Another Holiday season is well underway. While the world burns down around us, you’re probably scrambling to get gifts for people as the steady churn of capitalism continues unabated. By now, every single public place you enter is likely playing the same ten or so Christmas songs non-stop at a deafening volume. The bells and saccharine messages of joy are slowly eating away at your already diminished brain cells. It’s natural to want an escape.
Fortunately, artists are still making and releasing timeless songs that don’t feature sentient snowmen or radioactive reindeer. Here are a few you can put on as you drive to, like, ten different places to find a super specific gift before eventually giving up and ordering it on Amazon like a heartless, soulless monster.
Adrianne Lenker “Ruined”
Few things are certain in this life: Death, taxes, and the indisputable fact that Adrianne Lenker is not of this mortal world. Including her work with Big Thief, Lenker has released ten albums worth of material in just under eight years’ time. Any ordinary person in her position would be forgiven for taking at least a year off, but Lenker is far from ordinary. Her new single “Ruined” – from her yet-to-be-announced fifth solo album – is a haunting washed out and piano-driven ode to a fresh love, though – in typical Lenker fashion – the themes feel more cosmic on the outset. Perhaps if you could pen a song this masterful, your ex would finally take you back.
TWRP “Ladybug”
Ignore your seasonal depression and mounting problems for a couple of minutes, it’s time to fucking dance. At least that’s what our Managing Editor keeps screaming to her in-office mirror while blasting TWRP’s latest foray into future-pop ad-nauseam. She’s not wrong to do so, either. Between the infectious slap-bass, bitchin’ guitar solos, and melty vocoder vocals, hearing this song upwards of twenty times a day is the closest many of our writers have come to unabashed happiness in months.
IDLES “Grace”
The latest single from UK’s genre-defying quintet IDLES has arrived, bearing quite the influence from previous tourmates LCD Soundsystem. ‘Grace’ sees the band carrying on the pop experimentation that flooded their last LP ‘Crawler’ but with markedly more satisfying results. Crooning atop a droning drum machine loop, with swirling synths and phasers that wouldn’t sound out of place on even the most monumental early 2000s dance-punk album, it bites at nostalgia as it paves a sonic way forward for the band’s ever-changing sound.
Laura Jane Grace “Cuffing Season”
Laura Jane Grace’s latest offering ‘Hole In My Head’ isn’t due out for another two months and change. Based on your insatiable impatience, that may as well be ten years from now. Not to worry! Grace has released yet another single, ‘Cuffing Season,’ to help tide you over. Much like the first single ‘Dysphoria Hoodie,’ the track finds Grace proving how intensely she can perform without a roaring backup band punctuating her bombastic vocal delivery. While we’re champing at the bit to hear more of her drumming skills, this one still has us yearning for the pit.
Joanna Sternberg “Without You”
As if their recent album ‘I’ve Got Me’ wasn’t enough to bowl everyone over into a cathartic state of melancholy bliss, Joanna Sternberg has been steadily releasing new singles. Their most recent, “Without You,” is a sweetly satisfying jazz romp complete with Sternberg’s excellent lyricism and penchant for melody. There’s even scatting! It’s such a joyous track that you probably won’t even notice it’s about the dangers of codependent relationships until well into the fifth play-through.
Sweet Pill “Chewed Up”
You now have a new favorite emo band and it’s Sweet Pill. After making waves with last year’s fantastic debut, ‘Where the Heart Is,’ the band is continuing to expand their already massive sound. Their most recent single, ‘Chewed Up,’ is a journey through nearly every hidden corner of the emo genre at large, starting off intensely and mathy before breaking down into a dreamy half-time blissfest. Each twist and turn is bolstered by Zayna Youssef’s powerhouse vocal delivery. Try not to sing along too loud to this one in the car, that’s no place to pass out.
The Killers “Spirit”
The Killers just released a Greatest Hits album, coming as a shock to all who read the plural form of the word ‘Hit.’ It’s a pretty stunning display of power-pop triumph and also includes a brand-new song. If our ears don’t receive us, ‘Spirit’ sounds like it could have been plucked from the same sessions as ‘Hot Fuss.’ It’s a suitable addition seeing as that album might as well have been repackaged as the retrospective hits collection if we’re being honest with ourselves. Before you ask: Yes, we’ve heard ‘Sam’s Town.’ Everybody knows that album was more about vibes than it was about hits, you moron.
