It doesn’t matter if you’re into hardcore, post-, prog, ‘alternative’ (whatever that means), or the good old fashioned kind, you’re eating good these days because capital-R Rock is back, baby, and it seems like it’s here to stay. PPC, my preferred Aussie psych act (maybe tied with Tropical Fuck Storm, depending on the record), did what seems to be typical of psych rock groups these days and released two full-length records. I had trouble picking which I loved more this year for their spot on this list, so I’m throwing out any pretense of structural conformity to spotlight both. Moonman has this really solid, classic groove to it with great fuzzy riffs and impressively complex fingerwork on display especially in its second half. Pogo on the other hand comes out at a full-on sprint and doesn’t relent, delivering some of the Crumpets’ best walls of sound to date. I also really enjoyed the little tributes to other groups’ best moments of psychedelia, the most obvious being the Beatles hat-tip on the sweltering and spicy opener. I may not remember every song that this group puts out, especially if they’re intent on keeping up the pace of their output, but I’ll carry with me the way they make me feel throughout the new year.
As a big time SwansHead I was admittedly pretty disappointed with their last two albums and haven’t revisited them much outside of the months following their releases. They followed three of the most incredible releases ever put out by Swans (‘the trilogy,’ as fans have dubbed it), so there was a pretty high bar to clear, but even if you set that aside the two albums just felt listless, directionless, and muted. Something was missing in the performances, and I was starting to write it off as a consequence of Michael Gira and Norman Westberg getting into their seventies and the band just running out of steam after a fifty year run of endless left turns in the avant garde space. Apparently I was wrong. Even when he can’t walk around the stage and can barely hear anymore, M Gira proves to us that he still has gas in the tank in Birthing. Most Swans records take me a couple of listens to have everything ‘click’ but this time around all I had to do was make it to “The Merge.” That “I love you mommy” tape followed by an explosion of chaotic noise immediately made everything else coalesce and got me to allow myself to be consumed by the wall of sound that followed through to the end of the album. Birthing’s best moments are evocative of the high points of The Glowing Man, and after several re-listens it’s really competing with TGM’s position in my personal Swans tier-list. While I love the idea of Swans experimenting, returning to this well feels so much more satisfying and gratifying, and it honestly seems like it was the same for Gira/Westberg/Hahn/Pravdica/etc too the performances themselves just feel more alive across the record. Not the best Swans, but a real improvement and a great addition to their late catalog.
There is a lot of rage in the world, today, and no it’s not just restricted to that one asshole that we all can’t stand. The pandemic/post-pandemic era is quickly shaping up to be one defined by a collective awakening of our consciousnesses: to late-stage capitalism, to systemic discrimination and exploitation, to the unrelenting advancement of imperialism (something that Western scholars tried hard to convince us was extinct), to the third world’s unimaginable suffering in service of unending resource extraction, to multiple modern genocides, and, most of all, to the fact that we in the ‘first world’ are unwillingly complicit in perpetuating these evils. Whether it’s simply through our tax dollars or through virtue of accepting the creature comforts that all of these evils use to justify the status quo, we have begun as a working class to contend with the fact that blood is on our hands. And in the music from acts like Honningbarna or Hesse Kassel or Maruja, it’s apparent that this awakening is global in scale. Soft Spot was a great opener to my 2025, not for fueling the rage that I had in my heart for the era that I’m experiencing, but for validating it. Edvard Valberg’s lyrics (and CELLO PLAYING) in these punchy and chaotic punk tracks are angry, jaded, and raw, but they also speak to us all by saying “I’m here and across oceans we are feeling the same shit you are, dude.” To think that, in a country that is objectively more free than the US, this rage isn’t only felt in some form but is so universal, tells me one thing and one thing only: history has already told us how eras like the one we’re currently experiencing have an expiry date. And that, with how far-reaching the growing discontent is, it’s only a matter of time before we shift from just making music about this moment and start taking some sort of actual action. Fantastic fucking record.
