “In Your Face” / Boygenius “Salt in the Wound” / Haley Heyndrickx “Oom Sha La La” / Jeff Tweedy “Bombs Above” / Neko Case “Hell-On” / Courtney Barnett “Hopefulessness” / Paul Simon “Can’t Run But” / Jeremih & Ty Dolla $ign “The Light” / DeJ Loaf feat. Leon Bridges “Liberated” / Dear Nora “Simulation Feels” / TV Girl “7 Days Til Sunday” / Phosphorescent “Around the Horn” / Julia Holter “Whether” / BLACKPINK “DDU-DU DDU-DU” / Grimes “We Appreciate Power” / Hobo Johnson “Peach Scone” / King Princess “Pussy Is God” / Lizzo “Boys” / Billie Eilish “When the Party’s Over” / 03 Greedo feat. Lil Uzi Vert “Never Bend (Remix)” / Esperanza Spalding “The Longing Deep Down” / Neneh Cherry “Kong” / Videotapemusic “Hot Pants in the Summercamp” / Cuco “Lover Is A Day” / Boy Pablo “Losing You” / Unknown Mortal Orchestra “The Internet of Love (That Way)” / Video Age “Pop Therapy” / Darwin Deez “The World’s Best Kisser” / Sales “White Jeans” / The Breeders “Walking with a Killer” / Rhye “Feel Your Weight” / Cherophobiac “Unknown Liquid Substance” / Eleanor Friedberger “Make Me A Song” / Sloan “Don’t Stop (If It Feels Good Do It)” / Guided by Voices “Colonel Paper” / Lil Uzi Vert “New Patek” / Lake Ruth “Julia’s Call” / Yaeji “One More” / Alison Wonderland “No” / Mildlife “The Magnificent Moon” / Sibille Attar “I Don’t Have To” / Haley “Bratt” / Joan of Arc “Punk Kid” / Born Ruffians “Side Tracked” / Nicholas Krgovich “Time” / Belle & Sebastian “Poor Boy” / Mazzy Star “Quiet, the Winter Harbor” / Ian Sweet “Question It” / PC Worship “Shell Power” / Friendly Fires “Heaven Let Me In” / Migos feat. Drake “Walk It Talk It” / Meek Mill feat. Miguel “Stay Woke” / Tune-Yards “Heart Attack” / Chvrches “Graffiti” / Imagine Dragons “Natural” / The 1975 “Love It If We Made It” / Weezer “Africa” / Maroon 5 feat. Cardi B “Girls Like You” / Panic! at the Disco “High Hopes” / Zedd feat Maren Morris and Grey “The Middle” / Rita Ora “Anywhere” / Mitski “Me and My Husband” / Halsey “Without Me” / Carly Rae Jepsen “Party for One” / Dierks Bentley “Woman, Amen” / Florence + The Machine “South London Forever” / Kacey Musgraves “Slow Burn” / Luke Bryan “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset” / Ed Sheeran & Beyoncé “Perfect Duet” / Snail Mail “Heat Wave” / Lake Street Dive “Jameson” / Molly Burch “Wild” / BTS “Fake Love” / Mac Miller “Self Care” / 6ix9ine feat. Nicki Minaj and Murda Beatz “FEFE” / Logic feat. Wu-Tang Clan “Wu-Tang Forever” / Brockhampton “New Orleans”/ Ellie Goulding feat. Diplo and Swae Lee “Close to Me” / Aphex Twin “T69 Collapse” / Sharon Van Etten “Comeback Kid” / Crepes “As You Go” / J. Cole “Brackets” / Tyler, the Creator “OKRA” / Rich the Kid “Plug Walk” / The Alchemist feat. Westside Gunn and Conway “Judas” / King Tuff “Raindrop Blue” / Ty Segall “The Main Pretender” / Swae Lee “Hurts to Look” / Ashley Monroe “Hard On A Heart” / Christine and the Queens “Doesn’t Matter” / Amen Dunes “Blue Rose” / Saba feat. Chance the Rapper “Logout” / The Good, The Bad, and The Queen “Merrie Land” / Leon Bridges “If It Feels Good (Then It Must Be)” / Rico Nasty “Rage” / Metric “Love You Back” / Justin Timberlake “Midnight Summer Jam” / Rosalia “Malamente” / JPEGMAFIA “1539 N. Calvert” / Zayn “Let Me” / Bell’s Roar “You Call Me Cold”

Makaya McCraven “The Newbies Lift Off”

Makaya McCraven is a drummer, and that much is fairly obvious by listening to the compositions on his outstanding and varied record Universal Beings – the other instruments provide melody and texture, but McCraven’s percussion is always steering the music. “The Newbies Lift Off,” one of my favorites from the album, is a perfect example in how its sections seem to stop on a dime to switch up percussive strategies. It keeps the music exciting and interesting in a way particular to the thinking of a drummer, particularly one who seems to be influenced by the way rap DJs and producers have cut up beats in the ‘90s. Listen to this – there’s no way this guy hasn’t heard Endtroducing a million times over, right?

Buy it from Amazon.

Amanda Shires “Eve’s Daughter”

“Eve’s Daughter” is in many ways a song you’ve heard before – a country rock rave-up with lyrics that tell the story of a woman who fell in love, and then fell on hard times. But the execution feels fresh to me. Everything in the mix sounds like it’s in the red, and Amanda Shires sings with a raw, wild-eyed intensity that raises the stakes of every line of the song. It’s not quite shoegaze-y, but in terms of how country music is typically produced, this is just blaringly loud and abrasive, like the Stooges backing up Dolly Parton at the Grand Ole Opry. Traditional, but extra rowdy.

Buy it from Amazon.

DJ Koze “Lord Knows”

“Lord Knows” is warm and familiar, a sort of sample-based song that gives me a sense of deja-vu even without trying to figure out if I can place the vocal samples. Like, you could’ve told me that this was The Avalanches or Fatboy Slim and I would’ve believed you. And this is no slight on DJ Koze – if anything, it’s high praise. The feeling that he creates here is not unique, but it is rare and special. It’s hard to get just right. This is a remarkable composition – in perfect balance, but also so full of energy that the beats land in a way that feels like the whole thing could rattle and fall apart, like when the engineer on Star Trek worries that the ship is moving too fast and could explode at any moment.

Buy it from Amazon.