October has been a strange kind of limbo month for me, part reflection, part rebuild. The nights are darker, the air feels heavier, and apparently, my playlist followed suit. It’s that beautiful balance between melancholy and motion, songs that make you ache a little, but keep you moving anyway.

September was… a lot. Equal parts stress, melancholy, and a desperate need for noise to drown out the shit show in my brain. Lucky for me, music does what therapy sometimes can’t, it gets me out of bed, into the car, through the workday, and occasionally allows for a cathartic bathroom floor breakdown. So here it is, the run down of the soundtrack of my September.

If you don’t know, Stray Kids are an eight member K-pop group formed by JYP Entertainment in 2018 after a survival show of the same name. Since then, they’ve carved out a space as one of the most innovative groups in the industry, writing and producing the majority of their own songs, blending rap, EDM, and rock into something entirely their own.