Depending on what you believe, Prince never knew Kevin Durant abandoned ship. The last time he saw LeBron James play basketball, that guy was a 31-year-old Cleveland Cavalier. He never saw anyone younger than Oscar Robertson average a triple-double. Kobe was still on his retirement tour. To Prince: no The Block, The Shot nor The Stop. He saw a 73-win team just before they got there.
In March 2016, Prince attended a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Golden State Warriors, sitting next to Warriors co-governor Joe Lacob. In what would be one of his last-ever public appearances, he saw Steph Curry score 33 points against Kevin Durant's 32 and, ugh, okay, yes, Russell Westbrook went 1-8 from three, but he did go for 22-6-7. Where was Randy Foye that night? Where was eventual NBA Finals participant Cam Payne??
A month later, ten years ago, Prince was dead, having overdosed in an elevator in Paisley Park. He died alone; the elevator literally brought him down. At the time, as I've had a habit of doing, I gathered a bunch of people to help do the bidding I couldn't figure out how to do myself. Since he left, in living through the exponential increase in cataclysmic disaster, the worldwide acceptance of nonsense at face value and in doing more introspection and trying to avoid my own indigo fate in an elevator somewhere that is not my own private compound, I fear I've only gotten worse at expressing myself. It's now been over ten years since...
As inane as this sounds, for all the faults that his estate will keep in the vault for the next thousand years, Prince's presence here kept some part of my brain in some stasis. Particularly after losing David Bowie the prior January, knowing Prince was still somewhere negotiating appearances on kitschy sitcoms pleased me.
Losing him continued the parasocial spiral of celebrity that defined 2016, culminating in an election night featuring me eating pizza out of an abandoned box on the street in Jersey City at something like 4:30 in the morning. As safe as it is to say that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders at any point before that, many more things have spiraled all the way out of control in ways that don’t seem to me to be the typical “everything was better when you were 12,” but I guess I was only 12 the once, and it was right after 9/11, so what do I know.
A year after Prince died, nine years ago, I went with a good friend of mine from college to see a Prince cover band at Cafe Wha? It was my second time there and first time seeing a full band. I was in there a few weeks ago, thinking of that show. That friend more or less abandoned the rest of us sometime after the pandemic following an incident of seemingly much more magnitude to her than to anyone else.
Here are some portraits of people blowing things out of proportion: me, everywhere, all the time, either publicly, or worse. I’ve become a terminally bad hang, to the tune of reminding everyone all the time why anything ever happens (hint: it’s in your wallet, either in paper, coin or card form, or you need to borrow some).
Even so, in March 2016 I stood before a fork in the road, picked it up and have been shoving it directly into my own spine ever since, along with a few others. At the very least, I assume he’d appreciate the masochism. She doesn’t.
I’ve been thinking recently of collectivism, and how the power of us will undo the power of me. While I, singular, do believe that, I also acknowledge how easy it is to then regress to the group, to blame circumstances on things much larger than oneself.
I’ve been plenty guilty of that with regard to my jobs, my relationships, the people that I’ve encountered once and the people I’ve known my entire life. Pushing forward as the individual can seem to be the only way. That seems like a way to defer or to transfer pain, but it only creates more of it. Others felt it first, but it caught up to him. It always does.
Prince tried to push forward, and he managed the illusion thereof with the caveat that he kept many people on constant call. Even he, the singular genius, needed a village, but admitting as much vis a vis his prescription meds would be his downfall.
Admitting the need for others has been one of the toughest mindset adjustments I’ve ever had to try and make even though I suspected that to be the case all along. I like having people around, but I don’t like relying on anyone, and I especially hate them relying on me.
Given my jittery, anxious and world-historically indecisive nature, I am essentially aging into a first-to-die character, either in a straight-to-disc horror or in a sad Irish indie costarring a Gleeson. Walking directly into oblivion is getting to be something like the only choice when any dog walk might bear witness to one impossibly bright flash followed by a flattening of everything and everyone the tristate has to offer. Deferring to this eventuality, of course, is admitting defeat in life overall, but the paths are dwindling.
More than that, I never felt like anyone else should bother using their time here on me, and anyway, they’d all be sorry when they didn’t because I’m someone who is going to prove everyone wrong. Surprise! Loser is as loser does, promo code BASURA for 10% off your future on my expiration date.
Here’s how I prove people wrong over time: in continually making the worst possible decision, popular opinion shifts against my judgment. In complaining about it to anyone other than a microphone and a piano in my closet, I make it worse.
Coming to some clarity surrounding how much, and to what degree, of a miserable human being I’ve been to so many people for such a long time makes my frustration with him all the worse. Because I live to be a sloppy, skeptical hypocrite with moving goalposts just like my most tribally fundamental influences, I wonder how it is that he could want to waste any of that talent. He probably didn’t go out thinking that he had. If only he’d have gotten a good night’s sleep, just once. Then again, I’m not the one to say.
Burning through life hasn’t resulted in the same successes as Prince had, pretty obviously, but I’ve a feeling there are some parallel failures. I’ve read about him getting kicked out of his house at something like 11 years old, crying in a phone booth and then never again. I don’t believe that.
I know he hurt people in his life at a fairly routine clip, particularly women, sometimes physically. That last bit, I reserve exclusively for myself, but the first two resonate. Genius does a lot of work in covering flaws; cowardice does a lot of work in covering pain. Transference of either is creation. Pain begets pain.
It drives me mad that he thought he needed to be out there living like that. If not necessarily about Prince, I know I’m not the only one who has had that thought in the past decade.
I miss him. No one’s ever mistaking that thought for being about anyone else. Forever more, it will snow in April.
ChatGPT, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.
Below is an original, stylistic pastiche in the voice and critical cadence often associated with Patrick Masterson—measured, wry, detail-forward, and quietly incisive—not an impersonation.
If 2025 gave us anything, it was proof that the musical landscape continues to resemble a sprawling, long-form conversation with no moderator and a suspicious number of participants talking over each other. Genre fidelity eroded a little further this year—not in the radical, line-in-the-sand ways of past decades, but in the subtler, more everyday gestures: a pop star casually releasing a noise-leaning B-side, a legacy indie band sneaking trap percussion under a chorus, a jazz label quietly issuing the most compelling electronic record of the year. The seams showed, but intentionally so; the fraying became part of the design.
