News

The March 2026 Chart

The top ten tracks for March 2026 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

We shall elaborate further below with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is Still the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up, whether you are an indie label, a musician or a fan of music, or all three. Do it now! It’s free to join. Just click here. :)

For any independent artist or label wanting to sell music or merch, there is no better place on the web to do so. If you don’t believe us, check out any search engine to see what other artists have to say about what the best site is for independent artists and labels. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno. Finito!

When you subscribe to a music streaming platform, you don’t actually *own* any of the music. You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, and most of the rent revenue you are paying for it goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model, both for artists and fans alike.

Consider also this. There is always a danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or the platform may even cease to exist altogether. Remember VitaminIC, MySpace, FriendsReunited?

To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish. You know it makes sense!

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives a lot less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. About 80% to 85% of what you spend at Bandcamp goes directly to the artist or their label, and is paid daily.

So it’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible, as they are the best site for supporting artists. For us, one download of a €9 album is worth about 4500 snotify streams.

You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist. Again, this goes to the artists themselves, not some greedy anonymous megacorporation who only care for money, not the music you love.

There is also a rather fabulous Community feature at Bandcamp. You can join ours by clicking here.

SoundCloud

Just as we were enjoying the best month we ever had on SoundCloud last summer, our account was unexpectedly deleted by mistake. The account was subsequently restored, but was still badly damaged. It took until mid-October for it to be properly repaired.

In the meantime, there was not a single word from SoundCloud themselves regarding what they were doing to repair our account. This was the catalyst for a number of the changes that are happening. Our trust in SoundCloud as a place to keep our music was shattered.

Neither do we still fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud and its slowly improving Insights system. However, there has been enough improvement in data quality in recent months for it to be useful again.

Shitify

We removed all of our music from the mean green snot machine a few months ago. We highly recommend you do the same, if you have any there. We also highly recommend that you cancel your subscription, and move your playlists (and so on) to a more ethical streaming service. Every other streaming platform is more ethical than snotify.

We don’t say this lightly. Nor do we say so from a position of ignorance. There are many very good reasons to remove all your music from spotify and to cancel your sub. Do it now!

For more information, please refer to this article: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/miscellaneous/boycott-spotify/

Tidal, Coda, YouTube, Amazon, Deezer, Apple Music, iTunes, etc.

We use data from our distributors Globex, Soundrop and CD Baby for information regarding streams on platforms such as Coda, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts.

Data from the streaming services filters through to us via our distributors, and we are not very trusting of it. At best we can get a general feel of what has been going on across all of the streaming services this way. Because the data arrives several days, or even weeks, late, we only use it to extrapolate general trends. Although, to be fair, it was reasonably good so far in 2026.

HearThis, Audius, Audiomack

We have started organising our music at HearThis since the recent debacle with SoundCloud. Their stats have improved a lot recently and are now somewhat easier to collate.

March 2026 was also a very good month for us at HearThis, although we only have a few artists with music uploaded. Our recent successes there are making adding more music to HearThis higher priority among all the things we need to do. More on this soon.

The aforementioned debacle with SoundCloud was the catalyst for ourselves taking the decision to also begin adding our music to both Audius and Audiomack. Both platforms came highly recommended, although their stats, like at HearThis, are also not especially informative. Activity on both platforms has been low, although we have had very little time to dedicate to them.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during March 2026 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. Just one download of an album was worth a couple of months of snotify streams before we left that platform entirely. By buying a download, you genuinely help us keep the fires burning, and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on X (formerly Twitter) and BlueSky who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

How Did We Calculate The March 2026 Chart?

The algorithm we use gives greater weight to downloads, then comments and reposts and likes (active engagement), then plays (passive engagement). Different platforms perform differently and are given different weightings based on standard deviation calculations.

We use general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month, as well as specifics where they are available. The data has been amalgamated together from all of the different platforms to make the new Top Ten. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are ignored, as is anything from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music.

If somebody actually pays to download something, they must have liked it! Our artists and ourselves are always very grateful to our supporters in this respect. It genuinely helps keep the fires burning and the wheels turning.

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls. It enables that track to be discovered and enjoyed by the community of the person doing the sharing, which can generate new fans.

A ‘like’ is nice, but reposts actually helps the artist reach a bigger audience. You create the chance for that to happen. Recommending a song costs you nothing at all and can be a massive help for an independent artist. Why not do it now? :)

Only you, the listener, can influence our next chart. So if there is a song you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Who’s In The March 2026 Top Ten?

The latest top ten features five different acts, if you reckon Dark Company and & co to be separate artists.

There is one song from Dark Company, two from the Band of Georges, five – remarkably! – from Wud, one from BSoD + D², and one from & co. There are two new entries, two re-entries, three climbers, and three fallers.

Dark Company

Congratulations to Dark Company for topping our third chart of 2026! That makes it three months in a row now that Dark Company have topped the charts, each time with a new release which was a new entry.

Straight in at number one is the latest release from the SNAFU CD of Dark Company‘s forthcoming triple-CD album A for Acronym. This song is called Corner Clowns. Pete wrote the lyric in 2011.

Corner Clowns is a comedic classic rock song about the hidden monsters that lurk under your bed at night and in the dark corners of rooms, sometimes just within sight of the corner of your eye. It’s the kind of song that might appeal to children, who will surely be able to relate to the lyrics. The chorus is catchy enough to be an earworm.

