100-song playlist: Billy Woods, Car Seat Headrest, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and more

I made another 100-song playlist. It's the 32nd one I've made since November 2016 when I was walking through my college quad listening to Vince Staples and decided to throw "Summertime" in a playlist titled "Shit I Like." For some arbitrary reason I decided to cap that playlist at 100 songs and then make another. I've been doing that for nine years and now have 3,200 songs I theoretically enjoy sprinkled between 32 different playlists. I used to share these playlists on Twitter once they were complete, but people didn't really seem to care. That's fine. I make them for myself, mostly as a way to flag which tracks I like best on a given album, and to keep a stash of great singles handy for short car trips across town.

Last year, I started posting them on Chasing Sundays along with some blurbs about 10 standout tracks. I think it made people care a little more, and I also enjoy the exercise of combing through these mixes and coming up with something to say about so many of the random tracks that make it into the "Shit I Like" canon. All of my playlists are genre and era-agnostic. The only qualifier I have for including a song is if I hadn't previously liked it. Either because I hadn't heard it, or for whatever reason dismissed it during the previous time(s) I had heard it. As you'll see below, "Shit I Like 32.0" is a wild bunch. Shuffle it, skip around in it, turn your nose up at it, and get an accurate sense of what I've been liking during the first half of 2025.

Harmonia and Brian Eno - "Les Demoiselles"

I had a big moment with Tracks and Traces this winter. Recorded in 1976 yet not released until 1997, the album is a collaboration between Brian Eno and the then-obscure Krautrock supergroup Harmonia. It was recorded just before Eno decamped to Germany's capital to work with David Bowie on the groundbreaking "Berlin Trilogy," and you can hear many of the kosmische ideas Eno would develop with Bowie being tinkered with on this set. "Les Demoiselles" is a whimsical outlier within the overwhelmingly moody and minimalist sound of Tracks and Traces. I don't like it because it's different (I love the entire record), but because it's such a sweet, docile little polka with luscious slide-guitar strokes and a damp, filmy production quality that sounds the way it smells to gulp fresh air after a thunderstorm.

Central Cee - "St. Patrick's"

There're certain albums that I throw on during a busy New Music Friday™ drop with the intention of breezing through a couple songs, clocking the general vibe, and then never listening to again. Central Cee's major label debut, Can't Rush Greatness, was one of those records, except it had the opposite effect on me. I thought the massively popular London rapper offered some compelling rags-to-riches yarns about money corrupting family ties, the perils of fame, fractured relationships, yadda yadda. Typical fare for a rapper at Central Cee's caliber of success, but so earnestly delivered and technically slick that it unexpectedly haunted my car stereo for a couple weeks. "St. Patrick's" is the one I've repeatedly come back to. A slice of taut, exertive UK drill that simulates the endorphin rush of a runner's high. Sure, it might just be a lap around the block within the current rap zeitgeist, but that doesn't stop it from making me feel good.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - "All I Can Do Is Write About It"

Last year, I got really into Drive-By Truckers' album Southern Rock Opera, which is basically a coming-of-age concept album about Southern identity and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The record made me want to take the Skynyrd plunge, and I finally checked that box earlier this year while frantically decorating my room. I listened to a few of their albums and they were all OK. The hits are hits for a reason ("Simple Man" is...a perfect song) but the album cut that snagged my heartstrings was "All I Can Do Is Write About It," a ballad from their '76 LP Gimme Back My Bullets. It's a "no place like home" song that acknowledges the clichéness of that phrase and doubles down on the sentimentality anyways. Consider it a testament to the track's twangy poise that it made me, a Jew from Western New York, feel all warm and nostalgic for the lyric, "You can take a boy out of ole' Dixieland, Lord/But you'll never take ole' Dixie from a boy."

Lucinda Williams - "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings"

My podcast Endless Scroll did a Lucinda Williams deep-dive earlier this year and I was really surprised at how much I took to her music. Not only is she a great storyteller – funny, evocative, affecting – with a voice that's powerful enough to pry open elevator doors, but she also knows how to rock the fuck out. While Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is her indisputable masterwork, I also love the shaggy, snarling, Southern-rock grit of her 2003 album, World Without Tears. "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings" is one of those songs that made me say, "wooooahh yeahhh, there we goooo," the first time I heard it. The kind of song that makes you want to pump your fist and damage your hearing and blow through a tank of gas cruising down the highway just to feel something.

