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.

Despite my soft spot for Ariana Grande over most other radio pop artists, I've never loved an album of hers front to back. Sweetener isn't exactly an exception to this rule, but it is the closest she's come yet, even though, initially, I had no idea what to think of it. In many ways, it sounds like two albums forced to coexist in constant tension with one another. On one hand, you've got the glossy perfection of tracks like "No Tears Left to Cry," "Everytime," and "Breathin" with their pristine production and radio-ready choruses. On the other hand, there's a weirder, looser vibe to the low-key R&B of "Blazed," "R.E.M," and "Sweetener" that's harder to pin down. There are some missteps, yes, but also a whole lot to love. With a bit of patience (an unusual ask from a pop star), the two sides coalesce far better than one might initially believe.

Blood Orange has been one of the defining artists of 2018 for me. Funnily enough, this has been less because of his actual 2018 release and more because of me falling madly in love with his past work, particularly Cupid Deluxe. In comparison, Negro Swan feels somber and muted, more concerned with setting a consistent mood than cranking out catchy melodies. Nearly every song goes through several permutations, never settling into a single form for long, but this is nothing new; here, though, it occasionally feels tiring and aimless rather than innovative. Still, there are plenty of moments that shine, for their intricacy ("Charcoal Baby," "Hope"), for their infectiousness ("Nappy Wonder"), and for their intimacy ("Saint"). So, who knows, maybe I'll be fully singing its praises a few months from now.

Lotic's Power is a difficult album to describe because it takes countless different shapes that can't be easily slotted into preexisting categories. At its beginning and end, "Love and Light" and "Solace" offer beautiful reprieves, twinkling glimmers of hope, but they only achieve their full effect when the volatile constellations of darkness and tumult contained between are conquered. Heaven and hell collide on the title track, which in its heaviest moments resembles the industrial clamor of SOPHIE's "Whole New World/Pretend World." But even more conventionally vocal-based songs, like "Hunted," "Nerve," and "Heart," are complex puzzles due to their smoky, oppressive atmospheres. Listening to them is like wiping your hand across a steamy window for a few brief moments of clarity before it clouds up again.

I'll be honest: after a couple disappointing follow-ups to 2009's career-defining Fantasies, I resigned myself to the fact that Metric had probably lost their magic touch. Then, last year, Emily Haines released an unexpectedly excellent solo album, which is joined now by her band's unexpectedly excellent comeback, Art of Doubt. It's a dark, loose, gritty affair, the end result being that, for the first time in years, Metric actually sound like they have something vital to say. Songs like "Dressed to Suppress" and "Risk" are tightrope acts that skillfully balance ramped-up mid-2000s indie rock nostalgia and a newly refreshed sense of purpose. Elsewhere, although "Seven Rules" finds the band at their weariest, the title track pushes in a scrappier, more punk-leaning direction, proving they've got plenty of fight left in them yet.

Mitski is often positioned at the forefront of the women-led indie rock revival for good reason: the proof lies in her impressive discography, and Be the Cowboy is another solid entry in it. But that very solidness is also its greatest downfall; it's consistently good, there's nary a misstep in songwriting or delivery, but I can't help but feel that the sum doesn't add up to the strength of its parts. Nearly every track lands spectacularly well, from the hurtling desperation of "Geyser" and "A Pearl" to the shimmery disco-pop melancholy of "Nobody" to the serene contemplation of "Pink in the Night." But their impact, for me, ultimately proves ephemeral, evaporating into thin air as abruptly as it hits. There's no ravaging catharsis, as so many others have experienced. Instead, it's nothing more or less than perfectly enjoyable, and maybe that's okay.

Noname's Room 25 starts off swinging at conventional (and often misogynistic) understandings of what it means to be a hip-hop artist. On opener, "Self," she commands the listener's attention with an incendiary one-liner - "My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism" - before demanding with laid-back swagger, "Y'all still thought a bitch couldn't rap, huh?" The question of whether or not she can call herself a "real" rapper is one that she quashes over and over again across the album's eleven tracks. Her casual, unruffled demeanor allows her to tackle the personal and the political with equal conviction. She just as easily sells "Prayer Song," a breathless condemnation of police brutality, as she does "Don't Forget About Me," a ballad about wanting to be remembered for something good that culminates in the tender declaration, "All I am is love."

