New Playlist: March 2025

The March 2025 playlist is here! It’s been a very good month for new music from my vantage point, and I’m excited to share a bunch of it with you below. I’d like to borrow a phrase from all the publicists who email me and call this playlist “my most personal one to date” (that sounds like an April Fool’s joke but it’s not really).

Silo’s Choice, Fust, The Tubs, and Telethon all have multiple songs on this playlist (two apiece). If you’re looking for who’ve put out the best albums of the year so far, this is a big hint right here.

Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal, BNDCMPR (missing one song). 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.

“Trilogy of Terror”, Combos for Dogs
From Athletic Achievement (2025)

Ahh, I love this song. Combos for Dogs’ Athletic Achievement is a nice little power pop EP–it’s the first record from a new band made up of two long-time friends (Mike Stallmeyer & Andy Feldman), and I probably could’ve told you they were from New Jersey even if the Bandcamp page didn’t say so. There’s a suburban earnestness to the writing (both in the pop hooks/delivery and in the lyrics) that feels extremely Fountains of Wayne, and while that’s all well and good, you have to have the songs to back that kind of thing up, and Combos for Dogs’ first record indicates that they’ve got something going between the two of them. Half the EP (two songs, yes) could’ve been on this playlist, but I’m going with the jangle pop targeted strike of “Trilogy of Terror” over the mid-tempo power pop “Ra Ra! Resentment” by a hair. It’s two minutes long, it’s incredibly simple, and every second of it is just golden. 

“Experimental Hugs”, Kinski
From Stumbledown Terrace (2025, Comedy Minus One)

The latest album from longrunning Seattle experimental post-rock band Kinski is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. They’ve pared down to a power trio for the first time in over twenty years, and the remaining three walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll with the best of ‘em. Stumbledown Terrace starts with a handful of brilliant songs that are nonetheless on the more “difficult” side of things, but then we get to “Experimental Hugs”, which is (ironically) the most conventional track on the album by far. It’s a catchy two-minute hook-y rock and roller that kind of sounds like the Foo Fighters (but, you know, better)–and then it’s back to the epic guitar journeys for Kinski. Read more about Stumbledown Terrace here.

“Pl*net F*tness”, Pacing
(2025, Asian Man)

About two weeks ago, I realized that I had a dead person’s credit card in my wallet. Back when she was alive, her husband gave it to me to go buy food for everyone hanging out at the hospital and I guess I forgot to give it back. What do you do with a dead person’s credit card? This is kind of what the song “Pl*net F*tness” by the band Pacing is about. It’s the first song from the upcoming second Pacing album, following up their excellent 2023 LP with the long title and a “mini-album” that came out at the beginning of this year. The full development from a Katie McTeague anti-folk solo project to a full-on punk/power pop/whatever rock band is on full display here (thanks to longtime member Ben Krock on guitar, Sun Kin’s Kabir Kumar on bass and production, and Joe Sherman on the drums), but McTeague’s writing still shines against the louder backdrop.

“Planet Fitness makes you cancel your membership in person even if you’re dead,” McTeague sings in the–well, it’s not really a “chorus” because it only happens once. It’s under two minutes long and it feels shorter because of the lack of almost any repetition–even though it’s the lead single for an upcoming album, it feels like McTeague just wanted to get through the song and its revisitation of the mundane tasks surrounding a family member and onetime Planet Fitness patron’s death (her father, in this instance). The song’s music video, featuring McTeague as a zombie and Krock as Death himself, is good fun–the context, which I didn’t entirely appreciate the first time I saw it, supercharges it, but, watching what she and her band make out of it in the video, I also believe McTeague when she said the song “has been in my life for so long that what it means to me has changed over time” upon its release.

“Pl*net F*tness” has been worked over, but I suspect that any and all tinkering done to it over the years was just to pass the time until McTeague got to the right place–musically, personally, artistically, whatever–to pull something like “Pl*net F*tness” off. It’s a perfect Pacing song, about weird rules and awkwardness and profundity found therein and feeling like maybe the cashier got your Ch*rches Ch*cken order wrong but just walking off because Jesus Christ I’m not about to contest that on a good day and it’s also about how nobody in the ICU says you have to leave when visiting hours are over but when you walk down to the first floor at 4 A.M. nobody’s there except for one security guard and he’s like “you do know that the building is closed, right?” and you just kind of stand there and wonder what on Earth he expects me to do with that information, I’m inside the building and trying to leave it–let’s revisit this in a couple of years I guess.

