I Reviewed Every Song on My Spotify Wrapped (Part 3/4)

Songs 50-26 from my most-listened tracks of 2024

50: blink-182- “Turpentine”

This is another single off of ONE MORE TIME, mining a slightly different vein for blink-182. Rather than the sophomoric, fun-loving energy of many of their songs, this one falls into a darker thread, as the lyrics to “Turpentine” ruminate on the possibility that the narrator is irrevocably different from those around him, doomed to alienation. The song’s mournful bridge, delivered by Hoppus, gains further metatextual power when you recall that, in his 2021 cancer struggle, the singer recently faced his own mortality. Despite this darker, reflective tone, “Turpentine” still features that classic blink energy, powered by ripping guitar riffs and Barker’s thundering drums.

49: Twenty One Pilots- “At The Risk of Feeling Dumb”

As we work our way through every track on Clancy, “At The Risk of Feeling Dumb” is our next stop. Throughout the duo’s discography, mental health struggles have been a frequent topic of discussion for Twenty One Pilots. But rarely have they been more candid than on this song, as Joseph wails the song’s explosive choral refrain: “At the risk of feeling dumb, check in. It’s not worth the risk of losing a friend.” As the song seesaws between the raucous chorus and mellow verses, so too does Joseph’s perspective shift between the aforementioned dispenser of wisdom and the struggling friend in question, as he repeats “I don’t want anyone, know me or not, [to] see me at my lowest, you don’t have to drop by, [there’s] nothing you can do this time.”

48: Green Day- “Strange Days Are Here to Stay”

Another major album for me this past year, released at the very start of 2024, was Green Day’s new album Saviors. Particularly in comparison to their previous LP, 2020’s Father of All, a misjudged, overproduced bit of pop-rock, Saviors feels like a classic return to form for Green Day. The album even sees the veteran pop-punk titans reunite with producer Rob Cavallo, who worked on their seminal records Dookie and American Idiot. “Strange Days Are Here to Stay” is among the record’s standouts, with a grand rock style reminiscent of American Idiot, but imbued with a new maturity from the two decades the band has aged since that record. As the title suggests, the song captures the feeling of an increasingly unhinged zeitgeist in the Trump-Biden-Trump again era. As frontman Billie Joe Armstrong sings, “ever since Bowie died, it hasn’t been the same.”

47: Thirty Seconds To Mars- “The Kill”

Some songs on this list are here less because I’m deeply invested in the specific artist who performed them and more because I simply really like this specific song. Such is the case for “The Kill,” the lead single from A Beautiful Lie, the 2005 album by Thirty Seconds to Mars, the alt-rock outfit led by actor Jared Leto. Even with my ignorance of most of the band’s other output, “The Kill” stands as a perfect artifact of its mid-aughts emo era, its chorus a staggering lament of angst. Leto’s powerful voice in the chorus makes the song a fun one to attempt at karaoke, and its 6/8 time signature makes the song stand out in a world of largely four-on-the-floor rock anthems.

46: Taking Back Sunday- “Cute Without The ‘E’ (Cut From the Team)”

Speaking of songs where I don’t know much about the artist, but simply love the specific song. “Cute Without The ‘E’” hails from Taking Back Sunday’s 2002 album Tell All Your Friends and is an indelible classic of aughts-era emo pop. Frontman Adam Lazzara’s plaintive wail on the opening lines, followed by the introduction of the full band stands among the most iconic beginnings of a song that the genre has to offer. Throughout, the back-and-forth lead vocals between Lazzara and John Nolan, building to the overlapping parts on the bridge and outro, give the song a dynamic boost, and its plainspoken sentiment of resentment towards someone who’s romantically wronged you is near-universal.

