notes: may 2025 (pt. 1)
biweekly newsletter listing all the music, movies, books, and, tv i, mike, have experienced for the first time over the past two weeks and also the things i have thought about them. again, i am mike.
2025 releases
alien boy, you wanna fade? one of few bands which, in my opinion, quite simply have the Juice—not a whole lot of variation here or even within their discography more broadly, but the balance they strike as musicians (in their case blast-of-cool-air shoegaze as power-pop misery ballads) is just so undeniable that i’ll take as many of these as they’re willing to record for me.
billy woods, golliwog sort of billy by numbers (elucid features that aren’t quite as memorable as most armand hammer songs, guest verse from def jux figure, inside-baseball NBA references, at least one sample from a movie i’ll probably watch in six months and forget where i heard the dialogue before), albeit with some investment in picking up the horror-movie mantle from clipping. i think i’ve mentioned this before, but there seems to be a direct correlation in woods’ growing fanbase and his music’s evolution from gloomy apocalypse raps to jazzy beats that he increasingly does that little laugh over. even on something overtly horror-oriented, it never feels like more than just a theme. or an “era,” as we have to say now.
ghost bath, rose thorn necklace at 35 minutes, this sort of feels like a compressed deafheaven record in its gaze-suffix sheen, though it’s also much more conventionally true-metal in its occasional distantly-lurking-through-caverns evil-monster vocals and the inclusion of a disgusting, phlegmy coughing fit in one of its singles. “vodka butterfly” has some crystal castles in its DNA, too.
pink siifu, black’!antique maybe this is partly informed by the fact that a significant portion of my music diet is made up of reheated shoegaze stuff, but i can’t think of a lot of new music in any genre that feels as futuristic as siifu’s does—in this case without ever really explicitly paying homage to afrofuturism (his song titles are getting more encrypted, too). in that sense you could say he’s kind of like a more power-electronic outkast.
youth code, yours, with malice EP coincidentally dropping alongside my descent into the world of need for speed: underground 2 and its EBM-permissive soundtrack. really cool blend of what this band has been doing very well for a full decade and interesting genre detours: “wishing well,” for example, is a way cooler version of the mid-’90s hacker thing clipping. was doing on their new album, while a lot of the other stuff feels like vintage new wave on hyperdrive. “make sense” has some crystal castles in its DNA, too.
older albums
animal collective, centipede hz (2012) anco’s moonrise kingdom: a 2012 release that features several good bit parts and is aesthetically pleasing enough to satiate an audience, yet clearly raises concerns about how sustainable this thing is. sort of reminds me of the second MGMT album, too, in that the only way forward after their last LP brought their freak sounds to the masses was to present that widened audience with something strait up cartoonish, presumably in an effort to ensure their longtime fans that they aren’t settling into complacency. also, i know it’s ultimately a statement in opposition to the music industry that manufactures this kind of stupid trope, but still disappointing to hear avey do that thing on “monkey riches” where he refers to the song he’s singing in the lyrics to the song he’s singing.
kassie krut, kassie krut (2024) OK, i guess kassie krut feels as futuristic as siifu, but that’s it, i swear. maybe this sounds like an ignorant comment to anyone who listens to more deconstructed club music than i do, but it’s really impressive to me how fractured these grating sound bytes are, yet also how airtight this feels as an all-bangers pop EP. you know, the japanese have a term for this which i will now explain to you in excruciating detail in relation to my ability to overcome trauma.
prostitute, attempted martyr (2024) late to the party here, but so glad to have this scratch an itch inflicted on me by protomartyr and iceage that dates as far back as a time when white american music journalists couldn’t be trusted with the responsibility of sensitively writing about other cultures, let alone something called “prostitute.” probably goes without saying four and a half years into writing about bands that sound like this for this newsletter, but i love the way various synth, guitar, and string (?) parts across this album that make me feel nauseous.