“2005”, Silo’s Choice
From Liberals (2025, Obscure Pharaoh)

Chicago’s Jon Massey has been on a hot streak with his various bands as of late, and he’s started 2025 off with a bang in the form of Liberals, a strong offering from his solo project Silo’s Choice. Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–there’s a bunch of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock and a renewal of vows with concise pop music on here, and it’s exciting. I don’t think there’s anybody else out there other than Massey who could write a song like the whirlwind neoconservative bildungsroman of “2005” (“It’s 2005 / And we’ve only been in Iraq for a year in a half,” Massey situates us). It has to be heard to be believed, I’d say. Read more about Liberals here.

“Gateleg”, Fust
From Big Ugly (2025, Dear Life)

I love this Fust album. I really do. Big surprise, I know–I’d written about literally everything the band had released up until Big Ugly, and while I didn’t formally Pressing Concerns this one, I promise you that it’s just as good as Genevieve and Evil Joy, if not better. At this point, I’m ready to declare Aaron Dowdy’s group the best band making country-influenced indie rock in North Carolina (and yes, I’m aware of what kind of competition that description pits them against). In what I can only assume is directly pandering to the author of this blog, Big Ugly is an album-length journey to Dowdy’s roots in southern West Virginia, drawing its name and much of its imagery from the shadow of the Guyandotte River in Lincoln County. The scenes of corner stores and cinderblock-propped-up cars in “Gateleg” are much more than cheap signifiers, and I don’t really have the space and time here to get into everything going on in it, but that just leaves more for you to discover. 

“Madison”, Smoking Popes
From Lovely Stuff (2025, Anxious & Angry)

Over thirty years removed from their debut album, the finest pop punk band to ever come out of McHenry County, Illinois still has gas in the tank. Lovely Stuff is the eighth Smoking Popes album and the first one since 2018–even though I don’t love every song on it, I love how it sounds, a group of seasoned professionals just tearing into these tracks and letting the hooks speak for themselves. “Madison” is a good summation of what to expect on Lovely Stuff–there’s some nice pop punk guitar leads that go on for exactly as long as they’re supposed to, some self-deprecation and desperation delivered stoically from the singular Josh Caterer, forward-pushing drums, and big, big guitar chords. There’s a whole album of stuff like this coming out soon! (Bookmark “Fox River Dream” and “Never Gonna Break”, too). 

“Träume”, Spinnen
From Warmes Licht (2025, Alien Transistor)

Taking their name from the German word for spider, Spinnen are a Munich-based bass and drums duo made up of a couple of veterans of the “muggy, experimental” side of their home city’s music scene. Warmes Licht, their debut album, manages to be both “experimental” and “rock”–we get noisy, clanging art-punk bass/drum ragers right next to soft, almost ambient organs and synth pieces, as well as moments that don’t fit neatly onto either end of that spectrum. Warmes Licht’s opening track, “Träume”, works way better as an awesome opening pop statement than it has any right to–between the reaching-for-the-sky bass chords and the just-as-enthusiastic vocals, Spinnen pull off the perfect mix of skronky post-punk and power pop. Read more about Warmes Licht here.

“Narcissist”, The Tubs
From Cotton Crown (2025, Trouble in Mind)

This Tubs album, huh? You probably don’t need me to tell you that Cotton Crown is good if you’re tapped into the worlds of jangle pop and power pop that are this blog’s bread and butter–they’re one of the few bands that regularly get lauded outside of our bubble, and I can’t even be hipstery about it because this new album is the (already quite good) band’s best work yet. If you’re interested in learning about the personal nature of frontperson Owen Williams’ writing on this album, there are interviews (not to mention Williams’ own Substack) about it, and there is something undeniably perverse about twisting some working-through-it words about a complex kind of grief (“Jane says you’re a narcissist  / Well I wanna see / You should do it to me  / You should do it to me”) into bright, sparkling guitar pop.

