What Your Favorite Album of 2019 Says About You
‘The Irishman’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame’ are both over three hours, so why not make the third entry in this series even longer than the first two?
Solange — When I Get Home: You saw things you imagined. You saw things you imagined. You saw things you im-
The National — I Am Easy To Find: You hate this album at first, but you keep coming back to it. You listen every day. Your wife sets the house on fire. You pretend not to notice. She leaves you for Alicia Vikander. You pretend not to notice. You should have held on to her more. You should have finished that essay on dad-rock.
Sharon Van Etten — Remind Me Tomorrow: Your Mom’s Night Outs are WILD.
American Football — LP3: Your Dad’s Night Ins are MILD and THOUGHTFUL, but you LIKE IT THAT WAY. Your CO-ED BOOK CLUB is THERAPEUTIC.
PUP — Morbid Stuff: You complain that emo never gets Best New Music.
Oso Oso — Basking In The Glow: “Emo never gets Best New Music” is now inaccurate, and you will be the first to bring it up.
Pink — Hurts 2B Human: You have no idea what “emo never gets Best New Music” means; you’re probably better off this way.
Pronoun — I’ll Show You Stronger: You are a hyperintelligent shade of neon pink.
Ed Sheeran — №6 Collaborations Project: You are a dull shade of beige.
Angel Olsen — All Mirrors: You yearn for connection, but every time you try to speak a giant orchestra suddenly appears behind you and drowns out whatever message you were trying to get across. Or you’re Danny Brown.
Black Midi — Schlagenheim: You travel with a giant tank carrying your favorite kind of fully aquatic marine mammal. You move with a porpoise. (You’ve also tried to make “moves with a purpose” the r/indieheads variation on “narwhal bacons at midnight.” It won’t catch on.)
Jade Bird — Jade Bird: You have the front row, the front row seats to that Alanis Morrisette musical, so you get to see it, get to see it close up. If you forgot that was happening, well, I’m here to remind you.
Weezer — The Black Album: You‘re mad that the SNL skit didn’t mention The White Album or Everything Will Be Alright In The End.
Weezer — The Teal Album:. Your favorite movie of 2019 was Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall.
Doug Walker — Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall: You have never heard the original album, or any album, nor have you seen the original movie, or any movie, except for To Boldly Flee, Kickassia, and maybe Suburban Knights.
Danny Brown — uknowwhatimsaying¿: You recently realized how much you enjoy being more laid-back, not as concerned with pushing yourself as you used to be. You don’t even care that some of your friends haven’t been relevant in five years. Alternately, you’re Angel Olsen.
Thom Yorke — Anima: At 2am every morning, you take out a loop pedal and gorgeously mumble into Ableton, but you don’t let anyone listen to it for about a decade.
Bon Iver — I,I: After consuming an edible spiked with LSD while drinking ayahuasca, you realized that every song is secretly a reharmonized version of “Skinny Love.”
Tool — Fear Inoculum: You have been punched in the face twice. You have been arrested three times. You have five episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience downloaded for your eight hour drive to see Tool play thirteen songs.
Weyes Blood — Titanic Rising: You became convinced you had gills after watching The Shape of Water. You checked. You do.
Caroline Polachek — Pang: You are a cyborg-mermaid-queen, luring men, women, and non-binary sailors to their death.
Tove Lo — Sunshine Kitty: You want to be a lynx cat in the next life and also in this one.
Big Thief — UFOF: If you die, you will come back as Aisling, the deuteragonist of the 2009 Oscar®-Nominated animated film The Secret of Kells.
FKA Twigs — Magdalene: You fight demons both metaphorical and literal on your way to your weekly pole dancing lessons. You still haven’t figured out what “Fearless are my cacti” means.
Megan Thee Stallion — Fever: You just graduated summa cum laude and paid your tuition selling pictures of your feet.
Lizzo — Cuz I Love You: You majored in political science, but you are most comfortable hosting your all-Beyoncé class at the local Soulcycle. You use GrubHub as praxis.
Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell!: You are aesthetically flawless, ambiguously bisexual, and prone to severe depressive episodes that often, but don’t always, concern the state of the American dream.
