Two Years

June 20, 2025

This week’s Slowpoke marks my second anniversary of writing here. I started on my fortieth birthday, and on Monday I will turn 42. I have only missed one week writing - when I had Covid, and my partner took the reigns - and there was another time (Covid again) when I had no voice to do the voiceover, so BBC Radio 1 presenter Daniel P. Carter read it for me. Not a bad track record… although I am still terrible at writing these in advance, and more than a few of them have been written on a Friday morning, right before hitting send.

The content has evolved a bit, although I still want to shine a light on music and music-related topics that I find interesting. That part has been unwavering. I do occasionally just end up publishing what amounts to little more than my diary, spilling out whatever is percolating in my brain that week. Thanks for your patience with those newsletters. This might be one of those weeks though, fair warning. Let me have it, it’s nearly my birthday.

I find it fascinating - against my better judgement - what topics prompt immediate unsubscribes. Often when I comment about misogyny, whether in a direct, explicit manner or embedded within a rumination on art, I will get a small flurry of unsubscribes within minutes. I do find it disappointing that it’s so predictable, and I certainly never regret what I have written on those occasions. C’est la vie!

I never had any grand plans to re-imagine what writing about music could look like via this newsletter. It took me a long time to consider myself a writer at all, but I most definitely don’t consider myself to be a journalist. In fact, I curse my inability to wrangle the feelings and emotions that music and art elicit in me into words. And yet, still I persist. Here I am, persisting! I don’t attempt to be a cultural arbiter of what is good or bad; who am I - or anyone else for that matter - to bestow such weighty grandeur upon myself? If I were pushed, I would say that there’s no such thing as good or bad when it comes to art - only personal taste.

Part of the reason I believe I struggle to express myself articulately and with conviction is because I have come to loathe reading hyperbolic statements about art from people who are paid (directly, or indirectly) to say such things. I fear sounding as insincere as the things I read elsewhere. I don’t believe it’s very common for musicians to really be “the next big thing”, or truly unmissable, or actually the voice of their generation. But I do believe that without being those things, they can still be important and resonate with people. “Perhaps you’ll like this?” isn’t as compelling as “You must listen to this NOW!! If you miss out, you’re a FOOL!”. The latter being what almost all commerce-driven journalism morphs into in front of my eyes.

I am not committed to any particular sub-genre (although I admire those encyclopaedic minds who are), so I cannot weave a web of interconnected tales from week to week. I don’t think my music taste is particularly remarkable, it should be said, but it cannot be confined to easy categorisation within genres. And so I hop all over the musical map, as and when the mood takes me… although often at a slow pace, hence the Slowpoke name.

Here are some artists that I would like to say “perhaps you’ll like this?” about this week:

Habak - they’re crusty screamo/punk from Mexico. It’s dead good.

Flooding - slowcore from Kansas City.

Intercourse - noise rock x hardcore from Connecticut

Kathryn Joseph - angry Scottish lady with a piano collaborating with an electronic magician on her new album

True Body - post-punk dream pop from New York

Sextile - honestly, until I Googled it to write this very sentence, I assumed that their name was perhaps something to do with endytophilia or frottage. But it’s astrology related. They’re post-punk from Los Angeles.

Moodie Black - noise/rap duo from Phoenix, Arizona.

It’s a wonderful thing that there’s always new music to discover. I like the stories that are woven throughout any artistic expression, but specifically and especially in music. I make a playlist most Fridays for Roadburn. I don’t really take requests for it, but there’s this annoying publicist that I tolerate called Simon, who tries to get me to include artists that he’s working with. He is working with a band called Cwfen at the moment and I rebuffed his advances until he told me what a particular song was about. This is the quote from the band:

“I’d imagined this sort of vast, feminine cosmic horror. Sort of the opposite of what women are supposed to be. And I had this thought: what if, instead of being told to stay small and keep producing, a woman took up the biggest space possible and just… consumed? Almost a black-hole-sized matriarch hoovering up everything until there was nothing left. It was fun to think about this sort of monstrous feminine presence that can't be stopped. So the song was sort of an exploration of those feelings, a catharsis of sorts. And permission to be terrifying.”

Naturally I replied “well, why didn’t you just say they’d written a song about me in the first place?” and I was won over. Basically, I think stories matter, context matters, and I think black-hole-sized matriarchs matter. On a good week you might get all three here.

I thought I would take this opportunity to ask what you’d like to see most of here on Slowpoke. I can’t promise I’ll listen to you, but it doesn’t hurt to ask I guess. If you want something that’s not listed then you can always leave a comment or write to me.

Anyway anyway anyway. Happy two years to Slowpoke. In my head Slowpoke is a multi-limbed beast, but in the real world not a whole lot of it is particularly visible. Perhaps more of it will become visible this year… let’s see.

That’s all for this week! Thank you for being here x a million, especially if you’ve been here for the full two years.

See you next week!

~Becky

Image below shows me at my own birthday party, some years ago.