“Sourgum”, Olivia’s World
From Greedy & Gorgeous (2025, Little Lunch/Lost Sound Tapes)

I wouldn’t expect anything less than indie pop with an instrumental heft and a clear personality from Olivia’s World, and the Australian band’s long-awaited debut album, Greedy & Gorgeous, delivers. Bandleader Alice Rezende remains a striking frontperson, thoughtful and occasionally less-than-clear but never guarded in her writing, and the band are tougher and more unified than ever before, with the Pacific Northwestern looseness of their past work augmented by a hard-charging, Dinosaur Jr. fuzz rock streak that remains constant throughout the album. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “Sourgum”, the most full-on eighteen-wheeler rock and roller on the album. It rules, of course. Read more about Greedy & Gorgeous here.

“Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)”, Telethon
From Suburban Electric (2025, Halloween)

Ever since Swim Out the Breakers (my favorite album of 2021), the sixth Telethon LP has been at the top of my “most anticipated albums” lists, and after a few years of being in the works, the Wisconsin band just went ahead and surprise-released Suburban Electric last month. It certainly sounds like a Telethon album–but if it’s possible for Telethon’s blend of maximalist power pop, Midwestern workhorse pop punk, and dashes of ska and emo to ever be “streamlined”, Suburban Electric is it. It’s a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, of course, and part of that is how it stealthily builds up to the last, best, and catchiest song on the album, the frantic “Middleman (Theme to Suburban Electric)”. Putting your most crowd-pleasing song dead last on the album? Nobody’s doing it like Telethon. Read more about Suburban Electric here.

“Beautiful Stranger”, George Children
From Kitchen Sink Drama (2025, Dandy Boy)

Featuring just a plainly-strummed acoustic guitar and frontperson Jordan Chipman’s vocals for the most part, George Children’s latest cassette EP moves through five songs in nine minutes. Melancholic but still quite pop-friendly, Kitchen Sink Drama makes for an all-around strong stop-gap release in between larger records. The album’s opening track, “Beautiful Stranger”, is the record’s “hit” to my ears–not that the rest of the EP isn’t also catchy, but Chipman stumbles onto a timeless pop song for ninety seconds, synthesizing acoustic Dunedin sound pop, lo-fi LVL UP/early Trace Mountains, and Chipman favorite Bill Fox superbly. Read more about Kitchen Sink Drama here.

“Crowded Streets”, Exploding Flowers
From Watermelon/Peacock (2025, Meritorio/Leather Jacket)

Hailing from ground zero of the 1980s “Paisley Underground” movement, Los Angeles’ Exploding Flowers do evoke the loose, psychedelic side of this strain of American jangly college rock. Sometimes hazy, sometimes bright and vibrant, their latest LP, Watermelon/Peacock, is a compelling and generous Americana record arising from one of the country’s largest population centers. Watermelon/Peacock offers up everything from hook-fest power pop to pure psychedelia to throwback San Francisco garage rock to 60s-style keys and organs throughout its fourteen tracks and forty-odd minutes; the “hits” are as good as anything from the “vintage” power pop cellar, and peppy opening track “Crowded Streets” definitely qualifies. Read more about Watermelon/Peacock here.

“Ride to Robert’s”, Jason Isbell
From Foxes in the Snow (2025, Southeastern)

I have a Jason Isbell story that’s probably still too sad for me to share on the blog right now. Suffice it to say that the man’s music is inescapable in my life and it’s a great testament to it that I can still listen to it and love it for what it is. Foxes in the Snow is a tough one, the “divorce album” that the singer-songwriter recorded entirely on his own with just his acoustic guitar partly so he could just get the songs out and not have to dwell on them. “Ride to Robert’s” is one of the brighter moments on Foxes in the Snow–it can’t shake the melancholy that hovers over the entire album, but it’s a moment of hope, resting its laurels via Tennessee in the growing season, country music in Nashville bars, and perhaps Isbell’s current romantic relationship (“I’m still running, but I’m not alone” and “I ain’t lost yet, so much to lose”).

