Music Monday: End of 2024 Playlist

Last time I made a big playlist article, I mentioned that it felt a little shorter than usual, and wasn’t sure if it was a trend or something. As it turned out, it was not! I was in the mood for finding new music the last few months, and then Year-End lists gave me a lot more to dig through on top of that (I still have a bunch of stuff from those earmarked to check out once this is done).

In the interest of time, I’m just going to jump right in. As always, if you like any of this stuff, definitely check out the full releases the songs are from; almost all of the songs are standing in for recommendations of the full album or EP. And maybe also consider supporting the artists in some way; a lot of them are small acts with Bandcamp pages, the platform that already gives the best compensation to artists (and Bandcamp Fridays, days where the site gives their cut to artists as well, will return in 2025 starting in March). Now for the YouTube and Spotify embeds:

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Notes: As usual, not everything is on every list. Alpha’s music isn’t on either platform, but it is on their Soundcloud for those who want a non-Bandcamp option. The Spotify list is also missing iZme’s “Vivid” and the Live Session version of Knower’s “Overtime” (although I did substitute the studio version there). The YouTube list is missing two of the songs from SYM1 and one from The Only Humans, plus the Cheem song was only available as part of the full EP, so I left that one out too.



The Best Stuff:

Jamie Paige: Jamie Paige’s last album ‘Bittersweet’ was one of the earlier things I found when I started regularly browsing Bandcamp a few years ago, and I wound up listening to it a lot, as well as her follow-up singles and backlog. Several years later, and she’s finally released her next full album, ‘Constant Companions’, and it feels like it lived up to expectations. More of what I liked, but also new in ways that differentiate it so it feels fresh. She’s on a bit more of a kick with vocal synths here than on ‘Bittersweet’, but even that feels like a natural evolution, and she does some fun things with them.

There’s something about her songwriting style that just naturally draws me in, bursting with joyful energy and electric hooks, full of layers of synths and instrumentation, with recurring motifs and callbacks that can feel like their own ideas, and lyrics that lean can lean on big feelings but also a sense of humor, plus hint of sci-fi and fantasy ideas that can lend themselves to the idea of a bigger text and differentiate themselves from a lot of other songs, which can draw out emotion in fun, unexpected ways. Even stuff like the opener, "Dyad", about her desire to do both stuff like her last album and playing around with more Vocaloid songs, gets recast in both a more fantastic (a conversation between a person and a digital singer) and mundane (it’s literally recast as separation from someone you love and wanting connect with them), and that sort of layers are fun to think through and make it so easy to relate with.

Music Monday: Summer 2022 Playlist

It is once again that time of year, the point late in the summer where I decide “yeah, that’s a good enough cut-off” and build a loosely-defined playlist of what I’ve been listening to lately. There’s a lot to cover in this year’s version; I feel like I spent a lot of time browsing new music the past few months, and I had a lot of thoughts to write out about some of it, so let’s dive right into things.

(As a note: not every song I included here is on Spotify. The iZme songs can be found here, here, and here. Meanwhile, two of the Witch Café songs can be found here and here; however, I think “Cauldron Bay” may only be publicly posted on the artist’s Bandcamp page?).

9/21 Update: There's now also a YouTube Playlist version, for those who would prefer that:

It's still missing the Witch Café songs, as well as one of the gloss songs and two Polite Fiction songs (although those can be found here and here).

Let’s start with the big guns: my pick for Album of the Summer is The Kick, by Foxes. I listened to her debut album Glorious back in 2014, and it was fine. I didn’t revisit it a ton, so there’s a lot of it that kind of faded from my memory, but there were definitely stand-out parts, like the dramatic timpani rolls and stuttered vocals of “Youth” and the layered, Florence + the Machine-like vocals on the chorus of “Holding onto Heaven”. But I ended up missing out on her 2016 follow-up, and probably would have missed out on The Kick had my brother not sent it to me.

I kind of really regret not checking out All I Need, though, because I really did not see her swing into Carly Rae Jepsen-style dance-y synthpop on The Kick coming, let alone her skill at the style. This really is exactly what I want out of a summer album, just non-stop sing-along choruses and sparkling synth hooks for days.

Every one of these could be a standout single on a normal album, and it makes the 40-minute album breeze along. I could run on a loop without getting tired of it (and I suppose I have, to some extent), and I could pick any combination of three songs for it (my unofficial limit on a single album’s representation for these lists) and not feel bad (although it was difficult to ignore the pulsing excitement of opener “Sister Ray” or the absolutely cathartic drop in the bridge of “Potential”). With Carly pushing her next album into October, I am so glad this was here to pick up the slack as my soundtrack of the summer. And in the meantime, I definitely need to go back in her discography and see what I missed.