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.
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”
I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone,” one of the greatest songs ever written, back in 2005, when it came out. I was a tasteless rube then, with only a few dollars for iTunes singles. No, I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone” yet, but when I did, I felt could have written it. It’s all the 12-year-old me felt at the time: “Hope there’s someone / Who’ll set my heart free / Nice to hold, when I’m tired.”
For over two decades, Cabbagetown—also known as my neighborhood—has held an annual chili-eating festival in the first week of November. The chili bell rings at 12:30 sharp! You get to eat from as many homemade batches as you can reach before they run out. The Dixie cups end up stacking 20 or 30 high.
In all 7½ years of Earwyrms, Halloween has yet to descend upon a Friday… until this year, baby! Oh, we’d gotten close to completing the bloody ritual in past years, but all it took was one meddling leapfrog from 2019’s Thursday to that Saturday in 2020 to completely waste a decade.
We’ve yet to perfect a word for death by thirst. “Dehydration?” Inelegant—a prefix sewn ad-hoc to an embalmed corpse. Yet rarely has the word been so necessary as today!
Last night was a most special night—the harvest moon. The first full moon in autumn has long given ancient protection to farmers and workers. She’s given us light so we could reap our crop in darkness, allowing us to race against days growing shorter, against a future growing ever colder.
Sometime in the 1990s, an incredibly rare cultural gag reflex was triggered. This was the first generational challenge of the status quo since the 1960s: queerness, for once, wasn’t necessarily a death sentence, and feminism even had a third wave. The fact is a miracle to this day.
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.