No Expectations 101: Cool Blue Night

Four new albums that might be the best of 2025 so far. Plus, ‘Mickey 17,’ ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,’ and a stellar new novel called ‘See Friendship.’

Photo by Brandon Stoll on Unsplash

No Expectations hits inboxes on Thursdays at 9am cst. Reader mailbag email: Noexpectationsnewsletter@gmail.com. The newsletter I produce at my day job with WTTW News (PBS Chicago) can be found here.

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Headline song: Silver Synthetic, “Cool Blue Night”

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Thanks for being here and for the nice notes about this newsletter’s 100th(ish) post. After a busy start to 2025, I’ve kept things lowkey the last few weeks. Instead of making plans and cramming the schedule, I’m reading, watching movies, and hanging out at home. You might call it late-onset seasonal depression but I like to think of it as “just chilling.” Now that the weather is sunny and mild in Chicago again, I already feel more social.

Last weekend, I saw a movie and went to karaoke with friends. Now, as someone who writes about under-the-radar music, an indie rock deep cut is the last thing anyone wants to hear at a karaoke bar. When you’re there, it’s best to go for fun crowdpleasers: tunes people will know and want to sing along to. After that time a decade ago when I saw a guy sitting by himself eventually do the original Nine Inch Nails version of “Hurt,” I realized how important maintaining a solid vibe is at those places. If you’re curious, on Saturday I did Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta,” a “Something Stupid” Sinatra duet with my girlfriend, and, after a few beers, the Fray’s “Over My Head (Cable Car).” Yes, it killed. I hope your weekend is full of buds, getting out of the house, and good memories.

If you’re new to No Expectations, here’s a short explainer of what you signed up for. Each week, you get a wildcard main essay (often new album recommendations), a 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Sometimes you’ll get an interview with an artist I love and other times it’ll be a deep dive into one band’s discography. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this newsletter is very Midwest-focused. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a curated roundup of upcoming local shows to check out. There are no algorithms or numerical scores or rankings.

As always, you can sign up for a paid subscription or tell a friend about a band you read about here. It’s still $5 a month—the cost of one Old Style plus tip at Rainbo Club. Every bit helps, keeps this project going, and allows it to stay paywall-free. It’s rough out there, so I’m grateful you’re still reading and supporting this scrappy writing project. Also, in my opinion, there’s an especially good playlist this week.

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4 Albums For Your Week

Fust, Big Ugly

The Durham-based Fust is yet another star in the constellation of North Carolina indie rock bands with perceptive songwriters, ample pedal steel, and albums produced by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios. It’s the songwriting project of Aaron Dowdy, a West Virginia native currently getting his Ph.D in literature at Duke. On Big Ugly, Dowdy and his band lean into country textures with detail-rich, character-driven songwriting. While I’ve always liked his writing (longtime No Expectations readers will recognize a few songs from the back catalog from past playlists), this LP feels like a marked level up. Dowdy’s voice is more confident than it’s ever been and he’s backed by his band of NC indie rock lifers that includes Sluice frontman Justin Morris, drummer Avery Sullivan and violinist Libby Rodenbough (who are also in Sluice and have toured with Indigo de Souza), and more. “Spangled” explodes with palpable kinectism, loud guitars, and a delectably potent chorus. That song opens the album and it’s followed by another propulsive standout in “Gataleg,” which is a car trouble character study that highlights Dowdy’s def storytelling. It’s the band’s most cohesive and assured collection yet, an LP with a firm sense of place that lovingly grapples with the complicated people in its songs.

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Silver Synthetic, Rosalie

Hearing Rosalie, the sophomore album from the New Orleans group Silver Synthetic, for the first time was such a needed jolt that it made me get more excited about music than I have in months. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a release from a new-to-me band that felt almost comically in my wheelhouse. The LP scraps some of the Americana of the band’s 2021 debut for something more playful, cosmic, and effortlessly breezy. Across nine consistently memorable songs, the band hits the sweet spot between ‘70s California rock New Riders of the Purple Sage and 2000s indie like the Clientele. Each hook soars and each arrangement feels locked-in. When every track is great, it’s tough to choose a highlight from the bittersweet melody of “Red Light,” the smooth AOR grooves of “Cool Blue Night” to the Being There swagger of “Choose a Life.” Released on the always excellent Curation Records (Beachwood Sparks, Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears, Pacific Range), this is an album I see myself revisiting all year.

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Tobacco City, Horses

Chicago’s Tobacco City make gorgeous, neon-lit country songs for long nights and rough mornings. Anchored by singers and songwriters Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard, no two voices in this city sound better together (besides maybe Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of Finom). The band have excelled in quiet achy twang since 2018 (their singles “Blue Raspberry” and “Never on My Mind” from 2021’s Tobacco City, USA are good entry points) but Horses, their sophomore effort, adds energy and catharsis to their winning Americana blueprint. Singles “Autumn” and “Bougainvillea” reach shimmering heights, especially as Coleslaw and Goddard’s voices merge, but the real joys of the album are when they pare it back like on the stunning Goddard-led tune “Fruit From the Vine.” These songs are so easy to fall in love with.

