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Spiritbox at South Side Ballroom, Dallas TX 4 Apr 8:02 AM (yesterday, 8:02 am)

I love live shows, but sometimes the surrounding elements—onerous traffic, byzantine downtown streets, colorful people, sketchy parking lots—makes me wonder if it’s still worth it. Then I get a show like this and, yeah—it’s still worth it.

I’d only been to South Side Ballroom one other time, to see Metric back in 2019, and it must have only been filled to half its capacity for that show. Sometimes it seems like bands say a show is sold out just to instill a sense of urgency and get the remaining tickets sold, but this show must have been legitimately sold out. The venue was totally packed, easily north of 3,000 people.

Even though this was the first show of the Tsunami Sea tour, I fully expected the show to start with “Fata Morgana”; Courtney had mentioned in the Apple Music album notes that when she first heard the song’s riff, she couldn’t wait to walk out on stage to it. They also used it to open some recent European shows. It’s a deliberate, chugging vibe-setter. What I didn’t expect was to get the first 3 songs from Tsunami Sea in order. When “Fata Morgana” ended and the drum pattern for “Black Rainbow” kicked in, the room totally lifted. It went as hard as I could have hoped for. That it was the first time it had ever been played live was also pretty special. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.

The stage was set up with a 3-tier platform faced with LED screens playing video footage for each song, with the drums on the top tier. Everyone (except the drummer lol) moved around quite a bit, and Josh’s vocal contributions were really good. There were some co-singing moments with Courtney that he pulled off really nicely. My wife mentioned that even though it was heavy music with lots of screaming, it had really good energy. Loathe gave her the ick. 😂

There were a lot of songs from Tsunami Sea, which I really enjoyed, plus a few that I must admit I didn’t recognize (turns out it was the 3 songs from Rotoscope). That’s cool; I’m motivated to spend more time with their older material now. They also played a few songs from Eternal Blue and The Fear of Fear. “Holy Roller” and “Circle With Me” stole the show for real, and the crowd was clearly the most amped for them. They’re great songs, but they have such clear and distinct parts that they also sounded the best.

“Crystal Roses” was kind of a surprise. It’s such an electronic-imbued song that I figured it wouldn’t make the cut. Like other songs, it had a faint backing track, but Mike really stepped in to replace the electronic textures with guitar. Pretty damn cool. “Ride The Wave” was a perfect closer to the set, the first half clean and serene, the second half going hard to the mat.

If this band’s appeal wasn’t already crystal clear, it certainly is now. Not only are their songs really well-written, they also have great stage presence. Not a lot of theatrics, but a cool, collected stance in the midst of all the noise. I would 100% go to another Spiritbox show. Let’s hope the world holds itself together long enough for that to happen.

Setlist

• Fata Morgana
• Black Rainbow
• Perfect Soul
• Jaded
• The Void
• Tsunami Sea
• Secret Garden
• Circle With Me
• Rotoscope
• Sew Me Up
• Hysteria
• Soft Spine
• Holy Roller
• No Loss, No Love
• Crystal Roses
• Ride The Wave

Mixtape, March 2025 31 Mar 9:00 AM (5 days ago)

Slowwves – Evangeline (feat. Death Of Heather)

This came out in February, but I didn’t want it to get drowned in the already-long list of songs in the February Mixtape. Slowwves continues to make the epitome of shoegaze, and throwing Death of Heather into the mix makes this song even more gorgeous.

Kills Birds – Trace

Geez, I am more excited for this EP that I ever expected. I don’t vibe with much of Kills Birds’ previous material, but everything I’ve heard from this upcoming Crave EP has been noisier, thicker, and freakin’ amazing.

カラス – うぴ子【MV】CROW – UPIKO

What the Rick Astley is this??? I was not expecting that voice to come out of that little lady.

Spiritbox – Fata Morgana – Live at Ally Pally

What a tone-setter. I hope this is how they start the Dallas show in a few days.

Chug – Flowers

I heard this song on an episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete and hunted it down. This has a very specific 90s sound that I adore. What a bop!

Glixen at Club Dada, Dallas TX 25 Mar 10:47 AM (11 days ago)

What a night. This will 100% be my most chaotic concert recap to date.

