tl;dr
Song Of The Year: "B.S.A.S (Si Alguna Vez te Sentís Sola de Noche)" - EQ (Estratosfera, Qiri)
Album Of The Year: Friend - james K
Artist of the Year - underscores
Director Of The Year - Joel Petroykus (Vulcanizadora (2025), Buzzard (2014))
And: dumping Spotify, drinking, and never getting a boner again.
Song Of The Year: "B.S.A.S (Si Alguna Vez te Sentís Sola de Noche)" - EQ (Estratosfera, Qiri)
modern day Marie Antoinette.
i love that movie.
i love my girlfriends
Simulacral Glitz
Qiri, Estratosfera, and the girlfriends appear in the "B.S.A.S" video donning outfits evocative of the 00's, posing, cat-walking, and raving in a living room decorated lazily in cheap silver streamers and balloons-- but the stationary bike and pool table insinuate an upwardly-mobile, middle-class family home. The room is bathed in bright white studio lighting, like the set of a fashion shoot. The titles, like those of their single covers, imitate stock-image watermarks. The lyrics name-drop Getty Images. Someone dumps her purse on the pool table, spilling out a lighter, coin purse, loose receipts and feathers from a pink feather boa— but no iPhone.
EQ writhes in the simulacral glitz of the long 90s, when fashion shoots and celebrity gossip crawled by snail-mail through glossy magazines, "reality" TV, and masses flocked to MySpace and Facebook, where 'brand' management would shift from an industrial to a personal concern.
In this era, the teen bourgeoisie dreamed of The Club: a pagan temple to hedonism where hear-say is gospel and fantasy becomes reality. Dissatisfied in the interim, the young immanentized The Club in the parentless parentheses of their gilded cages: a living room, a basement, a detached garage.
It was the dawn of the digital natives, when social lives were electrified but it was still possible to be AFK. Sofia Copolla, whose Marie Antoinette (2006) begets EQ's party girl, documented this era in 2013's The Bling Ring, where Facebook and tabloid sites aid rich kids in high-fashion petty larceny.
But EQ and Copolla exploit this imagery for both its glamour and its melancholy. Shining celebrity was tarnished; world-wide-web promises were broken; the living room raves were never that fun. But the simulation has not ceased its metastasis, and we cannot help but look back nostalgically on its benign early years.
In the bridge, the mix is overwhelmed by a square-wave bass as Estratosfera sings: "I don't want to go to sleep, I don't want it," as though the narrator has turned up the music to give herself the necessary shot of adrenaline to maintain the bubble of nostalgia and delay the return to contemporaneity. "La fiesta termina cuando yo lo quiera"-- The party ends when I want it to.
"B.S.A.S" is like if BRAT was good.
Album Of The Year: Friend - James K
e-ink-tronica
The music video for "Play" starts with a CD placed by hands clad in fuzzy sleeves and sparkly nail polish into a bulky, translucent portable player. Cue shots with CRT TVs, handicams and Playstation controllers. Like the "B.S.A.S" video, we see a gathering of women in the guise of girlhood, but where EQ mythologize the Girl's bittersweet yearning for the night-life, james K finds comfort in a low-key clique kiki, hanging out in a bedroom with a half-dozen of her best-dressed friends.
The promise of consumer technology was to reduce the clutter and friction of life by unifying its disparate aspects (work, accounting, communication, entertainment) via spatial compression, evolving through personal computers, laptops, pagers, palm-pilots, dumb-phones, until reaching its apotheosis in the iPhone. Now there's nowhere left to go, nothing left to optimize. Everything solid has melted into air.
E-ink-tronica is my speculative name for a genre of music that's both nostalgic and futurist, and which dovetails with the recent wave of people picking up obsolete technology and choosing minimal alternatives to bloated smartphones. E-ink displays are among the last turn-of-the-millennium consumer technologies which contain a kernel of green utopianism: a novel, power-efficient device to reduce paper waste and spare your eyes from the harshness of LCDs.
E-ink-tronica is synthetic, high-frequency, rave-influenced, glitch-inspired, emotive and nostalgic: see CFCF's memoryland; Oli XL's Hideki Anno-inspired LOVE & POP; and the physicality of Iglooghost's Tidal Memory Exo (with its own web 1.0 epitext on exoportal.xyz and neurowaste.net).