Charly Bliss — Young Enough: You have been called ‘shrill’ and ‘unlikeable,’ but you’re sick of being talked about like misogynistic pundits describe presidential candidates when you’re just trying to exist as a woman in this goddamn shitfire of a hellscape jfc
Chance The Rapper — The Big Day: You are Chance‘s wife.
Kanye West — Jesus is King: You are Jesus Christ.
Sleater Kinney —The Center Won’t Hold: You are not Janet Weiss.
Foals — Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Pt. 1: You played Call of Duty in middle school, but graduated to Life is Strange in high school and you’re all growed up now.
Foals — Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Pt. 2: You played Life is Strange in high school, but graduated to L̶i̶f̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶S̶t̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶2̶ Dark Souls and you’re all growed up now.
Lady Lamb — Even In The Tremor: You are boundlessly gobsmacked by how beautiful this world can be, and the bond between you and your girlfriend is so powerful that a single glimpse of your PDA makes all homophobes disintegrate like that one scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Jonas Brothers — Happiness Begins: You’re happy Disney+ arrived, but your happiness really began when Sophie Turner sucked on that red lollipop in a bathtub. (Yeah, she’s married, but you have a crush on both her and Joe Jonas so…)
BTS — BTS World: Original Soundtrack: I fear you like Jungkook fears exploding microwaves. Did I get that right? Please say yes. Don’t hurt me.
Billie Eilish — When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go: Your parents are worried about you. They believe in you and are proud of you, but they just get concerned when your TikToks about wanting to die go viral and Jimmy Fallon builds a sketch around them.
Hobo Johnson — The Fall of Hobo Johnson: You braced yourself for a lazy joke about incels, and you got one.
Logic — Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: Somewhere on SoundCloud exists a recording of you attempting to rap over “Gourmet Race.”
Logic — Supermarket: Somewhere on Bandcamp exists a recording of you covering “King Kunta” acoustically.
Catfish & The Bottlemen — The Balance: It’s 2019, but you still listen to Everything Except Country and Rap™.
Lil Nas X — 7: It’s 2019, so you listen exclusively to country and rap.
Hozier — Wasteland, Baby!: You have written fanfic about Butch!Hozier and Femme!Thor falling in love. Congrats on your Hugo award, by the way.
The Twilight Sad — It Won/t Be Like This All The Time: You were recently diagnosed with goth-rock deficiency. Fortunately, with this album you found the Cure.
Clairo — Immunity: Your parents paid for tutors to carry you through high school calculus, but you eventually understood everything yourself and became a solid, well-rounded student.
Khalid — Free Spirit: You are a straight-A high school student with a ton of friends and extracurriculars, but you’re internally suffering and searching for a greater purpose. It’s chill though.
King Princess — Cheap Queen: Your parents were implicated in the college admissions scandal. It’s chill though.
Vampire Weekend — Father of the Bride: You spend a significant portion of your day looking at VHS recordings on YouTube while noodling on your guitar and/or crafting artisan hookahs. It’s chill though.
Big Thief — Two Hands: You’re more of the same but slightly edgier, but that’s not a bad thing, because you’re more of you, who is Aisling, the deuteragonist of the 2009 Oscar®-Nominated animated film The Secret of Kells.
Tyler the Creator — IGOR: You said some dumb shit back in high school, but you deleted your old social media before you came out so you could start fresh in college. You successfully reinvented yourself as someone who definitely didn’t swallow or subsequently vomit a cockroach in 2011, nor ever threatened to [REDACTED]
Sara Bareilles — Amidst The Chaos: You were the president of student government in middle school, high school, and college.
Maggie Rogers — Heard It In A Past Life: You were called a “forest queen” in your high school yearbook. You applied and got into NYU’s secret witchcraft major. You now have the power to talk to woodland creatures, and insist on calling yourself “witchy feminist Eliza Thornberry.”
Rico Nasty — Anger Management: You were once called a size queen on Twitter.
Kim Petras — Clarity: You’re surprised Ellen DeGeneres isn’t better friends with George Bush.
Taylor Swift — Lover: You lost yourself, then found someone, and somehow, that was everything. You also have a whole TED talk detailing How Taylor Could Have Made This Era A Smash, and it starts by making “Cruel Summer” the lead single.
