In 2022, it was strange and surprising that Kate Bush’s 1985 single Running Up That Hill charted. Now, it’s just a fact of the music industry that old music is more popular than new music. Last year 2020’s Pink Pony Club, 2006’s Headlock, and 2019’s Anxiety all charted. Why then do year-end lists restrict themselves to music that came in the last 12 months?

I like words. And I really like it when those words are set to music. This is my top ten list, so I make the rules. Old music makes up around 70% of all music listening From The Atlantic, so not uncoincidentally, I have 3 songs from the last year, and 7 songs from the olden days.

10.

When asked about the “hunkification” of Bob Dylan vis-a-vis Timothée Chalamet in a reddit AMA, Cameron Winter said this:

Cameron Winter must be aware that his own elven heartthrob status is vaporous; contingent on him not presenting that much to the public and being incredibly beautiful. Both of these things will fade with age, as he forms crows feet and smile lines and, like Dylan, he begins to toy with the peasantry. Maybe his mythical status is a little safer. Rather than presenting as a poetic genius, Winter’s poetry reminds me more of the uneasy beauty that a madman’s rambling graffiti can sometimes possess.

I like it when my taste aligns with critical consensus and popular culture. Love Takes Miles was Pitchfork’s favourite song of 2025, and it was impossible to find a ticket to his show. Love Takes Miles is the easiest listen of the album, and the only song in which I’m glad I’m seeing him play at a standing venue where I can dance, rather than a grand hall where I can sit and sip red wine from a plastic cup. You better start a-walking baby.

9.

There’s a story that Netflix’s CEO Ted Sarandos could only see films in drive-in theatres because his father was a heavy smoker, which meant he couldn’t go more than two hours without a cigarette. This may explain Sarandos’s love for the at-home movie experience, and his indifference at the decline of the cinema. I love cinemas. I love being enveloped by a movie. I couldn’t imagine anything more hellish than watching a movie with an itchy chain smoker. I couldn’t imagine anything more hellish than living my entire life like that. Please, come out from the doorway, and enjoy the party.

8.

I wanted to include this line purely for how economic the songwriting is. I mean– in eight words I can see a man coming home in the early morning to find his partner passed out on the couch. Behind a sliding door to the balcony is an ashtray piled high with cigarettes. Some times I feel like all my issues would get fixed if I got hit hard enough in the head. Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm.

7.

Last year I hospo-quit my job at a bakery. There was a gradual petering out of my shifts as working conditions gradually became less favourable. It was always small things to go, like the introduction of uniform, less hours to reduce lunch breaks, and an email sent company wide declaring that “we are no longer a small business.” Still, the conditions were still better than most casual jobs. The final straw was the introduction of a store-wide playlist. I loved controlling the music. It was a power I wielded like a tyrant. I would only ever play full albums, and everything from Magdalena Bay to Better Oblivion Community Center was in rotation. I played all of Sgt. Pepper’s and wouldn’t skip the scary part of A Day in The Life.

Some days I would play The Magnetic Fields’s two and half hour epic, 69 Love Songs. One day, a lady came in and commented on how tired and depressed the singer sounded. I explain the premise of the album, that it was 69 songs long: all about love. She countered, Well he doesn’t sound like a very generous lover.

Born on a Train is not from that album, but the lover singing is the least generous he’ll ever be. He knows he’s doing something wrong, but he’s accepted that this is just the way he’ll always be; after all, he was born on a train. He never quite goes all the way into feeling remorse, but he doesn’t want to hurt you anymore, and running off is the only way to stop that.

6.

Blade Bird is the other side of Born on a Train. The partner accepting their lover was born to fly away, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The Fader ranked this song as their number one of 2025, describing it as a long sigh at the end of the album. It is either an admission of defeat or quiet acceptance; after all, their baby is a bird.

She’s French, and sings in noticeable accent. Maybe I shoudn’t engage in stereotype, but the French are a direct people. Her songwriting here is so direct it’s almost unpoetic, and I love it for that.

5.

Dijon released a new album in 2025 where two songs are stylised in all-caps, and four have an exclamation mark at the end. I highlight that fact to say Dijon’s Baby is a frantic, stumbling, brain-tickly album. The sampling work especially reminds me of JPEGMAFIA’s music, which has entire albums set in all-caps.

Big Mike’s is the opening track from 2021’s Absolutely. In contrast, its sleepy, almost plodding. It’s sparse, and romantic. It’s Dijon bearing his heart out set against guitar feedback and a once-a-measure stomp.

4.

The only way to feel really loved is to feel loved completely. That’s what Dijon was saying in Big Mike’s. Even when your upset, or moody, or stressed, I still love you. It must be reassuring that his love isn’t based on the condition of tranquil seas. In You got time and I got money, Smerz sing of the opposite: loving unconditionally, almost manically, everything about someone else. Every pointless detail about them, from a clean t-shirt to the siblings circumstance saddled them with.

The song itself is a rare deviation on the album Big city life. Every other song is in black-and-white and chicly detached. “My IQ low, my shoe heels high,” they sing on the opening track. Every song is made up of cheap sounding midi instruments, to match the ironic lyrics. It is the perfect album to score late night tram rides home. You got time and I got money is the only song to trade in emotionality so directly, and it became a big Tiktok hit. Food for thought.

3.

I really like it when pop music intersects with politics. According to Wikipedia: “After Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, his administration developed a proposal for an interstate highway system, eventually resulting in the enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.” That’s a fun bit of trivia.

2.

Underscores’s album Wallsocket reads like a screenplay. I can picture every scene described purely in American high school movie cliches. From this line, I picture the camera behind the paper target, looking at Underscores from through a freshly cut bullet hole. As a smoke trail flows out, the camera slides to get a clear view of her, before cutting to a close up of the gun. It cuts to her, she’s hiding behind a baseball cap, in fear but half grinning. Maybe at this point, Happiness is a Warm Gun plays; if we can afford The Beatles.

1.

Phoenix is a collection of vignettes of a love lost, but one that the narrator is “happy to have known.” I find its second verse the most vivid.