· The thing that really sells me on Narcolepsy is the coda of the final thirty seconds or so.
· World Party and Do It, Try It are very different styles of music from very different artists, but they both have this driving force within them that carries you along by force.
· Snail Mail’s new album, Ricochet, is just consistently very good, and I kept adding more songs from it to this list.
· I put a bunch of nice warm J-rock on here, which I always find immensely comforting in a way that demands very little.
· Marlene Dietrich’s German rendition of Where Have All the Flowers Gone is rich and full, and is used to incredible effect in Bugonia.
· saman by Olafur Arnalds is a good example of a kind of music I love but don’t quite know the name of – it’s the sort where you play the piano with the mute pedal on, but you mic the pedal to make sure you get all its creaking. Janis Crunch and Haruka Nakamura and Takagi Masakatsu are other great examples of this genre.
· The Chicken is Naked and Afraid is a fascinating song, but its music video is really quite something (deranged).
· Burn Your Village has such a wild layering of beats and sounds.
· Lime Garden’s sophomore album is a world-weary, acid-etched rock testament.
· Emperor X fascinates me, they really do. Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan! obviously feels oppressively present and angry (in a good way); Schopenhauer in Berlin has a very different energy but has the same frenetic nerdiness infused with sincere feeling.
· Love Story is a cinematic, operatic play of tempo changes.
· Half Real is another majestic entry from Geese’s 2025 album Getting Killed.
· Agamemnon is exactly the kind of Royal-Navy-fixated sea shanty I cannot possibly get enough of.
· Depreston is a song I have loved for years; this is a song so profound and beautiful I actually assigned it the English class I was teaching a number of years ago, just because I could. Courtney Barnett is always masterful, and this remains her best work.
· Do not be fooled by their name, Humbert Humbert are the most wholesome Japanese folk duo you could possibly imagine, and there have been very melancholic periods of my life where I absolutely relied on them emotionally to pick myself up off the ground. There’s a quality in their voices that gives the sound an expansive sense of space, and an inborn vibrato, that just feels like how an old dog must feel being stroked gently.
· Ballad of the Last Payphone achieves its power as a look back, closing the door on a chapter of life you can’t revisit, precisely by its repeated chorus denying its significance. This is so beautiful.
