We’re starting the new year by taking a look back at some of the highlights of 2025. Yesterday, Joyzine editorial team member Aitch Nicol shared her picks, including Bob Vylan, The Moonlandingz and feminist body horror film The Substance – check out her full selection here. Today it’s the turn of one of our newest recruits, and someone more frequently seen as the subject of our articles than the author of them, until now – Mathias Kom (also of Canadian Garage Folk cult heroes The Burning Hell).
Album – Marlon Williams – Te Whare Tīwekaweka
Because my brain is profoundly damaged by the same capitalist hellscape that your brain is damaged by, when my friend Charlie introduced me to the music of Marlon Williams many years ago, I got distracted and forgot to keep listening (despite loving what I heard). But speaking of capitalist hellscapes, the one good thing the evil streaming giants ever did for me was to feed me this new Marlon Williams record earlier this year. I thought “I remember liking that guy,” and so I listened, and then listened again, and then again, and then instead of listening a fourth time I did the right thing and went straight to his website and ordered an LP for myself and a few more for my friends, including Charlie who tried to introduce me to Marlon Williams in the first place. One important thing to know is that Williams is of Kāi Tahuand Ngāi Tai descent, from Aotearoa / New Zealand, and this record is entirely in the Māori language. Another important thing to know is that it’s a truly beautiful collection of songs. There’s plenty of country and folk influences here, but it’s also very polished and occasionally poppy – there’s even a duet with Lorde – though if this was what typical pop music sounded like we’d all be in a better place. Marlon Williams has an undeniably beautiful voice, and he could sing the phone book (if we still had phone books) and make it compelling. But these words (co-written with friend and fellow artist Kommi Tamati-Elliffee) are special, underlining the emotional depth of his journey of connection with family, history, and language. I’ve read all the lyrics in translation, and it’s nice to understand them. But I’m starting to be able to sing along in Māori, and that’s even better.
Marlon Williams: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
*I wanted to avoid mentioning things my friends have made because of the bias involved, but I can’t help sneaking in a little footnote here to say that 2025 also saw some great releases by Jake Nicoll, Stanley Brinks, Caged Animals, Jimmie Kilpatrick, Jeffrey Lewis and Toby Goodshank & Leslie Graves, all of which are worthy of your ears.
Single – Hen Ogledd – Scales Will Fall
I love music! This is what I think when I listen to Hen Ogledd. More specifically: I love bands! I especially love it when a band has such perfectly distinct and complimentary musical voices, and the combination of Richard Dawson, Sally Pilkington, Rhodri Davies and Dawn Bothwell is exactly, magically that. “Scales Will Fall” is the first single from their upcoming album Discombobulated, and it’s an eight minute and thirty-five second revolutionary anthem centred on what Bothwell has called “bard rap,” which wasn’t a genre before but now is suddenly my favourite kind of music – bard rap is all I listen to, I will soon be telling everyone. I’m sure the album will be great, because everything Hen Ogledd does is new and scary and fun and smart, and I never had a phase where I pasted band photos on the inside of my school locker, but if I could I’d get in a Delorean and go back in time just so I could do that with Hen Ogledd. They’re not a typical band, maybe, but they’re exactly the kind of band that makes being in a band seem like the best thing you could possibly do with your life.
Hen Ogledd: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Gig – Kim Deal – Boston – The Wilbur Theater
I loved the Pixies album Trompe Le Monde so much when I first heard it as a teenager that I bought all their previous CDs as soon as I could. But then two years later I was watching MuchMusic (Canada’s cuter version of MTV) and “Cannonball” by the Breeders came on and before long I was even more obsessed with Kim Deal. Over thirty years later, standing close to the front of the stage in Boston’s beautiful little Wilbur Theater, I thought about how her music has soundtracked my entire adult life, from the Breeders to the Amps and now to her first ostensibly solo record (though I think there were eight other people on stage, including her sister and frequent bandmate Kelley, so I’m not sure what solo means, really). She played all of her excellent new album Nobody Loves You More, plus several Breeders songs and some other treats from deep in the well, and even the bro standing in front of me wearing a shiny tasselled shirt talking loudly in the ear of his partner the entire time couldn’t mar the absolute joy of hearing one of my favourite songwriters of all time play her songs for a thousand people who knew every word nearly as well as I did.
Kim Deal: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Festival – Sappyfest
I have to perform at music festivals as part of my job and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t like crowds of drunk people, I don’t like mass camping, I don’t like queuing at food trucks, I don’t like rushed sound-checks, and I don’t like feeling as though music is something to be consumed at some kind of enormous, filthy trough. One good and very small festival, though, is Sappyfest, in Sackville, New Brunswick. I’ve been going there as a performer, volunteer, and music fan for two decades. This past year was the 20th edition, and it was so nice that I’ll probably never go again.
