Thurston Moore appears to have been the straw that's broken this particular camel's back. Three days ago he posted a list of the "350 Best Records of 2025" on Substack - note, records, not albums. I had to go down to number eleven to find a choice that I agreed with but that's neither here nor there (his top record was the E.P. Fundus by the Antwerp-based harpist and composer Laura de Jongh, very much a recital that summons a respectful nod rather than a passionate embrace).
This exercise has provoked a fairly virulent response, best summed up by one Bluesky poster in the words: "shut the fuck up old man nobody cares anymore." All of a sudden, as 2025 hiccups to an unseemly close, nobody indeed does. I don't claim that Mr Moore was inspired by my list of the 550 (or so) best albums of 2024 from twelve months ago, but last year mattered musically in a way that this year has not.
Speed-checking my own records, I find at a charitable best about 250 albums from this year, all of which I have listened to thoroughly, that I once might have wanted to convert into some sort of order - and I probably only liked about a third of those enough to want to get them physically. To that I could add about fifty more that are either really not very good or plainly unremarkable - and most of the latter are the ones which appear to have cropped up in so many end-of-year lists, lauded and applauded. We have to ask ourselves why this has happened.
I think the root lies in the likelihood that music criticism is fundamentally run on a very wrongheaded basis. In the early days of music magazines, which until the mid-1960s, and in many cases well into the 1970s, were essentially trade papers servicing the industry, reviews of records were utilitarian and to the point. The new Beatles or Rolling Stones discs were generally summed up as "another solid effort from the boys" and their reviews told you exactly what the records sounded like and what you might reasonably expect from them.
Whereas I can search through reams of reviews of, for example, Lily Allen's West End Girl, and find acres of lyrical analysis but practically nothing that tells me what the record actually sounds like. This is in huge part to do with the fact, as Charles Shaar Murray pointed out half a lifetime ago, that most music critics are disillusioned English Literature graduates who view the text as paramount and know little, if anything, about musical theory. Added to that is the knowledge that readers are dissuaded by musical analysis, which is usually too technical for them to understand, unlike the Good Story promised by the lyrics.
Pretty much all of this type of thinking is undermined by the fact that, as I have lately been reminding myself, the late James Hamilton ran reviews in each week's Record Mirror packed with simple information about what records sounded like, down to beats per minute. It is true that his were specialist pages tailored specifically for professional disc jockeys. Yet he was easily able to communicate his deep love of music in clear and simple terms which hit with laymen such as myself. As with anyone, he had his likes and dislikes, but always kept an open mind and happily welcomed new developments in music; Arthur Russell was on an equal footing with Five Star (although Mr Hamilton rightly thought the former much better than the latter!).
And there was never a trace of sentimentality in Hamilton's writing. Unlike James Murphy, he was there, in the late fifties when discotheques had become the new fashion in Paris, in the early sixties when the Beatles and Motown were emerging; he spent most of my birth year, 1964, visting the Harlem Apollo on a weekly basis. Yet he understood, as so few writers do, that living in the past was really camouflaged dying. In his words, he'd much rather hear next month's hit than another dredged-up oldie, and I am in complete concordance with that philosophy. He was banging the drum for what would become House music in 1984, had little time for Rare Groove which he rightly viewed as the province of superior-feeling spivs.
All I see now in music writing - and to a huge degree also in broadcasting, but that's another story to which I'll come shortly - is what the aforementioned James Murphy might have described as borrowed nostalgia for two or three unremembered decades ago (as far as "Losing My Edge" is concerned, I myself would call it "the misremembered eighties" but more about that anon). Bands and artists whose records the critics bought when they were at university and to which they remain sentimentally attached; how else to explain the unmerited approval of Pulp's almost wholly unremarkable More, as opposed to relatively-unheralded but excellent albums by Suede, Stereolab and Ash which quite clearly are not content to dwell in the past?
Or the fortysomething columnists who sang along to Alright Still a generation ago and are happy to cheer on good old Lily fighting the good fight against her celebrity actor bastard husband because sisters are doing it for themselves (if not necessarily for anyone else). West End Girl stands as one symbol of this misapplied thinking; ravenously hyped up - and therefore streamed out of curiosity - by these same columnists (and no one else) at the time of its release, it spent four weeks in the album top ten (peaking at a reluctant number two) before going into commercial freefall. On actual sales it peaked at number eighteen and was gone after a fortnight. In Ireland it charted for a month, while in Scotland it didn't chart at all. A forthcoming physical release might revive the record, but fundamentally it is commercially dead. The fish didn't bite at the bait. I listened to it in full twice and couldn't remember how any of its songs went, even while I was listening to them, only knowing that I wasn't really bothered who "Madeline" was. In the meantime, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms Kitchen Disco herself and just over six years Allen's senior, returned virtually unnoticed with Perimenopop, a genuinely brilliant and eminently danceable examination of what it feels like to be a woman in your mid-forties who is treated by society with patronising contempt.
