Great Songs From Q1 2023.
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Nicole Dollanganger — My Darling True
For some reason, Nicole Dollanganger has always had that Goth Girl Animal Crossing player vibe to me. Her previous album really hit a cool and dark place for me, something suicidal-adjacent, some latent bland text that spoke about how they thought they were failing themselves and everyone around them, but still just had to work a shift tomorrow and didn’t have as macabre an intention afterall, just a really decent mass of depression calcifying over their heart. And while this newest record didn’t get into me the same way that one did, this song came close. This is a dark and dreary journey through the tabernacle once again, something that really gets me interested in her work in the first place. (YouTube)
French Montana — Chit Chat ft. A$AP Rocky, Smooky MarGielaa, DJ Drama
I’m not sure if this type of rap is relevant all the way anymore. I heard it for the first time and it sounded a little bit like a good mix between what I used to listen to sometime in the early 00’s somehow mixed with that trap beat/autotune style and a catchy-as-hell hook over the top as well. Verses are fine, beat’s fine. It’s just been a good little minute since I heard something rap related that really spoke to me, so I’m glad this one came along. Felt like it revved a long dead engine. (YouTube)
Into It. Over It. — Heather Lane
A solid b-side from II.OI. covering a track from Tyler Daniel Bean. It’s got a faded and fuzzed instrumental sound to it, leaning heavily on more of the synth side, more akin to another Weiss project by the name of Couplet. (YouTube)
Yo La Tengo — Aselestine
A beautiful lazy summer song that sounded right when I heard it at the end of winter, but sits so perfectly right now as the weather heats up and the sun makes its presence more known. Casual drift with reverbing lap steel, background ambience and an effortless foot-tapping acoustic bass to sail upon. (YouTube)
Hail the Sun — Mind Rider
Oh you have a band that has a dude with a high pitched voice wailing across pedally and mini-prog guitars? Give it. Typically with a song like this I’d jump to saying it has Circa Survive vibes, but I’m more inclined with this sound to liken it to Closure In Moscow. Great song. (YouTube)
Roseville — Workhorse
Dreary and dark and indie, this is just a sad song with a repeating guitar line that builds into a more complex background, abstract and haunted. (YouTube)
Wednesday — Chosen to Deserve
A happy and heavy alt-country jam that goes so big and whose riff is so catchy and wonderful that it makes me so happy to have discovered it. This was a Pitchfork best new music track and the full record comes out this coming Friday (4.7) and Stereogum named it as their record of the week, so I’m pumped for the rest of it. But this has that Being Alive After Living In a Weird Suburban Town Is a Bummer and Also Rules genre, and feels just so filled with life. It has a pulse, a heartbeat, a series of polaroids stuck in the corner of its mirror. (YouTube)
Surprise Chef — Pash Rash
Massive Surprise Chef stan over here. Cool grooves, high vibes. These guys simply do not put out a bad song and they sound like they are having an absolute blast making it. It’s just so elevated and easy to move to. Love this, boys. Keep it coming. (YouTube)
Daughter — Be On Your Way
A really cool post-Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, post-Phantogram sound from this trio, Be On Your Way is a bummer of a lifetime’s worth of disappointments culminating in a send-off that may be for now may be forever, but just a great sounding twinkly and lightly electronic track that gets right what a lot of acts going for the same thing just can’t seem to nail down. (YouTube)
BARA HARI — Violence Rising
A great modern alternative song that flies danger close to a less grungy Garbage sound. Love the way the production sounds so chromatic and sleek. (YouTube)
Pale Lungs — Hum
For me there is no great debate, but the first real gatekeeping that I dealt with in my life was over the usage of the word “Emo”. I would say that as the word has evolved over time, the gatekeepers have ultimately lost and pandora’s box is wide open and it has ended up meaning absolutely nothing. For me though, this song right here is more akin to what I consider to be a more traditional emo song, if nothing else. It’s slow and sad and really leans heavily into the heavy and desperate sound. It doesn’t sound polished and doesn’t sound good, but sounds simply like the song had to be written by the artist. It sounds like they simply couldn’t keep it in themselves anymore and had to let it out. The record this came off of is definitely one of my favorites of the year. (YouTube)
Taylor Swift — Lavender Haze (Felix Jaehn Remix)
Last year’s Taylor Swift record was interesting, but definitely didn’t end up being one of my favorites of the year, nor of hers overall. This song that’s remixed was definitely one of my favorites from the record though (there’s also a really great acoustic version out now, too) and this remix takes that sound and mashes it up into a genre I often have very little respect for. This is almost a straightforward dance track, very electronic by nature and has no soul to it, but takes a song with an already great hook and jumps it up by degrees. Does it improve the original? No way. But it’s fun as hell, and I’m glad I didn’t skip it the instant I saw “remix”. (YouTube)
Sleep Token — Vore
Had this band shared to me many times by a best friend, and never really landed on a song that I loved until now. This one is heavy and shreds hard. The one part with the Seether singing part is a little cheugy to me, but overall the song is tough enough for me to ride behind it. Lots of frenzy going on in the background, drums are an absolute phalanx… just a cool track. Going to pay a lot more attention to what they have in store going forward. The ending guitars have such a rad Deftones vibe to them as well. (YouTube)
Lil Yachty — sHouLd i B?
