Grooves N Jams

[groovesnjams]

"The Beast" by Patrick Wolf

DV:

If anyone had told me four years ago that after a decade's absence we were on the precipice of Patrick Wolf dropping a EP and LP, and that he'd follow the latter up with a new single less than 12 months later - not to mention multiple US tours - I think I might have passed out. But here we are, and if every release still feels a little improbable, well, that sense of the uncanny has never been entirely absent from his work anyway. "The Beast", a song built on the concept of drawing strength from strangeness, dropped the week before Pride Month. It'd feel pointed even if we weren't experiencing a sustained, multi-national attack on queer (especially trans) people. Wolf begins with fairytale imagery, characters trapped in stories they choose to reject - it works, but seems a little too arch up until halfway through when the song makes a sonic turn from the dance pop of the beginning to a sort of deconstructed version of its own production. "I don't owe you an explanation/ Of the nature of the beast that I've become," he intones, his voice low in the mix. The atmosphere ceases to be a party and becomes unsettled, dramatic. So when he croons, "But I'm not the only one/ Yes it's all the rage," Wolf recontextualizes the narratives of the song's first half, transforming them into expressions of comradeship within the queer community. And he turns one of the attack lines deployed against queer people for longer than any of us have been alive - the idea that queerness is contagious, like a meme or a trend - into an expression of power. If queerness is "all the rage," if "we become the beast" (as Wolf says at the end), then it is a threat to the power structure that seeks to eradicate us. What "The Beast" suggests is that we embrace this, rather than seeking to shrink ourselves into a world that will never see us as small enough. It's a defiant anthem for a gayer tomorrow, and while June is young enough that I'm sure we'll hear other attempts, I suspect there isn't a better song for Pride Month 2026.

MG:

Devoted as he is to whimsy and yore, I admire that Patrick Wolf is an artist I can be sure is not using a viral bot-based media scheme to gin up attention for his latest project. It's not a flavor you can specifically taste in his work -- that would be gauche -- but Wolf is profoundly divorced from commerce. In that way, I can't really imagine him intentionally releasing a Pride Month single, but there is a certain rhyming pleasure in his serendipity: a gay anthem for the pride community capitalism left behind.

[groovesnjams]

"Fuck the DJ" by Eli

DV:

Back when Nadia Oh told us she wanted to be the DJ's girlfriend, it felt a little like settling - like, if you're the visionary singer whose work anticipates everything from PC Music to hyperpop, why wouldn't you just be the DJ? Thankfully Nadia's final single to date finally took that step and put her behind the decks (RIP, she's a Tory now.) It may be too soon to tell whether Eli has a similar song-based character arc in front of her, but "Fuck the DJ" has so much to say that maybe it's best if she stays a little bit on the outside, throwing darts wherever she needs to. "Nobody getting ugly in the club these days," she muses in the chorus, just before dropping the titular line. It's brash and bold and - as is typical for Eli - walks a tightrope between funny and heartfelt. "Hey, I wanna fuck the DJ" doesn't sound like settling because it's not asking for a relationship: the hook hits like a whim, a joke, an urge during an eventful night of partying that also allows Eli to drop some ridiculous names. It sounds carefree in the best sense.

MG:

Though I remain disappointed in whatever commercially popular music is these days (a very quick scan of the Billboard top 10 reveals 3 Drakes, 2 Ella Langleys and 2 Olivia Deans which feels like, yeah, the Mag 7 of our cultural stock exchange or something) I find pure pop sonics to be an evergreen well of inspiration. Eli presents a fever vision of 2008 -- a time when, indeed, the ugliest thing you could do was fuck the DJ. She's presented a mirror image of the era, reflecting a setting where the pop was pristine so we could all get messy with a messy song to listen to in your bedroom or car. This might read like a criticism, of Eli or Gen Z or capitalism, but it's just another pendulum swing carving into the mountains of taste and desire, further hollowing out the valley of existence. At this point, there's a genuine debate to be had about whether Eli is pop because "Fuck the DJ" sounds like pop music from a bygone decade or whether Eli is post-punk because she makes niche music that's critically well regarded from childhood memories. Our simple system could only contain so much data; it's now consumed by incoherence.

