Sottobosco Crystallization, Aughts Shadow-Work, Stocking Stuffer
Before we depart for our holidays, we offer recommendations in the form of a close reading of a new dance pop single, a summary of post-aughts musical embarrassment and a gift-box selection of obscure tracks.
Recommendation: Danny L Harle, Oklou, MNEK - “Crystallise My Tears”
Let’s follow along with Oklou’s first verse, chorus, and second verse.
Last night, I was crying
Did you hear?
Oh, was it all for nothing?
Crystallise my tears (My tears)You have the strangest power (The strangest power)
Over me (Over me)
Give meaning to my sadness
Crystallise my tears (Tears, my tears)Last night, I was dancing
Did you see?
Oh, was it all for nothing?
Crystallise my tears (Tears)
These stanzas pair lines which immediately explain themselves (“Last night, I was crying”) with lines that don’t (“Did you hear?”). Oklou’s question in the first verse suggests listening across distance, and the possibility of one person not hearing another. There are two people with different ideas about listening. The following line (“Oh, was it all for nothing?”) indicates that the act of audition failed to occur.
It becomes easier to interpret the line “Crystallise my tears” the second time you hear it, because it rephrases the preceding line in the chorus, “Give meaning to my sadness.” This is a request for the kind of semiotic production that cannot be undertaken alone. Here, sadness is isolated at a distance from the other, unable to find itself caught up in collaborative narrativizing mechanisms. Sadness is thus insufficiently meaningful, which makes it more sad.
We can continue to MNEK’s verse.
Tell me how a heart
Could be so cold
To plant the seeds of a thousand gardens
And never let them grow?
This imagery, along with the single’s artwork, evokes a sottobosco atmosphere, an Italian term meaning “undergrowth” that refers to a genre of 17th century Dutch still life painting depicting the forest floor. Think shadows, moss, mushrooms, and snails. The muted palette of Harle’s dexterous production underscores this sensibility, until flashes of crystallization energize the picture.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Doing The Shadow Work on Embarrassment in the 2000s
Throughout the 2000s, a spectre was haunting America—the spectre of embarrassment. It’s encoded within the era’s music. The strident voices of pop punk, emo, and hardcore. The whooping and stomping throughout indie music: ukulele, accordion, glockenspiel. The emphasis on “unconventional” vocals—but also flamboyant electroclash, bespokeness, and caricatured sounds and performances. Embarrassment as a musical engine is not specific to the aughts era; but, it reached heights in the emergent digital mediatization of youth culture, and the ensuing self-consciousness of our sparring individualities and reactions to putting it out there. Performing an unrehearsed acoustic guitar performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” as a fifteen year old at a church open mic was not an absurd play in the playbook of the times. The pretense of uniqueness, and the resulting disappointments of the average, created circumstances for embarrassment to thrive and cipher thoroughly into our identities.
The recent resurgence of aughts musical style in 2025 has provoked me to do some shadow work in auditing how embarrassment became so imbued into the American millennial identity. Much of the recent music in 2025 that references and interpolates 2000s music often attempts to extract embarrassment out of the criterion. Throughout the 2010s, obfuscation became a primary tactic to overcome these latent musical embarrassments. Now, and in much of this year’s emergent music, a synthesis between embarrassment and obfuscation has arrived as a unique affect, combining to create an aesthetic of musical effortlessness. The pace of various tools, technologies, and efficiencies in and around music have allowed opportunities for embarrassment to diminish, or at least be more easily forgotten.
Plenty of music is still certainly embarrassing in 2025. But, its streamlining has allowed for embarrassment to become less existential, less centered around totalizing embarrassing moments. Rather, embarrassment has become a more casual transaction (as so many things have)—a coin of the realm in our navigation of music and culture. The tinge of the possibility of embarrassment, and the shadow of its lack, provides a scaffolding for today’s aughts-influenced music. The recent Gen Z continuum of this emerging music is wry but not overtly ironic, adept but not explicitly revealing, keyed-in but not bespoke. Clearly, clashing digital experiences have influenced the way embarrassment has been generationally handled—the 2000s experience of becoming online vs. the 2010s of existing online, and plenty of other media differences and conditions. Anyway, this kind of generational comparative discourse has become a bit overdetermined—also always hiding in the shadows of our current media conversations. Youth on TikTok refer to the aughts era as “millenial optimism,” a brightness seen again from the perspective of a more enshrouded now.
Continuing with shadows and twilight as metaphors for the cultural conditions around music in 2025, I’d like to bookmark and make a crass comparison with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s aesthetics essay In Praise of Shadows, and his expanded comparison between Japanese and Western toilets. The harsh brilliance of millennial embarrassment is the gleaming, tiled, porcelain Western toilet, starkly contrasted with the worn, weathered, dimly lit, and “spiritual repose” of the Japanese toilet. Within the radiance of the great American bathroom, millennial embarrassment, and aughts music in general, simply had no place to hide in the shadows. Everyone was really putting it all out there 💩.
