Now Playing: January 2020

We’re kicking off the new year with an incredible issue! For this month’s NOW PLAYING, our January featured poet Zach Linge shares what music they’ve been listening to these days.

Zach Linge

In the wake of Jan. 2, I’ve been re-listening to Anohni’s album HOPELESSNESS. Also, older Xiu Xiu: favorites like “Little Panda McElroy” and “Buzz Saw,” songs that are rich with sadness and self-hate. I’m finding it important to identify (with) what I hate about myself, my complicities and comforts, to look directly at these things, to feel them. These songs aren’t productive—they don’t do anything—but they foreground self-scrutiny and self-awareness, and that, I think, is a decent first step toward a solution: identifying and admitting the problem.