Kelsey Atherton: This dadrock playlist Your kid's doing great.

The Get Up Kids You rediscovered your CD wallets cleaning out the Kia Rio to trade it in for a minivan. The Mass Pike has lost the romanticism it held for you pre-college. As you exit for the Pioneer Valley to re-up on edibles, you pick up a flyer for a show you won't attend.

Destroyer What you say is: indie rock never died. You go to shows, and pretend to not notice the graying hair in the audience, or the earlier start times. What you struggled to accept, until you heard Bejar's voice at 2pm in a Peet's, is that you're already in your jazz phase.

Pavement You laughed when the board game group proposed having a powerpoint party as a change of pace. You still have, in storage, two slide carousels, one from a family vacation, the other a magical road trip with friends in the summer of 2001. Can you still rent a projector?

Weezer You bring enough earplugs to Emo Night for everybody, and were once questioned by bar security who saw you handing out the little baggies to teens. You haven't played D&D in decades but still think of yourself as a maligned nerd and not the target audience of the MCU.

Wet Leg At 15 you were sick of your shallow peers & dreamed of skipping ahead to adult. Now you're older than your parents when they had you, & you'd give everything to be 27 again for a couple more years. Discover Weekly showed you Chaise Lounger before their NYT feature, a win

KMFDM Sure, you put on "Xtort" while you vacuum the house, but you've been doing that for decades, that's not the problem. The problem is that this time, your teen's shithead friends kept asking "what videogame is this from?" and then saying "Must be ancient, like Halo 3"

John Hinckley These days, you've got a renewed appreciation for the simplicity of lo-fi. Songs you could sing around a campfire, maybe in the coming world after electricity. As you learn the chords to "Vagabonds," you can't help but wish his earlier work had produced more hits.

Smog You traded graphic tees for pearl snaps about 15 years ago & haven't looked back. Started drinking from mason jars before it was a trend, and keep it up after, too. You think you gave your daughter a good background in country, but she discovered Johnny Cash in a TikTok.

My Morning Jacket What she said was: "a denim vest is not a personality." What you heard was: "it's fine to move to Boulder, even if you're taking your tech job with you." The kids stay with you for summers, and in those few months Colorado is perfect.

Jets to Brazil DIY days are over but you still catch shows at the dive once. The lack of smoke these days is surreal, if only because no one has that same gravel in their voice anymore. When you put on Orange Rhyming, your kid asks if it's Jawbreaker.

Iron & Wine In the dewy stillness of the morning, you think about getting backyard chickens but never do. Your will contains a precise list of every location you want your ashes scattered, & you're still not sure how Junior's little league schedule works

Galaxie 500 You never did move to Olympia. You found a stable gig in a heat belt college town, & if you don't pay too much attention on open mic nights the music is good enough. Now you check PPM & Zillow prices daily, hoping your kids will pick Evergreen

Calexico What you say is: having a hobby car to rebuild reminds you of your late father. What you mean is: when things go south, you'll want a skill that transcends language. Your duolingo streak is impeccable, and there's go bags for all in the trunk.

Titus Andronicus (again) You never really outgrew your civil war phase, but it's exhausting when people ask you if you think another's coming. It's been years, and your reading went further, deeper. On a cigarette break from the circle pit, you snap. "Years of lead, man. Years of lead."

Ben Folds Five You've got the soccer practice shuffle down perfect, from the moment the bluetooth connects to your 2013 Yaris, speakers hitting "Govt Center" as you park. Four years in, "Now that's what I call your mom's house" playlist remains incomplete

As I Lay Dying www.tiktok.com/@stanleyws/v...

TikTok - Make Your Daywww.tiktok.com

Brian Jonestown Massacre Whenever you can make it to Swarthmore homecoming, you and the guys from Fight Ashbury reunite, in a jam fest that feels timeless. Your spotify payout is 30% from your own listens, and it doesn't even cover two beers plus tip.

