Some people are probably familiar with the Special Herbs instrumentals, which MF Doom released under the "Metal Fingers" alias and represent beats he made for both his own albums as well as ones he contributed to artists like MC Paul Barman, but what I think some people might not know is that the "Box Set" release, because it was made in the pre-streaming era, has significantly shorter versions of each track than the individual (well, technically two at at time) "Volume" releases. If you really want to luxuriate in these beats, skip the "Box Set" and check out the split releases!

I always liked how the end of Dummy's first album Mandatory Enjoyment sounds like it came off the dang Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles soundtrack

for comparison:

I did some end-of-the-year music type things across different "platforms" this year. Here are each of them:

• I rounded up my favorite albums of the year on record.club, along with thoughts about each of them. I'm trying to spend more time on record.club and less time on other social media platforms!
• I made an (unordered, intended to be shuffled) playlist of the songs that felt most important to me in 2025 on Apple Music.
• Lastly, there's a YouTube playlist with my favorite music videos of 2025, ordered chronologically by release date. It doesn't stand out to me as an incredible year for music videos but there are some really good ones and as I've said elsewhere Doechii kind of set the bar impossibly high with her January 2 music video release for the previous year's single "Denial is a River", which you should really watch if you haven't.

I think that's it for 2025 as a real focus, though obviously I will continue talking about music that was released in all years, not just the present one, here on this website. I'm already looking forward to new albums and concerts and whatever else 2026 has in store!

this is a nicely done performance. It's got Boiler Room voyeur appeal, Pink proving she can sing appeal, she is totally deserving of a victory lap in 2025, etc. there is a downer of a moment where the crowd struggles to figure out how to deal with singing along to the downward gearshift at the end of "run again" though

one thing that's kinda great about Confidence Man is that they are basically doing the "Planet of the Bass" bit but unironically, and they're incredible

see also last year's "I Can't Lose You"

Ice Spice makes a Bill O'Reilly reference in this song from 2025, something I did not clock when it first came out

if you make a 2025 list of albums and the weather station's "humanhood" isn't on it I am prepared to do fisticuffs with you

no whatever you're wearing is great. yeah we'll just work with that. great job lads