Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 11

please sir. may i have some more good songs?

part 1 here. part 2 here. part 3 here. part 4 here. part 5 here. part 6 here. part 7 here. part 8 here. part 9 here. part 10 here.

scroll to the bottom for youtube embeds of all the songs!

"Baby!" - Dijon
from Matt M

This was a huge year for music that sounds like a portable radio from the 1990s fell into a large body of water, created an electrocution situation, and somehow time-traveled into today's bleak but sensual landscape, a deep-fried relic of the era when "silk shirt rnb" was all about "beggin for the pussy." Love this vibe. Dijon's Baby came out when I was nine months pregnant and I played with fire when I put it on in the car on my way to my 39 week OB appointment. Figured if I went into labor, it wouldn't be a huge shock, what with all of Dijon's invocations of babies.

"My Full Name" - Madison Cunningham
from Nick
"Potent and earnest, hits hard on the first listen"

"I'm finding out that I'm allergic to / Every living thing that isn't you." Felt. For a girl whose possible favorite song of all time is Cat Power's minimalist piano cover of The Velvet Underground's "I Found A Reason", I tend to under-index on simple piano ballads these days. And for what?? Foolishness. Great song.

"Letter to Tracey in Her Bed" - Pretty Bitter
from Todd Derr:
"life imitating art about other art - this song (and album and band) helped save my life"

Todd also shared a link to a tweet about this song that I will reproduce below via screenshot:

This song alludes to Tracey Emin's artwork My Bed, a recreation of the artist's bedroom after she spent four days in a depressive spiral, doing what the kids today call "bed rotting." Apparently that piece got a lot of scorn back in the late 1900s when it was exhibited, but of course the relevance today is undeniable. You could argue that in 2025, it's never been easier to stay in bed, and so the act of getting out of bed and doing something, anything, is something that needs to be cultivated and celebrated. I can't remember who gave this advice—maybe the legendary beauty writer Cat Marnell?—but the most important thing you can do in the morning is make your bed, because that means it makes it so much harder to get back into. That's a hot tip for the bedheads. Anyway, the chorus to "Letter to Tracey In Her Bed" is incredible, I really love Mel Bleker's voice.

"La Yugular" - Rosalía
from pagona kytzidis (partygirl):
"i am always searching for something, and for a brief moment, when hearing this song for the first time and every time since, i found myself both arrive at it and exist inside of it, sobbing on my knees"

I wrote about this album in the context of Rosalía bucking trends and asking a little bit more of her audience, but I didn't write much about how...freakin...emotional LUX makes me. Emotional in the sense of looking at a stained glass window in church, brain in ambient mode, inattentive enough to let your thoughts meander, then letting your thoughts meander enough to chew over some wild concepts ("one god...three people??). The vocal production on this is wild, Rosalía's voice sounds like a gemstone displayed in a museum, illuminated perfectly so you can see all of the intricate facets, without needing to crane your neck.

“I See How It Is” - The Starting Line
from Chris:
"The Starting Line are early aughts pop-punkers from Philadelphia best known for the classic piner “Best of Me”. They rode the recent wave of When We Were Young-esque nostalgia, but surprised a lot of people by putting out a solid and contemporary-feeling album this year (their first since 2007.) This opening track hits such a solid groove by the when you get to the chorus, it has to top my new music list. This is also me trying to manifest a TSL tour in 2026."

I had no idea The Starting Line was still kicking, this rules. Kenny Vasoli's voice has aged like a fine cheese. Allow me to nostalgize briefly: I had a high school boyfriend who was a generational talent of mix making. For example: he smooched another girl over our February school break, told me about it the Monday we got back, and then let me know that he had made me two different mixes to commemorate his horrid adultery, one for if I dumped him, one for if I stuck around. I dumped him (like Joan Didion, 15-year-old me valued self-respect) and he handed over the breakup CD, which opened with Brand New's "The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot." Then when we got back together (15-year-old me realized self-respect only gets you so far), he put "The Best Of Me" on the reunion CD. You don't gotta hand it to him, but you kinda gotta hand it to him.

"Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)" - Wednesday
from Eve:
"I think it taps into a part of what it was like to grow up in a small town in a way that I had never heard from another band before. There are only a few artists on the planet that could make pitbulls pissin' feel so nostalgic and beautiful, and Wednesday is one of them."

Though the Wednesday perspective on small town life has a particular Southeastern / North Carolina / Appalachian bent, there's definitely something in the lyrics for anyone who grew up in a place where it wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to get drunk in the woods or a parking lot. This whole song rips but the moment in the third chorus when Karly Hartzman goes from singing the chorus in her head voice to screaming it? SUBLIME.