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/
It’s the end of the year and that means it’s time for us decide on our individual Top 10 Favourite albums list. Once this is done, we hand this to David, who fires up the TINH algorithm and a collective Top 10 is created. Sometimes it’s predictable, sometimes it’s not, more often than not Guy feels like the TINH black-sheep but every year we tell him we love him and it all works out well.
Part 1 | TINH Collective Top 10 List.
We run down our top 10 list, introducing the albums and why they made it into our top 10. We always plan to be short and snapy. We always fail. But hopefully you enjoy it.
Part 2 | Spin It Or Bin It | Favourite Track of 2024.
We usually create a short list of 4 tracks each and pick a single track to represent the theme. With it being the end of the year, the theme is obvious, Favourite Track of the Year. But we each created a 10 track ‘short’ list this time.
The 40 track ‘Favourite Tracks of 2024 is available here and it’s a belter.
In Part 2 we each talk through our favourite track of the year and then ask the question … Spin It or Bin It where we try to decide a track of the year.
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/
Another month, another pod. A very warm and most welcome to Episode 51 of This is Not Happening (TINH), an Album of the Month (AOTM) Podcast. 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’. This is where we pick a theme and each select a song that represents that theme. We judge each others selections by asking the question ‘Spin It or Bin It’?
This month, in Part 1, Joey sits in the middle of a ‘divisive discussion’ focused on Caribou’s new album Honey. One of us think it’s some of the best of Caribou’s work, one of us thinks it’s much less than that.
In Part 2, Spin It or Bin It, our theme this month is ‘Basslines’, for once we stipulated no other rules.
Part 1 | Caribou | ‘Honey’
We all love Caribou. There are few artists that sit in the centre of the TINH venn diagram, but Caribou is one of them. However, we all have different favourite Caribou albums and therefore have different expectations and hopes when it comes to a new Caribou album.
The debate is fierce. We cover many topics including how to be fair when an artist produces something we weren’t expecting, can you remove the bias of your disappointment and critique the album without bias? Unfortunately, we also end up talking about AI and music too.
Watch this short of Dan talking about ‘Volume’ … HERE
BBC Sounds interview with Dan Snaith from this month … HERE
Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | ‘Basslines’
The best Spin It or Bin It’s are often the simplest. This month, the theme is one word and no extra rules or exclusions, ‘Basslines’. However you want to interpret it, it’s cool.N
There was a moment when I watching Nilufer Yanya last week at the Brudenell in Leeds, when I was hit by a strong question – what am I watching? What is this music? Yanya has been doing a few in-store stripped back sets promoting her third album, My Method Actor, which dropped last Friday.
She had been expecting that the Leeds date, like the others, were a genuine in-store in a record store or similar – and seemed a bit bemused and slightly wrong-footed to start to realise it felt more like a proper gig. She had no drummer, with only two (very adept) musicians with her, one on sax and keys, the other on bass/guitar. I was expecting, as a result, to find the songs I already knew – four or five of them had already been slipping out the last few months – to feel a little underpowered. How wrong I was. If anything, they revealed themselves even more clearly – Yanya’s gosssamer light, murmured, throaty vocal hung in the air with surprising power, and the knotty construction of her clever, brilliant songs seemed so logical when you hear them live. But I was still nagging away at that question: what is this? Girl with guitar and vocals, quite angsty lyrics. Indie guitar music right? Not really. There’s a proggy-ness to the way she plays guitar at times, and her chord structures are angular and surprising in a way that feels more like jazz than pop music. Let’s throw post-rock into the mix too just for fun.She clearly plays with different tunings for different songs and was having to retune her guitar in between (she started to relax and displayed a lovely goofiness with her interactions with the audience that were wonderfully at odds with the intensity of her performance). I still don’t know what this is. Of course, in the post-Spotify era, why should this matter? Every artist is a jukebox of influences. But I think I want to know why because I want to understand why this is such a special album – because let’s be clear, I am completely blown away by this extraordinary record.
Nilufer Yanya burst onto the scene in 2019 with her much-lauded debut album Miss Universe. She seemed to arrive fully formed, comfortably living in a sound that seemed part confessional angular indie of early PJ Harvey, and part something less easy to categorise. I liked her immediately, though I found her follow-up Painless not quite as powerful and it didn’t quite stay with me.
Maybe it’s easy to say this when an artist finally delivers the perfect record in your own musical wheelhouse, but though I’ve really tracks of hers in the past, I’ve always had the feeling that her albums can feel a bit disjointed, and I like some tracks more than others. So when she released the first single from this album early this year, the astonishing Like I Say (I Runaway), I was pretty excited. It was, as they say, an absolute banger, and right now, I think it’s going to be my song of the year.
