chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (11/12) - Top 20 Songs of the Year
- Cameron Bishop
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
JID - Of Blue
Genre: Hip-Hop
Car Seat Headrest - Gethsemane
Genre: Alt. Rock
Anna von Hausswolff - Struggle With the Beast
Genre: Post-Rock
Geese - Islands Of Men
Genre: Indie Rock
Magdalena Bay - Paint Me A Picture
Genre: Prog Pop
billy woods - Waterproof Mascara
Genre: Experimental Hip-Hop
Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
Genre: Indie Rock
Danny Brown - Copycats
Genre: Hyperhop
Squid - Crispy Skin
Genre: Art-Rock
Clipse - Chains & Whips
Genre: Hip-Hop
Geese - Au Pays du Cocaine
Genre: Indie Rock
billy woods - Maquiladoras
Genre: Experimental Hip-Hop
underscores - Do it
Genre: Electropop
Magdalena Bay - This Is The World (I Made It For You)
Genre: Indie Rock
Maruja - Look Down On Us
Genre: Post-Rock
5.
The start of this song is very much in keeping with the vibe of Eusexua as a whole. It's got a very electronic, bassy sound, with a gorgeous vocal symphony that surrounds you. That alone would be a good song, especially with how she plays with the momentum of the song early on, taking out the bass to make the song floaty before bringing it back in for the chorus to give you a little satisfaction.
But that's not what got the song in the top 5 for me. That would be the way the song breaks down around two-thirds in. The way the vocals get chopped up, rapidly coming in and out to create this gnarly stretched effect that sounds violent but still as intimate as the rest of the song, like twigs is opening up so much at this point that it terrifies her. She's so vulnerable now that the vulnerability itself is painful. But right after that you're reminded why she's doing it, as the vocals return to normal but the beat sounds near orchestral as twigs lets out an ascendant holler, as the lyrics come in faster than before, it's a rush in every positive sense of the word.
I love when production and lyricism go hand in hand, and that moment is a masterclass in that, which takes this song from really good to brilliant.
4.
The main way this song (and this album for that matter) stands out is with it's lyrics. There are many ways to interpret the lyrics here that are validated by the lyrics themselves, most broadly as a story about how something you once felt passionate about has overwhelmed you and becomes something you do out of inertia despite the harm it causes you. The way I interpret it more specifically though, is as a cautionary tale regarding patriarchal masculinity.
The knight here is depicted as extremely passionate about war, to the point where he derives his sense of self-worth from his success on the battlefield (in the real world that may take the form of competitiveness, or career-obsession). When he eventually fails on the battlefield though, he reckons with the harm that the battles have done him. He doesn't fight out of passion anymore and recognizes that his combat-obsessed ways are making him miserable. With the help of a compassionate person that he meets though, he begins to learn how to approach the world with love instead of aggression, overcoming years of training and misguidance to be a better influence on himself and others.
It is very possible that the song was written with a different meaning in mind, but if not, these lyrics show a lot of empathy. It can be extremely difficult to remember the ways that someone who is aiding in your oppression may be oppressed by the same force (albeit less so), let alone making an entire song about it in such clear detail. In particular, I think the focus on the fact that many men don't even know how to approach the world lovingly, without using a zero-sum logic of domination, competition, and violent protection. The process of, as the song puts it, melting down the blade and shield and turning it into a crown is wonderfully depicted here and I think it is important for some people to hear.
3.
I already wrote about this song at length in my bop of the year post, so I'll keep this brief as not to retrace any of my steps so shortly after the fact, but one thing I didn't touch on much in that post that I think deserves a mention is the palpable feeling of escapism that the instrumental evokes. That country/folky twinge to jbrekkie's indie pop sound already does some of that via association, as does the locomotive drum pattern. But on top of that there is the reverby guitar that rings out like a faint, unreachable desire.
2.
I usually take a song opening with a long instrumental as a sign that I'm about to hear something extreme. Whether it is a positive or negative extreme isn't immediately clear, but I knew the odds here were always good. Black Country, New Road have always had a keen sense of how to use instrumental sections to make a song feel grand and powerful without stringing the listener along so much as to bore them before they're even able to appreciate it's beauty.
