Curation over Criticism with Gabbie

This year’s interview series concludes with the one and only Gabbie! As the writer behind New Bands for Old Heads, she inspires many music lovers of all ages to keep up with current sounds. She possesses a vast music vocabulary and a keen curiosity to perpetually explore new music, which shines through her precise recommendations and astute commentary.1

Gabbie and I share a love of seeking out music beyond the mainstream and unearthing the underground. I enjoy reading her insights and observations to see where we relate and engage with music beyond my radar. In the spirit of year-end recapping, she and I met over video chat one late Sunday morning in November to get to know each other more and discuss the methodology of building our favorite music lists.2 She’s currently rolling out her 2025 best albums lists in a strategic four-part series, whereas I tend to share two lists: one for favorite albums and another for favorite songs.

Music has always been a central part of Gabbie’s life, an experience she thought everyone shared. “Everyone in my family is very musical, actually. Except me.” she laughed. Writing about the art form became a lifeline to stay connected to her passions. “I started writing music reviews as a hobby when I started college. I went to a school that has a world-class music conservatory, but I am not a musician myself. So this is my way to be creative and connect to something that actually matters to me.”

During our chat, I also learned about the story behind her social media handle, the origins of NBOH, the fragrance she’d pair with one of her favorite albums, and more.

Read on for the full Q&A. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is one of your earliest music memories?

My dad plays the accordion. He has a lot of friends who are musicians, too, and when I was a kid, they would come over to jam. Someone would play guitar, others would sing or play the piano. It was all very off the cuff. I remember falling asleep with that in the background. To this day, I need some kind of music or background noise to fall asleep to.

I can definitely envision that scenario, and it reminds me of some core memories of family gatherings. To this day, if we get together, we’re gonna be listening to my grandma’s favorite soul songs and singing along.

It brings people together. When everyone knows a song, you feel that from the inside out. We’re all family when we sing together.

Absolutely—it’s that kinship of “We all know this song, and we have all been there to sing this song.” So thank you for sharing that. Next, I’d like to know: what is the reference point for your username, “Me and Timory?”

That comes from a Ted Leo song called “Timorous Me,” about one of his fans named Timory Hyde who died very young. The song is kind of a ballad in her honor.

I always thought of it as an homage to the music obsessive fan. Ted Leo is one of the reasons that I am so emotionally attuned to music and why I started writing about music in the first place.

The name stood out to me on your social media profiles, but it’s bittersweet to learn the story behind it. When did you first hear this song?

Somewhere around the early 2000s. I was definitely in college, so I was the right age. When I found out that Timory was something like 22 when she died, I felt a stronger connection to her. She was forever young.

I think in our fantasies we’ve all envisioned ourselves as the star: the lead guitarist or the singer, right? But I always stop myself in that fantasy and bring myself back to reality. I know I don’t have the talent. This song is eulogizing the perfect audience member. The perfect fan.

“But I watched her sing along with every word
In the prettiest voice that I never heard
And I still see her dancing, wearing my shirt
Right there”

That I can relate to.

The way you described it is so poignant. It reminds me of latching onto something, and that thing defining one’s identity at a specific moment in time.3 To that same point, please tell me about the origins of New Bands for Old Heads.

It started out on TikTok, which is not a platform I really wanted to be on, to be honest with you. I’m not someone who gravitated towards making videos of myself talking, but I got sick of writing album reviews. There’s only so much you can say over and over about a record; I might get a little creative here and there and make it sound a little bit less formulaic, but ultimately people are just skipping ahead to see the score.

What I really care about is talking to people about new music and helping people who stopped listening to new music rediscover it. I realized that I was really good at comparing new music to the music that I was nostalgic for. I like that detective work—you know, hearing a little guitar lick and pinpointing the exact older track it comes from.

I much prefer writing as a medium. I get to talk about more than one record in a post instead of a little clip. It’s a lot more engaging. I get to embed music into my writing and discuss all the connections I’m making. But there’s nothing more interesting to it than that. I wish I had some sexy story for you!

I think that’s great because I gathered that you had the foundation of music writing, but then you tried a different medium and took something from that experience. It allowed you to explore music in ways that matter to you AND succinctly distill your discoveries for people who need that guidance. On a related note, how did you first get into music curation?

