WILTLM: March 2026
Bassvictim, Lightris, Yeat, underscores, twentythree, Ye, The Breeders, Department, Jack Kilgore.
WILTLM stands for What I Listened To Last Month. The first week of every month, I look back at the last and rhapsodize about some music I heard for the first time.
March was cool. I got hay fever the first weekend and my heart almost exploded the next, live fast die young right? Hopefully that’s the extent of my health issues in 2026. I caught Philly boy genius slayr live at the Echoplex and moshed for the first time in years, it smelled disgusting. The night before at the Joanne Robertson concert someone shouted “Bring out Dean Blunt” in between songs and I wanted to teleport out of LA. I kept myself busy with writing, interviewing, and running which made the days go by slowly, a cheat code for keeping time at bay. In between there was music, always music. The worst thing I listened to was Yeat’s ADL which I wrote about below, the best thing is the subject of a forthcoming piece, so keep your eyes peeled for that very soon. The rest varies, but I was high on most of it. Thanks for reading, happy April!
Bassvicitm - ?
First listen, I thought I hated it, then I became less sure, now I have fomo about missing their show at The Roxy a few weeks back. The prolific and always insightful Eli Enis said that “Bassvictim have never sounded closer to the light than they do on ?” Personally, I think they’re still lost in the wilderness, but it’s certainly more magical than the scorched urban wasteland of previous releases. Forever, which I enjoyed, saw the pair start to deviate from the abrasive edm maximalism of their first two self-titled tapes. Tracks still boomed with an imposing party atmosphere, but more often they held onto tension instead of giving in to release. The approach brought Maria Manow’s strengths as a vocalist to the fore, her childlike impulsiveness and total emotional commitment. “I’m Sorry King” and “Ike’s Piano” are the clearest precursors to the direction taken on this latest project, which is even more stripped back and left field. The electro romp is still there, but more as a texture than the main event, lurking in the background to remind you this is still Bassvictim. Instead, ? is soft, tender, and triumphant, fully exiting the club in many cases, like the hypnotic march of “Dirge” or the Bunyan-esque “Don’t Stop Me Now.” The most memorable track is the snarling bass beast “Sometimes I believe in God (Sometimes I believe in myself),” but the high point is “Home,” an ode to letting go of where you’re from to discover where you’re meant to be (which may or may not be the same place in the end).
Department - Audacity Files
Back in 2010 I stumbled upon Since I Left You while searching through old Pitchfork year-end lists and immediately held it aloft as a treasured musical artifact. The album’s full-throated embrace of sampling spoke to my early fascination with hip-hop, the first genre I remember enjoying as my own, and insisted that recorded music is not dead; that there is always life to eke out of the lacquer. Shortly thereafter, I discovered DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising, though oddly their boom-bap grooves didn’t speak to me as much as The Avalanche’s kaleidoscopic sampledelia. Adam Kyriakou’s work as Department lands somewhere in between the two. While clearly a beat head at heart, he has a penchant for the same shiny, mellifluous harmonies preferred by his predecessors from Down Under. On his new album Audacity Files, so named because, to my knowledge, he made the project entirely with the open-source software Audacity, he weaves together r&b divas, soul wunderkinds, Italian prog rock auteurs, and Brit Invasion bands over booming trap 808s and swerving future bass. In some cases, the reference points are so distinct, like the iconic “Ghost Town” synth on “The Light of the East” or Mariah Carey’s “I’ll Be Loving You Long Time” vocal on “Distant Voices, Still Voices,” they resemble classic mashup albums like Feed the Animals or Mouth Sounds. The music is nostalgic in the manner of reverence, a celebration of the sounds Kyriakou grew up on and an offer of gratitude in their wake.
