Barry said this playlist wouldn't work. Too slow, he said. Too art school. "Nobody runs to Charlotte Gainsbourg," he said, like he'd just won an argument we weren't having. And maybe he's right about most people. But Barry's never reorganized his entire existence around finding music that makes moving feel like something other than punishment, so what does he know.
Here's the thing about 119 BPM—it's the tempo where electroclash meets your actual heartbeat on an easy run. Not the aspirational heartbeat of some maniac doing intervals, but the one you've got when you're just trying to clear your head after a week of chaos. LCD Soundsystem's "Tribulations" kicks this whole thing off, and it's the DFA sound doing what DFA does best: making you feel cool about something that's fundamentally uncool, like running alone on a Thursday morning because you couldn't sleep again.
The genius move here—and I'm not sure if it's intentional or accidental, which somehow makes it better—is how this thing weaves between alternative dance, art pop, and electronica without ever committing to being a proper dance playlist. Goldfrapp's "Train" floats in with that Felt Mountain-era atmosphere, all haunted and deliberate, before Coast Modern shows up twice like they're the house band for your existential crisis. "The Way It Was" into Sir Sly's "&Run" is the one-two punch that makes you think maybe forward motion actually means something.
The Raveonettes doing "Love In a Trashcan" is placed exactly where you need garage-rock fuzz filtered through a drum machine. It's Jesus and Mary Chain if they'd grown up with DJs instead of distortion pedals, and it slots between the stuttering electronics of !!! and Simian Mobile Disco like someone actually thought about how trip hop DNA still runs through all of this. These aren't just dance tracks—they're art-damaged dance tracks, which is the only kind that makes sense when you're running to avoid thinking about everything else.
Then "Bohemian Like You" drops in, and you remember The Dandy Warhols made the entire electroclash revival possible before electroclash even knew it was a thing. Dig! came out in 2004 and told the whole story: the DFA parties, the Vice Magazine aesthetic, the Rapture and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and every band that made being cool in Brooklyn feel like a full-time job. This track is from 2000, which means it predicted all of it.
Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Trick Pony" is the wall breaker here, track ten, two-thirds through. It's from Rest, the album she made with SebastiAn from Ed Banger Records after her father died and she had a brain hemorrhage. The production is massive and cold and somehow comforting, like getting swallowed by a glacier that understands you. By the time this hits, you've been running long enough that your thoughts have gone from concrete problems to abstract dread, and Gainsbourg's voice—detached, French, singing in English like she's reading someone else's diary—makes that feeling sound intentional instead of pathological.
Coast Modern comes back with "Hollow Life" because apparently this whole thing is about California ennui filtered through dance music, and then Lewis Del Mar's "Painting (Masterpiece)" does that indie-electronic thing where you can't tell if it's 2006 or 2016. Foreign Air's "Caffeine" and Miike Snow close it out, and you're left with the exact feeling you started with, except now you've run five miles and nothing is resolved.
Barry's wrong about this not being a running playlist. He's right about the fact that I keep choosing music that refuses to make anything easy.
