(500) Posts of Swim

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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. 

Pretty Rude – Ripe | Album Review

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SideOneDummy

There was an album that someone once described to me as so dense that the best way to understand it was if you were standing with the artist on the same corner of the same street on the same summer afternoon they were thinking about making the songs. An album so dense in layers of sound, lyrical twists, personal secrets, musical callbacks, and outra-artistic references that it would reveal more of itself with every listen, constantly morphing into a clearer picture. While I didn't agree with this assessment for that particular album, I think it perfectly describes Pretty Rude's debut album, Ripe.

If you find yourself digging through the digital indie rock crates, you're likely to encounter the name James Palko at some point. Palko is one of the most sonically recognizable producers of the 2020s, enveloping his work in rich sounds and big production. He’s culpable for the yacht rock bliss of Jimmy Montague, the muscular bark and wayward bite of Taking Meds, and the full sensory overload of one of emo’s most under-appreciated projects, Perspective, a Lovely Hand to Hold. 

The latter two bands ended somewhat abruptly, with Palko caught in the spin-out. The sudden change – a life built around writing, recording, and touring turning into a life without these reliable fixtures – led Palko to focus on Pretty Rude with longtime bandmate and epic drummer Matt Cook. Chronologically, Pretty Rude has been kicking around since 2021 when the group released a self-titled EP, but was mostly dormant until last summer when Palko re-shared the EP on the otherwise empty Pretty Rude Twitter account. Someone in the comments of the post asked what this meant, and Palko responded: “the ‘taking this seriously’ era has arrived.” And arrived it has. Now, Pretty Rude is back and more dialed in than ever for their debut album, offering an eight-song ripper that injects pure, electric power pop into well-loved Moby Dick references.

The album begins on an inhale—a final deep breath of feedback, sharp static, and a steady thrum that builds and builds before bursting into the exhale. “The Caller” is symphonic in its sound, swapping the whine of a violin for the hum of an electric guitar. The near-cacophony then begins to make room for the swing of Palko’s voice, alternating between his regular singing voice, his falsetto, and a choir. While his voice remains even, pointedly so, the song builds and falls, climbing around the bend of a competing electric guitar. Aside from Palko's voice, element that makes Ripe different from any other power pop indie rock record in 2025 is the band's use of a choir. In “The Caller,” this choir hums around the edges, adding an almost sinister depth to the song. 

One song later on “Things I Do,” the choir provides a secondary dialogue that questions Palko’s thoughts and plans by repeatedly asking, “Why do you?” Overall, “Things I Do” kicks ass, plain and simple. The song harkens back to rock’s most theatrical impulses with a tambourine ringing over Palko’s words, a hand hammering away at a keyboard, and Cook’s drums shuffling a groovy beat. But Pretty Rude are tricksters, not content to let any song move forward as expected. Halfway through, the track flips a switch, teasing a full breakdown before resurfacing into a hair metal bridge. 

There’s a palpable attitude that exudes from Pretty Rude, I mean, it’s in the name, they’re not only rude — they’re pretty rude. Sure, they never outright snarl at the listener, there’s an eye roll or a middle finger in there, but mostly directed at themselves. This likely originates from the man at the helm because Palko doesn’t mince words, ever. From the withering directness of Perspective to the shotgun combativeness of Taking Meds to the ever-incisive plea of Jimmy Montague, “don’t fuck me on this,” Palko picks projects that frustrate.

Frustration is all over Ripe. After “Things I Do,” the album shifts into its final single, “Call Me, Ishmael,” a grungy track with an agitated bass line and even more agitated music video. It’s critical to mention that Palko has a strong visual eye and directed several music videos for this album, including one for “Call Me, Ishmael.” The video harkens back to the 00s days of sell-out culture and satirizing big music labels. In the video, a cartoonish record label executive swaps the band’s instruments for cooler ones, the band’s clothes for stylish ones, and eventually the members themselves for what Palko called “Hot Guys Of The Future,” aka labelmates Stoph Colasanto and Tommy Eckerson from Carpool. The tongue-in-cheek video makes Pretty Rude’s anxieties about committing themselves to music laughable right up until the end. It reminded me of that one Sum 41 video, but instead of getting Deryck Whibley’s lesson that record labels suck and being true to yourself rocks, the “Call Me, Ishmael” video finishes on a sour note — the hot guys take over the band and Pretty Rude are kicked out. 

