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.

Built with Kit

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: 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.

Built with ConvertKit

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 2024 Playlist (Tenth Anniversary Edition!!)

Just in the nick of time, we have a Music Monday update with my second playlist of 2024! This is another big one (covering my listening from January through roughly the first week of May, although this is mostly just for my sake; I'm not super timely, and mostly just check stuff out when I get around to it), but I had fun discovering some new music and then writing about it.


And this is a big playlist in multiple ways: next week (June 7th) is also the tenth Anniversary of Out of Left Field! I doubt I’ll have time to put together another big piece, so you can think of this one as the Big Anniversary Post for the occasion.


As usual, here are the links to the Spotify and YouTube Playlists, each in roughly-article order:

Notes: The same songs are missing on both playlists, so I’ll just link to those Bandcamps. You can find 7mai’s tracks here, alpha’s here and here (or their Soundcloud), Prom Nite’s here, and Lauryl Sulfate’s here. Also, in case any of my former English teachers are reading this, I know album titles are usually italicized, but I used single quotation marks here because Blogger has been making fixing formatting very tough, and I’d like to minimize that.

Built with ConvertKit

As always, you can read a full copy of the playlist at the end of the article. And remember, a lot of these artists (especially the smaller ones) can be found on Bandcamp, if you want to support them!



The Best Stuff:

Good Kid: I'm not really sure how to describe their style? Every description I could find just leaves it at "indie rock", which feels overly broad. The closest thing I can think of is j-rock, but I feel a little weird calling a Canadian band that performs exclusively in English "Japanese rock", even if that is clearly is one of their major influences. But sound-wise, that probably is the closest fit. Although now that I think about it, I guess it is kind of weird that there aren't more English-language takes on that style. Either way, I enjoy it a lot, and ended up including songs from all four of their self-titled EPs here. The most recent one released back in March and has probably my favorite two songs of theirs, the frantic and frenetic “Break” and a high-energy cover of Laufey’s “From the Start”; limiting myself to just two selections per record was tough, but even with the high baseline, these two stood out as easy picks.


Bad Moves: I checked this DC-band out because I saw them compared to The New Pornographers somewhere. Not sure I would have made that comparison, but I do see it; they have a similar sort of power pop style, but with a higher energy and a little more stripped-down/straightforward? I started with their debut album ‘Tell No One’ and very quickly moved on to their follow-up ‘Untenable’. Picking songs from them was difficult; I could have really gone with any combination here and been happy, there really isn’t a clunker here, and any time I put it on, time just seems to start flying. It’s apparently been nearly four years since ‘Untenable’, and they finally released new singles in December and April, so I’m hoping for Album 3 soon!