This is what the Defector staff listened to and enjoyed this year.
From the Pyre, by The Last Dinner Party
In a year where the pop star praised most for being a songwriter put out a lyrically narrow album, I was drawn over and over again to The Last Dinner Party's sophomore album, From the Pyre, because of its density. The British five-piece band could have taken the easy road on their followup album and produced a simple pop album like everyone else did this year, but I found it brave and interesting that they went the other direction. Their first album topped charts in Britain and was full of easy melodies, songs like "Nothing Matters" that got stuck in your head and refused to leave.
From the Pyre is almost baroque in its saturation. It has tempo changes, harmonies, big strings, big guitars, and great vocals. The artists I am most interested in right now are the ones who are willing to stretch themselves in new directions, to try something more ambitious, even if that risks falling a little short. It's an album I've put on to do the dishes, walk my dog, and lie on the ground in silence. - Kelsey McKinney
“Nettles,” by Ethel Cain
Often, when I am “going through it,” as the kids say, I’ll play a song on repeat until the feeling leaves me. Needless to say, this can take a while, and this means that certain songs become like time machines, catapulting me back to whatever emotion was wrecking me when I first listened to it, for better or for worse. This is how Jade’s “Unconditional” became the soundtrack to me getting rejected from three apartments, how Donna Summer’s “Lucky” underscored my post-breakup relief and grief, how Ethel Cain’s “Dust Bowl” accompanied me in the rush of the first new crush I’d had in six years.
But “Nettles” was the song that stuck, anchoring me when I inevitably crashed out over said crush. It’s an eight-minute pastoral epic ribboned with banjos and synths that could be twice as long. It is a song that feels like a forest. “Nettles” builds and builds, layering plucky and atmospheric strings and Cain’s near-celestial, echoing vocals. “Nettles” tells the story of being consumed by the idea of loving someone even though you fear you are too difficult to be loved. In other words, it is an amazing song to loop and cry to, particularly when Cain sings, “To love me is to suffer me.” I wish I could have had the year where the best song I heard was something upbeat and full of joy. But we live the years we get, and as each new one passes, I feel grateful I have made it through another. And I feel grateful to have had “Nettles” by my side as I was moving through grief, loss, and fear, in part because it reminded me of how much beauty is out there for us to grasp, even in the bad years, and how lucky we all are to feel some kind of love, however long it lasts. - Sabrina Imbler
Martin Tyler
The bad news here is that this is not a music recommendation. The good news is your humble scrivener is not burdening you with a music recommendation, proof that sometimes nothing can be better than something. Rather, the best thing you can hear is Martin Tyler calling a Premier League game, any Premier League game. At 80, he is well beyond the shouty posing done by the Gus Johnson-Eric Collins school of "I'll tell you when to be excited, you unevolved scum," but he was never about that anyway. His voice soothes rather than grates, he knows the sport in ways that even his most gifted colleagues (Jon Champion, Peter Drury, et. al.) don't, and shares the experience rather than just barks out surnames or howls apocalyptic word salad for every goal scored. He's basically a treat who only occasionally pops up on USA or Peacock, and in general is just a fine way to absorb rather than angst through a match. The best thing to say about him, though, is that he would never play in America, because the play-by-play announcer takes a back seat to the syrup and vapidity of the analyst. It's better this way. - Ray Ratto
Viagr Aboys, by Viagra Boys
It takes smarts to make good dumb music (see Andrew W.K.). These self-aware Swedish post-punks have a very specific strain of knowledge: the spoils of delving late-night Wikipedia rabbitholes. I have that tendency myself, so no wonder I’m drawn to the lyrical content of songs about historical tidbits, conspiracy theories, and assorted scientific curios. The real genius is the extra step taken in crafting little characters and stories—usually huge losers with masculinity fixations—and putting the words in their mouth. It’d be one thing to write a song about a bog body being discovered. It’s another, beautiful thing to write a song accusing one’s girlfriend of being jealous of the narrator’s romantic feelings toward the bog body. Oh, and the music’s catchy as hell. - Barry Petchesky
Joanna Newsom
This year, I picked up doing sudokus regularly, specifically the New York Times sudoku, and more recently the Boston Globe (of Spotlight fame), as well as the (former?) New York Times KenKen puzzles, which are not exactly discontinued, but can only be navigated to via link in browser. This has also become the primary time I set out in a day to listen to music, and my go-to pick is, usually, a Joanna Newsom album.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Newsom’s music has singlehandedly changed how I (generally not a very dedicated music listener) listen to music, but it has changed nonetheless. I’ve learned what it takes for me to enjoy a pared-back song, in the process of not necessarily enjoying Have One On Me on first listen, and still going back for more. That one melodic passage from “In California” alone is enough to secure the song a spot in my Top Five Most Romantic Songs Of All Time list. Also, I’m generally not a lyrics listener, much less a lyrics enjoyer; due to some faulty logical leaps from people who were so insistent [redacted] was a great lyricist, I believed for a few years that songwriting was just bad poetry, but now I’m fully on that “sanded and beveled / the land lone and leveled” shit.