Every song that’s followed this one has been just as intriguing, and crucially, they’ve all felt part of a maturing and a broadening of Yanya’s sound. But nothing prepared me for what those songs would sound like in the context of a whole album. Even the songs I’ve smashed to death like Like I Say and My Method Actor sound fresh and new when you hear the sequencing of this record. And let’s talk about the sequencing. Is there a better opener than Keep on Dancing this year – crisp, taut, desperate, urgent – all the things this album is about, finding yourself in your late 20s, broken relationships, fears about yourself, about how you present yourself (hence Method Actor). Then onto Like I Say which now sounds like the things it was born to do – to take you into the album as a whole. To follow that with Method Actor feels almost rude – the disgustingly fantastic guitar on that song should be against the law.
You’d think the album might be front loading the goodies, and I did worry a little on first listens that the second half was a more languid, slow-burn affair. But as each song opens itself on repeated listens, it starts to dawn on you – or it did on me anyway – that there isn’t. bad moment on this tight, brilliant 11 songs, 44 minute masterpiece. I could go on about individual tracks, but we can do that on the pod. But I have to say that the Robert Fripp prog drone guitar on Call It Love almost makes me scream with joy every time I hear it!
Shout to Yanya’s collaborator Wilma Archer, about whom I know little – but he has clearly found a way to showcase Yanya’s brilliance to full effect, and Yanya has been very effusive about his role in the record. His background in electronic music is the key to this I think – there is openness and a simplicity about the songs’ arrangements that allow the songwriting and Yanya’s lovely vocals to shine. You hear every instrument, every line. It’s a triumph.
So yeah, I’m a fan. It’s in my top 3 for the year. It might even take the top spot. I might, in fact, need to take a break soon because I can’t get enough of it. How about you, brothers…?
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/
Welcome to Episode 45 of This is Not Happening. An Album of the Month Podcast where 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’. This is where we pick a theme and each select a song that represents that theme. We judge each others selections by asking the question ‘Spin It or Bin It’?
This month, in Part 1, David bravely returns to the scene a previous crime on our podcast. He brings the second St. Vincent album to a group of people who historically have not reacted well to St. Vincent. Wow. How might this one go? In all seriousness, this is a very different experience to ‘Daddy’s Home’ and a really good chat about the good, the not so good and our collective love of Pop Reggae.
This month, in Part 2, Spin It or Bin It, the theme is ‘Crying in Aldi’ or ‘music that makes you cry’. As the theme suggests, things got pretty emotional.
Part 1 | St. Vincent | All Born Screaming
I think the full continuum of emotions or lack of emotions is expressed in this review. David brings unconditional love for St. Vincent plus a thinly veiled threat that his wife might tell us off again if we say mean things. The rest of bring various thoughts and ideas to the table that range from the inquisitive to the annoyed.
Watch some videos hereincluding the Jimmy Kimmel live performance.
We reference the Tape Notes podcast (and also videos) which delve into the making of the album … this is seriously informative and entertaining discussion. Take a look at it here.
Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | ‘Crying in Aldi’
The most ‘in’ of ‘in jokes’ is that Joey often cries to sad songs while doing the big shop in Aldi. He’s been banned from 3 stores now and is considering to switching to Lidl. In support of our brother, we’ve all been researching which songs make us cry and testing them out in various big-box supermarket chains.
This year really has been an embarrassment of riches, music wise – after a slow start, the new releases starting popping out in Spring, and since then we really have been spoiled for choice. I could have easily chosen to review the Billie Eilish album, or the Waxatachee, or the Yaya Bey, and that’s just off the top off my head.
But there are two albums that, so far, have stood head and shoulders above the rest for me. The first of those is Vampire Weekend’s, which must be one of the finest collections of songs they’ve ever released. The second of those two albums is the latest album from St Vincent aka Annie Clark, her seventh.
I do so with quite a bit of trepidation – because as regular listeners/readers will know, I chose St Vincent’s divisive last album, Daddy’s Home, for a previous blog, and it’s fair to say that it went down like a bucket of warm sick. So I nearly didn’t. But then I thought what the blog and the pod is about, and that’s to communicate our love for music – and well, I REALLY love this music.
Though I really enjoyed Daddy’s Home sleazy 70s shtick, I can see why it didn’t land with some people. Annie Clark is unashamedly an art rock musician – she enjoys shapeshifting between albums and using different personas and is pretty open about her debt to David Bowie on that front. I’m a huge, huge fan of hers (as is my partner Caroline, who adores her), but I’m also pretty comfortable in that art rock zone – I like my music with a bit of style, edge and persona. I also get that, for some people, that can be a huge turnoff – that ‘persona’ thing can feel like an affectation, and barrier in the way of the artists and the listener.
So why have I chosen All Born Screaming after the mauling Daddy’s Home got? Well, perhaps I am a sucker for punishment. But I think this album is really, really special. The first thing to note is that Clark has completely dispensed with the persona – this is just her. She’s said in a number of interviews that she was finding it tiring reinventing herself and that she also wanted to try and channel a bit more honesty about what she’s feeling. That’s also reflected in the sound of the album – she’s a huge Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails fan and you can really hear it in songs like Reckless:
The other thing I love about this record is that, despite its incredible musical breadth – grunge rock, electro pop, ballideering and even reggae (!), it flows SO well as a unified piece of work. If you want to talk about the Art of the Album, then surely this would merit a piece? What a journey this record goes on. Opening with the ethereal Hell is Near, and then segueing into the dark, foreboding and brilliant Reckless, and then – boom! – you get right between the eyes with the single Broken Man, surely one of the strongest out and out rock songs she’s ever made.