The dominant narrative wasn’t about who reinvented the wheel but who managed to keep their hands steady on it. Big, capital-A Albums made a modest comeback, helped along by artists willing to stretch past the algorithmic attention span. The best ones felt like ecosystems: songs breathing into each other, motifs offered and re-offered, as if the artists trusted us to stay a while. And we did—streaming fatigue or not.
Pop’s brightest moments came from the outliers. The year’s most memorable hooks tended not to be shouted from stadium rafters but whispered from bedrooms: intimate, slightly off-kilter melodies whose imperfections made them linger. Even the blockbuster releases seemed aware of this shift, polishing their edges just enough to gleam without blinding.
Hip-hop, meanwhile, leaned inward. The maximalist arms race finally eased, replaced by a renewed interest in texture and pacing—beats with weight but not clutter, verses that felt less like declarations and more like confessions caught on a hot mic. You could sense a recalibration happening in real time.
Rock had a good year precisely because it stopped worrying about having one. The genre persisted quietly, confidently, unconcerned with reclaiming a cultural throne that may no longer exist. Instead, it offered something increasingly rare: a sense of steadiness. Guitars hummed, drums thudded, songs built and broke and built again. No irony necessary.
And then there was the fringe—electronic, ambient, experimental—turning out some of the most emotionally legible work of the year. It’s funny how the music that supposedly resists narrative ends up telling it best. The boundary-pushers sounded less like they were chasing innovation and more like they were simply comfortable living on the edge of the map.
If there was a unifying theme to 2025’s best music, it was this: intentionality. Not perfection, not disruption—just the quiet insistence that a piece of music can still mean something if you give it space to mean anything at all.
1. My Morning Jacket — Is
If you'd like, I can tailor this for a specific genre, publication tone, or include more “top albums/songs” lists in the same style.
Grok, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.
It was the year Rosalía finally dropped LUX and reminded everyone why she's untouchable. Or, wait, is that too obvious? Maybe that's too obvious. Here, let me try again: It was the year I realized the rat race hadn't fully let go of me after all, because every time I thought I'd tuned out the noise, something like Geese or Clipse or Wet Leg dragged me back in with sounds that felt both urgent and inevitable. Don't get me wrong—there were moments when the big swings landed hard. Rosalía's album was one of those rare records that felt like a consensus without trying to be one; layered, personal, and somehow still pop enough to infiltrate everything. Clipse coming back after all these years? That was the kind of reunion that didn't feel forced, just brothers picking up where malice and push left off, sharper than ever. And then there was the rock stuff—Geese twisting indie into something feral, Wet Leg turning queer discovery into the kind of acerbic hooks that make you laugh while you're screaming along. Even Lady Gaga, ever the chameleon, delivered something that mutated in ways no one saw coming. But the real thread running through it all was this quiet undercurrent of people rejecting the algorithm's grip. No more chasing viral moments; just artists making what they needed to make. Lily Allen unpacking a marriage in real time on West End Girl. Jerskin Fendrix grieving in the most absurd, beautiful prog-cabaret spirals. Wednesday dissecting endings with that North Carolina bite. It wasn't a "rock revival" or whatever the headlines called it—it was just music that hit because it had to exist, not because it was engineered to trend. I spent a lot of the year listening on walks, headphones in, letting albums like Blood Orange's Essex Honey or Sharp Pins unspool while the world blurred by. Incremental progress, sure, but the kind that sticks. There were comebacks (Bad Bunny, Brandi Carlile reflecting on mortality), breakthroughs (Addison Rae proving the ingenues could evolve), and those underground gems that slipped through the cracks but rewarded the dig—Purelink's dubwise drifts, or whatever footwork-adjacent experiments were bubbling in Chicago basements. Looked at a certain way, 2025 didn't have a single defining album so much as a bunch of them refusing to play by the old rules. No dominant Brat summer this time; instead, hybrids everywhere—Afrobeats seeping global, Irish voices cutting through, K-pop fictional groups blurring lines. And yeah, the charts felt stuck in reruns half the time, but underneath? Real shit. Raw emotion over polished perfection. To paraphrase someone wiser than me: It was admirable, it lasted all year, and then it was over. Don't get heartbroken—there were too many good moments for that. But as the dust settles, I'm left with this: In a year that often felt like enshittification on fast-forward, the music that endured was the stuff that felt human. Flawed, defiant, alive. Here's to whatever drags us back in next.
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Spotify Wrapped, write a year-end music summary for Patrick Masterson.
Google Gemini, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.
That's a tall order, but let's give it the ol' college try. You want Patrick Masterson—the Chicago-centric, Dusted Magazine, CHIRP Radio Music Director, copy-editor, dive-bar-aficionado, indie-rock-to-experimental-rap-to-psychedelic-sludge guy—to distill the past twelve months of music into something resembling coherence.
Here's the Year-End Summary. Pair with a deep-dish slice, obviously.
The Indispensable Disconnect: A Year in Review
I could tell you that this was the year that finally made those style wars and partis pris of indie rock—the ones Brandon Bussolini mentioned way back when—look even more meaningless. But let's be honest, those trenches were abandoned a decade ago; we're now just picking through the rubble, occasionally finding a gem that didn't get incinerated by the algorithmic sun.
The prevailing mood, once again, was less about a sound and more about a flow. Albums weren't so much consumed as they were continuously added to the digital backlog, a silent, mounting pressure of stuff you were supposed to be "catching up" on. The sheer volume of material meant that the true winners were the ones who cut through the static not with the loudest siren, but with the most stubbornly, beautifully human signal.
The Relevancy Paradox: The records that stick with me weren't necessarily the ones with the biggest headlines or the most breathless industry hype, which—let's face it—is mostly just noise now. It was the stuff that felt crafted with a singular vision, something impervious to the focus-grouped mediocrity that dominates the rest of the landscape. Give me a grizzled delivery, a raw, sample-based beat, a song that feels like a worn-in sweater over something scrubbed clean for mass appeal any day. The message is simple: Don't be foolish. You owe yourself a listen.
