What’s In and What’s Out in 2025
New year, same judgement. Read on to hear what music trends we’re leaving in 2024, and what we’re manifesting for 2025.
I am tired. I am most probably still hungover from New Year’s Eve. I am feeling cynical, irrationally disillusioned and mysteriously ill-at-ease. And yet, it’s there. The steady march of time and our almost ritualistic embrace of it has impacted me, too. New Year hope. What better to do, then, than complain to a silent audience about the elements of the music industry that I feel a great deal of disdain towards, whilst celebrating the parts that really make me tick.
So here it is: the definitive list of musical ins and outs for 2025. You may ask yourself - who made me the harbinger of all truth? If you follow my Instagram, you may have noticed my first ‘out’ for 2025 (non musical focussed) is ‘self-doubt’. So there, an Orwellian blunder but it’s true - practicing what I’m preaching. If you disagree with any of the below, well, go watch our very own Still Listening Single Showdown on YouTube (or wherever you get your podcasts) where I dish out even less eloquently articulated takes, and disagree with me in the comments. I’ve heard it’s in for 2025, so…
Outs
The cowbell
I get it. It’s fun, it’s cool, it’s the perfect vessel for crowd interaction - pass it into your audience and you’ve transformed a glazed-eyes inscrutable London crowd into diligent trojans loyal to the melody you’re ripping onstage. Scroll back on my social media long enough and you’ll see me bouncing around an early Courting gig, whipping furiously at a cowbell raised atop my head. But God, does it sound awful. Experiment with something else, please. Use a metronome in practice, if that’s what you need it for. Anything put that shrieking din.
Bands with the word ‘Dog’ in their name
Honestly, I swear I am a dog person. I have a gorgeous, fluffy golden retriever at home who hugs me like a human anytime I am within a three foot radius, and my heart melts every time. This is sheerly a point made from the extremity of excess. I cannot keep up. Dog Race. Office Dog. Fat Dog. Dogpark. Slaughter Beach, Dog. All great bands, but which is bloody which?
The Black Country, New Road Effect
I will say this one time, and one time only. Any band that has over four instruments, or a piccolo or something curiously mythical, we don’t need to hear that they sound, “just like Black Country, New Road”. We all remember where we were when we first heard the seminal album Ants From Up Here. We all miss Isaac. The reference is so overused it’s a non-reference.
Consistently missing the support act at shows
I’m not typing this one “with my chest”, so to speak, but rather as, say, a polite, tipsy nudge from a friend over a glass of wine: stop showing up so late. I also have a full-time job, life is hectic and feeding myself is a mammoth effort on days when my only plan is to rot on the couch (yes, the same one I write from now, rotting), let alone on gig days. But if it becomes a habit, and you can hear the thudding rhythms beneath you at a boozer like the Sebright Arms, say, when all you are doing is mindlessly zorbing out with your housemate, you don’t seem to be as much as a music lover as you may think you are. No one is wondering where you’ve been. It’s actually kinda rude.
30-odd minute albums
The album as an authoritarian force of containment or a structural boundary is a concept we’ve seen fragmented, pushed back at, and played with in 2024. Take our second best album of the year, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, only released on platforms like YouTube, inaccessible on Spotify. Declan Mckenna hid a secret track on the Vinyl release of ‘What Happened to the Beach?”. Indie-pop newcomers Bby separated their album into Vinyl running times. What I refer to here is bands who tease their album for months on end, and hit you with a sub-40-min total time. So, it’s not an album. It’s a glorified EP. You know who you are.
