Run Away With Me: October 2025

Written By Stephen Bands

… goddammit

Here’s a random thought: begging to be given a prize that you’ve done precisely zero work to earn, purely because someone you hate for racist reasons got one, makes you a big weird baby-man. I don’t know who that might apply to, but I’m sure it will be useful advice for… someone.

Unrelated to pumpkin-looking man-children: music! It’s great and it’s back in pog form, as well as streaming and on vinyl records, and I assume they still sell CDs somewhere despite there being a finite supply of that reflective coating and no one makes jewel cases anymore because of—pfft—the environment.

September was jam-packed with releases you’d probably want to acquire in one of those forms—especially the pog one, supplies are limited and sure to increase in value—including one that’s just gunning for that top year-end spot. So take a look and give a listen!

The Listen List

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

September

** must-listen

The Rewind

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

E·MO·TION

Carly Rae Jepsen

Dance-Pop | 2015

I have mentioned many times on this site that if I had one regret in my years of making year-end lists, it would be to include this album in the 2015 edition. And prominently. Like…top 3 (To Pimp a Butterfly and Carrie & Lowell came out that year too, you know). But, since time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses, this meager penance is all I can offer.

When it came out, Emotion was a big deal…one I ignored…on purpose. My only other exposure to Carly Rae Jepsen had been “Call Me Maybe,” a song I found mawkish, saccharine, and way overplayed at the time, and still feel a bit ambivalent about to this day. So for me to stoop to listen to an album full of…that? No sir.

That Emotion might not be exactly that song over and over for an hour, or that it might be a huge leap forward in CRJ’s songwriting, performance, and production was not a thought I would deign to entertain. “Call Me Maybe” was bad, so her music was bad.

Newsflash: her music is quite good. Excellent even. And on Emotion, it’s verging on transcendent.

If I haven’t made it obvious in any of my other rewinds, I was buried in the rock/alternative/metal scene with blinders on for a looooong time. Occasionally electronic would break through, if the beats were fast and hard enough, and sometimes hip hop, if the same were true there. Things I adore now: ambient, spiritual jazz, progressive country, and—god forbid—pop; they were shunned. If your band/act wasn’t within some seven-degrees-of-musicology-separation from Led Zeppelin or Nine Inch Nails, you were to be dismissed.

Indeed in the first ten years of this site, from 2011 through 2020, the only pop albums to even crack the top 10 were Beyonce’s Lemonade in 2016, Robyn’s Honey in 2018, and Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? and Caroline Rose’s Superstar in 2020. Four…in ten years. Hell, Carly herself wouldn’t be on one of my lists until The Loveliest Time, an album that clearly opened a pop floodgate since it accompanied three others in the Top 10 that year: Alison Goldfrapp’s The Love Invention, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts, and Caroline Polachek’s Desire I Want to Turn Into You. Four in one year vs. four in ten.

All that is to say that over the ten years since Emotion was released, I’ve been going back and finding what I missed out on during my self-imposed exile from happiness. And Carly is an artist I find my self returning to again and again.

But enough about me and my unenlightened past self. How does Emotion hold up? Like you even have to ask.

That saxaphone-by-way-of-Casio sample that opens “Run Away With Me” has become a kind of audio-meme, signaling the quirkiness of the artist behind one of pop’s most continually beloved albums, but also earworming its way into the pleasure center of your brain. That the bombast of that opener is followed by the still very energetic but contrastingly less dynamic title track proves CRJ’s range: taking something that could easily have been an overblown addition to the endless party-pop anthems and keeping it sonically restrained, because that’s what the song needs, shows a level of maturity in songwriting many pop stars never achieve.

“I Really Like You” has all the silliness you would expect from a song with that title, but with the brilliant late-80’s-meets-Hotline-Miami synth pack that makes it feel like you were dropped directly into the animated portion of an A-Ha video. And the bubbly surface of “Gimmie Love” is supported by an incredibly dark sound palette that is so bass-heavy you would think it was a rejected Burial track, complete with down-pitch-distorted backing vocal.

The funky-fat bass line of “Boy Problems” is paired brilliantly with synth packs that sound equally like they’re pulled directly from a 70’s promo for what’s on primetime and an Atari arcade cabinet sound card. Then, “Making the Most of the Night”s seemingly spare opening verse hides an almost-overwhelming kitchen sink of percussion that makes up the chorus, while CRJ uses her classic does-she-love-this-guy-or-is-she-a-psychopath lyrics that showcase how fine a line it is between love and obsession.

“Your Type” is exactly the kind of song that was floating through the ether of pop music everywhere since glory days of Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” five years before. But where other pop stars would devolve into cliche for their “I’m really the girl you want but you have blinders on for some bimbo” attempt, CRJ couches hers in self-deprecation and self-realization—plus that beat is straight up fire.

