Is this the latest post in Warm Visions history? Who cares – I’ve got it out. June 2024 was a solid month, with some of these records making it into my Favorite Music of 2024 So Far list: Mabe Fratti, Charli XCX, Skee Mask, Marina Allen and Angélica Garcia. Good little crop there!
Apologies for getting this out so late – I’m still listening to new music. I just need to post it.
We’re already halfway through 2024. Think of this post as a checkpoint. A place where you can refill all your potions, your mana, sharpen your weapons, or catch up on any of the sidequests you hadn’t finished. This is a place of respite amongst the unending deluge of physical and spiritual shit that rains down on us constantly. This safe haven is a list of 25 records, arranged by my preference, along with 40 unranked songs and a larger playlist beyond that. The music of 2024 has been great so far, so I really hope you’ll either find something new you like, or you’ll find comfort in knowing that another person you kinda know from the internet agrees with your niche opinion. Go forth, traveler.
Also if you’re unfamiliar with my blog, basically I forgo the structure of professional music criticism in favor of tapping into pure vibes. I put forth a “vision”, if you will, that the music conjures up in my brain. Look, this stuff is good, it’s on my list, OK? Open your mind and let it roam.
Hey all – check this out: a Recommended Albums post that actually arrived on time! The bad news is is that WordPress has decided to mess with me once again (as they do every few years) and decide the old way I embedded links is cringe and illegal. So I’ve had to take this legitimately great selection of Recommended Albums and mess with it a bit, messing up spacing, etc.
This is a really solid list of records. Furthermore, it’s 16 albums long. When was the last time I had 16 records in here? May 2024 really brought its A-game, with big hitters from reliable favorites, a few new faces, and some really invigorating new projects from artists that I didn’t expect. So please ignore the spacing and any wonkiness that you might find and just enjoy the music. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that.
Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown [Domino]
Storms approach a lonely cliffside house where its reclusive resident grapples with dread and possible freedom from the potential impending changes.
Camera Obscura – Look to the East, Look to the West [Merge]
A day spent out at the seaside with friends you haven’t seen in years, any awkwardness of catching up is abandoned in favor of relishing in each other’s company.
Dehd – Poetry [Fat Possum]
Sun-baked and exhausted after spending a whole day outdoors, but feeling a pure love-fueled second wind once the sun has almost set past the horizon.
Iglooghost – Tidal Memory Exo [LUCKYME]
Grinding across a rail made of pieces of old, decrepit A/V equipment in the underbelly of a crumbling future metropolis, its shantytown-like dwellings shadowed by empty towers and covered with soot from the skies above.
Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch [Mexican Summer]
At the thought of a passed loved one, an open window facing a quiet, tree-lined street brings in a gentle, evening breeze that billows out an inherited lace curtain and diffuses your incense further across the room.
Keeley Forsyth – The Hollow [130701 / FatCat]
A smoldering house is found in an arctic expanse. The family that lived inside finally achieved warmth.
Lightning Bug – No Paradise [Self-Released]
A field of flowers that emit a thick fog from their petals suddenly sprout in the middle of a town green, plunging the townsfolk into an ambiguous but beautiful new environment.
Lip Critic – Hex Dealer [Partisan]
Openly acknowledging and taunting the secret capitalism sensor drone that’s been tasked to you (like every person) to make sure we support the consumer empire efficiently. Your wanton defiance even causes the surveillance to glitch and its AI to consider self-termination.
Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements – Rain on the Road [Thrill Jockey]
Checking a book out of the library and finding nearly everyone who had read it before you had pressed a flower inside it, its stories augmented by dried petals and blank fragrances.
Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice [Matador]
Riding on horseback and launching an array of fireworks that cast dynamic lights and colors across a vast plain.
musclecars – Sugar Honey Iced Tea! [BBE Music]
The Saturday of your dreams, the energy of the city and the people outside flowing through you.
Priori – This but More [NAFF]
Gray skies like iridescent silver glint over an expanse of frozen taiga, steaming vents that poke up from the ground suggest the subterranean lives of the post-cataclysmic humans remaining on Earth.
Shannon & The Clams – The Moon Is In The Wrong Place [Easy Eye Sound]
Sending a paper lantern into the sky with a message of love and updating the heavens above on all the bullshit that’s going on down here.
Tidiane Thiam – Africa Yontii [Sahel Sounds]
Waking up with the birds at sunrise and feeling the Earth’s natural, renewed energy fill you up.
Winged Wheel – Big Hotel [12XU]
Tales of aliens that crash landed in a small, middle-of-nowhere midwestern town, who experience harrowing, psychedelic hallucinations thanks to Earth’s thick, polluted air while they rebuild their craft with rusting junk, but are greatly unnoticed by the townsfolk, their eyes having glazed over years ago.
youbet – Way To Be [Hardly Art]
On hour 13 of a 15-hour roadtrip across the United States. You have not slept, but have instead conducted an experiment where you talk to your friends on the phone the whole time. Your burnt psyche reveals a buried tenderness, and is contagious.
A desire for slowness and a widening of scope. Sinking back into the earth, deep breaths.
I made this playlist back in 2022 before my partner and I headed to Arizona for a vacation and the wedding of her childhood best friend. I had been to the southwest before, but this was her first time. I knew we’d be driving a lot and seeing a ton of amazing natural landscapes, so I wanted to make something that featured a lot of her favorite music, but also carried an easygoing vibe of peace that would match the serene nature that we’d be quickly surrounded by.
