Lately when I go see my parents, I’ve started joking with my mom that the first thing she does is update me on all the devastating things that have happened to people she knows, knew, or thinks I might have known since the last time I saw her. Kids I sat next to in band class who were killed in motorcycle accidents, brothers of classmates of my mom and my aunt who had heart attacks, the son of a sister of her friend who has been diagnosed with cancer – these people a couple degrees of separation away from us who are experiencing a worst-case scenario. It’s more compassionate than gossipy, and it’s a window into the life my mom has lived outside of being my mom; she remembers members of family trees from her tiny hometown in a way I could only dream of remembering anybody I’ve ever known.

2024 has already been a pivotal year for Good Morning’s Stefan Blair and Liam Parson. The Australian “soft rock band” released their seventh project (an ambitious double LP aptly titled Good Morning Seven), opened for Waxahatchee and Frankie Cosmos in the US, and celebrated a decade together as a duo. Despite these career highs, in retrospect, there was an air of cynicism and practicality-induced worry underlying the album’s rollout.

Mistyheads can exhale. The album we’ve been waiting for is here.

A couple of weeks before Tyler, The Creator kicked off the abbreviated rollout for his new blockbuster Chromakopia, we got the throat-clearing. Tyler produced and rapped on “Cracc Era,” a single from the Houston underground rap fixture Maxo Kream. It wasn’t the first time that Tyler showed up on a Maxo record; he did the same on “Big Persona,” one of the singles from Maxo’s 2021 album The Weight Of The World. On paper, they make an odd pair — the eccentric Los Angeles superstar with the guttural, gang-affiliated Texan street storyteller. Chalk it up to real recognizing real. Whenever those two raspy-voiced rappers appear on a track together, they become a two-man whirlwind of shit-talk. They speak a common language, and they speak it better than almost anyone.

Have you ever crashed your car? I have, several times as a teenager. When I try to remember the moment of impact from any of those incidents — when I sideswiped a truck, or when I hit the brakes but still rear-ended a sedan on the highway — all I can recall is the blankness of my mind at the point of collision. I am reminded of this when I hear “Less Meaning” by the Body, a syncopated song that embodies the way disaster can induce the feeling of going in-and-out of consciousness.

Winter in Northwest Washington’s temperate San Juan Islands may not be the freezing, brutal onslaught faced by comparable latitudes further inland, but four months of uninterrupted wind, rain, and minimal daylight can be a taxing monotony. Locals yearn for the summer, whose balmy lack of rain remains a well-kept secret. For tourists, the region may as well not exist from October to June.

Mystery has kept a hold on many of history’s most lauded electronic musicians. Producers ranging from Burial to Aphex Twin to Vegyn have employed varying degrees of elusiveness to their advantage, cultivating hushed personas that stir rumors and generate theories among fans. More recently, in the style of a Zoomer-friendly Daft Punk, Two Shell have become internet favorites without anyone knowing their identities. The UK duo emerged on Peverelist’s no frills left-field label, Livity Sound, with the dubstep EP Access in 2019. After creating the imprint Mainframe Audio, Two Shell distanced themselves from the austerity of their avant-techno peers. They’ve embraced gleeful hooks, launched a cryptic website, sold $1,298 “boring rocks” on Bandcamp, and disguised themselves with cartoony costumes. These impish bits quickly led some of Two Shell’s influential forebears to take notice, and they began cropping up in mixes from Ben UFO, Jamie xx, and Four Tet.

“Well early in the morning/ At the break of day/ I ain’t got no God/ To whom I pray/ No lord above/ To set me free/ I keep my burdens/ Right here with me.” So began A New Testament, the great 2014 solo album from former Girls frontman Christopher Owens. As someone who famously grew up in the Children Of God cult, spirituality has always been a looming subject in Owens’ music, sometimes as explicit context, sometimes as an ambient presence. Even when he was embracing humanism and aligning himself with the New Atheists, religion lingered in his songs as an adversary, the foil in his secular gospel-rock.

A man calls his mom and pretends to be held hostage so he can get money to spend on drugs. A man is haunted by a bulletin board of missing kids in a Walmart. A man watches videos of dogs working and feels envious of their sense of purpose. A man gets shot trying to rob a liquor store. A man scoffs at the freaks surrounding him at a bus station, telling himself he’s nothing like them. Welcome to the world of Drug Church’s new album Prude.

It feels like treading water. Like you’re at the starting line of a marathon, already out of breath. Like spiraling, but you can’t tell if you’re headed up or down. Like all your stupid little songs are all starting to sound the same.

Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.

In recent years, plenty of shoegaze songs became unlikely viral sensations: Wisp’s “Your face,” Flyingfish’s “wonder if you care,” quannnic’s “life imitates life.” Before any of them, there was julie’s 2020 single “flutter,” a frantic and fuzzed-out whirlwind, reminiscent of Swirlies, sweeping the listener into its mess of caustic guitars and hypnotic dual vocals. Since its release, it’s accumulated 36 million streams on Spotify and almost 3 million watches on YouTube. The tune is a sonic triptych — two outbursts of chaos separated by a meandering interlude. “flutter” isn’t afraid to wander; it’s confident that it can keep the listener hooked until the very end, and it succeeds.

