Baker's Dozen: feeble little horse, Bloc Party, Tigers Jaw

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memory column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

And the very thing that form copy is describing is what you're seeing right in front of you—only, it's for free! For now, at least...as previously mentioned, a lot of the stuff that would typically be behind "the paywall" will be free for the next month in order to give new potential subscribers an idea of what they'll be getting if they take part of the fabulous "birthday layoff" sale I'm currently running.

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Now, for the uninitiated, a brief explanation of what the "Baker's Dozen" actually is: Once or twice a week, I send out a playlist of stuff I've recently spent some time with that came out over the last five or six years, along with critical observations made about said stuff. If you want a slightly more involved explanation of the methodology that goes into putting the Baker's Dozens together, you can head right here. In the meantime—if you like what you see here, make sure to grab that subscription sale so you can keep seeing it when it goes back to being for paid subscribers only. OK, on with the show:

Saweetie, "Back Seat" [ft. Lourdiz]

Love this Saweetie song from way back in 2021, Aquarius vibes a little maybe...all that arguing about whether or not Saweetie was a good rapper was ultimately for naught, it does seem like her McDonald's meal will have more of an actual legacy than her music did, so it goes, many such cases, etc. This year is pretty much the first of the decade where she's been more or less completely quiet, I'd speculate about whether she's gonna drop later this year but given that she did last year and it was absolute crickets, I'd be best not to hold my breath.

The Reds, Pinks and Purples, "Slow Torture of an Hourly Wage"

At this point I would say that Glenn Donaldson is on something of a generational run when it comes to his output across the 2020s, his lovely low-register voice takes on more shades of gorgeous gloom with every single release and, especially in the case of 2025's The Past Is a Garden I've Never Fed, his lyrical perspectives remain sharp and acerbic and funny, qualities I don't necessarily associate with this type of cloudy-day indie-pop....I was honored to have Glenn on the newsletter back in 2022, you can read that right here.

feeble little horse, "Chores"

We'll get around to talking about feeble little horse's excellent new album bitknot eventually, but I do believe they're probably one of the most interesting young rock bands at the moment, as well as one of the only groups to take shoegaze's raw materials and do something genuinely fresh and weird with them...I went back and spent some time with their 2021 debut Hayday and it's fascinating how they were already coloring outside the lines to great success from the very beginning, this highlight in particular sounds like some sort of digitally-degraded Creation relic cut through with Sonic Youth guitars, which is all a compliment obviously.

Masego, "What You Wanna Try"

Masego just put out a record last month that I need to spin, I enjoyed his 2023 self-titled effort well enough even though it slipped into territory that was a tad too laid-back once or twice throughout...a song like this captures him in somewhat of a sweet spot, sticky-hot and humid without totally losing the melodic plot.

Honeyglaze, "I Am Not Your Cushion"

Another group whose recent stuff I need to catch up with, I quite enjoyed UK indie trio Honeyglaze's self-titled effort from 2022, in terms of Speedy Wunderground stuff it's actually quite straightforward, at times reminding me of Porridge Radio's (RIP) quieter moments...fun fact, this music video of theirs was directed by two-time newsletter guest Asha Lorenz of Sorry, it really is all in the family for these UK bands across the 2020s.

PENOMECO, "Change" [ft. sogumm]

This low-slung 2021 cut from Korean rapper PENOMECO is, in the world of Korean rap and R&B, not unlike the "Chamber of Reflection-core" I've been citing so much when it comes to Western indie and bubbling-under pop...I feel like I hear this woozy sound so often from this area of genre, especially from this specific time period, the level of distinctiveness it ends up carrying is truly a game of inches but, in this instance, I don't mind the fact that I've quite literally heard it all before.

Bloc Party, "Day Drinker"

On a level, it's purely disrespectful to refer to Bloc Party as "landfill indie"—and I'm saying that as someone who, beyond the "big songs," never really was that into Silent Alarm. On the other hand, if you're at a certain point in your career as elder statesmen of the 2000s post-post-punk boom and you're making stuff that sounds this much like landfill indie...indeed, Bloc Party's most recent album, 2022's Alpha Games (which this very aggressively fine song is from), sounds very similar to a lot of the bands of their time that are still trucking along, many of themselves starting out as capable Bloc Party facsimiles (longtime readers will know that I recently waxed a little on the Maximo Park record that came out around the time of Alpha Games). Anyway, these guys have a new one coming out soon, given the somewhat renewed interest in Silent Alarm I wonder if they're able to seize on such an opportunity that it presents.

Charlotte Cardin, "Passive Aggressive"

Charlotte Cardin? What is she, a friggin' bouncer? Just a little last-name humor for a Monday afternoon...at first blush I thought this one was UK-borne but as it turns out we've got a lil' bit of a CanCon situation here, it seems like every week I'm writing about at least one person who appeared on a singing competition and this is no different, as CC here was in the top four for the inaugural season of La Voix (take a wild fucking guess what that means in English) in 2013. This one stood out to me from her otherwise quite bland 2021 debut Phoenix, she put out a follow-up in 2023 and an EP in 2024 but hasn't done anything since. What's she cooking? (That's rhetorical.)

skaiwater, "TOOL"

After a string of releases that were critically beloved to some extent, it seems like skaiwater crashed down to earth with this year's double album Wonderful (is this the first intentional double album of the rage-rap era?)...I do think the largesse of this project hampered it quite a bit compared to, say, their very solid Pinkprint releases, this one jumped out at me amidst all the blare but not by much, I think that listeners, artists, and younger critics alike are starting to see the limits of possibility when it comes to evolution in this lane of rap music, for better or worse.

PJ Harding and Noah Cyrus, "You Belong to Somebody Else"

Young Ponyo's had quite a career, all things considered...even while excising the tabloid stuff (this entire thing is, in the immortal words of Tony Soprano, too fucked up for me to even think about) I'm kind of shocked as to where we've ended up re: Noah, at some point in the 2010s I was brought into a label conference room to hear "new music" from her that made me want to run out screaming. But across this decade, she's re-emerged as one of the few people to actually Go Country in a meaningful and interesting way, I very randomly close-to-loved last year's I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me, which I will write about at some point and featured Bill friggin' Callahan as a co-writer, I still haven't peeped her record from 2022 but I found the EP this is from—2021's People Don't Change, in collaboration with Aussie PJ Harding—to be tremendously effective in the sentimental-folk department, crazy to think about how she's probably amassing a better hit rate of recorded music than Miley at this point.

Eiko Ishibashi, "Evil Does Not Exist"

Eiko really whipped it when it came to the score for Evil Does Not Exist, a truly excellent film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi who is one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers (if you haven't seen Happy Hour, set aside five-plus-hours immediately)...very thankful that we're getting new Hamaguchi in a few months (with my fave Virginie Efira in the lead, no less!), sadly Ishibashi is not in the cut again for this one but I'll live.

SHY FX, Breakage, and Break, "I Got You" [ft. Tyler Daley]

Pure gooey drum'n'bass fare from 2021 going down here, love letting stuff like this coat my brain...SHY FX are typically very good at this to my knowledge, not much more to say past that.

Tigers Jaw, "Baptized on a Redwood Drive"

Tigers Jaw weathered the ebb-and-flow of the emo revival in perhaps the shrewdest way possible, which was to just become a really good indie rock band...I loved 2022's I Won't Care How You Remember Me and thought this year's Lost on You was even better, big hooks and emotional choruses abound, if I was in college they'd be all I care about period. I had the band on the newsletter a few months ago and it was a grand old time, you can read that chat right here.