[groovesnjams]

"Miss You" by Ms Ray & Nourished by Time

MG:

Ms Ray's Melt EP is designed with architectural sophistication as its guiding principle. All five songs sound like they're set in an LA office building at dusk -- right before both the German terrorists and John McClane roll in for the yearly Christmas party. Its highlight is "Miss You," featuring Nourished by Time fresh from last year's fantastic The Passionate Ones. Where he's earthy and sincere, vamping parts of his verse, Ms Ray is airy and delicate, vague in her concept of loss. Together they're natural duet partners, joining to elevate "Miss You" from minor break up to major earworm.

DV:

Maybe they're a little too natural of partners, in the way they hit the same vibe from different directions and settle into a middle groove that never quite sells the yearning the lyric describes. Or maybe it's the production, which keeps threatening to kick into higher gear and never quite does. Why not both? "Miss You" is a sum that's less than its parts, not a bad song by any stretch but one that's too genteel to dig in as deeply as it should. Ms Ray and Nourished By Time sing about longing for an ex, but what their song's really missing is drama.

[groovesnjams]

"Together" by The Avalanches ft. Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, Prentiss

DV:

Perhaps I should learn a lesson from "We Will Always Love You", which still makes little sense as a standalone single but fits neatly into The Avalanches album of the same name, a record that's grown on me tremendously since it was released in 2020. On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't overcorrect too much; "Frankie Sinatra" is still kinda a mess and so is the sophomore album it comes from. "Together" is in yet another lane - it sounds unlike anything the group's done before, and burbles and bleeps with enough energy that it's instantly sticky in a way they've sometimes struggled to achieve with their singles. But it still seems a little like it's waiting for context. "Frontier Psychiatrist" aside, The Avalanches have always been an album band, and when "Together" stops - not ends, just stops - it only serves to emphasize that the success of this song hinges on how it fits into a greater whole that we've yet to hear.

The interesting thing about The Avalanches as they enter their fourth decade as a band and approach their third album since their "comeback" is how their post-2015 releases have changed their legacy. Since I Left You made them legends, put them in a club with other artists who dropped a perfect record and never followed it up. But then they returned 14 years later, and everything changed. With their once-innovative approach to sampling now so mainstream it's almost not worth mentioning and a discography that's no longer legendary in its brevity but spotty-at-best, I'm no longer sure quite what distinguishes them from someone like their occasional collaborator Jamie XX, who shares a similar crate-digging ethos that leads to equally inconsistent results, or producers like Sofia Kourtesis, who take bits of their aesthetic in more personal directions. Or even #content-driven followers like Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who don't have anything new to add but raise the question: do The Avalanches, either? It's strange to think of a fourth album as a referendum on an artist, but that's where I find myself with The Avalanches - after a disappointing re-debut in 2016 and a promising follow-up, number four seems poised to be a deciding vote on whether they should have returned at all. Based on "Together," I'm undecided but cautiously optimistic.

MG:

I want to offer a sympathetic reconsideration of The Avalanches legacy in the context of some of their generational peers but I also don't; I hate "Together." In comparison to LCD Soundsystem -- a group I will never forgive for mining their fans' pockets with a fake break up and subsequent "reunion" tours -- I think releasing ever diminishing material in order to revive conversation around your erstwhile master stroke is a fair enough strategy. But it might not be a strategy at all because most creative work starts to circle the bowl by the fourth decade and that takes me to "Together." I genuinely think The Avalanches are nostalgic for the era that made them revolutionaries. These lists hold almost no sway anymore (even for their intended audience: nerds) but Since I Left You rightly belongs on a tally of the greatest albums of all time and, as DV points out, it remains very influential. "Together" sounds nothing like that alternate universe, it simply evokes the turn of the century -- playfully colorful computer devices, a childlike wonder at the burgeoning internet, the threat of what might wait for us if we submit to capitalist demagogues. Or maybe it's just me that hears something menacing in the promise of "forever and ever." Regardless of whether this song is delightfully chipper like its surface or creepy and darksided like its underworld, it's grim to have lived this life the first time and still be feeding from its umbilical cord.

