During my last three semesters at NYU, my classmate Sean Porio and I co-hosted the podcast Art Techo on WNYU, NYU’s student radio station. Our show focused on having conversations with artists and musicians who use technology in creative and forward-thinking ways. Our show aired on a forty-minute slot twice a month on FM radio and is also available to stream on multiple platforms. You can visit our website here.

In the fall of 2020, I took over the host position of one of WNYU’s longest running legacy shows, The New Afternoon Show. My slot aired on 89.1 FM from 4-7 p.m. on Fridays and showcased new music from underground, up and coming, and experimental musicians. As host, my specific interest was highlighting the work of artists from online music communities. I also remotely interviewed various artists for on the show. In October, I interviewed singer, songwriter, and producer Baird about his Birdsongs Vol. 2 mixtape.

In the spring of 2021, I interviewed Jill and Ethan of the indie rock/shoegaze band Punchlove. We spoke about the origins of the project and the making of their debut EP Terminal in the aftermath of leaving their study abroad semester early due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the fall of 2020, I provided original music for an investigative journalism piece by WNYU's news department. The piece explored the factors that led to a total staff resignation at NYU's student newspaper Washington Square News.

This year, a genre I got really into is neo-jazz/new age. You Can Always Go Outside, Endlessness, Shabason, Krgovich, Sage, and Subtle Movements being in my honorable mentions is indicative of my increased interest in floaty, meditative, improvised synthy-jazzy music.I also spent more time with ambient music this year than in previous ones. caught in pointers and Words That I Could Not Convey to You provided the soundtrack for a lot of my study sessions, quiet reading days, and long bike rides in 2024. Three and No Road No Problem also made for great studying music with their synth-heavy atmospheric and textured production.Phantom Brickworks LP II was my most anticipated ambient release of 2024 (the first installment in the series is one of my favorite ambient albums ever), but it didn't wow me like PB1 did. It came out in November, though, so maybe it will grow on me with repeated listenings.Baggy$$, TRUE MAGIC, and Three all had some dance floor-destined tunes that were on my heavy rotation this year, but the projects as a whole didn't keep my attention. Bon Bon by Fcukers, One of Those Nights by salute & Empress Of, maybe it's u by salute & Sam Gellaitry, and Mango Feedback by Four Tet are necessities for any house-head's year end playlist, though.Lastly, Rooting For Love was a release which caught my attention early in the year but I returned to it less and less as the months went by. Seeing Laetitia Sadier live at The Blue Room in Nashville was a favorite concert experience of mine this year, though, and I certainly enjoyed the album more in a live setting. Her stage presence was captivating while still casual.Those are my honorable mentions! Despite not making my ranked list, I'd still recommend that you listen to any and all of these albums if the genres are ones you're interested in. Next, let's get into my...

Burial - PhoneglowBurial is one of the few artists who will inevitably make my list any year he releases something, and this year's string of singles is no exception to that trend. While all of his releases in 2024 were incredible, Phoneglow is the most ear-candy track Burial has put out in a minute. It sounds like the grainy ghost of raves past and is equally as danceable as it is rewarding for headphone listening. Burial is the electronic music GOAT and I'm so here for his increased output as of late.EthanUno - Sigamos BailandoEthanUno has been putting out singles blending Latin music with electronic music for a few years now. His unique style of hispanohablante hyperpop is full of infectious rhythms, catchy melodies, and bilingual bars. Sigamos Bailando is my favorite of his singles from this year and it got me dancing like my tíos at the family function.Hey Again - Full SwingNew York jangle-rockers Hey Again made their solo debut this year with two singles, and Full Swing was my preferred of the two. This chord progression is one of my favorites of the year, and the energy radiating from the shimmering guitars and passionate lead vocals makes me feel like that one horse running in a field meme. Good stuff lads.Jane Remover - Flash in the Pan/Dream SequenceJane Remover has had one of the greatest artist development arcs in recent memory. Going from digicore darling to noise rock diva to electronic-shoegaze pop star has been a level of sonic whiplash that no other musician has matched, and she's pulled of each new sound she's touched exceptionally and with her own unique style. Dream Sequence had me feeling midest emo sad boy on quite a few occasions this year.Leon Vynehall - ShellacLeon Vynehall is making some of the grooviest and most unique sounding house music in the game right now. Shellac is another track in his signature vein of sound-design-focused, beat-driven, and bass-heavy dance floor bumpers. This beat would have me feral at the club if ever I were so lucky to hear it played in a set.Otto Benson - Bend (ft. Binki)From what I can tell, this song is about grappling with the pressures of maintaining appearances to align with someone else's expectations of you. That's mad real. Otto Benson's quirky little electronic beats are some of my favorite. I wasn't big on his album from January, but I loved this odd little song and I'm looking forward to his annual New Year's Day release for 2025.PinkPantheress - Turn it UpIf there's one pop star who knows how to make me want to do my little dance, it's PinkPantheress. Producer Mura Masa returns for the collab, and the chemistry between these two makes for an unbeatable combo each time. This song makes me feel like this. "Every time I think of youuuu!!" 👏 👇 😩 ☝️ 🙌Promises Ltd. - Psycho Overload / JungleAfter releasing one of my favorite projects of 2016 (their debut, self-titled EP), synthpop duo Promises Ltd. put out one single in 2018 and then disappeared. While one-half of the project maintained a regular output as Chrome Sparks , the collab project between him and Charlie Brand of the band Miniature Tigers seemed dead in the water. This year, the hiatus was broken. Psycho Overload and Jungle marked the return of Promises Ltd. and they sound just as good as they ever did. If you like synthpop at all, these two tracks are a must listen. The 80s-inspired production and earworm melodic hooks is an infectious pairing, and I sang along loudly to both these songs in the car all through 2024 (and yeah, I'm counting both of these songs as one entry — it's my list and I'll be idiosyncratic if I want to).PROP - Crash CourseOne night earlier this year, my friend Ally and I were driving down West End Avenue in Nashville bumping some tunes. As as we sat in silence at a red light picking a new song, another car pulled up beside us blasting Crash Course by PROP. I heard the song's synth solo and my curiosity was piqued. We got their attention, asked what song it was, and then queued it up ourselves. Thank you random stranger for introducing me to this banger. I don't know much about the artist, but the driver of the car next to us told me that he's big on TikTok. Good for PROP.Total Wife - Still AsleepNashville shoegazers Total Wife are one of my favorite local bands to see live. Their energy on the stage is absolutely chaotic, and their shows are among the loudest the scene has to offer. If you like crispy walls of guitars, misty veils of vocals, concussive drums, and distortion-fried electronics, give Still Asleep a spin.With the singles out of the way, let's move on to the entrée of the evening, my...

