Will is dragged by his sister to the concert of a band he doesn't care about but then he see the beautiful singer and wow

“Jane PLEASE don’t make me!”

Will was sitting on his bed, completely dressed and ready to go. He had been fine with the idea of going to the concert with Jane up until she showed him a picture of the band they were seeing. Now he would rather do anything else.

“Will, why?! You were so excited just moments ago!” Jane was at her brother’s door frame, looking adorably punk, if that were a thing. “Moment” was the Hop’s word-of-the-day a week or two ago and it had become her favorite word since. It was sweet.

“You didn’t tell me the lead singer was that cute! And we were going to be that close to them!”

“Dad won them from a radio show, I didn’t get to choose what seats we got! And I’m sure none of the band members will even notice you, you blend in with the crowd!”

Will looked down at his black slacks and tee shirt. He hadn’t tried to look nice, he was just going because he had figured it would be a good time. Now he was having second thoughts.

“Will, come on!” His sister pleaded with him. How was he supposed to turn her down now? Especially for such a profound reason. She was right, anyway. He’ll probably go unnoticed.

—

After showing their tickets to the guard, they shuffled to their seats, which were quite literally right in front of the stage. Not center, at least, rather to the far left. Will’s palms were already sweaty but he’s never seen Jane smile for this long so he tries to enjoy himself. The opening bands are decent, pretty good actually.

The last opener left the stage and it was silent and ominous for several moments. Then every light in the amphitheater went out. Most of the audience screeched in anticipation. The large televisions came on with a big “10” plastered across each screen. Then 9... then 8.... oh gosh. Will’s stomach began churning. Jane grabbed his arm in excitement and smiled up at him, pearly whites showing and bright eyes lighting up the dark space. Will was calmed.

3... 2... 1.

Will was not calm. He had to fight the urge to cover his ears at the sound of screaming bouncing off every wall of the large room. Goosebumps covered his skin as he saw the lead singer run onto the stage with a gleeful expression.

He really didn’t think it could have gotten louder in the room but it did, so Will’s hands impulsively covered his sensitive ears.

He closed his eyes tightly for just a few seconds, exhaled, and looked onto the stage. The band was already setting up to play their first song.

It was a soft ballad.... odd for their first song. He expected a lot of energy but... it was nice. Cute.

The singer, who’s name turns out to be Mike, Will learned, had his eyes closed during the first few lines of the song. There was already a thin layer of sweat covering his face that made him look like he was glistening under the spotlight. Will’s mouth was slightly open while he admired the boy’s chocolate brown curls and seemingly hollowed out cheeks.

His eyes opened and stared directly at Will while singing the next lines:

What a sight for sore eyes

Brighter than a blue sky

Mike continued singing while swiftly smirking at Will before closing his eyes again.

That did not just happen Will thought. His cheeks were so flushed, it felt like he had just ate a lemon. He looked over at Jane to see if she could tell but she was paying attention to the show rather then specifically the singer. Will should try that, maybe then he wouldn’t feel so ridiculous.

—

The rest of the show was pretty normal. The band got more energetic as it went on, they closed with a real “banger” as referred to by Jane.

There were a few more times he could swear Mike and himself had made eye contact, but then again it could definitely just be his imagination. He was probably looking at everyone in the audience, Will’s nothing special.

They walked out of the venue and to the parking lot, they were on their way to Will’s car when Jane grabbed his arm.

“Wh-” Will began to question but then she pointed to a tall figure in a black zipped-up hoodie. He seemed to be walking toward them.

He grabbed the mace he kept on his keychain for situations just like this, “Don’t try anything.”

Will’s stern voice seemed to have startled the thin boy because he stopped in his tracks. “Oh! Oh no uhm...” he pulled off his hood to reveal the same performer they had just seen on stage.

“Sorry, I wasn’t tryi-”

“Holy shit!” Jane exclaimed.

Will was speechless. What. Was. Happening.

“Uhm...” Mike chuckled awkwardly (cutely Will thought) before finishing his previously interrupted sentence, “I wasn’t trying to scare you or anything I just didn’t want to draw attention. I... wanted to come meet you guys. Noticed you in the crowd. Caught my eye.”

“Oh, you don’t have to include me I caught you two eye fucking between every other song. I’ll give you two a moment but you BETTER not leave before signing my CD.”

Jane winked at Will, took the keys from his hand, and walked past a few vehicles before finding theirs and taking a seat in the passenger side.

Will didn’t speak. He couldn’t.

Mike chuckled again, he was very awkward for someone who can jump around widely on stage without a care in the world. “I uh... didn’t mean to eye fuck you, if that’s what happened.”

“No, no it’s fine. Jane just likes to... well she... I’m not exactly sure why she says the things she does sometimes.”

Another chuckle escaped the curly headed boy. “Okay so I’ll just cut to the chase because it’s late and I’m not supposed to be here and I’m sure you need to get home so.... I’m in town for a few more days and you’re insanely cute if my eye fucking didn’t make that completely obvious so I would love to hang out with you if that’s possible? I can give you my number.”

That did not just happen Will thought for the second time that night. The only thing he heard from the ramble was: “you’re insanely cute,” “eye fucking,” and, “my number.”

“Yes.”

The simple answer received a blush and a deep, beautiful smile from the other boy. He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to the boy. Their fingers mingled for a moment. Will unfolded the paper to see 10 digits. This was really happening.

“Shit, I’ve really got to get back to my band. Tell your sister I’ll have all of us sign her CD if you bring it with you. That is, if we do get to hang out. So the pressure’s on you.” The taller boy winked, smiled, and ran past Will after putting the hood back over his head.

Speechless, Will walked to his car and took the driver’s seat.

“What the hell! He was supposed to sign my CD!” Jane was clearly upset, the disc was in one hand and a Sharpie in the other.

“Don’t worry. It’ll get signed.”

*******************************************************

Hey, I hope this is okay. I kinda rushed it because I wanted to get it out for you so it’s not my best but I tried!! Please enjoy :)

The lyrics are from Heather by Canon Gray which is really good!! Go listen!!

I’m going to start working on my other request ASAP so don’t worry!!

Horse Power.

The Nest’s writer-director Sean Durkin talks about creating atmosphere, watching films without judgment, and the best movies of 1986.

Downfalls in Hollywood movies tend to be chaotic, dramatic and a lot of fun along the way. From Citizen Kane to The Wolf of Wall Street, outsized ambitions are realized on screen in castles, exotic holidays, wild parties, sweeping us up in the extravagance of it all, before the inevitable crash. The Nest takes a slower, far more British view of ambition and its effects on family—or, as Charlie writes, “this movie is a reminder that people who call themselves entrepreneurs should instead be stay-at-home dads”.

The new film from writer-director Sean Durkin, the brain behind cult-survivor slow-burn Martha Marcy May Marlene, is less “strap in and enjoy the ride”, more “slow disintegration of all sense of sanity”—a tense psychological drama focused on the person who usually gets hurt the most: the wife. And that horse-lovin’ dream wife Allison, as played by Carrie Coon, is a character to behold (and the subject of many obsessive The Nest reviews on Letterboxd).

Just as Durkin takes time to carefully explore Martha’s vulnerability in his earlier film, in The Nest, he closes in on Allison, as she and their children adjust to 1980s life in an English manor, far from the comfort of Allison’s American home, while wheeler-dealer husband Rory (Jude Law) chases a new opportunity.

There are thematic similarities in both films; a case to be made that ambitious men wreak a comparable mental destruction on their families as cult leaders do on their followers, breaking them down with charm, persuasion, false promises. There’s also something about the juxtaposition of periods in the film—the fifteenth-century manor vs the ’80s bangers on the soundtrack—that adds to The Nest’s unnerving atmosphere (other parts of the soundtrack are composed by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry in his first film-score credit).

Keen to understand more about Durkin’s influences and memories, Jack Moulton put him through the Letterboxd Life in Film interrogation.

Carrie Coon as Allison O’Hara in ‘The Nest’.

The Nest feels like a very personal film. In what ways are the emotions of the premise personal to you? When I was making Southcliffe in 2012, I was back in England where I spent my childhood and I hadn’t been back in close to twenty years. It really struck me how London and New York felt very similar now but they didn’t when I was a kid. I thought maybe I wanted to make a film about a family that moves in that time and how a move can affect a family. As I wrote the script, I became a parent, so it became as much a reflection of modern adulthood as it did about my childhood in the ’80s. Although it’s a period piece, I wanted to make it feel very close to today to look at the celebrated values of the time and how those are still very relevant.

The mansion the family moves into is the titular ‘nest’, and the use of space and atmosphere contribute so much to the film’s subtext. What were you looking for when location scouting for the house? Was it an easy or difficult process? Yeah, it was difficult. It was like doing an open casting call. I had a very specific idea in my head but [my production designer] was able to put it into actual architectural terms so we were able to find a house that a successful commodities broker would live and commute from in Surrey. We needed something beyond that, but if you go too far, you get small castles. Once we located the right exterior, there were a bunch of [houses] that would’ve been great, but when we got inside, there were no open spaces. I wanted to have long hallways to be able to see through multiple rooms to create that isolation—the opposite of the cozy American house that they were living in before, to really highlight the good life they left behind.

Carrie Coon and Jude Law in ‘The Nest’.

We love the soundtrack; not just the choice of songs but the way that they’re mixed. Can you give us some insight into the song selection? When writing, I build a playlist that I write to. This one was a mix of personal memories from childhood—like Simply Red, which takes me back to falling asleep in the back of my dad’s car—so there’s a way into writing there on a sensory level, and then I build upon it with songs that I love from the time. I was listening to Richard Reed Parry’s Music for Heart and Breath album a lot and he ended up being the composer of the film, so his music was always part of the heart of the movie as I was writing it.

I would spend my drives to set with my assistant talking about music and he would turn me onto some stuff that would make it into the movie. It was a mix of a long-running preparation and things that I pick up in the moment then making that all work at the right level so it feels of the world. Like with The Cure, we actually played that off a tape cassette when Allison walks into the room.

Since your debut feature in 2011, you’ve had a prolific career in television and as a film producer; you’re a founding member of Borderline Films with fellow directors Antonio Campos and Josh Mond. Do you see yourself more as a producer who only occasionally directs films yourself? No, I don’t really consider myself a producer. I’ve produced movies for filmmakers and friends and I help people where I can. I’m not someone who’s out getting properties and thinking about how to put together a film, I’m only thinking about my own work as a writer and a director. Between finishing Southcliffe in 2013 and The Nest in 2018, I had a five-year gap where I was developing lots of projects one after the other—two features and a television show—that were both so close to [being greenlit] but something fell through, which was really bad luck.

What film made you want to become a filmmaker? The Goonies and Back to the Future were those movies as a kid that first made me want to make movies and tell stories, but the moment where I realized what filmmaking is was seeing The Shining. I saw it for the first time when I was eleven or twelve and a friend showed it to me because his older brother had the VHS. It was my first time understanding atmosphere and direction and I just had a sense that I could do it too. It was a really crucial moment, and I kept that thought to myself for a very long time.

Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély shoots Carrie Coon in Soho.

What’s your scariest film that is not technically horror? AKA, your area of expertise. Oh man, scariest? Something I’ve watched recently is The Vanishing and it’s probably one of the most unsettling films I’ve ever seen. It was incredible to rewatch it because I’d last seen it when I was in college—I watched everything back then—and I’d also seen the American remake, so when I watched it this time, I was trying to remember things [that were different] from the remake. I was like “he’s gonna get out, right?—oh no, that’s in the American version!” I find it an astonishing movie. There’s a real human element to the pain of the killer.

Let’s nerd out: what’s your top film of 1986, the year that The Nest is set? [Laughs] I’ve no idea what came out in 1986. Can I look up a list and I’ll tell you? Let’s see, films of 1986… This is fun! Alright, “popular films of 1986” I’m seeing: Blue Velvet, Short Circuit, Stand by Me, Platoon, The Color of Money, what else have we got here? River’s Edge… Pretty in Pink… Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—Ferris Bueller’s gotta be up there. Big Trouble in Little China! That’s it! I’m sure there’s other things, but from my quick search, I’d say Big Trouble in Little China. That was a movie that was always on in my house because it was one of my dad’s all-time favorites.

Which is Jude Law’s best performance? I love The Talented Mr. Ripley so much. I constantly rewatch that movie—it’s perfect. I also loved him in Vox Lux recently.

Sean Durkin and Jude Law on the set of ‘The Nest’.

What is the best film about marriage and why does it resonate with you? Shoot the Moon was really influential for me. I’d say it’s a bit more about divorce and family than it is about marriage but [it depends on] if you take the ending to mean that they’re going to stay together—I kind of do. You could say a separation is part of a marriage. I love that movie for how it finds light in humor. Albert Finney is struggling with his masculinity where, even though he’s the one who left, he still thinks he owns it all, and Diane Keaton is quite liberated by this scenario. It’s like their journey to find language again. I find it very beautiful.

Which film was your entry-point into international cinema? I’m trying to think back to what I would’ve seen, there certainly wasn’t a lot growing up. In college I really discovered Michael Haneke and Michelangelo Antonioni. L’Avventura made a huge impact on me. I think [because of the way] the mystery kind of dissolves and it’s about the journey, not the solution.

What film do you wish you’d made? I don’t. Filmmaking is personal and it’s so much an expression of perspective when done with care and love—though obviously, there’s stuff that’s just churned out. I never see something and say “I wish I made that”. One of the things I find hard is when people critique films and say they would’ve done this differently. I’ve become very sensitive to that over time because every choice you make as a filmmaker is so specific and thought out. I try to consume movies without knowing anything about them or making any kind of judgment. I just let them be what they are and wash over me.

Which newcomer director should we all keep our eyes on? I don’t think I’m looking out for new stuff necessarily. Once I get to see something, everyone else already knows about it. One person I would say is Dave Franco, who I just worked with on The Rental. I was an executive producer and I was a creative bounce-board for Dave through the process. It’s his first film and it’s astonishingly directed. We were getting dailies from the first week and we were like, “This is his first movie? This is insane!” I think he will do some exciting things.

Finally, what’s your favorite film of 2020 so far? I was absolutely blown away by Eliza Hittman’s film Never Rarely Sometimes Always. I miss having retrospectives at local theaters, which I’m always keyed into no matter the city I’m living in. I’ve started watching a lot of Criterion Channel and I watched a movie recently that’s taken over my brain: Variety, by Bette Gordon, from 1983. It’s set in New York City around Times Square, and it’s this incredible journey that this woman goes on that captured my mind.

Related content

Sean Durkin’s Life in Film list

Sean Durkin’s Sight & Sound Top 10

Clarissa’s list of films that burn slowly

Everything Carrie Coon watched during quarantine (and the best of that huge list)

Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon’s 24-Hour Movie Marathon

Follow Jack on Letterboxd

Afterburner by Dance Gavin Dance

“Classic acid.”

Release Date: April 24th.

Label: Rise Records.

With 8 studio albums under their belts, a three way split fanbase because of the various singers both entering and leaving the band and having a knack for the more obscure approach to post-hardcore, where does a band like Dance Gavin Dance go with their 9th release? To say every one of their albums was a polarizing release would be an understatement, with current falsetto dominant frontman Tilian Pearson being the longest running one of the three that have graced the band with their presence. Afterburner carries on that trend ever so strongly, while managing to be yet even more obscure than anything the band has done thus far.

Now if I wanted to just end the review right here and just bluntly say that this album was a mixed bag for me I definitely could, but that’s no fun. Please allow me to explain. When the album’s opener “Prisoner” was dropped a few months back, the song took me back a little time wise. It took me back to the genre’s simpler, more straight forward roots. I’ve already explained the song in depth on my review for it so I won’t go into too much detail but my consensus was that It’s definitely a banger. With solid performances from Tilian and the band on both the verses and especially the chorus, that ending break down just ices the cake, leaving me to look forward to what the band had written for the entirety of Afterburner. “Lyrics Lie”, another single provides another straight forward affair, with some of Will’s signature tapping guitar trickery to sweeten the sound mixed with both Jon and Tilian going back and forth in a shouting match towards the end of the chorus. The only way I can describe his unclean vocals are a rough mix of Anthony Green’s shouts and a little hint of Craig Owens’ shrill mids. The album comes to an almost screeching halt when the third track “Calentamiento Global” follows, leaving me confused about why the band decided that Reggaeton and experimental Post-Hardcore mix well. Tilian’s delivery just ends up being underwelming, as well as awkward sounding. Even Jon’s obviously superior performance can’t save this easily passable track. Both tracks “Three Wishes” and “Parody Catharsis” are somewhat of a relief, but at the same time aren’t really groundbreaking material for the band in general. The band follows this decent song-bland song pattern almost entirely throughout, which is what ultimately gives me my underwhelming impression of it, even after multiple listens. Practically every song is predictable by this point, some experimental instrumental gimmick that is supposed to be interesting, Tilian singing the same self loathing context he’s used since the Acceptance Speech days, with Jon and Matt in constrast doing what they do best. This in my opinion is their recipe for the inconsistency. The light at the end of the tunnel clearly are the two best tracks on the album, “Night Sway” and “Nothing Shameful”. The tenth track is a no frills, straight up freight train of a tune, with Will’s wall of a riff mixed with Matt’s classic quick pedal work in full force, tied together by Jon’s perfectly executed screams. Tilian’s pre-chorus and chorus performance actually shines well here, with soaring vocals and possibly one of the catchiest melodies on Afterburner. Coupled with Swan’s frantic tapping and intricate riffage, all of these elements make for a compelling track that the band is truly capable of churning out when they’re not trying so hard to fix what ultimately isn’t broken. “Nothing Shameful” is another excellent example of what the group can pull of when they really try to write the way they’re best at. Just like Night Sway, the opening riff hit’s the listener with full force while the precise drum work accompanies the tasteful guitar licks in a way that only these two musicians can pull off. Tilian is nothing less than excellent here as well, providing his signature soaring falsetto in most of this stand out track. The best quality about this song though is the stellar performance by Eidola’s own Andrew Wells, closing the track out using beautifully harmonizing vocals with lyrics that gnaw at you like no other lyric on this album. “Where to now? What happened to my fucking purpose? I am just a stone sinking, broken and numb. Where to now? The way you made me, made worthless. Truth is in the end, we all end up alone.”

Even with how great these two tracks are, unfortunately they aren’t enough to save the album from being the weakest release in their catalogue. Even an album like the band’s Self-Titled, while is definitely challenging to appreciate, had some kind of charm to it’s quirkiness and somewhat lackluster songwriting on some instances. Afterburner to me just feels like the band experimented with new elements, took risks and ultimately threw their fanbase another curve ball, which is fair game and what they usually do to their success. The difference this time around though is that it feels like they did solely for the sake of experimentation alone, which weakened their songwriting abilities as a whole. Kurt is to Happiness as Tilian is to Mothership, leaving Afterburner an almost decent, yet disjointed mess of ideas that just don’t quite match the quality of the band’s consistent solid work that they have relentlessly churned out album after album up until this point.

Favorite Tracks:

1. Prisoner

10. Night Sway

12. Nothing Shameful featuring Andrew Wells of Eidola.

Burned Out Pt. 2 | s.m

this is part 2. catch up here.

warning: LONG ASS CHAPTER BECAUSE I HAD SO MANY IDEAS THAT I WANTED TO FIT IN UWU hope this makes you CRY / lots of build up i'm so soRrry (ran out of text blocks on this one so had to shorten it RIP)

The last time Shawn saw you was at his album launch party. He was reluctant to invite you, for reasons innumerable, but he couldn't not invite you either. He could tell you didn't want to be there, tell that you were all but shrivelling under the gaze of his friends and colleagues. Only you didn't know why until after you listened to the album.

To one's surprise but yours, you were his muse. Not for a song or two, like you had expected, but for an entire album. Titled Because I Had You, Shawn's fourth studio album was a sixteen track masterpiece lined with one heartbreak anthem after another. If you thought the title single was bad, the rest of the album had you sobbing in bed at night, stomach churning at the thought that the entire world was now a witness to what were supposed to be private moments, only for the two of you and no one else to see. It wasn't even the subtly sexual songs like Particular Taste that maddened you, but the way he wrote about your love. Bold, powerful, passionate — when, in reality, it was everything but.

What Shawn and you had was delicate. It was beautiful, like a dainty flower creeping through cracks in a cemented floor. Like a green leaf on an autumn day. Not what he wrote, and definitely not what his music videos portrayed.

And that was that. Whatever little hope you had harboured of Shawn being a nice person, of him respecting your wishes and leaving you the hell alone after what happened went down the drain. All you had expected from him after the terrible way he'd left you, no questions asked, was your private life back. No instagram posts, no tweets, and certainly no interviewers entertained. He had seemed sincere enough when he promised to do nothing of the sort, pinky finger held out to you in the adorable manner that only he could pull off. Your heart had lurched, then, calling yourself stupid to ever think that Shawn would disrespect you like that.

And then when the album came out — you hadn't told him not to write songs about you, had you? So it was only fair. He kept his end of the promise, he said. Never took your name, he said. But he did name you, in every other way possible. Your eyes. Your hair. Your scent. The books you read, the songs you sung. All out in the world for people to listen to, and pick you apart. All because he needed a banger of an album to top his previous ones and what better publicity than an unexplained, undramatic breakup, right?

In that moment, you'd said Fuck him and never looked back.

Until today. Despite pushing it back for as long as possible, your friends had coaxed you into hosting a party at your place, since you had completely distanced yourself for the best part of the year after the breakup. It hurt too much to see Shawn completely unbothered, drinking the night away, a girl that wasn't you snuggling into his side. God, you weren't jealous when you were together, so why did it hurt so much to see him with someone else when you two were apart? But your friends being your friends had managed to weasle their way back in, and here you are again. And here Shawn is again.

For the most part, you avoid him. You know he's been looking at you all night, stealing glances when his date doesn't isnt looking, his cheeks tinged red with the alcohol he'd been nursing, loud laughter reverberating through the room. Know he's been looking for signs of him all over your apartment, little titbits of the glorious time you had together.

Tough luck, champ, you scoff to yourself as you head towards the fridge to get out another case of beers out and ready on the counter. As soon as you were coherent enough to function again, the first thing you did was dump all his things in a storage unit and mail him the key. You couldn't bare even the briefest of conversations, and that was the best solution you could come up with at the time.

Well, everything except the ring. While all the love and fondness attached to the piece of jewellery had completely vanished over time, its value still remained. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get rid of it. Probably never will, either, but that's a story for another day.

But you digress. Currently, like always, you have more pressing matters on hand. Your fridge seems to be all out of Coronas, and while your friends like to act pretentious, no amount of Chardonnay can get them buzzing like a gold old bottle of beer. Sighing to yourself, you decide the only solution is a quick run to the liquor store, since you're the only one sober enough for the job. You smooth your dress down, grabbing your keys as you announce your departure to your shitfaced friends.

"I'll be back in fifteen minutes, tops. Please, for the love of God, do not touch my record player."

"Are we allowed to go into your lingerie drawer?" One of your friends, Kooper teases, raising his glass of scotch towards you. You grin, lifting a shoulder in response, "If you can find it, sure."

"I'm sure Shawn can help," Comes a slurred reply, and you can feel your cheeks start to redden. There's a couple of chuckles around the room, and before Shawn gathers his thoughts to respond, you're pulling the door shut behind you.

Shawn is left staring at the door, where you were standing mere seconds ago. His neck feels hot at the thought of going anywhere near your lingerie drawer again, so he chooses to keep quiet. Taking his bottom lip between his teeth, he tries to focus on what his date is saying (something about politics, he really doesn't understand a lot), but it's hard to ignore the dull ache in his heart, growing more painful with every second that passes.

You look gorgeous. Ravishing, almost. And Shawn's always known that, always questioned how exactly he ended up with a catch like you in the first place. Especially tonight, however, because you're wearing red and it's such a look against your tan skin that it has his mind spinning at the sight. The beer in his veins is enough to keep him floating a few centimetres above reality, chucking him into an alternate universe where he didn't break your heart and your trust, and you didn't hate him for either of those two.

His date places a hand on his thigh, and he reacts almost immediately. Although her touch is innocent, hands still animatedly flying around, his mind is everything but.

"Hey, babe," He interrupts sheepishly, "While I would love to talk about Trump for the rest of the night, is it cool if we... get out of here?"

Her smirk then is one that has him blanching in anticipation. It's just the right amount of teasing with a lethal amount of mischief as she grabs at his collar, leaning in close to whisper into his ear, "Why do you want to get out of here? We can do whatever you need, for however long you need, right here."

Even shitfaced, Shawn knows he's breaking every fucking rule in the How To Act Around An Ex 101 rulebook if he follows through with what she's suggesting. Normal exes don't even invite each other to their houses, let alone fuck someone else while they're out. That doesn't stop him though, because seconds later the pair are excusing themselves and stumbling blindly into a bedroom, her lips attached to his and his fingers digging into her sides.

He smells you the moment his back hits the bed, your citrus scent all he can remember from the time you two spent together. However, before he can mull on the fact that This might not be the guest bedroom, her fingers are tangling into his curls and body pressing against his front. The moan that tumbles out of his lips when she sucks at his neck is almost pornographic, appalled at how quick she found his spot.

Not as quick as you had, however — because the first time Shawn and you had gone to town was a day that he would never forget. You had him reeling and begging under you with just your fingers and mouth, placing your fingers against his chest to push him back down every time he got a little too excited. He had never been happier to lose control than in that moment.

Fuck, he thinks as his date's hand palms at his crotch, I really shouldn't be thinking about my ex right now.

Right now? His mind answers almost instantly, Pretty hard when you're literally always thinking about her, right?

He's so lost in his thoughts and her touch that he doesn't hear the door to the bedroom opening, or even notice the light that streams into the room from the corridor outside. However, when a voice exclaims, "Jesus fuck, Shawn!"

His eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim lighting of the room as he tries to figure out who it was that shouted at him, and he breathes a sigh of relief when he sees that it's just Geoff. Not you. Thank fucking God for that. He rubs lazily at his face, turning away from the door, but Geoff isn't having any of it. Asking his date to please leave, he slams the door shut behind her, storming over to Shawn.

"What the fuck, dude?!"

"What?" Comes Shawn's annoyed mumble, "Jealous you aren't getting any?"

"How much have you had to drink?" He grabs Shawn's chin, inspecting his eyes to see just how red they are for him to pull some dumb shit like this. When he sees that he's not even close to being as drunk as Geoff first assumed him to be, he steps away. Scoffing in disgust, he continues, "You were going to have sex on your ex's bed? What is wrong with you?"

"I thought it was the guest bedroom."

"No the fuck you didn't, Shawn," He's pushing a hand through his hair, fingers clenching around his cup in anger, "You're still not satisfied with what you did? Wanna break her heart even further?"

"What the fuck are you talking about? It was a mutual breakup."

"Was it, though? Or were you just as self-centred then and didn't give a single shit about what she did or did not say?"

