weekly15

[weekly15]

8 4 18 / necessary / songs / missing / U / edition

guys, i’ve been MISSING U. there’s only one thing worth talking about this week and her name is fucking ROBYN.

i promise once i’ll actually get two consecutive weeks of music up. it’ll happen really. really really reably reoblyn robyN ROBYN

also, i have 18 songs, srrrry, 15 is more of a guideline. full playlist here.

1 / MISSING U / Robyn

“It’s been an emotional week,” I said to somebody quite seriously yesterday, referring to Robyn’s release of a new song on Wednesday. Wow there are no words except that I didn’t know what to expect from this or whether to be scared or thrilled or what but it is causing every emotion to exist in my body at once and I’ve already listened to it ~100 times and O M G SHES BACK YALL

2 / IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU / SNBRN / Harloe

The only reasonable thing that I can imagine is that somebody created an algorithm and fed it only Donna Summer’s entire library and the searching pain of circa-2010 Tumblr poetry. The result is this pure summer soft-serve twist, half bliss/half misery.

3 / BODY HIGH / Sam Bluer

If this were a just world, all the tweens in Ohio would be roller blading to this past their bedtimes under a sky filled with more stars than you’ve ever seen in your life.

4 / ARRESTED / Love Thy Brother / Norma Jean Martine

For when some slick dude pulls up to the only corner in your little town, lowers his sunglasses, and invites you to whatever faraway place he’s going. Your legs are wet and trembling; you’re already on your way.

5 / PAVEMENT / Wingtip

Blows in like Jack Johnson, out like an Avicii song. And somewhere in between Wingtip spins an utter ear-blasting jam, perfect for your hoedown or the nightclub rooftop with a view onto sunrise.

6 / STUCK / Lost Kings / Tove Styrke

A grown-up version of that dumb af Chainsmokers feat. Halsey blip which I lived for in the summer of 2016. It’s a bit slower, less insecure and preening, more of an evening in with people who’ve known you forever than a Molly bender on the first night of orientation week. But it sneaks up on ya, and makes you wonder if that person isn’t still inside, somewhere, urging.

7 / ALL LOVED UP / Amy Shark

Circular, whimsical, you emerge from Amy Shark’s orbit as if from a dream. What did I just hear? What did I just feel? You can imagine yourself rising, in a jet of clear wind, emerging upon a view of all the world. I can see so much from up here. I understand so much now.

But when the song ends, you fall, you flail, you’re back. The ground’s beneath your feet again.

8 / RUN THE ROAD / Santigold

We’ve been celebrating a lot of COMEB#CKS lately, and here’s another 1 to cheer for. Santi! Refreshing and insistent, she doesn’t miss a beat. She’s playing a game of hopscotch on the roof of the universe, and guess what - she’s keeping perfect time.

9 / I DON’T LACK IMAGINATION / E^ST

This song hits you somewhere in the pelvis, somewhere deeper, more central, a part of your body you haven’t learned how to dance with yet. It’s there, E^ST promises, and here: you move it like this. Stop trying so hard! Just close your eyes and let your hips scream.

10 / SHOW YOU / CXLOE

And now a dispatch from a parallel Earth. One of orderly, sleek silver bodies marching in step, boarding spaceships to places unknown. 10… 9… 8… a new life awaits on Planet 93X.

11 / COMPLICATED / Mura Masa / Nao

If this week weren’t consumed by the return of Queen Robyn, this song would far and away have the crown. This is a frenzied, shaking, utter jewel of a pop song, and it’s showing pop music the door it needs to go through. If this doesn’t make it to the radio, what will?

12 / HIGH HORSE / Kacey Musgraves / Kue

I haven’t featured Kacey yet, because this is only the second time I’ve updated this site since 2015. And it’s a good sign that she’s already finding her place.

Needless to say, I am borderline obsessed with her album, and this bonkers disco remix of “High Horse” is a vibe and a half. She knows something we don’t, and Kue tries to interpret it for us.

13 / EVERYTHING I GOT / The Aston Shuffle

Shuddering, soul-shaking, let this one wreck you. Maybe what you build back up in place of your old body will be a triumph. Maybe, ever so slowly, you can learn how to love yourself.

14 / PICTURE / Karen Harding

Karen Harding’s version of retro funk electronica is beautiful, messy, and fun. Something like life. Even if you don’t know how to feel good, you know how to try.

