January 7: A Question of Attention

Happy New Year, ya'll.

Been a wild year. Since the last time this newsletter was a regular feature of your inbox, I've left the job I'd worked at for the better part of a decade, taught myself the basics of video editing, went to Japan for a second time, got paid for my writing for the first time, published my first few videos to my Youtube channel, and, oh yeah, became a dad. It's been a year of experimentation, change, and growth, all leading up to a January 1st unlike any I've ever had. Unemployed. A parent. I'm looking at more blank space ahead of me than I've had since high school - it's sobering and energizing, both.

So what does that have to do with you? Well, it's a question of attention.

This newsletter started as an attempt to connect with people around some of my favorite things during a time when the whole world was aching for connection. That goal was about as strong a driver of my attention as I could hope for, and if you know me, you know that attention is my most fickle resource. And so, since then, the newsletter (and most of my other critical and creative pursuits) have started and stopped in unpredictable spurts. If I'm honest, it's mostly been in stops as my day job's intellectual and emotional demands escalated. Partially it was a failure to attend to making things. I mostly stopped writing, mostly stopped talking to people about things like music, movies, games, and books. But more importantly, I stopped attending to all that good stuff for myself. I took in less of what had always fueled this newsletter, and I certainly spent less time reflecting on any of it. Hard to keep a recommendation newsletter running when you've more or less checked out of the very things you're writing about.

Which brings us back to all that blank space in front of me. Leaving work has, in a more material way than I've ever experienced, given a lot of my attention back. Obviously, I've reallocated a lot of it into taking care of my new son and adjusting all the things in my life around that adorable little center of gravity, but that attention comes back to me in a way that the energy I gave client meetings and corporate strategy didn't. So 2026 is a bit of an opportunity for me. For this newsletter. For all the things I've been wanting to pull together for myself creatively since I left graduate school. Basically, it's 8 Mile season out here.

Ok - that's the backstory. Let's do what we all came here for: the recs.

This month we're kicking things off with a quick hit of some favorite music from 2025. Despite big swings and even bigger misses from many of the music industry's biggest stars, last year was one of my favorite years for new music in a while. While these aren't necessarily my four favorite records from the year, they're a great cross section of 2025's variety, quality, and inventiveness in the face of an increasingly AI-addled industry that continues to be ravaged by the gods of algorithmic streaming. Hope you enjoy!

Glaive - Y'all

Ash Blue Gutierrez represents my current favorite evolution of the hyperpop model. Young, sincere, witty, and above all, feeling things very deeply, Gutierrez has been busy smashing together an eclectic sampler of post-ironic electronics as a foundation for his confident brand of catchy songwriting. He's been cooking up music under the name Glaive since he was a sixteen-year-old, isolating in his bedroom during the pandemic. Since then he's released three studio albums and a host of tapes, EPs, and singles, but despite his prolific impact, Y'all still feels like a true coming out party. It's an album about the thrill of losing your youth, the breakneck pace of your hometown's decay, and paranoia's weird, happy coexistence with swagger. For a project that started deep in isolation, Glaive has a deft way with words about connection. Look to "Bluebirds" - it sounds strange but you've had a hell of a time, are you feeling all right? Elsewhere, Glaive's throwing spectators off the trail on the "if you see me, no you didn't" cut, "We Don't Leave the House", which itself evolves the theme of alienation he establishes on "Nouveau Riche": we just don't fit in places like these.

At times, Y'all feels almost like the Appalachian inheritor of LCD Soundsystem's best work. It's a "Dance Yrself Clean" to close out the quarter century.

The Callous Daoboys - I Don't Want to See You In Heaven

You can ignore the corny narrative framing device opening the new record from The Callous Daoboys - an old timey voice on a dusty speaker narrates a world where I Don't Want To See You In Heaven is a long lost artifact of dubious provenance, maybe even cursed. Or you can take it for what it is: a goofy throwback to 2010s metalcore tropes theatrically blown to smithereens. A preview, in other words, of this entire project.

