They took a 9-year-old from the parking lot of the Taco Bell where I used to eat drunk burritos my first summer in Minneapolis. They smashed in the car windows and took a child and two adults. My friends and I used to leave the car running while we ate, filled with the promise of an easier hangover and a better year. They left the car running, too, boiling the fuel of a child’s future with the key in the ignition, a kid gone to a mysterious prison none of us have seen.

I am writing at the bar. Someone is donating a sandwich-size Ziploc bag of whistles to the stash. As we speak, there are SUVs with masked drivers and out-of-state plates circling the hospital where, weeks ago, I walked in to have an ear infection treated. Back then, my doc gave me some drops on the house. She opened her palm and dropped them into mine, an intimate exchange that communicated a silent understanding of the rigors of the healthcare system. It was a quiet conveyance of: Hey buddy, you could use a win, thank you for taking care of yourself. Now, there are escorts needed for vulnerable folks to get from the hospital’s revolving doors to their car and not someone else’s.

As you certainly have heard, a Minneapolis mother was killed in broad daylight. She was a transplant, looking to build a life here, creating community by showing support for her newfound home. I understand.

Of all the devastating photos that came from the scene of her shooting, there’s one image that sticks with me the most. It’s not the blood on the headrest, or the bullet hole in the windshield. It’s the unfinished business. There are stuffed animals in the glove compartment and an in-progress bottle of mints on the floor. A dog’s leash waits in the backseat. Up front, there’s a university information pamphlet and a reusable water bottle in each cupholder, decorated with stickers that were probably placed with intention. There were plans for the future. There was lunch to go home for. I understand.

Renee Good was shot less than 50 feet from where I reported on my first story as a Minnesota journalist. Working as an intern, I wrote a lighthearted article about a local art collective who installed sculptures in front yards. The neighborhood where a 37-year-old woman was shot and killed is the neighborhood of life-size great white sharks and T-rexes in driveways.

They parade these creatures through town every summer. Powderhorn Park is a neighborhood of diversity and whimsy, a typical Minneapolis district where trees angle for a better view of you as you drive by.

And they killed her. They fucking killed her. I will never understand.

I am doing dishes in an invasion. The knives and straws are not dishwasher safe, so they are sorted into their own pile. The plates are stacked parallel. The utensils are placed handle-down. There are pyrotechnics just over a mile away. There is the sweet American siren of flash-bangs being thrown at a father’s car with his six children in the backseat. The youngest one, just six months old, reportedly stopped breathing and is now hospitalized.

I am making the bed in the morning. I am scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I am driving to work, taking the long way to keep eyes on streets where I’ve taken walks with ice cream cones and now neighbors are hiding from windows. I am zipper-merging and listening to John Prine.

I am looking for free parking outside the local pizza joint. I am deciding between the #1 and the #4 and getting a box to-go. I am walking back for napkins, watching keenly out the window and making judgment calls on the threat level of suburbans with black windows. I am reading the national headlines, which refer to every region of Minneapolis as “downtown” because they know what connotation that has.

I am putting gas in the car at a station similar to the one where they carried Orbin Mauricio Hernandez Serrano unconscious and bloody into a car against his will, for the crime of not rolling down his window.

Target is running deals on wellness drinks and Valentine’s Day candy and letting armed agents kidnap their teenage laborers — who are citizens, by the way, not that it matters. The Quesarito is back. The corporate job I used to have in (the actual) downtown Minneapolis is probably sweating whether the Coca-Colas are logo-out when visible for clients.

They are going door to door, asking people to point out which neighbors have thicker accents, and I am brushing my teeth. Thirty seconds in each quadrant, spitting and rinsing before going to bed to the sound of sirens down the road.

I am disheartened by the mundanity. I am heartened by the humanity.

I am proud to live in a neighborhood where the local punk venue empties at the sight of ICE presence. I am proud to immediately understand who the headliner was, knowing only that their fans are willing to take a little tear gas if it means wasting the bully’s time.

I am walking past a half-dozen citizens standing guard outside my favorite local Mexican restaurant at closing time. They stand with a posture that says: We’re okay, we’ve got this; You’re okay, I’m sorry.

I am visiting Renee Good’s memorial, where a scrapbook of posters, candles and poetry covers the ground. I am standing on the asphalt where, 9 days ago, someone was alive. And today they are not. For the first time since she died, it is starting to snow. Before I even notice the flakes on my shoulders, the locals lingering around the memorial are grabbing a tarp. They are laying it atop the many hand-written notes and flowers. It’s a gesture of preservation, a message to all those who came by that says: Your words will not be forgotten and neither will she.

You don’t have to look hard in this city to see adversaries. They move in convoys, backed by propaganda and a brazen hankering for violence. But you don’t have to look hard to see the helpers either. I see Minnesota in ear drops and neighborhood parades and whistles jingling from coat pockets.

I see us in unspoken exchanges that convey a message to the oppressed: I might not know you but I will help you get home safe. I love you and I will protect you as one of my own, because that is the right thing to do.

I hope you see us, too.

I’m watching outside the bedroom window of my new duplex.

It’s only the third or fourth day here. Unhung picture frames speckle the carpet.

Around them, fireworks. An autumnal pile of sticky, used 3M Damage-Free Command Strips (Size Extra-Large) wrappers. Outside, it is fall for real. I’m in the bathroom now. The day is about to begin.

But first, I’m sidetracked by a distraction so puppy-like it’s almost parody.

There’s a squirrel in the yard.

Mia — oh my God! — there’s a squirrel in the yard.

I’m the Joe Buck of this second-floor bathroom, shouting down the hallway.

He’s dashing across the roof of the garage.

He’s on the powerlines! He’s tip-toeing down the sideline of our neighbor’s wooden fence! Oh my heavens!

He’s got a morsel of food! A nut, perhaps? Cartoonish!

He’s at the 20, 10, 5.

And then the thrill is gone.

He’s placed the nut in a stash at the top of a fence post. He’s careful with it, setting it gently into a nook next to the day’s other treasures. He stops for a second to make sure it’s sturdy. And then he’s gone. I close the blinds, wondering if he came back for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Perhaps he just wanted to savor the forage. I get it.

Because much like Cameron Winter, I’ve been in my New Radicals era.

About a year ago, I launched Sounds Great out of necessity. In a new city, without great job prospects, I did the one thing I knew how to do: write about music. I sent several newsletters into the void and kept at it for about six months.

And then at the end of May, finally, one got some momentum. I watched my email inbox on family vacation as a tsunami of notifications rolled in.

New subscriber! New subscriber! New subscriber!

The next week, I started a very cool new job. A dream job. Still, I had every intention of riding this mild Substack success into a double-threat lifestyle. I set time aside to write on my days off.

But much like New Radicals after dropping their criminally underrated commercial breakthrough Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too — I laid low for a little while. I simultaneously broke the fevers of fruitless blogging and job searching, yet I was creatively paralyzed. I can’t quite explain why.

I got a beer with a friend recently and talked about writing and he asked why I talk about it in the past tense. I didn’t have a great answer for that. Maybe someday we’ll know. But a wise man once said you get what you give & you got the music in you (& threatened to kick Courtney Love and Hanson’s asses).

So I’m going to write about music again. And I’m picking up where I started with Sounds Great last December: the big year-end Album of The Year list.

If you’re new here and thinking…

“Wait, when did I subscribe to some blog called Sounds Great? Ohhhhh… This is the guy that wrote the one-sentence album review thing. What’s his deal again?”

First of all: These album write-ups are going to be a lot longer than one sentence. The annual year-end list gives me a chance to wax poetic about the records that changed me, so I’m going to do that. Bear with me.

Second of all: Let me re-introduce myself. I’m Gannon. I’m a writer and I talk about music for a living. I love 90’s pop-rock and DIY emo and alt-country and complicated hometown relationships and romance and the Minnesota Vikings and squirrels and hope and you. I love giving up just when things start to get good, and I love coming back right before they get worse. I love “Sparkle Song” by Florist and these 20 albums from 2025.

This is the 2nd Annual Sounds Great Year-End List.

I hope I didn’t just give away the ending.

Before we get started, here is the list of albums that didn’t make my Top 20 but I still loved a whole lot. It’s even sorted by genre for easy browsing. So please do not comment and say “You didn’t include ____?!”

Just kidding, please do.

Talking about the music you love is neat.

However, if your favorite album isn’t on this list that means I hated it and it was bad.

twangy things:
Dutch Interior - Moneyball
Ken Pomeroy - Cruel Joke
Fust - Big Ugly
Colin Miller - Losin’
Sam Moss - Swimming
Harlow - Cows Come Home
Shallowater - God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars
Friendship - Caveman Wakes Up
Free Range - Lost & Found
Pigeon Pit - crazy arms
Julien Baker & TORRES - Send a Prayer My Way
Jason Isbell - Foxes in The Snow
Snocaps - Snocaps

emo-adjacent:
Slow Joy - A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t See It Coming
Have Mercy - the loneliest place i’ve ever been
Dead Calm - Keep Moving
Moving Mountains - Pruning of The Lower Limbs
The Casper Fight Scene - S/T
Stay Inside - Lunger
Militarie Gun - God Save The Gun

sad folk summer:
Arny Margret - I Miss You, I Do
Ian Huschle - Algae Days
chrysalis - dog songs
Hut - Hut
Kiernan - Always, I Love You
Rapt - Until The Light Takes Us
Cottonwood Firing Squad - horrible and wonderful and figuring it out
Clara Mann - Rift
Darci Phenix - Sable
Way Dynamic - Massive Shoe
Of Monsters and Men - All is Love and Pain in The Mouse Parade
Emily Hines - These Days

the Rap Album Of The Year Grammy Award:
Ovrkast. - While The Iron Is Hot
Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out
Chance the Rapper - STAR LINE
Little Simz - Lotus
redveil - sankofa
Tyler, The Creator - DON’T TAP THE GLASS
Danny Brown - Stardust

that vague Rock/Pop section at record stores where they put King Gizzard next to Kesha sometimes and it feels like a cop-out because it is:
Bon Iver - SABLE, fABLE
Petey USA - The Yips
Runnner - A Welcome Kind of Weakness
Alex G - Headlights
Florence and The Machine - Everybody Scream
Emily How - How Are You Lately?
Walter Mitty & His Makeshift Orchestra - Yikes Almighty
Lorde - Virgin
Wet Leg - moisturizer
Bartees Strange - Horror
Jay Som - Belong
caroline - caroline 2
Viagra Boys - viagr aboys
Geese - Getting Killed

20. Great Grandpa - Patience, Moonbeam

The first full-length album from Great Grandpa in six years was worth the wait. With lush orchestral arrangements, glitchy accents and stellar world-building, this is an album worth living in. It’s a storybook of vignettes full of lyrics so abstract you can paint your own masterpiece over the top of them.

Take “Never Rest,” the de facto opener, for example.

Edelweiss
You said that cause it sounds nice
Heavy wore your face, everything here waves
Ground the spore, palomino-trained boar
In plastic from the Hague
I answered your call as the bike would sway

Other tales are so viscerally real that vocalist Al Menne sounds like an old friend, shooting the shit on an apartment balcony at the end of a long night. There’s a real balance to this record. It sits between unsettling and settled, longing and stasis. More than anything, it’s full of empathy. The cathartic “Task” is a perfect example.

Saw you at the party
We called you by your new name
You had changed
But the heart of you was still the same

19. Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override

A couple years ago, Jeff Tweedy published a book called How To Write One Song. It’s a great read and a magnifying glass into the brain of somebody who couldn’t stop at one or ten or 20 songs for his new triple-album Twilight Override. Despite my fractured attention span, this 30-song project is probably my favorite Tweedy release since Wilco’s self-titled.

“Stray Cats in Spain” and “Throwaway Lines” are all-timers in his catalog. “Enough” is as perfect of an outro as you’ll ever hear, a cowbell-driven singalong that wraps a bow on Tweedy’s 110-minute sermon.

“Feel Free” is one of my personal favorites. It’s a sparse, six-minute outlier. It’s a fresh haircut reclined on the lawn, cloudgazing. It’s one of those roller coaster loop flat-rides at the County Fair, spinning circles around the song you haven’t written yet.

If only somebody wrote a book on how to do it.

18. Park National - You Have To Keep Searching

Equal parts spritely and contemplative, this is East Coast emo-tinged indie at its best. Fans of beachy bands on that New Jersey-New England runway (like Oso Oso, Future Teens, Macseal and Valleyheart) will eat this up as much as I did.

You Have To Keep Searching is a nesting doll of songwriting scenes that come back to sear you on the third and fourth listen. It’s also ridiculously catchy. I think about the hook of “Edgerly” often. On his third record, Park National’s Liam Fagan drifts between humor, self-deprecation and genuine crisis with grace.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry:

On the dash of grandma’s old Corolla
A Radiohead CD
If there was one thing you taught me
It’s how to disappear completely

You’ll keep searching:

Can I carry the weight of this guilt?
And the fear that I’m standing still
And die on top of that hill and let ‘em live

17. Postcards - Peace, Love, The American Dream, Sadness, and Everything In-Between

The only thing more audacious than that album title — and the album cover I always mistake for a lovechild of Bright Eyes’ Fevers & Mirrors and Lifted on first glance — is Postcards kicking off this record with a helpful fact about Advil. But that audacity pays off. Because this ripper of a record is actually a functioning painkiller.

For those who love wistful crescendos and decrescendos, this is for you. The Denver emo band Postcards delivers top to bottom on this tracklist.

The three-song run from 6-to-8 is a perfect case study: back-to-back-to-back, the band gives you an explosive exorcism on “Stare at The Light,” a summery singalong with the hopeful “Rabbit’s Foot” and a devastating ballad in “Suffer the Consequence” to cue up the album’s final act.

That’s the Everything In-Between, I assume.

16. Walker Rider - Fair

The new album from Minneapolis-based, North Dakota-born alt-country band Walker Rider is produced by Colin Miller (of The Wind) and features Advance Base. That’s a dream sentence right there. The real thing lives up to its elevator pitch.

“93” is among this year’s best album openers. Wyatt Dronen’s warbled, lo-fi vocals recline in a rocking chair over this cornfield of a country song. The lullaby is so cozy it almost conceals the track’s grisly grief. The same can be said for “Til’ I’m Through,” a found-footage foray into a relationship’s beautiful mundanity. This is a must-listen for fans of North Carolina country-grungers like Fust, Sluice and Wednesday.

Oh yeah — that Advance Base appearance? It meets the hype, too. Owen Ashworth harmonizes one of the record’s best verses on the lovesick “Free”:

You faked a seizure at the rock show
Because the band suckеd and you wanted to go
I was mad as hell on the ridе home
I couldn’t help but laugh when you sang their song
And I was not prepared for loving you
And now it’s all I do

15. girlpuppy - Sweetness

All due respect to the absolutely bonkers Lily Allen album, but this gets my trophy for 2025’s Breakup Album of The Year. These heartbroken lyrics feel so startlingly tangible. Invasive, even. Sweetness captures the whole emotional tornado of a long-term split. There’s the anger. The nostalgia for the early days when things were simple. The cherry core of sadness at the center of the Ben & Jerry’s pint.

“Windows” grabs you by the jugular, while its hook bubbles along on the word “you” over and over. “Beaches” breezes over airy slide guitar and bright strums but girlpuppy’s Becca Harvey is singing about learning to hate someone you once loved. “I Was Her Too” is a brutally literal song about infidelity. Harvey wants to save the next girl in line from being the next girl in line.

“Sleeping with her while my clothes were covering your floor,” goes the hook. “And I don’t know why I’m surprised, ‘cause I was her too.”

14. Truman Sinclair - American Recordings

From what I understand, Truman Sinclair got his start playing in Chicago metal bands as a teen before later fronting the emo band Frat Mouse. Now, he’s penning retro folk songs chock full of harmonica and Wild Wild West ethos in the style of Hank and Cash (I mean, the album is literally called American Recordings). It’s a wild pivot, but Sinclair sticks the landing with grace.

More than anything, he writes the hell out of a hook. Several moments on this album get stuck in my head often, none more than the opening lines of revenge fantasy “Joel Roberts.” Other favorites include the strumalong, s’mores-roastin-ready buddy odes “Frank” and “Sit By My Fire.”

But the Neil Young-ish ballad “Bloodline” gets my nod for best verse on the album. There, you can really feel Sinclair’s heavier roots.

And they’re filling your mind with addictive design
Can you feel that pine, stop them drilling that line
They’re sucking blood blind from the earth
I feel them die, I hold my sign

13. Samia - Bloodless

I don’t say this lightly: Bloodless is Samia’s best work yet. She’s got a killer discography already. But on this new LP — where the now-Minnesota-based singer examines the idea of emptiness and what it means to be drained of self — the clarity of vision is unmatched.

On Bloodless, Samia writes with literary wit. In just the first two tracks, she references cattle mutilation conspiracies and a hole Sid Vicious punched in a wall in a Tulsa music venue. There’s body horror and religious imagery, self-deprecation and self-affirmation, social anxiety and skinny dipping. This album is a meticulous web of observations and contradictions, tied together by pristine production by Hippo Campus frontman Jake Luppen and Samia’s signature knack for shifting tones — sounding fully angelic on just about anything.

Every song is intentional, even the 66-second de facto interlude “Craziest Person.” There, Samia reckons she’s drawn to whomever in the room is crazier than she is, before getting cut off by the invasive, hooky “Sacred.” The gem of the album’s back half is “Proof,” an acoustic dirge lamenting self-destructed friendships, punctuated with a whispered, one-line chorus:

“You don’t know me, bitch.”

12. ZORA - BELLAdonna

Another album local to us here in Minnesota, but this one is a surreal hyper-hip-hop concept album about a sort of femme fatale vigilante, moving through the night to fuck up anyone who dare cross a woman.

The A-side is especially nasty, with bass-busting bangers like “THE BITCH IS BACK (Press),” “VIDEOGURL” and “FASTLANE” (which flips the Uncle Luke “pop that-pop that” sample harder than French Montana or Travis Scott) setting the tone.

These tracks are equally ready for the club as they are for the getaway car. They’re sexy, explosive and cinematic. From top to bottom (“head2toe” is CRAZY), BELLAdonna has perhaps this year’s best rap production. It has beats that boast the audacity of early M.I.A., the ringtone-readiness of an aughts rap .mp3 and the electronic sensuality of hyperpop pioneers like SOPHIE. This is a really special record.

11. Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band - New Threats From The Soul

This album is a masterclass in spinning a Ferris Wheel around an idea for longer than you expected the carnival ticket to get you.

It’s a country album within a rock album within an indie record within a Neil Young compilation within an even better country album. Mathematically, the average track on New Threats From The Soul is 8 minutes, 10 seconds. There are lines about Jessica Rabbit, a license plate that reads “OJDIDIT” and Dionysus at a urinal.

This is my favorite verse:

I was a cactus flower
I had Heisman buzz
Now it’s a pissing competition
Between the man I am and the guy I was

This is my favorite song:

Oh, the simple joys.

10. Joey Valence & Brae - HYPERYOUTH

Yeah, I’m putting JVB in the Top 10 for the second straight year. Sue me.

If you aren’t familiar with Joey Valence & Brae, these hooligans got me hooked last year with their bonkers NO HANDS, which wears the duo’s influences aggressively on both sleeves: Lady Gaga, Skrillex, Beastie Boys, Lil Jon, Daft Punk.

The artery of JVB’s work, though, is an inimitable humor. A loud and immature silliness so endearing because shamelessness just doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is so culturally drenched in detachment and irony now that a JVB song feels like a time machine. And that’s actually why this album exists — the duo have said that the inspiration behind HYPERYOUTH is seeing nobody dance at the club anymore. It made these two feel so old and embarrassed for their generation that they made a cohesive, crisp club record about fighting to feel young while everything gets older and staler around you.

That vision gives the album some real weight, like on the early 2010’s indie-core ballad “LIVE RIGHT” and the Bobby Caldwell-sampling “HAVE TO CRY.” They also enlisted three of this year’s best features: JPEGMAFIA on the explosive “WASSUP”; Rebecca Black on “SEE U DANCE,” which sounds like prime Timbaland and Nelly Furtado; and TiaCorine on the album’s best track, the bouncy “BUST DOWN.” Considering the thesis, perhaps the best reference point for this new project is KIDS-era Mac Miller, who gets a shout on the album’s first line.

Here’s a selection of the album’s funniest bars:

I’m half amazing and half Asian
I’m so good, you could say I’m am-Asian

I feel like Gumby, ‘cause all I see is green
I hear your drum beats, yeah, you just a MIDI-me

I asked the bartender where my coat is
Went for some Chinese food and the fortune cookie told me I was goated
(*gong sound*)

9. CMAT - EURO-COUNTRY

If there were one artist I’d stake my bets on being the Next Household Name, it’s CMAT. She’s a singular songwriter and perhaps an even more impressive vocalist. As a music fan, vocal chops are largely secondary for me. If anything, many of my favorite bands are fronted by debatably bad singers. But CMAT has some chops. She hits notes on this record that give her songs an almost four-dimensional feel.

EURO-COUNTRY is this year’s gold standard in pop songwriting. It’s infectious and remarkably textured. CMAT examines two identities on this record: her own and that of her home country, Ireland. That tone is set by the anti-consumerist title track and its successor, the twangy reflection on relationship guilt “When a Good Man Cries.”

Each song seems to be a set-up for the next track’s gut-punchline. Names like Dorian Gray and Janis Joplin are verbs in her lyrical world. I think a lot about the ballad “Coronation St.,” where CMAT pronounces “23” with a staccato drawl, making it sound more like twenty-tree. It seems like a simple quirk of dialect. But even accents have accents on this record, because the next song, a brutal analysis of grief called “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash,” opens with:

I heard death comes in threes
I misheard it, being from Dublin
I thought “death’s in the trees”
Which makes sense 
Cause they’re the saddest cunts of plants I have seen

8. Sleeper’s Bell - Clover

I didn’t realize until moving to the Midwest just how ruthless winter is, and how much better gentle music sounds when the snowglobe is shivering around your city. So in early 2025, I spent a lot of time with sparse and gentle folk albums like Clover, the debut full-length from Chicago band Sleeper’s Bell. Of all my folksy favorites, this has stood the test of time more than any other.

It’s as contagious as the seasonal flu, layered with catchy choruses and acoustic riffs so soft you can almost hear fingernails striking the nylon. There are subtle instrumental moments that set this record apart from your standard set of bedroom folk tearjerkers: the saxophone line on “Bad Word” and the pedal steel on the slow-strummer “Bored,” to name two.

Above all, lead singer-songwriter Blaine Teppema is a whiz at writing an opening lyric. In my years as a journalist, I’ve taken a lot of pride in whipping up a good one-sentence lede here and there. But Teppema is on some real Gay Talese levels when it comes to grabbing your attention.

“The world is full of things that don’t belong to me and I wanna keep that phone call in a cigar box full of crushed flowers,” opens “Phone Call.”

“Passing Through” jumps in with a question: “Who can blame anybody for how they treat a person passing through?”

But every great longform story has a good kicker to match its lede. And Sleeper’s Bell saves their haymaker for last, ending Clover with the pensive ballad “Hey Blue.” It’s an empathetic uppercut of a song, written seemingly to a friend who was victimized. It closes with a lyrical bouquet:

Hey blue, hey you
Your world is so real
But mine is, too

It’s minus-5 outside and this album will be in my winter rotation for years to come.

7. Racing Mount Pleasant - Racing Mount Pleasant

Do you like Bon Iver’s self-titled? How about Black Country, New Road’s Ants From Up There? Still think often about how it felt hearing early Modest Mouse or Funeral by Arcade Fire for the first time? Did you spend your 2025 Getting Killed?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, get ready to hear your new favorite album: Racing Mount Pleasant.

The self-titled sophomore record from the Ann Arbor band f.k.a. Kingfisher is gorgeous, lush and plays out like you’re trying to fit an entire orchestra through the eye of a needle. There are tender moments of acoustic yearning and swells of orchestral anxiety. There are whispery male-female vocal harmonies chased by room-shaking bursts of saxophone, trombone and harmonium. There’s an ethereal, symmetrical two-song suite called “You” at the center of the tracklist’s seesaw — and it’s arguably the best moment of all.

“We’re just two strangers by the bedside,” goes one line on the second half of “You,” as lead vocalist Sam DuBose shrinks backward. “Tell me it’ll be alright.”

This is one of those records you can’t just listen to one track from. It’s resistant to the put-on-a-playlist-and-shuffle norms of the streaming era. Each track leaves you begging for its successor. One listen to “Call it Easy” and you’re sucked Augustus Gloop-style by the soaring strings and half-dozen backing vocalists into the other side of the needle, trapped like a monkey’s paw in Racing Mount Pleasant’s instrumental winter. Grab a coat, it’s gonna be a while.

5. Dove Ellis - Blizzard

My favorite trophy to give out every year is the Oh Fuck! I Have To Change My Year-End List Now! Award. This is the album that comes out in the weird dead zone between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when year-end lists are being finalized in newsrooms nationwide. In 2022, that title went to the December banger of a record from Little Simz, NO THANK YOU. Last year, it was the surprise Kendrick drop.

This year, it’s fitting that the unprecedented winter surprise is literally called Blizzard. It’s a wallop of a folk-rock album by a mysterious Irishman named Dove Ellis, who I caught wind of on the r/indieheads subreddit when this came out in early December. The first two comments set a high bar, and he cleared it.

The Jeff Buckley comps are valid. Ellis performs with an enigmatic vocal flair that’s best approximated somewhere between Buckley, Cameron Winter, Thom Yorke and Heaven (the place, not the Australian heavy metal band).

The album flutters with effortless pacing between flooring folk balladry (“Feathers, Cash”), off-kilter rock catharsis (“When You Tie Your Hair Up”) and even one traditional Irish jig (“Jaundice”). But the crown jewel is “Pale Song,” which might be one of the best tracks of the decade. I won’t bother putting it into words. I’ll just let you experience it. If our world is just, that song will be 2026’s “Love Takes Miles” on the indie corner of the internet.

This is why I publish year-end lists at the end of December instead of at the beginning!

5. Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky

Momma’s still got it. There’s no other way to put it.

After this band put out Household Name — one of my favorite records of 2022 — my expectations were unreasonably and unfairly high for their next LP. But somehow, some way, Welcome To My Blue Sky might be even better.

For one, it’s got just as many fuzzy rock earworms. “Stay All Summer” and “Bottle Blonde” are irresistibly singable and ripe for a road trip. “I Want You (Fever)” is one of this year’s best singles and “Ohio All The Time” registered on the Richter scale at their show in Minneapolis in May. The whole album is also packed with whirring guitar riffs that scratch a nostalgic itch for the piece of me that yearns for Cadogan-era Third Eye Blind and Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness-era Smashing Pumpkins.

But what gives the newest Momma LP even more bite than Household Name is the depth on the back half. The title track and “Take Me With You” are acoustic-forward stunners. And “My Old Street” is the record’s final bow, a sucker punch for nostalgics like myself.

