MINNESOTA SOUND REVIEWS - 1/5/2026 (Not on Spotify)
Reviews by: Katy Tessman, Writer @summit.presents
Edited by: Andrew Perrizo, Owner/Editor @PlaylistTC
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Choosing Presence Over Platforms: Artists Who Left Spotify Behind in 2025
In 2025, a noticeable shift emerged as some artists chose to stop releasing new singles on Spotify. Not because they stopped making music, but because the platform increasingly felt misaligned with their needs and values. Concerns around low compensation, unclear enforcement policies, and the growing distance between corporate priorities and artist support led many to rethink where and how they shared their work. For some, the cost of participation began to outweigh the benefits. What followed wasn’t silence, but redirection. These artists kept releasing music, choosing intention over algorithms and presence over metrics, even if it meant stepping away from the most dominant platform in the room.
Taylor James Donskey “Gimme Some Time” (February 23, 2025)
This song comes from the early hours of the COVID-19 pandemic, when musicians and audiences alike were quietly wondering if live performance would ever return. Taylor James Donskey captures the suspended unreality of that night, when playing one more song felt like a way to hold time still. Lines like, “You don’t spill your secrets when you’re singing like a bird,” understand how music can feel like honesty while still offering cover. “Give us some time and I’ll give you a song,” lands as both a promise and a delay, a way of asking for just a little more night before everything changed. The song carries warmth and unease in equal measure, honoring that fragile moment before the world went silent. It’s a quiet tribute to the instinct musicians share: keep playing, even when you don’t know what comes next.
Maddie Thies and Lucas Rollo “Owie” (April 24, 2025)
“Owie” dives straight into the kind of internal spiral most people are too scared to name. The song circles the exhaustion of bending, breaking, and pretending you can keep doing both, with Maddie Thies and Lucas Rollo each singing and playing bass, their two voices blurring together like competing thoughts inside the same head. That mirrored structure gives the repetition real weight, turning it into the sound of a mental loop you can’t step out of. Lines about fighting time and brushing the edges of despair land with an honesty that’s hard to shake. If Thies’ 2022 Cedar Cultural Center commission recognized her promise as a young artist, “Owie” makes a clear case for how far that promise has grown, deeper, darker, and more fearless.
Clayton Ryan “Dopamine” (August 4, 2025)
“Dopamine” finds Clayton Ryan turning his gaze inward, tracing the long arc from childhood wonder to adult burnout with unsettling clarity. Built on guitars, banjo, and his own unvarnished vocals, the song lurches between humor and despair, using memories of dinosaurs, playground curiosity, and teenage laughter to measure what’s been lost along the way. Ryan’s voice is as big and unavoidable as his 6'6" frame, filling the song with a presence that makes the emotional drop-offs hit harder. The chorus lands like a plea rather than a hook, asking where the joy went and why it doesn’t come back the way it used to. Self-produced, the track lets the cracks stay visible. It’s a song about chasing feeling itself, and realizing how hard it is to catch once it starts running.
Laura Hugo “Radio” (November 29, 2025)
“Radio” arrives after a long stretch of silence, and fans who have been waiting patiently for new music from Laura Hugo will find it worth the wait. Drawing on her roots in Teec Nos Pos on the Navajo Nation, Hugo weaves memory, place, and survival into a song that feels both intimate and expansive. Since moving to Minnesota in 2010, she’s written from lived experience, using grief, mental health, and uncertainty as raw material rather than spectacle. In “Radio,” the dial becomes both refuge and release, a way to steady herself amid emotional noise. The arrangement instantly sets the song in motion, pulling the listener into a road-trip mindset where the radio becomes a companion and a guide. After so much time away, the song feels less like a return and more like a signal finding its way back through the static.
