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New traditions are hard to keep. They take time to develop, to love and live in and through. The speed of our world isn't kind to the slow and steady pace of repetition.  

Here's a tradition that I started six years ago: Name a song, released in January, to set the tone for the year. Previously, I've picked "One at a Time" by Lisel, "The Sun is Setting on the World" by Hatzihristos Apostolos, "milk crates" by Pigeon Pit, "After the Storm" by Yasmin Williams and "The Wilderness / The Color of Gold" by Luxury. What they share in common is the unease, ambition, hope of combination within me at that moment in time. (I have always worn my music on my sleeve.)

I didn't exactly agonize over the 2026 edition; it already feels like we've experienced an entire year in just 21 days, so choosing a song for this little project wasn't exactly top of mind. But, as I often say, music has a way of finding you when you need it. 

Szymon Wójcik's "it's only begun" is a little on the nose, isn't it? Despair, an inclination I have to fight within myself, is right there in the title. For the first two minutes, an electric guitar with an exquisite, obsidian tone strums sparse, discordant notes as skittering cymbals and low drones from a tuba fill the dust around them. And then Sarah Flindst sings: "Don't you worry." Hesitantly, but not blithely. The words that follow feel improvised, or at least written in a "first thought, best thought" fashion. Sound first, feel second. 

The music swells almost like an auditory illusion. In an arrangement that I can only describe as "the noise-rock bummer of Harvey Milk (for chamber ensemble)," strings and brass billow with great bravado, but never burst. What happens ends, yet everything begins again. In that way, "it's only begun" feels exactly like now: overwhelming, mournful and too much at once. And, yet, each time the singer returns to that phrase — don't you worry — a flint is struck. A spark in the dark; it just needs air to breathe. —Lars Gotrich, vikingschoice.org