Thomas Evans
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thewrittentevs.bsky.social
Thomas Evans
@thewrittentevs.bsky.social
230 followers 130 following 770 posts
Writer/Marketer. He/Him.

Writes about Doctor Who at https://readfnord.wordpress.com

'By an English Sea' is in 'Neon Magazine 44'; 'The Month You Were in a Relationship with Taylor Swift' is in 'Kiss Your Darlings'.
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thewrittentevs.bsky.social
#TheTwen2ie5 Day 44

7. Blinding Lights - The Weeknd (2020; Canada)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRX...
The last big club banger released just before the start of the pandemic, and thus one of the very few club bangers to be released at all between 2020 and 2022, ‘Blinding Lights’ dominated the charts for literal years. Part of this is, yes, simply being released at the right time. Part of it is also that the song absolutely slaps. Todd in the Shadows has a phrase he often uses about how certain songs feel like they’ve always existed, their particular combination of notes hitting a feeling so primal to the collective consciousness that you struggle to believe that no-one had come up with them before. The synth line for ‘Blinding Lights’ is one of those combinations of notes. If you’ve ever imagined 80s music, this is the song that played in your head; it simply took until 2020 for someone to realise that no-one had actually written it down yet and that they could release it. And for all that its chart domination partly came from being released just before the pandemic, its imagery of racing down post-apocalyptic streets on your own is definitely a large part of why it connected to a society trapped in their houses and yearning for escape. This is just a miracle song: a once-in-a-lifetime hit that arrived into the world fully formed at just the right time. We’ll never see something quite like this again (we hope).
November 19, 2025 at 8:03 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 43

8. Please Please Please - Sabrina Carpenter (2024; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF1N...
The second appearance of Sabrina Carpenter on my list, which is remarkable given how openly love-it-or-hate-it I am about her work. Nonetheless, this is a song that I’ve gone on a full journey with. On first listen, it’s a pleasant enough ditty featuring a woman complaining about her partner. The more you play it though, the more you realise how much Carpenter seems to genuinely loathe her partner and everything he does. This raises a massive question: If you hate him so much, why don’t you dump him? When I finally realised the answer - that this song is as much a parody of Carpenter herself as it is her boyfriend - it was quite the Eureka moment. There’s a lot of layers and complexities to what’s going on here. It’s also fascinating to think about the fact that this song is quite obviously about her then-boyfriend Barry Keoghan. The boyfriend in the song is an actor from a different country to her, and Barry even plays the character in the song’s music video. This is obviously part of the joke and he seems to be into it, but it must’ve still been weird to be dating one of the biggest pop stars of the time and have her write and release this. Have you ever woken up and the biggest song in the world is a track about how much someone exactly like you sucks at relationships, as written by the person you’re currently dating? Being a celebrity is insane.
November 18, 2025 at 8:10 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 42

9. Tina's Hausu (梯納的鬼怪屋) - Joanna Wang (2024; Taiwan/USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0AH...
As I’ve mentioned before, because this challenge is partly an attempt to create a first draft canon for 2020s pop, I’ve decided to take popular opinion into account and deliberately rank chart hits above indie darlings and personal faves. As the final song on this list which wasn’t a chart hit, you could thus argue that ‘Tina’s Hausu’ is actually my favourite song of the 2020s so far, being the one I like the most based purely on its qualities as a song rather than its position as a cultural text. This is the highest song on my list purely because I love listening to it. Given this, you’d think that I have a real in-depth reason for why I enjoy this song so much. Erm, not really. It’s a ska song about an evil house that eats people. I just think that’s neat. I love how much Wang embraces the shlockiness of the concept, particularly given that I’m a fan of b-movies myself, and I grew up listening to 2-Tone so this aesthetic would always be great to me. Hell, the specific use of the word Hausu is a direct reference to Hausu, one of my favourite horror films of all time. I’m just really on board with this. I can also heartily recommend the music video for this song - all thirteen inexplicable minutes of it. Beginning with a slew of genuinely funny Halloween themed comedy sketches, the song finally starts about eight minutes in and offers us an endless array of beautifully lit, low budget horror delights. It’s a hidden holiday gem.
November 17, 2025 at 8:04 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 41

