Top 10 of the First Half of 2026

Welcome to Songs That Don't Suck.

What's up, friend? Welcome to Songs That Don't Suck.

My name is Mark, and we have reached the halfway point in Season 4.

That's right, half of 2026 is behind us, and I want to take a moment and share with you the top 10 tracks that I have found so far, in my opinion.

Now, I like to share a little bit of history about how I started this because in 2023, the podcast was, you know, in its infancy.

And on the 27th episode, I searched and searched for songs and I couldn't find a single one worth of crap.

It was a horrible week of new music and I was panicked.

And I was like, what am I going to do? And in looking at the calendar, I realized that 26 episodes makes up basically the first half of the year.

And I was like, well, I could do like a first six month review kind of thing.

So I got creative and I came up with this idea to do a mid-year recap.

This is the fourth annual such recap.

And And, you know, why mess with a good thing? It's a nice break.

It gives me a moment to pause and reflect.

So if you listen each week, you know, as well as I know, some weeks are just better than others when it comes to the music that I find.

And we all have our favorites.

But make absolutely no mistake.

If it's on this podcast, it has earned its spot on the playlist.

But some songs just naturally will float to the top.

Like they end up in high rotation for me.

They're on my personal playlists that I build.

And because of that, it gets fed into the algorithm and it shows up on Spotify's generated playlists for me.

It's like they go viral in my own little personal ecosystem.

So I think it's worth paying a little tribute to these songs.

How do I get to this top 10? Well, there's two things really, right? My gut is the first one because I know what I'm hearing.

I know what songs I've put on my playlists.

I know what I hear throughout the day.

And without a doubt, there are ones that I gravitate towards.

And the second one is data.

If you know me, if you're a longtime listener, you know I love data.

I love talking about data.

And I love nothing more than getting into my listening data to see how much time I've actually spent dedicated to these top songs.

And it's funny because this year I actually had a list of about 20 songs that I was like, these should be included in the Mid-Year Recap.

And I thought about expanding it to do a top 20 songs.

But I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

I forced myself to kick some people out of the pool and whittle it down and just do the standard top 10.

So it's also worth mentioning that when I do these recaps, I do pull out the larger artists or artists that I have a long history with.

Um, so this year I pulled out Tom Morello.

I pulled out, um, Pustifer.

I pulled out Silver Sun Pickups.

Um, and honestly, those are the only three that I felt the need to pull out.

Um, and I'm proud of that because I always feel like a bit of a sellout when I have like big artists, um, you know, with millions of listeners.

Um, cause I do like to try and focus on artists that are kind of scratching and clawing in the music biz and give them a little bit of, you know, a little bit of sparkle, a little bit of shine.

So, out of 118 songs from the first half of the year, here are the top 10.

I'm going to present these songs in the order that they appeared on the podcast, starting with the earliest episode of Season 4.