25 - falls - incomplete 22falls first landed on my radar after releasing the EPS I Went to The Woods and Sunwarmed Window in 2017. Since then, he's maintained a steady trickle of soft, serene, and slightly somber guitar-driven ambient EPs. incomplete 22 is his longest project to date, and it makes for a peaceful listen. No track in particular stands out above the rest, but this is an album which I enjoyed in its entirety quite a bit while lounging around the house, driving in the car, or touching grass. Real rainy day vibes on this one.

24 - TV Girl & George Clanton - FauxlenniumIt seems like George Clanton has been using the clout he's developed since his incredible 2018 album Slide (which wasn't my album of the year that year, but might have been if I could go back in time and show it to myself earlier) to strategically get the attention of his musical heroes and make collab albums with them. In 2020, he teamed up with Nick Hexum of 311 for their creatively-titled George Clanton & Nick Hexum LP. This time around, he's linked with /mu/-sweethearts-turned-TikTok-trend TV Girl for another collab album out of a younger George Clanton's own self-insert fanfic.Just like with GC&NH, Fauxlennium emphasizes the sounds of Clanton's own style which were formed in imitation of his collaborator, and the pairing makes for a match made in chillwave heaven. You add Jordana (who proved her synergy with TV Girl on 2021's Summer's Over project) to the mix, and you get the track Butterflies, which gets a big ol' chef's kiss from me. This album's pretty groovy all around even if it has a couple lulls over its full runtime.

23 - Mura Masa - Curve 1In the ten years since his breakout lo-fi beat tape Soundtrack to a Death, Mura Masa has been hard to pin down sonically. Each new album sees the producer blending electronic music, pop, rap, and various dance genres in new ways. His 2020 album R.Y.C. even took a stab at indie rock and britpop. Curve 1 is hands-down his most dance floor-focused project so far, and it's also his most instrumental and least feature-laden project since his first. Mura Masa's production chops are sharper than ever in their standalone moments, but I prefer the tracks with vocal features to be honest. The songs Drugs, We Are Making Out, Still, and Fly are my personal favorites, but the whole album is a ton of fun and insanely danceable.

