“Paid Holiday” doesn’t strike one immediately as an offbeat song but not many songs by don’t get lemon do. The music video shows a man dressed like a character from a movie set in the Napoleon Dynamite universe and looking like it’s shot on Super-8. It fits the song about a guy living with delusions of low rent grandeur and constantly living a life of “adventure” unattached to obligations and somehow skating by on fantasies of a nomadic “lifestyle” thinking he’s living the high life on the cheap, going on until the wheels come off and dreaming of that life of being his own man with no expectations for himself than dubious luxury. It’s a way of being in which you have to tell yourself it’s what you want even if it’s ultimately unsustainable. And yet the song has a beautifully fuzzy melody and lends the depicted a soundtrack to his dreams of freedom and dignity. It’s an expansive synth pop song that like certain Wes Anderson movies the style brings a sense of romance to the unromantic and the contrast between the images of the video, the lyrics and the music is what sets the song apart from most other synth pop. Watch the video for “Paid Holiday” on YouTube and follow don’t get lemon at the links below.
Pulses of melody course through &Tilly and BlauDisS’s single “Chaotic Neutral” like drifting photons of tone, trailing in the field of hearing. In the music video the singer seems to be sitting in a bathtub and contemplating a moment adrift in a mood, in a state of being. The title of the song is perhaps a reference to the alignment in Dungeons & Dragons most motivated by impulse and being neither malicious or guided by a particular moral framework that one would identify as “good” it can be difficult to predict. But in real world terms it might encapsulate a sense of being adrift when most things that have anchored anything to values or a system of values has been eroded and you can easily get to a place in the mind when you start to wonder if anything has any inherent meaning and if anything is truly worth doing except what intersects with your mind in any given moment. Most thoughtful, sensitive people who may have once really believed in something only to have the foundation of that thing or set of principles supporting it undermined and discredited. This can be a cultural, societal, political, spiritual or interpersonal thing that was at the core of your sense of self and if you don’t have a solid sense of self separate enough from any of those things you can feel like it’s all nonsense even if for a short or extended period of time. The song’s gentle rhythms and melancholic moods suits a sense of disconnected yearning that remains when you’re not sure if anything matters but you can sometimes feel like you want something, anything, to resonate with you deeply. Watch the video for “Chaotic Neutral” on YouTube and follow &Tilly at the links below.
Madeline Goldstein once again demonstrates her complete mastery of composing percussive synth tone and rhythm on “My Own Design.” The song is about finding a way of handling the experience of anxiety and panic by projecting those feelings outward and describing them in words and wrangling them with captivating melody and dance beats. What Goldstein does in this song, as in others, is find a way to externalize what it’s like to live with those feelings that can feel constant or constantly on the horizon of consciousness threatening to crash in and derail one’s ability to function. Yet sometimes when you feel like you know what’s going on and can think through it you can ride through the worst of the moments with a sense of self preserved which makes it easier to pull yourself out of panic mode through an awareness of what’s going on no matter the specific triggers. In the song Goldstein sings about really feeling those feelings that can trigger one’s panic reaction rather than suppress them as a way to comprehension even if it can all feel incomprehensible in the moment. The circling vocal choruses are like mantras of being in the moment and work as anchors of a well crafted pop song which Goldstein has delivered in her recorded output to this point. Throughout the song Goldstein appears to sing about how she feels overwhelmed by feelings while showing how to propel oneself out of state of feeling helpless. Fans of Molly Nilsson, The Motels and OMD will appreciate the way Goldstein orchestrates her songwriting generally and the rich melodies and deeply evocative vocals that are simultaneously vulnerable and confident. Listen to “My Own Design” on YouTube and follow Madeline Goldstein at the links below. Expect the new album out in 2026 on Artoffact Records.
