Some New Music I've Been Listening to Lately

Cover of Good Kid 3

My twin daughters just graduated from high school and as one of our gifts to them, I took them to Denver for an overnight trip to see their favorite band, Good Kid. It was a marvelous experience and we were close enough to the stage that I could see myself in the Instagram post they did of the show we were at.

Since I entered graduate school, people have been telling me that “Rock is dead” and that Hip Hop and rap had pushed them aside forever. Obviously, Pop and Country remain as strong as ever. Pop’s focus on melody and vocal is a strong combination that has lasted 100 years so it’s not going anywhere. Sure, there are differences between Dean Martin and Bruno Mars, but there are also melodic and textural similarities. I never bought into this kind of doomerism.

I was always able to find new Rock, Punk, Pop Punk, Metal, and Alternative Bands. Heck, Guitar Hero and Rock Band on their own kept a lot of great music in kids minds. It did become harder for me to find new music as the modes of distribution exploded though. The combination of YouTube, Soundcloud, TikTok, Streaming, and you name it made it hard for me to find music as I was holed up working on my dissertation and working. There was a brief moment when I almost sank beneath the waters of “Oh, no! I’m too old to like the music of the kids today!” Then my daughters, and students, began talking about the bands they liked and my world has been filled with a bunch of new stuff. So what is some of this stuff?

Obviously, Good Kid tops the list. I still remember the day my daughters History and Mystery asked me if I would tell them what I thought about this band they liked. I felt proud that they thought enough of me to ask, but I was an instant fan. Good Kid is a great combination of several streams of Indie Rock and Pop Punk and they are very fan forward. Cicada is a typical feel good Good Kid tune.

I first encountered The Warning when a friend sent me their Enter Sandman cover. It was a good cover, but I thought their original stuff was much better. Their new song Kerosene is getting a lot of play, but I prefer their other new song Ego. I often say that Ke$ha’s song The Beautiful Life is one of the most truly cyberpunk songs ever written. It captures the vapid despair of the future that Walter Gibson and Bruce Sterling argued was around the corner. It’s one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. Ego isn’t as sad, but it sounds like what Skinny Puppy and Ministry hinted the music of a cyber future would sound like and with the age of AI finally on the rise, we are entering the real cyberpunk future. Their song “Hell You Call a Dream” echoes the emotional beats of Ke$ha’s dance of despair, but from a metal perspective.

I have no idea how MEMI(매미) showed up in my YouTube feed, but I am glad she did. Her sound is a nice combination of Grunge and Pop that makes for an interestign mix. It’s as if Soundgarden and Toni Basil got together to form a band and I’m very much into that vibe.

President shares some sonic qualities with Sleep Token in the way they use electronic layering as well as some vocal elements that are similar to Jared Leto and 30 Seconds to Mars. The combination of hard hitting guitar riffs and electronica adds them to my list of modern cyberpunk (cyberrock?) artists. They’ll be performing in Garden City later this year and I’ll try to check them out.

Def Leppard recently did a cover of Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode and it really demonstrates how Depeche really was an industrial band at heart. Phil Collen’s flawless performance of the guitar highlights how solid the riff that forms the core of the song is. Very cool cover that deserves more than the 41,000 views it’s received so far.

I’m always down for some new Pop Punk…always…but I was surprised to see a great new Pop Punk band come out of Atlanta. It’s a great music city, but its know for Indie, Rap, and Country and the rebellious suburban vibes of Pop Punk don’t seem to fit a place as deeply rooted in Southern Gothic as Atlanta can be. Just goes to show that the influx of film and television productions in the early 2000s helped create a Southern Orange County that could produce a band with a perfect name The Paradox. Yes, it’s a Paradox that Atlanta could create a Pop Punk band, but they are great.

The Belair Lip Bombs keep growing on me. They very much capture the sounds of late 1990s Pacific Northwest rock mixed with classic Shoegaze. Not bad for a band from Australia. Their sound isn’t that of the bands that broke out of the Seattle scene, rather the bands who formed the heart of it and I’d like to thank KEXP (a Seattle station I listen to) for introducing me to their sound. In Hey You, you can hear a little echo of INXS. It’s subtle, as is are the U2 notes, but they are there.

That’s just some of what I’ve been listening to lately. What have you been listening to.