22. Japanese Breakfast - “Boyish”

Never has hopelessness sounded as grandiose as it does within this jam. It’s almost as if the collective heartache of every teenager who ever felt unrequited love was channeled together within the ether and translated into a single anthem. All of us can relate. Regardless of who you are, look hard enough and you’re bound to find pieces of yourself, forgotten and obscured within the regret and embarrassment of memory.

It’s the ideal soundtrack in which those memories can breathe, a song that was meant to accompany the internal monologue of anyone who has ever soaked within despair while awkwardly swaying their lonely bodies within the dark and deserted corners of the dance floor. It doesn’t matter if your dance floor was an actual floor meant for dancing, or a bedroom, hallway, classroom, party, movie theater, or computer screen. The result is the same – an anti-anthem that all of us can relate to and a soundscape in which longing is given life. It’s like the personification of a delicious scent within those old Disney cartoons that tricks us into going somewhere against our will. It’s entrancing, eclipsing every other thought to hang within our mind like the giant glowing orb of a harvest moon. It’s impossible to look away from. We can feel it’s warmth from a distance, reaching out to haunt and deceive us even from behind the cold confines of space, and yet try as we might to stay strong, we can’t help but eventually be drawn in and surrender to its gravity.