Drain, Sluice, Thornhill, and More! May 16, 2026 // 11:38 A.M. One Sunday in March, one of my friends in the city invited me to see Secret World, Haywire 617, No Pressure, and Drain over at Nevermore Hall. They had just invited me to the Ratboys show at Ottobar, so after some hemming and hawing over another $40, I decided to go (and roped my boyfriend in as well). It was worth it!! We missed Secret World because the show started almost as soon as the doors opened, and we were still sitting outside eating pizza. Haywire (617) was great live – the rhythm section especially. Their tribute to TUI was great, and they seemed to have a real love for what they do and for the crowd. I appreciated the lead singer’s consistent breaks to talk to the crowd about the power of friendship. In contrast, No Pressure was good live, but not necessarily my style. Their rhythm section is not what gets me moving – more of a relentless pounding instead of a rolling groove. My boyfriend made a very accurate point: that they sound exactly like Yellowcard. I think I actually just don’t like pop punk. Then, palm trees, a surfboard, and a giant lifeguard chair made their way to the stage. Drain easily stole the show. A Campbell's soup baby in a shark costume danced around the stage, the guitarist climbed a mountain of fake amplifiers, and the lead singer crowd surfed – on a surfboard, of course – to the sound booth to give the sound guy a fist bump, before heading back to stage. All while covering Good Good Things. I smiled like an idiot the entire time. Drain felt less like a band performing and more like a chaotic circus show, where the lead singer becomes a ringleader, goading the audience into doing stunts for his entertainment while he brings the next lyrics out from his gut. Or maybe he’s dangling the microphone above a pile of people at the barrier, or asking if someone knows the words and throwing it to them over the heads of security. He was desperate to physically and emotionally connect with the audience, which was really special. He also claimed to love Baltimore (which is always going to win points with me) saying we’re the best crowds no matter what venue he’s at. Hand in hand with Haywire’s speeches about community, friendship, and support, Drain’s show and new album …Is Your Friend feels wonderfully intentional right now. If you have the chance, you need to see them live. It doesn’t matter if you know the songs or not. Just go. Half the joy of a rowdy show is just watching the crowd. I’m happy pushing people back into the pit, or ducking under crowdsurfers at the barrier, or standing over to the side and watching the crowd. What better way to do that than at a tiny country show at Metro? The Hiding Places and Sluice show was a good time. Despite being in the city for so many years, I’d only ever walked by Metro, never going in. To nobody’s surprise, I liked it there. Drinks are cheap, there’s plenty of NA options (sometimes you just want a little drink without the pain of alcohol!), and the sound was great. I got there 15 minutes before the show started and less than 20 people were there. This gradually filled in over the course of the night, but someone still stood right in the middle of my field of view. So I still got the experience of a sold out show with 1/10th of the people! Now that’s a steal. Hiding Places was really cool. They had two singers on guitars (always fun!) and a really good and grooving bassist. They’ve got that alt-country sound that's booming right now, complete with some poignant, Mitski-like vocals and occasionally cackling into the microphone. The guitar work was stellar; they stayed rooted in country, but with artsy or hard rock-y variations thrown in. My favorite songs were two they closed the set with – they’re unreleased songs. Exciting!! The CD I bought of their first album is definitely back-loaded. One of the singers actually told me they were selling a lot more CDs on the tour than vinyl, which vindicated me slightly after feeling deflated on my record store day quest. My favorite track so far is the title track, The Secret to Good Living. I think it’s a lot of fun when the two vocalists are on the same song. Sluice was really good, and sort of exactly what I expected. I felt the same way when I saw Soccer Mommy last September – I didn’t know all of the songs, and I just absorbed the music in a sort of pure and innocent state, without pretense. At both of these shows, I found myself focusing on everyone’s instruments more. How the drummer rolls some bells around in a free hand while maintaining the song's gentle heartbeat, or the violinist and guitarist trading lead and rhythm, meandering around each other, intertwining with the bass. The singer has a very distinct voice that reminds me of the singer in Friendship. He sings a bit like he’s tiptoeing around the song, gently intruding in the space the instruments have built. While many of Sluice’s songs bleed together, they are beautiful paintings of a very personal world. A very good example of a band that just makes more sense live. I didn’t fully appreciate the Sluice show until I went to my next show two days later. It was a particularly grueling lineup on a particularly grueling day. I saw Vianova, Fox Lake, 156/Silence, and Thornhill at Nevermore Hall. I was there to see Thornhill. My friend invited me earlier in the year, and I listened to their album BODIES and liked it well enough to go. It was sort of a perfect storm of a day; the temperature was almost 100 