“IWLYG”, Star 99
From Gaman (2025, Lauren)

A year and a half after Bitch Unlimited (my second favorite album of 2023), San Jose power pop group Star 99 are back with a fifth bandmember, a more wide-ranging sound, and a sophomore album called Gaman. I’d be despondent if Star 99 completely abandoned the sugary power-pop-punk that they’d mastered on their last album, and thankfully Gaman is not a reinvention so much as an expansion. Star 99 have once again put together a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (twenty-five minutes, actually shorter this time around) collection of tour-de-force songs with plenty of knockout punches; they’ve merely diversified the way that they go about landing these blows, is all. A subtle middle ground opens up on Gaman in songs like “IWLYG”; the energy and hooks are still there, but Star 99 add a jangly, Teenage Fanclub-esque wrinkle to their songwriting. Read more about Gaman here.

“Out Comes Crazy”, In Bedrooms
(2025, Pure Chance)

Did somebody order power pop from Guam? It gives me great pleasure to report that there seems to be a real music scene happening on the Pacific island and United States colony–before this month, I only knew it as Rosa Bordallo’s country of origin, but recently a Guam resident and musician named Christian Sumalpong reached out to me about their label Pure Chance Records and their latest signing, In Bedrooms (and also to inform me that Star 99’s Thomas Calvo is also originally from Guam and once played in a hardcore band with Sumalpong). “Out Comes Crazy”, In Bedrooms’ latest single, is guitar pop candy–if you’re into bands like Snow Ellet, Camp Trash, and (yes) Star 99 that merge power pop sensibilities with 2000s-style emo-pop touches (there’s a lovely, buzzy emo-synth hook here), then they’re the Guam band for you.

“Funny Way of Showing It”, Lone Striker
From Lone Striker (2025, Hidden Bay/Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)

Lo-fi power pop artiste Tom Brown (Teenage Tom Petties, Rural France) made the self-titled debut Lone Striker album at home utilizing “wobbly doo-wop samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds” as well as his typical indie rock instrumentation. It seems like a huge departure for him, but there’s still plenty of excellent guitar-driven (or, at least, co-driven) pop music here. Brown may be primarily drawing from psychedelic and atmospheric-pop 90s indie groups like Sparklehorse and Mercury Rev, but Lone Striker works because he’s able to speak the same fuzzy, half-remembered, mid-century Americana language that those bands also spoke (somehow, despite being British), and actually elucidates a core tenet of his other projects in doing so. My favorite track, “Funny Way of Showing It”, is as sugary and theatrical as anything off of Hotbox Daydreams (even if, slowed down and relying on chimes and pianos, it also kind of sounds like Christmas music). Read more about Lone Striker here.

“The Van Pelt Parties”, Patterson Hood featuring Wednesday
From Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams (2025, ATO)

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the second Drive-By Truckers singer-songwriter (current or former) to appear on this playlist with a solo album (note to self: put this behind the Jason Isbell song when I’m sequencing this). Unlike Isbell, though, Patterson Hood isn’t opposed to getting some help in realizing his latest statement, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams–Lydia Loveless, Waxahatchee, and Wednesday all guest on this one. A weird and insular album, I’ve nonetheless gone with the most “classic Drive-By Truckers country rock and roll” song for this playlist–what can I say, Hood still knows how to do it for me. I have to imagine that it was a blast for professed Drive-By Truckers superfans Wednesday to back Hood up for “The Van Pelt Parties”, an intriguing, historical, and country-rocking track that loads up on spiked punch and pedal steel guitars.

“Higher and Drier”, Will Stratton
From Points of Origin (2025, Ruination/Bella Union)

Singer-songwriter Will Stratton has called Beacon, New York home for over a decade, but he was born in a town outside of Sacramento, and his eighth album is a journey back to his Golden State of origin. Points of Origin is a record that attempts to grapple with the climate change-induced “natural” disasters for which California has become ground zero, although Stratton’s take on it is a character-led one. My favorite song on Points of Origin is the self-contained tapestry of “Higher and Drier”–several of Stratton’s collaborators are credited on it, but they stay on the periphery, letting the singer-songwriter unspool his story of an ex-artist turned real estate salesman selling beautiful, doomed mountain/beachfront houses. In addition to being engrossing as a story, “Higher and Drier” is an excellent showcase of Stratton’s musical gifts–he snakes his way through delicate 2000s “indie folk”-style verses and surprisingly grafts a campfire-song chorus to it. Read more about Points of Origin here.

