February

Welcome to the second installment of Old Town Roundup! This month was defined by New York City, a lot of Charli XCX, and a surprising amount of country music.

16 CARRIAGES, Beyoncé 

During the Superbowl this past month, Beyoncé surprised everyone by dropping the first two singles off her new album, a country record currently known as Act II. The first of these is “Texas Hold ‘Em,” a classic country tune made for line-dancing the night away. But the second one, “16 Carriages,” is where the spirit of Beyoncé’s take on country music really shines. It’s been said that country is what you listen to when you have a broken heart. In this song, Beyoncé takes each of her own heartbreaks and weaves them into a ballad mourning the loss of what her life could have been if her career hadn’t taken off in the way that it did. It builds beautifully, rich with typical Beyoncé layered vocals and complex instrumentation. This one’s a little less classic country than “Texas,” but it instead feels like Beyoncé took country’s heart and her own soul and created a masterpiece. 

Swim Good, Frank Ocean

Early this month, I came across a Frank Ocean song on TikTok that I didn’t recognize. It stopped me in my tracks. I played the snippet on repeat for nearly 10 minutes. This song was like nothing of his I’d ever heard before; it was addicting. Unfortunately, it was “Trouble,” an unreleased track from one of his earliest projects. I wasn’t going to let that stop me–I learned how to add local files on Spotify just for this song. For the next week, it was on repeat all the time. Though coming in at only 1:43, I could play it on loop for half an hour on end, and I did. “Trouble” is the real entry on this list, but since most people don’t want to put in the work of downloading their own unreleased local files onto their listening service of choice, I also spent some time going through other old Frank Ocean tracks that can be found on streaming. My favorite of these was “Swim Good,” a classic Frank Ocean track about suicide by sea. Check it out if you want my most recent Frank Ocean pick, but I’d also highly encourage you to give the “Trouble” snippet a listen. 

Maktub, Gary Clark Jr.

Gary Clark Jr. is an artist I’ve encountered every so often for the last four years. I was first introduced to him when “This Land” (a protest epic about his place in America as a Black man) was nominated at the 2020 Grammy Awards, where he performed it in front of a mansion with barrels of fire accenting the scene. I thought he was pretty epic then, and although I never got around to listening to a full record of his, I’ve been keeping an eye on his releases since then. In late January, he released the first four tracks from his album JPEG RAW, which will be coming out on March 22nd. One of these was “Maktub,” an updated protest song that gets its title from the Arabic word for destiny. This one is much less raw and reactionary, instead choosing to act as a rallying cry for the new revolution. Gary Clark Jr. uses blues music to the best of its abilities as a vessel for social change, and honors its history by making sure it stays a part of the liberation of Black Americans today. I’ll be listening to his new album when it comes out, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in modern blues or rock music to do so as well. 

HOOLIGANG, Joey Valence & Brae

I spent a lot of my time during my trip to New York City listening to this song. I honestly have no idea where I came across it, which means the answer is probably the background of a TikTok somewhere. Whenever I visit New York, I find there are two sounds that feel like they fit the city best, which can be summarized as Lorde and the Beastie Boys. It’s pretty obvious that this song is a direct take on the latter, but the beat is addicting enough to be worth its own listen. It’ll be interesting to see where these kids go. 

Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth, Caroline Polachek

This song was part of the deluxe edition of Caroline Polachek’s sophomore album Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, which came out right in the middle of my NYC trip. Riding the subway to my favorite café while blasting new Caroline Polachek in my headphones has to be one of the best ways I’ve gotten to listen to music that I can remember. Many of the other bonus tracks are more experimental, but this one is an 80s synth-pop track originally done by Irish band/avant-garde theater troupe Operating Theater (which is exactly the kind of music that Caroline Polachek would be into). In this version, Polachek puts her sonic spin on it, as well as adding a spoken-word clip of some of the lyrics from her song “Blood and Butter.” I didn’t know it was a cover until I was researching for this list, because she makes it fit seamlessly into her catalog.

Tears, Charli XCX (feat. Caroline Polachek)

Caroline Polachek strikes again with her second entry on this list, although this one is from 2017 as part of Charli XCX’s highly regarded mixtape Pop 2. Though Polachek didn’t start releasing solo music under her real name until 2019, she can be found featured on other people’s projects with the credit as early as 2010. As perfectly as she fits on the song, “Tears” is a quintessentially Charli track. An A.G. Cook beat rich with synths and complete with 30 full seconds of screaming in the background is about as Pop 2 as it gets. Not only is it one of the best pop songs I’ve heard in recent memory, it also serves as a shining example of why Pop 2 was such a revolutionary project at the time. 