[groovesnjams]

"Shattered" by Jump Source

MG:

Helena Deland released one of my favorite folk albums of this decade, the resolute and sparse Goodnight Summerland which unfurls at the pace of time spent alone. It's an album for noticing the details, all the little moments of life that escape our attention amid the din of everyday distraction. So, it's fascinating to hear her voice on "Scattered," doing a kind of slick, Suzanne Vega on "Tom's Diner" thing for Jump Source. She's the source of tension that propels the song everywhere from grimy clubs to chic modern living rooms to the worlds that exist between a pair of headphones. "Scattered" is both intimate and universal thanks to Deland's hums and whispers; a fantastic star turn from an artist who previously seemed disinterested in the kind of electricity a spotlight requires.

DV:

I have a longstanding soft spot for a folk/dance music crossover, a lineage that of course includes "Tom's Diner" but peaks with Jane Lancaster's "It's a Fine Day" and its many many derivative works. It's a genre pairing that has yet to run out of steam, and "Shattered" ably demonstrates its continued effect. The beat skitters and burbles with anxiety, never quite settling into a single place, but Deland balances it with a steady whisper and that earworm "deh deh deh" refrain. The result is perhaps a little slight when measured against the majesty of something like "Halcyon + On + On", but that's true of almost anything - and maybe in a year Jump Source can remix this and double its length.

[groovesnjams]

"Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" by Debbii Dawson

DV:

Despite Bruno Mars' best efforts, the 70s remain an untapped source in the modern pop ecosystem. Part of the problem is that he makes music for passing time between sessions at corporate conferences, but part is that Mars is almost never fully committed: his pastiches bounce between winking at the audience and patting himself on the back for whatever technically-impressive feat he's pulling off this time. He has plenty of hits but they rarely hit.

I don't expect Debbii Dawson to bring the 70s back to the top ten, but I do think she absolutely believes it's possible (and someone else must too, since this is produced by Joel Little ("Royals", et al.)) Unlike Mars, Dawson plays this theatrical throwback straight, and more or less pulls it off: while "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" lacks the mid-song twist of last year's "You Killed the Music", it shares that song's sense of drama and sweeping ambition. Is it still a little silly? Of course: at one point Dawson asks whether the good men got lost in the Bermuda Triangle. She strikes exactly the right balance, passionate without being polished into dullness, and the humor fits well into a pop landscape that currently has potential-peers like Sabrina Carpenter, Raye, and of course Chappell. There have been stranger hits recently - maybe it's time.

MG:

Debate about Bruno Mars aside, every production flourish and even Debbii Dawson's make-up cues date to the early-80s. I was hoping for a little disco, a little sensuality, but this is synthpop in bold jewel tones. It's been about 20 years, maybe we're due for a "Don't Stop Believin'" revival (and if this is it, Dawson is a fantastic spiritual sequel to Steve Perry's ridiculous, grinning earnestness) but I'm personally not ready. None of the ideas that populated the songs "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" references (a small town boy making it in the big city, heterosexual monogamy, and the eternal coolness of drums) are popular or even viable concepts in the current milieu. Thus, Dawson sings a sort of children's morning cartoon song about "good men" that I think might actually be anti-war anthem too subtle to clock. In that way, perhaps the song is more closely aligned with hits like "I Melt With You" or "Forever Young" -- songs you'd never guess are about nuclear fallout. I strongly doubt she has a hit on her hands, but "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" is much more interesting than yet another bop about coupling.

