Working the night shift to learn English
2026 Mix 17: Taylor Swift talks emo, confessional rap, and "little phonetic things"; then ADÉLA infiltrates, clave-oriented pop mutates, bouyon dominates, and art-poppers obfuscate (but sound great)
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.
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
For more on Bob Dylan's patchwork writing process (since the 90s, rather than "into") see the new book by Robert Polito, After the Flood. But he is an old man, so whereas Taylor keeps her scraps in her notes app, Bob keeps literal scraps of paper in a shoebox.
The tidal playlist failed to update this week. I and two other fans are deprived!