An illustrious franchise and hedonistic electro-clash duo light faux paths forward.

SAMUEL HYLAND

Moments before Snow Strippers graced the Basement East, a dilapidated Nashville venue that staunchly discourages moshing and stage-diving, the New York Yankees slugger Juan Soto blasted a staggering solo home run off Alex Cobb, a nervous pitcher with a blistered middle finger and a broken nail. It felt like bullying: here was this overachieving 25 year-old, an unquestionable Hall of Fame lock with a snarky attitude, pimping the fuck out of an injured pitcher, visibly—maybe even excusably—losing his cool in front of a sold-out crowd that happened to include Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Bullying, historically, is the creed of the New York Yankees, a dominant franchise once dubbed the “Evil Empire” for its tyrannical chokehold on the World Series trophy. But they haven’t been bullying—nor winning—much lately, and maybe that’s why tonight’s beatdown, in Game 1 of the ALCS, felt so good. The last time the Yankees appeared in a World Series, the electro-clash duo Crystal Castles were a year removed from their eponymous debut album, a cult-favorite opus that infused off-kilter synth-pop with a macabre, punk-ish chill. Their ascent coincided, loosely, with an aesthetic turn towards darkness and the occult, foregrounded by shadowy saviors who lugged goth imagery into club contexts. Months after Crystal Castles released their sophomore album, the Michigan EDM duo SALEM released King Night, a ghastly figurehead of what bloggers had begun calling “Witch House”: horror-tinged house music, cooked up in cauldrons instead of DAWs. Tumblr brimmed with crucifixes, music videos with pentagrams, closets with black. It seemed like the post-9/11 period’s all-out hedonism was devolving, for no other reason than that people were bored. Winning had only been fun in moderation.

“With 39 league pennants and 26 World Championships, they are the epitome of pride, class and success.”

Tonight, 30 minutes out from the Snow Strippers show, the opposite was true for the New York Yankees, who’d gone 15 years—the longest stretch in franchise history—without knowing what a World Series trophy felt like. I was watching the game from my messy dorm room desk, where a miniature Derek Jeter figurine stands guard atop a stack of overdue library textbooks. Soto’s home run felt like a return to something, even though it would take eight more wins to make the coveted “thing,” a championship, tangible. Tonight’s return was more ephemeral; it was to an attitude, the spark of amorphous good that ends a depressive episode. This return, put more bluntly, was to bullying: pimping the struggling pitcher, taunting the Taylors and Travises, lathering in all the splendor money can buy. Losing is only fun in moderation. When winning is within reach, you want to grasp it as disrespectfully as possible. All of which makes Snow Strippers, a hedonistic EDM duo from Detroit, particularly apposite for the 2020s, a doomed decade that began with death and clawed its way out of the grave, one club banger at a time. Ours is a direct inverse of the 2009 Yankees’ cultural backdrop, which staggered back into the cemetery because the land of the living grew old. 2024 wants winners, and it wants winners who win so loudly that the losing dissipates on the dance floor.

Though not necessarily figureheads of this moment, Snow Strippers embody its indulgent values—inebriation, sexual pleasure, club nights—with garish precision, a strategic sensory overload that owes more to Spring Breakers than Crystal Castles and SALEM combined. The duo comprises Graham Perez, a wiry producer with permanent weed-brain, and Tatiana Schwaninger, a dainty vocalist with a proclivity to frolic in summer-wear. Much of their appeal squares with fresh, maybe manufactured, feelings of post-pandemic freedom. Last summer, while cabbies tapped steering-wheels to Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem’s “The Hillbillies,” they headlined a stacked New York show, hosted by the in-vogue production crew Surf Gang and co-signed by Lil Uzi Vert. Much of it was spectacle, and much of the spectacle was vapid. (“It’s cultural manipulation thanks to a hefty industry push,” No Bells wrote in a scathing dispatch, “and the fact that many of these artists can’t turn down a one-way ticket to the sun.”) But it was fun to fall for, admittedly, because it was fun to have something to believe in—even if the thing in question was an EDM act that came from out of nowhere, blew up on TikTok, fell in with the cool kids, made a million versions of the same song, and turned its volume up louder every time someone asked for substance. It looked like life, and for a generation that had seen death, looking alive was more than enough. Maybe someday they’d go from looking alive to being it.

