Playlist: 2026.6 | In search of Something Real

Some months arrive with an argument already half-formed, and May was one of them. The title is not a complaint about the times, though you could read it that way. It is a description of what we found ourselves reaching for: music that does not perform sincerity but simply has it, the way a well-made coat has weight before you ever put it on. We started with Ezra Collective and Yazmin Lacey because joy, when it is unforced, is the most serious thing a record can offer, and “God Gave Me Feet For Dancing” makes no apology for it. From there the playlist goes looking, room to room, for the genuine article.

It wanders, deliberately. There is the long-limbed melancholy of Frank Ocean and the open-window restlessness of Lykke Li, and then it slips somewhere warmer: DJ Cam’s Paris with Anggun gliding over it, The Main Ingredient’s “Summer Breeze,” the kind of soul Christopher grew up on and has never once stopped trusting. Prince is here, because Prince is always the answer to the question of whether desire can also be elegant. Then the geography keeps moving, Quantic’s borderless funk, Ckay out of Lagos, Maribou State and Holly Walker holding the floor at that blue hour when a night decides what it wants to be. The thread is never genre. It is conviction, the sense that each of these people meant it.

It closes the way the search tends to close, quietly and a little exposed: Chet Faker, Hot Chip dancing in the dark, and finally Imogen Heap alone with “Hide and Seek,” which is about as close to the unguarded center of a person as a song gets. That is the real thing we were after all month. Not polish, not mood for its own sake, but the moment the artifice drops and you are simply somewhere true. Play it loud, play it late, and let it find its own way.

—Christopher Webster

Track List

• God Gave Me Feet For Dancing
  Ezra Collective, YazinLacey
• Lost
  Frank Ocean
• I Follow Rivers
  Lykke Li
• Sunrise
  Dublon, Dana Williams, jev.                                     
• I Wanna Be Your Lover
  Prince
• Summer in Paris (Starring Anggun)
  DJ Cam                 
• Summer Breeze
  The Main Ingredient
• Earrings
  Malcom Todd
• Time Is the Enemy
  Quantic
• Teardrops
  Neil Frances
• Darling
  Esbe
• Viscus (feat. FKA twigs)
  Oklou, FKA twigs
• By Now
  Ckay
• Midas
  Maribou State, Holly Walker
• Over You
  Chet Faker
• Dancing In the Dark
  Hot Chip
• Hide and Seek
  Imogen Heap