My wife and I left right the house on time and enjoyed smooth traffic, though we were having such an involved conversation when we walked out the door that we forgot our ear protection. I realized our mistake about 30 minutes into the drive, so rather than go without (bad idea) or go all the way back home (unappealing idea), we backtracked a shorter distance to a Guitar Center to get replacements.

That, combined with Deep Ellum’s perenially lousy parking situation, meant we were about 25 minutes late to the show. Thankfully, I had digital tickets in an email, because I’d also forgotten those at home. For real. Almost as soon as we walked in, Suzy Clue began playing. I’d never heard of them before, and honestly wish I never had. Not my vibe in the slightest.

Glixen played next, which made me realize that we had completely missed She’s Green’s set, which must have started right at 8:00 PM on the dot and run very short. It was a huge bummer because I really love their music, and they were probably the best band on the bill. Glixen was very enjoyable, though it helped that I knew the songs and could fill in the muddier vocal and melodic gaps caused by both Club Dada’s and the bands’ penchant for volume over clarity. All of the aforementioned unsavory events certainly colored the rest of the evening, but I really did find myself feeling better as they played. Despite the oscillating muddiness, the guitar tones were pretty darn sublime, and I especially enjoyed the drummer. My guy was locked in pretty hard. “Splendor” and “Sugarcube” were the standout songs of the night, and the blistering “Shut Me Down” was a fantastic set-closer.

As we usually do, we headed to In-N-Out for post-show burgers, but were unfortuately delayed when part of someone’s vehicle fell off in the highway and performed a very rude sneak attack on our undercarriage, almost immediately flattening one of our tires. I managed to get us safely off the highway and into a Costco parking lot. Unfortunately, our spare was also low, and since AAA was going to take four flippin’ hours to dispatch assistance, some dear friends answered our call and came to our rescue with tire-changing expertise and an air pump. 💜

Like I said: What a night. You better believe we still went to In-N-Out. I enjoyed the hell out of that burger.

Setlist

• all tied up
• Moodswing
• Splendor
• foreversoon
• Sick Silent
• lust
• Lick the Star
• Sugarcube
• shut me down

Spiritbox - Tsunami Sea 12 Mar 7:01 AM (24 days ago)

Oh, lordy.

I’ve been looking forward to this album since “Cellar Door” dropped way back in 2023. By the time The Fear of Fear EP came out, it was clear that Spiritbox was evolving their sound into a mirror-finish atom bomb. Not that they hadn’t achieved polished aggression before; “Holy Roller” was my introduction to the band, and it’s one of the most catchy, memorably heavy songs in their discography. I like the rest of Eternal Blue just fine, but something about The Fear of Fear unlocked my fandom.

Tsunami Sea is whole aesthetic. All the songs have this dense, dark, large-hall atmosphere that—combined with the album name, the occasional sounds of lapping waves, and the many lyrical references to the sea—can’t help but conjure the cold, wooded, stony shores of the band’s Pacific Northwest roots. I habitually listen to albums anyways, but it’s always great when a band makes a record that is so intentionally meant to be listed front to back, carrying a singular focus and considered pacing all the way through. As a designer, I naturally also appreciate all the packaging around the music, too. The black & white visual styling in videos, promo materials, and album art bolsters the music’s dramatic, uneasy feeling.

The singles were so good that I worried the rest of the album might be weighed down with acceptable-but-forgettable filler, but that’s not the case at all. I’ve found so much more I look forward to each time I roll through the track list. “Fata Morgana” is a creeper; not a lot of melody, but plenty of face-stomping riffage. Seems like the kind of song that could kick off a show really well. “Black Rainbow” is a delightful leviathan: the creepy riffs, battering drums, and mix of processed & throaty vocals are a triple threat. Plus, it’s got the sickest drop on the album. There’s a moment in the middle of “A Haven With Two Faces” where a long, drawn-out vocal note morphs into a scream. It’s probably a production trick, but it still slaps hard. And then there’s “Deep End”, which has the vocal melody of a pop ballad at its core, but wrapped in that signature Spiritbox sound. Not to undersell Mike’s sublime guitar parts, but Courtney’s vocals make this song soar.

