Everything I Listen To Eventually Turns Into a World I Live In
From songs revisited obsessively to albums experienced as complete emotional worlds, Dylan’s picks reflect a listener who connects with music through time, atmosphere, and repetition.
Dylan (@removejane) takes on the May 21 to 25 prompts as someone who rarely enjoys music just through his headphones. His selections move between an album whose sequencing feels inseparable from its emotional weight, an instrumental track that unfolds like physical spaces, artists he became quietly obsessed with through repetition, and songs that completely changed in impact after returning to them over time. Across each answer, music becomes less like something he simply listens to and more like something he gradually lives inside.
The prompts offer a closer look at how Dylan connects with music through immersion, atmosphere, and repetition. One explores an album that has no skips, while another turns toward an ambient instrumental that feels less like background music and more like a world you wouldn’t want to visit at nighttime. A different prompt focuses on futuristic imagery and his answer reflects on the relationship between identity, transformation, and visual storytelling, while another exposes the strange guilt of accidentally gatekeeping an artist (not really) who quickly became part of his daily listening life. The final prompt revisits a song he initially dismissed before eventually turning into one of his most replayed tracks.
Which album has no skips for you?
Revengeseekerz is one of those albums where every track feels intentional. I never in my life felt tempted to skip a song because the sequencing makes the project feel like one never ending spiral of emotional highs and lows rather than a disconnected collection of tracks. Even when the songs feel chaotic or messy, they still sound authentically Jane.
Throughout the album, Jane is as blunt and exposed as possible, which gives the project a sense of reality that makes listening to it so compelling, similar to reading someone else’s diary in a way. In my personal favorite track, “JRJRJR,” Jane says, “I wanna suck the life out of him, it’s just as sad as mine.” The line can be interpreted in many different ways, but it feels painfully direct and impossible to ignore the obvious implication that lyric has.
Moving on, a track that feels like a perfect summary of Revengeseekerz is “Star People.” At the beginning, it carries the same bluntness and intimacy mentioned earlier, before doing a complete 180 with a sample of her song “Famous Girl” from Ghostholding, an album released earlier that year. In this second half, she becomes far more wounded and vulnerable, representing both sides of sudden fame: the fun and excitement, as well as the regretful and isolating aspects that come with it.
The production is probably the biggest reason every track stands out individually while still adding on to a cohesive listening experience. On this album, Jane completely shifts away from the shoegaze and slacker rock sounds of her previous releases, Census Designated and Ghostholding respectively. Instead, Revengeseekerz moves through genres like digicore, EDM, rage, and hyperpop, which are all genres I love and always have on full rotation. Each song feels like its own self-contained bubble while still contributing to the larger world of the album as a whole. It is no wonder this album became an instant, skipless classic to me.
What’s your type of instrumental music?
I’m going to be insanely blunt on this, Hayden Anhedönia, also known as Ethel Cain, is one of the best artists of our time, and that is especially clear in her instrumental works. “Radio Towers” and “August Underground” really highlight this, but the instrumental track that stands out the most to me is “Thatorchia.” The track feels less like background music and more like a world you’re physically walking through. The track is seven minutes long and features dark ambient drones that seem to pulsate. Layered over them, her distorted humming further adds to the atmosphere.
It’s probably not the best song to listen to at night, but I absolutely love doing that. I love feeling like I’m inside the intricate worlds that Hayden builds. It’s truly beautiful. I remember the first time I listened to this track, I looked absolutely petrified, but I was also amazed. Her music can feel so terrifying and strangely delicate at the same time, which is incredibly impressive. The song itself feels like an oxymoron. Acceptance and rejection, love and resentment, isolation and crowdedness, acceptance and denial.
Hayden has a way of filling her music with such complex emotions that I can’t describe it with just one adjective. To an outside perspective, this task might seem easy. They would probably use words like “scary” or “uncomfortable.” But I struggle to come up with even a few hundred words that truly does justice for this song.
Which album cover feels futuristic?
Arca’s music is everything but conventional, and that is greatly shown in her album covers. All of her album covers would be a suitable answer for this prompt, but my personal favorite is KiCK i. Due to the fact that this is her first project released after her public gender transition, and the album cover greatly displays this. The album cover, which features her with her limbs extended by mechanical structures, can be interpreted as a metaphor representing transformation, identity, and rebirth.
