I moved to Chicago just in time for winter and its 4:30 sunsets. It was quite the shock to the system, after spending 3 months in tropical latitudes. Fortunately, I came across this post on Hacker News, which sent1 me down a deep rabbithole that some of you have probably traveled before.2
There is a robust and ongoing “quality versus quantity” discussion among folks building DIY lighting solutions to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder.
An overly-simplistic overview of the argument is that the quantity camp thinks that the perceived brightness of a room is the most important part of the equation. In practice, this means figuring out how to put out a ton of light as cheaply as possible and, as such, these folks talk a lot about “effective cost per watt” and the like.
The quality camp, often composed of people who can detect LED flickering, believe that “garbage in equals garbage out”. Cheap LEDs flicker and won’t actually put out light at the specific color they claim. You will find folks in the quality camp discussing which photography LED panels are the best for the price.
While the debate seems to have been fought to a standstill, recent scientific discoveries might completely upend our understanding of how light drives our circadian rhythm. But that’s a blog post for another time. Personally, given I don’t work from home, I decided to fall in with the “more lights is better” camp for version 1 and optimize from there if needed.
So without further ado, here’s my Luminator recipie:
Total cost: ~$165
The Feit bulbs can be set to one of 5 different color temparatures through a physical selector switch on the bulb base. Initially, I was a bit worried about the bulb temperature since the Command hooks don’t protrude far out enough to allow the bulbs to hang freely in the air. It turns out the bulb base is the piece that runs hot, and even then it’s not super extreme.
Yes, the bare bulbs on the wall is quintessential bachelor pad chic. But on those gloomy days where the cloud cover is so dense I can’t even see the Sears Tower a mile away, I can’t imagine trying to leave bed without it.
I’m proud of this pun. ↩
Ben Kuhn’s post, the original LessWrong Luminator post among others. ↩
In no particular order. I would love to know what you think.. Keep scrolling past the Spotify playlist for some brief thoughts on each track.
What’s in the water in Toronto? Whatever it is, it’s responsible for some great punk rock: Death From Above 1979, PUP, and now The OBGMs. This their first single following their breakout 2020 album The Ends.
Horsegirl was the band that put the insanely fertile “Hellogallo” scene on the map. But it was their friends and fellow scene-mates Friko who stoke the show at their album release party. “Holdin’ On People” was the highlight of an energetic set. I’m glad Friko played Audiotree shortly after since the album version really doesn’t hold a candle to the live performance.
It might be a stretch to call Vulfpeck underrated, but even folks familiar with the band might have missed the album put out by Jack Stratton this year. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of “Here We Go Jack”—it’s an earworm.
Really, the best music find of the year was not a song, but rather FBi 94.5 FM, a community radio station out of Sydney. So many good finds from Down Under and beyond! CLAMM is one of several groups on this list I discovered through my friend Jake and his partner Grace, a DJ for FBi. Driving Aussie punk that’s found strong traction in the underground scene.
The world needs more nonsense songs.
“Anti-glory” is one of the most mesmerizing tracks I’ve heard in a really long time. Hard to believe that the members of Horsegirl aren’t even old enough to play most of the venues in Chicago.
Hard rock with elements of classic British punk.
On one of my first days during my first-ever trip to Sydney, my buddy Jake said, “I’m gonna take you to see one of the best live shows in Sydney at the moment.” We wound up in a courtyard next to a Cole’s Supermarket. I have to admit, I was skeptical. But then Body Type took the stage, launched into their first song, and I immediately got it. A fun band with some great tunes.
The token North Carolinian on the list. Indie rock with country-inspired riffs and even a cowbell here and there.
My favorite cover of the year. Suspect we’ll be seeing this soon on Hottest 100.
One of my favorite local acts I found during my brief stint in Chicago. Soulful yet joyful.
Love the riffs on this track. Another solid contender for Hottest 100.
My favorite electronic track of the year, fantastic for late-night summer drives.
