Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2025 (25-1)

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Here we are! Rosy Overdrive’s 25 favorite albums of 2025, revealed today along with albums 50 through 26, and coming a day after albums 51 through 100. By my count, I wrote about 343 albums on the blog this year (not counting a few posts that have yet to be published), so these are really the best of the best! Once again, thank you for reading, vote in the Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll, and stay tuned for upcoming EP and compilation lists as well as a few more Pressing Concerns.

See also:
Part One (100-76)
Part Two (75-51)
Part Three (50-26)
Playlist links (Spotify) (Tidal)

25. First Rodeo – Rode Hard and Put Away Wet

Release date: May 16th
Record label: Bud Tapes
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, folk rock
Formats: Cassette, digital

Tim Howe (Vista House) and Nathan Tucker (Cool Original) are accomplished artists in their own rights, but the 2022 album they made together as First Rodeo is some of the finest work by either of them, so I was pleased to hear about Rode Hard and Put Away Wet, the duo’s second album together. Their new label Bud Tapes boasts that First Rodeo have “moved beyond genre constraints to explore collaborative songwriting and arranging”, and there are certainly moments (like “Nothing”) that back this up, but Rode Hard and Put Away Wet isn’t a huge departure–it’s still grounded in the roots, country, and folk rock on which First Rodeo built their initial foundation. (Read more)

24. Sharp Pins – Balloon Balloon Balloon

Release date: November 21st
Record label: K/Perennial
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop, psychedelic pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Whatever drives Sharp Pins’ Kai Slater to continually dig in the mines of Byrds worship and 60s jangly guitar pop, it’s a strong motivator, as we’ve now gotten a superb LP from the project three years in a row. I’d hesitate to call Balloon Balloon Balloon the best Sharp Pins album yet, but it’s the most impressive one: twenty-one pitch-perfect mod revival tunes in under forty-five minutes, one after the other begging the question of “how is this not an unearthed garage-band wonder from sixty years ago?” (or, at least, “an unearthed early Guided by Voices recording from forty years ago?”). It’s actually quite hard to make great music while remaining this devoted to time-machine-level construction, but here’s Balloon Balloon Balloon coming through with a real murderer’s row of excellent jangle pop material. (Read more)

23. Fluung – Fluung

Release date: April 7th
Record label: Setterwind/Den Tapes
Genre: 90s indie rock, punk rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

Seattle trio Fluung have been keeping Pacific Northwest indie rock loud, electric, and catchy since the mid-2010s, but Fluung is pretty clearly the band’s best work yet. An ambitious rock record that nearly doubles their last one in length, the third Fluung album has enough time to spit out a handful of blissful, hook-laden lost 90s alt-rock classics and push further into feedback-heavy, exploratory, lumbering fuzz rock terrain, too. Like the region’s best rock bands, Fluung is a record that’s about the journey as much as anything else, and the band make sure to leave us with a memorable and complete one. Fluung aren’t the first group to stumble onto something as fulfilling as this album, but it never gets old hearing a band figure it out like this. (Read more)

22. HLLLYH – URUBURU

Release date: June 27th
Record label: Team Shi
Genre: Art rock, noise pop, power pop, 2000s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

HLLLYH is effectively a new version of a 2000s art punk group from Los Angeles called The Mae Shi, a “blog rock” band in the realms of technicolor, noisy 2000s indie rock/pop music with all sorts of bizarre stuff thrown into the mix. Three years ago, a bunch of former Mae Shi members got together to create what they envisioned as the final Mae Shi album, but instead decided that it was something new. This something, the album URUBURU by the band HLLLYH, is drawn from “unearthed half-written Mae Shi songs” as well as freshly-written material–regardless of where and when these songs came from, HLLLYH have done an excellent job of recapturing that supercharged, ornery kaleidoscopic rock and roll energy that their previous band had. (Read more)

21. Ganser – Animal Hospital

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Felte
Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

We’ve been waiting for Animal Hospital for a half-decade, and Ganser have finally returned with an album worthy of an even larger spotlight than the one they’ve steadily amassed between 2020’s Just Look at the Sky and now. The Chicago post-punks are down to a trio for the first time ever, but nonetheless, Animal Hospital sounds like the Ganser we’ve continued to get glimpses of over the past few years: sometimes nervous, sometimes angry, always dark and loud. Ganser are a boring band–I mean, in the sense that their music drills and bores intensely and incessantly into anything and anyone that happens to be nearby. The rhythm section is pounding, of course, the guitars are an assault, and the synths whir and seethe at the base of it all. (Read more)

