2025? Where the hell . . . ?

I cannot believe it's the new year already.

Still, first things first . . . 

The time since the last post has gone by in a blur. I never did get to open my advent calendar in the end. As the days went by the idea of so many doors to open became overwhelming. However, I've decided to use it as a countdown to my birthday and will definitely be opening a door a day (until I forget).

Apart from dealing with all the horrid real life stuff, I've been working hard on my music - no Christmas films and mince pies for me, I was hard at work on catching up on the music I was so behind on. The good news is that it paid off. Once I decided to ignore Chinese music (for the second year), the task became far less daunting (relatively speaking). 

So going into the first weekend of the new year I have completed rating all the English and Other (Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino etc.) music for the year. I have finished all but the last 3 months of singles for Korea (although even they are down to top 10 and just need to be refined to find the top 3). I've also completed all the albums and EPs for Japan.

Although I have things to do this weekend (like go to the launderette before the bad weather hits - my weather app just sent me a message to say we're expecting 'significant' amounts of snow tomorrow night - in case you didn't know, snow is the worst weather in the world for me, I absolutely hate it), I am determined to get the Japanese lists out of the way. Then it's just 5 months of Chinese music to trawl through 🙈. I'm sure it will be fine.  

Then it will be time to decant it all into the End of Year lists and playlists and post up all the facts and figures - Last.fm has given me all sorts of interesting infographics some of which might end up in my post. I'm not going to give a deadline for getting it done otherwise it will all go wrong but I'm hoping to have everything sorted and posted before the end of the month.

The January playlist is starting slow, but only because Spotify hasn't been updating their playlists since before Christmas and I've only been able to add stuff released by my favs that shows up in my library as if by magic. 

That did include a new OST by my beloved Chinese actor/singer Zhang Binbin, but it disappeared a couple of days later, presumably because of licensing issues. Hopefully, it will be back soon - and I also need to track down time to watch his new drama The Blossoming Love (looks like a fun time). 

The person who takes first place on the playlist, and was indeed the first song I listened to on New Year's Day is EXO's Lay with his new single 开天(Kai Tian). It also has an amazing (and I mean LIT-level amazing) MV. Check it out.

Lay also got the whole fandom clowning today, as he mentioned in an interview that he's hoping to get together with the rest of the band in September or October. He said they're currently talking about it. Normally, this would have been exciting enough as OT9 crumbs are so very rare these days that they're always welcome, but only last week Suho mentioned that EXO will be releasing a new album following the conclusion of Sehun's military service (which ends in September). I and millions of others are praying hard that an OT9 EXO album (and please gods, a world tour) will be heading our way - we deserve it, we've done our waiting and we need them back to heal the world.

So, I think that'll do for now. Time to get back to Korea's December singles. It's tough, there were a lot of bangers (and a lot of Christmas songs).