The year is 2008. I’m a freshly minted 18-year-old and I’ve got one thing on my mind: electing Barack Obama. I’ve got a sick “Obama ’08” sticker on my 1998 Volkwagen Jetta, I’m living in suburbia, and we’re ready to change the goddamn world.
We’re going to end racism and elect the first Black president! We’re going to end feckless foreign wars! We’re going to wage war against the billionaires and fix our broken healthcare system! We’re cutting corporate corruption out of politics!
It turned out that all of that (except for electing the first Black president) was completely fucking wrong. Our savior Barack chose Timothy Geithner as the Secretary of the Treasury during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and ole’ boy Timothy decided that the banks did a big old whoopsie and deserved a mulligan (editor’s note: fuck Tim Geithner). The banks got bailed out and regular people got completely and utterly fucked.
Barack decided to continue the foreign wars and, in a fun surprise, bombed Libya. And “fixing” healthcare turned out to be a half measure of shitty tax credits while health insurance executives continued to rake in record profits.
“Hope” for our generation ended up being a continuation of the status quo, despite our best intentions. Barack was a shockingly pro-corporate president, and in many ways, he paved the way for the incredible economic inequality that defines our country today. Bad look for Millennials, if we’re being honest, but we also have to own skinny jeans, Mumford and Sons, truffle fries, and being too earnest for our own good.
This all leads me to Spanish Love Songs and their new album, “Future Nausea,” which comes just 18 short years later. After the Obama years, I thought we Millennials had officially abandoned any notion of hope, optimism, and “fighting the system, man.” That might still be true, but at least we’re making some great music about it.
I’m writing this on November 7, 2026. Progressives have just won the most congressional seats since the Watergate scandal, and it seems as if American voters have had enough of these pseudo-fascist fuckboys. It also coincides with the release of Future Nausea.
The first single, “Good American,” grabbed my attention right away. The rest of this post could just be the full lyrics of that song, but I’ll try to pick out just one:
“Every day is a question when you were born in the age of decline / You trip over piss jugs in your van to pull boxes on that warehouse line.”
We’re living through the Robber Baron Era 2.0, with nerdy fascists taking the place of ultra capitalists. The stock market is soaring, regular people are struggling, and corporate power is at an all-time high. Our time is “optimized” to the second, to the point where delivery drivers dropping cheap Chinese goods on our doorstep cannot take proper bathroom breaks while their location is tracked by our tech overlords.
It’s all dystopian as hell. Spanish Love Songs knows this, and in just this one line you can get a sense of their message. Musically, it’s a mix of The Menzingers, Gaslight Anthem, and a little Wonder Years sprinkled it. If you don’t listen too closely, it sounds like catchy-as-hell pop-punk music. The sheer darkness of the lyrics is a perfect foil for the bright melodies, and it creates a perfect juxtaposition.
Almost every song cleverly alludes to the incredibly shitty things happening throughout our society. Other album highlights include:
- Doom Tripping: The band takes a shot at morally-dubious prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket while wondering if we shouldn’t make a quick buck gambling on the end of the world.
- Welcome to Hell: “Kill your sense of sonder / Before it kills you and we all move on.” Sonder is appreciating that every living being you cross paths with is experiencing a life that is just as messy and complex as yours. In an age where the world’s richest man described empathy as a the “fundamental weakness of Western society,” perhaps we’re better off just not acknowledging each other’s struggles and going it alone! (lol)
- Jan666: We all have people in our life that have been sucked into the MAGA / tradwife / Proud Boy vortex. It sounds like Spanish Loves Songs do, too. “Lost you to the men’s rights activist group.” We sure fucking did, gang. Maybe they’ll come back someday.
This all sounds super depressing, I know. But here’s the thing: there is real power in naming these issues and writing damn good music about them. It helps me feel less alone and, frankly, less insane when I look around at the general state of things and wonder if this all seems completely fucking crazy to anyone else. I’m grateful to Spanish Love Songs for the validation, and for their ability to make our crumbling societal norms sound so catchy.
On the heels of the 2026 midterm elections, I feel hope again for the first time since 2008. Maybe, like last time, I’ll look back and think about how naive I was (again). Or maybe we really are turning a page on this decade of nightmares.
Only time will tell. At least we have some great music to get us through.
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