What I like about Spiritbox is what I like about, say, Rolo Tomassi: beautiful, vulnerable elements pushed up against harsh turbulence. It’s downright shoegazey in places. I go on and on about my love of contrast; the fact that Tsunami Sea can sound all at once brutal and etherial is so damn cool. The soft genre-bending is exciting too; not that Spiritbox invented mixing metal with pop or electronic elements, but they do it really well. Nor did they pioneer blending energetic music with darker lyrics, but they do it really well.

This album has 100% cemented my fandom, and I’m more excited than ever to catch them live next month. I hope “Black Rainbow” blows the doors off.

Long Live The Adventures of Pete & Pete 5 Mar 12:01 PM (last month)

🎵 Hey smilin’ strange,
You’re lookin’ happily deranged 🎵

It was the untimely death of Michelle Trachtenberg that pulled this tune out of the fog of the past. “Hey Sandy” is the theme song from 90s kids’ show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I haven’t thought about it in a while. The show revolves around the identically-named brothers—often differentiated as Big Pete and Little Pete—and immortalizes their normal, everyday childhood rites of passage as epic, surreal adventures.

Michelle joined the cast in the second season. Her Nona F. Mecklenberg was one of the more memorable supporting characters. All these years later, I still remembered that she wore a cast on her arm, not because it was broken, but because it made her arm itch and she loved to scratch it.

That kind of oddball quirkiness is par for the course on Pete & Pete. I don’t consider myself especially nostalgic, but given the current state of the world I have found myself blowing through episode after episode, delighting in its innocent weirdness. Like the time they tried to uncover the identity of Mr. Tastee, the ice cream man, only to discover that no one knew who he was, because he never took off his costume. Or the time Little Pete stayed up for eleven consecutive nights to undermine the International Adult Conspiracy’s draconian bedtime rules. Or the time a trip to the beach ended with the family digging out an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme buried under the sand after Dad discovered it with his metal detector. They drove it off the beach like it was brand new. LOL.

It’s also often sweet, like in “The Big Quiet”, where Big Pete suddenly finds it hard to talk to his dad anymore, but discovers that he’s allowed to grow and change, and his relationship with his dad will always be special even if it’s not always the same. Or “The Call”, where a public phone at the drive-in hadn’t stopped ringing for 27 years, rumored to destroy anyone who dared answer it. The kids vow to end this town-wide menace once and for all, only to discover that the call was intended for the Petes’ mom, Joyce, from Hub, an old seventh grade classmate that was in love with her. He’d become a telephone lineman just so he could keep the call ringing and keep an eye on the phone booth, hoping that Joyce would one day answer. After she lets Hub down gently, Big Pete’s wrap-up narration tugs the heartstrings:

“Hub knew that Mom would never pick up the phone, but it didn’t really matter. To him, the rings were like an eternal flame, kept lit by simply staying on the line. To this day, when we hear the rings, it reminds us that true love—if it’s really true—doesn’t need an answer.”

What kind of kids’ show was this?

It seems cliché to yearn for simpler times, because those times rarely existed. Pete & Pete aired in the mid-nineties, a decade that saw a lot of good things, but also kicked off the United States’ invasion of Iraq that blossomed into years of ongoing violence in the Middle East. What made the times simpler is that the atrocities were (usually) far away, and therefore easier to ignore; that the internet firehose wasn’t yet primed to deliver a 24/7 onslaught of bad news; that politics were much gentler. Even so, it’s hard to look to this past and not recognize that—bad stuff notwithstanding—it was still a lot better than now.

Rewatching this show, then, has been part welcomed escapism and part unexpected mourning. Michelle’s passing lends a certain poignancy to the feeling that the carefree times embodied by the world of Pete & Pete are long gone. On the other hand, they come back so easily in the smiles and laughter the show evokes. It makes me so happy. And why shouldn’t I feel happy, at least sometimes?

I see people unwilling or ashamed to share their joyous moments right now, like anything that’s not constant, active resistance is somehow frivolous and shows a lack of commitment.

But isn’t that why we’re doing all this? At the end of the day, I don’t resist fascism to prove them wrong or prove my worth, I’m doing it so I can live. So that other people can live a life full of those good moments.

Joy and living isn’t just a necessary component to fighting fascism. It’s the whole point.

— Jess Cho

Long live The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Long live happiness.

Mixtape, February 2025 28 Feb 9:00 AM (last month)

HAGANE – Life goes on!

