Music. It definitely happened in 2025. The broken record around these pages is that there’s way too much of it being released on a weekly basis these days — 1/5th of album reviews this year came from albums released in October and November alone, for example, and here’s hoping that doesn’t increasingly become the norm because it was overwhelming and exhausting. There’s just, uh, NEVER ENOUGH!… time to let it fully settle in and consider everything you’d hope to by the time another December list making season rolls around.

But something also felt kind of — off? — about everything this year in a way that’s hard to explain concretely. There really weren’t any real big, definitive event albums even on an indie level that lived up to their expectations and it really made you wonder if the reason that one fowl-named rock band from New York City who blew up big time and became the apparent saviors to it all during the autumn was a reaction toward listeners wanting to have that communal feeling of “something happening” in the landscape again to culture-correct that problem. This is not to say there wasn’t great music released this year! If anything, it’s given way for those creating exciting new shapes in sound across the underground and mainstream alternative to be seen in what otherwise amounted to a big transitional year in music. These are the 50 Best Albums of 2025.

50. ELUCID – Interference Pattern [Self-released]

A voice at the beginning of INTERFERENCE PATTERN introduces the listen by observing how every day has a relationship to four other days — not proceeding it but rather scattered throughout the past, and that in turn is the disruption to our timeline. ELUCID indeed is a disruptor, with NYC underground rapper establishing himself as the experimental virtuoso pushing Armand Hammer’s boundaries further beyond the contemporary. His latest offering isn’t exactly defined as a proper album — perhaps a mixtape would be a better descriptor — but don’t look for a tracklisting on this one, however. The listen melds out like an evolving form of sonic matter as one, 41-minute-long distortion collage. Errant vocals and field samples from both the surrounding waking world and others reshaped through a flux of darkly smeared and hyper-sped production focus themselves in and out of the foreground, giving it a kaleidoscopically telepathic effect, again proving ELUCID as a foil to rap’s boundaries by breaking down continuums.

49. Welcome Strawberry – desperate flower [Cherub Dream Records / à La Carte Records]

There have been plenty of shoegaze albums to preoccupy the vibes this year, but few of them past the purity test alongside the novel nature behind it as Welcome Strawberry’s latest, desperate flower. Stemming from the Bay Area’s esoteric DIY scene, the band led by multi-instrumentalist Cyrus Vandenberghe has been growing out its form since their eponymous 2022 debut through a dreamy cross-pollination of swirling ‘gaze, psychedelic plumes, pleasant bursts of noise-pop, and lo-fi tape loops that still render vividly. It all blooms in full wonderfully here on their sophomore effort in which Vandenberghe becomes something of a shoegazing perfume genius where it’s the power of scent that leads he and his band’s creative intuitions with the way the music opens up your senses. The definition of a sonic bouquet, if you will…

48. AKAI SOLO – No Control, No Glory [Break All Records]

“The lark is not a performance, the craft is not a joke even if everything else is comedy. Hmmm, does that make sense? Once we feel it, remember that feeling and refine it ’til it’s seizable and the mode is yours to enter and exit at will. That control attained is glorious to me,” AKAI SOLO prefaces his latest album, No Control, No Glory. The key word in all of the above: “refine.” Collectively, SOLO’s put together one of the better master classes on the art of over-thinking it all through an uncanny stylistic eloquence, even when it’s tangled and messy. No Control, No Glory‘s producers in his constant Wavy Bagels alongside August Fanon, Lonesword, coffeeblack, groundskeepr, and a cast of others step to his level in their own crafts by meeting this same energy. Together, the rhymesmith and the beatmakers transform the ground beneath which he walks. It’s akin to the epiphanic sensation that makes you feel like you’re levitating in air and eventually, the place where the soul touches starlight. The clutter of all that over-wrought chaos floating through his head is as close as can be to clarity.

47. terraplana – natural [Balaclava Records]

Just because they’re professing a more audible tutelage from the likes of Blonde Redhead, early Sonic Youth, and Lush rather than another distillation of MBV pedal worship, it doesn’t mean terraplana’s music lacks the ability to levitate you above ground, even if it keeps your senses fully intact when doing so. In going the au natural route with their sophomore effort, the Brazilian rockers show the rest of the world that there’s still plenty of corners to revisit and restructure from within when you begin to rely on organic substances. The Curitiba four-piece are more forward-thinking in that approach, exploring a noisier meeting ground between Heaven and Earth that uses the studio space to produce psychedelically blushed indie rock. Through it, they’re unafraid to make visible a separation of each electrical current and a distinct voice amid relying on more than one within their hook-and-drum-driven sonic structures, collecting the air’s static rather than dispersing it.

46. Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table [Closed Casket Activities]

After a three-year orbit away from this world, the Cloakroom’s fourth studio effort, Last Leg of the Human Table, is a concentrated effort to reground them onto more terrestrial surroundings, and at that, realizing the Indiana band’s most concrete-sounding form to date. The atmosphere which they reenter this Earth just isn’t the same one they left, though, and don’t we all know it. Societal decay and existential quandaries on the daily atop of the oddity feeling of returning to some place familiar that’s now rather alien resonates within their sonic reconfiguration. They don’t let it swallow them into a deeper vacuum, however. Vocalist and guitarist Doyle Martin, bassist Bobby Markos, and drummer Timothy Remis race black holes by ripping through them with hook-powered highlights, fusing shoegaze friction and elemental punk minimalism. Instead of meandering in the looming heavy plumes of doom, they let the heavy get spaced out psychedelically.

