Category: Sunday Songs

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/22/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: I’m going off about a) how it feels to be a woman, and b) late-career Gorillaz, but really, what’s new?

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/22/26

“I’m a Lady” (feat. Trouble Andrew) – Santigold

“I’m a Lady” begins at 8:55.

God. Santigold, man. I don’t know if there’s ever been a song that accurately distills the experience of being a woman down into less than four minutes (or if there will ever be), but this sure comes close. I’m glad I found it during Women’s History Month, because if there was ever a torch to bear, especially in these beyond-troubling times, it’s this one. I’d be hard-pressed to find a Santigold song that isn’t upbeat—that’s just her style—but the bright backdrop of this song juxtaposed with the repetition of “I know someday they’ll make a martyr out of me” in the first verse gives me goosebumps every time. That line, that knowledge in every woman’s bones that there could always be the possibility of infliction of violence based on our gender. It’s made even more potent by having a Black woman sing it, with the dual oppressions of gender and racial violence. Of course, the martyring might not necessarily be literal, but even without that context, there’s still the undercurrent of being made an example: step out of line from the heteropatriarchal standards of womanhood, and you’ll be kicked to the curb.

And yet, “I’m a Lady” continues to be upbeat. In spite of it all, “I’m a Lady” continues at the pace of a sunlit skip in the park. It continues with the conviction that despite the horrors that come along with womanhood, that being proud of your identity is the best way to be. And it’s true—when the world is bent on degrading you and your ilk, very little is more powerful than declaring that you love the parts of yourself that they despise. Being in women and gender studies, I’ve been exposed to a lot of theory about how womanhood can be boiled down to suffering, and that negativity is what defines womanhood, to which I say…what? There’s no doubt that it’s a part of womanhood, but claiming that it’s the whole would be like slapping a hand over your left eye and claiming that the limited view that your right eye has is all there is. Womanhood is fear and joy, heartache and pride. It’s especially relevant for Santigold; after this album, she’s spent years in the music industry trying to push against people who want to prevent her from being herself…and yet here she stands, undeniably herself, still making unique music and spreading joy. She embodies the last half of the chorus perfectly: “I know I spend magic reel it out/Try to hold a light to me/I’m a lady.” Every limp, hollow girlboss anthem of the past 10 years needs to step aside, because this destroys any corporately packaged notion of womanhood. Nobody balances the pain and joy quite like Santigold, and all in an indie pop package—not to fulfill some kind of quota, but to express what so many women of all walks of life have felt all our lives.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Shit Cassandra Saw – Gwen E. Kirby – “I got some money I was saving/Got some hearts that I’ll be breakin/Know someday they’ll make a martyr out of me/I know someday they’ll make a martyr out of me…”

“Delirium” (feat. Mark E. Smith) – Gorillaz

So…The Mountain. It’s a step up from Cracker Island, but that’s a low bar. At best, it has some of Gorillaz’s most introspective and meditatively poignant grooves of the 2020’s, and at worst, it just becomes another late-career Gorillaz album bloated with so many collaborators that you could easily forget that Damon Albarn is even in the band. Yet given the context behind it—Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s formative trip to India after the deaths of both their fathers in rapid succession—makes me respect it more. You can tell that they respect the grit in the industry of art in an age where convenience has overtaken the desire to put some blood, sweat and tears into making good art that hasn’t been shit out by ChatGPT. Even if the album itself isn’t my favorite, I have utmost respect for what Gorillaz has become: an international, intergenerational bastion of hope, justice, and worldly party music. I maintain that Gorillaz has and always will be The People’s Band.

Death looms over The Mountain, and that’s due in no small part to Albarn sifting through the archives of unreleased demos for this album; three of the collaborators have previously worked on Gorillaz albums, but passed away before this album’s release—Dennis Hopper (Demon Days), Tony Allen (Song Machine, as well as other Damon Albarn projects), and Mark E. Smith (Plastic Beach). Smith, who died in 2018, features heavily on “Delirium,” one of the most distinctive tracks on this album. Like on his Plastic Beach collaboration (“Glitter Freeze”), he looms as a kind of town crier of the end times, speak-shouting out the song’s chorus amidst some of the most infectious grooves on the entirety of The Mountain. His rattling cackle can’t compete with Maseo’s iconic laugh from “Feel Good Inc.,” but it’s a great entry in the growing collection of Gorillaz Laughs—and it always gets me so amped up to hear the thrumming bass of the chorus. If nothing else, “Delirium” is proof that no matter how their sound changes, Gorillaz will always be the prime purveyors of some of the most existential party songs out there.

BONUS: as a personal crusade against convenience usurping hard work in art (in life and in general), Jamie Hewlett made an accompanying animation for The Mountain, hand-drawn with cel animation. Even if you’re not familiar with the band, I’d highly recommend giving it a watch—it’s a gorgeous work of classic 2D (no pun intended) animation.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Genesis of Misery – Neon Yang – “There is panic on the mountain/Coz a new God’s come/He doesn’t recognise himself/Or what he’s done/But if you don’t embrace him then it’s time to run…”

“Let My Love Open the Door” – Pete Townshend

I’ve retained a few qualities from being five years old: craving a good cheese pizza, liking aquariums and zoos, appreciating a well-placed pink accessory…and really liking this song. There was a strong phase when I was 5 or 6 where “Let My Love Open the Door” was one of my favorite songs, which really isn’t doing wonders for beating the insufferable hipster allegations, but who can deny how intricately crafted of a pop song this is? It’s not just catchy—it really never lets you go until it’s done with you. That looping ouroboros of a synth intro and that first crack of the drums is a fuse being lit, and the glossy, ’80s firecracker that resulted is timeless. It’s no wonder that if you throw a stone at any given selection of rom com movies, you’ll probably hit one that’s featured this song—it’s not without reason. And listen—is it a bold move to give yourself a whole halo on an album cover? Absolutely. It’s…a choice. But I’d be lying if I said that at least an inch of it wasn’t deserved, at least for this song, because it never fails to fill my chest with tingling, joyous nostalgia every time.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Swift and Sudden Exit – Nico Vicenty – “I have the only key to your heart/I can stop you fallin’ apart/Try today, you’ll find this way/Come on and give me a chance to say
Let my love open the door, it’s all I’m livin’ for…”

“Diamond Light, pt. 1” – Tweedy

It’s been 12 years, Tweedy, the people need to know…where the hell is “Diamond Light, pt. 2”?

I’m saying that because somehow, it took me until my dad sent me this days before we saw Jeff Tweedy for me to recognize this song, and yet it’s easily the best Tweedy song I’ve heard. “Diamond Light, pt. 1” is one of those songs that I can’t imagine cutting any of the runtime, because it takes its time with layering in every possible ounce of creativity, but gingerly, like gently folding dry ingredients into cake batter so as not to overwhelm the integrity of the whole. In my mind, this is a sister or at least a cousin to Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Possess Your Heart,” another song that soaks up every note in order to make the buildup pay off. This track spreads every ounce of Jeff Tweedy’s most potently surreal lyricism into so few lines; “Rolling rivers of diamond light/Dash and heave/Each ache to the sky” is an image so nebulous, yet you can only see it in blurry strokes, but feel it, right in the ribs, in the precise rhythm of how the words “dash” and “heave” fit together like bone into muscle.

And when those lyrics haven’t taken center stage, “Diamond Light, pt. 1” boasts a breakdown reminiscent of A Ghost is Born, scarcely reined-in chaos that folds in on itself, expanding and shrinking, all within the bounds of Spencer Tweedy’s hypnotic drumming. The sounds in the background of the last minute or so feel like hearing a spaceship’s engines fizzling out from miles away, dissipating into echoing, radar-like pulses—that, for sure, feels like foreshadowing for “Infinite Surprise” nine years later. Before or after Tweedy, it’s clear that the potential for this song was always incubating.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stars Undying – Emery Robin – “Why don’t we pick one script/And read it/Where the milk has dried/On the throne…”

“Storms” – Fleetwood Mac

I’m not even that big of a Fleetwood Mac fan, but I can’t deny how hard this song hits me every time I listen to it. (Shoutout to Jeff Tweedy & co. for playing this before their show last week!) And yes, I’ve listened to and love “Landslide,” I’m not some kind of soulless ghoul, but something about “Storms” strikes a frequency in me that I haven’t felt with any of their other songs. Something about that melody—which, on an unrelated note, reminds me a ton of Harmonia & Eno ’76’s “Welcome”—is so innately captivating. Stevie Nicks has an undeniably magnetic vocal presence, but something about her harmonies with Christine McVie massages the folds of my brain so perfectly, and the wavers in McVie’s voice do so much for the pure devastation this track lays onto you. You know me. I’ll take the bait for any sad girl song, but the way Nicks mines such an innate, visceral sorrow into such a somber song is undeniably unique. For so many, she was clearly the blueprint. “Storms” made me really get it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The First Bright Thing – J.R. Dawson – “Every hour of fear I spend/My body tries to cry/Living through each empty night/A deadly call inside…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/15/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: inside you, there are three wolves: one is only skin, one is only in my dreams, and the other is only you…

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/15/26

“Only Skin” – Joanna Newsom

This song’s a way-homer, but it’s a hell of a long way home. It’s difficult to pitch this song, because yeah, how do you convince somebody to willingly listen to a nearly 17-minute long song whose main instrument is the harp with a decidedly squeaky-voiced vocalist? I doubt it’d convince you further if I said that it took me at least two listens to really get it. But when I did, I got it. I don’t think I’ve ever been captivated by a song this long, or this proggy. I say “prog” because there’s an element of this that its detractors would probably dismiss as self-indulgent, artsy-fartsy bullshit, and that its defenders would call epic. Prog of any subgenre is hit or miss for me, but I think what’s valuable about it is that it emphasizes art for art’s sake—it’s not afraid to get sprawling in service of creating music that defies mainstream traditions. I doubt that there was anything else like the harp-dominated, esoteric folk of Joanna Newsom released in 2005. Most of the imagery surrounding it feels medieval, and there’s a certain bardlike quality to how Newsom presents herself (especially on the album cover of Ys). But to me, it strikes me as strangely Appalachian, more rooted in the pioneer times of the U.S. in the 19th century than anything—particularly in this song, it’s the more folky instrumentation, the mentions of somewhat modern war imagery (even if it’s in an in-song dream sequence), and, somewhat irrelevantly, the way that Newsom says “swimmin’ hole.”

But really, “Only Skin” has genuinely made me go a bit bananas. Admittedly, I was exposed to this song through separate TikTok trends, but frankly, it’s wild that a song as weird as this got any traction. But this song is downright captivating. At best, I feel like I’m picking it apart in the same way that I would some esoteric classic in my English classes; other times, I feel like the voice in my head is about to bust a vein, announcing different elements of the track like a WWE announcer: “AND THERE’S ANOTHER TEMPO CHANGE! FELLAS, WE’VE GOT ANOTHER TEMPO CHANGE—AND HERE COMES BILL CALLAHAN WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!” (And yeah, that was wild to find out too—he has a brief but prominent feature about 13 minutes into the song.) Newsom has this distinct voice that squeaks so much in the first few seconds of the song that I genuinely though it was studio feedback, but I love that nontraditional quality of it—she peeps and howls and mewls, defying all notions of how the feminine voice is supposed to sound. She has this kind of sprite-like quality about her that makes her already stunning lyricism even more like a fable or a fairytale—there’s whole handfuls of lyrics that stop me in my tracks: “Back on the patio/watching the bats bring night in,” “The retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry,” “And I watched as the water was kneading so neatly/Gone treacly” are just a handful of the gems that Newsom has scattered through the rich earth of this track. I could probably go on for at least two paragraphs longer just picking apart all of the poetic devices scattered throughout, but this part of the post is already getting unwieldily long. But the real emotional oomph is the juxtaposition with the more devastatingly bare lines, things like the waver in her voice when she repeats the motif of “That’s an awfully real gun.” It all has a very Kate Bush quality about it, both in the vocal and lyrical styles—as well as her stories of women.