degrees, power was out at the venue until 40 minutes before doors, the humidity was punishing, and in case you missed it earlier, there were four bands on the bill. This was a key fact I did not really register internally until we were 1.5 bands in. Nevertheless, we made it five and a half hours, to the second to last song in Thornhill’s set, and hobbled home at midnight in the thick Baltimore air to take lukewarm showers. I say I didn’t appreciate the artistry of Sluice until after this show because this lineup was a bit hard to get through. Vianova was the most interesting opener but I was a bit worried the singer was going to get a heat stroke in his big fluffy hat, sweatshirt, and jeans. They had a really funky techno-metal thing going on. Then came Fox Lake and 156/Silence, who the pit enjoyed. I distinctly remember turning back to my brother during the show to ask his opinion, and he put it very succinctly: “corny.” Needless to say, Sluice and Hiding Places blew these guys out of the water. Four hours in, we eagerly awaited for the band we knew to emerge as we took turns squatting into various yoga poses for relieving tension in the lower back. Then, the lights lowered, Thornhill emerged, and the lead singer strutted onto stage in his best Layne Staley fit (positive). They were great live – one of the few bands I’ve seen that play their songs pretty much exactly how the album sounds, including all the vocal distortion and scream tones, and the singer had the stage presence to keep people entertained. Unfortunately, the crowd was clearly exhausted by this point. The heat and the lineup wore everyone out, and my friends and I tapped out right before the last song. I recommend seeing Thornhill with fewer openers! They put on a really good show, and I felt bad that I was too exhausted to enjoy it. I’m in a bit of a concert gauntlet right now! Of my own making, of course. It’s summer in the city, after all. I actually saw Wednesday again just last night, but I’m going to separate them out for a post with Ratboys, who I’m seeing next week… See you soon.
2026 Q1 + April Report March 19, 2026 // 2:52 P.M. Behold! What was previously going to be the other part of my videogames post, which ended up being too long. Live Music Update First things first, my live music update. On Valentine’s Day I went to see a Talking Heads cover band with my boyfriend, and we promptly left halfway through. They weren’t playing enough Talking Heads music, believe it or not, and also kept devolving into several minute long jam-band style breakdowns between songs. Not my style. But it was a fun v-date nonetheless. I have a few more shows lined up while I keep an eye on what’s around. I saw Haywire, No Pressure, and Drain in March. I’ve got five more concerts lined up so far: Sluice, Thornhill, Wednesday (again, in Baltimore! Yippee!), Ratboys, and Die Spitz. Die Spitz I’m caving and seeing on a Tuesday in DC – it’s in November which tells me if they come to Baltimore it wouldn’t be until 2027, which I’m not willing to wait for them to get even more popular for. I’m trying to see them before I get priced out of it! Especially since Livenation/ Ticketmaster might just face some sort of inconsequential fine instead of being broken up. I was looking at another show in DC and the price floor was $70. For nosebleeds! I realize this is sort of beating a dead horse. But whatever. As I’ve been working tons of shows into my schedule, I’ve spent time thinking about bands that I may not ever see again. Whether it’s financial, or that they’re too big to visit Baltimore, or that when they do it sells out immediately. I think I’m lucky to have seen Mannequin Pussy and Amyl And The Sniffers when I did. MP is opening arenas for Florence and The Machine right now, and after both of them opening for Turnstile on tour last year, they’re just doing victory laps at this point. Hayley Williams came to the Lyric and it was sold out immediately, and they opened some tickets up at will call the day of – I super regret not leaving work early to go get some. I’m going to wax poetic about this for a bit, so bear with me. Paramore was my first concert when I was 14, they’re the first band I actually chose to listen to and sought out music for. I’ve seen them live four times, had tickets to the original Hayley Williams tour that got cancelled in 2020, and now I don’t know if I’ll ever be lucky enough to see her or the band again. Her DC date isn’t a tour date at all – it’s a festival. Also she’s obviously incredibly popular. I know this is all very woe is me, considering I live in probably one of the best places in the US to see shows, but with ticketing systems being in the news as much as they are, it’s kind of hard not to reflect on it. And there’s the argument that if I just saved all my money from going to small shows, I could go to maybe one or two of these larger shows a year. But that’s so sad… We will see what happens, I guess. There’re some potential shows in the queue that I haven’t pulled the trigger on yet, since I’m currently trying to recover my savings from my yearly car insurance payment and impulsively getting a tattoo and spending $140 on baseball games ($70 is the cheapest I think anyone’s going to be able to see Turnstile ever again, even if they’re just spraying people with a hose in the outfield). I think I went a bit too hard on trying to hit ten shows this year. In January I was worried that I wouldn’t get to it because no shows were being announced, but obviously as the year