Welcome to Spotify's Algorithmically Generated Hellscape

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This is Big Thief.
This is Soundgarden.
This is Neil Young… Well, not anymore.

We’ve all seen these playlists when searching for our favorite artists on Spotify. If you open the app, press the little magnifying glass, and type in the name of virtually any band with more than 50 songs, you’ll probably see some variation of the same results; the Artist’s page, a few popular songs or albums by them, and then a playlist boldly declaring, “THIS IS [insert artist name].”

Those playlists exist for any artist that meets the minimum criteria, and they are designed to put together a decently-sized 2- to 4-hour-long playlist of all the artists’ most streamed songs in one place. Spotify’s “THIS IS” playlists exist for artists of all sizes and every music genre. This is Ed Sheeran. This is Michael Jackson. This is Weird Al. You get it. 

The scale of these playlists ranges from gargantuan collections of classic works to mildly successful indie rock groups from your hometown. In some cases, they act as decade-spanning histories of massively influential artists like The Rolling Stones. In other cases, they are pretty serviceable representations of a band’s collective work, like Stone Temple Pilots. In every case, these playlists are meant to do one thing: emulate a Greatest Hits record. 

This allows a casual user to search for a band, stumble upon this playlist, and scroll through a bunch of their most popular songs in one place. These playlists, along with the addition of a dedicated lyrics function, signify a change in Spotify upping their SEO and bolstering their recommendation engine. Alongside these more helpful quality of life changes is a new initiative that’s simultaneously goofier and far more sinister. 

Back in early November, Twitter user @_gaydro posted a picture of their Spotify app showcasing a playlist flatly named “Evil Mix.” The description beneath the automatically-generated playlist cover reads, “Evil music picked just for you.” 

People in the comments and quote tweets were quick to dive into their own Spotify apps and report back the most obscure and outright hilarious examples they could find within their libraries. Fast clown music. Spooky evil jazz mix. Tennessee pirate mix. Each title seemed more incoherent and absurd than the last; a gobbledygook combination of nouns, buzzwords, and vaguely musical terms, all denoted as from Spotify and “made for you.”

One Redditor commented on the sheer breadth of dog-specific playlists that Spotify had crafted for him: Calm Dogs Mix, Dogs Calming Mix, Dogs Pet Calming Mix, and more. “I must have searched once for music to help my dog figure fireworks out, and now I am gifted with this kind of variety… If you scroll slow enough, the page just keeps loading, so I don't think there is an end to the algorithm attempting to satisfy your every need,” they observed. 

These playlists are essentially an extension of Spotify’s Daily Mix program. In a press release from early 2021, Spotify explains the fuel behind these mixes with an impressive stat, explaining that “every day, half a trillion events—whether they are searches, listens, likes, or countless other actions—take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system. This gives us the ability to drive discovery in a way that audio has never seen before.” In their own bland, corporate, grey-cubicle-approved marketing words, “Spotify Mixes represent the next generation of focused, personalized offerings.”

So that raises a few questions, why so many? Who is this for? What the hell is going on? It was a fun day to be online and see what insanely specific playlists people were able to dig up, but I didn’t think much of this phenomenon until I traveled home for the holidays and was poking around the family computer to find that my own mother had saved one of these playlists. Happy Birthday Mix. There it was, staring me in the face. I finally understood.

Those far-out examples of “Goblincore Mix” and “Crazy Bagpipes Mix” are inherently goofy, but these “normal” instances like “Happy Birthday Mix” make much more sense. I can practically see my mom, on her birthday or the birthday of one of my brothers, searching Spotify for “happy birthday,” finding that playlist, and saving it. I mean, why not?

Maybe I’m just being overly precious about “mah playlists,” but it rubbed me wrong to see some algorithmically-generated bullshit garnering attention and listens just because Spotify has created a glut of playlists meant to catch any possible combination of terms a user could type into their app. 

In almost every case, these mixes are filled with “just some songs.” The more straightforward playlists will populate with a handful of songs you’ve already listened to and a dozen others that the Spotify Machine Brain thinks you will enjoy. For instance, my 70s Rock Mix (clocking in at an even four hours) opens with “Iron Man” and Tangerine” before throwing to some Heart and Pink Floyd. In these cases, Spotify is serving you music it already knows you like and throwing a few deeper cuts into the mix here and there. That’s where the “made for you” comes in; Spotify is just pulling your own data and serving it back to you under the guise of something specific like “Sensual Noise Mix.” 

As you would expect, the goofier playlists are where things get even weirder. The more absurd mixes contain songs that fit their criteria in very literal ways with song titles, artist names, or even album covers that fit the description. For me, “Fast Clown Music Mix” includes songs from a band named Clown Core taken off an album called Van, which has cover art depicting a blue minivan. The same playlist opens with a song off an album called Mirror Might Steal Your Charm, which features a sort of jester-like figure on its cover. Now that sounds like Fast Clown Music picked just for me.

So why does this matter? This technology is still in its infancy, but I believe these mixes are something Spotify is testing to trick their users more effectively. People have no insight into how these playlists are made, what goes into them, or how many of them there are. People just look up a term and are served a loosely-themed collection of music that they’re probably already familiar with. Alternatively, they’re given a playlist packed with a bunch of tangentially-related songs that fit some surface-level criteria.

