The Best of Q1 2022

We’re officially a fourth of the way through 2022 (or at the end of “Q1,” as those in the ~industry~ call it), and we’ve been blessed with an absolute glut of incredible new music. In lieu of the monthly roundups we did throughout 2021, I’ve been keeping an ongoing thread of my favorite releases over on Twitter which has helped me keep up on the neverending supply of new music. Now that we’ve crossed this natural beat a quarter of the way through the year, I figured what better time than now to sit down and take stock of my favorite albums released thus far? Here are ten outstanding records from the first few months of 2022 that have already managed to leave an impression on me despite our relatively short time together. 

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Anxious - Little Green House

Run For Cover Records

It’s easy to listen to Anxious and compare them to Title Fight. Ever since the Pennsylvanian rock group unceremoniously dissolved in 2015, people have always been searching for the “next Title Fight.” While that comparison is ultimately meant as a compliment, Little Green House feels like so much more than superficial worship of a bygone era. If anything, I find myself comparing this band to Adventures, a short-lived yet highly-influential pop-punk side project with just the occasional tinge of hardcore. 

Little Green House opens with a flat-out ripper in “Your One Way Street,” a song that kicks off with a killer drum fill and charges forth with a muscular chord progression. The vocals vault from a heartfelt croon to a full-throated scream, eventually falling into a beautiful harmony for the chorus. It’s a two-minute sample platter of everything the band has to offer, wrapped in immaculate production and a self-assured presentation. The hits keep coming with the spring-flavored “In April” and the poppy “Growing Up Song.” Side A closer “Wayne” is a mid-album pit-stop before the raging “Speechless” drops the listener back into the full-throttle embrace. Choices like this lead to the album’s peaks and valleys feeling very well-placed, all of which resolve with a gentle landing on the closing track, “You When You’re Gone.” Little Green House is a fantastic debut that’s clean, catchy, and feels as if it came straight out of the golden age of Run For Cover. 

Band of Horses - Things Are Great

BMG

Pitched as a return to form, Things Are Great not only evokes the folksy indie rock of the first two Band of Horses albums but also stands on its own as a pleasant, laid-back excursion for the modern age. It’s the musical equivalent of a soft reboot where you don’t need to concern yourself with the official canon, studio rights, or any other needless behind-the-scenes details. All that matters is the collection of ten songs that sit before you and how much they rule. 

Back in November, I lamented how often Band of Horses gets lumped in with terribly-aged “Hey Ho” Lumineers-type music while also arguing the deeper virtues of Everything All The Time. Maybe it's just because that deep dive is still fresh, but I can see multiple obvious parallels between the band’s first album and their latest. You’ve got a few free-wheeling singles in “Crutch,” “Lights,” and “In Need of Repair” that coexist beautifully alongside slightly more heady stuff like “Aftermath” and lackadaisical porchside kickbacks like “In The Hard Times.” Things Are Great is everything I could want from a Band of Horses record, and it feels like this release could genuinely stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the group’s first couple of LPs, even if it still feels like the newer younger brother.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody

Sub Pop Records

Look, do I really have to sell you on a new Bach House record? I obviously love the band, but you know exactly what you’re getting into here. A 90-minute affair split into four parts released over four months, Once Twice Melody is the type of album you can throw on and fully submerge yourself in. From the anthemic title track to the trap-drum “Pink Funeral” and the hypnotic “Over and Over,” there’s more than enough to sink your teeth into here. Once Twice Melody is a gold and glossy wonderland perfect for late-night smoke sessions, mid-day make-outs, and everything in between.

Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up There

Ninja Tune

I can’t remember the last time I heard an album like Ants From Up There… In fact, I may have never heard an album like Ants From Up There. The second LP from Black Country, New Road was preceded– and nearly overshadowed –by the news that lead singer Isaac Wood was departing from the band mere days before the album’s release. While this certainly shifted how Ants From Up There was received and interpreted, I can’t think of a better note to end one’s career on than this collection of songs. This record is heartfelt and heartwrenching, finding a group of young creatives at various crossroads in their personal and professional lives. The lyrics are poetic and abstract yet hit upon extremely personal struggles. The songs bend and wind in unexpected ways, expanding and contracting under the weight of their own anguish and celebration. 