progresses, bands are announcing tours every week. I think I’ll hit ten. Listening Update My friends and I have been making each other mixtapes this year. Part of it is trying to find new music without algorithms – something that’s sort of a lost art for people around our age. Plus, we all have cars with CD players now! So as of now, we’re two mixtape exchanges deep. I’m finding that they’re a fun exercise in expanding my knowledge of whatever genre I’ve chosen. The first one I made was alt-country (this year’s hip genre) centered, with a bit of alt-rock and classic country mixed in. Those who know my evil secrets will know it’s a lot of bands tangentially connected to Wednesday. I called it “weird winter” due to the fact that I was having a very weird winter. MJ Lenderman did sneak into that one. I spent some time listening to him in January, and had about a 50% hit rate with his album Manning Fireworks. I haven’t felt the need to dive in more than that. My second mixtape appears to be more of a hit so far, and it’s called “I WANT TO BE IN THE CLUB!!!!” for obvious reasons. I’m having a lot of fun in the pop space after spending several months in the grunge and country mines. If you know me, my evil secrets for this mix involve a spotify playlist (that I regularly port to my deezer account) made by a local party called sweet spot. I’d like to thank sweet spot for regularly updating their playlist so I have something to explore. As I’m writing this (yes, I’m really meandering around with this one), record store day came and went. I went to THREE record stores in two cities, and so far this year I’m sad to say my CD prophecy isn’t coming true. The only store nearby that reliably sells new CDs is The Sound Garden, and while I love to #supportlocalbusiness, I wish I could support the ones I have a stronger fondness for a bit more. I don’t blame them at all – CDs really aren’t having the comeback I thought they would be. Obviously purchasing CD stock is a bit more of a financial risk than record stock for an indie store, especially ones for less mainstream bands. CDs don’t have the chic collectors image that vinyl does, and they don’t get many limited releases. This was my first year going to record store day, and it was mostly out of coincidence. I’m not into collectors editions or special pressings for myself. I may grab one as a gift for someone else, but I’m most concerned with just owning the music and having the artwork. This is the one thing I would get a special edition for: a cooler album cover, or maybe some limited run promotional materials or lyric booklets. I have the Target exclusive CD release of This Is Why, for example. I got rid of a Live Through This reissue, despite it being one of my favorite albums, because it was just the album cover and the record – no lyric sheet or even any artwork on the record sleeve!! I’m not particularly interested in a re-release or exclusive record drop that’s $40, when I can get a CD for $13. And I can listen to that CD in my car. And burn it to my laptop. And even put it on my phone, if I wanted! I walked into a record store nearby and a customer was talking about how his friend, the owner, was robbing him blind because of all the records he wanted. I told him he needs to get back into CDs, and he laughed millennial-ly and told me he sold his entire collection in college and he’ll never go back. Despite the fact that a brand new CD can be less than a used record of the same album, and all the perks I mentioned above. Perhaps this lack of millennial market is also why CDs aren’t as huge right now. At this same store, I asked the owner if he had the new Angel Du$t CD, something I thought would be a safe bet for a Baltimore record store to carry. He didn’t! He said it’s just unpredictable and hard to move through CD stock. I’ll keep fighting for them, though, and probably continue to ask for CDs and be met with disappointment. I’m a bit biased by my friends, the ones previously mentioned who I’m making mixtapes with. I’m surrounding myself with an echo chamber of mp3s!! My final topic for the night is my listening habits. At work is usually when I discover new music, listening in the background while I do my regular computer tasks. This can be good or bad for my productivity, and has mixed results on my output (I’ve had to ban myself from tunes for a week or two before), but it’s the most reliable way I’ve found to discover new music. So I’m writing an appreciation paragraph (or two, or more) of sorts. A while ago, I watched this youtube video on finding music outside of the algorithm. While the algorithm has provided me with bangers before, I find myself participating in the current trend that desires and attempts to prioritize human creation. I already followed some of the advice provided before I even watched the video; I had dabbled in Pitchfork’s best new music page and poked around the Epitaph website for recommendations before. I added radio listening to my rotation sometime last summer, and now NTS is heavily on rotation in my office as well. The video’s advice about shows to start with rings true; In Focus and NTS Guide To are some of my most listened to programs. My favorite saved shows, however, are the ones that bands I like make. Karly Hartzman of Wednesday fame has her own show, as does Meg Mills from Turnstile. But a lot of my bookmarked episodes are little golden moments I find while listening to one of the two live stations. I also stream some radio stations online. My longstanding