I always end up dragging these out until the absolute last minute, don't I? Anyway, my listening last month was pretty heavy on the new releases again, but I did discover a few other cool things, too! Most importantly, I discovered a lot of incredibly fun and catchy summer bops I will most definitely be blasting through mid-August. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'll have enough material to do one of these for June without it overlapping too much with my other planned posts (my quarter two round-up, obviously, and also a very special and very indulgent post I hope to have up within a week or so, the content of which you can probably guess if you know me and my recent obsessions at all). So I might end up skipping it or doing a shortened version, but we'll see. Anyway, onward with the music!

10. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - Drinker

It's pretty clear from my recent posts, but I've been gravitating a lot more toward upbeat, bouncy pop music this year than ever before. Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the state of the world right now and the fact that music is the one thing I can count on to provide temporary escape - but I don't want to dwell on the depressing. Instead, I'll talk about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and her totally adorable yet totally demented and, most importantly, totally addictive songs. It's only logical that my intense PC Music addiction would eventually dovetail into cutesy J-pop, especially when it's masterminded by producer/songwriter Yasutaka Nakata, who, as I understand it, is a master of auto-tuned uncanny valley bops. As the voice that brings his ultra-sugary compositions to life, what Kyary Pamyu Pamyu lacks in range she makes up for with her bubbly personality. I can't even pretend to know what "Drinker" is about, but I do know it's technicolor cotton candy fluff of the tastiest variety.

9. Galantis - Spaceship (feat. Uffie)


I've never listened to Uffie before, but last month she released her first song in quite some time, "Drugs," and it's a cute little auto-tuned bop that satisfies my desire for more Pop 2-esque sounds. A couple weeks later, this massive-sounding collaboration with Galantis landed, and it's everything I could possibly want in a summer banger. "Spaceship" hits hard and fast, wasting absolutely no time with preamble or subtlety. Uffie's voice is a rapidly-shifting chameleon, warped and twisted into a dizzying assortment of shapes, some more recognizably human, others fully alien. Its digitally-aided elasticity is buffeted by appropriately spacey-sounding synths, propulsive and bass-heavy, that blast off and power down every time the song loops back around to its repetitive but highly addicting hook. This is definitely the type of song I would expect to soundtrack an extraterrestrial rager, broadcasting out from the surface of Mars to the entire rest of the galaxy for one epic dance party.

8. Janelle Monáe - Screwed (feat. Zoë Kravitz)


The contradictory nature of "Screwed," one of the most compelling tracks on Janelle Monáe's new album, Dirty Computer, is fascinating to me in that, when you take it apart and consider its components more carefully, it really shouldn't work. On one hand, it's easily one of the catchiest and most joyous-sounding songs I've heard all year, Monáe's voice alternating with guest Zoë Kravitz's on the verses to energetically saucy effect as the sexual innuendos fly, backed by danceable, funky instrumentation and plenty of hand claps. On the other hand, the double meaning of its title reveals a more political nature, which comes to light in the chorus' lyrics: "Let's get screwed/I don't care/You fucked the world up now/We'll fuck it all back down." These lines are delivered with a sort of desperate giddiness, their message a mix of nihilism and optimism. It's a brilliant subversion of the expected Prince-inspired, oversexed groove into something with a bold intellectual bite.

7. Natalie Prass - Lost


My interest in Natalie Prass' sophomore album, The Future and the Past, was peaked by the delightfully retro groove of "Sisters," and "Lost" may be even better. Comparatively, it's a much subtler effort, but its simplicity is no hindrance or crutch; in fact, it's the song's biggest asset. The tastefully sparse piano and string arrangements allow Prass' voice, bright and clear as a bell and searingly emotive, to steal the spotlight. "I get lost when I'm with you," she croons romantically before stomping all over the listener's heart with the follow-up question, "But at what cost do I let you do what you do?" The combined effect of the lyrics, instrumentation, and vocals could easily veer over the edge into treacly sentimentality, but there's just enough restraint on display to avoid such pitfalls. Instead, the song ends up feeling utterly timeless, like it's already existed for centuries before now and will continue exist for centuries beyond.

6. Braids - Collarbones


Braids make some of the most cathartic music I've ever heard, and Raphaelle Standell-Preston's lyrics speak to the experiences of being a 21st-century woman with startling bluntness and accuracy. "Collarbones" is a beautifully intimate ballad that places Standell-Preston's impassioned vocals front and center, where they punch the listener squarely in the gut as she explores what it means to exist as a woman in the Internet age. With filters and angles at hand to manipulate her image, she can turn herself into whatever version others want to see: "Do you think it makes me look pretty when I soften all my lines away?/When I make myself look as far away from real?/Breasts pushed up, I'm trying to show you/I have collarbones and cleavage you can rest in." But this ultimately only complicates reality, putting pressure on women especially to live up to their romanticized forms, feeding feelings of unworthiness and shame: "When my clothes are off and we're together/I probably won't look this way again/And I wonder will you still want me then?"

