July 04, 2025

Swimming Abroad: International Music Roundup

July 04, 2025/ The Swim Team

To quote Frank Reynolds, “you have to be a real low-life piece of shit to get involved in politics.” I think the same thing applies to being overly patriotic, especially now, as the United States Government proudly rolls out our very own concentration camp and revokes healthcare for millions upon millions of its own citizens. Shit’s fucked in every direction, so Independence Day doesn’t feel like a whole lot to celebrate.

To me, the Fourth of July begins and ends with barbequing hot dogs, drinking some beers, and jumping in the pool, and guess what? I did all that shit yesterday. While last year we had a fun BBQ music roundup on the Fourth, this year we thought the holiday might be a fun excuse to highlight some of our favorite music projects from other countries.

Please enjoy the music, please celebrate responsibly, and please consider the role we all play in this.

baan – neumann

The universality of music is one of the most beautiful things about humanity. A sound can be shaped in Philadelphia, and years later, a band from Namibia has made it their entire style. When it comes to heavy music, some of the most incredible records made often lie outside of American audiences’ line of sight; however, within the internet era, we are seeing a globalization of art that rocks at unprecedented levels in human history. Enter baan from Busan, South Korea—a band as heavy and thunderous as they are deft and talented. neumann is a journey–nine tracks with entire realms existing within them. In an era where playlists and short-form songs are championed across the music industry, an album that offers depth AND patience can feel very rare, especially when it can actually alter your perception of time. There were more than a few times where a song on neumann felt like a meditative 15 minutes when it really was less than that, or conversely, felt over in moments for tracks that ran over six minutes. An album that, whether it likes it or not, is as thoroughly about the act of listening as it is about the haunting abstraction of being alive in modern times, baan’s first release is dense, heady, and a prime example of how musicians outside of the states are just as worthy of our curiosity and attention as any here at home.
– Elias Amini

Sport – In Waves

The “Midwest” part of “Midwest Emo Revival” really has nothing to do with geography. It’s a holdover from the second wave of emo, known simply as “Midwest Emo,” which happened mostly in the 90s. Back then, a lot of popular acts really were from the heartland (also a lot weren’t, but hey, the name stuck). In the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s, that sound was revived by bands from all over, including those outside the US. Between 2011 and 2016, Sport cooked up three emo albums from Lyon, France. Even an ocean away, they brought every bit the same energy, talent, and quintessential sound as bands like Algernon Cadwallader and Glocca Morra—and after nine years, they’re back with another.

In Waves is aptly named. Each song swells, crests, crashes, and regathers itself in troughs of lingering reminiscence. Their sound is full-bodied, with gang vocals punching through walls of angular riffs, twinkling arpeggiations, and dynamic percussion. Though they skew towards math rock, Sport is unmistakably emo. Between the poetic verses and impressive wordplay, you can hear the mourning of days gone by and anxiety for the future. At the same time, you hear catharsis, conviction, and a passion for life.

Sport’s 4th album is for every emo enjoyer; it expands on themes from previous albums and breathes new life into their discography. In a recent interview, Sport says they picked their name because it’s the same in most languages. This global mindset has paid off, rekindling the flame of Midwest Emo abroad and exemplifying the benefits of seeking inspiration beyond your own borders.
– Braden Allmond

Whispers – Yom-Ma-Lok

I personally and bravely believe that the best way to experience hardcore punk music is to see it live. I don’t think anyone has discoursed about this yet, but I’ll give it time. My point is that while I had heard about the release of Yom-Ma-Lok at the buzzer of 2024 (and read a Stereogum comment summarizing it as a “yuletide ass kicking”) nothing could have prepared me for the swaggering way Whispers took the stage at Black Cat a couple months ago. At the first cymbal crash, the whole room was suddenly engulfed in the sound, drenched in their self-described “Bangkok Evilcore,” like when the air gets sucked out right before there’s an explosion. Every molecule of oxygen in the room was reverberating with their metallic sprawl and pounding with crushing blast beats.

Whispers, a very kickass crew from Thailand, released their latest EP, Yom-Ma-Lok, in December, a relatively long project with features from members of Kickback, Demonstration of Power, and hardcore’s it boys, Speed. There’s a certain magnitude to it, an ascension, as the band oscillates between brawling beatdowns and sweaty anthems. The EP relentlessly pummels the listener, but when I saw it live, the listeners pummeled each other back.

I would also be remiss not to mention that, as of today, my favorite Mancunian lads are back. That’s right, unless the Gallaghers have called it quits between the editing and publishing of this piece, Oasis should be taking the stage in a couple of hours. I’m feelin’ Supersonic mates.
– Caro Alt

racecarbed – bozo

In an effort to continually prove myself to be the most esoteric woman at any gathering, I will spend untold time going on musical deep dives online. Call it pretentious, but that’s showbiz, baby! That’s music journalism! That’s my RIGHT! Thus, in the spirit of my deep love for underground music, I would like to bring bozo by racecarbed to everyone’s immediate attention. I may be pretentious, but I’m not a gatekeeper. racecarbed is an artist and producer based in Ireland, creating incredibly delightful music across the pond that has made its way to my ears. If you enjoy hyperpop, noise, emo, digicore, and random sampling, boy, are you in for a treat. If you don’t enjoy any of those things, why are you here? Why are you reading this? Why are you looking at me like that? Go listen to racecarbed anyway! One of my favorite tracks from bozo, “Family Guy Funny Moments” is a painfully honest song, uncomfortably juxtaposed against - you guessed it - a sample of Family Guy. A beautiful and rather heart-wrenching synth melody immediately follows, causing emotional whiplash that is jarring in all the right ways. The shift from Peter Griffin to an evocative riff is, as it turns out, a bit of a shock. While the hyperpop genre often runs the risk of becoming overwhelming and too noisy, racecarbed exercises just enough restraint in his writing to create skillfully balanced digital masterpieces. Anyways, it’s time for you to leave me alone - I’m at the function reading Infinite Jest.
– Britta Joseph

Subsonic Eye – Singapore Dreaming

The title for Subsonic Eye’s fifth album, Singapore Dreaming, telegraphs pretty clearly exactly what you’re going to get. Press play on the opening track “Aku Cemas,” and you’re in for 30 minutes of dreamy, overly-saturated rock music straight from Singapore. It’s a consistently pretty album; colorful and well-constructed is the default baseline, even when the band is singing in Malay. By the time the band launches into the riff one track later on “Why Am I Here,” you’re already firmly situated in indie rock heaven. As the purple, yellow, and red from the cover bleed together, everything shifts into focus, then back out. Listening to an album like this feels like eating a good hearty meal; you walk away with every need met.
– Taylor Grimes

Crayon Cats – Songs About You! #2

There is nothing I love more in the world than an earnestly cute jangly pop-punk band, and no one is doing it better than Crayon Cats on Songs About You! #2. The band, who hail from Jakarta, Indonesia, nailed this sound on the first entry of this EP series back in September 2024, but on #2, Crayon Cats have even sharper songs and starker dynamics. The ramshackle pop-punk laments of “October Girlfriend” are juxtaposed with the hazier, dreamier side of indie pop on “Hospital Hopper.” The latter track is competing with “Not The Best Day” from their EP for the title of my favorite Crayon Cats song, in large part because of how brilliantly the band lets the song comedown. After two minutes of exemplifying the fear that builds while accompanying a loved one to the hospital in an emergency, the guitars crack into a vacuum cleaner whir until it all crashes down and ebbs out. In that comedown of fading distortion and reverb, the band captures what it’s like to sit in the hallway waiting for the results. After two sets of Songs About You!, I will continue to listen to any other songs Crayon Cats have to about you.
– Lillian Weber

Mantar – Post Apocalyptic Depression

When I discovered German metal duo Mantar this year, there were two things I found completely unfathomable: first, that they weren’t an obscure ‘70s occult rock group based on their simple yet fantastic logo, and second, that I hadn’t discovered them until this year. The band feels like they were concocted in a lab just for me, scratching my deep itches of other two-piece sludge metal bands like Big Business or Eagle Twin, albeit with a more direct psychedelic lean. Post Apocalyptic Depression could be the best album title of 2025, if it didn’t feel like our collective depression was more mid-apocalyptic, but it’s at least refreshing that the songs therein are nothing short of badass stoner punk’n’roll, well-suited for fans of other underground European metal acts like Kvelertak or Barren Womb. Lead single and album closer “Cosmic Abortion” (again, these guys really know how to make a great title), its lo-fi, space-trip music video, and chorus lyrics, “KILL, DESTROY, FUCK SHIT UP” made Mantar an instant sell for me, with Post Apocalyptic Depression becoming one of my earliest favorite albums of 2025.
– Logan Archer Mounts

Spirit Desire – Pets

With a decade of indie emo tunes under their belt, Spirit Desire have little to prove to anyone anymore. Pets is the band’s first release in a few years, a ten-minute offering comprised of three absolutely knockout songs and one instrumental interlude. While the opener, “Dead Pets,” is a great introduction that dives directly into the title at hand, it’s the propulsive “IDFC” that reveals itself as the true standout. The Toronto group offers a complimentary and affirmative palate cleanser with “It Is What It Is,” sending listeners off with some well-wishes until our paths converge again. The whole release is tender, open-hearted, catchy, energetic, and earnest; pound-for-pound, one of the best things I’ve heard all year, with not a second wasted. For as many ideas and riffs and harmonies as Spirit Desire have been able to pack in these ten minutes, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better EP in the rock music sphere.
– Taylor Grimes

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

I am once again asking for your listening support of UK’s jangle pop quartet all-stars, The Tubs. I recently saw their show live and in color in Chicago, which has further solidified my aspirations to be treasurer of their soon-to-be-created fan club. Cotton Crown is packed to the brim with energetic, uptempo guitar strokes to circumvent the melancholy, glum lyrics of vocalist Owen Williams. Throughout The Tubs’ sophomore album, Williams’ deep, love-scorned voice is a soothing siren that comforts you while he spills his guts out about lost relationships and the tragic, untimely death of his mother. Each song is a fascinating case study in successfully masking the deeply personal lyrics of Williams, which often venture into darkness with a bright, sunny disposition of music. “Chain Reaction” and “Illusion” surf on nonstop tidal waves of jangle pop guitar strings. Cotton Crown doesn’t have a dull moment in its brief twenty-nine-minute runtime. The Tubs have the energy of an early 2000s Four Loko with the passion of a grief-stricken poet, making this an instant favorite of mine.
– David Williams

June 30, 2025

The Best of Q2 2025

June 30, 2025/ The Swim Team

We’re halfway through 2025, and it feels like my brain is contorting into shapes it was never meant to hold. Unlike my intro for our favorites of Q1, I’m going to try my best not to go on a screed, but it’s hard not to treat these roundups as little check-ins. It’s also hard not to be upset at the countless acts of violence, injustice, and just plain stupidity being carried out in our name and on our dollar. It’s hard to conceive of because sometimes our day-to-day feels so completely unchanged or mind-numbingly banal. Hell, some days are even great. Then that feels weird because you’re allowing yourself one ounce of joy in the company of friends and loved ones, and suddenly you snap back to the reality of the world we’re living in. You remember the machine you’re a part of, and you try your best to operate outside of it, but sometimes that machine feels absolute and inescapable.

I think what I’m trying to say is that this is a uniquely treacherous time to be alive, but there’s still beauty to be had. There’s salvation to be found in community, and there is support to be lent to those who need it. There’s art to share with each other, and that’s why we’re here.

This past month, a couple of our friends had a beautiful, healthy baby. Another couple got a brand new puppy who’s barely big enough to make it up a single stair. I went to a baseball game primarily to down a beer, a hot dog, and fistfuls of popcorn. I had my 32nd birthday and was surrounded by all my beloved friends as we shot each other with squirt guns and shook our booties to Rihanna. I went to a music festival and hugged someone I loved. I took pictures outside of a tobacco shop in Ohio called “Butt Hut.” I shared some delicious meals with my beautiful girlfriend and watched Shakespeare in the park with friends. These are all varying levels of significance, and some of them might seem more frivolous or trivial than others, but they’re all part of the same thing. Finding the time to experience joy and wonder and happiness, acknowledging those feelings, and sharing them with as many people as possible is what it’s all about.

With that in mind, please enjoy The Swim Team’s favorite albums from the last three months. Fifteen releases from fifteen artists, championed by fifteen different people. I hope you find something here to love.

First Day Back – Forward

I’ve been an active participant in the emo scene for well over half my life at this point. I have seen its ebbs and flows, I’ve survived its famine years, and been relishing our current era of bounty. When one spends a long enough time being fully engrossed in the tides of genre, you begin to build a sense of which way the wind may start to blow. When I first heard The Arrival Note’s Vol. 2, I felt the tingle of an air pressure change, a movement in the sky that I surmised to be a harkening back to 90s emo that would find its way into our now burgeoning scene. Well, here we are, the first big gust to usher us towards our next few years of emo revival goodness. Actually, ‘revival’ doesn’t feel quite right. First Day Back’s debut effort is not them attempting to breathe life back into anything; it's all living, breathing experience, days and months and years and scattershot measurements of time clasped between moving string sections, moments pinched between their fret strings, memories weighing heavy on serenades and shouts.