She breathes wonder and fear and devotion and snapped rage into every line—it’s so dense that I can only scrabble for certain meanings. As far as I can tell, Newsom is the kind of enigmatic artist who ostensibly does write true stories, but obfuscates them under at least seven layers of fiction so that they’re all but impenetrable. There’s hints of personal relationship turmoil, something that her ardent fans have been desperately trying to puzzle out in the 20 years since this album was released. In my mind, I can see some kind of 19th-century narrative of a desperate woman married to a man wracked by trauma. She breaks her back trying to provide for him, and he only responds with demanding more and more still of her, without any thought to what she’s going through. I don’t blame said TikTok trends for choosing the part that they did: the part beginning at 13:02 (yeah, sorry) is the most striking part of the song, the climax where the woman reaches her breaking point. You’ve heard me ramble about the watering-down of female rage…but if you want real, desperate, breaking-point female rage? Step right up. Holy shit. This part is the musical equivalent of the straw that broke the camel’s back, the final response of the protagonist as she confronts him about how much she sacrificed just to keep him happy: “All my bones, they are gone, gone, gone/Take my bones, I don’t need none.” I get goosebumps every time I listen to it. This is why it’s worth all 16 minutes and 53 seconds—even if you don’t appreciate the highs and lows of the journey itself, the payoff from that buildup is worth every note. Like Oingo Boingo’s “Change,” it goes through movements, but all in service of a staggeringly intricate musical narrative.

I think those reminders of Oingo Boingo and Kate Bush, at least in terms of their mindset if not in their musical style, is what makes “Only Skin” such a spectacular song to me. Art for art’s sake implies a kind of self-indulgent quality, but there’s nothing much more admirable to me than putting out art that’s nothing but the vision in your brain, removed from all sense of trend-chasing or conventionality. If not for the musical freaks of the world, we wouldn’t have art as singularly unique as this. Art needs not appeal to everybody—just you, in the end. And if it finds an anchor in somebody else, then all the better. But it’s got to be for you.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Crane Husband – Kelly Barnhill – “All my bones, they are gone, gone, gone/Take my bones, I don’t need none/Cold, cold, cupboard, lord, nothing to chew on/Suck all day on a cherry stone…”

“Only In My Dreams” – The Marías

What I appreciate about The Marías’s Tiny Desk Concert was that María Zardoya did what I love with a Tiny Desk Concert from an act that’s been around long enough to accumulate a larger discography; she called the setlist a “tasting menu” of their career, with selections spanning from their newest album to their earliest releases. It gave me the perfect jumping-off points for getting into their music. “Only In My Dreams” is off of their very first EP, Superclean, Vol. 1. It’s always so intriguing when you can see the nascent signs of a band’s sound beginning to solidify so early on. Sure, the lyrics aren’t as refined (and the music video veers on being corny), but already, their distinctive flavor of dream pop was right there, waiting to be chiseled away. If this track is proof of anything, it’s that when you have a clear vision of what’s you, it’ll always shine through in the music, and time will only expose it further—it certainly did so for The Marías.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stars and the Blackness Between Them – Junauda Petrus – “You’re everything I need/To bare this fear/The demons in my bedThey’re always here/It’s only just a dream…”

“Savior Complex” – Phoebe Bridgers

“Savior Complex” was a favorite of mine when Punisher came out…what do you mean, almost 6 years ago? I remember watching that music video in December of 2020 and, as I did with everything in reach, looked at it with a very Fargo Season 4 lens, but to be fair, they have the commonality of a black and white vignette of a bloodied Irish man in a sketchy hotel with a dog that follows him everywhere. (Rabbi Milligan is everywhere for those with eyes to see him.) Listening back to this song is making me marvel at just how immersive Phoebe Bridgers’ atmospheres are. Her best songs feel like being inside of snow globes, but every snowflake feels just as real as one would in the outside world. There’s an ice-skating rink somewhere in that snow globe, somewhere in the middle of a city, where the flickering lights of the skyscrapers illuminate the ice. “Savior Complex” evokes the palate of the dead of night in December, with starry flourishes from the celeste, Rob Moose’s orchestral arrangements, and the understated murmur of Bridgers’s acoustic guitar. Like the album cover, it evokes the feeling of being absolutely alone, out in the middle of nowhere—lonely and liberating in equal measure. Yet Bridgers’s wintry whisper of a voice is what anchors “Savior Complex” in the end, with her stripped-to-the-bone lyrics: “I’m a bad liar/With a savior complex/All the skeletons you hide/Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” As poisonous as the relationship sounds, every utterance of “show me yours, and I’ll show you mine,” feels like a secret you’re being let in on.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Camp Zero – Michelle Min Sterling – “Baby, you’re a vampire/You want blood and I promised/I’m a bad liar/With a savior complex…”

“Fourteen Black Paintings” – Peter Gabriel

Us is full of gems. I almost called them hidden gems, but most of them are pretty easy to identify as gems on the first listen. But amongst gems, some songs get overshadowed in the process. Practically every song on this album hits me like a train, so it’s exceedingly difficult to compete when about half of the album makes me feel like this after I listen to it. But I’ve found that in the three and a half years since I’ve listened to the album, there’s always another layer to peel back. “Fourteen Black Paintings” doesn’t necessarily have the gut punch of “Come Talk to Me” or “Secret World” or even the grooves of “Digging in the Dirt,” but to me, it thrives on simplicity. It’s one of the sparser songs on the album, but all of the lyrics speak for themselves, plain and simple:

“From the pain come the dream/From the dream come the vision/From the vision come the people/From the people come the power/From this power come the change.”

That’s it. That’s the entirety of the lyrics in this four and a half minute-long song, other than Gabriel’s hypnotic murmuring. It has the same, dense arrangements and international instrumentation (that haunting instrument you hear at the beginning is a duduk, an Armenian flute), and yet, it’s all so muted and subtle that it tends to relegate itself to the background. Yet it’s proof that even Gabriel’s most seemingly simple songs are anything but throwaways; though it doesn’t have the same striking emotional highs as some of the other tracks on the album, Gabriel’s soaring vocals make up for any need for them. In fact, it’s quite like the fourteen black paintings that Gabriel is referencing in the first place: fourteen black paintings by Rothko, all housed in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas; though they seem like blocks of solid black to the casual observer, the brushstrokes within prove their deliberate and intricate construction. Quietly throbbing and pulsating, “Fourteen Black Paintings” remains an upfront declaration on the nature of power and resistance.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The King Must Die – Kemi Ashing-Giwa – “From the vision come the people/From the people come the power/From this power come the change.”

“I’m Only You” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

Consider this the millionth post where the gist just ends up being “Jesus, can Robyn Hitchcock leave some of that top-tier songwriting for the rest of us?” Predictably, I’m still stuck on the show I saw him at back in February, and I was delighted to learn that pretty much every other member of my family got as knocked off their feet as I was after hearing the line “I’m a house that burns down every night for you.” There’s a line that’ll stick in your head forever. Here’s the real kicker about “I’m Only You,” though: I’d say at least 95% of the lines are like that. “I’m a policeman working in an empty house?” “I’m a snow-covered mountain in an empty room?” “I’m a liquid you’re dissolving in?”

There’s so much in here about empty structures and becoming a vessel just to hold somebody else, but I found an interesting dichotomy with the lyrics: they’re all either about being said vessel (“I’m a liquid you’re dissolving in”) or being built for a purpose, but being abandoned (“I’m a distant steeple on a long-deserted plain”). It’s such a striking contrast between becoming empty or being surrounded by emptiness—and what a stunning metaphor for being devoted to somebody to the point of total self-sacrifice, only to find that you’re only a shell without them there.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Nothing Burns as Bright as You – Ashley Woodfolk – “I’m a mirror cracked from side to side/I’m a snow-covered mountain in an empty room/I’m a house that burns down every night for you…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/8/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: in a terrible day for feminism, I only have a single song by a woman this week, on International Women’s Day, no less. Cancel me if you must. Also, saying “Cobra” by Geese makes me sound like a caveman giving somebody directions for exhibits at the zoo.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/8/26

“Cobra” – Geese

“Cobra” starts at 6:15.

Shit. Okay. I get it now.

The mountain of hype finally caught up to me. I can’t say that Getting Killed lives up to all of the hype it’s received, but that’s because it’s probably gotten enough hype that, if it were all translated into text in a uniform size, it could probably circle the Earth itself. But Getting Killed really is an excellent album; though it does have some low points, I think it embodies a kind of breaking point in alternative music, and I think that’s what’s resonated with so many people. Getting Killed oscillates between fevered, dystopian breakdowns and moments of contemplative tenderness, but what ties it together is that, for this generation, those emotions often go hand in hand in quick succession. To me, it feels like a response to Gen Z turning to the horrors of the world and poisoning everything with irony; Geese saw this landscape, and the irony we put into it, and slaps us upside the head with this bit from “Islands of Men”: “You can’t keep running away from what is real.” And that monumental amount of hype has to be tapping into something deep within our generation. Honestly, I’m right here raising a glass at the celebration of the death of Gen Z irony poisoning—it’s not fully dead, but hell, Cameron Winter and co. are ready to clobber it with baseball bats. What they’re putting out is chaotic, frenetic, and not always organized or perfect, but it sure as hell feels authentic.

There’s something pure about “Cobra.” By all accounts, the lyrics don’t feel all that wholesome—there’s a strong undercurrent of “that guy isn’t right for you, leave him for me,” which could either be noble or more egoistic. With the whole cobra motif, there’s plenty of back and forth between venom and temptation, and all sorts of spite. So how does it come off so purely? Was it just because I heard the “you can dance away forever” bit and latch onto that? It sure does make you want to dance away forever—it’s a song that commands at least a little shimmy out of you, and the instrumentation—from Emily Green’s high-pitched, intricate guitar work, Winter’s innate ability to make a piano yearn, and the percussion that feels like Tiny Desk without being recorded at Tiny Desk—itself seems to smile. There’s an anthemic quality embedded into a lot of the lyrics, and regardless of whatever romantic foibles it happens to be about, it’s about severing yourself from unwanted temptations and breaking free. And despite the resentment the narrator holds towards this temptor character, I almost feel a kind of respect—he’s still saying that she should leave her boyfriend because he’s keeping her from doing things independently that she was always capable of. So I think that’s what makes this circle back around to feeling wholesome. “Cobra” is like being tugged out of monotony and onto a dance floor bathed in sunlight. It’s so joyous.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei – “Whatever he’s got in his hand/You can get it on your own, you’ll see/Baby, let me wash your feet forever/Baby, you can stay in my house forever and ever…”

“Wu-Tang” – They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants have practically been a part of my life since…well, birth probably. I grew up in the golden age of their children’s music (Here Come the ABC’s, Here Come the 123’s, and Here Comes Science), so they were about as vital to my hipster development as the milk in my baby bottle. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of a memory from early childhood that they’re not present in. And yet, other than said children’s albums, I’ve consistently loved them…but never their full albums. Other than Flood, I’ve never been compelled to listen to an entire album of theirs. They’re been prolific since the ’80s (this coming album, The World Is to Dig, will be their 24th), which means that there’s a lot to love…but also a lot to cherry-pick. And unfortunately, as much as I admire them as a band, their newer material has rarely grabbed me. I like them, but I never love them.

Until now. “Wu-Tang” is a burst of energetic, jangly joy, much more lively and enlivened than a lot of their new material. (Speaking of jangly, I swear the guitar part beginning at 0:20 sounds exactly like the guitar on Graham Coxon’s “You & I.”) The World Is to Dig, though the title is an homage to Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book A Hole is To Dig, means “dig” in the more “beatnik-y” sense, according to John Flansburgh: “A bit beatnik-y for sure…but hey daddy-o. That’s me.” In that context, “Wu-Tang,” which is about, well…how much the Johns like the Wu-Tang Clan, the title makes even more sense; apparently they’re sitting on dozens of songs that are simply about whatever’s grabbed their attention and has given them joy, which is as good a rulebook for songwriting as any. Impervious to any sort of industry molding or trends, They Might Be Giants have continued to be the flagship for musical weirdos everywhere—and heck, I’m glad they’re still going.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep – Sylvie Cathrall – “Something was hid in a secret compartment/Inside my heart/Somebody planted a seed and/They’d have me believe that it/Was all my idea…”

“Fireworks” – Jim Noir

HE’S BACK! MY BOY IS BACK!!