[groovesnjams]

"drop dead" by Olivia Rodrigo

DV:

First of all: where is this cursed bar that closes at 11:00, three full hours earlier than any normal bar in the real world closes and five or more hours before last call at what is commonly known as a "late bar." Perhaps this date is happening at a bar for children? It's all very confusing, but winds up contributing to the overall charm of "drop dead," which convincingly makes the case that Dan Nigro can't ruin every song he produces. Part of that is down to the lyric's detailed, compelling encapsulation of a suddenly inescapable infatuation, part is Rodrigo's half-spoken delivery on the second verse and the fantastically euphoric "Pieces and a Gemini" bridge. I'm vaguely reminded of Haha I'm Sorry and DAISY Rage era Kitty - though Rodrigo is much less densely referential, she shares more than a little with the emotional openness and vulnerability Kitty tapped into there. "drop dead" could still stand to be bolder - Nigro still seems fundamentally incapable of handling drums, and the song can't decide between committing to dreamy or driving, splitting the difference and losing the dynamism of either approach in the process. It's a testament to Rodrigo (and Nigro and Amy Allen, in their capacity as cowriters) that the song works as well as it does. But as is increasingly the case with everything Nigro produces, I can't help wishing we could get a remix from someone who knows what they're fucking doing.

MG:

Maybe I am just having a bad day or a bad life but after listening to "drop dead" I have come to the conclusion that there is no art under capitalism. This song is simply not distinct enough from anything else by a myriad of other artists (Taylor Swift being the only one really worth naming) to write a critical review. What I could write is a product review. The uses of this song, how the little touches that Rodrigo adds -- her razor sharp juxtaposition of the bathroom line and the walls of Versailles -- set it apart from the generic slop, trendy slang, and two buck synonyms that inform the latest work from Swift. It's a more informed iteration of late adolescent girl pop, a nuanced color and gritty formula for your soft goth lo--oh, sorry, a blush description slipped in there by accident. Well, you get the idea. This is the same thing we've been sold and bought up wantonly for generations. You'll like it but if you don't there's another one doing the same thing and if you try enough it'll feel better to like it than to admit how much you wasted. Happy Friday, I love you all so much.

[groovesnjams]

"New Jesus" by Truck Violence

MG:

I have many childhood memories of my mom frustratedly demanding my dad turn off some abrasive music. Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Muslimgauze -- even in what we now perceive as the good, easy times it still wasn't pleasant to work 8 hours and come home to cook dinner while some asshole bleated loudly in the background. Despite largely sharing my dad's taste in music, I always thought this was a bad dynamic and that a shared space should be titrated to the lowest common denominator. It wasn't like that didn't exist; we all loved Belle & Sebastian.

It takes more to offend my husband than it did my mom but every so often I stumble into something that rubs me raw in the right way but cannot be tolerated over speakers and "New Jesus" is just that. Frankly, until Karsyn Henderson started bellowing about 45 seconds in and was promptly silenced I kind of felt like I was losing my edge, like my taste had grown safe and stale. Fear not! “New Jesus” is loud and hard enough to be distasteful but still too bleary-eyed and concussed to be metal – my final genre frontier.

DV:

I've seen a lot less comments about how at least the protest music will be good under our current administration, though I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's too optimistic to hope those people realized the protest music never actually stopped, even if they didn't hear it: there've been political songs under every regime I've lived through, including Obama (who was in office when the Ferguson uprising happened, though sometimes it seems like most people have forgotten.) And their hit rate has been roughly the same all my life, which is to say that most of them are overdetermined and overwrought, few of them turn out to be hits, and once the moment is past and their statement's been made, there's not much replay value in the majority of them. But maybe that's the point! A protest song is a howl swallowed up by the void of the unheeding world, but perhaps more importantly it's a statement that the howling itself has meaning regardless of its power to effect change. As protest songs go "New Jesus" is arrestingly off-kilter. It's not going to be chanted in any marches but it's also not trying to be. It's for the times when it feels like all you can do is scream, and we've been in those times about as long as I can remember.

