Erin Kyan's Big Discography Listens

For my own enrichment, I am listening to full discographies of music artists that I either haven't heard, don't know well, or only know a small selection of their work. I am mainly focused on particularly famous artists, because there's a lot of ~classic~ music out there, however stuff that is popular now that I've just somehow missed is also very much on the table.

Once I am done, I usually want to write something up about it, because that's how I solidify my thoughts and opinions. People like reading my thoughts, apparently, so I have decided to start storing them here, whereas previously they would simply live on a friendslocked social media post.

This started when I decided to listen to the entire Prince discography for a different project, and I found that I really enjoyed it and wanted to do it with other artists. So I am.

I want to reiterate that I do these listens for my own enrichment. This is not a Content Project For The Internet. I'm not doing this for you. There is no schedule to this project, and there are no rules. I listen to whatever I personally choose to listen to, at my own pace, and I will write as much or as little as I want to write about it when I am done.

I'll start by reblogging my original Prince post, and then I'll copypaste the couple of other posts I've done on Facebook, and then future posts will come when they come.

(Originally posted January 2026)

So I have finished my most recent "full discography listen" - ABBA!

It's sort of hard to know where to start to talk about Abba, because like... they're Abba. You know who Abba is. You know all the words to Dancing Queen. You can easily sing along to Mamma Mia. It doesn't matter who you are or how old you are or anything else about your demographic. You know Abba.

I do too! I was excited for this listen because I really loved Abba when I was a kid, so I was excited to experience the whole selection.

Like most bands, their first album is, uh.... not very good. Okay, I'll be more honest: except for "Ring Ring" (essentially the song that made them famous), their first album is dogshit. Do not listen to it. There is nothing to be gained here.

Their other albums are all pretty hit and miss - each album usually has a couple of hits, a few mid tracks, and then some pretty bad ones. There's not a tonne of storytelling or central themes to Abba's albums, so you don't need to listen to a whole one to get a special experience... Abba is very much a track by track band, to be honest.

If you want my favourite albums, it's probably Voulez-Vous and their simply self titled Abba. I really love the heavier sound on Voulez-Vous, and Abba has probably the highest hit rate of any of their albums.

Hey, did you know Abba released an album in 2021? Yeah! I didn't know that either, until I did this little project! Are you expecting me to say it's great? Are you? Because that'd be weird, wouldn't it? Because if it was great, don't you think both you and I would have heard about the fact world-famous music group Abba released a new album after FORTY YEARS since their last?

Look, Voyage was EXACTLY what I expected from it - it's mostly slower, more ballad-y tracks, with a lot of sentiments boiling down to "wow that sure was a crazy time huh, and now here we are again". There are some higher energy ones, but I'll be honest, they're not that great. "No Doubt About It" is fun, and so is "Just a Notion". "Don't Shut Me Down" is the most depressing song of the album, because they're trying so hard to bring back that big bold Abba energy and it's just so, so clear that their hearts aren't in it. That sound isn't Abba anymore.

But honestly, Voyage isn't a bad album at all - in fact in most ways it's their best album. It's the best produced, it's the most narratively interesting, and aside from Don't Shut Me Down's lack of energy, there's not really a *bad* track on Voyage, something I can't say about any of their other albums. So like... overall, Voyage is probably Abba's best album, in my opinion.

But like. There's no huge hits on Voyage. There's no Mamma Mia. There's no Waterloo.

Is it disappointing? No, I don't think so. As I said, it was exactly what I expected. I think Voyage's only sin is that it's not PEAK ABBA. It's not the Abba that everyone--and I do mean EVERYONE--loves. See, some people are Abba fans, but I'm not talking about them. I bet they like Voyage just fine, actually. I'm talking about like... everyone. All of us people who aren't Abba fans. But we still all love Abba, and if you think that you don't, I want to see if that's still true when you're in a club or at a wedding and the DJ starts spinning an Abba track. Because I bet it makes you smile a little bit, even if you don't sing or dance along.

