Semisonic - This Will Be My Year

If you made it through the madness of the holidays to find yourself at the very last Rock Song of the Week pick for 2025 - congratulations! Our humble opinions and wonderful song choosing abilities are nothing without the brilliant ears and eyes of you lovely lot for them to land on, so as always, we are utterly grateful for you all. We also hope your holidays have been as good as they possibly can. We’re currently wondering here in RSOTW Towers if we have enough of those foil mince pie trays to squash into a big ball and sell for scrap to recoup some losses. And by recoup, we mean “buy more of” and by losses we mean “mince pies”.

Yes, the year might be winding down, but we’ve still got one more treat to shake out of the proverbial stocking for you. While you may remember Minneapolis-based post-grunge merchants Semisonic for some of their more famous efforts in radio stalwart Secret Smile and perennial nightclub kicking out song Closing Time, their mostly lauded 1998 album had more tracks than that, if you can believe it. Mostly might be doing some heavy lifting, there; anyone who takes music too seriously hated it (Robert Christgau deemed it not worthy to spend words on reviewing, and that man couldn’t wait to tell you what he thought about music). Still, despite its slightly morose tones, the earworm qualities and stark relevance of This Will Be My Year stuck out to us as a great pick to close out 2025. And that’s not only because we were starting to run out of artists who have covered Auld Lang Syne to use, either. 

While that melancholy edge might seem counterintuitive, think of it like this. Let’s be honest; it has really sucked out there in large chunks for the last year for many people; some other people out there seem to want that to continue to be the case. We want everyone to look back on that sadness from the rear view going forward, so take this one last little piece of forlornness (which is still a great track, I might be underselling that) and go forward into a better and much brighter new year. From our Rock and Metal corner of the Internet straight to your hearts, minds and ears, we all hope you have a New Year filled with aspirations fulfilled, joy experienced, and gym memberships renewed for at least six months. We promise to practice what we preach on at least two of those three, but we can guarantee we will see you for even more top-shelf picks in 2026. See you there!