Well, he’s only been gone from streaming, really, but the man himself has returned from his almost seven-year album hiatus (not counting his phenomenal and criminally underrated side project Co-Pilot). However, for those who have been following him on Patreon, we know that this has been a long, long time coming. He initially revived the Jim Noir Club, where he released EPs that gradually became his 2012 album Jimmy’s Show (real ones know that this album was originally going to be Jimmy’s Show 2), with the promise that in 2023, he would have three whole albums to show for it. I can’t fault him—I know I’ve made big declarations about projects and not followed through on them until way later. But as we got even more EPs than originally planned, I knew that the album that eventually became Programmes for Cools was going to be something special.

Three and a half years was an excruciating wait for a new album, and that’s also bookended with the time since his previous album, A.M. Jazz. (Insert the “it’s been 84 years” GIF from Titanic here.) But my recurring thought while listening to Programmes for Cools was that it was worth the wait. There’s nothing more gratifying than seeing an artist that you’ve been intimately watching craft an album finally put it out into the world. The demos and first takes have blossomed into fully-formed and polished incarnations of the offbeat pop that Jim Noir has made a name for himself (in my heart, at least) in; it’s slick, it’s ’60s, it’s synthy and sampley, and nothing but him.

Back when he was releasing EPs through the Jim Noir Club, “Fireworks” was a cut from EP 2 (you can probably guess how far along into the project it was released) all the way back in 2022. EP 2 remains one of my favorites of the bunch (it’s a crime that “Mr. No-One” didn’t make it onto the album, but maybe there’s a chance for Programmes for Cools 2…). It was difficult to imagine “Fireworks” getting much better than it already was, but the final version if it makes me realize how much potential was brewing in it from the start. The mix on the original was much more muddied, and in the light of day (the morning light, if you will), it gleams ten times brighter than before—just like the crackling, incandescent explosions that it takes its name from. Jim Noir has honed his craft here more than ever, creating a whole coral reef’s worth of different species of sound, with all sort of electronic blurts and flourishes that make it feel more like a bustling cityscape than the work of a singular man. But there is just one man behind it, and I’m as happy as ever that he’s populated our world with his music.

Programmes for Cools is only available on Bandcamp as of now, but Jim Noir has said that it will come to streaming eventually. In the meantime, support him on the former!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Murder by Memory – Olivia Waite – I imagine Jim Noir’s synths being the soundtrack to Olivia Waite’s heavily-populated generation ship.

“That White Cat” – Mitski

So…Nothing’s About To Happen To Me, right?? I stand by my opinion that The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is the best Mitski album of this decade, but this one was a success for sure. Though it’s not as cohesive or quite as emotionally potent (though it has plenty of moments that come close), it’s an album with a clear vision. It’s a Shirley Jackson-esque house with peeling, moldy wallpaper and women scratching claw marks down the walls. Mitski’s occasional ventures into Americana weren’t quite as successful as the ones on The Land for me, and at worst, the transitions between those and the more rock-oriented tracks were jarring; but as a whole, the album is nervy and feverish, but wholly certain of its image. After so long working with more deeply personal lyrics, it’s clear that Mitski’s indulging in a more fictional image—and it’s worked a charm so far. And yet, she can’t help but imbue her lyrics with the truth: about fame, about womanhood, and predatory people (see: “Dead Women”).

Some of my favorite moments on the album were when Mitski returned to her scratchy, guitar-oriented roots from albums like Bury Me at Makeout Creek. As much as I love her newer sound, something inside me always longed for the explosive torrent of her guitars from albums past. At least half of the album scratched that itch, and I could not be happier. In a downright neurotic album, “That White Cat” might be one of the most neurotic tracks. With only the accompaniment of bass and drums for most of the track, Mitski howls about losing control of her house thanks to a white cat whose scent-marking has declared her house his: “It’s supposed to be my house/But I guess according to cats/Now it’s his house.” Her ragged vocals lament the takeover of her house by a whole menagerie of invading animals in her signature, frantic lyricism: “Gotta go to work/To pay for that cat’s house/For the red corseted wasp/Who lives in the roof/For the family of possums/For the bugs who drink my blood.” Pushing her vocal range to the limits, making her voice rasp and gurgle and growl, she laments the loss of her autonomy, an invasion of her house—and her mind.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman – this might be cheating, since this is a short story and not a full-length book, but I kept thinking about this story for the entirety of the album. Mitski had to have drawn some inspiration from here.

“A Globe of Frogs” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

Getting this excited about a remastered, remixed version of a song means one of two things: either I’m officially getting old, or I’ve just surpassed some new benchmark of pretentiousness. But why don’t you go and listen to the original and then the 2026 remix/remaster of “A Globe of Frogs” and then look me in the eye and say that it isn’t a marked difference? The 1986 original was never subpar by any stretch of the imagination, but this remix, 40 years later, brings out what was blooming under the surface in the original. It’s far clearer and brighter. It feels like how the world looks after you wipe all the gunk off of your glasses. Robyn Hitchcock’s lyrics and artistic vision at large never needed any improvement; as it was before, “A Globe of Frogs” feels like taking a walk through the gardens behind a Victorian mansion, but the gardens slowly lead into Wonderland—not the Disney version, but the Lewis Carroll one, for sure. All that was evident from the first demo, I’m sure, but this reworked version feels like forcefully blowing the dust away to find the clean glimmer beneath.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Mad Sisters of Esi – Tashan Mehta – the strange world of this novel is certainly adjacent to the microcosm in “A Globe of Frogs.”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/1/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: lots of watery songs this week—you’re either in a swimming pool or standing mysteriously in the pouring rain, so pick your poison.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/1/26

“Nobody New” – The Marías

Apparently, 2025 was an exceptionally fruitful year for women who make music that sounds like you’re underwater (see also: Cate Le Bon). There’s a broader spectrum of both vibes and aesthetic here without a doubt, but in separate ways, María Zardoya and Le Bon have made music that sounds like dunking your head into crystal-clear water and watching tiny fish dart past your face. Of course, Cate Le Bon’s completely on another planet, but although The Marías don’t snag me nearly as much as she does (and nobody makes aquarium gravel music like Cate Le Bon), they’ve clearly perfected their own art of making music that sounds like light reflecting off the bottom of a swimming pool.

Here’s another contender for my list of songs with specific lyric pronunciations that scratch a very specific itch in my brain; pretty much everything that comes out of Zardoya’s mouth is downright ethereal, but the way she sings “nadie como tú” in the chorus feels like a massage on the tired folds of my brain. Gently wistful and listless, “Nobody New” has the heavy-eyed feeling of the first thoughts that tumble through your head after you drag yourself out of a dream you can’t quite remember. It’s sleepy, but in a way that instantly draws you in—in my limited experience, the best Marías songs feel like slipping into the sea, but fully embracing the swell of the waves as they crest over your head. It’s simultaneously weightless, like hair billowing underwater, but sagging with the weight of yearning.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – “Baby, I promise/There’s nobody new/I’m being honest/There’s no one like you…”

“Raymond Chandler Evening” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

I often lament that perfect songs are too short. I’m the last person I’d expect to say that about a Robyn Hitchcock song that barely scrapes past the two minute mark is just the right length. “Raymond Chandler Evening” only repeats its chorus once, and it’s generous to even call it a chorus when there’s only just verses apart from it. But some songs were meant to be a brief but potent punch, and “Raymond Chandler Evening” is one of them. It’s a series of polaroids strung together from the atmosphere of a noir detective novel—fitting, since the song itself is a tribute to detective fiction author Raymond Chandler. Every darkly humorous turn of phrase creates a vivid image that can only seen in black and white, from the abandoned body to the rain-soaked pavements. The only burst comes from Hitchcock’s description of the “yellow leaves [that] are falling/in a spiral from the sky.” It smells like rain. But interspersed within that noir backdrop is some of Hitchcock’s most wry lines: “I’m standing in my pocket/And I’m slowly turning gray” and “There’s a body on the railings/That I can’t identify/And I’d like to reassure you/But I’m not that kind of guy.” Hitchcock knows exactly how to package so much vitality and wit into such a short amount of time—as usual, Hitchcock doesn’t get the flowers that he deserves by and large. But the song was included in the comic The Crow, and a Cyberpunk 2077 side quest also paid homage to it in title, so it’s made more than a few ripples in pop culture—and rightfully so.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Even Though I Knew the End – C.L. Polk – “It’s a Raymond Chandler evening/And the pavements are all wet/And I’m lurking in the shadows/’Cause it hasn’t happened yet…”

“Queen of the Bees” – Jack White

I wish that there was a real, tangible reason for Jack White to get on my nerves. Scratch that—maybe it’s good that it’s just his personality that’s grating. It could be way worse. I’ve just never recovered from how much of a pretentious prick he came off as in It Might Get Loud. But he’s recently created his own publishing house and absolutely shredded with IDLES…the man makes it harder and harder to hate him every day.

After No Name proved to be rather samey (I saw a promotional poster last year that said “the best rock record of 2024 has no name“…lmao), it was official that I was just kind of sick of Jack White. After the adventurous two-for-one deal that was Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, White’s sonic range started becoming the same song over and over. So I let him fade into the background…and somehow forgot about this gem from Entering Heaven Alive. How could I have possibly forgotten about this song? “Queen of the Bees” is one of my favorites of his. He’s putting on every ounce of bluesy airs, but this time, but it doesn’t feel as posturing as some of his other stabs at the genre. So much of his solo work is very bluesy, but there’s a point where he almost becomes a caricature of himself (we once again circle back to It Might Get Loud). But “Queen of the Bees” feels like an honest embodiment of the genre. It’s a slick, charming strut where every strike of the mallet against the xylophone feels like a Cab Calloway-style cartoon feeling a visual chill up its spine. White’s rasping croon, though indebted to past rockers, comes straight from the soul, surpassing mere tribute. Yes, almost everything about the man is a meticulously curated performance, but I’ll give him this: he never half-asses anything. Everything you get from him is a labor he puts every ounce of his passion into.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Portrait of a Thief – Grace D. Li – “I’ll butter your toast/While you’re taking it easy/My tea needs honey/’Cause it’s not so good/And who cares if I’m misunderstood/’Cause I love you…”

“Alien” – Beach House

NOTE: definitely proceed with caution before watching the music video if you have epilepsy or any kind of photosensitivity issues.

Sometimes there’s no use in giving a big preamble about how I found this song. The other day, I just thought to myself, “isn’t there a Beach House song called ‘Alien?’ Wonder what that’s like,” and here we are. I’m just glad that it’s good—but then again, I’ve never met a Beach House song that I didn’t like. Them naming a song “Alien” is almost redundant, because all of their songs that I know have an equal degree of spaciness, and this track is no different. But it’s pure shoegaze indulgence; the distortion roars like the engine of a rocket careering through space, while Victoria Legrand’s vocals are whispers clinging to the soaring jet trail hurtling through the stratosphere. The lyrics verge on being surreal, but the castoff “helpless and glimmering” feels exactly how it is to be carried away on the comet’s tail of this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Ocean’s Godori – Elaine U. Cho – this track would fit in with the shining, sci-fi world of this novel: glistening, but with traces of rust and grime around the edges.

