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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.
He's not though. His belief in Athena, his guilt for what he did, what he witnessed, and those sacrificed. He's literally carrying that with him as he holds onto these mementos. That's pretty religious, no?
I get what you’re saying but it felt more like the gods (Athena) were just a metaphor for his guilt and the gods presence was really just natural occurrences or human intervention. To me he didn’t really believe in the gods he just followed the laws and such because he was supposed to (like bowing your head in prayer when you aren’t religious). For example, he says something like “the men were convinced I’d angered Poseidon” it just felt like he was removed from it and his story was all focused on his guilt and the guilt was what was punishing him, not the gods. It was just a very grounded take for such a fantastical story.
That's actually why it works for me. I'm no longer Catholic (I don't go to church on Sundays, I don't fast for Lent, etc.) but wherever I'm in church I still know all the words to the hymns, etc. So, like Odysseus being world-weary and that like diminishing his religiosity makes sense to me. But also, he can't shake it off completely. He's changed but he's not a different person.
i enjoyed the odyssey film for what it was but the people in the tags on this site are such nerds, fully crashing out because a myth wast told the exact same way it was told when it was originally written
He's not though. His belief in Athena, his guilt for what he did, what he witnessed, and those sacrificed. He's literally carrying that with him as he holds onto these mementos. That's pretty religious, no?
Having Helen and Clytemnestra be identical twins is genius because how poetic and fitting is it that Agamemnon, who used Helen as an excuse to start The Trojan War, who instigated the deaths of thousands and sacrificed his own daughter for his ambitions, only to fall by someone who bears the same face of the woman he politicized?
Had quite a trek to get to the theater for our showing of The Odyssey because of the heavy rains and flash flooding, had an incredible time, enjoyed the movie, thought it was a brilliant adaptation centering the passage of time and how the journey inherently changes you. The story felt both fresh and lived-in. Left the theater and the rain had ended. 5/5
‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan Defies the Gods with a Staggering Epic About Fate, Family, and the Future of Living in a Broken World
Thanks to a career-defining performance by Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' is one of his best movies. Review.
A densely layered and nonlinear saga about a hyper-capable but profoundly heartsick middle-aged man whose job isolates him from his loved ones — and indeed from humanity itself — to such an extreme that it becomes the only viable means by which he might ever make his way back home, “The Odyssey” is so foundational to Nolan’s interests and instincts as a storyteller that I feared it would be a waste of time for him to tackle it head-on. That, despite being forced to keep the hero’s wife alive for once, the director’s latest would still be safe and obvious to a degree that negated the monumental ambition of transposing an ancient Greek legend into the stuff of a hyper-real IMAX experience.
I could not have been less surprised that Nolan’s version of “The Odyssey” takes great pains to revisit those same ideas. I was, however, utterly ambushed by how bruising and immediate those ideas become in the context of this millennia-old story. The awesome power of “The Odyssey,” and the primary reason why Nolan’s ultra-grounded version of its story is as reinvigorating for Homer’s epic as Homer’s epic is for him, is rooted in a gambit worthy of the Trojan horse itself. Nolan’s casually radical translation uses its mythic setting to smuggle in his most grounded exploration of his “faith in the mechanics of the world” (to borrow a phrase from a wise man called Neil in “Tenet”).
Following his most frustratingly internalized film with his most unabashedly full-bodied one, the “Oppenheimer” director returns with another somber epic about a man who dares to defy the gods (and Nolan makes sure to stress that defiance at almost every chance he gets, while also eliding much of the help that the gods offer Odysseus in the poem). Only this time, the gods are real, the man is a myth, and the civilization he’s partially responsible for dooming to centuries of darkness spirals into entropy at the start of the action rather than at the end.
The team is headed back to the World Cup final, but one lifelong fan has fallen out of love.
