January Static

Surviving the week ahead required music. Not necessarily good music—just music that moved at the right tempo and didn’t make things worse. What I had was Lily Allen, who’d figured out how to smuggle genuinely cutting observations into pop songs designed to sound like they were about nothing; Shiny Toy Guns running their sleek electro-noir through Season of Poison, which was cold in exactly the right way; School of Seven Bells making something that sounded like being pleasantly underwater, all shimmer and soft distortion; and Empire of the Sun, who’d arrived on Walking on a Dream looking like they’d raided a theatrical costume warehouse and sounding like they’d been beamed in from 1982 specifically to make the present feel less bleak.

Four acts, four completely different ideas about what pop was for. January 2009 was not short on reasons to need a good playlist.