1. Anjimile - The King
Growing up, I taught myself to let things slide, to get over things quickly, to not let anything under my skin. A privilege I could have, I know, but at some point, between friends’ suicides or street harassment, I just stopped being able to take it. Theres a feeling that bubbles up inside until it boils over, lashing out in righteous anger, striking at the people who, in their ignorance of the world, in their social conditioning, perpetuate all the backwards hatred that make life as a trans woman difficult.
Anjimile, as a Black trans masc, is facing different, and often much more acute, hatreds than I do, but when they sing “if you treat me like an animal / I’ll be an animal”, they’re giving voice to a similar feeling, and I cheer them on. At some point, you realize the way the world sees you is not the way you see yourself, and, as a trans person, not even the way your family sees you. The King is an album about coming to terms with not just the anger and prismatic mess of identity-as-self and identity-as-social-construct, but the searching for those original wounds that drove the alienation, pinning them down, and demanding to know why they hurt us. We’re all owed answers, and we’re all owed room for our anger in seeking them out.
2. underscores - Wallsocket
She could’ve just written some 35 minute album of great hyperpop and everyone would have eaten it up, but, um, no, not at all, she decided to write a concept album about a midsized town in Michigan and the story of three girls who grow up there. There were Pepe Silvia-style yarn diagrams on her walls for godsakes; the album is an hour long, the catchiest song is about a teenage trans girl groomed by a man at least a decade older than her, there’s a song about the erasure of the Filipino third-gender by Catholic colonialism, it’s dense, it’s ambitious, it’s an album that we’re going to be talking about more in 2028 than we did in 2023.
Because of the density and because it was so different from what I expected after calling 2021’s Fishmonger my album of the year, it took me a number of listens to get into Wallsocket. After going to one of her shows, seeing her perform, and really losing myself in it, I realized that it deserved another shot. And then I saw all the threads of the album winding together into a cohesive whole, the ambition of the project, and the resonance of these girls and their fucked up normal lives, it just clicked, all at once. When you listen to it, remember to give Wallsocket the space it deserves and it truly shines.
3. 100 Gecs - 10,000 Gecs
If Wallsocket gave us the complex, nuanced hyperpop album we didn’t know we wanted, 10,000 Gecs is the easy road not taken. I heard someone say that this album was less fun than 1,000 Gecs and I can’t imagine anything further from the truth. It’s certainly more listenable, less alienating, you could imagine “Hollywood Baby” on the radio, but the album starts with the THX sound inexplicably fading into the opener, and one of the most unforgettable songs is about a frog hanging out at a house party.
If 10,000 Gecs has an antecedent of any sort, it’s Beck’s Odelay. Laura Les and Dylan Brady essentially invented the Zoomer version of Beck’s 90s slacker pop and refined it to perfection, and you can hear it in “The Most Wanted Person In The United States”. The slow, catchy bass, sound effects that sound like they came from a bargain-bin joke cassette tape sprinkled throughout, we haven’t heard anything exactly like this before but we can tell where it comes from. You’ll either find it brilliant or annoying as hell, or maybe a little bit of both.
4. The Mountain Goats - Jenny From Thebes
It’s late May, 2016, and I’m on the back of a 250cc motorscooter, somewhere in the Texas panhandle east of Pampa. I had just gotten lunch at a little diner, where I was served by an obviously queer 19 year old who hung around my table mostly to ask me questions about living in California and to talk about how badly he wanted out of that place. I put a small Bluetooth speaker in my helmet, it sounds like a clock radio at best, sometimes I can’t even hear it over the little scooter’s engine. Every time a semi passes me at 90mph to my scooter’s 70, I am certain I am going to die. Over the road sounds and the sound of big Texas trucks in the next lane, I am listening to The Mountain Goats’ 2002 cassette-tape masterpiece All Hail West Texas.
It’s a dangerous gambit as an artist to revist a critically-acclaimed work from your past; at worst, you get accused of cashing in on something already popular, and in any case, your listeners are going to look at the new work with eyes steeped in the old one. But I think that was John Darnielle’s point here. This album is about looking at the past and trying to understand a period of your life that, to the you of today, the present you, seems inconceivable. Why was I on a fucking Vespa in West Texas, risking my life alongside the F-250s and roadkill armadillos? I can’t say why now, but I can tell you exactly what it felt like. This album can too.
5. Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Caroline Polachek is my cis, straight doppelganger; she looks like my sister, and I have to support my family. Outside of familiar appearances, though, one thing we do have in common is a desire to own our desires. Women are rarely allowed that kind of confidence, and Polachek is up there with Carly Rae Jepsen in making music that’s not only sexy, but sexual, and very forthright about it. She sings about heartbreak, yes, but it’s always in terms of a body that was once close and how it’s become far away.
With this list also including 10,000 Gecs, I also find it interesting that after she released Pang in 2019, Polachek could have started making hyperpop in the vein of Charli XCX or Gecs, but instead chose to remain just barely on the more conventional side of the electropop / hyperpop divide. There’s nothing particularly admirable about creating challenging pop just for the sake of it, and Desire succeeds because it’s accessible and approachable. The songs are just good, you don’t need them to be exploring new ground because they’re tight, perfectly composed, catchy, fun, they succeed in everything Polachek sets out to do. When the album ends with “Billions” you wonder if maybe you should go out dancing, or text your crush. Conventional, maybe, but we all deserve a bit of fun.