Are you hosting a New Year’s Eve party at your place tonight?
If so, what’s on your playlist?
It’s not easy to put together a night everyone will remember. Since North Brooklyn is the best place in the city to discover great music, your guests are going to expect you to showcase some amazing and obscure songs from local bands, not just what you managed to crib off a Best of 2015 nation-wide music critics’ poll.
So, to help you out, we rummaged through our own favorite tracks to provide you just the ones that will bring even your moodiest friends to the dance floor.
Paperwhite starts our list off with some of their sun-dappled dance pop. It’s Take Me Back, followed by Give You Up. You know, for the end of the night, when you are drunkenly alternating between clinging to, and yelling at, your ex.
Speaking of breakups, local singer-songwriter Leland Sundries would like to announce as a New Year’s Eve resolution for 2016, he’s officially giving up redheads.
The Prettiots provide this witty gem, taped in December at Williamsburg’s Rough Trade.
Oh heck, they are good enough for an encore. Here, some dating history.
It’s tough to fit the melancholy sounds of Sufjan Stevens into your party mix, but he’s such an inspiration to his North Brooklyn music community, he should get a shout-out. This track is for slow-dancing.
A slow dance is a way to gauge if the guy or gal you just impulsively kissed at midnight this New Year’s Eve is worth further exploration. I recommend that during the dance you test if they can put more than two words together, and make sure they don’t reek of Febreze.
LE1F has been consistently firing up hip-hop fans on the dance floor this year. If you missed him at the Northside Festival this year, here’s your chance at redemption.
If everyone’s fired up and ready for a danceable punk tune, try Vanity’s Can’t Be Bothered (Talking To You). You can also cue it up to send a message to that guy who’s been creeping you all night.
To fill out your playlist, I recommend Cultfever, especially their tracks Youth, Knew You Well, and Animals, all of which you can find here.
Please, give your hardworking local musicians a nice holiday surprise and use the websites linked above to buy a download of any songs you like. For most of the downloads you name your own price. $3 is about the going rate for a track in an uncompressed digital format like FLAC.
An uncompressed track will play at a much higher quality level than a stream or MP3, and it’s easy then to add the track to whatever playlist program you are using.
Happy New Year everybody.