Are you still interested in discovering new music?
An outtake with Yang-Yi Goh and an afterthought on listening habits
Welcome to Human Pursuits, the column that features need-to-know names and stories in media and other creative spaces. Today, an outtake from my conversation with GQ Senior Style Editor Yang-Yi Goh
Read part one of our conversation here.
Outtake
ES: Are you still interested in discovering new music? Because a lot of people simply don’t have the time as they get older.
YY: I am, for sure. It’s been especially cool to watch genres like punk and emo come back. There’s all this new talent. I’m a huge fan of from Toronto. I’m lucky enough to consider [PUP guitarist] Steve a buddy.
ES: What a great guy. Love Steve.
YY: He’s the nicest dude in the world. And PUP is making some incredible music. There’s also a band from Long Island called Koyo that I really love. It’s been cool to watch people who grew up listening to the same music that I did start making their own music, and that a lot of it is good.
ES: Is it weird for you to see pop-punk’s trajectory in recent years? For so long, it was sneered at and not taken seriously, and now it seems completely ubiquitous. It’s like dad rock or something. I find the whole thing a bit surreal.
YY: I’m definitely of two minds about the whole thing. It’s nice to see bands that I loved growing up still together and making a living touring. My wife and I joke that our lives now revolve around going to 20th and 25th anniversary tours for the albums we loved growing up, which is sick. At the same time, there’s a corniness to festivals like When We Were Young. The corporatization of things, though a lot of these bands were on major labels and being sold at Hot Topic.
ES: I don’t know you super well, but from where I’m sitting, you seem like a pretty stoic guy. Pop punk is famously angsty. What is it about these chunes that keeps you interested? Clearly, you’re a fan.
YY: I don’t know how stoic I am, so it’s funny you say that. Maybe it’s because we’re talking on Monday morning and I’m just easing into my day. I think the angst is exactly why I still listen to that music. I feel angsty, especially right now. There’s so much awful stuff happening at the moment. It feels good to throw on some Jeff Rosenstock and scream in the shower a little bit.
Afterthought
Yang is a fairly succinct interview subject, so there wasn’t much to cut from our conversation. Asking if he listened to new music seemed kind of silly, in hindsight, so I trimmed the question and his response to keep the interview moving. I think it was the right call.
That said, I find listening habits incredibly interesting, particularly when the listener is trying to stay current. 2024 was a great year for music, and 2025 is trending in a similar direction. The number of notable new releases every week feels almost overwhelming. There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to everything. How does one decide where to focus their attention?
The biggest barrier to checking out Chunes, I find, is usually mental resistance. It takes effort to consume new material. It’s easier and more comforting to stick with what is familiar. Several studies suggest that our music tastes crystallize in our early 30s, with listeners often retreating into music from their childhood or teenage years.
I don’t have a perfect system, but as someone who discovers new music every week, here are three tricks for improved listening.
Read the lyrics: Maybe this is completely obvious, but it’s a lot easier to invest in a song when you know what the fuck people are saying. I could write a whole essay on the lack of enunciation in modern pop music and how it’s made things feel unbearably sloppy, but I digress… Ideally, Spotify or Apple Music will have the lyrics synced with the song already, though Genius works in a pinch. You could also purchase the album and hope the lyrics are included in the album packaging, though that feels less guaranteed these days. If the singer is from another country, I will try to find the English translation because I want to know what they’re saying. I did this with the recent Bad Bunny album, for example.
Abuse the queue: One of the weirder parts of my personality is that I will take two albums – normally one I like and am familiar with, and one I’ve never heard before – and interweave them using the queue function of my preferred streamer. Track 1 from artist A is followed by Track 1 from artist B, which is followed by Track 2 from artist A, and so on. It’s incredibly inefficient, but it also counteracts the aforementioned resistance because you’re constantly getting a dose of something you like. You know how, with dogs, you put their medicine in a slice of American cheese? It’s sort of like that.
Ride the algorithm: My cousin Dan introduced me to Spotify’s “Daylist” feature back in February, and I was surprised to discover I don’t totally hate it. Described as an algorithmically curated playlist, it updates several times a day and is an okay option if you want to hear music that sounds similar to what you already like, but is new to you. Not amazing, but it can contain a couple of gems. That’s how I found “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae. Just type “Daylist” in the search bar and hit enter.