These are the songs that built my ears, roughly in the order they fell out of my head.
Blancmange, Living on the Ceiling. This one's wired to long drives down to Brighton, motorway hum and that wonky Eastern-scale synth doing something no other track in the car quite did. Neil Arthur's got such a particular voice on it too, flat and deadpan in a way that shouldn't work over something that bouncy, and somehow does.
Foy Vance, The Wild Swans on the Lake. Came on shuffle one November morning not long after I'd moved somewhere greener, more water about the place. Mist still sitting on the lake, sun just starting to burn through it, and this landed in my ears at exactly the right second. That voice carries gravel and grace in the same breath, which should not be possible, and for about four minutes the walk and the song were the same thing.
Snow Patrol, This Isn't Everything You Are. Everyone reaches for Chasing Cars. This is the better song and it is not close. A "get up, you are not finished" song aimed at someone flat on the floor, and hearing it live in Amsterdam properly got me. Big, unsubtle, knows exactly what it is for.
Hozier, Hymn to Virgil. A deep cut off the Unreal Unearth extras, and if you only know Take Me to Church you have homework. The whole record is built on Dante's Inferno, and Virgil is the one who walks Dante down through hell. Hozier writes like a man who actually read the book. Bodily and brainy at once, which is the only thing I ever really ask of anyone.
Dermot Kennedy, Glory. Found him through Boston, of all places, sitting on the same 2019 EP as this one, and it was one line that hooked me properly: doves and ravens fly the same in glory. Trusted him enough off the back of it that I ordered his new album on vinyl having heard maybe two snippets, no more, and I don't regret it. He's got that same thing Foy and Hozier have, an Irish lilt where the poetry just comes through in how the words sit, not just what they mean.
Yello, Rubberbandman. Experimental and genuinely happy, which is rarer than it should be. Blender, off the same album, might actually be my preference if I'm honest, but this one's the one that's stuck round longest. Sometimes we get so obsessed with having taste other people will nod along to that we forget music's allowed to just be fucking fun. Yello never got that memo, and thank god.
Warren Zevon, Werewolves of London. I love this song properly, and I was genuinely ecstatic the day I got the picture disc with the wolf's head on it. Still can't quite believe my luck owning it. I've even got a Lee Ho Fooks t-shirt, the Chinese restaurant from the lyric, which tells you exactly how far gone I am on this one. The piano riff, that throwaway line about a werewolf with a big dish of beef chow mein, and Zevon's own yell on the chorus, ragged and delighted with itself. Funny and sad and a bit mean all at once. Nobody else does that combination. I don’t even like chow mein.
The Wildhearts, Shut Your Fucking Mouth and Use Your Fucking Brain. This was my first gig where I got properly drunk, Smirnoff Ice doing the damage, and I went back to see them a fair few more times in Wolverhampton after that. Bootleg t-shirts, roll-ups at parties with this lot on repeat. TV Tan, Caffeine Bomb, Top of the World, all of it excellent. But sometimes you don't need the singles, you need the title track, because sometimes shut your fucking mouth and use your fucking brain is exactly the sentence the moment is asking for, whether you're saying it or hearing it.
Incubus, Aqueous Transmission. Never been a big Incubus fan, if I'm honest, this is really the one track doing all the work. It came up on a random alternative playlist on shuffle during an early morning walk through a nature reserve, along the water and into the woods, and the timing was uncanny, much like the Foy Vance moment. Seven minutes long with a gloriously long, nature-y outro, pipa and crickets and water, and they leave proper headroom in it so it actually breathes instead of getting brickwalled to death like everything else on the radio. Right song, right water, right morning.
James Blake, I Need a Forest Fire (feat. Bon Iver). That opening loop, the little vocal back-and-forth between the two of them before the track properly opens up, gets me every time. I love Bon Iver full stop, but it's the idea sitting underneath the song that really lands, the appeal of burning everything down and starting again. Not often, but from time to time that urge is very real, and it's rare a song puts it this gently.