There is also the residual and seemingly unshakable nostalgia for polite mid-late nineties guitar-based indie music. Listening to the new and umpteenth releases by Big Thief and Wednesday, it is hard to shake the feeling that the sand is well and truly running out in that hourglass and that this type of music has about as much to say to people in 2025 as. well, the music of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen would have had to say to Prodigy fans (notwithstanding the actually rather tangible thread of Essex-based all-night raves that connects the two). It's a bit like Jazz Journal voting for a Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven box set as album of the year in 1980 (which they did). The world today is a miserable and hellish place and sitting about pondering and wallowing in that misery isn't going to improve it. This music is the equivalent of New Yorker fiction, tales for melancholy centrists about ageing philosophy lecturers nearing the end but still having affairs with students young enough to be their grandchildren (see also the normally excellent Divine Comedy's really dreary new album with its soporific reflections on ageing, bereavement and other things I already know about; cheer me up, Neil, and stick to the comedy character studies at which you're so good).
Or the urge for something, anything, to fill that gap in the ageing music writer's mind. You know that feeling, or at least Hornby summed it up in High Fidelity, about the Saturday lunchtime record shopper who mooches gloomily around the shop for half an hour only to come back to that blues compilation he saw when he came in, which probably isn't that great but at least it's something? That's much the case with Geese (the band, not the waterfowls). I liked Cameron Winter, alone with his piano, on Later With Jools Holland, then found his Heavy Metal album samey, overproduced and irritating. Writer Phil Freeman best described Geese as "Timothée Chalamet in The Thom Yorke Story." I've listened to Getting Killed on three separate occasions and can find nothing in it save utterly generic "alternative" rock music sung by Rufus Wainwright with a bad cold and questionable politics (I refer you specifically to the song "Taxes"). But there's no real U2, Radiohead or Strokes any more, and obviously no more Smiths or Stone Roses (you can't resurrect the bass player), so...they will do.
I'm aware that by saying this I'm potentially placing myself in the same camp as boring old sixties heads who looked at the Pistols in 1976 and sighed, "I've seen this all before with The Who." But what the Pistols were doing, and more importantly how they were doing it, was entirely new and different. They tore a new gap in the market, whereas Geese should more properly be called Polyfilla.
Or the desperation to find what critics can comfortably perceive as newness. I've already gone on about Rosalia's Sarah Brightman/Vivaldi tribute album/fashion show soundtrack Lux here and will only add here that in ten years from now, people will look back in wonderment at how we were so taken in by its arrogance, pomp and pretentiousness, and understand why the next punk explosion - whatever that turns out to be - needed to happen (it's apparently all really about Bad Bunny, except that Bad Bunny made much the better record this year).
And of course there is the disaster that is The Life Of A Showgirl. I said things about TS being the most important star pop has ever known in my 2024 summary, and it turns out that I was right, but in all the wrong ways. One awaits the radio commercial: "were you mis-sold a T*yl*r Sw*ft album that was marketed as wall-to-wall dance bangers but turned out to be the same old miserable acoustic shit as before? Call this number..." Or: were you mis-sold a Labour government at the last election?
Same old miserable acoustic shit. In 2025 I've listened to Tortured Poets zero times, but can't stop playing brat. Charli xcx responded to TS' platitudinous misreading of her song in the best way, i.e. by not acknowledging it at all and going off to work on a film soundtrack with John Cale. But even the reasonable TS stuff gets tainted by the smugness of Showgirl, a record whose sole aim is to game the charts, or whatever constitutes the charts these days - as with the profoundly ordinary "Ordinary," one cannot imagine people streaming "Ophelia" for more than a few seconds, as opposed to the kids at the back of the bus or the ladies in the office who sing along to "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" and "Golden," or anybody in Ireland, where "EURO-COUNTRY" has become a new folk song for the ages - a record which appears to exist for no other reason than to allow TS to continue being TS for another six months or so.
