Podcast EP.59 | Little Simz | Lotus

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

Welcome to Episode 59 of This is Not Happening (TINH), an Album of the Month (AOTM) Podcast. We’re missing a team-member this month as Davide is on an Anglo-French diplomatic mission. 

In Part 1 we deep dive into an Album that one of us has chosen and in Part 2 we play ‘Spin it or Bin it’.  We pick a theme and each pick a song that represents that theme. We judge the selections by asking the question ‘Spin It or Bin It’?

In Part 1, Nolan is in the seat. He brings Little Sim’z new album, Lotus. This was a reluctant choice when he made it. He thought it was an interesting album but he was far from loving it. Has that changed in a month?

In Part 2, we celebrate New Music. What are our favourite new tracks from the last couple of months?

                            —– Part 1 | Little Simz | ‘Lotus’ —–

This is the 2nd Little Simz album we’re reviewed as our little Album of the Month collective. Last time round was here debut album Grey Area which would all pretty much loved. I think our experience of her work since then has varied significantly. This album has been launched in a quite dramatic and controversial environment following the collapse of Simz’ relationship with former collaborator Inflo. What does Simz sound like without Inflo? Let’s find out.

Listen to the album, listen to the pod, tell us what you think. Here are some links that we mention on the pod or think could be useful to explore;

• Listen to the album … HERE.
• We mention the great Louis Theroux podcast interview … HERE.
• Watch the video for ‘Young’ … HERE.
• Buy some stuff … HERE.  

                          —– Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | ‘New Music’ —–

The theme this month is New Music. Simple. What new tunes are we loving? There’s LOADS of amazing music out but we also need to pick something that we think the rest of us will vote ‘spin it’ to.

• Joey chose ‘Feisty’ by Smerz.
• Nolan chose ‘Next to You’ by Erykah Badu and The Alchemist.
• David chose ‘Tricky’ by New Windows.
• Guy chose ‘Lowly’ by Young Fathers

We all chose 4 tracks as a shortlist which we combine into a belter of a 16 track playlist, listen to that bad boy HERE.