15 / STRANGERS / Emily Vaughn

Where have I heard this one before? A dream, a memory, a past life?

Emily Vaughn twirls and twirls her voice into your psyche, daring you to go down with her. But you can’t shake the feeling that it’s all happened before, it’s on the tip of your tongue, you remember being here before. But when?

16 / FEEL BETTER / Hälder / Laura White

This dreamy collab takes its time, settles slowly into your stomach. Let it bury itself there. It knows its way without lights. It’s felt the pink and squirmy lining of your intestines before. It’s comfy here, and so dark.

17 / LOW BROW / Chelsea Jade

Still can’t get over this album image. CHELSEA WTF. Could say something here about the duality of the self, the prophet and the wizard, etc, etc, etc, but no one wants that. LISTEN to this one, shimmer shimmer my babies.

18 / WATCH / Billie Eilish / Xie

Old-ish, but my myyy I’ve been dying to share this one. Dead ass p much the best remix out there rn that I can think of, in terms of “songs that make you wanna ROLL YA BODY.” Was reminded of this gem by a slamming new remix to “Watch” by Rossy, but Xie knows the hot language of the bloodstream better than anyone and she makes you warm as hell on this track.

—

Ok bye for now. Gonna try real hard to be back next week. In the meantime, have you fucking watched Killing Eve? Have you cried to Robyn’s welcome-back video? I’ve also been weirdly into these Bon Appetit videos where this guy eats a million versions of a city’s famous food in 24 hours (i.e. 15 Philly cheesesteaks in 24 hours). Like all YouTube videos, they’re a little annoying but also good.

OK!

[weekly15]

6 29 18 / necessary / songs

It’s been so long I’m not sure I know how to come back. With necessary songs from this month. I have a plan now. I have a way forward.

1 / PATTERNS / Eilish Gilligan

Has anyone done loneliness this ethereally, this effortlessly? Space out to this one, relax your limbs, climb into your lonely life like you'd climb into a zero-gravity womb room.

2 / IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW / Pusha T

If you know you know... 

I imagine this as the massive opening to a trip-hopera about 2018, that zooms out and introduces you to all the characters, each with his, with her visible frustrations, his repressed wishes, her trammeled desires. Let's see how it plays out. Welcome.

3 / LOST MY MIND / Lily Allen

Twinkling along the edge of insanity, as always, with Lily. Welcome back grrl. Cooing disturbed come-hithers, goodness we've missed u. Reminds me of Margaret Atwood's "Siren Song": Alas / it is a boring song / but it works every time.

4 / HUNGER / Florence + the Machine

Speaking of WE'VE FCKING MISSED YOU: Florence, Florence, Florence. She's back. I tweeted, in Jan or Feb, apropos of nothing, "My 2018 wish is for a new Florence + the Machine album!" So basically I manifested this, yw all. This was her massive MASSIVE return, and what a blaze of troubled glory. A voice that quavers with hard-earned strength, stronger as she goes, naming what she claims: our collective loneliness can make us each feel a little less lonely.

5 / DRUGS / Uffie / Bearson

Uffie, baby, who the uff are you? Where the uff have you been all my life? Love her feature on Galantis's uuuge new "Spaceship," but this one's the real gem. Bearson flips her lonesome "Drugs" into an echoey spin cycle that goes up up up while taking you down down down.

6 / I DON'T LIKE UR FRIENDS / EVAN GIIA

"WESTWORLD" was a banger, but Evan's new one smashes. The large middle fingers you've always wanted to give to anyone in your life who just unaccountably SUCKS. Some people, there's just no way around it, they suck. Listen to Evan. Jam out to this so you can see them in real life and not lose your cool.

7 / MESSY / Kiiara

This is a bubbly bouncy quietly bonkers little jam. You don't realize how much it makes ya wanna get DOWN until you are alllll the way down.

8 / BETTER NOT / Louis the Child / Wafia

LAWWd have mercy this an earth-shaker. When it hits, it hits. Would happily jump in a tight-knit circle on a sweaty dancefloor to this, arms swinging like you don't know what a "responsibility" could even be. Might be 2018's most necessary song.

