Unearthed from the archives, a small and possible miracle: in 2006 a band calling themselves Let’s Be Honeys released what appears to have been their only record, Popsongs for My Poor Self, a collection of lo-fi twee pop for those whose hearts remain stubbornly susceptible to the minor key vicissitudes of existence. If this particular strain of bedroom bound melancholy is your bag, I recommend the whole album without reservation. Selecting a favorite track is a fool’s errand, but here, for the purposes of introduction, is No Love.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Let's Be Honeys - No Love

Mp3 blog executive decision, arrived at sometime between the first coffee and the discovery that one's morning thoughts have already been colonized by the rest of the day: henceforth, some days the Song of the Day will simply be whatever tune has taken up residence in my skull upon waking, having apparently secured a lease agreement during the night. Today's tenant is Gay Human Bones by Harlem, a particularly adhesive specimen, whose chorus contains the irresistible:
"oh yeah that idea
yeah it's a good one
we just found out"
a phrase which, once introduced into the neural ecosystem, proceeds to reproduce with the enthusiasm of a particularly successful invasive species. Who had the idea? What was the idea? Has anybody actually found out? The song declines to elaborate, and perhaps wisely.

Anyway, the track comes from Hippies, Harlem's second album, released in 2010 to the considerable delight of garage rock enthusiasts worldwide, and arriving at the threshold of the new decade like some grease-stained herald of a noisier, less polished, considerably more entertaining future. For a moment there, it seemed possible that the cultural machinery might actually be coming apart in a productive way; but by the middle of the decade the record companies had more or less figured out how to repossess the distribution channels, the internet was undergoing its familiar transformation from anarchic frontier to corporate shopping mall, and the usual plastic-produced pop-star bullshit was being wheeled back onto the premises under new management. Now, in 2026, with the cultural weather once again suggesting the possibility of a substantial "vibe shift", one can only hope the next decade will be a little less airbrushed, a little more feedback drenched, and generally less inclined to ask permission.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Harlem - Gay Human Bones

1000 Times by Big Blood is one of those songs that the first time you hear it, you get it -- unless that is you've never felt the heart ache that comes with infatuation, in which case you should really try living more. I don't really have much else to say about this song, other than that it is perfect.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Big Blood - 1000 Times

This jazz infused ear worm will have you tapping your toes, and maybe even considering calling me back.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: My Robot Friend - Why Won't You Call Me Back?

Was talking to a relative the day before the election and in what I thought was going to be a fairly routine exchange of civic-minded pleasantries, asked whether she planned on voting. Turns out she was under the impression that because she registered as an independent, she was somehow barred from this election -- a sort of disenfranchisement by misunderstanding, or maybe one of those little administrative miracles by which democracy manages to eat its own. I considered letting the misconception stand, then thought better of it and explained that while she couldn't vote in a party's primary, she was perfectly entitled to cast a ballot in the midterms and pretty much any other election that might come her way. She seemed genuinely delighted with her newly restored enfranchisement, although whether she actually made it to the polls remains one of those unresolved mysteries of the American experiment (at least as of this writing). Anyway, today's selection is a lovely little ditty from a band called Mazy Fields, If Socialism's Right, a song I always remember trying to find a place for on for the various mixtapes we'd all make for friends, crushes, and all the other people occupying the narrow territory between. I know next to nothing about the group, except that they appear to hail from Germany and that the record from which this track is taken -- (Where Sunshine's Sold) -- may have been their only album; a modest discographical footprint, certainly, but then some of the best things in life arrive, make their case in three minutes, and disappear before anyone thinks to ask for identification.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Mazy Fields - If Socialism's Right

2009 was a particularly glorious moment in the worldwide C-86 revival. That year the jangling, guitar-pop renaissance seemed to reach every corner of the planet. Among its finest practitioners were Sweden's (surprise surprise) Liechtenstein, perhaps the most exciting band to emerge from the movement. Roses in the Park is today's song: a little burst of melodic transcendence and proof that sometimes the universe communicates through indie-pop songs. Their album Survival Strategies In A Modern World still holds up beautifully, so give this one a listen and if the spirit move you, track down the full album.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Liechtenstein - Roses in The Park