Sure enough, listening back to any of the songs on this playlist makes me think of that magical trip to the desert in June 2022. This post has been sitting in my drafts since then, thought I’d make it official at last. I think it’s a fantastic playlist, featuring artists like Emmylou Harris, Cassandra Jenkins, Marisa Anderson, The Roches and more. Put it on on a roadtrip, or on the subway, or on a bike ride. Especially now that the weather is getting better. I also wanted to post something a bit more seasonably appropriate than my last playlist I put up here. THIS is the early summer soundtrack you’re looking for.
Sitting on a plowed snow pile in the middle of a dead mall’s parking lot, the sounds of rushing cars bleed over from the highway across the litter-choked, barren tree-lined median. You think you know all there is to know about love, and you and your partner know the universe buckles under the weight of your mutual infatuation. Your car is parked but still running. The grey clouds hang heavy, bloated. Something bigger has to be in store for the both of you someday, right?
Just in time for the summer, I’ve come to share with you a… dead-of-winter playlist. Ennui Potpourri is a playlist that was borne out of a few extras from my last playlist, Winter Jacket Love Letter, that didn’t make the cut. However, this is not a collection of b-sides. This is a different vibe compared to the last collection, although they definitely exist in the same universe (you could say that Ennui Potpourri could be a sequel, or a prequel, to Winter Jacket Love Letter – which you can listen to HERE).
In the scenario for this playlist, I envisioned a pair of lovers (most likely early college, or at least “young-in-brain”), and their budding romance feels larger than life. The setting is a crumbling, post-consumerist world, specifically in the parking lot of an abandoned mall. It’s inspired by news of personal childhood malls shuttering, giant, empty parking lots that are taken up by large plowed snow piles that collect litter and take way too long to melt. It’s about a crush that feels astronomical, every sigh a seismic shift in not only your own body chemistry, but undoubtedly the universe. Will you ever escape this town you were born into? Will months of bleak skies and muted sunsets ever end? How will the world ever comprehend the time and space-bending qualities of our attraction and understanding? Brains hardwired to contemplate love and love only.
Pulling from a pool of classic dream pop tracks by artists like Trailer Trash Tracys, You’ll Never Get To Heaven, Strawberry Switchblade and Insides, along with a little hazy, jangly material by Black Tambourine and others, makes for a selection I feel like works well if you’re feeling very tender and emotional about a syrupy infatuation. Going a bit deeper into the setting, it also works if you’re feeling disillusioned about the current state of capitalism (and nostalgic for the versions of capitalism of your youth, aka going to malls with friends), the death of malls and in-person interactions, the loss of tactile examination of material goods before you buy them and potentially the environmental impacts we’re being faced with right now because of this overwhelming, planet-killing reliance on online shopping. The death of small towns. The fact that most towns and cities are purely covered by gargantuan parking lots, and what that means for the environment. A shitty cyberpunk future of asphalt. But really it’s about love. If that all sounds up your alley (as of posting, May 2024), then go right ahead and press play.
Howdy folks – gonna keep it brief since I’m currently hitting submit on this on a plane. April was a bonkers month for new records, as well as in my personal life. And guess what, May hasn’t been any different. Take a listen to some of these records here and let me know what you think.
Apologies for the delay once again – there was A LOT of great music out in March! I even broke through the 10-album goal and listed 12. From surprise AOTY contenders, to newcomers, to reliable favorites, March 2024 had it all, plus a ton of great tunes that come off albums I don’t feature below, but list in the GR8 SONGS segment! Don’t miss it!
Another late addition to the Recommended Albums party, but an addition nonetheless. 2024 is already shaping up to be a great year for music, as seen below with all these fantastic records. The Mk.gee one in particular I’ve been blasting for a while, along with the delirious Contrahouse.
I thought it would never come, but I finally was hit with the inspiration to feature some great albums from January 2024. December 2023 is a lost cause by now, but February shaped up to be a solid month. Looking forward to getting more solid records this year.
Here we go folks – it’s honestly my biggest 2023-related post of the year. This was the ninth year I’ve actively kept track of the songs that have sculpted my year. Whether they added clay or shaped me into who I am, these songs were the soundtrack to everything as it happened. If I was obsessed with a certain song, replaying it over and over, it goes in the list. If it was a song that I was listening to when I saw the best sunset in my life, it goes in the list. It it was something that was played a lot around the house with my partner, or a visceral cut I saw performed live, or anything that will clearly be attached to specific memories, emotions or feelings, it goes in the list. I’ve described it as a scrapbook of sorts, a collage. You can look back at older Retrospective posts HERE.
This will be my final 2023-related post, I’m sending it off in style. (I will not be doing a Recommended Albums of December 2023… I didn’t listen to a single album from that month, I don’t think). Thank you for reading Warm Visions for another year. We completely smashed my view count record this year, so I’m feeling encouraged to keep it up since people are clearly finding this blog. I also somehow got a ton of new Instagram followers as well, so shout out to y’all.
Below you’ll find 100 songs that soundtracked my year as it happened alongside a little blurb to go along with them. After that are my total listening stats for 2023 (most listened-to artists, albums and songs, etc). Then will be my other media wrap-up (movies, tv, books, games), and finally I have some wrap-up thoughts for 2023 as a whole. Thanks again for reading, and here’s to a healthy 2024.
Warm Visions 