Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Over the past month, the punditocracy has been engaged in a collective freakout over the success of the DSA and DSA-aligned candidates in several recent primary elections. There’s been the expected red-scare bait on Fox News, but some of the more revealing attacks have appeared in outlets perceived as broadly sympathetic to liberal and left-wing ideas. The central battleground has been The Atlantic. First came Jonathan Chait’s “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists.” Then came “Democrats Became Great by Fighting the Left,” written by David Brooks, the quintessential patronizing meritocrat who once wrote a column about a working-class acquaintance getting intimidated by Italian deli meats. The apex arrived two days ago when The Atlantic published an op-ed by James Kirchick entitled “The DSA Is a Parasite,” a frantic, dishonest effort to weaponize a bad historical analogy, misrepresent elected progressives, and describe a legitimate political movement through the language of biological infestation.

This is an exhausted genre in 2026: anti-left commentary written by people who appear to understand working-class politics primarily through polling crosstabs. These pundits frame the left and the right as equally dangerous, which has the convenient effect of normalizing right-wing extremism. They burn most of their word count policing the manners of very-online liberals and progressives—as if that faction, and not the actual Democratic establishment, were the ones setting the party's agenda. Lately, they have identified an even more frightening enemy: the Democratic Socialists of America and the growing visibility of socialist candidates within Democratic primaries. Kirchick’s piece is based around the premise that the Democratic Party is being devoured from within by a cabal of subversives, and the only way to save American democracy is to purge them forever. He drags out the ghost of Neil Kinnock, dusts off the threat of "entryism," and describes democratic socialists as a "maggot in the body" of the party, rhetoric that goes beyond run-of-the-mill reactionary centrism by trading in the vocabulary of biological infestation, a tactic used by such common-sense luminaries as Adolf Hitler. Through this language, Kirchick gives rhetorical cover to fascists like Stephen Miller who are already looking for excuses to criminalize political dissent.

Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock, 1985. Source: Getty

Even stripped of the dehumanizing language, the piece makes a weak argument, because its central historical premise relies on an incredibly lazy analogy: comparing the DSA’s electoral activity to the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist entryist group expelled from the British Labour Party by Neil Kinnock in the 1980s. The comparison makes little to no sense. It ignores basic realities of how both British and American parties actually function. First, the Labour Party was, and is, a centralized, membership-based parliamentary party with a formal constitution and disciplinary mechanisms capable of stripping party cards. The U.S. Democratic Party, by contrast, is not a formal membership club; it is a decentralized, big-tent ballot line where candidate access is governed by open state primary laws. Second, Militant operated as a clandestine, vanguardist “party within a party” that actively sought the revolutionary overthrow of the British state. It maintained its own organization, leadership, publications, and internal discipline while operating inside the Labour Party, with the aim of steering Labour toward a revolutionary socialist program. Any resemblance largely ends with the fact that both organizations sought influence within a larger electoral coalition. The DSA operates in broad daylight. Its candidates run open, highly visible campaigns on democratic primary ballots, debate establishment opponents in public, and win votes with persuasion and knocking on doors. Voters know who these candidates are and are free to reject them. That is far from a clandestine infiltration. It is electoral politics. Flattening these situations into the same story reveals the assumption beneath Kirchick’s argument: that the Democratic ballot line is the private property of its existing establishment and that any organized primary challenge amounts to theft.

That assumption is precisely why Kirchick treats the DSA’s use of Democratic primaries as an act of bad-faith "opportunism." He sneers at the fact that democratic socialists run on the Democratic line because they lack the standalone numbers to win as a third party as if this were some kind of con, rather than a basic structural fact of American politics understood by most middle schoolers. In a first-past-the-post system governed by Duverger’s Law, running an independent third-party candidate is a virtual guarantee to spoiler status (A sin that the center has never forgiven the left for, incidentally). Yet when democratic socialists do the electorally sane thing and contest open, state-sanctioned primary elections, the same pundits accuse them of hijacking a party that apparently belongs to consultants, donors, and incumbent officeholders.

I feel a bit stupid pointing out this type of hypocrisy, because none of this is a good-faith argument to begin with. Kirchick doesn't engage with what democratic socialists actually campaign on; he cherry-picks fringe, maximalist statements from online activists or obscure internal caucuses and presents them as the uniform DSA doctrine. The people voting for candidates like Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Melat Kiros haven’t all been radicalized by niche left-wing Twitter accounts; they are voting for candidates offering tangible solutions to their immediate material problems. Amidst the histrionic ramblings about Darializa Avila Chevalier's position on deportations and Melat Kiros's refusal to condemn a tragic event in the exact ideological terms the punditocracy demands, Kirchick does not once mention that these candidates ran focused campaigns that advocated for issues like rent stabilization, funding public transit, expanding childcare, and union protection.

Source: Jewish Voice for Peace

This omission allows Kirchick to avoid confronting the uncomfortable material reality driving democratic socialist electoral wins: their economic platform is quite popular. Take away the culture-war aesthetics and the elite-manufactured panic, and the core planks—universal healthcare, rent control, a higher minimum wage, taxing billionaires and ultra-wealthy corporations, expanded public transit—often poll with strong majorities of Americans. Drop the partisan labels off those same policies entirely, and substantial majorities of independents and even a solid chunk of Republicans, support them. But to acknowledge that democratic socialists are ascendant because they champion economic policies that working people actually want would puncture the ideological framework on which this genre of commentary depends. As such, the purpose of this op-ed isn’t to explain the DSA’s appeal. It’s to declare that appeal illegitimate.

The obsession with policing the “left-right” spectrum is one of American political journalism’s most durable scams. This industry desperately wants the public to believe that the traditional left-right axis is the only meaningful axis of political conflict in this country. On that horizontal plane, political life is reduced to a perpetual culture war—a theatrical, cable-news-driven sporting match between progressives and conservatives as equal and opposite "extremes," with high-minded centrists cast as the adults in the room. I don't blame TV producers and staffed op-ed writers for running this scam; it's a lucrative one. But it’s also a construct built to hide the vertical conflict that actually decides most people's lives: regular working people confronting institutions and economic elites with vastly more power than they possess.

When a family struggles with rent, stagnant wages, or medical debt, their material needs don't change based on their political self-identification. Just look at what happened after the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. When right-wing grifter Ben Shapiro posted a video demanding his audience join elite pundits in condemning the shooting as a symptom of "revolutionary leftist evil," his own comments section revolted, filling up with stories of claim denials and medical bankruptcies. The episode demonstrated how quickly a culture-war script can break down when it collides with people’s material experiences. The horizontal "left vs. right" framework helps prevent those recognitions from developing into sustained political solidarity. It keeps working-class people fighting over culture war bullshit while the institutions profiting from their division continue operating undisturbed.

The worst part of Kirchick’s take isn’t even the argument itself. When a magazine with The Atlantic's reputation runs a piece calling democratic socialists "parasites" and "maggots," it lends polite, liberal cover to the Trump administration's ongoing project of building a legal and intelligence apparatus to criminalize political dissent. We don't have to speculate about where this trajectory leads, because it’s already underway. Last year, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the DOJ, and the Treasury to treat "anti-capitalist" advocacy, tenant organizing, and labor activism as factors contributing to domestic terrorism. Just last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio's administration released a hundred-page dossier, "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism," equating ordinary domestic political dissent and foreign-backed "political terrorism." The report cites McCarthy-era blacklists and prosecutions as a model worth emulating, and names over forty American citizens, elected officials, and labor organizations—the DSA, the Amazon Labor Union, sitting members of Congress, mayors like Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass.

To pretend that calling a political faction "parasites" is just colorful punditry is to ignore one of modern history’s best-documented patterns. In Mein Kampf, Hitler referred to Jews as a "bacillus" (germ) that was poisoning the German body politic, and routinely defined his political and racial opponents not as ideological adversaries, but as biological organisms, describing them as a "parasite living on the body...of other nations". Nazi propaganda constantly deployed the language of public health and pest control, casting Jews and other targets as lice, typhus, and malignant tumors threatening the vitality of the Volksgemeinschaft.

That language did some serious political work for the Third Reich. You can’t get a society to strip its own citizens of rights, throw them in camps, or turn state violence on them while it still sees them as people with competing ideas. First you have to convince the public they’re dealing with an infestation. Biological metaphors turn political suppression into an act of hygiene. Once your opponent is a parasite, you no longer have to debate them, negotiate with them, or grant that they have a right to exist—let alone a right to appear on a primary ballot.

Do I think James Kirchick and the editorial board of The Atlantic are Nazis? Yes. No. What I do think is that the dehumanizing rhetoric laid out in “The DSA Is a Parasite” makes the column more than another round of reactionary-centrist scolding. This is what happens when an establishment runs out of real arguments. They can't beat the DSA on the merits, so they frame the people organizing around it as an invasive species.

The demand of a scorched-earth campaign against the DSA demonstrates that these commentators and the Democratic establishment they shill for would rather alienate the very people who knock on doors, build community unions, and register voters than allow the party to move a single inch to the left on economic policy. I’m not a political scientist and I don’t pretend to know how much success DSA candidates will ultimately achieve on a national stage. I don’t know whether leaning fully into economic populism is the bulletproof map to 270 electoral votes in 2028. Whatever happens in the next few cycles, the pundit and consultant class will bend the data until it validates their priors and protects their contracts. Whether this strategy wins or loses elections, this fight has already told us what they actually care about. Staring down an authoritarian threat, a deeply entrenched corporate establishment is choosing to burn down its own coalition and deploy the rhetoric of fascism rather than share a shred of power with the working class. The Atlantic isn’t the only mainstream outlet platforming this crusade against the DSA, it’s just the one that topped all the others in shamelessness by publishing this centrist pundit slop comparing human beings to biological infestations. Whatever this publication once represented, it’s currently engaged in a cowardly, dehumanizing retreat from an argument it can’t win honestly. Maybe it’s time The Atlantic finally lived up to its name and took a long swim in the ocean it’s named after.

And yet despite influencer pop’s chokehold on the charts, despite the brief novelty of a wallpaper psych band generated by an algorithm, 2025 proved to be an extraordinary year for new music. I’m now at the age (mid-thirties) where many people lapse into the familiar “music sucks now, there’s nothing good anymore” posture, a reflex nourished by a culture that fetishizes nostalgia. But if you push through that noise, there’s no shortage of vital music to be found, whether you’re drawn to rock, pop, hip-hop, metal, ambient, or anything really.

By the time you’re reading this, online music spaces will have already spent two months bombarding you with year-end lists, most of them way way better written than what you’re reading right now. So I’ve decided to approach things differently. What follows are a few of my favorite songs of the year that I felt compelled to write words about, alongside a handful of moments of music in my actual life—at shows, playing shows, discovering music on purpose, discovering music by accident—experiences that helped me get through this dog shit year.

Songs

"Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)" - Wednesday

If you’re an indie music fan with any affection for country-tinged Americana and blown-out guitar rock, Wednesday are almost certainly your favorite band of the 2020s so far (and if they aren’t, I question your judgment). “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On),” the second single from the Asheville, North Carolina group’s standout album Bleeds, is a slow-burn epic of attrition. It’s an articulation of survival as straight up exhaustion rather than the heroic endgame popular mythology insists upon.

Karly Hartzman continues to prove herself as one of the essential lyricists of her generation, braiding hyper-specific imagery with an instinct for emotional universality. Lines like weeds growing “into the springs of the trampoline” and “mounted antlers in the kitchen on a crooked nail,” are delivered with an offhand vividness, then dryly undercut by “other killers keep teeth, keep the fingernails.” Musically, the track is a study in accumulated tension. MJ Lenderman’s guitar lines layer gradually, thickening into a dense, sheet-metal distortion. The effect is cumulative and inescapable, mirroring the emotional gravity of the lyrics and Hartzman’s vocal, which explodes into a full scale scream by the end. Few songs feel this attuned to the quiet labor of staying alive, and fewer still make that labor sound so completely human.

“Afterlife” - Alex G

Alex G has always possessed a rare melodic intuition, one that set him apart from the wave of bedroom-pop peers who emerged alongside him in the 2010s. That gift for melody has gradually carried him far beyond his early scene. Over the years, that instinct, combined with his sonic adventurousness, has led him into collaborations that span from shoegaze bands like his Philadelphia compatriots Nothing to pop stars such as Halsey and Frank Ocean, all without diluting the idiosyncratic nucleus of his work.

Following his score for I Saw the TV Glow (my favorite film of 2024) Alex G draws direct inspiration from Jane Schoenbrun’s story of adolescent longing, mediated through the glow and promise of the television screen. “Afterlife” feels like the purest distillation of that influence: perhaps the most melodically unforced song he has ever written. A sense of childlike wonder has always run through Alex G’s music, but here it feels fully realized. Images of “rolling through tiger grass” and running between “heaven and a TV screen” drift weightlessly over a bed of mandolin and glimmering synths. The repeated line “When the light came, big and bright, I began another life” is as simple and natural as a nursery rhyme. What ultimately elevates “Afterlife,” though, is the tension beneath the innocence. The song’s dreamy, childlike perspective is quietly complicated by the voice of an artist now in his thirties, someone grappling with the distance between the life once imagined and the one currently being lived. The wonder remains, but it’s not naïve anymore; it’s searching, reflective, and edged with the desire for transformation.

In that sense, “Afterlife” refracts childhood evocations through adulthood, using memory as a lens rather than the warm bath it’s most often deployed as. Few reactions capture this feeling more succinctly than a comment from Reddit user doloreslover:

um it is a work of absolute genius that makes me feel like life is meaningful and full of possibility and feels like a timewarp that brings me back to the wonder of childhood and also into my own future and also right to the present moment like clouds are opening and I’m meeting myself. low key

“Afterlife” makes time feel porous, collapsing past, present, and imagined futures into a single, luminous moment. Every time I listen to it, for a few minutes I’m convinced that starting over might still be possible.

“Clams Casino” - Brian Dunne

Another track that spoke to me on an eerily personal level this year was Brooklyn singer-songwriter Brian Dunne’s “Clams Casino,” a song that, for my money (not that I have any), may be the sharpest articulation yet of millennial disillusionment and the grinding, everyday negotiation with diminished expectations that comes with it. Over multiple listens, it became clear that “Clams Casino” is doing something deceptively sophisticated. Its layered guitars, soft synths, and steady, soulful burn borrow heavily from the emotional language of heartland pop-rock, music historically bound up with an earlier generation’s faith in upward motion. There are echoes of a mode of earnest, middle-American songwriting that once treated stability as a given and aspiration as a moral virtue. For boomers and many Gen Xers, the music Dunne is referencing functioned as a soundtrack to attainable milestones: home ownership, career security, the slow accumulation of comfort. In “Clams Casino,” those same melodic instincts are repurposed to narrate a radically different economic reality, one defined by precarity and self-surveillance. The song’s recurring image (clams casino on a Sunday night) becomes a kind of tragicomic shorthand: a working person’s idea of luxury, a modest indulgence freighted with class pride and class shame.

Dunne understands this contradiction intimately. The song ping-pongs between why is it so hard to have a good thing? and is it so bad to want one?, a loop familiar to anyone who has learned to distrust satisfaction even when it briefly arrives. The verses catalogue small indignities (discount mattresses, concrete sleep) while the chorus reaches outward, grasping for something communal. And then the song undercuts itself. A second voice enters late, calling out the narrator’s self-absorption, reminding him that desire can sour into grievance if left unattended. It’s a shrewd move, one that keeps the song from collapsing under its own weight.

“Clams Casino” offers no solution to the structural forces it names, but it expresses the relief of feeling seen, of hearing your own unease reflected back without judgment. The music reaches for the emotional clarity of an earlier era even as the lyrics acknowledge that the conditions which once made that clarity possible no longer exist. It’s a song for people still learning how to live inside the gap between resignation and hope.

“The Birds Don’t Sing” - Clipse

In 2025, my favorite rap duo came back after sixteen years to release Let God Sort Em Out, which opens with an absolutely devastating ode to Malice and Pusha T’s parents, who died within a four-month span. Like many a white hipster who watched The Wire too many times, I’ve long been drawn to the brothers’ in-depth, hyper-specific chronicling of street life, drug dealing, and the survivor’s guilt that shadows both. That history left me slightly unprepared for the nakedness of “The Birds Don’t Sing,” a real-time processing of familial grief.

The John Legend–sung chorus veers too close to vapid commercial sentimentality for my taste, but Pusha and Malice’s verses are so unflinchingly honest that the song still stands as one of my favorites of the year. Pusha, historically the more nihilistic and swagger-forward voice of the duo, raps here with audible remorse, lingering on missed moments with his mother, the guilt of distraction, and the unbearable fact that his son will never truly know her. Malice, back in the fold after a long spiritual journey, delivers the song’s most crushing insight, articulating shame in recognizing how his father’s love and sacrifice couldn’t shield them from the pull of the streets:

See, mine made sure he had every base covered
So imagine his pain findin’ base in the cupboard.

Fucking devastating.

The title pulls from a line by Werner Herzog, who once said, while describing the jungle, “I don’t think the birds sing. They just screech in pain.” Herzog meant it as proof of nature’s indifference, a belief that harmony is a human fantasy imposed on a world that doesn’t give a fuck either way. Hearing that phrase here, though, it feels different. In Clipse’s hands, it doesn’t seem to be about nature’s cruelty, but what grief does to expression. When loss hits this close, there’s no song left in you, just the raw sound of pain spilling out however it can.

“It’s Amazing to Be Young” - Fontaines D.C.

After a banner 2024, Fontaines D.C. kept a comparatively low profile in 2025, but they still found time to release this quiet stunner in February. “It’s Amazing to Be Young” feels like a spiritual sibling to “Favourite,” the gorgeous, melancholic centerpiece from last year’s Romance, sharing its sense of emotional openness and slow, deliberate uplift. The band’s familiar touchstones are easy to hear. The chiming melancholy of The Cure and The Smiths lingers in the guitar lines and tempo. But where those bands often turned inward, Fontaines D.C. reach outward, pairing that lineage with arena-sized ambition and a festival-scale catharsis closer to U2 (minus the messianic posturing).