Fear and Friday's (Poem), Zach Bryan

To do a major genre 180°, Zach Bryan has become the first country artist I’ve really gotten into. I’ve flirted with country before, listened to a few albums here and there, but I haven’t found any country artist I like this much until now. Bryan is very much a modern country artist–not in the boyfriend-country-crossover-pop way, but in his openness to explore where his music can go. Despite that, he still manages to be one of the best embodiments of country’s heart and soul I’ve ever heard. He writes personally and honestly,  using his lyrics to explore his relationships with friends and family, his childhood, his military past, and his greatest fears. This is cemented in his choice to open his album with a spoken word poem that serves as an introduction to who he is. I’ve been exploring a lot of these kinds of introductory pieces lately, and “Fear and Fridays (poem)” is a stunning example.

Love Drought, Beyoncé 

After four years of having it on my list, I have finally listened to Lemonade. I find I agree with the commonly held opinion that it’s Beyoncé’s magnum opus. I would argue that the centerpiece of this is “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” a rage-filled rock track where she gets Jack White’s cosign in her vicious tearing apart of her unfaithful lover. However, as much as I could write about that track, I’d heard it a lot going in, and this list is about new music. Out of all the other songs on Lemonade, “Love Drought” is what caught my ear most–starting with the very beginning. The song opens on a beat with an incredible melody (made by Mike Dean, frequent Kanye collaborator) that’s impossible not to pay attention to. Lemonade is a journey through the stages of her grief over her husband’s infidelity, and with “Love Drought” serving as track 7, she’s made it past anger and denial and has landed deep into bargaining. She spends the song asking questions that she then finds herself answering, ultimately in an attempt to convince herself that they can move past this, opening with the bomb-dropping “10 times out of 9 I know you’re lying/But 9 times out of 10 I know you’re trying.” It is Beyoncé at her most vulnerable, even musically–you won’t find any belting on this track. Instead, it’s filled with whispery layered vocals and verses that feel more like speaking than singing. It seems fitting to open this collection of songs with “16 Carriages” and close it with “Love Drought,” as one is a reflection on Beyoncé's past struggles and one was born from deep in them. 

Drop 7, Little Simz

This isn’t going to be a formal entry, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Little Simz’s Drop 7. It was the final cut from this list, only because I couldn’t find a singular song I liked more than the others, but it’s a phenomenal little project I’ve spent a lot of time listening to this month and I would highly encourage checking it out!

how i'm feeling now, Charli XCX

Although I listened to this album when it first came out in 2020, it was a case of right-album-wrong-time. For the last few months, it’d been coming up again and again as something I needed to revisit. On my last night in New York City, I decided to take the train by myself up to the Bronx (shout out BAAD!) to see a presentation of queer dance (featuring songs from queer cinema) that a past dance teacher of mine was part of. They were doing a duet with a friend of theirs, and as they came out on stage, I saw the screen update with the song title: a track called “party 4 u” by Charli XCX, from the movie Bottoms. It was a phenomenal performance, and if the full video ever gets released I promise I’ll come back and link it here after I watch it 400 times. On the train back home, I queued up the song to see what it was from. I discovered it was a track off of how i’m feeling now and it felt like destiny. The next day, I listened to the album as soon as I woke up on the way to the airport. And then I listened to it again as I waited for boarding. And then a third time on the plane. This album has been addicting in a way no other has, and if you were wondering, “party 4 u” is, in fact, my most-played song of February 2024. I cannot get enough of it. 

This is a hyperpop record, but in a much less hyper way–I once described it as “100 gecs if they had friends,” by which I mean hyperpop that feels like it’s actually made to listen to. It’s also very much the version of Pop 2 that would have been made if Charli had been left alone in her house for 6 weeks to create it, which is exactly what happened. This was the first quarantine record I remember, coming out on May 15th, 2020. It’s very much an exploration of what Charli’s mind looks like in its purest state, with every song (except for, actually, “party 4 u”) being written entirely during those first 6 weeks. For being from the worst time in most of our generation’s lives, this album is surprisingly full of joy. Just the kind of paradoxical music you’ll find most often made during times of tragedy: when everything is horrible, all we can do is imagine what it will be like when it gets better.

you can find this month's playlist on spotify here.