WITLW: November 26, 2025
Sincere pop music, problmeatic EDM trash stars, and a return to 2018-era r&b wooze. Plus everything else I listened to last week!
What I Listened To Last Week:
Hollis Howard - Good Morning, We Love You
Making sincere music is hard, Hollis Howard does it well. On her debut EP, the 22 year-old LA songwriter takes the surprisingly difficult stance of saying she cares, about her friends, her family and her craft. In an age of learned nihilism and debilitating self-awareness, such a simple step can seem like a mountain to climb, and yet here’s a project which does it time and time again. Take “Gainsayer” for example, a track that muses about the things that divide us from the ones we love, its verses read as a series of run-on sentences with little in the way of poetic adornments to hide the sentiment flowing underneath. And then there’s “I LOVE MY FRIENDS,” a sort of laundry list of gratitudes that tumble out in wonder along with what may be the project’s slogan: “I don’t think it’s cool to/Try and hold it in.” Hollis’s directness on these tracks is disarming and part of the reason why they work so well, their immediacy knocks you back before you even have a chance to put walls up. It also helps that she has great pop sensibilities, perhaps most notably on the track “Nero” which has an incredibly bright and catchy hook that takes you by surprise each time it comes around, as it should per the accompanying lyric “You might take me by, take me by, take me by surprise.” A refreshingly sweet listen.
Bassvictim - Forever
My first real interaction with the victims of bass, though I distinctly remember their debut single “Canary Wharf freestyle” being one of the first things I listened to on nina back in the day. I guess these two are toxic? Their recent Pitchfork profile certainly gave that impression, but I don’t know, I haven’t been following along closely enough. What I can say is the music is pretty good, like brain-friend EDM that traffics in childlike melody instead of crystalline topliners. Ike Clateman’s production is impressively unhinged but Maria Manow’s heavily accented vocals are what make the project for me. Her performances have the freewheeling energy of a kid on a trampoline, as if the lines are dawning on her at the apex of each jump. There may not be much to take home here, but it’s a fun time while it lasts.
elmjack - FUNCTAPE
This one brought me back to 2018, when everyone was shacking up inside their bedrooms to make woozy pop-r&b tracks about the vagaries of youth. It was a genuine burst of creative activity that has since been pilloried with terms like “bedroom pop” and “Spotifycore,” but FUNCTAPE manages to give the sound a new lease on life. While there were some genuine gems that came out of the whole Lorem wave (“Suzuki Peaches” anyone?) a lot of it was, understandably, immature, haphazard amalgamations of contemporary rock stars like Frank Ocean and Tame Impala with half-baked lyrics about growing up and believing in yourself. Queens artists Hadji Gaviota and loe4t, performing together as elmjack, step in and add real depth to the mix. Across 7 tracks they reexamine some of the well-worn narratives we use to define ourselves, poking holes in their rationale and asking if we could be looking at things a little differently in both life and love. Hadji’s been one of my favorite pop lyricists for a minute, he’s got a knack for pushing conventional song ideas just past their limits, like on “a bother…” which transforms a run-of-the-mill breakup lament into a genuine moment of introspection with a single line: “But would it be about her.” And then there’s loe4t’s production which is warm and well-balanced, giving the tracks real weight where so many of their predecessors felt thin and one-dimensional. FUNCTAPE is one of those rare projects that’s able to traffic in nostalgia while still managing to sound fresh and present, good stuff.
SOTW: Victoryland - “No Cameras”
A bit of ramshackle guitar rock courtesy of former Blood member Julian McCamman’s Victoryland project. The main refrain (and upcoming album title) has been stuck in my head since I heard it last Sunday and I still have no clue what it means. Your heart is a room with no cameras in it? I suppose there’s something lurking in there about the machinations of love being unknowable, but no matter, the best lyrics usually resemble koans anyway. Julian’s voice reminds me of Berkshire weirdo LUCY’s, but with the goofiness dialed back a couple of notches. He throws it up and down the track with reckless abandon before letting loose a cathartic belt on the line “fade out” in the final moments of the chorus. It’s a jovial jaunt through a man’s slaphappy psyche, one with immediate replay value too.