Sometimes, there are those artists who hang out at the peripheries of your attention until circumstances conspire to make it the perfect opportunity for you to appreciate them. Maybe that's what happened to me with Santigold. I still haven't dug deeply into her past releases, but I Don't Want: The Gold Fire Sessions sounded like a winner from the first listen. It hits the ground running with "Coo Coo Coo" and "Run the Road," which deftly meld pop and hip-hop sensibilities with strong dancehall influences. From there, it barely slows down for so much as a breath. The tempo occasionally decelerates, as on the effortlessly cool "Valley of the Dolls," but the buzzing tropical energy never dissipates. This is largely thanks to Santigold's delivery, which captures the essence of hazy afternoons spent basking in the sunlight perfectly.

One of my favorite feelings is when a release arrives to sweep me off my feet completely out of nowhere. This is exactly what happened with Sinjin Hawke & Zora Jones' debut collaborative EP, Vicious Circles, which quickly went from being not at all on my radar to one of the most fascinating things I've heard all year. The duo's futuristic electronic soundscapes at first seem more dystopian than utopian: the occult-like Bulgarian chanting in "God," the bone-vibrating beats in "Source of Conflict," the relentlessly battering rhythms in "Lurk 101." But there's an undeniable element of beauty, too, fully encapsulated in the stirring closer, "And You Were One." Its celestial tings, gurgling synths, and pitch-shifted coos all add up to one masterful proof for my imaginary thesis on artificiality as the purest expression of human emotion.

It takes a lot for a standard singer-songwriter record to impress me these days, and that's what I assumed Whitney Ballen's You're a Shooting Star, I'm a Sinking Ship would be, so I went in with low expectations. I quickly realized, though, that it was something a bit more special than that. Ballen is a sharp lyricist, and her sweet-as-pie melodies and guileless, sprightly soprano (which should instantly appeal to fans of Joanna Newsom and Nicole Dollanganger) turn her razor-edged one-liners as unexpected as they are cutting. "Go/Forget about me/I know it's easy," she taunts a lover at one turn, only to own up to her own jealousy at the next - "I've got visions of you fucking her in my dreams" - but not without sneaking in another pointed barb alongside: "I think she's cooler than me . . . She's hitting you up to validate your feelings."

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."

     

The self-aware angle of the song strongly recalls Jenny Lewis, as disparate as her music may initially seem from Charli's. In the second verse, Charli sings matter-of-factly, "It's the truth/I'm bad news," mirroring Rilo Kiley's "Portions for Foxes," where Lewis insistently wails, "It's bad news/Baby, I'm bad news." But there's a deeper connection here, too. "No Angel" isn't simply a song about a girl who knows she's behaving badly but keeps doing it anyway. It's just as much about a girl who desperately wants to be good but doesn't know how. There's an innate desire for redemption threaded throughout the entire song - "Promise I'll try, promise I'll try/I'm no angel, but I can learn" - but it's never quite realized. By the end, this desire has morphed into something beyond the relationship itself. It's less about wanting to be better for a lover and more about wanting to be better for oneself - but what does "better" really entail, and where does one even begin when a lifetime's worth of baggage trails persistently behind?

These questions heavily inform two of my all-time favorite Rilo Kiley songs, "The Good That Won't Come Out" and "The Absence of God." On the former, Lewis knows she's a good person at heart, yet only the bad parts of her - "all the stupid lies I hide behind" - outwardly manifest. "Let's get together and talk about the modern age," she intones drolly, indicating just how little substance such interactions hold, "All of our friends were gathered there with their pets, just talking shit." (These lines are paralleled in the first verse of "Portions for Foxes" when she admits, "I keep on talking trash, but I never say anything"). Meanwhile, however, the layers of unvoiced goodness build up, threatening to calcify her from the inside out: "Eventually, my mouth will just turn to dust if I don't tell you quick." (In "Portions for Foxes," too, self-censorship begets violence: "There's blood in my mouth because I've been biting my tongue all week.") On the latter track, released two years later, her outlook is similar but perhaps even bleaker. Now, she's less convinced there's any goodness inside her at all and desperately appeals to a friend to help her find it: "Mike, I'll teach you how to swim if you turn the bad in me into good again."

