Minna Stess has a habit of making some of the hardest tricks in skateboarding look second nature: Take, for example, the street-style kickflip on an almost vertical bank that helped make her the youngest USA Skateboarding national champion at 15, or the nine consecutive backside airs—an aerial transition trick— she can casually rip on demand.
So it’s probably not surprising that the 18-year-old’s training playlists lean toward the chill side. And that’s when she’s listening to any tunes at all. As she tells SELF, sometimes she simply prefers the musicality of her board scraping against brick and pavement during a great run. While other skaters might compete with an AirPod in (and Slayer or Metallica blaring through), Stess often goes distraction-free when stakes are high: “I want to be able to hear what’s going on—when they say your name, and the buzzers and stuff.”
Training, though, is a little different. Usually, Stess is happy to roll with whatever’s playing over the speakers at the skatepark—she was raised by two musicians, after all—as long as it’s not “horrible TikTok rap,” she says, or the reggae her coach plays when she’s lifting at the gym. (That, she says, hits more for an, um, older crowd.) When she has her pick? Often she’ll simply throw her 967 liked songs on shuffle. She keeps it “mellow,” as she describes it, favoring a low-key indie mix. “It’s funny because I feel like everyone else hates it [for skating]. It’s so slow,” she says.
But for Stess it clearly works: After being named an alternate for the Tokyo Games, she’s officially competing for Team USA at the 2024 Olympics. With Paris in full swing, Stess shares the three songs that have helped her zone in, push through, and vibe out at the park.
I don’t usually listen to music at the gym or at PT because I’m with my personal trainer and we’re just talking the whole time, but if he asks me what music I want to hear, I always have him play TV Girl—it’s one of my favorite bands. I like this song for the start of a workout or park session since it’s mellow, it’s not too slow or fast, and it’s one that I’ll never skip when it comes on shuffle.
It’s great for skating—the guys in the band skate, actually. They followed me on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, TV Girl follows me!’ They post their own skateboarding clips and follow a bunch of skaters, which is cool.
I really like skating to this song, it’s a lot of fun. I feel like it’s probably the fastest, most hype song that I have in my saved music, so I play it a lot when I’m practicing at the park. I like to listen to it in the middle of the session because it helps me get my energy up. I’m usually playing slow music, and I wish I had more songs like this for speed. When I’m skating, I’m moving pretty fast, and this song can help me get faster and push through a run.
This one sounds like it’s going to be a rap song (based on the name), but it’s not—it’s more indie. I think it might be more like what other skaters are listening to, but it’s still my style. I found this song when I was stalking my brother’s playlist, so I stole it from him. He’s the one who got me into skateboarding too. I was two, and he was five or six, and he started skating, and I just copied him. When we were younger, our whole family would travel together, like when we’d go to Minnesota for Grom Contests, since we were both competing. It’s a nice connection for us.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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