soakrates

I agree with this but hear me out: most heavy metal is basically pop music already.

12-bar-blues structure, lots of big hooky choruses, songs that are generally 3:30-4 minutes long and almost always in 4/4 or some other meter that's easy to follow, etc. even a lot of extreme metal is structured this way.

it's fine! pop music is fine! pop music can also be incredibly sophisticated, which artists like Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder, Scott Walker and like a million j-pop songwriters have been proving for decades.

from the look of things, I really missed having a place to write about tunes. this was only meant to be some links and videos, but it ended up being uh, a bit more.

anyway, while I find that year-end ranking lists become more useless with time, I'd still like to share several of the many releases this year that I thought were really great. this may or may not become a series.

(these are all available on Spotify but I've included links to where you can buy digital versions of them because y'know fuck Spotify)