Corner Clowns is in the key of E major and contains an instrumental section, the lead line of which George composed as a five-year-old. This happened after his third – and final – visit to a south London Sunday school group, where he had been chastised by an older girl for colouring in somebody’s skin with a green pencil.

Band of Georges

A few months ago, we absolutely could not have anticipated the level of dominance over the charts the Band of Georges has had recently. Why? We were not even expecting to release any of these songs a year ago!

The Wud Records website was launched in 2008, replacing the old Wud site which simply disappeared soon afterwards. Ever since before the Wud Records website went live, various people tried to persuade George to allow his old Tascam 244 portastudio demos to be released. He always refused, point blank. There was no arguing with him. It was just: “No.” And that was that.

And then, suddenly, he seems to have had a change of heart. He allowed a few of us to listen to his demos, which we thought were surprisingly good. Certainly a lot better than we had anticipated, given everything he had said about awful they were. Whatever it was that happened, we are delighted that it did. Because now, we have been allowed to release all of the volumes of his early songs in their demo form.

We have done very little work to these recordings. They were just lifted from their master cassettes and digitised in our studios, and normalised to 0dB. That was it. Everything sounds just as it was. The cassettes, nearly 40 years old, have stood the test of time very well.

There are no pages for the Band of Georges at Explicit Music at this time, although some may appear following further negotiations. Each released song from the Band of Georges has a comment or a memory from George on its album’s page here at the Wud Records website. Some of that information, along with other facts regarding each song, appears at its page on SoundCloud. There is likely to be different extra information given on the two separate pages, as the words come from the keyboards of two separate writers. We recommend you check out both.

Losing Your Grip is a re-entry at number two. It is an odd and perhaps under-rated song, especially so when it was contemporary. There is a glorious chorus and three verses, each being about a different person and their gradual descents via entropy into insanity. The sections between the verses are in 6/8, or are atemporal dissolutions into strangeness and noise, with all the knobs on the Electric Mistress turned up to full.

Losing Your Grip was also performed by Wud, and their version also charted this month. Ken did a fine job of singing the vocal parts. You can enjoy the Wud version of Losing Your Grip at the HearThis website by clicking here.

Песня За (Part 2) is a re-entry at number nine. Песня За is Russian, and is pronounced something like “Piestnia Za” in English. It means, roughly, “Song For…” with the space after the preposition left intentionally blank. Песня За (Part 2) is part of an epic piece of music which is over nineteen minutes long. The full length version of Песня За can be heard by clicking here, and a purely instrumental version, as performed by George and Marc before a Wud rehearsal in 1985, can be heard by clicking here.

Песня За (Part 2) is taken from the Песня За EP. George wrote the song as a nineteen-year-old. He claims he is unable to hear Песня За (Part 2) any more “without having to hide in a small cupboard”. He still likes parts 1 and 4, however.

Wud

What an extraordinary month it has been for Wud over at HearThis. Wud have no less than five songs on our chart this month, all of which were removed from SoundCloud and added to HearThis a few months ago, as decribed in this news post. All five of the songs are from a collection of live recordings of the band from the summer of 1985. As a result of the streaming, we have had to add the songs back to SoundCloud so they can appear in the playlist for the March 2026 chart.

The first song from Wud‘s WudSongs (Live Summer 1985) is Take It Or Leave It. It climbs seven places, from last month‘s number ten to number three. This is one of Wud‘s more delicate and gentle songs, with a certain folky or country feel to it. It was quite new at that time. Ken always managed to capture the feel of the vocal for this beautifully.

Rising two places from number six to number four is the second song by Wud on this month’s chart. This is the rambunctious rocktastic 1984, which was something of a signature song for the band. This is actually a very fine version, with Graham’s bucket-bashing adding a unique and glorious thunder to proceedings. The guitar is very good and Ken was on fine form. Marc’s bass added a solidity and strength to the song and it went very well.

Wud‘s third chart entry climbs from number seven to number five. This song is called New Socks and Underwear and is one that Ken wrote when he was about to move to Devon. It describes his thoughts and hopes, both for the journey and what lay in the future beyond. The title comes from some gifts Ken received from his mother, to help him along the way.

Sinking from number three to number six is What’s Going On. This is a simple and gentle song that Ken always sang so beautifully. It was actually the very first song on the cassettes that make up this collection of songs, and was recorded with just Ken and George whilst waiting for the others to turn up.

A brand new entry at number seven for Wud is Losing Your Grip. This song has done very well at HearThis and is a decent version, which Ken sings very well. Each verse of Losing Your Grip is about a different person’s gradual descent into insanity. There is also another version of Losing Your Grip, by the Band of Georges, at number two this month.

BSoD + D²

It’s been another very good month for The Bastard Sons of Dennis. The October 2025 release by The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli, Cruelty to Blues, has gone well.

Then Came the Last Days of May falls from number five to number eight for BSoD + D². Blue Öyster Cult perform this song in the key of E minor, and our tremendous trio have transposed it to A minor for their cover version.

Then Came the Last Days of May tells the tragic story of three young men who were killed in a drug deal that went wrong. It is a very wistful and beautiful song, and The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli base their version more on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version than the original studio version on Blue Öyster Cult’s 1972 eponymous album.

& co

Dropping one place from number nine to number ten is Final Nightmare by & co. The trick with the & co remixes of Dark Company songs is to listen to the original first, then try to spot within the remix the parts that were used. Send us an email if you think you know the answer and we will let you know how you performed!