I’m not a pop guy, at least traditionally, but I dabble. However, despite being of out of my traditional element here, I feel at least slightly qualified to talk about Gaga since I have followed her since listening to her earth-shattering debut (The Fame) on repeat over seventeen years ago. I’ve generally liked most of her follow-ups, including her diversions like the Tony Bennett collab, but moreso I genuinely love her as an artist and role-model for other artists, especially how she advocates for herself and the little guys in the music industry as a whole. But up until this year I have not LOVED a Gaga project as much as I did The Fame; MAYHEM breaks that streak and almost overtakes it in terms of ‘Adam Appeal.’™ Following her turn in (and disappointing tie-in record to) Joker 2: The Ill-Advised Musical, I was worried she was washed up but honestly it is on me for ever doubting the talents of Joanne. MAYHEM is Gaga at her best: punchy, topical, but also paying homage and tribute to her own musical roots. There are elements of Bowie, Madonna, Bloodshy/Avant, electro-, disco-, and synth-pop here, all seamlessly tied together by some of Gaga’s best vocals since Born This Way. The record, by design, feels simultaneously timeless and fresh, which seems to be a trend in 2025 music overall (been bumping the newest De La Soul lately and feeling a very similar type of way about their harvesting of nostalgia for new angles). This was truly a great return-to-form for an artist who has already earned a heap of praise for her versatility, and a record that has me eagerly looking forward to her next chapter for the first time in nearly a decade.
Hayden Pedigo - “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away”
While I have been tangentially-aware of Hayden ever since he ran for city council in Amarillo and because he pops up semi-frequently in subreddits that I haunt, I never took a legitimate chance on his music until this year, after learning about his collaboration with my current fave Chat Pile. I’m so glad I finally did indulge in his back catalog ahead of that release, however, because I learned very quickly that this kind of somber, atmospheric, and lyrical guitar work is perfectly suited for someone like me. As a guy who got REALLY into early ambient and dark ambient music in my early twenties, and used that genre space as my gateway into post-, prog-, and avant-garde rock/punk, it feels like listening to Hayden’s American Primitivist pieces takes me full circle. There’s definitely a lot of the southwest (and the folk traditions that it inspires) in his music, but also a lot of influences from those same boundary-pushing genres are evident too. It also really helps that his thoughtful, beautiful pieces inspired by the Amarillo landscape he grew up in fit perfectly as a soundtrack to my own life in this moment, wherein I’m relocating from one desolate landscape made up of concrete (DFW) to another that more closely resembles the flat, empty beauty of his hometown (central Illinois). So to see him and Chat Pile explore a synthesis of those two aesthetics in their collaboration really makes me feel like their music is being written and released exclusively for me. While I’m primarily featuring his 2025 release here as a year-end call-out, I’d highly recommend exploring the other two records in his trilogy with Mexican Summer. All three are stunning works of beauty, and I can’t recommend them enough.
Hey! This is part of a catch-up series of Adam’s favorite albums of 2025. This isn’t intended to be anything close to a formal or ordered list, more just me trying to finally take the time to write about all of the amazing music that I’ve enjoyed this year but neglected to share on this blog. I hope you enjoy, and if you have any feedback about the format let me know.
“More Universal” was not the first mixtape I made for SFTL, but for whatever reason it’s the one I am the most fond of. It was a standard, 10-song grab-bag running about 45 minutes in length, with a vibe/intent as amorphous and hazy as its cover. Seriously, what was this thing? Was it just a bunch of my favorite selections from the blog? Was it a fall mix? Maybe a zeitgeist ‘indie-head hits of the moment’ type of thing? Heck if I know, and I made the damn thing. I listened to it a TON too, typically during bus rides to school when there wasn’t anything else catching my ear. After about a year of doing so I iterated on the original list and released a sixteen track version called “Even More Universal.” Years later, after creating the Spotify account, I revisited that mixtape often, either while closing up the coffee shop or taking one of my daily five-mile walks. Now that I’m dabbling again in this stuff, and being twice as old as I was when I made the original, it feels appropriate to once again revisit it. I approached this third iteration as if there was a version of me that never left/abandoned SFTL, and had kept adding his favorites-of-the-moment and rearranging the lineup in what has become a never-ending-tinker-tape. The result is about three times longer in runtime, but still adherent in spirit to what I can only imagine was sixteen year-old Adam’s vision for the original. Having listened to this in enough different settings I can confidently say that at the very least it still goes great with a morning bus ride or an afternoon walk during autumn.
While the original “More Universal” tracklist is lost to time, “Even More Universal” will remain available on both our Spotify profile and my Apple Music profile for those who are interested.
