34 hard-to-find DIY rock songs that may change your life, too

A Whole Fucking Lifetime Of This, American Pleasure Club's first full-length album since changing their name from Teen Suicide, sounds as though it's perpetually on the brink of unraveling. Disparate genres crash into each other, tempos pick up and ebb away, and bandleader Sam Ray's voice strains to be heard through the mess. Ray sings through heavy effects over a mournful piano loop on "eating cherries"; classic rock guitar solos pinwheel through "new years eve"; and drum & bass breakbeats drive the frenzy of "just a mistake."

Like a lot of Ray's music — he records solo electronic music under the name Ricky Eat Acid and put out a couple of stunning records with the indie pop band Julia Brown — Fucking Lifetime plays up the tension between its sugar-sweet pop melodies and its ramshackle assemblage. Rather than trying to make everything sound pristine, American Pleasure Club focuses on the ragged motion between its discrete parts, exploring the heightened emotional potentials that arise when a piece of music doesn't fit together perfectly.

A prolific musician, Ray's also been a voracious listener for the majority of his life. He gleaned a lot of his most cherished techniques from obscure artists local to his native Maryland, as well as tracks gathered from Bandcamp, college radio, and label compilations. Many of the songs he's collected over the years never made the leap to streaming platforms. They were released by labels that folded, or by artists who quietly retired, and can now only be found on the internet's back channels if they can be found at all.

So Ray compiled a playlist of otherwise forgotten songs that influenced his music, both as an archival project and as a way of mapping the genome of his new album. "Even if I know nothing about the artist and it's just a single song that got passed to me, all of it has been formative in learning what I want to write, the kinds of things that strike me," Ray says over the phone during a brief break from touring. Below, he discusses each song on the playlist and the way it has affected his songwriting practice.

The Night People label only released music on cassette, but once a year they put out a big Mediafire compilation. That song is from one of them. I don't know anything about We Shave. I've never heard another song by them, but this song is so fun. It embodies what I want to be doing with our band at our best and most playful. I love a song with a refrain at the end of every stanza instead of a chorus. It's a very old school rock & roll thing. That song reminds me of being 5 years old and hearing Chuck Berry for the first time — it has that same deceptive simplicity and playfulness.

That's my friend Alex! We were friends in high school. I don't know if he does music anymore. He was in a band in high school called Automatic Stallions and they were so goofy. It was him on synths and a live drummer and sometimes a guy would come dance in masks. It was that kind of high school band, but his songs were really good, even then. After we all graduated, he made this EP called The Dad EP. Half of it was almost hard to listen to, but I loved it: atonal acoustic guitar, slide guitar, a hundred layers recorded without headphones in GarageBand. Just this awful noise with beautiful, sing-song pop melody over it, and the most striking lyrics. But the other half was lo-fi indie pop songs. This song, "Majesty," is the pinnacle of it. It gets stuck in my head so much to this day. He is such a smart songwriter. I hope he still makes music.

I know nothing about this artist. My friend Adam Ward, who worked at college radio at the time, scoured Bandcamp for so long before anyone was really using Bandcamp. He would find the strangest, prettiest kitchen sink folk albums and film scores from movies you couldn't find. This was a song he played on his radio show. I think I texted him the second he aired it like, "What was that?" I love how you can hear all of these wrong notes. I don't know if they're intentional, but they're being hit softly, like when you're playing a flurry on an organ and you're not quite good enough to play what you're trying to play, but it's so much more beautiful because of it. That song is the embodiment of that. It sounds like a dream. Not a good dream, not a bad dream, just a dream, a twilight.

That's Nobunny's old band. They were the scuzziest, dirtiest, shittiest, scumbaggiest rock band ever. All their songs are a minute long and they sound like they were done in a trash can. I hope they're spoofing the idea of what they're singing about. Knowing Nobunny, I have to assume it's all a mockery. They have a song where he sings the line, "I want a blow job, I want a hot dog," and then everyone starts screaming in the background. All that stuff is very over the line, but the songs are so good. That is a style we love so much: dirty, scuzzy, but so catchy.