Skindred, Set It Off. Rock club nights in my late teens, back when a night out looked like an episode of Skins and not a queue of people posing for TikTok every five minutes. Nobody had a decent phone camera, so you were actually there instead of performing being there. This one got me through uni, living on an MP3 thumb drive player, which felt like an absolute revelation at the time. Welsh ragga-metal, and when the Newport Helicopter goes round in a room that knows the song, the shirts come off and everybody joins in. Those are the rules.
Talking Heads, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody). The best love song in the world. Not up for debate. We love lamp.
M83, Outro. Feels like a bit of a millennial rite of passage, being properly off your nut listening to this one at some point. Closes Hurry Up, We're Dreaming and sounds like the end credits of a life that went well. Those pads swell and duck under the kick, that sidechain pump, so the whole wall breathes in and out under you instead of just sitting there flat. Loud, obviously. And this one i worth your best fucking listening items.
The xx, Intro. One of the best wordless tracks going. Almost nothing in it and that's the whole flex, clean guitar, a sub you feel, acres of negative space where a lesser band would panic and drop a synth in. You've heard it under a thousand adverts and montages and it has more than earned it’s place. I have a not funny story about this one. I shared the track with someone, they were like love it so cool. Two months later asked me if I had heard of this band The xx, their mate was listening to. I’ll just go fuck myself then.
Nathaniel Rateliff, I'm On Your Side / Face Down in the Moment. Lived in these two, and the Night Sweats generally, during a stretch of a lot of back-and-forth travelling. I'm On Your Side is the one you send someone who's stuck on the struggle bus, properly stuck, not just having a bad day. But it's the water up to your knees line in Face Down that does the actual damage, it slaps you across the forehead exactly when you need slapping. Sung by a big man carrying a bigger ache.
Simon and Garfunkel, I Am a Rock. Genuinely funny, in a bleak way. Made for people like me who are one hundred percent certain they actually are an island, no metaphor required. A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries, sung by a man very obviously in bits the whole time he's insisting otherwise. The original introvert anthem, and still the best one written.
Pokey LaFarge, Fuck Me Up. Pokey's criminally underrated and should be a much bigger deal than he is. Old-timey swing played dead straight by someone who clearly means every second of it, no irony anywhere near it. This is the one that does it for me. Makes me want to own a hat.
Tricky, Excess. Straight off the Thirteen Ghosts soundtrack for me, and it's stayed lodged there ever since. Murky, narcotic, half-whispered trip-hop that sounds exactly like 3am in a room you probably shouldn't be in. Perfectly cast for a horror film, unsurprisingly.
Godhead, Penetrate. Bah bah bah bah bah bah, bah bah bah bah, that stop-start is perfection. Sat right in the middle of the Korn, Disturbed, Adema wave, industrial metal when the synth-pop wasn't cutting it anymore.
Linkin Park, Given Up. That scream. Seventeen seconds, sustained, and I genuinely don't understand how anyone can hear it and not love it. Brickwalled to hell, zero headroom, clipping on purpose, and for once that's exactly the right call because subtlety would be a lie here. Compression as an emotion.
Kano, 3 Wheel-Ups (feat. Giggs and Wiley). I love Kano, I love Giggs, and getting both on the same track off Made in the Manor is just greedy in the best way. Grime royalty, no filler, pure London.
Radiohead, Fake Plastic Trees. The slow build, and the bit on the last verse where his voice cracks and so does yours. Restraint, then collapse. Faultless. I love Radiohead, full stop.
Danheim, Runar. The whole album's brilliant for completely spacing out to, but this one especially. Nordic war-drums and throat-singing, and somehow it doubles up as one of the best things going for meditation, or whatever you want to call staring at a wall with your brain switched off. Excellent for the gym too, oddly. Different kind of switching off.
Twin Atlantic, Yes I Was Drunk. That Scottish lilt takes me straight back to raiding, coffee on, this one in heavy rotation during long WoW sessions, Ulduar era for me. Ninety seconds of raw Glaswegian nerve and no production to hide behind. Different soundtrack for different fights though, Through Fire and Flames was the one that mattered on Patchwerk hardmode, eight minutes long against a five minute enrage, so you had to be well past a certain percentage before the song even hit its midpoint or you weren't making the kill. This one was just what played while I waited for the pull timer to tick down.