As it turns out, music rocks. It’s beautiful that you can learn such things as an adult. This process of me learning that music rocks has probably driven my roommate a bit crazy, as it has entailed picking up select bits from select songs, including ones off Ys, and trying to sing them on repeat, even though I am not an incredible singer. However, I am slowly inching closer to the end goal of being a guy who only does Joanna Newsom songs at karaoke, so that’s nice.*
*For legal reasons, this is a joke. - Kathryn Xu
Just Send Me A Voice Memo, by Aaron Edwards
How do I describe this piece? It was a live performance at the Resonate Podcast Festival in November, written and performed by Aaron Edwards, on the power people have when they speak to each other across distances, time, and space. For now, the piece only lives in the moment in which it was performed, but I'm hopeful that Edwards will find a way to publish it that does justice to how it felt to see it performed live.
So let me just paint the picture of my experience of this. Edwards told the history of the abeng, an instrument used by Jamaican Maroons to send messages to each other across long distances. He played voice memos his close friends have sent him recently, and compared them to the messages sent via abeng. The piece was accompanied by live music from Lucy Little, who played violin in the corner over pulsing beats. At the end of the piece, the voice memos layered together with the sound of the abeng into a cacophony, and then Aaron closed his piece with this, which brought me to tears and galvanized me for weeks:
If calling is tough and talking isn’t cutting it, send someone the sounds of the steady air in your room and the radiator churning and maybe they’ll say sis, I’m freezing too. If it’s time to get to the streets we will lean on a language of sound, bolstered by the beating heart of generations, and how we hear the world, and the fascists won't decipher it, and the VC funders who wrecked good thing after good thing will cry out of confusion and run into their bunkers and those without love or humanity will mistake it for the sputter of a car compressor and the data center will collapse trying to replicate it and the monuments will come down again and you will write a line of the art I know is in you and we’ll meet you wherever we need to go to hear it. And we will all make noise.
- Alex Sujong Laughlin
E, by Eliana Glass
E asserts itself immediately. The instant you click play, you meet the two protagonists: Eliana Glass’s beguiling voice and plainspoken piano. Then it takes her 20 seconds and seven chords to get through eight syllables: “All my life, I’ve waited for you.” I was stunned to learn that a zoomer composed and performed this music; it sounded like someone who had waited a lot longer than 27 years. (It was akin to learning that Slint looked like marching band underclassmen as they invented a whole new way for guitar music to sound.)
E was released this April and filed under “vocal jazz.” To my ears, the record is far beyond calendar and genre. Long stretches sound like the lowlands between the snowblind crags of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, another album completely out of time. Throughout, Glass is direct but unhurried, so self-evidently talented that never she presses the issue, and something like one-and-a-half glasses of wine in. “Confident” is an apt if understated description. Contrast the five year-old demo of “Good Friends Call Me E” against the album version: The finished product clears out all clutter between Glass and listener, and slackens the pace by 10 percent. These are the moves of someone certain their work is sturdy.
Close listening reveals alluring tics and beauty marks: Glass swallows odd consonants, reprises lyrics and chords, sniffles once, and sometimes sounds like she’s shooting her sternum with a massage gun. Her volume fluctuates within songs as though she’s twirling around the studio, intermittently straying a little too far from the mic. The work of a master can feel antiseptic and cold; this one imparts a contact buzz. - Sean Kuhn
“Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” by Alex Walton
I’m going to try not to spoil a five-hour film, but the song that closes out Castration Movie Anthology II is done perfectly, and you should wade through all of it to get there.