I’ll keep my expectations high for all future Momma releases, because I know I won’t be disappointed.

4. Wednesday - Bleeds

Speaking of bands who’ve earned unwieldy expectations but manage to keep surpassing them … Wednesday is back with Bleeds, my favorite record of theirs yet.

Everything you expect to get out of a Wednesday album is here. Karly Hartzman is in her lyrical bag, her voice cracking over visceral lines about pitbull piss and picking ticks. There are shredding song conclusions where the guitars sound like they’re stuck in a tattered duffel bag, ripping zippers from the seams to get to you. There are dirty-yet-empathetic sketches of their home state of North Carolina.

But what makes Bleeds feel different is the blood, the lore, the well-documented heartache behind its christening. Listen — I’m the type of person to avoid song backstories. They often spoil a track for me.

But how do you not well up a little bit hearing the Merle Haggard ode “The Way Love Goes,” knowing the king and queen of countrygrunge — guitarist MJ Lenderman and Hartzman — recently split up from their yearslong relationship? How do you not let the tears flow when reading Hartzman’s brutally beautiful Vulture essay about recording that track?

How do you not take an extra lap around the neighborhood to collect yourself after listening to country ballad “Elderberry Wine,” the Best Song Of 2025? It takes about two and a half strums and a one-sentence tale of driving to the airport with the E-brake on to send me into a tailspin.

And the pink boiled eggs stay afloat in the brine
Cause even the best champagne still tastes like elderberry wine

3. Sarah and The Sundays - Like A Damn Dog

I’ll be honest. It wasn’t a great winter. Underemployed and overwhelmed, I stumbled numbly through my first Minnesota February. I begged to feel something other than negative-10-degree cold. But in this year’s most pleasant surprise, Like a Damn Dog lit a bonfire in my diaphragm.

This is a sad album, something that caught me off guard and I’m not sure why. I loved the last Sarah and The Sundays album, The Living End, which had some somber B-sides, but I chose in the last several years to remember the sunny parts. When I think of that album, a college favorite, I recall upbeat songs like “I’m So Bored” soundtracking dumb drunk parties and third dates.

But this time around, I listened to Sarah and The Sundays while walking through corporate skyway systems, bouncing between coffee shops to apply for jobs I didn’t want. And the bleakness of these songs built a doghouse for me to curl up in for a little while.

The ones that sit with me the most? The existentially anxious “Afterlife,” a song about hitting a death spiral after losing the family dog. “The Cue,” an accelerating prologue that splits you down the middle with its final act. “Sweet Tooth,” an acoustic ballad that features the lyric “I still hate my hometown for no good reason,” so any good friend of mine knows it was, statistically, my most-listened-to track of 2025. “Crystal Ball,” a crescendoing crooner about wanting to know something bigger is around the corner, even if it’s just the valve release of freeway traffic.

Is life in flux all I know?
I just wanna go home

Maybe calling this a sad record is shallow. There are certified indie-pop bangers like “Pipe Down,” “Looking Dead at The Function” and “Casanova,” which are very fun and begging to go diamond on college radio.

But it’s interesting what sticks with you. Sometimes you spend the day making snow angels and remember the mud on the carpet. I’m choosing to sit by the fireplace.

2. jasmine.4.t - You Are The Morning

I have a request of you. Tell me who you are. Speak about love with an honesty so human that even the worst motherfuckers can’t deny you. Create something with an ounce of the earnestness jasmine.4.t works with on her debut album You Are The Morning and we just might be okay.

The boygenius-produced first LP from Manchester’s jasmine.4.t is a panoramic photo of life as a transgender woman. Roses, buds and thorns. It’s an orchestral, gentle and dense record. At the heart of it is a love story about Jasmine finding and falling for another trans person. There’s a slew of swooning lyrics that feel like they’re written from the eye of a hurricane. In a world where discrimination against our trans friends and family is both culturally and legally expanding, Jasmine is at the kitchen sink on the album’s opener, falling in love.

I know the thoughts that drive your lips to curve
The thoughts I know well, but sure as hell don't deserve

This record puts dizzying tales of gender transition next to relatable fables about love — like the gentle slow dance “You Are The Morning,” which feels sonically like a disciple of Carrie & Lowell-era Sufjan Stevens. The Phoebe-featuring “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation” feels almost oxymoronic, with its buoyant banjo and accordion behind lyrics about having a dissociative panic attack at a grocery store while Guy Fawkes Night fireworks trigger PTSD.

The outro, “Woman,” ends with a straightforward proclamation to all those who deny identity, even passively.

You say it's hard when you don't have the language
It's only hard to talk to people like you
'Cause I know who I am
And I understand that I am in my soul
A woman

But the plucky acoustic title track — a crushingly sweet love song that feels like a deep inhale after years underwater — gives us the album’s core idea. It’s an expression of love so sincere I’m convinced, perhaps idealistically, that even the coldest of hearts can be thawed by it. I hope they listen. I’ll let jasmine.4.t have the last word on this track, with an explanation from the album’s press release:

1. Florist - Jellywish

I spent the day after the day after Christmas in my old neighborhood in downtown Phoenix. It’s the place where Mia — my partner of five years — and I first met five years ago. We’ve lived in three cities since. About two years into this five-year run of ours, I wrote a song in my iPhone notes about how different the city skyline looks since we had our first date. It’s unrecognizable now. It’s 70 degrees in December and I’m equal parts alarmed and held. I’m terrified, yet I’m cozy with the memory of that time we walked one block to get coffee and held eye contact with a golden retriever on an apartment balcony. We imagined our future and it looked like today.

I recall a day in May where Mia and I had a heavy conversation, one of those talks where you can tell things are going to be different for a little while. I walked to my temp job, spent an hour in a desk, brewed coffee and washed dishes and created Microsoft Teams events for well-meaning people who have known my name for about three weeks. I felt sick to my stomach. I walked out of the office. Into the spring air; into Mia’s arms; into the driver’s seat of my car; into a hike of an urban waterfall; into the sand on the shore of the Mississippi River; into the future, together.

Jellywish exists at the inside of the wishbone holding together these two worlds: the one where I let love die a cubicle death, and the one where I let love draw me home.

It’s a stunning, sparse indie-folk record from a band I’ve long adored. Singer-songwriter Emily Sprague sounds like clouds on these lilypad strums. Little bits of field noise put this record firmly in nature. But it’s the stream-of-consciousness storytelling that captures a 1080p image of my headspace on an average day.

There is so much love. The springy “Have Heaven” is full of unbridled joy. On “Moon, Sea, Devil,” Sprague simply sings: “I want to be a family with you.” “Sparkle Song” — perhaps my favorite song of the year — is a gentle love letter to mundanity with the one you hold. It’s the crease in the couch cushion where we’ve sat, ate, spilled popcorn and secrets and tears. It’s a weekday.

“Our Hearts in a Room” asks if that is enough:

Is this all you’ve ever wanted?
Is it all you believe is true?
Is it all our dreams collided?
And is that you?

And that’s the even more arresting question underneath the surface of Jellywish: On a planet where AI images of rivers are draining the real ones, how does one find the will to sit on the banks? When the world is ending, what does it look like to continue?

To continue loving, feeling awe, storming out of work at 10 a.m., looking that dog in its sweet damn eyes and stopping to think about how crazy jellyfish anatomy is.

The second lyric of the album, on the gorgeous intro “Levitate,” puts it this way:

Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere?
Is this life too long? Or too short to have no want?

A few days before the new year, I’m flying home to a blizzard. Mia’s by my side and I’m chemically designed to open my phone to an almanac’s worth of algorithm-generated content. Saturday is gone. I remember the waterfall in pictures.

The outro, “Gloom Designs,” which Sprague describes as the album’s thesis statement, plants us back in the soil. It comes back to love.

Is this love something that blends into the sky?
Or is it placed upon the countertop?
It’s been a long time since we laughed until we cried
It’s been a short time in the entirety of life

I remember the first time we held hands. It was right here on these Phoenix streets. Really, right here. I held your palm at the wrong angle and we walked like we broke our collarbones. It’s the funniest story, and I’d love to hear you tell it again.

We’re still here. We’re always right here.

It would probably be financially prudent for me to keep vinyl in the shrink wrap. Let it age a bit. Collect value. Appreciate.

Thanks, but no thanks. I hit the 300-record milestone with my vinyl collection recently. I’m proud to say that all of them have been listened to at least once.

That’s because every time I buy new vinyl — whether it is at a show, at a record store, or ordered online — it has to be spun before it can get properly put on the shelf. It’s a rite of passage.

This is a problem if I ever plan to sell any of them. I don’t.

The bigger problem? That I have this bad habit whenever I buy new vinyl, where I set the record down on my dining table, and then I just buy more.

The stack of un-listened records gets taller.

Taller.

Taller.

Eventually, it is borderline unsafe to have this many records stacked on one another.

So there’s typically one day of purging, where I sit and listen to every album in the stack. Ideally, this day falls in sync with a day of chores or a lazy Sunday morning.

Last weekend, Mia and I tidied the place up and listened to albums by Simon & Garfunkel, Momma, The Goalie’s Anxiety At The Penalty Kick, Olivia Rodrigo, Foxing, jasmine.4.t, Danielle Durack, Blair Borax and Cottonwood Firing Squad.

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It was a righteous and satisfying binge, a SportsCenter Top 10 of my music habits for the month prior.

When you listen to nine albums back to back to back, the whole day moves at a sort of breakneck pace. You sit with the froth of each album. Certain lines resonate more with the liner notes in front of you. In this weekend’s case, it was this bit from “Looks Like Nothing” by Foxing:

I blend the lows and the highs
Until they all become one lie
That's what I wanted it to feel like

Also, this little snippet from “Leaf” by The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick:

I know I’m a little behind on what I wanted to get done this year
Found a secret way to never get my feelings hurt
Found a sticker yesterday with a leaf on it

So this week in the blog, I thought … why not replicate that feeling of plowing through a stack of records? Because the proverbial Pisa of albums I have not written about yet has been leaning.

I planned to write about five of my latest favorites in April; then I wrote an NFL Draft thing instead. I planned to write about 15 of them a few weeks ago; I ended up doing a combo blog that pushed aggressively against the email word count.

So here we are, watching a leaning tower of wax tilt hazardously toward the window. And I hope you’ll help me catch these albums before they tumble.

These are some records from 2025 that you should hear, delivered at 77 RPM. One sentence, one song, one lyric, per album.

I considered picking 25 or 30 albums but thought I’d go for a nice, round number instead.

Here’s 28.

Part 1: Yup, they’ve still got it!

These artists have high expectations for a reason.

Bon Iver - SABLE, fABLE

Justin Vernon gets a little soulful with it, and it works especially well on the riveting second disc.

Favorite song: “Day One (with Dijon & Flock of Dimes)”
Favorite lyric: I am afraid of changing / And when it comes the time to check and rearrange shit / There are things behind things behind things (“THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS”)

Saba & No ID - From The Private Collection of Saba & No ID

Two of hip-hop’s most consistent creatives team up for 15 shadowy, memorable tracks.

Favorite song: “She Called It (feat. Frsh Waters & Tru)”
Favorite lyric: Don't you know I gave you keys before you had a piano? (“How To Impress God”)

Black Country, New Road - Forever Howlong

The band’s second post-Isaac Wood project is a lot more spritely, but still packs the signature, expansive BCNR punch.

Favorite song: “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”
Favorite lyric: How many things can one read till they feel they're not afraid of it all? (“Socks”)

Julien Baker & TORRES - Send a Prayer My Way

The country collab from Julien Baker & TORRES is a breezy Trojan Horse hiding heavy reflections on addiction and queer love.

Favorite song: “Dirt”
Favorite lyric: And everything I begged of you comes bouncing off the clouds / Now I just hear my own voice saying ‘Help me’ twice as loud (“Showdown”)

Great Grandpa - Patience, Moonbeam

An asymmetrical collection of indie-rock textures, knotted together by Al Menne’s gentle vocals and the band’s immersive songwriting.

Favorite song: “Task”
Favorite lyric: All good things in time define thеir meaning / And fold sweet ends into their own mouths / Around the tree we stirred the hatchling garter / And felt that sight held weight in our lives (“Kid”)

Aminé - 13 Months of Sunshine

Only Aminé, rap’s most charismatic emcee, could put a Waxahatchee feature and Hellogoodbye interpolation back-to-back — and it’s not even the most memorable moment on the album.

Favorite song: “New Flower! (feat. Leon Thomas)”
Favorite lyric: I am not a nepo baby, no trust funds, so it's fuck you, pay me / These n****s glazin', they ways is shady / So I must put 'em in a grave like Kacey (“Arc de Triomphe”)

Part 2: Winnesota

The Twin Cities just can’t stop winning (somebody please tell the Wolves).

Harlow - Cows Come Home

Fifty minutes of moody, country-tinged freeway rock, stretched as thin as lake foam.

Favorite song: “Deathbed”
Favorite lyric: It’s the deja vu / I’m supposed to know you (“Old New Friends”)

Samia - Bloodless

A combination of cryptic, tick-covered imagery and critical self-study makes Bloodless Samia’s densest, most impressive album yet.

Favorite song: “Bovine Excision”
Favorite lyric: To be loved like a child's toy or cigarette is to die a funny feeling in a chest (“Proof”)

Kiernan - Always, I Love You

A relentless indie-folk storybook, full of tales that are as restless and warm as the backseat on a family road trip.

Favorite song: “AILY”
Favorite lyric: Every now and then I think about the daffodils I planted last spring / I can do things by myself / But lately I’ve been feeling / So unhelpful (“Unhelpful”)

Walker Rider - Fair

For fans of the Asheville alt-country onslaught of the last several years, this will feel like a gift from Americana Heaven, delivered alongside a semi-cold PBR and a rusty tailgate seat.

Favorite song: “Til’ I’m Through”
Favorite lyric: I was not prepared for loving you / And now it's all I do (“Free”)

Porch Light - Porch Light (EP)

The brisk, debut Porch Light EP is chock full of yearning indie-rock hits and lives up to the band’s massive social media buzz.

Favorite song: “Fall Back”
Favorite lyric: Hanging on just to stay on the surface / Then they're gone, nothing left but a witness (“Over Flow”)

Part 3: Twang Time

This is for all my fellow “Elderberry Wine” enjoyers.

Dutch Interior - Moneyball

Often over whirring pedal steel and muddy guitar riffs, Moneyball vibrates like an ATV going off-trail, leaving behind a dusty scent of home.

Favorite song: “Wood Knot”
Favorite lyric: I wanna be where the people are / Turns out most of them are actually really far (“Fourth Street”)

Ken Pomeroy - Cruel Joke

Pomeroy’s bone-cutting candor and sparse instrumentation makes Cruel Joke, a collection of earthly and timeless songs, perhaps this year’s best Americana album.

Favorite song: “Flannel Cowboy”
Favorite lyric: I met someone I didn't want to talk to / She said my Saturn was on fire / What a liar / I am a liar (“Cicadas”)

Lily Seabird - Trash Mountain

With wildflowers at its edges and paragraph-packed lyricism at its center, Trash Mountain is everything you want a folk album to be.

Favorite song: “Trash Mountain (1pm)”
Favorite lyric: I hear that train whistle blowing as I sing to you tonight / And do you remember when we said we’d ride those rails together till we died? (“Albany”)

Truman Sinclair - American Recordings

With his DIY emo and bedroom-folk background, Sinclair steps into country music with ease, stringing together velcro-like hooks, quippy lyricism and a little harmonica as a cherry on top.

Favorite song: “Frank”
Favorite lyric: There's spaceship drones and dinosaur bonеs / And love is the answer, you turn it like stone (“Bloodline”)

Colin Miller - Losin’

Light as a whisper, Miller — prolific producer-engineer and touring drummer for The Wind — simmers over these reserved alt-country tracks, delivering with the Haw Creek musical tree’s knack for lyrical vignettes.

Favorite song: “Thunder Road”
Favorite lyric: I don’t need another Christmas morning / I don’t need another birthday picture cake / I just need you here for a second (“Lost Again”)

Free Range - Lost & Found

Following their 2023 debut Practice was a tall task, but Free Range met those expectations gracefully on Lost & Found, an album of earworms that has an Elliott Smith-ish acoustic intimacy.

Favorite song: “Big Star”
Favorite lyric: I stayed with my past as long as it took me to let go / There’s no sense in trying to protect me from my ghosts (“Storm”)

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Part 4: Let’s rock, let’s roll

Rock isn’t dead, you’re just not looking.

Park National - You Have To Keep Searching

Perfectly paced, tenderly written and consistently catchy, You Have To Keep Searching is a godsend for those who love sappier and softer emo acts like Valleyheart or Innerlove.

Favorite song: “Edgerly”
Favorite lyric: On the dash of grandma’s old Corolla / A Radiohead CD / If there was one thing you taught me, it’s how to disappear completely (“Your Mom’s House”)

Slow Joy - A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming

With guitar riffs that sound like they’re stuffed in a zipped-up hoodie, begging to break the teeth, Slow Joy’s debut LP is easily one of this year’s most explosive, form-bending emo projects.

Favorite song: “Until The End”
Favorite lyric: Lay me on the floor so I can kiss the pretty world (“Bent”)

Momma - Welcome To My Blue Sky

With a new album that somehow rivals the flawless Household Name, it’s abundantly clear that Momma is one of the best bands on the planet — and if the music world was just, they’d probably have arenas full of people to prove it.

Favorite song: “Stay All Summer”
Favorite lyric: It's so hard to hold on / To the driveway, the front yard / The dying grass and dead dogs (“My Old Street”)

The Casper Fight Scene - S/T

Grab a cheap beer and hustle to your favorite Midwest venue to see these new Casper Fight Scene tracks, which manage to feel like both a bucket of explosives and a pile of embers.

Favorite song: “Motorcycle”
Favorite lyric: Stay until you’re sober / Before you get in your car / Maybe we can talk things over / I don't care if you think out loud (“Cadillac Deathtrap”)

Beddy Rays - Do What Ya Wanna

Beddy Rays — Australia’s most fest-ready indie-rockers — follow up their booze-soaked 2022 self-titled with another collection of rollicking bangers.

Favorite song: “Silverline”
Favorite lyric: Waste of time / Wouldn't take a leaf out of your gutter (“A Million Times”)

girlpuppy - Sweetness

This year’s best breakup album is a relentless slew of slow-burners, capped by a cathartic closing sequence that will heal any broken heart.

Favorite song: “I Was Her Too”
Favorite lyric: I hear you in my voice / I see you in my eyes / Yesterday I noticed that you’re not listening to any of the music we liked (“In My Eyes”)

Part 5: It’s sad folk summer, baby

I can’t stop telling people that 2025 is the year of the soft folk album. Here’s why.

Darci Phenix - Sable

Draped with pillow-soft guitar strums and forest metaphors, Sable is a necessary album for wanderers looking to soundtrack a morning hike (or maybe a needed epiphany).

Favorite song: “Hummingbird”
Favorite lyric: Pretend to be an airplane and circle me in yellow rainbows until I believe I deserve to be happy (“In Plain Speak”)

Árný Margrét - I Miss You, I Do

Backed by an All-Star team of producers (Brad Cook, Josh Kaufman, Andrew Berlin), this Icelandic folk singer immediately steals your attention with her feathery vocals and lush, minimalist instrumentation.

Favorite song: “I Love You”
Favorite lyric: One day we'll meet like nothing ever happened / Talk about the bruises on our feet / And we'll think of the time we shared once upon a time, linking arms on the street (“I Miss You, I Do”)

Clara Mann - Rift

A perfect score for a rainy day, Rift is wall-to-wall with quicksand acoustics, haunting lyrics and Lenker-esque vocal quivers.

Favorite song: “Oranges”
Favorite lyric: Sometimes you call, so I never sleep (“Stadiums”)

chrysalis - dog songs

Full of questions and looking for answers, chrysalis rocks out a bit on this new LP, which has myriad memorable one-liners and campfire-ready folk songs.

Favorite song: “do you?”
Favorite lyric: I'm tired of ‘what’s-your-names’ / With time, it stays the same / Can I age old with you? (“angel sent”)

Florist - Jellywish

On my favorite album of the year so far, Florist examines — with gut-wrenching precision — love, nature, wonder, deterioration and the way these things interact.

Favorite song: “Our Hearts In A Room”
Favorite lyric: Is this love something that blends into the sky? / Or is it placed upon the countertop? / It's been a long time since we laughed until we cried / It's been a short time in the entirety of life (“Gloom Designs”)

I’m reading a book about why we all can’t focus anymore. It has, ironically, been the only thing I can focus on.

My brain has been jumping from idea to idea pretty viscerally.

I’ve had lots of ideas for Sounds Great columns this month. One of them I even published.

But the whole focusing problem has been, well, a nuisance. I’m working on it, looking to digitally unpack a bit this year. The social media detox subgenre of Substack is tired, so I won’t go into great detail.

But I think the phones have broken us all, to some extent.

To start: I turned off all push notifications on my phone and nuked my Twitter account. I deleted the social media apps. I bought a Flip video camera — those silly little guys shaped like a door? I love them! — to do some wholesome videography this year. It’s a hobby that might just fill the void.

But, alas, I’ve found myself itching for scroll dopamine. I’ve simply migrated to other platforms. I’m watching Facebook Reels on my Safari browser. I’m LinkedIn posting. I’m in the Bleacher Report comments section. It’s bad.

So I’m going to write a post that reflects the scattered attention I’ve had the last few months. Consider this a speed-run of all the blog posts I thought about writing in April, but did something else instead. It will include:

• A recap of three shows I saw last month

• Some prose about turning 24

• A poem

• A story about Record Store Day shoppers who waited 16 hours for ‘Wicked’ vinyl

Jigsawing these into one article is bad for the web metrics, but good for my soul.

Those always seem to be at odds, huh?

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Concert roundup: A great month to be a Saturday

I’ve had April 2025 circled on my calendar for a long time, because of my tickets to four consecutive Saturday shows. All very different, all very special.

Here’s the short of it.

April 5: Anxious at 7th St. Entry

Because I got sick, I didn’t make it to this show. But just know, it pained me to not be there.

Anxious put on one of my favorite live shows at the Rebel Lounge in Phoenix in 2022, and I also love their new record. I was especially excited to hear their emo classic “Growing Up Song,” one of (to put it mildly) my favorite songs of the decade. But there was another song I was anticipating even more.

[This is where, if I had attended the show, I’d write about the life-affirming catharsis of singing along to “In April” in April. It’s a guttural song. I interpret it as being about looking out for somebody, but struggling to keep your balance. It’s a song about juggling self-reliance and selflessness. It’s perfect. “Hold me as something more than a friend, but less than someone that you can depend,” goes the hook.

I’m proud of you. I know you’re doing your best.]

April 12: Fust & Merce Lemon at Raccoon Motel

When people in Minnesota ask me where I’m from, I always give them all of it:

Las Vegas … well actually a small town just outside of Las Vegas … I also lived in Phoenix … but most recently I’m from Iowa, er, the Quad-Cities area.

These are all home to me. On the second weekend of April, Mia and I made the drive back to the Quad-Cities home to stomp around Davenport for a few nights. It felt natural, ironically a lot better than visiting my actual hometown sometimes.

I filled up the car at my favorite gas station on River Drive. I ordered several cocktails at The Last Picture House. I found out my nephew was born while tipsy at Devon’s, a block away from the now-closed bar where I learned, eight months earlier, that he was on the way. A lot can change!

One thing is forever, though: the magic of the Raccoon Motel, America’s greatest dive venue. That’s where we saw the the stellar alt-country bill of North Carolina’s Fust and Pittsburgh’s Merce Lemon. These are two bands with, in my eyes, perfect discographies.

Fust’s latest release, Big Ugly, is full of Americana slow-burners like the contagious “Doghole” and the twisted, twangy outro “Heart Song.” These songs sounded just as good live as they do on-record. I was particularly blown away, though, by Merce Lemon. I really loved their 2024 album Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, but these songs had an extra layer of oomph in a live setting.

Maybe it was guitarist Reid Magette, whose violent-yet-lush solos seemed to sing their own lyrics behind Lemon’s. Perhaps it was violinist Libby Rodenbough — who also compiled last year’s stacked Cardinals At The Window benefit album for hurricane relief in North Carolina — giving each song a weeping rosiness. But this was pretty easily one of the best opening sets I’ve ever seen.

Song after song, my jaw slacked at my neckline. I turned toward Mia and Raccoon Motel booking man Sean Moeller with a wide-eyed look of “Thank you.” From here on out, Merce Lemon will be on my must-see list when they’re in my neck of the woods.

If they’re in my old neck of the woods, that works, too.

April 19: Kendrick Lamar & SZA at U.S. Bank Stadium

Kendrick & SZA completely changed my live music ideology this month.

Maybe it’s my brain rotted by years of concert review syndrome, but I’m a frequent visitor of Setlist.fm. I go into many shows having a good idea of what songs will be played, and in what order. Sometimes it even informs my decision to buy a ticket or not, when the get-in prices are steep.

Never again, though. I was handcuffed by the element of surprise for this Kendrick & SZA show, because it was the first show of their Grand National Tour — and Kendrick’s first full-length performance since Gnx and the Drake saga.

The unpredictability made every song hit so much harder. The feeling of shock I had at the needle-drop of “Poetic Justice” is something that probably won’t ever be replicated live.

Interludes included mantises, banter between Kendrick & SZA and lawsuit deposition parodies, each theatric enough to give ensuing tracks the feeling of a wrestler’s entrance. It was one of the best sets I’ve ever seen. Kendrick did all my personal favorites (save for “XXX” and “i”) — “wacced out murals,” “LOVE.” and “m.A.A.d. city” all made the cut, with the latter performed over an Anita Baker instrumental. SZA played my favorites, too, with a rockin’ “F2F” and a moment for “Good Days.”

Add Setlist.FM to the list of platforms I’m blocking from my phone.

Turn that TV off. Take off the WiFi. Etc. Etc.

April 26: Charli xcx at Target Center

Is Brat summer over? I hope not. It sounds like Charli hopes it isn’t, either. It certainly felt alive and well at the Target Center, where half of the Twin Cities’ lime-colored shirts convened for Charli Church.

With a minimalist stage design you’ve undoubtedly seen clips of online, all focus was on Charli herself. Over a brisk 90-minute runtime, she strutted between the catwalk, under-stage scaffolding and an elevated platform, performing nearly the entirety of the Brat tracklist.

The party leaked out onto the downtown Minneapolis streets long after Charli closer “I LOVE IT.” The line for the queer nightclub SALOON stretched several blocks, and the energy inside was even more vibrant.

That’s where the clock struck midnight. I rang in my 24th year alive, “I’m just living that life” still stuck in my head, rattling like a loose screw in a drying machine.

An essay: 24

I turned 24 on a Sunday afternoon. I woke up with a soft hangover from Charli-related activities, the taste of pizza-by-the-slice still stinging my throat.