"Shut the fuck up, Geoff," Shawn gets up, pushing his friend away, but Geoff's fingers are curling around his arm before he can storm off.

"No, you listen to me. I've had enough of your bullshit. You're my brother, man, but she's more than a sister to me. It hurts me to see her hurting, and if you can't behave around her, just stop showing up. She's been through enough already. Can you imagine her reaction if she was the one who had walked in on you? It would've killed her, Shawn."

"I don't— what are you talking about? We're over. We've both moved on."

Geoff's scoff is painfully mocking, and Shawn is narrowing his eyes in anger, "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Move on? It's almost sad how hung up on each other you guys are. You can't stop writing songs about her, and she can't stop—" Geoff trails off, catching himself before he can let anything spill. You would absolutely annihilate him, and that's not something he wants.

"What?" Shawn spits, "She can't what?"

"It doesn't matter," He mutters through grit teeth, "If you can man the fuck up and apologise for all the shit you've pulled on her, great. If you can't and want to continue being an ass so you can cash in your cheques, fucking fine by me. Just stop coming over when she's around. I didn't take taekwondo for nothing."

"You're not seriously threatening me."

"Try me."

"Fuck you, Geoff. You don't know jackshit about what happened between us."

"Yeah? Let me summarise, then. You got over her, you dumped her. Don't you dare make it sound any deeper than that," Shawn opens his mouth to protest, but Geoff isn't done yet, "And then you proceeded to make an entire album about your love, something so volatile and so private, and released it without her consent. She could've sued you for defamation, but she didn't. Do you know why?"

Shawn shakes his head, bottom lip latched between his teeth. There's so many thoughts running through his head that he doesn't even have the energy or the mental faculties to give his friend any attitude anymore. After the breakup, the both of you had managed to convince your friends that it was long coming, mutual, and amicable. Shawn had wanted it to be that way because he didn't want to be painted as a douche for springing something so sudden on you, and you had gone along with it because...well, he had no idea why. Maybe he should've asked.

"Because she's still in love with you, you fucking jerk. And it isn't my place to tell you this, but if it keeps you away from her, then so be it.You got over her, Shawn, but you didn't give her any time to ease out of it. You kept showing up with new girls every time, kept releasing these...these PG-13 sex tapes. The album was probably the final blow. With everything you did, her condition worsened, and we all saw it. We thought you did too, dude, because it was so painfully obvious."

There's a sour taste in Shawn's mouth, like the acidic tinge that puking leaves in your mouth. He's pretty sure he's completely sober now, but his mind keeps spinning, to the point where he has to sit down to steady himself.

"What have I done, Geoff?"

"I put up with this for as long as I possibly could, but it's not funny anymore. If not for her, please— for me, stop what you're doing. No amount of fame and money is worth the pain you put her through."

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," Shawn rubs at his face, trying to slap some reality back into him. He didn't break up with you because he got over you. He broke up with you because he was sure he never would. It took him a while to realise how toxic your relationship was getting for him, with no fault of your own. He had fallen and sunken so deep that if you had asked him to throw himself in front of a moving car, he would've done it, no questions asked. To the point where he was so dependant on you that it physically hurt him to leave you. Where he was so used to you helping him through his attacks that one without you make him felt like he was going to die.

His mom had called him stupid, told him that he had let the best thing in his life go because he couldn't commit. But Shawn knew love, and love wasn't supposed to be so scary. He cried because that was the most difficult thing he had done in his life, to date. Not even releasing a completely different genre of album, not knowing if anyone would enjoy listening to something so raw, had made him shiver so bad.

The last thing he wanted was to hurt you. He cared about nothing more than you. The album was a desperate cry for help, him putting out into the world just how much he needed you, as a friend or otherwise. Instead of forgiving him, you chose to distance yourself from him. In hurting you, he had completely broken himself. That's what they say, isn't it; play with fire, and you're bound to get burnt.

"Just— take it easy, man," Geoff claps a hand down on Shawn's shoulder, "The situation sucks over all, don't make it harder than it has to be. Also," He opens Shawn's palm, dropping your lost earring into his hand, "Put this back, 'kay? I don't know where it goes. l'll meet you outside."

Shawn nods solemnly, waiting until he hears Geoff's footsteps fade and the door click shut after him. Forcing himself to breathe, Shawn manoeuvres around your room, suddenly overwhelmed with the memories that surrounded his time there. The self-care nights, the pillow fights, the cuddling. The I love yous. He gulps, trying to see as little as possible of his favourite place in the world, pulling open a drawer in your vanity. Carefully dropping the earring on a glass tray, he moves it around a bit to make it easier for you to find it if you were looking for it.

Just as he's about to close the drawer, something catches his eye, causing him to pull the drawer open a little farther to inspect. Nestled behind one of your divider trays is a simple, tiny, royal blue suede box. Shawn's eyebrows furrow — He had never seen that before, had he? It could only hold a ring, he was a pretty sure, and he finds himself reaching towards the box before his conscience can stop him. He turns the small cuboid in his fingers, illuminated by the soft light mounted atop your vanity. Dried water drops stain the otherwise smooth surface, and his lips part in realisation not long after. That's not water, is it?

Deciding not to mull too long, he flicks the box open. Immediately, he desperately wishes he hadn't, because he feels his breath catch in his throat. Sitting inside the box is the most beautiful ring he's probably ever seen, silver and glinting in pride. As he brings it up to his face to inspect it better, he notices the strinking resemblance it has to his own ring, the one he had bought in Tokyo and never taken off after. There's two feathers interlinked together, just like on his ring, but there's a third, more intricate one binding the other two together in a perfect knot. He doesn't know what to make of it, doesn't know why he found it in your drawer, so he stands there. Twisting the ring in his finger, trying to convince himself that it has nothing to do with him.

And then the light catches the inscription on the inside of the band, and Shawn steps closer to the table to see better, eyes narrowed and nose scrunched in concentration.

120915 to forever, I'll love you.

12th September 2015 — Shawn doesn't even need to rack his brain to remember that that was the day you had first told him that you loved him. You were both strolling through the park, laughing about the fact that were people in the world who bit their ice creams, when you had stopped him midstep. Leaned in, kissed his nose, and told him that you loved him. The blush that coloured the both of your faces after was the most fiery shade of red that Shawn had seen. 120915; the last track on his album.

Shawn's mind is immediately thrown into a frenzy. He would be an idiot if he tries to deny the fact that the ring in his hand is most certainly an engagement band, because it looks too expensive to be a promise ring and the two of you had already exchanged your promise rings a year back. But when, how, and why? Why is there an engagement ring so obviously designed for Shawn just sitting in your drawer? Why are there tear stains on the box? Why does the forever looked like it had been scratched at?

Slamming the drawer shut, he all but stumbles out of the bedroom, making a beeline towards your kitchen. If his date sees him or any of your friends notice his panicked state, they choose not to comment on it, distancing themselves from the distressed boy. Slowly but surely, each of them trickle out as Shawn digs through your kitchen cabinet, looking for a file he knows would answer all his questions. When Geoff is the only one left, he contemplates staying. He owes you that much — not leaving you alone with an ex that you're still head over heels for, but he decides against it. You deserve the closure. The both of you deserve and need the closure, and if it means leaving you to deal with your vices, then he is ready to make the sacrifice.

Shawn doesn't notice a single thing around him, all his attention focused on the binders sprawled across him on the island. Carefully thumbing through the files, he ticks off the months in his head — July, August, September, October, November. Immediately flipping to the month of November, he pulls out all the receipts you had so carefully filed and spreads them in front of him. Wild eyes flying across the documents in hopes of finding what he's looking for.

And not long after, he does. A tiny, barely noticeable piece of paper, labelled Bijoux, avec Amour — Jewellery, with Love — printed on the top in cursive. He swears his heart plummets to the very core of the earth when he sees the date on the bill: 7th November 2018.

Not even two weeks before he left you.

His mouth dries out, and he has trouble inhaling. Falling to his knees, Shawn stares between the box and the receipt, feeling his body shake with sudden, overwhelming fatigue. His head feels heavy, like it's been bashed against a stone and left wide open, waiting to be stitched up. His breaths are coming out exaggerated, wild, making it seem like he's just run a marathon. He has, though, hasn't he? He's raced against time. Against your love for him. And Jesus Christ has he lost.

It doesn't take a genius to join the dots with all the hints laid out right in front of him — literally. You were going to ask him to marry you, and he had taken that hope, balled it up, and spat it back into your face. Maybe he should've had another track on his album, a track about how much of an idiot he had been. He would've titled it I'm Worse Than a Fucking Munchurian Ball.

You expect chaos when you return, because really, what good can a bunch of drunk adults get up to? And chaos you get, but definitely not the kind you had anticipated. At first you're confused to see your house empty, no signs of life anywhere. You weren't gone for that long, were you? And then your attention pans to the kitchen, and suddenly you're living that day again. Shawn staring back at you, teary eyed, hands in fists, and you helplessy trying to maintain his gaze.

You immediately start assumed the worse. He's hurt, he had an anxiety attack, his date did something. When you rush towards him, however, dropping the bags in your hands and falling to your knees, you see what you had never, ever wanted to see. His ring — in his hand. He's holding it up to you, so close to your face that you have to lean back to get a better look. Your hands are balling into fists at your sides, stomach twisting into knots. When your gaze falls to the bills strewn on the counter, you know you're done for. Shawn knows. He knows everything.

Fuck.

"Shawn," You try to keep your voice as level as possible, but it inevitably starts breaking, "Where did you find that?"

"You wanted to marry me," Shawn's voice is monotonous, his eyes glazed over. He can barely meet your eyes, gaze focused behind you instead, "You wanted to spend the rest of your life with me. And I.... I fucking dumped you."

You have seen Shawn cry before. Seen him breakdown before. Never, ever had he sounded as defeated as he does right now, like the very life had been sucked out of him, like it was paining him to utter mere words.

Exactly how you had felt all this while.

"Shawn..."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"This," he wags the ring in your face, sniffling loudly, "Was this with you when I broke up with you?"

You nod, feeling your heart pull at the sight of him so... so distressed, so lost. You can feel tears of your own starting to form, but you try pushing them back. This time, however, it doesn't work. They start flowing down your face like fireworks on the 4th of July; loud, uninterrupted, and seemingly with no end. You fall limply against the counter, feeling Shawn watch your every move. Wiping beneath your nose with the back of your hand, you manage to choke out, "Yes.. and—and I was so fucking sure you were going to say yes when I asked you. And then you—"

You can't find it in yourself to continue, and Shawn's hands go into his hair, tugging at the roots in utter frustration and helplessness. He had claimed that the both of you had moved on not even an hour ago, and now he can't even find it in himself to laugh at the irony of the situation. Two adults, crying on a kitchen floor. What a fucking joke.

"You should've told me," Shawn mutters through tears, rocking back and forth, "God, if only you had told me— it would've changed everything."

It's your turn to be angry now, and your body shivers as you spit, "Told you so you could laugh at me? Tell your friends about the girl who proposed to you as you were breaking up with her?"

"No! No, you don't get it, do you? I would've said yes. I would've called a priest and married you then and fucking then."

"No," you mutter, shaking your head. Louder, you repeat, "No, you don't get to do this. You don't get to feed me these lies and these Would Haves and What Ifs!" Pushing against his chest, you sob harder, "You didn't get to leave me! But you did. You left me when I was so in love with you that I could see nothing else. Fuck you, Shawn. Fuck you for leaving me."

"Slap me."

"Shut up."

He grabs your hand, placing it against his wet cheek, all but begging you, "Please, slap me. Punch me. I fucking deserve it."

You pull your hand away, cradling it to your chest, as if his touch burns you, "I don't want to fucking slap you! It won't fix anything."

"What— what will fix everything?" Shawn's hiccuping now, eyes red from his tears, "What can I do to go back? What will it take for you to forgive me?"

"I don't know, Shawn," You reply between fits, shaking your head, "I don't know if you can fix this."

"I'll do anything," Shawn whispers, "I'll do anything to be able to love you again. I'll marry you, for fuck's sake. I'm not the same without you," He lets out a chuckle, shaking his head, "I won't ever be the same. You're like... this part of me that I won't ever get back. Life's been a living hell without you. Don't you feel it too?"

You can feel your determination frailing, weakening, but you're not giving into him again. You're never giving into the pain that is Shawn ever again, so you wipe your tears away, putting your brave face on, "I don't. I really don't. I agreed with you on something I shouldn't have once already, Shawn. I'm not doing it ever again. As a wise man once told me, I don't deserve that. If a constant rotation of girls and a rocket to fame are a living hell for you," You inhale audibly, convincing yourself that this is where it ends. There's no going back from here. "Then I wish you the best of luck. But you can't fix this. Not now, not ever."

"But—," He's pushing himself up, making his way towards you, and you cower away. Something breaks inside the both of you, something so delicate that it can't ever be put back. Not by each other, and certainly not by someone else. Shawn's head drops, and you can almost feel the words emanating off his self before he even speaks, each word laced with pleading, "I love you. Please."

Your tears haven't stopped still, and they probably never will, but you can't let yourself go through the same thing again. No matter how much you love him, no matter how hard he tries to convince you that he loves you too, you know for a fact that the gaps between the two of you couldn't be a bridged by a couple of sorrys and a kiss. It would require something much more sacrificial, like jumping headfirst into the emptiness and hoping, praying that you could steady yourself along the way. You would rather head towards uncertainty than doomed failure.

"I'm sorry, Shawn. You should've thought about that before striking the match."

TAGLIST: @babywhenithinkaboutyou @catalinamgarcia @shawnm521 @holybrandt @fuckneymar @brenda-sucks @livelifesosily @yourwonderbelle @astromendes @ashwarren32 @grunge-pun-kat @truly-l @sunflowerinthefield

Re: 14.14, Ouroboros

So I said I’d write a post about this on Monday but I got more free time today to at least get started on churning out thoughts because, holy shit am I excited. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a modern day hermeticist, I’ve banged pots and pans about the Men of Letters and “Aquarian Star” before, but seeing the Ouroboros pulled up is just Y E S. I went to go find my mountain of serpent jewelry but realized I just woke up and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Anyway rather than writing like I have a stick up my ass I try to make it modern and fun so hopefully this won’t be too agonizing. 

Let it be said I don’t think everything I could ever talk about will come up in an episode but Yockey has proven great at manifesting really abstract concepts and I can see how he’s been arranging for something like this.

Okay first point people can gloss off of a wiki article: The sign of the ouroboros is a fairly universal emblem. We find it in Egypt, people have drawn relation to Jormungand, there’s a lot of mesoamerican and related cultures that have their own version, there’s mention of it in Vedic texts, so it’s kind of everywhere, but hermetics and alchemy are probably the most recurrent gong-bangers about it, as well as adjacent thoughts like gnosticism.

More babbling than this is gonna have me put it beyond a cut because, holy crap batman.

OKAY: the shorthand version you probably know is that the Ouroboros of alchemy is a cyclic figure, the serpent eating its own tail endlessly, and the symbol of “all is one.” 

“That the first day should make the last, that the tail of the snake should return to its mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind upon the day of their nativity.”

Every beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. *anonface NPC whispers in ear* Wait, that’s a song? *leans into whisper* Oh they used it on the quote board season 13?

Neat.

Anyway, I’m also side-eyeing “The Shadow” now and wondering if they chose that name for Jungian purposes, because Jung also tapped on the ouroboros. Just like alchemists, the thought of consuming yourself was thought to be like

bad gifs aside, in jungian psychology specifically, eating one’s own tail is also consuming the shadow, of which all people have, as a sort of primitive collective subconscious dreaming thing we all bubble up thoughts in and hide away parts of ourselves we don’t want. Or at least don’t want to admit exist or show to the world. (Carl Jung, Collected Works vol 14)

In Jungian thought it’s specifically part of attaining a true Persona, which you may remember me yelling about the psychology of a game series with a similar namesake.

Anyway, we consider this cycle of eating our own tail as somehow bad, but a lot of the symbolism came from, to the common eye, the immortality of serpents. They shed their skin and just kept growing. Obviously we know snakes aren’t truly immortal but that was the symbolism involved in it. The idea that all things cycle, that all things come to a full ring, but that the end of the ring isn’t a bad thing, just a new beginning, powered by the mistakes and advances of the old one.

So on the psychological side of things, the ouroboros is us having parts of ourselves that we don’t want to admit exist, that we take on, master, and start over again on a new journey, reaching the point of our birth to begin with. 

Either way, it doesn’t just end at psychology, as one of the key matters of hermetics is “as above, so below.” Or as Gabriel put it in season five, “As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth.” Gabriel, 5.08

Just... and-or the other way around, it puts it into a standard of sort of... relativity, chicken or the egg.

The Ouroboros is just one of several transitioning forms of the alchemical and hermetic serpent, which includes Nehushtan the brazen serpent,

In close association to the crucified serpent, as well as Asclepius and the Caduceus,

Funny we just saw Dean on a cover wearing an Asclepius pendant but OKAY whatever.

Anyway a quick brush over these attributes is that the brazen or crucified serpent is a snake that has broken its cycle and rather than simply consuming itself to exist and ‘grow’, it climbs the tree it would have been staked on. The image of the small idol there is it climbing the qabbalistic tree of life, which has a whole bunch of associations.

Notice the handy dandy traveler’s guide fnear the bottom-centerish of the image that looks like a zig zag or arguably, a sharp snake. Yeah, that thing. Yes, I keep that around my desk. Yes, it’s relevant to me. Yes, my cat has puked on it and I’ve had to clean it up, sorry about that. But the notes all over the page should probably tell you just about the kind of ideas this tree and climbing it considers. 

But, still likened to the ouroboros, once the serpent reaches the top of the tree, it descends in the form of a white dove from kether to malkuth, and sort of starts its cycle over again. Similarly, when not specifically the brazen serpent but rather the nailed crucified one, it’s a matter of transmuting the self by mastering the dark serpent, the other self, sort of binding it unto itself. The specific readings on this vary, but think of it like removing unnecessary chemicals that are mucking up an experiment, but not necessarily dividing from the shadow, as even the caduceus -- much less Jungian thought -- recognize the need for the shadow and things we consider not-good a lot of the time. It’s all about balance.

And that ascent to the divine also keeps it from being a stagnant cycle, but takes that whole “growth” part to another level, represented as a spiral, often tapping on the Fibonacci sequence, which is why Tool’s Lateralus album written all over with alchemical and hermetic concepts is sequenced to the Fibonacci spiral.

So I’m going to try to avoid getting into a ten billion page exposition about lengthy qabbalistic thought on the many planes, but you’ll notice one part of the image is its relation to the inner man (bottom right) -- part of that As Above So Below.

Also a lot of the time there are two snakes, that are arguably eating each OTHER to “grow” in their cycle. In this case, one has wings to represent volatile substance (”the bird of hermes is my name, eating my wings to keep me tame.”), while the other has no wings, representing fixed substance. But the creature(s) birth each other, metaphorically-marry, and slay each other in this circle of eternity, perpetual motion, but immobile, yet always in motion, recoiling on itself. It’s creation to order, and back to chaos, it’s the background radiation of the universe, it’s just this weird perfection-in-stasis, and yet, with the psychology aspect attuned, still room for improvement. Even the brazen serpent still has a cycle which basically involves passing go, collecting 200 dollars, and going back down as an enlightened dove to work its way back up this infinity ladder again.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

The path of the serpent, and the balanced polarity of the related caduceus, is all about attaining personal perfection and completion, manifest “so below” into the physical world through ideas like the pursuit of gold in the philosopher’s stone, but there’s so much more to it than Just That. It’s about the self, the Best self, but the journey never being over.

Rush!BTΣ — college!au, borderline crack au w/ @cynoirsure

a story about three friends and their obstacles of relationships, academic probation, and figuring out that international kids aren’t all that bad.

4/35

word count: 2k

warnings: swearing, underage/college drinking, getting high, hints of hookup

Y/N’s POV

Tonight was the first huge frat party of the semester and it was being held at Seokjin and Hoseok’s apartment. Beta Tau Sigma was known around campus for three, maybe four, things.

Having the best brotherhood between all the fraternities.

Being incredibly attractive, but also super nice.

Throwing the biggest bangers.

Being mind blowing at sex, for both guys and girls.

You’ve experienced three out of the four things that the frat was known for, if you’ll experience all four is to be determined. You heard about the Beta Tau party not through Jimin or Kevin, but through one of your sisters in your sorority, Sigma Phi Omega. You would be lying if you said you weren’t excited, the first time you got wasted at a frat party was also hosted by the Betas. You were pretty sure that they made you and Jungkook chug a keg together, but your memory was a little hazy of that night — and you were positive Jungkook couldn’t remember the party either.

“Honestly, fuck this quiz tomorrow,” you said to no one in particular, “I’ll just fail I guess.”

You gathered up your belongings in the library and headed towards your Big’s apartment. You usually got ready with her for parties, and tonight was no exception. She screamed y/n as you knocked on her door, pulling you in for a crushing hug.

“Are you so ready for tonight?” She asked excitedly, “I heard Seokjin set up tables for beer pong later in the basement, it’s going to be crazy.”

You laughed, “Jieun unnie I can’t go too hard tonight, I have a quiz tomorrow for my 8 am.”

“Simple solution,” she said getting you a glass of water, “get fucked up during our pregame and in the beginning so you can sober up by your class in the morning.”

You laughed and connected to her speaker, blasting a playlist that you always put on to get you hype for parties.

---

Approximately 4 hours later, you found yourself at Seokjin and Hoseok’s apartment with your Big and a couple other Sigmas. You were far surpassed buzzed, completely tipsy, and on the brink of being drunk...and it was only 10 pm. The night was still young and you knew more people were coming later. All the guys from Beta Tau were living it up. Seokjin was currently playing beer pong - and losing - against one of the guys from another frat on campus. Joon and Yoongi were sitting down in the dining room, Joon had a beer in his hand while Yoongi casually drank a glass of whiskey on the rocks. Both of them seeming to be in a deep philosophical conversation of some sorts. Hoseok and Jimin were talking and picking up some girls, Hoseok some guys. Typical. You were certain you saw Jimin enter the guest bedroom an hour ago with a girl. Tae and Kevin were on the makeshift dance floor in the basement with some other Greek life members. Jungkook was nowhere to be found, at least that’s because you haven’t seen him yet since you arrived.

“y/n, you doing alright?” Namjoon asked worriedly as you stumbled in the kitchen for another drink. You flashed him a bright smile, your face flushed from the alcohol.

“I’m doing great, oppa.” You slurred, “Do you have any more tequila mixes?”

“Why don’t you drink some water first,” He suggested handing you his own water bottle, bringing you over to where him and Yoongi were. The three of you suddenly engaged in a conversation about superheroes and which was better, Marvel or DC.

“Obviously, Marvel is the better franchise,” Yoongi said, as worked up as you have ever seen him.

“Oppa, you’re wrong.” You said defiantly, “Jinhee loves Marvel and she’s also just wrong.”

Namjoon clicked his tongue, “I don’t know, DC just doesn’t give as much character development as Marvel does-”

“Fuck the character development, Aquaman and Wonder Woman are just superior to everything else.” You said, “like most of them are gifted with powers from birth or something, with the exception of Batman. But like, Iron Man?? He literally built his own powers, I could do that.”

“Batman did the same thing!” Yoongi said shocked. “Oh, if only Jungkook was here.”

“Where is he?” Namjoon asked wondering about their youngest brother, “He was here a couple hours ago.”

You stood up bidding them goodbye, “I need to pee.”

Although you’ve been here before, you have never navigated yourself around the place drunk, mistaking one of the bedrooms for a bathroom. Opening the door, you walked in to find Jungkook sitting on the bed, taking a hit of his dab pen as he played a round of Fortnite on Seokjin’s gaming computer. He turned around at the sound of the door opening, looking surprised at your entrance. “Oh fuck, sorry man give me a second. Play a solo or something.”

“O-Oh sorry, I thought this was the bathroom.” You mumbled, suddenly feeling overwhelmed by how attractive he looked. Jungkook wore black skinny jeans with a white tee shirt tucked in at the waist, his sleeves were rolled up accenting his biceps. “You look really hot right now, Kook.”

Fuck. “Did I say that out loud?”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Jungkook nodded with a shy smile, rubbing his nape. “You look pretty good as well, y/n.”

“Thanks,” you said fiddling with the ends of your skirt. His eyes followed the movement of your hands, your stomach churning at the thought of him checking you out.

“Jin hyung has a private bathroom right here, you can use it.”

After peeing, you spent an extra 10 minutes in the bathroom just looking at yourself in the mirror, trying to fix your outfit, make it a little bit more slutty, also trying to sober up a little from your drunk state as to not make any more dumb slips. When you exited the bathroom, Jungkook was sitting casually on Jin’s bed, scrolling through his phone in one hand, twirling his dab pen in the other. You sat down on the bed across from him, the boy looking up in your direction with a smile, “wanna take a hit?”

“Yes please,” you said thankfully taking a hit from the dab and inhaling. Guess you’re gonna get crossed tonight. “How much have you drank?”

“Just a couple beers, we have our quiz tomorrow and I’m literally impossible to wake up.” He chuckled taking a hit and blowing some Os. You don’t think you’ve ever had a 1 on 1 conversation with Jungkook that lasted more than 5 minutes so the two of you casually getting high together while the Beta Tau party was in full swing was a new experience. By the time Jinhee and Seokjin entered the room, the two of them lightly bickering about something, you were definitely crossed, Jungkook on the other hand was baked, and the room had a hint of weed in the air.

“What are you two kids doing in here?” Seokjin asked curiously eyeing the two of you on his bed, “Please tell me that you didn’t fuck on my bed.”

“We didn’t fuck on your bed, hyung,” Jungkook answered with smile.

“You’re high as fuck,” The elder boy chuckled, “Get out and have some human communication, you two.”

“Besides, we’re doing a bet.” Jinhee chuckled.

“That was the only way I could get her to drink,” Jin said to which you stumbled over to your close friend.

“Unniee, I’m so glad you’re here we can party togetherr~”

“Christ, y/n.” She said stopping you from falling over. The two informed you and Jungkook of the bet.

Take a shot of vodka (or water depending on how fucked up you were already) every time Jimin makes out with a girl.

“Do the two girls earlier tonight count already?” You asked, “I saw oppa with some girls already.”

“I guess that’s two shots off the bat.”

You announced that you were going to get the shots, Jinhee supporting your steps as she guided you outside to the kitchen. The older girl cursed as you accidentally stepped on her foot with your heel, “sorry hehe.”

“How are my two favorite girls?” Hoseok smirked encountering the two of you in the kitchen.

“Make 10 shots Hoseok,” Jinhee said keeping you upright, “actually make that 8.”

“No I want to take shots too!” You whined as Jinhee and Hoseok talked about the bet against Jimin. From the corner of your eye, you spotted Kevin and Taehyung walk into the guest bedroom, but before you opened your mouth to say something, Yoongi, Namjoon, Jungkook, and Seokjin entered the kitchen.