It makes sense that when one has fucked up enough times in one's life, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate oneself from one's mistakes in order to attempt (or even see the need for) self-improvement. Failure becomes the norm, and one either subconsciously submits to it or actively chooses it because it's the only way one knows how to express oneself, a crutch for deeper, more complex feelings one's too afraid to expose. From that viewpoint, the only viable solution is to accept one's fuckedupness, a theme driven home by both songs. On "The Good That Won't Come Out," Lewis sings, "I think I'll go out and embarrass myself by getting drunk and falling down in the street/You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me." But there's still a veil of denial attached to this admission; her self-destructive nature is something others point out but she only grudgingly accepts with a mumbled "Maybe you're right." By "The Absence of God," though, she's more ready to take accountability: "I say there's trouble when everything is fine/The need to destroy things creeps up on me every time."

     

     

Seven albums and fourteen years in, you'd more likely expect a band to be limping toward an underwhelming end than making some of the best music of its existence. Yet the aptly-titled 7 makes a convincing argument for being a career highlight, easily positioning itself in the upper echelons of Beach House's discography. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally revitalize their sound by blending its classic dream pop components with heavier and darker experimentation. While some songs feel like long lost gems from Devotion ("Pay No Mind") and Teen Dream ("Drunk in LA"), others, while existing seamlessly alongside them, also manage to break new ground, like the droning, foreboding menace of "Black Car" and the film noir formlessness of "L'inconnue," in which Legrand's vocals twist around themselves like smoky cigarette plumes.

On Lavender, Half Waif's Nandi Rose Plunkett grapples with themes of loss, isolation, and self-doubt so beautifully you'll want to listen over and over again, even as your lungs burn and your heart aches. The serene, meditative calm of the album's atmosphere, built from layers of piano, synth, and percussion that weave expertly in and out, serves as a sort of healing balm: things may look uncertain and scary in the moment, but they can't stay that way forever. Meanwhile, the vivid poetry of Plunkett's lyrics, made even bolder by her richly expressive voice, sneakily shoots for the jugular. "In the Evening" and "Back in Brooklyn" may leave you wet-eyed, but that's nothing compared to "Salt Candy" and its brutally honest admission, "I wanted to be carried in my mother's arms/I wanted to be buried in my mother's arms."

If, for some reason, you've ever found yourself looking for the intersection between Carly Rae Jepsen, Mazzy Star, and Veruca Salt, Hatchie's debut EP, Sugar & Spice, might just hit the spot. As the title implies, it's heavy on sugar, in the form of swooning syrupy hooks that sound direct from the perfect pop song playbook, but it also throws in enough spice to stand out, with reverb-drenched walls of jangling guitar that straddle the line between shoegaze and grunge. Harriette Pilbeam's voice is sweet and pure with a touch of tongue-in-cheek coyness, the perfect vessel for the big, heart-on-sleeve declarations in her songs' choruses. "Sure," "Sleep," and "Sugar & Spice" are all dark horse contenders for song of the summer; the fact that they follow one after the other shows how much promise Hatchie's future holds.

Frances Quinlan has mastered the art of wringing every conceivable emotion out of repeated one-liners turned cathartic mantras. "Don't worry, we will both find out, just not together." "I don't know why I'm so mean each time I come around." "How can I explain it, having been seen, what would that mean?" "You're overgrown with a look of love." These are simple sentiments, but shaped by her wiry wild animal howl, they become monumental. Bark Your Head Off, Dog is Hop Along's most mature and accomplished album yet, and although it may temper much of the band's charmingly imprecise scrappiness, the wounds inflicted by the more purposeful emotional blade wielded here cut deeper and bleed longer. The gut-wrenching closer "Prior Things" was the first piece of music to make me cry this year, and I still haven't shaken it.

On 2014's Plowing Into the Field of Love, Iceage shook off their growing pains and gained critical acclaim. Instead of immediately capitalizing on this, the band took a break while singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt released two solo albums as Marching Church. This year, they've returned with Beyondless, which feels like a natural continuation of its predecessor, even if its polish buffs away much of the raw, dark passion that made Plowing so fulfilling. At times, the dialed-down angst leads to some of the band's most accomplished work yet; the building orchestral intricacy of tracks like "Under the Sun" and "Take It All" is chill-inducing. But almost more fun are the moments when Rønnenfelt's penchant for melodrama is in glorious full swing, like the drunken pop duet "Pain Killer" and the playfully swaggering "Thieves Like Us."