I haven’t talked about this publicly for a variety of reasons, including Hard Truth #6 (Honesty Can Only Hurt You). And everything worked out for me in the end.1 So why even bother publishing a post about my experience, and why now? I got laid off in April 2020 when all the talking heads were saying a recession was inevitable. Sound familiar?
I am certainly not writing this post to give advice. I want to make that clear upfront, lest some unwitting soul stumbles upon this dark corner of the internet and subsequently pins their hopes of fame and fortune upon my twig-like shoulders.
That being said, getting laid off is a profoundly lonely experience (Hard Truth #1). You will face platitudes weaker than the industrial toilet paper your startup switched to as they tried to rein in costs. The one thing I craved more than anything after getting laid off, even more than another job, was for someone to stand up and speak plainly, honestly, and frankly. That is my goal for this piece. So without further ado, I present to you 8 hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job.
I was surprised about how lonely I was after getting laid off.
During a layoff, everything from corporate comms to former co-workers’ posts on social media is wrapped up in the language of support. Yet, I found this support extended only to the mechanics of getting laid off: navigating COBRA, getting referrals, etc. Left unaddressed was the (surprisingly) emotional dimension of layoffs. While software engineers share a variety of shibboleths, from the importance of choosing an editor to the inanity of a whiteboard coding interview, the experience of getting laid off is not one of them. They don’t teach us how to handle this scenario at school. It doesn’t get brought up at cocktail parties. It’s one of the few career events that software engineers won’t brag about on LinkedIn. Ultimately, failing to find others that could empathize with my situation, I was left to navigate the feelings of rejection, failure, fear, etc. on my own.
Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. The daily interactions you have with your coworkers, however asinine, go with it. I found it difficult to fill this unexpected void in my life with positive activities and interpersonal interactions, especially during COVID. I had to build a new routine (and by extension, a community) to keep myself busy while everyone else was at work. This human connection, however informal, allowed me to recharge my emotional batteries drained by the interview gauntlet.
It is easy for software engineers to dismiss the long-term consequences of getting laid off since the general consensus is that software engineers, especially ones with solid pedigrees, are always in demand. They read articles with titles that read “Skilled tech workers snapped up despite downturn” and think that the ensuing job hunt won’t be much different than the ones that came before. They see founders on LinkedIn crowing about how they are still hiring. They may be tempted to seek comfort in the fact that they’re easily scoring interviews and are even proceeding to the final rounds. I know I did.
If you had asked me right after I got laid off how long it would take me to get back to work, I would have said three months – including two months of vacation. It took me a year.
This disconnect caused me a fair amount of pain on both the interview front (I wasn’t as aggressive in pursuing opportunities as I should have been) and in my personal life (I didn’t have enough savings and was broke). Out of all the hard lessons I learned, this was the easiest to avoid. If I had just applied that old engineering adage—take your worst-case estimate, then double it—I would have been signifcantly less stressed. Don’t be like me.
Just because you’re getting a lot of offers to interview does not mean that you are a hot commodity. Nor does it indicate a high likelihood of obtaining an offer. There are a few rational reasons why it makes sense for companies to interview large numbers of candidates even if they have no real plans on extending an offer:
Always be putting new opportunities into your pipeline, no matter how well you think you did on that final round interview.
Look, everyone here on the Internet feels bad for you. We all agree the interview process is broken. We know. Yes, it’s dumb you have to spend 8 unpaid hours on a take home project. We get it. That being said, it’s an employer’s market out there right now.
You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.
You might need to commute to the office again. Perhaps every day!
You may have to take a job at a “less prestigious” company.
You might have to pay for coffee at the office. And it may even be drip!
You’re probably going to have to fake enthusiasm for the AI-enabled TikTok outfit generator you will be working on. No, it’s not going to make the world a better place. Yes, it might even make the world a worse place.
But you will be employed.
