This is my third and final Sunday mix pulling together some of my favorite tracks from 2025 (the first one, ambient and instrumental, is here and the second, dub and dance, is here). This one starts out folky, strays from dub to cosmische and Balearic, and picks from the past too with two covers, some Stone Roses inspiration and Mazzy Star, songs borrowing from the years 1971, 1989, 1993 and 1999. Going back to go forwards.
- Joao Leao: One Of These Things First
- Sydney Minsky Sargeant: Summer Song
- Coyote: Battle Weary
- Stereolab: Flashes From Everywhere
- Psychederek: Thinkin' Bout U Pt. 4 (Jupiter/ Reprise)
- Saint Etienne: Alone Together (Hove Lawns Sunset Mix)
- Pale Blue Eyes: How Long Is Now (Richard Norris Remix)
- Red Snapper: Ban- Di- To
- Five Green Moons and Brix Smith: Boudica
- Raz and Afla: Windowlicker
- 10:40 Present Retro Fit: Lavender Mist
- Four Tet: Into Dust (Still Falling)
Joao Leao is a Brazillian- Canadian artist. This cover of a Nick Drake song came out on 7" in February on Toronto label Local Dish, a lovely, slightly tropical and ever so sweetly melancholic version of the original.
Sydney Minsky Sargeant's solo album Lunga was a 2025 highlight, an album with some songs that date back to his teenage years growing up in Todmorden and the flipside to Syd's main job as leader of Working Men's Club. Lunga is downtempo, personal, acoustic guitar based with echoes of Syd Barrett in the singing and Nick Drake in the playing. Summer Song is reflective, a little lost, the sound of the end of summer.
Notts Balearic veterans Coyote continue to drip feed new songs and tracks. 2025 saw a six track mini- album, Wailing To The Yellow Dawn, a collaboration with Peaking Lights and two singles including the one here, the dubbed out sounds of Battle Weary with the vocal sample iterating, 'Sufferin' is a poor man's crime'.
Stereolab returned after a long gap with a new album, Instant Holograms On Metal Film, an album stuffed full of vintage synths, motorik rhythms, wit, invention and (crucially) good songs. Flashes From Everywhere starts out like an easy listening track and then goes krauty and flirts with being poppy.
Stretford's Psychederek released the four track EP Thinkin' Bout U in August, four different versions of the song, covering everything from Pacific State style dance to broken down, beach bar Balearica (Pt. 4, the one I've included here), kind of proving there's no such thing as a definitive or final version. You can always find another way to do something.
Saint Etienne released four versions/ remixes of Along Together (a track from 2024's The Night). The Hove Lawns Sunset mix re- imagines West Sussex as a Mediterranean island, slo mo beats and sunset by the pool vibes. Bob, Pete and Sarah then announced an album that would be their last and a tour this year that will be ditto. I think we'll miss them when they're gone.
Pale Blue Eyes are from Sheffield, an indie/ krauty trio. Richard remixed the song as a cosmische autobahn trip, soaring away from South Yorkshire and into 70s West Germany.
Red Snapper were all over my 2025. A tour in March to celerbate the 30th anniversary of Reeled And Skinned, a new album Barb And Feather, and an appearance on Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2 with the percussion mayhem of Qraqeb. Ban- Di- To is amped up jump blues done 2025 style.
Five Green Moons second album, Moon 2, was a second strong dub/ folk set from Justin Robertson, who is really in a purple patch at the moment. Brix Smith appears on Boudica. Surviving The Fall/ leading an uprising against the Romans- similarly troublesome I'd imagine.
Raz and Afla released their cover of Aphex Town's Windowlicker, an Afro- futurist dancefloor bomb that repositions Aphex Twin somewhere new.
Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 released An Alternative History back in April, a track Jesse made inspired by a post here at Bagging Area where I imagined an alternate history of The Stone Roses, one where they didn't mess it up after June 1990 but kept going and recorded singles, EPs and albums all the way through the 90s culminating in a gig at Raglan Road scout hut in Sale, up the road from me, where Ian and John first rehearsed way back. You can read that post here. Jesse fired up his studio, sampled Ian and built a new/ imaginary Roses track. The third version, Lavender Mist, went all backwards and is named after Jackson Pollock's painting of the same name. For a while Jesse had the idea that I might provide the vocal but I bottled it. Probably for the best. My singing voice hasn't been the same since I gave up smoking. I always planned to include Lavender Mist on an end of year mix but Mani's death in November added an extra poignancy to everything Roses related. You may have seen the photos from the funeral of his former bandmates carrying his coffin out of Manchester cathedral. A very sad loss.
Four Tet's Mazzy Star sampling Into Dust (Still Falling) was my favourite single of 2025, a lush and slinky tune that (as I said elsewhere) sounded like summer in the summer and sounds like winter in the here and now. Kieran Hebden can do little wrong for me- his album with William Tyler was as good an album as any other released in 2025 and as Four Tet has been on a roll of superb albums in the last decade with New Energy in 2017, Sixteen Oceans in 2020 and Three in 2024.
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