Rosy Overdrive’s Top 40 Albums of 2025 So Far (Part 1 of 2)

Hello there, and welcome to the midway mark of 2025, I suppose (basically, I noticed other websites putting up their mid-year favorites and thought “well, guess I better start getting mine together now!”). Below, you’ll find forty records that RO loved more than anything else so far this year. Of course, there’s a bunch of good music I wasn’t able to fit on here (check the site directory for other records we’ve written about recently), but I’m quite happy with this list. I think you will be, too!

The list is unranked, ordered reverse-alphabetically by artist name (last year I did it alphabetically, and I alternate it every year).

Thanks for reading, and here are links to stream a playlist of these selections via Spotify and Tidal (Bandcamp links are provided for all records).

Click here for part two of the list!

Vulture Feather – It Will Be Like Now

Release date: February 14^th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, art rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Vulture Feather have such a distinct sound–Colin McCann’s otherworldly yowling vocals and chiming guitar, the steady, glacial movement, a rapturous devotion to minimalism and repetition–that they really only sound like themselves at this point. Like last year’s Merge Now in Friendship and 2023’s Liminal Fields, It Will Be Like Now is a powerful-sounding record, but I didn’t come away from it thinking “Vulture Feather just made the same album again”.  The fact that they recorded the album after a bunch of touring might explain the subtle difference I hear–“looser” isn’t exactly the right descriptor…maybe “more alive”? Liminal Fields sounded like it just came into being one day, but I can actually imagine Vulture Feather playing the songs of It Will Be Like Now live, in person, in-studio. This is their punk album, maybe. (Read more)

The Tubs – Cotton Crown

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, indie pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

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–The Tubs have been one of the few such bands that regularly get lauded outside of our bubble, and I can’t even be hipstery about the praise that’s been bestowed upon them 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, but suffice it to say that the group’s sparkling, bright guitar pop collides with some tough, complex kinds of grief throughout Cotton Crown.

(T-T)b – Beautiful Extension Cord

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Disposable America
Genre: Fuzz rock, synthpop, power pop, chiptune, slacker rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Boston’s (T-T)b incorporate chiptune and video game soundtrack instrumentation into their music as an accent, the way one might use synths or horns. Beautiful Extension Cord is the band’s second album and first new music of any kind in four years, and (T-T)b have evolved in the meantime, I’d say. It seems impossible for chiptune to ever be “subtly” incorporated into one’s music, but if it is, it probably sounds like this album–still quite visible, but integrated more seamlessly than ever into the group’s slacker rock, 90s alt-rock, and bedroom indie rock-evoking sound. Between the big old guitars, the chirping 8-bit sounds, and JM Dussault’s plain but capable vocals, there’s somehow a cosmic element to (T-T)b’s indie rock. (Read more)

Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6^th
Record label: Halloween
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Suburban Electric certainly sounds like a Telethon album, but it also sounds like a conscious attempt not to repeat their previous LP, the sprawling, overstuffed, guest musician-heavy Swim Out Past the Breakers. 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. Suburban Electric is still a rich and stuffed-to-the-gills record in its own way, though–every song on this album is a wild self-contained narrative (the lyrics are presented as paragraphs on the album’s Bandcamp page, which seems right to me), and Telethon set their punk rock theater energy towards building lengthy, almost prog-pop Jenga towers. (Read more)

Star 99 – Gaman

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Power pop, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

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. (Read more)

Spring Onion – Seated Figure

Release date: March 14^th
Record label: Anything Bagel
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

I’ve listened to the music of Catherine Dwyer extensively thanks to her work as the bassist of Remember Sports, but this year I learned that she’s more than capable of making a great lo-fi/bedroom pop record on her own (well, with the assistance of many great Philadelphia DIY musicians and her Remember Sports bandmates, but Spring Onion is “her” project). Seated Figure, the sophomore Spring Onion album and the first since 2018, is about the death of Dwyer’s father, and her vibrant, meditative version of sunny guitar pop is a surreal but deeply-felt tribute and crystallization of a foggy, difficult-to-describe experience.

Alan Sparhawk & Trampled by Turtles – Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles 

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: Sub Pop
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter, slowcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles is as tough of a listen as anyone familiar with the tragedy experienced by the former of the two artists would expect, although it’s “tough” in an entirely different way than last year’s confrontational electronic Sparhawk solo album White Roses, My God. An unlikely but ultimately very fitting team-up between two of Duluth’s most prominent acts, this album ends up synthesizing the glacial-paced, beautiful slowcore of the early work of Sparhawk’s Low and the more traditional folk music of Trampled by Turtles. The latter band’s bluegrass-trained sound is well-equipped to take these songs to the brink of the abyss, but Sparhawk steadies the ship with (one imagines) everything he’s got in him.

Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Indie pop, sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock
Formats: Digital

Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–Silo’s Choice mastermind Jon Massey mentions The Left Banke, early Destroyer, and Belle & Sebastian as touchpoints for this one, and he’s kind of right. At its most animated, Liberals has the same kind of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock that Massey had previously explored in the band Coventry, and even the slower numbers on this album display a renewal of vows with concise pop music. Liberals’ default mode of polished piano-led pop doesn’t come even close to getting stale, and there are plenty of deviations from it, dropping a bit into everything from folk music to disco. (Read more)

Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Folk rock, alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Trash Mountain was written and recorded much more quickly than Lily Seabird’s previous two albums, and I found myself pretty surprised at where the Vermont singer-songwriter decided to go on her third LP. The explosive bursts of noisy country rock of last year’s Alas, are decentered for a quieter, more deliberate, and intimate record, but this pull-back (if anything) only makes Seabird’s writing and singing even more immediate. Trash Mountain (named after an artist-filled house on a “decommissioned landfill” site where Seabird lived while writing the album) is a gorgeously ragged collection of folk rock that finds avenues of contentment rather than searching feverishly for moments of catharsis. (Read more)

SAVAK – SQUAWK!

Release date: May 30^th
Record label: Peculiar Works/Ernest Jenning
Genre: Garage rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

I’m pleased to report that Brooklyn’s finest prolific veteran-studded indie rock group SAVAK still sound exactly like themselves on their seventh album, SQUAWK!. A tight ten songs and thirty-five minutes, the album finds Sohrab Habibion, Michael Jaworski, and Matt Schulz continuing to hammer out their by-now quite recognizable style of college rock, post-punk, and garage rock–tough but polished, familiar but surprising, catchy as ever. Detours into New York electric noise rock collages, a more overt kind of Lou Reed worship, and atmospheric pieces are infrequent but always done well. If you’re already part of the SAVAK society, I doubt you’ll need more convincing that they’ve done it yet again–but there’s always room for more. (Read more)

Saoirse Dream – Saoirse Dream

Release date: February 28^th
Record label: Lauren
Genre: Hyperpop, synthpop, indie pop, bedroom pop, noise pop, chiptune, pop punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Since the beginning of this decade, Catherine Egbert has been connected to “hyperpop” as a movement, both through her work as Saoirse Dream and as part of collectives like webcage and User-177606669. Her debut album for Lauren Records is indeed a charged mix of chiptune pop blasts, pop punk guitars, emo angst, and lo-fi bedroom pop intimacy. Saoirse Dream isn’t as sonically chaotic as a lot of hyperpop I’m familiar with–I could imagine more typical pop punk/indie pop versions of most of these songs (in fact, they might already be in there somewhere), but Egbert has such a handle on these extra touches and tools that they pretty much always feel like they add to the music. Saoirse Dream has a ton of ideas in any case, and most of these are executed in the context of sweeping pop music. (Read more)

Pigeon Pit – Crazy Arms

Release date: January 17^th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Folk punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

In the three years since their breakout album, 2022’s Feather River Canyon Blues, Olympia folk punk rockers Pigeon Pit have solidified into a six-piece “country/punk maximalist” group led by former sole member Lomes Oleander and featuring a bunch of Olympia-area ringers. Crazy Arms is both a culmination of “Pigeon Pit the Band” and a statement of their current power; Oleander is still a “folk punk” frontperson, yes, but her vocals and writing have evolved to also encapsulate the kind of world-reverent folk-y indie rock practiced by heroes like the Mountain Goats, The Weakerthans, and certain eras of Against Me!–and, of course, the band is key in helping her realize a more expansive sound for these songs, too. Pigeon Pit is always giving about 120 percent on Crazy Arms, even (perhaps especially) when Oleander is singing about being run-through and tired. (Read more)

Pacing – Songs

Release date: January 7^th
Record label: Asian Man
Genre: Anti-folk, indie pop, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk, twee
Formats: CD, digital

San Jose anti-folk/bedroom pop act Pacing have been working on a proper follow-up to their 2023 album Real poetry… for a while now, but that’s not what their first new music on Asian Man Records, Songs, is. Songs is twelve minutes long. It’s a “mini-album” if it has to be called anything, or maybe it’s just “songs”. Most of these are written and played by entirely bandleader Katie McTigue herself. Only one of these songs is more than two minutes long. The naming conventions are aggressively low-key and casual. If Songs is a hot dog-esque byproduct of the sessions for Pacing LP2, it functions very well as a teaser for it. It’s a throwaway release that’s too good to be a throwaway release, and instead just ends up being the latest reminder that McTigue is still one of the sharpest and most unique songwriters operating in the present. (Read more)

Options – Beast Mode

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi pop, bedroom pop, synthpop
Formats: Digital

This one is a last-minute addition after I had to strike something else from this list, but I’m secretly happy that a spot opened up for this brand-new Options album. Chicago recording engineer and musician Seth Engel was incredibly active as Options in the late 2010s and early 2020s, but Beast Mode is his solo project’s first record in three years (in the meantime, he’s been playing with Mister Goblin and Patter and recording music from Nature’s Neighbor, Cusp, and Joey Nebulous, among others). Beast Mode is slick, snappy, heavily AutoTuned bedroom pop music (indeed, Engel writes that it was recorded “in my room 2021-2024”) that reminds me of a more fully-developed version of 2021’s On the Draw. It hits the same “fucking around and making timeless pop songs” sweet spot that, like, early This Is Lorelei did.

