Swim Into The Stats: A Slightly-Goofy-But-Still-Informative Look Back at 2024

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I’ve alluded to Swim Into The Sound’s growth a few times throughout the year, but as part of our year-end festivities, I wanted to take a beat and show that growth with actual numbers. Special thanks to Braden Allmond, one of Swim’s new writers, for all the data visualization and hard stats throughout. This one’s truly for the Numbers Heads, a recounting of the year for those who are curious about what goes into a site like this. 

To recap, at the beginning of the year, we put out a call for new writers which resulted in 54 applications, plus a few more that trickled in over the following months. This was on top of the 20-ish writers we already had on the team, so it became a real process to onboard all these new faces and get them up to speed. After this sizable influx, things really started to pick up in mid-February with an onslaught of show reviews, retrospectives, and single write-ups. I still found time to write some silly stuff, but for the most part, I was editing other people’s work as the Swim Team whipped up one fantastic piece after another. 

Fig. 1: Together, we’ve published 130 articles totaling 182,966 words. That’s equivalent to 1.5 Twilight books (Twilight is 118,975 words, and New Moon is 132,758 words. Eat your heart out, Stephenie Meyer). To me, this graph epitomizes the masthead of Swim Into The Sound: “Words on music and life.” While I hope the “life” part is woven throughout everything we publish, in 2024, our writers had the chance to see live shows, hang with artists on tour, premiere songs, and even film music videos. 

Obviously, most of these are reviews, and if you’re curious to hear everything in one place, Ciara Rhiannon (another one of this year’s excellent new writers) created this Spotify playlist with everything the site reviewed in chronological order throughout 2024. Weighing in at 984 songs and nearly 58 hours of music, if nothing else, this playlist feels like a terrific overview of the year in music and the type of bands that Swim covers. 

Whether we’re talking Real Deal Album Reviews, quarterly roundups, or long-form shitposts, that grand total of 130 articles is even more impressive when you look at it in relation to previous years.

Fig. 2: I know we are already too full of pie from the holidays, but here’s one more for your waistline before the new year. In 2024, we published more than one-quarter of all the articles Swim Into The Sound has ever posted! On top of that, we’re 75% of the way to the one-million-word mark. 

Behind the scenes, the Swim Into The Sound Discord has been a constant source of silly memes, music chatter, and genuine energy drink discussion. It’s been incredibly special to get to know all these people and even meet a few of them throughout the year. I think this next visual goes a long way to show how much the site grew in 2024 with all these new people on board…

Fig. 3: The number of individual authors SPIKED in 2024. If you sum up all unique writers from the inception of this site through 2023, it’s still less than the number of authors in 2024. 

But who are these people? Now that we have an idea of the number of people contributing to Swim, let’s examine how often they’re writing for the site and in what quantity.

*Contributions to lists, roundups, or end-of-year collections are not considered in this graph.

Fig. 4: This graph shows the number of articles written by a particular author this year. For example, the bin at “7” on the x-axis indicates that three authors wrote seven articles. This graph shows how difficult it is to turn sensible words into entertaining sentences and build those sentences into meaningful articles. Some people have a knack for it, some went to school for it, and some of us love music enough to shamelessly Google “synonyms for angular.” 

Fig. 5: Here’s one of my favorite graphs in this whole thing: Swim Into The Sound’s Yap Stat. This chart measures how much an author wrote on average per article by taking their total word count and dividing it by the number of pieces they wrote. I think this shows our penchant for verbosity and how much we love to talk about music. 

Fig. 6: If you are curious about what kind of traffic all this yapping nets us, this timeline shows our total visits on a month-by-month basis. This year was our best yet, with 81k visits from 69k unique visitors (nice), all adding up to 100k pageviews! That’s a 20% increase year-over-year, which makes total sense, especially when you factor in how much more we published this year. 

Fig. 7: We’ll discuss this plot in more detail closer to our 10th anniversary next year, but for now, marvel at its noodly glory; I think it speaks for itself.

Whether you’re refreshing the Swim home page three times a day, checking out an article a friend sent you, or a bot indexing our catalog, we’re glad you’re reading this. Thank you for supporting the work our writers do to document the music in our world and the artists who make the music we all enjoy. (You are remembering to support the artists, right?) 

