Local superstars, method actors, girls who do drugs

September's favorite music (+ a poem)

The cold that took me down this week gave me extra time to review the intensely and diversely musical month we’ve just exited. A few highlights from this corner…

Best walk/commute soundtrack: VIVA HINDS, Hinds

Recommended by a friend who doesn’t miss, this latest release from the Spanish girl duo is a release in many senses—a big, grungy sound and frank texts—polished with melodic hooks and touches of studio distortion. I love the bilingual division of lyrics: the English evoke a vintage rock & roll while articulating a contemporary malaise, the Spanish add extra punch to some of the record’s highest-energy moments. The whole felt like a breath of fresh air, which perhaps explains my desire to take it with me. It’s also one of the few things I have listened to in both Stuttgart (my new home-ish) and Berlin (my old home-ish, where I spent the last full week of September). Hinds seem to have summed themselves up well in a line from 2020’s The Prettiest Curse: “You’re too pink to be admired / and too punk to be desired.” That’s a dichotomy they embody fully on VIVA HINDS—safe to say, more admirable and desirable than the critics who inspired that line might have guessed.

Hinds are Carlotta Cosials (left) and Ana Perrote. (Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone, 2024)

Best house party soundtrack: My Method Actor, Nilüfer Yanya

Nilüfer Yanya has never had to get in your face to prove her talents, a tradition I trace back at least to 2017’s single “Keep On Calling,” which introduced her to me. So much of her sound is ambient, atmospheric, pulsing, hypnotizing, spell-casting. And yet the flare-ups (mostly electric guitar) prove that she’ll hit as hard as she has to to get her point across. I’ve been pleased to see her steadily accrue attention and accolades rather than ‘burst’ onto any ‘scene’ as I think the gradual ascent better honors her process. If this record represents how her style of theatre has developed, you’ll find me waiting at the stage door.

Best decompressing-in-my-room soundtrack: What’s Wrong With New York?, The Dare

I keep nearly calling this record “I Destroyed Disco” after one of its tracks, because it gives the sonic impression of being equally hostile and indebted to the genre. This ain’t no disco, but it’s dancing music beyond a doubt. The DJ behind The Dare is a fixture on the Brooklyn club scene, which might be why I took the title to be a defensive question rather than an accusatory one. Though he seems to have such a long history with his audience that it could easily be either or both. I, even through my Berlin techno/house/techno-house-induced haze, can’t argue.

October’s most promising listen: COYOTE, Tommy Richman

So far, the Gen Z pop landscape is not really doing it for me. Much of it strikes me as almost old-fashioned, whether in lyrical content or production style, which you would think would be a turn-on for me but is turning out to be a turn-off. (There are exceptions: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” sounds like it’s been around forever, in a good way.)

The Gen Z R&B/hip-hop landscape, on the other hand, feels exciting and surprising and retro-not-derivative. Doechii? Yes please. Ice Spice? Why not! Mahalia? Twice on Sundays. Juice WRLD absolutely still counts, God rest his soul.

“MILLION DOLLAR BABY,” Tommy Richman’s overnight hit, will likely go down as my song of the summer in that unerring book of judgment known as Spotify Wrapped. It’s irresistible. And it’s nowhere to be found on the LP he dropped last weekend—that’s how confident he is coming out of the gate. I’d be intrigued even putting aside that he’s trained as an opera singer or has a name that could have been invented for a fictional character who achieves sudden success. With my recalibrated energy, I will be, to quote a non-Gen-Zer, bumping that.

Speaking of things newly released, my latest poem (and second in the fine lit mag MEMEZINE) celebrates a game I got really into this year. Arguably bound to happen for a once-avid player of Connect Four.