10. Fantasia Me Now! - Major Parkinson feat. Peri Winkle (2022; Norway)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_m...
The story so far: Major Parkinson are a Norwegian rock band who combine prog rock, operatic goth rock and synthpop into these constantly shifting audio odysseys. Their latest album is Velsa - Chapter One, an album which is a full musical without the visuals. In it, a man who had a troubled childhood in the 80s that he escaped through pop culture now lives in a fascist hellhole and, haunted by memories of his best friend’s murder, struggles to figure out where it all went wrong. Cue an hour of tracks which veer back and forth from 80s pastiches to dark rock songs, gospel tracks, and everything else they can fit in between. ‘Fantasia Me Now!’ is essentially the entire album in miniature, starting as a synthpop ditty about watching The Never Ending Story in cinemas before switching to being a man angrily shouting about revolution, culminating in the mantra “Show me the killer” being repeated over and over again. There’s a recurrent theme in this list where I just really songs with bigness and ambition. Well, here’s the culmination of that: a song that’s a three act stage musical done in seven minutes. Give it a go and you’ll find enough material to satisfy you for several months solid.
November 16, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 40 (catching up)

11. Happy World - Debbii Dawson (2024; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5oa...
Debbii Dawson has come out of nowhere with a few singles and seems to have captured the hearts of the indie music sphere, or at least the indie music sections of Bluesky. Listening to her, you can see why - she’s the master of recreating old genres and mixing them in new ways that reinvigorate them, satisfying music fan’s desire for craft, tradition and innovation simultaneously. She’s pretty much built to be your music critic’s favourite act;, actively trying for a career which‘ll exist entirely in the Polachek Zone. My favourite songs of hers’ is ‘Happy World’, a track which starts as a Dolly Parton pastiche in the verses before seemingly transitioning into an ABBA song for the chorus. As usual for a pop song in the 2020s, there’s no real need for these components to be put together, and yet they just work. It’s a remarkable object. Dawson first made a name for herself by appearing on America’s Got Talent and singing, yes, an ABBA song. So far, she’s released two EPs and has been a support artist for acts like Orville Peck. One to look out for, she could do astounding things with a full album. Based on her early works, she should have quite the career ahead of her.
November 16, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 39

12. The Giver - Chappell Roan (2025; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dubt...
After ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’ finally became a world-conquering smash, Chappell Roan’s first post-stardom single is, in some ways, her playing it safe. Certainly, it’s not the first song she’s written that basically boils down to ‘I’m a lesbian who is great in bed’, nor is that too daring a statement in an age where songs about being gay and having sex are in abundance. The fact that it’s a country song is quite new for her, though again it’s not like country isn’t in vogue right now. In short, this isn’t the sound of a newcomer to fame trying to carve her own space within the mainstream anymore but an established superstar making a mainstream hit to prove that she deserves to be positioned directly at the center of pop culture. It’s Chappell Roan’s victory lap. And what a victory lap it is. Between the song’s joyous fiddles, its cheekily blunt lyrics and the large amount of fun that Roan seems to have singing it, this song is a celebration through and through. It celebrates how much gayness is better than straightness, it celebrates the freedom of queer sex, and, most importantly, it celebrates Chappell Roan, here positioned as a queer icon whose sexual prowess can solve toxic masculinity by making men surplus to requirements entirely. Sure, it’s literally ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ again without the tragedy, but that’s the point of it being a victory lap. More than that, it is notable that her next single, ‘The Subway’, is a genuine departure from not only her previous sounds but the predominant sounds of mid-2020s. She is still a woman in the process of showing the world everything she has. But for one song, she’s also an era-defining icon with the world in her hands. All hail Chappell Roan, the queen of 2020s pop.
November 14, 2025 at 9:05 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 38