favorite has been KXLU, broadcasting from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Their DJs have personality, the shows are decently varied, and there’s no ads. I donated to their student scholarship fund last month. My favorite shows are Burn Rubber, DJ Lily, Papunky, and Zoo Croo. I come away from Burn Rubber and DJ Lily with the most adds to my likes, but this is ever shifting based on my mood and the available programming. My newest addition to the rotation comes via recommendation from my coworker: WPRB from Princeton, NJ. While the DJs are a bit more shy, the station is at least in the same time zone as me, so it feels like I’m supporting something semi-local. It’s also ad-free, and has been really good for getting me into jazz and classical. I’m trying to save more instrumental pieces to my library so I can come back to them and build a little bit of knowledge, instead of just defaulting to videogame soundtracks when I want to hear something instrumental. Classical Discoveries on Wednesday mornings is my current favorite for this reason, but I haven’t listened to a lot of the other shows yet. I am also dipping my toe back into our local radio station, WTMD. They’re a little too pop-americana-folk at times, but I know they interact with the local scene a lot so I try to listen in occasionally to get snippets of artists in the area. I’m trying to go to the free festivals they put on in the city this year. I also stalk a lot of local venues and a local talent booker for interesting concerts. The booker I follow is unregistered nurse, the mind behind the Turnstile show in the Dell. She seems to have a really good eye for acts, so I check her website occasionally and see if the musicians and the price point combine into something I want to go to. (This is how I found the Sluice show.) So that’s my update! Summer concert season is about to kick off, so I’ll be around writing my thoughts down about those. I’m keeping an eye out for free shows in various city parks, just in case.
Final Fantasy, Unfortunately. March 3, 2026 // 11:25 A.M. It’s been a while! Nothing huge has moved for me lately, musically. The largest musical shift in my life at the moment is due to the fact that I’ve started playing FFXIV – probably a poor decision mentally and financially, but I’m having a lot of fun with it. I played it in 2016/2017 and then never had a device capable of playing it until I discovered I could get it on my steam deck. Now I’m playing the infamous free trial. I think it’s interesting that a lot of the current online community for the game joined after I put it down, and there’s a sort of attitude that when I was playing the game, it was really abysmal. I’ve noticed a lot of positive changes and I’m having fun playing solo (the trial doesn’t let you join free companies – player run organizations – and I wouldn’t have anyone to play with anyway). When I picked it back up, I remembered having fond memories of the environmental music. There are plenty of “FFXIV chill study music” playlists available to you on any streaming service, and there’s a plethora of songs due to just the sheer scope of the game. While I don’t know if the soundtrack is one of the best ever made, it’s chock full of better-than-average songs that I’m slowly crafting my own playlist of. This also led me to relisten to the FFXV soundtrack for a few days, an amazing soundtrack by the ever flawless Yoko Shimomura, and I got to thinking: what makes a good videogame soundtrack? This is a really hard question for me to answer because I’m not trained, musically, in any way. (In case you haven’t noticed.) When I think of movies, the ones that have standout soundtracks to me are the ones that are composed of a lot of “non-soundtrack” songs, like Kill Bill. Perhaps this is my lack of classical training showing bias. When I looked at the movies nominated for best score and saw Frankenstein on the list, I found myself confused! I didn’t notice the soundtrack the entire time, which to me signals a very average listening experience. I want to actively notice the music I’m hearing (which I did in Sinners – I haven’t seen any of the other nominees, so I can’t speak to them). So, how does this translate to videogames, where you’re trapped in a simulation for much, much longer than the average movie? Which games are winning awards? The Grammys actually just started giving videogame soundtracks awards in 2023. However, when you look at the list of nominees and winners, it starts to look a bit like a joke, sort of like the rest of the Grammys. There’s no presence of Japanese games at all, barely any indie games, and half the nominees are movie franchises: Star Wars, Alien, Indiana Jones… Five composers have multiple nominations despite only 20 games being nominated total (as of writing). The better award show to look at for things like this is obviously The Game Awards (previously the Spike Videogame Awards), which has been around since 2003. There’s still a bias towards triple-a and American-made games in the early years, but there’s a considerable amount of depth for the nominees. In recent years, after the transition away from Spike, Square Enix has dominated the Soundtrack category, with Final Fantasy and Nier taking home multiple awards per franchise. Despite The Game Awards’ biases, the nominees seem much more fair than The Grammys. The fans even get a voice, with a small amount of weight dedicated to the “popular vote” in every category, and a Player’s Voice award. The Japanese