45. Scowl – Are We All Angels [Dead Oceans]

The chorus on Are We All Angels’ opening track begrudgingly relents, “I don’t want to be special,” after all, yet it holds space as a reverse psychology of sorts that fuels the internal tension and sweet release from it, in turn allowing Scowl to exist in both worlds, under their own rules and needing not answer to anyone — even their own uneasy feelings. Recognizing their own polarization on the come-up at this point in the hardcore scene punctuates all of their strengths on the surface, something which they already began been testing the waters of more concentratedly with their 2023 extended play, Psychic Dance Routine. Pogo-bombing across a dozen tracks that bubble and explode with a joyous energy from embracing the audacity to be an outsider, it gives the Santa Cruz five-piece their own permission to fully colorize Kat Moss’ internal monologues with stylistic volatility.

44. FKA twigs – EUSEXUA [Young Records]

EUSEXUA invites you into its interiors, bringing together the best of both worlds — a merger of the ultimate in euphoric and sexual — to create FKA twigs’ most palpable musical statement and one intended for explicit body movement in ever way. If twigs’ previous efforts suggested that she was the heir apparent of björk in all of their evolutionary futuristic sonic gestations, then we learn here that the mother of inspiration is also that of Madonna during her pop-electronica eras of Ray of Light and Music. This is to say that the music here is more outwardly indulgent in a prismatic array of pleasure, immersing you in a late night fever dream that sees, hears, and touches its theme through constant aural stimulation, aided by a myriad of production from future-minded electronic shapers both large and more microscopic in detail from Koreless, Eartheater, Ojivolta, 100gecs’ Dylan Brady, Two Shell, and Nicolas Jaar.

43. Drain – …Is Your Friend [Epitaph Records]

DRAIN is your friend and don’t you dare take that for granted. Three albums into their career since breaking out during pandemic times with their 2020 debut, California Cursed, followed by their post-lockdown heatseeker, Living Proof, the Santa Cruz hardcore trio are still young, virile, and fully amped, ready to turn the pit into a party where all of the rage is more than welcome and darkness is to be destroyed on their hardest hitting of impact yet, …IS YOUR FRIEND. On their end, life realities are hitting harder on the health side of things these days (drummer and founding member Tim Flegal revealed his battle with cancer during the album’s rollout,) yet their relentless desire to smash hardcore skate punk and thrash through barriers, and have the sound coming out of the other end of the crater left behind is sounding golden. Whether you call it maturation, another growth spurt, or a refinement in form after putting in plenty of reps on the road, Flegal alongside vocalist Sammy Ciaramitaro and guitarist Cody Chavez are locked in here fully together.

42. MIKE – Showbiz! [10k]

10 albums into his prolific career which has designated him a solid spot among the most forward thinkers in the independent rap scene despite the hazed and dazed approach behind his style and flow, the latest effort from the New York rhymesmith doesn’t get away from that signature sway. Still, MIKE is building worlds within his own art on the storyboard of Showbiz! A place for every bar and a bar in its right place when detailing the life and times by the 26-year-old through a mostly self-produced vision, though he tags in Laron, Thelonious Martin, and Surf Gang’s Harrison here for some added staging effects. Building on the finer lines between 2022’s Beware of the Monkey and last year’s Tony Seltzer collab, Pinball, he’s gluing the fleeting nature of someone searching for their home base by looking at things from both hindsight and the road forward from a straighter line. Those mood boards and memory collages are still there to dot his introversions ruminated out, but there’s a pronounced precision in that formula this time around. 

41. Panda Bear – Sinister Grief [Domino Recording Co.]

Noah Lennox has endlessly remolded the shape of his solo work through varying tonal permutations and prism spectrums that have oft reflected seasons in his own life, informed greatly by death and a depth of existentialism wrought from it. At the end of its path, his eight studio effort, Sinister Grief, sounds like Lennox coming full circle in not only celebrating his own artistic life, but that of its extended limbs, too. All members of AnCo contributed in some shape or form to the listen alongside new waves borne from his influence in Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede, the elusive Cindy Lee guest, and his own daughter, Nadja. Psychedelic contours blending into warm hues again reframe themselves more forthright in this cast, with its bubbling of pop hooks reflecting that of ’60s turntable glory where breezes of harmony and ethereal production transcended timelines. Add in a spectrum of reggae, country western, and the stray reverberations of the extended AnCo multiverse’s uncanny synth-pop touching its surface, and it could only be a Panda Bear album. 

40. Fleshwater –  2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky [Closed Casket Activities]

We’re not dealing with the same fleshwater of just one year ago, never mind five years ago when they were merely known as the mysterious side-project of Massachusetts metalcore boundary breakers Vein.fm alongside experimental shoegaze songwriter MIRSY. For starters, this past spring saw them opening for Deftones in front of sold out arenas behind the strength of their continued success of their 2022 debut album, We’re Not Here to Be Loved. With all the momentum behind them in 2025, their sophomore follow-up, 2000: In Search Of The Endless Sky, hears them shooting for the stratosphere. The band could have easily continued on course to blowing up the scale of their heavenly heavy-gaze model, but instead, they’re making new direction strides that do more to collide their gravity into a melodic hardcore meeting ground. Star dustings of trip-hop and sparse art-rock arrangements within their cosmos bridge the gap between all corners of their scene influences equally. Their universe is indeed endless…

39. Addison Rae – Addison [Columbia Records]

For better or (mostly) for worse, influencers are a substitute for our love of media consumption in a day and age where the attention economy and a dying Hollywood can’t afford to produce content fast enough to keep up with the average person’s entertainment consumption habits. Addison Rae has thirst trapped that formula toward her advantage in relatively convincing fashion by transitioning her platform from a dancing TikTok star to potentially the next big pop star on her debut album,Addison. What’s so very influencer-like of Addison, however, is that for an album named after the artist itself, the real stars of it are its production team of Swedes and Max Martin protege, Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, who over-deliver in the aesthetics department. Here, they’ve given Rae severely faultless beats, sleek synths, ’90s-indebted electronica, and maximalist hedonism that positions her ethereal vapor voice as a promising substance.