Final Nightmare is a remix of the Dark Company song Terminal Road. Final Nightmare was that song’s original title. It was renamed when the artwork for the Rage in Heaven album was being hand-drawn by Marcus Podilchuk. The lyrics for the original version of the song are truly magnificent and the song itself is one of the most popular from the Rage in Heaven album.

* None of our other acts made it onto the March 2026 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in March 2026, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

The March 2026 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.

The February 2026 Chart

The top ten tracks for February 2026 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

We shall elaborate further below with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is Still the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up, whether you are an indie label, a musician or a fan of music, or all three. Do it now! It’s free to join. Just click here. :)

For any independent artist or label wanting to sell music or merch, there is no better place on the web to do so. If you don’t believe us, check out any search engine to see what other artists have to say about what the best site is for independent artists and labels. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno. Finito!

When you subscribe to a music streaming platform, you don’t actually *own* any of the music. You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, and most of the rent revenue you are paying for it goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model, both for artists and fans alike.

Consider also this. There is always a danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or the platform may even cease to exist altogether. Remember VitaminIC, MySpace, FriendsReunited?

To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish. You know it makes sense!

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives a lot less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. About 80% to 85% of what you spend at Bandcamp goes directly to the artist or their label, and is paid daily.

So it’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible, as they are the best site for supporting artists. For us, one download of a €9 album is worth about 4500 snotify streams.

You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist. Again, this goes to the artists themselves, not some greedy anonymous megacorporation who only care for money, not the music you love.

There is also a rather fabulous Community feature at Bandcamp, and you can join ours by clicking here.

SoundCloud

Just as we were enjoying the best month we ever had on SoundCloud, our account was unexpectedly deleted by mistake. The account was subsequently restored, but was still badly damaged. It took until mid-October for it to be properly repaired.

In the meantime, there was not a single word from SoundCloud themselves regarding what they were doing to repair our account. This was the catalyst for a number of the changes that are happening.

We still do not fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud and its slowly improving Insights system. However, there has been enough improvement in data quality in the last couple of months for it to be useful again.

Shitify

We removed all of our music from the mean green snot machine a few months ago. We highly recommend you do the same, if you have any there. We also highly recommend that you cancel your subscription, and move your playlists (and so on) to a more ethical streaming service. Every other streaming platform is more ethical than snotify.

We don’t say this lightly. Nor do we say so from a position of ignorance. There are many very good reasons to remove all your music from spotify and to cancel your sub. Do it now!

For more information, please refer to this article: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/miscellaneous/boycott-spotify/

Tidal, Coda, YouTube, Amazon, Deezer, Apple Music, iTunes, etc.

We use data from our distributors Globex, Soundrop and CD Baby for information regarding streams on platforms such as Coda, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts.

Data from the streaming services filters through to us via our distributors, and we are not very trusting of it. At best we can get a general feel of what has been going on across all of the streaming services this way. Because the data arrives several days, or even weeks, late, we only use it to extrapolate general trends. Although, to be fair, it was reasonably good this last month.

HearThis, Audius, Audiomack

We have started organising our music at HearThis since the recent debacle with SoundCloud. Their stats have improved a lot recently and are now somewhat easier to collate. February 2026 was the best month we have had there overall.

February 2026 was also a very good month for us at HearThis, although we only have a few artists with music uploaded there.

More on this when we discuss the actual artists that charted this month, in the text below.

The aforementioned debacle with SoundCloud was the catalyst for ourselves taking the decision to also begin adding our music to both Audius and Audiomack. Both platforms came highly recommended, although their stats, like at HearThis, are also not especially informative.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during February 2026 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. Just one download of an album was worth a couple of months of snotify streams before we left that platform entirely. By buying a download, you genuinely help us keep the fires burning, and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on X (formerly Twitter) and BlueSky who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

How Did We Calculate The February 2026 Chart?

The algorithm we use gives greater weight to downloads, then comments and reposts and likes (active engagement), then plays (passive engagement). Different platforms perform differently and are given different weightings based on standard deviation calculations.

We use general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month, as well as specifics where they are available. The data has been amalgamated together from all of the different platforms to make the new Top Ten. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are ignored, as is anything from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music.

If somebody actually pays to download something, they must have liked it! Our artists and ourselves are always very grateful to our supporters in this respect. It genuinely helps keep the fires burning and the wheels turning.

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls. It enables that track to be discovered and enjoyed by the community of the person doing the sharing, which can generate new fans.

A ‘like’ is nice, but reposts actually helps the artist reach a bigger audience. You create the chance for that to happen. Recommending a song costs you nothing at all and can be a massive help for an independent artist. Why not do it now? :)

Only you, the listener, can influence our next chart. So if there is a song you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Who’s In The February 2026 Top Ten?

The latest top ten features five different acts, if you reckon Dark Company and & co to be separate artists.

There are two songs from Dark Company, one from the Band of Georges, four – remarkably! – from Wud, two from BSoD + D², and one from & co. There are five new entries, three re-entries, and two are climbers.

Dark Company

Congratulations to Dark Company for topping our second chart of 2026, and for having one other entry in the top ten.

A brand new entry straight in at number one is the latest release from the SNAFU CD of Dark Company‘s forthcoming triple-CD album A for Acronym. This song is called Head Rush. Pete wrote the lyric in 2011.

Head Rush is an uptempo slab of the finest quality space rock. The infectious groove in Abm is a real toe-tapper and head-nodder. It sounds like a mix of Hawkwind, Ultravox and The Fall, and thunders along merrily, also mentioning Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Literary references in songs are always good.

