There's this thing I do where I convince myself I'm running to clear my head, and what actually happens is I spend five miles cataloging every stupid thing I've ever said to anyone. But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—a playlist comes along that short-circuits the whole neurotic loop. HERMOSA is that playlist, and I'm not entirely sure if I love it or if I just love who I was the first time I heard FIDLAR's "Got No Money" kick in at the start of a run I didn't want to take.
The title means "beautiful" in Spanish, which is either deeply sincere or deeply ironic depending on how you feel about garage rock that sounds like it was recorded in a storage unit. Probably both. The description—"The soundtrack for next time"—suggests whoever put this together knows something about the gap between who you are on this run and who you're trying to become on the next one.
Here's what's interesting: this playlist shouldn't work as well as it does. You've got FIDLAR's skate punk bleeding into Death Lens's egg punk (yes, egg punk is a thing now, and yes, I had to explain it to three customers last week), then pivoting through Bass Drum of Death's garage fury into Levitation Room's psych drift. It's like someone opened the Burger Records catalog, added some Murlocs and Osees because they know what they're doing, then threw in Shannon & The Clams at the end as a reminder that surf rock never really left, we just stopped paying attention.
What makes it work for running is that it's all built around the same restless energy—143 BPM on average, but it's not metronomic EDM bullshit. These are bands who learned to play in basements and garages, which means the tempo breathes. It lurches. FIDLAR comes out swinging with that snotty California punk sneer, and by the time you hit The Murlocs' "Loopholes" seven tracks in, you're deep in that hazy Melbourne psych zone where Ambrose Kenny-Smith's harmonica sounds like it's filtering through about six vintage amps. Then Psychedelic Porn Crumpets (yes, that's their actual name, and yes, they're from Perth, and yes, that matters because Australian garage rock hits different when it's coming from a place where the closest major city is a four-hour flight away).
The genius move—or maybe the happy accident, I'm never sure with these things—is how the playlist uses psych rock as a release valve. Just when the garage punk threatens to become exhausting, you get Levitation Room's "Warmth of the Sun" or La Luz's "Sure As Spring," these little pockets of reverb-drenched calm that let you catch your breath before diving back into the noise. It's the same principle that made Hüsker Dü's "Candy Apple Grey" work: you can't sustain maximum intensity for an hour without losing the plot. You need dynamics.
By the time "California Songs" hits—the 2024 remaster, because apparently Local H decided their 1996 anthem needed another coat of polish—you're two-thirds through and something shifts. This is the Wall Breaker moment, and it works because Scott Lucas has always understood that the best loud-quiet-loud dynamics are the ones that feel inevitable, not calculated. The song is about the same California these other bands are orbiting, but Lucas is singing from the Midwest, looking west at the mythology with equal parts longing and contempt. That tension is why it lands at mile four when your legs are starting to argue with your brain about whether this was really necessary.
The closing stretch—Naked Giants, Meatbodies, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, and then Shannon & The Clams' "Runaway"—is either a victory lap or an admission that you're just going to keep running until the music stops deciding for you. Shannon Shaw's voice on "Runaway" is pure early '60s heartbreak filtered through modern garage production, and it's the only moment on the entire playlist where someone sounds genuinely vulnerable instead of aggressively confident. It's a weird choice to end on, and also the only choice that makes sense.
I've run to this playlist four times now, and I still can't tell you if it's teaching me something or just letting me avoid the things I should be thinking about. What I do know is that next time I lace up, I'll probably hit play on this again, because "next time" is always the version of yourself you're trying to catch up to. And sometimes the only way to get there is to run through fifty-eight minutes of bands who sound like they're trying to outrun something too.
