SEVEN years as a twentysomething in the 2020s
A very self-indulgent birthday retrospective
Yesterday, I celebrated my twenty-SEVENth birthday, and it got me in a reflective mood, so today, we’re gettin’ diaristic. I’ve selected one song from each year this decade that helped me through a rough patch, offered a bit of much-needed catharsis or calm, or otherwise aided in staving off the apocalyptic nihilism which has become a ‘20s hallmark. Feel free to relate these anecdotes to your own trials and tribulations, or if you’d prefer, laugh and jeer at my stumbling attempts to navigate these unprecedented times as a young adult!
(2020) Default Genders - Cascadia Subduction Zone
In December of 2019, I saw Default Genders live at Kilby Court, my favorite venue in Salt Lake City. They were opening for Anamanaguchi, I was the seemingly the only person in the crowd who knew who they were (certainly the only person to loudly WHOO when Jaime Brooks introduced the backing track for “Black Pill Skyline” as a remix of a Black Dresses track), and immediately after their set I literally ran from the venue to catch a bus to a friend’s birthday party which I was already late to, where I proceeded to get blackout drunk, pulling a friend aside at one point and incoherently sobbing that I felt like I was letting my family down. Ahh, to be 20 again, horrible and invincible and everything else all at once! I had gotten to hear a brand-new song by my favorite artist, one that hadn’t even been officially released yet, live and in the flesh. The future was wiiiide open.
And not a single human being who once loved me
Walked away from me without some kind of wound
I left scars that, to this day, still mar the hearts of
All the very best people I ever knew
And the dark, well, it gets darker
And our hearts, well, they get harder
So what other options are there, baby?
What else is left to say?
Well, I grate and I grasp
And I fall and I lapse
And I breathe and I stop
And I bleed and I rot
And the ground starts to shake
As the world begins breaking in two
And I’m like “good, I wanted it to”
Freshly 21 and stuck at home day-drinking through an $11-an-hour call survey job, I coped with lockdown by fully embracing a long-burgeoning Bandcamp shopping addiction. I bought a lot of high school favorites (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Good News for People who Love Bad News, Run the Jewels 2, Red Album) and got into a lot of drone and ambient (Structures from Silence, Virgins, Going Places, Ayahuasca). But amidst my rapidly-crystallizing childhood nostalgia and the ever-thickening static fog of the covid present, one track dared to chart a path forward, one track tied to my brightest and clearest memory of the before-times. “Cascadia Subduction Zone”’s pessimism was rendered purely and vividly enough to demand more of me than passive consumption; the fuzzed-out Rage Against the Machine sample that ends the tracks ignited a passion in me for recontextualizing the culture of the 20th century that burns strong to this day. Fuckin’ Jaime Brooks, man. Never count her out.
(2021) Little Majorette - Not Mine
2021 was a fresh start and more-of-the-same in equal measure (the Biden era in a nutshell, I reckon). I got vaxxed, landed a few writing gigs that kept me good and busy, did my patriotic duty by releasing the scrappy little ambient album I had worked on through 2020, quit my job and flipped burgers for a few months (more fun than being a pollster, about equally dignified) and generally strove to be a productive member of society— all while spiraling deeper into an identity crisis which the covid-times had kicked off in earnest. This ethereal gem of a synthpop single, stumbled across during my umpteenth Bandcamp shopping spree, put the perfect words to the storms raging inside me:
I’ve been struggling uphill
Following detachment
I try some other way
Ah-ah-ah, I’m finding new tendencies
I’m working this all out
I’m a solid stone
But this heart is not mine
I’m trying, but you’ll find
This heart is not mine
I’m softly in denial
Zoe Durrant’s weightless, almost hushed sigh struck the perfect note, soaring over the glittery 4/4 thump while still nursing a certain wounded pathos. The track sounded, and still sounds, like getting on with life and even having a bit of fun while somewhere, deep down, you’re coming to realize just how much of yourself still needs to heal.
(2022) Moon Tooth - The I That Never Dies
I spent a decent chunk of 2022 moving 650 miles north from northern Utah to sunny Spokane, Washington, enjoying my sudden access to legal cannabis, and building enormous, days-long playlists for my new job running a little sandwich shop at the edge of Gonzaga University, where I had near-uncontested control over the store radio. I was, on the whole, doing fantastically well distracting myself from the dysphoria and anxiety festering in my subconscious, but uprooting your whole life and plopping down two states away can fuck with your sense of self, and mine was already shaky at best. My Utah friends and I had fallen in love with Brooklyn-based shredders Moon Tooth together throughout high school and college, and celebrating the release of their third LP Phototroph alone in a new town was bittersweet, not least because I initially didn’t like it quite as much as their first two. It sounded more triumphant than I felt at the time, but I still loved it, taking comfort in the band’s inimitable style.
Meeting the me that I was before I was me
Holy, holy
And we laughed in wonder, tore woe asunder
We are breathing free finally
We howled in joy, “Glory be, glory be, glory be”
“The I That Never Dies” is a moment of radical zen in frontman John Carbone’s restless, unceasing quest for self-actualization through art, and while his righteous chest-beating elsewhere on the album left me wanting, this song slowly but surely became a mantra to keep me from redefining myself around my lowest moments. Up and down forever, and different every time. This is just a wavelength at the curving of its line. I called one of those old friends up, we had a good talk about the album, and getting settled in Spokane felt a little less daunting afterwards.
