Ah, 2025—the Year of the Cassowary—a hideous, deadly, reprehensibly indifferent shit-show intent on ripping your guts out or chasing you into the sea. 

Goodbye and good riddance. Even an atheist like this Radio JRB host may be flirting with the idea of praying that, as Tony Blair, New Labour and D:ream assured us back in the late ’90s, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. Realistically of course, they can and very may only get worse—just ask Tony Blair, New Labour and D:ream. 

As you prepare to either make your way on some sort of mandatory end of year escape or else retreat behind your locked doors, electric fences and motion sensor beams to absolutely catch up on all that leisure reading, watching and listening you’re now going to have time for—here is the last JRB playlist of the year. Let it keep you company in misery, revelry or reverie: one mournful, and one cynical, Christmas song included. 

May 2026 be the Year of the Platypus—cute, weird, singular and inexplicably egg producing.

• Tymon Smith is a member of The JRB Editorial Advisory Panel, and a freelance journalist who writes about the arts and South African history. Previously the literary editor of the Sunday Times, he is the recipient of a silver Standard Banks Arts Journalist of the Year Award for feature writing. He was the head researcher for the interactive DVD Between Life and Death: Stories from John Vorster Square, and is working on a book about the Johannesburg police station.
  
• See his previous playlists here.