Where this gets complicated is that Spotify can choose what songs are placed within these mixes with zero transparency. After all, we’re talking about a company that gives out $4 for every thousand plays. They’re notoriously cheap and view the music being uploaded onto their platform as mere content. On the one hand, Spotify is making music more accessible than ever; on the other hand, they’re actively devaluing art. 

A couple of years back, Spotify introduced “Discovery Mode,” which is like the platform’s own version of pay-to-play. With this feature, the streaming company borrowed a concept from the days of radio where an artist (or, more likely, label) would pay a station to play their songs more frequently. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how Spotify could manipulate what tracks appear on these playlists and therefore get streams. 

Am I saying these bands are fake? Not necessarily, but that is something Spotify has been accused of. By the same logic, it’s easy to see how Spotify could fill hours of these types of playlists with ambient music, “peaceful piano” tracks, and faceless acoustic fare. It doesn’t matter if the artists behind these songs are real because the playlists are meant to fill a specific vibe, mood, or need. Cozy Christmas Music Mix. Dinner Party Mix. Beach Music Chill Evening Mix. They mean nothing.

This could just be the rambling of one overly-concerned overly-online music nerd, but I think that any time Spotify removes the agency out of music consumption, it’s a reason to be wary. Their series of “This Is” playlists are a microcosm of a platform-wide issue of pushing streams (and money) only to the top. Most artists do not turn a profit from Spotify, and that isn’t a sustainable business model. 

Tricking people into clicking on (and listening to) an algorithmically-generated playlist of songs is a step further. It’s gaming a system that’s already rigged. It will be fascinating to see what comes of these playlists over the next year or two. I’m interested to see if they become more plentiful, elevated higher within the app, or how often they start popping up over actual playlists and albums made by real humans. 

The truth is that Spotify has a vested interest in keeping you on their platform, but even more so if you’re listening to the artists they want you to listen to. They don’t want you to think. Spotify doesn’t want you to search for a small artist or listen to a specific album; they want you to throw on a four-hour-long megamix of music they have already chosen for you. Conscious listening is bad for business, Spotify wants you to devour slop from their trough.

Ultimately, when Spotify chooses what we listen to, we’re not listening to music anymore; we’re just listening to Spotify.

The Countrygaze Manifesto

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One time in 2009, I was sick as a dog. I was a sophomore in high school, and this was still a period before widespread smartphones or apps. The only sources of entertainment I had were my trusty iPod and a tiny little netbook laptop. It was a sunny spring afternoon in Oregon, and I was experiencing that delirious kind of sickness where your brain can barely function. I was bored as hell, but even in my stupor knew I had seen all that MySpace had to offer. Eventually, I found myself surfing Wikipedia, aimlessly clicking around various band pages in no particular direction.

I wound up on the page for Saves The Day, a band I had recently become enamored with, thanks to a particularly impactful Vagrant Records sampler. Wow, browsing the Wikipedia page for a band at 1 pm on a weekday, say what you will about me, but I have always been the same type of music nerd. I’m also the type of music nerd who just enjoys reading about a band, taking in as much history as possible in order to better understand them. Out of all the information on Save The Day’s page, the one thing that stuck out to me most was a pair of words in the band’s “genres” section: pop-punk.

I was in an exploratory mood, so I clicked on the link and what I found blew my mind. It sounds silly to admit, but it wasn’t until I was face to face with that Wikipedia article at the big old age of 15 that I realized my favorite type of music had a name. Pop-punk.

At this point, I was truly beginning to expand my musical taste; post-hardcore, grunge, indie, and metal were all seeping in around my strong foundation of classic rock adoration and Guitar Hero soundtracks. Underneath all of this was pop-punk. Seriously. Some of my first CDs were Sum 41, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Green Day. I had spent my entire life listening to this subgenre, and I didn’t even know it. 

I was too young and musically dumb to see the bigger landscape of what music was. I grew up hearing “Who Let The Dogs Out” in every movie trailer and listening to “Drops of Jupiter” on the radio. To me, “In Too Deep” was the fastest and coolest thing I had ever heard. I didn’t know what genres were, much less something as specific as pop-punk. This was also before Twitter, Reddit, and message boards leveled the playing field on musical knowledge. Some of that stuff existed, but I didn’t know where to find it. I knew what I liked when I heard it, but I hadn’t realized that things like subgenres could lead me to other bands and scenes I would enjoy in the same way.

Editor’s Note: Both “Who Let The Dogs” Out and “Drops of Jupiter” are undeniable bangers. I’m only using them here as examples to provide context to my understanding of music at the time growing up and becoming musically conscious in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Fast forward another 13 or so years, and I am still the biggest music nerd you can imagine. I run multiple music blogs, have a Twitter feed clogged with hundreds of esoteric bands, and my iTunes library boasts an unwieldy 70k songs. This blog is a years-long testament to my musical obsessions, large and small. I’ve fallen in love with countless bands and embedded myself in more subgenres and scenes than I care to count. Over the past year, one of my most powerful obsessions has been with a semi-invented genre called Countrygaze. 

Countrygaze is exactly what it sounds like; a little bit of country, a little bit of shoegaze. This is best exemplified by groups like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, also known as indie music’s favorite power couple. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Wednesday specifically are the countrygaze blueprint, and Twin Plagues is a textbook example of what the genre stands for. Sure, other bands have played at this intersection before, but nobody has owned it or honed it quite like Wednesday. 