“I guess that’s...12 shots?” Jinhee said, “make 2 water shots for y/n over here.”

“What am I, a bartender?” Hoseok huffed, “someone at least help me.”

“Can I please join the shots?” You asked getting an immediate no from Jinhee, Seokjin, Namjoon and Yoongi.

“You’ve been drinking for a while, y/n.” Namjoon said putting a hand on your shoulder. Seokjin chimed in, “plus you’ve been getting high with Jungkook.”

“You’re gonna regret it in the morning if you drink even more,” Yoongi crossed his arms.

You huffed and stomped on the floor like a child, “if I don’t get at least one shot of vodka I’m going to suck Hoseok oppa’s dick.”

The whole group tensed up at your challenge. Jungkook, surprisingly, spoke up first, “hyung, give her a shot.”

“I mean, I think this is a win-win situation for me.” Hoseok said leaning against the counter, “I don’t have to give her a shot.”

At that moment, Jimin stepped into the kitchen, wondering why all of you were gathered in the one place, “Hey guys, are we taking shots?”

“Oppa, if I don’t get a shot I’m sucking Hoseok oppa’s dick.”

It was as if a switch flipped off in Jimin’s head, “and suddenly, I’m sober. You’re gonna do nothing of that sort, you’ve had enough y/n.”

“Oh c’mon Chim, if she wants to suck my-”

“I’m gonna get Jieun over here and see if she can take you home,” Jimin said to you, “Joon hyung can you get y/n some water? And make sure my beloved Big doesn’t take her anywhere?”

“So touchy,” Hoseok said as Jimin walked away, “I’ll get someone else to suck my dick, no biggie. Sorry y/n, looks like you’re not getting another shot or a hookup tonight.”

You frowned watching the rest of the group take their shots, recording it on their snapchats or whatever. Jinhee and Seokjin sat with you as the rest of the boys dispersed into the party, your Big coming in with Jimin only a few minutes later.

“Little,” Jieun said with a smile, looking completely fine. You always marveled at how well she held her alcohol. “Jimin told me it’s time for you to go home.”

“I feel like a child,” You muttered under your breath.

She patted your arm, “You gotta take care of yourself at parties y/n, or you’ll make decisions you might regret. Besides, don’t you have a quiz tomorrow in your 8 am?”

Your shoulders slumped at the realization, suddenly feeling the need to cry. Jieun linked arms with you as you left, Jimin asking you to text him when you got back to your dorm, but there was no promise that you would remember in the 5 minute drive back.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay at my apartment, y/n? You know you’re always welcome to, I have the futon.” Jieun offered, you shook your head saying that you just wanted to sober up on your own. And as if the night couldn’t get worse, your roommate had her girlfriend over so you definitely couldn’t even enter your own room. Getting your phone out, your fingers drunkenly hovered over the keyboard.

Jiohooonei, can I slewp in yiur dorn tonighr?

Almost immediately, you received a reply, making you grin and press the button in the elevator to floor two instead of your usual floor four.

--

Meanwhile back at the party, Jinhee was drinking casually with Seokjin, Jimin, Yoongi, and Namjoon. Kevin and Taehyung still weren’t anywhere to be seen.

--

“Fuck.” Taehyung breathed as Kevin palmed his crotch.

“We probably shouldn’t do this,” Kevin said as he sucked on Taehyung’s shoulder. The older one whined, hiding his face in his shoulder. Taehyung began to trail kisses from the crook of Kevin’s neck up to his earlobe, biting gently and whining once more.

“Why not?” The pout was prominent in Taehyung’s voice, his hands tracing patterns down Kevin’s arm. Kevin growled lowly, capturing Taehyung’s arms and holding them together.

“Because if we go further, I want you to be sober when I’m fucking you this good, love.” The younger one pulled away once more, not before kissing Taehyung’s temple once more. Taehyung whined once more, but Kevin had already been making himself presentable once more, waiting for Taehyung to do the same.

“What if there isn’t a next time?” Taehyung’s question came out as barely a whisper, making Kevin chuckle. He shook his head and smiled softly at Taehyung.

“For you? I’d give you a million times.”

1-31-19

The 80 Best Albums of 2018

80. Beware the Book of Eli- Ski Mask the Slump God

For someone who has spent so much time living in the shadow of everyone’s (least) favorite Soundcloud rap quasi-martyr, Ski Mask the Slump God is one of the more audacious technical virtuosos out there. There’s no time to lose on Beware, so every second is a product of Ski anxiously shredding through ways to get your attention. There is no flow he’s afraid to try, no sound he won’t make.

79. 7- Beach House 

Beach House have monopolized a space in the indie-rock sphere for about a decade now. Their dominance is no fluke, but after a few hard-hitters, I was worried that they might make the same album over and over again. However, just a week after the almost too obvious Depression Cherry, they dropped Thank Your Lucky Stars, a more lucid affair. It marked a new chapter. 7 sees them continue to be done with making dream pop for sweet, peaceful dreams...they’re now making music for all dreams, especially the ones that linger into the morning, the ones you have to ask around about to make sure they weren’t real. Corny? Maybe, but it’s nice to see a stubborn band add even more dimension to their seasoned sound.

78. El Hombre- El Alfa

What does it mean to be “el hombre”? There’s no straight answer but if I had to take a crack at it, I’d say it‘s when you spearhead an entire genre so hard that when you venture out of said genre, people complain about it, even though the song features Cardi B. It also could be when you make yourself sound like the most obnoxious cartoon mouse imaginable, yet still manage to spit out a slapper. He may be the king of dembow, but El Alfa can’t be pigeonholed. Whether his voice is a sputtering tour-de-force or a comically nasal squelch, this album is a celebration of the ridiculous. In the end, the best songs are peak dembow, where a cloying sample of El Alfa’s voice works itself into a tornado and thumps for what could be forever.

77. 777- KEY! & Kenny Beats

Kenny was a prodigal son who left hip hop with dollar signs in his eyes and his tongue sticking out, tempted by the call of #REAL #TRAP #SHIT. Key! was an artist who had existed on the periphery of the scene, paying his dues while earning the most visibility when tacked onto the end of a Father song. They are the type of match that would slip under the radar until you realize that not only do they bring out the best in each other, but they also tap into something quite glamorous. The beats bump, the melodies stick, the energy is so high, and Key! treats this like his magnum opus. He’s expressive, dynamic, and Kenny lets him do it without any gimmicks. 

76. Soma 0,5 Mg- Taconafide

Maybe I’m a little biased, but I can’t understate how much this means to me. A Polish rap album that doesn’t draw on trends that fell out of favor eight years ago? One that is building its own lane and not just tangentially existing on the sidelines of the American scene? One that has not only one moderately funny song but a whole pack of well-thought out, extremely catchy bangers? No way. It’s too good to be true. Taco and Quebonafide carry themselves like they know that this is the album of a generation, that millions of Polish kids living their lives peering across the pond finally have something that is distinctly their own, and, more importantly, distinctly Polish. Dawaj dawaj! 

75. Shadow On Everything- BAMBARA

It’s hard to talk dirt on an album that has all its instrumentation down to a tee. Sure, you can’t get by on technical efficiency alone, but when bellowing drums translate into something so menacing and a flurry of guitars create such a haunting ambient presence, you take no detours when you’re propelled into the darkness. These songs are packed with enough action to tell stories but really, they just set scenes. That’s for the better. BAMBARA circumvent all the pitfalls of making post-punk in 2018 by putting passion into everything, ramping up the chaos as much as they can.

74. Doomsday Clarion- Airport

The world of fragile, noisy Soundcloud electronic collages is a pretty funny one, but rarely does the humor feel as sharp as it does on Doomsday Clarion. Miranda Pharis compiles sounds that never cease to keep me amused, intrigued, and, most importantly, spooked. They also find a way to tie them together so that it feels like non-stop commentary. Halfway through this thing, when we are exposed to a tangent about how one of the songs excels at putting an unnamed Youtube commenter’s rabbit to sleep, at first it’s like “LOL random”, but then it starts to feel like a snarky dissection of underground culture performativity...and it makes me wanna keep reaching as hard as I did there. It’s the type of record that wants to make you sound like a fool, yet Pharis doesn’t scoff as much as they embrace and pay homage. These turbulent compositions are all the more essential for it.

73. Nasty- Rico Nasty

There’s a few things you learn on Rico Nasty’s thunderous entrance. Apart from her sixth sense for broke boys and fake bitches, the observation that hits the hardest is that she’s pretty...well...nasty. She’s also not even close to being interested in apologizing for her fame, and anyone who thinks she should because she’s done it by making extremely aggressive (and borderline mean) bangers is full of shit. If Nasty proves anything, it’s that nobody is going quite as hard as this, and even though that would be enough merit to rest on, she’s not going to stop there. The more tender and spacious tracks here are shockingly the ones that bite the hardest. For an album that builds so much tension from brash exclamations, that’s quite a flex.

72. Negro Swan- Blood Orange

For Dev Hynes, the transition from indie’s best networker to its most multifaceted social commentator has been a successful one. However, I feel like that label minimizes him, because his albums are not trying to tell you anything, instead acting as abstractly pointed containers for ideas and chunks of culture that mold together into something triumphant. His albums have always been celebrations that cut deep into the complexity of blackness, queerness, and history. Negro Swan is his most on-the-nose and also his most unapologetically happy. However, it’s not the concise statements that make the album but the gorgeous, subdued melodies that take charge before you can even touch them. It might lack the explosiveness of Freetown Sound, but there’s hardly a moment on this record that isn’t radiant or holds back on any of its charm.

71. In Another Life- Sandro Perri

It doesn’t take long until the title track on this album finds the groove that it will spend the next 24-minutes delicately unraveling. It is a dainty, sweeping groove based on a simple keyboard arpeggio that invites every other sound in the vicinity to flourish with it, like it’s hosting an open picnic. It paces around, disintegrating and advancing with time, but by the end, it’s exactly where it started. That’s the beauty of Perri’s work; to say he can milk an idea is an understatement. He can milk an idea to the point where you can’t even tell an idea’s being milked, silently highlighting the beauty that emerges with prolonged exposure. 

70. Aura- Ozuna

It should come as no surprise that the most stacked summer album came courtesy of reggaeton’s most profitable powerhouse. It’s not even the extent to which these tracks go, but the sheer force with which Ozuna can continuously spin out them out, over and over again, like it’s absolutely nothing to him. For over an hour, it sounds like he’s doing no more than acting on his impulses, tapping into non-stop melodies and rhythms with confidence that it will all stick. Of course all these songs exist in the same vein, but there’s no comparing the twinkling romance of ‘Ibiza’ with the glitzy flexing on ‘Única’ or even the thumping pulse of ‘Sigueme los Pasos’, where he gloriously joins forces with reggaeton’s other king. There are 20 bangers on here, and the album only kinda drags. It can’t be this easy.

69. Famous Cryp- Blueface

It’s actually hilarious watching people get worked up about Blueface. “He can’t even rap on beat! How hard can it be to rap on beat?” Lmao, if you think rapping on beat is a prerequisite to making hip-hop, you’re as bad as the people trying to keep the impressionists out of art galleries just because they weren’t making hyper-realistic Jesus art. Yeah, I said it. Blueface is rap game Renoir. For real, it’s so much easier to rely on conventional technical ability than to tap into something that actually expands on a style of rap that should’ve been out of ideas a long time ago. Most importantly, if Blueface is such a hack, then how come he makes it sound so fucking good? How does he manage to rap like he’s racing the beat to the end of each bar, with his voice cracking every chance it gets, and still churn out songs with so much momentum? Why the fuck would he rap on beat? So he can sound like every wholesale G Perico/YG out there? Smh.

68. ASTROWORLD- Travis Scott

It would almost be irresponsible to leave the most quintessentially 2018 album of 2018 off this list. If you didn’t hear ASTROWORLD within a week of it dropping, you might as well have been watching telemarketing that whole week while 60,000 feet under the ground with no phone service. For all its lyrical gaffes, lack of personality, and unreasonably quiet NAV features, this album is pretty sick. We always knew Travis Scott was something of a curational master, with a taste for crafting rap albums that aren’t about him as much as they are apexes of the mainstream scene. However, when he came off as hollow before, ASTROWORLD has such an abundance of quality that you can’t even deny it. His ambition is easy to poke fun at until you find yourself returning to these songs again and again, marveling at each extravagant beat change or “STRAIGHT UP!” like it was your first time hearing it.

67. SR3MM- Rae Sremmurd

Just a note, I’m not referring to two solo albums that came with this (sorry Swaecation) because for all their charm, those were a bit harder to vouch for. Instead, I’m talking about the nine-track banger platter that got overshadowed by all the noise surrounding the “triple album.” Somehow, SR3MM was stealthily the well-rounded, adventurous album the boys had been promising us this whole time. Perhaps it’s because it is filler-free or because both of them (Swae Lee especially) have become absolute masters of their craft, having made so many seductive, irresistible tracks that at this point they could do it in their sleep. Or maybe it’s because there are so many imitators and it’s nice to have a burst of authenticity. There is hardly a moment on this album that isn’t an integral part of a refined rap song. They have so much more fun together. Sure, Swae is eclipsing, but I really hope they don’t break up.

66. Loma- Loma

When Cross Record established themselves as sublime folk masters on Wabi-Sabi, I didn’t think they needed the not-so-trendy and very, very normal input of Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg. I guess I was wrong. Turns out where they were once comfortable soaking in the hushed splendor, they are now compelled to be a bit more ambitious, to venture into louder places with more confidence. Thankfully, the newfound grandiosity does not come at the expense of any beauty; the vocal acrobatics sink into the spectral sheets of instrumentation just as smoothly as they did before.

65. Pastoral- Gazelle Twin

Gazelle Twin is a hard sell. There’s really no reason this uber-spooky electronic project where a woman in a mask chants and roars over industrial beats should be good. The look is cool and all, but this shit can be really off-putting if you’re not willing to have a little fun. Thankfully, the vibe is backed up by the production, which seems custom built to fill these songs with the bloodcurdling energy they project. If she’s not pounding her shrillness into you, she’s catching a sample at its most disorienting and looping it into further oblivion. It’s overwhelming yet so effective.

64. QUARTERTHING- Joey Purp

Now, I'm no purist who lives their life cowering under "DEATH TO MUMBLE RAP" bullshit, but if the status quo of hip-hop today can be critiqued for one thing, it's monotony. In a time where Drake can drop a 25-song album with, like, only ten songs where he actually sounds interested in what he's saying, it's refreshing to hear Joey Purp attack each verse like it's his last, with each hook falling into its groove like he was told at gunpoint to think of something catchy. If Joey Purp makes a song about something, he's going to approach the topic with purpose, almost likes he's aiming to make the definitive song about that thing. Here, he uses this essentiality to flex his versatility. QUARTERTHING is a record of confident experiments, songs that wander into unknown territory with purpose, capturing lightning in a bottle most of the time.

63. Le Kov- Gwenno

Gwenno is the type of vocalist who gets swept up by her songs rather than situating herself at the eye of storm. Her voice is a soft whisper most of the time, but the reverb on the drums accentuates each snare with a room filling quality while every dash of organ lingers and sustains. It’s baroque, it’s timeless, and, most importantly, it’s in Cornish, which I definitely thought was an extinct language. She could rest on that monopoly and still be fine, but she indulges instead. It’s an ideal combination of originality and refinement of an age-old style.

62. Drip Harder- Lil Baby & Gunna

When they’re not together, Lil Baby and Gunna aren’t that good. All of their solo albums at this point have been coated in filler, and when there’s a standout track, they usually both show up. That’s why it’s not surprising that the Young Thug proteges find their niche on Drip Harder, but it’s still shocking just how sharp, cohesive, and vital this sounds. The duo are moulding expressive, abstract melody-driven hip-hop in a way that hasn’t been as notable and of-the-time since Thugger and Rich Homie Quan did it in 2014. That pairing was more unlikely and exciting, but this one is more natural. Every moan, confession, and groove on here is impossible to resist, and the beats are some of the most intoxicating of the year. RHQ and Thugger crashed hard as a duo after they peaked, but I hope these two either stick together or use this as a launchpad for artistic growth. There’s so much room for it to grow, but for now, it’s more than enough to watch them carry each other’s weight.

61. Another Life- Amnesia Scanner

The hyper-saturated industrial dance music of Amnesia Scanner has now turned into hyper-saturated industrial pop music. As bizarre as that is to say about songs that are almost all led by grating synthetic vocals on the brink of becoming a deafening screech, there’s something conventionally attractive about the way these hooks form. Whether it comes in the form of a stuttering refrain or a massive #drop designed to elevate any scrapyard rave into the impending cyber-apocalypse, the pleasures here are simple.

60. Magus- Thou

It’s getting harder and harder for fans across the metal spectrum to agree on a canon. So much metal is being churned out at such a high rate, it’s becoming more of a task to pick out the gold from the clutter. Thou make a name for themselves with unmistakable grandiosity. Their sound isn’t the most challenging; the snarls have a soothing, ASMR-esque texture to them and the riffs are clean-cut, progressing with grace. For a band this prolific, it’s notable when they come out with something this refined. You can hear the effort in every idea, the precision in every new path they take. Magus might be the best entry point for metal’s most consistent stalwarts, a band who are much more interested in perfecting their distinct ambiance than embarking on well-meaning but slightly muddled genre-fusion.

59. abysskiss- Adrianne Lenker

As if Big Thief weren’t intimate enough. Adrianne Lenker takes her band’s prime descriptor (either “intimate” or “delicate,” depends on the day) and sees just how far she can push it before it gets uncomfortable. The staring contest that ensues on abysskiss is what you’d expect from one of the most hushed, intricate vocalists breathing into your ear with no more than a guitar backing her up. She definitely has the talent to get away with a mood piece, but no, abysskiss is home to some of the most devastating songs in her arsenal. At her best Lenker is lulling you into woozy trance, with songs that pack the visceral explosion of secrets. Such a sparse record has no right to be this intoxicating.

58. FM!- Vince Staples

You wouldn’t trust an elegant craftsman like Vince Staples to actually make an album that’s “no concepts, no elaborate schemes, just music.” He’s rap’s smuggest pundit, as well as the brains behind some of its most captivating music. So even though FM! is brief and blunt at its core, it still can’t resist being super clever. For starts, although Vince’s albums are often personal, they are seldom embedded with this much unshakable geography and West Coast inside humor. FM! is designed to sound like it’s playing on FM (get it) radio, and every time he cashes in on the gimmick with a new Tyga or Earl Sweatshirt snippet, his grin becomes more radiant. FM! thrives as a reminder that Vince can hop on any slender beat and ride it with ease, his listenability being the spectacle with the observations fattening it up.

57. Cellar Belly- Wished Bone

Those who know me might be shocked that a lo-fi twee album of any kind made it on this list, but Wished Bone are onto something. Sure, I’m a sucker for those staticy, soothing vocals and the delicate clicks and hisses that adorn them. If you’re going to celebrate the whimsical, you better make a full send. However, the beauty of Cellar Belly is not just the alluring sound but the amount Wished Bone are willing to do with it. There’s a sex jam called ‘Pollinate Me’ where they literally go “I am a flower, you are a bee.” Elsewhere, when ‘Seed’ abruptly turns into an itchy swing jam, I’m floored. Shouts out to delicate phantasmagoria; this is haunting in the cutest way.

56. mouth mouse maus- emamouse x yeongrak

This album is a colossal headache. Of course, anything that picks from the most lo-fi strains of nightcore and 8-bit is likely to make you feel a bit queasy, but mouth mouse maus is actually mesmerizing with the extent to which it sounds like a malfunctioning carousel in clown hell. Sure, this album is difficult to listen to and if you’re tuning in casually it’ll probably sound like erratic sludge. Yet there’s something heinous about just how fun it is. It’s not just fun in the random, unpredictable way but more so because it has you on the edge of your seat. This album tests you but you’re going to want to keep going, just to catch a glimpse at whatever tomfuckery comes next.

55. Elysia Crampton- Elysia Crampton

Although she likes to keep it short, nobody has epitomized the vanguard of electronic music in the past few years as confidently as Elysia Crampton. It’s like her sound is caught in this furious web where everything collides, with snippets of trap tripping over sturdy breakbeats that are embellished with a whiff of punk. It’s like an information overload themed fever dream that creates a world so dense it hurts your brain to think about. But it sounds so good with no frills. It’s a language so tempting to imitate, but even her peers can’t come close to this breathtaking chaos. This time, the grooves are as adventurous and subtle as they have ever been. It’s just as easy to be drawn in and just as hard to look away.

54. Freedom- Amen Dunes

Freedom is one of those rare sonic wonders that seems removed from any modern trends yet pushes the envelope far too much to be shrugged off as revivalism. Sure, Amen Dunes have influences and many of them come from a clearly defined school of rugged, classic Americana. However, Freedom is too musically nuanced and personal to function as any sort of nostalgia trip. It’s the album where a mastermind songwriter fully finds his voice after nearly a decade. Damon McMahon has made great albums before, but none of them have the urgency of Freedom. In that sense, it feels like it came out of nowhere, even though that couldn’t be further from the truth. The loudness with which he projects, this unmistakable need to be heard is what’s new; Freedom is an album that screams self-acceptance, magnifying the affirmative catharsis that comes after years of internalized trauma. You can’t deny the power of that, but even if you do, you have more than enough splendid melodies to gawk at.

53. Chris- Christine and the Queens

I get too close to putting Chris in a box. Impulse has me wanting to write about how this a masterclass in “queer pop,” because it’s so easy to oversimplify queer artists and bunch them together under the same umbrella. Although identity is at the core of her art, Chris is not an embrace of an identity as much as it is a rejection of the need to clearly articulate your identity or to have an identity that pertains to a set of rules. Chris finds eroticism in confusion, and in that sense, it is a stellar non-statement, with each sentiment drilled into your heart via Chris’s enveloping voice and the record’s colorful, addictive production. Vulnerability is rarely this convincing.

52. Now Only- Mount Eerie

On the surface, Now Only feels like six leftovers from the most gut-wrenching musical diary entry about death ever made. That would be fine, but this is so much more. Now Only exhibits a new lens with which Phil Elverum views his devastation. He knows he will never accept it, but allowing himself to grieve helps him approach a semblance of peace. The confessional approach is just as tear-jerking as it was before, but instead of lingering in Genevieve’s ghost, we are hearing someone who has found deeper meaning in this therapy. Musically, Now Only is more vast and ambitious, but the sentiment is just as awe-inspiring. It takes a lot of genuine pain to pull off songwriting like this, and after the mass catharsis that touring A Crow Looked at Me must have been, it’s fascinating to witness the depth and growth of some of the most intense emotions one can ever feel.

51. Only Love- The Armed

Maximalism and enigma is a tricky cocktail to pull off, but if there’s a place for it, it’s definitely in the hyper-saturated world of metalcore. There’s only a few ways in which these types of outbursts can go down, but when you’re doing as much as The Armed, it ends up being pretty spicy. This album is a non-stop catharsis where everyone is putting all the effort they possibly can into whatever noise they’re making. It seems spontaneous and turbulent, but there’s no way something this constantly earth-shattering isn’t carefully orchestrated. I would call this all-over-the-place, but all the action is streamlined and compressed so that, for all its shrieking and pounding, Only Love ends up being a pretty nice listen. That’s only from a sonic perspective though, because as an emotional experience, this is gut-wrenching, borderline hard to sit through. If you give it the attention it demands, Only Love’s childlike expression defies trends and subverts expectations.

50. Rich As In Spirit- Rich Homie Quan

What do you do when you fall off? It happens to pretty much everyone eventually. I don’t judge those who decide to cash in or rely on publicity stunts to get back into the public eye or even those who just stop trying. But Rich Homie Quan made one promise to us, didn’t he? He goes in on every song. He’s still goin in. He will never stop going in. Rich Homie Quan has been eclipsed by most of his former peers, but on Rich As In Spirit, he does exactly what he needed to do; stop worrying and hone his craft. You can hear the effort and emotion on just about every song. Rich Homie knows he’s gifted and doesn’t need to prove it. He’s always had a vastly underappreciated melodic grip and a penchant for churning out the most energy-fueled, heartfelt bangers. Rich As In Spirit magnifies that. Putting in effort doesn’t mean overdoing it. It’s refreshing to hear someone sound so much less jaded than his contemporaries, quietly outshining them in the process.

49. X 100PRE- Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny’s bellowing baritone used to be a couple things, but now it’s everything. As one of the most potent voices in pop music, his debut album was liable to slap, but X 100PRE concisely shows off the versatility that his singles hinted at. To say he stays in his comfort zone would be irrelevant because his comfort zone is so wide. He came up off the Latin trap wave, but now his prowess shines strongest on his ballads; the inspired optimism of ‘Estamos Bien’ or the sensual nocturne on ‘Otra Noche en Miami’. When he links with Diplo on ‘200 MPH’, it is just as mammoth as you’d expect, not because of Diplo but because the refrain is so fucking sticky. Even the songs where he does the most are far from tacky; the seamless switch on ‘Solo de Mi’ and the hilarious entrance of El Alfa on ‘La Romana’ show his curational eye. It’s one thing to have great ideas but it’s another to execute them so tastefully. Bad Bunny is Puerto Rico’s improvement of Travis Scott; his albums have the same sights and sounds, but twice the personality.

48. A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This- American Pleasure Club

You never know what you’re going to get from a Sam Ray project. One of the great gifts to have comes with the passing of time is the bleeding of Ricky Eat Acid’s mesmerizing ambient music into Ray’s lo-fi emo outlet Teen Suicide, which has now rightfully rebranded as American Pleasure Club. The cynicism has shed off with the name; A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is still despondent and stressed out (I mean what do you expect with that title), but it’s a lot more genuine and the thrills it holds are a lot more heartfelt. It’s hard to think of a way to channel your emotions that Ray won’t try. This album mostly consists of illustrious sad ballads made from ingredients so delicate that it seems like the foundation could collapse at any time. That’s not to imply that it is unsturdy but rather that these sounds are strong enough to break free from the glue holding them together. Elegance has become Ray’s forte, but he makes sure every goosebump is earned.

47. KTSE- Teyana Taylor

The last and least anticipated of Kanye’s Wyoming albums ended up being the easiest one to love. Teyana Taylor had been sitting on a bed of potential for years before this dropped, but her most visible moments came in the form of uncredited features, reality TV, and Kanye music videos. Kanye’s gold mine of minimalist, sample-based production feels most at ease when it’s elevating R&B, and Teyana has the ideal disposition to lead the charge. She’s confident, unashamed, and empowered. These songs articulate pleasure in a way that is proudly hyper-sexual, but even though its lyrics read like erotic literature sometimes, the result is tasteful. Taylor composes herself on this album like a star waiting to burst, her raspy yelp stealing the show every chance it gets. But this album will forever be associated with Kanye, and in fairness, that’s fine. He saved the most sultry, glimmering beats in his arsenal for this, and it pays off on an album that unravels with masterful pace.

