Are you ready? Well, whether you are or not, we’re starting off 2026 in Pressing Concerns today. We’ve got four albums coming out tomorrow, January 9th: new LPs from The Fragiles, Winged Wheel, Six Going on Seven, and Clémentine March. “With a bang”, indeed. The actual first blog post of 2026 was the December 2025 playlist, which went up on Monday, so check that one out too if you missed it.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
The Fragiles – Sing the Heat of the Sun
Release date: January 9th Record label: Living Lost Genre: Jangle pop, lo-fi indie rock, psychedelic pop, dream pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Broken Pendulum
Philadelphia musician David Settle ruled the realms of lo-fi indie rock in 2020 and 2021, putting out a slew of albums via his aliases The Fragiles, Big Heet, and Psychic Flowers (on his own Living Lost label) before they all went silent for the past couple of years. It’s not like Settle hasn’t been busy in the meantime–he’s playing bass for the great 2nd Grade, and I believe he’s been raising a kid–but his bands have been missed as of late, so it’s nice to start off 2026 with the first album from The Fragiles in five years. While Big Heet deals in noisy post-punk and Psychic Flowers in shit-fi fuzz pop, The Fragiles has always been where Settle explores dreamier, almost psychedelic indie-gaze, and Sing the Heat of the Sun offers a strong collection of such material.
With a capable band behind him (Remember Sports/Spring Onion’s Catherine Dwyer on bass, Gavin Perez-Canto of DRILL on drums, and Ylayali’s Francis Lyons on occasional synth), Settle is able to give the songs of Sing the Heat of the Sun delicate but forceful readings. There are a handful of instant-classic guitar pop songs on here (the jangly, Flying Nun-ish opening track “Broken Pendulum” and the bouncy, scuzzy lo-fi pop of “Dig for Now” both fit), and The Fragiles hold together in the greyer, more challenging material that’s the heart of the record, too. On the one hand, you’ve got the quiet ballads of “River’s Roll” and “Drugstore Winner”, and on the other, a wall-of-sound shoegaze influence on the likes of “Unglued”–but songs like the thrilling fuzz-noise-pop “Hell Or” and the slowcore crescendo of “Fall into Gray” demonstrate that it isn’t an “either/or” proposition. Whether Sing the Heat of the Sun marks the return of David Settle to his trio of projects or if it’s just a one-off for now, it’s a strong reminder how good this guy is in this particular sandbox. (Bandcamp link)
Winged Wheel – Desert So Green
Release date: January 9th Record label: 12XU Genre: Post-rock, psychedelia, post-punk, art rock Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Speed Table
The “creatively and geographically scattered” indie rock supergroup Winged Wheel emerged in 2022 as a quartet with their remote-created first album and 12XU debut, No Island, and the album’s success led to an expanded lineup, in-person live shows and recording sessions, and a sophomore album called Big Hotel in 2024. After touring in support of that album last year, the now-sextet, which consists of Matchess and Circuit des Yeux’s Whitney Johnson, Spray Paint’s Cory Plump, Powers/Rolin Duo’s Matthew J. Rolin, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, Water Damage’s Lonnie Slack, and Idle Ray/Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Fred Thomas, began recording Desert So Green in Chicago. The resultant record is an overwhelming, beautiful, “collective” art rock album, checking the “post-rock”, “post-punk”, and “psychedelia” boxes at different intervals.
Desert So Green opens with what I’d call a “vibe”; specifically, a six-minute shimmering post-rock instrumental deemed “Canvas 11”. Winged Wheel flex their “far-reaching” muscles soon after that, though, as the empty-space and violin-aided “Canvas 2” imagines a deconstructed post-rock Mekons, and the pummeling, ethereal “Speed Table” kind of feels like their take on mid-period Swans. An album that can regularly veer into out-there moments like the collage of “Canvas 8” can’t really “settle in” to anything, but there’s a comfort to Winged Wheel’s dream-psych rhythm-forward moments like “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” and “Bird Spells” (and “I See Poseurs Every Day” is damn near a pop song made out of the stuff). Desert So Green may be Winged Wheel’s best work yet (time will tell and whatnot), but I can already confidently say that it sounds like a band with infinite possibilities between their members continuing the work of pursuing new ones. (Bandcamp link)
Six Going on Seven – Human Tears
Release date: January 9th Record label: Spartan Genre: Art rock, new wave, synthpop, sophisti-pop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Jack Jones
Six Going on Seven emerged in the mid-1990s from Boston’s post-hardcore/emo underground, playing shows with bands like Braid, The Promise Ring, and Elliott and putting out music on Hydra Head and Doghouse Records. When they reunited in 2024 after being split up for over twenty years, they signed with Spartan Records, who’ve recently worked with notable 90s emo bands like Boys Life, Knapsack, and The Van Veldt. So, when I pressed play on their fourth LP and first since 2021, Human Tears, I was of course expecting it to sound like Peter Gabriel. Kidding! But that’s indeed what comes to mind listening to “Jack Jones”, the first non-intro song on Human Tears.