Tracklist:
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - "Young Shields"
M83 - "We Own the Sky"
The Antlers - "I Don't Want Love"
Owen Pallett - "Oh Heartland, Up Yours!"
Andrew Bird - "Pulaski at Night"
The Microphones - "Headless Horseman"
Elbow - "Weather to Fly"
Beach House - "10 Mile Stereo"
Miike Snow - "Sans Soleil"
The Helio Sequence - "Back to This"
Anathallo - "The River"
Fanfarlo - "Drowning Men"
Margot & The Nuclear So and So's - "A Children's Crusade On Acid"
The Dodos - "The Strums"
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - "This Love Is F*****g Right!"
black midi - "Still"
The Kills - "Last Day of Magic"
Parquet Courts - "Total Football"
shame - "Concrete"
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - "Qwik Maff"
Black Country, New Road - "Good Will Hunting"
Car Seat Headrest - "Not What I Needed"
Bound Stems - "Cloak of Blue Sky"
Spoon - "Tear It Down"
The Isles - "Eve of the Battle"
The Whitest Boy Alive - "Intentions"
Toro y Moi - "Don't Try"
Blood Orange - "Charcoal Baby"
Vampire Weekend - "The Surfer"
Fleet Foxes - "- Naiads, Cassadies"
Lord Huron - "Long Lost"
Sparklehorse - "Don't Take My Sunshine Away"
Father John Misty - "When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay"
A long time has gone by since I first started this mixtape. The formal process started in May, but I feel like I started this project the first day I got into my future wife’s truck, Rickety Cricket (may he rest in peace), on the way to get Weinerschnitzel together in Mesquite for the first time. Loving someone means entering and falling in love with their world. You’re deciding to take a dive into this entirely different way of seeing and experiencing things, an entirely different history that predates this moment right now, in Rickety Cricket. When we took off my wife put on a playlist of her favorite country songs, a big rotation of talented and varied artists with whom I’d soon become very familiar. My exposure to (and opinions of) this genre before her would be described as incredibly pedestrian: I had those two great Ray Charles albums, a couple standards from the first half of the century, and a handful of 50s and 60s classics (I knew “El Paso,” I wasn’t the most city of city boys!). That alone constituted the entirety of my ‘country knowledge.’ She opened my world with her music, showing me a thing or two about so many aspects of this rich, truly American, genre and its history: she showed me the sparkling beauty of 90s country hits, actual Americana standards that weren’t just featured in Fallout, red dirt and outlaw classics, and best of all she’s exposed me to the standard-bearers of this current generation: the Kacey Musgraves, Orville Pecks, and Tyler Childers of the world; such a stark contrast to Morgan Whalen or Jellyroll. This mixtape is intended to be a roadmap of where I’ve gone with her so far, both programmed and arranged in collaboration with my wife. The selection has a lot of my heart and hers in it, intermingling and in conversation with each other while exploring every aspect of what makes country so great of a genre. I love this mixtape; it’s the ultimate road-trip mix, it’s this a prismatic showcase of the multi-generational talent of the genre, but also it’s a bit of a radio-play about where she and I have already been and where we’re hoping to head together into the future. In particular I think the interludes in this (her idea!) make this one stand out as one of my favorite projects that I’ve had a hand in making during this era of SFTL so far. I really hope you give it a listen.
Track list:
1. Johnny Cash - "As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (Mono)"
2. Zach Bryan - "Fear and Friday’s (Poem)"
3. Tyler Childers - "Coal"
4. Blake Shelton - "Ol' Red"
5. Hank Williams, Jr. - "A Country Boy Can Survive"
6. Eric Church - "Smoke a Little Smoke"
7. Trick Pony - "Pour Me"
8. Paul Cauthen - "Cocaine Country Dancing”
9. Alabama - "Mountain Music"
10. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - "Fishin' in the Dark"
While I ultimately loved Forever Howlong (maybe this is foreshadowing for a future post?), it is impossible to not miss the original formation of Black Country, New Road. Thankfully, although undoubtedly the voice of Isaac Wood will return in some form or fashion, this small brand-spanking-new Chilean group has come out of nowhere with this shocking debut that carries the promise to keep the ‘sad man post-rock windmill vibe’ torch burning in his absence. It is so impressive what these guys manage to do over the course of one song; I know that some folks online have poo-poo’d the overwhelming multi-movement structure of these tracks as derivative or ‘try-hard’ but music for me is about feeling, and what I feel when I listen to La Brea, not knowing more than a couple dozen Spanish words and phrases, is real, raw emotion. Whether that be despair, political (proletarian) rage, hope, or a mix of all of these and more at the same time, you can’t help but feel it in your soul, in these performances. I am so happy to report that this current post-modern post-punk scene is continuing to grow, relentlessly and far beyond the geographic scope of south London. That means great things for folks who love listening to abrasive, complex, and cinematic-sounding albums on repeat while driving too slowly on the highway late at night. If you’ve liked anything out of Brixton from the last seven years (black midi, Black Country, Squid especially), I highly, highly recommend checking these guys out and giving them your support. Being able to find plucky acts like this that bring this much production value, passion, and ambition right out the gate in a debut like this is the reason I started SFTL in the first place.