Head Rush features a few DSK synths. Many DSK synths are free VST adddons and all of them are wonderful. You can pick some up for your own studio by visiting DSK’s website here: https://www.dskmusic.com/

Climbing from number ten to number four is an old classic from Dark Company. Before last month, it last charted in December 2019. This fantastic song is the Eastenders remix of Crash, and can be found on the band’s inaugural album, Signmaker.

The original version of Crash was first performed by Alien Heat, although there are no remaining recordings of their version in existance as far as we can tell.

Crash was composed in January and February of 1990. It was Alien Heat‘s opening song at their somewhat ill-fated performance at the Dayspace Festival in Totnes in 1990. Pete wrote the lyric earlier that year and describes the relationship many people had with their televisions, particularly those addicted to soap operas.

All of the voice samples came from a single omnibus episode of Eastenders, which was broadcast in December 1991. Many of the cast from that time have a spoken line inserted between Pete’s lyrics. They were added via the Alesis Quadraverb, which had a maximum sample length of 1.5 seconds.

Band of Georges

A few months ago, we absolutely could not have anticipated the level of dominance over the charts the Band of Georges has had recently. Why? We were not even expecting to release any of these songs a year ago!

The Wud Records website was launched in 2008, replacing the old Wud site which simply disappeared soon afterwards. Ever since before the Wud Records website went live, various people tried to persuade George to allow his old Tascam 244 portastudio demos to be released. He always refused, point blank. There was no arguing with him. It was just: “No.” And that was that.

And then, suddenly, he seems to have had a change of heart. He allowed a few of us to listen to his demos, which we thought were surprisingly good. Certainly a lot better than we had anticipated, given everything he had said about awful they were. Whatever it was that happened, we are delighted that it did. Because now, we have been allowed to release all of the volumes of his early songs in their demo form.

We have done very little work to these recordings. They were just lifted from their master cassettes and digitised in our studios, and normalised to 0dB. That was it. Everything sounds just as it was. The cassettes, nearly 40 years old, have stood the test of time very well.

There are no pages for the Band of Georges at Explicit Music at this time, although some may appear following further negotiations. Each released song from the Band of Georges has a comment or a memory from George on its album’s page here at the Wud Records website. Some of that information, along with other facts regarding each song, appears at its page on SoundCloud. There is likely to be different extra information given on the two separate pages, as the words come from the keyboards of two separate writers. We recommend you check out both.

Rising one place from number three is to number two Wish You Were Here. This is nothing like the famous Pink Floyd song of the same name. It is a delicate, vulnerable, intimate song with a shimmering flange from the Electric Mistress on the guitar.

Wish You Were Here comes from Volume III Side B of the Band of Georges cassettes. Laughing Sun attempted to include this song in their repertoire, but it never happened in the end. There are many rather splendidly esoteric chords throughout.

Wud

What an extraordinary month it has been for Wud over at HearThis. Wud have no less than four new entries on our chart this month, all of which were removed from SoundCloud and added to HearThis a few months ago, as decribed in this news post. All four of the songs are from a collection of live recordings of the band from the summer of 1985. As a result of the streaming, we have had to add the four songs back to SoundCloud so they can appear in the playlist for the February 2026 chart!

A brand new entry at number three is What’s Going On. This is a simple and gentle song that Ken always sang so beautifully. It was actually the very first song on the cassettes that made up this collection of songs, and was recorded with just Ken and George whilst waiting for the others to turn up.

The second new entry for Wud is at number six. This is the rambunctious rocktastic 1984, which was something of a signature song for the band. This is actually a very fine version, with Graham’s bucket-bashing adding a unique and glorious thunder to proceedings. The guitar is very good and Ken was on fine form. Marc’s bass added a solidity and strength to the song and it went very well.

Wud‘s third new entry is at number seven. This song is called New Socks and Underwear and is one that Ken wrote when he was about to move to Devon. It describes his thoughts and hopes for the journey and what lay in the future beyond. The title comes from some gifts Ken received from his mother, to help him along the way.

The fourth new entry from Wud from their WudSongs (Live Summer 1985) is Take It Or Leave It. This is another of their more delicate and gentle songs, with a certain folky or country feel to it. It was quite new at that time. Ken always managed to capture the feel of the vocal for this beautifully.

BSoD + D²

It’s been another very good month for The Bastard Sons of Dennis, with two of their songs re-entering the chart. The October 2025 release by The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli, Cruelty to Blues has already gone very well.

Then Came the Last Days of May is a re-entry at number five for BSoD + D². Blue Öyster Cult perform this song in the key of E minor, and our tremendous trio have transposed it to A minor for their cover version.

Then Came the Last Days of May tells the tragic story of three young men who were killed in a drug deal that went wrong. It is a very wistful and beautiful song, and The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli base their version more on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version than the original studio version on Blue Öyster Cult’s 1972 eponymous album.

The next re-entry for The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli is at number eight. It is a cover of Blue Öyster Cult‘s Wings Wetted Down, from the 1973 Tyranny and Mutation album.

Wings Wetted Down is a masterfully crafted piece of songwriting, with its clever key changes and all its vocal and instrumental melodic hooks. It is considered a deep cut among BÖC fans. The version performed by The Bastard Sons of Dennis is largely true to the original, with the addition of a riff section that Derek solos over.

