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.

December 2025 (Part 1)

Hope you're having a nice holiday season! We've slowly been getting into the spirit, mostly drinking eggnoggy cocktails watching an endless stream of Lifetime/Hallmark Channel style holiday romcom clones and digging up rips of old VHS recordings of various Christmas specials people have uploaded to Youtube. 

It's also year end list season, and though the online music writing landscape has maybe never been bleaker, this time of year remains a great opportunity to discover some stuff released in 2025 that I may have missed the first time around. Horse Combinations will be checking in with a list of favorites from this year soon, but for now let's talk about some cool songs I listened to over the last few weeks!

cootie catcher - “Straight Drop”
As mentioned earlier this year, cootie catcher sounds uncannily like the type of band I would have seen opening for Lemuria in a basement in like 2007 and briefly became obsessed with. “Straight Drop” and “Gingham Dress,” the two singles available so far from Something We All Got, out in February, are as strong as anything they’ve released. I’m obviously predisposed to this kind of DIY/twee indie pop but I am feeling bullish as hell on cootie catcher in 2026!

Takuro Okada - "Nefertite"
Dylan told me about this Takuro Okada album a few weeks ago, it’s really cool! A loving appreciation of the music of Black Americans thoughtfully infused with Japanese aesthetics by a beloved Tokyo experimental musician, Konoma gracefully traverses the worlds of instrumental funk, jazz, and hip hop. The shimmering, languid cover of Norwegian jazz legend Jan Garbarek’s “Nefertite” acts as an acknowledgment of outsiders past.

November 2025 (Part 2)

And just like that, another Cool Music November is behind us, folks. December is here and everyone's posting their Spotify Wrapped. I famously left Spotify earlier this year (something you should consider doing too) but I am also not above looking at every single Spotify Wrapped screenshot posted by every single person I know online.

As an extremely nosy guy I'm always curious about the media people consume, seeing how their favorite artists interact with my preconceived notions about them. I also just love the simple joy in finding out a former coworker got really into The Dismemberment Plan this year or that my friend's kid's ongoing Hans Zimmer phase has totally destroyed his algorithm. 

Obviously Wrapped is a lethal combination of navel-gazing ego stroking and FOMO manipulating free advertising for the evilest of streamers and sharing it in 2025 feels a little tone deaf to the valid pleas artists and other people smarter than me have been making all year. What complicates it for me is getting to see people earnestly share the music they love, something that is, at least in my social media sphere, becoming increasingly rare. 

Even if it's packaged as a roundup of data visualized KPIs or whatever, I'm happy to learn more about my friends and the shit they're into. Thankfully the other big streamers like Tidal and Apple Music also offer year end stats so we can all just plan on doing that next year.

Anyways here's blurbs about thirteen more songs I listened to and loved in November. Part one is here if you missed it. 

Westside Cowboy - “Can’t See”
The very exciting young rock and roll band Westside Cowboy has already been dubbed an official Horse Combinations “band to keep your eye on” and the designation stands with “Can’t See.” The dream of the mid 2000s blog rock scene is alive, baby!

Robber Robber - “Talkback”
Robber Robber’s 2024 debut was an underrated highlight of last year that deserved way more attention than it got and has stayed in regular rotation for the last eighteen months around these parts. They’re back with “Talkback,” a new single that refines the precise, nervy sound of Wild Guess, and has me excited for whatever 2026 holds for these guys.