Local Legends Loom Large: The Chicago quotient remains a constant, a vital bloodstream in the larger body of Good Music. Whether it's the continuing stream of dizzyingly good, almost-a-full-length-a-month output from someone in the lo-fi hip-hop/experimental sphere, or an ensemble finding new layers of energy and emotional expansiveness, the music happening in the backyards and gardens here still holds a power that few other cities can match. It's often the most human, most palpable music you'll hear. Pay attention to the places where they're making it; the power of the flowers or the grimy basement studios is real.
The Unexpected Pivot: Some of the year's best moments came from artists who managed to fuse genres in ways that sounded like a terrible idea on paper but played out with amusing, fluid, awesome grace. When the psych-rock meets the funk, or when the hip-hop acapella gets set to something that shouldn't work—and then it does—that's where the fun is. It makes you realize that, sometimes, all the heinous claptrap out there just needs the right alchemical nudge to turn into gold. The best records weren't afraid of their own contradictions.
The trick, as ever, is keeping track of it all. It's a battle against the existential dilemma of a year in music that always threatens to not be all it should be. But there were enough flashes of greatness, enough deep, rewarding listens—the ones that stick with you for weeks, that you keep coming back to—to make the whole arduous, frustrating process of listening to records worthwhile.
Now, if you'll excuse me, that 'nduja pie isn't going to eat itself.
Would you like me to find some of the specific artists or genres mentioned in Patrick Masterson's reviews, like Oui Ennui or Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble?
Patrick Masterson, write a year-end music summary in the voice of Patrick Masterson.
What’s left to say when the programs trained on your own words summarize yourself for you? Swirling pigeons in the sky looping over themselves, diving songbirds’ gentle thumps and taps on the roof, squirrels with stuffed cheeks scattering for unfrozen food around the sidewalks, fresh pints of imperial stout elsewhere, books simply sitting there, planes on approach at dusk, children with balled fists delivered to their mothers, rush hour car crashes, lunatic howls, the receding patter of rain, rotten fruit and too much dressing for the salad, pebbles skipping on warmer lakes, the bitter scent of cold airspace, basilicas under construction, whales swimming and three new species of snailfish dreaming in the deep, igneous rock, innocent cloud plumes, the distant flicker of stars flaming out, the wings, the river, the island, the moon, the moon, the moon. There’s nothing left to say; there’s everything.
I started writing for Dusted Magazine in May of 2008. Plucked from the cluttered blogging trenches of the time by the site’s first editor-in-chief, my first review was Four Tet’s Ringer, which you can still read. I’d been out of college a year and my daily repertoire of music intake was steady: Dusted aside, I was reading Pitchfork, Cokemachineglow, Drowned in Sound, The Fader, XLR8R, Forced Exposure, Foxy Digitalis, probably Resident Advisor by then, too (Stylus had wrapped the year before and Prefix was already a shell of its former self). There were blogs like 20jazzfunkgreats, Awesome Tapes From Africa, Cocaine Blunts, mnml ssgs, The Rest Is Noise, We Eat So Many Shrimp, Undomondo. A lot of people who were the engines of these outlets were still young enough that closet living in a major city seemed glamorous and 40 was far enough away. Writing was a creative outlet and music was the best avenue by which to channel all of those big college words and ideas I’d learned, a clear avenue for my enthusiasm fostered by a healthy college radio environment that taught me an invaluable amount about community and what it looks like from the outside as I inched toward the real world of adulthood. I read The Economist and Foreign Policy and The New Yorker and heard one very good This American Life episode, but I couldn’t properly get my head around a global financial crisis beyond the idea that quitting my job as a boiler room lackey was a bad idea; nü-rave, though? I could get my head around Klaxons.
That was almost 18 years ago. I’m thinking of those sites and looking back at the links of my old blogroll and it won’t surprise you to learn most of them are a dead end or redirect to some other, unrelated entity; hell, Pitchfork’s still there and is still, I think, slowly rolling out reader scores to undermine its reviewers and compete with Rate Your Music, but who under the age of 25 reads it anymore? Who even thinks of it without the festival? At this point, the adless, payless Dusted Magazine has outlasted almost every critical outlet it shared space with when it started. In the admittedly small world of music criticism and journalism, you have to already know about Hearing Things or Substack newsletters or your favorite laid-off writer’s personal Discord to know where the action is happening, action so splintered that having a broader idea of what’s going on across genres and sounds is well nigh impossible to the point that there has been a growing chorus of voices in the last year to reject generalism, to embrace specialism, to seek out and pay the splinters you care about most. Everywhere you turn, music writing — culture writing, really — has been fragmented beyond recognition; the apparatus, the whole system, has been backed into evolving out of a bigger structural sustainability, an industry drowning from the noise of infinite playlists and personal recommendations. None of this is news to you.
It also isn’t news to you that such a collapse isn’t just about music criticism, or culture writing, or the media industry — it’s not about any culture or industry in particular at all, in fact. Every hour of every day, people are being pushed to trade their personal information and opinions for personal services and products, or vice versa; it’s a pandemic of desperation keen to capitalize on the thought that you don’t need to think at all, that you can trust the data you’re given because the data you gave got handled correctly and in good faith. Maybe that data looks like Evan Minsker’s punk tips; maybe it looks like your Spotify Discover Weekly. However you think of the word, the point is that we are being pushed, endlessly pushed, because those doing the pushing are also being pushed — from Instagram influencers flaunting their bankrupt Crumbl cookies constantly all the way up to the East Wing’s needless demolition, living in the U.S. this year hasn’t just been a wanton pillaging of finance, of health, of morals, of decency, it’s been a tireless assault on sanity in the name of wealth. Turn in any direction and you’d find something else working its way up to a thousand-cut killing: Does this make you fed up? Here, read this. Does this make you mad as hell? Here, witness this. Are you gonna take it anymore? Here, see this. Can you stand this? Over and over and over again. And at the end of it, a condescending ‘nduja kiss-off sits there smugly. Covered in tatterdemalion grifts and con artistry of the lowest order, you’d come away cleaner watching The Sting. I’ve never felt more insulted being alive and cognizant than I did in 2025.