On the Bandcamp page for Twin Plagues, underneath the cute video for “Handsome Man” and the excellent essay by Hanif Abdurraqib you’ll find a basic but telling section; the tags. This is tucked all the way at the bottom, beneath the credits and the legal. In this section, Twin Plagues is self-labeled by the band as “rock, country-gaze, indie, lo-fi, shoegaze, and Asheville.” Spoiler alert, the full-circle moment in this article comes here because I felt the same way reading “country-gaze” as I did when I first read pop-punk. Are you kidding me, there’s a name for this specific thing I’ve been obsessed with for the past year? Thank fucking god. 

If you’re unfamiliar with shoegaze, this might be a good spot for a brief crash course. The genre was first popularized in the 90s by artists like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. Depending on who you ask, the term shoegaze could apply to everything from the more biting grunge of artists like Hum to the dreamier soundscapes of artists like Cocteau Twins. The usual signifier of shoegaze is the heavy use of effects pedals to create distorted riffs cranked out at an all-consuming volume that often overshadows the band’s own vocals. 

Over the past two decades, the shoegaze genre has maintained modest popularity, mostly in niche subcultures and heavy-adjacent music scenes. Bands have been making great records in this realm for as long as people have been making oversized pedalboard jokes.

Here’s where Countrygaze builds off of this foundation in a novel way. Wednesday’s lead singer Karly Hartzman never gets too dreamy on the vocals, but she also isn’t afraid to distort or modulate her voice. To me, that's an essential part of this fake subgenre. Many of the songs in Wednesday’s discography have shoegaze textures but keep the vocals a little more upfront. Lyrically, these songs could easily be mistaken for country on paper; they hinge on simple observations but ladder up to bigger topics like heartbreak, death, and other forms of loss. The band telegraphed this connection pretty heavily on their covers album from earlier this year which puts the likes of Gary Stewart and The Drive-By Truckers shoulder to shoulder with bands like Smashing Pumpkins and DIY shoegazers Hotline TNT. Take these influences, and you can see how a band would internalize them, then output an album like Twin Plagues or 2020’s I Was Trying to Describe You To Someone. 

Look no further than any of Wednesday’s music videos to understand what countrygaze looks like. In these videos, Wednesday play their songs in fields of dead leaves or empty K-Mart parking lots. Home videos exist alongside footage of tour life and cozy North Carolina living rooms. Nature is present and abundant but is often dotted with litter and dirty patches of snow connected by colorless gray highways. These videos are all beautifully shot, using earnest POV footage, and edited in a way that matches the songs perfectly. Heavy as the music and some of the themes are, most of these videos are also humorous and endearing, whether it’s clown metal face paint, Ring Pop props, or simply the sight of the members rocking out to their own riffage in the back of the van, they show a band loving the art they’re creating. If you want to know what countrygaze is, simply throw on a playlist of Wednesday music videos, and let it roll for an hour. 

As I sank deep into a Twin Plagues rabbit hole by the end of 2021, I started to put together a playlist of songs that fit this hyper-specific criteria. Fuzzy shoegaze riffs, a little bit of twang, and super simple lyrics. That’s the formula. Many songs out there have one or two of these things, but very few artists put all three together. Even Wednesday themselves sometimes drop the fuzz for classic country balladry like on “How Can You Live If You Don’t Love How Can You If You Do.” Other times, they drop the riffs for hypnotic lo-fi abstraction on tracks like the closing cover song “Ghost of a Dog.”

On the flip side, you have songs on Twin Plagues that read as complete and utter embodiments of Countrygaze. The shreddy, seesaw riff on “Handsome Man” paired with lyrics of overpasses, broken glass, and trashy family photos. One song later, the sight of a dilapidated fast-food restaurant forces Hartzman into an existential crisis. A woozy lap steel guitar soundtracks this internal struggle, eventually giving way to a torrential shoegaze riff that towers above everything that came before it. Choices like this give the songs a grungy loud/quiet/loud dynamic that encourages the listener to lean in only to be bowled over moments later by an overwhelming crush of noise. This shift also contextualizes the song’s lyrics, making them feel big or small depending on what Hartzman and company decide to prop them up against. Speaking of which, there’s a lyric on “Cliff” about putting a loved one’s ashes in a Dallas Cowboy urn, and honestly? If I were to distill this semi-fake subgenre down to a single line, it might be that one. 

In almost every case, these songs are small in theory but big in practice. The worlds are lived-in, often populated by modest people who are trying their best despite circumstances that are not always in their control. There’s truthfulness and relatability in how the band depicts these southern mundanities, making it feel as if you’ve lived the memories yourself in a dream or a past life. There are specific details and nouns that stick out, but there’s also a hot and oppressive southern haze that ties the whole thing together. That’s why I think Twin Plagues is the foundational record for this genre, because it wrote the playbook. This record is the canvas, and other bands are now beginning to play within it.

By the beginning of the year, I had declared myself fully “Wednesday-Pilled.” I had purchased all the band’s albums off Bandcamp, was taking excited selfies holding their vinyl, and slowly stitching together the tapestry of this wider countrygaze sound. I realized some of the more mellow stuff from Greet Death fit this category. I was talking to friends on Twitter about the novelty of this sound and discovering new artists in the process. Then-just released songs like “Kerrytown” by Big Vic, “Doubts” by Cloakroom, and “Q Degraw” by Wild Pink proved that this was an ongoing phenomenon and affirmed that this genre was something worth chasing down. 

