I said to myself that I wasn’t going to write long, rambly answers and that I would instead give concise responses. Let’s shoot for 50%.
Best “Featuring Zayna Youssef”
The Wonder Years – “Oldest Daughter”
Runners-up: Ben Quad – “You Wanted Us, You Got Us”; the album art from Action/Adventure’s Ever After.
Zayna Youssef is apparently an emo scene renaissance woman. Not only is she the frontwoman of the band Sweet Pill, she is apparently on speed dial for anyone who needs a female vocal feature or some great graphic design work. She’s got some incredible range, making her presence known in ska, metal, pop-punk and emo, and probably more I’m not aware of in just the past year alone. Seeing her name keep popping up throughout releases this year became a running gag among my group of friends, and that’s what inspired this category.
I picked her TWY feature this year for a couple of reasons. First, this is one of my favorite songs off of The Hum Goes on Forever. Even with that inherent bias in mind, I think this is the song she adds the most depth to. She sings some very light, airy background vocals that really help add a feminine touch to this song that help tell the story. You can almost hear her voice as a stand-in for the subject of the song, and there’s an element of longing to her singing that makes you feel a connection to the story. The best part about seeing a Zayna feature on a song is how she nails everything she gets tagged in for, whether she’s singing a soft melody or screaming her head off. I’ll definitely have to give Sweet Pill’s upcoming 2026 a listen to see who she decides to feature on it.
Song That Makes Me Think of My Mom
Like Roses – “Believe”
For the entirety of my childhood (and many, many years after), my parents had a TV cabinet in their living room that contained a hi-fi stereo which had a radio, cassette player, and a five-disc CD player, hooked up to some big floor speakers. Every weekend, my mom would put in the burned CD labeled “Mom’s Cleaning Mix” and would blast it on the stereo while she vacuumed and dusted the house. The mix featured classic tracks from her favorites like Seals & Crofts and Norman Greenbaum, but one of the more modern (at the time) tracks it featured was the lead single that brought about Cher’s late 90’s career resurgence, and the rise of auto-tune as we know it, “Believe.” Growing up in the sixties, my mom was a fan of Sonny and Cher, and hearing Cher’s voice on the radio once again probably took her back to her youth as she blissfully vacuumed every single room in the house. I could not count the number of times that song and my mother with a can of Pledge in hand greeted me as I dragged my teenage self out of bed. In my head, the album is inextricably linked to my memories of these ritualistic cleaning sessions.
When this version came up on a Spotify mix, I wasn’t really paying attention at first, and I had to do a double take. Were my ears mistaken? Was I really hearing a cover of this song? When I saw the artist was Like Roses, I understood why it all clicked. I loved Like Roses the first time I heard them (they made my 2023 playlist but that never got a proper write-up here). Lead singer and guitarist Amy Schmalkuche (what a surname) has such a killer voice that is perfect for the type of emo/punk that they create, and this cover perfectly showcases it. During the softer verses, she has an endearing emo warble to her voice, but then she opens up on the chorus (and especially the bridge) and lets it rip with a gritty punk rock yell that maintains the melody and never turns into a scream or growl. Honestly, the best way I can describe her vocals is just that they are cool. The band kills it on this track, and leaves me wanting more. I’ve been waiting for a full record for years now.
Hearing this cover takes me back to sleeping in on a weekend morning, waking up in the smallest room in the back corner of the house I grew up in. That house is still there, my parents are still there, and sometimes, I wish I was too. Maybe I don’t miss the vacuum, my mom’s fastidious dedication to cleaning the house, or the twin bed on a broken box spring, but I miss the way life and the world used to be back then. I never would have guessed it would be a Cher song taking me back there, just like it took my mom back so many years ago. Funny how cyclical this all can be. Call your mom.
Most Clever Lyrics or Title
This was one of the hardest categories to pick a winner in, and ultimately I went with my gut, because the winner was the one who inspired me to even create this category. So, before I get into that one, I want to talk about the quality of the other entrants I had on the short list here.
