Music Listeners

listening to Your Favorite Songs 2025, part 6

o shit waddup!

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

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

"Sugar Water Cyanide" - Rebecca Black
from Tatiana Tenreyro:
"Technically it came out last year but the album dropped this year so maybe it still counts! TikTok was obsessed with this song for like 30 secs and I think everyone moved on too quickly because I haven't. It's pop perfection!"

Rebecca Black could have plateaued after making bonkers hyperpop and everyone would still be gagged/gooped/etc. about her. After all yes yes this is the "Friday" chick, how far she has come from internet infamy and ridicule, bla bla bla. But she keeps leveling her shit up. "Sugar Water Cyanide" has elements of breezy Y2K dance pop that would fit onto the Evian Water Club Nation mix but also a fistbumpingly shouty chorus that is rather B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

Just looked up the producer, Nightfeelings (nice name) and another song title from his production discography caught my eye: "Zuppa Di Succo Di Mucca." Zuppa...hey I know that word, it's Italian for "soup." Well, apparently the full translation of the song title is...Cow Juice Soup? By the Italian rapper Ghali? Off the album PIZZA KEBAB Vol. 1?? Fuck man. I enjoy music so much.

"Monte Carlo/No Limits" - Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band
from Scott Carney:
"2025 has been a challenging year (and for many others as well, I imagine) so the line "there have been limits that I have pushed past" resonates with me. But! Challenges also make you appreciate what you have, and this year I'm so thankful for my beautiful and supportive wife Jessi, so the lines "I love you more and evermore so foolishly / And there are now no limits / Where there once were two or three" make me feel a modicum of optimism about what lies ahead. Also, this band kicks ass live - I saw them in a 200 person capacity club this month and it might be my favorite performance of the year."

With its boy-girl duetting voices and hardscrabble romance theme, is "Monte Carlo/No Limits" the "In Spite Of Ourselves" of the 2020s? Or am I just blowing music critic smoke in the way I know best? Let's call it the former. Humor me. "The doorbell doesn't work / But it don't need to if the Rottweiler's home" is a wonderful little short story.

"Jive" - Sorry
from Adam L:
"Because it rocks and is cool"

Well hold the damn phone, what the hell is this?? The lyrics "I wanna jive tonight / I wanna move my hips" imply a much jollier mood of song than the song you actually get—kinda sounds like a cross between Fevers And Mirrors-era Bright Eyes and Exile In Guyville-era Liz Phair, or a grungier Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Aka something to please teenage Molly, who, in an emotional Matryoshka doll situation, very much still glowers inside 36-year-old Molly to this day. I've never listened to Sorry, which, wow, my mistake. Sorry!!

"Jimmy" - Puffer
from Thee Male Nurse:
"A punk song from a legitimately incredible live band from Montreal with an insane pedigree of the Montreal punk scene like the heaviest hitters all came together and made the perfect pump up anthem like try and not immediately stage dive / head walk / goblin crawl to this"

Opening riff rips, but once you get to that pre-verse chug-a-lug, oh yeah it's on. I'm spilling beer all over the extremely heavy coat you have to wear once you cross the Canadian border or else perish. My coat is absolutely soaked with Labatt Blue. I looked up the Bandcamp of Puffer, very tickled to see Quebec described in the Street Hassle liner notes (by Jonah Falco, drummer for Fucked Up, who mastered the album) as "Belgium with snowmobiles, Catholic Texas, Ugly France." Also I like their band photo very much.

"whatsapp 2" - Pelados
from tess from ess eff

From the muted, blippy, computerized first verse, I was ready to give this the Moll Mollywood handshake just for being a chill nice tune. Then the chorus hit and somehow I was in a field, the sun shining, in a big crowd, flailing limbs limp as noodles. Also I wearing neon face paint, slathered on in abstract patterns, because people used to do that back when exuberance was on the menu and not just a seasonal special—wear face paint at music festivals. Not to be all, like, commercial, but this song could have sold a fuckton of iPod minis in 2006. CERTIFIED BOP! I like that Pelados, who are from São Paulo, seem to wear coordinated clothes.

"Party People" - Minuet Machine
from Claire:
"It's exactly the kind of super danceable, gloomy track that I needed this year, and it goes absolutely wild at the goth club."

Literally hell yeah. I want to time travel to 2022, tackle the music supervisor for The Batman out of his Aeron chair, pin him to the ground and make him promise to put this song in one of the Iceberg Lounge scenes. This also would be a great fit in one of my favorite movies of all time, Atomic Blonde, in which Charlize Theron plays a sexy spy doing sexy spy stuff as the Berlin Wall falls, along with other sexy spies James McAvoy and Sofia Boutella. It's '80s, it's goth, it's "icy," it's vodka on the rocks. Highly recommend watching it. Now I'm watching a video of Minuet Machine performing in Berlin...good shit.