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Everyone’s making end-of-the-year lists, so I thought I’d join in on the fun. Here’s my end-of-the-year list of songs and albums. And if you want more, I’ll write one about books and TV shows/movies.
I spend most of my days in the company of myself, so I spend a lot of time listening to music, both new and old, but here, I’ll be focusing on songs and albums released this year. I’ve long said it takes a few years for a decade’s style to reveal itself to us – much of what people consider Y2K isn’t really Y2K, it’s a mishmash of 2003-2006, and all the classic albums released in those years are turning twenty.
Since 2020 and 2021 exist in a haze and for good reason – the pandemic forced artists to postpone their albums and accompanying tours – those years didn’t feel like the 2020’s. Though 2022 and 2023 saw the return of live music, those years exist as an extension of the years before it. So, it wasn’t until last year that we started to hear the music of the 2020s.
And baby, dance music is back!
In 2024, Charli xcx gave us Brat summer, but little did we know it would lead to a year of dance music.
FKA twigs released Eusexua in January, and I’ve been listening to it since. Childlike Things sparked controversy with the inclusion of North West’s voice. North’s father disapproved of his daughter’s inclusion, but also, he claimed chattel slavery was a choice, so, I wouldn’t consider him an authority on anything, much less on his children. He seems to be more out of than in those children’s lives these days. Plus, Kim K was with her daughter when they were shooting the video. Twigs has said she wrote the song when she was around North’s age, and what’s more authentic than having a teenager singing a song written from a teenager’s POV?
While I’ve never been as famous as North – and honestly, who would want to be? I have been on TV sets and in studios. It was fun, and North seemed to have a good time. Together, she and twigs gave us a playful, catchy song.
I played the song for my mom after she told me about Kanye’s comments, she thought the song was fun and was surprised to hear North singing in Japanese. Little did we know, that would be one of this year’s themes: artists purposefully singing in languages other than English.
We are witnessing a test of American hegemonic control of the arts and entertainment.
On the eve of the Epiphany, Bad Bunny released Debí Tirar Más Fotos to worldwide acclaim. In Miami, I felt so removed from the winter holidays. All these holiday movies showed people watching, playing, and cleaning snow and I had never seen a snowflake. My palm-lined streets were a little drier, a little windier, and a little quieter. And that’s what DTMF feels like: a tropical winter. The standout is Baile Inolvidable, a song channeling the past and present of salsa in 6 minutes.
But the song I keep coming back to is Nuevayol. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have long lived in community with each other in New York’s five boroughs. The video reminds me of the quinceañeras I couldn’t attend but saw in photo albums and of arriving in NYC and feeling that cold for the first time. But most of all, the song reminds me of the New York I had imagined: the promised New York, where dreams come true.
My mom said the first time she took the train to Borough Hall she laughed – the place she had only heard in song was real.
But we had arrived and made New York home.
Disease arrived as a single in October 2024 and with it, a new era for Gaga. This Gaga was done singing showtunes but wasn’t ready to take off the costumes. Mayhem is an album only someone in Gaga’s position could release – it sees her remixing old styles into something new. Though I wish the songs were more like Disease and less like Blades of Grass, there’s something for fans of every era.
I’ve been critical of Rosalía being lauded as an expert on the genres of music she’s only dipped her toes into, but I’ve never been critical of her voice. The woman can sing. And in this era of whispering pop stars, her voice is much needed. I wish Lux had more songs like Berghain and less like La Perla, but pop audiences don’t like being challenged by their pop stars. Singing in multiple languages, blending genres, and bringing back the 90’s obsession with classical music was a needed addition to her oeuvre.
And lastly, but certainly not least, Amaarae’s Black Star is a distillation of various Black music styles from both sides of the Atlantic. Listening to the album feels like moving through time. Admittedly, I’m less familiar with Ghanaian highlife than with the musical styles of the Americas, but she seamlessly melds these sounds together.
Favorite Albums and Songs:
Amaarae – Black Star
S.M.O.
Bad Bunny – Debí tirar más fotos
La Mudanza
Deftones – Private Music
infinite source
FKA twigs – Eusexua
Drums of Death
Lady Gaga – Mayhem
Abracadabra (Gesaffelstein Remix)
Linkin Park – From Zero (Deluxe Edition)
Two Faced
Nine Inch Nails – TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
I Know You Can Feel it
PinkPantheress – Fancy That & Fancy Some More?