Friend is a canonical entry to the e-ink-tronica corpus. Tracks like "Days Go By" and "Blinkmoth (July Mix)" are as quintessentially trip-hop as anything from the 90's hey-days. The Oval-esque glitch passages that appear in "Idea.2" and "Lude (unwind)" remind us that ambient music is a two-sided coin: one, utilitarian 'new-age' suitable to soundtrack spa days; the other, an experimental and exploratory relationship with sound-making technologies. The heavy chorus effect on the guitars that structure "Doom Bikini" and "On God" evoke Brit-pop acts like The Jesus and Mary Chain or Lush. "Play" stands out as Friend's most chameleonic track, tension building between a propulsive electronic beat and a shrill drone until finally exploding into full-on drum n' bass with james K's most muscular vocal performance front-and-center.
anglo-denpa/techno-dystopia
Most of the works I cited above as works of e-ink-tronica themselves reference Japanese cultural production from the 90s. james K sings the opening of Serial Experiments Lain, "Duvet", in "Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream". Oli XL runs around around basically in Shinji Ikari cosplay in the "LOVE & POP" video, which could've been filmed on the same handicam as the eponymous Hideki Anno film. The art for CFCF's Memoryland sports illustrations of moody-looking, supermodel-thin anime femmes evocative of josei manga.
Each of the referenced works deal with atmospheres of technologically-induced anxiety, classified ex post facto as denpa, but it's hard to say any of the works themselves sink as deep into the territory of their referents. Does that mean it's strictly just for a vibe?
Take the cultural memory of Lain: one of the most popular neocities sites, fauux.neocities.org is a shrine to Lain in the form of a hyper-linked maze of aesthetic gifs. It's an incredible piece of work, but doesn't really engage directly with the subject matter Lain was presenting: of the web crossing boundaries into reality and vice versa; of the dissolution of identity in a globally networked world; and even of the Weird origins of the internet in the Manhattan Project, MKUltra and Arpanet. Despite its heady content, Lain is remembered today almost strictly as an aesthetic mood-piece of melancholy and dazed-looking anime girls in cyberpunk wombs.
While referencing Lain or Evangelion just for "the vibe" may not engage explicitly with their critiques, it does orient these works towards an earlier era with a feeling of greater potential, when there were still off-ramps from techno-dystopia. In the 90s, it was easier for Lain to critique the internet since the Web/Wired's boundaries were still relatively defined. Nowadays, your job, bank, TV shows, hobbies, and social life are all wired; the boundaries are murky, if they exist at all, and a critique now has to contend with a million facets of a net-saturated world.
Artist Of The Year: underscores
I'm late to the party, but I'm finally getting on the underscores train just it time for what's shaping up to be the 2026 AOTY.
Wallsocket
I don't know if I had heard of underscores before I clicked on "Locals (Girls Like Us)", but I knew as soon as the beat locked in with the loop of 'arms, body, legs, chest, skin, bones, sinew', that everyone needed to hear about underscores.
The fact that I can be out of the loop on the whole ARG and internal fiction of Wallsocket just makes the strength of the production and writing more impressive. How the fuck am I grooving this hard to a tight 4-minute pop-rock gem about dysphoria and grooming?
"Music"
Last night
I had a wet dream 'bout the perfect song
You have to be one corny bitch to write extended analogies between music terminology and falling in love, but instead of freshman-year poetry, underscores turned it into pop anthem material.
The above-quoted opening line has the same sense of humor the opening stanza of St. Vincent's "Birth in Reverse": "Oh what an ordinary day/ take out the garbage, masturbate". No taboo, sex in songwriting stands in for the narrator's romance, attractiveness, or mastery; but wet dreams and masturbation don't bestow the same aura. They signal uncontrollable compulsion in the former and mundane solitude in the latter, neither of which are desirable traits of the self-possessed neoliberal subject whose mental and sexual self-mastery precludes such perversions.
In "Music", the narrator's wet dream signals that her relationship with music has reached the level of the unconscious, and may border on pathological ("I know, I know, I'm too far gone").
This song sets the stage for the narrative laid out by underscores' 2025 output: the narrator is propelled by her obsessive artistry ("Music") into a career she wants more than anything ("Poplife": "I want that pop life, all mine, all the time I'm beggin' on my knees"), but the cut-throat industry ("Poplife":"they hate me, already see me belly up") and jet-setting lifestyle ("Do It": "If I left for three months/ and I turned my phone off/ would you wait here for me?") mutate what in "Music" is an artist's passion into the survivalist's utilitarianism of "Do It": "I'm tryna run a business here, come on, babe".
"Poplife" - umru & underscores
umru's beat, while a propulsive booty-shaker on its own, is very much of the hyperpop mold, but underscore's austere lead vocals and minor-key melodies take it to another level. It receives the highest honor possible: getting on to my gym playlist.
"Do It"
If I left for three months
And I turned my phone off
Would you wait here for me?
Sign on the dotted line
This is epochal levels of pop production. For better or worse (better, i.m.o.) a song about being emotionally unavailable and viewing people in terms of their utility to your music career will never blow up in the current market no matter how fucking mind-blowing it is, but all the better for us blue-haired and pronoun'ed libs to get to gatekeep.
