My Top Songs of 2025: An Exercise in Micro-Streaming
Only one of my artists cracks 1M monthly listeners on Spotify--and maybe that's how I like it.
End-of-year lists have a way of pretending they’re about taste, when they’re really about timing. These songs didn’t just land in my headphones this year — they arrived when I was ready to hear them.
They reflect movement, hesitation, maturity, and that uncomfortable awareness that proximity to something meaningful isn’t the same as actually touching it. If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s transit: between places, between selves, between the person you were and the one you’re quietly becoming.
‘Bangkok’ by wakelee opens the list with the deceptive energy of a song that sounds sun-drenched but isn’t interested in vacation. Echoes of early Bloc Party guitar work cut through an emphatic chorus that makes you question what Gen Z has against tanning — bright, urgent, almost confrontational.
But the song itself is about reluctance: a traveler in Bangkok who isn’t there for the sand or the spectacle, but for the reckoning that travel sometimes forces. It’s a song about realizing that movement doesn’t absolve you of unfinished business. That being near something doesn’t mean you’ve engaged with it. To be a person in transit, the song suggests, you don’t get to leave the loose ends behind.
That idea of becoming unrecognizable to yourself resurfaces in ‘Silhouette’ by In Passing. One of the quieter miracles of the streaming era is how algorithms can sometimes cut through geography and obscurity with surgical precision.
In Passing — an emo band made up of thirty-somethings from rural Missouri — would likely never have crossed my path otherwise. As one of their proud 295 monthly listeners, I can say the production value on “Silhouette” is anything but DIY.
A disconnected phone line hums in the background like an unanswered question while the lyrics ask whether you’ve become a shadow of someone else, or whether you’re actually living your own life. It’s a familiar emo theme, but filtered through experience — not adolescent despair, but adult unease. The kind that doesn’t scream, just lingers.
Dislocation takes a stranger, more communal form on ‘Bastard’ by Shoplifter. Little is known about this underground band from Victoria, BC, which feels appropriate given how the song itself resists clarity. Off-key guitars grind against deep, intoned vocals that feel closer to a hymn than a hook. Horns and piano drift in and out, never quite giving you what you expect, or what you think you want — and then somehow giving you exactly what you need.
‘Bastard’ captures the feeling of being young and misaligned with the world, of recognizing your own downtrodden experiences mirrored in others without romanticizing them. It’s messy, unresolved, and honest in a way that feels increasingly rare.
If Shoplifter captures communal dissonance ‘Say It For Yourself’ by Casino Hearts turns inward. The song feels like being dropped into a broken home — bell-like synths hovering over brushy drums and a low-fi, picked-at guitar. The lyrics are devastating in their restraint:
counting faces / in the mirror / in the chamber / of a beast i couldn’t help
There’s a sense of place and cadence here that cuts deep, but it’s the vocals that truly haunt. They transport me back to a softer time — like if The Cranberries were stripped of outright rage, leaving only a low, persistent hum. The song rises slowly, carefully, as if promising resolution… until it doesn’t. And that refusal to offer comfort feels honest. Some things don’t end cleanly.
Some wounds don’t close on cue.
Movement becomes gentler on ‘Essen’ by Nora Van Elken. The mysterious, largely anonymous (and presumed Dutch) DJ has built a discography that maps place through sound, and in 2025 that map led to Germany. Classical piano overtakes her usual minimal house framework, floating through breaks that feel perfectly suited for a rooftop wine night.
‘Essen’ isn’t a showstopper — and that’s the point. It functions as sonic glue, the connective tissue between moments, moods, and memories. It’s why Nora ended up as my most-listened-to artist this year: not because any one track dominates, but because the work understands how life actually moves.
Finally, ‘Sunset Years’ by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ closes the year with patience. Who else but a longtime collaborator with The 1975 would layer Murder, She Wrote voiceovers over a beach-hazed meditation on maturity?
Running nearly six minutes, the song barely changes on the surface. Angela Lansbury’s words drift in and out, the chords spaced wide enough to demand attention. Nothing here is rushed. The reward comes slowly, not in sound but in feeling — the realization that growth doesn’t always announce itself.
That’s a wrap on 2025: I really appreciate your readership, insights, and support.