Swim Into The Sound Turns Ten

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.

Columbia

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

Rhymesayers

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

Tiny Engines

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

Epitaph Records

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

Jagjaguwar

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

Ghostly International

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

Epitaph Records

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

Top Dawg Entertainment

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

Sacred Bones

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!

Rough Trade Records

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

GOOD Music, Distributed by Def Jam

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 

Deathwish Inc.

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

Self-Released

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

Drag City

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

Making New Enemies

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

Atlantic Records

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

Lame-O Records

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

Mom+Pop 

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

Orindal Records

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

Polyvinyl Record Co.

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

Wax Bodega

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

No Funeral Records

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.

(500) Posts of Swim

Because I am a dork-ass nerd obsessed with metadata, organization, and digital architecture, I was thinking about file names long before this website ever went live. Back when Swim Into The Sound was just one Mogwai review sitting in a Google Drive Folder, I decided to preface the document name with two leading zeros, sticking “001” before the title.

It was arbitrary and something that only I would ever see on the back end of the site in my Russian doll-like nest of folders, but I liked the idea that I’d be able to keep track of how many articles I put up. I also figured that three numerical spaces gave me a lot of room. If I ever wrote 999 things, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it, but one thousand pieces of individual writing seemed a far way off in 2015. 

As of today, with this post, Swim Into The Sound has officially published 500 articles, and that’s sick as hell to me. This achievement is largely thanks to the fantastic team of writers and contributors who are lending their beautiful brains to help keep Swim flowing with regular reviews and recommendations. Of the 33 articles we’ve published in the main feed this year, only three were written by me. I’ve kept myself busy with lots of editing, music listening, and Swim Selects, a weekly column I instituted earlier this year to help keep myself writing regularly and make things a little more casual. 

By and large, Swim Into The Sound feels more democratized and wide-ranging than ever before, and I feel so proud of all the writing we’re sharing and music we’re celebrating. It also probably goes without saying, but with this many people writing for us (no matter how sporadically), things have picked up quite a bit. To give a quick timeline: we celebrated 100 articles in 2019, 200 articles in 2021, 300 articles in 2023, and 400 articles less than a year ago in 2024. Bonkers. If you are a stats nerd and want to see even more numbers, charts, and graphs, I’d encourage you to read an article from the end of last year called Swim Into The Stats

To borrow a phrase from Comedy Bang Bang, each time we break off a fresh hundo, I like to break format a little just to discuss how the blog has changed since the last interval. Sure, it’s a little self-indulgent and navel-gazey, but sometimes you gotta celebrate the work and recognize the time/effort that’s gone into it. Everything posted here is considered, labored over, edited to the best of my ability, and released into the wild with our entire heart behind them. 

2025 was always going to be a banner year for Swim Into The Sound. This June, on Friday the 13th, Swim Into The Sound will officially be TEN years old, which feels absolutely outrageous to say. That’s one decade since I hit “publish” on that Mogwai review and changed my life forever. That might sound a little hyperbolic, but it’s true! Swim Into The Sound has been a central nexus of my life and brain for the last ten years. This website has allowed me to express myself in unbelievable ways, brought countless cool people into my life, and continues to be a wellspring of music and writing that I will treasure forever. Sorry if this is all too earnest.


To celebrate this milestone and spread some goodwill, I’m excited to announce NEW SWIM INTO THE SOUND SHIRTS! For the Real Heads keeping score: We had previously done a run of metal logo t-shirts in 2023, but I like the idea of shaking it up so no two rounds of merch are the same. I’m proud to show off this mockup of the second-ever Swim Into The Sound shirt: our Caffeine Lovers Tee, coming this June.

While I initially made this design as a fun little shitpost back in 2020, my friend Clair Bagwell helped clean up the files to make sure everything was perfectly kerned, spaced out, and rendered in pixel-perfect resolution. She’s killer, thanks to her. The shirts were printed locally through Wahoo Screen Graphix in Wilmington, North Carolina. Thanks to them too, they were awesome to work with.

In addition to the shirt, we have a run of SWIM INTO THE SOUND TOTE BAGS featuring our classic logo. There’s also a limited selection of SMOKE INTO THE SOUND LIGHTERS (available only in person at Fauxchella 8) and a fresh batch of SWIM INTO THE SOUND STICKERS that will accompany every order. This will all be available the first week of June.

I’m also excited to announce that we will be donating all profits raised from our shirts, tote bags, and lighters – splitting the money between three different charities: The Palestine Children's Relief Fund (pcrf.net), Be Loved Asheville (belovedasheville.com), and the Gender Liberation Movement (genderlib.org). These organizations are all doing amazing work, and it’s never been as important to be active and participatory in the world. If my writing about emo music and selling silly shirts helps spread something good, then it’s all the better.


Some more fun housekeeping. You might have noticed some changes around this site in terms of the design. For one thing, the logo at the top of your screen is now our official font. While I’ve been updating our home page and the blog’s sidebars, the most impressive thing to me is the new floating banner we have on mobile, which really helps make this feel like a real website. And while I’m giving shoutouts, thanks to my friend Alex Couts for helping with some backend CSS stuff to make your scrolling extra easy on the eyes. I love how this site looks and feels on mobile, especially – a worthy little facelift as the blog rounds off its tenth year of existence. 

That’s it from me for now. We’ve got some fun stuff planned for Swim Into The Sound’s tenth birthday on June 13th, but other than that, as always, I appreciate you being here. Thank you to anyone who’s ever read the site, wrote for the site, shared something from the site, or sent me some cool music. This whole site runs on passion, love, and free time, so thanks for spending some of yours here. 

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

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

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.

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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

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.