It has been indescribably rewarding to play matchmaker and link writers with these upcoming albums from bands they are passionate about. Throughout the year, a fair number of writers came to me with cool albums or bands they wanted to cover that I’d never even heard of. The end result is exactly what I had hoped for: a community of people loving music and sharing that passion with each other and the world. I’m excited to see how much more things grow in 2025.

Swim Into The Sound's Greatest Hits: A 400 Article Celebration

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With this post, Swim Into The Sound has officially published 400 articles! That’s pretty wild to me, especially considering we just hit 300 a year ago last May. Since we’ve celebrated 100 and 200 with similar fanfare, I figured it’s only fitting we continue the tradition and celebrate this as the landmark occasion that it is. Outside of just “cool number,” these intervals offer a nice reminder to look back and appreciate how much hard work has gone into this site and all the passion that’s helped us get here. 

Our first-ever review was published back in 2015, and while I don’t necessarily recommend you go back and read it, I think it’s important to recognize where you came from, so I’ll link it here for completeness’ sake. While I consider June 15th, 2015 to be the true birthday of this site, it wasn’t until 2016 that I really committed to updating it regularly. If you were curious to learn some stats, those 400 articles stretched across nine years add up to roughly 640k words. A majority of those have been written by me, but also includes dozens of other contributors, guest writers, and friends who have been kind enough to let me publish their work.

2024 has marked a bit of a sea change for this site as I move from Swim Into The Sound’s primary writer to more of an editor-in-chief-type role. Working with a team of writers that’s now 20- to 50-strong has been a blast because it’s allowed us to be more prolific than ever. There have already been several weeks this year where we’ve been publishing a review, round-up, or something every day, and that’s amazing to me. Not only has Swim Into The Sound been more relevant and up-to-date than ever, but it’s also felt amazing to connect so many writers with opportunities to write about music they’re passionate about. That’s why this whole thing exists. 

Speaking of which, I’m currently in the process of finishing up a bigger project, something more involved and more expansive than anything else this blog has ever published. So, when I’m not working my day job or editing other people’s work, that project is where most of my time and creative energy has gone. I’m beyond excited to share that in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted to pause and reflect on the scope of 400 articles published over the course of nine years. 

While I’m immensely proud of this body of work, I also recognize that 400 articles is a lot of writing to chew through. Just look at this unwieldy page that lists everything in one place. I don’t think anyone besides me has read everything published on Swim, but if you’re out there, I want to meet you. Are all of those articles winners? No. Am I proud of them all? You bet your ass. It’s hard to quantify how much work goes into writing, editing, programming, and promoting an article. I do my best to make sure everything is said in earnest and that the music we cover is something I can put my weight behind, written about by people who mean it. 

Since there’s such an unwieldy amount of writing on this site, and we’ve been publishing more than ever before, I thought it might be nice to highlight some of my favorite things I’ve written over the last nine years. There’s always our Favorites tab, which is designed to showcase some of these articles, but I figured it could be fun to re-surface some of my personal favorites with a little bit of director’s commentary. I hope you enjoy this greatest hits collection, and if you’re reading this, thank you for supporting Swim Into The Sound and helping us get to 400 articles. I’ll see you when we break off the next hundo. 

Hey, did you guys know I like Wednesday? How about MJ Lenderman? Those two are some of my favorite artists currently working, and together, they’ve already made a sprawling collection of music that articulates a hyper-specific type of southern living. It’s desolate and dilapidated, collaborative and caring, humorous and honest, breathtaking and beautiful. This article attempts to recount my fandom of these two bands, their body of work, and the charming semi-fake cross-sectional genre their music has spawned. 

 

When it comes to writing about Sufjan Stevens, you know I had to lean in with a long-winded title and an overly-earnest explanation of my adoration. While I adore Carrie & Lowell, Illinois, and Age of Adz, I’ll always be a Michigan Boy in my heart of hearts. In this nearly 4k-word essay, I detail the hyper-specific way I fell into Sufjan’s music and delve directly into the masterwork that is his sophomore album. I even made a bunch of phone wallpapers out of the album art if that’s your type of thing. 

 

I love the indie/math rock outfit Minus The Bear. Throughout most of high school, college, and my twenties, I’d catch MTB in concert every time they came through Portland as they wound their way north back to Seattle. In this post, I rank all of their 11 official releases and use that as an opportunity to extol the virtues of various songs across their almost two-decade-long career. It’s long and heartfelt, but I still agree with the ranking to this day, so it’s nice to know I’m consistent.

 

An Introduction To Post-Rock

Post #132
Published April 24, 2020

I love putting people on. There’s no better feeling than recommending a band or album to someone and finding out that it connected. With this article, I wanted to give people an entry point into the post-rock genre. Since it’s largely instrumental and has tons of legacy acts, it can be hard to know exactly where to start with music like this, so I attempted to take my decades of fandom and hone down to an album (or two) from some of the genre’s most essential bands. The result was a collection of nine albums that will hopefully open the door to exploring each of these artist’s phenomenal discographies and the genre as a whole. 

 

Here is one of the first times I ever waded into music “theory” on this site. I say “theory” in quotes because it’s all very floaty pontificating, not music theory in the traditional, educational sense. Instead, what you get is a ten-point outline of how we come to like (or dislike) records. I pull from pop music, hip-hop, indie rock, and more to explore the concept of “growers” and how many extra-musical factors come into play with our fandom of any given artist. It’s a vaguely scientific analysis of what “liking” an album means, and I’m still proud of how thorough this feels.

 

It Gets Brown: Swim Into The Sound's Guide to Ween

Post #47
Published January 24, 2018

Have you ever wanted to get into Ween? You know, the glue-huffing Spongebob-adjacent duo that changed the face of Alternative Rock for a brief window back in the 90s? They have a massive body of work that is vibrant, goofy, and hard to pin down. Their early work is rough and haphazard, but their later work loses some of the group’s youthful shine. As such, they have an ambitious discography that can be difficult to navigate, but with this piece, I try to lay out a path for prospective listeners to jump into their music with both feet because I truly believe it’s a journey worth taking. 

 

The Wonder Years changed my life. Hearing The Upsides for the first time in my senior year of high school didn’t just comfort and compel me; it tipped life’s hand and let me know what I could expect throughout college and my early 20s. That band remains incredibly special to me, but their sophomore album will always be The One. If you want to learn why (or read about my failed high school relationship), this article is for you. 

 

I don’t write many anniversary pieces for this blog, but I have a special connection with Tunnel Blanket. The third album from post-rock mainstays This Will Destroy You is a largely wordless meditation on death, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot to say. I wound up writing this love letter to their seismic third album, and by the time I finished the first draft, I realized that the record just happened to have a birthday coming up. So, with that happy coincidence falling into my lap, everything lined up, and I published my first-ever anniversary review ten years on the dot.

 

Okay, let’s do a silly one. Back in 2018, Migos were untouchable. Everyone was listening to “Bad and Boujee,” doing the dab, and whipping up stir fry. In the midst of Migos Mania, the group released Culture II, a two-hour affair that packed 24 songs into one release, for better or worse. In listening to the whole thing, it’s hard to ignore how often Offset name-drops Patek Philippe. It’s such a distinct combination of words, and the rapper does deliver them well, but after a while, the name starts to lose all meaning. Here, I try to compile all of the rapper's references to the watch brand in an attempt to answer the question, “Does Offset own a Patek Philippe?” I also took a bunch of old Patek print ads and put Migos lyrics over them, so that’s still funny to me. 

 

Justin Vernon’s Ascent Into The Artificial

Post #99
Published April 7, 2019

Like any good Millennial, I have an unwavering affinity for Bon Iver. Like so many other people in 2007, I heard “Skinny Love,” and it shook me to my core. I followed his career closely, eventually culminating in an absolute masterwork with 22, A Million, an experimental and electronic album that couldn’t have sounded further from the folksy strums of his breakthrough. In this article, I chart that journey and make a case for both ends of this spectrum being equally beautiful.

 

I love Portugal. The Man. That’s a sentence that’s even more embarrassing to say now than it was back in 2017 when I wrote this article, but let me explain. PTM was one of the very first overtly “indie” bands I ever loved, and the fact that they’re essentially a Portland group filled me with an immense amount of hometown pride. I love their early proggy post-hardcore stuff, I adore their 2010s dips into psychedelia, and I even admire them for everything they’ve been able to achieve in the last half-decade since cementing themselves as an alternative rock mainstay. In this article, I rank every one of their studio albums, though, again, it was really an excuse to write about how much I adore each one of their records.

