In order that I don’t ruin anybody’s Christmas, I should now confirm that I won’t be doing an end-of-year album list for 2025.
Now, there are plenty of music critic-friendly reasons not to do one. These include my feeling that this year hasn’t really deserved an end-of-year summary. It’s been one of those unglamorous consolidatory years for music – another 1969, 1974, 1983, 1992, 2002, 2012 (so many twos in there; does that indicate a cycle?) – with lots (and lots) of meaningful activity but little if anything in the way of actual breakthrough. A year of moments – we used to call them “singles” – has 2025 proved to be.
Another, more elemental reason is that I got it so spectacularly wrong last year. I listed Geordie Greep’s The New Sound as merely one of hundreds of very worthy also-rans (not to mention Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal) whereas I have continued to come back to it far more often than anything produced this year and it has proven to be one of those very rare albums that the listener is compelled to inhabit, to explore every last architectural and emotional corner.
You know, like we used to do with albums when we were teenagers. If nothing else (and be assured that there is a lot else), The New Sound has very firmly put paid to the idealistic, or more likely convenient, theory that once we “grow up” we don’t listen to albums in that way any more; they come, make their modest impact and retreat to the seldom-visited shelves.
The New Sound is an album in that profoundly uncommon order of Escalator Over The Hill, Rock Bottom, Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and The Lexicon Of Love, and I think my reaction to it has been the most intense and concentrated reaction I’ve experienced since Time (The Revelator) nearly quarter of a century ago.
In the nineties I had this sort of experience with a lot of albums, mainly because I walked everywhere, including to and from work, and listened to them repeatedly on Walkman headphones until I knew them as thoroughly as they could be known; this certainly applies to the first half of the nineties, if not nearly as much their second half.
In addition I was in my late twenties, going into my early thirties, at that time, and quite demonstrably hadn’t “grown up”; half a lifetime later, I’m not completely sure that I ever managed, so I’m uncertain how effective a case study this might be. What I am trying to say is that – I think it was albums that changed, not me. I didn’t get beyond the urge to absorb myself in an album’s fibres, but albums perhaps grew up or regressed instead. I don’t listen to albums the way I used to? At the age of sixty-one, The New Sound has instantly cured me of that popular misconception. The inquisitive magic in my mind still exists and prevails. The albums just needed to be…right, and the careful listener should expect to wait months, if not years or even decades, before they can feel themselves able to assess an album as it should be assessed.
Which latter of course hardly ever happens because capitalism demands immediate return on investments, hence we must react to albums immediately they happen because otherwise nobody will know about them or indeed buy them (hence they won’t make any money and the musicians won’t be asked to make another one), they will sink into benign oblivion and the musicians will be obliged to waste their creativity doing “real jobs” in order to remain alive. There are racks in record shops still to be filled, journalistic quotas to meet.
But there is a third and deeper reason for not compiling an end-of-year list in 2025, which is something that’s been nagging at and irking me for several years now; the fact that all of the end-of-year lists you see elsewhere look…awfully the same. The same records, the same new artists you’re expected to love, the gnarly old-timers whose new offering really isn’t going to rock anybody’s boat but they’ve served their apprenticeship, God bless them, the transiently-hyped, the antique favourites from when the music critic was at university and life had yet to impose itself on them.
And it’s cumulatively very tiring. The same dogmatic orthodoxy, the pained emphatic reliance on a specific form of music which really has nothing to offer anybody any more, the equivalent of those New Yorker short stories which are…yes, I know, it’s in the top three of music critic clichés, but…DULL AND WORTHY. No excitement, mischief or real joy (and certainly no sex – if anything, the presumed apotheosis of this kind of music is asexual). Palliative restraint for the old folk, whether in age or spirit. No thrills; watch that pacemaker. Nothing to which any pissed-off thirteen-year-old could relate. Bix Beiderbecke doing “Jazz Me Blues” (which, from title on down, is actually one of the sexiest pop records ever made) except the pupils now just slope off to TikTok instead of rioting and search for something else on Spotify.
I cannot and will not relate to gently glum funereal meditations about dying, impermanence and bereavement; De La Soul’s Cabin In The Sky, probably the second greatest album of their career, and typically released too late for anybody’s end-of-year poll, is a brilliantly profound and importantly also very funny (and infinitely more heartfelt) retort to that whole line of anti-thought, as well as putting a lie to the fable that old people can’t make great music any more (tell that to Suede or Stereolab, who also released some of the best work of their respective careers this year).
“The Silent Life Of A Truth,” Cabin In The Sky’s fourteenth track, is also a timely refutation of one of the deadest, most dishonest pop albums I’ve ever heard (sorry, Barney Hoskyns in the NME of 1984 talking about Spandau Ballet’s “I’ll Fly For You,” but those words were too good not to remix – and anyway, I owe you an apology, B.H….you were absolutely right about her), a record which we knew was instantly rotten, released not by the world’s biggest pop star, but by a madwoman who thought she was the world’s biggest pop star. And I had placed her previous album joint second in my 2024 list with brat. I needn’t have bothered. Is she still the most important pop star ever? My feeling is that she is now out to assassinate pop music.
Yet there is a fourth reason for not doing a list of albums this year, which far dwarfs the other three. That reason is that I am sick to my front and back teeth of lists, of rankings. Confine rankings to taxi stops. This craving to put everything in a comprehendible order is actually killing the thing we’re ordering (about). Yes I know, life is random and scary and in the absence of a convenient figure such as God the only way to make sense of something that is innately insensible is to make lists, to determine what is better than what else.
I mean, what were charts for (that could be a question on Mitchell and Webb’s Quiz Broadcast, couldn’t it – “what was hope?”) if not to place things in order, not simply for the benefit of the music industry, but also appealing directly to the “If so many others like this, so should I, else I am ABNORMAL” herd instinct (paraphrasing what Charles Shaar Murray, also in the NME but in late 1980, said about Top Of The Pops) – and we all possess that instinct; don’t kid on that you don’t, it’s part of the human condition – and our basic need to understand what’s what?
But there’s something also very juvenile about making those lists, isn’t there, about obsessing over where something “comes” in the imagined grander scheme of things, instead of simply enjoying the music. Yes, Older’s a great album – but what are “your” top five George Michael songs RANKED and IF NOT WHY NOT? Like William Holden’s Max in Network, I long ago put that sort of thinking away in the school playground, where it belongs.
If you look at most contemporary end-of-year album lists (i.e. at the time they were compiled), very few of what are now thought of as the accepted great albums turn up in them. Mostly they are transient favourites, solid fifth or eighth albums by long-serving reliables, placebos to their assumed (by the all-conquering marketing and accounts departments) consumer demographic, rather than future classics. That’s because most great albums don’t immediately bounce towards you bearing grandiose claims to greatness – see this year’s overhyped and overfunded fashion show soundtrack masquerading as avant-garde art – but take time to disclose their innate greatness. They, to use an ancient term, grow on you.
Whereas end-of-year lists, or any lists when you come to think of them (tip: don’t), are mostly assembled for purposes of commerce. The assemblers are businesspeople seeking enhanced trade. Which is, or ought to be, inimical to the essence of what art, including music, is about. I have no time left for lists; I’m living in stoppage time as it is. Stop trying to order things. Embrace the delighting chaos instead. Recommence tracing that random pop map you conceived in your twelve-year-old mind and carve out your own, independent road, which in the end is the only road worth taking. Where, unlike school, there are no rules, as opposed to lists, the presumed necessity for which is something that is generally impressed upon the minds of children in school. And we left school a very, very long time ago.
