Like last year, my 2025 music trends are quite steady:
My Last.FM shows me that I did not listen to a lot of new music. Here are the 2025 albums I have added to my library:
- Avantasia – Here be Dragons. In the same line of the previous trilogy of albums, with a callback to the original fantasy sounds. However, I still miss the opera style of the first couple of albums, while these latest 6 albums are more of a Tobias album with a few guests. I wanted more of Sign of the Cross epic song with several singers.
- Arjen Anthony Lucassen — “Songs No One Will Hear”. Ayreon has been my fix to this epic opera song. This is clearly not an epic Ayreon album, but Dr Slumber’s Blue Bus is a happy song that I just can’t enough.
- Halestorm – Everest It’s not one of the older albums “every song is a banger”, but it has a slower, more mellow tonality to it. In particular, my favorite song, Darkness Always Wins, gives me a déjà vu feeling, as if it was a song from my teens.
- Majestica – Power Train I mostly listen to it because of No Pain, No Gain which is one of the songs that I wake up to if I want energy right in the morning.
- Dynasty – Game of Faces Nills still has time to record with his original band (I love him in Amaranthe, despite having a slight preference for Jake’s era songs), but despite generally good, it does not have a really over-the-top song like earlier albums.
While not A-side, I have also enjoyed the two alternative releases by Linkin Park (“A Capella:https://consequence.net/2025/01/linkin-park-a-cappella-album-from-zero/) and The Mars Volta (Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio) but the original material still plays more on my speakers.
In hindsight, I have spent very little time searching for new bands, other than Majestica. One interesting Top40 source of recommendations is the Hitster boardgames, where you try to create a timeline of popular songs just by Spotify’s 30 second preview.