The Best Album of 2025
I don't view the act of criticism as mechanical or objective. I do think it is fact-finding. I don't hope to shape your views on a song through my writing; rather, I hope you become aware of different ways of looking at a song and the resonance it may have with other people, thereby broadening your perspective of the song. And the reason I attempt to do this, is very simple: it's better to enjoy things than not, and the more of the world we enjoy the better our lives become, possibly.
This year, though, I'm kinda burnt out.
There's been a recurring numbness I've been undergoing this year, such that music hasn't reached me all that much. I haven't been able to appreciate albums this year i.e. spend an entire walk ranting about how great an album is in my head.
I truly dislike not giving an artist their due. I mean, well, yes, I can be very glib. What I mean is, it doesn't take a lot of energy to hate, but it takes a lot of energy to love, and the energy put into love is worth it, both for the artist and for the critic. And I, have no energy.
I sense what follows will not be my best - i.e. my most passionate - writing, but this reminds me of the other reason why I write these: as a semi-historical account of what happened in a year. So, let us hope I achieve the bare minimum of what these articles are meant to achieve: to remember some truly excellent art, amid the giant flood of content we parse through everyday.
Let's start.
The year
If summer is defined by sensuality, then the song of the summer goes to The Hidden Cameras' "Undertow". Odd choice, surely, as there is very little hedonism in it, but it has the most intense longing I've heard in a while, particularly around Joel Gibb's half-croon half-sob of the word "undertoooow".
Ghost Mountain's "Moulder" has been in my mind all year. I love how the autotune submerges his "moooooouuulder". It is corny, it is melodramatic, it is not self-aware at all, and it somehow succeeds in being haunted. On a tangent: I became an old man this year; it's nice to see Gen-Z discard the fear of embarassment that has plagued millennials.
"First night without you, I collapsed on the floor; / 'cause when one door closes, it might never open, / there might be no other doors." It's okay that millennials are plagued with self-awareness, but you have to transform that self-awareness. PUP has always worked with this theme capital-P Perfectly. So in "Hallways", so in "Best Revenge": "The best revenge is living well, / didn't even know what was right in front of me." (As a side note: I'm genuinely surprised Ghost Mountain has more views than PUP.)
It's disappointing I don't connect with Wednesday more. I think "Bleeds" is really lyrically well-written. I just think the guitar fuzz doesn't mesh well with the lyrics of self-deprecation and longing. There's a good Adrianne Lenker album out of Karly Hartzman, that I would like more out of her than Lenker. But I digress. I love noise, and I love arty-fartiness. In 2023, there was the squall and transcendant chanting of "Bull Believer"; this year there's the car crash of "Reality TV Argument Bleeds", where Hartzman grunts, "You and your broke dick sincerity." It's okay if Wednesday doesn't pick a lane; they're good in all of them.
Amaarae is a mystery to me. 2023's "Fountain Baby", to my surprise, is in my mind quite a bit. But sometimes her music is a bit repetitive. The songs in "BLACK STAR" are very short. I should like it, but I don't. Hmm. But it's clear to me how concentrated "Stuck Up" is; whatever voice she has, and her voice is already unique in the crowd of banger music, is concentrated to addictive levels. When she snarls, "If I fuck a bitch in the truck, hmm, did I put a 10 in a coma? / Did I put a bull in a dozer? / Did I put a cat in a Doja?", she sounds like a demon; this same demon coos, "I move that dough like that; / baby you ain't gotta hold your nose, / you can't get high off that." She is in complete possession of her scene, ending with the shouting run of "Squeeze a nigga for his pennies, nigga IT'S A STUCK UP!" I don't really have a handle on Amaarae; does she view herself as a pop artist? Hip-hop? R&B? Or is she doing what artists are supposed to do: whatever the fuck she wants? And in so doing, achieving the effect every artist yearns for: leaving their audience wanting more.
As much as a music nerd I consider myself to be, I ... did not know Jonathan Richman was the frontman for the Modern Lovers. I just thought it was funny when he sings, "We have to try weird stuff, / that's how we learn, / and sometimes we just plain like it" in the, fairly obviously titled, "But We May Try Weird Stuff". Later he enters a simmering ecstasy in "Night Fever", merely enjoying being alive on a Saturday night, falling into joyous sighs as he whispers "Night fever, night feeeever..."
I like to approach a review with the least flattering angle possible. Let's try this for Annahstasia. She has her best bedsheet-ghost voice in "Be Kind" - that is, her voice descends from the ceiling of the room and haunts you. "Oh, I won't be heartless, / so don't be heartless, with me, / oh, I won't be careless, / so don't be careless, with me," she moans, precisely like a vengeful spirit who, after having been wounded, still seeks some light in her life. The Tracy Chapman comparison is interesting, flawed, but largely correct: in her vocal delivery and in the way she composes her songs, Annahstasia struggles with detachment and the yearning for intimacy, a tension that comes with wisdom.
Most memorable album cover goes to Tony Njoku's "ALL OUR KNIVES ARE ALWAYS SHARP". And, to my surprise, the music itself has that quality of clenching one's teeth on the edge of a sword. Njoku's use of autotune(?) perfectly paints the black ballet and mascara-smudging tears of his drama: "Is there space to be untamed? / Do we have to play your game? / Dressed in uniforms of shame..." he croons in "CATATONIA".
Best verse I heard all year? Hmm, maybe from Wave Generators' "Beyond Beyond":
Beyond, beyond, beyond,
spaceships on the White House lawn;
I'm the man from Mars,
I'm feeling totally electric,
I landed on the corner,
Miles Davis' second,
I'm not sure what to make of Lily Allen musically, but lyrically? So in "Dallas Major":
My name is Dallas Major
and I'm coming out to play,
looking for someone to have fun with
while my husband works away.
I'm almost nearly forty,
I'm just shy of five-foot-two,
I'm a mum to teenage children,
does that sound like fun to you?
and so, painting the scene, she concludes, "I hate it here." Heartbreak tends to bring out the pettiness in people, so Allen's approach of simply ... telling stories about her divorce is revelatory. And then there's "Tennis", where she's largely upset that her ex-husband won't play tennis with her.
Is invincibility necessary for rap? Does a rapper have to present themselves as unfuckable? Must this quality be palpable in the execution of the music? You know, fuck that. Rio Da Yung OG seems to be incapable of rhyme - as in, use the meter of his verse to give the lyrics dancing feet - and yet he still stays on the beat. He slurs, trips, mumbles, and moves onward in the song with a shrug. Then he has lyrics, as in "Ghetto Love Story", "Mike be hittin' weird shit, that's what liquor do, / but honestly, I hit some weird shit too, I hit a trick or two." Oh, here's another in the same song: "We went to high school, I know the real you, / I'll never let you borrow shit 'cause I might kill you." He's not trying to impress upon you he's some grand mafioso, he's not trying to say he's "hard", he's just ... himself. And he's really funny, and I'm not sure if he's trying to be. He has what rap is missing. Rap is a bit like coffee: you can't lie and oversweeten the taste of the brew, the flavor comes from bitterness.