46. Kwaidan- Meitei

I haven’t heard anything else like this and I promise I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it. Kwaidan is an anomaly, an album that orchestrates the most befuddling atmosphere without getting lost in its abstraction. Rhythms emerge from dust and the spoken-word croak (you’ll know it when you hear it) rides them with the grip of an MC. The juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic emerged when Meitei moved to Kyoto, a city where he knew nobody, and wandered around until the mood overwhelmed him. The bite of Kwaidan is rooted in this immersion; there’s no way you can make music this precise, creative, and original without fully buying into your surroundings. Many artist have tried (and failed) to capture the oh so fetishizable “Lost Japanese” aesthetic. Kwaidan epitomizes exactly what they were chasing. It’s hard thing to do right, but holy shit, it is rewarding.

45. Nothing 2 Loose- DJ Healer

There are three types of tracks on here. First, there are the more standard ambient ones, where lonely synths tread through densely layered pops and crackles. Then there are the ones which are led by a melting vocal sample (often a vocoder) channeling something disorienting and alien. However, the big guns come out when the record takes an absurd sample, whether it be a melodramatic melody or some ridiculous rambling about how “this is God’s creation...isn’t it beautiful,” and loops it over some equally theatrical breakbeats. This shit can be so funny, and it’s hard to tell if the hyper-spiritual aesthetic is tongue-in-cheek or completely earnest. Either way, it drills itself into the record enough to justify whatever it is trying to be, regardless of whether it’s a punchline or naked sincerity. This is one of the more haunting, incisive ambient techno albums in recent memory, built on ideas that are not only clever but extremely immersive.

44. Grid of Points- Grouper

Nobody has spent this decade cultivating a more distinct, mesmerizing aesthetic than Liz Harris. Grouper has become one of the most reliable operations in modern music. You know that you’re going to get little more than reverb-soaked piano and breathy vocals, but you also know that the wave of emotions will be overwhelming. Harris records these songs in a room alone, and I don’t think it could be done any other way. It’s astonishing how she is able to consistently do so much with so little, and I know that’s a cliché but fuck it. The warmth and comfort that radiates from these songs is priceless. Grid of Points is not as haunting as past Grouper, but it’s more ethereal and, as a result, more conventionally pretty. This type of allure is a undeniable fit. It shows a new angle of a simple formula that will suck you in with every last breath and smother you with its seclusion.

43. Daytona- Pusha T

Who is the 2018 Clipse? Rae Sremmurd? (lol I like this analogy already) Let’s ride with it. Daytona is like if Swae Lee, 12 years down the line, actually found a more compelling way to sing about going to the Bahamas and dunking a girl in a pool. Obviously, in this case, the Bahamas and pools are replaced by selling coke, but you know what I’m saying. Basically, Pusha T has every right to have peaked already, but instead his coke aficionado character has only grown stronger with age. Like, I can’t believe it took him this long to come up with the line “fuck it, brick for brick, let’s have a blow off.” However, it’s not really Pusha T’s words that form this album’s backbone; as the entry point to Kanye’s prolific (and pretty great) Wyoming Sessions, the real catch is how Pusha T is able to merge with these stuttering, soulful backdrops to turn coke-rap into razor sharp poetry. Pusha’s dedication to developing one thing over the course of his career has made his imagery as potent as ever; but the brevity and minimalism here will not waste a single moment. In a year where he temporarily took down pop rap’s radio Jesus, his true legacy builder was far more modest but much more premeditated. 

42. Golden Hour- Kacey Musgraves

You ever think about, like, how there’s northern lights in our skies, plants that grow and open our minds. It’s kinda crazy that in Tennessee the sun’s going down and in Beijing they’re heading out to work. This is a real thing. Kacey Musgraves writes lyrics like she is a child realizing  everything for the first time and marvelling, jaw agape, at how it makes her feel. All cynicism aside, it’s refreshing to hear someone so enthralled with it. Golden Hour is a collection of earnest meditations on the most simple phenomena, shit we take for granted. And while it’s easy to poke fun at the parts of this album that sound like earnest marijuana-fueled banter, it’s a lot harder to escape when the music is so beautiful and the sentiment is so genuine. There are moments on here where Musgraves underlines things like temporality of our most cherished relationships or how euphoria is always dissolved by the shock that it’s all going to end. This is some of the purest lyricism that exists, an album that frees itself from the alienating shackles of its country aesthetic to become one of 2018’s hardest things to argue with. 

41. Slide- George Clanton

If you openly exploit the “vaporwave” tag for Soundcloud plays while lightly disowning the genre, you must be quite a cunning fucker. You better make sure that the music you’re making is not only post-vaporwave but a capitalization on the aesthetic that resonates with millions but earns the scorn of the critical masses. Slide is just that. It feels grand and important, like it’s the apex of the more cyber-persuaded strain of electro-pop lurking around the memescape. George Clanton is a meme god, an artist whose ambition justifies the more eye-roll inducing, needlessly fetishistic aspects of the subculture. The motifs in this album are not just extremely well thought out but all the more effective when they emerge in the form of blustering, explosive melodies. It’s very hard for them to fall into the background not just because they are beautiful but because you can tell he’s having fun. Slide ensures that there’s a wholesome time hiding behind every cloud of reverb.

40. Momentary Glance- Lisa/Liza

During a phase of grief, any creation is worthy of praise. The lore of Momentary Glance is clear-cut; overwhelmed by tragedy, Liza Victoria persevered through a biting winter to record these six songs. The despondent trance she falls into as she strums and chants is hypnotic, not just because of the prolonged intimacy but because the compositions are presented with all their raw imperfections, embellishments that suck you in instead of taking you out. Victoria’s vocals on this album act as a well of hope in the face of despair. There’s no right way to cope and no glory in suffering, so praising this album’s open wounds seems counterproductive. But when an aspect of your livelihood is snatched from you forever and you can’t bear how much you miss someone, an album that gets it like this is a warm blanket in a freezer, a beacon of empathy in the face of debilitating turmoil.

39. KIDS SEE GHOSTS- KIDS SEE GHOSTS

I’m not sure who needed this most. Was it Kanye, eager to balance out his ugly, legacy-ruining 2018 by making people finally talk about his music again? Or was it Kid Cudi, the tortured autotune godfather whose albums over the past decade had ranged from forgettable to holy shit i don’t even wanna think about it? Either way, KIDS SEE GHOSTS was the apex of the Wyoming sessions. It’s as if all the urgency spun into one concise project, where every segment showcases two genuine masterminds trying to bring out the best in one another. Kid Cudi especially treats this like the album he was destined to make, exhibiting warbles so seductive that you forget they were ever grating. He lends this album its emotional cruciality, with skyrocketing hooks that ache so hard and a tone so spot on it’s like he was saving it all for this.

Kanye takes this as an opportunity to showcase his curational genius. For a seven song album, many of these tracks feel like interludes not because they shrug off responsibility but because they take a form so unconventional that it’s almost distracting. Even the boldest ideas on here leave a great taste in your mouth, but in the end the dearest pleasure is Kanye’s rapping. Every time he opens his mouth he does so with vitality, something we haven’t seen to this degree since Yeezus. 

38. 2012-2017- Against All Logic

Nicolas Jaar is a sonic virtuoso. While he’s proven many times that he can twist and fiddle through his most complex compositions, simplicity bears the most genuine rewards. As you may have guessed from the title, this is a compilation of sorts. It suggests that Jaar has been taking a crack at more conventional house music on the side for most of this decade, and needed an outlet to release it without disrupting the much darker, denser expectations of the Nicolas Jaar brand. It’s no surprise that he pulls it off. It’s hard to think of another producer who has a more nuanced grip on how grooves work and how to find glory in texture. That being said, I did not expect something this casual and accessible to reveal itself as Jaar’s forte. Jaar really is one for the intersection of soul and house. These songs all follow a similar formula where an old-school sample gets worked into a modest yet riveting pulse. However, what he taps into suggests that some of these sounds are much more compelling with the context flipped around. For the scribblings of a mastermind, this is unreasonably presentable.

37. Stadium- Eli Keszler

The moment on Stadium that has me sold iss not one of the ingenious blends of shuffling percussion and jittering plucks that come to define its sound. It’s at the end of a song called ‘We Live in a Pathetic Temporal Urgency’ (lol), where the thuds dissipate and we are left with a natural sound recording of what sounds like pop music playing on the speakers of the mall. It’s like it is beaming from a different planet, simultaneously grounding the album and inverting it into a much stranger endeavor. Keszler has orchestrated a platter of ear candy, sound porn disguised as psycho-jazz. Sure, the odd time-signatures and abundance of texture might grab the headlines, but the real kicker here is the lull that actively rests behind the music. I wish all glitzy technical showcases doubled as ambient mood pieces. 

36. The Recurrence of Infections- bod [包家巷]

There’s an ennui that not enough people make art about. Nicholas Zhu (aka bod) would call it “the quiet hours of laborious coping that fall into the areas between work and sleep,” but I’d probably call it “chill time”. The Recurrence of Infections is a lot of high-strung aesthetically driven gobbledygook, but it’s fucking awesome. I actually buy into it pretty hard. Forget the fact that it’s a masterclass in sound design and think about what “laborious coping” would sound like. You probably can’t think of much, but that’s because you can’t realize your vision as well as Zhu can. Pianos that turn into crashes that turn into distorted growling that turn into robotic warbling...these are not the type of things you remember, but can easily relax with, if you tune out the real pressure. It’s a joy to watch this album unravel. It’s the type of thing you’ll want to tell people about without being able to explain why. But that’s ok. Come hang sometime.

35. The Invisible Comes To Us- Anna & Elizabeth

Anna & Elizabeth make musical period pieces. It doesn’t take long until you realize that this isn’t just a folk throwback; these are actually old folk songs, shit that was popping off in, like, the 40s. While the whole “old songs for new audiences” thing is wholesome, the magic is in where they go with it. The Invisible Comes To Us is exhilaratingly strange to listen to. Adorned by a seemingly ancient aesthetic, you’d think a modernization could get away with slapping some synths and beats on there and calling it a day. However, Anna & Elizabeth are interested in how this music would sound if its spirit was still alive today, if people still had good reason to write lyrics like “tell me jovial sailors, tell me true/does my sweet William sail among your crew?” but had the technology to throw some electronic embellishments on there. Every song sees a comically traditional tune come to a screeching synthetic halt, and even though that combination should wear thin, the execution is passionate enough to be chilling.

34. Whack World- Tierra Whack

The strongest gimmicks are usually the most frustrating. Whack World is a harsh epitome of this; it’s a project that suffocates itself with originality, but would it really ruin the illusion if some of these songs were a couple minutes longer? It doesn’t matter, because this album and the visual spectacle that came with it was enough to fit right into our zeitgeist and run laps around anything less casually ambitious. Of course, part of the appeal was seeing Tierra Whack trimming a poodle, prancing around a cemetary with muppets, and snipping the strings of balloons while snarling in a Southern accent. However, an album’s stellar presentation doesn’t always translate into such addicting songs. Whack World is fifteen great ideas taken at face value so that they never lose momentum. These tracks seem designed to get stuck on repeat, always finding a groove and savagely leaving cravings unfulfilled.

33. Twin Fantasy- Car Seat Headrest

It’s weird to throw this on here because these songs have existed for such a long time. However, newer resources sparked an overhaul we didn’t even know we needed, and boy, did it work out. Twin Fantasy is one of those records that is so painfully personal you feel almost uncomfortable. Immersing yourself in its tales of infatuation and self-awareness to the point where you’re basically watching Will Toledo gut himself and everyone around him shouldn’t be this fun. It doesn’t gain a new audience by straying away from the lo-fi, but rather by accentuating the musical and conceptual turbulence. The best songs on here are eager shapeshifters, growing bigger and bigger until they pop, or in the some cases, they reach the ten minute mark and start gyrating. Eventually, he’ll start doing things like convincing himself that he can’t be evil, not because he’s good, but because “evil” is a phony construct. It’s a drastic leap from fondly recalling Skype calls to declaring that he is incapable of being both human and inhuman. Or is it? Car Seat Headrest has mastered the smug grin that does bad job of holding back the tears, hitting you with enough unhinged emotion to justify its performativity.

32. Sorpresa Familia- Mourn

Mourn have had a lot of burdens to shake in the wake of Sorpresa Familia, and it almost feels like they could only have made this album with something to prove. It makes sense as the product of a fight for financial justice, as it also sees Mourn viciously slithering away from the buzzwords people use to define them and the marquee names writers like me automatically liken them to. However, they don't do this by changing their sound, but by upping the ferocity in their energy, the complexity of their arrangements, and the stickiness of their melodies.

The commitment to quality makes it easy to forget the label drama that birthed this record. However, Sorpresa Familia would not exist in this form without the rage and hunger for justice that marked its creative process. "At 19 years old we're signing our divorce," they growl at one point. Anyone who has gone through it knows divorce often becomes a blissful catharsis for the victim. Sorpresa Familia doesn't merely mark this catharsis; it proves that Mourn needed to loosen the shackles to make the most fully-formed record of their career.

31. Lush- Snail Mail

It’s odd to hear someone younger than me (I’m 20) rock a style that shouldn’t have too many ideas left in the tank. That being said, it’s especially wild when they do so with such grace, sounding like a seasoned vet in their prime. Lush isn’t brimming with new sounds, but somehow it manages to be the most refreshing indie rock record in recent memory. Maybe it’s because the songwriting is simple at heart but captures something so universal and captivating. Lush dissects the ambiguities of young love, both the frustrating rush of being swept away and the strength it takes to realize that the exasperation may not be worth it. It resonates with me, and I can’t imagine these sentiments falling short on anyone, at least when they are delivered by Lindsay Jordan’s absolute powerhouse vocals. The more emotional bits come in like a sustained avalanche, knowing exactly what to emphasize and what not to overdo.

30. Devotion- Tirzah

We’ll talk about Tirzah in a second, but let’s take a minute to gawk at Mica Levi. It takes a seldom-seen skill set to create some the most weirdly accessible pop records of the early decade and then go on to get an Oscar nod for a movie about Jackie Kennedy. Yet now, having produced Devotion, she’s ready to give her tasteful, haunting minimalism the charismatic voice it has always deserved. Mica Levi was never the best frontwoman, so enter Tirzah, with a sultry, conversational voice that can mutter and howl in the same breath. This is a partnership that has been bubbling since early childhood, and you can tell just how well these two understand each other’s creative boundaries. Mica will take a sparse loop and spread it wide enough for Tirzah to spit out vulnerable bars like nobody’s watching, like she’s catching herself in a scary moment of candor and embracing it.

29. Sweetener- Ariana Grande

Ariana Grande’s music had always one-upped her public person. She had been in marquee relationships before, but none as inescapable as this. It’s weird to look back on Sweetener, which was dropped during peak Grandsonmania, as this happy, beam of light sticking out after she witnessed a bonafide tragedy unfurl at her now-infamous Manchester concert. It was the sound of an icon in full control of her narrative, choosing to show resilience and overdose on bliss. Instead of being distracted by her newfound spot at the top of the A-list, she was inspired by the spotlight. That being said, context doesn’t make Sweetener. Ariana Grande has always had a penchant for the most irresistible, immaculate pop masterstrokes, and Sweetner is home to so many of them. Her vocal capacity has become practically superhuman at this point. Whether she is howling on ‘breathin’ or unleashing a phantasmagoric coo on ‘R.E.M.’ it’s hard to imagine a delivery that would suit these songs better. She has perfected the ballad, but she has also perfected the bop, and Sweetener shows that she can effortlessly blend the two.

Of course, tragedy struck again in the death of her ex-boyfriend/best friend Mac Miller. She broke up with Pete and unpacked everything with her biggest song yet. However, Sweetener will always stand out as one of the most crucial and enjoyable bubblegum pop records of our time, one that, for all its lore, continues Ariana’s tradition of putting the music first.

28. New Bodies- Tangents

I’m never one to judge an album primarily by its capacity to make me go “whoa!”, but if I was, New Bodies would probably top this list. Simply put, this is a technical masterstroke. The type of music Tangents make is pretty hard to classify; its sprawling instrumental flexing suggests jazz but the ingredients are electronic. It’s impressive enough to pull off something so unorthodox but to do so in a way that manages to summon emotion while simultaneously dropping jaws...that’s a whole new level. New Bodies rejects the need to find a groove, fidgeting and sputtering to a point where it can either unravel or chase a massive crescendo. More often than not, it chooses both. This album flaunts its pace, but the real calling card is the texture, which is product of rattling percussion that manages to stay so varied and complex while providing a sturdy backbone. It shouldn’t be possible to scatter strings, cymbals, beats, and samples so haphazardly onto each track and come out with seven genuine odysseys. 

27. Galapagos- Wednesday Campanella

Wednesday Campanella aren’t quite subverting stylistic norms. Galapagos is chock full of drops, albeit interesting ones, and the songs rely on tried-and-tested formulas to drill the melodies in. However, skipping experimentation lets Wednesday Campanella to get straight to the point: unadulterated sonic bliss. Also, please don’t get me wrong. Wednesday Campanella don’t really sound like anyone else, even in the far-reaching, dense world of J-Pop. It’s hard to find any band that is so adamant on cramming this many glistening sounds into their music yet so capable of dodging busyness or being busy in the right way. Yet, for a group that does so much, it’s wild that they manage to have each element crafted with precision, whether it be a glittery synth sound shooting out of a vibe that would have never have called for it, or the vocals, which are always so high up in the mix that each breath is magnified. Sure, it’s not the most uncanny, but Wednesday Campanella stay surprising you with their audacious choices.

26. Room 25- Noname

Room 25 is birthed out of an entirely new set of circumstances. While Telefone was a Chicago album through-and-through, Room 25's namesake comes from the geographic ambiguity of two years spent living on the road. She sums it up nicely on "With You" where she raps "shared my life on Telefone, room 25 and 306, and 809 became my home.” Being thrown into the cutthroat touring process for two whole years is a unique and inherently transformative experience, and Room 25 captures this transformation in all its push-pull nuance, without sacrificing Noname's sharp eye for her surroundings. In this sense, Room 25 is excitingly personal. In the past, Noname the character has taken a passenger seat to Noname the narrator. Now she opens things up and focuses on her journey, and there's a lot of growth to be exhibited. It's an album with purpose, a moving snapshot of a coming-of-age worthy of all this great music.

Yet, for all the personality and reflection that comes out on Room 25, Noname's eloquent observations make for some of the stickiest moments on this album. When she ponders the hypocrisy of eating Chick-Fil-A "in the shadows" on ‘Blaxploitation’, she doesn't do so with a stern finger-wag but an onomatopoeic overcoming of sensation -- "mmm, yummy, tasty" -- kickstarting a flow that unwinds with her confronting the "thinkpiece" nature of her music head-on. However, these songs aren't thinkpieces. These are acute contemplations from someone with a lot to chew on. Room 25 sees a brilliant writer finding her outlet, taking in the world around her, and spinning it into her own extraordinary web.

25. Safe in the Hands of Love- Yves Tumor

Yves Tumor never seemed interested in stepping out of his mystery bag approach to making albums, mixing 8-minute long exercises in ambient noise with simple, concise soul jams. However, nothing he ever tries is derivative. Safe in the Hands of Love has too much distorted screaming to be labelled his crossover lunge, but now he seems ready to take his sonic ingenuity and apply it to something less abstract. Maybe that’s what happens when you get picked up by Warp, or maybe that’s just what Yves Tumor was planning this whole time. Either way, it doesn’t sound like any compromises are being made. Even the more anthemic songs like ‘Noid’ or ‘Lifetime’ reek of despair and restlessness, and the orchestral overtones that give the tracks their oomph aren’t exactly inviting either. More electronic tracks like ‘All the Love We Have Now’ and ‘Economy of Freedom’ are nods to past successes, but for all their electrifying grooviness, they embrace the same menacing grandiosity. The notion that nothing is off the table is all these songs abide to. Either way, these are some of his best.  

24. OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES- Sophie

Sophie never seemed that interested in feeding into the consumerism celebration/critique/caricature her PC Music contemporaries so loudly owned. For every robotic bubblegum pop hook she crafted there was an avalanche of emotion bubbling underneath. OIL takes that emotion and puts it front and center, revealing the dynamic human behind the once elusive machine. Sophie is no longer milking the hyper-synth + squeaky balloon + pots & pans combo into oblivion, but when it shows up here, it’s stronger than ever. ‘Ponyboy’ and ‘Faceshopping’ make previous career highs feel staticy, and there is now a lot more space and fluidity in Sophie’s barrage of beats. While these tracks will pounce on you, the real glory emerges in the most fully-formed moments of Sophie’s career. ‘It’s Okay to Cry’ will wind you with its earnest sensitivity, ‘Is It Cold in the Water?’ is built off a synthline that is borderline heavenly, and ‘Immaterial’ illustrates her identity with elegance that can only be described as career-defining. Music can be a lot of things, but at its very best it is an outlet to channel your truest self. OIL epitomizes this phenomenon, amping up the excitement as Sophie continues to explore.

23. The Smoke- Lolina

When you first hear the tuneless, off-kilter wobble of The Smoke, it becomes clear pretty fast that this album isn’t that interested in sounding “good.” Inga Copeland sounds detached from the music, her voice approaching a mumbling groan while the plodding keyboards and beats don’t sound especially happy to be there. It’s about nothing, it feels nothing, and it doesn’t want you to feel anything either. But, *surprise*surprise*, it’s fascinating. Unlike her close collaborator Dean Blunt, Copeland doesn’t rely on confusion to make the gag work but uses it to carve out a world for her tracks to awkwardly flourish. The first two songs are basically weed out tracks, testing even those most committed to adventure. Once you’re sucked in, the real drama goes down. The husting, solemn ‘The River’ has such a firm grasp on its momentum it practically feels like a set up. The next two songs are particularly stunning, stepping outside of the pervasive flatness to embrace something far more delicate. It’s hard to find an album that rejects aesthetics so much but transcends being just kinda interesting. In that respect, The Smoke is a rare success.

22. Veteran- JPEGMAFIA

Peggy comes close to wearing out his welcome a few times on Veteran. Instead, he just exasperates you, like a jester who bites and claws before he scampers away. It’s hard to even know where to begin with his music, but the elevator pitch is in the instrumentals. They frequently tease you with stomach-churning samples that seem borderline impossible to turn into a beat until they hit their stride and become obvious. On ‘Real Nega’, it’s a guttural sample of Ol’ Dirty Bastard croaking and on ‘Baby I’m Bleeding’ it’s a echoey computer crash of a stutter that paces around for a whole minute before turning into the banger it is. 

JPEGMAFIA ensures that listening to him is like tripping down an Internet rabbit hole, issuing somewhat agreeable hot takes about how Morrissey/Tom Araya/Varg deserve to die, how Pitchfork supports abusers (until it wasn’t cool), and...well...how he wants a bitch with long hair like Myke C-Town. He toes the line between sheer abrasion and accessibility, and the songs that do this best (‘Thug Tears’, ‘Macaulay Culkin’) seem destined for crossover success, because when he’s not hollering, he can sing about as well as anyone in Brockhampton. However, the most exciting thing is the notion that Peggy is a rapper who reflects music meme culture as much as he is a product of it, erasing the wall between the lurkers on 4chan and the artists they stan. #Edgy? Definitely, but I dare you to turn it off.

21. Joonya Spirit- Jaala

The most notable quotable I have read from Jaala is that the 4/4 time signature can go “fuck a dead donkey.” You’d think such a blatant contrarian might try a bit too hard to hit you with compositional gymnastics, and while there’s definitely some of that on Joonya Spirit, there’s a lot more passion. It’s rare to see something this proggy get caught up in such visceral vulnerability, with songs that confront anguish as the snide beast it is. One song has Cosmia Pay drained, wound up after being pet “like a dog.” Another takes the bare facts of a break-up and transforms them into a swaying hook. But between these outbursts, Jaala try to find the most convoluted way from A to B, constructing a self-imposed obstacle course. The journey bears gifts, to say the very least. While this can be a hard album to track, it’s elevated by an understanding of how to make the most out of its detours, with the complexity becoming a tool rather than a distraction. 

20. Cocoon Crush- Objekt

Electronic music is progressing so that the machine engages in a tug-of-war with the human. Some artists even use their platform to pitch a manifesto where there’s no reason humans should make better music than artificial intelligence. It’s a valid point, but it undervalues a virtuosic understanding of sound as a sensory experience, as if an algorithm can spew out music that is meticulously crafted to make you feel. Texture isn’t all it takes, but when Objekt’s music spreads itself out like the satisfying percussive ASMR it is, I nut. It’s not like his music is milking its benevolence, but it brims with life. The callbacks, the vividness, the rattling fiber...it’s designed to evoke. As an album that fully appreciates the artistic potential of technology, Cocoon Crush rejects techno’s anatomy and builds its own habitat.

19. The Wolf of Grape Street/God Level- 03 Greedo

It’s much easier to think of 03 Greedo’s output as this flurry of spontaneity, surfacing in eagerly explored ideas and a landslide of hard work and charm. Nobody has earned his spot on this list more than 03, an eager poet who packs all the turmoil he’s ever experienced into each nasally, autotuned whine. He’s also shockingly talented. Amidst the nearly 50 songs on these two projects, which are admittedly super bloated, there are really only a few duds, all of which suffer on the basis of being undercooked, not misguided. What makes up for it even more is the notion that the excess is probably the point. Greedo makes bangers that range from the devastated (‘Prayer From My Lost’) to the needy (‘Bacc to Jail’) to the combative (‘Basehead’) to the absolutely savage (‘Run For Your Life’).

It’s all infectious enough to shock you with its productivity, and that’s probably for good reason. Shortly before God Level was released, Greedo was sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in jail. It was technically on gun and drug charges, but it felt like he fell victim of a system that always put him last. Seeing him pour his heart out so urgently can only tug at the heartstrings.

18. Double Negative- Low

Not gonna lie, I would have never put my money on Low to craft an album that sounds so ahead of its time. Maybe I was ignorant...when you spend your whole career being the face of your own niche, especially one as fragile and poignant as slowcore, you can only waltz towards perfection. Double Negative may be just that. It’s ambitious, creating most of its backbones from waves of static. But how the fuck do you sound so relevant after years of sounding so worn down? Where did this need to deeply innovate and challenge come from? Whatever they did, Double Negative discovers a whole new language within its glitches.

Low have completely overhauled their sound, but only emphasized their essence. The vocals cast themselves like heavenly beams of light onto these suffocating drones, the type of clash that is built to overwhelm. Double Negative takes strokes of such vehement abrasion and tweaks them until they sound exquisite. It’s hard to find an album so unique yet so logical, obscurely branching off from an exhausted genre towards a practically euphoric display of textural understanding.

