Crucial Track for 24 April 2025

"Leonard Cohen" by boygenius

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'What is your favorite song from last year?' I am asked by the daily prompt from Crucial Tracks. 'Favourite,' I say. The 'favorite' spelling reads like a made-up element from thirties SF, or some such. But I'm avoiding the question. The thing is, what this tells me is, I don't listen to much new music these days. Or, when I do, it doesn't impinge, doesn't resonate with me, become something I go back to. I spent a chunk of 2024 listening through a list from <cite>The Guardian</cite>, of [the 50 best albums of 2023](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/dec/05/the-50-best-albums-of-2023), in order to check out what was good and recent. I had already heard the PJ Harvey, the Gina Birch, and the Boygenius albums, all of which I liked. None of the others made enough of an impact to count, sadly. That is, none of them got a second play. One, I think, I gave a decent chance, but couldn't even finish. And anyway, they were all new works from the year before last, not last year. So for the purposes of this prompt, I'm allowing 'new to me' to count. And while I love PJ Harvey, so you might expect one of hers to make the cut, <cite>I Inside the Old Year Dying</cite> is too much an _album_. It's its own unique thing, but I don't recall a specific standout track from it. So I'm going with Boygenius and, in another acknowledgment of my lack of new-music-attention, their one that namechecks an old singer — one of my favourites.

Listen to Martin McCallion's Apple Music playlist