I threw together a silly little Spotify playlist, and then the weather got warmer. By the time spring had rolled around, the term “Countrygaze” had largely slipped my mind. The weather was warming up, and I needed upbeat music to match the tempo. I was also at the beginning of an exciting new relationship, deeply in love, and happy with my life for the first time in a long time. I was ready to leave the all-consuming crush of countrygaze in a sadder section of my Spotify library. Then MJ Lenderman released Boat Songs. 

I had heard Knockin’ and Ghost of Your Guitar Solo the year before, but nothing had really connected with me outside of the latter’s titular instrumental. But something clicked with Boat Songs, and the record ended up soundtracking my summer. Maybe it was just something about that dumb hat or the charming thrill of hearing a man sing “Harris Teeter,” but the record delighted me. It also blew the doors open on Countrygaze by providing a distinct counterpoint to Wednesday’s particular brand of art school shoegaze. 

While Wednesday songs are often sweeping and poetic, MJ Lenderman's songs are folksy and goofy. They recount sports esoterica and romanticize wrestling. They hold sportstar Dan Marino and Disney's Toontown in equal regard. MJ Lenderman dares his audience to imagine a scenario in which they’ve bought a boat or tool around town in an SUV. He’s talking directly to the kind of audience who both relates with and wouldn’t mind belting along the lyrics, “I love drinkin’ too, yeah, I love drinkin’ too.” It’s basically the ultimate “Dudes Rock” music, but there’s also something deeper going on under the hood.

In contrast to the examples listed above, MJ also offers up a surprisingly deep philosophical probe on “Tastes Just Like It Costs” and stares down the loneliness of the universe on “Six Flags.” He also has a knack for writing lyrics that sound like they’re already colloquialisms. “Tastes Just Like It Costs” isn’t just a great chorus; it’s good advice and a cautionary tale. You get out what you put in; you pay for shit, ya get shit back; tastes just like it costs. 

At one point, near the tail end of Boat Songs, MJ takes a stab at articulating the feeling of love on “You Are Every Girl To Me.” In this song, love can be found in the vibrant colors of a community swimming pool and the simplicity of a birdfeeder. Love can also be found in small, heartfelt gestures like homemade dinners or buying someone a silly shirt. Ultimately, no lyric could be MJ Gospel more than the one found at the end of the second chorus when Lenderman sings, “Jackass is funny / Like the Earth is round.” Yes. We need more love songs about Jackass.

Another exemplary MJ Lenderman cut is “Someone Get The Grill Out Of The Rain” off Guitar Solo. The track is only a minute and 13 seconds long and doesn’t venture much beyond the conflict stated in its title. Someone left the grill out in the rain. MJ is gonna write about it. Halfway through the song, Lenderman lifts the veil and reveals what the song is really about.

“It'd be such a bust
That grill should rust
Precious memories are the ones
That suck
Just can't get enough”

At one point, my girlfriend and I were talking about MJ Lenderman’s lyrics, and we arrived at the conclusion that he’s adept at writing “a song about nothing that’s actually kinda about something.” Just look at that quote above from “Grill.” Sure it’s a song about a BBQ being left out to the destructive whim of mother nature; it’s also about a whole lot more. Similarly, a track like “I Ate Too Much At The Fair” is exactly what it sounds like. Again, the lyrics barely venture beyond the ones that make up its title but are presented in such a way that gives them an inherent deeper meaning. You can project a lot onto a song like “Fair,” but you could also just take it at face value as a song about eating too many elephant ears and feeling a little sick. That’s the beauty.

Through a detailed patchwork of originals and covers, Wednesday and MJ tackle things as commonplace as billboards, TV dinners, and trash fires. They take these everyday occurances and shift the listener’s perspective until those same concepts become holy. Together, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman offer two sides of the same Countrygaze coin. One brings big, towering riffs, and the other provides shorter, smaller slices. Both circle around the complex realities of life; they’re just approaching it from different angles. They are also dating, which makes this extra cute. They are the Countrygaze Couple we all wish we could be.

Most recently, bands of all shapes, sizes, and locations have been fleshing out their own corners of countrygaze. Wild Pink packed a wallop into their new album with the one-two punch of “See You Better Now” and “Sucking On The Birdshot.” Greet Death cooned “Your Love is Alcohol,” and no booze-based metaphor has ever hit the same quite since. Bands like Dialup Ghost have taken the lyrics in a radical political direction. In contrast, others like Spirit Was have leaned further into abstraction, melding equivalent but equally disparate genres like folk and blackgaze. Even albums from a couple of years ago, like Moveys and Empty Country, could now fall under this Countrygaze category retroactively. 

Exciting new groups like Big Vic and A Country Western have been adding their own artistic flare to these sounds, pushing the genre in artsy new directions that retain the distortion and the occasional hint of twang. Even Wednesday themselves show no sign of stopping; back in September, the band dropped an eight-and-a-half-minute bruiser called “Bull Believer,” and it’s already one of my favorite tracks from the project. That single (along with a signing to Dead Oceans) signaled a fruitful new page for the fake little genre that could.