The trio may not be the first emo-originating band to draw inspiration from 80s art rock (it is, in effect, trading in one “emotional” genre of music for another), but, to be clear, we’re talking about a full-on immersion in the decade and its array of new wave, synthpop, prog-pop, sophisti-pop, and so on and so forth. One thing that Six Going on Seven do leave behind in the 1980s is excess; this is a more streamlined take on this kind of music, with a few songs wrapping things up in around two minutes and even the longer ones feeling like they go on for only as long as they need to. That doesn’t stop Human Tears from being just as fun and awe-inspiring as the music Six Going on Seven have chosen to evoke, however. (Bandcamp link)
Clémentine March – Powder Keg
Release date: January 9th Record label: PRAH Genre: Art pop, chamber pop, indie pop, post-punk, psychedelic pop, synthpop Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Upheaval
The French-British (currently London-based) musician Clémentine March began putting out records of Brazil-influenced orchestral art pop in the late 2010s, releasing two EPs and two LPs from 2017 to 2023. Powder Keg is March’s third solo album, and it features contributions from an impressive array of musicians she’s connected with touring and recording across Europe (Naima Bock, Sophie Jamieson, Katy J Pearson, Alabaster DePlume, Dana Gavanski, and members of Tapir!). Nonetheless, Powder Keg lands on the more laid-back side of French (or, I guess, part-French) indie pop; the album’s core trio of March, bassist Ollie Chapman, and drummer Sophie Lowe leisurely wander through a collection of pop songs where strings and horns jump in and out as the feeling strikes. Of course, they cover quite a bit of ground through their meandering; the sprawling, six-minute dream pop of opening track “After the Solstice” switches gears into the perfunctory horn-tinged indie pop of “Lixo Sentimental”, and then “Upheaval” surprisingly moves into electric alt-rock. “Fireworks”, “Symtomatique”, and “Lucie” all prove that March can make groovy post-punk pop gems, but Powder Keg is too ambitious to be content to ride the rhythms for all too long. Regardless of where Powder Keg ends up on any of its dozen tracks, though, deft pop touches are never too far away. (Bandcamp link)
We’re slowly easing into 2026; last week, we crammed threedifferentPressing Concerns in before the New Year and revealed the results of the Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll. The December 2025 playlist is a bit of a grab-bag, pulling stuff from all over last year and some odds and ends, too. There won’t be a Tuesday post this week; we’re probably looking at two a week for at least part of January.
Laika Songs, The Michael Character, and Moviola all have two songs on this playlist.
Here is where you can listen to the playlist on various streaming services: Spotify, Tidal (I added a couple of extra songs to the streaming versions this time, because this month was unusually heavy for non-streaming picks). 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.
“Little Act”, Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls From Little Act (2025, Rock for Sale)
Nico Hedley and Léna Bartels launched a series called “Splits for Sale” last year, in which their record label Rock for Sale “pair[s] artists who have previously never worked together and invite[s] them to collaborate”. The second Splits for Sale EP links together two New York City folk acts: The Bird Calls, aka the solo project of Sam Sodomsky, and Izzy Oram Brown, a Brooklyn guitarist and songwriter who also played on Bartels’ most recent solo album. Little Act’s title track, in which Brown and Sodomsky share lead vocals, is a late entry for the best pop song of 2025: it’s the best of “lo-fi, drum machine indie pop” and “folk rock” all in one. Read more about Little Act here.