Today is the 17th birthday of SFTL. That means this blog is now older than I was when I first started it. It admittedly went through a very lengthy dry spell between 2016 and 2024, and its content output even in this ‘rebirth’ era doesn’t even come close to the post frequency of the blog in its peak. Back in the day, before accepting that putting out direct downloads of music without rights-holders’ consent was probably a bad idea, I put out compilation ‘mixes’ of the blog’s featured tracks in a series called On Vinyl. I decided to commemorate the occasion of today I’d resurrect that series in the form of the never-ending playlist you see here.
The work to make this thing was painstaking, and I took the opportunity to re-read every single post ever written on this website while manually adding each song to this playlist. What did I learn or glean from this exercise? More than everything else, I was constantly reminded how great of a writer Crystal was on this site. I may have started it, Austin may have designed it, and the other writers were all great in their own right at contributing their wide spectrum of perspectives and tastes (Anne! I miss your posts and your taste so much!), but Crystal was the heart and soul of this thing for a majority of its lifetime. While I would come and go – and there are some moments where it’s obvious that I was going through some stuff when I did show up – she kept the dream alive with her consistently great takes, consistently great taste, and later through her active and engaged leadership. It’s no wonder that she found kinship with so many others in the music community and ultimately became a contributor on bigger and better publications. I am honored to have shared such a special little project for such a brief time with her, and the rest of the great writers we featured on here. I had so many brief episodes where I wanted nothing to do with this thing, and I regret every single one. Reading back and also seeing how on the fucking pulse we were in our best years reminds me that this wasn’t just a silly little tumblr blog, it was something to be proud of.
Instead, for a large chunk of this thing’s seventeen-year lifespan I treated it like something I was too good for, like blogging was beneath me despite being so passionate about my baby when I first created it. Believe it or not I sometimes debated nuking it and erasing its history completely. I’m so glad I didn’t because now I’m thirty-three and for the first time in a decade I am eager to talk about my favorite music again. I’m eager to take a big handful of what I am vibing with, recontextualize it, and ask others to see the music I love in the same way I do. Maybe right now that’s primarily in the form of (chronically delayed) mixtapes, but don’t be surprised to see an album or track review pop up in your feed here and there too. After spending nearly two decades battling depression I’m choosing to finally take a different path; one where I don’t worry what other people think and I don’t look down on a music blog just because we’ve moved so far past that sort of thing’s relevance. This is more about me than it is about you. I’m posting here for an audience of one, and that’s okay because he’s my biggest fan and I don’t want to let him down.
The track list differs between Spotify and Apple just due to sheer unavailability. Of the 783 tracks featured on SFTL, the Apple Music version is missing 93 and the Spotify version is missing 103. I will post a list of the missing tracks for those of you who want to seek them out and manually add them to your version of the lists. This playlist will be updated anytime I remember to do so.
I’ve been working hard on a couple of mixtapes simultaneously but unfortunately I wasn’t able to get one fully baked out of the oven in time for May. So instead, I’ve decided to lightly reorganize and packaged/publish my “B-Sides” playlist for The Right Side of History. There were a lot of directions I took on that mix, but ultimately I settled on this cinematic, multiple movement structure that was really fun to see come together. In the process of organizing and reorganizing and listening to it over and over, I had to kill a lot of tracks that I felt really passionate about, and (most of) the rejects ended up in this playlist. I hope it gives you some additional inspiration to rise above this right-wing disgrace that we’re all sentenced to endure. It’s a little rough, but that’s what happens when you spend an afternoon on a mixtape instead of literal months. I promise I’ve got a pretty jaunty one lined up for June (fingers crossed), and hell it’s a stretch but maybe I’ll manage to get two out in a month. In the meantime I hope you all enjoy the weekend.