Jack Kilgore - Affection
You could listen to this in the background while you stare at a spreadsheet during work and still get something out of it, but the real way to experience Affection is by sitting down and watching the album-length music video. Much like its titular emotion, Jack Kilgore’s debut is both strange and profound, an experimental electronic record that traffics in droning synth waves, spoken word soundbites, and references to bread, all of which somehow communicate awe for the interconnectedness of human experience. On their own, these songs stand as monoliths of copper magic, dense and impenetrable walls of sound reminiscent of the grainy synth baths on OPN’s Replica crossed with some of the more aggressively schizophrenic cuts from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs. However, when paired with the clips and images selected by Kilgore for its visualizer, they become auditory lenses revealing the meaning in these small moments from life in the Anthropocene. The stippling high-bpm techno cut “I love you through hiccups” transforms a DDR playing mascot into a celebration of creative glee, and “Hey There Delilah” drag out “Mutuals” makes a lowriding Scotchman showing off his bawbag boxers feel like a cry for connection via shared nostalgia. The most penetrating and damning of these juxtapositions is that of the penultimate, and titular song “Affection,” which soundtracks a beached seal as flies swarm about its face and the tide rushes in to meet it. The track’s glowing, glass-like organ celebrates the beauty of the natural world while also begging the question, “Will our love be enough to save it?”
underscores - U
Electronic music can feel at odds with love, the rational artifice of its circuitry standing in stark contrast with an emotion of origins so unknown we can only call it natural. Songs that pull off the marriage well play with the feeling on their own terms. Daft Punk’s “Digital Love,” for example, locates the listener in the landscape of a dream, treating its cyborgian sounds as role play until you identify so closely with its tale of lost romance you begin to wonder if robots have hearts too. U is a pop album, but one in the vein of Skrillex, PC Music, and digicore; it wears its artifice on its sleeve and so is confronted by a similar obstacle, given that it’s also, very deeply, a love album. underscores’ solution is to recreate the feeling’s all-encompassing grip by flattening you with incessant, fast-paced, inventiveness. This type of omnidirectional deluge has long been a hallmark of hyperpop music, but rarely is it matched with the specificity of songwriting that underscores brings to the table here. Tracks like the extended vaping metaphor “The Peace” or the self-effacing, parasocial takedown “Hollywood Forever” have a layer of internal world-building that moves them beyond mere displays of technical wizardry. Album crown jewel “Music,” works in the opposite direction, employing a serotonin receptor-frying synth blast to overwhelm and drive home the song’s central metaphor, “When I’m with you it feels like music,” a comparison I’ve heard hundreds of times but for once, actually believed.
Lightris - “Up Down”
Madison rappers Lightris and Sero hit the TikTok lottery earlier this year with “Kwik Trip,” a lighthearted (and very danceable) lowend ode to the ubiquitous Midwest convenience store that’s racked up millions of streams across the web. The song’s success is easy to understand in light of our relentless negative news cycle; two homies chopping it up on their way to grab a late-night snack is a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of apocalyptic omens and a wholesome reminder of modern life’s simple pleasures. That being said, “Kwik Trip” isn’t even the duo’s best track; that distinction goes to the equally upbeat “Bronny James,” which dropped almost a year ago and recently got blessed with a standout video directed by Nolan Bulaschinni of Milwaukee music collective Run Along Forever (shoutout to the always excellent John’s Music Blog for putting me on). And both of these were eclipsed last month by Lightris’s solo effort “Up Down,” another lowend banger with a simple chorus (just repeat the title) that enmeshes itself so perfectly among the rapid-fire handclaps, you can’t help but find your shoulders popping and locking as the two-word mantra burrows its way into your skull. The beat, which comes courtesy of Lightris and LA producer Ekebabyy, sprints ahead with the energy of a sub two-minute sugar hit but sustains itself for three thanks to the addition of colorful elements like the boomeranging laser beams that enter in at 0:54 or the bongo hits that playfully stumble in a minute later. My favorite moments, though, are when the handclaps cut out, and we’re left with just Lightris crooning softly atop the lead melody, his pitchy autotune evoking fellow swagged-out white boy Bladee, but without the obfuscation of the Drain Gang leader’s angelic mysticism. It’s these brief interstices of longing (”Can I hold you hand because I don’t want to be alone”) and apprehension (”I’ll see if I break this pattern”) that make the release of the chorus so life-affirming.
