December 2025

There were 2 posts published in December 2025 (this is page 1 of 1).

2025 Music Recognized: The Year In Discoveries

For my final entry in these year-end looks back at 2025 in music, I figured I’d end on a hopeful note by touching on the artists that make me optimistic about the future of music. These are the artists I would consider discoveries — artists who came out of nowhere and impressed me with their latest albums despite not having any familiarity with them previously. It of course feels harder and harder to discover up-and-coming artists these days, since the algorithm tends to just point you toward whatever artists various music companies want you to invest your time in. But luckily, it is still possible for new voices to break through the status quo, and here are the albums that caught me by surprise. Continue reading →

2025 Music Recognized: The Year In Artists I Finally Got Into

Though I’ve had a hard time regarding 2025 as a great year for music, I will say there was a nice variety of types of albums I got into this year. Some of them were comebacks, some of them were artists at the top of their game crafting great follow-ups, some came out of nowhere, and some were from artists that I’d known about for a while and finally embraced. This is an easy phenomenon to come across in this day and age, since it’s so easy to hear a new artist on your streaming service of choice, which also makes it just as easy to dismiss an artist.

You can listen to a 30-second snippet of a song from an artist deserving of a more thorough deep dive, but if that snippet doesn’t hit for you, you’ll just disregard the artist and move on. Or maybe you do go to the trouble of listening to an entire album (like I did with some of these), and if that album wasn’t quite their best work, or it was and you just didn’t come across it at the right time in your life, you won’t give it a second listen. Either way, I try to remain open to embracing artists I’d ignored in the past, and these were the albums where that paid off this year. Continue reading →