notes: may 2026 (pt. 2)
do the kids know about chromatics
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.
2026 releases
friko, something worth waiting for i’ve cooled a bit on this band since their debut and my hope is that it’s for respectable-critic reasons rather than merely being petty—i.e. that it has more to do with the fact that this follow-up’s coherence removes the very just-got-our-bachelors-degrees sense of near-infinite possibility within the realm of aughts-indie revivalism and less to do with the fact that the venue refused to give me free water during their unbelievably sweaty release show. still holding out hope that their LA-band-like infatuation with ’70s pop rock passes like an overhead choo-choo.
tempers, delusion collection of coldwave club bangers largely built around that ambient hold music that goes weirdly hard (if you don’t know what i’m talking about just listen to the first or last track). jorge elbrecht is an interesting addition to the equation here, as “rise and fall fetish” opens with very veckatimest acoustic guitar strums and just about everything he does elsewhere with electric guitars brings chromatics to mind. feel like folks slept on this one, sort of in the same way seemingly 500 chromatics-related solo projects have dropped since that band announced and aborted several final albums without really turning any heads.
victoryland, my heart is a room with no cameras in it rare vein of gen-z indie rock that feels like slipping into a warm bath for millennials—sort of sounds like clap your hands say yeah for the geese generation at times. people are saying not to compare this to geese, but the fact that the album is also evidently getting shoved down listeners’ throats on spotify is also leading people to insinuate that they’re industry plants, so i don’t know what to believe. beyond the fact that i probably need to stop looking into what people are saying, i mean.
older albums
cult of luna, the raging river (2021) kinda seems like if you’ve heard one cult of luna record you’ve heard them all—choppy-seas post-metal that’s a bit more master and commander than the pirates of the caribbean black metal i generally listen to. the fact that i’m not impressed with the weird mark lanegan interlude confirms my long-held suspicion that these guys generally aren’t operating on my wavelength, though i’m still always drawn in with the breakdown-y post-rock riffs on tracks like “i remember.” also appreciate when a band that does 10-plus minute songs releases something 40 minutes long and boldly claims that it’s an EP.
earl sweatshirt, live laugh love (2025) album released just in time for the NBA season which was finally made available to me by the chicago public library just in time for the NBA playoffs. love the way everything earl has released since don’t like shit feels like a deep exhale, though this may be the first of those albums that’s drawn my attention. nice balance of heady, backwoodz-esque beats that barely last a minute and airier psychedelic passages that distinctly feel like stepping outside at the end of third shift. just a profoundly weird subject for initiating an album-promo beef with.
ekko astral, pink balloons: popped (2025) final minute of “pomegranate tree” sums up this band pretty well: insanely cool riff paired with a pop-cultural punning refrain that feels like more ammo for their haters. thought this would help me decide whether i should bother listening to the advance of the new album i was sent a full seven months ago and which currently has no release date once a court of law lets us know whether we’re allowed to still like this band or whatever on earth is going on, and i’m still torn—the rest of the EP is just remixes that play up all the non-insane-riff elements of their music but also demonstrates their exceptional curatorial skills.
pale chalice, afflicting the dichotomy of trepid creation (2011) flenser release that you can tell is from early in their catalog because it doesn’t really do anything to expand the parameters of black metal or further pervert noise rock (you can probably guess which of those two genres it subscribes to based on the album title). vocalist kind of sounds like the guys in these POV videos IG keeps feeding me where some demonic entity is showing us how single he is by, like, pulling back his sheets to reveal hundreds of cooked hot dogs just loose in swamps of ketchup or whatever.
movies
babylon a.d. dir. mathieu kassovitz (2008) a more european take on xXx that failed to please the la haine heads; a more thick-necked take on children of men that couldn’t appease the diesel heads. pretty telling that the movie’s own director described it as a “bad episode of 24,” though maybe this could’ve been foreseen in being a hybrid production between a major hollywood entity at the absolute depth of cyberpunk and post-apocalypse films and a french distributor that seems far more open to sci-fi ideas that are more existential than the messaging here, which is essentially just christian and anti-any-newer-religions. still anticipating a future where we’re all flying coke zero airlines.
broken english dir. zoe cassavettes (2007) rohmer-esque sketch of an aborted sex and the city character that owes nearly as much gratitude biologically to john cassavettes as it does creatively to sofia coppola and richard linklater (never in my life have i seen a movie recreate the final scene of another movie word-for-word without otherwise referencing it, let alone one as iconic as the final scene ripped off here). at best it’s an exhibit of poorly studied human behavior acted uncomfortably by a remarkably underutilized cast, at worst it’s on the wrong side of settler colonialism. mark cuban was so depressed after the 2006 finals that he went on the strangest spending spree i have ever encountered on imdb.
farewell dir. elem klimov (1983) less a narrative film than an extended meditation on our current era of living for the sake of living rather than having any sort of spiritual connection to the earth or anything natural, as the idea of human progress as defined by the post-industrial era only leads us to get lost in thicker ethical and existential fogs. far from the tone of come and see between it frequently being very goofy and its ending on a note of eerie ambiguity—i guess it is a little shaky in that regard, but it more than makes up for that fault with its circumstantial subtext, both as a story about communing with the dead directed by the husband of the original filmmaker after she died very suddenly and in its delayed release coinciding with chernobyl and gorbachev’s ascension to power. possibly the most dramatic movie i could possibly watch in anticipation of my upcoming move.
wuthering heights dir. emerald fennell (2026) there’s a certain kind of blockbuster that gets pushed too hard on audiences and is subsequently deemed a disappointment up until about a decade later, when younger generations find it and revel in the style and signifiers of its time—horny period-piece streaming hits, briefly ubiquitous pop stars, leading actors who were in everything for a year or two, a certain cultural lexicon that feels comically anachronistic—that are only elucidated by technical competence. this is my first experience with an emerald fennell movie and i kept this in mind throughout: unlike a narrative set in lockdown or anything allegorizing a fascist regime or whatever, there’s a subtlety to this approach of telling a story that’s been adapted to death through a post-tumblr-fanfic lens for a new generation that seems to be nostalgic for the era of tumblr fanfic (and maybe even the moment in feminism that accompanied it). ironically it doesn’t seem like they enjoyed it much, given that it arrived at a moment of bridgerton, brat, and euphoria fatigue, but i’ll bet the next generation will.
the zero theorem dir. terry gilliam (2013) retreads a surprising amount of ground covered by brazil for an era of cyberpunk that looked more like doctor parnassus than blade runner, with even the unexpected appearance of matt damon in a very un-matt-damon role reminding me of my disbelief at de niro showing up in something so far outside of the realm of what de niro was doing in the mid-’80s. gets a lot right about the near-future (AI therapy, corporate pushback against WFO, the ontological and astronomical wormholes newly made available by minecraft), though its biggest statement seems to be that our jobs often lead us to feel that the universe is meaningless when it only feels that way because the universe appears to revolve around our jobs, which are meaningless, and in many cases have supplanted the role of religion in our lives. i feel like this movie suffered the same fate as cloud atlas where it’s kind of just a new version of the filmmaker’s most beloved movie released after we’d begun questioning their credibility for doing a weird kids’ movie. also love how the horny VR fantasy suit looks like a perfect combination of ishioka’s vlad the impaler armor and the sad jester meme.