Almost Mainstream: The 2015 Mixtape

Posted on 24 December 2015

Every December/January, I like to make a little mix of my favourite things in music from the past year. Sometimes it’s top songs, sometimes it’s top albums, sometimes it’s twelve tracks, sometimes it’s twenty. It really depends on what feels most relevant to my listening habits of the past year.

This year, it feels like the most honest thing to do is make a mixtape that’s roughly representative of my listening habits of the past year, which was largely listening to various mixes and individual tracks. I limited it to forty tracks because I find anything too long is just not worthwhile as a curated mix of the best of the best. If you desperately want more, I suggest my 2015 jams playlist on Spotify which sounds awesome on shuffle and includes basically every song I loved from the past 360-ish days.

As it is, these are the forty songs I’ve selected as the best representation of the past year. I followed the Said the Gramophone rules for year-end lists, which is: every artist only gets one song, and the songs are ones that I heard for the first time in 2015- a few came out at the tail end of 2014, but I didn’t catch them then.

By the way, my favourite albums of the year were: Carly Rae Jepsen‘s Emotion plus all its related singles, Grimes‘ Art Angels plus all her related singles/releases of the year, and Bleachers‘ Terrible Thrills Vol. 2. My other favourite artists were Drake (who released a good album, a good joint album, and good singles) and Justin Bieber (who released a strong slate of singles, but whose album still has too much filler).

My favourite live artist was Black Spruce Bog, who had a great year from the Canada Winter Games through to The First Waltz and who also released the very excellent Confluence. My favourite song, period, was “Can’t Feel My Face” by the Weeknd. My favourite soundtrack was the season one playlist for Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, which is great all the way through and introduced me to “Cool It Now” by New Edition, which I’d somehow never heard before.

If you are interested, here are my previous year-end lists:
2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010

And here’s this year’s mix:

Stream:
Mixcloud | Download | Spotify (not all tracks are available on Spotify)

Tracklisting: