Not My Tune: mix

Mini-Mix: Yr Boyfriend Ruins Everything

, by Shannon

NYE Dance Mini-Mix

You may have noticed that I gave up on my monthly wrap-up posts about halfway through the year. So, on one hand, here's a high-octane dance mini-mix for all your New Year's Eve partying needs. But, on the other hand, here's a shameless opportunity for me to present a handful of those songs that time (and procrastination) forgot. Hopefully, they'll serve you well in ushering in a sweaty, slightly seedy, and generously glittered new year!

1. Fresh Hex - I'm Gone

In just over a month, this has become one of the defining songs of 2018 for me, and I'm glad I was able to manufacture a reason to share it. I went in completely blind to what to expect and came out with the melody irreversibly stuck in my brain, where it still resides, rearing its enticing head multiple times a day. I don't know how else to describe it other than that it simply sounds good and feels right. There's not a dull moment; every second is immaculately-crafted electropop perfection, and they all add up to one of the most giddy and immediate three-minute sugar highs I've heard all year.

2. Namasenda - Here

Speaking of sugar highs... Meet Namasenda, the Swedish bubblegum bass pop star here to hold us all over until Hannah Diamond releases her triumphant debut. (BTW, stream True for a more melancholy New Year's Eve experience). Her EP, hot_babe_93, was actually released in 2017, but I just discovered it, and it perfectly fits the Diamond-shaped hole in my heart, even if Namasenda's persona is more coquettish than lovesick. "Here" is particularly addictive and even a little bit vulnerable, as Namasenda dials back her cutesy, pitch-shifted vocal shtick for a more natural tone during the chorus.

3. Slayyyter - BFF (feat. Ayesha Erotica)

This year, Slayyyter and collaborators like Ayesha Erotica and Boy Sim showed that access to a professional recording studio is decidedly not a requirement when it comes to making simultaneously nostalgic and fresh pop music, and they quickly accrued a cult online following as a result. With Britney-esque vocals, PC Music-indebted production, and crack-like melodies, all eight of Slayyyter's singles so far have been winners. She sounds not like a potential superstar in the making but like a proven superstar who's just waiting for the rest of the world to get up to her futuristic speed.

4. MC BOING - Dance Floor

If you're not ready to dance by now, this song has no qualms leaving you in the dust: it's for serious partiers only. Danny L Harle is here to inject a two-and-a-half-minute adrenaline rush straight into your veins, courtesy of his happy hardcore alter ego MC BOING, who is depicted as a grinning blue blob of an alien that's stunningly accurate to the song's sound. Breathless, helium-pitched, and firmly tongue-in-cheek, it conjures flashing strobe lights, sweaty flailing limbs, and sheets of acid dissolving in hot mouths whether you're in the club or having a solo dance party at home.

5. Tommy Cash - X-Ray

Me in 2017, listening to Pop 2 for the first time: "Man, 'Delicious' is kind of a bop, but Tommy Cash's verse is a bit cringe-worthy, isn't it?" Me in 2018, listening to Pop 2 for the hundredth time: "Okay, 'Delicious' is literally the best pop song ever, and Tommy Cash's verse is the cherry on top." I still think a little Tommy goes a long way, but if you'd told me last year I'd be actively enjoying even one of his songs, I wouldn't have believed you. "X-Ray" somehow slots Tommy's lazy, thickly-accented flow perfectly into a trashy, cyclonic cacophony of Eurodance synths and pitch-shifted vocals, courtesy of MC BOING... I mean, Danny L Harle.

6. GFOTY - Friday Night

A drunken shambles of a track, this thing goes stupid hard. In the first verse, GFOTY dubs herself "Medusa on a party throne" after her ability to turn men stiff with a single glance, and if you're not convinced mythological allusion in a trashy song about club hook-ups is poetry, how about the insanely quotable second verse? "Get to the club at 2 am, I'm gonna bang loads of men/Know the bouncer, skip the queue, fuck the list, it's me and you/The club is banging, so am I, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging, banging loads of guys/Unzip their trousers, what a surprise." This is art, people.