After a few hours of sleeping in, Mia and I ate cheesecake for breakfast. We then drove to The Briar, my favorite Northeast Minneapolis café, to read and relax. I waited for the glow to arrive. I called and left a voicemail, asked for it to descend upward from the depths of every year before me at its earliest convenience. I sent a text, reminding the glow’s dreamlike state of impenetrability that it has been there at every birthday so far. Please don’t skip this one.

Holy fucking hell, I haven’t seen you in a while

We sat at the bar as a revolving door of sweet animals came in: a three-legged dog, an old golden retriever, the sweetest kitten I’ve ever seen. The glow held the door for each as they entered. It turned back to the gridded wooden entrance and left, promising to stop by later. Steam from an espresso machine rose.

Mia took the car back to the apartment to finish her work shift. I stayed at the bar, focusing on reading my book about focusing. I recommended it to the woman sitting next to me, then learned minutes later that the author has a fairly long rap-sheet of plagiarism errors in his past. Sigh. I clarified my recommendation with a grain of salt or two, which were enough to hospitalize the glow, whose sluggish allergy frustrated me. I called a few friends and family members.

A tidal wave of years have crashed, and a couple thousand miles

The bar staff invited me into a group shot of Malort around 5 p.m. I obliged on a mere half-shot, gagging at the taste but savoring in the ways it reminded me of my visit to Chicago last fall. We made small talk, the glow and I and other Briar regulars. They asked what I do for a living, what kind of music I like, what part of town I’m in. I stumbled on the answers. The glow paid its tab sternly and left.

I headed home after finishing a stout, saluting my newfound friends at the café on the way out. I listened to Florist’s Emily, Alone on my two-mile walk. The wind wrestled my hair and won. As I walked past a sports bar, I heard some shouting. The Wolves-Lakers game was close to wrapping up, I remembered. I stepped inside to watch the last minute. Joy erupted from the bar. For a moment, I felt community in a local team I don’t even really root for. The glow smiled at me as L.A. missed the go-ahead shot. Then it hailed an Uber and I continued my walk.

I should have got your number, my phone was in my hand

I finished day one of being 24 by taking advantage of First Avenue’s birthday deal. (The venue offers a free ticket to any show on your birthday, plus a free drink ticket.) I decided on Canadian singer-songwriter Field Guide and a Jameson-Ginger Ale. At some point on the walk over, I got the news. The glow had other plans. It wouldn’t be joining me for the gig. It might not be joining me ever again. We had grown apart.

I understand, I understand.

Field Guide sang and I sipped. I went home early and went to bed. I dreamt about the glow, saw it tucked into the built-in drawers of my middle school desk, tasted it at the bottom of my first legal drink, fighting through the beer goggles to remind me of its presence. The glow came to me in wafer paper and candle wax and buttercream. The glow wrote me a letter in an envelope, made me swear to open it when I turn 25. I’ll see you then, it promised. The drinks are on me.

But I was born twenty years ago, I'm no good at making plans

I turned 24 on a good day. Better than I expected.

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Chat

Drain water on a window pane
Doves silent this time of day
Red concrete is chipping away
I smell the sage, I smell the rain

In every dusty patch of grass
I see my high school’s soccer field
Kolsch and contemplation still smells
Like Phoenix in April

Exhaust fumes and cigarettes
Smoke reminds me of home
I was a point guard once
Now I’m taller, a power forward

Do you remember the months
That felt like years?
I forget how long it’s been
Since we’ve been there

Ripples on a river
Ripples on a dust pile
The air is crying and somewhere
I’m playing basketball

Meet the Record Store Day shoppers who waited 16 hours for the Wicked soundtrack

Or, alternatively: I went back to the QC and found a story to tell

Logan Jackson has been waiting all day for the waiting. He took the day off work. He canceled his plans to see the Quad City Storm hockey game across the river.

It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday night and he’s kicking back and relaxing in a lawn chair on a chilly but tolerable night on Davenport, Iowa’s Motor Row.

The occasion? Record Store Day at Ragged Records, the Quad-Cities’ beloved music store. RSD starts at 9 a.m. the next morning, but Jackson has been there since 5 p.m. He’s first in line. Somehow, he plans to sleep tonight.

It’s unclear whether the sidewalk or the anticipation is a bigger obstacle.

“This chair reclines,” he says, kicking back for emphasis. “I've got another chair behind me that would prop my feet up.”

Jackson, a huge rap fan, has a long list of exclusives he’s eager about: You Only Die 1nce by Freddie Gibbs, the “Guess” 7-inch from Charli and Billie, Barter 6 by Young Thug.

Those albums aren’t priority number one though.

The crown jewel this Record Store Day? Wicked: The Soundtrack, a 2 LP limited to only 2,000 copies worldwide. There are two here at Ragged Records, and the 23-year-old Jackson plans to get one of them for his girlfriend.

Is Jackson a fan of Wicked?

“She is, so it makes me one also,” he says.

Good answer.

“She would be here if she could, but she’s at work,” he continues. “So I’m locked in.”

Jackson and his girlfriend have been together for four years.

“When we first started hanging out, driving around and listening to music was one of our favorite things to do,” he said.

They have a merged record collection, now. Their music tastes have merged a bit, too. He enjoys the pop hits she loves.

So who gets the second Wicked copy?

A few feet to Jackson’s left are his biannual buddies, siblings Yvette and Eric Caudillo. The Caudillos call Jackson a friend. But they really only see each other twice a year: in this exact spot, on Black Friday and Record Store Day.

They don’t talk on other days of the year. But there’s an unspoken expectation they’ll see each other on the 2nd St. sidewalk.

“Last year, she beat me in line,” Jackson said. “But this year, I had to beat her.”

The Caudillos are planning to snag the second copy of Wicked. Eric, the younger of the two, is the one who is most excited about it. He’s a huge Ariana Grande fan. He’s seen the movie three times.

The siblings are closer because of music. They travel the Midwest together just to see shows. Eric and Yvette were near the front row for Chappell Roan at Lollapalooza last year. Recently, they saw Role Model, The Driver Era, Conan Gray, Harry Styles and Billie Eilish. On the record shopping list after Wicked: Gracie Abrams, Taylor Swift, “the pop girlies,” as Yvette calls them.

Eric and Yvette pack for their record camping the way one would for a wilderness retreat. In their car, parked down the street: four blankets, a coat, a sweater, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, boots, gloves, hats, ski masks. They’re ready for the cold. Eric’s got the day off work the next day. Yvette just got off her job as a dental hygienist before coming over.

They take this Record Store Day stuff seriously. Partly because they’ve been burned before. Yvette, Eric and Logan all remember last year, when they say the person first in line ruined the experience.

This man made small talk, they say, asking what everyone behind him wanted. Then right before opening, he invited three people to join him at the front of the line. When the doors opened, these vinyl pirates raided the most desirable records. They suspect it was only to resell later.

So this year, the line was personal.

“As much as I wanted to beat (Yvette) out, I really wanted to beat that guy out,” Jackson says.

Down the line, Abiti Trasowech and Ellie Cupp have frustration to air out, too.

“Last year, the motherfucker that cut me snatched Laufey,” Trasowech says. “So this is gonna be payback.”

Cupp got bumped from fifth to tenth in line last year because of the cutters. Not happening this time around.

“She’s got Ragged Records on speed dial,” Trasowech quips.

And it’s true. Cupp is one of Ragged’s biggest fans.

Despite living in Rockford, Illinois — comfortably two hours away — she makes the trip to Davenport for RSD every year. She appreciates the alphabetical set-up, and the fact there is order to the chaos.

“I will never go to another record store,” Cupp said. “This is the best one I've ever been to.”

This year is extra special for Cupp, who left her own 22nd birthday party to run to line once she saw Ragged post on Instagram that people started showing up. “39 minutes ago,” the timestamp read. She had to hustle. The car was ready. She hopped in and hurried. This is the ideal birthday, she says.

“This is exactly how I would want to spend it,” Cupp said. “I have a massive record collection, and they mean a lot to me.”

Trasowech is nestled into Cupp’s shoulder on their adjacent lawn chairs. The two just met a few hours ago. Trasowech has been collecting vinyl since 2021, and is hoping to add In The Blue Light by Kelela and Number 1 Angel by Charli xcx to the collection.

Cupp is waiting on Live At Village Underground by Good Neighbours, “Fortnight” by Taylor & Post Malone and Me and The Dog by Sam Fender. She won’t say anything else on her 13-record wishlist, for fear of getting beat out by those in front of her. She trusts the Caudillos, though. They have history.

“I always end up next to them, I don’t know what it is, it’s something in the stars,” Cupp said.

“We are like aligned,” goes Yvette.

“They are always in front of me, though,” Cupp laughs. “I will never have a chance to be in front of them, because they just know.”

The girls are yelling and laughing over the quiet Cade Beasley, who is waiting on his girlfriend to return from a bathroom break. Beasley is there for Barter 6 and “Fortnight,” too. He’s also hoping for Post Malone’s Nirvana album and Lil Uzi Vert’s deluxe Eternal Atake.

Finally, he interjects in the conversation: “When you’re here for 12 to 15 hours together, you might as well get along.”

Throughout the night, on my crawl around Davenport, I caught glances of the crew. They slept on and off. Their eyes slipped open as late night drunks sauntered by, gawking.

By the next morning, this was no longer vacation. It was business.

By 8:45 a.m. on Record Store Day, the line outside Ragged was massive. There was an eerie silence. One woman waited with a baby strapped to her chest. Several stood wearing bulky headphones, on a solo mission.

Groggy-eyed and eager, the front of the line crew cracked jokes and readied to enter.

Their 15 hours of waiting gave way to 15 minutes of shopping. And the wait paid off. One by one, the familiar faces came piling out.

“Everything I wanted,” Trasowech answered when I asked about the haul.

The Caudillos chimed in from their car with yelps and cheers. Their stack was impressive, too. Eric got one of the Wicked copies, alongside albums by Wallows, Laufey and Omar Apollo. Yvette got “Fortnight.”

Moments later, Jackson walked out briskly, hauling his stack of records like a full pizza box. He tucked a coat over the top of the pile — with Wicked at the top — in his passenger seat. Then he took off.

Presumably, this crew will see each other again in November. I hope they do.

Writer’s note: Mia and I also indulged in Record Store Day. We left Ragged later that afternoon with “Wednesday Morning, 3AM” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Guts” by Olivia Rodrigo, “Foxing” by Foxing, “Imaginal Disk” by Magdalena Bay, “Beast Epic” by Iron & Wine and “Gnx” by Kendrick Lamar.

Support local record stores. Quad-Cities, I love you!

At present moment, I am certainly an avid NFL Draft fan.

I watch the perfectly okay Kevin Costner movie Draft Day every year as a tradition. I could rattle off a lot more 7th round prospects than your casual football watcher. But I couldn’t give you much of a scouting report on them.

Most years, I key in on a few players that my Vikings are purportedly interested in. Then I build conclusions on the rest based on 1) what I’ve learned from a few notable football analytics, 2) athletic testing numbers, 3) the opinions of actual draft experts and 4) what I’ve seen while watching games passively, something true draft gurus snidely call the “eye test.”

This is the equivalent of disliking an album you never heard all the way through because you didn’t dig the singles and read a bad review in a music magazine.

I know what you’re thinking.

Gannon, this a music blog. I do not give a damn about the NFL Draft!

I have a point, and here it is: My goal to become a moderately intelligent NFL Draft nerd feels markedly similar to the inflection point when I started becoming a more well-rounded music listener.

This was 2020, in the early pandemic, when we all needed something to fill time. I spurned the TikTok challenges and turned to music obsession instead.

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Until March 2020, I would have told everyone who asked me that I was a huge music nerd. I was a host at the college radio station. I went to a few concerts a month. I just began collecting vinyl. I checked the boxes.

But my knowledge was pretty limited to the kind of music I cared about at that time. The stuff my family played growing up, songs I found through Spotify algorithms, radio rap. It wasn’t all bad (though a lot of it was bad). It was just very narrow. When other self-proclaimed big music nerds at the college radio station started making conversation about The Strokes and I only knew “Someday,” I felt like a poser.

Editor’s note: I still love “Someday” and if you don’t, I am mad at you.

So I set out to educate myself. I listened to more than 400 albums that year I’d never heard before, pulling from a list curated by recommendations from people I know and entries on several “Greatest Albums of All-Time” lists.

That summer, I listened to the entire Radiohead discography in one day. I heard The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill for the first time. I made an informed choice about my favorite Beatles album — Abbey Road, by the way, with Rubber Soul close behind. I then did the same thing in 2021, listening to around 300 more albums from across music history to flesh out my knowledge.

In 2022, I focused on current records, listening to more than 400 albums from just that year. I refined my taste, discovering genre pockets like DIY emo and lo-fi folk that would have been foreign to me two years earlier. I’ve listened to a few hundred albums every year since.

In the last five years, I went from a mild music fan to an informed one. I’m by no means a music expert, but at least I can back up my hot takes now. I’m hoping to get to that point when it comes to NFL Draft discussion soon, too.

The best part? Listening to new music and studying for the NFL Draft is actually pretty similar. A Big Board is basically an Album of The Year list. There are data points about every album (release day, genre, sales, etc.) the same way there are about an NFL Draft prospect (college, height, weight, position).

There are your mainstream picks — players from schools like Alabama or Ohio State are your Sabrina Carpenters and Post Malones — but the real joy of draft research is finding a deep cut you rock with. It’s even better when that player turns out to be a star later on. Is Delaware running back Marcus Yarns the Guard Dog by Searows (2022) of this Draft? Probably.

Most of all, draft boards in any given year are as subjective and scattered as year-end album rankings. Brat has haters and so does Missouri wide receiver Luther Burden III. (Me personally, I think they’re both fun and just victims of their own hype.)

Ranking albums and ranking prospects are both harmless and fun exercises that make the core hobby — watching football, enjoying music — a little bit more exciting.

So yeah, I’m a Draft fan. Eventually, I’ll be a Draft nerd. But for now, I’m still going to enjoy making an NFL Mock Draft to predict where each player might land. For the sake of this music blog, I’ll just lean into what I know best.

Here is the music nerd’s NFL Mock Draft.

For the sake of my sanity and yours — and because I don’t really feel like putting Oluwafemi Oladejo in music terms — I’m only writing about the first 10 picks. But I’ll include the full first round predictions for my fellow draft freaks.

1. Tennessee Titans: Cam Ward, QB, Miami

In football terms: Desperate to get their QB of the future, the Titans take the man with the most upside. Ward, if Tennessee can surround him with a good roster, has a chance to be the next big things.

In music terms: When a critically acclaimed album you liked, but didn’t love, keeps popping up at the top of year-end lists. You don’t really get it, but you aren’t a hater enough to argue otherwise. Yeah, Cam Ward, is the Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. by Lana Del Rey of this draft.

2. Cleveland Browns: Travis Hunter, WR/CB, Colorado

In football terms: An elite two-way talent, Hunter gives Browns fans something to root for while they wait for their QB savior to come in a future draft.

In music terms: The André 3000 flute album. One of the greatest rappers of all-time can just switch up and go classical for an hour and a half? How does he have the stamina?

3. New York Giants: Abdul Carter, EDGE, Penn State

In football terms: At a point in their rebuild where they just need talent, the Giants decide not to reach on a quarterback and go with the best player available. Abdul Carter is a beast of a pass-rusher to pair with Brian Burns.

In music terms: You wind up at the wrong stage at a major music festival, but end up liking the artist performing more than the one you were planning to see. This happened to me once with The Hives. Everyone should see The Hives at least once.

4. New England Patriots: Will Campbell, OL, LSU

In football terms: The Patriots don’t overthink the “arm size” concerns here, and go with the wire-to-wire best tackle in this class. Drake Maye’s blindside should be secure for the next decade.

In music terms: An artist you love whose most popular album is their worst, making it frustrating to talk about their music with anyone unfamiliar. In my case, let’s say Lupe Fiasco. Enough about “The Show Goes On”! Have you heard “MS. MURAL”???

5. Jacksonville Jaguars: Mason Graham, DL, Michigan

In football terms: New Jaguars GM James Gladstone brings his philosophy over from the Rams: Get a wrecker on the defensive interior and build outward.

In music terms: A rollicking rock record that isn’t perfect, but it’s undeniably catchy and you’re never going to skip it when it comes on. Example: That new Beddy Rays album and also the last Beddy Rays album. Basically anything by those Aussies rips.

6. Las Vegas Raiders: Armand Membou, OL, Missouri

In football terms: Another new GM brings their old squad’s mentality, as John Spytek looks to build a Tampa Bay-tier offensive line in Vegas.

In music terms: A widely beloved — but very abrasive — album. It sounds really grating at first, then it hooks you. The truth is somewhere in the middle, because it’s mostly solid. It just needs to grow on you. The latest Jane Remover album fits the bill.

7. New York Jets: Tyler Warren, TE, Penn State

In football terms: On a roster filled with holes, the Jets go with the best player on the board, a dynamic tight end for new QB Justin Fields to lean on.

In music terms: A producer you don’t really love is taking on one of your favorite artists’ new albums. Maybe it’ll work out like Gnx, but I’m worried.

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8. Carolina Panthers: Jalon Walker, EDGE/LB, Georgia

In football terms: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there’s a lot of smoke about the Panthers loving Jalon Walker. How will they use him on defense, though?

In music terms: Rebirth by Lil Wayne. Are you a rock album or a rap album? Because the tweener status makes things sound really ugly sometimes. But then again, there’s also the certified banger “Knockout,” so I can deal with a few duds.

9. New Orleans Saints: Shedeur Sanders, QB, Colorado

In football terms: Begging for mercy at the end of the Derek Carr era, the Saints look to the future with this pro-style quarterback who will put butts in seats.

In music terms: A nepo baby whose music you actually kind of like, but not enough to defend them when it comes up. King Princess or Maya Hawke, perhaps.

10. Chicago Bears: Ashton Jeanty, RB, Boise State

In football terms: The Offseason Champions complete their three-peat, grabbing the splashiest steal of the Top 10, a potential final infinity stone to their offense of playmakers.

In music terms: A pop album that’s been played to death on the radio. But you still love it, because a good record is a good record. And goddamn it, Guts is a good record.

The rest of the first round…

11. San Francisco 49ers: Walter Nolen, DL, Ole Miss

12. Dallas Cowboys: Tetairoa McMillan, WR, Arizona

13. Miami Dolphins: Kelvin Banks, OL, Texas

14. Indianapolis Colts: Colston Loveland, TE, Michigan

15. Atlanta Falcons: Mike Green, EDGE, Marshall

16. Arizona Cardinals: Jahdae Barron, CB, Texas

17. Cincinnati Bengals: Shemar Stewart, EDGE, Texas A&M

18. Seattle Seahawks: Grey Zabel, OL, North Dakota State

19. Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Jihaad Campbell, LB, Alabama

20. Denver Broncos: Luther Burden III, WR, Missouri

21. Pittsburgh Steelers: Derrick Harmon, DL, Oregon

22. Los Angeles Chargers: Kenneth Grant, DL, Michigan

23. Green Bay Packers: Will Johnson, CB, Michigan

24. Minnesota Vikings: Emeka Egbuka, WR, Ohio State

25. Houston Texans: Donovan Jackson, OL, Ohio State

26. Los Angeles Rams: Trey Amos, CB, Ole Miss

27. Baltimore Ravens: Oluwafemi Oladejo, EDGE, UCLA

28. Detroit Lions: JT Tuimoloau, EDGE, Ohio State

29. Washington Commanders: TreVeyon Henderson, RB, Ohio State

30. Buffalo Bills: Malaki Starks, S, Georgia

31. Kansas City Chiefs: Josh Simmons, OL, Ohio State

32. Philadelphia Eagles: Mykel Williams, EDGE, Georgia

I’m writing this from a coffee shop. I write all of these from coffee shops.

Every day for the last several months has felt the same. I’ve woken up, walked or drove to a Northeast Minneapolis café, and written a blog or applied for jobs. It’s not a financially responsible schedule when you don’t have a full-time income. These fancy, delicious lattes are expensive.

But it’s been just about my only way to feel human lately. I’ve lived for the 25-second interaction I have every day with a probably-overworked barista.

I’d like a latte. What do you recommend? That sounds great, I’ll get that. Thank you so much. Have a good one.

It’s typically one of the few out-of-the-house conversations I get on any given day. I love it. Scared to turn that small-talk into friendship, but terrified of living without it, on and on and on I’ve gone. In and out of coffee shops with my headphones on, typing away. Alone but not feeling so.

Pynch’s new song is perfect

This yearning for social normalcy is evoked in the newest single from my favorite British DIY band Pynch. It’s the group’s first new song since their 2023 synth-pop masterclass Howling At A Concrete Moon.

Like all the best Pynch songs, this one has the warmth of a bonfire and the shimmer of a mirrorball. With a fuzzy guitar lead and frontman Spencer Enock’s resigned vocals, “The Supermarket” describes the feelings of these last few months with devastating precision.

It’s the sonic equivalent of that little nod and smile to a passerby on a sidewalk. There aren’t enough of those anymore. We’re obsessed with our shoelaces, I guess. I am, too. At least they’re tied.

Enock sets the scene in the first verse.

Gonna go to the supermarket
All I want is to feel normal
’Cause I’ve been wasting all my time
Reading about love online
And the depths of the human soul

The hook gets there with even more specificity.

And it tastes like cheap cocaine
It sounds like an ex’s name
It feels like a warm embrace
I’m half awake, but feeling strange

I don’t want to feel strange anymore

This longing for connection has been a recurring theme for my music listening this year. My most-played song of 2025 so far is Gang of Youths’ “Fear and Trembling.” I recently got a little misty listening to this section of the song while walking over a freezing cold Hennepin Bridge.

I stopped the track and started it over a few times, just to memorize the feeling.

We're at the stumbling phase of the midnight waltz
At a bookend to the weirdest of weeks
Me and Arnold walk, pretty hammered and crying
"Hey, I'll miss you man, when you leave"
Hey, I'll miss you when you leave

'Cause there are feelings that are strong
And there are ones that are mixed
At the dawn of my young life's eclipse
I was a boy once, now I'm a kind-of-adult
Catching up on the cool shit I missed

Where is the cool shit? What is the cool shit? Did I fast-forward past the part of the coming-of-age film where I hit a romantic rock bottom? Or is that still coming?

As I’ve pondered these big old questions, I’ve taken solace in a recent remark from a friend of mine: “People are great,” they concluded sweetly and bluntly, arguing that people are the most unpredictable piece of life’s routine. And I agree with that.

I’ll miss you when you leave. Etc.

I would die for this animated cat

My favorite movie I watched this month was Flow, a wordless animated film about a prehistoric (or maybe post-historic) cat on a diluvial journey.

It had no humans, but it confirmed that central congenial truth — people are great — and moved me quite a bit.

I wrote about Flow on Letterboxd, because that’s what you do when you see movies and want your thoughts about them to live forever. Here’s what I wrote. It will live for as long as you read it and that’s okay.

I got a job this week. It’s full-time, five days a week, in-person. And I can feel a palpable weight off my shoulders.

I can’t wait to buy something nice for my girlfriend. I can’t wait to say “drinks on me” next time I’m out at a bar with a friend. I can’t wait to go to the local record store and leave with a haul. I’ll go to Mall of America later today and ride the log ride. It will be one of the best days of the winter. I can’t wait.

I’m also starting a new part-time job as a wedding DJ. I worked my first wedding this last weekend and almost put tears on the turntables, moved so suddenly by watching two strangers celebrate their love in front of the 300 people deemed most meaningful in their lives.

People are great. Etc.

Unstuck in time

To celebrate my new job this week, I did what I have been doing. But this time: sort of guilt-free.

I went to a coffee shop, and I sat with my headphones on. I read Slaughterhouse-Five — the signature novel from author Kurt Vonnegut — for the first time and loved it.

The short of the book is this: A World War II veteran named Billy Pilgrim has become “unstuck in time” due to a debatably-real alien abduction. These aliens see time as a dimension where free will doesn’t exist and everything that has happened and will happen just is. Billy Pilgrim drifts in and out of war memories and reflects on tragedy and atrocity with this alien apathy.

“So it goes,” he remarks after every death.

About halfway through the book, there’s a full-page illustration of a headstone with an epitaph that reads: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” The sketch has become iconic now. It would make a great tattoo.

It’s a fairly unserious epitaph for the life of a character who, in this novel (spoiler alert): witnessed the bombing of Dresden, suffered from undiagnosed PTSD, fell into a semi-coma after being the only survivor of a plane crash and witnessed the deaths of most of his loved ones.

But there’s something endearing about it.

I’ve been thinking about this quote and how I reflect on some of the worst or weirdest times of my life. Whenever they’re approaching an end — and miraculously, they always do seem to end — there’s a certain schmaltz about the whole thing, as if I didn’t feel stuck underneath ice for the last several months. As if I didn’t wonder, several times: is this the bottom?

The early-pandemic days of 2020 were the previous record-holder in the sport of Most Disorienting Period of My Life. Like these last couple of months without work, that era was also lonely, aimless and sudden.

But I also look back on it sort of fondly now.

I wrote a song back then, one of the last songs I wrote. It was about the ominous fear that the end of a bad time in my life would only give way to a different beast. A monster so wicked that I might just miss the nomadism of the pacified present.

This song was called “The Current.” It went like this.

It will live for as long as you read it and that’s okay.

What will you do when tomorrow laughs at yesterday?
For they are wearing the same clothes
But the latter’s been laid to waste
What will you say when snowy peaks mock you in the distance?
For they feel the cold wind
That you have only written

When these ferris wheel Sundays turn into dust
And you pray that one day your love will be lust
Will these rolling hills lead you to shore?

What will you do when the current rips you to sea?
And there’s a mile of uncertainty
Below your feet
Will you shed a tear for the grass you grew today?
Is blue brighter than green?
Can you carry the weight?

Logging off, hopefully

I don’t know what the next few months will bring with new jobs and new opportunities. I’ll have more money but less time for coffee. Funny how that works.

I might be writing less, too. I apologize for that, if so.

But I know that a major goal of mine is to get offline as much as I can. Lately, I look away from the various social media apps — all of which are controlled by outwardly right-wing oligarchs now, by the way — feeling less and less of that People Are Great feeling. The relationships I maintain through social media are synthetic. They are closer, yet somehow less fulfilling, than my 30-second coffee order today.

That’s because friendships are not meant to be streamlined and mediated. They are meant to be unpredictable and inconvenient and warm. And as much as I love you, watching your Instagram story makes me feel cold. And posting one of my own makes me feel even colder.

I’m a pretty staunch convenience-tech skeptic — pro-call, anti-text, ethically at odds with AI — and would like to follow those principles in practice and not just word. In a perfect world, I’d use Sounds Great as my main tool of staying in touch instead of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.

I’ll stop today’s blog somewhere shy of preachy. But all I’m trying to say is this: Give me a call sometime. I think you’re great. Let’s get coffee.

Can I get an encore?

I made a playlist this week of songs that I consider to be in the certified Pitchfork Fetch The Bolt Cutters Review, Simone Biles 2016, Holy Shit Blake Griffin Jumped Over That Car tier of music. We’re talking 10/10’s.