“On My Own”, Private Lives
From Salt of the Earth (2025, Feel It)

Private Lives make it all sound so easy on their sophomore album, Salt of the Earth; in under thirty minutes, the Montreal quartet bowl strike after strike down the lanes of power pop, garage rock, proto-punk, and indie pop. These ten songs sound ramshackle but precise at the same time, stubbornly insisting that they need no more than a power trio rock-and-roll setup and a powerhouse vocalist to work–and they’re right! Private Lives come out swinging with a bunch of roaring, ripping, rock-and-rollers, and they lean even harder on the gas pedal in the B-side; see “On My Own”, a revved-up girl group power popper hidden in the back half that’s probably my favorite thing on the whole album. Read more about Salt of the Earth here.

“Fourth Street”, Dutch Interior
From Moneyball (2025, Fat Possum)

“Fourth Street” is something of a self-mythologizing song–its title refers to the place where Dutch Interior’s first album was made (“an apartment where three of the band members lived and three others still do”). That’s all well and good, but “Fourth Street” isn’t on this playlist because I knew any of that in advance, it’s on here because it’s a really smooth, really pleasing version of Americana and alt-country-tinged electric indie rock that hooked me just about immediately. There’s no shortage of bands making music that sounds like Moneyball these days, but “Fourth Street” cuts to the chase–a strong and simple guitar riff kicks the track off, and Dutch Interior make the rest of the song work by giving plenty of attention to its foundation rather than just trying to coast on a vibe (if you build it, the vibe will come, after all).

“Interstate Runner”, Disaster Kid
From Rare Bird (2025, Semicircle)

Disaster Kid have a sound that fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene, but there’s a delicate side to bandleader Seamus Kreitzer’s writing that gives their latest EP, Rare Bird, a unique spin. I hear bits of John K. Samson, Noah Roth, and Buddie in these songs, plus a good deal of not only Kreitzer’s stated influence of Slaughter Beach, Dog but other Lame-O power pop groups like Hurry and Big Nothing, too. There are some interesting sensitive and strange moments to Rare Bird, but the aforementioned “power pop” influences are the dominant strain in opening track “Interstate Runner”, which is a beautiful roots rock heart-on-sleeve first statement. Read more about Rare Bird here.

“The New Design”, Mirrored Daughters
From Mirrored Daughters (2025, Fika)

The members of Mirrored Daughters have backgrounds in various shades of indie folk, pop, and electronic music, but their first record flows together with remarkable ease. Inspired by Greater London’s Epping Forest (where it was partially recorded), Mirrored Daughters is delicately ornate, with strings, horns, and woodwinds sprawling out slowly but confidently. Bright acoustic guitars and lead vocalist Marlody’s voice ensure that it isn’t wrong to call Mirrored Daughters a pop album, but neither do Mirrored Daughters shortchange the more experimental side of their music. “The New Design” is an early highlight, and its warm clarinet accents drag Mirrored Daughters into full-on chamber folk territory (well, maybe “drag” is the wrong word; it’s more like “gently float”, much like the rest of the LP’s attitude towards things). Read more about Mirrored Daughters here.

“Grave Digger”, evan.zuri
(2025, Candlepin)

“Grave Digger” is evan.zuri’s debut single, but the Boise-based musician has already opened for everyone from Wishy to Tanukichan to Supercrush (it pays to be a regularly-gigging musician in a smaller but still tourable city, I suppose). After a demo tape earlier this year, Evan Zurilgen’s solo project has linked up with the great Candlepin Records for his first proper recording, “Grave Digger”, a really great blast of fuzzed-out alt-rock that has the musician firmly on my radar. There’s a dour grunginess to the instrumental, but it’s still quite kinetic, and Zurilgen’s vocals are secretly very strong and full-throated. “Grave Digger” kind of sounds like early Damien Jurado fronting Dinosaur Jr., if that makes any sense. And, of course, “I’m not saying you’re a grave digger” is a great line.