“It’s Amazing to Be Young” thrives on that scale. It treats youth as a gift and wound, capturing its joy and ache with a cinematic sweep that never gets too goopy. Even in a quieter year, it’s remarkable that Fontaines D.C. still managed to hit the rafters.

“DOOMSDAY HOLIDAY” — NOT A TOY

I can’t think of a song that more perfectly crystallizes Mark Fisher’s idea of depressive hedonia than this electro-trap menace, a party track engineered for the slow-motion collapse of the American empire. It’s perversely irresistible, the catchiest song of the year by a country mile, and it caps its nihilistic glee by sampling one of George W. Bush’s most infamous soundbites. The vibe is pure dancefloor euphoria with nothing left to believe in.

“The Giver” - Chappell Roan

The best Shania Twain song of the twenty-first century.

Moments

Oasis

Seeing Oasis in a stadium in Dublin with 80,000 people. I already wrote about it.

Mórda

On our last night in Dublin, my girlfriend and I ended up at Thomas House, a great bar in the Liberties. We wandered downstairs into the basement, where a show was already in progress. I had no idea who the band was, but within one song I was convinced I might be watching the best set I’d seen in a long time, which is saying something, given that I’d seen Oasis just six days earlier.

The band was Mórda, led by Dan Murphy, a frontman with a remarkable voice. It’s definitely got echoes of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, but it’s unmistakably his own. Dan’s stage presence was incredible: confident without flash, building energy with the audience in a genuinely symbiotic exchange. The rest of the band was equally impressive—robust, adventurous, and locked in—especially the synth player, whose occasional atonal swells introduced just enough friction to keep the songs from getting too comfortable.

I spoke with Dan afterward, and he was exactly what you hope for in these moments: friendly, humble, disarmingly sincere (he’s Irish, after all). In a just world, Mórda would be one of the biggest bands in indie music. A just world is hard to picture right now, but I hope they’re heard by more people who can experience firsthand how special this band is. Check out the singles “Bird” and “Ref 2 U,” released in August.

Geese

After some initial skepticism about what all the fuss was surrounding Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal, it quietly became my favorite album of 2024 that I didn’t hear until 2025. That discovery opened the door to Geese’s back catalog (especially 3D Country). The band’s subsequent blow-up following Getting Killed, along with the rush of accolades, didn’t dull my enthusiasm in the slightest. Geese make rock music feel exciting and alive in ways that seemed impossible for such a stubbornly anachronistic form.

A Wilhelm Scream

Opening for A Wilhelm Scream with Structure Sounds, the band I play in, was both an honor and a rush. AWS are an exciting, explosive live band and some of the nicest people imaginable. That combination doesn’t happen often enough.

Farewell Callouts

And finally, getting to play with my friends in The Callouts (who released a great final record, Victory Lap, in January) at their last show ever in November. I’ve been lucky enough to see more of their shows over the past decade than I can reasonably count, and I’ll carry those memories with me for a long time. I may never save enough for retirement, but I got to see The Callouts. Honestly, I might prefer that.

My Favorite Albums of 2025:

Geese, Getting Killed

Wednesday, Bleeds

Greg Freeman, Burnover

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

Alex G, Headlights

Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place

Fust, Spangled

Total Wife, come back down

Hotline TNT, Raspberry Moon

Oh the Humanity!, Ground to Dust

Snocaps, Snocaps

Florry, …Sounds Like

Water Damage, Instruments

Agriculture, The Spiritual Sound

The Callouts, Victory Lap

Tyler, the Creator, DON’T TAP THE GLASS

One Last Thing - A Shameless Plug

We also put out a covers EP this year called Stolen Sounds, which was supposed to be a fairly low-key, laid-back project and instead turned into a much longer process than anyone planned. So if you’re into songs by The Weeknd, Amy Winehouse, Laura Jane Grace, Bad Religion, or forgotten early-aughts pop-punkers like Osker, this is the 2025 record for you!

Emily and I are 3,000 miles from home, holding our bladders, thirsty for another beer, on the pitch at Croke Park, and I'm doing the math: thirty minutes until Oasis takes the stage, thousands of people between us and the nearest toilet, and no chance we'd make it back to this spot if we leave. The beer vendors who'd been working the crowd like hot dog guys at Fenway have vanished. We could leave, but we won't. Neither will anyone around us.

Because this isn’t just any concert. This is Oasis, together for the first time since 2009, when Liam hurled a plum at Noel backstage in Paris—a final absurd straw after years of spectacular bickering. We’re here in Dublin for the penultimate show of the band’s Live ‘25 run in the UK and Ireland before the tour moves to North America the following week.

This reunion feels both inevitable and surreal. In the years since the breakup, Liam told LA Weekly that he would rather eat his own shit than work with Noel again, called him a “POTATO” on Twitter along with some other insults. Noel's own vitriol was no less potent; he once declared he “couldn’t stand the sound of Liam’s voice" and even quipped that he'd "liked their mum until she gave birth to Liam.” Rumors swirled that Noel had turned down £100 million to reunite. This time, either the money was too good to pass up (reportedly £400 million) or, against all odds, genuine reconciliation had finally bloomed between the warring siblings.

Whether or not these brothers still hated each other seemed to be of little concern to the city of Dublin which had been rededicated in the band’s honor. At the airport, a large cardboard cutout of the Gallaghers greeted arrivals with the caption “Dublin’s Madferit!” The EPIC Museum mounted an Oasis-themed exhibit, and bootleg Live ‘25 merch was hawked on what seemed like every other sidewalk. Our hotel breakfast buffet felt like an international Oasis summit. Fans from multiple countries came decked out in the band’s gear to eat runny eggs and soggy beans.

On the day of the show, the streets of Drumcondra around Croke Park overflowed with fans of every age in every imaginable piece of Oasis merchandise. Conventional hipster wisdom among concert-goers dictates abstaining from donning the band’s own merch at the show you’re attending. Here, it was the opposite. If you weren’t in Oasis gear—or at least a bucket hat and Adidas—you might as well have been cheering for the other team (Blur?).

We threaded our way through the vast throngs into the stadium and onto the pitch just before Richard Ashcroft, former Verve frontman and stealer of J. Spaceman’s girlfriend, kicked off his opening set. After running through a half dozen or so songs including Verve classics like “The Drugs Don’t Work”, “Lucky Man” and “Space and Time” (my personal favorite), he closed, naturally with “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, introducing it as either the best song of all time or one of the best, I can’t remember which. Either way, bold claim. But when the drums kicked in and he started leaping around the stage shouting “Come on,” it was hard not to believe him. His performance was undeniably mesmerizing, a masterclass in classic rock stardom. There was something unapproachable. I highly doubt I’ll look as good as Richard Ashcroft does when I’m 53, and I know I’ll never write anything as monumental as “Bitter Sweet Symphony”.

Soon, the stadium air grew heavy with collective anticipation. From our unwavering position amidst the masses, as 8:15 loomed, we cemented our resolve, prioritizing our coveted vantage point over the fleeting respite for our bladders and the deceptive allure of another Rockshore Irish Lager. Besides, Oasis fans have a notorious bathroom workaround: the charming tradition of lobbing piss-filled beer cups into the crowd—exactly the kind of revolting, practical solution you might expect from the Gallagher brothers themselves.

Right on time at 8:15, an Oasis-branded decibel meter appeared across the three massive LED screens behind the stage, warning us that this was not a drill. But nothing quite prepared me for the moment that Liam and Noel stepped out on stage, hand in hand, here in the flesh. I’d tried to avoid reading too much about the previous shows on this tour so as not to spoil my experience, but I knew this had happened at all their shows thus far. It was a great gimmick, pure showmanship. The authenticity of the display of affection was irrelevant. It felt like a genuine moment of triumph. I can imagine every complicated family relationship in that stadium suddenly felt a little more fixable.

Emily and I held each other in awe as they separated, Noel picking up his trusty Les Paul and Liam heading to the mic with his tambourine, roaring “Oasis vibes in the area! Dublin vibes in the area!” before launching into “Hello.” We jumped into the air with the masses, beer cups flew, I may have gotten some piss shrapnel, but it didn’t matter. We were subsumed into a vast, communal organism, a pulsating entity of an unprecedented scale to any I’d ever experienced, and the sheer power of it was utterly overwhelming.

After, they launched right into “Acquiesce,” a song that perfectly showcases the Gallaghers’ complementing strengths. Liam spits the verses with a bratty, aggressive swagger, his voice sounding almost as sharp as it did on the original recording. Then Noel takes the chorus with a soaring sincerity and lyrical simplicity that is one of his unique gifts as a songwriter.

The chorus—“Because we need each other, we believe in one another”—is probably the most self-aware analysis of the brothers’ dynamic Noel ever wrote. But shouted by 80,000 people, it became a statement of purpose for everyone in that stadium. If Liam was singing the verses at us as a challenge, we sang the chorus back with Noel as an answer. It was a perfect feedback loop: the band’s need for adoration met by the crowd’s need to see themselves reflected in their heroes. Amplified by the fervent outpouring, the song transcended its individual components, becoming a vivid projection of our collective hopes and dreams.

It’s that complete absence of a wall between them and us that defines the whole experience, and it arguably peaked later in the set during “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” Liam instructed the crowd to turn around and jump up and down “like you don’t care.” Then, as the iconic riff kicked in, he offered what I believe to be the band’s central thesis in nine words: “If I can do it, anyone can do it.” And so we did. In that moment, I found myself with an arm slung over the sweaty neck of a complete stranger, a man whose personal space I would never otherwise have breached. For five glorious, chaotic minutes, we were best mates. Beer cups (some, I’m sure, containing more than just beer) arced through the air, and nobody cared. It was sweaty, ridiculous, and probably a biohazard, and for those five minutes, it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

A song like “Cigarettes & Alcohol” is engineered for a moment like this. It’s an anthem that endorses hedonism as a perfectly logical response to a dead-end life, and the music itself operates on the same unapologetic logic. Its iconic central riff, for instance, is famously a direct lift from T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”

A lot of people call this theft and cite a myriad of similar examples in Oasis’ catalog. But these people arguably don’t understand songwriting and definitely don’t understand Noel Gallagher. He doesn’t write from a mystical plane of divine intervention; he writes like a diehard music fan stitching together half-remembered bits of the tunes he grew up on, whether it’s that T. Rex riff (which Marc Bolan cribbed from Chuck Berry), Don Draper’s Coca-Cola jingle that became the melody for “Shakermaker,” or the ghost of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” slide guitar that haunts the “Supersonic” solo. He’s a brilliant magpie, and in being one, he shatters the illusion of songwriting as some kind of witchcraft. For him, it’s a clever assembly of parts. And that creates the powerful, intoxicating belief that, with the right record collection and enough nerve, you could do it too.

I could spend another ten thousand words recapping the whole set, cataloging every Liam-ism and Noel smirk. But the emotional labor of reading it would probably cost you what a resale ticket is going for on the North American leg of this tour. Besides, the night wasn’t a checklist of songs; it was a series of escalating moments. I’ll leave you with two that tell the whole story.

The first was during “Live Forever.” When it was originally released as a single, three months to the day after Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered, it was positioned as an antidote to the entire grunge scene—a loud, defiant, but maybe naive insistence that life was actually worth living. For Emily and me, its big, simple promise has come to be something of a shared affirmation of optimism, and it often feels like something that belonged just to us.

But then you looked around Croke Park, and you realized almost everyone was having the same private moment, just publicly. Couples pulled each other closer, lads slung arms over shoulders, each group claiming the song as their own, together. In 1994, that defiance was aimed, intentionally or not, at the gloom of grunge. But hearing it now, in the face of a rapidly warming planet, ascendant fascism, and an ongoing genocide, the stakes felt higher. It felt like an act of survival. We were all shouting the same thing back at the darkness: fuck you, we still want to live.

If “Live Forever” is the anthem of shared survival, the last song before the encore, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” is the blueprint for the individual dream that makes survival worth the trouble in the first place. It’s the song that first made me fall in love with the band. In my teens I’d written Oasis off as derivative wankers with nonsensical lyrics. “Wonderwall” was the mating call of every guy in my freshman dorm who knew a couple chords, and everything I read about the Gallagher brothers made them seem like ego-fueled arseholes. But at 21, heartbroken after the end of my first serious relationship and just feeling like I was failing at everything in general, I gave them another shot after my bandmate told me Definitely Maybe was one of his favorite albums.

The first time I listened to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” something clicked. I heard pure, uncut desperation. Liam wasn’t singing about wanting to be a rock star so much as he was singing about needing to be one, because the alternative was unbearable, and he was going to make it happen through sheer force of will. Most people, especially kids from blue-collar families like the Gallaghers, are taught to muzzle those kinds of dreams and settle for something sensible. But there he was, also 21, completely unashamed of believing he could be special. It was inspiring, and even if I could never be as cool as Liam Gallagher, I could channel that raw hunger to want to matter, even if all it did at the time was help me get out of bed in the morning.

For that reason alone, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” will probably always be my favorite Oasis song, and Liam somehow still sang it with the same white-knuckle urgency, even though the dream had long already come true for him. By still singing it this way, he gave all 80,000 of us the permission to keep dreaming our impossible dreams and refuse to accept limitations. Standing there, shouting about living my life for the stars that shine, I felt both completely foolish and completely alive. And I didn’t feel alone, because everyone around me was doing the same.

Look, there are a lot of people who don’t care for Oasis. Many with whom I’ve long shared an appreciation for artistically adventurous music and leftist political convictions are often the most dismissive of the band. Consequently, I’ve frequently encountered the question: is my love for Oasis ironic, or heartfelt? There is a lens to view the Oasis reunion as yet another cultural escape into the kind of regressive nostalgia that permeates our modern cultural landscape in lieu of any kind of forward-looking creative movement. I think that lens is a perfectly valid one. I’m sure there were some people in Croke Park that night, perhaps people who had come-of-age during Oasis’ mid-90s imperial phase, whose embrace of the night’s event was predicated on an imagined past and a disdain for their current lives. But, I don’t think that was most of us, and if anything the night felt progressive in its rejection of the hate, division, and isolation that pervade the world in 2025.

Oasis’ music, if you can let go of constructed ideas of artistic legitimacy and lyrical complexity, is rapturous, blunt and overwhelming, a release that bypasses the critical faculties and lands straight in the body. And in a stadium with my partner, and a temporary city of others who’d allowed themselves the joy of giving themselves to a band that mirrored their own flaws, dreams of stardom, and belief in each other, it felt truly magical.

*big thanks to Emily for capturing some of these pics and MASA's From The Venue YouTube Channel for the clips.

Welcome back to the list (read Part I here if you’re so inclined). In this section, we’re looking at our final two categories: The Victory Lap, and The Last Hurrah.

CATEGORY III: THE VICTORY LAP

The Victory Lap is the album closer that sticks the landing with confidence. These are the songs the artist knows they nailed—the catchiest, most immediate track on the whole record. And yet they’re tucked at the end, not to neatly tie a bow, but to make sure the album goes out on a high. It’s more mic drop than close out (I probably should’ve just called this category The Mic Drop).

5 “Constant Headache” - Joyce Manor (from Joyce Manor, 2011)

Placing a song as undeniably catchy as “Constant Headache” as the last song on your debut album is a risky move. Will new listeners even stick around long enough to hear it? But the gamble paid off majorly for the California band, becoming their signature song and one of the touchstones of the 2010s emo revival.

"Constant Headache" arrived at the perfect cultural moment, catching fire on Tumblr just as the platform was becoming ground zero for emo’s resurgence. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with 80s synth-pop will immediately clock that singer/guitarist Barry Johnson’s vocal melody is lifted almost verbatim from The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby”. Far from being a lazy swindle, this bit of musical archaeology is key to the song’s immediacy upon first listen. But where The Human League deployed the melody in service of clinical detachment, Joyce Manor transforms it into urgent desperation. What once functioned as new wave artifice becomes emo authenticity, the same melodic DNA serving opposite emotional purposes.

The lyrics, meanwhile, have sparked years of passionate online debate. Is it about a struggling relationship? Unrequited affection? A dog watching his owner having sex in the morning? (My personal favorite). This interpretive flexibility has become part of the song's charm. It’s vague enough to feel universal, specific enough to seem deeply personal. The lyrics' ambiguity undoubtedly helped fuel its viral spread, and the fact that fans are still debating its meaning over a decade later speaks to how effectively Johnson crafted something that feels simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear, depending on what you bring to it.

In the end, Joyce Manor's decision to close their debut with their most accessible track turned conventional album sequencing on its head, proving that sometimes the best way to say goodbye is with a song that makes people never want to leave.

4 “Would?” - Alice in Chains (from Dirt, 1992)

After putting listeners through the addiction-soaked horror show that is Dirt (an album so bleak it should come with a therapy referral) Alice in Chains faced a choice: end on a note of total despair or throw audiences a hook-laden lifeline. "Would?" splits the difference perfectly. It's another anguished depiction of drug addiction that also happens to be the band's most undeniably catchy song.

“Would?” is a showcase for Alice in Chains’ greatest strength—those haunting vocal harmonies between Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell—but strips away the more punishing elements of earlier songs on the album (Staley’s woozy-dopesick vocals on “God Smack”, Cantrell’s grotesque screaming and tuneless riffage on “Iron Gland”). Cantrell opens with a ghostly, introspective verse; Staley answers with a voice that’s wide, wounded, and volatile, his vibrato trembling at the edge of collapse. Their interplay becomes a dialogue between inner and outer pain—Cantrell as the measured conscience, Staley as the spiraling self. When their voices merge in the chorus, it’s two griefs coexisting: one resigned, one raging, in marred harmony. The result is a song that feels both streamlined and spiritually dissonant, radio-ready yet emotionally bottomless.