I was ready to say that Janelle Monáe's latest album, Dirty Computer, is good but not nearly as jaw-dropping as The ArchAndroid. Then I saw it performed live and decided it absolutely is jaw-dropping, just in a different way. It's no genre shapeshifter, sticking to the wheelhouse of Prince-indebted pop R&B, but it's possibly the most powerful album to be shaped as a response to America's current sociopolitical climate so far. On "Screwed" and "Americans," Monáe cleverly subverts expectation by dressing calls to the resistance and criticism of blind patriotism in glossy, big-chorused clothing. Then there's the unapologetic sapphism of "Pynk," the unapologetic black feminism of "Django Jane," and the relatable daily anxieties of "So Afraid." It all adds up to exactly the message and the music we need right now.

My favorite thing about any given year is those albums that aren't on your radar at all arriving from nowhere to knock you off your feet. Let's Eat Grandma's I'm All Ears is one of those albums in the biggest, most satisfying way. Nothing prepared me for how fully its first three singles would bowl me over, and they're still probably the best songs here. But to fixate solely on them would be to miss out on the startling but effortless transformation from pristine synth-pop to intense, sprawling post-rock I'm All Ears undergoes. It's tempting to call the gorgeously spine-tingling "Cool & Collected" and boldly ambitious "Donnie Darko" accomplishments beyond the young duo's years, but, in fact, they couldn't have been written by anyone but teenage girls, and teenage girls are some of the most fascinating people on the planet.

Despite being enamored by its singles, I was initially concerned The Future and the Past had so much consistency in tempo and tone that its songs would blend into one pretty but homogeneous blur. Luckily, the subtle intricacies of its delicate melodies soon leapt out, and it's become one of my most quietly rewarding listens this year. Natalie Prass is often commended for her voice and rightfully so; here, it strikes the perfect balance between sweet Disney princess ("Far from You") and sultry torch songstress ("Hot for the Mountain"). But equally compelling is the craftsmanship of these songs, which package political lyrics in smooth, sprawling grooves reminiscent of classic artists like Joni Mitchell and Carole King. It's radicalization made palatable, which is sometimes just as necessary for real change as more incendiary stuff.

Neko Case is one of the most consistent singer-songwriters out there right now. She's yet to release a bad album, even if her last, The Worse Things Get..., paled slightly in comparison to its monstrously impressive predecessors. Luckily, Hell-On marks a return to the darker, weirder, broodier side of her songwriting. It's a world built on surreal but resonant imagery, where God is "a lusty tire fire," a voice is "a stolen mile of fingerprints," a mouth is a "frowning compass" that's "sharp as the rib of a star," and worry nests in hair and sheds "like a Christmas tree." The music perfectly accompanies Case's storytelling, from the jaunty and upbeat "Last Lion of Albion" to the melancholy "Halls of Sarah" to the intensely stormy "Oracle of the Maritimes." Through it all, Case's brassy voice remains a clarion call, wringing emotion from every syllable.

Now, Now's career trajectory has been halting and elusive. When they released Threads, a dark alt-pop cult hit, in 2012, they seemed on the threshold of breaking through to bigger things. But then Jess Abbott left to pursue her solo project, Tancred, and news of a potential follow-up grew sporadic and uncertain. Last year, remaining members Cacie Dalager and Bradley Hale finally released a new single in the form of "SGL," a surprisingly light and breezy return. It's also the opener on Saved, which at first sounds like more of the same: pleasant and catchy but unadventurous synth-pop. But there's more going on here than what first meets the ear, particularly in the subtle digital manipulation on tracks like "Saved," "Knowme," and "P0WDER," which reveals an intriguingly vulnerable (and highly re-listenable) side.

As serpentwithfeet, Josiah Wise makes music that defies categorization, transcending genre to distill sound into its purest form so that it more accurately conveys his deepest, most sensual desires. His debut album, soil, transforms acts of love into startlingly powerful and intimate acts of worship. All stages of his attachment to one man are cataloged with equal intensity, from infatuation ("waft") to singular devotion ("cherubim") to all-consuming sorrow when it ends ("mourning song"). This drama plays out not only in Wise's lyrical romanticism but in his rich falsetto and the lush, mystical soundscapes in which it lives. By centering his deep reverence for his lover, Wise extends his listeners the chance to experience their own: "Boy, whoever reads about how much I adore you/I hope my words bring them something new."