“Captain Palisade”, Jetstream Pony
From Bowerbirds and Blue Things (2025, Shelflife/Spinout Nuggets)

Jetstream Pony have been around since the late 2010s, but the members of the Brighton quartet have a much longer history in indie pop, playing in the bands Aberdeen, Trembling Blue Stars, The Wedding Present, Turbocat, The Dentists, and more between the five of them. Although their latest album is clearly the work of longtime indie musicians, it’s a bit rougher-around-the-edges than a lot of their peers at this stage–not quite Boyracer-level pop punk, Bowerbirds and Blue Things nonetheless has a loose, basement indie rock feel to its approach to guitar pop music (that, to be clear, doesn’t stop it from being wildly catchy over and over again). Huge late-record gem “Captain Palisade” keeps Bowerbirds and Blue Things’ momentum going strong into its second half–It’s not exactly surprising that Jetstream Pony are quite good at what they do at this point, but that’s no reason to take them for granted. Read more about Bowerbirds and Blue Things here.

“Here We Go Crazy”, Bob Mould
From Here We Go Crazy (2025, Granary/BMG)

“Airplanes in formation, there’s a conflict in the sky / Modern constellation choosing who can live and die”. Jesus Christ, Bob. The indie rock legend (BMG designation for his latest solo album notwithstanding) is back with his first record in five years, and while the title track to Here We Go Crazy hints at the politically-tapped-in fury of 2020’s Blue Hearts, it’s not as clear of a sequel as that. Dark but incredibly catchy, “Here We Go Crazy” isn’t quite Black Sheets of Rain territory, but it’s Mould meeting the moment with a song that’s heavy in multiple senses of the word. I didn’t realize how much I wanted Mould to make another solo album until I heard this song, but it’s good to have him back.

“Fair Enough”, The Tubs
From Cotton Crown (2025, Trouble in Mind)

It’s not lost on me that both of the Tubs songs on this playlist contain lines about Owen Williams being “sick of” something. “Sick” is a word that bounces around my head listening to Cotton Crown, and it definitely applies to the opening of “Fair Enough”. Williams sings “Know I’ve been an asshole, baby / Know I’ve been such a pain / Girl, I can hear you talking / I don’t hear what you say” in a sickly sweet way, a curdling that reads as “sarcastic” but is in fact drawn from the similarly British activity of “reveling in one’s own misery”. Like all of the other great moments in Cotton Crown, though, all of these funhouse mirror distractions fade into the background when The Tubs get to the brilliant, massive chorus. Like, you know, grief, it’s all rearranging deck chairs and petty squabbles while the actual thing that matters lurks in the background, ready to take over at any moment.

“My Old Man”, Spring Onion
From Seated Figure (2025, Anything Bagel)

This playlist can’t shake the spectre of death for whatever reason. I put this lovely song by Spring Onion, the solo project of Remember Sports’ Catherine Dwyer, onto this playlist, only to stumble upon an essay about the death of her father that begat Seated Figure upon researching it. That certainly gives a lot more context to “My Old Man”, probably my favorite song on the album, a song with very few and mostly quite cryptic lyrics (aside from “We don’t need no piece of paper / I love you now and I love you later”, a very nice sentiment but one I’m currently struggling with for various personal reasons). The essay is partially about Dwyer’s father’s love of Costco, which is coincidentally one of the last places where we were able to experience some normalcy on a Thursday before things took a hard and sudden turn for the worse on Friday. This new wave-y bedroom pop/folk song is not about Costco, I don’t think.

“Consolation Prize”, Transistors
From Everything Will Never Happen Again (2025, Melted Ice Cream)

“In your eyes I’m a consolation prize / Runner up and second best”. Aw, man, that’s a tough break, Transistors. Your song still sounds great, though! They’re a trio hailing from Rangiora, New Zealand, active in the 2010s and recently resurrected to record an album called Everything Will Never Happen Again with Joe Sampson of Salad Boys. If you enjoyed the frantic, garagey take on Kiwi guitar pop from Best Bets’ album last year, you’ll want to give Transistors a listen–and if you’re on the fence, “Consolation Prize” is an exuberant, aggrieved, loud power pop anthem that sums up the best of Transistors in under two minutes. 

