“KCSU’s Weekly Gems Countdown” is written by the KCSU Music Directors and describes the top artists that your local 90.5 FM DJs are playing this week! This article is posted weekly on Wednesday morning and discussed on the show “KCSU Weekly Gem Countdown” which airs every Wednesday from 1-2. During the show, you can tune in to hear the countdown, learn more about each artist behind the songs topping KCSU’s charts, and listen to DJ Fruit-Bat and Lady J break down the sound and feel of each song!
10. John Coltrane – jazz – 8 spins – highlighted hit: “What’s New,” off of the 1963 release “Ballads”
It’s a pleasant surprise to have John Coltrane on our Gems, one that feels very fitting for the October weather and views that we’ve been experiencing on campus lately! Coltrane grew up with music, his father an amateur musician. After he passed, Coltrane was raised by his mother and her sister, and he took up the saxophone in high school. He continued to play throughout the forties, playing in clubs and playing throughout his time stationed in Hawaii with the military. He band-hopped over the next few decades, addicted to heroine and struggling to remain in one situation for too long, but he got his big break in 1955 when Miles Davis hired him.
Our highlighted track is “What’s New,” an all-time jazz classic from Coltrane’s 1963 release “Ballads.” It’s a lovely, mellow little track, and it’s always exciting to see jazz on our gems, whether old or new!
9. Ratboys – alt/indie – 8 spins – highlighted hit: “I Want You (Fall 2010)” off of the August release “The Window”
Ratboys were formed in Chicago in 2010 by Julia Steiner (guitar, vocals) and Dave Sagan (guitar) back when they were still in college. Their debut record, “AOID,” came out in 2015, but they began to pick up more steam after 2017’s “GN,” touring with acts like PUP and Soccer Mommy.
“The Window” was created with Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, who helped produce the record’s more varied sound as the band get more comfortable with exploring other genres, shifting between indie, americana, midwest emo from track-to-track. Our highlighted track, “I Want You (Fall 2010),” is a love song reminiscing back to fall 2010, around when the band where formed.
8. Joey Valence & Brae – hip-hop/rap – 10 spins – highlighted hit: “GUMDROP” off of the September release “PUNK TACTICS”
Bringing the sounds of 90s east-coast hip-hop to the TikTok age, Joey Valence & Brae are known for their scrappy, heavily-mixed rap songs, proudly wearing their Beastie Boys influences on their sleeves. Joey Valence and Brae met their Freshmen year at Penn State, goofing around with music together and starting out posting their stuff on TikTok, collaborating on tracks like 2021’s “Crank It Up” and “Double Jump.” Following the success of these songs, their career moved from a few successful TikToks to appearances on tv shows like Ellen, where their music began to reach an audience bigger than just the in-the-know teenagers who already liked their stuff.
Released September 8th, “PUNK TACTICS” is the culmination of these collaborations, their debut record together. The record is high-energy, fast-paced, experimental, sample-heavy, and bursting with both the influences of their hip-hop successors and with all the new stuff they’re bringing to the table. It’s no surprise that this album’s been getting so much play here at KCSU!
Our highlighted track, “GUMDROP,” is one of the higher-energy, poppier tracks on the record, lapsing into breakbeat and hyperpop sounds over its quick, one minute runtime.
7. Dizzy – pop – 10 spins – highlighted hit: “Open Up Wide” off of the August release “Dizzy”
Dizzy is a Canadian indie-pop band formed in Ontario, Canada, in the mid 2010s. Their debut record, “Baby Teeth,” was nominated for multiple awards, including winning the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year. Their second record, “The Sun and Her Scorch,” came out in 2020 to similar praise. Their third record, the self-titled “Dizzy,” has a conceptual clarity, the sound of a band really coming into their own.
Dizzy’s vocalist Katie Munshaw describes their music as “pink in the middle,” Dizzy’s music is both earnest and self-conscious, raw and polished. Dizzy featured on our Weekly Gems last week with the track “Stupid 4 U,” and this week our highlighted track is “Open Up Wide.”
6. Daft Punk – electronic – 11 spins – highlighted hit: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” off of the 2001 release “Discovery”
Though tracks like “Get Lucky” and “One More Time” have hundreds of millions of streams across every music streaming app there is, Daft Punk haven’t released a full-length LP since 2013’s “Random Access Memories,” a staple album in the world of electronic and synth-pop. Formed in Paris in 1993, the band are known for their relative secrecy about their true identities, wearing chromatic robot masks both in produced material and at live shows. Though they featured on/helped produce music between 2013 and 2020, they officially disbanded in 2021.
“Random Access Memories” is Daft Punk’s fourth, final, and most popular album, a world built from synthpop, techno, disco, and prog rock. Daft Punk featured on our Weekly Gems Countdown a few weeks back with “Instant Crush (feat. Julian Casablanca,” and this week’s highlighted track, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” is another Daft Punk classic, one that gets extra play whenever we have sports events going on (especially Volleyball, which our sports team covers during Friday games!)
5. Cherry Glazerr – alt/indie – 11 spin – highlighted hit: “Touched You with My Chaos” off of the September release “I Don’t Want You Anymore”
Cherry Glazerr formed in Los Angeles in 2013, fronted by Clementine Creevy, the lead vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist. They’ve moved from their initial grungy output to lighter, indier tracks on their most recent record, “I Don’t Want You Anymore,” but their garage influences still shine through on every track.