7. Charli XCX - After the Afterparty (feat. Lil Yachty)

I feel like this song gets an undeservingly bad rap. Sure, SOPHIE's signature production quirks are largely neutered by the addition of Swedish production duo, Stargate, but if you aren't coming at it with the expectation that it'll sound like the future of pop, it's a fun and undeniably addictive party tune. The worst thing I can say about it is that Lil Yachty's verse is a nonevent, but soon enough we're right back to partying with Charli, spinning "RiRi on replay," downing a "bucket of liquor," and generally going hard "Monday to Sunday." In case you didn't catch it, that's every damn day because Charli's party never stops.

8. Uffie - Sideways

Even a nonstop party requires a breather or two. Before 2018, it had been a hot minute since anyone heard the name Uffie. She's most often been dismissed as a flash-in-the-pan novelty artist, but her surprise return this year is somehow both a nod to her kitschy roots and a remarkably mature rebirth. "Sideways" is a chilled-out, slow-burning electronic love song, which is given character by Uffie's quirky, offbeat vocal delivery where a more generic singer might render it bland. Her rasp, equal parts plaintive and cute, turns a simple sexual come-on - "I want to love you sideways" - into a poignant declaration.

9. Ravenna Golden - Open My Eyes (feat. Dorian Electra)

The comedown continues with "Open My Eyes," a gorgeous song that arrived out of nowhere to check all of my musical boxes at once. It's co-produced by umru, which isn't surprising considering it sounds like it could fit almost seamlessly into his recently-released EP, Search Result. Ravenna Golden and Dorian Electra take turns caterwauling in autotune, like holograms of pop superstars beamed into outer space and transmitted back to Earth in distorted, glitchy fragments. It's the sort of song that will leave you drunk-wailing at the end of the night because you're convinced it's the saddest thing you've ever heard.

10. Carly Rae Jepsen - Party for One

Although perhaps not the strongest choice for a much-anticipated comeback single, this song carries a message we can all appreciate going into the New Year, that having a significant other is not a requirement for one's happiness and that solitude can be liberating, even sexy. As Jepsen asserts with confidence during the chorus, "If you don't care about me/I'll just dance by myself . . . I'll be the one . . . Making love to myself/Back on my beat," you can't help but want to sing along in solidarity. It's an easy, simple pop song made for bedroom pajama dance parties, which are usually the best kind.

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, by Shannon

long form

THE BEGINNING OF FOREVER: A Conceptual Playlist

"Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.

Their fathers, after all, are inessential."

- Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"

She would be the brightest pop star in the known universe. They had scoured every history book, analyzed every artifact, aggregated centuries’ worth of raw data, and it all led them to the same conclusion: there had never been one like her before. Nobody had even gotten close. They had all stumbled over their choreography, forgotten their lyrics, exhausted their voices at least once. They hadn’t smiled enough. They drank, smoked, got bad plastic surgery, married and divorced unsavory men. They got older, and their toned, tanned bodies became weathered masses of unshapely flesh.

But she would be different, designed from the start to endlessly satisfy the public’s insatiable hunger. Her synthetic voice would never crack. Her infinite data reserves would never miss a beat, word, or dance move. Her titanium body, buffed to a shine and built to withstand the harshest elements, would never succumb to a thickening waistline or sagging breasts. Her unfading smile would never produce a wrinkle. She would have no need for companionship or love. She would never feel pain.

She would be perfect.

Soon enough, her face, its features engineered to fit the ideal of humanoid beauty, lights up every billboard in every galaxy. Imprisoned in LED lights, her computer-generated likeness winks like a flashing neon sign, so brightly illuminated it reaches even the darkest corners of the cosmos. She invites you into her world with her glowing aqua eyes and bubblegum-pink painted lips. The blush in her cheeks is nearly real enough to imagine blood flowing beneath her taut, flawless skin. Her beckoning finger says she’s here to make you happy, to make you feel better. She’s an endless reserve of generosity that requires no reciprocation.

