GL.25.15: CASEYSIMONE BALLESTAS
GL.25.16: Ryan Joyce
GL.25.17: Desa Warner
GL.25.18: Claren Warner
GL.25.19: Vikram Joseph
GL.25.20: Kevin Wyckoff
GL.25.21: Sidney Southerland
GL.25.22: Jazzmen Williams
GL.25.23: Megan Swidler
GL.25.24: Carl Anderson
***
Off the bat I am noticing an anxiety writing this. Last year this essay poured out of me during a 14 hour flight between Sydney and San Francisco. I was on the heels of the high that comes with spending holiday time with your most loved ones. In this case, my godson’s family; his parents being part of the beloved gel that tethers me to the Bergstroms, too. This year, there was never going to be the same luxury of focused-offline-time to write this essay. Not because of how life was different this year compared to last, rather, international flying is unique in its capacity to enact forced-oxygen nostalgia, which, dear reader, is absent from these words’ production (instead I am at a cafe). That is one of two limitations/disappointments that characterize this year’s essay.
LIMIT ONE: Grieving the Romance of how last year's essay was crafted.
LIMIT TWO: Grieving the lack of a conceptual-thread to tie the 136 songs released this year that I liked.
If you’re new here, and/or have not read last year’s essay since, well, last year, let's refresh how I tackle burning my hits and how many years in the making perfecting this craft has undergone:
This is year 5 of being asked to contribute to the famous Burn Your Hits List.
This is year 4 or making a playlist with all the songs I liked during the year.
This is year 3 of putting pen (key to actuator) to page (screen).
This is year 2 of submitting on time(-ish).
This year, I liked 624 songs totaling ~38 hours of listening (up from 455 songs in 2024 or ~26 hours of listening).
This year, 136 of those songs were released in 2025 totaling ~7 hours of listening (up from 48 songs in 2024 or ~2.5 hours of listening)
These are the facts. From this, I created two playlists, one that had all 623 songs and one with only the likes from 2025. I did this by extracting all the songs’ metadata into this spreadsheet (with the help of “spotlistr.com”). Then I listened to these two playlists for about two weeks while walking around, working, driving, etc. Spotify wrapped came out around this time but not before I locked in my song of the year. Last year, I identified an album of the year and a runner up simply based on number of plays. This year doing so did not feel correct. In terms of themes, last year I identified 8. This year, listening in this way revealed only two themes: ‘Dutch/German (Punk)’ and ‘Youth Throwbacks’ … but I am certain that does not capture the spirit of how music entangled with me this year, so I will speak about that in prose, perhaps you or I (through writing) will identify I thread that I can’t see from where I sit now.
(Update: I did find threads through writing, which is what I always say when I teach: “writing is thinking.” The axiom wins again! And 7 themes emerged.)
Themes:
1. Album(s) of the Year
2. Songs of the Year
3. Dutch/German (Punk)
4. Sapphic Chat 2024 → 2025
5. LOVEEEE
6. Youth Throwbacks (this essay got too long, but suffice it to say 2000s teenage dirt bag hits showed up in bulk)
7. Live Music (ditto on length of essay, but i’ll round up the list on my substack?? lol this is going to become a running joke…)
Theme 1: Album(s) of the Year
Album First Place: Warm Chris (Aldous Harding, 2022)
Album Runner up: You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This (Mirah, 2000)
Honorable Mention: The Art of Loving (Olivia Dean, 2025)
On August 11, 2025 I took a long walk and listened to Aldous Harding’s 2022 album Warm Chris front to back. I was completely absorbed by the art and moved to tears several times. During this walk I found a vintage frame and carried it home and mused about how sweet it is to be alive, to consume and relish in other people’s creativity, art. I shuffled around my neighborhood, chuffed that I have ears, and taste, and feet, and time, and a sweet dog to join me watching the sun set and melt over the East Bay.
I don’t think this album says anything about this year. I think it says everything about August 11, 2025 in my life. Which is simply not a sentence you write very often.
Aldous Harding: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
In my wrapped, though, Spotify reminded me that I used to consume music like this: deliberately, fully, no skips, out in the world on a walk just to hear the art because my album of the year (according to them was Mirah’s You Think It's Like This but Really It's Like This) is a no skip indie album that defined the summer of my sophomore year of high school. I will get to that in a moment, but first, when you consumer music as art, as I did on accident with Warm Chris, life truths sprinkle upon you and in receiving them from someone else in the form of taking in their art you settle into the “people-get-it” feeling that makes life so stupidly delicious. I am sure Rilke has said something like this but better, something about the recognition of the gooey relationality being alive. I think Aldous Harding capture that in my three favorite tracks from this album:
Lover, don't you run at the easy part now
…
And you let, let me in where a mother'd invested
If you’re not new here, you’ll know the mother stuff gets me. I just don't think there is anything more fully real than acknowledging someone loved you so that you could love and to bring that mother-invested-love out into the world to find your people is one of the most daring but also rewarding things we can do.
