Podcast Episode 21 – Metronomy – Small World

EP. 63 | Our Top 10 Albums of 2025 – This Is Not Happening – An Album Of The Month Podcast

Festive Greetings from This Is Not Happening and welcome to our year-end, 2025 wrap-up episode. As always we split the pod into Part 1 and Part 2.Part 1 features our Top 10 favourite albums of 2025. We use a proprietary algorithm to create our list our collective favourite albums, we're talking nascent data-science excellence! Every year it throws up some surprises as our tastes are so different (and in some ways so similar.Part 2 features a festive Spin It or Bin It. We each bring a candidate for track of the year and ask the age old question 'Spin It or Bin It' … will anyone really bin anyone elses Track of the Year? Probably.To retain the tension, I won't share any spoilers here … other than to share a 40 track playlist of some of our favourite 2025 tracks … here.Whatever you do at this time of year, who ever you do it with … have a good one.Please join us in January where we will go back to the usual format of Album of the Month + Spin It or Bin It.We've been writing the blog for years come and have a look – https://thisisnothappening.net/

1. EP. 63 | Our Top 10 Albums of 2025 01:20:41
2. EP. 62 | Juniper | Joy Crookes 01:14:05
3. EP.61 | Blood Orange | Essex Honey 01:12:50
4. EP.60 | Wet Leg | Moisturizer 01:11:11
5. EP.59 | Little Simz | Lotus 01:11:16

Following last months’s Album Club #1, This Is Not Happening returns to our traditional format. In part 1, we deep dive into an album that one of us has selected. In Part 2 we play ‘Spin It or Bin It?’ where we judge each others track selections of great new music from 2022.

Part 1 – Album of the Month

This month it’s Guy’s choice, Small World the new album by Metronomy. Spoiler Alert – Metronomy are one of Guy’s favourite bands.  We discuss our expectations, reactions, reflections, dynamics in the band and if every album being released at the moment is in some way a ‘lockdown album’. 

Some interesting ‘bits’ to check out;

1. The Metacritic album review summary can be found here
2. An interesting interview with Joe Mount for DIY Mag can be found here
3. Joe Mount doing an Instagram Live Q&A can be foundhere

Part 2 – ‘Spin it’ or ‘Bin it?’

In the second part of this episode we get stuck into the MASSIVE amount of great music that has been released in 2022. We all pick a track,  introduce our track and ask the others the critical question ‘spin it’ or ‘bin it?’ We then decide on a track of the month from the list of 4.

Nolan’s track selection is – Pusha T – ‘Diet Coke’
David’s track selection is – Sasami – ‘Call Me Home’
Joey’s track selection is – Holodrum – ‘Low Light’
Guy’s track selection is – Ibibio Sound Machine – ‘All That You Want’

A link to a mini-Spotify-playlist of these 4 tracks can be found here.

In order to make our selections, we all create a long list, then shortlist 4 tracks each. The 16 tracks that make up our track shortlists can be found here.