No, it’s fine if you haven’t seen Castration Movie Anthology I, Louise Weard’s four-and-a-half hour punk film about Vancouver outsiders making bad decisions and struggling with the mundane problems of life. Castration Movie II is basically its own self-contained thing, set in Brooklyn and following should-be Oscar winner Alex Walton’s character through her escape from an underground trans-woman cult into an After Hours-like New York night, where an obnoxious girl played by Ivy Wolk is desperate for her to detransition so the two of them can hook up.
Weard’s unchecked ambition makes for a ridiculous and obscene DIY landmark filled with so many choices and images that I’ve never seen before or really even imagined could be in a narrative film. You should discover most of it for yourself, but there is a nearly 30-minute long split-screen set piece at a Bushwick party that looks like it was done in a single take, for god’s sake. For a certain audience of cool trans people, Weard’s uncanny rendering of the world that surrounds us means that Castration Movie Anthology III will be just as much of an event as the two films preceding it.
Castration Movie II’s climax comes about as nasty and freaky as they get, but the comedown at the end has a much more quiet, subtle tension to it. Shot guerilla-style on the aboveground J train, it showcases Walton (primarily a musician) strumming an acoustic guitar and singing the old funeral hymn “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.” That haunting song has endured over a century for a reason, and in this particular stripped-down performance, after all the intensity before it, makes for a coda both brutal and beautiful in a way I’m still struggling to sort. Months later, I can’t stop thinking about it. - Lauren Theisen
Cameron Winter
Like the cilantro soap gene or trypophobia, I suspect that a certain subset of the populace is genetically programmed to experience confusion and perhaps even mild aggression upon their first time hearing Cameron Winter's warbled baritone. They might think this guy can't be serious with this Rufus Wainwright-being-chased-by-dogs thing. They might ask if anyone really likes the singer who sounds like chiptuned Isaac Brock. Those unfortunate listeners deserve not mockery, but pity, because they are missing out on the best guitar music being made right now.
I am referring to two Winter projects: his late-2024 solo debut Heavy Metal, and his band Geese's much-lauded Getting Killed. The two albums are remarkably distinct—the former a singer-songwriter record featuring the best pop song of the year and the most delicate, heart-wobbling line read of "Fuck these people" you'll ever hear; the latter a kaleidoscopic rock-and-roll record made by people exclusively born after 9/11—though given how much time I spent this year listening to both, I do think it is worth considering them alongside each other. For all of their differences, the common thread of Winter's songwriting ties them together, and I think makes them worth comparing alongside each other.
I have never cared about lyrics. Every year, a handful of albums are lauded for their songwriters' virtuosity, for their poetic heft, or for their narrative deftness, and every year those albums fall totally flat to me. The point of music, to me, is to facilitate the psychedelic experience of conveying a feeling or way of seeing the world to someone inhabiting a totally different inner world. Writing can do that, though if it's a piece of music's only vehicle for meaning, I find it ultimately ineffective. If I want Mountain Goats-level storytelling, I can just go read a book. There is something I find didactic, too certain, about most pop songwriting, even the lauded stuff (for as much as I liked the new Wednesday album, the commitment to detail and verisimilitude ultimately detracted). To my ear, the chief virtue of writing for music is density. What is the fewest number of words you can use to say something? Good songwriting, given these admittedly annoying impossible standards, needs to swim at exactly the same pace as the music. They have to work together.
Winter hits that mark better than almost anyone. A friend compared his style to Earl Sweatshirt, which I find illustrative and mostly accurate. Winter's writing has the requisite density to justify, on Heavy Metal, six-minute tension rattlers, normal-sized piano ballads about (I use that word extremely imprecisely) seeing the future, or 198 seconds of bliss. Your mileage will ultimately vary here (it does for the music world's smartest, most insufferable pedant), and the good news is the Geese album is totally different. It's as musically compelling as Heavy Metal is lyrically compelling. To be both more aggravating and more precise, its combination of more ambitious music and less ambitious writing is as great or perhaps better than its predecessor's combination of less ambitious music and more ambitious songwriting.
