1) The music of Kim Gordon / A fresh single sent me back through the catalog of the Sonic Youth great and singular rock dynamo. Gordon’s solo work scares me in the best way—it’s sexy, harsh, ironic, enveloping and shows off some of the best instincts you’ll hear.
2) The music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor / A different sort of deep dive—through more recent records from the Canadian art-rock collective—set off a beautiful spiral, through sounds unsettling and strangely, wholly consoling.
3) Marika Hackman, “Big Sigh” / The first memorable record of 2024 captures the British songwriter working at rare elevation. These songs live somewhere between indie rock and grander, chamber-pop gestures. But what matters most is their emotional substance; Hackman delivers 10 remarkable containers for lust and indifference, shame, relief and something like hope.
4) Jesse David Fox, “Comedy Book” / Fox’s recent volume feels like the comedy analog to David Byrne’s masterpiece “How Music Works.” This is a journalistic account of the comedic arts; a working philosophy of comedy; an argument for comedy as a human need; and an almost spiritual experience—and it’s all these things without ever feeling self-important or homiletic.
5) Amorak Huey, “How Much Time Do We Have?” and “Light Pollution” for The Boiler / Both poems here shake loose something beautiful and necessary inside me—as Huey’s work so often does. As a disciple of the night sky, the latter piece (just six lines) expressed so much of the longing and wonder and regret the night sky leaves me with. What we behold and what we’ve lost come through in clear relief.