thread to dis hyped releases that you don't get/don't like/wanna complain about

let's keep it in here, folks.

Jlin - if I wanted to hear a quantized sample of a CD skipping, I'd listen to an Oval CD from 1999

Caretaker - this is just a bunch of thrift store record samples

Oh yay I can post here AND in 'vent your bullshit'! Maybe the latter can be non-2017-specific though

yes this is just to keep your attention during the EOY poll, submitted with love

Bjork - I found this slow, gloomy, and unengaging. her mix that she did for Mixmag (?) was great, though.

*warms up FPing finger*

happy to help!

this is a safe space

;-)

Caretaker - this is just a bunch of thrift store record samples

otm, I've never understood the hype.

Angel olsens new one gets seriously dire in the second half. Love her but hate to say it's a bummer record

i'll just get this out of the way: most of the 2017 music is bad

Caretaker's not hyped though. It's got a steady following, but that's something else iirc.

Anyway I can't get enough of it.

no defences of albums itt imo

I've said this elsewhere I'm sure but the Julien Baker love-in is an album late; the new one is flat and mostly a disappointment

Where's the fun in that? xp

OK fine

but no holds barred. except like actual bigotry

KING KRULE is kind of boring.

oh yeah I can't take his voice for a second

Not as boring as The National though

That Big Thief album is boring as well. A charisma vacuum.

:o you're dead to me

I do like the Big Thief album a lot :(

LCD Soundsystem should be banned on the basis of that atrocious album cover alone. The music stinks, is completely irrelevant up to the point of self-charicture, and seeing critics hailing this has-been baffles me.

*caricature

thoroughly agree with every dis so far btw*. sleeve ur emperor palpatine

*not heard the bjork or big thief yet

Guided By Voices - the songs are twice as long and half as good (tbh I dunno how hyped this really was, but let's open the thread up to all contenders regardless of hype level/EOY standings)

I tried listening to the War on Drugs album once and I had to check the album wasn't starting over at some point. Still can't remember any of the songs in there.

@Moka, same here. It's drab.

Lorde is the new Carly Rae Jepsen - "pop" music that non-professionals spit out after a single taste, but which critics will continue to ride for forever.

Xp that is sort of the point with WoD - it's aural valium for the inhibited and the terminally nostalgic.

Me included.

Sounds like WoD do The Caretaker better than The Caretaker does!

I can't really diss it because I don't hate it at all but Yaeji seems overrated as hell to me. There's just not much going on musically and lyrically... every song seems she runs out of ideas and she just resorts to repeating words in the same monotonic voice.

Again, I don't hate it but I don't see what's so special about it either or why she's making it into so many EOY best songs lists.

Ok I'm done taking those out of my chest... I think... those are the ones frustrating me about their roaring approval.

Well, those an Bodak Yellow heh

i rate the yaeji EPs (2 isn't as good imo) but found it pretty easy to get burned out on her stuff. Not much replay value as there's not a whole lot of depth, ya

laurel halo album was a disappointment for me, way too esoteric and weird for weird sake

Xxp Kirby has a concept, though. Granduciel is walking in socks over cold coals.

I still don't really get what everyone liked so much about Black Beatles. I don't hate it, just does nothing much for me.

I think this is the first Laurel Halo album I like mainly on the strength of Moontalk alone but yes... it's way too dependent on its own quirks and weirdness.

moontalk is an amazing song! yeah

moka check out the king felix stuff if you haven't heard it, "spring" by king felix and her halo album "king felix"

I did not know about that project. Listening to spring now and it sounds amazing! Thanks for the recommendation.

:) sweet

the Fever Ray album was really disappointing to me

why? show your work :)

Sleaford Mods - this guy used to sound angry, now he just sounds bored (I do like most of the previous records)

Fever Ray was also so-so for me. I like the knife and the first fever ray album a lot, so I thought for sure this would be one of my favorite albums of the year but alas it ended being one of the most dissapointing ones for me. It’s just so hard to sit through... even harder than ‘shaking the habitual’ and that’s saying something.

I can get past the hamfisted lyrics (either way lyrics has never been her strong point), but the textures and production are sort of uninteresting too, the middle of the album is specially boring or annoying and contains some of her worst songs ever (“this country” really wtf is up with that).

I don’t know... I guess it’s just alright in small doses but I don’t want ‘just alright’ from her.

Ok maybe the production isn’t uninteresting... but it’s too harsh and irritating more often than not. I get that maybe that was her intent with this particular album but I’m not a masochist, sorry.

