Songs to Get Shit Done (February 2025)
The worst playlist in the world.
In recent months, I have been getting shit done. Getting married? Done. Various reports that I have to write for work that no one will ever read? Done. Auditing my monthly standing orders to ensure my money is going into a slightly different pot that could theoretically offer me greater tax efficiency on my savings? Done. Buying a secondhand set of laptop screwdrivers off eBay so my laptop doesn’t restart every time I start typing with too much vigour? Done. Harassing Yodel as to the whereabouts of my secondhand set of laptop screwdrivers after they inexplicably failed to deliver the laptop screwdrivers despite me being inside the flat on each of the three (alleged) attempts of attempted delivery? Done. I’ve done it mate. I’ve fucking done it. The only thing I haven’t done, is come up with a good idea for this month’s blog.
Indeed, I’ve been doing so much, it's safe to say I’ve forgotten to how to have any fun by myself. Every time I have any free time, I simply open up my laptop, plonk it on my lap, watch it crash, wait for it to restart, boot up my internet browser and think: “What can I get done?”. It's truly an unsustainable state of affairs; one that is no doubt nagging away at my brain health in a way that has not yet become apparent, as I put it through another wave of low level stress.
But still, done lots, haven't I! And what’s better to do when you’re doing lots, but to do some music in your ears?
I remember reading an interview with Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family, explaining how he has to get himself effectively into a state of opposition with the audience when he performs; develop a relationship of deep antagonism with the paying masses (having seen FWF a multiude of times, I can confirm that is the case). I can relate to this, as the shit doing state of mind adopts a similar mentality, especially when at work; like you are at war with the task and everything and everyone around you. The shifting timelines, the constant state of disorganisation, the sudden panic that you might be extremely fucked unless you get some stuff done at right this second. You want a soundtrack that is fast-paced and shifts gears through the album in such a way that you barely notice it happening.
For some reason, a necessary part of the equation is that the music itself should be… what’s the phrase i’m looking for?... oh yes – a bit shit. You need to be not just in opposition the task and everything around you, but also yourself, by voluntarily putting some pure garbage into your ears. Not too shit that it becomes unbearable, but not too good in case it actually makes you think or feel anything. Right in the shitspot. Just a medium level of shitness.
A quick point of order here: I sincerely believe that there is no bad music. You are welcome to enjoy whatever your brain responds positively to, no matter what it is. The pure subjectivity of music is why it's so brilliant. However, despite this, I am going to make quite a lot of cruel jokes that imply this isn’t what I believe. This is mainly because I think its funny, and I am simply here to entertain myself. This is also going to be the most disjointed, unpleasant playlist I put together, so apologies in advance.
Play the jingle!
In Vitro - Indivision
This one goes out to a fella called Brendon Keating-Tse, who has truly done the Lord’s work in creating and seemingly maintaining a Spotify playlist entitled “Chilled Drum & Bass”: the background to many busy times in my life in recent years. Despite amassing over 1,800 songs that somehow fit this vague and incongruous combo of “chill” and “drum and bass”, our man Brendon apparently is concerned that over 140 hours of drum and bass simply isn’t enough. He keeps adding to it. Why? We don’t know. Not enough drum and bass? Not chilled enough? Like I say, we simply do not know.
There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask Brendon in the unlikely event that I meet him (Why drum and bass? How do you judge to what extent a drum and bass song is “chill”? Why bother?), but I think it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that he has essentially made my career. The nature of my job is that, I semi-regularly need to sit down and smash out a lot of words about a thing I don’t really understand, and do so quite quickly. Luckily, I got a solution. I just got to ring up my man Brendon, click shuffle and we’re away.
To be fair, I think I had a soft spot for drum and bass even before Brendon came along. Arriving in Sheffield, with my floppy hair and vaguely conservative outlook on life, a southern country boy ready for life in the northern big city, I explored the right of passage which all students in new places go through. This essentially entails adopting new interests almost at random to modify your personality, just to see what happens. A necessary part of working out who on earth you are, in my view. Some people prtend they like jazz, I pretended I liked drum and bass, which was a quite lively scene in Sheffield at the time. I occasionally went to drum and bass/dubstep nights they held at the students union on Tuesday nights, and had an okay time. Would I prefer to be at an indy night? Sure! But listening to Little Lion Man in an O2 Academy isn’t going to solve my youthful identity crisis, is it?
