It’s that time of year again when shop windows fill with red-and-green dioramas, city sidewalks bristle with shopping bags and sharp elbows, and the pressure to reach strictly enforced levels of good cheer can turn the season into one giant, holly-covered bummer. Sometimes it can feel like there’s just no eggnog strong enough to take the edge off.That’s why it’s so nice to have music that understands how you may feel (or not feel) about the whole holiday thing. For every unwelcome tiding of joy, there’s another song that captures the melancholy side of the season, the alienation felt by anyone whose experience of the holidays doesn’t align with a rosy fantasy of cozy contentment as spun by Hallmark Christmas TV movies and radio stations that cruelly play nothing but “Joy to the World” 24 hours a day.Perhaps the most lovably caustic of the holiday-themed classics, “Fairytale of New York” is an especially valuable counterpoint to all that. First released a few weeks before Christmas of 1987 and later included on the Celtic folk-punk faves’ third album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, the classic song united The Pogues with their friend Kirsty MacColl for a tale of star-crossed lovers whose romance began on a more hopeful note “on a cold Christmas Eve” only to shatter like an ornament dropped from a great height. Singer and co-writer Shane MacGowan casts himself as a wreck reminiscing about good and bad times while spending the big night in a Big Apple drunk tank. MacColl appears as the voice of the other half of this romantic calamity. Hard words are exchanged (a few of them too hard for some stations), and God only knows what misdeeds could’ve inspired lines like “Happy Christmas your arse, I hope it’s our last.”As rancorous as the song may be — and poignant, too, all the more so after MacColl’s tragic death while on a pre-Christmas holiday in Mexico in 2000 — it’s an accurate snapshot of the big emotions that the season elicits in many of us. In fact, “Fairytale of New York” is full to the brim with the same feelings expressed in the rest of this playlist’s special selection of bittersweet holiday fare.Christmas cheer be damned. Go ahead and revel in the loneliness conveyed by Boyz II Men’s “Cold December Nights,” the unrepentant bleakness of Sufjan Stevens’ “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” or the dread and despair that fill the full-on Santa-pocalypses described in Johnny Cash’s “Ringing the Bells for Jim” and Nat King Cole’s “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot.” To borrow a phrase by LCD Soundsystem’s endearingly Scrooge-y curmudgeon James Murphy, Christmas can break your heart in oh so many ways.

For all the alluring and disturbing images that David Lynch has presented to movie audiences over the last 40 years, the filmmaker has always been just as particular about how his films sound as how they look. This has been obvious to listeners since they were enveloped by the harrowing soundscape that Lynch and Alan Splet created for 1977’s Eraserhead, the two men spending months concocting a mind-bending array of noises and drones in a garage. The same process yielded a catchy, if eerie, ditty called “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine).” As sung by the chipmunk-cheeked figure known as the “Girl in the Radiator,” Lynch’s song provides the film with an even more startling and disorienting bolt of lightning, even with the gloom already surrounding it.Lynch would toy with the idea of extremes again and again in the soundtracks of his films and TV shows that followed, including Twin Peaks, his landmark work in WTF TV whose reboot has just arrived to the world. The new show finds him teaming up with Angelo Badalamenti again, his go-to composer since 1986’s Blue Velvet, and another master of generating unease by aural means. Together, their musical approach consistently emphasizes themes of flux and decay that start as sumptuous or sickly sweet and disintegrate into doomy ambient passages or something more psychologically assaulting.Likewise, Lynch’s song choices have been just as daring and confounding. The filmmaker’s fondness for keeping the time periods of his stories ambiguous is reflected in his continual juxtaposition of ‘50s pop, early rock ‘n’ roll, ‘60s girl-group ballads, and lounge music with discordant blasts of industrial and metal. The latter category is especially prominent in his harder-edged films, like 1997’s Lost Highway, for which he enlisted the help of Trent Reznor and used songs by Marilyn Manson and Rammstein for typically nightmarish purposes.This love of extremes has also been fundamental to Lynch’s own musical projects, which have long been part of his career and have become much more prominent over the last decade as he shifts away from filmmaking to other artistic endeavors. Lynch has released two albums bearing his own name, collaborating with American singer Chrysta Bell, engineer John Neff, Polish composer Marek Zebrowski, and the likes of Karen O and Lykke Li.Even so, for many fans, it’s the haunting approximation of a sock-hop in hell in Twin Peaks that best represents the director’s aural aesthetic—a sound first developed by Lynch and Badalamenti for Into the Night, a 1990 album for singer Julee Cruise. As such, it makes for a fitting first stop in our tour of Lynch’s sonic world, a place that’s as intoxicating as it is straight-up terrifying.