The Callous Daoboys have always had a relentlessly promiscuous ear for heavy, mathy stuff, but on this new one, they really pull out all the stops. Take the first full song, "Schizophrenia Legacy". Long, lingering saxophone odysseys sit alongside crushing riffs in weird time signatures as vocalist Carson Pace shifts from bloodcurdling howls to saccharine croons about watching killing sprees like documentaries. Or listen to the certified ear worm that is "Two-Headed Trout", whose lyrics are so packed with weird, illegible metaphors you'll wonder what the hell you just sung along to. Until, that is, you get brain-wiped by the broad side of a grindcore-inflected breakdown. It's a zany, janky, awkward album, which makes its crowning achievement, "Lemon," all the more miraculous. Dropped square in the middle of the record like a double flipped bird, it's a straight up 90s alt rock banger in the vein of Third Eye Blind, Eagle Eye Cherry, or Barenaked Ladies. It's a hit of weird acid refreshment bringing your palate back to zero as you brace for the record's back half. But I Don't Want to See You In Heaven never succumbs to cynical irony. Instead, it uses "Lemon" to center a heartbreaking moment of perseverance in the face of parental doubt, hitting you when you're most expecting a laugh with the album's most emotionally resonant moment.

Jason Isbell - Foxes In The Snow

I always check in with Jason Isbell. At this point, he's become such a mainstay in the Americana / singer-songwriter scene that you kind of take for granted what he's able to do with some quiet fingerpicking and a sweet turn of phrase. Foxes in the Snow reminded me I need to start paying better attention. Branded as a divorce album on its release, Foxes in the Snow sees Isbell stripping things back to a softer, more gracious space than that reputation might otherwise indicate. It's not that the record is without bitterness - album highlight "Gravelweed" surely balances its note of self-reflection with a healthy dollop of self-pity - but it's that the bitterness motivates getting better. Not to bring an unwanted presence in the room, but compare the way Isbell sounds on "Good While it Lasted" to any of Morgan Wallen's awful caterwauling on that artist's petulant double-album of self aggrandizement. Isbell understands that good love doesn't fail even if it ends, and just because it ends in the words of a wounded partner, doesn't mean the cuts, deep as they are, won't heal.

Singer-songwriter records like this are a delicate balance. It's hard for them not to smack of ego - when the music is this deeply personal, the little anecdotes can sour from heartfelt to strangely presumptious. Isbell shows he understands that balance best on "Don't Be Tough," a sweet little song that's little more than a litany of life advice about how to be a man. I've been singing it to my newborn son all year. I like my singer-songwriter music to put a lump in my throat I can't get rid of until I've sung the song all the way through. Foxes in the Snow does that better than anything else I listened to in 2025.

Cheekface - Middle Spoon

I'm not sure where Cheekface has been my whole life, but I'm glad I've finally got 'em. Middle Spoon was maybe my most constant companion in 2025, a never-ending bit in the background cracking jokes at just the right moments. They're kind of hard to describe - maybe I'd reach for something like a three-way cross between Cake, Weezer, and The Hold Steady. But instead of lyrics reflecting Gen X detachment, Cheekface gives you songs that feel like a good hang on some gummies, staving the fact of unemployment off for another few hours. It's music for understanding that the times are bad, have been bad for a while, but hey, you've got your buds no matter what, and while that doesn't really make it better in the, like, cosmic sense, it does give you some nice memories to feel warm and fuzzy about.

It's also just so funny. On "Living Lo-Fi", the second verse offers, apropos of nothing, some unusual Biblical exegesis: David was a murderer who had a problem with the tall, and as someone who is tall, you find the whole thing quite offensive. "Art House" compares the girl he's got a crush on to an indie movie - I can only turn you on if I want to get confused. Cheekface's is a sharp series of reminders that, hey, you could actually be a likable, affable dude if you'd just stop being such a weirdo about everything. Not quite a call to touch grass. More like a neurotic joke about touching grass in order to cope with how allergic you've become from being such a chronic indoor kid. But maybe that's just me.

Well, that'll do it for The Crossover Appeal's official return to service. We'll shake some more rust off next week when we bring you four fav games from 2025. As always, thanks for reading.

Jordan Cassidy