Sharon Van Etten In the early morning fog of an October morning, you pause, set down your coffee and open your bullet journal. Was 2012 a Golden Age? You know it didn't feel that way at the time, but it's the last year that didn't feel worse than before

Q And Not U On your bike commute to work, you hop onto a sidewalk to avoid a careening Tesla. Your city has more bikelanes than ever, but you take side routes and ride through neighborhoods ubers don't frequent. Technology peaked at the iPod, worse since.

Luna On your nightly jogs, you keep an eye out for old speakers. You once found the left speaker for a 1998 Denon, & in pieces you cobbled most of the rest together. Your kids are fine with phone audio, but you remember a better time, before bad audio and ubiquitous surveillance

Man or Astro-man? Every summer, you and the old crew take a day off to go shoot roman candles at empty bottles in the desert. You have broken at least one of your old Guitar Hero controllers trying to convert it into flight controls for a quadcopter.

Fiery Furnaces You've been a fixture at local shows for so long that no one else remembers you first got into the scene from a "Blueberry Boat" jewelcase left behind in a coffeeshop couch. Your home decor isn't exactly "Etsy chic", but it's not not that.

Mekons Sure, you're still down for a whiskey drink, a vodka drink, a lager drink, or a cider drink, but what you learned from your mates, & what you taught yer kids, is if a Tory comes round to the local pub, you throw the empties at 'em til they leave

Queens of the Stone Age It's been years since you traded in the Charger for a minivan, but Junior's finally old enough to start thinking about wheels. You've wanted to fix up an old muscle car together for years. He wants it electric? You can go electric.

Drive-By Truckers There's mud on your good shoes & a lot of mud on your work shoes. You've got an encyclopedic knowledge of the Battle of Blair Mountain & enough familiarity with college football for small talk. You've quoted Marx while assigning chores

Steely Dan Your job is an email job, but you're senior enough that when you have to come into the office, you still get your own cube. Your teens were delighted going through your old vinyl, but not nearly as much as when Grampa said they were his first.

Black Mountain On clear nights, you set out the backyard telescope. It's been years since you dreamed of an astronomy career, but all your kids can still sight Jupiter fast. At work, everyone thinks you're really into Pink Floyd. You don't correct them.

The Wonder Years You're running late to soccer practice pick-up because your favorite beanie was misplaced. Hitting all yellows, you tap the ceiling each time, like you have since sophomore year. The weekend trips don't happen, but the group chat's strong

Silver Jews There's a nostalgia and a beauty to broken glass, one that sings in a darker key when it's catching sunlight next to discarded needles in a dirt lot. Your notes app is full of draft poems, your calendar more mock trial appearances these days.

Red Hot Chili Peppers You've been cheering the Lakers your whole life, though you'd only been to LA (well, Anaheim) twice growing up, both for Disneyland. You volunteer to carpool for every field trip. The soulpatch never worked, but full stubble does.

X You once left a bar because it had one of those internet monstrosities called a "jukebox" where you had to download an app to play it. The past is a foreign country. $2 Schlitz & 3 songs for a buck is a passport back to it. That's enough, most nights.

Okkervil River Once a friend gave you a framed print of "The Duke of Fall." You wear flannel like a second skin, and don't know if you could get by in a city without seasons. We're headed to collapse, but you've got a stack of unreads to last decades.

311 The widespread availability of edibles these days is a boon, except every time you go to the airport you forget what you've already got on your person and make a quick dash to flush it before security. You're trying for a "cool uncle" vibe as a dad.

Copeland You own all of Veronica Mars on DVD, but never bothered upgrading to Blu-ray.

Wolf Parade You haven't worked in brewing for years, but you still keep a small batch going at home, just to stay in form. Idiots think the coming emergency will be about fighting. You know, as you teach your daughters local plants, it'll be about forage

The Bloodhound Gang Before ubiquitous internet, you taught yourself NATO Phonetic, shouting in passing period. Ciphers came naturally next. When you volunteer with Junior Achievement, you say you got into your field for the puzzles, not joking innuendo.

