01/15/2026
You may think that my favorite album of the year would be ranked number 1. Unfortunately, I must needlessly complicate already useless things, so it remains in the ranking at 3rd place. During my intense deliberations ranking the 119 albums I listened to this year, this album was consistently placed at number 3 for a variety of reasons; Western Teleport by Emperor X stays at number 1 because of album cohesiveness, shelf-stability, and ties to my personal history this year, and Glory by Perfume Genius is genuinely the best album that was released this year, it’s obviously number 2. So why was the album at number 3 so determined to NOT stay in its place???
I constantly forget the name of the album, as well as the band. I cannot tell you more than 3 tracks off this album at any given moment. I know very little of the lyrics because of the murkiness of the sound. I don’t know anything about the band or the intentions, or honestly the aesthetic of the album at all. But I fell asleep & worked on art & walked around & soaked my life in this album & listened to the final, powerful, layered 10min finale more times than I could count. The album is my favorite of this year because of the droning & drowning soundtrack it provided for my life. And I loved every second of it. Every miserable second of this year.
I heard Face Down In Meta by Pet Shimmers & Goat Girl in January of this year (thank god). I became obsessed. I don’t know what kind of music I can compare it to — although I was reminded of it constantly, and I recommended it to countless people at any opportunity. It is a project that lives on the edge of something. The intro & finale tracks are my favorites, I think that says something very powerful about the composition of the album. Is there a movie you watched, maybe 10 years ago, that impacted you SO deeply to this day? Can you remember any of the plot, or just what it looked like? In my mind, this is sort of an anti-album, I have barely any mental recall of the songs, yet I know for a fact that I love all of them, and only have access to my memory of them while listening. The second they stop playing, any part of them leaves my mind. This semi-impermanence keeps me coming back to the album over and over, after a year of listening it still has such novelty to me.
Thawed out Plainclothes Demon opens the album belligerently, and demanding choir bellows from out of lackadaisical attack of the drums. The project contains a host of confusing phrases that I enjoy -- "Post-Dick Circle Fuck" is my favorite -- and this song opens the world of this album already presenting a strange disguise: Thawing out in plainclothes / But nobody knows. Something sinister is emerging, but under the cloak of something in broad daylight. I like this song as an interpretation of the title of the album, “Face Down In Meta” being a clear play on Facebook transitioning its brand into Meta, and what “meta” means in the context of wolves in sheep’s clothing, surveillance in social media’s clothing. Hook, one verse, right back to the hook, not even two minutes long, it ends as quickly as it has started. It provides a delightfully nauseating toss, and immediate feeling of acceptance of the sounds you are about to encounter. I like this song because it is short, and to the point. I feel the album does not bother to hammer in the same messages in each song -- from what I can pull apart from the spaghetti of it all. It’s electronic music, of course it’s about the internet.
Crash Tense Dummy holds the spot as my favorite song I have discovered this year. All the songs on this album open with blistering rackets, so it comes as a surprise, and a bit of relief, when this final song starts with clear vocals & gentle guitar. I don’t know what to expect when I turn this song on. 10 minutes becomes such a short amount of time. How can time slip away so quickly when 10 silent minutes are a nightmare, an eternity? It guides you past the introduction, and into one of my favorite builds in any song ever, and we slowly start to realize what this band is truly capable of.
Sound, as a concept, is a lot. There’s too many definitions of it. In my work & life I have identified with the label “iconoclasmist,” I’ve always said I’d rather be blind than deaf. We explore images in millions of ways, and sound has an equal importance in our lives, but they do not hold the same value to many people. I have a hard time explaining what I do. The chiropractor mistook me for a musician. A lot of people think I do foley work for movies. I don’t have another word for “podcast” but I wish I did because it feels so cringey to say you are a podcaster nowadays. I don’t know what sound is. I wish I could identify what’s in it like you can identify what’s in an image. I am desperately trying to do this with my work. There are impossible images to be made through sound, and I want to be that kind of photographer. Pet Shimmers & Goat Girl have shown me a bit of that sound photography that I am going to be enviously trying to replicate for a while.
Crash Tense Dummy takes the earth away. It builds and builds and builds through the same repetition and magnifying the intense doom it holds. It’s so much more than a car crash in slow motion. It is unyielding. It pours thousands of tons of concrete on you. It buries you so deep in the ground you come out the other side of the earth. It creates an infinite image that cannot be written about with words. The time I lose every time I listen is the closest thing I have to God.
When 2024 rolled into 2025, I was dancing at my favorite club and the beat of Blue Monday dropped. I mentioned today that it was right on the money, it set the tone for the year accurately -- sexy yet terrifying at every beat. What followed New Order’s doom & gloom came Pet Shimmers & Goat Girl’s perfect annihilation. I spend this New Year’s Eve wondering what song will be my accidental definition of 2026, and what album will be the soundtrack of my choice.
My rank of the remaining 118 albums lies here. Happy listening.
(P.S: My first song of 2026 ended up being pretty exciting. Let’s hope Debbie Harry was right.)