Forward’s modus operandi, it seems, is to just be honest. Honest in feeling, honest in thought, honest in execution, and when all of that honesty starts condensing and collecting across the breadth of the album's thirty-four-minute runtime, the rain cloud accumulating over your spirit gets a spring-kissed summer shower. This album feels like a natural phenomenon in that way, and I think that with time and its tides, some kids in twenty years will point at this band and, through wide-eyed listening sessions of this album, want to find their own way through that same honesty. I'll be happy to press play on that one, too.
– Elias Amini

Turnstile – NEVER ENOUGH

Turnstile’s summer blockbuster record, NEVER ENOUGH, has replenished for me the gigantic stadium rock feel from a band in their prime that I haven’t felt since the mid-2000s. It’s 45 minutes of crowd-pleasing summer rock action that scratches the itch of prime Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters. NEVER ENOUGH is fully loaded with explosive melodic riffs and an ample number of sonic twists and turns.

“BIRDS” is an adrenaline-pumping jam if I ever heard one. The song moves faster than a muscle car driven by Dom Toretto; it’s Turnstile at their mosh-pitting best. I just want to break something or at least knock over a traffic cone at full force whenever this song comes on. The transitions are as smooth and seamless – being able to move from chunky guitar riffs to break beats at the drop of a hat makes for a thrilling listening experience. The best example I can give is “LOOK OUT FOR ME,” which flies by at 100 mph with Q101 rock radio riffs, then morphs into a minimalist synth club hit that is full-on transcendent.

This record can be listened to nonstop on runs through the park, while manning the grill, or even while meditating by the pool. NEVER ENOUGH’s sonic versatility is the Swiss-Army knife for rock music.
– David Williams

Careful Gaze – one day this will let you go

Minneapolis rockers Careful Gaze have always been a little messy to categorize as far as genre is concerned. Generally, it’s fair to call them a mix of post-hardcore, metalcore, and heavy indie music. one day this will let you go feels special, shedding all of those labels to do something completely unique within their catalog. What we get is an ambient EP full of sound design, synths, and subdued vocals.

The first track, “you are the strongest that I know,” has a two-minute sound bath before vocalist Gabe Reasoner comes in to silently declare, “You should stay away from me.” They repeat the phrase until you realize that this is a break-up record borne out of the challenge of letting go of people you loved, or perhaps, still love. On the second track, Careful Gaze trades in the subdued energy of track one for trap hi-hats, a handclap snare, and swelling synths, creating a build that demands release in the form of the next song.

It’s on the closing title track where the emotional design of the record really shines. It challenges the listener to break composure while Gabe’s vocal delivery screams out, raising in intensity until the last line, dropping back down to close the record by saying “it’s fucked no matter what,” an acknowledgement that sometimes brokenness is just brokenness. There isn’t much hope here. This is simply the work of a broken person writing about brokenness.

This EP begs a few questions about Careful Gaze’s next full-length record. Will we see more of this lush sound design that’s being spotlighted on this EP? Will we get a resolution for the heartbreak we see here? It’s impossible to know what’s next, but I’m waiting with bated breath to see where this band will be landing when they hit the ground again.
– Noëlle Midnight

Panel – A Great Time to Be an Empath

With each spin of Panel’s debut album, A Great Time to Be an Empath, the more I feel the need to grab someone, shake them, and scream at them about the things Annie Sparrows’ songwriting makes me feel. Throughout this record, Sparrows aches for some sort of relief from the horrors of trying to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. The moment that hits the hardest for me is after the second verse of “Victoria” when she gently croons that titular name, and her voice is so full of desperate hope that someday she’ll be able to sit comfortably in her skin. “Victoria” does what I want every new song I hear to do, to leave me breathless and lost for words to describe what just happened and how the hell I could feel all of that in under two minutes. And it is not the only song on the record that makes me feel that way. It can’t be when the record opens the line “Everybody knows that the place to start / is before the end, before the part / where you began to go but you didn’t even know / it was the start of the lights out slip” spoken over a motorik rhythm that perfectly evokes the dissociative numbness that comes with living just to make it through the day and has a piano ballad as its centerpiece about a pets love performed like a lounge act. It’s a great time to listen to A Great Time to Be an Empath.
– Lillian Weber

Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back – winnowing

One way I try to remember each month is with a playlist of new-to-me music. In May, I heard “Out of Season” by Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back. It’s from their 2023 debut album, and liberally abuses the stereo audio format to split each guitar beat, giving the song an interesting and intentionally disjointed character. This, among other bit-crushing, oversaturating, and noisy tricks, was intriguing enough for a whole album play. Luckily for me, that same month they released their sophomore LP, winnowing. This second effort explores the softer side of low-fidelity recording. There are still plenty of crunchy crescendos and haphazard buzzings throughout, but each song feels more considered. They back off the chaos of their first album to introduce a meticulous melange, which is acoustic-forward and ever so slightly polished. If you’re a fan of Wednesday, glass beach, or Hey, ILY, you’ll find something to love about Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back.
– Braden Allmond

The Callous Daoboys – I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven

I’ve had the pleasure of working at a lovely, albeit somewhat niche, museum since October, and I still find new little nooks, crannies, and didactics throughout the exhibits to keep me invested. Being a museum employee also grants complimentary access to other museums, such as The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Seattle Art Museum, to name a few. However, one doesn’t need reciprocity to enter the Museum of Failure, an interactive auditory museum curated by the six-piece post-hardcore band The Callous Daoboys.

This museum is sprawling with different exhibits, ranging from the downright ridiculously heavy (“Tears on Lambo Leather,” “Full Moon Guidance,” “The Demon Of Unreality Limping Like A Dog”) to catchy (“Two-Headed Trout,” “Lemon,” “Distracted By The Mona Lisa”) to spacy (“Body Horror For Birds”). Some artifacts scare viewers while others will bring them to tears of laughter like the downright ridiculous A GAGA BOO AAGAA BOO BOO AAGAA in “Idiot Temptation Force.”

The crown jewel of this museum belongs to “III. Country Song In Reverse,” an almost twelve-minute colossus of sounds ranging from a two-minute ambient southern soundscape to thunderous breakdowns to an auto tuned repetition of “I Love You” culminating in frontman Carson Pace screaming, “I am worthy of the ark and I hope to god you can’t swim.”

There’s a lot of laughter, a lot of tears, and a lot of heavy shit in between. Is that not what life is? Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what I marvel at in the Museum of Failure is a group of artists who play to all of their strengths without sacrificing their uniqueness. God bless The Callous Daoboys.
– Samuel Leon

MSPAINT – No Separation

I used to work at a free museum that had a wax-coated sculpture in its sculpture garden. At 2 PM on the dot, every day, a mirrored skyscraper in a different neighborhood would aim a direct beam of light and heat onto this sculpture, melting it. But every day, the museum’s restoration team would fix it—kind of a standing battle with art and capital.

This is the stubborn determination that No Separation from Hattiesburg’s MSPAINT reminds me of. In their last release, 2023’s Post-American, MSPAINT dealt in potential energy, constantly building up momentum and threatening release. In No Separation, they release it, almost leering as they proclaim a positive future amongst the wasteland.

These past couple of months have been inundated with people talking about the boundaries of hardcore, and while all that’s been going on, MSPAINT has been digging under the genre and unearthing the unruly heartbeat that drives the sound. The result? No Separation. So what if it all melts? We’ll rebuild.
– Caro Alt

Pelican – Flickering Resonance

If there’s one theme that echoes throughout Flickering Resonance, Pelican’s first new record in six years, it’s the beginning of a new era for the Chicago metal quartet. Many great artists work in trilogies, such as David Bowie’s series from Berlin in the 1970s, or U2’s collaborations with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in the 1980s. Flickering Resonance marks the seventh full-length album from Pelican, and the start of what could be a third album trilogy nearly twenty-five years into their career.

Their dynamic sound, established since 2003’s Australasia and perfected on 2009’s What We All Come To Need, continues through new catalog classics like “Gulch” and “Wandering Mind.” The explosive and theatrical passages on “Cascading Crescent” and “Pining For Ever” fill the room with whatever speakers they’re blasting on, helping paint a soaring, loud rock landscape with the rest of the LP. Pelican has been one of my home city’s most important bands to me, and their staying power has only strengthened with the release of Flickering Resonance, unleashed to a dark world now made much brighter.
– Logan Archer Mounts

Arm’s Length – There's A Whole World Out There

At this point, there are few members left in the emo cognoscenti to sway regarding Arm’s Length’s mastery of the craft. Signing to genre-behemoth Pure Noise Records was merely a stepping stone before unleashing their sophomore LP, There’s A Whole World Out There, a record that features the group proving they’re anything but a one-album wonder. Admittedly, I was optimistically wary at first listen, because how does a group one-up a generational debut like Never Before Seen, Never Again Found? Thankfully, I was completely enamored by the rebuttal album on release day. What makes the Canada-based unit special is their knack for crafting something comprehensive and cohesive.

As is common in the emo genre, the band's initial full-length, NBSNAF, was lyrically condemned by its nostalgia-drunk tilt. The feeling is a drug – hard to quit and easy to get lost in. However, Arm’s Length find their way out on their newest LP, rooting themselves firmly in the present. Vocalist Allen Steinberg writes from hindsight's perspective this time around, and while this album is still very much sad, it takes a different outlook on it. Such is evident on heavy-hitting cuts like “The Wound,” where Steinberg pleads, “Time will heal me, will I stick around to see it?”

If I had to whittle down this album to 300 words or less (which is what I’m attempting), I’d say it’s largely about being overtly self-aware and viewing past mistakes through a magnifying lens. Being aware enough to recognize and admit that, yeah, there is a whole world out there waiting for me, but right now, it appears too large for me to conquer. So, this album begs the question: if there is a whole world out there, where do we go from here?
– Brandon Cortez

honeybee – midtown girl

A dynamic, warm indie rock record that feels like locking eyes with a beloved friend across a crowded party, right when they walk in the door. Chock full of 90s influences, beautifully produced, and adorned with some of the most confusingly tight harmonies of the year, midtown girl is the sound of a band loosening up—and shifting into a new gear as a result. It’s fun, it’s efficient, it’s a lovely companion to 2024’s Saturn Return, and it sounds perfect in whichever Midtown you’re closest to.

Regarding the 90’s influences, honeybee lead singer/songwriter Makayla Scott said, “There are just these things that are ingrained in a lot of us because that's what we grew up on...it is an amalgamation of everything that I've ever known and loved, which is 90’s Country and also a lot of Y2K Pop music. Avril, Ashlee Simpson, and then some Alanis Morissette, some Liz Phair. I'm not making direct references, but the references are just there because that's what I grew up loving and learning from.”

honeybee aimed for authenticity with midtown girl. The heart and the feeling both come through, not only lyrically but with the passion and intentionality of the vocals and instrumentals. “With midtown girl, Ian Dobyns, who is the co-producer, engineer, mixer…was really coaching me this time to deliver feeling, and to not worry about precision. So now, when I listen back on these vocal takes, there are things that I would consider not technically perfect, but the whole vibe of the song and the record feel perfect.”
– Caleb Doyle

Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

In the Sacramento Valley, heat waves slither atop the molten asphalt, and mirages shimmer among the brittle grasses. The violently warm air chaps my lungs from the inside, but at least it’s a dry heat. (That’s what they say, anyway.) To cope with the arid western summer, I have found myself spinning the perfect album for such weather: I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away by Hayden Pedigo. This instrumental folk record is a yellow-gold masterpiece, with guitar melodies that wrap you in a woolen embrace and bring grassy mirages to life. From nostalgic pieces like “Houndstooth” to the atmospheric title track, Hayden’s skillful playing will pull at your heart and tighten your chest. You’re not even sure what you’re sad about, but you feel a great and cosmic grief weighing on your shoulders. His writing is dotted with delicate phrasing and sparingly placed harmonics that feel just right, demonstrating masterful restraint. “Smoked” is the stand-out track: melancholy wanderings and improvisation, divided by pauses that feel like a sigh, prove Hayden’s exemplary storytelling. I take a deep breath. My lungs hurt, and it smells like scorched dust. But at least it’s a dry heat.
– Britta Joseph

Ribbon Skirt – Bite Down

The first time I heard Bite Down, I found myself helplessly mesmerized. I had few things to compare it to, but midway through “Dead Horse,” I realized the closest reference point I could pull was Japanese Breakfast’s “Diving Woman.” Both songs serve similar purposes as their respective albums’ transportive opening tracks, slowly unfurling and welcoming the listener into the world that the band inhabits. The thing with Bite Down is that feeling didn’t let up. As the Anishinaabe group phases from the spooky hyperventilated breathing of “Cellophane” to the groovy wink of “Off Rez,” I remained spellbound. There’s the piercing scream near the end of “Wrong Planet,” the carefree post-punk bop of “Look What You Did,” and then the apocalyptic world-ending reset of “Earth Eater.” Throughout it all, the band captures a unique sense of displacement, betrayal, and perseverance that feels authentic to who this group of musicians are culturally and creatively. A rock record unlike any others this year or ever before.
– Taylor Grimes

Hemmingway Lane – “Shattered Glass”

I am from just south of Michigan, about 15 minutes from the border, and something about the state always seemed magical to me. It was this place just out of reach and out of time, and I have been chasing that nostalgic high ever since. I was able to find it again last year when Hemmingway Lane reached out to me and asked me to cover their EP Let The Flowers Die. They liked the review so much that I was able to hear “Shattered Glass” as an unmixed phone demo many months ago, and I have been eagerly awaiting its release ever since. I am pleased to report that the full song exceeds expectations in every way. In the past, Hemmingway Lane has focused on a slower indie rock sound that is reminiscent of The Backseat Lovers; however, on this track, they unlock something new in their sound.