The cherry that came on top of this avalanche of highly-specific tunes came when I found myself bored clicking around the Wednesday Bandcamp page a few days ago. I was reminded of the term ‘countrygaze’ and decided to Google it just to see what would come up. 

The top search result was the page for the Bandcamp tag, of which Wednesday’s discography sits prominently at the top. There are also a few artists underneath the core three Wednesday albums, including scoutmaster and Nash To Stoudemire (two Wednesday side projects) and one from an LA group called Grave Saddles. This group has released an EP, a single, and most recently, a 2022 Tour Tape proudly tagged with the “country-gaze” moniker. 

I gave the three-track release a listen, and much to my surprise, I found myself really enjoying it. Most of all, I couldn’t shake how perfectly all three songs fit within the “countrygaze” label. I love this little tape, and it’s got me excited to follow this band to see what they do next. And this is how Countrygaze becomes a real thing. 

Wednesday still feel completely out of reach for me (plus, nothing I write could ever stack up to this profile in Oxford American), but I recently became mutuals with Grave Saddles on Twitter and decided to take that connection as an opportunity to ask them about this genre. Based on the group’s releases, it seemed like they had been active since 2019, but it wasn’t until 2021 that they began using the “Countrygaze” tag on Bandcamp. I asked guitarist Chris Broyles what he thought of that descriptor, how the band arrived at it, and whether or not it was influenced by Wednesday.

Broyles explained that they threw the Countrygaze tag on that release because it seemed to be the most widely agreed-upon term for whatever this scene is. They had a band before this one that often got relegated to the umbrella “shoegaze” descriptor. The band admitted they “100% lifted the tag from Wednesday” but also view that subgenre as one part of a larger movement called post-country. In the band’s own words, post-country is “essentially country songs or the essence of country songs that forego established conventions or instrumentation.”

The band traces their interpretation of this term back to Arthur Miles’ “Lonely Cowboy” in 1929, a song they jokingly called “proto-post-country” and view as an outlier in the country music canon. They say this scene begins contemporaneously with Acetone and their catalog, observing that “if there seems to be one common thread across a lot of these countrygaze bands, it’s that we’re all big Acetone fans.” 

Conversely, I asked Big Vic’s lead singer and guitarist Victoria Rinaldi what she thought about the “countrygaze” label. She feels like, if anything, the term fits Girl, Buried, but only retroactively. While Rinaldi is a fan of Wednesday and Lenderman, she says that Big Vic recorded the bulk of their record before Twin Plagues had come out, so Wednesday didn’t have much of a direct influence on the album. She also says the Americana tinge present on “Kerrytown” specifically came from her love for Wilco and Silver Jews. 

As captured in playlists by two of the movement’s figureheads, you can see everything from Acetone and Vic Chesnutt alongside droney shit like Earth and Sparklehorse as well as grungy 90s rock staples like Sunny Day Real Estate and Dinosaur Jr. Looking at that list of influences, it’s hard not to be excited by the promise of this genre. It feels like we’re on the precipice of something fresh, exciting, and truly unique. Wednesday and MJ have been setting the speed and the tone for what Countrygaze could be, but groups like Grave Saddles are running with it full force. 

Most of all, I’m excited to see where Countrygaze goes next. If the internet has proven anything, it’s that it has the power to make genres like this into legitimate scenes of interconnected artists all collaborating and building off each other. We’re coming off a banner year from the Wednesday/MJ Camp, with both artists having released fantastic full-length albums to increasing coverage and acclaim. With Wednesday poised to drop another record in the next year (on the same label as Phoebe Bridgers, Japanese Breakfast, and Mitski, no less), it feels like we’re only at the beginning. The future of Countrygaze is as wide and open as the rolling landscape of a classic country song. Strapping in and watching this scenery pass by has already been one of the most thrilling discoveries of my music-listening career. Where things go next is anyone’s guess.

The Best of Q3 2022: Part 2

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Remember when I published an article about the best albums of Q3 2022 and tagged it with ‘Part 1’? Well, guess what? Over a month later, here is Part 2! I may have been a slow writer lately, but I still wanted to highlight some of the albums from this past summer that have been resonating with me. 

Alex G - God Save The Animals

Domino Recording Company

Indie music’s favorite weirdo is back. Between shaking his booty like a maniac and scoring off-kilter indie movies, Mr. G has thrown together yet another collection of soon-to-be-classic folk tunes with an oddball bent. While it’s about as catchy and abstract as any of his previous releases, God Save The Animals feels far more spiritual than any other Alex G album thus far. In an interview with The New York Times, the artist admitted that faith has been on his mind these past few years, explaining, “I don’t really have a set of beliefs, but it seems like a place everyone has to go at some point.” This is reflected in songs like “Blessings” and “S.D.O.S.,” but pays off beautifully in “Miracles,” where the personal and spiritual intersect in one of the best songs of Alex G’s entire career. 