The song's masterstroke comes in its final third: an unexpected coda that promises cathartic release before snatching it away. What begins as a seemingly triumphant shift toward major-key resolution quickly dissolves into dissonance and chaos, with Staley's increasingly frantic questions—"Have I gone? And left you here alone?"—floating over Cantrell's busy, manic guitar work. That final cryptic challenge, "If I would, could you?" delivered over blasts of dissonance from Cantrell and the rhythm section, creates the kind of unresolved tension that demands repeat listens. This sophisticated bait-and-switch is exactly what made "Would?" the perfect Victory Lap: the structural complexity doesn't obscure the catchiness, it amplifies it, creating a song that gets stuck in your head precisely because it refuses to give you the resolution you crave. After 50 minutes of Dirt's relentless emotional punishment, ending with a song that's both gorgeous and deeply unsettling feels like the perfect mic drop, because even Alice In Chains' idea of "accessible" involves leaving you more psychologically damaged than when you started.

3 “Glory Box” - Portishead (from Dummy, 1994)

In the U.K., Portishead’s debut album Dummy became synonymous with sexy chillout music—the soundtrack for late-night seduction attempts and those grim 6 AM moments when the ecstasy wears off and you’re in existential dread mode. This is a connection that has always bothered Geoff Barrow, Portishead’s co-founder, who finds this perception “bizarre” insisting the band had more in common with Nirvana than any dance act. But "Glory Box," the album's closing track and biggest hit, is probably the biggest reason for this confusion. It's the one song that fully delivers on the promise of sultry accessibility, even as it maintains all of Portishead's signature unease—lush, looped, and unmistakably hauntological.

“Glory Box" succeeds by balancing seduction with subtle menace. The Isaac Hayes sample provides the sensual foundation, but it's the interplay between singer Beth Gibbons' mercurial vocals and that distorted, buzzsaw guitar riff (courtesy of Adrian Utley) that keeps the song from feeling safe. The guitar cuts through the groove like a serrated blade, adding just enough abrasion to remind you this isn't some kind of pedestrian slow jam. Gibbons shifts between whispered intimacy and soaring desperation, while the sparse arrangement ensures every crackle and distortion lands with maximum impact.

It’s that tension—between allure and unease, between vintage stylings and postmodern dread—that makes “Glory Box” such a perfect closer. After an album steeped in noirish paranoia and emotional withdrawal, Portishead end on their most accessible note, even if that version of “accessible” still has shadows moving at the edges. It’s the kind of song you could put on a playlist for someone you’re trying to impress, but listen closely and you’ll hear the emotional exhaustion, gender fatigue, and the quiet anguish of wanting to be someone else for a night. As a Victory Lap, “Glory Box” is slyly subversive: a song that hooks you with its sultry groove, then leaves a bruise where you expected a kiss. It’s catchy in the way all great Portishead songs are—loop-driven, hypnotic, and just off-kilter enough to keep you from getting too comfortable.

When it finally fades out, you’re dazed, seduced, a little haunted—like you’ve just come down from something you didn’t realize you’d taken. And as Dummy ends, that sense of gorgeous disorientation lingers. You’ve been pulled through smoke and shadow for almost 50 minutes, immersed in what feels like the memory of a movie you’re starting to think maybe never existed at all.

2 “Train in Vain” - The Clash (from London Calling, 1979)

The Clash stumbled into their perfect closer through pure chance. Originally written for an NME flexi disc that never happened, "Train in Vain" was, in co-founder and guitarist Mick Jones' words, just a "spare track we had done as a giveaway." Whether they thought their upcoming double album, London Calling, wasn't long enough already, or secretly knew they had a future hit on their hands, they stuck it to the album at the last minute. So late in fact, that the album sleeves were already printed, meaning that “Train in Vain” became punk's first hidden track: unlisted, without printed lyrics, existing only as a title scratched into the vinyl run-off like graffiti. It wound up being their biggest hit up to that point. Pretty good for a song they nearly gave away.

“Train in Vain” is an infectious pop song if there ever was one. It fully embraces the previous two decades of popular music—early Beatles vocal phrasing in Jones' "lie-ai-ai," the melodic soul of J.J. Jackson's "But It's Alright," the scorned lover pop of Fleetwood Mac, even a hint of Townshend-esque synth drama in those closing harmonica trills. Upon release, it became The Clash’s first U.S. Top 40 hit, a fact that sat uneasily with Joe Strummer—the band’s frontman and ideological compass—who never fully made peace with its pop leanings (See Strummer’s snarky introduction of the song from a 1980 performance for proof). But far from being a betrayal of London Calling’s revolutionary spirit, “Train in Vain” was the final twist in an album that thrived on reinvention: a soul-influenced, radio-ready love song from a band that had just bulldozed through ska, rockabilly, funk, and reggae with righteous swagger. That it arrived almost as an afterthought only deepens its mystique. The most conventionally catchy song they had released up to that point wasn’t even supposed to be there—proof that sometimes the best strategic moves are the ones you never intended to make, the Victory Lap you didn’t even know you were running.

1 “Fight the Power” – Public Enemy (from Fear of a Black Planet, 1990)

Good protest songs sound like calls to action. “Fight the Power” sounded like the action had already started. Originally commissioned by Spike Lee for his 1989 classic, Do the Right Thing, the song was designed to play a central role in the film’s emotional and political heartbeat—blaring from Radio Raheem’s boombox as he weaves through Bed-Stuy. But Chuck D and the Bomb Squad weren’t just writing for the screen; they were writing to define a moment of deep unrest. “Fight the Power” distilled the frustrations of the late 1980s: the reactionary politics of Reaganism, the crack epidemic, the moral panic around hip-hop, the corporate co-opting of Black culture. “Fight the Power” reflected the pressure of that moment and turned it into a generational rallying cry.

The song goes beyond voicing frustration and demands resistance. From the opening seconds, it explodes with intent: crashing drums, sirens, and a jagged guitar riff all come flying at once, disorienting and electrifying. The Bomb Squad’s production fuses chaos and control—dense layers of funk, noise, and rhythm arranged with razor-sharp precision. Chuck D’s vocals ride the storm with drill-sergeant clarity, while Flavor Flav darts through the mix with kinetic urgency, amplifying the song’s sense of alarm. In the background, vocal snippets call the listener to move, to listen, to get down.

Lyrically, Chuck D doesn’t pull punches. While the song is best remembered for its takedowns of Elvis and John Wayne, its most subversive line might be the quietest: “People, people we are the same / No, we’re not the same / ’Cause we don’t know the game.” In just a few bars, he rejects feel-good liberalism and dismantles the myth of racial sameness. At a time when multiculturalism was being packaged as feel-good unity, Chuck was challenging its most comfortable assumptions. The song is as much about seeing things clearly as it is about confrontation. That clarity, that refusal to soften the message, is what gives “Fight the Power” its enduring weight. And paradoxically, it’s also what makes the song so effective: a radical critique carried on the shoulders of one of the most infectious, anthemic tracks Public Enemy ever recorded.

For all its righteous fury, the song is almost impossibly catchy. The groove is unforgettable. You chant along before fully absorbing that you’re rejecting not just authority, but the cultural myths that have long propped it up. It’s an all-time great pop song inside a pressure cooker.

There’s far more to say about the legacy of “Fight the Power,” from its central role in Do the Right Thing, its ongoing political resonance, the way it redefined what a protest song could sound like and whom it could reach (I’m by no means qualified to unpack all of that). But within the scope of Fear of a Black Planet, the song is an undeniable final statement. It wasn’t even written for the album, yet its placement feels inevitable. Public Enemy’s third studio album is an almost unfathomably dense, confrontational work, designed to provoke, educate, and unsettle. “Fight the Power,” arriving last, doesn’t resolve that tension so much as reignite it, and distill it to its most accessible form. It leaves you energized, unsettled, and wide awake. Not just a Victory Lap, but a signal: the work isn’t done, and the volume stays up until it is.

Victory Lap Honorable Mentions:

“American Girl” - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1976) *this probably would’ve made the top 5 if I’d remembered that it was the last song on their debut until just now.

"This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" - Talking Heads (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983)

“Scenario” - A Tribe Called Quest (from The Low End Theory, 1991)

CATEGORY IV: THE LAST HURRAH

The Last Hurrah is what happens when the final track really is the final track. These are songs that end more than just the album—whether the artist passed away, the band broke up, or the studio lights just never came back on. Some of them feel intentional. Others weren’t meant to be the end at all, but history made them into farewells. Either way, these songs take on a glow in retrospect. They’re the last thing we got. And sometimes, that’s enough to make them feel mythic.

5 “Love Spreads” - The Stone Roses (from Second Coming, 1994)

Yes, technically Second Coming ends with a hidden track. No, we’re not talking about it. “The Foz” is six and a half minutes of borderline unlistenable acoustic noodling, and pretending it’s the band’s final statement would be like saying The Sopranos ended with the opening credits to the John from Cincinnati pilot (you might’ve just missed an important story beat when your TV went out). Let’s be serious: the last real song on the record is “Love Spreads.” And it goes out fucking swinging.

After five years of record label issues, perfectionism, and slow-burn ego detonation, the Stone Roses finally followed up their classic debut with Second Coming, a title that didn’t exactly scream humility. Fans expecting more jangly bliss and Madchester swagger were instead greeted with sprawling highway blues-rock, guitarist John Squire’s unabashed Zeppelin worship, and the sound of a band swinging for immortality but landing somewhere on the Be Here Now end of the Use Your Illusion-Be Here Now spectrum (a completely made-up classification system I invented for the sake of this paragraph, to be clear).

Second Coming isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, but aside from “Ten Storey Love Song,” much of it represents a band drifting from what once made them essential. “Love Spreads,” though, is the exception that proves the rule. It grabs hold of their blues-rock reinvention and makes it feel vital. From the moment Squire drops that swampy, sawtoothed slide riff, the track feels like it's dragging something heavy down a mountain. The production is huge and murky, a cavern of echo and crunch. Ian Brown’s vocals are slightly off-pitch in that uniquely Roses way, but he sells the madness. The lyrics, supposedly a feminist retelling of the crucifixion with Jesus reimagined as a Black woman, could’ve been pure provocation, but somehow it lands. Maybe it's Squire’s riff-as-religion guitar work or the sheer audacity of Brown’s visionary pub ranting, but it makes it feel mythic. That myth even resurfaced decades later, when the song made a left-field, pitch-perfect needle drop in Severance’s second season.

The Stone Roses would limp on a little longer—there were subsequent live shows, and a 2010s reunion—but Second Coming ended up being their final album-length statement. For a band that once soundtracked a movement, it wasn’t the ending anyone expected. But as a final, swaggering note, “Love Spreads” works. It’s the kind of Last Hurrah that leaves you dazed, half-smiling, and wondering if maybe, just maybe, they pulled it off after all.

4 “Riders on the Storm” - The Doors (from L.A. Woman, 1971)

Okay, this one’s also kind of cheating. The Doors technically released albums after Jim Morrison’s death, but come on. L.A. Woman is the last real Doors album, and “Riders on the Storm” is the last real Doors song.

Of all the ways The Doors could have gone out, this is the strangest and most fitting. Not with a scream, a firebomb, or an Oedipal meltdown, but with a song that sounds like it’s already halfway dissolved. For a band with a reputation for swagger, chaos, and Jim Morrison’s shirtless poet mysticism, “Riders on the Storm” is a weirdly graceful exit—low on theatrics, high on atmosphere, and quietly obsessed with death.

Everything moves slowly. The electric piano drips like water down a cave wall, the drums shuffle with spectral restraint, and thunder rolls in the background like a sound effect from a B-movie noir. Morrison doesn’t bark or moan—he murmurs, double-tracked with a whisper that trails behind him like a ghost version of himself. It’s not seductive or intense. It’s eerie. Detached. Almost like he’s already gone.

Lyrically, it’s standard Morrison fare—desert imagery, hitchhikers, vague dread—but drained of fire and ego, which somehow makes it more compelling. “Into this house we’re born / into this world we’re thrown” isn’t particularly deep, but it’s said with such hollow calm it almost feels profound. It’s not trying to explain anything, it just drifts into the void and leaves you there.

Morrison died three months after the album’s release, and “Riders on the Storm” became another thread in the myth: the lizard king, the poet of doom, the 27 Club. But the song itself resists all that. There’s no climax here, no final howl. It’s just a man fading into the background of his own story. As accidental last acts go, it’s pretty much perfect: one last ride into the storm, mumbling something existential as the world slides past the window.

3 “All Apologies” - Nirvana (from In Utero, 1993)

For the most part, In Utero, Nirvana’s third studio album, is a confrontational, abrasive fuck-you of a record designed to alienate casual listeners. After the runaway success of Nevermind, Nirvana pushed back against the weight of fame and expectation, enlisting the sonically brilliant but legendarily off-putting Steve Albini to helm the sessions. Yet for all the fractured song structures, screaming, and bile, Kurt Cobain couldn’t suppress his once-in-a-generation pop instincts for an entire album (see “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb,” even “Rape Me”). But he saved the most accessible song for last.

On “All Apologies,” the guitars hum and shimmer with fatigue, Dave Grohl’s drums drag with weary grace, and a droning cello coils beneath the mix like a held breath. At the center is one of Cobain’s most beautiful melodies—simple, inevitable, as if it had been looping in the background forever. He doesn’t shout (at least, not by his standards). His double-tracked vocal sounds worn down, intimate, almost private. The line “What else should I be? All apologies” hangs in the air, resigned. There’s no clarity here, no grand final statement, just a looping, hypnotic refrain: “All in all is all we are.” It’s vague, maybe meaningless, but it lands with a ghostly emotional heft.

For a band that reshaped an entire generation’s relationship to rock music, this is a relatively quiet way to go out. In Utero was meant to repel before it invited, but “All Apologies” is the opposite: a door cracked open at the very end. Cobain died six months later, and in the years since, Nirvana has become less a band than a brand—an iconographic shorthand for angst, rebellion, and thrift-store T-shirts. The song became one more piece of Cobain’s tragic myth. Which is why it still lands so hard. “All Apologies” doesn’t speak from the pedestal or the merch rack. It just sounds like a person trying, briefly, to be understood. As accidental farewells go, it’s hard to imagine one more human.

2 “I Can’t Give Everything Away” - David Bowie (from Blackstar, 2016)

David Bowie was never supposed to die—at least not in any way that felt real and final. His career was built on reinvention, deflection, and myth-making (and for a brief period, on cocaine and peppers). He made transcending oneself look easy: a parade of personas that weren’t so much masks as escape routes. Bowie was never relatable, but he was aspirational in the most existential sense. Which is why, when he sings “I know something’s very wrong” to close his final album, it hits with eerie tenderness. This is the sound of someone who spent a lifetime performing distance, finally allowing a little closeness.

That feeling extends into the music. The song is a graceful summation of Bowie’s final musical language: jazzy, synthetic, and emotionally elusive, even as it aches in a way he never quite allowed before. Programmed drums pulse beneath glassy synths and chorused guitars, with a plaintive harmonica lifted from Low threading through the mix. Donny McCaslin’s saxophone curls upward like smoke, while Bowie croons the title refrain with a kind of poised resignation. It’s a magician’s farewell: revelation and retreat in the same breath.

Two days after Blackstar’s release, Bowie was gone. The song’s meaning transformed from enigma to epitaph overnight. But “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is not only a personal goodbye—it’s a final lesson in restraint, and an acknowledgment of something larger: that none of us can give everything away—not because we’re unwilling, but because there’s always more within us than this world can hold. I can’t think of a more perfect way to go out.

1 “Pink Moon” – Nick Drake (from Pink Moon, 1972)

Nick Drake was one of a kind. He had an ability to perfectly mirror words, melody and music into miniature worlds of beauty and ache—intimate, elemental, and quietly eternal. If you didn’t know the English folk singer-songwriter died young, “From the Morning”, the final track on 1972’s Pink Moon, might sound like nothing more than a gentle sunrise. It’s short and clean. It’s quietly luminous—just voice and guitar, unadorned and perfectly synchronized. There’s no grand gesture, no final cry, but within its fragile frame the song carries something metaphysical in its closing lyric: “And now we rise / And we are everywhere.” It reads like a hushed epiphany, a widening of perspective, as if Drake is dissolving the boundary between himself and the world—a boundary he so instinctively tried to maintain during his life. In hindsight, it feels almost like a quiet premonition: his voice, barely heard in his time, slowly spreading everywhere after he was gone.

Drake’s songwriting was never confessional in the usual sense. His lyrics were elliptical, his delivery subdued, and his presence more sensed than felt. It was kind of like he was playing from another room. But beneath that hush was a deep, sophisticated musical intelligence. His use of alternate tunings and clustered chords gave his guitar a luminous, textural richness that sounded like no one else. On Pink Moon, he stripped away everything but the essentials—no strings, no backing band, just guitar and voice (aside from a single piano overdub on the title track)—leaving behind something raw, spare, and haunting. Most of the album sounds like someone turning inward, fading out. But then comes “From the Morning,” and the atmosphere shifts. Where the rest of the record retreats, this song opens up and glows.

Pink Moon barely made a ripple upon its initial release. Drake didn’t tour, promote it, and his label, Island Records, didn’t know what to do with a record that actively sounded like it was trying to hide from the world. Two years later, Drake was gone at age 26. For decades, his music lingered mostly in obscurity until a 1999 Volkswagen commercial used the song “Pink Moon” to sell compact cars to moody Gen Xers. Suddenly, people were listening to Nick Drake, and what they found wasn’t dated or nostalgic. It was music that seemed to hover outside of time, intimate and unplaceable, as if it had always been playing somewhere.

In retrospect, “From the Morning” plays like a farewell, but not a tragic one. In fact, no artist has ever gone out quite so tenderly, or so beautifully. It’s the sound of letting go gently. It’s a rising line, a soft light, and a quiet last hurrah of a voice returning itself to the world—we are everywhere.

Last Hurrah Honorable Mentions:

“Get Back" - The Beatles (from Let It Be, 1970)

"The Donor" - Judee Sill (from Heart Food, 1973)

“String Reprise/Treaty” - Leonard Cohen (from You Want It Darker, 2016)

Thanks for sticking around. Let me know all the many great album closers I’ve surely missed in the comments.

