Tag: destroyer

Legit Bosses: The 118 Best Songs of 2025

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

WE ARE CHARLIE KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRK WE CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRY THE FLAME…!

OK, so that song is obviously number one, no surprises there, but aren’t you still interested in the songs that finished #2 – #118?

Yadda yadda yadda, absolute dog’s bollocks tracks here, you know the drill: #118 is already a fucking banger, then each track afterwards manages to be somehow even better, until we finally reveal which piece of genius is almost as good as We Are Charlie Kirk.

Slightly smaller list than last year, partially because Prince’s insane output has been cordoned off this year to stop it hurting the self-esteem of 2025’s music, and partially because I made the last minute decision to not count any songs from Hallelujah the Hills epic ‘DECK’ project, as I promise I promise I promise that I’ll rank those 54 songs seperately sometime this year. Or, at a push, definitely before 2030. Ish.

Sit back, relax, bookmark this so your next few dumps are sorted, and think about how long it must have taken me to write this fucker if you’re on your twelfth trip to the toilet reading it.

Spotify Playlist

YouTube Playlist

In us it echoes, in Christ it sustains

Necessary Evil 2025: The Ragin’ Climax

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

The stage curtains open, revealing 40 lovely ladies in bathing suits, wearing sashes that denote which of 2025’s greatest albums they represent, blinding the front row with quite how dazzlingly white their full toothed grins are, in danger of taking someone’s fucking eye out with quite how resplendently squeezed tight their open cleavages are.

I come out through the floor on an elevating platform, full suit and bow tie, hair slicked back and microphone in my hand:

“There she iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis, Miss Necessary Eviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil…!”

“…and I said ‘Lady, that ain’t no gear stick!!!’ Seriously though, if you don’t let me videotape me pissing on you then I’ll eject you from the competition

Considering this will be the seventeenth time that I’ve collated the Scientifically Proven Best Albums of the Year™, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing by this point, yeah? I had only just graduated from university when I started writing this dumb list that nobody reads, and I’ll be freaking forty two when I finish the 2025 vintage! Considering my physical health (which, in 2025, has definitely started to take on a whole ‘end of days’ start of feel), it’s looking more and more likely that I will die before I ever retire this list. Mate, I would love to stop, this is a massive pain in the arse that ruins Christmas and my birthday for me every year. But if I go, then who seriously is there to take my place?? Pitchfork?? Give me a break. Fantano?? Bald fraud. Smash Hits??? Mate, I don’t like having to break this to you, but Smash Hits Magazine shut down in 2006. To quote a far less talented (but bizarrely more feted, which is often how it goes) personality who has been able to actually retire this year: I’m still here because you can’t do your job!

the last time ISN’T now

“Driving Myself Mad With Mental Health and Gender Stuff” – Efficax Interview

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Elle Gilliam is always taking her art places.

Over the course of the last five years, it’s difficult to think of many other musical artists who have so consistently and animatedly pushed their sound and style to more expansive and challenging places. When she first came to the notice of Necessary Evil, it was with the gorgeous, lilting, acoustic near Americana of ‘Picture Perfect Depression‘ in 2019, back when she was still recording as Helltown*. Her music five years on bears little resemblance to those essentially standard guitar based records, and along the way she’s also dragged it into so many avenues and artistic tangents that it has been anything but a straight progression.

(*and also still… y’know… mostly identifying as male…)

You may remember me interviewing Elle last year, so it makes sense that I would reach out to her on the 12 month anniversary to get an update on her current status, both artistically and personally. Well, that would have been in February, so fuck me I guess. Wonderfully though, Efficax soon released their follow up album to last year’s ‘DESTROYER‘, so I could at least question Elle about the themes and inspirations behind their new album to coincide with its release date. Well, that was in April, so fuck me I guess.

However, only six months after this essential record was released, I managed to tie Elle down and ask for her to talk us through the record’s fourteen tracks. As far as you all know, we met in a dusty but quaintly adorable bookshop cum cafe in the back streets of Los Angeles. Elle was nursing a kumquat espresso and idly browsing through a Breanne Fahs book when I came in, blinded by the rays of the mid afternoon sun trickling through her long hair. I sat down and apologised for the smell – I thought I’d seen a tuna sandwich in the bins outside the shop that unfortunately turned out to be a dead raccoon – and we began:

guess i got my fucking answer

2022’s Statictus the Fitness: The Numbers Behind the Year’s Greatest Albums

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Remember when I used to do these posts right after I did the albums of the year? So it’d be the Necessary Evil albums of the year, the scientifically proven best album fawned over at length, the stats, and then we’d be officially done for another year?

