Three Hot Trends You Need Right Now

Who are the cool kids now, dawg??

Among this week’s musical selections: A bounty awaits, including a magnificent summer record from 1968 by a Hungarian guitarist; a quirky and fun dub-centric record from contemporary Los Angeles; a worthwhile revisit of rap record out of Baton Rouge circa 2018; an underground rock tape from Athens, GA in 1987 that’s just been reissued; and more!

We’re all gonna sit at the cool table after this week.

Upon further consideration, the legal department at Listening Habit has informed us that referring to these trends as things you “need” may not be defensible in the Maslowian sense.

Trend 1: Future Medieval

This is a bubbling cultural/aesthetic moment that I’m here for. We might hypothesize that Future Medieval is what happens when you start to wear out steam punk and the kids want to go deeper and weirder. Or, it could be something more subliminal about our tech-feudalism economic moment, but either way we’re approaching a moment when Medieval Times might be trendy for fashion’s sake.

In March, Mashable described the new aesthetic as “castle-core” but this movement has been simmering in the electronic music scene for a little while now, and I think “Future Medieval” is where it started.

One recent harbinger was the debut of Teenage Engineering’s “Medieval” EP-1320 sample/sequencer which comes pre-programmed with hundreds of sounds harkening back to the 1200s (the century, not the Technics turntables). From the product description: “go back in time and play along with the included magical melodies, sultry songs and bubonic beats.”

Astute observers might’ve noticed some Medieval flair peeking out from the illuminated script styling of titles for the film Saltburn. There was even an exhibit at the Getty Museum in late 2023 all about graphic design in the Middle Ages, so illumination has been in the ether lately.

In the UK, along with “Future Medieval” the term “Bardcore” is getting thrown around cheekily as a portmanteau referencing hardcore electronic mixed with medieval themes. It’s an aesthetic enjoying a growing presence at a few UK club nights (or club knights?!).

The upside of this moment is we are still free to blend bass heavy jams with tales of chivalrous knights, may poles, peasanting, and drafty castles. The societal conditions surrounding serfdom are increasingly relevant to the zeitgeist…

Trend 2: Morgan Wallen

There might not be a bigger (mainstream) cultural trend right than Morgan Wallen, whose new album was released at the end of May and immediately catapulted him into total Billboard chart dominance. He had 6 of the top 10 songs, and 37 of the top 100 songs at the end of May. 🤯 To me, that level of “hotness” on the charts reeks of corporate manipulation, but what do I know?

If you’re morbidly curious, here’s the song “What I Want” with Tate McRae, which is currently topping the charts. Musically speaking, I’m not engaged by this type of pseudo-working-class country-trap-pop. It’s corporate-extruded White culture, and it does us all a disservice, sonically. Pink slime, but music.

It doesn’t matter whether Wallen is MAGA-coded without taking sides, or a neutral player being celebrated by Christian-Nationalists as the current pinnacle of White culture, because his output isn’t good listening. This is the music that algorithms tell companies to tell people to like. It doesn’t originate from a tradition. It’s country music vibe generated via a rehashed (white-washed) T-Pain praxis circa 2008¹ but twisting the “classic blue collar aesthetic” knob to 11 while layering in some guitar. Wake me up when it’s over.

It’s probably also a good time to remember that the Billboard charts are compiled using an opaque set of parameters to calculate the rankings. In fact, the weights of measurement were significantly “recalibrated” in 2017, which caused a significant decrease in the presence of rap and several latin genres, including Reggaeton, at a time when they were well represented on the charts. Now we’re at a point where there’s hardly any representation outside of this one country-rap-bar-pop artist. Suspicious.

Worth taking a look back at this article about the changes to Billboard chart measurement from Rolling Stone in 2017, if you’re curious about that.

Trend 3: No More Lookalike Contests

According to Harper’s Bazaar in Australia, the brief moment where we could all enjoy celebrity lookalike contests has ended almost as quickly as it re-emerged. Once Timmy Chalomet showed up to his own lookalike contest everything became too meta to be fun anymore. I don’t make the rules. I’m just the messenger. Sorry to everyone who’d been working on being more like someone else as a hobby. I guess we all have to be ourselves now.