It is probably the least futuristic of the Kick series, but that is exactly why I feel like it is the best choice. It is her most human and most modern album cover compared to the 4 later Kick albums. The later additions are more abstract and outlandish, often resembling something straight out of an indie sci-fi film, with alienesque imagery and surreal, indescribable visuals that push beyond physical reality.
Meanwhile, KiCK i takes what we have in the present and builds onto it with technological advancements, almost like a more realistic vision of the future rather than a completely alien world. The cover feels more grounded and accessible, while still carrying Arca’s experimental charm and futuristic imagery. It sits in that in-between space where technology and humanity overlap without fully breaking into something more abstract, something more complex, similar to the music on the album. An example of a song that I feel like matches the album cover is the track “Afterwards,” featuring Björk. It perfectly reflects the futuristic atmosphere. It sounds avant-garde while also carrying a sense of decay. The song feels like something that’s been around forever yet foreign at the same time, completely detached from our time. That balance is what makes it stand out within the series, as it feels realistic, grounding, yet nothing like we have in the modern world that we know.
Which artist do you gatekeep just a little?
One of the things I love the most is electronic music. I’m always on the lookout for new releases, and because of this, I stumbled upon an artist on the Indie Sleaze revival scene (love, love, love) named Velvette Blue. I listened to “Run + Hide” and I was instantly hooked. I kept repeating the small amount of songs he had nonstop, almost obsessively, just cycling through them on repeat. I was quickly getting immersed in that entire sound and aesthetic. Then I found his dgnr8 project and ran through those songs as well.
Although I know several people who can find his music boring, it has a certain appeal to me. I absolutely adore his music and find it borderline addictive. His music makes me feel like levitating and shedding into a form beyond human. His track “Over,” featured on Mixtape, his collaborative project with Garret Caramel, is definitely my favorite song of his. The track contains all of my favorite elements of electroclash music. It feels strangely timeless, using sounds reminiscent of the 2010s while still presenting them in a modern and refreshing way.
I wouldn’t exactly say I gatekeep him, because I wouldn’t call myself a gatekeeper at all. Still, I realize I always talk about my favorite artists but somehow never mention him, even though he was one of the quickest discoveries I’ve connected with. In a way, that probably does make me a bit of a gatekeeper without fully meaning to be one. So, in a way, me writing this is an apology for that accidental gatekeeping.
What's a song that grew on you over time?
“Trauma” by 2hollis is one of those songs that, on the first listen, I couldn’t quite figure out if I loved it or hated it. I quickly decided it wasn’t worth my time and wasn’t worth revisiting, which is honestly crazy in hindsight. If I could, I would go back and slap myself for even thinking that. After several listens, the song quickly became one of my favorites to return to. The production is insane, and I genuinely love it now. My favorite part of the song though, has to be his voice. I’m not sure why, but it scratches my brain just right. Might be the voice effects or the way he delivers words, but whatever he was doing, he was doing it right.
To be fair, when I first heard it, it was completely out of my comfort zone, especially coming off his electroclash album “Boy”, which had set a very specific expectation for his sound in my head. “Trauma” felt more intense, more layered, and less immediately accessible to me at the time. It was the right song, just released at the wrong time in my life.
Now, it has become my most streamed 2hollis song, and one of my most played tracks in general. I think it’s funny how something I dismissed so quickly ended up becoming something I can’t (and won’t) stop coming back to.
Dylan’s relationship with music seems to happen through repetition. He’ll replay the same songs obsessively, return to albums he already knows front to back, and slowly grow attached to tracks that didn’t fully click on the first listen. The music he connects with most isn’t necessarily polished or emotionally straightforward, it’s intense and chaotic, but in ways that feel completely intentional.
A lot of the artists he loves most create music that feels big enough to disappear into completely. Whether it’s the emotional intensity of Jane Remover, the atmosphere running through Ethel Cain’s work, or the strange futuristic feeling surrounding Arca’s music and visuals, he talks about songs less like individual tracks and more like places he keeps revisiting. That connection follows him outside of listening too, into his art, the visuals he’s drawn to, and the artists he keeps coming back to almost obsessively. For Dylan, music isn’t really something that plays in the background, it is something that creates worlds for him.
A creative constantly inspired by the music he listens to, whether that means replaying Jane Remover for the hundredth time, making fanart, or turning lyrics and emotions into new ideas of his own.
