We remember back when the EOYs were all posted post-Christmas. But not anymore! No surprises here: So far we're seeing lots of extra early, extra rushed, and extra extra boring bullshit.
We had a 2 hour drive earlier today, and so we said fuck it and breezed through P4k's "100 Best Songs of 2020" playlist. The process of wading through 20-ish songs we already knew and another 80-ish hookless plods generated some legit anxiety. It would be nice if any of them eventually built to a chorus or included something memorable. But no. Nothing. There was plenty of hot fire throughout 2020, and no big surprises here -- pitchfork ignored literally all of it. Even the Earl Sweatshirt deep cut bored us.
Anyway, mid-December seems like as good a time as any for a crescent fresh edition of The New Shit Radar, since listicle season succeeds in burying the December drops year after year. Here's some recent non-holiday-related stuff we're actually excited about:
Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou Covers Cranberries Song That We Forgot Existed
Oh yeah, that one. At the time, we didn't think much of it because it really does sound like "Zombie II: The Return Of Zombie," but in hindsight, and within this context, it's now probably one of our favorite tracks of the year.
MF Doom Spits Bars Of Fire On New GTA
DOOM's 2020 worldly contributions seemed to kick some ass across the board.
Def Lep's One-Armed Drummer Voted Best In The World
Maybe the voters were super bummed about the Def Lep / Motley Crue tour getting postponed once again. Rick Allen was the only one-armed drummer to make the cut, as far as we could tell. Three-armed drummer Tommy Lee placed in the top 10. Read the results here: https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/def-leppards-rick-allen-named-best-rock-drummer-in-the-world
The Gagmen Release First LP
Andrew WK, Aaron Dilloway, and current Wolf Eyes dudes formed a weirdo supergroup. Good album!
Stove's Surprise Bandcamp-Day Drop Is V.Nice
We probably shouldn't be referring to the project as "Stove" since that is technically a full band, but yeah. This was a nice surprise drop for sure. Catch it:
Editrix Drop "Chelsea" Ahead of Feb Release on EIS
Wendy Eisenberg's new band prepares to melt brains in 2021.
Glitterer's New Song Sounds Like Glitterer Except Newer
Are you sure?
Bee Gees Documentary Coming To HBO
Actually it already is on HBO now as of last night. Whoops. Our 30 day HBO Max subsription ends tomorrow at 9PM so I guess we better get on this. https://www.vulture.com/2020/12/the-bee-gees-hbo-documentary-review.html
Eyehategod Return With "High Risk Trigger"
New album coming in the Spring!
Somerset Thrower Drop 2nd LP
We are feeling this one. Grungey emocore.
After Hours Top 10 Most Played -- Week Of December 1st
Probably the final After Hours FM weekly list of 2020. The end of year results will be tallied and posted next week. In the meantime, here's the songs with the most plays from last week:
As Bray Wyatt seized responsibility to turn up the horrorcore to 11 and usher his re-brand as The Fiend, he realized his previous entrance from The Jesus and Mary Chain would not be easy to follow. Wisely selected, Code Orange surpassed all expectations with bludgeoning grace. But our favorite between these two might be Darby Allin's "I Fell," arguably the best Marilyn Manson jam of the 2010s (fake Manson or otherwise). In the highly unlikely event of Darby and Fiend facing each other in the ring, we'd sadly place 4 to 5 odds in favor of The Fiend, although an upset would not disappoint.
Blood Incantation's "Great Gig In The Sky," the growing meditative mid-LP noise crusher. In Jayson Greene's review, he quotes the band saying it was “improvised 'on psychedelics over a period of several months' [evolving] entirely in unexpected leaps, dissolving into synthesizer washes and backmasked guitars and then plunging ahead, again, stirring up the primordial ooze."
Without hyperbole, our hopes for the Hero follow up were higher than Obama's cocaine blunts on a sunny Sunday 4:20. This means the hopes were very high. Criminally underrated (as was the case with far too many 2010s LPs), Hero is a rare "11 songs 11 singles" record that happened maybe once-per-year in the 2010s. In the meantime, we pretended "The Middle" didn't suck and maintained optimism. Now that she has an actual hit, this could potentially lead to huge crossover jams. We're gonna give Maren benefit of the doubt here. She's talented enough to write another Hero, so it must be the label's fault. "Can you make these songs suck more?" The power ballad title track sadly ended up as Girl's best song, eventually spinning on a 2-3 day loop in our brain-chemical-controlled playlist, so that should count for something. ("The Bones" is also fine and would have placed in the 101-200 range.)