[groovesnjams]

"heyjah obialo" by heavensouls

DV:

Sorry for being sentimental, but this is our web site's 15th year and periodically since we started I'll get to feeling like nothing's really new under the sun, every idea in pop can be traced back to the Ronettes, I'm finding plenty of music to like but none that can measure up to whatever I heard a couple years ago, and then this wonderful thing happens where a song comes along out of nowhere and knocks me flat on my back. "heyjah obialo" is one of those. It's like getting hit with a lightning bolt, over and over - the song turns on a pin and then does it again, and each time it's astonishing. But as every new groove settles in, it feels like it makes perfect sense, like there's nowhere else the song could have gone after all. And yet anything and everything feels possible! I'm wrong again, and it feels - and sounds - incredible as always.

MG:

Rather than new, I think a lot of the broadly avant garde sounds newly vital -- suffused with a necessary urgency that is not present when so much of it is process based or ambient, as it has been for most of this century. I'm still thinking about poptimism. Last weekend I was in a car playing Top 40 radio and we hit a sequence that went Katy Perry's "ET" to "Opalite" by Taylor Swift and finally "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter. At the beginning I was like "banger!" and thought about how rich and vibrant pop music sounded in this era, how sticky and slimy the earworms were. But then the other two songs played and fucking yawn, it's the same thing just watered down to dribble. During the avant garde's ambient era capitalism created diamonds, but now pop is a honeyed hum and the outré is frenzied and absurd. heavensouls is more comparable to Sly & The Family Stone than, say, Jockstrap or Black Midi but all these art minded acts are like nucleotides for some future pop DNA structure.

Or maybe this is when we finally find out what's on the other side.

[groovesnjams]

"Reputation" by Ravyn Lenae ft. Dominic Fike

MG:

While I'm not entirely sure I like this song in any traditional sense of the word, I do find "Reputation" endlessly fascinating. Ravyn Lenae's been trying to make this one woman 60s girl group sound happen for years now and it's hard to say if it's ever going to translate into anything beyond notability -- but it sounds beautiful, even here. That's the most straightforward praise I have to offer. "Reputation" is a song about a woman's love for her cheating, no-good man (played here by Dominic Fike in a brilliant piece of casting) but that message is relayed mainly through context clues because the lyrics are bizarre. "Now you hate your reputation/ when I'm thinking of you" is an awful refrain that only works if you squint very hard. There's a bridge that is (probably AI) word salad delivered convincingly by the pair as their love's denouement. Back to Fike, he's snatched up a crown previously held by Machine Gun Kelly for the last decade: best performance of a loser fuckboy. Like the entire rest of the song, his lines make little sense (aside from the opening bars where I get the impression that he's resentful over being considered a dog rather than a boy/man/other unspecified three letter word) and they're delivered with such a deliciously whiny brat affect that it's hard not to root for Lenae to do something decidedly worse than simply walk away. "Reputation" is an anti-duet, a hostile and startling pop song.

DV:

I'm not really convinced there's AI lyric generation happening here - a line like "I'm typical, tellin' everybody I'm polygamist/ Ms Jackson I'm sorry/ Ms Jones, don't stop dancin" is bizarre in a singularly human way, like Fike clearly thought he was doing something. But I agree the result is largely nonsensical, even by the standards of pop music, a genre built on using nonsense to convey the deepest and most important emotions ever experienced. What "Reputation" desperately needs is some friction, some grit, to sell its tale of a doomed romance. The stakes here are so low they might as well not exist, and the production (by Dahi & Ely Rise) may as well be AI - not only does it fail to lend the song a sense of drama, it reminds me of the stock hold music you hear when you're waiting to talk to a human on the phone. Ravyn Lenae and Fike have finally done something I thought impossible: create a duet so dull even I can't find interest in it.

[groovesnjams]

"Hurricane Girl" by Eaves Wilder

DV:

Like her predecessors Surfer, Material, Barbie, and Hollaback, the Hurricane Girl is a particularly complicated character: do you want her or do you want to be her? Is it even possible to draw the line between the two? The woman Eaves Wilder describes is a fraught one, ashamed and bleeding, but she's also free in ways most of us can only imagine. She embraces the mess, calls for more of it, refuses help. And in doing so she reminds Wilder (and us) that the line between chaotic spinning and controlled twirling is equally thin. Wilder's production is equally compelling, evoking post-grunge dynamics and tone without succumbing to the sort of pale imitation we've heard a lot of recently - though as is often the case, the drums are a weak point. Still, "this "Hurricane Girl" is an impressively confident opening track, one more than capable of joining the pantheon of pop Girls.