22 - The Dare - What’s Wrong With New York?The Dare made a bold first showing after his debut single Girls blew up in 2022, but his 2023 EP Sex failed to reach the same levels of hype. Nevertheless, as the posterboy for the Dimes Square scene, a figurehead of indie-sleaze revivalism, and an in-demand producer after demonstrating his chops with Charlie XCX for her track Guess, his debut project was eagerly anticipated by party-crazed Gen Z-ers (myself among them). What’s Wrong With New York? released to an audience wanting to be wowed, but it didn't hit as hard as the surprise chart-topper Girls did on its own. While I enjoyed the album (it's on my ranked list and not my honorable mentions, after all), I was not without my gripes about it.I think that what The Dare did with Girls was setting up his audience's tonal expectations of what this musical project would be, and he seems torn as to whether he wants to be known only for musically horny-posting on main (on tracks like Open Up, Good Time, and Perfume) or for speaking to life behind the decks and rhapsodizing about the beauty of nightlife culture (on tracks like All Night, Elevation, and You Can Never Go Home). This divide between the expected absurdity and insincerity from his audience and his penchant for moments of earnest-but-inarticulate lyricism seems to have produced a widespread lukewarm reception of the album from listeners.I, too, am of the opinion that The Dare as a character makes for a somewhat inconsistent narrator, but I really enjoy Harrison Patrick Smith's (the dude behind The Dare) musical style as a producer even if it might just be LCD Soundsystem for Zoomers (a comparison I think is apt, but both projects being NYC-based electroclash is hardly as much of a bite as, say, Greta Van Fleet is to Led Zeppelin — it's not that deep, y'all). I'm not losing sleep over The Dare wearing his influences on his lapel, I just want him to go either full mouth-breathing goon or complete Manhattanite cultural critic on the next album. Dude's got to figure out who he's trying to be and make either some stupid bangers or dig a little deeper on the introspection if he's going to play Dimes Square Henry David Thoreau next time around. Or maybe still do both, but don't hold back. Either way, I'm praying that he doesn't fall victim to a sophomore slump. This debut has a ton of promise even if The Dare's not quite sure what he wants the project to be yet.

21 - Skee Mask - ResortModern techno maestro Skee Mask has been grinding in silence following the critical success of 2018's Compro. The album gained widespread attention from fans online (Pitchfork even gave it an 8.6), and then it was pulled from streaming platforms as the artist chose to protest streaming as a model for music distribution (honestly, BASED). Since then, he's put out four lengthy beat tapes on his Bandcamp (two of which came out this year IN ADDITION TO RELEASING Resort) as well as a string of techno and ambient EPs on the German Ilian Tape label. The guy is prolific, but he hasn't had a project that rivaled Compro in my mind until now.Resort is Skee Mask's most sonically coherent and focused album since Compro, and, like the latter, the former is best enjoyed as a whole listening experience. His atmospheres and textures are unmatched right now, and the grooves he makes are in a league of their own. Seriously, if someone can deduce the time signature of the fourth track Element, I'll be too busy trying to figure out how to dance to it to care. If you like music that makes you feel like you're raving in the PS2 main menu, give this record a spin.

20 - Caribou - HoneySomething's been in the air this year with producers whose output historically covers a wide range of electronic genres releasing albums that hone in specifically on house music. Caribou is very much a part of this trend. 2020's Suddenly saw him playing with the palates of synthpop, and now Honey has him making super-saturated dancepop Blingee collages.This album is brimming with uptempo house slappers adorned with Caribou's own chimpunked vocals singing little ditties about love, and the tracklist is equally cutesy as it is club ready. The title track is a bass house bruiser, and Broke My Heart, Volume, Honey, and Dear Life are lively 2-step shufflers. The real gem on the album has to be Climbing, though. Biking up hills in The Warner Parks to this track had me feeling invincible this past fall. If you want something to dance yourself silly to, try Honey.

11 - Chanel Beads - Your Day Will ComeOne of my favorite new (to me) acts from this year was Chanel Beads. I don't even know how to describe the music on Your Day Will Come. Maybe it's what would it would sound like if Nosferatu made hypnogogic dream pop with heavy influences of shoegaze and trip hop? You could certainly convince me that this album was made by vampires given that it has not one, but TWO instrumental orchestral tracks (and string sections throughout as well). Undead or not, Chanel Beads is (are?) exploring sonic frontiers that few others could even find with waypoints and a minimap.The instrumentation is a slurry of synths, guitars, and effect-laden vocals singing brief snippets of imagery and narrative without much clarity of significance. The effect for the listener is a dizzying gothic kaleidoscope that probably resembles what they would play at a DIY basement show in Central Yharnam. In terms of serving up unparalleled creepy ambient post-rock vibes, nobody's doing it like Chanel Beads. This album is like if Cocteau Twins were from the Dark Souls universe. I hope they play Nashville sometime soon (or I might have to head over to New York to see them myself) because I am so curious how this album would translate to a live show. If you haven't heard Your Day Will Come yet, check it out if only to have a truly one-of-a-kind musical experience.

