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Showing posts from January, 2026

Song Recommendation: “Farum Azul” by Hadal Sherpa (2025)

You’d be forgiven for not making it to the bottom of my big list for highlights from 2025’s Q4 but I really don’t want the tunes from this fantastic hard-prog rock band from Finland to slip through the cracks. They actually put out two albums in 2025 and while I recommended their output from December for the previous post (obviously) I want to now recommend a track from the record they dropped in May. Not to repeat myself but I can’t conjure anything better than what I wrote two weeks back when I said their style of psychedelic post-rock “occasionally drifts into dreamy territory before compressing into little mini-novas of sound, exploding out in all directions with a grandiose, bright white heat."

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My Favorite Music from 2025

Here’s where I usually drop a fairly long preamble in which I try to sum up my year in music to some degree or another, whether it’s trying to find disparate themes or some other common touchstone. But this year? 

It’s been a year. 


Despite everything, it was an incredible year for music and I’m excited to share with you what stood out to me the most this year. In the past, I’ve broken this up into two separate posts with favorite albums and songs but, fittingly I think for 2025, this year it’s all coming to you at once. Below are links to Tidal playlists for my favorite 50 albums, 100 songs, and assortment of EPs. 


2025 has been one of the most challenging in my life so far. Music has been one of the few balms to get me through it. I don’t know how I can wrap up any kinds of thoughts on this most fraught of years with any kind of coherence or, really, relevance. So I have to remind myself of my own refrain at concerts: “Less Talk! More Rock!” and just get into it. I've published 3 playlists on Tidal if you'd like to listen along.


Happy listening and here’s to 2026!





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Song Recommendation: “Self Satisfaction” by Addicus (2025)

Sometimes there’s a single element of a song that grabs me from the jump and makes me immediately pop it onto my shortlist for this very blog. In this case, I was 20 seconds into the first track off of the power-pop debut record from Addicus when I heard those glorious “chugga-chugga” distorted guitars that make up the underpinning of each verse. It’s a great song in total, of course, but man, those guitars…

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Song Recommendation: “Hot Stones” by Lazersleep (2025)

Prog/Psych rockers Lazersleep’s album from last summer, Gravity contains only four tracks but runs nearly an hour long, which should give you an idea of this band’s priorities. I’m recommending the shortest track here but don’t take it to mean the whole thing isn’t worth your time. I was kind of shocked to see that this is the group’s debut record as they sound so relaxed and lived in with their sound. “Hot Stones” starts with a tumbling beat that remains the driving force for the duration, spacy guitars quickly layer and build before, finally, ethereal vocals float in at the minute and a half mark. From here the song keeps its foot on the gas as it pulls you deeper and deeper into its swirling sonic morass. 
 
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2025 Quarter 4 Notable Albums

 And here we are, finally in 2026. The last couple months of this year were even harder to keep track of than the first nine, but we were certainly rewarded with some incredible music in spite of all the chaos spinning in the world around us. I’ll be back in a week or two with my write-ups for favorite music overall from 2025, though, if you’ve been reading along, by this point you should have a pretty good idea of how my lists are going to shake out. Regardless, there’s always more music to discover! Here’s to 2026 and more art by humans, for humans, forever and ever, amen!


Note: This is a long post folks so I've hidden the rest under the fold for easy scrolling. 

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Media Recommendations: Video Essays

A bit of a left-field pivot but a friend of mine asked for some video essay recommendations and as I started compiling a list, it occurred to me that the “genre” (or whatever you want to call it) of video essay is one that I value wholeheartedly. There are, of course, a lot of different shades to the “format” (still struggling with how exactly to define the umbrella term here) that range from the media analysis, mini-documentaries, political discussions and everything in-between. And, of course, for me, lots and lots about video games. As I typed out a text to my friend, the list kept getting longer, even as I tried to limit myself to one or two max videos per creator I wanted to highlight, so I decided to turn this into a bit of a blog post to make linking to the videos a bit easier. I also am leaving out most commentary as I think the videos all pretty much speak for themselves. And while a lot of these are indeed media discussions, I have found that these video essayists almost always work to create a singular experience in and of itself with their works: meaning that you really don’t have to have played, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 to get a lot of value out of Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ masterful treatise on the matter (I am one of those people, actually).

And for a bit of food for thought for those still scratching their heads at the idea of a video essay being artistic works themselves, I also urge you to watch what may be the ur-video essay of the modern era (though very far removed from youtube and video games), Spanish Erice’s La Morte Rouge, which can be seen on a weird Daily Motion channel here. Made in 2006, I’m certainly not claiming that any modern youtube based video essayist has even seen this relatively obscure short film from one of world cinema’s most elusive and enigmatic directors, but like carcinisation, I think that what we’ve come to see as a “video essay” can arise spontaneously from any creative thinker with a penchant for combining personal history, observational writing, media analysis, politics and visual storytelling (amongst other things). There’s quite a bit to be said about the democratization of filmmaking tools that has also helped spurn so many “amateur” creators into getting their work out there, but that’s probably a discussion for another time. 

This is a long list so I’ve hidden the rest of this post behind the link below. Happy viewing!
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