38. Deftones – Private Music [Reprise Records / Warner Records]

Deftones’ 10th studio album is a masterful display of the sheer sonic velocity in which the metal-gazing hydra-heads have the power to conduct riveting damage and seismic shifts throughout the atmosphere, even over 25 years after they broke new ground in the scene with White Pony. What’s apparent on Private Music on on standout tracks like “my mind is a mountain”, “infinite source”, and “milk of the madonna” is how they’re more directly anchoring a bold “pop” outline (by Deftones standards, that is…) into their gravitational weight in the heels of their recently-minted Gen-Z alt-rock hero status. Tapping into deeper grooves within their craters and cracked wide heavens of their atmospheric ballads like “ecdysis” and “i think about you all the time”, they band is conquering the art of satiating the highest tiers of the arenas that they comfortably command now on sold out headlining tours. Overdue, but well deserved.

37. Alex G – Headlights [RCA Records]

When you consider everything that has gone down in the personal life of one Alexander Giannascoli since the release of his 2022 album God Save the Animals, Headlights makes sense. For one, he’s now on a major label — signing with RCA Records for this, his 10th studio effort, and is also now a Gen-Z cult hero. The latter part pays no mind to trends — most of the tracks here are humbled neatly in acoustic guitars, violin, cellos and violas, and debonair piano that makes its aesthetic rest somewhere between the rustic symphonic and the more experimental indie prestige-leanings that go all the way in upending traditionalism. Alex G’s fantastically-voiced alter-egos that often popped up throughout past work seem to be drifting further into the rearview, although there’s still the omnipresence of compositional flourishes where the focus blurs, or the delicate angles suddenly bend into the sun or a much more heavier and humid shoegazing weight. In his major label bag era, Headlights merges the all-grown-up Philly wunderkind with ease down a long road of success to come as one of indie rock’s best accidental success stories.

36. R.J.F. – Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building [DAIS Records]

Cleaning Out The Empty Administration Building doesn’t break the continuum of CEREMONY frontman Ross J. Farrar’s preceding solo patterns, though it’s clear the punk poet has a firmer grip on his sound — and time’s passage — even if it remains a broadly uncategorizable. The mystique is beginning to flesh in full, conjuring psychedelic magic from the smoky air floating between post-punk, no-wave, avant-jazz, and experimental noise — an astutely complimentary canvas of random parts befitting for the abstractions of the poet’s spoken-sung word impressionism — and placing it within the bolder outlines of this equally weird human experience. You may find yourself standing several steps forward into the future than where you last remember leaving off, but so is this strange journey through living when R.J.F. is at the helm of fucking around with the space-time continuum in yet another daring experiment into parts unknown in sound.

35. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power [Roadrunner Records]

Clocking in at 62 minutes and 8 seconds in length, the latest from the Bay Area experimental black metal band can be regarded in today’s feeble-minded attention-deficit listening culture as a “demanding” listen, yet it’s most striking that it’s one of the most cohesively-designed productions in the rock spectrum that melds the band’s towering post-metal juiced to the max (“Magnolia”, “Revelator”) with gauzier reprieves experimented with on 2021’s Infinite Granite (“The Garden Route”, “Heathen”) and even new moves in their form of heavy that tempt more mainstream appeal (“Body Behavior”.) Complete with intro, intermission, and closing chapters featuring Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher and Paul Banks of Interpol in spoken word and shimmering production from Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Paramore, Jimmy Eat World,) Lonely People with Power is Deafheaven’s black metal magnum opus.

33. Ela Minus – DÍA [Domino Recording Co.]

In the five years since the release of Ela Minus’ debut album, acts of rebellion, we, the better parts of society, have come to realize that there will always be these oppressive forces bent on achieving the worst things for the lesser good beyond our control. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Colombia electronic producer’s  sophomore effort, DÍA, can be heard as a rebellion of the self, especially when consuming the negative thinking patterns that allow everything that isn’t so great about existing in this world to dim our light. Her resolve is the opposite of rage, as Minus’ “bright music for dark times” techno coda is a shield of radiant energy that topples mountains, dodges false idols and steers through oblivion, with her signature kinetic builds, celestial synth atmospheres, and call-to-action choruses amplifying themselves exponentially by the Lumens and renewing faith in your own righteous will.

32. Moor Mother & SUMAC – The Film [Thrill Jockey Records]

There are seemingly no limits as to where Moor Mother’s expanding universe of sound will go, as she has worked with everyone from billy woods to Mary Lattimore and Lonnie Holly alongside a host of remarkable free jazz players throughout a countless number of projects under her own name and others. Her latest creative exploration with experimental post-metal supergroup SUMAC may be the most far out and heavy, as their collaborative convergence on The Film sounds like a natural collision between where each of these artists have been heading in their respective corners of the cosmos. Ayewa’s poetry of real Black history is entangled through a dense space air. Every word is just inches away from a collision course with something that could offset the very fabric of our existence. And instead of near-misses or floating ellipses, she and SUMAC dare to allow them to hit.

