Rosy Overdrive’s Favorite Reissues and Compilations of 2025

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Today, we’re closing out my personal best-of-2025 picks with Rosy Overdrive’s favorite reissues, compilations, and archival releases from this year. As this list encompasses a fairly wide range of releases, it is unranked, unlike my Top Albums and Top EPs lists. This will be the last blog post before Christmas, but the blog will be back next week with at least one more Pressing Concerns and the results of the 2025 Rosy Overdrive’s Reader’s Poll (if you haven’t voted yet, you have until the weekend to do so!).

Here are links to stream this list on various services: Spotify, Tidal. To read about much more music beyond what’s on this list, check out the site directory, and if you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. Thanks again for reading.

Bunnygrunt – Action Pants (30th Anniversary)

Release date: August 8th
Record label: HHBTM/Silly Moo/Jigsaw
Genre: Power pop, indie pop, twee, pop punk, 90s indie rock, noise pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Bunnygrunt came out of St. Louis, Missouri in the early 1990s, co-led by guitarist Matt Harnish and drummer Karen Ried and with a relatively revolving door of third members. This thirtieth anniversary reissue of Action Pants, the first Bunnygrunt LP, restores the original intended tracklist for the album–bassist Renee Dullum abruptly left the band right before its release, and so the three songs she contributed to the album were just as quickly cut at the last minute. Presumably time has healed all wounds, and so now we’re finally able to take in Action Pants as it was initially intended. This is real indie rock for people who like “indie rock” and all that entailed in 1995: there are bits of twee indie pop, scrappy indie punk, and even “motorik” moments all across this album. (Read more)

Cave In – Jupiter (25th Anniversary)

Release date: January 10th
Record label: Relapse
Genre: Space rock, post-hardcore, alt-rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

At the beginning of a new century, the Massachusetts punk band Cave In pulled off a remarkable transformation, going from metalcore pioneers to heavy space rockers with their sophomore album Jupiter. The original 2000 LP is a fascinating time capsule, linked to the worlds of late 90s/early 2000s alt-rock and just as indebted to progressive rock as it was to the band’s formative metallic hardcore. I’m not sure if the contemporary demos and live versions included in this 25th anniversary reissue “reveal” anything new about these songs per se, but there’s nothing wrong with hearing new, fierce takes of classic rock (to me) songs like “Brain Candle”, “Big Riff”, and the title track.

Emery / The Western Expanse – 94-96 / The Western Expanse EP / The Western Expanse LP

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Dimensional Projects
Genre: 90s indie rock, post-hardcore, post-rock, math rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

In the mid-90s in California’s Inland Empire, four teenage musicians, inspired by punk, hardcore, and underground rock music in general, began making noisy post-hardcore under the name Emery, and the members continued as The Western Expanse as the decade drew to a close. Almost none of these recordings saw an official release during the bands’ lifespan, but bandmember Jae Rodriguez’s label Dimensional Projects finally released three records’ worth of material from these groups in 2025. Listening to the collected works of Emery and The Western Expanse is to follow along their trajectory from Dischord-worshipping punk kids to experimental, almost post-rock artists, and to hear three great records to boot. (Read more)

Fig Dish – That’s What Love Songs Often Do

Release date: August 1st
Record label: Forge Again
Genre: Alternative rock, power pop, post-grunge
Formats: Vinyl

Chicago alt-rock band Fig Dish and Forge Again Records previously worked together to release the band’s archival album Feels Like the Very First Two Times, and this year the same partnership resulted in the release of the band’s first album, 1995’s That’s What Love Songs Often Do, on vinyl for the first time. Originally released on Polydor, That’s What Love Songs Often Do is a mid-90s “alternative rock gold rush” classic, fifty minutes of “slacker” fuzzed-out power pop now available as a double LP. Admittedly, That’s What Love Songs Often Do still feels like a “CD album” to me, but this material feels fresh enough in 2025 that it needn’t be constrained to its original format. (Read more)

Grass Is Green – Yeddo (15th Anniversary)