The sooner you accept that you will have to do the interviewing equivalent of eating your vegetables, the less you will immolate yourself and, by extension, the opportunity in front of you by dying on some absurd hill. Suck it up and play the game. Sounds obvious? If so, I will politely refer you back to the title of this post.
I suspect the phrase “let me know if I can help!” has become a reflexive response to hearing bad news, especially within Silicon Valley startup culture. In your case, this is just a polite way of saying “let me know if I can refer you to my employer.” Nothing more.
That being said, there’s nothing wrong with making a strong, specific ask to folks who offer assistance. Just be sure to set your expectations properly (i.e. at zero). Examples of concrete asks that I found helpful in my search:
These are big asks for busy people! They may not say yes. But that’s okay! You asked (politely I’m sure) and that’s all you can do. On to the next one.
Don’t lie. But don’t tell the whole truth either.
Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off. Do not disclose the current status of your interviewing process. Don’t badmouth your former co-workers, even if they really are to blame for your present situation. Scrub your public social media profiles of anything that can be considered, even remotely, as controversial.
Here’s an example of how radical honesty backfired for yours truly. I am a big believer in transparency: I respect people who try to shatter the “everything’s flawless” facade that social media bombards us with. Whether that’s discussing their struggles as a startup founder, opening up about past trauma, or posting an unpopular, yet well-reasoned, political opinion: it takes guts to put a side of ourselves that we have long kept hidden into the world. After nine fruitless months on the interview circuit, I was fed up with failure. Every day, I would see founders post “We’re hiring!” on LinkedIn as I received yet another rejection. As a way of venting my frustrations (or perhaps to garner sympathy, I don’t know), I posted my interview tracker spreadsheet on Twitter under the guise of “being transparent.”
The very next day, I was on a phone screen with a recruiter when they said “Yeah, I looked at the interview spreadsheet you posted on Twitter and just based on that I can tell you’re not going to be a good fit here. I just took this call as a favor to <redacted> since they referred you.”
Call me naïve, but I never would have imagined that post being interpreted in such a manner when I posted it. Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers.
There’s no better feeling than finally securing that first job offer after several weeks (or in my case, months) of effort. With one click, you can make it all the stress go away and return to the sweet embrace of a life full of $6 lattes, $20 cocktails, and functional health insurance.
Wait. Take a breath. Remember that a new job represents a new opportunity—but that comes at a cost.
People want different things out of a job. Some crave meaning. Some want to make as much money as possible. Some seek internal mobility so they can make a lateral move as a PM or designer. Whatever you’re looking for, the reality is that some (most?) jobs aren’t set up in a way that will allow you to pursue your goals.
Sure, you can always quit a job that’s not a good fit. But it can take awhile to really discern culture fit with any degree of confidence. I always allocate a year: six months to get up to speed on the internal culture, tools, and processes; another six months to get your first performance review as a “ramped-up” engineer. Only then can you begin to understand the true trajectory of the company (from both a business and product perspective) and your place in that story.
A year is a really long time! Remember Clubhouse? They went from the hottest startup in the Valley to an afterthought in a year. A lot of startups IPO’d, grew their stock price 5x, then saw their stock price crash to 10% of all-time highs in that time frame. In a year, friends and former coworkers are going to start companies, raise rounds, and find PMF during that time. A role at your dream company, or within your dream niche will open up. And you’ll be sitting there, at a job you don’t like but gives you the stability you crave, with The Clash running through your head.
It’s okay to make mistakes. Very few of us are going to bat 1.000 during our careers, especially with the industry reshaping itself under our feet. But really interrogate whether or not the offer before you will help you accomplish your personal goals. And ensure you’re taking the entire role into account: the current trajectory of the company, the health of the market segment it is in, your compatibility with your future day-to-day responsibilities, your rapport with your future manager, etc.