“There She Goes” – The La’s

“There She Goes” has to be one of the more ironic stories in rock music history. It’s considered by legions of musicians, music critics, and music directors for every rom-com under the sun to be a perfect song. It heralded a renewed appreciation of the ’60s styles of The Beatles and The Kinks, but is often credited with being one of the songs that jumpstarted Britpop in the early ’90s. Yet by all accounts, its architect, Lee Mavers, hated it. Even when you brush past the inevitable “this song is popular and mentions veins once, it’s gotta be about drugs” (it’s been confirmed by multiple band members that it isn’t about heroin) rumors, there’s so much mythos swirling around this song; most of them are about frontman Lee Mavers, who hates the band’s one and only album. The characterizations span from troubled perfectionist at best to irascible and impossible to work with at worst, cycling through dozens of producers and band members just to achieve the unreachable, perfect sound in his head. It has to be a tragedy to never have that satisfaction be reached, and to have your legacy be the runoff from those fruitless sessions. And yet…how the hell could “There She Goes” be considered a failure? This ought to be the guidebook for a pop song—catchy, charming without being cloying, and guaranteed to make you nostalgic. This song is a must if you want to make your bus ride into a rom-com montage. It’s jangle pop royalty, and rightfully so—nobody jangles like The La’s, and not many have jangled quite so well since.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Isles of the Gods – Amie Kaufman – “There she goes/There she goes again/She calls my name, pulls my train/No one else could heal my pain…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/22/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: even though I mention both Water Moon and Underwater Moonlight in this post, they’re somehow not paired together…sorry. Plus, songs about grief, love, and illegally keeping wild animals in your apartment.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/22/26

“The Man Who Stole a Leopard” – Duran Duran

I didn’t expect to be putting such critical Madeline Todd lore here on the blog, but it was recently dredged up from the annals of my mind after not thinking about it for, at minimum, a decade. So here you are.

I’ve been something of a Durannie from a young age. Second-generation Durannie on my mother’s side, if you will. My mom was at the critical point of fandom for Duran Duran, being a tween (and then a teen) in their heyday, and from an early age, she passed down that love to me. I have lots of fond memories of watching their music videos from a DVD on our old TV, along with listening to their CDs while we played with Barbies, some of which my mom had passed down to me as well. That brings us to All You Need Is Now, which came out when I was in elementary school; a lot of the tracks have heaps of nostalgia attached to them, including “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” which I loved at the time. Fast forward a few years, and I now had my own iPod nano that I could listen to music with at night. “The Man Who Stole a Leopard” made its way onto the first playlist that my dad lovingly made. But at night, this song transformed into something that scared the shit out of me. Specifically, the violin sample beginning at 5:52. “Scared the shit out of me” is an adequate description, but what might be more accurate is that it gave me the absolute willies. My heebies were jeebied, dude. Something about the mild distortion of the violins, under cover of darkness, sounded so fundamentally wrong to my 10-year-old mind, huddled under blankets. Thankfully, I got my dad to remove the song from the playlist, and the nightmare ended.

Naturally, this was a very pleasant thing to remember when I woke up at 4 am a few weeks back. But when I revisited “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” I found that my memory had completely distorted my perception of that violin sample that freaked me out all those years ago. Admittedly, I get a kind of knee-jerk sense of dread in the lead up to it, but I was pleasantly surprised that it sound completely innocuous to me—a little distorted and reverby, but just a handful of fuzzy chords to give a flourish to the outro. I’m now hovering where I was in the pre-iPod era, when I was allured by this song. Despite what the fabricated (yes, FABRICATED, I’ve been living a lie since 2011) news broadcast might lead you to believe, this tale of the man who stole a leopard and kept it in his apartment is entirely fictional. (Granted, some of the wording in the broadcast clues me in to the fictionality of it now, but it’s still fairly convincing, especially considering that they got the real newscaster Nina Hossain to record it.) What stands out to me about this track, along with most of the tracks I fondly remember from All You Need Is Now, is that there’s hardly a sense of Duran Duran trying to put their youthful, ’80s glory days in amber and imitate it. Sure, there’s a very “Hungry Like the Wolf” sensibility to the subject matter, but its prolonged runtime (6:15) and more eery atmosphere better fits their earliest albums, before they became perennial pop icons of the ’80s. Like a prowling cat, it’s a drawn-out, seductive crawl through a tale of toxic seduction and love that isolates you from all else. But from all of these memories, there’s one crucial lesson I have to take from this: things tend to sound a lot more sinister when you’re in the dark. Shed some light on it, and this track—like so many other things—will lose the fangs you thought they had. What a relief it is to not be 10 anymore. I love this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Open Throat – Henry Hoke – I think there’s enough overlap between a big cat being inside human houses and almost being domesticated to bridge the gap between a leopard and a mountain lion. Literary fiction isn’t always my favorite, but this was an excellent read.

“Queen of Eyes” – The Soft Boys

At its worst, a lot of punk music and culture became a caricature of itself; There was such a dogged determination to “sticking it to the man” that, in declaring that they were different from the mainstream, they created a different kind of conformity in sound and style. If you’re not exactly like x, y, or z, you weren’t punk. As insufferable as that is in retrospect (and today, presumably, though I don’t keep up with a lot of modern punk), it did breed a veritable garden of absolute weirdos who weren’t punk enough in a myriad of ways—bands like XTC and The Soft Boys, whose quirky members adhered in some ways to punk’s musical style, but were too sincere—and literary-minded—for punk, because punks don’t write about statues who come alive and wander out to sea. I’ve definitely been influenced by some aspects of punk bands and aesthetics over the years, especially when I started becoming more aware of politics; however, I feel like the bands I identify more with are the ones that were a little too soft, melodic, or just authentic enough for punk. And I think that’s where my expression falls too—I’ve always identified, in terms of my makeup and my clothes and my politics and my music, with “alt,” just because it’s an umbrella term for anyone who falls outside of those strictly-defined, often social media-enforced lines in the sand between one aesthetic from another. My music taste was bound to fall here eventually.

I’d loved about half of Underwater Moonlight ever since I saw Robyn Hitchcock for the first time, but now that I’ve started collecting vinyl, I picked up a copy of the album when I saw him again at the beginning of the month—AND GOT IT SIGNED BY THE MAN HIMSELF!! I’m still in shock, honestly, so on the off chance that you’re reading this, Mr. Hitchcock—thanks again. It’s been in the background of my life consistently for the past month, and I can’t think of any downsides, other than my neighbors hearing the lyrics of “Old Pervert” through the walls. (Look, it’s not my fault that they made a song called “Old Pervert” but also made it an indisputable banger.) I was agonizing over which song to include here, since they’ve all more or less been on a loop in my brain, but “Queen of Eyes” stuck out to me, probably the sunniest inclusion on the record, especially on the heels of the jagged, leering stylings of “Old Pervert.” Even this early on, Hitchcock was nothing but himself: his half-nonsensical, half sweetly sincere and lovesick lyrics are wrapped in a wallpaper collaged from the psychedelic Beatles, Syd Barrett, and something that could have only come from his brain and his alone. Bright, jangly, and infectiously catchy, it embodies this line from the booklet that came from my record booklet, written by David Fricke: “the Soft Boys dared to ask: did punk rock and the end of the 1970s…also have to mean the end of joy, literacy, and bright voices?” That torch remains the same one that Hitchcock has carried for the rest of his prolific career. What struck me while listening to Underwater Moonlight is that this same spirit has always been there—his sprightly musical vitality has only brightened since his early forays into music.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Song of Salvation – Alechia Dow – “Here I am again, it’s no surprise/Locked in orbit ’round the queen of eyes…”

“Sienna” – The Marías

Expect a lot more about The Marías in the coming weeks—they’ve been a very calm anchor in the chaos of…well, everything in my life. I’ve spent the past week digging more into their music, but this song was one of the first I discovered, in no small part because it was the soundtrack to a recent art trend that went around Instagram and TikTok. (The one I linked is from @zaiciart on Instagram, who has such a wonderful style!) From what I’ve heard of the album, Submarine really was the best possible name—every song feels like it’s been submerged, crafted from trails of bubbles and that special kind of whispery echo that happens to your voice when you’re trying to talk to your friends in the pool. María Zardoya has such a uniquely ethereal voice, so much so that it was genuinely jarring to hear her normal, lower speaking voice on their (excellent) Tiny Desk concert. “Sienna” is a wistful track, but one that only really harpoons you in the gut out of nowhere once you look into the lyrics—the backdrop is the fallout of Zardoya’s previous relationship, but specifically mourning the baby she imagined having with her partner: “she would have done all these things like us. But because we broke up, Sienna will never exist,” Zardoya said about the origin of the track. The track’s ghostly qualities crystallizes once you know that meaning—this entire future that Zardoya imagined is nothing but mist now; it’s fitting that, as this future fades away, so does the song, and Submarine as a whole—”Sienna” is the last breath before the album closes, an exhale of resignation before Zardoya’s wishes become ephemeral.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao – “And I smile when I think of all the times we had/On the beach in the winter, when the waves were mad/Down by the water, crystal clear/See her face in the forest, then it disappears…”

“Cuckoo Through the Walls” – Cate Le Bon

Sunday Songs has basically become one of those Scooby-Doo villain reveal scenes. You rip off the “Sunday Songs” mask, and it’s just a weekly excuse for me to blabber on about Cate Le Bon. You fools all fell for my trap!

Did Cate Le Bon just casually come out of the womb with years’ worth of fully-formed talent? I still have two albums of hers that I haven’t listened to, but I swear that she’s incapable of making a bad album. Mug Museum feels a lot more like a standard indie rock album than her more recent works, but even the more (marginally) accessible style couldn’t keep her from her quirky engine firing on all cylinders. Moments of somber contemplation (“Mug Museum”) are hand in hand with ragged rage (“Wild”), and yet all form the weave of Le Bon’s experiences surrounding the album. Most of it deals with the death of her grandmother and how Le Bon processed her sudden absence from the matrilineal line; for her, it was less about what her grandmother meant to her as an individual and more about how her family rearranged and shifted in wake of her absence. The titular Mug Museum is a kind of haunted house of sorts where memories live: she called it “an imaginary place where relationships are looked at and thought upon.” Walking through this album does feel like strolling through a museum built inside of someone’s old house; small objects hold centuries of memories, and every strand on a curtain or crack in a window holds a deep history. “Cuckoo Through The Walls” is one of the tracks that I felt exemplified this feeling the best. Its more restrained, steady pace feels like tentatively peering through all the corners of said aging, dusty house, glancing at the light illuminating unseen gaps in the floorboards. Le Bon describes a state where these memories have anchored her to the house, to the point where she almost becomes the house itself: “And I watched the dinner drown/I drank for hours/Never leave the house/Cuckoo through the walls/Lay still on the ground/Exhale the sound of symphonies.” Like her signature, left-of-center takes on the most universal emotions, her grief doesn’t keen, but sinks into all the hollows of her mind and body—and that might be more of an honest depiction of it than most songwriters are willing to take.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Immeasurable Depth of You – Maria Ingrande Mora – “I will not sing your name/And tie my heart to Jupiter/And watermelon dreams/I felt the fear of change…”

“Au Pays du Cocaine” – Geese

Alright, you got me. The jury’s still out if Getting Killed is getting lobbed onto the mounting pile of albums I want to listen to, but “Au Pays du Cocaine” makes me understand a modicum of the hype. Sometimes an album invades your Instagram feed for no reason, but half the time, there’s at least something to it, even if that something boils down to only a song or two. This song just makes me feel…safe. Yes, it’s seems more to be about a relationship with someone who’s ruined their life, but it feels so safe to me. It sounds like the friends you give you a ride when it’s too far to walk, and the people who texted me and offered their showers when the hot water shut off in my apartment. It’s a hastily-built up lean-to to give you a fleeting moment of shelter in the rain. The middle ground between my feelings about “Au Pays du Cocaine” and the more literal lyrics is that it’s a promise: believing that people can change, and being ready for them when they do. I’ve learned the hard way that for some people, you just have to let them heal on their own terms, but that you by no means have to forgive them, or even be there for that healing. There’s a hard-won freedom in that realization. But this song is for the ones that are worth sticking around for—the people you love despite their faults. It’s rare to find those people worth sticking around for, but maybe that’s why I feel such solace in this song—those people are few and far between, but this song is for them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – “You can be free/You can be free and still come home/It’s alright/I’m alright…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/15/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: some of my favorite women in music getting unabashedly weird with it, the pioneering bisexuals of Britpop, and…crabs.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/15/26

“Wonderful” – Cate Le Bon

In her review of Crab Day for Pitchfork, Laura Snapes said this about the album’s inspiration (Cate Le Bon’s young niece replacing the mean-spirited pranks of April Fool’s Day for Crab Day, where you celebrate by drawing crabs): “nonsense is often the best response to nonsense, that the constructs we use to prop up our lives are often totally arbitrary.” Le Bon has had a deep sense of absurdity, but Crab Day as an album is built all about taking ordinary things in our life to task, but also about being faced with the fact that half of the things in our lives are arbitrary, flimsy constructs. Some of it’s done gleefully, as in the creation of Crab Day, but for others, it’s more emotional—“I Was Born on the Wrong Day” came out of Le Bon’s mother digging up her birth certificate and admitting that they’d had her birthday wrong for decades. Crab Day, both lyrically and musically, explores the pain that comes from realizing that our world is built on the flimsiest stilts imaginable, but also the glee that comes with spitting in the face of them and embracing life’s absurdity.

