What was playing in August's 2026 Rotation?

August 31, 2026

Preface

As usual, these entries are about music, and I listen to all kinds of things. Hope you find something that you like!

Whenever I write about music, it is inevitable that I will describe the feelings that are evoked by it. In this post, there are some comments about sadness and spiraling, anger and rage, and some libidinous evocation.
Songs on here are unrestricted to genre and language. Below, we talk about Korean, Spanish, and Hindi songs, and the genres metal(core), techno/trance, rap, and even country. Just be advised: most songs below (in this month) fall under the metal category.
I am not a professional “music reviewer,” whatever that is. Below, I just talk about the songs that I liked, how they make me feel, and what they make me think. Hopefully, you enjoy some of them, too!
I use YouTube to find music (in contrast to Spotify, for various reasons). All of my playlists are available on my YouTube channel.

The Songs in August’s Rotation

1: underscores - The Peace

I discovered this song through the YouTube algorithm. It somehow knew to send it my way. This song cracked me in a way that others haven’t recently. I am typically only “cracked” (i.e. damaged) by a new song at a frequency of every three to seven months, as per my calculations. It was to this song that I stared into the midnight sky after a violent thunderstorm blazed through our town and asked myself what on Earth I am doing in this world. Something about the way that underscores layers her chopped, vocoded singing infuses into every nerve in my body. As one of the comments under the video aptly stated:

the youth yearn for imogen heap-esque vocal chops

There is nothing so enveloping as listening to the vocoded harmony of Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek. And I am glad underscores has reminded me of this.

Now, as anyone who knows me knows, I do not really like the glorification of any type of narcotic—I’m like Hopsin in a way (see Hopsin - Nocturnal Rainbows, for example). As plenty of the commenters observed, both the lyrics and the music video revel in the liberation that smoking apparently offers: excitement, energy, serenity, elation, transcendence. Some people remarked that the music video was the “most effective erasure of anti-smoking campaigns.” And with the embrace of underscores’s singing over the warm river of vocoded melody, I, too, as I watched the twinkling stars in my forested neighborhood glisten in the post-storm humidity, thought about these momentary pleasures. After all, it can seem these days as if our world is only breaking further into pieces. I thought about dying happy. It’s a classic call: “live fast, die young” (Tinashe ft. SchoolBoy Q - 2 On). If our future is so uncertain, if our world is on the brink of disintegration, then maybe we really ought to be as present as we can be in this fleeting moment.

But that is the magic of music: With lyrics (and a music video) glorifying the transcendent experience of smoking, the song still meshed into my essence. It infused itself with me in the ways that all made sense to me. And as I listen to underscores sing about her three major experiences with smoking around the world, I do not ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, or redirect the attention—I just feel it. And that’s what music is often about.

2: Papa Jay - Work Dat

Do not skip out on this young performer; he’s surging to stardom. Papa Jay is a singer, rapper, and dancer! He just has that magic.

I discovered this song through Lah Pat, the mastermind behind the seductive classics Lah Pat - Kamikaze and—don’t you skip this one now—Lah Pat ft. Flo Milli - Rodeo (Remix).

Of everything on this list, I think I listened to this song the most.

Just listen. Get into your feet a little bit.

3: Camilo - 5 pa las 12

My labmate introduced me to the genre Salchipapeo a week ago. Salchipapeo appears to be a high-velocity techno- or house-inspired genre. One of the songs in that mix was Noro$t - five pa las twelve. Curious about the title of the song, I looked up “five pa las twelve” on YouTube and found Camilo - 5 pa las 12, the original song.

4: Zach John King - Get To Drinkin’

Country music is controversial, both because of its history and because of its suck (to put it lightly…). It was actually a long-time friend of mine who surprised me one day by playing Florida Georgia Line - Cruise when he was in charge of the aux. Not a bad tune, I thought to myself. And it was that mere thought that drove me to start looking up country songs online. These days, I will unironically (I know!) turn to the country radio station to see if there is anything new playing.

And, indeed, I found a new song that struck me. As I drove around the outskirts of and, on the other side-ish of the state, , I revisited my memories of those places to this song.

Zach John King’s song is wonderfully sad: He’s a man so deep in denial that he’ll say exactly the opposite of what is really going on: “Your side of town / That’s a line I’m fine to cross / … / When I find a memory / No, I don’t lose my mind / Your song comes on / I don’t go crazy.” Faux confidence. Faux recovery. It’s so simple, but it’s wonderfully sung by Zach John King.