“When faced with two choices, flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.” —Former gangster Arnold “The Brain” Rothstien
After I got laid off, my primary emotion was one of relief. This was unexpected. I was in a pretty tight spot: COVID was in full swing and I no longer had insurance, the stock market was cratering and I had little cash on hand, I was living abroad but countries were going into lockdown. Why would I feel relief, of all things? Because I knew I didn’t like my job but I didn’t have the courage to quit once COVID hit. They did me the favor of pushing me off the ledge.
I learned a lot of things about myself through the layoff experience. There are two unique dynamics to layoffs that result in these epiphanies. The instantaneous switch from “buried by work” to “I can’t do work on those things even if I wanted to” allows folks to analyze their day-to-day work in a clinical manner. It leads to subconscious reactions like, “I really wish I was able to launch that product, it would have changed the entire market” or “I guess this means I don’t have to do performance evaluations now, thank goodness”. For me, these insights occur regularly; they are just drowned out by the constant drumbeat of work.
Similarly, being unexpectedly laid off provides folks with the time and space to truly unwind and think more deeply. For once, your thoughts are entirely your own. Contrast this with the normal job-switching process. You spend your last month at your prior employer handing off work. Maybe you take a month of vacation, but with the next role looming large on your mind.
I didn’t know it at the time but I really needed several months to process what I had accomplished, and where I had failed, during my early twenties. The insights I gained during this period of reflection directly motivated my current pursuits. And apparently, it worked: I’ve never been more content, nor more productive, than I am now.
And what better note to end on? If you were recently laid off, don’t hesitate to drop me a note. I can’t promise I can help but I know how cathartic it is to vent and I’m happy to lend an ear.
It is a pretty wild story, even by Steven Buccini standards. Maybe I’ll even write about it someday. ↩
“The box score, being modestly arcane, is a matter of intense indifference, if not irritation, to the non-fan. To the baseball-bitten, it is not only informative, pictorial, and gossipy but lovely in aesthetic structure. It represents happenstance and physical flight exactly translated into figures and history. Its totals—batters’ credit vs. pitchers’ debit—balance as exactly as those in an accountant’s ledger. And a box score is more than a capsule archive. It is a precisely etched miniature of the sport itself, for baseball, in spite of its grassy spaciousness and apparent unpredictability, is the most intensely and satisfyingly mathematical of all our outdoor sports. Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”
]]>My second AIM screen name was ibleeddukeblue
(the first one, if you were wondering, was a Homestar Runner reference). Some of you may be surprised to learn that I was a Duke fan growing up. College team preference is just one of many ways North Carolinians talk in code, especially given the stark contrasts between Duke and Carolina. Duke is private, UNC is public. Duke is pricey, UNC is affordable. UNC is native sons and daughters, Duke is Yankees and international students. But when you’re a kid, you don’t understand any of that. It’s probably more accurate to say that I was more of a Coach K fan than a Duke fan. They say representation in media matters, and I guess even at 8 years old I realized that there really weren’t a whole lot of dark-haired Yankee Catholics with strange names walking around town.
Watching the 2001 Duke team go all the way was the first time I remember getting really into college basketball. The names still roll off the tongue with ease: Shane Battier, Jay Williams, Carlos Boozer, Mike Dunleavy. I remember my mom taking me to JP Looneys for the game. It was dark, it was smoky (remember “non-smoking” sections?), and it was really, really loud. That’s when I realized that for North Carolinians, college basketball is not just a game. It’s a religion.
When I moved out to California for college, I realized that the importance of basketball in North Carolina was something that couldn’t be explained to outsiders. Perhaps, after living in the state for a few years, it could be understood. But only those who grew up cutting class to go to March Madness at the Greensboro Coliseum, knowing the joy of seeing the TV cart wheeled during the ACC Tournament, or walking down Franklin Street after a win at the Dean Dome truly understand what this Final Four game is all about.
It’s hard to believe that tonight could be the night when the age of Great North Carolina Basketball Coaches comes to a close. It started with Dean Smith, going through Jim Valvano and Skip Prosser, continuing with Roy Williams, and concluding with Coach K’s retirement. Perhaps, in time, we’ll learn that the great era is actually still ongoing in Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer, both players-turned-coaches steeped in the traditions of their respective programs.
