Three-Day Weekend Playlist

Please enjoy this playlist for your weekend, and let me tell you about three of these new songs that are only from artists that are currently operating and performing in New York City. Go see them!

"Tarkovski" is the lead single from Bodega's "Our Brand Could Be Yr Life," their new album coming in April. The post-punks have been around for a decade now, capturing 21st century New York City's gray ambivalence with lyrics like "you said you wanted hardcore / no, you really don't," as they demand in the paradoxically cheerful chorus that you take them to "the zone." The guitars are dialed into a precise Cure preset, primed for something raw and direct from Robert Smith. What comes out instead is a muddle of half-felt emotions, the sound of a city just trying to believe "the zone" still exists.

"Silly Me" is my favorite song from "Hopeless Romantic," the four-song EP by ALEXVNDRIA, or Alexandria Hill, a freelance violinist. On "Silly Me," Hill builds out a refrain of "Waiting for you was the silliest thing this fool did over do," over a burble of tense, stacked strings that then collapse in defeat. Underneath Hill's lament, a drum beat chugs on like it has to.  

Infinity Song is a Roc Nation-signed sibling quartet that makes soft rock tracks thick with vocal harmonies. "Hater's Anthem" is by far their best track, a send-up of haters so caustic, it could ironically only have been written by a real hater. By the bridge, the singers are practically drooling, imagining an elderly critic dying, trying even in their last moments to comfort themselves with their undeserved self-satisfaction. "I love the way it feels to be a hater," they sigh together, right after. It should sound sarcastic, but it just sounds sad, like the song's character is less of a person than an impulse we all have to live with. 

—Adlan Jackson

Live with these links:

• The administration of Mayor Eric Adams says that the number of migrants in their charge has decreased. Is that because nearly a thousand of them are sleeping in the streets?
• Where do you stand on paying $150 million to install a plus-shaped public swimming pool in the Hudson river? Governor Kathy Hochul is all in!
• Hochul, however, is not into how slowly her administration has been rolling out licenses for weed shops.
• She's also not into allowing pandemic-era provisions that allow bars and restaurants to sell cocktails to-go to expire. 
• Not in my backyard, Tony Hawk!
• The FBI raided the homes of two fire chiefs alleged to have accepted bribes.
• A public benefits office in the Bronx is closing, part of a trend of the City's persistent and unprecedented failure to administer social services.
• The Independent Redistricting Commission approved new Congressional redistricting maps and…they look a lot like the old maps. The state legislature now gets to vote on them.
• New York City is going to get a lot hotter, wetter.
• Putin's top critic "died in prison," Russian officials say.
• The NYPD shot and killed a man in Queens. They initially said they were responding to a report of shots fired, but Gothamist notes that the shots reported came after the police arrived.
• And finally: