New Playlist: February 2025

It’s the February 2025 playlist! The year is in full swing, and this playlist reflects it, as it’s almost entirely culled from the new year. You’ll recognize a lot of these songs from Pressing Concerns, but there’s plenty of material that’d be new to even the most regular readers as well.

Jordan Krimston and Cheekface have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece).

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal, BNDCMPR. Be sure to check out previous playlist posts if you’ve enjoyed this one, or visit the site directory. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

“Fool”, Outro
From Broken Promise (2025, Repeating Cloud)

Northampton, Massachusetts quartet Outro have an excellent sound, somewhere between “Paisley Underground” and “Electrical Audio”, and the band’s most recent EP Broken Promise is a nice, succinct summation of their whole deal. Broken Promise is worth checking out for its opening track, “Fool”, alone–it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year so far, easily. It’s impossibly cool-sounding, sometimes like a chill explosion and other times like running water. Everything is positioned perfectly, from the roaring opening guitar riff to the rat-a-tat drums to the split-second bass spotlight to the rolling melodic guitars that eventually take over the track to Josh Levy and Adam Zucker’s harmonies in the brief refrain. Read more about Broken Promise here.

“Horseshoe”, Hooky & Winter
From Water Season (2025, Julia’s War)

Philadelphia duo Hooky and New York-based musician Samira Winter are two notable modern shoegaze/noise pop/dream pop acts that, as it turns out, are fans of each other–a mutual respect that eventually led to the brief four-song collaborative release Water Season. I don’t really make a distinction between “single” and “EP” for records with more than two songs these days, but if we’re doing that, Water Season (though billed as the latter) has a strong case for the former, too–there’s one obvious “hit” in the first slot, and three stranger experiments following it. “Horseshoe”, the hypothetical A-side, is worth the price of admission alone–it’s two minutes of jangly dream pop bubblegum, warped guitar lines, and sneakily huge vocals that all make it sound like a mussed-up, more electronic-influenced version of the best Sundays and Cranberries singles. Read more about Water Season here.

“Art House”, Cheekface
From Middle Spoon (2025)

Cheekface the big-chorus power pop slingers are back in a big way on their latest album Middle Spoon, as much as they were on 2022’s Too Much to Ask, if not more so. I had to cut a bunch of good ones to not make this playlist “oops, all Cheekface”, but I’m happy this one made the final draft. “Art House” might be a roundabout way of acknowledging that Cheekface, “cool” post-punk/art punk/power pop influences aside, are never going to be thought of as an “art house” band. Vocalist and notorious sing-speaker Greg Katz actually sings really well in the chorus, emoting like an emo-pop frontperson on the “sticky arthouse floor”, and if the central metaphor of the song is a little convoluted (“You are a grey and grainy scene / You are not big on dialogue / And I can only turn you on / If I want to get confused”), well, that fits with the theme. Read more about Middle Spoon here.

“Word Is a Four Letter Fuck”, ManDate
From Cloud Cover (2025, Cruisin)

The Seattle quartet ManDate just released their second album and first in ten years, and Cloud Cover is a wild rock and roll listen, jumping from garage rock to classic 90s Albini-ish indie rock to sprawling Pacific Northwest rock to even a twelve-minute post-rock piece. I heard of ManDate due to already being a fan of Clyde Peterson, so I guess it’s not that surprising that my favorite song on Cloud Cover is the one that most reminds me of Peterson’s other band Your Heart Breaks. “Word Is a Four Letter Fuck” is a incredibly catchy piece of slightly fuzzed-up indie pop, a song that has this kind of worldstruck Americana that marks a lot of Peterson’s writing (“How do molecules find their way together? / So that we can have ice cream and experimental records”). The rest of Cloud Cover doesn’t really sound like “Word Is a Four Letter Fuck”, but it sounds like a lot of other music I like, so I’ll be returning to it just as soon as I wear out this song on repeat.