6 - This is Lorelei - Box for Buddy, Box for StarI've known about This is Lorelei for a few years now. He's best known as being 1/2 of the experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes, and I first heard his solo work when I saw him perform at a DIY house show in Queens back when I lived in New York. After diving into his extensive Bandcamp back catalog, I became obsessed with his EP Move Around. His music takes a bedroom producer approach to fusing a wide array of influences like country, butt rock, electronic music, indie rock, alt pop, and folk.His solo record label debut, Box for Buddy, Box for Star is another bag of musical Chex-Mix from This is Lorelei. The songs Angel's Eye, Two Legs, and Box for Buddy, Box for Star sound like riding your rickety horse out of a Western frontier town while the songs I'm All Fucked Up and Dancing In The Club are lively uptempo lofi dancepop tracks. The album is a patchwork of sounds tied together by Nate Amos's slacker vocals and elaborate songwriting style.According to its Pitchfork review, the album was partially inspired by the artist's decision to stop smoking week after seeing Stonehenge. Whether that's true or not, the album is certainly about the artist confronting a younger, less healthy, and more directionless version of himself. I'm All Fucked Up is practically This is Lorelei sitting down backwards in a chair and giving his younger substance-dependent self a lecture. These songs come from a very personal and introspective place, but they're wrapped up in toe-tapping drum machine beats and classic rock riffs that would please any indie music fan.This album is the work of an artist operating completely within his own lane and making music that is entirely unique to himself and his craft. A lot of the music I've heard from This is Lorelei has this vibe of being something made solely for the pleasure of the one making it, but the product is too catchy to keep all for himself. I'm glad that we get to hear the musical equivalent of Nate Amos's diary put to music as This is Lorelei, and I'm glad that this album has put more ears onto his solo work. I think he's truly a musical maverick and one of the most unique voices to come out of the NYC indie scene in a long time. Give this one a listen if you want to hear something totally fresh but with enough points of reference to feel familiar.

5 - Underscores - Covergirl: Originally by Sonny - EPBefore I can talk about this EP itself, I need to give y'all a history lesson. Back before platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud consolidated the outputs of bedroom producers onto easily accessible outlets, individual websites, blogs, and Myspace pages were a trove of MP3s uploaded by DIY musicians making beats in their free time. Though hardly an amateur at that point in his career, Sonny Moore was once such a Myspace bedroom producer. After leaving his screamo band From First to Last and the associated spotlight that came with it, Sonny Moore experimented with what his solo act would sound like. At the same time, the former emo/pop-punk frontman was getting into dance music. During this little-understood point in the musical progression of the artist that would later come to be known as Skrillex, Sonny Moore blended his past with his future and released songs as low-quality MP3s on his Myspace page that fused pop punk, emo, and hardcore with his newfound influences of french house, electro, drum and bass, and dubstep. These files would later achieve an almost sacred status within the Skrillex fandom.If you can't tell already, I'm a huge Skrillex nerd. I spent a lot of time in my teens in online fan forums accumulating unreleased Skrillex tracks, and among them were YouTube rips of these proto-Skrillex songs that he made under his government name but never formally released. The originals are wholly unique creations from a visionary mind (yeah, I'm talking about Skrillex in these terms — I mean it, too) which drew widely from the music of his time to produce a sound that was entirely unrivaled. It's only been by catching up with and imitating what Skrillex was doing on his own over 15 years ago that anything even remotely similar has been made. I'd be willing to bet good money that artists like Jane Remover, Frost Children, 100 Gecs and others making electronic rock fusion in the 2020s probably had a couple of these songs that Skrillex made in 2008 on their MP3 players in high school. In fact, a whole generation of kids were influenced by the genius of Skrillex to make their own music, and many of them shared a similar obsession as my own for the forbidden songs of the pre-Skrillex era. Underscores is clearly one of those producers.On this love letter of an EP to the lesser-known hits of Sonny Moore's discography, Underscores not only covers the big four Myspace-era songs, she painstakingly recreates them from scratch with an insane level of precision. Seriously, go listen to the originals first (as low-quality Youtube re-uploads, as God intended: Turmoil, Father Said, Lustbug, and Ocean) and then go listen to Covergirl: Originally by Sonny (which is only available on her Soundcloud). That's probably the best way to understand how impressive of a feat this EP is if you don't already have the originals encoded into your brain in 128kbps like I do. It takes a special kind of musical talent to imitate Sonny Moore with such accuracy, and Underscores has shown without a doubt that she's up to snuff.The uncanny way in which Underscores has brought these songs back to life signifies the depth of her familiarity with and appreciation for the originals. Listening to this EP feels like the equivalent of colorblind folks seeing color for the first time through those corrective glasses, but for high-quality-Sonny-Moore-leak-starved Skrillex stans. Anyone with real Skrillex bona-fides will also appreciate this EP's nod to dubplate recreation culture. In lieu of high quality versions of coveted Skrillex leaks, many fans took to recreating the tracks themselves just so they could hear the songs in full fidelity. Countless producers from this era developed their production fundamentals and earned their sound design stripes by imitating unreleased Skrillex songs. I suspect that Underscores might have also made her producer baby steps by following in Skrillex's footsteps, and Covergirl is nothing short of the student becoming the teacher.

