But sometimes music offers us an environment in and of itself. Textures and atmospheres that we can live inside for a short time. Today, that’s our topic.

‘The Way It Breaks’ by Loathe ft. Mansur Brown

Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.

Texture is what comes to mind when I hear “The Way it Breaks” by Loathe, featuring Mansur Brown. Layers of effects-drenched sound washing over me in waves is my Roman Empire. And so when I find it, I sink into it.

This song reminds me of a Logic Pro plugin I used to use on all the music I made. It was meant to replicate an old vinyl being played on a record player, with dusty static, pops, and crackles. Considering the digital nature of the recording, I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar was used. It’s a wonderful textural topping that sits upon layers of sound. And while I hope I don’t share too much in common with Billy Corgan, I do find myself aligned with him on at least one issue other than an embrace of the bald community: A love for layered sound.

Often when I think of texture, the first thought that comes to mind is that it's the most important factor in music, in what separates a good song from a great song, or a bad song from a good song.

Texture is essential in all sorts of art. For example, Vincent van Gogh’s work. I love the way his thick globs of paint left waves and ridges cresting across the surface of the canvas. And music offers us something similar in the way artists use sound.

When I think of texture, I typically think of the layered sounds of bands like The Smashing Pumpkins or My Bloody Valentine. But sometimes I'll challenge that perception with a song that finds maximal use of minimal instrumentation, such as “Waiting for My Ruca” by Sublime. At first glance, it seems like the opposite of texture. It's just a bass drum, a single note, and Bradley Nowell. And despite there being almost nothing there, it's actually my favorite Sublime song precisely for what it lacks.

After all, I love the use of negative space in visual art. Take “Rock and Grass” by Ansel Adams, for example. So much of the image is comprised of a calm pool of water, against which shocks of grass and stone announce themselves. The rock is the kick drum pounding through the emptiness, and the grass blades are Nowell’s vocals yelping above the surface. But the negative space is what makes the image.

Which is my I think minimalism deserves equal consideration with deep layering, as far as texture goes. But it’s when you meld minimalism and texture that you get my beloved punk music.

The crunchy sound of the guitar distortion and the way it’s recorded in “Minor Threat” by Minor Threat is just a masterpiece. Beautiful in its perfection. It’s a pool of gasoline into which Ian McAkye can throw his match—and he does.

Another punk band, Refused, later demonstrated the value of contrasting a thick glop of distortion with a lean, muscular spring of crunch in it’s song “Pump the Breaks.” At 00:20 seconds the wall of static sludge crumbles, revealing a drumroll into a sprint of mid-tone riffing. I picture a cannon ball shot out of an embrasure carved into still-hot molten lava.

But in rock music, texture was perfected by shoegaze, a descendent of punk. And cliche as it may be to say, I don’t think anyone did it better than My Bloody Valentine. From the beginning, their wash of fine-grit textures piled into thick atmospheres was the locus of a developing scene. But their third album, 1991’s “Loveless”, is art at the level of someone like Gustav Klint. Or, come to think of it, maybe they’re more Monet with their impressionistic use of sound.

It is perfect from beginning to end. Like an introverted teenager sitting in his bedroom on a 2005 summer Saturday assembling the perfect playlist from a pirated file named “untitled 1 - unknown artist.mp4,” Kevin Shields built this album second by second, layer by layer, song by song.

Coming from the way guitarists would stare at their pedal boards while performing, the genre’s name first appeared in a review of a Slowdive EP. Their debut came the same year as the seminal “Loveless,” but the album they’re best known for is 1993’s “Souvlaki.” Along with bands like Cocteau Twins, these artists in the growing shoegaze and dream pop scenes continued to refine the layered and effects-laden sound My Bloody Valentine pioneered. And they did so with female vocalists, which I always considered a better fit for the shoegaze atmosphere.

But it was later brands like the Silversun Pickups that introduced me to shoegaze and helped me understand my own appreciation for texture and atmosphere. The Silversun Pickups’ “Carnavas” was basically “Loveless” for a new generation and I loved it. “Melatonin” remains my favorite track on the album and is the perfect name for a slow and hazy shoegaze song. Ten years later hardcore legends Title Fight also dipped their toes into the genre with their underrated, dream pop-inspired final album, “Hyperview.”

A more recent shoegaze adherent (as well as a fellow Incubus superfan) is Tanukichan. In “Hunnded Bandz,” her voice is a satin sheet floating over the a slow-swinging sledgehammer of distortion. That contrast is a perfect example of why I think women’s voices are just a better fit for the genre. They introduce a contrast, like the boom of the bass and the emptiness around it in “Waiting for my Ruca” or the gritty crag of the rock against the expanse of the water in “Rock and Grass.”

In my mind, the best current example of shoegaze is They Are Gutting a Body of Water. My favorite painter is Vincent Van Gogh, and TAGABOW’s music resembles a Van Gogh painting in the way they’re slapping thick chunks of sound onto the canvas.

The band is the darling of the shoegaze scene, and for good reason. While you can hear plenty of My Bloody Valentine in their sound, that’s not all you can hear. The story has been told plenty of times already, but it bears repeating because it explains the ways in which TAGABOW is moving the genre forward. Douglas Dulgarian, the creative force behind the band, was forced to abandon guitar playing for a brief period due to an arm injury. It was then that he began producing jungle music. That period of his life would bleed into the band’s sound. The group’s signature interludes, which they incorporate into their live shows, are all produced by Dulgarian.

The band has been active this year. Earlier in 2026 members of TAGABOW and Hooky released an album as god of war. They developed a sound I find reminiscent of fellow Philadelphia music lodestar Alex G. And this month TAGABOW dropped “KOOL FAITH / LOOSIES II.” After delving into a more rock-focused sound with their previous album, “Casino,” this latest record sees the band leaning back into its signature genre mish mash.

As much as I love TAGABOW, though, my favorite song from the resurgent shoegaze wave might be “Archie, Marry Me” by Alvvays. I can’t resist a poppy hook that as sticky sweet as a NERDS rope.

Shoegaze and dream pop are built on effect-laden guitars. But there are also electronic sonic textures and atmospheres. The occasional artful use of texture in dubstep is one of the reasons I fell in love with the genre in in the late aughts and early 2010s (along with like every other copy + paste white guy, I know). See what I had to say about Bassnectar’s “Magical World” in my post on music discovery for more on that.

But electronic textures can also have a much cooler, smooth, and stripped-down expression than you’d typically find in dubstep. Like the sound of a 5 gum commercial.

One of my favorite examples is “Idioteque” by Radiohead. The synth line in the song is the light blue line bisecting the canvas in Mark Rothko’s “No. 61 (Rust and Blue).” It sounds like an emphysema' victim’s stretched out and digitized attempts at breathing. And “Cleveland is the Reason” by Kid Cudi chops up and wahs a similar sound to perfect effect and feel.

Which brings me to my favorite instrument in jazz: The xylophone. Why? Because, used in the right way, it sounds like dipping into a rippling pool of cool metallic goo. Like if you could melt down the T-1000 from “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” into a soothing sound.

When it comes to xylophone, Milt Jackson is the master. And “Sunflower” is an example of his mastery. But there are others worth checking out, like Wolfgang Lackerschmid, who was introduced to me by a record store employee who noticed me buying a Milt Jackson vinyl. I’ve also really enjoyed the more recent textural travels of Masayoshi Fujita, who’s approach is stripped down and at times blends electronic elements.

Something common to many of the songs in the more deeply layered, wall-of-sound examples are the ways tones echo, reverb, and stretch through the space. You can hear this in the ring of a xylophone note or the reverb-laden wash of an echoing guitar strum. Examples of artists making the most out of single sounds like Jackson Pollock could wring so much from a glob of paint dripping off his brush. This sort of droning approach to music predates shoegaze by thousands of years, though.

In fact, according to Vedic texts the universe was born from a sound. Om is the sonic embodiment of Brahman, the unknowable supreme force that is everything in the universe. The all-encompassing reality. And that sound is represented in Indian classical music through vocal repetitions and droning notes. In both Hindustani and Carnatic music, the two primary Indian classical traditions, you’ll find droning notes layered with additional instrumentation and vocals. The idea is that all other notes are born from the drone, in the same away that the universe was born from Om.

When I hear that drone, I hear that texture. Which brings me to my music hot take: Shoegaze is very similar to Carnatic music. Each genre makes use of droning, layered notes to make the listener feel awash in sound. To envelope her or him in the sonic embodiment of the universe.