Release date: January 17th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Noise rock, math rock, post-punk, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Boston/D.C.-area quartet Grass Is Green were one of the original Exploding in Sound-associated bands, and while the members went on to make a ton of music I enjoyed after their breakup (guitarist/vocalist Andy Chervenak in Two Inch Astronaut, guitarist Devin McKnight in Maneka, drummer Jesse Weiss in Pet Fox), I never fully went back and appreciated Grass Is Green’s three LPs. Thankfully, Exploding in Sound gave me an opportunity to correct this by reissuing their 2010 debut album, Yeddo, at the beginning of this year, and it turns out that it’s very good! I can hear the math-y pop construction of Pet Fox, the explosive punk energy of Two Inch Astronaut, and the skewed, inspired guitar work of Maneka in Yeddo, which maybe isn’t surprising, but it’s still very cool.

Headphones – Headphones (20th Anniversary)

Release date: May 23rd
Record label: Suicide Squeeze
Genre: Synthpop, synth-rock, singer-songwriter, art rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The simply-titled Headphones project and its sole self-titled album have been a particularly well-loved hidden release in David Bazan’s fascinating discography–recorded and released towards the end of his band Pedro the Lion’s initial run, Headphones found Bazan, frequent collaborator T.W. Walsh, and drummer Frank Lenz (Starflyer 59) making a unique synthesizer-and-live-drums style of music that nonetheless felt in line with the emo-y indie rock that Bazan had been pursuing with his “main” band. Remastered and re-released with two bonus tracks for its twentieth anniversary, Headphones is both wildly of its time and just too potent to be left there, the synths only sharpening and highlighting the darkness of this album. (Read more)

Heatmiser – Mic City Sons (30th Anniversary)

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Third Man
Genre: 90s indie rock, power pop, alt-rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital

The one Heatmiser album that has the juice to stand up against its co-leader’s solo albums, Mic City Sons captured two songwriters operating at the top of their game even as their time in a band together had nearly run its course. Elliott Smith had already released a handful of classic songs by 1996, and I would genuinely put the majority of his contributions to Mic City Sons (specifically the first two songs, last two songs, and “Pop in G”) up there, too. Neil Gust holds his own in awesome alt-rock/power pop numbers “Eagle Eye” and especially “Cruel Reminder”, the first Heatmiser song I ever loved and the one that’s still my favorite of theirs some days. Third Man pulled out some unreleased tracks for the 30th anniversary reissue, and while it sounds like the best songs made the album, the cutting room floor cuts are nonetheless solid late additions to the Heatmiser songbook.

Heavenly – Operation Heavenly

Release date: July 25th
Record label: Skep Wax
Genre: Twee, indie pop, pop punk, power pop
Formats: Vinyl

Cleaner, bolder, and bigger than any of their previous albums, 1996’s Operation Heavenly found British indie pop icons Heavenly creeping towards a more mainstream, Britpop-evoking sound, although the band are still very recognizable as the “Heavenly of old” among these new angles. If they’d been able to continue immediately after Operation Heavenly’s release, I suspect that we would’ve eventually come to view this album as a “transitional” one, but tragedy resulted in this very good, curious album unintentionally becoming Heavenly’s final statement for nearly thirty years. Recent developments from Heavenly after three decades of dormancy may end the “finality” of Operation Heavenly; either way, this reissue is a nice chance to appreciate the album for what it is. (Read more)

Hüsker Dü – 1985: The Miracle Year

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Numero Group
Genre: Punk rock, hardcore punk, alternative rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Zen Arcade less than a year old, New Day Rising a couple of weeks young, Flip Your Wig coming later that year, and a major label debut on the horizon. This is the backdrop for the first half of 1985: The Miracle Year, a twenty-three song set from January 30, 1985 at First Avenue in Minneapolis. All of that Minneapolis show, plus twenty other live recordings from the same year, are included in this 4-LP/2-CD Hüsker Dü live collection from Numero Group. 1985: The Miracle Year has a strong case to be the definitive single document of the canonized speed-freak punks/alt-rock godfathers/flowery pop tunesmiths at their best–and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it supplants Zen Arcade or New Day Rising, it’s a pretty solid recording of something not exactly captured by those LPs either. (Read more)