And that's the thing, right - Abba isn't good because of, like, lyrics, or composition, or themes, or storytelling, or anything like that. In fact, Abba is pretty fucking bad at most of those things. The lyrics are very basic (although still better than *I* could write in a non-native language!), the compositions are very simple, the instrumentation is frequently uninteresting at best, the production often feels a bit cheap, and there's basically no narrative or even strong sentiment in most of their songs.

One thing that really bothered me throughout my whole listen is how clear it is that the men were the ones writing the songs - there is a casual sexism that's so fucking PRESENT in Abba's lyrics, if you actually pay attention to them. Everything that goes wrong is a woman's fault, every woman needs a man to be happy, women are only valuable if they are both young (often UNDERAGE) and beautiful... bleargh. Track by track you can easily ignore it (and we all do), but listening to their whole discography? Yuck, I hated it. And before you're like "but Erin you listen to way more misogynistic music than that", yeah, I do, and I hate that too. But the thing is, it's BECAUSE the sexism in Abba is so casual and trivial that it bothers me so much. We could have just not done that! Why you gotta do that?

So what DOES Abba do well? A few things, actually!

For starters, the singing. The women of Abba are fucking fantastic singers. They always sound MAGNIFICENT. They're very skilled singers, but even aside from skill, there is a very pleasant quality to their voices that can't be taught. They're just really nice to listen to. This is especially noticeable when the men decide they want to be a a part of the singing, because suddenly there's the male voices and they SOUND TERRIBLE BY COMPARISON, GO AWAY BOYS!!! JUST LET THE LADIES DO IT!!

Another thing Abba is good at is catchy hooks - and this is somewhere that the boys' poor lyricism actually helps them out, because simple lyrics sung over a good hook? Easy to learn, easy to sing along to, and thus easy to carry around in our heads all the time and immediately be able to join in on any singalong.

Abba are also very clearly very serious about their polish - even with less than ideal production etc, every Abba track feels polished and complete in a way that's really remarkable. I read on wikipedia that apparently they were pretty well known for being perfectionists in the studio, sometimes doing hundreds of takes to get things right, and you know what? I can feel it! Every Abba track - even the worst ones - are still absolutely *finished*, polished songs. There's nothing more to do to them. They are the most complete, best versions of the songs that can exist.

But at the end of the day, we don't love Abba because they're objectively high quality or whatever. We love Abba because their music makes us feel happy and makes us want to sing along and dance. Abba makes people excited, it makes people laugh and dance, it gets people moving and reaching for each other.

Abba makes us HAPPY.

There is literally no higher compliment that can be paid.

Abba certainly makes ME happy - after I finished my full listen? I am STILL LISTENING TO ABBA. I have had them on repeat for like, DAYS now. That kind of musical magic cannot be taught, bought or taken. "Thank You for the Music" indeed.

(originally posted September 2025)

I enjoyed my Prince discography listening adventure so much I've decided to do it with more artists, and the next one I did was Tyler the Creator - because he's super popular in spaces I lurk in online and I hadn't heard anything of his work before. I had major FOMO over how hype everyone was for his Chromakopia album so that's why I picked him to go next. He had 8 albums when I started, but then he released a new one while I was doing it (lol) so nine all up.

Anyway - his early work is considered super impressive by others buuuuut personally I don't really agree; he was still a teenager when he made his first couple of albums and to me that's really obvious, they're incredibly adolescent. Not immature as such - just adolescent. I can imagine that teenagers listening to them would find them the best shit ever but I am a nearly 40 year old man, so I was mostly like "okay, I see the potential, can't wait to hear you evolve", you know?