“It isn’t music to listen to; it’s music to be inundated and distracted by. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—not until the distractions run out.”

Sounding alive—not to be confused with sounding lively—is a far more difficult task. Snow Strippers’ sultry electro-clash is engineered for dance-floors, TikToks, treadmills, and talk-show intros: transitory things, consulted in the small pockets where life, a trudging slog, gives way to frenetic movement. It isn’t music to listen to; it’s music to be inundated and distracted by. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—not until the distractions run out. The first time I listened to April Mixtape 3, the duo’s latest full-length project, I was on a six-hour flight to Phoenix, where I would have 30 minutes to buy coffee before boarding a second flight to Los Angeles. I remember being desperate to feel something, desperate to be jolted out of my lowly middle-seat shambles, a dark prison where two middle-aged white women were mashing elbows into my ribs, blinding me with iPads. The one-two punch of “Again” and “Under Your Spell,” each of which lob lovelorn balladry over pulsating kick patterns, felt promising: fast-paced, energized, conducive to shut-eyed daydreams of roving strobe lights. But by track three, the unfortunately titled “Now It’s Not The Same,” none of these elements really evolved—bludgeoning and consistent, they pounded away behind slight variations in chord structure, less concerned with being unique than being felt. None of these songs are particularly bad, which is the tricky thing about an era that plays vibes like instruments. Snow Stippers’ music is lively in the way an animatronic is lively: It memorizes tricks, performs those tricks, does so well enough to make people want to see them again. But it only ever performs the same exact tricks, because, again, it is only lively—not alive.

Before tonight, when Soto’s home run drew first blood against the Cleveland Guardians, the same might have been said about the Yankees. Drive past Yankee Stadium on the Deegan Expressway, and it might seem somewhat Photoshopped, protruding like a concrete keloid from a hotbed of housing projects. The team’s illustrious history, though largely buoyed by a segregated era, is peppered with advantages—hefty payrolls, Hall-of-Fame rosters, large-market favoritism—that notched a similar God’s-eye-view over lowly league peers. Part of being a Yankees fan entailed leaning into this chin-up poseurship, cosplaying as an aristocrat in a sea of downtrodden vagabonds. (It was a fun bit to commit to—even for the gifts department. The New York Yankees are the most renowned franchise in baseball history, a boxed 2004 ornament collection, gifted to me by my sister, reads on the inside. With 39 league pennants and 26 World Championships, they are the epitome of pride, class and success.) Yet by the late 2010s, when fizzy champagne gave way to an arid championship drought, the most lively things in Yankee Stadium were its pennants, hovering over the bleachers like ghosts of a better time. “Ghosts” sounds hyperbolic, but it isn’t—most of the players who’d won those pennants were dead. And 100 feet beneath the nosebleeds, sprawled like corpses across that legendary baseball diamond, the loserly Yankees were dead, too.

“I don’t care about your perfectly-timed industry moment. I don’t care about your Hall-of-Fame roster. I don’t care how you got that Uzi feature. I don’t care how you got Juan Soto. Just win.”

Should they win the World Series this year, a well-produced team documentary will answer, as narratively and tear-jerkingly as possible, the question of how exactly the Bronx Bombers reversed their unfortunate fate. The SparkNotes version: Hal Steinbrenner had money—boatloads of money—and he used it. Prior to Soto’s solo shot, as the Yankees’ playoff run deepened, hyper-online fans trolled opponents by posturing as underdogs, lauding the grit of this “scrappy” superteam that won by the “power of friendship.” This is, of course, a laughable farce: the Yankees are obviously not “underdogs,” nor were any of their league-record 27 championship rosters. But in the case of Snow Strippers, a lucrative band that seems to wear the “underground” badge as an accessory, similar conflations feel a lot less intentional, and a lot less funny. The duo’s ascent coincided with a desperate cultural moment, itching for relics to cling to amid a dredging post-pandemic stand-still. Mark Fisher called this process “failed mourning”—a refusal to release the past in a mediocre present—and by those standards, a lot of their appeal seems owed to eras more attractive than ours. Our moment’s race to the dance-floor, figureheaded by proper nouns like The Dare and Dimes Square, doesn’t present new things so much as regurgitate old ones: New York’s hedonistic aughts, bloghouse’s photogenic underworld, Tumblr’s coke-stained camera lens on both. Snow Strippers are “underground” in the way that the 2024 Yankees are “underdogs”: they offer attractive respite from painful losses—so painful, these losses, that the means of winning don’t really matter anymore. I don’t care about your perfectly-timed industry moment. I don’t care about your Hall-of-Fame roster. I don’t care how you got that Uzi feature. I don’t care how you got Juan Soto. Just win.

