Five minutes before the beginning of 2025, Otto Benson and Mietze Conte dropped Hobby’s, a seven-track collaboration that sounds like a spontaneous burst of creativity, which is very much a result of project’s process: Hobby’s was created in a total of three days at the New York studio of Melody English and Sam Glock, also known as the band Test Subjects.

On Hobby’s, the Brooklyn-based Benson’s wiggly sound is fused with the Austria-born Conte’s knack for Eurodance earworms. It’s all pretty casual, though. The record’s sonics—both mangled and twee, blippy and organic—bear the mark of Benson, but there is something else at play here, the kind of melody that could only come from deep in the Austrian mountains, the kind of melody that makes you want to put your hands in the air and start crying, and that’s thanks to Conte. All but one song is under two minutes. A fantastic way to get your 2025 into gear.