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.)

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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. 

Music Monday: Summer 2024 Playlist

(Yes, this article is going up a little late, but I decided I’d rather get it posted during Labor Day week rather than wait another full week since Bandcamp Friday is this week, plus I still wanted to keep the “Music Monday” name.)

I’m not going to lie, the last few playlists articles have been exhausting, between their large scale and heaps of writing. I like doing them, sharing music and talking about it is a lot of fun, but I had kind of been considering scaling them back in some way to make it a little easier on myself; I started working on the last one something like a month ahead of my self-imposed deadline, and still barely got it done in time.

Thankfully, when I started working on this one (a little closer to the deadline), I realized that I also just had less to talk about this time. I was a little lighter on music discovery the last few months, between being busy with other things, the lack of Bandcamp Fridays spurring me to scour for new things, and just several other factors. Things might pick up again for the next edition (September 6th marks the first Bandcamp Friday since May for anyone interested in picking up things I’ve mentioned here before, and I definitely built up my own list to investigate before then; plus at a certain point, I’m sure End of Year lists will release and give me new things to check out), but we’ll see how I’m feeling come four months from now or so.

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But I did find things that I liked and wanted to talk about in the meantime, including some of my favorite releases of the year, so completely skipping a playlist was never part of the question. Like I’ve said before, I use these as much as scrapbooks for myself as anything, and missing any of them feels weird (I still idly consider going back and making playlists for the years I skipped sometimes).

So, without further ado, my Summer 2024 Playlist:






Notes: Not every song was on every platform. Plasma Cutter’s album wasn’t on YouTube (Bandcamp), alpha’s music was not on either YouTube or Spotify (Bandcamp), and sponzi’s “reach” is basically nowhere (Soundcloud).


On that note, I’ll reiterate that if you want to support these artists, Bandcamp is the best place to do it! Most of them have Bandcamp pages where you can purchase the music directly and which will give artists much better cuts than any other platform; and, as I mentioned above, this Friday (September 6th) is Bandcamp Friday, so 100% of any purchases on that day will go to the artists!


And much like the last Playlist article, I know album titles are usually italicized, but I used single quotation marks here instead because Blogger has been making fixing formatting very tough, and using single quotes means exponentially less work when I go to post.

Music Monday: Start of 2023 Playlist

Happy Memorial Day! It’s time for some music!

I’m going to be trying something slightly new this year. I like making playlists and writing about what I’ve been listening to, as you can see here. It kind of started as me making a summer playlist, which wound up covering everything I’d been listening to from the start of the year through roughly Labor Day, and then me making a smaller article to cover the rest of the year. But last year’s summer playlist wound up being way longer and more involved than I liked, and it looked like that trend would only continue.

So instead, this year I’m splitting it into two playlists to keep things more manageable. The Summer one should come at more or less the regular time, but I’m cutting it down to just May through August, more or less. And this Spring Playlist will cover January through April (even though it’s posting in late May; sorry, but I do still need time to actually write out my thoughts).

I’ve had a lot of fun looking for new music and collecting my thoughts on it (and not overwhelming myself with eight months worth of it! And spacing out the writing over a few weeks!), so if you want to follow along, I’ve included both Spotify and Youtube playlists. And if any of the songs jump out at you, definitely check out the records and artists they’re from; a lot of the time, I’m picking my favorite songs from full albums that I loved (especially if it’s one of the albums I’m writing about!).







Some housekeeping notes on the playlists, before we dive in: the Spotify version is missing 8 songs. Three of those (the DDRKirby(ISQ) and Jamie Paige ones) are on the Youtube version. The Hiro Tadomatsu songs can be found on his Soundcloud (here and here). 7mai’s can be found on their Bandcamp page (here, here, and here). In fact, most of these artists also have Bandcamp pages you can check out; it’s where I found a lot of them! Things are roughly arranged in the order I go through in the article, but also obviously feel free to skip around if you want; it’s not like the pacing of the music and writing will sync up, I’m not that skillful.

Also, if you’re a fan of these playlists or my game articles and want to be notified when they go up here, a reminder that you can sign up for my Out of Left Field mailing list below!

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Expert in a Dying Field, The Beths

I’m sure this will come as a shock to everyone, but my two playlists from last year featuring a few dozen recommendations? They don’t cover the entire sum of music released by humanity in the year 2022. So I spent the first but of the year catching up on some of the albums that I saw getting discussed on End of the Year Best lists, which is what brought me to New Zealand power pop band The Beths and their stellar record Expert in a Dying Field. And as you might be able to tell by looking at the contents of the playlist, I liked it so much that I wound up listening to even more of their stuff.

Really, I don’t know what else to say, other than it’s a perfect pop-rock record. The Beths excel at packing in catchy hooks and melodies that will get stuck in your head and have you singing along by the end of your first listen, even as they keep everything to reasonable lengths. The guitar riffs are jangly and energetic, the rhythm section is tight, and their vocal harmonies provide a lot of fun layering in the background. Lead singer Elizabeth Stokes has an understated but powerful vocal style that accentuates her lyrics, which have this beautiful melancholy to them, as she recounts all the anxieties that make up life and provides a cathartic release for those pent up emotions.

From the first notes of the opening titular track as it slowly builds from staccato pick ups to big chorus while weaving a metaphor between a failing relationship and seeing your life work die out, it has the way of just hooking you in, being relatable in an almost mundane way while also making you want to pump your fist to big guitar moments. But even the lower-key numbers, like “Your Side”, have an energy to them while still feeling intimate. And my favorite moment might be towards the end, “A Passing Rain”, another rumination on anxiety where Stokes relates her many fears before expressing shock and gratefulness at a partner who accepts her in spite of that, a sweet moment that’s made so much bigger by the kickass guitar riff and belted chorus of “I cave! Like I was built to break!/You stay! Like it’s a passing rain!” Man, it just feels like a high point that’s been slowly building for the entire album, even as there are so many good points on the way to it; I feel like I’m appreciating new songs each time I re-listen (even now, on my latest re-listen, I’m debating whether to swap in “Best Left” for one of these).

If you try Expert in a Dying Field and also find yourself liking it, my next move was trying the singles from before and after it, as well as their previous album, Jump Rope Gazers. It’s all just great in the same ways (check out “Dying to Believe” for a highlight), even if I think Expert is still a cut above them.