Albums of Academic Year 2024–2025

This is what we'd write in people's yearbooks if that were a thing in college. HAGS!!!! 💖

By Charley Burns, Sloane DiBari, Rhys Hals, Ebun Lawore, Benjamin Rosielle, and Zoe Stern

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Note from (one of) the Editor(s):

Does anyone else feel like 2024–2025 was kind of a uniquely insane year at Oberlin? Maybe this is just sample bias, but every single one of us have had a wild time these past two semesters.

This could be attributed to a number of things: the 2024 election, a general sense of distress and sadness on campus, an evil wizard casting a spell on the state of Ohio. Everything kind of sucks, to say the very least.

But in this ridiculous, terrible (but occasionally brilliant, despite everything) year, music has been a constant when everything else has been in flux. Those of us who could spare the time between finals and moving out decided to write a bit more on our picks for this last album list of the year (!) — that’s how you know this one’s extra special.

Enough from me — I’ll let everyone’s records speak for themselves. Here’s our soundtrack for this academic year. –Sloane DiBari

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Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000) – Limp Bizkit

raging, silly, lowkey annoying

Okay, I’m admitting something vulnerable here, so we’re not gonna judge me for my pick, cool? Cool. Over the summer, in my freshly graduated from high school angst, a friend of mine played me “Break Stuff” for the first time. Driving down a Detroit street, going 80 MPH, and having windows all down changed my life. I became a new woman. I spent the next three to five months slowly but surely going through all of Limp Bizkit’s discography. I said I liked them ironically, so it was fine. I lied. That irony morphed into genuine adoration. They’re not lyrically or really even musically geniuses, but Limp Bizkit has really, truly been the soundtrack to my freshman year of college. Significant Other (1999) might be their most popular album, but for me, the horribly named Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water has been my drug of choice. This album has been so weirdly versatile for me, having scored crashouts, cry seshes, and some of the best days of my life. I think Fred Durst, Wes Borland, John Otto, and DJ Lethal’s camp really makes this album shine for me in a way that makes my love for Limp Bizkit cross that bridge from being ironic to being real. “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” is a fucking amazing dancing song, let’s all just be real for a sec. “Hot Dog,” “My Generation,” and “My Way”’s 2000s nu metal anger has such an odd sense of fun that I really respect.

So is Limp Bizkit the greatest band in the world? No. Are they very fun, and did they just get introduced to me at the right time? Do I think they make genuinely very good music? Yes. Yes, I do. If you judge me after reading this, I totally get it, but also lowkey I don’t. But I am gonna take this moment to say: Fred Durst, if you're reading this, please bring me up on stage like you do with people at your shows to help you sing “Full Nelson.” Please, I know all the words, and it’ll be great. Okay, thank you, and go listen to more silly music, everyone! –Charley Burns ‘28

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Teens of Denial (2016) – Car Seat Headrest

anthemic, sobering, mythic

Sorry for Car Seat Headresting for the millionth time, but I had to do it. Teens of Denial is my quintessential college album. I remember listening to it in high school, when I was pretty socially isolated and even more online than I am now, while I fantasized about having all of the formative experiences Will Toledo sings about. It gave me hope that nerdy gay loser English majors can, too, go to parties and whatever. And it isn’t always pretty!

Teens of Denial is a record of learning life lessons the hard way, making friends and losing them, experimenting to results ranging from underwhelming at best to Evil at worst. The opener “Fill in the Blank” sets the tone for the story of hometown anti-hero “Joe,” Toledo’s college-kid alter ego devised two years after his graduation from William & Mary. Joe is something of a misfit, young and frustrated and lonely, simultaneously defeated and defiant. “Vincent” is a seven-minute identity crisis that reads, ironically, as naive and jaded at the same time. “Drugs with Friends” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” are decidedly unpsychedelic representations of bad trips, appearing on the tracklist in the order of peak to comedown. “1937 State Park” is a slightly effeminate bookworm’s fantasy of becoming a martyr of masculinity: “High school teen dream dies in a hospital / Leaves behind a journal and a pair of Air Jordans / Lyrics of popular rock ballds / Changed to include his name.” “Cosmic Hero” almost reads as a less forgiving response to the Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over,” another angsty college kid classic. “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” is an eleven-and-a-half-minute identity crisis, an ode to giving up on pretending you know how to be a Real Actual Adult. And, of course, I can’t neglect to mention the instant classic “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales,” placed just halfway through the record as a moment of clarity amidst a series of defining and devastating incidents. “It doesn’t have to be like this!” we tell ourselves as we go on to fuck up in a multitude of ways new and old.