The band is called fantasy of a broken heart. Yes, in lowercase. What's up with that. Is "Chaos Practitioner" precious. Yes. Is it overly romantic? No; in fact, the EP is like a preppy Destroyer. "Victory Path" mocks its time-out-of-mind protagonist; "We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways", a song that, as Stefan Babcock would put it, gives off "serious douche chills", which is the point. The protagonist wallows in self-pity to yacht rock, and we, as much as we cringe, are with him.
I love dance music. I hate how mercenary and trite dance music often is. My first loves in music were Daft Punk's "Discovery" and The Avalanches' "Since I Left You". The odd thing about dance music is, it can't just be about dancing, otherwise even the hedonism feels hollow. Dance works when it's grounded around people, the tugs-and-pushes that compel us to certain relationships. So Rochelle Jordan's voice coos in "Sum", "You just want some, / you just want some, / 'cause it's better than none," her voice becoming transcendent on that "some" as if that "some" is everything, concluding with "'cause it's better than none" as if she's open to something between some and none. I don't know if this is an insult or a compliment; it's a compliment to me; I hadn't felt this good about a dance record since Disclosure's 2013 record "Settle". It invites you to stop thinking, because its transports aren't fantastical, and yet its connection to our human emotions is. (What is it with Brits making great dance music? Thought for another day.)
The sample is conversational; it never operates alone. We can bop to "The Blueprint" without gleaming its sources, but we understand, almost through audio quality and the aesthetic differences, that we're being taken back to the past. It's either 1) weird artists don't use this quality more or 2) weird no one highlights these artists. Damon Locks, definitely, employs the medium to great effect in "List of Demands", the song "Reversed" looping a rock track as Locks drones, "You have found me; I have found you; we have found ourselves in an impossible situation." Later, a recording argues, "The people that are in control of our lives, will no longer be in control of our lives." The track "Isn't It Beautiful" loops the title over and over, as Locks mumbles "The hearts fall, the hearts fall." Thus, when Locks says, "The universe is in our eyes and thoughts in its unknown cosmic meditations", he's not making a statement alone; he wants you to understand he is merely communicating the intentions of the universe.
Good God I love brutality. I don't love the power that comes from smashing into someone's face; I love, instead, the feeling of having my own face smashed and seeing reality for the first time over a caved nose. This is La Dispute's "No One Was Driving the Car". In opening track "I Shaved My Head", Jordan Dreyer barks, "I understood what it meant / to need to kill and reset, / this stranger standing reflected / with my old image blending." Later in "Autofiction Detail", he's panting, his tongue long as a dog's at the end - the death, the asphyxiation - of his song: "A beating heart, a beating heart, / a beaten dog, the snarling teeth, / face of God, a light above, / beating heart, in us, the blood." The music is so ugly that I wonder if I won't love this one more as time goes on.
Is Kassa Overall cheating by making a jazz rendition of "Check the Rhime"? Yes. Is his take on "C.R.E.A.M" and "Big Poppa" revelatory? YEEEEEES. Jazz nowadays treads the same ground; and yet if it's going to retread, it might as well be fun, and "CREAM" is very fun.
I'm surprised I haven't talked about Jefre Cantu-Ledesma yet. I rarely like artists consistently; Cantu-Ledesma is the exception. I like "Limpid As The Solitudes", I like "Tracing Back the Radiance", and I like "Gift Songs". Silence as a tool, in practice, is often used like a club: you generally know why an artist is using it. Silence shows how "serious" the musician is. This is not the case for "Gift Songs". Take the low drone of "Gift Song I", where the gaps between the chords are not so noticeable where you think about them, but you certainly notice them. Over the drone, in a desultory, meandering manner, is Cantu-Ledesma's piano playing, which again uses gaps to artistic effect. Why is his use of silence so effective? Why is his silence so emotional but not dramatic, so purposeful yet not overwrought? I don't know. I really don't.
There's always one song stuck in my head every year. Last year it was Jessica Pratt's "Get Your Head Out"; this year it was William Tyler's "Howling at the Second Moon". Two elements strike me: the guitar groaning underneath Tyler's tactile strumming, and the luminous steel guitar (I think it's the steel guitar) interweaving themselves in-between Tyler's tortured strumming. Perhaps, in my own odd way, I associated the song with forgiveness: Tyler's guitar is the terror the brain weighed down by its own guilt, and the steel guitar is the moon opening up, piercing through the veil of darkness and allowing light to finally come in. Hence, "Howling at the Second Moon" - being renewed under the moon within the soul. The album "Time Indefinite" straddles back and forth between these emotions: being saddled by the tortured weight of the past, and looking hopefully, though wearily, into the future.
In the beginning of the year, I had a great fog overcome me. It's not unusual for me to feel numb, but, where I often felt nothing, I always felt there was some meaning in walking forward anyway. I didn't feel that at all this year; I just felt despair. While I was deep in my funk Ichiko Aoba's "Luminiscent Creatures" played a part in pulling me out. The wandering keys of "tower" and the soft sprays of melody from "mazamun" and "青葉市子" implied, to me, that it was okay to feel small and to not be heading anywhere, for the moment. It was okay to simply be. It's a shame this isn't higher on my list - going by my criteria, I simply haven't wanted to listen to it much more - but I haven't failed to remember this wonderfully gentle record.
Righty then, now onto the contenders of the year.
WNC WhopBezzy and 70th Street Carlos's Out The Blue
Rap is admittedly one of my great vulnerabilities. I admire to the point of idolatry New York rap - not East Coast rap, but rap made by New Yorkers. Wu-Tang, MF Doom, Aesop Rock, Public Enemy, Jay-Z (or JAY-Z, forgot which one); and hardly any OutKast, Clipse, Odd Future, whatever. Say N.W.A and I'll answer, Who? The only thing I appreciate is that one Ice Cube album produced by the Bomb Squad. So yeah, my record is kinda shit. But I love "Out The Blue", by...oh my God their names are longer than the title...WNC WhopBezzy and 70th Street Carlos, or Carlos and Whop, as I shall call them. It is a wonderfully stupid album.
Also, to add, this is a fairly incoherent album. It doesn't matter where you start, so let's start with "Rappin & Trappin".
