I think 2025 left us all a bit heartbroken. For me, the year was an ongoing series of disappointments big and small, ranging from ‘feeling as if the rug has been pulled out from under you’ to ‘oh shit, here we go again’. It doesn’t escape me that there is also a particular kind of heartbreak that is the experience of living while fascism thrives on both sides of the Atlantic, and as genocide continues unabated in Gaza, the Congo, and Sudan. (As I write this, the US has now invaded Venezuela, and NATO might implode because the US also wants to invade Greenland. At least two people have been murdered by ICE since the end of December: Keith Porter and Renee Good.) Life during fascism and genocide is a persistent heartbreak: whether you fear for your access to healthcare or for others’; whether you fear being abducted off the street; whether you fear further restriction on your civil liberties; whether you fear losing your home, your family, your life. (Please donate to this fundraiser for a Palestinian family, and/or this crowdfunder for a legal challenge to the UK Supreme Court ruling, if you feel so inclined.) It was just a shite year all around.

When Geese released their third album Getting Killed in September of last year, much of the public commentary remarked on how ‘2025’ it felt. Here’s Steven Hyden in Uproxx: ‘I am even more confident that is the most 2025 album of 2025, the record that, by far, best captures how scary and chaotic things seem right now, in this age of smart robots and dumb authoritarians and passionately litigated talk-show controversies and memory-holed sex-trafficking conspiracies.’ I’d be inclined to agree: the album opens with the Pixies-ish loud-quiet-loud ‘Trinidad’, where Cameron Winter juxtaposes the pleading ‘I try, I try so hard’ of the first verse with the screaming refrain of ‘THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!!!!!!!’ ‘Trinidad’ conjures up what it feels like to have your nerves completely jangled by the everyday experience of political chaos and late stage capitalism on a dying planet. Meanwhile, towards the end of ‘Taxes’, Winter sings: ‘And I will break my own heart / I will break my own heart from now on’, a line that moves me so much I have felt compelled to text people about it.

But this newsletter isn’t about Cameron Winter or Geese, it is about Maria Somerville. Somerville’s second album Luster, released with 4AD last April, is as 2025 as Geese’s, but it is more concerned with how one might hold on to themself during such chaos, anxiety, and heartbreak, how one might hold onto the things that matter and the things that will endure. It’s worth noting that Somerville relocated to Connemara during lockdown (where she is from), where she put the album together along with collaborators such as Olan Monk, Finn Carraher McDonald, Diego Herrera, Lankum’s Ian Lynch, and Róisín Berkeley. As she observed in an interview with Clash magazine, her new surroundings infused and influenced this work:

The Máirtín Ó Direáin-esque longing for home that underpins Somerville’s first album All My People (2019), now becomes a comfortable rootedness, a taking of strength and purpose, and a sense of renewal. I played Luster again and again throughout 2025: played it while trampling down the paths of Ormeau Park, played it while trying to escape the summer heat indoors, played it on vinyl in the late autumn and winter evenings. It is an album I have clung to like a life raft, an album I have been unable to stop talking about. It comforted and consoled me. At risk of sounding like the Isabelle Huppert instagram post where she says ‘A few hours left to wish you all a happy new year…’, which she posted on the 31st January while looking like your mum who’s just come in from the shops and wants you to make her a cup of tea, I may as well write about it.

I’m of the age now where I go to Slowdive concerts and find myself alarmed to be queuing with gothy teenage girls in the toilets, only to then remember that I started listening to My Bloody Valentine when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, having decided to pick up Loveless along with New Order’s Substance in the large HMV in Galway (rip) while on a trip with my youth theatre. Anyway, anyone with a passing knowledge of alternative music over the last five to six years knows that shoegaze is apparently back, baby. Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about what it is about shoegaze that I love, and how that has trickled into the other music that I listen to. I’m no musicologist or musician (I am just a music hobbyist! A fan!), but I can try to boil it down into two key points:

The last part is crucial: maybe shoegaze’s capacity for containing and expressing feeling and texture is why I return to it after all this time. The marriage of harmony and abrasion is integral to creating music that is pure feeling. Maria Somerville’s music understands this fundamentally. In an interview with The Vinyl Factory she acknowledged how her regular Early Bird Show on NTS Radio introduces her to new music, thus influencing her craft. It strikes me that she says: ‘I'm always encountering new textures and feelings.’ There is a deceptive simplicity to her lyrics — as Meaghan Garvey in Pitchfork writes, ‘What could be sophomoric simply registers as true, then dissipates before the thought solidifies.’ Somerville’s lyrics could be read as slightly ambiguous, but they register with so much emotional clarity and purpose. One of my favourite lyrics on the whole album is ‘The stars, they shine / The ones you told me do’ from ‘Spring’. What could just be a simple observation on the night sky becomes something else: the ones you told me do. It’s either a wistful remembrance or a happy reminder of someone you love. Her music conjoins that emotional truth to beautifully textured soundscapes. I love Luster’s opening track, ‘Réalt’ (which is the Irish for ‘star’), which is Somerville’s version of an overture: you hear the plucking of a harp, you hear overlapping sighing vocals, you hear a guitar playing one shimmering chord again and again. I have no idea what she’s singing about on ‘Halo’, but do I really care? No, not when it sounds this beautiful.

[NOTE: some flashiness in the ‘Garden’ video]

My most played track of 2025 was ‘Garden’. There’s its anchoring, chugging bass line, so perfectly in tune with the drums. Its lovely, intricate guitar textures lingering underneath before surfacing for the outro. I’m not sure if Somerville is singing about whether ‘But I must keep going’, or ‘that we must keep going’, and I don’t think it really matters. What matters is that her voice persists, ‘into / down / into / down’. Eventually, she can swim down, ‘in and out of the cave / reaching the darkest corners of my soul’. And the reward, and the pleasant surprise, is: ‘Oh, and the waters are warmer!’ ‘Garden’ anchored and propelled me throughout a year of uncertainty and instability: but I must keep going. I am not sure where it’s going to lead me, but I must keep going.

One of Somerville’s lyrics that has stuck with me is the refrain of ‘Violet’: ‘I believe in life / and love / and life.’ It reads so simply on the page: and yet, married with the song’s drone-pop surroundings, Somerville’s lyrics gently subvert our expectations. It’s not simply ‘I believe in love’: to sing of believing ‘in life / and love / and life’ is to anchor oneself in the world, to hold onto and to believe in the things that matter, to fight for them too. Somerville has cited the artist Dorothy Cross as an influence, who in turn cites Joseph Beuys’ observation that ‘To be of it, to be in it, not to be looking at it’ as her approach to her craft. When I listen to ‘Violet’, when I listen to Somerville chanting that refrain, it is a reminder that I, nor anyone, cannot opt out of the world around us. You can not simply watch or look: you must act, you must participate. When Somerville sings of the sea of change (a thrilling moment), it is a reminder that things move anyway, regardless of the pace and time it takes. Your heart might be breaking, but the ‘wild strawberries [are] growing on and on’.

The difficulty I have had in writing about Luster, though, is trying to translate what makes its textures and sounds so special to me, how its textures make me feel. It’s lived in my head for so very long. You have to listen to it yourself, basically. A few weeks ago I texted my friend Kit about how I love the key change in ‘Spring’, but my words felt so imprecise when trying to describe it to her. At the moment, the beauty of the key change in ‘Spring’ is beyond adequate words: maybe one day I will find them. All the way through 2025, I simply wanted to hold a friend’s hand and ask them to listen to a song from Luster with me. To sit with its beauty and its textures, its ability to express the purest feeling. Luster reminds me that there is no other choice than to remain in, and to resolve myself into the thick of life.

What I’ve been listening to: I’ve been loving Secret Love by Dry Cleaning (produced by Cate Le Bon, whose Michelangelo Dying was also a favourite of 2025). For some reason I only got around to Hayley Williams’ Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party this month, but I have a tendency to get really into a release from the year before every January. (See also: Cassandra Jenkins’ My Light, My Destroyer and Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You.) Deary have a new single out, ‘Seabird’, which is great and I’m looking forward to Birding in April.

What I’ve been reading: I’m re-reading Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly, which I think might be one of the best novels of the 2020s. Katie Kitamura’s Audition took me on a journey that I did not expect it to (complimentary). I’m afraid I’m now on the On the Calculation of Volume train too.

What I’ve been watching: I rewatched Children of Men at the weekend for the first time since 2013 (!) and it is infinitely more terrifying with age. First time watches this month include Bottoms (big fun), Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros (gripping), Natural Born Killers (very 90s and I don’t know if that’s a good thing), Peter Hujar’s Day (very special), and Persona (lesbians).