End of Year lists typically restrict their remit to the year they come at the end of, which is a sensible approach. This is not that sort of list.
Instead, this is a list of the best songs I encountered for the first time in 2025, with a dozen from this year, two from last year, five spread across 2021 to 2013, and one track dating back to 1968, making it 57 years old, yet still one of the freshest-sounding songs on the list. I tried to limit myself to 20, but it inched up to 24. An extended list for an extended year.
I can’t be arsed figuring out geographically where everyone’s from, but notably, only two are based in Scotland, where I live, but neither of them appear on the Tidal playlist, as their most recent work isn’t on Tidal. Oh, and one band hails from Ireland, where I used to live, but curiously, not the one that sounds Irish. (Put a pin in that, it’ll become relevant later.)
I suppose while we’re doing stats, which are never as precise as they pretend to be, a quarter of the bands/artists aren’t white, a third aren’t men, and only three, as far as these things can be discerned, are queer. Those numbers all seem low compared to my previous end-of-year lists, although I can’t verify that claim, since I opted for a clean slate when I moved from Spotify to Tidal in October, and scrubbed all my playlists. Consider me an unreliable narrator, I often consider it myself. At any rate, I like to think my tastes are more diverse than the stats imply, but the genres I gravitate to tend to be unwelcoming to anyone who falls outside the straight white man hegemony. If I want 2026 to be more inclusive, I’ll have to move outside of my comfort zone.
Also, this list isn’t ranked – I made a playlist on Tidal, and the songs have been arranged so there’s sort of a flow, although that flow can be a bit bumpy, but it’s all quite listenable. I think. Well, mostly. Some of it might be irritating. But I like irritating!
UPDATE: It looks like Tidal doesn’t let you listen to songs unless you have an account with them. So I’ve linked every song to the most accessible, ad-free version I can find online. In most cases, that’s Bandcamp, but some I had to settle for YouTube. Click through to listen while you read, or don’t, I’m not yr mum.
Anyway, headphones on, here we go:
David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors, STARGAZE: Gimme Bread
I love when music makes me feel stupid. Gimme Bread’s opening piano, tentative, fearful, discordant, tickles the underbelly of a music theory I don’t understand – these notes aren’t meant to go together, these chords are wrong, but they also feel right, in a way so unlike how if I were to sit down at a piano and bash a few keys, it would sound like I don’t know how to play a piano, which I don’t. It makes me feel like an idiot and DURR! DURR DURR! DURR DURR! That’s what happens, the intro isn’t even halfway done and the song blasts DURR! DURR! Which is great, as I also love surprises and melodrama and songs that sound like they could be from a musical but, oh hang on, shit, this song has a chase scene in the middle? Fucking hell.
Vampire Weekend: Connect
Vampire Weekend, I did not realise your game could go this gentle. If Gimme Bread is a performance artist on a Friday night writhing on a gallery floor, smearing paint on the audience and spitting in their drinks, Connect is the figurative painter in a starchy shirt who every Sunday, weather permitting, takes their easel to the same spot by the pond in the park, to capture on a small canvas how the seasons’ changing light can bend the world, how a sun’s shifting intersection with the upper atmosphere can turn a gaggle of ducks from ornamental sculptures into a cartoon fist-fight, webbed feet and beaks sticking out of a feathered dust cloud.
Ismail Seleit: The Birth of a Hummingbird
I found The Birth of a Hummingbird while looking for a song for an Instagram story of a collage of a hummingbird. I searched for “hummingbird” and chose the first one I liked. Sometimes you don’t have to be oblique, y’know? Anyway, it sounds like a moon inside a cathedral inside a moon.
Leenalchi: Pour and Pour Again
Do not, I repeat, do not pass up the chance to see Leenalchi live. Their combination of stoic tight drums, nimble airy bass, twitchy synths, and vocals oscillating between meditative traditional Korean song and faster-than-light-speed rap, it all adds up to something hypnotic as a cuttlefish. But their presence on stage is something else entirely, the band hanging back, cool as impeccably fashionable cucumbers, while vocalists Kwon Song Hee, An Yi Ho and Chun Hyo Jeong share the stage like a beat-em-up tag-team, pulling back, leaping forward, always in motion, ready to strike, also hypnotic as a cuttlefish. Pour and Pour Again sees them at their breathless best.