Algernon Cadwallader – “Shameless Faces (even the guy who made the thing was a piece of shit)”
Consider this one just a representative sample of the entire album, which spends most of its 11 tracks lambasting the state of the American republic in the face of fascists and sycophants, an ineffectual news media sphere, and the unrelenting darkness of the doomscroll. The song opens with the lines:
You can carve your name into a tree
That don’t mean you own it
Land of the free
Everything is free when you’re stealing
Then they come back and bookend the song with these lines:
Prime time evening news
Cover the spectacular fireworks in red, white and blue
Color now within, it can’t reach
And get down on my knees every chance we get to worship
Shameless faces in high places
Taken all in context, this song does an excellent job of using Mount Rushmore as a metaphor for the current state of US politics. The monumental faces of our founding fathers on land stolen from the natives mirror the fanatical cult worship of the current president in an election that he has all but admitted he stole. The entire album is full of clever lyrics, and it’s kind of a shame I didn’t give it enough space in my rotation, but it never really clicked with me beyond my appreciation for the lyrics.
Customer Service – “Never Meant To”
This one is a clever title, and to be honest, I didn’t get it until I was putting my playlist together. At first I didn’t catch it, because in the song they say:
Can we let go of what we said
And what we never meant?
OK, that makes sense. Mentions the phrase “never meant” and the song is called “Never Meant To,” so it all checks out. After hearing the lyrics in full so many times (because I sit here and slavishly worry about sequence on my playlist, so please listen to it in order), I realized it’s an allusion. For more context, here’s the opening lines of the quintessential midwest emo song, “Never Meant” by American Football:
Let’s just forget everything said
And everything we did
When comparing the two, I finally realized that this song title isn’t just titled “Never Meant To,” it’s also a play on “Never Meant 2,” as in they’re writing a sequel to “Never Meant,” but not in the “follow up to the story” sense, more like the “Spaceballs II: The Search For More Money” sense, which is just so fucking clever. I love this.
Hot Mulligan “And a Big Load”
There is nothing I can say better than what Hot Mulligan’s guitarist and co-vocalist Chris Freeman said in this Instagram post:
Motion City Soundtrack – “Particle Physics”
One of the enduring strengths of Motion City Soundtrack’s music is the quality of their lyrics. Whether it’s the upbeat and irreverent (but still serious) lines from “Everything is Alright” like:
‘Cause I hate the ocean, theme parks, and airplanes
Talking with strangers, waiting in line.
I’m through with these pills that make me sit still
“Are you feeling fine?” Yes, I feel just fine
Or the deeply emotional and metaphorical lines from “Hold Me Down” that the song crescendos to during the second chorus:
You’re the echoes of my everything
You’re the emptiness the whole world sings at night
You’re the laziness of afternoon
You’re the reason why I burst and why I bloom
You’re the leaky sink of sentiment
You’re the failed attempts I never could forget
You’re all the metaphors I can’t create
To comprehend this curse that I call love
How will I break the news to you?
Whether they’re fun or heart-wrenching, MCS has lyrics that just hit you right in the soul and this album is no different. I could have picked a couple of songs for this category, but I am choosing “Particle Physics” because it’s one of my favorite tracks on the album, and it’s that fast-paced, quick witted type of lyricism that I first fell in love with from the band. Let’s take a look at the chorus for an example:
Does anybody study particle physics? I just don’t get it
Oh, why is there such a lack of connection
Between the things they say and the subatomic pieces I focus on
It seems algorithmic, I flunked statistics, oh
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention
Is there a doctor in the house who could
Figure me out? Woah, woah
It’s like you need a PhD to get me, if you get me
At first glance, you could hear these lyrics and think that Justin is trying to say “Oh man, I’m so smart, I need someone who needs to be as smart as me,” which I think is a totally fair read. However, if you take a step back, what I think he is actually trying to say is that he is someone who is neurodivergent to some extent, and that has had an impact on his ability to establish and maintain a relationship. In order for a relationship to succeed, he needs to find someone that really clicks with him, and also due to his neurodivergent tendenies, some of the longest relationships he’s had in his life are with doctors or therapists. In true MCS fashion, this whole album is full of lyrics you could read anywhere from two to ten different ways, so it earns a spot on this list.