What I think is brave is that it doesn’t try and disperse the different styles across the record – more that you head from territory to territory, starting slowly then hitting the hard rocking trio of Broken Man, Flea and Big Time Nothing (another absolutely belter!). Violent Times moves the album into a whole new section with the Bowie-esque Violent Times followed but the gorgeous art-rock ballad The Power’s Out. Both explore Clark’s long held fascination with the ‘end of the world’ vibes in her lyrics.
And then the album does another extraordinary left turn. Sweetest Fruit is almost a straightforward pop banger (with a slight kink in it), but you can almost imagine it as a stadium ballad. If that doesn’t push the envelope enough, So Many Planets is a – I can’t believe I’m writing this – pop reggae track that is – I also can’t believe I’m writing this – an absolute triumph (others views are available of course, but I LOVE it!).
Things round up after only 41 brisk minutes and 10 songs with the funky and surprisingly chirpy All Born Screaming, that despite the dark lyrically content somehow feels like an upbeat climax to the album. And in that 41 minutes, Annie Clark has exhibited the full range of her incredible songwriting (and guitar playing, obvs) in a record that, for me, hangs together better than anything she’s ever done. I think it’s her finest hour. And that, brothers, is why I had to pick it for this month.
Ok, so some disclosure here first off: I was always a fan of N.E.R.D. back in the day, but honestly, never a die-hard. I loved In Search Of… and Fly Or Die but it feels like a long, long time ago that I listened to much beyond the hits. And I think it’s fair to say it was a different time. Back in 2001 and 2004 (when those came out) they seemed pretty much like something totally new: they were hip-hop, but they had guitars, they were cool, good looking, ridiculously talented, and of course, alongside this, they were The Neptunes. For all the brash, boisterous records they released as N.E.R.D., they were also one of the production outfits of the decade. Their Clones album had everyone on it, all produced with their slick, gossamer-like studio skills, and brought some of the best hip-hop of those years. Kelis, Snoop, N.O.R.E., Nelly, Busta, Ludacris… they sprinkled their gold dust on everyone. And so, well, I gravitated away from N.E.R.D. to the Neptunes.
So, fast-forward to 2017, and it’s been 7 years since their last long-player and the world’s changed. Have N.E.R.D.? I’ve certainly changed, and this was an album of the month that I’ve come to pretty much totally cold. Given Pharell’s polymathic skills, its’ a question that will it work or will it prove an ill-fated comeback. This is enough to give me the cold sweats, especially where it’s a genre I’m less than enamoured with than the rest of you gents. So, is No One Ever Really Dies (yes, that’s what the initials mean) really a step forward? Looking at the (inevitable) guests it certainly feels very 2017: Kendrick, Gucci Mane, Rhianna, Future, and Ed Sheeran. Yes. Him. Then there’s Andre 3000, an interesting nod to the past.
I’m three listens in, and I have to say, my first reaction is that I FEEL OLD. I know I am old, but really, for a man that’s pretty mired in the old school sound of samples, turntablism, and classic hip-hop, this feels so alien. It’s not like I don’t like new stuff – Kendrick is brilliant, Frank Ocean likewise, and there’s new records that still shake me (A Tribe Called Quest’s new record is one of my favourite albums of the last ten years, already) – but the new production style that sits somewhere less grinding than trap, but still with percussive, nervous tics and few melodies that open Lemon is way out of my comfort zone. In fact, the first listen almost makes me feel like I’ve tried to watch the news in a foreign language. Or use Snapchat.
But…. but…. it’s not all dad jokes and cliches. As I revisit, things start to gel. Lemon is a ballsy opening track, with Rhianna’s words and voice suiting its bombast well. Andre 3000’s golden skills on Rollinem 7s makes you wish he’d actually make a new album of his own. The brash melodies of Deep Down Body Thurst are bright and bouncy. It starts to emerge out of the mist, and I feel less like the new dad I am, trying to listen to Radio 1. Kendrick makes reading the phone book interesting, so he’s always listenable on Kites, and on Don’t Don’t Do It (though do they have to really overdo it on everything, rather than just make a perfectly-pitched record?). The overriding feeling so far is that there’s an album waiting to get out, if I just give it more time. It’s a much more coherent beast than some of their patchwork earlier albums, and much better for it. But it’s also an obvious truth that the modern style of hip-hop they’re swiping just isn’t my bag, so either I’ll end up liking it in spite of that, or going off it because of it. Pharrell didn’t need to make this album, and he certainly didn’t need the money, so while only time will tell, it’s good to have them back.
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