My first encounter with Indian classical music came through my early explorations of jazz music. My love for jazz began with “Birth of Cool” by Miles Davis. And as I dug deeper into Davis’s discography, I discovered the guitarist John McLaughlin. It was this next phase of the rabbit hole I was digging that brought me to Shakti. Put simply, with simply being about as much as I can profess to understand, Shakti is the divine feminine energy.

The concept originates with ancient goddess worship traditions in the Indian subcontinent and, like many ancient worship traditions, was folded into Hinduism over time. Within Hinduism, Shakti is personified by various deities’ wives. But, in some denominations, like Shaktism, the divine feminine energy itself is the central deity. And, similar to the universe emerging from a single sound, you can make an etymological case for matter emerging from the divine feminine.

In fact, the words mother and matter share the same Proto-Indo-European root word, méh tēr, which means mother. Just as a mother gives birth to new life, the divine feminine gave birth to all creation. And so the divine feminine is creativity, which brings us to the other meaning of the word Shakti: creative intelligence, beauty, or power. That is why when John Mclaughlin formed a jazz-Carnatic fusion band with L. Shankar, Ramnad V. Raghavan, and Zakir Hussain, they eventually settled on the name Shakti for their group.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I cannot help but hear the divine when I hear the music of Shakti. In fact, when I met my wife, my own Shakti, one thing we connected over early on was Carnatic music. She was raised in Mumbai in a religious family that practices a wide range of artistic pursuits, precisely because of the divinity inherent in creativity. She grew up playing the veena. To that point, Shakti was the extent of my experience with Indian classical music. As much as I loved the sound, I hadn’t done much further exploration. However, after learning about the veena I started digging deeper and I discovered Jayanthi Kumaresh.

While the veena plays the lead here, beneath it you can here the persistent percussion racing. Each slap of hand on drum sounds distinctly human. You can here skin snap off the surface of the drum, called a mridangam. Zakir Hussain’s tabla is played to similar effect in Shakti’s music. The skittering percussion forms a near-droning layer of sound itself. But in addition to that lies the true drone, the tanpura. This is one of my favorite sounds in Indian classical music. It is akin to the wash of distortion you may hear in a My Bloody Valentine track.

This article started as an explanation of why I love texture and atmosphere in music. But the texture and atmosphere you find in music are small scale representations of the universe itself that, at least in most schools of Hinduism, was created from a sound. A single, spiritual vibration that lives in all of creation and all of us. Even in the silence.

It is when we give ourselves permission to tinker, to become mother to our own creations, that we dip into the divine ourselves. With each word written, brush stroke swept across a canvas, or note plucked into existence, we are tapping into the divine creative force that exists in everything.

Sometimes that divine energy is a droning tanpura note or a wash of distortion. And other times it is the asked-and-answered question is, “can I scream?”

Chills, every time. To me, that is divine.

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Suggest Your Song

See you next week with a song suggested by another human.

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Last month much of the focus was on how we connect to music and how music connects. In other words, relationships to songs and to people based on those songs.

This month is all about the environment music creates and the ways in which music can affect our environment. We’re in for a 4,000-word doozy today, so let’s get into it.

Tunegrape Issue #2.1 Playlist

Spotify embed isn’t working so here’s the playlist and you can also click below to access it on YouTube:

‘Queen of Hearts’ by Flailing Idiot and ‘Wake Up Gene’ by Hijas de la Muerte

Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.

There are few things in this existence I love more than a great punk song. The genre is as near to my heart as food is to my cat’s heart. And trust me, Miso cares about nothing more than eating.

So when someone on Reddit recommended “Queen of Hearts” by Flailing Idiot and “Wake Up Gene” by Hijas de la Muerte, both bands I had never heard before, their suggestions were granted VIP access to the editorial calendar.

I’ve been fascinated by the philosophy and politics of punk since my days going to punk shows on Long Island in the early aughts. I even bought a book on punk philosophy. Punk songs and culture helped shape my views on politics and authority as much as anything.

A defining moment in understanding punk came at the end of “SLC Punk.” After two hours of watching two guys get on their soapboxes and argue about what punk is, occasionally interrupted by the wise owner of a local head shop named Trish, the main character meets his future wife. And she tells him something I’ll never forget.

That’s not rebellion, that’s fashion.

But when is rebellion punk and when is it something else? When online conservatives say it’s punk to take a contrarian stand against progressive norms, are they right?

Looking back, while the guys of “SLC Punk” seem generally good, blue-haired Steve-O did display some toxic relationship dynamics. And there’s no doubt in their world, those characters would have come across some truly shitty dudes. After all, there have been a lot of toxic guys throughout the history of punk music. But where there are toxic men, there are women who fight. And punk has had a lot of fighters. Believe me. There are few things scarier than the tiny woman in the mosh pit, set on proving she’s bigger than her body.

Women in punk, a history

In the early 1970s, Patti Smith was the pioneer who bridged the gap between avant-garde, Beat poetry-tinged New York rock of a previous time and the punk era to come while playing at legendary punk venues like CBGB in New York City. Her poetic punk music shattered conventions as her songwriting alternated between lengthy spoken-word sequences and crunchy guitar riffs.

It was seeing Patti Smith in concert that inspired The Slits to make music and, in the process, challenge the conventions of a genre still taking shape. This 1979 song, in particular, is dear to this blog.

The Slits did more than give us a great Marvin Gaye cover. They also challenged the conventions around what women in music were supposed to look like. Whether they were smearing mud over their bodies, wearing men’s clothing, or walking onto stage with greasy, unkempt mullets, they were innovative in finding ways to challenge the male gaze. And while wearing punky clothes isn’t necessarily punk, they showed us that there are ways in which appearance can be punk.

By the time Kathleen Hanna formed Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington, in 1990, punk had emerged as a force soon to be thrust into the mainstream by Nirvana. But rather than confront the police, the government, corporate structures, or capitalism, Hanna confronted the men who would attend Bikini Kill shows just to shower abuse on the band.

Their 1993 album “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” opened with “White Boy,” a forceful statement against oppressive men in the scene.

Bikini Kill was uncompromising in their approach to rebellion. In “White Boy,” Hanna sings “I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you, your fuckin’ culture alienates me.”

While some men were punching neo-Nazis with one hand and women with the other, Bikini Kill was exposing their patriarchal tendencies with raw and violent music.

The first time I heard Brody Dalle’s voice

The first time I heard Brody Dalle’s voice was on the Distillers’ track “Beat Your Heart Out” while playing “Tony Hawk’s Underground.” And I didn’t realize she was a woman. With so many of them of the era singing in a higher register, I assumed she was one of them. Then I saw the music video for “The Young Crazed Peeling” by The Distillers, and I fell in love.

Punk isn’t clothes. But the clothes or fashion choices can help. A certain top or hairstyle can communicate alienation from a societal norm. And liberty spikes are one damn communicative choice. I loved it. And more than that, I loved the music.

The Distillers are one of, if not the, most underappreciated bands of the early and mid-aughts relative to the quality of their music. And the band largely revolved around Brody Dalle. In my mind, her band deserves at least as much attention as the bands of the two famous men she married.

Dalle met Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong during a music festival in her native Australia in 1995, when she was 16 years old and he was 30. She moved back to Los Angeles with him, and by 1997 they were married, and the following year she formed The Distillers. Their 1999 debut album includes “Oh Serena,” about a girl whose reputation is unfairly disparaged by gossip. It also includes several songs attacking women who thought Dalle was stealing their men.

The band released two more albums between their debut and 2003, a stretch that also comprised the entirety of her and Armstrong’s relationship, one in which she described feeling controlled by him. The second, “Sing Sing Death House,” brought the band some degree of fame. The album brought stronger hooks and better riffs packed with tighter, more mature writing by Dalle.

For example, it included a more overtly political entry: “Seneca Falls,” a song about the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first formal women’s rights convention in the U.S. and a launching point for the country’s women’s suffrage movement.

It also featured a song that seems like a more direct sequel to “Oh Serena” called “Young Girls,” about a childhood friend who was abused by her father. The combination of this song and “Seneca Falls” illustrates a young woman growing more concerned with patriarchal dynamics both at the systemic and family levels.

The following year, Dalle divorced Tim Armstrong, and her band released what was probably their biggest album, as well as the record with my favorite Distillers song: “The Hunger.”

While “Sing Sing Death House” brought tighter writing, “Coral Fang” brought experimentation. Her success and the band’s sound had previously been attributed by some to Tim Armstrong. “The Hunger” demonstrated a much more unique artistic voice. About the struggle of moving on from her relationship with Armstrong, the song shows Dalle vacillating between coming back to him and moving on as the song vacillates between solemn verses and gritty screams and moans over churning guitars.

