My faves of 2025, I've been working on this one for a while. When the year began, I thought I wasn't gonna do another one of these, but here I am. Listening to it. Thinking about it. Writing about it. Listening to it again. There was a ton of good stuff this year and I know I missed a lot. As usual, I made an mp3 mix. There's something therapeutic about putting the songs in an order that has some semblance of flow, and then attempting to get the transitions to feel natural. I tried to keep it on the shorter side and, at 70 tracks and nearly 4.5 hours, I've both succeeded and failed. For perspective, last year's mix was 8 hours long. 8 ffs! I'm terrible at editing myself. So yeah, this one is still long but it's more digestible than the previous one. I'm taking every victory I can, no matter how small or dumb.
About some of the songs. I think my favourite album is Lambrini Girls' Who Let the Dogs Out. I'm not the target demographic (old, straight, dude), the quote on the album's hype sticker reads "party music for gay angry sluts" but goddamn, they are funny, loud and bonafide. So I had to kick it off with one of their tracks to set the tone.
There are a lot of very good/fun covers:
- Magdalena Bay - Ashes to Ashes (David Bowie)
- Weyes Blood - Shilo (Neil Diamond)
- PinkPantheress - Apple (Charli XCX)
- Rick Astley - Pink Pony Club (Chappell Roan)
- Soccer Mommy - Gold Soundz (Pavement)
- Wet Leg - Walking on a Dream (Empire of the Sun)
- Aimee Mann - Rainy Days and Mondays (The Carpenters)
There are two versions of Oklou's Blade Bird (from her super cool album, Choke Enough), the album version and the version recorded on her Tiny Desk appearance. I fucking love this song and both versions are sublime. Another "live" track found its way in, Fever Ray's Mustn't Hurry. The album, The Year of the Radical Romantics, was a live-to-tape studio session, they re-recorded mainly songs from the most recent album (Radical Romantics), sprinkling in some other Fever Ray classics. Some of these ended up almost unrecognizable; very cool album. Magdalena Bay appears on here twice with the previously mentioned Bowie cover, and then last month they put out a string of singles that absolutely kill. Love those kids. And we all knew Rosalía's Lux was coming, but did anyone know that it would be this fucking good? So yeah, lots of great music this year.
Anyways, for this mix, I couldn't think of any sort of title. Weapons was my favorite movie this year, the Aunt Gladys character was great. Then I had the ridiculous idea to make a Tinder profile pic for her. So it's nothing too deep, just dumb fun. And if you haven't seen Weapons, I highly recommend it.
There are two versions of mix linked below. I chose all these songs for better or worse, this is just stuff I like. No algorithm. No AI. I put the mp3 together by hand in Audacity over the course of a few nights. It's something I like to do every so often. I photoshopped the cover. Poorly, but whatever; it's all simple and satisfying to do it myself. If you've read this far, cheers; hopefully you can enjoy the music on some level. Click a link and turn that shit up.
Aunt Gladys 2025: mp3 version (597mb) | spotify version