Several readers have told me it’d be helpful if the selections in these columns, especially the local picks, were timed to upcoming shows. In a better world, that would always be the case, but balancing my various duties at Racket sometimes makes that impossible. This week, though, three of the five acts I spotlight are playing a show this weekend. A better world is possible?
Local Picks
Full playlist here
One thing I love is when bands make up their own genres, and among those this experimentally oriented band employs are “gaygaze,” “popcorn core,” and “mew mew metal.” All three sound relatively applicable enough to me, and who knows, maybe one will stick? If you prefer description to classification, try fuzzed-out guitar, free range violin and cello, and Haley Anne’s wafting vulnerability as she confesses of her object of fascination “My disguise is thin with her.” Ditch Pigeon will play a full release show at Amsterdam for Chronic Burger Vision on August 6, but the impatient among are likely to hear some of that forthcoming album’s tracks at Day Block Friday night and White Squirrel on Sunday.
Fiona Hayes, “I’m Losing Again”
Hayes has been a singles machine in 2026: “I’m Losing Again,” the release of which she’ll celebrate at Amsterdam Friday night, is, by my count, her fifth of the year. Like her previous tracks, this features fed-up vocals, lyrics that explain why she’s fed up, and enough brash guitar to get that fedupitude across. And I’m not just being polite in spotlighting the newest of the batch—each new song has been incrementally more realized than the last.
Toussaint Morrison, “Dancin’ in the Dark”
A multitalented multimedia artist who balances acting/directing and music with activism and education, Morrison has an album, SHPSHFTER, due out in September. Our first taste of it is a bona fide summer jam, with the singer warning you not to be confused by his polite attire (“very quickly I can come up out of this cardigan”) while scattering hooks across multiple choruses, pre-choruses, and semi-choruses.
The Stress of Her Regard, “Robot Dogs”
Calling all technophilaphobes. Big, booming whip-crack drums, ominous vocals, and a skeletal guitar hook suit a cry against the coming K-9 corps. Like they say, and as so-called progress has proven true repeatedly, “It’ll be all right till it’s not.” They’ll play a single-release show for this song Saturday night at Cloudland.
Wolfbabycup. “I Saw Julia Fox”
This is the kind of song title that makes you ask “Did they really see Julia Fox?” so I can confirm, based on the track notes, that Wolfbabycup really did see Julia Fox. “We were on our way to the pride parade standing on a corner and there she was right next to us in the flesh with a few of her cool friends,” the duo writes. Wendy Sorquist sings “I wanna be your best friend/I wanna enter your orbit” without being all stalkery about it, summoning the kind of romanticism that only true Midwesterners can feel about New York City over synths both wavy and tinkly.
NON-LOCAL PICKS
Full playlist here
Willi Carlisle, “The Mason Jar at the Center of the World”
Modernist poetry fans and recovering English majors will recognize the title of the first single from Carlisle’s upcoming album The Universal Bubba, produced by Tyler Childers and featuring Childers’s band the Food Stamps, as a Wallace Stevens reference. Musically it’s a loose jam; lyrically its as historical-minded as we’ve learned to expect from Carlisle, as in, “Grandaddy died for this land, he might've killed a hundred men/Nobody ask, nobody say, if we're better off in this way.”
Miranda Lambert, “Till the Going’s Gone”
I have slight reservations about Lambert when she’s in lady-drifter mode, but it’s a more attractive pose then fella-drifter, for sure, and she navigates this country disco two-step with “Everybody’s Talkin’” trappings with expected poise. Then again, as I never tire of pointing out, she’s quite easily the most consistent popular musician of the 21st century.
Carly Pearce, “You Can Have Him”
A country aesthete’s dream as a songwriter, Pearce has an actual hit with Riley Green on the charts too. But she’s at her most winning when she assays classic country. Sample lyric: “If he asks ‘Your place or mine?’/You should say yours/’Cause his is still mine.” Is there a key change in the final chorus? Oh you know it, pal.
Price’s timely new “protest mixtape” Days of Unrest joins inexhaustible titles like “Deportee” (with a nicely weathered Joan Baez joining in) and “Maggie’s Farm” to pointedly Spanish-language jams both new and traditional. But this anti-presidential Blaze Foley cover is the one that gets me. Yeah, it was written about Reagan, but when Price rips into the chorus, you’ll care as little as she does.
Jess WIlliamson, “Goodbye to All That”
The album Williamson recorded with Katie Crutchfield as Plains in 2022 really toned up her songwriting, and she’s been on a streak ever since. The lead single from her upcoming album, A Mile South of Heaven, has a title inspired by Joan Didion and this very Williamsonian lyric: “I love you and I’m leaving.” She sure seems to leave what she loves a lot, a good habit in a country singer.
Worst New Song
Jason Aldean, “Don’t Tell on Me”
My non-local picks inadvertently shaped up into an all-country and, excepting one queer man, all-female roundup here. So it’d only be fair to call out a twangy gal in this space. But while I’d love to shoot down “Boston,” from Stella Lefty (née Lefkofsky), the Groupon scion currently Gracie Abramsing her way to country stardom via a most certainly legit TikTok virality, the song is pleasant enough, and lord knows the children of billionaires could do worse damage to our culture. And speaking of the 1%, ain’t it just like America’s most famous newlywed to “return to her roots” with a Pixar tune? “I Knew It. I Knew You” is as good as a professional obligation needs to be and no more.
So I guess it’s time to blast the guys again. But there are so many fish and there’s so little barrel. Setting aside true stars like bad guy Morgan Wallen and good guy Luke Combs, the charts are full of gone-tomorrow’s like Josh Ross and “Hate How You Look” (after she dumps him), Tucker Wetmore and “Brunette” (about wanting to fuck one), and Cody Johnson and “The Fall” (Jelly Rollin’ addict-core with added homiletics), none of which earn more than the parenthetical allotted them here.
Which leaves us Jason Aldean. Possibly goaded on by his nitwit MAGA wife, he dipped his toes in the froth of culture war in 2023 with "Try That in a Small Town," an anthem for tough guys everywhere who are afraid to visit those terrifying cities that effete wimps like me somehow effortlessly live complete unmurdered lives in. But Aldean's music is typically mud-standard arena-country like this. The country greats sing about heartbreak with a sense of transcendent doom, placing themselves beyond the reaches of our sympathy. But Aldean whines like if he makes you feel bad enough you'll buy him another round, call him a Lyft, or suck his dick.
Wanna get a local song considered for the playlist? To make things easy on both of us, email keith@racketmn.com with MONDAY PLAYLIST in the subject header. (Don’t, as in do NOT, DM or text: If I’m in a good mood, I’ll just ask you to send an email; if I’m in a bad mood I’ll just ignore it.)
