Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
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Sleater-Kinney, “Can I Go On”
When Sleater-Kinney returned from a decade-long hiatus with 2015’s No Cities To Love, it sounded a lot like what the natural evolution of a Sleater-Kinney album would always sound like.
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Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
The Regrettes, “More Than a Month”
There’s a trend from the ‘90s that my old buddy Zack used to describe as the “hard jangle,” which describes the sound of a certain type of alternative-adjacent pop band. Though many of these bands had punk roots and shambolic histories, they bent their sound toward cascading melodies and a cleanliness in their guitar sound with just the right amount of crunch. Some of these bands, like Gin Blossoms and Goo Goo Dolls, became huge crossover phenomena. Toad the Wet Sprocket is a definitive hard jangle band. Some moments on Weezer’s self-titled debut are hard jangly. Not all of it was great (the first Maroon 5 album is also very hard jangle), but the best ones among them were female-fronted like Belly and Letters to Cleo.
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Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Mark Ronson feat. King Princess, “Pieces of Us”
Ronson has been promoting his new album Late Night Feelings as a break-up record, and he’s not kidding: None of the throwback froth of his previous effort Uptown Special can be found within, replaced instead by icy beats and nakedly emotional longing. On paper it’s a recipe for disaster, but in execution it is exquisite and bracing. That’s largely thanks to Ronson’s keen ear for collaborators, including a bunch of well-established stars (Miley Cyrus, Camila Cabello, Alicia Keys) and plenty of people nobody has ever heard of (Yebba, Diana Gordon, Ilsey). Somewhere in the middle of those two poles lies King Princess, a gender-fluid bedroom folk-popper who got a bit of attention on alternative radio for her song “1950” and who possesses both an exquisitely broken voice and a knack for making melodies shine. This is not as good as the Ronson/Cyrus joint “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” (one of the ten best songs of this decade), but this thing still cries while it bangs.
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Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Bruce Springsteen, “Sundown”
The new Bruce album Western Stars is a startlingly majestic album cover in search of some solid tunes, but it’s hard to deny Springsteen’s minimalist ode to the Laurel Canyon sound. I keep waiting for every song to find a second gear, though the only one that really does anything remotely like chugging is “Sundown,” which cashes a lot of checks on a surprisingly light touch on the old-man-at-the-end imagery. Springsteen might be playing himself by releasing a definitive Dad Rock album the weekend of Father’s Day, but maybe he’s just more business savvy than I give him credit for. And he still has a hell of a damn voice.
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
Prince, "Acknowledge Me"
Even more than two years later, the death of Prince still looms. Unlike many of the legends we have lost in the past few years, Prince still seemed to be finding career peaks. He was never going to eclipse his God mode run from Dirty Mind through Sign O The Times (which includes Purple Rain, perhaps the best album in the history of pop music), but he was still bench testing the elasticity of increasingly wicked funk grooves and still maintaining an adventurous and mischievous musical spirit. Up until the very moment of his death, the narrative on Prince was that he was an artist who had only recently emerged from an artistic desert and was working steadily—both in the studio and on the road—to reclaim his rightful place in the pantheon.
Some of that narrative is about to be rewritten.
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
The Hunna, "Dare"
We played a lot of the Hunna's debut album on Alt Nation, though their follow-up does not seem to be gaining the same sort of traction. That's a shame, because the Hunna have smoothed out their sound and built a sturdy monument to mid-'90s Britpop shot through a very 2018 electronic lens. Most modern bands process their guitars all to hell, but the Hunna leave in just enough crunch to remind you that banging on a six-string is a deeply visceral act (and much more physically engaging than, say, twisting a sampler knob). NOTE: Not a cover of Stan Bush's awesomely cheesy song from the animated Transformers movie.
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Every Monday, I pick a handful of tracks that have been floating through my headspace. Most will be new, some will be old, and all will be great. This is the Up All Afternoon Monday Mixtape.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, "You Worry Me"
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