I’m back with my playlist and article discussing the music that I’ve been listening to the last few months (specifically, January through April of this year). I was trying to keep it shorter than the last few, to keep it more manageable. I’m not sure if I pulled of the “shorter” part, but it did feel more manageable, possibly due to better planning on my end.
As per usual, I’ve made YouTube and Spotify versions of the playlist to follow along to. Also, a lot of these artists are on Bandcamp too, and that’s a good way to support them if you like what you hear (the next Bandcamp Friday isn’t until August, but they have the best artist payouts even outside of then). I’ll throw in one last pitch for signing up for the Out of Left Field mailing list below, and then we’ll jump right in.
Notes: Not too much is missing this time; the track by In Love With a Ghost is not on Spotify, and Jamie Paige’s ‘C-Sides’ EP is mostly constrained to her Bandcamp page.
PinkPantheress: I spent the first few weeks of 2026 continuing to go through various places’ Best of 2025 lists, and ‘Fancy That’ by PinkPantheress was one of my absolute favorite discoveries from that process. It was kind of funny, hearing it and saying “oh wow, I was totally sleeping on this!”, then getting to see her hit the American mainstream a few weeks later (following gold medalist Alyssa Liu skating to a remix of “Stateside”).
The record is pretty short for a full release, clocking in at nine songs and just over 20 minutes on the original version without remixes and such (in fact, she seems to describe it as a mixtape rather than a full album, which makes sense). But gosh, does it just lay on the gas from the word go and never let up, from the spacy synth chords of “Illegal” and PinkPantheress’s breathless introduction that immediately grab your attention before passing you through an infectious procession of thumping bass synths, four-on-the-floor beats, and impossibly catchy hooks. Songs slide into each other in a way that refuses to let up and makes it feel extra cohesive, aided by a sort of stream of consciousness lyrics that feel like they could be describing either a fun night out in first person, or an exhilarating Guy Ritchie-esque romp of mayhem through night clubs. Something breathless and blown up to its most exciting form, soundtracked by a stream of songs that could all stand alone as singles.
It the kind of dance pop where, even if you aren’t listening in a club setting, it still immediately overwhelms you and draws you into its embrace; I actually love the video for “Girl Like Me” for running on that logic, turning the whole world into a set of vignettes run by its thumping beat, like it’s a level from Rhythm Heaven. That really just captures the sensation I’m trying to describe.
Brigitte Calls Me Baby: Chicago alt rockers Brigitte Calls Me Baby were one of my favorite acts back in 2024 with their debut album, so I was excited for their follow-up ‘Irreversible’ when I learned it was coming out. Where would they go from there? ‘The Future Is Our Way Out’ was notable for their distinct sound, which I think I compared to “The Cure if they had an American Rockabilly singer”, but where do you go from there? The answer turned out to be “more of the same”, and it absolutely kicks ass. I don’t know, I feel like reading music criticism, people get really into the idea of changing up sounds to signal new releases and such. And that’s a powerful idea, it’s led to some interesting music, it’s even worked my way into my thinking even though I don’t know that I was ever consciously totally on board with it.
Monday, May 25, 2026
Monday, February 16, 2026
Music Monday: End of 2025 Playlist
And finally, my End of 2025 Playlist is available! It’s a little later than I wanted, but I ran into some delays over the last few weeks, and figured delaying it would be better than rushing things.
I think part of my anxiety about being late is how most places end up doing their year-end lists before the year itself even ends, which I maintain is just wrong; you might still find cool stuff in December! But I suppose it’s too much for me to change everyone else’s mind there. And I guess this isn’t really my “Year End” list anyway, since I kind of let each playlist stand on its own even when they share a year they’re covering. It’s just my “things I liked from the last four months of 2025” list, which is kind of a big difference, but whatever.
We of course have both the YouTube and Spotify playlists that correspond to this article. And just like usual, a lot of these artists are things that I found on Bandcamp; if you wind up liking their music as well and want to support them, that’s a great place to do so! And if you’d like your support to go even further, they even released the schedule for Bandcamp Fridays (where the site forgoes its usual cut in sales so it can all go to the artist) in 2026. I wasn’t quite ready in time for the one in February, but there’s one right around the corner at the start of March!
A quick note: 7mai isn’t on either platform; you can find their music on their Bandcamp page. And the Spotify Playlist is missing a few extra tracks on top of that; Alpha and Strawberry Station didn’t upload their tracks, while Powderpaint and June Jones have recently removed their catalogs from Spotify in protest of the CEO.
(And for a final reminder, I have an Out of Left Field mailing list separate from my baseball writing one. So if you’d like to know right when these articles come out, feel free to sign up here. I don’t use it for anything other than new article notifications too, so no worries about spam. Although if you are subscribed, make sure to check your spam filters.)
