Sound Signal is Third Bridge Creative’s curated guide to the best music writing on the internet, published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at soundsignal.fm. Below is an excerpt of that content.
After a summer spent wallowing in nostalgia, it’s been refreshing to spend the past week listening, processing, and discussing two highly anticipated and fairly substantial new releases, Charli xcx’s Music, Fashion, Film and The Strokes Reality Awaits. The Charli release leapfrogs over two potentially large career potholes: how to follow up an epoch-defining album, and how to use that challenge as the central thematic throughline of a new work. Her solution – guitars and intense self-reflection – could’ve been a slog, but Charli’s attitude carries the show, and A.G. Cook ‘s densely textured, stylistically omnivorous production keeps you leaning in and listening. And, as far as The Strokes’ album: it’s weird, and you’re going to either love it or hate it, but you have to admire their pure chutzpah.
Elsewhere, the great AI backlash continues unabated: Spotify users are taking matters into their own hands when it comes to detecting AI tracks; MIDiA makes a case for human curation; and Dada Drummer makes a “modest proposal” to combat AI-generated music with a user-centric streaming model. Mary Chiney’s seemingly unrelated (and thoroughly excellent) paean to short song hits on the mood: we’re all looking for something authentic and human, even if that arrives in 45-second, perfectly imperfect packages.
The temperature is hot, and the future seems unknowable, but one can hope that the disruption and attendant revolt of these times will land us in a place both strange and meaningful.
Charli offers us a whole song dedicated to friend and collaborator A.G. Cook, and it’s sweet! Music, Fashion, Film is Charli’s fashionably short, first-draft “one for me” record, and it trades BRAT’s club pop and shredded electronics for guitars. Much of the album requires familiarity with Charli’s whole deal, but this track is transparently heartfelt.
The New Yorker · Amanda Petrusich
Charli once famously wore a tee that declared “They don’t make statues of critics.” That’s true, but, if any modern critic deserves one, it’s probably Amanda Petrusich. Here, Petrusich smooshes two of the season’s bigger releases – Music, Fashion, Film and the Strokes’ Reality Awaits – into a review that looks to Lou Reed and Rob Zombie for words of wisdom. She concludes that there is “some emptiness or corruption lurking at their centers, threatening to take hold,” and bemoans that both are more about “inhabiting and manipulating the machine than about raging against it.”
Obsolete Sony spends its days documenting the machines most of us have forgotten how to appreciate, and here it lands a genuine coup: Akira Tanaka, the Sony engineer who actually built the later Walkman models, on why the company can’t just reissue one. The short version of the answer has nothing to do with corporate stubbornness. It’s that the suppliers, the tooling, and even the industrial knowledge and personnel are all scattered. Ultimately, you can’t order a bill of materials for a world that no longer exists.
Bingen declares it the summer of Charli xcx’s Music, Fashion, Film and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (as well as “a book I just read that I will not name as…I do not wish for the author to be bullied”), and she’s definitely not loving it, and the universal critical acclaim for these leaves her frustrated. Critics owe both their readers and the artist their honesty, and a plurality of perspectives actually helps drive the conversation. Also, “Charli xcx won’t become your friend because you gave Music, Fashion, Film a five-star review.”
MIDiA Research · Laura Fisher
MIDiA’s Laura Fisher opines that many of today’s superfans, those who the industry has identified as lucrative revenue streams, want to spend more time away from their phone, and they’re increasingly unsatisfied with the prospect of unlimited choice. They want “omakase listening,” where they hand the aux chord to a trusted source to provide context, curation, and narrative. Her big takeaway is that “editorial identity, not just personalization, retains the superfan segment.”
404 Media · Emanuel Maiberg
There’s always been sub-economies that’ve lurked on the underbelly of streaming music goliaths, think the playlist-for-pay or repost services that’ve presented “opportunities” for tech savvy bros to game the billion dollar system. The latest wave of these seems more nobly minded. Maiberg tracks SoullessMusic.com and SlopTracker’s attempts to out those prodigious AI auteurs. You can argue about whether this is righteous bid for transparency or witchhunt, but it’s undoubtedly filling a void that Spotify has created.
Dada Drummer · Damon Krukowski
Damon Krukowski’s long-running dispatch on the economics of music lands on a fix that’s intuitive, simple, and still, somehow radical: pay the artists people actually listen to. It’s called “user-centric accounting” (i.e. if you listen to artist X 75% of the time, 75% of eligible subscription fee goes to artist X) instead of the pooled-royalty pot (i.e., pro-rata) the majors have gamed. It’s hardly a new argument, but it’s one that’s increasingly salient in our post-bot streaming world.
The Guardian · Dave Simpson
The canonization of Durutti Column by a generation who wasn’t yet born when they made their classic run is one of the more surprising and encouraging developments in music over the past few years. And, on the cusp of releasing their first album in 16 years, Vini Reilly fields readers questions and plays the hits: Joy Division gluing sandpaper sleeves, Ian Curtis’s final phone call, a touching Tony Wilson tribute, and tea on the Morrissey sessions.
Jazz Noted · Michael Daniels
If you’re an American reader, and have ever daydreamed about escaping our MAGA-stained hellscape for the comparatively gentle environs of the Scandinavian dreamland Copenhagen, know that some of Jazz’s most iconic figures got there way before you. More so than romance or politics, this hipster flight came down to infrastructure: one club, a state broadcaster, and cheap airfare.
NME · Ali Shutler
In 2026, it’d be foolish to dismiss the impact of video games on music culture, and Ali Shutler tracks down one of the original masters of the video game music form. Composer’s Akira Yamaoka’s score for the 1999 blockbuster shifted what was both possible and desired, and decades of subsequent composers have tried to replicate his attempts to imbue the game with “a sense of psychological unease…the feeling that something is wrong, even if you can’t explain exactly what it is.”
The Quietus · Mary Chiney
When discussing the modern shift away from the big, epoch defining novel to the more short, compact novella or genre exercise, the late Chilean novelist bemoaned a public that was “afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.” In her defense of short songs, Mary Chiney makes a different point: the interludes and tossed off song sketches that frequently scattered across major albums reveal more about the artist than the overlabored singles or the epic masterpieces. These accidents are the places where “you have found the place where the record dropped its guard, and stayed.”
→ Read more of this week’s best articles here
A German DJ in a horse mask who answers to Stella Stallion and swears she’s half-equine. The joke could have ended at the viral ‘My Barn My Rules,’ but ‘only the best’ keeps the mask on and aims it at luxury, deadpanning about wanting only the finest while the beat refuses to take her, or money, seriously.
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