Things I Liked: 2025


Another year. Another unsorted list.
Good health and fortune to you and yours for 2026.

– MJG 

(See previous years: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)



Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a puzzle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in yet another puzzle of a video game. You play as a young boy who has been left a manor estate in the will of your grandfather, but to receive it you first must reach its mysterious 46th room. To reach the 46th room, you “draft” (in both the architectural sense and cards-in-a-deck sense) rooms. Interconnected rooms may contain puzzles themselves, as do objects and items in some rooms, and so on and so on. Deceivingly simple at first, the game quickly reveals deeper and deeper layers unto itself, and its own game logic. It was one of the first games in a long time that, upon hitting the credits screen, left me wanting to return to continue to figure out more of it even after “beating” the game.



I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away by Hayden Pedigo

Borderline psychedelic country western ragas from Pedigo had this record in heavy rotation for me this year. It's great music for writing or working (instrumental, but not ambient!), and also just a fascinating exploration in how much one can still wring from a guitar. While this album is bordering on the genre of “blissed out,” another stand out record this year comes from Pedigo’s collaboration with noise/sludge band Chat Pile, In The Earth Again.

KM5 CP1 CD Player

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know better than to make public pronouncements of new trends, and yet. One of the few shots I called earlier this year was that we’d start to see a mainstream-ification of the return of CDs as a media format (following the years-long ebbs and flow of vinyl in many facets of culture, a subject for another time.) For my own use, and also for use at Cafe Music events, I picked up a new portable CD player from Japanese brand KM5. The CP1 is slightly overkill for what I needed, but on aesthetic principles alone it’s pretty hard to top. The clear model pictured above was released in collaboration with BEAMS, was easy enough to buy online (though this was all pre-tariff mess.) USB C rechargeable, bluetooth connectivity built in, anti-skip, lightweight, and easy to bring with me in a tote bag or leave perched up next to my record player. When I first posted the picture above on my Instagram, multiple fellow heads reached out to inquire and a few bought CD players of their own. Year of the CD indeed…


One Battle After Another

Another PTA film inspired by a Pynchon novel? Sign me up. One Battle After Another was maybe my most memorable theatre experience this year. A tale of revolution, a send-up of American political power aptly timed, and one liners delivered in such a way they are buried deep in my brain still (“a few small beers.”) Leonardo DiCaprio is, y’know, Leo, so no surprises there, but Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti both shine in roles that they seem born to play and Sean Penn as the film’s antagonist gave the already over-the-top film a bit more over-the-top-ness.


Battlefield 6

I’ve long been a fan of Battlefield games, though famously their quality has waxed and waned over time. The last major release, Battlefield 2046, was infamously buggy at launch, but eventually got to a decent state a year and change later. The previous WWI and WWII set games, Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V respectively, (look I will not give any praise to the naming structure of the series) were both great and when developer EA started saying that the next game in the franchise would be a return to that style of game along with comparisons to fan favorite Bad Company 2, hopes were high. It turns out that many gamers still just want a FPS game where you can squad up with friends and cause a lot of destruction, and BF6 delivers that in spades. The single player campaign was… fine (a thin plot aiming for Tom Clancy levels of twists that falls flat, predictable missions, and so on…) and a not-so-surprise drop of a free-to-play Battle Royale mode titled REDSEC gave the game a much needed boost in player count that led to the games industry announcing that for the first time in a very long time, Battlefield had toppled Call of Duty as the FPS game of the year.



Sennheiser HD600 Headphones

One of my least favorite things this year has been the amount of construction happening on my block. A trusty pair of Sony WH-1000XM5 are still my preferred noise cancelling headphones, but in the heat of the summer in a Brooklyn apartment, a new problem arose: my ears were getting too hot. So, after some research and settling on wanting to try out a pair of open back headphones (both for audio and the aforementioned “head getting too hot”) I picked up a pair of HD600’s which have since become my daily drivers while at my desk at home. More comfortable to wear for longer periods of time, avoiding “ear fatigue,” and delivering a great wide sound stage with well balanced audio.


Hollow Knight: Silksong

A game that diehard fans had been waiting so long for that even a teaser of it became a meme unto itself finally came out this year. Silksong is the sequel to cult(?) hit Hollow Knight, building on the Metroidvania platformer that I never made much progress in. Silksong, debatably, has a slightly easier on ramp to it than Hollow Knight, and builds upon its predecessor’s fantastic art and sound design. At its core, you're a bug, with a needle, fight other bugs and monsters in a fantastical world. Through extremely well crafted game design, you explore, uncover, and progress through a gated world utilizing new tools and tactics to further your progress. Boss fights, borrowing from Souls-like games, are increasingly hard to the point that multiple times in the game’s first act (when I was still coming to grips with the game’s combat systems) I’d have to take a break for a day or two. I still never beat this game, for what it’s worth, but roughly half of the game I’ve played has stuck with me long enough to merit its entry here.

