Smile, but don't show your teeth
2025 Mix 2: A-Pop, A&A-Pop, sax jams, dance in Ivorian and South African styles, and a gritty Serebro reboot
I have no great insights into music of the new year so far, in part because I’m enjoying the brief holding pattern of this year not feeling like it’s really started yet, but mainly because this is a mix of leftover songs I didn’t use last week. Does that bode well for a glut of new music in the new year? Find out next week, when I’ll finally sort out last week, which by next week will be two weeks ago and I’ll be listening to music from last week, which is to say this week. Got it?
If you’d like to take your mind way off of 2025, check out the #LetsDoIt25 pre-rock music challenge over on Bluesky, where folks are sharing their top 25-50 tracks recorded prior to 1954. I joined this challenge late and without doing much research, so don’t have much to say about my own picks, but I have enjoyed listening to everyone else’s selections. The highlight so far has been Brad Luen’s recommendation of The DeZurik Sisters’ “I Left Her Standing There” from 1939, with its chorus of bird yodels.
And if you’re still processing last year, which might as well have been a century ago, the People’s Pop Polls are in, well, if not full swing, at least a modified swing for someone with an injured shoulder, over on Bluesky. Voting is open for another week, and nominated songs are collected loosely into genre/category playlists to make the listening and winnowing a bit easier. The full set of playlists is here.
Lastly, I should share for posterity (hi kids!) the various genre names I invented last week:
Trap Daniels (A request for a genre name to describe “the very particular strain of unbearable country-rap fusion slowly taking over white america like a virus,” a descriptor I take some issue with but couldn’t resist the pun. This was directed to Eric Harvey, who coined “PBR&B.”)
Stalecore (to describe music that, according to Mike Barthel, “sounds like eating a day-old muffin while the doctor’s receptionist tells you it’ll just be another 15 minutes.”)
Stallcore (stalecore, but for music that sounds like you’re hearing it drift into a bathroom stall)
Haunt Topic (stallcore, but for music that sounds like you’re hearing it drift into a bathroom in an abandoned mall)
Also, admin: I am syncing to Tidal and YouTube playlists now, linked below. They won’t be in mix order, just earliest to latest tracks added, but you can still follow along there if you don’t have or want Spotify. (No Apple Music yet.)
Previous 2025 Mixes
1. JADE: IT Girl
UK
That’s “it,” not “information technology,” which I did try to contort into some kind of metaphor for JADE’s ongoing facility with late-stage-internet bangers — that is, songs that sound like they should spark irritating discourse online but somehow don’t, so you can just enjoy them for being themselves. This one is very much an “Angel of My Dreams” follow-up, in fact was even outclassed in a lead track on one of my mixes not two weeks ago by Rebecca Black, but you can’t land on “it” and “shit” with that level of easy glee and not win at least some portion of my heart.
2. Madelline: Training Wheels
US
But enough about songs everyone likes — here’s one that is absolutely the worst possible version of a zeitgeist that I seem only to like when no one else cares about it. Pure, uncut A-pop straight from the Glenn McDonald-sculpted “Alt Z” genre tag, perhaps his genre-fication pièce de résistance as Spotify’s data alchemmist. Even figures out how to end “Good Luck Babe”—modulate gratuitously and go out on a hard cut after the last word. Easy!
3. St. Lucia f. Aly & AJ: Campari Lips & Soda
US
I have an extensive history with Aly & AJ but couldn’t have picked St. Lucia out of a line-up—South African- and German-born husband-and-wife duo who specialize in undifferentiated 80s pop, and here provide the least-wispy lightness Aly & AJ have played around with in a few years.
4. Vendredi sur Mer f. Hanni El Khatib: Hard
Switzerland/US
Was extremely into the string of Hanni El Khatib EP’s that culminated in Savage Times, my sixth-best album of 2017. But everything since has been pretty scattershot, so I enjoyed hearing him cameo on some pleasantly insubstantial disco-pop from French-Swiss artist Vendredi sur Mer, the sort of thing that I hope to hear in a high-end-enough grocery store someday, just like how I heard “Paralyzed” in Whole Foods and knew Hanni El Khatib had arrived.
5. Johnny Zee: Billo To Meri Aan [1989]
UK
Not sure if I knew Stereo Nation before this week and certainly didn’t know that frontman Taz (Tarsame Singh Saini, fka Johny Zee) had a fairly huge solo debut in the UK with Hit the Deck in 1989. Thanks to the Naya Beat Volume 2 compilation, lots of variously big-deal South Asian post-disco, I have now heard and very much enjoyed it. (This one sounds like Tony Stark trying to build Thriller in a cave.) Sad to learn that Saini passed away in 2022.
6. Yuki Nagase, WaMi f. yuigot: Sweet Chat
Japan
I have zero understanding of or background knowledge about Japanese VTubers (if that’s even what this is, as my light googling suggests) but I will listen to anything named Sweet Chat charitably.
7. Russ Millions: CC Bags
UK
UK drill with a swirl of harps against a dancefloor throb. I guess UK drill could use more ethereality?