17. Compro- Skee Mask

It’s not easy to penetrate the traditional IDM canon these days, especially now that Aphex Twin is still active, but fuck me if Compro doesn’t try. This doesn’t position itself as one for the purists; instead it’s a confident progression of an age-old form, an album that knows what ingredients make this experimental techno shit work, but has no interest in indulging. A Skee Mask song will set itself up with a gravity-shaking rhythm that bulges with enough texture so that when a groove comes to nest, it is punctured and complex, even if its beauty comes in conventional forms. The twinkle of the melody on ‘Rev8617’ or the icy, distant synth on ‘Soundboy Ext.’ are cast over ripples and breakbeats. It doesn’t feel like he’s creating a juxtaposition as much as he is balancing these sounds out, as if their splendor is highlighted with containment.

16. Cold Devil- Drakeo the Ruler

It shouldn’t surprise you that someone who has been taken to task by law enforcement based on the perceived authenticity of his lyrics prides himself on his intensity. It’s hard to keep up a shtick for this long, rambling about apparently miscellaneous characters like Mr. Mosley and Pippi Longstocking, while never forgetting to underline how you have your dick out like a “pedophile” or how you’ve been strangling snakes and you bathe with the apes. All the while, you end pretty much each track with a minute-long tirade where you take in your surroundings. It’s a lot, but for an album of seemingly low-stakes shit-talking, Cold Devil packs a ton of depth.

Crafted during an 11-month jail stint, Cold Devil projects the charisma, isolation, and precision that can only arise from such introspective circumstances. Yet, while tapped into ultra-realism, the most captivating part of sees Drakeo’s imagination running wild. It’s like he used the time to construct his own emotional lexicon, and while it’s the type of bogged-up conceptualism that you can’t really articulate, he’ll be fucked if he doesn’t try. What comes out is a whirlwind of ideas, each flourishing, albeit concisely, through a swamp of imagery and excellent rapping. Anyone who views this as a confession must be kidding themselves; it’s a vivacious expression that even the most observant couldn’t untangle.

15. You Won’t Get What You Want- Daughters

Anger, despair, dejection...these are all emotions that might sound contrived, especially in a context where they’re almost taken as given (*cough*cough*noise rock*cough). Fortunately, nothing feels fake about Daughters. Spreading their wings after eight years of silence, You Won’t Get What You Want sounds like the pinnacle of a decade of anguish rolled up into a ball and fattened up to sound as big as possible. You’ll notice a few things right off the bat: the drums sounds massive, the vocals are almost always approaching a scream, and every instrument seems to have the color tuned out of it. Daughters play like they are making themselves dizzy, launching into climaxes with brute force. Yet for all its density, it’s a wonder how music this outwardly menacing can transcend the bluntness of its elements to become somewhat inviting. That being said, there is nothing wholesome about the darkness that dominates this record, but Daughters make sure to tweak their pain into the most suffocating beast they can so that it’s almost conventionally beautiful. It’s hard to find a record that executes its niche so perfectly, an ambience that can only be approached after years of marinating in your ache. 

14. Some Rap Songs- Earl Sweatshirt

It makes perfect sense to make music that sounds like what your friends’ make, but when the long-awaited Earl Sweatshirt album came out sounding like a logical follow-up to MIKE’s recently released Renaissance Man more than the sequel to I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside, it was a little confusing. However much Earl may drown in his modesty and aggressively try to understate the potency of his music, his brand of cooped-up gloom comes with a midas touch. It’s hard to say whether Earl was hard at work for these past three years, or whether he spun out these 15 vignettes in a stroke of manic genius, but it doesn’t really matter either way. They’re here and it’s captivating as fuck.

Earl the operation is an outlet for Thebe the person, who is still easing himself into stability after an adolescence where he became something of a martyr to millions of kids (#FREE EARL). Of course, this is punctuated by the death of his estranged poet father, a disconnect that Earl has always struggled to grapple with. However, Some Rap Songs is wary of romanticising anything for the sake of a narrative. Instead, it jumps from dusty beat to dusty beat, a flurry of understatements that rarely stay around for longer than two minutes. Earl has always been eager to find his niche after a couple of regrettable teenage choices that risked contaminating his artistry. Even if the inspiration he takes is obvious, his energy can’t be channelled by anyone else.

13. The Whole Thing Is Just There- Young Jesus

For a band who could easily be described as a “philosophy bro jam band,” Young Jesus make it pretty easy for you to like them. This is a controlled exercise in pensive, intellectual emo, an album hellbent on making sure each groove throbs like it’s had its young recently ripped from its arms. The riffs don’t emerge as hooks but rather weave themselves through tunnels, fueling each crescendo. At the apex of it all is a shuddering plea for attention. Young Jesus channel the same catharsis as the emo revivalist except they don’t take the easy way out; their forte is their creativity and their pulse is their sensitivity.

All six songs here manage to fit in both moments of anthemic infection and utter disarray (the glorious kind). The segments that accentuate this album are defined by their space and tenderness, taking poignant philosophical observations and highlighting their consequence with emotional outbursts. It takes a style bent on nostalgia and pushes into an entirely new place, a feat that very few artists can pull off, especially with such volume and precision.

12. Have fun- Smerz

Smerz are like if an artist with talent, charisma, and pop smarts was approaching a fork in the road where they could pursue Top 40 glory or use their resources to lead the vanguard and make challenging, deconstructive electronic music. Guess which one they choose? The melodies that soar over the gritty, distorted beats could have been lifted from the bridge of a #1 R&B hit. Instead, they are spread over a tattered landscape, like a safari where you’re not gawking at animals but taking in an exhibit of quirky synth sounds and samples of speech that sound like they are lifted from a 3 AM drunk voicemail.

Have fun bounces between ethereal dizziness and stark percussive minimalism, but when the two combine, it’s a goosebump-inducing juxtaposition. Floating above the instrumentals-- which honestly could have been released on their own and still have made the lower-end of this list-- is either a deadpan cheerleader chant or a fluttering vocal harmony. Whatever Smerz do, they can’t stop creating music that the words “haunting” and “hypnotic” must’ve been invented to describe. They construct such an exclusive bubble where experimental techno and pop intersect, a fusion that needed to happen, that other artists have tried to do and came-out contrived. It pulsates with mystery, which is funny because most of these songs are about getting fucked up or, as Smerz would put it themselves, “basic bitch problems.” Their ominous gaze turns this charm into a manifesto. And why shouldn’t it? Music this serious yet unpretentious is a rare delight.

11. Honey- Robyn

Everything Robyn does, she does with conviction. She’ll look back on the empty spaces her lover has left behind without fearing her resentment. She’ll invite you to a beach party with casual assurance (“come thru, it’ll be cool”), but boldly winks to suggest that it might be the most transcendental night ever. She’ll demand forgiveness without begging for it, embracing submissiveness while knowing the absurdity of her demands. Is forgiveness even real? Is nostalgia hollow? Is it OK to be heartbroken? These are the types of issues Robyn deals with on Honey, an album that packs eight years of growth into 40 minutes, as if Robyn has been contemplating the scope of her influence and brainstorming the next best step.

Of course, Honey isn’t that calculated. It’s a record of audacious sensitivity, dissecting the simplest phenomena and matching them up with the perfect backdrops. The sex song (‘Between The Lines’) skips with a seductive sway, like a lab-constructed aphrodisiac. The club song (‘Beach 2k10’) is an anomaly, but walks with the confidence of a nightlife staple. However, the best tracks are the most fully-formed, tracks like ‘Honey’ and ‘Human Being’ feel like quintessential Robyn on steroids. It’s astonishing how good she is at this, and even when the record treads new water with suave, captivating disco cuts, Robyn owns whatever space she’s in.

10. Vibras- J Balvin

J Balvin is not the most emotive, distinctive, eccentric reggaeton artist, nor does he have the best voice or the most dominating presence. But he might be the most ambitious, and the most adept at making effortless smash hits, a thing he does on Vibras pretty much every time he tries. In a world where the top tier of Urbano Latino can get billions of views on YouTube and compete internationally with the biggest American superstars, J Balvin is the artist most excited to lead the movement, the most well-versed in its potential.

As the title suggests, Vibras is a record of concrete vibes. J Balvin is aware that a lot of his listeners will not go through the trouble of translating his lyrics, so he makes sure that even people who didn’t take Spanish in high school will grasp what he’s trying to do. All you need to know about ‘Mi Gente’ is found in the now-iconic stuttering vocal sample that starts the song, and the crux of ‘Cuando Tú Quieras’ is a similar sample being flipped into something sultry and seductive, functioning at just as high a level. Vibras seems masterfully curated, even if lots of the songs are anomalies. However, these anomalies don’t just stand out but elevate the power of the straighter, simpler reggaeton songs. ‘En Mí’ is a lovelorn ballad, ‘Brillo’ finds an unlikely pairing with ROSALÍA, who is at the peak of her melodic prowess, and ‘Machika’ ends the album with an almost overly lit EDM crossover. Everything works and it’s wonderful.

9. Bark Your Head Off, Dog- Hop Along

When Frances Quinlan unleashes her raspy, crackling yelp, you know important shit is about to go down. Hop Along have always specialized in a very particular type of drama. They have a penchant for telling stories with a candor that makes it feel like you’re eavesdropping, like you’ve stumbled upon a goldmine of gossip that you shouldn’t be hearing but are far too morbidly curious to plug your ears. The juiciness can come in the form of bureaucratic academia scandals, sexual overtones in the Bible, or the ever-so-relatable struggle of watching Watership Down expecting a kid’s movie, but observing a bloody festival of rabbit slaughter instead. The twists and turns are spot-on and frequently hilarious. If Bark Your Head Off, Dog’s ideas were expanded into prose, it would be a top-tier collection of short stories.

Amidst all the motifs surface nine expertly crafted rock songs that worm around with the utmost purpose, with each chorus/bridge/coda packing enough zest to fuel the whole track. Quinlan’s grip on these melodies is first-rate, as if she’s being swept up by something bigger yet going to painstaking lengths to ensure every tonal phase is spot-on. Bark Your Head Off, Dog is consistent to the point of near-perfection. It doesn’t take long for it to sink in that every song is a highlight, a beacon of emotion that capitalizes on every glimmer of melodic brilliance. Yet somehow, it’s impossible to predict where these songs will go. Often, strings or screams will emerge from out of nowhere, other times are doused in pure, saccharine pop music. Hop Along have mastered spontaneity to the point where nothing feels tacked on. There are so many dimensions to their sounds/stories that you’ll unpack something new with each listen.

8. Nothing Is Still- Leon Vynehall

Leon Vynehall is a practical musician. His last album was, literally, “designed to dance”; a myriad of songs at a streamlined, club-ready BPM that progressed with the pace of a night out. His fascination with multi-dimensionality in house music is abundantly clear. He’s always going to find a new way to be inventive, always ready with a brand new purpose.

Nothing Is Still tests house music’s limits with biography, each song representing a “chapter” or “footnote” in the life of Vynehall’s grandparents, particularly their emigration from England to New York City in the 1960s. Of course, this music is instrumental, so the introspection is all atmospheric, a hard thing to pull off. Thankfully, Vynehall comes up with some sky-scraping, impassioned music, channelling something very vivid. The ambient pieces on this album are textured and passionate. They must be immediate illustrations of the flood of emotion Vynehall experienced in the wake of his grandfather’s death, when he was fully gripped by the narrative, and decided to go down the rabbit hole. It’s oddly tangible, and even without the backstory, the distant grooves on this album could overwhelm you. It’s a bold feat to try and soundtrack something you didn’t directly experience, but the emotional depth packed in this electronic period piece can only be the result of extensive research and nights of curious catharsis. Taking your craft seriously is one thing; creating a record that brims with such sensitivity and personal importance without saying a single word is something else.

7. Harutosyura- Harunemuri

Whatever is being fused on Harutosyura, whether it be pop-punk and rap or hardcore and electronica, yields intense results. It’s not your standard foray into J-pop; Harunemuri are sure to make compact bubbles that writhe and spin before they burst, leaving behind a barrage of glitzy choruses and whines that sound like they’re at the end of an exhausting a potentially lethal chase. It’s chaos, but it’s also rich and entirely unique. Some songs will wear out a stunning riff before collapsing in a fit of aggression; others prefer to reach a screeching halt out of nowhere, only to come back stronger than ever to provide a new angle on their beauty. They will confuse you with the effortless strides they hit, especially because they sound like they are trying to cram every emotion they’ve ever experienced into one note. It’s too dramatic not to be entertaining and too action-packed not to constantly revisit. Even the most animated could only dream of channelling the flux of Harutosyura.

6. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships- The 1975

It’s been steady growth for The 1975. In their early days, they were a subtly good indie-rock boy band who mostly sang songs designed to get teenage girls a bit too excited. I probably hated them without having heard any of their stuff. Then, they became this overly ambitious 80s glam-rock monster, packing many standard pop bops on their sophomore album, but filling the space between them with tracks that sounded like shoegaze/post-rock/gospel parody (to be clear, I thought it was brilliant). Now, they are one of the most outspoken, monumental bands of our generation, still silly, but absolutely drowning in good ideas. Without hyperbole, I think they are the most exciting thing to happen to the band format in a long time.

Their main thing is that they do the most. Even when the pleasures are simple, Matt Healy is yelling a bit too close to your ear, throwing out commentary that masquerades as ill-fitting until you realize it’s actually super clever and eloquent. The main draw, however, is how every time they turn the page, they land on a song that immediately traps you. Additionally, all these ideas are fresh and essential. The centerpoint is ‘Love It If We Made It’, a tabloid-esque collage of cultural commentary that woos you with its timeliness as Healy throws his entire voice towards a scream of “modernity has failed us!” The rest of the singles range from the best 80s-movie pool party throwback of the year, a rainbow of soothing horns and romantic ennui, a finger-wagging burst of 29-year old wisdom, and a smugly confused radio song. Deeper in the album lie cautionary tales on Internet death told by a robot, Bon Iver-ian swaths of autotuned warbling transformed into high-tier experimental techno, a nocturnal barroom jazz track...I could go on like this for paragraphs lol. The point is, everything they try works and everything that works sticks with you. For an album where a bunch of millenials spend an hour obsessing over the “digital age,” A Brief Inquiry has too much charm.

5. Knock Knock- DJ Koze

If I have to hear someone call DJ Koze some variation of “house music’s biggest prankster” again, I swear to god (haha). I know he can be pretty goofy, and there are many moments on Knock Knock that project this goofiness. Some of the vocal samples (“I need a little light here!”, “I know the future better than you know the past”) are kitsch for sure, but there is no understating this man’s profound talent. He will find a sample, find another sample, and mix the two into something hypnotic. I don’t know if he stumbles upon these grooves or if they are vastly premeditated through some process where he hears an old record, his ears perk up and, poof, a full-fledged house banger surfaces in his mind. He’s always been willing to push the envelope, but on Knock Knock he fully embraces his versatility and distinctiveness. Even the most random sounds he throws into the blender make absolute sense in the sugary, hyper-charged context they’re presented.

Not all of this will sink in quickly, but there are some clear hard-hitters. ‘Pick Up’ floods into the mix like a warm embrace from a long-lost friend, creating a vibe that could and should continue forever. Yet all it does is chop up two 70s soul songs and loop them into oblivion, carrying such a heavy emotional load while staying relatively stagnant. The fat, throbbing bassline on ‘Bonfire’ makes Justin Vernon sound dreamier than he ever has before. ‘Illumination’ is a steady build to an ultimately glorious release, a masterclass in the sly emergence of its drop. It’s all so glistening and nostalgic. There’s sniffs of rap, folk, R&B, techno but none of the paths diverge from the cohesive sonic wonderland. Some prank lol.

4. Aviary- Julia Holter

When do you decide to make your magnum opus? How do you figure out that, after your most accessible album and a whole decade of building your own distinctive take on baroque, your next project would be 90 minutes of the densest, most sonically ambitious music you’ve ever released? Aviary is the type of album you wouldn’t want to put out until you are totally ready. Thankfully, Holter has every reason to be confident in her abilities. She knows when to sustain a wall of noise and when to interject with a mutter or an instrumental collapse. She knows how to pile reverb-drenched choirs onto light orchestration and how to let her voice soar while maintaining the necessary space. To pull off a sprawling, abstract project like this, you need to be some kind of genius. I don’t use that word lightly.

Aviary is meditative. Crammed with songs that linger for as long as they do without hitting a conventional stride, the dynamism is contagious. You genuinely have no idea where each song will go and there is such an abundance of feeling that it’s practically impossible to take it all in. It’s a world that you can untangle, plowing deeper and deeper into it and getting lost in the spectacle. At one moment it’s stressful, and in the next, it’s meditative. The declarations are profound. It’s a rejection of cynicism, and a full-fledged embrace of the simplest, most overpowering emotions, taking pride in the capacity to be swept away. Have you ever fallen in love? Sometimes love can be bitter and toxic, but other times, it is something worthy of a welcome parade, something that will make you loudly weep while you’re clutching onto it. That’s the scope of Aviary, a record that has no qualms about melting into gibberish, as long as it is fully evocative.

3. Be the Cowboy- Mitski

Mitski writes songs with such a penetrating, inhospitable gaze that she practically begs you to feel uncomfortable, even if she radiates warmth and empathy. She’ll come thru with a track about how much she loves her non-existent husband, how for all of eternity it will just be the two of them together, how they are doing better...it goes on until you’re pressed to think it’s a joke, but if it is, then why are you on the verge of tears? Then you sit, ponder, and start considering what it means to “be the cowboy.” Is cowboy swagger one that swoops in on a literal horse, becomes an all-or-nothing imposition of hyper-dominance, and carries itself like it’s the only thing that matters? Or is the one that takes you to a diner after years of silence, Blue Diner to be precise, and suffocates you with a lull while quietly reminding you that it will always keep a part of you? Vulnerability is Mitski’s forte. Whether it’s cloaked in sarcasm, painfully earnest, or deeply internalized, hers is a narrative so potent that you can’t help but unload all your emotional burdens alongside it.

Be the Cowboy is the moment when you’ve revealed so much about yourself to someone that for a second, it’s actually terrifying how quickly and easily they could undermine your whole existence. It’s naked but unconcerned, taking pride in its ability to crumble. Somehow, there’s nothing forced about the painstaking introspection; Mitski is fully committed to baring her soul without simplifying it or suffocating in self-righteousness. It’s equal parts defensive and dejected. You can only be reminded about the impossibility of idealization so much before you start to get confused. But when it’s as outrageous and tortured as this, it stops being a statement and becomes a full-fledged celebration. It painful to to watch, but it hurts even more to turn away.

2. El Mal Querer- Rosalía

Sometimes an album comes along feeling like such a pinnacle of a movement while deifying any categorization. It’s like Rosalía as a concept has been around forever, taking in influence from so many times and places and feelings...but nothing has ever really sounded like this. “Flamenco-pop” is a feeble label for something that so frequently whirls into a trance, belting out unhinged cries of fervor and then, on the next song, lifting a melody from Justin Timberlake. It’s like everything is being re-contextualized on here, and the result is a record that exists in its own time and space, refusing to branch out in favor of planting its own garden.

Rosalía lives for melodrama, which could be cloying if she didn’t justify it so well. It’s like her voice is always on the cusp of breaking out into a 30-second howl, which holds even when she coos a top nothing but a faint drum or a car engine noise. It takes a deep appreciation of your culture and history to be able to sound so universal without simply pining for an older vibe. Rosalía is constantly finding a way to go beyond that, subtly slipping autotune into a crevice that traditionalists would leave uncontaminated, developing sticky hooks without basing the whole song around them. When your core is a developed movement like flamenco but your crowd is the Spanish mainstream, you need more than a pinch of experimentation. El Mal Querer goes beyond that, not leaving any strand of its influences unexplored. Rosalía examines the age-old beauty of the form from every angle she can, shaking it up and seeing how it explodes.

1. Die Lit- Playboi Carti

What does it take to be the album of the year? Well...clearly not lyrical substance, or curt editing, or biting social commentary. The prerequisites for quality are getting harder and harder to pin down. All I know is that Die Lit feels like the album that all the over-saturated glut was building up to/the culmination of the ideas set forth by boundary pushers like Future or Young Thug/the logical conclusion to the intersection between lean-soaked hedonism and fine art. Don’t quote me, but we might not do any better than this. At the end of the bloated tunnel, there’s Playboi Carti squawking into oblivion, deconstructing the style that birthed him over beats that could’ve been produced by, like, Oneohtrix Point Never or Ricky Eat Acid or something.

Playboi Carti is a trailblazer. The most common critique of him is that “all he does is ad-libs, he honestly can’t even rap, and what’s good with all that autotune?” Back to my point about this being the logical conclusion of trap; removing the filler between the ad-libs is a fucking genius idea, an assured embrace of what you do best. I mean, imagine if Migos just went “uhh!” and “mama!” and didn’t have Quavo’s uninspired autotune weighing them down...it happens sometimes, and it’s beautiful. Carti’s ad-libs can be as simple as “what?” or “bih!”, and they are usually presented like a highly calculated flick of emotion, like the mechanics for a precise accentuism. Plenty of guests show up on Die Lit, and none of them have any trouble carving a space in Carti’s world. This makes sense when it’s Thugger or Travis Scott, but it is especially potent when it’s Nicki Minaj and Bryson Tiller, people who rarely delve into this type of experimentation on their own. Carti is so infectious that everyone is eager to step in his space and explore how they can dismantle their own form.

All of it is a daring experiment, especially in the moments where Carti tests the limits of his style, seeing how long he can hold the silence before getting swept into a verse, measuring how layered his voice can get before it crumbles and melts. Give Carti credit where credit is due, but Die Lit would be nothing without its producers, especially Pierre Bourne, who constructs a hazy, awe-inspiring fever dream whenever he hops behind the boards. Not only does this steer hip-hop into the direction it needed to go; it takes notes from the masters of ambient techno, blending snippets of overwhelming synths or vocals into beats that any lesser rapper would have no idea how to ride. When you’re on the forefront of the most widely consumed genre, it’s a lot of responsibility. Die Lit is one of the most forward-thinking statements in the hip-hop yet. At this point, Carti and his team are incapable of producing a song that doesn’t test boundaries or warp seasoned assumptions about what works.

Bring Me the Horizon - amo

For better and for worse, this one has been a long time coming. If Sempiternal was the irritated throat fans brushed off as nothing, then That's the Spirit was their first terrifying handful of blood coughed up after ignoring diagnostics, and amo is the progression of the untreated pop infection in Bring Me the Horizon's lungs that has progressed beyond treatment. For fans uneasy about the band's trajectory in 2015, this album is no easy pill to swallow.

I've been rather critical of a lot of bands aping Bring Me the Horizon's more try-hard anthemic metalcore style since the success of 2013's Sempiternal, but for Bring Me the Horizon themselves, I've actually had at least a little bit of appreciation for the boldness and ambition with which they have seemed to try to push their brand of metalcore since their 2010 album There Is a Hell, Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven, Let's Keep It a Secret. But with that appreciation of what they are trying to do to bolster their sound has also come with a lot of frustration when it comes to the execution, whether it be the repetitive formula on Sempiternal yielding some seriously irritating tunes whose energy only magnified their obnoxiousness, or the horrendous watering down that neutered any idea of ambition on That's the Spirit.

It has been about four years since the band's aggravating previous album, and for myself, the metal community outside the band's fanbase, and even within, those four years have been spent nervously gritting teeth in anticipation of what the band would progress toward next. And now it's here. Given the sour turn the band took with That's the Spirit, my hopes for amo were not high at all. In fact after a series of lackluster maimstream-ish releases so far this year, I was ready for the cherry to top the shit sundae with this album. That being said, amo is definitely bolder and a much more thoughtful continuation of Bring Me the Horizon's quest for pop glory, and one that is at least more determined and more comprehensive than That's the Spirit. The band finally commit to the sound they clearly wanted to make their way to, and in some ways it's good that they're not trying to cover their bases as thinly as possible like they were with their previous album. Indeed, there are a few tracks on here I enjoy quite a lot.

The band fully commit to the sounds and writing styles of Top 40 pop these days, and this album would definitely blend right in with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes. I feel like I have to address my distaste for Top 40 music in general and clarify that it's not based in a simplistic, tribalistic feud I see lots of metalheads take part in, where it's the principle of pop vs. rock or mainstream music vs. outsider music that's being fought over. No, I definitely enjoy me some thoughtfully done pop music and even some indulgently tasty pop as well. What I don't like is the sterility of the music from the likes of Halsey, Macklemore, Camila Cabello, or whoever made that shit song "The Middle" selected to be the goal for pop artists to strive for to reach radio/playlist success. And then there's the despised Imagine Dragons, the only pop rock band in existence apparently, based on how much time they suck up on the radio. I know this is a sidetrack and I know that radio is not the prime outlet it used to be, but it still represents a lot of what pop trends towards these days, and it continues to set a precedent for vapid, lazy songwriting, and corporately calculated pandering. That being said, there's the occasional song I'm surprised, not so much by my enjoyment of, but of the presence of something enjoyable coming from a mainstream pop outlet, and that's what amo seems to be going for.

I gave this album quite a few listens, both to really get to know it as per usual, and because this kind of pop isn't my usual forte, and it was interesting to see how the album transformed in my eyes with each successive listen. My first time hearing it, I knew I was going into a straight-up pop album, and with the ilk of Top 40 stations as my barometer, I was actually pretty relieved and pleasantly surprised to not be slamming my head against the nearest wall for the 51 minutes it lasts. But then I remembered, "wait a minute, this is a pop album, it loves to ride a good first impression, see how it is after 4, 5, 6 listens." And sure enough, it waned on me the more I listened.

The parts that I really enjoy did rise to the top as the rest sank, but with a better understanding of this album's content and what it's trying to achieve, I end up with a lot of the same frustrations I had with the band on Sempiternal and its predecessor, just in a less heavy format/context this time. Like the band's first metalcore-departing albums, amo has some good stylistic ideas and it works well with them, but the band's inconsistent results with the repetitive formulas they emply continues to be the limiting factor for them. On the vocal front, Oli Sykes clearly channels Minutes to Midnight-era Chester Bennington all over the project, from the raspy borderline shouted melodies and overwhelmingly polished cleans, while also making a very pop-influenced use of his falsettos as well, and as much as it often teems over with blatant imitation, at least I can't complain about his execution; he's on point pretty much the entire time, which could be thanks to some production crutches, but Sykes' performances sound watertight nonetheless. The rest of the band are much more present than I thought they would be, not as drowned out in gaudy pop production (which does still become a bit too much at some points, but for the most part it's pretty tasteful and balanced throughout the album).

