How To Not Be A Music Snob

Plus: Three recent album highlights in experimental electronics, ambient post-rock and alternative hip-hop

At the start of the year, when Bad Bunny’s global smash Debí Tirar más Fotos was released, I deliberately chose to ignore it.

Which is weird, because three summers ago, I’d really enjoyed both his last album Un Verano Sin Ti and Rosalia’s equally fascinating, experimental take on reggaeton, Motomami.

I’d just read an entertaining essay about white dads in their 40s that just won’t shut up about Kendrick Lamar. Though just a dog dad, I guess I didn’t want to be that cringey middle-aged white dude raving about some Latin pop superstar.

A few weeks later, I read an incredibly insightful and well-written essay by my former colleague Sammy, a New Yorker with Puerto Rican roots, about his feelings listening to the Bad Bunny album.

Touched by his heartfelt report, I finally gave DTmF a spin.

I rarely felt so stupid and ignorant.

Here was an outstanding body of work from a visionary artist who was not just pushing the envelope creatively, but also staying true to his (sub)cultural roots – and I’d kept away from it just because of some irrational fear of being perceived in a way that wasn’t in line with my self-branding.

This is just one example though. The whole issue goes deeper.

I noticed that I routinely default to skepticism when I feel an artist or record is overly hyped, like when an album gets the “Best New Music” rating on Pitchfork (which DTmF also received).

I realize this way of relating to culture makes me a total Gen X relict and probably sounds completely ridiculous to Zoomer ears.

Back when I grew up, we had two serious music magazines in Germany whose critical approval meant some kind of cultural cachet: Intro and Spex.

Whenever an album received a good rating in one of these magazines, record companies would put a sticker on its cover pointing out that Intro recommends this album, or that it’s album of the month in Spex.

I had mixed feelings towards albums with these stickers.

On one hand, some people at Intro and Spex clearly had good taste – and I aspired to write for these magazines myself one day.

On the other hand, I felt as if it was already too late to start enjoying these albums. I wanted to find my own music, not just blindly follow trends.

For the same reasons, I hated it when my favorite underground artists became too successful and the popular kids in the schoolyard suddenly started liking them too.

I feared nothing more than having the same generic taste as them, or even running into them at concerts.

It felt as if a mirror was being held up to me saying: You’re not as special as you believe. You might consider yourself a nerd, but you’re liking the same stuff as everyone else in your cohort.

That’s why I sometimes enjoyed taking contrarian positions, for example with artists who were so huge that the cool kids immediately frowned upon hearing their names.

I loved passionately making a case for Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears in the early 2000s, when most serious music fans still saw them as bubblegum Disney stars – but they’d started working with credible producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, which gave them some sort of pass in my narrow musical world.

I loved watching the faces of fellow nerds when I told them that I was really into some commercial R&B smash, and that I didn’t care at all for their favorite “iconic” white male singer-songwriter.

Looking back, all of this posturing was based on childish instincts.

My judgments were only partly based on the music itself, more so on how it was perceived, and how I would be perceived when taking on these opinions.

In the words of writer Max Frisch, I tried on stories like clothes.

Those instincts still come up, even after 25 years of professional music writing.

I still sometimes feel the burning urge to publicly celebrate an uber-successful artist like Bad Bunny, just because nobody would think that the publisher of a newsletter on fringe music enjoys such overly commercial stuff. (I really love Bad Bunny though.)

Then again, as soon as a sophisticated record or a cool indie artist is celebrated everywhere – and with everywhere, I’m of course referring to my narrow internet bubble –, it totally puts me off and my inner music snob is telling me to keep a healthy distance. 

Everyone else has already boarded the hypetrain – why would you jump on the bandwagon now?

Because of these instincts, I sometimes actually run the danger of missing out on good music just because I think an artist “has already become too big”.

Over the years. I’ve learned to mindfully acknowledge those thoughts, but not get too attached to them and instead just listen to the music.

After a few weeks or months of stubbornly ignoring a hyped up record, I will finally come to my senses and listen. I tend to do it with journalistic scrutiny and an inquisitive mindset, asking myself:

Why does everyone seem invested in this?

Did they just fall for some clever marketing scam?

Or could it be that this Is this actually good?

I believe that most great music is timeless. If it’s truly great, it will still be great in two months, or in two years, or in 20 years.

These ramblings are a lengthy but hopefully relatable way to introduce a couple of short blurbs on albums I was almost slightly reluctant to write about. Even though these records are far from global smashes, I felt like they had already been written about everywhere.

I guess my inner music snob almost got the better of me.

But these three albums have already (sort of) stood the test of time. I’ve had them in my listening library for weeks if not months, and I’ve steadily returned to them since – not because some influencer posted about them, or some friendly label publicist nudged me to please listen again.

No, the simple truth is that these records are actually good.

Purelink – Faith (Peak Oil, 2025)

Purelink are a “band” of three producers (they met in Chicago, but are now based in New York) who make dreamy almost-ambient electronic music with loads of references to heady 2000s subgenres such as dub techno, microhouse and clicks’n’cuts (read: European labels like Chain Reaction, Mille Plateaux, City Centre Offices etc.)

I have a theory about their relative success. Many of my friends who, like me, are in their mid-40s and work in the wider music industry sphere as journalists, label people, DJs, curators etc., like their music because it reminds them of music they loved in their 20s – but in a subtly updated way that doesn’t make them feel old.

Nobody wants to be the boring out-of-touch dude, but these three young-ish dudes clearly weren’t around when artists like Oval, Pole, or Vladislav Delay – who need to be referenced in every Purelink review by law - first came out, and they still seem to genuinely like that stuff.

