Now that we’ve made it to 2025, let’s be real: New Year’s Resolutions are generally a little basic. Of course we should be eating less junk food and doing our livers a favor by participating in “Dry January.” The combined stress and laziness of the holidays turns into the natural impulse to re-center, purify, and focus on our own personal journeys as we turn the page on another year — which is why so many of us vow to exercise more each January.
Luckily, if you’re looking for a little extra motivation to work out, run, cycle, lift, or all of those combined, we at Consequence have curated a series of playlists for the perfect 90-minute exercise routine. While many of us on staff spend probably too much time in front of our computers and not enough in the gym, each of these genre-specific playlists are tried and tested, having fueled some of our most empowering workouts.
A good workout playlist sets the tempo of your exercise, motivates you to put in the work, and distracts you from exhaustion or discomfort. It also allows you to understand music in a different way, connecting you to the primal roots of rhythm as the strain of exercise shifts your brain into performance and survival mode. In short, if a workout is hard, the right music can make it feel just a little bit easier.
First up is our rock music playlist, featuring 27 songs ranging from the late ’90s to today, with various shades of sub-genres in the mix. There are some automatic motivators from yore, like Rage Against the Machine’s “Testify,” Foo Fighters’ “Breakout,” Queens of the Stone Age’s “Little Sister,” and an Audioslave song so rousing it’ll give you an extra blast of energy. There are also some newer favorites, like Fontaines D.C.’s “Starburster” (our No. 2 song of 2024), Turnstile’s “BLACKOUT,” recent CoSigns Illiterate Light’s “Norfolk Southern,” and IDLES’ moshing classic “Never Fight a Man with a Perm.”
Check out the playlist below, and play it in order or throw it on shuffle; either way, these songs will be your best friends as you pump some iron, get back into kickboxing, or train for that half marathon. And if you prefer to get your exercises in to other genres, like metal, pop, and hip-hop, stay tuned for more specially-curated playlists throughout the week.
Our New Year’s Resolution Workout Playlists are available on Amazon Music. You can sign up here for three free months of Amazon Music Unlimited, which includes over 100 million songs in HD sound, the largest catalog of ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks from Audible. Submit proof of your free signup here for a chance to win a Bluetooth headphone bundle.