Bad Bunny: BAILE InoLVIDABLE
My love for Latin American music might be one of the more unexpected aspects of my personality. I mean, I’m a very, very white man, and as I age, I look like I should be more into Mogwai than mambo. But the chokehold Bad Bunny had on the start of my year echoed a summer fifteen-ish years prior, when I could not for the life of me stop listening to Buena Vista Social Club, and also a summer thirty-ish years prior, where on the shore of the River Lagan, a samba band opened for Ocean Colour Scene (no, I don’t know why, either). Somewhere in my parents’ house, there’s a photo of nine-year-old me, dancing at one my first large-scale concert, head thrown back in a scream of laughter, hips and shoulders almost dislocating from my spine, neurons wiring in a new core component of joy. Unforgettable Dance? Aye, you could say that.
Dorothy Ashby: Action Line
My partner, who is much cooler than I am, and more knowledgeable regarding music, put on Afro Harping while we were working from home, back in Spring, maybe late Spring, say May, because it’s not really a mizzly March sort of album, it needs the sun and a little heat. I asked who it was, said I liked it, thought nothing more of it. A few months later, Spotify (boo! hiss! etc) slotted Action Line into my Discovery playlist, and I shared it with him as if I’d been the one to discover it. Quite annoying, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Cheekface: Content Baby
Cheekface were my most-listened to band four years running, between 2021 and 2024. Not so in 2025. The promo around their most recent album stressed how difficult that insane rate of production was while touring during difficult life events, and everyone deserves and needs to set aside the late-capitalism grind and hustle. But man, I hate to say it, the resulting album, Middle Spoon is… mid. Sometimes it sounds like mannequins wearing Cheekface outfits, writing Cheekface songs, getting it sort of right but also incorrect. A guest rap vocal? Two forays into ska? After making a routine of constancy – even repeating the same jokes across multiple tracks – I’m not sure the Cheekface project can expand quite so suddenly, without feeling forced, manipulated, maybe a little panicked. I couldn’t put my finger on why this bugged me, until their late-Summer St Lukes gig, a twin-headline affair with Martha who, given their fanbase in Glasgow, really should have been allowed the actual-headliner slot. After Martha’s set of vim and spontaneity and an impassioned, improvised speech on the intersection of Palestinian solidarity and queer liberation, Cheekface played to a crowd that had visibly thinned, and… went through the motions. Much of the between-song banter was word-for-word identical to when I saw them back in 2023, the audience participation during the songs hadn’t changed, and when they themselves tried to speak to the political moment (which, y’know, fair enough, it’s a tad worse in the USA, or at least bad in a different way), the attempt was couched in so many layers of irony and self-awareness, when it ended on a plea to buy their merch… man, I just soured on them like milk gone bad. It’s not their fault, really – can’t fault an internationally touring band for trying to shift their merch, that stuff’s heavy to lug around. I just think it was the wrong gig, the wrong crowd, the wrong time, to keep doing the exact ame thing that had originally charmed me, and brought them success. I’m being a curmudgeon – most everyone else enjoyed the gig – but I hope they take their own advice, give themselves a few years off the grind and the hustle, and come back refreshed. Anyway, Content Baby still slaps, mostly for the guitar solo that leads into a guitar solo that leads into a guitar solo.
R.AGGS:[Title Unknown]
R.Aggs’ blend of folk violin, West African highlife, indie synthpop, experimental percussion, wistful but firm vocals, and (increasingly, lately) a touch of deep south Americana and 80s/90s dance anthems, is so uniquely, wholly their own. Their 2020 cassette, Tape 1, streamable on Bandcamp, contains fragments of all these elements, seeds which have blossomed confidently in their new work, all of which currently exists almost exclusively only as live material. If you’ve seen them live lately, consider yourself blessed.
Lucy Dacus: Ankles
I was tempted to redux the painter from earlier, for a little weekend jaunt round the neighbourhood junk shops, eating pastries with her girlfriend, but Ankles is already far too saccharine, so I won’t.
