onContinuing with our jaunt through last year: it's time to talk about music! Historically I've been a bit of a music aficionado, and I've written album reviews on this site in the past. However, I've been listening to much less new stuff than usual in the past like, uh, ummm, uh... six years? Which, I suppose, makes this musical drought the new normal.
When I say drought, I mean that I believe I only really listened to two albums in 2023. Two! Granted, they were 終焉 Re:write by 150P and EPHEMERAL by Mr.Kitty, which are both long albums that are packed with bangers. Sort of. But still, I've been wanting for a while to get back into listening to music more often, and not just idly while I write code. I did listen to more music in 2024 than I did in 2023, although not as much as I'd have hoped. Still, progress is progress!
I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about, in case you want to check them out or listen along with the post!
Albums
If you know anything about my music listening habits, you'll know that I predominantly listen to albums rather than singles. There's something about a packaged collection of music that is more digestible to me than random songs. I think part of it is knowing that I can spend like half an hour listening to something that feels cohesive, all sung by the same person, and that when my favorite song on the album ends, I can be comforted in my time of need by another song that I probably still like.
There's five albums I want to talk about for 2024, listed in ascending order of number of listens based on my last.fm statistics. I do want to give an honorable mention to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, which didn't make the list, but is still full of queer bops that I'm also pretty sure you've all heard already! Also, I should mention that only the first two of these actually came out in 2024; the rest are still 2024 albums to me, though, because that's when I heard them.
Tension II by Kylie Minogue
I was just poking around in the iTunes Store one day when I saw this album pop up. I've never really listened to Kylie Minogue before (although I've obviously heard Can't Get You Out Of My Head), but as a homosexual who grew up in Australia, it's kind of my responsibility to stan the princess. I liked it a lot! It's the kind of dance-y pop I was listening to in the mid-2010s, between my recession pop and dark electronica periods. Sia and Tove Lo, two artists that I think of as being from that era, are actually featured on the album! Their songs (Dance Alone and My Oh My respectively) are among my favorites, but I have to give the top spot to Hello, which has a perfectly earwormy hook that also just happens to be about being obsessed with your crush and showing up at their house in the middle of the night.
Hello, I am at your door
I know you're awake
Yeah it's close to four
Let me inThis is D-ne to B-ko. Yeah, everything's actually about Shuuen no Shiori and I make no apologies.
9 Sad Symphonies by Kate Nash
This album might've been higher up if I'd gotten it earlier in the year, and if I hadn't taken two vacations in December during which I didn't really listen to any music, which sort of highlights a fundamental problem with ordering by play count with an arbitrary deadline, but let's just ignore that. I've been a Kate Nash fan for a long time; her 2010 album My Best Friend Is You is in my top 10 albums of all time. That being said, that was 14 years ago, and I didn't like the couple of albums she released in the meantime.
9 Sad Symphonies is her first album in six years, and I was delighted to find that it was somewhat a return to form for her. It's more orchestral than Best Friend, which gives a bunch of the tracks these great swelling emotional moments that you just want to sing along to at the top of your lungs; one such track is Horsie, which alternates between mellow verses, and the lovely imagery of "I'm driving to the mountains to see snow! Crying in the car park of a Home Depot!" Ray is another, in which Kate promises you that "I can be a ray of sunshine" while sounding like she's having a hard time living up to it.
There's honestly too many tracks here that I love for me to go in depth on all of them. Millions of Heartbeats gives a great introduction to the kinds of feelings we'll be sorting through on this album, Wasteman is a catchy song that really gives off Lily Allen energy, and Vampyre gets stuck in my head for an hour every time I listen to it. And there's still more!
As a post-script unrelated to the album itself: what is up with the cover art? If you look at the image I included with the post, it's clearly a photograph someone took of the CD sleeve. I can tell because I have it in real life and that's what it looks like, and also the lighting on it would be different than if it was a digital image. But this, as far as I can tell, is the only official cover art for this album. This is what MusicBrainz, Album Art Exchange, and iTunes have. It's also something only I would care about, and doesn't really matter much, but it's pretty wild! I don't think I've seen something like that before, and I've been collecting CDs for years.
Monsters by Empathy Test
I got this album for Christmas in 2023 (and it actually came out in 2020), but obviously it still counts as a 2024 album. In fact, I consider Christmas to be the start of a new music year for me, since I usually get at least one CD. I don't 100% remember how I stumbled upon this group, although it was probably by looking at recommended artists on last.fm. This was after I'd spent a lot of time listening to Mr.Kitty, whose music has a dark feel, but is pretty firmly electronica.
