Life goes on and on and on and on and on and On and on and on ...
A month where the business didn’t stop, the algorithm wouldn’t let go, and a bunch of strangers I now love made the soundtrack.
I almost didn’t write this one.
Not for any noble reason — just that June didn’t have a single quiet hour in it. OutSnapped is picking up in a way that’s genuinely hard to keep up with, Pictor keeps chugging, I’ve been writing a lot more over at Artificially Intimidating, we’ve been recording pilot episodes of a podcast (stay tuned — this is real and it’s coming), doing AI consulting through SlowMotionMagic, and pushing hard on PocketSquare.ai. So when I say the playlist got made in the cracks between things, I mean it literally. This is a month assembled at red lights.
And then Oliver Tree died.
I never met him. I’m almost sure I never booked him or shot him — he came up after my NickyDigital nights had mostly wound down. But a lot of the people I did work with back then, the ones still in the music and nightlife world, knew him, worked with him and praised him. I’ve admired him from a distance for years. The commitment to the bit. The absolute refusal to break character. The music videos that are genuinely some of the most ridiculous and fun short films going, and the Instagram and TikTok stuff that’s show-stoppingly funny and weird in a way almost nobody else is willing or capable of being. If you’ve never gone down the Oliver Tree rabbit hole, do it — start with the videos and don’t stop.
He died June 14, in a helicopter crash in Rio, mid-tour, at 32. “Life Goes On” is the track of his I put on here, and I picked it before I understood how much weight that title was about to carry.
I’m turning 44 next week, which is probably why it landed the way it did. Someone with that much left to give, still giving it, taken that fast and that unexpectedly — it knocked something loose about the past and the present and what I actually want to do with the time. And then, because I’d gone down the rabbit hole, Instagram spent the rest of the month feeding me more and more and more of him. So in a strange way he’s more present in my life now than he ever was. Grief and the algorithm, doing that thing they do. I don’t have a tidy takeaway. I just know the list reads differently now — half these song titles are about being alive or not being: “Life Is Strange,” “Cutting Off The Head Of A Ghost,” “Life Goes On,” “Better Than Before.” I didn’t plan that. I just noticed it.
Okay. The music.
The single most fun fact on this list: Baauer is back with a full new album, and Believe it or not, Baauer was actually a NickyDigital intern before “Harlem Shake” broke the entire internet. He is literally one of the nicest kindest people I’ve ever met. So watching him land “Calling Out For U” — off U, his third record, executive-produced by Hudson Mohawke and built as a sunny love letter to the ’00s dance music he grew up on in London — is one of those look where he went moments that I never get tired of. He’s said “Calling Out For U” is the track the whole album grew out of. It’s a great one to have.
The other big return: La Roux, back with “Babyline” for what feels like the first time in ages, ages, ages — because it basically is. It’s the second single from Old Flames, her first album since 2014, and she’s called this whole chapter “happier, lighter, braver.” You can hear it: this one would’ve sounded right at home on the 2009 debut, all synth and spine. Pair it with “Sunset” — the Doublespeak track with Vince Clarke and Blancmange on it — and you’ve got a proper little vein of vintage electronic running under the whole month. I am, apparently, exactly as susceptible to that sound as I was at 27.
Then there’s the Aaron Lee Tasjan double. I put “Little Movies” and “Computer of Love” back to back on purpose, which I almost never do with one artist — but they earn it. One’s tender and small and the other’s got this ache wired straight into a drum machine, and hearing them in sequence tells you more about the guy than either does alone. Just trust me and let them run consecutively.
Here’s the thing that actually got me this month, though: how many of these people I still can’t name from memory even after listening all month. eee gee — “eeelluminagee,” a track I’d never have found on my own and now really love. Mon Rovîa, whose “Rust.” completely grabbed me — he took his stage name from Monrovia, the place he came to America from, which is the kind of detail that makes a song hit different once you know it. Ocie Elliott, Saya Gray with “SHELL ( OF A MAN ),” Maz’s “Tracksuit,” Pamela. closing the whole thing out on “Better Than Before.” A month ago these were strangers. Now I’ve followed every one of them and I’m genuinely excited to see what comes next. That’s the whole point of doing this, honestly.
And then the oldies-but-goodies holding the frame up. Andrew Bird’s “Manifest.” Sondre Lerche back with “Follow The River” — we love him, no notes. The Haffmilch Holiday opener with Kate NV and Deradoorian in the mix, which is about the most me way to start a playlist I can think of. Lord Huron’s “Life Is Strange.” Thee Oh Sees doing what Thee Oh Sees do. River Whyless covering “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
An hour and twelve minutes, 19 songs, made in the cracks of a month that wouldn’t slow down, by a guy who can feel 44 coming and got reminded — twice, three times, by song titles he chose before he knew — that the whole thing is fragile and worth paying attention to.
Life goes on. Better than before, if we’re lucky.