“Libretto”, Throwing Muses
From Moonlight Concessions (2025, Fire)

Hey, there’s a new Throwing Muses album out! Their first in five years, too. However much you think you appreciate Throwing Muses and Kristin Hersh, it’s probably not enough. And that goes for me, too–I have to be in a certain mood to appreciate the band’s distinct tense and tight version of rock music, but it sounds like nothing else when it hits. And “Libretto”, my favorite song on Moonlight Concessions, certainly hits. It’s an acoustic track with string accompaniment, harkening back to Hersh’s excellent first solo album, Hips and Makers, but there’s that dreadful Throwing Muses edge to it that isn’t present on a lot of that record. I need to listen to Moonlight Concessions as a whole some more, but this one’s already sticking with me.

“Bad Guys”, The Unfit
From Disconnected (2025, Share It Music)

The latest record from Pacific Northwest group The Unfit is a collection of previously-released singles and EPs, but it hardly sounds like rehashed leftovers. Disconnected is fiery and alive, following in a grand lineage of Seattle punk bands wielding a combination of wild, sardonic vocals and huge guitars to explosive ends. Too limber (and, let’s be real, not nearly self-serious enough) for the blunt-object post-punk/noise rock revival, but too heavy and hardcore-indebted for “egg punk”, Disconnected is ten songs and twenty-five minutes of The Unfit beating their own personal sweet spot to a pulp. The first song on the compilation, “Bad Guys”, is a dispatch from a dark reality of heartily encouraged violence and warfare; “I smell blood / I kinda want blood / A little bit of blood never hurt anyone” howls vocalist Jake Knuth, a worrying train of thought if there ever was one. Read more about Disconnected here.

“DTMWTD”, LP Gavin
From Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc. (2025, Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home)

LP Gavin is a London-based artist who combines the off-the-cuff pop brilliance of 90s American basement indie rock with classic British guitar pop songwriting, and his electric, wide-ranging first LP actually lives up to an album biography that cites both Ovlov and Robert Wyatt as influences. Beyond the moments of actual “fuzz rock”, Trials, Tribulations… is marked by a psychedelic, distorted haze that hovers over even the album’s more gentle moments; Gavin’s low-key British vocals mumble and stumble through these bright and inventive instrumentals, only sometimes the main character in his own show. “DTMWTD” (that’s “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”) is some satisfying fuzzy rock and roll, offering up some swagger that might be the most immediate moment on the record (not that a British guy mumbling about someone being “fuckin’ rude” over fuzzed-out guitars is all that conventional). Read more about Trials, Tribulations, Deliberations, Pratfalls, Repreievers, Etc. here.

“Goat House Blues”, Fust
From Big Ugly (2025, Dear Life)

“’Cause when you’re gone they can say that it was all your doing / It was your disaster / And they may even say everything got better after / But they’ll learn fast that being free it ain’t half as rewarding”. Even compared to the rest of Big Ugly (“Southern mountain rock, Southern lit, made and dedicated to the inextricable entity of land and people, to visions of community and utopia and testament to erosion,” writes Dan Wriggins of Friendship in reference to the album), “Goat House Blues” is a real cypher. The album-wide theme of work is present on the periphery of this one, but “Goat House Blues” is about escape and “freedom”, whatever that could possibly mean in the context of a land as far-off and foreign to the rest of us as Lincoln County, West Virginia. Aaron Dowdy may sound like he’s kicking back and putting his arms behind his head when he sings “Come on in, we’re loafing”, but he’s not.

“Make You Feel Better”, Inland Years
From Keep Your Eyes on the Road (2025, BSDJ)

Keep Your Eyes on the Road is thirteen songs of hissing, lo-fi, folk-ish guitar pop music from a hardcore/screamo/metalcore veteran delivered in seventeen minutes. Inland Years has garnered comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Cleaners from Venus in recent years, but between Ryan Daniels’ low-key but emotional vocals and the acoustic skeletons from which most of the songs are built, it reminds me more than anything of Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh. Daniels is a hazy frontperson, the songs come in and out of focus, and the tape is over before you know it but not without nailing a lot of excellent lo-fi pop. In under sixty seconds, “Make You Feel Better” establishes itself as one of Keep Your Eyes on the Road’s best moments–it’s bright, unvarnished jangle/power pop. Read more about Keep Your Eyes on the Road here.