I no longer count myself in their cohort. If there’s a villain of this World Cup, it’s been Argentina, a defending champion who bullied its way through most of the tournament, breaking hearts at each turn with last-minute winners. After nearly losing, in what would have been a Cinderella upset, to a completely unheralded Cabo Verde, Argentina benefitted from questionable refereeing decisions in subsequent victories over Egypt and Switzerland. Speculation abounded online about a conspiracy to return Messi to the final. Social media has teemed with unsavory videos of Argentinean misbehavior in the stadiums, including fans hurling racial epithets at a Black American influencer and showering Egyptians with beer. Two years ago, a couple of Argentinean players had to apologize after being filmed singing a song that denigrated the African origins of many on France’s team; some Argentinean fans still dust it off, as they do with other songs mocking the poverty of Brazil’s favelas. Last week, Eduardo Feinmann, a prominent and controversial Argentinean journalist, said on television that he found Mexicans “detestable” and scoffed at “the envy Mexicans have for Argentineans—not just in soccer, in everything.” The Mexican President, , waded into the fray, describing his remarks as “outrageous.”
Though Argentina’s fans were as boisterous and ubiquitous as ever, the team played little part in the scenes of happy nationalism that will be remembered long after this World Cup is over: the Viking-helmeted Norwegians who “rowed” in unison through the New York City subway and Times Square; the kilt-clad Scots who emptied Boston of its lager; the Japanese who charmed everyone by helping, en masse, to clean up the stadiums where they attended games; the startling bonhomie between visiting South Koreans and their hosting Mexicans; the striking figure of Vozinha, Cabo Verde’s itinerant, forty-year-old goalkeeper, who put his tiny nation on the map when he thwarted Spain in the group stage and staved off Argentina till extra time—heroic feats that saw him earn more than fifty times as many followers on Instagram as there are inhabitants of his country. Argentina’s supporters, meanwhile, lorded their success over others as their team kept winning with a crushing inevitability.
At this point, there’s little debate that Messi is the greatest player of all time. Still, he now leaves me cold. He is a titan of our disenchanted age, on display in every possible medium and format, but utterly boring off the field, insulated behind layers of corporate branding and an army of P.R. professionals. Maradona, on the other hand, was a charismatic populist, a scalawag from a shantytown, irrepressible and impudent. His most infamous goal—when he illegally knocked in the opener in the 1986 quarterfinal against England with what he himself dubbed “the hand of God”—would have been swiftly ruled out by the video-assisted-refereeing technology that has reshaped the experience of watching soccer these days. But that successful act of cheating is central to Maradona’s legend, as is his defiance in the aftermath. (To be sure, he did also score—legitimately—one of the greatest goals ever, in the same game.) He saw Argentina’s victory over England as justice for his country’s humiliating defeat by the British in the war over the Falkland Islands. “We blamed the English players for everything that happened, for all the suffering of the Argentine people,” Maradona wrote in his autobiography. “This was revenge.”
The United States’ dream didn’t die. It was overturned
Folarin Balogun and the USMNT's "dream" start was an uplifting story while it lasted. The beginning was worth it. The ending was unbearable.
Three weeks ago, in a tournament debut made for Hollywood, he called his two-goal performance “a real dream.” The U.S. men’s national team throttled Paraguay 4-1 that night. He was an instant American sports star, an elixir for one of the country’s most combative issues: birthright citizenship.
Balogun is the kind of American — born in Brooklyn and raised in London — that President Donald Trump has tried to expel, but when the striker shined in our colors, there was no conflict about claiming him. There was no denying his impact in helping this historically overshadowed soccer program galvanize hope and add home-cooked passion to the nation’s hosting responsibilities.
It was an uplifting story while it lasted.
Then the most powerful man in the world picked up a phone.
USMNT expecting to have Folarin Balogun back for World Cup quarterfinal, if it makes it
Balogun was “extremely surprised” by the decision. “I initially thought the ref was actually gonna give a call for me,” he said Friday.
“It’s important for me to say, first and foremost, it was totally unintentional,” Balogun said Friday, speaking to reporters for the first time since Wednesday’s game. “The choice of the referee was his choice. I don’t think it was the correct choice. I think a yellow card would’ve been fair, due to it not being intentional.”
“It’s something that happened, we have to move forward and I have to accept it,” Balogun said.
Of the play itself, Balogun said: “If you played the game, you would understand that there’s scenarios you simply can’t avoid them. That needs to be taken into context and it wasn’t on this occasion. As you all saw, there’s nowhere else to put your leg. It’s gonna be unavoidable.”
