Welcome to part two (of four) of Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2025! This post covers albums 75 through 51. For any and all background info, see part one.
See also:
Part One (100-76)
Part Three (50-26)
Part Four (25-1)
Playlist links (Spotify) (Tidal)
75. The Bats – Corner Coming Up
Release date: October 17th
Record label: Flying Nun
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, Dunedin sound, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
I don’t know if there’s much to say beyond that I’m grateful The Bats are still around and making new music. Corner Coming Up is the legendary New Zealand group’s first new album in five years, and it certainly sounds like a band who’ve been blissfully pursuing indie pop for over four decades. The Bats are now long-removed from making instant-gratification, quick-hit jangle pop singles, although that’s still part of Corner Coming Up’s DNA; it’s just now rolled into an all-encompassing, sprawling folk-rock land survey of an album that requires patience and time to really start to reveal itself.
74. Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
Release date: March 7th
Record label: Southeastern
Genre: Folk, country, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Foxes in the Snow is a tough one, the “divorce album” that Jason Isbell 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. 2023’s Weathervanes was my favorite Isbell album in quite some time, and while Foxes in the Snow isn’t an LP to “throw on” frequently like that one is, I do get the sense that it’s built to stand beyond the circumstances of its creation. Isbell’s separation from his wife and former bandmate Amanda Shires colors these songs, certainly, although one would have to have one’s head in the clouds not to recognize Foxes in the Snow’s ability to glance beyond that just frequently enough.
73. Golden Apples – Shooting Star
Release date: September 19th
Record label: Lame-O
Genre: Fuzz pop, noise pop, psychedelic pop, lo-fi indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
2023’s Bananasugarfire was a big milestone for Philadelphia artist Russell Edling and his Golden Apples project, incorporating shoegaze and psychedelia into the group’s loud and fuzzy sound. Pieced together in a handful of different locales by Edling with various contributors, Shooting Star pulls off the trick of sounding more like an insular folk-influenced record while at the same time retaining Bananasugarfire’s bright, distorted, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic power pop. Between these last two LPs, there’s now a distinct “Golden Apples sound”–I think I like this new take on it the best so far. (Read more)
72. My Wife’s an Angel – Yeah, I Bet
Release date: April 18th
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 to 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)
71. The Tisburys – A Still Life Revisited
Release date: April 25th
Record label: Double Helix/SofaBurn
Genre: Power pop, Americana, heartland rock, college rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
On A Still Life Revisited, Philadelphia heartland rock group The Tisburys consciously sought to expand their sound beyond the power pop of their last album (2022’s Exile on Main Street), name-dropping ambitious indie rock groups like Frightened Rabbit and The Hold Steady as their targets. This is a bold (and, for most bands in the same boat, would be an ill-advised) decision, but there was a Springsteenian largesse to Exile on Main Street, and A Still Life Revisited subsequently comes off as more of a continuous journey down a familiar road for them. It helps that bandleader Tyler Asay and crew still know their way around a nice, big guitar pop hook too, of course. (Read more)
70. Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals – A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears
Release date: April 4th
Record label: Phantom Limb
Genre: Experimental rap, noise rap, folk, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are a pair of Baltimore rappers who’ve gained a reputation for experimental and political rap over their first couple of records, and A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears isn’t going to disabuse anybody of these notions. On every account, though, the duo spend time out of these boxes–not everything reads as explicitly political, for one, and there are also moments that sound genuinely fun and pop-friendly (and even “rap” is too small of a box to constrain the duo on this record, as there are two straight-up folk songs on A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears, among other excursions). (Read more)
69. Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain
Release date: April 4th
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)
68. Lake Ruth – Hawking Radiation
Release date: June 6th
Record label: Feral Child/Dell’Orso
Genre: Psychedelic pop, jazz-pop, space pop, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
After releasing two albums in the late 2010s, Lake Ruth had been pretty quiet this decade, but Hawking Radiation is a great reintroduction to a high-quality indie rock band. Recorded by the band themselves with help from SAVAK’s Sohrab Habibion & Michael Jaworski, among others, Hawking Radiation is adventurous, psychedelic, synth-led “space pop”. Lake Ruth differentiate themselves from their like-minded peers via a palpably-embraced jazz side. Plenty of bands like this dabble in “jazz-pop”, yes, but rarely is it so thoroughly a part of a record’s makeup as it is on Hawking Radiation–everything from Matt Schulz’s tireless drumming to Allison Brice’s striking vocals to, well, everything that multi-instrumentalist Hewson Chen is doing is completely in tune with it. (Read more)
67. Craig Finn – Always Been
Release date: April 4th
Record label: Tamarac/Thirty Tigers
Genre: Singer-songwriter, heartland rock, synthrock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
The music of Craig Finn (and his band, The Hold Steady) is already fairly…divisive for the fickle bunch known as indie rock fans, and even those who enjoy Finn’s most acclaimed works seem split on Always Been, his latest solo record. I, for one, am really into it–I’ve felt that Finn’s solo career has benefited from his attempts to grow his music palette (we already know he’s a great storyteller–what else you got?), and Always Been–produced by Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs and leaning further into shined-up, 80s synth-rock than ever before–certainly qualifies. As always, the narratives are dense and no amount of polished production will ever make it “easy listening”. But I still love Finn and Granduciel’s attempts to make it so.
