Marcel Winatschek

Lykke Li, The National, and Some Kids

Three things on heavy repeat this week. Lykke Li first—Hannah pointed me toward her and she has good ears for this kind of thing. Lykke Li’s voice has this quality like she’s singing from inside a very small room, intimate and slightly detached at the same time, and once it clicks it really clicks. The National have been in permanent rotation for a reason I can barely articulate beyond the fact that Matt Berninger sounds like a man explaining his disappointments to a wall of sound, and somehow that’s exactly right.

The Black Kids are the harder one to pin down. There’s something gleefully unserious about them that I’m not sure whether to trust, but the songs stick anyway. Sometimes that’s enough. The music doesn’t always need to mean something. Sometimes Friday just needs something to run against.