The 2024 / 2025 Ho Media Awards

This has to be a rather brief summary of both the 2024 and 2025 awards, because I'm a slacker.

2024 Album of the Year: Elbow, Audio Vertigo



2025 Album of the Year: Doves, Constellations For The Lonely



2024 Song of the Year: “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years”
2025 Song of the Year: “A Drop in the Ocean”

2024’s near-miss for AOTY was The Decemberists’ As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again which is a fantastic album marred by a rollout that included the wrong digital files multiple times, vinyl albums using the wrong mix, and CDs with an unknown mix/master. “Joan in the Garden” – are you kidding me? 19 minutes and 20 seconds of prog bliss.



Really the only other new release in 2025 that is worth mentioning is Lord Huron’s The Cosmic Selector, Volume 1. This one channeled a lot of Strange Trails energy and includes the wild back-to-back combo of “It All Comes Back” / “Used to Know”. They also put on a hell of a show in Indy over the summer.

Easily the year’s biggest disappointment was Arcade Fire’s Pink Elephant. The compression here is just horrible. The songs are a bit thin, which might work if they weren’t being absolutely crushed from start to finish.

2025 was a year heavily filled with Mahler and other classical music, so there are a number of new releases that I haven’t been in the mood to listen to yet. In the vein, I’ll mention that I think the best classical recording I heard this year was Chailly conducting Mahler’s 3rd Symphony with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He gets the brass to snarl in the fifth movement like no one else I’ve heard.

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Looking back through the 2024 albums, I don’t see a single new name except for Wyn Morris with his fabulous recording of Mahler’s 10th. This year there were even fewer albums & artists overall, so I’ll pivot to Riccardo Chailly for not just his 3rd, but also his 9th, which comes close to the light touch of Barbirolli without getting too soft or saccharine.

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2024 Book of the Year: Daniel Mason, North Woods
2025 Book of the Year: Justin Cronin, The Ferryman

Both of these have enough in the way of twists that there isn’t much I can say. But you should read them both.

Wind and Truth was a book of high highs and desperately low lows. The lore dumps were really cool. The constant joke-cracking ruined countless moments. The ending was not any more of an ending than any other volume in the Stormlight Archive so far.

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2024 Movie of the Year: Transformers ONE
2025 Movie of the Year: Thunderbolts*

T:ONE would have won regardless of what it was up against. Thunderbolts* won by default.

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Onward.