Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 1

IT'S TIME! LET'S GO! Bring us some figgy pudding? No! Bring me some of your favorite songs of 2025!

[scroll to the bottom for youtube embeds of all the songs! "drop the mid-scroll embeds...it's cleaner" - molly]

"Iron Ring" - Solar Plexus Super Punch
from Imp (here's Imp's Music Moots™):
"The members of SPSP are a rare cut of Atlanta's music scene; despite being billed as a neo-soul, jazz fusion band, you'll hear striking moments of math rock and sometimes even folk weaved seamlessly into their tapestry of sound. Welch's drums are surgically precise, making the metronome feel human. Sam Boss plays off these rhythms with synergy rivaling the use of Potara earrings. Filling out the top end are Lily Berz and Steven Schlosser on guitar and keys respectively, finding melodies that would sound as in place at a grand festival as they would in your uncle's collection of records.

Picking any song from their new album Xenolith would be a sublime choice, but the terminal track "Iron Ring" is the one currently getting the most play on my iPod at the moment; hearing the modulating rhythm as they transition to the track is such a technical, danceable earworm that is sure to impress even the most snobbish critic."

Holy moly this is an ear-sizzler. There's a lot to love on this song but I want to shout out both the time signature switch-ups, which keep you on your toes, and also the sound of those KEYS. They've got that '70s funk tone that makes me want to spend a lot of money on sunglasses and drive around doing nothing but bobbing my head. Absolutely oozing with confidence and technical prowess...I love when people are good at playing music together.

"Bunky Pop" - Sleigh Bells
from Wagner Koop, friend of the blog (ed. note - designer of the famous I Enjoy Music feature image template!):
"I’m not a huge Sleigh Bells ball-knower (I have only listened to their first album and the album this song is on) but Bunky Pop is INCREDIBLY fun and hooky on top of making me cry almost every time I listen. It has me thinking about my own pets, the funny little nonsense names they’re given, how much I love them and how much I will miss them when they’re gone, but also how lucky we are to have sweet little pets in our lives in the first place."

As an "i was there" Sleigh Bells ball-knower (I spent the summer of 2010 working at my college's summer program, and a decent chunk of that summer was therefore spent in the dusty basement gym of a deserted dorm, running for my life on an old treadmill and listening to Treats...owww my kneeeees) the longevity of Sleigh Bells makes my heart full. "Bunky Pop" sounds like the theme song to a deeply bonkers children's television show; the original lore of the band is that Alexis Krauss was an elementary school teacher before she was a rock star, and that sense of playful childlike abandon is an essential part of the group's music. Are there full-on blast beats in this song??

Also we adopted a stray cat this year and his name is Magellan but we also call him many combinations of Buddy, Bub, Little Man, Big Baby, Mr. Fuzzy, etc. and it makes me happy. Pet nicknames are fun.

"Housofpsychoticwomn" - Ethel Cain
from Ben Firke, playwright & producer, pasta_ben on bsky but currently on Poster's Vacation:
"This year I decided to go Full Avant-Garde Snob when it came to music. I'm probably overcompensating after 15ish years of Poptimism, but these days I'm interested in the most freaked-out, least commercially-accessible songs I can find, especially drone music. "Housofpsychoticwomn" is a 13.5 minute dirge featuring no discernible instruments besides buzzing and whooshing noises. The closest thing to a chorus is the repeated incantation "I love you," mumbled into the same pitched-down vocal filter Ethel used to play the cannibalistic boyfriend character on the Preacher's Daughter album. This song is creepy, off-putting, ominous, menacing–basically a David Lynch film without visuals. It captures the vibe (constant ambient dread) of 2025 pretty well. I'm a big Ethelhead and love her country/pop records too, but I hope she continues to put out weird challenging music like this for the rest of her career."

Listen, my delicate sensibilities are always going to push me a little more toward "American Teenager" than anything off Perverts, and my personal pick for best Ethel Cain of the year is "Nettles," but I have to respect Ms. Cain for Going Weird in this very weird year.

I played Perverts while driving away from the L.A. fires this year, as a bit but also not, and that particular droning shapeless noise-mess is always going to remind me of this time. It's kind of like how I adore the Alicia Keys song "Fallin'", but every time I hear it I also remember how came out in June 2001, hit number 1 about a month before 9/11, thus getting Alicia Keys famous enough to nab a slot on the America: A Tribute to Heroes 9/11 tribute concert bill. Therefore "Fallin'" is 9/11 music to me.

"father" - Jim Legxacy
from Matty Monroe, moderator on r/indieheads and host of the Indieheads Podcast:
"In the world of British music, Jim Legxacy is the most exciting name to pop up in nearly a decade. The last people this exciting to come out of that cursed country were Jai Paul and Dean Blunt, and unlike those two whose ceilings are limited by either perfectionism (in Paul's case) or rebelliousness (in Blunt's case though he's only gotten more popular over time in spite of his unwillingness to play the usual industry games), Legxacy's is seemingly limitless.

On the track "father", he shares Jai Paul's meticulousness, fitting in little production tricks and hooks in every nook and cranny of the song, and like Blunt, he has a keen ear for sampling, taking a small segment from George Franklin Smallwood and Marshmellow Band's "I Love My Father" and recontextualizing it for maximum devastation. With this song alone, Legxacy isn't just announcing himself as British music's top prospect (despite the name of the mixtape "father" is on), but pop music's worldwide."

black british music was such an exciting listen for me this year. This song, with its somehow buoyant attitude toward lacking money and a stable home life, and of coruse its essential Britishness, cannot help but remind me of Great Expectations, that really good novel about, as Jim says, "tryna come up off the roads on my own two." When he raps nostalgically about listening to Mitski at age 16, I felt normal and definitely not old at all. Jim was born in 2000, so we're probably talking Puberty 2 here. Taste!

Jealousy & Envy" - Sam and Louise Sullivan
from Julian Fader! King of nominative determinism...
"This song (and honestly entire album) by the sibling band Sam and Louise had an absolute vice grip on me this year in a way that music hasn't often since I was a teenager. I'm 38 now and it's still the best feeling in the world. This song feels so classic but doesn't it dip into lazy pastiche. When it does borrow cliche, it does so with purpose. Great lyrics, it's funny! This music is comforting to me but it's sprinkled with enough left turns to keep my brain absorbed and my heart coming back for more. Incredible stuff."

Loveeee the muted guitar tone on this and the lived-in Fleetwood Mac quality. Opening a song about jealousy and envy with the line "It ain't easy being green" is so clever that I'm surprised no one thought of it before??

"Certain Uncertainty" - Reba Myers
from Tim Jones (I wrote the article about Silent Hill and the Cardigans and the other one about the Blood Brothers)
"Reba is probably better known as the former lead guitarist of seemingly-imploded metal sensations Code Orange but she put out a solo EP this year that has some really incredible songwriting on it, this one specifically. This song feels sort of emblematic of her deal as an artist, there's a real intensity here (that yell that opens every chorus, woo) but a sort of barely hidden tenderness too. It's a song in drop-D with a guy who used to be in Dillinger Escape Plan on drums about trying to be the best person you can for someone you love, and if that's not a great contradiction I don't know what is."

I really like Reba Myers' voice on this. It's got a little polished melodic theatricality, but also a rawer element that reminds me of the post-hardcore I listened to in the early '00s. The first time the drums and guitar bash in on the second syllable of the word "transforms," drop-kicking you in the chest, holy moly...playing with dynamics to manipulate the emotions of the listener? That's certainly one of the things I enjoy about music.