These 10’s range from the ironic (the glorious vapidness of Camila Cabello’s “I LUV IT” makes the cut, and so do several Lonely Island songs) to the obvious objective greats (“Purple Rain,” “Fast Car,” “Landslide,” etc.)

It should also be noted that I am morally opposed to several artists on this playlist but put their songs on here because a 10/10 playlist wouldn’t feel comprehensive without “All of The Lights,” “Wake Up,” etc. Feel free to skip those. Thankfully, there are almost 2,000 others to pick from, because there’s a lot of great music.

Let me know what I missed.

How are you doing?

I haven’t asked in a while, but I just want to check. Because this shit is crazy.

There was a negative-30-degree wind chill in Minneapolis last week. Next week, it’s going to be in the 40’s.

Sometime between now and then, my wisdom teeth will leave my skull, this newsletter will arrive in your inbox and the country will (almost certainly) be several steps closer to social media-fueled autocracy.

It’s a lot.

Weaving writing, leisure reading, Severance watching, new music listening, doomscrolling, heart palpitating, coffee drinking and job hunting into a few hours a day isn’t easy. But I want to find a way for Sounds Great to fit into that quilt, for both you and I.

So I’m asking a two-part question:

1. How are you? Seriously, I hope you’re well.

2. What would you like to see from this newsletter? Essays? Profiles of artists with new releases, like I’ve written the last few weeks? Lists of new music, like this one? Concert reviews? I’m curious. Because you may have noticed I’ve been throwing a lot of words at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s been fun, but I’d love to get an idea of what words are sticking for you. Let me know. This blog is young. I appreciate your patience. Comment on this piece or shoot me a message with what you’d like to see. Or just send me an album to check out. That’ll make me happy, too.

   Leave a comment

In the meantime, I guess I’ll do the music journalism thing.

I’ve been on an insane hot streak of new albums the last few weeks. I keep a little spreadsheet that monitors and sorts new releases into different categories, based pretty arbitrarily on my own emotional response to the album.

Let’s call it Music Data Refinement. The work is mysterious and important.

It helps me keep track of the albums that stick with me, so I don’t get too carried away with the appeal of something new and forget to revisit them.

All this exposition is necessary so I can say: I’ve stumbled onto about a dozen albums in just the last few weeks that fit into the tippy-top category on this spreadsheet. That’s an absurd hit rate. Usually, I have to sift through a lot of snoozes to get to that point. So in today’s blog, I need to get some of these releases off my chest.

I’m never short on words, so I’ll include a For Fans Of list with each album for all the skimmers. No shame. Hope you find something you like.

A few great albums from 2025 that I won’t be writing at length about today, for a myriad of reasons but mostly due to my sanity and your time

• jasmine.4.t - You Are The Morning

  • I anticipate this boygenius-produced, indie opus being on my Album of The Year podium in December, so I’m going to save my words for at least a few more months. Keep ‘em guessing. Still, you should listen to this. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

• Bartees Strange - Horror

  • This is another one I expect to have high on my end-of-year rankings. “Baltimore” is an early Song Of The Year contender. I’ll get to it down the road. I’m certain of that. In the meantime, read what my favorite writer Hanif Abdurraqib had to say about it for The New Yorker.

• Anxious - Bambi

  • One of my favorite emo bands released their sophomore LP this week and it fucking rips. I want to sit with it a bit more before I put words to it. But I am absurdly excited to see this band live In April in Minneapolis.

• Denison Witmer - Anything At All

  • This is another one I want time to sit with. It came out last week, but I didn’t get around to it until yesterday. Anything It All is full of really great folk music recommended for fans of Kevin Morby, Greg Mendez, or Tapir! For now, chew on this timely lyric from the album’s best song, “Making Love”:

    In your life, you cannot be neutral, but you can be kind.

• Winona Fighter - My Apologies To The Chef

  • As good as pop-punk has been this year or last. But… I wrote about it already and interviewed frontwoman Coco Kinnon last week! Read that!

• Cut The Kids in Half - What We Became

  • Two college kids in Boston put out one of the first indie albums to rock my soul this year. They wrote it when they were teenagers. Teenagers! Read my interview with them from January.

Okay, let’s jump in.

Sleeper’s Bell - Clover

FFO: Florist, Sun June, Bloomsday, Searows, Keep For Cheap

I listened to Clover, from Sleeper’s Bell, for the first time on a sunrise flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. Snow covered the landscape beyond my window. Worry blanketed the fields within my eyelids. Planes are falling every day now, after all.

But Clover was a great flattener. Calming, like a family dog brushing its ears against your shin. In fact, this debut album from the Chicago indie-folk duo is an early candidate for my favorite folk release of 2025.

Sleeper’s Bell songwriter Blaine Teppema writes with knife-like precision and Wednesday-esque observational savvy. It all starts with the lyrically surgical title track, which gives way to the catchy “Bad Word” and bass-bouncing “Phone Call,” brought to life by its emotive electric guitar flicks and orchestral waves.

Outro “Hey Blue” is the one I can’t get out of my head. It’s familiar. I’m almost certain I’ve heard it before, in this life or an earlier one. The acoustic three-minute tune is a tender, empathetic-yet-ruthless second-person address. Teppema’s guttural two-line conclusion could bring anyone to their knees.

Hey blue, hey you,
Your world is so real, but mine is, too.

Rapt - Until The Light Takes Us

FFO: Nick Drake, Damien Jurado, Buck Meek, “For A Dancer” by Jackson Browne

This is the newest album on this list … because it just came out Friday. Until The Light Takes Us is the fifth studio album from London folk artist Rapt, and it’s pure poetry.

On this eight-song record, Rapt singer-songwriter Jacob Ware pairs sprawling verses about grief, death and finding meaning in between with lush, spacious acoustics. It grips you tenfold with each lyric and hum. Ware’s whispery coos are an instrument of their own, but the gorgeous string accompaniment on tracks like “Attar of Roses” and “A Theory of Resistance” gives Until The Light Takes Us listeners one extra nudge into sweet slumber.

The title track is the most visceral on the album. It might be my favorite lyrical confrontation of grief in years. The second verse paints an unfiltered picture of a deceased former neighbor. It fades into an epiphanic refrain.

He came to me in a dream and said
‘Jacob, Jacob. I never smoked a day in my life’
‘You see some people come, some go,’ he said
‘Some people say they will lay with their god
But me I pictured a peaceful black, you see
Where I would lay and think of all that I’d had’

I don't know where I’m going but I know that I’ll meet meet him there
This I know to be true

The Lumineers - Automatic

FFO: The Lumineers (seriously, I know you know what these guys sound like)

If The Lumineers have a million fans, I am one of them.

If The Lumineers have a thousand fans, I am one of them.

If The Lumineers have a hundred fans, I am one of them.

If The Lumineers have one fan, it is me.

If The Lumineers have no fans, I am dead.

The oft-misunderstood-by-consensus titans of early-10’s indie-folk are back with their fifth studio album, and it’s their best release in a long time. I wasn’t a huge fan of 2022’s BRIGHTSIDE, so — as someone who thought songwriters Wesley Schultz & Jeremiah Fraites were essentially undefeated until then — this was a really refreshing return to form.

Automatic confronts the mundanity of life’s second wind, as Schultz and Fraites search for conclusions in the inherently inconclusive cracks of parenthood, marriage and artistry. The strummy “Ativan” and piano lullaby “Better Day” are two personal favorites. But “Keys on The Table,” with its callbacks to killer single “You’re All I Got,” is the best track on the album. It belongs in the canon next to older Lumineers deep-cuts like “My Eyes” and “Leader of The Landslide.”

A shallow interpretation would label this album the “back to basics” record every major rock band puts out two decades into their career. But those albums often fall flat. Automatic doesn’t. Long live The Lumineers.

ZORA - BELLAdonna

FFO: Kenny Mason, Doechii, the SOPHIE production on “Yeah Right”

Sound the alarm: The best rap album of 2025 so far comes from the Twin Cities!

The sophomore project from queer singer-songwriter-rapper-producer ZORA is one of a kind. It’s a two-disc concept album that gracefully shifts gears from intimate to vengeful. There’s a violence to the production from start to finish, brought to life by ZORA’s crisp cadence and emotive vocals. At times, this project sounds like the future, transgressive in ways that it feels like haven’t even been invented yet. At other times, it’s familiar. It’s Prince meets SOPHIE meets 2010’s pop-rap, all at once.

“tinytown” toys with electro-R&B grandiosity with an ease that would make Because The Internet blush. “FASTLANE” is club-ready and flips the Uncle Luke sample — don’t stop! — that you’ve absolutely heard in “Pop That” or “Balloon” or “SICKO MODE” or “Still Not A Player.” The first-lush, later-industrial “ANGEL/GHOST” has a flip halfway through that you’ll want to revisit several times before moving on. “THE BITCH IS BACK (Press)” is as addictive as they come, with a dynamite verse by Destiny Spike and a bass line reminiscent of Drake’s “Nonstop.”

All this being said, none of BELLAdonna sounds derivative. In fact, ZORA’s singularity puts her atop my watchlist of performers to blow up in the next few years. The album even ends with the cheekily titled “bye… for now;)” — so we’ll be hearing more from ZORA. That’s for sure.

Postcards - Peace, Love, the American Dream, Sadness, and Everything In-Between

FFO: Future Teens, Carly Cosgrove, Saturdays at Your Place, Vagabonds

Several years ago, I jumped headfirst into DIY emo, listening obsessively to all the classics and new releases with religious fervor. Now, I get cynical sometimes and think about emo like I’m Theodore in the movie Her:

The feeling never lasts too long. Because thankfully, there’s an album that puts me in my place. This month, that was Denver emo band Postcards’ Peace, Love, the American Dream, Sadness, and Everything In-Between. Seconds in, this album throws you to the wolves with a lyric about expired ibuprofen that arrives with the energy of a bridge. As the track list progresses, songwriter Aidan Grapengeter digs even further inward, trying to get answers on the catchy “Endlessly” and confronting dogma on “The Tao Has Been Helping.” “Rabbit’s Foot” is my personal favorite, an explosive, crescendoing track with a borderline-bacterial guitar riff on the chorus.

“It’s like life caught me by surprise,” Grapengeter sings. “And I might make it out alive.”

There are so many lyrics on this album I want to revisit and read like a book. So Postcards, if you’re reading this, I’d love a copy. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in the Great American Art of Independent Emo Music.

Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears - Head in The Sand

FFO: The Medium, Eagles, The Reds, Pinks and Purples

Sean Thompson is really good at picking a band name. His first group — according to his artist bio on Spotify — was called Gnarwhal. This one is simply Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears.

Both memorable. Both hilarious. But neither forecasts the Thompson skillset that surpasses band-naming: crafting country songs that fucking rock.

This sophomore album from the Nashville instrumentalist is full of great pedal steel whines, synth accents and songwriting as self-critical as the Weird Ears moniker would indicate. The guitar riffs are the stars of this show, though. There’s something vintage about it. The tones call to mind memories of self-titled Eagles and Southern Accents Petty, if albums that big were recorded and christened at your local fair & rodeo. The slow-burning, mournful “Not in The Cards” and the breezy “New Memories” are my personal favorites.

Pigeon Pit - crazy arms

FFO: Ramshackle Glory, house shows, “How’s It Going To Be” by Third Eye Blind

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Pigeon Pit’s next album ever since I heard 2022’s Feather River Canyon Blues. It was one of my favorite albums that year and tracks like “Fire Escape” and “Sunbleached” still beckon. The fourth album from the Olympia, Washington, folk-punk band lived up to my hype.

Somewhere between Uncle Tupelo, Ramshackle Glory and Semisonic — seriously, there’s a very “Closing Time”-ish line on this album — crazy arms has just about everything I love: choppy folk-punk strums, 90’s-reminiscent rock hooks, gang vocals, voice-cracking catharsis, string accompaniment, harmonicas, stellar lyricism and the almighty *twang*.

It’s simultaneously manic and meditating, a perfect soundtrack to the first few months of a year defined by AI, atrocity and ambivalence. Frontwoman Lomes Oleander shift vocal gears between breakneck and delicate. The songwriting is arboreal and full of questions that stick like sap.

“But who needs a headrest with a shoulder blade to catch you, do you?” goes “apple.”

“Have you seen the tide pools on the coast, their miniature worlds constructed carefully?” asks “tide pools,” before later wondering:

“Don't you know that you could hotwire this old haywire heart and drive it off a fucking cliff?”

Biig Piig - 11:11

FFO: Magdalena Bay, Remi Wolf, the Kilby Block Party music festival

The year’s best alt-pop album so far, Biig Piig’s debut 11:11, lived up to hype, too. The pop project from Irish songwriter Jessica Smyth first caught my eye in 2023 with the EP Bubblegum. But this one takes a step beyond that.

With warping, groovy basslines and sighing, sweet vocals, this is the kinda record you want to throw on while high. In a room full of gentle, colorful lights, perhaps.

Ear-worm single “Favourite Girl” sounds like if you put last year’s consensus classic Imaginal Disk and the 2010’s electro-pop hit “WESTWORLD” by EVAN GIIA in a blender. “I Keep Losing Sleep” is a one-minute, intoxicating hi-hat-heavy interlude that drops you through an Alice in Wonderland hole into the B-side. The chant-able “Stay Home” answers the question of: “What if the chord progression and instrumental warmth of John Lennon’s “Imagine” was applied to a sensual indie-pop song?” This project rocks.

Sarah and The Sundays - Like A Damn Dog

FFO: Peach Pit, Flipturn, okay alright, Flood by Hippo Campus

I spent several years of college loving every sunburnt indie-pop band I could find. Spacey Jane, COIN, Circa Waves, you name it. Bands that either are British or sound British. And then, for whatever reason, I grew out of it. Many of those bands have released albums since that underwhelmed me to varying degrees. I’m jaded and I wish I weren’t, because those were some of the best days of my life.

Sarah and The Sundays were one of those indie-pop bands I dug a lot in college. They last released an album — the summery, singable The Living End — during my senior year. They’re back now with Like A Damn Dog, and I worried that the letdown would come. It didn’t. This new LP is a noticeably maturer, moodier record that maintains the liveliness that endeared me to the Austin-based group in the first place. I’ve grown a lot since 2021. And they have, too.

Like A Damn Dog demands your heart from the opening moments, with the moving, dynamic “The Cue,” a song with a coda conclusive enough to be an outro. It’s immediately followed by “Afterlife,” a song about death with a weeping guitar solo before the final hook, which reflects on grief with devastating helplessness.

If grief is a part of love
Then I'll love no more, I've had enough
I cannot watch my mother cry
I cannot find the afterlife
I'm not as sure as I used to be
That I'm not afraid of the end of me
I'll live and die this way

From start to finish Like A Damn Dog is full of anxiety and insecurity, bluntly honest in all the best ways. 100-degree strummer “Sweet Tooth” rounds the A-side out. It delivers a first-verse lyric that loyal Sounds Great / Sounds Good readers know screams my name:

Still have a sweet tooth, still have a dark side
I still hate my hometown for no good reason

Lead vocalist Liam Yorgensen — notably not named Sarah! — confronts existential feelings with the earnestness of a grade-schooler raising their hand. You can feel that little ache in the shoulder from holding the hand so high for so long. You know the feeling. I know the feeling.

Before we move on, teacher, please confirm to me that I’m understanding things correctly. I don’t want to feel left behind.

I don’t know that we’re ever really called on. So open your textbook and figure it the hell out.

It’s Valentine’s Day, but Winona Fighter doesn’t have any love songs for you.

The Nashville pop-punk trio — with instrumentalists Dan Fuson and Austin Luther — is led by fiery songwriter/lead vocalist Coco Kinnon.

Kinnon said that she challenged herself at a young age to write about things that aren’t relationships. And even though she’s now happily married, she’s kept to that promise. But she knows what a good love song sounds like.

“You know that little feeling you get between your heart and your stomach sometimes?” she asked, in a recent Zoom interview. “Whenever you get that, that’s what makes it.”

This assessment adds up for Winona Fighter, a band with a knack for creating that twist in your diaphragm and then pulling it out with its cathartic claws.

The 14 songs on the band’s debut album My Apologies To The Chef — out now via Rise Records — may not be cut for Cupid, but they’ll certainly cut you up.

My Apologies To The Chef is anchored by explosive single “You Look Like A Drunk Phoebe Bridgers” and Winona Fighter’s breakout song “HAMMS IN A GLASS.” With gritty guitars and a killer bridge — the way Kinnon whispers “I’m a little stressed out” is necessary listening on the way home from a bad day at work — “HAMMS” is a perfect first unit in Winona Fighter 101.

That’s the idea for the whole album, Kinnon said.

“Hopefully this is our introduction to so many more fans and listeners,” she said. “So what’s going to make an album that’s 100% Winona Fighter?”

The first thing you’ll notice on a listen through My Apologies to The Chef is that every song on the record is titled, not after a lyric, but after a sort of in-joke. For example, “You Look Like A Drunk Phoebe Bridgers” is a song about a cruel manager, but its title is a direct quote Kinnon heard from a drunk dude at a bar.

“HAMMS” is a callback to another bar moment, where Luther asked Kinnon to grab a craft beer, and the only thing the bartender had was a warm Hamms.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, just put that in a glass and he’s not going to know the difference,’” she said. “And he didn’t.

“The song ‘HAMMS IN A GLASS’ is about feeling like nothing’s going right, and what better describes things not going right than when all you wanted was this cold, really good craft beer, and you got this shitty, lukewarm canned beer.”

More standouts on Winona Fighter’s debut include the noodly “Johnny’s Dead” and “I’M IN THE MARKET TO PLEASE NO ONE,” with a velcro hook and several satisfying middle-finger lyrics directed at an abuser.

I don't like to think you're having fun
I hope you suffer
And boys like you should rot for what they've done
Don't blame your mother

My personal favorite is single “I Think You Should Leave,” named semi-cryptically after the Tim Robinson sketch show. Kinnon said the song got its name from the lyric at the end of the first verse, “Hold on let me think about it.” It reminded her of the “Moon River Rock” sketch where a slimy talent agent convinces Robinson he’s going to be a star. The insufferable-yet-sympathetic duality of every Robinson character on that show makes for perfect punk songwriting source material.

“The whole vibe of every character he plays, you think it’s funny, and there’s a little part of you that feels bad for them,” Kinnon said. “But every fucking character you can’t stand.”

If she could use another Robinson sketch for material, Kinnon said it’s the skateboarding deep cut he made for BrainDead a few years ago.

Most of the songwriting on the record, Kinnon said, came from day-to-day experiences that felt emotionally potent enough to write about it.

The goal: have at least one song or lyric on the album that somebody could listen to and see themselves in its mirror. For Kinnon, her favorite lyric comes on album outro “DON’T WALLOW.”

Dollars turn to pennies
Pennies don't pay bills
My hair's done up in mats
I'll break my back like no one ever will

“That’s just about the struggle of being a punk musician and the uncomfortableness of seriously, seriously pursuing it as a career,” Kinnon said. “And since day one, we have worked just as hard or harder as everyone else.”

This DIY spirit — described most bluntly on the infectious “Subaru” — is fairly innate for Kinnon. She grew up on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border and got into the Boston punk scene at a young age, playing drums in her first band at just 14 years old and going on tour with a band of college students when she was 15. It’s given her perspective.

“I've always been a very outspoken, confrontational person, but I do think being in the scene at such a young age, you get thrown into these situations,” Kinnon said. “Like, one of my first bands there, the lead singer had a severe substance abuse problem. And I’m like — I’m a fucking kid.”

For Kinnon, getting thrown into the fire that young has turned her into a torch. It’s clear on the songs, which often sound like a stick of dynamite. That’s largely thanks to Kinnon’s absolutely killer scream.

On her short list of scream influences: Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland, Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante, Knocked Loose’s Bryan Garris and Dead Sara (and, now, Linkin Park) vocalist Emily Armstrong.

But the best screams, Kinnon said, always come from the inside.

“When you can tell it’s coming from some place, when it’s a guttural experience,” she said. “All the Winona Fighter screams, it’s just like, ‘Okay, let’s turn the mic on and do your thing.’”

Being a born-and-raised New Englander has given Kinnon an edge, too. She grew up going to an artsy, alternative school with just 15 kids in her graduating class.

“The type of school that I went to was very harsh and outspoken,” she said. “And also, in New England, people say shit to your face. They say shit with their chest.”

So it was a mild culture shock when, shortly after turning 18, she moved to Nashville to try to make a career of music. In Tennessee, there’s a lot more country than there is confrontation. But she’s built a punk community there. Last night, locals got to hear the album first at a sold-out release show at Nashville’s Blue Room.

“There’s more of a alternative rock scene here now, but when I first moved here, it was, like, just country,” Kinnon said. “You definitely have to do some looking and some digging.”

But so far, the music career pursuit is going well. Before their first album even came out, Winona Fighter has done festivals like Riot Fest and Aftershock. Coming up, you can find them at Innings Festival in Tempe and Minnesota Yacht Club in St. Paul.

Just last year, the band shared bills with Bayside, Taking Back Sunday and The Offspring. They have dates coming up with Simple Plan and We The Kings.

Kinnon’s shortlist of bucket list tourmates includes Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy, Hot Mulligan, The Story So Far and Movements. The holy grail for Kinnon, though, would be opening for Foo Fighters. They’ve been a huge influence on the band, she said. There is just one problem.

“I think (Dave Grohl) has a history with Winona Ryder, so that probably ruins our chances right there,” she laughed.

Still, I wouldn’t count Winona Fighter out on any goal.

That’s because Kinnon is the type of fighter you bet the house on. She’s battle-tested, and the songs are living proof. Rock stardom might be around the corner for this trio, but Kinnon knows it isn’t all romantic.

Her expectations are tempered. Her aspirations aren’t.

“You’ll watch a band documentary and it kind of touches on what it’s like when you’re first starting out, but not really,” Kinnon said. “It doesn’t talk about the exhaustion, or the playing to two people, so I feel very fortunate that I got a real life look at it at such an early age.”

It’s given Kinnon and her band a certain savvy that sets them apart. It’s also given her a chance to enjoy the little moments of progress along the way. She remembers the days as a punk teen, piling into an SUV and sharing rooms at Econo Lodges.

Now, the SUV is a van. The Econo Lodge is a Best Western Plus. It’s the little things.

“Every moment to me is like, ‘Oh, wow, we get to do this,’” Kinnon said.

And certainly, that’s a good feeling. It may not be a love song, but you can feel that one between your heart and your stomach.

Listen to My Apologies To The Chef on Spotify, Apple Music and more. See Winona Fighter in your city this spring and summer.

When Jason Singer jumped into our Zoom interview last week, it was a sunny 70-ish degrees in Tampa, Florida, where the Michigander songwriter spent a well-earned day off. He was there for the 10th show of his headlining “Broadcast” tour, where the band hit 14 cities in 18 days.

Singer — whose surname may have been some sort of prophecy — is a prolific performer. He opened for Band of Horses and The Head and The Heart last year. Currently, he’s on the road with Phoenix songwriter Sydney Sprague, a personal favorite of mine as a former Arizonan.

In a few weeks, he’ll be on the road again, opening for Dawes on their “Oh Brother” tour that stops in April in both of my most recent home metros, the Quad-Cities and Twin Cities.

I saw Singer play a solo show in Davenport almost one year ago to the day before our interview. But his music has been part of my life for a whole lot longer. In 2020, I had “East Chicago, IN,” a 2018 single, on rotation often.

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My love for that song carried into 2021, when I met my girlfriend and identified with the pleading romantics of the searing, brass-blasting final refrain.

It doesn't matter where you are
It doesn't matter where I am
You know that I've got you
You know that I’ve got you

Through all the rain and all the snow
It doesn't matter where you go
You know that I've got you
You know that I’ve got you

Tracks like 2021 freeway-ready rocker “Better” and 2023 Manchester Orchestra collaboration “In My Head” reinforced my fandom.

At Singer’s solo show in Davenport, I fell in love with “Safe,” a plucky, acoustic 2018 track that’s become my favorite Michigander song.

Of course, it’s about departure.

I lost another friend to the war again
A prison with a pretty face
He said it would be fine, but I said just give it time
And now he's sleeping with those choices that he made

“I thought I would be somewhere else by now,” goes the chorus. “I thought I would be someone else by now.”

His songwriting has been around for such a significant chunk of my life that it’s somewhat startling Michigander has not put out an album yet. That is, until today.

Michigander, the self-titled debut from Singer and Co. is out now from Totally Normal Records, via Thirty Tigers. It’s an album full of sticky, soaring indie-rock songs about anxiety, acceptance, the American Dream and a whole lot more.

That last theme comes to the surface on the opener “Broadcast,” which Singer has been sharing bombastic live clips of for a few months now. It’s got little woodwind flairs and incisive lines about the American Treadmill. It revels in the uniquely red, white and blue self-voyeurism that would put a nation in *gestures* this fucking situation.

Everyone’s a movie star on a diet of their own facts
Put your hair and makeup on, welcome to the broadcast

I’m an American dreaming
I’m an American dreaming
Well I’ve been hooked on a feeling
I hit my head on the ceiling
But don’t you look away
’Cause I’m American

Singer turns inward on singles like “Emotional” and “Giving Up.” The former grapples with the frustration of boiling emotions, the kind of feelings that make one reluctantly and beautifully human. The latter teeters like a swing set, mourning a relationship gone by with an admirable allocation of apathy.

The B-sides round Michigander out. The aggressive, groovy singalong “Socialite” and bass-licking slow-burner “Hair” are two favorites. Sugary piano ballad “Important” has a familiar line.

“Tell me what’s on your mind,” goes the hook.

It’s not the first time in Singer’s 10-year tenure of releasing music that he’s opined about that kinda thing.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Singer crooned on “Misery,” his biggest single, in 2019.

“Tell me what’s on your mind,” he sang on “East Chicago, IN.”

So it’s about time Singer tells us what’s on his mind. Here’s what he had to say about Michigander’s self-titled debut, handling grueling tour schedules and budgeting for a Costco Guys ad.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

This interview has been edited for cohesion and clarity.

So how are you spending your day off in Tampa?

Well, I woke up like an hour ago. I’ve been playing Block Blast on my phone, which is an iPhone game that my friend Connor told me about. So I’ve been playing that a lot. I’ll probably go for a walk in a little bit, because it’s very nice here.

Yeah, I’m gonna take a walk on a 30-degree day here.

Bundle up.

Let’s talk about the new album. You’ve been putting out new music for almost 10 years. I know your music has been a part of my life for four or five years now. What makes now the right time for a debut, self-titled album?

I think I just felt ready for it. I felt like this was the first time I had enough songs to put out a full record. In the past, it was always this huge struggle for me to put together five or six songs that I thought were really good, enough to put out in a collection of tunes. Having 12 always seems very daunting, but over the last few years it came together.

What separated the songwriting process of making an album from making an EP or a standalone single?