My goal is to get people to engage with new music again. So if I’m doing that, why am I going to tell anyone “and here are 10 albums that you shouldn’t give your time to” when people are already overwhelmed by how much is out there? I thought that the best way is to only talk about what they should be paying attention to. So curation versus criticism is where I landed. It seemed like a natural next step.

I didn’t really have to name that because my “if you like X, then you’ll like Y” formula was already doing it for me naturally. Whatever little blurb I write to accompany that is criticism enough.

Sometimes I’ll do a deep dive on a famous record that everyone’s already talking about and critique it because it’s already in the cultural ether. I think that is the proper forum for criticism. But I focus about 90% of my attention on underground, unknown music. Why am I going to give some tiny indie artist with 1000 Spotify listeners a month negative attention? That sucks! I’m just not gonna mention them at all if I don’t like them.

Agreed—there’s something for everybody. So someone will find value in the music and express that from their perspective. What are some qualifiers you consider when building your end-of-year list?

I don’t even know where to start with this question, honestly. I can’t fully buy in to that “best of” concept. I truly can’t. And ranking them on top of that—How are you actually deciding that? Maybe for a number one, because people have such an emotional connection with that one record or that handful of records. But how are you truly differentiating between number 23 and number 47? When I pull together a list at the end of the year, it’s essentially just an assortment of albums that struck me as most interesting over the course of the year, after listening to many hundreds. I used to have it down to a science, but I have given up on that.

Trust me, I can relate! I prefer the language of “favorite” because that is something I can more fully qualify. I’ve been using Last.fm to track my listens since I was a teenager, which helps. I also decided that I will only rank 12 favorites. However many months there are in a year, that’s how many albums you’re gonna get.

That’s nice. Do you do one per month, or is it just 12 because there are [that many] months per year, so this seems like a good spread?

It was the latter at first. Since I’ve started posting about albums that I listen to on a monthly basis, I’ve made it easier on myself by choosing a #1 play of the month. Then that allows me to ask when I build the EOY list: am I still going to include this, or will I opt for something else?

That makes sense.

So I’ve kind of developed my own methodology for it, but I do agree that the language of “best” and “top” just doesn’t resonate with me. It’s favorite because it’s more personal.

Yes, and no one can fight you on that. So for you, “favorite” implies frequency of listens?

Yes!

The reason why that’s harder for me is that the records I listen to the most are the ones I’m writing about, regardless of whether or not I actually like them. So that gets scrobbled a gazillion times and ends up being my top listen, even if it wasn’t necessarily something that I cared for that much. Also, I sometimes am obsessed with a particular song and not the rest of the album—even though I am usually a staunch full album listener.

Then my Spotify end-of-year list tells me I’m obsessed with one particular artist when in actual fact it’s just one of their songs.

I know, right?? Since Last.fm skews things, I’ve gotten used to comparing Apple Music Replay to Last.fm. I’ll take a screenshot of the top plays on both platforms and see where they compare. So it’s not about solely relying on the data—it’s also me informing it with my own perspective.

I appreciate that you have a system and that you’ve kept that system consistently for a long time. I don’t. I am very inconsistent. I used to keep a spreadsheet. Every time I’d listen to an album, I’d score it out of 10 and that would be my rubric throughout the year.

I noticed that the scores weren’t helping me. If you look at those aggregators, like Album of the Year or Metacritic, close to 90% of them are ranked 70 out of 100 or more. It doesn’t even make sense. The scores I gave were really similar.

Is every single album that comes out good? I wasn’t able to distinguish each 7 out of 10 that I gave. That’s not helping me when I’m trying to go back and discern which of these belongs on an end-of-year list. So I stopped. Scoring was useless to me.

This year for the first time ever, I haven’t looked at an aggregator. I haven’t read any reviews. I’ve just been looking at new release calendars to see what’s coming up so I can look at what to listen to. Then I’ll make my little playlists every month to track what I like. It’s been incredibly freeing.

On the topic of new releases: who are you currently listening to? Who are you always listening to (i.e. your music DNA)?

One brand new record that everyone’s been talking about that I have not loved is Snocaps, and everyone’s going to eat me alive for that. I’ve also practically memorized the new Lily Allen record, for better or worse, but only because I wrote about her.

I have been listening to a debut album from a band called CIEL, which reminds me of early 2000s Metric, and I’ve been really enjoying it.