Boom! You just been Mandela Effected, boyeeee! I actually only think I ever did that schedule once, for Necessary Evil 2019. I’ve always been far more often waaaaaaay late with these statistical breakdowns. What I actually used to do really early is (pfff!) do the stats just before the number one album! I could never (be arsed these days! These days the writing of the list itself is such a huge emotional toil that it takes me a long time to even consider thinking about these fucking albums again. Also, it’s getting harder and harder to think of puns on the word ‘stat’.

But these posts are basically just pictures, so I may as well just freakin’ do it. Let’s glance back at the wonderful year od 2022 when we all collectively thought, as always, “Well at least the next year can’t be as bad as this one…”.

Watch me drift and watch me struggle, let me go

#24 Destroyer: Labyrinthitis

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Oh Aggie, your beating heart was a carriage made of gold
How the arithmetic of this guitar melts your heart is beyond me
And when I say beyond me, I mean beyond me
Love ya? I barely know you, it goes to show
Who really knows what love is?
The branches, the breeze, the roiling seas
None of it seems worth mentioning
Though I’m in the process of figuring it out
Even if it’s elementary
A scrapyard angel, wings of brass
Ash, a river called trash
And speaking of lifelike, this is what life’s like
You thread the needle, then the needle runs dry
You thread the needle, then the needle runs dry
“Inward Crackle,” says the fink to himself
Oh well, I wasn’t taught how to
Go off like a, go off like a, go off like a, go off like a
Go off like a hydrogen bomb
But I do radiate a certain glow
It flutters and fades, a Ferris wheel on the run from the snow
You have to look at it from all angles
Says the cubist judge from cubist jail
The sky glows, the heat is unbearable
Parrot weather
My decision is final, a crazy game
I traded in moonlight for the morning dew
I know dusk when I see one
I know rust when I see it
You come out swinging, but you go down swinging too
You pay good money for a million dollar view
Flipping the pages of Chatelaine
The rude empiricism of every troubled loser
Quote, unquote, unquote
A moment alone please
A moment alone please
A moment alone please
With this, with this
With this rhapsody
With this rhapsody
Vital information from where I’m standing
Low-born Madonna
With her typewriters in the rain
Clacking their misfortunes, speech, speech
A figure of light’s trapped inside your kimono
Absent friends, where’d you go?
And while we’re on the subject of psychotic passwords
Honing in on nothing
Everywhere Rome goes
Everybody wants her
Ah fuck, I feel like a discovery someone once saw
On a clear day
Dump him

June

Dan Bejar, ladies and gentlemen and others

WHOO! WORD COUNT!

Necessary Evil 2020 pt.15 (6-4)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

#6 Katie Gately: Loom

Yeah, I know, because of the Prince entry this is technically part 16, but I just decided the optics didn’t look right. Don’t @ me

Grief will affect everyone in different ways. And, hey, what other year have we been forced to face silly, unbiased mortality more than 2020? Firstly, there is no intimacy league table with an imaginary line drawn across it- nobody who was less than this close to you can properly affect you. Oh, and they need to be bipedal animals with recognisable hands and a proven ability to use those hands to manipulate tools, so no excessive mourning for your pet dog passing away. But I guess if you have a pet gorilla or chimpanzee who dies, that’s covered so you’re allowed to grieve for that. Aw, man, imagine having a pet gorilla just hanging around the house, like a big hairy flatmate. And then that gorilla dying! I’m getting sad just thinking about it. And maybe crows are covered. You can mourn your pet crow dying. But the fact is, every death has the potential to affect you, and the arresting smack of mortality will smack you hard even if it’s an old schoolfriend who you haven’t seen in decades or somebody you’ve never even met, even an existence that you had no concept of occurring before it was snuffed out. A human life, an existence you know as being full of thoughts and dreams and opinions and love and hatred just suddenly being stopped isn’t easy to get your head around. You might laugh, but even the death of Prince in 2016- a person I have never met, a person who I’ve never even been close enough to spit on, a person with less than no concept of my existence- hit me hard and played a part in my mental downward spiral that led to Necessary Evil 2016 starting ten months late. Hey, here was a living, breathing, organic thing that was doing stuff– stuff that affected my life– and now that thing is no more and that stuff is going to stop. It’s actually pretty fucked up.

“Mate, those dishes are really piling up…”
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