Well, look who’s back on track? This makes two playlists in two weeks. I’m just hearing too much good music and I gotta get the news out to The People (that’s you!).
Local Picks
Full playlist here
The first-ever Racket Picked to Click winner returns with a typically uncategorizable mix of echoed falsetto vocals, self-taught guitar, just enough of a rhythm track to hold it all together, and a keyboard bit that always catches me up. And the emotional response it stirs up in me is just as uncategorizable.
Our most-likely-shoegazers-to-succeed return with vocals so clearly articulated and guitars so varied they’re clearly chafing at that unfair stylistic pigeonhole. “It’s not over yet, it’s not over now,” sings Zofia Smith, unruffled as a big guitar riff comes barreling her way. In dreampop begins responsibilities, as they say.
The Silent Treatment, “Devalued”
“You want something for nothing!” Claire Luger snarls at a culture exploiting artists even more brazenly than cultures usually do. Hear the band bash through this new single live at a Cloudland release show on Friday the 13th.
Over a chiming-then-crunching Modern Rock guitar, Arianna Wegley wishes with melodic desperation that it was as easy to get a do-over in life as in video games. This track's off the upcoming Cut the Lake, the anticipated (by me) follow-up to Window Seat.
Alan Sparhawk, “JCMF”
As a non-believer, I’m denied the emotional balm of divine retribution. But I still appreciate the vicarious charge I get when this believer declares, "When Jesus come back, all you motherfuckers are going to pay!”
Non-Local Picks
Full playlist here
Yes, that Al Green. Yes, that “Everybody Hurts.” Yes I said yes I will yes.
Langley’s chart-topping “Choosin’ Texas” snuck up on me, and it sent me back to her debut album, Hangover, which has some great moments, even if nothing there is quite “Choosin’ Texas.” Neither is this lament about failing to achieve perfect womanhood. But with Langley’s Alabama drawl contrasting beautifully with the glassy-smooth throwback country-pop track, “Be Her” does suggest that Langley and co-producers Ben West and Miranda Lambert may be about to release the best 1981 Rosanne Cash album of 2026. I can’t wait.
In a genre that encourages even the most anonymous practitioners to project individuality, Jill Scott is truly herself in a way maybe no other R&B woman besides Mary J. Blige can be, unless Erykah Badu counts in her gnomic way. Scott’s best work manifests as an unstoppable overflow of personality, and her new album, To Whom This May Concern, is among her best, a real Sunday afternoon kinda record. “I wasn’t the aesthetic/I guess, I guess I get it,” she shrugs as he overcomes the pressha to conform here, suggesting that even this rock-steady diva has her moments of doubt. A quarter-century into her recording career, she’s more Jill Scott than ever—which is how life’s supposed to work out, ain’t it?
Hemlocke Springs, “Be the Girl!”
The finale of this TikTok star’s first full-length, The Apple Tree Under the Sea, is aspirational pop at its most epic, and I do not use that word lightly, frequently, or without powerful reservations. Her girlie voice scrunched yet weathered, those pulsing synth ostinatos as propulsive as a treadmill, she's well on her way to recapturing her lost, better self even before she gets to the climatic key change.
Charli’s Wuthering Heights album has less to do with Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” than the movie does with Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In other words, look who’s gone and recorded her own Batman soundtrack. (I guess that makes the song with John Cale her “Batdance”?) Given an excuse to blurt grand emotions, Charli wuthers all over the damn place, allowing us to imagine what an genuinely goth-pop Wuthering Heights film could have been like. Fennell should have just satisfied herself with a music video for one or two of the tracks here. Not sure Margot Robbie would have been available though.
Worst New Song
Because a contrarian dickishness was key to his appeal even back when he was heroically saving College Rock from synthesizers, Morrissey’s decline into noxious irrelevance feels even more inevitable than most such tumbles, and harder to mourn. Without a distinctive guitarist as a foil (Johnny Marr, of course, but later Mick Ronson as well), he’s naught to fall back upon than his miserable personality and need to oversing. This is worse than most latter Morrissey songs not just because of the plummy way he too-correctly pronounces the title, but also because its racist insinuations about the 2019 Notre-Dame fire just don’t serve up the gratuitous superfluity of detail that real conspiracists thrive upon. (Nor does he have a hook like this.) And then he altered the lyric "Before investigations, they said, 'It’s not terrorism'" to end with “There’s nothing to see here.” Good luck saving Western civilization or whatever the fuck you’re up to with that kind of attitude, mate.