There’s something poetic about a changing of the guard at our state’s most treasured institutions reflecting the monumental transformation underway in our state. Everywhere you look, the last vestiges of tobacco-and-textiles North Carolina are fading away. The best and brightest are moving to the state instead of away from it. Dairy farms are transforming into shoddy tract housing. Durham went from Black Wall Street to white hipster haven. Beer replaced moonshine in the birthplace of NASCAR. People still say y’all, not because they’re Southern but because it’s inclusive. Native son Jerry Richardson sold the Panthers to Yankee hedge fund bajillionaire Tepper. That same bajillionaire started a soccer team in Charlotte that is primarily marketed towards (check notes)…Latinos? Hell, even NC State is more of an engineering school than an ag school these days.
Change might be inevitable, but heartbreak is the crucible that forges a North Carolina basketball fan. Fate has a way of wrenching the most treasured and beloved pieces of the game from us, doesn’t it? It moved the ACC tournament to the heart of Yankee Country. It took Jim Valvano and Skip Prosser in their primes. It took Dean Smith’s mind. It took UNC’s 2016 championship away at the buzzer. By any measure, Coach K not getting his fairy tale ending at Cameron seems minor in comparison.
While the Lord taketh away, The Lord also Giveth. And Giveth He has, bestowing us with a never-before-seen Tobacco Road March Madness matchup, in the Final Four no less. So tonight, as North Carolinians around the world head to the Church of Tobacco Road, we give thanks. Our team may not win, but we can rest easy in the knowledge that North Carolina remains the center of the college basketball universe.
]]>“Do you know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls to sell real estate.”
— Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross
Last week, Zillow made such a whopper of an oopsie that they shut down an entire division and wrote off more than $500 million in losses. I’m not gonna mince words here. Zillow simply did not have the guts to be in the “iBuying” business. Here is Max Levchin, founder of Affirm and the man most responsible for kickstarting the algorithmic underwriting craze in Silicon Valley:
Host: “How are you thinking about judging what is and isn’t important, and how do we know, like, is it [the underwriting model] going to work?
Max: “So you don’t. The honest answer is you don’t, and the only way of building a a successful anti-fraud and risk underwriting system is rigor and for lack of a better term, balls of steel.”
Zillow couldn’t stomach this uncertainty, with their CEO saying that “buying and selling thousands of homes every month required the company to put too much capital at risk.” The $500 million dollar question is, why couldn’t they? They oversimplified the problem. They thought they needed to build a machine learning model when they really needed to build an entirely new organization, one that possessed the technical and cultural mindset necessary to succeed in this space.
A machine learning organization thinks of risk entirely differently than an automated risk underwriting organization. But this is actually a byproduct of a much more fundamental difference: how these organizations treat data. Machine learning engineers tend to treat data as fungible and, as such, more is always better. This seems to have been Zillow’s approach (emphasis mine):
“The business model rested on the assumption that Zillow’s algorithm, fed by the company’s trove of data, would be able to predict home prices with pinpoint accuracy.”
“We used historical data and countless simulations to test [our housing price forecasts].”
—Rich Barton, Zillow CEO, Q4 earnings call
Contrast that with how Max Levchin thinks about data (emphasis again mine):
“The most valuable data is not social data, not what you ate for lunch, not even debt-to-income ratio, even though you know that’s fairly predictive, but your own data because every dataset that you’re looking at internally describes your own process, including your bugs, including your delays, including what changed, including the merchant base that you sign and the merchant base that churned. All those changes to your system are encoded in your own logs and building models from your own data is the only way to build a really successful system.”