20. Vulture Feather – It Will Be Like Now

Release date: February 14th
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)

19. Gum Parker – The Brakes

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Repeating Cloud
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop, garage rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

If you’re familiar with Galen Richmond’s previous band Lemon Pitch, then that’s roughly what his current one, Gum Parker, sounds like, but if you aren’t then they’re sneakily difficult to define. Richmond’s a 90s indie rock devote, but with Gum Parker he comes off as much more interested in simply making loud pop music than trying to directly emulate his influences. The Portland, Maine group’s debut album The Brakes is “power pop” without that genre’s defining reverence, “pop punk” without a trace of what that term traditionally evokes, “slacker rock” made by people with the perpetual nervousness. Oh, and Richmond, despite being the primary songwriter, only sings about half the songs–bassist Kate Sullivan-Jones sings lead on the rest of ’em. (Read more)

18. Guitar – We’re Headed to the Lake

Release date: October 10th
Record label: Julia’s War
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, lo-fi pop, fuzz pop, garage rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital

Three Guitar records, three reinventions. And We’re Headed to the Lake, the best one yet, ought to get Portland musician Saia Kuli the notoriety he’s been due for a hot minute. The sophomore Guitar LP ditches the lo-fi post-punk and the shoegaze-infused noise-fuzz assault of previous releases and embraces clarity and pop songwriting like never before. All of a sudden, Kuli and some familiar collaborators are making exquisite 90s-influenced indie rock that reminds me quite a bit of Guided by Voices, Pavement, and Silkworm. These elements were there in Guitar’s earlier, more chaotic material, but the clear and consistent embrace of dreamy jangle-rock and Robert Pollard-level guitar pop is still a shock to the system. (Read more)

17. Cheekface – Middle Spoon

Release date: February 25th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, post-punk, Cheekface
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

For the better part of a decade now, Los Angeles trio Cheekface have been making an incredibly specific type of music, a proprietary blend of power pop, dance-punk, and Television combined with Greg Katz’s everyman talk-singing vocals mixed up in a way scientifically guaranteed to garner Cake comparisons. The orations of Katz, a state-of-the-union collection of one-liners and fake-outs from somebody who has incomplete knowledge of every subject, have always been the immediate draw, but the band behind him and their mastery of “groove” have been an increasingly potent weapon. This growth is present on the fifth Cheekface LP, Middle Spoon, featuring more big-chorus power pop slingers than ever before. You can still dance to it, of course, but somehow it’s a more cathartic hip-swaying. (Read more)

16. Bliss? – Pass Yr Pain Along

Release date: March 21st
Record label: Psychic Spice
Genre: Lo-fi power pop, garage rock, jangle punk, mod revival
Formats: Cassette, digital

The debut from a new power trio straight out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Bliss?’s Pass Yr Pain Along is a full exploration of the strains of guitar pop (“REM, power pop, and all varieties of jangly 80s college rock”) formative to the band–Josh Higdon’s vocals are incredibly Elvis Costello-reminiscent, while the band’s somewhat jangly post-Replacements pop rock and roll sounds like the Gin Blossoms as interpreted by basement punk musicians. It’s not a “punk” record per se, but it absolutely benefits from a little roughness–Higdon isn’t at all shy about putting the vocals up front, and the band are loose but clear in a way that puts the spotlight on a collection of songs that really could’ve been shipped straight from Homestead Records to your local college radio station circa 1989. (Read more)

15. Pile – Sunshine and Balance Beams

Release date: August 15th
Record label: Sooper
Genre: Noise rock, art rock, post-hardcore, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

It’s really nice to have Pile back and rocking again. Rick Maguire and company never lost me during their most experimental years, but it feels like they had to wander the wilderness a bit to get back to what they do best on Sunshine and Balance Beams. The eighth Pile LP (give or take) hits in a way that the Boston-originating noise rockers haven’t quite hit since Green and Gray, even if you can hear the spacier moments of their recent material all over the album too. Pile are up to a lot of their usual tricks throughout the album: building up, drawing back, surging forward, exploding into fiery post-hardcore finales. They sound a little more “seasoned” here, but Sunshine and Balance Beams is as fresh as can be regardless.

