The Soundtrack of My College Years: A Timeline (Ages 16–20)

There's something slightly embarrassing about tracing the music you listened to as a teenager. It's a bit like reading your old diary: you recognise yourself in it, but the version you find there is gangly and unfinished, still working out what they actually like versus what they've decided they like because it fits a narrative they're constructing about themselves.

I'm doing it anyway.

This is a rough timeline of the music that followed me from sixteen to twenty – through college, through mental health wobbles, through discovering who I actually am versus who I thought I was. And for once, I don't have to rely purely on memory. Between Spotify's play history and my scrobble records – the vast majority of which are sitting in Teal.fm thanks to Malachite , a conversion tool I built myself because one didn't exist and that was annoying – I've got almost 89,000 plays logged across the full period to keep me honest.

Age 16 (Sep 2021–Aug 2022): The Eclectic Phase

My listening at sixteen was, to put it charitably, all over the place.

The data bears this out. In the first few months alone I'm going between Dagames and Lil Nas X, between YOASOBI and Arlo Parks, between Wellerman sea shanty remixes and Chicane. The top track of the year is Leslie Wai's Nocturnal (189 plays), followed closely by YOASOBI's 怪物 (185 plays). That's a pretty decent summary of the era: atmospheric electronic music and J-pop-adjacent songs I had no real vocabulary for but kept returning to anyway.

Chicane was already there. Autumn Tactics, No Ordinary Morning, Don't Give Up – they show up from the very first scrobble on record, which makes sense, because I grew up with them. Chicane, The Prodigy, the Black Eyed Peas – that particular early-2000s blend was just in the air when I was small, and some of it lodged permanently. Chicane especially. There's something about their particular brand of trance-not-quite-trance that I've never fully explained to anyone's satisfaction, including my own. It's patient music. Music that doesn't try to make you feel anything specific and succeeds extremely well at making you feel something specific.

Then April and May 2022 happened, and the data gets strange in a very telling way. The scrobble count spikes dramatically – over 7,000 plays across two months – and the artists shift almost entirely to ambient and focus music. Leonid Antonov, Sohn Aelia, Euloria, composers I couldn't give you a biography of even now. Music for working. Or for avoiding having to think. Possibly both.

And in the middle of all that ambient fog: AURORA.

Running With The Wolves appeared in April 2022, and I played it 73 times in those two months alone. Over the full five-year period it would rack up 466 plays, making it the third most-played track in my entire history. I also went on to play the WolfWalkers version separately another 127 times, because apparently that distinction mattered to me. It still does. The song had been the Wolfblood theme for Series 3 through 5, so it wasn't just AURORA – it was AURORA filtered through years of already loving what it was attached to. That's a slightly different relationship with a piece of music, and I think it shows in the play count.

Age 17 (Sep 2022–Aug 2023): The Kurzgesagt Year

If you had to characterise seventeen in a single phrase, it would be: existential dread, but pleasantly scored.

Epic Mountain – the composers behind the Kurzgesagt soundtracks – absolutely dominated this year with 1,341 plays. To put that in context, the second-place artist was CG5 with 797. The most-played track was Epic Mountain's Optimistic Nihilism, which feels almost too on-the-nose. I was eighteen months out of the worst of COVID lockdowns, still processing what that year alone in my room had actually done to me, and apparently the correct soundtrack for that was ambient music about the heat death of the universe being fine, actually.

I wasn't wrong. It helped.

CG5 was important this year in ways I find hard to articulate. Children of the Machine, Out of My Mind, Drift Away – music that sits in the space between game OST and proper pop, with a slightly elevated emotional register that I clearly needed. Bo Burnham's Welcome to the Internet also appeared (156 plays), which was probably less a musical discovery and more a diagnostic tool.

The other thing that happened this year: A Promise That I Keep. The Wolfblood theme, as covered by Geek Music. 308 plays in this year alone, 365 across the whole period. I posted on here recently asking Debbie Moon – the show's creator – if she had a master copy anywhere online. She replied. I will not pretend that wasn't completely surreal. The person who made the show that shaped an embarrassingly large portion of my inner life, replying to a question I asked on a social media platform. The nostalgic itch that prompted the question has clearly been running for years, and apparently it goes all the way to the source.

Chicane persisted quietly through all of this. Don't Give Up remains one of those tracks I return to without quite deciding to.

Age 18 (Sep 2023–Aug 2024): Ethan Bortnick and the New Arrivals

Eighteen is where things start to crystallise in a way I recognise from where I am now.

Ethan Bortnick arrived on the 8th of March 2024 and immediately became the dominant force. engravings – 390 plays at age 18 alone, 637 total across the whole period, making it the single most-played track in my entire scrobble history. cut my fingers off at 322 plays in the same year (535 total, second overall). For context: nothing else comes close. These aren't just frequently-played tracks; they're the kind of thing you put on when you don't know what else to put on, and they work regardless of what your emotional state is.

Dagames peaked this year too, at 1,031 plays. Are You Proud Of Me Now? is the standout, with 258 plays across the year and 331 total – a track that does something I can't fully describe without sounding like I'm being precious about it. It hits a particular note, literally and figuratively.

