Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 7

I AIN'T NEVER REP A SET, BABY. jk wrong year! welcome back.

part 1 here. part 2 here. part 3 here. part 4 here. part 5 here. part 6 here.

scroll to the bottom for youtube embeds of all the songs!

"Victory Lap" - Fred again.., PlaqueBoyMax, and Skepta
from saba:
"this track makes me want to dance immediately. i love how infectious it is, and how much fun so many artists have had with engaging with it (there have been many remixes of this song since this song released). this song is just an amazing example of when artists publicly collaborate to build on existing art, thus making it richer. i wish more artists did this.

here's a really cool video showing how it was done":

Have I written about Fred Again here? I feel like not yet? The first songs of his that I became aware of, the ones off Actual Life, weren't quite my taste (I'm a sentimental chick, but something about his use of poetry / voicemail snippets felt a little too Upworthy-core for me), and yet his live sets revealed a lad who knew how to throw the hell down when the time is right. Fred's Skrillex collab "Rumble" was what hooked me, and I've been a big fan of the grimier direction he's been heading ever since. Doechii sample that rhymes "Depop" with "free thot" and "sea moss"? Skepta name-checking Darren Aronofsky? Bass so filthy even a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser couldn't scrub it up? Let's go.

"Sue Me" - Audrey Hobert
from Phoebe:
"The whole Who's the Clown? album feels like it's written for MOI!"

At first listen, I judged the Audrey Hobert album too harshly. I think I was coming to it with a negative POV because of Hobert's association with Gracie Abrams (the two women co-wrote several songs from Abrams's last album; I'm not a huuuge fan of Gracie Abrams's whole deal). But there are some great little nuggets in Who's The Clown?, and Hobert knows how to play to her strengths—she's not a glam diva with a powerhouse voice, but she's a Hannah Horvathian lyrical diarist who is not afraid to ask, in many charming ways, the question that a lot of people still on their parents' health insurance need to start asking: why is everything so embarrassing? The merry-go-round synth of "Sue Me" gets stuck in my head quite easily.

Btw I wrote longer on Hobert for my GQ.com end of year pop roundup...

"N.A.B." - Not a Band
from Danny from Output 1:1:1 :
"It came out mid-Dec 2024 but I missed the deadline for last year! I got married that January, hosted a 10th anniversary party (from first date). We rented a local music venue. We had friends from the local scene play sets. This song was the last song of the night - they just put out a studio version. It makes me think of my wedding, and how happy my wife was as we went home."

I like that this song has this weird balance of structure and chaos. It feels like abstract art in a big strong frame. Also I recommend a listen to this with a sole focus on the basslines throughout. Cool weird meandering bass tangents, zigging and zagging.

"Bloom Baby Bloom" - Wolf Alice
from Patrick Mahan (Carefully Curated):
"My first time hearing this track was through its music video, and if you haven't seen it, it's an instant classic. Before that, all we had were those short teasers of the piano intro and handclaps, and I’ll admit, I got a little nervous. And I should have known better. Wolf Alice are masters at genre jumping without ever losing their identity.

“Bloom Baby Bloom” is absolutely bombastic. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals have never sounded better. The pre-chorus hits with real force, and the transition into the main chorus is just… beautiful. It feels like a song constantly unfolding into something bigger, brighter, and more surprising. It’s one of their all-time best."

It's been a while since I tapped into Wolf Alice, and frankly I did not realize they were getting it like that. The operatics, the piano, the maximalism and genre-smushing and *angularity*, oooooooo this feels so millennial-core, Kate Bush by way of Dirty Projectors. The way Rowsell infuses profound exasperation into her vocals on the great line "fuckin' baby / baby man"—FAAAHHHckin' baybeeeee—wow, just wonderful. We love a little theatricality in our independent rock music. Patrick is right, the video rips. I am never mad at a "louche dance ensemble" A Chorus Line vibe, especially if there are prominently featured butts involved. Choreography by Ryan Heffington, who also has choreographed for Sia...millennial excellence, baby!!

"Close Encounters" - Shinlifter
from @wolfmanramirez.bsky.social. I live in Edinburgh, I used to DJ run a little label but now just go to gigs and let other people choose the records to play:
"They've been the band I've seen the most this year and they're at the forefront of a best wave of bands the city has seen in the last 40 years - every time you go a gig there will be a new set of people who sound amazing. The music has absorbed the loud quiet dynamics so you can thrash along and the lyrics funny and deep and get stuck in your head. I them and this is best recording of any of their songs"

What I like most about this noise rock song are the slight imperfections. The moments when the tempo subtly shifts, the frantic nature of singer Olivia Furey's shouty vocal performance....it gives a sense of raw and coarse reality. Real band, playing real music in real time.

My friend Matthew Perpetua recently wrote about Geese in Fluxblog, calling Getting Killed "a flagrant and brutal rejection of the grid and quantization." I have started to listen for that anti-grid quality in the new music I encounter, and to appreciate it when I hear it. It feels extra important to seek out this anti-gridness in opposition to AI-generated music, which is kinda ALL grid: faux-slick, processed, literally predictable. I believe the human touch, and the natural byproducts of human touch (imperfection, variability, that certain audio je ne sais quoi), will only become more valued/valuable as time goes on.