Despite all the disillusionment, Pretty Rude find the time to soften everything with humor. In “The Work,” Palko reflects, “I should have been an athlete, I should have been a jock,” his rumination continues, wistfully imagining life as a finance bro and an actor. He ends with a pouty, “I’m a wreck when the work’s all gone, I’m just a mess, no fun.” In “Call Me, Ishmael,” Palko contemplates grifting himself, and in “Polish Deli,” he imagines seeing the rest of his life while waiting in line, the choir returning to monologue his inner thoughts. Between the funny videos and the project's sarcastic lyrics, Pretty Rude capture a vast emotional landscape, beating the listener to a self-deprecating joke before they even consider it. The jokes give way to honesty and insecurity in a way bluntness can’t capture. In other words, the humor of the project, like the Randy Newmans and Frank Zappas before them, protects its emotional depth.

But it’s not all laughs, “Unconfidence Man” (which, granted, is a funny phrase) opens with almost a straight minute of a razor-sharp electric guitar, alternating between the song’s earworm riff and a hard guitar chug, all one degree away from blowing out my speakers. This is one of two songs off Ripe that reference Moby Dick, the first being “Call Me, Ishmael.” Palko’s literary lyrics are central to Pretty Rude’s resounding cleverness, and his words are never inauthentic; rather, they’re crucial to the band, the conclusions of someone truly moved by literature using his interpretations of classic stories and characters to explain himself.

The literary references continue into “Debbie & Lynn.” Sonically, the song leans Weezerian, but like if Rivers Cuomo wasn’t a twerp with a fanbase that drives Cybertrucks and was instead, you know, a cool guy with a Twitter account. It’s a total power pop ride, kicking off with a whispered intro before Cook kicks in his dance beat. The song delves darker and deeper as Palko chants “No vacation” before soaring back into a guitar solo, like a diving plane pulling up before a crash. The song gets its name from Billy Collins’ poem “Traveling Alone,” which Collins describes as a work about “moving through a world of strangers,” a subject that seems to thematically match Palko’s continued processing of a new artistic life. Like “Call Me, Ishmael,” I would be remiss not to bring up the music video, which imagines two new flight attendants (Debbie and Lynn) and a drunken pilot, played by Palko, getting ready for work. 

The album ends with “No Moment,” a raw reflection on Pretty Rude’s career in music. In Palko’s words, “[No Moment] is all about how if this is how it ends, then nothing really came of it. Like, am I ready to be done with what I was doing? I was feeling a little bit chewed up and spat out by being in bands for the better part of the last two decades.” Pretty Rude is earnest in its honesty, even if the honesty is harsh. Despite these thoughts, and to have never had a “moment” in music, I’m glad Palko is still trying out new projects. I honestly don’t know where really cool rock and roll would be without him right now.

Every listen of Ripe reveals more and more, getting bolder and smarter with every replay; it even recommended me a poem. Each song has a new sleight of hand in its production that you didn’t notice before, and each lyric has a different meaning you didn’t consider on the last listen. Pretty Rude walks a constant maximalist line, fascinated with seeing just how much they can pack in. I feel like I’m on the street corner with them. Most importantly, I’ve never been more inspired to finally read Moby Dick. 

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Cathal Francis – Snowblind | Album Review

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Self-released

Cathal (pronounced “ka-hill”) Francis lives in Londonderry (or Derry if you’re familiar). Not a small city, but not a massive metropolis, it sits on the river, surrounded by gentle currents of green hills and what I’m assuming are mostly grey skies. I’m telling you this, however, primarily to dash it all away. The background, the landscape, and the imagery can only be found in bits and pieces when zoomed in on Cathal himself. His words, his timbre, his guitar-playing mannerisms —all flashes of his home and city, glimpses of an environment viewed in fleeting succession, like a series of windows down a long hallway. On his latest EP, Snowblind, the 24-year-old walks us down this hallway, not minding the invasive gazes both at him and the scenery.

