The Album That Defined My Year
It was not what I expected and it was not on most year-end lists.
I listen to several hundred new albums every year for work. I write about maybe forty of them. The one I keep going back to in private is rarely the one I write about most enthusiastically in public.
This year, the private album was a small Portuguese fado record by a singer most readers will not have heard of. It was on no major year-end lists. It will probably not chart. I have listened to it more than any other record in 2025, by a factor of three.
I cannot fully account for the obsession. The genre is unfamiliar to me. The lyrics are in a language I half-understand. The production is sparse to the point of austere. None of those things should produce repeat listens. They have.
What Music Criticism Gets Wrong About Year-End Lists
Year-end lists pretend to be about quality. They are mostly about consensus, recency bias, and the algorithmic visibility of the artist's PR campaign. The album that you actually listened to most in a year, if you are honest with yourself, is rarely the one your colleagues all wrote about.
The honest year-end list, written privately, is more interesting than the public one. I am trying to make peace with the gap.
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