Frightened Rabbit Sure, there's an appealing stillness to hiking a mountain summit, but the joy of a late fire back at camp is almost sacred. You have, over the years, gotten very good at buddy checks, even if there's a voice missing from the singalongs

The "Sick New World" concert lineup (2022) The best lesson your dad ever taught is that you're gonna endure some shit. That's most of life. You get why he played his Van Halen cassettes to dust. Same as the Alien Ant Farm disc stuck in your Corolla www.livenationentertainment.com/2022/11/syst...

System Of A Down, Korn, Deftones, And Incubus To Christen Inaugural Sick New World Festivalwww.livenationentertainment.com LAS VEGAS FESTIVAL GROUNDS SATURDAY, MAY 13, 2023 PRESALE NOVEMBER 11 AT 10 AM PST, PUBLIC ON SALE 2 PM PST The inaugural Sick New World Festival is set to deliver an enormous collection of multi-ge...

The Hold Steady / Mountain Goats show (2022) You sung a version of "This Year" as a lullaby, sometimes changing lyrics. When your daughters entered their teen years, your warnings before a night out got increasingly, autobiographically specific. They'll be fine

Semisonic You've learned there's a trick to endings, and it's the same trick to one-hit wonders, to anything ephemeral. In the moment, let people sink fully into the feeling of being present in joy. Then: invite them out, into the wider world, just before they wanted to leave.

(A brief pause in the bands: it was at this point in the thread I revealed that we were expecting our first. The kid's now 15 months old! The original thread is 2 years 6.5 months old)

In preschool, you taught the twins to respond to "what's cooler than cool" with ICE COLD. They learned LCD along with their ABCs. It's not until they're teens that it hits: Outkast to them is what Grampa's Grateful Dead was to you, or Lawrence Welk to him www.theonion.com/cool-dad-rai...

Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generationwww.theonion.com RENTON, WA—Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that ...

Sonny and the Sunsets You're a member of Sonny and the Sunsets

Television All your mythologies were built for a world that had already crumbled before you ever finished undergrad. You agreed to not raise a kid in a group house, so you finally left Bushwick in the first trimester. In the outer boroughs, you dream of grime and practice space.

A soft jazz cover of Green Day’s “when I come around” Classic Rock stations have played "American Idiot" since the Trump era. In the soft light of the Panera, you understand how your father must have felt, hearing Skynyrd in Home Depot. Aging is a kind of coming home.

Broken Social Scene You stayed in touch with a couple best friends from high school but have never & will never attend a reunion. When your daughter's older boyfriend gave her the vinyl re-release of You Forgot It In People, one "get a job / stay away from her" got him to end it

Dawes As a young man you were preoccupied with questions of death and memory, but set more to acoustic singalongs than Cure albums. Now, you jot the mostly good days in a diary, but after truly great days you're too wiped to write. Living them is enough.

R.E.M. Everyone remembers the 1980s wrong, which is hell in our fourth decade of throwback 80s nights. Finding a good album meant finding community, away from Reagan Youths. Your kid raided your closet for retro-chic. Everything cringe is cool again.

Stuck underneath the seat of your 2011 Honda Accord was the binder of mix CDs from Sophomore year. Sharpied-on names read "Boys and Girls In Amherst" and "You Forgot It In Purdue." The aesthetic was physical playlist, the definitive albums curated for 2.

The White Stripes You never threw the punches at parties that you wanted to, but drunken sprints over city parks in the dark scuffed your leather all the same. Last time it was your weekend with the kids, you put on Napoleon Dynamite, tears welling at "We’re Going to Be Friends"

Broken Bells In pressed khakis and rolled up sleeves, you curated the nursery. No millennial gray, but swatches pulled from past Pantones: an accent wall in Living Coral paired with a base of Serenity. Baby vomit pairs with neither, but you'll learn.

Speedy Ortiz Punk stylings hit different after a date night spent in the NICU. In the car home, music is gentle for new ears. In your headphones washing bottles, you think about guitar-driven independence & middle age. There is, in DIY, community still. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Ac...

