#358 (of 365) "Blankenship" - DIIV

Sometime during COVID, unable to go see bands play, I found myself "running out of new music." Part of that was due to my favorite bands not being able to get together to make new music and release it but part of it was because a key to my discovery of new music within the past fifteen years or so is seeing bands live. Either opening for bands I already like, or--quite frequently--me looking for a show on Songkick on a free night, trying out a couple of their songs on Apple Music, paying ten bucks and going to see them somewhere among the warehouses in East Williamsburg or Bushwick or Greenpoint, or sometimes, Bed-Stuy. And some shows are busts but most are not and I found a ton of new favorite bands that way. But during COVID, the well ran dry. And so I leaned into the "similar music" features on Apple Music, looking for bands and songs similar to the ones I loved that I maybe had missed. DIIV's "Believer" was my #1 favorite album of 2019, so it was pretty influential to my discovery of new artists (new to me, at least) and I would say the past five years, a vast majority of the music I've fallen in love with is in the vibe of "mellow beach music" or "bedroom pop" or "modern shoe gaze." Basically stuff that sounds like DIIV: Craft Spells. Pity Sex. Acid Ghost. Phantom Youth. Valley Palace. High Sunn. Lunar Isles. I had literally never heard of any of them before COVID, even though some were no longer even making new music. And I went wild on the back catalogs of other similarly awesome "beach pop" like Wild Nothing, Real Estate, Beach Fossils, Wavves, and more. So if this countdown were just of tracks I listened to the past 5 years, all of this style of music would dominate. In fact, if you look at my most played songs (according to Apple Music) since 2000, they would be songs by Wild Nothing, Pity Sex, Phantom Youth, Craft Spells, Wild Nothing again, and "Blankenship" by DIIV, with the 6th most listens since ~2000, or whenever I last reset the "plays" on my laptop. I've seen DIIV twice since COVID ended and they have a shockingly large, youthful following, so apparently I like what the kids like. And I play this song all the time.

"Blankenship" - DIIV // Believer (2019)