I just posted the first Featured Crucial Releases from 2025! New records from Ethel Cain, Lambrini Girls, and zzzahara. www.crucialtracks.org/featured-…

Enjoy!

Listened to the new Ethel Cain this afternoon and have spent the rest of the day thinking about it. Not sure it’s entirely enjoyable as music (for the most part) but as art it’s pretty amazing. It’s parts haunting, anxiety inducing, and beauty. Like a black and white horror movie set to slowcore.

📺 Finished: Dark Matter (Apple TV+) - a pretty faithful adaptation of one of my favorite books. I held off watching it because I didn’t want to be disappointed. Fears unfounded!

I really want to publish more Crucial Tracks interviews in 2025. To help, I put together a framework that is a starting point for participants. If you love music and want to think about (and share) what music made you who you are today, head over and follow the instructions! We’d love to have you.

Did our annual New Years Day hike today. This year to Tifft Nature Preserve just south of Buffalo. You can see the old grain silos near downtown in the background.

Last.fm year-end reports are out! Here’s mine.

Year number 3 of my song-a-day playlist is in the books! Find 2024 here and the brand new 2025 version here. Apple Music only, sorry.

Locked in and published: my favorite 20 albums from 2024. www.crucialtracks.org/my-favori…

New hack to get page views has to be load your site up with so many scripts that the page repeatedly crashes on 50% load, so you have to keep refreshing the page. Every “major” site I visit seems to be this way now. The internet is so broken.

Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 📚