I keep seeing the same posts everywhere: 2016 vs 2026. Faces, bodies, time collapsed into two images. I understand the urge. Ten years is just enough distance to look without flinching. But I don’t really change in pictures. Not in a way that tells the story.
So I took the train sideways. Instead of showing my face, I looked at my shelves. At the records I bought in 2016. At the music I lived with while everything else was still in draft form. Houses unbuilt. Jobs not started. Children small. Words everywhere.
This is what ten years sound like when you listen backwards.
Some of these albums were everywhere that year. The ones every music lover has on their shelves. A Moon Shaped Pool was unavoidable, and for good reason. Radiohead released an album that sounded like an ending without drama, a band stepping back rather than forward, leaving space where urgency used to be. It’s a record that doesn’t age because it already sounds like memory.
Blackstar by David Bowie belongs to that same category. Not loved by everyone, but owned by almost everyone who cares about music as more than background noise. It’s not a comfortable listen, but it was never meant to be. It marks a moment when pop music stopped pretending it could outlive its makers.
Other records from 2016 slipped past the noise more quietly. Weather Systems by Anathema had already been out for years, but it re-entered my life that year for a simple reason: I lost the CD. I’m fairly sure it was still in the car I sold, left behind in the player like a forgotten note. So I bought the reissued digipack and put it back on the shelf, even though I already owned the original vinyl from 2012. It was their most accessible album, the point where their long, heavy arcs finally opened into something almost weightless. Long songs, yes, but with doors instead of walls. It unfolds like weather rather than narrative, and it suited a year that was all preparation and no arrival.
2016 was also generous to people who listen for atmosphere. Mogwai’s Atomic turned tension into architecture. Ólafur Arnalds released Island Songs, tying music to place in a way that felt intimate without being small. Peter Broderick’s Grunewald walked the line between folk and silence. And then there was A Wave of Endorphins by Her Name Is Calla, a record that never really found the audience it deserved, hovering somewhere between post-rock and song, beautiful in a way that requires patience.
The shelves tell a wider story if you look closely. 2016 was the year Kindly Now by Keaton Henson lived on repeat, the year of returning to foundations: Pink Floyd reissues, The Wall, The Division Bell, records that had already taught me how to listen, now coming back in heavier sleeves, as if they needed to be held again. There were darker corners too: Alcest’s Kodama, Antimatter’s Too Late and Welcome to the Machine, Douglas Dare’s Aforger, music that stays unresolved on purpose. And then the quiet persistence of records like Sivert Høyem’s Lioness or worriedaboutsatan’s Blank Tape, albums that don’t ask for attention but keep it.
Looking back now, it’s the ordinariness of it that stays with me. Records bought, played, shelved. Nothing felt intentional. And yet, the shelves remember more than I do. These are just the 2016 releases. The rest has blurred together, as it does.
I didn’t know the house yet, the one we were still planning and drawing that year, or the work, or the version of me that would come later. Everything was still in draft form. But the music had already been there for a long time, holding the space. And somehow, it still does.
Some records leave. Some come back. And some stay.
Screenshots from my Discogs profile 🙂
reflections of an unquiet mind 