(I wrote and rewrote an entire post of melodramatic self-indulgence that’s honestly just best summed up as Writing for Fun Sucks When You Do It for a Living and Just Really, Really Hate Your Job. Professional malaise, struggling to beat back my inner accelerationist with inconsistently successful results, finding optimal escapism through cross stitch’s cathartic stabbings and just wanting to couch-rot through my leisure time all make for shit posting habits, especially paired with the kind of music-listening slump that comes with suddenly preferring silence for a spell. But! It’s Summer Burn season and there’s been a steady stream of new songs delighting my earballs lately, plus news of an upcoming Jens Lekman album turned out to be the announcement my heart was waiting for to bring a little music back into my world while also serving as a welcome reminder that this year started out with the best surprise since Cricket Rumor Mill unexpectedly gifted the world one perfect swan song of an album. I’m still trying to unfuck my iPod so I can rebuild the 12,700 Songs playlist there—which has admittedly been part of why I’ve neglected this blog for so long—but it’s also well past time that I told you about this album that made me literally weep with joy before picking back up the H songs that’ve taken a decidedly hilariously long time to even get halfway through.)

Things You Buried, Kids These Days
Released: 10 January 2025

Sure, I guess it’s objectively better for a band to leave behind a small but incredible catalogue as evidence underscoring just how criminally limited their output was rather than, say, watch them lose steam across a handful of bloated albums that might contain a buried banger or two but are otherwise total blights upon a once-spectacular outfit that didn’t know how to go out on a high note.

But it also just really sucks. Scrounging for scraps and grasping at any musical crumb that stubborn internet deep-dives yield is a brutal legacy to leave hungry fans, though I suppose it’s also unfair to demand a rich discography from beloved musicians who probably should instead be lauded for calling it quits when they’ve passed their expiration date as a collaborate unit. It’s just… so many things make me angry lately, and sure that’s a Me Problem, but it also makes the good stuff that much more appealing and important and necessary as emotional-support Things That Don’t Suck.

There are four bands I’d give anything to have just one more album from: Recess Theory, Cricket Rumor Mill (especially after Aloha came out of nowhere to rock my world more than a decade after I gave up on ever having new music from them again), Lendway and Kids These Days. Much like Cricket Rumor Mill, I had long abandoned any hope of ever getting another Kids These Days album beyond that one perfect first and last LP; in a tragic dissimilarity, though, I didn’t even have a smattering of EPs to glom onto once Kids These Days dissolved into a name used by and split among various newer outfits that gave me so much false hope every time I mistook those emerging outfits’ existence as a new album by a band I so badly wanted more from.

Which is exactly what I thought Things You Buried was when Spotify unceremoniously tossed it into one early-January What’s New recommendation roundup, the cover’s familiar art style and the album title’s oft-sung snippet of song lyric be damned. Still, hope is nothing if not ill-advisedly tenacious, and a skeptical look was rewarded with a screen full of instantly recognizable song names. Actual live songs! From a band I never got to see live! Recorded 20 years ago!

Despite all well-documented tendencies to the contrary, I am not exaggerating a little when I say that I cried upon realizing what this album was. CRIED. LIKE A LITTLE BITCH. I may have even wailed “I can’t believe I get to have this!” as I clutched a cold, heartless phone with an open music-streaming app to my chest.

And then I played the absolute fuck out of this 29-minute EP for months. It didn’t matter that what I really wanted—a live version of “The Hips (The Captain),” a full-length concert recording, a whole sophomore studio album—still don’t exist. Ever hearing another note from this band I’d assumed had gone silent was such an impossibility to me that this small-batch sampling remains my hands-down favorite thing a year filled with truly excellent new music has given me. Yeah, sure, the song that made me fall in love with this band didn’t get the live-recording treatment here, but who cares? Five other songs I love and one that’s apparently made quite the journey on the band’s side-project circuit did, and it’s everything I love about familiar studio recordings finding new life as live gems.

Originally a late-album tune, “Drinking Wine, Talking Art” gets a dreamily ethereal intro slowly coalescing into everything a lead-off song is supposed to do to warmly welcome in listeners. “About Every 12 Hours” remains perfect here, both staying true to the original and playfully reimagined in all the right ways, all while demystifying a lot of long-indecipherable lyrics for me. “Intoxicated” got the lushly layered instrumentals and harmonies its quietly introspective musings and realizations have always deserved, helping them land with an intensified emotional resonance. As this recording was what finally nudged me toward the veritable glut of Kids These Days side and solo endeavors, it was my introduction to “Cisco Kid,” which I’ve since encountered on at least two Octoberman records as the new friend showing me around a strange but promising space. “Sinking Your Teeth” might have a revamped name I haven’t quite figured out the necessity of, but it’s still upbeat and still somehow sounds like driving through a sleepy shore town and has retained absolutely everything I love about its All These Interruptions version. And closing out this bite-site treat with “Aging Friends” was a perfect choice, both objectively and subjectively, with its slow-build intro, settling-in realities of adulthood, deliberately meandering time and tonal shifts, meditative quality, and inexplicable ability to sound like clouds parting just in time for the kind of sunset that jolts you into a whole new way of thinking.

“Aging Friends” dwells on time in a way that matters a lot more now with my 40s and middle age squarely ahead of me than it did when I first sang along to lines like “25 is too young to die” half a lifetime earlier and with no way of knowing of what the rest of college had waiting for me, let alone the entirety of my 20s and the precipice of adulthood and everything after. I do often wonder how much I’ve grown and changed as a person: Loving so much of the same music now as I did in high school, in college, in my 20s and in my 30s is a great yardstick for assessing the ways I’ve always been me and how I’ve become an entirely different person, which I think has its own impact on how well-loved songs land differently when you get to hear them repackaged in a novel way literal decades after your first encounter. I loved this band whose debut album I plucked from the college radio station’s freebie bin on the strength of “The Hips (The Captain)” alone sucking me in whole-heartedly as the rest of the album made me fall for its nine other songs almost as hard; I never anticipated getting to also love this band as a blast from the past, offering up live recordings from an earlier era and released into a completely different world that could really benefit from a relic harkening back to a time that felt much more inviting and way more like home. There is a sense of a homecoming that accompanies something new but familiar, different but comfortable, and it’s one of the best rewards for making sure a band or an album or a song keeps fitting into your life no matter how much the latter shifts around it along the way.

Things You Buried didn’t just bring me back to Kids These Days and one of my favorite winter albums at the absolute perfect time: It also was the introduction I needed to really appreciate the range of projects a band I love has since turned into, from the earlier days of Mohawk Lodge and Octoberman to the comparatively more recent Bells Clanging. And any time new music leads me to more new music—even if it’s just new to me and not, like, the Earth—I’m gonna be really happy about the opportunity to fall in love with a brand-new crop of songs, especially since I don’t think I’ll ever completely divest myself from my insufferable indie-snob college persona who still loudly insists from the wasteland of wherever my inner children congregate that whoever cultivates the most obnoxiously obscure taste in music wins. And honestly, pleasantly persistent earworms notwithstanding, the greatest gift any album can give me these days is reliving the confident indie-rock elitism that Peak College-Era Me so eagerly embraced.