“I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore”, The Bird Calls
From Melody Trail (2025, Ruination)

The latest album from the prolific Sam Sodomsky’s project The Bird Calls was assembled entirely by Ryan Weiner (of the band Tiny Hazard) and Sodomsky himself, and while these songs certainly sound like they were written and sung by the same artist who made the last couple of Bird Calls albums, the duo give Melody Trail a more polished pop reading compared to the project’s more typical embrace of acoustic-led folk rock. Sometimes Sodomsky and Weiner embrace full-on 80s synthpop trappings on Melody Trail, while other times they settle on a more subtle “sophisti-pop”-indebted style; my favorite song on the album, “I Don’t Wanna Be a Cowboy Anymore”, is decidedly the former, a shined-up neon-lit country-western bar sign that sounds like Sodomsky and Weiner tried to rebuild The Bird Calls from the ground-up with new wave and synthpop. Read more about Melody Trail here.

“Side Ponytail”, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
From Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010 (2025, Slumberland)

Perfect Right Now is a compilation of early singles, EPs, and compilation tracks from the first three years of legendary fuzz-pop group The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Almost all of these ten songs initially came about either before or concurrently with their 2009 self-titled debut, and, as it turns out, there was an incredibly strong companion LP of noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee, and fuzz rock out there this whole time. About half of Perfect Right Now’s songs qualify as “rippers”, and none of them disappoint; my favorite song from this side of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on the compilation is “Side Ponytail”, which is two minutes of nonstop hooks, fuzzed out to perfection. It’s a twee song on steroids; it’s 2009, and it’s forever. Read more about Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010 here.

“Castle Cloud”, Jordan Krimston
From Count It All Joy (2025, DHCR)

I haven’t written about Jordan Krimston’s solo material on Rosy Overdrive before, but the San Diego-based musician has popped up here and there on material from Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon and Oso Oso (for whom he’s currently the touring drummer), among others. The prolific musician has kept up a steady solo career in addition to instrumental and recording work, and his most recent album, Count It All Joy, is a blast. As one might expect from an Oso Osociate, it’s roughly in the realm of “emo/pop punk/power pop”, although that doesn’t quite capture the adventurous, ambitious pop music contained herein. “Castle Cloud” just barely beat out “Mtn. Decoy” for this slot–the latter earns a Drain Gang reference on the album’s Bandcamp page, while this song is a curious music-lab creation combining weird math rock-y drums with chirping synths and Krimston’s bright emo-pop vocals. Good stuff.

“The Bullet B4 the Sound”, Califone
From The Villager’s Companion (2025, Jealous Butcher)

As the name implies, The Villager’s Companion is linked to Califone’s 2023 album The Villagers, recorded around the same time and augmented by a couple of covers that have been previously released over the past few years. Bandleader Tim Rutili referred to these songs as “misfit toys” when the album was announced, but The Villager’s Companion is just further confirmation that the longrunning Chicago indie-blues-art-folk-rock band thrives in a less formal environment. My favorite song on this record is “The Bullet B4 the Sound”, which is a bit of all of the band’s sides–Califone float purposefully but languidly in the ether on the verses, but come together all of a sudden to pull off a beautifully damaged chorus that’s on the level of Rutili career highs like “Gauze” from his previous band, Red Red Meat. Read more about The Villager’s Companion here.

“Catherine Never Broke Again”, Saoirse Dream
From Saoirse Dream (2025, Lauren)

Saoirse Dream’s self-titled debut album for Lauren Records is a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy, and the garish manipulations that I personally associate with hyperpop. Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music–take, for instance, excellent single “Catherine Never Broken Again”. It’s two minutes of high-flying, high-stakes mundanity, with Catherine Egbert plowing through a hyperpop anthem about…well, it’s about a bit of everything (and, incidentally, if I was trying to explain to someone how transmisogyny is just misogyny, I don’t think I could come up with anything more succinct than “I still get catcalled in jeans and a T-shirt / When I wear high heels, still get misgendered”). Read more about Saoirse Dream here.