I think Carlos takes the first verse (I unfortunately cannot tell their voices apart because they're FUCKING YELLING ALL THE TIME, though I think Carlos' voice is more nasally):
I walk by your hoe and make her sucking up She got on clothes but her legs open up She bend over and get to shaking and got me poking up She say I don't want you no more, you broke as fuck
Later, Whop:
All my arms broke, I hope they ass breaking How you a real bitch, but your ass faking
This is the album. I have tears in my eyes. (Later Whop yells "You know what happened to your dog? I'm gonna send you to the vet!"; Carlos, "I'M A GROWN MAN, I DO GROWN THINGS!")
I don't understand.
Part of the effect is that Carlos and Whop shout-rap. Sure, they have rhythm, but they don't have much of a concept of inflection. Of course this style of vocal delivery isn't uncommon in rap; in fact, it's very common; but often shout-rapping usually 1) disguises the rapper's inability to sing, 2) attempts to leap over the loudness of the instrumentals (because the music is meant to be played loud, loud, loud), and 3) lends a sense of urgency to the music. In general, the effect is to annoy the living shit out of everyone else on the street that's not in your car.
But Whop and Carlos are saying the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life, and they're shouting it, EXUBERANTLY, in my ear, which has the effect of a toddler telling you about the fiftieth life-changing fact they've learned that afternoon. It's really, really funny. And the music isn't aware of their being funny or clever, it just simply...is. This is what I desire from art: to be, only, itself.
I believe it's Whop who begins "Gz & Souljas" beautifully:
I got it on your mind, now I'm taking it off, ever since I was in juvie I was breakin' the law, nigga, you ain't smokin' za, I can tell by the cost, I've just been pouring syrup, nigga, ain't got a cold
It's bizarre; I don't perceive any difference between these lyrics and that of any other artist's, and yet Whop has that one trait every artist desires: complete control and ease over his picture. Perhaps the following lyrics are illuminating:
Just because you got some money, doesn't make you a boss, every L I took was a lesson, I ain't takin no loss, went from chromes to a brick, took the brick to a house
These seem to describe the approach Whop and Carlos have over the whole album: where rappers brag about what they have, they don't need to show anything off to prove they're just better than you. Superiority is in the tongue only. In that same vein, the only reason you're mad is because of how smooth they make your slander sounds.
(Though, later, Whop asserts: "When you got money, you can treat them bitches like that; / when you got money you can do them bitches like that," so, you know, hypocrisy.)
I'm decidedly...uhhh...cerebral in my approach to writing about music. I listen to the music, analyze my own feelings, and try to find a theme around how I feel. I'm always suspicious of music that simply "sounds good".
But "Out The Blue" is literally that: there's almost no coherence, it just sounds great. There is no thread. I can only talk about how great individual tracks are. I don't think an album like this has ever penetrated my tops list. If there's any theme, it's jubilation; it is on par with MF DOOM's "MM..FOOD", a product of emcees so good and so happy to be so good at showing off.
Seriously, I can play tracks in this album at random and I'll always get a lyric that stands out. Carlos in "Sale Out": "Broke niggas fell off, / I've been farmin' and them bitches sell out, / DUMB SHIT, all my niggas yell out, / nigga go up to the roof, nigga think he bulletproof, / notice how with me shit go up with you?"
Again, I wish I could say more, but...I got nothing. So let's end on "DYS", which is the first song I got to when I shuffled:
Whop, I think:
(and, to make abundantly clear, I do not understand anything they're talking about; I'm not really into clothes):
You dropped a bag on your fit, you need a tag on 'em,
you spent six on your shit, you need a tag on 'em,
you spend some money on your bitch, you need a tag on 'em,
you paid a thousand for your kicks, you need a tag on 'em,
you got twenty on your wrist, you need a tag on 'em,
you got that bagging on your shit, you need a tag on 'em,
you need something to brag on, give something to talk about,
nigga, I'm that nigga who these bitches always talking 'bout,
dollars in my fucking mouth, budgets on my fucking whip,
Timbs in my fucking trunk, went to L and got it bent,
baby, you don't like your shit, I can get you 'bouta gun(?), (there's no way that's right)
nigga, fuck my old bitch, really think he got 'em one.
Jesus. People talk about hunger in rap all the time. Whop and Carlos just want it more; you have to give it to them.
(Another highlight: in the same song, Carlos yells, "IF YOU HAD A GOOD DAY NIGGA I'LL RUIN IT.")
I think the reason why I love New York rap so much is that its rappers are obsessed with flow to the point of madness. Rakim said, Don't sweat the technique. Slick Rick said, and Jay-Z or JAY-Z parroted, The driver of the mission is a pro. It's not about vibe; it's not about sentiment; it's not about message, or rage; it's about delivery. Or, as DOOM put it, "One starry night I saw the light, / heard a voice like Barry White say, Sure you're right"; it's the very texture and power of the voice alone that can change lives.
This is "Out The Blue". It's just technique. Don't think too hard about it; but when you listen, there's everything to think about. It's also really, really, really goddamn funny. These guys are great.
(Oh, I'll add this: these write-ups are supposed to celebrate the artists specifically, but I'll give credit to Alphonse Pierre, writing for Pitchfork, for putting a spotlight on this album. Like, Whop and Carlos literally have no presence in the greater music industry and everything they create is self-published. They don't even have their lyrics on Genius. Critics should be as celebrated as artists, it's just that most critics suck ass. Pierre does not.)
Cate Le Bon's Michelangelo Dying
Cate Le Bon is one of those consistently-great artists. Over the years, since 2017's "Rock Pool" EP, which is when I first heard her, she has been developing her aesthetic and winding it stronger and stronger around an object. "Michelangelo Dying" is finally that object, that radiant sun that shows all the colors of her style in full grandiosity.
I'm not sure if "Michelangelo Dying" is a contender to me, but it sure as hell a high point in her career; it'll likely be definitive. I'm not in love with every song, but the songs I do love, I fucking love a lot.
Take "About Time", the song that hits the hardest for me. Cate attributes the album to a break-up; she's 42 now, and, at least I can say, love hurts a little harder as one gets older. So Cate laments in the song,
I'm not a gracious daughter,
I'm not religious on the water.
It's about time, it's about time.
I want to sing to regret,
I just can't pay this debt.
It's about time, it's about time.
Later in the song,
Who gets to make her a dress and then pretend it doesn't matter?
I'm not eager to make too much out of a song, based on a singer's personal experience. Yet when I hear it, what strikes me is the tone of failure, of being unable, and maybe being unworthy, of "marital bliss" and family. This is the sound of total collapse, causing, not destruction, but a fragmenting, that can be made whole again.