The “Coral Fang” album cover seems apt because her divorce from Armstrong led to Dalle’s crucifixion in the punk scene (in the album cover, I can’t help but see a Girardian turn of events, but we’ll get to that later). “Drain the Blood,” off the same album, much of which rehashes the relationship, is a much angrier and more definitive song about moving on, with one particularly accusatory line in the chorus: “All these fiends want teenage meat.”

The divorce, spurred by a photo of Dalle kissing Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme during her and Armstrong’s separation, played out in public as well as behind the scenes. Armstrong and friends blamed Dalle for the divorce while they privately made efforts to blacklist her and her bandmates from the music industry. They crucified her to protect Armstrong from excavations of his own role in the relationship, especially its predatory beginnings.

She was later married to Josh Homme, whom she met at Lollapalooza when she was 17 and he was 23. They married in 2005 and remained married for 14 years, having three kids together. It was shortly after their marriage that she formed a new band, Spinnerette.

The band took a turn toward a more garage-rock sound and its debut album received decent-to-great reviews, depending on the publication. It received 3.5/5 stars from AllMusic and 9/10 from Alternative Press. Only Pitchfork was truly down on the record, with a 2.7/10. But the single, “Ghetto Love,” never went anywhere, and Dalle’s music never had the same mainstream reach as it did during her run with The Distillers.

Her 2014 follow-up under her own name, “Diploid Love,” also received decent reviews, like a 4/5-star write-up from The Guardian and another 4/5 rating from DIY Magazine alongside the subtitle “part-time rock star, full-time awesome.” It also continued her musical adventurism outside the borders of punk music.

Songs like “Carry On,” with its electro-punk sound, not only show Dalle’s continued artistic growth, but they also show her learning with lyrics about pushing through difficult times and overcoming them. But again, the album received little attention.

In 2019, Dalle filed for divorce from Homme, citing his alcoholism and drug abuse. This seems to have come after some rocky years for the Queens of the Stone Age singer. In 2017, he was captured on video kicking the camera of Shutterstock photographer Chelsea Lauren into her face. While he initially denied doing so on purpose, he eventually admitted he had kicked her on purpose and apologized.

After the divorce, Homme entered rehab, and then they began hurling accusations of domestic abuse at each other. Dalle eventually won custody of her children, but the victory was brief. In 2023, Homme was granted sole custody of the children and granted a restraining order against Dalle after it was determined that her boyfriend had forged her signature on several legal documents.

Dalle never got a fair chance after entering the industry under the auspices of a predator who eventually cut off her access to resources and then suffering the abuses of a man who has shown a pattern of horrific behavior. Just when she got a chance to taste victory, it was snatched from her on a technicality. After Homme released a statement celebrating, Dalle released her own. She wrote, among other things, the following:

”My story is not unique and it is not rare, it is happening to protective mothers (and some protective fathers) everywhere. If you have never been accused of the quack debunked, looney and extremely dangerous claim of parental alienation and with zero evidence because there was none…..please, hold your tongue, you have no idea.”

The Distillers attempted a reunion and played a few shows around the time of Dalle’s divorce from Homme. But the reunion never took off. And it’s difficult to find much recent news on her. Dalle was alienated from her music, her friends, and her children by a series of patriarchal systems that used her, paraded her body in the press, took her family from her, and left her behind.

“I’m fucking broken,” she wrote in her 2023 statement. “This has shattered me into a thousand pieces. For a long time, I couldn’t get out of bed. I contemplated what the point of going on was. I’ve been filled with so much pain and fear for so long.

“No one can sustain that state. No one should ever. I let it go. I released it. I found the ladder of light. Get the fuck up and fight for your life. For them. Always.”

The battle of this decade’s two best bands

There’s something about Dalle’s story, and the “Coral Fang” cover in particular, that brings to mind the work of René Girard. I’m no expert, and only know his work through discussions of it had by people much smarter than me. He argued that human desire is mimetic. Over time, rivals competing over shared objects of desire begin to mime each other’s behaviors. Communities resolve the tensions that emerge from this mimicry by blaming a scapegoat. A Catholic, he argued that Jesus, hung on the cross, was sacrificed to show us the innocence of the scapegoat. To illustrate that our mimetic cycles of violence inevitably target innocents.

Dalle is whisked away from home as a teenager by a man who begins to resemble the forces of authority he opposes by controlling every aspect of her life. The consequence of this tension is Dalle choosing to leave, and for that she is scapegoated.

But like Dalle, there are plenty of women in punk today who aren’t content to quietly hang from their crosses, dying for the sins of shitty men. One of those women is Missy Dabice of Mannequin Pussy.

Anyone of the mind that conservatism is the new punk will be disabused of the notion by the night’s end if they wander into a Mannequin Pussy show. This is a band that, like Bikini Kill, would rather alienate the right people than allow those people to scapegoat them.

Just like the night I saw them open for another band at Terminal 5, in their NPR Tiny Desk performance, Missy makes an urgent plea to her audience. One that would drive revulsion among reactionary forces. But one that’s punk in its intent.

I discovered Mannequin Pussy shortly after “Romantic” was released in 2016. But it was their next album, released in 2019, that led me to conclude that they’re the best punk band of their generation. Maybe even the best band period, for my money. I remember waiting to transfer to the Muni at the Montgomery BART Station in San Francisco, listening to this album day after day while standing on the platform. I was amazed by the range of sounds explored, strength and emotion inherent in the message, and force with which the band’s collective fist swung upward.

Mannequin Pussy is an excellent example of the fact that the Trump-era punk scene has been dominated by female-fronted or nonbinary-led bands. And it’s not just the bands playing Tiny Desk. Songs like “Punch a Nazi” by The Muslims meet the moment as well.

The band Mannequin Pussy opened for that night at Terminal 5 is the other one that I’d say might be able to lay claim to the title “Best Punk Band of Their Generation.” Amy Taylor and her band emerged from Australia with boundless energy and a message that grows more political with each album release.

Although I haven’t seen Taylor mention Dalle’s name, they’re often compared as two women fronting punk bands that emerged from Australia’s underground scene.

One of the most effective songs in the band’s growing oeuvre of political polemics is “Knifey.” It describes an all-too-common fear among women—the fear of walking alone at night. Taylor sings, “Out comes the night, out comes my knifey.”

Taylor, of course, voices a real fear: men making something as simple as walking at night dangerous. But what about when the state itself is the danger? Even then, we have examples of women rushing into the breach, risking their safety for the benefit of an entire oppressed society.

Punk’s power is bigger than the Anglosphere

In 2012, the world heard the name Pussy Riot. A group of women dressed in colorful dresses, tights, and ski masks entered a Russian Orthodox Church and filmed a performance in protest of the church’s alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime. That night, the performance was posted as a music video for the song “Punk Prayer.”

Within a couple of weeks, two of the band members were arrested and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. A third was arrested not long after. While none of the women are still in prison, several are in exile—one, facing house arrest, escaped Russia in 2022 disguised as a food delivery driver.

They knew what they were risking when they entered the church, when they sang lyrics like “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin,” and “Don’t upset his saintship, ladies, stick to making love and babies.”

These women knew that punk is more than noise. It’s protest with the power to foster fear in the patriarchal system.

Few performances I’ve seen embody the physical expressions of punk and protest more than Otoboke Beaver. Diving into the crowd to crowd-surf while banging your hand away at your guitar, freeing it to screech whatever distorted notes your pick happens to find? Punk. Fucking. Rock.

It’s not just punk because it looks cool, though. It’s punk because with every performance, Otoboke Beaver is raising its collective middle finger to traditional Japanese gender roles.

But the first time I saw Otoboke Beaver, I took away more from the concert than unceasing admiration for its performance—I also discovered accordion punk.

The next decade of punk music

A band of Spanish-speaking immigrants based in Queens, Ratas en Zelos is fighting the patriarchal white powers that be with the pounding wheeze of an accordion. After seeing them open for Otoboke Beaver, I knew right away I needed to see them again. Luckily, they scheduled another show in New York City with Otoboke Beaver shortly after.

Their female-forward, immigrant-centered punk rock is timely and unique. Plus, who can resist their rat-ear headbands?

I’ve seen Amyl and the Sniffers twice. My long history of discovering bands while seeing them open for other bands is well established across this and other entries. And another is Upchuck, one of the openers for Amyl and the Sniffers when they played Brooklyn Steel in 2022. At the time, they were touring for their album “Sense Yourself.”

The album cover itself is an exercise in the appearance, the projection, of punk. KT Thompson’s bald head and face covered in smeared blood as she faces upward, singing into a microphone, hand clasped around its grill.

