Baker's Dozen: Sinéad Harnett, Twenty One Pilots, Loma

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 Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

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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:

GIDEÖN, "Nothing Without You (Dub Version)"

Londoner and Homo-Centric boss GIDEÖN's 2023 EP Storytime is extremely solid and body-moving house music, the OG version of "Nothing Without You" that appears on here is very solid (and very reminiscent of something Morgan Geist would cook up) but I found myself preferring this slightly trippier dub version, love the way the vocals are phased throughout this cut.

NCT Dream, "Dive Into You"

As an extremely rare "I actually listen to K-pop for the music" listener, I get absolutely gobsmacked when I read about the machinations behind a group like NCT Dream...what do you mean, this is the third offshoot of the K-pop boy band NCT, itself containing a "limitless" amount of members? Not a ton of daylight between such a concept and, say, live-service games, but I digress...this entry in what I've been informally referring to on here as my "K-pop survey of 2021" has an extremely appealing chorus in terms of how jarring it is compared to the verse structure, feels like the K-pop version of a brostep bass drop circa 2013 (mind you, plenty of K-pop will just straight-up do that sound too).

Heavy Lungs, "Ballerina"

I missed these Bristol boys' 2023 debut but it sounds like they had a bit of gas in the tank for last year's Caviar, which sounds like a fuzzier and more blown-out Idles (fittingly, there is an Idles song explicitly named after these guys' frontman)...British bands like these have been a tenpence-a-dozen across the 2020s but I do enjoy the relentless way this one ends, nice little bit of controlled chaos there.

Belvedere, "Chromatic"

I was gonna make a Mr. Belvedere joke about these veteran Canadian pop-punks (wait, where are you going?) but then I found out that they actually named this band after the goddamn show (no, really, come back!)...much of their 2021 record Chromatic is pretty drab but this punchy and short cut stood out mostly because it reminded me of the melodic double-speed style that Bad Religion have capably pulled off time and again (and, despite me still not being able to find my How Could Hell Be Any Worse? shirt, I do have an extremely soft spot for Bad Religion in general).

Torba, "SIDES"

Shout out to Jill Mapes over at Hearing Things for recommending last year's debut album II from Italian producer Luigi Pianezzola, good stuff for anyone who was feasting on the Nine Inch Noize material this year and is looking for a bit more beat-driven darkness...this guy was a touring musician with the Soft Moon (RIP the extremely talented Jose Luis Vasquez) and you can definitely hear it in his music.

Sinéad Harnett, "Ready Is Always Too Late"

I still need to listen to the album she put out in 2024, but if we're talking about the class of Disclosure's Settle, I'd say that I prefer Sinéad Harnett's output to that of Jessie Ware's; the latter has gone full-tilt lido-deck in recent years after the sophisticated disco of 2020's it-actually-was-very-good What's Your Pleasure? more or less restored her music career entirely, whereas Harnett's 2021 record Ready Is Always Too Late is the type of pure and unhurried R&B that Ware once cut an intriguing figure with circa her own stellar 2013 debut Devotion (if only she'd get back in the stu with Dave Okumu!). Unbelievably plush production on the title track here, courtesy of North London guy Lindon Jay (who also threw in on Doja Cat's not-my-fav-of-hers-but-that's-fine "Woman" in the same year).

Twisted Teens, "I Operate"

Another Blame the Clown track I love, highly reminiscent of Pavement's "Two States" to me in that it's a hook and a chorus and not much else (of course, "Tequila" is the ultimate hook-and-a-chorus song as well). Gonna share one or two more in the future maybe, why the hell not.

Twenty One Pilots, "Mulberry Street"

Longtime readers know I have the type of soft spot for these guys that would otherwise require a 5150....I think Twenty One Pilots are at their best when sounding iridescent and beat-driven, and by that measure 2021's Scaled and Icy is something of a low point in a catalogue where the albums are, I'll admit, way spottier than they ever should be. I'd go as far as to say that they made their "Maroon 5" album here, a lot of feathery choruses and mid-tempo misery that feels like someone turned the lights on in a club, which is a terrible feeling. This one cleared the bar but just barely, the best thing you could say about it is that these two do know how to write a song that sometimes irritatingly sticks in your head.

Clairo, "Thank You"

This is a good example of a Charm song that largely lives rent-free in my head purely because the chorus sounds like something you've known for millions of years...it's so straightforward and simple that, when not actively listening to it, I end up rating it as one of the lesser cuts on the record. But what really makes this one a standout to me is how she sings on the verses, it sounds very soft-focus in comparison to the chorus' clarity, and the entire song honestly sounds like she's singing to her shoes, an image that conveys a very specific sort of intimacy.

Natanael Cano, "Diamantes"

I've written recently on here about Peso Pluma and how, when it came to his 2024 record Éxodo, I much preferred the more straightforward corridos tumbados cuts to the crossover disc that makes up the double-platter's second half; Natanael Cano is more or less recognized as the guy who popularized corridos tumbados to begin with, and his very solid 2021 record A Mis 20 is a pure and uncut version of the sound...at this point in my life I could listen to this stuff for hours on end, especially when it sounds this free-flowing.

Loma, "Pink Sky"

Jonathan Meiburg's Shearwater just dropped their latest record, which I'm looking forward to getting around to; his other main group Loma have also gotten increasingly fascinating with every record to the point where I think they are just straight-up underrated, 2024's How Will I Live Without a Body? was as foreboding and inky as their sound gets, random observation maybe but I wonder how these guys would sound if Nigel Godrich was behind the boards.

Car Seat Headrest, "Deadlines (Yeule Remix)"

I'm unfortunately one of the many who believe that Car Seat Headrest have very much fallen off across this decade, but I found a few enjoyable gewgaws in the remix record for 2020's beginning-of-the-decline Making a Door Less Open that dropped the following year; as with the other remixes that I may share from this release moving forward, Yeule definitely succeeds here in making this tune fully their own—vocals and all—instead of putting a figurative bird on it like so many indie rock remixers tend to do.

Hollow Hand, "Baby You're So Rock and Roll"

Former MJ Lenderman tourmate Max Kinghorn-Mills' Hollow Hand project has a new record out in just a few weeks; I enjoyed 2023's Your Own Adventure quite a bit, reminded me of a more sedate version of Kelley Stoltz's countrified power-pop maybe, or an AM radio playing forgotten classic rock gems that never actually existed.