There’s always been quirkiness surrounding Le Bon’s music, but Crab Day feels like the moment that the eggshell split open and she fully embraced offbeat, unconstrained creativity. That’s not to say that any of her earlier work isn’t creative—quite the opposite, having just listened to Mug Museum—but this album is where her current sound began to coalesce in earnest. It’s much more guitar-oriented than her more recent works, but it’s got all of the hallmarks of what’s become her signature style: artful blares of saxophone, offbeat lyrics, and slanted melodies and rhythms that read like the audio version of a picture frame hanging at a crooked angle. “Wonderful” exemplifies that crookedness, easily the most unfettered moment of weirdness on the album. The guitars scream Lodger-era David Bowie, and the lyrics of mid-’70s Brian Eno. But the fact that seemingly every commenter in the YouTube comments section has an entirely different band comparison as to what it sounds like proves how original Le Bon’s unique arrangement of elements is. With everything from the xylophones to Le Bon’s vocals at a breakneck pace, it’s an ode to being constantly in motion: “I wanna be your motion-picture film, oh yeah/I wanna be your ten-pin ball, ball, ball.” In the context of the album’s crusade to expose life’s absurdity, it feels like a concentration of her spirit throughout this album, but also her career at large: to be adventurous in all sorts of ways, and to be constantly be searching for a new way of setting creativity and weirdness in motion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Floating Hotel – Grace Curtis – it’s difficult to match a song as singular as this to a book, since it’s so distinct; but if anything, this would match the bustle of a Wes Anderson-esque hotel in space.

“Marigolds” – Kishi Bashi

Realizing that Kishi Bashi had written a song named after my favorite flower was already an exciting revelation, but finding out how engrossing of a song it is made that discovery all the better. Tinged with both joy and melancholy, “Marigolds” surrounds cross-generational experiences, and bridging the gap of realizing that everybody around you has a complex inner life, separated by time, but united in the here and now: “It’s the realization that another person’s perception of the world is just as real to them as yours is to you, and that this humility is the first step in living in harmony on a planet that is ultimately made up of 8 billion parallel universes.” With that emotional core to the track, the field of marigolds couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor—each bloom appearing similar on the outside, but each one having a unique, complex makeup that can’t be seen from the outside. His usual lush string arrangements are layered in a glimmering swarm evoking the delicateness of flower petals and the ephemeral wingbeats of songbirds. Paired with a gorgeously animated music video by Geoff Hopkinson, featuring marigolds that turn into fantastical, jellyfish-like beings, “Marigolds” is an utterly transportive track, scented with pollen and wistful longing.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Record of a Spaceborn Few – Becky Chambers – “I wish that I could grow up with you/I wanna see the world the way you do/I want to fall off the edge with you/I want to have fun with you…”

“Drink Deep” – Florence + The Machine

You guys, I’m sorry. Every time I hear a Florence + The Machine song, it’s described as some masterpiece that leaves permanent claw marks on your heart, and then I listen and I come back feeling…perfectly alright? I’m sure there’s something I’m missing, but some things just aren’t everybody’s cup of tea all the way. Objectively, Florence Welch has great vocal range, and I’ve never hated any song of hers, but I’ve also never thought to myself, “I need to listen to more Florence + The Machine.” Maybe part of it’s just that she’s been unfairly associated with the TikTokification of female rage (or, “female rage is when a woman sings loud and man is bad”) and “divine feminine” becoming a buzzword, but that’s not her fault at all. However, as I follow a lot of music publications online, I saw that Mark Bowen of IDLES was one of the producers on her latest album, Everybody Scream, so I was at least intrigued.

One of my dearest friends has been trying to convert me for quite some time (once again, SORRY), but I heard a snippet of this one, and I was hooked out of nowhere. It sounds almost nothing like any of her other songs I’ve heard. Again, Welch has a great voice, but I feel like a lot of her songs seem to rely on the strength of her voice in order to amp up the emotion, and the rest of the music doesn’t always follow. “Drink Deep” is more contemplative, but also, a lot eerier than I gave her credit for. Here, Welch translates her experience with her life passing her by as she’s touring (while everybody else moves about normally in their lives) as akin to being prisoner to the fae, trapped and ageless in their realm for hundreds of years while everyone else ages naturally: “What I thought was a night was a thousand years/What I thought was a sip was a thousand tears/But still, they said/Drink deep.” It devolves into a kind of Celtic-inspired folk horror where what Welch ends up essentially cannibalizing herself at the will of the fae—an apt metaphor for what the music industry puts its performers (especially women) through. The atmosphere of “Drink Deep,” with an ominous, thundering drumbeat, chimes, and a warbling choir reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Rocket’s Tail,” evokes the passage into another, darker realm, a descent into an unbreakable deal made in blood.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “They gave me gowns and riches/Cut gold thread with their teeth/Every night I went to see them/No, I did not sleep/And every cup they brought to me/Oh, you know I did/Drink deep…”

“Moon” – Björk

Every time I mention Biophilia, it’s inevitable that I go on and on about the app—which is appropriate, since it is the backbone of the album. But I feel like you’re missing an entire chunk of the album if you don’t talk about the delicately constructed visual language of it—for me, you’re missing half the story if you don’t see the elaborate costumes and the artistry of the visuals. All of the music videos for Biophilia are showstopping, and the music video for “Moon” feels like the best introduction to the album’s aesthetic. Literally, it’s a moving version of the album cover, but the superposition of the moon phases over Björk’s body visually convey the lyrics and the concepts behind them. I love the jagged, glowing constellation-shapes surrounding her, both a map of the app and of a galaxy itself; and I cannot get enough of Björk’s costumes for this album cycle. That combination of her rusty, Mars-orange wig and the metallic shades all throughout her bronzy dress and the playable harp corset, against the stark black of the backdrop, are just such a memorable, cosmic color combination to me. The blue ringing her face and eyes brings out the contrast spectacularly. This is the epitome of a wholly realized creative vision brought to life. Granted, this is much later in her career, but it gives me some hope that maybe, in some ideal timeline, some of the projects that I’m envisioning can someday can get as much of my creative freedom inside of them as possible.

The best way that I can describe “Moon” is that I feel as though I’m listening to a perfect circle. Set in 17/8 sign to mimic the phases of the moon, the chorus of harps seem to circle each other, an elaborate, delicate Ouroboros that encircles itself forevermore. It takes a. rare genius to make a song sound like a shape, but that’s exactly the kind of musician that Björk is. Her mind!! Her MIND!! Having a lighter, more celestial tone for a song about the moon, a subject that often invokes more ominous, sweeping majesty or loneliness (see: Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon,” Bachelor’s “Moon”) makes it stand out from its many, many peers; the instrumentation is so pearly and dewy, and her line about “adrenaline pearls” makes me think of “Cocoon” in the sweetest way. And more poignant still is how she relates these lunar phases to the phases we cycle through in life—”Best way to start anew/Is to fail miserably/Fail at loving/And fail at giving/Fail at creating a flow/Then realign the whole.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Activation Degradation – Marina J. Lostetter – “As the lukewarm/Hands of the gods/Came down and gently/Picked my adrenalin pearls/They placed them in their mouths/And rinsed all the fear out…”

“The Drowners” – The London Suede

I think I just like 90% of Britpop. The only band in the genre that I’ve never liked is Oasis, and I’ve heard some argue that they’re not stylistically Britpop, but were just lumped into the genre because they blew up at the same time as bands like Blur and Pulp. I’m not sure if I can agree in good conscience just because I despise Oasis, but given what I’ve heard of them…it makes sense. Other than them, I’ve loved everything I’ve heard from the rest of the Big Four—and “The Drowners” is really convincing me that I need to listen to more of The London Suede.

At the forefront of every other explosive new subgenre, you will find a bisexual. The London Suede were one of the first bands to be called Britpop in earnest, and contributed a significant amount to its sound, although they were focused less on British social commentary and more on a dramatic, glam rock resurgence that recalled David Bowie’s storytelling and subversive sexuality and Morrissey’s literary-minded lyrics (and half-unbuttoned shirts). In their earlier days, they very much banked on the profitability and controversy of the queer imagery and lyrics in their band, as Bowie did back in the ’70s, from the lesbian couple on their self-titled album cover to Anderson’s obliquely queer lyrics and androgynous presentation. If he wasn’t bisexual, I’d honestly feel like it bordered on queerbaiting, relying on the shock value of subversive sexuality to make more money. But it’s not his fault, necessarily—God knows there’s legions of glam rock/metal artists from the ’70s and ’80s who glommed onto the queer aesthetics for the money it made them, and later disavowed queerness entirely. (Lookin’ at you, Alice Cooper.) Ultimately, The London Suede feel more like they’re indebted to English literary tradition to me—often queer, often subversive, and dramatically indulging in themes of class division and excess. That’s what Anderson and co. feels like to me, and “The Drowners,” with its cult of ambiguous sexuality, glamor, and wealth, feels like a worthy tribute.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Atlas Six – Olivie Blake – this brand of Britpop being big and dark academia being a major literary trend missing each other temporally is either a major blessing or a curse—they fit a little too well with each other.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/8/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: unfortunately, the pink theme couldn’t be scheduled for the week of Valentine’s Day, so enjoy your pink disentangled from the holiday. Also, Madeline being pretentious from the age of 5, a whole lot of beep-boop-beep, and Kathleen Hanna’s answer to these trying times.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/8/26

“This Island” – Le Tigre

All rise for the anti-ragebait national anthem! The litany against ragebait, if you will.

I’m sure there’s some activism/politically-involved situation that Kathleen Hanna hasn’t written about, but you have to give it to her—in that sphere, she’s got a song for almost anything. Since 2024, every new Le Tigre song that I discover has hit hard in this political context, whether it’s the perennially relevant reminder to “Get Off The Internet” (destroy the right wing!) or the rallying cry of “Keep On Livin’.” Even in 2008, the internet already had shown the ugly side of not just enabling faceless trolls to spread misinformation, but for anger-inducing content to get the most engagement; it’s been a disaster for everything, really, but especially activism. Pair that with social media’s penchant to push the most shocking angles on news stories that are already shocking (and the sheer volume of said shocking, disheartening news), and you’ve got a recipe for disaster for anybody who wants to doggedly keep hope. It’s ground so many would-be activists into the ground, turning them into despairing doomers convinced that there’s no hope for the future.