66. Jeff Tobias – One Hundredfold Now in This Age
Release date: October 17th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: Art rock, orchestral pop, experimental pop, jazz-pop, synthpop
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Musically speaking, One Hundredfold Now in This Age is more orchestral and jazz-indebted that 2022’s Recurring Dream was, but if you enjoyed that album’s smooth yet dense take on pop music, Brooklyn multi-talented artist Jeff Tobias does it again here, more or less. Tobias, (who also plays in art rock group Modern Nature and noise-jazz ensemble Sunwatchers), with an impressive list of guest musicians in tow, turns this collection of strange songs into a single chaotic, vibrant, and seething beast, a sharp, crystal-clear political collection that meets the moment in the most difficult and correct way. (Read more)
65. Charm School – Debt Forever
Release date: January 24th
Record label: Surprise Mind
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
The 2023 Finite Jest EP introduced Louisville’s Charm School as devotees of Touch & Go Records-influenced post-punk, garage rock, and post-rock. On their first LP, Debt Forever, Charm School haven’t completely shaken up their sound, but they’re doing something a little different here. It’s somehow both looser and angrier; there’s still plenty of that modern Fall-influenced post-punk sound here, but there’s also some San Diego-style post-hardcore/garage rock and turn-of-the-century Washington, D.C. art punk in the mix, too. As the title hints at, Debt Forever spends a good deal of time focusing on financial anxiety and insecurity–whether the alternatively brooding and seething music drew this all-American fear out of frontperson Andrew Sellers or whether his preoccupations with such matters informed the music, there’s no denying the synergy here. (Read more)
64. Teenage Tom Petties – Rally the Tropes
Release date: October 24th
Record label: Repeating Cloud/Safe Suburban Home
Genre: Fuzz pop, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
It may seem like there’s a steady stream of new power pop music from Teenage Tom Petties mastermind Tom Brown that he just can’t turn off, but he specifically wrote the songs of Rally the Tropes with a full-band recording session in mind–after releasing a pair of self-recorded albums in the past year and a half, Brown is ready to once again put his songs in his friends’ hands to elevate them. Even more so than the garage-y, punk-y, jangly power pop sound of Rally the Tropes, the band’s presence is felt via Brown’s writing; it’s communal in a winking (read: British) way. Though it may be Brown’s pen to paper, it’s the rest of his band giving him the freedom to fly on Rally the Tropes. (Read more)
63. Maneka – bathes and listens
Release date: October 29th
Record label: Topshelf
Genre: Art rock, slowcore, experimental rock, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, math rock, Maneka
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
The Washington, D.C.-originating, Philadelphia-based musician Devin McKnight has been making music as Maneka since the mid-2010s; much of the project lands in the realms of slowcore-ish, greyscale indie rock, but Maneka has always been a bit more than that. McKnight’s newest Maneka album, bathes and listens, was recorded with modern slowcore and/or shoegaze go-to producer Alex Farrar, and it subsequently finds the unclassifiable musician making a renewal of vows with distorted, 90s-influenced indie rock. It’s not a full retreat from McKnight’s stranger impulses, but when bathes and listens is supposed to rock, it rocks. (Read more)
62. K9 – Thrills
Release date: July 21st (Digital)/October 3rd (Vinyl)
Record label: Who Ya Know
Genre: Garage rock, power pop, punk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette (partial), digital
Thrills is K9’s first full-length album, and the twenty-minute collection delivers on the potential that the Richmond group had previously flashed in smaller doses. They aren’t shy at all about their love of classic college rock and jangle pop, but they carry themselves like a bunch of garage rockers (or even, at time, punks)–the final product is somewhere around the midpoint between Lame-O and Feel It Records. On one end of the spectrum, the vocal interplay between the two lead vocalists and the zippy guitar melodies help K9 pull off “indie pop” or perhaps even twee pop, and on the other side of things, the six-strings lob punk slingshots and the ferocious drumming approaches hardcore tempos. (Read more)
61. Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra – Yikes Almighty
Release date: July 18th
Record label: Lauren/Making New Enemies