It feels a touch trite to bring an Elliot Smith comparison to this review, as his work feels largely synonymous with any and all who make quiet tenderness their home, and all the same, Francis’ hearth undoubtedly has that glow. “Severance,” the EPs opening ballad, feels like a gloomy yet bright countryside stroll, and there are more than a few phrases that sonically harken back to the Wolfman himself, but still, Cathal finds his own course. Even with the clear line of influence found on tracks like the strummy hum-along melody that dots the hillsides of “Pattern” or the quiet ballad as soft as ripples on a small pretty loch, ala “Arrangements.” The EP builds its own world and wraps you up in it, but as tender as all the sound and thrum feels, it is very much still an album of despondency.

“Saccharine” launches a dreamy, slow meander through stormclouds brewing soft and sweetly before the cacophonous thunder-crack of its middle section, band joining in at full volume, storming around you as Francis sinks into a deceptively sugary refrain:

Is innocence a dying art?
How do you mend a broken heart?
You fill the void that’s in between
With Phenergan and Sertraline
If love is just a losing game, then why did you give me a name?
All good things come to an end
But that’s okay, ‘cause you’re my friend
Is it saccharine purity or naive immaturity that makes me wake up the way I am?

The hush following his final line feels as expansive, sweeping, and empty as a tempest-battered countryside, bleak and oppressed. 

I've always felt enamored by the singer-songwriter type. From the late great Elliot Smith all the way to the still, mighty, and true Will Sheff, something about a voice and guitar alone feels so powerful while bravely vulnerable all at the same time. Cathal Francis feels green in these ranks, but if there's one thing that the Snowblind EP indicates, it's that he'll be of familiarly kept company soon enough. 

Southern California born and raised, Elias can often be found at the local gig, be it screamo, emo, hardcore, or online @listentohyakkei begging people to listen to the MANS Summer 2007 demo. Their time in the scene is patchwork but their dedication to it and the music that makes it has made up the last few years of their life. They love this shit with the whole of their heart and will talk your ear off about it if you let them. Screamo for fucking ever.

Love your friends. Die laughing.

Apes of the State – What’s Another Night? | Album Review

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Self-released

When I first heard “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” I had to search for Laura online. She had been one of my best friends in high school, and I long had thought she was also trans, so it was no surprise when she came out within a month of us seeing Against Me! at the end of sophomore year. She always said school wasn’t for her, so it also wasn’t a surprise when she dropped out of high school the following year. I didn’t want to lose touch with her, but that’s just the way shit goes when you’re worried about taking the ACT and qualifying for nationals in debate while your friend is in the work force and getting her GED. Life has its way of tearing friends apart when you’re just thinking of yourself. It was a surprise, though, when I heard that she started doing heroin at some point in senior year.

The last time I saw her was in December 2019 at our friend Henry’s wake, only four years after we had graduated. Henry had seizures all the time, and they are what inevitably took him. Laura was good, she was clean, she cried on my shoulder before she had to leave for work. No one I’ve kept in touch with since high school mentioned her in the intervening years, and I hate to admit that I never asked because I was worried the answer would be that she died. 

I wasn’t expecting to think of Laura when I was listening to Apes of the State’s third album, What’s Another Night?, but I had to know after I heard April Hartman’s voice twist like a dagger while singing about her friend’s Bad Brains t-shirt she wears to remember them. All I could think about were Laura’s Misfits and Fear tattoos. 

Apes of the State have always made music about what it means to survive, from the plea to love someone through the pits of desperation on “Strangers” to the nine minutes Hartman dedicates to the internal conflict that accompanies justifying your existence on “Dear Mom.” Now on What’s Another Night?, Apes of the State is concerned about honoring their friends, those who’ve made it this far, and especially those who haven’t. 