“Next Door Hell”, Midwestern Medicine
From Ripped Headline (2025, Website)

If you’re looking for the motormouth-featuring, galloping-percussion-led side of Maine indie-garage-rock band Midwestern Medicine, you’ll get it throughout Ripped Headline, an EP entirely made up of two-to-three minute “rockers”. “Next Door Hell” (which bandleader Brock Ginther says would be the single “if [he] was doing that kind of thing”) deserves a special mention in this regard–there’s a bunch of really cool sections mashed together here, from the post-punk-garage verses to the lurching-upwards pre-chorus to the sneering refrain that gives the song its title to the…post-chorus? (Whatever you call the part that goes “They’ve got a draft of my unauthorized biography / It’s big enough that I’ll get crushed if it gets dropped on me”) which is actually probably the best part. Read more about Ripped Headline here.

“Free Association”, Friendship
From Caveman Wakes Up (2025, Merge)

Damn, I love Friendship. Bands like them are probably the reason why I turned into the kind of person that runs a music blog. Caveman Wakes Up is the Philadelphia alt-country supergroup’s fifth album, and the second in their four-piece/Merge Records era–it’ll be out in May, but “Free Association” will keep us company for now. The biography for this album mentions Talk Talk, an exciting place for Friendship to take their famed “ambient country” sound, and “Free Association” really blooms between the rhythm section (that’s drummer Michael Cormier-O’Leary of Hour and Jon Samuels on the bass) buzzing along and guest musician Jason Calhoun’s violin soaring. And, of course, Dan Wriggins is still Dan Wriggins, one of the great frontpeople of our time (first impression favorite lyric: “Order at the bar / Chaos outside”). Can’t wait to hear what he has to say about tree of heaven.

“Snowflakes”, Dropkick
From Primary Colours (2025, Bobo Integral/Sound Asleep)

Whether it’s with The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness, his Andrew Taylor & The Harmonizers project, or his oldest band, Dropkick, nobody does jangly, Teenage Fanclub-evoking wistful guitar pop like Scotland’s Andrew Taylor does. If you liked his previous records in this vein (from the last few years, I’d recommend 2021’s twin LPs Andrew Taylor and the Harmonizers and TBWTPN’s Songs from Another Life), you’re going to enjoy Dropkick’s latest album, Primary Colours, too. Time will tell how it holds up to Taylor’s impressive discography, but I’m already pretty sure that “Snowflakes” is one of the best songs of his that I’ve heard, full stop. Somehow the song is nearly four minutes long but feels like it doesn’t waste a second–it’s all bright power pop melody, all the time.

“You’re Like Me”, 72 Rats
From Nothing Left to Lose (2024, Grahamcracker)

72 Rats is the project of Seattle’s Graham Bremner, who started putting out records under the name at the beginning of this decade but has been making music for much longer than that–there’s a release on his Bandcamp page called This Drain that was recorded in 1995, for instance. I really like the sound of 72 Rats’ latest EP, Nothing Left to Lose, which features a full band (Mira Tsarina of Iffin on bass, Carl Christensen of The Lake Flora Band) backing up Bremner. There’s a British new waveiness to my favorite song on the EP, “You’re Like Me”, but filtered across the Atlantic and into a basement in a Robert Pollard-like way. Tsarina’s showy bass playing threatens to steal the show (and she also describes the EP as a cross between Joy Division and Wilco on Bandcamp, like she’s trying to undermine me too), but Bremner has a strong enough tune that “You’re Like Me” ends up well-rounded regardless.

“DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II”, Frog
From 1000 Variations on the Same Song (2025, Audio Antihero/Tapewormies)

1000 Variations on the Same Song, the sixth Frog album, is a departure from the more technicolored, eager-to-please pop sensibilities of their previous LP, even though it still sounds like a Frog record. As the title implies, 1000 Variations on the Same Song arose from head frog Daniel Bateman realizing he was working on “a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike” and deciding to embrace the similarities rather than try to vary things up some more; on this record, Frog sound more subdued and thoughtful, making their way through simple yet disorienting piano-led instrumentals at a leisurely pace. Bateman sounds almost divinely inspired in the most memorable parts of the record, giving a chant or even hymn-like quality to the refrain of highlight “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” (yes, he is saying “Damn, baby, what is you talking ‘bout” there, sliding it right into that yelp of a refrain). Read more about 1000 Variations on the Same Song here.

“Ghost Ship”, Lilly Hiatt
From Forever (2025, New West)

Lilly Hiatt hasn’t let me down yet. Perhaps the finest second-generation singer-songwriter in the realm of country-rock music (or any other genre, realistically) has been a consistent force for strong, emotional, but reliably rocking alt-country since she hooked up with New West for 2017’s Trinity Lane, and while Forever might not be as great as that one or 2021’s Lately, there’s some good stuff on it, not the least of which is “Ghost Ship”. It’s a pretty low-key mid–tempo country rock tune; there’s no way in hell that Hiatt’s vocals can ever fully fade into the background, but the garage rock guitars and vocal distortion let her take a bit more of a backseat than a lot of her material typically allows. It’s pretty rich underneath this protective layer, though (of course).

“Making Maps”, Rapt
From Until the Light Takes Us (2025, Start-track)

Jacob Ware has had a colorful musical past, but Until the Light Takes Us, the fifth album from the London singer-songwriter’s Rapt project, is definitely, inarguably “folk music”. It’s just Ware and his gently-plucked guitar for the most part, with intermittent percussion, bass, strings, and pianos fading into and out of frame and, all the while, Ware singing about death and dreams and love (and the disintegration thereof) in a winding pastoral, British conversational cadence. Ware resists the pop touches or heart-clutching relatability that made a select few “indie folk” acts stars earlier this century, but this isn’t to say Until the Light Takes Us is impenetrable or even unwelcoming–I’ve loved the most upbeat song on the record, “Making Maps”, from the moment I heard it. If you love the Mark Eitzel-40 Watt Sun-Idaho kind of slowcore, Ware hits the bullseye on this one, giving us one (1) olive branch to take with us into a difficult but rewarding folk album. Read more about Until the Light Takes Us here.

“Unkindness”, Johnny Chobani with Mary Macabre and Lorenzio Jones
From (What’s the Story) Hikikomori? (2024)

Johnny Chobani is a person from Philadelphia, possibly named Jake Innis, and the second album from the project, (What’s the Story) Hikikomori?, came out late last December. The album as a whole is a wild ride through lo-fi basement rock, offbeat pop, and electronic music; “Unkindness” is probably my favorite track from it. It’s an excellent slightly fuzzed-up pop rock tune with a serious Pixies streak–“Mary Macabre” and “Lorenzio Jones” are credited as guests on the song, and I’m not sure if they’re the two vocalists, but if they are they certainly did a bang-up job with this one. “Unkindness” is an unlikely five-minute rocker, taking a minute to get going and spending a good deal of its runtime wringing everything it can out of its chorus. It seems to be about waiting for bad things to inevitably happen–truly a song for our times.

“Music for a Silent Film”, Patches
From A Three Legged Chair (2025)

The most recent EP from remote-collaborative post-punk/college rock trio Patches is also unfortunately the group’s last. A Three Legged Chair is a clearinghouse release–five songs that were “scrapped, passed over, or shared elsewhere”, and the band openly state on their Bandcamp page that it “isn’t as good” as their albums–but, whether the band think so or not, it’s a nice appendix to Patches’ two excellent studio albums. And there’s some new terrain explored here, too–two songs feature the sister of Patches member Robin KC (credited as “KRMT”) on lead vocals, and they’re both highlights. “Music for a Silent Film” is my favorite song on A Three Legged Chair; the buzzing, sensory-overload dream pop sound is different than anything else on the EP and probably from anything Patches ever put out, period. Read more about A Three Legged Chair here.