Bright Eyes “Christmas In Prison” (John Prine Cover)
Look, we know we’re helping you avoid Christmas songs, but this one barely counts. There’s nothing quite as sad as a holiday-themed Bright Eyes track, which makes it no surprise that Conor Oberst has managed to make a jovial John Prine tune about incarcerated yuletide sound more somber than a funeral dirge. That’s not to say it’s bad, in fact far from it. It’s an incredibly touching effort, but let’s just say the addition of John Prine’s actual monologue from the track was a wise choice and a much-needed lift here.
Just in case these eight songs weren’t enough to soothe your Bing Crosby-induced white-hot rage, we’ve compiled these and a whole bunch of others in an ever-growing playlist. It’s updated weekly, or whenever we feel like it, so you’ll never run out of new music to bitch about. Click here to save and listen. If we get to 100 likes we might start putting good songs on it for a change!
From 2005 to 2010, Chicago, Illinois’ The Audition released four high-quality post-hardcore-adjacent full-length studio albums for Victory Records, but their sophomore LP, “Champion,’ is without question or hesitation their most superior effort, and producer Mark “Bleed Clarity” Trombino of Drive Like Jehu and Nicolas Winding Refn, also known as Jang’s, movie-film “Drive” brought the best out of the band sonically with a rockin’ R&B tinged release for people who want Maroon 5 to rock like Armor For Sleep. Even though a song title like album opener “Basbhat” would likely get a band canceled today, The Audition could successfully argue that said acronym means something else, or isn’t an acronym at all. Sadly, shortly after the also underrated “Great Danger,” the band’s fourth album altogether and for Victory Records, The Audition split up.
Progressive metal fans seemingly vouch for Raleigh, North Carolina’s more than technically proficient Between the Buried and Me weekly in all corners of the internet, but we wish that aggressive music fans outside of that uber-niche technical dorky circle were exposed to the band, and especially this six-song nearly hour-long effort “The Great Misdirect.” In an act of epic grandeur, half of this LP consists of songs longer than eleven minutes and three seconds, and not a second is wasted, which is commendable for bands with much shorter compositions too. Producer Jamie King deserves his flowers for his hard work on this record, many other BTBAM albums, He Is Legend, and Will “I Heart Chris Rock” Smith’s “I Am Legend.” “The Great Misdirect” is Between the Buried and Me’s fifth full-length album and happily the band has released five more since, several being sequels to originals that they created.
BoySetsFire, your favorite band’s favorite band, formed in the bitter Northeastern region of the USA in 1994, the year that punk rock broke and went mainstream, and released their second album “After the Eulogy” six years later. The band had several labels that they called home across their career, but Victory got lucky by showcasing this record, their best effort, and in a literally spoken request, you all need to take a deep dive into this band’s career right now if you previously missed out, but knowing you crazy rock and roller hip hepcat positive music fans, you already have done so! The band also toured with another act that we are highlighting, Snapcase, and what we would’ve given to be a fly on the wall for some of those dates would offend even your troll of a sister-in-law, Marda.
It’s quite a tossup as to whether Deadguy’s inclusion is more underrated as far as underration goes than what is listed two entries down’s (The Forecast) but there is zero dispute as to which of the ten albums here has the best title; spoiler alert – it is this one, the perfectly named only album in Deadguy’s collection, “Fixation on a Co-Worker.” New Jersey, and specifically, New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been a breeding ground for influential aggressive rock acts in the scene or whatever you want to call it like Lifetime, the aforementioned Thursday, The Bouncing Souls, and Take That, and Deadguy is no exception. Also, it only took one, yes, one, album from the band to catalyze and be at the center of the mathcore, yes, mathcore, movement apparatus with adept peers like Converge, Coalesce, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Barry Gibb.
If you read a hardcore zine in the mid-90s, you likely stumbled upon an ad or piece on Syracuse, New York, home of Destiny USA formerly known as the Carousel Mall’s, Earth Crisis. Sadly, we rarely see this influential band namechecked in 2023 unless it is on a fill-in easycore bassist’s white pointable lyric hoodie. Also, if you prefer some straight in your edge and some Seitain over Wagyu, EC has some positive and affirming words for you, albeit in a growling fashion. Earth Crisis has eight studio albums as of now, but none are as powerful as their debut “Destroy the Machines” and Victory Records will forever rule because of its inclusion; we still can’t believe that it has been nearly THIRTY years since the concise ten-track metalcore masterpiece hit stores. The wrath of sanity will never be the same.
