Happy 2025, hope it's as good as it can be. Let's get to it. This mix took a while to put together, but I somehow buckled down and got er done. For some reason, this year seemed like a stellar year for great music. Gonna try not to get super into it, but yeah, there is a lot I liked. 123 tracks. Just under 8 hours. I probably need to learn how to filter shit out and just do a top ten or twenty like a normal person.
Standard disclaimer, this is just stuff I liked and listened to, I'm sure I've missed out on way more. I don't even know how I kept up with what I kept up with.
So, the tracks. Let's see; Sabrina Carpenter appears twice. Once with her song of the summer, Espresso, and she also did a fab cover of Chappell Roan's Good Luck Babe. Nick Cave is on here twice, with the Bad Seeds and then for the song he did (Song for Amy) on the Amy Winehouse biopic. Miranda Lambert shows up twice, she put out her own album (Postcards from Texas) and she has a feature on Lainey Wilson's Good Horses. And Good Luck Babe shows up twice, the OG Chappell Roan and the aforementioned Sabrina cover.
One of my favourite discoveries is Kate Clover, her album The Apocalypse Dream is a super fun listen. Also Bronwyn Keith-Hynes's album, I Built a World. She plays fiddle and completely shreds in Golden Highway, the band that has been backing up Molly Tuttle as of late. Another one of my favourite covers of the year is Snail Mail doing Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight. Really really good. You can find that one on the soundtrack for I Saw the TV Glow. Unlikeliest feature on a track might be Oscar Isaac on Gaby Moreno's Luna de Xelajú. Like, THE Oscar Isaac? Okay, yeah, very cool. Biggest FUCKING FINALLY moment might be Sky Ferreira's Leash. It's SO GOOD. Fingers crossed her album finally drops and is more of this shit. Most educational song is Joshua Idehen explaining how the world works by describing various scenarios in which your mum does the washing. Pretty amusing and cool. And I love love love the live version of Waxahatchee's Right Back to It, played with MJ Lenderman on The Late Show.
The songs that aren't on the Spotify version are Sabrina's Good Luck Babe cover (BBC Youtube), Hatchie's cover of Eyes Without a Face (Bandcamp), and Cindy Lee's Flesh and Blood (Bandcamp). Pretty sure that's it. And the Waxahatchee track is different (live vs studio version).
And for the title, Deny Defend Depose. Well, it was one of the more interesting stories of the year. I've been trying to stay off the news feeds and it definitely caught my attention. Messed around in Photoshop a bit for the cover image. So yeah, that's where that's from.
All that said, hope you enjoy it on some level and apologies for the length.