Surely we're all excited for this! 13 in, 13 out. As opposed to the usual 10 in 10 out.

I'm also gonna take the opportunity to mention a site i've created a few years ago that'll help you actually listen to all albums from the book: https://1001albumsgenerator.com

It gives you one album a day from the book. Free of course! Funnily enough, we passed 1001 finished projects today as well.

The site has been updated with these new additions as well, making the total number of albums 1102 (i'm keeping all removed albums from all editions).

With that said, here are the changes for this new edition. They rarely remove any older entries unfortunately. Could do with a proper cleanup.

I miss Teen Dream and Power In Numbers already! Big fan of the Alvvays album, but i'm pretty sure i could live without another Rolling Stones one?

Removed

• Fiona Apple - Fetch The Bolt Cutters (2020)
• Little Simz - Grey Area (2019)
• Hookworms - Microshift (2018)
• Jane Weaver - Modern Kosmology (2017)
• Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)
• Hot Chip - In Our Heads (2012)
• Django Django - Django Django (2012)
• Beach House - Teen Dream (2010)
• Wild Beasts - Two Dancers (2009)
• The Mars Volta - De-Loused In The Comatorium (2003)
• Jurassic 5 - Power In Numbers (2002)
• Drive-By Truckers - Southern Rock Opera (2001)
• Super Furry Animals - Rings Around The World (2001)

Added

• Alvvays - Blue Rev (2022)
• Nova Twins - Supernova (2022)
• The Rolling Stones - Hackney Diamonds (2023)
• The Chemical Brothers - For That Beautiful Feeling (2023)
• St. Vincent - All Born Screaming (2024)
• The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World (2024)
• Charli xcx - Brat (2024)
• Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard And Soft (2024)
• jasmine.4.t - You Are The Morning (2025)
• Ela Minus - Día (2025)
• Mon Rovîa - Bloodline (2026)
• Poppy - Empty Hands (2026)
• Charli xcx - Wuthering Heights (2026)

Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish and Dutch lead singer Floor Jansen have parted ways.

My daughter was listening to "Say So" by Doja Cat on YouTube. And I asked her to replay it because something sounded eerily familiar—as if I heard it before.

Turns out, it sounds remarkably similar to the future funk song "Skylar Spence" by Saint Pepsi. If you're unaware, future funk is a genre that originated in the 2010s. It's basically a mix of disco and vaporwave. It has its following, but never cracked the mainstream.

But hold on... "Skylar Spence" samples "Love Talkin' (Honey It's You)" by Tatsuro Yamashita, one of the heavyweights of city pop.

City pop is what's known as a retronym. That is, a label we give to music when a retrospective canon gets formed, requiring recontextualization. Yacht rock is another example of a retronym.

In Japan, where city pop originates from, city pop is an obscure genre even though city pop songs themselves are popular. That's because it was simply mainstream pop in Japan.

Now don't get me wrong. "City pop" as a term existed in Japan during the 80s. But this wasn't a genre with a defined musical structure. It was more a marketing term to sell aspiration, much like how we in the West hear terms like "contemporary" and "sophisti-pop". Because of this, most Japanese people didn't recognize city pop as an identifiable thing.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Westerners started hearing Japanese music from the 80s. They needed context. So they re-purposed a Japanese marketing term to define a corpus, a body of work that identified Japanese music with broad similarities that seemed to have an associated scene.

The city pop canon was never big in the West. Even now, it's only known amongst music nerds. But its effect on modern mainstream music is huge. Here's examples:

• "Out of Time" by The Weeknd samples Tomoko Aran's "Midnight Pretenders"
• "GONE, GONE / THANK YOU" by Tyler, the Creator interpolates Tatsuro Yamashita's "Fragile"
• "We Ride" by Brave Girls was a Top 5 K-pop hit, but it was blatantly marketed as city pop upon its release

What's wild? City pop is not the only obscure genre to impact the mainstream but never hit the mainstream. Witch house, phonk, and vaporwave all had a big impact. But none of the artists who originated these genres have ever become house house names.

I think this is one of the defining characteristics of 21st-century music. A genre can remain underground while its sounds, production techniques, and aesthetics become completely mainstream.

We're in a time where the mainstream raids from subculture before subculture can ever challenge it.

Is this why we no longer see musical revolutions like jazz, rock, punk, hip hop, and grunge?

Has the mainstream become so good at absorbing underground music that new genres can influence it without ever displacing or fundamentally transforming it?