MG:

While I'm kind of down on our endless recycled culture in general and at the moment, "Hurricane Girl" is a genuinely fun listen. Eaves Wilder blends Hope Sandoval's airy, gossamer vocals with Pearl Jam's Southern rock revival guitars and if it's not a particularly new or complex iteration on the genre it's still good enough to slot on a mixtape as a bridge between the old gods and the new. I feel Mazzy Star's influence on modern music is -- and it pains me to say this -- a bit overstated, but hearing those lick-y, heavy guitar lines is unexpected enough to be refreshing. My only complaint is that there's no solo!

[groovesnjams]

"Ember" by Iceage

MG:

Well, by now I'm sure we've all seen that Geese is a psy-op. Or maybe psy-op is the wrong phrase. (I've never liked Geese and could tell from their debut that they were poseurs -- but award me no points because I completely wiped out on the mk.gee astroturf, womp womp.) But if you're reading this blog you already know fake hype is SOP for the music industry and the idea of "authentically good" art is, was, and will always be total nonsense. Whether you're influenced by an inimitably cool record store clerk ca. 1998 or an army of passionate UGC bots infiltrating your TikTok feed ca. 2025, the bottom line is still that you are influenced.

Anyway, that brings me to the point of my thought experiment: it's time to bring back taste. I don't mean along the shame-dominated good-bad spectrum but in a new dimension I will call personal-impersonal. Personal taste is what we form memories around. It's the music we listen to even when it's not in the public consciousness. Impersonal taste is late stage pop. It's the way my sister expressed incredulity that I'd never heard "APT." -- a hit song in her half-kid home but something I didn't hear (at all) until the recent Gatorade less sugar commercial. Songs can be incredibly selective hits now and uniting with your group feels paramount in our socially tenuous moment. I'm not saying eschew impersonal taste -- I recently attended a Snail Mail concert (for opener Avalon Emerson) that was functionally a ballroom full of lesbians and though I suspect not everyone personally loved Snail Mail, having that communion is precious. But tend to your personal taste. Be aware of what's growing in your garden and don't be afraid to weed.

Which brings me to my final thought, this Iceage song. I was planning to go into this post selling Iceage to the Gooseheads as a band that have done it (make rock music) without a splashy exposé. But "Ember" and "Star" before it are mid Brit pop rehashes. They're the same thing Fontaines D.C. are pivoting toward. They're just another sick convergence point in our stupid, sick culture. "Ember" honestly sucks, even if I'm kind of amused by Elias Rønnenfelt's newfound interest in all things sparkly. My conclusion is whatever, I don't care, stop worrying and learn to love the psy-ops.

DV:

If I've ever consciously listened to Iceage in their shockingly long time making music, I don't remember it and tumblr's always-reliable search function can't find it. After listening to "Ember" a half dozen times I would not say that fact has changed. This song is intensely forgettable, especially since - as MG notes - it could belong to any number of younger bands in the current era. Perhaps the youths yearn for guitars enough to overlook this: at that same Avalon Emerson show, MG and I were deeply unimpressed by the first opener, who might as well have been playing "Ember" over and over. But a decent crowd had showed up early for them, and their set kept people on the floor while we leaned against a bar outside the main room. If every generation gets the landfill rock bands they need, maybe sometimes those bands stick around long enough to make deeply mediocre music for the next generation, too.

[groovesnjams]

"EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED" by Tiffany Day

DV:

As an opening track to Tiffany Day's sophomore album - and a pivot into hyperpop-influenced dance music - "Everything I've Ever Wanted" is more manifesto than song, eschewing conventional structure for something more stream-of-consciousness. Which makes it an interesting choice for a single! Or maybe not: of all the bops on her record, this is the one I find playing in my head the most; the cascading repetition of the title phrase is nothing if not an effective earworm. But it's also an effective encapsulation of the album's primary thematic concerns, Day's obsessive self-reflection and search for an identity that fits her. The structure - essentially one long verse followed by an equally long chorus-slash-outro - reflects this intensity, Day's words tumbling out and over each other as the production (also hers) slowly builds toward a climactic freakout. It's one of the year's most striking songs, even without the video's inclusion of second track "DOIT4ME", a much more straightforward banger.

