The sound of snarks: personal favourites

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I thought it be fun to open a thread to discuss some of my favourite songs and albums. There will be no definite ranking or theme to this thread besides just featuring music that I love and explaining why I love it. I'm going to go between featuring albums I love and individual tracks. Expect a lot of Florence + The Machine/Lorde/The XX and a ton of random tracks from the 80s/90s.

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The XX - Coexist

The XX released their sophomore album Coexist in 2012 2 days before I turned 17, which felt like a gift at the time because their first album was incredibly influential for me and I was anticipating this album heavily. I remember being let down at first, I don't know why but I was hoping for a huge leap sonically from them. Their debut was perfect and seemed to contain so much potential for even better music, and this album felt like more of the same at first.

Over time, I realized my expectations were unrealistic and unfair to the band and the album grew on me in ways I never expected. There's a richness to the production that wasn't present on the first album. There sounds like there are more layers and it gives it a more ethereal quality. The first album seemed very contained to me, this album felt like an expansion of sound, like the songs went from being meant for a small room to now being made for the whole universe. The two lead singers, Oliver and Romy never have sounded like natural vocalists to me, they have a specific style and don't ever branch out of it(usually deep sing-talky delivery) but it always works perfectly for their material and gives it a poetic feel when listening. Listening to this album, it almost sounds like Romy and Oviler are singing together but not to each other, like two separate people singing about experiences they've both gone through but not with each other.

I'm not going to go through all the individual tracks but I will say I think they choose the right singles. "Chained" is beautiful and really has that expansive sound I talk about above. Jamie XX is an incredible producer and one of the things I love about his work is he knows how to make sparse moments/songs sound huge and otherworldly. "Angels" is incredible and definitely the most immediate song from the album, Romy has a haunting tone and I think it's her most intimate vocal. "Fiction" is my favourite song from the album, The guitar line, the melody, the way the production builds at the end so slowly, it's all fantastic. There's an energy to the song that I find to be a recurring theme in the XX's material, where it's incredibly introspective and observant, the lyrics discuss companionship in ways that I rarely ever hear in music. It's like the band has an appreciation for human relationships in all their imperfection, whether they be long-term relationships one night stands or on the verge of destruction. They don't sound like naive kids when singing about love, so many of their lyrics show insight into the anxiety and pain that comes with relationships, but more impressively, they show awareness of the boredom that comes with dating and the inevitability of the passion ending(whether literally or figuratively) and ending the connection to go back to your own head/be on your own again. It really is about co-existing with other people but still holding on to your own existence. With this album, The XX went from being a one-album wonder to a true artistic force that I will always be excited to hear and check out.