Fall’s Album of the Year Contenders
ISSUE #255
It’s tailgating season, which means it’s fall album season, which means it’s time to start encouraging people at the game to listen to Mitski. This year’s album autumn has some exciting heavy hitters on deck, from Sufjan’s upcoming return to form to Marnie Stern’s first album in ten long years. Already we’re dancing in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s juggernaut GUTS, and coming soon are what promise to be great releases from Slow Pulp, Armand Hammer, Lilts, Sampha, and L’Rain. And if you have four hours to kill under the falling leaves, don’t miss DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s Destiny.
Check out these cuts from the fall’s most promising and place your bets on who crawls out of the rubble with the pennant.
Writer’s block snuck in through the doggy door in January—I’ve found that phrase is a more palatable way to say "techno-fascist despair." The soul rots in blue light, and that’s all my cell offers anymore. Oh, I still touch grass, believe me! The last clumps those bastards burn will have to be pulled from my purple fists.
The house where I grew up was two miles from Highway 61. That’s the historic blues highway that Bob Dylan referenced with Highway 61 Revisited, his 1965 album that, in turn, gave the film A Complete Unknown its name from a lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone.”
For years, my favorite song was 7 minutes long. I never chose to have “All My Friends” hit me how it did, but I can justify it: 7 minutes is the perfect length. Temporal mathematics have divine standards too—like the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, in music, 7 holds liminal significance.
Places where the land ends are pure—you can hear water like that a mile away. Oceans are perfect, even radical, in their isolation. You could swim out into the sea as far as you like, if what you wanted was to drown, yet this desire to be free is forever compelling.
Bon Iver will be releasing the fifth album of their two-decade career this Friday. The elation this gives me is hard to overstate. Judging by the singles, it’ll be a masterpiece, for me—one that speaks to those silent floods that make up a private life. In truth, so far he has made four of my dearest albums on planet Earth.
As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously, but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia,
March is, generally speaking, when a lot of the year’s best music starts coming out of the woodwork. Think last year: Cindy Lee, Adrienne Lenker, Vampire Weekend, Challengers score (okay, technically April). Think Scaring the Hoes the year before that. The story of music in the 2020s is the story of March.
We have entered the arbitrary quarter century, which is fascinating because I’ve lived through it all. Remember: 25 years into the 20th, we had The Great Gatsby and “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The best song of 2024 isn’t on Spotify. It’s called “24/7 Heaven,” Diamond Jubilee’s closer. It comes drenched in strings and draped in blue light, at the end of Cindy Lee’s two-hour album. It’s the epitome of sublime, if you ask me—a sweet and perfect fruit, an apple at first sight.
When I was 21, I worked at Forever 21. I was the sole stock worker on any given shift, and I ran that backroom like a movie set—there wasn’t a single maxi dress I couldn’t echolocate.
I remember—I remember the first song I listened to for weeks. It was in 2004. I had loved a tune before, sure—your Cher’s “Believe,” your Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—but had never experienced that blissful hunger for one. That came with “All These Things I’ve Done”…
Chances are, you’re going to a Halloween party this year. Maybe you’re even throwing one. In either case, should you find yourself with the AUX, I bestow to you this gift—a six-and-a-half-hour mix of the best electro-goth and industrial dance music the 80s had to offer.
Two years after our first maddening descent into dungeon synth—the haunted, medieval, dark ambient subgenre born from side projects of Nordic black metal stars—and we’ve already seen a swell of scholarly literature on the genre from dark-corner music nerds and fantasy-flecked weirdos (both me) alike.
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. He killed himself—and he did kill himself. Crazy the acrobatics our minds will go through to rule out the reality of suicide. Impossible! That life could be too hard to live? We’re more likely to see misogynistic conspiracy lurk around every corner.
Often, one massive sensation gets split into two—or three, or four, or seven—different words over time, for the sake of convenience or the human urge to atomize. One example: “feel” and “hear” mean, in a prelingual sense, the same thing.