Moh Baretta, kuru, jackzebra - "Tested"

This might be my favorite song on this whole playlist. The late-2024 loosie finds Surf Gang expat Moh Baretta linking with digicore savant kuru and Chengdu plugg-cloud fusionist jackzebra for a tour de underground. It's rare that three rappers from the same Soundcloud underworld each sound so distinct yet also in-sync on the same track. Moh Baretta's gravely baritone barrels over the rattling snares. kuru's svelte chirps play ping-pong with the beat, dropping in and out of the pocket with an agile, pendulum-like volley. jackzebra smears over the instrumental like a fallen ice cream cone on hot pavement. Between his heaping auto-tune usage and the quickfire syllabic structure of his native Mandarin, the fast-rising jackzebra makes even the most eccentric voices in Western internet rap sound dull by comparison. His 2024 tape, 王中王, has also been in heavy rotation for me all year.

Car Seat Headrest - "The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)"

The rollout of the new Car Seat Headrest album made me finally accept that I simply don't have the appetite for this band that I once did. Teens of Denial came out when I was a 21-year-old college bum getting drunk every Thursday, Friday, Saturday – and why not Sunday? I'll hear a former version of myself in those songs for the rest of my life, and I'll return to a handful of them a few times a year when I need a good room-thrashing sing-along sesh. The notoriously uneven Making a Door Less Open served as interesting podcast fodder during the doldrums of COVID lockdown, but I haven't returned to the album since then. I doubt I'll ever give all 70 minutes of The Scholars another run-through either, but I'll flip on "The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)" from time to time because it fucking rocks – and I love songs that fucking rock.

Yung Lean - "Horses"

Like most people with ears, I didn't think Yung Lean's Jonatan was very good. That's too bad, because lead single "Forever Yung" was a jaunty riot, and "Horses" might be even better. The Sad Boys rapper is on this theoretically compelling tip where he's trying to drape his droopy, off-key yawp over regal indie-pop orchestrations. While Jonatan cuts like "Babyface Maniacs" and "Teenage Symphonies 4 God (God Will Only)" fail miserably, "Horses" works because he's basically trying to do Alex G's "Icehead" Swedishly. The ache in his voice meshes nicely with the loping slowcore strums, and his inability to hit the chorus's yearning high notes actually accentuates the despair in his otherwise rote lyrics about stallion-induced separation.

Sleeping Witch & Saturn - "Mother's Day"

Sleeping Witch & Saturn are one of the best indie-rock bands in Pittsburgh, and have been for years. The quartet is comprised of several local vets including frontman Matt Vituccio, formerly of the emo-ish, indie-pop-ish band Brightside, who had a major presence in Pittsburgh back in the 2010s (Broken World heads remember). Sleeping Witch's criminally underrated 2022 LP, The Divine Madness of Spring, is a rewarding grab-bag of shadowy post-punk, steely new-wave, and snarling Rawk. I've heard the newly-released "Mother's Day" in their setlists for a while now, and I'm so glad it's finally in my library. A sharp, swanky, maybe even a little sultry groover that's as delicately strung together as it is generously catchy. The sumptuous bassline, the palm-muted guitar tickles, the misty vocal harmonies, the button-popping guitar solo that brings it all home. This band should be fucking huge.

Winter - "Just Like a Flower"

I've been following Winter since her 2020 LP, Endless Space (Between You & I), and I really liked how she evolved from sun-kissed dream-pop to sputtering shoegaze on 2022's What Kind of Blue Are You? (full disclosure: I wrote the press bio for that record, though my enjoyment was, and remains, genuine). The L.A. musician is following that thread on her new single "Just Like a Flower," which is a driving, organically crunchy 'gaze-pop number that reminds me of Automatic-era Jesus and Mary Chain by way of Alvvays. Winter once again worked with producer Joo Joo Ashworth (Froth, Dummy, Sasami) on her forthcoming record, and I absolutely adore the way these two work together. The guitars and drums have a sandy, granular texture that distinguishes Winter from so much of the bassy, artificially grand shoegaze tones that have taken over the genre. This sounds real.

billy woods - "Corinthians"

The best rap music doesn't make me want to write; it makes me want to shut up and listen. I've been a billy woods fan since his 2019 breakthrough, Hiding Places, and his twin 2022 LPs, the lauded Aethiopes and the criminally underrated Church, were among my favorites of that year. I've been quietly spending a lot of time with GOLLIWOG, his dense, provocative 2025 masterpiece. billy woods isn't a singles artist, so dropping one of his songs into a playlist feels sinful. "Corinthians" is an exception in that the El-P production is unusually aggressive for woods' usual temperament. When the drums pare back and he mentions "twelve billion USD hanging over the Gaza Strip," the firmness in his voice hits my chest like a judge's gavel. In his guest verse, rapper Despot offers a humorous respite in the form of my favorite bar of the year: "Take what's yours and I make it all mine/ 'til the money's so long like it's sayin' 'bye bye.'"