Brad Mehldau, Daniel Rossen: Southern Belle
I came to Elliot Smith’s music a year and a bit after his death, during a period when I was fervently converting my teen disdain for pop into an appreciation. Pop seemed, at the time, the swiftest route to accepting my recently, resentfully discovered queerness. Publicly I pretended to fancy Sexy Back-era Timberlake, privately I moped around listening to men who wanted to kill themselves and sometimes succeeded. I think that split somewhat explains why I never really took the time to appreciate the larger picture; how Smith’s quiet anger had pushed back against grunge’s excess, the Loudness War, the theatricality of New York’s emerging cultural dominance of the early 00s indie-rock post-punk scene. I was mostly just listening for the doomer vibes. This cover has an overabundance of doomer vibes, Smith’s depression traded in for Rossen’s anxiety; I’m still here for it.
Tarvin Hill: Spider Wine
If this playlist was ranked, this would maybe be a bit lower in the rankings, but it’s still a top twenty-and-change, so, y’know. Good going. I’m a sucker for dreamy checked-out vocals, syncopated stabby guitars and delayed riffs which sync up at the end of a wordless chorus. Trust and believe, I’ll be repeating “we got the good simulation this time” to myself after every halfway-good happening in 2026. But the playlist isn’t ranked, so instead here officially begins a grungy interlude. Skip forward to Jazz on the Autobahn if that’s not your thing.
Blondshell: Docket (feat. Bully)
They just do not make them like this any more, do they? Well, obviously Blondshell does, and so does Bully, in fact a lot of alt-rock sounds like this, but you know what I mean: the lyrics hurt. Every line a regret, a remonstrance, a 90s teen slasher fishing hook to the guts – you’re sort of not allowed to hate yourself this hard any more, which as a card-carrying hater, I appreciate. Also, for me, sonically, Blondshell fills a hole PWR BTTM were on track to fill nearly a decade ago, only without all the allegations. Basically, a resurgence of the sparklier, more melodious end of grunge, a bit Hole, a bit Garbage, but also a bit Tori Amos and Veruca Salt. The sort of song that plays while Buffy and Spike slowdance in the Bronze - and indeed it scored high in a Music League round on that exact theme, so thank you for that, Blondshell.
Cola: Mendicant
Mendicant is a completely bog-standard mid-tempo post-punk ditty about sacking off all your responsibilities, right up until the 26-second mark, and then something happens that honestly I still don’t have words for even though I’ve rinsed this a hundred times and more since it released in May, but here goes anyway: I’m from Northern Ireland, which is Ireland but it isn’t, but I’ve lived longer overall in Scotland, which mostly doesn’t want to be British but nevertheless is, which, look, obviously there’s baggage, we do not have time to unpack it all here, but the relevant bit is this: I cannot with a straight face identify as Irish, Northern Irish, Scottish or British, despite partly being all of them, in one way or another, but Irish is ultimately the identity in which I feel most a pretender, and yet 26 seconds into Medicant, when those uilleann pipes arrive, sort of muddy and tired in the mix, like they’ve travelled a fair distance over a muddy field oh, oh, I want to cry with a homesickness completely alien to me, completely alien, maybe because of all the identity stuff, I simply do not have the capacity to miss a place, a time, I do not do nostalgia, and I do not consider myself to have a homeland, and low-key find any kind of nationalism sort of embarrassing at best, nefarious at worst, and yet here they come over the fields again and oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling!
The Felice Brothers: Jazz on the Autobahn
You will prise my soft-spot for Americana-tinged purple-prosed talky-singy pre-apocalyptic hope-core drive-time road-trip optimistic-dirge cod-philosophical honky-tonk from my cold-dead hands.
Sanam: Bell
Sanam played a beautiful, thundering, mesmerising gig to a packed-out Flying Duck at the start of December, and if they’d played six months earlier, and I’d gotten to know them a little more, I’d have more to say, but I’m still very much relaxing into their mix of traditional Lebanese folk, post-punk and droning noise. I think Bell is a bit of an outlier for them – jazzy, scrunchy, angry, impatient – but I’ll need to listen more in 2026 to be sure.