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“I’d like to thank God for making me a Yankee!”

Suzy Sheer is presumably a play on Suzy Shier, a fashion-forward women’s clothing brand that prides itself on its affordable prices. A visit to the outlet’s website yields a boldly-lettered seasonal discount—40% to 50% off new Fall favorites—plastered above a coterie of well-shot ranch photos, each featuring its own grinning white woman in rustic horseback-riding garb. This is, of course, in direct compliance with Autumnal uniform, the brown-hued leather palette codified by Christian girls in VSCO-sponsored vlogs. But fall weather isn’t exclusive to blondes in buckled boots: it belongs to numerous cultural dress codes, one of which is tightly adhered to by Suzy Sheer, a Brooklyn duo comprising the shadowy electropop artists tuchscreen and boysinblush. The latter of these musicians, a black-clad 20-something with disheveled hair, was hunched over an MPC at about 8:40, when myself and five friends arrived at the Basement East and settled into a sea of bobbing heads. The dress-code in question, observed by Suzy Sheer and a number of tonight’s revelers, might look something like this beneath a Depop listing: #tired, #whimsigoth, #y2k, #club, #black, #cunty. Watching the set felt a lot like waiting for this hypothetical Depop order. We hadn’t paid for a product—clothes or catharsis—so much as the experience of waiting for said product. We could see this product on-stage, the same way you can still see a product on Depop after you’ve ordered it. But looking at a product doesn’t make it come any faster. It also doesn’t make it enunciate any louder.

“Don’t you feel insane?”

Boysinblush, who was swaddled in a zipped-down leather jacket and black hoodie, didn’t sing so much as shy-speak, talking to his microphone as if telling his mom an embarrassing secret. It looked mysterious—dark figure talks unintelligibly and vigorously bobs head—which sometimes seems, in our era, equally as germane to selling music as sounding good. The day before Snow Strippers, I was at Brooklyn Bowl to see Duster, a graying slowcore band whose soft voices were obliterated by growling guitars. I remember feeling, vaguely, that this was purgative: watching them try (and fail) to shout over their squall was raw, living proof of life’s ability to overpower your pleas for help. Snow Strippers’ opener, a well-dressed button-masher, seemed too cool for such desperation, perhaps by design. None of which made it easy to shun his sweaty showcase—an airy sampler that, unlike the Duster show, felt more like a low-stakes DJ set than a tense try-not-to-cry challenge. Another crucial difference between this set and Duster’s: tonight, people were dancing.

Obviously, this isn’t a fair comparison. Duster, again, are a graying slowcore band whose music evokes storm clouds, back-seat windows, and grief-stricken depression. Suzy Sheer are a big-city electroclash duo who soundtrack key bumps sniffed at parties thrown in squatted houses. Alt-rock and electroclash demand different things from their purveyors: the former, to lay feelings bare; the latter, to drown feelings out. Duster’s patient guitar music, reignited by a slew of archival re-releases, doesn’t necessarily land as solidly in the 2020s as it did in the 1990s, because we no longer want prophecies as much as we want permission: permission to ignore the prophecies—particularly the ones that tell us to wait—and pull heaven down from the sky, even if the heaven we get is the hollow one we deserve. It’s the difference between the old Yankees, most of whom are resting in Monument Park, and the new Yankees, most of whom will be traded by the end of this season. I’m reminded of Joe DiMaggio, the hard-hitting husband of Marilyn Monroe who once proclaimed, famously, “I’d like to thank God for making me a Yankee!” A century has passed, and God has turned His face away from the Bronx, where money—the only thing these Yankees worship—has taken His throne and imposed its will. As is often true of Win-Now franchises, this store-bought superteam will, at best, hoist a championship, lose its best players to higher bidders, then fade, over the following decade, into a grueling title drought, maybe even worse than the last one. Hal Steinbrenner wanted heaven. The post-pandemic club circuit wanted heaven. The put-together heavens both received are the ones they had the patience for.

“Yo, (City)… It’s so lit, I don’t even know what to say. It’s lit as fuck right now. I swear, I love y’all.”

