"It's the best narrative podcast of all time—it's an investigation that could have gone left so many times, but instead, went right. My barometer also includes how well the podcast plays as a podcast—like we don't need it to be visualized and it's about audio in some way, making it well-suited for the form. This one is all of that, since it's about music. It has suspense, b and c and d storylines (including one in which the host, iO Tillet Wright, discusses his voice since he transitioned from female to male and still sounds a bit feminine at time of recording). Also the main character's voice, who turns out to be Tillet's mother, is unusual and fun to listen to. Tillet did such an excellent job with the audio material, crafting emotional callbacks—I cry every time I listen, and it's the only serial show I've ever re-listened to. It's the closest thing to literature I've ever seen in a podcast—it's so well done."

- Laura Standley

The Ballad of Billy Balls is a fever dream of love, loss, and obsession wrapped in the haze of late-1970s New York. Hosted by iO Tillett Wright, the podcast begins as a murder mystery—who killed underground musician Billy Balls?—but quickly unspools into something more jagged and intimate. It’s a story told through the eyes of Billy’s partner, Rebecca, whose grief burns as hot decades later as it did the day he was taken from her. What follows is less a linear investigation than a noir-tinged elegy, full of unreliable memories, punk grit, and the disorienting search for truth in a world that never cared to preserve it. Tillett Wright narrates with raw urgency, guiding us through a story where justice seems less important than understanding why it all still hurts. The Ballad of Billy Balls is haunting, romantic, occasionally maddening—and impossible to look away from. It’s tragedy told like poetry.