What is Cate's style? Since "Rock Pool", I'd say, Elliptical. She finds a way all around her subject without getting close to it. There is never much release from her music; the guitar never enters a hook; her choruses are fairly mute; and there is never much of a protagonist in her music. The snakiness of the music is fit for a noir that is ultimately banal. What arises out of Cate's music is, simply, warmth. Take 2019's "Daylight Matters", as she sighs about things past: "Promises speak in confusion and dice, / a day in the life, arranging the chairs, / and I'm never gonna live it again." Whether we know what she means, is not important at all; what's important is whether we empathize with her. The coiling guitar helps.
Then there's 2022 "Pompeii", where she got even weirder. The guitar in "Moderation" warms the heart like licks of the sun;Cate, here, is more confused than ever. So goes her chorus: "Picture the party where you're standing on a modern age; / I was in trouble with a habit of years, and I tried / to relate." It's almost as if, the years going by, Cate continued to recede further and further into the background, treating her lyrics and the music as layers of paint on a canvas.
Ergo, "Michelangelo Dying", and that gorgeous cover of wrinkled fabric. The cover depicts perfectly the culmination of Cate's aesthetic: layering upon layering upon layering of sound, such that the human voice isn't obscured, but colored. It's nearly shoegaze, frankly.
This is made clear on "Love Unrehearsed", which has substantially more reverb on the guitars than past Le Bon songs. The sound overlaps one another like waves, adding to an entire humming effect. When the reverb is laid the most thickly, she sings the album's title: "A surplus of you, / and Michelangelo dying, / and solace was a let down; / now you know I'm not crying." Pain doesn't leave her numb; it leads her to drift, into different worlds. One feels she invokes the Italian artist for his totality and purity of vision, and yet she too wants to see him die, so as to observe how the consummate genius would handle the chaos of death.
So many songs to mention. I also love the (perceived) sarcasm of "Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?" But I'll talk about the other song that compelled me to give this album an intense spotlight, "Body as a River". It begins with a churning, jogging, even aggressive banging on the keys; coincidently, Cate gives her strongest lyrics:
It's so good for me, good for me...
Time of my life, I've left everything
twice... I'm not attached to much,
send my love, to the roses.
In the prime of my life,
I've left everything twice.
Her voice then becomes more resplendent, leaving herself momentarily:
My body as a river: A river running dry, and I'm sick all the time, until he comes to life.
Michelangelo Dying? No, Cate Le Bon Ascending.
DJ Sprinkles' RA.1000
I understand most people view music as a space deliberately separated from reality. So I'm just going to be up-front and say this entry is about the war in Gaza. If you have strong feelings about it - this album is quite anti-war - move to the next entry or don't read the remainder of the essay. I write this for your and my enjoyment anyway, and if you're not enjoying it, then I feel bad.
Alright, assuming whoever doesn't want to read this has moved on, I want to make a correction: it's not the "war in Gaza", it's, depending on how you look at it, the genocide in Gaza. Or, if "genocide" is a word with too many legal hurdles to overcome, then "abattoir" in Gaza, I think, is accurate. And even that's a little too light, as there is a reason why we slaughter cows, even if the cows don't participate in that meaning. "Nihilistic fuckfest"?
Good, now we're all aligned on my politics.
Listen, I really do try to encourage people to listen to the music I write about; discussing the politics behind the music does not help my argument. We can discuss the aesthetics of "Mississippi Goddam", focusing on Nina Simone's passion and her frantic piano playing. We can discuss the irony of "Fables of Faubus". Works of art criticize, but I believe they criticize by carving their own space where the object of criticism is weakened, is ridiculous. In a sense, this is how satire works.
But "RA.1000", by DJ Sprinkles, or Terre Thaemlitz, is literally spoken-word monologues on Palestine and Israel's relationship interposed with music. There is not much of a space-apart-from-reality when the music requires some understanding of the original real-world conflict. And if the music has that requirement, can it be considered great?
I don't know the answer to that question. But something is very apparent with this mix: I simply listen to it a lot. I have a craving to put it on again. To me music is best when it has two qualities: 1) it makes you think about the world and 2) it makes you think about the world in a perspective you hadn't considered before. The context of genocide and war, obviously, induces anger and sadness; but the mix is neither angry and sad, it's just ... observing. The spoken-word comes and pass; we get worked up by their stories and their rhetoric; and then they ... just pass by, in the course of time, fading into music. There's a cynicism to it: yes, all suffering is eventually forgotten and ignored. But, as with all art concerning doom, there is an implicit message of: doom begins and ends with you. The music doesn't exist to make you fear, the music exists so that you can live in a way that's right by you.
The interesting thing about the mix is that it reveals how musical our daily speech and rhetoric are. There is a cadence to the flow of words, to these words you're reading now, hopefully. This principle is what permits the podcast format to be so addicting (I personally love standup comedy). The rhetorical tracks do not feel out of place at all with the musical tracks; Stephen Kapos narrating his relationship with the Holocaust as a survivor, flows smoothly into a pretty long cut of Billy Paul's "I See The Light", flows then into Eran Efrati discussing the (essentially) military occupation of the West Bank, then into a guitar track that I'm unable to identify (Susan Alcorn's "Dancing"?). Notably, Kapos' monologue is foregrounded with Future Islands' "Tybee Island", Efrati's with Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook's "The Choice", such that there is some musical coherency throughout the entire piece. Thaemlitz is never heavy-handed; "RA.1000" is punctuated with "breaks" in-between the monologues, where the listener can lay their griefs on softer soul and jazz tracks.
The track begins with a podcast ("Two Good Jewish Boys") discussing the enjoyment of a concert while the subjugation of the Palestinian people is happening. One speaker says that having fun is way more enjoyable with the knowledge that other people are suffering. It is difficult to tell if the speakers are being sarcastic or not; first listen, I thought they were serious, subsequently, I think they're sarcastic. I don't think it matters. Ultimately, what matters more is what the listener thinks, whether the listener confirms or denies their statements, and to what degree. The placement of this track is meant to confuse the listener, so that they are willing to accept the following tracks with a more open mind; it's also meant to broach on the subject of the nature of suffering, not necessarily Palestinian suffering.
