I was all set to write more about LØLØ, the Canadian artist who has been putting out somewhat anonymous but competent pop hits for a few years now, and her new album God Forbid a Girl Spits Out Her Feelings!, which in concept (“what if I just stopped mucking around and made a classic mid-aughts confessional alt-rock album without some other hook”) is the best album I’ve heard this year. But I feel stuck appreciating it at a stubborn distance—which I find compelling, like it’s more an idea for an album than album.

But then the New York Times published a list of greatest living American songwriters (no comment) and conducted what I think is one of the only long-form interviews entirely about songwriting craft I’ve heard from Taylor Swift in many years. So screw it, I’m talking about that.

Some revelations in the interview:

• She reveals the extent of her obsession with emo music and especially its lyrical construction, though she doesn’t give an exact timeline of when exactly she was studying Fall Out Boy and Dashboard Confessional lyrics. Certainly later than 12 but probably earlier than 17. My sense is that direct emo tropes don’t really start to show up in her music in full force until after Fearless, but maybe it’s in there earlier. Swift directly quotes the line that Isabel Cole used in her incredible essay on Tortured Poets Department from 2024: “I’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song.”

• In 2024 I wrote: “Taylor Swift seems to come up with lyrics like a rapper might, in disconnected bits of inspired wordplay or the perfect one-line evocation of an idea, which is then sometimes backfilled with other words to make it scan or, just as frequently, left stranded with other one-liners like a confetti of fortune cookie slips.” She all but confirms this, talking about carrying around an enormous list of words, phrases, and one-liners that she hooks into whatever song she’s working on. (This strikes me as similar to how Kendrick Lamar describes writing songs. Daniel Radosh claims that Bob Dylan’s songwriting process looks like this, too, especially since the 1990s.)

• In one of my favorite moments, she comes up with a distinctively Swiftian phrase on the spot to describe something she might have noticed in post-adolescence and early adulthood: “candle ash on the cuff of the shirt and the button,” an image that I have trouble visualizing (what is “candle ash” and how does it get on someone’s cuff?) but you can tell it’s interesting to her as word sounds: “Can-dle ash on the cuff and the button.” (“I have little phonetic things,” she says.)

• There’s a compelling, though maybe conveniently post hoc, explanation for the line “when we’re on the phone and you talk real slow, ‘cuz it’s late and your momma don’t know” in “Our Song,” rather than talk real low. She says that she doesn’t like ending a word with a consonant and starting the next one with the same consonant. Whether this is technically true or not, I’d never just tried to sing it as “real low.” It doesn’t sound as good!

• If you didn’t think she was pandering to me specifically in this interview, she complains about the label of “confessional” and how it often wrongly connotes “messy,” and should be applied to more male artists (she brings up Sombr). “Are rap beefs messy? Or are they confessional?” As the only music critic to make a direct comparison between Young Jeezy and Ashlee Simpson, I very much enjoyed this.

More on LØLØ’s incredible disappearing/reappearing personality act next week in the album and song round-up, maybe.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. ADÉLA: KGB
Slovakia

Do I love this song, or am I just rooting for ADÉLA and interested in an up-and-coming star talking about studying English from age eight so that she could infiltrate the US marketplace? Probably the latter, but I’ve come to think it really is a stronger song than I gave it credit for at first. I can’t help but set her against Katseye, her onetime reality TV competition, and note how naturally stardom comes to her after all that hard work, whereas you can always see how hard Katseye are working in a way that I find at best annoying and at worst distasteful.

2. Paloma Morphy f. EMJAY: Qué ves en mí?
Mexico

3. GRTSCH f. Medio Picky: Mamita
Mexico

I also don’t think you need to infiltrate the US marketplace (or sing in English) to knock it out of the park these days. More alt-rock noises from up-and-coming Mexican pop stars, from EMJAY’s recent EP to this collaboration with Paloma Morphy, who has always been closer to a post-Lorde confessional sound. Then, the second mix appearance for GRTSCH with some hard industrial clatter in the lead up to an almost tango-like chorus.

4. Natalia Doco: Hacha
Argentina-France

5. LUCIYE: Sabotáž
Czech Republic

For the artier side of clave-oriented pop you could do worse than art-pop smeared with guitar squeals from Argentine-French Natalia Doco or Brazilian-style pop-phonk from Czech artist LUCIYE. I used to be able to provide a handy distinction between Brazilian phonk and Brazilian funk—it has to do with whether there’s a hard potato-sack thump on all four beats with with some clave accents interspersed (phonk) or if the clave is driving the rhythm with a hard landing on the four, possibly via potato sack, or cartoon anvil, or a pile of bodies living or dead (funk)—but I’ll admit things have gotten even more mixed up than usual in the past year or two and seem harder to disentangle, especially when it’s getting reimagined in Eastern Europe, which, to make things even murkier, has its own substrand of phonk, to which this particular song bears basically no resemblance.

6. Ikkimel, Florida Juicy, nocashfromparents: Not Today
Germany

I am now drawn to enough German novelty filth on a weekly basis that I have to do a quick scan to see if I’ve featured an artist before. And yes, as I thought, this is the same Ikkimel who first drew my attention to this scene(?) with the delightfully foul “Unisexklo.”

7. Popa: Dove andiamo a ballare questa sera?
Italy

Disco pastiche with a period aesthetic video that doesn’t make me grumble like a guy examining the epaulets in a historical reenactment. They stick to what looks like a simple low-budget 16mm shoot and don’t crop the rounded edges around the frame. Don’t mess with what works!

8. Karl Wine, Sleazy Stereo, ValsBezig, Reanny: Baddie Alarm
Netherlands

Some dancehall that as best as I could tell is from all Dutch collaborators, constructed a little bit like baile funk but with a dancehall vocal on top. If I couldn’t do phonk/funk justice there’s no way I’m going to get across what’s going on here.

9. Miimii KDS: Coming
Guadeloupe

Breakout bouyon star with the inevitably paler but still good follow-up to her hit “Se MiiMii,” the official video to which seems to have been taken down in a copyright claim. Download yr faves!

10. LinLin: Maman m’a dit non
France

The better bouyon this week is from LinLin, who is from France and has put out a few real firecrackers this year, including her bigger hit “+” (“Plus”) which I might feature on a future mix.

11. sportcafé: Сумнівне кохання [Sumnivne koxannya]
Ukraine

Flat, thin post-punk noises from a Ukrainian group I’ve featured before and called “tuneful Ukrainian goth-pop.” This is notably less gothy, like they strained all the juice out of their sound.

12. Kathryn Mohr: Property
US

I like how this song traps itself in the opening riff of “Airbag” by Radiohead and fights its way out the whole time, like if “Airbag” was actually recorded in an airbag.

13. Coals: Basen
Poland

Polish art-pop group goes a bit too mellow, sometimes bordering on somnambulant, for me to handle in more than small doses, but this is the right dosage.

14. Hana: Un sólo parpadeo
Argentina

It’s a tough year for an Argentine electropop star with an arts background to keep using HANA, especially when she has what to me seems like a perfectly stage-ready given name (Florencia Ciliberti). Seems bound to get lost in a morass of search results for the Japanese girl group. But I was able to find her website eventually!

15. noffkoffska: w_moim_małym_pokoju.mp3
Poland

Needed to fill my Polish bedroom-pop quota. Lucky find.

16. Maryam Saleh: El Faqd
Egypt

I heard a different track from this album in the Peoples Pop World Cup (Saudi Arabia won its first match of three! It feels weird to be rooting for Saudi Arabia!). I don’t think I found this one from that lead, though I did like the song in competition. Has the cosmopolitan artiste layer I so often need to make Egyptian music scan. Someday I’ll figure out how to get down more reliably with the stomping 2/4 foundation of Egyptian pop without needing to cut it with something.

17. Hannah Peel, Beibei Wang: Awaken the Insects
UK/China

Golden Beatology-core—arty UK DJ and Chinese percussionist who claim that this album is a tour of the Chinese Zodiac or something. Bio mentions “Peel’s uncanny ability to evoke the atmosphere of a city she had never been to,” and that is in fact what this sounds like (not derogatory, but not entirely complimentary ), though Wang’s insistent, borderline hyperactive, overlapping vocals are the star of the show.

18. Chino Kidd, S2kizzy: Fashion
Tanzania

19. Aymos, Blackmyth, Blissbuoy f. Canicee, Oga: Xigubu 2.0
South Africa

20. Tkcreedlion, Mordecai, Sandy6eats f. Springle, Philharmonic, Miikey Ndlovu: Swidi K’Phela
South Africa

Ending with three interesting if minor variations on amapiano, which continues to amass in a holdover list that is past 100 tracks already this year. First a poppy take from Tanzania that interpolates “Jimmy Jimmy Aaja Aaja,” then a sunny track that sounds like it borrows from some old-school kwaito, and finally one of my favorite amapiano tracks of the year in a “heart wants what it wants” sort of way, a leisurely party jam that trades off between vocal hooks and smooth keyboard improvisations.

That’s it! Until next time, try to figure out any “little phonetic things” you might have yourself and go make some songs out of it.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from ADÉLA: KGB

I’ve been testing a few of my theories around US pop music lately. My general idea is not exactly that US pop is becoming a distinctive regional form of pop music, but that thinking about US pop in this way is somewhat alien to pop discourse, especially for people (like me!) who tend to centralize the US themselves, and also perhaps for people who have lived in the comparative shadow of the US’s role in global pop culture and distribution.

One side question that this brings up is whether or not there really are currently a lot of distinctively regional US hits, ones that don’t travel abroad. The Billboard Global 200 is a useful metric here, because it has one version that includes the Billboard Hot 100 along with other regions’ data, but a different version that excludes US charts. So you should be able to see the times that there is, by Billboard’s standards, a big hit in the United States that doesn’t hit as hard anywhere else, without having to do extensive analysis of lots of country’s pop charts.

It turns out that something hitting in the US and not hitting on other charts is relatively uncommon in any given snapshot of the Hot 100 versus Global 200 (Excl. US) charts. Most songs that do well on the Hot 100 also do pretty well on the Global 200 (Excl. US); there appear to be many more songs that do well on the latter (non-US) and don’t really hit the former (US). But there are some exceptions that I think are interesting.

(Important style note! I’m going to be referring from here on out to the cumbersome “Global 200 Excluding US” chart as “GXU,” which I think is somewhat annoying to read but is much easier to type!)

Here as best as I could tell are the songs that have done much better (i.e. greater than 25 places or so) on recent US charts than on the GXU charts:1

• Ella Langley: Choosin’ Texas — US peak #1, GXU peak #83

• Kehlani: Folded — US peak #6, GXU peak #58

• Noah Kahan: The Great Divide — US peak #6, GXU peak #39

• Morgan Wallen & Post Malone: I Ain’t Comin’ Back — US peak #8, GXU peak N/A

• Luke Combs: Sleepless in a Hotel Room — US peak #11, GXU peak N/A

• Luke Combs: Be By You — US peak #12, GXU peak N/A

• Lil Uzi Vert: What You Saying — US peak #12, GXU peak #69

• Pooh Sheisty: FDO — US peak #12, GXU peak N/A

• Don Toliver: E85 — US peak #15, GXU peak #100

• Noah Kahan: Porch Light — US peak #20, GXU peak #102

• Zach Bryan: Say Why — US peak #25, GXU peak N/A

Songs popular on US rap and R&B charts that cross over to the Hot 100 don’t always make a comparable leap to non-US audiences, though many others do. Country is even more distinctively regional to the US, which squares with a few ideas I’ve gestured toward occasionally—about the success of country as “regional US music” in the ‘20s, especially on the Hot 100. I mentioned but didn’t really dive into this in a section (plus footnote) of Part 2 of the A-pop series. I realize now, though, that I got my footnote point here backward:

The process through which pop music achieves any level of popularity follows certain universal principles of social diffusion. These principles now apply at a frictionless global scale that mirrors frictionless global access to streaming media. The result is more music from more places getting more popular much faster than was possible in previous eras of mass media distribution.

I think one side effect of this is that lots of American pop music that positions itself as part of an aspiring (or assumed) hegemon ends up seeming smaller, while other regional music forms seem comparatively bigger, including some forms in the United States itself.

Footnote: I think this is one of the factors of country music’s recent world-wide expansion, with the secret ingredient being its full sonic embrace of rap to bring it more in line with pop that tends to travel internationally. Why hip-hop (and jazz and blues and rock before it) traveled so well is a good subject for a different post, one I may or may not be qualified to ever write.

So really what I was noticing at the time was probably not “country music’s recent world-wide expansion,” but rather a regional music of the United States doing very well on measures of US listening. It is much more likely a regional success story, not a global one.

To some extent this may always be true of cyclical country music successes in the Hot 100; it’s somewhat difficult to make a comparison. But I think it’s worth underlining the current gap between US audiences and international audiences (as represented by the GXU charts) here. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” is the song with the biggest discrepancy in scores for any song that has recently appeared on both the US and GXU charts (#1 US versus #85 GXU).2 But pretty much all country music is like this. Morgan Wallen only cracked the top ten of the GXU charts once, for “I Had Some Help” with Post Malone, which peaked at #3. He has only had 3 other songs on the GXU charts across his entire career: “Last Night” (peak #82), “What I Want” with Tate McRae (peak #118), and “Love Somebody” (peak #134). Luke Combs has four songs that never got higher than #76 in the GXU charts, and Zach Bryan has two songs, with the highest peaking at #92.

When I talk about “A-pop,” I am not really referring to a regional form of music that is mostly popular within the US. I’m instead thinking about still-globally-minded US pop music seeming trapped in a battle against many other regional competitors for everyone’s attention. But I wonder if this sort of US regionalization is a related phenomenon. There are many forms of US music that haven’t always traveled well, but what seems different is that these types of more localized music are showing up in measures of listener accounting that tend to be more globalized. That is to say, the Hot 100 is perhaps taking on the characteristics of a more regional chart, one that may get more local and idiosyncratic as time goes on.3

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Courtney Barnett: Mantis
Australia

I don’t have an “All My Exes Live in Vortexes” or “Fist” level indie fave yet this year, so I suppose I will make up for it with volume. First, my favorite of a long suite of indie rock(ish) songs leading off this week, from an artist liked a lot at one time with what sounds to me like her single best song in a decade (not that I’m keeping close tabs). I like how she sings about searching for the melody every morning metaphorically, but the song hunts around for a melody, too, finding it in moments, missing it in others. She gets across a sense of persistent irritation in a grand search for meaning, maybe in songs or in trees, while allowing that beauty can be both a cop-out and a fair enough argument ender.

2. Robber Robber: New Year’s Eve
US

Have heard various chatter about this band, scrappier and more tuneful than some of the big alt names who I tended to like more when they were scrappier and, hm, less tuneful, weird.

3. TV Star: Reality Cheque
US

The last US rock group in this batch, had been holding onto this for a few weeks. Since that time, I’ve found the song additional multiple times, which usually means I will bail on any song I’d been wavering on—it starts to feel like too much of a PR push for the good faith nudge from [6.5] to [7]. Then along came this particular mix and they slotted in nicely. I will just roll my eyes and skip it if it keeps appearing again and again, idly wondering what streaming jackpot it hit (was it made or just happened?). Could be worse: I have now heard the Bloodhound Q50 song “Don’t Blink Or Stare” every single week for one year and three months. I referred to it as “a trifle.” If only!

4. Naaz: Something Good
Netherlands

5. Zara Colombo: Le Stelle
Italy

6. Elmer: Geen Beest
Netherlands

Three more rockers, two Dutch and one Italian. Dutch-Kurdish artist Naaz goes Cure in music rather than just name-dropping them; Italian duo Zara Colombo charm with guitar bends; Elmer ups the brightness but retains a sneer.

7. Nubiyan Twist f. Patrice Rushen: Threads
UK/US

Commence Golden Beatology vibes! The weather here has been a whiplash between scorching and freezing — we turned the air conditioner on last week and I have my little space heater back on overnight as I write this. I’m sure it’s all…fine. Let’s enjoy Patrice Rushen sitting in with Nubiyan Twist and not think too much about it.

8. Baalti, Lapgan: Romance
India-US

I am a reliable sucker for Bollywood sampledelica, will still go to bat pretty hard for Bombay the Hard Way.

9. Deli Dünya: Qamar
Turkey

That said, the -delica award this week goes to a plainer “psyche-” variant from Turkey.

10. Jamala: Flirt
Ukraine

Jessie Ware-ish dancefloor bravura—I should probably give the latest Ware more of a shot, but her last few albums have left me cold, strike me as a little fussy and prim. This has some of that, too, but not so much that it’s a dealbreaker.

11. Sara Costa: GroovinU
France

Straight down the middle cosmo Afrohouse, what more could you ask for? Well, a lot. But you don’t need to sometimes.

12. Sa & Guarabyra: Vem Queimando a Nave Louca (Ao Vivo no Sesc) [1979]
Brazil

This was a nice find, don’t know Sá & Guarabyra, a Brazilian duo known for mixing Brazilian Caipira music into rock styles, but to my ears it just sound like post-disco funk-rock, gnarly riffs ‘n’ Rhodes.

13. 鄭思恩 SHIYIN: Mila
Malaysia

Have been very much enjoying the resurgence of light samba and bossa across regions without it feeling too archly retro—here’s a nice one from Malaysia.

14. Neeti Mohan f. Siddhant Bhosle, Shayra Apoorva, NEVERSOBER: Rab Se
India

Checked to see if Siddhant Bhosle, a producer on this swaying Indian R&B number, was of any relation to Asha Bhosle—no, but he is the son of Sudesh Bhosale, a playback singer for Bollywood films who in one interview claimed that “everyone thought I was Asha Bhosle’s son.” There was a fantastic Bodega Pop Asha Bhosle tribute show on WFMU after her recent passing that you can listen to here.

15. MESTIZA: Salam
Spain

Says here “DJ duo that combines electro and flamenco influences.” Checks out!

16. Horse Lords: Brain of the Firm
US

Finally got acquainted with music critic meme du jour Angine de Poitrine, a math-leaning jam duo from Quebec with some inspired novelty elements—polka dot outfits, bare feet, live looping with a double guitar/bass, ostensible microtones. It looks and sounds great live, and promptly goes limp on the record, which is sort of par for the course for this kind of stuff (see also: Reggie Watts).4 There is no dearth of bands doing time signature fuckery with nominal avant/classical trimmings (phasing, looping, ostensible microtones, whatever). This one was pretty good!

17. Green Cosmos: Kalimba Walk
Germany

None of the twisty turny sharp elbows stuff can compete with a kalimba used for basically any purpose, go fig.

18. Omar Sosa, Joo Kraus, Diego Pinera: El Comienzo
Cuba/Germany/Uruguay

19. Nightmares on Wax, Adrian Sherwood: Sweeter Still
UK

Two languorous cosmo-pop jams to cool down to a close—a jazz hangout that I enjoyed and a DJ chillout sesh that I mostly just abided, but both worked well for the mix dismount.

20. Jon Bastiste, Josh Harmon: Song of Storms
US

A little post-script bonbon from a viral video that turned up in my playlists afterward. I won’t say this is anything more than a Leo-finger-pointing novelty for people who like silly jazz improv and already know the song from Ocarina of Time, but I am one of those people. I have also confirmed that I can actually play this! (And that I need to get my piano tuned and practice more!) Koji Kondo made things easier for me by composing everything around notes in a D Dorian scale, an easy key to improvise in. I wrote a bit about the Zelda soundtrack last year in this post.

That’s it! Until next time, practice!

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Courtney Barnett: Mantis

4

I also discovered that if you google the band now, this happens:

It’s the most wonderful time of every four years—when the People’s Pop Polls turn into the Pop World Cup, a music tournament where players nominate songs from countries participating in the World Cup. Some poll participants are assigned countries to “manage,” meaning nominating one track from the country and offering other suggestions. Each country gets three songs, and all of the songs then go head to head in a series of matches that resembles the World Cup’s match structure.

The preponderance of music will usually be not in English, with lots of potential for finding new music from new places. One of these tracks, Kat Stevens’s nomination from Austria, leads the mix this week. I have disqualified on release year grounds my favorite golden beat on a quick skim: via LondonLee, a 2025 song from French group Astéréotypie called “Cheese Bad Girl.” However, there is no restriction on sharing that song in the intro, so here you go!

I think the Pop World Cup and occasional Not In English polls (or comparable themes with a de-emphasis on well-known Western Anglophone pop) always do a little extra educative work without feeling like a chore, as people look into the regional context of music, learn new artists and genres, and tend to have more patience and enthusiasm for unfamiliar forms and other languages. I seek that stuff out in every poll, but the reason that the polls in general work is because you don’t have to seek it out; that’s just one of many ways to engage.

Which is to say, I will also probably be voting for “Say It Right” by Nelly Furtado, representing Canada and one of my favorite songs of all time. Join in the fun if you’d like—it’s run on Bluesky but all voting happens on Google Forms, so you can participate without having a Bluesky account. Tom also keeps an ongoing list of live matches off of social media on his website.

Here are my two noms as the manager of the Saudi Arabian team. They will join Jesper Haglund’s nom, Seera’s “Shams” from last year—a great find, and better than any of my potential third picks to round out the team.

Asayel: Asliyah (Saudi Arabia, 2024)

There has been a small TikTok-based Saudi Arabian pop boom in the past few years, which is where I found both of these songs. Rapper and social media personality Asayel came to fame and local “notoriety” in 2020 with her single “Bnt Mecca” (“Mecca Girl”) after government authorities decided the video was sacrilegious and ordered her to be arrested. (I originally found her by searching artists targeted by the Saudi government.) In 2024 she released this infectious and deceptively tour-de-force performance over Neptunes click ‘n’ cluck.

Amy Roko: Hia (Saudi Arabia, 2023)

Amy Roko is a pseudonymous online comedy personality who started way back on Vine and moved on to TikTok. She does a lot of media and advocacy for progressive niqabi practices and is worth looking into (I liked this interview). Her rapping is a bit of a side project but she’s good at it.

I like how both of these tracks have a certain sunniness to them that you don’t find as frequently in other countries’ current rap scenes, which in my experience tend to get stuck in painfully classicist boom bap or else sweat a little to keep up with more contemporary and “hyper-” trends. I appreciate their effervescence in the face of a threatening and oppressive environment.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Dani Lia: Schwindelig (omgomgomg)
Austria

The real Renee Rapp? Dizzy, indeed — a formidable opponent in the Pop World Cup.

2. FLVCKKA, Jrkv, NEOBUCHONISMO, LP Ent: Brazil
Mexico

This is the second Brazilian funk-indebted track I’ve shared from FLVCKKA this year, this one much more direct, though the lightly trippy piano and synth string wash in the background is an inspired touch.

3. Quỳnh Anh Shyn: Girl Phố
Vietnam

V-pop is still firing on all cylinders. This one’s a fun genre-mash, classic house organ and rubbery disco bass line gradually revealing themselves, restless in the best way.

4. Tkay Maidza: Must Be
United States

Tkay Maidza is one of those artists I continue to listen to whenever I see her—for about ten years now. Occasionally she comes through: really liked her Pixies cover on a 4AD comp, and now here’s what sounds like a periodic reintroduction to her somewhat chameleonic charm.

5. Didi B f. Zlatan, Chley: Je m’appelle
Côte D’Ivoire/Nigeria/South Africa

An interesting collaboration here—Ivorian star Didi B is first billed but the collaborators pull the sound away from Ivorian pop and toward Nigerian/South African hybrid amabeats. Gets more juice out of the combination than that particular pipeline tends to provide these days.

6. Tera Kòrá, FS Green, Freezy: Get Busy
Curaçao-Netherlands/Saint Lucia

From what I can tell this is a pretty good hipster simulacrum of Caribbean dancehall from a Curaçao-born and Rotterdam-based DJ and producer—could only find a reliable link to the song on Bandcamp.

7. DJ Kawest, Forever Music: Konpa Paradise 4 - Wasn’t Me Remix
Guadeloupe-France

DJ Kawest’s Konpa Paradise series continues to provide enjoyable twists on and perversions of pop classics, none getting close to the breathtaking “Get Ur Freak On” head-fake of part 2. But I appreciate that each one stands on its own despite messing around with an outsized sample.