Genre: Folk pop, singer-songwriter, indie pop, twee, slacker pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Dubbed “a calming existential crisis set to children’s toy instruments”, Yikes Almighty is low-key folk-pop music that’s about as “relaxed” and “chill” as its creator could reasonably allow it to be. Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra (aka Walter Etc., aka Dustin Hayes and whoever’s playing with him) get referred to as a “folk punk” act, and I can hear how they might’ve initially been one, but Yikes Almighty is in the realm of underground iconoclasts who fall somewhere between “lo-fi pop” and anti-folk/folk punk. Like a lot of “cult”-ish-type bands, it’s hard to say what, exactly, Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra is, which helps Yikes Almighty sound like a one-of-a-kind album in 2025. (Read more)
60. Strange Magic – Effervescent
Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Mama Mañana
Genre: Psychedelic pop, indie pop, power pop, dream pop, soft rock
Formats: Cassette, digital
New Mexico musician Javier Romero has been toiling away making homespun power pop as Strange Magic since at least the early 2010s, but the prolific artist’s latest record is something of a departure for him. Romero declares Effervescent to be inspired by “New Jack Swing, the golden age of hip-hop, and early, true alternative stylings”–I wouldn’t say that Strange Magic is now closer to those aforementioned genres than, say, the Elvis Costello-ish power pop of Romero’s past records, but there’s definitely some fun and unusual things going on in these songs. Effervescent is equal parts “dreamy, unmoored vibe-pursuing” and “grounded guitar pop”.
59. Miss Bones – Sap Green
Release date: September 13th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Indie folk, folk rock, folk-pop, pop rock
Formats: Digital
There’s a nice little indie folk/folk rock/pop rock scene happening up in Boston, and Miss Bones’ June Isenhart is right in the middle of it. Sap Green, the debut Miss Bones album, follows a 2023 EP called Grey Lady and features Isenhart backed by members of Lonesome Joan and The Michael Character. Miss Bones’ first album is a rock-solid coming-out party from the could’ve-been adult alternative/folk rock hit “What’s the Story, Mother?” on down: the roots-pop anthem “I-93”, the multi-layered folk-pop closing ballad “Moving Song”, the soaring heartland rock “Sign-Off”–any of these could be the center of Sap Green. We get it all on Sap Green, though, and a handful of more patience-requiring moments, too. (Read more)
58. Spring Onion – Seated Figure
Release date: March 14th
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, yes, 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.
57. The Bird Calls – Melody Trail
Release date: February 7th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk rock, soft rock, singer-songwriter, synthpop, sophisti-pop
Formats: CD, digital
2025’s album from Sam Sodomsky and his prolific project The Bird Calls finds the New York singer-songwriter (and music writer) putting together something a bit different, comparatively speaking. Melody Trail was assembled entirely by Sodomsky and producer Ryan Weiner, and while these songs certainly sound like they were written and sung by the same artist who made last year’s casual country-folk Old Faithful, the duo give Melody Trail a more polished pop reading. It’s a path down which many of Sodomsky’s influences–Dan Bejar, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen–have wandered to rewarding ends, but Melody Trail retains the greatest strength of Sodomsky’s previous work: namely, that he’s able to evoke the art of such idiosyncratic, larger-than-life figures while coming off more or less as a regular guy. (Read more)
56. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band – New Threats from the Soul
Release date: July 25th
Record label: Sophomore Lounge/Tough Love
Genre: Alt-country, folk rock, country rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
I don’t need to sing the praises of Ryan Davis as fervently these days, because the rest of the “music writing world” has finally caught up to his brilliance. If you liked the expansive alt-country sagas of Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band’s 2023 breakout album Dancing on the Edge, I’ve got good news with regards to what you’ll hear on New Threats from the Soul. As always, the incomparable Davis rolls deceptively simple country rock along with his rambling observations and lets us sort the resultant rich texts out. The confusion by some at Davis’ whole deal upon his ascent has been amusing, but not as amusing as listening to New Threats from the Soul.