Ins
Long song titles
No, old-school Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy are not writing this article. Back in the pop-punk heyday of the late 2000s, the Long Song Title was all the rage. 2005 album ‘From Under The Cork Tree’ opened with personal favourite ‘Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued’, and included ‘Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part To Save The Scene And Stop Going To Shows)’ - extra points for the quirky inclusion of parenthesis. I’ve seen plenty of experimentation with song names across the years, with varying degrees of success - check out Bring Me The Horizon’s 2019 experimental electro-rock project ‘Music to listen to~dance to~blaze to~pray to~feed to~sleep to~talk to~grind to~trip to~breathe to~help to~hurt to~scroll to~roll to~love to~hate to~learn Too~plot to~play to~be to~feel to~breed to~sweat to~dream to~hide to~live to~die to~GO TO’. Fuck it, why not. Language is dying off, becoming less and less useful for the post-verbal realities that need expressing. So go wild with it. For someone to copy, checkout Mancunian newcomers Westside Cowboy’s ‘I Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love (Until I Met You)’.
Sharing sex playlists
Frank Ocean is truly a defining artist of a generation… but the fact is, he hasn’t released anything substantial in over half a decade. His gorgeously melodramatic, yet sophisticatedly understated timbre can only do so much. If soundtracked intimacy is your thing, you most likely have a nifty playlist in the recesses of your Spotify for when your Hinge date nips to the loo. So share it with your friends. This is, of course, suggested with considerable warning; back in 2018, a good friend did just this (great!) and I was fumbling naked infront of a stunning stranger, trying to skip Macklemore, Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran (not so great!) until I realised we must just have pretty different types of sex. Not a turn on. (I still love you, Chlo.)
Hand-drawn gig posters
The hyper-digitisation of everything has seeped into creative taste in the last few years. Even I’ve found myself subconsciously prioritising events that looked flashy and sharply executed, over messy, bespoke cursive formats scanned in the Notes App and imbued with the Rio de Janiro filter (checkout posts from gorgeous venue the IvyHouse near Peckham to see some examples). But touching grass, and letting our phones die, is in for 2025. So why doesn’t this translate to the vessels through which we share and celebrate independent, heartfelt music?
The Perfectly Imperfect substack
I am constantly trying to find ways to resist the hegemony of the algorithm, the internet’s tendency to instantaneously spit out new factoids, ready-made information parcelled just the way I like it, therefore shaping the way that my personhood forms and evolves. For a while, I tried in my own way to figure out what things that artists I liked were listening to, supporting, reading, doing, consuming and so on, and trying it on to see if I, too, digged it. Recently, I found an organisation that does this for me - the Perfectly Imperfect newsletter. I signed up (to the free version, of course) and it sends over “celebrity” interests to my inbox. Today was Faye Webster yapping on about, amongst other things, her yo-yo collection. Charli XCX has one from a while ago. I’ve read some great books, and heard some great albums, off the back of these emails. Hashtag genuinely not an ad.
Concept albums
If you are looking for evidence of an echo chamber, look no further than the Still Listening staff. I could barely tolerate the opening synth chords of a pop ballad before I started writing for this magazine; now, I would probably die for the chance to listen to Magdalena Bay’s 2024 album ‘Imaginal Disk’ for the first time again. It’s plastered all over our top lists of 2024, not just in ode to the sugary-sweet melodies, intricate rhythm work, impressive dexterity and the dizzying, transcendent and often euphoric visuals. The album’s overarching metanarrative is so courageous, so intense. Listening to one song will instigate a listen to the album start to finish. The concepts grappled with alarming clarity and suspicion - the artificiality of modern subjectivity, self-referentiality, digital culture - are interlaced across the tracks, as well as within them. It is a body of art, not just an evidence of it. More of this for 2025, please.
State 51 Factory sessions
The music world was treated to a delicious end in 2024 with the release of three mega NPR Tiny Desk Concerts - Doechii, Billie Eilish and Sabrina Carpenter. If you aren’t aware, NPR Tiny Desk invite the most innovative, up-and-coming artists to their studio, and film a four-song-or-so set in the poky confines of quirkily-designed office space. They often get millions upon millions of hits. For more local music, and often more surprising offerings, check out label state51’s version of this: state51 Factory. The Tapir session is still one of my favourite things on the internet.