Songs like "nihilist blues" do well to set futuristically melancholic moods through modern electro pop instrumentals, while on songs like "MANTRA" and "sugar honey ice & tea" (a cheesy roundabout way to title the song "shit"), the band try to keep the guitar-driven energy high while blending more pop-oriented elements and performance/production techniques, and the blend is at least a refreshingly alive spin on the egg-shell-treading stlyes of this era of pop music. But the band still don't really manage to make what sounds good on paper actually sound as good as it should through speakers, churning out some annoying melodies through the overly repetitive structures that take bad pop songs from displeasing to disgusting. And these songs have some potential and some parts of them that I wish weren't wrecked by overproduction or cheesy choruses, "sugar honey ice & tea" especially has some invigorating building rock instrumentation in its verses, but the band don't really follow through on the hollow, high-pitched electro vocal-laden chorus. But then there are the songs that (I think) don't really have any redeeming qualities.

The songs where Bring Me the Horizon really just lean all the way into this new role as a prospective pop act are the ones where they of course fall into the styles' predictable pitfalls. Straightforward pop numbers like "mother tongue" and "medicine" channel kiddish lyrics about love and embodying vindictiveness respectively through bland, unimaginative instrumentation. Another track, "in the dark", runs in kind of the same vein of unadultered pop with Oli Sykes doing his best Shawn Mendes impersonation, but is at least a little bit more soulful and less robotic.

Back in the gray area is the song "heavy metal", which takes aim at the attitudes of discontented fans being mad at the band for continuing to shift styles. I understand that there are definitely a lot of stubborn people willing to let that be sufficient justification for their reasons for lampooning the band's change in style, but there are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about this new direction that lots of other people are articulating that the band could have addressed instead of minimizing the criticism surrounding them to the reductive basement-dweller strawman. Instrumentally though, it is one of the heavier songs on the album, ending with the album's only screamed breakdown, as short as it is.

As far as highlights go, the song "why you gotta kick me when i'm down?" is a convincing electronic banger that finds low-register synths mimicking the crunch of the guitar the band usually uses, and doing so well. Lyrically it oozes of the same kind of inability to accept criticism as "heavy metal", but at least this song's fierce potency makes a good case for the band's being above the type of simplistic criticism they lament. The song "wonderful life" is by far the best song on the album with its gritty electro-nu metal guitar groove and its anthemic vocal melody in the chorus raising a defeatist toast to growing old and burning out. The pop influences are still easily palpable, but taking a support role rather than the lead, with the band driving the song with the down-tuned metal riffage they do well that made Suicide Season and the best parts of Sempiternal.

For what could have been the definitive nail in the coffin for a lot of people like me who hated That's the Spirit, amo is definitely a mixed bag in classic Bring Me the Horizon fashion, but that sure is a lot better than the torturous train wreck I was expecting (especially after hearing "mother tongue" and "medicine" as preliminary singles), and it at least shows that this band does indeed have the potential to do well in this metal-flavored pop niche they're trying to carve out, and by all means I would love for them to do well with it. I think it is important for metal to continue to make good entry-level material for the new generations, and entry-level material that immersed fans can bond with new fans over as well and for younger generations to be able to look back at fondly after diving deep into the wonderful world of metal music. I definitely don't think amo is quite that album, but it is a gateway, and it does suggest that somewhere in Bring Me the Horizon's collective creative potential exists that album, which only tenacity and further perfection of this style they've arrived at can uncover.

better than Halsey/10

rank the Spirit Phone songs? (no need to do the demo's if you don't want)

oh fuck yeah okay uhh nondemo songs:1. cabinet man- this song makes me go KNUTS instantantly. if I've had an absolutely horrendous day, cabinet man just seems 2 get rid of it all. thanks Neil Cicierega for this song.2. lifetime achievement award - listening to this song with headphones/earbuds vs through a speaker is two entirely separate songs. listening to this song and doing literally nothing else is like getting on that one motion theater ride at Chuck e cheese. this song is excellent. thank you. 3. touch tone telephone - I love this song and it almost sounds like a love song the first few times u listen to it but as u find out the real meaning that love song interpretation just furthers the passion of the caller. it also sounds cool. thank u. 4. ancient aliens - the lyrics in the intro are Okay but the way it DIVES right into the main song is so good. I used to skip this just cause of the intro but it's So Good. I like that it's like a two in one combo with touch tone. thanks. 5. man made object - a really pretty song and I like it. it reminds me of the NUMTOT group on fb and urban planning in general. super great and cool. 6. Reaganomics - as someone who Absolutely Hates Ronald Reagan, this song is good in how it makes fun of that rotting bastard. idk if it's the demo version or not but the one on SoundCloud is super good. 7. earned my life - this song sounds good and the lyrics are Super Good and call out bootstraps politics from a first person point of view and it's rly cool. the repetition goes well with the beat and generally a song I enjoy when I am Incredibly Stable (not often). 8. spiral of ants - makes me dissociate but still a Really Cool Song. I discovered this through the one post about the ants that spiraled around the phone playing the drake Wii song ringtone.9. no eyed girl - valid heterosexual activity. really cool story song and that's why I really like Neil's music: almost all his songs tell a story and they're all weird and fun. 10. soft fuzzy man - invalid heterosexual activity. it sounds funky tho and I like the double meaning between creepy ass dudes and a literal sentient patch of haze that wants a gf. the beat sounds like something they would play in a cartoon Network bumper and I actually like that. Neil also pronounces girls and jirls and that's Something. 11. sweet bod - it's. okay. I really can't choose between the album version and the demo version. 12. as your father I expressly forbid it - it's kind of okay, my mom references it sometimes tho. the person the "dad" is referring to reminds me of my dad cause he was a Rascal! but I hate him. thank you. 13. eighth wonder - another one that's just. alright. I don't really have an opinion on it, I usually skip it cause it's just not as energetic as the other songs. 14. When He Died - I can't listen to this song cause of how it talks about death. I'm sorry Neil. Demo Track Time1. You're at the party - SUPER GOOD I LOVE THIS SONG. the imagery is so good and it draws me in really well.2. crisis actors - this. reminds me of the Jurassic Park ride at universal for some reason. besides that it's a neat song and I like the "those who do the math have been known to end up drowning in the bath" and it's SO GOOD. Excellent good song. 3. cabinet man demo - reminds me of gay shit for some reason. I like it. very cute and sweet.4. redesign your logo - ancap ANTHEM 👏👏👏 😫😫😫 (/s) . this song is good and I like the robotic vibe it gives off. 5. pizza heros - Neil Cicierega ended homophobia with this song thank you so much Neil.6. Kubrick and the beast - I love it! super fun song even without lyrics. 7. angry people - "when two people hate each other very much" pure genius Neil churning out another absolute banger thanks neil. 8. geocities - I went Absolutely Wild once trying to find this song cause I couldn't remember what album it was on. all I could remember was the robot voices. good night. 9. Moon's request - a neat remix of his gravity falls theme. pretty cool!! 10. gravitron - I like the bouncy sound and also that it another gravity falls song. 11. sweet bod - eh. it was okay. feels really drawn out and not the best. 12. angelfire - mmm. don't like this one too much. funky beat and enjoyable. usually.13. cat hacks - initially I confused this song with angelfire and . I'm so sorry to angelfire cause this was Not the best one for Neil. thank u.

December

I sat with my mouth slightly dropped. Maybe I licked my lips once or twice, I don’t know, but it’s very likely. Harry and Zayn were both stood topless in the kitchen. I mean, I didn’t mean to ogle, but it was bloody hard not to. Even Ringo had made a surprise appearance, and she was exactly the same. Zayn was a little weedy, but I could see from the look in Ringo’s eyes that was exactly her type. Me personally, it was Harry who had my attention.

I still hated him. It was the 19th of December, which meant he had moved into our flat just over a month ago, and we still weren’t on good terms. I was thankful that neither of us had ever mentioned the night where I found my head on his shoulder, his cheek against mine, our breathing in sync as he helped me throw up. It had been a strange moment that we shared, and one I was glad we didn’t really acknowledge. There had been a few more nights out, a few more arguments, and our situation hadn’t improved. However, ignoring all of that, his body was absolutely lovely. I would never understand that tattoo, that bloody moth or whatever it was. I tried to blank it out and stare at the pure bliss of his abs. They were something else. I knew Harry went running a lot, he would get up early in the morning and run around campus, but I couldn’t explain or even begin to comprehend how he kept that figure up. Especially with the lifestyle we were all leading. I had been too fascinated trying to find out if I had just spotted a third nipple to notice that he had seen my staring. Which obviously, he loved. “You enjoying yourself, Pip-Squeak?” “Hm?” I mumbled, darting my eyes up to his. “You just… taking it all in, yeah?” He smirked. “Your tattoo is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” I tried to cover my tracks. “Is it a moth?” “It’s a butterfly.” “Does it have sentimental meaning or do you just like giant, horrible tattoos?” I shrugged. “I like anything that makes a girl stare at my body like that.” He raised his brows playfully. I scoffed, returning my gaze to the TV on the wall. I was so looking forward to the upcoming two weeks I’d be spending at home. With Christmas only a few days away, I had begun missing my family more than you can imagine. I hadn’t gone home once, which I wasn’t expecting, being such a home orientated person. But I guess with it being that way, I just got more excited that I would eventually be home with them. Of course I was sad Liam wouldn’t be there with us, but we had promised to skype him throughout the Christmas meal, and that was better than nothing. I was even excited about the train journey to get home. I needed it all. The thought of two blissful weeks without Harry Styles made me want to cry with happiness. My phone pinged and as did my stomach, knowing it would be Louis. Louis: I might be slightly gutted I won’t get to kiss you on NYE. Many kisses had been exchanged between myself and Louis, but still, nothing more than that. I always asked, I always hinted. I was getting desperate for a shag, but he was so hesitant. I wondered if he looked at it how I should be doing. Thinking of taking it slowly and maybe we could get somewhere, rather than rushing it. I tried not to be completely paranoid about the whole thing, but I was not doing a good job. Me: I might feel a similar way. Louis: I’ll kiss you when we’re back. All over. Me: All over? Louis: All over. I felt my stomach churning, and it really felt like my day. He was finally kind of, secretly saying, it’s going to happen. In the new year, it’s going to happen. Finally, I would be able to feel his lips somewhere other than my lips, and neck, and ears, and every other place he had let those dainty things wander to. I sunk further into the chair, no idea what to reply to him, my stomach in absolute tatters. Ringo scurried back into her room, making sure to get one more eyeful of Zayn before she rushed off. I was still relatively breathless when Zayn came and sat next to me. “Louis?” “Yeah.” I sighed. “You shagged him yet?” “No.” “You dying?” “Yeah.” “Thought so.” He nodded. I was going to miss Zayn over the break. Two weeks isn’t really a long time, but when you live with someone it definitely feels like it. Zayn had been just across the hall from me for three months now. The thought of not having that did make me feel slightly uncomfortable. “Next year.” I told him. “It’s on.” “Yeah?” He chuckled. I tried to ignore Harry as he scooted and slumped down on the sofa next to me, some kind of pasta dish in a giant bowl, which he quickly started munching into, eyes on the tele, no interest in myself and Louis. “Definitely. In January I’m getting some.” “I’m trying to eat here.” Harry groaned beside me. “Yeah well on more than one occasion, I’ve been trying to sleep when you’ve had a girl in your room, so I’m sure you can deal with this dinner conversation.” He couldn’t argue with that. There had been Tally within his first week and two others since. Maybe that was the same girl but there had been two other occasions. I couldn’t help but think about how awful Tally felt on the other side of him. She must have been able to hear those noises as clearly as I could. Poor girl. The microwave pinged eventually and I dashed over to get my meal, excited that this was the last microwaveable meal I would be having for the next fortnight. Being home and eating properly was going to be a beautiful thing. I noticed Harry shuffle even further into the corner of the sofa as I went and reclaimed my spot in the middle, trying not to spill any gravy from my bangers and mash dish. “I’m gunna miss this.” Zayn sighed. “Living like a slob?” Harry asked. “Yeah, pretty much.” “Same.” Harry agreed. “Gunna miss me, Styles?” I asked with a grin. “More than I can explain, Pip-Squeak. My heart aches at the thought that you won’t be around pissing me off.” “I figured that would be the case.” “Do you two ever shut up?” Zayn groaned. We did try to keep it as low-key as possible when Zayn was around. Neither of us necessarily enjoyed putting him in the middle, because one of the only similarities we shared was our mutual love for Mr Malik. Mike exited his room with a massive rucksack on, cheering merrily to himself, making Harry and Zayn laugh, whereas I turned up the volume on the TV. “Guess who’s going home for Christmas?” He bellowed, and then pointed to himself. “This guy! This twat right here.” I had to let out a little chuckle at that, seeing Mike do a little dance round the kitchen. The thing on his back suggested he was going camping for a week, the dance he was doing definitely suggested he was going to a festival. All in all, he looked brilliant, possibly even taller than I had previously thought. “Don’t you have a lecture tomorrow?” I asked him, aware of his schedule by that stage. “Yeah, but they called it off, so this twat, is going home a day early.” “Why do you keep calling yourself this twat?” “Because this twat, is in the best mood ever.” He told me. He did a couple more spins in the middle of the kitchen floor, pointing and cha-ing whenever it felt good to him, and we all watched with little smiles on our faces, tucking into our meals. Everyone was feeling pretty similar, to be honest. The only one of us who had gone home during the three months had been Tally. It was proof we liked it at uni, a lot, but it didn’t mean we all weren’t ready for some time at home. “Y’know what, Mike?” I said, shovelling some food into my mouth and smiling up to him. “I’m actually going to miss you.” “I… I mean, of course you are. Why-why do you sound so surprised by this?” He asked, offended. Harry let out a little sniffle beside me, laughing and shaking his head. Mike could be the most annoying person in the flat, which was saying something, but I would miss him even more thanks to that. He was too lovable. He shuffled off into the hall and started banging furiously on Tally’s door. “C’MON, TALLY-WHACKER, TIME TO GO!” Harry spat out some of his pasta, his laughter coming from his mouth and nose and even his fucking ears and literally any single way it could get out of his body, it did. I turned with an alarmed look on my face to see him, in absolute pieces. “Tally-Whacker.” He shook eventually. “That’s fucking genius. Why didn’t I think of that?” “You save your shitty nicknames for me.” I scoffed. “You know Tally-Whacker is worse than Pip-Squeak.” He turned to me. “You probably like it so much just because Tally has seen your Tally-Whacker.” “When was the last time you saw a Tally-Whacker, Pip-Squeak?” He bit back. “WILL YOU TWO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP?” Mike yelled from the hall. “TALLY, COME ON! MY MUMS GUNNA BE OUTSIDE IN TWO MINUTES!” ”OKAY OKAY, I’M COMING.” We heard her mumble from her room. Harry threw down his empty bowl and crossed his arms, huffing loudly, nudging me with his shoulder as he did. I was glad Mike had interrupted when he did, because I could not think of a good come-back to what he had just thrown in my face. It had been a long time. A few minutes later, Tally came out of her room, dragging a giant pink suitcase behind herself and then locking her door, double and triple checking to make sure it was definitely locked, knowing me, Zayn and Harry were here for one more night. Who knew about Ringo. But if she left it open, we were bound to do something ridiculous for her to return home to in January. “You getting a lift?” Zayn asked her, forcing her to come into the kitchen and speak with us, even though she avoided Harry ten times more than I ever had. “Yeah. Mike’s mum was nice enough to say she would drop me off on the way.” If I remembered correctly, Mike was another half an hour’s journey or so in the car past the town where Tally’s family were. Then, in that exact moment, I had a sinking feeling; like a really sinking feeling, thinking about locations, adding things up in my head. And I swear, Harry had the same thing. He dramatically turned his head my way and I did the same to him, our eyes wide and our fears quickly being realised. “What train are you booked on tomorrow?” He asked breathlessly. “Seven to Manchester Piccadilly.” I answered. “Shit.” He cursed. + + + I swear I could feel Harry’s eyes on my face from across the table on the train, but then the second I looked up, his nose was back down in his book. So that’s where I returned mine, realising I must have read the same page at least three times, but it still hadn’t really been processed. Myself and Harry had had another run in in the communal showers the night before, and just discussed that we would sit away from each other on the train. Easy. But he had been running late, unlike myself, I had arrived in plenty of time. So when I saw Harry dash into our carriage, my stomach sunk, knowing that the seat directly across from me was the only one still free. I scowled at him with beady eyes, then once again, went back to my book, my eyes flickering between the words and him, seeing him hesitantly lift his head to look at me. That time, I had him. I bolted my head up so quickly he knew I had seen him drop his back down. He crinkled his nose, pretending to read as I stared him out, wondering if he would ever lift his head and tell me what the fuck he was staring at. I kicked him under the table. “Oww!” He cried, facing forward. “What?” I shuddered. “What?” He asked back. “Stop staring at me!” “I’m not fucking staring at you! Get over yourself.” I could see the lady next to Harry glancing between us, confused by the foundations of our relationship or if we were just two strangers on the train. Either way, the whole thing was stupid. We fell back into silence, the train bulking underneath us every other second, and I couldn’t help myself. I placed the book down, rubbing over my face with the back of my hand in case there was something on my skin, if that was why he had been staring at me. He chuckled under his breath. “What?” I shot again, through gritted teeth. “Nothing.” He shrugged. “Would you just give it up, Harry? I’m bored of it now, aren’t you?” “Honestly, Pip-Squeak, most of the time I get it, but I have no idea why you’re kicking off this time.” “You were staring!” I was almost squealing by this stage. “Why the hell would I be staring at you?” “I don’t know, you should probably have the answer to that since you were the one staring!” He pretended to strangle me from the other side of the table, shaking his floppy hair and returning to his book. I looked out of the window, wishing I had the window seat, since the guy next to me had fallen asleep and was not making the most of his seat at all. He looked like a student too, it seemed those three months had completely worn him out. I noticed scratches on his arms, worried his glasses were about to fall of the end of his nose and crack on the table or the floor, debating whether I should just push them back up a little, just to be safe. My fingers played with air thanks to the temptation, before I picked my book back up and ignored the urge. I don’t think Harry looked up to me again. If he had, I didn’t see, but I had finally been able to read my book, after many failed attempts. My heart fluttered with appreciation as I noticed we were pulling into the station, grateful to be so close to home, grateful to finally be escaping Harry. It also made me laugh that I knew he was another train journey away from his destination, whether it was a short one or not. It definitely made me feel a little better. Harry moved and put his book into the bag he had brought with him, which I figured looked relatively small for two weeks, but he did really only ever wear the same pair of jeans and a select few t-shirts. He looked across to me, seeing I was looking at him already. “Who’s staring now?” He smirked. “Piss off.” Once we had come to a complete standstill, the carriage unloaded itself. My suitcase mimicked the sound of the train as we walked side by side through the station. We trailed to the end of the line, and for some reason I stopped by Harry’s side as he looked up to the boards, and we both notices pretty quickly that his train was delayed. “Fuck.” He muttered under his heavy breath. It was busy in the station, people coming in from all over the country, others moving out, places to go, people and family to see. It was almost impossible to feel the way Harry did about families during such a season. I wondered where his head was on the matter at that point. I wondered what he was going home to, if he wanted to go home at all. He hunched his bag further on his shoulder, and even though we were practically indoors, the cold air reaching from the far end of the station made his breath appear in a thick cloud. “Gutted.” I mumbled up to the board. “Hope you’re not stuck here for hours. And hours. And more hours.” He looked down to me with one of his least amused faces yet as I tried to hold back my smile, my nose twitching as I attempted not to laugh at my own genius sarcasm. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” He groaned. “Yes, actually. I’ll be spending Christmas with my beautiful family. Should be home in... tops half an hour.” I grinned. “Then fuck off and go.” He sighed. The way he was reacting to my jokes, it didn’t seem like Harry would be going home to a mess of a family. He so wanted to get back. I knew having a train delayed going anywhere was frustrating, but nothing seemed to suggest he would be going back to hell. I grabbed hold of the handle to my case again, smiling smugly to myself. “Will do.” “Try to enjoy it without your brother.” I wanted to slap him for that comment, but in all honesty, I probably deserved it; I hadn’t been laying off him at all. But I still scowled and gave him the middle finger before I began storming off again, just about to make way through the glass doors when he called for me. “Pip-Squeak?” He yelled, necessarily loud. I turned around, waiting for him to say something. He awkwardly tucked his hands into the pocket of his giant coat, looking around himself as though asking why the hell he had just called my name, why the hell he had asked for my attention. Time dragged on, and I was mere seconds away from turning back around and clambering into the first taxi I saw outside, ready to get away from him. “Merry Christmas.” He simply said. I squinted my vision, staring blankly to him. He looked down to the floor as soon as he had said it, clearing his throat. It was so out of his nature, even just to say that, I could see his whole body rejecting the well wishes. It was totally surreal. “Merry Christmas.” I said back. Then I quickly turned around and dragged my case behind me, a weird lump in my throat, like I was going to cry. I held it back. + + + My mother screamed so loud when she flung the door open and saw my face, honestly, I almost fell backwards. My suitcase was left abandoned outside as she pulled me into her, still screaming, my face in her plump breasts, barely able to bloody breathe. I put my arms back around her for the first time in over three months, happy to be home. I lifted my head from its titty prison and glanced over her shoulder, seeing how inviting and warm my family home looked. It was an old building but had been made to look pretty modern on the inside, old wooden pillars leading to the ceiling that had been painted white, the hall long and thin with the stairs on the right-hand side. Thanks to the fact it was Christmas my mother had decided to just make the whole building a fire hazard by littering fairy-lights absolutely everywhere. But at least it looked nice. I had to drag myself away from her after the hug had gone on for far too long. “Oh god.” She grabbed at my cheeks. “Look at you, look how you’ve grown.” “I look exactly the same.” “No, no. You look like a woman. It’s like you getting your first period all over again.” ”Jesus Christ, mum!” “Come on now, Pippa, it’s Christmas. No blasphemy now.” “Yeah because we’re really religious.” She ushered me in and shut the door behind us, the cold air only lingering for a moment or two before an unfamiliar warmth wrapped around me. We always put the heating on at uni since our bills were covered in the price we paid to live there, but it never got that warm, it never felt that homely and comfortable. “PHILLIP!” My mum shrieked up the stairs, making me cringe. “PHILLIP YOUR DAUGHTER IS HOME, COME AND SAY HELLO.” “I’M JUST SENDING OUR DAVID ONE OF THESE EMAILS!” We heard him yell back down. “YOU HAVEN’T SEEN YOUR DAUGHTER FOR THREE MONTHS, PHILLIP! GET YOUR ARSE DOWNSTAIRS!” “I’M JUST TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT, LOVE. GIVE US A MINUTE.” My dad was as behind on the technology front as my grandparents were. Probably even further, actually. He owned a company that fixed cars in the centre of town, a pretty small business but it had helped my mum and dad live a very comfortable life, alongside my mum being a dentist. They had more than a comfortable living, to be honest. But thanks to my dad’s every-man job, he had never needed to learn what he was doing online, and he was trying his best to catch up with the rest of the world. But it seemed even sending an email was a task. I wandered blissfully into the living room on the left side of the hall as my mum bobbed off to the end into the kitchen, flicking the kettle on and then joining me. We flopped onto the sofa together. “So how’s it been?” She asked excitedly. “Yeah it’s alright. The lifestyle is great. The lessons are alright.” “Urgh. You sound just like your brother.” “I’m happy with that.” I giggled, flicking through channels. “I thought you might be.” She grabbed the remote from me, sticking with one channel. “Have you spoke to him?” “Briefly. A few texts. He rang me last month too, that was nice.” I could see her welling up, just talking about him. He’d been gone a long time; I hadn’t seen him since I was 13 years old. I knew my mum and dad had gone to see him at uni a few times, but I never did. Even so, we managed all those Christmas’ without him, we did birthdays without him, that was just how things were. Of course, he was easier to talk to and be in touch with before he went traveling, but it wasn’t a complete shock to the system. But my mum still got emotional about it, she still held in tears every single time he was brought up. Maybe it was getting even worse for her. I missed Liam, but I guess I was used to it. I think it was getting harder for her, rather than becoming accustom to it, she started thinking about how long it genuinely had been since he left. She probably wondered why he never came back. I felt for her, I really did. I let my fingers slot between hers, giving her a little smile as she pulled herself together, and my dad walked into the living room. “Kettles boiled.” He told her, opening his arms for me as I leapt to my feet and embraced him. “Oh, my love, how’ve you been?” “Really good, yeah.” I pulled away. “And you?” “Aye not too bad. Hows uni?” “Yeah it’s good. It’s fun.” “The living situation?” He asked. “Mixed emotions.” I huffed, flopping back down as he moved into the armchair, and my mum went to make the tea. “Grace moved out, as you know, which was awful. But they’ve replaced her with this guy... and we really don’t get on.” “Why not?” He asked. “We just... wind each other up. We’re just not alike. Always at each other’s throats. Sometimes we let it be kind of playful just so we can get our frustration out, but then other times we’re literally so fucking angry with each other. He’s awful dad. He randomly punched some guy on a night out and I think he’d fuck anything with legs. Just not my kind of person. But all my mates get on with him, and obviously I live with him, so I have to deal with it. All the time.” “He sounds like a pillock.” My dad nodded. “You’re not bloody wrong, Phil.” My mum came back with our teas a few moments later and we all settled into a quiet evening in front of the TV. It felt like such a relief, being able to openly talk about how much Harry annoyed me with someone who didn’t like him or live with him or anything. It was a nice feeling, no matter how brief. So I told myself that would be it. I wouldn’t have to even think about Harry until next year. Now that, was a beautiful feeling. + + + I watched my grandad with a chuckle threatening to escape me, as his head kept going, his eyes closing themselves. He had farted himself awake about a minute earlier, so I was still kind of laughing about that, but watching his sleepy little head keep going like a baby or a puppy was just as amusing. Suddenly he went, chin down on his chest and snoring straight away, to which my grandma cringed and tutted and scowled in his direction, always like she was angry at him. Years and years of marriage had done that to them, but they still loved each other really. “What film are they showing this year?” The frail lady asked as she rose to her feet, collecting all our plates. I was still looking at my grandad and trying to contain myself. This had happened for the last few years. He had reached the age where as soon as a meal was done, so was he. It was his bedtime. I found it hard to recall years where my grandad hadn’t fallen asleep at the dinner table on Christmas Day. “E.T. I think.” My mum stood to help her. “It’s always bloody E.T.” My grandma scowled. I figured she was quite an angry lady, but that was her charm. She was still drinking vodka, like she did most nights, I had never once seen her nail-varnish chipped, her short hair was always in perfect ringlets down to her shoulders, her figure even better than mine. She was a pretty mesmerizing woman. Perfectly on cue with our conversation, which made me feel like it was fate, Louis text me. Louis: E.T. is on bbc in half an hour. I’m going to be crying like a baby. I liked that he remembered our first interaction, when he admitted to always crying at that film. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling something stronger than bog-standard attraction at that point. Me: The Secret Garden was on earlier. I’ve already done my crying for the day. Louis: I avoided that one like the bloody plague, I can only hack crying once a day otherwise I worry my masculinity will leave and never come back. “Pippa, who’re you texting?” My mum asked nosily. “No one.” “Is it a boy?” She asked, to which I rolled my eyes. “They’ll stay in the back of your head if you keep doing that, Pippa. I’ve always warned you.” “Yeah, but now I’m not ten years old I don’t believe you. Unlike the time you made me cry because I was so convinced.” “But then you didn’t roll your eyes until you turned into a grotty little teenager. I had three years of absolute bliss where you didn’t roll your eyes once.” She smiled, beginning to clear the table. My grandad mumbled some non-coherent bullshit as he came back to life for a split second, probably speaking a section of his dream before he was straight back down, snoring again. I could virtually see my grandma strangling him in her head. “So who is he?” My mum asked after a few minutes of silence. “Are we really doing this?” I groaned. “Yes.” My mother and grandmother chimed in time. “Fine. He’s called Louis.” “From university?” “Yup.” “What’s he studying?” My grandma asked. “Art.” They both made disapproving noises as they collected plates and took them over to the sink, which just made me sigh and roll my eyes yet again, glad my mum wasn’t looking to catch me the second time. I expected nothing less from a family who had made sure I went to university to study English rather than Photography, a family who had been disapproving enough when I studied Photography at college. They’d rather I was meeting a boy who studied something apparently ‘sensible’ like Maths or Science or anything like that. “Everyone in my flat does subjects to do with the arts.” I shrugged. “You’re joking?” She seemed appalled. “What do they do?” “Zayn does Art. Mike and Tally do Drama. Ringo does Music and Harry does Photography.” “I just can’t believe those are actually subjects you can study at university.” My grandma shook her head in disbelief. I understood it a little more from her. She was old… Old as fuck. Her generation were beyond the point of catching up. It’s only really people my grandmas age who could get away with being completely narrow-minded. You’d just kind of have to shrug it off, say ‘oh you’ and forget whatever bullshit just slipped from an elderly persons mouth. But my mum being so baffled by those subjects was weird for me. When she had bought me my first camera, I thought it might have been her aim for me to develop a passion rather than take pictures of mindless bullshit and me and my mates on a night out. It turned out she would rather see pictures of me in a drunken state than seeing anything I had put a little effort into. Thanks to that, it was a rare occasion I would pick up a camera other than my phone. It felt too disheartening. I kept my head down and locked my phone, feeling discouraged. Christmas Day was actually always pretty boring, I wished I still had my brother around to make me laugh. My dad strolled into the kitchen and grabbed my mum by her waist, making her squeal and giggle as he turned her around and held her back to his front, kissing her cheek as my grandma left the room tutting at them and their public display of affection. Usually I would be the same, but due to recent conversations about family, it was kind of nice seeing them being that way with one another. They gave me hope. I stood up and began collecting glasses, putting them into the sink, ready to sit down to watch E.T. and probably text and think about Louis throughout. + + + The Christmas season had taken its toll on me. I don’t even remember being sober for any part of it, to be honest, and New Year’s Eve was bound to be no different. We were round at Sophia’s, because her house was huge and her parents were a little surreal, they had no qualms in her having as many people round at their family home as she wanted. So due to the surreal amount of friends Sophia had, the place was jammed. The 24 hour clock on the wall said it was 23:23 which meant we were very close to entering the next year, which basically terrified me because of the thought of going into the second year of uni, getting older, another year on the list without my brother. It honestly terrified me. On the 1st, I would be fine, wouldn’t even think about it, but the lead up to the actual event was a completely different story. Like an impending doom kind of feeling. “You kissing anyone?” Katie asked me. “Am I fuck.” I huffed. I think the main thing was I didn’t even want to kiss anyone if it wasn’t going to be Louis. Not that there would be anything wrong with it, there was definitely nothing official between me and him, but I didn’t like the thought of kissing anyone else. I liked kissing him. Katie was fine for the whole kissing moment, since she had been going out with Gregg since the first year of college. The worst part of it all was I kind of hated that I didn’t have anyone to kiss. I should have never felt that way, but I definitely did. “There are so many guys here though.” She cried to me. “Yeah well, you’ve not seen Louis.” I sighed wistfully. “Okay, well show me.” I got my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my camera album in the hope I had a picture of his beautiful face somewhere, since the lad refused to get a Facebook like a normal person. Luckily, I stumbled across one, and even more luckily, he looked as good in the picture as he did in real life. My face went painfully smug as I held my phone in front of her eyes and let her look at him. “Yes.” She nodded. “Yes. He will do nicely.” “I know.” “Shag him. Shag his brains out.” “I plan to.” En route to dragging my phone back into my pocket it started buzzing in my hand, knowing it would be Zayn since he promised to ring, but still pretty excited to see his name and a little picture of us in Thimble to accompany it. I began pushing through the crowd in the hope I would make it outside quickly to answer the call, but the amount of people in there made me realise pretty quickly that if I left it that long I would miss the call completely. I swiped my thumb across the screen and yelled. “GIVE ME A MINUTE!” “Jesus, Pippa, where the hell are you?” I heard him giggle. “GIVE ME ONE MINUTE.” I held my phone up in the air as I pushed and shoved until I was out in the cold. It wasn’t really quiet, you could still hear the music blaring from inside and all the smokers had congregated there for the evening, but it was loads better. Even so, I pushed my finger into my spare ear and held my phone up against the other. “Okay, I’m here.” I smiled. “Good. Finally. You alright? Sound sober.” He grimaced. “As a judge.” “Why?” “I tend to hit my peak in the beginning shreds of January rather than the last of December. Happens every year. Literally, I’ll be fine and then at about one-minute past twelve, I’ll be on the floor. It’s a beautiful thing. Can’t explain it.” I already missed him, so even his voice was a kind sound to my ears. I guess over that Christmas break we both realised how close we had gotten in our time together. Yeah, it was nice being at home with the people I had been to college with, my best friends from home, but none of them were like Zayn. “I’m sober as all hell too.” He replied. “How come?” I pressed my back against the bare brick. “Me and Harry have agreed to drop something as soon as it hits midnight, though by the looks of things he’s found some lass to kiss.” “Wait, you’re with Harry?” I swear my stomach dropped. I hated myself for it straight away, how pathetic it was to get jealous of a friendship. But I hated Harry and I loved Zayn and the thought that they were now pally enough to spend their New Years together didn’t sit well with me. “Yeah. We were talking and he said he didn’t have any plans so I invited him to spend it with me.” “Oh. Cool.” “You’re the worst liar of all time, Pip.” “When did I lie?” I huffed. “Well maybe it wasn’t quite a lie but you definitely don’t think it’s cool that Harry’s here.” He laughed. My eyes were right in the back of my head but I couldn’t help but laugh a little, not too surprised he had figured me out so easily. “You having a good time though?” I choked. “Yeah, he’s a laugh.” “Then that’s good. It shouldn’t bother me.” “Honestly, Pip, I’m gunna speak to him too, but when we get back next year I think you should both just try that little bit harder-” “I’ve tried, Zayn!” I butt in rudely. “I know you have, Pip, but you could both try a little harder. He’s a good lad, we all know you’re the greatest woman of all time-” “Agreed.” “- so if you could just do that, for me, that would be the best thing ever. And you’ll feel ten times better for it. So?” “So what?” “Will you try?” He begged. He sounded so adorable. If he had been with me I probably would have punched his arm and yelled a little more, but it was hard to be mad when all I could hear was his silly little voice. “You have to speak to him too.” I sighed. “If he agrees to it, so will I.” “You promise?” I could hear him smile. “Only if-” I tried. “PROMISE, PIPPA?” “OKAY I PROMISE!” I heard him celebrate to himself on the other line, hearing the background noise to the party he was at as much as he could probably hear the background noise at mine. “You’re the best, Pippa.” He said eventually. “If it doesn’t work out this time than that’s okay, I’ll let you off. Just one more go and if you still hate each other, I’ll abandon him forever.” “I knew you’d pick me over him.” I smirked. Even though I knew he was joking, that wasn’t the case at all, I was happy because he knew that saying that would comfort me, thanks to how protective I was of our friendship. It was enough. “Obviously. Anyway, I’m gunna go. See if we’re doing this MD together or if Harry is going to be fucking this girl instead.” “Tell her he has an STI, that ought to put her off.” I grinned. “What did I tell you about making an effort?” He told me off like a naughty toddler. “You’re right. Go have fun. See you in a few days alright? Be safe tonight.” “Will be. Happy New Year’s, Pippa.” “You too, Zayn, bye. Bye. Bye.” I often found it hard to hang up the phone without saying bye at least two times. This was something I seemed to inherit from my mother. I strolled back inside with a lazy smile on my face, kind of hoping that the month of January would be the month that mine and Harry’s friendship flourished. But that was just for Zayn, no other reason.

