Praise Dio, it's the most wonderful time of the year! That's right, it's time for end-of-the-year lists! I've been compiling my own personal best music lists annually for the last ten-ish years, previously publishing them for friends to see on Facebook. I've largely given the finger to Zuckerberg at this point, so I wasn't sure where my 2025 list was going to live. Fortunately, I made the decision to jump to another dead online medium this year! It was a pretty damn strong year for music, and here are my top 20.

Last night I went to what is almost certain to be my last concert of 2025, a bill of local metal bands at an instrument store/school/coffee shop called Klash Coffee. I had never heard of any of the bands playing, nor had I been to the venue before. But I had a free night and it was a $10 cover (with Toys for Tots donations also strongly encouraged), and a friend agreed to go with, so we braved the subzero temperatures to go check out the show. I'm incredibly glad I did. 

Yesterday, I missed my weekly recommendation post, which I'm happy to say has been quite rare. This was partially due to it being an unusual day for me - I was at home doing things around the house rather than playing music in the course of my day job. But more significant is the fact that I just didn't care for pretty much anything I checked out. I gave several new albums a listen, and most I shut off before finish.

The only album I made it through in its entirety was Conflict DLC by Health. Health is a weird band for me in that I've seen them live and have liked many of their individual songs, but none of their albums in full have sucked me in the way my favorite bands have. They're also such a sprawling band that it's hard to get a handle on their catalog - they're incredibly prolific and have albums, compilations, EPs, collaborations, and soundtracks. This new album is apparently all tracks that were supposed to be included on their last album, Rat Wars. In short, its hard to know where to start with Health. That said, this is a strong collection of songs. In particular, the song "Shred Envy" reminds me of White Zombie, which is always a good thing. Maybe a Rob Zombie collaboration is on the way! 

TL; DR: Listen to the new Health album.

I wasn't planning on writing a post today, considering the post-Thanksgiving Turkey coma. But, I find myself with some time on my hands, and it's a pretty solid release day. What tipped me over the edge was the discovery of a couple solid Bandcamp finds, so away we go!

This is going to be shorter than my typical concert recap because of a crazy busy day, but I caught (most of) Boris at the Fine Line in Downtown Minneapolis last night. They were in town for their 20th anniversary of Pink and brought Wisconsin-based stoner band Bongzilla along for the ride. Boris is a band that I had been meaning to check out for a long time, but they seemed to tour fairly frequently, so it never seemed urgent to catch one of their shows. But the stars mostly aligned, so I grabbed a ticket a couple weeks ago. I'm glad I did - the show ultimately sold out despite some other concerts around town that would seemingly compete for the same audience. But was it worth it?

I am a pretty obsessive tracker. I record every show I see on Concert Archives, movies I watch on Letterboxd, records I own on Discogs, and of course I have multiple spreadsheets and apps for my workouts. Of course, I have to track the songs I listen to as well, for which I use Last.fm. As you can see, I'm getting pretty close to 100,000 scrobbles (Last.fm speak for "songs listened to"), and my obsessive nature has me itching to get to that completely pointless milestone.

For someone who is so obsessed with music, 15 scrobbles a day is pretty low. That's only partially due to the fact that I listen to a lot of music where tracks that are 10-25 minutes long are the norm. The rest is because of the age of my account. I've been using Last.fm consistently for the last eight years. But I actually signed up for it nine years earlier, back in 2009. I don't exactly recall what happened, but it looks like I used it to track 330 songs back in 2009, then completely forgot all about it until the very end of 2017 (which is when, as a Google Music/YouTube Music user, I got jealous of Spotify's annual stats). I've been using it consistently since then, but my account has a full seven years of inactivity. All those years of zero tracks really pulls the daily average down. 

My actual daily average is more like 30-40 songs, which would be even higher if I didn't have to do stupid things like "go to meetings" or "live my actual life." That's no where near high enough to get to 100k tracks before the end of the year - I'd need more like 60-70 tracks per day, and there's only so much grindcore out there. But I figure I can get there by February or so, when I'll begin by annual project of listening to an album I've never heard before each day of the month. And once I hit that 100k goal? Onto the next completely meaningless goal, I suppose. Maybe I'll focus on trying to fix that daily average count. 

Happy Halloween! Today has a lot of interesting releases, but I'm not going to have as much time to dive into them as I'd like - real life calls. That said, I did have a chance to check out a few records this morning before things got crazy. 

Last night, I caught the tail end of A Queer Ritual, a two-day festival highlighting local and national queer heavy bands that was held in the basement of a warehouse/art space building in an industrial pocket of Minneapolis. This show came to my attention because of its two national headliners, Ragana and Couch Slut. I assumed that these two bands would be split across the two days of the festival, but when the daily lineups were announced, both were billed on Saturday night. With two bands I was interested in seeing at a venue I'd never visited before, plus the interesting niche of a queer-focused lineup and audience, I figured I had to check it out. 

​I'll be leaving for a long weekend tomorrow, so I won't get to a weekly music recap in tomorrow. But I still want to share a few miscellaneous thoughts as the week draws to an end.

• The video above from Jeff Nippard has some great exercises to consider adding into your routine. 
• Miracle Blood, one of the first bands I covered for my concert recap series, has a new live EP coming out on November 6th. It will be fun! The first live track dropped on YouTube a couple months back. 
• The first wave of lineup announcements for Prepare the Ground and Roadburn 2026 have dropped. Prepare the Ground scored a rare North American set from Oranssi Pazuzu and the only Svalbard North American set ever. Roadburn has an even bigger score - an Oathbreaker reunion. I'd given up any hope on ever seeing them live. I still probably won't! But a guy can dream.
• It's October, so you are required by law to listen to The Evil One by Roky Erickson, the most perfect Halloween album of all time.

By Josh Burke

This was my third time in Austin for Ripplefest Texas, a celebration of desert rock and stoner metal. It bills itself as a “family reunion” and of all the festivals I’ve been to, it really does feel the most like home in a lot of ways. I have made many friends at this festival and it’s great to see a lot of the same faces year after year. It’s also a small festival - while the capacity for the main venue is 2,000 people, I would guess the actual attendance is closer to 500. I don’t know how the financials work with this size of a crowd, but I love the intimacy. You can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be standing next to the bands playing the festival and I love getting the chance to meet and have real conversations with some of my favorite artists.