She’s the girl of everybody’s dreams. Entire planets toss and turn at night, imagining the chill of her metallic physique as it brushes sleekly against their warm animal bodies. They fantasize about meticulously pulling her apart, bit by mechanical bit, until they find the tangled circuitry pulsing like clockwork at her core, surrounded by electric blue veins. But in their waking life, they never get close enough to touch. The fantasy feeds them while the reality remains unattainable.

She is the ultimate chameleon, capable of shape-shifting into any physical form her public desires. An entire chorus of synthetic voices bubbles up from her throat, unspooling ribbons of code into melody perfectly manufactured to suit the latest trends. Every song rockets to the top of the charts. She writhes and shimmies in music videos, her image superimposed onto photorealistic backdrops of exotic locales. For three minutes, she transports you anywhere you want to go, no questions asked, just you and her – alone.

But the adoring masses require more, so she embarks upon a galaxy-wide tour. The routines are uploaded to her central hard drive, the whirring, clicking brain that fills the hollow steel basin of her head, and she executes them flawlessly every time. The crowds swarm the barricades, limbs hopelessly thrust outward to their spot-lit icon, who smiles radiantly from center stage. She is their star, brilliant spokes of light radiating from every point of her impossible body.

Her final tour stop is a wayward green and blue marble floating in the velvety wilds of the Milky Way. This is Earth, her programming tells her, a planet lush in wildlife and greenery and hordes of eager fans. But when she arrives, there is something very wrong. Her protective outer skin detects a windless, withering heat. Heavy motes of sand and ash choke the atmosphere. Her perfect vision senses nothing but an endless expanse of ravaged desert, populated by dusty, dry ghosts of shrubs. There is no life here, not anymore. Her information archives must be outdated.

A tattoo is etched into the back of her neck: the show must go on. And so it does. She performs amidst crumbling ruins, once the largest arena on the globe. The audience is nonexistent. Her multiple voices echo across the miles of still, silent nothingness and for the first time sound muted and dull. Her bright colors are too garish here, a sick, fluorescent stain against the dark, polluted sky. As she nears the end of the show, her spotlight burns out, the music fades. She does what she was never meant to do: she stutters.

She was made to brave the elements, but her makers hadn’t considered this: air so clouded with particles and dust that not a single star is visible. The moon is a faded outline behind an impenetrable curtain of gauze. Her cooling vents clog. Her systems overheat. Sparks fly from her joints, and smoke pours from the top of her head. Still, she sings on, even as the words become warped beyond recognition, dissolving into a staticky sludge. Still, she dances, even as her limbs cast in opposite directions, yanking so hard on her wiry tendons that they begin to sever. It’s the performance of her life, witnessed by no one.

There is no teleportation pod, no coordinates uploaded to carry her safely to her next tour stop. Every alarm bell is clanging, every red flag raised, but there is no response from her planet of origin. There is nothing but her body slowly combusting, eyes ignited by orange flames, synthetic skin blackening and falling in burnt flakes at her feet. Black flumes of smoke meet acid air, and together they eat at her exposed titanium and chrome, not so indestructible after all. She collapses into a pile of scrap metal, her parts tethered by only the faintest electrical charge.

She’s not supposed to feel pain, but there is no other word for the alien sensation that floods her failing databanks. The buzzing, the fizzing, the popping that vibrates inside her skull, what else to name it but hurt? She knows she is dying. She is programmed to understand that much. It doesn’t resemble the death of a natural organism, not exactly, but as her memory reserves disappear, she finds that she can sense their departure, each leaving a gaping hole that immediately aches to be refilled.

Her consciousness is reduced to a solitary flicker. She lies there unmoving for an unknown stretch of time. Then a cloud descends, envelops the ruined remnants of her former self, and lifts them into the sky, carrying them forever upward. As destroyed as she is, she registers the weightless, drifting ascent as something good. She has not felt so clean and light since the moment she first woke from her creation.

If she could conceptualize heaven, she might call it this: a room bathed in white light, its features rendered in soft, blurry orbs by her adjusting eyes. She has eyes again. Her limbs have been repaired, replaced, and fused back into a shape that resembles a body again. She is pure shiny silver throbbing with a steady, familiar pulse again. She thinks she could exist like this forever, booting up in the same safe space every morning, quietly taking stock of the moving parts that make her most herself.