MG:

Despite references to pen and paper (lol ok) "EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED" and the whole hyperpop into electroclash revival feels like a giant commentary on the internet. Elsewhere in the song, Day admires bodies on the screen and her voice glitches, as though speaking English with a clanker accent, when she pines for "something real." If brain in a jar was our desired state at the height of blogs and message boards, AI and algorithms and filters have warped and scratched that glass enclosed space we previously identified with -- it's hard to know if our brains are even real anymore. And yet, "EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED" is also grounded in the sort of coming of age angst that feels nearly universal. Her long, enjambed lines recall black hoodie emo even as the torrential onslaught of everything is too existential to really compare to sad boy love songs. I'd like to think that if Tiffany Day was able to tear a rift in time and send her song back to 2006 that we'd all get it, but I don't think we really had any idea where it was going.

[groovesnjams]

"Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep" by Gelli Haha

MG:

We've embraced hyperpop, we've embraced soundscaping, we've embraced chiptune and sampling and freak folk and psychedelia but until Gelli Haha we've not combined them all in one single piece of unhinged maximalism. In 2022 The Cut declared a "vibe shift" and I'd like to posit that we're at the end stages of that shift, a full unraveling of reality. "Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep," with its bright, chirpy optimism and its primary color palette, is the right hand path. The klouds part and a God wearing wayfarers implores us to "listen to your heart" -- whatever that means. In our total loss of meaning and the absence of a defining truth the possibility exists for something fertile and childlike, a rebirth, if you will. Gelli Haha is bringing us back to the lantern consciousness of our youth, she's uplifting us from the tragedy of our terra firma and delivering us to surreal skies. I've never wanted to drink the kool aid more!

DV:

Truly, this is the future The Polyphonic Spree dreamed of. Maybe the most surprising thing is how long it took us to arrive here - this is a longer nostalgia cycle than the one from the late 1950s and Grease, or the gap between The Beach Boys' early work and First Class's pastiche "Beach Baby". But this isn't simply nostalgia bait: Gelli Haha is pulling from all the places MG mentioned at least as much as the neo-psych and left-field pop of the mid-2000s, not to mention modern clowning. That jumbled blend of influences and reference points lends "Klouds" enough weirdness that it avoids treacle - the natural pitfall of anything so brightly, aesthetically aligned with youth. Because yes, childhood can be bright and sunny, but it's just as likely to feel strange and unknowable, like navigating a world that makes little sense and overwhelms as often as it delights. "Klouds" is bizarre enough to tread on the right side of that line, and after Switcheroo left me kinda cold last year I'm surprised to like it as much as I do. It's as much spectacle as song, but all the better for that.

[groovesnjams]

"no outline" by Lauren Auder

DV:

Maybe it's just the piano, insistent and plaintive, but I'm reminded of early Coldplay by the way Lauren Auder starts "no outline." It's mournful but propulsive too, drawing me along like an undertow until the song explodes into the arena-filler it longs to be. As she sings about a breakup and the "big black hole" it's left, the absence that she refuses to fully accept, the production careens and crashes, waves of fuzz and synths nearly overwhelming her voice. It's a punishing sort of catharsis, the kind that a younger Chris Martin might have aspired to but never quite achieved.

MG:

Instead of harder Coldplay I'd categorize this as softer Songs of Faith and Devotion era Depeche Mode. Regardless, I think we can agree there's a distinctly 90s production at work on "no outline." I always want Lauren Auder's work to be more complicated, to wrestle more with her love of radio rock by introducing some kind of competing tension, but this is a straightforward piano ballad. Meeting "no outline" where it lives, I think it's almost there -- dramatic, pretty when it cries, soaring from the depths -- but I could use a little Celine Dion style chest thumping, a little Alanis Morissette style teeth gnashing, a little more of what it's physically like to feel all that loss. It's charting on Mainstream Rock, but it could be number one with more oomph.

