What's immediately followed by one of the best part of winter –which is obviously end of year lists– is just this slight feeling of dread when we all discover that we haven't actually seen any of the movies nominated for all the awards, bought any of the recommended products that are now discounted, and don't even recognise the names of the artists (let alone the albums!) that are nominated to be the absolute best of the best of the year.

Most people shrug all this 'new music' off with a "they just don't make it like they used to" and move on. But if you're getting tired of the same songs in a different order (to mix it up!); allow us please, if you will, to demonstrate that some phenomenal work was indeed released in the year 2018.

Every year when glancing over the Grammy nominations and the NME end of year list and the Billboard '100 best tracks of the year' and the lists from NPR and The Line of Best Fit and all the other ones – there are loads of things we've simply missed entirely, every single year. And it is overwhelming. I used to wish that somebody could just make one playlist with ehh... like "the gist of the best".

And when we couldn't find a satisfactory playlist that covered this criterion, we made our own last year – aptly titled "Best of 2017". It was inspired by the 'industry buzz' but we'd filter it ourselves. So all these recommendations and best albums and best songs got dumped into one giant playlist that slowly got wiggled down to about a 4-hour long one. We knew it was good when it wasn't jarring to the non-music-obsessives, but would make industry folks go "wait, what's this" when it'd be running in the background.

The 'Best of 2017' became PROMOGOGO's most ever followed playlist – and it holds up really well actually if you want to listen. But obviously what you came here for, is the 'Best of 2018' list. Find a SoundsGood embed below, which means you can locate it on a number of streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc).

There are a lot of really great finds in there – work by amazing artists who are in various stages of their careers. Some are the biggest acts of the year, others haven't made it to 1,000 monthly listens on Spotify (yet!).

If you were worried about "having to listen to rap music now" since that is what "the kids these days listen to", there is some really interesting work happening in that space that isn't just spewing profanities through the speakers. While there certainly are 'explicit' tracks on the list, it should still be office-friendly enough for shared listening.

And while the GRAMMYs and the music magazines are held to a standard of depth and breadth and accurate time periods and listing the top 100 and all that, we made this playlist literally under the banner of the 'gist of the best'. Think of it as the headlines. It's not the full story by a longshot, but there should be enough to spark interest and dig a lot deeper. It is a carefully selected curation of the very best of 2018.

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