I was considering creating a musomuso ‘Best of 25’ feature for the site but then I thought, why not ask bands to nominate their favourite tracks instead. I reached out to a few acts that we have featured on the world famous SONIC NOMADS PODCAST and first out of the trap was SAM DURNEEN from a tremendous band called COLOUR TV. I asked for a paragraph on each track, Sam went the extra mile and wrote a novel for each one, nothing like setting the bar high! Read on to see which acts ticked all his boxes during 2025.
I took to writing this article on the kind request of Steve himself (that’s Mr musomuso to you). He was after a Top 5, some Best-of-the-Year round-up, the type of efficient journalism that an outlet like Clash Magazine or HELLO! would gobble up… I thought I’d give him a headache and take the reader through my year in song, reflecting on 2025 in a way I hope you find insightful. It turned out to be the sort of year that comes at you like a brick wall. Luckily the dent was left in the wall, not me.
This is not a list of exclusively contemporary music, but five songs that have taken me through the seasons, presented in the order they found me.
1. ‘Big Cat Tattoos’ - Hamish Hawk
“I think you'd prefer a firmer hand / With big cat tattoos / You could laugh at his jokes / You could bury your nose in his shoes / You'd like that, wouldn't you?”
I’ve looked to Hamish Hawk as a shepherd for ages now, there’s no one in the world whose command of phrasing and expression is as sharp as his. Hawk’s pen concocts from an inky amalgam of Pulp, Bowie, The Divine Comedy and Magnetic Fields lyrical gems like, “Crisis after crisis, we're undressing in tears / Therapists and dentists suggest rest and veneers” and “Still amidst all the hissing I'm remembering kissing the angel with the incredible piercing / While you're on brand names and acquisitions / Feckless sex dreams with cowards’ omissions”.
In 2021, the algorithm had been nagging me to check out his single ‘Calls To Tiree’. I bit the bullet and found out the bullet taste of hot dogs, or something delicious anyway. A few months later in an insane twist of fate, touring took Hamish (+ band) all the way to Plymouth, and so Colour TV found ourselves with the surreal good fortune of opening for a personal hero. It was an intimate encounter, which is music-speak for “pretty much empty”, but that night Hamish redefined my threshold of conviction in a performer and frontperson. You could not take your eyes off him, prowling and yowling with the crowd on a leash - as if singing to you alone.
(Afterwards we got to speak about Belle & Sebastian and Edinburgh, and he was so considerate to say, “We’ve been listening to your song on the way here, Charlieeeee” - which sounded twice as good in his brittle Scottish accent.)
Hawk’s roaring success since this encounter is no surprise whatsoever (selling out the 2,000-cap Barrowlands and releasing two further LPs to critical acclaim). The early part of 2025 was soundtracked for me by ‘Big Cat Tattoos’, the lead single from his latest album ‘A Firmer Hand’, a record which takes the band’s sound to violent places. It’s a horny song, bristling with the pent-up lust I usually go to Suede for, but sonically closer to, I dunno, Sparks or The Fall. Spiky carnival post-punk. It’s a great accent for bitter romantic jealousy, and I think maybe just in general.
“So I crave, crave to do it again / All again / Crave, crave to do it again…”
Sometime in March I rang Jack Yeo and suggested making Colour TV music again after breaking up the previous Spring. As we hadn’t spoken for a year, we began this process very cautiously - him sending across elaborate guitar work and me writing melodies and lyrics in the unfamiliar surroundings of the centre of Leeds. One distinct takeaway from this call was Jack’s suggestion I check out Paramore’s latest album ‘This Is Why’, on which Hayley Williams sings ten illegally catchy choruses. This homework was so influential in me re-learning how to craft songs and allow chorus parts, in Jack’s philosophical words, to “just be”. There is comfort and fluidity to the hooks and harmonies on tracks like ‘Running Out of Time’ and ‘Big Man, Little Dignity’. ‘Crave’ is my favourite, probably because I was craving to get the band back together and every happy complication that would entail. It’s beautiful, wistful pop music. I was also aware of Paramore’s enthusiastic citing of Bloc Party as an influence, which you can hear throughout ‘This Is Why’ - as well as, hopefully, a few Colour TV songs.
With this album on repeat, it felt like something magic had been rediscovered and in the space of about a week, 340 miles apart, Jack and I wrote ‘At Sunset’, ‘¡baby!’, ‘La La, Life Could Be Easy’ and ‘My Marionette’ - a promising bunch that’ve become the spine of our setlist.
That was Spring 2025 in a nutshell, and the story of how Paramore are to thank for our most prolific songwriting spell.
3. ‘Death Kink’ - Fontaines DC
“When you came into my life I was lost / And you took that shine to me, at what cost?”
If ‘Skinty Fia’ convinced me that Fontaines DC were the best band currently on Earth, 2024’s ‘Romance’ compounded this belief to the point that taking into account infinite parallel universes of competition, I’m confident Fontaines would remain the best on an inter-dimensional scale. The album packs this brutalist swagger, encompassing a kaleidoscopic spectrum of human experience, often within notedly economic framework. ‘Death Kink’ is 2 minutes and 23 seconds of seething resentment, an atom bomb of a song that cruises from start to finish like being dragged behind a car across tarmac - the sound of faith in love’s comprehensive obliteration. It is such nasty perfection, as simple as a nursery rhyme and bio-engineered to be played fifteen times in a row.