Yeah, my love for the first Fever Ray album is immense, this one is not bAd exactly, just very disappointing

yeah I agree with all of that Moka

the production mostly feels like lesser retreads of Silent Shout and the Fever Ray s/t, and the songwriting lacks the memorable melodies. the lyrics are a step down too - Silent Shout especially could be quite evocative but they're more hamfisted here and the BDSM subject matter of some of it is completely uninteresting to me

Sleaford Mods - this guy used to sound angry, now he just sounds bored (I do like most of the previous records)

heh this = lack of money > money

King Krule was the overrated hype of the year for me. Could barely get through that mess 3 times.

So I will probably dig his next record :P

Fever ray album is fucking great, just took time to grow on me. I mean it's not that different texturally from
The debut it's just more hyper kinetic arrangement wise. Give it some time, mustn't hurry

Unperson sounds like he thinks the Wednesday singer is hot and he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

unperson, I know you write a lot daily. I've often wondered whether you hang out with other people. You know -- people you might go to a show with even in the rural part of the state you live in, men and women at record stores or bars (I know you don't drink but still). Many of your proclamations about music and the people who listen to it, with all due respect, sounds inspired by isolation.

This sounds like the inverse gripe of “she’s wearing a Nirvana t-shirt but I bet she doesn’t know their music.”

Life is way too short to bug out about what other people like.

And sure there do seem to be a lot of throwbackish artists like Soccer Mommy, Horsegirl, Wednesday and I suppose also Big Thief with female singers, but perhaps it's because these women are finding a vehicle of expression in these sounds that were mostly male-coded in the 90s, or expanding on strands laid down by Liz Phair, Throwing Muses, Breeders, etc. But no, they're probably just trying to hook horny indie dads.

I didn't say anything about why anyone makes the music they make. I only commented on the responses I have seen, and the fact that musically Wednesday doesn't do anything for me.

Wednesday doesn't do anything for me.

That's all you needed to say.

There would be a hell of a lot less threads on ILM if that was a maxim

<As i’ve gotten older and had kids I’ve gotten to where i’m just happy when people care about music.>

This is otm. Most people, especially in the generations coming up, just start a playlist on Spotify and let it play. Or they play a song they hear on Tik Tok and then forget about it two weeks later. They may know a song they like, but they don't know albums or even bands.

Anyone who cares enough about a young guitar-based rock band to know their name or listen to an album is OK by me.

But I'm 100% a "people can like whatever they want to like for whatever reason they want to like it" kind of person.

Crap, my bad on the quote.

I'll say that in the case of my friend, I'm much happier when he's talking about or listening to new bands than wallowing in the nostalgia of 90s radio hits and soundtrack albums.

ime it can be an interesting exercise to try to work out why some forms of pastiche or certain ways of being derivative bother you and others don't. anyone with reasonably broad taste will inevitably be into something pastiche/derivative/traditional. maybe it's in genres where that's basically unremarkable like folk or jazz, and you'd sound like a weirdo complaining that a trumpeter sounded like Miles or Lee Morgan etc. maybe it's as simple as "I don't like it when music I never liked in the first place gets revived," which fair enough. maybe it's that reviving a sound leaves out the original social context, so it just seems bizarre to middle-aged people that the youths would be recreating shoegaze or idm while wearing the wrong clothes.

I think it's probably hardest to tackle the kneejerk reaction against pastiche that touches directly on music you heard in your formative years, or at least it is for me. It gives the music a nostalgic cast that is immediately distancing, it makes it both too familiar and alien

Part of it for me is that I don’t want to hear something that sounds a lot like, say, classic Pixies. The Pixies are still around and I don’t want to hear them. I know those songs and that sound so well that it’s pretty hard to get excited about it anymore. Even when I get in the mood to hear Pixies, it’s rare that i’ll listen to more than a couple of songs.

But there could be a new band that sounds like the Pixies that the kids love and that becomes their Pixies. That’s cool, I still have my old Pixies comfort blanket.

Whole chunk of lads accepting Olivia Rodrigo was about Alt 80s nostalgia iirc

i have loved reading this conversation.

something i wanted to offer, just from my experience as a catalogue enthusiast, is that tolerance for the tech of the day really does determine how much a contemporary listener can get out of the music.

i've tried to play awesome catalogue stuff for younger listeners. about half the time, the response is something along the lines of "why does it sound like that?" and they're not referring to anything in particular, they're just used to super hidef pop music from the past 20 or so years.