9 / 1950 / King Princess / MELVV

Didn't think King Princess's out-of-nowhere barn-burner could've gotten any more appealing. But MELVV spins it inside-out and upside-down and I forget where I am I'm so dizzy I love the night the stars I can't tell if the ocean is waving with tears or dancing to the beat

10 / SLEEP ALONE / Max Styler / Ella Boh

Stop what you're doing. Stop scrolling through your Instagram feed. What do you want, this very minute? Is it even possible to suss out what you want in a single moment? I want everything. What is want? Are my desires mine, and if not, who put them here, in my guard-dogged mind?

11 / ONLY YOU / Cheat Codes / Little Mix

This boppy breath is a cares-to-the-wind summer dream. Music isn't for confronting your mortality. It's for letting your hair down, for teaching the town where they banned dancing to f*cking dance. Take my hand: we'll teach those homophobic bakers that luv is a wind that blows through every town in the world.

12 / LEAN WIT ME / Juice WRLD

I guess what I mean by "necessary songs" are songs that make you feel a little less lonely, a little more generous, a little more at home in the world. Songs that allow you to have a little more hope. Or at the very least let you forget all that, let you not think, let you close your eyes and dance alone in your room on your wooden floors that you mean to Swiffer more than you do. 

"Lean Wit Me" is something that I'm not sure about, something raw and ultra-real that reaches a part of myself I wish weren't there. But then it makes me feel grateful that someone out there (Juice WRLD) gets it.

13 / PEACHES / CRAY / RAC

Who comes up with this stuff? Who is "CRAY"? Who is Peaches? I don't think I know you, or anything, or anyone. Feels like someone just dropped this song into the ether and walked away. There. My work here is done.

14 / CONFESS / Jack River

Some songs are meant to be shouted. At the end of a long day, in the middle of a longer life. 

15 / COUCH / Eves Karydas

A little sticky-sweet piece of gum dying to get stuck to the bottom of your shoe. I wanted to dismiss this song, with its stupid meaningless hook, but here I am weeks/months later still jamming to it. Eves knows what she's doing, whether you want her to do it or not.

16 / I GET BY / DJDS / Amber Mark / Vory

Sneaking in an extra since it's been too damn long. And to let Amber's amber waves of groan send you into the weekend. At the end of the day, this is a pretty good motto: I get by. Let's try this week, to get by. And let's be happy if (when!) we do.

Best thing that isn't music this week: Look, folks. It's bleak. Read a poem or two. Been seeing "Red Brocade" by Naomi Shihab Nye going around a bit. That's a good one. Or Anne Sexton's mighty "The Truth the Dead Know."  

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

Love and love, to all.

[weekly15]

2 4 17 wallow / recharge / wallow

Ok, so it's been a minute but we're bringing this back to have 1 thing to focus on during the week that isn't the insanity, ineptitude, and inhumanity draping themselves all the fuck over our institutions these days.

This week is for crying in your room with all the shades down and no one else looking. Since your hopeful outrage is ratcheted up to 100 in public, you can be quiet and dreamy and hopeless in private. This week is for taking hourlong subway rides back home at night after you and your friends meet for drinks and swear you won't talk about politics, but of course you do. This week is for the melancholy moments you steal for yourself that no one can steal from you because if you need to be sad sometimes, GODDAMNIT, be sad.

This week is for reflecting on why the fuck you wouldn't have been screaming had Hillary Clinton won and there was still ALL THIS SHIT.

With that off my chest:

1 XANAX - LIVE ACOUSTIC / Elohim

Starting at your lowest point here. Wouldn't typically recommend a "live" or "acoustic" song, but here we are. It's a different world.

Elohim speaks in sadness. Here she's cold, faraway, calling you to her. Maybe she'll be warm when you get to her. But no, what's this? Her head is lolling; her skin is chill; her cry insistent. She wasn't calling you. She's waiting for someone else, someone who isn't coming.

2 ATLANTIS / Bridgit Mendler / Kaiydo

Like a record playing backward, spooling you back in time, Mendler takes you down, down, down.

3 SAD / Kodie Shane / Lil Yachty

Anthemic, world-weary, all too true. Kodie Shane and Lil Yachty outwarble one another, their voices overlapping but never quite intersecting.

4 EASIER / Mansionair / Feki

If only all the world's problems could be fixed by swelling strings dripping into synths.

5 THE MIDDLE / Wet

Wherever we used to be, I liked it better there. Let's go back.