The bouncy “Facecard” illustrates Upchuck’s seamless blend of fun grooves and aggressive confrontations with authority. The lyrics are a rejection of objectification and exploitation based on looks and identity.

For Upchuck, political confrontation has always been part of the package. Being a woman is inherently political. Being a Black woman fronting a punk band even more so. And “Forgotten Token” from their latest album, “I’m Nice Now,” speaks to the way society devalues and tosses aside Black lives. KT Thompson sings, “I just feel ’cuz I’m Black it gets stacked in a lost closet forgotten token.”

You can see it in the way women like Sonya Massey have been murdered by police. Black women scapegoated and sacrificed to resolve tensions between the white desire for control and the white desire for freedom. Or the white desire for freedom and the white desire for violence.

But the next ten years might belong to a band that right now goes harder than any other I can think of: Die Spitz.

With guitar riffs that borrow from thrash and hardcore, sometimes churning beneath simmering solos and other times below assertive shouts, Die Spitz brings muscle to every punch.

The music, of course, is more important than the clothing. But these women’s outfits communicate something. Their looks don’t shout punk, but that’s exactly why their looks communicate something. They wear makeup, flowery dresses, and embroidered cowboy boots as they swing their guitars, curse at shitty men, and flail their bodies around the performance space like ragdolls. They know what punk is, and they can look as feminine as they want as they fight the power. Maybe a leaping scissor kick while punching power chords and wearing a sundress communicates something in the same way liberty spikes do.

But you don’t come by rebellion through your clothing purchases. It manifests in your mind. Your style is just a potential means to project it. And who you give your money to when developing that style matters. Buying punky clothes from Amazon or complaining about trans people or women who work serves the same thing: the billionaire class. Divide and conquer consumer. And being a billionaire isn’t punk. After all, your mind can’t produce rebellion if you’ve trained it to avoid introspection.

The reactionary who thinks they’ve guided the billionaire’s hand toward someone else’s throat is distracted by women just living their lives as the billionaire grips the reactionary’s throat instead.

It’s billionaires who defund affordable women’s healthcare, it’s billionaires selling glasses that secretly record women, it’s billionaires creating addictive algorithms that affect teen girls’ mental health, and it’s billionaires who perpetrated the Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking ring.

But it’s also the cool 30-year-old in a famous band who brought a 16-year-old girl 8,000 miles from her home to marry her. It’s that nice-seeming guy who pushed drinks onto you until you relented, brought you back to his apartment down the block, and used you for sex.

From billionaires on down to the guy at the bar, these forces seek control. And control, more often than not, is a downward punch. And when desire for control creates tensions, women are often made the scapegoats.

Men, desiring control but divided along political, class, or religious lines, resolve those tensions and unify around the subjugation of women.

There are plenty of guys who will dress up in costumes and perform as punks while abusing women (see Rolling Stone magazine's “The Punk Rock Predator”). But recently, and as always, it’s the women in the scene who embody punk the most. They refuse to accept being victimized by male violence, to be controlled or scapegoated. And you know by the direction of their fists.

When you consider who to rebel against, you have options: You can punch down, you can complain, you can change your mind and do nothing, or you can punch up.

Only one of these options is punk. And I know some ladies with strong uppercuts.

Which female fronted bands do you see punching up? Let us know below!

Suggest a Song

See you next week with another human-suggested song.

We’re also wrapping up a collection of posts on how we experience music, the connections we form with it, and the relationships we build through those connections.

Next week? When music throws a punch.

‘Map of the Problematique’ by Muse

I’ve never seen Muse live, but I’ve experienced them in a way I’ll never forget. After all, Matt Bellamy’s massive voice seducing listeners over brilliant riffs expressed through effect-laden guitars is made for nothing if not experience.

Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.

“Map of the Problematique” is from the album that brought them to greater international acclaim. I was introduced to the band through their “Knights of Cydonia” video on constant rotation on the music video network Fuse. Both songs are emblematic of their approach on this album.

While their arena rock sound was already established, "Black Holes and Revelations” used electronics and effects to make that sound even bigger. Layered, dueling guitar lines echo and reverb through the speakers in “Map of the Problematique” before the instruments merge into a single crunchy woosh of a riff. Bellamy sounds like he was born at the center of Madison Square Garden as he laments, “I can’t get it right,” several times over.

“Knights of Cydonia,” meanwhile, owes a larger debt to surf rock artists like Dick Dale with its stretched-out, tremolo main riff, in addition to the spaghetti western soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. It’s a sound, along with a music video, that cribs liberally both from that classic genre of western movies as well as Quentin Tarantino’s pop culture-pastiches.

Maybe it’s the band’s movie-ready sound that makes nights soundtracked to their music so memorable. Whether it’s that or something else, when I hear Muse I recall racing through the streets of Thessaloniki, Greece in my weed dealer’s car as we smoked spliffs and blasted their new album, “The Resistance.” It was him, his friend, and a few of my friends from my study abroad program, in addition to myself. We had recently begun hanging out with him and he quickly went from dealer to friend. He even helped us sneak into a professional soccer game without tickets and escape to a belly dancing bar after some hooligans stalked after us after the match.

The sound of our small communities

From the very beginning, music has been a community experience. People have gathered to hear music in celebration, in sadness, and for spiritual purpose. These moments can range from serious to downright silly, and we all have them in our memories.

College is an especially fertile time for such experiences. With all the alcohol, music, and young people, there’s bound to be some group singing. And when it comes to drunkenly singing a song together, one track that’s hard to beat is “Point/Counterpoint” by Streetlight Manifesto.

Around 2010, after more than one party on Westland Avenue in Boston, as the clock approached 3 or 4 a.m., a group of college students from Berklee School of Music and Northeastern University would gather in a room to sing “Point/Counterpoint” together. Everyone knew every word, and we would yell them into the center of the room, our voices converging and likely traveling through the ceiling and floor.

Each of us brought our unique memories of one single song together on those nights. Each throat, strained from shouting, was pushed there through youthful encounters with the band. And, truth be told, at 19 years old there existed between us nothing but youthful encounters.

Not long after, a different group of friends and I were rapping together in an apartment on Calumet Street as the clock approached 3 or 4 a.m. This time, the song was “Enter the Ninja” by Die Antwoord. This was our ritual afterparty. Every weekend we would come home and repeat this celebration. My girlfriend at the time and I would fill water bottles with vodka and Crystal Light powder. Then we would join our friends to sing the chorus and rap the verses as we swigged gulps of berry-flavored booze.

That relationship probably peaked on those nights, as did Die Antwoord. Or, for them, was it with “Chappie”?

It was on my return from a three-year excursion (no, not a war) to the West Coast that my encounters with music in the midst of communities kicked into high gear. While sometimes music is best experienced alone, encountering it with other people often adds another dimension of joy. That’s especially true for concerts. After all, it was a live music discovery that granted me my decade-long parasocial relationship with Mitski.

On moving from San Francisco to Hoboken, New Jersey, I immediately started going to shows with a childhood friend. Our first show together again was Modest Mouse’s Brooklyn stop on its Golden Casket Tour in 2021. It was my second time seeing them and second time seeing them with that friend. Our first was in New Jersey at the 2010 Bamboozle Festival. Live music has always been special to me, going back to Patent Pending shows around Long Island or seeing Green Day in 2005 on their American Idiot World Tour.

These were the communities I had indelible music experiences with, experiences that only we’ll truly know. No other crowd will be the same as that one in Farmingdale, NY, at the now-closed Crazy Donkey for a Patent Pending show. Some other group of friends might rap Die Antwoord at 3 a.m. in an apartment. But not the same apartment, during the same year, with the same flavor of Crystal Light packets in their vodka. Or the same history with each other.

There are few rushes quite like experiencing music with other people. That’s true whether you’re experiencing a song through discussion or through bodies banged against each other. And for me, the latter was always the more rewarding—if more painful—experience.

How does it feel to be in a mosh pit?

Is it a good show if you don’t feel like you’re going to puke? Is it a good show if you don’t take an elbow to the head?

A great punk show borders on baptism by combat. Through much of my life since turning 14, this was my church. I worshipped at the altar of the amplifier. My sacrament was a sacrifice—inducing pain or even injury for the sake of community.

But pain is okay in the midst of the sort of healing community you see in the Title Fight video. You might trade a bruised shoulder for a healed heart, a banged-up knee for a sturdier soul.

And there’s even a culture around it, passed from show to show. This is exemplified by the code of honor that’s followed in pits, with the golden rule being: If someone falls, pick them up.

I remember searching the floor for someone’s glasses or the time a fellow pit participant returned my lost Tulsa Drillers hat several songs after it had flown off my head during an I Am The Avalanche set.