About six months ago, I wrote a very long piece about the best album opening songs of all time. It got a generally positive response, and people seemed to enjoy it more than my ramblings about politics, Spotify surveillance capitalism, or turning my inability to understand large numbers into everyone else’s problem. As the late great Tennessee Ernie Ford once said, "Know yourself - and know your audience". I don’t know myself, and I’m not entirely sure Tennessee Ernie Ford actually said that (Google’s AI search is known to make some mistakes), but I do know my small, but fiercely devoted? audience. So here is the natural follow-up to “The Art of the Album Opener”, “The Craft of the Album Closer”. Which I’ll do in two parts to make the estimated read time look less daunting. I hope to have Part II up next week.

So, let’s ask: What makes a great album closer?

Even more than the idea of an album opener, the album closer is a vanishing concept, eroded by playlists that shuffle songs into algorithmic soup, or by listeners half-tuning in for “vibes” while folding laundry before switching to a podcast where two former prestige TV actors rewatch their own show. I worry that, as the modern internet drains my ability to focus on a single thing for more than an album's length of time, my reverence for albums has become more of an identity than an actual practice. Still, I stand (mostly) unfazed in the face of the inevitable progress of music consumption under capitalism. I still love albums. And I love the album closer: the artist’s parting gesture—a moment that can leave you breathless, contemplative, or a little confused (in a good way).

Closers carry the weight of resolution. They can tie every thread together with a sense of finality, explode into cathartic release, or fade out with quiet grace. Like album openers, they follow certain patterns or formulas, consciously or not. So without further ado, here are some of the best album closers, broken into a few recurring categories.

Category I: The Epic Sendoff

The Epic Sendoff is in some ways the most obvious way to close an album. These songs are grand farewells, often extending into the high single digit runtime mark and beyond. The best epic sendoffs are sprawling and cinematic, unafraid to take their time or reach for the rafters with theatrical abandon.

5 “The Court of the Crimson King” - King Crimson (from In the Court of the Crimson King, 1969)

"The Court of the Crimson King" doesn't so much close an album as it does an entire era of musical innocence. Released in the month before the 60s came to an end, this lavish title track stands as progressive rock's founding declaration, the moment when psychedelic whimsy crystallized into something far more ambitious and technically audacious.

The track follows four vaguely nightmarish compositions, from the gonzo free-jazz opener “21st Century Schizoid Man” (a song Kanye West would later sample on “Power,” apparently taking the "schizoid" part a bit too literally in his subsequent career trajectory) to the twinkling atmospherics of “Moonchild”. By the time listeners reach "The Court of the Crimson King," they've survived an auditory gauntlet that makes this majestic finale feel both earned and inevitable. The song unfolds in movements rather than verses and choruses, with Michael Giles' tasteful percussion and Greg Lake's vocals providing a steady foundation for Ian McDonald's ornate Mellotron arrangements.

What’s truly great about this track isn’t necessarily found in the technical realm, but in Lake so thoroughly committing to the bit in the lyrics. There’s not a trace of irony in his voice as he intones about “purple pipers” and “yellow jesters,” and the grim fantasy world he conjures is a perfect mesh for the grave, cinematic instrumentation. This alignment of musical gravities makes the song legitimately unsettling in the best possible way.

As the final Mellotron notes fade into oblivion, you can hear rock music crossing a threshold in real time, one that an entire genre of music, progressive rock, that sprung from this album’s soil, would never un-cross. Here, King Crimson declares the hippie playfulness of the 60s dead, humorlessly proclaiming a new era of ambitious, classical music-indebted, and self-consciously artistic rock.

4 “Won’t Get Fooled Again” - The Who (from Who’s Next, 1971)

Like most of the songs on Who's Next, "Won't Get Fooled Again" was initially conceived for Lifehouse, Pete Townshend's ambitious multimedia rock opera set in a dystopian future where rock music has been outlawed—soon to become rock's favorite apocalypse scenario—prompting a group of rock n' roll savages to fight back. I guess this origin story partially explains the "careful what you revolution for" preaching of the lyrics, but honestly I've never much cared or tried to derive any meaning out of this song. That’s because the colossal sound of this epic eight-and-a-half-minute finale speaks louder and more eloquently than any lyric ever could.

The song features a groundbreaking use of synthesizer as rhythmic foundation, creating a hypnotic, driving pulse that serves as the backbone of the track. Throughout, Townshend's power chords alternate between rhythmic pillaring and explosive accents, John Entwistle's bass forgoes simple root notes and hums with complex countermelodies, while Keith Moon's famously chaotic drumming pummels with fills that defy the rules of conventional time-keeping but, miraculously, never fall apart.

But the apex of "Won't Get Fooled Again" arrives late in the song when Roger Daltrey unleashes the greatest "yeahhh!" in rock 'n' roll history—a moment that's as cathartic, transcendent, and explosive as any single moment you'll ever hear on record. The album's sequencing deliberately builds toward this climax, encapsulating the instrumental innovation and compositional ambition that define Who's Next. Though The Who went on to release a number of good albums (and one great rock opera not about a dystopian post-rock n’ roll future) after this, they never again reached the mountaintop of "Won't Get Fooled Again."

3 “Champagne Supernova” - Oasis (from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, 1995)

Speaking of never again reaching a mountaintop, here’s Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova”. Closing out the group’s sophomore album, “Champagne Supernova” stands as perhaps the definitive example of the Gallagher brothers’ remarkable gift for making utter lyrical nonsense sound like the most profound statements you’ve ever heard. Like what the fuck does “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball" actually mean? Noel’s not exactly channeling the ghost of Wordsworth here, but dissecting the lyrics with a literary critic’s eye fundamentally misses the point. They’re not designed for the page; they're designed to be shouted by 125,000 fans with arms linked at Knebworth.

The brilliance of “Champagne Supernova” lies in its unhurried grandeur. If the tracks that precede the song are a showcase for Oasis’ mastery of concise, hook-laden tunecraft, “Champagne Supernova” is proof that the band could stretch out with a more patient kind of confidence, one of certainty tinged with longing and nostalgia. The song builds gradually, crescendoing when The Jam’s Paul Weller shows up to rip a blistering guitar solo. Then, it swoops back down and Liam’s vocals enter again, asking that eternally unanswerable question: “Where were you while we were getting high?”. The younger Gallagher’s penchant for sounding both utterly detached and emotionally raw is never better than it is here. The song doesn’t so much end as it does dissolve into the ether, leaving you with a strange mixture of euphoria and melancholy that serves as the album’s emotional pinnacle. It doesn’t matter that it was all downhill from here for the Mancunian band (at least for their recorded output), they had created a flawless seven-and-a-half minutes of cosmic Britpop that will forever echo through the stars.

2 “I Know the End” - Phoebe Bridgers (from Punisher, 2020)

“I Know the End” detonates Punisher more than it closes it. Starting with quiet resignation, building into a frantic escape, and ending in cathartic obliteration, it redefines what an album closer can accomplish in the indie-folk landscape.

The song has a brilliant three-act structure. Bridgers’ intimate murmurings over gentle guitar begin the first, as she surveys the ruins of memory, of relationships, of hometown detachment. It’s the sound of someone too emotionally fluent for their own good, quietly cataloging all the ways they've disappeared inside themselves. Just when you think you’re firmly settled in this familiar Bridgers terrain, the song shifts gears. The tempo picks up, horns start to creep in, and suddenly we're on some haunted American highway. Her deceptively simple line, “I’ll find a new place to be from” perfectly captures a kind of terrifying freedom, the act of walking away from your identity, your past, your pain, and erasing the emotional blueprint that built you.

In the final act, Bridgers goes full Godspeed You! Black Emperor, conjuring a continually mounting wall of sound—horns, strings, distorted guitars—both triumphant and utterly terrifying. It keeps swelling until it reaches that unfiltered exorcism of Bridgers’ primal scream, a moment so visceral you can’t help but yell along with her. Released amid the isolation of mid-2020, the glorious, horrifying howl became an instant signifier for the collective emotional overload of the pandemic that few other pieces of art could fully express.

After the sonic madness dies down, the song closes with the soft, close-miced sound of Bridgers’ heavy breathing, a perfect punctuation mark. Nothing on the other side looks the same after this track. “I Know the End” leaves you altered, like you’ve crossed some invisible threshold. It’s the kind of song that hums beneath your skin long after the final note, and it’s one hell of a way to end a record.

1 “Purple Rain” - Prince and the Revolution (from Purple Rain, 1984)

“Purple Rain” is the textbook definition of the Epic Sendoff. Sprawling, cinematic, emotionally maximalist, and almost nine minutes long, it sanctifies the album of the same name. It employs the same theatrical sensibility that opens Purple Rain, but where “Let’s Go Crazy” kicks off the album with an iconic faux-eulogy that combusts into a kinetic party anthem that instructs you not to fear the end, “Purple Rain” teaches you how to feel your way through it when it finally arrives.

The song begins its slow march as shimmering, chorus-drenched guitar chords, soft digital synths, and Prince’s wounded voice reaching for something unattainable. In the context of the film, each verse ties into a different strained relationship Prince's character desires to reconcile, but the lyrics are so broad, elliptical, and emotionally open that the song resonates just as deeply even if you’ve never seen this melodramatic artifact of 80s cinema. You don’t need to know what “purple rain” is to feel the mass of it. It functions as love song, atonement song, and spiritual farewell, a metaphysical rendering of what it feels like when something ends. It hurts, but there’s beauty in that hurt.

As the track progresses, it sheds restraint in favor of pure, maximalist feeling. Prince’s essential backing band, The Revolution, builds behind him with stately patience, until he unleashes a blistering, emotionally unclad guitar solo that screams all the words he can’t say. It’s passionate, not necessarily flashy, wrung out of the depths of his soul. And just when it feels like you’ve reached the summit, the band re-enters and carries the song upward into a rapturous four-minute outro, live crowd and all (it was recorded live at the iconic First Avenue in Minneapolis).

The song ends with a hush—Prince’s voice trailing off, the crowd still lingering, the instruments fading into an ethereal cloud. It’s a slow, dignified collapse, like a cathedral falling gently into the waters of Lake Minnetonka. The effect is simultaneously cinematic and deeply personal.

Prince was far from a perfect person, as a still-suppressed documentary—reportedly blocked by his estate—allegedly explores in unflinching detail. But “Purple Rain” the song transcends the man who wrote it. It’s a transmission from a spiritual plane that feels bigger than any single voice or ego. To hear it is to feel something pass through you, something eternal. “Purple Rain” is the gold standard of the Epic Sendoff album closer: a sprawling, grandiose composition that becomes a sonic exorcism of grief and grace, and a testament to how we carry both at once.

Epic Sendoff Honorable Mentions:

“Cowgirl in the Sand” - Neil Young with Crazy Horse (from Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969)

“When the Levee Breaks” - Led Zeppelin (from Led Zeppelin IV, 1971)

“The Battle of Hampton Roads” - Titus Andronicus (from The Monitor, 2010)

CATEGORY II: THE SOFT LANDING

The Soft Landing takes the opposite approach. These album closers are subdued denouements that often sharply contrast with what came before. The best soft landings feel like intimate revelations whispered in your ear, stripped-down moments of clarity that cut through the noise and complexity of the preceding album. These songs are musical exhales, creating space for reflection after the journey.

5 “Pops” - Angel Olsen (from My Woman, 2016)

There are times when an artist’s expanding talents and creative ambition converge at a single point to create something perfect, and for Angel Olsen this intersection was 2016’s My Woman, an album that expanded her sonic horizons to include Orbison-inspired balladry, 60s country-pop, and Crazy Horse guitar freakouts. Yet it's the closing track, "Pops," a haunting piano requiem, that rings in your head long after the record stops spinning (or Spotify inevitably shuffles you to a self-help podcast).

On “Pops,” Olsen's voice is mixed to slice through every emotional frequency the brain can process, as she delivers a devastating ode to a love that refuses to die even after it's over: "I'll be the thing that lives in your dreams when it's gone." It’s heartbreakingly sincere, and gains power from the stark, skeletal musical arrangement—just piano and that voice. The track provides a perfect emotional resolution, closing out an adventurous album with breathtaking intimacy.

4 “After Hours” - The Velvet Underground (from The Velvet Underground, 1969)

The Velvet Underground were many things—abrasive, avant-garde, really fucking cool—but “gentle” was rarely one of them. A notable exception is “After Hours,” the final track on their self-titled third album. That record was already a departure from the first two records’ noisy paeans to drugs and the perils of shipping yourself in a box, but even the more subdued, pop-oriented songs of The Velvet Underground seem boisterous next to its closing track, “After Hours.” A wobbly acoustic tune too pure and innocent for Lou Reed to sing himself, vocal duties are instead passed to drummer Maureen Tucker.

Reed had an underrated knack for pulling from early 20th-century pop traditions; and you can feel the spirit of Tin Pan Alley here. But where Reed’s vocals on this song might have transformed the song into a sleazy hymn to endless nightlife, Tucker’s understated, sing-speak delivery makes it a shy, childlike nursery rhyme about wanting to belong yet feeling permanently just outside the circle. Her unguarded voice makes the song feel like a bittersweet invitation to a private world. It’s an intimacy that’s rarely been replicated in popular music in the half century since. It’s a final moment of warmth for the album; a beautiful dim light left on after everyone else has gone home

3 “I’m in Love with a Girl” - Big Star (from Radio City, 1974)

Big Star is perhaps the most influential commercial failure in rock history. Their three records, each brilliant in its own right, failed to make any kind of dent on the charts, partly due to lineup instability and partly because their luminous ’60s-inspired pop arrived in a decade that had already moved on. But their DNA runs through countless acts who found success in the 80s and 90s including R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, and The Replacements. Radio City, Big Star’s second album, is a beautiful guitar-pop record bubbling with lust, confusion, and emotional volatility, but it ends with something softer.

“I’m in Love with a Girl,” just a minute and forty-five seconds long, strips everything down to a single acoustic guitar and Alex Chilton’s fragile voice. There’s no snark, no irony, just someone singing about falling in love and not quite knowing what to do with it. It’s tender and direct, and unlike many of Chilton’s songs, there’s no underlying angst or tension. When he hits the word “girl” there’s a quiver in his voice. It’s not polished or performative; in fact, his voice goes slightly off-key. But it’s gorgeously raw—like he’s surprised by the feeling as it comes out. In the context of the record’s sharp edges and tangled energy, “I’m in Love with a Girl” feels like a soft landing in the purest sense: a gentle descent into clarity, stripped of everything but one person’s truth.

2 “Hurt” - Nine Inch Nails (from The Downward Spiral, 1994)

Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral is a brutal, genre-shredding descent into self-destruction—an album full of industrial noise, religious iconography, violent sex, and dissociation. It’s about as subtle as a brick through a windshield. But somehow, after all the digital screams and mechanical pounding, it ends with “Hurt”, a song that surveys the wreckage and quietly submerges itself in it. It’s the sound of someone who’s burned everything to the ground and now stands blinking in the ashes.

“Hurt” starts off eerily detached, led by a detuned acoustic guitar and strange, dissonant background noise that feels more like interference than actual music. The sonic decay mirrors Trent Reznor’s vocal delivery—dry, flat, emotionally hollowed-out. But then, the dissonance starts to resolve. The chorus opens up with ghostly harmonies and a simple, aching melody, almost hymn-like in contrast to what came before. It’s not pretty in a conventional sense, but disarming in its intimacy and utterly fragile (no pun intended). The instrumentation builds so gradually that you barely notice it until it suddenly erupts into controlled chaos, only to be cut off by abrupt silence.

The song isn’t a soft landing because it’s quietly comforting. “Hurt” is a collapse, a final flicker of humanity in a record obsessed with dehumanization. There’s no closure here, just a haunted, hollow emptiness.

It’s telling that when Johnny Cash covered “Hurt” in 2002—old, weathered, staring down his own mortality—it became one of the most gut-wrenching performances of his illustrious career, now considered one of his signature songs. And while many may prefer Cash’s stripped-down take, the fact that the song holds such devastating weight in either form is a testament to Reznor’s deeply underrated songwriting. He crafted something so raw, so emotionally exposed, it can belong to anyone who’s ever looked back and wondered if what came before was all just pain in disguise.

1 “Wreck on the Highway” - Bruce Springsteen (from The River, 1980)

The River became the Boss's first album to top the Billboard 200, but in many ways, it marked an ending, closing out the conceptually and sonically linked trilogy that began with Born to Run and continued through Darkness on the Edge of Town. On The River, the romanticism of those earlier albums gives way to blue-collar melancholy and domestic disappointment, arguably creating the first definitive "Heartland Rock" record. The final track, "Wreck on the Highway," moves deeper into the existential reckoning that would later permeate his stark masterpiece, Nebraska.

The first element that strikes you is Danny Federici's haunting organ, suspended in the air, ghostly and restrained, lending the song a funeral-like atmosphere that’s perfectly suited to the spiritual weight of witnessing death and confronting life's fragility. “Wreck on the Highway” lacks a traditional hook or chorus; it's linear, almost static—musically reinforcing the narrative paralysis of the character. He's seen something he can't unsee, and the music sits with that, quietly refusing resolution.

After nineteen tracks that oscillate between rock exuberance and domestic realism, this song stops time altogether and asks: what if this is all there is? It doesn't reach for a grand statement; instead, it lingers in a small, human moment: a man lying awake at night, holding someone he loves, acutely aware of how precarious everything is. “Wreck on the Highway” reframes the entire journey of The River: the party songs now feel like mere escapism, the romantic ones seem heartbreakingly fragile, and the serious ones appear as preludes to something even darker.

That's the soft landing in full effect: not a summation, but a quiet confession. Like a beautiful secret shared after a long night of holding back.

