For anyone new to this newsletter, this isn’t what it normally looks like. Normally you get a website update, some show dates, some media recs, and a big yap about life or a movie. But it’s new year’s eve (my favorite holiday), and a lot of really good music came out this year, and that means you’re getting a little album of the year breakdown.

Here we go.

10. Geese - Getting Killed

Let not the fact that this album is wildly overhyped obscure the fact that this album is also wildly good. I wrote about it and Geese earlier this year, you can read that here!

9. Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer

Ninajirachi not only has her finger on the pulse of the internet as her free hand cobbles together absolutely addicting pop, hyperpop, and club bangers; she also has a wonderful sense of communicating what a generation has been silently contending with. Overstimulation, nostalgia for and marriage to our gadgets, tech, and the trauma that, as Bo Burnham put it, ‘anything and everything, all of the time,’ can inflict on minds young and old. There’s real pain and confusion here, scattered amidst the keyboards and posters on the cover. There’s an unspoken loneliness. But, via the music, pumping speakers and late nights, a small room breathing in the breath of others in the moment and alive, there’s also catharsis.

8. Deftones - private music

Deftones was always a band that eluded me. I spent almost a decade trying them out, listening to Around the Fur and White Pony and failing to understand what everyone else heard, content to enjoy Chino Moreno in his feature on one Dance Gavin Dance song. But this year, at the advice of my hardcore nonsense bandmate Marco and the internet’s Joshua Rivera, I really committed to putting in the work. I finally found a record I loved in 2012’s Koi No Yokan, and used that as the crack in the dam for all of the rest of their work to hit me like a rush of water. For all my effort, I was given a wonderful birthday gift in August: private music is easily my favorite record of theirs. Sexy, sleek, Chino Moreno’s croon eternal, heavy like a brick to the head, tender despite it all, what I put on when I need to be hit hard and soft.

7. Danny Brown - Stardust

I still remember the first time I ever heard Danny Brown: 2013, I was in the back of my friend Mike’s Honda Odyssey when Break It (Go) came on, and when Mike let go of the wheel to clap along when Danny said ‘make that booty go,’ I knew in this rap star I’d found a treasure. I followed him loosely over the following years and seen him live during the Atrocity Exhibition tour, a sonic journey through reckoning with addiction and anxiety. Almost a decade beyond Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown is sober and shining brighter than ever. Watching him dance about on stage at Warsaw this past month, he looked like an artist who understood his audience, his art, and himself. He literally embraced a new generation of up-and-coming hyperpop musicians, jumping around with femtanyl and underscores on their featured songs (“1l0v3myl1f3!” and “Copycats,” respectively) and welcoming into his space, his shows, the trans youth who our country has made a target of scorn outside of those rooms. I’m so excited for what he does next, what further beauty and community ripple out from his sober journey.

6. Sudan Archives - THE BPM

What I have been yelling at everyone since I heard this album for the first time is that THE BPM is the most bisexual album since Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It injects the listener with power from the moment the opener DEAD begins, a kind of unshakable sexiness that had me strutting through Manhattan in my schlubby clothes like I was in league with the Soho fashionistas. I remember scouring Apple Music to find something that would scratch an electronic music itch in the wake of Tame Impala’s failure of a record Deadbeat, and THE BPM was a salve and so much more. I’m dancing in the kitchen, dancing on the street, walking hard as hell like it’s Paris Fashion Week. (I also love this interview Hearing Things did with Brittney Parks!)

5. Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer

It’s a little hard to talk about this record without talking about the miracle that is Daniel Lopatin’s score of the film Marty Supreme. Secretly, this record and that score are sharing my number five spot, not only because they’re electronic music masterworks that were released by the same artist within a month, but because both pieces together encapsulate the magic of Oneohtrix Point Never as an artist. Plunderphonics is a genre of homage and collage that has been beaten to a bloody pulp by copyright. Synths are a magical soundcraft that have been utilized with the surgical precision of capitalism for inescapable pop earworms, sullying their magic with plugin profitability. Daniel Lopatin for decades has managed to dig under the hellworld cruft for the potential of these tools, stitching together transportive sonic worlds, and I feel that Tranquilizer and the score of Marty Supreme work hand in hand to deliver. We get to close our eyes and float through his meticulously designed sample-heavy spaces on Tranquilizer, where doors squeaking and babies crying echo out into a beautiful, seamless oblivion; and we get to open them and see Lopatin working hand in hand with the best filmmaking team in the game, using the 80’s synths that capital would poison to highlight an unspeaking tension, add beauty to the memory of trauma and survival, and sweatily celebrate the rebuke of a vampiric billionaire. My number five is Tranquilizer, but it’s secretly also the score of Marty Supreme, in that my real number five is my love of Oneohtrix Point Never and the anticapitalist magic he cut his teeth in, and will ever continue to weave.

As we get higher up in this list, I have somewhat hit escape velocity for any actual ‘reviews’ or blurbs on the record themselves and enter into an ambiguous stratosphere that I can only navigate through writing whatever my hand and mind tell me, thinking about the past, about experience, and about how music shapes it. I hope it all makes sense anyway, and you like what came of me trying to reason with what’s beyond this point.

4. FKA twigs - EUSEXUA¹

I’ve spilled a lot of ink on this record and twiggy already, and I don’t think I can spill any more without making myself cry. So I’ll just share what I wrote back in February.

Things are a little better now, I think.

3. Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power

I talked a lot with my friend John about how this record feels impossible to put words to, how whenever we listen to it and we both saw them live (myself at the Warsaw, him in Manchester), we were awash in indescribable memories across the past years of our lives amidst crowds of flailing strangers. Because I lacked words, I went to find some: I started reading John Gardner’s book Grendel, and its inspiration, the epic Beowulf.

I realize rather than intimacy

a pustule of lust inflicted 

on innocence

was leaning lascivious on an 

open car window, the cover

its story, a sour corruption

What I wrote is inspired by the tracks “Incidental III” and “Winona,” which I described to John as “if they made you wait the entire record for the ending of ‘Dream House.’” You can read the rest here.

2. Quadeca - Vanisher, Horizon Scraper

One of my bandmates and best friends, Erin, had a really bizarre experience with this record. I interviewed her about it.

Yeah, isn't that crazy? I had given it a couple of listens before my hospital stay, and I really liked it. But, it's such a dense album. Usually my method when I'm listening to an album for the first time is, I put on my good headphones, and I take Garbo for a walk, and I listen while I'm walking, and that's what I did. When I got through with it, I was like, holy shit, that was incredible, and so dense, I almost don't even know what I just listened to. And so I put it down, and said 'I need to revisit this.'

I did not know that revisiting it was gonna be what it was for me.

You can read that here.

1. Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

In as few words as possible, this record and experiences that surrounded it helped me finally feel Puerto Rican, for the first time in decades.

I wrote about that, in my own way, here.

Congrats if you made it this far! Here are some honorable mentions.

• Hannah Frances - Nested In Tangles

• Pile - Sunshine and Balance Beams

• Little Simz - Lotus

• Tyler, the Creator - DON'T TAP THE GLASS

• FKA twigs - EUSEXUA afterglow

• Viagra Boys - viagr aboys

• Black Country, New Road - Forever Howlong

• Rosalía - LUX

• Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

• Rafael Toral - Traveling Light

Thanks for reading everyone, and thanks for your patience if I had ya waiting around. Here’s to the hope for a wonderful 2026.

- Will