4 - Bickle - Double Eagle - EPSimilarly to This is Lorelei, Bickle is another artist who I consider as operating in a musical space of his own design. The producer made waves a few years ago with the viral single Naked (Talk Words also saw some success) and he was being courted by big labels for a time. There's an alternate timeline that could have existed wherein Bickle had a similar come up story as PinkPantheress and became a Gen-Z chart topper, but the dude decided to do his own thing. His album Biblickle last year had some impressive highlights (and secured the #4 spot on my list) and its focus was more on the songwriting and less on the production. On Double Eagle - EP, Bickle is correcting course back to the beats.This EP is a short and sweet electropop thrill ride with Bickle's signature crunchy beats providing the base while his full-throated vocals hit some of the hottest melodic riffs I had the pleasure of listening to in 2024. It's hard to not let these infectious rhythms get you hyped up, and each chorus on this EP is an earworm unto itself. You just need one listen of the songs Use Your Heart Wisely, Don't Look at the DJ, Hey You, and Double Eagle to catch their melodic brain worms and crave another hit. If you rode in my car this year while Little Faded was playing, you probably heard me singing along and hitting some nice harmonies. Despite what claims I might have made earlier on this list (I'm getting towards the end of writing this thing and I am too tired to go back and revise) this song actually was my most listened to song of 2024.I feel like people are sleeping on this dude's music big time. He's insanely talented and every project of his has lab-grown diamonds of songs from front to back. From what I can glean off of his socials, it seems like he left his hometown in Georgia for greener pastures in New York City this year, and I wish him all the success he deserves. All that his music needs is to have some more ears on it before he gets the recognition his music warrants. It's only a matter of time before we'll all be seeing big things from Bickle, I'm convinced.

3 - Punchlove - ChannelsI'll preface this by saying that I do know Punchlove personally from my undergrad program, but I'm sure that I would feel the same about this album if I heard it knowing nothing about the band behind it. Channels is the debut full length of the NYC-based band, and it is an impressive first foot forward. If you were to describe the band with a single genre, it would be shoegaze, but the band pulls from pop, prog rock, psychedelic rock, math rock (Birdsong alternates between 9/8 and 4/4 seamlessly, and I might be missing some other time signatures in there too), and noise in equal measures over the course of the album.In typical shoegaze style, the music on Channels is characterized primarily by noisy torrents of heavily-effected guitars and choirs of washed out vocals, but that's not all there is to appreciate here. The riffs, melodic lines, and textures across the project showcase the members' ridiculous musical talent. The whole thing was also entirely recorded and self-produced in the band's home studio, demonstrating a level of studio mastery which few other bands can show off like Punchlove has.The album progresses along in a way that makes for a very rewarding top to bottom listen. The more energetic tracks like Screwdriver, Apartment, and Birdsong show off the band's riffs and rhythms, and they alternate gracefully between the more relaxed and psychedelic cuts such as Corridor and Pigeon where the band pays more attention to tone and texture. The songs Dead Lands, Guilt, and Birdsong demonstrate the songwriting and vocals skills that Punchlove are bringing to the table, too. Glued together by a keen ear for the balance between musical signal and harmonic noise needed to make great shoegaze, the songs off Channels are best enjoyed all together and in one sitting. This thing is an ALBUM ALBUM.If you want a sense of how far the band has come in only a few short years, you need only scroll down a tad from this spot on my website to hear an interview I did with founding members Jill and Ethan in 2021 about their first project Terminal. Give the EP a listen and you'll hear all the potential that was waiting to be released onto an album like Channels. It was clear to me from that first project that whatever Punchlove produced in the future, it was going to blow me away. This debut record definitely validates my gut instinct, and it was well worth the wait. If you want to hear a shoegaze project that comes from a place of deep appreciation and mastery of the genre, then queue up this album. I'm so proud of what my friends have done here and hopefully I won't need to drive to Memphis again before I catch another one of their wild live shows.