“Days of the Atom Bomb”, Endless Mike and the Beagle Club From The Forest Is the Trees (2025, Sidewalk Chalk)
Endless Mike and the Beagle Club are new to me, but I feel like I immediately understood the Johnstown, Pennsylvania act’s whole deal after just one listen to their latest album, The Forest Is the Trees. Endless Mike, aka Mike Miller, is a Rust Belt troubadour making alt-country, cowpunk, folk rock, “Americana”, “heartland rock” and touring the underground circuit for two decades. The Forest Is the Trees has a lot to like on it, but it boldly starts with its best song, a bottle rocket cowpunk/country punk rocker called “Days of the Atomic Bomb” that burns brighter than anything on the LP. Read more about The Forest Is the Trees here.
“Mario Party Crashout!”, Addicus From A Story About… (2025, Acid Punk)
Over ten scrappy indie-pop-punk songs, Addicus made their case as a notable name in the Upper Peninsula music scene with their 2024 self-titled debut album. The trio didn’t wait long to return, as we were given a sophomore Addicus album, A Story About…, a year and change later. It’s a shorter record than Addicus, but it’s their strongest one yet. Their bread and butter is still three-to-four-chord wreckers of punk-pop songs: see “Mario Party Crashout!”, a shining example of the form hidden in A Story About…’s second half. Read more about A Story About… here.
“Over & Over”, Summer Blue From Summer Blue (2025, New Morality Zine)
I associate Chicago label New Morality Zine with a certain muscular kind of music sitting at the intersection of hardcore punk, alt-rock, and shoegaze, but recent signee Summer Blue don’t quite fit the mold. The San Jose-based quartet (“Victoria, Matthew, Eric, and Syed”) call themselves a power pop band and reference groups like The Sundays and Velocity Girl as inspiration for their self-titled debut EP. I’m happy to report that Summer Blue nails this sort of wistful but euphoric dreamy 90s power pop sound, and the bursting-with-hooks “Over & Over” is one of the best pop songs I’ve heard in recent memory.
“A Little a Lot”, Dan Darrah From Vacationland (2025, Sunday Drive)
Toronto’s Dan Darrah ended 2025 by quietly dropping his second album of the year, Vacationland; unlike his lastcouple of LPs, this one is digital-only, and it doesn’t appear that his regular backing band The Rain play on this one. Maybe Vacationland is subsequently supposed to be a more casual or lower-stakes Darrah record, but there isn’t a drop-off in quality compared to his last few albums here. Vacationland is pretty laid-back and meandering as a whole, but the drum-machine-propelled opening track “A Little a Lot” is a lively exception. Read more about Vacationland here.
“Friendly Competition”, Constant Greetings From Good Sports (2025, Retriever)
I called New Brunswick indie rock group Constant Greetings’ sophomore album an “intriguing collection of somewhat hazy, somewhat dark, yet fairly catchy 90s-indebted indie rock” at the time, and I’m pleased to report that Good Sports, their third LP, lives up to and even expands upon that record’s foundation. Constant Greetings favor a relatively unadorned setup, but their songs are sneakily quite layered, and there’s a throughline from more garage-y indie-punk-rock to hook-y, melodic, punched-up pop rock like “Friendly Competition”, maybe the best song on the album. Read more about Good Sports here.
“Anxiety”, The Max Levine Ensemble From Sad State (2025)
Before his work in Rosy Overdrive fixtures Bad Moves and Dim Wizard, Washington, D.C. musician David Combs led the pop punk trio The Max Levine Ensemble alongside bassist Ben Epstein and drummer Nick Popovici in the early 2000s (a bygone era in which figures like “Plan-It-X Records” and “Ben Weasel” carried now-unthinkable weight). The first Max Levine Ensemble record in ten years isn’t “new music”, per se, but it’s three newly-recorded versions of previously-unreleased Max Levine Ensemble songs from the 2010s put to tape as an acknowledgement of the group’s 25th anniversary. The Ensemble is also playing a show with The Ergs as part of the anniversary commemoration, which saves me the trouble of making up a more tenuous excuse to reference The Ergs as a band to whose fans these songs will also appeal.