On the spoken-word themselves, the first two, concerning Kapos and Efrati, are demonstrative; the speakers spend most of their time telling stories about their connection to Israeli identity. The latter two, concerning Norman Finkelstein and Gabor Maté, are argumentative; both are engaged in a dialogue with an unknown or oft-unheard-from speaker. If we're going to discuss oratory, let's discuss oratory: the latter, showcasing Finkelstein and Maté, is a bit manipulative, precisely because Finkelstein and Maté are privileged above any dissent. Yet, as manipulative as it is, I don't think it was Thaemlitz's intent to argue that the two are "correct" in any sense. "RA.1000", as a whole, is intended to show how pro-Palestinian mindset is developed, within an ethnically and culturally Jewish person. Therefore, the addition of Finkelstein and Maté is strictly to show how such a mindset develops against an explicitly Palestinian-hostile environment. The sequencing starts with an "awakening" or a development of a consciousness of the Palestinians' reality, and ends with that same consciousness trying to reconcile that reality with the illusions of the world. I can admit that this specific aspect of the mix is manipulative, while the whole generally is quite fair and even-minded.
But on the contents of the mix itself - I feel like I am walking down a spiral to an abyss I don't really want to enter - I'll say this: beyond the musical nature and pacing of oratory itself, the other compelling and hypnotic aspect of speech is logic. I am a lover of philosophy, and I love following arguments; our ability to thread through logic extends to our ability to understand stories too. Efrati's account of his time in the reserves and his enforcement of the curfew, Maté's attempts to sympathize with his opponent while asserting the two live in separate realities, and Finkelstein's describing the suppression of free speech are all fascinating. I think, as indifferent as we human beings pretend we are to external events, we always find history and psychology interesting; these subjects, after all, compose who we are, and we sense they do, even though we deny this. That's the ultimate effect "RA.1000" has: it is a revealing of that which we deny in our subconscious, and by denying it we give it power to destroy our happiness and our lives. So Maté argues in the case of Edith Eger, a Holocaust survivor: he recounts that she had personally went to Hitler's grave to forgive him, not because his actions were forgivable, but because she wanted to find the grace within herself to move on without hatred in her heart. Appropriately, "RA.1000" ends with Bing and Ruth's "go on."
You know what, as I discuss this, I have the sense my feelings for this mix will increase someday. But that is another time.
Geese's Getting Killed
Let's start by talking about the difficult subject: rock is such a strange genre.
It's always awkward defining genre by arrangement. For example, is James Brown a rock musician? He's got guitars. Why is Bob Dylan under "Singer / Songwriter", and John Lee Hooker "Blues"? What the hell is D'Angelo? Is the awkwardness on the image - as in, there's something about Dylan aesthetically that separates him from the blues? Well, what would Dylan say? He'd probably cite his debt to the blues. So what is it? Is the image false, and we must reject it, or does something undefinable transmogrify the one to the other? We can say, until our faces are red, that categorizations and distinctions are artificial, and yet we still find them useful, and therefore there is reality to them.
I think, more than aesthetic and actual musical proficiency, what defines a genre most is approach. This is why punk is so stretchy: it begins with the nihilism of The Clash and The Sex Pistols, moves through the absurdity of The Ramones, and crystallizes with the DIY-ness of The Minutemen and Fugazi. James Brown is funk - what's most important is that the hips and the feet move, thought coming consequently. Sure, you can achieve transcendence through the Grateful Dead or, say, Zed,but the method is important; the Dead want you to form a community, whereas EDM is pure hedonism. And where something like, say, techno and EDM separate? The piercing, pummeling sound of techno is, inherently, militant; you can dance to it and achieve the same level of transcendence, sure, but it's more "End of Evangelion" than orgasm, which is actually pretty apocalyptic when one thinks about it.
Rock, to me, is associated the most with ambition. I only need to mention The Beatles to prove my point. But even thinking about Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue", when you hear those drums - those fucking drums - you know how it is to feel passion so intense as to make everything else quieter.
Some say rap is the new punk rock, but I don't know. Rap is too aristocratical and adversarial to compare to rock. (Even if you have someone like KA who sneers at the competitive aspect of rap, his reaction is still within that context - that he reacts is proof enough.) Ambition is not necessarily competitive; again, with the comparison of Buddy Holly, or Elvis, or even the aforementioned Bob Dylan, there is a quasi-religious feeling that, by achieving great musical heights, one elevates as an individual. Rap needs an audience; rock does not, necessarily. This is sort of why I miss rock - its absence from popular radio is the absence of naked, embarrassing, "cringe" ambition. Sure, shit on Nickelback all you want, but at least they wore their stupid hearts on their stupid sleeves. The sense of danger moved to rap; the feeling of piety moved to country; grandiosity of feeling moved to pop; but sheer, humbling, maddening ambition, to distinguish oneself, is gone. What's left are various pissing contests.
So, the obvious topic, before we get to "Getting Killed" proper: Geese in the context of New York's rock scene. The last time New York, the home of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, blah blah blah, had anything near a "rock renaissance", was in the early 2000s, with The Strokes, Interpol, which...fizzled out. Did "Is This It" and "Turn On the Bright Lights" age? Short answer: No. Long answer: Hell fucking no. But the bands did, aged like milk, pretty much. This isn't a fault of the bands; it's a fault of what we discussed before, the concept of ambition in rock. What followed the initial music was more of the same. The Beatles followed "Rubber Soul" (1965) with "Revolver" (1966) with fucking "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967!) with "Magical Mystery Tour" (we're still in fucking 1967!). It's sort of The Beatles' fault they set expectations a bit too high.
What fueled The Strokes and Interpol? Angst. Lots of it. Fin de siècle angst. It's in the title: Julian Casablancas moaning, half-numb, half-weary, half-too-tired-to-give-a-shit, and half-too-lazy-to-try, "Is this it?" Paul Banks, in "Obstacle 1", bitches that "she puts the weights in my little heart". Oh, I forgot about The Yeah Yeah Yeahs! Zoomers know the chorus of that one song: "Wait, they don't love you like I love you."
What fuels Geese? Angst. Not lots of it, but it's visible. It appears angst lights a fire in one's belly.
So, by the long route, let's discuss angst in Geese's "Getting Killed", starting with the song I find myself playing all the fucking time, "Au Pays du Cocaine". So Cameron Winters moans:
Baby you can stay with me and nobody would care, you can stay with me, you can stay with me and just pretend I'm not there; like a sailor in a big green boat, like a sailor in a big green coat, you can be free, you can be free and still come home.
And if his desperation doesn't come through here, then Winters practically wails the follow-up verse:
You can change, you can change,
so his voice trembles, doubting himself,
you can change, baby, you can change, and still choose me,
his voice falling upon itself. And at the end, he pitifully squeaks, "I'm alright", as if a consolation.
How does one describe the music in "Au Pays du Cocaine"? "Jogging". It does not hurry, it does not overwhelm - well, except at the end - it sounds angelic, paradisal even; I can't place the strings, but I thought they were a harp or a ukulele initially. Even though there's desperation, the music does not meet the desperation; the music either comforts or mocks.
