The Music Weird's Best of 2025

 

My 25 favorite albums of 2025 followed by my "Best of 2025" playlist on both Tidal and Spotify. 

Mostly melodic electronic, organic house, deep chillwave, stuff like that. 

Tidal says I listened to 2,400 unique artists in 2025, and that doesn't include whatever I listened to on YouTube, Spotify, and physical media. As a result, my "Best of 2025" playlist has nearly 300 tracks, but I'm not going to shorten it like I've done in previous years. 

25 favorite albums of 2025

1. Edapollo – Every Cloud..
2. Lily Allen – West End Girl
3. Lehto – Sisu
4. Barry Can't Swim – Loner
5. Maribou State – Hallucinating Love
6. Mild Minds – Gemini
7. Blonde Maze – Second Sight
8. Qrion – We Are Always Under the Same Sky
9. Stavroz – Take a Seat
10. Teho – Shifting
11. Kiln – Lemon Borealis
12. Jesper Ryom – No Place in Particular
13. Tenem & Sebastian Davidson – Lament
14. Fejka – Azur
15. Emancipator, LAPA – Stories of the Melting Sun
16. Mini Trees – Slow It Down
17. K-LONE – sorry i thought you were someone else
18. Inwards – Free Flow
19. Lightheaded – Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming!
20. Kid Drama – 11:11
21. Weval – Chorophobia
22. Poldoore – Chroma Dream
23. Bon-Psy – Order Chaos Balance
24. Nick Warren – Turbulence
25. Jan Blomqvist – MUTE

Streaming playlists

Spotify

Tidal

The Music Weird's Best of 2024

My 25 favorite albums of 2024 followed by my "Best of 2024" playlist on both Tidal and Spotify, cut down to a tight 10 hours (!). Mostly melodic techno/electronic music. 

1. Jamie xx – In Waves
2. Swimming Paul – Smiling Through the Pain
3. Marek Hemmann – Five
4. Tycho – Infinite Health
5. Mimose – Parra for Cuva
6. Catching Flies – Tides
7. Bunt. – Levi Don't Do It
8. Jody Wisternoff – Welcome to My World
9. Fakear – Hypertalisman
10. Kenya Grace – The After Taste 
11. Boogie Belgique – Postlude to Machine
12. Nils Hoffmann – Running in a Dream
13. Christian Löffler – A Life
14. Flamingosis – Better Will Come
15. Lane 8 – Childish
16. Tourist – Memory Morning
17. Four Tet – Three
18. Kasbo – The Learning of Urgency
19. Teho – Shifting
20. Kidnap – Something Lost, Something Gained
21. Eric Hilton – Sound Vagabond
22. Caribou – Honey
23. salute – TRUE MAGIC
24. Seahawks – Time Enough for Love
25. Bubble Love – Bubble Love

Same Bat Time, Different Bat Channel...

I'm not writing new blog posts these days, but I post unusual/interesting songs sometimes on my YouTube channel. Check it out here if you're interested. 

The Music Weird's Best of 2023

My top 40 of 2023 in no particular order, although I put tracks from my five favorite albums first. The playlist is available on both Tidal and Spotify.

Those five albums are: 

1. Good Lee – A World Within
2. Helios – Espera
3. Nuage – 0% Anxiety
4. Seb Wildblood – Separation Anxiety
5. Lusine – Long Light

The complete track list is given in text below. 

Artist	Track	Album
Good Lee	Your Happy Place	A World Within
Helios	A Familiar Place	Espera
Nuage	Full Moon	0% Anxiety
Seb Wildblood w/Laraaji	366	Separation Anxiety
Lusine	Transonic	Long Light
Yotto	Timbre	Growth
The Mole	Being a Total Warm Up	The River Widens
Yamil	Symmetry	Amanecer
Rameses B, Borukon	Moonlight (Lofi Version)	single
Amtrac	Connection	Extra Time
Bonobo, Jacques Greene	Fold	single
Teen Daze	One for Paradise	Natural Movement
Phaeleh	Walk Away	A New Day
Harmonious Thelonious	Afterhour	Cheapo Sounds
Khotin	Computer Break (Late Mix)	Release Spirit
I:Cube	Kaszio Plus 1	Eye Cube
Entheogenic	Codices	Kailash
Jack Vanzet, Thrupence	Turn Around and Go	Structures
Lane 8	Woman	single
Pépe	Resonant Bodies	Reclaim
Luke Brancaccio, Gai Barone	Memory Child (Original Mix)	Until the End
Isolée	7eleven2	Resort Island
Anthony Naples	Orb Two	Orbs
Vril	Animist	Animist
In Explosions	Nothing in Its Right Place	single
Fakear	About You	single
Uppermost	Do Not Surrender	P2P
Stavroz	Her Eyes Were Red	single
Autograf, Johanson	Over the Sea	Affirmations
Mord Fustang	Nature Over Form	single
X-Press 2	Muse	Thee
Vorso	Facets	Holonomy
Icarus, Bacavi	All for You	Change
Clark	Dolgoch Dry as Ash	Cave Dog
Otik	Epiphania	Cosmosis
Dea Dia	Mercury in Retrograde	I’m in a Midnight Sort of Mood
Syn Sizzle	Secret Blend	single
DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ	Brave	Destiny
Abel	Glasshouse	Cosmic Law
Elderbrook, Tourist	Howl (Chill Mix)	single

The Cristy Lane doll (1985)

If you're here, it might be because you—like me—wondered what the Cristy Lane doll looked like.

This Cristy Lane doll was introduced in 1985 and sold by mail order. The doll was part of a merchandising blitz that coincided with the 1986 publication of Lane's biography, One Day at a Time, written by her husband/manager, Lee Stoller.

Big-hair energy

In early 1985, Billboard reported:

In March, Stoller will add a new product to the mix: a 14-inch Cristy Lane doll, which will retail, along with an album of her gospel and "positive" hits, for $19.95, plus $3 for shipping. He says he will test market it in "half a dozen" areas to give him the data he needs to buy tv time during the Christmas season.

Lane started out as a regular country singer and performed worldly cheating and divorce songs such as "Slippin' Up Slippin' Around" and "I Just Can't Stay Married to You" before moving into contemporary Christian music, so the reference to "'positive' hits" in the Billboard article indicated that the included album (actually a cassette) would not feature those kinds of songs.

Interestingly, the cassette that came with the doll was titled Simple Little Words and used the same cover as Lane's secular United Artists album of the same name but with a different track list that replaced every song except the title track with religious songs or innocuous songs like "Up on the Housetop" (the Christmas song).

The doll included a "birth certificate" and wore an almost Victorian dress "patterned after the actual garments worn by Cristy." When I read Lane's biography, I saw the ad for the doll in the back pages (reproduced below) and wondered what it looked like, so here it is for anyone else who has a burning curiosity about the Cristy Lane doll.

 

I wonder what the "free gift" was?

 

Best of 2022

 

I created the playlist in both Spotify and Tidal, but one track is missing from the Tidal playlist ("Summer" by Frederik Valentin & Loke Rahbek) because I couldn't find it on there. 

Fave album of 2022 is still Tourist's Inside Out. 

Enjoy.