Staff Pix 12/13: Songs of the Year!

It’s been quite the year here at Milk Crate. Love, loss, elections, eclipses, laughter, beach days, rain storms, the sun, the moon, and everything in between. To top it all off, there’s been a whole lot of wonderful music to help us make it through. Here’s to 2024, music and friendship and collegiate radio. And here’s to doing it all again next year!

“missy” by packs

PACKS is a humble indie force with a dense catalog, and this year’s Melt the Honey brought their most sensible work yet with distorted guitars and fuzzy exclamations galore. The final single from the LP, “Missy,” is an utter delight in a perfect two-minute package. It’s melodic and enchanting all the way through. Toeing the line between whimsical and heavy, the track has endless replay potential. Lyricism is guided by many satisfying “ahs” until the bridge, delivered in Spanish by feature tormentatropica. Simply, it’s impossible not to fall in love with this one. —Sofia Giarrusso

“Sienna” by the Marías

“Sienna,” the final track off The Marías sophomore album, Submarine, spits listeners out of the ethereal world the band created and throws them back into reality. Lead vocalist María Zardoy disguises the sad lyrics behind her soft voice as she sings about an imagined life with her former partner crumbling before her eyes. Throughout the song, she reminisces about the times she’s had with him, but realizes they’ll never share those moments again. I find romanticizing a fictional world with someone you can never have extremely relatable, but maybe that’s just me… —Delaney Roberts

“Sadness as a gift” by Adrianne lenker

Adrianne Lenker’s profound songwriting in “Sadness As A Gift” is heart-wrenching in the most beautiful way. It’s a warm hug of a song that reassures you that the burden of sadness you may feel in a given moment is ultimately one of the greatest gifts. Appearing as the second track on her 2024 album, Bright Future, the melody brightens the tracklist as Lenker describes her journey with heartbreak as something she wouldn’t trade for the world. It takes a lot to dedicate true devotion to anything other than your own suffering and, in this track, Lenker speaks on the breaking of such cycles. In a song that shares the beauty of uncertainty, Lenker sings “You and I could see the same eternity / Every second brimming with a majesty.” It’s a beautiful sentiment to find comfort in sharing the universe with someone you love. —Sophie Parrish

“if you hear me crying” by cindy lee

“If You Hear Me Crying” rips right from the gate with a jovial, ‘60s sock-hop swing. In my year of juvenile romantic strife, Cindy Lee’s guitar has become the dearest of friends, her simple melancholic lyrics jabbing right at the simplicity of sometimes-it-just-sucks. “Is this the love you’re looking for?” she croons, before sinking into a groove akin only to the complexity and playfulness of a medieval tapestry. The final minutes of the song break way to swooning guitar bends, jumping through and between the previous melody before bursting into heart-broken, ear-splitting fuzz. In those final moments that melody comes back, just off in the distance over the driving purr of the instrumental, it says with just as much clarity as her voice: “Look right through me / Is this the love I’m looking for?” —Nathan Hilyard

“doves” by Armand Hammer

Cold. Interminable steel towers. Urban decay that seeps through every nook and cranny, every leaky faucet and hole in the wall haplessly painted over by a landlord. Ennui infiltrates the mind, corrupts it from the inside out, turns life into a game of survival; “I had to let it all go so I could live in my head, again / Ransacking my mind but something hiding in the vents, ductwork or worse / Something died in the walls like a church,” raps New York MC Billy Woods, his words spoken, his tone one of tired frustration. He’s been here before. On “Doves,” the monumental bonus track to Armand Hammer’s 2023 record We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the producer-MC duo finds beauty in the apocalypse, and love in the revelation that time damns us all. The track is a nine minute post-industrial ambient fever dream, a ghostly concoction of half-hearted guitar strumming, unearthly groans, and suffocating bursts of noise that sees MC’s Elucid and Billy Woods reckoning with love in the face of death and eternal damnation. “Pardon me / People are spilling out,” quavers guest vocalist Benjamin Booker in the song’s harrowing first act, his voice raspy, subdued, grieving. The days become a blur, signs of repentance manifest themselves in the trees, the world grows colder. “They called now like ‘Come now, he doesn’t have long to live’ / I dress slowly / Came back and took my baby out the crib so I could hold him,” lets loose Woods, in a brief moment of lucidity. But there is still hope. Even in its bleakest moments, “Doves” offers hope for the future, however small. “Dinner served, I wait for my guests, long table set,” concludes Woods’ verse, followed by nothing but a lengthy, punishing silence. It’s all coming back, maybe. —Lucca Swain

“I guess time just makes fools of us all” BY father john misty

I commonly call Mr. Tillman the greatest modern male lyricist. While I have been dodging talking about him out of fear of attempting to analyze the clever speech patterns in his writing, the day to spill my guts has arrived. Whether belting out “All Falls Down” by Lizzy McAlpine in my car or pondering the story of Georgie Greep’s “The Magician?”, 2024 is an innovative year for music, so I can do both at once. Enter the phrase that kept digging into my mind since the back half of the summer–“I guess time just makes fools of us all.” This lead single from Tillman’s latest project Mahashmashana opens like a western. An isolated horn leads into a ragging instrumental backing track that follows Tillman through the song as he directs the listener to his story. Tillman brings the listener through a dramatic series of lines within the song’s eight minutes, such as, “Yours is easily the least famous / To turn down the cover of the Rolling Stone.” This easily makes you twitch your head, making you think about each word spoken. As the curtains close on the movie shot into your years, it’s not uncommon to click play again on the casual eight minute epic.  —Sam Shipman

“pon pón” by Khurangbin

Khruaungbin’s fourth album, A LA SALA, came out this year and it emits gooey warmth. When I needed a break from brat summer, I turned to A LA SALA, and “Pon Pón” quickly became one of my favorite tracks. Easy-going electric guitar and a bassline that is not only grounding, but is audible! The guitar riffs are having a conversation with the vocalist; a soft whisper emerges from the instrumental landscape. “Toma uno.” The electric guitar responds with a short phrase. “Toma dos.” The same phrase slightly higher. “Toma todo.” The riff gets higher once more. “Pon Pón.” This structure is followed for most of the song. “Pon Pón,” and Khruangbin as a whole, feels like the sun on your arms and the wind in your hair as you drive down the highway with your friends. There is pure joy in the tune, which makes the repetitiveness addicting. There’s no need for complexity, just guitars and whispers lapping over each other like the ebb and flow of waves. An orange glow washes over me when I listen to “Pon Pón” and even on the coldest nights, warmth still creeps up my arms and holds me softly. —Izzie Claudio