I'M NOT KNOCKING TECHNOLOGY, EITHER. i think it's fucking awesome that consumer playback equipment is better, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. it does reveal the flaws in the recording tech of the past though.

analogy to close. thanks for reading.

kind of like playing old 8bit nes games on flat-screen hdtv in 2025- kids these days will never understand deciphering those pixels via crt. one is not better than the other; context matters.

I was thinking about this at Making Time this weekend, particularly given that I found myself gravitating toward sets from older, more established DJs and producers— is it because I’m older, or because with deejays in particular, experience is hard-won and older deejays tend to actually just be better deejays? even ten years makes a difference!! comparing Chaos in the CBD from 2015 with now, for example, is wild— their selection and mixing was occasionally interesting but kind of naff when they first started, and now they really know how to move a crowd!

it just seems bizarre to middle-aged people that the youths would be recreating shoegaze or idm while wearing the wrong clothes

Then there's me, happy to see any and all shoegaze bands of current vintage doing their thing no matter the age or the clothes. (Which did explain why I was initially interested in Wednesday and still am, but less so for any trad country Americana whatever going on.)

casual 50yo dudefan of wednesday, think lenderman’s great, love the connection upthread to bettie serveert. the singer from wednesday sez the idea for the band was combining the sundays with the swirlies, that’s a very good plan for a band as far as i’m concerned.

i do think it’s more common now in rock than 30 or 50 years ago for a 50 year old to listen to music made by 20 somethings. regardless of gender. there were no 50 year olds at pavement or yo la tengo or stereolab shows when i saw them in the 90s in a small college town. but when i would see a jazz or folk singer back then, you’d get old people, even if the artist was very young. so that says to me that rock as a genre has indeed reached a sort of comfortable end stage where the listeners don’t feel put off by anything.

I saw stereolab for the first time last night and was surprised to see so many people who looked to be 20s or 30s.

anyone who digs neu-alt or weds is a Palomine

the kid's alright

there were no 50 year olds at pavement or yo la tengo or stereolab shows when i saw them in the 90s in a small college town. but when i would see a jazz or folk singer back then, you’d get old people, even if the artist was very young. so that says to me that rock as a genre has indeed reached a sort of comfortable end stage where the listeners don’t feel put off by anything.

this is really interesting. I would see old folks at indie/punk/whatever shows in the 80s/90s/00s but they were very much a minority. but even back then lots of old folks went to jazz shows.

otoh I saw Rashied Ali play a 2500-seat hall for like 8 people in 1997 or so... I can't remember the demographics but I was in my 30s.

Reality TV Argument Bleeds

Regarding old dudes listening to a young woman…. isn’t that good? When I was in high school a lot of guys had no interest in Belly or PJ Harvey or Throwing Muses,
a lot of guys simply didn’t want to listen to a woman.

If you’re telling me there’s an army of old farts eagerly listening to Wednesday, then Hooray! Even if their motives are somehow impure, maybe they’ll learn something.

I'm really tired of this whole 'everything is retro, nothing is original' stance. I like originality, it might be hard to achieve today, but that's why it should be recognized and celebrated. Some bands are more retro than others, and it makes sense to argue about which ones are the least retro. Imo Wednesday is more retro than other Pitchfork-hypes like Water From Your Eyes and No Joy, but probably less retro than MJ Lenderman.

it just seems bizarre to middle-aged people that the youths would be recreating shoegaze or idm while wearing the wrong clothes

Then there's me, happy to see any and all shoegaze bands of current vintage doing their thing no matter the age or the clothes. (Which did explain why I was initially interested in Wednesday and still am, but less so for any trad country Americana whatever going on.)

― Ned Raggett, Monday, September 22, 2025 1:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think it was intentional, but pulling that quote out of context makes it seem way more prickly than was intended. It's not that I care at all what clothes people wear while listening to shoegaze! It's the time-out-of-joint feeling of a (music) style being renewed in the present but warped by the passage of time and recontextualization in the present. Obviously this happens all the time (e.g., I lived through the *third* wave of ska), but it's a notable feature of middle age ime. I often think of a middle-aged woman I worked with in the late 90s who could not get over a pair of navy surplus jeans I wore, which were basically bell-bottoms, and now it's me wondering at the kids in their Docs etc.

