100-song playlist: Seefeel, Salem, Namasenda, more

Looky here: another "Shit I Like" playlist. I've been making 100-song playlists of new-to-me songs I enjoy since 2016, and this is my 35th installment in that series, bearing the title "Shit I Like 35.0." It contains 100 songs spanning a multitude of genres and eras that are bound together based on a very simple criteria: I like them, and before they were added to this playlist, I either hadn't heard them or hadn't realized I liked them.

"Shit I like 35.0" is not sequenced in any rational order. It's intended to be shuffled through and blindly explored like a messy crate of records in the back of a thrift store. Mixtapes are cool, but I also think there's value in thumbing through a big jumble of bangers and stumbling into something you never thought you'd hear.

To get you started, I plucked out 10 songs from "Shit I Like 35.0" and wrote about them below. I did the same type of write-up for my previous four "Shit I Like" playlists, which you can read here, here, here, and here. And like the most recent 100-song playlist posts, my paid subscribers are the ones who'll reap the full benefits. The first five blurbs are free for all to read, but the second five are behind the paywall along with the actual playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.

If you subscribe to Chasing Sundays for $5/month, you get to read weekly artist Q&A's, the full versions of all my (increasingly common) longform interviews, all of these 100-song playlist posts, and any other paywalled writing on my site. Don't miss out.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water, Horse Jumper of Love - "charter spec"

It's kind of improbable that They Are Gutting a Body of Water keep finding new ways to amaze me. After straightening up their disheveled sound just a tad for last year's throttling LOTTO LP, the Philly boardsmiths are rolling around in the muck again on "charter spec," a collaboration with Boston slowcore stalwarts Horse Jumper of Love that fortunately sounds nothing like them. TAGABOW have always excelled at wading through heaps of artless scuzz to unlock the parallel dimension that only Philadelphians have access to, and "charter spec" is yet another soul-twisting glimpse from the other side.

The song's eruption channels the simultaneous unease and wonder of flipping over a log to find hundreds of pillbugs squirming in the dirt, and then Dulgarian's voice seeps in from the far left and right sides of the mix like mysterious ooze dripping down the concrete walls of a haunted basement. Shoegaze, as a mode of sonic expression, is brimming with imaginative potential that most bands sadly squander in favor of atmospheric vagueness. TAGABOW untap the genre's psychoactive properties, knowing full well that what they unleash might scare you.

Namasenda - "Coquette"

I've been spending a lot of time listening to the Stockholm artist Namasenda, who was formerly signed to PC Music, appeared on last year's horsegiirL EP, and just dropped her great debut album, Limbo, on the Swedish alt-pop hub Year0001. Like a lot of contemporary Scandinavian music, Namasenda's songs are sleek, icy, and exploit the tension between avant-garde production and accessible pop songwriting. I think I described Limbo to a friend as, "oklou if she banged harder," but one of my favorite album cuts on the record, "Coquette," is a bit different than that.

The first time I heard this track I thought the verses were a bit derivative of late-2010s Charli flows, but once the chorus came in my eyes practically bulged out of my skull and I had to take my eyes off the road to quickly chuck it in this playlist for safe keeping. The splayed bouquet of synths remind me a lot of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" (a banger, let's be real), and the way Namasenda purrs the line, "All night she wanna daaaance," is just so primally satisfying. This track should be 10x bigger than it is.

Seefeel - "More Like Space"

Seefeel have made some incredible music since detaching from shoegaze post-Quique, including their 2026 LP, Sol.Hz, which is one of my favorites of the year. But goddamn. No one's ever fused ambient techno with wavelets of abstracted guitar distortion quite like Seefeel in their germinal years. "More Like Space," the title-track from their 1993 debut EP, is one of the first instances where Loveless's sound traveled beyond My Bloody Valentine.

Basically every other shoegaze band to this point had been using Isn't Anything as the nascent genre's template, but Seefeel snatched the liminal textures of "Sometimes" and "To Here Knows When" and affixed them to the cyclical pulses that Aphex Twin and The Orb were popularizing in the next club over. On "More Like Space," gentle dub bass and disembodied wails bob against the ripples of spongey noise. It's been over 30 years, and the water's still fine.

underscores - "Innuendo (I Get U)"

I don't like every song on the new underscores record, but I love this one. "Innuendo (I Get U)" blends together the Sophie hyperpop stomp circa "Vroom Vroom," the sultry R&B-pop of Nelly Furtado, and the articulate production that underscores' class of alt-pop auteurs (Jane Remover, 2hollis) are furnishing the underground with today. Jane Remover started tinkering with the same 2000s Timbaland-core reference points on last year's staggering "So What?" single, and it's really cool to hear underscores adopt a vocal delivery that also reminds me of riding to soccer practice in 2005 while Kiss.FM crackles out of the minivan speakers.

Except nothing about this song is simple nostalgia bait. The squeaky laser-beam synths and torqued bass demonstrate how PC Music's parts can still be scrapped and reassembled into a shiny new rig, and the way underscores uses accents of auto-tune instead of heaping on gratuitous layers feels like a hallmark of the post-Brat era of pop. The soul, the heart, the sweat in underscores' delivery gives "Innuendo (I Get U)" a palpable humanity, even as the surrounding music is digitally decorated.

if i was a pony - "will this be the last time"

if i was a pony are another band, like cratre, who sound distinctly post-ear to me. The London duo only have two songs to their name, but this cut from March is an extremely promising hybrid of coy indie-pop and clattering drum 'n' bass that has all the squiggly weirdness of ear and all the amped-up verve of RIP Magic. I think it's undeniable that the shaky, collagist, perhaps a bit needlessly quixotic production on "will this be the last time" will sound timestamped to the mid-2020s before the decade even concludes.

However, I'd like to think that any band who can string a killer hook together, even an unintelligible one like this, has the means to outlast laptop twee and carry us further into indietronica's future. I don't want to put the cart before the...pony, but I have a good feeling about this band. And if "will this be the last time" is too slow for you, then they also have a "(fast)" version that cranks the speed to 1.25x. Giddy up!