Select Frequency #11
New memories
Coming back around with my second edition of this playlist-based series, I found myself gravitating to a theme of coming back around. I decided to stick with 2025 songs again, but every pick on here somehow reflects back on music and artists I’ve loved in the past, whether through iconic samples, a long-awaited return, or just a feeling I haven’t had in a while. I found myself touching on that in a lot of the writing here, so I guess I’m nostalgic. Some nearly included artists are Blood Orange and Erika de Casier, each of which are deeply reverent to the past. Each song has a Youtube embed, and all the tracks available on Spotify (9 of 10) are on the following playlist.
Bon Iver - “Walk Home”
Car Culture - “Is Love Knowing”
Carly Rae Jepsen - “Back Of My Heart”
dexter in the newsagent - “Eighteen”
Kelly Moran - “Echo in the Field”
Lunice & Rustie - “Patterns”
Princess Nokia - “Blue Velvet”
Tennyson - “it’s idea!”
UFOs - “UFO”
username - “not enough”
Bon Iver - “Walk Home”
from SABLE, fABLE // 2025 // folk-pop - r&b
Bon Iver’s been on a positive kick for the last few years, predicted all the way back in Bon Iver, Bon Iver’s somewhat controversial closer echoing adult contemporary, and fully cemented in this year’s Americana-infused SABLE, fABLE. While the album as a whole can crumble a bit at times under the weight of Vernon’s usual lofty stylings clashing with his newfound carefree takes, “Walk Home” excels in its quiet, important romance. It sounds like the slow, trodding journey implied by its title, a path back to the embrace of the ones we love. Coming from a band so practiced in the beauty in pain, a soft and reasonable reminder of the healing power in consistency and community is both refreshing and makes a lot of sense.
Car Culture - “Is Love Knowing”
from Rest Here // 2025 // ambient - downtempo
A simple guitar hook, looped, soon joined by a repeated background vocal, a synth emerges for just a few seconds at a time, harmonized by a pretty piano melody, then a chopped up voice half-asking if love is knowing, and all these layers are growing, developing, building, and multiplying and refreshing until the end, just keys, nothing more.
Carly Rae Jepsen - “Back Of My Heart”
from E·MO·TION (10th Anniversary Edition) // 2025 // dance pop
E·MO·TION soundtracked my freshman year in college, a year spent riding high on living free for the first time and crashing hard on constantly spoiled dreams. Each song served as a temporary shield of denial against issues I hadn’t accepted, and they did a hell of a job. I have many memories of practically skipping back to my dorm listening to the bouncy “Let’s Get Lost” and “Boy Problems,” and carefully making sure nobody was home before belting along in my room to the cathartic “Your Type” and “When I Needed You.” It’s been a decade since then, I’m in entirely different life circumstances, and I don’t need the shield it gave me anymore, but that effervescent joy still hits me when I listen to the recently released bonus tracks for the 10th anniversary, most of all “Back Of My Heart.” It has the same funky, seductive synthpop feel of some of the more low-key tracks like “All That” and (my personal favorite) “Emotion,” and I can just as easily imagine my younger self finding refuge in it as my present self can find a reminder that it’s ok to let go of all and lean fully into optimism sometimes.
dexter in the newsagent - “Eighteen”
from (Untitled Mixtape) // 2025 (upcoming) // r&b - pop
You might remember “Special” from my last column, or from the feeling you might have had locking eyes with the person you thought was the love of your life. “Eighteen” comes from that same heavenly heartbroken lineage, simpler, shorter, but no less of a perfectly bittersweet sunbeam. This time, the topic is conflict, wanting to hold on to youth, maturity, connection and independence all at once. It’s not just your classic “bright sounds with dark lyrics” thing, these songs sparkle with joy and tears on every layer.
Kelly Moran - “Echo in the Field”
from Don’t Trust Mirrors // 2025 // post-minimalism
If you heard 2024’s Moves in the Field, you might recognize the main piano line from the title track, a sublime piece that helped cement that album as one of the best of the year. “Echo in the Field” lives up to its namesake, leaning into the originally intended techno-inspired palette and high-paced mood that this year’s Don’t Trust Mirrors is all about. But instead of acting as part of the ending set of tracks, “Echo” is the introduction, and it’s less of an echo fading away and more of a weaving of a web of repeated, interlocking echoes. It’s a signal somehow getting stronger the farther it travels.