“Shattered Glass” is a song about the time someone threw a rock through lead singer Elijah Flood’s back windshield. However, like all art, it takes on a deeper meaning, one of truly accepting the place you are in life. It is the kind of concept that really sticks with me as I enter the period of my life where I am realizing that I am no longer who I once was, and I never will be again. It will just take some time, but eventually I'll take the shards of my splintered existence and put them into something new and beautiful.
– Ben Parker

Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky

The fourth studio album by Los Angeles-based Indie rock band Momma is one of those records that hit me pretty casually upon first listen, but am now regularly throwing on at work when I gain control of the aux both as a small comfort to myself and also like I’m teaching the patrons of the bustling cafe what Indie rock music is truly capable of being. Moody lyrics about love and longing delicately accompany some of the surprisingly punchiest riffs I’ve heard in a while. Heavy hitters like “Rodeo” steadily planted themselves in my brain until I realized this is one of the best albums I’ve heard all year in some unexpected, beautiful Stockholm syndrome effect. So much of this album’s power lies in the atmosphere created by tracks like “Stay All Summer,” which constantly oscillates between subtle strums and shrieking guitar tones, along with the eerie electronic effects of sleepy comforts like “New Friend.” One of the singles from the album, “Bottle Blonde,” specifically commands the utmost attention and places Welcome to My Blue Sky in the upper echelon of 2025’s offerings. The nostalgic melodies, instrumentation, and composition of this powerhouse remind me of my favorite “girl rock” bands of the late 90s and early 00s and could not be more at home in a well-patronized coffee shop or blaring from your bedroom speakers while you paint your nails and try to expunge your ex from your thoughts. As we launch headlong into the summer, there is no better time to spin this emotive collection of fair-weather hits.
– Ciara Rhiannon

PinkPantheress – Fancy That

Resident pop Swimmer reporting for duty. I was less than impressed with PinkPantheress’s sophomore LP, 2023’s heaven knows. Too minimal for my liking; I needed an oversaturation of elements to have even the slightest chance of stopping The Thoughts. “Tonight,” Pink’s first single of the year, was everything I thought heaven knows wasn’t—thumping, bubbly, clubby, relentless, addictive. The kind of song you hear playing in your head as you stick your head out the window of the Uber home. The rest of Fancy That matches that energy, stacking sample upon sample as Pink skates across house-adjacent trip-pop backbeats with her signature veil of indifference. “Illegal” is already going down as my song of the year—I’m convinced the opening synths could bring me back from the dead. I love this mixtape so much that I waited 35 minutes in a queue to secure tickets for her tour. She’s just doing it for me right now. See you in October, queen!
– Cassidy Sollazzo

June 13, 2025

Swim Into The Sound Turns Ten

June 13, 2025/ The Swim Team

As of today, Friday, June 13th, 2025, Swim Into The Sound is officially TEN years old! Since I just waxed poetic about the site for our 500th post a month ago, I’ll try to keep this short and sweet.

After going back and forth for a while debating how to best commemorate this birthday, I decided it’d be fun to ask the Swim Team what their favorite album of the last ten years was. We’re counting everything from 2015 to 2025, and because I’m a real dork with it, we’re also only counting the window that this blog has existed: from June 2015 to June 2025—the last ten years to the day. I’ve organized everyone's answers in chronological order (Thank you, Lillian), and we’ve got some fun stats at the end for the Heads (Thank you, Braden), so keep reading after the roundup.

Before we get to the proceedings, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for being here; thank you for reading, sharing, writing, and supporting this little website. It means the world to me, and I am continually ecstatic to have this outlet to talk about the music that I enjoy and believe in. I think all the people you’re about to read would say the same thing. Thanks for ten years, and thank you for caring. As always, I hope you find something here to love.

Please enjoy this journey through the past ten years guided by your trusty Swim Team.

One Direction – Made in the A.M.

Released November 13, 2015

One Direction hated being in One Direction by the end of it, and in 2015, they broke up. They actually never formally did this, but they released Made in the A.M., which is the closest they could get to ending things. One Direction songs aren’t vapid, but they are vague, leaning into the searing Bo Burnham analysis, “I love your eyes and their blueish, brownish, greenish color” at their weakest. There’s always some love that they want but can’t have. Made in the A.M., however, feels uncomfortable in that structure. Songwriter and appointed Cheeky One, Louis Tomlinson, used that framework to craft a goodbye rather than their usual popstar mystique. Finality underscores songs like “Love You Goodbye,” “History,” and “Walking in the Wind,” becoming bittersweet letters to fans rather than their usual tortured, lovesick songs.

The whole album sounds Un-Direction as well, with a rounder, synthier, stomp pop sound, something that matched their contemporaries rather than their discography. I love Made in the A.M. for that weirdness, even that title —a begrudging nod to the fact that all this was recorded in the grueling early hours of the morning on their tour bus as they traversed the world without Zayn Malik. And then that was just it. A couple live performances, a lackluster rollout, no tour, and a promise that the band would come back once they were off a needed hiatus. Now, 10 years later, the band won’t and can’t come back, but in the words of One Direction’s final song, “A.M.,” it’s okay because “I'm always gonna look for your face,” and as a forever Directioner, I really will always look for them.
– Caro Alt

Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid

Released April 29, 2016

After much intensive deliberation, I feel confident that Long Island rapper Aesop Rock’s seventh album, The Impossible Kid, probably holds the most emotional weight to me of the thousands of albums I’ve heard since June of 2015. Originally my #3 record of the year after its release, it’s a proof of concept that tastes change and grow stronger over the years, and an album you listen to a handful of times in a 365-day span doesn’t have to be confined to that timeline.

Aesop Rock has been my favorite rapper since 2012’s Skelethon, and when The Impossible Kid dropped four years later, I was out of college and living on my own, making the first real transition to conscious adulthood. While much of Aesop Rock’s lyricism is abstract and conceptual, this album is his most directly personal across his discography, referencing multiple stories from his childhood and tributes to longtime friends and family. Particularly the song “Blood Sandwich,” the second verse of which Aes raps about his older brother being denied tickets to see Ministry, deeply affected me. Hearing two of my musical loves intersect in this way resonated with me, as I had gone through a similar experience when I was younger.

Whether he’s criticizing the ins and outs of the rap world (‘Dorks’) or boasting about his cat (‘Kirby’), Aesop Rock shines on The Impossible Kid in a way that is so specific to this album only. From a technical standpoint, it almost feels like he’s still trying to one-up himself, like on 2023’s head-spinningly impressive Integrated Tech Solutions, and even his just-released Black Hole Superette. But to me, there isn’t a rap album that speaks more to nerdy, introspective, and emotional youths than The Impossible Kid.
– Logan Archer Mounts

The Hotelier – Goodness

Released May 27, 2016

In 2016, I worked my first full-time job as a residence director at a private college on Long Island. I didn’t live far from my alma mater, so I was in this liminal space of young adulthood, where many friends were still at school while I worked a day job taking care of people just like them. It was a year of transition. I was shedding relationships, beliefs, and happiness.

My constant was music. The LI emo scene was instrumental for me. I had left all of my childhood friends in the city to make new ones at college. We moshed to easycore, pop-punk, post-hardcore, and what is now called “mall emo.” Being away from old friends, I grew perpendicular to them and my younger self. I became way too into my head. I needed to get out of it and touch grass.

Goodness came out just over a year after I graduated college. I felt ennui on Long Island, in my job, in my relationships. I couldn’t envision a life for myself there; Brooklyn, changed but still mine, beckoned me. I quit my job over some bullshit miscommunication about my dog, and didn’t look back.

The Hotelier kept me company on that final drive back to my parents’ house. With Franklin the pug in shotgun and my life packed into the backseat and trunk of my Civic, I yelled “I don’t know if I know love no more” to “Piano Player” while I sped down the Southern State Parkway. I embraced agnosticism on “Two Deliverances,” meditated on “Sun,” and considered death on “Opening Mail for My Grandmother.” I mourned a forever-lost love on “You in this Light.” I felt that chapter of my life close on “End of Reel.”

Revisiting Goodness now, I bloom in gratitude for that time, for this album, and for my life.
– Joe Wasserman

Touché Amoré – Stage Four

Released September 16, 2016

It was brutally hot the day my grandpa died. I had driven to his house to say goodbye, knowing that this would be the last time. I clasped his fragile hand and smiled through the tears that burned like fire in my eyes, trying to memorize every painful detail of those moments. Afterwards, I dragged myself out to my car in a haze, sliding into what felt like an oven as I gingerly closed the door. The silence was deafening, and I couldn’t bear to sit with it. The only album I wanted to listen to was one that had already carried me through years of pain and grief – Touché Amoré’s Stage Four. The album is both sonically and topically heavy, tackling the loss of frontman Jeremy Bolm’s mother to cancer. My grandpa died from cancer as well, and as I watched him suffer and wither over the course of a year, I returned again and again to Stage Four. I found myself taking comfort from Jeremy’s words as my heart screamed that I, too, knew this pain. Dense and beautiful, each song soars to massive emotional heights and crashes into frantic, melodic choruses as brutally honest lyrics about grief thread through the entire record. I was fractured like glass on that hot September afternoon, but Stage Four pieced me back together.
– Britta Joseph

Bon Iver – 22, A Million

Released September 30, 2016

I was not thriving when 22, A Million dropped in September of 2016. I was living in a townhouse packed too-full of college dudes and scrambling to maintain a relationship that was winding down to its inevitable end. My undiagnosed scrupulosity (religious OCD) had reached a fever pitch, and I was functioning at peak neurosis, all atoms vibrating and neon.

I don’t know if any record has affected me so viscerally on a first listen. It might be over soon. God, I hope so. The new songs were beautifully damaged, everything pushed into the red, held together with desperation and scotch tape, as fragile as I was. While Vernon’s voice and the indie-folk-mad-scientist production were the first things to grab me, the occult symbolism and numerology proved genuinely unsettling; having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian sect, becoming obsessed with an album that quite literally takes you to hell and back was functionally my own bizarre, self-administered form of exposure therapy. I think 22, A Million is possibly one of the most influential records of the past decade, but I’m writing about it because it feels like it was made just for me. At the risk of overspiritualizing, its existence feels damn near providential. Well it harms me, it harms me, it harms me, I'll let it in.
– Nick Webber

Black Marble – It’s Immaterial

Released October 14, 2016

I sometimes accidentally Pavlov myself into enjoying things. Half a decade ago, I had one too many jumbo margs, promptly threw up on the sidewalk, then trudged three long blocks home. When I fell on my bed, I thought, “You know what would really help these spins? Some electronica from New York.” I don’t listen to electronica or anything adjacent. At least I didn’t use to. I fell asleep, and in my drunkenness, I looped the album and immediately lost my phone behind my bed. I was too uncoordinated to stop it from playing for eleven full hours (surprisingly, I wasn’t too drunk to plug my phone in beforehand). I woke up a changed man, with a newfound distaste for tequila and a burgeoning love for a genre I never paid much attention to before.

These tracks have been with me for most of graduate school, and I have memories—good and bad—for each. I listened to “Frisk” 27 times in a row, mid-Covid, figuring out a single statistical mechanics question. Black Marble conjures full cities and surrounding landscapes, using understated vocalizations that seep into and become part of their masterful, bass-forward, fully synthetic creations. Through years and mile-high waves of self-doubt, It’s Immaterial is the buoy that has kept me afloat.
– Braden Allmond

The Menzingers – After the Party

Released February 3, 2017

When I think about records that have had a profound impact on me over the last decade, the fifth studio album, After the Party, by American punk rock band The Menzingers always finds its way around the top of the running every single time. Introduced to me during our junior year of college by my best bud and all-around punk enthusiast, Avery, I was immediately arrested by The Menzingers’ effortless song structures, candid lyricism, Irish-Catholic sensibilities, and the way the band unapologetically exudes “Americana.” After the Party tackles the daunting themes of growing beyond your reckless years, facing a new decade of adulthood, and reconciling with the most regrettable aspects of yourself – delivering it all in a way that kicks my ass upon every subsequent listen, but always manages to keep me coming back for another round. As I stare down the barrel of thirty-years old just a month from now, I find myself coming back to the repetitious line “Where are we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” from the album’s opening track “Tellin' Lies.” I’ve never been more uneasy about entering a new stage of my life than I am now at the edge of my twenties, but I’m also holding on to this comforting notion that the party ain’t over. Even though ultimately deciding on my “favorite” album of the past ten years feels impossible, I can’t think of another album that so accurately represents those years, nor feels more ubiquitous across them than After the Party.
– Ciara Rhiannon

SZA – Ctrl

Released June 9, 2017

Ctrl came out on my last day of high school. SZA’s full-length debut is now regarded as one of the most important releases of the 2010s, and it is certainly one of the most important releases of my 2015–2025. While a lot of albums from my teens exist in one fixed point of my memory, Ctrl has wiggled its way into every moment of change I’ve found myself in since its release. It played in my headphones on my flight to college, on my walk to my first class. It played at a consistent, low hum that emanated from my bottom bunk. I’ve screamed the words to “Prom” in mid-summer euphoria, windows down, sun out, ocean in my hair, driving a little too fast over the bridge. I’ve had pensive, tearful sunset walks to “20 Something,” wondering if I was ever gonna get my shit together. SZA has a way of making the most specific of situations feel universal, of summing up a generation's worth of anxieties into a few sparse lines (“Fearing not growing up / Keeping me up at night / Am I doing enough / Feels like I’m wasting time” couldn’t sum up my existential worries better). I mean, “Normal Girl”???? It’s like SZA ascended from the heavens and blessed girls everywhere with the soundtrack of their early adulthood.
– Cassidy Sollazzo

Manchester Orchestra – A Black Mile To The Surface

*Loma Vista Recordings and Favorite Gentlemen*

Released July 21, 2017

I sometimes get emotional thinking about all the people in my life who have loved me, who have cared for me when I was difficult to love or self-destructive. I’ve made it so hard on so many people, but I’ve been loved deeply. I especially appreciate this because we live in a culture that seems to communicate that love is earned. If you’re convenient, if you keep the scales balanced, don’t take more than you give. If someone can use you or extract something from you, then you’ll be loved. But I’ve been given so much grace. What the fuck.

