Castle Hughes takes us through their playlist.
When I started writing my debut album Crashed Out, I didn’t realise I was also building a playlist that would quietly shape the entire record.
Over the two years leading up to the release, I was constantly listening to electronic music, late at night while writing lyrics, driving around Perth after gigs, or sitting in my room replaying production ideas in my head.
The playlist I’ve put together, The Best of Electronic, is basically the sonic diary of that time.
It’s every song that influenced the way Crashed Out feels: fast, emotional, a little bit chaotic but always honest.
The album itself is ten tracks in just over 25 minutes, a kind of emotional sprint through anxiety, heartbreak, obsession, and the strange clarity that only seems to arrive at 2am.
Critics have described it as living in the space where house music and confessional pop collide, which feels pretty accurate to me. I’ve always loved how the dancefloor can be both an escape and a place where the truth accidentally slips out.
That’s exactly what this playlist represents.
Some of these songs taught me about movement, how a beat can feel like adrenaline in your bloodstream. Others showed me how electronic music can still be deeply emotional, even when everything is built from synths and drum machines.
When I was writing songs like “Run” or “Spinning Faster,” I kept coming back to tracks that captured that feeling of your mind racing faster than your body can keep up. I love music that feels like it’s moving forward even when the lyrics are falling apart.
There are also songs in this playlist that influenced the softer moments on the album. Tracks that reminded me that even in electronic music, space and vulnerability can be powerful.
Some of the most emotional moments on Crashed Out actually started with me trying to recreate the feeling of a song from this playlist, that moment when a drop hits and suddenly everything feels bigger than you.
More than anything, this playlist is a map of how the record happened.
It’s the music I listened to while figuring out who I was as an artist. The songs that made me want to write faster, produce harder and be more honest in my lyrics.
If Crashed Out is the final story, this playlist is everything that led up to it.
Turn it up, play it loud, and step inside the world that built the album.
