Gold Soundz No. 5, Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here
by Sebastian Cruz, Two Years Old; Employee of the Semester
Illustration by Amit Eisenstein
Oauhgghhhhh. Ouooouaahaagaahaaaaaa, ouuuuuuuuuuuuuurj. This past Tuesday I watched the film Stop Making Sense by Jonathan Demme and for some reason I thought about reviewing it. I thought about standing up, dropping trou, crying into my sushi underwear and dancing like a taser victim, and then writing about that. I was David Byrne for Halloween one year (pretty on the nose) and my one blond male friend was Tina Weymouth, which deeply affected me. At times, on cold and black nights, I dream of dancing lampshades and perfect music and love beyond belief, fantasies that always conclude with my penis getting blown up. When I was an even smaller baby, I was dropped on my pituitary gland a lot.
This is Gold Soundz, we clown in this motherfucker, better take your sensitive ass back to The Review: Point/Counterpoint about the Worst College Football Team in America. Lights! Camera! A-word!
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Mercy
Sometimes, it’s nice when the artists I review do the talking for me. Emcees billy woods and ELUCID have been spitting so much game for so long that words fail when it comes to articulating their greatness (I would know, because I wrote an 1100 word treatise about their previous release, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, for this very publication, and it was quite the struggle to write, much less read). To cut the chaffchat, here is the second verse of “Peshawar”, performed by billy woods, in its entirety:
“Gleefully watching the system crash/No matter, though, they easily reboot it/Back of the napkin math, looking fucking stupid/‘Alas,’ all I said when I seen how they plan to use it/Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human/Mind, that's the rubric/Deep Blue verse Vladimir Putin/Stepped in the other room, but HAL still read your lip movements/Tears in my eyes listening to machines make music (It's beautiful)”
Don’t say I didn’t try to tell you: there is not a single other group who is doing it like them. And the Alchemist still rocks.
Recommended if you’re… STILL playing catch-up.
Listen to: “California Games” (feat. Earl Sweatshirt)
Danny Brown - Stardust
There’s something that I want to say and I want you to picture me holding all of your hands: Danny Brown has always been lame. Although it took some time to fully emerge, he has aged into being an earnest, elder-family-member-who-you-cringe-at-but-ultimately-respect kind of guy very gracefully. This has, naturally, bled into his artistry. His headfirst submergence into digitally-frayed, chipmunky, tooth-rotting hyperpop is, to me, 100% seamless. It helps that Danny cedes a decent amount of the space to a veritable chorusline of producers, singers, vocal accoutrements and also femtanyl (kidding!) which lend him a musical legitimacy and backbone for his pop rap excursions. It’s not all fireworks; Quadeca lends Danny some of his washed-out plaintiveness much to his detriment, and the sexless sex jam with Frost Children left me colder than Danny on the album cover. Like it or hate it (and man do some people hate it), it’s hard to deny that it’s good for the guy.
Recommended if you’re… Tryna get yer groove back, daddio.
Listen to: “Copycats” (with underscores)
FKA twigs - EUSEXUA Afterglow
What the fuck? Why is this so good? EUSEXUA, God bless it, has been but a drop in the veritable ocean of fantastic pop music from 2025, and its January release date did it no favors. Now twigs is swinging back with a sister album as well as a reworking of the tried-and-true original, adding and dumping three songs (because if Kanye could do it in 2016, it can’t be wrong). This was all a recipe for the sloppiest of seconds. Afterglow, graciously, goes harder in the paint regarding its clubby genesis and features her loosest song structures, longest instrumental patches and hardest-hitting beats (“Love Crimes”... jak úžasné…) Better than the original? I shan’t say. People are watching me.
Recommended if you’re… Already thinking of ways to work this into your upcoming DJ set.
Listen to: “HARD”
ROSALÍA - LUX
It would be a comforting thought that there’s a method to all of this brilliant pop music madness. This, EUSEXUA(s), Stardust, West End Girl if you wanna count that too I freaking g, and that’s just this issue alone! ROSALÍA’s immaculately-arranged and performed art pop album has enough opulence to basically be classical crossover. Frankly, it seems like she time traveled and somehow heeded the words I wrote right this very minute because sweet baby Jesucristo, she has delivered quite the walloping fugue. Spanning several languages and fifty minutes, while also featuring Björk and Yves Tumor on the same sub-three-minute song, it’s a divine undertaking. I had many false starts when spinning it casually; it deserves a careful ear and a copy of tu Biblia close at hand.
Recommended if you’re… Ready to let the Lord into your home because I know I am.
Listen to: “Reliquia”
Lily Allen - West End Girl
You don’t want this guy to talk about Lily Allen’s West End Girl. Projecting? Definitely possible, but something about the discourse surrounding this release has kept me rapt against my better judgement. This is likely because much of the drama involves David Harbour, a man I am primed to hate only because of how big and stupid his stupid beard is. Jesus, it’s so fucking dumb. Anyways, West End Girl, an album not for me and possibly not for anyone but Lily Allen and David Harbour. Well, probably mainly for David Harbour. Probably for his dumb face with that dumb big beard. Really big, just really really big and dumb. The confessionals confessed here are heartbreaking and quite real and something that I really shouldn’t be listening to nor discussing. Maybe you should be. Maybe you’re also David Harbour, or responsible for his dumb beard.
Recommended if you’re… The least interesting person in your own life.
Listen to: A forty year-old woman sing about “a sad, sad man” and how “it’s giving 4chan stan” with a straight face.