Lead Belly - "The Bourgeois Blues"
YG - "FDT (feat. Nipsey Hussle)"
Kendrick Lamar - "Alright"
A Tribe Called Quest - "The Space Program"
The Roots - "Here I Come"
Black Thought - "I'm Not Crazy (Outro)"
Gil Scott-Heron - "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
Defiance, Ohio - "The New World Order"
Pat The Bunny - "We Don't Get Tired, We Get Even"
Wingnut Dishwashers Union - "F**k Shit Up (Whanana)"
Frank Turner - "I Still Believe"
Parquet Courts - "Normalization"
Bikini Kill - "Rebel Girl"
Lambrini Girls - "Big Dick Energy"
Chat Pile - "Why"
Good Riddance - "Pox Americana"
Propagandhi - "...And We Thought That Nation States Were a Bad Idea"
End It - "New Wage Slavery"
System Of A Down - "Prison Song"
Zulu - "Things Ain't Gonna Change"
Kind Eyes - "F**K a PROUD BOY (feat. UnityTX)"
Prostitute - "All Hail"
Swans - "Power For Power"
Sleaford Mods - "The Wage Don't Fit"
IDLES - "Grounds"
The Chisel - "Retaliation"
NOFX - "Murder the Government"
Black Flag - "Police Story"
Bad Religion - "American Jesus"
Viagra Boys - "Return to Monke"
Jeff Rosenstock - "Powerlessness"
Radiohead - "Burn the Witch"
Open Mike Eagle - "Happy Wasteland Day"
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - "OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)"
This one has been a long time coming: the fourth entry in my old ‘hip hop diary’ series which I (cringe) originally titled The White Boy’s Beat. When I was seventeen and spending time on this blog every day I was still incredibly green and under-exposed to hip hop, a natural result of where I lived and who I typically hung around at school. It was thanks to this blog (namely, my much more cultured friends who wrote for it) and my incredibly online obsessive gremlin behavior that I began to break out of that sheltered suburbia mold. Early on in this journey I wanted to document snapshots of my taste evolving along the way. The first two entries are still on our Spotify page, and the difference between what I listened to then and what I listen to now is staggering, to say the least. From what I remember of the track list from In The Streets, the forever-lost part 3, I had only just started truly getting up on game with old school nineties acts like Wu-Tang after copying a ton of records off my aunt and uncle’s old iPod. That was fifteen years ago, so when I resolved to make a part 4 I wanted to try and encapsulate my entire journey between then and now. Since then though hip hop has skyrocketed in the rankings to become my favorite genre of music, so it has proven hard to fit all of the different eras of my taste into one mixtape. Heck, I had to completely leave off selections from my ‘trap era’ and from that brief period where I was enthusiastically bumping Rae Sremmurd. Don’t think most would consider that much of a loss, though; at least I don’t. I have worked this thing to death for like five months to get it ready for others to hear, so I hope it hits the way I was going for. I know hip hop mixtapes, whether they’re curated or generated, are a dime a dozen and I appreciate anyone who gives my little two hour project here a chance. While I can’t make any promises I’ll try my best to get the next one out to y’all a little sooner than a decade and a half next time.
Hey we made you a mixtape. Remember those? I’ve been dabbling as of late and after the beginning of the end started in November last year I have found myself leaning more and more on music to cope with the state of the world. COVID really radicalized my worldview, and it seems like every successive year since 2020 has just been a big fat dump of kerosene onto the fire of revolution that burns in my heart. Heck, the other title for this when it was a wee 20-track work-in-progress was “A Soundtrack for Destroying Private Property.” When you explore the movements and diversions of this varied track list I think it will be all-too-obvious that those thoughts and some even darker urges were on my mind. I’m not going to pretend that my two-hour mixtape is going to end the threat of fascism and free us from this capitalist hellscape but I do hope that at least some of these incredible artists’ words inspire some of you to do more to stand up to the evils that liberalism is clearly ill-equipped to address. In these increasingly dark times, all we have is each other. That, and music.
