“cool kids never have the time”
Hello and welcome back to FanPost Friday. It’s sunny out and the 2025 Mariners are still riding high off of one of the more improbable comeback victories in franchise history over the hated Houston Astros. Listen, we knew this team was going to be weird, but they may end up being more chaotic and absurd than anyone could have guessed if they keep this shit up somehow all season.
But, today we’re gonna focus on generally good sunny day vibes. As the weather continues to tease us with false spring, real spring, hail storms, thunder storms, and random intense downpours, it’s those sweet, sweet UV rays I’m focusing on today. When the sun comes out, I wanna hear summer time good vibes music. That can mean a lot of different things to different people. I have made many summer-centric playlists over the years and they tend to skew more toward pop-punk and/or fuzzy 90’s alt-rock or just full-on party rap depending on the occasion. Today I’d like to share three fairly recent sunny day songs that I’ve been jamming during brief periods of sunlight in the PNW.
Alien Boy – “Changes”
Portland’s Alien Boy might be your new favorite band if you like fuzzed-out, jangly, and distorted songs about yearning. Clearly owing much of their sound to the 90’s, it was super cool when I saw them at a Halloween show last year and they played four(!) Smashing Pumpkins cover songs. Made a lot of sense. Also, they roll with three guitars for no other good reason than just pure volume and extra texture. Anyways, this song sounds like a windows-down drive through the city.
Suzzalo – “River”
You may know of Rocky Votolato’s work as a solo singer/songwriter & as frontperson of Waxwing (truly one of the most underrated Seattle bands of the last 20 years). Suzzalo is his new band, also featuring the very talented drummer from Waxwing and Gatsby’s American Dream, Rudy Gajadhar. Rocky and his family experienced unimaginable tragedy as their oldest child died in a car accident in 2021. Rocky’s previous two decades-worth of music was no stranger to grief as a theme, but obviously this loss was utterly life-changing. His wife April, an artist, began pouring her efforts into a project aimed at normalizing and celebrating grief in its many forms. Rocky’s last solo album, “Wild Roots,” dealt a lot with the massive devastation of the loss and how powerless it all felt. In contrast, Suzzalo’s songs (so far, the full album comes out in May) seem to be centered around remembrance, acceptance, and also on choosing to lean into joy wherever it can be found. When the classic, fragile lilt in Rocky’s voice hits during the line, “I don’t know how we lived through the hell that happened,” before triumphantly stating that “We’re golden,” it’s just….man. Hits home big time. So yeah, a sunny weather song about grief because grief never ends, it just ebbs and flows.
Turnstile – “Never Enough”
Many of y’all probably know this band at this point, but Maryland’s Turnstile started as a hardcore band in the early 2010’s playing Leeway and Cro-Mags riffs to great acclaim among moshers and stage divers all over the country and world, eventually. Always a big sing-along-centric kind of band, they progressed into more pop-punk directions while embracing a massively bright yet crunchy guitar tone that must have made the dudes in 311 extremely jealous. Their pandemic-era record “Glow On” blew up so big that they were playing on Late Night shows. This new single dropped last week and I happened to come across it while I was literally standing in some rare sunlight at the park by my house. Let’s just say it fit the dang vibe with an intro that evokes M83 before diving straight back into a massive, arena-shaking day-glo riff.
PROMPT: Give me some favorite sunny day songs, new or old! Links to YouTube, playlists, etc, highly encouraged.
Have a great weekend and go Mariners.
Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images