Chasing Fridays: Sacred Holes, road trip playlist, Tommy Fleece Q&A

Hello hello, the fall season is fast approaching and I cannot wait for the oppressive humidity to end. I spent a lot of time this week holed up in my room with the A/C blasting, mostly listening to pop records for an episode of Endless Scroll where I was tasked with choosing my top 5 pop albums of the 2020s. Peep that episode when it drops next week to hear my picks, and continue reading this newsletter for my thoughts on a totally different world(s) of music. I wrote about the intersection of emo-rap and laptop twee, blogged up a bunch of the best songs I heard on a 7-hour road trip last weekend, and then interviewed a songwriter who I've been obsessed with for the last month: Michigan neon-pop wunderkind Tommy Fleece.

Sacred Holes, wackoes - From There to There...

I can tell by my website's analytics that a lot of my readers aren't particularly moved by my coverage of obscure emo-rappers like katmoji, sevenmillion and Swords2. Some of you with more traditionally "tasteful" preferences might not understand why that grassroots scene of artists – some of whom are, admittedly, not good at all – is relevant to the other, more critically appropriate segments of the underground that I regularly trace. Well, now don't you feel stupid? Sacred Holes is one of the many monikers of ear's Jonah Paz – one of the most influential musicians in "indie" music right now – and he just dropped an EP with the rapper-singer wackoes, who's previously collaborated with sevenmillion, Swords2, and other figures from that Le Citadell emo-rap milieu.

The five-song project, titled From There to There..., is slightly more esoteric and also slightly less memorable than the other Paz offshoots that arrived earlier this summer, one under his own name and another as the pictures. Like last year's Sacred Holes EP/comp, Genuine Uppers Life, these songs apply Paz's quietly intense production to perky cloud-rap builds that glitch and skitter with an irregular nerviness. wackoes has a lighter presence on the project than Paz, but when the two accentuate their respective vocal styles – Paz a svelte mutter, wackoes a nasally mew – on a cuts like "Thursday" and "The Recorded Message (A Message)," that's when the laptop tweemo magic happens.

Some standout songs from my roadtrip playlist

I drove from Pittsburgh to Chicago last weekend for a friend's bachelor party, which involved two 7.5 hour treks across some of the flattest terrain I've ever cruised over. I had a friend in the car who generously allowed me to play basically whatever I wanted in both directions, so I flipped between some of my go-to road trip artists (Silver Jews, Built to Spill, Lana, Fountains of Wayne, Chief Keef) and a couple playlists from my Shit I Like series. One of those was my "Shit I Like Masterlist," which is currently a 3,500-song behemoth encompassing all 35 100-song playlists I've made since 2016.

Naturally, shuffling through that playlist is a total dice roll. Extreme metal songs are followed by rap bangers and indie-rock classics are succeeded by oblique electronic songs I don't even remember saving. Shuffling through it is a fun way to kill time on a long-ass haul, and there were a few standouts in particular that really got me through the drive during those last few hours. I wrote about several of those tracks below, none of which are new, but all of which are awesome.

Starflyer 59 - "You Don't Miss Me"

Starflyer 59 are probably the best shoegaze band to listen to in the car – with Swervedriver being a close second. All of their good records (the shoegaze ones from the mid-90s) are stuffed with gigantic riffs that unfurl at a slightly slower than mid-tempo nod, allowing them to fill every crevice of the space you're in like a boat gradually taking on water. By the time the ripping guitar solos arrive, you realize that you're fully submerged in Starflyer's viscous pool of fuzz, and by that point there's no escape. "You Don't Miss Me," a standout from their '97 LP Americana, is basically a Neil Young song encased in gazey goop. The guitars steal the show, but the Hammond organ notes that ring in the background like church bells suspended in time are such a crucial touch.

Parquet Courts - "You've Got Me Wonderin' Now"

Parquet Courts have frustratingly been reduced to a shorthand for a specific type of guy – metropolitan, pretentious, perhaps physiognomically reminiscent of a certain newsletter writer – and I think that's a shame. I have no doubt that they'll have their "vintage" return to prominence at some point in the next decade, but for now I think it's fair to call the 2010s critical darlings legitimately underrated. Their run from 2012 to 2018 – Light Up Gold, Sunbathing Animal, Content Nausea, Human Performance, and Wide Awake — encompasses some of my favorite "post-punk"-tinged music ever made, and even this track from their 2013 EP, Tally All the Things That Broke, is an order of magnitude better than any other band from the last 15 years who claim Pavement as a major influence.