Happy Monday, fellow survivors of the annual temporal discontinuity. Hope you're adjusting reasonably well to the federally sanctioned experiment in making everybody feel they've misplaced an hour of their lives AKA The End of Daylight Saving Time (or was it the begining?). Today's song comes courtesy of Giant Drag: Kevin Is Gay, the opening track and first single from their album Hearts and Unicorns, a record I don't revisit nearly as often as this particular song, which at certain points in my life has become something of a reliable emotional appliance.

There's a raw, punkish, grungy-ness to the whole thing that feels especially appropriate for late autumn, when the trees are shedding their obligations and the sunlight has begun to resemble something recalled under hypnosis. A perfect wake-up and greet-the-fucking-day song, really.

Lyrically, I suppose it's a love song: phrases like "you're all I need", "you're all in me", "you're all I eat," etc. etc. create an almost impossibly perfect piece of romance here folks; dispensing with the usual ornamental nonsense in favor of consumption, possession, and the gradual dissolution of the boundaries between two people let the listener imagine this Kevin guy as a great lover. It's near perfect love song writing! Not too serious. Broad strokes. Nothing too sentimental. The repeated 365/750 presumably refers to 1.) the days of the year and 2.) 750 is probably a reference to the little identifying stamp on 18-karat gold, the sort of thing you'd find on a piece of mom jewelry. And those meows toward the end! Wonderful.

There's an easy playfulness to the whole show, a lack of self-importance that makes it such a consistently fun listen. You put it on, the guitars do their thing, and for about three or so minutes the world seems to be operating according to a more agreeable set of rules.

Still, one question remains: who the hell is this Kevin guy, and why exactly is he so gay? I don't think it's meant as an insult. Maybe Kevin is just happy. Maybe he's figured something out that the rest of us haven't...

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Giant Drag - Kevin is Gay

Today's Song of the Day arrives courtesy of Little My, a band out of Cardiff, Wales — that damp, green, and historically suspicious corner of the British Isles where even the sheep appear to have private arrangements with the weather. And what is there to say about this song, really, except that it reminds me of the best things, not merely in my own life, with its regrettable sequence of invoices, misunderstandings, and occasionally self-inflicted catastrophes, but in humanity itself — that long-running experiment in cooperative feeling which, against all available evidence, has not yet been discontinued. There is an unbridled joy to All But The Beeps Meep — sonically speaking — a joy that refuses to recognize the customary municipal boundaries between one person's happiness and another's spilling over, contagious in the most benevolent sense, like some previously undiscovered strain of optimism for which Big Pharma has yet to develop a suppressive medication.

Lyrically, (and here I must confess that my relationship with the actual words has never advanced beyond the stage of competing eyewitness accounts), it seems to concern growing old, or perhaps the speculative exercise of imagining oneself at some future date when "all of your bits creek", the body's various hinges and load-bearing components having entered into a prolonged labor dispute with the brain's increasingly unrealistic demands. And yet, even then, there remains this appetite "for a little more", this insistence that life, having already supplied you with a certain allotment of disappointments, poorly timed revelations, and mysterious stains, might still have something left in the back room. Some might find this a dark sentiment; personally, I've always found it a compelling reason to keep looking, even if the looking has occasionally involved crossing boundaries, ignoring posted warnings, and discovering, somewhat belatedly, that the door marked EXIT was actually an entrance to a much more expensive problem.

