1) Crosses, “Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete” / The music made by Chino Moreno and Shaun Lopez extends the lush heaviness of their better-known bands (Deftones and Far, respectively) into something resembling synth-pop but not so easily defined. A late-album collaboration with Robert Smith hints at the band’s lineage while Moreno and Lopez slide into a groove distinctly their own.
2) Jamila Woods, “Water Made Us” / The latest Jamila Woods record is damn near perfect. Her delivery, smart and intentional, sounds so natural as to resemble a stream of elevated consciousness. And this may be the strongest production on any Woods record so far: these arrangements both resemble the quaver of ‘80s and ‘90s electro-pop while approximating some future-tense soul music.
3) Anders Carlson-Wee, “Disease of Kings” / Carlson-Wee’s poetry never fails to discover the lyricism in subsistence or celebrate communities forged from fracture. Sifting through what others treat like a discard pile, his speakers stumble upon the everyday ecstatic.
Strains of Kerouac sing through his descriptions of loyalty and brotherhood (“Isn’t that the secret indulgence of friendship: being near what you can never be?”); genuine emotion attends descriptions of feelings, pure and childlike, somehow recovered in adulthood; and here, in these verses, silent laughter and scrounged sandwiches become the stuff of life.
4) Mileva Anastasiadou, “The Subtle Art of Making Ghosts” for Club Plum / Every story is a ghost story if you look long enough, and every ghost story is made of something else—these realities crease a soulful story from Anastasiadou, who achieves an exquisite rhythm at the sentence level and stokes romantic wonder throughout. I won’t ruin the story’s kicker, which will fix itself in readers’ memories, but a passage like this—about dreams—contains whole worlds:
… the forest disappears, the alien fades away, the words are left unsaid, the spaceship dissolves into still life and memory, and only love remains, and that is frustration in progress but it is also bird songs, and new dawns, and beginnings.
5) Andrew Hemmert, “Love is a Stone that Won’t Sink: Two Poems” for Electric Literature / Both these poems work on the reader at an elemental level, chiseling something like hope into the stony regions of our hearts. Each has moments that truly sing—the exclamatory desire to make beloved ones sumptuous food and drink in the latter; the unfolding nature of what we are like in the former:
Like a dollar I am depreciating all the time. Like a lighthouse throwing the net of my pretend moon on the predator shoreline.