My 2025 Listening Habits

Top 5 Albums Released in 2025
Headlights	Alex G
Thee Black Bolt	Tunde Abebimpe
Sogolo	WITCH
1985: The Miracle Year	Hüsker Dü
NEVER ENOUGH	Turnstile

15 Favorite songs for the year:

Miracle Aligner - The Last Shadow Puppets

I had tried The Last Shadow Puppets previously but was expecting a version of the Arctic Monkeys. This somng finally clicked,

Magnetic - Tunde Abebimpe

The closest to a recent TVOTR radio release and a fun album for the year.

Metronomic Underground - Stereolab

2025 was a Stereolab year.

Don't Know How I Keep Loving You - Julia Jacklin

Discovered this on. the local AAA station, great vocals that remind me of Sharon Van Etten.

Madness - Prince Buster

They call it madness.

Sungu Lubuka - Petelo Vicka et  Son Nzazi

The first track on another great compilation from Analog Africa, this aptly titled Congo-Funk.

Skinhead Stomp - Symarip

I watched a great documentary on Trojan Records. I had missed the fact that Jamaican artists in Britain were releasing tracks for that market and skinheads specially.  

Lou Reed Was My Babysitter - Jeff Tweedy

Fun moment from the triple album of the year!

Stop It - Pylon

nev er dug in, not sure why I took so long!

Kamsule - We Intend To Cause Havoc

Zamrock originally continue to release funky stuff.

Seconds - The Human League

The LCD Soundsystem London Session included a cover of this, and although I listening to to Dare before, this time it stuck with me.

Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Not sure why I had not listened to this before having heard Winter in America but not this amazing track.

Alex G - Afterlife

90's REM vibes.

CAN - Mother Sky

Didn't have Soundtracks before this year, finally realized what I was missing.

Parliament - Mothership Connection (Star Child)

Dug into P-Funk this year, one of my favorite tracks from that exploration.

My 2017 Listening Habits

A momentousness year for my household where there never seems to be enough time to listen to music. Some of my favorite artists of the last 10 years release some of their most disappointing records (looking at you Arcade Fire) and a few artists that I hope to go back to at some point (Fleet Foxes). In the year of infinite music, it becomes a challenge to focus on new records, and I find that in the CD era I may have listening to something 3 or 4 times before deciding if I liked it or not. Now, I never even made it through Everything Now during 2017.

This year, I spend some serious time re-listening to music of my childhood. YouTube provides a great conduit for live performances and I enjoyed some great stuff from my 80s favorites of REM, The Smiths, and the Depeche Mode. I thought a lot about how the music my parents listening to had a big effect on my own taste as well as the point an album became my own. An REM record I had overlooked, Live at the Olympia, fit the mode with multiple older cuts from the IRS era. An excellent document of an band in their twilight revisiting their younger days.

Two older records in contact rotation this past year was Can's Tago Mago and The Clean's Anthology. Can has been a favorite for a while, but I never listened to this one, which may be my favorite from their discography. I could listen to Paperhouse forever. The Clean take elements of the Velvet Underground and distill it down to it's base elements. If The Modern Lovers were the American take on this sound, The Clean gave us the Kiwi version. A favorite track from this collection was Secret Place.

Favorite records of 2017:

Future Islands The Far Field 
War On Drugs A Deeper Understanding
The National Sleep Well Beast
Zola Jesus Okovi
Beach House 7