I wrote about this record (in my own incredibly abstract way) back when it was first released, and in the time since then, it has become symbolic of so many things to me. Closely tied to what is now a fully-fledged relationship with someone I feel incredibly lucky to know and love, this album means more to me than I can possibly put into a few-hundred-word blurb. This album speaks to me in ways that I never knew I needed and now represents something much bigger than the songs found within its walls. I love this record, I love my partner, and I feel lucky to have these memories and emotions tied to a single work of art so concretely. Much like the album itself, these feelings are bigger than any one song or sentiment. Ants is an insurmountable work that brushes up against the inarticulable in a way that has helped me understand my own life and love on a deeper level. 

Camp Cope - Running with the Hurricane

Run For Cover Records

It’s been four years since How To Socialize and Make Friends, and I am glad Camp Cope is back. Captivating as ever, Running with the Hurricane centers around the trifecta that made the group’s prior work so compelling; Georgia Maq’s iconic voice, Kelly-Dawn Helmrich’s bouncy basswork, and Sarah Thompson’s steady drumming holding everything together. It’s a triad that has driven this band apart from every other pier in their field and resulted in some of the most distinct output in the indie/emo sphere. 

Running with the Hurricane follows similar beats as previous Camp Cope LPs, buoyed by the stunning opener “Caroline” and the explosive, rolling heartland rock of its title track. The band winds through relationships, strife, and loss throughout the intervening seven songs, eventually landing on the cathartic “Sing Your Heart Out,” which I am man enough to admit that I openly sobbed to. Camp Cope is a band unlike any other, with a voice and a sound as outspoken as the members themselves. It’s good to have them back.

Carly Cosgrove - See You In Chemistry

Wax Bodega

An iCarly-themed emo band. That’s the elevator pitch for Carly Cosgrove, and odds are you will either balk at that or be sold immediately depending on your age and tolerance for committing to the bit. While the band’s schtick is funny and novel, the good news is (beyond their song titles and the occasional veiled reference), your enjoyment of this album is not dependent on your knowledge of mid-aughts Nickelodeon sitcoms. 

Going into this record, my main concern was the same with most emo LPs: will I like this for a full 40+ minutes? This genre is so entrenched in EPs, singles, and splits, and it’s pretty common for that bite-sized energy not to translate into a full-length record. I’m happy to report that Carly Cosgrove nailed it, though. Like any good emo band, the opening track “Sit ‘n’ Bounce” ignites with crowd-churning midwest guitar taps and clap-inspiring kick drums which immediately brings the energy up to a 10. Over the course of its 43-minute runtime, the band lays confessional and hyper-relatable lyrics about anxiety, mental health, and living in extremes over dynamic and ever-shifting instrumentation. See You In Chemistry is excellently sequenced, superbly written, even sticks the landing with an 8-minute closing track, a feat for any band, much less one this young. The result is an energetic and youthful debut that’s affable, affirming, and firmly committed to its vision.

Chastity - Suffer Summer

Deathwish Inc.

Much like Dazy, Chastity is a one-man project concerned with fuzzy grunge riffs and utterly immaculate hooks. Holding equal reverence for both Smashing Pumpkins and Jimmy Eat World, Suffer Summer is an album composed of breezy pop-punk tracks that gradually melt, giving way to the heaviness of reality. Each song boasts an earworm chorus, often in the form of a single infinitely-repeatable phrase, making it easy to belt along. Tracks like “Pummeling” feel as if they could have wormed their way into an early-2000s movie soundtrack right alongside the likes of heavy-hitters like “All The Small Things” and “The Middle.” Once the listener has acclimated to the sunnier sound of its first few songs, Suffer Summer takes some unexpected half-steps into neighboring genres and heavier topics, offering a fulfilling journey in just 34 minutes.

Cloakroom - Dissolution Wave

Relapse Records Inc.

Due solely to when it was released, Dissolution Wave essentially acted as the definitive close to my Obsessive Shoegaze Winter. I was in a dark place for a few months there, and this record felt like the perfect way to finally find closure and pull myself out of that spiral. A high-concept album pitched as a “space western in which an act of theoretical physics wipes out all of humanity’s existing art and abstract thought,” Dissolution Wave bears all the fuzzy, wobbly, soul-crushing riffs you can hope for from a shoegaze act as legendary as Cloakroom. There are catchy cuts like “A Force at Play,” bleary stoner rock tone on “Fear of Being Fixed,” and even some woozy countrygaze on “Doubts.” Despite its sky-high concept, Dissolution Wave remains an accessible shoegaze LP that offers an excellent case for the best of what the genre has to offer. 

