I've been keeping lists of albums since middle school, ranked, re-ranked, argued over, then re-ranked again at 2am when I should've been sleeping.
I'm a senior studying Information Science at UW-Madison. Most of my coursework lives at the intersection of data and how people interact with it, which is a very polite way of saying I spend a lot of time thinking about systems. Music is the one place where I completely abandon any attempt at being systematic and just feel things.
This site is the experiment: what happens when you put both sides together? The pipeline pulls data from Spotify, cleans it, and uses cosine similarity to surface recommendations. The reviews are just me, listening, and writing what I actually think. No scoring rubrics, no genre gatekeeping, no affiliate links sending you somewhere I get paid to send you.
The name comes from something I actually believe: every album deserves more than one listen before you decide what it is. First impressions are usually wrong. Some of the records I love most sounded like nothing to me the first time I played them.
If you're here because you love music the way I do, obsessively, messily, maybe a little too much, you're in the right place.