8. XYVRL, Ivo Impreso: Scottie T (Remix)
Philippines

A nimble romp through a desert of outdated pop culture references—I caught “beast mode,” Tarantino, and Finding Nemo in quick succession in XYVRL’s chorus, all of which still somehow best Ivo Impreso’s verse.

9. kuudere, Reikko: Summer ‘16
Japan

No idea where this satisficing Japanese landfill hyperpop came from, have been searching my playlists for ten minutes now and see no trace of it. Maybe it was an algorithm gift? It happens sometimes! (Not often.)

10. DJ DEIVÃO, mc pl alves: Como Que Vou Acreditar no Amor
Brazil

11. DJ Lopez, Mc Gw, Mc Lekão, Conexão do Funk: 125 Bpm do Xxx
Brazil

12. Staffan Lindberg, Mc G7: Botâo
Sweden/Brazil

13. DJ Mandrake 100% Original, MC LIPEX: Piano do Mal
Brazil

Brazilian funk block! DJ DEIVÃO fits farty oompah into hard clave; my radar gun confirms “125 BPM do Xxx” goes its advertised speed; a Swedish interloper smuggles some dubstep into a particularly uncool but still successful hybrid; and my favorite of the bunch is phonk/funk that pounds out a salsa-like piano figure and hits you over the head like…not a hammer, but maybe one of those padded Whac-A-Mole mallets.

14. DJ Aka-m, John Trouble, Kukupela: Fim de Semana
Angola

I really need some better leads on Angolan pop — might as well plug Jonathan Bogart’s 2025 list again and follow some of his leads myself.

15. VICKY: Bunte Scheine
Germany

More German viral novelty! This one’s relatively clean, too, just lots of bright bills in baggy jeans.

16. Baimint: คนมันเฟี้ยว
Thailand

I compared Baimint indirectly to MILLI in her first appearance on a mix last year, more in charm than skill (I wrote: “sounds like a character that MILLI would have impersonated for a few seconds in a verse in ‘Sudpang!’”). Still true!

17. User116: 杀
China

18. uzi9ine: Come Here
US

19. 09PEAS, Artahe: Lightboy
France

Noisy block! I assumed all three of these were from billdifferen’s March roundup, but I see that only the low-rent French house-pop from 09PEAS came directly from the list.

Uzi9ine was featured, but he has gone viral enough with his dank DMV hit that it is now lodged permanently in most of the rap recap playlists I pull from. Unlike Skino’s “300B” last year, it does not sound quite enough like “the rapper is trying to stay on beat while he and everything around him fall down the stairs.”

That leaves Shanghai-born and London-based User116 with the rare hypertrap assault that lands for me, one from Ryan Dee’s rolling songs list.

20. THEFOODLORD, Bill Rothko: Fancy Clown Husband
US/UK

One of the handful of retro-ish backpackers I single out in a given year, congratulations to THEFOODLORD (569 monthly listeners on Spotify) for this honor.

21. Fetty Wap f. Divinity, Ymanie: White Roses
US

I always really liked Fetty Wap’s plaintive honk when he broke through on “Trap Queen,” and on this one he sounds like T-Pain shedding the Autotune, revealing that there’s always been a Pretty Voice(TM) under the pretty voice. I like it best when you still get a few glimmers of the old honk, though.

22. Praed: Assarab
Lebanon

A lot of short songs this week, so there was plenty of time for this avant-jazz Lebanese group to go long with a frenetic groove that starts somewhere between Sam Gendel and Polysics and finds plenty of other routes to try out on its way to minute eight.

23. Rish NK: Idichakka
India

Curious if YouTube is deceiving me about the popularity of an Indian film tie-in song, from the Mollywood film Derby,1 whose official trailer has 2.6 million views even though there are only about 3K on this upload from the soundtrack. The song has a slapped-together charm, sounds like it’s augmenting the wind section with kazoos but still gets an actual flute solo in there.

24. Talal Fattal, Samini: Black Stars Straight to the Top [2006]
Ghana

Ending things with the non-pop World Cup, a time capsule celebration of Ghana making the tournament for the first time in 2006. The song sounds like it was recorded twenty years prior to that.

That’s it! Until next time, go check out the only World Cup you are guaranteed to feel good about participating in.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from VICKY: Bunte Scheine (“ich hab' noch dreiundneunzig Cent”)

It has only been two weekends since the last time I sat down with a big pile of songs, but that still means I have quite a backlog to sort through this coming week.

I didn’t have a ton of time for discourse in those two weeks, but I have wanted to write something about a calcifying pop myopia that I’ve been noticing for a few years now. I was thinking about it looking at what feels like the hundredth absurd “genealogy” chart of pop music I’ve seen, that begins with Madonna and ends with a group of minor stars that to me have little to do with their supposed lineage.

I’ve been having a hard time categorizing this sort of pop chat, which seems to fall somewhere between fandom conversations, social media spitballing, and shallow YouTube native criticism. It is characterized by a stunted timeline that rarely goes past the mid-to-late ‘80s, assertions of a shared canon of stars that seems haphazardly cobbled together, and the persnickety flowcharting of what to me look like arbitrary associations.

What it reminds me of is…me. When I was sixteen.

I was pretty late getting “into music,” by which I mean having strong opinions about and studying popular music closely. I’ve written about my rock-critical history before, but to recap: in my junior year of high school I realized that the kids I wanted to talk to about movies talked about music half of the time and I wanted to keep up. The first thing that really stuck in my craw was three people having a conversation about The Joshua Tree by U2 and having absolutely no idea what the hell they were talking about.

So I threw myself into a frenzied study of rock history. But it wasn’t just any rock history, it was a weird version of rock history that had congealed into a blob of conventional wisdom on the internet, across indie message boards and websites. It was typified in Pitchfork, where you’d learn that the Beatles were extremely important as long as you discounted the teenybopper stuff, but also that Pet Sounds was wildly overrated (a subject of roiling debate) and the Rolling Stones were kind of passé (no such debate that I can recall) and the Pixies and Pavement were gods. I have a graveyard of ‘90s recommendations that came as a historicized package but that I see no particular rhyme or reason to now—though I do regret selling my copy Eccsame the Photon Band by Lilys. It was an authoritative-sounding history from a group of people who were mostly just describing the records they happened to like (fair enough).

None of the reference points really meant much to me early on, so I sort of went along with it, bought albums that were said to be important, avoided ones that were said not to be.1 I liked the Doors and Pink Floyd, but I didn’t invest much in them (literally—I was still buying a lot of CDs at the time). I was really into Frank Zappa on the recommendation of a teacher, but the herd was steering me toward Captain Beefheart.

Now that I’ve had a few more decades of sense-making under my belt, I recognize how slapdash all of this ostensible canon-making was—to be clear, mostly on my part, but also on the part of those early sites and a few sniffy online personalities. This is maybe just the nature of canon-making.

But there was something specifically slapdash about the indie canon, which seemed to absorb little bits and pieces of broader conventional wisdom around classic rock but not others, deified a few non-indie nobodies that I never understood how anyone could possibly like, and drew meticulous lines between big influences and many tiny little ripples in ways that were exciting to me when I was younger but now make little sense to me. The story about the past seemed to change to retroactively match whatever minor contemporary indie artist was now in the spotlight. I came to eventually understand that the historicizing was happening backwards: find the next big thing right now and make the “canon” fit to it. It was never really about the past; it was about making some version of a past to fit the present, so that the present—which was small and insular by many metrics—would seem bigger and more important.

My sense is that some version of “pop music”—most of which really falls under the umbrella that I’ve been calling A-pop—is going through something like its indie phase. What’s important about that distinction is that it’s an audience distinction more than an artist distinction, per se. The rock canon of indie sites in the early aughts didn’t only comprise “indie acts,” but conversations about every act was “indie” because of the weird way that they distorted history to make a selective crop of minor contemporary artists feel worthy of sharing that same canon.

I think the same thing might be happening now with the sort of pop music that was once dismissed in those indie conversations: a need to shrink the field down to something manageable, to meticulously catalog its smallness as a sort of illusion to make it appear larger. Again, this may in some sense just describe all canon-making—and I would bet that many of the flowchart-makers are themselves pretty young. But I think most people really into indie rock music in the early aughts would tell you that it felt small then, and felt in need of a defense against the tides of more popular mainstreams. It seems similar to defensiveness about certain pockets of pop music now, which have lost their claims to a coherent mainstream and need other ways of asserting importance.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Six Sex: Not ur mom
Argentina

Well, folks, the song of the year has arrived — in fact it arrived a few weeks ago, but I had several mixes in the pipeline already and only got to share a few breathless posts about it over on Bluesky.

It’s Argentine provocateur Six Sex’s “Not ur mom,” a real hoot, blahs blah-ed and nyahs nyah-ed, that strikes me as equally funny in or out of Spanish. To my surprise, the only explicitly racy line seems to be the, er, titular joke. (Fair warning, the official video, a combo of “Not ur mom” and lead-in “Ultra Terrorific Fantasy” is highly recommended but maybe not at work.) I hope this is the opening salvo for a whole album—she’s already released a follow-up, “boyfree.”

If you need a primer on Six Sex, try Richard Villegas’s profile from 2024 in Remezcla, which anointed her “queen of the perreo rave.” On paper she seems like an Argentine Charli XCX, including precocious rave attendance, canny collaborations, and an eye and ear for transgression within alt-pop’s plausible deniability that you’re doing it as a bit or as commentary. All that is fine as far as background goes, but I don’t think her previous work quite prepares you for what’s happening here. This is doors kicked down stuff.

Being late to artists like this always makes me wonder if I should be trying to follow scenes more diligently. One reason I don’t really follow scenes very well is that my ears tend to be on the alert for sparks flying out beyond their boundaries; the scene itself is like a launchpad and I’m always looking up. I think this is mostly a “me” problem—I’m easily distracted—and I don’t want to downplay the importance of the terrestrial. My own role in the musicwrite ecosystem is weird, more based on a restless disposition and addled attention span than some underlying philosophy that says the sky is better than the ground. (Plenty of people can watch both.) I think the work people do in scene cataloging is vital; it just doesn’t happen to spark joy. Only the stars do.

2. Theodora: Miss Kitoko
DRC-France

Speaking of stars, some people just have it, you know? It’s not necessarily a pop star thing, though it sometimes overlaps with pop stardom. There are plenty of non-stars who have it, and it boggles the mind that they struggle so much (well, not really—it’s not really up to anyone in particular). So it’s nice when someone like Theodora ascends in what seems to be a simple, preordained sort of way—hit after hit, spark after spark. Her third appearance on my mixes this year alone and likely not her last.

3. BikaBreezy, Jaytrue: 巴适 (Bashi)
Kazakhstan

Q-pop rapper goes ama-pop, sounds fantastic.

4. Lil Uzi Vert: What You Saying
US

Is this the first Lil Uzi Vert song I’ve paid attention to in ten years? Has there really been over a full decade of Lil Uzi Vert? (What year is it?) Who chose to roll with this sample and why does it work so well? I’m counting this as very tenuous Eurovision influence in mainstream US hip-hop—Indila was rumored to be approached for 2026 for France. They went with this one, which is good, is a very satisfying A-pop story (Monroe was born and raised in Utah) and would also be a good Lil Uzi Vert sample.

5. Yuri: Tekito Make
Japan

My statistical find for artist of the year 2024 (i.e. didn’t realize how many times she appeared on mixes until I looked at a spreadsheet) is back, and I can’t place the obvious song that her flow sounds like. The closest I got was “Work from Home” by Fifth Harmony.

6. Cosmosy: Chance ~switch on~
Japan

One of those “global girl group” deals between Japanese and Korean companies, but with all Japanese members. I don’t know if the standard jazz-inflected K-popish chord progression (which I wrote about a bit here) has a specific name but I am nothing if not neologism-minded so should probably call it something. A J/K progression? (The “j” could stand for “jazz” but also sometimes “Japan”?)

7. Sugar ‘N Spice: Sun-Kissed
Thailand

For more sugar than spice, you’ll probably need to go further afield—Thai pop continues to operate across multiple K-pop generations, not being afraid to sound goopy and saccharine in a seemingly passé sort of way that I still like.

8. KiiKO: KiiKO Forever
Japan/Ireland

Well-produced glitchy J-pop from a duo based in Ireland.

9. MJ Cole f. PinkPantheress: Still Sincere (MK Dub)
UK

A leisurely coasting two-step number with PinkPantheress baked right in, sounding a bit like someone pasted her vocals back onto a track she’d already absorbed into her own music.

10. Anitta: Pinterest
Brazil

Anitta released this charming, low-key samba about plotting out a vacation with a new beau on Pinterest in both a Portuguese and Spanish version, and I kept changing my mind on which one to put on the mix. You get the highlight (pronunciation of Pinterest as “peen-ter-esh”) in both versions, so vote your conscience.

11. Julia Takada: Take You Away
Japan

The opening synth swoop really got me; the rest of the song lives up to it (just).

12. heavy / bloom: Бруд [Brood]
Ukraine

This is kind of what I wanted the Hemlocke Springs album to sound more like—lots of sharp left turns into rapping and chanting and guitar solos, a sense the song can’t figure out where it’s going.

13. Pappy Kojo: Masallaci
Ghana

14. Pablo Fierro: Yal
Canary Islands

15. Antropoceno, sonhos tomam conta: Ayaba Oxum
Brazil

A quick Golden Beatology stretch before the extended indie rock landing: smooth Ghanaian rap, interesting Middle Eastern cosmo hodgepodge from a DJ from the Canary Islands, and an indulgent Brazilian guitar freakout.

16. Avalon Emerson: God Damn (Finito)
US

17. The Orielles: Shadow of You Appears
UK

18. Ida: It’s Not All Right [1995]
US

19. Makthaverskan: Pity Party
Sweden

20. Teen Suicide: Spiders
US

Indie section! Starts with an artist I would have sworn was a Spotify Indie Find or something but apparently has enough cred for a bunch of Pitchfork coverage. Then, former fave The Orielles take the Phoenix route of devolving for each new album—the indie Benjamin Button disease—moving further away from songcraft and toward pleasant in utero (not In Utero) drone, pleasant enough in this case to make the mix. This suite also gives me an excuse for a Numero Group rerelease of an Ida song from 1995 (which means it does not feature Karla Schickele—aka k.—on bass).

To finish up, a great rec from Isabel, melodic Swedish indie I would have pegged as…Irish, maybe? And finally some light downer guitar thrashing from a group that I once again failed to realize features KITTY. I noted in this very blog that she was in this band only a few months ago and yet still forgot again when I pulled this song. I guess she’s still got star potential after all these years.

That’s it! Until next time, follow the stars, even if they don’t become stars.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Anitta: Pinterest (“e agora já são quatro weekends”)

I am away this week, so am writing this intro well in advance. Luckily, it being [checks calendar date two weeks from now] April 2, it’s a good time for a March roundup. Here are the albums and songs I liked and/or remembered this month.

11 Songs I Heard in March (unranked)

• Alizade: Immigrant

• Bebe Rexha: Çike Çike

• Ditonellapiaga: Che fastidio!

• Dziarma: Moment

• María Isabel: Suiza

• Pipiolas: NaNaNa

• Psyché f. MERVE: Yallah!

• Sw@da x Niczos: Synchronija

• Tea White: Season

• YENA: Catch Catch

• Zee Nxumalo & Dlala Thakzin: Awe Mah

10 Albums I Heard in March (lightly ranked)

Still nothing jumping up my personal album charts yet. But plenty of enjoyable albums and EPs.

• EMJAY: Confesiones de las que me voy a arrepentir [EP]
  Mexican neoperreo filth monger goes confessionalish and expands her palette if not to confessional rock proper than at least to broader pop omnivorousness.

• Fif: The lower forty eight
  I love finding a crunchy indie album that lets itself shred a little as a treat.

• Jack Harlow: Monica

  Not going to dive into the controversy around Harlow’s New York Times interview except to say that any outrage expended on Harlow should go double for the interviewers. This album is one-dimensional but the band is resolutely in the pocket even though it sounds like they recorded in a quarantine from the singer. Like if Astral Weeks was…a Jack Harlow album.

• DJs Di Guetto: DJs Di Guetto II

  Jagged Príncipe DJ odds-and-sods album comprising archived tracks from 2007. From the same group of batida scene-makers on the first DJs Di Guetto release in 2006, which was then repackaged in 2023.

• Djy Biza: Art of War

  Have been waiting for “Jazz3” to reappear on streaming since putting it on a mix two years ago. The album follows suit—expansive and jazzy amapiano if you’re into that sort of thing (I am).

• DJ Erik JP: No Clima da Sul

  Haven’t yet found a Brazilian funk album to write home about, but this one is worth at least a post-script.

• Mary Middlefield: Will You Take Me As I Am?

  Winner of the A-pop neoconfessional arms race so far this year, even though she’s technically from Switzerland.

• Pina Palau: You Better Get Used to It

  Haven’t given the whole album enough time to see if I really like anything as much as the two songs I already featured from it on mixes, but it made the cut on a first listen.

• underscores: U

  Gonna tell my kids this is Brat, if only because they’re more likely to encounter underscores through nerdy gamer culture than they are to get into Charli XCX (they probably think Charli is dad music, even though dad only thinks she’s OK)

• Xylitol: Blumenfantasie
  …Gentle jungle? Mm, nice.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Bebe Rexha: Çike Çike
Albania-US

Bebe Rexha has finally found a route that might work for her—leaning in to A-pop, where the “A” stands for Albania. I’ve long teased Rexha’s lightly cursed pop career in part because I do genuinely like her and think she’s capable of better songs than she’s generally made. All she needed to do to win me over this time was get a decent DJ Snake bass line and throw a cedilla or two into the title. And this is in fact a pretty strong post-A-pop (non-Albanian usage) strategy, as you can not only fool cosmopolitan dilettante marks like me but also reduce wasted effort in appealing to an elusive US mass culture. (Of course, Bebe Rexha can’t even really compete for first place in this very specific area, because she’s still got fellow Albanian Dua Lipa to contend with.)

2. ALTÉGO: Call Me
UK

I mostly know these guys from Frank Kogan sharing occasional mash-ups, including most recently them striking while the iron was hot on the t.A.T.u. sync from Heated Rivalry. Played this for my youngest, who was frustrated that they don’t commit to a bigger drop that intensifies when it repeats. I explained that it’s really more pop logic than EDM logic, so you want to return to the same chorus, not provide a bigger release each time. But my kid was probably right.

3. iza tkm f. AKRIILA: Nos keremos tanto
Mexico/Chile

There’s a sort of uncanny valley to hyperpop, where you want to be firmly on the “art” or the “pop” side and not fall into the dip. I think this is a structural weakness of hyperpop, since really good art and pop shouldn’t be so easily separable. Think this chooses to hug the art shore, almost always the weaker choice to my ears, but it works here.

4. Miami XO: Bazooka
US

I thought this song was very funny, and then I had a stray thought that it was genuinely poignant in parts, the synths and the sister doing heavy lifting. My curiosity piqued, I discovered that it is wildly popular, with dozens of remixes tracing mostly the comedy (lots of grannies getting hit by bazookas). To me the result is a compelling botch, the kabooms and kablaows not quite meeting the melancholy. It’s like watching something get 40% of the way to opening a portal to a new universe and then stalling out with the door left stubbornly ajar.

5. Jeune Morty: Katy Perry
Côte D’Ivoire

Ivorian hypertrap about finding answers in one’s glass, but not necessarily the answer to the question “why is this song called Katy Perry?”

6. Alizade: Immigrant
Turkey-Netherlands

Alizade brings a stinkbomb to an “immigration debate.” In the video she drapes herself in the EU flag while the camera cranes out of the bars trapping her in a concrete bunker. She says “immigrant—that’s my nation” like she’s cutting you down to size in the lunchroom.

7. 1LIFE f. Sexsi: OMG
Thailand

Getting early Lonely Island vibes from the video, but if the song is parody, it’s either playing it close to the vest or I don’t get the joke (either seems plausible).

8. Younha: Karma
South Korea

From what I can tell, Younha has always tended more toward J-pop than K-pop, and this is from a covers album where she takes on “Karma” by South Korean duo Dareharu from 2020. “Karma” similarly blurs the lines between the two countries’ pop scenes. If you want more proof, here’s commenter kmsk1999 to provide backup: “Korean: Isn’t this J-POP? Japanese: You’re saying this is K-POP? Western: Did RDR draw this?”

9. Ánh Sáng AZA: Shine
Vietnam

I thought about comparing the synths in “Bazooka” to the Postal Service but decided not to, thought it was a stretch, but now I am compelled to compare the synths to the Postal Service. Or maybe Owl City? Whichever you pick, it sounds better as V-pop backdrop.

10. Zulia: Toma!
Mexico

Whirls and swirls until a reggaeton beat breaks out, but he sings like he’s tiptoeing across trying not to trip.

11. Claudia Valentina: Girly Things
UK

Wasn’t sure where this was from until she name-dropped Harrods.

12. AGGi f. RCEE: Big Spender
Ghana-Denmark/Ghana

Riding a phrygian figure like an old Beyoncé song playing next to you in someone else’s car, you don’t even strain to hear it, just sort of let it seep in as pleasant ambience.

13. Reo, Téhilah: La vie doux [2025]
Dominica

14. TKS 2G, P.L.L.: Boucan Canot
France

Some of my playlists for new Caribbean music have a loose definition of “new,” though they’re generally current enough to keep (for now). That means I’m ending up with a lot of previous summers’ bouyon hits, to which I can only say sorry not sorry.

The shatta stuff I track, however, is pretty well vetted at this point, so I don’t usually get huge hits from the previous year. Whether this one’s a hit is hard to say, at about 300K views at press time it might be? It sounds like one, but that doesn’t always tell you much.

15. Telly*, Biga*Ranx: Big in Japan
France

Reggae and dancehall remain a blindspot for me, partially for taste reasons and partially for not looking hard enough (the two are probably related). Occasionally some song that I’m confident is both Jamaican and must have been released years ago crosses my radar, and I am usually wrong on both counts.

16. Anish Kumar: Passionfruit
India-UK

17. Asha Puthli, Say She She: Pawa!
India/US

Cosmo-pop reigns! Anish Kumar with a “Passionfruit” nipping at the heels of Drake’s only non-derogatory record for “best _____” that I can think of. Then Say She She features Asha Puthli on a slick disco track, kind of a no-brainer collab.

18. La Sécurité: Bingo
Canada

Haven’t featured Montreal band La Sécurité in a while—they appear to be singing in English now, but are still about as good as they usually are in French. Is this the best song with a Battleship grid mentioned in it? There must be other contenders for this title, right?

19. Mura, Udulele: Another One
Kenya

Ending with a suite of pleasant songs from the world café that I could more or less identify in geography but not in time—there’s not an archival rerelease in the bunch. To start, an insistent Kenyan dance track that finds just enough room for guitar and trumpet solos to break through. It could stand more space to stretch out, but then again I am very Jasper van ‘t Hof’s Pili Pili pilled.

20. Tietê: Geologia
Brazil

I absolutely loved this Brazilian ensemble’s 2023 album and especially their track “Zig Zag” (still under four digits on the YouTube views!). This might be the only overlap in coverage I’ve ever had with indispensable but criminally underutilized (by me) blog Brazil Beat.

21. Stella & The Longos: En Retard
France-Germany

Berlin-based band of mostly French musicians, just funky enough to avoid full lounge, which isn’t to say there’s no lounge.

22. Mohamed Doumbia: Kende
Mali

OK this one I would have bet good money was archival, but it’s “a little known bar band playing in contemporary Bamako, Mali that feels like an unearthed classic.” Could have fooled me, and almost did!

That’s it! Until next time, don’t worry if you get fooled, it happens to all of us. You can even get fooled again if you want, I’m not your boss.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Jeune Morty: Katy Perry (“Des fois j'recherche la réponse dans mon verre”)

Was honored to be mentioned in Ann Powers’s NPR newsletter last week in a great essay on looking globally for new music: “I’ve found that seeking out more off-the radar music helps me fight off the tendency to absorb this far-flung music into an Americentric world view. It’s a tiny way I can resist my own provincialism.”

