My Year in Music 2025
Trends
Just like last year, I spent a lot of time listening to the Chillhop seasonal albums. They provided an easy soundtrack to work without any distracting lyrics. That said, there were a few exceptions to that. In February I used Spotify to listen to Bad Bunny’s New Album “Debi tirar más fotos”. In March I made a Cover Songs playlist and spent a good chunk of the month listening to it. I also listened to a lot of Kill Lincoln while prepping for their September concert. When I wasn’t listening to chillhop or those albums, I mostly listened to random music while at work. For some reason, the random radio doesn’t work on the phone app for me, so if I wanted to listen to random music while on my phone, I would listen to my favorites radio. I have a decent amount of tracks so it’s not too repetitious, but it does tend to concentrate the songs I listen to. Also, when I was at work, if I wanted to listen to a whole album, the design of funkwhale biases me towards more recent additions as those appear right on the home screen.
First Album I Bought
Most days I only check Bluesky and Mastodon for a few minutes while I’m in between sets at the gym. When I happened to have loaded up Bluesky recently I saw a variant on those old email chains that seem to reappear on each new social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc). This one was asking people to post the first album they ever bought. Thinking back to my first ever CDs, I knew the first 3 or 4 were birthday gifts. Eventually I figured it was most likely Going Public by The Newsboys. When I had both a CD player and enough money to buy my own music I was basically only listening to oldies (thanks to my parents) or Contemporary Christian Music (thanks to my faith and the fact that it was the only rap or rock that my parents approved of). But then I thought a bit more and I realized I bought an album before that…only I bought it on cassette tape.
2024 End Of Year Music Retrospective (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)
Trends
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
Final Concert of 2024: Kill Lincoln's No Normal Release Show
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
Review: Kill Lincoln - No Normal
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
2024 Concert #1: MxPx & The Ataris
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
2023 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)
Another year has ended and so it’s time to take a look at the music I listened to all year. First of all, it was yet another year in which I grew my personal music collection. I’ve seen more an more artists removed from places like Spotify, Apple Music, etc, so it’s still important to me to own my music.
- New albums
- C. Tangana - El Madrileno.
- Chill Hop Music - Essentials Winter 2022(?), Essentials Spring 2023, Essentials Summer 2023, Essentials Fall 2023, Winter essentials 2023
- The Midnight - Monsters
- Anberlin - Convinced
- MxPx - Southbound to San Antonio, Find a Way Home
- Thundercat - It is What It Is
- Seeming - The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity
- Lzls - discography - mostly vaporwave covers of Final Fantasy music
- The Pirates of Drinax (part of a humble bundle)
- Rifti Beats - Chocobo and Chill
- Smooth McGroove - New Super Mario Bros Overworld Theme
- The One-Ups - Secrets of the Forest (Solid Gold version)
- Less Than Jake/ Kill Lincoln - Wavebreaker 1
- Haircuts for men - sampler
- Girl Ultra - Adios
- Una Noche Con Ruben Blades
- Submotion Orchestra - Kites
- Gifts
- Orquesta Akokan - 16 Rayos (gifted)
- Prince Welcome 2 America (gifted)
- Herbie Hancock - 5 original albums (gifted)
- Taylor Swift - Midnights (gifted)
- Gorillaz - Cracker Island (gifted)
- Lana Del Rey - Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? (gifted)
- Rosalia - MOTOMAMI (gifted)
- The Weeknd - Dawn FM (gifted)
- Chance the rapper - the big day (gifted)
- Childish Gambino - 3.15.20, summer singles (gifted)
- Marina - ancient dreams (gifted)
A few other things happened in 2023 to affect the trends. Early in 2023 I asked Dan for suggestions for Spanish non-dance music and he gave me a couple suggestions. The one that I really liked a lot was C. Tangana and his album El Madrileno. It’s a great album and I listened to it a few times. Continuing with Spanish music, the Alt. Latino Podcast introduced me to the band called “Daniel, Me Estas Matando”. Their music reminds me a lot of the music the older generations used to listen to when I was a kid. Finally, Alt Latino also had an interview with Karol G and I listened to her on Spotify for a few days in a row.
Another Reason to be Glad I attend small concerts?
I like listening to NPR’s It’s Been a Minute and today’s episode was a real doozy. Here’s the descriptive paragraph from the NPR page for the episode:
Every couple of weeks there’s a new story of a fan at a concert misbehaving. One fan threw ashes at Pink, another hit Drake with a cellphone, Miranda Lambert stopped her show when fans took selfies with flash photography. Extreme instances have landed performers in the hospital, but more often attendees have noticed the audience has gotten louder and more distracting than ever. Where is all of this coming from?
Bad Time Records 2023 Concert: We Are the Union, Catbite, and Kill Lincoln
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.