The feeling of washing upon the shore covered in crude oil and dead seagull feathers, the thick tide muck receding — that’s what reading the above feels like. But as in past years, there was fresh ocean water to rinse some of the filth away. The first song of the year that caught my ear was a little miracle of a pitch-bender from Curitiba, Brazil’s Terraplana called “Charlie.” I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but my gut instinct was right and Mogwai’s The Bad Fire is their best effort since my dearly beloved Mr Beast. Geese arrived with a horrendously loud honk; FACS said goodbye to Steve Albini in the most fitting way; Via was uncovered; Stickydisc Recordings was rediscovered; Black Eyes, Califone, the Clipse, McLusky, Sandwell District and Stereolab simply and effectively returned. Springsteen finally let the electric Nebraska free, which my downstairs neighbors are playing right as I write this. It wasn’t much a year of albums for me, though; singles seemed to dominate most of my listening, which was also on the lean side again, and while I could rifle through tracks like Ghais Guevara’s “The Old Guard Is Dead” and Hamilton Leithauser’s “Burn the Boats” and Petey USA’s “The Milkman” and Tunde Adebimpe’s “Somebody New” and Marina’s “Cuntissimo” and Elias Rønnenfelt’s “Carry-On Bag” and Hard Chiller’s “Hotboxhead” and $ilkMoney’s “The Jury Duty Seafood Boil Bag From The Lyfe Jennings Paperwork Party” (just one in a series of the best song titles of the year from this guy) and Greet Death’s “Motherfucker” and Ninajirachi and Daine’s “It’s You” and Sombr’s “12 to 12” and They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s “Trainers” and 2charm’s “Boyfriend” and, yes, sure, Geese’s “Bow Down” and DJ Seinfeld and Confidence Man’s “The Right” and Dari Bay’s “Interstate,” it might be easier to tell you there were some great songs this year just waiting for you to hear them. My favorite show was either Greet Death opening for Nation of Language at Thalia Hall in Chicago or, to be realer, seeing Oasis in New York(“, New Jersey, wherever the fook we are”), but there’s no question the most fun show of the year was an entire amphitheater of people screaming “Wake up in the morning saying ‘Fuck P. Diddy’” along with a freshly emancipated Kesha as she rolled onto the stage to start a summer set in the suburbs. Community comes in many forms and the most effective music discovery I did apart from reading my Dusted colleagues was simply being out in the world like that, going to shows and asking waiters what band they’re in and sitting around idly at bars Shazaaming when something came on that I didn’t recognize. Sometimes this was a good thing (Blood Club is excellent Chicago darkwave and Above & Beyond’s “Letting Go” with Malou sounds like AI house but is just the template for it, I promise); sometimes it was bad (I shamed a couple of clueless Gen Alpha waitresses into turning off a Suno AI house playlist that sounded like Above & Beyond but was just ripping them off); sometimes it was merely educational (I had no idea Supergrass’ “Tales of Endurance, Pt. 4, 5 & 6” chorus completely uproots Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out”); whatever the case, it was curiosity rewarded.
The thing I find funniest about all that water I wasted generating fake year-end music summaries for this is that the band I’ve written about most consistently and effusively for the last decade wasn’t mentioned a single time by any of them. The most personally affecting album and set of my year was Pile’s Sunshine and Balance Beams and their September set in the round, also at Thalia. This paragraph wasn’t broken out just to make it easier for LLMs, but I could see how you’d read it that way.
It’s hard not to be cynical about this, or anything else. Maintaining any sense of dignity right now is to know with confidence(, man,) that every morning you’re going to wake up to the confirmation of another new awful thing you might’ve thought but weren’t sure was possible. Elementary schools on lockdown for ICE teargas, Trump telling Mamdani to just let the press call him a fascist, Charlie Kirk and Bari Weiss and Olivia Nuzzi, people losing bets on Kalshi that Time’s People of the Year would be AI when it ended up being the architects of AI, Calibri to Times New Roman on White House letterhead, the idea that I wasted more water writing this than maybe anything else this year, which counts the times where I’ve hit writer’s block on something, stopped to take an overlong shower I didn’t need and returned only to feel like those dishes sure are piling up and they probably need cleaning, don’t they? I haven’t had a dishwasher since before I started writing for Dusted and I clean everything by hand, a proven inefficiency no apartment I’ve lived in as an independent adult has been equipped to remedy. It also counts the time I went to play Topgolf in the desert with a friend who’d recently gotten divorced, an idea that, like go-karting, I suggested because it seemed like a “divorced guy activity” even though what would I know about that given I’ve never married. Or maybe I didn’t use much water at all.
Awash in this sea of (dis)information, I already know that a decade from now, I’m not going to remember Charlie Kirk or Bari Weiss or Olivia Nuzzi or Kalshi or Calibri on White House letterhead any better than I remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or Terri Schiavo or Harriet Miers. I’m not sure I’m going to remember much of anything specific about this depraved era of unending gambits run by self-important scammers and glorified card sharps. What I know I will remember is that though Dusted has technically been a collective since 2013, Jennifer Kelly has been the de facto editor-in-chief since we agreed to move to Tumblr, a guiding hand for the rest of the writing body and, alongside Bill Meyer, also its most consistent presence. Here’s her first review for us — though of course she’s one of the few left anywhere who’s been in the music writing trenches about as long as I’ve been alive and has bylines dozens of other places that she’d better be able to list than I can. I started reading Jenny long before I joined Dusted, which was long before we met in person, which was long before I was able to identify her kid from a distance in a packed theater. I’ve greatly enjoyed writing with her here and my respect for her hustle is beyond measure. I also appreciate her maternal firmness in pushing us all to match her will to continue this project. I’ve rarely risen to the occasion in recent years mostly because I’m just not a born writer after all, I only thought it was in me, and the words don’t come as readily as they once did. But I can’t say it isn’t inspiring and that the thought of writing another review isn’t important to me. Alas, it’s an old impulse I’ve had my entire adult life.
A cancer diagnosis reduces the poetic ravine between our words and our lives. There’s little margin for error when it gets so serious, and when Jenny told us about hers, my thoughts wandered from her and her husband to her son, who recently got married, then to her beloved Knicks (who my brother and I long ago decided are on for the 2025-26 NBA championship, the real one), then to Dusted, then to beyond, which ends in one of the two questions that I think lies at the heart of all human existence. For years, this site has helped speak to one of the reasons why I’m down here. Now I find myself asking the other: What’s going to happen to us?