Kilkenny Cats – Hammer + Echo

Release date: September 26th
Record label: Propeller Sound Recordings
Genre: College rock, alternative rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Killkenny Cats were a key part of the Athens, Georgia alternative rock underground in the 1980s, releasing an album in 1984 and an EP in 1988 before eventually fading away sometime in the 1990s. The group (featuring half of similarly underappreciated Athens group Is/Ought Gap) were a bit “heavier” than their contemporaries, mixing classic rock guitars with their southern “college rock” and post-punk, and it all peaked with Hammer, the 1988 EP that was their final release as an active band. Hammer + Echo collects the original EP’s five songs (which still stand out today as distorted, electronic takes on college rock) plus eight “outtakes, demos, and deep cuts” from across the group’s career (“Echo”). (Read more)

Lunchbox – Evolver

Release date: April 18th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Indie pop, psychedelic pop, art rock, power pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

Evolver, inspired by co-bandleader Tim Brown’s time in Berlin a few years earlier, general dissatisfaction with the uniformity of the then-current Bay Area indie pop scene, and the technology found in the basement studio in which they were living, was something of Lunchbox’s swan song. It ended up being their last album before over a decade of radio silence after its 2002 release, turning this difficult-to-replicate statement into a tentative final one until they were ready to re-emerge years later. This self-described “lost album” is finally available again thanks to Lunchbox’s current label of Slumberland, with bonus tracks and “puzzling aural ephemera” added to boot. (Read more)

The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree (20th Anniversary)

Release date: October 17th
Record label: 4AD
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital

The Mountain Goats’ third album for 4AD Records wasn’t the first time John Darnielle took his previously lo-fi project entirely into the studio (that would be 2002’s Tallahassee), nor was it the first time the short storyteller experimented with autobiographical writing (a toe was dipped with 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed). The Sunset Tree was nonetheless a headlong leap for the indie folk project, an intense record about childhood abuse set to music more consistently polished and ornate than anything else the band had done up until that point. It’s rare for a band with this much of a “cult” status and sprawling discography to have a clear consensus “best” work, but The Sunset Tree has only become steadily more beloved over the past twenty years and countless follow-ups that expanded (or subverted, or ignored, but then came around again to) the foundation this record laid.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008-2010

Release date: February 7th
Record label: Slumberland
Genre: Noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, fuzz pop, twee
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart effectively defined an entire era of indie pop, bridging together a bunch of scenes and genres with an enthusiastic credibility that nobody else really had the right ingredients to do for four albums over about a decade. Perfect Right Now collects early singles, EPs, and compilation tracks from the Brooklyn band’s first three years; almost all of these ten songs initially came about either before or concurrently with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s beloved 2009 self-titled debut album, and, as it turns out, there was an incredibly strong companion LP of noise pop, power pop, jangle pop, twee, and fuzz rock blended together out there this whole time, just waiting for Slumberland to compile it. (Read more)

The Reds, Pinks & Purples – The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed

Release date: July 4th
Record label: Fire
Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

This is the sound of justice. The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ Glenn Donaldson has released wistful, sad, jangly indie pop at an overwhelming pace for most of the 2020s, putting out more music than labels like Tough Love and Slumberland could reasonably be expected to press to vinyl. The San Francisco institution signed with Fire Records this year, and the first Reds, Pink & Purples release on their new home is an LP that collects fourteen songs from Donaldson’s digital-only self-released albums, EPs, and singles to give them a first-ever physical release. Some of my favorite Reds, Pinks & Purples songs are on here (“My Toxic Friend”, “There Must Be a Pill for This”, “Richard in the Age of the Corporation”), and The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed also shines a light on songs I hadn’t appreciated enough beforehand like “Slow Torture of an Hourly Wage” and “Marty As a Youth”.