“This Island” isn’t exactly the uplifting chant of “Keep On Livin'”, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Its target is that kind of person who’s so hopelessly entrenched in internet-peddled doom that they need a bucket of ice water to the face to snap them out of it. It’s tough love (part of the chorus is just a repetition of “You’re a mess!”), but it’s vital if you want to carry on. The brutal 3.3/10-rated (3.3? Did Le Tigre kick your puppy?) Pitchfork review of This Island lamented that the album sacrificed its normal political bite in favor of making it more watered down and commercially accessible. Yet although the instrumentals are smoother and the beats poppier, no major label production could ever defang Hanna and co.; “This Island” rings as an unflinching slap upside the head and a call to remember all of the good things happening in the world; the backdrop of the album was the War on Terror, but now, in…well, a new iteration of just that, this last verse hits harder than ever:

“The horizon’s like a ship in flames tonight/You say you just don’t know/If you can take this city, cause the/Rent’s high, and the war’s on/And it’s last call/Even your friends look worried/My friends all think you’re smart/We think you’re super-fine/But it’s high time/I mean it’s high tide…”

I’m not above doomscrolling. Goodness knows that I’ve needed said splash of cold water in my face more often than not. It’s not our fault—social media has been deliberately manufactured to keep you hooked as long as possible; in just the same way, the ruling class wants to keep you hopeless and constantly posting so that you only make money for their corporations and don’t rise up. What matters most is what you are—and what you do—outside of the internet. What matters is that you have the strength of your friends and community beside you. Even when it seems like all hope is lost, we can take this city. Le Tigre took this city in 2004—who’s to say that we can’t do it in 2026?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope – edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older – several of the stories in here have a similar aim that Le Tigre did back in the day: to merge political awareness with art.

“Always On My Mind/In My House” (cover) – Pet Shop Boys

Separately, the elements of this song should not work. If you just said, without context, that this was an ’80s synth pop cover of an Elvis song (which was, as with most Elvis songs, a cover in and of itself) that devolves into acid house halfway through and stretches to nearly 10 minutes long, I’d probably be put off, to say the least. It’s like the musical version of “I hate gay halloween, what do you meanyou’re dressed as [insert combination of niche references]?” Things that were only possible in the late ’80s, folks. But against all odds, this is incredible. A few weeks back, I was listening to this on repeat while making a digital drawing, and I got into a flow state so queer that the drawing practically flew from my fingertips. Originally conceived to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, this, “Always On My Mind” later morphed into the 9-plus-minute remix and combination with “In My House.” Retrospectively, most of the writing on this song talks about how, by all accounts, this shouldn’t have worked. And yet Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe make it look like the combination of Elvis, house, rap, and random firework samples was always meant to be. It’s a case study in lulling a listener into a false sense of security before letting the floor drop out from under them. Every beat drop and twist works seamlessly—the switch from house back into the Elvis cover at 5:26 knocks me off my feet every time. You already need a boatload of talent for a song to sound effortless, but to be able to unite so many disparate elements and make it into a chart-topper—this was the #1 Christmas single in the U.K. in 1987.—takes a special kind of band.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Swift and Sudden Exit – Nico Vicenty – thematically, it fits nicely with this book, but this had to have been hidden somewhere in the ’80s scenes (or the ’90s ones, for that matter).

“Cover Me” – Björk

I always come back to Post. To me, it’s one of her most experimental albums, but not in the sense of musical genre—it’s one of her more accessible ones, right after Debut. But it’s much more experimental in its mindset. She sends her feelers out in every possible direction, and the joy of the album comes from the sheer range of emotions and genres she explored, from grimy, electronic tracks to an attempt to channel Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (in the way that only Björk could). The adventurous spirit that she first fostered on Debut, playing the role of ingenue in both her life and music, practically explodes out here. You can hear it more clearly on the louder songs, whether it’s the bevy of strange instrumentals pulsating outwards or Björk herself actually screaming—another staple of her music that’s carried on 30 years post-Post.

“Cover Me,” the penultimate track on the album, is often forgotten in the deluge of other masterpieces stacked on top of each other on Post. But to me, it represents, both lyrically and musically, a key part of where Björk would go later on in her career. It’s a prickly yet twinkly song—the main body of the instrumental consists of hammered dulcimer, which is played in such a way that it feels cautious, like any sudden movement or snap of branches could trigger a trapdoor; the feeling is accentuated by the humid, jungle-like atmosphere, with all sorts of rattling noises that disappear just as quickly as they appear. Without a doubt, it’s one of the less accessible tracks on the album. Every time I listen to “Cover Me,” I feel like I’ve stepped into Henri Rousseau’s painting “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!),” pushing aside the woodcut-looking leaves and treading lightly so as not to alert the snarling tiger inches away from me; it’s fearful, but the fear is outweighed by the ecstasy of proving that “the impossible really exists.” Her lyricism feels fairytale-like, as though she’s mapping out an entirely new land, looking over her shoulder to guide you with her commentary; With a sly smirk, she declares, “I’m going hunting for mysteries.” Taking another step forward, she whispers back to you, almost afraid to admit: “This is really dangerous/But worth the effort.”

According to Björk, she wrote “Cover Me” to poke fun at herself for making the process of making the album so pointedly different, and purportedly, difficult. And yet, as the black sheep even in an album swarming with oddball anthems, it’s paved the way for exactly the kind of career that Björk has made for herself. Every part of her life has been about pushing music to its limits, whether it’s bridging together music, science, and technology to make a stunning album and an educational app or creating entirely new instruments for her tours. Björk has never shied away from what’s dangerous, and her willingness to bend, stretch, and outright break boundaries, musically and societally. Though she’s known by more iconic lyrics, this one might just be the best to describe her career so far: “I’m going to prove the impossible really exists.” And if there’s anything to be learned from her endeavors, is that all of that danger was well worth the effort.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Search for Wondla (The Search for WondLa, #1) – Tony DiTerlizzi – “While I crawl into the unknown/Cover me/I’m going hunting for mysteries/Cover me/I’m going to prove the impossible really exists…”

“Circuit” – Apples in Stereo & Marbles

Tragically, this song (and the album, Expo) aren’t even on YouTube. Criminal, if you ask me! But I think it should tell you how concerningly niche my music taste was, even as a child—”Circuit” was my favorite song when I was about 5. Less of a brag and more of a grim foreshadowing of me becoming an insufferably pretentious adult. Back in the day, I had this great little Hello Kitty CD player; I’ve got a specific memory of having this song on a playlist and having to press down on those thick, 2000’s buttons just so I could hear this song over and over, ad nauseam. I stand by 5-year-old Madeline—it never gets old.

Though it’s labeled under The Apples in Stereo, Marbles is the solo project of Robert Schneider, the Apples’s frontman; if you thought that you can’t possibly get any more beep-boop-beep than The Apples in Stereo…buckle up. Chiefly consisting of synths, Expo is nothing but electro-pop—emphasis on the electro. Every song I’ve heard from the album sounds like the kind of music that could only be made by squeaky robots from some ’50s pulp sci-fi movie. Little me specifically imagined Plex from Yo Gabba Gabba! singing it. It’s a self-contained sci-fi universe, complete with its alluring protagonist, some sort of robot or cyborg woman who “perceives circuitries/Inside everything she sees.” Lo and behold, this is the work of a man, not a machine. But with the precision applied to every single part of this track, “Circuit” truly is a well-oiled machine. Like the intricate, fragile fragments of a circuit board, every flourish of processed orchestral samples and every bubbly synth chord all work as cogs in a machine with so many moving parts, yet with effortless cohesion that so many artists can only dream of reaching. This is how you make a pop song. Embrace the beep-boop.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Infinity Particle – Wendy Xu – The robot is gender-swapped here, but he sure does see electricity.

“Typical Love” – Cate Le Bon

“Typical Love” was cut from the Pompeii sessions, but according to Cate Le Bon, was “disassembled and reassembled it many times but it always felt like a second cousin to the other tracks so was put aside for a rainy day.” It’s in limbo between the production of Pompeii but with the kind of lyrics I would’ve expected on Michelangelo Dying, cataloguing the quiet, suffocating mundanity of a relationship gone stale. If it had any closer cousin on Pompeii, it would probably be “French Boys”; it has the same kind of wry comedy of Le Bon putting on airs—she might as well be muttering “Typical love, typical love” before taking a drag from one of those long, old-fashioned cigarette holders. But as with most of her tracks, “Typical Love” is anything but typical, with percussive bursts of her own breath, saxophone blares that bleed out like oversaturated watercolors soaking through thin paper, and an Eno-like taste for taking repetition to its logical limit, stretching melodies and words until they no longer feel like their original forms. It’s all at once angular and circular, like an abstract painting, woven from brightly-colored, dancing shapes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “Nothing ever changed in your corridor eyes/Rely on me, baby/Rely on air/Only a shadow again/Typical love…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/1/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: who would win in a fight: righteous haterism or unfettered whimsy? Neither, actually. They’re both more powerful when they’ve joined forces.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/1/26

“Lipstick on the Glass” – Wolf Alice

It feels redundant to say that this is a very 2010’s song for it coming out of the 2020’s—”Lipstick On The Glass” only came out in 2021, and Wolf Alice were active all throughout the 2010’s anyway. And yet, I can’t shake how much they’ve crystallized that 2010’s indie sound. This song feels like a cousin of Eisley’s “Currents,” a favorite of mine in middle school, which came out in 2013. Both of them feel very cloudy and foggy, but adorned with clear, angular sparks that stick out of the mist like fragments of crystal. Even through the almost Cocteau Twins-kaleidoscope in the chorus, Wolf Alice have set up a system of lighthouses: the sharp percussion, and Ellie Roswell’s vocals, that range from a husky whisper to a diving bird of prey cutting through the sky. Free-floating and without much of an anchor, “Lipstick On The Glass” ha such a sense of urgency despite the deliberate blending of most of its musical shapes and textures into each other, making for an exciting, cinematic blend—especially when the chorus first kicks in. That beat drop is even more gratifying paired with Roswell’s lyrics, succumbing to the siren song of an old lover. But even after that beat drop, “Lipstick On The Glass” is beguiling all the way through.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stars Undying – Emery Robin – “Oh, my body does deceive me/Just as did yours/Though we’re fighting different wars/In our ways…”

“Harbour” – Cate Le Bon

Straightforward for Cate Le Bon usually means that it’s still delightfully strange. When I first listened to Pompeii, “Harbour” was actually one of my least favorites—I never disliked it, but it wasn’t as in-your-face inventive as some of the others on the first listen. It’s a case of every song on the album being excellent, so the benchmark is extra high from the get-go, making songs like this get lost in the dust. To be fair, after experiencing “Dirt on the Bed” for the first time tends to overshadow all else when you listen to Pompeii, but that’s no excuse for leaving a song like this to languish. I maintain that it’s one of the weaker songs on the album, but at this point, a weak Cate Le Bon would be a career highlight in your average artist’s hands.

Pompeii as a whole has a pretty even, calm pace, as adorned with all kinds of weirdness as it is. “Harbour” got lost for me because it didn’t have the same strangeness on the surface, but the more I listen, the more layers I find hidden within it. That’s the joy of Cate Le Bon for me—even her more radio-friendly songs conceal everything from watery, pre-Michelangelo Dying synths to spurts of saxophone that sound like the happier cousin of the brass blasts at the end of “Dirt on the Bed.” Pompeii as a whole is quite ’80s, but not in the way of shoving neon synths down your throat—it’s just a more subtle exploration of the sound rather than a way to farm nostalgia; even so, the specific use of saxophones in “Harbour” veered too close to the latter territory on my first listen. Once again, the bar just breached the stratosphere, given how seamlessly Le Bon has been able to integrate saxophones (and brass in general) into her music without it being full on “Careless Whisper” cheese. Now, though she’s used it in better ways, it’s still a cut above the rest. That goes for “Harbour” as a whole—she’s a master at manipulating seemingly ordinary elements and twisting them just far enough to the left to make you do a double-take. She’s full of surprises.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley – “What you said was nice/When you said my face turned a memory/What you said was nice/When you said my heart broke a century…”

“Presumably Dead Arm” – Sidney Gish

I’m back with another unexpected kick back into late 2019 from my shuffle…OOF. This one came during the period where I discovered some the fruitful harvest of offbeat indie rock after I got Apple Music. The floodgates were open, allowing me to listen to way too much girlpool…and this.