Stateside & Stateside + Zara Larsson
Rochelle Jordan – Through the Wall
Get It Off
Rosalía – Lux
Porcelana
Honorable mentions:
Addison Rae – Addison
Ethel Cain – Perverts
Not For Radio – Melt
Sudan Archives – The BPM
Zara Larsson – Midnight Sun
The honorable mentions include albums I wouldn’t have found or listened to if it weren’t for the people on my social media feeds recommending them. I’ve never been much of an Ethel Cain fan, but as an exercise in noise, Perverts is perfect. It’s heavy, haunting, and at times, difficult to listen to… I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the experience, but I did feel like a different person having listened to it.
Likewise, I hadn’t heard The Marías until the dreamy Otro Atardecer, on Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, but María Zardoya’s EP Melt, was exactly what I wanted and needed to hear in the fall.
The BPM brings the sounds of the Midwest and the Jersey shore to the forefront. Her “Gadget Girl” persona reminds me of Janelle Monáe circa Dirty Computer.
Addison and Midnight Sun are fun, pop-forward dance albums with clear American and European influences and seem to be in conversation with each other. Addison Rae was born and raised in Louisiana like Britney Spears and her influence is clear. Zara Larsson, on the other hand, hails from Sweden, and it’s clear she’s influenced by Robyn’s electropop.
As for next year, I’m looking forward to Gorillaz’s new album, The Mountain. Gorillaz has always been one of my favorite bands and though I didn’t love The Happy Dictator when I first heard it, the second single, The Manifesto, reaffirmed my love for the band. Thus far, the best track is Damascus. I first heard Omar Souleyman through Björk, who’s had a notable year, with her inclusion on Rosalía’s Berghain. But I love Yasiin Bey’s verses, especially:
Turkish coffee, Starbucks, you’re corny
The track is infectious; it makes you want to get up and dance.
Ambitious and unapologetically erotic, Interview With the Vampire returns to give its fans an existential crisis.
The ambitious, stunning, unapologetically erotic Interview With the Vampire is back and giving longtime fans an existential crisis.
IWTV’s first two seasons are framed by the infamous interview Louis gives to journalist and Interview With the Vampire writer Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) and adorned with lots of operatic set pieces, gallons of viscera, dialogue that prances between lustful and hateful, and Anderson and Reid’s magnetic chemistry. The baroque melodrama of Rice’s prose remained intact, but the episodes tackled America and Europe’s penchants for racism, xenophobia, and homophobia more directly. The second season culminated in a play staged by the bloodsucking troupe Théâtre des Vampires in which Louis and Lestat’s vampire daughter, Claudia (Delainey Hayles), is killed onstage before a cheering audience of humans who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing, a stunning encapsulation of the show’s high and low taste. AMC is “the first network ever that I could say, ‘The thing that people see on television is the thing I wanted to make,’” says Jones, a Pulitzer-finalist playwright who put in time on Friday Night Lights, Weeds, and Boardwalk Empire.
And now, in its third season, the show is blowing itself up. It’s changed its name to acknowledge its new source material (Rice’s second novel) and to signal Lestat’s newfound, fourth-wall-breaking control of the narrative. It is now structured around his band’s tour, for which Reid had to record original songs and perform them on set. The season starts with its central couple in the throes of a breakup, much to the chagrin of the series’ most fervent fans, who call the pairing “Loustat,” describe them as “true soulmates” who “match each other’s freak … in the most unconventional manner,” and soundtrack TikTok odes to their relationship with music from Megan Thee Stallion and Sufjan Stevens. (Molloy calling Louis and Lestat “Taylor and Travis” in a season-three clip sent reverberations through the base.) Will Vampire’s loyal, if still modest, fandom buy into an experiment that changes the show’s primary protagonist and its established storytelling mode, complete with an incest storyline that puts George R.R. Martin’s bibliography to shame? More important, can it rally the kind of viewership and mainstream awareness that turned Heated Rivalry into a phenomenon and guarantee a future past season three?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.
People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.
And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.
And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?
Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.
*takes the hand of a period drama writer gently* A queen consort is not a queen regnant. A dowager queen is not a queen regnant either.
There is very little intrinsic institutional power in queenship. The power a consort, dowager, or queen mother has depends mostly on how much the reigning sovereign (usually a man) is willing to grant her. Needing a queen to serve as regent is exceptionally rare, and the regent is more often a male relative.
Queen regnant: woman who rules in her own right, not on behalf of someone else.
Regent: Someone who temporarily assumes the powers of the monarch on account of the monarch being too young or too incapacitated to govern.
Queen consort: Woman who is married to the monarch.
Dowager queen: Woman who was married to the monarch. The monarch is dead, and she is owed support as his widow.
Queen mother: Woman who is the mother of the monarch. Usually the dowager queen, though there are exceptions if there isn't a straight line of succession.
