It’s the most wonderful time of the yeeeeeeear! Yes, the Joyzine Advent Calendar is back once again to bring you 24 days of fantastic free music downloads from a amazing array of our favourite artists. This year marks the 21st edition of our online calendar making it (as far as we’re aware) the longest running on the net (though we’re always happy to be corrected). As always, every track is completely free to download and we don’t require you to sign up for a mailing list (though you can if you want to) or hand over your personal data – it’s our way of saying thank you to everyone who’s visited the site during 2024 and to hopefully bring a few more listeners to some very deserving artists.

However, if you do enjoy the tracks we would love you to consider making a donation to our chosen cause, which this year is the wonderful First Timers Fest, a brilliant grassroots DIY organisation helping people take the first step into making music. Alumni include Joyzine faves Big Joanie, Panic Pocket, Charmpit and Breakup Haircut, with many more great bands coming through every year. We asked First Timers for a few words about what they do:

First Timers Fest is all about supporting new people into music! Yes that’s right, we mean you! We demystify the music making process through a series of beginners workshops that encourage people to try something new, no pressure to start a band after. The festival is open to everyone, but we particularly want to encourage people from marginalised groups to apply.

Next year we will be hosting our workshops at the Cavendish in Stockwell but following a sell out festival at the Victoria in Dalston we have decided to host the festival at a much bigger venue: The Oslo Hackney! This will take place on 4th May 2025. See you there!!!

Make a donation to First Timers

We’ve got a sleigh-full of fantastic tracks for you again this year, including some festive tunes, plenty of exclusives and some of our favourite songs of 2024. Let’s get crack(er)ing!

Photograph of the band How To Swim gathered in a living room

Glaswegian odd-pop outfit How To Swim are responsible for one of my favourite albums that I have ever reviewed for this long-established publication. Niagarama is an astonishing shapeshifting beast that manages to be both intensely personal and utterly universal at the same time. It’s a brilliant record that you should take a pause from reading this paragraph to go and listen to now.

Finished? I hope you enjoyed it as much I have done for the 10 years since it was released. 10 years in which I’ve been waiting for a follow up, but despite some excellent EPs, a compilation of curios and some fine singles, a full-length album has yet to see the light of day. Thankfully though our wait will be over soon with the impending release of Greek Active on 20th December.

Impatient as we are for new sounds, we asked for a track for this year’s calendar and the band kindly obliged. We caught up with frontman Gregor Barclay to find out more.

Tell us a little about your track please
‘Soul One’ is an odd one for us, it’s a sleazy slow jam and then it goes a bit Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and then there’s a kinda gentle outro. It’s an outlier – there’s nothing else like it in our catalogue really. But after doing this for 25 years, Bill Murray’s line from the end of Groundhog Day comes to mind: “Anything different is good.”

What have you been up to for the last twelve months?
2024 has been pretty busy for us, probably the busiest since we came back from our wee hiatus in the teens. In March, we put out Bars ‘n’ Loners (a compilation of our three Barcelona-recorded EPs), we’re set to drop Greek Active on December 20th, and then there’s another album and a half in the can to come early next year we hope. The couple music videos we’ve put out recently have also been highlights – ‘Magazines‘ in particular was a blast to make. On the live side, we haven’t been doing as many shows as we’d like – a handful of personnel changes have slowed us down a bit on that front, but we’re aiming to remedy that in ’25 now the new lineup is on its feet.

Christmas songs – love them or hate them?
We love ’em. There’s a real ‘end of term’ energy to your favourite artists’ Christmas tunes – all bets are off, the pursuit of cool gets abandoned for a little bit; there’s something genuine and honest about the best of them.

Download ‘Soul One‘
Make a donation to First Timers

How To Swim: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Youtube

Catch up on all of this year’s Advent Calendar Tracks so far:
1: Piney Gir – Reindeer
2: Gabriel Minnikin – Said Information
3: LOUD WOMEN ft. Smallways, Butterknife, Daddy Issues, Witch Spit, R.U.B, Vipersnatch, Worm Girlz, Lady Lazarus and Stabbitha & The Knifey Wifeys
4: First Timers Fest ft. Gay Skeleton Club and Skutterfly
5: Goo Records ft. Jopy, The Stanford Family Band, Owners Club and The Roebucks
6: Dead Horse – Historic