I love New York, love New York, love New York, love New York, love New York

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2025.

#4 : Addison - Addison Rae



Once derided as a former TikTok dancer who made ill-fated attempts to break beyond the platform, Addison Rae’s fortunes changed last summer when Charli xcx invited her to collaborate on a remix, washing away the sticky juvenilia of her social media fame. Her debut album offered up dreamy synthpop that was weirder and more interesting than expected. Opener New York begins sounding floaty and fizzy, but ends in a pummelling explosion of chaos; High Fashion and Times Like These were an experimental hallucination of trip-hop and R&B. The fact that Arca remixed Aquamarine says it all. The pleasures Rae sang about, however, were far simpler. The gauzy, romantic Summer Forever distils the vibe: how fun it is, to be “young, dumb and cute / Nothing to lose”; the record’s mix of hedonism and nostalgia, its proud anti-lore depthlessness and hunger for sensation feel like extremely 2025 techniques for distraction and survival.


The 22nd album I've listened to and, when I met it as a new entry, I gave it a quick listen and was distinctly unimpressed - I didn't think it was hateful but really very lightweight ("sub-par Charli XCX ripoffs"). I feel I need to revisit it because of how nice The Guardian is about it above and, you never know, I might change my mind second time around, but I struggle to see it happening...


Yeah, it's certainly not hateful and "dreamy synth-pop" is certainly a reasonable description - it's just the "weirder and more interesting than expected" that I struggle with, because, well, it just isn't. It's not the first album that I somewhat seem to be in the minority by completely missing the point to it and I'm sure it won't be the last - I think "perfectly fine" is the fairest thing I can say about it but I''m certainly not going to get any more excited than that. 


This debuted at #2 and managed eight weeks on the chart  - she seems to have got a lot more promotion than you might expect from those numbers. Wikipedia has a decent amount on the album (208 milliPeppers) and it tells us it's her debut album - and it gives us a load of nonsense about her inspirations, process, blah-di-blah, whatever. Critically, it was very well received and made quite a few year-end lists, including #1 in The Fader and The Washington Times and commercially, it's done pretty well globally, getting to #2 in Australia and #1 in the mighty New Zealand market, but only #4 in the US - NZ is probably the one that matters most to her though. 


discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for 20 quid, but if you want the limited edition with clear vinyl filled with "pink sparkle liquid" (probably best not to ask) then it's going to set you back £100. And I will not be spending that, or even any amount on it - I'm intrigued by its popularity but that's as far as my interest goes, I'm afraid. I guess Addison Rae Easterling will be pleased she won the round though - that and her her #1 in NZ must have made her year.


#5 - A very decent album


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I got caught compiling my own news

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #35 :  SABLE, fABLE - Bon Iver If, as Justin Vernon recently suggested, this is the last ever Bon Iver album, it’s a beautiful redemption arc: a loving send-up of his anxious, myopic sad-sack self blossoms into a radiant appreciation of possibility, sensuality, risk. Everything Is Peaceful Love has one of the year’s best refrains: “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now!”, giddy with thrill and absolutely no idea of what to do when you get up there other than enjoy the view. And while there are gorgeously passionate songs here, it’s the ones about gracefully letting go of an unviable love that really underscore the admirable humility in Vernon’s bowing out. I always feel like I should enjoy Bon Iver albums more than I do - they feel like they have the ingredients I need but come across a bit detached and miserablist for me to actually want to revisit them - but The Guardian suggests there may be hope for this...
Read more

But you hold your love like a weapon in your hand

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #14 : pr ivate music - The Deftones This was the US alt-metallers’ first album back after serendipitously getting a huge new following via TikTok, particularly for their sweeter, shoegazier material. But rather than court that audience by cynically remaking Sextape 11 times over, they instead created a balletic cyborg of a record. The riffs could put a dent in concrete masonry, but the groove-metal rhythms are light-footed and, as ever, vocalist Chino Moreno sets out even wider tonal possibilities. It’s as if waves of pain and relief pass across his spirit as he goes from dry croaks to thunderous denouncements to blissful clean singing. The thirteenth album I've previously heard from the list because I met it as a new entry and I'm afraid I won't be relistening to this one because it was (and I quote) " too noisy for my sensitive ears". This debuted at #2 (kept off the top by Wolf Alice) and mana...
Read more

Left you in Catford 'Spoons and you were all alone

Image
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2025 . #47 :  Dead Channel Sky - c lipping. Clipping frontman Daveed Diggs is best known for being in the original cast of Hamilton, and for all that this album is filled with noisy industrial rap, you can easily imagine it being successfully adapted for the Broadway stage. Dead Channel Sky is set in a cyberpunk dystopia not dissimilar to the scorched-sun “real world” of the Matrix, humming with janky tech and populated with fascists and freaky hedonists. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes render it in acid squiggles and revving breakbeats, while Diggs delivers his mutoid poetry like a prophet jacked up on some amphetamine he’s synthesised in a backstreet lab.  Somewhat surprisingly, this is our second visit with the pretentiously named clipping. - last time I described it as "unremittingly grim", so obviously I'm super glad to be back with them. Well, that was "interesting". The first track ...
Read more