6 CHILL OUT / RAY BLK / SG Lewis

Space-age, post-Tinder, don't-give-a-fuck loneliness for when your weed dealer is the last one you text at night and the first one every morning.

7 KING CITY / Majid Jordan

Perfect for a 2AM drive through a blurred city you no longer recognize. For balancing the wheel between your knees, for lowering the windows on the coldest night of the year.

8 HEY KID / Bloodboy

Wake up. Rub your eyes. Shake off the sleep. This song is the sliver of light shining into your shade-darkened room. What is that? you squint, sitting up in your bed. It's been raining so long.

9 THE BLACK / VHS Collection

That thrumming insistence that something is wrong even though everything seems right.

10 WAITING / BETSY

How desperate is too desperate? How many pebbles against your crush's window? How many quarters drowned in the mall fountain? How many screaming protests; how much no, no, no?

11 I WAS A FOOL / Tegan and Sara / Matthew Dear

Anyone else have relatives who loved to wrap gifts in misleading ways? An enormous box with rocks in it that's really just a scarf. That kind of thing.

Matthew Dear's remix of Tegan & Sara's arena-filling "I Was a Fool" is the Borgesian version of  deceptive present-wrapping. A box within a box within a box, leading nowhere, leading back to itself. At the very center, something small and hard to see and miraculous.

12 CUT MY LOSSES / Allie Moss

Lonely shower-singing from one dimension to the next.

13 TROUBLEMAKER DOPPELGANGER / Lucy Dacus

I wanna live in a world where I can keep my doors wide open. Same. Lucy's melancholy dreaminess will get inside you where it hurts and stay there.

14 DOG YEARS / Maggie Rogers

Maggie's glittering windchime world sounds like the perfect one, the one where you just might fit in, until you realize that she's talking about Hell. But goddamn, she's insistent.

15 GET MYSELF TOGETHER / Robyn

I have to end with Robyn. Because when a Robyn song ends, you're ready. The fight starts when her propulsive, staccato shrieks end. After a Robyn song, there are no more excuses. She's so bouncy and infectious, you forget she's outlining her existential crisis. Join her strange dreamy Conga line; it lasts forever.

PS The best thing that isn’t music this week is fucking nothing. It’s all pretty bad. Listen to Who Weekly? on the commute home and then read a magazine, whatever you want, when you get back. Log off of social media: easiest way to give yourself boundaries. Great article in the New York Review of Books on the sexy lure of the analog. Try it? 

PPS (because I can’t not) Set up your monthly donations to the ACLU, the Sierra Club, IRC, wherever the fuck. Just get that money out there. Pay your gdamn taxes without complaining. Repeat after me: when government is good, government is good. Me: I’m folding up a big sign that says “How Dare You” so that I can go to any protest at a moment’s notice. This is what’s happening now. My Senator is King of the Spineless Pat Toomey so there’s a lot. Fax these fuckers if you can’t get them on the phone, email ‘em, write postcards, stand outside their offices. You gotta be like Hagrid when the Dursleys keep hiding Harry’s Hogwarts letters. Find a way in.

[weekly15]

11 20 14 / kimkardashian / papermagazine / bodyparty / playlist

We’re a few days after the one-day break-the-Internet shit-hurricane that wasn’t (downgraded to a tropical storm a few hours before it made landfall, downgraded to a few strong winds in the back of Uncle Alan’s yard once it did.) 

Where were YOU when you first saw Kim Kardashian’s Paper Magazine cover? Was this also the first time you heard of Paper Magazine? Don’t worry, they’ve just been busy trying too hard to seem like they aren’t trying hard. It’s ok; we’re all playing the same game. It’s the new world order.

Anyway, the party playlist from the Paper Magazine Kim.Kardashian.Com Launch Party backslash Self-Congrulationathon leaked to us. We have it. Conveniently, it’s exactly fifteen songs long. 

1 FROOT / Marina & The Diamonds

Instagram-ready as always, Marina & The Diamonds’ latest is heavily filtered, saccharine, and filthy, just how you like it. 

2 FOUR / BenZel / Juicy J 

Juicy J croons disgusting, masculinized come-hithers over this booty-popping BenZel beat. I dare you to look away.