[groovesnjams]

"paris (to get you out my head)" by 2charm

MG:

Allegedly, 2charm are a new strain called "gooner pop" -- I guess after the incels that jerk off all day? "paris" features production from ninajirachi so I'm not surprised they've made something that's both a massive bop and a weird feeling on the inside. This song, and all of the magnificent star scum city, is full of soaring trance thrills and enough irony to drown the Chainsmokers. Amusingly (to me), this is the first time in my whole entire life that I've wished I had good enough taste to honestly not enjoy something, but reader, I won't lie, I also read profiles of Clavicular. Using the signifiers of a community driven genre like dance music broadly in order to explore something profoundly alienating like misanthropic internet subcultures isn't entirely new (again, reader, I also had a phase where I was listening to a lot of Die Antwoord and I know, you're thinking "you said this was the first time you wanted better taste" and you're right) but it is perversely meeting this moment in its yucky-horny-compelling gutter. I wish I could tell you I'm ready to move on from whatever 2charm is but I know I'm just getting started.

DV:

There's plenty of irony in the juxtaposition between the lyric of "paris" and the very gay video 2charm pair it with, but the song itself could use a little more of that tension in itself. If anything, it's too tasteful - ninajirachi gives it the same kind of flawless production that made I Love My Computer irresistible, but "paris" delivers none of the thematic depth or character of her best solo songs. Like, "#Selfie" was terrible but at least The Chainsmokers were singing about something. 2charm build this song on a casual sort of excess wealth (for the record, but I had to look up Saint-Tropez to fully understand what it meant to fly to three destinations in order to get over a breakup.) It's the kind of unexamined privilege that could reveal or yield something worth discussing. But it doesn't do much here, either to enrich or complicate the singer's heartbreak; the cities come and go in a swell of synths, details so irrelevant they could be swapped for almost anything else. "paris" is still good - I'd be hard-pressed to call any song this sparkling and catchy less than that - but if 2charm are going to call themselves gooner pop then they need to introduce some friction to live up to their promise.

[groovesnjams]

"MOVEURBODY 춤춰" by HYO

DV:

Despite enlisting the hottest producers of ten years ago (Ryan Tedder, Mike Will, (the deepest of possible sighs) Diplo), BTS forgot to write toplines for most of their new album. It's a self-important slog of a record, 40 minutes that feel almost twice as long. Adding insult to injury, it's dropping just after what's generally considered to be a surprisingly weak year for K-pop. If the biggest boy band in the world can't turn things around, who can?

(Re)enter HYO, who's dropped a handful of singles since Girls' Generation ended, but wasn't on my radar until "MOVEURBODY," the biggest banger I've heard so far this year. To be clear, HYO and producers Czaer and Haechi aren't giving us something we've never heard before - this is an electropop banger and not trying to be much more. But unlike so many others, "MOVEURBODY" is overflowing with energy, irresistibly focused on its singular purpose of filling a dancefloor, and has the hooks to make good on its intent. This is a song that could stand to be twice as long without wearing out its welcome, and I'm sure some DJ has already made that happen. That it's sitting with 100K views on YouTube (as compared to 13M for the last BTS single) doesn't change that this is a much more exciting signpost for what K-pop can be in 2026.

MG:

I'm sure I've told this story before, it's one of my formative memories, but just in case: in third grade I had a history textbook that began a chapter by extolling the virtues of country music, insisting that no matter who you were you couldn't resist tapping your foot. And in that moment I vowed that I would never tap my foot because I would not be told what to do by, of all absurd things, a children's history textbook! I gave up the grudge eventually but that impulse is die hard and it rears up even when I listen to "MOVEURBODY." There's nothing wrong with the song, exactly, I just feel like it's best suited to an aerobics class or something. It's too prescriptive, too "please clap," for its organic purpose.