13. Welcome to My Island - Caroline Polachek (2023; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxgc...
Given that this challenge is at least partly about trying to form a first draft of a musical canon for the 2020s, I have deliberately ranked songs with critical and commercial success over my obscurer picks. The result is that my list basically starts by defining what type of music I most like before defining the type of music that most speaks to the decade (in my opinion). If you’re trying to write something for me, turns out you should have a woman who presents herself as a literal God singing about isolation against a musical backdrop that mixes several incompatible styles. If you want to make a successful pop song for the modern age, you want to pick good components which feed into each other in non-obvious ways, making for things that are more than the sum of their parts. Polachek does both in ‘Welcome to My Island’, a song of solid components which soar over each other. Built out of the ways that Polachek’s Tarzan yells contrast both against the background “Hey hey hey hey!”s and the more claustrophobic verses, and out of the constant switches between big chords to glitchy techno, this is just a solidly crafted song that moves from one amazing musical moment to another. All these moments end up breaking away from and reinforcing each other, giving the song this sense of bigness that it shares with many other tracks of this list, thus turning up the volume on the romantic feelings of the lyrics. This appears to be the most common songwriting approach of 2020s art pop: take something, investigate it from multiple angles, then smush those angles together and present the result warts and all. This makes fascinatingly messy objects that feel dense and meaty, inviting us to get lost in them as we find our own paths through their material. After the relatively staid and traditionalist 2010s, we’re back into the realm of the melodramatic and the high concept - an age of big ideas trying to grapple with the insane and unstable new world that’s formed after 2016.
November 13, 2025 at 8:18 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 37

14. Living Lo-Fi - Cheekface (2025; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfrZ...
Cheekface advertise themselves as America’s local band, and also have a tendency to like Bluesky posts shouting their praises (hello if you’re reading!). With their simple but catchy riffs, laidback delivery and absurdist lyrics, they’re the platonic ideal of what a certain type of indie band should look and sound like. If you’ve ever wanted a band who are like if They Might Be Giants started writing Pixies songs (you little quirk-meister), this is the band for you. The reason ‘Living Lo-Fi’ made my Top 50 list is simple: I really enjoy listening to it. This could’ve easily been another post where I just transcribed the song’s lyrics and left it at that. I can’t really tell you what it’s about (at best guess, some form of affectionate parody of hipsters who live off-grid, many of whom probably constitute Cheekface’s core audience). Hoo boy do they have a lot of fun with their topic though, dedicating entire verses to a guy who hates David and Goliath (‘David was a murderer who had a problem with the tall, and as somebody who’s tall, you find the whole thing quite offensive’) and a woman who’s likable in a non-annoying way and who is ‘sleeping on a mattress without a bedframe’. The entire thing is made out of digressions and asides, giving it a free-wheeling energy and joyous playfulness. Plus, the chorus is just incredibly catchy. It’s a great song to sing along to, to listen to, and to think about.
November 12, 2025 at 8:13 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 36

15. Party Time - The Northern Boys (2022; England)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLLQ...
November 11, 2025 at 8:08 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 35

16. Death and Romance - Magdalena Bay (2024; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gf...
I first came across Magdalena Bay when I saw the backend of the “Death and Romance/Fear, Sex” music video in a YouTube short. In it, a woman witnesses an alternate version of herself in a portal, said alternate self is strapped to a chair and laughs while fracturing into a rainbow version of herself, and then a bright red man with a star for a face inserts a CD into her forehead, all while ambient trippy art pop plays. This had been put through a VHS filter (on top of the several filters that are already in the video) and was presented completely sans context. To put it politely, I was intrigued. As said, this turned out to be the coda to the music video for ‘Death and Romance’, a sterling piece of lovestruck art pop with another eye poppingly stylised video. Out of all the songs on my list, this is the one I have the least words to describe it with. Its entire aesthetic is trying to capture something that feels like it transcends existence itself, and it manages it, feeling impossibly big. This then helps to support the romantic narrative of its lyrics, elevating the song’s emotions from a simple crush to something elemental, each kiss the size of a star. It does actually remind me a lot of Star Wars: a combination of elements which imply endless depths beyond what we get shown. It’s a galaxy in a song. I mean hell, even the single cover is a banger. A spaceship is exploding while two aliens hug in the background, the sky a sea of red fire while they stand in an inhuman blue glow. It’s just cool. Sometimes pop is capable of reaching the sublime. ‘Death and Romance’ is as sublime as they come.
November 10, 2025 at 8:05 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 34