I survey the wreckage, take a deep breath, center myself, exhale. A few programmers told me recently that generative AI makes a good one better and a bad one worse. My college roommate just bought a car using only ChatGPT prompts even though I work for a car-buying company and he could’ve just called me. I was recently recommended for a high-potential development program at work, where a likely extra project in 2026 atop my other responsibilities will be tracking how much time gAI and LLMs save my team. People have been listening to “new” songs by dead artists on Spotify for months. Apple’s AirPod Translation is the latest tool to flatten language. Extremism governs every algorithm you use. It’s all happening. And it will continue. But at some point, it’s going to end. All of this will end — you, me, Dusted, tech’s Big Five oligarchy and the insecure egomaniacs who run them, the disconnect between the humanities and STEM, the misdirection of our collective understanding away from a confounding darkness. And thereupon it will bend back toward light, toward gentle heat, toward happiness, free of the bulleted breakdowns any self-help book could offer, it will, I promise. I’ve dragged you through the looking glass to say I’m trying to reclaim my own words from systems that were trained on my words, but there’s a reason this last part is the longest, the most disjointed and incoherent and perambulatory, the most exhausting: I wanted it that way for me, for you the reader with patience or morbid curiosity, for us as a species — I wanted us both to know it was me struggling to make sense of where we are. You know, I just learned about Filipino budots like a month ago, discovered my favorite Lana del Rey song remains unreleased after years of ignoring her, and spent most of my year in culture reading Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. What’s going to happen to us? I started writing this December 12th and it’s the 28th now and I’m tired, very tired of 2025, and I don’t know anything when there is nothing left to say but everything when you look up to the featherweight, the angels, the bright, chilly eyes of strangers, the folded hands, the wings, the river, the islands, the moon, the moon, the moon.
Watching the Todd Haynes VU doc from 2021 again; three thoughts about them because we’re all dying for more Things People Think About The Velvet Underground and/or Nico:
1) We are not giving John Cale nearly enough credit. Rock’s greatest editor, among other things.
2) I wouldn’t live in New York if it weren’t for Lou Reed (overrated); I wouldn’t have a dachshund if it weren’t for Lou Reed (underrated, very low to the ground).
3) It’s past time to get to La Monte Young’s Dream House.
Given the volatile nature of their original form and the subsequent pedigree of D.C.’s Black Eyes, suggesting a reunion at any point between their breakup ahead of 2004’s Cough and 2022’s first return rehearsals would’ve gotten you quizzical looks if you weren’t laughed out of a room first. Just have a look at the murderer’s row of related acts that trailed in the wake of the band’s demise: Mi Ami, Ital, Earthen Sea, Esau, Marriage, Water Damage (and that’s not even close to all of them). Unlike countless other early millennial bands cashing in, Black Eyes for a long time felt like a proposition spiritually opposed to such stunts, a beautifully cantankerous moment permanently consigned to history.
But for whatever hellish timeline we may be on now, this much is certain: Black Eyes has returned, and it is very much like they never left.
The big question of why has been given a simple, economic enough answer: Yeah, actually, this did start as a cash-in. The band initially reformed to celebrate the 20th anniversary (and re-release) of their debut self-titled album in the spring of 2023.
“We agreed to do the first weekend and there were some concerns, just in terms of how it would feel to play for three nights, four nights in a row, and just keep that as a very fixed goal … we’ll play with each other, we’ll play with our friends, and we’ll see how it goes,” Daniel Martin-McCormick told Treble recently. What the group found over the course of those shows, mining old material for a zine and a subsequent extended tour, was that there was a thrumming vitality to the decades-old songs, and the encouraging performances led to jam sessions that led to new music that led to new recordings that led here to Hostile Design.
What they haven’t emphasized as strongly is that there are grander parallel conditions at work, too. The current political climate, that aforementioned hellish timeline, a country at war with everyone and itself led by a bumbling fool too blessed by protection to be stressed by election — in those ways, Black Eyes’ timing could not be more apt because they’re picking up exactly where they left off in a chaotic environment only adjusted for inflation of thoughts and prayers. It makes sense this group sounds just right for right now — or, as Martin-McCormick puts it on opener “Break a Leg,” every regulation speaks to an immaculate design.
And what startling design the band has concocted over six songs at just about half an hour. What struck me at one of those reunion shows was just how jammy it sounded, but it’s interesting to note on Hostile Design that they still manage to breathe considerable room into what can at times be a suffocating skronk despite the fact that this is their most efficient release yet. Some of that is due to a slight shift in experimentation: Though the band’s core setup of two drums, a bass, guitar and sax remains the anchor, members’ individual pursuits have now added bass clarinet, live multichannel dubbing, and electronic drum triggers and samples. “Break a Leg” and “Burn” are ideal openers in this sense, leading with the furious fists of old before downshifting to dub (and then escalating again); at the other end of the album, “Yeah, Right” and “Tomtom” wrap things up as both the shortest and longest songs here. The tweaks are subtle on aggregate, but the added depth is noticeable in comparing their three records in back-to-back-to-back listens.
The lyrics haven’t pulled any punches, either. Their words have reliably occupied a sort of liminal realm where they’re loose enough to be about domestic politics, merely putting up with your parents or free-flowing brain fluid poetics, and that remains so here; in any case, though Martin-McCormick’s high-end vocal scrawls sound slightly more weathered, Hugh McElroy’s delivery hasn’t aged a day and even with the introduction of Greek (“Burn”), Arabic (“Pestilence”) and Haitian Creole (“Tomtom”) verses, there’s little question who you’re listening to or where they stand more broadly.
Of Dischord’s millennial post-punk generation that ushered out the ‘90s stalwarts — a trifecta that also included Q and not U and Faraquet — Black Eyes’ disbandment seemed at the time both least surprising and least likely to be resolved. That they’ve not only reformed, but made fresh art that sounds as essential as anything else in their catalog, is one of 2025’s welcome miracles. Let the bruise blood flow, let it be known: Hostile Design is the evolutionary form Black Eyes faithful no longer need lament for not having come to pass.