Drunk Uncle - Look Up

Count Your Lucky Stars Records

Look, I can’t help it; I love that tappy shit. There’s something about my brain where it hears good midwest emo and releases a truckload of dopamine without fail. Does that sound goofy and extremely on-brand? Sure, but who am I to question it? Luckily for myself and others like me, Drunk Uncle brings the riffage in spades on their debut album. Released on the legendary label Count Your Lucky Stars, Look Up already had all the makings of a classic emo record before it even dropped. 

The album kicks off with a bouncy jostle and full-throated caterwaul. The tapping begins almost immediately, which, when paired with these remorseful wails, fills the Marietta-shaped hole in my heart. The sound remains remarkably consistent from the clappy lead single “Depakote” to the arid “Blue Skies,” but things take an unexpected electronic ascent mid-album. The band wanders from heartbreak to pensive ambient stretches before resolving tenaciously on the album’s horn-adored title track. It may be a modest 33-minute album from a band with a goofy name, but Look Up is pretty much everything I could ever want from an emo record. There’s no doubt in my mind that this album would be viewed as a classic within the genre if it had been released ten or even five years earlier. If there’s any justice in this world, Look Up will find its audience and eventually achieve that status in due time.

Proper. - The Great American Novel

Father/Daughter Records

The Great American Novel is a tome in album form. A densely-packed 15 tracks clocking in at just under an hour, the third LP from the Brooklyn-based indie rock group acts as a dispatch on life in America. Firmly rooted in its creator's perspective as a trio of Black creatives existing in primarily white spaces, this album is an unflinching dissection of everyday life in a country that alternates between indifference and outright objection to your existence. 

This album is a sharp synthesis of countless vital topics, and a huge part of what makes it such an exhilarating listen is how wide-set the scope is. Songs navigate everything from the music industry and masculinity to meaningless sex and complicated family trees, all in concise and compelling ways. Amongst these topics, the band also weaves a throughline of heavier, more complex subjects like systemic racism, the prison industrial complex, and the idea of identity and belonging. These are all inextricable facts of life for the band members of Proper, which is reflected in these songs in a beautifully heartbreaking way. Musically, the range of genres on display is just as diverse as the lyrics, with sounds stemming from a baseline of emo-flavored indie rock but stretching to shreddy heavy metal guitar, pitch-shifted spoken word passages, pissed-off beatdown vent sessions, and System of a Down-style political takedowns. Somehow, The Great American Novel lives up to its name; an impressive, diverse, and powerful document that offers an essential perspective on topics that can sometimes feel too big to broach, much less compartmentalize into a single song.

My Favorite Songs of All Time

With this post, Swim Into The Sound has officially reached 100 articles! I’ll admit between the dreary weather and burnout at work I’ve felt less than inspired to post here regularly this year, however 100 blog posts is a big deal, and I wanted to make sure that I did it justice. I’ve got dozens of different ideas for articles jotted down in digital notes across various devices, but it felt ingenuine to put up “just another” write-up as my one-hundredth post. 

This January I celebrated all of the site’s recent achievements, and of course, the Favorites page has an ongoing list of our best articles, so I didn’t really want to focus on the blog from either of those perspectives. Instead, I’ve decided I’m going to do a write-up on something straightforward but important: my favorite songs of all time. 

My desktop has a 100+ song playlist of my favorite songs all meticulously organized, ordered, and ranked. While that playlist still receives some regular updates, the top 15 or so haven’t changed in a number of years, so I figured why not highlight all of these tracks in one place to celebrate the site’s recent milestone? Without further adieu, I’m excited to share my 15 favorite songs of all time.

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15 | Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - “Sunday Candy”

Two years after Acid Rap had cemented itself in my life, I was eagerly waiting to see what Chance the Rapper would do next. Suddenly on a late May evening in 2015, an album called Surf was uploaded to iTunes for free. Released under the name “Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment,” Surf was a collaborative project that combined the artistic powers of Chance The Rapper, trumpeter Nico Segal, and a host of other Chicago musicians. 

Making sure to savor every ounce of this new release, I wanted to ensure my first listen was special. I downloaded the album, grabbed a couple of hard ciders, and spent the evening in my backyard listening to Surf on a night that was just warm enough to enjoy without a jacket. 

Surf wasn’t quite the Acid-Rap follow-up I was expecting, but it ended up being a release I enjoyed nonetheless. The record is a joyous, warm, and creative outpouring that’s filled to the brim with collaborative spirit. As my first listen came to a close, the record began to wrap up with the penultimate “Sunday Candy,” a bright and loving gospel track that finds Chance reminiscing about his grandmother’s role in his life. These expressions of love are all wrapped around a sunny, infectious chorus courtesy of Jamila Woods that radiates with happiness and a vibrant zeal for life. My first listen of the song left me breathless, tearful, and overjoyed. To this day, “Sunday Candy” still has the power to make my day a little bit better merely by its presence. 

