Carter Amelia Davis
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Music I like: April 2025
🕑 Added 2025-05-01 14:28:07 +0000 UTCHi! It seems like people liked my last music post so I figured I'd make another while I'm still deep in the animation trenches. This is a day late so just imagine that it's still April 30th, ok? This selection of songs skews a lot sunnier cuz spring is on the way. Also here's a Spotify playlist with all these songs.
Recent Songs
Disiniblud - It's Change (link)
Anything Rachika Nayar is involved with is an immediate must-listen for me, but this song from her and Nina Keith’s Disiniblud project is nuts. It’s like a fragmentary collage of beautiful sounds, weaving multiple different voices (Katie Dey! Julianna Barwick!) into a pretty cloud. It almost reminds me of The Books? Idk how to describe it, one of the most gorgeous songs I’ve heard all year.
Bb Trickz - Tipz and Trickz (link)
Bb Trickz is a Spanish rapper who makes breezy lil songs with beats built around fun samples. I love how she sounds over this sunny afrobeat production. Her new “album” 80’z is less than twelve minutes long and a true delight.
Yetsuby - Aestheti-Q (link)
Yetsuby is one half of the Seoul-based ambient duo Salamanda, but her new solo album 4EVA is almost like.. ASMR techno? It’s got big thumpy breakbeats galore but its melodies often manifest as delicate little blips and squelches and dings. I love how bouncy and alien it sounds. This kind of music is extremely my shit, one of my favorite albums of the year so far.
Pig the Gemini - Don't Play With Love (Interlude) (link)
Pig the Gemini’s Lover Girl is a sweet and airy album of sapphic plugg music. This interlude track samples very liberally from The Cranberries’ Linger, but she takes things in her own hazy wistful direction. Cute!
Kokoroko - Sweetie (link)
Kokoroko make tropical jazz that ideally should ideally be listened to in a hammock with a cup of mango sorbet. It’s music that makes me feel like I’m on vacation. I love their warm trumpets, so pretty.
Logic1000 - under the sun, beneath the rainfall (link)
Logic1000’s new DJ-Kicks mix is a wonderful overview of many of the different downtempo and ambient sounds percolating right now, and this track of hers is a nice early tone-setter. I like how subtle the changes are across the song’s runtime, as layers fade in and rise up in the mix or change shape. Good to zone out to
Slikback - Sea (link)
Slikback is a Kenyan producer who mostly makes noisy industrial bass music. He’s incredibly prolific and everything he releases is worth checking out. “Sea” finds him in gnarly UK dubstep mode, all menacing rhythms and tectonic low end.
cootie catcher - Friend of a friend (link)
This music is for sweetie pies only!! I like cootie catcher cuz they make catchy lil twee pop songs but there’s usually some weird sloppy sounds happening in the mix. It’s mildly unhinged without obscuring their sweet colorful melodies. This one gets stuck in my head the most, but I also really love the intro track, which prominently samples a youtuber tersely explaining why she’s not going to cover the basics of how to crochet in her video.
Two Shell - Oops… (link)
Another big bouncy futuristic dance slammer from Two Shell, this time featuring genius maniac Nikki Nair? Nothing wrong with that!!!
Momma - Bottle Blonde (link)
Momma play very direct hooky rock music; it’s the kinda thing I might find a little boring if they didn’t do it so well. This single from their new album sounds unusually electronic for them, and I really like how their voices sound over those textures. One of my first big summer jams of 2025, makes me feel like I’m a god and I’m gonna figure it out.
Joseph Shabason & Spencer Zahn - a river a museum (link)
This is an awfully pretty slice of nu jazz. Swift crackly IDM-style percussion is anchored by warm, luxurious washes of sax and keys. The mood is ambiguous and thick.
Alien Boy - Changes (link)
I was a huge fan of Alien Boy’s last album Don’t Know What I Am and this single from their forthcoming album made me whoop like a gibbon. They specialize in making fuzzy jangle pop songs full of queer yearning, and Changes is very much more of that. The chorus sticks in my head for days.
Serengeti - coach ajai (link)
It's kind of a task for me to even explain what Serengeti's deal is; he's one of underground hip hop's strangest, most mercurial voices. He releases way too much music and frequently switches up his sound in wild ways, and alongside his more personal work he's rapped as multiple different characters with complex backgrounds and storylines. He's made many albums as the working class Chicagoan Kenny Dennis, for example, and he's lately been more focused on his hypebeast character Ajai, who is the focus of this track. All of this lore could be tedious and annoying, but when Serengeti really locks in he has a wonderful specificity to his lyrics despite their free associative sprawl. He's got a great sense of humor, too, and the guitar-driven instrumental on this song ebbs and flows perfectly with his verses. He's a true original and his discography is fascinating and rewarding.
Rodrigue Dubois - Quimperlé (feat. Simo Cell) (link)
I’m not familiar with Rodrigue Dubois’s music, but I love Simo Cell’s big evil cavernous beats and this is another great big cavernous evil beat. Lots of weird watery synths floating around in this one, feels kinda lightly psychedelic.
Nino Paid - Play This At My Funeral (link)
I’m not used to hearing rappers be this direct about their problems without glamorizing them. Feels very vulnerable to me. I like how he reflects on the good and the bad equally, too; life can be demoralizing and relentless even when some things are going really well.
caroline - Tell me I never knew that (feat. Caroline Polachek) (link)
The UK post-rock group caroline teamed up with Caroline Polachek for this beautiful piece of abstract folk music. It’s funny that their names are kinda the same but it doesn’t sound funny, it’s so so pretty!! I love at the end how she repeatedly sings “It always has been, it always will be,” “It always happens,” and “this always happens.” I like lyrical vagueness like that. I think I get what they mean.
Nuvolascura - and in the end, you threw it all away (link)
Nuvolascura’s last album As We Suffer From Memory & Imagination is one of my favorite contemporary screamo albums and I’m so stoked that they’re back. This new single is a little minute long grenade of sick riffs and bad vibes.
Bonus Older Songs
aya - That Hyde Trakk (link)
aya’s new album hexed! is absolutely incredible and it’s been super cool to see it get a ton of critical praise. I was listening to some of her older music and “That Hyde Trakk” really blew my hair back. These are some of the most intense breakbeats I’ve ever heard; starting around 3:36 it sounds truly hellish. I understand why she releases the tension not long after that for a (relatively) serene extended outro but I’d love to hear her stay in that nightmare zone for even longer.
The Beach Boys - All I Wanna Do (link)
I’m a huge Beach Boys fan and I feel so stupid for not knowing about this amazing deep cut until last week. I can’t believe that this was released in 1970, it sounds so much like 2000s chillwave. The production is insanely ahead of its time. Did Ariel Pink base his entire career off of this song? Notably crappy dude Mike Love even does a good job as the main vocalist here. Unreal..
Gilfema - Akwe (link)
I heard this song on my local jazz radio a couple years ago and scrambled to Shazam it. Rich warm soulful vocals, lovely percussion and guitar.. sounds like a damn vacation. For real!!
Comments
Ian Gustafson
I'm still rocking this list
biquinary
omg I saw cootie catcher a few months ago, they were so lovely!