Peoria, Illinois’ The Forecast is likely the lone band you didn’t know about on next year’s When We Were Young festival lineup that is playing their “hit” album front to back, and that’s ok, but you should know better. The band’s unique vocal and genre blends were showcased in 2006 with “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen,” but sadly not enough to stand out amongst the scene as a whole. If you like the early-aughts Vagrant Records lineup like .moneen., The Anniversary, The Get-Up Kids, and Matisyahu, then The Forecast and their Clint Eastwood-esque album cover is for you! If not, your taste sucks as much as your eventual unoriginal troll-like comment on our social media pages, and we demand a fistfight FOR our fathers and WITH your sons… May you one day carry this band’s legacy into your home, cities, states, and countries!
Some may say that Long Island, New York’s The Reunion Show walked hard so that Motion City Soundtrack could run fast. However, while we don’t completely disagree, MCS doesn’t have the singer from LI third-wave ska-punk legends Edna’s Goldfish in their lineup, so they’ll always take an “L” here, and we aren’t taking any further questions ON the matter, or, anything else FOR that matter. Back to TRS: Sadly the band only released one EP via Law of Inertia Records, and this particular LP, “Kill Your Television,” through Victory Records, before hanging their collective hats and morphing into the also good, but not as great keyboard-filled Action Action. The Reunion Show also toured with bands like Midtown, Fall Out Boy, Recover, and Big Daddy Kane in the early-aughts, so the cred police have been behind the band for two decades, so join the bandwagon!
The fact that The Sleeping’s sophomore LP and first for Victory Records, “Questions And Answers,” wasn’t one of the more successful post-hardcore efforts from the aughts is still a tragedy, but we feel that it was handicapped in the way that it didn’t come out two or three years earlier, when the boom was at its height. They just ended up staying behind; sigh. We’re speaking loud and clear here, so don’t hold back any of your well-informed and thought-out opinions in the comments even if you strongly disagree, because we know that you will. On a sad note, The Sleeping paid tribute to Victory Records labelmates Bayside’s late drummer John “Beatz” Holohan, who tragically was killed in a van accident out on tour, via their song “Heart Beatz” on “Questions And Answers”.
Easily the coolest album cover here, which also echoes some of Hot Water Music’s early LPs via No Idea Records, highlights Buffalo, New York’s Snapcase’s sophomore LP “Progression Through Unlearning” belongs on every underrated ‘90s aggressive rock act DSP playlist. It says a lot that the majority of the bands listed here grew up in the freezing cold, and one can hear their frozen angry hearts in each song’s subtext and execution, especially on this one; screw you. Anyway, revered/talented producer Steve Evetts, who also sat behind the boards for Saves the Day’s breakout “Through Being Cool,” The Dillinger Escape Plan’s debut “Calculating Infinity,” the aforementioned Deadguy’s “Fixation on a Co-Worker, and Ashlee Simpson’s “Autobiography.” Snapcase subsequently released two more full-length LPs and broke up, but reformed.
Formed in the late-90s, our last entry here, the post-hardcore masterminds and chemists known as Spitalfield released their debut studio album “Faster Crashes Harder” in 2001, signed with Victory Records in 2002, and put out their sophomore LP “Remember Right Now” just one year later. Fun fact and quick note: bands in this genre in the 00s reference car crashes ALL OF THE TIME, but we digress. Anyway, Spitalfield is for fans of emo-adjacent acts Hidden In Plain View, The Juliana Theory, Further Seems Forever, and Jennifer Love Hewitt, and “Remember Right Now” is an all killer no filler record and if you got a chance to watch them play it in its entirety in this year of our lord, you must have felt quite alive those days; that ending was stolen from some great writer named Mark Rose… Stop doing bad things!
Obviously dead last. Krampus is the guy who does Santa’s dirty work and he’s never given a gift in his centuries-long life unless you count a birch rod to the face. Krampus isn’t someone you want to see on your best day, let alone fresh off the heels of a drunk driving rampage that caused $96,000 in property damages and 14 injuries that made the news in 3 states.
This lusty, giant-headed goat-skinned Italian creature is not to be confused with Krampus, but will also be of little help to you. As the tradition goes, villagers lull the Badalisc into a trap with a young maiden, and then he spills the whole town’s secrets in the form of a rhyming poem. Well, good luck rhyming “Destroyed a Starbucks” with “Narrowly avoided running over an elderly woman despite his best efforts” you goat-snitch bastard!
