Random Rules Playlist 042: Favorites From The First Half Of 2025

My 50 favorite songs released over the past six months

Welcome to a brand new edition of RANDOM RULES! The point of this newsletter is to tell stories via playlists, and provide the perfect soundtrack for different holidays/seasons, or different times of the day. So far we’ve featured DEEP dives into genres like shoegaze, slowcore and freak folk, playlists for holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, 4th of July, Pride Month, Memorial Day and Easter, plus fun themed mixes about The Devil, UFOs, Insects, beef tracks outside of the hip-hop genre, songs about Florida, plus our ongoing Family Tree series which has covered Talking Heads, Slint, Matmos, Vivian Girls, Pedro The Lion and Pavement so far. You can access the archive, mostly for free, or you can upgrade to paid to have full access to our archive.

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Here’s a playlist of my 50 favorite songs of 2025 so far, excluding anything that I have been professionally involved with (for that playlist, click here). This is a bit of a departure for me because I spend most of my time here talking about older music, but I’m one of those rare music listeners who did NOT stop paying attention at the age of 35.

Every major outlet and everyone with a music Substack has made one of these lists already (I noticed a lot of these posted extremely early), so I’m not going to do an in-depth breakdown of each track, as my list has a lot in common with many other lists (hopefully with a few surprises / discoveries) and I think it’s a solid listen front to back, as long as you’re open to a little genre hopping (which you should be if you are a RANDOM RULES subscriber!) I also included a few songs from albums that won’t be out for a few months from Wednesday, Cate Le Bon, Clipse, Automatic, Guerilla Toss, Ryan Davis, Forth Wanderers, etc.

Another important topic I want to bring up: SPOTIFY. I’m going to try to shift to hosting these playlists on platforms other than Spotify moving forward (the reasoning behind this should be obvious), and I wanted to get input and feedback from you on which platforms you’re likely to actually listen on - maybe TIDAL, or Qobuz? Are any of you actually using Deezer? Also, I love Bandcamp but for my purposes their catalog is a little too limiting for the kind of playlists I make. Please let me know in the comments. I’ll likely continue using Apple Music for the time being, fyi.