None of this week’s music finds are aligned with these trends. #ListeningHabit

Gabor Szabo - Dreams

Starting with an oldie but a goodie dating back to 1968. If you aren’t familiar with the work of Gabor Szabo, do yourself a favor and give the album’s opener, “Galatea’s Guitar” about 2 minutes of your time. It opens with a dusty, open-air take on a meditative classical style and then after about 90 seconds explodes into space before flipping the script to become a wildly expressive jazz break. By 2:23, if you’re not like “oh dang, this is really something,” then I’m deeply sorry about the emotional blockage that’s preventing you from recognizing what cool feels like.

The symphonic-jazz interpretation of Donovan’s “Ferris Wheel” is a great tune for a certain kind of early evening in the summer. There was a recent vinyl re-issue of this, so if you’re digging it, keep your eyes peeled at places where records are sold. No skips. A total gem.

Pachyman - Another Place

Press play on this one and you’ll start with “Hard to Part” which is a funky, analog-weirdo breakbeat groove. It’s immediately chased by a spacey astro-dub number, and you start to get a sense of the eclectic nature of what’s going down. If you’ve got diverse crate-digging sensibilities, then there’s a good chance you’ll catch the groove here.

The overarching tendency is traditional dub roots sound, but the artist brings his own flavor to the mix on songs like “Take Me the Dance”, which weaves in tropicalia and yacht rock for a leisurely setup before the dub echo loops drop. PACHYMAN is touring Europe for the late spring and early summer and then returns for a run across the United States and Mexico in September.

RIYL: Vex Ruffin, the band cuts off Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head

Quadry - Malik Ruff

This one is a rewind to 2018 and a breakout record for a young rapper from Baton Rouge, Louisiana who was eschewing the established local trap sounds to embrace a broader expression of the Southern underground. I’m bringing this album back for the summer.

Press play and start with “1:04” which feels like a perfect candidate for a skate video with a blend of indie-rock beat and underground flow. The song “Nowhere to be Found” draws easy comparison to Outkast circa ATLiens for it’s leaned-back, reversed-sample loops and a boom bap beat with more rides than hi-hats, which is refreshing. “Cross (New Shoes)” has a great balance between pounding post-Neptunes production and a summery pop hook in a good way. “Pirelli” is a fantastic piece of introspective trap paired with fluid flows that will have you nodding along if you’re into JID.

Quadry is diverse in styles, creative in delivery, but cohesive in sound. Might be a nice rap palette cleanser, if you’ve been feeling like there’s an underground flavor that’s been missing lately.

The Fall of 1987: Samizdat Zine Tape

You may already know that I have a soft spot of random cultural artefacts, and this one is a doozy. Chunklet worked with Georgia-based underground-music aficionado Gene Lyons to give this tape a re-issue almost forty years after it originally hit the streets of Athens, GA in September 1987 accompanying a rock zine called Samizdat that Gene helped put together with some friends at UGA.

Athens fosters a lengthy history of leftfield rock magic from REM to the Elephant 6 collective, the 40 Watt Club, and so many more. It’s sort of a weirdo island of a college town in the classic sense, or it was at that time, for sure.

This tape is snapshot of underground bands that didn’t have any intention of REM’s mainstream success, and a tape created by some local scene enthusiasts who enjoyed the view from the weird side of the world. From the wild and distorted rock sounds of Bar-B-Q Killers to the outsider-acoustic of Vic Chesnutt, this is an eclectic mixtape that captures a listening experience from a very specific time and place.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Gene in Savannah about 15 years ago when he lent me some large speakers and a PA for Vinyl Appreciation’s sound system. He didn’t ask me for any money or anything either (which was good because I wasn’t making any on those nights). He just appreciated people doing cool music events.

Take that energy out into the world and rock on.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for spending some time listening with us. We’ll be back next week with something completely different. Until then, try to do something small to support local weirdos.

1. Did you know T-Pain did a cross-over song with Taylor Swift back in 2008? The video is one horseman of the cultural apocalypse in my understanding of U.S. history.