I ended up liking this album a lot! It has a dark, shoegaze-y sound, kind of like Blouse by Blouse,1 a favorite of mine from like eight years ago. The title and leading track, Monsters, is one of the best, with its heavy bassline and glittery synths, amid echoing voices warning the listener that "Baby, I've got the monsters." Incubation Song is high up there for me too. It's much lighter, musically, than many of the other tracks; it gives me the feeling of breaking out of a building where you've been held captive by a cult and you finally get to run free through the nighttime streets, even though the lyrics are quite self-destructive.
My favorite, though, is Skin, a song equally emotional and catchy, and which makes me reflect on my own evolving experience with loss:
But I see you've moved on a little too fast
For me to believe you've left the past behind
I'm just another boy with a bruised ego
Who can never let go of something he didn't know he had at the time
Isn't it always the same?Worlds by Porter Robinson
This is the oldest album I'll talk about today, as it came out in 2014, a full decade ago. It's another Christmas special, actually; my brother handed it to me as he was packing up his personal effects while my parents were preparing to move house (obviously a fun thing to do during the holiday season). I'd never really given Porter Robinson a chance before because I figured his music would probably be pretty mainstream electronica, and I'm really into the sub-genre of "music you hear as you're freezing to death in an abandoned cathedral", like Crystal Castles and Mr.Kitty.2 But I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard!
Most of the tracks I really liked were just very jubilant, very clear and melodic. Divinity is a great start to the album, kicking it off with some fun gated instrumentation that I'd love to do a better job explaining but honestly I'm kind of a novice when it comes to the actual production behind electronic music. It hits, is what I'm saying. Years of War and Hear the Bells have similarly strong hooks, with the latter's serving as the drop for the chorus, accompanied by a choir of children singing. I like Lionhearted a lot too; it's just very energetic.
This brings me to Sea of Voices. This, I would say, is my favorite track of the year, and it's very different from the rest of the album. It feels like a mythical journey through the clouds, with gentle synths building up for minutes before the drop, and soft repeated words calling out like an angel's voice. This is definitely what I would call an "aesthetic" song; a song you want to listen to while staring at the snow out the bus window. I'm gonna embed it here because I want you to listen to it even if you don't listen to the playlist (which also has it):
And the thing is, the next track (Fellow Feeling) is good and weird enough that I don't even feel too upset that Sea of Voices is over.
Nurture by Porter Robinson
Well, I mean, after I listened to and enjoyed Worlds so much, I obviously had to listen to Porter's other music.
Nuture came out in 2021, so it's at least closer to the present than the other two old albums. I got it for my birthday, which is pretty much half a year away from Christmas, so it's kind of like the year was split up into two Porter Robinson eras, and those eras have very different vibes. Worlds was more produced, more focused on drops and cool synths, and a touch more mainstream. Nurture is much more singer-songwriter. It feels personal, it feels vulnerable. And it's catchy as all heck.
I have a similar problem to 9 Sad Symphonies with this album, which is that there are too many standout tracks to comment on them all. But I have to try or I'm gonna explode.
Look at the Sky: This is the first non-instrumental track on the album, and it's such a good introduction to what's to come. It feels so hopeful; it feels like you're in the field of grass from the cover art, but you're facing up now, staring into the sky and dreaming of the future.
Look at the sky, I'm still here
I'll be alive next year
I can make something good, oh
Something goodThere's a lot to this, I think. Porter Robinson has said that he dealt with depression for years after his first album, and that he wasn't sure he was going to make a second one. This feels like a rejection of that; time passes, things change, you're still alive, and you can still make art. I struggle with feelings like this too, especially regarding my worries that I'll never be able to complete the indie video game I've been trying to make for years. It's rather interesting, then, that I found this album during one of the periods I was actively working on it, and that listening to the album therefore makes me think about it.
Musician: This is just straight up a bop. You can dance to it. You gotta, really. It's also got an anime music video. Just like the last track, it feels so hopeful.
Mother: Possibly the most emotional track for me. One's relationship with their parents is often one of the most complex relationships in your life. No matter how much your parents love you, you will still get hurt, sometimes even because of them. There's something about a parent admitting their fallibility and continuing to put their child's needs above their own that always gets me (e.g. Crystal Castles's Child I Will Hurt You, also I cried during the third Princess Switch movie and that's embarrassing). Also it's catchy!