Soft Landing Honorable Mentions:

“Little Martha” - The Allman Brothers Band (from Eat a Peach, 1972)

“Daydream” - The Smashing Pumpkins (from Gish, 1991)

“Motion Picture Soundtrack” - Radiohead (from Kid A, 2000)

It's funny of course. Children's perceptual constraints about finances and numbers are great fodder for cute, relatable anecdotes. "Look at this child's naivety!" The tacit presumption is that we, the adults, understand numbers far better than children. Developmental psychology tells us that children initially perceive numbers logarithmically, seeing the difference between one and two as similar to the difference between one million and two million. Well, of course, this resolves itself with age and education, right? Not really. Despite our adult pretensions to mathematical sophistication, this fundamental confusion about numerical scale remains embedded in our mental processing, even if we've learned to mask it with sophisticated MBA jargon and Excel spreadsheets.

And sure, all that polished financial speak might help us track numbers, but they don't help us truly comprehend them. Let's take my nephew's personal fortune into account: If he were to save every single penny he earned from now until the age of 65, he would need to bring in approximately $41,666 per day to reach a billion dollars. That's almost as much saved every day as the US individual median income for sixty years. But let's take it a step further and consider the net worth of Grimes’ ex-husband, Elon Musk. To get to Musk's current (as of March 2025) $340 billion net worth (down from over $400 billion at the end of last year), an American earning the median individual income would need to work for over 8 million years—a timespan stretching back to before our earliest primate ancestors had discovered walking. But even these comparisons are just slightly more sophisticated versions of my nephew's Disney-branded money box mathematics. Whether we're still learning to read or we're flexing Ivy League ECON PhDs, we're all just trying to count to numbers we’ll never grasp.

This isn't just some amusing quirk of humanity or neat fodder Malcolm Gladwell’s next pop psychology best-seller. It’s a built-in shield for the ultra wealthy, who are massive beneficiaries of our evolutionary computational limits which are woefully unable to translate abstract numbers into holistic understanding. It’s a shield that deflects serious scrutiny of how they accumulated their wealth, how they maintain it, and why we continue to allow it.

But why are we so bad at grasping large numbers? Enter "number numbness”, our brain's tendency to become increasingly desensitized as numbers grow larger. The science is pretty blunt: our brains process small and large numbers through fundamentally different circuits. We can instantly recognize four objects without counting—whether it's the Beatles crossing Abbey Road or dead president heads carved into stolen land—but beyond that threshold, our neural precision begins to fail. The difference between two and three deaths feels substantial and personal; the difference between 100,000 and 100,001 dissolves into statistical noise. But this perceptual limitation isn't just about our ability to process large numbers—it fundamentally shapes how we experience and react to inequality itself.

The insidiousness of this limitation reveals itself when we consider how differently we process inequality we can see versus inequality we only know as statistics. We might feel genuine outrage seeing an unhoused encampment in the shadow of luxury apartments, or discovering our coworker makes double our salary for the same job. But that visceral reaction fades when we try to consider the fact that Elon Musk's wealth could fund every emergency shelter in America for generations and double every Tesla assembly line worker's salary for the next half century. The first examples trigger immediate, emotional responses—they exist within our brain's processing capacity for unfairness. The second examples, despite representing wealth concentration so grotesque to be its own form of violence, become abstract rather than moral. Our sense of economic justice basically has a cognitive horizon line, and beyond it, no matter how extreme the disparity becomes, our capacity for moral outrage flatlines like a major corporation's commitment to DEI following Trump's reelection.

This numerical blindness thoroughly distorts our view of the entire economic landscape. A 2014 Harvard Business School and Stanford study, aptly titled "Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Really Is" asked respondents to estimate the pay difference between CEOs and average workers. Most guessed it was around 30-to-1. The reality then was 350-to-1, reaching 399-to-1 in 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Perhaps even more telling, when asked what they think the ideal ratio should be, most people suggest something around 7-to-1. The lowest recorded ratio in modern U.S. history was in the mid-1960s at around 20-to-1, a number that would make modern CEOs spit out their champagne during a quarterly earnings call.

If our response to pay inequality is confused, our relationship with wealth distribution is a masterclass in cognitive dissonance. In their landmark 2011 study "Building a Better America," researchers Michael Norton and Dan Ariely presented Americans with three pie charts showing different ways wealth could be divided across society. When asked to choose their ideal model, 92% of respondents—including 90.6% of Republicans and 93.5% of Democrats—selected the most equitable distribution, matching Sweden's model rather than America's. Even more striking, when shown the actual distribution of wealth in America without identifying it as such, 90% rejected it as too unequal. The disconnect here is clear and absurd: Americans broadly agree about wealth inequality when they're actually looking at raw numbers, but that solidarity crumbles the moment someone suggests doing literally anything about it.

The absurdity of modern wealth concentration demands cosmic metaphors: if moderate wealth is the distance to your local Whole Foods, billionaire wealth—like that of the guy who owns Whole Foods—is the distance to Alpha Centauri (our closest stellar neighbor, about 4.2 light years away). This might explain why the most successful attempts to explain the magnitude of modern wealth concentration come not from economists or policy papers (or all my tortured metaphors about space and grocery stores), but from viral TikToks showing Jeff Bezos's wealth in grains of rice, where each grain represents $100,000. These visual aids succeed where the latter fail precisely because they transform abstract numbers into physical reality.

At this point you may be thinking: congrats on coming to the realization that billions of dollars are hard to comprehend, I'm looking forward to your follow up piece "Wow! Gravity Make Things Fall". Fair enough. But I really think there's more to this. Is our inability to translate financial figures into lived experience also a psychological defense mechanism? Our minds seem to deliberately blur the true scale of inequality, and maybe that's because fully comprehending it would be too overwhelming, too heartbreaking, too enraging. It's like how our eyes automatically look away from the sun, instead of looking directly at it (except for that one guy). Our minds instinctually shy away from grasping the sheer magnitude of wealth disparity, because it would demand immediate, and very likely uncomfortable, action. That's probably why I'm writing about it with abstract statistics and examples from TikTok, rather than doing anything directly related to confronting the violence of economic inequality.

I find at the crux of this are questions about the value of human life. When Jeff Bezos makes almost $8 million in the same hour that a worker earning the federal minimum wage makes $7.25—a difference of over a million to one—what are we really saying? The difference isn't merely numerical—it represents a fundamental shift in the nature of money itself, from resource to abstraction. Is one person's hour worth a million times more than another person's? When we allow this, we, as a society, are making a claim about human worth, and that claim is that yes, some humans are worth more by amounts that exceed our evolutionary capacity to comprehend. Anyone who tries to rationalize this social framework engages in intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice of the highest order.

We don’t need philosophy to understand how America values human life—just read our tax code, where hedge fund billionaires keep their carried interest loophole while children lose their tax credit. Both Senator Ron Wyden's Billionaires' Income Tax and Former President Biden's Billionaires' Minimum Income Tax proposals from 2023 stalled in Congress—a predictable outcome in a political system where billionaire influence is entrenched in the leadership of both parties. This failure is particularly striking given that more than 70% of likely voters, including majorities across party lines, believe American billionaires should pay more in taxes. At this level, wealth stops being about purchasing power and becomes about world-shaping power.

Maybe the point isn't to try to force our stone-age brains to comprehend these incomprehensible numbers at all. We don't need to understand quantum physics to recognize that nuclear weapons are an existential threat to humanity, so maybe we don't need to fully grasp the scale of billions to understand that no one person should control resources equivalent to generations of human labor. The limits of our economic imagination aren't a weakness—they're a warning. Any system that exceeds our cognitive architecture's capacity to comprehend it is, fundamentally, beyond our ability to regulate or control. Our task isn't to understand these numbers—it's to dismantle the systems that generate them.

I don't wish to suggest that hard work shouldn't be rewarded, or that no one should be able to accumulate wealth through innovation and effort. But when we have a system where wealth grows exponentially through untaxed inheritance and strategic tax avoidance, it deprives public services of essential resources needed to meet basic human needs. If the top 1% of Americans simply paid what they already owe—not higher taxes, just their current legal obligation—we could raise an additional $175 billion annually, enough to lift every American out of poverty. The tragedy isn't just that we've allowed wealth to accumulate at scales beyond our comprehension—it's that the cost of this hoarding is painfully comprehensible.

And yet we continue to both normalize extreme wealth across all media, starting practically from birth. On my nephew’s iPad, the YouTube Kids' algorithm feeds him an endless stream of wealth glorification disguised as children’s entertainment. The Royalty Family—just one of countless family channels in this ecosystem of kids' content—rack up hundreds of millions of views with videos of their kids having extravagant birthday parties, parading around their mega-mansion, even building six-figure dog houses. Thanks to videos like these, he can recite his future car collection—a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, and a Bugatti—with the same enthusiasm he brings to playing with toy bulldozers in the dirt.

My nephew is a sweet, empathetic boy, and I hope he grows up to live comfortably and securely. But I hope he never becomes a billionaire—not because I don't want him to succeed, but because I hope by the time he's grown, we’ll have built a world where we've finally recognized that no one should control wealth that exceeds our capacity to comprehend its human cost.

There's something darkly poetic about watching The Brutalist in 2025, as AI companies scramble to convince us that creativity can be reduced to prompt engineering and Silicon Valley bros try to replace artists with algorithms. This three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian architect battling his wealthy patron's growing resentment feels less like period drama and more like a warning shot across the bow of our current techno-cultural moment.

Last week, I finally got the chance to see Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist when it arrived in my city. I went in skeptical of the latest darling of film-bro veneration, but I was thoroughly awed by the experience of watching it. Beyond being a monumental technical achievement, shot on VistaVision cameras and released in gorgeous 70mm, The Brutalist is also just a really entertaining movie that never drags over its prodigious runtime. More importantly, it offers a prescient meditation on the eternal pissing match between authentic artistic expression and wealth-driven control.

While the film builds a metaphorical landscape that is about as subtle as a brutalist concrete facade, it is quite successful in that it allows the viewer to ascribe meaning to a multitude of topics found within: immigration, anti-Semitism, Zionism, architecture, class, and the vacuity of the American Dream itself. But what I've found myself obsessing over is the relationship between art and commerce that plays out between Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—a dynamic that feels particularly relevant to today's billionaire overlords and their attempts to buy artistic legitimacy in increasingly pathetic ways.

This archetypal conflict—the perennial struggle of wealth attempting to commandeer creative legitimacy—represents a time-honored social pathology. The most affluent individuals invariably discover that artistic authenticity cannot be purchased, no matter how obscene their financial arsenal. Witness Mark Zuckerberg's beyond-cringe collaboration with T-Pain on an acoustic cover of the Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz classic, “Get Low” (Zuckerberg’s auto-tuned delivery of the line, “can I play with your panty line” alone could halt a thousand orgies) or Knicks owner James Dolan's decades-long quest for boomer blues-rock legitimacy with his vanity project, JD & The Straight Shot—a band that Mr. Dolan himself couldn't pay me to see. (Actually, that's a lie. Call me, James, let's talk numbers or MSG floor seats.)

The underlying psychology here is pathetic, fascinating, and a little tragic. These guys will always be left out of the cool creatives club, and somewhere in their coddled psyches, they know it. Their resultant resentment becomes a weaponized instrument, and they attempt to destroy the artists they envy through constantly evolving methods of subjugation.

In The Brutalist, Harrison's resentment toward László follows this playbook with, dare I say, algorithmic precision. We first meet Harrison as he's forcibly ejecting László and his construction crew from his palatial country estate, having discovered them there after his son Harry Jr. (Joe Alwyn, doing his best "privileged failson") secretly hired them to remodel daddy's library. But when the unauthorized redesign is lauded in Look Magazine as proof of Harrison's cultural bona fides, he tracks down László and ingratiates him into his high-society circle to cement that prestige. Soon, László is living (presumably) rent free inside the Van Buren's guest house and hard at work on a grand commission—a massive community center that will serve as a tribute to Harrison's recently deceased mother.

As the project progresses, Harrison's desire to bask in László's clout increasingly clashes with his indignation at being forced to live in the architect's shadow. Playing Harrison, Pearce's nuanced portrayal telegraphs the character's resentment in subtle physical articulation, the envy practically seeping from his pores like expensive cologne. It finally erupts in words when he meets László's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), newly arrived from Europe:

"As persons of unique privilege, I have always thought that it is our duty to nurture the defining talents of our epoch. I possess no such talent whatsoever! Truth be told, I am terribly emulous of individuals like him."

By the film's final act, Harrison's resentment has metastasized into physical abuse that has all but destroyed László.

Like Harrison Van Buren, today's tech leaders represent those who, haven chosen financial power over creative fulfillment, seek to destroy what they cannot possess. The rush of AI companies stealing the labor of thousands of artists—musicians, visual artists, writers—to create tools that distill the joy of creation into a few clicks represents the latest manifestation of this destructive impulse.

Take Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, a generative AI music creator, who recently displayed some world-class projection on a podcast when he claimed, "It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." My brother in Christ, that's literally the point. Here Shulman displays such a profound misunderstanding of the artistic process that you have to wonder if it stems from some deep psychological wound—like the lingering trauma of never mastering “Wonderwall” well enough on acoustic guitar to impress any of the girls in his freshman dorm. But whatever personal frustrations might fuel this mindset, the end result is that he and his ilk are making it infinitely harder for actual creatives to make a living.

This destructive tendency mirrors Harrison Van Buren's literal violence. Just as Harrison physically takes without asking in the film's most harrowing scene, tech companies scrape data and train AI to churn out "art" without artists' consent. It represents a calculated strategy of cultural expropriation, wherein technological platforms systematically deconstruct and reconstruct artistic production without meaningful consent or compensation.

The parallel may seem a bit hyperbolic—and I'm not necessarily claiming otherwise—but the destructive impulses of wealthy men who possess everything material yet remain unfulfilled should be evident to anyone who's spent ten seconds on Elon Musk's X account. Now with a similarly bitter and petty grifter back in the White House, tech barons like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Jeff Bezos find themselves more empowered than ever to marginalize artistic communities. But ultimately, that will never be enough for them. Like Harrison Van Buren, the hunger derived from their emotional voids is insatiable. These guys could be using AI to solve climate change or cure diseases, but instead they’re determined to dilute art into an algorithmic transaction, poison the human experience, and infect us with their own deep dissatisfaction and unquenchable materialistic desire.

In the interim since I began writing this, it came out that The Brutalist used AI in post-production to smooth out the Hungarian accents of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that the 18-month-long post-production process included the usage of Ukrainian artificial intelligence-driven speech synthesis software Respeecher. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó said. "We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There's nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot."

While I don't think this revelation undercuts the film's exploration of the tension between art and commerce, the use of generative AI on a project ostensibly lauded as a triumph of old-school filmmaking certainly raises questions. The precedent has been set now to use AI in the making of a prestige film. However, for a director like Corbet trying to make maximalist art on a minimal budget, the decision is understandable, and I do worry that focusing too much on this fact erroneously overestimates the current capabilities of AI—a narrative simultaneously inflated by profit-thirsty investors and doom-scrolling tech critiques.

If we are to take Jancsó's words at face value, the use of AI in The Brutalist enhanced the film's artistic integrity. But just as László battles to maintain his artistic integrity under Harrison's increasingly predatory patronage, we’re going to have to fight like hell in the coming years as AI companies and tech barons seek to erode creative agency, commodify, and ultimately nullify the creative process.

In both cases, the fundamental truth remains the same: genuine artistic expression cannot be bought, controlled, or artificially replicated. Our collective resistance lies in maintaining a critical awareness—rejecting the seductive illusion that artistic competency can be instantaneously generated through algorithmic intervention. As long as we remember this, no matter how many billions the tech barons throw at the problem, true artistic legitimacy will remain gloriously, frustratingly out of their reach.

I’ve long made my loathing of Spotify known to friends, acquaintances—basically anyone who'll endure my rants. Yet, there’s one day each year that tempts me to convert to the platform as my primary form of listening: Spotify Wrapped Day. For the past several years, I’ve relished watching—and, naturally, judging—my friends’ gamified listening habits, all dressed up in Spotify’s undeniably slick visual aesthetic. As they flaunt their Kendrick obsession and proudly disclose the ungodly amount of time they spent listening to boygenius over the past year, I find myself jealous that I can’t join in. I would love to tell everyone that I’m one of the most loyal Yo La Tengo fans in the world, but I just don’t have the Spotify receipts to back it up.

The day always feels like a missed opportunity for me to flex one of the aspects of my personality that I hold most dear: my taste in music—broad, nerdy, and populist all at once, ranging from Bjork to Blink-182 to William Basinski (though I doubt any of the hour-long tracks on The Disintegration Loops would ever top my “most-streamed tracks” list). More significantly, it’s a day when I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on connecting with like-minded music lovers and participating in what is, in many ways, a joyful cultural phenomenon celebrating music.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Spotify Wrapped is not really a celebration of music. It’s a shameless glorification of surveillance capitalism, a glossy repackaging of your personalized metadata into free advertising for a streaming behemoth that hardly needs it. From a psychological level, the success of the campaign lies in how deftly it satisfies both the individual ego and the communal instinct. By flaunting your unique taste as exemplified by your super hip top five artists or bragging about being in the top percentage of one of those artists’ listeners, you’re not just sharing—you’re also attaching yourself to the artist’s cachet, basking in the glow of perceived superiority. Wrapped centers music as data, transforming listening into a competitive sport. This gamification keeps you glued to the app, changing your listening habits to maintain those coveted metrics, all to pad their profits.

Before I get too far into this spiel, let me clarify: this isn’t an “old man yells at cloud” rant against modernity. That’s not my intention at least. My aim here is to try and reconcile the streaming giant’s myriad sins with the joy Wrapped brings to so many people. Hate it or love it, Spotify’s on top, a platform deeply embedded in our cultural fabric, and for many, its appeal is unshakable. So, let’s grapple with that reality while also acknowledging the darker truths.

