2025 has been a huge year for Stef Macbeth, marked by the publication of FOLK and the arrival of his third child. His reading, listening and cultural intake reflect a wide-ranging curiosity – from big, ambitious novels and visionary pop to Panorama Bar epiphanies and conversations on creativity with the likes of Brian Eno and Zadie Smith.

What have you been reading this year?

2025 has been a huge year for me with the birth of our third child in April, around the same time as the arrival of the advanced copies of FOLK.

Reading-wise, I adored Andrew O’Hagan’s big, sweeping London novel Caledonian Road. A proper state-of-the-nation piece, it has that Dickens quality of immersing you in a world that feels so real and urgent and recognisable, with a cracking plot.

I can’t talk about 2025 without giving a plug to Emma Warren’s essential (and very timely) new book Up The Youth Club. Velocity readers will no doubt be familiar with Emma’s previous book, Dance Your Way Home, which I only read this year, and which perfectly sums up what I’ve always believed – how social dancing is this crucial language that connects us to each other and to ourselves.

Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers blew me away with its spare, lyrical sentences that seem to dance off the page. It’s a novella/prose poem in the English folk tale tradition about a grieving father and his two young boys who are visited by a trickster crow. Utterly bewitching.

Finally, for those of you with school-age kids in your life, Michael Rosen’s Uncle Gobb series is riotously fun, smart and irreverent. Both my six-year-old and my eight-year-old thoroughly enjoyed reading them together (and me too).

Any new favourite tracks, records or releases from the year?

This year, Numbers released a 10 Year anniversary edition of PRODUCT. I treated myself to the pink vinyl. To my ears, SOPHIE’s peerless debut anticipated the last decade of pop, yet it still sounds like nothing else. So bold, so wild, so singular in vision and execution. What an incredible talent she was.

Keeping things pop, my favourite new discovery this year is Joshua Idehen. I found him through his Kill The Bill (My spirit is not for kettling) EP, which was released on Optimo Music a couple of years ago but somehow I missed it at the time. His playfully pedagogic banger Mama Does The Washing is now a fixture on the family playlist (my kids think it’s hilarious). Recently, he teased a couple of tracks from the new album, which is coming out in 2026.

Check out his version of Once In A Lifetime as well. It’s brave (foolhardy?) to touch a beloved classic that is already perfect, but his use of the choir for the non-talky bits is inspired, and his delivery brings out new aspects of a song I thought I knew inside out.

At the clubbier end of the spectrum, my old pal Scott Fraser’s long-awaited album ‘Expanded’ is a vivid slice of sumptuous deep techno. File alongside Domenic Capello’s sublime Basement Philosophy album.

Heard any standout DJ sets or been to memorable parties or events?

This year, we lost JD Twitch, which has profoundly affected many of us in the wider Velocity Press community. I don’t want to get into it here, although I did recently share a few personal reflections about Keith over at Substack. In March, I was fortunate enough to catch him and Jonnie play what would turn out to be their final set together in Berlin.

Appropriately, given that Optimo was always on a Sunday, they were given the extended Sunday evening slot at Panorama Bar, playing us through to midnight. As always with Keith and Jonnie, it was epic and wonderful and the dance floor was popping, all smiles and warmth.

Any new favourite films/TV programmes?

I haven’t had a lot of time for telly this year, but I made a rare trip to the cinema for the new Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another. Based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, it has a peculiar vibe (even by PTA standards) but is totally captivating and rewarding and the physical performances are immense. Worth seeing just for Sean Penn’s walk.

Have you been listening to any podcasts, audiobooks or radio shows?

Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Brian Eno is definitely one of my cultural highlights of the year. I’ve been using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” – a set of creative prompts in the form of cards, a bit like Tarot – in my own creative routines for a while now, and he’s just so good on the whole topic of creative practice. In the podcast (which isn’t paywalled last time I looked) they cover loads of ground. His take on AI, given his own experimentations with iterative automation over the years, is well worth hearing.

Literary podcasts can be a bit up themselves, so it’s always refreshing hearing Zadie Smith speak affectionately about, for example, why she still loves clubbing at 50, which she did on the Wildcard podcast. Speaking of literary wild cards, a shout-out to Dua Lipa’s Service 95 books podcast. Her one with Percival Everett was particularly great.

What are your reflections on your book now that it’s out? Has anything surprised you?

Having FOLK out in the wild has given it a life of its own, which I love and which continues to bring surprises. So far, we’ve done three events (one in London, two in Berlin) and each of them has been fun and illuminating in very different ways. It was an honour to launch the book alongside Yushy’s incredible exhibition and to be interviewed about it by Emma Warren, a writer whose work I admire so much (see above).

I’m a big believer that works of fiction are completed by the reader – that is, we bring our own baggage and agenda as readers, and this shapes the experience of what we find on the page. Hearing from my readers, either at events or from the messages I’ve been getting from people, confirms this and is probably the single biggest motivation for me to get the next one done and out there.

What are you looking forward to in 2026?

I’m working on my follow-up to FOLK. It’s a novel that plays very much to this moment. I can’t wait to share it with you all.