What a Curator Hears in This Week's Selects

Pitchfork's Selects playlist landed this week with Lily Konigsberg, Krill, and Jane Remover on the cover, and if you're building a setlist for a game or a film, that trio is worth more than a passing click. The feature is a simple one: songs the publication's staff can't stop replaying. But the curation logic behind a playlist like that is closer to what a music supervisor actually does than a genre chart is. It's a snapshot of what people with trained ears keep returning to, which is a better predictor of emotional usefulness than a streaming algorithm's median.

Start with Krill. The Boston trio's catalog — "Alam No Hris," "Fresh Pond," that whole run — is a masterclass in controlled mess. Songs fall apart and reassemble in under three minutes, guitars stay brittle, the low end never quite sits still. For a composer, Krill is a lesson in tension management: you can hold a scene together with a bassline that refuses to resolve, as long as the drums and vocal phrasing give the listener a clear handhold. That's exactly the trick you hear in the best indie-leaning game scores, where the loop needs to feel unstable so the player notices the moment it breaks. If you've been leaning on ambient pads to signal unease, Krill is a reminder you can do it with a four-piece instead.

Lily Konigsberg is the other half of that equation, and she matters for a different reason. Her writing is small, wry, specific — a voice close to the mic, arrangements that leave air around the words. Palberta and her solo work both understand that a sparse mix can carry more weight than a produced one. For anyone scoring dialogue-driven scenes, that's the useful takeaway: a single detuned synth, a fingerpicked guitar, a drum machine that sounds like it's apologizing. Konigsberg's songs don't try to win a loudness war. They win the moment the viewer stops noticing the score and starts noticing the silence the score created.

Jane Remover sits on the opposite pole, and her presence on the same playlist is the real story. Hyperpop-adjacent, sample-dense, vocally processed until the singer sounds like a character in her own song — Remover's music is built from collapse. Glitch as rhythm section, pitch-shifted vocals as texture, genre shifts inside a single track. For curators, that's the hard sell of the format: a track that refuses a consistent mood can't sit on a background playlist, but it can absolutely own a cutscene. The lesson isn't "use hyperpop." It's that audiences raised on these transitions now expect scores to move, not just to bed. If your cue sits on one chord for ninety seconds, you're competing with a generation that hears key changes as punctuation.

Put the three together and a pattern shows up. Krill's structural unease, Konigsberg's negative space, Remover's maximalist pivots — none of them are doing what a traditional film score does, and all of them are doing something a traditional film score often can't. They're carrying narrative without a narrative. That's the core skill for anyone scoring games, short-form, or episodic work in 2025: you have to imply a story inside three minutes, sometimes inside thirty seconds, without a lyric doing the work for you. Pitchfork's Selects isn't a chart. It's a reference reel. Listen to it like one — not for songs to license, but for choices you can steal.

The practical move for a label or supervisor reading this week's list: pull the three artists, note the structural decisions, then ask which of your current projects is too safe. Krill will tell you where you're over-resolving. Konigsberg will tell you where you're over-producing. Remover will tell you where you've forgotten that the listener is smart. That's the whole value of a curated playlist from people who actually listen for a living — not the songs, the instincts behind them. Track it, then go break something in your own session.