Summer 2025 Playlist

I usually try and get my Summer Playlist article out for Labor Day weekend, since that’s the traditional “End of Summer”, but I was busy around then this year, so it couldn’t be done. I thought about waiting until next Monday to post this too since I’ve become really attached to the “Music Monday” column name that I use, but this already feels overdue as is, plus my schedule is getting crowded with the end of the baseball season (and my usual articles that come with it).

So here we finally have it: my Summer 2025 Playlist! I mean, it’s still fairly warm where I am anyway with a final early-fall heatwave, and it’s not like I let out-of-season names affect when my other articles come out (I refuse to move my “End of Year” articles any earlier than the next January, “End of Year” includes what I listen to in December and I need time to process all of that!). I tried to be a little more concise to help speed things up, but I don’t really think it worked.

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As per usual, if you’d like updates about my Out of Left Field posts, I have a mailing list for that here! (And it’s separate from my baseball one.) And also like usual, I’ll note that a lot of these artists post their music on Bandcamp, and that’s a great way to support them if you like their stuff!







Note: In a shocking first, almost every single track that I included was available on both YouTube and Spotify. The one exception was the two tracks by alpha, which weren’t on Spotify (but were on Youtube). Also, I’m still doing album and EP titles in single quote marks instead of italics, to make publishing easier.


The Playlist (but as an article)

Racecar: Without a doubt, ‘Pink Car’ by Scottish trio racecar ended up being the soundtrack of my summer this year. It’s basically perfectly designed for the task, a March release of breezy pop music that even invokes lazily hanging around all summer in the first lines of opening track “Lay Me Down” over a bouncy bassline and funky light guitar riff. It’s a catchy start (one that I couldn’t help but repurpose for the playlist here), and perfectly builds from there into a frantic little pop tune stuffed to the gills with catchy hooks, flowing melodic lines, and exciting little flourishes.

But the fun part is letting it carry you along with the flow and eventually realizing that what seemed like a fun little aural lazy river to float along with actually has some actual depth and currents to it that will sweep you away before you catch on. Racecar is a talented group of songwriters, and their arrangements are richly layered and show off the variety of styles they’re playing with. But the album is also structurally fun, as they let tracks flow into each other as they build out a fuller story about a tempestuous summer fling and the storm of emotions it brings.

Mario Kart World Review: How Do You Follow-Up One of the Biggest Games Ever?

It’s not often that I am (relatively) on top of the zeitgeist in video games, playing the new big-name release of the moment while also having a lot of detailed thoughts about it, so I figured I’d take advantage of it and get out my thoughts on ‘Mario Kart World’, since they’re weirdly complicated.

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: following up ‘Mario Kart 8’ was always going to be a tall order. It feels easy to forget that, given how much the game has become a fixture of the gaming landscape, serving as the most recent mainline entry in the series for over a decade. It’s maybe also easy to lose sight of just how defining a landmark it was that landscape, too; the Mario Kart series has long been one of Nintendo’s blockbusters, but MK8 took it to absurd levels.*

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*It’s not essential to this column, but I love number-based trivia too much to pass some of this up, even if the data is a little less comprehensive than sports stats. MK8 was the best-selling game on two straight Nintendo consoles. On Wii U, it sold nearly 8.5 million copies, which still put it 2.5 million ahead of second place on the console. On Switch, it octupled those numbers, crossing the 68 million mark and landing over 20 million ahead of the second-best seller, the most recent Animal Crossing. It more than doubled the sales of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’ and ‘Super Mario Odyssey’, the big new entries for Nintendo’s two flagship series. It sold roughly as many copies as every single new mainline Pokémon entry on the console combined (Sword, Shield, Scarlet, Violet, and Legends Arceus). It still regularly pops up on Nintendo’s monthly best-seller lists, despite being a decade old. And combining the two versions’ sales, it appears to be the fifth-best selling video game of all-time. There’s even a chance those numbers will go up for a little bit longer, since the most recent update seems to have been from the end of March.

Even setting aside the crazy objective stats for the more subjective evaluations, as a long-time fan of the series, I think it’s pretty easy to call 8 Deluxe “The Definitive Mario Kart Game”. Even when the original game was released, I was already inclined to that idea; the 32 base-game courses include many of the best tracks in series history, and I think the overall set is easily the best one all-around. The retro levels all feel improved from their original incarnations, the game always looked gorgeous and stylish, the new mechanics are interesting and allow for a whole bunch of exciting course designs, and the racing feels as fun as ever and balanced in a way that not every entry in the series has been. 

The later DLC and Deluxe version only turned things up a notch, adding another 16 strong courses that stood up to the originals, debuting the new 200cc game mode, and fixing some of the original short-comings (the weak battle mode, a thin roster). And the Booster Pass additions of 2022-23 were maybe not as universally strong as the ones that came before, but there were still some standout levels in there. And moreover, it was a full 48 new courses, doubling the tracklist in what was already the biggest game in the series and revitalizing interest in a game that was over eight years old at that point.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the final version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels more or less like the perfect version of what the series had been doing up to that point. So the obvious question was always: where do you go from there? I think everyone who liked the series thought that. There was always going to be a next Mario Kart entry eventually, so what would that look like? 

Music Monday: Start of 2025 Playlist

And now, we have my second playlist of 2025, covering the stuff I was listening to for the first four months of the year! There’s some more catch-up from the end of 2024, but also a lot of new releases too! I really enjoy putting these together and talking about the music that I’ve been enjoying (and I’d even like to think that my ability to write about music is improving too), I just wish the whole “building playlists and getting it formatted and published” side of things was a little quicker.

Anyway, I’m off to enjoy the rest of my Memorial Day, but first, my usual quick reminders: a lot of these artists (especially the smaller ones) have Bandcamps where you can support them directly! And if you’re interested in these articles and would like to know when one gets published, I have an email list that I use to notify when new things get published! (It’s separate from my baseball mailing list too, for anyone on that one as well).

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Note: Only one song is missing from each list, which might be a first for these? Alpha and Natsume’s collab “Idea” isn’t on YouTube, but it is on Soundcloud. Meanwhile, Alpha’s solo effort “everything” is not on Spotify (or their Soundcloud, for some reason), but there is the YouTube video in the playlist. Also, I'm still doing that 'album title in single quotes' thing to make formatting a little easier.


The Playlist (but as an article)

Great Grandpa: I didn’t really know what to expect from Great Grandpa’s ‘Patience, Moonbeam’ going in other than liking the early singles, which I saw getting some praise before the album dropped. I wasn’t really familiar with their earlier records (which were from a few years ago anyway, as the band has been on hiatus since 2019 or so), and while I pay some attention to big stuff in the indie rock scene, I feel like I usually don’t stray as far into the more folk-ish side of things? I don’t know, maybe people more in tune with those sides of things will have different opinions, but I think so far, ‘Patience, Moonbeam’ is my favorite album of 2025.

It all just sounds so amazing, lush and layered, warm and intimate. But it’s all in service of such pretty arrangements, too, full earthy guitars and stacks of voices and string sections. There are just so many small parts that stand out in my memory because of how good they sounds, but also how good they are in the song, from the cello mirroring the melody on “Never Rest”, to the pedal steel guitar on “Junior”, the mirrored vocal harmonies of “It’s funny how I need you/Damn” on “Emma” and “Doom”, the drums and pianos on closer “Kid” (really, everything on “Kid” is amazing, it can easily bring me to tears when it all comes together).