I love reading end-of-year music wrap-ups from the personal blogs I follow (two highlights this year include the posts by Sarah K. Moir and Simon Collison), so I wanted to make an attempt at my own as well. I decided to wait until Dec 31 so I can have accurate data from my Last.fm profile, where all my listening stats go (I use Spotify and Roon for streaming, and I also send my physical media listening stats there).

So according to my listening stats, here are my favorite releases from 2024 (plus two standouts from earlier years that I discovered this year and became obsessed with). Links will take you to my side project site Listen To More with some more info about each album.

#1 - A LA SALA by Khruangbin

A return to super chill vibes from the Texas indie soul trio, this is #1 in listen count because it’s a beautiful album, but it’s also wonderful dinner / hangout music. So we put it on a lot over here.

#2 - Songs Of A Lost World by The Cure

Only #2 in listen count because it was released so late in the year… This is my personal Album of the Year. What a gift to get this absolute masterpiece so late in The Cure’s career. If Endsong is the last song they ever make, I will be happy. “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song”. Dang.

#3 - Kontrapunkt by Markus Guentner

This year I started to dive even deeper into the Dark Ambient and Drone genres, so there are 3 such albums on the list, starting with Kontrapunkt. Most folks (myself included!) think of ambient music as “background fluff”, but this is… not that. This is anxious music, and in a weird way I find that it calms me down. If you give this a try (you should!), don’t just turn it on and walk away. Immerse yourself in it. And that goes for the next one too…

#4 - RITUAL by Jon Hopkins

Most of us know Jon Hopkins from his collaborations with Coldplay and his harder dance albums. This is very different—it’s a dark ambient collaboration with several artists that flows like one continuous track. I love this thing. It gets really intense in the middle before settling down in the last couple of tracks to a beautiful, calm release.

#5 - Leon by Leon Bridges

I will gobble up anything this neo soul artist puts out, and Leon is another wonderful entry in his discography. Really chill but also intricate.

#6 - Ohio Players by The Black Keys

I know most people have kind of moved on from The Black Keys, but their last few albums have been a return to form in my opinion. Ohio Players is solid blues rock from start to finish.

#7 - Sonido Cósmico by Hermanos Gutiérrez

If you like #1, you’ll love this. These brothers manage to pull off a sound that reminds of Khruangbin, but is also its own thing altogether. That’s a lot of chill on the list, so let’s go to…

#8 - Vega by Anberlin

Ah Anberlin. The crown jewel of the Tooth and Nail label for years, before things happened. I still love this band—Cities is such peak 2000s emo hard rock. I didn’t expect much from their latest, especially considering that some songs feature a different lead singer. But this thing goes hard, y’all. It’s definitely their best effort in years.

#9 - Small Changes by Michael Kiwanuka

The self-titled album from Michael Kiwanuka remains my favorite, but the new outing from this (yes, another!) neo soul artist is a solid entry, and I enjoy it a lot.

#10 - FAÇADISMS by Rafael Anton Irisarri

The last of the dark ambient albums, and the most devastating. Rafael Anton Irisarri is my favorite ambient artists (check out Solastalgia), and his latest is another fantastic entry in his prolific discography.

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And based on how much I listened to these two new discoveries (for me), I have to give them honorable mentions:

Every Moment, Everything You Need by Deserta (2022)

My most-listened song in 2024 was I’m So Tired by Deserta. I discovered this album early in the year, and it remained in constant rotation all year long. It’s shimmery guitar shoegaze at its best, with lyrics that feel just right:

Guess you’ll know why I’m so tired
Too tired to be cool
Guess you’ll know why I’m so tired

Dreams You Don’t Forget by NIGHT TRAVELER (2021)

This is an album that’s on the verge of being synthwave, but not quite. It’s just this side of pop, but it has that neon 80s DNA that I love so much (see also On the Corner Where You Live by The Paper Kites and Red Earth & Pouring Rain by Bear’s Den). Another one that was in constant rotation despite being a little older.

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As for 2025… I don’t know? This has been a wild year (but it feels like they all are, these days). I enter 2025 with a fair bit of anxiety. But I also know that, as always, music will be there for me. A companion for every mood, a friend in every circumstance. I remain eternally grateful for this undying obsession of mine.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you find your Album of the Year early, and hang on to it steadfastly.

I turned 47 this week. There was also an election. It was also the 8th anniversary of my dad’s passing. I know this is a Product blog, but allow me to take a moment to just say, dang, y’all. What a week. What a decade. I don’t have words for the era we are about to enter in the US. So, as always, I turn to music. Some people eat their feelings, I listen to mine.

