It’s been another week filled with new experiences, growth, and constant horrors. If you’ve been trudging through all of this without a good soundtrack, it’s no wonder you’ve been so despondent. It’s not really our place to judge, but we can’t stand seeing you like this. Here are six staff-picked songs to help turn your frown upside down or possibly just back into a neutral position.
Coheed and Cambria ‘Searching For Tomorrow’
The long-running front for selling comic books, Coheed and Cambria, announced their 11th album ‘The Father of Make Believe.’ Don’t worry, despite the title; this does not appear to be a prog-rock Christmas album, but rather a continuation of the band’s Amory Wars/Vaxis series. News of the album comes paired with the new single ‘Searching For Tomorrow,’ which finds the band dipping into their pop-prog bag a la ‘Favor House Atlantic’
Opeth ‘A Story Never Told’
Opeth’s latest masterpiece ‘The Last Will And Testament’ has been released and it already has fans in a frenzy. Some are calling it their best album since whatever their last album was. Upon listening, it’s not hard to imagine why. Over three decades into their career, Opeth still sounds fresh. ‘Last Will’ drives this point into the ground and offers something for fans of all eras of their storied career.
Glixen ‘Lick The Star’
If you’ve ever wanted to attend a sound bath performance but didn’t want your friends to ridicule you for months on end, Phoenix shoegaze up-and-comers, Glixen, might be for you. Their latest single ‘Lick The Star’ offers the dreamiest intro you’ve ever heard in your life before slamming you into a brick wall of fuzz. The track comes ahead of their newly announced EP ‘Quiet Pleasures,’ which we assume will save the genre once and for all.
Illuminati Hotties ‘December’ (Neck Deep cover)
Legendary pop-punk label, Hopeless Records, has been properly celebrating their 30th anniversary with their excellent singles series ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You.’ The series has already brought us a ton of great covers from the label’s roster, and this week we got one more. Illuminati Hotties have contributed a timely and excellent version of Neck Deep’s ‘December’ complete with exploding choruses and half-time breakdowns.
3GT ‘Watch the Clock’
White Reaper recently saw the departure of their rhythm section earlier in the year. Like many dealing with loss, lead singer Tony Esposito and keyboardist Ryan Hater decided to dance through it with a new side project. 3GT manages to combine the intensity of White Reaper’s frenetic rock sound with borderline EDM elements. It probably shouldn’t work, but it fucking shreds.
NOFX ‘The Decline’
Yesterday somehow marked the 25th anniversary of NOFX’s seminal 18 minute long opus ‘The Decline.’ While the track may have inspired countless other bloated and less necessary works from lesser artists, it also derailed countless band practices as bassists across the globe fruitlessly attempted to play some of the song’s most iconic lines. Rumor has it your estranged friend Greg finally nailed the part that’s ‘like, real high up on the neck’ but ‘forgot’ to hit the record button on his phone.
Trump has long considered The Smurfs to be dangerous communist infiltrators and therefore viewed their arch-nemesis Gargamel to be an ideal fit for Attorney General. A brief look at the dark wizard’s track record and lifestyle, however, soured him on the choice. In all of his years of trying Gargamel has yet to kill a single Smurf despite towering over them physically, plus he’s childless and lives alone in a dirty shack with a cat. Gargamel and J.D. Vance wouldn’t get on, and Trump has no time for infighting when he’s got an entire democracy to dismantle.
Not much is known about Dr. Claw and that’s exactly what Trump is looking for right now. He admires the way Claw operates from the shadows “like the Gestapo.” Trump was excited to become one of the few people to ever see his face, giving his team the out of claiming he would only meet on Zoom with the camera pointed at his sinister metal hand. Insulted, Trump vowed to increase funding to the Inspector Gadget program and moved on.
Trump was impressed with Burns not only as a fellow decrepit capitalist but as an innovator. He thought Burns’ plan to increase Springfield’s dependency on his nuclear power plant by blocking out the sun showed real moxie. He figured the two of them working together could finally find a way to stop the wind once and for all. The infatuation was short-lived. During the vetting process, certain questions came to light about the nature of his relationship with longtime assistant Waylon Smithers, prompting Trump to dismiss Burns as “one of those types.”