I know nothing about this, except that I found it through an old label that used to be in Baltimore called Wigflip. That song is so beautiful. I don't know if it's samples — it could be stolen completely from somewhere — but it's so pretty and I've been listening to it for so long. They had all their music up for free, with no press. That's where the Run DMT stuff came from, too.

Jordan has so much old music that's so gorgeous. Everybody should know it. His career didn't start with that incredible masterpiece album, Love's Crushing Diamond. It started years before. I've loved Mutual Benefit so long. It was hard to pick a song because they're all so good, but on "Animal Death Mask," you can hear where the album came from in the scope of it, the serene, slow-moving, heartbreaking nature of that song. But it's weirder. Diamond had strings and piano and drums. It was a collaboration between so many people. This song is the sound of one person using the craziest stuff they have, electronics, noise, broken toys, just the sound of the inside of one person's head in the best way.

CUFFS used to be a band called Pants Yell!, my favorite indie pop band ever. Their first album, which isn't streaming anywhere, is my favorite, most seminal indie pop album. CUFFS did this four-track demo, and that song, "You Can Come True," is my favorite. It's when you have a 65-degree day in the winter and you drive around with your windows down and you see the sky turn black like a thunderstorm's rolling in but it never actually hits and it just stays like that until it gets cold at night.

That's a band that someone passed me forever ago, a four-track EP on Bandcamp. It's stunning. That song in particular, I don't know why, but it really stayed with me.

Winks were a Baltimore band in 2009 or 2010. Their members were all in other acts I knew at the time. I guess I never really liked a lot of their music, but this song is so good. Kind of the same as the Sneaky Pinks stuff — something that works so well on such a scuzzy level and is so catchy. It doesn't have to break any ground. It's just doing something that so few bands can.

This is the band that all of the old Porches stuff sounds exactly like. You can hear how he found his original sound before he went techno. I don't know a lot about them. That song "The Rounds" blew my mind the very first time I heard it. Something about it is so very beautiful — the voice, the recording, the strings. It's slightly off-key and off-time, but always coming together behind it, like they're playing just outside their means. Everything together is so good and so much what I wish I could be doing.

That's a Night People band. I don't know a lot about them, but they were so good. They drew on all these old, kitschy '70s songs, Dolly Parton songs, country songs — they took stuff from everywhere. I don't know how much of their music is original and how much is pastiche, but they put it all together in this weird, droning, psychedelic country way. They had so many people singing that couldn't sing all together that it added up to something awesome. That song, "This Heart," has always been the one. It's so hard to find out anything about them. If you look up any of their lyrics, you only get the original songs that they're copying pieces from. It's kind of a disappearing act.

This is one of three songs on the compilation by my old friend and one-time bandmate Alan, who was in Cotton Candy Collective. His style and songwriting has, without a doubt, influenced me more than anything. I'd go to his house and see him work with 30 broken yard sale keyboards and drum machines and four-tracks he would salvage and put back together. He'd record guitar and have me keep hitting reverse, play with the pitch knob the whole time, and we'd end up with this guitar lead that was so fucking weird and beautiful. It's this idea of pure experimentation matched to pitch-perfect pop songwriting —that's the biggest possible influence on me and my work. On our new song "there was a time when i needed it," I give credit to "Track 07" because they share a melody and a structure. That song is a direct homage.

That's the other side of the Run DMT song — they did a split together. Happy Family was a weird, bro-y, Baltimore guy that ripped off Panda Bear really hard. That might be the guy that ran the Wigflip label; I'm not sure. Panda Bear's sound is so locked in, so when you have someone doing such a messy, weird take on it, it becomes this new, beautiful thing. That song stuck with me. It's like a sunny day.