Anyway, some of it obviously left its mark on me, because here we are listening to someone apparently called “Indivision”. Exploring their Spotify profile, their biography tells me they’re Estonian, which is quite fun! They also look like a couple of grade A melts (one of them is wearing a t-shirt that says “100% Energy”, c’mon mate). But what did I expect? I reckon being “into” drum and bass probably is just quite a melt-y thing to like I reckon.
In Vitro is a rare song that actually broke through the stony barrier of indistinctiveness to register on my brain. I can’t really tell you why, or what I like about it, I just do.
What I find comforting about the songs that Brendon has collated is the absolute soullessness of them; their incredibly formulaic nature, which I can only assume is designed to elicit almost almost no emotion of any kind. Yet, weirdly, they always try to add some legitimacy to themselves by having vaguely emotional sounding titles. A brief scan of Brendon’s playlist includes song titles such as “Keep You With Me”, “Falling in Love” and “Heartbeat”: theoretically sentiment in name, but utterly empty in reality. The electronic music equivalent of that music they play on Love Island, the overly dramatised and breathy cover versions of ballads. Yet, probably 1 in every 100 songs I play, I stop briefly to check who the artist is and what the song is called; which I’ve normally forgotten about 5 minutes later anyway. A fleeting interest.
Thanks Brendon and thanks Indivision.
Every Night - Zmeyev
On a similar “chilled” theme, we now shift to the world of “chilled lo-fi beats”. To understand this, we must regress back to the world of 2020 lockdown. It's warm, it's stodgy, it's confusing, and I’m sitting in my bed gawping at Instagram, trying to work out what it all means.
As we all are, I am always fascinated by what the internet and social companies think I like, and thus what ads they push my way to reflect this. As well as the ads for craft beer and new housing development in Hackney Wick, one particularly unusual ad I kept getting featured a short arty clip of Bart Simpson in a red, open top classic car, driving along with some pals, whilst some saxophone music played over the top. It was weirdly striking. The song itself transpired to be Every Night by Zmeyev, and the ad was for a playlist called Chill Beats <3 groove, relax.
We all like to pretend that we’re not influenced by ads. Everyone likes to believe they have cultivated such a complex personality that not even the Mark Zuckerberg and his big gang of wanker friends can untangle the exciting network of synapses in their brain. And who can blame us? We all like to believe we’re special. But this was the point I realised I was just like everyone else. All it took was a vaguely cool looking mock of a cartoon that I don’t really care about with some brass over the top.
Needless to say, the world of Chill Beats <3 groove, relax is quite a depressing place. In the most cynical corner of streaming platforms sit these faceless artists who produce generic, inoffensive music that game the algorithm to take advantage of the misery and anxiety that all of us face in our day-to-day lives. It exists for nothing else other than to get plays. We can speculate about what the impact of AI might be on music, but it's effectively already here: The future is Chill Beats <3 groove, relax.
But still, here we are. I’m really the mug here because I’m recommending it! That shit I’ve got to do isn’t going to do itself is it! To be fair to Zmeyev, he does at least have a face on his profile. He also appears to be from the country of Georgia: a positive in my eyes. Like a lot of his chill beats pal, a lot of his musical artwork has some very AI-generated-looking images. Still, fair play to the geezer: Every Night has more than 25 million hits, so a lovely bit of pocket money for him.
A Girl And His Cat - Biffy Clyro
I remember speaking to a lecturer of mine during a university field trip to South Africa in 2013. His name was Dan, and he told me how he recently got into running. He told me that the best album to run to was Green Day’s American Idiot, because it's relatively unique in that there isn’t a break between any of the songs. For running purposes, Dan thought this was highly beneficial. I can’t remember the exact reason, but it was something along the lines of how the fact there were no breaks between the songs meant that he never broke concentration, so he could run longer without realising what a hellish activity running is.
This is kind of how I feel about the album upon which A Girl And His Cat is from, Opposites. The songs do have gaps between them, but they all sound so similar that it feels like they all merge into one. Opposites is also a double album, with 21 songs in total lasting one hour and 21 minutes, which is quite a nice amount of time for almost uninterrupted concentration. Combine that with my limited interest in the work of BIffy Clyro, and you’ve got yourself a winner. Even as I’m writing this I’m trying to remember how A Girl And His Cat goes and I just can’t do it.
I always feel like I can’t really place Biffy Clyro in my musical mind. I have no idea how big they are, what sort of people like them, whether they’re cool or not. I remember spending most of my youth vaguely aware of them but assuming they were some emo shit that I wouldn’t care for, but I did definitely have a BIffy phase at some point, but I just can’t remember when. I can see they’re still making music, but I never see that they’re touring, never see them on festival line-ups. Given all the nostalgia for noughties music right now, I assumed I would see them pop up on some trash city festival line-up at some point. Would I want to see them live anyway? Maybe?