So, more on those darker truths. I’ll try to keep this brief. Spotify has institutionalized the devaluation of music that began with Napster at the turn of the millennium. Though it relies on constant capital injections to keep the lights on at company headquarters, it has successfully transformed how we consume music, forcing competitors to adopt its exploitative blueprint. That exploitative blueprint primarily extracts from the artists. While Spotify grants us access to more music than we could ever listen to in a dozen lifetimes for a pittance, there’s a big catch. Artists earn mere fractions of a penny per stream, making it nearly impossible for anyone outside Taylor Swift’s tax bracket to make a living. Approximately 70% of musicians earn next to nothing, 30% scrape by on minimum wage, and only a sliver see real money. There’s more to critique about the mechanics of the company’s payout system, but I can already feel Spotify stans scrolling away, so let’s move on.

Beneath Spotify’s fun-loving image, perpetuated most effectively through Wrapped, is another tech juggernaut sucking the blood of labor and accelerating planetary decline. CEO Daniel Ek, worth $7 billion after cashing out $283 million in shares, is richer than any musician in history. When he’s not making tone-deaf remarks about how struggling artists should work harder, he’s investing in the global military-industrial complex, through emerging AI technology. If that reads as tangential, consider the military-tech podcasts Spotify hosts, and its habit of censoring content critical of the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. These connections are, at best, unsettling.

What about the platform itself? In terms of functionality and overall satisfaction it leaves a lot to be desired. Longtime users have criticized Spotify’s decline in navigability, its increasingly TikTok-ified interface, and its recent price hikes. While Spotify claims to broaden users’ horizons, the platform’s underlying profit motive means that its algorithms often do the opposite, nudging listeners toward familiar, more immediately enjoyable content instead of new discoveries. Had Spotify existed when I was ten, I might still be trapped in an airless capsule, suffocating on nu-metal and post-grunge butt rock.

Okay, okay, okay, we get it. Spotify is evil, but is it really that evil? Most apps harvest our data, but few give back anything as dopaminergic as Wrapped in return. Exploitation in the music industry is hardly new, and artists have long been shortchanged in terms of royalties. It’s not like the other streaming services pay artists much better. Daniel Ek is far from the only CEO of a major tech company with morally questionable investments. The “enshittification” of Spotify is arguably less pronounced than similar declines in quality from platforms such as Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber. Musical tastes are arguably less static now than ever before.

These points are valid, and those of us who bristle at the devaluation of the album and the “content-ification” of music need to stop pining for an illusory past where every instance of music consumption was a rigorous, intellectual exercise that involved listening to a full album on an analog medium with a hi fidelity stereo. It wasn’t. There is no “right” way to engage with music. Our appreciation of it operates in vastly different ways. As someone who’s released music, I’d love for listeners to experience albums I’ve worked on in their entirety, but once a record’s out there, how people consume it is out of my control. With such a colossal mass of recorded music competing for attention, I’m grateful that anyone’s listening at all.

With all this in mind, let’s turn back to Spotify Wrapped. In an era where joy and connection can be precarious resources, I am all for people sharing their Wrapped stats. Still, I hope Spotify users take a moment to reflect on what the mechanisms behind this campaign are. Are the metrics that Spotify has dictated are central to satisfaction actually synonymous with enjoying music? Is a song’s play count indicative of its value? If so, are we limiting the breadth of sounds, voices, and emotional responses that we engage with because of that value judgement? Why do we have access to this information about our listening habits, and more importantly, why does Spotify, and what are the consequences? How does celebrating that you’re in the top 0.05% of a cool artist’s fans interact with traditional gatekeep-y hierarchies of music fandom?

Most importantly, we should all question whether artist exploitation is inevitable for digital music to remain widely accessible. Use your power as Spotify customers—limited though it may be—to demand fairer compensation for creators. In fact, you can do that right here and signal your support for the Living Wage for Musicians Act. I encourage you to sign and share it alongside your Spotify Wrapped stats this year. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but not all unethical consumption is equally unethical. Spotify can do better, and we all can, too.

When I was eight, I became fascinated with American electoral politics and its history. I even memorized all the presidents in order—the years of their terms, even their birth and death dates (you guessed it, I didn’t have many friends). That same year, my dad took me with him to vote in Rhode Island's midterm elections. He told me he was voting for Myrth York, the Democratic challenger to the incumbent Republican governor, Lincoln Almond, but expressed doubts about whether she could actually win. He was right. Myrth York lost that race, then lost again to Republican Don Carcieri four years later. After that election, I found out that York had also lost her bid for governor in 1994. I asked my dad if he thought the reason she had lost three consecutive elections in a heavily democratic state was because she was a woman. He replied with something like, “It certainly didn’t help”. 

***

The story of why Donald Trump, a sociopathic sexual predator who ordered a hit on Congress after he lost the 2020 presidential election, won a second term last week will continue to be debated for months and years to come. We will hear the legacy media class say it was because of “woke”, that the progressive left turned off “real” Americans and branded Kamala Harris in its image in a way that no amount of conservative policy posturing or Cheney endorsements could erase. Others will continue to say that the Democratic Party apparatus is far too defensive of an establishment that more Americans than ever are contemptuous of (an argument I’m generally sympathetic to). I’m not here to offer any grand theory as to why the country elected a man with the emotional intelligence of a four-year-old and a strange Hannibal Lecter fascination. Pinpointing it on any single factor is reductionist and counterproductive. What I want to discuss is men—more specifically, why so many men seem to have an innate discomfort with women in power, and why young men in particular were so drawn to Donald Trump’s exaggerated performance of manhood.

Kamala Harris’ three-and-a-half month sprint of a campaign had many issues beyond her gender, but to deny that gender played a significant factor in her loss overlooks the monumental difficulties women face in trying to earn the votes of men in this country. There are a multitude of reasons why Trump is 2-0 against Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, and 0-1 against Joe Biden, but the record is telling, nonetheless.

As men, we’ve been conditioned from an age before we can successfully navigate a toilet to see girls and women as occupying a lower status. From school age onward, being called girl-y is the worst insult imaginable. Boys are dissuaded—whether directly or indirectly—from any interests, activities, or expressions deemed too feminine. In her indispensable investigation into masculinity, For the Love of Men, my fellow McGill alum Liz Plank explains this phenomenon as such, “The smallest transgression of traditional masculinity leads to huge, enormous acts of rejection from other men. Often from the men they care the most about.” Is it any surprise, then, that men, whose lives have been governed by spurning all things feminine, struggle to accept a woman in the most powerful elected office on the planet?

But this is only one part of the gender equation that played out this election cycle. Donald Trump has always presented a cartoonish version of masculinity, but he took it to new extremes during the 2024 campaign. As repellent and absurd as it was to some, it was very effective at drawing in young men—typically the least likely demographic to vote—in numbers unseen for a Republican presidential candidate in decades. Trump’s show of manhood aligns with hegemonic masculinity, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be 'mentally, physically, and emotionally tough', and reject anything considered feminine or gay. More than anything, hegemonic masculinity is a performance aimed at securing the approval of other men. It foregrounds performative bravado, renounces anything resembling vulnerability, and equates cruelty and dominance with strength.

It's hardly surprising that a belief in hegemonic masculinity was a leading indicator of Trump support in 2016 and 2020, above party affiliation, race, or education level. Identifying that a growing number of Gen Z men are sympathetic to this view of masculinity, the Trump team made a concerted effort to reach them on the main online subcultures that speak to—and profit from—their anxieties. Without a similarly robust and well-financed alternative espousing a more positive form of masculinity, it should be no surprise that young male support shifted in Trump’s direction, and that with a bit of mobilization, these men actually turned out to the polls.

The sad truth underlying all of this is that Gen Z men and boys are truly in danger of becoming a lost generation. They’re lagging behind women in college enrollment, about 20% of men under 25 are unemployed, and nearly a third have engaged in no sexual activity in the past year. In desperate need of validation, many are lured into the “manosphere”, a loosely connected network of websites, podcasts, and online forums that promote misogyny. Here, they’re told their struggles aren’t due to income inequality, a weakening global economy, or personal failings, but to a society that has turned its back on masculine virtues and become too “soft”. The manosphere pushes them to embrace hegemonic masculine ideals as a way to regain control of their lives. But the manosphere also thrives on the constant financial exploitation of these men, particularly in the “hustle bro” influencer community which combines misogynistic relationship advice with shady get-rich-quick schemes. When embracing these masculine ideals inevitably results in poor emotional outcomes—from constant pressure to perform, perpetual validation-seeking, and rejection from women who don’t want to be treated like shit—they remain an angst-ridden, eternally dissatisfied audience from which to profit off.

Though they may find rhetorical validation from the highest office in Donald Trump’s election, many men will likely face further hardships building a better life in the coming hyper-kleptocracy of the Trump Administration 2.0. Calls for the left to connect with young men as effectively as the manosphere are everywhere right now, but it’s hard to identify a single figure (Hasan Piker notwithstanding) let alone a movement, that can successfully rival the financial backing and emotional appeals to deep-rooted misogyny of the manosphere in the near term. Look no further than the slogan “Your body, my choice,” which took off on social media the night of the election for an example of how deeply rooted that misogyny—and the associated threats of violence—truly are.

Still, the left must try to reach men, particularly young men. Whatever form this outreach takes, it must include a reckoning of how we see women from our deepest, most ingrained views of gender norms. This deep-seated discomfort with women is not exclusive to Gen Z men or even men who voted for Trump. I’ve seen it in progressive friends who will mansplain, overcorrect women, or ignore them altogether in conversations. I’ve heard about it from female friends who have given constructive criticism and been chastised by male coworkers who preach inclusivity. And, yes, I’ve recognized it in myself. Until we as men have a serious reckoning with all our latent sexist assumptions, implicit biases, and the harm of performing hegemonic masculinity, women will continue to face discrimination in all aspects of professional life, much less the nation’s highest office.

***

On January 20, 2025, I hope to wake up in a world where the right’s apocalyptic imaginations of a leftist, female president have miraculously manifested. To be clear this leftist female president is not Kamala Harris. Maybe it’s some hybrid of AOC, Angela Davis, and Angel Olsen. She’ll speak of a future where gender equality, shared prosperity, and maybe even the end of in-building coin-operated laundry (sorry, more of a personal crusade) are within reach. She’ll tell men that we don’t have to constantly prove our toughness—that we can be in touch with our feelings and drive a full-sized pickup (as long as it’s an EV). That we can respect, value, even vote for women and still be seen as cool, strong, confident, college football-loving guys by our bros. At some point, she’ll thank the women of American electoral politics who blazed the trail for her, and somewhere, Myrth York will be watching, thinking that taking three Ls in a row was somehow, in the end, worth it.

What makes a great album opener? It’s a question that becomes increasingly irrelevant with each passing year, as the music world sinks deeper into algorithm-dominated streaming playlists, and listeners settle into more passive habits. Yet for a dedicated minority of music fans, the album remains the primary medium to experience and present a collection of songs. It’s a cohesive statement, placing a well-sequenced order of tracks on the same artistic plane as a great novel or film. For these enthusiasts (myself included), the album represents the highest aspirations of music as an art form, and every great album needs a great opener.

While album openers aren’t always the best song on a record, they hold an outsized importance. They introduce the artist’s vision and invite listeners to stick around for the journey ahead. A weak opener can give the listener an easy opportunity to abandon ship, and perhaps miss out on an otherwise excellent batch of tunes. 

Though all album openers share a common goal, they often choose different approaches to achieve them. Here, I’ve highlighted a few recurring categories that some of my favorite album openers fall into, and I’ll be ranking the top five tracks in each of these categories.

Category I: The Mission Statement

The Mission Statement opener serves as a condensed preview of an album’s themes, style, and sonic identity. These types of openers are often found on debut albums, and often set the tone for not just the record itself, but the artist’s entire career.

5 “Tellin’ Lies” – The Menzingers (from After the Party, 2017)

Music across genres often glamorizes the ecstasy of adolescence, but somewhat less explored, and decidedly less sexy, are the stories of getting older and teetering on the edge of giving up your dreams for a more stable life. Few artists have explored these themes with as much precision—or as many catchy hooks—as The Menzingers on their 2017 album After the Party. Opening track, “Tellin’ Lies” encapsulates the album’s central theme with gorgeous simplicity in the line, “Where we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” which launches the song’s anthemic chorus. 

Over huge guitars and self-referential lyrics, “Tellin’ Lies” beautifully describes both the crippling anxiety of aging, and the dogged determination to keep fighting for the things you love. The bridge pulls the energy back down to earth, offering blissfully, nostalgic renderings of your twenties juxtaposed with the humbling lessons that don’t often hit until your thirties. As the song closes, co-frontman Greg Barnett repeats “Is it wrong to say that things can change?”​​—a question After the Party spends the rest of its duration trying to answer.

4 “The Future” – Leonard Cohen (from The Future, 1992)

For Leonard Cohen, songwriting was often a tortuous process. A well-known story recounts Bob Dylan asking the Canadian legend how long it took to write “Hallelujah”. Cohen lied and said two years—it actually took five. A similarly arduous process went into crafting the title track for his ninth studio album, The Future. But the result of that labor is a masterful, grim, and sardonic song that sets the tone for Cohen’s album-long odyssey to find meaning in the turbulence of the post-Cold War era.

From the punchy, lounge organ groove that ignites the song, to Cohen’s guttural baritone singing about crack and anal sex, “The Future” sounds light years removed from the pensive, acoustic folk of his early albums. Yet the composite of sonic elements creates a fitting canvas for the singer’s eerily prophetic lyrics. Drum machines, smooth jazz bass lines, gospel harmonies enveloping Cohen’s gravelly vocals, and a minor-key tonality come together to evoke the chaotic, tasteless world he envisions. There are few lyrics as chilling and definitive of an album’s tone than Cohen’s stark declaration: “I’ve seen the future, brother—it is murder.”

Amid all the allusions to end times, the horrors of the twentieth century, the erosion of privacy and objective truth, Cohen still finds a glimmer of hope in love, which he hails as the “only engine of survival”. Whether that love is romantic, sexual, or spiritual in nature might be irrelevant to Cohen, who, through his body of work, suggests their synonymy. This infusion of hope gives the song a flicker of optimism, previewing the brighter tones that appear on later tracks, especially the beautiful “Anthem.” A work of extraordinary musicality and lyrical depth, “The Future” serves as a bold manifesto for one of the finest albums of Cohen’s career.

3 “All I Really Want” – Alanis Morissette (from Jagged Little Pill, 1995)

While “You Oughta Know,” the second track on Jagged Little Pill, is often seen as the album’s defining statement, “All I Really Want,” which precedes it, better captures the core themes of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 breakthrough. The song paints her world in more nuanced, vibrant hues than the reductive “Angry Young Woman” label imposed by male rock critics of the ’90s would suggest. “All I Really Want” establishes Alanis as a seeker, a sophisticated thinker, and a sharp deconstructor of relationships. Musically, the song’s patient tempo, repetitive chord structure, and swirling rush of harmonica and wah wah-ed guitar feel like Alanis gently taking you by the hand and guiding you into the raw, wondrous world of Jagged Little Pill.

2 “Bring da Ruckus” – Wu-Tang Clan (from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), 1993)

Great opening tracks on hip-hop albums are often pushed to the second slot to make room for intro skits that often serve little purpose beyond padding the runtime. One of the most notable exceptions is “Bring da Ruckus” from Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album—a track that stands as the best mission statement in rap history.

After a brief sample of dialogue from the 1983 Hong Kong martial arts film, Shaolin and Wu Tang, the Clan dives straight in, with the group’s mastermind, RZA, shouting “bring the motherfuckin’ ruckus” at full blast. It’s the perfect battle cry for a group that arrived fully formed, ready to unleash their unique blend of grimy beats, eerie soul samples, kung fu mysticism, superhero bravado, and raw chronicles of street life.

The rest of “Bring da Ruckus” is a furious transmission of grit and elegance, with the group’s cadre of MCs laying down a blueprint not only for the rest of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) but for the entirety of their career as a collective. While every Wu-Tang song is worth hearing, if you only listened to “Bring da Ruckus,” you’d still grasp exactly what makes this group such a groundbreaking force in hip-hop—and why they remain so beloved by their legions of fans.

1 “Rock n’ Roll Star” – Oasis (from Definitely Maybe, 1994)

Ah, Oasis. Rarely has a band sounded so brash, confident, and desperate right from the outset. The first song on Oasis’ classic debut album, Definitely Maybe, “Rock n’ Roll Star,” lays out the blueprint for all that would follow in their world-conquering years: simple, catchy verses? Check. A shout-along chorus? Check. A swaggering encapsulation of the previous thirty years of British Rock? Check.

But what truly makes “Rock n’ Roll Star” stand out is the undercurrent of desperation beneath all the dick-swinging ambition. The opening lyrics, “I live my life in the city, where there’s no easy way out, the day’s moving just too fast for me,” underscore the mundane realities of working-class life after a decade of Thatcherian attacks on England’s welfare state. It’s a reality that the lads of Oasis knew all too well, and the song’s driving force is the sheer will to escape that existence by any means necessary—a quality that makes it so deeply moving.

The theme of music as an escape from hopelessness was hardly new in 1994, but in the thirty years since, you’d be hard-pressed to hear the will to conquer that despair expressed with the same beautiful, brazen cocksureness. It’s quite a statement of purpose for the album and the band, whose dreams of stardom would soon become real.

Category II: The Barnburner

The Barnburner is a dramatic, high-energy showstopper. Often released as the album’s lead single, the barnburner kicks off a great album with a blistering, attention-grabbing blast. The best barnburners are soaring and anthemic, though they may not always reflect the structure, lyrical themes, or instrumentation of the tracks that follow.

5 “Only Shallow” – My Bloody Valentine (from Loveless, 1991)

All the overindulgent rock critic platitudes in the world can’t diminish the sheer exhilaration of listening to My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 masterpiece, Loveless. It’s an otherworldly marvel, existing far outside the conventions of 20th-century Western popular music, infiltrating deeper levels of consciousness beyond mere sound. The opener, “Only Shallow,” launches the album with a quick snare count before Kevin Shields’ squalling riff—achieved by routing his guitar into two amps facing each other, their tremolos shaking at different rates—propels the song into a hypnotic hyperspace. Bilinda Butcher’s narcotized vocals drift weightlessly through the sea of instruments and effects in the verses, only for Shields’ ferocious riff to return and pulverize everything in its path.