I prefer the Geese album. It feels amazing to dig into a Guitar Music album made by people young enough to reference all the stuff I was listening to as a teenager, and make something new and cool with it. As GQ put it in an essential profile of the band, Getting Killed "rips open the carcasses of Radiohead, Pavement, and Swans and feasts there," thanks in part to growing up in the streaming era, unbound from terrestrial concerns such as "not having access to the entire history of recorded music" and also in part to the production work of Kenneth Blume (f.k.a. Kenny Beats). The band is good enough at playing their instruments that you can spend, say, "Husbands" only focusing on the drumming and enjoy yourself. This way, you will be surprised when Winter wails in, or the other two Geese wrest control of the song and move it in a new direction.
My point is that it would work without Winter, though it's the particular texture of his voice that makes Geese so special to me. Also, their cover of Justin Bieber is great. - Patrick Redford
The Let It Be Reissue, by The Replacements
The best thing I heard this year just turned 41 years old. Surviving members of The Replacements put out an expanded version of their 1984 album Let It Be again in November. A D.C. music club held a Replacements listening party timed to the repackaged set. I went by myself because I didn’t want anybody to see me cry.
Like a lot of aged white guys, I cannot speak or type rationally about this record or this era of the Minneapolis band. I got out of college the year it came out, obsessed with the Replacements and their alleged Twin Cities rock rivals, Hüsker Dü, as much as I’ve ever been obsessed with any artist—or hell, with anything. They were dumpy, drank too much, and complained about everything, stuff I was really good at. Yet they were still cool, so maybe there was hope for me! After graduation, I was interning for D.C.’s alternative newspaper, Washington City Paper, with duties including putting out the weekly’s concerts section, and I picked up the phone in the office one day and the guy on the other end said he was from Twin/Tone Records, The Replacements' label, and I asked who I was speaking to, and was told “Peter Jesperson.” I knew that was The Replacements' manager and producer. My reaction was some version of “OH MY GOD I’M ON THE PHONE WITH PETER JESPERSON OH MY GOD!” My City Paper work was pro bono, but this brush with post-punk greatness at that point in my life was absolutely priceless.
There was, of course, a lot more to The Replacements than a bad attitude. So many great tunes! I was into the caffeinated guitar rock that dominated the band’s 1983 record, Hootenanny, tunes like “Hayday” and “Color Me Impressed." Let It Be kept that up with slacker anthems like “Favorite Thing” (with lead singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg screaming, “I don’t give a single shit!”) and “We’re Comin’ Out” (“One more chance to get it all wrong!”) that struck a chord with my suburban dirtball ass. Plus a possibly ironic but musically faithful rendition of KISS’s best song, “Black Diamond.” Too much fun!
But beyond the aggro hard-rock tracks, Let It Be made sensitivity kosher for post-punkers. The album had The Replacements’ first sweet song, “I Will Dare.” The piano-only “Androgynous,” a tune about gender independence, seems impossibly ahead of its time. Westerberg flaunted his vulnerability in the period-piece confessional “Answering Machine,” and “Unsatisfied,” spending the better part of four minutes on the latter yelling “I’m so unsatisfied!” and doubtless meaning it.
Some pals and I with shared rock pasts took a pilgrimage to Minneapolis in 2008. At the risk of (hopefully) making readers of a certain ilk jealous: Our tour guide on that trip was Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü. Being a good dude, and rivalry be damned, Hart brought us to the house on the cover of Let It Be, which left me more starstruck than when I saw the Eiffel Tower. This was the record that made The Replacements an “Our Band Could Be Your Life” band for me. The reissue forced me to mull how I won't ever have another. And yeah, I cried at the listening party. - Dave McKenna
“True Believer,” by Hayley Williams
I am nothing if not consistent. Hayley Williams released an album in 2020, and I wrote about it as my personal “best thing I heard” pick. Hayley Williams released an album in 2025, and I was planning to write about it as my personal “best thing I heard” pick … right up until she went on Late Night and narrowed my pick even further. Williams performed “True Believer,” off Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, and I have not stopped thinking about it since:
While I am fully in the bag for Williams, and Paramore, I have to admit that my fandom isn't just related to the music. It’s very good, mind you, and I listen to all of it quite often, but it’s the performance aspect that has always hooked me the most. Williams is a masterful frontperson for her band, and though I have not yet seen her perform a solo show—I do have tickets to do so in April, thankfully—I have seen enough videos of live performances to know that this carries over. None have made me feel so sure about that as this “True Believer” rendition.