3 OPEN WIDE / Calvin Harris / Big Sean

If you were put off by Juicy’s lyricism in “Four” you might want to skip this one. Big Sean is as unrepentant and nasty as possible, and teams up with Harris, another spurned new bachelor, to create the weirdest, vilest breakup kissoff of the year. Big Sean’s bleeding heart is right there, for all of us to see, if you only know where to look. It’s the 2014 anthem Kanye would have written if he hadn’t found Kim.

4 ALL MY LOVE / Major Lazer / Ariana Grande

Grande’s voice echoes solitary in the void, as always, just like all your best, most heartfelt tweets. Who are we talking to? What are we striving for?

5 OVERNIGHT CELEBRITY / Twista / Milk N Cookies

Somehow fitting. Cheers to all the people who wake up and find themselves in the harsh and lonely public spotlight, and must fumble their way through the pains and difficulties of living a life behind Plexiglas. They must try to live up to our ideals of perfection, because God knows we never could.

6 PROMISE / Ciara

Breathy, sexy, lose-yourself-on-the-dance-floor R&B as only Ciara can do it. Rumor has it they almot put the Midliife remix on the playlist instead, but this one packs a little more party punch. Sure, it’s a throwback, but we need to remember Ciara. Her discography could have been the soundtrack to Kim and Kanye’s wedding. She’s forever got it.

7 NO ENEMIESZ / Kiesza

Shouty, persistent, Kiesza gets into your head. Ever-current, the Kim/Kanye tastemaker braintrust dipped into the zeitgeist for this choice. If Ciara got you sexy sweaty, this one gets you riled up sweaty: passionate post-punk flower children taking a stand on the dancefloor.

8 TALKING BODY / Tove Lo

The buzzing Scandinavian siren may finally be having her well-deserved moment. You probably heard “Habits,” but you may not have known who the voice behind it was. Sounds like agreeable radio pop, but with someone real behind it. There’s emotion and pain in that voice. There’s anger and heartache. Tove Lo is the human who has come to save the music industry from its robots. Until someone gets their hands on her.

9 GLOW / IYES

This is the weird future party song that plays as the partygoers settle in with their food. Maybe a few intrepid souls are on that dancefloor still banging their heads, but they’re probably on something. An interesting choice. This song unravels in front of you; it is the shy spectacle inside us all that would burst forth if only it weren’t socially unacceptable.

10 ONE MORE / Elliphant / MØ

Get back out on the floor. Scream and let your hair down and have the best time of your life. This is fun, wacky, pill-popping crazy and it belongs at a warehouse party, banging off the tin walls of our society’s barren, #YOLO heart.

11 CAN’T STOP / Theophilus London / Kanye West

This retro slow-burner will heat up the dancefloor just as the party starts breaking up, just as the random Williamsburg partyhoppers find themselves on the doorstep of something that looks like a bourgeoisie hipster art gallery, and they let the music take them inside. But the PBR 40s they’re looking for are decanters of Cristal. This isn’t hipster, they think. This isn’t real Brooklyn. Exactly, my friends. Just enjoy your Cristal and stop complaining.

12 SEXUAL HEALING / Marvin Gaye / Kygo

Of course. By now it’s a classic, but this Kygo starmaker is what you need right now and at all times. Kanye likes the off-putting combination of mainstream and hip, that strange middle ground of anti-pop pop, and maybe this falls in there somewhere. Or maybe it’s just damn good, sugar sweet, ice-melting music that we need to stop overthinking.

13 DOSEY DOE / Omar LinX / Pro Logic / Zeds Dead

Face-level innocent, bashfully sampling, with Omar LinX as the earnest spokesperson, this is the stream-of-consciousness inner monologue of a tortured populace trying to find its way back.

14 DRUNK IN LOVE / Beyoncé / Jay-Z / Kanye West

The song from this country’s undeniable queen that you better have heard by now. Flipped by Kanye, making this song even less innocent than it was to begin with, putting the sexual liberation of today’s “America’s sweethearts” on display. It’s a depraved, wonderful kind of world that we live in, where this can be our love song. B and Jay. Kim and Ye. These are our heroes. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, at least they’re just as fucked up as you.

15 ONLY / Nicki Minaj / Drake / Lil Wayne / Chris Brown

Another absurd, horrifying, controversial, addicting song to round out their playlist. This one is really something. Moral decay at its sharpest and most enthralling. Put our fameaholic society under an HD microscope, and what you’ll see is “Only.”

