the vaudeville ghost 2025 songs of the year spectacular
Did you know there were some songs that came out this year? It's true! Personally I'm a fan of the album as an art form (fastest way to annoy me is to start skipping tracks on an album) and don't listen to individual tracks much (unless I'm in exploration mode), but the cool thing is albums are made up of individual songs, and I can promise you I won't link to a song if I don't think the album is also cool, so a "songs of the year" list like this one does double duty as a "here's some albums you should check" out list. Everyone wins!
Anyway, here are the rules. I like these songs; I'm not going to rank them. If I like the song, I like the album it's on. One song per artist; sometimes it will be my favorite and sometimes it will be the one I think you'll like. Please enjoy, in alphabetical order according to my music player, some songs that are cool whose metadata says they're from the year 2025.
These Songs Are Cool
- Coral Grief - "Avenue You" - I saw someone describe Seattle band Coral Grief as sounding like the Pacific Northwest, and you know what? Yeah. I just drove I-90 back to Seattle and they sound like mist-shrouded forests and rainy canyons and surprising sunsets that paint the snow on the mountains orange and gold.
- Deep Sea Diver - "Happiness Is Not A Given" - I think every single track on Billboard Heart was in contention for inclusion in this list at some point; this one I picked because it is so good as a closing track--it feels like a benediction--and also because I think it's a great showcase of Jessica Dobson's vocal talents.
- Die Spitz - "Red40" - Die Spitz are sometimes very punk and sometimes very metal, but they always bring an amazing energy; this song, which they told KEXP is about hot cheetos, is a great example of that.
- Horsegirl - "Well I Know You're Shy" - I find Horsegirl hard to describe. On Phonetics On And On they're building textured soundscapes out of very minimalist stripped down, deliberate sounds, where normally "textured soundscape" implies a lot of distortion and walls of sound. They're fascinating! They're catchy! They sound British even though they're from Chicago!
- illuminati hotties - "777" - It was hard to choose a song here because Nickel on the Fountain Floor is a very diverse EP. There's a couple of pop punk songs in "Wreck My Life" and "Skateboard Tattoo", the cool electronics of "Bright Sun", the classic indie pop of "Hollow", and then there's the textured dream pop of "777", which I'm going with here, but honestly this whole EP is a lot of fun.
- ivri - "erosion" - A band came on the work radio after I had improved it by adding Sleater-Kinney to the rotation and I heard a song that sounded really cool, so I went to make note of the artist's name. I'm pretty sure ivri is actually a completely different artist than whoever came on but this song is one of those songs that had me going "holy shit" the whole time, so I'm glad I made that mistake.
- Lena Raine - "Verdant Mysteries" - I'm not joking when I say that one of the high points of my time writing things on the internet was the time Lena Raine reposted one of my essays on Cohost1]. This song is from her OST album for the cancelled video game EARTHBLADE; the whole album slaps but this is the one I've picked to share with you, my beloved readers. It's so cool that we get to listen to these pieces of a game that will never be, to explore this lost world through music.
- Madison Cunningham - "Goodwill" - Here's a fun fact: of all the albums I have downloaded in 2025 this is the only one which includes a genre tag in its metadata! (Presumably this is because I downloaded it directly from Madison Cunningham's online store rather than Bandcamp.) Anyway, this track is a fine example of folk music at its most expressive. (This album, Ace, isn't on Bandcamp yet for some reason but you can buy it at her store.)
- Mannequin Death Squad - "Monsters" - I should warn you that on Bandcamp (and probably on the streaming services? I don't use those) this is one of those two-track setups where the first track is like a minute long and the second track is the actual song, which, like. If I had a nickel for every Australian band I like which did that with a 2025 song I really like, I'd have two nickels, etc. (The other one was sleepazoid's "CHOMP", whose intro segment is a minute-long track called "85".) Anyway, this song rules.
- Scarlet Rae - "Call Off The Day" - Is this emo? Her bandcamp tags say she is an emo musician. I wouldn't know; I missed the boat on that one. Anyway, Scarlet Rae's debut EP is five tracks about grief and this one is the one that brought me there.
- Sharon Van Etten - "I Want You Here" - It's not universally true that most of the bands I listen to have amazing vocals but it is one of the easiest ways to get me to check someone out. Sharon Van Etten's guest vocals on Deep Sea Diver's "Impossible Weight" so thoroughly impressed me I went out and got her newest album, and "I Want You Here" is a great demonstration of just why I was so impressed.
- sleepazoid - "RWTD" - sleepazoid are a lot of fun. RWTD is the title track off their debut EP, running with the dogs, and while I think it's probably the track that best captures their energy, they're all fun, and I do hope they put out a full album soon.
- Stargazr - "Drink the Poison" - Do you like musical saws? Do you like cool ethereal mostly acoustic rock? Maybe you should check out this track and also this band!
- The Beths - "Mosquitoes" - While it's true that I was looking for music with a bit of a sharper edge for my collection this year, that hasn't stopped "Mosquitoes" from being the standout track for me on The Beths' excellent new record, Straight Line Was A Lie, a pensive track about feeling small and insignificant in the face of the vastness of nature, and how important that is.
- Tomo Nakayama -"Plovers" - Tomo Nakayama's pretty, minimalist folk has made him something of a local icon; this track off his new album Ocean is my favorite there but they're all real good.
- UNBEATABLE - "DIALTONE" - I've written about UNBEATABLE before; it's a great game, and it's a game with a soundtrack that I would listen to on purpose even if there wasn't a cool game attached. This is one of my favorites off there but there's seriously a lot to choose from.
- We Lost The Sea - "The Gloaming" - The thing about post-rock is most of the time the songs are over ten minutes long so it's a hard sell to get people to listen to them. This one isn't! And not only is it very short for a post-rock group it's also a very good track. Give 'em a listen!
Anyway, happy New Year, thanks for reading, I hope you find something you love from among this pile of cool artists, and remember: friends don't let friends use Spotify!
If you followed me on Cohost it was probably either from that essay or from Case by Case? There has never been another place on the internet where you could pick up followers just from writing either of those things. I hope that one day there will be again.↩