Spotify Haters Club

You know something that is absolutely worth considering? Planning an exit from the culture-destroying, weapons-investing, ICE-advertisement platform known as Spotify, a place where music is seen only as a tool to destroy people's imaginations and flatten art into a homogenised, AI-friendly, beige churn of endless content to immiserate us all.

It's not that any of the other streaming services are good, but Spotify is almost certainly the worst. Do not trust it. Do not let it turn your enjoyment of music into stats and algorithmic playlists. Do not let it quietly funnel AI-slop into your daily mixes. Do not let it sort you into woefully inaccurate micro-demographics to better sell your data to advertisers (what’s the chances it shares this arbitrary-human-classify tech to its weapons company interests to decide who’s allowed to not get bombed?). Do not willingly give it free advertising by sharing league tables of bands on your socials. Don't do it. It is appropriating all that is great about loving music, all that is great about being part of the communities that surround music, and weaponising it against us all! If you don't believe me, read this book and see if it changes your mind.

Also, Brian Merchant recently wrote a fairly comprehensive how-to guide for leaving Spotify which is more practically useful than my contempt for them is. (Apologies for the Substack link... there's just no escaping these abhorrent tech companies is there).

A year or so ago I took the relatively nerdy option of building my own Plex server. I filled it with mp3s of my old cd collection I’ve carried around forever on hard drives, bandcamp purchases, and songs foraged from various corners of the internet. It was the best music-related decision I have made in years.

Plex offers only the vaguest of stats really. Just 'top ten most listened to artists'. Last year that chart was topped by Lana Del Rey followed by Ryuchi Sakamoto. This year it turned out to be... exactly the same. Which at first felt strange because I felt like I had listened to a lot more new music than last year.

But then, like a not-particularly-profound-thing hitting me at a sensible speed, I realised both of these things could be true. My Lana playlist remains a go-to for many moments, and I still think she has written some all time bangers, but that playlist serves a particular function for me. It is not quite background listening (or 'lean back' listening as they'd call it internally at Spotify), but it also isn't exactly active listening. I guess it is wandering around or commuting music for when my brain is elsewhere.

I still love listening to music I know inside out, that has travelled with me through large parts of my life. But it doesn't follow that music I only listen to a few times or even just once cannot also be impactful. I only read most books once, only see most films once. And — always wary of nostalgia — no matter how hard I might try, I will not be able to hear music for the first time and have the same reaction to it I did hearing new music in my teens or twenties. I bring too much to the text. I have seeped myself in noise for decades. This relationship has become different. I am still learning how to lean into that. But clearly, for me at least, not trusting any new music discovery to corporate algorithms is a step in the right direction.

So abandoning that one stat Plex offered, I made a filter to show a playlist of tracks that I had not heard before 2025 and that I had listened to at least once during this year and it became a much more interesting selection. And so, with some light editorialising and removing things that I immediately decided were rubbish (I am looking directly at you, latest Taylor Swift record), here are some cool albums I actively listened to this year, as opposed to musical anaesthetic that I lazily wrapped around myself to block out the rising existential horror of existing in 2025. Bandcamp links where possible. Happy Spotify Wrapped Season!

SOME GOOD MUSIC

Ben Lukas Boysen - Alta Ripa // Just gorgeous synth work. Ben's stuff always sounds like being wrapped in analog silk.

C Reider - The Mending Battle // What 'computer music' ought to sound like in a world where computers haven't become mostly awful and terrible.

Calum Gunn - Eroder // Really, really good. Wrote about it HERE.

Carly Rae Jepsen - E•MO•TION // Somehow I had never heard the whole album before. It's great.

Clark - Steep Stims // Clark absolutely back on top form with microtonal weirdness and clanging bangers.

Deftones - Private Music // It's another Deftones album. You already know exactly what it sounds like and what it does.

Emptyset - Dissever // Another band who always sound reassuringly like themselves. Rarely do I listen to this kind of thing these days but nice to know it's still there.

Grails - Miracle Music // Wrote about this HERE. Didn't stick with me as much as I thought it might, but that's my fault rather than the record's.

Greet Death - Die in Love // Fantastic, heart-on-sleeve stuff inspired by all your 90's alt-rock favourites.

JISOO - AMORTAGE // I just love this. Wrote about it HERE.

Jungle Fatigue Vol. 1 // Will give you jungle fatigue. Two thumbs up.

Jungle Fatigue Vol. 3 // As above.

Kendu Bari - Drink For Your Machine // Some solid drum'n'bass production.

Ledley - Ledley // Curious contemporary jazz. Sort of a bit like if Squarepusher were a brass-centric jazz band?

Native Soul - Teenage Dreams // Can't remember how I stumbed across this. Electronic deep house from South Africa. Very good. It makes writing beats that people will want to dance to seem effortless.

Noneless - A Vow of Silence // Some really great glitch production but it is sometimes overshadowed by occasional dubstep tangents that veer a little too close to Skrillex for me to be able to gel with.

Papé Nziengui - Kadi Yombo // Lively folk (harp-based?) energy from Gabon. I bet this is great to see live.

Paul Jebanasam - mātr // A gorgeous bruise of a record. Full of noise fluttering on the edge of distortion.

Polygonia - Da Nao Tian Gong // Some pretty techno. Easier said than done.

Tentacles of Destruction - Tentacles of Destruction // An old punk cassette I found on archive.org. It is VERY GOOD if you like mysterious old punk cassettes. The internet suggests they are from early 2000s New Zealand. Also the chorus of the first track sounds a lot like 'Perfect Teenhood' by ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

TROVARSI x ALX-106 - Frequencies EP // Some tough, utilitarian techno. Easier said than done.

Underworld - Strawberry Hotel // They've still got it, huh?

Ψ - Again There is Nothing Here // End of the world synth growls. That kind of analog broadcast that is cold, clinical yet simultaneously bursting with a warm of kind of hope(lessness).

Takashi Yoshimatsu - Symphony no. 2 // I know nothing about this and can't remember how or where I found it, but it is an absolutely sublime, really spectacular piece of work.