14. Telethon – Suburban Electric

Release date: March 6th
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)

13. Alex Orange Drink – Future 86

Release date: October 3rd
Record label: Million Stars
Genre: Power pop, punk rock, garage rock
Formats: CD, digital

In September, Alex Orange Drink (aka Alex Zarou Levine of The So So Glos) revealed plans to release five albums based on the five stages of grief (written and recorded parallel to Levine’s battle against cancer) by the end of 2025. May’s Victory Lap (#23) was tagged “denial”, and the second one, Future 86, was deemed by Levine to be a “power pop album about the bargaining stage”. Levine does a great Elvis Costello-Kinks-Clash-Ramones synthesis on this entire album, and while there’s certainly death hovering around Future 86 (in one of the best moments on the album, Levine triumphantly touts his lead in being “first one to oblivion”), the punchy power pop hooks and winking lyrics resist any sort of pigeonholing as a “cancer album”.

12. Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

Release date: May 16th
Record label: Merge
Genre: Alt-country, ambient country
Formats: LP, CD, digital

The more anthemic, immediately-gripping songs of Friendship’s 2022 triumph Love the Stranger are gone on Caveman Wakes Up, and the Philadelphia alt-country group have replaced them with more ambient, vibes-based music. I compared Love the Stranger to Lambchop, without properly appreciating the kind of range that “Lambchop-esque” would end up giving them. Perhaps the die was cast for how this album would be perceived when they released a song called “Free Association” as the lead single. Frontperson Dan Wriggins, who recently released his first book of poetry, does seem more “poetic” on Caveman Wakes Up than he’s been in the past, but he’s also quite direct in his own way. I didn’t need the press pack to infer that a breakup was involved in the composition of these songs, for instance. (Read more)

11. Liquid Mike – Hell Is an Airport

Release date: September 12th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Power pop, pop punk, alternative rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Hell Is an Airport, the third Liquid Mike album in as many years, strikes while the iron is hot: bandleader Mike Maple apparently quit his job at the USPS to focus on the Marquette, Michigan group full-time, and they’re now a well-oiled five-piece alternative rock and roll band. If a tad less grandiose than last year’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, Hell Is an Airport is the smoother and tighter album: fourteen songs of 90s-fuzz-laden, pop punk-baiting power pop in under thirty minutes. Everything on Hell Is an Airport feels like a hit, and the songs bleed and squeal into each other like Liquid Mike are running frantically from one idea to the next before the fire burns out. The urgency makes for exhilarating listening, but I don’t think there’s any act currently going that needs to worry less about their flame being extinguished than Liquid Mike. (Read more)

10. Gosh Diggity – Good Luck! Have Fun!

Release date: July 3rd
Record label: Worry
Genre: Chiptune-punk, pop punk, power pop, emo
Formats: Cassette, digital

Well, it seems like emo-chiptune-pop-punk-rock music is in good hands in 2025. Specifically, I mean music that combines big power pop hooks, rock band instrumentation, and video game-inspired synth bleating; if that sounds alright by you, it’s time to meet a trio from Chicago called Gosh Diggity, co-founded in 2018 by vocalist/guitarist/synth programmer Joe Marshall and vocalist/bassist CJ Hoglind and eventually joined by drummer Kelson Zbichorski. As one should be able to surmise for the album’s cartoon cover art, Good Luck! Have Fun! is absolutely loaded with bright colors, quick energy, and 8-bit/chiptune hooks strewn all over the place. Hoglind and Marshall are an excellent tag-team, both displaying the ability to emote like proper emo/pop-punk frontpeople and not sound absurd with the technicolor, digital symphony going on around them. (Read more)

9. Mint Mile – andwhichstray

Release date: November 28th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Alt-country-folk-rock, 90s indie rock, Crazy Horse
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Mint Mile recorded andwhichstray a couple of months after last year’s Roughrider came out with longtime friend of the band Steve Albini, less than a week before the legendary engineer’s sudden passing. A year and a half and a lifetime later, we have andwhichstray–an album, thankfully, made to stand tall in heavy circumstances. For one, this is the best that Mint Mile have ever sounded–the Crazy Horse solidification of Roughrider is sharpened further here, the band even more roaring. A clear-eyed directness is the central “thread” on andwhichstray, a feature found in everything from bandleader Tim Midyett’s lyrics to (of course) Albini’s engineering. (Read more)

8. Graham Hunt – Timeless World Forever

Release date: June 13th
Record label: Run for Cover
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, power pop, Madchester, post-punk, trip hop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

It’s like an intricate and smooth version of “slacker pop”, the Graham Hunt sound, indie rock with bits of 90s alt-pop as well as electronic and dance touches delivered in a skewed but ultimately sincere fashion. Timeless World Forever might be the most “Graham Hunt” Graham Hunt album to date, and I think that might make it the Madison musician’s best work so far. The instrumentals are bright, precise, and adventurous, Hunt’s vocals are all over the place from “burnout” to “soaring emo guy” to basically rap-singing; Hunt approached the album like a “modern pop record”, and there’s plenty of the hazy psychedelia and hip hop structure I’d associate with that kind of world here. Timeless World Forever is a lot, but (to paraphrase Hunt himself in “Spiritual Problems”) the weight of it is a gift. (Read more)