I am also surprised that this music video stands at below a million views on YouTube (as of this writing). And it is a wonderful music video as well: What kind of story do you want to tell yourself?

5: The Avalanches - Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life (Edan Remix)

Simply an excellent song. Excellent rhyming and flow. This style of rap is one I haven’t heard often these days. We’re just laid-back today, hanging out in the stairway and thinking out loud. It is not jam-packed with multi-syllabic wordplay. It’s reflective, slow, pensive: “I’m out to live tonight like it’s the final night of all of my living / Appreciating all that I’ve been given.”

6: Architects - Gone With The Wind

This song is not one that I listen to regularly; it is one of those that I designate as “dangerous.” Do you ever avoid watching a movie, reading a book, or listening to a piece of music because it’s just “too good?” This song falls into that category—but the word to use here is not “good.” No, not at all. (Just like underscores - The Peace is dangerous.)

This song is damaging—that is the proper word for it—the way that On the Nature of Daylight is damaging. One cannot walk away from this song without a few scratches, or a few rivers stained into their cheeks. “Gone With The Wind” propels me into a hopelessness, a dejection, a deep and sustained depression, the one that engulfs your mind when you return to face the Absurd. It does not matter what I am doing: walking home; going shopping at Kroger; washing the dishes; sitting outside on a beautiful, sunny, Spring day; exercising at the gym; debugging a Python script. This song will draw tears, like a wand cast at the corner of my eyes. It is, in that regard, a dangerous song, because it inevitably will draw my entire being away from its current state and into the song.

Those who are not attuned to metalcore likely will hear “just noise.” But there is a passion in this song that seeps into listeners who allow it. Listeners who do think that metal music is “just screaming” must remember under what circumstances humans scream in the first place. This song, which ultimately is metalcore, combines desperate, exasperated, frustrated screaming with classic metalcore chugs; it is envelopingly hopeless, but also a song to which you can momentarily shed the façade of being a rigid-and-poised adult with all the answers. Listening to this song is a kind of catharsis.

Architects lost their guitarist, Tom Searle, on August 21, 2016. He was afflicted with cancer and died after living with the disease for over three years. The lyrics are about coming to terms with the inevitability of your demise. Have you ever considered for yourself what it would be like to have “a sickness with no remedy?” Have you ever asked yourself “…how deep you could sink into nothing at all?” Perhaps you know somebody who is going through this experience.

7: Motionless In White - Abigail

My friend recently saw this band live! Apparently, Will Ramos (vocalist of Lorna Shore) showed up for “Abigail,” which is hands-down one of the angriest, frantic, injury-inducing metal songs of the 2010s. Chris Motionless (singer of Motionless In White) goes between serrated highs and demonic growls all in the span of two minutes, as we all are possessed with rage and scream “How could you?!”

8: Tinashe - Crash Out

Speaking of Tinashe: I have been following her since she released Tinashe ft. SchoolBoy Q - 2 On (and I have wonderful memories of performing to Tinashe - All Hands on Deck with good friends), she recently released two songs: Tinashe - Crash Out and Tinashe - Melatonin. When “Crash Out” came out, I was reminded of just how domineering and high-octane Tinashe’s music can be. She commands the entire performance. Now, “2 On” was wildly addictive, but I find it stunning that some of her other music has not received the same acclaim as “2 On.” I should mention, too, because it makes me happy, that Tinashe “does all her own stunts.” That means that she sings, raps, and dances.

9: Tashannie - Don’t Bother Me (Caution)

I originally found this song through another video, Dont Bother Me, which was uploaded on October 26, 2005… Videos like these sometimes will leak into the Recommended Videos sidebar to the left and compete with the other, more popular videos dominating the YouTube algorithm. And that is exactly what happened, and how it ended up in this August’s song rotation list, in the big ol’ 2026.

This song is “K-pop,” although it might not sound like the K-pop that has been in circulation for perhaps the past 10-15 years. For example, do you think it sounds anything close to BLACKPINK - 뚜두뚜두 (the Korean reads “DDU-DU DDU-DU,” of course!) or GD X Taeyang - Good Boy? Tashannie (Tasha + Annie) was a Korean duo that was on the scene for only a few years. In “Don’t Bother Me (Caution)”, you’ll hear the combination of singing with rapping, which was relatively exciting to encounter in South Korean music in the 2000s.