17. Sexy To Someone - Clairo (2024; USA)

youtu.be/iUxlnNnAoTc?...

Please ignore that the image itself gets her location wrong, and also how bizarrely ill-fitting the song's music video is.
Clairo really captures a desire to be recognised in a very relatable way with this track.
November 9, 2025 at 8:47 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 33

18. Nothing Matters - The Last Dinner Party (2023; England)

youtu.be/pETz4IMmeDU?...
Despite them being a bunch of spoilt rich kids, you can't deny that the time gifted to them by their lack of needing to maintain a living wage has certainly gone into making them potent songwriters.
November 8, 2025 at 12:05 PM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 32

19. Fairlies - Grian Chatten (2023; Ireland)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU79...
I must admit, I don’t really get Fontaines D.C. They’re fine and all but I just can’t hear what makes them great. Their lead singer’s solo work though - now that’s some great stuff. ‘Fairlies’ is about someone who wants to emigrate from Ireland but is afraid that the Fairlies of Irish mythology won’t follow him, which is a fancy way of discussing the fear of leaving home and losing touch with part of who you are as a result. As is common with this list, the above setup becomes a container for a collection of things I like. Mythology appears a lot in my own creative work, and the way Grian weaves it into his emotional themes is really well done. My depression will always appreciate a chorus that goes ‘No fair, they can follow me, I can live alone, I can live alone’. And the music is wonderfully layered, giving us a potent mix of ragged guitar to yearning violins. I connected to this song so much, I literally changed the name of the main character of a TV script I was writing so that I could use this as the show’s theme song. There’s something so cinematic yet crooked about it. An absolutely astounding track.
November 7, 2025 at 8:20 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 31

20. Bad Habit - Steve Lacy (2022; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF-F...
One thing that links me and Steve Lacy: we both got into music through playing Guitar Hero as kids. Of course, Lacy then went on to learn how to play guitar, figured out to record demos on his iPhone, uploaded them to the internet, got in with the Odd Future crowd, released a series of critically acclaimed albums, and had one of his songs slowly rise to become US No 1 after it started gaining traction on TikTok. I, meanwhile, did none of that. Of course, according to this song, the other thing that connects us is that we’re both slightly awkward figures who sometimes don’t read social situations right. ‘I wish I knew you wanted me,’ he sings. ‘Could’ve made a move, could’ve made a move, is it too late to pursue?’ Usually is mate, better luck next time. The song really goes in on creating this Outsider status for itself, its sound these oozy licks that keep flowing into each other, its rhythm stop-start, Lacy’s singing moving up and down octaves. It’s one of the weirder US No 1s of the modern age; the type of thing that wouldn’t have made it as big as it did if not for TikTok’s preference for songs that quickly capture a vibe over those with more standardised structures. It’s all part of the re-weirding of pop music that’s been going on for a while now, resulting in a song that’s fully of its time despite not sounding like anything else.
November 6, 2025 at 8:11 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 30