While many of their aesthetic references point to a certain golden era of experimental electronic music, they don’t just recreate that sound and leave it there. Their first album, 2023’s Signs, did so even more than their eagerly awaited new album, Faith, which sees the trio fleshing out their very own, distinctive sound on six long tracks.

While their debut was an all-instrumental affair, this features vocals by fellow electronic producer Loraine James and the poet Angelina Nonaj on two songs.

The music on Faith sounds even calmer, more clearly ambient. Some tracks do have beats, but they’re not mixed into the foreground at all; they’re out there in the mist, and in that way, Purelink are following the same path as Loraine James with her brilliant last album under the Whatever The Weather moniker, which I’ve called “ambient-not-ambient”.

Most of these tunes feel like long intros. They don’t build up tension but elevate the listener into a floating state. They appear and then fade away.

Faith merely hints at what’s beneath that veil of sound, and this is where Purelink are at their strongest – there’s definitely a palpable emotional core to these compositions, but they don’t hit you over the head with obvious mood signifiers or stupid literal lyrics, like much popular music does these days.

This is an austere, but weirdly inviting album; it’s not deliberately complex for the sake of being complex. This music remains mysterious, while at the same time feeling vaguely hopeful and most of all, deeply human.

Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe – Second (Balmat, 2025)

This record surprisingly came out on the Balmat imprint (co-run by electronic music journalist

Philip Sherburne

) which has mostly focused on ambient and experimental electronic music in the past.

Stephen Vitiello is an artist whom I definitely see in the Balmat world; he’s been part of that lowercase scene around labels like Taylor Deupree’s 12k and Richard Chartier’s Line for many years, a gifted producer with a knack for creating organic, textural ambient by means of studio wizardry.

Brandan Canty, on the other hand, is a drummer known for his long-time stints in genre-defining post-hardcore bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi; and Hahn Rowe is a violinist from New York’s downtown avant-garde who’s been active in the experimental rock band Hugo Largo.

You can read the story of how they met and decided to work together in an in-depth interview that Sherburne circulated via his

Futurism Restated

newsletter.

Futurism Restated 108: Stephen Vitiello on his new LP with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe

Their first recording, released in 2023 on the now-sadly-defunct Longform Editions label, was just one long 17-minute jam.

This new record feels like the trio’s proper longform statement though, a canvas for trying various approaches and processes while keeping a playful, exploratory spirit all the way, over nine six- to eight-minute tracks.

The three musicians’ shared comfort zone seems to be a forward-pushing version of instrumental post-rock. Not in that crescendocore sense though, more like Tortoise in their TNT phase, quite jazzy and playful, while slightly more energetic.

There’s also a heavy dub influence palpable, mostly in the way the record is produced and mixed. The combination of quasi-motorik pulses and synthscapes even sounds a bit krautrock-y. Some of these tunes remind me of late-1990s Stereolab instrumentals, circa Cobra and Phases – but Canty’s muscular drumming keeps them from ever becoming too ambient and textural, and Rowe’s violin gives this record a lot of its character.

This is not the type of heady deep listening music I often write about here – it’s an engaging record with super high replay value that works as background and foreground music, at least if you’re looking for a certain energy level, and that can sound very different depending on mood and setting.

billy woods

billy woods – GOLLIWOG (backwoodz, 2025)

2025 has been a good year for indie rap music so far. New albums from MIKE and PremRock kicked it off, and strong full lengths by the likes of Fatboi Sharif, Fly Anakin and, most recently, Aesop Rock, got released over spring.

But my favorite hip-hop album of the first half of the year comes from the true king of the present-day hip-hop underground, billy woods.

Active since the early 2000s, woods’ tenure as a music journo favorite started more recently, in the late 2010s. Most of his last records, the solo albums as well as the Armand Hammer joints, received either a rating above 8.0 or the Best New Music tag at Pitchfork.

The thing with woods is that even while releasing at a steady pace of at least one album with either a producer or his Armand Hammer partner Elucid per year, he hasn’t ever disappointed by dumbing his music down or making stuff that feels rushed. All of his collaborations have a conceptual feel to them; the quality level of his output remains alarmingly high.

GOLLIWOG is his first solo album with multiple producers since 2019’s Terror Management, and it’s yet another beast of a rap record – a dark, unruly, furious body of work, just perfect for this moment in time.

Even though woods does explore horror imagery and metaphors on GOLLIWOG, the ‘horrorcore’ references in many reviews still feel misleading, You could possibly draw a line back to the specific New York version of that sound (think mid-1990s Gravediggaz/Flatlinerz), but woods’ music is way too complex and versatile to file it under such a gimmicky subgenre tag.

The instrumentals on GOLLIWOG were created by some of woods’ long-time collaborators like Messiah Musik, Steel Tipped Dove or Kenny Segal, but I’m most excited about the contributions from Canadian electronic duo Saint Abdullah and L.A. jazz trio Human Error Club. Those moments make sure listeners can’t get too comfortable settling into the backwoodz sound as some kind of ersatz lo-fi boombap.

The featured artists range from Despot, a NYC indie rapper associated with the Def Jux label in the 2000s, to al.divino from Massachusetts, one of the most exciting voices of the post-Griselda underground.

Lyrically, woods and his guests paint a bleak picture of the declining west, chronicling the rise of racist authoritarianism and the ongoing backlash to the woke era – not so much through linear storytelling, but through a flickering kaleidoscope of haunting scenes and striking images.

These are many clumsy words to basically convince you the hype around woods is real. In my book, he’s truly a one-of-a-kind artist, and GOLLIWOG is conjuring his poetic vision vividly, in the darkest musical colors. If you’re just a slight bit into hip-hop, you need to give this artist some attention.