GL.25.15: Caseysimone Ballestas
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And so we come to the end of the greatest Guest List Week of our lives.
(On the nomenclature, what can I say? I’m an American sports fan. The Big Ten Conference has 18 teams. I can easily look at a period of time that started on December 10 and ended on January 20 and think, “yep, that’s a week.” A little nominative dissonance is just the price of doing business. Get into it. Guest List Week forever.)
We broke records all over the place!
Most Lists: 28
Most Debuts: 9
Youngest List-Maker: Claren Warner (Age 9), with an Honorable Mention to Georgia Trnka (Age 6)
Oldest List-Maker: … hmm. Well, look, I don’t know who it is but we’re all a year older so it just stands to reason, it’s definitely one of us.
I remember the first Guest List Week, back in 2012, and how excited I was that I managed to convince six people to write about their favorite songs. Now that we’re up to 28 people, I can say with total conviction that I am at least 4.67 times more excited than I was then, and I hope that number goes up forever.
And, as I set about trying to summarize more lists than any other year, I love that the additional data points don’t lead to a greater consensus, but to greater diversity.
The fact that a simple prompt (“Write something about the music that was important to you in 2025”) could produce such stunning variety is a testament to music impacts each of us on such a deeply personal level. My year wasn’t your year. It couldn’t be.
Underlying that diversity, though, was a fascinating web of connections, little overlapping venn diagrams of taste. Each list is unique, but no list is an island.
Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. Some lists are islands. Let’s break it down like this: We start with the 28 lists. Tony wrote about albums, and Max wrote about his favorite artist, but that leaves 26 of you writing about songs. Out of that 26, there were four lists that did not share any songs in common with any other list.
Two of those did not share any songs or artists in common with any other list: Isabel and Curt (via Georgia), thank you for giving us a window into your perfectly singular taste. Don’t ever change.
The other two, Jazzmen and Tom, did have some artists in common with the collective, so as a group we can share in your love of Wednesday, Rosalia, and others while paying respect to your incomparable song choices. You are not like other girls.
For everyone else, though: Your list intersected with someone else’s.
As I started compiling the Year in Review leaderboard, I started to fixate on the songs that appeared on exactly two lists, both the singular overlaps that felt perfect and the singular overlaps that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
For instance, Tate McRae’s “Sports car” appeared on the year’s first and last Guest Lists without appearing on any of the 26 that came in between, symmetrical bookends on the year in very-sexy-baby-core, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Ilana and Tom share quite a bit of musical DNA. It’s more fun that total strangers Mary and Nora both picked Alemeda’s “Beat A B!tch Up,” and I hope they’re both carrying that energy into 2026.
Two people included Raye’s “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” One of them, as he describes it, is in Brazil looking for a husband right now. The other one got married on my birthday twelve years ago and is now at the point where her kids are making lists. On a long enough time horizon, questions answer themselves.
Desa shares Ben Kweller’s “Dollar Store” with her cousin Mario, and it’s possible they’ve listened to that song while sitting in the same room. On the other hand, it’s less likely that Desa and Jem have listened to Miley Cyrus’ “End of the World” while sitting in the same room, since they live more than eight thousand miles apart and have never met (though I really do think they’d be friends).
The two people who chose Viagra Boys’ “Man Made of Meat,” Erik and Caseysimone, were both at the same concert in Oakland, but you wouldn’t know it by reading their diametrically opposite reviews of it.
Vikram and Kevin both picked Youth Lagoon’s “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas),” which feels perfect to me since those two have very similar taste (which is to say that I’m a little bit intimidated by both of them). Vikram and Darrin both picked Rose Gray’s “Everything Changes (But I Won’t)” and I’m not sure what they have in common besides the fact that they’re both clearly a part of the Hot Girl Agenda (complimentary).
There are probably two dozen of these, so I won’t go through all of them here, but they’re all fun.
With respect to my own singular overlaps, each one seems like a perfect testament to the way that we all rub off on each other. Of course I share “Spike Island” and “Wreck” with Marisa. Of course I share “Straight Line Was A Lie” and “Skateboard Tattoo” with Carl. Of course I share “Shadow of a Man” with Ilana because we are apparently the only two people on earth who can recognize a perfect pop song.
Anyway, where were we? Right. Song of the Year.
SONG OF THE YEAR
The rules are the same as last year: We judge Song of the Year based solely on the number of lists on which a song appears. Since not everyone ranks their lists, and others rank only a part of their list, it would skew the importance of ranked lists if we tried to account for where on specific lists these songs appeared. So, one point per list. Also, we’re grouping all versions of a song together: this includes remixes, edits, alternate versions, covers, and live versions.
Last year, in an incredible show of dominance, Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” appeared on more than half of all lists. This year’s winner(s) couldn’t crack a quarter.
37 songs appeared on three or more lists.
Only eight appeared on four or more.
At the top of the list, with six lists each, we have a four-way tie for first: Geese’s “Taxes,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” Perfume Genius’ “It’s A Mirror,” and Wet Leg’s “catch these fists.”
In what felt like an especially deep year for music, it is perhaps fitting that our Song of the Year was, basically, all of them.
Here’s a rundown of every song to appear on three or more lists:
So, that’s Songs. How about Artists?
ARTIST OF THE YEAR
As with last year, we’re changing the rules just a little bit. This year, we’re ranking artists based on Total List Mentions as lead artist, with a max of two per list. If, just hypothetically, you included more than two songs by Taylor Swift, or Snocaps, or Jay Som, they get two points for that, but your devotion has been recorded. Otherwise we get into ballot-stuffing territory. This isn’t Eurovision. We have standards.
Anyway, there is no need for a preface here because it would largely be a copy/paste of the above. We spread out in all directions. We overlapped some because it’s fun, but what I will remember about 2025 is the total lack of conformity across the lists. Even with more submissions than ever, our Artist of the Year had a lower score than previous years.
And that Artist of the Year, in a somewhat surprising result, is Momma.
We all came to Momma from different places. Seven different Momma songs made at least one list, but none made more than three. Add it all up and they take the crown over a stacked top five of Lady Gaga, Geese, Turnstile, and Wednesday.
Here’s the full list of every artist to score four or more points:
And with that we finally (finally!) reach the end of 2025 and stare bravely into the abyss of 2026. The first great song of the year is probably Robyn’s “Talk To Me,” but if we’re really talking about my year in music so far, I would also like to recommend (1) listening to Screamadelica while riding a Lime bike across Paris, (2) listening to The Disintegration Loops while mildly dissociating at a modern art museum, and (3) listening to “Hard Rock Hallelujah” on repeat at the gym like an idiot.
See you back here in December!
I smiled the whole time reading this. To my fellow guestlisters throughout the world, cheers to great music.
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