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.
Hauntology is, as far as I’m concerned, Halloween’s most essential genre. Embodied by Burial, Boards of Canada, The Caretaker, and more, its defining sound is that of decay—vinyl noise, tape hiss, reverb, echo—and it captures the ghostly nature of nostalgia. A haunting, at its essence, is the presence of an absence.
Start digging around in Halloween music and before long you’ll turn a weird corner: there’s a lot of surf guitar. That strange kitsch has fueled everything from Friday the 13th to Rocky Horror. This band, Messer Chups, has distilled it to its purest form.
Ten years now I’ve been listening to Blonde. Whenever I do, it deepens me. That these songs were ever written is still a miracle. There’s no way to contextualize it without bringing up love—a steep style of living, built entirely out of faith—because love, like fiction, is something you can know everything about without knowing it really exists.
It’s the night the rave came home—two years after the terrifying events of Electroween, the terror in leather tights has reëmerged. No black-lit living room, no unfinished basement, no warehouse-district dance party will ever be safe. Cyberpunk as hell, clawing up from its filthy grave, this industrial-dance sound was never going to stay dead for long.
Today, I’ll be returning to Shaky Knees, Atlanta’s premier rock music festival, for the first time in four years. What brought me out of my slumber? It’s funny, almost a full year after Getting Killed, to say it was Geese. Even ignoring that bot-marketing exposé, I simply haven’t revisited the album since Christmas. Already it feels like a time capsule—less a reflection of their artistic legacy than my life’s insistence on stampeding onward.
I’m subject to a lopsided and very minor synesthesia—I see colors with my numbers. I associate the early integers, 1 through 9, each with a hue. 1 is sunflower, 2 the blue of dusk. 3 is green. 4 is neon fuchsia. 5 is marigold, 6 is midnight. 7 is blood red, 8 is maroon. 9 is pale and jaundiced yellow.
Atlanta has long claimed the symbol of the phoenix. Set ablaze by Sherman in the Civil War, it charged into the unknown to become a city rebuilt. No loss at all, depending on who you ask. There are material benefits to leaving history in the ashes. With the pages all burnt, power rewrites the story.
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.
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.
In 2021, I wrestled with the impossible: I isolated the 100 greatest songs ever written. Five years later, I'm ready to reckon with the terror I hath wrought—it’s time to expand the list from 100 to 200. That’s right: we’re adding a cool hundred to the Earwyrms Canon.