Music Discovery Digest #5: The Best of The Sound Vault 2025 Edition

The Sound Vault’s most-loved discoveries: Portishead’s essential tracks, Massive Attack’s trip-hop masterpiece, Makis Ablianitis, and the songs you searched most.

I started The Sound Vault with zero expectations.

The plan was simple: write about the songs I loved, dig into their stories, figure out who actually made them. In the streaming era, we’ve lost something essential. We don’t know the musicians anymore. We don’t remember the session players, the engineers, the people who actually created the sounds we love. Independent artists get buried under algorithmic playlists. The human element disappears.

I thought I was alone in caring about this.

Turns out, I wasn’t. The blog grew. Comments started arriving. People shared stories about discovering artists through The Sound Vault that Spotify would never show them. Music communities proved they’re still fighting back against AI recommendations and algorithmic homogenization. Readers told me they were tired of being fed the same 30 artists in different orders.

I learned as much as you did. Every deep dive into a song’s creation story, every exploration of a forgotten album, every spotlight on an artist who deserved more attention changed how I listen to music. And watching which posts resonated most revealed something important about what we’re all searching for.

So before we move forward, I wanted to look back. Here are the discoveries you connected with most, the articles you returned to, the songs you actually searched for after reading. This is what human curation looks like when it works.