Time once again to reiterate how many years since summer radio drives didn't suck. Since we recall Summer 2013 so fondly, we're guessing it might have been the last decent summer for Top 40. It was the summer of "#Beautiful" and "The Way," Mariah Carey's final summer song and Ariana Grande's breakthrough single. We're guessing Mariah's diva/narcissist tendencies might prevent any officially cosigned "passing of the torch" moment, but Ariana Grande's singles have filled the void ever since, peaking in 2018 with "No Tears Left To Cry." Thank U Next dropped so quickly afterwards, leaving the summer radio landscape wide open. Social House saw their opportunity to capitalize with an obvious "Thank U Next" ripoff, and thank the good lord they did. We needed it.
Hot challenge: Locate the true 3/4 waltzes of chart hits. Apparently, Ed Sheeran had a huge hit about two years ago with a song called "Perfect" that was the 15th biggest song of the decade. We love "Kiss From A Rose" and "Iris." We do not love Edwin McCain or Lifehouse. An old Paramore single called "The Only Exception" came up. 
Fun game: Sing 
Scissor Sisters dude sings this one. We forget which one he is. Pretty sure we liked this better than Like Clockwork or Villians. We're curious to know, what exactly are the 11 or 12 people involved in this project so busy with? What was preventing them from carving out an extra week or two so that the first Desert Sessions record since 2003 didn't have to be 7-and-a-half songs long? Where's the love? Can they do another one of these ASAP?
Maneka has played "Time In The Barrel" live only once, at their album release show last July. Can they bring it back? No one minds that the one little part sounds like "Drain You." In fact, the jam holds up, especially the free noise section in the middle. A Rick and Morty reference regarding cancel-culture may or may not have influenced the song title and lyrics, although we had trouble locating a more specific origin. No disrespect to Jim Croce. Meanwhile, Bojack (the character, not the show) got sentenced to some literal-ass barrel time, with Princess Carolyn erroneously theorizing that "people forget." [Kobe rant redacted.] Yeah anyway... Maneka! Great band! Serious bangers! Open up the pit!
2019 will be remembered as the only year when rap/country hybrids didn't make eardrums bleed. [The] latest and possibly final submission to this narrow 5-6 song canon arrived a few weeks ago from none other than Lil B The Based God, deep in his Hunchback of BasedGod mixtape. 
The hot takes are in. Mostly plagiarized from the pod. 
This would've been a lock for Top 20 had Steve Lacy remembered to write and record an ending. The bridge builds some nice momentum, and then the song just ends? That's it? Anyway, let's talk about the positive side to crack. What about the good side? We're making this up as we go: The four points on the funk-spectrum are Cocaine, Weed, Satan, and Jesus. 
No big surprise: The #1 rock radio song of the 2010s was not by Imagine Dragons nor Portugal The Man, but in fact 
We had a lot of fun this past Fall seeing so many "guitar solos are bad" poptimists publicly losing their shit over the long version of "Not." Now THAT'S how you play an anti-solo, arranged to arrive at the correct moment for the perfect length with all the dopeness one should expect from all those "wrong" notes. It's one of those infrequent moments from the past few years of music that zoomers and millennials didn't realize they wanted or needed, arguably expressing just as much without lyrics as Adrienne Lenker could gather throughout the song's first section, and securing a lock for the highest placement just outside our Top 20. (Yes, there's a 4-minute edit with no solo. Maybe their management suggested this to ensure more scrobbles, but otherwise it's unclear why this exists.)
This is the one that goes "I hate a-youuuu". Some people need to hear that they're hated. 
Is the world prepared for technological armageddon? The digital dark age? Literal #breaktheinternet? One day we'll wake up, and it's all gone. Where's my Spotify? Where's my tweets? Where's my HelloFresh? The stock market commits suicide on live TV. The fires begin. Nuclear explosions in the distance. Watch yourself melt. Watch your friends melt. Watch your family melt. Watch net neutrality melt. Watch Bitcoin melt. Watch Google melt. Watch reddit melt. Watch clickbait melt. Watch paywalls melt. Watch your follower count melt. Watch the blue checkmarks melt. Watch ad revenue melt. Sorry we forgot to follow back. If it makes any difference, it's all been merely a blip in the history of time as we await the sun's engulfing of all we'll ever know.