45: Twenty One Pilots- “Backslide”

Here we return to my dissection of essentially every track on Clancy, this time with “Backslide.” In contrast to some of the album’s higher-energy moments, “Backslide” has a slower, mournful style, appropriate for its lyrical themes of worrying that one has fallen back into old habits and sinking into regret. The song’s lyrics, particularly in the second verse, also see Joseph get more candid than ever about the effects of fame. He sings “kind of wishing that I never did ‘Saturday,’’ a reference to a single from the previous Twenty One Pilots Album, Scaled and Icy that received backlash for its more generic pop style, and indeed, I was part of the chorus who may have made Joseph regret “Saturday,” having called it the worst song in the band’s discography. Joseph also sets up a mock conversation with a friend who asks him “did you solve all of your problems?” to which he replies “thanks for asking, in a way, but accidentally uncovered a new one yesterday,” a frank reflection on what artistic success can and cannot solve. The verse concludes with the line “I used to be the champion of a world you can’t see, now I’m drowning in logistics.” When Clancy released, some fans expressed disappointment that the album doesn’t delve deeper into the fictional world of Dema, the dystopian society introduced on Trench that serves as an analogy for Joseph’s mental health. Instead, Clancy is the band’s most grounded and lyrically straightforward effort in years. On “Backslide,” we see the answer. In “Bandito,” Joseph sings “I created this world to feel some control/ destroy it if I want.” He also samples those same lines again on “Overcompensate,” the opening track on Clancy. It’s clear that a creative device that began as an escape became a new burden in itself, and Joseph chose to destroy it when he felt that it was beginning to control him.

44: Green Day- “One Eyed Bastard”

Here, we go from a pretty deep track to one that’s less so, but nonetheless a ton of fun. The song’s lyrics, though slightly opaque, see Armstrong take on the persona of a vengeful mafioso, a persona he embodies down to the song’s post-chorus refrain of “bada bing, bada boom.” With raucous guitar somewhat reminiscent of Green Day’s 2004 single “Holiday,” “One Eyed Bastard” is an energetic pop-punk anthem that’s too busy having fun to get morose.

43: Tomorrow X Together- “Thursday’s Child Has Far To Go”

This song is another one I listened to in preparation for seeing Tomorrow X Together in concert. It’s a track from their 2022 EP minisode 2: Thursday’s Child, and references the classic nursery rhyme “Monday’s child,” which ascribes different traits to children born on different days. While all the other days are given a plainly positive (“Friday’s child is loving and giving”) or negative (“Wednesday’s child is full of woe”) trait, Thursday hits an ambiguous note, stating that, as the song’s title repeats, “Thursday’s child has far to go.” TXT’s song interprets that refrain as an attitude of moving forward after heartbreak, remembering the pain, but also knowing that it isn’t where your story ends, and you have far to go from that point. The song strikes a bittersweet tone, blending synth-forward K-pop with acoustic pop rock, and carried by the group’s emotive vocals, though only three of the quintet’s five members sing on “Thursday’s Child.” Though I like the song, one detail about its creation reflects a trend in modern K-pop I’m more apprehensive about– it has a whopping nineteen credited writers, including both members of TXT and an all-star cast of K-pop hitmakers.

42: Radwimps- “Zenzenzense”

I first encountered “Zenzenzense” over five years ago, as a part of the soundtrack for the 2016 Japanese animated film Your Name, which I watched in a screening at college. The film is a highly emotional teen romance with a surreal magical twist- a boy and a girl get to know each other when they begin magically waking up in each other’s bodies, becoming close without ever having the chance to meet. The band Radwimps composed that film’s original soundtrack, and “Zenzenzense,” a title which means “past, past, past life,” perfectly embodies that film’s themes and emotions. The lyrics to “Zenzenzense” reflect pining and longing for an out-of-reach person, who you feel you’ve known in a past life. Coupled with Radwimps’s energetic playing and instrumental virtuosity, “Zenzenzense” is an addictive burst of fresh youthful energy and stands out as the only Japanese-language song in my Wrapped countdown.

