February 2026 (part one)

Every month I'm making a new playlist and adding a variety of cool new songs and cool old songs I listened to and then once every week or two I log onto my website and write 2-4 sentences about those songs. That's the Horse Combinations promise, baby! Here's what we've come up with so far for the February 2026 playlist, streaming exclusively on Tidal!

Barry Walker Jr. - “Peridot, Call Me”
Portland-based paleontologist Barry Walker Jr. moonlights as a pedal steel player with groups like Rose City Band, North Americans, and Mouth Painter. He’s also released a handful of really solid recordings under his own name, most recently January’s excellent Paleo Sol, a collection of earthy instrumental tracks that manage to stand out from the increasingly crowded ambient Americana scene.

Gia Margaret - “Everyone Around Me Dancing”
Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is one of my favorite albums of the decade. It’s a record I played endlessly after it's summer 2023 release and is something I revisit frequently when in need of a half hour or so of peace. Album opener “Hinoki Wood” has taken on a life of its own over the last few years as a sound on TikTok, used mostly as an easy aesthetic shorthand for all things carefully curated and self-consciously cozy. Being a middle aged indie rock fan, I’m used to latecomers embracing music I love in new, weird contexts, it’s fine, but when I’m scrolling Instagram reels and hear the first five seconds of a song that introduces a record that to me represents sort of the sort of peace and stillness that is in direct opposition to looking at my phone, it still feels a little uncanny. It’s the same irked feeling I get when I hear "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" or “Maps” in Walgreens, like this is too meaningful of art for me to be hearing while I’m just in here for a minute trying to buy chips. Anyways there’s a new Gia Margaret album coming and this is the first single from it and I think it’s really good.

January 2026 (part two)

We're back and blogger than ever! Let's take a look at some blurbs about ten more songs I listened to last month and liked and think you might like too.

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore - “Stardust”
A standout from the overall extremely nice new collaborative record from Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of the best ambient/new age/experimental etc. artists going.

Talking Heads - “Love Goes to a Building on Fire (CBS/Columbia Demo)”
I’ve always loved "Love → Building on Fire,” an early single that is often tacked on to the end of the first Talking Heads record. All this time I didn’t really know how to pronounce the arrow in the song title but I never would have guessed “goes to a” would have been it, Anyways this demo version is the first song released from a forthcoming triple CD boxset featuring a bunch of Talking Heads rarities that I’m gonna devour when it comes out next month.

January 2026 (part one)

Damn it's cold here in Chicago! Only thing cooler than the wind chill are these tunes!! Here are some thoughts on the first ten songs added to the Horse Combinations January 2026 playlist!!!

Yusef Lateef - “Semiocto”
It’s 9am in early January, the holidays are over and I’m walking the 10 minutes from the train station to my office making my brain feel crazy listening to Yusef Lateef’s Psychicemotus.

Jana Horn - “Go on, move your body”
I’m all in on the new Jana Horn record. I’ve been listening to this song repeatedly since it was first released back in November, hoping the rest of the album would live up to the expectations set by this spare, subtly noisy gem. Now that the full thing is here, I’m pleased to announce that it does and I will be listening to it a lot over the next few months (at least).

December 2025 (part 2)

Wow it's 2026! Before we start talking about all the cool songs to come in the new year, let's look back at the final ten tracks added to the Horse Combinations December 2025 playlist. Lots of reminiscing happening in various ways across these songs; there's stuff I loved when I was a kid, covers of some all-time classics, meditative piano jazz from one of the best guys to ever do it, etc. 

Lemuria - “Bugbear”
A couple times a year I will, in a fit of nostalgia, listen to basically every song Buffalo indie rock band Lemuria released between 2005 and 2009. A formative band for me in high school, Lemuria was the bridge between the far off, inaccessible world of A-list indie music I read about in blogs and magazines and the small, interconnected Western New York DIY scene. Rather than passively consuming art from musicians from my bedroom deep in a secondary market, hoping to catch touring acts who settled for a Buffalo gig when they couldn’t make a date in Cleveland or Pittsburgh work, I could see these bands play live in basements, record stores, and tiny bars, maybe even nervously talk to them at the merch table in between sets. You could also book them on shows yourself, pairing them up at house shows with your friends’ bands, maybe even worm your way into an internship for their record label. As an excitable 18 year old with a developing sense of taste and talent for sending emails but not much else, discovering DIY was a paradigm shifting moment for how I interacted with art for the rest of my life. Anyways “Bugbear” is an unbelievable song.

25 albums from 2025

2025 has drawn to a close and there are lots of cool songs to look back on with fondness despite the darkness, despair, and complacency overwhelming nearly every aspect of the independent music landscape. Let's focus on what's good and encouraging out there!

Below are some thoughts on 25 of my favorite releases of 2025. This is actually the second 2025 retrospective I've put together, the first of which can be read over at RIYL. In order to keep from repeating myself, any records included on that list were not named here, but other than that anything goes! Let's get into it.