Hello and welcome to the Postmortem for the Weekly Album project that I've done this year. It is insane to me that I actually made it this far and managed to listen to every album before the year was over, as there have been points in the year where I thought for sure that this whole thing was going to fall apart at any moment. Before we get into the real meat of this post, I just want to say thank you to all the people who have read all these posts.
Statistics and Data
To start, I'm going to be doing a little bit of data analysis. The most basic aspect of this would be finding the mean and median score of all the albums I listened to this year. The mean ended up being 7.826 and the median was 8. The scores also had a standard deviation of 1.491. So what does this really mean for the albums? It means that on average I enjoyed the albums that I listened to as the mean score is rather high and the median score, being the score that is roughly in the center of all the scores, is also high. The standard deviation here means that on average the scores varied from the mean by 1.491 points, so on average my scores would be in the range of 6.335 to 9.317. All of this indicates to me that I seemed to enjoy the albums I listened to.
Another important aspect of all of this is what kind of music did I listen to the most. The generalized Pie Chart below shows the percentages of each major genre that I listened to, with anything that didn't fit in the main categories summed into an "Other" category. I felt that it was right to combine Indie and Emo due to their ties and vagueness in genres, but anything labelled under Indie-Pop did not go into the Indie category.
So based on this it seems I listened to a lot of Rock and Indie music, but it is also important to get into specifics on those. Below is a much less generalized Pie Chart which shows individual genres, except for anything that had a percentage smaller than 1%.
Apologies for the small font size. Based on this, the most represented genres would be Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Progressive Pop, Midwest Emo, and Indie Pop. I do think that it might be fair to mix some of these genres together, but this is just what the raw data shows. The real question here is what genres did I like the most? To find this out I sorted all the albums with their genres by score, and only looked at albums with a score of 8 or above. This score is what I would consider to be the minimum score of a really good album, so it would be a good indicator of what genres I like if the albums with those genres have a score of 8 or above. Based on this, Rock shows up 21 times, Indie shows up 13 times, Pop shows up 9 times, and Emo shows up 5 times. It is important to note that this is doing a lot of double counting, as many albums have a mix of these genre tags. I do think that this kind of shows that I tend to like a mix of Indie and Rock, which I think is an accurate measurement.
A fun piece of data to me is seeing when many of the albums that I enjoyed this year were made, as this can give me clues as to what eras to look into for more music. The Bar Graph below shows the amount of albums I listened to per year, with only the years I listened to an album represented to make it easier to understand.
So based on this we can see that the year with the most albums from was shockingly 2025! Though 1999 is in a close second place, only 1 album less. I will say though, the late 90s in general beat out any other era of time when it comes to what I listened to, which does not surprise me at all. A lot of that Indie, Emo, and Alternative Rock stuff I listened to this year was from the late 90s. That is just when that stuff existed for the most part. So what era did I like the most music from? To figure this out I once again only looked at albums with a score of 8 or above, and then sorted by year. The results of this are shown in a Bar Graph below.
This bar graph indicates to me that I really enjoyed music from the 90s. Looking at these albums, only 3 of them were from before 1996, so I would say the late 90s would be the most liked era for music based on the albums I listened to.
A fun piece of data to look at is what were my least favorite albums this year. I decided the criteria for this would be all the albums I gave a score below a 6. These albums (in order I listened to them) are:
- Animals - TTNG
- How To Leave Town - Car Seat Headrest
- Deathconciousness - Have a Nice Life
- Up High In the Night - Arlo
- Phantom Island - King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
- One Week - First of October
For the most part, I wouldn't say I outright disliked these albums, just that they were not my thing or were disappointing in some way. I think they all had some good qualities, for example I liked some of the songs on One Week. But the good outweighed the bad just enough to go below a 6. These are just extremely average albums.
I would say the most important piece of data to collect from this is what albums did I like the most? What albums did I give that mythical, 2 digit number... a 10. I gave 7 albums a score of a 10, and those are (in order of when I listened to them)
- Switched On Bach II - Wendy Carlos
- Long Season - Fishmans
- Everything is a Miracle Nothing is a Miracle Everything Is - Kickball
- Thank You, Guitar - Cyrus Pireh
- Song Cycle - Van Dyke Parks
- This Afternoon's Malady - Jejune
- Yeti - Amon Düül II
This 7 albums have the legendary status of being the best albums I listened to for this project. Looking back on this, I can say I think I am correct about all of them. Many of the albums I listened to this year I didn't give much thought after the listens I gave it for the review, but I came back to these albums multiple times after the review, except for Yeti as I just listened to that yesterday for the review so I'm giving it a little bit of time. I also know that I came back to Song Cycle the most as I listened to it so much it showed up in my Spotify Wrapped. How about that for an album that had an impact on what I listen to.
Conclusions
To wrap everything up, I think I can say that this project was mostly a success. I found a lot of albums that I enjoyed, and some that I really truly loved. I do wish I varied up the music I listened to more. In an ideal world, there wouldn't really be a clear winner in terms of what genre I listened to the most. That came about just because of my trouble finding albums to listen to on my own, so I would just gravitate towards stuff I had a feeling I would like or was already on my radar.
So what now? Well I think based on how easy it was for this project to spiral out of my control, I think I might slow down for next year. I still greatly enjoy listening and reviewing music in this format, but I think next year I'll do every other week instead of every week. This will also give me more chances to make blog posts about other things, which I feel I lacked this year. It was a lot to listen to the albums and then write the review, and it would take away from the energy I wanted to give towards other blog posts. For example, that is why the Eggy review became my King Gizzard rant post because I could not find the motivation to write it besides for an album review. So look forward to more rants or maybe other post formats! Have a Happy New Year and thank you for reading.
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