Open Head – What Is Success

Release date: January 24^th
Record label: Wharf Cat
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk, no wave
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Kingston art punk group Open Head had grand ambitions for their second LP, naming hip hop and electronic music as equally influential on it as punk and art rock. Of course, any adventurous and forward-thinking band ought to be looking outside their own genre for ideas, and just because the resultant What Is Success is “merely” a rock album doesn’t mean that Open Head weren’t successful in making something that genuinely feels informed by things other than “merely” post-punk and noise rock. Although, to be clear, I do hear a lot of good noise rock and post-punk bands in What Is Success’ sound, too–New York no wave, Exploding in Sound-associated post-hardcore, and Rust Belt noise rock all likely had a hand in where Open Head end up here. (Read more)

Now – Now Does the Trick

Release date: May 16^th
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Jangle pop, psychedelic pop, lo-fi pop, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The second album from the difficultly-named Bay Area trio Now and their first for their new label is called Now Does the Trick, and it’s a different beast than their debut but no less strong of an LP. The psychedelic, kraut-y mud of 2023’s And Blue Space Is Burning Noon is turned down and the jangle pop guitars and hooks are turned up–Now sound like they’re aiming for the little big-time here. Now are still a bunch of weirdos, though–lo-fi, sparkling jangle can’t paper over all of that. Even though the dozen songs of Now Does the Trick total just a bit over a half-hour, it feels like they encompass so much more than that; Now eat their craft-sharpening cake and get to keep some skeletons in their collective closet, too. (Read more)

My Wife’s an Angel – Yeah, I Bet

Release date: April 18^th
Record label: Knife Hits/GRIMGRIMGRIM/Broken Cycle
Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

My Wife’s an Angel are a chaotic, piss-taking noise rock band from Philadelphia, although my intelligence suggests that they may have roots in the expansive wasteland known as “the rest of Pennsylvania”. The quartet’s second album, Yeah, I Bet, is positively a mess–it’s ugly, heavy noise-punk that sometimes doesn’t sound like any of those descriptors at all. The closest thing I can think to compare My Wife’s an Angel is, like, a more millennial and Appalachian version of Killdozer (if you understand what I mean by this, you’re probably going to hell, by the way)–the Midwestern classic rock devil worship subbed out for a big, wide, empty hollering against rock music simply played wrong. (Read more)

Miscellaneous Owl – The Cloud Chamber

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Bedroom pop, synthpop, indie folk, lo-fi pop
Formats: Digital

This year’s Miscellaneous Owlbum is called The Cloud Chamber, and Madison, Wisconsin singer-songwriter Huan-Hua Chye promises something “folkier, quieter, and dreamier” this time around, as well as “1000% more theremin” than on her last record (You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow, one of my favorites of 2024). While the exact specifics of this description (other than the theremin part) are up for debate, I do agree that The Cloud Chamber displays a more thoughtful and subdued side to Chye’s writing. You Are the Light That Casts a Shadow ran out to greet us with early Magnetic Fields-worthy bright synthpop instrumentals, and while this new one has some such moments, on the whole it’s more of an album that one is “welcome to join in progress” than one that’s going out of its way to invite us inside. (Read more)

Mekons – Horror

Release date: April 4^th
Record label: Fire
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The Mekons are forty-nine years old this year. I’m not even going to try to figure out what number LP they’re on at this point. And yet here is Horror, an album that purports to “[look] at history and the legacies of British imperialism with mashed up lyrics” and that sounds a hell of a lot like the great Mekons records littered throughout history before it. Post-punk artsiness, alt-country rock-and-rolling, traditionalist folk instrumentation, reggae rhythms, and a good old communal feeling all permeate Horror, an album that keeps one foot in the past only to mainline all the power and humanity and bullshit that’s still ever-so-relevant today, always forging some kind of connection or another.

Lùlù – Lùlù

Release date: June 6^th
Record label: Howlin Banana/Taken by Surprise/Dangerhouse Skylab
Genre: Power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The self-titled debut album from Lyon/Marseille-based Lùlù is power pop in its most freewheeling, energetically fun form. Bandleader Luc Simone and his collaborators gleefully roll around in the histories of garage rock and punk rock to make ten massively hooky rock and roll knockout punches. Far removed from the refined, cosmopolitan sound that I associated with French indie pop, Lùlù has more in common with Australian garage-power-poppers like The Unknowns and Romero, American retro-pop groups like Sheer Mag and Free Energy, and, honestly, even a little bit of melodic lifer “orgcore” punk rock groups. (Read more)

Click here for part two!