Welcome to the 17th annual Bacon Top 31. A quick primer to anyone new here: the Top 31 is my personal blogging platform. I post primarily in January. Every day throughout the month, I’ll count down my favorite albums of the previous year, starting at #31 and ending in my favorite album of that year. There is no committee, no group consensus — this is the culmination of a year’s worth of listening by one aging caucasian Gen-X man.

When I started the Top 31 in 2009, my first child had been born the year before. The expansion of my family didn’t affect my love of music, but the additional mouth to feed hit my family’s bank account in a way that forced me to be more innovative in how I consumed music. I began acquiring most of my music for free (via mp3s) and maintained my live-show diet by getting in for free thanks to my local music blogging credentials. Along with all the free music, a sense of guilt began to fester inside me – I was enjoying all this great artistry but giving basically nothing back to the artists.

Fate intervened, and presented an opportunity for me to alleviate a lot of that guilt: a close friend of mine (hi Ryan!) had been running his own version of a Musical Advent Calendar in the 00’s, and when the effort exceeded his available time, he decided to call it quits with his 2008 list. There was nobody in my circle picking up the slack, so after clearing it with him first, I started up where he left off. I put my own spin on the idea (for one, I expanded from his more traditional 24 advent days to a larger 31 days of the month), bought the URL baconreview.com, and in December of 2009 the Bacon Top 31 was born.¹

17 years later, I’m still here, avidly collecting new music throughout the year, taking in everything I can like a sponge with ears, and then ranking and writing about the artists and albums I’ve loved. The guilt that drove my output in 2009 is no longer there – I spend plenty in support of the artists I listen to, through streaming and vinyl and concerts (just ask my lovely, supportive wife). Today, I share the Top 31 purely out of love — I want you to read, listen to and ultimately fall in love with the albums and artists like I have. And if the artists get some form of additional kickback, all the better. Music sustains us, we sustain music.

Let this year’s spreading of the love of music begin…

TRON: Ares (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Nine Inch Nails

We start the 2025 Bacon Top 31 with an artist whose debut album came out 36 years ago. I’m fairly certain Nine Inch Nails need no formal introduction. But if you’ve not really paid much attention (like me) to Trent Reznor’s movements over the last 20-30 years, let me give you a quick refresher.

Since releasing Pretty Hate Machine in 1989 (!), Reznor has become quite the auteur. He’s released 14 Nine Inch Nails albums and, together with his writing partner Atticus Ross, he’s created the soundtracks for 21 films. The latest Reznor / Ross soundtrack, for 2025’s TRON: Ares, marks the first time they’ve applied the band name Nine Inch Nails to a soundtrack, implying that until now, all previous soundtracks were not worthy of the NIN name.

I concur: their soundtrack to TRON: Ares feels very much like a Nine Inch Nails from my youth. Prior to this album, I think the last NIN album I listened to and actually enjoyed was 1999’s Fragile. Consequently, despite having released multiple NIN albums since 2009, none of those were worthy of the Top 31. In fact, the only time Reznor has appeared on the Top 31 at all was as a collaborator on a couple songs on Fever Ray’s last album, Radical Romantics (#10 back in 2023). I even saw Nine Ince Nails perform on stage in 2014 (with Soundgarden opening!), and yet nothing recorded was hitting me quite like PHM or The Downward Spiral.

Ares is a return to form for Reznor and Ross. This feels like the Nine Inch Nails I loved in the 90’s. Click play on the video above, for the song “As Alive As You Need Me To Be.” So good! I can’t say if the movie is any good, but I am glad to know that should I see it, I’ll at least be entertained by the soundtrack.

^{1. I’m stretching the truth slightly. The url I bought in 2009 was for royalbacon.com, which I’ve not done anything with. I didn’t buy baconreview.com until January 2011, after two years of hosting my blog on tumblr. This is why the earliest posts on baconreview.com (that I migrated over from blogspot) have different formatting and poorly-managed cross-posting links.↩}

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Full Albums
All albums in their entirety

Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

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Radical Romantics by Fever Ray

Welcome to the Top 10 albums of 2023. This is where things really get fun for me, thinking about the albums from the year that I had the most trouble putting down, and what they mean to me and place they occupy in my life.

Fever Ray is the moniker under which Karin Dreijer – half of the groundbreaking electronic duo The Knife – performs, and seeing them appear here in 2023 should not be any surprise. The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual was #29 back in 2013, and both of Dreijer’s earlier Fever Ray releases have appeared on the Top 31 (#18 in 2009 and #21 in 2017). I am always picking up what they’re laying down.

Dreijer, and their nom de plume, Fever Ray, are unlike anything else I currently listen to. In my younger, gothier days I’d cycle through The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie, and the like, and while all of those bands had a particular look to them – liked to wear dark makeup and do funny things with their hair – I would never have said any of them were “in costume.” My days-away from 50-year-old wants to call Fever Ray “goth,” but there’s something more to it. Dreijer and their Fever Ray bandmates are 100% “in costume,” all the time. On the cover to their phenomenal third album, Radical Romantics, Dreijer has a bald cap on, a ringed mane of long thin white hair, and elaborate makeup that would make them a shoe-in for the Ghost of Christmas Past in a revival of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Radical Romantics is Dreijer’s best album since The Knife’s Silent Shout, which came out back in 2006 (better than the two previous Fever Ray albums, and way better than The Knife’s final album, Shaking the Habitual, from 2013). The additional help Dreijer brought onto Romantics likely has something to do with it. In addition to roping in their brother Olof (aka the other half of The Knife) for four songs, Fever Ray also collaborated with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Oscar-winning and Grammy-winning duo behind the soundtracks to 2010’s The Social Network and 2013’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (that’s not to mention Reznor’s other gig) on two songs. You can watch videos for both of those Reznor / Ross songs. The first is featured above, called “Even it Out,” and even shows Reznor and Ross performing within. There are some definite Reznor-like sounds flowing through the song. The other is “North,” a more subdued affair, with similar production to the duo’s soundtrack work. Obviously, Dreijer’s work without the help is great, too (the albums wouldn’t appear here on the Top 31 if I didn’t think so). But when 60% of the songs on the album are essentially The Knife songs or tangential Nine Inch Nails songs, there really is no comparison.

You can watch a couple other videos the band has released from the album: “Kandy” and my favorite track from the album, the opener, “What They Call Us.”

I had the immense pleasure of seeing Fever Ray perform live in November, and it was everything I want out of a live show. Theatrics, costumes, dance routines and throbbing bass make for one hell of an experience. Just last week Fever Ray released a live performance video created for ARTE.tv (“the European Culture Channel”) concert series “Passengers,” called Les Hauts Fourneaux d'Uckange (in English, The Blast Furnaces of Uckange) — an hour-long, extremely well-produced film showing the band perform in an abandoned factory in northern France. I encourage you to watch the performance, as it is nearly 1:1 of what I saw back in November, right down to Dreijer’s deathly makeup, their David-Byrne inspired big suit, and the light-up cloud headpiece worn by the keyboardist. Watching them perform, you’ll start to understand what is so magical about Dreijer and the band.

Radical Romantics is eerie, intense, brooding, and it seeps into every one of your orifices like a thick fog. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

#31 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Nine Inch Nails

#10 on the 2023 Bacon Top 31 — Fever Ray