It feels like treading water. Like you’re at the starting line of a marathon, already out of breath. Like spiraling, but you can’t tell if you’re headed up or down. Like all your stupid little songs are all starting to sound the same.

When Perfume Genius released “Queen” and “Grid” as the leadoff singles for 2014’s Too Bright — which turns 10 today — Mike Hadreas’ metamorphosis into a pop star was well underway. Rock was mired in a general embarrassment about its domination by straight white dudes with guitars during pop’s post-“Blurred Lines” moral reckoning, and the indie world needed something fierce, fun, and challenging. Hadreas, a gay 30-something from Seattle who’d released two albums of painfully fragile piano ballads under a name taken from the grisly and voluptuous 2006 thriller Perfume: Story Of A Murderer, was in the position to give that to the world. Working with Portishead’s Adrian Utley to push his sound into the post-Yeezus zeitgeist of serrated minimalism, Hadreas seemed ready to complete the transition towards a more pop and extroverted mode, which is often the extra push a rising artist needs to vault to the highest echelons of indie acclaim.

Imagine a scenario where you’re just two months out from a presidential election where it feels like the fate of the country, and even the free world as a concept, is on the line. The previous years have been full of tragedy, protest, fear, media distrust and paranoia. Unprecedented societal shifts introduce “new normals” and generations of kids are marked by the conditions they’re born into. The stakes have never been, nor could they be, any higher.

When Richard D. James is mentioned, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is his Selected Ambient Works series. Comprising two of the most iconic (and meme’d) electronic records ever, it helped draw a throughline between party culture and erudite left-field sounds. The first installment, in 1992, served as James’ full-length debut under the moniker Aphex Twin. Establishing a foundation for intelligent dance music (commonly abbreviated as IDM), it thrust him out of the metaphorical hacker’s den and onto the festival stage. Its 1994 companion was comparably cerebral and synesthetic, asserting that James’ talents as a mad scientist producer were just as remarkable when stripped of pulse.

Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.

“We are like the Gallagher brothers, but in the Canadian sense,” Tegan Quin told The Age in 2003. Along with her identical twin sister, Sara, she had just finished promoting their album from the previous year, If It Was You, and in interviews, the pair joked that it sent them into therapy. That record, whose cover literally featured the pair yelling in perpendicular directions, rumbled with a palpable if unfocused angst, its strongest ideas buckling under the unbearable weight of being 19 years old in the public eye. By the end of that tour, perhaps to prevent an Oasis-sized meltdown, the two had moved to opposite sides of the country, Sara in Montreal and Tegan in Vancouver. Once tourmates and roommates, they began to repair their fractured relationship as penpals, sending demo CDs through the Canadian postal service.

School, career, friendships, family, romance, politics, sports: In the fall of 2004, these were trivialities, minor disturbances that kept me from my life’s true purpose at the time. Which was listening to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. This was a rare, yet familiar feeling, one I also experienced with Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — albums that somehow outshined their blinding comet trail of purely online advance hype, rendering the print world of circumspect four-star reviews obsolete, incapable of recognizing the canon being assembled in real time.

In recent years, plenty of shoegaze songs became unlikely viral sensations: Wisp’s “Your face,” Flyingfish’s “wonder if you care,” quannnic’s “life imitates life.” Before any of them, there was julie’s 2020 single “flutter,” a frantic and fuzzed-out whirlwind, reminiscent of Swirlies, sweeping the listener into its mess of caustic guitars and hypnotic dual vocals. Since its release, it’s accumulated 36 million streams on Spotify and almost 3 million watches on YouTube. The tune is a sonic triptych — two outbursts of chaos separated by a meandering interlude. “flutter” isn’t afraid to wander; it’s confident that it can keep the listener hooked until the very end, and it succeeds.