Lunice & Rustie - “Patterns”
Demo // 2025 // future bass - trap (edm)
For a very small but very loyal niche, EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE was generational. Rustie’s third album and last in a decade pushed his signature euphoric and wonky trap/trance hybrid to the absolute limit, and this feels like a direct step forward from that. I enjoyed his singles from last year, and hope to hear more in that style (he’s much better at subtlety than he gets credit for - messy sequencing aside, Green Language was great in those more ambient moments), but God, there’s something so exciting about hearing a redlining Rustie remix again, like feeling the magic of his BBC mix for the first time. Enough about Rustie though, as much as I could write about him endlessly, Lunice is the only reason this exists in the first place. The original track from his exciting and infectiously good-natured Beat Blog series provides the bones here, weird and crazy and hyped-the-hell-up, another step in his consistently brilliant and creative discography. In a better world, these two underrated and absurdly talented producers would have dropped five albums together, but I’ll gratefully take whatever I can get.
Princess Nokia - “Blue Velvet”
from GIRLS // 2025 // hip-hop
On first glance, Princess Nokia is fighting a losing battle, but she’s not going down easily. The mere act of mentioning the late David Lynch on a song that opens with the line “Girlhood is a spectrum” is enough to get her laughed out of a lot of male-centered rooms that shouldn’t be as significant as they are, even if the album art wasn’t already being talked about more than the music. Meanwhile, the song itself is great, a highlight from her very bluntly feminist project GIRLS. It has a beat that bridges the very narrow point between scary, catchy, and powerful while managing to deftly dodge corn. Lyrically, this is an (accurate) explanation of how unfair it is to be a woman, facing disproportionate levels of dismissal and danger, lessons she has obviously learned a long time ago, but she just keeps getting back up. On that note, the Lynch/Laura Palmer connection makes a lot more sense, and similarly, I have every reason to believe she’ll follow his path and just keep doing her own thing regardless of what a bunch of dumbasses who don’t get it have to say about it.
Tennyson - “it’s idea!”
Single // 2025 // dance pop - breaks
Tennyson has been delivering consistently intriguing music since the early 2010s, within a wide variety of sounds and styles. The thorough line has always been a willingness to play with unique samples and noises, usually in charming, borderline twee ways. You can hear it in the heartbreaking seatbelt alarm anthem “Lay-by,” the bubbly and distant “Smother”’s SNES, meow, and chair creak samples, all the way to 2025’s positively thrilled “It’s Idea!” As usual, it feels like sections of the song may have stemmed from some sort of kids toy, but that just adds texture and life to an already bright and momentous skeleton. Keeping with the imaginative theme, the chorus of the song is “it’s not real … it’s idea!” but I think that’s really underselling it.
UFOS - “UFO”
Single // 2025 // indie pop - french house
UFOs are Phoenix, Alan Braxe, and DJ Falcon. These are names that have been circling around the same scenes for decades, and for good reason, each of them signatures of high quality pop and house music. Braxe and Falcon dropped one of the best songs of the decade so far with Panda Bear (“Step by Step”) by playing to each other’s strengths, and the same phenomenon reoccurs here on “UFO.” This song develops and increases vocal loops, drums, and bass in the same way that a classic French house song does, while keeping the general structure and organic feeling of one of Phoenix’s many perfect pop songs. It’s the natural evolution of “If I Ever Feel Better” and “Intro” all rolled into one, the closest thing we’ll ever get to a 21st century Darlin’ reunion.
username - “not enough”
from epiphanies // 2025 // footwork
Footwork artist username has been on an unbelievable streak of dropping project after project for years now, with four this year alone. If you are an experienced enough listener, you probably see that as a bright red warning sign labeled “quantity over quality,” and I don’t blame you for that, but I promise username is an exception. These are consistently really, really good, some of the best new footwork I’ve heard in years, with a respect for and talent with the form often missing in the much more common and formulaic stuff that seems designed for a nostalgia bait mix on Youtube. This is real, layered, with fantastic drum programming that would in fact work for the genre’s namesake. My personal favorite of this year’s projects is epiphanies, which tends farther on the remix end of the remix-to-sample spectrum. I won’t sample snitch, but I will say that this is a deeply stirring song made even better than I thought possible with the username treatment. If you like it, there’s a feast awaiting you.