I said in my last music post that I don’t know if I’m going to do this every month, but hey it’s content for the website to make it look busy and, more importantly, it’s something to do to keep the black dog at bay. So let’s have a self indulgent look at what music I listened to in January 2025, an urgent topic for any person looking at the internet.
Top Artists
In January, my top two artists were two that I don’t think I had ever heard of before. I try to listen to my New Music Mix playlist that comes out every Friday. with new releases from artists I already listen to as well as similar artists, and Psycho Charger and KREIGN both had songs that grabbed my attention immediately. I’ll go into more about those in the top songs below.
Third on the list are Nine Inch Nails. They announced a world tour in January, but I had already listened to a long album of theirs before this (see below) so this entry isn’t gig related like quite a bit of my listening can be. Speaking of the world tour, I set a reminder to buy some tickets and when the time came I logged in using both my phone and iPad because buying tickets for anything big is a nightmare nowadays, and I got promptly blocked by Ticketmaster for being a bot! By the time I worked my way around the blocking got into the ticket queue, the only seats left at the O2 were in the upper tier, approximately 1000 miles away from the stage, at the sum of about £160 for two. If you’ve ever been to the O2 and sat in the upper tier, you will know that it is shite! So I wasn’t paying that much to see them and my coping mechanism is that it would never be as good as that time I saw them at the Eden Project anyway.
Yota is a great synth pop artist that I found when I started falling down the Synthwave rabbit hole a few years ago, and a great example of that hybrid 80s but modern kind of sound.
After ‘discovering’ and listening to some Psycho Charger, they reminded me of Deadbolt, so I gave them a listen too. All of these bands make up the top songs and top albums below.
Top Songs
In the top 2 spots, we have Psycho Charger. My previous music posts have all been dominated by Synthwave and industrial metal, but I’m also very partial to a bit of rockabilly, or more specifically the heavier/faster variant called psychobilly. Even more so if it’s songs about monsters! Brain Buster, Knuckle duster was the song I heard on my New Music Mix and I instantly loved it and went searching for more. Midnight Monster Show is the first track on the same album. Both of these songs grind along nicely and remind me of The Cramps or 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster.
At number 3, we have Dark Dandy by Yota. I sort of listened to this song 4 times by accident. This song is in my giant Synthwave playlist, but I ended up listening to it a lot because I tried to stream the album whilst on the train. My data coverage was quite patchy and it kept some skipping songs whilst playing others, and I guess it ended up playing this one the most.
Dark Triad by KREIGN is another song I’d never heard before but was in my New Music Mix and instantly liked it. Some solid industrial that has a bit of a 90s feel to it and reminded me of old Die Krupps. Right up my street.
Hillbilly Zombies by Deadbolt is a song about hillbillies turning into zombies after drinking a bad batch of moonshine. It’s both funny and a good song.
Top Albums
The Fragile (1999) is a double album by Nine Inch Nails and one of those albums that really is best if you listen to the whole thing. This will easily push it to the top of any top album list that is organised by minutes listened, so here we are. When this album came out, it was a bit divisive but I liked it at the time and I still like it now. If you have never listened to NIN and you want to hear a bit of all the different styles NIN have adopted over the years all in one long album, this is a good place to start.
III (2024) by KREIGN and Return of the Psycho (2025) by Psycho Charger contain the tracks I heard on my New Music Mix, so these albums were the most obvious place to go to hear some more, as I explained above. I ended up listening to both albums twice. And I also explained Room 412 (2023) by Yota above, making this paragraph all very matter of fact. If all three music charts are this tied together in another month, I might not bother writing about them as I don’t have much to say.
Finally, we have Buy a Gun – Get a Free Guitar (2011) by Deadbolt. This is a great album. In fact, I like everything by Deadbolt, the self proclaimed ‘Scariest Band in the World’ who describe their music as voodoobilly. They normally have a loose theme on their albums, such as trucking on the album Voodoo Trucker, and this album is mainly full of songs about hillbillies. It’s both dark and funny at the same time with some very catchy songs. A lot of fun, give it a listen.
Matt Hart 