This anthem for heartbreak spoke to me as Colour TV made our way out of rehearsal rooms and back onto the stage come summer. The first gig featuring our original line-up since mid-2023 took place in July, amidst a slight personal crisis. On reflection this fueled a stormy performance, worthwhile but missing the warmth we’ve been able to transmit since... I feel this slightly glazed-over state comes across in Drew Slade’s “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” documentary about the band’s prep for that show, which is testament to Drew’s talent as a filmmaker because of its accuracy - he forged no artificial joy for the camera.
There’s nothing artificial about Fontaines DC either, who I saw at Pavilions last November. ‘Romance’ is their masterpiece, and honestly I could have put forward any of its tracks - a special mention for ‘Motorcycle Boy’ + ‘Here’s The Thing’, plus the career-best single ‘It’s Amazing To Be Young’, where Grian Chatten wrings the most profound observation out of the most threadbare couplet: “It’s the cost that brings you down / But it’s amazing to be young.”
4. ‘Blackberry Stone’ - Laura Marling
“I’d be sad that I never held your hand as you were lowered / But I’d understand that I’d never let it go.”
As I told musomuso when he interviewed Colour TV back in June, my first concert was Kate Rusby, October 15th 2004. I was a toddler so I don’t remember anything… apart from her silhouette from high up, sort of. Folk was the music my Mum and Dad sang to me when I was tiny. The lilt of ‘Underneath The Stars’ and ‘The Cobbler’s Daughter’ struck 3-year-old me as eye-wateringly sad, so if anyone wonders why I’m a bit of a mug, there’s your answer. In love with the delicacy of the violin and their velvet cases, I did take lessons, which I suppose lit the flame for pursuing music even if my playing gave the neighbours cause to relocate to Australia.
This Autumn, for one reason or another I relived all this by listening to a metric ton of folk tunes. I was introduced to loads I’d never heard that I probably should have done, like Bob Dylan who it turns out is just as good as everyone says, but whose work glows double when sung by Joan Baez. My brother Oliver owns a million Joan Baez records and has been trying to get me to listen to her for yonks, so I’m late to the party but Joan’s Bob covers are precious and now mean whatever they do to Oliver, to me too. There’s a clip of Baez and Dylan from Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue that captures the two like they don’t know there’s a camera in the room; Joan laughs and with a sad smile and her eyes on the floor she says, “Oh, Bob…”, then “How do you like my dress?”, but Bob doesn’t seem to hear the question and carries on yapping.
The song I’ve chosen is ‘Blackberry Stone’ by Laura Marling. Her melodious voice takes your hand as her words promise not to let it go, sounding as optimistic as she does mournful: “You did always say that I was going places / And that you wouldn't have it any other way…”
I’m happy that this folky detour has found foray into Colour TV - earlier this month we recorded a single called ‘Wake Up, Sleepyhead’, with a line that goes, “Wish-o-wish-o-wish-upon / A folk song”, and an unplugged bridge section that answers that prayer. Keep an ear out for that in 2026.
“And it's you and me in the summertime / We'll be hand-in-hand down in the park / With a squeeze and a sigh and the twinkle in your eye / And all the sunshine banishes the dark…”
This Winter I have been listening to ‘Summertime’ by The Sundays. I haven’t too many thoughts to share, the song is so pure and self-explanatory. Harriet Wheeler’s aching delivery of the chorus contrasts the verses’ shrugging disinterest, her voice a siren of resignation; I also love ‘I Kicked A Boy’ from their debut, specifically the shrill promise that, “I’d marry you but I’m sooo unwell!” - Smithsy in the best way. ‘Summertime’ rounds out the year on a joyful note which is only right because December’s Underground headline turned out to be the best gig Colour TV have ever played.
How come? (For a start, the support bands were great which set the tone - check out Cat Rose, The Buzzards and Lily Thomas!) I think myself and the guys performed with a newfangled confidence combined with real compassion for each other as musicians - Jack, James and Sean possess blazing talent and lay such a generous framework around me to sing and all that jazz. But our audience couldn’t have been more in tune with us, which lit the whole show up like Christmas. I have always wished for Colour TV to occupy a place in people’s minds beyond just being “a band”; a group whose fans feel a more spiritual investment, all in it together. At the set’s end I watched from the bar as the band wrung out the final mile of ‘For Belugas’, twenty people sardined onstage around them, limbs spinning in all directions but so courteous, nobody crushing the pedal boards or touching the mic, not a beat skipped. Feeling so proud of the four of us.
You’ll be hearing a lot more from the band, starting early next year. In the meantime, how about I blow this rodeo wide open! ’Ave that, musomuso - a sixth song!
“I loved you like a sun / Stung you like a mutha / It’s never gonna feel how it did when you were younger.”
We’d like to thank Sam for sparing his entire weekend to create this masterpiece, I feel for every other band that are yet to reply to me as they have some catching up to do. In the meantime, enjoy Sam’s selections and make sure that you keep an eye on their socials for news of future gigs, releases and other Colour TV shenanigans.