Gilla Band: Lawman
Metronomic delirious blown-out distorted shouty Irish guitar rock might not be the most obvious soundtrack for a night of collage primarily featuring hummingbirds – collage being an art form growing tweer by the minute - but perhaps a suitable accompaniment to a deranged freelancer designer crosslegged on the carpet tearing up National Geographics wondering how the hell he’s going to afford to pay bills come the New Year and thinking fuck, maybe it’ll be collage, maybe he’ll be the next great collage artist, move over Dada, it’s time for no what the fuck are you thinking fuck shit fuck fuck shit collage are you serious you can’t make a living off collage fuck shit the song’s ended put it on repeat shout fuck shit collage fuck.
Les Savy Fav: Legendary Tippers
LSF played a top-ten-gigs-of-my-life-of-all-time-and-perhaps-top-ten-gig-anywhere-ever at Drygate, a soulless cavern of a venue that would obviously rather be a full-time sports bar, if only it wasn’t so dependent on us aging hipsters buying their craft beer. Unpredicable frontman Tim Harrington spent the entirety of the show roaming the crowd, forcing us to hold his very long, very beer-sticky, very floor-grotty mic cable aloft, as if he was a diver and we were reeling out his oxygen. He dragged a table into the crowd to make a satellite stage, he bought a pint halfway through a song then threw it over his shoulder, he stripped down to his Y-fronts and did a running slide on the concrete floor, he dressed up as the pope, he accepted a gift of a bottle of port and lurched from person to person pouring it into their mouths with very little precision. That he, and the rest of us, survived the gig intact, is a miracle.
Preoccupations: Focus
I’ve been a fan of Preoccupations from way back, when they were still called Viet Cong, a name they changed for obvious reasons. From the 2012 album of the same name, I’ll be listening to Bunker Buster until I die, maybe even as I die, those opening guitar riffs digging into the flesh of life like a biting dog, roughly shaking the thing side to side, a refusal to let go, to drop it. So I was ecstatic to finally see them play live earlier this year - but regrettably at Room 2, in my opinion Glasgow’s worst live music venue. The stage, bordered by stairs leading either to the bar or the street, occupies what clearly used to be half a relatively functional sunken dancefloor, now hedged in on the opposite side by the sound desk. As a result, the only spot from which to watch the band is constantly interrupted by people arriving, leaving, going to the bar, which, elevated but perpendicular to the stage, encourages a lot of chatter to clutter the soundspace, something which the hapless sound-techs don’t know how to accommodate or negate. All three times I’ve attended a gig, the sound desk seemed to be manned by someone grabbed off the street, men with the whites showing all round their eyes, pushing buttons in a panic like they’re in an I Love Lucy skit. Add to this, for the Preoccupations gig, two heavyset men who decided the already-too-small dancefloor was the perfect place to start a mosh pit, population: them, pushing everyone else up the bordering stairs, lest we take an elbow to the face, and, well, it could have been one of my worst gigs of the year. But it wasn’t! Preoccupations were that good! Listen, anyone who’s seen me shoot daggers at talkers on the dancefloor knows it takes something very special for me to waive breaches of gig etiquette, and Preoccupations delivered. With a broad mix of songs from all six albums, not much weight was given to their newest album, Ill at Ease, their smoothest and jangliest and most new-wave to date. And as much as I adored Bunker Buster blasting the room at close range (proximity being the only thing Room 2 has going for it), I’d love to experience a set of only their latter material, with a less nostalgic crowd, afforded more space, and license, to actually dance. Anyway, the gig was stellar, and album opener Focus, one of the more polished and propulsive tracks, was an easy highlight. Not to mention, on the recording, I’m 90% sure that’s Cindy Wilson guesting on the chorus, or at least a Cindy Wilson-soundalike, which if this list was ranked, which remember it isn’t, would be a short-cut to placing in my top 5 of any year.
Clipping: Dodger
Despite a friend describing Clipping as Musicals for Boys Who Don’t Let Themselves Like Musicals - a read so savage, it risked obliterating not just my enjoyment of Clipping, but also my fondness for songs that sound like they aren’t from a musical, and then my sense of self, and then also most of Neo Tokyo – despite that, I’m still besotted with this strobe-quick slice of end-of-days cyberpunk.