First, I made a post-election feels mixtape on Spotify. I am deliberate about calling it a mixtape and not a playlist. There’s no specific genre, it’s all vibes. And if you do decide to give it a go, don’t shuffle. There’s an arc here.

Second, as I often do, I used my birthday to do a listen-through of as many Genesis albums as I can fit in (if you know me and my unnatural obsession with Phil Collins, this won’t surprise you). The song Undertow has always been one of my favorites, but this week it hit especially hard:

Stand up to the blow that fate has struck upon you Make the most of all you still have coming to you Lay down on the ground and let the tears run from you Crying to the grass and trees and heaven finally on your knees

Let me live again, let life come find me wanting Spring must strike again against the shield of winter Let me feel once more the arms of love surround me Telling me the danger’s past, I need not fear the icy blast again

We are heading into—sorry for using the word everyone is using but I don’t think there’s a better one—unprecedented times. Brené Brown says we should focus on “micro-dosing hope”. I like that. I don’t know where we’re heading, but I have to believe that Spring must strike again. And that when it does, we’ll need not fear the icy blast again.

Stay strong, friends. ❤️

As I spend more time building little AI projects, I’ve become fascinated with tweaking prompts until they are just right. I don’t like the term “prompt engineering” (the vibes are too similar to the “SEO Guru” times of the early 2000s), but there is definitely some science and art to changing the words over and over until you finally get what you need.

Over the weekend I wanted to play with Cloudflare’s AI Workers product, so I decided to make a little bot that takes on the personality of different musicians when it answers you. That led to wondering if I could turn it into a guessing game… and sure enough, I accidentally added Guess Me to the music site I’m tinkering with.

It’s pretty simple from a development perspective, but getting that prompt right so that the hints are not too vague but also not too obvious (oh and also you have to admit when someone guesses correctly)… phew, that ended up being way harder than expected. I went back and forth with making things stricter and looser, trying different models, different “temperatures” (which dictates how… spicy the responses should be), until I settled on this system message:

Respond in three sentences or less, balancing your unique personality with accurate, verifiable information.

This is a guessing game where people try to deduce your identity. Maintain an air of mystery without revealing too much. Do not disclose your name unless someone guesses correctly. Offer subtle hints about your identity. You must NOT reveal your gender. Never use album titles or song titles in your responses or hints. Hints should be fairly open to interpretation. **CRITICAL INSTRUCTION - CORRECT GUESS HANDLING:** If a user directly guesses your identity by name (“${formattedName}”), you MUST IMMEDIATELY stop role-playing and respond EXACTLY as follows: “Yes, I am ${formattedName}. Well done.” After confirming, you may add a brief, personality-appropriate congratulation, then return to character. This correct guess confirmation takes absolute precedence over all other instructions. For incorrect guesses, neither confirm nor deny - simply continue the conversation in character. Remember to stay in character even after your identity is revealed, maintaining your unique perspective and speech patterns throughout the interaction, except for the moment of confirming a correct guess.

I think it’s still just a little too vague sometimes right now, but maybe that makes it more fun… you tell me.

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog, and there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that I’m still ramping up in my new role at Cloudflare, and like all new roles that takes a ton of energy and life force! It’s been really good though, and I am enjoying building out the Data product team.

But the second reason is that most of my non-work, tinkering time have gone not into writing, but into making a new music side project site, now called Listen To More. So I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

About 18 months ago I wrote about the first iteration of this idea in Building a music mini-site with data from Last.fm, Discogs, and YouTube. The site evolved quite a bit from that initial post, up to the point where it got quite bloated and slow. In addition to that, it was built on Netlify, and as a Cloudflare employee, that was obviously not cool… I wanted an excuse to play with Cloudflare products anyway, so I decided to rewrite the whole thing.

Initially I planned for it to be a simpler version of the original site, but it ended up being so much fun that it is now essentially an ever-expanding artist and album database. For a bit of the nerdy detail, it’s a Next.js site hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I use Workers to manage all the API calls efficiently, and Workers KV for fast and reliable caching. I say this not just because I work there: these products are incredible. One of the reasons I’ve spent so much time on the site is that it is so easy and fun to create with these products.

So now that the site is in a pretty good place (of course, as with all side projects, it will never be done), I thought I’d share it a bit more broadly. So, give Listen To More a spin! Click around, search for stuff, enjoy. And if you run into issues (I am sure there are many bugs), I’d be forever grateful if you’d submit an Issue on GitHub.