 

The Stark Maximalism of Sufjan Stevens

Post #119
Published January 7, 2020

Okay, one more Sufjan post. What can I say? The guy’s influential to me. Here, I focus on the Carrie & Lowell era as a suite of releases, stacking the original album side-by-side with the accompanying live album and collection of B-sides and demos released throughout the back half of the 2010s. What drew me to this body of work is how you can hear any given song scale up or down; you get these beautiful original versions on the LP, then bombastic renditions when performed live, and somehow even more quiet and careful versions when the same songs are in demo form. It’s a true marvel, and I’m grateful to follow an artist who treats his own work with this much reverence. 

 

My Favorite Type of Song

Post #214
Published November 19, 2021

We’ll end this with my favorite. Not necessarily my favorite thing I’ve ever written here, but a post about my favorite type of music. Specifically, a song that is long, winding, and wandering, preferably with a big, expansive, searching instrumental. It’s not quite a jam, but it’s not not a jam. In this post, I simply try to articulate what that feeling is and why it hits my brain so nicely. 

And there you have it: a baker’s dozen of essential Swim Into The Sound articles for your reading enjoyment. I hope you have had fun on this walk down memory lane, and thank you again for helping this site achieve such a landmark milestone. Now it’s onward to 500!

Celebrating 300 Articles: A Self-Important History of Swim Into The Sound Merch

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Last week, Swim Into The Sound sold out our first-ever run of t-shirts, and that’s unfathomably cool to me. First off, I wanted to thank everyone who encouraged me to make these shirts a reality, this was a fun project, and I’m proud to have a piece of this blog out in the world in such a concrete, physical way. Thanks even more if you’re one of the 20 people out there who are rocking it. Even if this shirt is just a goofy novelty item in your closet, it means the world that anyone would ever support me or my blog that much. 

While we just published our 300th article last week premiering the new Grave Saddles single, this is almost the “spiritual” 300th post, as I would like to pause, break format, and write candidly for anyone interested in reading. To borrow a phrase from the inane and inspiring Comedy Bang Bang, I’m going to “break off a fresh ‘hundo.” Historically, my hundredth posts have been big, intentional celebrations of me, my music, and the site. In a way, this is very much “back to the roots” of the early days of Swim, where I treated this more like a personal blog than a “music publication.” Okay, I’ll stop self-mythologizing now.

When I started this article, it began as a thank you to anyone who bought a shirt, but now I want to recount how they were made and the (semi-secret) history of Swim Into The Sound merch. If that sounds interesting, read on; if not, understandable, have a nice day. Regardless, thank you for reading any of our previous 300 articles or buying one of our shirts. It’s a surreal feeling to have all of those out of my closet and off into the world. Thanks for supporting this blog and supporting independent music writing. It’s hard out here, but we do it all for love. 

Swim Into The Sound has never made money. In fact, this blog has consistently lost me money. From day one, this was zero investment, with the site running 100% off Google Docs and Tumblr. I waded into any sort of financial commitment very gradually over the course of years. After I had run this thing for long enough and confirmed that it was something I wanted to keep doing, I bought a $20 domain from Godaddy and slapped it on my Tumblr page as a URL mask. Surprisingly, the move from “swimintothesound.tumblr.com” to “swimintothesound.com” did a lot to make this feel like a legitimate operation, even if it was just a top-line superficial change.

About a year later, I bought a (pretty massive) run of 4x4” stickers that I’m still milking to this day. Those stickers have lasted five years and, for a while, only existed as things I would stick up on light poles or dive bar bathrooms around Portland and Detroit. A month or two after I bought those stickers, I moved this whole operation over to Squarespace (yeah, boo, I know), but it felt like a move towards “independence” that I needed to make at the time. That same year, I paid a local photographer in the Portland DIY scene for usage rights to some of her photos from a recent Remo Drive concert. The beautiful, sweaty, grimy, black-and-white pictures you see on the home page are the imagery we’ve used since 2018. 