31. Prewn – System [Exploding In Sound Records]

Prewn currently resides in Los Angeles, but make no mistake about it — her sound is very much born out of the rapturous quiet that is the understated beauty of Western Massachusetts’ wonderfully weird, cantankerous underground rock scene. Every turn is an unexpected, creeping up from behind you much like those intrusive thoughts that cross the wires throughout her sophomore effort, System. Describing the album as a “private journal made public,” Izzy Hagerup definitely informs the rawer edges you hear on standouts like its unraveling title track, the muck of “Dirty Dog”, and the black hole of “Cavity”. Like her former Northampton roots, Hagerup’s songs are an uncompromising example of distinct style, contorting riffs and forcing distortion to bend in her favor — morbid wordsmith humor to punch — rendering the emotional weight in Prewn’s music with a specificity to its sound that feels fully in sync with the personal. 

30. Sharp Pins – Balloon Balloon Balloon [Perennial / K Records]

From the Beatles to the Nerves to Big Star to Guided By Voices, Lifeguard guitarist Kai Slater has made it a point to rediscover each decade’s gold standards of power-power through a brand new set of ears while giving it a lo-fi DIY punk makeover under his solo moniker, Sharp Pins. Balloon Balloon Balloon, quickly follows last year’s breakthrough, Radio DDM, and pops even louder. His songwriting formula remains a consistency in substance — colorful power-pop songs with sunny, jangled hooks and melancholic melodies plotted out in all of the right places against grainy, window-smeared exteriors where Slater’s fingerprints run across them to mute, muffle and blow out the speakerbox. At its most polished, tracks like the hand-clapped “I Don’t Have The Heart” with its teen idol scream could have easily sent an entire Ed Sullivan studio crowd into a fainting frenzy while “I Could Find Out” make you wonder if Slater was actually born under a British fog in a past life. The deeper you delve into the 21 tracks, however, it’s there where you start to notice the idiosyncratic discord within Slater’s craft. He makes it sound like a one-of-a-kind handwritten personal love letter recorded for your ears only.

29. Oneohtrix Point Never – Tranquilizer [Warp Records]

The origin story behind Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest experimental electronic opus, Tranquilizer, practically sounds fated, even by simulation theory standards. According to Daniel Lopatin, the listen uses preserved samples ripped from ’90s-era CDs that initially lived on the actual Internet Archives until they, in greater irony, became lost media of their own at one point. Now more permanently restored within OPN’s fair use creative pursuits, it’s more than just Lopatin rediscovering the fine electronic avant garde art of syncing together digital fragments and intentionally corrupted files filled with nature, projected extraterrestrial signals, and vapory blankets of calm to elicit a beautifully unsettling sonic mirror of our culture lived through the online lens. His hyper-meticulous grotesque fascination with the impacts of digital degradation on our lives make themselves known, as if they’re simulating the upgraded version of reality in a content dump for these over-saturated, broken attention economy times.

28. Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon [Third Man Records]

If you’ve been a Hotline TNT listener since day one, Raspberry Moon may feel a little jarring at first. Its outer veneer is less about loud layers of static and swirling emotive synesthesia, and more forthright in its desire to create heart-bursting anthems where the feelings stand front and center. “Julia’s War” may be named after the modern DIY shoegaze label run by They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s Doug Dulgarian, but its structure — alongside the “nah-nah-nah-nah!” chorus — is more in line with Britpop pop-rock anthemry than Brooklyn underground rock oddity. The jangled tail-end standout “Dance the Night Away” only emphasizes that shift. That’s not to say Hotline TNT have fully left their shoegaze past behind. Instead, they’ve discovered that a widescreen projector and the art of collaboration (it’s the first album where frontman Anderson ceded complete creative control to his formalized bandmates) can expand their sonic diagram to reach more ears, rather than compressing it to a breaking point.

27. End It – Wrong Side of Heaven [Flatspot Records]

End It know an opportunity to seize when they see it, and do so on their own terms with their debut full-length, Wrong Side of Heaven. 15 songs clocking in under a half hour, they take what they already did damn well on a handful of previous EPs, tidy up the sound quality with an assist from producer Brian McTernnan at his iconic Salad Days studio (which has also been a transitional setting for early Turnstile releases as well as those for luminaries like Bane) and blast through with clarity. The line that separates the Baltimore band from every outstanding harder-edged hardcore band these days from those who are merely solid is a big personality bursting from their sound. Akil’s loud mouth delivers bad omens, calls out the 1% for their complacency, humbles the posers, and bodies the haters. He’s such a natural at the art of smack talk and socio-political pipebombs that when he goes into balladeering mode on their melodic hardcover cover of Maximum Penalty’s “Could You Love Me?”, you have to double check to see if you’re on the same record. They’re on the right side of everything nonetheless.

26. Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky [Polyvinyl Records]

Growing pains have been at the epicenter of every effort Momma have released since embarking on the search for their authentic selves in the spoils of suburbia throughout indie rock introspection. On the Brooklyn band’s fourth full-length, Welcome to My Blue Sky, it very much feels like they’re not just in control of the turbulence, but deep diving further into sky to widen the lens of how to set it all into sound with the last splashes of ‘of ’90s indie rock, perpetually youthful Midwestern emo euphoria, and hooked-up shoegaze. Yet, it sticks around with a bittersweet lust for life nostalgia about exes, places, friends, and family member’s faces they can still see clearly in the rearview. The words around them of course matter, but what’s really striking in the air they whirl around in is how Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman assign an energy to each piece of it that captures a moment in a perfectly shaped time capsule of sound.