Forty years ago, David Byrne danced with a lamp. In what might be the most memorable scene of Stop Making Sense, my pick for the best live-concert film ever made, Byrne picks up a regular floor lamp, previously a mere part of the stage setting, and pushes it back and forth, shimmying all around it — a classic subversion of pop-star gesturing that works as pop-star gesturing in its own right. On Friday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Mitski did Byrne one better: She danced with a beam of light.

It’s a bit like naming your band Illmatic, isn’t it? “Dummy” is a great word with lots of fun uses, but if you bring it up in a music-nerd context, people’s brains will all wander to the same lonely, desolate, beautiful Portishead album. The members of Dummy absolutely belong to the music-nerd community, and they know that better than most.

In June 2013, the professor and programmer Mark Sample debuted the Twitter bot @mobydickatsea. Every two hours, the account would tweet a randomly selected fragment of text from Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, without context and in no predetermined order. Entries could be humorously elliptical (“swallowed down and thrown up by a whale”) or rich with accidental meaning (“the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”). The decontextualization of Melville inspired a bigger project that Sample unveiled in 2019, called An End Of Tarred Twine, for a line in Moby-Dick about a shipowner saving every scrap of sail material for future use. Like that frugal captain, Sample took every scrap of the novel and created “a procedurally generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick,” one that unfolds differently every time you read it. “Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you,” Sample wrote on his blog in 2020. “Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location ‘is not down in any map; true places never are.'” Sample’s original bot still posts as @mobydickatsea, but in protest of Twitter’s Muskification, he’s moved it to a different platform. The fragmented Moby-Dick now appears exclusively on Mastodon.

Once a perfect little baby/ Who’s now a jerk/ Standing close to the pyre manning fireworks. These are the last words on the sparse opener and title track of MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks. It almost sounds like an elegy, grieving the loss of innocence, wondering how he ended up there. But as usual, it’s too irreverent and funny to be a requiem.

“I’ve seen so many shit bands throughout the year and often have found myself saying, ‘I can do better than that.’ So that’s what I’m doing. There’s a lot of bands that are almost there or just have no idea how to make something cohesive, or with swag, or literally anything that elevates the experience of just being people with instruments. So I gotta have a vision that’s better than the competition.”

“Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty,” a 21-year-old former Nickelodeon actor told the New York Times in a 2014 profile. But what, to Ariana Grande, did forgivable naughtiness entail? She may have risen to the public eye thanks to a role on children’s television – in her case, as a supporting player on Nick’s tween sitcom Victorious – but don’t be fooled: She’s no Miley Cyrus. She’s no Britney Spears. She’s a good girl, and she’ll blow your mind.

In Víctor Erice’s 1973 coming-of-age film The Spirit Of The Beehive, a young girl and her sister growing up in 1940s Spain see a mobile cinema’s screening of Frankenstein. “The film’s producers do not wish to present it without a preliminary word of caution,” goes the presenter’s spoken introduction. “But I would encourage you to not take it so seriously.” Six-year-old Ana takes it as gospel. Plagued by unanswerable questions – how could Frankenstein’s monster accidentally kill someone, and why would the villagers murder him in retaliation? – she sets out in search of unknowable answers. The real world’s monsters, she soon discovers, tend to hide in plain sight.

On the first song from Fontaines D.C.’s debut album Dogrel, Grian Chatten proclaimed: “My childhood was small/ But I’m gonna be big.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 2019 record from the Dublin band — who’ve since relocated to London — instantly set them apart from the slew of other groups overpopulating the post-punk genre. That year, we named them a Band To Watch; the year after, they unveiled its follow-up, A Hero’s Death, which was honored as our Album Of The Week. Their third LP, Skinty Fia, was predictably extraordinary as well, but now, with Romance, Fontaines D.C. leveled up in ways that couldn’t have been expected.

When Garden State debuted in 2004, it felt like it was a movie made for me — a hopeless romantic millennial teen girl from New Jersey grappling with loneliness who had a fascination with pop culture and a burgeoning interest in music discovery thanks to my dad’s Sirius (not XM quite yet) account. The movie, which follows actor/waiter Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) as he returns home to New Jersey where he unpacks a lifetime of trauma after his mother dies and decides to go off of his antidepressants, felt like a love letter to my home state (and Braff’s).