Game Awards also exist, but haven’t had a soundtrack based award for a while, instead just giving out awards of excellence to various games that were released during the previous year. When they did give out soundtrack awards, however, Final Fantasy was still winning! What a legacy. While I may not personally know what makes a good videogame soundtrack, Nobuo Uematsu certainly does. I don’t disagree with the soundtracks winning at the (Spike) Game Awards, either. Some of my favorites are there – Nier Automata, Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2. I think an award-winning soundtrack needs to bring something unique to the category, beyond a typical ambient orchestral score. I also want to notice the soundtrack, and notice that the soundtrack is good, at multiple points in the game. Of the winners I’ve played, that’s why Nier Automata and RDR make so much sense! However, I was also a huge fan of the infinitely looping, short but sweet Balatro soundtrack. While I didn’t play the game myself, I fell asleep to it several nights of the week for months as my boyfriend played it in bed. The key difference here is that Balatro is a 2D puzzle game, and Nier and RDR are story driven RPGs. While there isn’t a huge lack of indie game representation in The Game Awards as a whole, there certainly is in the soundtrack winners category. I’ve heard of the idea that the soundtrack has to “make up for” games that aren’t graphics-heavy, story-driven RPGs, but I don’t think that’s true. I also think a game with amazing graphics doesn’t always benefit from a more minimal soundtrack. It’s more about the overall tone of the game and how well the soundtrack can reinforce that. For example, look at RDR2 and The Last Of Us 2. Two American-made single player RPGs with highly realistic environments and character driven stories, one with a very minimal acoustic soundtrack, and one with swooping, brass filled compositions that crescendo during big story moments. Both soundtracks are beautiful and reinforce the story in different ways. The quiet environment of TLOU2 and the desire to ground the story in humanity, vs the fading grandiosity of the American west and dying from tuberculosis. And while I personally prefer RDR, this is where, in my mind, we start to hit the line between subjectivity and objectivity when weighing if a soundtrack is worthy of winning an award. Because even though TLOU2’s soundtrack is objectively good, I don’t find myself reaching for it outside of the context of the game. I don’t particularly have an answer for this besides some vague, hand wavy qualifications that you could impose upon the nominees. First: how well does the soundtrack reinforce what’s happening onscreen? Is it noticeably enjoyable to listen to? Does it pique the viewers interest without distracting or detracting from the rest of the game? And second: how unique is it to the game? Is this a soundtrack that isn’t easily transferable from one game to another? Can players of the game recognize the soundtrack if it was to play outside of the context of the game? There are probably more insightful questions someone more versed in the world of composition can come up with, but this is my best attempt at what makes something stand out to me! And while not all of these answer “yes” to every question, some of my personal favorite video game soundtracks that I think meet a majority of these criteria are: Nier: Automata, Red Dead Redemption, FFXV, and Persona 5. Obviously the bias here is that these are games I’ve played, and the games I’m interested in aren’t the only games with really good soundtracks. I also don’t play many indie games, so they’re a pretty big blind spot for me. This post got much longer than I anticipated, so I’ve split it away from my general life/music listening post that I’m planning on writing. Hopefully I can get my ass in gear and have that one done soon! Coding/writing are taking more of a backseat these days to playing videogames. When I started writing I was playing FFXIV religiously, but lately I’ve been playing/watching my boyfriend play various Resident Evil games, and playing through the first Ace Attorney game as well. And no, neither of them are making it onto my list of best soundtracks.
2025 Music Reflection January 2, 2026 // 11:07 P.M. In a year marked by more and more people starting to rebuild physical media collections, illegally downloading songs onto strange new mp3 players, and where it’s more cringe to use Spotify than ever before, it’s still hard to resist the all-familiar urge to show off a specific data set that proves just how special your taste is. I’m no better than anyone else here, to be clear. Sure, I traded Spotify for Deezer in August in an attempt to lesser-evil my streaming. One of my thoughts when switching was that I wouldn’t be able to compare Spotify’s wrapped data to my last.fm data – something I started using solely to see how the listening lines up. But I got a car with a CD player this year (what an upgrade!), made more effort to listen to my local radio stations, and sought out specific human-curated radio online (NTS, KEXP, KXLU). So, even though last.fm could track my cross-platform move, it was still a lost cause when it came to an accurate, all-inclusive list of everything I listened to in 2025. With that shortcut gone, I find it’s time to take matters into my own hands and figure out for myself what I actually want to reflect on regarding my music listening from this past year. It’s more insightful, in