Lucy Dacus is in a weird position at the moment.

I have a hard time with Playboi Carti. He seems like he’d be a really rough hang, and the predominant narrative about his output in the past 18 months has been how strangely difficult it has been to hear new music by him. But a big part of me admires just how intensely he has managed to stick to his guns and how much he has bent the mainstream to his deeply chaotic approach.

Chuck Klosterman once half-jokingly wrote about how Radiohead’s Kid A might have predicted 9/11. I don’t think Thom Yorke had any sort of inside info about the comings and goings of international terrorists, but I do acknowledge it’s kind of wild that album feels like what life was in the immediate aftermath of that attack, even though Kid A arrived nearly a full year before the event. Kid A wasn’t a response to 9/11, but it felt like one, and retroactively feels like the soundtrack to life in New York in the aftermath. (The same could also be said of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, which also came out in the fall of 2000, is all about urban isolation, and features vocals from Yorke.)

In a similar vein, I sometimes think Matty Healy of the 1975 anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keeping your horizons (musical or otherwise) expanded gets harder with age, and I like to think I’m a more open-minded listener than most. But sometimes I find myself circling back to the most comfortable stuff possible, even if it is made by a group of dudes who don’t remember 9/11.