Dear reader, whoever you are, I cannot overstate how important it is for you to understand this: none of that is true. It is an absolute and utter fiction being sold to you by powerful people with ulterior motives.
To many of you, this is stating the obvious. Last month, I flew back east for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party, and got to see a bunch of extended family and family friends who I haven't seen in years. And because pretty much all we know about each other is where we live and who our partners are, Portland's presence in the news came up in conversation a lot. Thankfully, almost everyone I talked to knew instinctively that it was bullshit. However, there was one older, conservative family friend who rejected my assertion that, aside from the manufactured controversy, things were actually pretty nice in Portland, saying in a voice that I swear was DRIPPING with condescension: "Well, I'm glad to hear that you're able to stay positive in spite of all the troubles over there." Ugh. Fuck off.
Which brings me to: if you’re a conservative, and you’ve never been here, you probably don’t have a fondness for Portland. Which I can understand. We’re a famously left-leaning city, and you don’t like that. And given that you don’t believe in ‘liberal’ political policies, it would make sense to you to imagine that Portland is failing as a city, and that deploying federal troops is exactly what the city needs. But that’s just not the case.
As loathe as I am to agree with him on anything, the goddamn chief of police has stated that we unequivocally do not require assistance from the federal government. Again, that’s the chief of police. I can assure you, he is not a radical leftist. But, much like the family friend I just mentioned, my buddy’s own father won’t believe him when he tells him Portland is fine. Think about that. He refuses to believe his own son's direct experience because it doesn’t fit the narrative that he prefers. That's a truly disheartening sign of the times.
I just want to shake these people and say, it's OK to be wrong! You might think that being smart = being right all the time, but the fact is, an important aspect of being smart is developing the ability to recognize when you get something wrong and to correct yourself. And it's never too late to say, "I made a mistake. I believed a lie."
If we’re going to survive as a country, we have to agree, at the very least, that the truth matters, and is unwavering in the face of belief. This is a plea. Let’s shake on it.
...
OK, now on to the list. I’m warning you, this thing got way out of hand. I tried to edit it down but I have a lot to say. 2025 was not an easy one, but I’m coming out stronger and sharper than ever. In 2026, let’s all put in the fucking work.
20.
Rún
Rún
The flies are anxious
Even the crows are slow to land
Spacious, droning, psychedelic sounds that are somewhere in the realm of post-metal, noise rock, and stoner, but with a distinctly experimental, acid-brained flair. Thunderous percussion, thick fuzz bass, whirring electronics, and heavy-lidded vocal incantations.
19.
Hasard
Abgnose
Always deeper into nightmares
Always further into despair
Hasard start with the kind of high-minded, dissonant black metal for which their homeland of France is known in black metal circles, and add a ton of symphonic strings and synths. The project’s second album, Abgnose feels more single-minded in its focus than its predecessor, and that focus is on assaulting the listener. It’s chaotic and pitch-black to the point of actually being disorienting to listen to at high volumes. Hasard opts for a careening, breakneck pace throughout, with the only moments of respite being provided by unsettling orchestral breaks that sound like the Big Bad reveal in a fantasy movie — think the moment that Shelob (the big spider) drops down from the ceiling in Return of the King.
18.
The Haunted
Songs of Last Resort
Bodies dropped into a grinder of meat
Millstones keeping their pace
Columns march as if to a beat
No faces left to trace
Full disclosure: this is the first Haunted record I’ve listened to since their debut. This isn’t a slight against The Haunted, as, Insomnium aside, I’ve largely abandoned melodic death metal for about 20 years. So I don’t know how Songs of Last Resort fits into their discography, but I’m guessing that they haven’t strayed too far from their core sound, and if they have, I’m further guessing that they weren’t very good at it. If I’m wrong, feel free to track me down and murder me.
Songs of Last Resort kicks fucking ass. It’s about 90% tight, thrash-y, and catchy-but-brutal in the way that only the Swedes have truly mastered, with the remaining 10% taking on a sludgier, mid-tempo groove. Lyrically, we’re talking about the same kind of abstracted, warmongering, authoritarian political boogeymen that have been haunting metal lyricists since “War Pigs”, and that totally works for me right now, for reasons that should be obvious.
