most of the time I go with the chaos of just hitting shuffle on all the mp3 files I have on my phone, which is over 3,000 songs. I will sometimes get in the mood for a specific album experience, but that mostly only happens for me with albums that are, like, very coherently Doing A Thing linking all the songs together to tell a larger story. Like the folk album Piece by Piece, by Maria Dunn, which tells the story of the women working in a garment factory in Canada from when it opened to when it was finally shut down. Each song tells a specific woman's story but overall the stories come together to form a mosaic picture of the garment manufacturing industry from the pov of the workers. That's interesting to me! but otherwise I want to have songs appear in my ears without me directly deciding on them, so that I'm listening to things I haven't listened to recently, and won't overplay anything to the point I get sick of it - which happens too easily for me.