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Panicked by the backlash and other problems caused by disco’s market oversaturation, most of the big record labels had abruptly shuttered their dance-music departments by the end of the decade. Yet they overlooked something that should’ve been obvious: A whole lot of people hadn’t tossed out their boogie shoes.And so those dancers found new havens in places like the Paradise Garage, where DJs like Larry Levan and François Kevorkian fostered new innovations in the art of the mix. In so doing, they inspired musicians to try their own experiments in disco science. One Paradise Garage regular was a downtown cellist and composer named Arthur Russell who began releasing a more avidly peculiar brand of dance music under names like Loose Joints and Dinosaur L. Elsewhere in New York, punks and no-wavers developed their own take, with labels like ZE Records and 99 Records becoming hotbeds for the “mutant disco” sound pioneered by acts like ESG (pictured) and Liquid Liquid. Meanwhile, hip-hop began its move from the Bronx to Manhattan, the first step in a burgeoning revolution.Back in the overground, labels like SOLAR and acts like Shalamar and the S.O.S. Band ruled the radio with a shiny, synth-heavy sound that bridged the gulf between disco and the urban pop that would define the new decade. A 1979 masterpiece that built something shiny and new out of the old aesthetic, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall had already shown what was possible. Rick James and Prince had their breakouts next. In Chicago, DJs and producers found new ways to sate their dancers’ undimmed appetites for disco by integrating the sounds they wanted with Italo disco and electro, and the result became known as house. Meanwhile, a New York club kid named Madonna was paying very close attention to everything that was going down.As wild and adventurous and modern as this music could be, all of it had disco in its DNA. And as this playlist of post-disco essentials demonstrates, many of these mutations have proven to be just as hardy.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Over the course of 1975 and 1976, disco was most definitely ascendant as radio programmers and DJs fed the new appetites and clubs competed to have the most advanced sound systems and the largest glitter balls. The apex was reached in 1977 as Studio 54 swiftly became not only the most famous disco in New York, but the world, too. Later the same year (and well into the next), Saturday Night Fever turned America into a land of wannabe Tony Maneros in tight-fitting white suits, strutting down every street to the ubiquitous sound of the Bee Gees’ soundtrack.At its worst, disco in its imperial phase was a whitewash of the dance music that preceded it, the blandest examples removing soul’s passion and funk’s hardness. But the foremost practitioners—like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, also architects of hits for Diana Ross and Sister Sledge—made music of indisputable sophistication. It could be also be cheekily subversive, like when French producer Jacques Morali cast a series of hunks, dressed them up as gay archetypes of the era and somehow sold the Village People to Middle America.Like all parties, this one couldn’t last forever. By 1979, disco suffered a fatal counter-attack by its haters, i.e., the white dudes whose traditional position of privilege was threatened by a cultural surge that was so strongly female, African-American, and gay. But no matter how many records they tried to blow up in baseball parks, there was no way to erase the mark made by so many of the tracks on this playlist.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!A café opened in my neighborhood a few years ago that I just couldn’t figure out. The trouble wasn’t the menu, but the decor: The interior was a gaily colored hodgepodge of Buddha busts, paper lanterns, pretty vases, and posters of mighty waves and long-tongued dragons; the place was a kitschy riot of Chinese and East Asian motifs. Yet I didn’t see a single Asian employee. It took me several visits to realize that the design aesthetic wasn’t just some egregious example of cultural appropriation—though it probably was that, too—but a new manifestation of a phenomenon with much deeper roots.Derived from the French word for Chinese, “Chinoiserie” is the name for a style of European decorative arts that brandish an Asian influence, the result of new trade relationships between the East and West in the 17th century. King Louis XV was a fan, as were the architects who decided that no English manor garden was complete without a pagoda. In any case, my neighborhood’s belated example of orientalism-in-action must’ve confused people because the establishment didn’t thrive. The space was eventually reborn as a sushi restaurant, and needless to say, the new proprietors didn’t do much redecorating.I’m also relieved to no longer have to deal with complex questions of white privilege, cross-cultural exchange, and colonial power dynamics every time I want a decent latte. Yet these matters seem inescapable today, what with the Trump administration’s unabashed Islamophobia, the growth of nationalist and nativist movements throughout Europe, and the hardening of attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Citizens