Prestige Format Picks 23 September 2025

Deep Forest - self-titled

This and those Enigma cds have been on my list forever thanks to those Pure Mood commercials from when I was a kid. It’s so much fun. I really love the sound of a track built up around a good sample, and it’s funny how much this album reminds of Polo & Pan, other Frenchmen who build dance tracks around nostalgic samples often in languages other than English or French.

Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump

The other weekend, a friend and I caught Grandaddy playing this album front to back and it ruled. Hearing it in fully live instrumentation, with bird samples, live drums, piano, synth, and every guitar: steel, acoustic, electric, and bass was enrapturing. It’s an album permeated with sadness and with magic, and both were palpable live.

Fold Zandura - ultraforever

I used to just think of Fold Zandura as leftover detritus from my time where I listened to nothing other than Christian music honestly up until maybe last week. I’m seeing these guys open for another legendary band playing an album front-to-back this coming weekend, so I threw this on to get reacquainted and I was blown away. I think those Recommended If You Like sheets at the Christian bookstore didn’t have the right language for OK Computer-esque shoegaze-y space rock, so they just called it “industrial”. Another artifact of surprisingly good stuff lurking in a surprisingly soulless industry.