Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 8

for a relaxing time, make it I Enjoy Music Time

part 1 here. part 2 here. part 3 here. part 4 here. part 5 here. part 6 here. part 7 here

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

"Burnover" - Greg Freeman
from Zac Djamoos of The Alternative (@gr8whitebison on X, The Everything App):
"The story-song is in short supply lately, and nobody's doing more to justify its continued existence than Greg Freeman on "Burnover," from 'Burnover.'

A song about a firefighters' strike that draws up, in plain but poignant text, the high stakes of valuing (or devaluing) social infrastructure, "Burnover" shows off Greg Freeman's devastating linguistic precision: "And after three weeks with no contract / That's three weeks with no pay / I saw smoke out on the horizon / But heard no sirens gone that way." It's funny that people have compared MJ Lenderman to Neil Young when Greg Freeman is, like, right there. Greg Freeman is as Neil Youngian as a high res portable music player shaped like a Toblerone bar.

“Arrowhead” - Charmer
from jen:
"it’s quality midwest emo. it’s bright, exciting, and builds in a compelling way. rips"

Loved this. I don't know if there's a musical term for the specific emo rock tendency of building a song's energy with a combination drum roll / guitar roar, so it sounds a bit like an engine is coming to life, but I love it. That tendency occurs, for example, on "Liar (It Takes One To Know One)" by Taking Back Sunday, one of my favorite songs from, uhhh, almost 20 years ago. The emo equivalent of going VROOM, VROOM.

"Taxes" - Geese
from Anonymous

Re-listening to Getting Killed, there is a quality that many of the songs share that "Taxes" exemplifies most clearly. Do you remember 'rolling down a hill' as a childhood activity? In a certain era of my youth, the most fun you could have was lying down and rolling down a grass hill, gaining momentum, perhaps getting a few bruises on limbs, depending on the hill shape. If you went down really crazy, you earned a special childhood merit badge: 'getting the wind knocked out of you.' Anyway, that's what this year's Geese songs, and "Taxes" in particular, feels like to me. Rolling down the hill, getting the wind knocked out of you at the end.

"horseglue" - Ekko Astral
from Miriam Grace:
"It is brilliantly composed (dissonance is best harmony), elevated in thought (not unique for them), and wantonly hedonistic in the way it warmly abuses your senses as it forces you to confront its message with your whole ass self. Because the blood drips down like Hershey’s Chocolate, and it feels good."

This writeup is amazing, ty Miriam. This year started with a big fire, and then everything that happened after felt like more fires. The guitar noise, smoldering then blazing, spells it out. "horseglue" sounds like what it feels like to live amid constant bad news—and more specifically, to have said news happen directly to you—every day. "Why am I / so close to / genocide?" How do you stand it all? You have to ring the alarm however you can. It's so great to be around at the same time as Ekko Astral.

"Cuento (Versión de Ximena)" - Ximena Sariñana
from Jeff, 44 years old from Wisconsin:
"I tend to connect to something that feels deeply emotional but also warm and relaxing. This one ticks all the boxes for me. For some reason, I'm also particularly fond of women singer/songwriters from Mexico, and Ximena has been on my radar for a long time. She beats the usually-in-first-place Mon Laferte this year.

(This is a song from 2017, but this version of it was released in 2025 and feels much more personal.)"

I translated the top comment on this new version's YouTube video from Spanish: "I think I speak for everyone when I say that we can finally rest in peace knowing that we can return to this now remastered song whenever we need it most emotionally." I love that. I really like Ximena Sariñana's voice—sophisticated, smooth, just very pretty. Eminently listenable music! I have a goal to listen to more music that isn't in English next year. Seems like a very easy way to expand my horizons. I am open to recs of all kinds—send them to my mailbag as always, ienjoymusicblog [at] gmail [dot] com :)

"plz don't call (when you're sober)" - polo perks <3 <3 <3 and emma puppy
from katherine :3 :
"i am extremely interested in the ways in which hyperpop and hip hop / rap overlap into each other as both genres evolve forward. they've started to overlap in some really cool ways, which is easiest to exemplify with the new Danny Brown album, but i think that polo perks' production / history with surf gang and style better fits for a hyperpop crossover (with an artist I hadn't heard of before!). they come together to make something soooo dancy and fun, I wanna blast it in a deathly ill grey 2006 Toyota Corolla and feel my whole body shake"

Man this rips. I love the combination of tenderness and aggression, the absolutely gnarly distorted bassline, and the tension in the lyrics. My favorite line is "Bitch, everybody want an explanation, I don't really get it." Boy does that describe me at a certain time in my life, and possibly always? There is nothing more exhausting than having to explain yourself to people who are indifferent to, or even opposed to, understanding you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This song and "JRJRJR" both make me feel like hyperpop really is the genre of the 2020s that feels most embodying of this era: chaotic, uncertain, isolated but also intimately connected. Also the genre that feels the most new, at a time when a lot of music is weak pastiche, misremembered nostalgia, pilfered nachos. Hyperpop is not just the blending and exaggeration of previously existing genres, samples, motifs—it's also this blending and exaggeration of emotions, sweetness and bitterness fighting each other and eventually co-existing in weird and special ways. If the '90s were the loudQUIETloud decade of rock music, I feel like the 2020s are the niceANGRYnice decade. Sour Patch Kid music.