What about the other sexually frustrated song, "Cobras"? Here is more yacht rock, not of the Vampire Weekend variety, but closer to the mocking sort Steely Dan specialized in, with not a little Grateful Dead.
Baby, let me wash your feet, forever; baby, you can stay at my house, forever, and ever; baby, let me dance away, let me dance away forever,
which begs the question, Winters seems to really want someone to live with him. Interesting.
Baby, you should be ashamed,
you should be shame's only daughter.
Whatever's he's got in his hand,
you can get it on your own,
you can get it on your own,
you can get it on your own,
you can make the cobras dance, yeah,
but not me.
Compare to the sexual frustration of the aforementioned "Obstacle 1", but also consider Leonard Cohen's lyrics in "Why Don't You Try": "Why don't you try / to do without him, / why don't you try / to live alone? / Do you really need his hands / for your passion, / do you need his heart / for your throne?"
This is certainly no "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"; it's self-effacing, certainly.
You know, this is kinda evil to say, but the music, outside of the lyrics, played fantastically by Dominic DiGesu (bass), Emily Green (guitar), Max Bassin (drums), and Winters (vocals, guitar, keyboard), makes me think of Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville". I mean, it's kinda true. It's faux-relaxing. It has a bit of Ezra Koenig making fun of himself for his music's whiteness, while embracing it anyway.
And so we go back to the top, with the opening track, "Trinidad", which alone convinced me this band had something. Compared to the other tracks mentioned, this one is funky, psychedelic, and not keen on getting nowhere - and you have to be really, really confident in your abilities to not give the whole act away immediately.
And that's what Geese accomplishes: the band takes their time, not arriving at their point, not trying to make a statement, not being overly stylistic, until Winters starts screaming "THERE'S A BOMB IN MY CAR!" at the 50-second mark almost exactly.
And even then, Winters only starts foaming at the mouth around the 2:40 mark:
My son is in BED
My daughters are DEAD
My wife's in the SHED
My husband's burning LEAD
The rest are force-fed
or baked into bread
and nothing's been said
for four and a half days
WHEN THE LIGHT TURNS RED I'M DRIVING AWAY.
This all gets a thumbs-up from me.
It's this desire to blow up the album, so to speak, as to deny harmony, melody, "good vibes" to the audience that intrigues me; and what follows, subsequently, is Geese making the album a little more palatable with the "Margaritaville"-esque "Cobras".
This tension, between hooky songs and funky songs, between The Pixies' famous quiet-then-loud philosophy and sedated lyrics, defines "Getting Killed". Never mind the super hooky, euphoric "Taxes", where Winters claims he "will break my own heart from now on", let's touch on the closing track "Long Island City Here I Come", which proceeds, as we might expect, with Winters pounding the keys and Bassin playing Little Drummer Boy. Winters gets pretty violent here, threatening,
Like Joshua kick-kick-kicked the king out of Jericho, I'm about to kick your ass up and down this street,
which gives license for Winters to mutter angrily, or excitedly, "Here I come / here I come / here I come / here I come". The band changes modes, leaving the percussive, attack-heavy melody to something more harmonious, Green and DiGesu finally spilling into the music, winding around Winters' trance-like "here I come, here I come, come." The strings are almost metal in approach; they then lapse back into the aggressive banging of the keys, so Winters can rage, anguished, tortured, denied his rest, "So too shall I reach Long Island City, one of these days."
Well, Geese arrived. This, is the wildness I so craved from music. Maybe it's a little more tame than its predecessors, but wildness is wildness all the same. And so, on this topic, I'll conclude the essay.
Because rock is more an approach than a style, the music changes based on the perspective of who plays it. Casablancas was completely deflated; Banks was violently detached. Albert Hammond Jr. gave The Strokes a relentlessness to their sound, that mirrored how overwhelming the city was and still is. Geese, in contrast, never wants you to forget to dance. You don't play "Getting Killed" loudly so as to blunt your emotions, you play it to shake your hips.
We know it: the beginning of the 2020s has been endlessly and creatively destructive for young people; the Pandemic was only the appetizer. Perhaps that's the urgency behind Geese's music: we're really at the end of our rope, and now all that's left is each other. "Getting Killed", as sarcastic as it may be concerning its psychotic, neurotic narrators, is about dancing even when people are watching, it's about singing when it makes you feel good, it's about being with friends and not needing to "belong". In short, it's about joy, and it doesn't matter where joy takes you so long as you go about it without reservation.
Ninajirachi's I Love My Computer
We did it, we did it; we finally had a member of Generation Z write a song with the lyrics, "I want to fuck my computer" (the "fuck", aesthetically, bleeped over). Pundits and newspaper columnists alike rejoice, we have witnessed the stereotype we have been swearing exists and had been warning about.
Let this decade be the era for dance trash. "Brat" had the perfect fulcrum between overthinking things and, through the music, going dumb; too much of the former and critics, like me, get to mouth-breathing; too much of the latter and you fear you'll actually lose brain cells. I want to like Porter Robinson and Zed, but they're too dumb; they possess every sensual trick in the world, but one sees a dire nihilism lurking beneath their hedonism. On the flipside, Sudan Archives is too self-aware, too eager to explain itself, too willing to justify itself, when art shouldn't need a reason at all. It's almost as if, for all the gadgetry we perceive to go behind electronic music, it needs to be primitive; it needs to produce a sound so undeniable we don't question it or wonder at its origin. It's very different from traditional instrumental music, where we know there is blood running through the hands on the strings; electronic music needs to make a further leap and prove its impetus is real and intense as humans can be.
Anyway, Ninajirachi's "I Love My Computer" is fucking amazing.
Let's begin with "iPod Touch", the first song that peels back some of the faces the music wears, where on a classic dance track Nina sings:
I've got a song that nobody knows, I've got it on when nobody's home,
before losing herself in the rush:
It sounds like high-school, front gate, smoke in my face, it sounds like dyed, frayed, high-waist, bought at Supré, it sounds like loving you is easy but they boosted the bass,
which line always get to me, because I don't quite understand it. It's a reference to Mat Zo's "Easy" with Porter Robinson, whose title is in the line "Because loving you is easy." Now, am I overthinking it: is she referring only to the song, or is she referring to the song and the feeling of love? In which case, the addition of "but they boosted the bass" is really, really funny.
I love that line, and a lot of my love comes from the nature of the music itself. Where "Easy" is big and grandiose, "iPod Touch" and the other songs on the album have the feel of Ninajirachi simply making music on her laptop. "Easy" doesn't want you to know how the music is made (beyond the human emotions, not necessarily the human, making it), but "iPod Touch" is all about Ninajirachi, which point is further emphasized with
It sounds like iPod Touch, yellow Pikachu case, FL Studio, free download in my search history, hidden underneath my pillow 'cause I should be asleep, it sounds like - I'm keeping it a secret.