Which leads us back to risk. If data is truly fungible, then the path to building a business like Zillow Offers is fairly simple: acquire as much housing data as possible, train a model on it, ensure it spits out sufficiently correct predictions, and use that to make offers. Understanding whether or not your model meets this threshold is a pretty binary decision: it either is good enough, or it isn’t. Therefore, the perceived risk with this approach is fairly low. Again, this seems to be Zillow’s approach:
“We set unit economics targets that required us to stay within plus or minus 200 basis points in breakeven.”
—Rich Barton, Zillow CEO, Q4 earnings call
But automated risk underwriting engineers know that you can’t bootstrap a model on existing data sets. The only way to get the data you need to be successful is to pay for it in time, talent, and treasure. Needless to say, this is a significantly riskier undertaking. Here’s Max again:
“Of course, it’s very hard to build models from your own data if you don’t have a lot of data and the only way to get a lot of data is to lose a bunch of money.
[…]
The punchline is you only find out what works when you use the data that describes your own system, and that means processing a lot of transactions and bracing for impacts because a lot of the transactions are gonna go sour. One of the things that happens for a brand-new launched credit card: done right, you lose about 50% of the dollar volume in the first several months which is terrifying because it’s half the money, literally.”
So what lessons can we learn from Zillow Offers’ collapse? Mark my words: they are only the first company to go under. The algorithmic underwriting sector is the new Hot Thing in Silicon Valley, and many of these companies are taking shortcuts as they try to outrun the competition. Yet, in the end, these shortcuts will be their downfall. Here are some common mistakes I’m seeing in the space:
At a high level, the story of Zillow Offers is a story of our industry at its best. It’s a story of an industry giant facing an existential threat from a scrappy upstart and then deciding to confront the challenge head-on, even though their business (high-margin lead generation driven by a large sales team) and their technical expertise (SEO optimization) is completely orthogonal to the problem at hand (low-margin business driven by state-of-the-art machine learning).
And this storyline isn’t going away. The activity in the algorithmic risk underwriting space is frenetic, to say the least. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that we will see many more companies, of all shapes and sizes, make these same mistakes. Because when you have a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail and when you have TensorFlow, everything tends to look like an ML problem.
]]>I’ve noticed something interesting that’s present in almost every episode. Let’s see if you can pick up on it (if you have time, you should watch all of these from the beginning. They are definitely worth your time).
Here is producer Ron Flair talking about the first time he heard Vannessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles”:
Let’s try another… (technically this is from The Defiant Ones, but give me a break)
And again.
Once more, with feeling.
Wait, there are still more examples?
Sometimes, you just hear a song and you know it’s a smash. And sometimes, you use an app or a new technology for the first time, and you know your life will never be the same. I call this “the Smash Test.”
Here are some products I vividly remember passing the Smash Test:
But increasingly, it seems like these eureka moments are fewer and further between. Why? Is the rate of innovation slowing down? Is it a natural byproduct of our industry maturing? Has my risk appetite decreased dramatically? Is it because I’m older and more jaded, meaning I fail to comprehend the potential of technologies like web3 and the enthusiasm behind it? Is it because I’m more experienced, so like Dorothy peeking behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, I can see through the gimmicks laid before me? Is it because my social circles have evolved so I have less exposure to innovative people and products?
I’m still thinking through this. Have you used a product or service recently that passed the Smash Test? Do you know of places (either virtual or real-life) where I could hang out to increase my exposure to these types of products and the people building them? If so, please drop me a line.
]]>My fervent wish is that everyone will be fortunate enough to have the experience I did during 2018: the ability to pursue their dream with their peers, mentors, and heroes standing behind them in support. Although I didn’t win my race, I decided that the best way to improve my community going forward was to pay the generosity of my supporters forward by making bold bets on other ambitious young people who are dreaming big.
At the beginning of this year, I happened to be browsing social media one day when I came across Kyle Villemain’s bold idea: to start a new magazine with deeply-reported long-form features on North Carolina, written by North Carolinians, for North Carolinians. It is called The Assembly.