2 - Porter Robinson - Smile :DPorter Robinson is a bit of a musical chameleon. While he's stuck to electronic genres broadly, the form his music takes is different from record to record. The dude was making electro when I heard his first project Spitfire in 2011 (he's another artist who I learned about from Skrillex's OWSLA label back in the day, are you starting to sense a pattern here?) but this album might have more in common musically with pop acts like Taylor Swift, albeit spoken in the language of Ableton and synths reminiscent of early MGMT. Actually, this album is maybe best understood as the result of Porter going back to his musical roots and making singer-songwriter/pop music with the same instruments that he once used to use to make EDM.Conceptually, this album is really interesting. Over its 10 songs, Porter confronts his nearly 15-year long career and the fan base he's acquired head on, grappling with the effects of parasocial fandoms, celebrity culture, and the drinking of his own Kool-Aid. He questions how much of his experience is true, and what is just a part of the character he puts on, the spectacle that comes with stardom. He seeks to get closer to the things he truly values, and most of that comes from a reconnecting with his inner child, the place he's from, and the people in his life he loves the most. On Smile :D, Porter Robinson is mostly talking to himself, he's just letting his audience listen in (this is the most true of the tracks Russian Roulette, Kitsune Maison Freestyle, and Easier to Love You. Thematically (and perhaps also literally) he's just telling himself jokes that only he's laughing at, making what he wants to make, and taking the time the appreciate living in his own head for a bit.This album also has its fair share of fourth wall breaks. On the opening track Knock Yourself Out XD, Porter breaks down the illusions his fans have of his persona. If they're disappointed by the discrepancy between who they think he is and who is is in actuality, that's on them! But on the closing track Everything To Me, Porter sings earnestly about how much it means to him to interact with his audience when he performs for them live. It's a sweet moment that acknowledges the incredible highs of realizing that you have people who care passionately about the work you do, even if they are annoying at times.I saw Smile :D in concert when the tour came through Nashville this year, and it was my favorite live show experience in a long time. The show started with this new album, providing a level of both spectacle and performance that is rare for electronic music. Porter Robinson clearly cares a lot about putting on a good show. The concert also acted as a sort of career retrospective, with sections for his albums Nurture and Worlds coming after an intermission that followed the Smile :D set. Each album era required a change in set, had its own accompanying visuals, and necessitated a change in instrumentation amongst the band members (again, this album is the closest he's been to Taylor Swift as an artist). It was awesome seeing Porter celebrating his incredible discography with one big display. but I got a sense of finality about this tour that I didn't feel when I saw him in previous stages of his artistic career.If I'm right about my inferences from the lyrics of Everything To Me (I'm the annoying parasocial fan, y'all — it's me), I think Porter might be stepping away from playing shows and his public persona for a bit. If that is the case, I think this album is a great note to end on. The music is sincere to the point of being cringe, and then it continues to the point of being endearing again. You can tell that the production and songwriting on this album was made with little concern from Porter about what precedents he's set with his discography before this. He's just making what's on his heart.Porter Robinson has always worn his passions on his sleeve, but I think this album is the most open and honest he's been so far. Though what we see and understand of the artist Porter Robinson from this album is just the blown up facsimile of the person, and we shouldn't assume that the art is a 1:1 for the person making it, I like hearing albums such as this that feel so inseparable from the true core personality of their creator. Smile :D wasn't what I thought I'd be getting from a Porter Robinson album, but he's always going to do what he wants to musically. I'm okay with that if it means that we get the results that he truly wanted us to hear.

1 - Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream PoliceAt long last, we've reached my album of the year. I'm not sure what is about Two Star & The Dream Police, but I knew that this would be my #1 from my first full listen through. I've become very well acquainted with this album since then. The melodies are drilled into my brain after having the whole album on repeat all year, and I sing along to these songs shamelessly even though most of the lyrics still elude me. I'm not a big guitar dude, but the tones Mk.gee makes from his guitar are some of the most out of this world noises I've heard on a record that's as accessible as this one.The songs on this record are snappy, tight, and straight to the point. Mk.gee serves up potent melodies, riffs, and beats without any fluff. These songs are all killer and no filler. In terms of song structure and vocal delivery, this album is pop rock, but the instrumentation is actually incredibly boundary-pushing. This integration of the novel and the familiar is a riveting combo, and its a realm that Mk.gee is very comfortable playing around in.This record is associated with some of my favorite memories from this year. It motivated me through exhaustion in the final stretch of a 50-mile bike ride on the Natchez Trace, it gave me the name of my first cat (Riley, after Rylee & I), it accompanied me on multiple long road trips, and the crowd at the Mk.gee show I saw was one of the rowdiest I've had the pleasure of jumping around with since I saw Yeat (probably because both shows were full of high school kids who know the music from Tik-Tok). People have been raving about how good this album is all year, and I'm probably not going to say much that needs saying, and I'm very tired after writing this whole list. So my final thought on this album will be to say go listen to it if you aren't aware of Mk.gee's game yet. It's likely that something about this album will catch your ear for being unlike much of what people are making nowadays.

For those who are shocked and in disbelief at how Harris could have lost to Trump, let me try to explain why I think that people were right to want something better than Harris and how Trump took advantage of this rational instinct to serve his own megalomaniacal needs. In short, it’s just 2016 all over again. Everyone knows and agrees that the status quo is failing (or they just benefit from the status quo, but I don’t want to focus on the privileged class since there’s no surprise why they might support Trump). There are also those who do not consciously know that the system is failing, but they might have an unconscious sense of the things which are wrong without a picture of the whole. They might recognize the issues of the cost of living and inflation crisis, the wage crisis, the housing crisis, the climate crisis, the incarceration crisis, the wars and genocides happening with the direct support of the American government and our taxpayer dollars, etc. What they do not see is that these things are the consequences of the same system: Neoliberalism, the American status quo ideology.Our two party system is not the solution to the status quo, it is a product of it, and the system by nature will not produce the solution to itself. Nevertheless, people are like “let's vote for the guy who says he'll make things better over the person who promises more of the same,” and then it just makes everything worse. Just as Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, history will show time and time again that the American public will reject a warmongering, status quo, Neoliberal Democrat in favor of a fascist with rizz that positions himself as being meaningfully different. This is because status quo Democrats believe in the system, they do not want it to change. They largely choose to be blind to its flaws while those to the right of them politically understand the system and its flaws but love it because it serves their individual interests. Trump himself is a member of the wealthy elite and benefits greatly from the status quo, and its his own elite class whom he truly serves. But Trump doesn’t openly present this way, and for good reason. Instead, he presents himself as the people's candidate of change, and he won because of it.