Andy Hull has this ability to write songs about people who are ugly and hopeless, but you end up caring for them and identifying with them and wishing them well. You end up growing eyes to see the lonely and broken people around you. The folks that seem to get pushed out from the middle of the circle. This is the sort of album that makes me think maybe we can all learn to grasp Each Other and grasp God and grasp Love and actually make sure that none of us go it alone.
– Ben Sooy

Amen Dunes – Freedom

Released March 30th, 2018

Freedom is my favorite album of the last decade because, no matter how many times I listen to it, there’s always something new that I haven’t considered or noticed. It’s an elusive album for me. I can never quite put my finger on what's really going on with it. Is it a mystical bent on classic rock? Maybe it’s a long-lost adult contemporary album from the turn of the millennium, a dark and beautiful companion that might slide into a radio rotation filled with David Gray and Dido. Whatever it is, Damon McMahon gets it the most correct when on “Blue Rose” he sings, “We play religious music, I don’t think you’d understand, man.” He’s right, trying to wrap your mind around this music isn’t the point. It’s not present in our realm for the sake of classification and dissection; it’s here for experiencing and feeling. If your senses have not been graced by Freedom, then I suggest giving it a go on your next road trip, preferably a summer one, bonus points if it’s along the coast. That’s where you’ll sink into its essence.
– Connor Fitzpatrick

Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!

Released May 18, 2018

Although released in 2018, I didn’t get around to Wide Awake! until 2020. Global pandemic, lockdown, nationwide protests over police killings. You remember. In the early days, it was a time to escape the rhythms of modernity and sublimate myself into the couch, subsisting on government checks, homemade mai tais, and Mario Maker 2. It’s there in my complacent crysallis that this album came like a nasty right hook to the spirit.

Dense with aphorisms both didactic and daring (“Travel where you are, tourism is sin” from “Tenderness,” or “What is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?” from “Violence”), the record, and its title track, serve as a clarion call to move and embrace and rage and shake loose the complacency. The record sounds like Parquet Courts, but their collaboration with Danger Mouse pushed their “Sonic Youth by way of Pavement” sound to new heights, yielding such joys as the 70s dance rhythms of “Wide Awake” or the pristine, soaring hopefulness of “Freebird II.” Part political polemic, part personal wound-bearing, each track on Wide Awake!, from its opening screed (the Tom Brady-hating collectivists’ handbook “Total Football”), to its closing track (the drunken bar singalong anthem “Tenderness”) the album is an anathema for alienation, a record that proves more and more valuable as time goes on. We don’t need any more televised killings or a global pandemic to shake ourselves awake. We’ve got all the tools here.
– Joshua Sullivan

KIDS SEE GHOSTS – KIDS SEE GHOSTS

Released June 8, 2018

In a lot of ways, KIDS SEE GHOSTS was the last hurrah of an era. Still years out from Kanye West torpedoing his career down the toilet, the 2018 “Wyoming Sessions” that brought sudden turbo-charged energy to the hip-hop genre with five weekly records from GOOD Music artists, including the legendary Queensbridge MC Nas, and even this group representing the friendship between Kid Cudi and Kanye. I reminisce about this time period fondly.

Cudi and West have a cosmic spirit within them that rises to the surface on each song throughout. They both bring out the best in each other, much like legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino do in the crime thriller Heat. KIDS SEE GHOSTS is only seven songs, clocking in at 23 minutes with 0% body fat. Together, they produce a psychedelic blend of pure, unabashed artistry at its finest. “Reborn” is a spiritual masterpiece of two guys standing at different crossroads in their own lives. West tapped into a realness and heart with his lyrics, but Cudi steals the show, sounding like he’s found the peace that has escaped him for his entire life. The “Keep Moving Forward” lyric could have been a mantra Cudi used during his own dark days. This song is something I listened to almost religiously, and have applied this phrase to my own life to this day. Tough times don’t last forever; there’s always hope on the horizon if we keep moving forward.
– David Williams

Gouge Away – Burnt Sugar

Released September 28, 2018

Gouge Away’s sophomore album, Burnt Sugar, is the sound of drifting bodiless through a life. It is the only album I can listen to when I feel like no matter how much I scream or cry or beg nothing will change, like when I can’t bear to get out of bed in the morning but have to get up because I’m out of sick days at work after I’ve used them all up on the countless depression addled exhausted mornings before this one, like when I’m a ghost, because no other album makes me feel less alone. This album sounds suffocating, like a hand around your neck as Christina Michelle screams of the ways she tries to stay grounded. If you need an album to keep you company, I’d suggest a whiff of Burnt Sugar.
– Lillian Weber

The Happy Children – Same Dif

Released June 18, 2019

Aside from some ambient essentials and recent Beatles reissues, this semi-obscure album (if you didn’t live in Minneapolis in 2018) has filled my headphones more than any other over the past decade. A decade of scrobbling doesn’t lie. The Happy Children were usually a trio, founded in the late 2010s by Caleb Wright and Mitchell Seymour. The group bubbled up with a mix of damaged art rock and the washed-out electronics that Wright would bring to his future production work. Their parting gift was a compulsively listenable, dynamic octet of songs, mapping the beginnings of dozens of paths not taken.

Same Dif remains a small miracle of experimental pop and marvelous weirdo rock about loving your friends, released at the crest of a surging wave of Minneapolis DIY music. For some strange streaming reason, the piano-pop closing track, “Bubblegum,” has 25 times more streams than the banger single with a video. It’s a pinball machine of a record, full of oddly hued lightbulbs, chiming jingles, and generous sound design; refreshing in how baffling it feels for the songs to get stuck in your head for days. The Happy Children ended just in time, precisely when they meant to, with a marvelous swan song.
– aly eleanor

Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains

Released July 19, 2019

David Berman’s Purple Mountains is the authentic account of a man with nothing more to lose. There is a lot of pain found throughout the album with songs like “All My Happiness is Gone” and “Darkness and Cold” providing little to no hope or comfort. Berman’s songwriting on Purple Mountains is vulnerable, unflinching, and blunt—the most straightforward and least obtuse lyrics of his career. There’s little room for interpretation with lines like "the end of all wanting / is all I’ve been wanting" in album opener “That’s Just the Way That I Feel.” Thankfully, Berman’s opus is full of his signature humor and astute observations to balance out the ever-present sadness.

Self-loathing is often met with incredible self-depricating wit: "If no one's fond of fucking me, / maybe no one's fucking fond of me" Berman states on "Maybe I'm the Only One for Me.” Punchlines and comedic scenes regularly couple moments of despair. “I nearly lost my genitalia / to an anthill in Des Moine” is a really funny thing to say shortly after saying “this kind of hurting won’t heal.” This needed comedic relief on the bummer numbers takes a break when Berman pivots toward the mundane. Scenes of snow falling or grief-stricken recollections of his mother are treated sincerely, resulting in perhaps his most serene and beautiful recordings.

The loss of love, God, and spirit permeate Purple Mountains, but penultimate track “Storyline Fever” (a top 5 Berman song, if you ask me) gives us a glimmer of optimism that makes the album worthy of repeat listening: “you got to find a way to make it work / 'cause defeat is where your demons lurk.”
– Russ Finn

Walter Mitty And His Makeshift Orchestra – Puddles of Alligators

Released September 6, 2019

When I was first introduced to Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, I had largely outgrown my hardcore/mall emo phase and was going through my indie fuckboy college era. That said, my frame of reference for “indie” was relatively narrow, mostly guided by whatever my Tumblr feed was currently obsessed with: Mac DeMarco, The 1975, Arctic Monkeys – not necessarily “indie” in the traditional sense, but I took the feed as bond. You can only imagine how my world was changed when I learned of DIY culture through Walter’s music, how everyday people were making art while working jobs or going to school, playing shows at houses and garages, printing shirts in their backyards. I’m blessed to have been introduced to DIY culture with Walter’s music, which I still listen to over a decade later. Puddles of Alligators is a collection of B-sides and loosies, some of which are staples with the Walter heads, while others made their debut with this release (the backyard performance of “Mellow” went platinum on my YouTube, years before this collection dropped). Even in a collection of loosies, Walter’s sharp songwriting and rhythmic guitar shine bright. And knowing that it’s just a bunch of buddies making music together, without a studio or contract forcing them to, makes it nothing short of magical.
– Nickolas Sackett

Charli xcx – how i’m feeling now

Released May 15, 2020

At the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I graduated from college, married my forever wife, and started my first big-boy job, all in the span of four weeks. I was working as a design engineer for a small company in a small Texas town outside of Austin. I was fresh on the scene and eager to please, which meant that once I was able to work from home, I was working all the time. I don’t remember exactly when I first listened to how i’m feeling now, but I do remember the shift that happened to me once I did. Before Charli, my go-to focus music was Frank Ocean’s Blonde and the soundtrack to Prince Avalanche. how i’m feeling now became a companion during the early mornings alone at the office, playing catch-up, and throughout the nights working from home while my wife was on a night shift. Charli’s familiar pop music sensibilities stuck me in the glue trap for the ripping saw-blade production to leave my eyes darting side to side, trying to trace its path. My After Charli Period has been filled with the PC Music universe, a massive amount of Whole Lotta Red, months of hard bop and free jazz, and whatever is playing on NTS Radio. This album is important to me because it marks a shift in my brain – a shift in how I see and value music. What was once a single-sided experience of sound waves hitting me now has the ability to be a two-way street. I realized that someone has to be wriggling around in that glue trap for the songs to really have impact.
– Kirby Kluth

Slaughter Beach, Dog – At the Moonbase

Released December 24, 2020

I’ve always loved the way that training lineage is tracked in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, providing a family tree of student/teacher relationships that directly connect modern practitioners like Mikey Musumeci to Carlos Gracie and the sport’s creation. Although Gracie passed away before Musumeci was born, we can examine this lineage and see how his impact was still felt through osmosis, with the knowledge the old master passed on to his students working its way down the line to those pursuing the sport today. Rock music doesn’t feature this same kind of rigid hierarchy, but I think it’s at its best when you can discern a similar sense of history from it. This is why At the Moonbase is such a special record; it’s the place where Slaughter Beach, Dog’s sound transcends the current moment and connects with the legacy of all the great singer-songwriters who came before it.

There are some more obvious sonic connections here—for example the way the spoken word delivery on tracks like “Do You Understand (What Has Happened to You)” and “Song for Oscar’s” bring to mind the work of Craig Finn—but even beyond that, the storytelling throughout the record calls back to the tradition of artists like Harry Chapin and Jim Croce (not to mention there is literally a song called “Van Morrison”). The album serves as a continuation of a bardic style that for so long has been a bedrock of popular music, doing so with a fresh sound pushed forward by Jake Ewald’s incredible arrangements. “A Modern Lay” is a masterclass in songwriting. “My Girl” does so much with so little. Not one bad song on the record. Thank you Slaughter Beach, Dog.
– Josh Ejnes

Porter Robinson – Nurture

Released April 23, 2021

Sometimes a record comes along at the right place and the right time, setting off a chain reaction that completely shifts how you view music and the world around you. It was the spring of 2021, and the northeast weather was starting to loosen its cold grip. I had just received the first dose of the COVID vaccine, and I began to see some of my friends in person again for the first time in over a year. Coming from someone who listened almost exclusively to heavier music at the time, the soundtrack of my reintroduction to the world came from a sonically unexpected place: a glitch pop album.

I consider Nurture to be a landmark record in my journey not just as a music listener but also as a human being. I found myself moved by Porter’s lyrical articulations of feeling alive for the first time and holding what you love close to your heart amidst a comforting blanket of electronics. It shifted my brain from a sizably individualistic worldview to a more communal mindset, guiding me to fully appreciate and support the people in my life that made me who I am. The record encouraged me to seek out more versions of this glitchy yet exciting style of music, leading me down the road of alternative music and eventually landing me into a more well-rounded musical palette. I feel indebted to this album for making me a better person and giving me the confidence to confront my fears head-on.

