erie’s 2024 in music
Posted: 2025-01-15
Updated: 2025-01-15
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I originally planned for the k-pop post to be part of this post, but it proved too unwieldy and took on a life of its own. This is the post where I talk about my non-kpop listening habits this year, which I'm looking forward to. The soul of my Twitter account was really all the zero engagement Youtube links to random songs I'd post so I'm happy to continue screaming into the void, this time in a medium with even less possibility of engagement from readers.
Live music
This was the year I started going to a lot of concerts. Some of the artists I saw included Julia Holter, Bladee (bucket list item for me), claire rousay, and Mass of the Fermenting Dregs. The most fun I had at a show was Next Music from Tokyo, anesthesiologist Steven Tanaka’s comically expensive passion project where he brings Japanese underground bands to tour Canada. Steve must have a gift for A&R because in the past he brought bands like Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, Kinoko Teikoku, and Hitsujibungaku before they got as big as they are now. After NMFT I suffered from “thing, Japan” syndrome until I realized that basically every city has bands, went to some dude’s house (sorry, DIY venue) and found some local bands to support. A few brief notes:
Julia Holter
I’ve been listening to Julia Holter since high school. She has one of the purest, most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard, and her band was great too! Her albums are strikingly original and full of fascinating detail and colour to get lost in.
Hammer Head Shark
My favourite band at NMFT and one of my favourite discoveries of the year. Sick live performances. Singer Nagai Hiyu’s delivery reminds me of Kaneko Ayano at times. They have kind of post-rock/shoegaze stylings, but newer stuff sounds grungier.
Old faves
These are in descending order of my last.fm scrobbles for the year.
Bladee
Bladee was still my #1 artist on last.fm this year. I got into Bladee post-Icedancer, but my most powerful Bladee memories involve walking around in some suburban shithole listening to Eversince and thinking about how much I hated myself and my life. This followed a period where I was doing the same thing but listening to house music or Giles Corey, so it was probably good to cast off that unc behaviour and learn important higher vibrational certified drain concepts like “loss and gain are the same”. To be honest I haven’t been that enthused about Bladee for a while (although I will always go to bat for Thaiboy Digital) and still haven’t listened to Crest or Spiderr straight through. Now that Bladee is 30, Cold Visions is a sort of violent reaction to the prospect of uncdom where our hero links back up with the Working on Dying crew and at once retreats to an earlier era and enters the future now that f1lthy-inspired rage is the culture (see Ken Carson). For me this was a great throwback to evil Bladee tracks like “Cover Up”, and demonstrates that he can kind of rap when he feels like it. Seeing him play old tracks like “Gatekeeper” live was a peak experience. I also particularly like that the general mental state implied by the lyrics indicates a caveman regression from the kind of artsy fartsy Christian mysticism and heightened emotional intelligence that his lyrics had been tending towards.
Hiperson
Hiperson (海朋森) is still my favourite band in the world, and No Need for Another History (我不要别的历史) is still my favourite album in the world. I listened to this live performance many times this year, and bitterly regret not being able to catch them on their Asia tour.
.soldat
Criminally underrated and underlistened. I only learned about .soldat because one of my Twitter mutuals had verses on some of his songs lol. During COVID lockdowns was when I really felt like “hyperpop” started gaining some coherence as a scene of Soundcloud bedroom producers messing around with synth design from untrendy (ymmv) genres like eurodance, trap/drill beats, and experimenting with all sorts of vocal chains. I seriously think .soldat is like Beethoven because on Knife Level he totally perfected all these contemporaneous influences to the point where I don’t ever really want to listen to stuff like glaive (no hate, just a randomly chosen example) because I think .soldat literally has the definitive take on this whole wave.
Lucki
I listened to a lot of Lucki this year but not new releases, partly because his discography already has so many perfect songs that I don’t ever feel compelled to keep up to date. Listening to Lucki too much gives me the delusion that my purpose on Earth mainly revolves around managing my relations with the various bad bitches coming in and out of my life.
Discoveries
trance
At the end of 2023 I heard this Boiler Room set and was bowled over. As a pretentious teenager I used to listen to “IDM” a lot, and trance always kind of struck me as being the opposite of that (i.e. “unintelligent dance music”). That said, the energy in this set is undeniable and I kept listening to it throughout the year. Eventually I got a chance to see Minna-no-Kimochi live as part of TDJ’s SPF Infini tour, which put me onto TDJ. Unfortunately I’m decrepit now and clubbing until 4AM is not really a pleasant experience. SPF Infini: Genesis is also an epic mix that I listened to a lot this year, with some serious bangers like that stretch from “The Encore” to “Signs Of Life” to “sunsets+memories”. It kind of makes sense that I like trance now since a lot of the synth design has leaked into rage beats.
