The Inventory Full Pick Of The Year - 2025

It's New Year's Eve. Time for the Inventory Full Pick Of The Year. Oh, wait...you already knew that. It was in the title. The portentous, pretentious title. 

Putting the name of your blog in the title is the blogging equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person, something Inventory Full has been doing an awful lot of all through December. Should we be worried?

It's not even as though the title is self-explanatory. It requires some clarification. Music is what we're talking about. I'm sure as heck not going to go back over the entire three hundred posts and pull out all the so-called highlights. I'm not a crazy person!

Songs, though... that should be much easier. And, actually, I already did the prep. Twice. Once back in November or thereabouts, but I left the list on the hard drive of the old PC, and then again last week.  It seemed like it would be easier just to do the whole thing over again.

I'm not digging out the stats to prove it, but my sense is that I did fewer "What I've Been Listening To..."posts this year and left longer gaps between them. Partly, that's because I don't think it's been a particularly stand-out year for music. It's been fine but 2024 was epic, so I guess 2025 was always likely to suffer in comparison. 

The main reason for the shortfall, though, if there was one, wasn't so much lack of good tunes as it was too much AI. Go on, blame AI for everything, why not? It's not like it's going to argue. More like it'll tell me how right I am and what a great insight that was.

But in this case it's true. I spent countless hours making my own music using AI, time that would otherwise most likely been spent searching for and finding music made by others. Probably most of it would have been made by humans, too, although it's getting increasingly hard a) to pick out the sound of humans through the ever-increasing AI signal and b) to tell the difference when you do.

I did manage to make a handful of significant discoveries all the same, foremost among them being Sunday (1994) and R. Missing. I bought all the CDs Sunday (1994) were willing to sell me (One of each, that is, not carloads of the same one. I'm not some kind of crazy hoarder.). I would happily have done the same for R. Missing only she doesn't do physical. I guess that's why her channel was my most-viewed of the year on YouTube.

For the post, I went through all the posts in 2025 with a "Music" tag and pulled out any songs I could both remember and remember listening to more than twice. I deliberately stopped at thirty because the Top Thirty was the thing when I was growing up, before it turned into the Top Forty, which I never really believed. Also I didn't have forty solid picks.

Here's the longlist. 

• Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas (sometimes) - Harvey Danger  
• A Winter Fairy is Melting a Snowman - 木村カエラ (Kaela Kimura
• Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale
• Girls On The Internet - Elita
• Make Time/Waste Time - Snowmen
• iPod Touch - Ninajirichii
• Cowbella - Bar Italia
• Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT
• Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter
• went to bum a cigarette - april june
• Diet Pepsi - Blondshell
• Devotion - Sunday (1994)
• Kelly Was A Philistine - R. Missing 
• Pony Yeah - R. Missing
• Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey
• Rain - Sunday (1994)
• "23's A Baby" Blondshell
• The Wolf - Witch Post
• Braces - Sept
• Algernoon - nickateen
• Fuck It - Punchbag
• 1-800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol 
• Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)
• Blonde - Sunday (1994)
• TV Car Chase - Sunday (1994)
• The Summer Ends - Blondshell
• You Let My Tyres Down - Tropical Fuck Storm
• 鹽焗雞$alty Chick - 今晚好想好想打俾你
• (He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River - TISM (This Is Serious Mum)  
• POSH - The Pill

If I had nothing better to do, I might go through the whole thing and add links but I do have better things to do and no-one needs links anyway. There's a perfectly good search function right here on the blog if you're that interested. 

The list isn't in order, which is why I haven't numbered it. That would imply preference. It's almost in reverse chronological order but only because I started at the end of the year and worked backwards. Then I thought I ought to have something by The Pill, who I'd left out because I couldn't decide exactly what it was by The Pill that I ought to have. And when I made up my mind I just stuck it on the end, so that one's out of sequence. Probably others, too.

Acts on the list that I bought CDs by are:

Bar Italia

Blondshell

Sunday (1994)

I also downloaded the Ninajirichii album.