January 2024 brought a cluster of new arrivals: Night Club, Kavinsky, Motionless in White. Kavinsky's Nightcall would end up with 311 plays total (mostly this year), partly because it's an exceptional piece of electronic music and partly because I'd decided it was the theme song for my DnD character Cailean – a chaotic good werewolf barbarian. The connection felt thematically appropriate. Still does. That synthwave sound, the city at 3am quality, started threading through everything I reached for from this point onwards.

Night Club's Survive ended up with 347 total plays. Motionless in White's Werewolf at 186. You can probably see the through-line developing.

Age 19 (Sep 2024–Aug 2025): The Year of Powerwolf (and 30,000 Plays)

This year has 29,958 scrobbles. The next closest year has 15,707. I don't fully know what to do with that information except to note that something happened in autumn 2024 that changed my relationship with music in a fairly fundamental way.

What happened was Powerwolf.

They first appear in my history on the 16th of November 2024. By the end of the year they had 4,960 plays. February 2025 was the single biggest month in my entire scrobble history: 5,615 plays, of which 1,606 were Powerwolf.

Powerwolf are a German power metal band with an aesthetic built around Catholic imagery, gothic excess, and wolves. Army of the Night. Venom of Venus. Lupus Dei. Wake Up the Wicked (288 plays – their most-played track in my history). Thunderpriest. 1589. The list goes on, and then continues for a while after that.

The wordplay in the name, which I clocked at roughly two in the morning some months after I found them, operates on two levels simultaneously: "Power Wolf" collapsed into one word, yes, but also po-Werwolf – Werwolf being the German cognate to the English "werewolf." That's a band name doing multiple things at once. I sat with that for a while.

It fits. That's the thing. Every element of what Powerwolf do – the wolf mythology, the theatrical commitment, the production that takes itself absolutely seriously whilst being completely unhinged – maps onto the part of my brain that's been running the lycanthropy special interest for twelve-odd years. Finding them felt less like discovering a new band and more like something slotting into place.

Cjbeards and Moon Walker both arrived in February 2025, right at the height of it, and stuck. Cjbeards – ambient, textured, thoughtful electronic compositions – at 1,326 plays this year. Moon Walker, whose New God I would later recognise someone humming from across a room, at 1,028. Thomas Haines at 996. Ethan Bortnick held strong at 1,137, because some loyalties are not easily displaced.

My Spotify Wrapped 2025 confirmed all of this: Powerwolf first, Cjbeards second, Moon Walker third. 56,642 minutes listened. Power Metal as my top genre. Top 0.03% of Powerwolf listeners globally – ranked 1,252nd in the world.

I posted the Wrapped directly at Powerwolf's Bluesky account. Seemed appropriate.

Age 20 (Sep 2025–Feb 2026, Ongoing): Consolidation and New Threads

The data here only covers a partial year, but the shape of it is already clear.

Powerwolf remains number one. Cjbeards number two. New arrivals are appearing: Animal Sun, Call Me Karizma, Self Deception, Fish in a Birdcage, Sabaton – and THØRNS, a covers project whose catalogue overlaps heavily with Powerwolf, which tells you something about how I found them.

Sabaton is interesting as a counterpoint: both are power metal, both are theatrical, but where Powerwolf is gothic and wolfish and Catholic, Sabaton is rigidly historical – songs about specific battles, specific people, specific moments. Different flavour of excess. Both scratch the same general brain region.

The ambient phases still happen. They always have; I suspect they always will. But the core of my listening is metal now in a way it wasn't at seventeen, when Epic Mountain was the dominant force. The two things coexist without any real tension, which probably says something about what I was using each of them for all along.

What It All Adds Up To

Chart it, and there's a visible arc. It starts scattered and curious – sea shanties and J-pop and trance-adjacent ambient, with a consistent thread of atmospheric music that I couldn't quite name. Then it sharpens: Epic Mountain, Ethan Bortnick, the soundtracks and the dark electronic work, everything starting to cohere around mood and texture. Then Powerwolf arrives and everything accelerates.

The through-line, the thing that connects AURORA's Running With The Wolves at sixteen to Powerwolf's Lupus Dei at nineteen, was always there. I just didn't always have the vocabulary for it. Wolfblood gave me the interest. The ambient years gave me the patience. Ethan Bortnick gave me the emotional register. Powerwolf gave me the volume.

A Promise That I Keep – the Wolfblood theme, 383 plays and counting – is probably the most honest single data point in all 89,000 of them. A piece of music from a CBBC show, listened to across nearly four years of college, because some things you just don't grow out of. You just find more things that rhyme with them.

The music you listen to at sixteen is embarrassing for a reason: it's you, unguarded, reaching for something that makes sense of the noise. Looking back at mine, I don't cringe much. I mostly think: yeah, that tracks.

Scrobbles are public on my Teal.fm profile. The history goes back to September 2021 and I have no intention of stopping. Worth noting: almost the entire history — around 88,400 of the 88,936 plays — was imported via Malachite , a Spotify/Last.fm to Teal.fm conversion tool I built myself out of frustration that one didn't already exist. If you want your own scrobble history in Teal, it's there.