Discord and Rhyme: An Album Podcast

GoddammitbabyyouknowIain'tlyintoyouThisIsDiscordAndRhyyyymeYEEEEEAAAAHHHHWWWW!!! Van Halen was a cultural phenomenon in the late 1970s and early 1980s until David Lee Roth split with the band, and they’re one of the first bands that John had any real opinions on in his journey of getting into rock music. With this album, the band largely redefined the boundaries of what an electric guitar could do in a rock context, but they also found a way to make this boundary-pushing fun and light on its feet in a way that largely helped shape rock music for the next decade. About half of this album is radio staples, but the other half has some real gems as well, so come listen to John lead a discussion (with Rich and Mike) about a great album from what was, for a few years, an absolutely great band.

This Is Comp is back! We're reviving our compilation series with a great one: The Wrecking Crew!, released in 2015 as a soundtrack to the excellent documentary film of the same name. The songs on this comp cover a huge range of genre and quality, but the session musicians are always top-notch. From weird crossover country to Mexican folk to one of the finest pop songs ever recorded, we had a ton of fun with this first batch of songs and we're thrilled to be back.

It … is happening … again! This week, Producer Mike rings in 2026 with NorCal producer DJ Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece Endtroducing….., whose release was a watershed moment for the art of instrumental hip-hop. It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first album to be composed entirely out of sampled sounds, but focusing on the technical achievement seriously undersells the depths of Shadow’s artistry. This is lively, organic music, with compositions that feel like sculptures crafted from the clay of music history, and the entire 21st-century DJing movement stands on the foundation of what Shadow accomplished here. Mike himself is a composer of sample-based music (including our awesome theme song) and a long-time admirer of Shadow’s work, and he’s invited Rich and returning special guest Shivam Bhatt to deconstruct an album that builds a mighty head of steam out of a grain of salt.

It feels like there shouldn't be anything left to say about The Dark Side of the Moon. It's one of the best-selling albums of all time, and it's consistently rated as one of the greatest albums of all time by critics. If you tune into a classic rock station for more than a couple of hours, chances are better than 50/50 that you'll hear a track or three from it get played. It's so common to hear tracks from here out of context that it's become easy to forget that these tracks, when heard in order from start to finish, constitute one of the most stunningly coherent artistic statements of the album era, and that makes it an album that Discord & Rhyme had to cover in depth at some point. Join Amanda, Mike, Rich, and John as they discuss the 1973 classic that transformed Pink Floyd from a niche-famous British prog-adjacent band into one of the most famous bands in the world.

The gang sits down by the fire to discuss a second round of the songs that made them love music. This year's batch covers an astonishing amount of ground, including movie soundtracks, jazz, funk, girl groups, folk, prog (of course), hip-hop, musicals, dub reggae, power pop — and even a hymn!