As for what I always listen to? Actually, it’s a little bit sad, but I don’t think I can answer that. I always want to go back and listen to older music, but because of this new music world that I’ve thrown myself into, I find that I don’t have time. It’s depressing. In fact, if I don’t go back and listen to the songs and the music that I grew up with, or alternately, go back and listen to all my own musical gaps from past decades, I am only listening to new releases. That really bums me out.

I totally identify with that feeling, and I think that’s why I prefer having playlists to track what I’ve listened to each year/decade. On that note: is there an artist/album from 2000 that you’ve grown to appreciate over time?

The best answer I can think of off the top of my head actually is The Avalanches. This is more of a “I didn’t know about them at the time” answer; it wasn’t on my radar back then. I didn’t start listening to them until way after. Since I Left You is the album that I started with and know the best.

I recall you once mentioning that you curate experiences related to fragrance when you travel. If you could pair one of your favorite albums (from this year or beyond) with a fragrance, what would that pairing be?

One of my favorite albums this year was Smerz — Big city life. I’ve talked elsewhere about how it reminds me of the heat wave of the first summer I spent in Philadelphia: the late nights I’d spend out dancing, the cigarettes I’d smoke on stoops and in bars (because we still could back then!), and the sticky un-air conditioned concert venues I’d frequent. I didn’t wear any perfumes when I was in my 20s, so this isn’t a memory association, but I would pick État Libre d’Orange’s “Fin du Monde.”

This fragrance smells like an afterparty to me. It has this very strange, sticky popcorn note mixed with cigarettes or gunpowder. It’s like smelling perfume on somebody else’s clothes a few days after they sprayed it - present but not at all overpowering. Definitely a “wake up in somebody else’s bed” feeling, which is 100% the Smerz vibe. It’s certainly the closest I can think to bring me back to that time and place of my early adulthood without actually being able to recall a specific scent to anchor me there.

Is there anything else you'd like readers and listeners to know?

My big message about listening to new music is just to stay open-eared and open-minded. Don’t dismiss music just because it’s not what you’re used to!

Gabbie’s hallmark series offers new music recommendations based on older bands or genres that people already enjoy. We collaborated on a version of this format to compare albums from 2000 and 2025, essentially analyzing the evolution of music over the last 25 years. Our personal histories prompted two different experiences in terms of revisiting music from 2000.

Born in the ‘90s, I knew some singles from a couple of the albums we analyzed together (especially if they were radio or countdown show hits), but I was mainly looking to the past for discovery. I was curious to know how certain sound essences transcended time. Like I do with my own EOY lists, I sought to understand the consistency of feelings evoked by the music—similar to the ethos Gabbie described behind her music curation formula.

By comparison, Gabbie was a teenager at the turn of the 21st century, so she was able to look back to rediscover and reminisce. In conversation, we observed that the following pairings were not wholly reliant on their sonic similarities, but rather a holistic analysis of the music and what surrounds it.

What these albums have in common is that they are sophomore albums with overlapping themes of motherhood, soulfulness, and timely social commentary. Erykah Badu and anaiis became mothers in the interim between their first and second studio albums. They emerged back into the spotlight with even stronger conviction of their creative foundations and perspectives. There’s a beautiful expansiveness to these records where they just allow things to breathe, flourish, and grow—listening makes you feel warm and cozy. Both Mama’s Gun and Devotion & the Black Divine also make great use of vocal repetition that becomes incantations, like spells that mesmerize the listener.

During our chat, I began to preface that this comparison wasn’t a 1-1 when Gabbie mentioned that it was my strongest pairing—a compliment that filled me with pride! Both D’Angelo and Dijon grew up in the DMV area and have honored their roles as descendants of specific musical lineages—synthesizing their influences into something that simultaneously revives the existing sounds and takes on a life of its own.

From the sustained gospel notes and breathy crooning to the analog quality, this is reference-heavy music that’s as raw as it is refined. Both of the songs I’ve selected as examples (“Feel Like Makin’ Love” and “Another Baby!”) are also about lovemaking. Kinda goes without saying, but Prince's inspiration is palpable on Voodoo and Baby—thematically and instrumentally. Additionally, they share Pino Palladino as a collaborator.

