October 2025 (Part 1)

I have no good ideas for an introductory paragraph to today's blog post, so let's just get straight to it. Here are some thoughts on eleven cool songs I listened to this month, as featured on the official Horse Combinations October 2025 playlist.

Animal, Surrender! - “Misswanderer”
While the name Animal, Surrender! may be better suited for some third string Mars Volta proggy post-hardcore band with one mostly forgotten LP from 2007, they’re actually a trio of weird rock music lifers playing wild instrumental jams on the eight string bass, pipe organ, and drums. The knotty, mesmerizing groove of album opener “Misswanderer” hooked me immediately, I’ve had this record on repeat for weeks!

james K - “Peel”
I think I first read about this new james K album via some Boomkat post on Bluesky a month or two ago and their effusive writeup of the producer’s “gauzy ambient-pop x trip hop” had me intrigued because I usually like all that bullshit. Friend has been a go-to album to throw on every few days ever since, full of off-kilter pop songs and weirdo electronic soundscapes.



Lemon Quartet - “Right Hand Wine”
I’m always revisiting the pair of albums from Ohio jazz heads Lemon Quartet. Their debut Crestless and its followup ArtsFest (featuring the excellent “Right Hand Wine”) are hazy masterpieces, laid back instrumental pieces that have soundtracked countless uneventful afternoons spent catching up on reading or prepping stuff for dinner.

The Primitives - “I’ll Stick With You” 
The Primitives were cited as an influence on The Cords (featured on Horse Combs just a few weeks ago) in their Bandcamp bio alongside other indie pop icons like Tiger Trap and The Shop Assistants. I wasn't familiar so I listened to their 1988 debut Lovely out of curiosity and was very into it: fifteen finely crafted minimalist treasures, including the extremely charming “I’ll Stick With You.”

verity den - “wet glass”
In 2023 my wife and I decided to start including a link to a wintry mixtape with the Christmas cards we sent out to friends and family. I’ve just started compiling some tracks for this year’s mix and was listening back to last year’s slightly lower effort playlist, Pillow Drift Vol. 2 when I heard the awesome song “washer dryer” by verity den, whose underrated debut album was one of my favorite albums released last year. I hadn’t checked in on them in a while but it turns out they’re releasing a followup in just a few weeks! Title track “wet glass” is one of two available singles from the album so far and I can’t wait to hear the rest.

Harmonia - “Monza (Rauf Und Runter)”
I made the half measure move of harm reduction to switch from Spotify to Tidal this summer, which has mostly been fine but has come with some challenges. Tidal has a well-documented issue with poory maintained artist pages, where multiple artists ranging in legitimacy that have released music under the same name will be lumped together with little to distinguish between legendary masterworks, tossed off freestyles from aspiring Eastern European rappers, and AI generated slop. Every few days I’ll get a notification on Tidal that there’s a new Harmonia song ready to be streamed; it's never a track from the 1970s krautrock supergroup Harmonia, but a new piece by a Spanish electronic music producer who releases music under a variety of pseudonyms, Harmonia included. Anyways this inspired me to listen to the German Harmonia’s Deluxe on the train earlier this week and I’m glad I did.

Khadija Al Hanafi - “Borders”
I was revisiting footwork producer Khadja Al Hanafi’s record !OK! that came out in January and it’s still awesome. 

TOPS - “Perfected Steps”
We saw TOPS here in Chicago last week and it was really good! Early in the show, after ripping an extended flute solo during the outro of “Paper House,” lead vocalist/flautist Jane Penny greeted the crowd with a quick “Nice to be here in Chicago, fuck ICE” before the band launched into a fiery version of “Perfected Steps” from their 2022 EP Empty Seats. That’s what it’s all about, baby!

Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd - “Sea, Swallow Me”
It’s finally Cocteau Twins weather out so now I’m listening to Cocteau Twins all the time. The Moon and the Melodies, the album they did with Harold Budd, is really doing it for me lately. 

Shrunken Elvis - “Sun Pillar”
This new Shrunken Elvis record is really cool, a bunch of spacey ambient country jams punctuated by glacial pedal steel and vintage Robert Fripp style guitar solos. It's really the best case scenario for this sort of modern new age stuff, still vibe-forward but every track is full of interesting ideas and textures.

D’Angelo - “Till It’s Done (Tutu)”
D'Angelo's sudden passing last week was such a heartbreaker. Black Messiah is one of my favorite albums ever, “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” still gets stuck in my head over a decade after the album dropped and I played it on an endless loop for months.  

 Full playlist embedded below, back soon with more!