The other day, I was reading in about how “ .” ’s food editor Alan Sytsma had observed that a lot of newly opened restaurants in the city were “recreating childhood food memories more or less exactly,” citing elevated takes on buttered noodles and McNuggets; given the state of the world, he concluded, “We should probably eat some pudding cake while we have the chance.” The “kids menu” article struck a chord with me, in part because I have a profoundly unrefined palette—I only ate raw fish for the first time a couple of years ago, in large part to save face in front of friends—but mostly because I couldn’t help but apply the same logic to music right now.
So much of what comes across my desk seems to offer a gourmet take on something that millennials and Gen X-ers would have loved at some point from childhood to early twenties: taps into -era and early ; and superimpose the vocal tone and lyrical directness of pop-punk onto office-friendly folk-rock; made an album of , à la Cobra Starship, then one of , à la . , the new album by , is also ordering from the adult kids’ menu. The dance music milieu with which Dan Snaith tends to be associated has trended this way in recent years: remains hard to pin down, thanks to left-field collaborations like last year’s “ ,” with , and the intermittent use of his alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ, but he’s now best known to many people as the happiest guy ever to headl.