Birthday Dad - The Hermit

Refresh Records

Sometimes an artist’s bio is so good that I just end up copying the whole thing into one of these write-ups. Birthday Dad is one of those artists. Their Spotify bio reads, “Imagine if Bright Eyes locked themselves in a room for a year and only listened to Jack's Mannequin.” Yep, that’s Birthday Dad to a T. Seeded by singles “TV Dinner” and “Death Too,” The Hermit is an album concerned with the unfeeling mundanities of life. Whether it’s the ennui of your nightly garbage run or the nostalgic comfort of playing Pokémon on your Game Boy Color, Alex Periera’s songwriting is consistently cutting, clever, and honest. The end result is a phenomenal and endlessly relatable debut that isn’t afraid to speak from the heart.


Death Cab For Cutie - Asphalt Meadows

Atlantic

I don’t think I need to sell anyone on Death Cab For Cutie in 2022. The band has been a known entity in the alternative rock sphere for basically my whole life. That said, as with any legacy act, their music has waxed and waned quite a bit over the last decade, from the mid-career high of Narrow Stairs to the relative low of Codes and Keys and the mixed bag of Thank You For Today. To me, the band began to right the ship with 2019’s Blue EP, specifically the slow-burn closer “Blue Bloods,” which embodies all the characteristics of my favorite Death Cab songs. 

Asphalt Meadows is not a return to form in the sense that the band is retreading old ground, but it feels like they’ve regained their quality control. Album opener “I Don’t Know How I Survive” rolls out slowly until about a minute in when a blown-out noise rock assault upends every expectation you entered the record with. From there, the band continues to explore new sounds that still feel distinctly Death Cab. On the upper end, there’s a jangly new wave bounce on “I Miss Strangers” and killer guitar work on “Here to Forever.” On the other end, the band experiments with some striking spoken word delivery on “Foxglove Through The Clearcut,” which vaults from a subdued monologue to a sweeping emo build that feels reminiscent of the band’s oldest material. Overall, the record does a masterful job of alternating back and forth between peppier songs and moody tunes, resulting in a satisfying LP that feels exciting, exploratory, and rejuvenated, yet familiar and comforting. 


Future Teens - Self Help

Triple Crown Records

People talk a lot about “sad” music in relation to artists like Phoebe Bridgers, and that’s fine, but for my money, nobody cranks out truly sad songs like Future Teens. While it’s not as slow and plodding as anything on Punisher, the music that the self-described “bummer pop” group makes broaches topics that feel far more honest than sad for sadness' sake. Sometimes it feels like sadness can become an artist’s “brand,” and as soon as that happens, it all begins to ring false. Future Teens have always been like this.  

The lyricism found in the band’s music has always been confessional to the point of worry; like these are things that should be written in a journal and discussed with a therapist rather than put to music. The group uses simple terms to paint scenes of shitty mental health, substance abuse, and failing yourself. Throughout the album, the perspective bounces back and forth between the two guitarist-singers Amy Hoffman and Daniel Radin, which keeps things dynamic and interesting. These are songs where just getting out of the house and going to Target counts as a victory. For the litany of personal trials depicted throughout the album, nobody summarizes the band’s creative ethos better than themselves when they belt, “Feeling bad, at least it’s something.”


PHONY - AT SOME POINT YOU STOP

Self-released

I’ve written a lot about “death albums” recently. On paper, AT SOME POINT YOU STOP is yet another entry in this lineage. The third album from ex-Donnavan Wolfington/current Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier primarily centers around the passing of his father, but it’s also about much more than that. Capturing grief with a wide-set lens, this record is as much about loss as it is about everything that comes in its wake. 

The album deftly juxtaposes internal emotions and external forces for a collection of conflicted tracks that range from the melancholy sway of songs like “THE MIDDLE” and “SUMMER’S COLD” to peppy punk on “GREAT WHITE.” There are glitchy amblings, trip-hop detours, and drunken diversions, but ultimately, the heart of the record can be found on “KALEIDOSCOPE,” whose melody makes a reprise in the closing song. 

As we follow Berthier’s loss and subsequent journey across the country, the LP congeals into a woozy late-summer emo masterwork that’s truly emotive in every sense of the word. A devastating record less about death itself and more about the void that it leaves. As signaled by the title, AT SOME POINT YOU STOP is a record about life continuing on even after weathering an event that levels your emotional landscape. 


A Place For Owls - A Place For Owls

Self-Released

Are you a little too earnest? Have you been known to profess your emotions through overwrought sentiments? Do you feel things cataclysmically? Well, A Place For Owls might be for you. The self-titled debut from the Denver-based indie rockers is packed wall to wall with heartfelt lyrics and sweeping sentiments. Drawing inspiration from indie rock greats like The National, Frightened Rabit, and Manchester Orchestra, as well as more modern extensions of the same artistic mindset like Julien Baker and Caracara, APFO is a broad and expansive piece starring a band that feels everything deeply and isn’t afraid to report their findings directly to their audience. If “Emo Kid to Sad Dad” is a pipeline, nobody has canonized that journey better than A Place For Owls.


The Wonder Years - The Hum Goes On Forever

Hopeless Records

I’ve spent the better part of my adulthood in the shadow of The Wonder Years. When I was graduating high school, they were graduating college. As I made my way through college, they navigated their place in the world and rationalized their life choices. I lost friends, and so did they. At every step of the way, lead singer Dan Campbell has written honestly about the struggles that have come with each phase of his life. Depression, loss, heartbreak, and addiction are all ongoing candid discussions within The Wonder Years’ catalog. At the onset of their career, the band navigated these realities with pop-punk power chords, but, over the last few albums, have shifted to a hefty alternative rock punch. Their music is the definition of cathartic, and you don’t have to look any further than a single concert snippet to see hordes of people screaming these lyrics back at the band to understand. I am far from the first person to have found peace in this music. 