A disturbing trend among electronic musicians

I’ll be blunt about it. I do not like where the EDM scene is going, and it doesn’t help that the more and more the scene grows, the less and less interesting the music becomes. Don’t get me wrong, there are an exceedingly large number of great things coming out of the EDM scene growing. It’s building friendships, spreading love and happiness, it’s bringing people together. There really are so many amazing things coming out of the EDM scene. Sadly, though, those are only latent functions of an over-saturated industry. While it’s great that people are coming together and making friends, the music itself hasn’t gotten much better or innovative like it was five, ten, or fifteen years ago. Before I begin, I want to clarify that I am not belittling the musicians. I am simply criticizing what is either their label’s choices or their own choices. It’s often hard to tell when it’s the label making them do this, or if it’s simply their own free will. We live in a musical society where singles reign high, and albums are afterthoughts. Even EPs are set on back burners. The other day I was scrolling through the new releases for electronic music on Spotify and I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Almost every release was a single from some big-name DJ that, honestly shouldn’t be popular because of the lackluster ideas and over-used synths. If you were to go to any major DJ/producer Spotify profile, you’d see more singles released this past year than Sufjan Stevens has albums. And quite frankly, these singles are often just copy/paste of the last single with moderate edits. The only exception to this is when the DJ decides they want to try something new (props to them) and end up making a trap single or a future bass single (take those props away).  Some DJ/producers actually release incredible music every time they have a new single. But with that in mind, why not make an album? If you’re churning out a grade-A song every month or so, at that rate you could make an album and be even more respected and looked up to than the next guy making the same style. Albums define an artists’ versatility, right? They show off how much the artist can actually do, allowing them to push their ideas to the next level, and connect them all together with fine threads and repeated motives.  Nope, not in these days. You get a single! You get a single! Everybody gets a single! That’s how it is. Even in sub-cultures that I am a part of in the EDM scene such as trance and house, you see it all the time. Why is it that EDM has so many singles and every other musical genre has albums and EPs galore? It’s been going on for decades, and no one has bat an eye. It’s less of a problem when you see the DJ/producer have BOTH singles and albums, that manages to clear some air.  There are a few reasons why this may be occurring in the EDM scene more than other genres. Here are a few of those possible reasons:  Firstly, it’s easier on them. They crank out a song a month, get signed by a big EDM label with a cult following, make bank, then keep doing it. That’s why you see so many DJ/producers who make the same kind of song every single time they release something. You see it everywhere, even in trance and house music. In the end, it’s about making money off your work, and if you enjoy doing it, there’s really nothing wrong with it, except your work may be disinteresting to a lot of people. The next possible reason is that it’s been going on for years, why change it up now? For nearly 2 decades the electronic music scene has run almost entirely on singles and double releases. Even back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s, DJs put out singles that often had an alternate mix on the other side of the record. They never made albums, never made EPs, so if the legends of yesterday did it and they succeeded, why don’t we do the same thing? It feels like EDM DJ/producers release strictly singles almost out of tradition. But if we’ve learned anything in the past ten years from anything, it’s that tradition sometimes needs to change.  While singles are great and consistent, they get boring, and they don’t show what the artist can do. It can be seen that even the biggest DJs who make albums end up only releasing ten to fifteen songs under a cover art titled “generic EDM album name” and they are just that, a collection of songs. At that rate it might as well be a “best of generic DJ including songs that may or may not have been released yet” album. Hardwell released his album a couple years ago titled “United We Are” (I cringe every time I read that title), and i dubbed it one of the worst albums I’ve ever heard. It didn’t flow, it had no continuity, ideas were re-used not in the way that they should be in an album (to clarify, every song sounded the same). It was a collection of bangers rather than an album, or rather a DJ set of unmixed music full of songs by one DJ. This is what EDM albums often end up being.  If you are an EDM producer, and you’ve managed to refine your sound to a good enough standard where you can say you “know what you’re doing”, I ask you to even simply make a concept EP, or even an album if you have enough content. Something that can get the ball rolling. I see this method being used by indie bands and synthpop groups, and even some EDM artists. They make three, four, even five EPs before they release a full album. The EPs get the ball rolling, end up building up a fanbase, and having a strong catalog (not riddled with singles) already before they release their debut album. I’m doing this myself. Seven Lions has been doing it since his first release on Viper, and he still has yet to release an album (I almost think he will never have an album).

Seven Lions is a perfect example of someone who has balanced singles and concept releases. Every EP he has has a concept. Every single he releases is incredible and different from the last. My theory on his success and skill level is that he spent years before he got signed refining and perfecting his sound. He did it so well that even his first EP is astoundingly good in production quality, and he has only gotten better (I like to call him one of the EDM master producers, up there with Noisia, Nero, deadmau5, KOAN Sound, and Andrew Bayer).  If more and more new, and already established DJ/producers took a line from Seven Lions’ success book, and released a more interesting song every time they release something, and balance it out with conceptual EPs and albums, they would stand out, they would catch more eyes. Singles are not the way to being recognized and respected, though it has been done before. There are better, more artistic ways to succeed in the EDM world. If you want to be called an Artist, you need to think like an artist. Don’t be a manufacturer.  This is the biggest problem with the EDM world. Too many singles, not enough art. 

Album of the Year #25: Kali Uchis - Isolation

Artist: Kali Uchis

Album: Isolation

Label: Universal Music

Release Date: April 6th, 2018

Listen

Apple Music

Spotify

Background

Kali Uchis is a 24-year-old Colombian-American singer. Her parents fled to America a couple of years before she was born in order to avoid conflict in Colombia. Born In Virginia, she bounded around between America and Colombia during her childhood. During her adolescence, she learned how to play several instruments and was always writing poetry and songs. At first, she was more interested in directing and writing and had no interest in singing herself. This changed when she decided to release her first mixtape in 2012, Drunken Babble. The project was met with positive reception as people lauded her ability to switch between genres and create her own lane and sound.

As she continued to release more music, her popularity grew and she began collaborating with more well-known artists and producers, particularly Diplo, Tyler the Creator, BadBadNotGood, Kaytranada, Snoop Dogg and The Gorillaz. The first three singles to Isolation, Tyrant, Nuestro Planeta and After the Storm, helped cement her fanbase even further. She performed several festivals in 2017 and at the beginning of 2018 was brought on as the opening act to Lana Del Ray's "LA to the Moon" tour at the beginning of 2018. Several features, including those with Daniel Caesar and Miguel, helped bring her name more into the mainstream as well. At the time of the release, Kali's fanbase was ready for the new album as her last full-length project was released in 2015.

Review

In a world where there are only two options for fans of rap and RnB music, drip or drown, it is refreshing to listen to a project as meaningful and palatable as Isolation. As our genre of music becomes more mainstream, the lyrics and impact of songs become diluted. This has been the case for quite some time and is by no means a new phenomenon, but for me, in 2018, I was actively searching for fresh perspectives and new voices to listen to in hopes of breaking the uniformity and staleness of modern rap. Enter Kali Uchis, a 24-year-old female singer from Colombia. Prior to listening to this album, my knowledge of her music was limited, but I had seen that the project received praise here on HHH, so the day after the release I decided to listen. I will dissect the album more thoroughly later in the piece, but just from a holistic perspective, this project was amazing. The airy, up-beat instrumentals coupled with Kali’s incredible vocals make for such a great combination. For me, a project is good if I can feel transported to the world that the artist is in and describing. With Isolation, I felt exactly that – sitting on the beach drinking something out of a coconut with the WhoDatMiami American flag bathing suit on.

The album begins with “Body Language”, an invitation to the listener to explore the life of Kali Uchis. Featuring production and writing from Om’mas Keith, frequent Frank Ocean collaborator, the spacious and flute-heavy beat set the table for a deeper dive into the album and the whimsical and capricious lifestyle of our narrator. “Just come closer” she urges the listener, and how can you not with how perfect her vocals sound? The track transitions into “Miami”, which is an ode to the empowerment of women and how today, immigrants like Kali and featured artist Bia do not have to conform to previously-established gender roles and they can pursue success in any medium they choose to. The line, “He said he'd want me in his video like Bound 1. But why would I be Kim? I could be Kanye. In the land of opportunity and palm trees” encapsulates her desire to break free from traditional paths to fame for women. Quoted about this line, Kali said, “I’m not the Kim on your motorcycle, btch. I’m the one riding the sht.” Kali is in control of her own fate and will not be marginalized by the system that has set her up to fail.

With “Just a Stranger”, Kali flips another trope within rap music completely on its head. Ever since Kanye dropped Late Registration, rap fans have held disdain for gold diggers who simply use artists like Kanye for their wealth and notoriety without actually caring for them. But have those same listeners ever asked themselves why gold diggers exist? Kali seeks to provide an answer – the Colombian-American singer bashes the stereotype completely and lauds woman going after what they need. “When bellies are hungry, but there ain't no money you get it and don't care how.” As an immigrant woman, Kali faces obstacles on a daily basis that male rappers do not. She feels no remorse taking advantage of someone for money because the odds are against her and she has to get it how she can.

Kali continues to address the hardships that immigrants face in “Your Teeth in my Neck”. Within the track, over a bouncy instrumental which I think is my favorite on the album, she discusses how no matter how hard she works, her material keeps getting ripped off and people are appropriating her art. This is a common theme within music, particularly with Americans hopping on trends started and popularized by immigrants. After all, who would have ever thought that Beyoncé would be on “Mi Gente” and Drake would be saying “tings”? This also seems to be a dig at the music industry as a whole, saying that artists are taken advantage of by large record labels, only to be worked and churned out when their popularity diminishes. It is an unfortunate reality, but Kali knows that with persistence and hard work, she will be able to overcome these obstacles.

Within the larger context of the album, Kali also addresses her love life and the relationships the she has been in. In “Flight 22” she floats over the beat, singing about her unrequited love and that no matter where she is going on this trip, she wants to be with this lover. This track truly highlights how incredible her voice is. As someone who was in a new relationship when this album dropped (and still is!), this song resonated with me a lot. I knew that wherever I was going, I wanted my girlfriend with me. On the contrary, Kali addresses some of the hardships she has dealt with in relationships. In “Tyrant” featuring Jorja Smith (you should also check her album out as well!), they discuss the idea of staying closed off in a relationship in order to avoid being overly-exposed and in-turn, manipulated. Kali has addressed previous relationships in which she was taken advantage of, so it is no surprise that she is approaching this new love with some restraint. Even though she is madly in love, she is afraid to show it because she does not want to get hurt again. Whoever you are, I think we can all relate to that feeling in some capacity.

On “Dead to Me”, Kali dismisses a past fling, asking the previous lover to simply leave her alone. Even though this person is still obsessed with her, she just wants things to end. I think this track is very relevant, especially with what is going on with Cardi B and Offset right now. Whether their breakup is legitimate or not, the way that the rap community has reacted to it is disgusting in my opinion. Constantly urging Cardi to take back Offset and forgive him for whatever he did wrong is exactly the ways of thinking that propagates the type of behavior discussed in the song. Many men believe they are entitled to whichever women they want and in turn, cannot handle rejection in an appropriate way. Kali is sticking up for herself, and declaring that in her eyes, this person is dead. On a musical note, this beat features one of my favorite instrumentals of the album with airy synths and drums backing her.

Nuestro Planet is a song completely in Spanish featuring Reykon, a Colombian reggaeton rapper. From a production standpoint, this song differs from the album a bit with a more latin-influenced beat. In this it is a great change of pace on the album and even though the listener may not understand what she is saying, it is still sonically pleasing and easy to follow along with. Admittedly, the message of this song of Kali yearning to have things return to how they were with her lover falls a bit flat relative to the depth and importance of some of the other tracks on the album.

Next, enters my favorite sequence of songs on the album – “In My Dreams” into “Gotta Get Up”. “In My Dreams” is an absolute banger in every sense of the word. The use of guitar and light percussion make for such a minimalist yet profound beat. This is a song that when it comes on, you just can’t help but nod your head along to it. This is the most positive song on the track, discussing this utopian dream world for Kali in which all her problems are erased and everything is perfect, but only in her dreams. Her bills are paid, her mom isn’t on coke, boys treat her properly – its great! “Why isn’t everyone here?” she wonders aloud. Well, her question is quickly answered when her alarm goes off and she is awoken and slammed with the hardships of her everyday life yet again. This song is another great display of her vocals, showcasing her range as she belts out that she has to get out of bed and look for something in real life that can match what she yearned for in her dreams.

The next track, “Tomorrow”, talks about Kali’s desire to break-free from her everyday life and follow her dreams. Even though things seem dim in this small town, she urges her lover to follow with her on a path to freedom. All she wants to do is day-dream and pursue her dreams, pushing reality to be addressed tomorrow. The song is produced by Kevin Parker of Tame Impala. The beat compliments the message of the sing so well as the spacey synths give a bounce to the track. Kali rides the instrumental beautifully.

“Coming Home” talks about how no matter what Kali does, there will always be people who disapprove of her, but she is fine with that. Featuring one of the best beat switches of 2018 (no cap), she talks about she intends to stay true to her roots and remain confident despite all the negativity she is surrounded with. When you are a female artist in a community largely dominated by males, appearance is something that is unfortunately brought-up a lot. Regardless of what people say though, she simply intends to “keep It moving.”

“After the Storm” is truly a masterpiece. Odds are, if you have listened to one song on this project, it was presumably this one because of the Tyler feature. The message of this song is so overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. For 12 songs, Kali has talked about countless issues and obstacles she has faced as a result of her gender and ethnicity and despite all of that, she urges the listener to remain positive and that even though things may be hard now, they will get better. As someone who tends to overreact and snowball from small issues in my life, this song truly helps to put things in perspective for me. The calming and transient ambiance of the song helps reassure the listener that even when it rains, the sun will shine once again.

The final two songs return to relationship issues, the first in which she discusses how no one likes to be taken advantage of in a relationship. Even though she was cheated on, Kali cannot cope and is acting as if everything is the same in her life. This song shows that even though Kali is working towards independence, there are still moments of weakness that we all face. These moments are underscored on “Killer”, the concluding song of the album. This song was recorded when Kali was 17, which is truly a testament to how talented she really is. I think this track shows just how much progress she has made as a woman over the years. Instead of being upset and yearning for her past lover as she did when she was younger, she now has grown and is able to see how she can learn and move forward from this time. Kali wrote this song while she was living out of her car and shows just how low things were for her at the time. It is a reminder to the listener that even though things are looking better now, experiences like these are what guided her to where she is today.

To me, this project just feels so important in the context of the current political landscape. In a world where a GoFundMe to build a wall has $16mm donated to it, we need to throw our support behind strong, immigrant women who show that no matter what race or country you are from, you can be a positive contribution to the community. I strongly urge you to listen to this project, especially if you live in warm weather as this album just screams summer to me. Furthermore, if you are already a fan, see Kali in concert. She was absolutely incredible and was one of my favorite shows of the year. Her bravado on stage compliments her music so well and her vocals sound even better in person.

Thank you for reading and for those celebrating, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Favorite Lyrics

The sun'll come out

Nothing good ever comes easy

I know times are rough

But winners don't quit

So don't you give up

After The Storm (Featuring Tyler The Creator and Bootsy Collins)

I'm feeling happy inside

I've got no reason to hide

I'm a dream girl

I'm never stressing my bills

Nobody ever gets killed

It's the dream world

In My Dreams

Today is the day I'll learn that I believe in miracles

I can feel the world opening up, I think I broke the curse

Tomorrow

Discussion Questions

What were your thoughts on the album?

How important to you is finding music from new perspectives?

Is it important to listen to music that spreads a positive message and helps to eradicate stereotypes and limitations placed on marginalized groups (in this case immigrants and women)? Is this something you consider when consuming music?

Do you think Kali will transition into the "pop lane"?

