What I'm Hearing: Geese's New Single, Lord Huron's Quiet Dominance, Neil Young vs. Van Morrison

Plus: MJ Lenderman covers one of Jason Molina's greatest songs

A few weeks ago on Indiecast, I made an observation I later (somewhat) regretted. I said that 2025 was a weak year so far for music. I didn’t regret it because I don’t believe that right now, I regretted it because I know better than to proclaim such things right now. Such things reveal themselves over time.

This truism seems especially apt for Cameron Winter, whose 2024 album Heavy Metal came out last December right as year-end lists were dropping. Just seven months later, I suspect that Winter’s record would likely be on many of those lists if critics had a redux. The gnarled and emotionally charged psych-rock ballads collected on Heavy Metal have blown a lot of minds — I wrote about it here — though I’m still partial to Winter’s last album with his band Geese. 3D Country is yet another slow-burn favorite — it generated positive but not ecstatic reviews upon release, perhaps because some critics (like me) weren’t all that crazy about Geese’s 2021 debut, Projector. On that album, they seemed like just another NYC post-punk band in thrall to the city’s past musical greats. But on 3D Country, they showed they were capable of following their Pablo Honey with a The Bends-style reinvention. A wild, druggy, jammy, and exhilarating ride, 3D Country made my year-end list in 2023 but only in the low 20s. I now consider it one of my favorite rock records of the 2020s.

All of this is to say that I’m excited for the newly announced Getting Killed, which was teased this week with a great single, “Taxes,” spotlighted in a truly deranged music video that has serious “Darren Aronofsky’s Mother” vibes. That might not sound like a ringing endorsement but I promise it is.

On this week’s Indiecast I definitely did not regret recommending the Detroit band Neu Blume, whose latest album Let It Win is loaded with low-key slacker indie-country jams. (Shout out to Josh Terry’s great newsletter No Expectations, which hipped me this album via his mid-year albums list.)

Over at Uproxx, I wrote about the L.A. band Lord Huron, whose new album The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1 comes out on Friday. But I mostly focused on the 10th anniversary of “The Night We Met,” the cinematic, nostalgic love song that currently has more than 3.1 billion on Spotify. That’s right, billion. “The Night We Met” is one of the most popular tracks on the platform ever, kind of incredible given that Lord Huron (despite being an enduringly successful live act) isn’t really a household name. There are, in my view, a defining example of a “popular but not famous” band.

To put those numbers in perspective, it’s helpful to compare them to other songs typically regarded as the biggest rock anthems of the 21st century by indie-adjacent acts. I recently wrote about “Mr. Brightside,” a defining jock jam of the modern era by one of the best-known arena-rock bands. That song has almost 2.7 billion streams. “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes also has bulletproof “sports song” status — it has just under 2 billion streams. Arctic Monkeys, the acknowledged champs of British rock in the past 20 years, clocked more than 2.6 billion streams for their biggest hit, “Do I Wanna Know?” (A TikTok craze a few years back also propelled the lesser known “I Wanna Be Yours” to 3.1 billion plays.)

The rivals to “The Night We Met” on Spotify include the top songs by two of the biggest pop-rock institutions of the century, Coldplay (“Yellow,” just over 3.1 billion streams) and Imagine Dragons (“Believer,” nearly 3.5 billion). The only band that decisively outpaces them is another “popular but not famous” LA group from the 2010s, The Neighbourhood, whose LGBTQ+-themed 2013 hit “Sweater Weather” presently sits at almost 3.9 billion streams.

Read more here.

Over on Never Ending Stories, we reviewed new albums by two of my most beloved grumpy old men, Neil Young and Van Morrison. One of the albums is quite good, and one of them is quite not good. I’m going to post a song from the one I think is quite good. As for the other one, I’m starting to wonder if this particular artist has another truly great album in him. The 21st century, for the most part, has been a bumpy artistic ride. When I did a column on this person’s discography, sifting through their work from the last 20 years nearly broke me.

I leave you with a newly released cover of “Just Be Simple,” one of all my all-time favorite Jason Molina songs, by one of my current-time faves, MJ Lenderman. It comes from an upcoming tribute album, I Will Swim to You: A Tribute To Jason Molina, due in September.

What are you hearing lately? Let me know in the comments!