Say what you will about Trump’s callousness, he really seems to have a genuine soft spot for men with a history of violence against women. When he heard that Dick Dastardly had caught a bad rep from the liberal media for his penchant for tying Penelope Pitstop to the railroad tracks, he thought he would throw the guy a bone and offer him a job. Trump was also impressed with the way Dastardly blamed all of his failures on his subordinate, Muttley, a classic power move. It went downhill from there, however. By the end, Trump decided that a guy whose catchphrases include “Drat!” “Double Drat!” and “Curses, foiled again!” was simply not a winner. According to rumors, Dastardly is now being courted for a high-ranking position in the DNC.
It’s not clear if Trump was seriously considering Oroku Saki for the position, the truth is that a meeting with the Foot Clan leader has always been something of a white whale for Trump. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, he would frequently gripe about the ninja master’s elusiveness. “I know everyone in this city! Giuliani, Epstein, Crang… Why the hell won’t this Shredder bozo meet me face to face?!” Currently, he’s out of the running, but that could all change as several members of the Trump transition team are still tasked with sending a communication to Dimension X.
Trump’s initial thinking was “My supporters wear skulls, this guy is a skull, he should be the Secretary of Labor!” He has long held sympathy for the former Eternian despot, ever since Castle Greyskull was stolen from him by the Sorceress, whom, as Trump understands, is the head of Eternia’s liberal elite. His interest halted abruptly upon seeing a Skeletor positivity meme page. “Cancel all my calls to Eternia people, Skeletor has gone woke!”
Trump admires Mojo’s hard stance against notorious woke radicals like The Powerpuff Girls. Unfortunately, Mojo proved to be too much of a know-it-all for the incumbent President’s liking, (he’s already got Elon to deal with,) and he told his aids to cancel scheduling a sitdown with him before the second commercial break. About 20 minutes later he was heard shouting “Get Johnny Bravo on the horn!”
Elon is the only villain on the list Trump actually managed to meet with face to face, and boy did he regret it! Talk about annoying. There’s “cartoony” and then there’s this unbearable jackass. It quickly became apparent to Trump that suffering Elon’s company was barely worth the votes he illegally purchased, there was no way he was going to put him in a position where they would have to work together in any regularity. In the end, Trump gave Elon the “Daddy make work” position of The Department of Government Efficiency, which of course does not exist. This way Trump only needs to meet with him about twice a year and when he pitches things like “Let’s use Acme dynamite on trans athletes” he can say “Great idea champ, action that, put it on the fridge, whatever.”
Megatron’s story captivated Trump, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s a former socialist freedom fighter who saw the light, embraced strongman totalitarianism and literally transformed into a giant gun, basically a conservative folk hero. Once Trump heard Megatron complaining that the Matrix of Leadership was “stolen” from him by Optimus Prime, he knew they had to collaborate. He ordered his aids to make contact with Cybertron immediately. When they nervously protested that attempting contact with the alien robot planet could potentially embarrass the administration, Trump simply insisted “We should be friends with Cybertron.” They wound up telling Trump that Megatron simply wouldn’t take their calls. Infuriated, Trump declared “When those lug-heads run into another energon crisis they’ll get no aid from us!”
Of all the ludicrous picks Trump had before finally settling on real-life sex offenders and con artists, this one set his team on the biggest tailspin. At first when he started saying things like “I need the sort of generals Golobulus had, you know, Cobra Commander and Destro!” they thought he was simply using his trademark hyperbole. Nope. They soon had to reconcile with the fact that they worked for a man who not only believed G.I. Joe was real, but that the character he saw the most potential in was Cobra Commander. Not Duke, not Roadblock, not even the hillbilly guy with the rebel flag belt buckle, fucking Cobra, a foreign military leader with a history of terrorism on American soil. Eventually, they convinced him that the constitution, as it stood, would simply not allow him to appoint a foreign enemy commander to a cabinet position. Trump relented, but privately reached out to Project 2025 thinktank group The Heritage Foundation and urged them to see what they can do while some other “loyalist stooge” keeps the seat warm.