21. War Pigs - T-Pain (2023; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfEc...
T-Pain is the 2000s rapper known for his pioneering use of autotune to actively distort his voice rather than using it to sound natural. He’s also this goofy little guy who’s happy to turn up on things like the Lonely Island’s ‘I’m On A Boat’ to croon lyrics like ‘I fucked a mermaid’. In 2019, he appeared and won The Masked Singer USA dressed as Monster, beating Donny Osmond as Peacock and Gladys Knight as Bee to the top spot. Having enjoyed the experience of singing other people’s songs, he started putting together a full covers album, this becoming 2023’s On Top of the Covers. Ever wanted to hear T-Pain’s versions of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Belivin’’, Sam Smith’s ‘Stay With Me’ and Frank Sinatra’s ‘That’s Life’? Probably not but they exist and they’re fantastic. The standout of the collection is his cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’, a full funk-fusion reworking of the original song that T-Pain and his band go to town on. This thing hits with force, the cathedral-orchestra synths and T-Pain’s echoy lyrics giving the whole thing an epic grandness that really fits the theme of war. Ozzy Osbourne himself called it the ‘best cover of War Pigs ever’, and you can’t get better praise than that. Despite the complete word salad that is ‘T-Pain’s funk cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”’, this is the real deal.
November 5, 2025 at 8:30 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 29

22. Happy New Year - Let's Eat Grandma (2022; England)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R9q...
When Let’s Eat Grandma hit it on the scene, they were two nineteen year old girls who had spent their adolescences exploring music together and somehow ended up creating seven minute long electro prog rock songs called things like ‘Eat Shiitake Mushrooms’. Time had not been kind to them though: being in a band was hard, one of their partners died of a rare form of cancer, and they seemed to be slowly drifting apart. Out of this came Two Ribbons, an album that’s pretty much their Rumours given how directly it’s about the band’s troubles. Each song was written separately and then produced together; each song is pretty much them describing a fractious friendship; and the album as a whole keeps switching between synth pop bangers and slower ballads, the concept of splits built into its very structure. The music remains astounding though. ‘Happy New Year’ is the synth pop banger that kicks off the album: an euphoric declaration of dedication to each other whose choruses are filled with painful little vignettes of their friendship troubles. The lyrics ‘And you said “Just think, if we’d been together, we’d be breaking up”. I said “I want a synth”, and “What a thing to say”’ just speak so evocatively of who these people are and where they’re at. It’s really quite beautiful, and sad, and joyous, all at once. It’s like the friendship itself: absolutely massive feeling, yet oddly fragile.
November 4, 2025 at 8:01 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 28

23. White Woman's Instagram - Bo Burnham (2021; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHot...
November 3, 2025 at 12:15 PM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 27

24. Moderation - Cate Le Bon (2022; Wales)

youtu.be/M6a7WeVYnSs?...
"Moderation" is an enigmatic song that really captures the vageries of being both self-assured, neurodivergent and really anxious.
November 2, 2025 at 8:40 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 26

25. Back to the 70s - Home Counties (2022; England)

youtu.be/hf4_hJC-_6Q?...
A great and underrated band give an enjoyably wobbly sounding critique of society from the 70s to the modern day, all facilitated by some of my favourite lyrics of the decade.
November 1, 2025 at 9:57 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 25

26. Girl With No Face - Allie X (2024; Canada)

youtu.be/k7unOyCT_Rs?...
A song I love for the way it brings back a particularly 80s style of sexiness that hasn't really survived the sex positivity of the 00s.
October 25, 2025 at 11:34 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 24

27. Besties - Black Country, New Road (2025; England)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cae5...
When they arrived on the scene, Black Country, New Road were the exact type of band you didn’t get anymore. They wrote ten-minute multi-phase songs that veered between jazz, indie rock and noise. They had tons of band members. Their lead singer was an angry young man poet. In an age with so little money flowing around the music industry, it was rare to get some newcomers with this much ambition. And in their wake came a new generation of young British indie bands – your English Teachers, Home Counties and Last Dinner Parties. And then, a few days before the release of their second album, the lead singer dropped out of the band and disappeared into the ether. Black Country, New Road were now a band defined by their incredibly idiosyncratic lead singer who no longer had a lead singer but did have an album and tour to do. What could they do? Amazingly, they banded together, scrapped their old songs, wrote a gigs worth of new material and did the tour anyway, releasing one of their shows as the album Live at Bush Hall. Then they went back into the studio and completely rebuilt themselves from the ground up. Wanting to avoid any of them burning out again, the songwriting and singing duties were shared among the band’s members with people typically singing the songs they wrote the lyrics to. A lot of the songwriting was also given to their female members. With comradery on their minds, their songs ended up being largely about the theme of friendship. With friendship on their minds, their songs largely brightened up and became much more folksy in feel. And with that, Black Country, New Road had gone from being Britain’s best indie band to being an even better one. ‘Besties’ is their comeback single and establishes their new sound immediately – bright, hopeful and friendly but still with that jazzy, experimental edge. It’s a shining, heartwarming track and shows you the best way to reinvent anything: give it to women and make it warmer.
October 24, 2025 at 8:31 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 23