movies
the girl with the needle dir. magnus von horn (2024) at the tail end of a months-long MUBI trial i’ve learned that my best shot at escaping the horrors of 2025 is simply to experience the horrors of a century ago instead. this seemed to be marketed as surrealist psychological horror, but beyond the opening video art and dark-ambient soundscapes, it only felt lynchain due to sharing eraserhead’s impressionistic baby anxieties in black and white and a side-plot obviously indebted to elephant man. i think you get a sense early on what type of movies this is—a candide-esque stringing along of almost comically traumatic incidents—which leads your brain to jump the gun on contemplating the worst possible reason for every new character’s kindness (never once has it been a good thing when the main character is introduced to a new drug; “dewey, you don’t want any part of this shit,” etc.). ultimately it seems to express that life is less about bad things happening to you than it is having these experiences open your mind to the evils that are out there afflicting everyone, with the film’s wolf in sheep’s clothing central to any good gothic tale standing in as any entity striving to keep us in blissful ignorance, if not sedation.
mammoth dir. lukas moodysson (2009) the ladytron to babel’s frou frou. structurally and in some senses conceptually redundant with inarritu’s movie, as every user review timestamped 2009 insists, but feels infinitely more tightly knit and grander at the same time—“tighter” in the sense that the ensemble cast is reduced to just one of babel’s stars, his character’s wife, and their housemaid, prodding deeper into their psyches; “grander” in the sense that it explicitly strives to expand its scope to all of time and space to prove the godlessness of our universe. now that i think of it, the structure’s reversed, too, as it unravels its chain of events that eventually knocks down the house of cards quietly alluded to by thom yorke midway through the movie that really only affects the half of the global population represented here that you might expect. pretty sure michelle williams actually does surgery on a grape at one point?
rotting in the sun dir. sebastian silva (2023) variation on charlie kaufman’s funneling of over-the-top self-pity into engaging genre filmmaking updated for the age of parasociality, K-holing, and dicks-as-visual-punchline outside the context of heterosexual bro comedy. at its center is a funny expression of the internet age’s familiar feeling of scrolling timelines equally littered with laments about the loss of livelihoods and videos of dogs being auto-tuned, addressing questions surrounding the ideas of creating lasting art versus contributing to the interminable glut of fleeting idiotic content—the film itself intentionally covering both bases. something very relatable in watching firstman delete vain grid selfies out of a vague sense of guilt as soon as something serious yet completely unrelated creeps into his inner world.
warfare dir. ray mendoza & alex garland (2025) feature film which first and foremost serves to expand the cinematic language associated with that thing where an explosion leads to the audio being replaced with that tinnitus sound. respectable in the sense that it trims as much fat as possible from the war-film genre, freeing it of cliches (no exposition providing context or definitions for combat terminology; no heroism, really, despite all the leftist critiques i’ve read of it; only one era-appropriate needle drop, which is very diegetic), but what i appreciated most is that it maintains civil war’s striking verite objectivity down to its wiseman-esque title. in doing so it manages to simplify this particular conflict perfectly as a deeply messy, painfully drawn-out invasion of domestic life (quite literally acts of terror), dressing its scenes up with imagery that ambiguously suggests valor and certainly sells video games. the conclusion seems like an apt metaphor for US military rationalization as it contrasts with objective reality: panoramic rubble signifying a destructive force attempting to erase its bootprints.
TV
kidding season 2 (2020) by default the second most heartbreaking risotto TV plot point from 2020. dying show about a dying show that shifts its focus to new themes and energies in its second and final season to feel more like the product of a middle-aged divorcee working out the difference between self-improvement and self-sabotage as the horrors the series documents expand from the relatively contained realm of TV into more modern frontiers like podcasting. you can feel the shift out of the midlife-crisis-antihero decade of TV (only after a sopranos-esque dream sequence in episode two) and into the era of everything being about “vulnerability” as we learn about the main character’s backstory—his trauma of witnessing the challenger explode on TV, encouraging him to dedicate his life to providing happier imagery though the medium, only to have it trap him in his childhood with the help of his father/boss, who by the series’ end is even further reduced to the cognitive state of a child than his son—while the script advances its seeming MO of presenting the televisual idyll as “compassionate deception.” all that or it being a prolonged PSA for organ donorship.