Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: You know what’s better than Monday? That’s right, Sun—[gets dragged offstage by a comically large cane]
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 9/28/25
“The Happy Dictator” (feat. Sparks) – Gorillaz
This song came out at the tail end of a terrible day for me…even though I’d experienced some pretty awful events in the past 24 hours, at least there was Gorillaz at the end of it. And a new album with Sparks, IDLES, and Yasiin Bey on it??? EVERYBODY SAY THANK YOU, GORILLAZ! March can’t come soon enough…
From the looks of it, Sparks are having a better 2025 than most of us, what with releasing MAD! and an accompanying EP—collaborating with Gorillaz just seems to be the cherry on top for them. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for them to collaborate. Either way, they’ve come together to sprinkle some healthy satire and upbeat tunes on this dystopian hellscape, and I am all the better for it. As always, Albarn has an eye trained on…well, the trajectory of most of the world right now, but he weaves a tale of opulent tyranny, of dictators who shroud their dirty deeds in illusions of placidity, peace, and universal happiness; it was specifically inspired by a visit to Turkmenistan with his daughter, where the former dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, “wanted everyone in Turkmenistan to only think happy thoughts and sleep unaffected by the doom of the world, and just keep everything upbeat, so he kind of banned all bad news.” Even though his rule ended decades ago, echoes of it can be heard the world over, and Gorillaz is once again here to critique them: “In a world of fiction, I am a velvet glove/I am your soul, your resurrection, I am the love.” It’s…well, frankly, if I emptied out all the parallels, this post would be impossibly long and I would be even more dismal about the news than I already am. At least, in these turbulent times, we can count on Gorillaz to weave some excellent art out of the collective suffering. Plus, if Russell Mael is the dictator in this situation, then y’know what? All hail our new overlord.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins – …need I really say more?
I promise I’ll stop blabbering about Japanese Breakfast soon, but the concert’s had me on such a kick of their music since the beginning of the month. I wasn’t familiar with any of Michelle Zauner’s soundtrack work before the concert, and I wasn’t familiar with the video game Sable at all. (I’m fairly video game illiterate, but it looks super cool, honestly—from what I can tell, you’re basically exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization on a desert planet, and the art was inspired by Moebius. You had me at Moebius!) This game was Zauner’s first foray into soundtracks.
At the Japanese Breakfast show, Zauner whipped this one out of nowhere solely because she’d heard somebody humming it before the show, which should tell you everything about how cool she is as a person. The instrumentation is fairly different than most of her work—it’s much more synth-based, but it works well with something like “Posing in Bondage.” It has a chiming, starry quality to it, just the kind of music I’d imagine hearing while wandering the desert on a sci-fi glider. Once her lyrics fade out of the recognizable and into the more abstract, pulled apart like putty by autotune and editing, it takes on an almost Cocteau Twins quality to it, but if they had been transposed into glaring sunlight and not the wintry sound palettes I usually associate with them. “Glider” is weightless, always looking skyward, yearning and hoping.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Light at the Bottom of the World – London Shah – I feel like “Glider” fits in a multitude of sci-fi settings, but somehow, it feels particularly at home in London Shah’s vision of a flooded England and submersible races.
“Better Than Monday” – Ginger Root
Opening bands are always a gamble, but somehow, I’ve had unusually good luck with them this year—Hana Vu, Tyler Ballgame, and Black Country, New Road are some of the standouts. I went to Japanese Breakfast with a dear friend of mine, and neither of us really knew Ginger Root, and the only person we knew who knew him was a mutual friend. We looked on his Spotify bio, where he described his music as “aggressive elevator soul.” So, in a word, our expectations were…lowered? But we were morbidly curious.
Honestly? I wouldn’t go back and listen to everything of Ginger Root’s, but at the end of the day, I can’t deny how creative of a guy Cameron Lew is. Not only does he have this very polished indie pop act going, he’s also got an entire short film, which he played excepts of during his show. He’s a talented musician, and his band is too, and god, he’s got his hyperspecific vibe down to a science, so I can’t fault him for that. It ventured from more soul-oriented songs to instrumentals that sounded like they should’ve been in the background of MarioKart, but dammit, the guy’s got a vibe going. Plus, anyone who puts absolutely everything into getting an action shot of a melodica solo has my approval…as much as I hate to admit it. “Better Than Monday” was my immediate standout—the bassline is just so propulsive and bouncy, and it’s just such a bright, sleek song. It’s one of those songs where you know from the get-go how much fun Lew and company had making it—the enthusiasm radiates from every note, and that was half of the fun of their opening set. Catchy songs are great on their own, but they’re even catchier when you know that every part of the process was a blast.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Finna – Nino Cipri – it feels odd to say that Ginger Root works perfectly for a book set in an inter-dimensional, legally-distinct IKEA, but life is full of surprises.