TLDR: If you knew me before Nurture, no you didn’t.
– Samuel Leon

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Released August 13, 2021

Even though this prompt was my own damn idea, I had the hardest time whittling down to decide what album was truly my favorite of the last decade. At times, I found myself waffling between Psyhopomp, New Hell, and a slew of emo bullshit (complimentary). Ultimately, I wound up pulling Wednesday’s sweltering third album, Twin Plagues. I’ve written at length about my love for this record as well as this band, and it’s been an affirming thrill to watch this crop of North Carolina artists rise to worldwide indie rock prominence over the last few years. While I have love for everything that came afterwards, Twin Plagues will forever hold a special place in my heart as an album that helped me through a dark time and inspired me to find the strength to pull myself out of it. The true testament is that I can listen to the record today and not be dragged back into those depths. I still get swept up in the shoegaze crush of the opening title track. I still am mesmerized by the seesaw riff in “Handsome Man.” I still think “How Can You Live” is one a goddamn miracle of a song. Much like Sufjan’s Michigan pointed me to Detroit years before, when I found myself moving to North Carolina in 2023, I looked to Twin Plagues as a sort of affirmation that I was heading in the right direction. After two beautiful years in this state, it turns out I wasn’t wrong.
– Taylor Grimes

Alvvays – Blue Rev

Released October 7, 2022

I’ve been listening to power pop and indie rock for longer than I’ve known what either was. R.E.M. was the first band I ever knew the name of, and from that point on, I was raised on a steady diet of ’80s and ’90s alternative courtesy of my Gen X parents. I’d hazard a guess that the masterminds in Alvvays had a similar upbringing because Blue Rev plays like a crash course in the sound of the first twenty years of my life. The guitars alternate between a supercharged fuzz and the vibrant jangle that I fell in love with as a child in the backseat of a beat up Honda Civic. Every synthesizer feels handpicked to evoke a specific memory in my mind. Oh you like shoegaze? Hit play and you’re immediately hit with “Pharmacist.” Maybe you’re a lifelong new waver - that’s okay, “Very Online Guy” and “Velveteen” have you covered. If the R.E.M. shout perked your ears up, crank “After the Earthquake” up to max volume and then wonder why you’re still reading this instead of bouncing off your own walls.

All that would mean dirt though if it weren’t for Molly Rankin’s constant towing the line between wry wit and genuine pathos as both a singer and songwriter. In true power pop tradition, she’s able to wring both a laugh and a tear from her listeners, sometimes even with one twist of a phrase. On Blue Rev, she invokes heroes that range from Tom Verlaine to Belinda Carlisle to weave 14 perfect vignettes of loneliness, longing, and waiting. As someone who was entering their third decade far too used to disappointment, wasting time waiting for life to start, hearing an album I’d been anticipating for almost half a decade knock it out of the park was a near revelation. I’ve changed a lot in the two years since Blue Rev’s release, and my taste with me, but if I ever do reach back, it’s likely with Alvvays: all my favorite records and the boy I was rolled into one 38 minute package that ends with a dare: “Now that you’re around, take another shot.”
– Wes Cochran

Arm’s Length – Never Before Seen, Never Again Found

Released October 28th, 2022

This one grew on me in ways that growth is painful, yet cardinal. Akin to when you’re forced to accept that someone will never be the same as they once were, putting down your suffering dog, the bone-stretching growing pains while lying in your middle school bed at 3 AM. It feels like I’ve ached through a great deal of that sort of growing in recent years, in that same sense: that growth is often painful, yet essential.

What they don’t tell you about entering your mid to late twenties is the heap of emotional weight you suddenly bear as your frontal lobe fully develops, plopping all your demons and skeletons front and center for you to deal with amidst the rest of your shiny new adult responsibilities. Never Before Seen, Never Again Found found me tangled in uncomfortable growth, and even though it’s an emotionally painful listen, it’s completely necessary. The album is vulnerable in every way that I hope to be, airing out tumult with grief, religion, and identity. Arm’s Length crafted an all-timer in this one– a modern day Home, Like No Place Is There– with not a single skippable track in sight. This is the type of album that you put on at your lowest; to go blow-for-blow with your dread. It’s strange that we tend to listen to sad music when we’re sad. Perhaps we need to simmer in the sorrow and wallow in the bad luck before we can rise and ask ourselves, “Is it just my luck?”
– Brandon Cortez

Basque – Pain Without Hope Of Healing

Released March 22, 2024

When compiling a list like this, I am stressed. My favorite albums, even my favorite favorite albums, are often a moving target. Like a sequestered pond hosting a slew of migratory birds, the songs I become most passionate about are subject to climate, to season, to temperature. One flock leaves as soon as June hits 98°, another to arrive when a fall sunset triggers a wistful memory. So even though the last ten years have hosted an almost uncountable number of classic, iconic, and incredible albums, I am beholden to my obsession of the past year; this flight of fancy that has consumed me fully. And perhaps next year I’ll think myself insane for believing it, but the final Basque album is effectively perfect from start to finish. An unreal meditation on the agony of self-loathing, the album's lyrical despondency would feel too much if every performance on it weren’t a pitch-perfect match. With vocals that howl and shriek in perfect tempo, guitars turn on a dime while bouncing and wailing, a bass that hammers like knuckles to plaster, and what has to be one of the greatest drum performances ever put to record in this genre. Pain Without Hope of Healing is easily one of the finest screamo records of the last decade.
– Elias Amini

Swim Into The Stats

Hello, and welcome to the nerdy part after the article where we talk about STATISTICS. Think of this like the scene that plays after the credits–a fun little bonus for the real heads that want to stick around. This is a spiritual successor to something we published at the end of last year called “Swim Into The Stats.” While that article focused almost exclusively on 2024 in review, we are now shifting to look at the entirety of this blog’s run over the last decade. Thanks to Braden Allmond for wrangling all this data and rendering these spiffy charts; it’s a trip to see this website’s history condensed in such a visual way.

First, here are all the articles we've published over the last decade, displayed as a noodlepoint scatter plot with a different color for each year. It’s cool to see this rise (more or less) year after year as I began to take the site more seriously and also feature more contributors. It's also interesting to see my life in the gaps, such as moving across the country in the fall of 2023 or absconding from all responsibility in July 2024.

This git-style plot shows a grey box for every day in the last decade, and a blue box for every day Swim posted. It makes sense that Friday is usually spoken for, given that’s when new music releases and we like to be of the moment whenever possible. You can also see my commitment over the last couple years to not really post anything on the weekends.

Focusing just on 2025 for a bit, it feels like we’re moving at a pretty steady clip. Most of these are reviews, which makes sense, but I like seeing the interviews, features, and roundups strategically scattered throughout.

Examining the number of unique authors in this bar chart is probably the easiest way to illustrate how collaborative this site has become. Sure, it’s still me running this thing, editing and wrangling reviews, but it’s all the beautiful, lovely people above (and throughout our ten years) that have brought a wealth of voices, perspectives, and tastes to the forefront.

Finally, let’s end with some dessert. This delicious pie chart shows a breakdown of total articles by year. It’s wild to see 2024 taking up over a quarter, but other than that (and a slender 2015 and 2016 as we got off the ground), everything else feels pretty evenly split.

Finally…

There ya have it. Ten years of albums from our esteemed Swim Team, some retrospective charts to show off our growth, and a whole lotta gratitude on my part. I’ll just say it again, especially if you made it this far, but thank you for being here. I love music, and running this website is just something that makes sense to my brain. I gotta get this adoration out somewhere, and the fact that anyone reads this regularly, contributes, or cares in any way is a little bit brain-breaking to me.

Whether you’ve been reading for years or are totally new, thank you for being here, and thank you for helping us get here. Here’s to Ten Years of Swim.

March 31, 2025

The Best of Q1 2025

March 31, 2025/ The Swim Team

In 2025, I think it’s become clear to pretty much everyone how nefarious the tech industry is. All the major social media platforms are owned by oligarchs, actively pushing narratives that benefit them, silencing dissent, and forcing users into isolated echo chambers of a uniquely hellish making. AI-generated slop has proliferated every corner of the internet, from braindead comment-generating bots and nonsensical recipe introductions to a snowballing quantity of deadening content designed to keep you scrolling forever and ever. Every move is being tracked, reported on, and sent back to some advertiser who’s going to try to squeeze another couple of pennies out of you for a new-and-improved dish soap tailored specifically to you and your ideals.

In a way, it’s a hell of our own hyper-customized making, but also one we’re utterly helpless to as the current of technology transfers power further and further up. It’s fascinating and frustrating to have watched the internet evolve from this place of wonder and near-limitless potential to an ad-sponsored wasteland where only the rich and the stupid survive.

To that end, I’ve never found it more important to log off and experience the real world. To touch grass and stare at water, to keep my nose in a book and my head on the positives. When I am logged on, I try my best to seek out things made by real people. I’ve found great comfort and camaraderie in newsletters, music, and the carefully considered creations of friends. It’s never been more important to be intentional about the things you interact with. To question the recommendations of the algorithm and ask, ‘Who is this benefiting?’ because, more often than not, you’ll find that it’s something terrible if you follow that chain for long enough.

Jesus, I didn’t mean for this to be such a bummer. This is all a long and slightly dour way for me to say that I see a great deal of worth in genuine recommendations from real people, and that’s exactly what this round-up offers. Part of me dislikes that I instituted a quarterly cadence for recapping our favorite new releases because it makes me sound like a dumb business bro. Stocks were down in Q1. Feeling bullish on alt-country. Sell all your ownership in shoegaze. That’s just not how music works. The title of this article might seem silly, but honestly, it’s just a way for us to make a case for our favorite releases of the year so far in hopes that you find something new to enjoy.

Sure, we’re only a few months into 2025, but the dedicated crew of music geeks that make up the Swim Team have found no shortage of records to love. It’s a fast-moving world, and we want to help you keep up by giving you something new and fresh to obsess over. Every Friday, I find about a dozen new records I want to listen to, and I almost never get to them all, but that ever-elusiveness is part of the game. You find a bunch; you love a few. What follows are 18 recommendations from 18 of our writers. That’s 18 records made by real people that are worth your time and effort and money and love.

Fuck your algorithm, trust your heart. Thanks for being here.

Anxious – Bambi

It feels like whenever I’m writing a Swim Into The Sound “Best Of” entry, it’s for some band on Run For Cover. I'm still not sure if Bambi is my favorite record of the year (the new Cloakroom, Spiritbox, and Art d’Ecco are fantastic), but it's certainly the one I've gone back to the most, thanks to its unique blend of indie-rock and emo inspirations. It's hilarious to listen to this mostly melodic record and think about how, just five years ago, I was watching Anxious open for Knuckle Puck and had to actively avoid stage divers and crowd killers. That's not to say you won't find those in 2025, but with songs like “Some Girls” and my personal favorite, “Jacy,” in a tracklist like this, nestled alongside “Head & Spine,” you get the best of all worlds. This is the sound of a band maturing, and not in a bad way.

– Samuel Leon

Caroline Rose – year of the slug

When I think of Caroline Rose, I picture the cover of LONER, which depicts a vacant-eyed Rose staring off into the middle distance with a mouth crammed full of cigarettes like that one file photo of Homer Simpson. That album was one of the best releases of 2018: a red-washed indie rock release packed with wildly inventive songs, fun music videos, and an excess of personality. I liked 2020’s Superstar a fair bit, but by the time The Art of Forgetting came out in 2023, it felt like something had been lost in the equation.

year of the slug scales things back in the most wondrous way, reminiscent of that free-ranging invention I first fell in love with back in 2018, even though it sounds much different. Self-recorded entirely through Garageband on their phone, most of these songs are sparse and simple, featuring only guitar, vocals, and Rose’s uncanny knack for uncovering a melody. There’s some ornamentation: the occasional multi-tracked vocal, drum loop, or piano dirge, but in comparison to Rose’s previous albums, everything is paired back in a way that’s striking and remarkably catchy.

When announcing the album, Caroline Rose posted something of a mission statement, outlining their desire to live life more slug-like. Through these constraints: self-recording, self-releasing, avoiding streaming services, exclusively touring independent venues, and pairing things back to the absolute bare minimum, Rose has created an immaculate and inspirational collection of songs that stand on their own as a testament to pure, artistic creativity. Thank you, Uncle Carol.

– Taylor Grimes

Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table

When our editor put out the call for Swim’s Q1 roundup, I ran to claim Cloakroom’s Last Leg of the Human Table as fast as my fingers could type. This moving, variegated album has had me and my colleagues buzzing since its release – its vast emotional depth and intensely satisfying density have proven that Cloakroom just keeps getting better. The opening track, “The Pilot,” is a soaring and spacey anthem that I unabashedly claim as my favorite off of the album. Heavy without being overwhelming or cluttered, I’m calling it now as the song of the summer. Though Last Leg of the Human Table stays true to the band’s shoegaze-y, self-described “stoner emo” sound, the album also proves Cloakroom’s range with the thoughtfully strummed “Bad Larry” and the wistful interlude “On Joy and Undeserving.” When I need a hit of pure dopamine, I’ll be cranking Cloakroom at max volume with the windows down.