Throughout What’s Another Night?, Hartman draws on the dissonance of missing the “good old days” and knowing you can never go back there. The folk-pop-punk of “I’m Okay!” and both parts of “Hot Summer Night” draw me back to a memory of the night before junior year when all my friends were at Henry’s house, when we snuck out at 1 a.m. and wandered his neighborhood until we saw a loose street sign pole leaning on the concrete divider ahead of a roundabout when I accidentally pulled it out of the ground when I was just testing to see how stable it was when we all looked at each other before running back to Henry’s house with our shirts off because we had slung them around the pole so we could carry it by the ends of our shirts instead of covering it with our fingerprints when we got to Henry’s house he grabbed his tools and we took the “keep right of divider” sign off when ran the pole back to the roundabout and laid it next to it’s hole in the ground when the next morning while Laura was driving me home we went towards the roundabout and saw a guy from the fire department parked next to the stripped sign writing on a notepad and I just knew when he looked at us he could tell we did it, and when I’m finished reminiscing about that night, I’m reminded of the photo of Henry in a t-shirt with a skateboarding cat propped next to his casket. Things are easier when you’re teenage punks, when your biggest worry is asking your mom for money to get Chipotle while you’re skating 12 miles to the nearest mall. Things are easier before time has definite boundaries and you feel invincible.

But that’s where the hymns of remembrance that make up this record find their strength, in the fact that “time keeps moving forwards even though there is no way of knowing what direction I am facing.” What else is there to do but to keep going, to hope and work towards a better future?

What’s Another Night? isn’t just a set of songs remembering departed friends – it is those moments that Hartman directs to the people still with us that are my favorite on the record. I love the moment on “Little Things” when she so sincerely sings, “and to my friends who are here with me / I’m not saying let’s take life seriously / but I’m serious about you staying alive.” Truthfully, the scariest thing to me about being trans is the reality that all of my trans friends’ lives are made precarious by the disdain we face for existing. There are so many confounding variables in life that I worry I don’t show my love and care for my people enough, like Hartman admits on “Best Friends” or “Round 2” (an acoustic rerecording of the acapella “Fight Song” from Pipe Dream) when she sings, “sorry that I haven’t called you back / I’ve been busy trying not to lose my shit.” I know I am often a shitty fucking friend, I’m the type of girl to put her foot in her mouth with an ill timed joke, but that’s what makes me so grateful my friends still love me. Like Hartman sings, “I promise that I’m working on it.”

I’m worried that it was never clear how much I loved Laura. Right after I came out, I realized Laura didn’t know I was trans too. I’m sure she suspected it, though. Around that time, I found her Instagram account and requested to follow her. That was the first thing I checked when I was listening to “Punk Rock Shows in Heaven,” but three years later, that request is still pending.

When I Googled Laura, I misspelled her last name, but still, there she was. The top result was the page for her wedding in November. There was that close-lipped smile I knew, and a black beanie like always. I saw her holding her fiancée in her arms as Hartman sang “tell the kids that are hooked on heroin / we found a way down here to cope without that.” 

I’m happy that even though we weren’t facing the same way, we both moved forward with the time for another night.

Names in this review have been changed for the sake of privacy.

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her burner account on twitter @Lilymweber.

Beauty Saloon – BS | Album Review

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Self-Released

By the time you finish reading this sentence, Beauty Saloon may have already broken up. The on-again-off-again Chicago group has been relaxing under the radar for over a year and a half, quietly assembling the pieces of their debut album, the cheekily-titled and almost eponymous BS. Singer-songwriter and guitarist Michael Molitor believes the band’s lifespan from here on out hangs in the balance, uncertain if the Saloon’s hours are up, but the release of their possibly sole LP acts as a celebration of progress, a document of a post-pandemic upstart band delivering everything they have to offer. Looking at the album’s track listing, BS may initially seem like a compilation or unfinished fragments of a more holistic project, but it all culminates in a complete listening experience that clearly delivers on the band’s intentions.