Somehow that seems to make those feel like I liked them more but I'm not sure that holds. For example, I put Addison Rae's album on my Christmas wishlist but no-one bought it for me. And now she doesn't even make the longlist, except by proxy, so what does that mean? And I asked for the second Wet Leg album, even though I didn't like any of the singles all that much. And then I got it and listened to it and I like it better than the first album, even though i like all the songs on the first album better than any of the songs on the second album. But Wet Leg aren't even on the long list so why are we even talking about them?

People do have to make records before you can buy them, too. Not everyone does, these days. I would have very happily bought CDs by Witch Post, Aimee Fatale and R. Missing if they'd made any. And, of course, Lana del Rey, who's now two years overdue for a new album but instead appears to have retreated into married bliss with the Everglades answer to Crocodile Dundee. 

All the others on the list I watched/listened to on YouTube. Repeatedly or they wouldn't be on the list at all. I ought to mention a couple that didn't make the cut - my favorite title of the year by a mile was "We'll Always Have Paris 1919" by Tenderness. The song didn't make the longlist, though. 

My favorite video was Sabrina Carpenter's Manchild, which did, but that didn't make the Top Ten. Go figure. Also, I didn't watch KPop Demon Hunters until last night so Golden didn't get a chance. It might have made the longlist at least, had I watched the movie when it came out instead of waiting weeks for no good reason. Maybe it'll be in next year's list, by when it'll be stale as biscuits.

I'm going to pull out a Top Ten now and it's going to need some rules. No more than one song by any artist and I have to have at least one thing to say about why I chose it. Also, they aren't going to be in any particular order. Not of merit, anyway.

That's enough rules and enough talk. Let's party like it's 2025!

Diet Pepsi - Blondshell (Covering Addison Rae.)

Performance of the year for me, as far as interpreting a lyric goes. Also cover of the year, although Magdelana Bay doing Ashes To Ashes runs it close. That nearly made the list but I couldn't really say I'd listened to it often enough. 

Sabrina recorded Diet Pepsi as a special for Sirius XMU, which isn't that far off singing it to herself in the shower. I see the link I used in the original post is now dead. Fortunately it did eventually find its way onto YouTube officially and also into her live set. 

I think as a vocalist she's probably my current favorite after Lana. She has an incredible, paradoxical ability to give a lyric an intense emotional charge, while at the same time her voice appears to lack any affect. It makes all her own compositions feel fogged and frightening in the best possible way. 

That effect is in overdrive on the second album. Where the first felt like an instant classic from the moment I heard it, the second took a lot longer to come through. She seems to hold so much back, lyrically and vocally, the songs are sometimes barely there at all. I'm all up with her now but it took a while to get there. 

As an interpreter of other people's songs, though, she's far more accessible. She did a superb cover of American Football's The Summer Ends but her take on Diet Pepsi topped even that. Addison Rae's writing is a lot more direct and she clearly has more time for a melody than Sabrina, who sometimes seems to be actively avoiding coming anywhere near one. The two approaches meld perfectly in this magnificent cover. It's notable that of the three Blondshell songs on this list, two are covers.

Tired Boy - Sunday (1994)

Not an easy choice. There are five Sunday (1994) songs on the list and there's next to nothing to choose between them. This was the first single and it's been in my head, on and off, all year. But then, so have they all. Oh, I don't know. I had to pick one and I've picked this. Could've been any of them. They're all magisterial.

Also, I've just discovered that using the word "Magisterial" in a Suno prompt gets you a vibe like theirs. I don't suppose they'd want to know that. 

 Pony Yeah - R. Missing

This is how I found her. I click on pony songs. Wanna make something of it? I used to think all pony songs were all always good and for a long time all of them always were but it's surprising how many there are. The streak had to break sometime. Still, it's a solid indicator. Better than tiger, which is also good. Anyway, this is a proof.

It's scary, isn't it, how random things are? If she'd called this something else I might never have known she existed. Although I would always have clicked on Kelly Was A Philistine. I mean, you'd have to, wouldn't you? Titles are so important. And so powerful.

