What I Listened to in 2025, According to Apple

23 Jan, 2026

Like a lot of people, I have pretty conflicting feelings about music streaming. I like the accessibility of it, the fact that I have a massive wealth of all the music ever released that I can tap into pretty much however and whenever I want for very little money. Someone can recommend a band to me, and I can start listening to them the same day (the same minute even). But it comes at the cost of royally screwing over musicians and songwriters. Of making it more and more impossible for anyone to make a living as an artist. Of contributing to a culture that is turning art into content. And meanwhile we users get screwed over too. Our listening data is tracked, collected, and sold. Advertisers use it to better understand how to exploit us, and it's only a matter of time before someone even worse starts playing with that data too. A bad actor knowing what songs you like may seem like sort of a trivial thing to worry about, but as the digital world continues forming into a total surveillance state, every trivial thing adds up.

But with all that said, I have to admit that I am not immune to the charms of Wrapped Season. I love it, in fact. I love getting to take stock of my year in music via an objective source that tells me what I really listened to.¹ Yes, it's basically free advertising for corrupt businesses, and yes, it's kind of just a brazen admission that your data is being harvested. But I still get a little thrill of glee as I look at my playlist of my top 100 songs for the year and oscillate wildly between "wow, I have such great taste" and "oh god, that made it on here?" And it's a wonderfully communal experience to see your friends' results and find where your listening habits overlap and diverge.

When I was on Instagram, I would talk in depth about the results of my Replay mix each year (my sin of choice is Apple Music, which I use on account of I Am On a Family Plan and My Parents Are Paying for It), and my friends and I would send each other numbers that would prompt us to wax poetic about the corresponding songs in our top 100. I didn't do it at the end of last year because I deleted my Instagram account in September. This was, on the whole, a positive decision, and I truly can't recommend it enough to anyone still trapped in the app's clutches. However, I did find myself really missing the opportunity to talk publicly about my Replay, and I wondered if there was some way I could do it elsewhere.

So therefore, I am going to take you, the loyal readers of my infrequently-updated blog, on a tour of my Replay results. You'll get to see what I listened to, and more interestingly (I hope), what I thought about it. At some points you may find yourself wondering about the stability of my mental state last year, which is fair enough. But whatever you get out of this, I hope you at least enjoy this incredibly self-indulgent journey into the songs I like.

Let's begin!

Top Artist: XTC

I have been sort of aware of XTC for a little while now; I think I maybe first learned about them from a post on a Talking Heads meme page years ago, and I listened to a fair bit of stuff from their album Drums and Wires back in the day. But for whatever reason, they kind of had a chokehold on me this year. These guys are masters at what they do. Andy Partridge has a kind of unfathomable consistency when it comes to catchy melodies (the other songwriter, Colin Moulding, is less consistent, but when he's at the top of his game he gives Partridge a real run for his money). They more or less helped invent New Wave music, and then right when the genre they helped bring about took off they pivoted to pure pop excellence.

I mainly listened to two of their albums this year, both new to me. Black Sea is I think the peak of Early XTC. They'd gotten their nervy, high-energy sound down to a science, and the whole thing is tight and just crackling with electricity. Every XTC album has a few missteps and for my money the ones here are "Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)" (all XTC lyrics are pretty unsubtle but these are just juvenile) and "Love at First Sight" (which is excellent until you pay attention to what they're singing in the last verse). But it's easy to forgive those because every single other song is so damn good. "Generals and Majors" is, of course, one of Moulding's best works, while Partridge delivers banger after banger, ranging from deceptively bright ("Burning With Optimism's Flames") to deliciously nightmarish ("Travels in Nihilon"). Meanwhile, the other album, The Big Express, demonstrates late XTC finding its footing and blossoming into something sublime. XTC fans seem to have mixed feelings about this album but for my money I think it might be my single favorite of theirs. I genuinely think it would be a perfect album if they axed the pseudo-jazz slog that is Moulding's "I Remember the Sun" and inserted his obscenely good B-side "Wash Away" between "Reign of Blows" and "You're the Wish You Are I Had." The band's very best songwriting is on display here, particularly in the first half of the album, where you get stuff like "This World Over" (uncharacteristically subtle and moving for XTC), "All You Pretty Girls" (the catchiest song to ever get away with having the word "quayside" in the chorus), and "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her" (I plead the Fifth).