Salem 66 – SALT

Release date: June 6th
Record label: Don Giovanni
Genre: Post-punk, college rock, jangle pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

Don Giovanni made 1980s/early 90s Boston group Salem 66’s entire discography available digitally earlier this year, as well as putting together a career-spanning compilation called SALT as an accessible entry point. Salem 66 are perhaps most easily defined as “college rock”–hardly “power pop”, “jangly” enough to fit in with early R.E.M., and their ilk, marked by a guitar-led psychedelic sound, fluent in the heavier strains of indie rock but, more than anything else, “doing their own thing”. SALT is enough to make it clear that Judy Grunwald and Beth Kaplan (the band’s two songwriters and only consistent members) were two lost indie rock giants, and it’s much more than enough to make one wonder what took so long for something like this to come together in the first place. (Read more)

Ben Seretan – Youth Pastoral (5th Anniversary)

Release date: April 11th
Record label: Tiny Engines
Genre: Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Formats: Vinyl, digital

It’s true: Rosy Overdrive is now old enough that albums which appeared on the blog’s year-end lists in their initial form are now showing up here with anniversary reissues. Ben Seretan originally put out Youth Pastoral on Whatever’s Clever in 2020, and now his current label Tiny Engines (who also put out his album Allora last year) have reissued the out-of-print LP and dredged up some demos as digital bonus tracks, too. Emotional, folk-y indie rock is such a crapshoot, but Youth Pastoral was the one that fully sold me on Seretan’s whole deal; stuff like “Am I Doing Right By You?” and “1 Of” are bursting with life thanks to Seretan and key collaborators like Nico Hedley and Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel). 

Silkworm – Developer

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: 90s indie rock, Silkworm
Formats: Vinyl, CD (included with LP)

Every Silkworm album is a “cult favorite”, but the background on their 1997 album Developer makes it perhaps the über “cult” Silkworm album–it was their second and final album for Matador Records, the band’s final chance to parlay critical/indie rock underground buzz into larger platforms and sizeable followings. They made Developer instead, a cold and insular album that stands among the band’s best statements and predictably went nowhere in terms of “Alternative Nation” success. Now a two-LP set with a handful of bonus tracks thanks to Comedy Minus One twenty-five years later, Developer is still right there for you to figure out if you haven’t yet. (Read more)

So-Do – Studio Works ‘83-’85

Release date: February 28th
Record label: Time Capsule
Genre: Post-punk, dub, art punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

More dubby post-punk from the 1980s being unearthed is always welcome (see also The Lo Yo Yo among the honorable mentions for this list), and my favorite take on it this year came from So-Do, a quartet from “small town” Japan who put out two singles and an EP before fading away towards the end of the decade. British reissue label Time Capsule have collected those three releases in a single compilation for the first time as Studio Works ‘83-’85; according to the label, the quartet’s striking sound came from a collision between singer, songwriter, guitarist, and saxophonist Hideshi Akuta and guitarist Akira Tsukada, the owner of local venue/bar Buddha who introduced dub and post-punk to his collaborators. Along with bassist Yoshifumi Ito, drummer Kimihiro Takemae, and a handful of guest musicians, So-Do fully embrace the spacey, rhythmic sides of post-punk on strange, captivating highlights like “Natural Wave”, “Get Away”, and “Hashiru”.

Souled American – Rise Above It: A Souled American Anthology

Release date: February 21st
Record label: Omnivore
Genre: Alt-country, country rock, 90s indie rock, folk rock
Formats: CD, digital

Last year, the cult Chicago alt-country band Souled American made their entire long-out-of-print and digitally-unavailable discography purchasable and streamable on Bandcamp; this development alone probably should’ve been enough to put them on this list in 2024, but thankfully the Souled American revival has continued (and expanded into the realm of physical media) this year with Rise Above It: A Souled American Anthology. The group mastered country rock and got weirder and weirder over the course of six albums from 1988 to 1996 (many of which I’m not as familiar with as I’d like to be), and Omnivore Recordings has done their best to condense this journey into a twenty-song, seventy-six minute career-spanning CD. Rise Above It seems to try to capture the more straightforward side of Souled American, but it’s not hard to recognize them as country weirdos in the makeup of these songs after one spends a bit of time with them.