When Dan Campbell sang, “Jesus Christ, I’m twenty-six / All the people I graduated with / All have kids / All have wives / All have people who care if they come home at night,” I was a fresh 20 years old. I recognized the sentiment but didn’t truly identify with it until I found myself on the other side of college committing myself to creative pursuits as piers settled down in relationships and started families. Similarly, on The Hum Goes On Forever, Campbell paints a picture of his life as a father and all the struggles and spiritual victories that come with it.

The band’s seventh album is the first substantial update we’ve had on the members’ lives since 2018’s Sister Cities, and (obviously) a lot has happened since then. While I can’t fully relate to the sentiment of fatherhood, the band does an excellent job of translating the ups and downs of parenthood to their army of lifelong fans. Hum contains the usual mix of upbeat singalong bangers, classic callbacks, and some exciting experimentation that imagines possible future directions the band could take. Like catching up with an old friend, The Hum Goes On Forever is a touching document that affirms my decade-plus-long fandom and makes me grateful to have grown up alongside this band. And who knows, in five or six years, I’ll probably relate to this album on an even deeper level. I cannot wait. 

The Best of Q3 2022: Part 1

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Not to sound like a guy in a suit, but it’s the end of another “quarter,” and *adjusts tie* that means it’s time to tell you about some of my favorite releases from the last few months. After all, what better way to celebrate the return of fall than getting all sentimental and retrospective?

If you’d like to read about my favorite albums of Q1 and Q2, click here or here. Other than that, read on for some of the best releases of the summer. Part 2 is coming soon because a bunch of great albums dropped in the last few weeks of September, and I’m working on my own time, baby.

Brady - You Sleep While They Watch

Flesh & Bone Records

Sam Boyhtari has had a busy year. Somewhere between nationwide tours with Foxing, Home Is Where, and Infant Island, his band Greet Death managed to drop a phenomenal EP called New Low. Forecasted by a breadcrumb of fantastic singles, this 21-minute collection of songs found the Michigan shoegazers digging a little deeper and going a little darker. Impressive for a group whose last album is literally called “New Hell.” After releasing that EP out into the world and relocating himself to a different part of the Midwest, Boyhtari finally had enough time to dedicate to his Chicago-based heavy rock project simply called Brady. 

Self-described on Bandcamp as “the perfect blend of hick shit, innuendo, and a sad story,” it’s hard to think of a better elevator pitch for the group than that. Fans of Greet Death will likely feel at home here, as most of the LP still hovers around a baseline heavy rock sound. What's surprising, however, is just how much Boyhtari has to say and how he decides to present it. 

Much like the writing on his other project, songs like “Radon Blues” and “Family Photos” find their structure with a catchy phrase and a compelling instrumental build. Meanwhile, on songs like “Big Future” and “Catherine,” Boyhtari has enough time to get beautifully poetic and surprisingly grounded. The entire album weaves a stark, urgent, but ultimately beautiful portrait of life in 2022. You Sleep While They Watch is an album that is equal parts crushing and compassionate. A necessary balance to strike in the face of our increasingly-oppressive world. 

Read our full view of You Sleep While They Watch here. 


Carpool - For Nasal Use Only

Acrobat Unstable Records

Can we please talk about Carpool? I’ve been dying to talk about Carpool. For basically the whole summer, I’ve been lucky enough to have For Nasal Use Only on repeat. The EP has soundtracked foggy walks along the Oregon coast, much-needed trips back home, and long flights to visit my girlfriend. Simply put, there’s no collection of songs I would rather have tied to the memories of this past season, and you should be excited at the prospect of attaching these potent tracks to memories of your own this fall. 

The latest dispatch from the Rochester emo rockers offers dancy spurts, catchy chants, and even a left-field acoustic number. After an impressive debut album in 2020 with Erotic Nightmare Summer, the band’s latest EP proves that the group’s penchant for immaculate and hooky emo rock was no fluke. Carpool is one of those bands that make it easy to be a fan. The good news is, with Nasal Use finally out and even more exciting things on the horizon, there’s never been a better time to buckle up and join the ride.

Read our review of lead single “Anime Flashbacks” here. 


Holy Fawn - Dimensional Bleed

Triple Crown Records

Can you feel that? It’s the push of cold fall air gently cresting over the horizon. This change of seasons brings not just crisp weather but legions of darkened shoegaze to earbuds worldwide. Something about the dead leaves and the colder nights makes the genre feel slightly more appropriate right now than during the throes of a summer heatwave. 

Dimensional Bleed is the sophomore album from Holy Fawn and a record that feels tailor-made for this time of year. The release sees the six-piece effortlessly shift and morph between blackened metal, shoegaze, post-rock, and more. There’s a shared murkiness to all these sounds that makes the band feel like a wendigo or a smoke monster, silently gliding behind the listener, waiting for the just right time to unleash their violent fury upon their prey. Songs like “Death is a Relief” and “Lift Your Head” stick out as initial highlights, but really, the whole appeal of this album is slipping in and willingly surrendering yourself to the music for 49 minutes. 