When comparing a 2025 hip-hop album to OutKast’s Stankonia, it seems that the obvious and easy choice would be JID’s God Does Like Ugly, considering that both he and the aforementioned rap duo are from Atlanta. JID was also featured in OutKast’s tribute performance during this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. However, I believe that BLACK’!ANTIQUE by Pink Siifu is a closer match to OutKast’s brand of funky, left-field Southern hip-hop. The degrees of separation between the two are minimal, since Dungeon Family’s very own Big Rube is a frequent collaborator of Pink Siifu—both Stankonia and BLACK’!ANTIQUE conclude with his signature spoken word narrative features.

In addition to various all-star appearances from contemporaries, both albums also share potent rhythms to dance to, pearl-clutching vulgarity, raw lyrics that prompt reflection on life, and the stoic black-and-white/greyscale cover art. Although many rap groups and collectives have come and gone in the wake of OutKast’s departure, I will admit that no modern Southern rap duo has picked up exactly where they left off.4 Still, Pink Siifu channels that creative energy and a reverence for dirty south music at large.

File under: avant-garde, neo-psychedelic, mystical freak folk from some of my favorite musicians of the last 25 years. Both Animal Collective and Saya Gray make music that’s not easy to pin down under one genre, but the results are heady and curious and keep listeners on their toes!

From Detroit to Montreal: I recommend both of these albums if you like rock with heavy bluesy guitar, experimental DIY flair, and hyper-focused themes (on the surface, Yves Jarvis was inspired by his love of driving music, whereas The White Stripes named their album after a Dutch art movement). While The White Stripes always leaned heavily into roots music and Yves Jarvis takes a definitive “all of the above” approach, both De Stijl and All Cylinders incorporate a wide array of influences and lyrics that invite deep study. They achieve a goal of paying homage without being too derivative. Visually, the album artwork and packaging share the color scheme of black, white, and red. I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to link the songs “Why Can’t You Be Nicer to Me?” and “I’ve Been Mean.”

Mass Romantic is my favorite New Pornographers record. It’s so completely of its time, and I’ve never been able to find a great modern analogue for their brand of high energy, high production power pop.

This album was such a big deal to me when I was in college, and I wanted to see what would capture that big joy of this record. The key of The New Pornographers was how big it was and slick in its sound, but most of what taps into their influence these days misses that specific mark.

When I heard The Beths’ new record, I felt the closest approximation of the joyful, sweeping, emotional resonance of Mass Romantic. A little ironic that “No Joy” is the song that brought me the most joy!

If you’re into the more melodic and accessibly fun side of riot grrrl, it’s not a long stretch at all to recommend a band that names this genre—and Sleater-Kinney specifically—as a direct influence on their work. I had the pleasure of hosting a listening party with SHAGGO on the New Bands for Old Heads Discord server just before they released their debut record this past summer, and they are so passionate about reviving the homemade punk aesthetic of the ‘90s.

There are many Gen Z bands who are influenced by their Gen X parents’ music, but SHAGGO embodies the ethos as much as the sound, and they are all in. I hear so much promise in their music, and I want more people to listen to it and hear them come into their own.

I gave myself a very difficult assignment trying to find a modern match to Since I Left You, and I’ll be the first to admit there’s nothing quite like it. The CV Vision record sonically goes in different places than The Avalanches, and it’s perhaps not as layered or complex. But give it a try if electronic musical collage sounds like your cup of tea. Both records have a similar controlled chaos that connects them.

There has been a lot of excellent hip-hop in recent years, but much of it has been either raw, heavy, and introspective (think billy woods) or over the top, outlandish, and experimental (like JPEGMAFIA). Jurassic 5, maybe even moreso than other conscious or “backpack” rappers and producers in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, had very laid back, feelgood vibes. They didn’t make you feel the weight of the world; they were for blasting outside on a hot and sunny day. McKinley Dixon may not sound quite the same, but his music certainly serves the same purpose. It’s joyous and uplifting. It makes you excited to be alive.

Thanks Gabbie for this insightful and enjoyable chat! Please follow along with her work below. We also made a playlist of our picks—available on Spotify and Apple Music.

Have you already compiled your favorite/top/best music of 2025 list, or is it still a work in progress? Either way, I invite you to submit your EOY recaps to be featured in the December edition of The Medley. I’m accepting submissions through December 28, 2025, at 11:59 PM EST.

Submit your EOY lists here!