7. Ex-Vöid – In Love Again

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Tapete
Genre: Power pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

As Welsh indie rock band The Tubs gained a decent amount of notoriety over the past few years, their sibling band Ex-Vöid quietly made just-as-great records. Lan McArdle and Owen Williams (who first debuted as members of Joanna Gruesome in the 2010s) singing together is one of the greatest sounds one can hear in all of indie pop/power pop/jangle pop/et cetera, and Ex-Vöid’s sophomore album In Love Again certainly delivers on that front. Perhaps a little less punchy and more refined than 2022’s Bigger Than Before, In Love Again is as natural-feeling a guitar pop album as any of those to which its members have lent their talents. Unfortunately (but not entirely surprisingly), Ex-Vöid broke up in October, making In Love Again a strong final statement.

6. Wavers – Look What I Found

Release date: August 29th
Record label: Salinas/Musical Fanzine/Reach Around
Genre: 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, twee, fuzz pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

My favorite EP of 2024 was an under-the-radar self-titled debut from an Olympia, Washington quartet called Wavers, an impressive release that threw together emo, 90s indie rock, lo-fi indie pop, and punk in under ten minutes. The band’s Salinas-released debut album, Look What I Found, retains the sound that made Wavers sound so great, giving everyone who missed that EP the perfect second opportunity to jump on board. Wavers may not have a rabid cult following yet, but they’re already starting to look like a band that could sustain one, between the thematic call-backs and connections, large hooks, and the independent yet communal vibe that permeates everything about them. (Read more)

5. Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7th
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)

4. Mal Blum – The Villain

Release date: July 11th
Record label: Get Better
Genre: Alt-rock, fuzz rock, pop punk, slacker rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

After coming up in the late 2000s in the world of early Mountain Goats-inspired folk punk-adjacent music, Mal Blum eventually graduated to more electric indie rock with bits of pop punk and grunge-pop. They’ve always displayed flashes of brilliance, but The Villain is, for me, where they’ve finally “put it all together” and made a cohesive, potent, front-to-back classic album. It’s Blum’s first album made entirely with their “lower register after several years on testosterone”, and they’ve embraced their new voice’s ability to sell a specific kind of low-key, muttering darkness. The press release implies that The Villain isn’t entirely a break-up album, but there’s a lot of relationship ugliness in here, and the character that Blum adopts throughout the album–passively, sardonically observing one royal mess after another as if they aren’t even there at all–ends up being a very fascinating byproduct of a major personal transition. (Read more)

3. The Tubs – Cotton Crown

Release date: March 7th
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.

2. Pacing – PL*NET F*TNESS

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Asian Man
Genre: Indie pop, twee, folk-pop, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Pacing’s 2023 debut album Real Poetry… was a kitchen-sink indie pop/twee/“anti-folk” DIY affair with visible seams, and the studio-recorded PL*NET F*TNESS represents a bold step forward for the San Jose group. Pacing’s evolution on PL*NET F*TNESS goes beyond the instrumental bells and whistles–it’s just as thematically ambitious as Real Poetry…’s dissection of reality and art was, but Katie McTigue seems more comfortable drawing from personal experiences to construct these giant overarching structures this time. For all of its might and bluster, PL*NET F*TNESS features some of McTigue’s most confused and awkward writing yet. There are no answers on PL*NET F*TNESS, only Things–charismatic professional chess players, bastardized Mr. Rogers quotes, reality television, true love, half-remembered advice from the dead, tickets for events you forgot to go to. And some pretty nice guitar tones, too. (Read more)

1. Fust – Big Ugly

Release date: March 7th
Record label: Dear Life
Genre: Alt-country
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

At this point, I’m ready to declare Aaron Dowdy’s Fust 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). I’ve loved everything that this band has done thus far, but it didn’t take long before it became clear to me that Big Ugly is the band’s masterpiece. 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 record’s scenes of corner stores and cinderblock-propped-up cars 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. 

Honorable mentions:

Click here for:
Part One (100-76)
Part Two (75-51)
Part Three (50-26)

2 thoughts on “Rosy Overdrive’s Top 100 Albums of 2025 (25-1)”

  1. A staggering list of great music! Thank you so much for all the work you do and all the new music you highlight and promote. (Gosh Diggity’s album wound up in my top ten this year too and I’d never have heard of them with this blog!).

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