17.
Aesop Rock
Black Hole Superette
Sorcery so absurd
Even Merlin had his phone out
Aesop Rock is another artist with a pretty deep discography of which I have barely scratched the surface, but unlike The Haunted, he is generally held in very high regard by both critics and fans of the genre, so I find it weirdly intimidating to write about him. But goddamn, better late than never. Bizarro philosophical musings, observational humor, and flex raps — often all at the same time — over off-kilter, synth-y beats. Features a pair of straightforward story-songs, “John Something” and “Snail Zero”, that literally never fail to make me laugh out loud, unfortunately including when I listened to them on my earbuds on a plane. This type of cerebral, borderline nerdy rap used to get on my nerves, but now it makes for what’s apparently my favorite hip-hop record of the year.
16.
NyreDolk
Barndommens hjem
Straffer børn med ord og hånd
Familievold binder blodets bånd
Gnarly, punk-infused Danish black metal. The predominant style of riffing — heavy, spiteful, but groove-y, over butt-simple drums — is like catnip to me, and NyreDolk wield it with the best of them. Love the heavy, raw, but spacious production, too. According to promo materials, Barndommens hjem is about generational trauma. It’s all in Danish so beyond that specifics are often lost on me, but that emotional weight and complexity is palpable even in the album’s most bludgeoning moments, allowing its surprising, melodic, sorrowful conclusion to hit with a sense of real catharsis.
15.
Mongrel
Baptized in the Gutter
When you’re baptized in the gutter
There’s no getting clean
There’s a lot of death metal-infused hardcore going around, and it typically goes in one of two directions: 1) Sick death metal band with hardcore breakdowns, or 2) Shitty death metal band with hardcore breakdowns. Mongrel have boldly innovated a third option: extremely heavy, extremely dark hardcore band with sick-ass, Cannibal Corpse-worthy riffs. Makes me want to go knock on my neighbor’s door and just fucking start swinging on him when he opens the door. I *think* they’re straight-edge, which I am very pro, but they go about it so nihilistically that I honestly can’t tell for sure.
14.
Kal-El
Astral Voyager Vol.1
On a mission, fixing all the broken stars
To the spaceborne, filling all the giant jars
Great doom metal bands make it look easy. Regardless of subgenre — stoner, funeral, drone, epic, atmospheric sludge — it always takes the form of a kind of aural hypnosis in which every element of songwriting and instrumentation hits exactly the way your brain wants it to hit, making every move feel pre-ordained: like, of COURSE it dropped down to that lower chord at that exact moment, it HAD to.
On Astral Voyager Vol. 1, stoner-doom titans Kal-El have mastered that art. Elements of their sound bring to mind some of the greatest to ever do it — Ozzy’s strained vocals, Isis’ glacial groove, Electric Wizard’s heady riff-worship, Kyuss’ drugged-out sleaze — and it all comes together in an epic, space-brained sound that’s all their own. But maybe the best example of their ability to anticipate exactly what the listener will want comes during the massive, album-opening title track. I honestly wasn’t sold on first listen until the guitar solo hits at nearly the 6-minute mark and the album blasts into outer space, then after some ring outs, the solo keeps going, just like it had to.
13.
Fer de Lance
Fires on the Mountainside
I see fires on the mountainside
And I see through all the lies
Speaking of Great Moments in Metal 2025: there is a moment, over 7 minutes into the almost absurdly epic album-opening title track on Fires on the Mountainside, that strongly, proudly announces that Fer de Lance is not fucking around. After taking numerous twists and turns, including a long, acoustic-driven build-up, the guitars come crashing back, the double kick hits, the vocalist hits you with a harsh, wordless “YAAAAAAAAAAH,” and you realize that you’re listening to one of the greatest heavy metal songs ever recorded. At least, that was my experience. The rest of the record can’t quite keep up, if for no other reason than they never really try to scale to those heights again, but it’s very strong nonetheless. Expect something in the vein of early Manowar and Nordland-era Bathory that’s actually worthy of both comparisons.