One of the ways they keep the listener engaged here is the switch-ups. The song switches a few times between tempos and time signatures and it keeps things exciting, but also bewildering as you don't have much to anchor yourself to.
As mentioned in the write-up about For the Cold Country though, this band tends to excel most with lyrics, and while this song is very interesting musically, it is still in service of the lyrics. Trying to unpack the lyrics of this song is a bit of a nightmare, because it tells a very dense story, and certain things are very much up for interpretation, but broadly it is about a promiscuous woman getting pregnant unintentionally and the slut-shaming that she experiences afterwards. There are a few ways to interpret a lot of the other events of the story, but it also appears to touch on abortion, religion, and possibly suicide.
Continuing with my interpretation of the events (being that the song revolves around Nancy's decision to have an abortion), once it is established that the protagonist got pregnant by accident, they seek reassurance from their mother, who apparently urges her to keep the child using an appeal to religion: "I tried to take the word and what you said // I tried to take the word but the word was dead // I did not want it". After going through with the abortion though, deciding she simply didn't have the money to raise a child, the shaming continues further. The endless shame eventually causes her to commit suicide to escape the relentless barrage of judgements and unfair expectations.
That brings us back to why the song is so erratic: it places you in the shoes of the protagonist, with nothing reliable to cling onto. Everything is daunting and hard to parse through the sheer amount of noise swirling around you at all times. You can't pin anything down, and it's an overwhelming thing to try to break down. This sort of conceptual harmony is always really interesting to me, as I mentioned earlier, so when it's done as interestingly as it is here, and when the other aspects of the song are almost as excellent, I was always going to appreciate this.
1.
My favourite song of the year -- and being totally honest it's not even that close, as much as I love the others -- is Honey Water. I've already had a pretty good go of explaining what I love so much, but honestly I don't think I can write about my love for this song as convincingly as I can for the likes of Nancy Tries to Take the Night or Striptease. That isn't because this isn't how I truly feel, or because I don't know the genre well enough to speak about it, but instead because it's one of those songs that just speaks to me, directly to my very core. There isn't much to intellectualize or analyze here. It just hits me like a ten-tonne truck, downhill, at 80 miles an hour. In my previous write-up though, I did mention that I was refraining from diving into the lyrics too much, and that is something concrete that I can speak on pretty comfortably.
The song pretty much kicks off the album's main theme of men failing her. Here, that failure appears to be about a loved one cheating on her repeatedly, but as I touched on in that other post, it's noteworthy that the protagonist doesn't ever seem angry or even really that upset. Her response is instead to become hopeless and apathetic. The most ear-catching lines are the ones that appear in the refrain, and they sum up the protagonist's attitude pretty perfectly "So it goes // I don't mind". And, again briefly taking from my previous write-up on this song, it is really striking how sincere those words feel for a number of reasons that I touched on in that previous piece. It is so unique to have a song about cheating where the response is unhealthy acceptance that you will continue to be hurt no matter what you do.
The first verse is also incredible at setting the scene here:
"
Why can't you be faithful?
Why won't you believe? They say only love can change a man but all that changes is me Return through the seasons Make up for the night I dream about leaving but now coward's soul is mine "
It so clearly depicts an unhealthy relationship and an unhealthy mindset. The woman in this relationship is constantly placating the man, even as the man is the one doing all the harm. The woman knows that she should leave, even dreams about it, but has equated leaving this toxic relationship with quitting in her head, and as a cowardly thing to do. This verse is the vast majority of the unique lyrics in the song, and it is frankly astonishing how much depth Michelle Zauner packs into these 6 lines. It is an incredibly efficient depiction of a toxic relationship, from the placating, to the manipulator doing barely enough to make their partner hopeful of a change, to the pre-existing mindset that makes leaving seem shameful.
I'm disappointed that the album didn't get much love, but I'm so relieved to see that people really appreciate this song, because there's so much to love about it. It's a truly exceptional piece of art.
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