Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 13

almost there...getting closer...to listening to all of your fave songs of the year!

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. part 11 here. part 12 here.

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

"Follow Along" - Cusp
from brock:
"This song is all the best things a song can be: it's earnest but not encumbered by self-seriousness, it's catchy, the production feels minimal (complimentary), its sound is unique but not in a contrived way, and it sounds like everyone involved is having a ton of fun."

I loved the Cusp album this year!! Alt rock baby!! I think I checked them out via Nina Corcoran's Pitchfork review. "Follow Along" is a cheeky shout-along chune about thinking someone in your life is so cool that you want to do everything they do, just like them. The line "How do I get like you??" in the pre-chorus sounds like it would be very fun to scream at a show. Speaking of, Cusp are on tour with Remember Sports this spring, nice.

"North Poles" - Samia
from @eatyrgho.st:
"When you see yourself in someone, how can you look at them?" is a chilling line for anyone who ever dealt with self-loathing, especially delivered in such a rollicking indie pop number."

I was intrigued by the last lines of this song: "Everyone's Sofia / You cannot stop crying / I cannot stop drinking / Can I let the light in?" According to Genius, the lyrics were inspired by a time when Samia's friend and co-writer Rafaella, high on mushrooms, kept saying that everyone in the room looked like her sister Sofia. There's a very interesting tension in "North Poles": joy versus freakout, pleasant indulgence versus totally overdoing it. Substances can be a shortcut to hilarity or catharsis, and yet it doesn't take much to cross the line into what David Foster Wallace called Too Much Fun, and you often don't know if you've crossed the line 'til it's way too late and you're crying about everyone looking like your sister. The energy of this song sounds like pedaling a bike faster and faster until you lose control of the pedals and have to take your feet off, lest you shear off an Achilles tendon. Beautiful, sneakily dark.

“A Tear For Lucas” - Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo
from Heaven:
"Chat Pile teamed up with Hayden Pedigo to make this weirdly beautiful album, In The Earth Again, mixing Sludge Metal and fingerpicking guitar. It’s out of left field for both artists and they somehow marry both their talents into something really cool. The last track of the album, “A Tear for Lucas”, is an ode to lead singer Raygun Busch’s good friend who passed away not too long ago. Busch’s voice can be heard breaking as Pedigo plays the guitar.

It’s a softer side of the band, and it’s hard not to get misty when Busch closes the song with, “I loved you then and I love you now”. The discourse surrounding male loneliness and toxic masculinity is tired but the lead singer of a sludge metal band crying over the death of a good friend makes me feel as if there are some men out in the world breaking down these barriers, and I’ll happily take that in 2025."

First, shout out to Chat Pile because they participated in my "behind the promo photo" series last year...

Second, holy god, this made me cry, because Raygun cries on it and I basically cry when other people cry. Thank god I didn't encounter this song when I was pregnant, a period of time when I was so emotional that I cried after 1) making eye contact with one of those plastic honey bears 2) seeing a photo of Tracy Morgan leaving the Knicks game in a wheelchair after he barfed courtside?? 3) watching the Lollapalooza livestream, specifically a bunch of kids dancing in a carefree manner to the Murda Beatz set. Anyway, I think it was a very vulnerable and beautiful thing to release this song with this particular vocal take. So directly affecting, you can feel the grief radiate, and sometimes the only thing you can do when you're grieving is keep going, let it all out.

"Folded" - Kehlani
from jasmine of the intermittently produced black bubblegum podcast:
"it’s just so sticky! lush production, perfect vocal performance, elite melodies coalesce into a song imbued with timelessness."

Timeless is right, this song reminds me of peak '00s R&B power balladry. "Love" by Keyshia Cole, "U Got It Bad" by Usher, that kind of thing. "Folded" has a very clever setup: it's a calm mask of emotional maturity ("And I would still choose you through it all, that's the crazy part") with a sneaky plea for forgiveness and reconciliation hidden beneath ("Meet me at the door while it's still open / I know it's getting cold out, but it's not frozen"). I have had to do a Breakup Stuff Handoff once, but instead of the ex allowing me to go to get my stuff from his house, he sent a friend to bring me everything in a plastic grocery bag! I don't think anything was nicely folded either! Someone write a song about THAT!

"Cardiac" - Pretty Bitter
from Scott from the Rock & Roll Rabbit Hole:
"Pretty Bitter is a local (DC area) band that I've been following for a couple of years. This song is the one that really captured me from their latest album."

Song #3 from Pretty Bitter in this end of year roundup, nicely done. I think it says a lot that all three songs are quite different from each other—"Letter To Tracey In Her Bed" is anthemic, "Thrill Eater" has that delicate banjo bit, and "Cardiac" has emo-style intricate guitar + gang vocals. There is something for everyone on Pleaser so if you enjoy music, you should listen to it:

"Medicine for Horses" - Viagra Boys
from John:
"A lot to choose from this year. Sometimes it’s immediate for me, but this one I had to think about. “Medicine for Horses” is my favorite off Viagra Boys’ newest album and one of their very best songs.

V Boys’ more chaotic stuff absolutely rips, but their slower, more contemplative songs are often the ones I find myself listening to on repeat. Instrumentally, there are so many interesting textures and flourishes, moments of exaggerated dissonance among all its discrete parts. Just an expert arrangement. The lyrics are sardonic and self-destructive, but there’s a kind of naive hope there too. The song is quite dreamlike; it could go on forever, and you wouldn’t notice until it stopped playing."

I love VB in rude boy mode: Punk Rock Loser mode, "I ain't nice" mode, "I'm LOOSE" mode, Shrimp City Beach 1993 mode. Music for spraying beer and ripping off your shirt. "Medicine for Horses" is subtler and more solemn than the party punk stuff, and it's pretty amazing. I feel like this is Viagra Boys in Interpol Mode: stately, gloomy, autumnal, deliberate, awesome in the traditional sense of the word.