I'd wager that nostalgia is the most powerful emotion. Empires have risen and fallen on the stuff. And with the rapid flattening-out of culture that we're experiencing now in the 21st century, our near-complete loss of cultural touchstones and temporal identity, one is drawn more and more to the aesthetics of the past. But it is an aesthetic without a soul, without substance. It is a copy of a copy. Pure pastiche. It is sound removed from the conditions that made it. Without Benjamin's aura. Empty sound.

Mark Fisher identified this trend back in the '00s in his essay "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." The cultural institutions that facilitated the sounds of the past have disappeared. Without these engines to drive forward progress, we're stuck in time, cursed to relive the past forever. Sounds no longer evolve, they just cross-breed.

Magdalena Bay's sophomore effort, Imaginal Disk, sits at the edge of recognition. It's in the same liminal space as bouts of deja vu, or grainy film photographs. It's the fuzzy muscle memory of blowing dust out of a game cartridge, or hanging up the telephone on the wall, or missing the simplicity of your 240p camcorder, even though you were born in this millennium and never experienced any of this. It's manufactured nostalgia. Even the cover is designed as such: evoking a 90s glamour shot, or a bad 80s music video. A sort of optimism runs throughout the record, but it's an optimism from the 90s; a retro-futurist vision of what things could be.

So why is Imaginal Disk my runner-up album of the year? Because, to me, it captures, more than anything else I've found, this overwhelming feeling of our modern world. I cannot describe this any better than a sort of "running in place." We are stuck in time, yet the world moves faster and faster. Life is a blur, and there's nothing to hold on to. We cannot move forward because we are held back by the past. Derrida's hauntologies are even more present in politics; science; technology; and philosophy than when he first put his pen to paper. Capitalism no longer breeds innovation (whether it was ever an effective system to do so is another article), yet we hold on to this techno-utopian myth from the 80s that tech will save us from ourselves.

Maybe Fukiyama was right, if a bit premature. It truly feels like we have reached the End of History. Neoliberalism seems to have a stranglehold on governments. The market is a confidence game, one disaster away from total collapse. Strongman fascism is back in vogue. The planet is spiralling out of control, yet we have idiots focused on sci-fi visions of colonising Mars, AI that can make art for you, and sucking up all the water in the world to cool down huge data centres that purely exist for the storage of slur-laden social media posts. Imaginal Disk is hauntology. A nostalgic past that never existed; a future that was promised. It's also catchy as hell.