We did it. Well, I did it. I got through the 12th annual Hooptober marathon, reviewing 31 films with only one re-watch, and I ALSO finished the 900-page biography of the Grateful Dead, complete with deep dives into their studio discography (well, up to Blues for Allah, anyway) with detours to some of their best live documents. Now it’s November and I have stacks of CDs and vinyl arranged according to 2025 releases and older box sets and reissues I want to try and get through before the end of the year. So despite the massive stacks of album in the queue, this does feel like a calm. So let’s get into this week’s playlist, half of which are new releases and the other half is more of the stuff recently arrived in Consuming HQ.