I never thought I’d see this pressed to vinyl. An absolute staple of my high-school life and adding this to the collection brings immense joy.
This makes me so happy. I … really never expected I'd be listening to new The Academy Is… music again. Up there with The Format as the most shocking/exciting to me over the last year or so. Spoiler: The entire album has the same breezy vibe as this song. Feels like a mother fucking spring day set to music. "L Train" sent me into an immediate groove.
Getting Last.fm Counts in Raycast
Look, I like Last.fm. It’s fun. I like seeing my stats. I’ve written about it a lot.
I include my weekly stats on all of my Top 9 posts and during the week I often like to see where I’m at. So, I wrote a simple script for Raycast to quickly calculate the stats and output them in the app:
The script’s on Github.
Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2025
Why hello here, it looks like it’s time for yet another best of list.
You can subscribe to my newsletter if you’re interested in a weekly rundown of the music and other entertainment I consume, and the staff compiled best of 2025 list can be found here.
Read More “Jason Tate’s Top Albums of 2025”Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2025
I spent a huge amount of time and emotional energy in 2025 going back through the back pages of my own music listening history. The My Life In 35 Songs series, which I launched in March and wrapped on my 35th birthday in November, provided space on this website every week for me to gush about the music that shaped who I am. It was a massive commitment, and it left little time for any other type of music writing. But it also served as a stirring reminder of how important a good song or a great album can be. For those of us on this website, music doesn’t stop being formative or emotionally resonant just because we got beyond those teenage years of self-discovery and first-time experiences. On the contrary, if you give yourself over to it, music can continue to be a true companion for your entire life.
With that thought in mind, I dove into compiling my best-of-the-year list for 2025 with as much enthusiasm and excitement as I’ve ever brought to a year-end list before. My Life In 35 Songs felt freeing and invigorating because the structure of it gave me permission to be 100 percent honest – not only about the music I’ve loved, but also about life experiences that had previously felt too raw or too private to share. I wanted to bring that energy to this list – to try to tune out any kind of popular consensus and zero in on the albums that felt vital to me. The resulting list has a bunch of albums you’ll surely recognize, but also a few I haven’t seen on a single other list so far. Just like My Life In 35 Songs, it feels true to who I am and to the life I lived this year.
That life was as confounding as ever in 2025 – a year that saw America go fascist, that saw seemingly every industry embrace the scourge of generative AI, and that saw me bristling against a growing number of indicators that I am simply not that young anymore. Along the way, though, I found a lot of records that did make me feel young again, or that gave me hope and light amidst the growing darkness. Here are a few dozen of them.
Read More “Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2025”Adam Grundy’s Top Albums of 2025
Another year has come and gone, but the tunes will remain. And what a year it was! 2025 thrilled with key reunions of bands like The Starting Line, Yellowcard, and Motion City Soundtrack, while some solo albums from Hayley Williams, Luke Spiller, and Taylor Acorn all made their way onto top spots in my personal list. In this blog, I’ve hyperlinked to my past work on this site in ’25, and added in some new blurbs if I didn’t get around to writing about the record during the year. I hope everyone had a peaceful and relaxing holiday season, and 2026 seems poised to be just as strong in the music front.
Read More “Adam Grundy’s Top Albums of 2025”Garrett Lemons’ Top Albums of 2025
It’s been an interesting year around these parts. Like always, music, books, and television has played an integral part of how I cope with the daily stress of life, the added stress of the world we live in, and just in general with how I interact with those around me. I don’t have all that much to say, but if you know who I am from being around Chorus and AbsolutePunk for the last twenty years, here’s some things that I found to be class this year.
Read More “Garrett Lemons’ Top Albums of 2025”Trevor Graham’s Top Albums of 2025
End of the year – you know what time it is.
A wise man named Smash (but it’s Dr. Mouth to you) once said “the years start coming and they don’t stop coming”. He was so right for that. 2025 felt a decade long, but also it’s already December again. What’s that about? Not a fan!
Some real bullshit in the world this year, dude! I know it’s not what you came here to read about, so I won’t get into it. But if life feels more and more like circling the drain these days, I get it, and implore you to hang in there. Yes, Dr. Mouth, our world is also on fire – but every now and then we get a One Battle After Another. Or go to Red Rocks for the first time. Or compete in a parallel parking contest. Or watch stand up comedy in a park on a summer afternoon. And it’s like, oh shit, life is pretty tight actually!
Wonderful year in music though – it was tough narrowing down to 50 selections. Can you believe I did it? Applause break please. My fun little annual project at the end of every year is to count down my list over the course of a week on Instagram stories – it’s not the ideal platform for something like that, but I like to think of it as an exercise in concise (and very casual) writing since there’s a limit on space for text. Below you’ll find my favorite albums of the year, with all of those little blurbs. If you don’t care about any of that, scroll to the bottom of this page for a screenshot of the list in its entirety.
Read More “Trevor Graham’s Top Albums of 2025”
Chorus.fm Wrapped – 2025 Edition
I’ve been wanting to build something like this for a while and used the last quiet days of 2025 to finish it. I needed to figure out a better way to handle a bunch of people hitting the page at the same time and better cache the results so it’s not calculating the big queries with each hit. And after a soft launch in the Q&A thread I think I’m relatively comfortable that the servers can handle it as built.
The feature is a supporter only perk and can be found here: forum.chorus.fm/wrapped
It will take ten to thirty seconds to render the first time and then should be instant after that when you return (same thing for past years if you go back in time). It will automatically update to the new year on January 1st each year, and when I come up with other stats to calculate I’ll update the script to include those as well. I went with the basics to start with.
I thought this could be something fun to start off the year with.
And that’s a wrap on 2025.
All the stats are totaled and my most played albums of the year are on slide two. Best of the year lists will be posted on the website on January 5th.