(2023) Crisis Sigil - God Cum Poltergeist
2023 was a really tough year! I was terribly isolated, barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck, and filling the void with a spree of truly irresponsible online exploits, which I will refrain from detailing only to spare my poor parents who read these from any unseemly mental images. I smashed my hand in a vegetable dicer and it triggered something like a psychotic break; I became certain I was cursed by some demonic, unknowable entity. There was perhaps no artist better-suited to speak to my circumstances than one Ada Rook, who took her grindcore side project Crisis Sigil to the next level in July with God Cum Poltergeist. The lyricism is impressionistic and fragmented, so any narrative through-line is ultimately a matter of conjecture, but I was the target demographic, and from my first listen I got it on a gut level: the album is a story about the internet as a malignant, supernatural force, one that people let into their lives because everything else feels like shit and it feels like an escape. Another wet dream in the dead gleam of repression, indeed. The closer and title track barreled through my headphones with an electrifying momentum, like the cortisol spike of getting in an argument on Twitter and DESTROYING your interlocutor with FACTS and LOGIC. Where the rest of the album more directly evoked the attention-shredded, brain-rotted reality warp of the digital native, “God Cum Poltergeist” was the chemical hit that kept me coming back for more.
(2024) Willi Carlisle - Critterland
Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but in the waning months of 2023, I managed to get my shit together something fierce. By my twenty-fifth birthday, I was employed full-time at the local thrift store (a dream job since early adolescence) and in a committed romantic relationship for the first time in my life. I was also newly out of the closet and on cross-sex hormones, and the future felt more uncertain than ever, even as I felt more like myself than I had in a decade. It was an election year, and the rhetoric around transgender Americans seemed to only get more and more frightening with each passing week; staying politically informed often made me sick to my stomach, even after I finally took the leap and deleted my Twitter account. It took a bona-fide anthem from one of the biggest-hearted songwriters of our era to keep my chin up.
Oh, I never thought I could love like this
They think I’m a queer and a communist
But I’ll go along to get along
Darlin’, it feels so right
‘Cause why have a god if no one is saved?
I think love is a burden if it ain’t brave
I’ll live and die forever there
Right there in that divine
Willi Carlisle’s 2022 sophomore masterpiece Peculiar, Missouri had already blown my socks off with its vividly emotional musical storytelling and disarmingly earnest rootsy twang, and “Critterland” kicked off his eponymous third album with enough joie de vivre to carry me through the next two tracks, which respectively address the death of a mother and a father. The rafter-shaking singalong chorus (TAKE ME TO CRITTERLAAAAAAAAAAAAND!!!) was prize enough on the soul-soothing front, but between the lines Carlisle carved out a defiant and pragmatic optimism— nay, humanism, that dared to see the best in a precarious, often hostile world. Fact is, it’s a critterland out there in America: my people are stranger, hairier, less obedient and more generous than our corporate masters would have us all believe. My girlfriend calls this song “quintessential Kerry”, and it may just be the highest compliment I’ve ever received.
(2025) The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie
I thought I was getting better
But I’m back to where I started
And the straight line was a circle
Yeah the straight line was a lie
We’re approaching recent days here, so I’ll spare you another spiel on American politics and/or my p-p-personal journey, suffice to say it was tougher than ever this year to have any kind of faith in the future. It was also tougher than ever for me to keep up with new releases: throughout 2024 and especially ‘25, I threw myself into an exhaustive power pop listening project that had me digging up far too many forgotten gems from the ‘70s and ‘80s to bother with anything that might remind me of the dismal historical moment I was living through. Naturally, one of the few 2025 releases to break through my retro-obsession was from the standard-bearers for modern power pop (don’t call me, Weezer fans): I’ve loved The Beths ever since their first EP, and the titular opening track of their fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie, in true Beths fashion, condensed the entire unsettling absurdity of self-improvement in current year into a tidy little guitar-pop earworm. Guess I’ll take the long way / Cuz every way’s the long way. The gentle humor, the rueful yet upbeat tone, the catchy-as-hell melody— it all hit just right. Power pop will never die!
(2026) Burialgoods - Cold Wizza
I’ll finish off with a nice simple one: I do not really know anything about Burialgoods, only that this song popped up in my YouTube algo a few weeks ago, I clicked because funny cat with grills, and I was instantly hooked by the chilly horrorcore beat (complete with sleigh bells for maximum frigidity) and the wildly entertaining ice magic-themed bars (I’ve caught myself idly muttering chrome revolva, problem solva, icicle drip go even harda to myself more times in the past month than I care to count). It’s just a hilarious banger that hasn’t failed yet to slap a big ol’ smile on my face. Is there some deep psychological connection here to where I’m at in my life? Ask me in a few years. In the meantime, I’ll be cheering THESE SNOW TROLLS AIN’T SHIT, I’M ILLA.
Aaaand that’s another SEVEN in the bag! Hope you enjoyed this therapy intake session disguised as a Substack article. What songs have gotten you through the COVID-times? Sound off in the comments, take a looksee at my colleagues’ fine work HERE, and smash that subscribe button to stay abreast of all things Gatekeep!y.