i feel old when it comes to autechre … sure their new stuff is clever , but i miss the melodies and beats from their 90’s material…well i dont miss it becuase its still available.
similar with underworld …
please dont burn me. i’m old
Blawan seems to be doing 'new / difficult / unconventional ’ stuff… its not for me either.
i ussually go through the bleep top100 of the year… each year there is less and less i return to. i dont know if theyre doing a 2025 version.
alessandro cortini - forse3
Hate to tell ya but If you have to ask it’s because you’re old
I’m pretty checked out on pop culture though, there’s really no point to following music, movies, TV, whatever to the level I used to when I was younger. There’s this impulse to keep up with what everyone else is into that I no longer feel.
Too true! I’m more so trying to filter through what seems like an infinite range of new stuff that is hard to find the nuggets
appreciate all the suggestions, it’s an 80 min walk to the office so will load up the machine over the next 2 weeks with some of these
The amount of recorded music that’s available now absolutely dwarfs the amount that was available when you were younger. And it’s easier to access. And it’s basically free. And there’s no real curation, it’s all algorithmically assigned, or it comes up on TikTok.
That said, the kids are listening to a lot of different stuff and it changes year to year. My wife teaches elementary school music so she keeps up with it all. Might just be because we’re in NYC, but a lot of kids listen to hyper-local rappers. Her 5th graders knew Ice Spice before she blew up, for example. Every year there’s new and exciting music, but also older music that they get obsessed with. “Bye Bye Bye” got huge after Deadpool, for example. And one kid really loves “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.
However, pick any genre - it’s all been done better in the past. Hasn’t it?
I think this is listener error. Better is subjective of course, but it also isn’t the point of music. Art isn’t about finding the best, it’s about expression. Here are a few interesting albums from the last few years in my preferred genres. 
Blackbraid is solo Native American black metal project. Dude took a style of metal that’s mainly white (and too-often white supremacist) and turned it into something completely his own. Absolutely mind blowing, 2022.
Mesarthim. Combining spacey black metal and dancey synths in a way that I am just absolutely obsessed with. This album convinced me to get back into keys/synths after a nearly 10 year hiatus.
I’m going to assume you know Carpenter Brut already, but if you don’t, you’re welcome. This album changed the game. Obvious John Carpenter inspiration, and some flirting with heavy music, pop music, and of course electronic music. Got tickets to see the show in April and I’m over the moon about it. - 2022
Okay, no more heavy stuff. The soundtrack to Hollow Knight is one of my favorites. This gets a lot of play for me. Orchestra/piano heavy and just really wonderfully moody.
Sorry, youtube on this one. But man, no game nor soundtrack evoked emotions in me as strong as Disco Elysium, soundtrack by British Sea Power. “Instrument of Despair” captures a drunken, depressed, post-bar feeling beautifully. It resonates so hard and I love it.
I read an article not long ago that stated that there is more music uploaded to streaming services every day now than all of the releases in 1989 combined. There is a ton of great new music being made currently but the industry is so diluted it can be challenging to actually find.
In my late teens, I believed all great music had been recorded back in the 60s-80s. Now I’m happy to discover amazing music that is released every year.
Yes, the best music has already been written. But there’s still a lot to explore imo.
Here are 2 albums from Skee Mask that i like a lot. Breakbeats and other electronic stuff.
yes and no I mean most musicians have to get paid to tour and perform extensively or teach music as a paid gig to survive. Streaming services do not pay the bills.
Jay Glass Dubs
Why are you an ai pumper then if you’re going to turn around and cry about things being better in the past? Make it make sense ffs. 
There’s so much great and interesting music being released every day, the issue is finding it.
As for the comment about listening to older music, hasn’t that always been true? I know I’ve always listened to a lot of older music alongside newer stuff. Are you talking about kids picking up on old 80s pop songs based on seeing a Tik Tok, or hearing a song in a film?
all music is dead, we just don’t know it yet. not gonna stop me from banging out a few yawners from time to time.