It’s a bit like naming your band Illmatic, isn’t it? “Dummy” is a great word with lots of fun uses, but if you bring it up in a music-nerd context, people’s brains will all wander to the same lonely, desolate, beautiful Portishead album. The members of Dummy absolutely belong to the music-nerd community, and they know that better than most.

“I’ve seen so many shit bands throughout the year and often have found myself saying, ‘I can do better than that.’ So that’s what I’m doing. There’s a lot of bands that are almost there or just have no idea how to make something cohesive, or with swag, or literally anything that elevates the experience of just being people with instruments. So I gotta have a vision that’s better than the competition.”

In Víctor Erice’s 1973 coming-of-age film The Spirit Of The Beehive, a young girl and her sister growing up in 1940s Spain see a mobile cinema’s screening of Frankenstein. “The film’s producers do not wish to present it without a preliminary word of caution,” goes the presenter’s spoken introduction. “But I would encourage you to not take it so seriously.” Six-year-old Ana takes it as gospel. Plagued by unanswerable questions – how could Frankenstein’s monster accidentally kill someone, and why would the villagers murder him in retaliation? – she sets out in search of unknowable answers. The real world’s monsters, she soon discovers, tend to hide in plain sight.

The story of Oso Oso’s new album life till bones begins with tragedy: A month after recording the demos to what would become his 2022 LP sore thumb, emo-pop dignitary Jade Lilitri’s cousin and creative partner Tavish Maloney died suddenly at 24. Lilitri isn’t necessarily known for bringing collaborators into the studio – he’s admitted to being a bit controlling, playing most, if not all instruments himself – but Maloney had been there for the entire recording process. Lilitri wasn’t planning on releasing the demos as-is, but he decided the world had to hear those songs the same way Maloney last heard them. With a touch of minimal final mixing, Lilitri let sore thumb into the world. There was no other way to do it while keeping a quiet conscience.

Navy Blue’s new album is called Memoirs In Armour, but it’s more like memories in mist. Over the course of about 27 minutes, the Brooklyn-based spitter shrouds fractured recollections in floral, imagistic poetry, leaving listeners to sift through the dense metaphors to find the trauma and catharsis at the center. With its blend of hazily soulful production and esoteric self-created truisms, the LP plays out like an audio cipher; he unspools personal vignettes in layers of thoughts and sensations he leaves you to peel back. Like the best riddles, it’s all as tedious as it is engrossing, further evidence of the rhyme prowess that’s made him a face of New York’s underground vanguard.

The history of DIY punk rock in Washington, DC spans something like 45 years. In that time, DC punk has nurtured all sorts of vocalists: growlers, howlers, barkers, snarkers, whiners, moaners, yappers, zappers, preachers, screechers, gurglers, motormouths, dreamy waifs, deadpan wraiths, mock-operatic divas, whatever you want to call Ian Svenonius. For the life of me, however, I cannot remember a DC punk singer who delivers lyrics with Broadway-style flair. I’m not talking about the Broadway of generations past; I bet Shudder To Think’s Craig Wedren could’ve found a place there. I’m talking about recent Broadway — the precise, crystalline, self-aware diction that seems to thrive in movie-adaptation musicals like Mean Girls or Heathers. If you threw Ian MacKaye or HR or Mary Timony or Travis Morrison or Jael Holzman into one of those shows, bad things would happen. But Katie McD would be right at home.

Let’s start at the top: I fell desperately in love with someone I knew was bound to fuck me up. So begins “Horny Hangover,” the second track and second single of Queen Of Jeans’ third album All Again. “We’re trying to tell the story of when you look back at an important relationship,” guitarist and pianist Matheson Glass explained about the LP. “Years go by, and the more you reflect on it, it becomes more warped and the facts become a little bit more murky.”

If Water From Your Eyes take an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to making music, Nate Amos’ solo work as This Is Lorelei tosses in the whole damn kitchen. Referring to This Is Lorelei as Amos’ “side project” would be inaccurate. While the New York-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is best known as half of the Matador-signed duo making anarchic, mechanical stoner pop, he’s been releasing an honestly intimidating amount of music under the This Is Lorelei moniker for the past decade, averaging at least one album every year, often an EP or two as well. Over the course of his discography, Amos has ricocheted between glitchy bedroom pop, soft folk balladry, rambly slacker rock, and noisy garage grunge. On Box For Buddy, Box For Star, he streamlines his focus without sacrificing his omnivorous sonic appetite.

Last year, Peggy Gou made a worldwide hit. Up until the moment that it happened, this didn’t seem especially likely. Gou was a well-known figure in the dance-music intelligentsia, the type of ultra-cool DJ who hangs out with Four Tet and plays terrifyingly fashionable European clubs. She was hugely successful in her universe, jetting all over the planet and maintaining a record label and clothing line as well as managing her own career. But her music — sparse, textured, perfectly manicured, in touch with its place in dance history — didn’t exactly seem likely to break out of its bubble and into the larger world. A track like 2019’s “Starry Night,” Gou’s biggest single until last year, is catchy and slinky and hypnotic, but it’s defined, at least in part, by its chilliness. That was not the case with “(It Goes Like) Nanana.”

