You get a dozen songs every month, in playlist form, that act as official PoYB music recommendations, since none of the other music columns are necessarily recommending anything, just exploring. These are your recs. Fuck the algorithm.
We're almost halfway done PoYB's pop culture year (which goes from December 1st to November 30th). You have any good picks for your favorite music of the year so far? Drop 'em in the comments. I'm not going to drop anything in the comments, since I've been dropping my favorite music of the year onto this monthly playlist the whole time.
May 2026
1. "Man Overboard" by American Football — I missed the whole beginning of this saga, where the first song on the first album is apparently, at least to some people, the most important emo song of all time. I think that song ("Never Meant") is great, and I think that American Football has spent their entire stop-and-start career since then trying to match that. LP4 is the closest they've ever gotten.
2. "Not Too Amused" by Sebadoh — I spend a lot of time (okay maybe I'm exaggerating, it's not that much time) just chasing music from artists I might have heard of, but have never heard, and have no idea what they are going to sound like. Here's what I found: I finally know what the term "slacker rock" means.
3. "Best Buy" by Frog — Frog released my favorite album of 2025. Then they released another album in 2025, and it was pretty good. Their (first?) album in 2026, Frog for Sale, is somewhere in between. Maybe not something that I will ever be surprised by again necessarily, but something that still is incredibly weird and idiosyncratic and yet somehow finds itself directly in my wheelhouse.
4. "Love Your Fate" by WU LYF — I sometimes forget about Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, a cult classic that came out in 2011 but that I finally discovered in 2013 during a very specific time in my life, and then every so often I'll rediscover it. It's indie rock that is equal parts weird and huge, and adding to the mystique is the fact that the band almost immediately went away. Now they are back, fifteen years later, like they never left, and the music sounds even bigger! The album isn't available unless you subscribe to their website or you steal that shit (guess which one I did), so I had one option for a song to add to this playlist. Hope you like it.
5. "Drip Drop" by Carla dal Forno — I don't always try out Stereogum's Album of the Week, but occasionally something will hook me or intrigue me, and I'll give it a go. I don't remember what they said about Carla dal Forno that got my attention. Really neat shit. If I was trying to get your attention, I'd say to imagine that your average young female singer-songwriter attempted one day to sound like Fishmans.
6. "Cotidiano" by Chico Buarque — I do not have a hook for this one. I don't even remember how I got here. Possibly something like "what is the #1 samba album of all time according to RYM?" or something like that. It's just nice to try something new every once in a while, ya know? I bet you that I wrote this album down sometime around the MMM for Wes Anderson bus traveling. You'd probably find Chico and Gal on similar lists!
7. "Mata Zyklek" by Angine de Poitrine — That conversation about Geese being "fake" or whatever (not worth going into it) including some people on the message boards roping Angine de Poitrine into the conversation. I had never heard of them before, and so was curious why they were being mentioned in an internet conversation about bands going viral. Maybe six hours later I heard one of their songs on XPN, so there you go. I like it. I don't love it. I think there's room to love it, if maybe say listening to King Gizzard instrumentals could be your thing.
8. "The Great Plains" by Eaves Wilder — I don't mind making space on this monthly playlist to shout out Through My Ears, and whatever the best song I pick up from that column ends up being. I liked Eaves Wilder's Little Miss Sunshine, and I thought of all the wide variety of rock- and alt-adjacent sounds that can be found on it, this wide-lens Heartland-rock-esque thing was the most intriguing.
9. "Ha" by Juvenile — I forget what year it was that I tried to listen to a hip hop classic every week. Was that 2023? Whatever the case is, I'm pretty low in the reserves of "hip hop classics" at this point. It's not every week. But I do occasionally scroll through some lists and see what mid-tier classics I'm missing. Here's what I found on one such list: oh shit, "Back That Azz Up" by Juvenile! I wondered whether the whole album was good. It was good! I'm not, like, into Juvenile now, but only because I'm not as well-versed in rap as I am in rock. I don't have a problem just enjoying a good classic hip hop album with a lot of filler and just enjoying it and not thinking about it too much.
10. "I Believe in Ghosts" by Kacey Musgraves — Kacey Musgraves went back to her original collaborators for her new album, which means that, more than I can recall for her since I've been listening, Middle of Nowhere feels like pop-as-country. This is a turn from her previous album, which was basically a folk album. Nothing wrong with pop-as-country when you have good intentions. It's just that pop music gives her a reason to create songs that aren't very deep but exist only because the song title is kinda halfway clever. "I Believe in Ghosts" is clever if you take a couple extra seconds to think about the play on words. Otherwise, it's a good song, not great. I still like Kacey Musgraves, even though I'm not nuts about this new one.
11. "In This House That I Call Home" by X — I need to do a better job at taking some of my favorite Blind Spot albums, and moving deeper into those artists' discographies. I loved that X album that we covered. Why did it take me so long to try another X album? I don't know. I guess there's only so much time in the day.
12. "Choo Choo" by Friko — I've said this before and I'll say it again. If an artist is outed as abusive, then I feel uncomfortable listening to their music, BUT ALSO, if another artist (with no such abuse allegations, obviously) sounds like that first artist, then I have no issue loving it. I have not purposefully listened to an Arcade Fire song in years at this point, and I couldn't, because listening would make me feel sick to my fucking stomach. But at no point will you hear me deny that those first few Arcade Fire albums weren't some of the best music ever made. It's just that I cannot and will not listen to those specific albums anymore, that's all. It's a gift, not a curse, that Friko sounds like Arcade Fire. I love this kind of music! Of course I love it! Let's fucking go!!!!!
4 comments:
The Angine de Poitrine album is one of the ones a wrote up for Through My Ears for May so far, lol. I listened to it about two weeks ago because it seemed inescapable for the last month and felt like I was late to the game, haha. It’s one of the only new albums that I’ve heard people talk about in real life with in the last year or so that wasn’t a previously mainstream artist. I think it’s cool (and I get that you are being snarky), but I also like King Gizzard instrumentals
I'm glad at least that you were able to confirm that normal people are talking about it too and not just the indie rock blogosphere basement dwellers I surround myself with on the internet outside of PoYB. I definitely like the album! (And would probably still like Nonagon Infinity if it didn't have vocals!) I just thought it was strange that people were equating them with Geese in that particular context. But that's a whole different conversation I guess.
"Ha" is absolutely on the Fatter, Older 500.
You're in your forties now, man. It's time to pull the trigger on this thing!!! Let's fucking go!!!!
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