I don't dance but I want to learn her fucking moves.
Director of the Year: Joel Petroykus
'Black comedy' is the genre that lies the least. It depicts humans, accurately, as bumbling nincompoops foiled by our own egos. The best black comedies are like watching lab rats in a maze without an exit.
All I knew about Vulcanizadora (2025) when I sat in the theater was the poster and the blurb. I didn't know I'd be watching the latest barn-burner by the last great American director. Buzzard (2014) features the same characters: Petroykus deftly playing a washed unc alongside Joshua Burge's self-serious metalhead. Their dynamic is painful to sit through. Each is a cringe-inducing man-child in a different way, with the washed unc mimicking his MTV-era conception of 'cool' and the metalhead catastrophizing his personal injustices into unnecessary high-stakes gambles, leading to lethal consequences. As exaggerated and comical as the characters are, both movies manage to end on a note that feels mythological.
Other Stuff I Liked
abandoning spotify once and for all
I won't fault anyone for paying for a service, switching from one to another, or even staying on Spotify ("there is no ethical consumption..."). Streaming is the air we breath, now; why voluntarily go on life support? And self-hosting a music streaming stack is a fucking pain in the ass.
But I just hate spotify so fucking much. I've hated it since I started using it a decade ago. But now I have my own shit. It has its rough edges but It's mine. I'm definitely falling out of the loop in terms of new releases but who gives a fuck? I'm aging out of needing to care.
doing my stupid little weekly blog posts
idgaf that no one reads them, I'm treating this shit like a job.
I have a few reasons I like doing them:
A reminder to enjoy things
I can get depression-induced tunnel vision that makes me think everything sucks and I'm wasting my time and I'm fucked for life. But if I enter each week knowing I have to come up with things I enjoyed, I can shake the blinders off a bit. It also motivates me to seek things out to write about.
They also serve as a kind of diary for me to review to be able to see changes in my taste over time or some positive self-development instead of my self-perceived stagnation induced by self-loathing.
Reclaim my attention span
I enjoy playing the social-media slot-machine as much as anyone, but it caused me actual distress to feel like I was struggling to have thoughts longer than a tweet. I also want to be able to think about things for longer than I takes for me to scroll past them.
Let other people know I like their stuff
Throwing stuff out on the internet can feel totally pointless. You can get 100 likes and some retweets, maybe a nice comment-- what does that really mean? How quickly do people forget? How do you know it's not just bots?
I rarely '@' people because it feels like some real pick-me shit, but when I do it's because I want people to know that another person has seen with their work and felt something because of it. Despite the light-speed churn of the content cycle, everyone deserves feeling like their work was engaged with on a meaningful level.
Do stuff with my own hands
as cringey as I feel about "writing a blog", it's fun to have a self-imposed low-stakes project and see it grow over time. and every part of my-- granted, pretty under-cooked-- website is made with my own hands. every part of the presentation is up to me. whatever good has been achieved with the platformization of the internet-- new affinity groups, opportunities for self-employment, amplifying marginal voices-- has been met at least in equal measure by surveillance, exploitation, harassment and terror. I don't want to perpetuate the myth that's haunted the internet from its birth that it was, is, or could be a space of collective liberation and self-expression rather than militant colonial expansionism and cultural hegemony, but there was at least a time when things moved slower. that's what this is about. i guess.
404 Media
https://www.404media.co/ this is the only news outlet i subscribe to, period. as far as I can tell, every other tech-related media company is a bunch of big-tech dick-riders (pejorative)-- except for techdirt, but they post too much outraged lib BS for me to really give a shit. 404 is also the only outlet, afaik, that reports on issues around porn regularly and seriously.
Drinking Alcohol
I love being tipsy. It's so good for my mental health. If my relatives have experienced anything similar to the mental anguish I've felt ameliorated by liquor, I can understand completely why alcoholism has destroyed three generations of my family.
My Eunuch Era
A combination of relationship grief and SSRIs has annihilated my libido, and I couldn't be happier. The semen retentionists are literally right about everything: I feel clear-headed, stronger, more attractive, and can levitate.
Anarchism
After reading a brief 700-page history of Anarchism I feel like it's the ideology for me since it lets me be a total contrarian. Oh, Trump stopped federal aid for AIDs prevention in third-world countries? Good, it's an existential imperative that the U.S. retract its tentacles from every corner of this Earth. Oh, you think the state should institute a minimum level of welfare for its citizens? Fuck off, every State is a bloodthirsty war machine that buys your complacence with bread. Drop out of civilization and join a squat right now!
But despite my proclaimed beliefs I will never give up any of my privileges. If I were to actually live my values I would be in a cave somewhere building bombs.