– Britta Joseph

Coheed and Cambria – The Father of Make Believe

When it’s a Coheed and Cambria release year, I tend to make the joke that no other album stands a chance. This is mostly because Coheed has been my favorite band for well over the last decade, and that’s just the expectation at this point, but there is always the fear in the back of my mind that this will be the album of theirs that doesn’t resonate for me. Fortunately, this is not the case with the band’s (somehow) eleventh studio album and the third act of the Vaxis saga, in which Coheed comes back stronger than ever, delivering possibly my favorite of the three. The hints were all there, but realizing this was secretly a third Afterman record not only satisfied the part of me that loves referential themes but produced some of my new favorite Coheed experiences like this album’s acoustic slow burn “Corner My Confidence.” The Father of Make Believe reminds me exactly what I adore about this band, specifically in bringing back their epic, album-ending suites, as well as continuing to lock in their tried and true formulas, arresting rhythm section, and grandiose, operatic sequencing. Despite alluding to the eventual ending of the band in their new pop ballad “Goodbye, Sunshine,” I truly hope Coheed continues to produce these kickass, sci-fi epics for as long as possible.

– Ciara Rhiannon

Denison Witmer – Anything At All

I really hope Denison Witmer finally gets his flowers. Witmer’s been making thoughtful and contemplative folk songs for almost 30 years, and I’ve been a fan for almost 20. I saw him play the student center at my Christian college in the year of our Lord 2005; he played simple solo folk songs about sleeping, dreaming, and longing, and I was never the same.

Anything At All was recorded and produced by Witmer’s longtime friend and collaborator, Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan is only credited as a featured artist on two of the ten songs, but his voice and musical fingerprints are everywhere. Witmer’s writing seems to focus mostly on the intersection of the mundane and the divine: trying to be a good dad and husband, working in the garden, planting trees, dealing with self-doubt, questioning what sort of life we’re living and what sort of legacy we’re leaving, reconciling the smallness and the existential largeness of middle-aged domestic life. Maybe it’s the fact that I turn 40 this year, but honestly, these are the sort of songs my soul longs for. It’s good shit! If you like Anything At All, check out 2020’s American Foursquare and 2005’s Are You A Dreamer?

– Ben Sooy

Fust – Big Ugly

In a world full of new artists that you NEED to know about, the simple solution to the glut is to look to North Carolinian photographer and musician Charlie Boss, who seems to be best friends with some of the most important musicians of our day. Charlie’s work introduced me to the Durham, NC band Fust, and for that, I am forever thankful.

I only moved to the South three years ago, but gah-lee, if Fust’s Big Ugly don't make me feel like I was born with a Mountain Dew in each hand. Aaron Dowdy’s writing about the South spoke to a newcomer like me in ways that caught me off guard. Big Ugly guides me down through kudzu-covered hollers and helps to remind me just how beautiful it is down here. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about “Spangled,” the lead single and lead track of the album, which takes you soaring down dotted highway lines and over dilapidated buildings, all while the structure of the song itself steadily turns into an Appalachian free association. Big Ugly goes on to oscillate between Springsteen-style power ballads and sharp songs of yearning. It is an album of beauty, humor, and truth-telling. If I could have any superpower, it might be to have whatever Fust band leader Aaron Dowdy has. It might just be better than flying.

– Kirby Kluth

Jaye Jayle – After Alter

Evan Patterson is already underway ruling my first quarter listens in 2025, most recently with Power Sucker, the new Young Widows album and the band’s first in eleven years. On top of that, there’s After Alter, the latest offering from his solo project Jaye Jayle, which kicked off the year with a thunderous punch back in January. It’s a heavy and dynamic release that continues Patterson’s tradition of recontextualizing sludge metal into the singer/songwriter realm, channeling the more intimate moments of artists like Nick Cave, Neurosis, and Swans. The rhythmic drones of tracks like “Father Fiction” and “Doctor Green” are emotional and entrancing, dark ballads for doomful druids. After Alter’s final moments are introduced with a seven-minute rendition of The Beatles’ “Help!” done in a way only Jaye Jayle can do and doesn’t sound out of place with the rest of the record at all. It’s one of Patterson’s finest works to date in an already prolific catalog worth celebrating.

– Logan Archer Mounts

Men I Trust – Equus Asinus

I think a lot about how Christopher Nolan had Clémence Poésy, who appears in one sequence of Tenet to “explain” the time-bending mechanisms of the sci-fi spy masterpiece, tell the Protagonist and audience: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” Tenet is a vibes movie, one to ride with and luxuriate in, one to let the craft wash over you and feel it rip you away.

Men I Trust’s albums are vibes records. They lure you in with sultry, lounging grooves, but on Equus Asinus, the songs are full of aching. Aching to feel like you did before, aching to return. These aren’t the sweet dreams that earned dream-pop its genre tag; these are the dreams of Twin Peaks. So close to being reality, but with one glaring, off-kilter element that knocks you off balance. It’s in the warm creak of the piano on the closer, “What Matters Most.” In “All My Candles” questions of what our time even amounts to. In the mud, we come with and come from. In the melodramatic instrumental on “Paul’s Theme,” which would fit perfectly over Shinji psychically breaking in the back half of Neon Genesis Evangelion. One set of lyrics repeatedly asks in French: “Little man, what do you want?”

You feel it too, don’t you?

– Lillian Weber

Midcard – Sick

Growing up in a no-stoplight town in Montana, my world was saturated with the podunk culture of rural life in the American West, so I denounced country music on principle, opting for my version of things that felt rebellious (pop-punk, metalcore, screamo, etc.). It’s only been in the past several years that I’ve had a redemptive journey with twangy music by way of country-tinged emo rock, and Midcard from Austin, TX, is one of my favorite bands doing it. I’ve been a fan since “BMI” made me cry real tears in 2023, and this new EP is my favorite thing they’ve done. The southernness is apparent, but there’s not even a hint of affectation in these indie punk songs that land somewhere between the last couple Hotelier records, early Manchester Orchestra, and 90’s alt-rock in the vein of Everclear. What hits especially hard for me are the lyrics, tender and pissed off in equal measure, often flirting with cynicism, with plenty of wit and passion to cut the acid. There are gang vocals, tappy emo riffs, dudes yelling, “Woo!” before guitar solos, panic chords, an all-time great diss about “very publicly misunderstand[ing] The Catcher in the Rye,” and none of it feels anything less than earnest. Rock music.

– Nick Webber

Oldstar – Of the Highway

Back in February, Oldstar’s Zane McLaughlin posted on the band’s blog about recording Of the Highway and said, “Oldstar went Hi-Fi, is what the critics will say, all three of them.” Well, I’m a critic, and I am here to say they went Hi-Fi, and it’s fantastic.

Even with a full band, a new home in New York City, and a real-deal recording studio, the melancholia of Florida’s Oldstar still weaves through the album. The band deals in lyrical storytelling, with McLaughlin recalling conversations or tall tales, all over songs that lean into a country twang (“Wake Me”), alt-rock fuzz (“Nail”), or blend both seamlessly (“Alabama”). Oldstar is a band that I wanted to make a huge album, and I am so happy they did. It’s getting warm again, so go find a chair outside, crack a beer, watch the sunset, and listen to this.

– Caro Alt

Pink Must – Pink Must

Pink Must, the collaboration between Mario Rubio, aka more eaze, and Lynn Avery, two of the most delightfully eclectic musicians in American experimental music, is straightforward. Well, in a way. What started as a process of sending demos back and forth, trying to make a grunge album, eventually clicked into place once both relocated to New York City. Two specialists in pulled-and-stretched compositions united to craft an album of AutoTuned alt-rock songs. What sets Pink Must apart from potential pastiche is total commitment and earnestness. Exploratory tendencies aren’t sanded down; they are poured into the space permeating these songs, surrounding warbled poetry, guitar riffs, and mirage-like full band grooves (everything was recorded and performed by Rubio and Avery). Six-minute lead single “Himbo” unfolds into ambiance and guitar strums, only slightly hinting at its creators’ oeuvres. Pink Must is one of the year’s best rock albums, inverting tropes, sounds, and expectations and making something special, making something unique.

– Aly Eleanor

Pyre – This Is How We Lose Fullness

I, like many of us, have been waiting for the album of 2025 that feels like it will help me soundtrack all this absurdity. Cloakroom certainly has done a great job, but when I finished my first listen of This Is How We Lose Fullness, a very frantic energy that had been pinging around my bones and muscle finally seemed to have dissipated through and out of me like Hawking radiation, but for bad vibes. Pyre’s potent blend of screamo, hardcore, and emo mechanics create an invisible latticework of gyres and pulleys, riffs seizing guitars, vocals drawn to bass thrums, drums propelling gang vocals like a moonshot. Force as we know it and (barely) understand it exists in This Is How We Lose Fullness; its inexorable pull, push, and grasp all feel so physically present that you’d think the album was actually shaking you. From the vile clarion call of the album opener to its final quieting death rattle, Pyre have nailed the feeling of our current doomscrolling existence while you urgently battle your growing need to claw at your face from the madness of it all. But hey, you know what they say: A body for the pyre, pile it on and get on with it.

– Elias Amini

Rose Gray – Louder, Please

This one’s for all my fellow pop princesses out there. My brats, my partygirls, my club rats. Lovers of all things Charli XCX and Tove Lo.

Rose Gray’s Louder, Please honestly had me at the album cover – something about the harsh lighting, the face-melting scream on Gray’s face, the beach, the red hair. She charmed me even before the first song. I was then pleasantly surprised to see that the image on the cover completely matched the vibes of the music upon hearing the thumping club banger opener “Damn.” The East Londoner (and Harris Dickinson’s long-term girlfriend? Okay queen, go off) channeled her underground rave roots throughout her sophomore album, mixing EDM and dance-pop with anthemic hooks to create a record that feels like one big, whirlwind night out. B-side sleeper “Everything Changes (But I Won’t)” is already primed to be my top song of the year. Gray’s vocals are the perfect mix of detached and all-consuming, making her songs that much more enticing. And she was certainly citing her sources: songwriting credits include the guitarist for Cobra Starship, Ryland Blackinton, on “Angel of Satisfaction” and synth-pop “Pop the Glock” queen Uffie on “Just Two.” The season change makes this the perfect album to add to your hot summer rooftop pregame playlist.

– Cassidy Sollazzo

Saba and No I.D. – From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.

I’ve listened to many great albums this year, but none had me running it back over and over and over again like this one; I probably listened through the full thing about six times the day that it dropped. When people talk about No I.D. these days, a lot of focus is put on the way he’s mentored and influenced other artists, and though that is a huge part of his legacy, I feel like more needs to be said about the fact that he’s still one of the best producers in the game. The beats on this record wrap themselves around you; you can live in them, and they stand up alongside almost anything else in his impressive body of work. Pair that up with Saba, one of Chicago’s greatest storytellers, laying down some of his best verses since Care for Me, and the result is just a beautiful record. The features are all great too, particularly MFnMelo on “Westside Bound Pt. 4,” an absolute gem of a track. I know that I mostly write about emo music, and the people reading this are probably primarily emo listeners, but even if rap isn’t something you listen to regularly, I’d implore you to check this one out (that goes double if you’re from or live in Chicago). Anytime two titans like this link up, it’s a blessing, and though it’s still early, it’s tough for me to imagine anything else coming this year that can top this one. So happy that we have this.

– Josh Ejnes

Tobacco City – Horses

Chicago’s Tobacco City is alt-country in look alone, with mustaches, rattails, and arms full of tattoos, but when the music starts, they deliver pure Conway and Loretta. They are as swingin’-doors a saloon band as Merle Haggard’s Strangers. There’s nothing really “alt” about it; their country sound is authentic and captivating, and their melodies and instrumentation are as unique as they are antique. Horses, their second LP, is more distilled country than their first, and the band has built on that original sound. The songs are airtight, and the lyrics are true 21st-century Americana—strip malls, late-night diners, and struggle. The heroes of the album, without question, are the dual harmonies of bandleader Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard, as well as the pedal steel stylings of Andy “Red” PK. Coleslaw has a classically deadpan-style country voice, like Waylon Jennings or Jay Farrar. Goddard’s heavenly voice laces and loops around like Emmylou Harris or Miranda Lambert. When their voices meet in harmony, they reach a truly ethereal plane. Red lays down pedal steel somewhere between Jerry Garcia on Workingman’s Dead and Lloyd Maines on Anodyne—and he joins Wednesday’s Xandy Chelmis as a titan of the Pedal Steel Moment.

– Caleb Doyle

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

The best export to come out of Wales since Gareth Bale, jangle pop quartet The Tubs have created an album that has already made a permanent home in my rotation for 2025 and further. The songs are packed to the brim with energetic, uptempo guitar strokes to circumvent the melancholy, glum lyrics of vocalist Owen Williams. Williams’ deep, love-scorned voice is a soothing siren that comforts you while he spills his guts out about lost relationships and the tragic, untimely death of his mother. Cotton Crown is a fascinating case study in successfully masking the deeply personal lyrics of Williams that oftentimes venture into darkness with a bright, sunny disposition of music. “Narcissist” and “Strange” will have you feeling like Otto Rocket while surfing on nonstop waves of jangle pop guitar strings. Cotton Crown doesn’t possess a dull moment in its brief twenty-nine-minute runtime. The Tubs have the energy of a spiked Celsius drink with the passion of a grief-stricken poet, making this an instant favorite of mine.