This song is exactly what it sounds like: an epic, metal pep rally. If you need encouragement to keep pushing through the slop—and I think we all do—translate the lyrics on this video’s pinned comment. It’s pure, joyful perseverance from start to end. Oh, also: JAPAN WHAT ARE YOU DOING OVER THERE THIS IS GOD TIER TALENT

she’s green – Graze

It’s been a long wait for new music from she’s green, and it doesn’t disappoint! This band has always delivered gauzy, gentle vibes. What a cool video, too! Can’t wait to see them play in a few weeks.

Magdalena Bay – Airplane

I’ve been crushing on this band’s A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling EP this month, and particularly this song. The beat makes it lift and bounce, but the melody and lyrics are full of of longing, resignation, fear, and hope. You know me: I love the juxtaposition of unexpected or contradictory elements, and this song delivers in spades.

Horsegirl – Switch Over

I’m not all that into Horsegirl, but this song scratches some kind of nostalgic itch. I never thought I’d hear such strong influences from both The Breeders and New Order in the same song, but here we are.

Blurred City Lights – 祝祭

This new track from the first of their dual EPs, Utopia, is really beautiful, and the noisy rendition of of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” toward the end of the song is a cool surprise.

好芻- SPARK!

Oooh, new Japanese dream pop from the vocalist for math-rock band tricot? Pretty vocals over noisy guitars? Always, please!

BAND-MAID – Shambles (Live)

I love when bands start a song by letting members solo into it, and none do it better than BAND-MAID. They’re all great, but Kanami’s dramatic, heavy riffage takes the cake this time.

The Cost of Convictions 21 Feb 10:03 AM (last month)

Having convictions is lonely.

I’m not on Spotify anymore because it’s managed to be such a garbage company as to kindle my deepest wrath, but most listeners are on Spotify, giving it the better discovery experience because they have more data. Social media links to Spotify are also ubiquitous, and I notice and feel more left out now that I’m not there.

I’m not on Twitter anymore—because Nazis—but my entire social network was there. Almost all who came to Mastodon with me—and there weren’t many—have stopped participating and moved on to something else.

I’m also not on Bluesky or Threads, because Meta sucks and Bluesky is likely not far away from introducing whatever it can to monetize itself users. But that’s where a lot of my ex-Twitter circle has landed, and this wonderful connection of federated services is just not happening as seamlessly as it seemed it would.

My choice to root out those corporations is a kind of luxury, because there are viable (though not equal) substitutes, or I’m able to live without them. The luxury only extends so far, though; it’s hard to name a corporation I frequent these days without finding something morally and/or ethically problematic:

• Amazon — Jeff Bezos muzzles The Washington Post from publishing anything that would personally affect his wealth, like endorsing Kamala Harris or criticizing Elon Musk. The billionaire boys gotta stick together! The “magic” of Prime delivery comes at the cost of huge amounts of unsustainable human labor and energy consumption. I try to minimize my shopping here, but sometimes it’s the only reasonable place to get what I need, because Amazon has put so many other businesses out of business. It’s hard to quit.
• Kroger — This company jacks up prices and blames inflation. They—and many modernized grocers—have also adopted digital shelf tags and facial recognition technology, which would allow them to quickly change prices based on demand and a personal shopper profile. That they deny any intent to begin dynamic/surge pricing doesn’t exactly fall on a soft, downy bed of trust. At a time when people are being financially squeezed from every corner of the economy, playing with prices for maximum profit is pretty despicable. And why the hell does a grocery store need facial recognition? I try to shop at less problematic grocery stores, but—again—it’s hard to quit because it’s the only reasonable place to get some items.
• Apple — Executives can do whatever they want with their personal earnings, but it’s worrisome that some choose to use it to fund fascism. But it’s hard to quit, because it’s my entire computing ecosystem.
• Target, Walmart, Lowes, Amazon, Meta, McDonalds, Ford, ad infinitum — Cowards and bootlickers. As soon as a new political administration expressed displeasure with DEI and other socially responsible programs, they were all too happy to jettison their flowery, caring, inclusive rhetoric to expose the sociopathic machinery beneath. We always knew it was there, but we wanted to believe otherwise.
• Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon, despite the horrific levels of energy required to deliver mediocre results. Avoiding every company employing AI will be impossible.