Mirror: Another absolute bop, this time about combating negative self-talk.
Something Comforting: This is slower and more ballad-y than the other songs. The drop brings it back up a notch, but honestly my favorite parts are the slower ones. You can hear the pain in his voice during the chorus, begging that "Someone tell me something comforting." Something Porter does in a number of places throughout the album is edit his voice to sound higher and more feminine. The verses on this track are in his regular voice, whereas the choruses are in the higher one. But then there's an extra chorus at the end where it cuts intermittently between the two voices with some glitchy sound effects. It sounds so cool, and just emphasizes the emotion behind the words.
Unfold: This was my favorite for a while. It's the penultimate track, and it starts off with the guest vocalist, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, singing over a melody with this really expectant energy, like you're watching someone prepare to unleash their final form. Porter's feminine voice joins in during the buildup, and then at a moment's notice, you're hit in the face with a jubilant landscape of sound. In retrospect, it makes sense that I like it so much; Porter Robinson has said that TEED was a big fan of Sea of Voices and wanted to make something like it. Unfold has the same kind of beauty, and the same kind of weight to it. You're flying through the clouds, but you're also burdened with "the weight of the world." It's a great climax to the album (not to take away from the simple peace that Trying to Feel Alive, the final track, leaves you with).
I can't recommend this album enough. I haven't yet listened to his newest album, the one that actually released in 2024, but I'm looking forward to doing it at some point (gotta spread this stuff out though!).
Tracks
Even though I mostly listen to albums, there are times when I'm forced to just enjoy a song on its own. Sometimes the album's not out yet and I can't wait, or it's an artist who doesn't really do the whole "album" thing. Either way, I wanted to acknowledge some of my favorite songs this year that couldn't be praised as part of an album.
Memory Reboot is a collaboration between VØJ and Narvent. There's a few versions; the one I like is the "slowed" version, with the Ryan Gosling music video. It is another "aesthetic" track; you know how sometimes at night time, city buses turn off the regular cabin lights and use a low blue light while the bus is driving? Sitting on a blue light bus at night and listening to this feels like entering eternity. I love how you get a taste of the magic, then it mellows down, before eventually building up higher than the start and it finishes tantalizingly too soon. I've gone on record saying that Memory Reboot should be four hours long.
When I played this song for my brother, he immediately said "this is one of those TikTok songs!" I don't know how to feel about this.
The next thing I did was play This Feeling by my;lane, and my brother said "I've heard this before!" It turns out it's a remix of a Noisestorm song with the same name. I like the my;lane version better. It's darker and you can really dance to it. The only sad thing is that it slows down halfway through the track. I mean, I still like it, but I want more time for fistpumping and screaming "I will never lose this feeling!"
Obviously I'm going to mention Leash by Sky Ferreira. We've only been graced with three songs from her angelic voice in the last 11 years, so it was huge when this dropped almost out of nowhere at the beginning of December. She supposedly only had two and a half weeks to make it, and it's incredibly in character of her to take a stressful and chaotic situation like that and drop pure art out of it. It has the classic Sky Ferreira grunge to it, both musically and lyrically, and her vocal dynamics are on point as always. Honestly, if she punched me in the face Regina George style I'd say thanks, but like, this is legitimately a good song.
Finally, I'm going to talk about Chappell Roan after all. I'm sure you've all heard Good Luck, Babe! because it's one of the most popular songs of the year, but I want to shout it out anyway because I really love it. Talking about compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia resonates with my own lifelong struggles with them. "You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling" in particular hits quite hard. I love seeing a popular figure talking about this kind of stuff. Also, it's super catchy.
(I'd be remiss not to mention the famous incident when my friend said "Chappell Roan's been stuck in my head" and I misheard it as "Chappell Roan's been suckin' my dad" and like. I KNEW it was wrong, but I didn't know what was right!)
Anyway, we've reached the end of this post! It's pretty difficult to review music in a satisfying way, and I know this and have known this for years and yet for some reason I keep trying to do it. I hope this post was at least somewhat more engaging than me just saying "omgggg I love this song and this one aaaaa pls listen to it!!" Although. If that convinces you, then yes, I said that too. Happy new music!
Ghost Dream by Blouse is one of my favorite songs ever and I will rec it at every opportunity. ↩
Disclaimer that both Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles and Mr.Kitty himself have been credibly accused of sex crimes and so I can't really recommend them despite loving their music. I recommend Pastel Ghost and Mareux. ↩
JAN
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