Swimming Pool Wednesday Kinda Weekend (2025)
Historically, the weekend is a cultural and political achievement. Its roots lie in religious traditions—the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. But the weekend as we know it is less than 100 years old. During 19th-century industrialization, work was given a strict schedule: six or seven days a week, fixed hours, almost no breaks. We’ve got unions and workers’ movements to thank for shorter weeks and working hours. In England, the term weekend emerged in the late 19th century, originally meaning Saturday afternoon plus Sunday. Across Europe, the weekend gradually became standard, and by the mid 20th century, the five-day week was established.
Sounds like progress—but some say this kind of freedom is a bit of a lie. Anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin argued that state-granted rights can become forms of control: they might moderate hardship but just as often serve to maintain existing power structures. Peter Kropotkin, also an anarchist and geographer famous for his work on mutual aid, argued that our time is still ruled by external authority and the weekend just a structured pause rather than true autonomy over how we live and spend our time.
Anarchist hot take: Maybe that’s why a free midweek may feel so much more liberating than a Saturday—a tiny crack in the system.
The Dutch-Swiss band Swimming Pool taps into this feeling in their single “Wednesday Kinda Weekend”, released in August alongside their debut EP Line Cuts. The duo from The Hague and Zürich—consisting of Klyl Shifroni and Seraina Fässler aka Seina—weave airy vocals, bowed bass and blurred ambient textures that loosen the rigid structure of time. “Wednesday Kinda Weekend” sounds like a moment that refuses to be counted: hazy, elusive, like a memory that’s both present and unreachable. The track captures what the calendar can’t: a fleeting sense of liberation that can turn any day into a weekend.
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The Dispossessed by legendary writer Ursula K. Le Guin is a thought-provoking science fiction novel that explores freedom, society and human nature through the journey of Shevek, a physicist challenging the boundaries of his anarchist world. Anarchist utopia meets Sci-Fi—if you haven’t read it yet, please do.
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Shoegaze is a guitar-driven genre of layered, effects-laden soundscapes and ethereal vocals. Born in the 1980s and 90s, it’s been making a little comeback lately—thanks in part to TikTok. We wrote about this some time ago, but reading about it is one thing; the real deep dive is listening to our The Rest Shoegaze Playlist.
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