All you get is an ad for a thing you don't want

No April fooling around here. Just a ton of great new music that you need to hear. Here’s the playlist link. Keep reading for some words about the songs and a YouTube clip for you to sample them.

Elliott Green - Kintsugi EP

Imagine lying down in a lush field of flowers and staring up at a gray sky. The soft, cold rain feels good on your lips. Your shoes are untied and soaked through. Your cheek is cut and bleeding ever so slightly. You close your eyes and feel a strange bliss come over you. A smile appears on its own.

That’s what these excellent songs feel like.

Restorations - Restorations

This is a rock record’s rock record. It’s got urgent vocals, wistful lyrics, hooks everywhere, big guitars, bouncy keys; these songs sound massive. You’ll find your arms pounding the air drums before your brain has even caught up. This is a career achievement. This is a culmination of everything that came before. Self-releasing and self-recording this finds the band self-refreshed. There’s a moment in the opening track where the band steps on the gas (“now all your friends are living in the wild / now all your friends are living in the clouds”) and they don’t let up until the slow, repeated ring out of the ninth and final track, where they coast downhill to victory, arms raised in the air. Triumph.

Chelsea King - “outer space vacation”

I think my favorite genre of music might actually be “would have been a massive hit on 90s alt rock radio” and this is exactly that.

Cusp - Thanks So Much EP

There is so much goodness packed tightly into these five songs. They are warm and fuzzy, raw yet refined, and they demand your attention as they churn forward with a propulsive drive. This is a band with a clear mission, creating a hazy, cloudy, dynamic, introspective world for these songs to inhabit. There is tension throughout, ranging from the most intimate, personal fights (self vs self) all the way up to the global fight (self vs authority) we all face, even the concept of being stuck under the ever growing pressure of capitalism in America.

And after weighing those complicated thoughts throughout the five songs, gratefulness and an optimistic view win out in the end: “I think people are good / they just make mistakes.”

The Dreaded Laramie - “Fishnets”

The second single from their upcoming record, due July 5 on Smartpunk. It seems like this band writes catchy, shreddy jams the same way I eat double dark chocolate Milano cookies: by the handful. They’re playing a bunch of shows in the southeast with Virginity in April. Buy your ticket now. Thank me later.

Pacing & Career Woman - “Boyfriends”

Is this the perfect pop song? Maybe. It is almost definitely the best song that includes the line “I got a really cool pen” though. The fact that something this catchy and fun came out of Katie and Melody working on a different song is just more proof of the mysterious alchemy that comes with artists collaborating. A true delight.

Louisa Stancioff - “Cigarette”

What an incredible voice. Her record comes out this month, and the first three singles are all great.

VIAL - “falling short”

VIAL’s burnout is a refreshing dose of confident, brash, grungy punk from Minneapolis. The VIAL recipe includes pop-punk, dream-pop, grunge rippers, and the secret ingredient: a dash of humor. Fans of artists ranging from Sleater-Kinney to illuminati hotties to Olivia Rodrigo will dig this.

All of these songs can be found on this playlist, plus the songs from my last post, plus a few other songs I’ve been jamming lately: another single from Blushing, a ripper from Diva Bleach, a bop from Carpool, a fuzzy tune from Pouty, another great jam from Gulfer, and a blink-182 cover by Tiny Stills, where Kailynn and the boys show their love of The Mark, Tom and Travis Show, a record I still quote to this day.

You can leave and beat the traffic, or you can stay and… well, IYKYK.

Reading Material

I was going to write something about the stunning downfall of Twitter: how the owner of the site has offered protections to literal Nazis that he refused to offer for trans people, how he is constantly interacting with and boosting right wing conspiracy theories, and how utterly embarrassing it is to see just how stupid he is. But really, this piece by Ed Zitron is all you need to read about that.

Another interesting thing I read recently: a behind the scenes look at the Los Angeles Dodgers signing Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, with two guest appearances you’ll never see coming: Brad Paisley and Kevin from The Office. I am very glad baseball is back. Must be nice to have a baseball team that spends money on good players!