14 | Band Of Horses - “The Funeral”

While I have an overall preference for Band of Horses’ sophomore record, there’s no denying the brilliance of “The Funeral.” Far and away the band’s most popular song, “The Funeral” revolves around a sparkling guitar line and poetic lyrics that address loss and separation. At some point in the late-2000’s the song entered the pantheon of iconic alt-rock tracks alongside the likes of “Mr. Brightside,” and “Skinny Love,” yet no matter how many times I hear “The Funeral” in a bar, in a movie, or in a commercial, the song manages to disarm me completely. There’s something profoundly spiritual and awe-inspiring lying at the emotional core of “The Funeral,” and that feeling hits me harder each time I listen to it. 

13 | The Flaming Lips - “Do You Realize??”

Around the same time that I was discovering indie rock, I was also introduced to The Flaming Lips. While the entirety of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a mind-bending discovery back in high school, “Do You Realize??” was anything like I’d ever heard in my life. Tackling death from an honest and straightforward perspective, the song genuinely made me consider what all my relationships meant to me. It made me think about the inevitability of it all, and what kind of life I wanted to share with those around me. I’d like to think it gave me a greater appreciation for life as a whole, not just existence itself, but life as it was happening. Because one day all of this will be gone, so why wouldn’t you savor every second? Good or bad, life is a gift, and it’s easy to take that for granted. 

12 | My Morning Jacket - “I Will Sing You Songs”

I still remember my first time hearing “I Will Sing You Songs.” After having My Morning Jacket’s discography on my iPod for nearly three years, I’d put off listening to them only for “I Will Sing You Songs” to come up on shuffle and stop me in my tracks. Almost instantly, I was swept up in the song and found myself frozen by its slow-moving melody. For nine minutes the song carried me gently into an expression of love and adoration that I felt down to my bones. It was dream-like, transportive, and absolutely gorgeous; precisely what I needed to hear at that moment. Years later, It Still Moves has become one of my favorite alternative records of all time, and “I Will Sing You Songs” remains it’s shining, perfect centerpiece.

11 | Radiohead - “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”

“Jigsaw Falling Into Place” is one of the most well-paced songs in Radiohead's discography. Starting out with a winding guitar lick and hi-hat keeping time, these two instruments set the scene for an explosive tale of flirtation, heartbreak, and love lost. Within a few beats, the bass enters the fray, and suddenly the song ignites like an engine. Within an instant, all of the instruments fall into a fast-paced groove as the guitar jangles underneath Thom Yorke’s moody humming. Depicting a series of drunken college nights filled with missed connections and possible love, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” is a nonstop, evermoving journey that can only end in one way. The song continually mounts until every element is exploding to life with color and the song reaches its emotional fever pitch. Everything is humming at the right frequency, beguiling the listener in the most well-crafted and artistic way. 

10 | Sufjan Stevens - “Oh God, Where Are You Now?”

I’ve already written at great length about my love for Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan, but “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” is the single-song encapsulation of why I love this man’s art. It’s the song that led me to Sufjan. The song that carried me through countless winters whether I was alone or surrounded by loved ones. This song is everything that I love about the Earth, and art, and creativity, and beauty. It’s a haunting, spiritual, and heart-rending question of existence all wrapped in memories that make me feel like I’ve lived this story a hundred times before. It’s the soundtrack to my heart and the death of each year. An absolutely stunning and beautiful track that’s quintessential to my existence. 

9 | Funkadelic - “Maggot Brain”

I first heard “Maggot Brain” in middle school knowing nothing of George Clinton, Parlament-Funkadelic, or even rock as a whole for that matter. I’d barely dipped my toe in the water of psychedelia, and even less in instrumental music… which explains why this song felt so revelatory when I’d first experienced it. “Maggot Brain” begins with a disarming spoken word introduction followed by ten minutes of the most soulful guitar work I had ever heard...or have ever heard. Split into two halves, the first section of “Maggot Brain” reads like a eulogy. A wordless loss that commemorates the unspeakable feeling of discovering a loved one had passed. This builds up into an eruption of emotion found in the second half in a transition that flows seamlessly and makes sense on a cosmic level. The journey contained within the song can be read in many different ways, and I hear a different pathway each time I relisten to the piece. Truly a powerful condensation of the human psyche. 

8 | Radiohead - “You And Whose Army?”

