Wintercore: a Melancholy Holiday Mixtape

The perfect soundtrack for being surly and introspective in the cold

I do some of my best pensive moping come winter, when it becomes atmospherically appropriate to do so. When the vibrant oranges, reds and yellows turn to dreary blues, greys and whites, the sun sets at 3:30 instead of 6:30 (if it decides to show itself at all throughout the day), and snow begins to fall instead of leaves, the contemplation of another year gone by, an impending homecoming, and a high-stakes family gathering sets in.

As such, my listening becomes somehow even more cathartic than it usually is. However, it is arguably the most bittersweet of seasonal musical choices. Nostalgic, cinematic, orchestral, and emotional, my winter rotation, I found while putting this playlist together, is entirely composed of songs I associate with my hometown, the gain and loss of love, and the simultaneous comfort and discomfort of spending time with family has changed so much. As my mom would say, it’s happy-sad.

So, whether it is scoring a blisteringly cold walk, or a treacherous journey home via plane, train, or automobile, I hope its happy-sadness moves you appropriately. If not, please admire my father on the cover, embodying the emotional labour of the holidays by rigorously brushing snow off the windshield.

“Your Ex Lover is Dead”- Stars

Something about baroque pop elicits a strong need in me to walk pensively through falling snow. I am also a tried and true sucker for a prominent cello melody, an instrument I played all throughout school (I was extremely cool and popular). “Your Ex Lover is Dead” might be one of the best-executed renditions of both of those things I’ve ever heard. Every time I hear that arresting intro of “When there’s nothing left to burn, you set yourself on fire” followed by those melancholic violins, it’s like the world becomes a mid-century black-and-white winter romance film, where the cinematic and the ethereal replace the real for four minutes and fifteen seconds. I’m also more than ready to leave my ex-lover behind in 2025, and experience the bittersweetness of falling in and out of love, remembering everything so well and simultaneously letting it fade away and becoming somehow even more enamoured with the idea of love itself – sensations that find their musical equivalent in this song.

“Black Sheep (Brie Larson Vocal Version)”- Metric, Brie larson

Snow and home are two words that encapsulate winter pretty ubiquitously. And, as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of the great, if not one of the only, snowy, Toronto-set, music movies, I had to include its most iconic track, written by Toronto music icons Metric. It’s impossible not to play this song while I’m walking through the Annex to my brother’s apartment, past Lee’s Palace and where Honest Ed’s used to be (rip, gone too soon), trying to survive the blistering winds that make it impossible to see where I’m going. Envy Adams, you will always be famous.

“Lover’s Spit”- Broken Social Scene

The baroque pop thing and the Toronto bands reminding me of winter thing collide with this song from Broken Social Scene: a Canadian Indie rock collective formed around Kevin Drew—who provides the vocals on this song—and Brendan Canning, with a rotating lineup of Canadian indie heavyweights (including Torquil Campbell of the aforementioned Stars). Drew’s juxtaposition of repetitive lyrics and a slowdance-esque melody with the message of growing out of the idealism of young love perfectly embodies the undeniable ties between melancholy and romance. It will lull you into a blissful stasis, floating out of time, before moving you into a new year, out of the snow, ready to “grow old and do some shit.”

“Pharmacist”- Alvvays

I promise not all of these songs are on here because they are by Toronto bands and make me nostalgic for my hometown. This one still is, however. It was the song Alvvays opened with when I saw them at the first show of their Blue Rev tour, just before Christmas in 2022. I came back from school before I’d even submitted my last final and went with my mom. She parked the car in the snow before we sprinted to the venue to avoid the cold, the cool blue ambiance lighting inside History Toronto echoing the wintery exterior. You could feel the comfort and warmth of a hometown show, an opening show, an indoor show that shields you from the frigid wind coming off the lake. Another song about the dichotomy of homecoming and moving on and growing apart, “Pharmacist” reminds me that coming home doesn’t mean regressing.

“Here’s Where the Story Ends”- the Sundays

“A little souvenir of a terrible year,” in addition to being the infectious refrain of this Sundays classic, is also what this playlist is to me in a way. My ex lover is being left behind, I’m returning home to the throes of familial turmoil, feeling like I’ve completely changed, having become incompatible with the people who used to know me and being anxious to see them again. But the cheeriness of the melody that accompanies these themes in “Here’s Where the Story Ends” gives way to an ironic joy amid the pessimism and cynicism experienced in winter and at the end of the year. A shitty year can be compiled into vignettes and memories that will surprise you by popping into your brain for some time, but thankfully they’re part of a story that is now over.

“My Zero”- Ezra Furman

Ezra Furman is a great example of what happens when an artist is just as much of a poet as they are a musician. Their lyricism always paints such vivid imagery, and for some reason the lyric “I saw her dark hair falling / All down her snow white back”, although it uses snow as a metaphor, always conjures in my mind an image of a Narina-like setting with a lone, angelic female figure standing idle under gentle snowfall. I also remember hearing it for the first time in the first season of “Sex Education”, a show Furman helped soundtrack. It came out in early January of grade eleven, so I holed up inside and watched the entire series in a day while a blizzard wrapped the windows of the townhouse we were forced to rent after our basement flooded and all our water pipes froze. A good song like “My Zero” has the power to make you long for even the terrible circumstances winter has to offer.