One balmy evening this past summer, I was hanging out in the bustling courtyard of a bar under the Williamsburg Bridge, celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday. I was having a nice enough time making small talk with various partygoers—until a stranger asked what new music I had been listening to. The trains above screeched to a halt. Everyone at the party fell silent and looked my way. I racked my brain. Surely there was something cool and obscure I could turn this person on to. And … I had nothing. The truth was that most of what I’d been enjoying fell into two categories: Old Dad (Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Simon & Garfunkel) or New Dad (Vampire Weekend, Sturgill Simpson, Solange).
There’s a technical term for what was happening to me. I was becoming washed.
I’d recently turned thirty-two, which according to both informal studies of streaming data and anecdotal evidence from the old people in my life is right around when this particular affliction typically hits. Browse around online and you will learn that your tastes are shaped in adolescence, your openness to new music peaks in your early twenties, and “music discovery stops at thirty-three.” If my parents were any indication, by my forties, when asked what music I was listening to, I’d reply with a sincere, “Brian Lehrer is great. Oh, and Terry Gross!”
Studies show that music discovery stops at thirty-three. Indeed, I was facing diminishing returns from my old go-to: Vampire Weekend (pictured circa 2008).
Of course, any reminder that you are moving ever nearer to death is disconcerting. But more than the existential ramifications of taste freeze, my concerns ran practical: I wanted to feel something. A few months before my friend’s fateful birthday party, I’d ended a relationship that began in my mid-twenties. By its final days, my sense of self was so fixed that it was almost as though I didn’t exist; I was more concept than person. In the aftermath, I didn’t want to radically upend my life or even buy a sports car. I just wanted to wake up, to throw out old routines and experience the world with fresh eyes—and, as it were, ears.
To put it more plainly, what I wanted was a shot in the arm. Finding a new favorite song is invigorating—a stimulant on par with a great cup of coffee or a runner’s high—and I was facing diminishing returns from old go-tos on Vampire Weekend, Contra, Modern Vampires of the City, and Father of the Bride. (As you may expect, I was quickly burning through Only God Was Above Us, too.) In general, I felt the particularly wonderful jolt of new discovery less frequently and intensely than I once had. How tragic it would be to only experience this feeling at the slow, sporadic pace at which some of my old favorite artists released new material.
But was it even possible to experience new music the way I had at fourteen or twenty-four, back when the Red Hot Chili Peppers felt rousingly subversive and Kanye West seemed like he actually might have been touched by God? Is there something biological about being in your thirties that limits the satisfaction that listening to new music produces? That closes the brain off to new sounds? That sparks an insatiable appetite for Wilco?
I was going to find out, goddammit.
Growing up, I didn’t think of myself as an especially adventurous music listener. But when I reflect on those years, it’s amazing how fluid my tastes were. If you put on a random popular song from, say, 2004, chances are it will send me back to a specific place or feeling. Most of these memories are rather banal—driving across the Tappan Zee Bridge to the tune of Dido, debating the lyrics of “Roses” with a camp counselor. (Let it be known that I was right: Roses really smell like “boo-boo-ooh,” not “poo-poo-ooh”). But then there’s a song like “Yeah!” which, despite being everywhere, never ceased to be frighteningly sexual, or a track like “Wake Up,” which soundtracked years of teenage yearning. Back then, I sought out music on iTunes and at Barnes and Noble, but more often it was finding me. That year, I can recall my aunt introducing me to Kanye West’s “We Don’t Care” because it was brilliant, a friend introducing me to “Freek-a-Leek” because it was comically erotic, and Apple introducing me to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” because they wanted me to buy an iPod. All of it, I see now, impacted me in a way that rarely happens these days.
So what changed?
Recent research confirmed that as the brain develops, it becomes harder to absorb a new language. I worried that the same was true of music—that as we age, the mind becomes less receptive to anything unfamiliar. Indeed, according to Elizabeth H. Margulis, a professor and the director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, “if you just look at the literature, most people think there’s something special about adolescence [when it comes to music discovery].”
There’s a technical term for what was happening to me. I was becoming washed.