“Glitter Witches”, The Illness
From Macrodosed (2025, Sea)

The Illness’ debut EP, 2023’s Summerase, contained shades of everything from post-punk to slacker rock to slowcore to baroque pop, marking a strong introduction to the “Liverpool-York (and beyond)” collective. The Illness continue to sack indie rock and indie pop history on their debut album, Macrodosed, their trademark freewheeling guitar pop music remaining intact over the course of two sides of vinyl. Even with all this said, “Glitter Witches” still kind of comes out of nowhere–it’s all shiny 80s synths, skittering basslines, and a gorgeous new wave-y chorus. It’s far from the meandering, David Pajo-featuring indie rock of the previous track on the record, but when The Illness showcase an ability to switch between these two sides so easily, who’s complaining? Read more about Macrodosed here.

“30 Years”, Power Pants
From PP7 (2025, Punk Valley/Knuckles on Stun/Idiotape)

There’s not a moment of respite to be found on PP7, the latest album from prolific Winchester, Virginia power pop/synthpunk/egg punk project Power Pants. Only one song reaches the two-minute mark, and all of them are a delirious assault of train-speed punk guitars, blaring synth hooks, and gruff but somewhat anxious-sounding vocals. Within ten seconds, PP7 already cranks out a barrage of Power Pants’ typical tricks; opening track “30 Years” positively roars out of the gate with a garishly catchy synth part and guitars streaming out of control, and the garage punk vocals kick in not long afterwards and hold their own against the instrumental torrent. Read more about PP7 here.

“Independent Animal”, Guided by Voices
From Universe Room (2025, GBV, Inc.)

Coming in at barely over a minute, my favorite track on the most recent Guided by Voices album is a song that captures the band’s unparalleled brilliance in brevity. Universe Room is a difficult album, even for this era of Guided by Voices–apparently they really mixed up recording styles on this record, having different band members record all the music for different tracks, which I appreciate. I don’t know which member(s) are responsible for the sound of “Independent Animal”, but it’s an immediate highlight, capturing the “get the idea down and nail it, no repetition required” attitude of classic Guided by Voices albums (it also kind of sounds like the at-this-point-underrated “classic lineup reunion” albums of the early 2010s, too). There are basically two sections to the song–the “proper” verse-to-chorus first half, and then a brief but earned 30 second victory lap. It all sounds great.

“Content Baby”, Cheekface
From Middle Spoon (2025)

“Content Baby” is another certified Cheekface power pop hit–and it’s quite rich beyond its smooth dance-pop-punk exterior, too. I feel like I could write a whole essay on this song, if I were the kind of person to do the whole “long essays about a single piece of music” thing (somebody should pick up this thread for me!). I have to keep things reined in here, but where does one even begin with a song with lyrics like “You like the good type of drone / I like the bad type of drone / We are two cute little perverts / With a heart made of gold” and a chorus that goes “Treat me like your content baby / You have my consent to share me”? “Content Baby” is also where Middle Spoon gets its title, and I think it zeroes in on what I think this record is all about–sickly sweet, suffocating, grotesque comfort. They’ve really outdone themselves with this one; Cheekface, you shouldn’t have. I mean, maybe you really shouldn’t have. Read more about Middle Spoon here.

“Nightmare Rider”, Minorcan
From Rock Alone (2025)

Ryan Anderson’s Minorcan project is modeled after vintage southern college rock/power pop/alt-country troubadours, and the singer-songwriter’s latest album is an album about community, family, and human connections that was made entirely by one person alone at home (hence Rock Alone). Anderson sums this all up in “Nightmare Rider”, a song that’s anything but naive in its continued pursuit of its ideals. “To live without you, ooh, that’s my nightmare / To live without you, ooh, that’s my worst fear,” Anderson sings in the refrain–the lingering on the fear in this, the biggest moment on Rock Alone, is telling. “I say it all with gritted teeth / They want us to stay lonely,” goes the next line, and I shouldn’t have to tell you what the one after that entails. Read more about Rock Alone here.