Pairs
While looking up a Hong Kong band I first discovered via /mu/ sharethread in high school and have loved ever since (The Yours), I discovered an intro to a now-defunct Shanghai two-piece called Pairs in which The Yours catch a stray as a “rather dull guitar band”. Anyways, much like the author, hearing Pairs for the first time reminded me of being a teenager discovering a new favourite band (Car Seat Headrest at 16, and I remember that I had to pause Twin Fantasy either partway through or shortly after “Beach Life-in-Death” to go downstairs for dinner). Pairs has a lot in common with Will Toledo - you can tell from the lo-fi recording that these guys were jamming econo, and the vocals display little singing ability but tremendous, earth-moving conviction. I’m no music writer and can’t really do justice to something I find so engrossing yet must sound like the most anti-musical, listener-hostile noise to people who don’t get it. I’ll quote a gig report from a Hong Kong show: “You’d be inclined to think that they really can’t play – but don’t be fooled. Their musical minimalism is one born out, not of incompetence, but higher judgement.” And like every good band, they inspired a transcendent cover that almost clears their whole discography.
Composed of Australian expat ESL teacher Xiao Zhong on drums and vocals, and local Shanghai girl F on guitar (supposedly she only knew how to play two chords when they started the band), they played a kind of punishing, high-adrenaline, dead-simple, face-melting punk. Xiao Zhong’s lyrics try but fail to make sense of the bewildering experience of Hu Jintao-era China, a period that I can only postulate at once felt like everything good had already ended and everything good was becoming possible for the first time. For whatever reason I’m often occupied thinking about late 00s/early 10s China, the same way that other straight dudes supposedly think about the Roman Empire. Eventually Xiao Zhong went back to Australia, breaking up the band but producing a brilliant final album containing possibly the best Pairs song of them all, “Northeast States”, which sums up his experience of China in those years much better than I ever could imagine, let alone write about. And despite his declaration that “there’s nothing romantic, there’s nothing romantic here at all”, “Northeast States” is probably the most romantic and beautiful song in the whole Pairs catalogue.
Doing some Google-fu, it turns out that Xiao Zhong was also in quite a few other bands, which all bear signs of his musical ability or manic songwriting style. I’m partial to Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes (汤姆克鲁斯和凯蒂赫尔姆斯), a sort of shoegaze/dream pop outfit that also broke up when he went back to Australia, producing A Million Farewells with “Waking Up” being a particular stand-out. Back in Australia he played in garage rock outfit Thug Mills. Despite only releasing the one album, they still produced brilliant noisy freak-outs like “Flagstaffed” (that “and your parents must guar-an-tee your home” line is awfully catchy) or “Mei You”. As far as I can tell (because the white-guy Chinese lyrics are buried under a layer of glorious fuzz and feedback), “Mei You” is about bringing your beloved Chinese wife to a foreign country and trying to figure out if it’s all been worth it, or if the woman you love might not be better off having never met you at all. I find it profoundly moving, probably because my parents immigrated for my sake (to some extent) and I sometimes wonder if this decision can’t be understood as two people throwing their lives away for someone who didn’t deserve it. On that note, this brings us to our final section.
Asia and beyond
I discovered Into Dust late this year, a Chinese guy’s project to promote underground Asian acts. While I don’t like everything he posts, maybe not even half, sometimes he really puts me onto bangers like German rapper Norwin Wren or these Thai teenagers spitting sinophobic bars over an Osamason-type beat.
toe
I’m glad they’re back with new music! The new album also finally puts their great track for the Sonny Boy OST on streaming, whose appearance in the last episode was a definite highlight of the show and by extension that whole season/year of anime. Hopefully they tour North America in 2025 and let me check off another bucket list item.