There aren’t many words you can make out in “You And Whose Army?” Sure, you can hear the title (also about the closest the song ever gets to a chorus), but what’s left is a mush of phrases that are practically left up to the listener’s imagination. Individual words may make their way through, but for the most part, I love “You And Whose Army?” because it’s an endlessly-interpretable song. These delicately-delivered lyrics are placed above a gently-strummed guitar and Yorke’s own hums in the background. Midway through the song, these fragile elements meet a more precise bassline, rigid drumbeat, and shaky piano that all carry the song to its wounded emotional climax. “You And Whose Army?” is haunting, beautiful, and foreboding all at the same time. Everything feels at once obscured and perfectly in place. 

7 | Pink Floyd - “The Great Gig In The Sky” 

One of the most spiritual experiences I’ve ever had wasn’t at a church, on a vacation, or in a relationship, it was listening to “The Great Gig In The Sky” in my backyard all by myself. Yet another album I was handed in middle school, I must have listened to Dark Side of the Moon dozens of times trying to figure out why everyone thought it was so great. It was on t-shirts, referenced in pop culture, and obviously meant a lot to everyone older than me… but I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out what made this record so great. Years later, I put the album on during a warm summer evening and let the LP carry me from beginning to end. It was an experience I’ll never forget, and “The Great Gig In The Sky” was the emotional climax of that journey. From the introductory dialogue, the way the instrumental lifts, and of course, Clare Torry’s brilliant performance on vocals, there’s nothing quite like “Great Gig” out there in the world. To this day, I’ve still never found a song that captures the hard-to-grasp emotions tied to life and death as well as this song does within these four minutes.

6| Explosions In The Sky - “Have You Passed Through This Night?”

For my money, there’s no song more frisson-inducing than Explosions in the Sky’s “Have You Passed Through This Night?” Centered around a sample of dialogue from The Thin Red Line, this is one of the only songs in the band’s discography to have any sort of lyrical content whatsoever. Maybe the decision to center a track around these words is what makes it even more powerful. 

As you listen to the gentle guitar strums laid carefully underneath this sample, a sudden gunshot cuts through the song. Then we hear the titular line. Then a slow-moving guitar. Then a series of increasingly-powerful drum strikes. The song then mounts for the remaining four minutes creating one of the most beautiful builds in the entire genre of post-rock. Truly a moving piece of music that instills a sense of something greater just beyond the next mountain. Absolutely awe-inspiring. 

5| The Cribs - “Be Safe” 

Generally speaking, I am not a “lyrics guy.” I tend to take songs as a whole without necessarily focusing on any one individual element, including the words being sung. That goes for just about every song except for “Be Safe” by The Cribs. An anomaly within their discography, “Be Safe” finds lead singer Ryan Jarman ceding control to Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo for long-winded spoken word passages that act as collages of random visuals placed over a ceaseless instrumental bed. Beginning in a definitively-negative headspace, the song finds its narrator complaining about “One of those fucking awful black days when nothing is pleasing” and how they hate everyone around them. Our narrator explains that he could change, but he knows his old self will always catch up no matter how hard he tries. Suddenly, without warning, The Cribs’ lead singer Ryan Jarman enters the song with a bright and shimmering chorus that seems to give our narrator hope:

I know a place we can go
Where you'll fall in love so hard that
You'll wish you were dead

From here, Ranaldo describes life through a series of abstract flashes, each of which brings a beautiful glimpse of the world into the listener’s mind. As these images pass through your headphones, the song gets brighter and picks up its pace. The words become more positive until they culminate in an escalating rallying cry of “Open all the boxes!” before one last scene-setting outro. It’s undeniable poetry. A reversal of mood that captures these two vastly different feelings and how one person or event can turn your life around in such a short amount of time. It’s a reminder that sadness isn’t permanent, and that the world is beautiful. That it always has been. 

4 | Queens Of The Stone Age - “A Song For The Dead” 

It only took a few listens for Songs For The Deaf to become my favorite album of all-time back in middle school. The record was unlike anything I’d ever heard and introduced me to a vast array of genres that I’m still shocked all work in conjunction with each other. At this point, Songs For The Deaf has been my favorite album for over one decade, and “A Song For The Dead” is just one of the many reasons why. If you were to ask me why this song spoke to me specifically, I’d answer with one word: drums. 