In the churning whirlwind of noise and melody of Taleen Kali’s shoegaze track “Crossed” one hears the touch of Going Blank Again-period Ride, maybe a hint of The Vaselines in the sheer embrace of raw sound in a pop hook. The rippling/repeating synth line that opens the song is like a primer for the glorious flood of sound that carries you through the rest of the song. The songwriter’s vocals soar in harmony and solo over the proceedings while not dominating the mix. The lyrics seem to express an inner change and acceptance of transformation and change rather than holding on to outmoded ways of thinking and being. The music and its layers of atmospheric guitar and texture at headlong pace supports this untangling of self into more expansive states of spirit and the song hits as triumphant rather than melancholic. The single is also available as a limited edition lathe cut on Bandcamp. Listen to “Crossed” on Spotify and follow Taleen Kali at the links below.
Joyer has a gift for framing fond and emotionally complex memories in a way that is more touching and affectionate than nostalgic. The atmospheric and detailed guitar melodies put one in a reflective mood instantly and on “Glare of the Beer Can” the group offers vivid memories in a way that suggests creativity and insight in the realm of visual art to inform the music and vice versa. The song is about how so many things in your environment can remind you of the people that have made memories with you and how it could be haunting but it can also be something you don’t mind sitting with especially in moments of loneliness and isolation to warm the heart just enough to lift your spirits. It’s one of the more mellow songs on the group’s excellent new album, On the Other End of the Line… (out October 24, 2025 via Julia’s War Recordings) band one that showcases the group’s musical versatility and attention to the fine details of how feelings flow through the mind and what triggers memories and how it all interacts within one’s lived experiences. Watch the video for “Glare of the Beer Can” on YouTube and follow Joyer at the links provided.
Blue Tomorrows seems to have channeled at once OMD, Feist and late 2000s chillwave on “Colorado.” The pitch-shifting/autotune on the vocals lends an otherworldly quality that in another song might seem gimmicky but there’s something sublimely introspective and transporting about the way the song is composed so that it seems to constantly expand emotionally and tonally before floating in space for several moments in the last part of the song like the artist is savoring a heartfelt romantic memory mixed with some bittersweet sense of loss and yearning and a flicker of hope like the feelings maybe you hold for someone that has really left a positive impression on your psyche even if things didn’t work out in the end the way you had hope. The emotional nuance expressed in the song tonally and in its words reveal a creative and emotional maturity resonates beyond the usual themes of youthful love in pop music. Listen to “Colorado” on YouTube and follow Blue Tomorrows at the links below. Look for the full-length album Weather Forever out December 12, 2025.
Broken Record is a Denver-based band that formed after singer/guitarist Lauren Beecher and bassist Corey Fruin moved to the Mile High City from Connecticut in 2017. Both had roots in the underground and DIY scene in and around New Haven and in forming Broken Record around some material Beecher had been working on what emerged was music that reflected the influence of punk and hardcore, certainly in the ethos of the group, as well as the atmospheric melodic qualities of The Cure. If you caught the band early on you might be excused to hearing in the music a touch of Hüsker Dü’s emotionally rich and fierce yet gentle aesthetic. The fledgling outfit found a home in the local hardcore scene and played early shows with the likes of then relatively newly founded bands like Destiny Bond and Ukko’s Hammer. And yet Broken Record never seemed out of place even though the catharsis of its music wasn’t formed from the same set of sounds but the emotional core of the songwriting shared a similar vulnerability and intelligence in expressing emotion with a keen sensitivity in the language of emotionally charged rock music.
The quartet released its debut full-length I Died Laughing on April 24, 2020 and of course could not tour around the record due to the global pandemic. But on that album one hears the knack for melodic jangle and shimmer embedded into earnestly energetic hooks with the expert pacing and Beecher’s warmly thoughtful vocals that strike the perfect emotional coloring for songs that are often poignantly melancholic and always deeply observant. For the 2023 album Nothing Moves Me the songwriting seemed to experiment further with tone and style incorporating delicately minimal guitar leads and triumphant choruses while seeming to be able to mine the more interesting ends of adolescent angst as a lens by which to understand the sometimes disillusioning aspects of adulthood. Like an entire record of what your teenage self might have to say about your current adult self. The 2025 album Routine (via the band’s own imprint Power Goth Recordings) and its cover of suburban American would-be normalcy takes the band’s established themes further to seemingly comment with great insight into the compromises and perils of navigating life in late capitalism and how that can cast a pall over your life if you’re not equipped to find some meaning in a socioeconomic environment seemingly designed to erode your joy and ability to live a full and dignified life. But also on the album the band seems to find the threads of psychic resistance to it all in creative acts and writing songs that feel like a shaking off of the gloom with music that feels like an expression of basic human solidarity.