All presented in front of music that is meant to make you shake. Or head-bang. I head-bang. On my bed.
"I Love My Computer" is about the human on her laptop trying to express the human whose life is largely digital in as explicable terms as possible. Don't let opener "London Song" fool you. But "London Song" is a great opener. Over an electroclash track (for those who do not know, here is Peaches' "Fuck The Pain Away" as primer), Nina claims "I've never been to London, / and that's the truth; / I've never been to London, / but I'd go with you."
Yup, that's all there is to it: Ninajirachi thinking about going to London, and there's nothing particularly enticing about London, and there's nothing particularly enticing about going anywhere. "London Song" strips the idea of music to its bare bones: fuck the idea of being clever, just dance. The beat is above everything. And that, really, is the truth. We can mouth-breathe all we want, but it's only ever about the resonance we have with the art.
Leading to "Fuck My Computer", where, we have to give Nina credit, the reason for it is that "'cuz no one in the world knows me better; / it says my name, / it says" - screeching - "and no one in the world does it better." We can mock those born during the digital revolution for their obsession with their phones, but you can't mock humanity, and that's what "I Love My Computer" fundamentally is: human. Human emotion, connection and intimacy are in the forefront of "I Love My Computer". There's no disconnect, there, in fact, is an intense yearning to discover.
Which then leads us to discuss the trance of "All I Am", where in a moment of Zen Nina mumbles "All I am, all I can, / all I need is where I am," before the song launches into high velocity and color. Finally, there's "Sing Good", where Nina admits "I used to look the lyrics and Google, What's a chorus? / wrote some of my own and used GarageBand to record it, / 'cuz I can't really sing good, but I'm still gonna try it, / I might even like the way it feels." It's certainly the most introspective song on the album, and it certainly shows her in her vulnerability, but as critics we have to remember the context of the album: "Sing Good" is about her, in the past tense, and "All I Am" is her in the indomitable present.
Following "Sing Good" is "It's You", the closest she comes to the true transcendence we expect out of house. And yet, where the lyrics in EDM are generally vague, but generally life-affirming, we perceive the narrative of the song as if behind a veil:
Let me down...
Do you feel better now?
'Cause I was wrong,
and there's questions I can't answer if you're gone.
I see everything,
and I feel better about it.
You say they love me,
but I'm not that kinda magic -
it's you they really want, it's really you.
Whereupon the song opens up. So what is it about? Insecurity? Self-loathing? Gaslighting? Is it supposed to be exuberant when she sings "Need you to pick me up, / spin me around in your lies"? Why does the heart race when she sings, "It's you they really want, it's really you"? Does the lift come from her rage, and her sudden agency?
Again, do any of these questions actually matter? There is but the beat.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention "Delete", where she sings,
The shortest skirt in the drawer, just enough to show it off and leave 'em wanting more, yeah; I'm exposed to my core, modern mega digital meta mating ritual, yeah.
To which is added,
I'm sorry, I promised it'll be gone in the morning, I only posted it, so you would see it, I was so deep in my late night feelings, didn't mean it; it was stupid,
and then the heart flutters:
Once you've seen it with your eyes, I want you surprised, I want you to see what's underneath me, I want you to see what you're missing out on and how we could've had fun and how it could've been all yours.
Let's be honest: it's a fucking embarrassing song. But the fact that she expresses the sudden rush of feeling and the overtaking of emotion that precedes the embarrassment, is fucking incredible. That's the point of art. It is, in fact, an embarrassingly horny song, and it's great because she pulls it off.
This album has the perfect tension: Nina makes her emotions and her intent obvious, even modest, but her artistry blows up her feelings into kaleidoscopic proportions. Parsimony can be precious, and scarcity is a symptom of low self-esteem; it doesn't hurt artists to try to give their audiences everything, or at least more than they came for, because they might actually achieve it. Audacity, and the failure to meet one's ambitions, shouldn't be cringe.
Ah, did I say Nina achieves true transcendence through penultimate song "It's You"? Well, I was wrong: she achieves it with closer "All At Once", a pummeling jungle song that flows into rave. It has the same thematic weight as Charli XCX's "365", but where Charli is still there at the end of "Brat", dancing the night away, Ninajirachi bludgeons herself into pure digital existence. She has acquired mastery; her computer has not subsumed her, she has devoured it.
On the cover, Nina is bottom of the frame; she is almost obscured by all her crap. To the right of frame are posters of anime characters I genuinely don't recognize (maybe she or a friend drew them), and a detailed drawing of a cat; top right is a power strip tower, a giant furry claw (looks like a fetish thing), and one of the sadder house plants I've ever seen; an anime figurine sits on a plateau made of CD cases; top of frame is an amp and a book titled, I think, OMENS & SUPERSTITIONS, and a cross-legged Hatsune Miku; below Miku is what looks to be a fur stole, or maybe more furry stuff; bottom right, a vinyl sweater or duffel bag with the words GIRL EDM (which, I think she coined?); center of frame, flanked by two loudspeakers, are an assortment of rainbow bracelets; a little above Nina is the titular CSIRAC. One of the slightest things in frame? A hat, in the center, modestly showing the lyrics of a Ninajirachi song: "I WANT TO F*CK MY COMPUTER". Our eyes then turn to Ninajirachi, her wrist to her mouth, hiding half of her face, almost making herself even smaller amongst the clutter. She is so much a master of it all, she doesn't need to make a point of the fact.
Oklou's choke enough
"Obvious" was my first cipher for the album.
It begins with a pendulous synth, warping in and out of the ear; Oklou, over / within the synth, murmurs "All the words that you say (on and on and on) - / one actor in the play (anyway...) - / speak louder than me... / I know you will."
This is when the horn comes in. And with it, comes no more clarity.
There is a bright spot in the track - when Oklou sings, warbling, her voice distorted,
You got pretty much everything you need to get by, you get pretty lost when you try to figure it out.
So...who is she talking to?
I saw this album when it was published (February 7th). I heard this album when it was first reviewed.
I normally hate albums like this. I hate vibe music. I hate navel-gazing. I hate artists hashing out their problems on a record, when in reality they're settling scores. I have a bias where, if a song doesn't go anywhere in the first few minutes, I'm strongly inclined to leave it on the chopping block.
I'm so fucking wrong.
I mean, yes, I'm also right. This is a navel-gazing album.