…still sooooooo many good music out there to discover and to embrace in one way or the other…in fact, there’s only GOOD music and BAD music anyways, no matter what main genre it might be going along with, or sub genre or sub sub genre of the sub genre there might be, in all this uberdiversity…
last time i checked, it was more than 50thousand brand new releases every single given day…
so, problem is not age…problem is not new music in general…problem is those heaps of masses, making it pretty much impossible for anybody to dig anywhere deeper, to discover something relevant, to stumble upon something that touches U, that still has the momentum to start to grow on u…
too much attention economy battles, no time left to give it the moment it needs, too much noise all over the places in a world in which everybody is born and entittled to be a dj anyways, not havin’ a slightest clue if there could be any difference between curating and creating from scratch, while it’s never been that easy to just grab any next new piece of code to just give it a try all on ur own, alone…who needs a band, if u can become the next bedroomproducer any second…
i was shocked, when i had my first m1 mbp with bitiwg on it…
cought in the thought, what if somebody would just beam me back to the late 80ies, early 90ies, with nothing but this little setup, so i’m enabled to just rewrite pop history…gosh…it all became too easy, too convinient…everybody is going for the quick fix, the shortcut…i listen to ur stuff, if u’r listening to mine…first.
pop is eating itself…out there…everywhere…
but subculture is subculture…go out and check ur hood…
meanwhile, bandcamp might be the very last record store of the planet…
and it’s a huuuuuge success, if UR music can give something meaningful to just ONE other human on this swirling rock in space, we all still call a home…
Old cats like 10 year old cats spend 99% of the day and night doing weird shit like astral projection, rather than chasing a laser pointer or something fluffy tied to the end of a string.
Fluffy stuff is still as amazing as ever like it was 40 or 50 years ago. I mean look at it, it’s fluffy and all it takes is a slight breeze and off it goes; fucking magic! But now all the kittens are going ape shit over the Bluetooth laser pointers that play your daily horoscope at the same time and they say one day you won’t even need a human to operate the laser pointer or blow in the general direction of fluffy things because they will be able to do that themselves and they might even destroy the whole world.
You said Americana … this album from Tall
heights in 2024 fits the bill. Great band live
this may be the secret to life
I think this question is as old as time. Right through the history of music and art in general, there were those who thought it had reached its creative and impassioned zenith. If you’ll forgive me being the forum’s tediously-predictable source of classical music analogies, this happened at multiple times. Particularly at the turn of the century, when there was a push-pull between the masters of the 19th century style, who believed there was still a lot of mileage in that (think Rachmaninoff), and the purveyors of the new, multiple sub-styles of the avante garde. As soon as serialism and atonality became a thing people queued up (not unreasonably) to pronounce music basically done and reductive beyond this point.
Is this just people getting old and missing their salad days? Perhaps. Certainly I can associate with this. I used to studiously collect all the Fabric, Global Underground, Renaissance etc. releases and, by and large, I thought they were all fantastic. Late-90s breaks still sound as amazing to me today as they did then (while other genres have definitely dated e.g. tribal house).
These days I struggle to find new music that evokes anything like the same strength of feeling. Partly this is down to market saturation and the “everything, everywhere, all of the time” nature of the internet. It feels much more of a chore sifting through music, with greatly reduced chances of landing on something special. Even (some of) the labels I used to trust and basically buy anything they put out have diversified and these days seem to put out a lot of samey, lower-quality stuff, but that’s of course subjective.
Has pop eaten itself? Yes, long ago. There’s been very little innovation in pop for decades now - this is to be expected in a genre that is essentially just a product. Why change a winning formula if you’re the music exec? Stick to the formula. Change key up a tone for the final chorus; switch to the relative minor for the middle-eight; the kids will lap it up.
Just my random musings.
The 2010s were a complete revelation for rap music
The whole rule book was thrown out and rewritten, and it attracted a huge global young crowd
Like it or not, but SoundCloud rap, UK drill etc were massive cultural phenomena and sounded like little else before.