2025 Music Recognized: The Year In Comebacks

Everybody loves a comeback, and there were some good ones in 2025. I wasn’t sure exactly what the qualifications for what constitutes a comeback should entail for the purposes of this post, but I kinda just went by whether an album felt like a comeback to me. A lot of these artists hadn’t released albums since the pandemic times, and I have to assume this global event also impacted the gestation periods for a lot of these albums to some extent. Whatever the case, these were artists that I was happy to hear from this year and who I hoped wouldn’t keep me waiting so long for another follow-up. Continue reading

2025 Music Recognized: The Year In Disappointments

As you may or may not have noticed, I did not do a whole lot of writing about music on this blog in 2025. In fact, this has been the longest time since we started this website that I didn’t write a single post about a new album.

There are a few reasons for this. The first being that the first half of the year just didn’t have a lot of standout albums for me. Sure, there were plenty that I was happy to listen to and got me through those early cold months of the year. But even as we got deeper into 2025, there weren’t as many exciting albums that usually come out in the Spring and Summer that remind me what it means to be alive. Then there was the fact that I just felt generally busier than usual this year, perhaps due to planning a wedding among other things. There’s also that nagging conceit that maybe I’m losing touch with new music and perhaps it’s time to retreat to the music of my youth like every other aging millennial. And then of course there’s the big elephant in the room that the year was just a hard one to be excited about if you were paying any attention at all to the news, and that seemed to make pleasurable things like music just a little harder to enjoy.

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