Just like 2025 and 2024 before it, we are eschewing a "classic", big ol' list of albums we liked from 2026 so far. Lists are fun, but they make no sense ("this album is number 12 and this album is number 9" are words uttered by the insane). Instead, we will be using the next few weeks to highlight our favorite trends, releases, shows, cover art, experiences, and more from the first half of this (musically) excellent year.
Back before I wrote for the Blog, I would learn albums by heart. Some of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t have money to buy CDs every week (and also, CDs suck) and so I had to stick with the few albums I bought for a month or two. But part of it was also just how I listened to music. This was not just before Heavy Blog but before Bandcamp, before streaming, before a lot of things. Music, for me, was something to dive into, to grow to love like you love a piece of well worn clothing or a house. When I joined the blog, all of that went away; I got swept up in the pace of listening to music to keep up. It wasn’t just the blog itself; Bandcamp blew up, streaming was everywhere and also yes, I started getting hundreds and hundreds of promos to check out.
This ended being my mode of listening for years, all the way to about three-four years ago. What changed? Well, to be honest, it was mostly my life circumstances. I no longer had a commute because COVID meant I worked from home. I also changed careers and moved away from a role where I wrote a lot (product management) to roles where I was on calls, internally or otherwise. Suddenly, I was listening to a lot less music. Here’s my Last.FM chart; I think it tells the story a lot better than I can. And this is 2025 vs. 2024, and 2024 looks much the same. So we’re talking way down, and consistently over time as well (though 2026 is looking to pick back up because I’m doing a lot of travelling and driving again).
I’ll be honest with you: I tried really hard not to care about this. After all, I don’t listen to music for the scrobbles or numbers on a spreadsheet. I listen to music because I love it, because it’s beautiful. And yet, I found myself profoundly affected by the statistics. Part of it is because listening to, and writing about, a lot of music is a big part of my personality. I’m Heavy Blog Eden! It’s kind of my thing and it felt bad to maybe be losing that. Another part is that I’m past my mid-30’s and this is right about that time where people’s tastes begin to ossify. I really don’t want that to happen to me. Finding new music and being passionate about it is one of my life’s greatest joys and I was worried it was slowly fading over time. This is undeniably true by the way. Just like visiting cathedrals or museums or going to live shows, there is no way that the 500th one is going to hit like the first one.
However, regardless of my concern, there was no way to stop this. I tried and it was miserable; I forced myself to listen to more albums, to find time to do it, and I hated it. I found myself running through albums just to mark them off, I hated the music as a result (because I was projecting my distaste with the method onto it) and in general, I just didn’t do it. Numbers kept falling and I kept listening to less until at some point, something inside of me broke and I stopped worrying. I started escaping my new pace and just letting it be. This is how I listened now and it really didn’t matter if it was “OK” or not because it was what it was. There was no deep understanding, no lessons learnt, no change in philosophy. It was just how I was now, like the myriad little things that are different about each one of our bodies or our brains.
That came after, that came this year. Funnily enough, the understanding came as I started listening to a bit more music because suddenly, I noticed I was losing something again but this time it was something I got from listening to less music. I never went back to my original pace, of a few albums every few months which I learned end to end. But I was spending more time with each “batch” of new music and I found that I liked it! I think the main thing you get when you listen to less music is that it has more time to “tie” itself to a certain period in your life. For example, I cannot listen to Caligula’s Horse’s without immediately thinking of 2024’s early Spring, which is when I did most of my listening to the album. “Thinking” is the wrong word; I am downright transported to that time when I listen to the album and to how the streets of Providence felt, sounded, and smelt.
This is partly because you consume less music and so every piece of it has a bigger impact but it’s also because the music has more time to “nestle” into the period in which you’re listening to it. This compounding of aesthetic experience, memory, narrative, and the other senses is incredibly powerful. It creates a connection with a work of art that is literally indelible. Even now, I can listen to albums with which I forged a connection in the days before the blog and just instantly appear fifteen-twenty years ago when I was listening to them. It’s a really wild and powerful experience and you lose that (except for a few very special albums) when you listen to massive volumes of music.
I didn’t want to lose that and I was once again nervous, now that I would lose these new things that I had found with music. So guess what I did? That’s right, I started to artificially slow down the pace of my listening, just like I had tried to speed it up, and I felt just as miserable. I would want to listen to new music and agonize about the music I already had and wasn’t paying “enough” attention to, as if that means anything. I felt guilty but this time in reverse, obsessed with a completely made up high water line when I had “understood” an album. I started to obsess over dates when an album was added, how many times I had listened to an album (so that I wouldn’t “move on” before a certain number of times had elapsed and so on). Needless to say, all the magic evaporated. I wasn’t forging connections with these works but rather doing a chore, marking days on a page for...nothing, essentially.
Luckily, it didn’t take me years this time to realize what I was doing wrong. To be honest with you, when it hit me I burst out laughing at how stupid this all was. Now I’m slowly learning to let this go as well and just let the music come as it may. Some weeks I listen to more albums and some to less. It really doesn’t matter. Just like in other places in my life (like martial arts), I am trying to learn to be in tune with my body and my mind and just let the pace of things happen as it does. After all, the world pushes hard enough to either speed up or slow down, depending on the constraints of alien and horrible things like “markets” and “jobs”. At least in our hobbies, and especially in our passions, we should try to let things come as they may. It’s not only important for our sanity but for the passion itself, for the connection that we feel with the art. Whether fast or slow, a lot or a little, there is a spark in the aesthetic experience that defies attempts at manhandling and grappling. You have to let it be, to let it come to you and, most importantly, to give yourself time and space to come to it.