My love for mosh pits began in the dive bars and venues of my local music scene. And I mentioned this being my church for a reason: My first local live music experience was a Patent Pending show in the basement of a Long Island church.

As someone who works out every day, participated in wrestling as a child and teenager, and got into more than a few fistfights over the years, you might say I need physical outlets to channel aggression or process emotions. The physicality of live shows bridged the gap between this need for release and the only other emotional salve I knew in my youth: music.

To this day, that remains true. Even if I’ve found new ways to mosh. For example, I’ll never forget the first time I moshed to dance music.

But this part of the story starts with Black Country, New Road. Now, the first thing we need to get out of the way is that I’ve seen people get down to BCNR. I know it happens. It’s on the YouTube. Or at least, I thought it was at the time I saw them in 2023 at Knockdown Center in Queens. Because now I search and can’t find it. Suffice it to say, there’s no better moment to mosh than the pinnacle of “Turbines/Pigs,” but maybe I’m biased (you can see a little movement and fist-pumping, but not what I expected).

But when we saw them that night in Queens, the crowd of 20-somethings barely swayed to the songs. As far as the eye could see, throughout the set, movement was kept to a minimum. Maybe these younger people worship at the altar of the amplifier in a different way, and that’s fine, but we were mystified.

The counterpoint to that is Jockstrap.

It’s hard to find a video on YouTube that captures the experience of seeing Jockstrap live in Brooklyn in 2023, touring their remix album “I<3UQTINVU.” But this might be my favorite live show of the last few years. Everyone knew every song, and so everyone became one as we elevated to another plane.

The two-piece consisting of Taylor Skye, the producer, and Georgia Ellery, on vocals and strings and of BCNR fame, was on tour around the same time as BCNR. And, in fact, the band had another string player subbed in for Ellery at the Knockdown Center.

During songs like “Concrete Over Water,” “Good Girl,” and “50/50,” I swear I could feel the building shake as the crowd bounced to the beat and off each other all at once, like atoms in a frenzy, singing every word along with Ellery.

However, even standing still, I was blown away by “Turbines/Pigs.” Worship doesn’t have to be what you expect, as long as it’s worship. I understood the spiritual importance as I sat in a temple for Diwali for the first time, in the same way I understand the spiritual importance of seeing BCNR for the first time when you’re just 21 years old. Connection is connection, even if you’re just dipping your toe into someone else’s experience of it.

But these connections, these experiences, take on a whole new meaning when the artist participates by stepping into the crowd.

Communion with Cole Haden

Vice suggested that YHWH Nailgun is the last great band in New York. My counterpoint would be another New York City band that experiments with their instruments to create an industrial maelstrom: Model/Actriz. If most concerts are like a Baptist mass, a Model/Actriz show is like an Appalachian snake-handling worship service.

Cole Haden of Model/Actriz is what happens when you dip a diva of the highest order into a boiling pot of dive-bar punk primal instinct. The puppy-dog hats; draped clothes, dresses, or skirts; forearm gloves, all accentuating his prowl across the stage. The crowd clinging to his every swinging sashay. But the show is unleashed when he jumps off the stage and makes his way into the crowd, dancing with them, screaming and moaning over the clanging steel of guitars and a pulsing beat.

However, at each show I’ve been to, the performance climaxes with their performance of “Amaranth.” It is a moment in the service when the preacher and an audience member are linked through possession by a spirit beyond our realm. Beyond our understanding.

Haden stalks through the audience as the song begins. Feeling the bodies, giving in as they sway against him, pushing him through the crowd like a stick on a stream. His arm is raised above him as he carries the mic wire, and those in the crowd behind him keep track of its length.

But in the final reprise of the pre-chorus, the chaos calms to the twinkle of a guitar as Haden sings the same few lines over and over, “See the petals stagger onto me, see my body carried splintered,” and so on. He and the crowd around him crouch to their knees as the energy in the room quiets and centers on him. He chooses a single member of the audience and, pressing his forehead against theirs, continues singing. It feels like it could be an endless moment. Until his voice rises as he sings, “high enough for scattering.”

Then, back on his feet, he screams “amaranth!” The music comes back like a brick through a stained-glass window. The song ends on the crunching pulse of the chorus, Haden screaming over and over, “amaranth, crawling to it.”

You walk out of the show knowing that he might perform that ritual in a new city every night. But not with those people. Not on that night. You walk out of that show knowing what you had with that room of strangers was something special. In that moment, together, we transcended.

What’s your favorite music experience? Tell us below for a chance at a future feature:

Suggest a Song

See you next week with a song suggested by another human.

If that is also not your jam, this might not be your week. I’m sorry. You can come back next week to read about Muse and mosh pits and stuff like that.

Suggest a Song

‘Meyou’ by Julia Holter

Sometimes music needs to offer little more than ambience to have an all-encompassing effect. And sometimes you need a voice is all it takes to create that ambience.

Courtesy of an unnamed reddit user from r/musicsuggestions.

“Meyou” by Julia Holter is a study in building atmosphere through layers, in creating textures that swallow you up like a sometimes-itchy, oversized wool sweater. With building repetitions of the same words stacking up and occassionally devolving into screeches, yelps, vibratos, and scratches, Holter creates an alien sound chamber.

For someone my age, the obvious comparison point is Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” I learned of Imogen Heap from one of Zach Braff’s often-immaculate soundtracking achievements: “Garden State.” The soundtrack also introduced me to my beloved trip-hop music, so it will always hold a special place in my heart. And of course, there’s the Jason Derulo sample that I forgot about until I listened to the song while writing this.

But even more than “Hide and Seek,” what this reminds me of is the ambient music my wife and I sorted through in building out a playlist for research into music and psychedelic therapy that she did at the Yale-affiliated AZA Lab. The sort of music that you might hear at a yoga class or during a massage. I listened to tracks like “Rivulet” by Tonal Topographies and “Akasha” by Paul Horn in search of songs that could fit the requirements of playlists built for psychedelic therapy. In fact, it was another way to discover new music.

In the sequencing of the playlist, there were echoes of a past project I undertook.

The healing science of music and psychedelics

A few months before I met my wife, loneliness had begun leaking from its predefined layers of experience into other areas of living. It permeated everything. It felt punishing and sickening all at once. And I saw no way out.

At the same time, my innate but long-inactive desire to connect with the spiritual side of life was emerging. Maybe that went hand in hand with the loneliness. Probably, in fact. Like Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, sometimes I felt so lonesome I could cry.

And when I got my hands on a free bag of psychedelic mushrooms that summer, my empty weekend calendars filled with attempts to capture a fleeting glimpse of God.

I had long ago abandoned the pursuit of heavier trips. Instead, I planned to go just past the hallucinatory threshold each weekend for a month in search of spiritual healing.

The final weekend would be the ultimate test of this strategy: I curated a three-hour playlist aligned to the stages of a mushroom trip from onset through peak. I was going to lie on my couch, eyes closed and headphones in, as the songs carried me through the trip. A psychedelic musical ritual with intent.

I didn’t know at the time that this plan wasn’t far from what researchers like Helen Bonny and Bill Richards were doing decades prior.

Science-backed music for psychedelic therapy

Psychedelic researcher and advocate Terence McKenna wrote that magic mushrooms catalyzed human evolution and conciousness. In books like “Food of the Gods,” he speculated that religion also came from visions experienced by early humans during psilocybin trips.

I’m not so sure mushrooms are the source of human consciousness and religion. But the effects of psychedelic drugs are profound. And their effects are made even more profound by music. We see this in the work of psychedelic medicine pioneers like Richards and Bonny, or those continuing their work like Dr. AZA Allsop, the founder of the AZA Lab.

It’s through my wife’s work as a research fellow with the lab that I learned about Richards, Bonny, and the story behind the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Therapy Playlist.

While psychedelic therapy is growing more mainstream, less discussed is the role music is thought to play in amplifying the healing effects of these drugs. The work of Bonny and Richards helped define this field.

“We were working with 33 RPMs and turntables, and always trying to decide what record to play next,” Richards said. “We developed a certain intuitive list of favorites that just seemed to work well with a lot of people. … People’s experiences were going deeper and deeper, becoming very profound.”

Bonny was a music therapist, and Richards is a psychologist researching psychedelics who joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1999. After meeting at a conference Bonny helped organize, he offered her a position at the newly constructed Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and she moved her family from Kansas to join the center. It was Bonny who curated the researchers’ playlists for psychedelic therapy—sequences that would inform the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Therapy Playlist.