One of the strangest Snow Strippers songs is “Don’t You Feel,” a downtempo April Mixtape 3 single that sounds like what coming down from a high feels like. It’s one of few tracks where Schwaninger’s piercing shrill, typically lathered in self-contained hedonism, feels accusatory: Don’t you feel insane? For a track of its speed—dangerously close to Duster territory—it seems morally wrong not to internalize its plea, to consider whether you, a subscriber to this sweat-soaked club fantasy, are in your right mind. And by the midway point of Snow Strippers’ set, I didn’t really feel like I was in mine. Much of the concert was an exhibit in sensory overload, punctuated by Perez’s troll-ish cues of a soundboard: N-N-N-Night Killaz! N-N-N-Night Killaz! (Air horn blast) (Air horn blast) (Air horn blast) We love prescription drugs! I laughed at this every time it happened, but at a certain point, I realized that I’d begun fake laughing, in hopes that maybe one of these fake giggles might turn into a guffaw, and I’d forget about tomorrow’s midterm, which I hadn’t studied for. (Editor’s note: the author of this article wound up sleeping through the midterm in question. He will likely be failing MUSL 1600-01 American Popular Music, a course he only enrolled in because he thought it would give him more time to write articles like the one you’re reading.) In all the set’s militaristic sameness—Schwaninger’s flailing, Perez’s soundboard-mashing, the crowd’s sweat-soaked sway—I felt desperate for anomalies, moments where the flow seemed to be interrupted. Even these moments felt recycled. Perez only spoke a few times, to say things he likely said at every other tour stop: “Yo, (City)… It’s so lit, I don’t even know what to say. It’s lit as fuck right now. I swear, I love y’all.” The air horns would blast, the next song would begin, and I would feel stuck.

All of which is to say: Snow Strippers put on an incredible show. I only realized this when it ended. It was a self-contained bubble that blotted out the outside world, drenched it in amorphous synth-haze, and laid its denizens bare, trapped in the October brisk to recall, suddenly, how fucking ugly life is beyond the dance-floor. Little of the sounds made sense, and none of them really seemed designed to. But if there was any official soundtrack to the 2020s, it was this: fast-paced highlight-reel music, manufactured to make you want to kill yourself as soon as the moment was gone. (Not my words, but a fan I overheard outside the venue, yelling at a grinning friend: “Bro, I’m about to kill myself!”) In 2024, there aren’t hours, minutes, or seconds, but moments, like this one—fleeting things to fill with TikTok, Twitter, Spotify and SoundCloud. It sucks, but it stimulates, and the fact that it stimulates is more important than the fact that it sucks. “We’re back under a siege,” Schwaninger sings in another April Mixtape 3 deep cut. She’s talking about jilted romance, but she could just as well be talking about infomation overload. “Now do you care? You’re doing something that’s blatant disrespect and… it’s so interesting.”

“The ghosts were pulling out there to Monument Park, that’s for sure.”

Interesting, too, are the ways MLB players spend their moments, particularly when those moments—postseason moments, when big bucks and roster spots are earned—decide their legacies. Going into tonight’s game, Yankees captain Aaron Judge had been known to quiver beneath bright lights, something like the neutered Hulk of Avengers: Infinity War. The following evening, something brilliant happened: in Game 2 of the ALCS, up 2 runs against the Guardians, he blasted a ball sky-high into dead center, where it miraculously cleared the midfield fence and landed in Monument Park, swaddled by statues of the deceased. Asked about what he felt during that moment, Judge made direct reference to the spirits haunting Yankee Stadium: “You never know on these windy, chilly nights what that ball is going to do when you hit the center here,” he said, slyly. “But the ghosts were pulling out there to Monument Park, that’s for sure.”

Two windy, chilly nights later, he was down two runs against the Guardians in Cleveland, back against the wall in the top of the 8th inning. He did the unthinkable—hit a game-tying, fairytale-restoring home run—after which Giancarlo Stanton, another well-paid product of the Yankees massive budget, blasted a solo homer of his own to snag a damning late-game lead. This was precisely the put-together heaven the Yankees had paid for. It was also precisely as hollow as such heavens tend to be. By the end of the following inning, the game was tied at 5. And two innings after that, when the Guardians walked it off with a game-winning home run, the moment was over as quickly as it began.