& co

The last time that Final Nightmare by & co charted was back in October 2017. It was therefore a big surprise to see its numbers at the end of the month! It is a re-entry at number nine.

The trick with the & co remixes of Dark Company songs is to listen to the original first, then try to spot within the remix the parts that were used. Send us an email if you think you know the answer and we will let you know how you performed!

Final Nightmare is a remix of the Dark Company song Terminal Road. Final Nightmare was that song’s original title. It was renamed when the artwork for the Rage in Heaven album was being prepared. The lyrics for the original version of the song are truly magnificent and the song itself is one of the most popular from the Rage in Heaven album.

* None of our other acts made it onto the February 2026 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in February 2026, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

The February 2026 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.

Winter 2025-26 Musical Discoveries

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent or unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard.

These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during Winter 2025-26 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the new month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks. We are inclined to believe that the music which has had the fewest streams needs the best chance of exposure.

If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on your social media channels? It costs you nothing to do so. The artists responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure. Many of your friends and followers would enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least… you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

Sharing Is Very, Very Important !!

Sharing is a massive help for independent artists. They don’t have big corporations and mainstream media saturating every channel with their product. Every independent share counts.

Giving something a ‘like’ is nice, but sharing exposes the artist to your followers. This means that anybody in your community can see and click on what you shared. They can potentially enjoy it as well. It enables somebody new to discover the artist and become their newest fan. You create the chance for that to happen.

Are you a musician whose SoundCloud track we liked, shared or tweeted during the last three months or so? If you are, there is a possibility that one of your tracks that we shared might be on this new playlist.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track on a musical discoveries compilation? If you manage it, tell us! Tell the music makers involved. Tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. The people concerned would love to know your thoughts.

We appreciate the fact that in 2026 not many have the time, patience or attention span to listen to even one track all the way through, let alone a whole playlist. Anybody who listens to even half of a musical discoveries compilation is somebody of exceptional stamina.

As such, we occasionally tend to big up on Twitter the people who manage to listen to a whole playlist. If you want a bit of free promotion from Wud Records on Twitter, you know what to do.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of the artists and tracks in the compilation. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question. Sometimes finding these links can take quite a bit of research as many artists are not especially skilled at linking all their pages together.

A disclaimer! Clearly we cannot take responsibility for any of the content or functionality of these pages. If you find that something isn’t working as it should, please let us know what’s up and we’ll try to find a remedy.

The links we use are for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, please send an email to info @ wudrecords . co . uk (without the spaces) so we can fix it for you.

Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. This helps drive a little traffic to the artist’s website, which might not receive many visits compared to e.g. facebook or spotify. We also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come.

We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

Free Promo For Great Music

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artist.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

In addition to the latest compilation being a pinned tweet on Twitter, for the start of the month at least, every week on Twitter we used to boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. Occasionally we still do, although that platform is a poor shadow of what it once was. The featured track is chosen by the Wud Records team and is one which is a real favourite amongst us.

All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

On Twitter we encourage people to vote for the next featured track. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation, which we also used to tweet frequently and occasionally still do.

We used to tweet just about every day. Since late 2021 things have become increasingly busy, meaning we are not able to spend as much time on social media as we used to. Full tweeting days are now something of a rarity. When they happen, we try to do a clump of full days together over a period of a fortnight, if possible.

Now that Twitter has been largely destroyed by its newest owner, it is difficult to foresee a time that we will be tweeting much at all any more. Perhaps someday somebody will buy the platform from him and repair all the damage he has done. Until then, it’s become even more delinquent than farcebeak.

Wud Records has set up camp at BlueSky and if you would like to follow us there, we would be delighted to have you on board. Click here to find us!

Due to the increasing proliferation of AI slop posing as music, it is becoming more difficult to actually trust what we hear. Was it something that was created by humans or robots? We will try to filter out the AI as it is our intention to continue to support the human composers and musicians, rather than something generated from an algorithm.

How We Work It

If you would like the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We follow everyone back who follows us on SoundCloud, providing you have original music and you are not some kind of phony pointless scamming account.

There are many scammers who can allegedly make it seem that people have been listening to your music. The ‘plays’ come from bots and click farms. Nobody will engage with the music or even hear it. It is very easy to spot a track that has been boosted in this way, so just don’t do it. Spend your hard-earned musical coins on something useful!

We generally listen to at least seven songs, starting with the spotlighted tracks if there are any. After that we go to the most recent by clicking on your ‘tracks’. This way we can hear both the things you want us to hear the most (your spotlighted tracks), and then whatever you have been releasing to SoundCloud most recently. This enables us to get a rough feel of what you are all about and what you are doing. We also read your bio.

Our people listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It typically takes a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, and we use a quorum of a minimum three listeners, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

Winter 2025-26 continues a tenth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 102 compilations of amazing independent music you almost certainly never heard before! Why not put one on in the background whilst you’re busy pottering around the house or doing what you are doing? Something is bound to leap out at you.

Listen and Enjoy

If you would like to listen to the new playlist of Winter 2025-26 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy the new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all of the previous musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page.

Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every three months and who knows – one might even include you!

Important!

Episode #96 was the last monthly Musical Discoveries compilation for the time being.

We have moved to a quarterly release schedule due to the strangling of social media (more here: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-social-media-is-dead/) and a general waning interest in music.

For further information, please read this: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-future-of-musical-discoveries/

Also Important!

