All of It Was Real And None of It Was True

Albums I Listened To This Week, or, I have a Substack now (kinda)?

Marina Karella (Greek, b. 1940), Gold as Sulphur/Coffee shop, 1993.

At some point during the five-month fugue state I entered between deciding to apply to graduate school in November and paying my enrollment deposit to an MA program in March, I decided that I should start a Substack.

The reasoning was both very simple and very opaque even to me. Likely for that reason, it went nowhere. In my head, it would be good for me to practice long-form writing again, or writing at all. In August of 2023, I fell out of love with three separate people in rapid succession, and after that I simply had no desire to write. Once I was out of school and out of love, I also ran short on words. In November, after a year and a half out of college, I decided it was time to go back to school. The process demanded writing endless things: statements of purpose, sample essays, personal statements, program prompts. One million emails. Etc. As for the love— that’s better left for another post.

Initially, I had intended to write about parallel themes in unlikely sets of movies: the ways that heterosexuality, gender, and professional archetype function in Black Swan, American Psycho, and Serial Mom, or the weird prevalence of Confederate vampires in Twilight and Once Bitten. Those will likely be posts that I do revisit at some point, but they’re a bit lofty as far as ambitions to start off with go. I love to bite, but chewing becomes a whole other issue.

So instead, because I am not #1 Hobbyist Music Listener but probably in the top 25, here is a list of full albums I listened to this week in reverse chronological order:

April 1

Love Me— Gordon’s Grandson (2024/7 songs/14 minutes)

Sweetness— girlpuppy (2025/10 songs/32 minutes)

Relationship of Command— At The Drive In (2000/13 songs/53 minutes)

Hospice— The Antlers

March 31

Hospice— The Antlers (2009¹/10 songs/51 minutes)

Name In My Head— Kitchen (2025/5 songs/18 minutes)

A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole— Alabaster DePlume (2025/11 songs/42 minutes)

March 30

Every Video Without Your Face, Every Song Without Your Name— Lucy Liyou (2025/7 songs/28 minutes)

Goat Girl— Goat Girl (2018/19 songs/40 minutes)

All Flesh Is Grass— Propolis (2023/10 songs/33 minutes)

March 29

Dead Bandit— Dead Bandit (2025/16 songs/46 minutes)

Warlord of the Weejuns— Goya Gumbani (2025/16 songs/45 minutes)

Vestiges— Poise (2021/11 songs/29 minutes)

Softcore— Transviolet (2025/12/37)

Plant Feed— Nilüfer Yanya (2017/3 songs/11 minutes)

The Sound of Deceit— Enjoy

Twist of Shadows— Clan of Xymox (1989/10 songs/46 minutes)

Vipera Mortis— Diavol Strain (2024/6 songs/24 minutes)

March 28

The Sound of Deceit— Enjoy (2025/15 songs/40 minutes)

Carrier Pigeon— Odie Leigh (2024/10 songs/33 minutes)

Dead Bandit— Dead Bandit (2025/16 songs/46 minutes)

March 26

Tequila (Expanded Edition)— Wes Montgomery

March 25

Tequila (Expanded Edition)— Wes Montgomery (1966/12 songs/46 minutes)

Alligator Bites Never Heal (Extended)— Doechii (2025/20 songs/51 minutes)

Brat and it’s completely different but also still Brat— Charli XCX

March 24

Brat and it’s completely different but also still Brat— Charli XCX (2024/34 songs/98 minutes)

Dead Bandit— Dead Bandit (2025/16 songs/46 minutes)

Yaramaz— Güner Künier (2025/9 songs/22 minutes)

…Typing all this out took 55 minutes of scrolling through my Spotify recents and cross-checking everything, a practice I would describe as both meditative and frustrating. Frustrating, because it involved a lot of opening Spotify on my phone and then opening Spotify on my laptop, and then scrolling on both, and then typing something on my phone into the laptop search bar, etc etc etc. Meditative, because I am coming to realize how much and how little information this list gives. In looking at this, one could reasonably conclude that I listened to the most music on March 29, and the least on March 25 or 26. The opposite is true: I listened to over 171 and 179 songs on those days, respectively, and “only” around 159 songs on March 29 (accounting for the albums, as well as 71 miscellanous songs).²

The albums that I listened to the most don’t necessarily show up as “the albums that I listened to the most,” either— though Brat and it’s completely different but also still Brat shows up twice, I listened to Poise’s Vestiges probably 3 times in one day, and I listened to Hospice a whopping 8 times in one night. The albums that I repeated are frequently, but not always, the ones that stuck out to me: Tequila was my music of choice for reading this week (Wes Montgomery soundtracked the last 100 or so pages of The Year Of Magical Thinking), Brat was for walking fast, but I can’t say either defined the week.

The albums that did define the feeling of the week for me:

1. Warlord of the Weejuns— Goya Gumbani

2. Alligator Bites Never Heal (Extended)— Doechi

3. Yaramaz— Güner Künier

4. Dead Bandit— Dead Bandit

5. Every Video Without Your Face, Every Song Without Your Name— Lucy Liyou

   and, of course:

6. Hospice— The Antlers

Perhaps at a later date I will write more things about which albums I really liked, which albums I recommend/why, and which albums played key roles in my week.³ This one has gone on long enough, though, and I don’t want to push my luck.

1. Whether Hospice is a 2008 album or a 2009 album is a point of major contention in my head, personally, as the original CD was produced and put out entirely by The Antlers. Upon NPR’s glowing review of Hospice as one of the best albums of 2008, label Frenchkiss picked the band up and re-issued it. Technically the version on streaming is the re-issue, and so I am noting it as being 2009.

2. Spotify does not count looped albums as being “repeated” plays of a song in your recently listened history, nor does it account for replays of songs. This leads to some obvious inaccuracy in numbers, which makes it difficult to fully substantiate my claims here. Superfan, an app my friends and I use to rudimentarily keep up with each other’s music habits, is not without its flaws but does offer slightly more insight: I tend to average around 700 tracks per week, suggesting an average of 100 songs played per day. Apparently this week I was just really on one.

3. LOL. All of the albums that defined the week were really good and excellent TO ME. If I had to pick out must-listens-to-catch-the-vibe, I would recommend Warlord of the Weejuns, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Song Without Your Name, and Yaramaz. Frankly, recommending Doechii at this point feels like cheap points. Obviously you should listen to Alligator Bites Never Heal.