In an unlikely and unprecedented year, 2025 saw me only listen to 21 albums that were new to me. Just to put that into perspective, I averaged more albums per month in 2020. While there were a number of factors leading to this, the most notable was starting a full-time job in January. Especially during those early days of the year, I just did not have the energy to listen to music and review albums after a long day of work. So I didn't.
Frankly, my strict regiment for music listening and album reviewing didn't help. Over the past five years, I had been very dedicated to a schedule where I listened to four or five albums a day, listened to each at least four times, and then wrote a review for each which often took something like forty to fifty minutes. (Not to mention all the research I do to find out about the artists I should listen to.) When my music listening all came crashing down, I wasn't prepared to adjust my schedule. I didn't immediately move to only one or two albums a day--which probably would have been sustainable--I just kept imagining I could restart my strict regiment in the near future.
In the interim, I mostly listened to my favorite albums and artists from previous years. By the end of 2025, Apple Music unsurprisingly found my number one artist to be the old standby Bob Dylan, and many of my top songs to be from his The Bootleg Series Vol. 5, which I got really into midway through the year. Upgraded from its original B+ rating to an A, it's technically my highest rated album of the year.
Even now, I regrettably haven't figured out a way to maintain a schedule of new music listening. It seems wrong to discontinue written reviews (which is the main bottleneck in process) because that's always been the most important and final step in parsing out my feelings for an album. Giving an album four listens and then smacking on a letter grade with no review just seems wrong! Still, it's something I'll have to keep open as a possibility, especially since it may at least get the ball rolling and get me back to some sort of normalcy.
But let's get to the albums I did listen to. For those who paid close attention to the artists on yesterday's list, they may notice some familiar names: Wire, The Fugs, King Crimson, and Iggy Pop (as a member of the Stooges) have all been on the blog before. These are artists I listened to in previous years and, because I regretted not going further in their discography, I decided to circle back to them in 2025. For the Fugs, I picked up lead singer Ed Sanders's autobiography and it made me curious enough to go back and keep listening. For Wire, I had always loved their debut, but in the past two years, I started going back to their second and third albums a lot too. Decided to give more of their albums a listen, and I'm glad I did. For King Crimson, I returned to them because I loved Robert Fripp's guitar playing on other people's songs and Robert Christgau (a fellow King Crimson hater like me) gave their 1974 effort Red a surprisingly high score. I didn't like Red, but I decided to continue on with their discography and found an unlikely gem in 1981's Discipline. My only properly new artist to make the top ten (besides the old country artists) was the Raincoats, an all girl British post-punk band, whom I quickly found charming and enjoyable.
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