Some of the earliest clues that GLP-1 drugs might reshape the brain emerged almost by accident, through research on a hormonal disorder affecting 1 in 10 U.S. women. Once known as PCOS and now increasingly called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, the complex endocrine disorder can lead to hormonal dysfunction, metabolic abnormalities and abnormal tissue growth that can affect fertility.
At the University of Colorado Anschutz, pediatric endocrinologist Melanie Cree had been studying whether the drugs could help adolescents with the condition by reducing excess weight and stabilizing blood sugar. As Cree’s trial progressed, her colleague Shapiro began scanning participants’ brains, looking for neurological changes that might accompany the metabolic ones.
What she found pointed researchers toward a deeper possibility: that the disorder may involve dysfunction in the hypothalamus, the small but powerful brain region that helps regulate hunger, stress, sleep and hormones. The area also contains a high concentration of GLP-1 receptors.
Acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons claimed in March that Hernandez had “abandoned” her son to a “violent murderer” who killed him weeks later. ICE had arrested her after a sheriff’s deputy in Baldwin County, Alabama, stopped the car she was riding in with her sister to work. Contrary to Lyons’s assertion, Hernandez said she had begged ICE to deport her with Orlin. Instead, the child and his cousins were put in the custody of her sister’s estranged partner, Samuel Maldonado. He was a laborer who had been in the Honduran military and the father of her sister’s three young children.
Police say Maldonado drank heavily, whipped the children with a wire, and dealt the most vicious blows to Orlin. The boy had multiple broken bones and signs of sexual battery. He had been stomped on, burned with a lighter, and suffered at least 17 blows to the head. Maldonado has been charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty.
The case has stirred outrage, prompted calls for a full accounting of ICE’s actions and shone a light on the sometimes dangerous situations children are left in when their parents are detained or deported. After Orlin’s death, some Florida sheriffs who signed up to help DHS with immigration enforcement during routine matters like traffic stops said the effort should focus on serious criminals.
Feds pick design for Penn Station rebuild, won't move Madison Square Garden
The federal government announced a "master developer" for Penn Station. It marks the rebuild's biggest step forward since the Trump administ
Amtrak announced it selected a group called Penn Transformation Partners as the “master developer” to oversee the station's redesign and reconstruction of the busiest train station in the country. The group includes real estate company Vornado, which owns much of the land around Penn Station, and construction company Halmar, which is currently working to build the MTA’s Second Avenue subway extension into East Harlem.
The announcement represents the biggest step forward in the rebuild of the notoriously dreary transit hub since the Trump administration took control of the project from the MTA last year. If realized, the plan would be a transformative upgrade. Since the original Beaux-Arts Penn Station was torn down in the 1960s, it’s been an eyesore and inconvenience for millions of commuters who have struggled to navigate its dark and dingy corridors.
The Story of the Woman Who Gave Birth in Brooklyn Arraignment Court Is Worse Than You’ve Heard
A lawyer in the courtroom Friday night told Hell Gate the birth was a scene of "complete violence."
But Jen Kovacs, a public defender with the Legal Aid Society who was in the courtroom of Judge Devin Robinson throughout the birth, described a different and even more disturbing version of events to Hell Gate in a conversation Monday morning. The woman being arraigned was handcuffed behind her back throughout the birth, she said. And Sharpe, the woman's attorney, wasn't even in the courtroom through any of the birth, according to Kovacs—she told Hell Gate she found him out in the hallway afterward and alerted him that his client had just given birth. Sharpe's account of the birth as the arrival of a "bouncing baby boy" is materially false, she said, and serves to obscure the violence of the scene. (Sharpe did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the NYPD or the Office of Court Administration. We'll update this post if they do.)
Part one of Drake’s comeback trilogy is an attempt to settle the score. He does not succeed.
Read Jayson Greene’s review of the album.
Today, we’re only going to be looking at ICEMAN, both for the sake of honoring each distinct project and because we have limited breath to draw here on planet Earth. The cover invokes Michael Jackson’s iconic sequined glove—not usually a heartening sign of an artist readjusting his perspective and seeking firmer ground. But really, what would we do, as listeners, if the character Aubrey Drake Graham played in his music ever encountered “perspective”? He can’t. We count on him not to.
The problem is, all of this insight-free grousing used to be fun, and Drake’s music—his rap music, at least—hasn’t made prolonged contact with fun in a decade. Instead, every new Drake project is a buffet of humiliation, mortification, and self-serving delusion. On ICEMAN, we get a few teaspoons of nourishing hilarity, but mostly it’s a long platter of the cold, lumpy self-pity that made us push our chairs back in the first place.