I love this song. In my opinion, it is one of those songs that people often describe as “the end credits music to the world” (in this case, the internet), which is how the user TheWraithOfMooCow described vedfx - Everyone’s Platinum Seque nine years ago now:

This sounds like the ending credits to the internet.

(Another comment is “Did I just finish Youtube?” Tashannie’s “Don’t Bother Me (Caution)” strikes me as also having that sound of upbeat-but-finished, as in we are celebrating the end of something epic, and maybe just a little sad about it ending.)

P.S.: Another performance of the song is available here: Tashannie - Don’t Bother Me (still known as: Caution).

10: Rahen Na Rahen

What a wonderful algorithm find. I listen to a lot of contemporary Indian music, which is found typically in cinema. That means it typically features genres I’m already familiar with but includes Hindi, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, or Bengali lyrics on top. As much as I enjoy, for example, the songs Ding Dang, Yo Yo Honey Singh - Dheere Dheere Se Meri Zindagi, Kuthanthram, it was a pleasure to indulge in these older songs that don’t frequently “make headlines” the way modern Indian music does (e.g. show up in the YouTube algorithm).

So, since I recommended a K-Pop song above, let me briefly make a comment. I have observed that K-Pop has managed to penetrate much of the Western entertainment industry. In contrast, Bollywood, Mollywood, Kollywood, and other -woods seem not to have broken the barrier yet: Everybody knows what K-Pop Demon Hunters is, but Western audiences know about T-Series only because of PewDiePie. All I can say is that the country of India has no shortage of fascinating movies and music. Additionally, I’ve been fortunate to have met many people from all over India in the past decade. As a result, I have seen movies and listened to music from all around the country, contrasting with what people typically think of as “Indian entertainment”: just Bollywood.

But, I mean, song after song after song after legendary song, Gallan Goodiyaan, Dola Re Dola, James Bond, London Thumakda, Naakka Mukka… are we not aware of this art?

11: Amber D - Amber’s Theme (Alex Kidd vs. Kidd Kaos Remix)

This song was uploaded to YouTube 16 darn years ago. It is one of those songs that young Internet browsers would run into during their YouTube exploration, like DJ Satomi - Waves or DJ S3RL - Pretty Rave Girl. The early years of YouTube featured a lot of rock, metal, rap… and then this kind of stuff, which is (you decide) either techno, trance, dance, hardcore, and so on.

Anyway, this song apparently falls under the category of “hard dance.” Whatever genre it falls under, it is wonderfully progressive. I observe that lots of techno songs, say, typically feature a kick and snare and feature some minimal melodic accompaniment. This song, though, really progresses through a myriad of emotions: it starts hard, concussive, intense, and then opens up the airy melody with the vocal-chops and its “lyrics” until returning to its dirty bass-driven breakdown. It’s an eight minute song, after all, and it is a journey. So, enjoy it, and don’t think about the destination!

12: Chelsea Grin - Recreant

For whatever reason, this cursed song has been in the rotation throughout August. This song is wrath manifest. I think this may be one of the angriest songs in metal (I think many people would want me to say that it is technically deathcore…). Actually, I said that for “Abigail” above, didn’t I? I suppose those two songs can tie. But “Recreant” is particularly special. The screams are grating, straight from the mouth of Hell. I think (don’t kill me if I get this wrong) Alex Koehler (the singer on “Recreant”) is even inhale screaming, which is nothing short of intoxicatingly possessive and maddening. I can barely keep my composure. Even though I have not been particularly angry towards anything in the month of August, I caught myself many times “singing” (if you can call it that…) the final breakdown out loud, with the single, isolated cymbal crash carrying the slowed melody. It really is its final segment that constitutes one of the most iconic breakdowns in all of metalcore.

Conclusion

If this commentary of “what’s been on the playlist” has been enjoyable, then I’ll consider doing another one for September!

Notes/References:

See the story behind “Gone With the Wind” on the Genius [dot] com blurb here: Architects – Gone With the Wind Lyrics. To see a live performance of this song, in which the lead singer Sam Carter addresses the story behind the song, consider watching Architects - Gone with the wind (live reading) sam speech .

Updates:

2026-09-01: Fixed some embarrassing typos.