Monthly Listening: Oct 2025

[adevyish]

was saying to a friend that i had been listening mostly to shoegaze recently because i needed familiarity among the stress. he joked that we’re getting old and our music tastes are stuck in our younger years. which, yes, my favourite artists have all at least been around a decade but am i truly calcifying? the only new-ish producer i like is haraguchi sasuke and even he’s been around for a few years now. i have no idea what laufey sounds like! there’s a coachella 2026 act i only know due to a child on taskmaster aotearoa!

i read a guardian piece recently about how rockabilly is dying because it hasn’t been revived or referenced by pop music, unlike many other genres. it feels like every other month there’s an article about the death of rock music, but is rockabilly truly dead when there was an entire baz luhrmann movie with that guy who i pettily dislike? sure there’s no innovation, no new life breathed into this granite genre, but the genres rockabilly is indebted to are still flourishing. perhaps it’s the narrowness of the genre: like shoegaze’s orbit around mac demarco because if you go too far into the electronic oort cloud you are now dream pop.

i think the true measure of my obduracy is my dislike of hyperpop. even though i like kawaii bass, touhou two-step, happy hardcore, and a dozen other extremely-online-in-2006 edm sub-subgenres the world now calls hyperpop, i simply do not like hyperpop! give me a melody, or a catchy beat, or something. if i hear one more ennui-laden, autotuned-to-mariana-trench hyperpop track i may toss soundcloud out a brutalist skyscraper.

oh right. the songs.

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• Sweet John / Bing zai xin li
  • Their latest album has the distinct touch of a wretchèd label exec. A couple of songs still manage to shine, like this math-influenced pop rock piece.
• Atarayo / Shinaide ★
  • In the style of a classic mid-2000s j-rock belter. I can picture my uni self singing it at the top of my lungs in a tiny room, door firmly shut.
• Rei Yasuda / Hikari no Sumika
  • A power ballad hinges completely on the singer’s voice, and Rei Yasuda’s time-worn tones do their job to amplify the angst. My only complaint is a proper ballad should be at least 5 minutes long, and this is a streaming-friendly 3.
• Ray / Tentai
  • Shoegaze that starts restrained, and keeps a slow dreamy tone as it leans into the amps.
• White Frequency / Survival ★
  • A jittery dance beat with heavy metal guitars kicks off this song, but the chorus slows down to a proper Y2K visual kei paean. It’s a weird mix of different decades of rock styles but it works well.
• hardnuts / 13th ★
  • Speaking of other eras of visual kei, hardnuts’ latest album is a great go at it. But of course like many of the best visual kei–sounding J-rock of the past decade, they’re just some regularly-dressed people in very ragged t-shirts.
• neochi / Sora wo Tsukamu you na Hint
  • Always delivering with the jazz-math rock, but with a more idol pop spin than some of their other songs.
• Laura day romance / platform
  • A bit of a folk touch to their typical dreamy alt rock.
• ivy / yugamu pink ★
  • A gorgeous hopeful shoegaze song.

Bonus: Fine, have some pop

• Non / GwGw (prod. Kana-Boon)
  • The Pokemon music project has now granted us pop punk Psyduck.
• Yuka Nagase / Right or Left
  • Some silly and incredibly catchy sing-rap.
• Louis Tomlinson / Lemonade (@ BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge)
  • Even better than a live brass band is the weird xylophone bit — very Hot Chip.

Comments

[petsohp]

monthly lists of music...this is catnip to me. let me know if u ever want to expand to reggaeton that isn't 'gasolina'.