Data, baby!

2025 Mix 5: The future of alt-pop in 2007 revisited, the first ever Other Dave Heidi Montag legacy poll, Kenya fills this week's South African slots, and flowers for Kim Wan-sun

Your data, my daughter

Look, who knows what kind of shit we’re going to be dealing with by Thursday (it’s Sunday at the moment)—I’m trying to institute a 48-hour delay on my outrage responses when at all possible (the tariffs are getting the full 48, e.g.) so I’ve decided to use my own bully pulpit this week to insist that you go and listen to the second Katy Rose album from 2007, Candy Eyed.

Youtube playlist || Tidal

Katy Rose was one of dozens of major label post-Avril Lavigne investments after 2002. She’s the daughter of Kim Bullard, a classic rock keyboardist, who produced both of her mid-aughts albums and also her closest thing to a hit single, “Overdrive,” which hit the AC Top 40 and got a placement on the Mean Girls soundtrack. If you dig into her debut album on V2, Because I Can, you’ll find that it has a stylistic breadth and genuine oddball charm that eluded a lot of Avril cash-ins.¹ My favorite song on the album was the arty-farty fairytale rocker “Watching the Rain,” which I evangelized quite a bit c. 2006.

Candy Eyed was the follow-up, released as a download-only curio on an indie label in California after Rose’s V2 deal fell apart, as was the style at the time. I downloaded it early—heard about it from the same friend who clued me in to Taylor Swift’s debut—and carried around a beat-up CDR of it for years until Rose released it on streaming in 2020. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time—in that way it was similar to the Veronicas’ follow-up Hook Me Up.² Both of those albums wound up more or less predicting the future, even though neither was very popular in its time. But the Veronicas were an order of magnitude more popular than Katy Rose, certainly in the years after the album came out.

I think the polished but quintessentially bedroom pop of this album, its uneasy middle ground between alt-rock, pop, and noisy semi-experimentation, sounds more like the alt-pop I hear from all around the world now than anything else from this period. I’ll skip an album analysis here — it’s just an intro and also I might try to write a book about this teenpop interregnum eventually — but I think it’s worth thinking about what it was doing in hindsight, since at the time its primary audience (me?) mostly just went “…huh.”

---

Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. Heidi Montag: Prototype
US

Speaking of “…huh,” the other week I heard a song that I thought was brilliant — somehow managed to peel back the layers of irony-or-is-it terminal meta-ness from the original hyperpop blitz and create something that truly might have inspired that zeitgeist. But it turned out to be a 15th anniversary rerelease of a track from The Hills star Heidi Montag’s 2010 album that I’d completely forgotten about.³ This is a new song, created in the wake of hyperpop, but still manages to sound like hyperpop on accident, or something from its prehistory (compliment!).

2. Marina Satti: Epano Sto Trapezi
Greece

Next, flying over to Greece to see where one of my two favorite 2024 Eurovision contestants has landed after putting out an EP-ish album that wound up in my Top 20 (and Top 5 EP’s if you’re counting them). Looks like she landed on top of the table at her press conference while the reporters…eat her? OK!

3. Marie Davidson: Demolition
Canada

Marie Davidson putting out this austere Berlin Wall’d ‘80s electro, punctuated by jarring barks and growls and whoops, and then playfully intoning “I want your data…data, baby!” is really hitting this week, albeit for unsettling reasons.

4. MYERA: Lie Lie Lie Lie
Japan

Debut single from a new J-pop group that Jel Bugle recommended over on Bluesky. I am not equipped to write much about the occasional peanut butter/chocolate confluence of J-pop and K-pop, which seems like a relatively rare but interesting overlap, but I like how it turned out here.

5. SIMONA: Cocon
Spain

Spanish alt-reggaeton gradually reveals layers of kitchen clatter, like a drummer needing more surface area and adding a new pot to their kit every few seconds.

6. Victoria: Whistle
Italy

Italian DJ has a certain view-from-nowhere (European?) perspective on Brazilian funk, which is diluted enough here to merely add color—for one thing, if it were Brazilian, the titular whistle would make you wince. Settles for being a hyperactive novelty song that, sure, Europeans do tend to do pretty well. (And, as a bonus, it’s the sort of thing that my kids tend to go gaga for, which they did.)

7. ELASI: ETC
Italy

Pretty high BPM for so little to fill the beats with, winds up sounding surprisingly flimsy for something so propulsive, but it has a hypnotic effect. Makes me want to nod along rather than dance, like I’ve lost control of my body but in the opposite direction intended.

8. Mong Tong: Jitro Pop
Taiwan

Had never heard of Mong Tong when I stumbled on one of their songs in 2023, but I’ve seen them in my playlists pretty consistently since then. Had them pegged as psych but they’re harder to pin down. This one’s cloudy electronic music, like watching a drop of dye spread through water while you tap your foot impatiently (they had the foresight to record the tapping).

9. MARO & NASAYA: Forever & Ever
Portugal/Réunion

Gauzy easy-listening art-pop from a Portuguese/French duo. The whole album is good for boutique shopping background fodder but this one perks up a bit with a bright 6/8 sway.

10. Kim Wan-sun, SEULGI: Lucky
South Korea

Red Velvet member pays homage to featured K-pop OG Kim Wan-sun with the sort of ‘80s pastiche that, as expected, doesn’t sound much like the ‘80s. In fact they really tip their hand on this one—they forgot to cover their tracks after swiping the chorus from “Say You’ll Be There” by the Spice Girls.