28. Columbus & 89th - Sarah Jarosz (2024; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gI3...
My first ‘almost-a-relationship-but-not-quite’ happened during the first year of my Masters and the final year of her undergrad degree. We had known each other for years but then something clicked and, before I knew it, I was dropping dinner mid-plate to bake cakes at hers’ until 1am. She was big into the folky side of country and listening a lot to Sarah Jarosz’ song ‘Build Me Up From Bones’. A bittersweet ode asking a lover to hold them close and ‘build them up from bones’, it’s a quiet but tired thing with a real sense of fragility. As someone to whom ‘tired’ and ‘yearning’ are basically the two emotions I’ve got left, it connected to me like little else that year. Just before I could ask her out, she received an offer from a far away university to do a better Masters degree than was offered locally. Too early into things to ask her to stick around, I instead went through my first proper heartbreak. (My heartbreaks are spectacular; a film student literally made a documentary about it.) And there with me during this period was ‘Gone Too Soon’, another Jarosz song from the Build Me Up From Bones album about her not wanting to leave her lover. The emotional connections I have to that song still wreck me to this day. I moved on and did other things also defined by their failure to start. Then, over a decade later, Sarah Jarosz returned to my algorithm with new single ‘Columbus and 89th’. In it, Jarosz remembers a past relationship that the world seemed to temporarily align itself around and quietly contrasts it against the unspoken years after she left it, this relationship now one of the few moments where her life made sense. I don’t know how she keeps doing it. Every time I listen to a new Sarah Jarosz song, I find that it’s describing my current emotional state and end up carrying it with me as a totem. Beautifully crystalline and impermanent, it’s another hidden gem from the one woman I appear to be in the process of growing old with.
October 23, 2025 at 7:09 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 22

29. Doodles - Rose Betts (2024; England)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Bv...
A cute little folk song this time, detailing all those little regrets Rose has collected in her life. ‘So it’s one for the time that I broke his heart, one for the joke that I took too far, and one for the dent in the rental car, the doodles I’d undo. It’s one for the nights that I let them win, one for the light that I let him dim, and it’s one for a kiss that should never have been, the doodles I’d undo.’ The folksy instrumentation and singsong nature of the chorus establish this as a song to be sung in a pub, thus turning her doodles into things done under the influence. While the song is about regret though, Betts seems happy to wear her doodles on her sleeve, every mistake given a gloss of nostalgia such that each becomes a stepping stone on a path unfinished. People do tend to build mythologies around their nights out, each notable memory becoming part of an anecdote pantheon that can be trotted out whenever social situations require. These stories are often about being young and stupid. When you’re young, you’re doing most things for the first time and are thus prone to mistakes. As such, the failures of our youth often end up becoming the things we’re most proud of in retrospect. They show that we’ve grown, that we have indeed been improving over time. If life is the process by which we collect anecdotes, then tales of hideous nights out and stupid mistakes are evidence that we’ve lived. I do slightly regret not going out more in my youth. It’s not that I didn’t do it, I just don’t have any stories about doing it. My friends have never really been big partiers and I’ve always been too self-reserved to go wild; all my nights club were just going out with friends, dancing a bit and then going home on my own. I should’ve let myself be messier, then I might have few more regrets and learned a bit more. At least I have ‘Doodles’ to live vicariously through.
October 22, 2025 at 7:00 AM
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#TheTwen2ie5 Day 20