Santa at his most pious and non-secular is unlikely to be any help to you. He is the patron saint of, among other things, children, sailors, and archers, each of whom you injured in your drunken joyride. He is also the patron saint of repentant thieves, so maybe if you can convince him that you’re sorry you robbed that archer of his right arm, who knows? Seriously though what the hell was that archer doing in the middle of the road that night?
No! What are you an idiot? How is an idea going to give you a PS5? We’re trying to play Spider-Man 2, not wax poetic over gushy holiday sentiment. Don’t waste our time.
The name is French for “Father Christmas,” though he also goes by “Papa Noel” or, “Daddy Christmas” if you nasty. As a Frenchman he has a pretty lax attitude toward drinking and finds our American drunk driving laws to be oppressive, so he’s with you. Unfortunately, he only leaves gifts in shoes that are left by the fire filled with carrots for his mule, so unless your shoe is big enough to fit a sick-ass PS5, your chances are slim.
He’s exactly like Père Noël, but Cajun style! That is to say, he delivers gifts out der oun da Bayou in a boat that is drawn by a team of 8 alligators. In other words, there is no way that dude is sober, and he doesn’t give a damn about your DUI. He doesn’t have the same shoe-sized gift restrictions as his namesake, but unfortunately, anyone traveling by gator boat is likely behind the times. We hear he’s still giving out N64s.
He does not forgive you for drinking too much alcohol and getting behind the wheel that night. He just doesn’t understand why you had to get all liquored up when you could have enjoyed the rich taste of an ice-cold Coca-Cola. Whether it’s classic, cherry, or any of their caffeine and calorie-free varietals, nothing pairs better with the moments of our lives worth celebrating than a Coca-Cola. (bottle pop sound, glug glug noise) Aaaahhh.
Upwards of 90% of robotic Santas go berserk and try to kill you. It probably won’t have anything to do with the fact that you were going 75mph the wrong way in a school zone per se, but unless that roboSanta has a PS5 in its chest (which would be dope!) your chances are slim.
Father Christmas and Santa Claus have become sort of synonymous in recent centuries, but back in the day, Father Christmas was the personification of Christmas itself. He’s an elemental avatar, like Swamp Thing, only with Christmas instead of plants. Unfortunately, he has no connection to gift-giving of any kind. He’s all about feasting and merry-making, which of course means drinking. He certainly won’t judge you, but when it comes to playing Spider-Man 2 you’re shit out of luck here.
The Dutch O.G. who puts the Saint Nick in Santa, Sinterklaas is no stranger to mistakes. The whole “Black Pete” thing went on way too long. Unfortunately, the forgiveness of your DUI notwithstanding, he can’t give you a PS5 because in the Netherlands Christmas already happened on December 6th! If only you had been busted for the drunk driving you did weeks ago, you might have started asking sooner!
Ugh, goddammit, the Hungarian Santa is another useless shoe guy who pretty much just leaves candy and finishes his rounds by December 6th. Curse you, bishop of Myra!
He also had his licence taken away and also doesn’t have a PS5 but thinks having one would be rad. Basically, he’s exactly like you only smellier and dressed like Santa. And just all-around worse.
The Santa of Texas is the latest incarnation of the jolly old gift giver. We’ll say your odds are 50/50 with Cowboy Kringle. It’s all about how you frame it. Instead of saying “I was recklessly driving under the influence and I hurt a lot of people,” try saying “I got my license cancelled by the woke-mob.”
The “Daddy Christmas” of Brazil is pretty much exactly like the American Santa, only he gives gifts through windows instead of chimneys because there aren’t a ton of chimneys in Brazil. He’s also notably sympathetic, so we’ll put him a notch above Santa Prime, but honestly, it’s hard to sympathize with someone who kept shouting “Points!” every time they drunkenly ran over something.
Yup, just your traditional old-school Santa. He’s sort of an amalgamation of every Santa on this list, so, lot of ins, lot of outs, lot of what have yous’. As the most Hallmarky interpretation of old Saint Nick, he is capable of forgiving your vehicular rampage and getting you that PS5, but you’ll have to work for it. We’re talking super grand gesture here, like adopting some of those kids you displaced when you crashed into that orphanage. Honestly, maybe not worth the effort.