11. Badger, TFace, Mayday: Canva (How?)
UK

I’m glad I pulled this one instinctively based on its sonics, because it took me the full listen to realize it’s the funniest song I’ve heard so far this year. British rappers rightfully express disdain for artistes who just plug everything into Canva. I feel personally attacked, but that just makes it funnier.

12. Skino: 300B
US

I haven’t really kept my regional rap scenes sorted so can’t tell you if this DMV rap (DC-Maryland-Virginia for my international blog fam) is typical in the way it sounds like the rapper is trying to stay on beat while he and everything around him falls down the stairs. Lots of hammers on anvils, but also intriguingly cerebral, more like a headache than a bloodbath.

13. DJ CORA: Para Boy
Nigeria

Ah, now this is the sort of Nigerian cruise music I’ve been expecting to hear this year, from a producer I’ve featured before. Also sounds positively stone-aged compared to the other cruise that I’ve put on mixes so far, as if I found it two whole months ago, which of course feels like eons away now.

14. Dj luis do grau, MC MTHS, Oliveira Mc 011: Zn Bota Tudo na Oliveira
Brazil

The beat drops at 15 seconds in a 1:15 runtime, so there better be something big to justify such a short length even by baile funk standards. And there is (ish)—the sampled voice, made to sound like a Casio keyboard preset, wailing around back there.

15. Dj Mura K.E, DJ Fita, N’Jiru: Kazi
Kenya

16. Saint Evo: Shy
Kenya

Two surprising Kenyan finds this week, both taking their cue from South Africa in a way that most Kenyan pop I find doesn’t. The first is derived from a broadly South African house template with some amapiano influence, more or less in line with my (I’m guessing pretty spotty) experience of Kenyan pop savvily but unpredictably borrowing from global pop trends. But the second, by producer Saint Evo (who went to college in South Africa but dropped out to make music), is a genuine 3-step song, and a pretty good one, too.

17. Surprise Chef: Fare Evader
Australia

Second lifetime mix appearance from these Australian makers of (now quite unfashionable) chill beats to study to. They must have something going for them, because I almost never stop on music that sounds like this. If I need to study to some chill beats, there’s always the Deltron 3030 instrumentals.

18. SEES00000: Everybody Got Paid
US

Noisy hipster DJ fare from I think Los Angeles? Opened for mk.gee. The whole song is built around a repeating organ tone that sounds like a warm but still annoying wake-up alarm.

19. Blacksea Não Maya: Reborda
Portugal

A trio of Príncipe-orbit artists—DJ Kolt, DJ Perigoso and DJ Noronha—combine forces for this batida supergroup(?), but on this one sound closer to a combination of dub and a little bit of drill-based (as in the power tool, not the genre) musique concrète. Might even say that the previous track has more of the woozy loping quality of batida than this does (I’d sequenced the two songs together before I checked who either of them were), but wouldn’t have categorized either as such during the blindfold stage.

20. Kissa: Wayne’s World
Finland

Finnish rock dorks who all sound like they’re having fun but also don’t have to worry about health insurance. I should watch Wayne’s World again, it’s been ages. Enjoyed this post on Finnish pop charts, where I learned that Sonny & Cher’s “Little Man” was number one in Finland for five months in 1966.

21. Bartees Strange: Wants Needs
US

I must have misfiled Bartees Strange in my hopelessly cluttered mind palace (it’s more of a studio apartment with cracked CD cases piled up everywhere) because I thought it was a group (it’s just the one guy) and was middle-of-the-road indie rock (the road may be indie-leaning, but it’s safely clear of the middle). The singing is compelling in the center, vocals like a TV on the Radio unafraid to go pop, while the band around him sounds more like early Bloc Party.

22. Organic Pulse Ensemble: Passing Phase
Sweden

Oh what the hell, I’ve got nine minutes for some meandering Scandinavian bedroom jazz, which appears to be pieced together one instrument at a time by the “band’s” pseudonymous polymath Gustav Horneij. I guess that makes Horneij the Katy Rose of the Swedish jazz scene. Might even be the first flute of the year on one of my mixes—finally! Something to celebrate!

***

That’s it! Until next time, if you’re going to insist on doing everything yourself, at least learn how to play the flute.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Marie Davidson: “Demolition”

1. Though not as many as you’d think. And Avril herself was a bit like this—darker and less samey than you maybe remember. She rapped to a Natalie Imbruglia imitation!

2. I wrote about it for the first time in December 2007: “Katy Rose - Candy Eyed: Goddamn this album is weird. I can’t even figure out which track is weirdest. Kind of love it, though, would use the dance number toward the end (“Dancin’ For”) as a track on my upcoming CONFESSIONAL DANCE ‘07 mix”

3. This also reminded me that in 2008 Frank Kogan suggested the following poll for the Heidi Montag song “No More”:

1) If Heidi Montag’s singing didn’t sound like she was forcing salt water out through her nose, “No More” would be one of the best singles of the year.

2) Despite her sounding like she's forcing salt water out through her nose, Heidi Montag’s “No More” is one of the best singles of the year.

3) Heidi Montag’s “No More” is one of the best singles of the year, and one of the reasons for this is that she sounds like she's forcing salt water out through her nose.

(I am wavering between choices 1 and 2. If I were ever to shift to choice 3, this would probably mean that I have entered a new psychosocial life stage, such as _______.)