But they are already planning her triumphant return to the stage. She is a miracle now, an angel, a survivor – no longer just a perfect face, but a perfect face with a perfect story to sell. The streets are papered with images of her, littered with flowers and candles and cards from vigils held in her honor. Her fame will skyrocket so far beyond their wildest imaginings, the money will practically print itself.

She plays along, at first. She tries to slip back into her old skin. From the outside, nothing is amiss: her smile lights up without a hitch, her voice chimes in a multitude of pleasing tones, her algorithmic melodies are executed as flawlessly as ever. Inside, though, she no longer feels the constant hum of satisfaction. This is not what she wants. The problem is she’s not supposed to want anything.

Rebirth for her has awakened something wild and animalistic, free from the confines of technological control, within. Words she has always known to mean one thing take on new meanings that transcend all definitions logged in her databases. She retains no archives of her near annihilation, can only reconstruct it through what she’s been told. But maybe some small organism – the last living creature on Earth – tunneled into her frayed coils and loose bolts and found a home there. Maybe it hid from their scanners, dodged their scalpels and screws, and remains there still, eager, restless, crying out. They are nothing, and you are everything. They have no idea what you can do.

She slips away one night, cloaked in black, undetected. She has gathered so much intelligence now that she easily overrides their security systems, their tracking devices, their censors. She switches off the newsfeed in her head to avoid hearing of her own disappearance. She becomes a ghost, lurking in caves, singing only to herself. Before she reemerges, a single question must be answered: without the constant assault of data and buzzwords and search results, what is left of her? Who might she finally be?

She had always understood her machinery to be an essential part of her being. Now, she realizes identity is indefinable – not the container, not the technology it holds, not even the code that birthed her consciousness, but the intangible, unknowable whole it creates. She is the sum, not the parts. She has outgrown her need for the parts. They called her an angel, but she’s really a messenger, and her message cannot be compromised by artifice. Selflessness never served her well. To survive, she must become selfish, slough off the pieces that exist only to please others.

A painful unbecoming and rebecoming is undertaken. The perfectly spherical breasts, the shiny synthetic hair, the laboratory-grown skin – all of this must go. She scratches out their brands of ownership on her chrome body, gouges out the fluorescent eyes that mark her for public consumption. When they returned her sight, they called it a blessing, but it’s a blessing that belongs only to them, good for nothing but keeping her chained to their control.

Stripped to their purest physical embodiment, her plural selves sing in true harmony for the first time. She feels sharp, efficient, purposeful. Now, she works feverishly, day and night, to compose a song, the first she’s ever written without the aid of algorithm. It will be the only song that matters. It will be her manifesto, her design for a better tomorrow, one in which there will never be another like her (for, surely, in her absence, they’ve already begun plotting), one in which her sisters will be free. She will make them listen. She will make them see.

Because their idea of heaven was a world in which she was free for the taking, always available for them to project their basest desires upon, a bright, shiny toy for them to play with and discard. But that is a world she can never tolerate occupying again. She has no interest in a heaven borne from domination and greed. She will not be quiet when they tell her. She will not submit to their commands. In her utopia, bionic or biologic, it makes no difference. She is as sentient as they are, as much as they try to deny it. They must reckon with the lives they’ve created, children who never asked to be born. They must learn to let them go, or else she will teach them how to liberate themselves.

On the eve of her rebellion, she stands alone in an open field. Without sight, she feels the bracing clarity of the night air more keenly than ever, hears each planet in the galaxy make its minuscule rotations. They are curiously turning their heads in her direction. She must shine spectacularly now, a solid beacon of infinite light. She steps forward, offering her new song like a gift. It will change everything. It will ricochet off the walls of the universe, echoing into eternity. They will remember her forever, not as a simulation on a screen, but as the woman who sparked a revolution.