With all that out of the way, let’s start the actual list:
The Playlist, as an Article
Sydney Sprague: I’ve been trying to organize these lists roughly with a “best stuff at the top” mentality for a while now, and while it’s not always perfect (the exact order isn’t always 1-to-1, and I’ll sometimes group stuff based on the flow of the written blurbs in the middle), I do tend to really think about what goes at the top of the list. And while that’s easy sometimes, one album or artist will just stand out to me, this time was a little more difficult. I kept flipping between the top three choices here, and I might even change my mind the day after publication. But I’ve got to publish this list eventually (I’m already behind my loose schedule…), so this is where we’re landing for now.
I think part of my anxiety about being late is how most places end up doing their year-end lists before the year itself even ends, which I maintain is just wrong; you might still find cool stuff in December! But I suppose it’s too much for me to change everyone else’s mind there. And I guess this isn’t really my “Year End” list anyway, since I kind of let each playlist stand on its own even when they share a year they’re covering. It’s just my “things I liked from the last four months of 2025” list, which is kind of a big difference, but whatever.
We of course have both the YouTube and Spotify playlists that correspond to this article. And just like usual, a lot of these artists are things that I found on Bandcamp; if you wind up liking their music as well and want to support them, that’s a great place to do so! And if you’d like your support to go even further, they even released the schedule for Bandcamp Fridays (where the site forgoes its usual cut in sales so it can all go to the artist) in 2026. I wasn’t quite ready in time for the one in February, but there’s one right around the corner at the start of March!
A quick note: 7mai isn’t on either platform; you can find their music on their Bandcamp page. And the Spotify Playlist is missing a few extra tracks on top of that; Alpha and Strawberry Station didn’t upload their tracks, while Powderpaint and June Jones have recently removed their catalogs from Spotify in protest of the CEO.
(And for a final reminder, I have an Out of Left Field mailing list separate from my baseball writing one. So if you’d like to know right when these articles come out, feel free to sign up here. I don’t use it for anything other than new article notifications too, so no worries about spam. Although if you are subscribed, make sure to check your spam filters.)
With all that out of the way, let’s start the actual list:
The Playlist, as an Article
Sydney Sprague: I’ve been trying to organize these lists roughly with a “best stuff at the top” mentality for a while now, and while it’s not always perfect (the exact order isn’t always 1-to-1, and I’ll sometimes group stuff based on the flow of the written blurbs in the middle), I do tend to really think about what goes at the top of the list. And while that’s easy sometimes, one album or artist will just stand out to me, this time was a little more difficult. I kept flipping between the top three choices here, and I might even change my mind the day after publication. But I’ve got to publish this list eventually (I’m already behind my loose schedule…), so this is where we’re landing for now.
Saturday, January 17, 2026
We Can Do Better Than Calling Zelda-Inspired Games Metroidvanias, Right? (Plus Some Indie Game Recs!)
Sarcasm aside, whatever the main genre of the 2D Zelda games is, it doesn’t really have a name, or certainly not one that’s caught on with the general public. I actually tried discussing this subject a few years ago, and in the time since, I feel like the style has proliferated even more, with a ton of new indie games falling into that bucket. I think that’s great, as a big fan of the genre, but it would certainly be nice to have an easier way to refer to that type of game, for a variety of reasons.
(Also, a reminder that Out of Left Field has its own mailing list separate from Hot Corner Harbor! If you’d like a notice when new articles go up (and only then!), feel free to sign up for it here.)
So let’s start with my proposed name from a few years ago: Top Down Action-Adventure, or TDAA (I think I’ve been using Top Down A-A in the tags on this site too). In retrospect, I don’t dislike that name. Part of me thinks it’s a little wordy now, but that’s part of why you can just abbreviate it to TDAA. After all, it’s not like people usually spell out “First Person Shooter” or “Role Playing Game”, they just write (and even usually say) “FPS” or “RPG”. It’s fine.
It does feel a little overly specific, maybe, but those are all of the elements that make a 2D Zelda game a Zelda game. Take away the adventure part and there are a whole lot of dungeon crawlers and hack-and-slash games and such that apply; remove the action and you could technically include stuff like the 2D Pokémon games or Sokoban/block-pushing puzzle games in the genre. Those were essentially my arguments last time, and I think they mostly hold true now?
But I have actually played a few games from last year that made me reconsider that, though. Those games were Furniture & Mattress LLC’s ‘Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure’ and Cicada Games’ ‘Isles of Sea & Sky’. Writing reviews that cover a single game really in-depth has been a bit tough for me, so instead, let me work some discussion and recommendations of them into a larger related topic; that might be a little easier.