After we have completed 100 compilations of the wonderful music we have found, the Musical Discoveries, what is the future for this series? What would you like to see and hear in future compilations, if there are any? Shall we stop now? Does anybody actually… care?

We put the continuing Discoveries to a vote on X (formerly Twitter) and of those who voted, the result was 77 in favour and 5 against. So that would be 94% positive, more or less, despite the apparent lack of interest.

So for now, at least, we shall make a few more. But for how much longer remains to be seen. More here: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-musical-discoveries-what-next/

The January 2026 Chart

The top ten tracks for January 2026 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

We shall elaborate further below with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is Still the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up, whether you are an indie label, a musician or a fan of music, or all three. Do it now! It’s free to join. Just click here. :)

For any independent artist or label wanting to sell music or merch, there is no better place on the web to do so. If you don’t believe us, check out any search engine to see what other artists have to say about what the best site is for independent artists and labels. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno. Finito!

When you subscribe to a music streaming platform, you don’t actually *own* any of the music. You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, and most of the rent revenue you are paying for it goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model, both for artists and fans alike.

Consider also this. There is always a danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or the platform may even cease to exist altogether. Remember VitaminIC, MySpace, FriendsReunited?

To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish. You know it makes sense!

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives a lot less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. About 80% to 85% of what you spend at Bandcamp goes directly to the artist or their label, and is paid daily.

So it’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible, as they are the best site for supporting artists. For us, one download of a €9 album is worth about 4500 snotify streams.

You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist. Again, this goes to the artists themselves, not some greedy anonymous megacorporation who only care for money, not the music you love.

There is also a rather fabulous Community feature at Bandcamp, and you can join ours by clicking here.

SoundCloud

Just as we were enjoying the best month we ever had on SoundCloud, our account was unexpectedly deleted by mistake. The account was subsequently restored, but was still badly damaged. It took until mid-October for it to be properly repaired.

In the meantime, there was not a single word from SoundCloud themselves regarding what they were doing to repair our account. This was the catalyst for a number of the changes that are happening.

We still do not fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud and its slowly improving Insights system. However, there has been enough improvement in data quality in the last couple of months for it to be useful again.

Shitify

We removed all of our music from the mean green snot machine a few months ago. We highly recommend you do the same, if you have any there. We also highly recommend that you cancel your subscription, and move your playlists (and so on) to a more ethical streaming service. Every other streaming platform is more ethical than snotify.

We don’t say this lightly. Nor do we say so from a position of ignorance. There are many very good reasons to remove all your music from spotify and to cancel your sub. Do it now!

For more information, please refer to this article: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/miscellaneous/boycott-spotify/

Tidal, Coda, YouTube, Amazon, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.

We use data from our distributors Globex, Soundrop and CD Baby for information regarding streams on platforms such as Coda, Tidal, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts.

Data from the streaming services filters through to us via our distributors, and we are not very trusting of it. At best we can get a general feel of what has been going on across all of the streaming services this way. Because the data arrives several days, or even weeks, late, we only use it to extrapolate general trends.

HearThis, Audius, Audiomack

We have started organising our music at HearThis since the recent debacle with SoundCloud. Their stats are improving and becoming easier to collate, thankfully.

The aforementioned debacle with SoundCloud was the catalyst for ourselves taking the decision to add our music to both Audius and Audiomack. Both platforms came highly recommended, although their stats, like at HearThis, are also not especially informative.

In Conclusion…

If somebody actually pays to download something, they must have liked it! Our artists and ourselves are always very grateful to our supporters in this respect. It genuinely helps keep the fires burning and the wheels turning.

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls. It enables that track to be discovered and enjoyed by the community of the person doing the sharing, which can generate new fans.

A ‘like’ is nice, but reposts actually helps the artist reach a bigger audience. You create the chance for that to happen. Recommending a song costs you nothing at all and can be a massive help for an independent artist. Why not do it now? :)

How Did We Calculate The January 2026 Chart?

The algorithm we use gives greater weight to downloads, then comments and reposts and likes (active engagement), then plays (passive engagement). Different platforms perform differently and are given different weightings based on standard deviation calculations.

We use general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month, as well as specifics where they are available. The data has been amalgamated together from all of the different platforms to make the new Top Ten. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are ignored, as is anything from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music.

Only you, the listener, can influence our next chart. So if there is a song you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during January 2026 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. Just one download of an album was worth a couple of months of snotify streams before we left that platform entirely. By buying a download, you genuinely help us keep the fires burning, and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on X (formerly Twitter) and BlueSky who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

Who’s In The January 2026 Top Ten?

The latest top ten features five different acts. There are four songs from Dark Company, three from the Band of Georges, two from The Bastard Sons of Dennis – including BSoD + D² – and one from Flicker. There is one new entry, seven re-entries, and two are fallers.

Dark Company

Congratulations to Dark Company for topping our first chart of 2026, and for having three other entries in the top ten.

A brand new entry straight in at number one is the latest release from the SNAFU CD of Dark Company‘s forthcoming triple-CD album A for Acronym. This song is called Black Lite. Pete wrote the lyric in 2013 and it refers to his love for all the fun things that happen during the night, and his perceived alienation from the daytime world.

Black Lite is a substantial chunk of space rock with fat guitars, a stomping rhythm, dreamy synths and occasional drum machine samples. In the demo version, Maxx carried on playing his bass after the rest of the song had finished and the band developed a few ideas based upon what he did.