I wrote a lot more songs. I think I wrote 40 or 50 songs and I had to narrow it down to 12. And some of those 40 songs sucked. Just because there’s a lot of them doesn’t mean they’re all good, by any means. But it just felt really cool to have a cohesive body of work.

The main thing I want people to do with this record is have at least one, intentional, conscious full listen through as a whole. That’s how I consume music, so I guess that’s how I create. I’ve always tried to do that with EP’s, and it’s always been a little bit harder, because it’s half the amount of songs.

You said that’s how you listen to music, too. I’m a big album person. Way more of an album person than a singles person. Were there any cohesive projects that were a guiding light for you when putting together something like this?

Man, definitely. “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” by Oasis is such a perfect record. I feel like “A Rush Of Blood to The Head” by Coldplay is such a perfect record, from top to bottom.

Amen.

The layout of that record is so inspiring. “In Rainbows” by Radiohead is also a perfectly sequenced record. “Trouble Will Find Me” by The National, I think that’s a perfectly sequenced record as well. “Suck It And See” by Arctic Monkeys, I think that’s a really good laid out record, too.

Those are all emotionally heavy but also super earworm-y, so that makes sense, because that’s my main takeaway from your record, too. “Giving Up” has been in my head for the last couple days.

What is your approach to writing a hook and getting it to sound so sticky?

That’s a great question. I don’t really know the answer to that. If it sounds good and it feels good and I can remember it without recording it, that means it’s probably good. The ones I had to record are the ones I forget the most.

Like “Giving Up,” I have voice memos of me driving and just being like — da da da da, da da da da da da da da — and I took that, went away for a day to write some songs, and that was one of them that came up writing a song on a guitar on a little cabin outside of Nashville. I don’t know that there’s a trick to it. It just happens, like I’m just accepting the melody from the universe or something. Not to sound too goofy.

Lyrically, it feels like there’s a lot of acceptance on this album. “Giving Up,” “Emotional,” there’s this very accepting the things I can’t control kind of thing that ties things together. Was that purposeful? Has that been on your mind the last couple of years? Am I misreading things?

No, you’re probably reading that well. I think other people tend to analyze the songs a lot better than myself, and then I find out what they mean later. I have been reading stuff about stoicism. The gist is that you can’t be in control of certain things, you just try to control how you react to them. So I guess that is kind of true. Being accepting of things and moving on.

“Emotional” is kind of a song about being human in spite of being human. Like, I’m just annoying, and I know that I’m annoying and emotional and let emotions dictate a lot of my behaviors. But I’m just trying.

The other lyric I had to ask about: “I’ll Be OK” has a line about seeing Sylvan Esso at a ramen shop. What’s the story behind that?

Yeah, that song is written about SXSW last year. We played nine shows in three days, which was horrible. But, you know, rock and roll. I really experienced anxiety for the first time, where I thought I was having a heart attack and had to go to the urgent care. But right before, I went to this ramen shop I really like with some friends, and meet Sylvan Esso in line. And then I went to the emergency room right after that.

Did that amplify the anxiety? Or was it almost calming to see another artist?

No, it was just weird. I wasn’t anxious because of that, I was just feeling horrible. Like, the worst I’m feeling ever. I might be dying. But at least I met an artist I like.

I’ve never been to SXSW, but I hear stories. Are you just running into artists every which way? It seems like it takes over the whole city.

It’s just a crazy couple of days. It’s very overwhelming, but it is a necessary evil, maybe. I don’t really want to do it again after my last experience, but it is a cool thing. We got signed and got management because of it years ago, so I guess that’s important.

Doing festivals vs. doing headlining tours, do you approach those differently? Or are you in the same headspace no matter where you’re at?

Well, festivals — when we’re at like Austin City Limits or Lollapalooza or Bonnaroo — those feel like we’ve made it. We feel like a real band, like this is the moment and we’re playing for 10,000 people or whatever. And it’s just so cool. And then we play in, like, Tallahassee to like 20 people.

So it is a different mindset. At Lollapalooza, you feel like a rockstar. In Tallahassee, you feel like you should not be doing what you’re doing. But also, at these festivals, you’re with bands that are way above your pay grade and have these massive crews and tour buses. We’re just in a van with a trailer. Not to undersell what we’re doing, but it is very different.

Even as a concertgoer, I feel like I’m in a different headspace at a festival vs. when I saw you at the Raccoon Motel in Davenport. It’s a very different experience.

Well, that’s the cool thing about the smaller shows. Everyone’s there for us. At the festivals, it feels awesome because it’s so much energy. But at the Raccoon Motel — which we love, we love the Quad-Cities — it feels like everyone’s there for the songs that we have, and that feels really cool.

That Raccoon Motel show was a solo show. And what I love about this album is that it’s so full. There are even these little saxophone flourishes. What’s your dynamic like working with the band? How much do you lean on them for those little moments?

For the shows, we’re really locked in. It’s kind of weird how long we’ve been playing together at this point. But those solo shows, I loved doing them. It felt like what it felt like when I first started touring, and it was just me and my friend Dylan and our buddy Alex just traveling around in a van. Not a lot of gear to set up. I hope to do more of those in the future.

It is a very different dynamic, though. On the stage, I can’t hide. There’s no good way to transition between songs and there’s awkward silence. You were there for it, but I tried to script it, so I had a through-line and a story and I think that made it a lot more interesting.

I’m sure the improv can get exhausting.

Big time.

You’ve got a tour coming up with Dawes. It’s coming out this way to Minneapolis. How did that come together? What’s your relationship like with their music?

They’re one of my all-time favorite bands. Taylor Goldsmith is one of the best songwriters of the last 20 years. I’m so excited for it.

We get to play First Avenue. We’ve got to do that one other time with Manchester Orchestra and that was so cool.

I was there just a few nights ago.

Who’d you see?

Beach Bunny, for an anniversary show for the local radio station The Current.

Oh yeah, we love The Current.

A silly thing I have to ask about, because it killed me when I saw it: The AJ and Big Justice Cameo that you got. I imagine that’s the type of thing you have to budget for as an artist. How did you come to the conclusion of “We need this.”

Any cost. We need that. I put it on a credit card and said, “This is what we need if we expect this project to go any farther.” I just paid for it.

But I will say, I paid for it a long time ago when it was cheaper. And the thing with Cameo is that they don’t refund your money. They just give you a credit. Which is crazy. So I had this money and had to spend it. But I thought, it’s worth every penny from the Costco Guys, who we love.

Michigander: certified Costco Guys fans.

Absolutely.

And the Costco Guys are certified Michigander fans, now.

I guess so. We’re in their region. They live in Florida, so I was hoping to run into them while we’re here.

Hopefully you can get a couple big booms for the new record.

Yeah, five big booms.

It’s still January, so I wanted to ask what resolutions you have for this year, with the album rollout and everything.

That’s a good question. I don’t really do those. I would like to, but I just don’t. It ends up being depressing by March, because you fail.

I’m just really excited for the record to be out. I’m excited for people to hear it and hopefully listen to it as a whole and sit down with the vinyl.

What would a successful album release look like for you? Is it feedback from fans, people singing the songs at shows, what is it?

Obviously, if it opens some doors and stuff. But that’s out of my control. It’s already successful, because it’s finished.

I’ve worked my whole life for it, and that alone is good enough. As corny as that sounds.

Listen to Michigander by Michigander now, on Spotify, Apple Music and more.

Jack is the older of the Silver brothers.

He’s the wordsmith, a writing & literature student at Emerson College in Boston’s Theater District.

The 19-year-old has been a poet and fiction writer since he was very young, but he never expected to be a musician. He rarely even sang in the car as a kid. Now, though, Jack’s the lead singer for Cut The Kids in Half, a five-piece rock band founded alongside his brother, Charlie.

“It continues to be my greatest passion,” he said of literature, in a recent Zoom interview. “It's somehow translated over into the musical world, which is not something I ever cared about when I was younger.”

Charlie is the younger of the Silver brothers.

He goes to school at Boston University, a half-hour away by train from his older brother. The 18-year-old is a bit more soft-spoken than Jack.

He’s the instrumentalist and has been playing guitar for almost a decade. At around 13 years old, he started writing songs, inspired by the classic rock — Led Zeppelin, The Beatles — the Silver brothers’ parents put them onto as kids.

Charlie’s songwriting piqued his brother’s interest.

“I started thinking, ‘Well, I could do that,’” Jack said. “Even though I have no musical talent whatsoever. I can't pick up a guitar and play anything other than one chord — and I do that pretty badly.”

Many of those songs, written by the Silvers as mere tweens, have evolved into the tracks that make up Cut The Kids in Half’s debut album What We Became, out now.

The album was largely recorded in New Jersey by Ray Ketchem, whose prior credits include The Cactus Blossoms and Guided By Voices. The band has expanded since those teenage days to include drummer Luke Tan, guitarist Kevin Mortenson and bassist-keyboardist-trumpeter Joey Sorkin.

Cut The Kids in Half is proud of their first album. But more than anything, the Silvers say they’re ready to release it and close this chapter of songwriting. These songs have been on their minds for most of their teenage years, after all.

“Obviously, you know, if Rolling Stone publishes our album and says it's the best album of all time, that's ideal,” Charlie jokes. “But a lot of what I'm thinking about is really more future-based. If we get this album done and we're proud of how we did it, then we can actually move on to making new music.”

Sorry, Charlie. I’m not Rolling Stone.

But I did love What We Became, a heater of an indie record with nine earnest, grandiose songs. Many of them evoke the emotional propensity of acts like Gang of Youths or The Head and The Heart. Perhaps that’s because of Jack’s baritone vocals, which, with their breathy, emotive drawl should easily draw comparisons to Dave Le’aupepe or Jonathan Russell.

“Riverbend,” the album’s penultimate 11-minute standout, is an early candidate for one of this year’s best rock songs. The trumpets burst at the end of several of the album’s meandering, prosaic verses. The literary lyrics check out with Jack’s background. They’re provocative and made of clay.

“Everybody’s on a one-way street,” goes one line. “And we’re driving down it faster each day it seems.”

“Old Manhattan” is another opus, a six-minute slow-burner with locomotive acoustic guitars and subtle orchestral accents.

The comparisons are fairly easy for Cut The Kids in Half. The catchiest of the album’s singles, “A Good Man Died,” is a must-listen for anyone as addicted as I was to British indie band Pynch’s synthy, thumping Howling at a Concrete Moon in 2023. When the band layers some fuzz onto Jack’s voice — on “Song of Two Humans” especially — it’s a dead ringer for Julian Casablancas.

Indeed, The Strokes are a major touchpoint for the Silvers.

When asked about their influences, the brothers are a jukebox of rock’s all-time greats. The Velvet Underground. Elliott Smith. Oasis. The Silver brothers have jokingly planned a Gallagher-style feud a few years from now to drum up controversy, despite the fact that they rarely even butted heads as kids.

“That’s to generate interest in the tour, obviously,” Jack said with a smirk.

Cut The Kids in Half’s moniker is a reference to a Radiohead lyric on “Morning Bell,” from Amnesiac. Jack and Charlie considered several options for the band name. They first hoped to use their last name, pairing it with another word “that sounded vaguely cool and esoteric,” Jack said. But all the Silver puns sounded too cheesy.

The Silvers? Taken. Silver Age? Nope.

They thought about a comma name, too — Black Country, New Road was a huge influence on their songwriting the last few years. “Cracked Eggs, Dead Birds” was an option, Charlie said. That’s also a Radiohead lyric (“Street Spirit”). It would be fitting, given their record’s BCNR-esque cinematic propulsion and abstract storytelling.

But ultimately, they settled on Cut The Kids in Half. Jack said they hoped to bear the torch of musical ancestry by naming their band after Radiohead the way Thom Yorke named his group after a Talking Heads track.

“It felt like carrying on a line of great rock artists,” Jack said, before re-writing his ambitions a bit. “Not to call ourselves great rock artists — the idea was to manifest it.”

The “Morning Age” lyric that has become Cut The Kids in Half’s namesake is ostensibly about divorce. There’s some discussion of parenthood on What We Became, too, most cleverly on track three “Run Kid.”

Run kid
Out of the death grip
Into a new life
So far away
Out of the gray sky
That poisons your blood line
Feeds into your panic
And keeps you in place

But the Silvers want to clarify that these are just stories.

“Our parents are both huge fans of our music and so supportive. When we were younger, they were showing us all new music, and now we show them new music,” Jack said.

“At least a few of the songs on this album are about parents, and it’s easy to misconstrue them for reality, because they’re dark, almost negative, songs. Our parents are beyond supportive.”

In fact, the album’s outro, “The Quiet Life of August,” was written as an ode to their mother when the Silver brothers were kids. She asked for a song for her birthday — at the end of August — and they granted it.

The song, released in 2022 as the band’s first ever single, came together in just one night. That’s a stark contrast to most of the songs on the album, which have been tweaked and changed for years, Jack said.

“Charlie came up with the riff, and I would come in, write a lyric, and then I would run out into the hallway,” he said. “And I would brainstorm for 20 or 30 minutes, then I would run back in.”

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Despite the sweet backstory, the song itself is still a little bit brooding. That’s just how Jack writes, he said.

He doesn’t have any shame in being a little self-indulgent as a lyricist. He takes pride in being informed by all-time great “rock manifestos” from legends like Bruce Springsteen, the musical patriarch of the Silvers’ home state New Jersey.

When asked about how being from New Jersey shaped his songwriting, Charlie said he doesn’t feel like it influenced the instrumentation much, despite the fact that he loves plenty of local bands.

Jack, though, points to “Storm Drain Girls,” the crackling, piano-forward opener on What We Became. That’s the most Springsteenian track on the album. On it, Jack’s voice burns to a growl over verses about alcoholism and escape.

The storm drain girls mean nothing to me now
They’ll cause a raging tempest to seep silent underground
And I’ve seen beneath the sewers
I’ve learned what boys become
Men who trade their faces for the safety of their sons

“The lyrics are almost over the top and poetic to the point of irony,” Jack said. “It's almost so over the top of what a teenager would say when they're going through a breakup, or about to start a new chapter of their life, or trying to leave their hometown behind — all these very Springsteenian messages that shine through.”

That last part is perhaps the most Jersey thing about What We Became.

It’s about leaving.

“I think there is a certain element that comes from the Jersey heritage,” Jack said. “Even if it's about wanting to grow up and get the hell out of there.”

It’s most telling that the Silver brothers got the hell out of there together.

Once Jack went off to Emerson, Charlie zeroed in on Boston schools only for his own college search. He did it so they could keep playing music together, he said, like they have since they were kids.

College schedules are busy. Charlie’s studying electrical engineering. But Cut The Kids in Half keeps the kids whole. They see each other every week for band practice and writing sessions.

“We've always been close,” Jack said. “But if it weren't for music, I would probably see him every once in a while.”

The Silver brothers called into our Zoom interview separately. Part of the way through, Jack shared that he was planning to meet his younger brother for band practice as soon as the call ended.

So I wrapped up the conversation. They had places to be.

And this one-way street doesn’t have a speed limit.

Listen to What We Became by Cut The Kids In Half now, on Spotify and Apple Music.

Good is the enemy of great and so am I.

I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. I’ve been wanting to scream it at you. I’ve dreamt of cupping my hands, mustering a pep rally worth of gusto, and letting it rip as I fall into a void. I’ve been wanting to whisper it in your ear. I’ve been wanting.

There’s been so much wanting.

I wrote it in my notes a few years ago, convinced it was the single most important sentence I’ve ever written. Someday, I’d use it as the lead for a brilliant essay. A novel, perhaps. Maybe a screenplay. Maybe an album. At the very least, a song. Or a really good poem.

It’d be my thesis for a life of unfinished goals. The diagnosis for my symptomless pain. The sentence I’d use to describe this sentence, a perfect definition for the dull sore of seeing so many things I could be and being none of them. Not for a lack of trying. But instead, worse yet, for an allergy to it.

Every time my favorite football team loses, I turn on the franchise mode for that year’s Madden video game and drop into the current moment, playing out the rest of the season in a way that’s realistic enough to be true. I trade a few players away, sign a few new ones, reach the precipice of a new season with a new hope, optimism, roster and — for a moment — reality. I play a few games. It feels good and new.

And then I turn the game off. And the next time they lose, I do it all over again.

Every time I look in the mirror and don’t like the person who stares back at me, I call someone I love and tell them all the ways I should change. Sometimes, they agree. Sometimes, they disagree. That’s worse.

The next day, I set out on a mission to change these things. I run a few miles, read the first few chapters of a book, smile, put on a smartphone screen time limit, fast, write, take a walk, make a meal and kiss my girlfriend, with the honey-sweetness of the moon still rising.

And then a few days pass, and the feeling fades. And I do it all over again.

Every time I get frustrated with work, I start hypothesizing new careers I could pursue, and what cities these careers might take me to. In my head, I’ve been a graduate student in Leeds, an English teacher in Rhode Island, a food critic in Denver, an administrative assistant in New York City, a sports reporter, a copywriter, a college admissions counselor, a therapist, a songwriter, an author, a friend.

And then I wake up. To the blue light of this stupid fucking video game. It’s the Super Bowl. I’m in it. I really don’t feel like playing. Because the hard work was putting the hypothetical team together in the first place. Right?

I’ve been listening quite a bit to Always Repeating by Runnner lately. It’s a perfect album, especially for this feeling. Here’s a potent verse from “New Sublet”:

Now you're seeing it backwards
You're struggling to draw your own face
Sitting drunk on the internet looking at prices of places
For cities you don't live in and you've never been
You're just getting addicted to starting all over again

And another from the obvious standout “Ur Name On A Grain Of Rice”:

Maybe I loved you
Or maybe I wanted to
see something through
Just cause I never do
And I should call, but I'm afraid
of what you're gonna say
Notice all the ways I’ve changed
and all the ways I’ve stayed the same

There are so many books on my shelf with bookmarks after their second chapter. I don’t know how any of them end. I’ve never even been to the middle. I’m struggling with that.

I’m feeling aimless, at sea with an oar and not a damn clue which direction land is. I’m hoping Sounds Great is the beach. But I’m not sure.

I’m scared. Because as far as I can remember, I’ve only seen through two things in my life.

First: My relationship, a true miracle cobbled together with some combination of luck and her immense patience.

Second, and I mean this: The shitty rap mixtape I made when I was 16 years old. I wrote the entire thing in solitude with YouTube-bootlegged Chance the Rapper type beats, Band of Horses instrumentals and the worst cadences imaginable. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve just picked up an instrument.

It sounded terrible. It was poorly mixed, derivative, corny, messy and downright embarrassing. It was the kind of thing you’d expect, given I was a white kid in a small town, dining on a diet of pop-rap and lyrical miracles. Sorry to the voyeurs, but I’ve scrubbed it from the internet (though there are two dozen or so CDs floating out in the universe, so I imagine it’ll come back to haunt me someday).

Still, I wouldn’t change a thing about those days. I’ve never been intoxicated by a creative project the way I was with that one.

I wrote the entire thing for myself. I kept it a secret from some of my closest friends for more than a year. In my childhood bedroom, I sang into an off-brand podcast mic until 2 a.m., tinkering with GarageBand effects and coming up with new hooks. It was an obsession. It was the first time I felt truly passionate about anything.

Around the time I wrote it, I was dealing with intense bouts of anxiety, fearing death to the point of physical symptoms. I held this anxiety like a dirty little secret. But the music helped.

Even more than death, I feared disappointing people who’d be ashamed of this little project. The music sucked, after all. And I knew on some intrinsic level it did. But I finished it anyway, because I had to.

The track list followed a linear narrative: 14 songs, with the first 7 sad and the second 7 upbeat. The plan was semi-meta. I’d speak my happiness into existence by writing an album about becoming happier. It was audacious. but it worked. Sure, the product wasn’t great. Unlistenable, even. But I did get happier. I found joy in finishing a project for the first — and hopefully not the last — time.

There’s a part of me that’s still sympathetic to bad art because of this experience. Even those God-awful Instagram Reels songs that go viral on Twitter every few weeks. Because I know making bad art with pure intentions can be a really transformative thing, both emotionally and creatively. I know nobody is a fixed point on a line of artistic value.

I knew then, too. But in the years after making that project, I let the anxiety get the best of me. I continued writing songs for a time and learned a few chords on my guitar. But I didn’t share these songs with anybody outside of a few close friends.

I’ve channeled my creativity into different types of writing — articles, poems, a few texts and tweets, even! — and all of them were infinitely better than that damn mixtape. But the process has never felt as good. Nothing has felt as freeing as my year as a dumb kid when I wrote songs in my room with one goal in mind: feel better. Sometimes I still listen to them, and I can’t help but smile.

I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. It has scared the hell out of me, but I just thought you should know. I thought you should know how vast this ocean is. How heavy the paddle feels in my hands, how sharp the splinters are in my palms.

I just want you to know there’s land somewhere, and you should build a sand castle when you get there. Forget about the structural integrity. Wear your crown for a second. Let the castle stand, just long enough for you to feel pride. Take a picture of it for later. Cup your hands around it and let the sand slip between your fingertips. I want you to know how soft and warm it is when it’s yours.

I want you to know who the enemy is.

It’s time for the second Sounds Great of the new year. But here’s the problem: I can’t stop for more than a few hours this week without thinking about football.

So we’re doing this. The music fan’s guide to the NFL Playoffs.

As a nerd with one knee deep in both music and sports fandom, I have always felt like a translator.

When I tried to get my Phoebe Bridgers-loving girlfriend into the Vikings a few years ago, I put the team in indie music terms. Every season, they punish me, after all.

When I would chat with my fellow sports journalism major roommates about music in college, I put my listening habits in sports terms. I compared my obsession with finding new artists to my obsession with armchair-scouting potential NFL Draft steals. Stumbling onto the MJ Lenderman discography right after Boat Songs came out felt like drafting Richard Sherman in the fifth round.

So I figured I’d put these translating skills to the test ahead of the NFL Playoffs. They start this weekend and — regardless of your appetite for football — will undoubtedly dominate your social media feeds.

Do you know more about Kacey Musgraves than Luke Musgrave? Are you a Mach-Hommy fan, but not a Mahomes fan? Is Dan Campbell just the guy from The Wonder Years to you? This is the NFL Playoffs primer for you.

Hopefully you can leave with a team to root for and a new band to check out, too.

Detroit Lions

The Lions have been one of the NFL’s most dominant teams this year. They win games with flair and intensity. Detroit is flashy and undeniably corny with a sort of mean streak. There’s something very nu-metal about it. Until last year, they hadn’t won a playoff game in decades. But like Linkin Park, they’re back. To add to the corny-metal Lions lore: Detroit offensive lineman Kevin Zeitler said in 2022 he’s next door neighbors with a member of Disturbed.

Their coach is Dan Campbell — not to be confused with the lead singer of The Wonder Years and Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties — and he famously started his tenure with the team by proclaiming his players would bite the kneecaps off of the other team’s players. The whole speech felt like an “I Think You Should Leave” bit. Speaking of, Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson are huge Lions fans and recorded their schedule release video earlier this year.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Petey, Conor Lynch, Easy Beach, Ingrid Andress, Bonny Doon, Fireworks, BabyTron

Root for them if…

You want to be part of the hype. Detroit feels like America’s team. They’re the team of choice for casual fans, neutral fans, broadcasters, the NFL, America and whatever deity oversees football.

They’re having a Charli xcx sort of moment right now. Like Charli, they’re unconventional and unafraid to take risks. They’ve been lovable underdogs for the last several years and have now risen to the spotlight by being lovable winners, too. The downside? It’s easy to be oversaturated by their “People’s Team” schtick. If you were turned off by the Kamala is brat era of Brat Summer, the Lions will get old fast.

Philadelphia Eagles

No team better personifies their city than the Eagles, whose fans are known for tearing Philly to shreds every time they win a championship. The Eagles’ coach, Nick Sirianni, is an Italian dude who heckles opposing fans mid-game. Their head of sideline security is an absolute unit of a guy known as “Big Dom” — who looks a little like Fat Joe if you squint — and he once got suspended for shoving a 49ers player.

The Eagles have one of the best records in the NFL, with possibly the most talented roster of players. Yet their fans still boo sometimes. This insatiability is reminiscent of Kanye West fandom. Like a Ye fan, the Eagles know you despise them. But they also know you can’t deny the talent. As a self-proclaimed Eagles hater, even I can acknowledge their quarterback Jalen Hurts is likable. He told GQ he’s a vinyl collector with albums by artists like Frankie Beverly, Al Green and Anita Baker.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Caracara, Carly Cosgrove, Soul Glo, Sweet Pill, Ther, Greg Mendez, Katie Bejsiuk, The Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick, Sadurn

Root for them if…

You like your success with a side of dysfunction and drama. Zach Bryan is an Eagles fan. Two of the team’s best players have been in a mildly-public spat all season. It’s giving Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac.

Philly also probably has America’s best indie music per capita. So if you like bands like Dr. Dog, Mt. Joy or Modern Baseball, the Eagles will be up your alley.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

There may not be a better player in the NFL to party with than Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield. His taste in country music is questionable — he took the stage with Morgan Wallen and Hulk Hogan last year — but he also once wore a wig and tutu just to sing “California Gurls” by Katy Perry at a fundraiser.

Tampa Bay head coach Todd Bowles is a lot more soft-spoken. But he does have an eclectic taste in music. When talking to the Buccaneers website in 2019, he name-dropped Gladys Knight, LL Cool J and The Temptations and said he listens to everything but heavy metal and opera. The team’s fight song is a super groovy, horn-heavy pop tune called “Hey Hey Tampa Bay.”

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Bedside Kites, charlie, Doechii, Khia, Glove

Root for them if…

You want to see Tampa native Doechii — owner of the best NPR Tiny Desk ever — come out with her TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl. I know I do. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” on a stage like that? Sheesh. Maybe we’ll even get a song between the two. The Kendrick-Doechii collab will probably happen anyways, but it’d be cooler if a big contingency from Tampa is there in the crowd to enjoy its debut.

Los Angeles Rams

The Rams are one of the most dependable teams out there. Their head coach is a football whiz who broke out when he was young and has since changed the way NFL offenses call plays. This ahead-of-the-curve influence is perfect for pop fans who dig Bjork, R&B fans who are into Frank Ocean, or indie fans who like Radiohead.

One of their best receivers is Puka Nacua, an underdog story who came out of nowhere last year like Fetty Wap in 2015. I expect Puka to have more staying power, though. Their other star player, Cooper Kupp, is a self-taught guitarist-pianist. He’s also a 2Pac fan, and has your typical oldhead’s perspective on modern hip-hop: “Too many Lils, too many Youngboys, too many Babys,” he said in 2023.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Runnner, Claire Rousay, Militarie Gun, Paris Texas, Girlpool, Open Mike Eagle

Root for them if…

You want Kendrick Lamar’s victory lap to never end. Seriously. Imagine it. The Rams are in the Super Bowl. Everybody from L.A. has made the trek to New Orleans. Kendrick’s on stage for the Halftime Show, and he fills it with as many L.A. reps as possible. Underground rappers, TDE artists, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, DeMar DeRozan, LeBron James, the whole nine yards. Psst… I see dead people.