12.
junodream
Dream Untitled (On and On)
And the doctor said
“It’s always harder to accept at first
But then you get over it”
A three-track EP of atmospheric, space-y, trip-hop-driven alt rock that I listened to one million times this year. The title track and “White Whale” are similarly lyrically vague — there’s an “I” and a “you” and life doesn’t seem to be going too great for either one — and both take a comparably washed-out musical approach, but “White Whale” sheds the chill-out vibe by the end, piling on walls of feedback in a genuinely thrilling denouement. Finally, “Making Too Much Noise” is an acoustic ballad about the aftermath of a terminal diagnosis that once made me tear up while I was unloading the washing machine.
11.
CMAT
Euro-Country
Things are ugly to me, I get it
A flip phone with a lack of credit
And others beautiful, I remember
Blanch right at the end of December
I don’t want to spoil the end of this list, but I only decided to give this a spin after CMAT lost a certain award to my #1, and she said something cheeky about how she thought [album] was amazing but that she (CMAT) was “fucking robbed.” That’s great energy. Had to check it out.
And I’m so glad I did. It’s an album of witty, self-deprecating, at times devastatingly raw songwriting. The first half of the record is uptempo and accessible, with enough stylistic range to touch on widescreen indie pop (the title track), something resembling punk (“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”), and retro-pop (“Take a Sexy Picture of Me”), all with a deft, shimmering country sheen. The second half of the album, starting with the fittingly titled “Iceberg”, takes on a downbeat, singer-songwriter vibe. While this stretch may be less thrilling, it contains what’s, to me, the album’s most affecting song: “Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”, a song mourning a dead friend (ex-lover?) in which she refuses to confront the loss head-on (“I don’t miss you because I can’t / If I think too much about you I go mad”) instead opting to focus on how angry it makes her to see a Tesla parked outside of his old house.
10.
Anna Tivel
Animal Poem
You can be someone who loves
Or you can be somebody else
I tell you, kid
The first one is the hardest
Apparently one of the best American singer-songwriters of our time lives in my own city of Portland, OR. Warm, homespun songs colored by subtle, jazzy instrumentation and a few gently psychedelic flourishes — the reverb that rushes in to catch the vocals on “Fluorescence in the Future”’s dreamy refrain, the tremolo guitars on “Paradise”. The album’s emotional centerpiece, “Hough Ave, 1966”, is an absolute gut-punch, tracing its narrator’s journey from a hopeful arrival in Cleveland, to living in their car, to bleeding out in the street.
It’s not all so heavy, though. We are treated at the end to a pair of hard-won love songs. “Meantime” is about as plainspoken as Tivel gets — “In the madness of real life / I promise to do my best” — while “The Humming” drifts away in a warm, hazy, bittersweet abstraction — “I was trying to tell you but I couldn’t find the words / Someday when we’re older, sit in quiet” — before ultimately giving way to a lone, ‘bar’s closing’ piano and a voicemail. Might be one of my all-time favorite album endings.
9.
Heavy Lungs
Caviar
I’m living large in Casino Royale
I’ll have the steak and the caviar
Hooky garage-hardcore-noise-punk with a fat ass and a sarcastic sense of humor to balance out the nihilistic overarching aesthetic. The disgusted “UGH”s on “Yes Chef”? Make me wanna flip a desk. The hyperdriven psychedelic instrumental break on the title track? Holy shit, I almost broke my wrists drumming on my steering wheel to that shit. The surrealist “I wanna [blank]” rock ’n’ nonsense vocals on Side A-ender “Into the Fire”? Fucking forget about it.
I love this fucking album, and if you don’t, I don’t trust you.
8.
Vulture Feather
It Will Be Like Now
For my heart overflows with gratitude
For the kindness you have shown
Reaching out through the night to extend your hand
Even now, even now
The elevator pitch for Vulture Feather might go: Lungfish, but the vocalist is a sensitive sweetie instead of a deranged lunatic. They do the same trick where, instrumentally, you already essentially know how the whole song goes within the first 10 seconds — whatever happens in those moments is gonna happen again and again until the song is over. But there’s a hypnotic alchemy in that repetition, providing a glimmering, pulsing base for wavering but declarative vocals delivering often surreal but deeply empathetic, heartfelt lyrics.
