chaosincurate's 2025 Favourites (8/12) - Boundary Breaker

This category is pretty straightforward, but a crucial one for any music fans journey: it's all about the albums that took me by surprise and opened me up to a new genre or style of music.

John Coltrane - A Love Supreme

Normally this category would go to an album or artist that came out this year, but unfortunately no album or artist was able to break any boundaries for me with their releases this year, at most putting a dent in the walls of my comfort zone (such as Deftones making me slightly more amicable with metal and a few albums this year microdosing me with country infused into the styles I already love). So instead, I will do what I have dedicated my blog to doing this past year instead and go back in time.

When I listened to John Coltrane for my It's About Time series here on this blog, I was struggling to get into jazz. I was able to appreciate it on an intellectual level, and appreciate the virtuosity on display, but I couldn't feel it. It felt like looking at a rune's inscription of which I didn't understand the language. It was a series of patterns that seemed complex and interesting but meant nothing to me.

Perhaps it was due to the titles of A Love Supreme clearly laying out what I should be looking for that allowed that to finally change somewhat, sort of like I have a translation cheat sheet to refer back to if I ever get lost. Maybe that's the cause, or maybe it isn't, but ever since listening to this I have become far more comfortable with not just jazz, but instrumentals as a whole, which I was always liable to interpret as incomplete. Even if I still prefer my music with lyrics, the impact of this album on my listening makes up for it's shallowness with an overwhelming width that shed a new light even on songs in albums that I otherwise loved, so I think it more than deserves to win this category, even if it's win is due in part to weak competition.