Featuring Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters on percussion, “A Song For The Dead” is a marvel of precision instrumentation. It’s a middle-finger-extended ‘fuck you’ rock track that’s propelled by Grohl’s unrelenting presence on the drums. Beginning with a single organ note and hi-hat keeping time, a guitar sets the scene followed quickly by a series of drum fills courtesy of Grohl. Within seconds, Grohl lays down a swaying drum beat, and the bass enters mimicking the guitar line perfectly. Josh Homme’s trademarked snarling vocals throw the listener headfirst into song’s desolate, desert-themed hopelessness, all the while Grohl’s cymbals crash, snare snaps, and sleigh bells jingle. 

One of the best moments come in the songs final seconds where several fakeout endings are tied together by multiple drum solos and an unrelenting guitar line. This is one of the few songs I know every molecule of, and I have to give Dave Grohl props for contributing such a major element to the track’s structure. 

3 | Sharks Keep Moving - “Like a River” 

Picture this: It’s summer. You just graduated high school. You dropped your date off at her house, and now you’re going for a long drive through the countryside with your windows down as you watch the sun set over rolling hills in the distance. That’s what listening to “Like a River” is like. 

Helmed by Minus The Bear’s Jake Snider, Sharks Keep Moving was a short-lived jazzy-math rock band from Seattle featuring members who would go on to form groups like Pretty Girls Make Graves, Botch, and The Blood Brothers. The band produced one full-length, two EPs, and one split in their five-ish years together, and despite their relatively-small output, every song managed to strike a chord in the heart of a high-school-aged Taylor. 

While every song is worth a listen, “Like a River” is the crown jewel of Sharks Keep Moving’s discography. Front-loaded with a narrative tale of drunken love, the song is half storytelling, half gorgeous instrumental. Throughout the first half, Snider paints a scene of meeting a woman at a bar and becoming immediately infatuated with her. Ending the tale with a half-drunk rallying cry of “Get up / Let’s Walk,” the song then floats the listener along a river of sound with an instrumental that adds some color to the narrative brush-strokes laid earlier in the track. It gives just enough time for the listener to meditate and fill in the blanks of the story, whether that be with the words they were just handed or recent experiences in their own life. It’s a transformative piece of art that manages to clock in at 11-minutes long, yet not overstay its welcome. It’s pure contentment, captured to music. 

2| Radiohead - “Nude”

I know what you’re thinking… another Radiohead song? But hear me out, “Nude” is the perfect Radiohead song. A love song at its core, “Nude” may not be as popular as “Creep” or as catchy as “Karma Police” or as versatile as “Exit Music,” but it manages to reach another level entirely. Lying somewhere between the groovy approach of “Reckoner” and the lyrical content of “True Love Waits,” “Nude” was a long-shelved Radiohead track that took literally one decade to see the light of day.  

Centered around a pristine bassline, careful drumming, and a reversed vocal bed, “Nude” is a world-shattering love song. The defeated lyrics are sung in Yorke’s highest falsetto as Colin Greenwood’s bass rumbles lovingly below him. Meanwhile, Philip Selway’s drums fall into perfect synch with Johnny Greenwood’s gentle guitar plucks, and all of this swirls behind gorgeous orchestral swells that mount with each word.

There’s no other word with which to describe “Nude” other than beautiful. Each element works in perfect synch for a song that emulates love, loss, heartbreak, and sorrow all within the space of four minutes. Those feelings crest as Yorke belts out “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking” before the song is carried out by a build of double-tracked hums that feels careful, practiced, and achingly beautiful. A rare example of a song that was worth the ten-year incubation period. 

1 | Minus The Bear - “This Ain't a Surfin' Movie”

Well, here we are, my favorite song of all time, and I don’t even know where to begin. “This Ain't a Surfin' Movie” is perfect — a song of love, beauty, and escape that feels like it was tailor-made for me specifically. 

I first discovered Minus The Bear back in high school around the same time as Bon Iver, Portugal. The Man, and half of the other songs on this list. Specifically, I remember hearing “Pachuca Sunrise” (the band’s most popular song) and “Fulfill the Dream” on a friend’s iPod and being nothing short of blown away. Minus The Bear’s music just made sense to my brain, like it was something I’d been waiting for for years and finally found. Both of those songs coming from the same record, I decided to give the rest of Menos El Oso a listen, and wouldn’t you know that I loved it almost instantly. 

My favorite song on the record jostled around from time to time throughout high school, but a piece of me was always impressed with the way the band ended the album on such an abjectly-beautiful and warm note with “This Ain't a Surfin' Movie.” Depicting a beach-side evening alone with a lover, “Surfin’ Movie” is a song about physical and emotional paradise. A day spent in the arms of a lover in a beautiful place where nothing else matters but you and the connection to that other person. It’s quite literally the most powerful, moving, and loving thing I’ve ever heard put to music. 

