Baker's Dozen: IDLES, NNAMDÏ, FIELDED

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...

But today I'm doing a free Baker's Dozen to give people an idea of what you get when you sign up for the final week of the holiday subscription sale, which goes through January 25th. The deal remains: 50% off monthly and annual subscriptions, it really doesn't get much better than that. You can grab the monthly sale here, and the annual sale here. It's a great way to support a 100% independent publication.

OK, let's get into a 2021-exclusive installment now:

Youth Fountain, "Keepsake"

I'm a sucker for burly, bruised pop-punk like this, Tyler Zanon keeps the big ugly hooks pumping on his second record Keepsakes & Reminders. (Is it just me, or is this type of emo-adjacent rock music always coming from Vancouver?) He also dropped a record in 2023 that I still need to get around to.

IDLES, "The Beachland Ballroom"

I remain highly amused that this band continues to be so divisive for many, "coworker music" accusations abound online obviously, in the end I think IDLES won the post-post-post-post-punk sweepstakes of 2021 simply by being a bit more interested in varying textures than their contemporaries. (Whether they won the long game is a different story, Fontaines D.C. and Geese became different bands entirely and have both possibly overtaken these guys in terms of Big Popular Indie Rock right now, but I'm sure the members of all three bands would tell you it's not a competition anyway.) Anyway! I do like these guys, I thought 2024's Tangk was even better than Crawler which this song is from, I had drummer Mark Bowen on the newsletter around the time of the last one (hey, we're probably due for a new one from these guys soon, right?) and you can read that right here.

Makthaverskan, "Tomorrow"

New one from these guys soon, thank god...no secret to anyone who has a passing interest in the various shades of indie-pop that these guys always deliver the goods hard, the Swedish indie-pop vibes are obviously off the charts when it comes to what they do but they're always adding a little muscle and intensity to the mix in ways that are quite surprising (and they toss dream-pop cues in there occasionally too, which you think would not work but, by the evidence of this track specifically, actually does).

Delta Sleep, "Water Rise"

I actually wrote about these guys' fifth album Spring Island a little in a recent-ish installment but I went back to it and this one jumped out at me as well, this sounds like if glass beach were Grizzly Bear basically.

NNAMDÏ and lynyn, "You Don't Know" [ft. Sen Morimoto]

Few modern indie artists are as try anything once-y as NNAMDÏ, and he turns that approach into something quite virtuous for sure...his 2021 collab EP with fellow Chicagoan Are You Happy was a big surprise for me, all right-angle electronic textures that are just a few steps away from one of the less-wack EDC stages (and this is, as someone who's gone to EDC before, a massive compliment). Love Sooper co-don dadda Sen Morimoto's appearance on it too, overall this whole thing is very Sooper-y in that it takes risks that are hard to pull off but does so with relative ease. I had Sen on the newsletter forever ago, you can read that right here.

Hiatus Kaiyote, "Red Room (Ki Pharaoh Basement Edit)"

This is the big standout from the remix album for Hiatus Kaiyote's Mood Variant, courtesy of London's Ki Pharaoh—you can obviously hear the UK-ness in the 2step gait that's just dusty enough, this kind of knocks in a less aggressive form that Blawan's classic "Getting Me Down" did.

FIELDED, "Damaged"

When FIELDED lands for me, the crater is substantial. I really loved her Backwoodz-released record Young Medusa from 2021, just purely sublime stuff, she finds the perfect balance on this track specifically of the sublime and the grounded without pushing anything too much in the red.

Land of Talk, "Calming Night Partner"

I think you could say at this point that Elizabeth Powell has reached "your favorite songwriter's favorite songwriter" status, every so often I will talk to someone who preaches the gospel of Land of Talk and a stormy-yet-simmering cut like this one from her EP of the same name is exactly why...she's able to create shapes in her songwriting not unlike Sharon Van Etten, balancing on the edge of several emotions in a way that can be really thrilling.

Same Side, "Domesticated"

I wrote about the Story So Far guy Kevin Geyer's Same Side project a long time ago when I shouted out "What You're Missing" from his 2024 record Oh No, which was the full realization of the DCFC-as-snowglobe sound that he was developing on 2021's decent In Place, this is so Gibbard-y that it hurts (not in a bad way, though).

Projexx, "Sidepiece"

Love this extremely smooth slice of genre fusion from Miami-via-Kingston's Projexx, his 2021 EP Queen Hill is fairly solid, he's put out a few things since that I have to check out but hasn't been super above-ground across the last few years in general.

Lil Zay Osama, "How I'm Coming"

The harder stuff is where it's at on Trench Baby 2 from 2021, at times Lil Zay Osama dips into pure pain-rap territory and it's fine but not very distinctive...this is of course not especially distinctive either but it does the trick, I love how his voice sounds as if it's coated in some viscous chemical (an effect which pairs very nicely with ATL Jacob's expectedly solid drum work).

The KVB, "Unbound"

One of those bands that I get mixed up with several other bands just because of the name, but I like how Invada-signed the KVB do things beyond the fact that I just generally trust stuff that's on Invada...I actually shared an excellent Trentemøller remix from 2021's Unity forever ago, in general I am a sucker for the steely-yet-sugary electro-pop-slash-post-punk aesthetic that these two exude.

Defcee and August Fanon, "Alive"

Unsurprisingly gorgeous production from August Fanon here, I enjoyed his and Defcee's Style Wars love letter We Dressed the City With Our Names EP from 2021, it carried just the right amount of wistfulness and historical reverence without crossing the Rubicon into overly saccharine territory, tough thing to nail but they nailed it.