i listened to 200 albums in 2025, and i made 52 soups!

my favorite albums that came out this year my favorite albums that came out in past years

i listened to exactly 200 albums in 2025! it’s way less than the last couple years! for basically the entire year whenever someone asked what i’d been listening to lately i said i was in a rut, and it was alway true. i got out of the rhythm of listening to music on my way to/from work when i started biking to work last january, started listening to more music at work when i started working functionally solo for most of my day, and then stopped working there and fell off. i’ve even fallen out of the habit of putting on music when chilling at home and especially when cooking, which historically has been the big new music time!! this has happened before, i usually oscillate between “music is good right now” and “podcast is good right now”, but podcast has been bad for basically the entire year and i still don’t put on music :/ . treacherous brain!!

it is really just falling out of the habit, because there have been times where whenever i put something on i liked it, like in december, but there’s a block in my brain where i don’t put anything on. i think part of it is that it’s gotten harder for me to spontaneously listen to music. i stopped paying for spotify in august, which fuck those guys and i don’t regret that at all, but i didn’t really have anything to replace it with. i almost always use bandcamp now, which is great!!! but a lot of bigger artists aren’t on there, which has come up when i want to listen to albums by people like grace jones or madonna, and in rare cases it blocks you from listening to an album more than three times if you haven't bought it. and that’s great! i should and will buy music on bandcamp!! the other things i’ve been using are soundcloud, which has always had ads on my phone, and on youtube, which my laptop adblocker recently stopped blocking ads on. so i avoid those mostly!!! i’ve been getting into souls**k, which rocks, but it’s much less spontaneous if i’m trying to put on something new on during my trolley ride.

when i do spontaneously listen to music now, it's been nts. i love it! it’s close enough to my music tastes (primarily dance music ambient and jazz with a focus on the overlooked/experimental/strange, sometimes they have guitars or label showcases or really anything. honestly my only critique is that they play too much downtempo but i recognize i am biased) that one of the two stations is at least Fine, especially if i’m at work and just wanna hear a kick drum, and if i’m really lucky it’s one of the best dj sets i’ve heard. many djs also have an extensive archive of their monthly shows. i listened to most of jane remover’s wait watch this shows (all amazing!! she is a genius. i listen to the june 21 set pretty often), and everything chuquimamani-condori has put out on there. because i get the aux at predictable times of day at work, i also have gotten familiar with the weekly shows that run then, like the spinee set on saturday nights that is reliably fantastic and strange. her bio says she was on pc music but i’d never heard of her before this. she’s great! dj wawa also has a monthly show that is always a welcome treat. in general’s nts’s programming is great. i happened to be listening to the NTS Guide to Indian Classical Influence on Jazz that rocked my world and another time i happened to be listening to the NTS Guide to Digicore that aged me so much i turned into dust. two hours of these!! what a treat!! huge fan of nts and i want to incorporate it more into my listening habits at home and keep up with specific artist’s shows.

a very brief shoutout to the humble fm radio. this year i was very brave and admitted to myself that i prefer wprb from princeton to wkdu from drexel even though wprb is based in new jersey and wkdu is based up the street. basically every time i tune into wprb they are playing some weirdo shit i either enjoy or at least am compelled by. sometimes it’s bog standard college rock! then i put on nts. but the hit percentage is soooo much higher for wprb than wkdu. it’s tragic! i wish the radio i have in my house would pick up wprb (or the eagles broadcasts!) but it’s easy enough to put on my phone or computer and let go for a while. i just want to use my radio more. i don’t listen to either of these to follow specific djs like my friends do, but whenever i put it on on saturday morning and i remember it’s the indian classical station i smile. maybe 2026 will finally be the year of the pirate radio for me!!

i feel like my music taste changed very little last year, much less than it did in 2024. i still like scary kick drum music and free jazz, i still get annoyed every time i hear a guitar unless you’re more eaze or sonny sharrock, i still like it when it’s confrontational noise, i still really like it when the song is more than 20 minutes long, i still think the minimum tempo for club music should be 160.

my goals i wrote down last year were to listen to more dj mixes, delineate more genres of dance music in my head, and listen to even more music from outside the anglosphere. i listened to much more dj mixes, both incidentally on nts and intentionally putting sets on. i’m better at identifying more types of club music, which i’ve mostly done by going to dj sets with my friend, leaning over and saying “gabber” and then she smiles and says “hardstyle” and i say “fuck” and then i do better next time. incidentally this is also how i’ve learned about birds. still much to learn! i did a decent job at listening to more international music, but i was still focused on us/europe and something i want to keep expanding. i would like to find specific bandcamp pages that do a lot of reissues and trust their curation. the main music site i’ve read for the past few years, stereogum, is going behind a paywall, which is great and they should do that, but i won’t go with it. they’ve primarily covered music i’m not interested in the past couple years but they had a couple good monthly columns i relied on for music discovery, so i have to do something new now. i’m thinking of becoming a resident advisor guy. sure!! i continue to find ways that cohost shutting down has soured my relationship with being online and music discovery is For Sure one of them. i miss that place! people were so excited to talk about anything they liked.

anyway! that was my music year. i have fewer three thumbs up releases than last year (just three! los thuthanaka, skrillex, and ninajirachi) because i tried to be more choosy; my criteria is that it either blows my mind so astoundingly or it opens up a whole new genre for me / seriously changes how i think about a genre. it didn’t happen very often this year. a highlight the past few years has been seeing people/people’s tastes show up in my listening habits, which i also felt like was rare this year. i think partially because i’ve been in a rut i’ve been talking less about music to my friends, and also i’m meeting fewer new people than i was when i was in a band and a little more social. i also continue to remember that my taste diverges pretty strongly from other people’s; i was talking to a beautiful woman about the music i was excited about and i played her the new skrillex album and summun bukmun umyun by pharoah sanders within about five minutes of each other and got a bemused but mostly baffled and slightly concerned look as i floundered trying to explain why i like them. i don’t think i did a very good job at all!!! however we are now dating :). she is very patient.

for the coming year i want to incorporate the ipod that is sitting on my nightstand into everyday use + to commit to doing frequent small imports of audio files to have something new to listen to (a goal i have had since 2022); i want to learn to dj and then spin a set (a goal i have had since 2020); i want to find new avenues like blogs or smaller websites that are talking about music that i am interested in; i want to buy more music on bandcamp and download more mp3s; i want to force myself to relearn the listening-to-music-at-home habit i’ve had in prior years; i want to play a show non-dj style; i want to talk to more people about music in person. attainable!!

Just OK year for music! good year for soups!

i saw someone online in december 2024 who had made 50 soups in a year and i said i bet i could do that and then i did that. i made 52 soups this year!! if you count risotto as a soup, 50 if you don’t. but i think you should count risotto as a soup. i don’t think i like learned anything huge about myself through doing this, but it was still a lot of fun. very quick reflections

january!! we did it!

feb

march!

april

may

june

july

august

sept

oct

nov

dec