30. THE BADDEST (BADDER) - Joey Valence & Brae feat. Ayesha Erotica (2024; USA)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIhb...
We’re back in hyperpop land with the loudest, most braggadocious record this side of Fatman Scoop. Heralded by an army of trumpets and singing entirely in capslock, Joey Valence and Brae are here to let you know that they’re ‘THE BADDEST BITCH IN THIS CLUB’. One’s got ‘7-UP IN MY CUP’. The other looks like ‘DANNY PHANTOM’. Then Ayesha Erotica turns up with a big vat of sexuality that she spills over everything like the chili scene from The Office. The bravado is off the charts. Goddamn if it isn’t contagious though. The past year has featured me listening to this a lot to pump myself up for things. It’s a workout in song form. The secret sauce that makes it work is that Joey Valence and Brae are obviously dorks. Again, there’s a Danny Phantom reference, and look at the album cover. They’re not the baddest bitches in a club, they’re teenage boys in their bedrooms. And yet they just sell it, diving into the track with full confidence and no holding back. That’s why they work so well as a pump-up act: if Joey Valence and Brae can be as hot shit as they are here, then so can you. Then in comes Ayesha Erotica to provide an absolutely killer guest verse that steals the show. As forceful as Valence and Brae but actually believable, her performance is awe inspiring. I really love the interplay between her and the boys too, particularly the ‘Do you think anyone’s actually going to dance to this?’ ‘Hell naw!’ introduction. She’s entirely in on the joke and knows to play the material straight. It’s another of the joys of hyperpop: the way that its aggressive pastiches and dedication to aesthetic extremism makes for a really flexible genre where the fun is watching people fluidly switch between identities at breakneck speeds. You can tell how the sound came out of online queer spaces. The ultimate conclusion reached: YOU’RE THE BADDEST BITCH IN THIS CLUB.
October 21, 2025 at 7:00 AM
thewrittentevs.bsky.social
#TheTwen2ie5 Day 20

31. Jonah (Prequel) - Major Parkinson (2020; Norway)

youtu.be/vsG9OjUDsUs?...
My favourite current band is Major Parkinson, a prog rock act from Norway. They started their career with the albums Major Parkinson and Songs from a Solitary Home, both combining pure fury with a carnivalesque aesthetic. They then changed their style for their next two albums with Twilight Cinema and Blackbox both settling into a more gothic, operatic sound. Now they’ve changed their styles again for their next two albums, Valesa – Chapter 1 and the upcoming Valesa – Chapter 2, both concept albums that add musical theatre and 80s synthpop influences to their already packed musical pallet. ‘Jonah (Prequel)’ was released between Blackbox and Valesa – Chapter 1 and is designed to bridge between the former’s gothic aesthetic and the later’s synthpop stylings. It starts like a normal Blackbox song, a low synth tone and drum beat rumbling along while the gravelly voiced vocalist spits out the opening lyrics to ‘In Heaven (Lady in The Radiator Song)’ from Eraserhead. This setup momentarily stops and is then replaced by these intricate synth trills and a main synth riff, all of which have been played and recorded with the grandiosity of an cathedral organ. From this point onwards, the song keeps growing into something bigger and wider until an entire choir turns up and starts singing a communal tribute to the song’s titular character. Wrap things up with an astounding guitar solo and you have a great song. An alternate version of the track, simply titled ‘Jonah’, appears in Valesa – Chapter 1 but in a completely different form, this time played on acoustic instruments with a slower tempo and a gospel choir providing the background singing. It’s a more intense experience, providing a suitably grand and funereal tone to one of the core moments of the album’s plot. I do personally prefer the single edit, enjoying the sound of friends at a party remembering a loved one more than I do the titanic sound of the church edit, but both are colossal tracks from an astounding band.
October 20, 2025 at 8:00 AM