Like our undergraduate years, Teens of Denial is a firestorm of contradictions, some beautiful, some terrible, and some both. Its bravado is self-conscious, its drug-induced haze is cut with an unforgiving clarity, its classic rock worship is marked by an unmistakable indie-kid irreverence. It’s been a crazy year for everyone I know. I’ve seen couples break up and get back together, friendships implode, a tragic unicycle accident, a succession of other various crises and injuries. But I’ve also learned how to dance a little less badly, how to love in ways I never envisioned, how to write a solid research paper. For every crashout, there’s been a beautiful night walk in mild weather, a fit of rhythmic spasming to house music, a miracle of nature. The sophomore slump was followed by the invincible We’re So Back. College life kind of sucks. But it’s also pretty great. With Teens of Denial, Car Seat Headrest proves that they know that better than anyone. Recommended for the worst 21st birthday ever, swearing that shrooms will be fun this time around, making the same expensive mistakes over and over again, and getting the goddamn band back together. –Sloane DiBari ‘27

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Seed of a Seed (2024) – Haley Heynderickx

mystical, folksy, outdoorsy

Haley Heynderickx has been a background favorite of mine for a while. I’ve been a longtime listener of “The Bug Collector,” basic as it may be, and the scream-singing in “Oom Sha La La” rivals that in Phoebe Bridgers’s “I Know the End.” A week after the presidential election last November I went on a multiple-day Outings Club trip to a secluded farm. On the drive there, someone put on Seed of a Seed and I instantly fell in love. The first track, “Gemini,” is a beautiful critique of life in today's world. When I listen, I feel caught up in the chaos of it all, overwhelmed, a bit scared, and kind of mad. The lines “The food that I’ve been eating says I’m processed / And I can lack communication / I can lack coordination / Inside my awkward occupations like fortress” make me go feral. The whole album has beautiful lyrics and guitar work, making me feel that much less insane in a very insane world. I normally hate when media references pop culture, but Heynderickx does so in such a way that is incredibly thoughtful and meaningful, adding significance to her cultural critiques.

When she came to the ‘Sco I felt very nonchalant about attending, but the second she came on stage and started to sing I lost it. I loved her vulnerability, her stage presence, and her asking people not to take photos of her. Initially irritated, I came to appreciate the points she made when talking on stage, staying true to the themes of her songs. Also, she complimented my hummingbird tattoo. Since that night, (where I purchased this album on vinyl and had her sign it) I have been addicted to this album, listening to it no matter what mood I’m in, what I’m doing. I’ve used it to track how long it takes me to do my problem sets (usually about 3–four listens all the way through). It is one of the few albums I make a point to listen to in its entirety and it always hits the spot just when I need it. –Rhys Hals ‘27

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Romance (Deluxe Edition) (2025) – Fontaines D.C.

angsty, playful, comforting

I remember when the original version of Romance came out. It was August 2024, a week before I came to Oberlin. I had just got my license and I was driving around listening to the whole record for the first time. At first, I thought it was just okay, but I then went on to listen to it so much during fall semester. And when the deluxe version came out in April, I fell in love with it all over again.

This is one of those albums that I love so much because I have no idea what it’s actually about. They tend to use a lot of really obscure metaphors in their lyrics, and sometimes their accents are so Irish that I actually just have no idea what they are saying. But every so often they’ll have one random lyric in a random song that will pierce me in the chest, take up all the space in my brain for weeks on end, and somehow connect to my life perfectly. In September, I would listen to “Favorite” and think of all of my high school friends that I hadn’t seen in months as the lyrics, “Yeah, it’s been a long, a long, a long, a long, a long-long / You been my favourite for a long time,” rang in my head. During my Winter Term four week-long existential crisis I would lie in bed internalizing the part of “Horseness Is the Whatness” that says, “Will someone find out what the word is that makes the world go ‘round, cause I thought it was love / But some say that it has to be choice / I read it in a book / Or an old packet of smokes.” More recently, I’ve been thinking about the part of “It’s Amazing to Be Young” that goes, “It’s amazing to be young,” and I’ve been frolicking around campus thinking about how amazing it is to be young.