You know what else I can’t quit? Instagram. I hate that this is where I carve my own petty, personal abscess into Meta’s bloated carcass, but it’s the last place I can enjoy connection with my favorite artists and any friends that have remained active there. I’m afraid that if I let go of that, I would end up completely isolated. As it is, music has become the thing I can hold onto and rely on to maintain some joy and sanity in these awful times, and my people still post uplifting and creative stuff.

My hands feel dirty, yet I’ve already given up so much for my convictions that I can’t find the strength to scrub them any cleaner. It’s unfair this is where we are, all somewhat complicit and tangled in the machinery of amoral capitalism.

Maybe I should be stronger. Or weaker?

A Disposable Commodity 5 Feb 12:37 PM (last month)

I’ve been reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. It’s a pretty damning synopsis of the streaming giant’s reshaping of our musical landscape, significantly assisted by major record labels.

I was particularly surprised to learn of the popularity of Spotify’s curated “mood” playlists, probably because I couldn’t be less interested and have never engaged with them. However, their massive audience is all the fuel Spotify needed to take them over with its own “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) songs: toothless imitations of songs by actual artists pumped out by a raft of production studios. These significantly cheaper songs give the boot to artists that Spotify would have to pay actual royalties.

The more surprising revelation is exactly how Spotify got the idea to start the PFC program in the first place: research! As Spotify looked at how music was being streamed on the platform, they discovered that there were playlists attached to certain moods that listeners played in the background of other activities, usually on a loop. That’s why their play counts are so high. The fact that listeners are treating these playlists as functional music provides the perfect environment for swapping songs created for the love of music with ones created to bypass royalty payouts. Since all these listeners seem to care about is the vibe these playlists create, why would they care who was making the music, or any kind of artistic merit? All that matters is that these scab songs sound similar to what they replace.

I was reminded of something Trent Reznor said on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast back in 2023. Speaking about what his music listening experience was like when he was younger:

“I wasn’t [listening to music] in the background while I was doing five other things, and I wasn’t treating it kind of like a disposable commodity. I don’t go to the cinema and do my taxes while a movie’s playing.”

Oof. Those in and around Reznor’s generation know exactly what he means. No one is demanding that we drop everything and apply laser focus to music every time we hear it. We obviously do stuff while listening to music. Working, writing, social events, and video games are all activities that aren’t granting 100% focus to the music, but “only listening”—putting on music with listening as the primary activity—is a normal part of being a music fan, as is knowing artists’ names, band members, their discography, and other fun facts. I’m sure this continues in younger generations, but Spotify’s user research suggests there are a lot of people out there just looking for something to fill the air, set a mood, and drive away the silence.

I have two concerns here. The first is Spotify’s ability to influence listening behavior and how that affects artists. I’m personally not concerned about the existence of curated playlists, but is the overwhelming presence and marketing of playlists driving listeners to just pick one—even if it’s not a mood playlist—and press play? I have to admit, I’ve done that on more than one occasion. Having so much music to choose from can definitely cause decision paralysis, and playlists can quickly solve that problem. Heck, I even wrote an article last year titled What Should I Listen To?, and listed playlists as an option. Problem is, most Spotify playlists are heavily influenced by major labels, and are not the organic expression their fanciful names make them out to be. Some authentically curated playlists may still exist, but the existence of entire companies dedicated to help artists “pitch” their song to land on a Spotify playlist suggests that playlist placement is mostly driven by those who have the resources to pay for it. Streaming is not a meritocracy.

The other concern is how we—and specifically these vibe-chasing playlist listeners—collectively value music, because one could (disingenuously) argue that Spotify is only serving a clearly-identified market. How we listen to music—perhaps most damningly illustrated by the word “consume”, an increasingly common stand-in for “listen”—has changed a lot over the past 30 years. That these mood playlists continue to garner so many streams even after being replaced with nearly 80% PFC content shows just how unbothered or unaware these listeners are by this bait and switch, which only emboldens Spotify’s foray into music production. Pretty soon, AI is going to enable PFC content to start being produced in all sorts of heretofore untouched genres and spread across all of Spotify’s playlists, displacing more and more real artists. The more our musical vocabulary decays, and the less we care about the real people and the craft behind music-making, the easier it will be for listeners to not only accept but embrace souless music of all stripes.