Say Sue Me
I first learned of Say Sue Me from the second episode of The World Underground, one of the coolest things on Youtube (the first episode is an awesome document of the Chinese underground scene circa 2013). It’s hard not to love their sunny cover of fellow Busan band Genius’s “One Question” featuring the lines “Are you sleeping with my boyfriend?” before threatening to “kill, kill, motherfucker, you and him” as well as your family, friends, and pets. Anyways they’ve come a long way since then, surviving tragedy, lineup changes, and the COVID pandemic, to become one of South Korea’s biggest indie rock bands afaict. This year I really enjoyed their 2022 album The Last Thing Left, which augments their breezy surf rock style with more aggressive textures and some of their most emotive songwriting yet.
jackzebra
Like with claire rousay, Bloodz Boi put me on. “Getting into” jackzebra this year felt like when bladee finally clicked for me, not because of that viral tweet calling him “Chinese bladee”, but because when someone is so out on a limb in terms of their vocal delivery most will refuse to take it seriously at first, including me. I have this idea that “mumble rap” emerged as a term not because rappers in the mid/late 2010s were actually mumbling but because listeners weren’t used to hearing certain accents as Soundcloud made it possible for guys from regional scenes to blow up into the mainstream. On the other hand, jackzebra is probably just mumbling because I can’t really make heads or tails of what he’s saying half the time, making him the perfect target for the classic “can’t understand a word but it’s fire. much love from china” bit people love posting under Yung Hurn videos (swap out China for Germany or Austria). That said, reading his lyrics produces the auditory version of those lenticular illusions where you’re trying to see some hidden image that is impossible to see until it becomes unmissable in an instant, and is strangely rewarding. jackzebra kind of makes you realize how much potential there actually is in Chinese language hip-hop, with this song’s melding of plain-spoken insults (“这个人其实他不是人/他很有可能是畜生”) and cosmic mythology (“财产盘古大挪移”) serving as a prime example. From this perspective any distortion of the spoken language is permissible in service of jackzebra’s literary vision.
other asian rap
Henan Rap God (河南说唱之神) dropped the brilliant “工厂” (“Factory”) this year, which became his biggest hit and is also maybe as lyrical as Chinese hiphop has ever gotten. Weirdly it kind of reminds me of Dongbei renaissance flagbearer Shuang Xuetao’s work with its complicated sense of allegiance to “home”. The introspection is as sincere as it gets when he wishes he could be a bit more shameless like KenRobb and admit he’s just after the money (“我羡慕萝卜说 我只要钱/我不够真实 我太要面子”) before acknowledging that chasing the bag is more about emotional rather than material insecurity (“其实我需要很多的钱来/将我的自卑和不安给掩埋”).
Like most dudes, sharing Youtube links is a big part of my social life. When my friend put me on to Eric Reprid’s “Suki” I was like “fuck this comedy rap shit” after the ultra-viral sus line heard around the world (“I fucked so much pussy, I might switch to bussy”). However, I later heard the same song on headphones and I had to admit that the beat fucking bangs. On “NBA” producer STVRK is going fucking crazy with the 808s and what might be an enka sample, and to be honest it’s hard to avoid feeling some affinity with another similarly aged Chinese-Canadian dude with bad skin grinding for years in obscurity. When I was a teenager I also used to use “chink” similarly for some stupid reason, so maybe if I were worse at academics and better at music, I would have ended up like him. Hard instrumentals aside, I refuse to scrobble this man, and the way Eric Reprid chooses to refer to women as “whores” instead of the more common “bitches” is lowkey alarming. In a way the generally un-PC nature of this artistic project makes him an early frontrunner for representative act of the second Trump presidency with its increasingly multiracial coalition of aggrieved men, while also being a throwback to when Rich Brian first came onto the scene using the n-word and calling himself “Rich Chigga”. (As an aside, “Dat Stick” was produced by a friend of Brian’s who was mainly making trance at the time, which makes it proto-rage in my books.)
idol stuff
pinponpanpon are a 3-person Japanese idol group produced by French Cries/Space Boy of STARKIDS, a hyperpop outfit based in Tokyo. This is their best track since “pinpondash” imo. Shit goes crazy. Also I like that they seem to have a never-ending list of gyaru/jirai-kei Instagram shorties on speed dial for music videos.
Japanese idol group f5ve is not really consistent but when they hit they go crazy. Apparently BloodPop is part of the production team. Some people care about this but I don’t really know who that is.
oomf put me on. babyMINT are a Taiwanese idol group that has really weird music thanks to their 4-dimensional producer A.F. I was planning to embed my favourite babyMINT song, which happens to be their most normal (can definitely imagine a version of this for Le Sserafim) and perhaps boring. However, stuff like “Hellokittybalahcurri³ hellokitty美味しい” is a much more accurate representation of the kind of Frankenstein’s monster pop they usually put out. Musically, most of their stages during 未來少女/NEXTGIRLZ felt like the production team were on some next level idgaf which is kind of awesome, and the stage concepts matched that energy. Rapidly moving through so many disjointed musical ideas almost serves as a parody of a certain tendency in k-pop writing, and thus a profound statement on how NMIXX’s “O.O” really fucking sucks.