Groove Art Feature
Captain Monk
Feelings
The music industry in 2025 is suffering from the same generalized problems as - well, pretty much everything else. Call it noise pollution. There is so much output, so much offering, that it’s nearly impossible to focus on much of anything.
Meanwhile, the mainstream has become such a stagnant monoculture that it’s easy to feel like we’re living on a garbage heap.
We’d love to produce a TED Talk explaining why we think music is actually richer and more exciting than ever.
But instead we’re hoping to give you something more useful - actual leads to follow.
And nothing is more indicative of the core of how we see this question than Captain Monk, and the latest album under that name titled Feelings.
Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Jackson Allen has more skill than ought to fit in a single human - though if you read his resumé you’ll see he came by it honestly. As a drummer, as a guitarist, as a lyricist, as a composer, an arranger and a producer, as a vocalist, basically in every domain that relates to what you hear when you hit “play”, Allen is on a nearly superhuman level.
The only discipline that he doesn’t seem to have had time or inclination to master, in between becoming a professional at multiple instruments and honing both his songcraft and his production skills to a fine point, is the short-form video fuckery that defines publicity and promotion in the modern music industry.
It’s entirely understandable - just perusing the lyrics on Feelings gives you the strong sense that this isn’t somebody concerned with viral hooks. But it’s a pity, because there’s probably no other good reason for why this hasn’t been heard by 10 million people already:
This was the first Captain Monk song I remember hearing. Instantly sold, instantly hooked. That filthy, gargantuan, almost inconceivably sinister guitar riff. The harmonized verses that will make you think of Layne and Jerry. The push and pull of the dynamic variations. The ridiculous and yet somehow par-for-the-course (on a Captain Monk record) guitar solo.
I had probably listened to “Slugger” fifty times before I ever even noticed the lyrics. Do you know how sure of yourself you have to be to have the first words of an entire studio album be “Drop trou”?
Captain Monk’s lyrics aren’t as easy to parse as some writers, not as heavy handed or on the nose, but neither are they impenetrable. Throughout “Slugger” you get the feeling that Allen has plenty to say on the state of music today, on what passes for success, on what sort of degradations you are expected to submit yourself to in order to “make it”… but also that he’s got enough sense to keep it ambiguous. Still, it’s hard to read some of these lyrics and not think you have a pretty good idea who he’s thinking of when he’s writing:
Some light funk and a saxophone
Ain't got no story to tell now come on
Catch me dead than singing some French shit like ooh la la
It's all smooth jazz
you're doing smooth jazz
You're doing really good
We’re not going to try too hard to cram any of this into a genre box because it transcends all of that.
“Okay” continues the sludgy, gritty energy of “Slugger” - the way Allen spits out “a world of jealous meat bags” is just awesome.
The stupidly sexy “Glue” sounds like if the Kool Aid Man kicked a hole in the wall in the middle of the opening credits of a 007 movie and started yelling at people to shake their ass.
Throughout all this, the impeccable tightness of it all speaks volumes. You don’t have to be told you’re listening to a professional. And it would be easy, by the time you reach the 4th track “Nickel” to think you’ve got Captain Monk pinned down. The attitude, the swagger, the muscle, the weaving together of disparate influences. And then he drops that extra dimension on us.
“Nickel” is the finishing move that cements Captain Monk as a fully developed artistic entity. Full of vulnerability, utterly gorgeous, this song shows Captain Monk stretching further than anywhere else on the album to gather elements from the outskirts of unexpected genres and sounds.
The result is breathtaking. Name a band from the Southern rock radio heyday and this would’ve easily been in the top 5 songs that band ever released. “There ain’t no Hallelujah left inside of me” is a brutal gut-punch of a line, and it’s delivered with all the soul Allen can muster.
Come to think of it, “Itch” also would’ve been one of the best songs from any number of hugely successful bands whose aesthetics were stadium rock but whose sound veered towards rootsier fare.
This is probably my favorite song on the record. The chorus is so full of swagger, so groovy and impossibly cool, that I get angry every time it comes on, because I can think of at least a dozen touring bands who should be putting Captain Monk onstage in front of themselves every night.
“Strapped” throws us back into the vibe that kicked off the record before a fun, instrumental deviation called “Spurf” (yeah, you’ll figure it out). The home stretch features the extraordinary Prince-adjacent funksplosion of “Feds” and the sultry groove of “Neighborhood” before letting us drift away on the dreamy-but-despondent shimmer of the title track.
And this brings us back to the thesis we have been chewing on for months.
If the James Webb telescope had scanned .00008% of the cosmos and found a civilization on the level of something like the Galactic Federation, we’d assume the universe must be teeming with such spectacular societies. Likewise, if the veritable no-man’s-land of independent artists contains people like Allen, albums like Feelings, it’s a hard sell to suggest that music is shit these days.
Is there a whole lot of empty space? Are many, perhaps even the great majority, of planets in our musical universe dusty and devoid of intelligent life? That may be.
But it’s a BIG universe. There are more brilliant artists working, sometimes without even really trying to get your attention, than you think - more even than we can count.
We will continue trying to point you towards the best that we find. And for the moment, there’s virtually nothing out there we could recommend any more enthusiastically than Captain Monk and his Feelings.
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