I don’t know what happens next. All I know is that it’s extremely hard to change behavior at scale. Perhaps this latest evolution is just another manifestation of smartphones’ and social media’s effects on attention span and decision-making. Maybe it’s a sign of the times: people using music as therapy, and Spotify being the easiest and cheapest way to self-regulate. It’s weird to think that Spotify’s original vision was to just to have a big “Play” button that would magically deliver exactly what the listener wanted to hear in that moment. It doesn’t sound so crazy anymore.

Mixtape, January 2025 31 Jan 9:00 AM (2 months ago)

Welcome to 2025! This month’s mixtape is unintentionally metal. 🤘

Kills Birds – Behind

I cannot get over the vocals on this song. I mean, it’s a great song, too—90s slackercore basslines married to some kind of mesmerizing punk/shoegaze concoction—but this vocal performance got me all goosebumpy.

Gore. – Pray

This band didn’t catch my ear right away, but I found myself unable to stop thinking about what I’d heard, and have come back to listen many times. Their debut EP is amazing, and “Pray” is one of the best metal songs I’ve heard in a long time!

Novelists – Coda

People Are Talking ^TM about French band Novelists’ latest single, and for good reason. What even is this? I mean, it’s clearly awesome, but big pop hooks, bluesy riffs, and finger snaps? Metalcore is going places, y’all.

HEADWRECK – LOW BLOW!

I love metal that bops. This sounds like what you would get if LMFAO fronted Nova Twins with 3x intensity. Respect.

Architects – Blackhole

Music videos are back, baby! This band is new to me, and this song blew my socks off. Those drums decimate everything. And let’s take a moment to appreciate the production value of this video. Insanity.

Electric Callboy – ELEVATOR OPERATOR

Haha, what even is this? Why am I both laughing and headbanging? This song is club-banger-meets-metal, and it’s fantastic. Keep your mood booster playlists. This’ll do the trick for me, thanks.

2024 Music Report 2 Jan 9:00 AM (3 months ago)

Sheesh, what a year! How it felt like an eternity but also gone in the blink of an eye is a wild mind game.

For me, it was also bit of a rollercoaster. There seemed to be long stretches of time that were musically stagnant, but maybe that’s just a matter of perception, a lingering comparison against the explosive fire hydrant of discovery I uncorked 3 years ago that has been slowly depressurizing down to a more sane and steady stream. The reality is that a lot of great music and true revelations came out this year that I really enjoyed. Maybe the pacing was a bit uneven, but I suppose it’s nice to have a bit of breathing room to be able to more deeply enjoy a new discovery before the next obsession inevitably comes along.

Some music came out that captured my attention enough to relax the chokehold that shoegaze has had on me. For whatever reason, metal has been interesting me more and more, and that’s only accelerated as the year winds down. I’m also still very much in my “I’ll listen to anything once” season, which opened the doors to some amazing stuff that I may have ignored five years ago.

I hope your musical year was fulfilling, too. Perhaps there’s something here that could make a lil’ extra spark. Let’s find out!

Softcult has been at the top of my listening for the last few years, and for good reason. This band has some kind of magic that I haven’t felt in maybe 20 years. I got to see them play again this year, and that night has really stuck with me. I’ve watched the whole recorded show over a dozen times. Sometimes there’s just a feeling in the room, you know? The vibes were so thick. My long-term memory is soggy, so I won’t go so far as to say it was Top 5 all-time material or anything, but it’s probably Top 3 in functional memory. The aura was nuts.

Magdalena Bay was an unexpected revelation that had barely registered on my radar until this year. I’d listened to their first album a few times, and while it’s got some cool songs, it didn’t stick enough to get a lot of plays. I’m glad to have given them another shot because their output has been maybe the most seismic, creative stuff I heard all year. More about that in a bit.

And my year kind of ended with Poppy. Again, an artist I’d listened to before but didn’t get into. Her latest effort, despite being probably the most accessible flavor of metalcore, is totally floating my boat.

Softcult’s Heaven is probably the band’s strongest EP to date. It’s always great to see a band come along that builds steam as they keep going rather than washing out. This EP has fantastic songwriting and production, and I love how they continue to meld indie rock, alt rock, shoegaze, and pop into a unique signature sound. If you haven’t put Softcult in your earholes yet, now’s the time.