Interestingly, my very favorite XTC song isn't on either of these albums, and consequently it's only #54 on the Replay mix. That would be "Love on a Farmboy's Wages" from Mummer, which I thought would maybe wind up my favorite album of theirs until I realized my love for "Farmboy" didn't quite extend to the other tracks. "Farmboy" is XTC at their least energetic but most pastoral and melodic, resulting in a song that's just achingly pretty. It conjures up a world I want to get lost in. And I feel for the poor farmboy, who wants to do right by his bride-to-be but just can't earn enough for a proper wedding. It's just such a well-crafted, thoroughly gorgeous song, and I love it so much.

Top 500 Listeners: XTC and The Bug Club

So this is a new thing Apple's doing that I think they ripped off from Spotify. I guess they have rankings of who listens to what artists the most and I managed to crack the top 500 for two of them. XTC makes sense as we've seen already. The Bug Club being here is intriguing to me. I've only actually listened to a single album of theirs. I think I made the top 500 for two reasons. Firstly, the album, Rare Birds: Hour of Song, is long as hell. It has a whopping 24 songs on it, and if you include the short spoken word interludes between each one the total balloons up to 47. Secondly, I listened to the whole thing somewhat religiously earlier in the year. Does only knowing the one album make me a poser? Only the real Bug Club diehards can say. But anyway, this is a damn good album. It's playful in a way that's infectious and addictive. The lyrics are unabashedly silly yet staggeringly earnest, and they utilize a scrappy DIY sound that gives all their music the sense that it's so full of energy that the songs can't fully contain it. Even when they slow down or get quiet, you still feel like these are people who are having the time of their lives. I would put on this album whenever I needed a rush of adrenaline in my daily life, which I guess must have been pretty often.

Top Album: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly by Le Loup

I am very much an Albums Guy. I like having a series of songs that flow in a particular order. I press shuffle mostly under duress. And I really love it when an album feels like a fully-formed thing, like it never existed as separate songs before it suddenly popped into existence one day.

I found this album via a recommendation in the fan Discord for the artist Radical Face (who I love very much but who interestingly only had one song crack the top 100 for me this year). I don't know what possessed me to listen; I guess I was intrigued by that long-ass title or the scrawls of writing on the album cover. But I pressed play one day and I found myself whisked away to a strange and beautiful otherworld. One of my longstanding musical preoccupations is sad, pretty, folksy stuff, and The Throne... has that in spades. But that doesn't mean this is an all-acoustic piece. Far from it. There's synthesizers, weird loops and samples, and seemingly any instrument these guys had around the house. There's a very haunting quality to all of it, a sinister force lurking below the beauty on the surface. There's something apocalyptic and yet spiritual about it all; it sounds like a tape put together by those left behind on Earth after the rapture, making a joyful noise in praise of the god that abandoned them. The album is much greater than the sum of its parts; it demands to be listened to in one sitting, and with one exception I basically never listened to its individual tracks on their own.

I can definitely see how this made it to #1 for me. I listened to it almost compulsively, constantly finding myself wanting to visit its strange world. And remarkably, it holds up to that kind of intensive re-listening. I've already listened to it a couple more times this month. Despite this, though, I think in relation to all the other music I listened to I still listened to The Throne a pretty normal amount.

Top Ten Songs

1. "Le Loup (Fear Not)" by Le Loup
2. "Music for a Found Harmonium" by Penguin Cafe Orchestra
3. "I Had a Dream I Died" by Le Loup
4. "Generals and Majors" by XTC
5. "Canto I" by Le Loup
6. "We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!" by Le Loup
7. "Planes Like Vultures" by Le Loup
8. "Outside of This Car, the End of the World" by Le Loup
9. "To the Stars! To the Night!" by Le Loup
10. "(Howl)" by Le Loup

...oh. That's eight out of ten. Never mind.

As you can see, my number one song of the whole year was "Le Loup (Fear Not)" by Le Loup. This is the only track from The Throne... that I listened to regularly outside of the album. I don't know how to properly describe this song. The lyrics conjure up packs of wild animals, and animals are the only way I can think to explain how this song makes me feel. Imagine a hundred crows taking to the sky. Imagine a Siberian Husky alone on a cold mountain. Imagine a pack of wolves running in the night, their fur sleek, their eyes sharp, all of them vicious, intelligent, beautiful. Can you see them? That's how this song sounds.

