I scanned this totally preposterous list on Substack over the festive period, where Thurston Moore lists his 350 Best Records of 2025. Yeah! – there’s no typo in there – that really does say 350, and Thurston really did list ’em all.
A totally pretentious concept, he goes, of course, for the willfully obscure and impossible to track down; cassette-only releases, band-made CDRs of live shows that 23 people were at, a Lana Del Rey (hey! I known her!) CDR single (ie promo-only release), a Sun Ra lathe-cut 10″, a Lou Barlow lathe-cut 7″, and so on and so on…
That coveted number one slot of Thurston’s was occupied by Laura De Jongh‘s Fundus. De Jongh is a harpist from Antwerp with a lovely, textured, ambient feel for soundscaping, great late night/early morning chill out stuff if that’s your kinda thing, but by the time of the list’s publication, her record – another 10″ (2025’s undisputed underground format of choice) was already long out of print.
Who has time to listen to – and properly critique – that much new stuff…and then whittle it down to a shortlist of three and a half hundred?!? The album buyer for Rough Trade East won’t have managed that. Not even the counter staff at Mono in Glasgow will have managed that combined. I get that Thurston has used the opportunity to shed light on some of his lesser-known friends’ essential, if outre, work, but c’mon, man! Three hundred and fifty records! What nonsense!
Now, had this been 1997, Thurston might’ve opted for a more mainstream approach. Possibly the last great year for album releases, it seemed the year threw up a now-considered classic every other week. OK Computer and The Fat Of The Land, In It For The Money and Radiator, Dig Your Own Hole, Homogenic and Urban Hymns, Homework, Earthling, Blur and Tellin’ Stories, Heavy Soul, Vanishing Point, Maverick A Strike, Songs From Northern Britain, Mogwai Young Team, Brighten The Corners, Being There…Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space…ladies and gentlemen, we were spoiled for choice.
It’s quite possible too that a Tokyo collective of long-fringed shoegaze revivalists had cooked up quite the Jazzmastered storm on a limited to 50 copies CDR, wrapped in rice paper and designed to erase itself after half a dozen plays, but y’know, who knows? Maybe Thurston does. He probably has 2 copies.
Even further back, 1991 was a similarly stellar year. Spin Magazine, the US equivalent to the UK’s NME (ie, it focused on metal-free, guitar-based music plus the odd slab of interesting hip-hop) went as far as declaring Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque its Album of the Year. Considering 1991 also threw up Nevermind and Loveless, Out Of Time and Screamadelica, Trompe le Monde, Blue Lines and De La Soul Is Dead, Weld, Achtung Baby, OG Original Gangster, Peggy Suicide and Foxbase Alpha, that’s quite the feat. Maybe it had something to do with ex-Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly being Spin’s contributing editor at the time…or maybe it was just the simple fact that Bandwagonesque was (and still undeniably is) a great record.
I listened to Out Of Time today, start to finish, twice. I can confirm that it’s lost none of its buzz – indeed, time has been very kind to it, and a record I’d heard a dozen times a day from the counter of Our Price is, in 2026, possibly even more appealing. REM’s real crossover album (Green may have brought them peeking from the margins, but Out Of Time went overground in a totally unprecedented way), even tracks like the much overplayed Losing My Religion and the much maligned Shiny Happy People sparkled boxfresh and urgent.
The high points, of which there are many, go some way to explaining why people despair at the drop-off in quality of REM’s output in the years that followed. Low, with Michael Stipe’s voice in a, eh, low register is a slow-boiling beauty, possibly the second-best track on the record. The none-more Beach Boys-y Endgame is still sublime. I could play this at one point, learned by ear and note-perfect on an acoustic guitar. (I must get my chops back.) Belong‘s soaring wordless chorus, first heard and sung three years previously during 1989’s Green tour at the Barrowlands. Half A World Away…Texarkana‘s choppy riffing, Me In Honey‘s soaring and sparring dual vocals… Out Of Time is a properly fantastic album. You should make a point of playing it this week.
The pinnacle though? That’s easy. The gothic, country blues of Country Feedback is, quite clearly, the greatest song on the record, and quite clearly the greatest song Neil Young never wrote. Michael takes centrestage, the band slow and stately, totally in control of the song’s unwavering steadiness with Stipe’s unspooling vocal throwing in the odd, unexpected sweary word amongst its gorgeous melody. I could listen to this all day long and never tire of it. If I’m making a Thurston-type list for the end of ’26, Country Feedback may well be at the upper echelons of it. The 10″, lathe-cut, US promo-only white label, of course.
Here’s REM doing a grand version on Jools Holland’s Later in 1998.
REM – Country Feedback (Live on Later)
It’s quite easy to imagine a Neil Young version on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his ramshackle and feedbacking guitar replacing the weeping pedal steel. If only.
REM and Neil Young – Country Feedback (Shoreline Amphitheatre, October 1998)
The closest yet is from 1998, when ol’ Nel himself grabbed an acoustic guitar and joined REM for an encore at the Shoreline Amphitheater in California. Michael says at the start that it’s his favourite REM song, and who can blame him?
Plain Or Pan 