Keep in mind, this song comes after ten other dancy, catchy, groovy songs that soundtracked my high school years, so there’s absolutely some added power there, but even still, “Surfin’ Movie” caps off not just this album, but our list as my favorite song of all time. 

To this day, I still remember sitting in the parking lot of a 7/11 back in high school with my childhood friend. We were riding the high of having just attended our first Minus The Bear concert, drinking AriZona’s, listening to Menos El Oso, and reveling in what we had just seen. I remember feeling speechless once the album ended, wishing I could live in that feeling forever.

“This Ain’t A Surfin’ Movie” is a marvel to listen to. It’s a monument to love and an absolute artistic achievement. It’s something that I’m lucky to have found, and fortunate enough to have felt. It’s simply perfect. 

You can listen to a playlist of all these songs here.

Album Art, Visual Translation, and A Pride Week Collage

Album art is sacred. It is the physical embodiment of a record’s soul, a manifestation of the thoughts, strife, and emotion that went into its creation. Album art is often the one chance an artist has to distill their work into something visual; into one composition that translates the art they’ve made into an entirely different medium. An album’s cover is both the face and synopsis of the music that lies directly behind it.

Even outside of vinyl, the artwork of an album is a vital piece of the overall music experience. As we cram albums onto our phones by the hundreds and platforms like Spotify continue to shrink artwork down to hundred-pixel squares, it’s more important than ever to appreciate the work and artistry that goes into a cover. 

In 2018 it’s less important to have a cover that “sells” a potential listener simply because there’s rarely ever a sale in the traditional sense anymore. When everything is one click away, the listener has nothing to lose aside from the three-minute commitment it takes to listen to a song. Sure artists can still use sex or controversy to court discussion and clicks, but now more than ever the cover’s primary job is to translate the senses of the record into something outside of itself. Something recognizable, something beautiful, something with heart. 

I’ve long been fascinated with album art, and more recently I’ve found myself looking at my music library abstractly, organizing albums and playlists not by artist, alphabet, or genre, but by color. If records are the physical embodiment of the artist's music, then the color can tell us a lot about the mood and texture of their songs at a glance. 

Earlier this year I found myself face to face with a playlist of all pink albums and enjoyed the experience of interacting it so much that I figured why not do that for every color? I sat down, scrolled through my library, and after collecting all of these lovely records into one mood-board-like word document, it only made sense to talk about them here. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed apropos to have this multi-color collage coincide with Pride Week, the most colorful time of the year. So here are 60 (mostly single-color) albums that are largely well-regarded, but also definitively “Taylor-core.” 

And In addition to the six-row “Pride Flag” layout above, I’ve also created a “Full Spectrum” rainbow version, since white pink and black were three of the easiest colors to fill out. You can find the full-resolution versions of these collages here and here. I dare your ass to name all 90 albums.

But wait, that's not all! In addition to these images, I’ve plucked one album from each color and given it a short mini-review. Most of the covers above fall under "classic" territory, but there are also some deeper cuts that I've always wanted to write about on here, even if it's just for a short paragraph.

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Owen - I Do Perceive

Husband, father, and noted sad man Mike Kinsella has been making music for a majority of his life. From his work as a teenager in the late-90’s under Cap'n Jazz and American Football to his current solo work as Owen, Kinsella is a prolific artist who seems to be continually overflowing with both good music and raw emotion. While American Football’s self-titled debut is now viewed as an all-time classic in the emo/indie/underground circuit, I posit that I Do Perceive should be brought up with the same level of reverence. Offering a slightly more “adult” counterpoint to his younger self, Perceive is an early-morning exploration of Kinsella’s headspace and the inner-workings of his most intimate relationships. Packed with smart observations, clever topics, and lush instrumentation, this album aches with beauty and honesty. 

John Frusciante - PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone

Perhaps best-known for his work with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers during some of their most successful releases, anyone who dives into John Frusciante’s solo records will quickly come to realize what an essential (and artistic) role he played in the group. From his early drugged-out acoustic albums to later-career dissonant electronic phases, Frusciante is a complicated musician with a vast body of intricate work. PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone is a 2012 experimental album that blends electronic, indie, and hip-hop into one schizophrenic explosion of songs that shift rapidly and without warning. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life and concrete evidence that Frusciante is a genius with a mind and vision all his own. 