“Gum”, Vegtable
From Through the Motions (2025)

It turns out that I just needed some slowcore from Singapore to set me right. The entirety of the debut album from Singaporean trio Vegtable (“no e between the g and t”, per their Bandcamp page) is great, but I keep getting stuck on Through the Motions’ opening track, “Gum”. The delicate and shimmery side of 1990s indie rock is alive and well in “Gum”–I hear bits of Bedhead, Codeine, and Seam in this one, any of those band’s louder sides sanded down to a gentle river of meandering guitar leads and whispered but melodic vocals. There’s some interesting synth parts as “Gum” swoons to its ascending bridge, but it grounds itself and returns to the modest guitars that make it strong as it sees itself out.

“Tumbleweeding”, Telethon
From Suburban Electric (2025, Halloween)

Every song on Suburban Electric is a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on Telethon’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me). Suburban Electric could be Kevin Tulley’s bid for “best lyricist in indie punk rock whatever currently going”, not in a “heartache-inducing one-liners to write on your spiral-ring notebook” way but in a “how the hell does he fully step into the worlds of his characters in an opaque but charismatic way over and over again like that?” way. Telethon surprise musically on Suburban Electric, too–the group set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers. In the power-pop-punk rush of “Tumbleweeding”, Telethon seemingly break free from some of the record’s more heady trappings, but a closer inspection of this hit-the-ground-running banger reveals much of these hallmarks of Suburban Electric hiding in the hooks, too. Read more about Suburban Electric here.

“Empire Anthems”, Chaepter
From Empire Anthems (2025, Pleasure Tapes)

Oh boy, Chaepter’s back already! The Chicago art rock/post-punk/fuzz-gaze-whatever freak put out an interesting and tricky album called Naked Era on Candlepin last year, and he’s more or less picked up where he left off on this year’s Pleasure Tapes-released Empire Anthems EP. Much more frantic, paranoid, and post-punk-indebted than the majority of his nu-gaze/space rock/grunge revival peers, the title track to Empire Anthems is perhaps the greatest distillation of Chaepter’s whole thing in a single song yet (although he does need nearly six minutes to get it all off his chest). “Empire Anthems” reminds me a bit of bands like Pardoner who try to merge the more exploratory side of 90s indie rock with pop music–and while Chaepter is a little less concise here, there’s definitely a strong anchor that keeps “Empire Anthems” plowing forward anyway.

“Pick Me Up #2”, Silo’s Choice
From Liberals (2025, Obscure Pharaoh)

The one true indulgence of Jon Massey’s folk side on Liberals is “Pick Me Up #2”, which might be the best moment on the entire thing. Massey turns everything over in his head in the Starbucks inside the Target on Halsted, waiting out inclement weather: “I’m never far from walking out between the cars / With a snowball in my hand, spinning, spinning,” he remarks over confidently but delicately-picked acoustic guitars in the refrain of this one. The music conveys the general sense of what Massey is on about here–as for the specifics, we’ll have to file that away to come back to. Read more about Liberals here.

“Flies”, Dick Texas
From All That Fall (2025, Tortilla Flat/Life Like Tapes)

Loosely speaking, All That Fall is a country rock record–and “loose” is the right word to use here, as Dick Texas’ lost, woozy, incredibly slow playing style really does sound on the verge of falling apart more often than not. The songs–all seven of ‘em, that’s all we need–sprawl out in their self-contained desert worlds, and frontperson Valerie Salerno is the steady center with vocals that murmur along with the music’s psychedelic haze. Paisley Underground and post-punk collide with more traditional country and folk music–but even so, none of this quite compares us to the out-of-nowhere closing track “Flies”, an electronic-fried krautrock/psych rock creation that ends All That Fall on a smoking high note. The fog that surrounds All That Fall doesn’t clear on “Flies”, exactly, but the shapes we can just barely make out are clearly moving faster. Read more about All That Fall here.

“Why Is It So Hard to Say Goodbye?”, Vundabar
From Surgery and Pleasure (2025, Loma Vista)

Why indeed, Vundabar.