of the so-called First World have never been freer to cast a fearful eye on whichever group they consider the “other.”Meanwhile, in the cultural realm, there’s a renewed urgency to carve out new spaces for previously marginalized or unacknowledged voices and perspectives within a dominant industrial-entertainment-media apparatus that seems forever prone to missteps. In other words, it’s not an overreaction to question the wisdom of casting Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese anime heroine. Every day yields a new Twitter eruption on the topic of who can and can’t represent positions and experiences, especially when the work involves transgressing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and class.All of this makes me feel even more confused and conflicted about a huge body of music that’s always fascinated me. This is music by (mostly) white people who eagerly adopted other modes that were ostensibly foreign, which automatically was a complicated move given the stew of African, Caribbean, and Latin influences in American popular music in the first place. Nevertheless, they drew and continue to draw from African, Asian, Arabic, East Indian, indigenous, and other traditions to create forgeries and mutations that positively revel in their inauthenticity.I’m not about to defend all of it—I can’t. So much of it reeks of an old colonial mindset, one I continue to grapple with as a suburban kid who grew up in a placid corner of Canada, devoid of the cultural markers I perceived and envied in other lives (an illusion that’s proof of my white privilege, of course). Yet much of it is also the product of an age in which much of the West had a different attitude toward the rest of the globe. Looking back at the world music vogue sparked by Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel in the ‘80s, it can seem like a wave of cultural appropriation run rampant, a self-congratulatory embrace of cultural otherness that’s as suspect as the exotica craze of the 1950s. But at its best, this music can be seen and heard as an open-hearted effort to dissolve the borders and boundaries that are so important to people right now.Those good intentions and spirit of curiosity connect music as diverse as cheeseball tiki-lounge tunes, the cheeky ethnological forgery series of Holger Czukay and CAN, early American minimalism music—which was steeped in Indian raga, African percussion, and gamelan—and even The Rolling Stones’ dalliance with The Master Musicians of Jajouka. In recent years, newer acts such as Goat, Beirut, Dengue Fever, Vampire Weekend, and Dirty Projectors have incurred charges of appropriation for stepping outside of their own original cultural domains to investigate and play around in others. Such engagement is bound to be problematic on several levels, yet it deserves a reaction other than knee-jerk dismissal. So does the music we get when—to borrow a favorite title for post-grad courses on postcolonial legacies—the empire looks back: when Western pop modes become absorbed and transformed (though that’s another playlist). As confusing as it may be, this music elicits emotions and sensations other than the hate and fear that are otherwise so rife in our moment.

Whether working on her own recordings or with friends like Peaches, Chilly Gonzales, or Broken Social Scene, Leslie Feist has always been more of a serial collaborator than a solo artist who likes to keep it solo. That’s one reason why the stripped-down sound of her fifth album, Pleasure—the Canadian chanteuse’s first in six years—is so striking.Recorded in rooms in Paris, California, and upstate New York, her performances are as raw and unadorned as any she’s recorded, with her usual crew of helpers pruned down to producer Renaud Letang and longtime musical foil Mocky. That said, some friends did stop by to add a few touches, like the sprinkling of keys from Gonzales and horns from Arcade Fire collaborator Colin Stetson. She also enlisted Jarvis Cocker to deliver a cameo at the close of “Century”—reminiscent of Vincent Price’s voice-over in “Thriller”—one of the most unbridled songs on the new album, after the libidinous, PJ Harvey-channeling title track.So maybe Pleasure isn’t such a lonesome experience after all, though its starkness still marks a bold shift from the chic sheen of 2007’s The Reminder and the stormy swells of 2011’s Metals. More intimate recordings from her early days, both with and without pals, point the way to Pleasure, as do other pieces by singers she loves and by equally gifted peers who’ve left their traces on her work.And lest Pleasure seem like “one of those endless dark nights of the soul,” as Cocker quips in “Century,” the new album still contains many cheeky gestures, including her occasional dives into Pulp-worthy theatrics and her use of a Mastodon sample at the end of “A Man Is Not His Song” (after the release of Metals, she formed a mutual admiration with the Atlanta band and covered their “Black Tongue” on a split single for Record Store Day). Thanks to Feist’s ability to seamlessly integrate these many elements while maintaining a spare aesthetic, the pleasures of Pleasure are nothing if not the sophisticated kind we’ve come to expect.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

