I‘d like to take to heart the term “twink rock.” This is the banner that Joey Walker playfully hoists above his work. It’s a title that can only be taken on with a keen self-awareness: one doesn’t exactly make themselves a twink, but is made one; one falls into this role or one notes a proximity, moves closer. Not all identifiers go this way. For instance, queer (the word that serves as the title for Walker’s 2017 debut) is at times both hotly contested and strangely elastic.

More about: Joey Walker

Angels in America’s redux of Uptown Funk — previously taped together on reel in a fragile, limited run early-version cassette — reminds me of what I was missing when the age 12 was happening to my male-identified body. That absolute, overarching angst that seemed too deep to itch. Picking up cigarettes postal workers flick out their cars.

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REMS, the debut solo album by Nima Aghiani (one half of 9T Antiope with Sara Bigdeli Shamloo), still haunts me. It lingers and still I shudder, not because its onslaught of power noise is especially frightening on its own, but because of the emptiness that the noise clears, the clearing of a silent space in its pounding doom. From a glacial silence, it can bear witness to its own violence, as if with a tranquil compassion.

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Save for trucks full of afternoon tourists or the odd climber, the Columbia Icefield is some hundred-thousand miles into the Rockies and 125 square miles of nothing. Like a post-12 Monkeys Philadelphia. But I’ve never been. Albums or songs named after geographical anomalies happen often, yet, even if we comb through what the internet has to offer, there is a hearty disconnect without having been there.

More about: Nate Wooley