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Will Stratton, Points of Origin

I’ve loved Will Stratton’s music for almost two decades now. Not to date myself, but I found out about his first album What the Night Said via the iTunes Store in 2007 (he was a “related artist” for Sufjan Stevens, who guested on that LP on oboe). The upstate New York-based folk songwriter has released seven more albums since then and each one feels like a subtle but striking evolution (at some point over the years we became social media mutuals and I wrote the bio for his previous effort, 2021’s The Changing Wilderness). His latest and eighth full-length Points of Origins is his most ambitious in scope taking a birds-eye view of California, the state where he was born. His clear-eyed and tasteful songs are populated by a wide-cast of characters: CIA operatives, duplicitous real estate agents, barroom regulars, and the undeniable West Coast landscape. “Higher and Drier” is as righteous as it is hair-raisingly beautiful while opener “I Found You” might be his most immaculately arranged tune yet. Even after all these years, I’m still floored by his inviting voice, his openhearted lyricism, and his dexterous fingerpicking. The best of his class.

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What I listened to:

The No Expectations 101 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal

1. Graham Hunt, "I Just Need Enough"
2. Florry, "Hey Baby"
3. Fust, "Gateleg"
4. Paco Cathcart, "Bottleneck Blues"
5. Silver Synthetic, "Red Light"
6. Neu Blume, "Cold Strange"
7. Dean Johnson, "Blue Moon"
8. Lucky Cloud, "Invitation"
9. Tobacco City, "Fruit From The Vine"
10. Will Stratton, "I Found You"
11. Mei Semones, "I can do what I want"
12. The Convenience, "Opportunity"
13. Ty Segall, "Fantastic Tomb"
14. fantasy of a broken heart, "We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways"
15. Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas, "Clock no Clock"

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What I watched:

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (dir. Radu Jude, watched on Mubi)

This is my first taste of the provocative Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude and now I have to watch all of his movies. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is one of the most vital, innovative, and brutal films from 2024 and its near three-hour runtime never lags. It stars a commanding and hilarious Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an underslept and overworked production assistant tasked with driving around Bucharest interviewing injured factory workers to cast them in a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational corporation. In her spare time, Angela films vulgar satirical TikTok videos in character as an Andrew Tate wannabe. It’s an absurdist, pitch black, and brilliant takedown of what it means to live in an internet-brained gig economy that devalues human life and dignity. Despite that description and subject matter, it’s one of the most fun first-watches I can remember.

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Mickey 17 (dir. Bong Joon-ho, watched in theaters)

There’s something about Robert Pattinson in auteur-directed sci-fi films that’s consistently up my alley: High Life, Tenet, and now Mickey 17. More Okja and Snowpiercer than Memories of Murder or Parasite, this film is Bong Joon-ho’s post-Best Picture blank check movie. It’s a hilarious and bonkers dystopian satire that finds parts of humanity leaving a climate-ravaged earth for a new planet. Pattinson plays Mickey, a hapless hero who accidentally signs up to be an “expendable.” His job is to die: to test out the atmosphere of the inhospitable planet, to do the dangerous work around the spaceship, and other not safe for work or life tasks. (His memories are uploaded and his body 3D re-printed upon each death). I had a blast catching this at the Music Box: Pattinson plays a great goofus and I’m just grateful that it was Bong Joon-ho rather than, say, The Russo Brothers or Jon Favreau with this source material. It’s not perfect, maybe a little too over-the-top, but it’s great they are still somehow making box office swings like this.

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What I read:

See Friendship (by

Jeremy Gordon

)

When I first freelanced full-time in 2013, Jeremy Gordon was one of the first writers I really looked up to. He had written a piece around then about the “Do’s and Don’ts of Freelancing” that I basically used as a bible. (It’s funny to think back on it now but “Do: Wake Up Early” and “Do: Ask For Me” were legitimately groundbreaking tips for a totally green 21-year-old who didn’t know anything about anything). Over the years, we’ve gotten to know each other through annual hangs at Pitchfork Music Festival (RIP) and my admiration for his work has only grown. (He’s written for everyone and his newsletter is always excellent). Now, he’s published his debut novel See Friendship, and the smart, conversational, incisive, and earnest writing that marked his culture journalism translates so seamlessly to fiction.

See Friendship is about grief, unreliable memories, nostalgia, and figuring out who you are when your job is to write about how you view the world through the culture you consume. The protagonist is about a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based culture journalist named Jacob Goldberg who starts a podcast project untangling the mysteries of his high school friend Seth’s death. Gordon has an infectious love for his characters and expertly captures the awkward intimacy that can come from high school bonds. From the many Chicago dive bar name drops (Inntertown Pub! Alice’s! Jake’s Bar?!) to the local indie rock subplots and the neuroticism that festers from making a living writing online, there’s so much that resonated for me here. It’s heartbreaking, humane, and anxious prose that I’m truly in awe of. Highly recommended. If you’re in Chicago, he’s doing a book event at City Lit on Thursday, March 20. Order the novel here.

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The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:

The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it in your inbox a day early.