The next merch I committed to was an order of guitar picks with the blog’s logo printed onto them. They’re incredibly light and probably more of a novelty than anything, but I just thought they would make cool “business cards” for when I met people at shows or wanted to tell someone about the blog. It didn’t have my name or email on it or anything, I just figured “if they google Swim Into The Sound,” they’d find me. 

For a few years, any other money spent on this blog was either a domain renewal or buying another year of Squarespace. For some reason, I decided to order a one-off Swim Into The Sound Mug during the height of my 2020 Mania. I just bought it off one of those photo printing sites, so it’s “one of one,” and probably was more proof of concept than anything.

But I had always wanted to make a T-shirt. For years, I wanted to do even a weird little one-off with the logo on black, but never pulled the trigger. It didn’t help that, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the blog’s “normal” logo would look weird on a shirt. I still love our wordmark, color scheme, and the font I chose, but I just think it would look odd as words stretched across somebody’s chest. 

About this time a year ago, I saw lead singer of Khaki Cuffs and Twitter Friend Brody Hamilton posting about their design work. Aside from some solid logo rips and iconic shitposting vision, I knew Brody could throw together a pretty gnarly metal logo, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ and decided to commission one.

The first time I saw this logo, I was absolutely geeked. When I got the final version, I sent it to pretty much anyone I thought would be able to read it. I didn’t want to destroy the “brand recognition” of my standard logo (I still like how bold and simple it is), but this metal logo essentially became the secondary mark for the site. Brody was kind enough to lay out a “square” version and a “horizontal” layout I could use as my Twitter header. 

In August of 2022, I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs for a Short Fictions concert. I had never been to that city, so I was going around taking it all in the first time, trying to absorb the vibe. At one point, I was driving past a pretty nondescript business complex and saw a sign that read “Tees in Time.” My thought process was basically, “Huh, what if?” and I decided to get a quote the next day. 

I finally had all the pieces I needed: a sick-ass logo that would actually look good on a shirt, disposable income, and just enough of a home base established here in Denver. I decided if I ordered a small run of shirts, I could give a few out to friends and maybe even sell a handful. Most of all, I wanted one for myself, but I figured I could probably make the numbers work on a small order. 

This challenged me to learn about “ecommerce” and different ways to sell things online. Thanks to Jake from Grey Matter, Nick from Equipment, and Jake from No Fun Club, all of whom were kind enough to answer my (pretty stupid) baseline questions about running an online storefront. After a sufficient amount of research and finance wankery, I was spun up on LimitedRun and Pirate Ship. I had a minimal but clean storefront, and I was in business. 

It was hard to predict how many of these shirts I was going to sell. I was potentially ready to sit on these for years, just like I have with my stickers, but after a few sales rolled in from some friends back in Detroit and a few Twitter pals, I was struck that anyone actually wanted these enough to pay real money. It wasn’t until some of these friends sent me pictures of them wearing the shirts that I realized I made shirts and sent them halfway across the country. Pretty cool moment.

Earlier this year, I decided my time in Denver had come to a natural conclusion. In about a week, I’ll be moving my band shirts, kitchenware, keepsakes, and other sundries back to Portland, Oregon, where I’ll hang out for the summer. I stared down ten-ish remaining shirts in my closet, discounted them, slapped the free shipping option on, and decided to sell em hard. In one day, I shipped out the final six shirts and had one less thing to move. Go me. 

Then it hit me that (even though some were discounted) 19 people besides myself support whatever this is enough to own a shirt of it. That means the world to me, and I just wanted to capture that feeling of gratitude in this article today. That was a lot of backstory, numerical figures, and nitty-gritty details, but sometimes it’s nice to pull back the curtain and let you know how stuff like this runs. It’s easy to see how any support, financial or otherwise, can go so far at this scale. 

I’ve had all the sales from these shirts piling up in my Paypal (an account I never use for anything) and cashed it all out at once. Twenty shirts and months worth of planning finally done. This was an experiment, and it’s reached a point where I can actually stop and reflect. The fact that it coincided so closely with our 300th article is just a happy accident. 

I am feeling the love, and I always want to keep spreading that. As a way to pay it forward and spread the love, I’m making a donation to The Center on Colfax, which is an LGBTQ community center here in Denver. That wasn’t profit or money left over, it just feels like something that makes sense to do. Swim Into The Sound is a silly blog about emo music, and sometimes there are more important things we have to acknowledge and support and push out money toward. 