Describing a song like this feels inherently insufficient, as words can’t fully capture its beautiful, ineffable nature. So instead, here’s the best advice I can give: go listen to it, right now. It’s probably the best thing I could ever tell you.

4 “Cherub Rock” – The Smashing Pumpkins (from Siamese Dream, 1993)

On “Cherub Rock”, The Smashing Pumpkins burst into their stellar sophomore album, Siamese Dream, with a dramatic spectacle of dizzying hard rock. Despite the well-known fact that almost every instrument (aside from the drums) was recorded by Billy Corgan alone, the track’s thick, immersive wall of sound could convince you otherwise. 

Opening with a drum riff allegedly lifted from a Rush song, “Cherub Rock” swiftly crescendos into an epic symphony of discontent, as Corgan whines about his outsider status among the likes of “cooler” bands. His lyrics resonate less in their specifics and more in the universal angst he channels—a superpower of his that connected The Pumpkins to millions of ’90s teens, despite his generally off-putting personality and the band’s “uncool” leanings (prog rock flourishes, melodramatic guitar solos),

Speaking of melodramatic guitar solos, the one that Corgan unleashes in “Cherub Rock” is a blistering, beautiful mess of piercing high notes emerging out from a blanket of gooey fuzz and heavily processed effects. It’s a swashbuckling twenty-second treatise that cements the song’s barnburner status. While Siamese Dream contains songs that explore a range of tempos and tones, “Cherub Rock” serves as the ideal gateway to them all.

3 “One More Time” – Daft Punk (from Discovery, 2001)

Although initially met with a somewhat lukewarm response from a handful of critics when it was released at the turn of the millennium, “One More Time” is now rightly celebrated as an all-time classic and one of music’s greatest party anthems. It’s a song that continues to draw people of all ages and walks of life to the dancefloor, serving as the ideal induction to Daft Punk’s universe of French house, disco, glam rock, and electro-pop, all baptized in futurism and nostalgia, that the duo craft on Discovery.

“One More Time” is centered around a simple, captivating, heavily-processed vocal hook sung by the late Romanthony that loops over and over as the bass thump and electro-funk drums build. The song enchants you into a state of pure boogielicious ecstasy before a beautiful, minimalist, nearly two-minute middle 8 gives you time to catch your breath. Almost a quarter century after its release, it remains inescapable, yet its ubiquity has done nothing to dampen the pleasure it induces. Just witness the pure joy radiating from people when the sound of the heavily-processed sample of Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You” that opens the song emerges from any speaker in the world, and you’ll understand.

2 “Crazy in Love (featuring Jay-Z)” – Beyoncé (from Dangerously in Love, 2003)

The song that not only propelled her post-Destiny’s Child solo career, but also catapulted her into the stratosphere as an artist and pop culture icon, “Crazy in Love” is a volatile canister of romantic obsession, propulsive rhythms, lavish funk-soul horns, and superstar swagger. It’s a rare song that sounds so combustible, yet so fully in control. It’s a song so danceable, so energetic, and so infectious that it’s impossible to sit still, even when just thinking about it. The sheer physical exhilaration of falling in love has rarely, if ever, been captured like this in a piece of recorded music. Not even one of Jay-Z’s more tossed-off, pedestrian verse can come close to blunting its momentum. While Beyoncé would go on to create albums that are more complex and evolved, “Crazy in Love” remains an explosive opener, setting a high-energy tone that defined not just Dangerously in Love but her entire trajectory as a global icon.

1 “Let’s Go Crazy” – Prince and the Revolution (from Purple Rain, 1984)

“Let’s Go Crazy”, the high-octane opener for both Purple Rain the soundtrack and the movie, fittingly begins with a playful irony. Prince’s iconic invocation of a funeral service—complete with a solemn church organ and the solemn address, “Dearly beloved”—quickly shifts gears into a frenzied celebration of life. As Prince’s sublimely ludacris opening sermon gives way to an ecstatic rave-up rock stomp, propelled by a simple call and response between organ and guitar, the song’s message is revealed: it’s not about death, but about living with wild, unabashed joy in the face of it.

While Prince often played every instrument on his earlier recordings (including his entire debut album, For You), “Let’s Go Crazy” is a group effort, with the entire Revolution firing on all cylinders. The band operates as a tightly oiled machine, teetering on the edge of complete chaos, but always remaining tightly in sync. By the time the group cuts out during the final minute to let Prince rip into an absurdly flamboyant solo guitar performance, the song has elevated you to a state of ecstasy and unhinged wonder. It’s the kind of irresistible, electrifying track that makes you want to buy into anything the man singing it is selling—be it an all-time classic album, or a delightfully erratic movie.

Category III: The Reinvention

The Reinvention signifies a significant departure in an artist’s sound or lyrical themes. Exceptional reinvention openers vary sonically, but consistently challenge listener expectations, boldly announcing the artist’s intent to subvert prevailing narratives about them.

5 “Farewell Transmission” – Songs: Ohia (from The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003)

In July 2002, Ohio singer-songwriter Jason Molina, who had cultivated a small but devoted following with his homespun folk-rock tunes under the name Songs: Ohia, gathered an assortment of instrumentalists at Steve Albini’s studio in Chicago to cut a new record. The result was The Magnolia Electric Co., released the following year, a transcendent and beautiful collection of songs that departed from Molina’s intimate sound, embracing widescreen, cosmic Americana. “Farewell Transmission” is the ideal introduction to this musical reinvention.

Reportedly recorded in a single take after Molina went over the song’s simple chord structure with the makeshift band, “Farewell Transmission” ushers listeners into the expansive world of The Magnolia Electric Co., where tossed-off space-cowboy musings and heartfelt human desires coexist harmoniously. The song commences with a cryptic slide guitar melody, gradually building into a cathedral of drums, guitar, piano, and ghostly backing vocals. Along the way, Molina conjures vivid, post-apocalyptic imagery and sings with fragile desperation about the will to persevere through darkness—yet ultimately concedes, “the real truth about it is, there ain’t no end to the desert I’ll cross.” 

“Farewell Transmission” establishes the tone for both the album and the remainder of Molina’s career—a career tragically cut short by his death in 2013. Though he’s gone, the haunting beauty of “Farewell Transmission” continues to resonate through the cosmos.

4 “Ambitionz az a Ridah” – 2Pac (from All Eyez on Me, 1996)

The tale of 2Pac’s tumultuous final year has been so exhaustively chronicled and mythologized over the past quarter century that it’s easy to forget that his pre-Death Row musical output was far more lyrically eclectic than the unapologetic thug bravado showcased on the final studio album released during his lifetime, All Eyez on Me. The bloated (but brilliant) double album kicks off with “Ambitionz az a Ridah”, a track that marks the moment where ‘Pac shifted his primary focus as an artist away from social commentary and fully embraced into the glamorization of the gangsta lifestyle. 

Recorded just hours after Suge Knight bailed him out of prison and signed him to Death Row Records, 2Pac sounds magnetic, menacing, and vengeful as he spits bars about guns, shady women, and his growing paranoia. Eerily foreshadowing his own demise, he raps, ‘So many battlefield scars while driven in plush cars’ in the opening verse and later refers to himself as ‘reincarnated.’ Producer Daz Dillinger cleverly reworks the drum break from Joeski Love’s “Pee Wee’s Dance” and constructs a sinister, cinematic G-funk beat to match ‘Pac’s embrace of a gangsta nihilism. The beat stands in sharp contrast to much of the Bomb Squad-influenced production on his earlier albums, and though the rest of the beats on All Eyez on Me vary slightly, there’s a polished, hi-fi texture that unifies them all. The genesis of 2Pac’s transformation into a hardened, more maximalist version of the rapper he was before he went to prison begins with this masterful album opener.

3 “Monday Morning” – Fleetwood Mac (from Fleetwood Mac, 1975)

Fleetwood Mac’s evolution from a British blues rock band in the late ’60s to the California-based, cocaine-fueled pop rockers of the mid-’70s culminated with Fleetwood Mac (1975)—not to be confused with their 1968 debut of the same name. The first track, “Monday Morning” is an absolute gem of an opener, signaling the final death knell of the band’s blues roots and a full embrace of soft rock craftsmanship. Lindsay Buckingham makes his presence known right away on “Monday Morning”; his searing tenor enters a split second before Mick Fleetwood’s drums and all of a sudden we’re off on a whimsical rush of restless romanticism and buoyant pop . The chorus is a melodious, pleading ode to an unpredictable lover, and later on in the song, Buckingham’s beautifully-phrased slide guitar lead balances out the pop sheen with just the right amount of grit. While “Monday Morning” may not be Fleetwood Mac’s best song, it’s the track that introduced the world to the band’s transformation—an energetic, powerhouse start to a timeless album.

2 “Enter Sandman” – Metallica (from Metallica, 1991)

By 1988, with …And Justice for All, Metallica had pushed their innovative brand of thrash metal fundamentalism to its logical endpoint. Sure, they could have pursued even faster, longer songs with more unconventional structures, but the most radical move, according to the band’s drummer and resident provocateur, Lars Ulrich, was to simplify. After spending several years in the studio under the tough-love tutelage of Motley Crüe producer Bob Rock, Metallica reemerged with “Enter Sandman,” the opening track and lead single from the 1991 album Metallica (aka The Black Album). 

The song marked a radical simplification of the band’s sound, and though it alienated some hardcore fans, “Enter Sandman” propelled Metallica into the mainstream. Built around a striking, mid-tempo riff and an anthemic chorus, it still retains its potency after three decades of radio overexposure. “Enter Sandman” is a stadium metal lullaby—a big, dumb rock song of the best kind—and a powerful opening salvo for the album that launched a new, globe-conquering phase of Metallica’s career.

1 “Everything in Its Right Place” – Radiohead (from Kid A, 2000)

Radiohead’s sonic transformation on Kid A is the stuff of legend, lionized by the critics, indie heads, and music snobs of the world for a generation. The near-mythical reverence for Kid A might seem excessive if the album weren’t such a masterful reinvention of the band’s sound, and if “Everything in Its Right Place” weren’t one of the greatest opening tracks in music history. The song is a tense, sparse and seductive amalgamation of electronica and minimalism, with Thom Yorke’s glitchy vocals and disorienting lyrics evoking a kind of fragmented, crumbling mental state. Its harmonic structure defies the traditions of Western music by never resolving to a dominant chord. It all creates the sensation of being caught in an ominous loop of anxiety and dread.

Despite this, “Everything in Its Right Place” doesn’t feel oppressively dreary. Instead, the song conjures a sense of awe, a world of eerie beauty and mystery where Radiohead discover a new symphonic palette to express themselves. It sets the stage for the paranoia, surrealism, and musical adventurousness that define the remaining tracks on Kid A, and charts a new course that the band has (mostly) followed ever since.

Category IV: The Oddball

The Oddball opener breaks all the traditional rules of a great album start. Often slow, dissonant, or unusually long, these tracks steer the listener into the album’s mood in unexpected ways. Despite ignoring conventions, they work because they set the tone effectively—or simply because they’re undeniably great songs.

5 “Station to Station” – David Bowie (from Station to Station, 1976)

Instead of opting for the infectiously catchy “Golden Years,” David Bowie boldly chose to open Station to Station with its sprawling, ten-minute title track, which encapsulates the album’s inventive beauty and chaotic, coke-fueled energy.

After over a minute of flanged guitar mimicking the sound of train accelerating, the band jumps in, playing atonal, dissonant chords, and “Station to Station” immediately challenges the listener with the most decidedly antagonistic music of the artist’s career up until that point. The song settles into a slow-moving, trance-like groove which mirrors the dread and paranoia of Bowie’s lyrics, introducing his Thin White Duke persona–a vampiric, amoral Aryan superman– referencing Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley, and struggles with his global fame.

Halfway through, the song shifts into a triumphant, rocking, disco-soul groove, transforming the cold nihilism of the preceding minutes into a rebellious celebration in the face of meaninglessness. It’s an epic overture of decadence, an enigmatic embrace of spirituality, absurdity, and excess, as musically adventurous as anything a star of his orbit had created at the time. Despite its long running time and sonically demanding character, or perhaps because of them, “Station to Station” stands as one of the most monumental album openers of all time.

4 “Downward Spiral” – Danny Brown (from Atrocity Exhibition, 2016)

Danny Brown ascended to mid-level hip-hop stardom in the 2010s by pushing the genre’s boundaries, employing high-pitched, somewhat bizarre flows and a striking combination of darkness and humor to great effect. With his fourth studio album, the Detroit rapper delves even further into the shadows, summoning levels of emotional complexity and technical dexterity that few rappers could even dream of, let alone execute.

Atrocity Exhibition, a title inspired by the Joy Division song of the same name, begins with “Downward Spiral”, a dark, visceral window into the mind of an artist too caught up in depression and drug-induced paranoia to enjoy his own success. Lines like, “Your worst nightmare for me is a normal dream” are terse confessions of the demons he’s had to endure, but even in the despair, he can’t help but boast, “Nauseous, don’t know the last time I ate, but I eat these fucking rappers like a last steak”.

What makes this song so peculiar of an opener is the sparse, stripped-down beat. There’s very little percussion off which to syncopate, making the fact that Brown raps over them so skillfully even more of a marvel. The eccentric glitches and warped sample from a song recorded by obscure German krautrock band, Guru Guru, mesh with the dizzying beat to create a frightening, alluring, experimental atmosphere. While it’s a demanding introduction, purposely alienating to casual fans, it sets the tone remarkably well for the ambitious, incredibly unique work of songs that follow.

3 “Tears of Rage” – The Band (from Music from Big Pink, 1968)

The decision for a group to introduce their debut album with a five-and-a-half-minute ballad is, for lack of a more dignified word, ballsy. Yet, The Band’s “Tears of Rage,” which kicks off the phenomenal, timeless Music from Big Pink, serves as a superb lead-in to an album that defiantly resists the cosmic psychedelia of the time in favor of something deeply rooted in an earthly realm. This doesn’t mean it’s a mere retread of archaic sounds; the album is an impressionistic amalgam of almost every strand of American roots music—folk, country, blues, early rock ‘n’ roll, gospel—crafted by a group of Canadian men (and Arkansas-born drummer Levon Helm).

The innovation and craftsmanship displayed on the album are evident in “Tears of Rage,” a Bob Dylan-penned song ostensibly about a frayed relationship between a father and daughter, sung from the father’s perspective. However, delving deeper, connections to the Bible, the birth of America, and the political unrest of the 1960s become apparent. This thematic richness transfers to the music itself, populated by instruments both old (piano, horns) and new (clavinet, organ, electric guitar) that blend together beautifully.

Richard Manuel, pianist, and one of the Band’s three primary vocalists (along with Helm & Rick Danko), delivers a lead vocal performance so wounded and moving that it could melt even the coldest heart. While “Tears of Rage” may not be the best song on Music from Big Pink, it serves as a brilliant prelude to the rest of the album—a stunning dirge full of pathos that sounds as elemental as it does inventive.

2 “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” – Wilco (from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002)

If the goal of an album’s opening song is to be immediately accessible, irresistibly catchy, and to entice listeners to stay for more, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” appears to defy such expectations. It begins with a minute of disjointed avant-garde soundscaping—piano, synth, percussion, and various found sounds—before an acoustic guitar enters and frontman Jeff Tweedy starts singing. As Tweedy begins, it becomes clear that the song is exactly what it seems not to be: an accessible, melodic, and memorable pop song. Yet it’s one that has been deconstructed to its bare elements and reassembled with a MacGyver-like unorthodoxy and innovation.

The cryptic, poetic lyrics seem to describe the conflict between a relationship with another person and the relationship with self-destructive tendencies. Their contoured ambiguity renders any intended meaning secondary to their beauty and intensity. Around the five-minute mark, the song begins to break down into harsh, ugly dissonance—bursts of static, atonal piano, and jumbled vocals. By this point, the song’s shattered beauty has seeped into your soul and into the cosmos of broken communication that binds Yankee Hotel Foxtrot together.

There is much to read and watch about the album’s tortured creation, its rollout, and the myriad eerie connections to imagery surrounding the September 11 attacks, but the timeless quality of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot lies in songs like this opener. While defying conventional expectations for album openers, it successfully seduces the listener with its singular sound, setting the stage for one of the best records of the 21st century.

1 “Maggot Brain” – Funkadelic (from Maggot Brain, 1971)

The greatest oddball opening track of all time defiantly shuns conventional wisdom that dictates an album’s first song should be punchy, accessible, and tight. Instead, “Maggot Brain” presents a slow, brooding, ten-minute instrumental composed of only three central elements – a simple, descending chord pattern, light percussion, and perhaps the greatest guitar solo ever put to wax.

Though classified as an instrumental, the track opens with a spoken word introduction that sets the emotional context, with Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton referring to the “maggots in the mind of the universe.” The legend of how Clinton roused guitarist Eddie Hazel’s performance has been well-documented, though details remain disputed. Did Clinton tell Hazel to play as if his mother had died, or tell him that his mother actually had died before hitting record? Was Hazel tripping on LSD or just grief-stricken? The details matter less than the overwhelming feeling of mourning that emerges – mourning of a loved one, mourning of the lost ideals of late ’60s counterculture, mourning of a nation itself. The wah-drenched solo takes Hazel’s Hendrix-influenced sound to dark new emotive heights. His playing is dynamic, switching from wild, free-form anarchy to concentrated tightness with extraordinary dexterity. The raw emotion and deep evocation of pain Hazel expresses through his guitar creates an impassioned apocalypse of noise, simultaneously embodying the “maggots in the mind of the universe” and Clinton’s determination to “rise above it all, or drown in my own shit,” the words which close the introduction.