Magdalena Bay’s second album Imaginal Disk came out this summer and kind of cracked my head open. I was not expecting to turn on my heel from shoegaze to sparkly psychedelic prog-pop, but that’s what so damn fun about music. Something comes along that slaps you hard and gives you new, amazing sounds to be excited about. This album totally reminds me of why I love music in the first place. Let this album destroy your cynicism. Don’t like it? Check your surroundings: you may be in a casket.

Poppy’s been inching onto my radar over the past year with a couple excellent collabs with Bad Omens and Knocked Loose. Negative Spaces is a stunner. I suppose this would be generally categorized as metalcore, and the majority of the songs fit that mold, but I love how this record refuses to get completely pigeonholed by entertaining quite a bit of variety. I’m crazy about the huge, heavy songs like “they’re all around us”, which pushes the pedal to the floor with relentless blast beats and screamed vocals, and “the center’s falling out”, an off-the-rails rager. Then there’s “vital”, maybe my favorite song, channeling a sort of Avril Lavigne vibe, but heavier. I think it’s got the coolest melody on the record. “crystallized” and “push go” swerve into more electronica-infused territory a la Rebuplica or Garbage. Those memorable hooks, varied textures, and nostalgic callbacks have made it such a replay-able album.

I’ve struggled to articulate how I feel about Pale Waves’ Smitten, but I guess it’s time to say something. It’s really beautiful. That’s what’s kept me coming back. It’s the most cohesive they’ve sounded in years, and this gauzy, 80s-tinged jangle-rock sound really does best suit their vocals and lyrics. There are hooks galore, and lots of really beautiful production. In a twist that I never saw coming, though, this may be my least favorite Pale Waves album. Most of the vocal performances, while completely aesthetically pleasing, feel emotionally flat to me. That said, my personal experience is no reason to skip this album. It’s definitely worth a listen, and may speak volumes to you!

Thank god kids are still picking up instruments and learning how to write songs, because they’re making my heart sing from 5,000 miles across the globe. Astronomies’ And All My Thoughts Come Hurtling Down is brilliant, moody, yearning, delicate, and dynamic—a brilliant mix of indie rock and shoegaze. There are a couple songs that take a turn midway through, and it’s delightful to hear them reimagine themselves. I’m particularly fond of the center of this album; “Interlude” brings some calm to a noisy first half, and then “Apollo, Pt. 1” & “Apollo, Pt. 2” slowly rebuild the wall of sound to finish off the album.

Softcult once again sweeps this category. I wouldn’t have guessed that Shortest Fuse was my top song of the year, but the stats don’t lie! It’s a great song, so it’s not like I’m that surprised. The way those drums and bass lock in sound so, so good. Can’t get enough, it seems.

Notables

Some of last year’s music didn’t make my top fives, but deserves your consideration:

We.the Pigs – We.the Pigs

This album is excellent, compressing the likes of My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and maybe a bit of The Joy Formidable into noisy but melodic gems of songs. I can’t believe the band only has ~75 monthly listeners on Spotify, but I also can’t find any mention of them online beyond a few of their own social media accounts. The mystery is to your benefit, because you too can become the next fan of a band that basically no one has ever heard of.

Wishy — Triple Seven

Wishy’s songs aren’t absent of the push and pull of life and relationships, but the overall vibe of Triple Seven is exuberant. This album just has good energy; there’s a feeling of abandon and plunging in headfirst that’s super infectious. The guitars are noisy, the rhythms kinetic, and the melodies immaculate. Jangly indie pop-rock, alt rock, shoegaze: Wishy dabbles in all the good stuff. “We’re trying to tap into a place of joy, and a carefree perspective.”, they say. Nailed it.

Bloodywood – Rakshak

I’ve known about Bloodywood for a hot minute, but it took me a while to get around to listening to their debut album, 2022’s Rakshak. This album has it all: chuggy guitars, harsh & clean vocals, rapping, hooks for days, and lots of native Indian instrumentation and vocal styling that make it sound fresh as hell. It’s got a socially conscious backbone, too, which makes me love it even more.

Slowwves

Southeast Asia continues to make the best-sounding shoegaze. This band started releasing singles early in the year and those five tracks have me praying for an EP or album in the near future.