The Stick Figures – Disturbance

Release date: June 1st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Post-punk, dance punk, art punk, college rock
Formats: CD, digital

An early-adopter post-punk band from the underheralded music scene of late-70s Tampa, Florida, the five-piece “collective” The Stick Figures only ever released one EP (a 1981 self-titled one) before an expanded version of it featuring a full album’s worth of unreleased recordings (2021’s Archeology) surfaced forty years later. As it turns out, The Stick Figures also had a second album’s worth of entirely unreleased material, chronicling their move from Tampa to New York and subsequent dissolution. Imminent demise aside, the resulting collection Disturbance depicts a band hell-bent on pushing forward until their end. (Read more)

Unrest – Perfect Teeth (30th Anniversary)

Release date: March 28th
Record label: 4AD
Genre: 90s indie rock, indie pop, post-rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

After crash-landing in the 1980s as chaotic experimentalist cassette-slingers, Washington, D.C. indie rockers and Teenbeat Records lynchpins Unrest finished their career by releasing two polished, enthralling pop albums. The second of those two albums, 1993’s Perfect Teeth, was both their 4AD Records debut and their final (non-compilation) LP, and the trio undoubtedly went out on a high note. The “hits” stand up to any indie pop scene anywhere– “Make Out Club” is quite possibly the greatest pop song to come out of the 1990s American indie rock underground, and “Cath Carroll” isn’t far behind–but the excellent space-occupation of “Angel I’ll Walk You Home”, “Breather X.O.X.O.”, and “Soon It Is Going to Rain” are arguably even more important in making Perfect Teeth an unforgettable finale. 

U.S. Maple – Long Hair in Three Stages (30th Anniversary)

Release date: June 13th
Record label: Skin Graft
Genre: Experimental rock, noise rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

The legendary Chicago experimental rock group U.S. Maple’s first album turned thirty this year, and so their label Skin Graft re-released it on vinyl. Cool! Long Hair in Three Stages really does deserve its reputation as a key piece of weird underground rock music–and it does rock, in a rickety post-punk way, sure, but it does nonetheless. The choppiness that would get them Captain Beefheart comparisons is already here, but not overwhelming yet; it’s more like a Pere Ubu record if they’d come up a decade or so after they actually did. Al Johnson’s voice, an intense, hissing whisper, gets the full force of Mark Shippy and Todd Rittmann’s guitars and Pat Samson’s drums behind it; U.S. Maple would only get stranger from here.

Volcano – Volcano

Release date: April 17th
Record label: Don Giovanni/Skunk
Genre: Psychedelic rock, alt-rock, country rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

An unlikely supergroup, Volcano was the result of the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood linking up with none other than two architects of Sublime (Bud Gaugh and Miguel Happoldt), plus bassist Jon Poutney. Their sole album saw a limited CD release in 2004 shortly before the project fizzled out; this year, Don Giovanni put it out on vinyl and released a CD version featuring eight home-recorded demos. Volcano is a surprisingly strong collection of laid-back Meat Puppets-esque psychedelic alt-rock; the reggae influence is used sparingly, but it’s there enough in Gaugh’s drumming. Volcano were hardly the only notable alt-rock collaboration to form and dissolve around this time period, but the album they made together is a strong argument that they ought to be remembered as one of the most successful partnerships of the era.

Whelpwisher – Greatest Hits

Release date: November 7th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, power pop, fuzz rock
Formats: CD, digital

In addition to his work in bands like Babe Report, Big Big Bison, Geronimo!, and The Gunshy, Chicago indie rock musician Ben Grigg has spent the past ten years making lo-fi, poppy indie rock under the name Whelpwisher. To celebrate a decade of Whelpwisher, Grigg has pulled from the project’s dozen-plus digital-only EPs and albums to create a twenty-four-song, fifty-minute CD called Greatest Hits that is the first-ever physical Whelpwisher release. I’ve kept up with Whelpwisher since around 2020, which means several of my favorite songs of Grigg’s are represented here (“Same Mistakes”, “Deaf to False Metal”, “Kneel Young”), but the compilation also introduces material from across the Whelpwisher oeuvre to me, from the seven-minute towering “King of Quitters” to the lo-fi fuzz of “Honorary Drugs” to “There Go the Warm Jets”, which sounds like how you’d hope it does.

Honorable mentions:

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