Then if you're not for me
Guess I am not for you
I will enjoy the blue
Need I say much else? If it's not for you, grief might tend to you as you find what is for you. Then grief will lift with new insights and frames and people and ideas. You will be better for the blue, I hope!
I fell off, that's okay
I got back, I lost my way
Voted love for my life, but I drifted off at the meeting twice
Passion must play or passion won't
Passion must play or passion won't
Passion must play or passion won't stay
PLAY!! PLAY!! PLAY!! You must play to have passion, I might also argue. And a good life must have both. And you deserve for it to stay.
I’ll be more brief with Mirah’s album. For the reasons I love it are the same as Warm Chris: it feels like a needle and thread runs through every song, and like I met the artists as they want to be known. These albums feel made first for the artist themselves. In that way, falling for their art feels like falling in love with someone for who they are, not who you wish they were. It is loving the version of them they love about themselves, which, if you ask me, is the most desirable kind of love.
This album also, of course, inspires a nostalgia in me given this album comes back into my life every now and again for almost 20 years. And as I get older, I become more and more astounded by my younger self who made sure I still know every lyric to this whole album. That girl was so optimistic about the world, she was so sure of who she was going to be, in her innate-naivete of adolescence she threw herself into her passions with such full abandon loading no skip albums onto her flip-phone and listening to them non-stop. Maybe it's because there were many moments this year that I felt I was winning the prize that my teenage self so aspired to: to be known and in cahoots …
You know all of my secret ideas
The ones I'm giving up on and the ones I'll keep
And everybody sees a funny look in our eyes
'Cause we know that we already won the sweepstakes prize
What I don't think I knew or could know at 14 is that the honor is all mine to be increasingly cahoots with myself. To acknowledge “all of my secret ideas, the ones I'm giving up on and the ones I'll keep.” Of course, Jung understood these are shadows, and they want light. This year, perhaps more than ever, I have made that my obligation. (Would recommend, highly. Also, painful, very.)
This year, I also have simply felt fireworks like the kind Mirah opens this song with, “you remind me of a firework … you sparkle and burn but you take your time.” Time, time, time!! I too think time matters so much. It's taken me 20 years to digest this album, apparently. And I want things in my life, people in my life, where I can take my time, and they can too. Which brings me to why I think this year has been hard to characterize musically, where has the time gone? What was the time? Dare I say, “what was that?”.
RE: Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving, I liked the same amount of songs on this album as I did new songs by Blackwater Holylight, but those were singles so it's hard to say who took the cake. I clearly liked both of their new work.
Theme 2: Songs of the Year
No, like I really don’t know what happened this year. Last year we had girlhood-summer. This year, no really, what was that? So while I can’t see the thread, per sé, these songs are likely to define 2025 if and when I look back on it from 2035, in alphabetical order, by theme:
Berghain (Rosalía, Björk, and Yves Tumor, 2025) – see more in Theme 3
Man Made of Meat (Viagra Boys, 2025) – see more in Theme 3
Mannenbaby (Sophie Straat, 2025) – see more in Theme 3
Never Enough (Turnstile, 2025) – see more in Theme 3
Cuntology 101 (Lambrini Girls, 2025) – see more in Theme 4
Sugar on My Tongue (Tyler, The Creator, 2025) – see more in Theme 4
What Was That (Lorde, 2025) – see more in Theme 4
Real Thing (Drugdealer and Weyes Blood, 2025) – see more in Theme 5
Shy Girl (Haute & Freddy, 2025) – see more in Theme 5
..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ) (Saya Gray, 2025) – see more in Theme 5
And the one song that has no theme: Talk of the Town (Fred Again, Reggie, and Sammy Virji, 2025).
And one song that is on the internet (like I asked them today how do i link to it) because it's my FAVORITE SONG OF THE YEAR and my friend’s wrote it: ENTER → Bay Area Baby (Andre Margatini in Luigi the Musical, 2025). I first heard this song in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, where more than thirty people were packed shoulder to shoulder to watch a variety comedy show. Out of that strange, fluorescent-lit moment came the seed of a stage production, first in the Tenderloin at a tiny theatre, and then at the independent, all based on an idea my best friend Nova had first had only months prior. (I love having friends who speak action into life!!!)