From a musical perspective, any other albums that you would recommend that have a similar sound?

submitted by /u/Loubanga [link] [comments] from /r/HipHopHeads on Reddit http://bit.ly/2T5dbiY via http://bit.ly/2BG3T63

Column: Favorite Rap Mixtapes of October 2018

With a cascade of releases spewing from the likes of DatPiff, LiveMixtapes, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud, it can be difficult to keep up with the overbearing yet increasingly vital mixtape game. In this column, we aim to immerse ourselves in this hyper-prolific world and share our favorite releases each month. The focus will primarily be on rap mixtapes — loosely defined here as free (or sometimes free-to-stream) digital releases — but we’ll keep things loose enough to branch out if/when we feel it necessary. (Check out last month’s installment here.) Here at Tiny Mix Tapes, mixtapes are like Halloween handouts, which is to say we recommend continual and regular consumption of sweets, sours, and suckers balanced by physical activities including but not limited to picking and carving, taking long walks, and watching so many scary movies it becomes physically tasking. To wit, my list for the month so far includes: The Omen (1976), Damien: Omen II (1978), Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), Season of the Witch (1972), The Man in the Orange Jacket (2014), Daughter of Horror (1955), Daybreakers (2009), Nightmare City (1980), Fear X (2003), The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976), Shock (1946), Shock (1977), The Stuff (1985), Santa Sangre (1989), Neon Demon (2016), The Lost Boys (1987), and The Skeleton Key (2005). Therein, as below, audiences can discover numerous tricks and treats. It is, of course, our privilege to help pass along both as they’re equally essential, like ODB would say, “for the children.” And speaking of the little ones, let us not gloss over this month without acknowledging that it somehow brought out releases by no less than seven (!) established “Lil” rappers: B, Baby, Gnar, Jay So Icy, Mosey, Tracy and Xelly. “The horror!” –Samuel Diamond --- Illingsworth - You’re No Fun [DOWNLOAD/STREAM] Swerve past the skeptics and you’ll find that there still are scythe-tongued rappers and producers beholden to the unseen funk. Although rapper-producers are not rare, there are few today who manage such a fluid blend of sway and spitfire as my latest chiropractor, the Detroit-bred Illingsworth. While known mostly for his beats, the plunderer can kick some nerdy flex raps too; he was nonchalantly sipping on lemonade in a pirate’s fit, while you were busy teething on cockroaches. On his latest opal with Mello Music Group, You’re No Fun, Illingsworth’s pearly bounce is as live as ever. The lasting sapphire in the mix might just be “Wind (No Clues),” a “Love’s Gonna Get’cha”-esque ode to a young have-not, searching for a path where shards of systemic violence won’t sink into the soles. In the grubby fists of a lesser MC, the concept might ring out as corny. But in the studious grasp of Illingsworth, it feels as if the ghosts of SV sprinkled steez over construction gravel to help the whole damn thing glisten. –Cirrus Slump --- Kodie Shane - Stay Tuned … [STREAM] Some two years after stealing the show on the Sailing Team’s “All In,” Kodie Shane’s just about ready for her close-up. Young Heartthrob, her full-length debut, drops early November, meaning that Stay Tuned … is the last in a long line of EPs by which she has built a fanbase and a reputation, (mostly) escaping Lil Yachty’s shadow and establishing herself as an artist who deserves a spotlight of her own. Packed front-to-back with brand-name features, Stay Tuned … scans as a set of songs too pedestrian for the album but too expensive to discard entirely, less interesting for Rich the Kid’s continued interrogation of the phrase “dat way!” than for the promising glimpse it provides into Shane’s musical development since last year’s Back From the Future. I can’t imagine listening to this once Young Heartthrob is out, but I won’t be listening to anything else until then. –Corrigan B. --- MihTy - MihTy [STREAM] Here you have it folks: the long-rumored, widely-anticipated eponymous collab between the foremost crooners in hip-hop. That’s right — Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign have teamed up in true Rhythm-and-Blues Brothers fashion to give us MihTy, which apparently might have been completed as far back as 2017?? The original release was supposed to come August 2018, but, as happens so often these days, the drop date was pushed back to October. So, here we are! Dolla and ‘Mih apparently churned out some 60 songs in the studio, then picked out these 11 from said batch, which explains why this project doesn’t hit me as incredibly cohesive or focused on a particular idea, aside from, of course, romance, sex, and various forms of decadence. But if you know these two at all, that shouldn’t surprise you, and perhaps all that intimacy is exactly why you (and I) listen. It’s a solid and varied tape, with a good list of producers (exec. produced by Hitmaka, with appearances by Go Grizzly, Keyz, et al.) and suave harmonies. In a most satisfying way, it’s the tape I’d expect from the two — a wonderfully romantic, melodic, and smooth-hip-hop-R&B ditty to cuddle up with as the weather gets colder. –Alex Brown --- Bambu - Exrcising A Demon | Article 1 | A Few Left [DOWNLOAD/STREAM] Filipino-American California MC Bambu has been kicking bloody street soliloquies as far back as the early 2000s and even released a critically acclaimed full-length collaboration with L.A. rap royalty’s DJ Muggs in 2010. However, if there’s ever been a moment better suited for this particular audio document, it must have occurred in some alternate timeline, because Exrcising A Demon | Article 1 | A Few Left arrives at a juncture that demands more than ever for stories of American immigrants and their children and the struggles they share to be told plainly, without glorification, political comment, or other modes of curated re-contextualization. The truth, like humanity, is brutal, war-torn even, but above all else, necessary. And if this release is truly the first in a five-part series, as the Bandcamp page describes, then Bambu and OJ The Producer have set the bar incredibly high for themselves out the gate. Clearly, though, this is a matter of both exercising and exorcising, show-and-prove a given. –Samuel Diamond --- Shy Glizzy - Fully Loaded [STREAM] For a couple years now, the Washington Wizards have stood pat in free agency, keeping their roster’s core intact in order to develop their existing players rather than compromising their identity in pursuit of new ones. Their horrific start to the current season aside, it’s worked pretty well; the John Wall era has been one of consistent success, salad days not only for Wall, but also for a host of young stars under his tutelage: Bradley Beal, Otto Porter, and most recently Kelly Oubre. Yet in their consistency, the Wizards have raised questions about untapped potential, about complacency in the face of the consistently “pretty good,” and about who is really to blame for a series of failed attempts to integrate new play styles and personalities. Luckily, rap isn’t basketball. Probably. –Corrigan B. --- Lil B - Options [STREAM] –Lovebug --- Gangsta Boo & BeatKing - Underground Cassette Tape Music Vol. 2 [STREAM] Being a consumer of contemporary “rap” music in 2018 without recognizing Gangsta Boo is a privilege. As a member of Three 6 Mafia, she helped collapse geographical and aesthetic distinctions between Southern rap, experimental horrorcore, and radio music without burying Memphis signifiers in common ground. Her new mixtape with Houston-hailing BeatKing is a conservation of both artists’ distinct regional styles, revealing by way of phonogeographical survey just how deep trap’s roots go. Fortunately, Underground Cassette Tape Music Vol. 2 is also a banger in its own right, reminding Migos fans why this historical primrose path was worth nourishing and following. Plus, remember Paul Wall, Danny Brown, and RiFF RAFF? They’re all on this, too. It’s a scary good time, so fly that you won’t even remember they’ve been doing this since before I could talk. If there ever were a laurel-draped whip, this whole crew has scrapped it for a brand new ride. And it bumps as hard as everything before it. –Jazz Scott --- D Savage - D Phoenix [STREAM] I’m not entirely sure where D Savage came from, but “a neural network trained on 10,000 Soundcloud rappers” isn’t out of the question. Yet amidst opaque mythology — “3900,” “2700,” and a dozen variations of “Phoenix” reappear endlessly across songs and IG captions — and thoroughly ambiguous authorship, there’s an undeniable grasp of melody that refuses to be ignored. As often as not, it’s a mere moment; “What You Want” justifies its existence on the strength of half a hook alone. And that’s more than enough: with tracks rarely exceeding two minutes, D Savage’s best work is so immediate that it can’t even begin to wear out its welcome before its time to rewind. There’s little here that warrants repeated listens, but what sticks will be looping in my mind for months on end. –Corrigan B. http://j.mp/2RmZRpo

Three Ways to 1,000 HP: LS vs. RB vs JZ Swap Info

Brand loyalty in engine choices is becoming less of a concern as time goes on. Largely driven by a pursuit of boost, three of the most-swapped engine platforms we see in drag racing, drifting, and time attack are the LS, 2JZ, and RB26—they’re the do-all powerhouses for their respective brands. While we’re deeply familiar with the LS family, the RB and JZ engines are new territory for many. These Japanese straight-sixes came out of Japan’s real muscle-car era, the 1980s to 1990s, and share a lot of similarities with the LS in their respective roles as budget-friendly solutions for 1,000 hp.

Nissan RB Series If you’ve played Gran Turismo, you’re already familiar with the RB26 and its brethren. The heart and soul of the early Nissan Skylines, the RB series was pumped from Yokohama, Japan, between 1985 and 2004. These straight-sixes range from 2.0L to 3.0L and get a little displacement enhancement with factory turbocharging. The RB nomenclature is very easy to decipher: RB is, of course, the engine family; the second number refers to the displacement; and you’ll find tech details like whether it’s dual-cam (D), fuel-injected (E), or carbureted (S) and whether it has a single turbo (T) or twin turbos (TT). For example, the RB26DETT from the 1989–2002 Skyline GT-R would be a 2.6L, dual-cam, fuel-injected, twin-turbocharged combination. Their cult status is well-earned in the Skylines, but what about as a swap motor candidate? This is why we grabbed Kostas Tatsis of Australia’s Croydon Racing Developments (CRD), a shop that specializes in the Skyline and RB platform with several records down in the 7s with little more than a Turbo 400 and a fistful of boost. For the most part, we will focus on the RB26 and RB30, as they’re the most commonly used blocks.

Common Donor Vehicles: 1985–2002 Nissan Skylines, 1986–1988 Holden Commodore (VL) Displacement: 2.0L (122 ci) to 3.0L (182 ci) Horsepower: 200–325 Torque: 230–290 lb-ft Bore: 3.07 in (78 mm) to 3.38 in (86.0 mm) Stroke: 2.74 in (69.7 mm) to 3.34 in (85.0 mm) Block: Cast iron Cylinder head: Aluminum, 24-valve overhead cam Dimensions: L: 33 in, W: 26 in, H: 28 in (approximate with turbos) Weight: 550–600 lbs (approximate with turbos)

We never got Nissan’s “Godzilla,” as it became known, but they were notorious in Australia. “They were racing at Mt. Panorama in the 1990s, and I think that’s where the cult status came from. They actually banned them,” Kostas recalls. “They were just too quick. They kept trying to restrict them, but teams kept raising the bar on the RB—and with AWD, you can throw big power at them and they’re streetable.”

With more than 30 years in the field, he mentioned the first bottleneck in horsepower for the RB is its turbo and fuel system. Most of the factory units max out around 14–15 psi, and the later ceramic-wheel-equipped turbos will live very short lives at elevated boost levels. You’ll find around 330–350 hp at the wheels before the stock fuel system is stretched thin, but according to Kostas, “Most people skip half of that and go straight to a bigger single-turbo and do a heap of work at once.”

The main issues are with the rotating assembly: first is that the factory oil pump lacks the volume needed at higher rpm (or was outright defective, as in earlier RBs), and second is that the cranks are not as stable as their counterparts from Toyota—though the aftermarket has healed these wounds for Achilles. With a billet crank and a larger, higher-volume oil pump (and an additional oil restrictor to the head, maintaining pressure in the crankcase), they can live above 1,000 hp with few worries. Stock cranks can manage 1,000 hp with a carefully balanced rotating assembly, but durability is a concern.

The major limitation of the block isn’t the displacement of the cylinders, but the actual internal clearances for stroker rotating assemblies. “There’s not enough room in the block for aluminum rods,” Kostas says. “But we spin these things to about 11,000 rpm with steel H-beam rods in the 3.2—they definitely love to rev.” Australia’s Bullet Race Engineering has produced a billet block with room for bulkier al-yew-mini-um rods.

For the average builder, though, stroker combinations are popular. The RB20 is small-bore at 78 mm, but the RB24/25/26/30 share the same 86mm bore with strokes ranging from 69.7–85 mm, meaning that each foundation has room to grow. “Ninety-nine percent of the big-power stuff is all 3.2L, but we’ve started to see a big rush of 2.8s again,” he says. The 3.2 is a combo that utilizes the RB30 block from Holden, which carries an extra 40mm of deck height, with the Nissan RB26 head. “Really puts them on the same ballpark as the 2JZ with similar displacements,” noting the increased low-end torque is welcome.

Our pick? Grab one of the cheaper RB25DETs and a 2.8L stroker kit (Kostas recommends Nitto Performance Engineering) with all the right reliability mods, and have a ball. Something like this would be a riot in a Datsun 240Z or a 510—or maybe a 1967 Ford Mustang fastback.

Toyota JZ series While we’re all cheering for 1,000 hp on stock-bottom LS engines, the Toyota Supra’s 2JZ has been churning four-digit numbers on the street even before Brian owed Dom a 10-second car. With factory turbocharging and seven main bearings, it didn’t take long for the Supra to gain a notorious reputation in Japan for measuring horsepower by the Richter scale. In later years, the U.S. import invasion reignited interest in Toyota’s tower of power, as it offered a big improvement in displacement and strength over the venerable four-banger found standard in most Japanese sports coupes. We met Jay Meagher during Drag Week 2016, when he placed third in Super Street Small-Block Power-Adder with a stout 8.277 at 163.272 mph. He runs Real Street Performance out of Sanford, Florida, specializing in Supras while keeping his doors open to most any late-model speed.

Common Donor Vehicles (Toyota JDM counterpart): 1993–2004 Lexus GS300 (Aristo), 1999–2005 Lexus IS300 (Altezza), 1991–2000 Lexus SC300 (Soarer), 1993–2002 Toyota Supra Displacement: 2.5L (152 ci) to 3.0L (182 ci) Horsepower: 212–276 (underrated) Torque: 209–330 lb-ft Bore: 3.38 in (86.0 mm) Stroke: 2.81 (71.5 mm) to 3.38 in (86.0 mm) Block: Cast iron Cylinder head: Aluminum, 24-valve overhead cam Dimensions: L: 33 in, W: 31 in, H: 27 in (approximate with turbos) Weight: 595 lbs (approximate with turbos)

Jay is not shy about his views of Toyota’s 3.0L straight-six: “I think the 2JZ is the Japanese small-block Chevy. They’re an incredibly viable option and incredibly affordable to hot rod.” The engine was prolific in Toyota and Lexus applications, though we only saw its purest turbo versions in the Supra. Out the gate, Jay recommends buying a USDM or JDM 2JZ-GTE with factory turbocharging if you can. You can find the naturally aspirated 2JZ in 1990s to early-2000s Lexus GS300s, IS300s, and SC300s. Without cracking them open, they can handle 500–600 hp with a turbo, but by the time you’ve gone through one to prep one for the venerable 1,000hp mark, you would have saved money starting with a turbocharged variant that carries most of the hardware already.

The internet is full of rumors about which source of one is best, but regardless of domestic market (U.S. or Japan) or inclusion of variable-valve timing (VVT), Jay mentions they’re all equally capable with the same supporting mods. In fact, the VVT reduces turbo lag significantly, if you need low-end response (road racing or drifting, for example).

We’ll get to how easy it is to build power next, but first the oiling system has to addressed. Simply put, Toyota never intended it to rev as high as what racers needed.

“If you’re going much more than 8,300 to 8,500 rpm, and you don’t have money for a dry-sump, then you should use an aluminum rod,” he says, in addition to an upgraded oil pump. Aluminum rods simply stress the rotating assembly less, saving the bearings as the 2JZ reaches for five-digit rpm numbers. Camshafts and springs are highly recommended, but take note to order a factory set of 3S-GTE valve shims and buckets. The 2JZ uses shim-over-bucket adjustment for valve clearance, meaning that at high lift the camshaft can actually spit a shim out. The 3S-GTE’s arrangement places the shim under the bucket, eliminating this.

“If you want to make 700 hp, it just takes the right turbocharger, octane, and tuning on the stock ECU,” Jay says. “A dry-sump and a proper ECU, like a Motec, is money well spent. The smallest turbo I’d use is something like a 66mm turbine—like a Precision 67/66 and add valvesprings, and you’ve got something that makes good power from 4,500 to 8,500.” For serious horsepower, billet long-blocks are out there, but there’s nothing water-jacketed for the street just yet, but there are stock 2JZ blocks in the 6s that prove the point.

General Motors LS series It should be no surprise that the LS engine carried on the original small-block’s tradition of being the solution for practically everything. Despite its compact dimensions, the LS supports big-block displacements, with the General offering options from 4.8L to 7.0L. Better yet, there’s no shortage of them to trip over in wrecked trucks and vans at your local junkyard. We grabbed Westech Performance’s mad scientist, Richard Holdener, as our ringer in this story—his Big Bang Theories are to blame for more than a fair share of LS swaps.

Common Donor Vehicles: 1999–2013 Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, Hummer trucks and SUVs; 2003-current Chevrolet and GMC vans; 1997–2013 Corvettes; 1998–2002 Pontiac Firebird and Chevrolet Camaro; 2010–2015 Chevrolet Camaro; 2004–2015 Cadillac CTS-V Displacement: 4.8L (283 ci) to 7.0L (427 ci) Horsepower: 255–638 Torque: 285–604 lb-ft Bore: 3.78 in (96 mm) to 4.125 in (104.7 mm) Stroke: 3.26 in (83 mm) to 4 in (110 mm) Block: Cast iron or aluminum Cylinder head: Aluminum, 12-valves (1999–00 LQ4s carried iron heads) Dimensions: L: 29 in, W: 26 in, H: 22–30 in (approximate, depending on oil pan and supercharger) Weight: 450–550 lbs (approximate with exhaust manifolds)

“The most common engine people get is the 5.3L. It’s the base engine for a ton of different truck and SUV applications, and they made millions more of them than performance cars,” Richard says. One of the stark contrasts between the LS compared to the RB and JZ platforms is its physical size for the displacement. With their turbochargers, both inline-sixes are wider than the LS is while being about 4 inches longer.

The weight difference is a little apples-to-oranges, as the RB and JZ weights include the turbochargers, but even the supercharged LS9 weighs about as much as the other two. This is in part because of the technology gap, in lieu of advanced simulation, a lot of Japanese automakers engineered overkill cast-iron blocks to give themselves plenty of breathing room in long-term durability—the blocks also withstood a lot of horsepower at the expense of weight. Even with the iron block truck engines, the LS is a svelte motor thanks to its more advanced block design and webbing.

For the most part, the recipe of a 76mm turbo, uprated valvesprings, and a camshaft are about the only things needed to tickle 750–1,000 hp. Turbocharger choice is up to the owner, and Richard suggests going with the best you can afford. “There’s nothing wrong with someone on the street grabbing an off-shore turbo. If it lasts for a few years, but costs one-third the price, it’s not a bad deal—buy another,” he says. “I won’t use off-shore wastegates, that’s one thing I’ll spend good money on, as controlling the boost is really important.”

When it comes to the upper limits of the LS block, there’s a notable difference between the Gen III and Gen IV short-blocks. Not only are the later, full-floating rods stronger, but the block itself has small reinforcements, too—meaning there’s more headroom for horsepower before you go to an aftermarket block.

Beyond that, the last advantage of the LS platform is the community that supports it. Not only are our tech pages full of ways to build any LS you can image, but Holdener notes that, “What’s great about the LS is you can use the factory ECU and harness, and start tuning. The nice thing about it is there’s a lot of calibrations out there that someone can download for free. You know, if a guy throws a turbo on a 5.3—that’s been done a million times. So you can download one of those and get really, really close before you go to a dyno.”

The post Three Ways to 1,000 HP: LS vs. RB vs JZ Swap Info appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/three-ways-1000-hp-ls-vs-rb-vs-jz-swap-info/ via IFTTT

Where Are The Dreamers

Title: Where Are The Dreamers

        Article Body: When the Tennessee Mountain Man was a young man, there were dream girls. Girls like Liz Taylor, Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe, Diana Ross, Nancy Sinatra, Tina Turner and the Vargas girls. Man, we even thought Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, Miss Kitty, Della Street, and the girl next door were hot… probably a hormone thing.

But, there were also dreamers. Dreamers like John Kennedy who had a dream that challenged and inspired a new generation. Dreamers like Martin Luther King, Jr. who had a dream that changed a nation. Bobby Kennedy had a dream. The Gipper had a dream.

Then there were the dream makers… dream makers like school teachers who challenged you to be all you could be, professionals like lawyers and doctors who practiced their skills primarily because they cared for their fellow man often for a pound of butter, a dozen fresh farm eggs, a chicken for the dinner table, or a gallon of fresh churned buttermilk, and there were men of God who spread the Gospel out of love for something other than numbers, pride and money. There were local community leaders who inspired and they actually got out on the street and interacted with their citizens.

The poet Langston Hughes:

“Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

  Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.”

Where are the Dr Kildare’s that dare challenge one to a noble service bigger than themselves rather than seeking self aggrandizement? Where is America’s future? Where are all the dream inspiring TV shows and actual road trips like Route 66? Where are real cars that people can fall in love with? Where are all the road side stands where a child’s imagination could be driven for hours without anything being stolen or broken?

Where have all the dreamers gone? Where have the dream makers gone? Why are those who started with nothing but a dream now setting comfortably in their million dollar homes sipping brandy in the evening and ensconced in their ivory towers by day while dreamers disappear from the landscape? Who do they think will inspire a new generation to dream, to dare if they don’t? What we have been given, what we have accomplished comes with a price which cannot be abdicated. The dream, the inspiration must be passed to a new generation. They must strive for a new frontier.

Oh, community pride, community love, community care, 4-H Clubs, Boy Scouts, FFA, school plays and cake walks where art thou? The Computerman don’t see his grandchildren pursuing any of these things or dreaming about what could be. We have not arrived by a long shot. Where is the next generation and what will it accomplish? Will it add anything worthwhile to God’s earth or be self absorbed or be couch potatoes playing with the latest gizmo?

Does your pastor inspire the young people, or is he or she just there to count heads and collect dollars? If it is not the former, it is time for a new pastor. Do the teachers in your schools inspire and motivate students? If not, send them packing. Their grossly extended vacation schedule and short hours be damned. Let them do that for which they are best suited like slinging burgers at the Golden Arches rather than holding back our prodigy. Do civic and political leaders lead? If not, replace them, and the sooner the better for the next generation of dreamers.

Why is hanging in the hood so popular today? Why are gangs and gang bangers so prevalent? Why can’t our children dream beyond their current circumstances? We did! We wanted to be Wyatt Earp (at least the TV image), Matt Dillon, The Lawman, Perry Mason, Dr Marcus Welby, M.D., Paladin, Pat Garrett or perhaps even the Reverend Billy Graham or the next Reverend Dr Martin Luther King or a Sister Theresa or maybe Elvis or Ricky Nelson and we enjoyed watching Lassie while wolfing down a big bowl of pop corn or home parched peanuts while we dreamed.

We had to dream before we acted, before we accomplished. Before we had the answers there were the dreams. There was a dream, then there was Rosa Parks. There was a dream, then there was John Glenn!

We dreamed… we dreamed of being… we dreamed of becoming… we dreamed of serving… we dreamed of living… we dreamed of loving… we dreamed of giving… We dreamed.

In the theater of our minds we slipped the surly bonds of earth and dared ponder the possibilities that lay before us.

What happened? Where have all the dreamers gone? Are today’s sick, addicted, anorexic pop stars tomorrows future? Where are the dream makers? Who can capture the imagination and propel it forward through the haze of uncertainty and through the unknown into a better brighter tomorrow? Who? Where are the dream makers?! Where are the dreamers?!

Visit Our Store

 http://two-old-guys-emporium.co.place/  

  Join Facebook Group:  Magikal Journey Art Studio Public Group (4800 members)    

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/magikal/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

  https://plus.google.com/109438225808606562460   Google Store

 https://www.instagram.com/starbornlewis/  Store

  Da Vinci Designs/ Website

https://www.facebook.com/Da-Vinci-1505571056179865/

  https://plus.google.com/109438225808606562460   Google Store

Please Read: Shipping and Returns We ship from China Warehouse.  We ship worldwide.

Two Old Guys Would love to hear from you.

We always like to know what you think.

Use the form below to chat with us.

Feedback/Subscribe

Email [email protected]

Two old Guys Would love to hear from you

[contact-form]

    by http://two-old-guys-emporium.co.place/2017/07/20/where-are-the-dreamers/ from Blogger http://twooldguysemporium.blogspot.com/2017/07/where-are-dreamers.html

Where Are The Dreamers

Title: Where Are The Dreamers

        Article Body: When the Tennessee Mountain Man was a young man, there were dream girls. Girls like Liz Taylor, Raquel Welch, Marilyn Monroe, Diana Ross, Nancy Sinatra, Tina Turner and the Vargas girls. Man, we even thought Dale Evans, Annie Oakley, Miss Kitty, Della Street, and the girl next door were hot… probably a hormone thing.

But, there were also dreamers. Dreamers like John Kennedy who had a dream that challenged and inspired a new generation. Dreamers like Martin Luther King, Jr. who had a dream that changed a nation. Bobby Kennedy had a dream. The Gipper had a dream.

Then there were the dream makers… dream makers like school teachers who challenged you to be all you could be, professionals like lawyers and doctors who practiced their skills primarily because they cared for their fellow man often for a pound of butter, a dozen fresh farm eggs, a chicken for the dinner table, or a gallon of fresh churned buttermilk, and there were men of God who spread the Gospel out of love for something other than numbers, pride and money. There were local community leaders who inspired and they actually got out on the street and interacted with their citizens.

The poet Langston Hughes:

“Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

  Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.”

Where are the Dr Kildare’s that dare challenge one to a noble service bigger than themselves rather than seeking self aggrandizement? Where is America’s future? Where are all the dream inspiring TV shows and actual road trips like Route 66? Where are real cars that people can fall in love with? Where are all the road side stands where a child’s imagination could be driven for hours without anything being stolen or broken?

Where have all the dreamers gone? Where have the dream makers gone? Why are those who started with nothing but a dream now setting comfortably in their million dollar homes sipping brandy in the evening and ensconced in their ivory towers by day while dreamers disappear from the landscape? Who do they think will inspire a new generation to dream, to dare if they don’t? What we have been given, what we have accomplished comes with a price which cannot be abdicated. The dream, the inspiration must be passed to a new generation. They must strive for a new frontier.

Oh, community pride, community love, community care, 4-H Clubs, Boy Scouts, FFA, school plays and cake walks where art thou? The Computerman don’t see his grandchildren pursuing any of these things or dreaming about what could be. We have not arrived by a long shot. Where is the next generation and what will it accomplish? Will it add anything worthwhile to God’s earth or be self absorbed or be couch potatoes playing with the latest gizmo?

Does your pastor inspire the young people, or is he or she just there to count heads and collect dollars? If it is not the former, it is time for a new pastor. Do the teachers in your schools inspire and motivate students? If not, send them packing. Their grossly extended vacation schedule and short hours be damned. Let them do that for which they are best suited like slinging burgers at the Golden Arches rather than holding back our prodigy. Do civic and political leaders lead? If not, replace them, and the sooner the better for the next generation of dreamers.

Why is hanging in the hood so popular today? Why are gangs and gang bangers so prevalent? Why can’t our children dream beyond their current circumstances? We did! We wanted to be Wyatt Earp (at least the TV image), Matt Dillon, The Lawman, Perry Mason, Dr Marcus Welby, M.D., Paladin, Pat Garrett or perhaps even the Reverend Billy Graham or the next Reverend Dr Martin Luther King or a Sister Theresa or maybe Elvis or Ricky Nelson and we enjoyed watching Lassie while wolfing down a big bowl of pop corn or home parched peanuts while we dreamed.

We had to dream before we acted, before we accomplished. Before we had the answers there were the dreams. There was a dream, then there was Rosa Parks. There was a dream, then there was John Glenn!

We dreamed… we dreamed of being… we dreamed of becoming… we dreamed of serving… we dreamed of living… we dreamed of loving… we dreamed of giving… We dreamed.

In the theater of our minds we slipped the surly bonds of earth and dared ponder the possibilities that lay before us.

What happened? Where have all the dreamers gone? Are today’s sick, addicted, anorexic pop stars tomorrows future? Where are the dream makers? Who can capture the imagination and propel it forward through the haze of uncertainty and through the unknown into a better brighter tomorrow? Who? Where are the dream makers?! Where are the dreamers?!

Visit Our Store

 http://ift.tt/2umz1Gw

  Join Facebook Group:  Magikal Journey Art Studio Public Group (4800 members)    

 http://ift.tt/2uV4Ymr

  http://ift.tt/2umdrC1   Google Store

 http://ift.tt/2uVdUbv  Store

  Da Vinci Designs/ Website

http://ift.tt/2umTQ4B

  http://ift.tt/2umdrC1   Google Store

Please Read: Shipping and Returns We ship from China Warehouse.  We ship worldwide.

Two Old Guys Would love to hear from you.

We always like to know what you think.

Use the form below to chat with us.

Feedback/Subscribe

Email [email protected]

Two old Guys Would love to hear from you

[contact-form]

    by from Blogs from Two Old Guys http://ift.tt/2tjeUom via http://ift.tt/2uigtX0