There’s something uniquely satisfying and majestically meta about a hard rock classic whose core subject is the transformative power of rocking out. An unbeatable demonstration of Foreigner’s brand of no-apologies and no-holds-barred AOR, “Juke Box Hero” demonstrates that fact with all the cocksure swagger you could possibly demand.Over a stark, almost metronomic beat and a burbling, ominous synthesizer, frontman Lou Gramm devotes the first verse to a cinematic vignette about a downcast dude who “couldn’t get a ticket” to “the sold-out show” and now finds himself stuck in the rain. Nonetheless he gets all he needs by putting his ear to the wall and hearing the one guitar that “just blew him away.” As the tension rises through the second verse, he arms himself with the proverbial “beat-up six-string” and gets down to business. And you can tell how good all that rocking makes him feel because the song makes damn sure you feel it, too, especially when a series of windmill-ready riffs leads into a chorus that seems scientifically engineered to elicit fist-pumping, hard-strutting and anything else you need to do to cope with the surge of testosterone in your bloodstream. Formed in 1976 in New York by former Spooky Tooth and Leslie West Band sideman Mick Jones and King Crimson co-founder Ian McDonald with a cluster of burly Americans like Gramm, Foreigner undoubtedly knew they were never going to be cool. After all, they emerged as unrepentantly old-school rockers at a time when disco still ruled the airwaves and the critical establishment was far more interested in punk and new wave. There was little respect afforded to any band doing – as Jones later admitted – “the exact opposite.” Of course, that hardly meant there wasn’t an audience for their sound, which – thanks to the match of Gramm’s muscular vocal style and Jones’ flair for crunchy riffs and sticky hooks – was a big cut above most of the AOR that would become predominant on American radio through the ‘80s. On early hits like “Feels Like the First Time” and “Hot Blooded,” Foreigner managed to be beefy without being bombastic and dramatic without being overblown. They’d fine-tune the formula even further while somehow doubling its force when they joined forces with the era’s two most innovative rock producers: Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, Cars) for 1979’s Head Games and then Robert John “Mutt” Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard) for 4.Alas, in the wake of the success of the globe-conquering but hardly strut-worthy power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is,” the alliance between Gramm and Jones splintered. Though they would periodically re-team over the ensuing decades as Jones worked hard to maintain Foreigner’s health as a reliably rockin’ staple of the amphitheatre, county-fair and casino circuits, neither man would reach the heights they did in Foreigner’s ‘80s golden age. That said, Gramm did unleash one final iconic burst of AOR glory in 1987’s “Midnight Blue,” a pretty much perfect solo hit that may be the mightiest ever example of jukebox heroism. With all that in mind, we present this celebration of the Foreigner Strut, full of all the hits and deep cuts that you need for the ‘80s-movie training montage that may already be running in your mind.

Maybe it’s the cheap rent that’s essential for sustaining the vitality and vibrancy of artists and culture in a modern metropolis, or maybe it’s the proximity to beloved landmarks and bit players from The Wire and the movies of John Waters; either way, Baltimore continues to thrive as a musical hotbed, one that retains a fierce loyalty among the many great acts born and bred there. Future Islands count as one, even if they started two states south in North Carolina.After moving to Baltimore in 2008, they became part of a remarkably welcoming DIY community, one that resulted from the efforts of Dan Deacon and other members of the Wham City arts collective to transform the city from yet another study in American urban decline into a haven for millennials with a taste for maverick sounds. Some of those sounds were dreamy and some raucous, but all were more than a little weird.Of course, longtime local institutions like Dischord post-hardcore types Lungfish had already done much to foster that spirit, and before its members headed off to NYC and Europe, the teenaged Marylanders of Animal Collective paved the way for freak-flag-fliers like Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine. Future Islands weren’t the only imports; Matmos relocated there from San Francisco after Drew Daniel got a job teaching at Johns Hopkins. Wherever their origins, the fertility of the ground occupied was soon recognized worldwide thanks to the success of Future Islands and other Baltimoreans like Deacon, Wye Oak, Beach House, and Lower Dens.With this week’s release of Future Islands’ fifth album, The Far Field, it’s a fine time to celebrate the city’s indie scene with a playlist of Baltimore acts you may already know and love, and others who deserve more than hometown-hero status, like Ed Schrader’s Music Beat and relative newbies Sun Club. The music by Future Islands’ many side projects—such as Peals, William Cashion’s duo with former Double Dagger bassist Bruce Willen—is further proof that local politicians made a dumb move when they changed the city’s old slogan, “The Greatest City in America.” Keep it weird, Baltimore.

