The Lethe

I wanna start using this section of my site more. So I’m gonna put a bunch of stuff at once. This will be the first of a couple things. Last year, I made a playlist for a couple of my friends filled with music by Queer artists for a lark. This year, I made it a tradition. This, along with my list of favourite graphic novels from last year were written in discord, so the prose really doesn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. But we’re all friends here! I literally don’t show this blog to anyone who isn’t! So, here are the details of this year’s list:

To produce only the finest selection of songs for you today, I have carefully curated this playlist into an ordered arrangement of roughly an hour in length. 

We begin with the club classic of 2024 which I’m sure you’ve all heard already, Guess ft. Billie Eilish. I just liked the brat album and this song is pretty fire.

Then, one of the funniest songs in the queer corpus, Gay Bar. Simply blast this at any time this month for a good time.

Maintaining the good humor is I’m Yer Dad from contemporary Riot Grrrl outfit GRLwood. I just love the screamed line “AAAAAAHHH I FUCK MY CAARRRRR”

Building on the hype, but now veering into more revolutionary and heavy political territory, we begin with Prism, another contemporary queer core jam.

Small history lesson: When the Riot Grrrl movement was taking off in the states, there wasn’t actually a huge parallel musical movement in the UK. Huggy Bear were THE Riot Grrrls over here in the day. Pansy Twist is my personal favorite song from them, with the second half of the song just being a really fucking good screamed refrain. Exceptionally angry band. 

Want Us Dead is in a very similar vein, the title kinda says it all. Limp Wrist are a recently formed band of queer veterans, they’re all bears in their 50s, and have excellent album covers.

Pretty Like a Boy bc I cannor exclude DUMP HIM from anything I love them so much.

Suede are a classic britpop band from the 90s, who were filled with all the sexual drug-fueled ambiguity of the time. This song feels like a tableau of the clubs they frequented, and my friends said it’s mid so I’m mad about it >:|

Cute Thing is Car Seat Headrest’s least sad song. It’s a delightful and sweet rock ballad which swells into several beautiful crescendos. 

Patti Smith is practically the godmother of punk. Many look at her album horses as one of the first punk albums full stop. She would play different characters and bend gender and sexuality. I mean- look at that goddam album cover and you’ll see why she was an icon that many a lesbian styled themselves after. There is simply no song which gets me more hyped about being into women than Gloria. It’s so fucking powerful.

Real date is a classic modern queer core archetypical song about crushing on the straight friend. Just done super duper well.

Destroy boys is one of the most popular bands of the second wave riot grrrr movement, and it’s not hard to see why. This song is a salacious, almost mythomanic jam about a dangerous seductress. Sick as fuck.

I love Alien Boy so much holy shit. If you like midwestern emo then prepare for the greatest shit ever. They tour with a banner that says “Dreams and Queer Feeling” and man it’s so true. The chorus gets me every time.

The Unicorns are a classic indie rock band from Canada, who used off-putting storytelling, and incredible fairy tale imagery to make the sickest jams of all time. This song is a radtastic push against (patriarchal) normalcy.

There’s just something so lovely about nearly-incoherently muttering the tribulations of your romance into a mic. I’ve been really into the Younger Lovers this past year. I find their songs so sweet. The chorus spins in my head for ages. 

Towards the end of the playlist, we begin to calm down, starting with this sombre song of a really toxic relationship. This song is GUTTING but also so so so pretty in how it’s put together. The lilting chorus is so good. The passion and FEELING which each verse is drenched in is incredible. Every lyric is the most evocative thing you’ve ever heard.

Ani DiFranco is a classic queer folk icon from the 90s. She’s also a huge feminist icon for being one of the first to create her own record label. Untouchable Face is wonderful confession of incredibly intimate frustration. 

Oom Sha La La is one I’ve definitely recommended before, but it really fits in this playlist. And it’s really good for being indignantly, insistently, but also sweetly, motivated to get out of bed in the morning. It’s like a tearful hug.

Labi Siffre went through a lot of shit being a black gay man trying to crack into the London music industry in the 70s. His influence is crazy, though, even if you’ve never heard of him. He was the original writer of It Must Be Love. The riff of his song I Got The… is used in the Eminem song My Name Is. His anti-apartheid song Something Inside So Strong ended up getting pretty popular. He ended up settling in Wales in a menage a trois with his husband and another man. He was together with his husband for 48 years until his husband passed away, at which point he married their other partner, who also passed in 2016. Every ounce of love he had for those men can be felt in his music. Bless is the sweetest I have ever heard. I love it so much. 

We close with a soft ballad of wistful romance once had from a smallish band called Dear Nora. It’s great for gazing at sunsets to.

Here’s the playlist.