Cherry Bomb was the first album that really worked for me - I felt like I could feel his artistic style really starting to take shape. That growth continued in every album after it, and I pretty much did like every album more than the one before it, in general. I feel like you can see the seeds of all his later work in Cherry Bomb better than anywhere else. Flower Boy came right after it and Flower Boy was VERY successful - and for good reason, it's a great album - but I've seen a few people say Flower Boy was when they could see Tyler's artistic style change and grow more into what it is today and I disagree, I think that growth is really, really apparent in Cherry Bomb, and I don't think Flower Boy would have been nearly as good if Cherry Bomb hadn't come before it.

IGOR was a really stand out album for me, probably because I'm a basic bitch and so hearing a queer man make a whole album based around falling in love with someone closeted and getting in his feels about it and trying to make it work only to finally move on just hits right for me, you know?

Chromakopia was, indeed, a really fucking good album. It's impressive that it stood up to the hype - it came out last year and I'd heard nothing but praise for it, so it had a lot to live up to when I got to it, but it totally succeeded. It's experimental and personal and beautiful, there's nothing else quite like it. It's not perfect, it still retains some of the adolescence that he's hanging onto (more on that in a moment), but it's a really great album and I do think that it's worth the hype it got. :)

I don't really have a favourite song or a least favourite song by Tyler, I don't think? I feel like he's really an album artist - he's best listened to all at once rather than just a song here or there. His narrative skills with his albums are really good, and always have been, that's actually something even his first couple of albums were pretty good at in my opinion.

One cannot discuss Tyler the Creator and not discuss misogyny, unfortunately. It's not as much there in his later work but his early work was *extremely* misogynistic, even by standard mainstream hip hop standards.

I don't think Tyler the actual human being is particularly misogynistic - he seems to work with and support more women creators than any other mainstream rap artist I can think of off the top of my head at the moment, actually. I did some cursory googlings and couldn't find any history of misogynistic abuse, other than a) making some sexually explicit tweets at Selena Gomez, that he clearly realised were fucked up because he deleted them and apologised, and b) responding with some venom towards Collective Shout when they targeted him (CS are a bullshit group of pearl clutching "activists" here in aus who are currently trying to ban adults from buying R rated video games - they wanted him banned from the country because of his lyrics).

So I do think that the misogyny in his work is fictional, and that's not, like, a problem necessarily, right? Fiction is fiction. BUT. But. Fictional or not, the content is still pretty rough. Look. I know that Tyler doesn't like it when people describe his early work as horrorcore, but baby, if it walks like horrorcore and it quacks like horrorcore, it's horrorcore. And his early work is quacking. So if you don't have the stomach for it, I'd advise skipping his first few albums - maybe come in at Cherry Bomb at the absolute earliest if you're not up for the violent, graphic stuff.

I've seen some people say that he should like, make it clearer that it's fiction - but I dunno, I do actually think he makes it pretty clear. Hell one of my favourite lines from him is from Goblin - "Okay, you guys caught me / I'm not a fuckin' rapist or a serial killer, I lied." I laughed out loud at that bar, I thought it was funny and clever as hell.

I said before his early work is adolescent and this is kind of what I mean - it was violent and angry and, like I said, if I was a teenager, I'd think it was the hottest shit, no question. All feelings no brakes.

But, as I also said, that adolescence does kind of remain through all his work, even if it's getting diluted with every album. On finishing my listen to everything, and thinking about how I felt about each album, I realised there was this really clear throughline for me of waiting to see what comes next. After his first couple of albums I was waiting to see what he would do when he matured. I was right to; he got better.

But there's still some of that adolesence there - and the thing is, I would bet money that Tyler himself would agree with me. A lot of his songs are about his own insecurities, immaturities, selfishness, uncertainty - he feels like he still has growing up to do, even in Chromakopia, an album he made in his early thirties.

So once again, just as I felt after hearing his first album - I can't wait to see what he does when he matures a bit more. Even now. I can't wait to see what he's doing in his forties, fifties, and then on. I think he's going to be one of those rare artists who doesn't calcify, I think he's going to keep growing and changing and maturing, and I'm actually pretty excited about that.