my opinion, to look at how my listening has grown and changed in the past year. According to last.fm, Mannequin Pussy is easily my most listened to artist. A shock to nobody. To me, it makes more sense to catalogue what’s new in my listening habits, instead of reinforcing that I am still in fact listening to I Got Heaven on repeat. It’s also obvious that I listened to a shit ton of Turnstile this year, along with everyone else. I think Never Enough was my most listened-to CD of 2025. Wet Leg also put out an amazing album! I didn’t realize they were so popular, and their show at the 9:30 Club sold out before I even knew they were playing there. But these are all bands I’d already been listening to, and as a result they don’t really stick out as something that specifically demarcates this past year. So, without further ado, and in a semi-specific order, here are my favorite discoveries from 2025. Wednesday In case you couldn’t tell from my previous post, I became obsessed with Wednesday this year. Once I heard Bleeds, it was all I listened to for a month. It was Bleeds or NPR. In this fugue state, I bought my 9:30 Club tickets. Then, I reluctantly moved on to Rat Saw God. Got blown out of the water again, and listened for two-ish more weeks before burning out. Kept listening on and off until I saw them live, and I’ve since been a little freer with my choices. I am curious about listening to MJ Lenderman, but I’m hesitating because I’m afraid I’ll end up like a child who has to choose her favorite parent in the divorce. Which isn’t how divorce works, or how listening to music works, but that’s how my brain is spinning it. One of the best playlists I listened to this year was Wednesday’s NTS show – give it a listen if you like Wednesday and have the time. Die Spitz Another band I found this year that I invested a lot of listening time into is Die Spitz. I heard their Teeth EP in January and loved several tracks, but wasn’t super into other releases from them. They had a show at DC9 coming up that was sold out when I found it, and then their other show in the area was expensive, as they were opening for Viagra Boys. I want them to come back so bad, because apparently their live show kicks ass!! Die Spitz come to Baltimore, please. Their first album, Something To Consume, came out in September. (Good month for albums!) They actually were signed to Third Man Records for this project, while Teeth and their previous EPs came out under “poop butt records,” which implies to me they were self published. I was a bit worried about whether or not I would like the album because I wasn’t a huge fan of the first single, Throw Yourself to the Sword. It reminded me of some of their more metal-leaning songs that I’m not super into. I didn’t listen much to the other singles that dropped, and gave the album a cursory listen a week or so after it was released, but I was in Wednesday mode and didn’t have the brain space to give it the listen it deserved. I honestly probably listened to it at work, which is never a good place to intentionally listen to an album. However, I still kept Die Spitz in the back of my mind. I revisited Something To Consume in early December, and it’s an amazing first album. I’m happy I kept them on my radar to revisit – sometimes you just need to come back to an album when you’re more ready for it. Not a single instrument is wasted. The drums in particular are relentless. Every band member plays multiple, if not every instrument, including singing! At least three of the four girls sing. They all have distinct vocal styles and they bend the genres to match, but Something To Consume is nothing if not cohesive. The album has excellent pacing, with no song feeling out of place. There’s also clear growth from their previous works, but not so much it feels like an unnatural jump. Throw Yourself to the Sword is a favorite now, along with RIDING WITH MY GIRLS and Punishers, and American Porn, and Go Get Dressed… There’s a new favorite every week. I think (and hope) their second album will rip twice as hard. Other Bands I’m Keeping My Eyes On There’s a few other bands I found this year that have things upcoming or were recently released. Babe Haven is a punk duo with a great album titled Nuisance, which is coincidentally also my favorite track on the album. Gas Pedal and Blind Yourself are also standouts. I just missed them in Baltimore but I hope they come back again when it’s warmer and not in the middle of the holiday shopping season… I have to listen to their debut album, but there are a few songs on Nuisance that need to push just a little further – the chorus of If I Were You comes to mind. The timing of the lyrics and the backing instruments don’t seem to match up, and it throws the energy of the song off balance. And while I’m sure it’s hard as hell, I want to hear more of a range when they’re screaming. But I think they have such a clear musical vision and are demonstrating that they can put out bangers. On Spotify they have a killer playlist of their influences which I recommend listening to. Let’s go Babe Haven!! I also liked Scowl's album this year. They keep coming to Baltimore at inconvenient times or with bands more hardcore than I’m built to see, but I would like to see them live. I like the singer’s mix of vocals – her growl is much more snarly than a lot of bands I listen to, and it brings a fun contrast to her standard singing. When Are We All Angels released, I was pretty thrown by the mixing. It’s something I noticed in Ecca