Listen, I need you to understand something about Scott Lucas. The guy from Local H. Two-piece band, one guitar doing the work of three, bass frequencies coming out of custom pickups because who needs an actual bass player when you're that good and that stubborn. He's the kind of musician who names a song "January: The One With 'Kid'" and builds an entire playlist around it like a confession you didn't ask for but absolutely need to hear.
This playlist—"THE RUN WITH 'KID'"—reads like someone broke into a very specific record collection and grabbed everything that ever made them want to break something or become something or maybe both at once. It's Pretenders and Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, sure, but then it pivots hard into Kyuss, three tracks deep of stoner rock that sounds like the desert learned to play guitar. Then Interpol shows up like the college radio station finally got its signal back, and by the time Blondie and The Libertines close it out, you've run through about six different decades and zero apologies.
I've been thinking about this a lot—what it means to build a running playlist from stolen goods. Not literally stolen, obviously, but borrowed. Borrowed confidence from Chrissie Hynde. Borrowed swagger from Angus Young. Borrowed weight from Josh Homme's guitar tone, which sounds like gravity got a recording contract. You don't run to this playlist because it's scientifically optimized for 180 steps per minute. You run to it because someone who knows what records are supposed to do put these songs in this order, and you trust that.
The playlist opens with "Tattooed Love Boys," and if you've never heard Chrissie Hynde snarl her way through a song about desire and danger and the blurry line between them, you're missing the entire point of why guitars and running both exist. It's 1980, it's New Wave before New Wave became a costume, and it's the sound of someone who doesn't need your permission. Then "January: The One With 'Kid'" kicks in, and Lucas is doing that thing he does—splitting the difference between punk and post-grunge, making one guitar sound like an argument you're losing. This is the centerpiece. This is why the playlist exists. Everything radiates out from this track.
Then the classic rock section hits—more Pretenders, Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times" which is just John Bonham announcing that drums are a full-contact sport, then AC/DC for two tracks straight. "Riff Raff" and "What's Next to the Moon." Let me tell you something about AC/DC that runners don't talk about enough: they're perfectly stupid. I mean that as the highest compliment. No overthinking. No jazz chords. Just Angus Young playing the same riff until your legs forget they were ever tired. It's not sophisticated. It doesn't need to be.
And then—this is where it gets interesting—the playlist drops into the Kyuss section. Three tracks: "Demon Cleaner," "Gardenia," "Odyssey." If you don't know Kyuss, they're the band that invented stoner rock in the California desert in the early '90s, recorded everything like they were playing through sand, and broke up before anyone outside of skate videos noticed. Josh Homme went on to form Queens of the Stone Age, but Kyuss is the blueprint. And these three tracks, back to back, are slower, heavier, denser than anything else on the playlist. Around 110 BPM, maybe lower. Your pace drops. Your breathing changes. And somehow—this is the part I can't explain—it works. You're not running faster. You're running harder. There's a difference.
"Communication Breakdown" yanks you back to speed. Zeppelin again, 1969, the riff that taught every other riff how to behave. Then Interpol's "Fine Mess," which is the band at their most 2010s-polished, all reverb and restraint, Paul Banks singing like he's apologizing for something he hasn't done yet. It shouldn't fit. But it does. And then Blondie. "Heart of Glass." Disco-punk, 1978, Debbie Harry doing more with a deadpan vocal than most singers do with a full octave. And finally, The Libertines close it with "Run Run Run," which is exactly the kind of on-the-nose title that would normally annoy me except Carl Barât and Pete Doherty play it like running is the only thing that ever made sense.
Here's what I keep coming back to: this playlist doesn't care about BPM consistency. It doesn't care about genre purity. It cares about a very specific feeling—what it's like to run when you're borrowing someone else's confidence, someone else's record collection, someone else's riffs, and making them yours for 52 minutes. Scott Lucas built this, or someone built it in his name, and either way, it's a love letter to the idea that the best running playlists aren't about science. They're about what you steal and what you keep.