This works because the populous knows that their material conditions will not improve under corporatism, American interventionism, capitalism, and individualism, though many would not knowingly identify these as being the greatest forces against their well-being. But, given that this is the status quo ideology of America (Neoliberalism), when an alternative ideology that is objectively worse (Trumpism, which is Fascism) effectively markets itself as being in opposition to the norm and claims that it has the public's best interest at heart (populism), the masses will gravitate towards it even though it will only accelerate the deterioration of their material well-being, as Fascism and Neoliberalism serve many of the same purposes in terms of material impact. In truth, neither ideology benefits from meeting the needs of the people.It may be hard to accept this. The Neoliberal system we were raised in instilled within us the belief that it is a system which works to serve us. Out of the system's need to develop widespread acceptance in order to guarantee self-preservation, we were not raised to see the need for an alternative. In fact, we were taught that other ideologies are inherently worse, which is why we don't use them (some correctly so, none of us were taught that Fascism is good). But when people begin to realize that the system is failing, they reach for whatever alternative seems the most viable without giving much thought as to what that ideology really is. They just know that what we're doing isn't working, and they want to believe in something else. Currently, this is Fascism, and the blind faith in the exceptional and infallible nature of the American status quo which the system instilled in us made it inconceivable to imagine that it would produce Fascism so easily.

The reality is that neither ideology will improve people's lives meaningfully. If this were true of Neoliberalism, it would have born its fruits by now as it has been the operative ideology of America (and the West at large) at least since the end of WW2 (and arguably since the industrial revolution, or indeed even since American independence). And we've seen what Fascism does. The only true method to combat the forces of Neoliberalism and Fascism from continuing to impoverish the masses is to return power and agency to those from whom it has been stripped. However, so many Americans have been programmed to demonize any such ideologies and call them Communism, Socialism, etc. They say that these ideologies are inherently anti-American. Which, to be fair, they are inherently in opposition to the status quo, thus they are the solution, but I would not conflate that with being "anti-American" as they are more concerned with the material well-being of the American people than the current system has ever been, and it is the people who are important, not the concept of the American nation state and its position on the world stage (American Hegemony and Imperialism), which is what both Neoliberalism and Fascism serve.

Earlier this weekend, I got to see a Skream set in Nashville. For those who aren’t familiar with the origins of UK dubstep or who Skream is, seeing Skream play in Nashville is like a country music fan from Poland seeing Johnny Cash play in Krakow, or a rap fan from Mongolia going to a Wu-Tang show in Ulaanbaatar. The DJ traditions that Skream comes from and the dubstep subculture which he was so instrumental in developing in mid-2000s and early-2010s London are entirely foreign to the music culture of the American South. Yet, there he was, a master of the art of DJing playing an open-to-close set at a small club in midtown Nashville.I arrived to the club in an Uber a few minutes before the set was scheduled to start at 10:00 PM and got a gin and tonic at the bar while I waited for the mirrored sliding door to the dance floor to open. By the time the lights dimmed, the door slid aside, and people made their way down the hallway from the lounge to the floor, Skream had already started his set with no introductions—a lit cigarette hanging from his lips and a pair of headphones resting at an angle on his head over one ear.The first ones in the room stood stationary around the dance floor’s perimeter holding their drinks. It had been raining that night, and most people left their homes with jackets that now, since the club didn’t have a coat check, lay draped over their crossed arms while they watched Skream behind the decks. Dumbfounded as to why a club wouldn’t have a coat check, I walked back into the hallway and stashed my heavy rubber raincoat behind a trash can for the night. Unencumbered, I finished my drink, put my phone in my pocket on Do Not Disturb, made my way to the center of the dance floor, and let my body do whatever felt better than standing still. I had come to dance.