41: Bring Me The Horizon- “Ludens”

“Ludens,” the lead single from Bring Me The Horizon’s 2020 release Post Human: Survival Horror (the 9-song, 32-minute release has been referred to as both an album and EP), stands out in the group’s discography. Over the band’s career, they’ve put out a widely varied range of styles, from pounding heavy metal to atmospheric synthpop to catchy, energetic pop-rock. On “Ludens,” we get the entire Bring Me The Horizon package, distilled into a single song that rises, falls, and morphs over the course of its runtime to incorporate all of the sonic elements that the band have dabbled in over the decades. Especially exhilarating is the song’s double bridge, which swerves from minimalistic dance beats to a pulse-pounding metal breakdown to a soaring, amped-up final chorus.

40: Olivia Rodrigo- “love is embarrassing”

With a bouncy, new wave energy, “love is embarrassing” is among my favorite tracks from GUTS, and one that sees Rodrigo bring a refreshingly original perspective to the well-trodden territory of love and breakup tracks. We’ve all heard song after song about being head-over-heels for the one, and just as many about being done horribly wrong by a monstrous ex, but “love is embarrassing” takes on the gray zone, the clarity of regret, realizing that you had been making bad decisions, and in the wake of the breakup, you feel like the “goddamn fool” who didn’t notice all the red flags through your rose-colored glasses. Rodrigo plays the part perfectly, projecting and expressing the track’s self-effacing lyrics, all while producer and co-writer Dan Nigro lays down what might be the album’s most addictive guitar leads in the background.

39: ONF- “Complete”

The K-pop boy band ONF is among the more underrated acts the scene has produced in the past decade. As I wrote about previously with regard to Infinite’s work with Sweetune, there’s something special when a pop act finds the perfect collaborator, and they work together on crafting a great sound. For ONF, that collaborator has been with the producer and songwriter Hwang Hyun, himself a former member of the Sweetune team, who has crafted scores of immaculate pop singles for ONF, with “Complete,” the lead single from the group’s 2018 EP You Complete Me, chief among them. The song plays in the pop and house sandboxes, and is driven by an uplifting synth soundscape and electric piano, with a groovy bass groove in the chorus, revolving around an exuberant central saxophone riff. Beat drops and dance breaks are far from new ground for a K-pop song, but ONF makes them sound refreshing and utterly joyous.

38: Twenty One Pilots- “Oldies Station”

What happens when an emo kid grows up? It’s a question many of the bands I follow have tackled lately, as the champions of a genre rooted in the big emotions of youth move from adolescence and young adulthood to unqualified adulthood and even middle age. Some try to recapture that youthful spirit, whether writing from that younger perspective, or from the angle of nostalgia. But I find it infinitely more fascinating to see acts inject their work with a new sense of maturity and perspective, and “Oldies Station” is a remarkable example of that. The tone of the track is melancholic yet hopeful, as Joseph reflects on how things have changed for him over the years, the Twenty One Pilots musical project now having taken up half of his life, ages 18 to 36. With age, Joseph seems to have gained comfort in knowing that he can make it through dark times, just as he has in the past. The song’s simple refrain of “push on through” is imbued with rich feeling, as is the lyric from which the song takes its title, a realization of one’s age when “your favorite song was on the oldies station.” It’s a truly special and heartfelt song, and one that, despite my being a dozen years Joseph’s junior, hits me right in my feelings.

37: +44- “Not, It Isn’t”

When Your Heart Stops Beating, the sole album by the blink-182 offshoot +44, is filled with dark, bitter emotions, many of them stemming from the circumstances around blink’s initial 2005 breakup. Once close friends,the trio of Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker, and Tom DeLonge had grown apart, with DeLonge often finding himself at odds with Hoppus and Barker over creative decisions, the band’s schedule, and their priorities as a group. After forming +44 with Barker, the acrimony from the band’s break seeped into Hoppus’s songwriting, and nowhere more so than on “No, It Isn’t,” a bitter track whose title attempts to avoid the obvious question raised from its glum, vitriolic lyrics: “is this about Tom DeLonge?”. “Not, It Isn’t” begins with Hoppus accompanied by a spare single guitar as he sings a striking, harsh opening couplet: “Please understand this isn’t just “goodbye,” this is “I can’t stand you.”” Gradually, the track builds, with spare percussion from Barker in the second verse and chorus before building to a full-band rager in the bridge and final chorus, along with vocal harmonies from Carol Heller. “No, It Isn’t” is a bleak listen, but in its gothic imagery and palpable rage, it’s also among the strongest songwriting Hoppus has ever done.