For those of you new to the newsletter, I post a sequenced CD-length mix (at least 20 tracks, no more than 80 minutes) of new songs from around the world every week, along with a bit of commentary for each song and an essay up front. I will occasionally repackage highlights, or you can just skim the ongoing playlist below on Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, or YouTube.

I’ve also written a few larger essay series. My first series was on Taylor Swift. Last year I wrote about our current global pop era of ascendant regional styles, and I refer to a relatively diminished role of the US in this context as “A-pop.” You can read about it here:

So how is A-pop (or at least US-originating music) doing this year? At this point I have a regional snapshot of my own listening in the first quarter of 2026. For the first time ever, the United States has fallen well below a plurality of tracks on my mixes.1 US songs comprise 11% of all tracks, which puts it tied in fourth place with Africa, and below Asia (16%), Latin America (14%), and Europe (13%).2

I’m not consciously downplaying US music in my listening. In fact, I don’t usually think about anything except sounds and vibes when I’m doing my somewhat frenzied weekly listening, which is highly intuitive. The A-pop series was mostly intended as a provocative intervention, poking at English-language music coverage that still treats thriving global scenes competing with US pop on its own terms like they’re geopolitical curios or “world music.” (The historical emergence of “world music” itself is a worth exploring in light of how access to the world’s music has changed over the past few decades.) I still have a deep remaining bias toward thinking and talking about pop culture from a US-centric vantage point, but my ears aren’t really cooperating with that bias.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Katelyn Tarver: #1 [2025]
US

2. Mary Middlefield: Summer Affair [2025]
Switzerland

3. PONY: Superglue [2025]
Canada

One side effect of how I listen to music for this newsletter is that it’s been a real challenge to focus on albums. I used to engage with albums to hold my attention across one artist’s work, but I find that I can do that just fine with strings of singles and EPs now, and this makes me much less forgiving of album filler.

One remaining useful feature of the album format is discovering songs I’ve missed in the last six to nine months—it feels like catching a show I’ve missed on cable in syndication, despite everything technically being available on demand.

Here are three lead singles that are what I would maybe call A-pop by genre (only one is by someone from the US), all released in 2025. They’re from pretty-good-to-very-good 2026 albums by Katelyn Tarver, Mary Middlefield, and Pony, all three traversing the post-windowpane indie singer-songwriter landscape in their own ways, mostly by being less shy about pop hooks.

Tarver clearly put everything she’s got into her lead single, maybe her best song ever. The other two artists are new to me. Middlefield is a playlist find, while Pony was one I found mucking through Rate Your Music with a few strict filters applied. This gets harder to do as the year progresses and too many RYM barnacles get stuck to their recommendations across genres.

4. Pipiolas: NaNaNa
Spain

Charming Spanish electropop whose chorus hook reminds me of something specific from the ‘80s that I can’t place.

5. Hallows: Wear You Out
US

By contrast, this is attempting to remind me of something specific from the ‘80s, but it isn’t. That said, I’ll take budget freestyle moves any time.

6. Jappie Lebona: You’ve Got It [1984]
South Africa

If you needed a reminder of what the ‘80s actually sounded like, here’s the real deal, a chunky synth groove from South African artist Jappie Lebona, from a compilation of South African disco and boogie music from label Music Team, put together by Kalita Records.

7. Cochemea: Dilo
US

Indigenous go-to sax session guy for Daptone with an effortless jam that seems ready for the right media sync and/or barbecue.

8. Vv Pete, DEELA, Lisha G, UTILITY: Toss It
Australia/UK/US

Only the “yeet” would clue you in to when in the last 15 years this blooping and bleeping minimal rap might have come out.

9. LB aka LABAT, Skin On Skin: Feel So Good Around U
France

A breakbeat, a guitar riff, a cooing vocal hook, and a little “hey” punctuating the end of the loop—somehow this is music that A.I. can’t seem to replicate, even though it can nail Taylor Swift’s melody and rhythm perfectly. Strange times.

10. BOWPRAT: ความสัมพันธ์ชั่วคราว (Midnight Love)
Thailand

Something about the production here put me in mind of the late aughts boomlet of sunshine teen R&B like Jessica Jarrell, Priscilla Renea (mk 1), Teyana Taylor (also mk 1), and Vistoso Bosses—the latter of which released their first song in 15 years pretty recently, apparently. These sounds have already worked their way through various regional pop scenes for over a decade, but sometimes a specific synth flute timbre takes you back directly.

11. BigDaddy f. Dangrangto: RẤT LÀ NHIỀU TỎI
Vietnam

Haven’t heard much straightforward clave like this in Vietnamese pop, but maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention?

12. Kuty: Tezgah
Turkey

I couldn’t really tell you why this particular Turkish rap made it through this week, sometimes a song just sorta hangs together, you know? Mix spackle is an important resource.

13. H3adband: BOO
US

It’s been a decent year for meme rap so far, with this low-rent horrorcore plodder ignoring genuine menace for the campy fun of something like Killer Klowns from Outer Space, if John Linnell was collaborating on the soundtrack. H3adband is also responsible for the most shameless use of the “six seven” meme I’ve heard, but this song is better.

14. Marou, Massin, Kempi: Dans
Netherlands

Bouyon seems to be spreading internationally as fast as any regional rhythmic music I’ve tracked in the past few years—here it is showing up among Dutch artists whose other work is more nondescript hip-hop from what I can tell.

15. Loukeman: Elktorn
Canada

A catchy, if atmospheric, electronic bauble that I’d file under “upbeat IDM” if people used that genre descriptor anymore.

16. Roselle f. Junes: Eau Salée (Phil Murray remix)
Canada

The original and remix both have a subdued Eurodance feel, but the more sophistipop rework matches the melody better, I think.

17. Shabaka: Step Lightly
UK

Sons of Kemet leader processes a wind section within an inch of its acoustic referent even before the drum machine thump comes in, though maybe that’s a heavily processed acoustic drum, too? Whatever it is, I think it sounds neat.

18. Miike Snow, Yttling Jazz: Ingrid the Sailor
Sweden

A Scandijazz take on the sea shanty craze from a few years back, maybe? A kid chorus sings some nonsense about the high seas over impeccable vibes (literal only—the figurative vibes are a little off).

19. Parker Graye: Gas Station Flowers
Canada

Sometimes I just happen to share the Don’t Rock the Inbox house taste rather than getting songs directly from them, but I do appreciate being able to outsource a blurb!

NW: There’s enough lyrical heft here to pull it out of echoey ballad mediocrity — as ever, some pedal steel doesn't hurt either.

20. Saranggola Society: Sana’y Di atapos Ang Gabi
Philippines

Throwback twang ballad—I would have guessed this mythical early ‘60s dance band time-warped to the present from Indonesia, which tends to specialize in uncanny retro rock. But it’s a combo from the Philippines who I hope get lots of work soundtracking dances.

21. Marco Benevento, Marianne Mirage: Turandot
US/Italy

Winding down with some exit music to a film, a little 6/8 mystery/melancholy from a US composer/producer and Italian vocalist who go alternately smoky and baroque.

22. Gregory Uhlmann: Back Scratch
US

Some fun with phased piano to close things out, just manages to skirt tinkle and hit twinkle.

That’s it! Until next time, don’t tinkle if you mean to twinkle.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from BigDaddy f. Dangrangto: RẤT LÀ NHIỀU TỎI (“trong đầu tao đã nhiều sỏi”)

I sometimes say that 2004 felt more like 1994 than like 2008.

This is most obvious in technology: by 2008, YouTube and iPhones had both taken off. In 2004, I was in college and still had a landline, which I used to make three phone calls with any regularity: girlfriend, dad, and Pitchfork. It was a weird time; the internet had sort of arrived, especially if you were in college with a fast connection, but it wasn’t yet quite a thing you could take for granted. Social media was for the most part still in its prehistory. The most reliable forms of rapid response in online communication (email and message boards) and direct media access (file sharing) were the same forms that I was familiar with in the late ‘90s, just slightly more expansive and growing every day.

I think of that period, 2004-2008, as an interzone, after Alfred Soto’s term for the period of US popular culture between 1988-1993, the Poppy Bush Interzone. Here’s Soto:

[T]he Poppy Bush Interzone (PBI) comprised a period in American pop music a product of and detached from history. It encompasses the fall of 1988 until the fall of 1993, a period just before and just after Bush’s term in office. Decades aren’t walls of mortar. The increasing visibility on MTV of British acts borne of punk and post-punk resulted in greater crossover radio play. This was the era when The Cure, Depeche Mode, Morrissey, New Order, and Siouxsie and the Banshees enjoyed their dominance; so did Psychedelic Furs (in many ways this era’s John the Baptizer), Echo & the Bunnymen, XTC, and members of Bauhaus, among others. Chris Molanphy has written well about this era. I should note too that my nomenclature owes a debt to critic Ned Raggett, who on the ILX message board years ago first used “interzone” as descriptor.

By contrast, the pop chart reflected the dominance of the decade’s biggest marquee draws. Taking advantage of Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen’s silence after the last singles from Bad and Tunnel of Love, respectively, had peaked, Madonna and Janet Jackson entered a new chart and critical ascendancy. Prince hung in there. Lionel Richie chose silence. In their wake rushed a slew of imitators: Karyn White, Paula Abdul, Milli Vanilli. Although boomer rock acts had adapted to Contemporary Hits Radio during the High Reagan Years, the sudden importance of VH-1 gave the Doobie Brothers, Paul McCartney, the Traveling Wilburys axis, and especially the Rolling Stones another medium on which to preen for viability. Thus, you had the phenomenon of “Mixed Emotions” and “Miss You Much” played within minutes of each other, or “Free Fallin’” beside Michael Penn’s “No Myth.” Fine Young Cannibals landing a #1 album and two #1 singles? Purest PBI. Listeners over the age of thirty-five may remember the PBI as the years when the Beatles catalog in its American compact disc pressings finally saw the sequencing — hence integrity and gestalt — of the original albums restored. World Party, Matthew Sweet, Jellyfish, and less remembered imitators profited.

I can’t really speak to the veracity of Soto et al.’s account of this particular interzone. ‘88-’93 are formative years for me (circa ages 4-8), but I was also a little kid and not well equipped to notice structural changes, while my nostalgia also keeps me from thinking about it too far outside of that personal lens.

But I can say that there is a definite interzone feel in the “Sonny Bush” period. About ten years ago I even considered outlining a book about this period, chronicling different music acts starting in 2004 and ending with the 2008 election. It was modeled on Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, the book by Will Hermes that chronicled changes in disco, rap, salsa, and rock in New York City between 1973 and 1977. At the time, my first thoughts for major stories were indie (Arcade Fire), rap (Kanye West), art-pop (M.I.A.), and either pop (Britney Spears) or maybe confessional teenpop (Ashlee Simpson). Now I think I’d probably want any book like this also to focus on reggaeton or dancehall, which are well outside my own expertise.

I do think the broad strokes of these stories are all still interesting, and many stories have been told in the interim. Chris DeVille’s Such Great Heights captures the indie boom; Britney Spears has had documentary treatment of her reception during this period and general understanding of the tabloid nadir has changed a lot. I think the appetite for diving deep into three out of four of these acts is complicated by their present-day controversies, but I think you could probably tell plenty of stories with a wider lens without focusing on them specifically. (For instance, someone should do a 33 1/3 style book on Hyphy Hitz.)

It’s a little strange to me that I find this four-year period easier for me to historicize than more than a decade of music history that followed, where I feel like I missed most of the biggest stories outside of the US and broader Anglosphere. But that’s probably someone else’s book to write; I’m still following the breadcrumbs backward to try to figure it out myself. I might still write the confessional teenpop book some day, though.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. YENA: Catch Catch
South Korea

Two big K-pop singles leading mixes already in the first quarter of the year (this and KiiiKiii’s “404 (New Era)”), is that better than last year? I can never tell how any particular style is faring with this newsletter. God knows I don’t keep track of anything in my head; that’s what the spreadsheets are for. But between I-liked-it stuff like this big new YENA single—which an online K-pop chat friend connects spiritually to the 2011 2nd gen heyday (when YENA herself would have been about twelve)— and also the don’t-like-it-but-respect-the-hustle stuff from BLACKPINK and IVE, I think my claim last year that even a “bad year” for K-pop can’t hide its center of gravity is looking pretty good.

2. Say Now: Millions
UK

But if you need an older center of gravity, throwback millennial girl group Say Now has you covered. They’re still repping the pop couture from oh-four. Every time that I wonder why they’re not much bigger than they are, I remember that this was in fact over twenty years ago and that I am officially old enough to frequently wake up with mysterious aches from muscles I seem to have pulled in my sleep.

3. Wersow: Party Girl
Poland

I’ll have to hold my thoughts about words versus phonetics and whether this is a distinction in need of a collapse. Will quickly mention, though, that “business woman party girl” has to be said in exactly this way in exactly this song to work, whereas Wersow could have gotten away with many other line readings of “ha! ha! ha! ha!”

4. María Isabel: Suiza
Dominican Republic-US

Was charmed by this one even though my analytical faculties are stalling out at the usual embarrassed grimace and shrug while stammering something like “er…kind of a soca vibe in there maybe?”

5. Dziarma: Moment
Poland

I have no such stalling issues with the Brazilian-inspired Polish weirdo-pop with hulking CGI rats dancing in pink polka-dot bikinis, which they do not look like they’re wearing for the first time today. You go, girls.

6. Raakasaga, Jokujekku: Paha Maine
Finland

Finnish rappers have some bass and a trap beat lying around and put on a show.

7. GRTSCH, Mon Laferte: Streetfighter
Mexico

8. Myaap: Beep Beep
US

Two joyrides. More peanut-butter-in-chocolate Latin/Caribbean crossover with bouyon (and maybe a little Balkan?) touches as a Mexican artist I’m finding hard to Google peels out. Glad to add Team GRTSCH to my badge collection next to Team Team Dresch. Then Myaap zips along, hand on horn, and drops references to previous hits like cursory glances in the rearview mirror.

9. Kuami Eugene: Scatter
Ghana

Afrobeats from a highlife singer who smuggles a party through a swamp of foreboding minor-key synths.

10. $ober, Shyron, MunH0: Sua Voce
Finland

Some phonk songs capture the fancy of the whole world while others flounder in triple-digit views. Such is life.

11. DJs Di Guetto, Dj Pausas: Mootoo (Remix)
Portugal

12. DJ Danifox: Mais Alto Que O Medo
Portugal

Two Príncipe (or -adjacent) picks, one from a wild album of avant-technno from DJs Di Guetto (click through the Bandcamp link) and the other a water-treading but pretty minimalist single from DJ Danifox.

13. Ploegendienst: Surinaamse Broodjes
Netherlands

Resident fact-checkers can let me know what else going on in this sharp, contemptuous Dutch punk song about the racist assumptions strangers make about where the subject is “from.” (“Why the fuck are you asking me where to get Surinamese sandwiches?”) All I really know is that I could hear “contemptuous” just fine through the language barrier and I’m glad I trusted my instinct not to sing along phonetically.

14. Mclusky: As a Dad
UK

Here’s one in English, and I couldn’t possibly tell you what it’s about even based on how it sounds. Turns out that’s because Mclusky did the smart thing and stole the chorus from a toddler.

15. Ragapop: Catharsis II
Ukraine

16. Deli Kate: Оз [Oz]
Ukraine

Two from Ukraine, post-punk with a hint of TV sync-ability, and then the sort of auto-pilot dance-pop that needs a sprinkle of fairy dust to signify, which this one has along with tossing in a wolf howl for good measure.

17. Evaya: Sprint
Portugal

My Eurovision country qualifier skimming hasn’t yielded a ton of gems, but my heart’s not really in it this year. This was the highlight from Portugal, synth-pop with a nice balance of moodiness and brightness.

18. ira4ma: Locket
Malaysia

Amazingly I did not get this directly from the billdifferen February roundup, but I checked back when the video looked familiar. I suppose that either means that Malaysian hyperpopper ira4ma has enough heat to make a few playlists or else I’m swiping from someone else with a similar taste profile. (Double checking now, I think it came from Ryan Dee’s playlist, so here is the requisite semi-yearly shout-out).

19. Sofia Kourtesis, Novalima: Los Poemas No Siempre Riman
Peru

I guess I’ve somehow gotten myself onto the Sofia Kourtesis street team? Here’s a track from her upcoming DJ-Kicks mix.

20. Styn: Rode Druif
Netherlands

Dutch techno hodgepodge that (according to the Bandcamp bio but also, to some minor extent, my ears) mixes hard techno with global styles — bubbling and (so it says but I didn’t really hear) batida. Whole album is good.

21. Souad Massi f. Youssoupha: Congo Connection
Algeria-France/DRC-France

A little world café for my own tastes, but there’s some heft to the arrangements and some tunes underneath—there’s a little more rock and funk elsewhere on the album.

22. V#, summerdayy: Chẳng Quan Tâm
Vietnam

23. Châu Bùi: Big Girl Don’t You Cry
Vietnam

Ending with two V-pop songs, both decent snapshots of the development of the pop scene there, which feels like it’s been holding its own with any other hyphenate you’d care to name. The videos, on the other hand, neither reach for the decadent heights of K-pop in its music video bloat era nor revel in the scrappy low-rent charm of Thai pop. Good thing I don’t care about videos!

That’s it! Until next time, recommend me some good recent music videos, I guess?

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Say Now: Millions

I am participating in the People’s Pop Pop World Cup as a manager, which means that I am responsible for corralling song nominations for a country that is also competing in the non-pop World Cup. I made many jokes about preemptively trying to find a decent song for Qatar or Saudi Arabia, and then very amusingly did in fact pull Saudi Arabia in my random draw.

I’m pleased with the challenge, and quickly found my main nomination, which I won’t spoil here. In going through my newsletters, I see that I only knowingly featured a Saudi Arabian track once, in early 2024: Fulana’s “Ya Thalam Ya Kabes,” from Saudi Arabian label Wall of Sound Records. My research for the tournament has taken me pretty far afield from this lead, though.

I first had to sort through enough khaleeji music to know that it probably wasn’t going to be a good fit for the tournament, and then moved on to the sort of YouTube and TikTok algorithm nudging that is much more helpful for this particular purpose than my usual playlisting methods. For what it’s worth, I did find one khaleeji track that captured my attention, only to realize that this is because someone had uploaded the song at the incorrect RPM onto streaming services, opening up a tantalizing hypothetical cultural phenom of chipmunk khaleeji. (This isn’t all that different from what PinkPantheress, TikTok, and hyperpop all did to pop tempos coming out of the ‘10s, and I like a lot of that stuff better than its predecessors, too.)

Although I have the main nom sorted, I’m happy for anyone’s ideas in this region in the off chance I need other options (seems possible that no one else will nominate anything from Saudi Arabia). According to the tournament rules, this could be someone not born in but now based in Saudi Arabia or a Saudi artist living abroad.

One side effect of looking for songs differently is that I accidentally trained my YouTube algorithm to find Arabic pop that I often miss to the vagaries of crowdsourced streaming playlist curation. (Here is a second plug for Jonathan Bogart’s 2025 year-ends, featuring videos he finds mostly from a well-trained YouTube recommendation system.) The YouTube accounts on my laptop can’t recommend videos at all due to the many extensions I use to strip YouTube down to a minimal white screen. But my unfiltered phone account has been suggesting some great stuff, including this one that I missed in late 2024, from a Syrian/Lebanese duo based in Toronto. Maybe I should do try some algo herding after all?

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. underscores: Tell Me (U Want It)
US

There is a new underscores album due out in March, and the rumblings I’ve gotten from the pop commentariat—plus the lead singles and a recent remix with Yves— suggest it could be major.

2. Sw@da, Niczos: Synchronija
Poland

My favorite Polish find of last year, who were runners-up in Poland’s Eurovision qualifier, continues to synthesize global sounds with a mad restlessness (this time with Afrohouse), like they’re trying to cram the whole world into a little snow globe to shake up.

3. MOLIY, bees & honey: Partygyal
Ghana-US/Germany/UK

One left-field Billboard Global 200 heatseeker meets another one, as the star of “Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)” and the production team behind WizTheMc’s “Show Me Love” (no the other one…no, the other other one) join forces for something that probably won’t make as big of a splash but does let MOLIY swim way out into the ocean without any sense of when she might come back.

4. Thee Diane, Sabrina Bellaouel: Nana
France/Algeria-France

Immediately got a solo track from Thee Diane after liking her feature on a Christine and the Queens track a few weeks ago. In the car, my kid said “this one is kind of interesting,” but when I asked how they’d describe it they shifted intonation: “I’d describe it as kind of interesting.” Fair enough.

5. Ditonellapiaga: Che fastidio!
Italy

Pulled this from the blindfold taste test before learning it got third place at Italy’s Sanremo Festival. (I’m behind on listening to the country-level competitions.) The contenders this year did not, to my ears, feature much of the global genre synthesis I was hearing when Angelina Mango won a few years ago. But any pop song bemoaning things being boring (Pet Shop Boys, The Pierces, babyMINT) or, in this case, being annoying, is a dependable microgenre. Bonus points for complaining about bossanova before going into a little bossanova section.

6. Eve La Marka: TI X4
France

A French rapper whose bouncy-ball flow reminds me of Young Leosia from Poland, but trying to do something more indebted to Latin American pop. Come to think of it, Young Leosia already did that—and she threw in a few log drums for good measure, too.

7. Trim, Bankroll Ni, Bri3, thickney: Guapo
US

8. Bri3: Hard ES
US

9. BunnaB: Not My Problem
US

Three rap singles from our current golden age of Young Women Having Fun in Hip-Hop While Everyone Frets About Rap Dying Or Whatever. A welcome respite from the fumes of the humorless breakthroughs of the last decade on the one hand and the hip but persistently mildewy art frauds on the other—I would bet that at least one of the most buzzed-about noise-rappers appears at a Whitney Biennial before they make a song I’d want to play twice.

Two of these tracks feature Bri3, who on a quick listen seems to have already made a big leap forward from her debut album in October. BunnaB is a dependable ringer that I could have put on a few mixes by now—this is her third single since January. I was holding “Seeumsayin” in reserve for a while but decided on this one instead.

10. Jezzy: La Mujer Que Me Pario
Dominican Republic

Never know when I’m going to find an “M” after the YouTube view count. Seems like a slower than usual take on dembow that makes up for lost kinetic energy with a jarring snare sound, like trying to charge your dying cell phone with a cattle prod.

11. ZXKAI, slxughter: No Batidão [2025]
Brazil

Speaking of “M’s” on the YouTube count, how’s about sixty of them for the latest interchangeable Brazilian phonk dance trend that memed its way onto the global charts! And that’s only the regular-speed version, which happens to be the best one and thankfully is the one getting the most attention. If you include the “slowed” version, you get another 44 million, and that’s before trying to do any TikTok forensics. For what it’s worth, the dance looks easy enough that I could figure it out, or at least as much of it as the teacher in one of those compilation clips who comes in right at the end as a surprise.

12. DJ LK 011, DJ GOMEZ, MC BN: Sarra Na Peça Dos Cria
Brazil

13. Chzter, FLVCKKA, angely2k: 3some
Mexico

14. MC ZKW, Poundshop: Sou Eu Mesmo
Brazil

An interesting trio of funk and funk-alikes. First is a particularly wobbly cut-up of the “Careless Whisper” sax, which is the second use of it in a Brazilian funk song I’ve featured to date. I’m sure there are several more I haven’t heard. Then, three Mexican rap troublemakers hop on some hard clave for a threesome that looks (and sounds) a lot more like sitting around getting drunk with two friends at your apartment and passing out in the middle of a conversation. And finally there’s MC ZKW and Poundshop with the first Brazilian funk song I’ve heard try to surf the recent bouyon wave. Maybe the global ferment torch has been passed—not that you can’t have a bunch of torches lit and passed at the same time.

15. VÆB f. dóttir.x: Gamerboi
Iceland

Iceland dork duo who got into Eurovision last year and now get to rep Iceland in the Other Dave parade of Eurovision boycott countries, albeit on a technicality (I haven’t looked for any other Icelandic songs yet).