Minnesota Vikings

I’m partial, because the Vikings are my home team. But they’re probably this season’s most surprising success story. Sports betters and NFL experts expected them to win 6 or 7 games. They’ve doubled that, and they’re g(r)iddy about it. They play “Let’s Go Crazy” by Minnesota’s own Prince after every touchdown. Lizzo’s new man was once on the team, allegedly.

Their coach, Kevin O’Connell, is a relentlessly wholesome guy who tells his team he loves them. He has Kenny Chesney in his phone contacts. O’Connell has helped revive the career of quarterback Sam Darnold, who once said he listens to “15th and the 1st” by Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane before every game. Safety Cam Bynum is known for leading the team in dances from Disney shows like High School Musical and Camp Rock. He was caught singing Christmas carols to fans in Minnesota a few weeks ago. Tight end Johnny Mundt is a big Sturgill Simpson fan. Their kicker, Will Reichard, once said his rap producer tag would be “Will The Thrill Comin’.” This team is fun as hell. I love them. Skol.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Atmosphere, Dua Saleh, runo plum, Fend, Keep for Cheap, Prize Horse, she’s green

Root for them if…

You’d like to see a city and state achieve decades of catharsis. The Vikings, on paper, are one of the best teams in NFL history. But like a Beyoncé Album of The Year Grammy award, Super Bowls are elusive in Minnesota. They’ve lost four of them. The feeling of joy as a Vikings fan is A Complete Unknown. If you’re not prepared for that kind of heartbreak, shy away.

When this Vikings team does win, it feels like a song by Gang of Youths or early Coldplay — fulfilling in a cinematic sort of way. A Super Bowl win would be the Vikings’ opus. Their Rush of Blood to the Head, if you will.

Washington Commanders

Nobody saw the Commanders coming this year. They were the second worst NFL team last year and have developed a reputation over the last decade for being poorly ran, thanks to previous owner and absolute menace Dan Snyder. He’s gone, and so are the bad vibes. Their break-up has sounded as good to fans as “The Breakup Song” by D.C. native (and big-time Commanders fan) Wale.

Washington now has a new owner, new general manager, new head coach and new quarterback. The last one is the most fun of the bunch: Jayden Daniels, a rookie who plays faster than a Jeff Rosenstock song. Daniels has said he has sorta backwards listening habits, starting his day with Meek Mill and getting into the pregame mood with gospel. Last year, the team posted a recap of their players’ top Spotify artists, and answers included Brent Faiyaz and Key Glock.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Glitterer, Ekko Astral, Origami Angel, Oddisee, redveil

Root for them if…

You want to see a fast-rising star reach the pinnacle at historic speed. Daniels — the likely NFL Rookie of The Year — would be the first rookie quarterback to ever play in a Super Bowl. That kind of meteoric success would be like a hypothetical Chappell Roan Song of The Year Grammy win in February. Good luck, babe.

Green Bay Packers

The Packers are the NFL’s most historic franchise, but it’s been a rough last decade. The team has fallen short in the playoffs over and over. This year, thanks to the team’s Top 5 offense, fans have heard “Bang The Drum All Day” by Todd Rungren a lot. It’s the Packers’ go-to song after every touchdown. Another classic at Lambeau Field? “Jump Around” by House of Pain, thanks to college traditions down in Madison, Wisconsin.

As for the players’ music taste: Packers cornerback Carrington Vallentine told the team’s TikTok he has a playlist called “Stand On Business” with a cover photo of SpongeBob wearing black Air Forces. Their quarterback is Jordan Love, so any song with “Love” in the title — or anything by the band Love, those guys rock — works as a great pun. Love was once rapid-fire quizzed on his thoughts on Taylor Swift songs. He called “the 1,” “Hits Different” and “I Did Something Bad” skips; he endorsed “Bad Blood” and “Shake It Off.” Big 1989 guy.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Bon Iver, I guess? He’s still more Minnesota’s than Wisconsin’s, though. Somebody send me a Green Bay indie band to check out. Or just an artist who loves the Packers. We’ll take what we can get.

Root for them if…

You love it when new artists sound like they could be old ones. The Packers are the youngest team in the league. But they play in football’s oldest stadium, with football’s oldest traditions. That’s a fun dichotomy. I’m thinking Thee Sacred Souls or The Dip. Maybe a little bit of Chlöe and The Next 20th Century by Father John Misty.

Alternatively, root for Green Bay if you were Team Lil Wayne during his minor dust-up with Kendrick Lamar over the Halftime Show. He’s a huge Packers fan who once dropped a song called “Green and Yellow.” Surely, Wayne’s favorite team playing in his hometown stadium would soften the blow of not headlining.

Kansas City Chiefs

The Chiefs are frontrunner’s paradise. They won the last two Super Bowls. They have the best quarterback in football, Patrick Mahomes, a guy who has been name-dropped in more than 200 rap songs, including ones by Migos and J. Cole. The Chiefs have the most famous musician on Earth in a suite at all their games. Every other commercial features their coach talking about Bundle-rooskis. Kansas City’s pop-cultural overkill — paired with their kicker’s insufferable graduation speech last summer — makes them easy to hate.

If you have any inkling of counter-culturism, avoid this team at all costs. But if you’re into, I don’t know … calling songs like “Don’t Stop Believin'” or “American Pie” masterpieces, these guys might be for you. If you were rooting for Drake in last year’s rap beef, these guys might be for you. If you have several vinyl versions of The Tortured Poets Department, these guys are definitely for you.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

BLACKSTARKIDS, Kevin Morby, Chappell Roan, Hembree, 1010benja, The Greeting Committee

Root for them if…

You’re from Kansas City, you have family from Kansas City, or you’re a huge Swiftie. Other than that, join the good guys instead.

Buffalo Bills

The Bills are probably the league’s most lovable team. Alongside my Vikings, they’re tied for the most Super Bowl losses in NFL history. But their fans — who are known for suplexing picnic tables in the stadium parking lot — are relentlessly optimistic and seemingly numb to cold weather. They call themselves the mafia, and they’re just about as easy to root for as JPEGMAFIA. They once raised thousands of dollars for another team’s charity as a thank you for helping get them in the playoffs.

Their quarterback, Josh Allen, is a Human Golden Retriever engaged to Hailee Steinfeld. He listens to “Put Your Head On My Shoulder” and Frank Sinatra before games. Last month, the Bills TikTok account — a must-follow, according to my girlfriend — gifted Allen a six-hour rental of an Elvis impersonator for Christmas.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine, Del Paxton, Julie Byrne, Camp Trash, M.A.G.S., Carpool

Root for them if…

You love an underdog who sticks it to the man. In this case, the man is Kansas City. The Bills have lost a playoff heartbreaker to the Chiefs in three of the last four years. Beating them this year would feel like when Lil Nas X pissed off country traditionalists by breaking records with “Old Town Road.” Or when Chance the Rapper earned a Best Rap Album Grammy for an indie mixtape with Coloring Book. Plus, a Bills Super Bowl win would certainly have the mafia drinking all night, drinking all night, drinking all night, ayy, ayy.

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Baltimore Ravens

The Ravens are easily one of the most exciting teams to watch. That’s thanks to reigning MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson, a bottle of lightning prone to strike at any moment. He’s on a run right now like Bruno Mars in the 2010’s. Switching tempos with ease. Delivering hit after hit after hit. But because he’s got a few clunkers — “The Lazy Song”? — in his past, some refuse to give him credit. This year is Jackson’s chance to change the narrative. The Anderson .Paak to his Silk Sonic is Derrick Henry, running back built like a semi-truck. Henry runs through defenders with the ferociousness of that viral Knocked Loose & Poppy Jimmy Kimmel set.

Ravens kicker Justin Tucker is one of the greatest ever, and he and I share a favorite band in Third Eye Blind. Unfortunately, he also likes All Time Low. Sigh.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Teen Suicide, Pinkshift, Nourished By Time, Combat

Root for them if…

You want to see Lamar Jackson’s haters — some of whom are downright bigots — have a bad time. Because of a historic stigma about Black quarterbacks, Jackson has had to deal with some real bullshit in the NFL. Like when Tyler, The Creator won a Grammy and then spoke out against boxing Black artists into “Urban” categories. A championship ring, though, might be the thing to shut critics up.

“It's still there,” Jackson said about racial bias against Black QBs in 2022. “That's why I need that championship."

Houston Texans

The young and surprising Texans were magical last year. But the magic is fading. They had some brutal luck in 2024. Since Halloween, they’ve had seven players go out for the rest of the season due to injuries. It would take a change of pace as explosive as the middle of Houston native Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” to get this train back on track. Don’t rule out a beat-switch though. Or maybe a full-blown curveball, like another Houston native’s last two albums: RENAISSANCE and COWBOY CARTER.

Texans star receiver Nico Collins shares a name with a hyper-cheesy internet pop singer apparently, which has to be good for at least somebody’s SEO analytics. In a podcast with Overtime in 2022, quarterback CJ Stroud — an L.A. native — named not one but two Nipsey Hussle albums as his favorites of all-time (Crenshaw & Victory Lap).

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Robert Glasper, Narrow Head, TisaKorean, Blue October

Root for them if…

You want to see one of the only teams in NFL history to have never even gone to a Super Bowl finally go to one. That fact is just about as surprising as hearing Bruce Springsteen never had a No. 1 hit. Neither did James Brown or Bob Dylan!

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Los Angeles Chargers

The Chargers are a historically unserious team. Their typical season feels like listening to the Weezer discography. There are gaffes and heartbreaks and even the biggest fans know the gang’s at their best in the powder blues.

The Chargers have leaned into the goofy bit somewhat extra this year with new head coach Jim Harbaugh, the former coach at the University of Michigan. Harbaugh is as much of a goofball as you’ll find on an NFL sideline. His music taste is as unpredictable as he is. Harbaugh’s players have shared that the 61-year-old holds space for “Defying Gravity” and his favorite song is “The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. When he gets the aux at practice, he plays everything from Phil Collins to Yo Gotti and Moneybagg Yo. Hell yeah. Their quarterback, Justin Herbert, has said he loves AC/DC and Tom Petty.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Runnner, Claire Rousay, Militarie Gun, Paris Texas, Girlpool, Open Mike Eagle

Root for them if…

You’re a lover of good fashion. The Chargers’ uniforms are widely accepted as the best in the league, and they’d undoubtedly look good at the Super Bowl, too. American Idol fans should be Chargers fans, too, because Jordin Sparks is the team’s most famous fan. She’s possibly, also, the only one. The team has notoriously low turn-out at their games. So if you want to deal with absolutely zero accusations of trend-hopping, this is your team.

Pittsburgh Steelers

Pittsburgh is the Waxahatchee of the NFL. The epitome of consistency for more than a decade. The last time the Steelers had a losing season, “Hey Ya!” was at the top of the Billboard charts and The Kid Laroi wasn’t alive yet. Their coach, Mike Tomlin — a famously uncanny Will.i.am doppelganger — is a big reason why. This year, they can also thank quarterback Russell Wilson: husband to Ciara, and a guy so cringey it might just be camp? Music-wise, he’s a fan of Boyz II Men and Michael Jackson and, presumably, not Future.

Defensive Player of The Year TJ Watt’s favorite album is Illinois. No, sadly, not the Sufjan one. The Brett Eldredge one. Receiver George Pickens is occasionally unhinged on the field. Off the field, he told the Steelers socials that Young Thug’s “Uncle M” would be his sitcom theme song.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

Merce Lemon, Short Fictions, feeble little horse, Ethel Cain, Montell Fish

Root for them if…

You couldn’t get enough of the black stripes and yellow paint on Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow.” The 2010 banger is a de facto ode to Wiz’s hometown Steelers and they haven’t been to the Super Bowl since the season it came out.

Can they break the “Black and Yellow” curse?

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Denver Broncos

Like the Commanders earlier, the Broncos are looking to make history this year by being the first team to make the Super Bowl with a rookie quarterback. Theirs is Bo Nix, who says he listens to Christian worship music before every game. The Denver Gazette reported that the team’s stadium DJ, Squizzy Taylor, comes to players for song requests. He praised the music taste of Broncos star cornerback Patrick Surtain (who is into Kodak Black and BossMan DLo), running back Javonte Williams and receiver Courtland Sutton. Cornerback Riley Moss digs “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, the DJ told the Gazette.

Denver head coach Sean Payton has been depicted by Kevin James in a Netflix movie. He’s also been depicted with devil horns in my childhood notebooks — Payton was once suspended for an entire season after getting caught incentivizing his players to injure opponents, most famously in a crucial playoff game against my Vikings. Anyways, I guess Payton is also friends with Kenny Chesney and has a gimmicky rap song named after him, thanks to his viral postgame dance in 2018.

Artists with ties to the city to check out

A Place For Owls, Broken Record, Bellhoss, Corsicana

Root for them if…

You’re a fan of mountain music. The Lumineers and Gregory Alan Isakov are from Denver. Red Rocks Amphitheater is a short drive away. And the Broncos really lean into the whole “Rocky Mountain High” thing. They call their home stadium “Empower Field at Mile High.” Their fans have high expectations. And hell, it’s Colorado — they’re probably high, too.

Happy new year and thanks for reading Sounds Great. I wish the best of luck to whatever NFL team you’re rooting for in these playoffs.

Well, as long as it’s the Vikings. If it’s any other team, I respectfully hope you have a miserable January. Sorry.

Skol.

Sounds Great is a fully independent, reader-supported music blog.

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Hey! It’s your friend, Gannon. It’s good to be back.

It’s been more than a month since I last published any music writing.

In that time, I’ve packed up my Quad-Cities apartment, moved to Minneapolis, applied to probably a hundred jobs, assembled roughly as many pieces of IKEA furniture, flown westward for Thanksgiving and Christmas, thrown in the towel on my retirement savings and bought several large coats.

This month has been both tumultuous and affirming. Most recently, I had my faith restored outside a sold-out Wilco show at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul, where a man handed my girlfriend and I two tickets, refused a thank you, and ran off without elaboration like some sort of alt-rock Clarence Odbody.

Inside the venue, Tweedy & Co. played a setlist of B-sides and deep cuts and I stood, tipsy and joyful. My heels slipped backward against a step into the packed pit. I craned my neck to see the band. The fans around me were a show of their own.

During “At Least That’s What You Said,” I watched several people to my left mumble lyrics under their breath. Their lips were pursed into a constant, content smile.

When I sat down on the bed next to you
You started to cry
I said, maybe if I leave, you'll want me
To come back home
Or maybe all you mean is "leave me alone"
At least that's what you said

They closed their eyes. I could tell that this Wilco song, for a moment, was their God. So was the next one. And the one before it.

I knew that feeling.

On my first night in the Twin Cities, I saw Young Mister — one of my favorite songwriters — at The Green Room in Uptown Minneapolis. My back was sore from six hours in a U-Haul seat. I ugly-cried to “American Dream Come True.”

The summer sky surrenders to fall
The autumn air gives way to the cold
So on and so forth, they say
Somewhere between go and stay
There's a place pretty close to the ground
Where you can settle without settling down

‘Cause there's always tomorrow
To do everything, did you know
That yesterday was your last chance
To take it slow

And then I cried a little bit more to this bit from “Familiar Colors.”

Sometimes I can't move my body in the morning
I feel like Cameron Frye, just paralyzed in bed
Nostalgia hits me with the weight and without warning
So I scroll through the pictures and captures
Man, it's almost like I'm there

There is a feeling of rebirth that comes with this time of year. But right now, it’s even more tangible, given that I’m living in a new apartment in a new-ish city, seeking a new job and starting a new music blog. (That’s this one!)

New Year’s is my favorite holiday for a reason: New is good.

I love the feeling of setting resolutions every Eve. There’s optimism that some of them might just come true. Let’s see how last year’s fared…

The winners:

• See a show in Chicago

• Cover a music festival

• Write something longform that I’m proud of

• Log more than 100 movies on Letterboxd

• Write a poem

• Go to Disney World with my family

• Start a Substack

  • This is at the buzzer, but it counts!

• Get published in one of my favorite music outlets

The losers:

• Read all the books on my shelf

  • I actually accumulated MORE books

• Delete Twitter

  • See above hyperlinks

• Run five miles a week

• Get a dog

• Drink less coffee

• Listen to more new music than last year

It’s a mixed bag, but resolutions always are. Nobody runs as much as they wanted to.

That last one is sticking with me, though.

In 2024, to tell you the truth, I had a complicated relationship with music. It was my first full year as a full-time entertainment reporter. I worked for the incredible Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, where every week, I wrote a music column called Sounds Good.

That column was one of the greatest gifts of my life so far.

Through Sounds Good, I found confidence in my voice as a writer. I found a greater sense of home in the Quad-Cities. I connected with strangers on a shared love of music and riled up a few folks who wrote angry letters to the editor. I interviewed artists like Hippo Campus, Wilderado and Clover County. I compared the Buffalo Bills to an Alvvays song, and wrote an ode to “A Long December.” I opened up about my relationship with my dad, my mom, my siblings, my girlfriend, my friends, my dog, my favorite albums, my search for a feeling of home and my losing battle with nostalgia.

It was deeply fulfilling and I wouldn’t change a thing.

But I also think I burned myself out.

As a full-time entertainment reporter and weekly music columnist, the lines between work and play got blurrier. I stopped listening to albums that challenged me. I leaned on artists that brought comfort instead. Seeing live music no longer felt like an escape from work. It was work.

So in 2024, I listened to roughly half as much new music as I have in years prior. Worse yet, I felt a distance from the music I did listen to. I wasn’t connecting with it emotionally or analytically the way I did in 2023 or 2022. It was all fodder for the next piece of writing. The joy was gone.

With this in mind, I’ve felt like a constant imposter in my field. I’ve questioned my worthiness in a full-time music writing job — a dwindling position that I wondered might be better allocated to folks more in-tune than I am.

That feeling has been pretty creatively and emotionally stifling. But so has being without work. So I think the problem lies within me and not without. And I’m not giving up on these William Miller dreams.

That’s why I’m setting a different kind of goal for 2025.

Almost every resolution from last year involved more. More music. More movies. More reading. More running. More. More. More.

But in 2025, I want to dig deeper instead of wider. By constantly putting pressure on myself to consume, consume, consume, I’ve sanitized my relationship with music. It doesn’t feel romantic anymore. Those God-like moments — like the ones I witnessed at the Wilco show or felt at Young Mister’s — have got fewer and farther between.

I plan to sort this little crisis out in 2025 by continuing to write about music, but finding a better why. I hope you’ll follow me along the way by subscribing to this newsletter/blog/Substack/column/diary/etc.

It’s free, and I promise they won’t all be this long.

Subscribe now

For now, I’m calling it Sounds Great. After all, it’s a spiritual descendant of Sounds Good — the music column that got me here — but we’re aiming higher this time around. So if you enjoy it, share it with a friend or two.

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Sounds Great is kicking off with a Best Albums of 2024 list. In a year where I found it harder than usual to connect with music, these are the 50 records that rose to the surface.

If you’d prefer to listen as you go, I’ll put a sampler playlist at the end with three songs from each of the top 50, plus three songs from 50 more albums I loved this year but didn’t write about.

50: yungatita - Shoelace & A Knot

Shoelace & A Knot is everything rock should be. It’s abrasive, rough around the edges and catchy as hell. Each song teeters between synth-rock and emo-pop (think Kicksie, Worry Club or Winona Fighter). “Descenda” does it all. There are fuzzy screams of the word “sauce” as a bass lick spins like a playground firepole. Seriously, this thing rocks. “Whiplash” and “Pack It Up” are two of my most-listened-to songs of the year for a reason.

49: Danielle Durack - Escape Artist

I’ll sing the praises of Danielle Durack forever. The folksy pop songwriter from Phoenix, now based in Nashville, was the subject of one of my first music features in 2021. I was a big fan then — shortly after Durack released the outstanding No Place — and I still am. On her latest album, Escape Artist, Durack sings with Bareilles-esque hook sensibility and her lyricism flows like water. “Dean” grapples with the loss of a loved one. “Ice Caps (Live Laugh Love)” tackles the juxtaposition of hope and fear. The ice caps are melting, but Durack is gassing up her car to get somewhere. She’s escaping. There’s promise in that.

48: Rapsody - Please Don’t Cry

Rapsody’s Please Don’t Cry is a 65-minute mosaic of self-affirmation. Across 22 tracks, the rapper studies womanhood, identity, criticism, commercialism, Black artistry and more. The production — on “Marlanna” and “Diary of A Mad Bitch,” particularly — is as impressive as the songwriting. Transitions between frustration and sentimentality feel effortless. “Asteroids” is a Best Rap Song nominee at the Grammy Awards next year. I wouldn’t complain if it wins.

47: Muted Color - take i lovely you

As an admitted shoegaze novice, I say that take i lovely you, from Chicago band Muted Color, is a perfect starting point for those looking to get into the genre. It’s punchy, dreamy and endlessly re-listenable. “acid rain” is a personal favorite, with siren lead guitars and lead vocals that drape over you like a broad paintbrush. This is my favorite shoegaze record of the year, a title held in previous years by Funeral Homes and she’s green. Minnesota’s 12th House Sun gets my unofficial silver medal.

46: Hippo Campus - Flood

It was a great year for Minnesota bands. So of course it was a great year for Hippo Campus, too. At Hinterland Music Festival in August, I talked to these 2010’s indie-pop legends about Flood. In our interview, they scoffed at the promotional notion that this is the “best Hippo Campus album yet” and instead conceded that this is just the “best Hippo Campus yet.” That maturity comes across in the music. Songwriters Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker write with impressive clarity on this album, which sounds starkly more restrained than 2022’s jittery LP3. It’s gloomier and more contemplative, a contrast that works in the band’s favor. The singles are especially spotless. I’ll even dare to say I enjoy Flood as much as any record in their discography. Yes, including Landmark.

45: Various Artists - I Saw The TV Glow (Original Soundtrack)

It’s rare that I put soundtracks on year-end lists. But 2024’s best movie deserves a nod. “Starburned and Unkissed” might just be one of my favorite songs from Caroline Polachek. Its needle drop in the movie is pure catharsis. “Riding Around In The Dark” from Florist is the perfect walking music for a Midwestern winter day. Sadurn, Phoebe Bridgers, The Weather Station, L’Rain and others round the soundtrack out with a set of songs that turn a good film in to a great one.

44: Liquid Mike - Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot

Y2K revival is all the rage right now. Taco Bell commercials are playing “Flagpole Sitta.” Linkin Park is back. Kyle Mooney’s got a thriller about the computers coming to life. We’re probably not far from an “American Pie” reboot. But none of that sounds as good as the onslaught of early-aughts reminiscent emo bangers on Liquid Mike’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot. If we lived in a just world, “Mouse Trap” would be “In Too Deep” levels of big. It’s that good. These guys rip live, too.

43: This Is Lorelei - Box for Buddy, Box for Star

Many, many music writers have written about this one with more dexterity than I could ever wish for. But I’ll do my best in unscientific terms — Box For Buddy, Box For Star sort of sounds like the answer to the hypothetical question “What if 100 gecs had a Slaughter Beach, Dog-style indie-twang side project?” That’s a good question, and the album is an even better answer.

42: Susto - Live From Codfish Hollow

I’m breaking my own rules and putting a live album on a year-end list. Normally, I’d rule it out. But Live From Codfish Hollow, recorded at the greatest music venue in America, has been getting me through the winter.

For those that don’t know — Codfish Hollow is a barn in rural Iowa, a short drive from my former home of the Quad-Cities. There’s no service. A repurposed school bus drives you from the parking lot to the entryway. Barn dogs dip between your legs. The beer is cheap. No matter who takes the stage, you’re guaranteed a one-of-a-kind live music experience.

On this album, Susto makes the place sound like heaven, especially on the group’s classics like “Diamond’s Icaro,” “Hard Drugs” or “Smokin’ Outside.” They cover Oasis and Lana Del Rey, and Q-C legend Mike Steele screams the album intro. For this former Quad-Citian, it sounds like home.

41: Billie Eilish - HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

I don’t really get riled up by the popstar NASCAR races on stan Twitter. No matter how often they drift onto my feed. But for my money, Billie might be the best we’ve got. She’s such a skilled songwriter and brings something new to the table with every record. HIT ME HARD AND SOFT hits all the orchestral notes that Happier Than Ever enjoyers certainly loved, while delivering the sort of dreamlike gloom that drew me to When We All Fall Asleep. “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” is as good of a pop song as you’ll hear this year. “SKINNY” is one of 2024’s best openers, a deft reflection on fame, pressure and growing up in the spotlight.

40: Heart to Gold - Free Help

I recently saw Twin Cities emo band Heart To Gold at Fine Line in Minneapolis. I went with a friend I made online, the way all small emo shows should be attended. It was as good as I anticipated, based on my obsessive listening to Free Help the last few weeks. The A-side of this album alone is a wallop of a boxing match. “Surrounded” and “TNT” are instant classics. The hooks are anthemic. The guitar riffs are crunchy walls of catharsis. And then there’s “Pandora” hidden on the back side, a crescendo-ing rock ballad that rivals the band’s 2018 track “Smo’” as one of their best ever.

39: Tyler, The Creator - CHROMAKOPIA

Death. Taxes. Tyler, The Creator releasing cohesive, genre-bending albums that age like wine. On CHROMAKOPIA, he makes the most of his features. Breakout star Doechii puts on a clinic on “Balloons,” because of course she does. Daniel Caesar delivers two great guest appearances, too. “Sticky” is the gold standard, though. Over an absurd, brass-heavy beat you can expect to hear covered by marching bands forever, each feature (Sexyy Red, GloRilla, Lil Wayne) one-ups the last. It gives “Not Like Us” a run for its money when it comes to the year’s most addictive song.

38: LL Cool J - THE FORCE

Here’s another rap record that makes the most of crisp production and a killer guest list of features. This one just caught me a little bit more off guard. Maybe I’ve been a bit ageist about hip-hop the last few years, shying away from new albums by the greats. But I’m glad I didn’t put THE FORCE in a discard pile.

LL sounds simultaneously vintage and new on tracks like the catchy “Runnit Back” and the wordplay wizardry that is “Passion.” Saweetie and Busta Rhymes add great verses to the album. The trio of Mad Squablz, J-S.A.N.D. and Don Pablito all crush “The Vow.” But rap’s original prince is still the one who’s going to knock you out.

“True story, I'm a walkin' crematorium,” LL raps on the outro. “Helpin' rappers earn urn obituaries from historians.”

Sheesh.

37: NewDad - MADRA

After hearing MADRA, I’ve come to the conclusion that Irish indie band NewDad is one of those acts that I’ll see on festival lineups for the next several years. Each year, they’ll be put on larger stages, at later times, in front of bigger crowds, and I’ll be grateful I was in on the ground level. “Sickly Sweet” and “Where I Go” are fuzzy, dreamy, certified earworms that have to be at least triple platinum on college radio station playlists.