“(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again”, Publicity Department
From Old Master (2025, Safe Suburban Home)

The latest album from London’s Publicity Department generally follows a winding, meandering slacker rock path, British pessimism and irony fighting against the melodies and hooks to come to a convincing draw. Bandleader Sean Brook writes that Old Master is partially written from the “perspective of old men raging at a world they have all but destroyed but no longer understand”, and there’s a yet-to-be extinguished defiance in my favorite track on the album, “(There’s No Stopping Me and My Friends from Achieving) Happiness Again”. Book really takes that convoluted title out for a walk in the chorus, sounding positively triumphant over a (recorded entirely by Book himself, like most of Old Master) whimsical but utilitarian guitar pop body. Read more about Old Master here.

“Grindset Blues”, May Leitz
From A Touch of Grace (2025, Lonely Ghost)

May Leitz is a prolific hyperpop artist; we join her with A Touch of Grace, her debut for Lonely Ghost Records. It’s a trip, but not unnecessarily so–the core of each of these tracks is undeniably effective pop hooks, and when Leitz throws either 80s synthpop dressings or an assault of pop punk guitars at them (maybe even in the same song), it’s a complimentary balancing act. Speaking of balancing acts, the run-ragged, country-infused “Grindset Blues” is an early highlight on A Touch of Grace–it works way better than you’d think, and that’s without even getting into Leitz’s lyrics about the titular lifestyle sapping her life force (“I know one day it ends in a premature heart attack” / “I can’t complain, see, I’ve dug my own grave”). Read more about A Touch of Grace here.

“Lighter Touch”, Samuel Aaron & Noah Roth
From Two of Us (2025, Happen Twice)

The latest release from Rosy Overdrive favorite Noah Roth is a collaborative EP with a new-to-me figure who nonetheless proves to be a match for Roth in the realms of classic folk and pop songwriting, Samuel Aaron. Two of Us starts off with relatively buttoned-up folk-pop music and gets a little more curious as it goes on, perhaps cataloging this new songwriting team-up in real-time (the record was written and recorded in one day, per their label Happen Twice). They’re all successes, but I think that the oddest song on the EP, “Lighter Touch”, is my favorite–Roth breaks the 1970s cosplay fully by AutoTuning their vocals, leading a fiery but very catchy song about a recovery of sorts (“I don’t think about you much anymore / I’ve adopted a lighter touch than before”) that bleeds into the closing cover of The Beatles’ “Two of Us”. Read more about Two of Us here.

“Criminal Activities”, The Rishis
From The Rishis (2025, Primordial Void/Cloud Recordings)

Despite a credits section again filled with indie rock royalty, Elephant 6-associated group The Rishis resist the urge to turn their self-titled sophomore album into an overstuffed affair and instead continue to lock their gaze on creating perfect pop tunes in their chosen folky, slightly psychedelic realms. For the most part, the Rishis’ guests are integrated seamlessly, but when Mac McCaughan steps in on guitar on “Criminal Activities”, The Rishis are all of a sudden riding Superchunk-like electricity for a two-minute surprising album highlight. For the most part, The Rishis (while indeed being a little more electric than their 2022 debut album August Moon) isn’t such a stark departure from their typical sound, but when you’ve got a member of Superchunk on the track, there’s no harm in leaning into his strengths a bit more. Read more about The Rishis here.

“November”, Moon Orchids
From Moon Orchids (2025, Positively 4th Street)

Moon Orchids caught my attention by referencing names like Magnolia Electric Co. and Silkworm as points of influence for their self-titled debut, but the one I’d lean the most on in describing the sound of Moon Orchids is the same act from which those bands took a good deal of inspiration–Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Moon Orchids is a “folk/rock” record like classic Young LPs, with mandolin and acoustic guitar-led folk songs sitting right next to blustery, meandering Crazy Horse-style rock explosions. My favorite (probably) song on the album falls into the latter camp–the sweeping “November” (featuring lead vocals from trumpet player Morgan Keltie) sprawls for nearly six minutes in an incredibly agreeable, meandering manner. Read more about Moon Orchids here.