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8yMT57T/
^ enough said, the lyrics speak for themselves!!
Theme 3: Dutch/German ~*Punk
When Aaron and Ilana visited in early December, I told them the only thing I knew for sure about my year in music was this: there was going to be a suspiciously strong Dutch and German punk presence in my faves.
I assumed 2025 would land Viagra Boys the top album spot, because after Amyl and the Sniffers took Album of the Year for me in 2024, I was prepared and expecting to stay in my punk era with the second half of “In Spite of Ourselves” releasing a new album. But the Viagra Boys 2025 album, viagr aboys (and their show at the Fox this fall) were flops, to me. Then again, The bar was simply too high after “Punk Rock Loser,” had a unique punk anthem staying power I concede is hard to match.
And yet, punk showed up sideways this year, nevertheless. Not always punk by genre, but punk by posture. In addition to one track from Viagra Boys, “Man Made of Meat,” I’d like to (re-)introduce you to: Sophie Straat (NL), Ploegendienst (NL), Grenzkontrolle (DE), and Yung Hurn (DE). Five acts, five different/ish sounds, same refusal to be solemn about serious things. Punk.
I feel a kinship with the Viagra Boys. Though they are technically Scandinavian (which Amsterdam aspired to be), Sebastian Murphy is also from the Bay Area. And when they played the Fox this fall he mentioned it was the first show he had ever been nervous for because he realized people he went to high school with were in the room and his parents were there too!! That landed hard for me. I started spending significant time in the Netherlands in high school and moved there permanently after college. I became an adult there, but currently am a n adult in the Bay. I feel a tension between the person I was raised as and the person I have become collapse into each other in strange ways. Made stargazer by this rush of emerging tech we are all living through, which in an otherwise NOT a no-skips album for me “Man Made of Meat” captured this uncanny identity space, as the Viagra Boys do so well, yet again:
Man Made of Meat (Viagra Boys, 2025)
I'm subscribed to your mom's OnlyFans
I spent five bucks a month to get pictures of her flappy giblets
And I spent another ten dollars a month to chat with her on the AI chat program
It feels great
I don't wanna pay for anything
Clothes and food and drugs for free
If it was 1970
I'd have a job at a factory
I am a man that's made of meat
You're on the internet looking at feet
I hate almost everything that I see
And I just wanna disappear
I LOVE SOPHIE STRAAT. She is whip smart, critical, funny, and famously lived in de Pijp (qualities some might also ascribe to me, lol). She has a knack for writing songs that feel like a protest sign you can dance to. This year, she gave us “Mannenbaby” which translates neatly to “man-baby,” and opens with what might be the most elegant use of an ellipsis. She says, “The most irritating thing in the whole world is when a man…” and then just lets the sentence hang there. And I find that fascinating. Instead of filling in the insult, she pivots and inhabits the inside of that sentence: the pent-up feelings, emotional blockage, pressure to act tough that defines man-hood. She sketches the male experience as constrained and miserable without romanticizing it or letting it off the hook. The takeaway is not sympathy so much as clarity: yes, this sounds awful, and also, pull it together. DO NOT BE A MAN-BABY!
https://www.tiktok.com/@caseysimone_/video/7521985915263241504?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7473000667959952939
Mannenbaby (Sophie Straat, 2025)
Het aller irritantste van de hele wereld vind ik als een man… |The most irritating thing in the whole world, to me, is when a man…
In je hoofd | In your head
Opgefokt | Fucked Up
In jezelf | Self-Involved
Opgekropt | Pent up
Soms ontroerd | Sometimes moved
Maar doet stoer | But acts tough
Emotioneel | Emotional
Zonder gevoel | Without feeling
Mannenbaby! | Manbaby!
L: Sophie Straat R: Ploegendienst
This year she paired up with Dutch Punk band Ploegendienst to make “Liefdesliedjes.” Ploegendienst is great all on their own with their 2024 song, "Interessant" also making into the song-like 2025 list.
Liefdesliedjes (Sophie Straat and Ploegendienst, 2025)
Liefdesliedjes, verbrand de liefdesbrieven | Love songs, burn the love letters
Er zit geen liefde in mij, ik voel geen liefde | There's no love in me, I feel no love
Ik ben verbitterd, maar vrij | I'm bitter but free
M'n hart zit diep in het ijs | My heart's stuck deep in the ice
Liefdesliedjes? Dit is geen liefdesliedje | Love songs? This ain't no love song
Devotees of my writing/social media presence will know I also LOVE Yung Hurn, who is probably classified as a hip hop artist, and chat tells me this song falls into cloud rap / emo trap … but there is something about the lyrics that I argue are inherently punk: pissing on the cops, c’mon !--> PUNK.