Sappyfest: Website / Instagram
Music-related moment of the year – The Velvet Sundown and A.I. in music
Considering how quickly we seem to be creating a real-life version of Skynet, and pretty soon we’re all going to be regretting not paying stricter attention to Sarah Connor’s doomsday ravings, it seems a bit silly to fuss about the impact of A.I. on music, of all things. But as I type these words, 34% of all new content on streaming platforms is A.I. generated – up from 18% back in April – and most of us can’t tell the difference. The Velvet Sundown is just one example, though thanks to the mysterious prank-filled story of this particular fake band, it might be the only entertaining one, in spite of the blandness of the actual music. I’ve heard some persuasive arguments that because of the way A.I. learns, it will only ever be able to create the most boring, milquetoast, pablum versions of popular music, and that it will never truly innovate. Nevertheless, the near future will see us all wrestling with debates around A.I. and creativity a lot more, and we must ask the fundamental question: why are we still allowing our listening to be mediated by tech platforms, instead of just learning the banjo or whatever, and doing something productive in the war against the machines?
Film – Sinners
I really didn’t expect to love this movie as much as I did. It’s a vampire film and a western and it’s smart and silly and violent and funny, and it makes some very astute points about racism in America while also being an absolute romp. Michael B Jordan is a wonder – well, two wonders in this case (following in a long, beautiful tradition of actors playing twins, from Bette Davis to Jeremy Irons to Jackie Chan to Lindsay Lohan), but writer-director Ryan Coogler is the standout star to me. Sinners contains one particular scene of musical pastiche that balances on a remarkably thin precipice overlooking a deep chasm of schmaltz and cheese, somehow never falling off. That’s just one scene, but the same knife-edge between clever and earnest, silly and serious, is why the whole thing works so well.
Book – The Employees – Olga Ravn
My friends are all tired of me talking about this book so I’m glad I have another outlet here. It’s one of the most inventive pieces of fiction I’ve read in ages, and if you’re not a fan of sci-fi, don’t let the fact that it’s a narrative about artificial intelligence and workplace culture told via a series of interviews with the employees of a space exploration company put you off, because it’s also a riveting satire that will make you completely rethink what it means to be human. In other words, you should read it right away.
*Again, some personal bias must be admitted to here, but you should also read Niko Stratis’ excellent memoir The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman.
Art Exhibition – Erica Rutherford at the Rooms, St. John’s Newfoundland
I live on Prince Edward Island (properly called Epekwitk in the Mi’kmaq language), which is both the smallest Canadian province and the place that the British artist Erica Rutherford spent the last several decades of her life, after undergoing gender affirming surgery in the mid-70s in the USA. Rutherford’s work as a photographer, filmmaker, and writer is compelling, but it’s her painting – particularly her later pieces and especially her series The Human Comedy – that speaks to me most. Living where I do, I’ve seen a lot of her work before, but I was lucky to spend time in Newfoundland recently, where I saw this outstanding retrospective and fell in love all over again.
Erica Rutherford: Instagram
TV Programme – The Rehearsal, Season 2
Are you old enough to remember the first era of so-called ‘prestige’ TV, when shows like The Wire made us all excited about the possibility that the form could be something more artful than the slop we were used to watching on cable? I sure am. But I’m also old enough to remember when we watched television on actual televisions, and Twin Peaks and Kids in the Hall in the 90s – and arguably All in the Family and The Muppet Show before that – had already demonstrated that TV had the potential to be more than just long-form advertising or mindless marshmallowy time-filler. So I’m never skeptical about the possibility that a television programme might come along and do something truly new, but I was as amazed as everyone else by the way the second series of The Rehearsal broke so much new ground it might as well be its own entire planet. Nathan Fielder has radically altered the way I look at aviation, the human voice, and motherhood, among many other things.
Podcast – The Blindboy Podcast
Carsie Blanton introduced us to Blindboy and I don’t generally listen to podcasts so it speaks to how much I trust Carsie’s recommendations that I ended up (reluctantly) checking it out. And I have to say that even as someone who has made peace with always being late to the party, I feel a new level of shame in sleeping on this absolute treasure chest for nearly a decade. The first episode I heard was titled “The Psychosexual History of Digestive Biscuits and their Use as Instruments of Physical Force” and for the two other people on the planet who haven’t heard this podcast yet, this is a great one to start with.
The Blindboy Podcast: Website / Instagram
Article by Mathias Kom
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