A song with the line “music is my savior” and a refrain repeating adages about rock n’ roll is bound to be a crowd favorite—hook, line, and sinker. Yet none of this song strikes me as cliched. Just because it rouses a crowd doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. And who could be better than that than Jeff Tweedy?
That’s not even the real sunken treasure of “Sunken Treasure.” I’d only remembered this song when I saw Wilco play it live back in August, but it’s so jam-packed with showstopping lyrics that it made me astounded that I hadn’t listened to it more attentively when I’d heard it in my dad’s car…because I definitely had. It was an inevitability that I’d come back to this gem. Just…okay, it’s about to be a “just copying and pasting the lyrics” moment, because my god:
“There’s rows and rows of houses/With windows painted blue/With the light from a TV/Running parallel to you/But there is no sunken treasure/Rumored to be/Wrapped inside my ribs/In a sea, black with ink…”
The fact that I’m now picturing the Muppet talking houses notwithstanding, I am once again asking Jeff Tweedy to save some poetic talent for the rest of us. Come on. It’s one of those songs with such a near-universal theme—melancholy and relationships sputtering out—and painted it in a way no other artist has. To some extent, we all go through a handful of the same experiences in our lives, and yet nobody can retell it in the exact same way as the person next to them, despite sharing 99% of their DNA with them. “Sunken Treasure” makes me think of that, because I doubt anybody else would pair that feeling with “If I had a mountain/I’d try and roll it over.” Roiling in the background is a veritable red-hot pot of soup boiling over—it feels like a quieter precursor to “Via Chicago” with distorted, crumbling-brick guitars collapsing in the background, strings pulled to the limits. It’s the instrumental epitome of insisting that you’re fine and unbothered, but deep down…there’s no sunken treasure rumored to be wrapped inside your ribs, etc.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Seep – Chana Porter – “But there is no sunken treasure/Rumored to be/Wrapped inside my ribs/In a sea, black with ink/I am so/Out of tune/With you…”
“midori” – mary in the junkyard
With the steady breadcrumb trail of singles that mary in the junkyard have been putting out since the end of last year, I can only hope that this mean that there’s an album on the way…or an EP, at the very least. Paired with “drains,” which came out this summer, they’re surely building up to something…something! But in the meantime, I’m just pleased to be getting new music from this burgeoning talent every few months. They’re like little spooky, rock treats.
That being said, “midori” feels slightly weaker than some of their other singles. It’s not bad by any stretch—the fact that this is weak for mary in the junkyard is a testament to how consistently good they are—but it feels like it could’ve been one of the songs from this old house – EP. It’s a double-edged sword: it could’ve been a great addition to last year’s EP, but I fear that at their worst, this song doesn’t stray as far from their older ones. On the other sides of their discography, “drains” took their sound to an extreme and “this is my california” took it in a softer, more introspective direction. Granted, they have an EP and a handful of singles to their name, so I hesitate to really call it a formula—only nine songs doesn’t really give anybody the full idea of their sound or what they have left in store.
And even if they’ve got a formula (which, again, very hesitant to say), it’s a damn good one. I say that as if I’m not eating up pretty much everything they do…mary in the junkyard are proving themselves to be masters of their atmospheric craft. Their electric guitars sound like they’ve been draped in a decaying bridal veil and left to get haunted for a century or so—everything echoes and brims with an untold history. “midori” was written entirely about plants coming out of concrete, and Clari Freeman-Taylor manages to transform the subject into the angstiest thing possible: “Could you help it?/With no god to bow down to/And no soil to grow down in/Could you help it?” Feeble sprouts become desperate, mewling spirits in her hands, and the echoing guitars and strings turn urban nature into a sweeping and creeping epic, shrouded in ivy with leaves wilting at the tips. It gives the air of something waiting to be free—you can just barely hear some squealing sounds in the background, the sound of something desperate to claw free—exactly the kind of fare mary in the junkyard expertly deals in.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Maid and the Crocodile – Jordan Ifueko – “Though I am concrete-bound/I am fragrant/I get old and get out/I am fake and dead…”
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!
The Bookish Mutant 