The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Starflyer 59

[#] Lust for Gold (2024)

A highly successful muscular, updated take on the old sound.

Reviewed October 20, 2025

An album with a name and backstory as self-referential as "Lust for Gold" can only be either a gross attempt at recapturing relevance (Starflyer fans have been clamoring for another noisefest since they stopped coming in the 90s) or a desperate desire to dive back into the past for inspiration. Funny thing: this isn't. In lyrics and songwriting, Lust for Gold actually recalls the best moments of recent records Slow and Young in My Head. There's no ear-piercing feedback squalls a la "Duel Overhead Cam", no endless, roaring codas a la "Messed Up Over You". You soon realize this is Jason applying decades of his songwriting sharpness to some fairly intentional sonic callbacks in the dry drums and echoey, screechy riffs, and coming out with a late-career instant Starflyer essential, for us noisemongers and for his similarly-aged, yearning fanbase.

Given how often later Starflyer efforts are given to slow, miserable laments on aging, and how Gold itself was pretty down in the dumps, you'd expect this to be off-puttingly sad, but Lust for Gold is frankly the most vital full-length Starflyer has given us in a while. Sure, the lamenting is still there, but it's framed such, musically in memorably dissonant riffs and sharp choruses and lyrically in fuzzy memories for the now-defunct 909 area code or adventures rode out on a Yamaha YZ80, that honestly I'm just glad Starflyer seems to want to say something again. If, like me, you're struck by how relatively verbose Jason Martin's gotten since the days of "Sled" and "You're Mean", check out "Everyone Seems Strange": "The Christians have/Found their own/Different ways/Oh God, please help me find/The ones/That stayed/'Cause everyone seems strange". And that's it.

Essential:	"909", "My Lungs", "Everyone Seems Strange"
Quintessential:	"YZ80"
Non-Essential:	"No Sweat"
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from Starflyer 59's Bandcamp