36: Porridge Radio - Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me

My favorite kind of albums are the ones where every song feels like it could be a finale. Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, from British indie band is that kind of album. On it, lead songwriter Dana Margolin wrestles with identity and the way we push ourselves aside for others, for love, for work, for creativity.

“I wake up crying through loving you,” goes “God of Everything Else.” “I'll go everywhere just to get away from you.”

35: Downey Chase - Downey Chase

This year, I can’t shut up about how insane that it is that New England indie-folk band The Brazen Youth wrote their debut album, The Ever Dying Bristlecone Man, when they were teenagers. Teenagers! It’s genius. It’s one of my favorite records of all-time. It’s statistically one of my most-listened-to albums this year. I’ll probably write a whole Substack about it someday.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Brazen Youth vocalist Nic Lussier’s solo debut under the name Downey Chase is profound, too. A lot of the indie-folk revival music coming out right now seems to wear wanderlust as a costume. Lussier doesn’t. He writes about fields and storms and conjures images of pine trees with a self-studying eye. It’s not a mask. It’s a mirror.

Subtle lap steel accents the harmonic “Highwaymoon,” the album’s biggest stand-out. In my current state of aimlessness, one lyric feels particularly incisive.

But how do you find who you might be,
if who you might be is a lie that you own?
And that’s all that it is, and that’s all it comes from?

34: Keep For Cheap - Big Grass

Would you look at that? Another Twin Cities band!

Keep For Cheap describes their sound as prairie rock and I’m not going to argue with it. Like the fields that speckle the corners of this band’s home state, there’s a spaciousness to Big Grass. You can see the entire horizon in folksy tracks like “Yours/Mine,” which ends with a plucky, patio-worthy guitar lick.

There’s also a real sense of place. “Lakehouse” starts with some ambient river noise and references the drift of Canadian wildfire smoke that I remember hovering over Minneapolis last summer. “Ski-Doo” is a love letter to the loon, Minnesota’s “sweet state bird” that sings right back to vocalist Autumn Vagle.

This is not just any Minnesota album on a Minnesota-heavy year-end list. This might just be the most Minnesota album of 2024.

33: Sinai Vessel - I SING

First, the good news: I SING, from North Carolina’s Sinai Vessel, could fairly be called this year’s most poetic record. On my first listen, I had to stop several times per song to re-hear a line, hoping to recreate the magic of hearing it for the first time. The imagery is tangible and visceral, with a matter-of-fact delivery reminiscent of Phil Elverum or David Bazan. There’s a stream-of-consciousness story about driving on “Laughing” that’s a personal contender for 2024’s best verse.

Conscious that staying the course isn’t my first choice
I start to look away from the road a little too long
Reading the fine print on billboards —
Why do they put fine print on billboards?
I guess it’s for a passenger to read, but I’m driving alone
Where am I going? Where the fuck am I going?
Laughing to myself

Now, the bad news: Songwriter Caleb Cordes shared in October that Sinai Vessel won’t be releasing new music anymore. The news came in an announcement full of flawless, devastating prose about dreams and concession. The uncertain storytelling on “Laughing” feels a bit like a flare gun, now.

“I’ve tried for a long time to untangle making music from the sick cycle of hope,” Cordes wrote. “But I can’t.”

I hope to see Cordes release music again. But until then, I’ll have to keep on revisiting I SING. I’m better off because of it.

32: Darryl Rahn - Dusk

This is going to sound strange, but Darryl Rahn has the Ben Gibbard gene. He simultaneously sounds both boyish and as wise as a sage, a juxtaposition that makes every song hit just a tad harder on Dusk. The album features guests like Free Range and Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith, and it’s one of this year’s best lyrical records.

“Nothing Ever Happens” puts existential anxiety into the most digestible of terms. “Heaven’s A Dive Bar” imagines the afterlife exactly how I’d want to. “Still Apart” and “Company” are required listening for someone dealing with a break-up.

The one that hits me hardest, though, is “The Pharmacist,” a track about a woman who feels crushed by the responsibility and hours of life in a pharmacy.

Sometimes she envies the front desk
Selling packs of gum and chapstick and shampoo
She’s only back there for the check
Which never feels worth half the day that she’s been through

It’s one of my favorite songs of the year, because the first verse verbalizes an anxiety that’s always been tough for me to describe.

As a reporter, it’s the feeling that creeps up on the drive home from any day where I wrote a big story. I wonder… Did I misrepresent someone’s art? Did I misspell someone’s name? Did I get a fact wrong? Did I ask shallow questions in that interview? Did I misquote somebody? Did I ruin someone’s day? What was that bump in the road? Did I just hit a dog? Am I a horrible person? Surely, I am.

There are no dogs. But the spiral goes, getting more and more irrational as it circles the drain. The pharmacist gets me.

Now the day swims through her head
She replays every prescription that she filled
While her son’s asleep in bed
She’ll convince herself that she got someone killed

31: Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

Imaginal Disk is on just about every year-end list for a reason. It’s inventive, boundary-pushing pop music with a clever concept. That kind of music should always be celebrated.

But vocalist Mica Tenenbaum makes just about every song sound singular. “Image” understandably seems to be the track that’s getting the most love. But I’ll die on a hill for “That’s My Floor,” where the warping electronic accents and sick drums build the baseboards for the glossy la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la hook. “Vampire in The Corner” is another personal favorite, if only because I can’t get that “bees do their buzz” line out of my head.

30: Angry Blackmen - The Legend of ABM

If you are just completely and utterly tired of this shit, this album from industrial rap duo Angry Blackmen — a.k.a. Brian Warren and Quentin Branch — is for you.

Come for the haymakers thrown at racism and consumerism. Stay for the film and pop culture references. There’s a song called “Stanley Kubrick.” Pitchfork catches a stray. At one point, they rhyme Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Charlie Kaufman. “Dumbledore ya dome, shooting spells at ya body, bitch,” goes one line. Crash Bandicoot gets name-dropped in a song about contemplating suicide.

“I’m on I-88 cruising listening to Prodigy,” goes Warren on “FNA.” “My tank stay on E from this fucked up economy.” Then later on the track, Branch drops to a whisper, a reprieve from a beat that seems to be slamming a percussive wrench into your forehead. This duality makes Angry Blackmen one of rap’s best duos. And it makes The Legend of ABM one of 2024’s best albums, too.

29: Jake Xerxes Fussell - When I’m Called

We’re jumping into the twangiest section of this list with North Carolina songwriter Jake Xerxes Fussell. Every song on When I’m Called works as a lullaby, warm in a Nashville Skyline kind of way. Gentle strums and muted horns color the periphery. It sounds something like a winter day where the sun is still hanging overhead.

On “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going,” a wanderer’s hymn, Fussell stretches just five phrases into what feels like five years of being nomadic. “Gone To Hilo,” which features vocalist Robin Holcomb, feels like a thematic sequel. It’s yet another song about the call of leaving and the burden of who gets left behind. Much of the album is about the elusive feeling of place. There are nods to many locations — Glasgow, Salt Lake City, Alabama, Rio, Georgia. When I’m Called is an album of traveling songs for someone weary from the ride, laying down in a hotel bed, ready to hit the road again in the morning.

28: Adeem the Artist - Anniversary

It’s been a year since I saw country’s most charismatic crooner Adeem the Artist perform at Davenport’s Raccoon Motel. I thought I couldn’t love their music any more than I did then. But this year’s Anniversary somehow intensified my fandom. It’s got everything I’ve come to expect from an Adeem LP.

“Rotations” looks at death and finality with kind eyes. “Nightmare” digs at the bigotry baked into religion, managing to do it with both humor and empathy.

“I promise not to tread on you, if you don’t tread on me,” they sing. It’s one of those lines you wish you could just shout from a rooftop overlooking the culture war.

“Wounded Astronaut” is my go-to scrupulosity song this year. It weighs hindsight guilt about relationships gone by, a feeling that eats at me all the time.

I was insensitive and hyper sensitive
A duality not lost on me
I thought that love was just these feelings
With no regard for what a lover needs

Then, later, a conclusion:

Were that I could go back
Into the past with a letter
Perhaps I could do better in that timeline

27: Rosali - Bite Down

Speaking of artists I saw shred the Raccoon Motel stage, Rosali’s Bite Down was one of this year’s first albums to truly knock me off my feet. The guitar tones here from top to bottom are one-of-a-kind, especially on the front end of “Hills on Fire” and the back end of “Slow Pain.” The lyrical ambiguity works in this album’s favor, too. It shapes meaning with each listen. But it’s always tender.

26: Johnny Blue Skies - Passage du Desir

Each track on Passage du Desir, Sturgill Simpson’s debut under the moniker Johnny Blue Skies, contains about an album’s worth of thematic material.

I would be willing to spend at least a dozen songs exploring the story behind “Jupiter’s Faerie,” an outlaw country ballad with astrological curiosity. In it, our friend Mr. Blue Skies — not to be confused with the ELO song, please — remembers an old partner from years ago. He ponders what they might be up to nowadays, only to learn they are gone now. The survivor’s guilt is crushing.

I'm sorry I wasn't there, I wish I'd known
I would've tried to give you love it'd been so long since I'd shown
But then had I, maybe you'd be here today
Suffering and crushing from sadness and its weight

The Moondance-esque, crushingly self-immolating outro “One For The Road” is a Song Of The Year candidate in my eyes. It would be, even if it was only five minutes long and cut off after Simpson uttered the last lyric. But it’s not. It gets even better. It turns out that one he’s giving us for the road is the year’s best guitar solo, a nearly four-minute singer that moved me as much as any riff this side of MJ Lenderman’s “Heartbreak Blues.”

HALFTIME BREAK: Honorable Mentions

I’m indecisive, so here are a few more albums that I didn’t get a chance to write about:

• Horse Jumper of Love - Disaster Trick

• Carpool - My Life in Subtitles

• Wild Pink - Dulling The Horns

• Bedbug - pack your bags the sun is growing

• Carly Cosgrove - The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty

• Little Kid - A Million Easy Payments

• sundots - Honeyspot

• Joe Stamm - Memoirs

• Barely Civil - I’d Say I’m Not Fine

• Runnner - starsdust

• JPEGMAFIA - I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU

• Soft Idiot - All the Same Dark

• Conor Lynch - Slow Country

• acloudyskye - There Must Be Something Here

Now, onto the top 25…

25: oso oso - life till bones

There might not be a band in the world more consistent than oso oso. Every few years, the Long Island emo rockers drop a new one-of-a-kind LP, and it feels as natural as the changing of the seasons. The season that comes to mind is almost always summer, because there’s just something about singer Jade Lilitri’s voice, coupled with those coastal strums, that makes a heart warmer.

“all of my love,” with its infectious hook, handclaps and lead guitar melody, is as good of a single as the band has ever put out. So is “that’s what time does,” one of this year’s great break-up songs. But even though this record sounds beachy, the “island ain't much like it used to be,” as Lilitri puts it on “skippy.”

There’s a ticking clock to every song. An impending doom and anxiety about time. A feeling innate to anyone who has ever sat and thought too long about midnight.

“Life is a gun, now I know what you mean,” Lilitri goes on “seesaw,” an acoustic track and my personal favorite. “If we can't get off the ride, are we really free?”

24: Cottonwood Firing Squad - growing old & dying in your sleep

It’s remarkable how effortless Cottonwood Firing Squad makes it look. The California-based bedroom folk songwriter is prolific, yet always profound. They’ve released five full-length albums in the last three years and several EPs, too.

Every CFS release has been exactly what I needed, with fuzzy atmospherics that sound like the warm glow of a street lamp and guitar licks that are as grand as they are subtle. But growing old & dying in your sleep might just be my favorite. It’s certainly the most melancholy. It’s the kind of album that hits like a pill and a pillow at 3 a.m. It’s headphone music for when you’re taking a walk and putting off sleeping because sleeping means maybe not waking up.

“I don't do much these days, I just think a lot,” goes the title track.

The album-opening “living in the aftermath of tragedy” and the delicate “soft & pretty” are my two personal favorites. The spritely “a lifetime of nothing” begs for the sun to come up. And thankfully, it will. It always does.

Don't want to talk about the good old days
And how the wall clock on the floor's my only down time now

23: Tapir! - The Pilgrim, Their God, And The King of My Decrepit Mountain

I vividly remember jotting one note down when I first heard this three-part Tapir! record: “Harry Nilsson with a Bandcamp?”

That’s a sort of reductive explanation, but it gets The Point across.

Seriously, this visionary alt-folk masterpiece has all the fantastical storytelling of Nilsson’s The Point with all the indie leanings of a lo-fi folk singer. It’s somewhere between Big Thief and Black Country, New Road, with mythical folktales and scenic imagery deft enough to take you to another land without even closing your eyes. It’s especially imaginative on the grandiose “Gymnopedie” and “Mountain Song,” two of my favorite songs this year.

22: 1999 WRITE THE FUTURE - hella (˃̣̣̥╭╮˂̣̣̥) ✧ ♡ ‧º·˚

The first half of this year was full of compilation rap records. Some weren’t great — Lyrical Lemonade — and some had highs and lows — Pigeons & Planes — but only one was perfect. That’s hella (˃̣̣̥╭╮˂̣̣̥) ✧ ♡ ‧º·˚., the genre-bending indie-hop mixtape from 1999 WRITE THE FUTURE.

This ensemble was put together by 88rising, a label that boasts artists like Joji and Rich Brian. Those two appear on here, and so do big-name guests like Ghostface Killah, Smino, Rick Ross, Souls of Mischief, Westside Gunn and Offset. The list of genres is as extensive as the list of contributors.

The California-hot second track “SPIKY BOiz” has a Smino verse that sounds a little Anderson .Paak-ish. Joey Alexander takes one of the several jazz fusion interludes. On the back half, Eyedress shreds a shoegaze-skater-stoner anthem called “rUN tHE FaDE,” with a whole verse about Garfield and a music video that features Tim Robinson. Rook Monroe writes not one, but two songs about the PlayStation 2, with one of them sounding like it could be on Channel Orange. YOON MIRAE gives a hard-as-hell, Korean-English bilingual, Sade-referencing verse on “VOoDOo BOogie.”

There’s an emoticon and a song for everyone on hella (˃̣̣̥╭╮˂̣̣̥) ✧ ♡ ‧º·˚.

21: Stay Inside - Ferried Away

On my last day in the Quad-Cities, I stopped by the apartment of a fellow reporter who has become a great friend and mentor of mine. He told me to stay in touch. I said I would. I asked that he do the same. Then, more seriously, more sternly, he reiterated it — “I mean it.”

Last week, I visited some old friends from high school for the first time in a while. We sat on a trampoline, the same one where as teenagers we once risked concussions trying to test the buoyancy of an exercise ball. These friends used to know everything about me. I knew everything about them. When we sat down to catch up last week, I had to ask almost all of them what they’re up to nowadays.

Oh. I get it. I mean it.

This is my long-winded way of saying that I’ve been thinking a lot about people this year. How easy it is to lose them, how hard it is to get them back, how little I’ve done to stop that tailspin. Ferried Away, the latest album from New York punk rockers Stay Inside, puts that feeling into words. It paints people as scars, painful reminders of where we’ve been — and who we’ve been — before.

“An Invitation” (like “Jupiter’s Faerie” from Johnny Blue Skies a few blurbs above) reckons with losing someone you’ve already lost:

Are we ever gonna speak again?
I used to think I wouldn’t have to ask
But now I'll meet you at a casket
Hope the flowers give us something to say
While we’re reckoning how this one got away

“A Town To Give Up In” takes on nostalgia:

There’s a slope to my shoulders now
I swear we only float in the shallow end

“A Backyard” puts its simplest:

Your daughter, your neighbors
I wish they knew my name

I’ve spent so much of 2024 missing people that I’m probably missing people.

Ferried Away is the soundtrack to that paradox. It just feels better.

20: Pedro the Lion - Santa Cruz

It shouldn’t shock anyone that a David Bazan record has some of my favorite songwriting of 2024. But it certainly shocked me the specificity with which the virtuoso behind Pedro the Lion pierced me with Santa Cruz.

“So many places where you don’t belong,” goes album closer “Only Yesterday,” a song about the malice and miracle of memory. “Can’t fight this feeling like you’re almost home.

“It won’t be long.”

The album is the threequel of place-named, autobiographical records Bazan’s put out under the Pedro the Lion project the last few years. It follows the incredible Phoenix and Havasu. It’s a high bar, but Santa Cruz might be my favorite of the three.

Bazan’s storytelling is rich as ever, but the range of instrumental color sets this one apart. The selfless “It’ll All Work Out” and the bouncy “Spend Time” are defined by charged synth tones. “Modesto” has quiet verses and cacophonous hooks, with the guitars buzzing like a Dinosaur Jr. track. Lyrically, that one is about those God-like music moments. Bazan recalls getting a mixtape from a co-worker at a guitar store.

What I heard in my walkman headphones
Pacing by the speakers and PAs
Was a beautiful hilarious tragic mess
That sent tears streaming down my face

I hope he knows his music has that same effect.

19: Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood

Waxahatchee — easily one of favorite live performers I’ve seen this year — manages to bring something new with every album. Her lo-fi 2012 American Weekend remains an all-timer in my books, and the 2020 country opus Saint Cloud is, too.

Tigers Blood picks up where the latter left off and goes even further. Relationship worries decorate the edges of This Year’s Best Country Song “Right Back To It,” which features harmonies from the great MJ Lenderman. Toxicity dominates the restrained “365,” which ends with the album’s best guitar lick.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing just how many of my favorite songs this year are about the passing of time and the departure that comes with change. I’m starting to feel like a broken record and a cliche. My apologies. But, I have to admit, this catchy “3 Sisters” chorus is my favorite moment on the album:

It plays on my mind
How the time passing
Covers you like a friend

18: Hurray for The Riff Raff - The Past Is Still Alive

Now, we move from one Americana maestro with a punk rock spirit to another.

I heard The Past Is Still Alive, from Hurray for The Riff Raff, for the first time on a drive through rural Wisconsin. Middle America rolled by my window. I saw beautiful dairy farm fields and ads for cheap gasoline and patriotic bumper stickers and the sweet smile of my love in the passenger seat. This record felt fitting over all of it.

On The Past, songwriter Alynda Segarra puts bits and pieces of their life story into every song. These anecdotes are painted into beiges and blues by lap steel, acoustic guitars and harmonies from S.G. Goodman and Conor Oberst. Every story is honest and brazen. Segarra is throwing shit. They’re hiding from the cops in Nebraska. They’re sleeping on a tour bus.

But again: it’s the albums and songs about time that hit me hardest this year. Here goes “Hourglass,” my favorite of the bunch:

Then the moment's over
And suddenly a boulder is just sand
In an hourglass

17: The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick - The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick

Every song on The Iliad and The Odyssey and The Goalie’s Anxiety at The Penalty Kick feels as expansive as the title itself. There are whole galaxies in the crevices of a couch, or the crannies of a calendar.

While this record loves to reference the clock — there are nods to months, weeks, days, and the hyper-specific birthday on “April 25” — there’s a real timelessness to The Iliad. The name is a nod to Homer’s literary epic. The cover art is inspired by a J.M.W. Turner oil painting from 1829. The outro, “Claire de Lune,” is a cover of a classical Debussy piece.

There’s also a real tranquility to it. The whispers and simple acoustics of “Midwestern Home” are cozy. The sweet string accompaniment on the build of “System of One” sounds straight from a serene seaside. I have a hunch that this is one of those albums that’ll change shape for the better with each listen in years to come.

16: Macseal - Permanent Repeat

Earlier this year, New York emo band Macseal gave BrooklynVegan a list of 10 things that influenced their summery 2024 LP Permanent Repeat. The list explains a lot about why I love this record. On there: Slow Pulp, Goo Goo Dolls, Alvvays, early 2000’s music nostalgia via tracks by Rob Thomas and Jimmy Eat World and — most crucially, for me — the bass line on the bridge of The Fray’s certified banger “Over My Head (Cable Car).”

Anyone who has ever been with me to a karaoke bar knows that “Over My Head” is my go-to song. But I’ve also been known to sing “Iris,” “3AM” or “The Middle.” And if they were on the playlist, I’d be picking songs from Permanent Repeat, too.

The title track, perhaps, where the magnetic “It felt just like my favorite song on permanent repeat” chorus becomes sort of meta every time I put the song on repeat. Or the sandcastled “Beach Vacation,” which sounds as spritely as you’d think despite the fact it concedes a trip to the beach cannot, in fact, fix you.

If you're not happy with nothing
Surely won't be happy with a beach vacation
Especially on your own

The mostly acoustic “A + B” and “Dinner for Two” give the tracklist some counter-weight, and make the 32-minute runtime feel like half that. The guitar breakdown on single “Golden Harbor” is somewhat reminiscent of the Oso Oso masterpiece “gb/ol h/nf.” In fact, there’s a homely, wait-a-minute-I’ve-heard-this-before quality to the entire album. Maybe I’ve sung it before, too.

15: Fend - Disc

I told you there’d be more Minnesota on this list and I wasn’t lying. Minneapolis indie rock act Fend has my favorite record from the state in 2024.

Their 13-song Disc finds meaning in small things: the extra hour of Daylight Savings Time sleep (“1:59 AM”), being high at a show (“Wet Garden”), buying beer at the grocery store (“Angel One Million”).

“Ghost Ship” has my favorite verse on the album:

Between the hours of working and not
I find myself frozen
For sure I'm sure this tendency will pass
This habit of not telling time
Valentines, another February passing by me
Passing me by

Frontperson Josie Villano has such an emotive voice that any single word they utter could sound like a full sentence — especially the “by” at the tail end of that lyric above. Backing vocalist Kate Malanaphy, also of Keep for Cheap, adds a real density with their harmonies, too.

The guitar riffs are varyingly shortcake sweet and sledgehammer sturdy. Yet somehow, the band somehow sounds even better on-stage. Their album release show at 7th St. Entry was my first local gig after moving to Minneapolis. I could see them headlining next door at First Avenue eventually. Jump on the bandwagon now.

14: Riley! - Keep Your Cool

If we’re measuring purely on the quantity of catchy emo singalongs — an IMPORTANT metric in my eyes — Keep Your Cool could be Album of The Year. This absolute heater from Texas emo band Riley! earns the group’s stylistic exclamation point and maybe a few more.

Opening track “777” throws you to the wolves with a “hell yeah” worthy guitar riff and a shoutable chorus: “When I think of YOUUUUUUUUUU.”

It only gets better as the album progresses, as the outraged “Keep Your Cool, Man” and “Kill Yr Boss” let out similar levels of catharsis. The kickdrum-driven “Ego Peek Mid” was one of my favorite songs I’ve seen live all year, and the dynamic closing ballad “Talk It Out” saps up all the remaining tears.

13: Ok Cowgirl - Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut

There’s a refreshing bluntness to New York indie band Ok Cowgirl’s LP Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut. Take “Larry David,” for example. It’s this year’s catchiest indie-rock track, and it gets right to the point.

“Everything is fucked!” exclaims lead singer Leah Lavigne, as guitars explode behind her, as if they’re packed into a suitcase and about to break the zipper. Eventually, they do, ripping the teeth apart and giving way to more exclamations:

“I am not a fad!”

“New York doesn’t care!”

“I am zoning out!”

The album isn’t always combusting, though. In fact, it’s the emotional range that makes it one of this year’s best. Just two songs before the Curb-stomping “Larry David,” there’s the delicate, slow-burning rock ballad “Our Love,” where Lavigne mourns a relationship gone by. She drops the album title in the first verse.

Maybe it was need
More than even wanting me
Too much responsibility
Too much taken, too much owed
For my 20-something bones

Lavigne eventually comes to the most hopeful of conclusions, a breath of fresh air for anyone who has ever missed anyone:

Screw the tyranny of time
We shared something so divine
Days and years could never really measure
Our love

This epiphany is backed instrumentally by a burst of cymbals and killer guitar work. It’s immediately followed on the album by the lovely, selfless “Mars Cheese Castle.” Later standouts include “Abbey” and the existential outro “Nighttime Thinking.”

Ok Cowgirl gets the award for This Year’s Best Newcomer To My Ears.

12: Bloomsday - Heart of The Artichoke

Bloomsday songwriter Iris James Garrison writes songs with oracle-like omnipresence. They point out the simplest of truths with the grandest of orchestrations. They turn lush, vintage folk songs into spacious psalms, like they’re expanding the eye of a needle to fit the eye of a storm.

“Dollar Slice” especially feels like a gift from the heavens. Garrison recalls a tender moment with a loved one, where they explain a dream that cuts through the noise of the city bus, the internet feedback loops and the pressure to do something, with a sticky hook that might as well be scripture:

You said, "You won't believe this,
I saw God buying a dollar slice"
He said, 'Won't you try to let go and live your life
Instead of wasting it?'"

More upbeat tracks like “Object Permanence” and the horn-incorporating “Bumper Sticker” give The Heart of The Artichoke equilibrium. “Carefully” is another favorite of mine, where Garrison’s words of advice read like those of a trusted parent or mentor. The guitar strokes on this track are soft as fur, and so are Garrison’s vocals. They offer the sweetest of reminders, gently nudging you toward the kind of life you want to live.

Oh, see how you've grown
In your window
On your bedside
There is a home

11: Foxing - Foxing

I speak in hyperbole often. But I really mean this when I say it: The one-two punch that opens Foxing’s fifth album might just be the greatest two-song opening I’ve ever heard. Forward my best regards to Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

Track one: “Secret History,” a sonic bisection between a weepy, glitchy opening verse by vocalist Conor Murphy and a supernova second half.

“They took all your dreams, didn’t they?” Murphy consoles early on, mourning an idea dried in the sun. His voice gets worn and wispy, sort of like a peak Matt Bellamy (of Muse) chorus. You can hear years and years and years of angst and artistry underneath.

“Make your mother proud, you’ve got to,” Murphy reminds himself.

Finally, the anger boils to the surface. Every instrument detonates.

“Sold! The dream! For arms! And legs! To work! To eat! To sleep! Repeat!”

Track two: “Hell 99,” a sort of origin story that references Limp Bizkit’s New Year’s Eve performance from 1998 and brings the nu-metal instrumentation to match. It’s explosive, unforgettable, and ends with a rock and roll symphony.

“Hell 99” lays the groundwork for Foxing, an album-length autobiography with descriptors like: self-titled, self-produced, self-mixed, self-released.

“Greyhound” is an 8-minute, climactic heater where Murphy proclaims that he feels like a blue whale in the Table Rock Lake (in the band’s home state of Missouri), drowning in the last ten years. He comes up for air for a bit only to land supine on a bench on “Kentucky McDonald’s,” crushed by the weighty reminders of someone, triggered by every car passing through the fast food drive-thru. The penultimate “Hall of Frozen Heads” is driven by a lead piano and Murphy’s somber vocals. A sister set of lines on the final refrain tells this record’s dichotomy perfectly:

What does it matter?
What doesn’t matter?

