My 2025 In Music

It's recap season! As someone who rarely stays up late and doesn't drink, New Year's Eve is a holiday that pretty much passes me by. But I do really enjoy all the retrospectives that pop up around this time of year. It's fun to read something and think "seesh, that was this year?!", especially for 2025, which was actually 82 years long.

I wish I could pass myself off as a cool guy who is constantly on the cutting edge of music and knows all the hip obscure bands, but I am very much not. And since I'm not a Cutting Edge Cool Guy, I can't sit here and rattle off my top 50 albums of 2025 or whatever. What I can do, however, is talk about a handful of songs I heard for the first time this year that struck a chord with me. Or at least, I'm going to try to. Writing about music is one of those things I would like to do more often but struggle at. These are not in any particular order. Hell, some of these didn't even come out in 2025.

Haute & Freddy - Shy Girl

We'll start with the group that lets me be the closest thing to a Cutting Edge Cool Guy. I don't remember how I learned of Haute & Freddy. I think the song just randomly came across my Youtube homepage. What I do remember, however, is spending the back half of the song searching for a Bandcamp for this group. There wasn't one. There wasn't an album either. There wasn't anything! This is a brand spanking new band, but they sound like they've been at it for years. I've heard all their available singles and so far Shy Girl is far and away my favorite song. They nail the 80s synthpop sound without sound without sounding too derivative. I hope we get a full album this year. Until then, we've got a Simlish cover, which is fun.

Ninajirachi - Infohazard

One day at high school in the early 00s, a kid in my Webmastery class named Will completely suckerpunched me with an Ogrish link to a grainy video of someone being beheaded. I guess he thought it would be funny to see me react, I don't know. I still don't know why people pass that sort of thing around online. Infohazard is about Ninajirachi's first time encountering a shock film like that. "It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed?", to quote her from a Rolling Stone interview. There's something... weirdly cathartic about turning this shared moment a lot of us have into a dance track? I especially like that there isn't a line that implies it isn't an issue anymore. He's still showing up in her dreams. The entirety of I Love My Computer is a great album, but Infohazard is the song that has stuck with me the most.

Bob Vylan - I Heard You Want Your Country Back

Shout out to the BBC and everyone who threw a big enough hissy-fit about Bob Vylan to get me, someone who wasn't even paying attention to Glastonbury and had never heard of them before, to check them out. Thanks, ya big dummies! This shit is great! And no lies detected either.

Pink Lady - S.O.S.

This song is from 1977, and I don't care! You know what else? I've heard this song before! Well, sorta. Let me explain. Earlier this year I was listening to a podcast about notorious 80s relic Pink Lady and Jeff, and sprinkled throughout the episode are a few songs from Pink Lady. I enjoyed what I heard and went onto Youtube to hear their first album, Pepper Keibu. When track 6, S.O.S., started I froze in my tracks. Where had I heard this song before? Eventually I figured it out: the anime Kare Kano featured a cover of this song in an episode! I haven't seen that show since my high school days, but this song had been lying dormant in my brain the entire time. The entire album is a delight, but I'm choosing to single out S.O.S as a fun link between my past and present.

Sabrina Carpenter - Goodbye

Short n' Sweet was always gonna be a tough act to follow. Saying Man's Best Friend isn't as good is a pretty boring take at this point, but it's also true... until I got to Goodbye, the closing track. It's ABBA by way of Sabrina (extremely complimentary). The "a-ha"s are straights off Voulex Vous, the descending notes after "means that you're losing me for life" sound a lot like the melody from Take a Chance On Me. The verses have a waltzy feel that also feel very ABBA-esque, even if I can't put my finger on it. In a perfect world, this and House Tour would have been singles instead of My Man On Willpower or Nobody's Son. Or When Did You Get Hot. Or Tears, honestly.

Lady Gaga - Vanish Into You

According to Last.fm, MAYHEM is my most listened-to album of 2025, and Vanish Into You is my most listened song. Look, sometimes I am just a big honkin' cornball and I need a song about being so in love with someone you want to be together at an atomic level-- and also I need it to be a big disco ballad with Nile Rogers-ass guitars. There's something so joyful about the song, but also the underlying feeling like everything could all go wrong at any second.

The Beths - Expert in a Dying Field

I was made aware of The Beths/this song thanks to a Music League league back in spring. Gosh, I just love it. That "upbeat melody with the melancholy lyrics" thing is something that works on me 10 outta 10 times. It's a song that makes me want to wistfully look out a window, but also skip down the street. "And I can close the door on us, but I know the room exists" auuuugh I'm not even going through heartbreak at the moment but if I was I think this line would tear me to shreds.

I don't know what my music stats will look like in 2026. Since the rise of AI slop music, I've been finding myself kind of wary of newer stuff and instead have been checking out releases from the past few years. Not that older music is exempt, there's more than enough Youtube videos of AI crap out there claiming to be newly-discovered Beatles tracks. I guess we've entered the era where I have to dig through the internet to find out whether a band is real or not. And even that can be faked; how long until someone makes a Rate Your Music or Facebook page for their generated band? It's tiring.

But I don't want to end this ramble on a down note. I am very heartened by the amount of people I've seen recently who are going to back to CDs, dedicated MP3 players, or are making their own Plex/Jellyfin setups. You know my thoughts on the importance of having local files of things you like. A big thumbs up to all the Gen Z kids I've seen sharing tutorials about how to rip CDs or make mixtapes (!!!!). Maybe we can't stop the AI flood, but we certainly don't have to stay on the big corporate streaming services where it festers.