– David Williams

wakelee – Doghouse

Brooklyn indie-emo trio wakelee appeared to me in a particularly ferocious doomscrolling session on TikTok. The band’s video snuck in a substantial three seconds of screentime before I swiped up to feed my ever-insatiable brain rot. However, in those three seconds, the unit introduced some of my favorite music of the year thus far. Doghouse, released on February 7th, is the band at their most confident and commanding.

Ironically, the song that piqued my interest during that fateful doomscrolling bout was track one, “mildlyinteresting.” Starting inquisitively with a hazy arpeggio, the jarring, fat guitar chords kick in before the captivating opening verse strikes. The track explicates vocalist/guitarist Alex Bulmer’s (and clearly my) noxious dependence on being online. The song will not only have you returning for an ungodly amount of repeat listens but also dwelling on all the times you shut the blinds and sought strangers’ advice on Quora.

Equally as catchy but largely less upbeat is the ensuing track, “Bangkok.” Following the same arpeggiated intro as the initial track, it’s here that wakelee takes a much more reclusive and introspective route. Driven by melancholic vocals and guitar melodies, the track paints pictures of leaving relationships with wounds. Hemorrhaging and haunting, Bulmer musters, “It’s not fair, I wish that you could be here.” The rest of the EP is just as fantastic – from more delicate, pensive tracks like “Doghouse” to the alt-rock-dunked anthem, “Gary’s Outcome.” Combining aspects of acts like Remo Drive, Pinegrove, and oso oso, wakelee’s Doghouse is required listening in 2025.

– Brandon Cortez

YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds

It’s rare to find a new release that genuinely opens your mind, expanding possibilities of what’s viable within a genre, but YHWH Nailgun do just that on 45 Pounds. Between Sam Pickard’s frantic drumming and Zach Borzone’s delivery that falls in a liminal space between whimpers, grunts, and screams, the rest of the band is left to inject whatever jagged pieces of melody they can. The result is 20 minutes of some of the strangest punk music I’ve heard in my life. Guitars and synthesized noise echo in response to each hollow drum fill, like sheet metal crumpling in response to the hits of a hammer. The individual components sound mechanical, but together, they twitch in ways that feel disturbingly lifelike. As Borzone sputters out seemingly every fear, delusion, or revelation that crosses his mind, a soul makes itself known. Is it pretty? Almost never. Do I dare look away? Not on your life.

– Wes Cochran

February 14, 2025

Heart Sweats: A Swim Into The Sound Valentine’s Day Mixtape

February 14, 2025/ The Swim Team

Rip open that box of chocolates, pour that red wine, and grab some chalky heart-shaped candies, ‘cause we’ve got a lovey-dovey Valentine’s Day roundup for all you hopeless romantics out there. In celebration of the most amorous holiday, we asked the Swim Team about their most memorable music moment tied to their love life–it could be something that made their heart melt, something that made them cringe with embarrassment, or a song that played during a confession of love that they’ll never forget. Regardless, we wanted to hear about those moments when the music stuck an irreversible chord with their heart.

Here’s a playlist of each song as a little Valentine’s Day mixtape from The Swim Team to you. I strongly encourage you to listen along as you read and enjoy the happy-accident tonal whiplash in the sequencing. We hope you have a love-filled Valentine’s Day, please have an extra chocolate-covered strawberry in our honor ❤️

Death Cab for Cutie – “Passenger Seat”

The road from Southern Illinois University to Missouri Baptist University is about 40 minutes. Maybe 35 when you speed down the highways in your Ford Focus. It was a route I became deeply familiar with in 2008. My now-husband was studying to be an engineer, and I was getting a communications degree I had no clue what to do with. We’d spend hours together watching stupid comedies in his dorm room before I would sneak out to try to make it back before the 10 PM Baptist curfew. I spent those autumn trips diving into albums, but the one I always came back to was Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism. I would queue up the title track as I started the drive, but I always slowed my car down the second it turned to “Passenger Seat.” As if obeying the song, I would roll the windows down and watch the deer of the campus fields look up at my headlights before returning to their indifferent grazing. The smell of crisp autumn leaves and bummed American Spirits would flood my car as I made my way through the empty streets. Then, once the song was over, I would hit repeat.

Death Cab would come to play a big part in those early months of our relationship. He even asked me out with a ticket to their Narrow Stairs show, and if he judged me for crying throughout the set, he never showed it. This year will mark our 14th year of marriage, and with that comes 14 years of changes, most of which are good. We’re wildly different people than we were our freshman year in college. Yet the second I hear those opening piano keys, I’m back on the road in my busted Focus, smiling as the leaves fall down around the deer of the field.

– Lindsay Fickas

Less Than Jake – “The Rest of My Life”

When I was in middle school, I had a big crush on one of my neighbors. We’d hang out a lot, but things never really took a romantic turn. Whenever anything happened that reinforced the fact that we’d likely never be a couple—be it her getting a new boyfriend or saying that she wasn’t interested in hanging on a particular day—I’d go into my room and blast this song on loop while fantasizing about moving to a different neighborhood where there was a neighbor who loved me back. I would never have admitted this back then—both because it’s very pathetic and because my appreciation of “The Rest of My Life” ran counter to my stance that Less Than Jake were traitors for abandoning ska to make milquetoast pop-punk—but now I’m ready to tell the truth. Also, for the record, I don’t think I ever actually believed what I was saying about Less Than Jake being traitors for their stylistic shifts; it’s just the sort of thing that’s fun to say when you’re 13 (though I was hyped when GNV FLA came out and they brought the horns back).

– Josh Ejnes

Talking Heads – “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”

In the summer of 2014, I lived in Richmond, Virginia. My wife and I had been married for almost 3 years, and we had just moved away from Denver in order to reinvent our lives in a new city. We lived in Richmond’s Church Hill neighborhood, and I was making 26 thousand dollars a year working for a non-profit. We had no money, no friends (because we were in a new city), and no real idea about the future and what shape it would take. Spotify had recently gotten a real hold on me, and I was rediscovering my love of making playlists. One playlist I made that summer was just 60 minutes of different covers of “This Must Be The Place.” I remember us dancing around our small apartment, trying desperately to figure out how to execute the logistics of “sing into my mouth.” I don’t know, man. Every year with Kate, I think I understand that song more and work to be in love that way even more deeply. Will you love me till my heart stops? Love me till I’m dead. Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank spots, hit me on the head.

– Ben Sooy

Ezra Furman – “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend”

Perhaps it’s a bit obvious to use this song to ask out a girl, but I’ve never been one to catch subtlety, so when I got a message from my future wife with this song in it, I, of course, still had to be sure she was saying what I thought she was. Unfamiliar with Ezra Furman, a transgender woman making punk that falls between Laura Jane Grace and PUP, I quickly looked up the lyrics to the song. After all, you don’t want to accidentally miss that the third verse could be sarcastic and mean the opposite of what it appears on its face. Thankfully, I found no such thing and quickly said yes as I read the lyrics, “That’s right, little old me, I want to be your girlfriend and blow your mind each night when you come home.” Subtle, it was not. Having gotten caught up in the energy of the moment, I didn’t actually listen to the song and wouldn’t for weeks. Less than a year later, I married the girl. I’m happy to call myself a fan of Ezra Furman’s now, with this song being particularly heartwarming as a moment I can share with my wife every time it comes up on a playlist or album listen.

– Noëlle Midnight

Car Seat Headrest – “Beach-Life-In-Death” Live at the Royale in Boston

On this day in 2019, I was staring at Will Toledo.

In the second semester of my sophomore year of college, I was fresh off a breakup when my friend threw out that we should see Car Seat Headrest when they came through Boston. It was an immediate ‘yes’ for three reasons: I love my friend and would do whatever with them, Car Seat Headrest was the most important band to me in college, and I needed to hear “Beach-Life-In-Death” live. The show was on Valentine’s Day. I don’t remember much of the show, honestly. I remember the opener sucked, I remember a crowd surfer dropping directly into my friend’s arms, and I remember piles of college kids smoking Golds outside. But what I remember most fondly is waiting for “Beach-Life-In-Death.” I think it’s still my favorite song, but back then, it felt so big and so meaningful (it still does, so I guess that’s why it’s still my favorite). Which brings me back to the beginning of this. On this day in 2019, I was staring at Will Toledo, washed in a pink glow, with my friend, screaming the lyrics to my favorite song together. Love is so beautiful.

– Caro Alt

Sufjan Stevens – “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!”

For someone who has largely built their life around music, I can’t make a playlist to save my life. I rarely listen to songs outside the context of albums, and if someone passes me the aux cable, Lord have mercy on the hapless souls trapped in the car with me: the vibes will be chaotic. If I were a wedding DJ, I’d have people bolting for the fire exits.

My wife Ellie learned this the summer of our first year dating. I flew out to visit her at her family’s place in Minnesota, and we decided to take a day trip to Duluth. We set out before sunrise, and since she was driving, she tasked me with music duties, requesting “peaceful early morning vibes,” which started out okay! Indie folk à la Gregory Alan Isakov, Iron & Wine, The Head and the Heart, First Aid Kit, coffee shop core (non-derogatory). And then I queued up a little ditty from Illinois by Sufjan Stevens: “Decatur, Or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!” In my mind, this was a perfect song for a Midwest road trip, but Ellie burst out laughing as soon as she heard that perky banjo and accordion cutting through the predawn tranquility. It’s an obvious misstep in retrospect, as we went from sweet whispery love songs to goofy rhymes about chickenmobiles and making amends with your stepmom. In any case, the vibes were totally off the rails from there; I unearthed our collaborative playlist on Spotify, and somehow, we ended up at “Guilty Cubicles,” a moody post-rock instrumental from Broken Social Scene’s debut.

This began a tradition of sabotaging drives by dropping “Decatur” in the middle of completely incompatible queues (it’s sort of my version of Rickrolling, specifically for my wife). Eight years later, it’s a sweet way to remember one of my favorite days with Ellie, just driving up the North Shore, sharing our favorite songs, and stopping at every lighthouse we could find.

– Nick Webber

Insane Clown Posse – “The Nedan Game”

TikTok has transformed my girlfriend into a Juggalette, which means she has pushed all her chips in on the court jesters of horrorcore, the Insane Clown Posse. How did this happen, you say? The culprit lies in the freshly painted face that goes by the username @carissadid. Carissa is a sight to behold as she metamorphosizes from human into clown while rapping seamlessly to a different ICP song in each video. I’m afraid a spell has been cast abound my girlfriend, as she has watched far too many of her posts and is past saving at this point. I fear one day I may be ambushed in my sleep with Violent J’s face paint on me or, even worse, Shaggy 2 Dope’s.

“The Neden Game,” which is my girlfriend’s favorite ICP song, is a crude humor spoof of the show The Dating Game. The track plays over in my head repeatedly like I’m trapped in some kind of vulgar clown P.O.W. camp that would have had Bozo turn in his red nose and oversized shoes. The song sounds like it would play at frat parties in between keg stands for degenerates. If you see me at this year's Gathering of the Juggalos festival, I have been held against my will in a Liam Neeson Taken-type situation. If this happens, please, someone call the F.B.I.

– David Williams

The Sidekicks – “A Short Dance” + “Don’t Feel Like Dancing”

For a relationship that’s more or less founded on a shared love of music, I find it odd that my girlfriend and I don’t have “a song.” There is no single piece of music that we can point to as “ours,” on the contrary, it’s more like we have the opposite problem: there have been far too many songs that feel like connective tissue throughout our three years together. I suppose when faced with hundreds of possible songs, dozens of back-and-forth playlists, and a seemingly unending spool of bands we’ve bonded over, it becomes hard to pare it down to just one entry.

Thus, this is but one pit stop in a densely populated field: the one-two punch of “A Short Dance” and “Don’t Feel Like Dancing” by The Sidekicks. Starting with the 48-second prelude, “A Short Dance,” is how so many relationships start: trepidatious and unsure–a nervous and unshakable energy as you psych yourself up for the big moment. You can imagine all the possible futures just as quickly as you can picture the stinging rejection. Either way, you find the courage to accept your fate and approach this person, ready for any outcome.

In comes “Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” a joyous explosion of love and adoration. Over sun-splotched major chords, Steve Ciolek explains how nothing in life (not dancing, not flowers, not even ridiculing dudes!) is as sweet as when you’re experiencing them with your person. Avoid the pit of nostalgia! Sip that mimosa! Fucking boogie! You can make excuses all you want; you’re gonna get pulled onto the dance floor no matter what.

– Taylor Grimes

Pup Punk – “My Real Girlfriend”

The first thing my now-partner ever said to me was, “Hey, nice shirt!” The second thing she ever said to me was a suicide pass. Pointing at her sister, she said, “Do you think we’re twins?” I correctly answered, “No?” and it’s been a love story ever since.