55. Peter Peter Hughes – Half-Staff Blues
Release date: September 5th
Record label: Tired Media
Genre: Post-punk, indie pop, garage pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Digital
After stepping down from his position as the longtime (we’re talking since the 1990s, more or less) bassist for the Mountain Goats last year, Peter Hughes was finally faced with the time to make his first solo album in a decade and a half. The former Shrimper Records stalwart, to my delight, decided to go to Australia and make one of them Aussie indie pop/post-punk kinda albums; recorded with members of The Ocean Party, Pop Filter, and Partner Look, Half-Staff Blues translates Hughes’ propensity for unflinching left-wing commentary and melancholic meandering into the realms of snappy rhythms and bright and garish pop get-ups.
54. SAVAK – SQUAWK!
Release date: May 30th
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, more overt 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)
53. Club Night – Joy Coming Down
Release date: May 2nd
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Art rock, math rock, emo
Formats: Vinyl, digital
There were plenty of groups in the late 2010s making music that could be described as some combination of “math rock”, “indie rock”, and “emo”, but the way that Club Night do it–an overall hugeness, jittery art-punk instrumentation, strange but welcome synth-centric additions–just works better than the others. It was enough to keep the band regularly on my mind in the six-year gap between their first album, What Life, and Joy Coming Down, which picks up right where Club Night left off–not that a band like this can ever really be predictable, but their second album packs as much of what makes this group special as it can in its forty-two minutes. Club Night alternate between sounding like a real, rumbling live rock band and a bunch of artists frantically sculpting something in a gigantic studio throughout the album. Like a good math rock record, a lot of these change-ups in Joy Coming Down happen within the same song. (Read more)
52. FACS – Wish Defense
Release date: February 7th
Record label: Trouble in Mind
Genre: Noise rock, experimental rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital
Wish Defense was the final album recorded by Steve Albini before his sudden passing last year, but its tragic circumstances do not obscure the fact that this LP is actually a rebirth and revitalization of FACS. The Chicago art rock trio welcome back original guitarist Jonathan Van Herik for the first time since their 2018 debut Negative Houses, now playing bass after founding bassist Brian Case moved over to guitar to replace him. 2023’s Still Life in Decay found FACS pushing and probing their sound to the outer margins of “rock music”, a direction seemingly necessary for the band to continue to sound inspired and forward-glancing. The reintroduction of Van Herik seems to have changed this calculus, allowing FACS to find heretofore undiscovered life in the realms of (relatively) brief bursts of power trio post-punk and noise rock. (Read more)
51. Julian Cubillos – Julian Cubillos
Release date: July 25th
Record label: Ruination
Genre: Folk-pop, psychedelic pop, indie pop, soft rock, synthpop
Formats: Cassette, digital
Julian Cubillos has contributed to records by everyone from Okkervil River and Joe Henry to Field Guides and Scree in recent years, but Julian Cubillos is the Queens musician’s first solo album in seven years. Julian Cubillos is just an absolute blast of pop music–it’s short and pretty straightforward in its instrumental choices, but Cubillos has jammed so much stuff into it nonetheless. It’s a tight collection, wrapping its ten songs up in under thirty minutes with hardly a wasted moment. Cubillos has the touch of a studio rat and auteur (Wilson, Rundgren, Prince, et cetera), and though he’s an understated frontperson, he has the material and attitude to justify a mini-whirlwind through funk, folk, psychedelia, and R&B (among other stops). (Read more)
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Part One (100-76)
Part Three (50-26)
Part Four (25-1)
Rosy Overdrive 