16. rusino f. Hatsune Miku: Looping the Rooms
Japan

Patrick St. Michel has a long post on the past present and maybe future of Vocaloid, but I still mostly pick these things out like I’m searching for a keyboard tone that scratches the right itch. My kids’ friends are all obsessed with Hatsune Miku as something other than a syllabic preset. I think she’s more interesting as what I called in the A-pop series an auteurist mirage, “not personalities reduced to instruments, but instruments elevated to personalities.” See also: Addison Rae?

17. asmi: チョコっと好きよ [Choco Kinda Like You]
Japan

No presets, just lots of little left turns in rhythm and arrangement, a song that can’t sit still and is better for fidgeting.

18. Michał Anioł: Lubię Burzę
Poland

Remember how I mentioned a keyboard tone that scratches the right itch? This is one of those.

19. Psyché f. Merve: Yallah!
Italy/Turkey

A standout from a forthcoming Italian psych album with guest singers from Turkey and Tunisia, and sounds borrowed from all over, if by all over you mean the sort of stuff you might find on Habibi Funk.

20. Oskido, Nkosazana Daughter: Ngizimesele (DJEFF Remix)
South Africa

Finally, some Afrohouse that’s not from Poland! Another longtime kwaito and Afrohouse producer with an upbeat edit that mostly tips me off to a stronger original, from a relatively recent track (from 2022). You can follow Oskido’s trail back 25 years, through his first YouTube video in 2011 and then to his DJ sets and Church Grooves compilations from the early ‘00s.

21. Matute Boy, Mulest Vankay f. Xduppy, Mellow & Sleazy: O Batla Nako Or Chelete
South Africa

22. MxCarter, Rody Joh, T-Low: Tondolo
Tanzania

Two solid amapiano and Afrohouse tracks to close things out with. You’ve got another 13 minutes, right?

That’s it! Until next time, feel free to respond to this newsletter at any time with “how annoying!” but hopefully never with “how boring!”

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Ditonellapiaga: Che fastidio! (“Il sogno americano—che fastidio!”)

Haven’t formulated enough thoughts for a proper intro on a few topics of the moment: (1) the relationship between syllable sounds and meaning, and to what extent understanding the words in a song gives something an edge in the way I listen to it. (The short of it: sometimes, but not as often as I might have thought earlier in my life.)

And (2) the expansion of K-pop in the past few years, roughly post-NewJeans, into something not only competitive with American pop norms and ambitions, which it has been for a while, but so obviously eclipsing it. Brought on by Sam3K’s observation on Bluesky about the new BLACKPINK single: “I can't remember the last time pop music sounded or looked this expensive.” (That the single isn’t very good is sort of a moot point, but that does mean I’m less interested in writing about it this week.)

Then I looked at the calendar and hot damn it’s March already! So I can do a February round-up hot on the heels of just getting around to January. No big movers and shakers in the albums category yet.

11 Songs I Heard in February (unranked)

• Paula Biskup: Halo?

• Christine and the Queens f. Thee Diane: Ah Ya

• Emjay: Brainchem

• Hannah Jane Lewis: Consolation Prize

• HUR+ / 林詩雅Grace: Refund

• KiiiKiii: 404 (New Era)

• Magic System f. Didi B: Même pas peur

• Pigeon: Miami

• Luka Salam f. Hadi Birajakli: Toute

• Theodora: Des mythos

• North West: Piercing on My Hand

10 Albums I Heard in February (lightly ranked)

• HANA: s/t
  J-and-sometimes-K-pop group with a don’t-bore-us-etc. hodgepodge pop album that hangs together in a way I find oddly miraculous given the nature of such projects

• Whodamanny: Onda Biloba
  Italodisco revivalists include the kitchen sink, and its a farmhouse

• Liz Cooper: New Day
  An indie songwriter that held my attention at album length!

• Hemlocke Springs: The Apple Tree Under the Sea
  Love it the nerdier it gets, does not plumb the depths of nerdiness quite enough but I am still firmly team hemlocke

• Willow: petal rock black

  Look, I’m not going to claim I loved-loved this album, but I do think Willow is a no-foolin’ genius and I also like the occasional jazz noise

• Magic System: Dôni Dôni

  Ivorian party music; does it maintain the party to album length? Maybe?

• Dina Ögon: Människobarn

  Swedish indie-pop is maybe the closest to a Golden Beatology album this week. I imagine many readers will like it more than I do (though I do like it and have featured Dina Ögon a few times)

• Natoxie: Cout Scrub Riddim [EP]

  A not bad shatta party with lots of good vocalists. Not really an album medium, but could be an EP medium?

• Eem Triplin: a love song for u [EP]

  This one is good, mostly annoyed that I missed his full-length from last year

• Luka Salam: Hassasa [EP]

  All-over-the-place Egyptian jazz-positive bedroom pop, thoughtfully patched together even if it’s still a mess

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Zee Nxumalo, Dlala Thukzin f. Funky Qla, Shakees & Les, MK Productions: Awe Mah
South Africa

2. Tea White: Season
South Africa

Let’s check in on the status of 3-step, which in South African house subgenre years has what feels like a decade under its belt (it’s in circa year 4), which means it is a legacy style before I’ve even figured out how to properly stylize the genre name. From breakout star producer Dlala Thukzin and I-hope-still-breakout star vocalist Zee Nxumalo comes an attempt to fit Thukzin’s production into a contained pop package that I think works pretty well, though I’m not sure why the visualizer above cuts 90 seconds out of an already pop-length edit. They could have pushed it to 5 minutes and it’d still seem short.

Then from Afrotech-centric label Stay True Sounds, Atmos Blaq’s label, comes a producer I didn’t know before, Tea White, with the full 7+ minutes of lush instrumental bliss I’ve come to expect from these minimalist album covers. A producer to explore more — I also like his Afrotech album from 2023.

3. Justine Skye: Thong
US

A rec from Katherine St Asaph, who continues to write a fantastic monthly column over at Stereogum that you should be reading. Another production win for Kaytranada, who has been on a roll with R&B royalty and assorted heatseekers for several years now.

4. Kromow: Look at the Sky
Netherlands

Dutch rapper and producer with a solid R&B hook cut-n-paste and post-mumble sing-rap that has a certain sheen to it. I was not entirely surprised to see a deluge of YouTube commenters admitting that its placement in an ad on Instagram is where they discovered it. As for me, I often like the commercial music without even watching the commercials—when I was teaching high school, every time my head turned for a song I wasn’t expecting to hear in the classroom it was invariably for a YouTube ad before the real song played.

5. Danny L Harle f. PinkPantheress: Starlight [2025]
UK

Well, score another one for me liking something when everyone decides it is no longer cool or interesting. I’ve never been big on the first wave of hyperpop, but the selloutish pop album from PC Music’s Danny L Harle—featuring this song that came out last year—was more interesting to me than any of the golden age stuff. I could also probably give a lot of credit to PinkPantheress’s appearance here, even though it doesn’t really sound like she had much to do beyond throw her vocals into the song grinder.

6. Tenxi, Yung Caters, Jemsii: Liga Baru
Indonesia

7. Effie: Red Horse
South Korea

8. Nori, Kori: i_ain’t_fly (G6)
UK

9. Francis Jeremy, 1MillionU$D: Lazerdim
Uruguay

Four picks taken from or inspired by billdifferen this week. The blog appears to be back (this is why you keep bookmarks and blogrolls, whippersnappers!). He’s started posting a monthly roundup there—here’s January and here’s February.

The first two songs are leads from his best of 2025 list: Indonesian art&B from Tenxi and Jemsii, who both feature on a 2025 song from the hipdut scene (which I have never heard of). Whether or not this particular song counts as hipdut I couldn’t tell you—it sounds like Drake, but not in an entirely (derogatory) sort of way. After that, art-pop from South Korean artist Effie, whose name rang a bell and whom I apparently covered back in November, writing: “Butterfly meme, but it’s a fairy instead of a butterfly: is this fairy trap?”

For some signature billdifferen face-meltage of the sort I usually admire more than I can stomach it, you will need to dive into the lists yourselves; my tastes are Lawrence Welk by comparison. I will, however, cosign the low-rent hijacking of “Like a G6” by UK rapper Nori, if only as an excuse to share this video about the original song’s creation. (Spoiler alert: the Cataracs accidentally put their synth line in the bass track and sold 5 million records.) I will also pass along, if not exactly cosign, the weirdest rap voice I’ve heard since South African rapper Vson’s strangled Death Muppet flow: Francis Jeremy, who is the only rapper I think I’ve ever heard that turns a nervous, tremulous wheeze into a real threat. He sounds like there’s soup dribbling out of his mouth, and he will definitely kill you.

10. DJ SEBB, Junior, Le Jèm’ss, YSN: Tiki Taka
Réunion/Martinique/Guadeloupe

Jonathan Bogart has also been sharing a best of 2025 list that also contains many songs I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard before. Interestingly, Jonathan’s picks often fall on the opposite side of my personal tastes—that is, the opposite vector from wherever face-melt is located. …Face moisturizer?

I can bet that almost nothing I single out on my newsletter lists will overlap—Jonathan’s carefully curated YouTube dumb-algorithm is as unintuitive to me as I’d bet my streaming dumpster-diving is to him. But music criticism is a team sport, and I always find new artists and scenes to follow as a result. My interest in Caribbean music, especially shatta, owes a huge debt to his work.

(All that said, I was going to pick this one regardless because they throw some Soulja Boy style “YOOOUUUUUU”s in there.)

11. Nikita the Wicked, Jkyl & Hyde, CREG: Horsepower
US

A song that in a quick snippet seemed like a sample I’d hear in an underground rap sorta track that gets through to me, but by all appearances this is a couple of EDM DJs moonlighting as hip-hop producer for a no-profile rapper whose bio just tells you to follow their Twitch.

12. Miguelle & Tons, Dav Julca: Quiero Decirte
US/Panama-Peru-US

Miami DJs keep things upbeat but the real star here is whoever supplies the vocals and the clumsy keyboard solo—I believe but didn’t confirm that both are from Dav Julca.

13. Morobeats, Dj Medmessiah: Di Papasakop
Philippines

Ragtag rap posse from the Philippines, can’t keep track of how many people are rapping, but I particularly like whoever is yelling like Zack de la Rocha.

14. Zoe Lucy, Meryl: An Lo Mal
Guadeloupe-Haiti/Martinique

Paused on this one for Meryl, who mostly adds color to a song by rising Haitian singer Zoe Lucy.

15. My New Band Believe: Numerology
UK

I’ve never followed Black Midi enough to know which reductive historical comparison songwriting duo to slot Greep/Picton into, so suffice it to say that I like both of their solo directions well enough, though I’m mostly using this as an excuse to share one of my more cursed mashups: Gracie Abrams vs. Geordie Greep’s “I Love You I’m Holy.” Petition to get both these guys more guest singers, or maybe a nice consulting fee for sneaking trickier charts into Gracie Abrams songs.

16. Natalia Catalan: Beat Up
US

No rhyme or reason to which hyperpop song-shards reach my brain or heart, I guess, but these ones did.

17. HANA: Bloom
Japan/Korea-Japan

Up-and-coming girl group formed through a televised audition process for newer J-pop label BMSG with Korean-Japanese rapper CHANMINA. I had a different song in this spot, but then saw this translation by Kimonobeat, whose translations I follow over on Bluesky for leads on Japanese pop. That got me listening to other tracks—turns out the whole album is great (see album rundown above). You can see what a difference a thoughtful translation makes when you compare the “color coded lyrics” in the YouTube to the Kimonobeat translation. The subtle distinction between the YouTube’s “bloom you can’t grasp” and the stronger “bloom you can’t seize” was enough of a smile to get the title this week.

18. Ranil Y Su Conjunto Tropical: Bahia [c. 1975]
Peru

Another comprehensive restoration from Analog Africa, whose incredible Roots Rocking Zimbabwe got a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album last year. This time it’s a second compilation for Ranil Y Su Conjunto Tropical, a great Peruvian cumbia act apparently rarely heard outside the region.

19. Mei Semones, Liana Flores: Koneko
Japan-US, Brazil-UK

20. Willow: Ear to the Cocoon
US

Yes, I am a sucker for corny jazz arrangements from my favorite singer-songwriters, and yes I think I’m probably grading both of these on a curve. I seem to be really into what Mei Semones is putting down, even when she puts it down a little too gently. Willow, on the other hand, is a generational talent and I have become something of an evangelist, so you maybe shouldn’t trust me when I tell you this new album is good. I do think her stubborn one-woman-band self-production is impressive, for whatever that’s worth (not much, if I’m being honest). I’ll probably let the tangled web of melodic ideas on this song stand in for the rest, though.

21. Yasmine Hamdan: Mor Club (Deena Abdelwahed remix)
Lebanon/Tunisia-France

Never really warmed up to the whole Yasmine Hamdan album after loving “I Remember I Forget” last year, but this spare, skittering remix has piqued my interest to try again, or at least hope for a remix album.

That’s it! Until next time, try to figure out which way you’d like your face to go, on or…off.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from HANA: Bloom.

Had the opportunity to revisit Britney Spears and will.i.am’s “Work Bitch!” while I was putting together my list of songs of the 2010s. When it came out, I gave it a [10] at the Singles Jukebox:

will.i.am is such a dork, we all knew that, but more importantly Britney Spears is such a dork. I think that is wonderful, that we have such a huge dork in the fifteenth year of her unabated music career still blowing up planets and laughing with a little snort at the end (fun fact: Britney Spears is about as far along in her career now as Madonna was when Britney Spears debuted). But mostly I think this song is wonderful, this bluntest instrument in an era of very blunt instruments, bashing everything up not because it’s better (though it is) or because it’s dorkier (because it isn’t) but because these dorks are the biggest dorks, a distinction they have both earned, damn it.

Since that time, a somewhat compelling but unproven theory came out that Britney Spears is not (or is barely) singing on the track, and that the bulk of the song, along with other songs from Britney Jean, was recorded by her backup singer, Myah Marie:

The demo sounds pretty similar to the recorded version, where Myah is credited as backup. The question is whether the vocals are entirely Myah’s. There’s a comparison track—Britney Spears re-recorded the song for her Vegas residency, with those vocals isolated and then matched with the original instrumental:

I am not committed enough to this question to break out the waveforms or spend too much time parsing microscopic differences. The two different vocals already sound pretty similar, and I also don’t know exactly what I’m hearing in either of those original clips to begin with.

The question that I’ve been wrestling with, though, is how much I would even hypothetically care about whether or not Britney Spears is actually singing the original “Work Bitch.”

Although many things about the current wave of A.I.-generated music seems like hype, or like people over-reading the direction of a new technology too early in its mass adoption, the technology’s ability to copy voices is improving rapidly, and at some point A.I. generated voices of celebrities will probably be indistinguishable from a recorded vocal.

Just as an example of where the technology is at right now, Holly Boson created this Taylor Swift song with the following prompt: “A Taylor Swift song from the late 2010s or the early 2020s about performing massive environmental damage by rolling coal in a private jet, spraying cans of hairspray outside while yelling, using generative AI to come up with songs, and so on.”

I wonder if A.I.-generated voices will be used to augment or replace vocals from artists, in a way that’s indistinguishable from tried and true practices like stitching together multiple vocal tracks, slathering on vocal effects, or stacking on sound-alike back-up singers. And the question is whether I’ll care about this in the same way I care about the possibility that Britney Spears does not actually appear on “Work Bitch.”1

But the thing is, I can’t really work out how much I care about whether that’s actually Britney singing. I only know the answer is definitely not “I don’t care at all.”

A lot of things that feel like values in music-listening turn out to be relative assessments that are at best only true in a plurality of cases. In some instances these may be like value phantoms—that is, things you think you might believe until something forces an exception or reveals a contradiction that causes the whole house of cards to tumble down. For my part I try to steer clear of saying anything too definitive when I genuinely don’t know how I feel about something, or if I have never had reason to think about it.

At some level, all music is a magic trick: signifying personality from performance, tools of obfuscation and polish creating something that is realer than the thing “under” the thing—what you hear is what you get. I care deeply for how things sound and what they seem to convey, and I often don’t get too hung up with the documentary technicality of their construction, which might be illuminating or might be totally beside the point. There are songs whose evidence of creation deepens the impact of what the song is doing, and also songs whose resonance totally defies the boring, accidental, or tawdry reality of their creation. It usually doesn’t bother me, or at least not consistently.

But the Britney thing bothers me. And a lot of the A.I. stuff bothers me, too. I certainly feel differently about generated songs than I ever did about, say, AutoTune or synthesizers or samplers, which I always viewed entirely as production tools. I found skepticism or hostility toward them baffling. In fact, I would say that the further extremes of electronic manipulation have often brought out the humanity in the music they produce—like Autotune becoming a primal squeal, or synthesized instruments ignoring verisimilitude to let their various freak flags fly. But maybe there will be more exceptions with A.I., too, and I just haven’t grappled with them yet.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Georgia Maq: 10 Drunk Cigarettes
Australia

I always doubted that “10 Drunk Cigarettes,” the ostensibly A.I.-generated viral novelty from 2024, was actually a fully A.I.-generated song. At the time, I figured A.I., if used at all, may have horked out the lyrics and provided the vocal from a guide track. I didn’t think that A.I. song generation alone could produce a song with such “good bones.” By now I think it probably could, but interestingly I don’t know if the resulting song would be “bad” enough to be so good. Anyway, the song’s pristine skeletal structure is on full display in this crackling cover from Georgia Maq of Camp Cope (h/t to Jacob Sujin Kuppermann). An early A.I. era “standard,” maybe, along with “BBL Drizzy” and Frank Sinatra’s “Cruel Angel’s Thesis”.

2. Hannah Jane Lewis: Consolation Prize
UK

If you need it realer, here’s one of two realer-than-real (neither complimentary nor derogatory) country songs via Don’t Rock the Inbox this week, though this was the only one I remembered was from them (i.e. didn’t pick it out of the blindfold taste test). Natalie at DRTI singles out the line “heard you rode the Bitcoin train to the bottom/ don’t know when to quit boy, that ain’t my problem.” I also like this week’s title bad news coming out of the woodwork. (I imagine it emerging like the girl in The Ring.) There’s more, across a whole EP.

3. Anna Calvi f. Iggy Pop: God’s Lonely Man
UK/US

I am a perennial sucker for both schaffel-stomp and Iggy Pop guest appearances (his old Teddybears feature could have used a dollop of swing), so Calvi doesn’t need to do much to make this work. She holds her own trading lines and does a fun register swap in the chorus.

4. Lydia Képinski: À l’extérieur
Canada

5. Vamo: Des heures au tel
Canada

Two from Montreal: first, electro that is a combination of chintzy and blunt that sounds practically Eastern European (complimentary), and then some nice sing-rap on a clave base.

6. Javi Wayne, Anto Bosman: Hello Kitty
Chile

Campy reggaeton-pop (skews a little closer to dembow, maybe?) from Chile that retains the kawaii spirit of Hello Kitty while also defiling it. Frank Kogan recently had some musings on “neocute” (“i.e., claiming to reclaim cuteness as empowered choice”) which I don’t know if this qualifies as, but I think isn’t unrelated to.

7. Prod.Nifour, Mc Gw, Cacau Chuu: Ela ké Leitada
Brazil

8. Menor Teteu, MC Menor MT, DJ J2: É Só Prainha
Brazil

Two funk picks this week—blown-out brega funk fun with utility player Mc Gw and twice-mixed Cacau Chuu, then Menor Teteu gives “Glad You Came” by The Wanted a defib.

9. pinponpanpon: Pon Direction [2025]
Japan

Despite featuring several batshit pinponpanpon tracks last year, I somehow missed this one from October, where they hold Paris hostage with a baguette.

10. Amayajane, Zae: Spend That
Philippines-US/Philippines

Filipina rappers go way recessive in surroundings but not performance and give a sense of overshooting the mark. Normally this is something that requires some alchemy between vocals and production (like Cassie with Ryan Leslie, say) but here it works on personality alone (barely).

11. Bad Gyal, Chencho Corelone: Choque
Catalan/Puerto Rico

Catalan neoperreo star Bad Gyal with a straightforward scorcher.

12. Lestef KJF Boyz f. Dj Luchshiy: TAKE UR TIME
Guadeloupe

Have finally started backing up my mixes in earnest after figuring out how to mostly automate the extremely tedious process. I’m through 2023 and heading into 2024, and so far I’ve only completely lost two songs: The Emillio and Vagif Nagiev’s light EDM remix of “Azerbaijan” by Muslim Magomayev; D’Athiz, Ke-nny, and Locomeister’s quantum sound “Gumba Fire.” A third song I thought I’d lost: a Nigerian mara (street rap) song by Professional Beat, “Aye lo so (mara),” but I did find a copy of it eventually—in fact, while I was writing this.

Professional Beat, “Aye lo so (mara)”

There are another 10-20 songs I had to similarly reconstruct from other places because they’re off of the major streamers. All of this is to say that I need to be a bit more timely and diligent about the backups, especially for local scenes and songs that originate on Soundcloud or seem to be on wobbly copyright grounds. My guess is that this designation might include crackerjack bouyon remixes of Madonna hits, already only available on YouTube as a session video.

13. 林詩雅Grace f. HUR+: Refund
Taiwan

Taiwanese girl group recommended by ‪Iain Mew, though this particular song—a highlight from their album 9of9 Arcana—seems to be credited as a solo by Grace Lin. Maybe they’re doing their BLACKPINK and post-BLACKPINK careers simultaneously?

14. Haku.: ふわ輪 [Fuwa wa]
Japan

Dubdobdee fave Haku. is back…BACK! as they seem to be every few months. Tuneful J-rock power pop.

15. Luizga f. Faew: A Caverna Ligou No Wifi
Brazil

Gilberto Gil-minded singer/guitarist teams up with (from what I can tell) a backpack-minded beatmaker and create something with electronic logic and mostly acoustic sounds.

16. Cazzu: Jujuy Estrellado
Argentina

Cazzu is a huge star I don’t follow very closely; I can’t tell how much her somewhat traditionalist bent in the past year or so echoes other parts of her career—I first heard her on charming trap-pop hit “Chapiadora” in 2018—but this one splits the difference a bit, feels intriguingly out of time.

17. Ashs The Best: Weeruway
Senegal

Have rustled up a few more Senegalese pop playlists and found this lovely ballad, a wash of harmonies sounds great in counterpoint to the wandering guitar line.

18. Yemi Alade: My Bébé
Nigeria

Yemi Alade is always dependable, was reminded that she’s been a pretty big deal for over a decade now when Jonathan Bogart shared “Bounce” in his songs of the ‘10s countdown. (His countdown points toward the ‘20s in a way that mine shies away from them; should go back and do some revisionism at some point with more of a post-A-pop mindset.)

19. IKITSUKE, Toshiyuki Yasuda, Sala: MSA
Japan

Bringing the mix in for a landing with a light Japanese ballad that forces the horn arrangement behind the singer to muffle themselves with pillows.

20. Naïma Frank: Ainsi soit-il
Haiti-Canada

Montreal is bringing it this week, very cool kitchen-sink art pop that pins its various ideas to a serviceable Jersey club throb.

21. Luka Salam, Hadi Birajakii: Toute -  توت
Egypt

Egyptian pop goes Latin-tinged songbook, but it can’t stay on the same page of the book and whirls through a few other jazz-pop styles, ending somewhere in Paris, probably well clear of pinponpanpon.

22. August Ponthier: Everywhere Isn’t Texas
US

Didn’t realize this was recommended in the same Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter as Hannah Jane Lewis, but will pass the recommendation karma on to Hannah Jocelyn, who just reviewed the album in Pitchfork. I appreciated the audacity of the musical quote that Hannah singles out in her conclusion:

On paper, the title track and its reprise take that sentimentality too far: Even given The Wizard of Oz’s historical significance to the queer community, it’s risky for an artist to interpolate “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in 2026, and riskier still to do it twice. Yet these tracks do that while also getting across the album’s central dilemma: Do you flee your home when it’s getting too dangerous, or do you work on making the place you’re from better? Do you come out, or do you stay safe? The first song flees for greener pastures; the second song digs its ruby heels in, with a message that seems directly aimed at the trans teens who will likely find this record: “Everywhere isn’t Texas/’Cause the words and laws they wrote/Couldn’t touch our soul.” It’s achingly optimistic about the future of trans people without being naive. Ponthier doesn’t always strike the right balance of mischief and melancholy, but when they get it right, the mix is disarming.

