Okay, I’ll play this game. Don’t know about you, Matt, but I went through a pretty productive listening period during our time off. Amidst the ear nuggets were several selections that would qualify as “the new shit” we tend to neglect with reckless abandon. I picked up that Best Coast album (“the new hipster shit”) I’d been mulling over, the latest from the Black Keys (“the new mainstream shit”), and maybe my favorite of all, the debut LP from Jack and the Whale-offshoot Wild Nothing (“the new throwback shit”).

A Molotov cocktail of far-off vocals, layered guitars, and shimmering synths, WN’s “Gemini” reeks of that late-eighties moment when synth pop was finally heading for the exits while shoegazers and the C86 crowd were just stepping up to bat. This is definitely not a bad thing, even if most of the tracks on the record sound to my ears like slightly less good versions of this or this. I have serious doubts about Wild Nothing’s shelf life—at least on my play list—but it certainly plays the role of proximity infatuation to a T. On that note, really, is there anything more fun than ragging ad nauseum on an out-of-context McGee-ism?