Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 2

thanks for coming back. more songs for ya, coming right up. scroll to the bottom for youtube embeds of all the tunes!

"JRJRJR" - Jane Remover
from DJ Ellie/peprally:
"It’s been an incredibly stressful and angsty year for me personally, and this song provided perfect catharsis for a year where I wanted to scream, cry, and free the intense emotions inside me constantly. As someone who’s followed Jane’s musical journey since 2021, JRJRJR feels like everything she’s led up to in her career. Very funny that my favorite song of the year came out on January 1st."

Kinda wild that Jane Remover has created a masterpiece like this at the age of 22 but she's simply the real deal, the future, etc. etc. My favorite thing about her music is that no matter the amount of hallucinatory audio mess she layers onto her productions, there's always a molten core of undeniable melody to tap into.

"JRJRJR" is an exhilarating mission statement adorned with impenetrable tangles of glitch, so dense with incredible lyrics both aggrandizing ("Let the DJ save your life, bro, we cheated death again"; "I'd put down the mic just to be a fan") and apprehensive ("They like the pop song but leave when shit gets ugly") that it could probably be split into three different equally good songs. Jane said in an interview with Anthony Fantano that she had a "zestiness quota" for Revengeseekerz ("Every song needs to have a zesty bar") to which I wonder, why don't more artists try this approach? I need more zestiness always. Viva la zest.

"Company Car" - Snõõper
from Sun Kin (Kabir Kumar)
"It's a heater, for one. Absolute banger melody. Maybe even more importantly, there are several instrumental songwriting moments that go wild on this song. Love the random bars of drums that switch between hi hat and floor tom. And talk about that guitar lead; the bends in the chorus are positively euphoric. In a world that increasingly looks past the contributions of bands to idolize singer-songwriters and one-person-bands, be a Snooper."

God damn it this song makes me want to drive a go-kart, even though I've never driven a go-kart in my life. Can they play loud music on the go-kart track, or at least pipe it into individual go-karts? I need to do this. This song smells like burnt rubber and freshly extruded plastic. I once saw a tweet, since deleted and lost to time, about how we should all have access to amphetamines/uppers because "it's our human right to go fast" and I think about that every time I hear a good fast song. It's our human right to go fast. Snooper rules.

"Long Island City Here I Come" - Geese
from Nicole V:
"It feels like the most triumphant song of the year. Its got great dark lyrics, it’s joyful and wild at the same time."

and from @devvinnnnn:
"Perfect culmination of the album of the year. Chaotic and ridiculous, perfect to yell sing on the way to work."

Thank fucking god for Geese for many reasons, but in this case because Cameron Winter understands the perfect balance of lyrical abstraction and lyrical specificity, of direct reference and indirect musings, and as such is capable of making you cry and making you laugh, often within seconds of each other (e.g. "Like Joshua kick-kick-kicked the king out of Jericho / I'm about to kick your ass up and down this street").

The couplet that snagged me on my listen for this blog was "You were there the day the music died, and / I'll be there the day it dies again." Holy cow...the music is always dying, in order to get born again. That's the thing that's so damn freaky: artists get older, they die, their fans die, and then other people take their respective places, on and on again, with uncomfortable moments of overlap and friction. In this economy, music is less a career than a calling, and Geese serve it up like they're enjoying the hero's journey. By the time Winter starts yelling "HERE I COME," I'm hopping up and down like Tom Cruise on the Oprah couch.

"do it" - underscores
from Tom Bown:
"underscores’ 2023 album Wallsocket is still probably my favourite album of this decade so far. Her new music moves away from the progressive alt-rock/pop style of that album towards more of an early-00s nostalgia pop/R&B feel, but is still just as exciting and enticing. Plus I’ve loved seeing this trans musician’s progression from pitch-shifted vocals and covering her face in shadow to not only being comfortable showing her whole self but having an entire video for this song where she does full-on choreography?? It’s fuckin awesome."

and from Josh Richmond:
"underscores feels like the future of pop to me, and “do it” is my favorite of a couple killer singles she released this year. It’s a Britney-ish club stomper, but with this pummeling, machine-tooled production that would make Gesaffelstein proud, hyper-aggressive but playful. Perfect to kick off a workout playlist for your January gym membership renewal."

I got into underscores when I was recommended "Locals (girls like us)" at the end of 2023—it is now in my permanent pantheon of pump up jams. And I love to see her evolving! "do it" is sooo fun. Throwing a little bit of strummed acoustic guitar into a sexy pop star will never not remind me of Justin Timberlake's imperial era (shout out to "Like I Love You," still hits even though the world tour was ruined) but this particular situation, overtly sexual and sonically hectic, reminds me of something Britney Spears might have sang on In The Zone, an album that doesn't get the critical shine Blackout does but I would argue is equally artistically bold/bonkers and deserving of legend status. "do it" is such well-observed y2k pop that it kind of freaks me out but you know what? Underscores was born in 2000. I merely adopted the y2k. She was born in it, molded by it.

"Cobra" - Geese
from Daisy Alioto

Like many people, I fell in love with Getting Killed the second Cameron Winter screamed THERE'S A BOMB IN MY CAR ("Trinidad" had its live premiere at Kilby Block Party, if that wasn't a sign for you to try to hit the best small festival in America next year), but "Cobra" was the song that got me to buy a Getting Killed CD—from Urban Outfitters, haha—for my father. When I saw Geese at Kilby I wrote "They take elements of these dinosaur rock acts like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and run them through a youthful irreverence machine, but in this way where you come off with the impression that they simply think Music Is Cool." "Cobra" reminds me of Soft Mick Jagger but also a little bit Cat Stevens. "You should be shame's only daughter" is a crazy bar.

"Never Going Back" - nobigdyl. & Kato On The Track feat. Project Pat
from John M.:
"Project Pat SNAPPED. It’s uplifting and an absolute banger"

That bell on the beat is just what the doctor ordered ("this song already was turnt but here's a bell" - Yeat), nice work from producer Kato On The Track. That opening sample is from "Money Flippa," a Project Pat and Juicy J song from last year that also features an interesting financial justification for tithing ("Ten percent go to God first, now my money long"); nobigdyl. and Kato On The Track asked for permission to use the sample, and Project Pat ended up coming aboard for a whole verse. That's gotta feel good—like when a casting director is looking for an actor with an [established actor] vibe, and [established actor] is all, "I'm actually available." Link and build, or die.