Together, they developed a framework for sequencing these playlists aligned with the phases of a psychedelic trip. Dr. Allsop built on this framework with his own study comparing the classical music common in the Bonny iterations with modern cinematic scores. The components of the framework are:

1. Pre-onset or Ascent

2. Peak

3. Re-entry or Descent

4. Return

As the playlist progresses toward the peak, the music builds, and then, following the peak, it retreats. In this way, it mimics the structure of the psilocybin trip itself. The early stages should be structured and dependable, according to Richards.

“It’s going somewhere, it’s picking you up and carrying you. It’s got some force, some substance,” he says. “It doesn’t have very unpredictable changes of rhythm or something that’s going to startle or frighten you. So, it’s a net of reassurance, almost, and of leadership.”

Dr. Allsop’s cinematic playlist is sequenced on similar principles. With selections from the Bonny playlist, Dr. Allsop’s track list, and my own clumsily assembled version, you can see how each approached these early stages. To ensure a comfortable entry into the psychedelic plane, you should begin with calm, predictable, and at times near, if not outright, ambient songs.

These give way to increasingly percussive, aggressive, or emotional music. As the peak approaches, the long, droning stretches of notes and recurring loops give way to staccato chords or dark and slow-building tensions.

We’ll soon get to the crème de la peak of my playlist, but first, I want to point out one of my favorite songs from the ascent: “La Mer” by Nine Inch Nails. It’s a song with tension that builds in exquisite crashes and dissonance over a looping piano line.

From there, we come down. Voices can be helpful during the comedown as the return to regular human experience progresses.

Research into the combination of psychedelics and music is ongoing, but labs like AZA Lab are also studying the healing effects of music alone. Even divorced from mind-altering drugs, the science shows that music can help pave the road to recovery, or at least a semblance of regularity. For example, there’s AZA Lab’s Music Mindfulness Study.

“We utilize community drum circles, music mindfulness groups, music sharing circles, and music-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as forms of therapeutic expression and as mediums to fortify social connectedness, alleviate trauma and stress, and mitigate depression and anxiety,” the lab’s website says.

The results of one study called “Music Mindfulness Acutely Modulates Autonomic Activity and Improves Psychological State in Anxiety and Depression” are promising. The lab found that music increased heart rate variability (higher HRV is a sign of calm) and boosted activity in areas of the brain that handle emotion regulation, focus, and self-awareness. Whether participants attended live or virtual sessions, the results were measurable. However, only the former also fostered social connections.

Where these treatments go, who knows? But, we’re in good hands with AZA Lab. I know that. And in fact, psychedelic treatments are so effective at rewiring the brain, it’s hard to fault anyone for thinking they’ve been handed to us from a higher realm.

…so what happened with the mushroom playlist?

If you’re going to pursue psychedelic therapy or psychedelic music therapy, please do so in consultation with a professional. While this treatment should certainly be more accessible than it is, doing it without the help of a professional can be dangerous.

I spent most of the first few hours of the trip watching colorful patterns mold and meld and slide across the back of my eyelids. But there was no evidence of God within them. As the effects grew stronger and the music grew louder and more chaotic, those movements peaked.

When John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme, Pt. I - Acknowledgement” came on, the chaos exploded in speed and intensity as horns bleated and, toward the end of the track, the chants repeating the song’s title echoed through my skull. But still no God.

After just over 30 minutes, “A Love Supreme, Pt. IV - Psalm” came to a close, and everything shifted on the arrival of “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the Sky. The chaos gave way to a bright flash of gold-tinged white light at the ring of the first note. It felt as if after a veering journey in search of supreme love, I was being granted evidence that I was, in fact, hand in hand with God.

Here’s a short poem I wrote about the experience toward the end of my trip:

ant colony

cocaine rush
of digging roots
pushing into me. 

funnels of light purge 
tunnels, burrowed like
an ant colony 
in my chest. 

filling with the		Supreme.

belief is like the warm embrace of family.

salvation like a bath:
watch it well up in the floor and swallow you whole.
sink into the water
and be baptized. 

My spiritual journey is ongoing. But the glowing light arriving just as “Your Hand in Mine” came on, and just after “A Love Supreme,” felt like a pivot point. And with that turn came a sense of relief. Of healing.

I wasn’t treating a serious medical condition like depression. But I did feel as if a new mental plane had opened up to me. Like I had attained a swipe card for an upper deck of spiritual access. A new level of communion with a Creator.

Richards noted how meaningful Bonny’s music choices were during psychedelic music therapy sessions for patients being treated for substance use disorder.

“It took on meaning in the struggle, the unfolding, the dissonance being resolved,” he said. “They could understand that that type of classical music is a language about life and human experience. And when you’re in the music, it’s so different from listening to the music.”

The music helped push me to a better place, too. I’ll never forget that the sequence made that clear to me.

Sure, you can say that the spiritual experiences I describe are just extensions of the drug’s effects. But maybe that’s why these chemicals exist. Were created. As a pathway to God.

Of course, psychedelics that alter brain chemistry, dissolve the ego, and heal disorders as a potential conduit to God are a well-trod path. I have a friend who got a free vaporizer pen packed with DMT hits in return for joining a church! And I wouldn’t go so far as to say mushrooms developed human consciousness. But are psychedelics here to offer us a touch of God’s healing and grace?

And if that’s the case, why not music as well? Really, this can spiral out infinitely: if God is in mushrooms and God is in music, why not everything?

What song is a spiritual experience for you? Tell us below for a chance at a future feature:

Suggest a Song

See you next week with a song suggested by another human.

Let’s jump right into: This week we’ve been recommended “Air” by Clozee and Sauvane:

Courtesy of Digital Habit, a hydraulic mechanic and music producer from Vancouver, Canada.

Not ready to read all this? You can find most of the completely human-curated music recommendations in this issue on this playlist.

Air starts with an entrance, and you find yourself in an echo chamber humming with chitters and shimmering synths. The next 60 seconds or so build as more synths are layered in with dramatic effect and Sauvane slips into the mix, singing about a suffocating other. Eventually, the layers fade into a single synth line bridging into an instrumental section. It sounds almost empathetic with Sauvane’s situation, giving her a comfortable landing spot to drop in again for the second verse. Now she’s clearly singing from the perspective of what seems to be God, feeling suffocated by humanity. It’s a song you can dip into that has a deeper meaning without feeling preachy. Plus, a vibe reminiscent of some of the calmer early 2010s so-called intelligent dance music genres.

And, with that era in mind, “Air” reminds me of discovery and a phase when discovering was a pillar of my free time. The act of discovery is interesting in at least one way: it affects brain chemistry.

There are different degrees of dopamine delivery. Drugs can be a dopamine hit. But they offer a temperature sort of like the stereotypical L.A.—so comfortable you get stuck there and start seeing through the facade. Or you become a part of it.

And over a long enough period of time, dopamine can simmer into serotonin. Love is when someone pulls the dopamine trigger enough times to induce serotonin. A burst in the place where your heart beats. This may be the best version of this high, when something simple as reuniting after a long day of work is a sweetness.

But there’s another dopamine hit that can over time stir serotonin: the hit delivered through discovery. That’s what we’re here to discuss today.

Music discovery in the blog era

We know music can affect the brain. But discovering it brings to mind college amid the EDM wave of the late aughts and early 2010s. Inspired, as the musical historians tell it, by Daft Punk’s legendary 2006 Coachella set, this was when EDM became mainstream and rave festivals started cropping up across the country.

With its analog, backward-looking masterpiece “Random Access Memories,” Daft Punk also symbolically closed out the era as EDM dissolved from the mainstream into a niche genre thriving on the festival circuit.

While I had long been a fan of genre predecessors handed to me by my father, like Fatboy Slim or Moby, this new era of dance music found me during my senior year of high school and stayed with me into college.

So I spent hours crawling websites like Hype Machine for new music. I found songs by artists like Miike Snow and Emancipator on those websites, as well as more mashups than any single person could ever want. I have etched into my mind memories of my tiny desk in my half of the bedroom in my last college dorm, listening to Emancipator after an interview I was sure I bombed.

My future boss called with an offer in the following week or so and on my first day gave me a pile of books about psychedelic drugs, including Terrence McKenna’s “Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge – A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution.” But that’s another story for another issue.

One of my favorite discoveries from that era was Ellie Goulding. Specifically, her Sun Sessions. My favorite version of Ellie Goulding is her raspily belting over acoustic guitars. I’m still more apt to revisit this live performance than any of her studio-recorded songs.

Another was “Hooligans” by Don Diablo and Example.

I remember the moment in the “Hooligans” music video when the siren screams an ear-bleeding blare. Then it fades for a quiet bridge of some woo-hoo vocals and synth stabs before giving way to a full blown mosh pit of noise. Just hearing the energy in that moment was a rush. It was peak discovery.