We'd like to dedicate this entry to the "leanback" dude and his seriously big fingers. // Two jams of pure fire arriving via "homies of the blog;" in the past, we've blurbed of musical acquaintances in a similar manner who may or may not have Googled themselves (or their band name), discovered this blog, figured out who we are, and rightfully placed us into the "garbage asshole" category for tapping into our strangest ambien-induced auditory responses, most of which we don't remember writing due to light amnesia. // "Big Fingers" tends to loop in our heads for days; this was especially true last Fall thanks in no small part to its intense fiery combustion, straightforward uncryptic lyrics, and creepingly earwormy angular riffs. // The growing pensive energy in "Never Nowhere" downshifts into 3rd gear, climbing and brewing. Meeting an unexpected wild acceleration, the halfway checkpoint goes full throttle. Vin Diesel howls in excitement; The Rock just smirks in preparation for layin' the smackdown. // This is why it's probably uncomfortable when getting into the "conflict of interest" portions of the big chungus of 2019. Why did Maneka's jam initiate this big budget visual? In a similar brainwave, we're certain the music licensing for the Marvel cinematic universe botched what could have been their only perfect sync by neglecting 
We would like to dedicate #16 to Crispin Glover whose birthday is April 20th which means that his birthday will be happening for a whole month in 2020 since this will be the only year when 4/20 is a month-long celebration. In an interview in 2011, Back to the Future co-star Michael J. Fox said, "Crispin isn't crazy, just excitable." Crispin is your density; "Destiny" represents a confluence of production references, namely (Sandy) Alex G and Arthur Rizk, affiliate of Red Death, Power Trip, and Code Orange. This might help explain how Glitterer gets a free pass as one of those 8 or 9 non-hardcore bands lucky enough to join multiple hardcore touring packages (ie Young Guv, Tony Molina, Nudie Mag, Lil Ugly Mane, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal). Speaking of back-in-time, "Destiny" clocks in around 2:20-ish, placing it among the project's lengthiest and most realized jams.
An immediate infectious summer jam, "In Your Head" also arrived equipped with a titular reminder of the exact spot where it got firmly stuck for six entire weeks. Whoever said it sounds like young Sade fronting Pavement was half-correct. Again, we're nearly a decade since Yuck, and poptimists simply can't get it through their thick fucking heads that electric guitars existed before or after the '90s. It's like they refuse to accept that any halfway-loud guitar-based verse-chorus rock music has any identity within the 2010s, that it all must be derivative of a bygone era. Seriously, listen to that snare drum tone, and find us the '90s band that sounds like this. They don't exist. We'll accept "young Sade fronting some moderately rockin' Sub Pop band from 2012-2015." Sure, that works fine.
A colossal wave of Weezer-worship bands felt unavoidable in the wake of Nada Surf's "Popular" and Nerf Herder's "Van Halen." Sure enough, 1998 marked a post-Pinkerton explosion highlighted by Ozma's classic Songs of Audible Trucks and Cars CDR release. Whether we like it or not, each passing year adds another 99 records to this pile, typically ranging from bland to lackluster and shipped to college radio from promoters with an apparently unlimited supply of "RIYL Weezer" stickers. And each year, the debris of bland unjustly buries one or two genuinely great and often unheard releases. One of these was 
Full disclosure: This is a lie. The actual #10 is "For No One," the "penultimate" track appearing before "Marijuana Trench" on Holy Serpent's Endless LP. We decided to put "Marijuana Trench" instead because it's a truly outstanding song title, but the jam to hear is "For No One," a much better song about bloodshot dragons ripping mad gravs of bong and exhaling the smoke of the gods. No need to light the flame with a lighter because dragons literally breathe fire and don't really require one aside "for kicks" aka the novelty of the human lighter. Don't believe that Hollywood bullshit; Dragons only know how to fly in slow motion, and they do participate in ganja. "You son of a bitch; I'm in." Also "penultimate" is one of those words that inarticulate people overuse to sound smart.