My son wanted me to hear this record, as he was wondering what my opinion on something so different from the artist would be. Easily a guy I never would listen to, but with his new take, I don’t know, there’s something about him putting something together that’s so left field that I actually like it? It’s catchy in a way that doesn’t really ring out as if it were scripted to be so well put together, and feels uncomfortable enough to have that vulnerability that really works for it. (YouTube)
It Was a Good Dream — Drawing Your Recurve
Actually found out about this band from an IG ad and followed up enough to check out more than just the one single they were pitching. This one goes massive enough to make me find that love I had of post-rock about a decade ago, something that’s primal and built in, the same way our love of the stars and of natural phenomenon is. It feels bigger than we can wrap our arms around, feels larger than the biggest breath we can possibly take. (YouTube)
Pile — Link Arms
Pile had a record a few years ago that I really liked. It was bleak and flat and sad as a distant mesa. Their album from this year doesn’t feel to me like it has the same staying power but certainly is strange and interesting in a way that made me put a bookmark in it to revisit when I was feeling a little more cerebral. It’s a sonically dense record (as this song portrays) and I think there’s just a little more than meets the ears to this one. It reminds me of a song that would have lived perfectly on the Death Stranding soundtrack. (YouTube)
MIRSY — Thank You
A little bit of a grungy vibe to the song, a hypnotic track that’s simple on its surface but put through the ringer in post-production, creating something that feels like a sonic tower of pulsing pearlescence. (YouTube)
King Princess — The Bend
I loved King Princess’ first EP that she released through and through. Couldn’t get enough of it. Listened to it obsessively. Everything from her since wandered into a little bit of a territory that was too poppy for me to really dig into, but this song turns the dial into just the right middle place that I fell in love with her all over again. A little Haim-y, a little old-fashioned with just the right amount of big pop hook sound. Hell yeah, Mikaela. (YouTube)
DILLY DALLY — Morning Light
So this song was released in a little bunch of stuff that the band dropped when they were announcing their breakup, so I’m not sure the intent or the timeline of the track. But I do love it. When I heard it for the first time, I was really looking forward to the announcement of a new record that would have this same spirit, so while this song rules it comes with the melancholy feeling that I will never hear more just like it. Chugging guitars that sit deep in the background behind dreamwavey guitars and a borderline riot grrly snarl that jumps with a little bit of Cindy Lauper fun. This song prowls on you, man. (YouTube)
Jana Horn — The Dream
“The Dream” is such a perfect title for this lucid track which picks apart the senses and places them into 6 different petry dishes and watches them interact with various chemical notes. It’s simple and plaintive, bearing a clear thread throughout. (YouTube)
Sincerely — Illustrious
A fun guitar instrumental in the vein of Chon and Covet. An absolute celebration of the instrument in noodle form. (YouTube)
Jesus Piece — Silver Lining
Just criminal and miserable and fucking heavy. Like screaming into the caved face of an immortal. That breakdown hits and sinks you into a beartrap, man. This song hits so powerfully. Relentless, no prisoners, no quarter. And then that second round of breakdowns, a little bit of that traditional Poison the Well sound with something more nefarious, something more dense. Oh hell yeah. (YouTube)
Chuck Strangers — Prospect Park West
I came to be pretty familiar with Chuck’s stuff through his production. This song has one of the best beats out there and I think in this song his flow resembles one of my favorites of all time, Big Pun. It had been a while since there was something from Strangers that really jumped out at me like this, but this one felt special. (YouTube)
August Burns Red — Revival
I almost didn’t check out the August Burns Red record because most of what they do tends to blend together for me which was phenomenal when I saw them live as it was all octane all the time, but on a record it tends to cheapen so much of each track as all of them start to sound more like a product than a piece of work. While a lot of the record is “Good.”, it does seem to blend together a bit, except for this song which seems to take things in a different direction than most of their other stuff. That isn’t to say that this reinvents the ABR aesthetic, but it certainly stood above most of the other stuff they’ve been putting out there. (YouTube)
Fire-Toolz — The Great Allower
All over the place in the best of ways, this song sounds like a cluster of radio waves from a hundred solar systems was picked up on a satellite and beamed directly into a single speaker. It’s right on brand for this band who is releasing something along the lines of grindy, dilapidated frenzy and also experimenting a great deal with other sonic outputs as well. I highly recommend checking out ‘It Is Happening Again (Thank You, Council of Saturn)’ if you are interested in this level of wild and boundary ignoring hex. Can’t wait for more of whatever this band is planning. (YouTube)
eleventwelfth — every question i withhold, every answer you never told
This sound comes from somewhere kind of after the huge boom of 2001–2004 bands that were doing the sadboy thing but before a lot of them started turning way edgier and breakdowny-er, when bands like Mae and This Day & Age were coming around with big poppier sounds with a bit of a lean in that sound that somehow nudged up against what the punkier bands were doing but still were standing on their own. This record is one that I was looking forward to for a while and once I shook off a little of the dust of the era, I think it overall sounded really great, really composed. This song is just a really great example of a band not trying to reinvent the wheel, but putting together something strongly written, something earnest and it sounding excellent. (YouTube)