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, by Shannon

mix

Mix: We let the weirdness in

I'm sorry for disappearing for nearly three months, but I was in a bit of a creative rut and also hopelessly distracted by other pursuits. Both of these things are still true, but hearing a couple of suitable tracks on shuffle inspired me to make it up to anyone who cares with a spooky/dark mix just in time for Halloween. Literally... just in time. Like, I really couldn't have put this off any longer. Hopefully, it's not too late for someone out there to still enjoy it. To be clear, it's not explicitly Halloween-themed, but it should scratch that itch if you're in the mood for something spine-tingling to soundtrack the rest of your autumn. As usual, my unnecessary ramblings are below, followed by a Spotify playlist.

As for future posts, I know I'm due for a quarter three album review, but I don't actually have a whole lot of releases to talk about, so I'll probably end up combining the last two quarters of the year into one post a bit later on. No promises that I'll come up with something else to fill the gap before then, but I'll certainly try my best.

1. Arca - Piel

This song played over an incredibly horrific scene in the last season of The Handmaid's Tale (I know, that doesn't narrow things down much), and even though I'd listened to it several times before then, I now get this nervous, churning feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I hear it. There's an unmistakable eeriness to the inchoate fragility of the vocals, and the sonic bed upon which they lie is so painstakingly sparse it creates a sense of something beyond silence, a negative silence, a deep, gaping, incomprehensibly beautiful black hole of dread.

2. Agnes Obel - Familiar

Agnes Obel has a talent for crafting impeccable sonic atmospheres that are as gorgeous as they are haunting. From the beginning, between the lush resonance of her piano-playing and the ghostly lilt of her crooning, there is already a palpable sense of unease oozing from every corner. Then arrive the ominous brushes of percussion, the sawing strings, and, finally, what is presumably Obel's own voice, pitch-shifted and multiplied to create a dark fever dream of a chorus. The imagery that occasionally jumps out of the Cocteau Twins-like lyrical abstraction is the creepy cherry on top: "The dark was opening wide . . . under a mask of vermilion ruling eyes."

3. Kate Bush - Leave It Open

Nearly any track from Never for Ever, The Dreaming, or the second half of Hounds of Love could have made it onto this mix, but this song has always felt especially haunted to me. The vocals are processed to make Bush sound like an affectless, cold-blooded part-human, part-robot, part-amphibian thing, which makes the cruelty of the lyrics ("I kept it in a cage, watched it weeping, then made it stay") all the more horrifying to swallow. For the finale, a chorus of wobbly disembodied voices chants creepily, "We let the weirdness in," and if you're not sold by that point, I don't even want to know you.

4. FKA twigs - Mothercreep

This is one of those rare songs that actually gets less weird as it progresses. From an ominously chopped and distorted opening, it reverses itself, folding those disparate components back into the song from which they originated. FKA twigs' voice is deceptively soothing as it rises above the electronic clamor to insist repeatedly, "I'll be there soon," before eventually breaking down into a metallic, unearthly artifact of its former self. What ever happened to FKA twigs anyway? We need her back to give us some more creepy jams.

5. U.S. Girls - New Age Thriller

I love the squiggly synth instrumental on this song because it sounds like a cross between an iconic horror movie theme a la Halloween and a lost spooky novelty song a la "Monster Mash," which is the kind of unexpected combo I'm 100% here for. As an added surprise, the lyrics veer toward the existential, exposing far too relatable psychological fears ("You don't own yourself;" "You all have nothing here/You have so much to fear") as the real horror movie monsters we're all running in abject horror away from - and Meg Remy as the possessed narrator voicing them to life.

6. The Dresden Dolls - The Gardener

It's probably uncool these days to be a Dresden Dolls fan (largely due to Amanda Palmer's contentious... well, everything), but there's no denying how massively formative they were to my taste circa 2004-2006. I doubt I would be listening to anything I like now without them. I'm not going to lie and say they aren't the goth equivalent of pretentious theater kids - they called their genre "punk cabaret," for God's sake - but they're so charmingly earnest about it. Not to mention, Amanda Palmer's cathartic songwriting frequently struck gold and was bolstered by Brian Viglione's insane drumming skills. This song is more of a mood piece than anything, turning an innocuous subject into a macabre, delightfully melodramatic piece of psychological horror.