“Break It Down Again”, Sting Pain Index From The Revolution Somewhere Else (2025)
Sting Pain Index are a self-proclaimed “punk rock supergroup”, and I suppose that their newest EP, The Revolution Somewhere Else, is punk rock–sometimes of a noisy, abrasive, and “post-” variety, and sometimes not like that at all. The Revolution Somewhere Else ends with a shockingly faithful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Break It Down Again” (if the title of the EP sounded familiar but unplaceable to you–it’s a paraphrased lyric from this one). Sting Pain Index clearly saw something in this also-ran pop song that speaks to their agitated underground Americana, and its inclusion on The Revolution Somewhere Else is, ironically, successful at building this connection up. Read more about The Revolution Somewhere Else here.
“Optimism Shame”, Laika Songs From I Can Feel an Ending (2025, Two Worlds/Galaxy Train)
I Can Feel an Ending, Laika Songs’ second album in as many years, is an incredibly comfortable one: it’s just as large as 2024’s Slowly Spiraling Towards the Lightis and has at least as many great pop moments, but it’s even less concerned with presenting them punctually or linearly. So many of the most immediate tracks on I Can Feel an Ending come in its second half, including the gentle power pop charms of “Optimism Shame”, which is my favorite song on the LP at this exact moment. Read more about I Can Feel an Ending here.
“Telling You Nothing”, Moviola From Glen Echo Autoharp (1998, Spirit of Orr)
I took a trip over twenty-five years back to listen to an early album by the long-running Columbus, Ohio alt-country group Moviola, whose most recent album, Earthbound, appeared on this blog in 2025. Glen Echo Autoharp is a distorted, fuzzy example of Midwestern 90s indie rock that has legitimate twang in some places and sounds more like Guided by Voices, Sebadoh and the like in others. “Telling You Nothing”, the album’s opening track, is the “hit” of Glen Echo Autoharp if it has such a thing; it’s a beautiful, earnest pop rock ballad run through a substantial number of filters in between inception and appearance on-record.
“Sydd”, Pelted From Effort (2025, Broken Cycle)
One of the countless bands currently making music that features some degree of shoegaze and alt-country influence in Philadelphia is called Pelted (they call it “horse rock”), but there’s just something to their debut EP Effort that kept me returning to it as 2025 wound to a close. I think the third track, “Sydd”, is my favorite. It’s (I believe) the only song that band co-leader Dan Hanna sings; the vocals remind me a lot of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, and the lyrics–an offbeat character study of the titular unsavory figure–enhance the comparison in my mind. Read more about Effort here.
“Old Friend”, Erie Choir From Golden Reviser (2025, Potluck Foundation)
Eric Roehrig is a North Carolina indie rock veteran, probably most well-known as one of the two singer-guitarists in the late 90s/early 00s Saddle Creek group Sorry About Dresden (alongside the late Matt Oberst). Roehrig’s quasi-solo project Erie Choir has existed for nearly as long, though, and the group returned last year with an album called Golden Reviser (featuring contributions from ex-Sorry About Dresden members and other Saddle Creek-associated acts). It’s a solid record of relaxed folk rock and indie pop, but the rest of Golden Reviser didn’t prepare me for how much I ended up loving its closing track, “Old Friend”. It’s a really captivating roots/country rock finale, something that owes more to names like Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett than Bright Eyes (but with a little bit of Saddle Creek edge to it, still, sure).
“Quit with Suzy (75K)”, Humbug From Open Season (2025)
Pasadena’s Humbug bill themselves as a “new power pop band”, but they don’t really slot into the jangly, wistful version of the genre happening upstate in San Francisco, nor are they necessarily really loud Weezer-worshipping alt-rockers, either. On Open Season, Humbug really sound like a band out of time, landing closer than anything to offbeat, catchy turn-of-the-century indie rock; not really 2000s “post-punk revival”, aware of XTC and The Beach Boys but not directly imitating them. This adds some dimension to Open Season–for instance, how many other bands would write about middle-class angst so directly and melodically as “Quit with Suzy (75K)”? Read more about Open Season here.
“Scared to Dance”, Hermetic Delight From Vagabond Melodies (2025, Facultative/October Tone)
The Turkish/French trio Hermetic Delight (currently based in Strasbourg) checked in last year with Vagabond Melodies, which is I believe their third LP since 2012. It’s a solid album sitting at the corner of “art pop” and “indie rock”, exploring the realms of synthpop, post-punk, and dream pop over its nine songs. My favorite song on Vagabond Melodies is a six-minute wrecking ball of a dance-pop song called (of course) “Scared to Dance”; the trio keep the energy steady, slick, and undeniable for the entirety of the track.