The first album from FKA Twigs would be her final release without a proper title. Perhaps the naming scheme — starting with EP1’s eerie minimalism in 2012 and followed by the elegant R&B of 2013’s EP2 — was an attempt to keep some distance between Twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, and her listeners. As a professional back-up dancer, she was already far too aware of the foibles of visibility — she was beginning to get recognized in public for her dancing, but nothing beyond, “Hey, aren’t you that girl from that video?” LP1, released 10 years ago today, is, fittingly, a debut about the dance of perception: the power of delayed gratification, the intimacy of the slow reveal, the ultimate vulnerability of “do[ing] it” (you know what) with the lights on. In the dark, after all, it’s much harder to ask, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

The story of Oso Oso’s new album life till bones begins with tragedy: A month after recording the demos to what would become his 2022 LP sore thumb, emo-pop dignitary Jade Lilitri’s cousin and creative partner Tavish Maloney died suddenly at 24. Lilitri isn’t necessarily known for bringing collaborators into the studio – he’s admitted to being a bit controlling, playing most, if not all instruments himself – but Maloney had been there for the entire recording process. Lilitri wasn’t planning on releasing the demos as-is, but he decided the world had to hear those songs the same way Maloney last heard them. With a touch of minimal final mixing, Lilitri let sore thumb into the world. There was no other way to do it while keeping a quiet conscience.

It’s undeniable: Tyla is the face of amapiano. The 22-year-old Johannesburg singer established her pop-star status with last year’s “Water,” a Top 10 Billboard hit that brought the South African house subgenre to the masses. There are multiple reasons for its crossover success, not least of which is her unrelenting attitude towards becoming a household name. Concomitant to such strategizing is that her brand of amapiano is less concerned with winding, longform dance numbers — as is typical for her contemporaries — than bite-sized pop songs attuned to Western R&B.

“How do you feel when you’ve felt it all now? How do you see when you’ve seen it all?” Those are the last words Jack White sings on No Name, the rad new album he’s officially releasing today after slipping white label copies to unsuspecting Third Man Records customers two weeks ago. (The properly labeled album went on sale at Third Man shops today, and tomorrow it hits the internet and select indie record stores.)

Navy Blue’s new album is called Memoirs In Armour, but it’s more like memories in mist. Over the course of about 27 minutes, the Brooklyn-based spitter shrouds fractured recollections in floral, imagistic poetry, leaving listeners to sift through the dense metaphors to find the trauma and catharsis at the center. With its blend of hazily soulful production and esoteric self-created truisms, the LP plays out like an audio cipher; he unspools personal vignettes in layers of thoughts and sensations he leaves you to peel back. Like the best riddles, it’s all as tedious as it is engrossing, further evidence of the rhyme prowess that’s made him a face of New York’s underground vanguard.

Like much of downtown Portland, Project Pabst shuttered abruptly as the realities of COVID set in. Project Pabst launched as a fall festival in September 2014 before shifting to July in 2015. It remained a summer festival for the duration of its run, which was shorter than anyone anticipated. After expanding to Denver, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in 2017, the festival vanished, and a return to the old Portland-only format was planned for 2020.

Day 2 of Project Pabst — the resurrected Portland music festival where Stereogum was a media partner this year — began much like the previous day. The slightly overcast sky and pleasant breeze lasted for the first hour of the festival, giving way to relentless cheery sunshine. By 2:30PM on Sunday, the crowd was a bit thinner than Saturday but a little more lively. Saturday leaned toward black shirts and denim; Sunday was a more traditional mix of festival attire: colorful fits, glitter, dramatic sunglasses. Everyone was drifting, not in a rush to get anywhere. At the south end of the festival on the “Captain Pabst” stage, Kenny Mason did an admirable job of activating the small crowd that had filtered over. “Y’all probably only on your first or second beer,” he said between songs, “But my job is turn you the fuck up. We’re gonna work together.” And he really did get people moving. As I headed to the other stage, I heard him responding to an audience member: “I fuck with you too, thank you.”