The White Stripes - The White Stripes

While they achieved greater success and recognition with later records, The White Stripes’ self-titled debut remains a fantastic release that marks the beginning of an incredibly strong discography. Featuring punchy, thrashy, and messy garage rock, The White Stripes shows us a band in its charming infancy. There are well-crafted choruses and catchy melodies, but at the same time everything is so ragged and distorted that the entire record sounds as if it was recorded in one take. There’s something pure about pre-fame Jack White, and the band’s rough-around-the-edges debut is eternal proof that everyone must start somewhere. 

Sharks Keep Moving - Pause and Clause

While it’s only three songs long, Pause and Clause stretches out over a luxurious and lavish 21 minutes. Technically only an EP, this shorter format allowed the band to embrace some semblance of punctuality while simultaneously giving the songs proper time to breathe. Fronted by Minus The Bear’s Jake Snider, Sharks Keep Moving is a reverse-super group whose members went on to form Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Blood Brothers, and These Arms Are Snakes. Pause and Clause, the group's final release, features long-winding and arid songs of love, heartbreak, and disappointment, the centerpiece of which is the 11-minute “Like A River.” One of my favorite songs of all time, “Like A River” tells a tale as old as time of a man, a woman, and a bar. It’s a song that’s not afraid to writhe in its emotions and say exactly what it’s thinking. The lyrics are few and far between, but each line hangs in the air as a poetic observation of the simple beauties in life. The song’s instrumental outro is thrilling and gorgeous, allowing the listener’s mind to reel in their own experiences and project themselves onto the multi-colored soundscape of love and affection.

Sorority Noise - Joy, Departed

After gaining a cult following with 2014’s Forgettable, Sorority Noise returned one year later with their landmark Joy, Departed. Decidedly more serious, mature, and musical, the group’s sophomore effort sees a shift from half-goofy pop-punk into full-blown heart-on-sleeve emo. In retrospect, this release does a fantastic job of acclimating the listener into the band’s more-grounded later work, but still manages to strike a balance between sing-along pop-punk and moody emo that I find enchanting. With poetic lyrics tackling depression, self-harm, and drug addiction, Joy, Departed is far from a “fun” listen, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable or important.

Band of Horses - Everything All the Time

Assisted by Seattle’s own Sub-Pop, Everything All The Time was Band of Horses grand unveiling to the world. While “The Funeral” will probably always be their best-known and most widely-recognized song, Everything All The Time is an incredibly-well put-together album featuring personable and charming songs of lackadaisical indie rock with just a tinge of country. Tracks like “The First Song” and “I Go To The Barn Because I Like The” offer laid-back earthy slice of life vignettes that all add up to one of the better debuts of the 2000’s. 

Explosions in the Sky - How Strange, Innocence

For an album that was recorded in only four days, How Strange, Innocence is absolutely immaculate. Even when taken in nearly two decades later, Innocence fits squarely into the Explosions In The Sky’s discography and feels like a group that already knew exactly what they wanted. While the band’s later work gradually became quieter and more subtle, their debut is the loudest, most distorted, and most singular thing they’ve ever recorded. Each song explodes with a wall of guitar, drums, and bass that all chug forward relentlessly until crescendoing into sparks of violent beauty. It’s an absolute wonder. 

Tame Impala - Currents

After achieving commercial success and near-universal acclaim on his first two records, Tame Impala’s third album found Kevin Parker moving away from Beatles-esque psychedelia and further into electronic progginess. Much like Joy Departed, Currents does a fantastic job of segueing long-time fans into the band’s new sound. Opening track “Let It Happen” begins as a classic Tame Impala psychedelic rock song before glitching out into a prolonged electronic section marked by a dancey explosion of sound and light. Mid-album cuts like “Eventually” all bear the same clean production and showcase the specific type of beauty to be found at the intersection between these two seemingly-disparate genres. 

Japandroids - Post-Nothing

Comprised of only two Canadian men, a guitar, and a drum set, Japandroids pack a gigantic, anthemic, and cathartic punch into a small package. While 2012’s Celebration Rock is arguably the rock album of the decade, Post-Nothing will always hold a special place in my heart as that record’s fuzzier, more nostalgic older brother. Beginning with the Thin Lizzy-referencing “The Boys Are Leaving Town” Post-Nothing immediately casts a late-summer spell upon its listener, hurling them into a suspended animation of their own memories. Mid-album cuts like “Heart Sweats” and “Crazy/Forever” find the duo settling into well-crafted melodies and lulling the listener into a sense of trust and inner-peace. Finally, album closer “I Quit Girls” is a soul-rending adult lullaby that builds to a climactic groove which eventually ferries the listener off to the end of the record.