The Breeders - Title TK
This is punk’s answer to Kid A. In late 2000, Radiohead brought art rock into the barely extant twenty-first century by abandoning the technological anxiety of their up-til-then magnum opus OK Computer, and dropping wholesale into the digital abyss that was just beginning to swallow us all. A year and a half later, Kim Deal and her mostly new Breeders lineup released a slightly less depressing but no less concerning take on the low-key grunge of Pod and Last Splash. Whereas those records offered an antagonistic but largely coherent reaction to mainstream culture, Title TK is unable to collect itself for even an opening salvo. The album is best described as a collection of fragments: stilted drum beats, mechanical guitar riffs, and wandering vocals that happen to coalesce into songs, but could just as easily have remained separate. This may sound like criticism, but it’s all to Title TK‘s advantage. The disjointedness reflects the way in which the world was beginning to fracture at the time; there were fewer clean narratives to respond to, which left the act of doing so, punk’s ultimate hallmark, feel as jumbled as Deal’s lyrics on many of these tracks. Rewire your brain to live among the machines.
twentythree - “stay awake”
The IG blogs are calling this EDM-jerk, I guess because the songs have synths that go pew instead of squelch? I’m not quite ready to endorse the name, but there is some truth to it. twentythree is a Toronto rapper and producer whose single “Queens St” blew up off the strength of a single saw melody. The song is mixed like twentythree’s fakemink-esque chipmunk vocals are an afterthought, shoved in the background and fighting for their life alongside a lone and blocky 808-pattern. It’s this deferment of attention that’s actually the secret to the track’s success; we’re really just here to be buzzed in half by a giant sin wave after all. I’ve definitely heard “Queens St” bouncing around my For You page for a while now, but it wasn’t until this past month that I became properly acquainted with its creator through his more recent loosie “stay awake.” Here we have the same stripped-down club sound getting passed through a haunted sigilkore filter, complete with unnerving bouts of fiendish laughter and skittering OVO “6 God” ad-libs. “Imma hop in the car and go fast,” twentythree raps on the hook, and really, that’s the appeal of the song, the way it makes you feel like you’ve strapped on night vision goggles to go joyriding around downtown Toronto in a space whip.
Yeat - ADL
Here lies the bloated, pustulating carcass of the prestige rap album, a concept ossified in form since the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy a decade and a half ago. I knew this album was going to be ass from about 20 minutes into Yeat’s Zane Lowe interview when he kept emphasizing how much he really tried this time around. The whole point of Yeat is that he’s not trying; he’s just ripping through insane alien beats while slurring off nonsense that sounds like the inner monologue of someone on a Perc 30 bender. I’m glad he got sober, but it appears to have come at the cost of the weirdness that made him him. The beats on ADL are staid compared to those on his previous blockbuster 2093, consciously reigned in and hollowed out to give Yeat as clear a path as possible to connect with listeners, a bad move considering he has absolutely nothing to say. But who cares if your lyrics are empty when you have the cache to get Grimes and NBA Youngboy on a song, or the capital to rap atop an Elton John sample (the same one from Ye’s “Good Morning”), at least that’s the conceit of this album. Artists love to talk about rising up and taking down the industry, but it may just kill itself with old ideas.
Ye - BULLY
Speaking of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West released his long-teased album BULLY last month, his first since embroiling himself in a river of scandals revolving around anti-semitism, not to mention a pair of sexual assault cases. In contrast to much of West’s discography, and as a result of his current status as a pop culture pariah, the album is largely devoid of the genre-defying collaborations that records like ADL take inspiration from. Instead, Ye contents himself with running through his back catalog solo, revisiting old sounds as an older lone wolf. Opener “KING” sounds like a leftover from Nasir, “ALL THE LOVE” is a poorman’s update to “Love Lockdown,” similarly “SISTERS & BROTHERS” is a defanged “Guilt Trip,” and “Whatever Works” digs back into the chipmunk soul that put him on the map in the first place. Absent from it all is his characteristic hunger and irrational self-belief, crucial to selling such wild and novel updates to hip-hop’s form back in the day. The man we hear on BULLY is a shell of himself, worn down but his never-ending, self-made war against the vaguely defined “they” that have forever sought to tear him down, even as he built himself into one of the most defining artists of a generation worth billions of dollars. All that being said, at least there isn’t rage bait like “WW3” on this thing, at least the lyrics sound complete and coherent, at least he put out an apology, however opportunistic the timing. And there are a couple of glimpses of the “old Kanye” here too: he actually manages to wrangle a good collab out of the husk of former mentee Travis Scott on “FATHER,” and while “PREACHER MAN” may be a “Bound 2” sequel (threequel?), it renews its source material with the perspective of a man settling into middle age instead of running from it. Only time will tell if these are hopeful indications of what’s to come, or the final gasps of Chicago’s Icarus.