Winner: Arm’s Length – “The Weight”
This is another case where there’s an entire album of extremely cleverly written lyrics, but I’m using this track to give it the shine it deserves. The fact that I just wrote a whole essay on the quality of the writing on the new Motion City Soundtrack album and then still picked this over it should tell you about the caliber of writing on this album.
“The Weight” uses a lot of different semantic tools to draw a correlation between an eating disorder and an existential burden, and tying one’s place in society to their place in the universe. When I first heard this song, the lyrics immediately stood out to me and I actually said, out loud, to myself, “oh shit, that’s good.” The song comes out swinging with this verse:
Slept with a constellation night light on
When I was a kid
So when I woke up
Fearing you were gone
I’d look up and it was insignificant
Since then I have expanded my orbit
To reaffirm my importance in the grand scheme
Ugh, be still my heart. Tying a space metaphor into your emo song is surely one way to get me to swoon over your lyrics, but the picture it paints here, with the metaphor of the night light drawing a correlation with the insignificance in the universe is just *chef’s kiss*. Then the part I really fell in love with was the pre-chorus and chorus:
If I’m made up of molecules
They all pretend I have form
But I’m not sure
I’ve learned that I am matter
I don’t want to matter no moreDon’t got much meat on my bones
Not making it through the winter
But I’ve gotten so good
At hiding as I get thinner
Don’t want to take up much spacе
So I get the best hiding placе
How can you tell me I’m safe
When I am seen?
So now we’re going from the galactic scale down to the molecular level. The double meaning of “matter” in the lines “I’ve learned that I am matter / I don’t want to matter no more,” is just so clever I can’t stand it. Then the chorus juxtaposes the ideas of hiding and getting thinner with being safe and seen, which introduces the concept of an eating disorder, but also trying to slink away from society.
I’m not going to dive line-by-line through the rest of the song, this one category is already way too long on its own. Go read the lyrics to this album when you listen to it. It’s really some top-tier work.
Best Re-Release
Acceptance – Phantoms/Twenty
Runners-up: Cartel – Chroma (2025); Fall Out Boy – From Under the Cork Tree, The Wonder Years – No Closer to Heaven
Since we’re 20 years out from 2005, one of the most impactful years in pop-punk and emo music, it’s no surprise that we saw three highly influential albums get re-released in various manners. When a band wants to re-release one of their seminal works, there are a few different ways that they can do it:
- Simply re-release the album largely as-is with a few extra tracks slapped on.
- Remaster the audio to improve the quality
- Re-record the album to give it a new life (and usually overcome some licensing hurdles that might tie up the original release of the album).
In our lineup of albums we see some variations of most of these options. The Wonder Years remastered the audio, and while I never thought the audio on the original album was a huge issue, the remaster is a step above the original. Fall Out Boy remastered their album and also slapped a bunch of live tracks and demos on the end of it. They also both sold upgraded “deluxe” versions of the remaster at a big markup – FOB’s was especially egregious.
Then we have the re-recordings. Cartel rerecorded Chroma, which I thought was going to be my 2005 album of the year until Based on a True Story came out (see yesterday’s post for more on that album). The re-recording has way too much processing on it, and I feel like it actually loses some of the integrity of the original with too many rough edges sanded off. There are so many vocal effects and a lot of different takes on the guitar licks, it almost sounds like a cover band released a Chroma tribute album. There are maybe two songs on this version I prefer to the original.
Acceptance on the other hand wanted to stay true to the songs, but still reinvent them in a way. While every song on the album stayed the same musically, the band pulled in a special guest on every single track. This resulted in a really interesting take on the album that felt like Phantoms, but older. A lot of the artists on the album were influenced by Acceptance, or were friends of the band, so it has a real “gang’s all here” vibe to it. A very fun and clever take on an anniversary album that I honestly think more bands should adopt for this type of release in the future.
Comments
