100-song playlist: Alex G, Warren Zevon, It Dies Today, more

[DJ Khaled Voice]: "Another one." I made another 100-song "Shit I Like" playlist. It's the 33rd one I've made since November 2016 when I was walking through my college quad listening to Vince Staples and decided to throw "Summertime" in a playlist titled "Shit I Like." For some arbitrary reason I decided to cap that playlist at 100 songs and then make another. I've been doing that for nine years and now have 3,300 songs I theoretically enjoy sprinkled between 33 different "Shit I Like" playlists.

The playlists are intended to be shuffled. They're not sequenced in any real way and contain songs from many different eras and genres. The only qualifier I have for including a song is that I didn't previously like it. Either because I hadn't heard it, or because it didn't click with me on previous listens. For as disordered as they are, these playlists are the most accurate reflection of my daily listening habits. I think that makes them fun and revealing. I published the last two "Shit I Like" playlists on Chasing Sundays here and here, but I'm doing this one a little differently.

You've got to subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month to view/hear the full playlist on either Spotify or Apple Music. I wrote about 10 standout songs from the mix in the following article. Five blurbs are free for anyone to read, and the other five are behind the paywall along with the playlist itself. Going forward, all of these playlists will be for Chasing Sundays supporters only. Hopefully it's a good incentive for frequent readers of my work to sign up. You'll get to read the full versions of all my weekly Q&A's, the full versions of my longform interviews, and the full versions of the playlists and listicles I publish on here from time to time. Pretty good deal, in my opinion.

Friendship - "Resident Evil"

I saw Friendship play a dive bar over the summer and in my notes app I jotted that singer Dan Wriggins' eyes are "suspicious and vulnerable, like a suspect getting arrested on an episode of Cops." During the levitating climaxes of their set, Wriggins' hoarse roars shushed even the drunk chatterboxes in the back of the room, but it was those eyes that reeled me deeper into their performance. Now, every time I revisit "Resident Evil" from Friendship's AOTY contender, Caveman Wakes Up, I can see those beady, searching eyes scanning the filthy apartment Wriggins shares with a degenerate roommate. A conceited slob – a "shithead," as Wriggins snarls in this song – mucking up the singer's sacred living space with piles of shirts and loud video games in the living room. I can see the anger. I can see the shame. I can see the genuine struggle to choose empathy. His eyes contain it all.

Warren Zevon - "Desperados Under the Eaves"

I don't really know what compelled me to do it. I was 10 minutes into a four-hour road trip when I grabbed my phone off the console and decided it was time to listen to Warren Zevon for the first time. I started with 1978's Excitable Boy because that's the album with "Werewolves in London" on it. I loved it. I cradled my phone in my lap with cruise control on and Googled, "best Warren Zevon albums" to help guide my next pick. A years-old Reddit thread suggested Warren Zevon, his 1976 masterpiece. I'm always hyper-receptive to music on long drives, and the album seeped into my pores and fumigated my lungs while my eyes scanned for deer among the passing pine trees. Eventually, "Desperados Under the Eaves" came on. The closer. The capstone. The high-water mark for rock 'n' roll. Never surpassed. This was it. He put a pin on the whole medium with those transcendent strings. That melodious air conditioner hum. That thousand-yard stare down Gower Avenue. Supreme. Like hearing God's birdsong.

It Dies Today - "Blood Stained Bed Sheet Burden"

Metalcore is a genre I find both intuitively easy and staggeringly difficult to write about. I've been listening to it for 15 years and have so many complicated feelings on not just the music itself, but the heinously cringey culture surrounding it. So, let me try to be as clear and concise as possible while writing about this 2002 song by It Dies Today, a perfect metalcore song. There's good metalcore and there's bad metalcore. 95% of the metalcore from the last 10-12 years is horrible. 65% of the metalcore from the 2008-2013 period (my gateway era) is terrible. Buffalo's It Dies Today emerged in the early 2000s, back when metalcore was still an outgrowth of hardcore and therefore (generally) better. This song from their EP, Forever Scorned, is so gratuitously heavy, so authentically pained, so swagged-out, that someone who's only interacted with metalcore via the genre's current torchbearers might ask, "wait, this is metalcore?" Yes, my child. Yes it is. Isn't it beautiful?

Alex G - "Beam Me Up"

I realize I haven't written anything about Alex G's Headlights since my mini-essay about lead single "Afterlife." I've been trying to live with the record for a while and think about how I really feel about it. Listening to singles with friends, sitting with the vinyl in my living room, muttering along to album cuts when they pop up on shuffle in the car. I'm still thinking. For now, what I'll say is that "Beam Me Up" was an all-timer the first time I heard it. He's so reliably successful at ever-so-slightly pushing the boundaries of his sonic range while still sounding like him and no one else. I love the way this song drifts on and off the grid, staggering behind the beat during the verses and gradually speeding up as the chorus proceeds. His kiddie-voiced harmonies sparkle like a shooting star tail, and the track lulls itself into an eternal groove with banjo strums set against a wash of synth ambience. Like all perfect Alex G songs, "Beam Me Up" sounds so new and also like I've always known it.

Biosphere - "Baby Interphase"

Biosphere's 1991 ambient techno landmark, Microgravity, is a record I was turned onto a couple years ago and had an absolutely delightful time seeking refuge in during the sweltering heat of July. Cavernous and dim, the album evokes such a vivid setting every time I put it on. My imagination is particularly animated by the foreboding pulse of "Baby Interphase." The sound of soberly puttering around a cold, dank warehouse several hours before the rave actually lights up. Or of creeping along tile floor with headphones on, the music simultaneously protecting your paranoia from hallucinated triggers and also dilating your greatest fears by muting your familiar footsteps. This is dance music for the end of the world. Not a climactic anthem for an apocalyptic explosion, but a slithering groove for a steady descent, one post-industrial city left to rust after another.