Antarctica is melting
2025 Mix 43: Madeline, Madilyn, madeleine, Marit, Marla, Martinique, Moga, Moore (no, another one), and more
Everyone is talking about the weird, insular break-up album that’s brimming with anger and paranoia set against a deceptively sweet and melancholy pop backdrop.
That must be because the 20-year anniversary of Under the Surface by Marit Larsen is fast approaching! I might actually pitch something for this somewhere when the time comes, to be continued.
Lily Allen also put out her first album in 2006, but I didn’t really click with her until 2009, when It’s Not Me, It’s You scorched the discourse space with mass intentional fallacy. I bailed soon thereafter and figured I might never return. Her new one—a concept album (or whatever) about a marriage falling apart as middle age looms—immediately grabbed me upon listening to it, but loosened its grip as the tabloid detectives descended. This usually means that the album won’t survive first impressions. No amount of hype or annoying internet chat can really ding an album that I’ve decided is full of the ol’ heartsongs, but this sort of annoying social buzz can be brutal for the not-quite-there stuff.
And anyway, the “project” of West End Girl, which on paper is extremely my shit, is a bit too telegraphed for my taste in concept-albums-or-whatever when I have so many examples of albums that explore similar territory without the little bits of scaffolding showing: Kelis’s Flesh Tone, Kesha’s Gag Order, and, yeah, Marit Larsen’s Under the Surface. I also have examples where it’s all scaffolding, and the scaffolding is falling down: Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended even goes Escher with its braided pipes and warped transoms.
I also have to grapple with the other carnivalesque song suite about some weirdo’s frayed nerves and tangled wires that is almost the inverse of West End Girl—that is, extremely not my shit on paper but grabbing me in a nagging way. That’s Madilyn Mei’s A Thousand Songs About It All: Act I, a cloying morass of theater kid clowning slash clowning kid theater that even at its best and most engaging has a little grain of irritation remaining in it, a constant speck of dust in the eye. (I mean…clowns!)
Normally this sort of cyclical post-ironic twee puts me off enough that I don’t think about it much—sufferable but somewhat uninteresting Jax and insufferable but somewhat interesting corook, say. But sometimes post-ironic twee gets my number, and I can’t seem to wave away Elio Mei, who embraces or at least evokes a tumult of diagnostic and/or binary-fucking and/or terminal hobbyist acronyms (which gets you DnD) that I personally feel both drawn to with a sort of dull yearning and also too old and settled (like dust settles) to get tattooed somewhere relatively private. (Come to think of it, I feel the same way about tattoos.)
Oddly, I think there’s one extra element that is Not to My Taste—let’s call it Jack Skellington Backpack-core—that I think makes the full complement of wobbly blocks hang together, a lightly gothic dare I say emo undercurrent that gives some bite and blood to the impeccably sculpted miniatures cluttering a childhood bedroom its inhabitant has long since outgrown. This was also true of Angelica Garcia’s early work, which I sort of wished would have moved more in the direction of “Karma the Knife” but has moved in a more sophisticated global cosmopolitan direction.
What I liked so much about Under the Surface back in 2006 was that its own kaleidoscope of shrewdly salvaged uncool—Disney princess soundtrack strings and slide-whistle country-pop and reverent ABBA pastiche piano—was always in the service of the song, sad banger after sad banger, and in focusing like this made the self-questioning (or -loathing) and paranoia (or rage) feel subterranean and more effective in its way than just tweeting it out. (To her credit, Lily Allen figured out how to tweet things out before Twitter existed.) I think about the line “her eyes are too narrow, her legs are too long, she knows by this time tomorrow you’ll be gone” a lot.
Ultimately the concept albums (etc.) that win me over figure out how to spotlight a beating, if sometimes palpitating, heart of optimism in the center, something that sounds like it should be true of Under the Surface but really is a false front that gives the whole collection a distinctively bitter aftertaste—in a good way in this case, but there are not many such cases. So maybe the new Lily Allen refuses to fully click because I’m sorry that happened without having the counterbalancing “happy for you tho.” Or maybe (more likely) it just needed better songs.
1. BIA f. Tyler ICU, Khalil Harrison
US/South Africa
2. Kamo Mphela, Aymos, QUE DJ, Jay Music f. SpacePose: Partii
South Africa
3. JAZZWRLD, Thukuthela, Babalwa M f. Dlala Thukzin: uValo
South Africa
Ah, another mix where the music that reaches me by listening volume has nothing to do with the music that reaches me by thought and chat—I mean, look, I don’t know what to tell you, you can just pluck random songs out of the couple hundred South African house options that are released each week and make a damn fine mix. That means the stuff that ends up on my own mixes has to do something else, too.
BIA, to my knowledge, is the only I-guess-pop-star (BIA’s celeb status remains a little mysterious to me?) who has totally given herself over to amapiano proper, the exact move that I hoped for from Rihanna back in 2023 and was only partially successful with actual South African crossover Tyla, who will probably appear next week with A-POP emblazoned across her video (though the A- probably doesn’t stand for “American” and she probably does not read my blog).
With a bit of hindsight it feels like Tyla did her crossover from the wrong direction, less a translator of South African house than a magpie cross-cultural phenom basically competing against other R&B. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not this—an actual, no-fooling amapiano pop move, with the right producer and the right guest and a good-enough personality in the center. Would have sounded better with Rihanna, but what wouldn’t.
The other two are gqom and amapiano pop hits proper, respectively: “Partii” was on my holdover list for weeks before a message board nudge got me to appreciate it as a year highlight, and has a Litchi-choreographed video that got me down a rabbit hole of Litchi’s other credits that traces some sorta greatest hits compilation (“Huku”! “Water”! “Wadibusa”!)