25. They Are Gutting A Body of Water – LOTTO [ATO Records / Julia’s War / Smoking Room]

Where are they? The weird, synthesized accents plastered all over a mess of a soundboard. The guitars looped ambiently into infinity and breakcore beats compressing and decompressing all of shoegaze’s history into a split second. Uncanny-to-replicate cuts and splices in song composition that time-shifts your focus in and out of nowhere. LOTTO is a totally different game from what we’ve come to known of the experimental ways of They Are Gutting A Body of Water. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly as the Philly band’s most highest profile release to date — their first in tandem between frontman Doug Dulgarian’s Julia’s War label, the cassette imprint Smoking Room, and major indie ATO Records — heading into this moment with as much “structure” as one can expect from a band who has never quite aligned with convention is to be expected. Siphoning every eccentricity delivered aggressively in dreamscaped swaths of feedback against a grotesque canvas reflecting society and the self is what makes the underground darlings of shoegaze futurism’s big move so ready for the added ears and attention.

24. Militarie Gun – God Save The Gun [Loma Vista Recordings]

Life under the gun isn’t just a witty debut album title that will catapult your band from being DIY hardcore scene darlings to getting big enough to get that Taco Bell bag while playing Coachella. A self-fulfilling prophecy to shoulder with from there on out it has become that for Militarie Gun, who find themselves thousands of miles away on their sophomore effort putting full faith behind frontman Ian Shelton exploiting his loss of edge and the subsequent personal strife for the sake of achieving bigger, sweeter-sounding, and smarter hardcore-informed alt-rock anthems. The result is the band’s strongest jams to date which can kick you in the face one moment and convince you to wave your hands while drowning the next. Beyond the rock-solid reinforced melodic hardcore and punk-pop, Shelton and company deviate from the same ol’ through fired up distortion-accented surf guitars, beaming synthesizers, heavy emo acoustic ballads, and loveless crashouts. It’s what rock music sounds like when the higher power of self-belief has you going for broke.

23. DJ Haram – Beside Myself [Hyperdub]

We’re living in a literal hellscape and while the Beside Myself‘s creator, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Philly-by-way-of-Jersey-based producer Zubeyda Muzeyyen, b.n.a. DJ Haram, may have been nourished across those city’s vibrant club scenes, she’s using the power of radical thought to extend that energy out into a hedonistic, vigilante service to the culture in a 14-track block of guest-heavy tracks. Armand Hammer, Moor Mother, Moor Mother’s Irreversible Entanglements bandmate in trumpeter Aquiles Navarro alongside guitarist Abdul Hakim Bilal, Egyptian producer El Kontessa, and Jersey producer Kay Drizz all appear in an organic and electronic chemical reaction that combines visceral hip-hop and sexed up club beats, meditative poetry and punked up mantras, as well as samples of traditional Middle Eastern music with Arabic bars scribed over it. Timelines shift within seconds, merging the past of humanity’s ugly history with its future dystopia.

23. Total Wife – come back down [Julia’s War]

We should probably consider it a curse word to consider the Nashville-by-way-of-Boston duo as mere shoegaze, as you’ll discover on Total Wife’s new album, come back down. Instead, Total Wife immerse you within their own underground world that is entirely own thing, traversing between lucidity and a waking reality through a strewn, recycled energy source. Guitars are repurposed as synth samples as well as those of the unassumingly not-so-obvious which keep its cosmic body evolving (the entire album is apparently scattered with vocal samples taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”.) Blurring lines between slowcore fades, digital pop glitter, blown out techno, and yes, swelling pools of shoegaze, into one sonic topography where vocalist Ash Richter’s lyrics — a hushed dissolve of thought borne of pure isolation — truly make the whole of the body a connection between human emotion and what your senses translate into sound.

21. Hayley Williams – Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party [Post-Atlantic]

With Paramore (as well as her own) freedom being the new reality of her artistic career since gaining independent label freedom, Hayley Williams’ latest solo effort, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, is like one big emotional roller coaster that lets all the shouting, screaming, crying, pain, and deserved moments of joy out in in one sitting. The whole of the album is proudly genre-agnostic, channeling a diversity of styles that form-fit Williams’ faceted creative personas. There’s guitar-spiraling shoegaze, depressive dream-pop, bright bubbles of art-pop , rock-edged, SZA-sizzled modern R&B, and even a signature return to form of big-feeling emo. Along the way, Williams makes it a point to pull no punches in saying what she wants to say and has always meant to say out loud. Political niceties, Christian hypocrisy, and racist country stars being damned. Progressive as fuck no matter which way you hold it, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party solidifies Williams’ status as one of the most realist alternative pop stars to do it this generation.

20. Maria Somerville – Luster [4AD]

The apparition of Maria Somerville is wondrously refreshing — a calming experience purifying the noisier feedback and pop in static of shoegaze’s modern air with something more considered in intentionally seeking out transcendence through minimalism and textures while meandering between the delicate and loud. After turning ears her way with the release of her self-released 2019 debut album, All My People, her sophomore follow-up, Luster, finds an appropriate home on 4AD that makes her a kindred torchbearer to the label’s own past dream-pop celestials the Cocteau Twins while also defining the Galway songwriter’s own new age spirit. She herself is an artist of multiple sonic dimensions: absorbing the walls of chamberic post-punk within cavernous waters and haunted echoes, an other-worldly presence in swells of ambient mystique, and tripping out in quiet rhythmic bursts of ambient pop bursting in color from the greyscale. It’s a listen that goes beyond known borders, and the physical realm for that matter.