I don't have much to say about the other seven Le Loup songs since I mostly see them as parts of a whole, and I already touched on "Generals and Majors" in the XTC section. I do want to call your attention to song #2 though. I feel as though Apple Music has done me dirty here because that song is my morning alarm. Apparently every time my alarm goes off, for Apple's purposes it counts as a stream of that song. I'm glad the Simon Jeffes estate is getting their fraction of a fraction of a cent, but that shouldn't reflect on my Replay mix. My sibling also uses a song from Apple Music as their alarm and they don't have this problem. Like I guess I listened to this song a lot because I hear the first bit of it every morning before work, but that doesn't feel like actually listening to the song. I demand a recount.

A Sampling of Other Songs from My Top 100

#11. "Made Up in Blue" by The Bats

Midway through last year I got a wild hair to try to find a playlist of bands from Flying Nun Records. For those unfamiliar, Flying Nun is a New Zealand record label that during the 80s put out music by a bunch of bands associated with this scene called the "Dunedin sound," which more or less invented the sound of indie rock as we know it today. U.S. alt rockers like R.E.M. and Pavement were big fans of Flying Nun bands. I'd read about the label but never actually heard anything from it, which was why I wanted to look up a playlist. I found one and was enjoying it fine, but then this song came on and it was like I'd been hit by a train. I immediately jumped to find more by The Bats, which led me to Compiletely Bats (a collection of their singles and EPs), which has been in heavy rotation ever since. All the songs from that album are good, but this one remains a high point. I like how jangly the guitar sounds, how catchy the melody is, how lively it is overall. Great for jumping around to, which is what I often do when it comes on.

#17 & 36. "Roundabout" & "Take" by The Beths

Speaking of one-syllable Kiwi bands that start with the letter "B," The Beths released a new album this year. The Beths are one of my very favorite bands working today. They perfectly meld high-energy, tuneful electric guitar music with some of the most existentially depressing lyricism in the biz. These were my two favorite tracks from the new record, and coincidentally they go back to back in the tracklist. "Take" is one of the darkest-sounding songs The Beths have ever dropped, an exercise in building tension more and more and more until it overwhelms you completely. And then they follow it with "Roundabout," one of the most unambiguously lovely songs of their career so far. It's about being in love with someone for a long time, and it sounds like it too. I hope The Beths continue to have a long and fruitful career, and that I get to look forward to enjoying it the whole way through.

#21. "Said the Spider to the Fly" by The Paper Chase

I don't normally pay attention to music producers, but I started noticing the same name popping up over and over again: John Congleton. He'd produced a lot of albums I really loved (namely I'll Be Your Girl by The Decemberists, FFS by FFS, and Suburban Nature by Sarah Jaffe), and this thing would keep happening where I would listen to music, like it, and then discover he produced it. So after a bit of research into this guy, I learned that prior to his producing career he fronted a post-hardcore band. Intriguing. I looked them up, found an interesting song title, and pressed play. Three days later my ravaged, lifeless body was found in the sewers of a neighboring city. This song frightened me, but it was beautiful and moving, and I couldn't stop listening to it. It sounds like what you might get if you beat a power ballad until it was half-dead. Like all good horror, it makes you think just as much as it scares you. I think if someone ever turned my favorite webcomic "What Happens Next" into a TV show this wouldn't be a half-bad theme song. I want to listen to more from The Paper Chase but I am lowkey too scared to try.

#23. "Minor Swing" by Django Reinhardt

I ran a D&D campaign throughout most of 2025, and like any year I ran a D&D game the music I played during the sessions occupied a significant amount of my Replay mix. For this campaign, I wanted to get the music exactly right. I found that a lot of people's pre-made D&D playlists didn't sound the way my world did in my head, so I spent a not-insignificant amount of time scouring the internet for suitable instrumental music. I made multiple playlists corresponding to different locations in my campaign setting, along with a pre-session playlist (consisting exclusively of Django Reinhardt) and a post-session playlist (consisting of rock and pop music I thought fit the energy of my world). Thing is, though, effectively running a D&D campaign with a completely original setting and adventures requires a kind of mania that is difficult to sustain if you're just a hobbyist like me, and after a year of scheduling conflicts, new projects, and other life things, I fizzled out and put the campaign on indefinite hiatus, which is where most of my campaigns eventually wind up. I hope someday the mania returns because I do love the world I made, but only time will tell if that happens.