This is our world. As everything burns, grab something real and run out of the fire. Unless you like it here, because at least you can have a good time as you watch it all turn to ash.

PS The best thing(s) that aren’t music this week. Stumbled across a feature on The Atlantic’s website, called By Heart, in which authors discuss their favorite passage from all of literature. While you’re at it, read If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, because you should. Follow Paul Ford on Medium. Don’t listen to the Serial backlash. Try to find articles from the erstwhile Holiday magazine.

[weekly15]

11 13 14 / for a midterminable november

11 13 14 / for a midterminable november

You’re sad, angry, hopeless? We are too. So crack open your nicest bottle of red and pour it straight down the drain. Nothing matters anyway. 

1 YOU THERE / AQUILO 

For staring out a melancholy, rainy window and watching the floodwaters rise and carry your brutal city and all its careless inhabitants far, far away. 

2 WELCOME TO LOVE / Young Ejecta 

This is what the new millennium has turned love into, something empty, technological, a half-remembered distant bleating. This song is broadcast from some future humanity, one that has evolved out of love yet still holds onto its precious heartbeat as a remnant of both beauty and disaster.

3 MAGNETIC / Annabel Jones / AObeats

Ok: Sit wherever you are and feel the world spinning. Can you try really hard? Now, listen to this song and try feeling the Earth’s rotations again. 

Isn’t ours a miserable, endless kind of world, filled with people walking side by side yet barely touching each other? Reach out to someone. There, just like that. Reach out your hand and touch somebody else. It doesn’t hurt. It feels nice. 

4 SO CLOSE / Tom Misch / Carmody

Carmody’s trills in the latter half of the song will give you life. Sure, it’s a sad, brittle, silent kind of life, but beggars can’t be choosers.

5 TRUE LOVE / We Are Twin / White Cliffs 

Below all our hardness, somewhere deep inside of us, there is a thread. You must pull it out from inside of you, like a magician upchucking rainbow handkerchiefs. Consider this song a searchlight. Don’t stop looking for that thread. It’s there, even on endless rain-soaked November evenings, it’s there. 

6 LATCH / Disclosure / Sam Smith / The Melker Project

For all the nights spent weeping into your Stouffer’s while C-SPAN plays noiselssly on the TV, as you think back to all the things you could have done differently, if only you had stood up and raised your hand. 

7 27 CLUB / Chløë Black

A more threateningly sad and unhinged Lana Del Rey, Black is holding a knife in her hands with that glint in her eyes and you’re pretty sure it’s a joke but you’re also not totally sure.

8 HOLD ME / Janine And The Mixtape / Pusha T 

Curl up next to nobody and clutch that pillow like it’s the only lover that never hurt you. This one’s for that first dance between you and yourself, in the dark, retracing steps you used to know.

9 I HAD THIS THING / Röyksopp

It’s almost the warmth that breaks your heart: something bubbly, yearning, and forever lost. PS I can't find this streaming anywhere. Idk, use Spotify or something - it's there.

10 PRETTY THING / Broods

It’s like those nightmares where you’re a kid again, at the mall, and can’t find your mom. You turn around and you’re lost, and you’re swiveling and swiveling and everyone is talking and smiling but so scary all of a sudden and you wake up in a cold sweat and you’re tingling a little bit because your dream is the most adrenaline you’ve felt in months.

11 GET AWAY / CHVRCHES

Here’s to those nights on Makeout Ridge, where we felt for each other under the blanket in the backseat of your Dad’s Camero. Where we weren’t quite sure what we knew but we whispered fervent promises to each other with hot, anxious breath. This one is dark, psychopathic, unstoppable.

12 ONE TOUCH / Baauer / AlunaGeorge / Rae Sremmurd

Post-apocalyptic dance music. Rae Sremmurd are the rappers from a disastrous, lost, enthralling future. And AlunaGeorge are the cotton-candy-sweet, preening, insincere sirens. Put it together with Baauer’s rubbery synthnoise and you’ve got a strange, insistent track.

13 ISABEL STREET / Robert DeLong

Moaning and knife-sharp, this is a weird one. But it works somehow, cobbled together like the best of our lives, cobbled of this and that. This song is all of us, groping in the dark for something coherent, pierced every now and then by a moment of fearful lucidity before falling back into collapsing sprials of sound.