36: Bring Me The Horizon- “Kool-Aid”

This song, another single from NeX GEn, dropped at the very beginning of 2024, and remained in my rotation all year long. “Kool-Aid” perfectly marries Bring Me The Horizon’s pop and metal tendencies, delivering a track that’s simultaneously heavy and soaring, harsh and catchy. As the song’s Jonestown Massacre-referencing title suggests, the track examines a controlling cult mentality, using the trappings of romantic language to put a gloss on a nightmarish reality. Within the broader NeX GEn narrative, “Kool-Aid” might be seen as coming from the perspective of the fictional Church of GenXsis, an organization within the album’s narrative that blends fears of organized religion with dystopian cyberpunk fears of AI control reminiscent of The Matrix.

35: blink-182- “Cynical”

Some fans of blink-182 look with disdain at the period from 2014 to 2022 during which Matt Skiba, known as the frontman of Alkaline Trio, took what had traditionally been DeLonge’s place in the band, as co-lead vocalist and guitarist. However, that era, which included the albums California (2016) and Nine (2019), also included some real gems, including “Cynical,” the opening track from the former album. It’s an unconventional one for blink, clocking in at under two minutes, and diverging from any traditional pop song structure, instead consisting of a spare intro from Hoppus, followed by an extended instrumental break, a verse, and finally, a plaintive chorus from Skiba, serving as a grand way to introduce the band’s new member. Throughout, “Cynical” vibrates with blink’s signature energy, including pulse-pounding drums from Barker.

34: Twenty One Pilots- “Paladin Strait”

“Paladin Strait,” the grand closing track on Clancy, returns to the Dema narrative that much of the album eschewed in favor of a more down-to-earth subject matter. The track begins with a comparatively mellow, ukulele-driven sound, before escalating to a grand, lofty sound in its bridge and outro. On the album, the song then “concludes” before multiple minutes of silence, and a final chorus afterward. The final moments of the song find themselves cut off by the low, distorted voice that, over the course of Twenty One Pilots's discography, has become recognized as Joseph's dark alter ego of Blurryface, indicating that this storyline isn't over yet.

33: Fall Out Boy- “Love From The Other Side”

“Love From The Other Side,” the opening track from Fall Out Boy’s 2023 comeback album So Much (For) Stardust, was my number one most-listened track of 2023, and remained in heavy rotation in 2024. After years of pop experiments that yielded mixed results, SM(F)S is Fall Out Boy at their very best, delivering work that's sonically innovative without straying from their rock and roll roots. Case in point, “Love From The Other Side,” which amps up a classic pop-punk banger with orchestral grandeur. It’s another answer to the previously-posed question of what happens to the grown-up emo kid: they make the same music, but with a greater sense of maturity.

32: Bring Me The Horizon- “YOUtopia”

“YOUtopia” opens the NeX GEn album with crunchy guitar and a hard-hitting lyrical couplet: “there’s a place I wanna take you, but I’m not quite there myself yet.” As mentioned in previous entries on songs from this album, addiction and mental health struggles are a major theme, and on “YOUtopia,” Sykes sings about the idea of wanting to embrace an improved, more emotionally healthy self, but simultaneously feeling afraid to break out of his old ways. Sonically, the track reflects a range of influences, from the pounding alternative metal of Deftones to the heart-on-its-sleeve emo melodicism of My Chemical Romance.