8. Redman: Aye
US
Redman has put out an “old school” album that sounds older-school than he’s ever actually been to my knowledge, which makes me think it’s a late period prestige play, complete with the corny radio DJ tags. But he’s in good form and the chorus hook did, in fact, hook me.
9. BloodHound Q50 f. Bloodhound Lil Jeff, CEO Trayle: Don’t Blink or Stare
US
Somehow the specificity of the lyrics in this one made me look into the corresponding Chicago bloodshed mentioned in it, giving the whole thing a more unsavory vibe than you might expect for a trifle that doesn’t make it to two minutes and repurposes the synth hook from the Wallpaper remix of “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” But I chuckled at the Grammys line.
10. MC BF, DJ YUZAK: Ritmada Sem Sentimento VS Arrependimento
Brazil
MC BF has already tackled Nintendo — Zelda and Mario — so why not level up and take on George Michael with a bold swipe of the sax from “Careless Whisper.” That this particular pillage feels totally unremarkable in context is itself pretty remarkable.
11. Marino El Abusador, El Chuky De Lewa: Mucho Humo
Dominican Republic
The genre tag searching has yielded better dembow tracks than my playlists, so I’ll keep dipping my toes in every few weeks. This week I’ve gone for the one with cartoonish scream-yelps (obviously).
12. Joli Rouge Sound: Yonn Pa Yonn
Martinique
13. Kaf Malbar: Machinima
Réunion
Two shatta/zouk riddim holdovers from my genre scan last week, from Martinique and Réunion, respectively, and about which I have little to say but sounded good in sequence.
14. Oyoki Onanayo, Renard Barakissa, Kadirov Mania: Biama Brut Reverse
Côte D’Ivoire
Explosive Ivorian biama that jerks between A and B sections (and probably a C and maybe a D?) like it’s compulsively shifting gears while the speed’s already maxed out. It plays out like a song suite, the rhythm mutating in each new section. Didn’t notice until seeing the video that this is the same team behind Lokpo year-end favorite “Mon combat,” and that this comes from Lokpo’s Rolling Côte D’Ivoire YouTube chart playlist. (Renard Barakissa and Kadirov Mania bill themselves as the duo Team 2Poy.)
15. Nandipha808, Thesiix, King Tone SA f. Skay da Deejay: Bujwa Stena
South Africa
16. Nobantu Vilakazi, Njelic f. Chley, Thabza Tee, Rhythm Tee: Yoh
South Africa
17. Okmalumkoolkat f. Slim Ego, Drakhula, Dankie Boi: iDrum
South Africa
Three from South Africa this week. I’ve cooled my jets on trying to figure out whether South African dance music is getting gqom in its peanut butter or amapiano in its chocolate — I realized, e.g., that the sense of gqom-like severity I was getting from Nandipha808’s amapiano track (categorized under the quantum sound subgenre I don’t totally understand yet) was really just from its processed marimba sound, which scans as “hard but soothing” in the way I felt about Pantha du Prince’s 2007 album This Bliss. The amapiano beat is more straightforward in the next track, but the vocals come in with a guttural force. And “iDrum” is closer to gqom proper, but the focus is on the rappers and the song breaks into a trap beat about halfway through. Lots of cross-pollination afoot, per usual.
18. Sabren Elnegily: Qalby Dak Daka
Egypt
Fun Egyptian pop track that sounds a bit like “Macarena” played at half speed.
19. Designer: Magic Memory
US
20. Raya: Un despertar
Spain
Two scrappy rawk tracks from Creem’s Spotify list, which I added to my haul late last year. They’ve been pretty reliable for under-the-radar rock music, of which there is vanishingly little on my playlists, and they also dip into other countries to find the remaining flecks of gold in the international rock landscape: Raya’s from Spain and have the upper hand, I think, compared to a song from a North Carolina group that has a hint of Kim Deal in the vocals but sound a little stodgily retro, heavy on the Runaways.
21. 東京初期衝動: 岡崎京子のあの娘になりたかった
Japan
The real standout rock track of the week, though, comes from Tokyo Initial Impulse, whose title, I’m told by my computer, translates to “I Wanted to Be Kyoko Okazaki’s Daughter.” I know about as much about manga as I do about VTubers, but the name rings a bell and a quick glance at her work suggests I should read it.
22. Lilly Palmer, Azzido Da Bass, Timo Maas: Dooms Night
Switzerland/Germany
Pop-EDM logic and length applied to the European club classic remix of “Dooms Night” from 2000. As good a reason as any to listen to the original, I suppose.
23. Serebro: Отпусти меня (Remix)
Russia
And speaking of short, intense remixes of originals, here is some kinda gritty reboot EP of onetime Russian Eurovision stars Serebro. The EP is anchored by a batshit original Poppy-indebted song that I highly recommend you check out but couldn’t really sequence on the mix (“Song #2”), followed by a bunch of phonk, hyperpop, and otherwise grim-sounding electronic remixes of older songs. I singled out this quick ‘n’ dirty oddity, a sped-up defacement of “Otpusti Menya” from 2016.
***
That’s it! Until next time, if you’re going to deface something, at least keep it short.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from JADE: IT Girl.
Thank you so much for the Youtube playlist!