Geheim (Yung Hurn, 2025)
Ich kann dir immer vertrau'n, weil du sagst nix der Polizei | I can always trust you 'cause you don't tell the police
(Du hörst nix, du siehst nix, du sagst nix, du liebst mich) | (You don't hear a thing, you don't see a thing, you don't say a thing, you love me)
Und wenn die zu dir scheiße sind, dann piss' ich an ihr Bein |And if they're shit to you, then I'll piss on their leg
Lastly, “REVOLUTION” came onto my radar b/c tiktok. God bless the algo! Catchy, to the point, has you frothing with agreement by the time they get to “Wo kommen wir da hin?!” … because indeed, where the heck are we headed, folks?
REVOLUTION (Grenzkontrolle, 2025)
Verstörende Bilder - There is no Planet B | Disturbing images - There is no Planet B.
Leben leben - und das irgendwie | Live life - and somehow.
Du wählst hellblau? Und die Faschos applaudieren | You vote light blue? And the fascists applaud.
Auf den Hass kann ich nur mit Hass reagieren | I can only respond to hate with hate.
Wo kommen wir da hin? | Where are we headed?
L: Yung Hurn R: Grenzkontrolle
Berghain (Rosalía, Björk, and Yves Tumor, 2025)
Never Enough (Turnstile, 2025)
Honorable mentions of songs from Dutch or German or Punk artists from this year include:
CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE (Ecca Vandal, 2025); The Money (Lung, 2025); This Summer (Sleigh Bells, 2025); Slit (Paper Lady, 2025); Sma3 (Taqbir, 2025); All I Need, (Blackwater Holylight, 2025).
Now, before we meander to Theme 4, for any of you who are not convinced Theme 3 was synthetic, I agree that any attempt to group the above artists by genre would collapse under scrutiny. That said, I grew up with Back to 19 Mistakes by Gruppo Sportivo (1988) on repeat, and I think that album tuned my ear to expect a certain move from Dutch and Germanic popular music: anthem shapes, dumb-smart humor, wordplay, folk-repeatability, protest without solemnity. (In the Dutch hip hop space this year the same was done: “0612345678” by Cedre and Bilal Wahib, 2025 and “Combinatie” by Kaya Imani, ADF Samski, and Yssi SB, 2025 both use word play to talk about getting a phone number and not giving the code to the phone, respectfully; kind of random, also kind of brilliant?). So while these songs/artists are not all punk by genre, they are doing something I am happy to call punk in spirit.
Theme 4: Sapphic Chat
I want to return to something I was circling last year in Theme 2 around girl-coded, perhaps even sapphic-adjacent pop, and how that energy shifted in 2025. This year, we “lost” Fletcher and JoJo Siwa and sort of Billie Eillish in the sense that they began publicly dating men. During this time, one of my first TikToks to ever go semi-viral was a critique of “Good Luck, Babe” and the way #wuhluhwuh narratives historically and continuously get organized around men as a point of orientation. What I kept seeing online, especially early in the summer, was frustration from lesbians who were not asking to be defined against men, but to be allowed to exist without them as a narrative hinge at all. These pop “losses” supported folks on the internet have discourse about this.
What I love about the songs in this theme, Theme 4, is that they feel like a un-intential response to that moment, even when the artists themselves are not all queer/gay/lesbian. Rather this is a hodge-podge hosh-posh of songs that feel like there is a gravitational pull that clusters them together, even if only in my mind alone.
For example, while Lily Allen is not gay, you cannot tell me the title “Pussy Palace” is not gay. (In fact, I already know a she/they sports team that will be called that this upcoming dodge-ball season.) Similarly, while members of Wolf Alice are also (according to the internet) not gay, “Just Two Girls” is such a sweet vignette of girl-hood/sapphic admiration:
I like the way she chain-smokes incessantly
Tiny epiphanies when she's drinking with me
…
Then I undress my every thought
The way that you can't pay for
Just two girls at the bar
…
Here's the stage, you're the star
…
Just two girls
Also, not a lesbian, but, and I fret this is not a hot take whatsoever: Tyler, The Creator’s “Sugar on My Tongue” is overtly c*nni*l*ngus-coded. And, if that reading holds, I am genuinely happy to see it in the mainstream. And, while “LUNCH” did a lot of sapphic/wlw/lesbian cultural work last year, Billie is no longer being read as holding a sapphic role (*at the moment), and so, of course, dessert showed up: sugar …
And then there are artists who (again from what the internet tells me) are queer/sapphic/lesbian/gay. Renee Rapp and Momma released new albums. And Lambrini Girls, Your Smith, and philine all got on my radar. I suppose the rest of this list is just to say: support your local wuhluhwuh artists!! And, if you want to get more into the weeds of what "sapphic" and “lesbain” have to do with one another, listen to this incredible podcast episode by Material Girls.