The first time I listened to It Will Be Like Now, it was on the recommendation of a friend who typically recommends hardcore and noise rock, so between that and the band name, that’s what I was expecting. I was walking up to meet my wife, thinking about a friend who I had just been texting with who was stuck at home, spiraling out with anxiety and sadness over the state of the world. After a brief, chiming instrumental intro, the vocalist belts out that first verse: “There’s no need to hide what you’re going through / I’ve been down that road myself / There’s a pain in your eyes that I just can’t stand / My friend.” And I swear, my knees almost buckled. Instant classic.
7.
Benjamin Booker
LOWER
Give a little love, they’ll kill you while you sleep
Give a little love, the place is gone
LOWER was the first album I heard this year that felt like a shoe-in for this list. Serrated guitars, R&B/hip-hop-type beats, anxious noise, and ghosty, almost whispered vocals, all in service of an exploration of American violence, the trauma it wreaks on Americans — particularly Black Americans — and our attempts to live in spite of it. It’s the kind of album that pierces one of its lovelier moments with a truly disturbing audio clip of an actual school shooting. The album isn’t completely without hope — “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” finds an uninterrupted moment of tranquility, as Booker repeatedly intones “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me / What this life can be” over a gentle Rhodes piano line — but it is, overall, almost oppressively bleak. LOWER doesn’t encourage you to give up, but it doesn’t suggest that things are going to get any better, either.
6.
Agriculture
The Spiritual Sound
At the very height
Of the world they built
They destroyed it
For no reason
A cacophony of guitar dissonance over hammer-blasts, a stop-start nu-metal riff over a one-two beat, a bonkers guitar solo over a two-chord mosh riff, and vicious, high-pitched, rasping vocals: I have just described the first minute of The Spiritual Sound. It’s an absolute frenzy, and one of the more thrilling album openings in recent memory.
The rest of the front half of the record sees an expansion on these ideas, with another standout track, “Micah (5:15am)”, striking a balance between anthemic melodic hardcore/screamo and epic black metal.
Midway through the record, the great shoegaze cleansing of “Dan’s Love Song”, subsumes all traces of metal in a droning, percussion-less ocean of guitar and murmured vocals. After this, the album takes a distinctly more accessible, indie/alt-rock flavor, without letting go of the unsettling, chaotic black metal on which the album and band is built. It culminates in “The Reply”, a haunting piece of music that’s unlike anything else — a head-on collision of beautiful, cascading post-black blasting and minimal, melancholic folk.
5.
These New Puritans
Crooked Wing
Sing that lullaby to the abyss
Sing, sing, sing
Since their 2008 debut, These New Puritans have quietly been amassing one of the best discographies this side of the millennium. I’m not gonna nickel-and-dime about whether Crooked Wing is their ‘best’ album, but it’s certainly a high-water mark in a body of work that’s already full of them.
Much of the album finds them back in the realm of subtle, impressionistic chamber music — “Bells” weaves a breathtaking tapestry of glimmering chimes, piano, and choral synths, while “Industrial Love Song” taps Caroline Polachek for its ethereal refrain. Elsewhere, “A Season in Hell” sees a return to the thunderous percussion and rapid-fire vocals of their earlier work, but here it’s driven by grim pipe organ, and ethereal vocal interludes put the ugliness of their surroundings in sharp relief. The heavy, beat-driven “Wild Fields” has a similarly sinister tone. The rest of the album is spent filling in the spaces between these extremes, including a brief return to the ECM-esque sound of Field of Reeds on “Goodnight”. How do they make difficult music so easy to listen to?
Previously:
4.
Craig Finn
Always Been
The places we don’t go
Will still be there without us
It might sound like a strange way to praise an album, and maybe it isn't really praise, but Always Been contributed to me having a full-on existential crisis. It was a combination of factors — friends dying and random physical ailments that made me feel my age were more significant players fore sure — but the song “Luke and Leanna” did help to push me over the edge.
