Lemuria is the second full-length album from L.A.-based duo Optometry
Lemuria, the sophomore album from Optometry, has the best closer I’ve heard in a long time, so we’re going to start this review at the end. “Never Coming Back” is in the vein of what’s considered post-punk right now. It has a running-for-your-life tempo (over 160 bpm for those of you who keep track of these things), a gloomy synth and a “Ceremony” sad guitar. It’s dark— really, it sounds like the cliff-hanger ending of a TV show— but also danceable and it’s become my favorite track on the album, which is out today on Palette Recordings.
As the story goes, in the early years of the 1990s, the buzz on Drop Nineteens began with two demo sessions that landed them gigs, ink in the U.K. press and, ultimately, a record deal with Caroline. The songs on the demo, though, weren’t what made it onto the band’s debut album, Delaware. In fact they hadn’t been officially released until now. Called 1991, the remastered collection of songs recorded mostly in a dorm room on an 8-track reel-to-reel is out now via Wharf Cat Records.
French Police released a new EP, Espera, last week. If you haven’t already added the four-song release to your listening queue, get on that asap because this is a good one.
Based in Chicago, French Police is a trio on the post-punk/darkwave tip who have been steadily gaining popularity over the past few years. Anecdotally, I can tell you that their songs were requested at virtually every party I played with Klub Nocturno this past year. Frequently, their songs were requested more than once during the course of one night. Outside of the clubs, you have probably heard them in the ether somewhere in L.A. Recently, when I was at Alamo Drafthouse to see Pump Up the Volume, there was a French Police playlist on in the bar.
Mogwai The Bad Fire is one of this month’s essential new releases
We’ve finally made it to the end of the longest month ever. I’m writing this under the assumption that no one— literally, not one single person— wants a recap of the events of January, 2025. However, I do want to spotlight some of the music that came out this month because we need the arts most when the world is bleak af and there is some wonderful new music that came out this month.
The deluxe edition of The Faint’s 2004 album Wet From Birth is set for release on March 14, 2025
Recently, maybe at the CSS show last week, I said to a friend that you know we’re living in dark times because people are all nostalgic about the ‘00s. I’ve written about it here before, but that decade was not cute. Bleak is probably a better word to describe an era marked by wars, financial shenanigans and rising social conservatism. And, at least in comparison to other decades, there weren’t many musicians addressing the turmoil in their work. Amongst the few who did was The Faint.
Years ago, Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher had a show called Snuff Box, a comedy about two executioners who hang out at a gentleman’s club— the British kind, not the Bada Bing! kind. The show itself is fantastic, but the most memorable thing about it is the theme song. That melody has haunted me for years, even when my content-addled brain struggles to recall what actually happened in the series. Matt Berry writes a good earworm.
Berry, the actor who has been in cult favorite shows like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh, starred in the British series Toast of London and recently ended a six-season run as Laszlo in What We Do in the Shadows, has a parallel career as a musician. His latest album, Heard Noises, was released on January 24 and it’s potentially as sticky as that Snuff Box theme song.
In 2022, Legendary Pink Dots released The Museum of Human Happiness, their first album since the pandemic. It was one of my favorite albums of that year and, really, one of the finest releases from a band who celebrated their 40th anniversary just before lockdown. Now, two weeks into 2025, they’ve dropped the follow-up, So Lonely in Heaven, via Metropolis Records and I humbly recommend that you listen to the two albums back-to-back. I don’t know if it’s intentional, but from the listener’s perspective, The Museum of Human Happiness and So Lonely in Heaven sound as if they are part of the same extended body of work.
In the four or five times that I’ve listened to The Human Fear, the latest album from Franz Ferdinand, since it was released on January 10, I keep going back to one song. “Black Eyelashes” is the band’s take on rembetiko (also spelled rebetiko), a style of Greek music that was particularly popular in the first half of the 20th century, and I’m hooked on it.
It’s sounds like there have been a Greek influence on Franz Ferdinand’s music from the get-go. I can’t really pinpoint exactly what it is, but something in the guitar tones and the rhythms they use has struck me as very eastern Mediterranean since I first heard “Take Me Out” 20+ years ago. On, “Black Eyelashes,” though, the influence is so blatant that you might start imagining that final dance scene in Zorba the Greek. I did.
Spoiler alert: Romance by Fontaines D.C. is the album of the year.
Year-end lists are tough. I don’t even know how many versions of my top 2024 albums I drafted before settling on this one. It was, originally, a 10 album list. That just wasn’t working, though, so I expanded it to 15 and still ended up cutting a bunch of albums that are fantastic. What I’m getting at is that I’m not going to argue with anyone about what isn’t or isn’t on here. I already spent a few weeks arguing with myself and will probably continue to second-guess every choice until it’s time to make the 2025 list. If you don’t like it, make your own list.
All of these are albums that I like to listen to in full. A few of the picks have songs that turn up in my club sets, but club-friendly music is not a requirement here. I’ll have another list for that and, likely, a mix as well, so keep checking back between now and New Year’s Eve. Until then, read on for my top 15 albums of 2024.
I was on the treadmill the first time I listened to 3 AM (La La La), the latest album from Confidence Man, walking at 3.5 miles an hour, a brisk pace, but not quite enough to keep up with the strobelight pulse of songs like “I Can’t Lose You” and “Control.” Maybe I could have stepped up my own speed to a run, or at least a jog, but I didn’t feel like it, so I kept walking off beat, waiting to see if the vibe would shift somewhere over the course of an album that, four songs in, was starting to sound a little too much like a late ‘90s Eurodance throwback.
Confidence Man is the Australian four-piece fronted by Janet Planet and Suga Bones and backed by the veiled and cloaked individuals Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie. I first heard them during lockdown when someone DMed me Yuksek’s track “Gorgeous,” which features Confidence Man. Two years later, the band released Tilt, their second full-length, which quickly became a personal favorite. “Angry Girl” is the song that has appeared most often in my sets since 2022 because it has a dance punk vibe that works very well at L.A. clubs and it mixes seamlessly with The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers.” But, the thing that made Tilt one of my favorite albums of that year was that it was super cheeky and the music was all over the place, kind of like a cross between Bis and Chicks on Speed back at the turn of the millennium. Given the new album’s title, which definitely alludes to both KLF (“3 AM Eternal”) and maybe also references ATC (“Around the World (La La La La La)”), it seemed like Confidence Man would continue that vibe. Fifteen minutes into 3 AM (La La La), though, I started to think that the spirit driving TILT was lacking on this album.
If I were tuned into Spotify, I would have just skipped through tracks or moved on to another album, but I actually purchased 3 AM (La La La) and downloaded it without hearing more than a couple preview Reels on Instagram. I had to stick it out for the whole album.