The thing that stands out to me about Sidney Gish is that I think she’s a key part of a newer aesthetic that will probably be defined more in retrospect. She’s the spitting image of a certain brand of Gen Z, internet-bred musician who records their music on their laptops and cut their teeth with covers on YouTube. (Gish, for the record, has a very sweet cover of The Magnetic Fields’s “All My Little Words” that she recorded in her shower that stars her pet rabbit. That should give you an idea of her general vibe.) They’ve all got purposely poorly photoshopped album art and quirky, vaguely surreal lyrics. For Gish, I think she’s at least an inch above the rest because her lyricism is, for the most part, very distinctly her and not necessarily just there to service a meme-y aesthetic. Yet I’m almost certain that it’ll date her music instantly, given a decade or so. Ed Buys Houses is still a solid, unique album, but there’s no doubt that it’ll be more and more distinctly 2016 as time passes.

I think “Presumably Dead Arm” was the first song of Gish’s that I ever listened to, and to this day, the charm of it mostly holds up. The sound is so distinctly late-2010’s, complete with the fuzz you get from recording music off of an aging laptop speaker. Now that it’s 2026, I can’t see the title without hearing it in the same cadence as this, yet even so, it’s just such a softly charming little tune. It has a very late teenage kind of wistful melancholy to it, but with the added through line of finding said presumably dead arm in a graveyard (and taking it to prom). Between laments about isolation and drunk and high friends, Gish’s distinct flavor of lyricism shines through: “I’d rather let the poor kid sleep/But he’s tripping balls, he’s tripping testes/LSD, post-wisdom teeth/He got lost in the shower/And he barely knows the hour.” But what hits me now, seven years after I initially found this song, is the genuine fear hidden behind some of the lyrics, the kind you can only get when you’re approaching your 20’s and don’t have a clue what you’re going to do about growing up: “And all these pretend spouses are a happy storybook/That’ll turn to stark non-fiction in the time it took/For me to notice that I’m old, which means I’ll be thirty and happy/Likely married to personified business-casual khakis.” As silly as some of those lines are, they’re delivered with such an urgency that for a fleeting moment, I feel them like a skipped heartbeat in my ribcage. It’s uncanny, how quickly Gish can switch from abject silliness to existentialism. But that’s very Gen Z—and very Sidney Gish, in the end.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly – Sybil Lamb – an underrated oddball of the book world, as Sidney Gish is to indie rock.

“Therefore, I Am” – Jim O’Rourke

I’m all for having compassion and empathy in your heart, but there’s a special, beautiful place in this world for songs that innately feel like a massive middle finger. Sometimes it’s healthy to indulge the spite and blast your fuck-you song. And if you’re looking for a good fuck-you song, then boy, do I have the song for you.

I mainly knew Jim O’Rourke from his far calmer, instrumental world and his role as the longtime producer for much of Wilco’s discography. I knew that he had a solo career, but I honestly thought that it was more along the “Bad Timing” side than this. Apparently he’d been so steeped in his more experimental musical roots for so long and decided to try his hand at a more straightforward indie rock album, and came out the other side with Insignificance. It’s a shame that he doesn’t tap into lyric-oriented music and sing more—he’s got a great voice. And I’m not saying the stuff about the lyrics because they’re some poetic, soul-searching kernel of wisdom. They just happen to be some of the most artfully vitriolic disses I’ve heard put to song. Take this one:

“We are on a sinking ship/But I’d like to stay on board and shoot the cannons at you.”

DAMN. DEDICATION. On my first listen, I just kept hearing this over and over with each successive lyric:

I would not want to be on the receiving end of that. I pity whoever Jim O’Rourke was beefing with circa 2000. “As you can see/I’m a happy guy”—are you sure, Jim? For a song sung so calmly, every line is a gleeful slap in the face—it’s not just a fuck-you to whoever it may concern, but an open brag about how much his life has improved ever since they ended things. The instrumentals have a very Brian Eno, repetition-oriented feel to them (with a guitar tone that scratches every good itch in my musical brain, I might add), and yet even without any screaming or hammering guitars to pieces on stage, it manages to be so cleverly bitter under such an unassuming guise. Perfect cure-all for any and all breakups, toxic friendships, or just thinking about the excess of scummy authority figures all around. I need some Riot Grrl bands to cover this. God, it’s so fun.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – Moniquill Blackgoose – “Why do you hide behind somebody else?/There’s one too many in this room/And I think it’s you…”

“Octopus’s Garden” – The Beatles

I know the whole situation of 3/4 of the Beatles being at each other’s necks during the Abbey Road/Let It Be sessions while Ringo Starr just made a song about an octopus has been memed to death. But really? We should all aspire to be like Ringo in that scenario. Observe the chaos around you and defy it openly with silliness and childlike wonder. Being labelled as the goofy Beatle must’ve had its perks, because I doubt anybody would’ve expected “Octopus’s Garden” to have as lasting of an impact as it did. It’s a classic, both in the Beatles sense and in the sense of most every child since 1970 having fond memories of it. And it’s a classic for a reason. Unlike some of the other more obliquely “joke” Beatles songs (see: “Wild Honey Pie,” which, I’m gonna say it: a thing of sheer beauty), the production is staggeringly good. It came on shuffle the other day, and when I just expected to have a little laugh with Ringo, I got blown away at just how tight of a composition it is—the piano arrangement? George Harrison’s guitar riffs? The harmonies? EVERYTHING? For a song that often gets dismissed as one of the more shallow songs in their catalogue, “Octopus’s Garden” has all manner of hidden layers to it, like bits of seashells hiding just beneath the surface of the waves.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sea Sirens – Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee – I’m convinced that this book is set exactly where Ringo Starr set “Octopus’s Garden.” We found it, gang. We found the Octopus’s Garden…

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/25/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: Here it comes again; a fantastic voyage to Palo Alto to answer this essential question: where’s my phone? It’s been undone!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/25/26

“Where’s My Phone?” – Mitski

It’s finally come to that time of year when I start accumulating albums that I’m looking forward to. Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, which is set to release on February 27, is topping the list at the moment for sure! Mitski is back for her first album in two and a half years, and as usual, she’s set to put a pulse on the neuroses of the world; Nothing’s About to Happen to Me seems to be a concept album about a recluse who never leaves her cluttered house. With the aesthetics of cats and old wallpaper, this album has such a clear image—and an intriguing one. Mitski channels some of her heavier guitar work on “Where’s My Phone?”; it’s an exciting sonic callback, like she’s been dusting off the old Bury Me at Makeout Creek sounds (!!!). Adopting a falsely cheery tone, Mitski sings of this character desperately repressing every possible source of negativity, yearning to be “clear glass with nothing going on.” The sentiment of “I keep thinking surely somebody will save me/At every turn I learn that no one will” is pure Mitski all the way down, but it’s refreshing to see Mitski going headfirst into a new character; her introspection, fictional or nonfictional, is where her art shines. Plus, that music video, in which Mitski’s multigenerational home gets assailed by dozens of strangers, is nothing short of bonkers. Definitely somebody’s vivid anxiety dream, for sure.

For some reason, my mind got stuck on the classic censored beep sound on the “I would fuck the hole all night long” line. Sure, we are in the age of musicians proactively self-censoring, but of all musicians, Mitski seems like the last one to do that, especially with how she’s clawed to keep her individuality—and sanity—intact in the music industry. She’s not a Taylor Swift type, and she hasn’t shied away from profanity before. There’s no clean version of the song, and the music video has it too—and yet the official lyrics don’t censor it. So what’s the deal? Was it some sort of artistic touch for the album’s central character’s supposed shame and guilt? I still haven’t come to a conclusion myself, but I swear that it’s intentional. Whatever the case, “Where’s My Phone” buzzes with neurosis, crunching at the edges, an ember of anxiety.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid – “I keep thinking surely somebody will save me/At every turn I learn that no one will/I just want my mind to be a clear glass/Clear glass with nothing instead…”

“Fantastic Voyage” – David Bowie

As calm of a song “Fantastic Voyage” is, it’s a certainly eerie start to Lodger. I finally got around to listening to the album in its entirety not long ago, while mourning 10 years since Bowie’s passing in 2016. Listening to Lodger not long after Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy put me in an irreparable chokehold makes me realize the sheer impact of Eno on Bowie—his weirdness was all there, but after decades of being mainstream, it was Eno who resurrected the less palatable parts of weirdness. I’m sure it was less unexpected at the conclusion of the Berlin Trilogy, but expecting another “Starman” and getting…I dunno, “African Night Flight” must’ve been some unparalleled whiplash. And he’d keep the act going throughout his entire career. In a way, Lodger is a microcosm of what his career would later be. There’s no shortage of tricks up his sleeve, from the strange, often eerie left turns to the sneakier tricks; for one, “Fantastic Voyage” and “Boys Keep Swinging” have an almost identical chord progression, but their atmospheres are so radically different that I didn’t even notice. It’s a trickster kind of album, obstinate in its mission to not be boxed in.

After falling back to Earth, the Berlin Trilogy got much more worldly, and Lodger was its peak. The entire album reeks with the recollection that the world is rife with the unknown, be it in places unseen or the machinations of politics. “Fantastic Voyage” is the thesis of that song; it reads like a scrawled diary before the apocalypse, and it very well could have been, what with the threat of nuclear annihilation and the Cold War on Bowie’s mind. He pits the casual dehumanization of entire peoples against the plea for the dignity of all individuals. He looks skyward, pondering the missiles that could rain down on the population and end everything in an instant. But in the midst of all this turmoil, decades after 1979, the final verse rings truer than ever: “They wipe out an entire race and I’ve got to write it down/But I’m still getting educated/But I’ve got to write it down/And it won’t be forgotten.”

Oof. Certainly feels like a slap in the face, given that ICE has been snatching children off the streets and shoots unarmed civilians in Minneapolis, and I’m just holed up in my apartment trying to get my thesis done. Yet Bowie’s words feel like a guidebook. I’ve got to write it down—I interpret that both in the sense that we have to commit the crimes of these monsters to paper, lest the government conveniently paints them in a more pleasant light (as they already are), but also that in spite of everything, we have to keep on with our creativity. Sometimes, all we can do is write. Of course, that doesn’t make political action, however small, null and void, but sometimes it’s all you can do but journal everything around you to stay sane. All that matters, both for Bowie and for all of us, is to keep the pen moving—that keeps our minds sharp, it creates a record of the soul.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? – Temi Oh – “Remember it’s true/Dignity is valuable/But our lives are valuable too/We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression/And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression/We’ll get by, I suppose…”

“Palo Alto” – Radiohead

In a move that’s probably stunned nobody, I’ve decided to become the insufferable neighbor and take up collecting vinyl; my parents were nice enough to gift me with a record player, as well as my two favorite albums: David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Radiohead’s OK Computer. I can’t thank them enough. My neighbors, on the other hand, are probably rueing the day that they had to hear “Fitter Happier” through the walls without warning. Your honor, I plead “whoopsie daisies.”

OK Computer—specifically, the 2017 remaster with all of the b-sides, OKNOTOK—all but swallowed me whole in my freshman year of high school, and the version of me that got chewed up and spit out was irreparably, permanently changed. Whether it was for the best or the worst is up to interpretation, but either way, it’s given me a love of Radiohead that hasn’t waned to this day, more than seven years after I first listened to the album. However, at that age, I was still in the woeful process of immediately deleting whatever songs that didn’t hook me on the first few listens from my library. The destruction left in the wake was irreparable—and it also made me completely forget that this absolute gem existed. I can’t even put my finger on why it wasn’t a favorite at the time; the only reasonable explanation is that OK Computer is just so jam-packed full of songs that shattered my brain that brain-shattering became the standard. I was harsh back then.

Yet on my new record player, “Palo Alto” came out of left field. In the mindset of Thom Yorke, I can sort of see why this one got the axe back in the day—musically, it’s less adventurous than some of the other tracks. It’s very much of the same, more straightforward rock/Britpop crop of The Bends, despite the avalanche of fuzz and decorative beep-boops. Thematically, it’s on par with the anxiety of OK Computer, with the tiresome monotony of corporate life: “In a city of the future/It is difficult to concentrate/Meet the boss, meet the wife/Everybody’s happy, everyone is made for life.” Even if it’s not as compositionally inventive as some of the a-sides, even Radiohead’s more straightforward songs are a cut above the rest, and “Palo Alto” is proof. With the sudden, grinding assault of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s guitars against Thom Yorke’s exasperated delivery of regurgitated small talk, it encapsulates the exhaustion of being trapped in an endless cycle of work buttressed only with surface-level interactions.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “In a city of the future/It is difficult to find a space/I’m too busy to see you/You’re too busy to wait…”

“Here It Comes Again” – Cate Le Bon

I regret to inform you that I’ve been listening to way more Cate Le Bon again, but I can’t help it that it faintly fits the vibe of my honors thesis. Michelangelo Dying, Pompeii, and Reward all got revisited last week, and you will be hearing about it. This is, once again, a threat.