It’s a compact story about a couple living a pleasant but unremarkable life together: modest date nights on the weekends, Chinese takeout on weeknights, not a lot else, repeat. Leanna starts to feel unfulfilled, has a brief affair with a coworker who eventually dumps her, she comes home crying and lies to Luke, saying “It’s just nothing, something at work,” the end. Now let me be clear: I’m not saying I can relate to EVERY aspect of this story. However, I very much can relate to that feeling of coming home in the midst of an emotional breakdown, and attempting to pass it off to my partner as a bad day at work. Moreover, in my darker moments, I can relate to the sentiment expressed directly before the narrative takes a turn: “What’s the point of this whole thing?” The existential crisis part came when I realized that this was a song that, at a different time in my life, I would have interpreted as being about the pitfalls of this capitalist system we live in — like, a “Susan”, or a “Julie”, or a “Reality Whitewash” — whereas now, I’m relating to it on a deeply personal level. Bit of a headfuck.
Anyway. Craig Finn was the songwriter/vocalist/driving force behind The Hold Steady, whose Boys and Girls in America is one of the most revered albums of the mid-aughts indie boom. For an artist whose work was once synonymous with drug-and-alcohol-fueled debauchery, it’s worth mentioning that Finn has been sober for 15 years now, and that Always Been, which (very) indirectly looks back on that life with wisdom and empathy, is easily my favorite record he’s ever made. It’s a non-linear concept album — produced by Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs, if you’re wondering what it sounds like — about a man who, at different points in his life, becomes a preacher, struggles with drug addiction and alcoholism, moves around the country a certain amount, and seemingly sobers up. Not sure about the timeline of those events.
Ultimately, the overarching story is far less important than the individual stories and moments within: moving in with his sister and the quiet family drama that unfolds (“Crumbs”), unsuccessfully attempting to resuscitate an overdosing friend in a bathtub then going through his pockets (“I Walk with a Cane”). I’m particularly fond of “Fletcher’s”, in which Finn dispenses with singing, instead simply iterating a story about an impromptu party at a friend’s house and the morning aftermath, which finds the narrator walking around the city with his friend’s date, mutually yearning for something that will probably never come, and reassuring each other that “it’s probably good enough right here.”
The second track, “People of Substance”, finds the narrator desperately trying to convince an ex that he’s ‘better’, insisting “I don’t get depressed anymore” and “I don’t drink nearly as much,” all the while constantly undercutting himself, in a “I Get Along Without You Very Well” or “Most of the Time” type of way. You can practically hear him sweating. But by the time the album closes out with wistful-banger “Postcards”, the narrator tells a postcard’s recipient that they “wanted you to know we’re doing better,” and this time, you believe him.
3.
For Those I Love
Carving the Stone
Cover me in a mountain of seeds
I want to breathe long after my death
I want to be with the flowers and weeds
I want to feel like the life that I left
(I don’t have the space to do all a whole background on For Those I Love, but for the uninitiated, it’s worth looking into this project’s origins.)
When I first heard Carving the Stone, which also served as my introduction to For Those I Love (aka Dublin artist David Andrew Balfe), I truly didn’t know what to make of it. He’s rapping — or is it rhythmic spoken word, and if so, what’s the difference? — in an Irish accent, about dead friends, doomed souls, financial insecurity, late capitalism, gentrification, and the pervasive sorrow and anxiety inherent in it all. And the instrumentals are like something Kanye West circa Yeezus might have come up with if he’d been tapped to produce a rave record in the mid-aughts: glittering synths and breakbeats chopped up and burnt, all frayed ends and degraded samples, with hints of post-punk and trip-hop dancing in the peripherals. It reminded me of the first time I heard Original Pirate Material, and not just because there’s a dude with a thick accent rapping over rave-type beats, but because part of me was repelled on impact, while another part of me was undeniably, irrevocably drawn in.
The songs on Carving the Stone are alternately downcast, bleak, and hopeful — occasionally all at once. Tracks like “The Ox / The Afters” and “Mirror” seethe with anger at lives snuffed out and muted for the benefit of the ghoulish few, or as Balfe puts it, “Reprobate ethnostate modern nationalist cunts” who “will tell a man that to hate is to love.” Early album highlight “No Quiet” tells the story of a woman whose family leaves one by one — her mother seemingly lost to suicide, her dad to an unnamed sickness, and her brother locked up for life — as she soldiers on, promising over and over to no one in particular, “I’ll stay.”
