Fall can be gorgeous — leaves turning, local coffee shops dusting off pumpkin spice syrup bottles, Target putting plastic jack-o’-lanterns on display earlier and earlier with every passing year. It can also be liminal. It’s in the feeling of a sudden gust of slightly chillier breeze against the skin, in the sun going down just a minute before it did yesterday and in the strange, vacuous sadness of the in-between.
Shoegaze and post-punk feel made for this threshold. With layered guitars and echoing lyrics, they don’t quite resolve — they haunt, like an echo in an alleyway. This playlist is not about cozy autumn tropes — it’s about the beautiful yet eerie boundary between the light and dark.
I. Morning: Lingering Summer
These songs carry the leftover echo of summer days while softly cradling the first undertones of unease, like the first breath of cold.
- Slowdive: “When The Sun Hits”
The obvious opener by the genre’s ones-and-only. The guitars shimmer like a fading afternoon tumbling into the golden hour; the vocals are partly sung, partly remembered.
2. Soviet Soviet: “Iris”
An angular, insistent and somewhat desperate take on the Goo Goo Dolls’ classic. A good cover always comes across as a basic essential for the season of the borderline: at once borrowed and new, it taps into the nostalgic wiring while looking ahead.
3. chiaroscuro: “città invisibili”
This gorgeous offering from the Italian collective is a soundtrack for walking briskly with no real destination — or for replaying conversations in your head at 11 p.m., when the night refuses to settle.
4. Life On Venus: “Camera Obscura”
Both heavy with guitar riffs and airy in between chords, Camera Obscura feels like chilly winds biting the nose on the way to class. The fragmented lyrics of the track itself lean more towards describing the challenges of a long-distance relationship than those of an 8:30 a.m. lab, but art cannot be defined by anyone other than the observer.
II. Golden Hour: Last Light
The midpoint, the threshold — a brief stretch of time when the world feels suspended in amber.
5. Softcult: “Heaven”
A honey-slow, dazzling composition — Heaven feels exactly like catching the last rays of sunshine from a day slipping away.
III. Evening: Afterlight
Songs for the hours that blur into shadows as the sky tips into blue and black.
6. Soft Kill: “Sea Of Doubt”
Opens this stretch with a steady beat and an imposing yet soft greyness, like wandering in the fog without one’s glasses on.
7. House of Harm: “Away Above”
The Boston band’s newest and most minimalistic release, “Away Above” feels like another one of those nights — not quite the same as yesterday’s, yet not distinct enough in any meaningful way to feel like its own.
8. warmachine: “fiction”
This is where the sadness starts creeping in — not the acute kind, but the dull ache of things missed and unresolved. They always sting just a little, but become nearly impossible to ignore when bathed in the evening tungsten light.
9. DIIV: “Raining On Your Pillow”
A song that drifts like condensation down a windowpane. Less layered, more spacious, like an echoey empty room; it’s music for lying awake past midnight, the ceiling barely visible, listening to the world hum outside the window.
10. Drab Majesty, Rachel Goswell: “Vanity”
Synthy, spectral, and heavy with its own reflection, Vanity feels like walking through a not-so-pleasant, anxiety-ridden dream you can’t quite hold onto — and why would you want to? Rachel Goswell’s presence opens and closes this playlist. It’s a song that doesn’t resolve so much as dissolve into the static, leaving only the echo, the shadow, the lingering trace of light.
You can access the playlist here.
Arina Zadvornaya is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. She can be reached at az499@cornell.edu.
‘Solar Flare’ is a weekly playlist column where Sun contributors spotlight a slice of musical taste with the campus community. It runs every Monday.