31: blink-182- “Bored to Death”

Another gem from blink-182's Matt Skiba era, “Bored to Death” builds from gloomy verses to an anthemic, wall-of-sound chorus. “Bored to Death” was the first single blink released with producer John Feldmann, and while some fans eventually chafed at his penchant for catchy “woah”-filled choruses, it works perfectly here. As he sings the first chorus, Skiba immediately proves that he fits in well with blink, but the song so perfectly fits the band’s energy that it's remained in their set even following DeLonge's return. Barker’s complex, speedy drum part on this track is among my favorite work he's put out in his decades in blink.

30: Michael Bublé- “Haven’t Met You Yet”

Shortly after I graduated from college, I began taking vocal lessons. I have no background as a singer, and don't intend to perform in any capacity, but I enjoy karaoke and singing along to my favorite songs, and thought it would be enjoyable to have a somewhat trained singing voice under my belt. Beyond training on classical and Broadway tunes, my voice teacher has had me select songs from pop singers with comparable baritone vocal ranges to my own, and Bublé is among them. On its own terms, “Haven’t Met You Yet” is a solid piece of orchestral accented retro pop, but it's also a lot of fun to sing and try to measure up to Bublé's famous pipes.

29: Waterparks- “FUNERAL GREY”

This song hails from Intellectual Property, a 2023 album from Waterparks that remained in my rotation throughout 2024. The track pairs the band’s signature sugar-sweet hooky brand of pop-rock with droll lyrics describing its narrator’s infatuation and frustrated attempts at flirtation with an alluring woman with a dark, sarcastic personality. “FUNERAL GREY” was cowritten with Julian Bunetta, a songwriter behind many of One Direction’s biggest hits, and indeed, there are light shades of those boy band titans in this song’s massive, singalong hooks. The song’s title features the British English spelling of the color typically spelled “gray” out of frontman Awsten Knight’s aesthetic preference.

28: Bring Me The Horizon- “DiE4u”

“DiE4u” was the very first single from NeX GEn, released all the way back in the fall of 2021, over two and a half years prior to the album’s May 2024 release. At the time, it immediately became one of my favorite Bring Me The Horizon songs, and remains a favorite of my listening, particularly during my drum practice sessions. “DiE4u” is among the catchiest, most pop-oriented tracks Bring Me The Horizon has released, but it’s not without the hard-hitting rock edge the band always brings, and also features the glitchy electronica edge that pervades the album it’s on. The song’s lyrics, while on their face framed as a love song, in fact, deal with addiction and Sykes’s toxic relationship with substance use.

27: Linkin Park- “Heavy is the Crown”

One of the biggest music stories of the past year was Linkin Park’s return. Inactive since the 2017 death of lead vocalist Chester Bennington, the band reformed this year, releasing the new album From Zero and introducing two new members: drummer Colin Brittain and new vocalist Emily Armstrong. To my ear, it’s been a successful new era for the band, and plenty of tracks on From Zero hold their own alongside Linkin Park’s classic oeuvre. “Heavy is the Crown” is a hard-hitting rap-rock blend, featuring co-frontman Mike Shinoda’s rapping in the verses, while Armstrong’s powerful, raspy scream anchors the choruses, not an imitation of Bennington, but tapping into a comparable energy.

26: Olivia Rodrigo- “obsessed”

“obsessed” was the lead single from the “Spilled” expanded reissue of Rodrigo’s Guts album, and might just be my favorite from the entire LP. As I mentioned in my entry on “love is embarassing,” Rodrigo here once again positions herself in an interesting place for a song concerned with relationships and breakups, not as a happy partner in love or a melancholic victim, but as someone, like the song’s title suggests, obsessed with their partner’s ex, even in what’s an otherwise happy relationship. Rodrigo’s tongue-in-cheek performance anchors the song as it swerves between a mellow bass groove in its verses and thrashing, distorted guitars and clattering drums in its massive, raucous chorus. In an era where rock feels largely far away from chart-topping pop, I think it’s extremely cool that Rodrigo keeps making such unabashedly thrashy, screamy rock music mainstream.

Stay tuned for numbers 25-1 on January 9!