I won’t describe the whole thing blow by blow—the video is right there, I believe in you—but I do have to point out The Note. About three minutes in, surrounded simultaneously in darkness and back lights and with a string section ascending, Williams gets to the climax of the song: After singing the final chorus of the song, with the music kicking up to its emotional high, she belts out a smaller vocalization before really letting it rip for 10 seconds of fury.
“True Believer” isn’t my favorite song on the record (that would be “Parachute,” or maybe “Hard”), mostly because it is a bit self-serious in the way it lyrically tackles Nashville gentrification and fake Christians, but that note is the peak of the album. When performed live, it’s euphoric. Williams’s biggest strength as a vocalist has always been that she is never afraid to really fucking go for it, and even 20 years into her career, she can find new ways to weaponize her voice for maximum effect. I didn’t listen to as much music this year as usual, but I am pretty confident that nothing else would have affected me as deeply as watching someone who has been my favorite musician for more than half my life absolutely crush such a big moment. Shame that Jimmy Fallon is around, but even his usual overexuberant-toddler act and subsequent “Oh my GOODNESS” at the end of the song can’t ruin it for me. - Luis Paez-Pumar
Anthony Jeselnik Putting His Fellow Comics In The Trash
As someone who grew up wearing out cassette tapes of any quality standup album he could get his hands on, it kills me to watch comedians now. I know what’s coming. I can almost set my watch to it. To cue up a standup special in 2025 is to make a gamble I’m certain to lose. I’m betting—hoping, really—that my chosen comic will get up there and just tell some fucking jokes. But there’s always a pivot. Sometimes it’s right up front. Sometimes it’s a few minutes in. The performer complains about how they can’t make as many jokes as they used to, because the wokes will get mad at them for it. Then the crowd gets five minutes of tired pronoun jokes as additional punishment. It makes me not want to watch standup ever again.
So when my son asked us to put on Anthony Jeselnik’s 2024 Netflix special Bones and All, I was steeling myself for that pivot. Jeselnik is the definitive comic’s comic, and he’s always trafficked in dirty, pitch-black one-liners that his more aggrieved peers—Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle—admire. He’s a made man in that community. He’s also as white of a white guy as white guys can get. I figured he’d carve out a moment in his special to piss and moan about cancel culture. Sure enough, in the back half of the special, he started off a bit with this line:
“I’m against cancel culture.”
The crowd applauded him and I let my thumb hover over the SKIP button. Then Jeselnik went on:
“Thank you. That’s my impression of a shit comic trying to get on Rogan. In 20 years of standup comedy, the question I get asked most, by far, is Anthony, what do you think about cancel culture? Does it make you mad? Aren’t you scared? What do you think about cancel culture? So let me be clear: I don’t give a fuck about cancel culture. What I’m sick of are comedians complaining about cancel culture. It’s not that hard. Do your job. Comedians are supposed to be unparalleled badasses. I know this because I have a fucking mirror. Cancel culture is not scary. It’s also not interesting, and it’s definitely not new … and yes, I did mention Joe Rogan, guys. Do not get me wrong. I like Joe. Joe’s my friend. Joe’s a good guy. But if you listen to his podcast, you’re a fucking loser.”
Jeselnik has made such jabs elsewhere, but this was my first time hearing him make them. Not only did I feel incredible relief hearing those words come out of Jeselnik’s mouth, but I also laughed. Hard. Not clapter. Real laughter. You and I can try to put the big comics in their place all we like, but it only matters when someone from the inside does it. So thank you, Anthony Jeselnik. Unfortunately, I have to cancel you because you stepped out on Amy Schumer that one time. Tough business, amigo. - Drew Magary
KPop Demon Hunters
I was late to KPop Demon Hunters. This says less about my taste or level of cool, both of which grow more incoherent as I get older, and more about the fact the movie arrived two months after my second child was born. Being in the baby vortex takes you out of linear time and space; this is especially true if you have two kids. If, like me, you have two kids under the age of four, you are basically impervious to waves of culture and the outside world. I could tell you more about episodes of Bluey or Yo Gabba Gabba! than my current listening/viewing habits.
Finally a quiet night came, and we got a chance to watch. As a one-time Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsessive and lifelong anime enjoyer, I was hooked from the jump. But it is truly fucked up that this movie about an animated demon hunting band produced some certifiable pop bangers. Not even "above average soundtrack material," but shit you would listen to not just as a bit. I loved the original Space Jam soundtrack, but I was not putting on the single by Quad City DJ's to get hyped for a night out.
"Golden" and "Soda Pop" are bouncy, bass-friendly and terrifying fun in that specific lab-produced earworm way that makes so much K-pop irresistible. Yes, this is in fact a plot point, but they didn't have to make some undeniable bops for a damn Netflix movie! Somehow my 3-year-old, who has only seen music videos for Huntrix, will not stop singing "Golden," despite barely being able to pronounce some of the lyrics. Even on the days when I am ready to smash every object in my house if I hear "We're goin' up, up, up it's our moment," one more time, it is better than suffering the tyranny of Baby Shark. - Justin Ellis
Stephen Graham On Off Menu
Comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster host Off Menu, a podcast where they invite a guest to design their dream restaurant meal. Like all podcasts, this one has plenty of recurring bits, one of them being Acaster's one-sided beef with actor Stephen Graham. Whenever Graham's name would come up on an episode, Acaster would jokingly talk about how he would beat up Graham if he ever saw him, as revenge for some witty burns he directed at a friend of Acaster's on a British talk show. It's a good bit. It made everyone laugh.
Then Off Menu booked Graham as a guest, which offered a perfect comedic opportunity. A few minutes into the episode, Gamble revealed the details of Acaster's agenda against Graham, and that's when the whole episode was placed on a knife's edge.
You never know how famous people, especially actors, are going to be. Someone who appears witty and collegial on screen can be a bore in real life, and vice versa. Graham, had he been humorless or just plain confused about the bit that was being explained to him, could have derailed the entire episode with his reaction. Instead, he immediately understood what the situation called for, and in an instant snapped into character. Stephen Graham, charming Scouser, had left the room and was replaced by Stephen Graham, actor.
Graham transformed into a character who was ready to jump across the table and rip Acaster's throat out, then successfully switched back between his normal self and that character throughout the rest of the episode. It was an incredible piece of live, improvisational acting, and he did it for more than an hour.
Another running bit on Off Menu is that Acaster is overly impressed by actors, and thinks about acting like other people think about magic tricks. Listening to this episode, you can understand where he's coming from. - Tom Ley
Last and First Men (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), by Jóhann Jóhannsson
Last and First Men is a wild book, man. The author, Olaf Stapledon, was a pacifist who served in World War I as a conscientious objector. He studied history and philosophy, picked up socialism, became an advocate for a democratic world government, and envisioned cosmopolitanism—not necessarily at the expense of cultural flavor—as the ultimate formula for human development. Last and First Men tells the history of human civilization as a tragic persistent failure to achieve true cosmopolitanism, but from the perspective of a human being, a "Last Man," living two billion years in the future, part of a race of humans that bears basically no resemblance to our own. Their reality is so distant from ours—physically, culturally, technologically, and even biologically—that the narrator cannot even bother with trying to describe it in very much detail, acknowledging that the primitive brain of a member of the First Men could not even begin to grasp meaning from the words. As the history develops and humankind becomes weirder, the narrative accelerates, not only because it can finally dispense with describing iterations, but because the narrator simply cannot put into First Man terms things that motivated certain behaviors of 10th Men that evolved from rabbit-like subhuman creatures living on Neptune. Humanity moves over a horizon, then hundreds or thousands more. Alas.
Good old Stapledon. My man. The book reads like history, which means that it is formally boring as shit. As a work of imagination, it is fucking ASTOUNDING, and it became a foundational text for modern science fiction, because you cannot read it all the way to the end without having your mind totally blown.
Adapted with any fidelity whatsoever, Last and First Men would make for a very ridiculous movie. Jóhann Jóhannsson, the brilliant Icelandic musician and composer, endeavored to make an experimental film out of it. The book tells the story of trillions of humans, some of them in relative detail, so naturally Jóhannsson cast one person in his film, then put them onto the screen for not even one single moment. Also, there are no special effects. The entire thing is shot in black and white, and the only things that ever appear on screen are old metal and concrete memorials from around former Yugoslavia. The only presence in the film is the disembodied voice of Tilda Swinton: Over 70 minutes of total runtime, she provides probably 30 minutes or so of narration.
