Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music, both homegrown and national, over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
Jordan Duffy, ‘Not Your Dream Girl’
Movie endings can often be so unrealistic that they feel downright alien — and Jordan Duffy took that concept and ran with it. The Los Angeles-based, Worcester-raised artist has released her new song “Not Your Dream Girl,” a response to sappy, eye-roll-inducing finales in film. The single and its (extraterrestrial-infested) music video brought some kaleidoscopic pop to the doldrums of January.
Duffy sparked the idea for “Not Your Dream Girl” while watching Sixteen Candles and musing about what the soundtrack would sound like if the final acts of John Hughes movies weren’t so sweet. Using ’80s nostalgia as a springboard, she crafted a bubbly synth-pop tale of tenacity that aligned with some of her lived experience. The music video takes the tune in a campier direction, staging a surprise intergalactic romance within the most classic John Hughes setting: A high school. It might just be the most lifelike affair you see on this side of Valentine’s Day.
Cape Crush and Good June, ‘Apple at the Aggy’
Behold, the Massachusetts rock triple threat we needed to trudge through January: Good Dogs Wear Capes, a three-way split record featuring Cape Crush, Good June, and Impossible Dog. Releases from the forthcoming collaboration were sprinkled throughout the month, starting with the steady power-emo jam “Apple at the Aggy,” which welcomes Good June vocalist and guitarist Alex Ilyadis to Cape Crush’s camp. As Ilyadis exchanges lines with Cape Crush’s Ali Lipman, the pair forge a vocally delicate duet that’s charged by bursts of arena-ready guitars.
Meech BOLD, ‘Brockton Boxer’
There’s a word that Meech BOLD‘s new song “Brockton Boxer” returns to, over and over again: Heavy. “Way that I live is heavy / Things that I risk is heavy / All that I bare is heavy / Pardon my hands is heavy” the Brockton emcee raps on the track. The word appears over 25 times throughout the lyrics, and for good reason. As Meech BOLD describes in an Instagram post about “Brockton Boxer,” he’s witnessed his hometown shouldering the weight of “heavy circumstances . . both fiscally and spiritually.”
With that context in mind, the rhythm of “Brockton Boxer” becomes a bit like doing reps at the gym, with the artist growing stronger and more dogged each time he utters the song’s central word. The song positions Meech BOLD as a determined citizen who’s still building his community-based work; as he signs off in the aforementioned Instagram post, “I stand on the front lines.”
Cut The Kids In Half, ‘Song of Two Humans’
There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s engaging in a conversation that’s “stillborn.” Care to guess which one stymied a friendship for Cut The Kids In Half? The Boston-via-New Jersey band dredge up a soured exchange in “Song of Two Humans,” a tune that untethers its narrator from someone they no longer want to be involved with. The searing alt-rock riffs fueling “Song of Two Humans” are matched by Silver’s lyrical daggers; “You’re a temple / And I’m only passing through it” comes to mind, along with the aforementioned zing about a “stillborn” conversation. Yet the band’s story never becomes unkind — just painfully honest. Depending on who you relate to in this scenario — Silver or his old acquaintance — the single’s message is either an exhale of relief or a gut-gnawing goodbye.
FifteenØeight, ‘Empty Handed’
Some artists seek clarity when lost in a haze; others cloak themselves in the smog and wind some synths around it. FifteenØeight fall into the latter category on “Empty Handed,” a misty shroud of electro-pop that arrived at the tail end of January. The follow-up to the Boston duo’s 2024 album TRUTHFULLY is a series of contemplations that escalates from a simple acoustic guitar melody to towers of flickering synths. “Am I just floating around? / Excusing all my actions?” singer Daphne Eleftheriadou calmly asks amidst the maelstrom, later sharing the almost-mythical lyric “I should have let the water strip away my skin.”