The Albums And Podcasts That Stayed With Me This Year

Every year, I keep a running list of records and podcasts that earn a place in my daily life. It begins casually: a song saved during a walk, an episode that makes a long train journey disappear, a recommendation scribbled in the margin of a notebook. By December, the list has become a small map of the year, marked by moods, places and accidental discoveries.

The best entries are rarely the most obvious cultural events. A famous album may arrive with a large campaign, a festival headline and a dozen think pieces, then fade quickly. A quieter record can do something more useful. It can become the soundtrack to making coffee, cooking dinner, crossing Dublin in the rain or watching the light change over a suburban street.

Podcasts work differently. They are companions rather than objects, and their influence accumulates in fragments. A good show can alter how I understand politics, technology or history without announcing that it is teaching me anything. It can also become part of the rhythm of a week: one episode on the bus, another while washing dishes, a familiar voice on a walk through the city.

This is my annual list of favourite albums and podcasts, with the emphasis on the things I returned to rather than the things I merely admired. It is a record of listening habits as much as a set of recommendations, and it includes a few discoveries that arrived from outside the usual paths.

The Records That Made The Year Feel Larger

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Wild God remained a remarkable piece of work. It has the scale of a spiritual performance, yet its strongest moments feel intimate and slightly unstable. Cave’s voice moves between celebration, grief and sermon, while the arrangements seem to keep opening beyond the edges of the room. It is an album that rewards volume, though it also works in the quieter hours when the house has gone still.

Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown offered a very different kind of gravity. The record feels ancient without sounding nostalgic, as if folk music, chamber music and private memory have been drawn into the same weather system. Gibbons sings with restraint, allowing pauses and rough edges to carry as much meaning as the melodies. I found myself listening to it early in the morning, before the day had acquired its demands.

Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future was gentler, but no less absorbing. Its songs have the apparent simplicity of something written in one sitting, although the emotional detail runs deep. Lenker understands that a small observation can hold an entire relationship. The record’s warmth made it an easy choice for a slow Sunday, especially with a moka pot on the stove and a book open nearby.

Noise, Joy And The Pleasure Of A Great Hook

Charli XCX’s Brat was impossible to ignore, and its success was deserved. The production is sharp, physical and deliberately artificial, but the emotional writing keeps breaking through the gloss. Its songs know how pop works while still sounding mischievous about the machinery behind it. The album also produced that rare cultural moment when a visual identity, a phrase and a sound travelled together far beyond their original audience.

The record’s energy made sense in Melbourne, where a night out can begin with a small bar, move to a warehouse venue and end with someone arguing about the best late-night kebab. It also travelled well to Australia’s more ordinary listening spaces: a crowded tram in the rain, a drive along Parramatta Road or a backyard gathering where somebody eventually takes over the speaker.

Fontaines D.C.’s Romance brought a different kind of force. The Dublin connection is obvious, but the band has moved beyond the narrow expectations attached to post-punk. Their music is expansive, theatrical and willing to risk grandeur. I enjoyed the contrast between the bruised guitars and the moments of unexpected tenderness. The album made familiar streets feel newly dramatic, which may be one of the most reliable tests of a great city record.

MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks also stayed in rotation. It carries humour, melancholy and a slightly battered guitar sound, with songs that feel both conversational and carefully constructed. Lenderman has a talent for making awkwardness memorable. The album never seems to overstate its case, which is part of why it keeps inviting another listen.

The Albums I Returned To In Ordinary Hours

Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee was the year’s great deep dive. It is sprawling, strange and full of shifts in texture, drawing from pop, garage rock, television themes and the blurred emotional atmosphere of old recordings. It does not behave like a neat collection of singles. It feels more like entering a private archive and finding that every room contains another door.

That quality suited the fragmented way many of us listen now. Streaming services encourage endless movement between tracks, yet Diamond Jubilee made me want to stay with an album’s oddness. I listened in pieces at first, then gave it a long uninterrupted afternoon. The second approach was better. Its rewards are hidden in the accumulation.

A less fashionable pleasure was revisiting older albums alongside the new ones. The Cure’s Disintegration, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira all returned to my listening queue. Annual lists can create the false impression that culture arrives only in the current year. In reality, new music often sends us backwards, offering fresh reasons to spend time with records we thought we already knew.

