Getting the woke shit out of the way: Spotify bad, but I’ve been paying for other people's subscriptions for years through a family plan, and most will not be able to follow me to another service and I feel bad even though they're all gainfully employed adults. Still, I’m trialing others and all song links below are to YouTube.

I feel bad for December releases. Outside the cinema, where the Oscar hopefuls are dumped into theaters for their qualifying week at Christmas, there’s really a sense in art and entertainment that we should move onto next year – a feeling accelerated by the growing trend of platform recaps. Spotify’s “Wrapped” is probably the second smartest idea the company has ever had (after “Let’s make all music easily accessible for the price of cheap or free”), giving users both a genuinely fun look back at the days or weeks worth of music they heard in the previous 11 months and resulting in just so much organic advertisement.

Every week after Thanksgiving, social media is flooded with people posting their Wrappeds – The Week I Review’s Discord even has a dedicated channel for it, utilized just for those few days every year.

So of course everyone else jumped on the wagon: YouTube & Twitch have “Recap”s, Apple Music’s got “Replay,” Amazon should be thrown off the Earth for “Delivered,” and Deezer went boring with “Year.” Which is awesome, because everyone should get the experience… but also it's all missing the most wonderful time of the year. Think of how many lists “All I Want for Christmas Is You” isn't on because people were waiting to get into the mood.

Not mine, but if every store I've ever been in is any indication, people sure do like that song. And look: I may listen to “Holiday” music, but I listen to a lot of music during the Holidays. And I want it wrapped up too, which is the past few Januaries I have requested all of my account data for the previous year (thanks GDPR!) and then Exceled the hell out of it. It's genuinely fascinating to see how things do — and don't — change in that time.

Listening to Happy Birthday Mr Baskets’ “Half Answer” another 124 times after 2022’s cutoff (up to 354 total) just increased its lead over Braden Ross’s “sun” (200), but jxdn’s cover of d4vd’s “Romantic Homicide” didn’t release until after the 2023 Wrapped and still ended up with 320 listens by the new year – meaning a song not even in my Wrapped 100 got right up next to the top, second only to 8485’s “Scribbles,” which I’d already heard 386 times by the cut-off and brought to a frankly absurd 433 by year’s end.

(That entire paragraph was one barely coherent sentence: newsletters amirite.)

((Also, 2024 was a year where I listened to songs more like normies do, hearing my top track – shinigami’s “everything falls to the floor” – only 212 times, 37 of which came after Wrapped.))

The most significant number on this year’s Wrapped is not one my account data can tell me nor is it one everyone saw: after reaching some arbitrary threshold of obsessiveness, fans were given their rank on actual listener leaderboards. Of the at least 160K people who listened to daine on Spotify this year, I was number 82.

Obviously someone had to be 82, and 81 people have to be more obsessive than me, but jfc dude. If me and everyone (in the world!) who listened more were invited to a special performance, there would be less than half as many people as attended daine’s first-ever New York show at the Sultan Room in 2023 where they accidentally ripped an XLR cable and cut out the mic for several minutes.

Good times.

My introduction came in 2022 when their song “boythots” (opening lyrics: treat that boy like a slut / That’s what he is) was put onto ex-YouTuber Finn McKenty’s list of cool music that people should check out. It was a few months after they’d released their first EP, “Quantum Jumping,” and the difference between that EP and “boythots” is striking and a huge part of daine's appeal.

Spotify calls them “hyperpop,” but most of their music is more like “alt-rock with autotuned vocals.” I sympathize with the categorical complexity, though: those vocals somehow sound equally natural over the naturally squeaking guitars of “cemetary dreams” as they do the danceable beats of “SHADES ON” (you can usually tell what sort of sound they’re going for by the capitalization).

And as someone who listens to a pretty wide variety of music, this is great. I love genre-bending and -blending – one of the two non-daine tracks in my Top 5, Blind Equation’s “Flashback,” is a combination of extreme metal and hyperpop that is maybe the most “My Shit” thing ever – but there are plenty of artists who mix things up in ways I don’t like as much. 8485’s recent tracks with Danny Brown just don’t work for me at all (“G.I.R.L” is low-rent Charli XCX), and that sucks but her old music still exists and I will listen to it forever (her not being in my Top 5 artists was only because Spotify couldn't count this YouTube recording of a Covid-era “live” rendition of their Plague Town EP that I listened to so many times).

But all these names-that-aren’t-in-the-bible speak to a different number Spotify added this year: “Listening Age.” Mine is 18, because I’m a hip cool cat listening to fresh stuff… but I am not 18. In mere days, I will be entering my mid-30s, and the fact that so many of the artists I fixate on are literal children (or close enough to) makes me feel weirder with each passing year, because I feel like I should not relate to people I wouldn't really feel comfortable having a conversation with.

When I saw daine in August, I wasn’t the oldest person in the crowd… but I was definitely up there – and not just because it was an 11 PM start time for their set (though that’s a fucked up thing to do on a Thursday).

Where I really felt My Age was before it even began: I was talking to a Pakistani kid out in the bar waiting for doors when daine walked out for a smoke break alongside someone who could have been anything from a romantic partner to a manager, and goodness gracious did she glare at me. And that stopped me from making any attempt to get up and say anythingm and I expect that was the point. (The Pakistani kid went out for a smoke with them and he was extremely excited after, so I’m happy for him.) I don’t know exactly what her look was about… but I also totally do. I have no doubt a whole lot of people who look like me would love and have tried to take advantage of a tiny Filipino-Australian NB with autism and POTS.

And I look younger than my age! Most people assume I’m 27 or 28. Yet I will eventually be visibly in my 30s and then my 40s and etc., and I hope to continue finding new music and new artists, keeping that listening age young because too many people my age calcify in their tastes… but I know it will only get weirder. At some point, I won’t feel comfortable going to the shows at all because I know my presence would make the youth uncomfortable. And fair enough!

But I can’t help loving daine’s work. I listened to the title track of this year’s EP, “i want the light to swallow me whole,” 265 times; them singing “pull me, I push you away and the silence kills me” is — for reasons I can’t articulate — my favorite ten seconds of music this year. “eighteen” (188) and “payphone” (174) are those types of extremely specific songs about wishing they’d dated that guy who worked at a morgue and telling people they’re too drunk to talk to but still calling them from the airport and whatnot. I don’t relate to these songs at all, but unlike most singer-songwriters, daine has a great voice so I’m happy to hear the stories told. Plus, hearing “payphone” live at that late-night show made the exhaustion then and at work the next morning absolutely worth it.

(Apparently that song is about someone they met in New York, and it was their first time performing it live. They said it was weird singing it here.)

The day after Wrapped’s release, daine put out another two songs: “MAKE IT RIGHT” and “I RUN MY HANDS THRU IT.” And as expected from the capitalization, they’re more synthetic in their instrumentation, with the former’s emphasis on trap hats and the latter’s pulsing bass. And they’re great: of course they are. I knew instantly that they would be knocking OCT’s “Don’t Touch My Clogs” and Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” (19 each; I contain multitudes) off my True Top 100, because I’m in their True Top 100.

And if I’m gonna be the weird old man being the big old fan, I may as well commit.