Somewhere in the decades that have followed, our nation lost its social apparatuses for instilling people with the human tradition of social dancing, the fault of our prevailing Western culture upheld by the institutions of power within our nation. It was capitalism that gave us the 9-5 work week which impoverished us of our time and energy, making the physical exertion necessary for dancing less appealing than the lounging required for consuming escapist media. It was capitalism, too, which concentrated riches among the ultra wealthy, robbing the masses of disposable income and rendering such events a luxury rather than a vital function of society. It was patriarchal and puritanical religious traditions which labeled the physical flesh as sinful and made us ashamed of the bodies we inhabit, internalizing in us the notion that dancing is somehow a sinful act and that our human desires are to be ashamed of and ignored (which, as an aside, is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that Nashville has a Christian night club that serves no alcohol and restricts what kinds of dance moves are permitted). And it was a confluence of factors that led to the dissolution of our society’s third places, leaving us all to collectively seek out parasocial community online while being isolated in our homes, gathering in digital spaces while the physical spaces which once housed our communal behaviors fell into disrepair and faded to the passage of time.As humans, however, we still possess the ingrained biological needs both to release energy through movement and to socialize, and these needs are so profound that we continually develop ways to fulfill them without understanding why. Intrinsically we know how to jump around at a concert, we know how to get rowdy in a mosh pit, and we know how to imitate TikTok dance trends in an atomized simulation of our deeply embedded need for social dance outlets. But, aside from the few remaining exceptions (i.e. queer club spaces, imported dance cultures from Latin America, rural folk traditions like line dancing, etc.), American culture largely stopped producing recreational spaces where people could come together and discover how to tune into their bodies and let rhythm naturally guide their movements.

Around 2:00 AM the crowd started to thin out. Those of us who remained huddled around the DJ booth and tried not to break our immersion by recognizing that we were dancing in a mostly empty room. At 2:30 Skream started playing dubstep. The switch from garage, house, and techno (each being around 120-130 BPM) to dubstep (traditionally around 140 BPM and in half-time) caused a noticeable change in movement. While house music is felt in the feet, the legs, the hips, and the shoulders, dubstep is felt in the head, the torso, the arms, and the hands. I appreciated the rest for my lower body which Skream had granted with the change in genre.Skream played OG tracks like 3K Lane by Joker and Jakes and his remix of La Roux’s In For The Kill (I wrote a note on my phone thanking him for playing the former, he nodded and gave me a thumbs up). A fellow dancer in the crowd held their lighter up to the booth to light Skream’s cigarette. At 3:00 AM Skream closed out his set with his Von Dutch remix, which I celebrated with the person from the bar earlier.

photo by Hank Borders and viz_wel

On a personal note, I’m so thankful for this EP. Some of the material on the project dates as far back as 2019, and a lot of the subject matter was informed by how Kate [the other half of Trash Bangs] and I were feeling as music students/recent graduates during the height of the pandemic. I feel pretty far removed now (thank God) from the scared, lonely, anxious, depressed, and insecure kid who made this music. I remember applying for jobs and internships throughout that part of my life and just feeling totally worthless getting nothing but rejection back. It felt like this thing which I had spent my whole life until that point pursuing (music) had now led me into a world that saw nothing of value in what I put so much of myself into, and by extension saw no value in me and what I had to offer.

The title of the EP comes from those infamous five words at the start of rejection letters and the feeling of reading them and getting all the wind knocked out of your sails, and more broadly the EP is about that feeling that nothing you’ve hoped to achieve across various aspects of your life will come to fruition (which is the main idea of the first song, Going to Be). Funnily enough, I currently find myself in another summer of job searching, but at least now I can attribute rejection largely to factors outside of my control (the pitiful state of modern corporate hiring culture, for one) instead of it being a reflection of my own value. Unlike my younger self who made this EP, I’ve come to a place where I’ve based my self worth outside of how “successful” I am or the clout of the company I eventually land a job at.

visuals by viz_wel

center graphic by viz_wel

For a while it felt like the music would never come out in any final state as the world and our personal lives kept getting in the way of our continued work on it. I also felt a deep need for the music on this EP to be perfect, since if I was going to be a failure professionally I needed to at least prove that my music degree wasn’t entirely for nothing and that I came out of it being a decent musician. Obviously, when all you hear are the faults in your own music and the projection of your own insecurities as a musician, you’re never going to be satisfied. The music sat in this limbo state of never being quite good enough for years until I finally texted Kate that this EP would never come out unless it happened the summer before I started grad school, last summer. Despite us both living in different states, working jobs, and myself studying for the GMAT and prepping for another cross country move at the time, we recognized the value of what we created and the need for it to be put out into the world. I’m so glad we did that.

Listening back now with a different perspective, I can still hear in the music a lot of what I was feeling at the time of making it. I can still feel the parts in the production where my younger self needed to express all these big, heavy, dark emotions through the sounds and energy of the music. This music was made in the midst of the worst years of my life, but I’m thankful that, through music, I had an outlet to channel those emotions into something beautiful. I had come to the realization towards the end of the production process that, in making the EP at all, I had proven the little voice in my head wrong: that I actually could make something great despite all the things in the world that were actively working towards discouraging me. I put the little robot voice that’s the last thing you hear on the EP in as a reminder and affirmation to my future self to acknowledge what Kate and I had achieved in the creation of the EP. Lemme tell ya, little Nick, I hear you loud and clear.

visuals by viz_wel