A Year of Blind Spots: A Series of Sneaks

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Mad respect to those who have the ability or the wherewithal to move through an established artist's discography chronologically. I've tried it before, and it hasn't worked out well. There's just something wrong with my brain, I think, that I can't process art like that. It feels better to jump around a little bit. Obviously, when I'm processing it all alongside the artist, and listening to albums as they come out, then chronology can't be helped. But so then the disorder needs to come from the act of filling in the gaps. I really like the feeling of finding that missing piece and being like, holy shit, I get it now, I get the big picture. It's like a puzzle, right? I'm just fitting the pieces together as I go along. Anyone who starts a jigsaw puzzle from the top left and moves methodically from left to right and then down to the next row would be labeled a serial killer.

I was lucky enough to discover Spoon at the point that is now, in 2026, exactly halfway through their discography. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga will never be topped in my mind, and that's okay. It's okay with Spoon especially, because they are at once very consistent and also are always subtly changing their sound and aesthetic. Every album is undeniably a Spoon album, but each album can also be comfortably placed within an "era" of Spoon. 

I latch onto professional critics in times like this, and so according to PoYB antagonist Steven Hyden, A Series of Sneaks is at the end of the first era, that of the traditional indie rock sound. Which is good and fine. I can squint and see what he's talking about. I specifically wanted to speak of Spoon in this column through A Series of Sneaks because of this placement in their discography, as I was already familiar with the touchstones of the other eras of Spoon. Part of that consistency, however, means that I listen to A Series of Sneaks and am not, like, blown away or anything either. They are not breaking the mold in either direction. Just because the jagged guitars of "30 Gallon Tank" would mean less and less to Spoon's sound as time went on, doesn't mean anything is gained or lost in the discovery of the time in Spoon's career when guitars were essential.

Consistency, of course, can be an albatross. The beauty of being a music critic is that we have the strength to remove those heavy albatrosses from our necks and look around for—and make up wholesale, if need be—that almighty narrative that is going to lift the music from the mundane to the profound. This is what I was talking about with the missing puzzle pieces. It's tough to see the narrative wholly if you're still scrambling under the couch for the missing pieces. The hope was that A Series of Sneaks could provide some much-needed perspective on what is happening and has happening with Spoon beyond them just being a very good band.

What I'm told is that this, Spoon's second album, is the one that ends their brief dalliance with a major label, and whose ultimate commercial failure eventually makes the band hungry, and due to the fallout from A Series of Sneaks, Spoon is committed to then making capital-a Art. Which they do, first by getting weird, then by going big, then by turning cool. I think that A Series of Sneaks makes sense in that way, like it maybe could feel "lesser than" by comparison, but flourishes when you understand that this is the thing that happens before the bigger things.

I'm not gonna be the guy whose contrarian and tries to say that the thing that happens before the bigger things is actually the better thing, just by nature of being simpler, more primitive, less artsy, more directly to the heart of the matter. I was once that guy—oh god, remember when The Bends was my favorite Radiohead album?!—but I'm not that guy anymore. I'm adult enough to understand that the gap in between A Series of Sneaks and Gimme Fiction is so large because the art had improved so rapidly. But I think there's room, too, for a search backwards. Or a search all over the place, which ends up being backwards anyway. There's room for that, because you wanna know the big picture. How we got here. Consistency is built one album at a time, and here on the second album, you can start to see Spoon's consistency, before such a thing derailed critics' ability to talk about them without cliché.