Honestly, the constant supervision of children blows my mind, because it's so different from my own experience. We were given a certain degree of autonomy from a very early age — one of my earliest memories is playing with neighbourhood children without adult supervision. I must have been three or four years old at the time, because we moved a few months after my fourth birthday. And now I know primary school children who have less autonomy than I did when I was still working out complex sentence structures.
When Interview With the Vampire returns for season 3 (June 7), it's now titled The Vampire Lestat. Named after the second book in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series, the show is switching perspectives. Long gone are the days of Louis' thoughtful, dramatic voiceover. Now, you're inside Lestat's head. And you better buckle up.
"It's tonal whiplash in the most intentional way," says Jacob Anderson, who plays Louis de Pointe du Lac.
Reid admits, "It was very overwhelming to read. I was anxious because it's such a huge departure."
For showrunner Rolin Jones, his philosophy is simple: "Adapt or die." It's been that way from the start.
And other links to start your hellish commute Monday.
The strike, the railroad's first since a two-day strike in 1994, centers on wages. The affected workers represent over half of the LIRR's labor force and are part of a coalition of five unions coordinating their efforts as the Long Island Rail Road Bargaining Coalition. They claim that the wage proposal on the table from the MTA—a retroactive 9.5 percent wage increase covering the last three years, and then a 3 percent raise for this year—is too low, given that the workers, who include engineers, signalmen, and trainmen, haven't had a raise or a contract since 2022.
From the outside, it would appear that the two parties aren't that far apart: the MTA has said that they're in agreement on the pay bumps for the first three years of the four-year new contract, but haven't come to agreement on the fourth, when the unions want to see a 5 percent bump. The unions aren't budging on this, and claimed that the MTA brought last-minute healthcare changes to the bargaining table, which led talks to ultimately collapse.
Highlights from the Project Hail Mary director's commentary:
*SPOILERS!!!*
Grace waking up from the coma was the first shot they filmed for the movie! They wanted Ryan to feel eased into the character, and what better way to do that than have him play a character who can't remember who he is?
The little "GOOD LUCK!" note in sharpie that's written on Grace's sleeping bag was canonically written by the other astronauts on the I.S.S. before the Hail Mary crew got put into the ship. In real life, Phil and Chris wrote one word each. They said it was like "a blessing on the movie."
Ryan's most nerve-wracking day on set was when he had to shoot with the classroom full of children. Most of the kids were made up of the children of the film's crew members.
The scene where Grace looks through Yao and Ilukhina's photos is footage of him looking at and reacting to actual pictures of the actors with their loved ones.
When Grace calls Stratt to tell her that he and Carl figured out how to breed astrophage, Ryan is genuinely calling Sandra on her day off set, and her audio is her genuine reaction to the unexpected line: "Carl and I made a baby!"
"We like showcasing Ryland Grace's social anxiety while having a lot of people staring at him. LOL!"
Their intention for the space funeral scene was to have Grace convey that he was trying to ease his own sadness by making the dead people with him feel better about being dead :(
The markings on Rocky's body convey his mission patch, his rank in the crew, his wedding band, and his family crest.
Grace and Stratt's conversation on the boat is Grace asking her if they're allowed to be close friends, and the response from Stratt is no, they can't. This gets driven home in the karaoke scene. She understands the value of connection, a part of her wants it, but "Her love for people has to be suspended for her to do her job."
Rocky has different forward-facing faces for different thought processes! They named his "satellite dish" face, his "scrunched up thinking face", and his "monobrow face".
Direct quote: "I love how on the spectrum Rocky is." ROCKY AUTISTIC CODED CONFIRMED!
After Rocky recovers from his injuries: "As Rocky returns to the movie, the lights turn on. The warmth returns. It's like the day breaking."
Confirmed that when Grace and Rocky reunite, Rocky says to Grace, "You came back for me, question?"
They throw this out there for two seconds and do NOT expand on it, but according to Andy Weir, Stratt is imprisoned for life but somehow ESCAPES???
The Eridians built Grace an artificial tree in his enclosure because Rocky knew he liked trees
There's so much more they shared about film processes and the people who were behind making certain effects possible. I highly recommend checking out the commentary if you're able!
Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted a rent freeze during his successful campaign, but was lambasted by landlord groups.
The board has only considered a 0% increase for one-year leases on two other occasions in the past decade. It’s also the first time board members have considered freezing rent on two-year leases.
Two tenant representatives on the board proposed taking the unprecedented step of decreasing rent by 3% on new one-year leases and by 4.5% on two-year leases, essentially nullifying the board’s rent increase last year. Their landlord-sided counterparts proposed raising rents by 3% to 5.5% on one-year leases and 6% to 8% on two-year leases.
