Are You Listening?

Joy Road Media

264 episodes listed below

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Album arguments with homework and history.

The gist

Are You Listening? follows Scott and Brand as they bring albums to the table, compare notes, wander into side arguments, and eventually land on a verdict. Punk, metal, grunge, hip-hop, classic rock, and pop-adjacent records all get filtered through history, jokes, nostalgia, and half-skeptical curiosity.

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About Are You Listening?

Are You Listening? is an album-discussion show powered by friendship more than polish. Scott and Brand sit down with a record, then let the conversation find its own route through the songs, the artist, the surrounding era, and whatever personal memory gets knocked loose along the way. It is structured, but not stiff. The show often starts with a bit of weather-talk nonsense, intro confusion, or a small argument that has almost nothing to do with the album, then quietly uses that looseness to make the music feel lived-in. Records are not treated like sealed museum pieces. They are remembered, doubted, defended, teased, ranked, and sometimes rediscovered in real time. The recent run shows how broad the lane can get. Pulley and Lucky Boys Confusion sit near Sugarcult and Type O Negative, while Nirvana, Black Sabbath, The Doors, and A$AP Rocky pull the hosts into bigger cultural and generational territory. The show is especially good when one host knows a record and the other is arriving late, skeptical, or completely blank. That gap creates the main tension. One person has the old attachment, the other has fresh resistance, and the episode becomes a negotiation rather than a lecture. Discography drafts add another mode, turning bands like The Doors and Black Sabbath into playful arguments over albums, eras, and the songs that never really disappeared. The talk can be nerdy without becoming sealed off. A Fugazi documentary, a Switchfoot riff, Jim Morrison's mystique, Peter Steel, Rihanna, or a half-remembered college listening phase can all become useful evidence. The best moments come when a joke suddenly exposes a real attachment to music. A record might be too long, too familiar, too dated, or better than expected, and the hosts will usually say so without sanding off the uncertainty. It is not clean critic-table certainty. It is record-store conversation with homework. Listeners who enjoy rankings, album context, casual music history, and friendly resistance will find the rhythm quickly. The show works because the friendship is not decoration. It is the review method.

Made for: For music fans who like album reviews that sound like smart friends comparing notes, not formal criticism from a distance. It especially fits listeners with taste spread across punk, metal, grunge, classic rock, hip-hop, and 2000s radio-adjacent records.

What sets it apart: The show turns disagreement into structure: one host's attachment, the other's skepticism, and a shared rating ritual give each album a real conversational arc. Draft episodes and release-era side trips keep it from becoming a standard track-by-track recap.

In their own words

A music podcast born from two friends trying to get each other to listen to their favorite albums and neither being super receptive to it. Each week they cover a different record, some history on the artist, other albums that came out at the same time, and the Billboard Charts before discussing the actual album. They then answer the question: Throne, Own, Phone or Groan?

As heard by us

Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026

Scott and Brand make album criticism a candid negotiation between memory, close listening, disagreement, and the music surrounding each record.

Scott and Brand turn album criticism into a friendly stress test, setting one person's formative attachment against the other's ears in the present.

Read our full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A treasured high-school record arrives, and you can hear the fear of a friend hating it.

Press play if you want

to hear Scott and Brand disagree about music without treating it like a friendship emergency
to follow an album conversation into the other records that came out around the same time

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

album reviewsdiscography draftsartist backgroundrelease-era contextmusic nostalgiarecord rankingsgenre blind spotsfriendship banter

Talks about

Music Album Reviews

Best episodes of Are You Listening?

Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.

Pulley - @#!*Apr 15, 2026

Loose, friendly music talk that moves from jokes to memories without trying too hard.

Are You Listening? stays comfortably inside the world of two friends talking music, joking around, and letting the conversation find its own shape.

Discography Draft - The DoorsApr 8, 2026

A Doors draft that turns ranking into memory, banter, and a strange hat story.

