The only albums I listen to entirely from start to finish, are those where all the songs actually connect to each other. Most albums are not like that.

Today I am listening to Refused, The Shape Of Punk To Come

How very prog of you. 🤙

Some albums, yes. But not all.

A couple of years back I was on the tier of music that came with Amazon Prime. One day they decided that listening to albums in order was a premium feature, and if have to pay extra for that.

I suspect Spotify never had as many subscribers sign up as they did that day.

nothing beats having a wall shelf full of cds <3

Album ≠ album. There are certainly ones worthy of listening to them as a whole. But there are plenty of albums that are just utter garbage too. The war on the single by record companies in the 90s produced a number of albums that were at best a couple of okay singles plus 8-10 pure fillers. Name another Chumbawamba song, you can't without googling.

In a way we are reverting back to the 1950s where the single reigned supreme and albums were an afterthought. Now the single song does better than an album again. Some musicians release every streamlined Spotify curated 2 minute song as a "single." Since most of it is done digitally only why not?

Dogma is useless.

Problem is it can sometimes be too samey, so it just blends together after a while.

I always listen to album tracks in sequence, either from the start or from in inner track. love to get into the groove, I don’t think I’ve played tracks randomly for years. Obligatory fk Spotify.

At my house I almost exclusively listen to records.

I put it on, listen to the whole thing and put the next one on.

This is part of why I prefer Bandcamp over Spotify. Throw on a whole album, give it a listen, if I come back and do that a few times it's probably worth buying. And then it's mine forever without DRM.

Yes, maybe, for some.

Not many live shows (ignoring classical i guess) follow album order though and they're very rarely worse than the LP.

Jeffrey Lewis did a cool interlude recently last time he played here on how he comes up with the set list for a city - he has a massive database.

Huge agree. There are so many albums that tell a complete story. They take you on an emotional journey. Or you're just missing banger after banger. The only time I ever listen to a random assortment of songs is if I'm listening to music on Youtube or the radio for some reason. I almost never sit down to listen to music in a random playlist when I'm going through my collection. Don't even have Spotify installed. Years of collecting music doesn't require a Spotify account.

Honestly, it's very hit or miss, and it's way more miss than hit for big artists... there are albums that are even conceptualized as a full art piece, but in reality the majority have lots of songs that are there because the record company said there had to be an x amount of songs, a new album every x amount of time, and sometimes would even force them to record covers... The Shape Of Punk To Come is among my earliest acquisitions and is a great album, but among my earliest acquisitions there's also Recipe for Hate, and that joke about buying an album because of one song (in this case, American Jesus) and the rest of the album sucking is true :P

I was thinking about this recently, because artists releasing music exclusively in digital formats they rarely release full albums nowadays, just tons of singles, and platforms like Discogs are having a hard time cataloguing new artists, but I guess not having to release x amount of songs together gave them more artistic freedom and they can focus on releasing what they really like and not just pushing records because of contractual clauses.

That being said, never let an algorithm pick music for you.

Great album you are listening to.

I feel the same way as well, I will always listen to albums / EPs and very rarely a playlist of random songs mashed together. In general I don't really care for playlists at all.

Quite often there will be one song on an album I will skip though, usually the wanky ballad on a metal album for example, and I'm OK with that. But if an album has one or two great songs and the rest is shite I just won't ever listen to those "great" songs really either.

I want the whole listening experience, not just a list of songs from all different artists.

Vol. II by Angine de Poitrine is definitely a good example of requiring a front to back listen. Not because the songs connect per se, but the novelty never seems to die when you listen to it this way.

It's like the difference between getting one spot on your body massaged every day, and getting a head to toe massage every day. But it's my brain/ADHD being massaged.

A lot of modern artists just release singles, which makes it really difficult to know where to start or how they want me to discover their sound.

It's not all art, especially when labels and PR folks are involved. How much say in set order or even content of an album the artists get varies.

i'm younger but i feel the same way. i almost always listen to albums exclusively, and it's probably the only thing i don't enjoy about being a community radio dj - they tell us not to even play more than a single song by the same artist in an hour.

on the one hand, people put likely hundreds of hours total into a single album, and the album as a whole is the only way to truly appreciate the entire piece of art. on the other hand, it is a small issue to feel better than other people with, lmao. & i would argue the majority of albums have at least a few songs that aren't as good.

Nah.

Agreed. A lot of work goes into deciding track order on an album, it is part of the process. Back when ipods and mp3 players were how people carried their music around i found it stressful when i was looki at someone elses collection and it was just 1 song per artist because mine was whole albums only.

Some are, some are not. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not. But then I'm the guy who mostly just listens to vocaloid covers.