SOPHIE's OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES is an experimental pop opus about the danger of using a hierarchy of authenticity to police self-expression, but, more importantly, it's also about how to break free of all that. By expanding our perception of what it means to be via their sound design, structure, and lyrics, its songs also expand our perception of what it means to feel. Are the emotions accessed truer in "It's Okay to Cry" than in "Faceshopping" because one's a pretty, sappy ballad and the other's a cold, metallic banger? Is the sentiment more valid in "Is It Cold in the Water?" than in "Immaterial" because one's artfully brooding and the other's "cheap" and "mainstream?" SOPHIE's answer to these questions would be a resounding no, and all the proof she needs lies in the beating human heart at the core of each song.

In 2015, Them Are Us Too released their debut album, Remain, full of utterly gorgeous and incredibly promising dark dream pop. Devastatingly, one half of the duo, Cash Askew, lost her life far too early in the Ghost Ship fire in late 2016. On Amends, her musical partner Kennedy Ashlyn, alongside family and friends, has built a stunning tribute to Askew's life and talent by completing their unfinished work together. It's a beautiful but heavy listen, particularly the elegiac finale. On the nine-minute "Could Deepen," Ashlyn delivers a Liz Fraser caliber vocal performance, gravely unspooling slow motion threads of grief. "I've been told the melody lingers on," she sings, "How can I? How can I?" This raw outpouring is heartbreakingly mirrored in the title track: "The world we made I must abide/Now so hollow/How can I?"

The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs is another solid entry in Wye Oak's discography, and a few of its tracks are clear all-timers. "It Was Not Natural" and "You of All People" are two of the most beautiful songs they've crafted, the former being just about the realest meditation on depression I've ever heard ("As I expected, with time, it hasn't gotten easier/I have to work now at things that used to be like breathing") and the latter transforming its title phrase into the weightiest accusation in the world by means of Jenn Wasner's delivery alone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, "Symmetry" is a relentless, nearly psychedelic tangle of guitar, drums, and angular melodies. This is Wye Oak showing off what they do best, which they've done two or three times over already, making the sum slightly less impressive than its parts.

I've managed to get this post out into the world the first week of the month? Who am I? I hardly recognize the non-procrastinating version of myself! Well, I wanted to finish this as early as possible because I've got big plans (at least by my usual standards) for the rest of the month if I don't lose my determination. I know I said I wasn't even sure I would have enough content for a June wrap-up, and it's true that a lot of my listening was focused on albums I'd rather save my thoughts on for my quarter two review, but it turns out I listened to enough other stuff to warrant it. Granted, I had to pad it out with a few older things I left out of previous wrap-ups to get a full top 10 (which I guess doesn't even matter that much, since the order has become increasingly arbitrary), but I did it! So, without further ado, feast your ears on these beauties.

10. LUMP - Curse of the Contemporary

9. Perfume - I Still Love U


Yasutaka Nakata, the mastermind behind Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's music, is also behind Perfume's, and the two acts have a lot in common. But where Kyary Pamyu Pamyu sounds like demented carousel music for children, Perfume sounds more like pop for adults, just polished to a futuristic shine and delivered by a trio of occasionally malfunctioning androids. You know those creepy Chuck E. Cheese's animatronic performances? "I Still Love U" is like the J-pop girl group equivalent of that. The vocals are processed to inhuman levels, which gives the melodies an artificial and robotic feel, too, like they're being auto-generated in real time, complete with a mainframe glitch partway through. It's very unsettling but also oddly addicting.

8. Arca - Desafío


Arca is an interesting conundrum for me: he's produced some incredible work for other artists, but whenever I listen to his own music, I can never quite decide if I'm actually enjoying it or not. Yet I keep coming back to it, so there must be something about it that draws me in. Anyway, there are a few songs of his that I unreservedly love and "Desafío" is one of them - unsurprisingly, since it's startlingly poppy and accessible for him. As immediately hummable as the melodies are, though, it's still an uncomfortable listen under the surface. Arca's thin, wavering voice sounds constantly like it's on the verge of breaking, and the stirring orchestral soundscape is underpinned by more industrial-sounding synths and beats.