The early 2010s was also when I started the original Tunegrape blog. But with an audience small enough to hotbox a dorm room shower, that project never went anywhere.

I go through phases, but at the moment I think the best song I found through those aggregators (non-live performance division) might just be Bassnectar’s Nelly Furtado remix. “Magical World” remakes Furtado’s 2000s hit “Turn Off the Light,” transforming it into one of the two best songs to come out of the dubstep era in my opinion—the other being the Caspa remix of deadmau5’s “I Remember.”

Now let’s be clear: “Turn Off the Light” is a jam and Nelly Furtado’s music was everywhere when I was growing up. While young, I hadn’t developed the taste to enjoy her on my own, but my still-maturing music fandom could feel what was obviously there. And during my first year skipping summer vacation to stay on campus in Boston and rack up credits with classes like “American Text and Film,” I remember listening to “I’m Like a Bird” while cleaning my apartment. Some things are just undeniable. One is Nelly Furtado.

So finding a song that flipped my childhood Furtado memories over the deep growl of early 2010s dubstep was mindblowing, as were plenty of the strange mashups and remixes of the era. But few reached the peaks that “Magical World” did.

The moment the slow oscillations of Bassnectar’s spiky synths drop, you start sinking into it. And when Furtado’s “follow me follow me follow me down down down down” hits, a trap door drops you into another realm. One where you have no choice but to succumb to the atmosphere that Furtado and Bassnectar create while melding her voice with his thick layers of textured, wobbling synths.

And the bridge? Furtado’s relaxed raps echoing through the valley Bassnectar carves just capture me every time.

I can’t cop to discovering Nelly Furtado on a blog while sitting at my cramped desk next to the mattress on my bedroom floor in my first apartment. But I can say that of “Magical World” and so many other tracks—most of them of the aforementioned weird and wild mashups and remixes variety.

The joy of discovering early is even greater than simply discovering. In fact, it’s more than enough for me to represent that early discovery like I represent my city’s laundry (go NY, go NY, go!). I’m a Rosalía fan like I’m a Knicks fan. I found her on one of my regular music research forays in 2018, shortly after “El Mal Querer” was released. There’s no doubt there’s an artistic depth to her that burrows further down than most of her contemporaries. The dramatic concept album that is “El Mal Querer” is no exception.

And one of the highlights is her flip of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” Her voice floats, angelic, over El Guincho’s immaculate keys and intermittent flamenco-flecked percussion.

Discovering music in person

But one of my favorite types of discovery is the type that happens in person. When you go to a show expecting one thing, and walk back out of the venue soaked in beer and sweat, grinning about something new.

That brings us to Against Me! Like Furtado, I can’t cop to discovering them on an online blog. Against Me! was sewn into the tapestry of my teenage years by the few circles of friends I found, as well as my beloved Fuse, a music video television channel that peaked in the mid-aughts. They’re one of my all-time favorite bands, and their “Acoustic EP” is one of my all-time favorite albums.

My roommate in my second college apartment (and, after that, first post-college apartment) may have been an even bigger fan. So in 2015, after I moved into my first studio apartment, him, his girlfriend, and I drove from Boston to Brooklyn to see them play McCarren Park.

The sight of her cuts through my memories of that trip like a snapped guitar string lashing my arm. In her white shirt draped with a bundle of chains and black pants, with a neon pink bass guitar hanging from her neck, she boomed like an opera singer over heavy bass and crunchy guitars.

Her stunning vocals soared above waves of distortion reminiscent of the punk and grunge music I loved. The image is burned into my mind. I have been to many shows in the years since I saw Patent Pending in the basement of a church on Long Island in the early 2000s. Few stand out to me like the first time I saw Mitski when she opened for Against Me! that day in McCarren Park.

I saw her again in 2019 at a free concert in Stern Grove Park in San Francisco. This time I didn’t have to road trip from a 90-square-foot apartment in Boston. Instead, I waked from my Sunset District SRO to the park. This was after her tour with Lourde, with Mitski on the precipice of riding the TikTok trend wave to a more solidified status.

I sat toward the back of a crowd many times the size of the one we were part of in McCarren Park, nestled next to a tree on a hill and overlooking the stage. There was no need to mosh my way to the front and, come to think of it, there wasn’t even a mosh pit.

She felt more practiced and comfortable as a performer, although she was already a touring veteran by the time I saw her in Brooklyn. She stood further from her band as the show began, dressed in all black with nothing but a microphone in hand. But by the middle of the show she had shed the hoodie she wore as protection from the San Francisco cold, warmed by her performance as she thrashed about on top of a white kitchen table behind a white chair.

I would welcome the chance see her a third time and 2023’s “The Land is Inhospitable And So Are We” may have surpassed “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” as my favorite album by her. Furthermore, these days “Heaven” competes with “Townie” for my favorite Mitski song.

But I would have none of these songs and memories without that day banging bodies to her music on a hot square of asphalt. We were both 24 years old then. I’ve grown as her music has grown, as she has grown. There’s maybe nothing sweeter about discovery than savoring memories with an artist accumulated over years. I’ve hit one decade with Mitski. All I can do is hope for another and enjoy what I have. Nice job if you can get it.

Song suggestions through newsletters

One of my favorite recent discoveries comes from a newsletter made to lubricate the wheels of discovery. I don’t think Perfectly Imperfect makes its playlists as available as it once did. But when they were widely available, shortly after I moved to Queens in 2022, I found Fcukers on one of them, sitting at my oversized desk in the first one-bedroom apartment I could call my own. And when the “Homie Don’t Shake” single dropped, I was hooked.

This summer the it-kids of New York City released an EP of remixes of songs from their album “Ö,” from earlier this year. Most of my gym sets and cleaning sessions the last couple weeks have been soundtracked by songs like Eli Escobar’s remix of “if you wanna party, come over to my house.”

So much of music discovery consists of finding other people mining the same nostalgia you are. I think about this in my apartment specked with the design sensibilities of my mother. I consider it while sitting on the same couch I sat on while I rooted for the Knicks during their 2026 finals run, a team inherited from my father and his father before him. It’s no surprise that nostalgia itself is another trigger for dopamine release.

I’ve heard Mitski evolve from punk influences to folk music—in other words, from one end of the Against Me! spectrum to the other, albeit with a foray into pop music between them. Bassnectar, of course, flipped a childhood hit. I can trace a line from “The Rockafeller Skank” on the FIFA 99 soundtrack to Nelly Furtado’s early-2000s radio hits and on to Bassnectar’s “Magical World” further on through to Fcukers. And I can do the same from Caspa’s “I Remember” remix when I listen to “Air” by CloZee and Sauvane.

These songs are building blocks of an accumulated history. Each one adds to the previous, constructing a comfort zone kept warm by a nostalgic flame. A place we retreat to in times of need, rush to in times of joy, or even use to get the chores done.

Some things never change, even if we wrap them in new packaging. Like what makes great music. Or the fact that I still blast that music as I clean my apartment, whether it’s a cramped old unit it Boston, a beachside SRO in San Francisco, or a one-bedroom in Flushing.

Discovery & nostalgia: two sides of the same coin

As I shed old lives for new ones and grow more comfortable in myself, these stages reflect the music I loved in each. I see my early chapters of my story in Mitski draped in gold chains and a pink bass guitar on a small stage on a patch of concrete. And as I grow older I see myself in Mitski doing interviews with The New Yorker and having her own Criterion Closet segment.

Now, a decade later, early Mitski is nostalgic for me in the same way Against Me! is—they’re each wired into my brain. Discovery sparks a short dopamine hit tied to memories. But the over time, with repeated exposure, the increasingly familiar dopamine transitions into the sweetness of serotonin. A love rooted in memory and in nostalgia.

I don’t dance much, but my love for a danceable beat has always been there.

Life, in that way, is a series of remixes and mashups of memories and experiences, each building on the next. When we discover a song that strikes just the right nostalgic chord, we’re hooked for life; a new soundtrack for the next stage, specked with the just-right strands of old.

Today’s Playlist

What’s your favorite discovery? Tell us below for a chance at a future feature:

Suggest Your Song

See you next week with a song suggested by another human.

You may already know a little bit about this newsletter’s mission. In this first issue I’m here to clarify.

This is a place where humans recommend music to humans. Music through the grapevine. Since I’m the human (or so they tell me) who started it, I can explain how it works.

Tunegrape’s Mission to Humanize Music Discovery

Sounds grand, huh? Maybe I overdid it. Anyway, here’s the idea: Each week music recommendations from someone or some people will appear at the top.

