New York Times, Tuesday, August 20, 2019

This puzzle is a par 4. I wanted it to have a narrative progression when all was said and done, so I hope you enjoyed the order of the entries!

Looking back, some of the fill is a little less clean than I might hope to include if I wrote the puzzle today, but such can be the nature of a six-theme entry beast. I hope some of the mid-to-longer answers appealed to you. Now, I am not a person who knows a lot about pop music at all, so the inclusion of two modern musical performers (CARDI B and AVICII) surprised even me at the time…

This puzzle was written in May 2018. When I discovered that AVICII worked in the lower-left, I felt that I had to include him; the performer had taken his own life the month before at the age of 28. Here's a link to "Wake Me Up," the song referenced in the clue; and "Heaven," a beautiful tribute video created by some of his long-time collaborators. I've always been a fan of classical music foremost, but I enjoy Avicii's work. If you had difficulty with his name (hopefully all the crossings were fair; apologies for UVEA or SNOCAT if they weren't), I hope it was worth the introduction.

When I played golf, my thematic sequence would have been:

TEE SHIRT

WHIFF ENPOOF

ROUGH PATCH

ROUGH CUT

ROUGH HOUSE

SHANK BONES

Ending sadly with MERCY RULE. No GREEN PEACE for me, which is why I gave up the pointless game. Sour grapes? Bah!

Evan did nearly everything right today. TEE, ROUGH, BUNKER, GREEN, CUP make for a descriptive golf sequence, and they're beautifully disguised within phrases. It wasn't until GREEN that I knew what was going on.

Smoothness, Evan's strokes like butter. A couple of minor hitches with some concentrated initialisms in CGI ESL FTC, but those are all ignorable.

And the bonuses! Nothing lengthy, but so much of the mid-length material sang. GLACIER and MT ADAMS. ON THE DL. Slangy ST PADDY. Even some SPRITZ TIRADE to round things out.

Thankfully, CARDI B has been in the crossword twice before, so she didn't give me hesitation. Third time's a charm!

Can't say the same with AVICII, which was the one major barrier to me awarding the POW! Especially in an early-week puzzle, you want to do everything you can to create a moment of "oh yeah, I defeated the NYT crossword!" Today, I got a "umm … I might have possibly finished the crossword, albeit with a bizarre corner, WEIRDER than ever; that can't possibly be right, so let me double-check everything, no, it must be right, but it can't be right because it's so odd" moment.

Not ideal.

It's a constructor's job to put solver above self, setting them up for glorious victory. That didn't happen today.

However, Evan did so well aside from AVICII that I still gave him the POW! Interesting, well-hidden theme, solid and smooth gridwork overall. I'd happily give this one to a newb, with the big caveat that they won't get as satisfying a victory as they deserve.