This episode works best as a loose Doors draft, with Scott and Brand trading jokes, corrections, and memories as they move through the record with obvious affection.

The 2025 Year End EpisodeDec 31, 2025

A loose year-end hang that turns favorite-record talk into something warm, funny, and a little frazzled.

This New Year’s Eve episode catches Scott and Brand at the turn of the year, talking through music, fatigue, and the strange speed of time at 43.

200th Episode Game Spectacular!!Jul 23, 2025

Same-room chaos, band-name games, and enough chemistry to make the trivia worth hearing.

The episode leans into a same-room experiment and turns Are You Listening? into a loose alphabet-game hangout, which is a sharp break from the usual separate-location setup.

Propagandhi - How To Clean EverythingJul 2, 2025

Scott and Brand turn Propagandhi into a warm, loosely guided music conversation.

Scott and Brand settle into an easy music conversation that feels lived-in rather than staged. They spend time on Propagandhi, stop to sort out how to say the band's name, and come back again to the record that was a high school 10 for Scott, which gives the discussion real…

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Find your next episode

About Are You Listening?

In their own words

As heard by us

Why you'd press play

Talks about

Best episodes of Are You Listening?

Podcasts like Are You Listening?

Episodes

Tool - Undertow

Twitching Tongues - In Love There Is No Law

Local H - As Good As Dead

Harm's Way - Isolation

Discography Draft - Body Count

Coheed & Cambria - The Second Stage Turbine Blade

100 Demons - Embrace The Blacklight

Rites Of Spring - Rites Of Spring

Discography Draft - Linkin Park

Attila - Outlawed

Death Cab for Cutie - Plans

Cher - Dark Lady

Sparta - Wiretap Scars

Discography Draft - Mastodon

The Autumn Offering - Revelations Of The Unsung

Sponge - Rotting Pinata

The Number Twelve Looks Like You - Nuclear. Sad. Nuclear.

Discography Dissection - Evergreen Terrace

Deltron 3030 - Deltron 3030

Makaveli - The Don Killuminati: The 7-Day Theory

The Ataris - Welcome The Night

Discography Draft - Crowbar

Kid Liberty - Fight With Your Fists

Gallows - Grey Britain

Dawes - Good Luck With Whatever

Pulley - @#!*

Discography Draft - The Doors

Sugarcult - Palm Trees and Power Lines

Lucky Boys Confusion - Throwing the Game

Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses

Discography Draft - Black Sabbath Part One (Ozzy Era)

Nirvana - Nevermind

A$AP Rocky - Long Live A$AP

Mos Def - The New Danger

Discography Draft - Metallica

Mudvayne - L.D. 50

Godsmack - Godsmack

Deadsy - Commencement

Discography Draft - Slayer

Nelly - Country Grammar

The 2025 Year End Episode

Christmas Songs Draft - 2025

Ween - Pure Guava

Cardi B - Invasion of Privacy

Stone Temple Pilots - Purple

Despised Icon - The Healing Process

Placebo - Black Market Music

Discography Draft - AFI

Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and Hot Dog Flavored Water

Soul Coughing - Irresistible Bliss

As Blood Runs Black - Allegiance

Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary

Discography Draft - Sum 41

Balance and Composure - The Things We Think We're Missing

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

21 Savage & Metro Boomin - Savage Mode II

Discography Draft - Whitechapel

Pavement - Brighten the Corners

Bleeding Through - The Truth

The Cranberries - No Need to Argue

Discography Draft - Senses Fail

From A Second Story Window - Conversations

Being as an Ocean - Death Can Wait

200th Episode Game Spectacular!!

Kublai Khan TX - Exhibition of Prowess

Discography Dissection - Thursday

Propagandhi - How To Clean Everything

The Distillers - The Distillers

Brad Paisley - American Saturday Night

Discography Dissection - Paramore

Arsonists Get All The Girls - Hits From the Bow