Creevy describes the process of making “I Don’t Want You Anymore” as a period of intense, raw self-reflection, quoted on Spotify as saying “I’ve spent these years taking a hard look at myself, at my relationships, and writing about it. I guess I’m coming to terms with a lot of my bullshit.”
Our highlighted track, “Touched You With My Chaos,” features the heavy guitars and confessional lyrics that Cherry Glazerr are known and loved for.
4. Ricky Montgomery – alt/indie – 12 spins – highlighted hit: “Boy Toy” off of the September release “Rick”
Ricky Montgomery’s career has been uniquely 21st century, led by his presence on the internet, which started with his vine account. Montgomery got his start posting both comedy videos and singing ones on vine around 2013, garnering a small audience for the release of his first-ever EP, 2014’s “Caught on the Moon.”
Montgomery’s debut album, “Montgomery Ricky,” came out in 2016. It was popular within niche internet circles at the time, but it was only after TikTok’s rise that his came as well. Tracks like “Like Without a Hook” and “Mr. Loverman” blew up within fandom circles, now boasting hundreds of millions of streams.
Montgomery’s second-ever album, “Rick,” was just released this September, seven years after his first. Montgomery describes record on his Spotify as “my long, awkward path toward remembering myself as an artist,” a journey that, for a long time, he was “too scared to try.” Our highlighted track is “Boy Toy,” one of the lighter, poppier tracks on the record.
3. Slowdive – alt/indie – 13 spins – highlighted hit: “kisses” off of the September release “everything is alive”
Slowdive are shoegaze royalty. Formed in Reading, Berkshire in 1989, the band consists of Rachel Gloswell (vocals), Neil Halstead (vocals/guitar), Christian Savill (guitar), Nick Chaplin (bass), and Simon Scott (drums). Slowdive’s career started as a slow burn, their cult status slowly growing in shoegaze circles until their second record, 1993’s “Souvlaki,” become one of the most seminal shoegaze records ever created. They broke up after their third record, 1995’s “Pygmalion,” but reunited in 2017 with a new album, the self-titled “Slowdive.”
“everything is alive” was released September 1st, and it describes the sound of this record well—the soundscapes the band explore over the course of the record are living and breathing, subtle and layered without any elements getting lost. Our highlighted track, “kisses,” is one of the album’s leading records.
2. Mitski – alt/indie – 15 spins – highlighted hit: “Bug Like an Angel” off of the September release “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We”
Mitsuki Miyawaki, known simply as Mitski, is a singer-songwriter who’s been releasing music since her first few self-released records, “Lush” (2012), and “Retired From Sad, New Career in Business” (2013), which she originally made while still in college. Mitski’s cult status among indie fans only grew after her subsequent releases “Bury Me At Makeout Creek” (2014) and “Puberty 2” (2016). Mitski achieved more mainstream success following 2018’s “Be the Cowboy,” with tracks like “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart” going viral on TikTok and Twitter.
Mitski’s music is associated with many online niches: sad Kendall Roy edits, sad edits in general, what’s often called “sad girl” music, but Mitski rejects the idea that her music has to be defined by sadness, saying in a video for Crack magazine that “The sad girl thing was reductive and tired like 5-10 years ago, and it still is today…let’s retire the sad girl shtick.”
Her newest album, “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We,” was released September 15th to massive acclaim from critics and fans. Mitski describes this on her Spotify as her most “American album,” and she’s been in the top of our charts ever since its release! We’ve featured the tracks “My Love Mine All Mine” and “I’m Your Man” on our Gems already, and this week’s highlighted track is “Bug Like an Angel,” one of the first singles off of the record.
1. Hozier – folk – 16 spins – highlighted hit: “First Time” off of the August release “Unreal Unearth”
Hozier (aka Andrew Hozier-Byrne) is a singer-songwriter from Ireland who skyrocketed to fame after his 2013 song, “Take Me to Church,” became one of the most popular songs of the year (now with over 2 billion streams on spotify). His bluesy, folk-oriented music explores love, politics, religion, nature, and everything else one might expect from an Irish wordsmith whose songs reference everything from the bible to Dante’s Inferno to his favorite jazz songs and poems.
Hozier’s most recent release, “Unreal Unearth,” was released last month on August 18th! It’s based upon Dante’s Inferno, with each song representing one of the circles of hell that Dante journeys through in the famous poem. Hozier wrote this album partially as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, telling GRAMMY.com: “As a structure, I did want to acknowledge something in my experiences of [that] two, three year period, and what I was processing. I [wanted] to find a way that nods to that, and the significance of that — albeit, not necessarily in a way that was a lockdown album or a pandemic album, or songs that focus on the nuances of that experience, but at least acknowledge the journey. And it’s taking the structure of that journey as imagined by Dante, these Nine Circles he walks through and then he comes out the other side.”
The record is a hit with Hozier fans who waited patiently for its release, and Hozier’s two Red Rocks shows in Colorado next week are sure to be stellar ones. Our highlighted track off of “Unreal Unearth” is “First Time,” a song Hozier described via Apple Music as capturing “This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again.”