Happy to let that be the last word. But I will take the opportunity to link one of my favorite “Over the Rainbow” interpolations — more of a passing resemblance —On!Air!Library!’s “Bread.”

That’s it! Until next time, go dig up your old On!Air!Library! records, I guess?

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Hannah Jane Lewis: Consolation Prize

An odds and ends week in both mix and intro. There are a lot of tracks from late ‘25 this week, mostly because I caught up on a few regional viral charts, where December material is still going strong.

I should probably be recapping songs more regularly for those of you who value your time and sanity and therefore skim and skip mixes. One way to keep up more casually would be to follow what I call my Golden Beatology playlist. Those songs are chosen to appeal to a hypothetical median voter in the kinds of music discovery polls that I like to participate in online. It pares down the number of songs and probably hits a pretty broad cross-section of readers, not to mention at least one person in my household. (Not the one who wants me to teach them this song on the piano.)

I’ll also try to do periodic recommendations for albums and songs. Might put these somewhere else and just link to them once a month, though.

11 Favorite Songs I Heard in January (unranked)

• 143leti: Venite haacia mí

• ano: ピカレスクヒーロー [Picaresque Hero]

• BabyDaiz: Allonsy

• Danpapa GTA: Ikeja (No Go Thief)

• Dora & Marlon Collins: Rákata

• ily: ปิ๊งป่อง (PINGPONG)

• Juky San f. Liu Grace: Ta Cùng Nhau Quên Niềm Đau

• MOLIY: Backie

• No Na: Work

• Yael Naim: Wow

• Zsá Zsá, Lucry & Suena: P*rnstar

10 Favorite Albums I Heard in January (roughly ranked)

• Vayda: Don’t Lose the Groove EP

• Juky San: ĐẪM TÌNH

• Poppy: Empty Hands

• PVA: No More Like This

• Yumi Zouma: No Love Lost to Kindness

• Imarhan: Essam

• Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic

• Djy Ora: The SGIDONOLOGIST2

• Lia Larsson: Dunka

• Plash: I Live Alone

Marginally useful album descriptions from Bluesky:

Indie: Yumi Zouma. Alt-pop: PVA. Chill vibes/tasteful=high: Imarhan. Chill vibes/tasteful=medium: Djy Ora. Get high and stare out the window bc wow: Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore. High energy/tasteful=medium: Vayda. High energy/tasteful=LOW: Larsson. Screaming: Poppy. Anti-screaming: Plash.

Other odds and/or ends, but no sods:

• Al Valera has a great Top 100 of 2025 with write-ups for every song.

• Kayla Beardslee and friends have put out their always great list of K-pop songs of the year. (Also recommended: Kayla’s least favorite K-pop songs of the year.)

• Must give a special shout-out to Brad Luen for writing up my Taylor Swift mash-up album (!!) and even politely acknowledging without writing up the follow-up that was probably more fun for me to make than it is to listen to.

• New Willow album klaxon! She produced and played every instrument on petal rock black, and does to tune-yards what Taylor Swift did to Lana Del Rey on “Snow on the Beach.” I like it, but it is not immediately my album of the year, which was not true of Willow’s previous two albums.

• I didn’t realize that the Charli XCX Wuthering Heights soundtrack is…basically a Sky Ferreira album? Majority co-writes with Ferreira co-writer Justin Raisen, and one featuring/written by Ferreira herself. As Sky Ferreira albums go it’s merely pretty good, but it’s great if you don’t really like Charli XCX.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. KiiiKiii: 404 (New Era)
South Korea

I know they’re not actually singing “404, the new error, error,” but it is where the title comes from (new era = getting off the internet and really living maaaaan) and this is now what I will sing to myself every time I get a 404 error for the rest of my life. Well done!

I am heartened, if skeptical, that my K-pop tastes are re-aligning with critics I trust on it after a decade of divergence (mostly from me not paying much attention). Though maybe it really does mean 2025 was a bad year for K-pop if I am familiar with almost everything in the top thirteen of the Pop Excellence list? I featured six of these songs on mixes, including a 2025 KiiiKiii song on the list, “Dancing Alone.”

2. Sentimento, Nadia Rose: Busy
France/UK

Nadia Rose graces a does-what-it-says-on-the-tin busy beat from a French producer. Sounds like she’s dodging the sound effects, including the ones she makes herself.

3. Pedro Sampaio, MC Meno K, Melody: Jetski
Brazil

4. Marina Sena f. Psirico: Carnaval
Brazil

Two December ‘25 singles on the current Brazilian viral charts—summery brega funk whose hook vaguely resembles Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” and then a party anthem at once solid and slippery, gives the sense of bodies sliding together and apart, which I assume is also what it’s “about.”

5. Sara Wakui: 幽霊になっても美しい [Yuureininattemoutsukushii]
Japan

A fun little J-pop song that twitches and cruises along at the same time, high-strung and cool in equal measure.

6. North West: Piercing on My Hand
US

Well, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s daughter has finally had her hypertrap debutante ball, and rather than get into anything that could be inferred as commentary on her background, I’ll just say that this song is fantastic. The song has guileless youth media charm shining through its polished wall of noise.

7. Eem Triplin: If I Wanted To
US

A November ‘25 single (just released as part of a new EP) from PA rapper Eem Triplin, who has the sort of impish squeaky vocal that I also liked in Luh Tyler the few times he could land a joke. Eem Triplin seems more consistent in this regard—funny guy. I likely got this from Stereogum, where I see Tom Breihan also used “squeak” to describe the vocals—you’ll just have to trust I did not read his write-up first.

8. NAZU: Pura Pura
Malaysia

Trap-inflected R&B from a Malaysian pop star tucks some log drum into the mix so I am claiming it for ama-pop (“we count those!”).

9. Magic System f. Didi B: Meme Pas Peur
Côte D’Ivoire

I first heard Magic System in 2009 when I fell in love with “Même pas fatigué,” which I reviewed at the Singles Jukebox. (I’d probably rate it an 8 or maybe a 9 now.) Interesting what a difference a decade makes, I doubt I’d make a top-of-mind genre joke now without doing a little effort to get more of a sense of region/scene or at least be more transparent about my ignorance. Eh, maybe I would.

10. Chuwi: Plei
Puerto Rico

Another mix appearance for Chuwi, and another opportunity to be transparent about my ignorance! Want to go with “light salsa” but I just don’t have the body-feel for rhythmic and genre distinctions in this field. It opens with one person wanting to go out and the other person wanting to stay in and play Playstation, which means I have an excuse to link “The Game Song” by Keke Palmer (“that’s why I, I hate Madden! That’s why I, I hate Madden!”).

11. Bic Runga: Red Sunset
New Zealand

Bic Runga! I had her on one of my 1998 mixes, the “jagged lilt” mix — Mix 8: I’m Alive I’m a Mess. She was sequenced between Anouk and Vonda Shepard. (You can see the full track list for those mixes with a link to the playlist here.) Looks like Red Sunset is her first proper album since 2011. I have also learned that Bic Runga’s 2008 cover of “Autumn Leaves,” a song I believe is impossible to cover without achieving a minimum 7/10, is a 7 out of 10.

12. ALT BLK ERA: Tissues
UK

ALT BLK ERA is back rhyming “tissues” with “issues”! Charlotte Church would be proud. What’s she up to? (Checks.) Huh, interesting journey, but watch out for spoilers for Celebrity Traitors.

13. Christine and the Queens, Thee Diane: Ah Ya
France

Have always been hot and cold on Christine and the Queens but I am (re?) warming up as the recent Rahim Redcar collabs continue to hit gold, first his song with Cerrone and now with French Afrobeats generalist (post-Afrobeats? is that a thing?) Thee Diane.

14. PPJ: Me Pega
Brazil-France/France

She’s from Brazil, he’s from France, which is about where I left the research. Decent bongo mileage, nice harmonies.

15. Serebro: Кто я для тебя [Kto ya dlya tebya]
Russia

Wasn’t sure exactly when Serebro flipped back into the ON position, or in what formation, or who flipped the switch and how I should feel about that. I started on the Wikipedia and there were twists and turns galore. This is a fully rebooted new line-up and the “past members” list now stands at a whopping eleven. Aims for the lightly trashy melodrama heights of t.A.T.u., but I can’t really blame them for falling far short, as the bar is literally in outer space.

16. Lala Lala: Arrow
US

Struggling with my Amerindie quota this month, does Lala Lala count? To find out, I have burned two of my four Pitchfork views outside the incognito tab to reveal she has gotten two polite 7.5’s, which I probably didn’t need to click through to guess.

17. Charlotte de Witte f. Conduit: A Prayer for the Dancefloor
Belgium/US

Some real techno for my fake friends (that is, people who actually go to clubs) despite usually sharing fake techno for my real friends.

18. Nation of Language: Inept Apollo (Tom Sharkett Remix)
US

First question was whether the indie vocals were going to be a dealbreaker, and when they weren’t, the second question was whether the groove is worth seven minutes. It…isn’t, quite, but it’s close enough!

19. Mulest Vankay, Pcee, Scotts Maphuma f. Slyzza Rsa: Mark Zuckerberg
South Africa

Skimming various South African charts to see which amapiano hits I’m missing and turned up a good ‘un, hopefully this is not pro- its titular billionaire (don’t tell me if it is, though).

20. Societeit de Harmonie f. Natasya Elvira: Syakara
Indonesia

An Indonesian band doing decent Tin Pan Alley and swing era classics, both covers and originals. Singer Natasya Elvira does a mean kazoo solo.

That’s it! Until next time, practice your kazoo solos.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Eem Triplin: If I Wanted To

Have unfortunately been thinking about generative A.I. and “slop” this week after having to make a determination on my first automated content regular in the comments section. (It was a reluctant block.)

I’ve started replacing the ubiquitous word “slop” with the word “spam” when thinking about machine-generated content whenever it’s applicable. The difference, I think, is one of malicious intent: not just creating shit, which is always a gamble, but flooding the zone with shit. I think if you don’t factor that in, you’re simply using machine automation to replace assumptions that were until recently attributed to a presumed group of highly cynical people—suits, grifters, mercenaries, marketers. Before it was slop, it was crap or junk. There were technically humans producing that stuff, but in the old telling, the humans had no humanity.

I am anti-spam on principle, but this doesn’t extend to being dogmatically anti-junk. Junk is often a vessel for great art, and the line between junk and non-junk depends on who’s drawing the line and why and sometimes when. Your trash might be my treasure, and today’s trash might be seen by someone else as tomorrow’s treasure, etc. I’m also pretty seasoned at this point in refusing a trash/treasure dichotomy, or at least trying to ask a more interesting question when there’s a more interesting question to ask.

The real issue with generative A.I. content in music as I see it is its potential volume and speed—that is, the problem is the collective impact of all of it together, not the features of a specific piece. As Tom Ewing wrote over on Bluesky: “Floods of slop on platforms is like ‘what if the Long Tail was gangrenous?’”

I think that’s an interesting way of putting it. But I would add that the long tail of any creative content, especially online, has always been an incoherent morass of mostly-garbage, and could easily seem gangrenous if you chose to dive into a random subsection of the tail without any sense of what you were looking for.

For what it’s worth, right now I don’t actually experience A.I.-generated music as spam, even if it functions that way on many major platforms at some level that I don’t happen to encounter much. And if it’s just a slop problem and not a spam problem, well, welcome to the party, pal. You always have to slop through the muck — muck through the slop? — to find the gems. But the gems keep coming, for now.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Theodora: Des mythos
DRC-France

I’m glad that my initial sense that Theodora is difficult to pigeonhole by genre is in fact the result of her not confining herself to genre. This is art-pop full stop, with an arresting video that makes a play for people who may not be as amused with, say, BBL bouyon as I am. I’d say find someone who can do both, but I don’t think you really need to find someone who can do both. Still, it probably doesn’t hurt.

2. Fcukers: L.U.C.K.Y
US

Some folks, on the other hand, really only do the one thing, but do it pretty well sometimes. I don’t know if electroclash lives, but it still generates a few pings on the heart monitor.

3. Paula Biskup: Halo?
Poland

This might be the most pandemic-coded video I’ve seen since 2020. I’ve featured Biskup at least once before, and wouldn’t have described her as bedroom-pop—not any more than any other alt-leaning dance-oriented stuff. But maybe I should!

4. Yuri Redicopa, Supernova Ent: Amapiano
Brazil

Interesting funk song that flits between lots of broader Latin American pop zeitgeists. This is maybe Yuri Redicopa’s whole deal? Despite featuring him a lot (at least six times) I apparently enjoy totally different elements of his music each time—the archives tell me I’ve singled his songs out for trot, indie rock (via a Cafuné sample), balalaika, brain-tingling clave timbre, and “real elf shit.”

5. PETERBLUE, Simona, Pablo Mayorga: Barcelongas
Colombia/Spain

Relentless house thump and steel drums from PETERBLUE and bare minimum personality signification from Simona, at which she seems to excel.

6. Ms Nina, Isabella Lovestory, King Doudou: Sucia
Spain/Honduras/France

“Would I like fast and filthy global music less if more of it was in English” is a question that comes to mind occasionally. It’s nice to be reminded that the answer is “no.”

7. éther: Dérange
Canada

Quebecoise rap, a scene that I don’t know anything about and will not bother to pretend otherwise.

8. Problema: Тваринні інстинкти [Tvarynni instinkti]
Ukraine

Ukrainian rap I have a little bit more experience with, enough to know that Problema has more impressive technical chops than a lot of the other pop-oriented Ukrainian rappers I’ve featured. One to keep an eye on.

9. Facta, Warrior Queen, Killa P: SLoPE VIP
UK

10. Dana and Alden f. Ghais Guevara: Obsidian
US

11. Zukenee: Suicide Note
US

Three rap tracks that instinctively triggered my “share the Bandcamp” Spidey Sense (4-digit or fewer views on a YouTube that is a “topic” post or not an official video), and was only off on one of them. First a UK producer that evokes some of the lighter elements of aughts grime mostly thanks to a fun guest spot from Warrior Queen. Then a Philly rapper I (somewhat self-consciously) underrated at the Singles Jukebox, with a jazz-minded production duo who wisely go less smooth to compensate. Finally an Atlanta rapper who is too popular for the Bandcamp threshold finds exactly the sort of music box hook that will trick me into sharing pretty much anything using it. Or, to quote my favorite YouTube comment:

12. Flow Glow: Punisher
Japan

It’s a VTube group, which means there is an ocean of online context I will never bother to understand. But I like to think it’s what a good Bratz song might sound like in 2026 if cartoon supergroups were still a going concern in the states. (Are they?)

13. Young Posse: Visa
South Korea

Who needs cartoons when the real thing can just put out a hypertrap masterpiece like it’s no big deal.

14. efey4hya: Hasta
Turkey

Compared to Young Posse, this Turkish rapper puts twice the effort into menacing hypernoise for about half the payoff, but half the payoff still easily clears mix inclusion.

15. ARTIGO016 f. LVNT, Mc Dioguinho: Samba
Brazil

Frank Kogan notified me of a new EP from Artigo016, a Brazilian funk DJ [EDIT: funk DJ act] whom I shared with Frank when I was the fourth view on one of his YouTube videos last year. (The above YouTube has five at press time.) I’m awful at keeping up with most of the folks I unearth in a given year, so am thankful for the nudge. Whole EP is great.

16. DJ Jeeh FDC, Iraqui ZL, Mc Dricka: Mágoas, Ódio e Rancor
Brazil

More funk, builds the beat around a pretty ambient phrase.

17. Djy Ora f. M&N Projects, You Found Axe: Sticks & Stoness
South Africa

A recommendation from Job de Wit on Blueksy, who has a great ongoing playlist here. He refers to it as amapiano with a harder edge — and the album introduces me to yet another amapiano subgenre, sgidongo (Djy Ora calls himself the Sgidongologist), which has the harder metallic edge of quantum sound but a bit more of a party atmosphere. Not that I can usually tell this stuff apart or describe it very well.

18. Veg: 再会 [Here Again]
Japan

Hard pivot to light jazz-funk from Japanese band Veg. Had been holding onto this one for a week or two looking for the right transition for them, and instead found the perfectly wrong transition.

19. Clara Roy-Jensen: Mon amour
Canada

Indie chanteuse from Montreal with a light bossa sway, not sure if it earns the full four and a half minutes, but I’ll let it ride.

20. Ora Cogan: Honey
Canada

Smoky indie rock with an alt-country bent, could use a lyric sheet but the words getting half-buried in slurred mannerisms doesn’t bother me for some reason, plus I like the piano and banjo punctuation throughout.

21. Lella Fadda: 25
Egypt

Left-field bookends of two big finds from 2025—first Theodora opening the mix and now Lella Fadda (nearly) closing it, with a slow introspective number that isn’t nearly as weird as Bb trickz’s early 2025 entry in this vein, and hopefully won’t portend the rapid crash of Bb trickz’s career, either.

22. Tiwayo: Up for Soul
France

23. The Olympians: Strawberry Kiwi
US

Ending with two neo-soul numbers, one produced by a Black Puma and the other a Daptone supergroup conjuring up forgotten classics. This particular forgotten classic-alike (“Strawberry Kiwi”) is the sort of thing that could open Season 2 of Wonder Man, the soundtrack of which surfaced a different Daptone find: Benin funk group El Rego et Ses Commandos with “Hessa.” Fun show, doesn’t devolve into a rainbow laser CGI mess or waste fifteen-minute stretches on tedious backfilled exposition.

That’s it! Until next time, if you are writing a new Marvel show, just cut the exposition and laser fights and let Ben Kingsley say something funny.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from from Paula Biskup: “Halo?” (“może przez przypadek napiszesz”)

I have not gone to Miami, but I am away, so it’s a quick one while etc. Lucky for me, the haul this week was more than enough for a mix, with about ten to spare.

Last week I shared a playlist with the uncategorizable songs from the ‘10s, so this week I will share some more categorizable ones from my decade list. Won’t spoil the whole list, but here are five as a sneak preview in no particular order.

Angelica Garcia: Karma the Knife (2019)

This is a song I’ve been trying to figure out how to nominate for a poll or otherwise get more people to hear it for years. I always thought it was a 2020 single (the album is from 2020), but it was first released in August of 2019. So into the ‘10s it goes.

DJ Zinc & Ms. Dynamite: Wile Out (2010)

Hoping that folks haven’t forgotten about this one. It was a big hit at the then-recently-rebooted Singles Jukebox back in 2010 and frequented many mixes I made in that period.

Kiiara: Gold (2015)

I really don’t understand why this song works as well as it does. There are few songs I associate more with the mid-2010s than this—the only song I can think of that employs bort-pop technique and still sounds incredible. (This is probably because the syllable chopping isn’t defacing some older hook, but creating a brand new one.)

Vershon: Mercy A God (2016)

This was a serendipitous find—was driving at night and tuned in to a college radio station that happened to be playing is. The DJ never ID’d the song but I was able to find it later, no idea how (I probably remembered a few lyrics).

The Knocks f. Sneaky Sound System: The One (2014)

The first song I remember hearing after my first kid was born. For any brand new or future parents among you, this trick only works once, so make it a good one! (Just kidding, I don’t think you really get to choose if a song does this, or which one.)

I wrote about it as my “song of the decade” back in 2019:

My decade was all about family—making one, maintaining one—and so I only have three options for the song that defined my decade. One is inextricable from its surroundings—“On My Own” from Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended, an album about death and motherhood that is as poignant and sad and weird as anything I’ve ever heard. Another is from the second-best mom album of the decade, Flesh Tone by Kelis, “Song for the Baby.”

But my song of the decade is the first song I heard after my first son was born, “The One,” by the Knocks featuring Sneaky Sound System. The thing about having kids is that it really wrecks you—I didn’t realize that my entire life, its daily rhythms and boundaries, was being broken down and remade in those first few weeks. I was consumed with a pointless mania, so while he and his mom slept I spent most of my time hacking wooden chunks out of his bedroom door with a boxcutter in a doomed effort to “level it” and putting together an enormous playlist of every song ever featured on the first 50 NOW! compilations—something that I have almost no memory of doing, but which nonetheless currently has 38,000 followers and counting.

This is all to say that maybe I wasn’t my most stable or least sleep-deprived self when I first heard “The One,” but whatever it was, I remember thinking, when the chorus hit, that this crass thing, this stupid thing, is right—everything is going fast, and he is everything to me, it is true, he is the one, my number one, and I cried, a good, long, cleansing cry. And then a few weeks later, when I was settling into the new me and sleeping a little more and monkeying with that NOW! playlist for the minor omissions from my fugue state and nursing the wounds on my fingers from the boxcutters, I listened to “The One” again, and you can probably guess by now that I cried again, the very same cry, with snot and everything. And then three years later I had another son, so I listened to it again, just to see what would happen, and I thought, surely this time it won’t—but it did! And I cried again, because he was my number one now, too, the song was still right, because with your kids they’re all number one, you just find more heart to hold it all.

Why did this particular song have this effect on me, a song that to my knowledge no one has heard the way I hear it, possibly including the people who made it? Right time, right place, right me? A random twist of neurochemical fate? Maybe it doesn’t really matter—we all get our own private sessions with epiphany, but we don’t control the schedule, something like that. Songs speak to us when we listen and sometimes even when we don’t, and sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can really hear them whether or not we were ready for them—there, I heard it, this was the one, and I didn’t get to choose my vessel any more than I got to choose my kids, but there it is and I love it all the same. Now it’s been five years and it still goes fast, and there is so much to lose, more to lose than you could have possibly imagined. But it’s lovely while it lasts.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. EMJAY: Brainchem
Mexico

EMJAY’s 2025 album Me estoy volviendo loca is filthy and wild, but to me the music all congealed into an undifferentiated mass as an album, though I liked “Boss,” especially in its remix version. “Brainchem” seems to be pandering to me directly with avant cheerleader bounce and a nicked chord progression from “Toxic.” It might be my favorite song she’s done so far.

2. DJ Kanji f. 7, eyden: Money Up
Japan

Noisy and annoying 808-driven J-rap that doesn’t let up for a second, while the MCs make like they’re not touching you they’re not touching you they’re not touching you.

3. Whodamanny: Loca Loca
Italy

A whole album of throwback Italo disco sunshine. Sometimes trying to sound too much like a past sound comes across as too studied, and there’s a hint of that here, but I think the singers manage to put it over.

4. Pigeon: Miami
Guinea/UK

A perennial People’s Pop favorite that I’ve featured at least once before and try to check out when they cross my radar screen. This is sillier than I remember them being—8-bit keyboard hooks, absurdist lyrics. But I’m very cold at the moment and would like to drop everything for some sun in Miami, so good timing.

5. FLVCKKA, Yeri Mua f. Angely2k: Notype
Mexico

FLVCKKA’s “Tsunami” was a favorite of mine last year that didn’t really take hold of the pop commentariat that I try to evangelize some of these things to, and in this case I think I need to trust the commentariat. But I’m glad the women in alt/reggaeton/pop seem to be building a critical mass anyway.

6. SadBoi: Twisted
Canada

Can never tell how big SadBoi is despite sharing her songs for a few years now. I think her voice is pretty memorable, but her beats are all over the map—she tries out a bouyon-ish beat here, after sounding just as comfortable alongside “Shake It to the Max” breaktrhough MOLIY in a song I shared last year, and with Atlanta rapper Vayda the year before that.

7. Eliangel, Saga: 日本 Borracha de Poder
Venezuela-Mexico/Mexico

More Mexican alt-pop, this one with the exciting distinction of having zero views on its YouTube page.

