2025 - Geese reflecting the age of Trump, Slow Music, Enmeshment...
and the beginning of the next world.
Personally it was a year of two halves, kinda split by ROSE. The first half was dominated by the finishing of the album. In hindsight it all makes sense but so many of the final pieces of the puzzle don’t make sense at the time. You just have to get up day after day and work away; gradually every issue in every track and every decision about design, presentation, what is left out and how polished or rough every final element should feel works itself out. The engineering that goes into a piece of work like this can feel endless, and I always yearn to just go back to writing on my guitar and piano after finishing club material. At home my listening was (and general always is) a reflection of this. Spending your weekends listening to soundsystem music is the balance for me to spending my weekday evenings listening to songs and acoustically minded works.
My two most listened to new LPs - Cerys Hafana’s Angel and Snuggle’s Dust - both seemed to capture the best of two wider trends. The first a small resurgence in Celtic/gaelic artists extending folk traditions to contemporary meditative places. The second a product of a thriving local scene in Copenhagen. Irene Bianco, Emil Palme, Fine etc. Astrid Sonne, Elias Rønnenfelt and ML Buch having led that charge a few years ago and I guess so much of the music the result of a confluence of solid musical education that exists in Denmark and a reaction against the techno scene that dominated the city in the previous decade.
I guess it also chimes with a wider cultural moment this year just for bands. It felt like between Oasis and Geese a huge chunk of mainstream bandwidth was taken up. Blood Orange, Wet Leg, Turnstile all released albums and even the Beta Band reformed. My only comment here is really that I find the domination of the privately educated over the last two years on mass musical culture (last year brat and this year Geese) just fucking dull. Geese make perfectly decent music - I think I enjoyed their record more than brat - but they come from a boring, moneyed place and the success of their white male rock star type in this form is actually a perfect symbol for this age of Trump and Conservative success.
There was lots of impressive music that I didn’t return to very often after my initial bedazzlement (Los Thuthanaka, Blawan, Carrier). Usually not because it wasn’t still great, but just because it didn’t give me whatever I craved emotionally when I went to put something on. And there was, as ever, lots of music that I was excited for and then disappointed by (Oklou probably near the top of that list). One thing I will say about Cameron Winter is that the songs are fleshed out and built up in a way a TON of older songwriters just haven’t been doing so much since the 2000’s, which was an issue with the Oklou record. We have had so many wispy songwriters who half sing and half write songs over the last decade and it’s not surprising that this has been usurped by a return to bigger, sturdier ideas.
The second half of the year - post-ROSE - was dominated by the upheavals of moving country and a vaguely enforced happy decision to leave music making for a while, until I find a space and mental desire in London to start again. Doing the Arpo shows meant being able to set up situations that I felt were the best since the pandemic - simple, small warehouses and clubs, long sets and the a crowd that felt healthy in its mix. Nights which felt restorative emotionally and musically. Nights where the attitude of the audience is as important as the sound, each element vital in making the thing great. This also culminated in another Everything is True a few weeks ago which embodies all of these elements.
I really didn’t expect the album to land as well as it did personally with people (I’ve long given up trying to guess what critics will think as it never chimes with my own gut), but the earnestness with which people talked to me about the project stunned me. Someone described the whole thing as “slow music”, as in you had to slow down to lock into it which seemed ironic to me for a club record, but also true given the number of ideas I had tried to stuff into it. Along with ROSE this was the absolute high of my year.
Perhaps this was an extension of the prevailing sense that we crossed a rubicon in our collective understanding that the endless scroll, the swole of slop is all a form of vice. Big tech has lost the argument. It is the year we began to just ban social media and in 2026 it is likely Denmark and Norway will follow Australia’s lead. Losing access to TikTok and Snapchat is apparently pushing kids to just text and call one another instead. Honestly am surprised but maybe I shouldn’t be? In the history of pointless inventions genmoji rank high, and the logical response is to get back to <3 and *_* By the end of the decade we may well have begun to correct some of the relationships between the state, technology, commerce and our interior lives.
Niklas Brendborg’s studies about Supernormal Stimuli, how our world is optimized to be addictive as possible in every aspect of our lives (the natural place for the attention economy to reach) has desensitized us and left humanity lonelier and less understanding of one another was published this year and felt about as zietgeisty as any other nonfiction book I came across this year. Brendborg’s work also demonstrated how quickly we resensitize to food, sex, watching films, books and time itself when we put the screens down or change how we use them. It was a constant reminder to myself and again gives me some hope that the future will be better than the present last few years.
TikTok trialling BOTH split screen mode/dual clip and a less addictive algorithm was maybe the nadir we needed to reach? Or was it the Harper’s article on gooners/gooning/goon-caves/goonlife? Or was it Palantir considering moving into the education sector? Or KKR now owning the literal water that we drink and wash in?
The point here is that everything is enmeshed. The only option we have is to make our own spaces. Spaces where we come together and listen to music, poetry, recitals, plays and, ultimately, talk each other. It has felt like millennials urge to call out, to wage unyielding online campaign as a form of brand, has begun to be seen by the following generation for what it is - an act usually rooted in the campaigner/caller’s identity more than anything else. The next gen do not know much of a world before the enmeshment. This is now their world to navigate and regulate. In 2026 this will be a world of creatine and of phone numbers, a world in which glitzy and ritzy presentation is suss, lofi aesthetics continue to return and we don’t document everything. 2025 was a kind of ground zero in that future.
I don’t believe in faves so take this with salt:
Fave new book
Sasha Debevec-McKenney - Joy is my Middle Name
Fave new record
Cerys Hafana - Angel
Fave new film
Sinners
Fave exhibition
A year of big hitters… Kerry James Marshall at the RA/Noah Davis at The Barbican/Paul Thek at Thomas Dane/Wolfgang Tillmans at The Pompidou
Infinitely appreciate this take on Geese…dull is the word.
I randomly saw Cery’s Hafana play harp and sing in a tiny little pub in Dingle, Ireland 2 years ago…it felt like we were watching a touring elf at an inn in Hobbiton, she had us completely spellbound, fire lighting in the back and some pints of Guinness, twas bliss.
I appreciate how you've put your takes on specific releases in the context of how you experienced the year individually and as part of a shared cultural and political lens. Thank you for your honesty and for pulling on those threads, allowing us to see your world.
I fully agree that we need to create our spaces for people to connect and tell stories of whatever kind, music, poetry etc.
Some clubs used to feel to me like one of those spaces, a utopia where people genuinely connected, on the dance floor, the bathrooms, or anywhere in between. But it has always felt like an isolated utopia, disconnected from the dystopian world outside. I understand that for some people the club might be an important escape but I believe there is true power in allowing and encouraging the love and respect found in (some) clubs to spill over into the 'real' world.