What astounded me so much with "Obvious"? One: the artist is aware of the mysteries in the music. There's no shoulder shrug of "Ooo, even I don't know!" And you know this, by two: she shares that confusion with the audience, through the subterranean sound of "Obvious".
Well, alright, maybe there are flukes. What about the succeeding track, "ICT", which, I assume, stands for "Ice Cream Truck"?
You get fairly anodyne lyrics:
Strawberry dancer vanilla summer driver pull over ice cream truck
And yet, what is the music? The track begins with more of those woozy synths; soon, a horn enters, a lone wanderer not particularly prominent in the mix and entering the edges of the sound. In fact, the lyrics really begin with Oklou in sing-song: "La la, la la la la la..." Navel-gazing? Yes. But why is there anything so wrong in letting Oklou remember? And as the music proceeds, Oklou sings faster and faster, in line with this lyric: "Tomorrow's never / so I go faster, / faster than I have ever gone."
And so we arrive at the following track, which is the title track. This is the same track I heard, like, in the beginning of December, when everything was already written up and "I Love My Computer" was the top, and I had to pull everything over to make space for "choke enough".
The title track begins with more of those murmuring synths, which have the effect of ocean waves or shimmering moonlight (which comes into play). Oklou arrives into the track some time later, her voice notably more distorted than usual; she's blurred, she's almost a passing detail in her own song, and she's singing,
If you get choked up now, you get choked up now, well, in the morning they will find you on the road.
Later, she reveals the greater scenario of the song:
And if I choke up now,
will this life grant me the space?
Oxygen's level down,
or will it bring me face-to-face
But if I choke up now
then I'll just come back home to say
How's the moon hanging up;
I think my dad will appreciate.
Besides the above verse, throughout the song Oklou largely does not provide the regular "presence" a singer has on a song; she weaves in and out with disembodied vocals. Of note, in the track's middle, is the garage-like escalation of the beat, as Oklou's heart beats faster and faster as the breakdown escalates.
This is art. This is what art is supposed to accomplish. Whether the music arrives or coheres into a meaning, does not matter; it matters that it conveys the matter. So Bladee (I can't ever rid myself of this fucker; YOU STOLE THE ALBUM OF 2022 FROM PUP, ASSHOLE) sings, "If only I had listened enough, / would've heard the words you whispered." The ultimate themes of the album are regret and loss, of people and memories being forgotten. And, from this, Oklou reflects on what she will do going forward: listening, and being present.
I just don't quite get it. Maybe it came from my being so numb in the beginning of the year. How did I miss this? The opening track, "endless" is an excellent song, an expanse of sound where Oklou reflects on growing distance from some unspoken other. I simply don't see "choke enough" as pop music, as it is advertised; if it is, it is something quite new; otherwise, it's, very simply, excellent electronic music, the same genre that uses rapidity and repetition to keep apace with modern life. It does not matter if we never know who Oklou is precisely speaking to; as we find from the music, it's enough that she says. There are no answers, there is only reflection.
And so the album ends on "Blade Bird", where Oklou concludes that "I've come to terms / my baby is a bird; / when you're in the sky, / I'm hoping you'll return" and the "blade is on the bird; / I'll be the one / who ends up getting hurt."
Then,
Should I hold you while I can;
see that you feel held down,
I'm scared that you always will
but you're not the only one who's afraid of losing something.
What is there more to say? The rest is in the music.
The year
This was certainly the year for not caring. Or lowering expectations or whatever.
All of the contenders of the year came in the second half, and I heard like half of them in the last month or so. For someone who likes to sit on albums, and who likes to write on them, boy, it was not great writing an end-of-the-year list. But that's the hubris of the list itself, so...whatever...
Dijon's "Baby" should be somewhere here; its very blunt, even abrasive, distracted, chaotic sound suits my arty-farty tastes, and yet I feel nothing for most of the tracks. So, it's just not here.
There really was an article where "I Love My Computer" was at the tippy-top, and then "choke enough" snatched it from the jaws of victory. (I don't actually have anything against Bladee, I just think it's funny that, to this day, I still think how unfair it is that "The Unravelling of PUPTheBand" came out in the same year as "Crest".) I love "I Love My Computer" to pieces - in my heart it's a #1 - Geese was great and "Out the Blue" was great, but "choke enough" was thematically and aesthetically stronger, so much so that a theme finally emerges in the year through its light.
The theme of the year is "obscurity", or "going the long way to say the same damn thing." "choke enough" doesn't intend to be obscure or unapproachable - the lyrics are pretty plain enough - it's that Oklou may think there just isn't anything to say, or anything worthy of saying, or she, particularly, is the least vehicle to say them. It's the same with Dijon's "Baby" (this albatross again!) - the vocals are so distorted, and the samples so disguised, that it's difficult to arrive at what the matter of the album is, except joy. Geese, after pleading for someone to come back, then says "I'm alright" as if apologizing for their emotional overreaction (whether deserved or not). Of everyone, Ninajirachi was the most blunt, and yet one should note her relationship with her computer is pretty lonely - she doesn't even take this computer out to meet her friends.
From my understanding, this was a pretty good year for pop in terms of diversity of music. But what's funny about it is that nothing came close to reaching the euphoric heights of the 2000s. I immediately think of the dance-punk of James Murphy's DFA Records; the music wasn't stupid, but it wasn't soaked entirely in neuroticism. I then think of Vampire Weekend in the late 2000s; 2013, Disclosure; 2015, Jamie xx's "In Colour"; and then it kinda subsides, though I'm sure if I kick up memory lane something will come out. The closest I can think of for this year is PinkPantheress; "Fancy That" was great, but it also felt ... reserved. Single "Illegal" describes it perfectly: there's still one barrier before she allows herself into pleasure. And Pink...accepts the premise. You know, Whitney did not need to qualify her need to dance with somebody. Usually when a singer is guarded, you get more introspective music. (This is not a critique of Pink at all; I think she's great. It's just an observation. You can even make the same for Addison Rae.)
It's always fun to look at other years in comparison. Twelve years ago, 2013, my album of the year is Fiona Apple's "Idler Wheel" (sorry Fiona, not putting the full title). That's overt and very introspective. We're at the point where introspection seems disingenuous. We're in some deep "yeah, but what do they really mean?" territory. You know, paranoia. And so now the normally-introspecting artists seem to need to self-censor themselves; Charli did it in "Brat", and you see it in part in "choke enough".
Where can this go? Nowhere, absolutely nowhere. The whole point of art is to express, and it's an untenable state when the the expression feels it cannot express. You can't sing around the world forever. The dam has to burst at some time and it's not going to be pretty. But it'll be interesting. And so, as interesting as this year was, let's hope next year is too.