We All Break the Same: May 2026

Written By Stephen Bands

Welcome to May! Next month will be entirely dedicated to the best of the year so far, so it’s the last Rewind for a while, but it’s a particularly special one to me. Then there was a hot competition for the Now Playing section, but most recent amazing listen wins.

What else is in the news? Oh… never mind

The Listen List

An update about what’s out now and what people around the internet are talking about

April

** must-listen

The Rewind

A look back at a favorite from (at least five) years past

I think back often to my junior year of college, to the moment I had a true musical awakening. Late Night with Conan O’Brien is on and the musical guest comes out. I’ve never heard of them, the song is a slow-burn pop-rock tune that, given the many many issues broadcast TV has with properly mixing live music, sounds…fine. But then, it becomes the most unhinged thing ever put on the airwaves: band members run around and switch instruments, the drummer in particular is playing random pieces of the set dressing, while the singer/keyboardist falls hard after attempting to do a handstand on his Moog, and the bassist is literally playing the guitarists pedals as an instrument. Nothing makes sense, and it is, to this day, the greatest musical guest performance I’ve ever seen on television.

Mutemath

Mutemath

Alternative Rock | 2006

Needless to say, the next day began the search for who those guys were and where their album is. Much to my great joy, not only do I find a copy of it, but they are actually new on the scene, this being their debut album. My excitement of being on the ground floor was uncontainable. I began sending clips of the Conan performance to everyone I could, and texting anyone that had my number that this band is the real deal.

My discovery of the unhinged late night live performance led to another discovery of the unhinged music video for “Typical,” probably Mutemath’s most famous song (and rightly so). Shot entirely in reverse, the band had to learn to play and sing the song backwards in order for it to appear forward in the video.

Like I said, unhinged, and one of the best music videos of the 2000’s.

The song itself is a fantastic wind-up pop-rock song with a big, loud, stadium-ready chorus that is bookended by these harsh static squelches and backed by these gorgeous synth chords that lie in wait like the most beautiful and dangerous panther. The final pass is so full of sound: radio transmissions, triple-tracked vocals, uncountable guitars and Wurlitzers, the drummer, Darren King, utterly destroying his kit; it wells up in you and boils out with pure elation. It’s everything I ever wanted a radio-friendly rock song to be. It’s just unfathomably good.

Since 2006, I have listened to this song, easily 100 times, and it’s probably closer to 500. And it’s not even the song they played on that fateful Conan episode. That would be “Break the Same,” which appears about midway through the album. It has a big, loud, synth bass-driven opening line and refrain, but the song is otherwise reduced to a simmer for much of its remainder. But what the studio version lacks in the excitement of its live counterpart, it makes up in musical complexity: layers upon layers of guitars playing overlapping and interweaving melodies, jazz drums, hurricane wind effects, eery keyboards. That it breaks, halfway through, into an extended drum and sound effects jam is clearly designed for the live performance to go into hyperdrive, but it’s still amazingly enjoyable to hear a new band on their debut album go so hard into a sonic experiment while also courting the mainstream pop crowd.

My personal favorite from the deeper cuts is “Plan B,” with its ground control radio sound effects and sci-fi synth lines before exploding into a huge 90’s alt-rock chorus. The verse sections are handled with such care and reserved energy—followed by an extended organ and keyboard break that pulls from Zeppelin’s “No Quarter”—that when those big, swinging guitars come in for the finale, and Paul Meany’s wild ad-libs scream across the track, it feels like true transcendence.

That the band was also willing to include so many instrumental and long-form segue tracks was also truly revolutionary to me. I had never before heard a debut band, trying to make it big on the arena tour circuit of rock, make so much space for the kind of musical experimentation and expression that would usually be left to the indie and budget-less scenes. “Reset,” the album’s closing track, in particular is a masterful piece of high-speed spiritual jazz that incorporates Tishoumaren guitars, turntablism, and drone electronics so seamlessly that you almost forget you’re four minutes into what is essentially a drum solo.

From a critical perspective, I can honestly say that this is one of the best debut albums of the 2000’s. It is far too often forgotten, buried in the avalanche of garage rock revival (the Killers, the Strokes, etc.) and indie rock (Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, etc.) debuts that crowded Mutemath out of the charts, but it should be thought of on the same level as any of them. Not only because the songwriting is immaculate, and their willingness to give space to sonic experiments so brave, but because it sounded, and still sounds, so fucking good.

Never before have I heard a debut album this well mixed and produced. The layers of effects, and all the background chords and synth patches, and the ultra-dry front-and-center mix of Darren King’s batshit insane drumming; every piece is so beautiful and so well-designed. It’s truly a shame that their biggest mainstream success was being included on the soundtrack for Twilight (no shade to the various Twilight soundtracks though, since Twilight: Eclipse birthed one of the best songs of all time).

Personally, I owe a lot to this album. Seeing that performance on Conan made me want to go see start-up acts at tiny club shows, many of which still rank among my favorite performances. And that rush of feeling from buying the album, like I got in on the ground floor of a band I would love for years, created my obsession with seeking out new music that led to the creation of this website. I had the honor of seeing them live precisely once, in the dingy, grimy, and gone-too-soon Baltimore Sonar. At one point, Paul Meany stole one of Darren King’s floor toms and went crowdsurfing, riding around on it like an emperor on a litter. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

Now Playing

A quick look at my personal favorite recent release

Maybe Not Tonight

Lime Garden

Dance-Punk

I know, I thought the Angine de Poitrine album would have been here too. But between literally everyone and all their mothers talking about them already, and this last minute sneak into my playlists, I feel like spotlighting an amazing band I don’t hear anyone talking about…also recency bias.

Lime Garden have produced an album that is front-to-back, beginning-to-end fun. Even when they try to tone it down a bit, like with “Always Talking About You,” the tunes are still incredibly danceable. But the big moments really rock hard, like the three-track run of “All Bad Parts,” the title track, and “Body.”

I can’t quite put a finger on why, but while first listening to this, all I could think of was Eurythmics’ Be Yourself Tonight, with these guitar-driven, reverb-heavy, riot grrrl-influenced dance tracks as the broody, floor-staring antithesis to that 80’s new wave synthpop stunner. But while Lime Garden certainly takes influence from that era—mainly Gang of Four-style post-punk—their sound is anything but derivative.

Maybe Not Tonight is a blazing musical force, and a fantastic sophomore effort from Lime Garden, that navigates humor and heartbreak with equal brilliance, creating a new punky, dancey, disco-y experience that’s essential listening for this otherwise dour year.

Up Next

What’s coming out in the next few weeks?

  • In Times of Dragons by Tori Amos

  • Wired by Basement

  • Inferno by Boards of Canada

  • Loud Bloom by Olof Dreijer (FKA The Knife)

  • Now You Exist by The Field

  • From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth by Future Islands

  • Crawlspace of the Pantheon by Guided By Voices

  • For Love of Grace & the Hereafter by Iceage

  • FENIAN by Kneecap

  • Look For Your Mind! by The Lemon Twigs

  • The Afterparty by Lykke Li (presumably her final album)

  • Middle of Nowhere by Kacey Musgraves

Well, what releases did I miss? What’s coming out soon that you can’t wait for?

And as always, fuck ICE, release the Epstein files, and happy listening!

Stephen Bands
Next

We Are the Ones Who Seem to Travel Through Time: April 2026