30 Days in 60 Minutes: December 2024 (Part I)

Featuring Astrid Sonne, The Hellp and "your 2010 electronic favorites are back, in basic b*tch form"

It’s been so long since you’ve heard from me! Thanks to everyone who kept subscribing in the interim, every one of those emails was a reminder to keep going and I’m really hoping to be more consistent in 2025.

A few weeks ago on Indiecast, Steve asked what I’d been up to during the Christmas/New Year’s break where we don’t record new episodes and I tell him the same thing I do every year - in the space between year-end lists and the next year’s release schedule starting to heat up, I pretty much listen to nothing but the electronic music I missed throughout the year. If it’s an ambient house record that finished at like #42 at FADER or The Quietus, you better believe that’s getting priority over whatever Big Indie or Pop or Rap record that I ignored and is clocking in every top-ten. And, as I get more and more disconnected from even the center of the Music Writer Discussion, I start to wonder whether the next year is finally the one where I tap out and just become an Electronic Guy, in the same way a lot of my peers become either Jazz Guys or Jamband Guys (there are literally no other choices).

The answer in 2025? Probably not, since I spent most of the past two weeks working on my very belated Best Emo Albums list for UPROXX and jamming the new Anxious. Fun while it lasted!

ML Buch - “Pan Over the Hill”

This album felt like “the Chappell Roan of music critics who also tweet about wrestling,” which is to say that I recall Suntub getting a little bit of notice in 2023 and then seeing people talk about it as an undisputed instant classic six months later, with almost nothing in between. Coming in at #13 on Pitchfork’s mid-decade list, despite not having made the 2023 year-end, seems proof enough of that. I enjoy it well enough, it all seems very Conceptual in ways that don’t immediately resonate with me, though the one thing I do have to push back on is its supposed pitch-perfect revivalism of a forgotten 90s. As someone who actually lived in that era, I don’t hear “the 90s” so much as vaporwave’s vision of the 90s, where an entire decade was boiled down to a techno-optimism defined by Windows 95 and Ecco the Dolphin and leaves out basically everything else. Vaguely reminds me of that weird sub-trend in 2015 where Grimes and Oneohtrix Point Never said they were going to make their nü-metal albums and that line got repeated in every review despite neither Art Angels nor Garden of Delete sounding nothing like it whatsoever. That being said, I do think it nails the acoustic guitar sound that I associate with Jane’s Addiction and Sugar albums before it completely disappeared into Hillsong rock played on those lute-like Ovations.