[An aside before these next few; I am not one for big grand New Year’s resolutions, but a silent goal for the year was to try and make a point to go see more live music. Perhaps one of the best things about living in New York is that almost every tour you want to see will stop through here. On the flip side, seeing music in New York has become an extremely expensive pain in the ass. Death to Ticketmaster.]


MJ Lenderman: Live at Brooklyn Steel

Given that Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks made my list of things last year, I was happy to catch him on tour at Brooklyn Steel early in the year. A set covering most of the album plus a few older tracks and a cover of Patterson Hood thrown in for good measure stuck with me, so it was a nice surprise to see the whole show as an official YouTube release a short while later.


Nala Sinephro at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity

Another from last year’s list, Sinephro’s Endlessness, became the soundtrack to a lot of reading and working. A chance performance of the suite was announced at a church in Brooklyn Heights, with tickets very quickly getting grabbed up. A friend had bought two and in our group chat offered up the spare which I was quick to jump on. To hear it performed live was spellbinding, aided in no small part by the atmosphere of a near pin drop quiet and pitch black church, save for the lights on stage.


Sun Ra Arkestra at SFJAZZ

Work had me traveling for a few weeks straight this summer, ending up in the Bay Area after filming near Stanford and hanging out in Palo Alto for a few days. Reconnecting with a friend who by chance had a spare ticket gifted to her to catch the first night of the Arkestra’s run at SFJAZZ. Blessed with basically front row tickets, that also got us to the GA area, had us dancing with the band at points of the night. After a long run of work, it was a release to take in some cosmic space jazz.


Sturgill Simpson and Dead and Co.
at Golden Gate Park

Look, if the work trip was going to drop me in San Francisco and it just so happened to coincide with the 70th anniversary shows of the Dead… I’ve discussed this all day affair with my more heady inclined friends already so to save the rest of you the more intricate details: the show was great, the crowd was not. It was great to finally catch Sturgill Simpson live, having missed or been out of town the last two or three times he was playing in New York, and compared to the first night of the three night run, Dead and Company sounded great. I even managed to find a cousin and some college buddies in a crowd of 70,000.



Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts at Jones Beach

I don’t think I’ve been to Jones Beach since I was a kid, when my parents took my brother and I to see Jimmy Buffett. Coincidentally, my parents happened to be in town for the weekend and, on a whim, decided we should get tickets and rent a car and go catch Neil at Jones Beach, and so we did. It was a great set, mixing hits, B-sides, and a few contemporary tracks. Even at 80 years old, Neil sounded great on both guitar and vocals.


Baby Steps

Baby Steps is an incredibly funny game, and an incredibly frustrating game, that is vaguely about contemporary toxic masculinity. Made by a small team including indie game maker Bennet Foddy, maybe best known for QWOP, which shares some DNA with Baby Steps. You play as Nate, a 35 year old failson. You get sucked into your television and placed into a video game world. Unlike most video games you’ve ever played wherein you move the left analog stick forward and your character automatically walks, in Baby Steps you have to control each leg individually. Through progressively challenging terrain, puzzles, and obstacles you meet other characters, many of whom are pantsless donkeys. The writing in the game is Flight of the Concords-esque humor; self referential, and extremely sharp, with cut scenes both hilarious and absurd.


Acadia National Park/A Visit to Maine

Towards the end of summer, I shared a rented house in Hancock, Maine with a group of friends, about a 30 or 40 minute drive away from Acadia. We managed a few hikes, seeing a fair bit of the park and getting to jump into the (very cold by that point) ocean. The trailheads aren’t the most accessible compared to some of the other national parks I’ve visited, but once you’re on a hike you quickly feel removed from the infrastructure of the park in a nice way. Quick stops in nearby Bar Harbor and Ellsworth made for some good meals, but we spent most nights cooking big dinners, taking out kayaks, and sitting around a fire pit at the house we’d rented.



Isle of Skye

If you’re going to do a destination wedding, it helps to maybe do it somewhere your guests otherwise might not go to. My friends got married in September on the Isle of Skye, with the wedding party bookending the trip in Edinburgh. With the little time we had in Edinburgh, the city didn’t exactly grab me. Skye, however, felt otherworldly. Lush rolling hills, a roadside stop at a castle on the bus ride, and mostly fantastic weather save for the actual wedding day (“It’s like rain on your wedding day”), and an afternoon tour of photo spots made for a brief but great visit.