Throughout this whole school year, Fontaines D.C. has just been finding me in the right moments, up until the very end. Even now, I am going to their concert in Cleveland the day after my last day of classes. If you take a listen to this record, hopefully it will find you in the right place, too. –Ebun Lawore ‘28

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Rat Saw God (2023) – Wednesday

visceral, compelling, (Southern) Gothic

In my writeup for my November album of the month, I wrote that “you’d be hard-pressed to find me claiming Wednesday to have a better album than their 2021 release Twin Plagues.” Now, with six more months of Oberlin College experience under my belt, I regret to inform you that you are, in fact, hard-pressed. Rat Saw God is the band’s masterpiece. It pushes their range as musicians, hinting at multiple stylistic directions at once while improving upon their previous efforts as a band.

Every part of Twin Plagues that I loved (the lyrics, the hooks, the crescendos, the slide guitar) is more nuanced, compelling and well-placed on Rat Saw God. Just as Wednesday have gotten better at writing pop songs, their noisy guitar textures feel more tortured and detailed than ever before. Every track on the album is worthy of praise, all the way from the gut-twisting opener “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” to the gentle, subtly uneasy closer of “TV in the Gas Pump.” While the crescendoing “Cody’s Only” (off of Twin Plagues) is close to my favorite Wednesday song, I’ve recently come around to “Turkey Vultures” as my slow-burner of choice, a song with a dynamic buildup so visceral it gives me goosebumps every time. While I could write a thousand words gushing about every track on this album, I’ll leave it off with “Quarry,” my pick for song of the (can I say it?) decade and a masterpiece in storytelling which paints a (mostly real) picture of dysfunctional Southern life that is extremely catchy to boot.

In my insatiable quest for more Wednesday lore, I’ve devoured Hartzman’s personal website, prisondivorcebombshell.com, which is both an inspiration to neo-Luddites everywhere (she quit social media) and a fascinating insight into the interests and artistic processes of one of my favorite songwriters of this century. This album has inspired me to try (and fail) at restarting a habit of consistently writing lyrics, although it did persuade me to waste a few hours here or there playing Wednesday songs on the floor of my dorm room. Looking back on their 2020 full-band debut I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, you can see the brilliance of Rat Saw God peeking out of the corners of songs, hinting at a fully-fledged vision that had yet to materialize. It’s hard not to trace their development as a band onto my adolescence: I was 13 when they released their debut, and 12 when Karly Hartzman released the embryonic (though excellent) How Do You Let Love Into the Heart That Isn't Split Wide Open EP under the name Wednesday alongside future bandmate and ex-boyfriend MJ Lenderman. Just as Wednesday have grown so much as a band over the years, I’ve grown too, and I can’t wait to see where we both go next. Recommended for dorm room pregames, midnight walks in the freezing rain, and falling in love for the first time. –Benjamin Rosielle ‘28

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Ghostholding (2025) – venturing

adventurous, tantalizing, heart-wrenching

Great. Another Jane Remover pick, Zoe. Listen, this is venturing so it’s different. This album came around the time I first joined WOBC Blog. I wasn’t ready to write about it then, but I am now. Even before Ghostholding released, I listened to each single from the album religiously as they came out over the course of last semester. It didn’t help my obsession that each song mirrored the plot of my school year in real time.

Venturing, Jane Remover’s indie rock side project, was initially substantiated with lore related to a fictional band from South Dakota, but Jane has recently claimed the project as her own work. In 2023, venturing released its debut Arizona EP, and after releasing four singles over a four-month period toward the end of 2024, Ghostholding came out on Valentine’s Day of this year. Ghostholding is a crashing descent into addiction, the bitter disappointments and hopeless trap of love, and losing oneself in the process of chasing fame and validation. Like the name venturing implies, Ghostholding is moving, going anywhere. It is walking home in the echo of the party or biking to the Arb at full speed, seeking some sort of escape. It is being pulled into the ground by the weight in your chest.

Despite the evil portrayal of Ghostholding I’ve given thus far, there are some upbeat bangers. “Famous girl” and “Recoil” are fun and take on a lighter tone (if you don’t think about the lyrics too much.) In contrast, “Sick / relapse” is one of the most soul-crushing songs I’ve ever heard, and ruins me every time I reach it in the album. The drastic fluctuation in the album’s mood reflects a vicious cycle akin to the cycle of addiction. At the end of it, Ghostholding winds down in exhaustion, drained of all ambition: “The girls, they tell me I’m all out of love.”

My first year of college has taken me on some of the strangest, most unbelievable, and most euphoric journeys of my life. It has also taken me to some of the darkest places in my life. Music has helped me process and cope with all of it. Even though I have some bad associations with Ghostholding, I can still appreciate the vastness of the album’s emotion and its ability to engulf me in memory. –Zoe Stern ‘28

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