8. 1T1, MiiMii KDS: In Di Corner
Guadeloupe

I’ve been trying to follow some of the music coming out for Carnival a bit more closely this year, and MiiMii has been capitalizing on her breakout bouyon hit “Sé MiiMii.” Funny to have shared 1T1 for the first time last week only to immediately hear their duet here. It sounds good but their delivery isn’t quite massaging the impact of the words enough not to notice a few clunkers: “I smell you from down there” is one you might want to retire from your pickup line repertoire.

9. Jahlys: Bizness
Martinique

Shatta star Jahlys gets a second lifetime mix appearance and I would not be surprised if she gets a third.

10. Spice: Soft Girl Era
Jamaica

Meanwhile I’ve wanted to feature Spice for a long time now—most recently she was on the remix to Zuchu’s “Amanda.” I suppose making yet another great song with the title “Soft Girl Era” is as good an excuse as any.

11. Zé Filipe, Bellagi: Pretin
Brazil

An odd one, seems to split the difference between brega funk and Europop, like they borrowed a soundboard from Toy-Box. Is there a genre called “bubblegum brega”?

12. Saalva13: #générationkartel
Martinique

Another discovery from my shatta playlists, a bit harder and less crowd-pleasing than his hit from last year, “La Sérénade.”

13. Scoophy Snacks, CDQ, King Soundboi: Hola
Nigeria

Thought about subbing in something from my South African holdover list here rather than this Nigerian producer’s somewhat scrappy take on amapiano, but in the end I decided I had to feature an artist named Scoophy Snacks on one of my mixes.

14. Bongo Maffin, Oskido: Mari Ye Phepha (Fka Mash Afro-Glitch remix)
South Africa

An Afrohouse remake of kwaito group Bongo Maffin’s “Mari Ye Phepa” from 1999. Kwaito is a big blind spot for me—this song was huge and I’m glad to finally be acquainted with it.

15. Dj Yk Mule, Mastertune: Sax Dance Guitar
Nigeria

Cruise producer Dj Yk Mule mostly creates a backdrop for guitar from what I’m assuming is Mastertune. Couldn’t find a lot of info on this one on short notice.

16. By Özdemir, Liza, Raif: Mevzu Sen Olunca
Turkey

Sort of a Turkish take on the kind of pleasant but anonymous pop I found a lot on Spotify in the late ‘10s. I have no way of judging how fake any participants are here like I could back when some Z-list EDM producer brought in a fake Carly Rae Jepsen. But the vibe is similar (not entirely derogatory!).

17. noffkoffska: Szept (Czy czujesz to samo co ja?)
Poland

18. Nagham Saleh, Abraxsophia: Cabaret
Egypt

19. Kuaskio: Ю Раниш [Yu Ranish]
Ukraine

Three circa 2-minute songs from Poland, Egypt, and Ukraine before a very long song to follow, all of them mostly getting by on the performance more than anything special happening in the production.

20. Toffo Houssou Gilles, Orchestre Les Volcans Du Benin: Yemakpego Dragons [1984]
Benin

Yes, I have 15 minutes to spare this week and plan to use them. Benin group’s Afrobeat jam is modeled on a salsa jam, and if it maybe doesn’t earn every minute, I’d say it earns most of them. A rerelease from the Albarika Store distributed by Acid Jazz Records, available on Bandcamp.

21. Lia Pappas-Kemps: Towers
Canada

22. Baby Queen: I Hope You Don’t Remember Me
South Africa-UK

Ending with some indie-pop—I like how Lia Pappas-Kemps inches toward baggy (🪇), and I also like that she’s got Canadian government funding to do it. Baby Queen is one that I perennially underrate until I hear something that reminds me to go back and revisit. I guess “Dancing Alone” is basically a golden oldie now but when gloomy sequencer confessional works, it works.

That’s it! Until next time, I hope you are able to travel to warmer areas of the world than the one I am currently in.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Pigeon: Miami

There is apparently online chatter looking back at the year 2016. There are many reasons I’m not eager to look back to 2016, but I am thinking a bit about the pop music of the ‘10s in preparation for yet another music challenge. (Yes, I have hobbies for my hobbies.) And when I finally started to put my picks together, 2016 had the most tracks for a single year. But music is good every year, so I don’t know if that tells you much.

To be honest, my sense of the ‘10s as a Decade in Music has been shaped a lot by my changing understanding of the music landscape through the ‘20s so far. There are so many global sounds and trends that I was unaware of or only vaguely aware of in the ‘10s, never really taking the time to dive in and explore. So the decade feels like a transitional phase—maybe just for me personally, though I made some sweeping general claims about the decade in an unwieldy but I think pretty good A-pop installment, too.

Toward the end of 2019, I put together a list of 150 songs from the 2010s that seemed to defy my attempts to categorize them. I called the playlist “What do you even call this decade???” (I’ve settled on “the tens”). It was focused on novelty—some obvious novelty songs, but others that were novel but not “novelty music,” per se. These were not my favorite 150 songs (in fact I would say that at least two or three of my top 5 songs of the decade don’t appear on the playlist), but they were the ones that had little cartoon question marks forming over my head when I listened.1

The challenge is to select my favorite 50 singles from the decade. I’m somewhat surprised so far that I’m not drawn to much of the big charting pop music of the middle of the ‘10s or other people’s preliminary picks of big (non-charting) singles, even songs I used to like.

I would also bet that the middle stretch of the decade is still hiding a lot of music I would have loved but wasn’t paying enough attention to notice—precursors to the explosions in many different global scenes that I now try to track more diligently. The story of the ‘20s seems to be how global innovations of the ‘00s and ‘10s have been supercharged through streaming and especially TikTok, mutating into new forms or finding new audiences.

I don’t have enough time to revisit the decade for this particular challenge, but it does suggest I need to do some work to follow some of the strands of this newsletter into the recent past.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Girl Group: SuperDrug
UK

Lots of meta and alternative takes on girl groups this week. This is the first British girl group I’m aware of that models itself in a post-Lola Young mode, pretty but defiant, skirting indie but not removed from it. Their story sounds a bit like the art school version of putting together a hit boyband on a reality show, which is to say if you squint it might just be a band forming at university. But they present themselves as a group of singers, not a band, a sort of non-corporatized UK take on Katseye. …Er, Kats-oi?

2. ily: ปิ๊งป่อง (PINGPONG)
Thailand

I guess you need to go to Thailand these days to get the sort of chirpy “ping pong” hook you’d get in K-pop fifteen years ago. Or maybe I’m just listening to the wrong K-pop.

3. Tomatomat: Collect Call Garage
South Korea

Meanwhile I think contemporary K-pop has sounded best recently when it’s either going bold with pop sonics (NewJeans in 2024, NMIXX in 2025) or competing more ruthlessly with American pop styles (like the BLACKPINK solo material, or maybe Jeon Somi’s “Closer”). Alternatively you can go weird (KIIRAS, some recent Le Sserafim) or put on a heavy charm offensive (YOUNG POSSE). Tomatomat, a K-pop trio Michael Hong recently recommended, achieve both alternatives here, I think—weird charm offensive. Plus they’ve got a bossa nova.

4. Mimi Kiddy: I Am ME?
Japan

And speaking of weirdo charm offensives, here’s a J-pop group that, in the words of one regular source of recommendations, Patrick St. Michel: “calls upon young producer cva beatz to create a speedy song featuring a steady bounce and, by the end, the members’ voices being sliced up into samples.”

5. No Na: Work
Indonesia

Partial credit for the above rec also goes to Jel Bugle, but Jel gets sole credit for sharing this song: an absolutely electric Timbaland-style thump with terrible lyrics that are perfectly conveyed by an Indonesian girl group on 88rising.

6. Zsá Zsá, Lucry & Suena: Pornstar
Germany

Germany’s deluge of viral smut-pop has not abated. This one gets extra points for riding a beat reminiscent of Robyn’s version of “Cobrastyle.” (I might stick one of the new Robyn songs on a mix at some point. Do you still need me to share Robyn songs? I feel like people are well-enough informed.)

7. Afro Bros, Monq, Kalibwoy: Bubble Up
Netherlands/Suriname-Netherlands

Kalibwoy’s name rang a bell and a quick search reveals this is the Surinamese-Dutch dancehall/etc. artist’s third appearance in three consecutive years.

8. Luna Ki: Bomba de Amor
Spain

9. Dora, Marlon Collins: Rákata
Spain

10. Miranda!, bailamamá: Despierto Amándote
Argentina/Spain

11. Asha: Turista
Morocco-Spain

12. Rosalinda Galán: Mataora
Spain

And now an extended block of five songs all from Benidorm Fest, usually Spain’s national competition for Eurovision, except Spain isn’t competing so this is it. Last year was also a strong year for Spain’s qualifiers, but this year they have so far blown the other countries out of the water, not least by bringing in at least one ringer from Argentina.

Luna Ki has a fairly straightforward Latin pop number, while Dora and Marlon Collins’s “Rakata” would be considerably edgier, a menacing, plodding reggaeton number. The ringer is Argentine group Miranda!, a personal favorite from way back, with light Pet Shop Boys dance-pop. After that is a Moroccan-Spanish singer mixing Arabic and Spanish, and finally moody electro flamenco from Rosalinda Galán.

When I wrote my A-pop installment on Eurovision, I imagined these country competitions surfacing more and more boundary-pushing pop that was synthesizing niche or fringe sounds for mass audiences. I doubted whether I was right about that given the ongoing crisis of the competition itself, but I think Spain is demonstrating exactly what I was imagining, and in fact was one of the regions that got me thinking about the idea in the first place at this time last year.

13. Mel Semé: 20AÑOS
Haiti-Cuba

A rare Cuban playlist comes through with its first minor ping of my radar of the year, a ballad from the star of the Buena Vista Social Club Broadway adaptation, a role that ratcheted up his name recognition considerably from a long singer-songwriter career in Spain.

14. xiangyu f. Gimgigam: 結局シャリ [Kekkyoku Shari]
Japan

15. 143leti, Awesome Pierre: Venite haacia mí
Argentina

Two artists layering in Brazilian funk hard clave in a way that seems like an organic fit and not mere trend-hopping. First is xiangyu, the savvy and globally-minded Japanese rapper I’ve featured several times, who on this one alternates between dubstep wubs and funk clangs. Argentine pop star 143leti takes an even bigger swing that I think pays off, hyperpop buzz gives it a vaguely phonk feel but the clave anchors the whole thing without it feeling derivative.

16. Natoxie, Kenjox, Twinsizz: Grégoire
Martinique

Natoxie is back with another shatta banger and also some ill-advised and suspiciously A.I.-ish hyperrealistic cartoon avatars. So you may want to close your eyes to enjoy it.

17. P.L.L., 1T1: 97Volts
Guadeloupe

The latest single featuring 1T1, whose 2025 hit “Bouwéy” I had in this slot but decided to just link it and put something released for Carnival instead. One to keep closer tabs on.

18. Juls, Xico: 3AM in Kaapstad
UK-Ghana/Nigeria

Afrobeats producer with a bit more of a pan-African-pop hodgepodge here, a little bit of an Afrohouse chillout tent vibe, an amapiano jazzy piano line, Amabeats log drum accents.

19. Yin Yin: Spirit Adapter
Netherlands

I stopped wavering on a song I’d pulled from the big weekly playlist after Kel recommended the album over on Bluesky. Sadly I can do no better than their PR: “a joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs.” Cosmo-pop ahoy!

20. Tiara: Nawi Aaleih
Lebanon

I suppose it would be gauche of me to invoke Timbaland again here, especially since a lot of what he was drawing from (or, not infrequently, sampling or copying without credit) came from Middle Eastern music and not vice versa. But I have a very tight self-imposed deadline here, so.

21. Carolina Chocolate Drops: Here Rattler
US

I remember seeing Carolina Chocolate Drops live many years ago at a festival and liking them enough to purchase at least one of their albums (I own two but can’t remember if I bought both there). Rhiannon Giddens has had pretty incredible career since then, but I do like returning to their older reconstructions of traditional folk music, which manage to avoid being too academic, though not un-academic. There is something exciting about hearing this music interpreted in crackling high fidelity in the present. It makes me wonder how things are panning out with one of the few slam-dunk use cases for A.I. tech—salvaging and isolating stems from rare or deteriorating recordings—during the great A.I. hype freakout (I still have a whole year before I will be obligated to share a firm opinion). This is a bonus track on the 15-year anniversary rerelease of Genuine Negro Jig, and I wonder if they performed it when I saw them; it sounded familiar.

22. Tyler Ramsey, Carl Broemel: Elizabeth Brown

Tasteful instrumental Americana is timeless so I will overlook that this came out in early November of last year. I probably should have found a different closer, but it’s nice!

That’s it! Until next time, let me know what you call the previous decade.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title translated from Zsá Zsá: Pornstar (“ich hab' mich selbst zum Star gemacht”)

Still not much movement in the charts, discourse, or music news. Maybe the news-news is happening too quickly? Maybe this is just what January always feels like and I just forget?

That gives me a chance to spotlight a few different things this week.

• Chuck Eddy has several posts I wanted to highlight (go subscribe!). There are two really lovely posts about his son who recently passed, a memorial remembrance and a piece from 1990: “We went to the zoo and tried to figure out what a ‘buffalo stance’ might be, but the buffalo just sat there.” Also be sure to check out his 2025 year in review. These year-end features always manage to dismantle conventional wisdom with a surprising amount of warmth and good faith.
  

• Natalie Weiner suggests the term “third stream country,” after “third stream jazz,” to describe how “the growth of country/Americana/roots/folk in recent years has created more room for artists operating in the in-between,” something between country radio and festival Americana. I find the idea fascinating, and I like as many ways as possible to think about the in-betweeners. There’s a lot of in-between these days, and it’s good for critics to figure out how to talk about some of it coherently. (I usually go for an annoying neologism that no one will ever use.)
  

• Plenty of people have already shared Eric Harvey’s comprehensive review of Bob Marley’s Legend; here’s one more. (I guess you can make this one of your four monthly reviews in Pitchfork’s farkakte new paywall system.)
  

• The People’s Pop 2025 poll is in full swing and a lot of the songs that I surfaced early or nominated are doing well with the pollectorate. It gives me renewed energy going into a new year that the way I’ve been going about finding stuff has had some traction with others. (This may also extend to k.’s New Problems from 2001, which I championed after a Discogs dive for the upcoming 2001 album tournament, if enough people nominate it.) I’m pretty restless and flighty with my discovery, so I always really appreciate it when I either connect with people who have long championed things I’ve just stumbled on or when new people take to something I’ve shared with them.
  
  Perhaps there will be a song like that this week! If so…wow.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Yael Naim: Wow
France-Israel

The name was familiar and I was surprised to read in Naim’s bio that she had a top ten hit in the American charts—in artist-bio-speak that usually means some niche chart than the Hot 100. So you can imagine my surprise when I checked and was whiplash timewarped back to 2008 with maybe thee Apple commercial smash hit (Applecore?) of the era, “New Soul,” which I don’t think I’ve knowingly heard since. This new one is annoyingly catchy in a way that I find more palatable (…wow!). Feels like it could have been another Apple commercial smash hit. Maybe not today, exactly, but definitely ten years ago.

2. Danpapa GTA: Ikeja (No Go Thief)
Nigeria

When Lokpo identifies a new direction in Naija pop that steers clear of the Amabeats pipeline, you’ve gotta follow it. Would it be crass to suggest that it would absolutely destroy in the 2026 equivalent of an Apple commercial? Let’s get it in season two of the hockey show or something.

3 . DJ Skaytah: Mass 2 (Welcome to Guadeloupe)
Guadeloupe

I have lots of gaps in my playlists at the beginning of the year—by March I’m usually running at least two and sometimes three mixes ahead— which means that I get to scramble productively for new music using charts, recommendations, lists of viral songs, and the still-functional (if eroding) Spotify genre-tracker that Glenn McDonald built, which I talked about more here. This is especially useful to find recent songs in the places in the world where everything is not currently frozen over. This one came from a shatta scan—DJ Skaytah transforms a literal Carnival street party into a figurative one, too.

4. Wizkid, Asake: Jogodo
Nigeria

I write a lot about being tired of the South Africa/Nigeria Amabeats superhighway but I have carved out an exception for one of its architects, Asake. This one sounds much more indebted to 3-step, despite not technically being 3-step formally. Hard to tell how close it is without the three beats spelled out, but it has the same soft build to the one.

5. Dj Smallz, ZinedinexSguche, 031CHOPPA f. Uncool MC: ZEP
South Africa

Had this in my amapiano holdover list until yet another gap in the mix appeared and I called it into service. For some reason I visualize this substrand of South African house/amapiano, at which 031CHOPPA excels, as a skeletal structure with added muscle, hard and spare but without any room for any other sound. It’s like the song is training for an action movie.

6. Muroki, Joe Kaptein: Popo
Kenya-New Zealand/New Zealand

7. Somadina: Fighting
Netherlands-Nigeria

Two cosmo-pop hybrids. The first is a lightly funky rocker, Kenya by way of New Zealand, and there is, appropriately, an untamed impala in the video. Not sure I’ve heard the exact combination of Somadina’s plain funk clave and frosted glass Afrobeats—sounds great.

8. Chinese American Bear: No No Yeah Yeah
China-US

Second lifetime mix appearance from a group I get recommended on streaming all the time but have never heard much chatter about in real life. Now this would sound good in an actual Apple commercial. (Ha, that’s how I described them the first time!)

9. Kwaku DMC, Hkmk, DRILL SZN: Done
Ghana

Ghanaian new music recommendations on Spotify seem pretty random. Artists that regularly get tens of thousands of views on their more popular videos wind up represented by songs that no one is actually listening to. Suits me fine—turns out I like this UK drill-inspired track more than a lot of other things on Kwaku DMC’s page—but I should probably click through to hear the rest of their work more often.

10. ano: ピカレスクヒーロー [Picaresque Hero]
Japan

Didn’t know whether to credit Jel or Ryo for this one but it turns out I also picked it out in my blindfold taste test this week. I’m not exactly light on ano recommendations! This is not metal as fuck, more like metal as felt (as in the fabric), given the puppets and bunny ears.

11. 單依純: 纯寐寐 [Shan Yichun: Chún mèi mèi]
China

Have featured Shan Yichun before, one of the few Chinese pop stars I seem not only to like but who is actually somewhat properly popular. This is a different version of one of her big songs from last year, but I might prefer this version, which tones down the post-hyper-pop with indie-anthem drums and, dare I say, would sound great in an Apple commercial.

12. WOKEUP, Orange: Cháy Máy
Vietnam

Vietnamese pop is firing on all cylinders—this isn’t even that good and I love it—but the videos still need a bit of work. Concept is good but I feel like they could have done more with dancing on a giant Xerox.

13. 桃子A1J, Diiton: 4to9
Vietnam-Taiwan/Taiwan

Wait, the visualizer for this one has a copier and office space imagery in it, too…huh.

14. BRIZZA, Mazzarri: 808’s & Gaitas
Mexico/Venezuela

At first thought this might be Latin American post-hyper-something from some slight warbles in the vocal, but it settles into something closer to flamenco-pop.

15. Imarhan: Ahitmanin
Algeria

Tom Ewing informs me in his 2026 rolling albums thread about a new album from Tuareg group Imarhan, who did well in the Name Is the Artist poll. “Imarhan” by Imarhan from the album Imarhan was a favorite song and the phrase had legs as an enduring poll meme. Their new album, which contains no self-titled material whatsoever, is fantastic, warm desert blues heavy on catchy group choruses.

16. Pitou: To Do What
Netherlands

How many times am I going to suggest something would sound good in an Apple commercial this week? This is the fifth one, right? This would need somewhat trippier visuals than your average Macbook spot, not unlike the charming cut and paste collage they put together for the video.

17. Mandy, Indiana: Cursive
France/UK

A band that I first heard via Ian Mathers, who nominated “Pinking Shears” for The Singles Jukebox amnesty week in 2023. They remain noisy and hard to pin down if you are reluctant to default to overused post-punk adjectives.

18. Parlor Greens: Eat Your Greens
US

God, I am a sucker for solid organ-driven rock music. Deceptively hard to do it well without sounding like background music, and maybe this will not overcome that hurdle for you, but it worked on me.

19. Sofia Manousaki: Ektos Topou Ke Hronou [2025]
Greece

Have still been skimming some country qualifiers for Eurovision and didn’t hear much that was too promising from Greece, but I’m comparing everything to Marina Satti, which is not fair to anyone else. This chanteuse-ish waltz, which was not in competition last year but is still a little Eurovision-y, blew everything I actually heard out of the water.

20. Flea f. Thom Yorke: Traffic Lights
US/UK

There is a forthcoming Flea jazz-pop album on Nonesuch, which made me wonder if he’s done anything like this before. It’s his debut solo album, mostly covers but a few originals, including this song that Thom Yorke features on and co-wrote. I would have been very excited about it as a teenager, like seeing that U.N.K.L.E. video for the first time, even though Yorke and the Radiohead Extended Universe has lost a lot of its luster and not only for political reasons.

My youngest has recently decided that they are really into Radiohead after hearing “No Surprises” in drum class, and now says things to me like “are you ready for some bonding?” when it’s time for us to listen for anything from Kid A that will hit like “No Surprises” did. (Nope. …More claret?) Parenting tip: maybe skip “Fitter Happier” on a mix for your eight-year-old.

21. Filippo Ansaldi, Simone Sims Longo: +1
Italy

And as long as we’re making jazz noises, let’s let the Italian professionals do some third-streaming(?) with minimalist horn figures staggering around until a buzzing groove (groovy buzz?) descends.

That’s it! Until next time, feel free to let me know what new songs should be finding their full potential in an Apple commercial.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Yael Naim: Wow

The year is underway, but so far I have not hit much discourse. (Discourse is still trickling in from 2025. Will no one rid me of these meddlesome geese?!)

I have, however, had reason to listen to a few albums celebrating a 20-year anniversary this year. A comedy podcast I listen to shouted out Jörgen Elofsson, whom they did not recognize, but of course I immediately Leo-meme-pointed. Elofsson is the Cheiron whiz responsible for the best Bratz song and most of former A*Teen Marie Serneholt’s 2006 solo album Enjoy the Ride, among many other credits.

Enjoy the Ride is fascinating because it pulls off a similar gambit as Rachel Stevens’s Come and Get It the year before: member of a teenpop group makes an “adult” solo album that is, improbably, a contemporary masterpiece compared to anything from the group act. Unlike Come and Get It, though, there’s no obvious reason why Enjoy the Ride should have worked. It’s a stylistic grab bag—some post-Stevens electro-twang (title track), appropriately ABBA-esque bittersweetness (personal favorite “I Need a House,” which is A*Teens gone existential), dumb (dee-dum) Swedish choruses (“That’s the Way My Heart Goes”), satisficing Britney facsimile (“The Boy I Used to Know”).

2006 was the Year I Went Poptimist, and it was a great year to do so. I don’t know if I’ve ever had as much “perfect pop”—of the Popjustice house debate variety—in my ears or on my lists since then. To the year’s credit, there was something in the water, with several great artists putting out some of their best ever material: Margaret Berger’s Pretty Scary Silver Fairy (not on streaming!), Linda Sundblad’s Oh My God (also not on streaming!), Amy Diamond’s Still Me Still Now, Lillix’s Inside the Hollow, Fefe Dobson’s Sunday Love, Fergie’s The Dutchess, Paris Hilton’s Paris, Cassie’s Cassie, and my album of the year, Marit Larsen’s Under the Surface.1

There was Nelly Furtado’s Loose, Lily Allen’s Alright Still, Gwen Stefani’s The Sweet Escape, The Veronicas’ Secret Life of the Veronicas, Jojo’s The High Road, Vanessa Hudgens’s V, P!nk’s I’m Not Dead, Kelis’s Kelis Was Here, Christina Milian’s So Amazin’, and Rihanna’s A Girl Like Me. Hannah Montana and High School Musical stormed the Billboard charts. I got really into BWO for some reason.