And yet I have no idea what this song is about. Not ponies, that's for sure. 

The Wolf - Witch Post

Banger of the Year! I would totally have lost my shit to this on the dance-floor in the 90s. That fucking riff! That chorus! The supersaturated sound! 

Again, I just worked out that adding "supersaturated" to a Suno prompt is a magic trick. Add "all needles in the red" for extra raw. Now if I can just figure out how to make it overdrive the vocals instead of having everyone sound like a goddam choir-girl...

Cowbella - Bar Italia

Wouldn't you like to see Witch Post and Bar Italia up against each other in the final of a Battle of the Bands in the back room of a dive bar? Or in the nightclub scene of a Swinging Sixties movie? Some bands should never be seen in daylight. Most of the good ones, actually.

You Let My Tyres Down - TFS

Or Tropical Fuck Storm if you prefer, which I do. I just used the acronym in case it stopped the video flagging as Adults Only but I bet it didn't. I won't know until I publish but I'll leave it however it lands. (In fact it doesn't even work in the Preview so that's a wash.)

This isn't new. I think it's one of only two songs in the post that didn't come out in either 2025 or just before and even those two are from the 2020s. I listen to a surprising amount of Australian music these days which might be because a surprising amount of Australian bands are really good. They certainly seem to have this kind of spiraling, violent guitar squall cornered, anyway, along with the existential hooligan singing. It's all a bit Clockwork Orange sometimes. 

Braces - Sept

This is an odd one. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it. It's much more of a vibe than a song. It has that indefinable, plangent guitar sound I associate with South American indie rock. Quite a lot of the comments in the YT thread are in Spanish, too, which makes me wonder. The video seems like the most mannered, unreal vision to me but the comments are full of people going overboard about authenticity and their own lost teenage years, which does make you wonder where the hell these people went to school...

And then of course I had to google to see exactly where the band does come from... and it was a lot harder than you'd think to find out. Gemini doesn't know: "They appear to be an independent, indie music act based in the United States, as indicated by various social media and music platform snippets. Further details regarding their specific city or state of origin are not readily available in the search results."

I did a bit better on my own, once again demonstrating the value of AI assistance. This Instagram interview makes it pretty clear they're from Southern California. They also mention a bunch of other bands I'm gonna check out because they name some good names...

Apple Of My Eye - Aimee Fatale

One of the top comments reads "i had this on loop for a week straight im actually obsessed". I wouldn't go quite that far but I played it over and over when I first happened upon it. Haven't heard it for a few weeks and it sounds just as good now as it did then. She doesn't have a lot of songs out. Nothing in physical format but there's a live set on YouTube with several numbers I haven't heard yet. I'd listen to them all but the sound, particularly the vocals, is so muffled it's hard to tell how good the songs might be if you could hear them properly. 

Henry, Come On - Lana del Rey

I almost left this out just because every time I hear it, it reminds me just how damn long it's been since we heard anything new from Queen Lana. I don't think there's been a drought like this since I joined the cult back in aught-12. We didn't know how blessed we were, all those years.

Lana, Come On! 

A Winter Fairy Is Melting A Snowman 

 木村カエラ

What can I say? I spent longer thinking about this final spot than all the rest put together. I even went back through all the posts to see if I'd missed anything essential. I found a bunch of songs I might just as easily have included as most of the ones I did but no, I'd caught everything that really had to be here.

Then I thought about what would be the coolest one to end with, because you would, wouldn't you? And what would be the least cool, because that, too. 

In the end, though, I decided I ought to be honest and finish with the song I've probably listened to more often than anything else on the entire list. Which is this one. Really. I played it over and over going into Christmas and I just played it three times back-to-back as I wrote this paragraph. It's just... well, it is, isn't it?

And that's that for 2025. You could do worse than play these ten at your New Year's party tonight. You are having one, aren't you? You're not just playing video games and going to bed early again?

Fair enough, if you are. That's what I'm going to do!