Summer is here, and so is its soundtrack. Whereas some forms of dream-pop sound unmistakably like winter, the Marías make music for sweltering poolsides, afternoons encased in air conditioning, and glamorous waterfront locales after dark. On their 2021 debut Cinema, the band established an aesthetic that both aligned them with the zeitgeist and gave them their own singular presence. The album won them Grammy nominations, spun off an Adult Alternative radio hit in “Hush,” and made a superfan out of Bad Bunny, who featured them on 2022’s biggest album. Sophomore LP Submarine, out this week, is just as appealing.

If a decade ago you told me that not only would DIIV still be around, but that they’d be considered a modern standard bearer to a younger generation, I’d be equal parts surprised and relieved.

My body instantly locks in with the driving drumbeat — my pulse, my breathing, the insatiable urge to bop along. The guitar chords ripple and shimmer, and a tail of colorful dissolving static seems to follow every steady strum. The music feels plastic and brittle yet glows like a neon sign, blurring together the organic and synthetic into something grimy and hyperreal. It carries on in this alluring state for about 15 seconds. Then, after a brief pause, the bass drops, Joey Vannucchi’s grizzled vocals enter the frame, and that bleary, distant beauty shifts to the foreground, its undertow now so powerful that I’m instantly swept away.

All music is the product of thoughts and feelings, but Tom Krell’s derives from so many thoughts, from emotions felt so deeply. Most albums released into the music industry slipstream are presented with some degree of “director’s commentary”-style guideposts explaining how to think about the work — interviews, press releases, an official biography — even before getting into the common language of cover art, music videos, stage visuals, merch, and social media posts. Music is an ancient form of human expression; popular music, especially in the internet era, tends to be a multimedia art project. Krell understands both points, and with How To Dress Well, the great creative endeavor of his life, he goes beyond the norm to give the world a little extra. Or maybe a lot. Extra is who he is. He pours his whole heart and mind into his records, and then he gives you detailed footnotes.

Funeral For Justice is a fantastic record that should not have to exist. Last summer, during Tuareg rocker Mdou Moctar’s North American tour, his home country of Niger was thrown into chaos when right-wing militants overthrew the government. The coup temporarily stranded Moctar, aka Mahamadou Souleymane, and bandmates Ahmoudou Madassane and Souleymane Ibrahim in the US, wondering what would become of their loved ones back home. It was an infuriating, terrifying situation, but it was hardly the first upsetting development in Nigerien politics lately. Moctar was so distraught and enraged by his country’s situation that he and the band had already completed their new album of political rallying cries before the coup.

Dumpster-diving by a Dunkin’ Donuts. Spraying insecticide in closets to get rid of roaches. Walking seven miles with friends after getting too high to drive, only to realize you forgot your wallet. Pissing off of a porch. Going 65 in a 25. Trading a hat for a pack of Newports. Wedging a hanger into a car window to unlock it. For over a decade, Atlanta’s Microwave have masterfully captured self-destruction in the South, painting vivid scenes of desperation, slick with sweat and spilled beer, set to a concoction of acerbic pop-punk and razor-sharp emo. Their debut full-length, 2014’s Stovall, and its follow-up, 2016’s Much Love, are powerful bursts of summery rock, while 2019’s Death Is A Warm Blanket was heavy with grungy darkness. Now, they’re back with Let’s Start Degeneracy, an album about enlightenment.

Listening to Still House Plants can feel like witnessing a song come together in real time. Years ago, the UK-based trio would open sets with “Pleasures,” a track from their landmark 2020 album Fast Edit, by having drummer David Kennedy’s kit all over the stage. Once he set everything up, it would cue the band to start the next song. To begin their concerts like this was a symbol of the band’s driving force; they write music, first and foremost, as a group of best friends who trust each other, and their tracks are a way to challenge themselves, to grow through communication, and to push through life’s difficulties.

They don’t make pop music like this anymore.

Here’s a folk-rock album that actually rocks, folks.

Something changed when I turned 40. I developed a taste for tea. I started dressing, in the words of one friend, “like a history teacher.” And suddenly, after never giving the genre more than a respectful hat tip, I want to listen to jazz all the time.

“Bye Bye” doesn’t just sound like a Playboi Carti song. The beat was actually made for Playboi Carti. According to a recent Kim Gordon profile in the New York Times, Justin Raisen — who’s produced for indie-rock pop stars like Sky Ferreira and Yves Tumor, hip-hop weirdos like Lil Yachty and Teezo Touchdown, and even rap superstars like Kid Cudi and Drake — was with his brother Jeremiah over the holidays cooking up music to submit to Carti, Atlanta’s king of fractured, illegible, noise-bombed trap music. When they wrapped up the beat that became “Bye Bye,” the opener and lead single from Gordon’s new album The Collective, Justin recognized it as perhaps too out-there for even Playboi Carti. “But it could be cool for Kim,” he told his brother.