The album culminates in a two-song sequence that finds Balfe embracing the melancholic beauty that had previously hovered on the edges of the record’s chaotic, dense instrumentals. On “Of the Sorrows”, he reckons with the feeling of being “box[ed] out” by his Irish homeland, and the push-and-pull he feels inside it: “I had to leave it, but I want to die in it.” “I Came Back to See the Stone Had Moved” dives further into these themes as he interrogates his own culpability (“Hell is a cold place when you find it in yourself”) before his voice gives way to a pair of samples to close the album; Jean Ritchie’s plaintive protest song “Black Waters”, and a fragmented sample of “Amazing Grace” for a widescreen grand finale that works incredibly well in spite of itself.
2.
Propagandhi
At Peace
I am at peace these days
Give or take a fit of blinding rage
When I was 16, I essentially had two T-shirts. One was for the band Filth, which I had cut the sleeves off so I could wear it while I played drums, and a heather gray Propagandhi shirt that had a Circle A pocket print on the front and a picture of a dude wearing a white pride hat with target crosshairs on his forehead on the back. One day in the lunch line, this fucking gigantic redneck kid who rode my bus told me he’d beat the shit out of me if I wore it again. Guess who wore it the next fucking day, and guess who didn’t get the shit beat out of him. A rare W in a high school career full of Ls. Someone buy me that shirt in a medium please.
All things considered, Propagandhi had about as much impact on me as any other punk band. As a young mall punk on the brink of transitioning to an anarcho-crusty, their first two albums provided a crucial link between the hyperactive, melodic snottiness of NOFX and the pissed-off, unrelentingly political assault of Crass. And songs like "Less Talk, More Rock" and "Refusing to Be a Man" genuinely helped me navigate the complexities of being a gentle, emotional young man, who liked to make out with his dude friends now and then, in a world that expected me to be aggressive and aggressively hetero. But as I grew older and more jaded, my interest in them waned, and by the time they put out their third album, I had moved on to Radiohead, NIN, Dystopia, weed, and depression. Over the next couple of decades, I’d check in with them periodically every few years, and I always liked what I heard, but never quite re-connected.
Flash-forward to January 2025, and for WHATEVER REASON, I find myself listening to “The Only Good Fascist Is a Very Dead Fascist” a lot. Then a few months later, At Peace drops, and it’s easily my favorite of theirs since those high school days. Over the years, they’ve gotten darker and more metallic, both of which certainly align with my worldview and taste. And their rage is focused entirely where it belongs — the pathetic, hateful losers (see For Those I Love above for more on them) who are currently, openly attempting a fascist political and cultural takeover. At Peace couldn’t have come at a more fitting time.
They also haven’t lost either their sense of humor or the flickering, grim sense of hope that has always been at their core, which keeps the whole thing from going sour. On the tour-de-force title track, after discussing his belief in “a liminal state between death and rebirth in which you and me reconvene,” Chris Hannah assures us, “Oh yes, I’m really fun at parties / Draw a dick on my face with a Sharpie / Excuse me sir this is an Arbie’s,” before concluding, “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Gotta kick at the darkness ’till it bleeds daylight.”
1.
Sam Fender
People Watching
Above the rain-soaked garden of remembrance
Kittiwakes etched your initials in the sky
Oh, I fear for this crippled island and the turmoil of the times
And I’ll hold you in my heart till the day I die
It’s the morning of Saturday, February 22nd, 2025. I’m lying in bed, awake. A week and a half before, on Tuesday, February 11th, my friend Pat had died. In my lifetime, I’d called three people my “best friend.” And although we hadn’t spoken in years, Pat had once been one of them. Another, Danny, had died the previous April. I have spent most of the week in one of either two states: numb and detached, or breaking down, and I am exhausted.
I’m not ready to get out of bed. So I grab my phone and start scrolling, landing on stupid Pitchfork. Their one review for the day concerns an album called People Watching by Sam Fender. It’s a mediocre review — they take issue with the emotional inroads he takes in addressing politics, they think he’s too wordy or poetic for his own good, and they feel it’s ultimately all been done before. The descriptors, however, make it sound like something I might like —they mention Springsteen and the War on Drugs — and the lyrics they quote, even when doing so just to poke holes in them, resonate with me. So I pull up the title track and give it a listen.
