The Only Band Worth Losing an Argument Over

The woman I’ve been sleeping with on an irregular, mutually convenient basis plays guitar in some sufficiently terrible rock band. This means her Spotify is a permanent archive of acts nobody outside her immediate social circle has ever heard of, running at full volume at midnight, presented with the kind of evangelical certainty that only mediocre musicians and committed religious people seem capable of sustaining without apparent effort. Put on anything else—rap, anything electronic, anything produced after 1998—and the lecture starts. Only rock is real. Everything else is disposable noise for people who can’t hear.

I stopped arguing. Partly because I’ve run out of energy for that particular fight. Partly because she has an extraordinary body I’m not ready to stop seeing, and fighting about Spotify at two in the morning is a reliable way to make that stop happening. And occasionally, out of the wreckage of whatever she’s queued, something genuinely good surfaces—which is how I first properly heard Cherry Glazerr’s Stuffed & Ready. I swear to you there is nothing like Juicy Socks and Daddi and Wasted Nun running loud on repeat in some Kreuzberg back-courtyard apartment while you’re losing your mind in the best possible way. Frontwoman Clementine Creevy has this quality of knowing exactly what she’s doing even when the song is in freefall, and she basically sang me to the finish line that night. More than once.

Maybe my skepticism about rock is permanently compromised. Maybe I’ve crossed over. But only because of Cherry Glazerr—and only because I had the right company when I first really heard them.