chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (3/12) - Banger of the Year

This category is for my favourite banger of the year, including any song that seems intent on giving me whiplash or hearing loss. Anything that feels gnarly and gritty enough to have me stank facing.

Honourable mention: Maruja - Look Down On Us

I really enjoyed the Maruja album as a whole this year and this song really sums up what I love about it. The prominent use of saxophone in rock music is one of those things that just really works for me, and here it is used to great effect, making the song feel so much more chaotic. It's elusive and erratic melodies hint at an opulence that is out of reach: the perfect backdrop to a song about inequality and powerful people dehumanizing those without it.

The second half in particular feels like a sort of radical scripture direct from a revolutionary deity. It reframes radicalism back to what it was always about but which we can often lose sight of: we do what we do out of love. If we chase something new based on acquiring their weapons and not destroying them, we will become them. It takes a lot to be better than the enemy, but that's the cost of forging a better path.

Japanese Breakfast - Honey Water

I won't be getting any points for originality here, but for the second time in a row, I'm going with a Japanese Breakfast song. As soon as I heard this song it became a favourite for me, and my love has only grown for it after many replays and even being blessed with a live performance.

I've mostly put focus on the lyrics during the write-ups so far, but the star of the show here is the guitars. There's like three different guitars (4 including the bass), with the acoustic guitar locked into the groove with a shaker-like consistent texture and tone, and I'm pretty sure there's an electric guitar that is mostly buried amongst the crowded (but never over-crowded) mix, but the real heavy hitter is that awesome electric guitar sound with the distorted, delayed effect on it. You only really get a taste of it during the pre-chorus for most of the song, but then the solo comes crashing in in all it's shoegazey glory.

The song sets a scene of an inevitable temptation, and once again, Japanese Breakfast nail the lyrical-musical harmony, because everything here feels inevitable. Quite often I describe songs as having a palpable sense of dread (maybe a personal cliché, or maybe just a reflection of the dreadful times in which we live), but there is no dread here whatsoever. The sense of dread is actual conspicuous by it's absence. It's as if there is a sort of comfort in the inevitability, summed up by the lines "so it goes // I don't mind" that close out the song. It's so powerful in it's apathy, not because it's a unique sentiment to be expressed in music, but just because the sentiment is so often at odds with other parts of the song. Sometimes it's intentionally unconvincing, other times it's not intentional, but this is the first time I can think of where I heard this sentiment and fully believed it. Fully believed that a destructive tendency (here implied to be a partner's cheating) has been truly accepted as a part of the protagonist's life from there on out. That is what makes those words so unique and so powerful.

Michelle Zauner's tender and whispery vocals also feed into the songs meaning in two ways: 1. It has an almost angelic, siren-song nature to it. There's a laid-back effortlessness to her singing that feels reminiscent of temptation somehow, but 2. it can also read as melancholy, hurt. and detached. Like the voice of a tired lover, worn down by constant betrayal.

I am very tempted to dive into the lyrics a little here, but in the interest of saving something for my favourite songs list (spoiler: this will be high on that list) I'll refrain for now. Suffice it to say though, this is some of Japanese Breakfast's finest work ever and is well worth a listen, maybe even in the context of the album.