Anyway, who cares. All I know is, if you like guitar music and want to not know you’re listening to it, this is the one. Have at it.
Architects - Rise Against
For the purposes of this piece, Architects and the rest of the album it is on - Endgame - is a great getting shit done song because it's very fast paced and rooted in a not-so-subtle anger about something or other. Sometimes you’re doing something that needs to be done quickly, and you’re a bit annoyed about it. You’re pissed off. You’re riddled with angst of the injustice of having to do something, full of blame for all the people and reasons who put you in this position, and you’re looking for someone who understand and want you to take action. Rise Against understand. They’re pissed off like you, except not because they’ve got a report due at the end of the week and it's not going exactly as you would have liked, but because of some vague stuff about war or animal rights or the man or whatever it is they’re on about. It's something about “the system”, definitely about “the system”.
They really smash it out, and it is this sort of smashing that was very appealing to young teenage Sam. Rise Against helped to make me consider for the first that the possibility that there were other issues in the world, beyond my invisibility to girls at school and the fact that most of my friends were better at cricket than me. I idly considered one day: maybe caring about stuff is cool? It was with great pride that my friend Harry and I made the radical decision to go see Rise Against instead of Arctic Monkeys at Reading Festival in 2009, as part of a protest against their album Humbug, which we did not care for. Either way, I felt it was cool that they were out there, saying stuff, and given I had no opinions of my own, I was probably quite easily impressed.
I think my interest in Rise Against existed in negative correlation with developing actual opinions of my own. Over time, I have needed to lean on them less. The conflict I feel with them more relates to how I feel about “activism” in music just generally. On the one hand, protesting and making stuff with a political statement is, in many ways, cool. You’re raising awareness of social issues, and using your art and platform to make a statement about them: fair play. And yet, there is a big part of me that feels that this is also kinda naff? With music in particular, I am often drawn to bands who pretend like they don’t care in some way, or are operating on a quite deep level of irony. Music, for me, is much better at communicating in subtle ways. There are lots of songs that I find deeply meaningful, or quite funny, but aren’t intentionally going out there and trying to be those things. It just comes across as a bit trite, feels a bit blunt.
I think this conflict exists more generally, and the overall slight discomfort with activism; in that I quite like the idea of being involved in stuff, but don’t really love the experience of actually doing so. The fact I’ve never really been affected by any sort of structural societal issue at any point in my life also probably contributes towards this laziness. But still, I don’t feel great about it.
Nevertheless, listening to “Killing In The Name” makes me want to create more hierarchy and inequality in the world, purely to spite Rage Against the Machine for making that song. Thankfully, Rise Against are the less cool version of RATM. I never used to hear Rise Against at any of their songs at indie nights to cause me to hate their music. Instead, when I’m getting shit done to Rise Against, you get to enjoy just a tinge of nostalgia for who you once were, and the thoughts you didn’t really have.
Miracle - Paramore
This selection feels like the natural blend of the previous two: the pop sensibilities of Biffy Clyro with the overt, affected sincerity of Rise Against. For me though, this one is probably the finest example of an album that you just simply don’t realise is happening to you. An exhibition in indistinguishability and repetitiveness. This is exemplified by the fact, when it came to writing this, I knew there was a song (other than Misery Business) which I knew was slightly better than the others, but I couldn’t find it. I had to guess at five or six tracks before I found it. I didn’t even know what the album was called, it's just the one with the naff album cover.
I also think there’s a subconscious element to Hayley Williams’ voice that aligns well with the general ‘down in the trenches’ vibe that you’ve got to create when you’re getting shit done. There’s something about her voice that makes you believe she’s singing about something important, even though that’s probably not the case. The effect of this is that it makes you also believe that it's okay to have adopted this fortress mentality for something that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t really matter that much. Maybe Hayley might write a song about me writing a report? Maybe its okay to get really irrationally angsty about not particularly important things? Maybe this unhealthy coping mechanism of mine is actually fine?
But seriously though, I reckon that - of all of the ones on this list - I’ve saved the best until last. I genuinely reckon that this is a good album. In fact, I was so convinced that it was a good album, I had assumed it had achieved some kind of critical recognition for what it did for whatever genre of music Paramore is. A consultation of Wikipedia proves that this was just an invention of my sixth form brain (which, to be fair, makes a lot of sense). All I’m saying is, go and listen to Misery Business and tell me that isn’t a great song. I’ve just chosen Miracle to come across like a hipster.