In the first 18 months of knowing her, we had 20 in-person days together. We met while I was briefly in Minnesota for a conference, but otherwise, I was studying abroad in France. We hit it off immediately, sending each other a playlist less than 24 hours after meeting (mine to her, hers to me) and dooming ourselves to a year and a half of extra-long distance FaceTime calls.

Nowadays, we’re much closer—just a short 8-hour drive away or 4 hours of airport and plane time! While we were on different continents, telling our friends about each other felt very much like this song: “She’s a model, you don’t know her // She lives in Minnesota where it’s colder // I’m in love and you’re not // My real girlfriend’s really hot.” The catch is she is really real—I swear! We have pictures together!

I look back on that time when we were so far apart and wonder how we ever did it. Ultimately, what made it possible, and what makes our relationship so strong, is complementary knowledge of pop-punk and emo music. That, and a strong foundation of mutual respect and shared love for all forms of music and humor or whatever.

– Braden Allmond

David Gray – “Please Forgive Me”

“We don’t have A Song, do we??” I had to text Emily.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think we do??? I’m ashamed..” she replied.

Surprising, and ironic, because so much of what we love about each other started with our taste in music. Hers isn’t exactly like mine, nor vice versa. But we love many of the same things, and we’ve opened each others’ worlds to new and different music. I now know about Modest Mouse’s deeper cuts, and she now knows whether ’91 or ’84 was a better year for the Grateful Dead (it’s ’91).

It’s a new relationship, though moving very quickly (we’ll be roommates in May!), and it has been built on vulnerability and honesty. Communication has been the number one factor in the initial success and comfort of our relationship. For two people who haven’t had the most luck in the past, this feels like our first adult relationship. We both feel totally at peace and have the liberty to speak our minds and lay bare our vulnerabilities.

“I will ALWAYS think of you sending me ‘Please Forgive Me’ by David Gray but idk if it’s *our* song. Just one of the first moments I remember being like oh shit, I’m so cooked,” she said.

“Please Forgive Me” is a song about falling deeply in love with someone fast and having to ask their forgiveness because you’re acting like an absolute freak. And that’s just perfect for us.

“Feels like lightning running through my veins / every time I look at you.”

– Caleb Doyle

Alanis Morissette – “You Oughta Know”

There are pros and cons to every romantic entanglement. With this one in particular, the pros were that he had fantastic music taste and was very funny, while the cons were that he refused to sing karaoke and was cheating on me. While we were together, he was in a Jagged Little Pill phase, and for a few weeks, we’d blast it every time we drove in his car. He, karaoke-averse, was always taunting me, a karaoke devotee, with a potential pick—“Okay, I think I’d actually do this one”—and “You Oughta Know” was his latest false promise. “I’d go up to a guy with a girl and sing ‘and are you thinking of me when you f— her” in his face as a bit,” he’d joke, flipping his hair.

Well, you mess with the cat, you get the claws, I think to myself in the karaoke bar a few months ago in Brooklyn, stepping up to finally lay his alleged pick in its grave. “And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back, I hope you feel it,” I yelp to the room full of starry-eyed lesbians. Karaoke’s supposed to be light, and perhaps a little too much real rage seeped into my performance, but I think Alanis would understand. I hope he can’t hear her without feeling like shit, and I hope he’s thinking of me when….nvm.

– Katie Hayes

Antarctigo Vespucci– “Impossible to Place”

My relationship with Claire is full of false starts. We kept matching on Tinder for years as I reset my account, and finally went on two good dates at the start of our junior year in film school, which resulted in me ghosting her and dating another girl for a month.

Right after ending that interim relationship, I was out to dinner with my friends and scrolled on Instagram to see a photo of Claire. My spirit floated at the sight of her gentle smile, her beautiful black hair, and those sparkling eyes behind her tortoiseshell glasses, and I knew I wanted to rest my head against her leg forever. Two days later, we were on a kinda-first-kinda-third date for coffee. She viewed it as a revenge date, a chance to rub it in my face that she’d gotten picked for our film school's elite Spring Break trip to LA, but it ended with us cuddled up on my twin-size bed, showing her Star Wars for the first time. On the way from coffee, we stopped in my apartment's mailroom to pick up my copy of Love in the Time of Email, Antarctigo Vespucci’s sophomore record. As we watched Star Wars, I murmured the chorus of Antarctigo Vespucci LP1 highlight, “Impossible to Place,” Chris Farren’s soft plea to his wife to “stay, stay around me / for the evening.” Claire asked what I was singing, and so, for the first of hundreds of times, we listened to the song together.

If you asked me what I feel for Claire, I would sputter and stammer that she’s my best friend, that she’s the person who makes me laugh the most, and that she has a mind I adore. But none of those words really captures the feeling.

When she left the morning after our first/third date, I posted a Snapchat story of me holding up Love in the Time of Email with the caption, “If she doesn’t make you feel like an Antarctigo Vespucci song, she isn’t the one.” When Claire asked if that was about her, I lied and said it was a general statement. But the truth is that “Impossible to Place,” with those layers of angelic vocals on the bridge, Jeff Rosenstock’s lackadaisical chiming guitar riff, and the longing in Chris Farren’s voice, is the only place I’ve been able to pin down the pure essence of what feels like to love Claire.

– Lillian Weber

KISS – “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”

I have talked about KISS way too many times for an indie/emo-leaning blog, and I thank Taylor for letting me get in my zone once again here. It is the biggest cultural phenomenon that I am the most in love with, so it finds its way into all aspects of my life, including the romantic ones. But I won’t be talking about “Bang Bang You,” “Take It Off,” or “Let’s Put The X In Sex.” The story goes that Paul Stanley wrote “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” and brought it to Gene Simmons, with Stanley singing the dark and sensual verses and sticking Simmons with the “do do do do do do do do do” chorus backing vocals. It’s a divisive song among the KISS Army; some fans love and embrace it, as it was a number-one charting hit in multiple countries (but only as high as 50 in the States). Some fans disown its disco flavor, the Dynasty album it came from, and nearly everything that followed for the next 40 years. It was teased in the fantastic Detroit Rock City film, released in 1999 and taking place in 1978, where a character named Christine, played by Natasha Lyonne, notes, “[It’s] so big right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if KISS made a fuckin’ disco song.”

I saw KISS for the first time in 2017 and took my then nine-months girlfriend, despite her previous disdain for the band due to an annoying Ace Frehley obsessive from her high school. From one night, she was a convert, if maybe initially just being considerate to my obsession. And she’s done just that for the last eight years, standing by my side through every phase and fixation, listening to my diatribes about how Gene tried to reunite The Beatles on his 1978 solo album, and how Paul was clearly lipsynching on the End Of The Road tour, but I suppose it’s better than him sounding like shit. I saw KISS six more times on that tour between 2019 and 2023, and she patiently accompanied me to half of them. We spent my 27th birthday in Las Vegas at the KISSWorld exhibit and mini golf course at the Rio Hotel & Casino. Truly, we’ve shared so many bands, songs, and musical moments in our relationship that it feels unfair to focus on only my dumb one. Music is the foundation that brought us together in the first place, from a year of Tumblr DMs about Hostage Calm and Japandroids to finally meeting at Riot Fest 2016. But she’s my Dr. Love, she’s hotter than Hell, and she’s my rock and my roll, all nite, all the way. I was made for lovin’ her. Do do do do do do do do do.

– Logan Archer Mounts

Amber Run – “I Found”

“Do you like him?”

My best friend Kris and I were sitting in my grad school apartment, cross-legged on my bed. She had just asked me the above question, and I, though embarrassed, admitted that I did, in fact, have feelings for the boy in question. I mean, Kris didn’t even need to ask; it was more that I just needed to admit to my crush aloud. (Everybody could tell. It was really, really obvious.)

A few weeks later, I handed my crush a letter scribbled on notebook paper. I was way too nervous to try to confess out loud, so I let this missive do the talking for me. You can imagine the beaming joy that washed over me when he admitted his mutual feelings. We were already close friends, but neither of us had ever talked about the obvious chemistry and bond that we had.

After that day, we would spend hours together in a rickety car (borrowed from a generous friend), driving through the Florida dunes at night. We talked about anything and everything and would hit the Whataburger drive-thru for fries and malts afterward. It was a glorious and happy season. On those drives, we would take turns picking music to listen to, and one of my favorites was the gorgeous and moving “I Found” by Amber Run. The lyrics describe finding love “where it wasn’t supposed to be / Right in front of me.” It fits our relationship so perfectly, and I still smile whenever I put it on. My favorite version of this song is their Mahogany Session, which features the London Contemporary Voices. It’s recorded a cappella in a cathedral, and the melancholy beauty of this song is captured so perfectly.

We found love right in front of us and kept it - this May marks our seventh year of marriage.

– Britta Joseph

The Beatles – “I Will”

Forgive me for writing more about the Beatles in the year of our Lord Paul twenty twenty-five. The world may be exhausted from ceaselessly hearing about how good these four fuckers were as a band, but fortunately for my last.fm scrobbles, I’m far from exhausted. “I Will,” despite being slightly buried towards the tail end of The White Album’s first disc, is far from a deep cut. It’s my favorite Beatles ballad (there’s no need to get started on other qualifiers) and also the second half of my favorite Beatles sequencing choice. Immediately following a lowdown bluesy number about, um, mid-highway exhibitionism is one of the sweetest love songs ever laid to tape.

It bears a simple conceit. “Love you whenever we’re together, love you when we’re apart.” Well, yeah, that’s what love already is. Most songwriters wouldn’t get credit for laying out obvious facts with a pleased grin plastered on their Liverpudlian face. In McCartney’s words, facts are utterly ignorable. He merely caught a glimpse of the song’s subject — that was enough for a galactic force of love to obliterate him. The simplicity is necessary. Sometimes, you’re so smitten that even the most glaring truths need to be reiterated; sometimes, it’s all that grounds you. The plainspokenness of the song is cradled by softly strummed intervals and a capella vocals sneaking into the bass register. The love depicted is unadorned with instrumentation to match.

Before I even met my partner, I would sing this song nonstop. Queuing up the 2018 White Album mix in full aside, “I Will” played in my daydreams and trickled from the clouds. When I was singing it, my voice belonged to the song and to whomever might one day hear me. In the absence of a lover’s song to fill the air, I was unconsciously hellbent on providing the air with an ample supply of music. At least the oxygen and I could enjoy it together. After falling in love, the song didn’t leave my mind, but it doesn’t occupy the air nearly as often. There is someone else’s song. The constant dawning of romance is null and void. It never really mattered; I will always feel the same. Sing it loud so I can hear you.

– Aly Eleanor

Blog

baan – neumann

Sport – In Waves

Whispers – Yom-Ma-Lok

racecarbed – bozo

Subsonic Eye – Singapore Dreaming

Crayon Cats – Songs About You! #2

Mantar – Post Apocalyptic Depression

Spirit Desire – Pets

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

First Day Back – Forward

Turnstile – NEVER ENOUGH

Careful Gaze – one day this will let you go

Panel – A Great Time to Be an Empath

Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back – winnowing

The Callous Daoboys – I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven

MSPAINT – No Separation

Pelican – Flickering Resonance

Arm’s Length – There's A Whole World Out There

honeybee – midtown girl

Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Ribbon Skirt – Bite Down

Hemmingway Lane – “Shattered Glass”

Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky

PinkPantheress – Fancy That

One Direction – Made in the A.M.

Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid

The Hotelier – Goodness

Touché Amoré – Stage Four

Bon Iver – 22, A Million

Black Marble – It’s Immaterial

The Menzingers – After the Party

SZA – Ctrl

Manchester Orchestra – A Black Mile To The Surface

Amen Dunes – Freedom

Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!

KIDS SEE GHOSTS – KIDS SEE GHOSTS

Gouge Away – Burnt Sugar

The Happy Children – Same Dif

Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains

Walter Mitty And His Makeshift Orchestra – Puddles of Alligators

Charli xcx – how i’m feeling now

Slaughter Beach, Dog – At the Moonbase

Porter Robinson – Nurture

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Alvvays – Blue Rev

Arm’s Length – Never Before Seen, Never Again Found

Basque – Pain Without Hope Of Healing

Swim Into The Stats

Finally…

Anxious – Bambi

Caroline Rose – year of the slug

Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table

Coheed and Cambria – The Father of Make Believe

Denison Witmer – Anything At All

Fust – Big Ugly

Jaye Jayle – After Alter

Men I Trust – Equus Asinus

Midcard – Sick

Oldstar – Of the Highway

Pink Must – Pink Must

Pyre – This Is How We Lose Fullness

Rose Gray – Louder, Please

Saba and No I.D. – From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.

Tobacco City – Horses

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

wakelee – Doghouse

YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds

Death Cab for Cutie – “Passenger Seat”

Less Than Jake – “The Rest of My Life”

Talking Heads – “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”

Ezra Furman – “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend”

Car Seat Headrest – “Beach-Life-In-Death” Live at the Royale in Boston

Sufjan Stevens – “Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!”

Insane Clown Posse – “The Nedan Game”

The Sidekicks – “A Short Dance” + “Don’t Feel Like Dancing”

Pup Punk – “My Real Girlfriend”

David Gray – “Please Forgive Me”

Alanis Morissette – “You Oughta Know”

Antarctigo Vespucci– “Impossible to Place”

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