There's a kid who comes into the store every few weeks, always asking about bands nobody's heard of yet. Last Tuesday he mentioned Crispies—three times on this playlist—and I realized I'd stopped analyzing and started just running to them. That's rare for me. I catalog everything. I rank, I cross-reference, I make lists about my lists. But sometimes a playlist just works, and you don't question it until you're three miles in and your head's finally quiet.
MAYNINTH—which I'm assuming is May 9th compressed into something more urgent—runs 38 minutes and feels like someone recorded the exact moment garage rock remembered it could be vulnerable. Crispies opens with "Good Times Only," which is a lie, obviously, but it's the kind of lie you need to get out the door. Hembree's "Money Time Love" follows, and you're already moving before you realize the BPM jumped. That's the trick here: the playlist doesn't telegraph its moves.
By the time you hit "The Runaround" by Zip-Tie Handcuffs—which sounds like a band name I would've made up in 2003 and been proud of—you're in that stretch where running stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like momentum. Hifiklub's "Over" arrives right when you need something looser, less insistent. Then Strawberry Fuzz does this live session version of "Sadness" that's rawer than anything around it, and suddenly you're not running away from something, you're running toward figuring out what that something is.
The Mating Ritual track—"Good God Regina It's A Bomb"—is pure garage rock melodrama, the kind of song title that makes you want to start a band or at least reorganize your vinyl by emotional intensity. It's followed by The Thing's "Dixie Queen," which I had to look up because The Thing could refer to about seventeen different bands, but this one sounds like they recorded it in a basement in 1998 and just now remembered to release it.
What's strange about this playlist is how it holds together without trying too hard. Aspen Forest, Evening Elephants, Oceaneater—these aren't household names. They're bands you find because you're looking, or because someone who was looking made you a playlist. And that's the point, I think. MAYNINTH isn't trying to be definitive. It's just 16 tracks that know when to push and when to let go, which is more than most runners—or record store clerks—can say about themselves.
I've been running the lakefront for years, and I've learned that the best playlists aren't the ones that match your pace exactly. They're the ones that know something about momentum you forgot. This one knows that good times aren't the only times, that sometimes you need Trouble Andrew yelling "Bang Bang" at you, and that Clans closing with "Terrorize" is exactly the right kind of unresolved ending. You finish the run. The playlist stops. But nothing's actually settled. You're just back where you started, except now you're out of breath and you've got a new list forming in your head: Top 5 playlists that worked when I stopped asking why they worked.