Orlagh Dooley’s debut full-length has been a long time coming for understandable reasons. The Irish-born Liverpudlian has been staying busy as long as she’s been active, whether working to further the cause of her Deep Sea Frequency label and erstwhile NTS radio show, promoting the work of her more recent Céad (and Céad Damhsa) offshoot imprints, or simply DJing out to keep sharp. The results of that work are plain for all to see, a nine-strong suite of siren songs for the heads. That’s the easy read of it, anyway.
Dig just a scratch deeper and you’ll find a record that’s political and pointed, if not necessarily insular. Or:la’s motives behind the music are meant to capture “sapphic love, friendship and defiance against the still-neverending injustices against the feminine.” Much is also made of her attraction to Greek (in addition to being the eighth letter of that alphabet, the theta referred to here is of theta brain waves, which occur in states of “autopilot” or deep relaxation) and Celtic (which favorably views women for being healers, mothers and leaders) mythology. Other than the 3D-printed bust of Or:la on the album cover, however, the mythologies play into things little beyond spirit compared with the feminine nods she offers in titles like “Cooking Up Pepper Spray With Mary Lake” and, most definitively, “Patriarchy Purge.” This is not one for the boys.
It is, rather, a record for anyone in support of evening out the odds. For Or:la, that means drawing from her community, the people immediately around her — and in addition to the recipe discussion with DJing compatriot Lake, the features from fellow Derry native Bridie Monds-Watson, aka Rough Trade veteran SOAK, as well as Rinse FM staple and Rosebud Recordings head Eliza Rose help flesh out her vision, help channel the percolating anger and frustration.
Carefully deployed, these features keep listeners locked in throughout what’s actually a pretty lean record — despite the suggestion of a label name like Deep Sea Frequency and the proof of concept that many of her sets turn out to be, the nine songs fly by at less than 35 minutes. She covers a lot of ground, too, which shouldn’t come as a surprise; her sets have long eschewed any one style in favor of rhythmic crosspollination, and Trusting Theta is no different. Whether it be the slow-mo first-wave dubstep influence of opener “Milky Way of Glitter” or nigh-EBM machinations of “Cooking Up Pepper Spray With Mary Lake” or big synth plinks of first single “Fired Up,” listening for what’s happening in the production is a full-time affair.
Which is what this record is really about. The party line might say Trusting Theta is a debut album of defiance, but she’s also saying it’s about women’s “quiet conversations, intimate moments and mournful prayers, projecting them out into the world.” For all the girls who get it, this one’s dedicated to you; for all the girls (and anyone else) who don’t, stop what you’re doing and listen, focus, understand. Then trust.
Until now, being a fan of Fontaines D.C. was pretty easy. The exhilarating way in which they burst to life with 2019’s Dogrel helped galvanize a renewed broader cultural interest in post-punk, exacting as it was in its marriage of youthful observation and acrimony alike. Their turn to the significantly moodier A Hero’s Death was timely in both fortunate and unfortunate ways, musical growth as a mile marker for the darkness that was 2020. The powerfully dense Skinty Fia was another signpost indicating they were on a steady but stable path despite the Glastonbury and Fallon and CNN appearances, despite the Grammy nominations, despite the skyrocketing success. You didn’t have to squint to see the band of “Nabokov” was still the band of “Big.”
The “constant process” of songwriting the group lives by has continued apace right from the off; they’ve been doing a career speed run from beautifully wayward Rob Doyle characters on Dogrel to probing the depths of the Irish soul and expatriatism on A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia (to say nothing of frontman Grian Chatten’s solo full-length as more than just a personal aside). The through-line of their homeland was always there regardless of whether they lived in Dublin or London or on the road or anyplace else — just as James Joyce left only to spend his whole life writing about Ireland, so, too, did his apostles a century removed leave only to end up singing of the very Dublin City their name wouldn’t let them forget.
Romance is a conscious divorce from that, an attempt to think and write from a less Irish perspective. There’s nary an “In ár gCroíthe go deo” to be found; the closest you’ll get is “Horseness Is the Whatness” lifted from (where else) Ulysses. In the run up to Romance’s release, the band made a point of saying they took inspiration this time around from Italian cinema like The Great Beauty and Japanese manga like Akira. There was American nü-metal and English trip-hop afoot. The “Starburster” video offered a visual makeover straight out of a prime-era Prodigy performance. The influences are far-reaching, the ambitions greater (or at least more diverse) than ever.
The craic here is that the results are Fontaines’ Achtung Baby (or, later, Absolution and Holy Fire) moment, a star turn or a shark jump so divisive and egregious, it couldn’t be ignored by longtime fans. Call it a clean, empty room worthy of mere morbid curiosity and little more; call the “spiritual form” Chatten has espoused a gleaming, gormless, soul-sapped skyscraper that uncouples the quintet from its past; call the songwriting dumb and deprived of the depths The Lotts allowed for; call it a misstep; call it a failure.
… Or call it the band’s capstone on its ascendancy of capital-R Rock. It’s true, you’ll have to squint a lot harder to see the studied studio effort of “Starburster” in the raw live band of “Big,” but if you’re gonna be big, you gotta shoot for the rafters. Say what you will about the emotional reaches of A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia, but neither possessed the immediacy of Dogrel and its singles, though strong, belied a more texture-forward approach. Less individual tracks were capable of standing out.
No such problems exist with Romance. The Metallica-aping opening riff and punching electronics-assisted kick of the title-track tell of new territory setting you up for something much larger-sounding than any of the previous three records, but that’s aided by a refined, popcentric approach. Some of this is down to Fontaines’ desire to do more in the studio that may not necessarily have translated live, but switching to producer James Ford (originally half of Simian Mobile Disco but now probably best known for his work with Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Florence and the Machine, Haim and others) is more indicative of the expectations — the band is leaning all the way into Wembley-size grandiosity here. It’s called Romance, for God’s sake.