Cindy Lee at Brooklyn Paramount

Diamond Jubilee was one of my favorites from last year, and it feels like it remains one of those secret handshake records among music heads in my circles. I missed out on tickets for the Brooklyn Paramount shows and couldn’t justify the steep resale prices, but a friend reached out with an extra ticket the week of the show so sometimes it just works out. Lee’s set, already lauded, was nothing short of watching an artist hold the entire venue in the palm of their hands. The entire place fell silent as they walked out, adjusted their microphone, and started singing. Outside of applause between songs the audience remained largely quiet throughout the rest of the show (a blessing in a year that left me mired with encounters with chompers.) With very little dialogue between songs save for a “thank you” and a dedication, and Lee’s guitar playing sans guitar strap led to an almost theatre performance energy.


Arc Raiders

Extraction shooters are a divisive genre to say the least. The most popular of the genre, Escape From Tarkov, exists as a complex network of systems, menu management, and rage inducing runs leaving you with no progress. The gameplay loop is simple; build a loadout, deploy to a map, fight (both against other players and NPCs), loot, and make your way to an extraction point. If you fail to extract (either from dying or from running out of time), you lose all the equipment you brought in with you or collected. Frankly, I never saw the appeal. The games ask hours of commitment for miniscule progress and, at least for Tarkov, your progress is wiped entirely at the end of each “season” of the game. Someone described Arc Raiders as “Tarkov for adults with jobs” which has become the elevator pitch for many gamers. The NPC enemies are all sci-fi robots, there is a loose narrative about a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by machines, more importantly the gameplay feels good and is easy to grasp. Inventory management, once you get the basics down, is simple and you can quickly progress to “endgame” loot and join others in limited time events to take down very very large robots. In-game proximity chat leads to a meta layer of social gameplay: can you trust the stranger you just met, who is also armed to the teeth? Can you talk your way out of a stand off next to a pile of loot? It quickly climbed up the ranks of what we wanted to play among the group I play games with.


Caroline 2 by caroline

Post folk emo rock is back(?) Really just a great step forward in what was already a pretty good year for “guitar music.” The first single, Total euphoria, has a moment that just hits you like a wave and then continues building from there. Caroline takes the genre in some interesting directions, pushing towards a more post-rock production style (overwhelmingly warm and distorted) but in the same turn pulls in Caroline Polachek for a guest vocal spot.


Paul Spring and Friends at Sunny’s

I got turned on to Paul’s music through a friend who plays with him. Paul’s music is great and his output is somewhat prolific, having released two albums this year, one of which is entirely written and sung in Classical Latin. During last winter, Paul held a residency at Sunny’s, a classic favorite down in Red Hook, with a semi rotating cast of musicians (including my pal Jon) sitting in alongside him doing mixed sets of his originals and covers in the wheelhouse of John Prine, Neil Young, and Gillian Welch. Intimate and cozy, (though by the time the residency returned this winter it felt like it was basically standing room only), the performances made for a good night out.


Paradise Pop. 10 by Christian Lee Hutson

Another win for the year in guitar music, Hutson’s latest release has some extremely good songwriting and lyrics. Catching his album release show in Brooklyn (featuring cameos by a cloaked and hooded Phoebe Bridgers, singing harmonies on a few songs) bore out that the album basically works as a setlist. Songs about heart break and hopes, one inspired by a short story a fan sent him about a mediocre version of heaven, and others that feel like short stories of their own. Few other artists right now evoke a sense of backstory and character narratives like you’ll find here.


Getting Killed by Geese

By the numbers, my album of the year. The band’s 2023 album 3D Country was good, but didn’t hook me, but this one? Sheesh. Enough ink has been spilled by others (I would point you towards GQ’s profile of the band) to set the stage for what the young band is up to and how willing they are to experiment and fuck around to produce something that sounds significantly new. Certainly feeling like a band du jour, most critics have heaped praise on the album and the band instantly sold out their shows in New York, leading to resale prices of $800+ (I can not stress enough how many times I got pissed off at Ticketmaster this year.) I can’t find it again now but I remember a post saying that if The Strokes Is This It was “the” post-9/11 album, Getting Killed might be the first “post” (I know, I know) Covid-19 album. It feels apt, there are certain emotions and gradients of anger and other forlorn emotions that feel inherently tied to life in America post 2024. Well worth watching the band’s From The Basement performance, too.

Honorable mentions:
Racing Mount Pleasant by Racing Mount Pleasant
Box for Buddy, Box for Star by This Is Lorelei
Loud and Clear by Brian Anderson
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe 
Sinners
Pluribus