I was immediately intrigued, because it hit several key points in the thesis behind my run for state office:
North Carolinians deserve their own space to discuss the key issues of our state in the face of rapid change. I would absolutely love to see The Assembly grow into something like Texas Monthly or The California Sunday. But more fundamentally, it’s important to support young folks in this state who are shooting big like Kyle, just as I promised myself I would do several years ago. Kyle has been written off by the establishment because who the hell starts a long-form magazine whose main differentiator is nuance in this day and age, what with all the hysteria around fake news and newspapers closing throughout the state at an alarming rate and who wants to read about a boring state like North Carolina anyways?
But for many of us, The Assembly is more than just a business opportunity. It is the embodiment of the new North Carolina: thoughtful, considerate, and cosmopolitan yet grounded, humble, and respectful.
The Assembly has done some incredible work in its few short months of existence. Most notably, they broke important news around Nikole Hannah Jones’ fight for tenure which ended up becoming a national news story.
I’m very proud of Kyle and the work that The Assembly has accomplished in such a short period of time—not just with the stories they’ve published, but providing a place where world-class, North Carolina-based journalists and photographers can showcase their work. If you’d like to be a part of this movement, you can become a subscriber here.
]]>Bloc Party crossed with Interpol.
Future bass for flow work. One of the best additions to my programming playlist.
Best new pop punk I heard all year.
Stripped down acoustic with a deep baritone reminiscent of Colter Wall. If you like this, you might also like “No Way Out” from Susto’s excellent album released last year.
Featuring Justin Vernon’s intricately-laced melodies and iconic strained falsetto.
Reminiscient of the classic Southern rock I used to listen to at the pool during the summer. The rest of their debut album is quite good, “E-Jam” is another favorite.
While we’re talking about jam bands, I’ve got to mention White Denim. “I Don’t Understand Rock and Roll” is a perfect song title for a track that I don’t know how to describe (best I can come up with is falling somewhere between Southern and psych rock). The frontman released a bunch of songs this year under a side project named Constant Bop, “Better Days” was a favorite.
Memorable power pop.
Solid pop punk with catchy syncopation.
Best bass line of 2020?
Wistful indie rock perfectly suited for 2020.
Love this guitar riff.
It’s worth taking the time to appreciate this astoundingly authentic cover.
Solid shoegaze pop. I love the way this song slowly builds up to its conclusion.
If you like this track, you might want to check out “Esoteric”, “This Heat”, and “Lake Song” off this same record.
The Districts moved away from their classic rock sound with their latest album but they definitely struck gold with this song. Bass line challenges “Weirdo” for my favorite of 2020.
Not your typical IDLES track (if that’s what you’re looking for, may I suggest “Kill Them With Kindness”?), but I think that makes it all the more interesting.
Reminds me of The Killers circa Sam’s Town.
Definitely a slower pace than their normal fare which allows We Were Promised Jetpacks to develop some catchy riffs that we haven’t really seen in their other work.
One of my favorite nights in Japan was when I caught these guys at a small club in Shimokitazawa. The frenzied pace and the guitar tones reminds me of early Strokes.
I have no idea how to describe this sound. Ska rap? Whatever you want to call it, it’s hard to believe this sound comes to us straight from Norman, Oklahoma.
I’ve always been in awe of Aesop’s flow. My favorite track off his new record.
Classic Arkells sound that never gets old.
Technically, this single was released in 2019 but since the album came out thsi year, I’m counting it. It’s good to have the classic Bombay Bicycle Club sound we know and love back again.
Gorillaz isn’t exactly obscure but since this gem was tucked towards the end of their (lengthy) latest release and didn’t get a slick music video like some of the other bops of the album, I doubt many people have heard it.
Moonchild Sanelly seamlessly mixes English and Xhosa lyrics in a style she calls “future ghetto punk.” I had never heard anything like it before but I’m a fan.
I still remember Oliver Tree performing as the very first act of the day at the small stage at Outside Lands and immediately was a fan. To say he’s blown up since then would be an understatement but I still think this unique sound deserves to be heard more widely.