Portland is less gray than people tend to expect; we don’t have the endless rainy gloom of Seattle, and in any case, the dark days are confined pretty neatly to the winter months. The summers here are the exact opposite — near endless unbroken sun that comes up before 6 AM and doesn’t disappear below the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock. If it gets hot, there’s not much rain to break up the heat, but you’re only suffering if you’re standing directly in the sun. When the sun slides behind a passing cloud, every breeze brings immediate relief.

“I was like, ‘Damn, we comin’ up on being old heads. It’s about to be our 10th anniversary. I should probably go ahead and tap in and make sure I set something up.'”

She started the show with “Bad Idea Right?” I was not ready for that. In her short career, Olivia Rodrigo has released two albums, and both of them have near-perfect opening tracks. “Brutal” and “All-American Bitch” are both revved-up, energetic statement-of-intent ragers. Both would’ve made great openers for Rodrigo’s first-ever arena tour. But no, she went with her best song.

The best possible outcome for a piece of art to have, I think, is to inspire its observers to make art themselves. When I first heard “Falling In Love Again” by Joyce Manor, a surge of excitement shot through me and I was gripped by a desire to create something as warm and evocative as that song. I grabbed my laptop and typed away, birthing my own little universe in the form of a short story. It wasn’t good, but I felt an inexplicable, intoxicating sense of connectedness, which only expanded once I heard the rest of the album it was from: Never Hungover Again by Joyce Manor, which turns 10 today.

There wasn’t supposed to be another album. According to the man himself, 2021’s The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita was to be the last Sturgill Simpson record. There would only be five. He’d said it time and time again, but how many musicians play this game of peekaboo? When cash stops flowing as heavily as it used to, a farewell tour can be the tempting financial diuretic for a band that needs to pay the bills. Fans will pony up, only to feel duped a handful of years later when the reunion tour is announced. Simpson always seemed too noble for that, so we took him at his word. With his vocal hemorrhage in 2021, it seemed like his retirement was a done deal.

For a brief and spectacular moment two decades years ago, it seemed like every band could be the Fiery Furnaces. Every band could make music bursting with ideas, suffused with charm, willing to try almost anything to give its listeners a thrill. Blueberry Boat, released 20 years ago this Saturday, was a double album whose signature tracks stretched past seven minutes in multi-part suites — not a rock opera (though it was fun to pretend that it was) so much as a masterful short story collection about the burning, globalized world. Today it stands as a pinnacle of indie’s artistic ambition, and a dense universe still open to exploration and discovery.

Is “Wilco (The Song)” off of Wilco: The Album a deep cut? Who cares — it was a perfect way for the band to end a fan-friendly Friday night set at Solid Sound 2024, because even when you’re playing nothing but (relative) obscurities and rarities, you still gotta finish with a statement.

The history of DIY punk rock in Washington, DC spans something like 45 years. In that time, DC punk has nurtured all sorts of vocalists: growlers, howlers, barkers, snarkers, whiners, moaners, yappers, zappers, preachers, screechers, gurglers, motormouths, dreamy waifs, deadpan wraiths, mock-operatic divas, whatever you want to call Ian Svenonius. For the life of me, however, I cannot remember a DC punk singer who delivers lyrics with Broadway-style flair. I’m not talking about the Broadway of generations past; I bet Shudder To Think’s Craig Wedren could’ve found a place there. I’m talking about recent Broadway — the precise, crystalline, self-aware diction that seems to thrive in movie-adaptation musicals like Mean Girls or Heathers. If you threw Ian MacKaye or HR or Mary Timony or Travis Morrison or Jael Holzman into one of those shows, bad things would happen. But Katie McD would be right at home.