1) PUP, “Who Will Look After the Dogs?” / I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone making more vital rock music in 2025 than these Canadian punks. PUP’s latest is another electric symphony of abandon and restraint, anger and something like activated hope.
2) Lucius, self-titled / The latest from Lucius is as gorgeous as Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s harmonies, as fierce as the bared canines on the album’s cover.
3) Pink Breath of Heaven, “Colors Make a Sound” / Last year, this San Francisco band poured out singles in anticipation of a forthcoming full-length—and the anticipation seized me. Pink Breath of Heaven is a 21st-century balm for fans of bands like Mazzy Star and Portishead, a dreamy, swirling cloud of psych-pop and its subsequent sunburst sky.
“Colors Make a Sound,” I’m glad to report, is more than worth the wait, a star-making debut if the world ever leans fair.
4) Larissa Pham, “Trust” from the collection Kink / Joining the likes of Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee and Roxane Gay in this 2021 R.O. Kwon-Garth Greenwell-edited collection of stories, Pham turns in a spectacular entry, a consideration of how rough sex and something resembling new love reveal what we internalize about trust, abandonment and commitment. Let this representative paragraph wash over you:
Once, an old boyfriend of hers broke up with her because she was too vulnerable, or more precisely, because she was not vulnerable in the correct ways. He went so far as to write her an email. In it, he described what he perceived to be her character flaws. It seems to me that you are less interested in actually being vulnerable with others and more enamored with the symptoms of your own vulnerability, he wrote. This struck her as cruel. It was cruel. It was not untrue, which made it even crueler. Since then, she has been guarded, locking everything inside her like a series of nested chests. She is aware that this makes her difficult to love, but she doesn’t know how to stop doing it.
5) Maureen Langloss, “The Pink Lady, the Honeycrisp” for Wigleaf / Several reads in, this Langloss story continues to bowl me over in the best and most tragic ways. This is a truly flawless example of craft serving emotion, evidenced (only in part) in the beautiful rhythms Langloss assigns grief, in beautiful and momentary absences of punctuation, allowing those rhythms to dive and lodge beneath the reader’s chest. Worth coming back to, again and again.
She folded at the waist and rested her body over his body over the wood over the cross before the whole church, before friends children cousins, before mother father God. My God. She will never be called on again. She pressed empty hands against wood, remembered how she used to hold his hand crossing roads, crossing rivers, climbing hills, climbing heartbreaks.