19. Nuclear Daisies – First Taste of Heaven [Portrayal of Guilt Records]

Welcome to Nuclear Daisies’ own Heaven, a supernatural place where the next phase of shoegaze’s life is beyond this plane and sounds nothing like what might be currently whirring to increasingly exhausting, monotonous forms throughout sound systems down here on Earth. The first full-length taste from the Austin trio, featuring past and present members of Ringo Deathstarr and Temple of Angles, imagines the possibility of an infinite future for all of us as well as their sound where transformation has no cosmic ceiling by popping a curious pill that allows the trio to dive head-first into colorful DMT-soaked ’90s dream-pop, big beat, industrial, and electronic new age. The lasting effects of these alterative energies in collision on the same plane creates the movement which pushes a forward-transcending passage through all of one’s experienced time and space, and into an indescribable destination where ultimately, who you once were is shattered and what remains is a new you, transfigured on the cusp of bliss.

18. Earl Sweatshirt – Live Laugh Love [Tan Cressida / Warner Records]

“What started as a tongue-in-cheek critique of the irony in the phrase developed into a genuine examination of the nostalgia of joy and the simplicity of genuine connection.” And with that, the motto Live Laugh Love finds a redemption arm through the unlikeliest sources in the world view of one Earl Sweatshirt. But more than anything, it’s the album in which the enigmatic rapper finally embraces the outside after detesting it for so long and opting to wrap his word rhymes through collage-cut beats and spirograph samples that have been prominent on the mood board since 2018’s underground rap landscape-changing effort, Some Rap Songs. The hazy, dazed energy might still be apparent in the way his words sway through the open air, but in their collaborative production with kindred spirits of the scene in the likes of Navy Blue, Black Noi$e, and Child Actor, Sweatshirt sounds more transparent than ever now that he’s embraced his creative work with no need for shades or sun-stained windows.

17. Wednesday – Bleeds [Dead Oceans]

Do you think there’s any truth to a pitbull puppy pissing off of a balcony on “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)”? In Karly Hartzman strange world of a dirtbag hipster-goth Americana, catching these stray moments with opportune timing, come all too supernatural in her sense in observation and penmanship. Rest assured, the events that unfold are someone, somewhere’s story. With Bleeds, the fifth full-length effort from her band, Wednesday, the art of doing so becomes her distinct signature alone in sculpting words around sound, and reaches it’s most rugged finesse. It’s really been headed in this direction ever since the band’s two-fold breakthrough of 2021’s Twin Plagues and 2023’s Rat Saw God introduced the outside world at large to their mundane malaise, dressing up the morbidities of daily living and harnessing them into a loud-soft sonic collision of indie rock and shoegaze with a Southern rock accent. Here on Bleeds, we’re hearing Hartzman and company carve out these faceted styles within her storyboard niche with a meticulous bend of the knife.

16. Anxious – Bambi [Run for Cover Records]

Bambi is an album that may have not even happened had Anxious vocalist Grady Allen not opted to put some space between himself and the musician life after going hard on the dream following the Connecticut emo punks’ breakthrough 2022 debut, Little Green House. Instead, he and band come out of the other end of that exploratory sabbatical by defying sophomore slump territory and decidedly make an instant scene classic, fully alive on its arrival. Collaboration worked wonders for the quintet just as well. Where Allen was once the de facto frontman of the band, guitarist Dante Melucci’s songwriting prowess steps forward equally so, adding dueling verse and chorus structures as well as a sweetness of harmony into their sound that broadens their alternative appeal. Overcoming the growing pains with big swings, Anxious have mastered the art of adulting.

15. Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound [The Flenser]

Leading up to the release of their debut full-length, The Spiritual Sound, self-professed ecstatic black metalmakers Agriculture sounded like they were escaping that label by previewing the whole of the body with a series of expectantly intriguing yet nuanced listens that shifted away from the heavier material of their 2023 breakthrough debut album and the coupling of EPs bookended at both ends. The art of the red herring is a good reminder as to why you shouldn’t assume something of an album based off its promo cycle, as there’s audibly an energy spike in the very, very ecstatic black metal divine occurring throughout while embracing an inner calm after achieving the highest level of consciousness from the onslaught. This is no longer the thing of black metal as derived from beautiful white noise and violent static with joy and Zen applied to the formula, but rather one transformed by the deconstruction of the self where Agriculture define their sound as their own spiritual identity.

14. Geese – Getting Killed [Partisan Records / Play It Again Sam]

Getting Killed sounds like an an astute lineage of NYC’s storied creative bohemia spanning well past the point of each band members’ own parents’ lifetimes colliding into the unbothered energy of some young freaks making art outside of algorithmic trend. It’s a rarity this day in age, to say the lease. From the moment the keys get placed into its bomb-fueled ignition on “Trinidad” in its world folk-noise-rap crashout, what follows in the funky art rock of “100 Horses”, the bar room’s junky jukebox rattling within “Husbands” and “Cobra”, or the ghostly tax-crucifying anthem jamming out across the fields of “Taxes”. Narrated by Cameron Winter’s distinct multiple vocal personalities defined by unhinged freakouts and dangerously handsome croons, there’s good reason why the third album from year’s most buzziest band came to be the one thing that everyone from veteran punk poets to buzz band survivalists themselves claimed as the new rock hope.

13. crushed – no scope [Ghostly International]

In 2023, Shawn Durkan, frontman of psychedelic noise-gazers Weeknd, linked up with Bre Morell, frontwoman of dream-swept Austin rockers Temple of Angels, across wireless lines for crushed’s first release, extra life — an EP so perfect in the way it reinvented their existing sonic exteriors against a forward-thinking trendscape of ’90s trip-hop and that era’s FM alternative-pop dial, it almost made you wonder if they’d already arrived fully formed. On their debut full-length, no scope, they refine their dreamy electronic guitar-pop craft, crystallizing a polarity of lovelorn longing and timeline glitch bliss in the process. Tiny, perfectionist details stardusted along the way level up no scope with more life than where they first started, be it slowburning ballads tailor made for Morell’s vocal gravitational force, alien transmissions or that crisp collision of digital and electric layers ecstatically crackling through. no scope‘s energy pulls your head into galaxy brain mode, then rips you right back down to Earth a dozen times over.