Next I’ll toss you a few songs of my own with commentary on why I’m including them. Plus, I’ll add some words on how these disparate sets of tunes come together across themes.

As far as recommendations, I’ll go first, then all of you can take it from there.

Suggest a Song

Suggestion: Deception by Blackalicious

Courtesy of a writer named tunegrape from New Jersey.

Not ready to read all this? You can find most of the completely human-curated music recommendations in this issue on this playlist.

I’m going to sound like an old man. I don’t want to, but here I am about to sound like an old man. Some people will never know the joy of riding around in a minivan with a friend listening to a CD one of you burned.

My favorite CD, burned for cruises around Long Island in my best friend’s minivan after he got his license, was built off of “Deception” by Blackalicious. As a budding writer, the work of lyrical artists on songs like “Deception” or “Kick, Push” by Lupe Fiasco, or “Hip Hop” by Dead Prez inspired me.

Cassettes count as well. But with streaming that experience is gone. When you burn a CD, you’re making an investment. Time and, even more important, love go into a CD burned for a friend or a loved one. There’s a story in each burned CD.

Now, a playlist can feature love. And it can take time. And someone who grew up on burned CDs by no means has a more important musical experience than someone who grew up dragging songs from Spotify’s near-infinite library into the lefthand column where the playlists live. But if you’re one of those people, allow me to indulge in explaining how my ritual is different from your ritual.

Ritual and why it matters

My ritual involved deep research. There were no algorithms telling me which songs to listen to. I had websites like AllMusic, various blogs, aggregators like DatPiff, and even print magazines. Each included songs curated by humans, described by humans, and recommended by humans. These person-to-person suggestions were what I thrived on when building my music library.

And then there was the piracy. All the glorious piracy. Metallica be damned. Sailing the high seas of P2P networks, I cultivated the full discographies of rappers from The Roots to Sage Francis.

Downloading those songs took time. Waiting by the computer, praying that the downloads didn’t break. Then I would have to go through each song to make sure the file wasn’t broken or the song wasn’t glitching. Plus, of course, edit all the metadata.

Then from that ever-growing collection I would select songs. And not just any songs, but tracks that you might not expect to flow from one to the other. For example, “Sea Lion” is an exquisite preamble to The XX Gon’ Give It To Ya by The Hood Internet, a mashup of The XX and DMX.

I would go where the flow took me. Across genres, subgenres, instruments, stories, and cultures. Together the tunes curved like a river in the most natural ways from one to the next.

And when I burned a CD, I told a story about myself as a 16 year old; about what I enjoyed and what I was learning of the world and myself. The ritual is in discovering and telling the story, then experiencing it with others who are close to you.

We can further unpack this Russian nesting doll of storytelling. Because many of the songs are stories as well. And rap, with songs like “Deception” or “Kick, Push,” is a genre built for storytelling.

The stories we share with music

The aural storytelling ritual is an artifact of human evolution. It has been with us for thousands of years, according to researchers Ruth Anne Rehfeldt, Ian Tyndall, Jordan Belisle in their paper on music as cultural inheritance. We carry cultural practices and experiences through the songs we compose and perform.

There are also concept albums that tell you stories strung across a series of tracks. Some you already know, and I’ll skip for brevity’s sake cough, *cough, another brick, cough.* One favorite of mine is Rosalía’s “El Mal Querer.” Or the album that transformed me when I first heard it in a dorm room freshman year of college: “Deltron 3030” by Deltron 3030.

Among my favorite music genres are the storytelling ones, borne of specific cultural experiences. Like rebetiko music, characterized by Markos Vamvakaris’s painful working-class string plucking. Or the Mexican corridos, like songs by Los Tigres Del Norte that helped give rise to the drug balladry that is narcocorridos—an excellent modern example being Peso Pluma.

In each of these songs lives yet more rituals. The rituals that come with writing—so unique to each individual’s creative process. The rituals that birth the stories; tales of carrying drugs across the border to feed one’s family, wasting away days in Greek hashish dens, or falling in love with a village girl in the crowd at your concert.

Sandra E. Trehub, Judith Becker, and Iain Morley, wrote about musical ritual in a paper titled “Cross-cultural perspectives on music and musicality. ” They said:

For members of many small communities, past and present, musical rituals have meanings that are transparent within the native community but opaque to others. There may be different levels of meaning as well, holistic meanings about particular rituals, like a call for rain or for animals to present themselves for the hunt, and specific meanings linked to individual elements.

In other words, our cultures and cultural rituals inform the narratives we identify in songs. If a culture tells its adherents that a higher force commands us to sing and dance in exchange for rain, their music will reflect that. And if a culture centers drug smugglers as heroes bringing money back to desperate families and towns, their songs will speak to those experiences.

A song contains inherited cultures stretching back generations, filtered through an artist’s own cultural encounters and individual experiences. It is imbued with new meaning when the listener imprints their perspectives. Finally, it serves as a vehicle for creating shared memories and is inherited by the next line of listeners. When we recommend a song, this is what we’re passing from one human to another.

Like many people, my ritual was burning CDs. I discovered stories built on individual experiences and inherited culture, bopped to them, burned them onto CDs, shared them with friends (in minivans cruising around Long Island, for example), and we created new memories together.

My performance of that ritual peaked with my CD that began with “Deception.” In the song Blackalicious’s Gift of Gab (R.I.P.) warns “don’t let money change ya.” It tells the story of a rapper who loses himself as his career grows.

He put in the work and rose to the top. He signed a major label contract and “lived a lavish style of life, fast money, women, cars.” But the money was a curse. And later in the song the protagonist is “broke, bumming money, drinking out the 40 bottle, living outdoors.”

There’s much more to the story than that, like the ways in which society uses then discards black artists—a theme Kendrick Lamar explored on “To Pimp a Butterfly.” But extreme wealth can isolate someone from the very experiences music is built on. In fact, research indicates that wealth may weaken empathy, “cloud moral judgement,” and fray our social bonds.

Reintroducing humans to music discovery

In “Deception,” money was the change agent. When it comes to modern music discovery, the change is being wrought by big tech companies. These corporations are run by individuals who, like the rapper in “Deception,” are cleaving themselves off from human experience by way of their own wealth accumulation.

Disconnected from the rest of us as they are, they’re turning music discovery into a corporate scheme. Our role? Serfs in the algorithmic fields, working the interface to deliver new learnings to the software.

You pay them for music. In exchange, they drain you of data, digitally encoded human experiences. Precious and valuable experiences, stolen and made grist for the algorithm mill. All so that these big tech companies can hook more users, capture more subscriptions, and increase share prices.

(I know I’m sharing music using the very software I’m attacking. It’s convenient, sue me. The point is the music is being recommended to you by a human. I encourage you to buy the music from the artists, particularly the extra-profitable medium that is CDs.)

The technology building extreme wealth for a few tech bros and their shareholding buddies isn’t destroying the human bonds that music reinforces. But using technology that vomits gamified content collections at us every time we open it can be addictive and isolating. These apps can degrade the experience that is sharing and discovering music.

In a paper titled “The lonely algorithm problem: the relationship between algorithmic personalization and social connectedness on TikTok,” researchers Samuel Hardman Taylor and Y. Anthony Chen write:

Whereas research supports the connective potential of social media algorithms (e.g., Guess et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023), each of the same algorithms are also associated with various forms of social isolation, ostracism, or disconnection (e.g., Bucher, 2017; Simpson & Semaan, 2021; Taylor & Choi, 2024). These unacknowledged negative externalities suggest that algorithms meant to bring people closer together will also likely drive people apart.

The founders and shareholders with incomprehensible wealth? Their social bonds are fraying as their fortunes isolate them. They see the human bonds that connect us, built on generations of ritual and experiences, as market inefficiencies.

I believe their apps’ destructive effect on human connection is an extension of their wealth’s corrupting effect on their moral judgment and capacity for empathy.

As long as technology is shoehorning its way into our musical rituals, we should seek space to reclaim the humanity in our ancient aural art. When we recommend music, as humans, we’re extending thousands of years of cultural experience to each other. We shouldn’t hand that privilege in toto over to machines.

That’s why Tunegrape was founded. To play a small part in helping us stay connected with some of the musical rituals that are oh so human, like song recommendation, curation, and discussion. After all, music heals. And we need some of that. Plus, playlists. And you can find the playlist for today’s issue here:

Today’s Playlist

See you next week with a song suggested by another human.

If that’s your reaction, I have a sneak preview for you. Here’s the playlist featuring the songs from Issue #1.1 of Tunegrape, where you’ll find recommendations that tell stories:

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See you again in September.