Alec wrote about some of these themes in the context of Screamo music and Lyotard’s writings on stridency. His example of screamo specifically rends a bifurcation of being humiliated and doing the humiliating as a complex operation within the “social contract of conformity.” Alex’s recent writing on Audrey Hobert Who’s The Clown? reveals a younger artist turning to embarrassing millennial tropes in her songform and lyricism, to thrilling effect in today’s culture. I recently wrote about the band ear’s album The Most Dear and The Future, a work which suffuses aughts’ sounds into a beautiful ombre of the era’s influence. Overall, the general status of brilliant embarrassment giving way to enshrouded embarrassment feels unresolved. But, even when the arrows blot out the sun, there are those who will still fight in the shade.
This is all stuff a lot of people seem to be dealing with at the moment, and I recommend that we keep doing the shadow work. With embarrassment as an internalized lexicon, compass, and resultant condition for people who grew up in the 2000s, I also think it can be a kind of psychological superpower. I am feeling a lack of totalizing embarrassment, and also reflecting on new feelings of doubt in its absence as we sit in the shadows cast at the end of 2025. I hope to have more to say along this line of thought in 2026.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Brenda Cay’s “X & Y,” MellowGuitarSounds’ “Mellow Guitar Sounds,” ddsdan’s “Get Some”
This past weekend, returning home at 2:00 AM from a friend’s Christmas party, I realized that my upstairs neighbor’s big holiday celebration was still in full swing. Beneath the spirited cackles and stomping feet, I accepted the impossibility of sleep and I determined that my best course was to don my nightshirt, hit the penjamin, and settle in for a long winter’s night of listening to interesting music. In the holiday spirit of the stocking stuffer, this week I recommend three very special artists, two new and another that I dug out of the vault..
Brenda Cay’s country breakup tune “X & Y” is really what set me off on that festive evening. I found a clip of Brenda’s music video for the song and was immediately obsessed with the chorus, listening to the section probably 20 times on repeat before I ventured deeper into the Brenda Cay universe. As I’ve written about in a previous week, I seek out a wide array of strange, experimental, or otherwise relatively unheard independent music on Youtube, Instagram, Spotify, and so on out of a genuine curiosity and desire to learn about and celebrate music at the margins of digital mass distribution. Brenda’s expressive, nasal, highly compressed vocal performance (with a conspicuous central southern twang) read at first as a kind of hyper local, slightly naive songwriting effort, the likes of which I’ve seen all over my various feeds. The DIY music video features Brenda walking around and singing along the boulevard of the small Georgian Tennessee border town of Ringgold. In a panoramic shot at the homely intersection of Lafayette and Tennessee St, across from the Grocery Outlet and beside the historical society marker for the Battle of Chickamauga, Brenda sings an empowered and cleverly harmonized country anthem about a rear-view relationship. Despite its homespun quirks, I find the songwriting incredibly solid and, in glimpses, sophisticated - so much so that I was inspired (probably for the first time since college) to sit down and write out the progression of the chorus (I-IV-I-ii I-IV-V7-VII-I-V). Nothing too crazy, but in this milieu of self-released singer-songwriter music, a secondary dominant cadence snuck into the tail end of a chorus like that is rare and compelling. Listen to the song and you’ll hear it. There’s plenty more to say, but this week I’m going to let Brenda’s music speak for itself. In short, I think it’s special.
Here’s an amuse bouche for you - a Ferraro Rocher from the stocking: “Mellow Guitar Sounds” by MellowGuitarSounds. I’ve had an ongoing interest in the publication of isolated, bespoke sample pack recordings like this as they form their own sort of liminal music flotillas in the uncharted waters of music distribution. I came across this one and loved the direct-in digital distortion of the guitar tone, the surfy inflection and the loud, uncanny digital drum kit. I felt moved by the matter of fact 38 seconds, by the simplicity of its incidental poetry: of a loop that never repeats - infinity unrealized, and only implied.
ddsdan is probably an all-time backburner obsession for me. I think it was my dear friend David Grubba who first discovered his absolutely bombed and clipped the fuck out Jersey Club track “Get Some.” This is hall of fame stuff. The ddsdan channel contains numerous, nearly 20 year old, pre-smart phone videos of young Jersey kids dancing in the street and in empty rooms. It’s so good. Released on Youtube 17 years ago, the magnum opus “Get Some” is accompanied by a super pixelated image of the teenaged ddsdan (formerly DJD) in a Blingee flame panelled template (with Blingee logo emblazoned at the bottom). The track contains all the normal conventions of Jersey Club, except it’s imbued with an incredible low-fi quality: ddsdan’s vocal sample is stretched and broken like his pixelated face across the triplet beat, de-pitching and decaying as the final kick in the pattern sustains over into the repetition of its harsh, liberatory queasiness. Half way through the track, along with the substitution of Lil Jon’s iconic “WHAT,” for his “get some” refrain, the accompanying image flips to a photo of the young DJ absolutely flexing on us in posterity, in what appears to be some kind of unfinished basement utility room. Budweiser cans rest discreetly in the back, and a digital camera’s signature in the corner flashes the date in big yellow numbers: 01/01/2005. Happy New Year.
—Alec Sturgis