I can admit that, much like the 2024 Wrapped that did a stellar job of showcasing just how uninspired a product can be when you fire all the anonymous talent behind it so the fat cats don’t have to sacrifice their creature comforts and fifth yacht, I really phoned it in with this blog last year.

Take your pick from a wealth of reasons culminating in a perfect storm of neglect: the all-consuming torpor of defeat that comes with realizing you’re stuck in a brutalizing workplace where journalistic integrity and a deep-seated compulsion to fix things put you at odds with every out-of-touch decision-maker steering the ship with both eyes shut tight; the meandering timeline of grief being a really inconvenient pain the ass; bestie introducing me to a podcast that dominated my attention for the entire month of September after her late-summer visit ended with me crying for three days straight as my soul all but clawed its way across the country like the thing on the wing of a plane because it sucks missing one of your favorite people this much all the time; trudging ever closer to a future that my ancom better angels want to believe in but my regrettable accelerationist lesser demons are tempted to shrug at; falling wildly in love with embroidery (also thanks to bestie), which summarily led me back to mostly cross stitching but also knitting and crocheting to the exclusion of every other hobby for the final quarter of 2024 and has shown no signs of letting up, with the addition of sewing classes only encouraging me harder.

Oh, and my iPod finally got corrupted and I can’t remember the password for the absolutely ancient desktop that’s the last computer in this house capable of sustaining my iPod Also of a Certain Age, which means I can’t reformat and then rebuild the 12,700 Songs playlist there (though I did realize with an embarrassing delay that I could just put it directly on my ALSO-irrelevant-but-still-trucking-along iTunes until Slothrop the iPod overcomes my stoner brain to rise from the digital ashes). That more than anything sucked all the wind from my blogging sails: While the previous iPod scare at least means I have some pretty obsessively curated spreadsheets ready to help me recreate the necessary playlists as I finally finish writing about the remaining H songs, I have to actually, like, do the thing and I am notoriously bad at rote tasks until the flow takes over.

There are so many other little disappointments dotting the landscape of 2024. I’d assumed it was the year I’d get to 300,000 Last.fm listens (nope). I’d wanted to wrap up the H songs (nope). I had wanted to, like, not stall out on updating this blog for months on end because the idea of sitting in front of the laptop I occasionally use for work to write for myself made my otherwise dangerously dulled survival instincts sit up and scream until I did anything else with my equally diminished ability to enjoy things (hahahah, noooope).

But it was also such a good year for new music and rediscovered gems alike, so it’s hard to be too bummed out: What I lack in anything of proven volume or tangible merit I more than made up for by falling in love with a veritable treasure trove of new releases and things that finally landed on my radar, yielding what’s probably my absolute favorite Top Songs playlist in the history of my begrudging Spotify usage, which made an otherwise bare-bones Wrapped much more of a treat than it had any right to be.

And holy fuck did old shit dominate last year. Look no further than Last.fm’s Last.Year as proof:

To make 2024 an even more lackluster entry in the constellation of listening stats, this wasn’t even a year with a notable divide between Spotify Wrapped and Last.fm’s far more comprehensive annual retrospective report.

To be perfectly honest, I’m really only going through the motions of sharing these stats because I’m a completist and it feels weird to usher in a new year without formally acknowledging the old one to bid it adieu. I unintentionally and prematurely blew my load on 2024 with the aforelinked Year So Far post; I do think the only recent release it’s missing is Orla Gartland’s newest album, which didn’t properly rock my world and dominate my attention ’til earlier this month.

I guess I could also say the inciting incident that finally nudged me toward putting a final flourish on ’24 was this domain’s auto-renewal and subsequently feeling like maybe I should at least get my money’s worth from that so the ADHD tax doesn’t gobble up another sacrifice, but that would be a lie. What finally got me to update this blog for the first time in five months was Kids These Days giving the world an album I never thought I’d hear.

There was another but Chicago-based band named Kids These Days that ultimately took over this Canadian one’s Last.fm presence but before that, I had that awful whiplash of thinking a band I loved rose from dormancy to deliver a sophomore album, only to be heartbroken by common phrases making for equally as common band names. I’m eternally betrayed by my brain giving me a hope that reality gleefully dashed, so I assumed that was the case again when Spotify notified me about a new Kids These Days album a couple weeks ago. And it took me a second to register that live versions of decidedly obscure songs etched deeply into my heart were finally seeing the light of day.

I’ll save detailed descriptions of how I literally, literally cried happy tears and hugged my phone to my chest as the first strains of a live and beautifully fleshed-out version of my beloved and intensely familiar “Drinking Wine, Talking Art” flowed freely from it in ways I never thought I’d get to hear for the post I am absolutely going to do about it, but that’s why this post happened, as obligatory and not-really-engaging-too-much-with-the-titular-stats as it is.

But first, here’s 2024 as my top 100 songs and the albums they call home, courtesy of the Last.fm Collage Generator and where everything old is my avenue of blissful aural escapism.