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.

Music Monday: End of 2022 Playlist

2023 Has finally arrived, but before we get too far along into the new year, I’d like to close out 2022 with some music. That’s right, it’s time for my third annual End of the Year Playlist and accompanying article! I’ve had a fun time finding new music and writing about it the last few months, and honestly, this size feels much more manageable for what I’m trying to do with this series. I might even split my normal Summer Playlist into two smaller ones since it’s been getting more and more unwieldy, we’ll see.

Once again, I’ve assembled the playlist in both Youtube and Spotify so that you can follow along.





Notes: The YouTube playlist is more complete than the Spotify one, missing 5 songs to 13. Of those five, “Under the Sun” and “Milk & Moon” can be found on full albums on YouTube. I couldn’t find much of 7mai on either service, so here are Soundcloud links to the full EP releases of the two songs of theirs that I reference: “Strawberry Mousse”, “Celestial”. The only place that I can find “Spring Cleaning” is on Sir Babygirl’s Bandcamp page.


With all of that out of the way, onto the article:

My Favorite Albums of the Playlist:

-St. Lucia
St. Lucia dropped a lot of their new album, Utopia, early as pre-release singles in the run-up to the full release, and I’m always a little mixed about that strategy. I understand that constantly dripping out new material is a good way to stay at the forefront of people’s minds, which is becoming increasingly important in music. But it does feel like it can sometimes dull the impact of the full album; finding new surprises to enjoy on your first or second listen of a full record is one of the things that I like most, and knowing most of the songs early undercuts it.

But it didn’t seem to matter here, thankfully. On the one hand, Utopia is great, and no amount of pre-release familiarity was going to dull its impact. I still stand by “Touch” being maybe my favorite track of theirs (which I said when it made my last playlist article), and it’s backed up by a ton of other strong tracks, like “Take Me Away”, “Another Lifetime”, “Rockets on My Feet”, and so on. Few other artists have as good an ear for big soundscapes and ringing, triumphant choruses that you can shout along to, in my opinion.

But on the other hand… maybe it’s just too good of an album for surprise to totally wear it down? The group has a strong track record, and I love all four of their albums. But maybe I’d be saying Utopia easily stands above the others if I heard it mostly at once with only one or two singles, as I did their first three (When the Night, Matter, and Hyperion). I guess all I can do at this point is keep re-listening over time and see if my opinion on it grows as much over time as it has for the others.


-Fickle Friends
Every now and again, maybe once or twice a year, I’ll stumble upon a new album from an artist that I haven’t heard of or don’t really follow, and fall in love with it, leading me to go back through their older work and discover that 1) there’s a decent amount of stuff to listen to, and 2) I love it as well. At that point, I just end up kind of stuck on that artist for a few weeks, maybe trying some other stuff but always circling back to them. And that is why there’s so much Fickle Friends on my End of 2022 Playlist.

I saw their new album from earlier in 2022, Are We Gonna Be Alright?, while browsing for something I hadn’t heard before, and immediately latched on. It wound up being one of my favorite albums of the year, just 40 minutes and a dozen songs of tight, bouncy, catchy synthpop. I had it on loop for days, dancing and singing along to songs like “Glow”, “Pretty Great”, “IRL”, “Love You to Death”... there something about it that all works perfectly, the hooks are so memorable and tight, and the lyrics stick in my mind simply capturing moments of love and relationships and loneliness.

And from there, I went back through their back-catalog. Their debut album You Are Someone Else was a little less polished, but still displayed all of their talent beautifully. Their two Weird Years EPs served as a perfect pandemic-era bridge between the two. All of the B-sides and early EPs were similarly fun, all the way back to their first one in 2014. I can’t believe I missed them for this long, they really are straight up my alley! And I spent a lot of the end of 2022 just getting caught up on them, so they end up making a lot of this playlist.

In the past, I’ve tried to limit my picks from a single artist somewhat, but… these lists are at least partly for me to revisit, too, so I’d like it to reflect what I was listening to at the time. And I honestly was just listening to Fickle Friends for a while this year!


-Carly Rae Jepsen
I was a little worried about The Loneliest Time; following up two absolute classic albums like Emotion and Dedicated seems like it would be a tall order. Thankfully, The Loneliest Time lived up to it; it helps that it moved into its own sort of territory, separate from those two albums, lower key while still somehow full of big, emotional moments. But like those two, it's just a bunch of top-notch bangers throughout, with a few 11/10 songs (“Shooting Star” and the title track duet with Rufus Wainwright) highlighting the experience. And now, we can once again return to anxiously awaiting the arrival of The Loneliest Time B Sides.

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Music Monday: End of 2021 Playlist

Last year, I did an “end of the year” supplemental playlist to go with my normal summer playlist (which usually ends up covering the first two-thirds of the year anyway), and I kind of liked doing that. So it’s making a return this year to follow up my Summer 2021 list, especially since there’s a lot of good stuff I’ve been listening to since then. Like normal, I’m including a playlist link up top, followed by some stray thoughts on various entries on the list, and then a full text listing at the end. And as per usual, it’s mostly 2021 stuff, but I’m also only one person doing this on the side, so sometimes it takes me a while to get around to trying things.





To start: last time, I called CHVRCHES Screen Violence my album of the summer, and if I had one complaint, it was that it felt a little shorter than their last few albums. Well, they released a bonus version in late October that included three new songs, all of which are stellar. Especially “Killer”, which might be my favorite song on the album now? “How Not to Drown” is hard to top, though.

Moving on from my favorite album on the last list, to my favorite album on this list: it’s Mercurial World by Magdalena Bay, which has been living in my brain for the past month or two. Every song is just great, layers upon layers of hooks and melodies and interesting things. It’s almost hard for me to pick three songs off of it, but “Hysterical Us” is probably my favorite track (I absolutely love that main piano riff). And “Secrets (Your Fire)” feels like the perfect introductory single to the album (I think it was the first track of theirs that I heard, although I’m not positive), plus it’s such a smooth jam. A third pick from the album was difficult, since there are so many good songs. Just by how much I enjoy the songs, I’d probably go with album closer “The Beginning”, but I think part of what I like about it is how it works as a final track, so I left it as a surprise. After that, it was a tough call between the title track, “Chaeri”, “You Lose!”... but I ended up going with “Dawning of the Season”.