Vandals music too, where the mix is really vocal forward and very smoothed out. It feels like pop music. Once I gave it some more listening time, I enjoyed it. B.A.B.E. and Not Heaven Not Hell are my favorites. I’m also keeping my eyes on The Bobby Lees. They just signed to Epitaph, so I’m really interested in seeing how that album turns out. There’s a single from it out now called Napoleon. Sword II, Sprints, and Friendship are all dancing in my peripherals as well. Predictions and goals for 2026 I think the CD renaissance will really hit next year. I’m not a professional trend predictor and I’m nowhere near being ahead of the curve, but I think there’s a strong correlation with the economic and political state of the US and our desire to actually own things. Perhaps it also correlates with the fact that younger millennials and older gen z were the last generation to grow up pre-streaming, and are now “going back,” with younger gen z getting mp3 players for the very first time in 2025. And while I’m sure many people never left the physical media collecting grind, it’s much more in vogue to have packed shelves these days than the minimalist greige of our past did. I believe it’s also a direct rebellion against millennial minimalism. Mid-century modern was the (mainstream) name of the game this year, with maximalism lurking in the shadows just behind. Another part of it is the consumption of it all. Take a look at bag charms, for example. Something that most people haven’t intentionally thought of in years, now being packaged and sold as something fashionable people do. And why not? A $10 impulse buy of a plastic cherry duo in American Eagle is much more budgetable than $150 jeans, and it’s still on trend, and it’s easier on the wallet than “buy it for life” denim. (I am not necessarily a bag charm hater or gatekeeper. I just find the entire trend extremely fascinating.) The bag charm is a sort of microcosm of what I observed, culturally, in 2025: a desire for uniqueness, but also trying to buy it, but also not having a lot of money. I think the desire to have your own (unique, personal) collection, combined with the affordability of CDs and the size of the secondhand CD market, will lead to their mainstream revival in 2026. I also think we’re gonna see more of the punk and rock resurgence. I’m looking at the romanticization of early 2000s garage rock, the skyrocketing mainstream success of Turnstile, and the economic and political vibes as a whole. You could argue this is already happening, and you would be right! Again, it’s not like I have my finger on the pulse here. I’m a few inches away. I think the return-to-concerts push will continue, because of our post-pandemic and AI-poisoned world’s desire for real human connection and art and increasing transparency on how musicians really make money. I would like to see Ticketmaster break this year, but I have little hope on that front. I am really trying to push off finishing this post until the very last minute, because this December has been just a flurry of finding new artists and songs. This happens every year, ironically after “wrapped” is released and your data doesn’t count for a month. I also went to ten concerts this year (two were free), and I want to at least meet that number in 2026. To do that, I need to expand my horizons and listen to smaller and more local artists so I can keep affording to see the amount of music I want to see. I would like to expand my record and CD collection to include more classical and jazz this year, and perhaps even follow some artists I like! I will probably be using NTS to find more music outside of my typical genre bias (and in it, of course). Overall, I want to consume more in 2026. More books, more videogames, and of course, more music. Thank you for the visit, as always, and I hope 2026 is good to your ears and mine!
Wednesday, Daffo at the 9:30 Club November 23, 2025 // 7:53 P.M. This past Saturday I caught Wednesday’s late show at the 9:30 Club, and I’m happy to say it was a good one! I always have a good time at the 9:30 Club – the sound mixing is good, I usually get there early enough to get a good spot, etc etc. I was on the upper balcony for this show, and I do lightly regret not being down on the floor. The show was sold out, and I’m short, so I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of luck being able to see on the ground floor (and I like to see!). The energy on the floor is always better than upstairs, and I wanted to jump and sing loud with the rest of them. Upstairs is always much more mellow, and not as often acknowledged by the performers (because they probably can’t see us). Leaning on a railing surrounded by people who aren’t moving and singing doesn’t encourage you to start. Also, I’ve been wearing earplugs at shows in an effort to save my hearing, but this means when I sing along I can only hear myself. Which isn’t what I want to hear. So if anyone has concert earplug recommendations that don’t do that, send word somehow. Daffo opened and they were one of the better openers I’ve seen! Because it was a late show, they started off only half an hour after doors opened, which I liked. I wish all concerts had this level of urgency. The band had energy and pretty decent songs. My only complaint is that they were very obviously fans of Wednesday (and proclaimed so twice during their set) and their sound was super influenced by them. I want the vocalist to embrace more of her own style instead of a sort of knockoff of