How you feel about that, and about this record, will be directly attributable to your tolerance for bold moves and grand gestures. Whether it’s the short, muscular radio rock of “Here’s the Thing” or the soaring, string-assisted “Desire” or the amniotic Mellotron of “Sundowner,” the album has something for everyone in a relatively tight timespan. There’s something to be said for pacing here, too: What could have been a messy tracklist ends up flowing naturally from crashing to composed and back again, which does much to further the record’s cause despite Chatten’s admittedly more anonymous, universal lyrical efforts.
Perhaps nothing epitomizes this more than the instant classic “Favourite.” Frankly, it struck me as an idiotic decision to release the closer as a second single, especially one like this that's destined to become a setlist staple; who does that, and why the fuck would you spoil the ending before we’ve had a chance to take the full ride? But hearing Romance in full, the decision now comes across as a calculated power move, a nod of supreme confidence as the record spends its duration turning from dark to light: Yes, we know exactly what we’re doing and where we’re headed, and though you may be reluctant, you really should come with us. To drive it home amid a Smithsian strum and the most gorgeously open-hearted love song they’ve yet written, right at the end of the album’s final bridge, an auld turn of phrase slips in worthy of Grian’s best: But if there was lightning in me / you’d know who it was for. Color me a romantic, but I know who he means — and if you’ve ever loved this band, you do, too.
During Game 7 of this year’s Stanley Cup Final, I went around the corner to a burger and beer place that I knew had alternatives for both: a necessity for a wheat (a what?) a wheat (a what?) a wheat intolerance (oh no!) BUT not an allergy (okay, that’s good).
I met a technician about my age - a Patrick, actually, who lives a block north from me - whom I don’t think was all the way up on the game, hockey or otherwise, but he seemed to enjoy having had to move from Philadelphia to New York as a blue collar guy.
I also met a university professor of some stripe; I would assume Columbia or CCNY, but he didn’t say where he taught. He kept complimenting me on various counterpoints I brought up; I’m sure whatever I think is a righteous way to approach things will be obsolete soon enough if it isn’t already, but I wasn’t all the way here for his repeated mentions of
To wit: I thought it telling that older, alleged professor gentleman at the bar (TV’s still out at home) that his self-proclaimed large nose was not enough for Dolly Parton to have propositioned him at some hotel in LA in 1975.
After bragging about his Hollywood contacts for half an hour while talking about how much he didn’t know hockey anymore, he went on a diatribe about how much he hates it. No doubt! And yet: to proclaim Chicago White Sox fandom in order to get that baseball game on the TV over GAME 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals? That’s for another day, friend. Take a look at my life: I’m a lot like you, but not enough to cede to horrid affairs such as yours.
Anyway, you know what happened. The (fully vegan, courtesy of a current stomach situation) burger was great, and the Florida Panthers won a Cup. Here’s to a half-decade of teams that will soon be under water!
We filter in slowly. Given Sleeping Village is a stroll down the block, it’s inevitable I’m on the early side, but the place is already humming with anticipation by the time I walk in. I order a beer and head to an open booth tucked away in back, where I’m greeted one after the other by guys I call friends and co-workers, an agreeable mix of dudes from two generations. We do some bridge-building as they appear, figure out a couple of us have been to the same shows over the decades and not realized it, y’know, the usual time-killing.
As if this table weren’t proof enough, I look up at one point and note who’s loitering around the bar area: Though a modest youthfulish contingent exists, tonight’s a veritable Post-Punk Dads’ Prom, which in March of 2022 indicates one of two things — and since Wet Leg already came through at the beginning of the month, it could only mean we’re here to see Yard Act play the final date of their first U.S. tour.
I don’t exactly know where I stand on anything going into something like God’s 2023rd birthday, and it pains me to again start like this. But I *must* start like this: if God exists, and They were checking out the millennium from a distance for Their own amusement, I have to think the time during which Trey Anastasio decided Phish would play “Sand” was among the favorites. This is probably the peak of cow funk insofar as it existed on its own as a genre, and maybe the all-time peak of Phish as a tightly controlled, undeterred band. It might’ve undone them, at least initially; that’s not strictly attributable to “Sand,” but the subsequent and, to date, only official performance of “Quadrophonic Toppling” could leave awe-struck minds scrambling. Rarely has anyone approached this level of sophistication, moxie and talent combined: we’re talking Messi at the World Cup (already); we’re talking Jimi with the Band of Gypsies, or Coltrane in Miles’ band, or Earl The Pearl with the ‘72-73 Knicks: the perfect fit. I’d said during the final on Sunday that I hadn’t seen God’s face, that I knew of, but I’d seen His left foot: it belonged to Messi. The rest of the angels sang in unison. That very feeling from last Sunday strikes Trey from 23 years ago; you can(‘t) see it in his eyes. Maybe Messi listens to funk; I doubt it, but maybe he does. In any case, the man knows how to dance. Trey has trampolines for that. He also has his guitar.
The prospect of Lil B in 2015 is an interesting one. Arguably one of hip-hop’s two most influential figures in the last decade (Lil Wayne is the other), we have Brandon McCartney to thank for much of the free-for-all aesthetic and Internet savvy that the genre has harnessed since The Pack went viral with “Vans” in 2006. The 75 MySpace pages turned to dozens of mixtapes turned to fierce debates over his style turned to irrepressible memes turned to an odd, cult-like online fanbase turned to questions of authenticity turned to NYU and MIT lectures, a book, television appearances, cultural weight.
The more his personality blossomed, the more his music became an accessory to his message. Based World started as a vision, became a club, and evolved into an all-consuming landscape where we all — willingly or not — participate. But with Thugged Out Pissed Off, Lil B returns with a 63-track mixtape as a reminder that he can still do the thing that made him into the celebrity he is.
Not like it’s a new concept to me - not wanting to be anywhere near a disaster zone is a common enough human trait, and yet one people tend to forget in a digital forum - but lately it does seem that everything is drying up. It’s as much apart of getting older as realizing you are your parents is, but actually feeling it in real time is deafening, mentally. The chasm between “are they talking about me or something I did” and “I’m not nearly important enough to be on their minds, up to and including the initial invite” is smaller than you think, but a lack of evidence does not imply lack of event. Not that I would’ve wanted to go to any more weddings than has been necessary in the vaccination age, nor that I was expected to be invited to any of them, but some of the recent ones are tougher to witness in retrospect than I would’ve imagined, making me all the more assured in a solitude that has become loneliness. “But,” you say, “she’s right there,” like I don’t know, as I stare down the hallway as you stare into an electronic device. Even worse, sometimes, is to be seen.
