Another 2025 Playlist

Like every year, here are two playlists of our favorite music of 2025. Not what Spotify told us we listened to most, but what actually mattered to us, over the course of a year. What demanded our attention instead of sliding into the background. And when we put Joachim’s list next to Christoph’s, we realised they’re both doing exactly what Dijon described: being a sore thumb within the thing. So here they are: As always two sides, but a big 114 tracks divided between us. Christoph’s A Side and Joachim’s B Side. Different vibe, same frequency. (Mostly) different artists, all with the same refusal to disappear into the background.

Every artist on both ‘sides’ made 2025 harder to ignore. Fontaines D.C. didn’t make another post-punk record, they made something their fans would have to reckon with. Tyler didn’t make streaming-friendly singles, he made a 28-minute provocation about why we stopped moving in public. Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnenfelt kept making love songs that sound like they’re falling apart. Lambrini Girls put “cunt” in a song title 40 times and called it self-love. bar italia named their album after a Marilyn Monroe film and made it sound like three people arguing in the dark. Alex G took a major label deal and still made it weird.
What connects both lists isn’t genre or sound, it’s intention. These are artists who could have optimised for passive listening and chose not to. They’re the ones who, when faced with the choice between frictionless and memorable, picked memorable every time. As Liz Pelly wrote about refusing Spotify’s version of your year: “rather than letting a streaming service tell you what records were important to you simply because you played them the most on one app, consider taking the time to write a list based on what you actually connected with”. Burial’s still making 12-minute tracks that demand you sit with them. Blood Orange made an album about grief that refuses to be background music for your sadness. ROSALÍA got Björk and Yves Tumor on a track and conducted a symphony instead of chasing a TikTok moment.

This is what curation actually means. Not counting plays, but making choices. Not what the algorithm surfaced, but what we kept coming back to because it refused to let us forget it. These lists are what happens when you refuse to let technology do the thinking for you. When you treat music like it still matters which records shaped your year, not just which ones you happened to stream most on one app. (Full disclosure: I do have this annoying tendency to skim the internet, blogs, publications, etc. for new interesting music and then listen to it a few times before abandoning it again. And those publications I consult are probably pushed to the surface for me by the algorithm anyway… )

But here’s the thing: every single one of these artists is doing what we try to do with Another Something/Everything. They’re opening doors instead of closing them. They’re making things that are deliberately difficult to ignore, to playlist, to background. Like Dijon said: “if I can be a sore thumb within the thing, just by making the music a little bit more difficult to just sit there…. Why not do that?”. They’re choosing new combinations over safe bets. They’re proving that anti-sameness isn’t just our philosophy, it’s an act of resistance for anyone who refuses to be flattened into content.

Because when streaming platforms become “testing grounds for machine learning”, the act of choosing what matters becomes resistance. When consumption metrics replace critical judgment, curation becomes radical.

In short: Music that made 2025 feel less like a data point and more like a year worth remembering.

Another Playlist 2025 A Apple Music / Spotify

Another Playlist 2025 B Apple Music / Spotify