There might be some lyrical tricks that went over our heads, but we hear "Obsessed" as a decorative shrine. Inherently innocent by design, childhood obsessions are more fun than we realize until decades later, after confronted with weightier concerns. "Obsessed" marks yet another great example of an unheralded album highlight thanks to the same clueless poptimist music writers who preferred the singles without a guitar track. Between her earlier, frostier Soundcloud singles and the subsequent bloom springing from 2019's Keepsake LP, one might say "I gotta give it to Hatchie; yaknow, she really represented; she stepped it up" in a manner not dissimilar from the judges of 
Maybe it's just us and the other gen-x/millennial cusps, but perception through the space time continuum grew exponentially more fucked since right around the release of We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, not-so-coincidentally the first major album release within the 48 hours following the 2016 election of Doctor Professor -- an eternity ago, yet also uncomfortably recent. Three years later, "Combat" highlights uknowhatimsayin¿ -- arguably the LP under Q-Tip's direction that most closely resembles Tribe's imaginary 2019 follow-up, complete with Danny Brown's best uncanny impressions of Phife flowing into a few key insertions of Q-Tip and Consequence. DB's arguably more relevant now than ever, and his lol-bombs never quit: "I die for this shit like Elvis," "Got more pills than the Olsen twins." 
Ricky was a young boy. He had a heart of stone. He walked the streets a soldier. "I have two things to carry, one is the recycles bag and other is the little trash bag. We basically go around and people have their recycles out and they freak out, 'Hey, what are you doing, taking my recycles?' and it's like 'Hey, it's at the curb. We own it, not you.' Apparently there's a bit of a smell because of the recycles and there's fucking bees and hornets and wasps and shit everywhere." Ricky is covered in garbage juice because of the recycles. Fuckin way she goes. 
Speaking of redundancy, here comes Big Thief again rounding out their unprecedented 4-for-4: "Masterpiece" was our #17 in 2016, "Mythological Beauty" was our #7 in 2017, solo jam "Symbol" placed #9 in 2018, and now "UFOF" at #5 is their highest placement, arguably the hottest jam throughout their 4 LPs. As far as late decade dopeness is concerned, no one else in the light-indie/SiriusXMU/NPR spectrum can match or surpass the consistency of Big Thief's lead singles. The only real downside is that we no longer have anything noteworthy to say about this band that hasn't already been said on this blog or elsewhere. 
In 2008, literally every album review of M83's Saturdays = Youth compared "Kim and Jessie" to Molly Ringwald movies. Each subsequent year, a handful of acclaimed artists made equally bland attempts to raise the '80s nostalgia bar. The poptimist boners peaked in the wake of 1989's superficial resemblance of the actual summer '89, stealing thunder from E•MO•TION's botched promo campaign. As the decade progressed, it felt like indie-filmmakers understood the nuances of '80s aesthetic with more clarity than pop producers; take Turbo Kid for example, premiering at Sundance just a few months after 1989. It's a type of nostalgic art that's so painfully detailed that it's almost difficult to tell whether it's a genuine artifact of the era. This is also the case with "More Love," a song that Paula Abdul should probably cover for her unwarrented 2020s comeback. As Sedona's prior Soundcloud tracks stride towards the present, "More Love" marks her current apex of correctly nuanced vocal inflections and structural mastery, leaving us in heated anticipation of her foreshadowed follow-up EP.
Our #3 entry is dedicated to the great Slavoj Žižek, our official 2019 "Hunk Of The Year" and probably of the decade.
What a revelation: I just signed a deal at the mall. Young Baby Jesus CEO was just a regular at the local food court in uptown North Carolina when Interscope's A&R execs finally tracked him down. They ask, "Excuse me sir, are you DaBaby?" as they hand over a record label contract, a fancy ink pen, and one-million dollars in cash. This scenario might have seemed feasible if these were "Suge's" actual lyrics, which they are not. In recent interviews, his frequent shout outs to the late great Rick James did not seem especially suspect until 
Congrats to Beak> on earning their distinction as the only artist who twice placed as our Album Of The Year who then would later also receive Track(s) of the year. Apologies for the tie, but the two jams feel so thematically and texturally unified with this specific moment in history. Back in 2012, the similarly eerie