5. Kate Tempest - Grubby


Kate Tempest is a name I've seen a lot, but between my lack of exposure to hip-hop until recently and my leeriness toward white rappers (which I still hold as a general rule), I never gave her a proper chance. Recently, a few random Spotify plays convinced me to try Let Them Eat Chaos, and it's actually one of the more compelling things I've heard recently, based specifically around the lives of seven strangers at the exact same moment in time and generally around navigating the capitalistic demands of modern London as a young adult. While Tempest has impeccable flow (which steers clear of appropriation), she draws just as much from her background as a poet. "Grubby" tells the story of Pious, who has a one-night stand with a woman she barely knows while still pining for her ex-lover. "She doesn't love/She just devours," Tempest intones as the omniscient narrator. A minute in, it explodes into a stream-of-consciousness jangle of first-person nerves and self-loathing: "I'm fighting my darkest parts/I'm frightened/Nightmares/Tighten my hands 'round my own throat/Because you're the snake charmer and I'm the old rope."

4. Ariana Grande - Be My Baby


I've been in an Ariana Grande spiral recently, and while My Everything is not actually a very consistent album (it's about half great and half borderline-awful), "Be My Baby" has to be one of the best pop songs of the last five years. It has one of the absolute catchiest choruses I've ever heard, which the song clearly knows, seeing as it wastes no time going straight into it. Seriously, I dare you to find something as satisfying to sing along to as the repeated "Be my/Be my/Be my/Be my/Be my baby" at the end. Cashmere Cat's bright, springy production touches give the song a further lift, and Grande, who's been accused of lacking charisma, gets the chance to display a real personality in the flirty second verse: "I'll give you all of my trust if you don't mess this up/You ain't trying to get no other girls when you in the club/All you got is eyes for me/I'm the only girl you see." I could possibly listen to this song on loop for the rest of my life and die happy.

3. EASYFUN - Be Your USA


"Be Your USA" is a fizzy and infectious synth-pop anthem that arrives just in time for blasting from your open car windows all summer long and adds to the body of evidence that EASYFUN is low-key one of PC Music's most valuable players. The song enlists Estonian singer Iiris for vocal duty, and I honestly don't know anything about her, but her light, bubbly (and heavily-processed) voice is the perfect vessel for its frothy sentiments, in which impossibly high expectations ("I don't want to be your USA/Never going to be your everything") are eschewed for a more intimate and meaningful bond ("I just want to be your music"). The song is essentially all chorus, but when you've written a hook this good, why not give it the showcase it deserves, hypnotically building up to a soaring release? Along the way, EASYFUN's signature screechy synths and well-timed glitchy vocal samples push it over the edge from fun to genius.

2. Half Waif - In the Evening


Honestly, Half Waif's 2016 album, Probable Depths, is so special to me that I was initially afraid to even listen to Lavender - so much so that I held off on doing so for a couple weeks after it was released. As it turns out, the album does have a very different vibe, less whimsical and more straight-up devastating, but I fell deeply in love with it almost immediately. "In the Evening" literally took my breath away with how meditative and serene it is on the surface and how dark and angry it is underneath. There are certain lines you might initially interpret as sweet - "In the morning, there'll be tea and coffee and milk/Just the way you like" - until others soon arrive to warn you there's something more sinister going on: "Don't expect me to be happy to see that you're happier than me/I don't owe you that." Ultimately, it's a song about loss, the loss of one's sense of self to the throes of an intense and tumultuous relationship, driven by Nandi Rose Plunkett's smoldering vocal presence. "There's a life going on/But it doesn't feel like me," she sings sadly before her voice is kaleidoscoped  into a digitized watercolor smear.

1. Beach House - Drunk in LA


I don't know if it was me or the music itself, but I started to lose interest in Beach House around the time Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars were released. (I've recently revisited both and have decided I quite like the latter, but the former is still a snooze to me, even though I know it has a lot of pretty intense devotees.) For this reason and the fact that none of the pre-release singles until "Black Car" really grabbed me, I wasn't overly excited to hear their latest release, 7. Once I actually listened, though, everything clicked into place, to the point where it may very well be on its way to becoming my third favorite Beach House release - but more on that later. "Drunk in LA" in particular is a track I've been playing the shit out of because it feels so quintessentially Beach House, encapsulating everything I love about their sound without seeming stale or uninspired. In fact, if anything, the band sounds revitalized. Victoria Legrand's smoky, seductive voice is at its best, the atmosphere is perfectly woozy, the melodies are golden, and the lyrics are reliably evocative. Hearing it for the first time transported me back to hearing "Zebra" for the first time, which is high praise considering it was the first Beach House song I ever fell in love with.