The spacey brew of funk, psychedelia, heavy rock, and soul in the six songs that follow expands upon these themes while at times embracing the twisted fun and humor in societal and personal decay. It’s an eclectic mix, and with the exception of the closing track “Wars of Armageddon,” any would have been a more conventional, safer choice to open the album. But beginning with “Maggot Brain” perfectly introduces the sonic and philosophical universe that Clinton orchestrates – an expansive cosmos of soulful grooves, lysergic guitar rock, racial consciousness, societal turmoil, and planetary destruction unlike anything else on this earth.

You can stream all the tracks from this list on the playlist below:

I’ll never forget the first time I cracked a 9/11 joke. It was September 14, 2001. I was 11 years old. My children’s theater company was holding a candlelight vigil for the victims. Trying to impress my older friends in the cast, I suggested that instead of the solemn, staid music that was scoring this observance, we should blast Drowning Pool’s then-popular rock radio hit, “Bodies.” (For those too young or too old to remember this tune, singer Dave Williams repeats the line “let the bodies hit the floor” about four hundred times during its three minute twenty four second duration). Tasteless? Absolutely. But it worked—I managed to get a laugh from the older kids, who I was always afraid thought of me as a dweeby, try-hard hanger-on. 

Two years later, “Bodies” was played on repeat at Guantánamo Bay for ten days as interrogators tortured a Mauritanian engineer named Mohamedou Ould Slahi. While some artists might object to their music being used to aid in the abuse of a man who was ultimately never charged with a crime, Drowning Pool's bassist, Stevie Benton, had no such qualms. In a 2006 SPIN article, he took pride in the song’s use, saying, "People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that, played over and over, it can psychologically break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”

Benton's reflexive embrace of post-9/11 propaganda—the claim that torture was necessary to stop terrorism—was hardly uncommon in 2006, and it wouldn’t be shocking to hear many a MAGA habitué uttering the same conviction in 2024. This was, of course, one of many falsehoods used to justify the Bush administration's torture program and broader War on Terror policies. When I talk to people who find 9/11 humor inherently offensive, I always want to ask if they’re just as bothered by how 9/11 was used to justify torture. Or how it was exploited to brainwash the public into accepting bloated military budgets, and endless wars. Or how both parties used the fear of that day to construct a massive surveillance state that now tracks our every move—and has allowed tech companies to monetize almost every aspect of our private lives.

In the decades since the September 11 attacks—through the initial horror, the lingering fear, and the perpetual numbness of living in a world forever marked by that day's legacy of polarization, paranoia, and hate—humor remains one of the few ways we can reclaim some sense of agency over a tragedy that was stolen from us by the powerful and made into a mockery.

Do some 9/11 jokes and memes veer into pretty ugly territory? Undoubtedly. Are some just weird and unfunny? Sure. Yet much of it works precisely because it's both tasteless and absurdly funny. Take the image of the twin towers depicted as uncooked spaghetti with red sauce pouring out like smoke, captioned, “never forgetti.” It’s not for everyone, but I find it hard to take issue with repurposing the same imagery that was used relentlessly to propagate fear for something as innocuous as a stupid pasta pun. Another widely circulated 9/11 meme features the famous photo of George W. Bush being informed of the attacks by his Chief of Staff, Andy Card, a template often used to mock contemporary online culture.  I see nothing wrong with the repurposing of this image for general mockery, though I sometimes wish more of these memes targeted Bush himself—the war criminal who used 9/11 for his own political gain, and successfully won reelection by casting his opponent as a terrorist-appeasing pussy—in the moment of utter fecklessness this picture represents. The “Bush did 9/11” memes, while pushing a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory, still manage to serve as criticisms of Bush’s foreign policy and the role of U.S. interventionism in inspiring the attacks, all while embracing the innate absurdity of the overall claim.

While I could analyze countless more examples of 9/11 memes, that's not really the point. The point isn’t to argue that 9/11 humor is always funny, or that people don’t have a right to be offended by it. If there is a point, it’s to reflect on the ability of humor and meme culture to help us cope with fear and tragedy, and how it can defang the moralistic posturing that hands the legacy of 9/11 over to those who harness it as a propaganda tool. Memes that mock those who profited from the tragedy are powerful examples of humor at its most potent—"punching up." And in these cases, the more distasteful the meme, the better.

So why does 9/11 humor resonate so deeply with me personally? Even I can't fully explain it. I think 9/11—both the horrors of that day and the horrors it justified for years afterward—is painful for me in a way that’s probably similar to many people in my relative age range. We were old enough to understand what had happened, but too young to have the perspective or coping skills to process that reality. I wasn’t in Lower Manhattan that day, and I’m fortunate enough not to have lost anyone close to me. I don’t mean to suggest my pain is anything like the unimaginable grief of those who did. The pain I feel comes from a different, more distant kind of loss. It’s the pain that stems from the loss of the broader world I knew. The unparalleled strength of America’s military following the end of the Cold War, and the roaring economy of the mid to late 90s were distilled into a vision of impossible optimism, a vision that was imbued in our young minds by teachers, politicians, and the news media. However fleeting and foolish that optimism may have been, it was what we knew. No matter how much I struggled with anxiety and self-doubt as a child, I still felt confident that things would turn out fine because I lived in a world that seemed destined to remain peaceful and prosperous. 

That Tuesday morning, my friend and I were annoying our teacher by repeatedly shouting the year-old "whassup?" catchphrase. By that evening, I was lying in bed with my mom beside me, the first time I'd asked her to help me sleep in years. I was a scared little boy, staring at the stars through my open window, thinking about death, loss, and the traumatic images I’d seen on TV all day. I had watched countless Hollywood action movies from the '80s and '90s—full of explosions, bombs, and hijackings—without ever feeling scared, because I knew they were entirely fictional. The footage looked surreal—like a Michael Bay movie minus the low-angle spinning shots. That evening, though, I was beginning to grasp how painfully real it all was.

Childhood innocence inevitably comes to an end, but for me and many others in my microgeneration—those of us privileged enough to have food, shelter, and no major personal loss up until that point—9/11 left an indelible mark. It was a clear line between a world of endless possibility and one of perpetual uncertainty. And it turns out, it was just the first of many collective traumas that shattered whatever remained of our childhood illusions, from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world was never going to be as rosy as the adults in my life seemed to suggest it would be before September 11, 2001. But growing up in a belief system that embraced that delusion left me woefully unprepared for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are a part of life. In some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from being jolted awake from that impossible dream. Maybe laughing at an image of Rudy Giuliani with the caption, “Men will profit off 9/11 instead of going to therapy,” makes it all a little less painful.

This year marks the twenty-third anniversary of the attacks, and although I’ll try not to, I’ll inevitably end up watching footage of the planes hitting the towers or some 9/11 documentary on YouTube. I hope this year I can also try to do something that will help me move beyond this day as the reoccurring trauma reminder that most tragic anniversaries tend to be. Maybe I’ll find the resilience that I—and many white cisgender men of my mid-millennial generation—have struggled to cultivate, and finally let go of that latent longing for the world we were promised: one where life would be easy and prosperity was an inevitable outcome. One thing’s for sure, though: on this solemn American anniversary, I’ll share 9/11 memes with my friends and laugh. If you think it’s tasteless, that’s fine, but it will never be as tasteless as surveillance capitalism, endless wars, and bloated military budgets guzzling funds that could go to dying first responders and homeless veterans—or, for that matter, as tasteless as an 11-year-old suggesting a violent nu metal song as the soundtrack for a 9/11 candlelight vigil.

Two weeks ago, the stark contrast between genuine activism and Hollywood’s superficial, low risk performative activism was on full display as protests outside the Dolby Theatre delayed the start of the 96th Academy Awards. Meanwhile, on the red carpet, high profile stars including Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo wore tiny “Artists4Ceasefire” pins that could easily be mistaken for the red circle stickers used for office inventory, while avoiding any mention of the ongoing crisis in Gaza during interviews by ABC reporters (who unsurprisingly did not ask about the pins). No words were uttered about Gaza until English director Jonathan Glazer took the stage to accept the award for Best International Feature for his remarkable film, The Zone of Interest. 

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst… Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” The response from supporters of the occupation was unsurprising, especially considering how the words “refute our Jewishness” sound stripped completely from their context. 

Former Reagan speechwriter and current Commentary editor, John Podhoretz, tweeted, without a hint of irony, “By saying he refutes his Jewishness on the biggest stage in the world five months after the attack on Israel, Jonathan Glazer has instantly made himself into one of Judaism’s historical villains.” Abraham Foxman, who for almost thirty years served as the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), posted “As a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you,” 

The responses to Glazer's acceptance speech, including the failure to acknowledge his mention of Israeli victims in the October 7 Hamas attacks, reflect a binary mode of thinking that refuses to even consider the possibility that while Israel was founded by many survivors of genocide, it also has the capacity to perpetrate acts of ethnic cleansing. This mode of thinking suggests that because Jews have endured perhaps the longest and most concentrated form of discrimination in history, a Jewish state is immune to wrongdoing. It further equates criticism of that Jewish state with antisemitism, which effectively downplays the pervasiveness of antisemitism worldwide. 

In addition, these comments and others illustrate the Zionist objective to fundamentally separate the Holocaust from other genocides in human history, by taking umbrage with any equation or analogy with other mass murders of ethnic groups. In pursuing this agenda, they advance an understanding and teaching of the Holocaust centered not upon remembrance, but retraumatization. In her recent book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein aptly describes the difference, writing, “retraumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state”. 

The narrative of retraumatization foregrounds the gruesome details of the Nazi genocide–the gas chambers, the torture, the unfathomable number Jewish victims–yet neglects to contextualize the Holocuast within the continuum of human history, however exceptionally horrific it was. It's a narrative that serves as an effective instrument in persuading Jews everywhere to endorse Zionism and to view the Palestinian cause as merely an extension of the same antisemitic hatred that birthed the Holocaust, rather than a struggle for self-determination. 

This plays right into a misreading of The Zone of Interest as a piece of filmmaking. Of course the film is a testament to the horrors that Jews faced in Nazi death camps–horrors industrial in scale depicted through a relentless soundscape of distant gunshots, screams, and grinding machinery, juxtaposed with Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family’s serene domestic life just outside Auschwitz’s walls. However, Glazer’s decision to limit the audience’s visual perspective to just that space outside the camp makes the sounds of terror emanating from inside the camp that much more visceral and immediate, because like all great historical films, The Zone of Interest speaks directly to the present. 

The cognitive dissonance exhibited by the Höss family is an invitation to examine our own detachment from the immense suffering happening in places like Gaza, evidence of which is just a scroll away on our screens. It is an overture to contemplate the illusion that consumer goods, like clothing, can be divorced from the exploitative conditions of their construction and acquisition. The scene where Mrs. Höss (Sandra Hüller) nonchalantly receives and tries on the fur coat and lipstick of a Jewish prisoner, reminiscent of a casual fitting room experience at Old Navy, echoes the absence of thought that goes into how the clothing we purchase gets into our hands. Just as the Höss family knows what is happening just beyond their property, we too cannot claim complete ignorance of the profound suffering that goes into the products we thoughtlessly consume–the beatings endured by women in the Bangladeshi garment factories that churn out fast fashion for us, the suicide nets that are a normal architectural feature of the factories in China producing our smart phones, the workers in countries like India and the Philipines who moderate the content we consume on social media, who are traumatized by the same ghastly, gruesome images that they protect us from are but a few examples of the dark underbelly of 21st century capitalism. Perhaps dissociation emerges as the only possible response to prevent ourselves from coming apart at the seams in the face of this knowledge. 

Even Rudolph Höss himself struggles to maintain this dissociation. In the final moments of The Zone of Interest, he finds himself at something akin to a Nazi office party in Berlin. Upon leaving the festivities, he is suddenly overcome by a powerful urge to vomit, his body's visceral response to the profound brutality of his actions. As he stumbles down the stairs, onto the next floor, he encounters a vision at the end of a cavernous hallway: the modern-day employees of Auschwitz, engaged in the mundane tasks of vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping—a museum dedicated to the victims of his genocidal crimes. At this moment, Höss's humanity briefly resurfaces. But seconds later, he has gathered himself and descends another level of stairs, further into the darkness.

The point of this is not to proclaim that we are no better than Rudolph Höss and his family, but rather to recognize that, in certain ways, most of us have the capacity to blindly ignore the horrors of the world, particularly when we are directly benefiting from them. It's a tendency often compartmentalized with language that disconnects us from reality, and effectively dehumanizes others. We see this theme depicted multiple times in The Zone of Interest as Höss is lauded for his breakthroughs in “KL practice” (KL meaning concentration camp), including circular burn chambers that can more effectively exterminate, speaking of the prisoners as if they are merely a household pest. He is described as a man who has a particular strength for “turning theory into practice”. The act of killing here is spoken of as if it were academic research. 

This same vein of disconnection is evident in the coverage of the war in Gaza by major U.S. news outlets. The deaths of the thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children killed are rendered in clinical terms such as “minors” or “people under 18”, in a seemingly deliberate attempt to avoid eliciting sympathy. Just this week, the New York Times published a piece about the two million Palestinians on the brink of famine with the headline, “How Gaza Civilians Have Fared After Israel Has Asked Them to Flee”, deliberately obscuring any Israeli government culpability for this catastrophe with clunky, passive language.

It’s the same sickening detachment found in Israel's relentless campaign to dehumanize Palestinians amidst their ongoing siege, describing Palestinians as ‘human animals' ', and frequently unloading unverified and sensationalist accusations against Hamas to justify the ongoing slaughter of civilians. Only through such dehumanizing propaganda can the forced starvation, mass killings, and societal destruction happening today in Gaza be rationalized, and it is not dissimilar from propaganda that normalized the Holocaust in the minds of German families like the Höss’.

What is so remarkable about The Zone of Interest as a film is its ability to present us with these complex questions, devoid of easy answers, which linger in our minds long after the credits roll. In one way it serves as something of a cinematic response to a query posed by Gillian Rose in her 1990 essay “The Future of Auschwitz”. After visiting the camp, Rose found that the horrors of the site were seen entirely through the “infinite pain of the victims”, and asked if Auschwitz could also find a way for visitors “to engage in intense self-questioning: ‘Could I have done this?’ Glazer’s film transcends the dominant narrative of retraumatization surrounding the Holocaust, urging us to examine our own complicity in the horrors that are unfolding across the globe today, whether they be in Gaza, Southeast Asia, or in our own communities. With his words at the Oscars, Glazer reminded us all of that imperative self-reflection.

Inspired by the writer-director's childhood, Aftersun tells the story of Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father Calum (Paul Mescal) taking a low-budget vacation to Turkey sometime in the late 90s. The story is depicted in a blend of traditional narrative, camcorder footage, and surreal moments that seem out of place and time. These scenes are intercut with visions of adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), now a parent herself, as she tries to piece together an understanding of Calum. This framework positions the film as an amalgamation of objective fact, memory, and hallucination that is an extraordinarily effective structure to tell both a coming-of-age story and a character study of a lost loved one. The boundaries between the past, present, Sophie's subconscious, and objective reality collapse in on themselves, illustrating the mechanisms of mourning better than any film I can remember.

With this extraordinary visual language in place, Wells explores Calum's interior space with empathy, and depicts his mental health issues with delicacy. That isn't to say that Calum is never shown in a negative light. On one night of their stay, he ridicules Sophie's karaoke singing, lets her venture off on her own, then gets plastered and takes a midnight swim before coming back and passing out in their hotel room, leaving Sophie locked out. The film doesn't excuse this behavior so much as it provides context for why Calum behaves this way.

Though it is never specifically laid out, it's clear that Calum was a teenager when he had Sophie. Their small age difference and the way Sophie projects a maturity beyond her years lead other hotel guests to mistake them for siblings, and in some ways they act like they are. Nonetheless, Calum's parenting is, for the most part, honest, proactive, and compassionate. He tries his best to fight through his crushing depression to create happy memories for his daughter. Calum knows from his own experience the impact that growing up in a toxic family can have on a child, and throughout their trip he goes out of his way to make Sophie feel loved and cared for.

Still, Calum can't help but feel the guilt of possibly passing down his melancholy to Sophie. After a fun-filled day of scuba diving Sophie asks Callum, “Do you ever feel like you’ve just done a whole amazing day, and you come home tired and down, and it feels like your bones don’t work? They are just tired. Everything is tired. And you’re just sinking”. He avoids engaging directly with the question and tells Sophie to just have fun and not to worry about it. Then, in a moment that might feel familiar to those who have experienced the guilt and self-loathing that is often an outgrowth of depression, Calum aggressively spits at his own reflection in the mirror when he thinks Sophie's out of sight. She's not.

The times when Calum really attempts to fight through his depression are some of the film’s most illustrative and moving moments. He practices Tai-Chi. He reads meditation and self-help books. He's silly and jokes around with Sophie at numerous points throughout the trip. He shares a loving embrace with her as they dance to “Under Pressure”. In these scenes, Calum’s behavior shows us that dealing with depression and anxiety doesn't always entail sulking in silence or hiding in darkness. It manifests in moments of action, stretches of joy, and gestures of love. The struggles may always be lingering just behind us, but they don't always define us. 

Whether she is aware of it or not (I’m sure she is), Wells has done a great service in portraying Calum's struggles with such grace and nuance. This depiction goes a long way toward dispelling misconceptions and reductive interpretations. Mood disorders, anxiety disorders and other mental health issues aren't choices made by the individual, and while there seems to be a growing consensus that this is the case, it is far from universally accepted. Too often mental health buzzwords like “self care” and “mindfulness” are deployed to sell products rather than to actually increase awareness. I don't mean to suggest that one small, independent film can change this, but the mere fact of its existence in a culture where this is the norm is somewhat of a triumph. It takes true care to craft a character that so realistically embodies the complexities of depression. It takes remarkable insight to make a film that so accurately shows the toll mental illness takes on individuals and families. For those of us who struggle with depression and anxiety (even if not to the extent that Callum does), Aftersun provides an opportunity to see our struggles with an authenticity that has rarely been captured on screen.

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