This has been long and very masturbatory, but if you read this far, thank you. Three hundred posts is a huge milestone that’s worth celebrating. Moreover, when we published our massive Fauxchella interview last month, that article officially pushed the site to over 500,000 words published. It’s crazy to think that half a million words have been posted to this blog, and that’s a number that still trips me up a little. 

Regardless, there’s lots to celebrate in an already awesome year. Thank you for everything. 

Here’s to another 300 and half a milli more. 

My 200 Favorite Songs of All Time

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At the end of last year, this site rounded the corner on 150 total articles published. Once I hit that milestone, it immediately felt as if my 200th article loomed right around the corner. I had started to post more regularly than ever before, and running this website felt like a relatively healthy hobby to commit to during a global pandemic. At the onset of this year, I also made a resolution to post at least one article a week throughout 2021, and I’m proud to say I’ve kept that up all year, more or less. 

Also around this same time, I hatched a grand idea for my 200th article on this site to be a ranking of my top 200 songs of all time. I wanted to do full-paragraph write-ups for each song, articulating exactly what I loved about them on both a personal and musical level. I tried to start that piece a few times over the last year, but the idea was simply too overwhelming for me even to begin to genuinely chip away at.

However, what I have done over the last year is create an iTunes playlist of all my favorite songs. I’ve been updating and scrutinizing this list with some level of regularity, so it feels like a relatively complete reflection of who I am in 2021. Obviously, I couldn’t quite find the time to write about all 200 tracks, but I realized that if I was going to have them all collected somewhere, I might as well make it somewhere public. 

This isn’t a traditional post where I wax poetic for thousands of words. Instead, I celebrate Swim Into The Sound’s 200th post in a manner that’s very un-like Swim Into The Sound. At the bottom of this article, you’ll find a Spotify playlist featuring 200 of my favorite songs of all time... Err, well, more like 198 of my favorite songs, because neither “Weak Man, Weak Boy” or “Waltz of the Sea Wolf” are on Spotify. This playlist is in “reverse chronological order,” with my favorite songs up top. While I’m listing asterisks, I’d also like to caution that this playlist gets decidedly less ranked as it goes on. 

If you’re interested in reading about some of these songs in more detail, I wrote about my fifteen favorites back in 2019 for the site’s 100th post. That article approaches the topic in a manner that’s more befitting of this blog; long adoration-filled paragraphs about pieces of music that are very near and dear to my heart.

Even though this post is not the ornate 200-song-long write-up I first envisioned, it’s is still a celebration. Two hundred articles is a monumental achievement in my mind because it just feels so big–each hundred does. I still remember naming my first document in Google Drive and using the format “001” because I thought I would never pass 1,000. It’s not like I’m close now, but I at least understand what that quantity feels like.

This is also a celebration because I genuinely believe in everything that gets posted here. I have poured unquantifiable hours into each of the 199 posts that proceeded this one. This blog may seem amateurish or overly earnest at times, but it’s genuine to me, and that’s what I care about most. 

So thank you for reading this. Thank you if you’ve ever read Swim Into The Sound before, and thank you even more if you read the site regularly. 

Thank you if you’ve contributed to the site as a guest writer, said something nice on social media, or worked with me in any capacity. It all adds up, and every single piece of support means the world to me.

Running this site is genuinely one of the highlights of my life, and I thank you for being a part of it.

Thank you for coming along, and thank you for caring. 

Invite The Neighbors Podcast Interview

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Ever wondered what my voice sounds like? Ever wanted to know the origins of Swim Into The Sound? Do you want to know what my favorite thing I’ve ever written was? Well, the answers to those questions and more will all be revealed in the newest episode of Invite The Neighbors.

Bryan Porter of In A Daydream invited me on to his DIY podcast to discuss this very blog. We covered the first posts I ever wrote, the (questionable) first concert I was ever paid to review, and why I love doing this despite how much time, effort, and money it consumes.

So please give it a listen, and check out some of the other interviews. Thank you Bryan for the awesome chat, and for being such a gracious host. 

Give the podcast a listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or through this link.