Summer Songs Supermix

Spyplane's Version

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Every now and then — too rarely, really — we put together a playlist of new songs we are feeling, and we mix these with older slappers in a genre-agnostic fashion.

The juxtapositions, adjacencies and resonances we create tend to smudge the edges of strict linear time. The more you listen, the harder it can be to discern what’s new and what’s old, and the line between familiar and unfamiliar bleeds, too. Listening to a Spyplane playlist, you will hear a song for the first time but feel certain you have heard it before — and you will hear a song you have played hundreds of times and hear new things in it, to the degree that you wonder if it’s a different recording than the one you’re used to… possibly “Spyplane’s Version.”

Today we’re dropping a new playlist for Summer 2025. It’s 90 minutes and 21 songs long.

There are no songs by Justin Bieber. His new album, which he made with what sounds like a lot of help and inspiration from the young Spyplane chune hero Mk.gee, has cool things we like on it, but nothing that we like as much as the time earlier this year when Bieber went Hoodie Over Bathrobe Over Hoodie (H.O.B.O.H.) Mode — a splitting-the-atom-grade layering breakthrough captured in low-res in the artwork above.

The longest song is nearly 15 minutes, the second-longest song lasts 8, and both of these capacious fellas understay their welcome. The rest are normal-song length, except for the three shortest, which are 2:12, 2:10 and 2:07, and they rock, even though Songs Are Too Short These Days.

Out of 21 songs total, 12 have readily identifiable guitars. There are 16 with vocals, 14 with lyrics, and 2 (Alex G and The Band) with accordions. They make me want to learn how to play the accordion.

I have listened to this playlist so many times by now — deleting, amending, rearranging, making it hum — that I can hear / hallucinate not just thematic echoes but interconnected quasi-narratives across it. There are two sad, beautiful songs about sad, beautiful East Coast American cities, including a funky and forlorn opener about Baltimore written by Randy Newman and interpreted by Nina Simone. Soon afterwards there’s a Mac DeMarco track about filling up a city with so many regrets that you can’t imagine ever setting foot there again.

Later on, a characteristically chill verse by the Bay Area’s own Larry June, who loves Jean Prouvé, who designed some great lamps, segues into a gorgeous, amped-up song by Baltimore’s Turnstile called “Light Design.”

Toward the end, there’s a 1996 Björk remix from an album Erin owned on CD in high school and put me on to. The song has a fantastic, hopped-up and aggro beat that sounds much more enormous and f--ked up than I remember anything pop-adjacent sounding in 1996, which is Björk for you. This leads into a trio of tracks (Smerz, The Pool, Geese) that sound like they have debris rattling around in the percussion, as if the Björk drums knocked something loose.

Find the SPYPLANE SUMMER SLAPPERS 2025 playlist on Apple here

Find the SPYPLANE SUMMER SLAPPERS 2025 playlist on Spotify here

One quick piece of accounting: There’s a cool track by the underground rapper J3 called “I Got Twenty.” J3 has a thing where he raps numbers over beats in a way that is both funny and deft. He’s gifted, as a Fader writer put it earlier this year, at “finding numbers with the best rhythm, making sure they either rhyme or flow through the line well, and delivering them with conviction — it’s absurd yet quite beautiful, its own integer-based cut-up poetry.”

Despite the title, “I Got Twenty” is not one of J3’s number songs, my favorite of which is an IG snippet that the homie Wes from Understory put us on to.

103, 370, 88, 6,000,000,000 and P🎻E🎻A🎻C🎻E til next time,

— J & E

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