Culture
Suggested Listening 2025: Julia Weber
By: Julia Weber
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Suggested Listening is WOUB Culture’s annual roundup of the songs and albums our community couldn’t stop playing this year — not necessarily new, just loved.
Julia Weber is an arts and cultural journalist based in Athens, OH, who is eternally taking music, film, book and art recommendations that she will add to her list and may or may not actually ever get to. In her rare free time, you can catch her at a live show, making ceramics or hanging out with her cat, Griffin. You can follow her writing on Instagram at @notjuliaweber.
Candy Breath – Wednesday
There’s only a handful of bands I’m motivated enough to see multiple times on the same tour; Wednesday is one of them. I was first hooked when I saw them play The Union at ACRN Media’s 2023 Lobsterfest, and they hooked me again when I saw them play thereafter at Nelsonville Music Festival. It’s come to a point where if they announce a show near me, I pretty much drop what I’m doing, get in the car and go.
What I love most about Wednesday is how well their muddy, distorted, feedback-heavy sound informs the mundanity of the memories frontwoman Karly Hartzman draws from in her lyrics. I worried I would feel underwhelmed by whatever followed 2023’s Rat Saw God — it felt like a masterpiece and I knew it would be tough to beat — but Bleeds finds a matured, refined version of the band in content and sound. Plus, “Guzzle it down at midnight / in the fridge light” has to be one of my favorite lines of the year.
Au Pays du Cocaine – Geese
Geese, like many of my favorite bands, found their way onto my radar when they played 2023’s Nelsonville Music Festival. I had liked what I’d heard on 3D Country and thought they delivered a great set at the festival (although I may not have fully appreciated it in the literal heat of the moment, trading audience experience for shade and hydration like the adult I’ve somehow turned into), but it wasn’t until I heard frontman Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal that I could genuinely call myself a Geese fan.
Off the band’s latest album Getting Killed, Au Pays du Cocaine is one of art rock outfit Geese’s softer, more melodic songs in the group’s discography. Winter begs perhaps the listener, perhaps the subject of the song, perhaps even no one but himself, to come home. Winter pleads “You can be free, you can be free, just come home, please” almost ritualistically throughout the track. The song reaches a cathartic tipping point as it descends into dissonance and chaos before finally resolving itself — or, maybe more aptly, letting it go — at the end of the track.
SHE’S GOT PAIN – Sudan Archives
When I was first introduced to the music of Sudan Archives, I was at Pittsburgh’s The Warhol to see Kurt Vile perform in what I look back on as one of the more expansive concert bills I’ve been fortunate enough to see. Born Brittney Parks, Cincinnati native Sudan Archives put out her third studio LP THE BPM earlier this year. Parks is an incredible violinist, bringing it into her studio recordings for an undeniably one-of-a-kind sound. If you get a chance to witness it in a live performance, I strongly suggest you take advantage of the opportunity.
Dance music gets an undue reputation for being vapid, frivolous, surface level or otherwise lacking in emotion, but Parks’ artistic oeuvre is deeply vulnerable. In SHE’S GOT PAIN, Parks laments the distance between herself and the subject of the song and alludes to the sensuality underpinning the track. “If you take a bite, you might feel it right, babe / Tied up for the night, hit the lights, we glow up,” she sings before the song veers into a dynamic, pulsing violin feature and eventually returns to a progressively more enmeshed version of both at once.
You In Rehab – Snocaps
A few years ago, I read a review about a supergroup in which the author argued that mixing your three favorite bottles of wine won’t make the best wine, but might make something undrinkable altogether (or, rather, sometimes you should just let your favorites be your favorites rather than try to make something greater than the sum of its parts). Snocaps, for me, is a rare counter-example. Earlier this fall, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, Swearin’s Allison Crutchfield, producer and multi-instrumentalist Brad Cook and Wednesday member MJ Lenderman dropped a surprise album debuting a new side project: Snocaps. The project draws on the influences of both of the Crutchfield twins, who formed the band P.S. Eliot together in 2007 and played under the name until 2011. And if you’re noticing a through line in my year-end favorites, you’re right: it’s NMF alumni.
You in Rehab juxtaposes what seems like a fairly simple upbeat song with the complexities of a loved one going to rehab. The track brings classic Crutchfield lyricism, unexpected quips and words you forgot you knew. You in Rehab is an exercise in cautious optimism and a careful toeing of the line between love and self-preservation, with lines like “I let myself feel some relief / You sound a little bit better every time we speak / But me and the sadness move / Clandestinely around each other eternally.” Judging by the group’s tour schedule and the fact that the members have been collaborating for years or decades already, I’m optimistic that there’s more on the horizon for Snocaps; I’m excited to see what comes next.
Heaven Is No Feeling – Cate Le Bon
Welsh singer Cate Le Bon caught my attention with 2022’s Pompeii and again when indie rock band Wilco hired her to produce 2023’s Cousin, making Le Bon the band’s first outside producer in more than a decade. On paper, it makes perfect sense: both albums (and artists) are working through dread, anxiety, unease with the world around them. But if years past found Le Bon fixated on the uncanny, Michelangelo Dying finds her more at peace, if not resolved, with it.
Lush synth-drenched songs meet a mastery of the confessional and narrative lyricism; Le Bon veers between the observer and the observed in Michelangelo Dying. Compared to the somber, dirge-like Pompeii, her newest album pulsates and pushes forward into and through the atmosphere she’s curated. Heaven Is No Feeling has the feel of a quintessential Cate Le Bon song; vague but prescriptive, a lilting voice atop underlying buoyant electronic beats, an almost theatrical experience of performance — but it doesn’t feel stagnant or lackluster. It’s a clarified approach to what Le Bon is best known for, and it was certainly a welcome addition to my library in 2025.
Beam Me Up – Alex G
Another artist — one of the most important figures in contemporary rock, Alex G (born Giannascoli) — joins the ranks of NMF alumni who made my year-end list. Whereas Giannascoli’s God Save the Animals (2022) found the artist at peace, resolved with the world around him, Headlights feels more self conscious and less certain.
Beam Me Up is wistful and nostalgic — possibly even as far as regretful — as Giannascoli admits to the tradeoffs love and money necessitate in the music industry. In classic Alex G fashion, the track itself is relatively sparse; Giannascoli’s vocals lead the way with instrumentation following in tow. Backing vocals proclaim: “I’m gonna put that football way up in the sky” and it could very well be chalked up to me projecting my love for the Peanuts cinematic universe, but I can’t help but think of Charlie Brown’s neverending attempts to kick a football only to be thwarted again and again by Lucy.