14 COLOUR ME IN / Damien Rice

Beautiful and tender, like everything we’ve ever come to expect from Rice. We are trying, he’s telling us. We are doing the best we can. We are alone. We have each other. In a contradiction of silence and noise, of lyric and emptiness, Rice has something loud and true to say. We all want to be filled. We all want. Let’s sit next to each other. Let’s fumble for something to say to each other. I’ll believe what you’re saying, if you believe me.

15 FUCK IT ALL / Elle Varner  

And Ms. Varner says it the best: fuck it all.

:)

PS: Best thing this week that isn’t music is NPR’s podcast Serial. I can’t say enough good things about it. I’m late to the party at this point, but hurry up and listen. And if you want an interesting opinion on it, read Jay Caspain Kang today in The Awl. 

Full-ish playlist below. Cheers everyone.

[weekly15]

7 10 14 / now / party / future / party

THANK GOD IT'S FUCKING THURSDAY *playlist at the bottom* *linked to YT some of the songs that have sketchy soundclouds*

1 BREAK FREE/ Ariana Grande / Zedd

http://disputations.gawker.com/is-ariana-grandes-new-single-actually-everything-1599713278

2 BLACK WIDOW/ Iggy Azalea / Rita Ora

Forget fucking “Fancy.” This will get you screaming along, breathlessly out-of-key, intoxicated with Ms. Ora’s promise of loving you until she hates you, briefly forgetting you are in the kitchen, in your pajamas, shouting into a spatula, living a non-famous life, and Rita Ora will probably never even mess with you harder.

3 2 ON / Tinashe / Schoolboy Q / TOKiMONSTA

Been bumping this everywhere. This remix makes me want to get 2 On and I don’t even know what that fucking means.

4 GOOD KISSER / Usher / Disclosure

Instant classic. Whirls Usher’s spiffy tune into a merry-go-round of trademark Usher seduction. But does he need to keep rubbing it in that he’s been around the world, kissed a lot of girls? We get it, man. The Disclosure boys kill it on this one. Throw this on at your next party (TMRW.)

5 HIDEAWAY / Kiesza / Zac Samuel

Everything has been said about this song. Here’s the remix that’ll get you breathing fast, sweating, throwing it all on the floor. Perfect.

6 LET GO FOR TONIGHT / Foxes

A full-throttle symphonic anthem from her debut Glorious, so of course the music video is people throwing paint on each other. Of fucking course.

7 LITTLE WHITE LIES / Florrie

As always, Florrie drops this track straight from heaven. She soars.

8 1965 / Zella Day

I guess this is “old” if you have a narrow perspective on time, but this tune will get you dreaming. Can we go back to the world we had…? If only we could, Ms. Day, if only we could.

9 FAIR GAME / Sia

Absolute standout from 1000 Forms of Fear. There is apparently nothing her voice can’t do. Follow those magic pipes anywhere.

10 CADILLAC GIRL / Only Real

Damn. This is sweet, smooth, bouncing turnpike mellow-rock, perfect for sweltering down the highway, windows down, thighs sweating into the leather, leaving it all behind.

11 PROBLEM/ Ariana Grande / Iggy Azalea

That sax. That rising, rising voice. What’s not to love? (Ok, except for the creepy whisper. Which grows on you, I swear.)

12 HEART AND SOUL / Twin Atlantic

How does he even pronounce “generator”? It’s all fucking vowels. This’ll have you hooked from the first chord. Rockin.

13 YOU & ME / Bassnectar / W. Darling

Goddamn. This song will take you there. The sound is blow-your-mind amazing.

14 YOU (HA HA HA) / Charli XCX

Oh my god. Another old one, but shit, it’s endless.

15 BOBBY / GFOTY

No one seems to think this is as much of a jam as I do. “What is this shit” was the response from the 3 friends I played it for. I’ll keep trying. Press play. I’d party to it.  

That's it. The best thing that isn't music this week is Gawker's new Disputationsblog, which you can see in the "Break Free" link.

Edit 1: Looked up "2 on" on Urban and I want to be it more than ever.

Edit 2: I'm half-convinced that PC Music (the label that hosts GFOTY's "Bobby" is some sort of mind experiment in infiltrating the indie music blog hivemind that pronounces things "cool" because some of their stuff is so out there that it must be a hoax. And then it's called "cool" by the hipsterati "tastemakers" because why not? Either way, don't skip "Bobby," it's a fucking new-world track.)