“Same Mistakes”, Whelpwisher
From Same Mistakes (2025)

You can always count on Chicago’s Ben Grigg for a brief, noisy guitar pop tune. Gregg hasn’t neglected his solo project Whelpwisher even as he’s played key roles in bands like Babe Report, Big Big Bison, and FCKR JR over the past few years, with the twelve-song, nineteen-minute Same Mistakes kicking off 2025 with a collection of short, catchy, and loud Grigg rock music. My favorite song on Same Mistakes is probably the title track, which doesn’t even need eighty seconds to come out swinging with feedback-laden power pop hooks and a delicate pop core underneath all of the clatter.

“Mtn. Decoy”, Jordan Krimston
From Count It All Joy (2025, DHCR)

Earlier in this playlist, I said that I chose Jordan Krimston’s “Castle Cloud” “over” “Mtn. Decoy” for this playlist; since I wrote that, however, I came back to this one and decided that it needed to be here too. Loosely speaking, “Mtn. Decoy” is in the same arena of adventurous emo-pop as “Castle Cloud”, but the math-y percussion of that one is replaced with a smoother ride here. The shuffling beat and Krimston’s casual but pointed sung-spoken vocals are indeed hip-hop-influenced (as I alluded to when I wrote about “Castle Cloud”), but for the most part it’s still more or less a guitar-driven pop song (that, nonetheless, has plenty of fun with its synth touches, too).

“Out of Body Out of Mind”, Above Me
From Above Me (2025, Dandy Boy)

San Francisco band Blue Ocean made a noisy, experimental post-rock-influenced version of shoegaze on their underheralded records; apparently the group quietly broke up last year, but this bad news is tempered by the announcement and debut release from co-founder Rick Altieri’s new solo project, Above Me. Still certainly operating in the wider worlds of “shoegaze” and “noise pop”, Altieri doesn’t try to recreate the sensory overload sensation of his previous band on Above Me, instead taking advantage of the self-recorded, drum-machine-heavy pallet to make some heavily fuzzed-out, psychedelic pop music. The blossoming fuzz-dream-pop of opening track “Out of Body Out of Mind” sets the stage pretty much immediately–and though the EP matches it in pop-forward moments and challenges us all a bit later on, this first move is still Above Me’s best so far. Read more about Above Me here.

“Kid 1”, Dead Gowns
From It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow (2025, Mtn. Laurel)

I touched on Dead Gowns a bit back in 2023, when the Geneviève Beaudoin project released a deluxe version of their 2022 EP HOW featuring a couple of bonus tracks. “Kid 1” was one of those extra songs, but it wasn’t until I heard it on It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow that it really stuck out for me. The first-ever Dead Gowns LP is almost a decade in the making, and it’s a sprawling collection of folk rock and alt-country that’s a lot to take in, but “Kid 1” serves an important purpose by offering up welcoming guitars and a dramatic pop attitude early on in the LP’s runtime. The Maine-based singer-songwriter has the qualities that could make her the latest indie-folk-rocker to take the next step up, but regardless of how successful It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow ends up being, Beaudoin’s doing good work.

“The Shape of Thirst to Come”, The Thirsty Giants
From THIRST A.D. (2025)

Ooh boy, a Midwestern garage punk trio whose music is loud, scuzzy, and occasionally grotesque. The Thirsty Giants are an “inter-generational basement punk” band currently spread out between Duluth and Makato, Minnesota and made up of guitarist/vocalist Holden Perron, drummer David Perron, and bassist Hunter Thiesen. The group have put out a handful of records that straddle the line between LP and EP; the brief six-song Thirst A.D. (out on March 7th) is solidly in the latter camp, but The Thirsty Giants make the most of their brief time, especially on lead single “The Shape of Thirst to Come”. A swaggering blues-y garage punk song, it’s not quite Butthole Surfers-level “fucked-up Americana” but it does indeed capture the attitude of classic SST and Touch & Go bands that cast their gaze upon Detroit.