And it really works! The movie captures the strangeness, the emotional remove, the impenetrability, and the tragedy of Stapledon's story. What works best in the movie is Jóhannsson's score, which is an all-timer. Jóhannsson, who died before he could complete the film, had already done pretty much perfect work in his life: His score for Panos Cosmatos's bonkers horror film Mandy is a fucking miracle, and whatever you think of Denis Villanueve's Sicario, the terrifying number that plays over the protagonist's ride to Juarez basically redeems the entire project. To me, Jóhannsson's score for Last and First Men is his best work, and that is really saying something.
Back in 2017, I was on a train and reading another science-fiction classic, Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, and I got to the back half of the chapter called "The Monsters," which is not at all about monsters. It's about the bizarre and possibly non-Euclidean structures of the titular planet, things called mimoids and symmetriads, impossibly vast and complicated, utterly alien. Lem devotes so much space to these things, with so much detail, I think with the very deliberate aim of overwhelming the reader. It's the opposite of the Iceberg Theory: Lem wanted to force the reader to not conjure a good-enough picture of these concept, to obscure them behind so many words, because the whole idea of Solaris, the book, is to explore the idea of things being truly alien, the possibility of there being stuff out there in space that is entirely incomprehensible.
Anyway, I was reading this book on a train full of noisy people, and listening to music on my headphones as I read the book, and the music that came on for this section of the book was the soundtrack to the movie Blade Runner 2049. What a stroke of fortune. The music was dark and weird, but propulsive, and it suited the content of the chapter, so that instead of laboring through a dry forced intellectual exercise, I was tingling with exhilaration, smiling and even cackling in places. It was one of the really great reading experiences of my life; it's sort of devastating to think that I will never relive that exact thrill, the surprise and the surreality.
Jóhannsson's work for Last and First Men strikes me as either inspired by a similar experience or designed expressly for the purpose. I dearly wish I had thought to pair the two. You could watch the 70 minutes of Last and First Men, if for no other reason than its sheer weirdness. You could also read the book, although let me warn you that the first third of it is so dry and straightforward in its imagining of 20th- and 21st-century geopolitics that you might die. If you do read it, please play the soundtrack album on repeat, and let me know how it goes. The music is just fucking unbelievable. We may be stupid primitive doomed little creatures, but we are capable of truly bitchin' music. The gigantic dispassionate all-knowing disembodied brains that are our eventual Fourth Men descendants could simply never. - Chris Thompson
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Performed by Ben Miles
Let me preface this by saying that I’m not a fan of audiobooks. This isn’t an elitist take—reading a book is reading a book. My issue with audiobooks comes down to the fact that since I was a child, I’ve hated being read to. Like most writers, I can read fairly fast, fast enough that I’d need to play most audiobooks at 1.5x speed to not get bored. At that point, it feels less like an enjoyable act and more like I’m being waterboarded by words.
This year, I discovered the audiobook of Wolf Hall, the first book in Hilary Mantel’s iconic and much-lauded trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. I read the first two Wolf Hall books in the early days of the pandemic, then never finished the series, because I can’t handle endings even under the best of circumstances. Then a sort of Wolf Hall fever swept Defector this year, and I found myself curious about how Cromwell’s last days looked through Mantel’s eyes.
But after four years, I needed a refresher on Cromwell’s early days, and the Wikipedia page wasn’t covering it. This desire to revisit Wolf Hall happened to coincide with Normal Gossip’s tour in September, and no one has ever accused the Wolf Hall novels of being slim. I dug out my e-reader before I remembered how glowingly Patrick Redford had spoken of the Wolf Hall audiobook earlier that year. It only took a couple of minutes for me to understand why.
The Wolf Hall audiobook is performed by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in a Tony-nominated 2014 stage adaptation of Mantel’s novel that was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. As you might imagine, he’s really fucking good—not just as Cromwell, but as every single character in Mantel’s densely populated book. Thomas Howard, Henry Tudor, Anne Boleyn, Gregory Cromwell: They’re all brought to life by Miles, as is Mantel’s lush, sinuous prose. - Rachelle Hampton