Margulis, though, is skeptical that “that’s really true.” Instead, she believes that young people’s deep, lasting connection to music mainly results from where and how they’re finding it. “[Meaningful experiences are] part of how you build up this sense of what music means and how it’s important to you,” she says. “If we’re just searching around on Spotify, that’s a single-dimensional musical experience. We don’t have a lot of context. Versus a new musical style coming along with a summer when we were in a different place, hanging out with different people.”
So there was hope for me! And better yet, a source of blame! Streaming has its utility, but I’d never found it to be an especially fruitful gateway to discovery. In part, that’s because of what Margulis was pointing out: We mostly stream in an isolated vacuum, removed even from the connection to a radio host. But streaming companies’ primary objective—keeping you listening as long as possible—also runs counter to the necessary discomfort of exploration.
Doug Ford, Spotify’s head of editorial and music culture between 2013 and 2018, recently told The New Yorker that the company’s algorithm and user experience have evolved to prioritize passive listening. In other words, the platform keeps listeners content through homogeneity. Personally, I’ve noticed that when the platform serves me a new song I like, I tend to feel mild enjoyment rather than a fiery passion. More often, I feel numb from the overall monotony and repetition. As it turns out, what I want after listening to Angel Olsen has less to do with genre (spare me your generic contemporary indie band!) than dynamism (give me something that burns a hole in my heart!).
Before I set out to find new music, most of what I enjoyed fell into two categories: Old Dad or New Dad. (Sturgill Simpson, pictured, definitely fell into the latter category.)
I’m far from the only person who feels frustrated by the blandness of the streaming experience. Josh Terry, a veteran culture journalist who writes the music newsletter No Expectations, tells me he thinks that when “[finding] music doesn’t take any effort and [what you hear] is totally designed to mesh with your tastes, then [the experience] is going to become stifling. And then all you’re going to want to do is discover things that expand your taste.”
Yes, totally! But, well … how?
I turned to Terry—as well as my broader social network—for help: How did other people discover music? I wanted something more than Pitchfork reviews and the writing of a few popular critics. I was willing to put in a little work, but I didn’t want the process to become a tedious slog. Above all, I really did not want to join TikTok (like I said, washed). Friends suggested an assortment of blogs, newsletters, curated playlists, and music influencers to follow. Some said they stay abreast of their favorite artists’ and venues’ social-media accounts for recommendations.
Terry, who is my age, says he found himself in a similar musical rut during the pandemic, when new releases slowed and live shows essentially stopped. But when the pandemic ended, he started going to concerts regularly again, and he’s discovered a lot of bands he likes by showing up early to catch the opening act.
I decided to see some artists I wasn’t familiar with live in concert. I browsed upcoming New York shows and found I knew distressingly few of the acts. More alarming, though, was the primal urge to snag Yo La Tengo tickets. I restrained myself and took a different tack: What if I just randomly picked shows on nights I was free?
“Ughhh, these boys are my sons,” my date crowed. The boys (and one girl) in question were Friko, a young post-punk quartet from Chicago. The band specializes in swelling, heart-on-sleeve anthems. Just past the energetic climax of one such song, Niko Kapetan, the band’s lead singer, dramatically donned and removed his sunglasses with hasty urgency.
Friko opened for Royel Otis at Brooklyn Steel that night. From the second Kapetan stepped onto the stage—beginning with a skittish solo number reminiscent of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense—the group brought the pants-on-fire energy of a high school band playing a college show. The long-limbed bassist dangled his legs like they were being operated by a highly caffeinated puppeteer. The backing guitarist used every rock-band move in the books to attack his instrument. It was all inescapably endearing—but the appeal of Friko goes beyond the band’s enthusiasm and theatrics. Kapetan is a gifted vocalist, and he had the crowd in the palm of his hand when he hit a difficult falsetto at the peak of the single “Where We’ve Been.”
The post-punk quartet Friko (pictured at Lollapalooza 2024) gave my music-discovery journey a satisfying jolt.
