Why I Still Listen to Albums from Start to Finish

A reflection on music, menus, and learning to accept change...

Now before you move on wondering why the hell I’ve randomly decided to write about music, hear me out. And if you’ve been here a while, you’ll know I mentioned recently that I had something brewing on this topic. This is just one of a few pieces I’ve been wanting to write—but it felt like a good place to start.

I used to love writing album reviews as if one day… I might end up in the pages of a music magazine, like William in Almost Famous. Now obviously those daydreams are long gone, but I still find myself sitting with a new record and listening to it exactly how it was meant to be heard: from the first track to the last. No shuffle. No skipping ahead. Just trusting the order the artist chose, and however it was chosen.

There’s something incredibly special about that.

An album, when it’s done well, is structured like a great menu. There are peaks, pauses, contrasts. A bright opener that wakes you up. Something deeper and heavier in the middle. A moment of reflection before the final note. Of course, there are favourites—you always have the dish you’d happily order again and again—but if you only ever return for that one plate, you miss the full experience the chef designed.

Music works this same way.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the contrast between albums like BRAT and other records that feel almost like the opposite side of the same person. That kind of polarising shift is part of what makes artists interesting. It’s the same thing you see across Billie Eilish’s work—from When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? to Happier Than Ever and then Hit Me Hard and Soft. Each one captures a different emotional temperature.

Artists like Charli XCX or Billie aren’t the only ones navigating this. Think about bands like Kings of Leon, Red Hot Chili Peppers, artists like J Cole, Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar. Over decades, their sound has shifted, softened, hardened, matured. Sometimes fans celebrate that evolution, and sometimes they push back.

But evolution is the point.

The pressure on artists—especially after a successful album—is enormous. When something resonates with people, the expectation is often to replicate it. Do it again. Deliver the same sound, the same energy, the same feeling.

But humans don’t work like that.

We change year to year. What we experience changes us. What we want to say changes. The things we’re curious about shift.

Cooking is no different.

If I served the exact same menu forever because one dish became popular, I’d stop growing as a chef. Ingredients shift with the seasons. Your palate changes. New ideas emerge from travel, from conversations, from mistakes in the kitchen that suddenly become discoveries.

Menus should evolve the same way albums do.

Sometimes a dish is louder, brighter, more chaotic. Sometimes it’s restrained and quiet. Sometimes you revisit an idea years later with a completely different perspective. That doesn’t mean one menu is “better” than another—it just means it belongs to a different moment in time.

That’s why I find it difficult when people say things like “they’re not the same anymore” or “this album isn’t as good as the last one.”

Of course it’s not the same.

It shouldn’t be.

And maybe there’s something bigger in that.

If we allow ourselves to sit with a new album that sounds completely different—whether it’s Charli XCX leaning further into chaos, Billie Eilish exploring vulnerability, or even Childish Gambino, J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar approaching a new phase of their writing—we’re actually practicing something quite important: getting comfortable with change.

Humans are strangely vulnerable to change.

We struggle with ageing. Birthdays feel heavier every year. Politics shifts and unsettles us. Migration reshapes cultures and communities. Even the smallest shifts in our personal lives can make us uncomfortable.

But what if we trained ourselves, in small ways, to respond differently?

Something as simple as listening to a new album from start to finish—even when it sounds unfamiliar—can be a tiny exercise in openness. In curiosity rather than judgement. Just pausing for a moment before deciding whether we like something.

Because sometimes the first reaction to something new is resistance. But if you sit with it a little longer, you begin to understand what the artist was trying to do. You see the intention, the risk, the vulnerability behind it.

The first time someone tastes something unfamiliar—fermented shrimp, bitter herbs, funkier flavours—it can feel confronting. But curiosity opens the door to understanding. And once you understand something, it’s much harder to reject it outright.

And there’s another trap we fall into that might be even more damaging: comparison.

Comparing one album to another can quietly rob us of the joy of experiencing either of them. We do this constantly in life. People compare cities, restaurants, holidays. I hear it all the time when people travel—especially in places like Thailand—“this city is better than that city,” or even worse, comparing entire countries as if they exist on some universal ranking system.

It’s a strange habit we’ve developed.

You can prefer something, of course. Preference is natural. But saying something is better is loaded with so much personal context—where you were in your life, who you were with, what you ate, how you felt that day.

Those things can never be replicated exactly.

So when we frame experiences purely through comparison, we set ourselves up to be dissatisfied. Nothing will ever fully live up to something else, because it isn’t meant to. And worse, when we speak about experiences that way, we can unintentionally rob someone else of the chance to enjoy them on their own terms. We taint the moment before they’ve even had it.

Albums deserve their own space. Cities deserve their own space. Meals deserve their own space.

Maybe that’s why I still love listening to albums the way they were designed—from start to finish. They remind me that growth isn’t repetition, and experience isn’t a competition. It’s just a journey you’re invited to sit with for a while.

And maybe the real lesson—whether it’s music, food, travel, or life—is this:

The moment we stop comparing experiences is usually the moment we finally start enjoying them.

Love you all and take care xxx