All in all: I'm sorry about the Beeps meep.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Little My - All But The Beeps Meep

If I'm going to do an MP3 blog, it seems only fair to talk about an MP3 I found on one of those blogs back in the day. Today's specimen: Love Is a Wave by the Crystal Stilts, which I believe I first encountered in 2009, shortly after moving to Philadelphia and discovering that I had a considerable appetite for noise. Here was a band that seemed to understand this appetite — the blown-out guitars, the funereal vocals, the whole beautiful racket — and, more importantly, to confirm that I wasn't alone in it. The revelation was almost sociological: Oh shit, other people like this stuff too.

The song works on both fronts, sonic and lyrical; the noise doesn't so much accompany you as move through you, carrying you along on some great and possibly hazardous swell of feedback and yearning. Ride the wave, it seems to say, although whether you're headed toward enlightenment or just another disappointing apartment viewing in North Brooklyn is anybody's guess.

Never saw the Crystal Stilts live; never particularly wanted to. They belonged to that late-aughts Brooklyn ecosystem of reverb-drenched guitar bands, a scene I instinctively suspected of being populated by rich kids with good record collections and enough parental insulation to spend their twenties pretending not to care about money. We hadn't quite settled on "nepobabies" yet, but the basic arrangement was already in place. Still, Slumberland Records on the résumé counts for something — a mitigating circumstance, if not a full acquittal. If the Crystal Stilts were rich kids, at least they were talented rich kids; and in the current cultural climate, where privilege increasingly seems to be mistaken for an artistic medium in itself, that feels like a distinction worth preserving.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: Crystal Stilts - Love is A Wave

Been thinking a lot lately about the old MP3 blogs of the late '00s and 2010s, those little amateur distribution nodes in the otherwise increasingly consolidated machinery of popular music, where some guy with a Blogger account and a questionable grasp of copyright law might, between posts about obscure Swedish pop and photographs of a girl whose name nobody knew, briefly restore the world to something resembling a place where music could be discovered rather than merely delivered. Looking for a new distraction, or possibly just another machine for converting the passage of time into manageable little files, I thought I might try doing something similar here.

On that note, today's MP3 is What You Want by the Wannadies, from their 1997 album Bagsy Me, which, incidentally, is a pretty excellent album title if you happen to enjoy the idea of pop music as a kind of playground extortion conducted under the supervision of the Swedish state. The Wannadies formed in Skellefteå, (an unpronounceable word that serves as a town's name in northern Sweden), in the late eighties, and spent the next decade or so refining a particular variety of guitar pop that seems to understand, perhaps better than its practitioners would care to admit, that happiness and desperation are not mutually exclusive states of being. Frontman Pär Wiksten and company made their name in Britain with Be a Girl before Bagsy Me arrived in 1997, containing some real bangers like Friends, Hit, and Someone Somewhere. Their You and Me Song found its way onto the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which is probably where I first heard about them as an adolescent infatuated with feelings that felt like a matter of life and death, which, to be fair, really hasn't changed much. The Wannadies are good at this sort of thing: melodies with their sleeves rolled up, guitars bright enough to suggest that the sun might actually come out tomorrow, and an undertow of emotional unpleasantness that keeps the whole enterprise from becoming an advertisement for toothpaste.

What You Want is a fine specimen of this machinery: two minutes and forty-something seconds of brisk, hook-laden guitar pop that seems to have arrived from an alternate timeline in which the early nineties never quite ended. There's something reassuring about it, the way a song can be both entirely disposable and somehow impossible to throw away, like a receipt you keep in your wallet for reasons that become less clear every time you look at it. Had a Google and discovered, with considerable pleasure, that these freaks are apparently still making music, or at least remain sufficiently extant to be found by the usual electronic means. This warms my heart. The internet has done plenty to make the world stranger and more exhausting, but every so often it returns something you thought you'd lost, without asking you to remember where you put it in the first place.

Anyway, Bagsy Me is worth checking out in its entirety. Consider this a public-service announcement from the Department of Unfinished Business, which is to say, the part of the brain that still believes there might be something good on the next page.

DOWNLOAD TODAY'S SONG: The Wannadies - What You Want