Among the many impressive things about Cate Le Bon is the myriad ways that she makes her music sound innately aquatic. I talked about how watery all of Reward feels when I first listened to it back in July, with “Miami” and its sounds of aquarium gravel and bubbles. Unlike a lot of her songs, “Here It Comes Again” feels more like water rhythmically; with an almost waltz-like rhythm, it feels like the motion of a plastic toy boat being carried out to sea. The melody continually repeats and lives by eating itself, a gently cyclical waltz across a flooded ballroom covered in algae. That precise quality of the melody is what enhances the lyrics. It’s implied in the title (and the chorus), but “Here It Comes Again” drowns in monotony, its sonic eyelids growing heavier with each repetition: “Man alive/This solitude/Is wrinkles in the dirt.” Very few artists make solitude and dreariness into such musical feasts like Cate Le Bon does—if it’s loneliness, she’s spun it into something as appealing as a bowl of candies with brightly-colored wrappers.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane – “Man alive/This solitude/Is wrinkles in the dirt/I borrowed love from carnivals/Set it in a frame/Here it comes again…”

“Been Undone” – Peter Gabriel

HE’S BACK! PETER GABRIEL IS BACK TO SAVE 2026!

Once again culminating in an album coming out this December, o\i is being released in singles corresponding with each full moon of 2026. Three days into 2026, it gave me some hope—and a bittersweet full-circle moment for me. I spent the spring semester of my freshman year of college listening to i/o‘s singles, and I’ll be spending the spring semester of my senior year listening to its inverse. The songs comprise of both castoffs from the i/o sessions and from further back in his career; according to this video, the chord progression for “Been Undone” has been on the back burner for several decades. As the starting gun for the album, it’s an expression of some of what I love best about Gabriel: his boundless creativity and his grounded humility. “Been Undone” is all about learning moments—the ones that cause us pain or overwhelm us, but ultimately teach us something valuable: “By all the forms that you get from the Mandelbrot set/I’ve been undone/By the recursive slaves in the home of the brave/I’ve been undone.” I’m assuming the latter is in reference to the deeply broken U.S. prison system, but back to back with a mathematical concept that results in dizzying, fascinating patterns, it proves the song’s point: both great wonder and great pain can be the origin of learning. Musically, I thought it was going to be a more standard new-era Gabriel song, and it continues so for nearly 6 minutes; but at 5:59, he takes a left turn back into “The Tower That Ate People” territory, turning a pleasantly synthy tune into his personal brand of almost-industrial, proving that even at 74, he has no shortage of tricks up his sleeve.

Also, the bit where Gabriel was asked about the Bright/Dark-side mixes and if he allows the producers to play with the structure cracked me up—probably the clearest vocalization of “no <3” I’ve ever seen HAHA

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Life Hacks for a Little Alien – Alice Franklin – “Though I want to observe, it keeps touching a nerve/And I’ve been undone/By the past that you trace, by a moment of grace/I have been undone…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/18/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: two queens maximizing their joint slay, songs that get a little confusing in the discography next to each other, and unintentionally capitalizing (as if I earn any money from this blog) on gay hockey being the next big thing. Also, a shoutout is due to my mom, because I ended up getting 3/5 of these songs from a single car ride with her. Love you 🙂

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/18/26

“Sleeping Powder” – Gorillaz

Here’s the thing about Gorillaz: I’ve talked extensively about how since 2018, they’ve become less Gorillaz and more about the collaborations, and it feels like they’ve lost themselves somewhere in the midst. The thing is that they’re fully still capable of returning to their roots and balancing the old with the new. Even though it sounds like it could’ve come from Plastic Beach, “Sleeping Powder” was released after Humanz came out in 2018. According to the official Gorillaz lore, 2D made this song behind the rest of the band’s back because he felt that he’d been excluded from the album (shhh, don’t tell Murdoc); the song is primarily about the character’s drug addiction, as evidenced by the music video, complete with the classic “this is your brain on drugs” sample and a 3D 2D (they said it couldn’t be done…) tripping balls and abusing his green screen privileges. It feels like a promise of what Gorillaz still could be; “Sleeping Powder” never feels like it could mesh with Blur or Damon Albarn’s solo work, as some of his more recent music does. It’s pure Gorillaz, channeling the urgency and grooves from their earlier eras but giving them a more modern flourish. Complete with a fusion of acoustic guitars and synths—and one of Albarn’s signature raspy howls—”Sleeping Powder” feels like a reminder that the core of Gorillaz exists—it’s just been buried, which, given how hit or miss their output has been since 2018, is a real shame.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Shamshine Blind – Paz Pardo – “I get dropped from where I belong/I take my pills and I get in the mode/And I take five to get it to load in/Even in the place…”

“Heat Wave” – Snail Mail

Seems like this is a very advantageous time to write about this song, since a) the nearly 5-year Snail Mail drought is purportedly ending next Tuesday (!!!), and b) gay hockey is in. May I interest you in some lesbian hockey?

Hearing “Heat Wave” when I was 14 felt as though something in the world of music had cracked open like an eggshell, and the yolk of possibility had opened up for me. I’d just discovered Snail Mail on the cusp of her first album, Lush, and the first few singles instigated a seismic shift in me. Here was Lindsey Jordan, only 18 at the time, making such raw, fully-formed music with guitar at the forefront. She was openly gay, she wasn’t traditionally feminine, and she looked like somebody who I’d see in my brother’s high school class. But here she was, taking the indie world by storm.

It’s so oddly raw listening to “Heat Wave” now. I’m older than Jordan was in that video now. The lyrics are even more teenage now, but they hit almost as hard as they did when I was 14. At a show I saw her at when I was 16, Jordan admitted that she’d forgotten which song was about which girl; now, it hardly matters—she bottled that open-wound feeling of a fresh breakup and concentrated it so fully that its source is irrelevant. Concentrating that emotion so distinctly is a feat at any age, but at 18! 18! I was writing stories about weird spaceships with way too much purple prose at 18. Man. “Heat Wave” is so chock-full of emotion that it felt almost heady, like strong perfume, listening back to it after so many years; and yet, adorned with some seriously intricate and catchy guitar riffs (once again, AT 18, Jesus Christ), “Heat Wave” is such an indie gem, and Lush remains a testament to the sheer talent she’d worked so hard to cultivate.

Even if Valentine was weaker in retrospect, and even if this new single doesn’t turn out good, there’s still the Snail Mail I loved in 2018. She’s the main reason I picked up the guitar in the first place, and she gave me the courage to come out not long after I saw her at a tiny club in Denver. And I will always treasure that Snail Mail.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Perfect on Paper – Sophie Gonzales – “And I hope whoever it is/Holds their breath around you/Cause’ I know I did/And otherwise/If only sometimes/Would you give it up, green eyes?”

“Tied Up!” – Genesis Owusu

One word keeps popping up like a whack-a-mole every time I listen to “Tied Up!”, and that is “groovy.” Dear lord, this is such an expertly tight groove. There’s not really a genre I can definitively pin it to, and from the looks of it, the same is true for STRUGGLER, the critically-acclaimed album the it comes from. But either way, this song is neat as a pin—this is a groove, nothing more, nothing less.

Loosely centered around the character of The Roach, a struggler on the run from the manifestation of any antagonistic force you can think of, named God. (Sidenote: I love the bug-eyed sunglasses that Owusu wore when he toured for this album. Perfection.) Along with “Leaving the Light,” an adrenaline-fueled sprint away from God’s wrath (“I’m a beast I can feel them poaching/Stamp me down, but a roach keeps roaching”), “Tied Up!” embodies what feels like the mentality of this Roach character: no matter what God throws at him, roaches are famously unkillable, virtually impervious to apocalypse and mass extinction. Owusu declaring that he’s bleeding from his legs right on the heels of the most upbeat pop chorus is whiplash, but it embodies that feeling of taking pride in being unbeatable when you’re being beat down from all sides. Owusu chucks all manner of musical influences in the pot—hip-hop, pop, alt-rock—but they all come out feeling like something wholly new. Aside from a few weak lyrics here and there (“What other choice can I chose?” always trips me up), “Tied Up!” has no bumps in the road—it’s a slick groove all the way through.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Resisters – Gish Jen – “I’m bleeding from my legs but it’s alright today/Better out here than the hell where I stay/I said my feelings start to wobble when I stare at the doves/I’m fighting through life, I have no boxing gloves…”

“Always The Same” (feat. St. Vincent) – Cate Le Bon

If there ever was an audio manifestation of “two queens coming together to maximize their joint slay,” then this is it. This is the only thing keeping the fabric of 2026 together. I can only hope that Cate Le Bon will follow in St. Vincent’s footsteps and retroactively announce a tour date near me.

Praise! We get a momentary extension of my favorite album of 2025, Michelangelo Dying! From the looks of it, there was a fruitful window where St. Vincent and Cate Le Bon were drawing from each other’s musical wells; back in 2024, Le Bon contributed backing vocals to “All Born Screaming.” Now, St. Vincent’s switched roles, providing a harmony for Le Bon on this track from the Michelangelo Dying sessions. “Always The Same” falls on the slower side of the album with songs like “Pieces of My Heart” or “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” and deals with the same heartbreak, although not in the heart-ripped-from-your ribcage way. What stands out to me about Michelangelo Dying is that it’s not a breakup album in the traditional sense—it’s not about the romance so much as it is about the gradual buildup leading to the break. There’s little rage or sorrow, but what there is in great amounts is exhaustion, repressed and built up in the chest until it makes you collapse. She’s not a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl so much as she is a river running dry.

“Always The Same” takes that same bleary-eyed exhaustion and draws it out; Le Bon describes her losing battle with her lover as “back and forth like a country/losing land to war,” shrinking herself until there’s nothing left of her at all. The background saxophones are almost unrecognizable as the instruments they are, made so ripply and strangely plastic by the production, expanding and contracting like a lung made of rubber. Both lyrically and instrumentally, it’s like watching a bundle of herbs dry out in the oven: something that was once green burns up and loses all its color. St. Vincent offers her higher harmonies to rise with Le Bon’s sonorous vocals, a devil on her shoulder to dismiss her pain, repeating: “she can bury it!”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “I swallowed your memories/Like a morning prayer/I’m in your debt now/Almost there…”


“Troubles” – TV on the Radio

Nowadays, this song has to be a pain for TV on the Radio, since they put out a far more popular song called “Trouble” four years later. Oops. Hindsight is 20/20. At least “Troubles” is a bonus track, so it gets forgotten easily. Good for clarity, not good for a perfectly good song that deserves more attention. But if girlpool could make it work by having two completely different songs called “Pretty,” then TV on the Radio can too.

Either way, “Troubles” doesn’t deserve to get left in the dust; even if there are stronger tracks on Nine Types of Light, it’s a calm, steady track—the even-keeled instrumentals makes the chorus of “Despite all the heartbreak it brings/Our love is a surefire thing” feel just as anchored. With imagery of springtime fields and songbirds aplenty, it’s alight with flickers of hope amidst the plateau. It’s a vow to be the calm after somebody’s storm. Even if it’s more restrained than some of the more adventurous, intricate tracks on the album (see: “Killer Crane”), the vocal harmonies are as melodic and light as the songbirds they describe, and the flickers of horns and fluttering synths make for a song built like a dense greenhouse full of bright blooms.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea – Rebecca Thorne – relaxing and steady, with steadfast love and a pastoral, magical setting.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!