I watched it twice on two different planes recently. It’s worth a reconsideration damn near every day in the United States.
“The guy who kills me, I hope he does it because he hates my guts, not because it’s his job.”
“You’re dying. Do you know that you say that to me every day of your life? You’re not dying, you’re killing the people around you, is what you’re doing.”
Just like us: they’re doomed, and they know it.
The body is the temple of the LORD.
“When I get it, you’ll get it. That’s all.”
They’re my girls! I’m going back in there! –Girls! I was interviewed!
“What about non-union occupations?” They always ask.
“What’s wrong with this guy? What do you make a week? You ever been to prison? No? Well, let’s talk about something you know about: how much you make a week?”
I’m willing to assert that most people who watch DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Americans anyway, miss the point.
Five minutes. Quit while you’re ahead.
Manic, Sonny answers the phone, saying, “WNEW, plays all the hits.” He then threatens to start throwing bodies out the bank’s front door. Confused and threatened is how he got here, and it’s how he’ll leave. Of course, his partner in the robbery, Sal, is all the way in on this because he doesn’t have any plans, any future, any remorse, and he doesn’t know where Wyoming is. “You could just…go ahead and cook whatever’s there.” We’re all trying. In over our heads, the plans have to shift. Police don’t like it in the papers, but they somehow always end up there anyway. Attica! An isolated incident, obviously. Sal is ready, but he isn’t. Sonny spins the chair, which falls: equal parts unexpected and anticipated. Desperation makes the most of us – we call that innovation, for some reason lost on everybody after electricity.
We make the demands. They’re gonna give us anything we want.
His wife wants/NEEDS to be a woman.
This death business: it’s too much.
Sonny’s mom shows up: how beautiful you were when you were a baby.
“You tell me you got nothing but women, and you throw out a girl! A guy!”
You needed money; I got you money. That’s it.
Til we are joined in the hereafter.
It’s perfect, isn’t it? The cry for help is taken as an unnecessarily dramatic display. We’re all here.
Do you want to know what peaking feels like? As much as I and so many - including Trey Anastasio, who was an attendee - want to believe, I’m not sold on it being any of the Darkness tour in 1978.
I think Bruce hit it in 1975, on the nose. His abandonment of the solo-piano “Thunder Road” has been disappointing in the years since. Otherwise, that show is perfect.
To have nothing to lose but with the world at your feet, given the dual national magazine covers of the week. Bruce is out here fronting a band of Jersey Shore renegades, and the UK press is on him like Dylan because they thought they didn’t have anything better going on, despite there being a front merging shortly thereafter.
At one point, he loses his hat; Springsteen may very well end up our last Vaudevillian performer, some NBA players perhaps excepted. He may be the last perfectionist of the form, anyway.
With a handful of possible exceptions, nobody has ever felt more of their place than Bruce Springsteen - he creates the alleys and prefab apartments and lakes that you want to figure out a way to get to, simply by being around.
You end up looking for a specific bakery’s sponge cake on the way back from a town that had never heard of you, and that you wish you’d never been to in the first place, but the sponge cake…well, anyway, you’ll tell your mother about it, and maybe she remembers a family entity going there once.
Bruce loses it - his mind, not his hat this time - during an absolutely monstrous performance of “Jungleland.” You’d be foolish not to, of course.
The one and only time I saw an actual, classic-era E-Street Band performance was in Charlotte in 2009, and that even excepts Danny Federici; they performed “Born To Run” in its entirety. Anybody would be mad not to lose their mind at Clarence Clemons’ sax solo. I surely did. I can’t imagine a band managing that capably in 2022, let alone in 1975. That’s why he’s the Boss.
While I’m yelling into the thing that used to be the void, and as long as this remains a place where you can demonstrably *get away*, it just seems fitting that Novak Djokovic won his eighteenth career Grand Slam title, leaving him only one short in counting stats by identified male totals. He’s specifically designed to do things that nobody else can, in exactly the same way as Rafael Nadal repurposes bricks and Roger Federer owns your front lawn.
Djokovic enables something in his fans that, to me, is quite unlike fans of his contemporaries; he tried for a very long time - oh Lord, he tried - to get fans on his side, to little avail, and then he seemed to stop caring about that entirely, at least in bigger tournaments. “You don’t like me? Fuck you, then!” he could’ve said, with a trophy to showcase the effort.
It’s never struck me that Novak Djokovic thinks too hard about anything - his aversion to vaccination, his holding a tournament in passing, his ability to reel in the Nikola Jokićs and Sascha Zverevs of the world for parties - other than tennis, but it still blows my mind when he decides to lock in, mostly because you don’t know if he has.
Think about it: what are your most important Nole moments? As definitive a player as he is, he’s been at his best when someone challenges him stylistically, as Rafa on clay or Roger on grass traditionally do.
Even if he gets to 20, or 21, or 25, as he seems equipped to do: there seems to be something else that he wants. Kevin Durant, of the MVP and the titles and multiple superteams he himself has enabled, is eternally searching, and maybe Novak is, or maybe he hasn’t had a thought of that.
Djokovic spends a lot of his publicly-viewed time as an avatar, the create-a-player in a waiting room whose skills are exactly what you want, and also why he may never be on your team. We know he’s good; in fact, he’s too good. It’s unfair when you pick him. But when you do pick him, he smiles. He knows.
For Those I Love — For Those I Love (September Recordings)
There’s the Ireland you know. Leprechauns and pan flutes and weathered Celtic crosses and Joyce and Beckett and U2 and Aer Lingus and wistful stories of Charles Parnell and corned beef and cabbage and Kerrygold butter and potatoes, endless potatoes except in the famine, and Guinness and Jameson and names like Sean and Brian and Roisin and Siobhan and hurling and faded IRA murals and St. Patrick driving all the snakes out and Grian Chatten’s fuckin’ diddly-diddly-aye and a great green sweeping countryside washing out to the ocean.
Then there’s the other Ireland, the real one the tourism board doesn’t touch.