“What Is Tough to See”, …or Does It Explode?
From Tales to Needed Outcomes (2025, Snmyhymns)

…or Does It Explode? is a band hailing from Madison, Wisconsin whose previous music mixed Dischord Records-influenced post-hardcore with more cavernous and exploratory Midwest emo sounds. Tales to Needed Outcomes (initially conceived as a solo project for guitarist/vocalist Shawn Bass before the rest of the band got involved) explores …or Does It Explode?’s more intimate side, operating in the world of horn/string-laden Midwest emo, orchestral slowcore and post-rock, and good old-fashioned 90s basement indie rock. It has the core of the bedroom project it began as, but it benefits greatly from the full punk-trained band backing it up at all times. It’s hard for me to single out specific tracks on Tales to Needed Outcomes because it’s such a cohesive experience, but “What Is Tough to See” (the first proper song on the album after an intro track) really does set the scene and prepare us for the long, beautiful journey that follows. Read more about Tales to Needed Outcomes here.

“Downhill”, The Winter Journey
From Graceful Consolations (2025, Turning Circle)

Manchester’s The Winter Journey released their debut album in 2008, and their first LP in over fifteen years, Graceful Consolations, does remind me a bit of the duo’s era of origin–a precocious and deliberate period of “indie music”, where everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Belle & Sebastian was suggesting that maybe there was something new to be gained from the old guard of 70s folk rock, Brian Wilson, and soft rock after all. “Downhill”, which opens Graceful Consolations, starts with Anthony Braithwaite singing a gorgeously wistful melody alongside folk-y guitar playing; halfway through the brief track, Suzy Mangion arrives as a second voice, and the piano and bass begin to fill the song out. This is Graceful Consolations in a nutshell–deceptively simple, but complete and containing so much. Read more about Graceful Consolations here.

“Oh, Oh”, Nikki Minerva
(2024, Kid)

Nikki Minerva seems like a name to watch for a certain subset of this blog’s readership. The Chicago-based singer-songwriter only has a couple of released songs to their name so far, but their latest one (their second “proper” single, third if you count a demo in 2023) is more than enough to get a grip on their music. “Oh, Oh” is a six-minute, dreamy haze of an indie folk tune–the “dream” part is basically literal, as Minerva sings of waking up and falling back into a dream, and the song itself hovers somewhere in between. Spindly guitars and slow-motion percussion eventually join Minerva’s acoustic chords, and a good portion of the second half of the track is made up of laid-back guitar soloing. Minerva refers to writing the lyrics as “[bleeding] all those emotions out”–the title almost seems like an attempt to deflect the, ahem, confessional writing found in every other line in the song, but it works well enough that no obscurity is necessary.

“Let It Through”, Vulture Feather
From It Will Be Like Now (2025, Felte)

Vulture Feather have gotten to work hammering out slow, deliberate, Lungfish-esque guitar-heavy post-punk ever since their 2023 debut album, Liminal Fields. Vulture Feather’s hallmarks–Colin McCann’s otherworldly yowling vocals and chiming guitar, the steady, glacial movement, a rapturous devotion to minimalism and repetition–remain intact on It Will Be Like Now, even though there is a subtle loosening of their sound on their latest record. It’s hard to single out specific Vulture Feather songs because everything they ever do feels like one big single movement, but It Will Be Like Now has some notable mile markers–for one, closing track “Let It Through” (the one with Green on baritone guitar) is really indescribable, just four minutes of one three-chord guitar progression and McCann giving it everything in the vocals. Read more about It Will Be Like Now here.