It feels like my ears are growing, my hind legs are starting to sprout, and that fluffy tail is just… drooping. I’ve tumbled down so many musical rabbit holes this year, I’m half expecting to start gnawing on things and doing excited little hops. You know that feeling? That persistent, almost hopeful belief that if you just keep digging, you'll hit some kind of bedrock, some solid cultural foundation? Well, for me, every discovery just seemed to open up another hidden gate, another passageway that sparked even more curiosity. There’s so much more I could delve into, but as 2025 winds down, I wanted to share a few of the sounds and ideas that truly resonated, even if they didn't quite make it into a full feature.
Love in Lethargy
Picture this: the basement of an old brutalist mall in Kraków, Poland, the hum of a motorway just outside. The air was thick with a kind of haunted red glow, and people were gathered, hushed observers leaning against columns or huddled on the floor. I was tucked away in a leather booth with some friends, espresso martinis in hand, listening to Joanne Robertson. It was intimate, almost uncomfortably so, like we were witnessing a friend’s very first, slightly awkward public performance. Her music, spare yet incredibly rich, filled the quiet spaces between incidental noises and her own quiet adjustments.
This year, I found myself drawn to a particular kind of singer-songwriter ambient. Think of Malibu’s Vanities, where low drones hang in the air and wordless moans seem to swallow the sky, like Gregorian chants slowed down and drenched in reverb. Tracks like “So Sweet & Willing” and “Lactonic Crush” felt like being enveloped, consumed by a beautiful, hazy grayness. It took my overstimulated brain a moment to truly appreciate the luxurious languor of choke, but it quickly became a go-to. And Maria Somerville’s “Spring”? There’s something profoundly restorative about it, the way each ghostly vocal line reaches out from the void, offering a kind of sonic acupuncture for tired pressure points. Even the title of deer park’s Terra Infirma perfectly captures that hypnotically hazy sound, reflecting the slippery, retconned texture of our current existence, where perhaps only raw feelings feel truly real.
On a grander scale, there’s Addison Rae’s “Headphones On,” a slow-motion drift through Iceland’s idyllic countryside. Enough accelerationism, enough cognitive overload. For 2026, I’m hoping for a bit more of this dreamy lethargy.
Laptop Twee
Then there’s MASSI’s “tiny robot, big city: the day in the life of a friendly android.” Hitting play on that instantly transported me back to flipping through the pages of Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town. It’s this wonderfully cute spree of register buzzes, forklift whirrs, and cybernetic chirps. Suddenly, the Industrial Revolution doesn't seem like a mistake, but a miracle. Imagine a Lego civilization where your friends and family are all transhuman cyborgs.
This track also made me think of “laptop twee.” It’s this emerging wave of artists who are taking the precious aesthetics of twee and indie pop and re-wiring them with intricate sound design, unexpectedly fat basslines, or just these wonderfully cracked shards of 2020s style. Coined by some blogger friends, the term “laptop twee” now conjures this almost elven twinge in my mind, a blend of Medieval bards and MIDI pixelation. You can hear it in the psychedelic leanings of the weirdo-dance duo Bassvictim, or their friends Worldpeace DMT and Rowan Please, whose old-school inspirations manifest as these adorable little glitches. And you can even extend this framework beyond indie rock and pop into digicore, like ASC’s “love quest.” He raps in a Times New Roman font about completing a “quest inside thou hearten,” all while nightingales sing over an adorably clunky Runescape-esque beat.
But perhaps my favorite discovery this year is 300skullsandcounting, a London-based artist who describes themselves as “cy-Baroque anti-folk pop violence” and also “Undertale on fent.” Nothing quite beats cuteness like watching it be… well, desecrated. Like an aural Happy Tree Friends, Skulls tosses pom-poms of fuzz into the sky and then proceeds to trash them. “Eagle vs. Sheagle” is almost excruciatingly abrasive, while “wait here while i pee” takes a solid 107 seconds – a long damn time to pee – before unleashing this heavenly torrent of twee-mo screamo.
Laptop twee feels so promising because it’s re-injecting a sense of calm, a childlike joy, into the very machines that have become symbols of soul-eroding shittiness. It brings to mind those wonderfully ungainly, playful GeoCities websites, a nostalgic flash back to when I was a kid whose favorite sounds were the 8-bit symphonies chirping out of my Gameboy Advance. It suggests something kind, something small-scale, something… human.
