Thanksgiving is over which means it’s time for the most magical time of year… LIST SEASON (I’m not a nerd tho I’m cool I swear). It’s a daunting task to go through all of the music of the year, so here are some resources:
The Indie Pong Archive
This is a comprehensive list of every song that was on the Indie Pong playlist this year. They are arranged in order, but like a contestant on the early rounds of Master Chef I shant tell you how to digest your meal. It says it started in May but that’s just when I started archiving, it most certainly started in January.
The Indie Pong Official Playlist
You’ve probably never heard of this since I hardly ever talk about it, but this is the official playlist for the blog that I curate every week (ish*). I keep about 50-80 songs on here at a time and right now it dates back to August, so there’s some meat on the bones here.
The Indie Pong 50 Best Tracks of the Year So Far
This is a ranked list I made of the best songs of the first half of the year, so I basically did all the work for you (?), if you want to Venmo me let me know I’ll hit you with my handle in the DMs.
Any of JPG’s Playlists
JPG is notorious in the online music community for being the very best in finding indie gems from all over the world, and he curates like 20 playlists daily (no asterisk, they’re literally all daily curated) and they’re all filled with gold. The way me and JPG met was I sought him out at the blog’s inception and basically begged him to write with us because he has the best eye I’ve ever seen. I’m not joking, these are the actual original DMs that started our now flourishing relationship:
This mf didn’t even know my name frfr back Indie Pong was small change
That’s Oliver empty bowl in hand begging for more soup if I’ve ever seen it.
Anyways here we are and JPG has pretty much the best playlists ever to exist, these are my favorites (but again there’s like 20 of them):
One of the things that sealed the deal for me and JPG was the fact that we both really cared about shining a light on smaller artists. I think his exact words were “Soccer Mommy and Tame Impala are doing just fine without our help”- facts.
More Folky
It’s been a fun ride so far, much love to JPG even though he only marginally knows how Zoom works.
Album of the Year
This is easily my favorite resource and anyone who knows me knows it. This is my number one place of finding gems. It’s all community based, and I think it’s frankly the most lovely website in music besides from Bandcamp.
Metacritic
George’s little kid brother who’s basically a child music genius for his age once told me that every once in a while you’ve got to check Metacritic and just see what’s over 80. He’s the smartest kid you’ll ever meet, like Stewie from Family Guy but instead of world domination in his heart he just patrols PMC (RIP) and the online music world plugging Stone Roses, Belle and Sebastian, and Oasis whenever tolerable, brazenly stating his case and cementing his place in the online music universe. Adorable little guy.
Hope that’s helpful, tis the season.