Fall’s Album of the Year Contenders
ISSUE #255
It’s tailgating season, which means it’s fall album season, which means it’s time to start encouraging people at the game to listen to Mitski. This year’s album autumn has some exciting heavy hitters on deck, from Sufjan’s upcoming return to form to Marnie Stern’s first album in ten long years. Already we’re dancing in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s juggernaut GUTS, and coming soon are what promise to be great releases from Slow Pulp, Armand Hammer, Lilts, Sampha, and L’Rain. And if you have four hours to kill under the falling leaves, don’t miss DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s Destiny.
Check out these cuts from the fall’s most promising and place your bets on who crawls out of the rubble with the pennant.
Olivia Rodrigo’s universally acclaimed third album came out the same year the film Obsession made over $300 million dollars at the worldwide box office. This is nothing less than a fact, and the implications are far beyond the scope of this issue; nevertheless, it speaks to a generational changing of the guard, and the universal pattern of emotion and memory for our centennially challenged species.
Every year, the days get longer, pushing golden hour ever closer to midnight. This invites one of the great states of living—sitting around while the sun goes down. This is a playlist for those crepuscular moments.
There’s a new subgenre of IDM that I’ve discovered since last week’s Boards of Canada issue. IDM is the condescendingly named “Intelligent Dance Music,” which is rarely even danceable and came when electronic musicians looked past the dance floor to the more experimental realm of personal, quiet spaces.
Last week, for the first time in 13 years, Boards of Canada released a new album—and boy, is it the shit. Inferno is up there with the very best of the Scottish electronic duo’s catalog, and it’s not like they’ve really missed before.
If there were four horsemen of the 1986 apocalypse, their names were Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and the drum machine. By the grace of god, two are finally dead. The third is, at least, under control in some Western capacity. For the scope of this newsletter, it’s the drum machine we still reckon with—troubled as its legacy may be, even I must admit it’s led to as many triumphs as follies.
For some reason, in 1976, everyone was trying to break into Graceland. In April, Springsteen was escorted off the grounds after trying to jump the wall to see his idol during a tour stop in Memphis. In November, Jerry Lee Lewis was arrested, drunk, with a pistol outside at 3 a.m. He loudly demanded to see the King. Elvis would die nine months later.
Exit 8 is a film about being trapped in a subway platform. It’s based on a video game, which remains unique as an art form because it gets closest to balancing the relief and futility of waking up day after day. Any time, in Exit 8, you feel like you’re making any progress, you turn a corner to face a new challenge, a new silence, a new dead end.
Welcome to the year’s best music so far—and I have to say, in the music realm? It’s been a good early year. There’s plenty of great stuff that didn’t make this round, but these were the real clappers (lights on) to me in these first few months. Just remember, if you like a track, there’s a lot more where that came from on each respective album!
Every year, spring comes back. At least there’s that. The sun’s non-scorching warmth remains the greatest balm for the mind and skin. It’s as good a time as any to step away from slopaganda—the flowers are here again! So, here’s my annual playlist of the soothing and the meditative, the peaceful and the pastoral.
The human is a musical animal. We’re one of the few: the birds, the whales, maybe the cats. Profiteers try to pretend like music's some exclusive skill or talent. It’s not. It’s a spiritual compulsion. A limitless drive. As rebuttal, ask them—"Remember gospel?" "Read about life before microphones?" Sorry—probably: "Seen someone make a video about that stuff, or imagined it?" "Felt like there's something you wanted to sing?"
Before 1966, the Beach Boys only made surfing music. It didn’t matter that Dennis Wilson was the only member who surfed—neither his younger brother Carl nor his older brother Brian had ever touched a board—the public had a vicious appetite for this promising, carefree California life that was gleaming off the foam of the golden coast.
In this house, we love Questlove. His is one of the greatest working minds in the creation, curation, synthesis, and analysis of music as a cultural force. Over winter break, I read his latest book, Hip Hop is History, and it’s his best work yet. It’s at once a comprehensive history and a personal work of music biography—as both a listener and creator—from a man whose heart is as big as his brain.
This year was awesome, of course—the future always is—promised (ripped straight?) as it has been from speculative literature. It's a huge slap to the haters that the best songs of 2025 were artificially generated, ripe and ready to fill the coffers of the First Family. That's life, baby—that's liberty, that's the... the... sorry, my hands don't usually quake like this.
The first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was written in German, which can neither be completely nor unequivocally translated into English. This sentence, which was written exactly 100 years before 2015, has echoed throughout a century of literature:
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”
About a month before I started cramming The Odyssey, I was halfway through a pocket-sized Macmillan Collector’s Edition of The Maltese Falcon. It was my first time reading it. I’ve actually never even seen it. But! I did study Hammett in a paperback class in college—he was the genesis of hard-boiled crime fiction, which was called noir when adapted to screen. His prose could be sharp as Hemingway’s, at his best.