Fred: I didn't see anyone making that argument in this revive, but I also did not reread every post. "everything is retro" is definitely nonsense, but it feels straw-manny

zchyrs post upthread is close enough that I don't think I'm strawmanning at all.

probably less retro than MJ Lenderman

I dunno, to me this dude sounds a lot like some of the boozy post-Westerberg stuff that used to get written about in No Depression

Since you used them as an example, I like Water From Your Eyes because for every time I think, "hey, this sounds like the Pixies," I also think, "hey, this sounds like Blue Gene Tyranny!" I feel like that band in particular is doing its own thing in a way that makes their music unlikely to be mistaken for something that existed 20 years ago. I guess that's all I really ask of a new band

Imagine putting Lenderman in the same SENTENCE as Water From Your Eyes! Oh w-

I mean Rachel WFYE moving on from Nate WFYE to Lenderman might well be a boyfriend upgrade. Definitely isn't a fuckin songwriter upgrade (which is why WFYE stiil exists I guess lol)

Is this the ilm gossip column thread now?

That's common public knowledge ffs

is it?

It was in a published interview I read

I tend to not hear about these things until there's a break-up album or an abuse allegation.

"Posters only love you when they're posting..."

Frederik, I never meant to imply "everything is retro, nothing is original." Only that Wednesday in particular don't sound very "retro" to me. There are other young indie bands that I think do sound retro (Momma comes to mind). Why some artists strike me that way while others don't, is something I'm still figuring out. I also want to be clear that I'm not pooh-poohing the idea of originality.

I do think, to an extent, we are living in a kind of post-retro age. Aesthetics from many different times and places have been rubbing up against each other and synthesizing since at least the 90s, and certainly for my entire time as an engaged music listener. Some styles have already been revived, and re-revived, to a point they no longer read as referential to some original influence, while still legible as part of a lineage of influence, and that's how I hear Wednesday: as a descendant of Swirlies/Uncle Tupelo/Breeders/whoever else you want to name drop, not a band whose M.O. is just "hey, remember 90s alt-rock?"

Again, this may be a product of my particular point of view in time: by the time I started getting into music in the early 2000s, 90s alt-rock was *already* this relic from a recently-vanished past, something to be revived. So I've always kinda experienced it through that rosey lens.

relevant perhaps to this discussion I'm seeing a lot of comments on YMO videos from (presumably) new listeners who are surprised it's from 1981 and not the early 2000s. obviously they were ahead of their time but not by *that* much...I think its more that there was a full on 80s revival going on then and I would imagine younger listeners maybe aren't able to make that distinction

I mean, I was born in 86, so to me anything from say 1968 until then was 'old music', but anything before that was really old music - the stuff my parents listened to vs. the stuff my grandparents listened to, though that was obviously from before the era of recorded music as we know it today - might be confusing to the new generation when their grandparents listened to Talking Heads and their parents listened to stuff that knocked off Talking Heads

we listened to Tom Tom Club, our kids listened to Mariah Carey sampling Tom Tom Club, our grandkids listened to Latto sampling Mariah Carey sampling Tom Tom Club

my favorite podcast plays bits of it every week as part of a regular segment, and they always rep for Tom Tom despite clearly having no idea who they are or their connection to Talking Heads

I mean Rachel WFYE moving on from Nate WFYE to Lenderman might well be a boyfriend upgrade. Definitely isn't a fuckin songwriter upgrade (which is why WFYE stiil exists I guess lol)

― imago, Tuesday, September 23, 2025 11:44 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

well I guess I know who will be attending their Carrboro show tomorrow night.

I keep reading WFYE as some new feminist spelling for Wife

I guess this is where the conversation about the new Wednesday album is? I was listening to it this morning and thinking that I hadn't seen a revive. Not as good as the last one, but there are a few good jams on it.

I dunno, I know for a fact that I gravitate toward certain new artists because they tap into an aesthetic that has been in my veins since adolescence and thus will always appeal to me. But I am also a dilettante who listens to a lot of stuff, so I don't feel like I am getting overly excited about anyone in particular or that it's coming at the expense of appreciating other kinds of music.

their own thread was briefly revived: a thread for the North Carolina twangy indie-rock band Wednesday

definitely very ilm-in-2025 that this thread was the more active one though

WFYE was where I used to buy CDs at the Mall, iirc

Finally catching up with the Dijon album, and it's not doing anything for me!!

It's a great sound world but I haven't felt very compelled to go back to it.

It ended up clicking for me in the right setting (ie. not while taking a walk). I still prefer Nourished by Time though.

After trying with his solo album last year and this new Geese album, I have concluded that Cameron Winter is just not for me. I can see what people dig, or I think I can — the emotional and musical range, undeniable creativity and energy — but it doesn't connect for me.

what on earth is this geese crap?

It’s all over the grass

I'm not sold yet on the new album but try 3D Country before completely dismissing Geese. It's a lot more fun and less raggedy