He added he was “extremely surprised” by the decision. “I initially thought the ref was actually gonna give a call for me,” he said.
Balogun came back on the field after the win to celebrate with his teammates as well as shake the hands of all the game’s referees. He didn’t linger or protest, he wanted to show respect.“
There are lots of people we’re inspiring, boys and girls watching, you have to show them the right way to handle things,” Balogun said. “Even when you think it’s unjust.”
Leslie Feinberg, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein, and Riki Wilchins are all Jewish nonbinary people who have paved the way for trans and intersex rights and transfeminist action in the United States over the last several decades and you should know their names and what they've done.
There is a reason why there is a more modern antisemitic caricature of "the college educated coastal elite trying to erode at western masculinity and femininity" and it's literally, in part, because of Jewish led transfeminist action. It is a caricature that exists in dialogue with longer standing antisemitic stereotypes, but we're talking specifically about the modern iteration of it.
It's because of Leslie Feinberg's action, mobilization, and writing in the late 70's through the early 00's as a vocally Jewish transgender feminist. It's because of Judith Butler's essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" and their book Gender Trouble in the 90's. It's because of Bornstein's books Gender Outlaws and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, the second of which was worked on in collaboration with Jewish trans man S. Bear Bergman. It's because Riki Wilchins has been an active part of trans and intersex feminist action for decades despite you probably not knowing hir name.
Wilchins co-founded Camp Trans with Feinberg. S/he co-founded Transsexual Menace with Denise Norris. Wilchins coined the term "genderqueer" and s/he also helped lead to the foundation of Intersex Awareness Day thanks to hir work with intersex activist Cheryl Chase and the Hermaphrodites With Attitude! protest group. Wilchins has been a backbone of trans and intersex activism since the 90's.
All Jewish nonbinary people from different assigned gender backgrounds working towards trans liberation and solidarity. For decades.
If you ever question why my own politics are aimed so pointedly towards liberation and solidarity, particularly across the lines of sex and gender, it's because it is a legacy that I'm very proud to follow in the footsteps of as a nonbinary Jewish person.
USMNT into World Cup last 16 after beating Bosnia; Controversial red card clouds Balogun’s heroics
On a tense and controversial night in California, the USMNT won a World Cup knockout match for just a second time ever. We break it down
Then, in the second half, he was sent off after a video review showed that he’d stomped on the ankle of Bosnia’s Tarik Muharemovic while challenging for a ball.
Without Balogun, and reduced to 10 men for the last half-hour of the game, the U.S. held on for a cathartic victory. Malik Tillman’s superb free kick in the 82nd minute sealed it. It was just the second men’s World Cup knockout-round win in U.S. history. It’s the first since 2002, and the first in primetime, and the first to be greeted by gleeful celebrations at watch parties big and small all across the country.
But it sets up an even bigger occasion, a round-of-16 showdown with Belgium on Monday. And Balogun, the team’s leading scorer, will miss that game while serving his red-card suspension.
The French disdain for climatisation hits its breaking point.
Of course, France wasn’t always this hot. On the few days a year it went above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, you could make it through by closing your shutters and drinking a lot of water. But Lindsey Tramuta, a French American journalist who lives in Paris, said she believes the government has missed a major opportunity over the years to adapt to the reality that Europe is the fastest-warming continent and things are only going to get worse. “We’ve had plenty of scary heat waves that should have fueled the country to accelerate not only their greenification programs but building and infrastructural adaptation,” she said. “That means potentially doing the thing the Architectes de Bâtiments de France” — the powerful French historic-preservation agency — “don’t want to do: modify Parisian heritage structures to make them livable and safer.”
“What is most enraging is not seeing widespread messaging that acknowledges the emergency of cooling things down for people now while also urgently working on the long-term solutions,” Tramuta added. “Several things can be true at once, but the French continue to make this about AC resistance and not the layered crisis we’re facing that requires multiple solutions.” The short-term solutions do seem a bit subpar. In Clichy, the Parisian suburb where my family and I live, the heat-wave survival response from the local government was to publish a map of water-fountain locations, distribute extra fans to overheated schools, and remind people to eat lots of fruits and vegetables.