L: Welcome to My Blue Sky (2025) R: Bite Me (2025)
Shy, Leave Me Alone (Renee Rapp, 2025)
I Want You (Fever), My Old Street (Momma, 2025)
Cuntology 101 (Lambrini Girls, 2025)
Debbie (Your Smith, 2025)
ten years time (philine, 2025)
Theme 5 – LOVEEEE
This is by far my favorite section to write, the one about LOVEEEE. Last year this was spoken about in “Theme 7: Repeats Not From 2024.” So discreet, no one would know it was about love. But isn't music always? I cherish the list I curated in that theme, a tiny little playlist of daring to love and all that goes with it.
I am going to try to do the same here, though a cute little side note, this year these songs came to me a bit differently: through making playlists. Yes, playlists for somebody … what other kind of playlists are there??? (& yes, I’m so glad you asked, she made playlists back for me! … we both like music very much!)
I maintain, as I did last year, that loving requires daring (and maybe some mess too). Grace Ives captured this delightfully in “Avalanche”:
Avalanche (Garce Ives, 2025)
And I want, want, want and I take, take, take
Feeling sorry not sorry for the mess that I make
Ah-ah, coming down like an avalanche
...
I was playing in the country I was filled right up
With a whole damn lot of a new kind of love
I was drinking up the day, yeah, I was filling my cup
...
Yeah, I been around the block I know it's pay pay or play
And I go, go, go and I take, take, take
Feeling sorry not sorry for the plans that I make
There is an irreverence here that reminds me of Charly Bliss, owning the stakes robustly without shame. Owning the particular mess and pleasure of doing life for the first time and loving in spite of it all, one must feel “sorry not sorry” lest they stall and lose faith in aspiring!!!
Real Thing by Drugdealer and Weyes Blood song feels like The 1975 called Carol King and she answered. Its optimistic in a way anyone falling in love with someone good deserves, and its nostalgic production makes the claim feel rooted in generational truth:
Think I found someone who loves me
Somebody that's so proud that they found me
Someone who loves me in every way
Finally found a love who sees me
Somebody who makes my life so easy
It's the real thing
I wish and pray for this kind of love for everyone, especially at the front end when it's still a thought and confirmation has not yet arrived, to you I say: may it be confirmed, if it is real. (See note about Lawn and enduring it if it is not real.)
The second to in this quadriptych about musing about love is for all my girlies.
Shy Girl (Haute & Freddy, 2025)
Shy, shy, shy, shy girl
When you gonna run the whole wide world
I do recall there was madness in your eyes
Let it come out tonight
I have the coolest friends, most of whom are women or women-adjacent folks, girls not girls, if you will. And they are incredibly smart, emotionally curious, creative, dynamic, and capable. And still, because the world is hard, sometimes they get overwhelmed, maybe by doubt creeping in, or fatigue from trying to birth their creative vision. When this happens, I find myself wanting to shake this song at them. This song is an anthem for remembering that you have it in you, that you will let it out, and that when you do, the world will meet you there. You and your creativity will be better for it, and so will everyone lucky enough to be there to receive you!
Finally, one last love song, in my eyes, dropped in my lap from a Discover Weekly (lol who also forgot about DWs this year?). I think it's the perfect song/earworm; warm and ping-y:
Take Me To Beijing (一起回北京) (Chinese American Bear, 2024).
Take me to your hometown
Let's drink some Oolong tea
Show me where you first loved
Show me your family
Remember what I said about ~ love is daring ~? Love is also comprehensive and chronologically curious. It’s like vacation photos; from strangers it's the definition of labor, when love, real I want to know you love is there, you want to gobble their family photo albums whole. (CC: watching Ilana’s home videos together with her one night like it was a new Netflix show to binge; most nourish TV ever, let me tell you!!!) To want to show your history and to want to consume someone else's history is love, and as this song shows so simply it comprises familiar attributes of daily living: places to be, things to consume, and people to meet. But when you love someone you buzz like this song does with warmth because you can share those attributes and the meaning of both knowing about them together.
Before I go, a shout out to our host, Aaron, without whom we would not know our own relationship to the sonics of our years. This is becoming an increasingly important end-of-year tradition that I look forward to all year. Thank you again for including me, and if we ever go back analog to burnt CDs and zines, you can still count me in!!
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