For our first episode of 2026 we're back in relatively recent times (although longer ago than you'd expect 2010 to be!), where we discuss our favourite songs of the year, including Electropop bangers, Blackened prog, & hour long noise jams, plus unexpected jazz appreciation, Beautiful baritone vocals, and the best mispronounciation of a member of Sigur Rós I've ever heard...

We've each chosen our 10 favourite songs of the year and sent them over to Colin's wife Helen, who put the playlists together and distributed them so we were each given a playlist of the 20 songs from the other two hosts, along with our own 10. We then ranked the playlists in order of preference and sent them back to Helen, who totalled up the points and worked out the order. She also joined us on the episode to read out the countdown, which we found out as we recorded so all reactions are genuine.

Now, admittedly, in parts we're a little bit brutal to some of the songs in the list as we're three separate people with differing music tastes, but please remember that to be in this episode at all the songs have to have been in one of our top 10's of that year.

Bands featured in this episode include (In alphabetical order, no spoilers here!) - Agalloch, S. Carey, Caribou, Clever Girl, El Goodo, Everything Everything, The Fall, Fear Factory, Foals, Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, Goldfrapp, Gorillas ft Gruff Rhys and De La Soul, John Grant, Grinderman, Ihsahn, ILIKETRAINS, Jónsi, Kayo Dot, LCD Soundsystem, Liars, Linkin Park, Massive Attack, Merzbow, Dan Michaelson, The National, Red Sparowes, Robyn, Teenage Fanclub, Terror, & Warpaint

Find all songs in alphabetical order here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50k4w0QBaammhPgSCnUj0A?si=05cc225aed9d4e12

Find our We Dig Music Pollwinners Party playlist (featuring all of the winning songs up until now) here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/45zfDHo8zm6VqrvoEQSt3z?si=Ivt0oMj6SmitimvumYfFrQ

If you want to listen to megalength playlists of all the songs we've individually picked since we started doing best of the year episodes (which need updating but I plan on doing them over the next few months or so), you can listen to Colin's here – https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5x3Vy5Jry2IxG9JNOtabRT?si=HhcVKRCtRhWCK1KucyrDdg
Ian's here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2H0hnxe6WX50QNQdlfRH5T?si=XmEjnRqISNqDwi30p1uLqA
and Tracey's here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2p3K0n8dKhjHb2nKBSYnKi?si=7a-cyDvSSuugdV1m5md9Nw

The playlist of 20 songs from the other two hosts was scored as usual, our favourite song got 20 points, counting down incrementally to our least favourite which got 1 point. The scoring of our own list of 10 is now slightly more complicated in order to give a truer level of points to our own favourites. So rather than them only being able to score as many points as our 10th favourite in the other list, the points in our own list were distributed as follows -

1st place - 20 points
2nd place - 18 points
3rd place – 16 points
4th place – 14 points
5th place – 12 points
6th place – 9 points
7th place – 7 points
8th place – 5 points
9th place – 3 points
10th place -1 point

Hosts - Ian Clarke, Colin Jackson-Brown & Tracey B
Guest starring Helen Jackson-Brown.
Playlist compiling/distributing – Helen Jackson-Brown
Recorded/Edited/Mixed/Original Music by Colin Jackson-Brown for We Dig Podcasts
Thanks to Peter Latimer for help with the scoring system.

Part of the We Dig Podcasts network along with Free With This Months Issue & Pick A Disc.

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