Wednesday’s Karly. I think they just need to come into their own a little more as a band. There were a few moments seeing them perform where I was thinking “wow, this is really good” only for the song to immediately undercut itself, usually lyrically, and in a way where I could tell they were trying to emulate Wednesday. The show was a lot of fun and I was sort of enchanted by Karly. She was bubbly on stage and interacted with the crowd a lot, and obviously topped it off by being an amazing performer. I’ve been getting a little parasocial with it – visiting her website, reading her blog posts. She’s the genre of woman who I just think is undeniably super cool. I also appreciated Xandy – the man playing pedal steel and lap steel – who, despite sitting, was grooving along and headbanging as much as he could. Some special moments include Karly getting a birthday cake and a couple getting engaged in the pit. Whenever I go to a concert I find myself more in awe of the actual art of their show, whether it’s the instrumentation itself, their voices, or even the physical performance they’re putting on. And they make it look so effortless, despite it being the polar opposite. I loved Karly’s vocals. Pitchfork’s review of Bleeds mentions that she wrote Wasp to follow up Bull Believer live, and part of that process was learning how to scream without destroying her vocal chords. I haven’t seen Wednesday live before, but Bull Believer apparently used to be their last song because of how strenuous the final act is to sing. This doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore, not only because of the Wasp follow-up, but the amount of respectable screams in the set as a whole. It was poetic in a way- they started with the scream in the beginning of Reality TV Argument Bleeds, and ended with an entire track of screams. Professional screams! Screaming in songs will always be a little controversial, and I think that’s because there’s a real spectrum of musical hollering that sort of gets flattened a lot in casual conversation. I don’t personally enjoy a lot of the deep, gravelly screams you hear in black metal or some hardcore bands. I’m more of a yell enjoyer, on the scream spectrum, if that makes sense. Where the singer's voice is still coming through. I need to do some more research into the different genres of screaming, and with the way music is trending now, I think we’re going to see a lot more of it in actual popular music soon (see Mirtazapine or Ice In My OJ from Hayley Williams’ new record, for example). Karly’s screaming is a wonderful, melodic take on a sort of stereotypical final girl scream. Whether it’s anger, desperation, or just a general overwhelming feeling – she always nails it. Live, it blew me away that she could release something so guttural and then revert back to her otherwise very gentle voice. I imagine it’s something she’s put a lot of practice into. The setlist for this show leaned into more of their hard stuff, especially in the second half. Which I actually didn’t expect! I peeked at setlists from the tour a few weeks ago, and I think I either misremembered what was on them, or they changed it up for their second DC night. (Mannequin Pussy did a different setlist on their second night at the 9:30 Club as well, which was also harder than the setlist the previous night. I wonder if this is a known tradition.) I wish they had performed Gary’s II, but I loved hearing Hot Rotten Grass Smell’s chainsaw ripping guitar in person. I was the most surprised by hearing Bath County – a song I love and had to keep it together for, because I was so happy they played it. I also kept it together for Bull Believer, but the pit actually had most of my attention for that song. Going back to screaming, she actually yelled more in the live version, during the chorus. Like Mannequin Pussy, they also didn’t have an encore, instead just playing the set all the way through. Which I prefer! I’m very happy I went to the show, even if I have regrets about my positioning. They also weren’t selling CDs at the merch station, so I didn’t end up getting anything, which I’m sad about. I like to try and pick up stuff at concerts as often as I can, but it does have to be something I want at the end of the day. The hat was cool, but it was a little too expensive to justify right now. I’d also feel like a bit of a poser wearing hunting camo… That’s all I have to say for now! See Wednesday live if you can!
hi! welcome to rebworld. November 15, 2025 // 3:23 P.M. Hi! Hello! First post alert! I want to make a creative outlet and a place to talk about media and music without being an extreme bother to my friends. Hopefully this website can function like that! I'm also using this as an excuse to learn html, css, and maybe one day… javascript (unlikely). Everything is going to be a work in progress forever but hopefully the website will grow and evolve as I keep making posts. If you’re here and you’re actually seeing the very first version of this website, congrats. I am also going to try and make this mobile responsive! It isn’t yet because I just want to get the ball rolling. But I think being mobile responsive is important, cool, and fun. I hesitate to make any sort of actual thesis statement about this place because I don't want to end up pigeonholing myself! I just like to analyze things! I want to get better at writing and expressing things, and again… the website building. Whatever else happens will happen. So, without further ado… welcome to rebworld. I'm Reb.