I can't remember any of the songs on Showgirl without prompting, and horrible songs they mostly are too, apart from the last one which is markedly saved by the intervention of Sabrina Carpenter (whose Man's Best Friend bears all the wit and inventiveness - and, if you listen carefully, also the spite - that Sw*ft once naturally possessed). The get-out clause that this is yet another persona, an imagining of the horrible character TS might turn into, doesn't work because T*yl*r isn't Bowie. Songs worshipping your fiancée's, um, attributes, laments for those who have been "cancelled," the singer's significant refusal to condemn what Harry Shearer calls the Felon-in-Chief's use of her music in his campaigns - this all points to an imminent Republican trad wife and the eventual horror that really this was what she, and therefore by extension all pop music, was about; just the urge to make money, devoid of all other considerations.
Oh, squeal certain critics, how dare you criticise a Pop Superstar for making a fun album about decadence - well, it has to sound decadent in order for that to work. And as far as both Lux and Showgirl are concerned - along with too many other things this year (Wolf Alice's thoroughly unconvincing this-is-what-we-always-wanted-to-do-honest schtick about their retreat into a late eighties Fleetwood Mac tribute band) - they are assumed to be immune to criticism, especially when the person criticising them is a MAN, and you wouldn't be saying this about those records if they were made by MEN?
Which assumption, needless to say (if not to pun), is complete bollocks. If you do not worship Rosalia or T*yl*r you are by definition a misogynist. How does that explain Hayley Williams' astonishing Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, where she rages against not only what's happened to her throughout her life and career, but also at what those running/destroying her own country are doing? Or JADE's funny, furious and inventive THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY!, the real sequel to Chemistry? Or savagely wonderful albums by, to name but four, Lady Gaga, Self Esteem, Marina, or Lorde? I could go on. Women are in control of pop right now, and that is really as it should be (since in history, from Connie Francis through ABBA to Madonna, they have always been). But we cannot overlook the fact that all of us, now and again and regardless of gender, are also capable of making not very good records.
So what, you ought to ask, was good about 2025's music - and would anyone even notice? I'm not sure anybody cares enough about anything any more to notice, and it certainly isn't helped, either by radio or television, or by social media. There exists this stranglehold of selective nostalgia which is actively suffocating newness. At the beginning of the year I had a little empire of musical blogs which, with two exceptions (this being one, and the other only has another five chapters to go before it finishes), I have allowed to run down. Lena and I agreed to finish Then Play Long the way we did because we felt that its story had been fully told without the need to take another (at the time of writing) 832 (!) albums into account (and in any case it is highly unlikely that I would live long enough to bring that blog up to date; furthermore, I concluded my piece on Mezzanine with a macabre alternate-universe twist so subtle that nobody seems to have got it!).
Uncorrected Bound Proof was an unpublishable spent folly. The Ogun Records blog didn't do anywhere near enough business to convince me that it serviced anything more than an extremely narrow niche interest. This one comes and goes. I'll be taking the Young Punctum blog towards its natural conclusion because if anything that's really blossomed and it's been a pleasure (if also something of a stress, having to do all that retyping) to run it (although nobody who doesn't already know about it or me is reading it or picking up on it).
What all of these blogs, except the one you're reading now, have in common is that they concern themselves with - rest in peace, John Miles - music of the past...and there's far too much of that happening now; too much looking back and missing the art for the trash. If the eighties meant anything to me musically it was in terms of newness and nowness - there was so much new music demanding my urgent attention that I had the neither the time nor inclination to revisit the old stuff. It was exciting and dangerous (but in a good way). Yet if I switch on the radio in Britain now - digital or online - all I hear are the same old bland chestnuts, songs I thought were boring at the time or good songs slaughtered by overexposure, whereas I still want to hear what's happening tomorrow. One would think that starting up an internet radio station would give you free licence to play what you like, except what people seem to like are gnarled oldies too crappy even to pass as camp that you can hear anywhere.
The exception that proves the ironic rule - given its history - is Radio One, which presentation-wise I find unlistenable for more than about five seconds before realising that the station isn't meant for people like me, but for the young, and they seem to operate successfully in a continuous present tense. Whereas 6 Music is a confused beast of a station which plays "new" music that its producers seem to think you ought to like, as opposed to what its listeners might actually want to hear, and cannot readily grasp the simple notion that people tune in to music radio in order to hear music, not guests "dropping in," droning away inarticulately for half an hour and killing any atmosphere, or that a radio station isn't school and that music fans don't tune in to be lectured at, like naughty children at the back of the class, or yelled at as though pop music were a boot camp (balanced out by endless "uplifting" and "calm" bollocks - great art is neither of these things - to appease the possibly imaginary demographic of fortysomething mood mums to which most BBC music radio stations seem to want to attract; sorry, but they long ago ran away to Magic FM and Heart). Radio One gets the idea, though, as to a slightly narrower extent does Capital Radio. Good for both.