Speedy Ortiz - "Scabs" (Official Lyric Video)www.youtube.com “Scabs” by Speedy Ortizfrom Speedy Ortiz's new album ‘Rabbit Rabbit’ out now (Wax Nine Records)Stream / Download / Buy: https://speedyortiz.lnk.to/rabbitrabb...

The National The mobile bar you bring to parties has a second patina, retro-chic indistinguishable from just a thing you've used for two decades. On your fourth whiskey sour, you talk about how Bush stole the 2004 election, which is why you stick to three

The National (part 2) At the Amtrak dining car, there's exactly two kinds of tired: parents mistakenly thought the novelty of rail would make the premium of a sleeper car for 4 worth it, and slow business travelers jealous of rail-hoppers. You're both.

Cobra Starship You own "Snakes on A Plane" on DVD but not a DVD player. You have an encyclopedic knowledge of VH1's programming from 2008-2011, but aren't sure who the president is at present. Stick to your style for 6 more years & it'll be retro-cool

Craig Finn's Solo Work Your relationship is fine, but there's a particular taste that comes from a bowling alley bar rum & coke that hits the way you imagine no-fault divorce must. Never had a league team, but you set playdates for the kids here on alt weekends just for the bar

Dirty Projectors Old friends still offer you sangria and weed when you visit, not realizing you switched to negronis and bouts of sobriety at some point in the Trump era. The vibe you cultivate is "burnout gone professional," the vibe you give is "hanging in there for the kids"

The Dare You were in middle school when The Libertines broke out, & have with Machiavellian precision spent twenty years in the music industry looking to catch the next wave of that sound. You have no idea what music your kids actually like. Why would tween opinions matter here?

Future Islands When the kids moved out, you traded your suburban home & Rivian for a downtown apartment within walking distance to a grocery store. No guest room, but a pullout couch. On weekends you read Raymond Carver in coffee shops, waiting to retire

The Riot Fest lineup There's a youthful energy to this list, you think, remembering bands you discovered in your teens and are eager to see perform in their 50s. You've never been near a riot, though you like to think daytime protests in June 2020 counts. riotfest.org/2023/05/16/t...

The Riot Fest 2023 Lineup Is Hereriotfest.org The Riot Fest 2023 lineup has been revealed and tickets are on sale now. Stop reading, and go buy your tickets now. Already got your tickets? Follow the playlists on Spotify, Apple Music…

boygenius (part 2)

William Tyler Before kids, you fancied yourself a wanderer, a poet of backroads and diners outside campgrounds. This, despite mostly remote working an email job writing company newsletters. Now, as you find "Alpine Star" the only thing that quiets the tot, you wish for lullabies

The NYT Millennial Canon of New Dadrock You're up on streetwear, or you were 5, no, 9 years ago, but the guys in your group chat fill you in when you ask. You'll adjust fashion when your kids go to college, but it'll take grandkids until you see your music as one canon of many

The Magnetic Fields There's a half-filled Field Notes within reach. You still serve wine in mason jars, but its much nicer wine these days. You can patch your kids torn clothes like it's nothing, but it's their other dad who has to explain rules of sports

Tove Lo You've canvassed in a crop top, and worn the top half of a suit to a zoom PTA meeting. Your guest room has a standing "no-questions-asked, you can crash for a night" policy for your kids' friends, though they tell you over breakfast anyway.

Fall Out Boy The Pete 2020 bumper sticker on your Chevy Volt is peeling, revealing the Still With Her sticker underneath. You've always been more "Pops" than "Punk," but it took a Billy Joel cover to accept you love the suburbs, & want them to be denser. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LkV...

Fall Out Boy - We Didn't Start the Fire (Lyric Video)www.youtube.com I thought about this song a lot when I was younger. All these important people and events- some that disappeared into the sands of time- others that changed ...

The Smile When you picked up Autumn from the airport after her semester abroad, you put on Bending Hectic, and let the RAV4 carry you both home for the summer. "It's Traveling Wilburys for Radioheads" she said as you parked, "and I love that for you.