That's Rachel from R. L. Kelly and Jeremy Mullins. This song is weird because I've never been able to find it ever again. They gave me this EP, and when I went to look for it again, all these years later, I couldn't find it. There's not even a trace of it. I literally listened to that song hundreds of times. It was my top song on my old Last.fm. That's how much it struck me. Something about it is so easy to loop over and over.

I think they were a Portland band. Their music sounds like shit and they are awesome. They fit with that Sneaky Pink, Nobunny thing. I don't know anything about them as people. This song is about a girl you like dating someone new but you're like, "Fuck that dude, dance with me instead." It's not a nice sentiment, but it's a nice-feeling song even though it's done like shit and played like shit. It just hits you in this weird way. You smile listening to it. That's at the heart of a lot of music I love and a lot of music I want to make. It can be done so bad and still be so good, ideally.

That's another one from Adam Ward. It's a friend of his, from what I understand, somebody he knew in college who made a lot of stunning music that no one really has heard. It's all this angular guitar playing and Avey Tare vocals, but very pop, the way his melodies come together. There's something a little bit weird about it. Even though it's just guitar and vocals for the most part, the way he chops the vocals up at the end, that speaks to how much more he was thinking about it. He didn't just put a tape player down and hit record. It really feels like a full, thought-out composition.

A lot of electronic musicians I know cite her as an influence. She had all these albums up for free through her website. They're all really different, each record, and they're all really stunning. They seem simple at first and the more you pick them apart, the more you get the sense that a lot of thought and work went into these intricate, small pieces. It feels like a spiderweb, the whole album. Each song is a thread. I've sampled them a lot and I hope she doesn't mind.

Alex is certainly at a higher profile now, but when I first heard his music, no one outside of my friends in Philly knew who he was. They were obsessed. They said, "You have to hear this kid. He's phenomenal. He's the best songwriter." He didn't release his music. Someone had a thumb drive of it, and we'd drive over to their house and they'd give us a thumb drive of a whole bunch of Alex G albums. And then someone else six months later would have another one, and so on. Eventually he started putting albums on Bandcamp. I have hundreds of songs that I don't think he'll ever show to the world again. "Bike" is a song that, for reasons that are unexplainable, attaches to you. It haunts you in your head for years.

They were one of the members of one of those bands, Real Estate or something. They were in that crew of all the Jersey bands, but they did something that was so catchy when all the others did something dirge-like. Their music has fallen away forever. No one knows it. It's only on YouTube. That song "Cruisers" and their other song "Shore Patrol," they're just perfect to me. They've stuck with me so long. It's so simple but so good, with such strong writing. I love it so much more than the band that found success.

I have never been able to find anything of theirs again. That song sounds like the Wolf Parade guy, Spencer Krug, if he fronted a more down to earth, emotional art rock band. I know nothing about them. I found them because someone I follow on Twitter posted it one day like, "Anyone remember this band from six years ago?" No one said anything, but I downloaded it and then I lost the rest of the record. I've always been curious if the rest of it is as good as this song.

That was my penpal over AIM in 2006. They made this terrifyingly strange electronic music, and that was when I first started making electronic music, too. They taught me so much about it. I'll always be glad. All these years later, I still find something really evocative about this song. I don't know what happened to them.

They're like The Treehouse, another small EP I found through that Wigflip label. That song is clearly a couple samples over and over. Maybe it's their own playing, but it's a loop that builds. Something about it reminds me of the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet movie. Building a beautiful song out of loops, taking them away and adding them on, that's something that is very dear to me in my own music.

Attic Abasement, I'm wearing their shirt right now by accident. They're one of those artists that found an audience that was not there when they first put their albums out. They're still working, but nothing will ever be like the album that "Australia" is from. It's such a unique, home-recorded thing, like if the Silver Jews were a pop band. The sense of lyricism is there, the wittiness, the darkness, but in such a traditional pop songwriting context. So many people have covered it. Rachel of R.L. Kelly covered that song. I think Mat from Coma Cinema covered that song. The influence is broad among that generation of artists.