I was impressed by other acts I had recently caught live—in particular, the ethereal soul singer, Tasha, whose flutey voice wafted pleasantly through the intimate room at Baby’s All Right—but Friko was the true standout. In the days following the show, I cued up many of the band’s prominent tracks. When I did, I was brought back to what turned out to be quite an electric night, and I indeed experienced a satisfying jolt. Signs of life!
That said, Friko wasn’t exactly pushing me out of my comfort zone. The band’s emo lyrics and stirring guitar riffs brought to mind bands like Surf Curse and Teen Suicide, both of which I’d enjoyed in my twenties. I was expanding my library, but I wasn’t necessarily broadening my taste. With age, I’d been experiencing this a lot: Most new music either sounded so familiar that it was clearly derivative (The Dare, MJ Lenderman, both of whom, it should be said, I quite like) or so foreign that I couldn’t wrap my head around it (100 Gecs, 2Hollis).
I also wasn’t sure how sustainable going to concerts was as a means of connecting to new music. Post-breakup, I was enjoying giving in to late nights and spontaneity. But the day after the show, I was exhausted—clearly too washed for this to be a regular thing.
When I surveyed my friends on how they discovered music, there was one other recommendation that kept coming up: NTS Radio.
At this point, you’d have to be among my washed brethren to have not heard of NTS. Femi Adeyemi, a DJ and fashion executive, founded the station in London in 2011 as a genre-agnostic, commercial-free online alternative to traditional radio. Thirteen years later, it’s a global platform with two continuous feeds, over eight hundred resident hosts, and a number of extensive on-demand mixtapes. As streaming eclipsed radio listening, NTS’s comparative appeal shifted in stride. Across its many shows, it offers access to deep cuts (many of which are not available on streaming services), a broad array of musical styles, and thoughtful curation from genuine music obsessives. “It’s about making sure that the music that’s on is not wallpaper,” NTS CEO Sean McAuliffe says of the company’s core ethos. “By creating something that’s really interesting and exciting, it makes people feel moved emotionally. And that’s what we’re on a mission to do, is really move people.”
Good music is good music, no matter the genre or period.
As I tuned in to NTS at random intervals many times over several weeks, I listened to shows specializing in ’80s Italian hardcore, African disco, modern UK drill, and more. I wasn’t moved, exactly, but I did frequently feel something—curiosity, delight, disorientation. And where listening to Spotify often could be draining, NTS was predominantly energizing.
One of the shows I found myself returning to was Dust Bunnies, an eclectic monthly program from the New York–based music content creator Margeaux Labat. Labat—known as Marg.mp3 on social media—is twenty-seven and turns out to be somewhat famous among my social circle for her boundless music knowledge. (Several friends independently steered me toward her when I mentioned my quest.) There’s an appealing ease to the way she connects, and moves through, diverse work. Usually there is a coherence and arc to her set progressions. But sometimes the transitions could feel gleefully dissonant. “That adds a little bit of chaos to the listening experience,” Labat tells me. “And that feels inherently human because it’s not totally streamlined.”
When listening to Dust Bunnies, I would often become enamored with a song and save it to my music library. Though these songs spanned eras and genres, I noticed that none of them were recent releases. This wasn’t, though, a result of my washedness. Rather, Labat was barely playing any contemporary songs—and not because she wasn’t up on them. (She most definitely was.) Instead, she views her show as an escape from her daily life, and older music was unconsciously what she gravitated toward. And it wasn’t just her. McAuliffe told me that among young people there’s a lot less anxiety about staying current: Good music is good music, no matter the genre or period.
It was a liberating notion. I began to think that branching out could be as valuable—and cool, even—as looking ahead. I was reminded of something Josh Terry told me. It was his view that as you age, there are two options. “You can kind of embrace what you already like unselfconsciously and keep an open mind to other things,” he says. “Or you can just dive 100 percent deep into what the kids like and you’ll just come off as a total poser. There’s a happy medium of being washed but also open.”
Lately, Terry had been embracing a lot of music he once thought of as lame—specifically jam bands. Though the music wasn’t new, it was new to him, and it was producing strong feelings. And really, at a certain age, you just have to be grateful for that: As long as you’re feeling, you ain’t dead yet.