12. ROSALÍA – LUX [Columbia Records]

ROSALÍA’s LUX is an ornate reaction to what came before it — the maximalist, experimental art-pop adventure that was the Spanish singer’s 2023 album, MOTOMAMI. A polarity against the album’s immediacy conceived with a diverse cast of collaborators from across the spectrum — producer constants Noah Goldstein and Dylan Wiggins, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Pharrell, and El Guincho as well as uncanny guest vocals from björk and Yves Tumor — she transcends this physical world and the passage through death’s door (be it our own human mortality or her own artistic creativity) through another singular stylistic reinvention that conflates R&B pop, electronic, and — more dramatically — classical and operatic remnants across four movements of 60-minute-long musical cinema about love, heartbreak faith, and fame. Is it too much to add that ROSALÍA does this all in 14 languages specifically inspired by Christian saints, Hebrew prophets, Sufi Muslim mystics, and Buddhist nuns? This is exemplary pop-avant garde grandeur, but also an album that leaves plenty of room for life’s mysteries to permeate without one, unanimous concrete belief system needed to deconstruct them.

11. TURNSTILE – NEVER ENOUGH [Roadrunner Records]

Since shifting the hardcore scene culture on 2022’s GLOW ON,  the word “adjacent” has become a curse word when describing any band trying to make a similar crossover to copy cat effect. Where does that leave TURNSTILE in 2025? NEVER ENOUGH answers that resoundingly by owning up to their departure as a hardcore band properly in style (but not necessarily spirit) and instead, has the audacity of becoming this year’s best alternative rock album, period. As a bigger, bolder extension of GLOW ON‘s non-hardcore sonic eccentricities, NEVER ENOUGH goes all in with their outsider elements of embracing meditative electronic breakbeats and ambient energy currents attached to nearly every climax. The Baltimore DIY expats are now simply one of the biggest bands on the planet who just so happened to come up from the hardcore ranks, now in a category all their own.

10. Lifeguard – Ripped and Torn [Matador Records]

Not many young adults around their age these days care about music made beyond the ’90s timeline, but Lifeguard’s music nerdiness has them done a hell of a favor in making them stand out with an authentically exciting combustible energy. Ripped and Torn, the band’s debut full-length, overdelivers in that regard. It’s an evolution on what they began plotting out back on their 2022 EP, Crowd Can Talk, a promising post-hardcore introduction to the Hallogallo scene leaders, and 2023’s more calculated extension on that noise, Dressed In Trenches. Channeling everything into mono compresses their sound aesthetically into that similarly of their veteran punk guitar heroes, but also emphasizes that unkempt, raw live energy which they hope to connect their music with audiences whenever they’re playing it out in the wild. There’s little left behind the surface of what Lifeguard are doing right now, because it’s all the real deal.

9. PinkPantheress – Fancy That [Warner Records UK]

PinkPantheress’ fourth effort and second mixtape, Fancy That, solidifies Victoria Beverley Walker’s craft as a future-minded producer far and away from creating utter viral novelty or disposable art with her studies of Aughts techno flowing through this seamless 20-minute elixir of bubbly dance-pop. Unlike her 2023 proper debut full-length, Heaven Knows, where she flirted with a prism of energies and stylistic cues to set the mood for the club beyond the Internet, this one is decidedly a cohesive mix of pastel house tones and sleek LED lights astutely featuring production from indie sleaze hitmaker the Dare and samples of tracks worked on by Ray of Light producer William Orbit as well as classic millennial Euro club hitmakers Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, and Underworld. You can’t help but hear PinkPantheress honor those vibes in a manner which most vibe makers wish they could produce, perhaps because there’s more natural tastemaking substance behind her efforts.

8. Horsegirl – Phonetics On and On [Matador Records]

Musical academics are once again at the forefront of Horsegirl’s creative approach on their Cate Le Bon-produced sophomore effort, Phonetics On and On, though the application of it resonates differently. Since relocating to New York City so that two of its members can attend NYU, the trio apply a higher learning and their new found cultural surroundings to their sound by retooling its noisier corners into minimalist indie-pop that — much like the repetitive recounting of round numbers on “2468”, the rapid on-and-off energy of “Switch Over”, or the ticking down of the clock in “Frontrunner” — finds the trio methodically arranging each song as if they are a form of sonic architecture where every sung syllable, use of an instrument, and the way a tune bends pop melodies loudly out of the quiet has a purpose in holding up its structure. The idea that its process of addition and subtraction eliminates much of the noise and instead embraces space is simply radical.

7. Bad Bunny – DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS [Rimas]

Not to play down the impact of 2023’s nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana in being a deserved transitional victory lap on the heels of 2022’s Un Verano Sin Ti, a sleek and cohesive streaming giant double album that defined the state of modern Latin pop, but Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS feels more like its proper event follow-up in how it merges that era with that of Puerto Rico’s storied musical history. He threads his pulse and needle through the country’s past festive influences in bringing salsa, plena, and música jíbara to bigger stages as it moves through the neon footprints of the now in his reggaeton-fused dance steps. For Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, he uses this moment as much as one to celebrate his roots as much as he does to reground himself into them — a reminder that no matter how big his star gets, Puerto Rico is his home and he remembers where he came from. He wants the world to know it, too (especially those in the United States who think they’re at the center of it.)