Madonna — Madame X: You didn’t watch Eurovision.
The Mountain Goats — In League With Dragons: You project a little too much of your personal life into your D&D campaigns, but the other people in your group are cool with it.
Denzel Curry — Zuu: You swear you did, but you didn’t really enjoy your one visit to a strip club; you would rather be brooding and reminiscing on the past, or if you absolutely had to have fun, maybe slaying Rage Against The Machine at karaoke.
Orville Peck — Pony: You know that scene in Spider Man 2 when the people on the subway protect Peter Parker’s identity? That was you after you accidentally saw his true name on a BrooklynVegan article. You prefer to let the sonorous masked cowboy sing in peace.
100 Gecs — 1000 Gecs: You always wondered what a thousand geckos on a thousand pirated Ableton copies would sound like after ingesting high quantities of crack cocaine, Blood On The Dance Floor, and actual blood on an actual dance floor.
Coldplay — Everyday Life: You wish you could go back to 2015, when everyone was united and no one disagreed on anything. You’re optimistic about the future but you miss emotional stability, Brian Eno, and The Newsroom. You’ve genuinely tried to make the world a better place, so you’re really hard to seriously roast.
DaBaby — Baby on Baby: You walk into a party and only spend three minutes with each person before heading out, but you make an impression anyway.
DaBaby — Kirk: You often go to any nightclub with the intention of getting into a fight.
JPEGMafia — All My Heroes are Cornballs: You can no longer take someone at their word when they say they’re disappointed.
Charli XCX — Charli: You love Charli so much you hack into her Google Drive account every time she tries to change her password.
Post Malone — Hollywood’s Bleeding: You are the radical
centrist of the poptimism/rockism debate.
Ariana Grande — Thank U Next: You have started a thinkpiece with “Like queer identity, poptimism has always existed…” You’re straight.
Carly Rae Jepsen — Dedicated: You hold up a sign on the street that insists “Poptimism is not dead!” You shout to passerby; “Dedicated had an underwhelming rollout but is overall Carly’s most consistent project to date!” “That Popeye song is better than anything on E*MO*TION Side B!” They don’t listen because they can’t handle the truth, and also because you’re very wordy.
The Blackconteur Keys — Let Us Rock, Stranger: “Poptimism is dead, rock is BACK baby!” you exclaim, except even Rolling Stone didn’t review these albums separately.
Sam Fender — Hypersonic Missiles: You stopped reading because there are far worse -isms to worry about in the world than poptimism.
Have A Nice Life — Sea of Worry: You do your best to make a difference, but sometimes it feels like nothing ever will. You’re good enough at existing within the confines of depression, good enough at existing within a system that feels stacked against you, but it’s exhausting and burns you out further. Oh wait, there was supposed to be a funny thing here… uh… you still hate Anthony Fantano?
Purple Mountains — Purple Mountains: Nothing I can say, a joke or otherwise, is better than the Drag City eulogy, so just read that instead.
The Highwomen — The Highwomen: You were picking up your ten-year-olds from soccer practice when you got this list from your nephew — The two of you bond over NPR’s All Songs Considered. You read it, but it’s full of things you don’t care to understand anymore. You’re content with your lot, even as the odd news of a childhood friend or a childhood hero passing away makes you reckon with your mortality. In this uncertain time, you don’t know what the future holds for your kids, but you ignore that while watching them shake hands with the other team. ”Good game. Good game.” You don’t see that kind of sportsmanship in the adult world, but seeing it on the field gives you a little bit of hope. You take the kids into the van, and you drive off, Alicia by your side, into suburbia.
CREDITS:
Logic — Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Madonna — Madame X blurbs by Katherine St. Asaph.
Jonas Brothers — Happiness Begins and Tove Lo —Sunshine Kitty blurbs co-written with Jackie Powell.
Post Malone — Hollywood’s Bleeding by Jacob Sujin Kupperman.
DaBaby —Kirk by Nortey Dowuona
Tool — Fear Inoculum inspired by Ben Pierce.
Megan Thee Stallion — Fever by Natasha Genet Avery; convincing me to put that one on here was truly an impressive feet.
Stay tuned for the decade list, which will be uploaded next week.
