A Finely Tuned Sense of Déjà Vu

Take an interactive journey with me as I attempt to tell you how I connect new music to old. Inside: an ineffective cooking analogy, new songs compared to specific old counterparts, and a playlist.

My poor attempt at photoshopping records on top of this nice lady’s cake.

There’s one question I’ve been dodging for a while.

“What’s your process for determining that a new artist sounds similar to an old artist?”

It’s an infuriatingly good question, one that I haven’t been answering not because it’s some weird proprietary secret, but for the simple reason that I have no idea.

I’ve been thinking about it, though, and you’ll have to indulge me in a ridiculous hypothetical scenario that will help me explain how my brain works.

Guess the Secret Ingredient

Imagine you’re at a friend’s house for a dinner party. Your friend is a great chef, always putting her own little spin on traditional dishes, but a little possessive about her recipes. In fact, she’s kind of a jerk about it — before she’ll share, she makes you guess her secret ingredients, and it’s not always easy. She’s turned it into a kind of game.

On the menu tonight is a hearty chili. You love chili. You’ve had chili a thousand times before, and this one isn’t all that different. It’s just beans and meat, right? You do taste an unexpected new flavor this time, though. You just can’t quite put your finger on it.

Is it spicier than usual? Did she put more pepper in it?

No, it’s more aromatic than you’re used to. Cinnamon?

She tells you you’re partially right — she also added coffee. You didn’t realize you had to guess two ingredients this time. You’re incredibly annoyed that you missed it.

OLD MUSIC FOR OLD HEADS,

For me, listening to new music is a constant taste test for the “secret ingredients” of older influences. Sometimes there are so many I can barely trace them all. Other times I only hear the tiniest flash of something familiar in one backing riff. Other times there’s just a general, pervasive sense of familiarity, but I can’t place any specific influence.

For me, listening to new music is a constant taste test for the “secret ingredients” of older influences.

True, nobody is forcing me to guess what these secret ingredients are, but I feel an overwhelming compulsion to do it anyway. That feeling that I have it right there at the tip of my tongue drives me insane.

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A Finely Tuned Sense of Déjà Vu

Our phone assistants are great for telling us what song is playing in the supermarket right this second, but they’re not super helpful at answering “what songs does this remind me of?"

If You Like [X]

When I hear a new track, I’m sometimes overcome with nostalgia, a memory of an older song (or often several) that won’t leave me in peace. I have to know what it is, and unless that artist is aware of the connection that I’m personally hearing — not impossible, but rare — it’s not something I can easily look up.¹

Most people would probably let it go. If I did that, New Bands for Old Heads wouldn’t exist.

The problem is that I might just have a finely tuned sense of déjà vu, not any kind of step-by-step process that I can impart to you. I’ll try to work by way of examples instead.

First, let’s make this a bit interactive.

Just below is a track from a Japanese dream-pop band called Taffy, who released a new record a couple of days ago.

Tell me, does this song make you feel nostalgic? Does it remind you of any older artists? Does it maybe remind you of one song in particular?

Hint: skip to 0:44 if you’re feeling lost.

Don’t worry; there’s a playlist at the end that will give you the “right” answer.

Sometimes the connections are obvious.

(I hate using YouTube links - you’re seeing them in cases where I wanted to clip a song past the beginning.)

Occasionally, there’s so much hype around a new artist that their reputation precedes them.

You don’t need me to tell you that The Dare…

…sounds like LCD Soundsystem.

Even if you didn’t hear the connection immediately, you have practically the entire music media spoon-feeding that exact comparison to you. The Dare is the poster boy of the indie sleaze revival. If that’s a scene you milled around in, you’d have figured it out eventually, with or without my help.

There are less zeitgeisty artists who similarly telegraph their own influences. I’ve already mentioned Folly Group once, but let’s review. Listen for the jabbing, repetitive guitars and the call/response vocals.

Then, compare to Gang of Four:

Going by my poorly thought out ingredient guessing game analogy, I’d liken this to noticing that your friend had put bacon in her mac’n’cheese. It’s plain for everyone to see.²

Sometimes the connections aren’t so obvious.

I’ve written before about how nostalgia drives our perception of music. It makes sense that what I hear when I listen to a new album won’t necessarily align with what you hear, because we don’t have the same associations.

When I first recommended The Bug Club over on TikTok, I said that they sounded like a mix of the Velvet Underground and the Moldy Peaches. To me, it was uncanny. “Marriage” was my entrée into the band, but it was even more apparent in another song from a later release:

I started singing “Temptation Inside Your Heart” as soon as I heard “Better Than Good” and it fit perfectly.

I thought that this was an open and shut case. But no matter how obvious I think certain connections are (and I’m sure many will disagree with those I’ve called obvious in this very post), there will always be skeptics. This was no different.

My video recommending “Marriage” went semi-viral, so you can imagine it invited a lot of commentary. One of the most common was that Bug Club sounded much more like Parquet Courts than any other artist.

I love Parquet Courts. For a post-punk obsessive like me, they’re on heavy rotation. But I just couldn’t hear it. Like Folly Group, they’re tied with Gang of Four and their brethren in my mind: The Fall, Wire, Mission of Burma. Serious People, in other words.

The Bug Club, on the other hand — and I say this with all the love in my heart — are a couple of nerds singing silly songs. Incredibly good silly songs, but still.

In the end, I realized I was splitting hairs. I’m not here to gatekeep anything, especially not anybody’s highly subjective listening experience. Whatever connections you make are yours, and they’re correct.

Sometimes I’m flat out wrong.

Now, I realize I literally just finished telling you that there is no such thing as “wrong.” What a tricky thing, eh? Life is full of contradictions.

In 2023, I fell in love with a band called bar italia. Their first album that year³, Tracey Denim, put them on the map and invited a lot of buzz, especially because the British trio like to keep a purposefully mysterious profile.

One common misconception that I fell for hook line and sinker is that they took their name from the Pulp song of the same name. They hadn’t, I learned later, but the association had already cemented itself in my brain.

I described them as a completely insouciant version of Pulp without any of the glam. I was completely off-base, of course. bar italia is closer to shoegaze, if anything, and they claim to dislike Pulp, anyway. Ah, well!

Sometimes the match is flawless.

My crowning achievement remains identifying the relationship between Viagra Boys’ “Punk Rock Loser”, easily my favorite song of the last five years…

…and The Dandy Warhols’ “Horse Pills”:

I’ll let this comparison speak for itself in this case.

Did this song actually influence the tongue-in-cheek Swedish post-punkers? Completely unclear. Probably not. “Horse Pills” is hardly representative of The Dandy Warhols’ usual sound. It doesn’t matter to me, though. As far as I’m concerned, these songs are essentially written in the same font.

A playlist, so I don’t go on forever.

I like to think that I have more hits than misses. Instead of listing them here endlessly, I’ll give you a playlist to peruse on your own time instead.