That backward movement matters in Australia, where music discovery is shaped by distance as well as taste. A release may be discussed online for weeks before a local record shop receives a physical copy, and touring schedules can make live performances feel like rare events. Radio remains important too, from Double J and triple j to community stations whose programmers keep older and stranger music in circulation.

Podcasts For Thinking, Walking And Switching Off

Search Engine continued to be one of the smartest shows about the questions hiding underneath ordinary life. Its episodes often begin with something that sounds trivial, then reveal an economic, technical or historical problem. The show is curious without being smug, and its explanations usually leave room for uncertainty. That matters in a media environment where every topic is quickly forced into a confident position.

The Rest Is Politics served a different purpose. Its value lies in the conversation between competing political instincts, especially when the presenters resist the temptation to turn every disagreement into theatre. Australian listeners may recognise the appeal during an election cycle, when coverage can become a churn of polling, campaign slogans and commentary designed for immediate reaction. A longer discussion provides a little breathing room.

For literary and cultural reporting, The Audio Long Read remained dependable. The format gives writers enough time to develop a subject rather than reducing it to a headline and a few clips. I particularly value episodes that create a sense of place: a neighbourhood, an institution or a community described through the voices of the people who live there.

I also kept returning to Articles of Interest, which investigates the history and meaning of clothing. Its apparent subject is fashion, but its real territory includes class, labour, branding, identity and design. It is a good example of a podcast making a familiar object more complicated without making the listener feel lectured.

The Shows That Earned A Place In The Week

The Blindboy Podcast remained gloriously difficult to classify. It can move from Irish history to psychology, art, folklore or personal reflection, often with a comic detour along the way. The tone is distinctive, but the deeper appeal is the willingness to treat culture as something connected. A conversation about a painting may become a conversation about memory, and a story from the past may illuminate a current anxiety.

That kind of mixture works especially well for listeners who live between categories. The Australian podcast market has grown quickly, with ABC Listen, the BBC, independent producers and major streaming platforms competing for attention. There is plenty of polished, commercially tested content, yet the shows that last often have a recognisable voice and a willingness to wander.

For lighter listening, The Rewatchables remained a reliable pleasure. Its best episodes are less about whether a film is objectively good than about the memories attached to it: where the hosts first saw it, which performances have aged well and which scenes became part of the culture. Film discussion is often most enjoyable when it allows affection and criticism to sit together.

I also liked the practical intelligence of Plain English. It takes complicated public questions and tries to make their stakes legible without flattening them. That is useful during a year when technology, housing, climate and international politics all compete for attention. A podcast episode cannot solve those issues, but it can provide a clearer starting point than an endless social media argument.

Listening As A Form Of Keeping Track

The value of an annual list is personal rather than universal. It says less about what everyone should hear than about what a particular year sounded like from one person’s position. A record can be tied to a job, a friendship, a journey or an ordinary domestic routine. A podcast can preserve the atmosphere of a period when its subject matter has already moved on.

That is why I keep notes while listening. I record the obvious details, such as the title and artist, but also the circumstances: the album heard on a ferry, the episode played during a long airport wait, the song that made a bad week feel briefly manageable. These associations are not critical analysis, yet they are part of the truth of listening.

The habit extends to other discoveries. My wider annual discoveries include objects, ideas and small pleasures that do not fit neatly into a music or podcast list. Keeping them together creates a broader picture of how a year was spent, from the things that filled my headphones to the tools that changed a daily routine.

There is also pleasure in comparing private enthusiasm with the public conversation. Some choices on this list were everywhere; others barely appeared in end-of-year coverage. That difference is healthy. A listening life should contain popular culture, specialist recommendations, old favourites and a few records that seem to have arrived for one listener alone.

The archive of those choices continues to grow on the Derek Owens blog, where music, books, technology, politics and place often overlap. A favourite album may lead to a memory of a city, while a podcast about design may change the way I notice a website, a shopfront or a cup of coffee.

The albums and podcasts worth remembering are the ones that remain available after the list has been published. They return in the car, on the tram, during a late walk or in the quiet stretch before work. The important thing is not whether they were the year’s most celebrated releases, but whether they gave the year a shape, a voice and a few moments worth returning to.