It hits me almost immediately. The lift on the chorus, the powerful vulnerability in his voice, the teary-eyed majesty of the string-powered bridge, the triumphant sax intermingling with the propulsive synths and insistent motorik rhythm throughout the song’s sustained climax. (My dad would later describe it as “like being hit by a lightning bolt.”) And even more so, the song speaks to me deeply and profoundly about grief, passionately asserting that the horrible, aching pain of loss that I am feeling is actually love — that it is beautiful, and it is worth celebrating. At the very least, I am forced to get out of bed so I can listen to the rest of the album on better speakers.
Following the title track, the first song that really rocks me is “Crumbling Empire”. It starts with an aerial view of a “Detroit neighborhood left to ruin” then pans across “the Atlantic mirror” to Newcastle, where a similar scene plays out. The next verse zooms in on the lives of his father, his mother, and his stepdad, who had one-by-one been let down by the system. Finally, he sings of an old friend who had lived on the streets for 25 years — “under the arches, strung right out” — describing him as “another kid failed by these blokes” before a lonely guitar solo plays as the song fades into the night.
Quickly thereafter, the whole album slides into focus for me. “Nostalgia’s Lie” chimes like a lost Petty classic as it laments good times lost and young friends passed — a recurring theme in his work — and expresses an urgent need to live in spite of it all. On “Wild Long Lie”, Fender repurposes the wonky acoustic groove of Kurt Vile’s “Pretty Pimpin” for a sprawling story about taking drugs to get through the holidays that culminates in a gloriously atmospheric instrumental outro. The biggest curveball of the album, “TV Dinner” is paranoid and dark, considering the destructive potential of fame and admiration while raging at the privileged few with whom he now shares ranks: “Posh cunt had me irate / He said ‘we’re all the same’ / Are you wild? / Do you have enemies? / A start with no amenities?” An obvious highlight and a personal favorite, “Little Bit Closer” is an ode to the beauty of life and yearning for spiritual fulfillment encased in a rejection of the Christian conception of God.
The next day, I send People Watching to a longtime friend who loves Bruce Springsteen, saying something along the lines of “I’m really feeling this but I’m also emotionally raw so I can’t tell if it’s actually as amazing as I think it is.” She gets it 100%. Within a few weeks we’ve both listened to his other 2 albums and are already ranking our favorite tracks, building playlists, analyzing lyrics, watching interviews and live footage, wondering how the fuck he still hasn’t broken through in the states, etc. I re-join Instagram solely to facilitate the sharing of Fender content and to follow every Fender-related account: band members, fan pages, venues that he’s played at, photographers and artists that he’s associated with, all of it. By the beginning of April, we have seen him play twice — in Seattle, then again in Portland two days later — and have made plans to see him again on the east coast based on speculation that he’d be doing some dates there later in the year.
At some point along the way, I realize that, for the first time since my mall-goth-Marilyn Manson-kid days, I am a true superfan of something, and it’s the most fun I’ve ever had as a fan of anything. It’s been all gas no breaks since then. In September, my friend and I roped our respective partners into flying across the country with us to see him play in NYC and Philly, where we arrived hours early to both shows in order to ensure that we got as close to the stage as possible. We wore matching custom-made tees, cried and hugged during “The Dying Light”, and danced until we felt like we were gonna pass out. It’s a memory that I’ll take with me when I go.
Honestly, the fact that there are 19 other albums on this list, and that it took great effort to whittle it down, is truly a testament to how much goddamn time I spend listening to music, ‘cause I must have listened to this album alone at least 50-60 times. And yes, I’m well aware that People Watching is not Cool Music For Cool People. It’s too earnest, too catchy, and too sentimental to make it past the gatekeepers. But this music touches me in a way that maybe nothing else before it has, and I don’t question it. I’m 43 years old, I’ve been through too much fucking grief, and I will take happiness in whatever form it comes. And right now, it is a lad from North Shields bellowing “I people watch on the way back ho-ome!” as an ecstatic saxophone solo shoots me into the stratosphere.
