Listen: on our site, PRX, Mixcloud — full track list

This week on the Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Bart Everson enters territory the program has circled but not yet fully inhabited: a full hour of “Songs of the Climate Crisis,” music that names the emergency directly, obliquely, wordlessly, and with every emotional register from elegy to rage to dark comedy.

The episode opens, arrestingly, with one of the most commercially successful artists of the past decade: Billie Eilish, whose “All the Good Girls Go to Hell,” a pop hit from 2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was brought to Bart’s attention by friend Manuel Casal as a climate song in disguise — confirmed, as Bart notes, by Finneas, who described the lyrics as being about climate change, God, and the devil, and “the idea that humans have made such a mess of the planet at this point.”

From there, Ed D’Alessandro of Seattle declares a climate emergency in plain terms with “Break the Glass” (watch the video) from The Longing; Majel Connery offers “Burning,” a demo for Elderflora, a song cycle on the life of a tree; Pagan Harvest‘s “Earth’s Secret Engine” runs too fast; and Ariana Fig of Hamilton, Ontario, delivers “Until There’s Nothing Left” from her Cranes by the Creek EP, written as part of her 2024 master’s degree at McMaster University, processing a year of researching climate catastrophe through the medium of music.

The virtually anonymous vaporwave artist Ultrakey enters with “二酸化炭素” — Carbon Dioxide — from an album titled Ultrakey vs Climate Change, segueing into Lori and RJ‘s “Green House Effect,” a children’s music offering from San Francisco, and then Baba Brinkman of Canada bringing his “Mo Carbon Mo Problems” from The Rap Guide to Climate Chaos — thanks to superfan Erik Assadourian’s recommendation.

Throughout all of this, and throughout the episode as a whole, field recordings from the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies serve as a sonic undertow: Melting Landscapes, documenting the rapidly retreating Morteratsch glacier in the Swiss Alps through underwater and contact recording across four summers and winters between 2015 and 2018. The glacier does not editorialize. It simply diminishes.

The second set opens in England with Kimwei‘s a cappella rewriting of “I Vow to Thee My Country” — melody by Gustav Holst, original words by Sir Cecil Spring Rice, new climate-crisis text by Kimwei McCarthy, from her ongoing in-progress album You Are the Revolution (DRAFTS). Then Sara Ajnnak of Sweden, in collaboration with The Ciderhouse Rebellion, offers “Geärkkie — Whispers Through Stone” from Landscape of the Spirits, Part Two, released on the summer solstice of 2025: a wordless yoik, one of the oldest surviving vocal traditions in Europe, belonging to the Sámi people of the far north, who live in the regions where climate disruption arrives first and most violently. No words are necessary. Becca Flintham of Devon follows with “Sparks,” spoken word from Voices of the Rebellion Vol. 1, a fundraising project for Extinction Rebellion. Then Ann DuHamel, performing “Solipsismo” by Mexican composer Erick Tapia, from Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1, just released in April 2026 by New Focus Recordings — a project that began when DuHamel issued a call for scores responding to the climate crisis and received works from more than 170 composers in 35 countries. Tapia’s title names the philosophical malady the episode has been diagnosing all along: the solipsism that enables inaction.

The hour closes with Radiohead performing “Idioteque” live at South Park, Oxford, on July 7th, 2001 — a hometown show, a song from Kid A that has become one of the defining artistic statements about civilizational dread, with Thom Yorke chanting “ice age coming” while the crowd sings along. Released as a live recording on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings the same year, it is the oldest track in the episode and perhaps the most visceral, and it closes the hour the way only Radiohead can: with elegance, panic, and the persistent, unreasonable hope that art is doing something useful in the dark.

Photo: “Persephone at the People’s Climate Festival” by Bart Everson