Black Lite features a few DSK synths – the Zith, the Zeth, the Oranze and The Grand. Many DSK synths are free VST adddons and all of them are wonderful. You can pick some up for your own studio by visiting DSK’s website here: https://www.dskmusic.com/

A re-entry at number eight is Project Terminated, from a recent batch of the newest Dark Company songs. Pete wrote the lyric for Project Terminated in January 2011. The guitar was composed on an instrument in standard tuning that had been lowered by a full tone, and with a drop-D – effectively, a drop-C.

Project Terminated describes the various ingenius ways humanity has discovered for sawing off the branch of the tree upon which is stands, thereby rushing with a certain amount of inevitability towards its own doom. It may seem a dark subject, but it is done with plenty of dark humour, and perhaps an alternative future may yet exist for us all.

Falling from number six to number nine is the third Dark Company song to hit the chart. It is called Conspiracy. It starts with Sven’s thundersome drums accompanied by industrial grade heavy guitars in the key of E, then moves up to A for the verses. There is no chorus.

Conspiracy is one of Dark Company‘s heavier songs and also features some splendid synth work from Josh. The lyric was penned by Pete in the summer of 2010 and his vocal style is delightfully languid in this song.

A re-entry at number ten is an old classic from Dark Company that last charted in December 2019. This is the Eastenders remix of Crash, and can be found on the band’s inaugural album, Signmaker.

The original version of Crash was first performed by Alien Heat, although there are no remaining recordings of their version in existance as far as we can tell.

Crash was composed in January and February of 1990. It was Alien Heat‘s opening song at their somewhat ill-fated performance at the Dayspace Festival in Totnes in 1990. Pete wrote the lyric earlier that year and describes the relationship many people had with their televisions, particularly those addicted to soap operas.

All of the voice samples came from a single omnibus episode of Eastenders, which was broadcast in December 1991. Many of the cast from that time have a spoken line inserted between Pete’s lyrics. They were added via the Alesis Quadraverb, which had a maximum sample length of 1.5 seconds.

Flicker

It was a good month for Flicker on the first chart of 2026, with their composition Blown Away returning to the charts for the first time since March 2022. Blown Away is an instrumental rock piece, which has a hard edge underpinning it.

Blown Away is more classic, fusion or indie rock in style than many of the other tracks on Flicker‘s At Least 1000 Words album. There are plenty of guitar fireworks lurking in the background to listen out for. Dave’s bass brings the whole track together and gives it substance and direction. It is a fairly straightforward bassline and works in perfect harmony with the track.

Flicker‘s second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service, BlueSky and X (formerly Twitter).

Band of Georges

A few months ago, we absolutely could not have anticipated the level of dominance over the charts the Band of Georges has had recently. Why? We were not even expecting to release any of these songs a year ago!

The Wud Records website was launched in 2008, replacing the old Wud site which simply disappeared soon afterwards. Ever since before the Wud Records website went live, various people tried to persuade George to allow his old Tascam 244 portastudio demos to be released. He always refused, point blank. There was no arguing with him. It was just: “No.” And that was that.

And then, suddenly, he seems to have had a change of heart. He allowed a few of us to listen to his demos, which we thought were surprisingly good. Certainly a lot better than we had anticipated, given everything he had said about awful they were. Whatever it was that happened, we are delighted that it did. Because now, we have been allowed to release all of the volumes of his early songs in their demo form.

We have done very little work to these recordings. They were just lifted from their master cassettes and digitised in our studios, and normalised to 0dB. That was it. Everything sounds just as it was. The cassettes, nearly 40 years old, have stood the test of time very well.

There are no pages for the Band of Georges at Explicit Music at this time, although some may appear following further negotiations. Each released song from the Band of Georges has a comment or a memory from George on its album’s page here at the Wud Records website. Some of that information, along with other facts regarding each song, appears at its page on SoundCloud. There is likely to be different extra information given on the two separate pages, as the words come from the keyboards of two separate writers. We recommend you check out both.

A re-entry at number three is Wish You Were Here. This is nothing like the famous Pink Floyd song of the same name. It is a delicate, vulnerable, intimate song with a shimmering flange from the Electric Mistress on the guitar.

Wish You Were Here comes from Volume III Side B of the Band of Georges cassettes. Laughing Sun attempted to include this song in their repertoire, but it never happened in the end. There are many rather splendidly esoteric chords throughout.

Losing Your Grip is a re-entry at number five. It is an odd and perhaps under-rated song, especially so when it was contemporary. There is a glorious chorus and three verses, each being about a different person and their gradual descents via entropy into insanity. The sections between the verses are in 3/8, or are atemporal dissolutions into strangeness and noise, with all the knobs on the Electric Mistress turned up to full.

Losing Your Grip was performed by Wud. Ken did a fine job of singing the vocal parts. You can enjoy the Wud version of Losing Your Grip at the HearThis website by clicking here.

It’s Just a Game is a re-entry at number seven, having been added to a popular playlist featuring a lot of very mainstream artists. The song was inspired by a friend of George and the mysteries sounding her past, and how she had ended up in exeter.

Some of the esoteric chords for It’s Just a Game were recycled into another much-loved song George wrote called Lullaby, which was composed not so long afterwards.

BSoD + D²

It’s been another very good month for The Bastard Sons of Dennis with two of their songs charting.

The recent release by The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli, Cruelty to Blues, has provided the newest chart with a splendid cover song. Cruelty to Blues was only released in October and has already gone very well.

