My 2025 highlights
an eclectic playlist about few bright points in a dark year
I never published a playlist before, but I feel compelled to do it this time. 2025 has been objectively one of the shittiest year in recent history. I have already elaborated in my previous post about how I felt about the world we are living in and the people that are ruling it. I have been struggling to motivate myself in working, writing, and organise political resistance. In such dark times every little moment of brightness is precious, essential to keep us connected and able to react. I am happy to share some of the best things I stepped into during last months. It is not about a specific discipline, format or genre. I am mixing up my passions- music, literature, cinema, art, politics- listing just some good, moving and powerful outcomes of human creativity or engagement, either books, records, performances, publications, etc. What connects these entries is their capacity to have an impact on me, pull me out of the dominant apathy, opening space for reflection, and especially let me with desire to act, to engage myself in creation or struggle. Or just things able to give me intense, not just ephemeral pleasure. This list is not about the best of 2025, just my personal highlights, moments and encounters that left me something through the current cognitive bulimia.
Books. I read less and with fatigue. My attention is in shards, not differently from the majority of us, corrupted by compulsive scrolling and digital hyperstimulation. I have been reading disorderly, seldom being fully captured by a book or finishing it in one round. One exception was Bret Easton Ellis’ last novel, the Shards. Nothing really different from what he has been writing obsessively, pathologically, psychotically since the 1980s, but it has never felt more apt and lucidly grasping of the American hallucinated zeitgeist than now. A paranoic meta-fiction in which the author collapse himself with the protagonist as a young student in a Los Angeles characterised by the absence of the rich parents who leave their children to wander among empty villas, sports cars, and self-cleaning swimming pools (Spoiler alert: if you plan to read it you may not want to go on).
Reading the new remix of the American Psycho in form of an autobiographical account about being haunted by a deranged serial killer who in the final plot twist reveals to be the writer himself, I was just illuminated by the pristine capacity of this glacial fictional diary to capture the spirit of the US (or rather us?). Isn’t the essence of contemporary Western civilization precisely in the revelation that we are the evil force, processing the horrific revelation, and then delivering a contrived memoir about our guilt that we can then sell for a profit? Somehow it reminded me of Confessions of an Economic Hitman…
Live. I’ve also attended few live music concerts, most of which were random performances at my favorite jazz bar in Berlin. Ben Lamar Gay’s live performance at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin was unquestionably the year’s highlight. For nearly three hours, the audience was captivated by an ensemble of eight elements arranged in a circle in the center of an oval amphitheatre with world-class acoustics. I could’ve gone on even longer. I also got a signed copy of Open Arms to Open Us, the album that made me fall in love with the Chicago-based horn player and composer. Later this year, the new album, Yowzers, was released; it wasn’t as amazing as the previous one, but it was still very good.
Theatre. A chapter in his own is the performance of Bach’s Passion according to St. Matthew directed by Romeo Castellucci played at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale di Firenze. It was an adaptation of the show presented fours years ago in Hamburg, and was also subject some technical restrictions in the Florence version, but I found it a marvellous experience, profoundly touching. Even the idiots booing during the first half break were somehow symptomatic of a masterpiece, when you have the standard mediocre Opera enjoyers scandalised by something that is not a stage filled with figurantes disguised as baroque lampshades.
Records. It’s difficult to pick one, let alone ten, records that stand out in the musical landscape of 2025. Not for a lack of quality, but for a fairly uniform distribution of quality within the general overproduction. (Thurston Moore chose the 350 best records. I’ll spend 2026 catching up with him). Isn’t this what the avant-garde advocated: art and creativity in every corner and social strata of society? Submerged in new productions, surrounded by music (and images) via our mobile devices, and with easy and direct access to almost any tune produced on the planet, listening to music today is simply a radically different experience than it used to be. Do I miss when I had to travel one full day to get to the closest record shop selling new wave records in that part of the world, spend another day in the shop listening to all the vinyl before picking the three I could afford, and then obsessively consume those records until the turntable crackle became an essential part of the experience? Not sure; probably the profound destabilising effect that Remain in Light or Half Mute had on my life was more because of my age than because of their capacity to disrupt conventions and genres. Today, the majority of music exists in a limbo outside of such conventional classifications, individual productions born into a nebulised constellation of musicians, mostly in dialogue with their computers and moving from collaboration to collaboration with others. The record I listened more to (and with more pleasure) this year probably is Lotus, by Little Simz, wonderfully exemplifying the total crumbling of the edges between hip-hop, R&B, electronics, jazz, etc. Additional mentions go to British producer Everything is Recorded (Richard Russel is Temporary), John Glacier (Like a Ribbon), Oklu (Choke Enough), I Cani (Post Mortem), Eli Kezler (Eli Kezler), Lucrecia Dalt (A danger to ourselves). Here my playlist on Tidal, and yes, I happily left Spotify this year, and so should do you too.
Movies. I am a little embarrassed as someone that still considers himself to be a film maker to say that I have seen almost no film produced in 2025, and I cannot really suggest any meaningful best film of the year. Well, I enjoyed watching Black Bag by Steven Soderberg, as well as Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (which was produced in 2023), and I hated the Substance. I enjoyed to watch some good old movie, and among my propositions for next year is to watch more new films.
Substack. It is my second year here, and I have a feeling that this will be the next typical enshittification story, but arriving in a great place just as it is about to become a shitplace is the story of my life. I’m beginning to believe that the rotting offers the best perspective for understanding the world. Cioran, Celine, and Bernhard would have agreed. Keeping a pessimistic outlook, Il Disertore di Franco “Bifo” Berardi provided me this year with some of the most lucid, painful, but also energising perspectives on the world we live in. The best new addition to my reading list is anthropologist Mo Hamdouni’s Moroccan Epistemologies substack, which reignited my regret for never learning the Arab language.
Francesca Albanese. Best person of 2025. Fuck Nobel prize.