Pavement - "Here"

Speaking of Pavement. Interestingly enough, this band weren't a formative indie-rock touchstone for me in the same way their contemporaries were (Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo, Silver Jews, yadda yadda), but I've been revisiting Slanted and Enchanted lately and marveling at just how much of a masterstroke this record remains. For a while I would've said that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was my preferred Pavement LP, but I think I'm adjusting my opinion to Slanted, mostly because the song "Here" appears on the tracklist. The wilted, mellow slow-burner is somewhat of an outlier within their catalog, but I just love how the band's trademark lackadaisica is reconfigured into a tender, melancholy flicker on "Here." Devastatingly pretty song.

Jimmy Eat World - "Goodbye Sky Harbor"

My Endless Scroll co-hosts and I completed an exercise a couple years ago that we dubbed the Jimmy Journey, which involved listening to every Jimmy Eat World album and discussing them on our show. As it turns out, there are more Jimmy Eat World albums than you might think, and most of them are terrible. Clarity, their ambitious major-label flop from 1999, written years before they'd achieve actual success as Y2k pop-punk regulars, is far and away their best effort, and the only cut I've returned to since the Journey concluded is "Goodbye Sky Harbor." The friend in my passenger seat didn't seem to appreciate this song's hypnotic repetition – i.e. playing the same riff for 12 minutes straight – the way I do, but to me this is what all of my favorite emo strives to be: indie-rock.

Jimmy Wopo - "First Day Out"

The other Jimmy I enjoyed on my return trip was Jimmy Wopo, the late Pittsburgh rapper who tragically died in a drive-by shooting before he became the star he was destined to be. Even worse is that his death occurred on June 18, 2018 – the same day xxxtentacion was murdered, which sadly overshadowed the tremendous loss that Wopo's demise spelled for the artform. If you haven't heard Wopo's music, it's abundantly clear from the first five seconds of "First Day Out" that he was a special talent. A gifted writer who could weave funny wordplay and gritty personal mythos into the same song, he was my personal favorite Pittsburgh MC from the era he came up in; harder than Mac, more thrilling Wiz, just as artfully magnetic as the both of them. RIP forever.

Shoreline Mafia - "Poe the Drop" (Feat. Future)

Shoreline Mafia member Fenix Flexin' has been in the news this year for his disgracefully AI-generated hit "Rubberz," but there was a time not too long ago when the L.A. group were pumping out some of the most authentically appealing music in their corner of the genre. "Poe the Drop" is a cut from their 2020 album Mafia Bidness that utterly knocks in the car speakers, and it provided a much needed reprieve from the run of dreary indie-rock that took up the majority of my trip. Future's verse on this song is an effective flashback to his Monster-era hunger, but it's Ohgeesy's plainly spoken hook – "Po' the drop, gimme top" – that makes this the sturdy club banger that it is.

Chasing Down

Tommy Fleece
a
pop singer

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Did I anticipate back in January that some of my favorite songs of 2026 would be made by a guy who unabashedly channels Metro Station and Cobra Starship? No. Am I mad about the circumstances I've now found myself in? Also no. In fact, I'd like to triple down on every compliment I paid to Tommy Fleece's June album, Ultrasonic, when I reviewed it earlier this summer. Songs like "Hanging on a Minute" and "I Can Do This All Night" are absolute genius-tier pop morsels that evoke the neon sweetness of Fun Dip. The Michigan native is operating under the broader "hyperclash" umbrella where The Hellp and Frost Children also linger, but the way Fleece refurbishes the gaudy pop-punk of yore with the agile production of today translates into his own shutter-shaded style.

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Fleece about his affinity for late-2000s neon-pop, larping as an L.A. socialite, coming up in the Michigan scene, his new Ultrasonic remix album, Plus (which boasts a rework by indie sleaze OGs The Teenagers), what he likes to blast in the car, and much more.

Read the full interview below – and the 70-plus others in the archive, with a new one added each week.