“uValo” been big on the South African charts and took me longer than it should have to revisit it on vulgar popularism grounds to notice its incremental futzing with 3step, continuing what I once called “changes in the genre over time [that] can be subtle enough that it almost feels like you’re watching evolution at the individual genetic mutation level.”
4. DJ Kawest, TKS 2G: Ta Nana
Martinique
DJ Kawest gets a whole damn song out of the guitar bend at the end of the loop. Nothing has yet beaten the audacity of what he did to “Get UR Freak On,” but it’s nice to get his alchemy even in microdoses.
5. Kwaw Kese, Skonti: Ama Yare Fever
Ghana
I have a feeling not understanding the lyrics here is saving me some unpleasantness that the album art did not have the decency to do, but as with “Doot Doot (6 7),” it is very hard for me not to include a song with car-swerving “byeeeeerum” onomatopoeia.
6. Arlene MC: Celoso
US
Pennsylvania-born Domincan dembow artist seems to be on a slow and steady rise for the past five years, and commanding a grab-bag of bubbly Latin American reggaeton-pop styles probably won’t hurt.
7. Luca Eck, SIMONA: Puta Emocional
Germany/Spain
There’s a layer of artiness that has kept SIMONA’s album away from my top spot but I’m intrigued with the balance that she maintains, never quite giving in to scare quotes. Here the closer-to-scare-quotes techno pop backing from German DJ Luca Eck gives her permission to go dumber and sound smarter.
8. Sayuri & Sopholov, Fuentes Prod: Veo Veo
Mexico
Speaking of bubbly pop reggaeton and dumb stuff that sounds smart—here’s more of that!
9. Marla: On les a cramé
Côte d’Ivoire
So how do we choose Ivorian crossover breakthroughs these days? Can we get the cumulative advantage snowball rolling on Lady-Stush-squeak lightning in a bottle Marla or what? There are sixty goddamn views on this thing. Comes from a fun compilation of Ivorian rap, Kimberlite Rap Ivoire, that steers well clear of coupé decalé. This may explain some of its under-the-radar status—as far as I can tell it’s only been featured on a few payola-ish regional new music playlists.
10. TwoLips, BIG SIS: Come 2 My Shit
US/UK
Nostalgia’s funny—I seem to genuinely miss bad millennial hipster rap. Maybe I should take my turn to go memory lane tripping on Chris DeVille’s indie rock book like everyone else is doing. I was there! (I am quoted in the book.)
11. Jasmine Sandlas: Pols
India
American-born Indian pop star whose uncanny valleyish 4 million video views does not give me a clear sense of how popular she might actually be, as opposed to another Warner Music Spotify plant (which, to be clear, I am fine with—it’s probably how I found “Meherbaan”). Butterfly meme: is this I-pop? …No! I-pop is not a thing!
12. Marta Del Grandi: Antarctica
Italy
Global warming quirk-pop—if it’s part of a concept album (or whatever) I’ll probably check it out!
13. Param: That Girl
India
Very charming Punjab sing-rap from a singer that a light google tells me is from a working class family from Moga, Punjab, got into music in college and excelled in local cyphers. She brings a distinctive sweetness to this viral hit.
14. Luz: Lelela
Romania
Joe Muggs has recently been crusading against the “cultural decline” narrative that, as readers of this here blog would know, I frame as A-POP. As evidence he wrote a good primer on the abundance of Afro house. Afro house proper doesn’t tend to grab me like the songs in the wider umbrella of South African house styles do; it’s maybe a little too clubby and international (for what it’s worth, Luz, branded as a, or maybe thee, Queen of Afro House, is Romanian.)
15. La Perversa, Puyalo Pantera, Mapa Negro: Que Dique Tu Si
Dominican Republic
I did not intentionally set out to include every artist that Jonathan Bogart name-checked in his rundown of woman-fronted dembow this week (as quoted in last week’s newsletter), but both La Perversa and Arlene MC were on his list.
16. BOABOA, Junior Simba: Barato
Germany/Zimbabwe
Undifferentiated cosmo-house sounds a little pale coming after the South African house stuff, I suppose, but when it works it works.
17. JOPLYN: Airport
Germany
Still not sure why I’ve found so much good German dance and pop music this year. There were also a few viral filth-pop hits I decided to punt to another week and gradually lost track of (that’s how the universe tells me they weren’t good enough for a mix). I’m sure there’s more where that came from.
18. San Ignacio: El Año Que Viene Las Críticas Serán Menos Ofensivas
Argentina
Glitchy deconstructed electro cumbia (so they claim in a pile of dubious genre tags) that I think dips into the wash of clicks and clacks and beeps that my partner would refer to as “blippy bloopy.” That is to say that I like it but will probably listen on headphones.
19. Alec Lomami, LMBSKN: Ndombolo 5000
DRC/Nigeria
African house (but not Afro house) that seems to have come out of nowhere, and to nowhere I would bet it returns. Ashes to ashes, etc.
20. Moore Kismet, Arya: need2know
US
I think the only kismet thing here is that the name alone got this autopilot hyper bauble a third listen from me. It works batting cleanup.
21. Leyla El Abiri: Regazze
Italy
Leyla El Abiri returns! This one doesn’t hold a candle to previous feature “Speciale,” but it’s nice.
22. Mint Royale: What Do You Want Me to Say?
UK
Oh god, Mint Royale is back?? What in the Hey Remember the Late Nineties is this—a Proustian madeleine moment for “Would You…?” by Touch & Go? I’ll take it.
***
That’s it! Until next time, keep your madeleines close and your “who the fuck is Madelines” at a distance.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Marta Del Grandi: Antarctica
The first thing West End Girl reminded me of was Kirsty MacColl's Titanic Days and that was before I worked out the subject matter