NATL PARK SRVC - EP4

Self-released

Where have all the indie rockers gone? It’s a question that’s been on my lips (and apparently everyone else’s) as of late. For the last half-decade, NATL PARK SRVC has been crafting sweeping indie rock songs with an emphasis on early-aughts sounds that Pitchfork would have eaten up back in the day. For the last half-decade, the group has also been refining their bombastic big band style, typically boasting around seven members or more depending on the occasion. 

While I loved last year’s The Dance, at times, the full-length left me feeling looped around and overwhelmed over the course of its 48-minute runtime. For that reason alone, the five tracks on EP4 feel like a more concise and compact sample platter of what this band does best. Opener “BLOODY” is a hard-grooving track that builds to an ultra-dancy Frank Ferdinand guitar riff as lead singer Dylan Wotock croons, “why don’t you punch me in the faaaace / why don’t you put me in my plaaace,” stretching the last syllables of each line like a kid playing with silly putty. After a Billy Corgan name drop and a Will Toledo-style monologue, this chorus dovetails with a series of carefree vocalizations for an ornate display that bands like Spoon could only dream of. 

From there, lead singles “UP ALL NIGHT” and “VHS” keep the forward momentum with boppy instrumentals featuring the standard mix of guitar, drums, and bass, but accentuated by everything from violin to saxophone and trombone. It’s an ambitious feast for the ears, all spectacularly produced and remarkably clear. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “SUMMERSIDE,” an undeniable queer anthem that navigates the muddy and often cliche-ridden waters of figuring out your own sexuality. 

The EP’s crown jewel can be found in its closer “PSALM 11:02 PM,” a remorseful and morbid piece with an unshakable Midwest flavor. The song finds Woytcke lamenting the funeral of a close friend, turning their individual grief into a sort of communal outpouring backed by the force of the full band. Mentions of funerals give the song a raw and open-hearted feeling that evokes the honesty of everyone’s favorite Hotelier song. Instead of finding catharsis in a throat-shredding shout, NATL PARK SRVC ascend into a hypnotic repetition of “I still think about it sometimes / I still dream about this sometimes,” which Woytcke sings over a group chant and a winding riff that eventually finds its rest on a charming bed of strings. A beautiful close to a stellar 20-minute release where no second is wasted. 


Pool Kids - Pool Kids

Skeletal Lightning

Throughout their self-titled sophomore record, Pool Kids lay out the various phases and emotions of a breakup, then shuffle them around, deconstructing the experience and distilling it into an explosive and cathartic album-length experience. Their first collection of songs as a full band (outside of a half-jokey hardcore double called POOL), Pool Kids balances its emotional heft with impressively technical instrumentation that will stagger even the most jaded math rock fans. 

At points, this album feels like an amalgamation of every genre I’ve ever loved growing up: emo, metal, pop-punk, prog, and 2000s alt-rock are all represented, everything wrapped in crystal clear production courtesy of Mike Vernon Davis. It’s a testament to both the band’s musicianship and vision that everything folds in so nicely under the Pool Kids banner. 

Pool Kids is unique in that it’s a breakup album in neither the “boo hoo, I’m so sad” territory or the vengeful “fuck you, I will make you pay” camp. At times it has elements of both, but the part that feels true to life is how jumbled and non-linear the process feels. Breakups aren’t all raw heartbreak or revenge fantasies; it’s both of those and much more. Breakups are pity and longing, regret and self-sabotage, moments of reflection and reconnection. Pool Kids recognizes the many facets of emotional turmoil and recomposes them into something anyone can find a piece of themselves in.

Read our review of lead single “That's Physics, Baby” here.


Quinn Cicala - Arkansas

Self-released

Quinn Cicala is back, yee-fuckin-haw. Since 2017, Cicala has quietly been making some of the best alt-country in the whole country. I’ll admit, I first found my way to the musician as a way to ween myself off Pinegrove, and while that may still be a sticky comparison for some, it at least gives you a point of reference for what to expect with this EP. The good news is I eventually grew to love the Cicalaverse on its own merits, and I’d even go as far as to call “24” one of the best songs of all-time. Heavily grounded in the American South, the five songs Quinn Cicala offers up on Arkansas are expectedly pleasant and beautifully compelling. Guided by a folksy twang and breezy instrumentals, these songs unfurl like a sleepy cat in a warm sunbeam. The humid southern air clings to the bones of this release. Whether the band is depicting true love in the heartland or talking about frivolous news publications, it’s easy to find a home within these songs, even if it’s only for a quarter-hour.


Russian Circles - Gnosis

Sargent House

I ran the numbers, and it turns out Russian Circles have been a presence in my life for 16 years. My Russian Circles fandom is officially old enough to drive. Ever since I heard the pummeling guitar of “Death Rides a Horse” back in high school, I’ve been hooked on everything the Chicago trio has put out over the course of their hyper-consistent career. Always a reliable source of instrumental metal riffage, Russian Circles seem locked into a new mode of operating on Gnosis, sounding tighter and heavier than they have in years. Every style and speed of the band is represented here; “Conduit” is a ferocious and gnashing song, while the title track is a slow-simmering black cloud that mounts into a torrential downpour. Regardless of where I’m at in life or what I’m doing, I can always count on Russian Circles to be there, scoring the scene with brutal metal that crushes me in a warm embrace.