The most neutral adjective you could use to describe the voice of Sleaford Mods mouthpiece Jason Williamson is probably “distinctive.” His wordplay, as in the opening couplet of the Nottingham duo’s 2014 breakout track “Tied Up in Nottz”—“The smell of piss is so strong, it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill under the piss station”—is impressive enough, what with the way he stitches together an in-joke about the band’s favorite grimy Hamburg hotel and a reference to everyone’s favorite Kevin Bacon movie. But Williamson’s air-hammer delivery and thick-as-marmite East Midlands accent—both front and center on the new album English Tapas—contribute hugely to Sleaford Mods’ appeal, even if some non-Limey listeners may require the use of subtitles—and probably footnotes, too.Indeed, the unabashedly regional nature of Williamson’s voice remains a rarity for any act who’s garnered international attention. The vast majority of British acts have largely stuck with the tradition instituted by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which holds that popular music should be sung in an American accent or a close enough facsimile. While fellow British Invasion acts like The Kinks and Herman’s Hermits subverted the convention—and the ubiquitous voices of Adele and Ed Sheeran sometimes demonstrate a similar degree of latitude—it can still be jarring to get an undiluted dose of Cockney, Brummie, Manc, Geordie, Scouse or any other strain. Sleaford Mods belong to a proud counter-tradition of vocalists who not only defy the pressure to Americanize but brandish accents that have traditionally been masked as markers of low class in British society.This quality creates a fascinating connection between an otherwise disparate series of singers, poets, and shouters operating not just in the punk and post-punk styles dear to Sleaford Mods, but in folk, electronic, grime, and even sound poetry. To mark English Tapas’ release and the band’s first North American tour this spring, here’s a selection of these distinctive voices. And if it just sounds like a whole lot of British people—and a few Irish—yelling at you, just remember: You probably did something to deserve it.

I’m not paralyzed with fear, but sometimes I wonder if I ought to be. Mostly, it’s the little things I obsess over: the worsening signs of global decline and potential extinction-level events already upon much of the world, but filtered through my bubble of North American privilege. It’s petty stuff, like wondering how much longer my five-year-old daughter will get to eat her favorite food of shrimp tempura, as she may be among the last people on Earth to enjoy seafood before warmer waters and climate change decimate the food chain. Or figuring out how realistic it is for my wife to keep pursuing her lifelong dream of visiting the Maldives, as the island nation may be underwater in our lifetimes, as well as Miami, New Orleans, and more than 400 other American cities and towns soon after.I know these preoccupations are silly and useless given the wretched circumstances and challenges already facing the overwhelming majority of humankind. I ought to see how good I’ve got it, what with my ready access to food, fresh water, fuel, and free Wi-Fi. Sure, every generation believes it’ll be the last, and millennial cults have yet to get the right date for the end times. But it feels like we’ll finally be the ones to make good on all those visions of apocalypse: whether it’s famines, fires, bee-population collapse, or other environmental crises; a viral plague or rampaging superbug; or a nuclear war sparked by rising tensions in North Korea, Iran, or Pakistan. My fears about the future are so huge and unwieldy that the only responses I can manage are pitifully small and solipsistic.But there’s another response, which is anger. How else to react to the Trump administration’s attempts to erase the already too-modest moves by its predecessor to address the climate crisis? Thankfully, it remains to be seen whether Trump can actually gut the Clean Power Plan or pull America out of its commitment to policy change in the Paris Agreement, given the resistance by many industries that have already adjusted to new realities and to the efforts of the Obama team to bulletproof changes in legal terms. It’s ironic how much the President is willing to sacrifice his nation’s economic supremacy and superpower status to the country he loves to bash so much: China is understandably eager to find clean-energy solutions now that so much of the country’s air is unbreathable.I know there are more positive and productive responses than my neurotic ones. Nevertheless, the road ahead is still filled with fear and despair, the same emotions that color the songs on this playlist, which ponder our distressing present and ever so uncertain future. The next Earth Day is April 22, and with Tom Waits in mind, I wonder if it would get more attention if we renamed it The Earth Dies Screaming Day. It couldn’t hurt.