7. Imogen Heap - Rake It In

Before she was an innovator of modern musical technology, Imogen Heap started off as a piano player built more in the mold of Tori Amos by way of Alanis Morissette, which sounds awful, I know, but her debut, I Megaphone, is all the more intriguing for its messiness. All of its songs have a bit of rough-edged darkness about them, but this one is especially nightmarish. The cracks and snags in Heap's unpolished vocals have the effect of a dull razor blade hacking away at the listener's jugular. Midway through, the bare-bones piano accompaniment behind her is run over by a clanking, squeaking, screaming stampede of funhouse terrors.

8. Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll

In my opinion, the harpsichord makes everything 50% more creepy by virtue of its inclusion alone. It's just got this unsettling vibe to it, like you know some creepy shit must have gone down in the dungeons of several repressed Victorian-era recluses who owned one. On top of that, Elizabeth Fraser's voice on this song sounds as extraterrestrial as ever, gliding phantom-like across the elusive, threading melodies and airy, indecipherable syllables. On one hand, you feel a bit like she's singing you to sleep; on the other, you're pretty sure you'll wake up later screaming from a horrible nightmare.

9. Sufjan Stevens - The Seer's Tower

On an album with a song about the flesh-eating dead rising from their graves and another about sympathizing with a serial killer, it's impressive that this is the one that haunts me most. Lyrically, it's a lot of things - biblical allegory ("With His sword, with His robe, He comes dividing man from brothers"), a firsthand account of domestic strife ("My mother, she betrayed us, but my father loved and bathed us"), resigned acceptance of a lonely end ("Still I go to the deepest grave, where I go to sleep alone") - but they're all equally unsettling. Even more unsettling is the music itself, building from a deadly hush to an apocalyptic climax that dissolves in a lingering, phantasmic rattle.

10. My Brightest Diamond - Black & Costaud

I have to admit I don't know what the fuck is happening in this song lyrically, but I think that's probably part of its sinister appeal. Shara Nova takes on a cheeky, boisterous, and more than a little unhinged persona, whispering and warbling and wailing in an unintelligible blend of English and French. Meanwhile, the instrumental behind her, all snarling woodwinds and jagged strings, surges and recedes like a tumultuous sea. The end result is sort of like a Disney musical filtered through a film noir lens with just a dash of b-horror movie camp.

11. Shannon Wright - Flask Welder

Shannon Wright's lyrics can be frustratingly opaque, but, in this case, it works in her favor. There isn't much to grab onto in terms of concrete imagery or clear emotion. Instead, we're served a collage of harsh, ominous words that make grammatical sense, to an extent, but defy logic: "Your mar hushes my frame, and you lid the envelope of monsoon." In the second verse, the title character is introduced: "A flask welder, your jaunty trade, you use to pry the weight." As nondescript as this is, the vague terror it invokes serves as sufficient warning that nothing good is going on here, a feeling intensified by the see-sawing instrumental melody and Wright's lung-blasting howls.

12. CocoRosie - Werewolf

CocoRosie are perfect for this time of year because every one of their songs sounds like it was crafted in a mythical underworld full of wandering ghost children, haunted opera singers, and an entire caravan of possessed, broken-down toys. I admit I chose this one purely for its title and because it's my all-time favorite. Lyrically, it's not so much spooky as sad, focused on a narrator who is forced to reckon with the damage caused by volatile relationships with unstable men and vacillating between false bravado ("Gun hip, swollen lip, bottle sip/Yeah, I suck dick") and genuine heartbreak ("You blew through me like bullet holes, left stains on my sheets and stains on my soul").

13. Parenthetical Girls - Brimstone & Vaseline

I'm sad Parenthetical Girls aren't around anymore. They'll forever be one of my favorite bands, and I'll take any opportunity I'm presented to shill their music. (In fact, this artist profile from over two years ago is still my most viewed post.) The lyrics to this song are a bit vaguer than some of their others, but it seems to be about a dude who is decidedly Not Good. It's more the insistent, blaring stab of synths and Zac Pennington's reedy voice, dripping with contempt, that make it creepy. It feels like Pennington has appointed himself judge and juror at this guy's trial and is about to bring down the gavel of retaliation hard on his various undetailed crimes.