#27. "Bulletproof" by La Roux.

How is it that in 17 years of this song being out I never realized how great it was? It played during a shift at my job and even though I knew for a fact that I'd heard it before it was like I was hearing it for the first time. It's electro-pop perfection; the music is so synthesized and crunchy that it almost sounds like a chiptune. And Elly Jackson's voice completely and utterly commands your attention. It's just so cool, and it makes me feel cool too. Maybe you can scare off the people who wronged you through confident presence alone. Wow!

#33. "Postcards from Italy" by Beirut.

I run a weekly music-sharing email chain with some of my friends (called Music Friday, a basic concept I stole from Matthew R.F. Baloušek, RIP Cohost), and one week my friend Raven submitted this song. I'd never heard it before and for a short period I made it my entire personality. To borrow a line from Tame Impala fans, did you know that this is just one guy? He has a voice that reminds me of a whiskey-soaked Rufus Wainwright, and the instrumentation conjures up a fictional European country in the years before the war (pick any war, doesn't matter). I found myself nostalgic for a world that almost certainly never existed in the first place. I don't think I could ever really live in Europe (despite everything that's happening, America's weirdness fascinates me too much to leave), but it's fun to pretend I do every once in a while.

#53. "I'm Deranged" by David Bowie

This song is used prominently in the film Lost Highway, which I watched for the first time last year. The song itself is great, dark and sinister and driving ever forward on a path that can only end in destruction. Really, though, I just love Lost Highway. Lost Highway is great, y'all. It's a brutal yet artful look at how anger, misogyny, and toxic masculinity warps people, and also there's a really weird guy in it who delights me. Losing David Lynch was a real crummy start to last year. But man, what a wealth of work he left behind.

#75. "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" by My Chemical Romance

I spent a lot of last year writing and rewriting a full-length play. It still isn't done, but it's coming along nicely, and I am thinking I will be able to put it up next year if I get everything in order. (Am I procrastinating on starting the next draft by writing this post? Perhaps.) The world of this play has occupied a lot of my mind all year, and part of that consisted of thinking about what kind of music it might have in the sound design. At first I thought it would be bright, energetic indie rock ("Future Me Hates Me" by The Beths was particularly on my mind). But I realized I was wrong when I was on a road trip and my friends put Avril Lavigne on in the car, and that realization cemented when I went to My Chemical Romance's spectacular and thought-provoking San Francisco arena show. It had to be pop-punk, Tumblr emo, the music you listened to in middle school that you now make a big show of being embarrassed by because you're afraid of how much it still moves you. This song in particular became my play's theme song. I'd put it on every day before writing to get in the right headspace. It's everything I want my play to be: the lyrics are kind of silly, but the emotional core is so raw and earnest that it breaks your heart the second you allow it to. I don't know if I'm walking that particular tightrope yet, but that's where I'm hoping I'll get.

#82. "Holy, Holy" by Geordie Greep

YouTube had been trying to recommend me this song's music video for like a year, so on an impulse I finally clicked it. I didn't know if I liked it at first. Musically I was mostly enjoying myself (particularly with that buzzsaw electric guitar riff), but lyrically I was uncomfortable with how sexist the narrator was. I was pretty sure it was supposed to be satirical, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I figured I'd given the song its fair chance and I wouldn't bother with it again, but later I found it was stuck in my head. So I put it on again, and this time I paid attention to what he sang in the second half of the song, and it floored me. It completely recontextualized everything that came before. The guy still sucked, but he was so pathetic that I genuinely felt sorry for him. Now instead of just seeing it as macho posturing, I see the song as one of my favorite short stories, a poignant tale of the hollowness at the center of the fantasy of masculinity. I haven't listened to anything else by Geordie Greep yet but I think I really should

And there you are. This still only scratches the surface of what I listened to in 2025, but it should give you a decent idea of what I'm interested in and what captures my attention. I'll see you again in 2027, when I take stock of whatever music I heard this year.

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