There's a moment around mile two where I stopped cataloging the tracklist and started moving like I'd forgotten what my legs were supposed to complain about. LCD Soundsystem kicked it off with "Tribulations" — the edit, not the album version, which tells you something about whoever made this thing. They know the difference. Goldfrapp's "Train" follows, and suddenly we're not in indie dance territory anymore, we're in art pop, which is just a fancy way of saying "electronica that read Barthes in college."
This playlist runs at 119 BPM average, which on paper sounds like recovery pace, something you'd put on for an easy Sunday shuffle. But here's what's weird: it doesn't feel slow. The tempo sits right in that zone where your stride locks in without effort, where you're not chasing anything, just maintaining. Coast Modern shows up twice — "The Way It Was" and "Hollow Life" — and both times it feels like the exact temperature the run needs at that exact moment. That's curation, not accident.
The genres here — alternative dance, electroclash, art pop, trip hop, new rave — read like the record bins at a store that couldn't decide if it wanted to be cool or profitable. I had a kid in the store last week asking where to find "genre-fluid electronic stuff," and I almost pointed him to this tracklist. It's DFA Records meeting electroclash meeting the Raveonettes' garage psych, and somehow it works because none of it takes itself too seriously. "Bohemian Like You" by The Dandy Warhols sits dead center, and if you don't understand why that song belongs on a running playlist, you've never felt the specific joy of running to something that sounds effortless even though you know it isn't.
Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Trick Pony" arrives at exactly the moment you need something French and detached and vaguely unsettling. It's produced by SebastiAn, who built his reputation on making pop music sound like it's coming through a broken radio in a good way. That track into Lewis Del Mar's "Painting (Masterpiece)" — that's the stretch where the playlist stops being about running and starts being about why you needed to leave your apartment in the first place.
Here's the thing about this tracklist: it's not trying to push you. It's not aggressive. Sir Sly's "&Run" and Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe" both have this patient insistence, like they know you'll catch up eventually. Even the David Guetta track — "Silver Screen (Shower Scene)" — doesn't sound like David Guetta. It sounds like what Guetta was doing before he became a festival headliner, back when he was just a French house DJ trying to make something weird work.
The playlist ends with Miike Snow's "Lonely Life," which is either perfect or cruel depending on how your run went. I've decided it's both. The track fades out right when you need it to, and you're left standing on the lakefront path, overdressed because you thought it was still cold, watching joggers in shorts pass by, wondering if the run solved anything. It didn't. It never does. But for forty-seven minutes, you weren't thinking about the store, or the regular who comes in every week to tell me vinyl peaked in 1973, or the fact that you reorganized the electronica section three times this month and it still doesn't make sense.
Top 5 Songs That Made Me Feel 22 Again (Not In a Good Way): LCD Soundsystem's "Tribulations" — James Murphy yelling about how "everybody makes mistakes" while a cowbell refuses to quit, reminding me of every DJ night at Empty Bottle where I thought I was discovering something the rest of the world missed (I wasn't). The Dandy Warhols' "Bohemian Like You" — Courtney Taylor-Taylor sounding like he doesn't care, which is the most effort you can possibly put into sounding like you don't care. The Raveonettes' "Love In a Trashcan" — garage rock meets Phil Spector's wall of sound, exactly the kind of thing I'd put on a mixtape to prove I had range (I didn't). !!!'s "Myth Takes" — dance-punk that made me believe moving your body and thinking about Foucault weren't mutually exclusive activities (they are). Coast Modern's "Hollow Life" — indie pop with enough reverb to make you think your early twenties had a cinematic quality they absolutely did not possess.
