Pop, Lock & Bops: Best of January 2019

Welcome to Pop, Lock & Bops, a monthly playlist series documenting our favorite windswept country tunes, heartfelt tearjerkers and down-right intoxicating dirty-pop club bangers.

The world is still on fire, but at least, we have music. ROZES howls her way into the new year with “Halfway There,” a freedom-powered mountain topper pushing the needle forward. Her voice is cataclysmic, as she tears her claws through the rubber-pinned patriarchy. Mixing organic piano and synthetic theatrics, she propels her spirit onward and upward. The odds are stacked against her, but that only fuels the fire stoked in her gut. The song, beginning as an intimate prayer, soon explodes into a gospel-glued hymnal. She looks skyward for the answers, but what she needed all along was buried deep in her skin.

The ferociously blood-thirsty glam-rocker Aaron David Gleason lurches with a gothic-turned romper called “I Was a Teenage Zombie,” a vital conversation piece from his new album Gilly Leads, one of four new albums dropped this year so far. He sticks his tongue out and slithers in the grim of a dive-bar, permitting himself to sell his soul for freedom. “I’ll give you nothing but pain,” he spits, situating a decayed, dirty relationship as a searing ritual of liberation. He doesn’t mask his pain; in fact, it punch the grit squarely in this teeth, as a display of sheepish grandeur.

Punk-rock troupe FIDLAR pop a top (again) on their new song “By Myself,” a skin-seething haze of booze, frenetic beats and sexual energy. “I didn’t know it felt good to cry,” the band spouts between caked layers of rabble-rousing and guitar clashes. In unleashing every shred of emotion, celebrating the misery as much as the new-found catharsis, they skate out of one black abyss into another and choosing to accept the current state of things. “Everybody says I need professional help / But I don’t wanna think about that anymore…”

The new roundup playlist also includes: filous, Torrey Mercer, The Darcys, Lizzo, Wrabel, Andrew Cassara, Betty Who, Vandoliers, Marlene Oak, Caroline Spence, Mindy Glendhill and countless others.

When all is said and done, we’ve got 63 songs to bookend a great year of music.

Take a spin:

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