There is a wide range of influences that weave in and out of each song, starting with “What Are You Made Of? (Milk!),” which is immediately reminiscent of the quirkier sides of alternative music, such as Beat Happening, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Cheekface. The shimmering melodies and jangly guitars let the song sit nicely somewhere between emo and unfuzzed shoegaze, all with a ripping alt-country guitar solo to boot. Molitor’s vocals are restrained and captivatingly boyish, sifting on top of the music as another instrument in the mix. “Zelda” is a twangy, strummy ballad that almost sounds like a performance of a ‘60s Bee Gees soul song played three rooms away – smooth with a magnetic subtlety.

If you were a fan of MJ Lenderman’s seemingly nonsensical lyrics on Manning Fireworks, you’ll enjoy the fast food odyssey of “Dial Up,” Beauty Saloon’s opus clocking in at just under six minutes. This is one of a few tracks written by second guitarist Austin Rose but sung by Molitor, who handles it with the care the words deserve. I don’t mean to call this song “nonsense,” but there’s a lot about it that channels the spirit of a track like Lenderman’s “Rip Torn,” where Rose recalls, “When I was a child, maybe seventeen, me and my old man went down to Burger King. And we went to Popeye’s Chicken too, no, our dogs and our cats can’t eat that kind of food.” Following the end of that verse is a sprawling instrumental passage that encompasses a variety of different flavors, much like a Whopper and a classic chicken sandwich.

Rose’s other writing credits include “Pickups,” his only lead vocal on the album, complete with a backing track that sounds like a beachy b-side from Kings Of Leon’s Come Around Sundown, but less familial rock and roll and more slacker whammy bar worship. There’s a nice addition of cello performed by Chaepter Gottschalk, who glides along nicely with the rest of the band, and Rose has a great call to Molitor’s guitar solo á là Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me.” Lead single “No One to Feed” is the third Rose writing credit and the third of four songs on BS that leans into a food theme, one that I suspect is unintentional overall but creates a fun throughline across the album’s duration. The groove, along with Molitor’s vocals, makes it sound like Elliott Smith at the not-O.K. Corral, a tear-in-your-beer tune turned tender for tongue-in-cheek tattooed millennials. The track is preceded by the album’s briefest moment, “Feels Good To Be Invited,” which could have been plucked from any of the classic, pre-insurrection Ariel Pink albums.

The second half of BS dips into the band’s slightly older material and recontextualizes it for an album presentation. Molitor rocks “Bassoon Girl” like a mix of Ram-era McCartney and early Springsteen, with more fun lyrics that could have come from an old Sparks album: “And I still hear the bassoon rushing over it all… and I ain’t got no hearing problems.” The song originally appeared on their first EP of demos in 2022, although interestingly, the three demos that follow on BS are previously unreleased. “Sugarbear Honeypie” is as sweet and mushy as the title suggests, but holy shit does Beauty Saloon put together one of the prettiest ballads I’ve heard this decade. The harmonized falsetto group vocals over the guitar arpeggios dance beautifully with each other and make the track sound like a generationally passed-down lullaby. “Can’t Keep Love Around (Dopamine Dragon)” is a lo-fi Kurt Vile-esque laidback rocker, and it would have been cool to see what the band could have done with it as a proper studio track, but this demo version gives it a particular personality.

“Liza Minnelli,” the band’s first proper single from 2023, closes out BS in an alternate, live-in-studio version, and is a nice button on the LP and the band overall. Listening to Beauty Saloon take one of their more popular early tracks and letting it ring out as the final moments on their first album gives a feeling of completion, like the band has served its purpose, and the next chapters are going to begin. It’s their encore performance before the bow, just like Minnelli herself would give.

Beauty Saloon’s brief period in the Chicago indiesphere could have been glossed over entirely, leaving them a memory of a memory of a band, but their work on BS shows them coming together and leaving their mark, reminding us locals of the special brand of DIY music they had to offer. And who knows, by the time you finish reading this sentence, Beauty Saloon may have already reunited. 

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.