And even that doesn’t include the big pop albums I didn’t rate very highly at the time but were still in the mix: Bertine Zetlitz’s My Italian Greyhound (underrated it), Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics (still hate it), Girl Talk’s Night Ripper (liked it then, don’t like it now) Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (good), Beyoncé’s BDay (also good), Jessica Simpson’s A Public Affair (by far her best album parentheses derogatory). And there’s Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, the album that I always think should be the central subject of any reckoning with “poptimism takes over Pitchfork” (or whatever) and for some strange reason never gets the outrage that any number of women—many of whom were not a big deal at the time and remain not a big deal—still get. Hm.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Rebecca Black: Fame Is a Gun (Triple J Like a Version cover)
US

Rebecca Black recently recorded “Fame Is a Gun” by Addison Rae for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) Triple J’s Like a Version show, and it’s a lot of fun—vocal looping, live drum pads, a brisk tempo, and…you know, enunciation. I’m pretty well sold on the “pop object” of Addison Rae’s work to date but I’m not at all sold on her as a pop star; Rebecca Black looks like a consummate pro, and I’d be happy with her taking over all of Rae’s material. (I also love the top comment on the YouTube video: “Ethically sourced Grimes.” It is!)

2. Hedda Gamma: Mirroring
Lithuania

More loops ands electro-futzes from a Lithuanian singer who models her PR pitch after Laurie Anderson (language as a virus etc.) but is a bit plainer than that suggests, probably to her benefit. They can’t all be Laurie Anderson. In fact, I would bet they all can’t be Laurie Anderson. It all piles up prettily but doesn’t quite have the guts to fall apart, too.

3. Juky San f. Liu Grace: Ta Cùng Nhau Quên Niềm Đau [Let’s Forget the Pain Together]
Vietnam

Vietnam really is just pushing right to the front of the global pop arms race, isn’t it. Juky San and 2pillz together make a decent case for the hierarchy of power in the DC (dilettante curator?) universe shifting. Let’s see if 2025—South Korea’s year of assimilation and the United States’s year of humiliation—has left a big enough opening for a few others to break through.

4. Dev: Oops Oh Well
US

It’s Dev! Back with another minimal melancholy banger that could have been a bonus track on The Night the Sun Came Up back in 2011. Never change, Dev. No, seriously…never change.

5. Lolo Zouaï f. Dinos: Les Mots
France-US

Fell in love with French-born, US-launched Lolo Zouaï’s single “Ride” back in 2019, when I first started making megamixes over on Tinyletter (there’s some good stuff in there), but didn’t hear or at least register much from Zouaï in the interim. Well, she’s back, singing in French, and she’s still good.

6. Zevin: My Mind
Croatia

7. LELEK: Andromeda
Croatia

What to do about Eurovision, aside from boycotting it? I’ve decided not to follow, watch, or otherwise participate in the main competition this year and would love to see more countries drop out. Enough is enough.

But I can’t let the qualifiers go unremarked on, because the national competitions have become an important way for me to get a sense of the local pop landscape of each participating country. Here are two from Croatia’s DORA 2026—day-glo monotone rap from Zevin and dramatic coven-bop from LELEK. But I won’t follow the winner forward. I will also try to highlight some acts from countries that aren’t competing.

8. Heavenly: Excuse Me
UK

Finding pop music versions of Pierre Menard’s Quixote has become my own quixotic project in an age of uncanny soundalikes, but the magic is elusive. Case in point: when Heavenly puts out their first album in 30 years, they still sound like the mid-nineties in a way that so many mid-nineties fetishists just…don’t. And as long as they’re still there competing, I don’t see how any of the wannabe Menards can find much of a foothold.

9. Maggie Antone: The Devil’s Not in Hell
US

Sometimes I wonder if I am just not that into country music and then I hear something that reminds me that I grew up with country music but have over time become reluctant and picky. So in that way country is a bit like musical theater or jazz, something that can really wallop me, but only every once in a blue moon and not for predictable reasons.

10. Peso Pluma f. Tito Double P: Dopamina
Mexico

Peso Pluma didn’t seem to get much of a halo from his big regional Mexican music crossover year in the US, but I did eventually hear what everyone else was hearing—a bit of a bridge/guide to sounds that I’ve heard peripherally for a long time without investigating much. At this point I hear his sound as pretty firmly its own thing—and maybe there was a halo after all and the new album will be massive. For what it’s worth, it debuted at #6 on the Billboard 200 chart, the only 2026 release to get into the top 10 so far I think.

11. La Joaqui, Gusty dj: Turr0logia
Argentina

Trashy Argentine reggaeton-pop sounds more fun and I would guess cares not a whit about the Billboard 200, and who needs it? (Not entirely a rhetorical question. 2026 is a crucial year for A-Pop theory to Be a Thing before everyone forgets about it!)

12. Mc Gw, DJ BM PROD: Modo Foda-Se
Brazil

13. HL NO BEAT, MC Luana SP, KAROLLYN: Tira Tudo
Brazil

14. Bailefunk Kakeko: Pyun
Japan

Two going on three baile funk tracks this week—two from Brazil, the third an interesting take on baile funk from a Japanese producer that Patrick St. Michel featured on a recent mix. I’d say you can see the beads of sweat forming on Bailefunk Kakeko’s brow, taking some real effort to keep the cyclone going. Meanwhile Mc Gw slows things down to an I-guess-slow-jam that crackles of its own accord. I don’t know who’s doing what in that middle one, which seems to compress several decades’ worth of funk styles into 90 seconds.

15. YOASOBI: アドレナ [Adrenaline]
Japan

No YOASOBI on my mixes ever, and then two in two consecutive weeks (if you count a solo appearance from Lilas Ikuta last week). I’ve never really understood what helped them pull away from the competition to become so huge beyond “went viral during the pandemic.” (If you have figured it out, though, let me know. I am interested!)

16. Lia Larsson: Dunka
Sweden

I guess all of those random Lia Larsson novelty Eurobangers I keep liking over the course of several years eventually congeal into albums. I missed her 2024 album 30km/h but this one came out in the first week of January. This is the title track to her new one and it sounds…like a Lia Larsson song.

17. HollyG f. Theodora: Coller la petite
Guadeloupe/DRC-France

More videos should begin with a CGI map of origin (swish pan from DRC to Guadeloupe). If I had more skill, time, or rigor, I’d start literally mapping some of the music I share to corresponding countries. This is indeed epicenter bouyon stuff, with French pop heatseeker Theodora coming along for the ride.

18. DJ Erise, Kenzy Dona: Umbrella
France

Shatta from a French producer and rapper. Thought I might have gotten this from a genre scan this week but was featured on the France New Music playlist.

19. Jaanni, Jyoti Nooran, Bunny: Saasu Maa
India

The occasional Indian pop track that makes it through to me before I’ve been forced to grapple with it after getting half a billion views in a month. Love the way the sitar doubles the vocals in the chorus and then the vocals double the sitar in the solo afterward.

20. John Lundun, uBeyond, Novex, Nobuhle: Ingoma
South Africa

It’s South African and house but much less of a “South African house” feel—slower, simpler, grounded by a nice piano-and-melody hook.

21. Kader Japonais, Tikoubaouine: Khadoudja
Algeria

Another pretty melody, from Algerian raï singer Japonais, and desert blues backdrop from Algerian group Tikoubaouine, who describe themselves as having a Tuareg core but being drawn to other pop forms, which is what it sounded like to me.

22. Rahma Riad: Taa Khabbik
Iraq

A final gift from Saeed Saeed’s indispensible Arabic pop guide, which he updated throughout the year. I managed to hear and share five or six of them on my own without the nudging, but definitely wouldn’t have found most of it otherwise, including this lovely ballad from Iraqi singer Rahma Riad. (Not least because ballads are a huge blind spot in my sorting process. Sorry balladeers! I’m not your chronicler.)

23. Sun-El Musician, Mavhungu, Thakzin, Sylent Nqo: Muloro
South Africa

Thakzin has worked with Sun-El Musician before, but I didn’t find much that post-dated his development of 3-step. On paper the lush dream piano of Sun-El Musician’s hard-to-categorize productions (a sort of gateway drug into amapiano for me back in late 2019/early 2020) and the immersive, unhurried lockstep of 3-step work well together, but this hews much closer to a Sun-El Musician jam with some Thakzin seasoning. I’m not complaining.

That’s it! Until next time, recommend me some pop albums from 2006 I did not already list!

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Dev: Oops Oh Well

New year, same me! I like to think this newsletter is pretty consistent. I am me, as a wise woman once said. In fact, I have likely quoted said wise woman to open a newsletter before. It’s a tough quote to check, and not only because I write about Ashlee Simpson, like, kind of a lot.

What can you expect aside from more of the same?

Well, I am already working on my series for this year, which I am calling All Ears: The Disney-Pop Decade. It’s an attempt to weave together three strands I haven’t systematically explored in this way yet: (1) the landscape of corporate children’s media from 1980 to present, which I studied in grad school, (2) reflections as a parent on kids’ development of preferences and taste in the context of parental gatekeeping, and (3) the approximately ten-year period of rapid growth in Disney’s pop music ambitions with Radio Disney and Hollywood Records. (The “Disney-pop decade” is c. 1999-2009.)

The series title was Radio Disney’s slogan, but I’m also directly alluding to Metal Mike Saunders’s 2000 Village Voice essay on Radio Disney, which in terms of my own critical sensibility was a bit like Bruce Banner getting hit with gamma rays. I alluded to it for the first time in a piece I wrote in college, “All Ears After All These Years,” about the state of Radio Disney during the High School Musical explosion in 2006, which I’ll get to eventually.

I’m aiming for six installments again for symmetry with the A-pop series and Taylor Swift series, but I’m discovering there are probably several books that need to be written on this general topic, even on top of the ones I’m aware of that have been written: class dimensions of parental media moderation, but from a child’s standpoint; an industrial history of the ties between Disney and evangelical culture; and the generalist history of the teen confessional rock boom that I’ve been psyching myself up to write for a few years now.

Anyway, doing all of that is future Dave’s problem. This part of the year is great—there’s so much later left!

One technical change in how I list country of origin on the mix: I will try to mark artists with dual nationality, tribal affiliation, or other heritage included in bios or promotional materials with a hyphen when possible, loosely following a [born/heritage]-[based/nationality] format. E.g. MOLIY, born in Ghana and based in the US, is categorized as “Ghana-US” and so is Amaarae, who was born in the US to Ghanaian parents and raised between the US and Ghana. I will still use slashes (e.g. “Ghana/US”) to describe two artists, or different members of a group, from different countries.

All 2026 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. MOLIY: Backie
Ghana-US

MOLIY goes bouyon, world domination scheme continues apace.

2. Mello Buckzz: Cheddar
US

Chicago drill rapper could not make it through a google before I hit tragedy, but still lightens up on a new single. Not to, say, Monaleo levels, but it made me think about something I’ll post occasionally to get more engagement online, that rock music didn’t die, women just make it and we call it pop. I don’t think this is entirely accurate, but whatever the general dynamic I’m desribing is, it’s also happening in rap music right now…

3. Vayda: Coffy
US

…As a growing number of women in rap have more fun with better beats on average than the men, who often feel like they’re in a state of defensiveness and retrenchment. I had high hopes for Vayda in particular since I heard “Bingo,” and the new album finally delivers.

4. Lil M.U.: Rodeo
US

And in some ways women can take more interesting risks. Lil M.U., last seen on my mixes jumping on car hoods while horns blared, here does a line dance that is much less “country goes rap” than “rap goes country.” Wish I’d heard this soon enough to bring it to Chuck Eddy’s attention in time for his 2025 country singles list; going to call this “year of impact” 2026, but it came out in November. (That’s also a good reminder for me to listen to more Southern soul.)

5. Ice Spice, Tokischa: Thootie
US/Dominican Republic

At this point I’ve settled on Ice Spice being a quite bad rapper with no signs of improvement, and rapidly losing the charm of her early singles. But her ear or luck for the right productions is kind of astounding. I can’t think of many artists who, regardless of their other merits or lack thereof, just sound so good so frequently. On this one, go-to producer RiotUSA does his take on dembow, and it makes me think that dembow is one area of regional ferment that could probably use more cross-pollination, experimentation, and maybe even a little bastardization.

6. Lil Boo: 2026
Mexico

Or you could just go route one like Mexican rapper Lil Boo, modal moves on a trap beat with outdated aughts synths to ring in the new year without the next new thing.

7. Leys: Intro Famme (télé achat)
France

Missed Leys last year, who made it to the finals of a French Netflix competition and seems to have had one monster of a single that I found too late to offer it up for year-end consideration (La Règle du jeu as “Boss Ass Bitch”). This is the intro from a forthcoming EP. One to look out for.

8. Haifa Wehbe: Bas Bas
Lebanon

Huge Lebanese star, not that I’d have known without checking, with a new album that made it through my tin ear for Arabic pop. Perhaps I’m de-tinnifying over time, or maybe this one’s just really good.

9. El Bogueto, Anuel AA f. Fuerza Regida, Yung Beef: Cuando No era Cantante (Remix)
Mexico/Puerto Rico/US/Spain

If anyone was concerned, music in general is still Very Good. I had half the usual number of songs to work with this week and still ended up with more than a mix’s worth of songs to show for it. But to augment this week a bit I did some light surfing through various regional “viral” charts and hit this remix of a reggaeton hit, which must be some sort of platonic ideal of easy reggaeton vibe loop.

10. Modulo Thegabwoy, He-Brew, Gasmilla: Chainsaw
Ghana

An odd one from Ghana with some impish oompah to it.

11. BabyDaiz: Allonsy
DRC-South Africa

BabyDaiz was a favorite at the end of the year and showed up on my ketchup mix last week. Makes me wonder if 2026 is the year I start getting into South African rap proper and diversify away from the South African house music monolith—amapiano, gqom, Afrohouse, 3-step. That I’ve already started a holdover list for South African house in week one with about ten songs in it suggests…probably not.

12. Naira Marley, Zinoleesky: Adugbo
Nigeria

13. DJ Lycox: Telemá
Portugal

14. DJ Ws da Igrejinha, DJ TH DO PRIMEIRO, MC Menor MT, MC Fahah: É Muito Bom
Brazil

15. Didi B: 13500 Volts
Côte D’Ivoire

Plenty of room this week for a few dependable standbys, all artists featured on previous mixes, all doing their thing ably. Those things, respectively, are: bread-and-butter Naija pop with a good Zinoleesky feature, DJ Lycox splitting the difference between batida and global pop, minimalist bass buzz from DJ Ws da Igrejinha, and some Ivorian rap from Didi B, which has more spring in its step than most trap but less spring than most Ivorian pop.

16. ZICO, Lias: Duet
South Korea/Japan

The ongoing saga of NewJeans is pretty dispiriting, but you can’t undo their impact—effortless dnb-pop is everywhere, and here it provides the foundation for a track that combines South Korean rap and J-pop literally and also in spirit, a duet between Korean rapper ZICO and YOASOBI’s Lias.

17. BADWOR7H, renie cares: Мозок Диско [Mozok Disko]
Ukraine

Dorky disco from Ukraine!

18. Lea Romea: Bobler
Denmark

Dreamy pop R&B from Denmark!

19. Adèle & Robin: Adrénaline & Amnésie
France

A bit of French quirk, a little dramatic to classify as iPod indie-pop but close enough in spirit.

20. JTalent: Fa Fa Fa 发大财
Singapore

Ah, now here’s a live one—some kind of Singaporean talent competition where they have everyone do a group song, like when American Idol did “Float On” that was also a Ford commercial or something? (Am I remembering that right? …Yes, I got it right!) And it starts out that way, amateurs singing guilelessly, little slathers of Autotune peeking through, and not even the hip hyperpop sort, to what I assumed was a cover song. But then the chorus hits—“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7! FA FA FA…”—and all of a sudden it sounds like ground zero for a viral phenomenon. A bit of searching of lyrics and personnel suggests it’s an original. The chorus is begging to be snipped, remixed, and memed into a recursive global juggernaut. We’ll see what happens.

21. The Shanghai Restoration Project, Tebza Majaivane: Finding Bakoena in a SoJo Cloud
China-US-Brazil/South Africa

Lovely collaboration by Chinese-American DJs based in Brazil with South African vocalists. I can’t throw out my cop-out “cosmopolitan” category just yet. Some things are just too damn cosmo. The whole album is out on February 6.

22. SAY MY NAME: UFO (ATTENTION)
South Korea/Japan

A K-pop band led by Hitomi, one of the Japanese members of iz*One. The secret weapon here is not K-pop or J-pop but a secret third thing: 2003 Hilary Duff soundtrack pop.

23. Taifu Club: Dakishimatei
Japan

Brainy Japanese punk(ish) group plays a rousing game of Spot the Hook until they give up and just finish with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And why wouldn’t you.

24. Sister Nancy, King Jammy: Muma Dis Come [1992]
Jamaica

A Sister Nancy re-release from 1992—assumed this was part of the roll-out of her last album, but seems to be a one-off. But a January release date is a January release date, even if it’s a re-release date.

25. Marit Larsen: When Susannah Cries
Norway

Marit Larsen’s show-stopper from reality show Hver gang vi møtes, where Norwegian singers cover each other’s songs and are then filmed having warm reactions to everyone else’s covers. This is a 1997 song from Espen Lind, whose name vaguely rang a bell and what do you know, he co-wrote “Hey Soul Sister” and “Irreplaceable,” which frankly shouldn’t have been possible.

That’s it! Until next time, feel free to reminisce about all things Radio Disney with me while I put these essays together. Should be fun!

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from SAY MY NAME: UFO (ATTENTION)

Happy New Year! Of course there has not been enough time to collect music from 2026 yet. I would guess that only something like 10,000 songs have even been released in the seven hours of the year so far.

As is my yearly tradition, I offer a catch-up (ketchup) mix of songs I’ve discovered through year-end perusal. A lot of them come from the People’s Pop Poll nominations. A few are my own discoveries, and others are from various year-end lists and challenges.

Minimal commentary on the songs this week—I wanted to use this installment mostly to highlight 2025 music writing. I don’t keep up with enough music writing to do much more than shout out the folks I follow regularly anyway (and have usually followed for many years), but it’s still nice to have an opportunity to spotlight things you might have missed.

• Frank Kogan has a corkscrewing stemwinding rabbit hole of a post on the social spread of various incarnations of the syllables “ah-pu-tah” across countries and cultures. Like its subject, the essay keeps expanding.

• George Henderson has written a lot of great stuff this year. If you have to start somewhere, I recommend his essay on fairy trap.

• Al Valera has a fantastic post about “worst” lists that also functions well as a worst list.

• Holly Boson wrote a “Which Eminem Album Are You” quiz that is stealthily some of the best criticism about Eminem you’ll find. Collect ‘em all. Two of my favorite music pieces of hers this year, though, are these posts:

• Chuck Eddy has migrated over to Substack (subscribe!) and has been re-publishing a lot of pieces from his site plus many thousands of new words about music and mushrooms.

• Katherine St. Asaph’s Stereogum column is always a must-read. Really liked her 40 Singles of the Year post.

• Alphonse Pierre has been doing incredible work at Pitchfork this year. My favorite pieces of his are this one about his grandmother falling in love with “Lean Back” by Fat Joe and his profile of Monaleo.

• Don’t Rock the Inbox is always great—go subscribe to it.

• Joe Muggs has been making the case for our current age of musical abundance.

• Joshua Minsoo Kim’s interview with Billy Woods is a life-affirming hoot.

• BDM’s recent essay on Swift, Plath, and Nelson was really good.

• Shout out to the extended Xgauverse bloc including but not limited to (apologies to anyone I missed): Steve Erickson’s radio show Radio Not Radio, Christian Iszchak’s Xgauvian blurbs, Brad Luen’s thoughts on poptimistic popularism, Joey Daniewicz’s ranking of every Allo Darlin’ song, Ryan Maffei’s series of Taylor Swift revisits, and Dan Weiss’s singles of the year, which I pilfered as much as I could from before running out of space for uncanny valley Sublime and a lost lo-fi teenpop masterpiece from Numero Group that I can’t believe I did not unearth myself.

• Mark Sinker at London Review of Books on A.I. and the grotesque.

• Lucy Sante is basically writing a book-length writer’s guide. Read all of it if you can.

• If you need more recommendations, Grant Sharples started a thread where music writers shared their own favorite work.

That is all the room I have for this particular newsletter’s intro, but I will try to circle back for folks I missed in the new year.

Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube || Deezer

1. Say She She: Cut & Rewind
US

I have enough links up top to threaten the email cutoff almost immediately so minimum commentary and maximum tunes this week. Say She She is one that I wanted to like as an album more than I did, but their Le Tigresque “my uncle’s got an indie disco” electro bop opener “Cut & Rewind” is a huge highlight.

2. Halsey: Safeword
US

One from Dan Weiss’s list. Cannot believe I missed this: justice for Halsey, including from the injustice of my burnt-out attention span.

3. Cerrone, Rahim Redcar: Catching Feelings
France

A discovery in the Singles Jukebox’s amnesty week, where I did not successfully Marina Satti-pill the masses but did hear the only Rahim Redcar (fka(?) Christine and the Queens) project that has stuck with me to date, in no small thanks to Cerrone transcending self-pastiche.

4. Cain Culto, Xiuhtezcatl: ¡BASTA YA!
US

5. @onefive: Kibidango
Japan

6. Silvy Kumalasari: Culik Aku Dong / APT THAI
Indonesia

7. Falle Nioke: Falle Le Le Le
Guinea

Four songs that feature in the upcoming People’s Pop 2025 poll: From Holly B, two artist/activists of Colombian/Nicaraguan and Nahua heritage make resistance (sans ™) sound like a blast. J-pop from Jel Bugle, the Indonesian pop at the center of Frank Kogan’s syllabic odyssey linked above, and a sort of minimal electro highlife from Guinean polyglot Falle Nioke, recommended by PPP regular Neil, with whom I seem to have some sorta taste mind meld happening—he nominated my main pick for the tournament (“I Remember I Forget” by Yasmine Hamdan) literally seconds before I did.

8. Salima Chica: Songi Songi
DRC/Angola

Circling back around, as promised in a previous mix, to the actual 2025 smash from Salima Chica after sharing a minor feature from her.

9. BabyDaiz, Rebo, Kvng Vinci: Allez Tobina
DRC/South Africa/Nigeria

10. shego: Curso Avanzado de Perra
Spain

11. Kocee: PDG
Cameroon

Two African pop bangers from LokpoLokpo with a Dan Bright Amaya Spanish rec in the middle. I will even tempt the email cutoff by linking to both of their Bluesky accounts — go follow them!

12. Titica: Só de Trás
Angola

Can’t believe I did not hear Titica’s album in time for year-ends, might be her best to date.

13. DJ Japa NK, MC Meno K, Mc Ryan SP, Mc Jacaré: Posso Até Não Te Dar Flores
Brazil

Had this funk song in my Brazilian holdover list for a while, but it wasn’t until it got recommended to me that I listened more intently and realized I missed an interpolation that made me gasp.

14. Charly Gynn, Tzunami: Lo Rocé
Mexico

Annoying chirpy reggaeton that soothes my addled brain. No idea where I found this one (have featured Charly Gynn before).

15. Young Eman, Eline De Sainté Vherodia: Popstar in Da Bits
UK

Uh oh, the UK is outdoing us even in blown-out mildew rap, this is a national crisis.

16. Jhondiez, Dj Rocka, Santiago Berrio: Katty Perry
Chile

Annoying non-chirpy (but yes blurpy) reggaeton that soothes my addled brain. No idea where I found this one, either.

17. Shallipopi f. Wizkid: Like That (Bomboclatt)
Nigeria

Shallipopi’s strong year culminated in a December album that I did not rate in time for year-ends. This one borrows much more than just the log drums from amapiano and feels fresher than most Amabeats.

18. La Nonna Go, Mc Topre, Mc Lukinhas 011: Bota Elas Na Garupa
Brazil

19. Mc Laranjinha, Wesley Gonzaga, Dj Gvzinho Tralha: Próxima Parada
Brazil

Two Brazilian funk representatives in the People’s Pop poll, including what I believe is the mellowest production Wesley Gonzaga has done to date.

20. CUZZOS: Moesha
US

Another Dan Weiss rec, charming five-member rap crew who don’t want no scrubs.

