about me

i just want everyone to know that i was a killers fan from the very beginning, i have that indie cred, even if their newer stuff is kind of lame and balladic. but sam's town has always been my favourite of their albums, which was definitely foreshadowing for ~10 years later when my music taste started to shift across to the other side of the atlantic.

baby's first "oh my god you can do this?!" indie. i was already a radiohead fan - at ten, my father decided i was ready, and handed me a copy of ok computer, which was the start of everything. ok computer is very dear to me, but i don't love every single track, and at that age i mostly just listened to tracks 4/5/6 on repeat (ten year old loudly singing "we hope that you choke" in her bedroom etc). in rainbows really blew my mind. as a classical musician basically since birth, it was the first like popular album where the musicality really jumped out at me. also "reckoner" is the most underrated radiohead song of all time and that's the hill i'm dead on

augie march are my favourite band. i discovered them with the release of "one crowded hour" - i saw the music video on rage and never managed to catch the name, but i remembered the lyrics, which helped me find the single at HMV (rip). by the time the song topped the hottest 100 i was well versed in their entire back catalogue and within years i would become part of their dedicated core of fans, getting my hands on old singles and secret mp3s. but i will never love another album the very curious and specific way i love strange bird. it's all over the place in a way that wraps back around to make it brilliant again. and of course one of my top 5 favourite songs ever ("brundisium") is on here.

yes, i am basic, thank you for asking. this is obviously a pretty perfect album but it was also one of the first contemporary indie albums i fell in love with, and one of the few favourite albums i share with my best friend. in high school we knew all the words to "hard to explain" and would start spontaneously singing it at a moment's notice. the nostalgia value is high.

for better or for worse, this was my first manics album. i borrowed the CD from the library after i saw them play "the everlasting" on a jools holland rerun, coincidentally also a few months after the album came out. (they didn't have this is my truth tell me yours.) i was a manics superfan for a while and while i've kind of cooled on them now (their later albums suck so much that it was hard to stay invested) there's always a part of me that's still 14 years old and reading theories on livejournal about the disappearance of richey edwards, and this was my soundtrack.

when i was 16 my desktop computer got a virus and in the months before i had time to sit down and fix it i was stuck using the dinky little lenovo i'd won as part of a scholarship (laptops were still a new thing then.) i could use my laptop for schoolwork just fine, but the main thing i was missing was my itunes library. this is the experience that got me onto pandora (lol) and eventually spotify (lmao), but in the meantime i had just discovered pulp and the main way i listened to music was watching their videos on youtube over and over again. when i was 17 they were touring in the middle of one of my final exam weeks and i went regardless and had the night of my life. jarvis came down to the barrier during the bridge of "i spy" and stood right in front of me and i said "hi" and he said "hey." they played every song on different class that night except "monday morning" which was my favourite then, and maybe still is now.

the first album that changed me as an adult. obviously it came out long before i found it - this was in my early days of spotify, 2016 i think, and "take off your sunglasses" showed up on my discover weekly playlist. the combination of awkwardness and vulnerability really resonated, obviously, and i fell in love with ezra's style of abrasive confessional songwriting. this is the point where my music taste gets decidedly more american, foreshadowing the fact that I Live Here Now.

when this album came out i was at the beginning of what would turn into a year-long breakup (long story, thanks covid, etc). i would get as far as "don't know how to keep loving you" and then i would have to stop listening. i must have tried dozens of times. the song made me so overwhelmed that i couldn't get through it, or if i got through it, i had no space for whatever came next. on the other side of everything, i finally had time to listen all the way through crushing. idk, i guess it's special to me that julia's breakup album was also my breakup album, and that her next album, about learning to love again, came at the right time too.