I can’t say I wasn’t a little disappointed that “Let’s Get Lost” is not the perfect song by Beck & Bat for Lashes, but then I remembered that that is a different song by different people. This one opens with a guitar sample that I SWEAR I’ve heard somewhere else and I will listen to every goddamn song in my Spotify history until I find it! RRRAAAAAHHHHH!!!

…ahem—excuse me. Despite the equivalent titles, this version is very much Carly’s to own. The production is some of the most masterful I’ve heard in pop, including some very-well-hidden-until-they’re-not sax samples that appear at just the right time.

Oh, and that closer. *chef’s kiss* “When I Needed You” might be the finest song CRJ has ever written. A song of rejection that can never be healed, no matter how strong that first crush was, backed by some of the greatest synth-new-wave-revival pop beats ever recorded. I cannot stop playing this song over and over when it gets brought up on shuffle.

Emotion was the big step Carly Rae Jepsen took out of the world of bubblegum, and into the world of pure flavor. A deep and fulfilling album that feels as light and fun as a trashy beach novella. That it wasn’t immediately followed by a billion-dollar tour and the kind of ravenous fandom that some…significantly lesser contemporaries of Carly have been granted, is a travesty of pop-justice that I don’t think will ever be righted.

But maybe it’s for the best that Carly is in the “b-list” (God, I hate using that term and Carly in that same phrase) of pop stars: fewer spotlights means more room to breathe, more time to hone the craft, more cover to take big swings. It’s certainly been better for my experience of her music, and her consistent excellence is the worst-kept secret in music criticism.

I’m so glad I can attempt to fix my worst mistake in the 15 years of making this website, and I can’t wait to hear what Carly has in store for us next. In the meantime, I’ll just be blasting those sax samples on repeat.

Next month: magnets, how do they work?

Now Playing

A quick look at my personal favorite recent release

Getting Killed

Geese

Indie Rock

Right off the bat, I have to say how darkly hilarious it is to hear YouTubers and the like talk about this album: “I love getting killed!” You…you do? Oh, the album, right. There’s no way that wasn’t at least a tiny part of why Geese gave their newest release that name.

Secondly, I have not been shy about my love for Geese’s previous album, 2023’s 3D Country, a masterpiece of genre-bending and -blending that left me as stunned as I was addicted. I have been totally obsessed with it since its weird album art showed up in my feed two years ago.

Getting Killed is a different animal entirely. Yes, a lot of the quirk remains, but without the concept or structure of country music, the band is free to weave in and out of different sounds as they see fit.

Opener “Trinidad” is an utterly insane choice for a first track that only Geese could pull off. The bass dances while Cameron Winter’s lyrics are barely whispered until “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!!!!!!!!” and the whole band falls over themselves to play any salvageable notes. It is a wild ride.

The title track is illuminated with gorgeously arranged backing vocals and hyper-frenetic percussion that gives the whole song the feel of a block party. And “Au Pays Du Cocaine” is probably the most beautiful song they’ve made, their version of “if you love them, let them go,” backed by plaintive, high-plucked guitars.

Two of the best songs of the year go back-to-back to end the album. “Taxes” performs the perfect slow build with brilliant lines like “You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down,” to a massive wall of sound for the chorus.

Then closer “Long Island City Here I Come” follows the same build-up formula, but now with a longer game plan, way more pianos, and a buttload of hand percussion. But all of a sudden, everything drops out to leave just the racing drums to start the build-up all over again, the motion never stopping, always increasing. Eventually we reach the very Geese ending: so many instruments playing so fast all at once, that the band sounds like it’s literally falling down and tripping over them to keep up. Then hard cut. The end.

Getting Killed is quite the experience (see, it’s impossible to not sound ridiculous talking about it), and while I miss the cowpunk and yacht rock stylings of 3D Country, this new, highly exploratory, immensely creative venture is equally as fulfilling.

Up Next

What’s coming out in the next few weeks?

October will see a couple new releases I’m pretty excited about. Maybe you are too:

  • AFI - Silver Bleeds the Black Sun

  • Anna von Hausswolff - ICONOCLASTS

  • Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream

  • Soulwax - All Systems Are Lying

  • Sudan Archives - THE BPM

  • Tame Impala - Deadbeat

  • Taylor Swift - The Life of a Showgirl

  • The Last Dinner Party - From the Pyre

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

And as always, release the Epstein files.

I mean… Happy listening!

Stephen Bands
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Alive and Spaced but All So Beautiful: November 2025
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The (first) Big (hopefully monthly) Issue: September 2025