Patrick Wolf: The City

Patrick Wolf’s music sounds like late nights in cramped apartments, all goth theatricality and glitchy synths, the kind of thing you play when you’re too young to understand why you’re depressed but old enough to want to feel it anyway. His albums are dense—layers of strings and electronic noise that feel almost overwhelming on first listen, then somehow intimate after the tenth. There’s something about how he structures his melodies, this minor-key vulnerability wrapped in production that feels expensive and strange, that made sense to me when I was figuring out what taste was. You either get it or you don’t, and for a while there, getting it felt like proof that I understood something true about the world that other people didn’t. Which is stupid, obviously, but that’s what good music does at a certain age. It makes you feel like you’re the only one paying attention.