Genres: Folk/Americana, Punk, Hardcore, Metal, Hip Hop, Riot Grrrrl, Folk-Punk
Track list:
Rolando Alarcon - "No Pasarán"
Woody Guthrie - "Tear the Fascists Down"
The Cigarettes - "They're Back Again, Here They Come"
Minutemen - "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing"
The Clash - "Spanish Bombs"
Poison Girls - "Statement"
Frank Turner - "1933"
Killer Mike - "Reagan"
IDLES - "Danny Nedelko"
Propagandhi - "The Only Good Fascist Is a Very Dead Fascist"
Anti-Flag - "Kill the Rich"
Against Me! - "Transgender Dysphoria Blues"
Chat Pile - "Funny Man"
Lambrini Girls - "God's Country"
Rage Against the Machine - "Killing In the Name"
Black Flag - "Rise Above"
Dead Kennedys - "Nazi Punks F**k Off"
Stray from the Path - "Goodnight Alt-Right"
D.R.I. - "Tear It Down"
God's Hate - "Finish the Job"
Kind Eyes - "Lady Liberty"
System Of A Down - "B.Y.O.B."
Soul Glo - "31"
G.L.O.S.S. - "Lined Lips and Spiked Bats"
black midi - "Near DT, MI"
Zulu - "Now They Are Through With Me"
Gil Scott-Heron - "Whitey on the Moon"
Public Enemy - "Prophets of Rage"
Run-DMC - "Down With the King (feat. Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth)"
The Coup - "5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O."
N.W.A - "F**k tha Police"
A Tribe Called Quest - "We the People...."
Run The Jewels - "Ju$t (Ft. Pharrell Williams and Zach De La Rocha)"
Ghais Guevara - "Prison Riot"
Beastie Boys - "Sabotage"
Dicks - "No Nazi's Friend"
Petrol Girls - "Preachers"
Amyl and The Sniffers - "Capital"
Sleater-Kinney - "Combat Rock"
Downtown Boys - "Violent Complicity"
Defiance, Ohio - "The Condition"
AJJ - "Normalization Blues"
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - "GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS"
Look, I’m as surprised as you are that I’m bumping some Beastie-Boys-ass, 90s throwback hip hop in the year of our lord 2024. But I mean, can you blame me? Just listen to that fucking beat and hook, man. Joey and Brae ooze personality and attitude in every bar, and their “throwback” style and schtick feels both smart and fresh, probably because their lyrics read as simultaneously authentic and hilarious—just like the Boys back in the day. It all just works, and I can’t get enough of it and am stoked to hear what they cook up next. Given the current pace of their output I doubt we’ll be waiting too long.
Chat Pile has been a revelation to me as of late; maybe blame it on the state of things now (which the band has stated they are a direct response) or just my never-ending quest for more and more “hardcore shit,” but I cannot get enough of this band’s sound. There’s something comforting in the lyrics, which are often explicitly political and other times more evocative of horrific imagery as a suggestion of the political, amidst the never-ending grind of their guitars and blaring drums. Sludge is back in a big way, and in these dark times it fits right in. Sometimes you’ve just gotta stare into the abyss in order to overcome it.
While not as visceral and cutting as 2021’s “let me do one more,” Sarah Tudzin’s third illuminati hotties record POWER continues to deliver on the self-described ‘tenderpunk’ sound that she’s made a name for herself with since 2018. Folks who like to lean back to punk and garage-rock-adjacent jams from the likes of Jeff Rosenstock, Cheekface, and Sleater Kinney will feel right at home here.
Following a year that may sit side by side with 1988, 1994, 1996, and 2000 as one of the greatest in rap, it’s fitting that we see an album like Anderson .Paak’s Malibu in the first few weeks of 2016. Don’t get me wrong: Paak’s voice and sound is his own on this record, but everything about it plays like it is the first in presumably a litany of albums that I would label as post-Butterfly. Even Kanye pushed his album back after hearing Kendrick’s, and it sounds like the rest of the game is either reacting to or consuming its influence in this moment. Malibu is evidence of this sea change in commercial rap and if this is how 2016 is opening I can only have high hopes for the year ahead.
I’m pretty upset with myself that I didn’t spend more time with No No No when it first came out a few months ago. Beirut (Zach Condon) is always so in tune with his horns and miscellaneous instruments and effortlessly constructs beautiful orchestral movements.
