Podcast EP.61 | Blood Orange | Essex Honey

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 61 of This Is Not Happening, a monthly music podcast.

In Part 1, we review and Album of the Month. This month it’s Joey’s choice and he’s picked Essex Honey, the latest release from Blood Orange, UK born and raised, New York based creative force.

In Part 2, we play Spin It or Bin It, we pick a theme and all pick songs that represent that theme. This month the theme is ‘Colours’  

                            —– Part 1 | Blood Orange | Essex Honey  —–

Devonté Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, is a Grammy-nominated English singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, and director based in New York City. Devonté is a talented human being, playing multiple instruments, he is a consummate songwriter and an incredible producer. 

His latest album, Essex Honey is quite something. We all agree that this is very intelligent, impressive album created by a unique artist. But that doesn’t mean that we all like it. We get stuck right into that in this episode. Have a listen and let us know what you think.    

• Listen to the album … HERE
• Watch some great videos … HERE
• Buy some stuff … HERE

                           —– Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | ‘Colours’ —–

Sometimes the simplest themes are the best, songs with colours in the title. The 4 tracks we chose and the 16 track playlist we created are belters!

• David chose – ‘Grey Day’ by Zoot Woman.
• Guy chose – ‘Brown Paper Bag’ by Roni Size.
• Joey chose – ’99 Red Balloons’ by Nena
• Nolan chose – ‘Redbone’ by Childish Gambio

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.