I had missed that Matt Johnson had put out a new The The record last year.

While I have always appreciated Johnson’s albums, I have tended to hold them at a bit of a distance. I don’t need to music to always be comfortable and make me feel good, but there is an aspect to his music that feels like someone working through their own mental and emotional issues. While that is obviously pretty common in music, there is something about the way Johnson does it that I find vaguely unsettling.

I really like this new album, though. It feels like a pretty good encapsulation of what it is like to be alive in These Current Times.

Originally published at https://albumwhale.com/petebrown/2025-albums#album_40609.