Listen to our interview with Lauren Beecher and Corey Fruin on Bandcamp and follow Broken Record at the links below. The band is celebrating the release of Routine with a show at The Skylark Lounge Bobcat Room on Saturday, November 15, 2025 with Precocious Neophyte and Safekeeper, doors 8 p.m., show 9 p.m.
The title of Girl Wilde’s “if love skips this lifetime, i’ll die in my room” is appropriately melodramatic. It expresses the moment of aching, soul deep collapse of the psyche in reaction to unfulfilled yearnings, perhaps spurred by imagined or actual rejection, and the searing and gutting disappointment that can hit you hard when it feels like you had built up real feelings for someone that you felt were reciprocated only to find out that for whatever reason the situation wasn’t what you were hoping, to the point of belief, it would be. And the crashout into conviction that it’s never going to happen for you with enduring overwhelming feeling that you’re someone who is just going to give up until the next great, cosmic go around. The song is awash in afterglow melodies, stuttered and staggered, glitchy rhythms, vocals that are hushed and poignantly melancholically exhausted and at times processed into auto-tuned disassociation. It’s the kind of sound that makes sense when you’re trying to really feel out the moment in all its painful manifestations all at once to get through this moment you know will end but feels like it never will. Listen to “if love skips this lifetime, i’ll die in my room” on Spotify and follow Girl Wilde at the links provided.
Eric Angelo Bessel’s latest album Mirror at Night just released on October 31, 2025. For an album filled with elegantly and carefully crafted harmonic drones and flowing, resonating, abstract textures the track “Non-digetic Sound” both embodies and identifies the character of the entire album. The title refers to the incidental music in a film that the viewers but not the characters can hear. It provides emotional content that helps to enhance and sometimes establish the mood of the film in a non-verbal way that isn’t always obvious with the plot. The aforementioned song by Bessel is in a constant state of unfolding with a sustained sense of illuminated memories that come into the mind in peak moments that seem to parallel what’s happening before you. It’s a sense of wonder and connection that feels ethereal, mysterious and special. Bessel seems to have tapped into these often unspoken experiences that we comprehend but can’t always put into words, especially not in short. The music works on a similar level that Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks does by capturing the moment and the feelings precisely without the need for verbal explanation. Listen to “Non-digetic Sound” on YouTube and follow Eric Angelo Bessel along with his other project Lore City at the links below.
Night Teacher’s “New Cage” finds its visual manifestation in the superb music video directed, filmed and edited by Cat Rider. The song is about how the digital age and the concept of the idealized self as presented absolutely imperfectly and not actually completely under one’s control in social media and digital platforms generally. And how the dynamic channels one’s modes of expression into narrow pathways thus shaping the medium and content and narrowing the actual possibilities of expression with the illusion of choice and creativity. The song is orchestral and warmly analog in its textural tones cast in guitar, piano, bass and Lilly Bechtel’s finely expressive vocals in sharp contrast to the overwhelming inducement to turn all areas of one’s life into a commodity that can be more easily manipulated. Indeed, a new cage in which we’ve all been encouraged to participate in placing ourselves in the name of being with the times and not being left behind. Musically, it hearkens to early-to-mid-90s Sarah McLachlan and that songwriter could take heavy subject matter and imbue it with humanity and deep emotional atmosphere in which to get caught up in a moment of personal honesty. Watch the video for “New Cage” on YouTube and follow Night Teacher at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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