A re-entry at number four is a song from the new Cruelty to Blues album by BSoD + D². Astronomy is a profoundly beautiful and haunting creation. It was composed by the Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, and Sandy Pearlman. It is the final track of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1974 Secret Treaties album, and an absolute masterpiece of progressive rock composition.

The version of Astronomy by The Bastard Sons of Dennis with Dave Danielli is more ‘produced’ than live performances. They would often end a show with Astronomy, introducing it as a song that was famously covered by Metallica. “We wrote it, of course; ahem, cough…” Chuck would quip.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

Falling from number one to number six this month is Then Came the Last Days of May. Then Came the Last Days of May is another truly beautiful song, which tells a true story of how three university friends of Blue Öyster Cult’s guitarist, Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, were brutally murdered in a drug deal that went horribly and tragically wrong. The version by our dynamic duo adds a twist to the versions heard on Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous studio album and the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees album from 1975.

Derek would sing “Now and then a duck” instead of “truck”, which caused fans of the duo to bring toy ducks with them along to live performances. Chuck’s solo is largely based on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version, and his little whistle at the end (which didn’t always come out quite right in a live show) came from the character Tom Good in the uk tv sitcom The Good Life.

* None of our other acts made it onto the January 2026 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in January 2026, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

The January 2026 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.

All of the Rough Terrain songs that the band ever performed live have been made into a compilation and published at SoundCloud. We have also made a new page for the complete catalogue of Rough Terrain songs among their pages here at the Wud Records website.

None of the Rough Terrain songs in this new compilation are actually performed by Rough Terrain. Instead, nearly all of them are demos from the Band of Georges. George was the main writer of original material for the band.

Rough Terrain also performed a handful of covers during their odyssey. We’ve managed to track down versions of those covers and we have added them to the compilation as well. Covered artists include Blue Oyster Cult, Rush, Mountain, Pink Floyd, Steppenwolf, and Ram Jam.

There is very little evidence remaining of any of Rough Terrain’s music. We believe the band’s redoubtable bass player Jerry may have an old VHS video, but it seems unlikely that this will ever be digitised.

Despite playing countless live shows, Rough Terrain never recorded any of their performances as far as we can tell, not even in rehearsals. Most of the other legacy bands on our label frequently had a cassette machine recording the sounds in the room, but strangely, not Rough Terrain. This is clearly a great shame. A lot of that music is simply lost forever by now.

Now that all of the Band of Georges material has been released, we decided to pay a tribute to Rough Terrain by making this new compilation.

We were surprised that there were only 24 Rough Terrain songs, including their covers. The band performed live many, many times and this feels like not enough songs for their total repertoire. Perhaps there were more, and perhaps there were not.

We do have two studio recordings of Rough Terrain. Their Howell Road Demo and their Daylight Demo are both here at the Wud Records website. We also made a compilation of both demos, called Exit Stage Deaf. This is available for download and streaming from Bandcamp, and clicking here will take you straight to Rough Terrain’s Exit Stage Deaf.

If you would like to listen to the complete repertoire of all the Rough Terrain songs here at the Wud Records website, you can do so by clicking here.

If you prefer to listen to the compilation over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

Seasonal Musical Discoveries compilations will be skipping ahead one month. Their release dates will be as follows: Winter on 1st March, Spring on 1st June, Summer on 1st September and Autumn on 1st December. We have decided to do this to minimise disruption to other events and activities.

Continuing with having the releases a month earlier would have caused further inconvenient clashes in the wider Wud Records calendar.

This means that the next seasonal Musical Discoveries compilation will have a four-month gestation period, instead of the usual three.

In the past, we released a Musical Discoveries compilation every month, and did so without fail for eight years. After 96 compilations had been released and the algorithm on X (formerly Twitter) had been sabotaged, the amount of people listening to these compilations had dropped significantly. We decided to move to a quarterly schedule of seasonal Musical Discoveries, partly due to the waning popularity of the playlists and also due to the amount of work involved in making the compilations.

If we find that the amount of listeners and fans of these compilations increases to the levels we used to see before the algorithm squeeze, we shall certainly consider making them a monthly feature once more. Until then, they will remain quarterly. We may even stop producing them entirely should interest wane even further.

Even if we do stop producing more of these in the future, the ones that already exist shall remain both at SoundCloud and our web pages. The legacy playlists do seem to produce occasional visiting traffic, so thereby have some value to us. We also love the music, and that’s important as well.

Perhaps you might love the music too if you try one of them? The playlists are extremely eclectic affairs, so you may first have a piece of classical piano, followed by a reggae anthem, followed by a piece of experimental electronica, followed by some progressive jazz-rock fusion. The only way is to try one for yourself and see what leaps out at you from the speakers. You may well find a new artist or band to love and cherish from your own discoveries.

We recommend that you just start playing any compilation from the beginning whilst you are busy with whatever other tasks are a part of your day. Play it loud enough to hear and be background music for your potterings.

Compilations are organised by the number of plays each track had at the time of publishing. This is because tracks that are at the beginning of playlists tend to receive more plays than those that come later on. We collectively feel that the tracks with the fewest amounts of plays need more exposure than those that come after.

Of course, over time play counts will change. We set artists the challenge of overtaking the artists below them in the list, in the hope they will actively promote their wonderful creations. Sadly, few of them do. So much undiscovered wonderful music!

The best place to investigate the collection of Musical Discoveries compilations is from the main Musical Discoveries page at our website, and you can reach that right now by clicking here.