Getting back to the Thurston Moore problem, though - I'd just mention in passing that Kim Gordon would never feel the need to compile a list of 350 albums; why should she, she's got a proper life to live? - makes it clear to me that in all ways we need to drag ourselves away from the security blanket of lists and putting everything in order. The gates, thanks to the internet, are all open now; we are our own gatekeepers without the need for intermediaries, can judge music for ourselves and do not feel any need to "rank" its individual components. And we need to come to terms with "the past"; not to deny it, or to airbrush it or cherry-pick from it, but to accept it and use it as a chassis to help drive us through the present. Young Punctum represents me trying to come to terms with my own past because I only have so much time left and need to start putting my affairs in order. But my primary concern, as always, is with now. So should it be for us all.
AFTER ALL THAT, A LIST
But it isn't any old boring list; it's...THE 2025 DJ PUNCTUM AWARDS!!
Album Of The Year: what it should have been last year - The New Sound by Geordie Greep. Having not listened to it nearly enough in 2024, I came back to it last Christmas and have hardly stopped playing it since. It's my new Rock Bottom - that's how deeply I've got into it, and almost singlehandedly it examines in depth what it's like to be a man in the twenty-first century, for better or for, largely, worse. And it boasts more musical invention per pound than practically anything else made this century.
Single Of The Year: "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" by RAYE, who tops this particular list for the second consecutive year, not simply because the song's video was partly filmed literally around the corner from where we live, but because it's a Proper Pop Record with a tune, a hook, lyrics that tell a story in ways pop has not really managed before, imaginative production and arrangement, and hope for both our and the singer's future; she's escaped from the hell documented in "Genesis." and is ecstatically content simply to be herself. Honourable runner-up: "Golden."
Pop, Pop, Pop Music (In A Better World): Greatest Hits by Metronomy and Joy Of Repetition by Hot Chip. If this were 1982 every schoolkid would be singing their songs and you'd have probably seen both bands performing them on Cheggers Plays Pop. As Joe Mount says in his sleevenote, the world of pop has changed in the last twenty years, and it isn't his fault.
You've Heard Them All Before, But Now I've Done Them Better: Tower Block in a Jam Jar by Mozart Estate.
O Canada, Always There When You're Needed: Jane Inc, Debby Friday (probably the year's two best pop albums, in that order), Marie Davidson, Sloan.
Spokeswoman For A Generation: CMAT.
Rock 'N' Roll Can Never Die: The Ex-Void, Sam Fender, 5 Seconds Of Summer, The Royston Club.
Music Hall's Still Going Too: Baxter Dury, Olly Murs.
I Made The Better Album, Deal With It: Bad Bunny.
Remember Us? I Bet You Didn't: Ash, Amelia Barratt and Bryan Ferry, Dave, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, Songhoy Blues.
Remember Me? I KNOW You F***ing Didn't: Jamie Woon (sleeper of the year and possibly the decade!).
We're Not Done Yet, Far From It: Stereolab, Suede.
But You Love Us!: Sparks.
Let's Push Things Forward (Hip Hop Division): Danny Brown, Armand Hammer & the Alchemist, Mourning [A] BLKstar, billy woods.
Let's Push Things Forward (Country Division): Tyler Childers.
D'Angelo Memorial Award For Pushing Things Forward So Let's Celebrate Him While He's Still With Us: Miguel.
Tribute To A King: Cabin In The Sky by De La Soul, the best and most poignant rap album since We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service; "The Silent Life Of A Truth" might be the song of the year. Also, Traces Of You by Ivy.
And finally, but by no means lastly...
WOMEN OWN IT: Black Country New Road, Victoria Canal, Sabrina Carpenter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms. Ezra Furman, Alison Goldfrapp, Haim, Mary Halvorson, JADE, keiyaA, Kesha, Lady Gaga, Lambrini Girls, Little Simz, Lorde, Marina, Melody's Echo Chamber, Ela Minus, QUAD90, PinkPantheress, Addison Rae, Renee Rapp, Gwenifer Raymond, Moonchild Sanelly, Say She She, Self Esteem, Sprints, tUnE-yArDs, Wet Leg and Hayley Motherf***ing Williams!