Ashnikko, Blow. Found her off the back of a clip for Working Bitch, went digging through the catalogue after and landed on this one. Brash, blue, filthy, and very funny with it. The opposite of everything po-faced, and I love it for exactly that.
Satxri, Shamisen Killa. My brother sent me one shamisen track and I fell straight down the hole, found a whole playlist of shamisen trap and got properly hooked. Worked out to it for about a year solid before I remembered I like burgers and buldak a great deal more than sweating. Shamisen trap sounds like a gimmick on paper and is in fact an absolute banger.
Kings of Leon, On Call. Another WoW-adjacent one for me. It's the bass doing the work here, the way it locks in under call me now and I'll come running, that's the bit that gets me every time, not the chorus everyone remembers. Real grit on this one, even off the stadium-sized album that made them huge. I have a couple of Kol vinyl now, but it’s not something I hunt out, just when I find it I buy it.
Rationale, Fuel to the Fire. His voice. That tone alone does it. Big, dark synth-soul with a voice that deserved a far bigger room than it got. Slept on.
Men Without Hats, The Safety Dance. People file this under novelty and people are wrong. It's a genuinely defiant little song about being allowed to dance how you want, dressed up as a laugh so nobody clocks it meant it. The best pop smuggles something real in under the daft. This is a masterclass in the smuggling. Also, I cannot hear this without seeing Pauly Shore freeing the mahi mahi in Biodome, and I refuse to seek help for that. I still watch the movie - it’s still the best.
Moby, Porcelain. Moby's personal reputation's taken a proper battering since, deservedly by most accounts, but Play the album still got to me. Had it bootleg and it felt like heaven at the time, fragile and watery, the whole sad end of the nineties folded into four minutes. Complicated feelings about the man aside, I really loved this album.
Roxy Music, In Every Dream Home a Heartache. Tied to Mindhunter for me, where it does exactly what the best needle-drops do, makes something already unsettling about ten times worse. Ferry singing to an inflatable doll like she's the love of his life, deadpan and detached, a band who started out art-school and spiky slowly buffing themselves into glass. Too smooth to move you and then it absolutely does, and I've spent years quietly annoyed about how. He sings the whole thing like he's already left the room, which is precisely why it lands.
Krrum, Blessing in a Black Dress / Doom Is the Mood I'm In. Honestly it depends entirely on the mood I'm in, one or the other, and I genuinely cannot believe more people don't know Krrum. Woozy, bass-heavy, slightly broken electronica that sounds like a thought you have at 3am, and the album these two live on is one I'll defend to anyone who'll listen. Modern, and it scratches the exact itch the old cold-synth records put there in the first place.
Gorillaz, The Hardest Thing. I'm deep into The Mountain now, bought it on the liquid-filled vinyl and it's genuinely beautiful to own as an object. The Hardest Thing is the track I'd pick if forced to choose one, but honestly it's the instrumentation across the whole record that's got me, the range of it, all these collaborators and textures folded into one Gorillaz album. Still a cartoon band writing some of the saddest happy songs going, this many albums in.
Joji, Run. I love the whole catalogue, BALLADS1 especially, and if you want my honest answer, Hold My Blood might be my favourite Joji song ever, released under the Green Echo alias rather than his own name for age couldn’t find it anywhere but youtube, but not it is on spotify, so most people miss it entirely. Run's the one carrying the pick here, same rawer era. Got the new record on colour swirl smoke vinyl too, genuinely beautiful thught not played often. Seeing him at the Ziggo Dome in August and I am not normal about it.
Muse, Plug In Baby. Sometimes you want the precise opposite of restraint: a stupidly enormous riff and a man wailing like the world is ending and breathing stupidly loud between each line. The teenager pick. Everyone needs one.
That is me. Most of me, anyway. Have put a few and some randoms in the playlist below, and if This Must Be the Place is not your favourite by the end, well. We tried.