Psychic Graveyard
Difficult Fun: June 2021’s Best New Punk
Welcome to the third edition of Difficult Fun! Each month, SPIN will spotlight the best punk on the planet and discuss it here, with the ambition of challenging preconceived notions of what the four-letter word actually means and, ideally, entertaining readers in the process. Purists, piss off! Everyone else, enjoy. This is a column concerned with contemporary sounds, which means it is ultimately a column about the ways in which music is shaped by the current moment. (Consider this your disclaimer. Skip below to the hot tracks if your brain has smoothed over the last 15 months.) Lately, there’s an obsession with returning to “normalcy” in America: bars, clubs, restaurants, and stores are slowly beginning to reopen, which means “normalcy” is tethered to capital; the idea that the only way t...
The 50 Best Songs of 2020 (So Far)
Great songs have a freedom that albums don’t because great songs only have to pull off their trick once. It’s like how a great SNL sketch can be a terrible movie or why Vine was an underrated miracle of online comedy. Sometimes an artist can get a lot more done in miniature. When people say that no one listens to albums anymore, they’re obviously mistaken, but they mean that no one listens to certain kinds of albums anymore. They won’t wait to get to the good part, and an industry that’s been padding out their wares for decades has had to adapt to a new reality where the customer is always dope. From Hailey Whitters to Hayley Williams, from King Von to Christine and the Queens, here’s a supercut of just the good parts: The songs that have challenged and delighted and comforted us through a...