6. billy woods – Golliwog [Backwoodz Studioz]

As much as we wish we could make an easy, breezy backseat getaway getting high with billy woods with producer Kenny Segal riding shotgun like we did on the cross-continental tour dispatch that was 2023’s Maps, Golliwog is the escape these times deserve. Thankfully, with our narrator being one of the best rappers alive right now, it’s not very hard to sit your ass right down into place, let these tales engross you, and keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish, from the very first “Jumpscare” to every “Cold Sweat” in between. woods’ homage to horrorcore and the MF Doom blueprint is impeccably designed in its medley of very ominous, lurching beats, spiral cinema strings, and samples culled from slashers and screamers. He’s lured you in with a promise of fun scary stories that end up being way more fucked up and heavier than you realize, only to lock the door on you after making an escape for himself. There’s no way out of this world, and that should terrify you.

5. oklou – choke enough [True Panther]

Oklou, the experimental pop moniker of singer and producer Marylou Vanina Mayniel, first fascinated avant popheads and experimental electronic circles back in 2014 with her Avril EP (under the Loumar project banner, at that,) and then took six years to breakthrough with her 2020 effort, Galore. choke enough, her proper debut LP, doesn’t necessitate needing to know the Oklou of the past in order to understand where she is today, or — perhaps more astutely — where the French songwriter is in the future right now. What once were songs moving through an immaculate, Roland-designed prism field of R&B-pop romance now parses those layers into both the micro and minimalist as well as the wider screen and maximalist by expanding her canvas with guitar-pop textures, lush folds of electric brass, and turning outside sounds into entrancing field recordings that present both the delicate and chaotic of life. In some ways, it deconstructs natural order, as Oklou magnifies emotion into listeners’ mood view in a way that captures the everyday in all of its significances.

4. Dijon – Baby [R&R / Warner Records]

Dijon’s 2021 debut, Absolutely, was the kind of breakthrough that had some really good ideas on it you just knew were the beginning of something new happening to redesign music culture as the Baltimore songwriter pushed the needle forward beyond kaleidoscopic beats, bleary synesthesia, and honeysuckled soul samples, and into a current that was humanly electric. It gets there and pops on his sophomore standout, Baby, in how it feels like a listen that’s wholly alive rather than one best experienced when stuffed into a headphones headspace. Clustering guitar-pop distortion through a haze of psychedelia, the color of the air changes prismatically and its gravity gets defies direction. At times, his own voice blurs amorphously into disintegrating synths and instruments, and yet, its drum, bass ,and thumping piano lines pump blood like the circuitry of a heartbeat, making for a listen that in its fresh chemical peel on soul-glowing R&B is one best experienced in the flesh.

3. No Joy – Bugland [Hand Drawn Dracula / Sonic Cathedral]

Songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz, under the moniker of No Joy, has been a progressor of shoegaze’s outer limits well before it became in vogue to do so. It’s an actual joy to hear her fifth full-length album, Bugland — a production collaboration with the experimental producer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid of Fire-Toolz — being a coronation for her contributions towards its future which many of her peers haven’t even broached a proximity to. Layering dimension upon dimension into No Joy’s soundboard, the tandem take listeners through several left turns, from peaceful new age ambient reprieves to almost-metal breakdowns and the gristle against cosmic brass, all while the psychedelic tapestry spooled from silken synthetic strings weaves these sounds together in a way that sounds eerily natural. It succeeds at piquing the senses with brilliance, brightness, and contrast turned up to the max and pop weirding out hard.

2. Water From Your Eyes – It’s A Beautiful Place [Matador Records]

Let’s make one thing clear: It’s A Beautiful Place has not dulled the color spectrum of Water From Your Eyes’ sound, nor has it made them boring. What may be jarring, however, is how much the Brooklyn experimental art-pop rockers are sounding heavier with the weight of the world on their shoulders here. The glossier effects of riffage currently being dished out in the modern hardcore-adjacent scene atop of the ongoing deluge of ’90s alternative and nü-metal revivalism is placed firmly on its surface, bent and reshaped ever so slightly to resemble a Water From Your Eyes interpretation of that energy. It may not be as complexly “weird” as their previous efforts — the kind of listen that took you off this Earth by way of asymmetrical sample loops, brain-warping electronic experimentation, and art-rock deconstructed down to the bit size that took some greater focus to digest — but it makes the most of the one we’re living in.

1. YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds [AD 93 / Many Hats]

YHWH Nailgun are a noise rock band in the transcendent sense. The canvas of what we’re normally used to hearing from that realm — a steely post-punk sheath, some industrial weight lobbed behind lofty riffs, and an ambiguity of distortion blurring guitars and synthetic wires together — gets recontextualized into its own subversive pop exploration on 45 Pounds. A 20-minute-plus listen equating to a sensory cardio workout, the breakthrough debut from the Brooklyn band challenges sound, color, and motion, and physics really to chronically redesign and align in their direction while never ever fully coming untethered from the center of its shifting gravity. Vocalist Zack Borzone, drummer Sam Pickard, guitarist Saguiv Rosenstock, and keyboardist Jack Tobias busy their soundboard with visceral impulse: Borzone’s hoarse, indecipherable tongue punctuates its firing percussion as rhythms palpitate in a synthetic wilderness. They occasionally rupture and bleed out violently through cut electric jugulars before remerging back into a cellular building block. Listens like these are glaring case studies as to why the rest of what’s being created out there have no reason to be as obvious or predictable as they are.