10: MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

Surprise, surprise. MJ Lenderman has done it again. You could argue the Asheville singer-songwriter-guitarist has the Album Of The Year for the last three years — Boat Songs, And The Wind (Live and Loose!), Manning Fireworks — and I really wouldn’t fight you on it. With fewer sports metaphors but just as much gravelly perceptiveness, this newest LP from Lenderman rivals the previous two. It’s endlessly quotable and always groovy. Lenderman’s guitar licks meander like rivers eroding paths on their way through Appalachia.

The plucky B-side “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In” is the type of song you’d throw on at the lake, gazing at a blue sky and thinking, thinking, thinking. The slacker-folk breakup anthem “She’s Leaving You” piles on. It’s one of this year’s best songs, period, and one of the best in Lenderman’s already stacked discography, too.

“It falls apart, we’ve all got work to do,” Lenderman chants on a chorus that sticks in my head a few months a week.

Manning Fireworks is full of Lenderman-isms, little bursts of American imagery that evoke a certain sort of “I’m doing the best that I can” with impressive simplicity. Over the course of the album, MJ references, with devastating wit: a half-mast McDonald’s flag, John Travolta’s bald head, a bowl of Lucky Charms, Lightning McQueen, a Kahlua shooter and a DUI scooter.

“Wristwatch” is one of the album’s best songs. It gave us the now-iconic “Himbodome” lyric but it also gave us the titular “wristwatch that tells me I’m all alone,” perhaps the ultimate MJ symbol. You can have everything and feel like you have nothing, it says. You can also have nothing and feel like a king.

9: Beyoncé - COWBOY CARTER

I recently saw Interstellar — one of my favorite movies of all-time — in IMAX for the first time. It blew me away, like it always does. But this time, it dawned upon me how eloquently it is able to do Everything. It’s a movie about ambition, parenthood, love, America, technology, climate and cool space shit, juggling them all without dropping anything. It changes meaning depending on your mindset going into it.

That’s how I feel about COWBOY CARTER. It’s a record that does Everything, without losing anything, both instrumentally and thematically. Across 27 songs, one of the world’s greatest pop stars manages to touch on motherhood, religion, racism, empowerment and more, all through the lens of Black music history. It drifts at times between orchestral electronica (“AMERICAN REQUIIEM”), true country (“16 CARRIAGES”), folk balladry (“PROTECTOR”) and hip-hop (“SPAGHETTII”). “YA YA” does it all at once, energetically interpolating nods to the Beach Boys and Nancy Sinatra with a rodeo-ready delivery.

It’s sort of a middle finger to the country radio homogenization of this century and sort of a “look at me” from one of the world’s richest musicians. At times, it feels like Bey — the most-nominated, most-winning Grammy artist in history — is looking the listener in the eyes and saying, “Run me my overdue Album Of The Year now, thanks.” But despite all that, COWBOY CARTER never really feels self-serving.

The outrageously eclectic list of features all deliver, too. This is the most I’ve enjoyed a Miley Cyrus track in a long time. Before you could hear him pouring up a double shot of whiskey in every bar, stadium and frat garage in America, Shaboozey was crushing features on both “SWEET HONEY BUCKIIN’” and “SPAGHETII.” Jean Dawson adds production on the opener, which is thematically revisited on the closing “AMEN.” Post Malone sounds great as ever on “LEVII’S JEANS.”

In cinema and in music, I admire when somebody can do Everything. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when it’s Beyoncé that pulls it off.

8: Kendrick Lamar - GNX

The greatest rapper of all-time capped off 2024 — a year he’s basically slapped a trademark on — with GNX, one more piece of Kendrick Lamar perfection. The 12-song tracklist doesn’t really miss.

“squabble up” is a tour de force that I can’t wait to see at the Super Bowl. “luther” brings together the sweet vocals of both Vandross and SZA. “tv off” feels like an equally killer B-side to the song of the year, “Not Like Us.” “wacced out murals” is Kendrick’s best opener since “Wesley’s Theory.”

It’s less thematically focused than prior Kendrick works, but just as dense. Ever since he eviscerated Drake and danced on his grave, rap’s most precise songwriter has put down the sniper. He’s holding a gatling gun, now. Get out of his way.

MUSTAAAAARRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

7: Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future

songs is one of my favorite records of the last decade, so I’ve been waiting four years for this Adrianne Lenker solo release. I knew it would devastate me. It happened faster than I expected, though. Here goes the first verse of “Real House,” a whispery piano ballad about constantly leaving and wanting to stay:

Do you remember running?
The purity of the air around
Braiding willow branches into a crown
That love is all I want

Later in the song, there are memories of seeing your parents cry, seeing your dog die, feeling like magic might just be real as you settle into a new home. There’s one anecdote that sticks with me in particular, eerily reminiscent of the apocalyptic nightmares of my youth:

When I was seven
I saw the first film that made me scared
And I thought of this whole world ending
I thought of dying unprepared

Again — this is just the first song. Bright Future manages to continue to get better from here. “Real House” is followed by the ethereal “Sadness as A Gift,” with its weeping string accompaniment and sweet embrace of the unknown.

“You could write me someday, and I think you will,” goes the chorus. “We could see the sadness as a gift and still feel too heavy to hold.”

Later standouts include the trancelike “Ruined” and the extrapolated wordplay exercise “Evol.” Lenker’s own version of “Vampire Empire” is on here, and I like it more than the Big Thief cut. “Free Treasure” is perhaps this year’s sweetest love song. Lenker paints a picture of a partner making dinner late at night. It smells so sweet, just because they’re making it. Even in those delicate moments, there are the creeping fears. The anxiety of peace is the little devil on your shoulder telling you that you shouldn’t have it this good. Or, as Lenker puts it:

There's a guy on the nape of my neck
And he hangs out there all day
He quantifies my every thought
And tells me not to play

6: A Place For Owls - how we dig in the earth

Denver rock band A Place For Owls opens how we dig in the earth with a confession.

Go on and say it
Go on and say it all
You’re not okay
You’re not okay at all

This is a band who describes themselves as “goofball prophets” in the album bio. This is a band whose discography, internet presence and real-life personality could most briefly be summed up as “bear hug from a friend you haven’t seen in 10 years.”

But yet, on their new LP, this is a band with their back against the coldest and most callous of walls. “go on” gives way to the thunderous, heart-splintering “hourglass,” a visceral song about loss. It holds nothing back. You can hear vocalist Ben Sooy’s throat shattering as he describes processing grief in a Starbucks across the street from a hospital. He settles on patience, deferring dreams to days ahead.

Still I will wait with you
For a promise we both can see
And I will build with you
A house where our kids can sleep
And a garden where we can breathe

Every song after that feels like a plea for photosynthesis. In one way or another, it works. The garden gets greener.

That’s thanks, in part, to the precise, pulsating instrumentation of Owls members Daniel Perez, Nick Webber, Ryan Day and Jesse Cowan, most of whom get writing credits at some point on the album. It’s a team effort. On “tattoo of a candle,” Perez is even mentioned by name. The affirming “find your friends and hold them close” has a song title apt to be the band’s motto. “Hope is a weapon,” a line from “tattoo of a candle,” would work, too.

Sooy’s songwriting savvy is most apparent in the middle section of the record. He processes the complex emotions of losing a step-father in “desmond hume,” an acoustic, teary-eyed smoke break of a track named after a Lost character. The sepia “broken open seed,” the album’s dynamic lead single, evokes echoes of A Black Mile-era Manchester Orchestra. The band duets with Elliott Green — who released my favorite album of 2023 — on the horn-utilizing “haunted,” a harrowing highlight. By the time you get to the closer “help me let the right ones in,” you can smell the soil under APFO’s nails.

This is a soul-searing album about growth and watering the plants. Even the plants that are covered in snow and shedding their leaves. Especially those ones. They need you right now. You need them, too.

5: Joey Valence & Brae - NO HANDS

This has been one of the toughest albums on the list to place. But I’m putting it in the Top 5. Because every week, when I open my phone to decide what to listen to, I’m drawn like a magnet to this primary color-laden cover. The one that looks like it was plucked straight off a 2008 YouTube thumbnail. More often than not, if you see me bobbing my head, I’m listening to NO HANDS.

The sophomore record from rap duo Joey Valence & Brae is an absolute fucking blast that I can’t get enough of. Equal parts referential and unrivaled, NO HANDS has the brashness of an early Beastie Boys record, the production detail of an El-P Run The Jewels beat and the reckless infectiousness of a Lil Jon hit.

The humor on this record is ridiculous. On the bouncy, catchy “WHERE U FROM,” Valence asserts that he’s a Civic, but “bitch, you a Prius.” He feels “like Michael Cera in his swag era.” On the club-ready “WHAT U NEED,” Valence’s got "the burger with the green (lechuga).” On the title track, record scratches and a brassy, jazzy breakbeat are the background for bars like this:

When I was ten, I was sippin' Shirley Temples
Present day, I'm still sippin' Shirley Temples

Danny Brown gets in on the action with “PACKAPUNCH,” asserting that he’s got “your face fucked up like a 2K scan,” perhaps the funniest bar of 2024.

“OK” and “THE BADDEST” are the biggest hits of all, placed back-to-back at the center of the brisk 31-minute runtime. The bass-knocking latter is going to be on my pregame playlist for the rest of eternity.

I got 7-Up in my cup
I got bubbles up in my tub
I'm the baddest bitch in this club

4: Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties - In Lieu of Flowers

Every year, there’s a part of me convinced that the Vikings are going to win the Super Bowl. No matter the data. No matter the quarterback. No matter the Vegas win-loss total. Even when it’s unreasonable, impossible and unrealistic, I sit down for every single game thinking and fantasizing about a world where things go right.

Maybe this year I’m right.

This irrational hope unique to sports fandom is the kind of feeling being chased in Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties’ latest release, In Lieu of Flowers. It even gets two explicit nods. First, on the firecracker second song “Roman Candles”:

Each spring the Mets will win the Pennant
And your grass is gonna grow
Ain't that the fucked up thing about hope?

Then later, on “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” one of the most optimism-invigorating songs of 2024:

In a snow storm, I watched the Bills lose
In the playoffs, from the common room
On the first night I checked in
Another replay of a lost youth
Thought it was our year, I guess I always do

In Lieu of Flowers is the closing act in a trilogy of “AW20” albums — the semi-fictional, emo-twang side project for The Wonder Years frontman Dan Campbell. This one wraps a bow on West’s story. We find him fighting healthcare costs during the pandemic, feeling stuck in his hometown and reminiscing on the grimy green rooms of a rock tour. Every hook is catchy, with Campbell’s iconic voice driving the lyrics home. Once in a while, a new one-liner will come to my memory, like a dream from adolescence. These three, especially:

• “No one told the birds the world is ending,”

• “Someone stole a catalytic converter from the front yard,”

• “I take a train to the city, it feels like my life's playing back in reverse.”

The album is startlingly well-paced. Opener “Smoking Rooms” is first acoustic and later cataclysmic, getting on base like any good lead-off hitter. The Runnner-produced, lap steel-laden “Whiplash,” offers an acoustic elegy for the A-side, a needed breath before the emotional triumphs of the second act. That one’s got horns. Others have stunning saxophone melodies, like “Runnin’ Out of Excuses,” which has my money for the year’s best bridge.

Here it is in full:

So when I walk past the window, I tell the shadow on the wall,
”What a cosmic fucking miracle it is to exist at all?”
But I never asked to come, so I'm leaving when I want
I still got shit to do, so I'm staying 'til it's done

From start to finish, In Lieu of Flowers is a shedding of skin and a shredding of cynicism. It’s the best Aaron West album yet.

Take us home, Sam Darnold. It’s our year.

3: Good Looks - Lived Here For A While

Great songs sing about change and the best songs change you. Lived Here For A While, the sophomore LP from Austin heartland rockers Good Looks, does both.

A little bit Springsteen, a little bit The War On Drugs, every song on this record shreds like rubber on asphalt. The staircase guitar riff on “Desert” and gritty lead melody on “Broken Body” offer balance to lead vocalist Tyler Jordan’s gentle timbre.

Each song is a freeway. It’s going somewhere, but undoubtedly leaving a lot behind, too. Jordan has a knack for finding meaning and generosity in the exhaust. There’s a sweetness to the way Good Looks simmers in its see-you-laters.

“If it’s gone, say goodbye,” goes the hook on “If It’s Gone,” an earwormy opener that soundtracked my drive out of the Quad-Cities last month. “Say goodbye, it’s nice to meet you, yes I loved you for a while.”

Change takes various shapes on Lived Here For A While. There are the shifting neighborhoods of “White Out,” a song about gentrification on the album’s back half. There are far-gone relationships like those on “Vaughn,” which Jordan mourns with a grin, too.

In a year when everything was going wrong,
I’m so glad that I met you, Vaughn

Good Looks wrestles with the double-edged sword of religion on “Day of Judgment,” a song that ends with an amen and starts with a viscerally pictorial verse about an awkward, couch-side Spam and beans dinner where someone calls Vanna White a whore. Jordan gets jabs in, but always leaves room for the benefit of the doubt.

One change seems to underpin the entire album, though, and that is grief, a feeling that boils up to the conclusive “Why Don’t You Believe Me?” The six-minute outro goes down as comfortably one of this year’s best closers. In it, Jordan apologizes for not calling his mother on her birthday, fading off the B-side with the stumbling repetition of the same line: I wanted to.

Even on the most tragic of tracks, he concedes sympathy. It’s something we should all take notes on.

Love you, I still love you
Even when you fail me
You always fail me, it’s nothing new

2: Charli xcx - BRAT

There’s a part of me that has wanted and tried to be counter-cultural about BRAT. It would be neat to be one of those hot take factories on Twitter spouting off about how it’s actually not that good or irresponsibly glorifies drugs or completely ruined by the Kamala tweet or whatever the hell we’re saying, now.

But I can’t do it. This album fucking rips.

I’ve been a mild Charli fan for a little while, enjoying her beat-shattering singles like “Vroom Vroom” and early bangers like “Break The Rules.” But there’s always been something that hasn’t quite clicked for me. BRAT does the trick.

For one, it offers at least a half dozen of this year’s best pop songs. Maybe even more, if you count her follow-up Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, a remix record that’s actually transformative and clever and not just a cash-grabby excuse for further merchandising. Ahem.

The squeaky, thumping “Club Classics” has endless replay value. The bubblegum, bass-knocking lead single “360” sets up its just-as-good sister tracks “Rewind” and “365.” The destined-to-be-a-2000s-chart-topper “Talk Talk” gets even better with Troye Sivan on the remix. The fuzzy, synth-blasting ode to adult high school bullies “Mean Girls” hides a killer piano lick on the breakdown.

“Von dutch” is my personal favorite, because “Cult classic but I still pop” is a sort of a mission statement for the Charli xcx listening experience, and so is the hair-tossing delivery of opening line “It’s okay to just admit that you’re jealous of me.”

What separates BRAT from previous Charli xcx releases, though — aside from the sheer quantity of chart-ready hooks — is the ease with which she self-analyzes. She’s not just an It Girl. She’s a person grappling with what it means to be famous and what it means to be a woman in the music industry.

“Girl, so confusing” gets to the heart of that, and even offers some resolve on the chills-worthy Lorde remix released later. “So I” processes the grief of losing friend, collaborator and hyperpop pioneer SOPHIE. Piano-driven, interlude-ish “I might say something stupid” is one of many that breaks down Charli’s steel surface.

Either way, it’s damn near impossible for an album to achieve this type of commercial and critical consensus nowadays. But BRAT is deserving of it. So instead of nitpicking that, why not be bumpin’ that?

1: Friko - Where we’ve been, Where we go from here

Sometimes you can hear an album without hearing it. Does that make sense?

For example, based on the title alone, I knew this Friko record would be an instant classic in my mental music library. After all, that simple pair of phrases sort of sums up how 2024 has felt for me. And 2023. And 2022. And the last 23 years of my life.

Equal parts nostalgia and meticulous planning for an uncertain future.

But sometimes a name is just a name, right? I knew, logically, it was possible the album wouldn’t be as good as the title would suggest. But I pressed play on the opening track, “Where we’ve been.”

Now I don't know where we go from here
I spent one year and I gave it up
A sickness that brought you to your parents
A life of only errands will make a fool out of ya

Oh, shit.

The song ends with clamoring drums, gang vocals and emotive power chords. It’s an outro-style opener, the best kind. It immediately confirmed my priors. Where we’ve been, Where we go from here lives up to its name and then some.

Chicago indie band Friko’s latest album is both forward-thinking and allusive. At times, it sounds like the type of LP that would’ve become indie canon in 2005, conjuring memories of Sufjan, Bright Eyes and Funeral by Arcade Fire. But it also pushes the envelope with several bursts of electric guitar-lit dynamite, like on the violent “Crashing Through.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are moments of quiet on this album. After all, there are not one, but two, piano lullabies: “For Ella” and “Until I’m With You Again.” The former is a parenthood ballad that paints a beautifully nostalgic picture of an optimistic young girl splashing in puddles in a yard. The latter is an Elliott Smith-ish goodbye letter, accented by holiday bells and mallets.

But the best moments on Where we’ve been are the volcanic ones.

“Chemical” is a feedback-heavy bottle of TNT with unpredictable drum patterns and a vocal breakdown that trips over itself — “Chemical, chemic-chemical-chem-chemical.” Track two, “Crimson to Chrome,” follows a similar pattern, beating a line to death until the line beats back.

We're either too old, too bold or stupid to move
I guess we're caught on the wrong side of the shoe again

The album’s ending is as good as its beginning. Penultimate “Get Numb To It!” is the de facto outro. It starts with a choppy, acoustic humalong tune, gives way to a climax of frustration, and ends with a voice memo-style callback to “Where we’ve been,” rounded out by studio chatter and laughter.

“Cardinal,” the true finale, is more of an aftershock. It’s an acoustic tribute to the worst mornings after the best nights, the saddest sunsets after the best afternoons. Vocalist Niko Kapetan’s voice is angelic, grasping onto breath before each hook. The second verse has maybe my favorite musical moment of 2024. With wedding-worthy strings behind him and an overwhelmed smile behind his voice, Kapetan sings:

I've had better days, but none quite like this
The battle in my eyes is stuck between my lips

The white winter has kicked in at my new home in Minneapolis, and sometimes I can’t quite tell if it’s morning or evening. The sun sets too early. The sun rises into my east-facing window and forces me awake too early, too. Maybe I’m just a little too late.

Where do we go from here? I’m not sure. But I’m happy you’re here. I couldn’t do it alone.

I was 13 years old then, nestled into the backseat of a Chrysler, or an Acura, or a Ford pickup truck, whatever chrome-colored commuter my Dad was driving that year. He changes cars often, in search of a better bargain. Now retired, my Dad still rocks both Walmart cargo shorts and an economical-yet-fresh sports car. Every car he bought was used enough to be discounted; new enough to still smell staunchly of fresh leather and faded cardboard trees. 

But the only smell stronger than White Ice was that breakfast sandwich. Ryan was a teammate of mine on the middle school basketball team, a B-squad that I wasn’t nearly skilled enough to start on. 

Back then, our practices were scheduled every morning at 6 a.m., and the parents of a few neighborhood kids on the team rotated carpool duties. It’s funny now, looking back, that I’m certain the workload was an even split between parents, but I can’t seem to remember a single ride with a teammate’s parent. I do, however, remember the days my dad drove. And I can still feel the aroma of that damn breakfast sandwich, and the way it collided so viciously and warmly with New Car Smell. 

I was more of an Eggo guy, myself, prone to housing a troubling caloric amount of processed sugar before running sprints on a junior high hardwood a half hour later. Ryan went on to play varsity hoops for two years; I did not. Lesson learned.

An aside: Like many once-familiar faces from Moapa Valley, I haven’t seen Ryan Foster in at least six years. I hope he’s alright.

The sun was never awake when the carpool route started or finished. It was pitch black on those drives. I watched LED headlights scan the desolate beige landscape on the 15-minute drive across the town, worriless and optimistic. Maybe I’d make a good impression that day at practice.

But the sky felt darker when my dad drove. He played the same albums every single morning — Middle Brother’s self-titled 2011 record and Deer Tick’s Born on Flag Day. Much to my chagrin. Sure, there were a few bluesy bangers, but my dad clung to the ballads. “Smith Hill” and “Daydreaming” are the most tangible as I reminisce a decade later. They’re also my favorites. More on that later.

Then, I hated that gutwrenching whine. That soily twang. If I possessed the pure audacity to put on headphones in the passenger seat, I would have muted every single alt-country minute played in the car that basketball season. At 13, I’d have loved to drown the dreary acoustic Deer Tick dread out with pseudo-inspirational mid-2010s pop rap. Give me Macklemore or give me death, I thought. 

Why should I feel this sad at 5 a.m.? Minutes after eating peanut butter waffles (and minutes before a self-inflicted zone defense disasterclass), all I wanted was some dopamine from the DJ in the driver’s seat.

But instead I got John McCauley.  

Both of those records are now in my own vinyl collection. I fucking love Deer Tick. 

It was seven years before I revisited Born On Flag Day. In the winter of 2021, I gave it a shot, hearing those songs as a humbler version of the tween that sat in those leather seats. I listened to verses that once clashed thematically with my jubilant, naive adolescence. But there I was, a 20-year-old music-obsessed melodramatic feeling jagged, and getting jabbed by each of McCauley’s lyrics. 

On “Little White Lies,” he sings of regret, guilt and isolation.

I knew those feelings too well. Let me be clear on two things — 1) Born On Flag Day is not entirely sad. That would be a reductive summary of an outstanding record, but the saddest songs are the ones that resonated. That’s the point. And 2) this was not my first rodeo with sad music. That year, I was already on a bender of Bright Eyes and Bridgers and Bon Iver and Bob Dylan. But it was certainly my first battle with musical revisionism. How could something that sounded so visceral as a kid sound so freeing as an adult? What changed? Am I alright?

Well, the setting certainly helped. I listened, sitting in the grass at Hance Park, a spot in downtown Phoenix, which was a place I was just learning to call home. I journaled that day — here’s an excerpt:

The sun set, and I noticed a large variety of people in the park around me. It’s amazing to just watch the world pass. A couple next to me laughed uncontrollably to a TikTok with Waka Flocka Flame’s “No Hands,” letting it replay over and over again, twisting into their picnic blanket with joy. A small boy walked by and carried such curious innocence in his eyes. A dog barked at a stranger, who wasn’t disturbed but certainly wasn’t amused, either. Life can be brilliant if you stop and listen. I even took my headphones out for once. 

How was it possible that a song as scathing as “Song About A Man” could bring me the same serenity that a Drumma Boy-produced club slapper brought the couple nearby? I was lonely, but I was free. I learned to feel that emotion, free from the distraction of 808s and hi-hats. To paraphrase my favorite sad (ish) song of all-time: I’d never been so alone. But I’d never felt so alive.

Even the most downcast lyrics stand as reminders to me that it can get better. And it did. Because I still remember that day, for reasons far beyond my blissful and wistful alt-country ahas. It was January 10, 2021.

After the conclusion of Born On Flag Day’s closer, “Stung,” there’s a silence. That’s when my life irreversibly changed for the better. Still wandering aimlessly around downtown Phoenix, I ran into my virtual crush from the college radio station. We had never met in person.

“Is that the legendary Mia Andrea?” I called out to her. 

It was. She is. We spent the next six months inseparable. My world felt like indie pop.

I was carless and careless then, walking everywhere in Phoenix for both business and pleasure. But four months later, I got my first vehicle as an adult, a maroon Kia Optima that I once drove intermittently in high school (when lucky) and now got to drive semi-permanently. It was a gift from my dad, a bargain find of his, fresh off the dealership lot as a former test drive vehicle when he bought it years earlier. 

For two years, I drove around Phoenix in that Kia listening to any and everything. In that sweet early-relationship honeymoon period, it was hits from Circa Waves and Two Door Cinema Club. On good days, it heard Cheekface and Chance, “BedRock” and “Bed Head.” That Kia often took Mia and I to record shop at Zia, where — once — we heard Sia playing through the record store speakers. We laughed our asses right into the rock aisle. 

When driving alone, I preferred volume level 35.

Turned it down to 15 if I had company.

Turned it up to 40 if I wanted catharsis.

Only maxed it out at 45 if I needed it. 

And I did. I needed it quite a bit these last few years, and more often than not, like my dad in that Camaro or Chrysler or Cruiser, I turned to the warm embrace of melancholy. Sad guys and gals with an acoustic guitar and an undercurrent of hope. And, for me, the vague smell of bacon, eggs, toast and melted cheese. 

MJ Lenderman and Middle Brother. Wilco and Waxahatchee. Son Volt and Susto.

Tears were shed into those meshed black seats. Vocal chords were shredded howling at the moon to “Size Of The Moon.” I nicknamed the car Lazarus — Lazzo for short. It had been hit before. Towed. Repaired. Lost. (Don’t ask.) But it always came back. There were always more songs to sing.

But last week, Lazzo didn’t hear any acoustic guitars. It did, on the other hand, hear “Burning Man,” a ripper of a song by one of my dad’s favorite bands, Third Eye Blind. It’s an underrated song on one of my all-time favorite records, but “Burning Man” turned out to be my former sedan’s swan song.

Just under two minutes into the ragged 90s rock anthem, on my commute to work, I got in a car accident on the freeway. Thankfully, the crash had no injuries. But the car is most certainly totaled. And that night, 1,600 miles from the Phoenix streets where I made the Optima a sentimental music haven, it hit me that I’ll never drive it again.

Every day, on the way to work, I drive past red and black metal scraps, painted like the self-titled album cover on the screen when it halted. I see years of memories on that Minnesota road shoulder. The collision replays in my head over and over.

I’m overwhelmed by piecemeal memories of the driver’s seat. I’m pulling into the driveway of my childhood home after a high school event, parked long enough to let the song end and the sadness, too. I’m headed down a residential street in Phoenix with the windows down. I’m taking the long way home. There’s an iced coffee in the cupholder, leaving condensation stains that will now never be cleaned. I’m listening to Zach Bryan, or Slaughter Beach, Dog, or whoever it may have been that day. 

I choke up remembering that there, in the Passenger Seat, Mia first heard some of the most important songs from my childhood. I dwell on the many times I waited outside of her dorm to pick her up, blasting bass so loudly she’d hear it from the building’s elevator inside. 

Lazzo saw nine states, five years and 54,374 miles. There are still pennies stuck to the bottom of the console. Colorful straws never unsheathed on late night collegiate fast food runs. An empty cardboard box in the trunk, for whenever I relocate next.

But every nostalgic glimpse is interrupted now when I remember the odor of oily smoke, radiating from the Kia’s dented dashboard. Stalled out on a Minneapolis interstate, I stepped away from Lazzo for the final time, the pungent smell still lingering in my nostrils today.

And then last night, listening to Born On Flag Day once again, I remembered the smell of Ryan Foster’s breakfast sandwich. It was dark out. But not in. I’m reminded that there are always more songs on the setlist. 

Somewhere in the silence between “Stung” and “Goodnight Irene,” I figured that out.

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