21. Rema: Kelebu
Nigeria

22. Blaq Major, B Yember f. Mzamo Ngcobo, Sphiwe: Faki Beer
South Africa

Yeah yeah, more People’s Pop. Rema goes in hard while Blaq Major et al relax with a cold beer.

23. Khtek: Frizzbee
Morocco

24. Amaia: Aralar
Spain

Not sure who I got either of these from, and I am far past my word count. If you shared one of these, please take credit, they are both great! Who can keep up with everything??

25. BOSA: شط جديد (a new shore)
Egypt

26. Thakzin: Release & Sustain
South Africa

Let’s end with two slow burns from…let’s see…ah, People’s Pop. Mic Waters’s nom, Egyptian dream-pop by BOSA, and Lokpo’s reminder to keep Thakzin in your thoughts and in your year-end social media music challenge nomination slate.

That’s it! Until next time, don’t put so many links in your newsletter.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Halsey: Safeword

This is year three of my newsletter, which makes it something like year six of what I jokingly call my “dumpster-diving” project. The idea that started to become clear to me around 2018, and that I formalized into this newsletter in 2023, is that the best way to find new music is to rapidly plow through lots of it — an ungodly, maybe inhuman amount of it. For whatever reason, I think I am well-suited to this task: I have ears that can pick things up quickly and I’m not precious about the process; I assume I’ve missed a lot, that I’m only hearing a minuscule fraction of what’s available, and that the universe will make me aware of what it needs to in this one precious lifetime I’ve got.

This is a marked change from my approach to music before that point, which was voracious but was never quite so frantic or anarchic. I did a lot of work to “keep up”—followed music chat, mostly, with a huge inclination toward a few specific voices pointing me in various directions (often abroad). I’m not sure what eventually clicked, or broke down, or opened up. Probably a combination of the world and just me, but I’m only me, so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

My point is, there is a fundamentally chaotic and chance element in my finding most of these songs—I am a highly unreliable narrator and tour guide, and I like to think I’ve been forthright about this in the newsletter, leaning in to the chaos and my own amused bewilderment.

This process—both making the newsletter itself and making peace with my bewilderment—has brought me great joy and fulfillment over the past few years. I like being at sea. I’m just kind of a sailor now, like Moby Dick minus Moby Dick, wild anecdotes and the tingle of the sublime in the air and a few stabs at dubious scientific inquiry and lots of jokes and the occasional gruesome description of something you’d rather not have ever known even existed. Sometimes I feature incomprehensible rituals between the other folks out on lonely boats, too; sometimes I just kind of stare out into the enormity of it all and feel very deep and very small all at once.

So here are few jewels—cœurs de la mer. I’ve chosen 50 of them, a silly round number, but a grid’s a grid. There are countless others down there.

The stuff that makes me wonder if you’re even allowed to do that

I don’t know where I’d put the songs in this first group on a list of best songs—I don’t know that they’re my favorites (maybe), or the ones I listened to the most this year (probably not). They’re the ones I heard and thought I can’t believe they got away with this or I don’t know if anyone has ever done this before or this might be awful but I want everyone to hear it.

Quick formatting note: I’ll be sharing YouTube view counts here. For the few actual three-digit view counts I will use an exclamation point to confirm it is not a typo. In lieu of a song review (I have already reviewed all of these at least once) I’ll boil it down to a tiny highlight.

Badger, TFace, Mayday, Dubzco: Canva (How?) (5.8K views)

“Spend the P’s!”

Kristina Dawn: OneHalf And (355 views!)

<desperate inhalations>

Gena Desouza: เข้าใจปะห์ (Do You Understand?) (11K views)

<jerk synths> “It’s G-G-G-G-G!”

DJ Danz: Sugdan Na Ang Pag Budots (53K views)

<bloops, clangs, oomphs>

Nelly Furtado: Corazon (DJ Arana remix) (51K views)

“Done, done, duh-duh-done, done”

NLE The Great: KO (9.7M views)

“Role model, you will never fit the shoe”

Snow Tha Product: Sabado (6.3M views)

“Que uno de nosotros votó por TRUMP…”

THÉA: Qui Fera Taire Les Kidz Fucked Up?? (134K views)

“Les kids fucked up ce soir?!”

Tommy Genesis: True Blue (3.6M views)

“But I’m not that little, I’m not that little, I’m not that little”

Vana: Bite Back (817K views)

“Walk you like a dog WOOF WOOF <screaming> whimper when you whine”

xiangyu f. Gimgigam: はっちゃKO (868 views!)

<gqom sounds>

WeTalkSound, Fimi, SGaWD: Hei God (2.3K views)

<panting sounds>

The stuff that sounded like it should have been way more massive

I have a very poor track record of championing underdogs. My underdogs tend to stay way under. So here are the songs that I sort of assumed upon hearing them were or would soon be massive, only to find that I didn’t hear much about them anywhere else.

In some cases this might mean raw numbers: Marla, an Ivorian rapper who has had some success with other songs, has gotten about 100 views on her charming “On les a cramé.” In other cases it’s relative—Ari Lennox and Rico Nasty both broke a million views, but their songs sound worthy of many more millions. Sir Chloe seems to be more popular than my other indie rock fave later on the list, Miya Folick, but I hear Folick come up a lot in indie-leaning conversations and haven’t heard a peep about Sir Chloe from anyone. (This may be limited to my very specific music social circle, though.) And there are a bunch of regional hits with six-digit streams that sounded like they should have gone mega-global.

Arp Frique and the Perpetual Singers: Hold the Line (Another Taste Rework) (2.2K views)

“Praise the Lord with all I have to give”

Cannelle: Fille (135K views)

“Step it up bitch, step your cookies up”

chi: Life of the Party (6.4K views)

“‘Cause I’m the life of the party and somebody’s hottie”

Lella Fadda: OKHTY (239K views)

“Cue violins [sounds like ‘violence’]”

FLVCKKA: Tsunami (72K views)

“Brrrrrrrr….ciento ochenta carretera oop”

INJI: U WON’T! (160K views)

“You won’t take me to the Hamptons on a Wednesday cuz it’s random”

Ari Lennox: Soft Girl Era (1.3M views)

“Woop…yeah yeah yeah yeah”

Marla: On les cramé (126 views!)

<squeak>

Arianne Moffat: Jouer (141K views)

“Combattre le feu par le jeu…”

Nayomi & Perrie: Eih El Kalam? (158K views)

<mattress spring squeaks>

Emma Nolde: Indipendente (45K views)

“Indi-din-din-din-din-dipendente”

Rico Nasty: Teethsucker (YEA3x) (1.1M views)

“YEAH YEAH!”

Rocio Sensación: La Nueva Sensación (1.1K views)

“ayyyyyyy, corazon….”

Sir Chloe: The Hole (55K views)

“It’s not fun, it’s not fun, it’s not fun anymore…”

Tshegue - Plus de place nulle part (45K views)

“On fait du yoga, Coca Coca Cola”

The stuff that I did not think would be any more massive

This just means that I am not surprised by how many or few people were listening compared to my expectations. In some cases that means “huge smash” (Naija pop hit “Laho” and reggaeton hit “Secunena”) and in some cases that means “got a boost in music nerd attention,” like Pitchfork-approved “Sé MiiMii” or Sub Pop-distributed “Omorfo Mou.”

Miya Folick: Fist (16K views)

<Dolores O’Riordan yawp>

NMIXX: High Horse (685K views)

<drums!!!!>

Myaap: Fairy (7.8M views)

“With a fatty…on my daddy…”

Marina Satti: Epano Sto Trapezi (1.7M views)

“I guess I’m a butterfly” <squash>

Mei Semones: Animaru (105K views)

<vocalizing to guitar line>

MiiMii f. Dj Skycee: Sé MiiMii (1.4M views)

“Hello!”

pinponpanpon: SO COOL (79K views)

“The cold never bothered me anyway-ay-ay-ayyyy”

Sayuri & Sopholov: Secunena (17M views)

“trai-go-lo-qui-tos-a-los-de-la-se-cu-dea-la-do…”

Shallipopi: Laho (70M views)

“Laho-o-o-o…laho-o-o-o…”

Zuchu: Amanda (14M views)

“You tryna dingi-dingi-dingi-danga-die”

Σtella: Omorfo Mou (78K views)

“Ooh ya ya”

The stuff that I found hard to categorize even given the tongue-in-cheek flexibility of the former three categories

And finally…the rest! I mean. They’re all just good songs. I’ve shared nearly all of them before, though this group does contain one that will technically show up next week (Say She She).

Atmos Blaq: Shimova (23K views)

<3-step intensifies>

Banfy f. Sheridan: Bam Bam (28M views)

“Bam bam bam bam bam”

Yasmine Hamdan: I Remember I Forget (43K views)

“الخوف عادي [alkhawf eadi]”

Irmãs de Pau: Queimando Ice (1.9M views)

“ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE ICE”

KIIRAS: Kill Ma Bo$$ (7.6M views)

“Are you ready to beat my heart?”

Lachispa: Hartita de Llorar (614K views)

“Estoy hartita de lloraaaaaaaaaaar!”

Kamo Mphela, Aymos, Que DJ, Jay Music f. SpacePose: Partii (5.5M views)

“Partii….partii….partii…”

Mula: Wôyô Mulingue (1.6M views)

<call and response>

Rihanna: Friend of Mine (10M views)

[waits 50 seconds] “ooooh…”

Say She She: Cut & Rewind (72K views)

“So hire the guy who’s gonna look you in the eye”

Tayna: Thana (16M views)

[Rihanna voice] “S’jam andej…”

Tokyo Syoki Syodo: Okazaki Kyoko No Ano Ko Ni Naritakatta (32K views)

<Tony Hawk Pro Skater ska riff>

That’s it! See you next week with the first mix of 2026—which will be the last mix of 2025. Stay safe, have fun, be well.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

I did not have it in me to write up any albums this year after all, which is a shame because it’s a particularly good year to throw a few off-the-beaten-track albums into the mix for consideration with a bit of word oomph behind them.

This was the hardest year I can remember to sort out which songs or albums were my favorites, despite it being almost trivially easy to find amazing stuff from pretty much any part of a globe I chose to throw a strand of spaghetti at. And I’m still getting great recommendations, mostly from friends and familiar polls and year-end chat on social media.

Meanwhile, I continue to find the few remaining publications that concern themselves with year-end extravaganzas pretty dispiriting. I’ve started to use a simple heuristic to even engage with a year-end list from a major publication—what would this list look like if you only included work that was not in English? This is not really a fair heuristic, since there is obviously tons of amazing music in English, and “the words are in English” (if there even are words) doesn’t really tell you that much about the artist who made the music or what kind of music it is.

But just for thought experiment’s sake, I wanted to see which (and how many) not-in-English albums were getting mentions. I went through the list of the current top 200 albums on Rob Mitchum’s (no, the other one) aggregate of year-end lists and pared it down to the not-in-English albums.1 (This is based on a quick skim so I may have missed some.)

Rosalía - Lux (#2, 21 placements)
Bad Bunny - Debí Tirar Más Fotos (#9, 16 placements)
Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film (#46, 6 placements)
Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves (#91, 4 placements)
Ela Minus - Día (#100, 4 placements)
Eiko Ishibashi - Antigone (#106, 3 placements)
DJ Haram - Beside Myself (#115, 3 placements)
Titanic - Hagen (#120, 3 placements)
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslave Saienko - Hildegard (#139, 2 placements)
Silvana Estrada - Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (#140, 2 placements)
Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures (#145, 3 placements)
Karol G - Tropicoqueta (#180, 2 placements)
DJ K - Radio Libertadora! (#186, 2 placements)

That’s 13 out of 200, or 7%. If you include instrumental albums by not-in-English artists—or if you assume I missed a few, which you probably should—you could probably nudge it up another percentage point or two.

I mean, it’s not nothing. You can’t just asterisk away two of the biggest artists of the year in the top ten, or pretend that Stereolab doesn’t count, as I initially did. And this method doesn’t tell you anything about the makeup of individual lists. The problem may be that everything is pretty spread out, with this affecting not-in-English work disproportionately in the aggregate.

But I did figure out that if you exclude Rosalía/Bad Bunny/Stereolab, those other 10 albums are mostly clustered in the same publications’ lists. Only 11 publications (out of 29 publications included so far) account for all of the lower-ranked nominations in the top 200.2

I’ve probably gone on about this stuff enough for now: final A-pop series plug of the year and maybe ever, tell your friends! Lord knows there doesn’t need to be any more opining on the subject of critics’ lists. God bless ‘em for staying alive. To put a more positive gloss on it, isolating the not-in-English albums in this way gave me a few new leads or reminders to re-listen—hey, I probably underrated the Ichiko Aoba album!

I just wonder what I’m hearing that everyone else isn’t? It seems impossible to imagine myself building a list of songs or albums that isn’t a large proportion, if not an outright majority, of music in languages other than English. And it’s not because I think this is some noble goal: there are plenty of regions and scenes where some level of monolingualism should be more or less expected. But if you fancy yourself something of a generalist, or at least un-specialist, it’s just where a lot of the best music seems to be.

Examining the critic picks at the very least has reaffirmed what I do want to be doing here, which is finding as much music as I can and sharing it. But mostly that has meant finding and sharing songs. So where does that leave my Relationship to the Album As a Format? Many years ago, I wrote about albums as an “attentional strategy” — a way of focusing on music that didn’t make me feel so at sea in an ocean of songs I couldn’t track or organize. But at some point I learned how to swim in this particular sea, which means I no longer view albums in quite the same way.

Music in general is not like many of the struggling mass media forms of the 20th century—television, narrative film, journalism—which are having a tough time with whatever changes have been happening in attention and distribution. But perhaps the album is like those forms, just not exactly in the way that people have been hand-wringing about for the last 25 years since “Your Hard Drive” was named album of the year in SPIN. Like those other forms, it hasn’t died, but is maybe retreating into a somewhat niche art space. So albums specifically might be more like opera, even as music in general is more like writing.

I have a relatively well developed appreciation for the form of a good album, so I will likely continue to follow the form like a 21st century opera-goer. But I also seem to have less to say about albums generally. At some level, albums are and always have been snapshots and song collections. But I often don’t have much to say about a collection of good songs beyond “this is a collection of good songs” (which is fine, and makes for many excellent albums). For albums I tend to write more about, I’m usually after something else, a sort of long-form movement or story or idea to hook on to.

The albums that I found myself wanting to write about the most this year are ones I didn’t really like, but wanted to: I started writing a post about tenuous connections between Lily Allen’s West End Girl, Allie X’s Happiness Is Going to Get You, and Madilyn Mei’s A Thousand Songs About It All: Act I, only to find as I started that I didn’t want to listen to any of the albums all the way through again. None of them appear on my lists below.

Instead, I saved myself a bit of effort this week by writing very brief comments about a few albums that I liked that I saw almost no other mention of in year-ends over on Bluesky. So far only one of the albums from that thread has received a placement on the year-end aggregator — British new wave freaks Cardiacs (“what if Sparks were Mr. Bungle”) were placed at #30 on the site Louder Than War’s list.

Albums: Under-the-radar-ish

• Chini.png: Via Lo Orozco
  “Chilean art-pop wins the Núria Graham deceptive complexity award.”

• Marilina Bertoldi: Para Quien Trabajas Vol. I
  “Argentine rock album of the year, kitchen sink post-punk, a lot of fun.”

• SANAM: Sametou Sawtan
  “Avant psych and/or psych avant from a v cool Beirut band”

• KIWI: sama
  “Polish singer-songwriter, swoops and swells without leaving the bedroom”

• Irmãs de Pau: Gambiarra Chic, Pt. 2
  “Brazilian-funk-spiked pop with the best anti-ICE song of the year (if you squint…different “ice” but close enough)”

• TAMIW: Farewell Party
  “Wrote that one song ‘suggests Willow covering “The National Anthem” by Radiohead,’ which is very me-coded”

• Gen Hoshino: Gen
  “Eclectic Japanese pop album with a few left-field collabs”

• Alemán: De Vuelta a las Andadas
  “Mexican rapper with a shaggy party album overstuffed with rap, pop, reggaeton, and otherwise unspecified bangers of all kinds. Bonus(?): the most tasteless album cover of the year”

• Salin: Rammana
  “Thai-Canadian jazz drummer/composer with a throwback Afropop album”

• Cardiacs: LSD
  “The band I described recently as ‘painful acupressure for ADHD stress relief’ are back after 25 years sounding…like that.”

• Virna Lindt: Danube
  “But maybe you needed a 40-year hiatus instead? Here’s espionage thriller pop by self-described ‘Hitchcock blonde’ Swedish new waver Virna Lindt”’

• Lori Goldston: Open Space
  Sometimes an album does what it says on the tin: “I recorded Open Space with in a single continuous take: my cello, an amp, and a distortion pedal.”

• Vĩ: a-Soft Warning: Live from Glasgow back Home
  Vietnamese pop experimentalist, fka Vũ Hà Anh, is worth gathering in full (click through to Bandcamp for various singles and EPs; this is the closest to a 2025 LP).

• Anderson Neiff: I.E.A.A.N.
  “Baile funk album block! Decent albs/EPs this year from d.silvestre, DJ K, and DJ Arana, but these are my top three. First, some bright brega funk.”

• Dj Aguilar: Direto do Alto Vol 1
  “All-around funk sampler of the ‘DJ & Friends’ variety.”

• MC BF & DJ YUZAK: Bebeto e Romário
  “My surprise funk album of the year, smooths out its sound with phonk and sustains the full album length that way.”

• V/A: Não Estragou Nada
  “Príncipe batida isn’t primarily an album medium, but this massive hodgepodge of unreleased work by some of the big producers in the scene is probably as close as they’ve gotten to a [aughts indie dork voice] DFA Compilation #2”

• Lella Fadda: MAGNÜN (deluxe version)
  “Fantastic Egyptian art-rap, something like my #3-4 of the year.”

• SIMONA: Astuta
  “Finally, will stump for the two highest-ranking Spanish-language albums on my list and call it a day for this particular thread. First: Spanish semi-avant-pop that’s better when it leans out from the art.”

• Juana Rozas: Tanya
  “And finally, the one I’ve recommended a bunch this year already and might be my album of the year depending on how it fares in my next few weeks of album-revisiting”

Albums: The Rest!

I did not ultimately put Tanya first. I decided that Monaleo’s Who Did the Body can remain in the top spot, even though every middling to negative review I’ve read about the album I also agree with. (That’s how you know it’s a keeper.) I wrote about the album already in this post.

Instead, I’ll present the remaining albums on my list that I did not share above, available on my ongoing yearly lists. The ranking isn’t super relevant, but for the record my #1-2-3 is Monaleo, Juana Rozas, and a mid-December release of a budots supergroup album: DJ Love, DJ Danz, & DJ Ericnem’s Budots World: 3-Hit Combo!

In parentheses, the placement these albums have on the year-end aggregate at press time (or N/A for no placement).

• ALT BLK ERA: Rave Immortal (N/A)

• Ano: Bone Born Bomb (N/A)

• Bambi: Trap or Die (N/A)

• BunnaB: Bunna Summa (Ice Cream Summer Deluxe) (N/A)

• Deep Sea Diver: Billboard Heart (N/A)

• Disiniblud: s/t (N/A)

• DJ Love, DJ Danz, & DJ Ericnem: Budots World: 3-Hit Combo! (N/A)

• GOON: Dream 3 (N/A)

• JADE: That’s Showbiz Baby (#45)

• JAZZWRLD & Thukuthela: The Most Wanted (N/A)

• Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI (N/A)

• Maggie Lindemann: I Feel Everything (N/A)

• Logic1000: DJ-Kicks (N/A)

• MARINA: Princess of Power (N/A)

• Mellow & Sleazy, Tman Xpress: Midnight in Diepkloof (N/A)

• Monaleo: Who Did the Body (#429)

• Ashley Monroe: Tennessee Lightning (N/A)

• Addison Rae: Addison (#18)

• Mei Semones: Animaru (N/A)

• Soyuz: Krok (N/A)

• TiaCorine: Corinian (N/A)

• Titanic: Hagen (#120)

• Yeule: Evangelic Girl Is a Gun (#252)

EPs

There was also a lot of action in my EP list this year. The line between album and EP is blurry these days, but these are ones that seemed undeniably EP-like.

• ADÉLA: The Provocateur
  Worthy Slovakian competitor in a Netflix talent competition lost to Katseye but blows the Katseye oeuvre out of the water in hooks and provocation.

• Bb trickz: 80’z
  For a time my album of the year before a “demotion” to this category, a rapid tour through avant beats and charmingly disaffected raps.

• Big Wett: Risk It
  Ultimately goofier than it is filthy, but it’s close!

• Rebecca Black: SALVATION
  She has become the emblematic A-pop striver, understands that it’s all niche and small, but you still have to work extremely hard, which is why she should absolutely take over all of Addison Rae’s material.

• horsegiirL: v.i.p. - very important pony
  Better than Horsegirl, but only because the album is 10 minutes shorter.

• Van Hunt: A Heart Full of Questions
  Yes, I liked that Van Hunt album from 20 years ago so much that I sat through all of this EP twice even though it sounds like tossed-off demos of half-remembered song ideas.

• KIIRAS: Kill Ma Bo$$
  This strains the definition of an EP—it’s really just a single plus remixes. That’s how much I like the title track.

• Anish Kumar & Baalti: Stunt Doubles Pt. 2
  Was pleased that this project, a Golden Beatology goldmine of Bollywood sampled into dance music, has been chopped into two EPs rather than released as an album.

• Le Sserafim: HOT
  Not sure when this group, who a few years ago I’d pegged as fairly unremarkable, decided to follow weird muses into art-pop territory along with their more straightforward pop, but it really works for them.

• Liv del Estal: tue moi
  Had no idea what this even was until I saw it on my list again, but it’s great! What if Frou Frou was actually French?

• Morgenshtern: Alisher
  Have been interested in Russian rapper Morgenshtern since 2020 when he was, well, a rapper. He has since moved on to rock and singer-songwriter material. The more shamelessly Damon Albarn-ish the alt-rock hooks the better, so the highlight is “Povod.” (Nyah nyah.)

• NMIXX: Fe3O4: FORWARD
  I guess this is the K-pop album of the year? NMIXX is frustrating because their album from the year doesn’t have the best songs from the EP and the EP doesn’t have the best songs from the album. But only the EP has “High Horse” on it.

• SAILORR: Sincerity
  Really like SAILORR, whose conversational R&B is equally charming and menacing (“hey, Pookie!” might be my favorite two-second moment in a song this year, per Hannah Jocelyn’s annual prompt). This is also exactly the right dosage of her and happens to have her best songs.

• Elle Teresa: Yukako
  Second name on my EP list I didn’t recognize, but the cover is familiar. Japanese rapper who I think I kept liking after putting one of these songs on a mix back in April.

• xiangyu & Gimgigam: 遠慮のかたまり
  No album-length collection of one of my favorites of the year (Japanese pop by way of gqom and other global dance styles) and couldn’t justify this 7-song 23-minute collection on the main albums list.

My stuff

You probably don’t need more albums to listen to, but here’s a final reminder that I also made some of my own stuff, too. To me, mash-up albums are more like music criticism than music production, but it is an area where I do tend to enjoy the stuff I make, which I can’t say about other creative music endeavors I attempt.

I have one official mixtape of Taylor Swift mash-ups, a sort of audio essay that sets Taylor Swift melodies to melodic rap beats. The reviews are in: “This is cursed, but I listened to the whole thing” and “Holy shit though. This is Grey Album level.”

But wait! I also made one unofficial mixtape of Taylor Swift songs set to…pretty much everything else, based on my observation last year that her last album seemed like a mixtape minus the unauthorized samples.

Hence: THE TORTURED POETS MIXTAPE. (Does Charlie Puth appear? Maybe!)

That’s it! If you have any more words about these (or other) albums yourself, feel free share them here. Next week I’ll whittle down some songs. Then I’ll be back with at least one and maybe two(!) post-script mixes based on the many songs from the year I’ve found from other people’s lists this month.

—Dave Moore (the other one)