Electric Six Three things have changed since your early 20s: you're more worried about nuclear war, you're unlikely to tell jokes where the punchline is "gay bar", & when you wake up on the couch on a Saturday, it's because you slept when the baby slept

Xiu Xiu You have never once missed a parent teacher conference, but you have on occasion forgotten to take the bandanas out of your back pockets before walking onto campus

Phoenix It's not that you miss the Great Recession, exactly, it's just that all your most pivotal memories were formed then, making little videos on digital cameras. Ordering a HEPA filter for the nursery, you'd settle these days for a smokeless summer.

Wilco As a teen, you bristled at your own dad's attempt to get you into his records, "Is that more 'Neil Old?', you scoffed, slipping YHF into your discman. After your son spent a week at his grandparents he made a musical discovery: "Jesus Etc is Harvest Moon for divorced dads"

Dead Man's Bones You own five "Kenough" hoodies.

Chevelle The cooler is for Bud Light. What do you mean? No, the cooler has always been for Bud Light and will always be for Bud Light. What, you're going to let the news tell you what beer to drink now? You've changed man, in the skatepark days you would have never cared.

Explosions in the Sky Lo-fi beats to study to. Lo-fi beats for researching the decline and fall of musicians in the streaming era. Lo-fi beats in which to get your tween a stereo system. Lo-fi beats in which to wrap a jewel-case CD. A deep, comforting wall of sound, passed down.

Jet Yeah of *course* you saved your old leather jacket to give to Mason when he turned 16. What you "forgot" to do, in all the years it waited, was remove the flask tucked away. A week after his birthday, he quietly returned the flask. When lifted, jacket now rattles with juuls.

TV on the Radio (again) In your home office you keep the guitar you never play next to the amp-that-is-now-a-printer-stand. Your kids are starting to go to all-ages shows, and you'll linger to hear the openers. There's too many laptops on stage but a wall of sound still hits.

Slowdive A few months ago, you heard scuzzy guitar sounds repeating out of the kid's room. Once they put a mumbly vocal over the sound, you unearthed your old CDs, & found a new player for them. This is classic rock now, you sigh happily, in a TikTok they made from the back seat

The Cool Greenhouse "What, you don't like the post post post punk stylings of musical misfits 'The Cool Greenhouse?'" you ask your crying baby, in an attempt to calm with song an upset that will be only remedied by a diaper change and a nap.

Fugazi When junior goes to protests, he does so with perfect fluency in three-letter-agencies and the official names of military operations from before he was born. He carries this knowledge with a nervous energy: punk credibility evaporates if his peers figure out daddy's job.

Morphine There's narcan in your diaper bag, but baby's change of clothes might be three months too small.

This dadrock playlist Your kid's doing great.

Death Cab For Cutie "I miss the simple challenge of texting by T9," you post on X, Threads, bluesky, notes, cohost, tumblr, & as your facebook status. "The friction meant what you said mattered more." You are driving to pick up a CSA box, last month's veggies freshly composted.

Alien Ant Farm In 2001 you ran the powerstrip out the window to the porch so you could watch VH1 on a found couch, "What's better than guys being dudes?" the whole of your philosophy. Decades later, you're chill with an expansive definition of dude. No use for those who aren't.

"Illinoise" (Original Cast Recording) Your first encounter with the midwest outside of a layover was when you met your husband's parents. He introduced you to Sufjan, too, a pivot from a diet of showtunes. Now you sing in the choir together. Over the crib, Chicago is a lullaby.

The Strokes New York City Cops New York City Cops New York City Cops Can't take Julia and Nicola to the library on weekends because New York City Cops New York City Cops New York City Cops Take all public money, so you're writing an op-ed to defund New York City Cops

The Best Friends Forever lineup Your Letterboxd top-4 is Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, Asteroid City, and American Psycho. You smoke American Spirits but are pivoting to Hestias. You've got big "estranged stepdad energy" which complicates daycare pickups. www.bestfriendsforeverfest.com/lineup

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard You've never been a cocaine guy but, as you pound your third energy drink of the day at 7pm, you wonder if it would help. Can't be that much more expensive than the sitter or the ticketmaster fees. Then the wall of sound hits and that's enough

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