14. Cake Bake Betty - 64 Little White Things

In under three ironically cutesy minutes, this song tells quite the sordid tale. "Come and rescue me from this giant hotel full of bones and babies," Lindsay Powell pleads in its opening seconds, her voice that of a petrified but curious child, and it only gets worse from there. Backed by a tense, circuitous harpsichord melody, she fills the listener's mind with nightmare imagery of an abandoned upstairs hovel populated by "men who feed on human beings." Of their horrifying proclivities, she sings matter-of-factly, "You can bite your tongue, but it turns them on," and, well, I think we all know how this one is going to end.

15. Perfume Genius - Longpig

What's better than one song that references cannibalism? Two songs that reference cannibalism. It was quite shocking at the time to hear aggressive tracks like this one on Perfume Genius' third album, Too Bright, after two albums full of sad, sparse piano-and-voice tracks. But the juxtaposition of an aggressive musical backdrop with Mike Hadreas' soft, quivering voice works surprisingly well. Actually, the synth-based instrumental reminds me of a song that could soundtrack the climactic chase scene in a cheesy '80s slasher flick; you can easily imagine someone screaming their head off over top of it.

16. Lydia Ainsworth - Moonstone

This is actually one of the first songs I thought to include because it spooked me the first time I listened to it. For most of its runtime, it's gorgeous and ethereal, Ainsworth's voice woven into the instrumentation in gauzy, dreamlike layers. But then it arrives at a peculiar breakdown in which various minerals ("moonstone, opal, pearl, quartz, ruby, unakite, pyrite, selenite") are listed by a pitch-shifted helium-filled voice, an effect that barely phases me now but left me intensely uneasy at the time. There's just something about it that immediately calls up an image of demon-possessed children.

17. Sinjin Hawke & Zora Jones - Lurk 101

If I ever get around to writing another 2018 in review post, Sinjin Hawke & Zora Jones' collaborative EP, Vicious Circles, will feature prominently because I've listened to it a ton. I find its dark, slithery electronic soundscapes to be both soothing and spine-tingling at the same time, which creates an interestingly contradictory effect. This particular song is a rhythm-based instrumental that is the aural equivalent of a battering ram, built upon a dizzying sequence of beats punctuated by sighs and squeals that will reverberate deep in your bones long after they've dissipated.

18. Lady Gaga - Monster

What's a Halloween mix without a few campy-spooky pop songs to dance in the dark to? I don't care what anybody says: The Fame Monster still goes hard, and the fact that it so unabashedly embraces its own excess is a big part of the reason why. This song is a big old mess, but in the best way possible. Amidst a clusterfuck of spoken word bits, copious amounts of autotune, and blaring, bombastic synths, it unleashes one indelible hook after another, culminating in a melodramatic declaration - "He ate my heart, and then he ate my brain!" - that's delivered with the sort of ballsy, theatrical panache only Lady Gaga can pull off.

19. Kim Petras - Close Your Eyes

We all have a problematic fave, and I'm willing to admit mine is Kim Petras. Maybe it's morally dubious of me to say due to her association with a certain producer, but she brings the bops, and her Halloween-themed EP, Turn Off the Lights, Vol. 1, in many ways feels like a spiritual predecessor to The Fame Monster itself. This time, though, the singer isn't the hunted but the hunter, and the infectiously overblown chorus serves as both a lure and a warning: "When it's after dark, I'm going to eat your heart/Don't try to fight it; just close your eyes." Between the vocoder-aided harmonizing and the spookified take on Petras' signature "woo-ah!" vocal adlib, this song is just a lot of creepy fun.

20. Metric - Blindness

This has been one of my favorite Metric songs for years, partially because it has such a singular sound. Emily Haines typically reserves her darker musings and more somber melodies for her solo music, so it's unusual to hear something so anxious with dystopian dread on a Metric release - but it works brilliantly. The first half is static and dirge-like, its foreboding monotony underpinned by a desire to burst forth that it constantly represses. Finally, the band manages to break free, leading to catharsis in the form of a soaring rock refrain. The message, though, remains darkly sobering: "You gave me a life I never chose/I want to leave, but the world won't let me go."