7. St. Vincent - Fast Slow Disco


I'm probably due for a revisit, but I have to admit the latest St. Vincent album never quite clicked for me entirely. To me, a lot of the songs feel like they have potential but don't go far enough in pushing the limits of weird, arty abstraction. I can't say "Fast Slow Disco" does that, but it does take the original "Slow Disco," the subdued melancholy of which is intriguing but anticlimactic, and turns it into an appropriately glittery disco rave anthem. And if I can't get fully bizarre and experimental Annie Clark, I'll certainly take full dance pop goddess Annie Clark; it's about commitment either way. "Don't it beat a slow dance to death?" goes Clark's distorted croon at the song's end, and, yeah, it does kind of beat the slow dance of the original to death.

6. Lotic - Hunted


"Hunted" was released in April, but it sunk its hooks so deeply into me I still think about it all the time. It's a quietly eerie examination of the intersection between gender non-conformity and blackness and the doubly-large target these qualities in tandem place on an individual forced to navigate a racially hostile society. Vocally, it's mostly built around one recurring whispered phrase - "Brown skin, masculine frame/Head's a target/Actin' real feminine/Make 'em vomit" - which starts off sounding like a fear and ends sounding like a threat from a person pushed to their breaking point enough times to stop giving a fuck. This statement is strengthened by the almost oppressively minimal musical accompaniment and chilling music video.

5. Portishead - Roads


While getting into Sevdaliza in March, I kept seeing comparisons to Portishead, which is one of those bands I've always felt I should like but never quite did. I last heard them years ago, though, and my taste has broadened a lot. I now realize what a special album Dummy is, and it grows on me more every time I listen to it. My favorite songs are probably the ballads because they allow Beth Gibbons' expressive, quavering vocals to shine brightest, especially "Roads." Her voice, the sparse, moody instrumentation, and the enigmatic but affecting lyrics combine to create an intoxicating blend. "We've got a war to fight/Never find our way/Regardless of what they say," Gibbons murmurs, with a frisson of sorrow that sends shivers up my spine.

4. Hop Along - Kids on the Boardwalk

I've been on a Hop Along journey these past couple months, and while I previously found Get Disowned quite formless and meandering, I've been enjoying the hell out of its rough, unpolished quality lately. At under three minutes, "Kids on the Boardwalk" is an immediate adrenaline rush of everything that makes the band so great. Frances Quinlan rasps and shouts her way through funny, relatable lyrics about childhood crushes ("He liked the dirty drawings I made/Girls with impossible breasts/I tried to sell him one for fifty cents") before hitting us where it hurts with an abrupt turn into adult honesty: "I want truth in beauty/I want to love someone simply/I want truth in beauty/I want to love something without it having to need me."

3. Mitski - Nobody


Very few artists can turn a one-word chorus into one of the most compelling things I've heard all year, but Mitski does exactly this on "Nobody," reshaping the title word's meaning by means of subtle vocal inflection and key changes. It alternately sounds like "nobody" and "no body," a linguistic double entendre that fits the themes of loneliness and identity erasure explored in the whimsically melancholy video. Musically, the song is a pure delight, leaning hard into disco influences and more overtly catchy than anything else Mitski has released up to this point. Yet it still retains her signature charm, particularly in her vocals, which find a perfect midway point between polished sophistication and unfiltered emotional impact.

2-1. Charli XCX - Focus / No Angel

Charli XCX keeps killing the pop game, so much so that I can't even choose between these two songs; it's like being asked to pick a favorite child. On one hand, you've got "Focus," which manages to turn ad nauseum repetition - "I just want you to focus on my love," Charli chirps in an auto-tuned warble about a hundred times - into a hypnotic, frothy, and effervescent electro-pop rave, the final pulsing minute of which is pure light-headed euphoria. On the other, you've got "No Angel," a long-time live favorite that many fans expected never to see official release, which is like the dictionary definition of a perfect pop song. As bold and brash as it is, with Charli unapologetically wailing about "fucking in the hotel" and being "bad to the bone," there's also a compelling thread of self-deceiving desperation buried in its refrain: "I'm no angel, but I can learn."