Just in the nick of time, we have a Music Monday update with my second playlist of 2024! This is another big one (covering my listening from January through roughly the first week of May, although this is mostly just for my sake; I'm not super timely, and mostly just check stuff out when I get around to it), but I had fun discovering some new music and then writing about it.
And this is a big playlist in multiple ways: next week (June 7th) is also the tenth Anniversary of Out of Left Field! I doubt I’ll have time to put together another big piece, so you can think of this one as the Big Anniversary Post for the occasion.
As usual, here are the links to the Spotify and YouTube Playlists, each in roughly-article order:
Notes: The same songs are missing on both playlists, so I’ll just link to those Bandcamps. You can find 7mai’s tracks here, alpha’s here and here (or their Soundcloud), Prom Nite’s here, and Lauryl Sulfate’s here. Also, in case any of my former English teachers are reading this, I know album titles are usually italicized, but I used single quotation marks here because Blogger has been making fixing formatting very tough, and I’d like to minimize that.
As always, you can read a full copy of the playlist at the end of the article. And remember, a lot of these artists (especially the smaller ones) can be found on Bandcamp, if you want to support them!
The Best Stuff:
Good Kid: I'm not really sure how to describe their style? Every description I could find just leaves it at "indie rock", which feels overly broad. The closest thing I can think of is j-rock, but I feel a little weird calling a Canadian band that performs exclusively in English "Japanese rock", even if that is clearly is one of their major influences. But sound-wise, that probably is the closest fit. Although now that I think about it, I guess it is kind of weird that there aren't more English-language takes on that style. Either way, I enjoy it a lot, and ended up including songs from all four of their self-titled EPs here. The most recent one released back in March and has probably my favorite two songs of theirs, the frantic and frenetic “Break” and a high-energy cover of Laufey’s “From the Start”; limiting myself to just two selections per record was tough, but even with the high baseline, these two stood out as easy picks.
Bad Moves: I checked this DC-band out because I saw them compared to The New Pornographers somewhere. Not sure I would have made that comparison, but I do see it; they have a similar sort of power pop style, but with a higher energy and a little more stripped-down/straightforward? I started with their debut album ‘Tell No One’ and very quickly moved on to their follow-up ‘Untenable’. Picking songs from them was difficult; I could have really gone with any combination here and been happy, there really isn’t a clunker here, and any time I put it on, time just seems to start flying. It’s apparently been nearly four years since ‘Untenable’, and they finally released new singles in December and April, so I’m hoping for Album 3 soon!