Pink Pound: Play Pretend
Pink Pound’s been described in the past as “yassified New Order”, but lately they’re pushing towards something more nebulous, digging deeper into where the overlap of pop, post-punk and new-wave cast irregular shadows. The Acts EP toys with masculinity, repetition, desire, decoration, restraint – my personal favourite, Play Pretend, lays down a mechanical push and suck of drum machine and synth and samples, as Pink Pound’s rich vocals flip from coy to generous to scornful to sultry, sharing a good dose of DNA with George Michael’s Freeek! High praise? Yes. Am I biased? Yes. But am I also correct? Yes.
Jacob Collier, Kimbra, Tank and the Bangas: In My Bones
When Jacob Collier’s extremely tricksy multiphonic cover of Stevie Wonder’s Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing went viral in 2010 - and remember, I love music that makes me feel stupid, not to mention the cover mutates into a heavy salsa halfway through - I basically had no defences against it, despite it being, and remaining, extremely cringe. And now here he is with Kimbra, one of thee most slept on pop geniuses of our time! As well as Tank and the Bangas, who, well, I’m not completely in love with their contribution here, but it would be churlish to dock points from a song explicitly built to be overstuffed, for being overstuffed. And boy is it overstuffed! Every note devised by man gets a cameo, like the last episode of a beloved sitcom where everyone says their catchphrase one last time.
Formal Speedware: Wait (Hatchet Gets a New Hide)
Yeah, DEVO, Talking Heads, Brian Eno, we can all hear it, but look - if you don’t appreciate Beck Clewlow’s gleefully pained HHhheeeuunnnGhn! at precisely 2:31, I don’t know what to tell you.
Goldfrapp: Slide In (DFA Remix)
You would think, being a DFA simp, and a once-Goldfrapp stan, I’d have known about this remix long before now. You would be wrong. I make no understatement when I say, discovering this percussive gem twenty – TWENTY!!! I perish – years late, single-handedly salvaged some of the grubbier days of 2025. When I finished my book – that is, the complete first draft of the third version of my book containing the third draft of the first third, the second draft of the second third, and the first-and-a-half draft of the final third (look, just… just let it… writing a book is hard, okay?) – I put this on repeat and danced in the living room until the windows fogged up and had to be squeegied dry.
tUnE-YaRdS: How Big is The Rainbow?
Back in 2011, tUnE-YaRdS’ W H O K I L L (if you don’t format these things correctly you’re a journalistic coward) pulled me out of depression. Probably shouldn’t have cancelled my second appointment with a therapist one (1) calendar day after hearing Bizness, because I went right back to being depressed come 2012, but hey, you live and you learn. Better Dreaming is probably my favourite of their albums since W H O K I L L, overall less self-conscious of its musical influences, more optimistic with its politics, and finding comfort, rather than uneasy anxiety, where they intersect. Though they’ve yet to best Heart Attack from 2018’s I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life, How Big is The Rainbow? comes very, very close. Was it corny when, during their November gig, Merrill Garbus got the audience to harmonise on Rainbow’s chorus? Yeah, it was! Is it, to quote The English Teacher’s Malcolm, a bit born-this-way gay, a bit I’m-with-her queer? You know, like, love-everyone-regardless-of-whether-they-love-you preachy? Well, yes. But that’s tUnE-YaRdS’ whole thing! Singing about how hate comes from within us all, even when we’re trying to love, and in fact that’s when hate becomes its most destructive form, and while hate might come from within, it’s condoned from without, stoked and encouraged by forces larger than any one of us individually, and it takes all the collective, communal will in the world not to let that become normal or normalised, or you yourself will rot from the inside, so you might as well sing it all out at the top of your lungs, and it doesn’t even have to always sound good when you do, sometimes anger and disappointment sound weird and wrong, but if you sing enough wrong notes together, they end up sounding right - that’s their whole deal! That calculated naivety and wonder – like pulling three tarot Fools in a row – that’s what pulled me out of depression in 2011, and made the gig, likely my last of the year, so transcendent. Sure, I love music that makes me feel stupid. But I love music more when it makes me feel loved.