Track 9: The Killing Moon
New Wave Goodness for Depressed Babies
With each week that passes, I get an overwhelming sense of dread that I’m losing grip on my Substack. Has it really been almost two months since my last post? The hectic whiplash of the corporate grind has been pulling me like the moon pulls the fucking ocean tide, but the thought of sitting down to pour out a post was starting to feel like another box on the checklist.
And then I remembered: It’s not that serious and I’m the ringleader of this shit show. So, meet an the new, extremely parsed down, altered format of the playlist—one that might reignite the thrill I felt writing micro paragraphs on Tumblr 12 years ago (iykyk). Less to write for me, less to sift through for you, but the same feels and discoveries, guaranteed.
Now, let’s jump back in with a real classic.
The Song: The Killing Moon
The Band: Echo & The Bunnymen
The Genre(s): New Wave, Post-Punk
The Discovery: My first true memory of really, fully absorbing “The Killing Moon” takes us back to the end of my freshman year of college. I was listening to this playlist from Rookie circa 2012 (RIP to a real one). Now, “Show of Strength” was the actual Echo & The Bunnymen track on this playlist, but I love a rabbit hole. It was there that I listened to “The Killing Moon,” which I’d lamely catalogued as “that one song from Donnie Darko” in my youth. Ooof.
The Feels: This song harkens back to the precipice of a major depressive episode that grew legs in the Summer of 2012 and didn’t fully cease until I’d uprooted my academic career, moved home, and transferred schools in Fall of 2013—a fun tale for another time. Lots of staying up until 4am and sleeping until noon! As stressed out 19-year-old Art & Comm major, I’d put on “The Killing Moon” after class, skateboard down the road to my college’s priory campus and sit in the soccer field as the sunset with my then boyfriend, picking fights for no other reason than wanting to burrow into my own misery. Feels very “my life is a sad movie and this is the soundtrack” but for millennials romanticizing their mental illness.
The Memories: Balmy May nights on the soccer field, the traffic on Harlem Ave buzzing lazily in the background. Roaming the stacks of Myopic on desperate treks to get away from school. Existential terror building in my bones, the kind that is unique to teens on verge of entering their twenties.
Today’s Spin: Listening to this track now, I still think about that period of my life when everything felt paralyzingly scary. Except, in hindsight, I’d love to go back to simplicity of life back then. Hindsight and all that. Still, this song is great to blast on a Spring evening, windows down, watching the sunset, but on the other side of the horizon.
Thanks for listening.