Unpopular position: track order is most of an album and shuffling is…

Unpopular position: track order is most of an album and shuffling is a small act of vandalism.

Not out of some purity thing. Sequencing is doing real work. The quiet one after the loud one lands quiet, and on shuffle it just lands. Half the songs I love are load-bearing only in position, and heard alone they are fine, unremarkable, a bit thin.

The counter-argument is that most people have always heard music out of order, on the radio, on a mix, from a wall. Which is true. But the album is the one format where somebody decided, and I like hearing a decision.