“Start Making Sense”, The Kyle Sowashes From Start Making Sense (2025, Anyway)
Kyle Sowash is a Columbus, Ohio indie rock institution who’s been stubbornly leading his eponymous band in gruff, punk-adjacent underground rock music for coming up on twenty years now. Start Making Sense, the Kyle Sowashes’ first LP in six years, is thirteen songs of The Kyle Sowashes experience, which can be described in loose genre-based terms (pop punk, “orgcore”, 90s-style indie garage rock) or more basic, kind-of-backhanded-sounding descriptors (“no-frills”, “workmanlike”, “everyman”, “barebones”). The title track is my favorite one; its beleaguered chorus feels like the big cathartic moment towards which it feels like the entire record was building up. Read more about Start Making Sense here.
“Mind Like a Tool”, Caution From Peripheral Vision (2025, Dust’s Delight)
I’ve written about Birmingham, Alabama musician Cash Langdon’s solo records before, but this is the first time I’ve touched on his duo with Nora Button, Caution. Following an EP in 2021 and an album in 2022 on the sorely-missed Born Yesterday Records, Button and Langdon have closed 2025 out with a new one called Peripheral Vision. It’s an impressive collection of fuzzy, distorted pop music, too sleazy and scuzzy for “dream pop” but too casual for “shoegaze”. Maybe just queue up “Mind Like a Tool”, the enthralling, somewhat hypnotic opening track, to get an idea of what Caution are up to here.
“The Impermanent Coffee Can”, The Michael Character From The Impermanent Coffee Can (2025)
On their eighteenth LP, The Impermanent Coffee Can, the vibrant, sweeping Michael Character sound is used to tackle the “divorce album”, with bandleader James Ikeda taking us to some understandably difficult places in his writing. The prolific Boston project’s rollicking folk rock/folk punk/somewhat jittery singer-songwriter material remains intact for this journey, but Ikeda and his collaborators veer away from it in the right places, too. The title track is the most beautiful song on the album, an unflinching and subtle account of what it’s like to have permanency blink out in front of one’s self along with all its taken-for-granted mundanity. Read more about The Impermanent Coffee Can here.
“Choices”, Fust & Merce Lemon From Cup of Loneliness / Choices (2025, Trouble Chair)
I’m not sure if you heard, but North Carolina alt-country stalwarts Fust made the best album of 2025, according to the influential music blog Rosy Overdrive. The Durham group spent some time on the road this year with similarly-minded Pittsburgh folk rock musician Merce Lemon, and they commemorated their time together by recording and releasing a 7” of George Jones covers. Fust take the lead on “Choices”, although Lemon does provide backing vocals–there’s not a whole lot for me to say about this cover other than it’s very well-done and shows how seamlessly the traditional side of country is sewn into Fust’s sound (which, of course, is more so than a lot of their peers, but it’s easy to take it for granted with how recognizable Aaron Dowdy and his band have made their “style” over three albums).
“Lace”, Boreen From Heartbreak Hill (2025, Bud Tapes)
The Portland, Oregon project Boreen had an impressive ten-year history leading up to Heartbreak Hill, their fifth and final album. I don’t know why bandleader Morgan O’Sullivan decided to end Boreen now, but I do know that the fourteen-song, fifty-minute Heartbreak Hill is an impressive send-off of adventurous and wide-ranging indie rock, folk, and pop music. There are lovely, sweet indie/jangle/power pop songs hidden in the midst of this tape, if you’re a fan of the diamond-in-the-rough experience; my favorite song on the album, “Lace”, is a second-half gem of the sort. Read more about Heartbreak Hill here.
“Go Home”, Space Jaguar From Every Room Is an Escape Room (2025, Subjangle)
Earlier in 2025, Ireland’s Mark Grassick debuted his new power pop project Space Jaguar with its debut album, If You Play Expect to Pay, which nailed the 90s-inspired jangly-power pop sweet spot. We didn’t have to wait too long for the second Space Jaguar record, thankfully, as Grassnick (once again with The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness and Dropkick’s Andrew Taylor on production) put out a surprise seven-song EP called Every Room Is an Escape Room in the middle of December. Every Room Is an Escape Room is every bit as capable at throwing out perfect power pop as its predecessor was; see “Go Home”, perhaps my favorite Space Jaguar song yet. Read more about Every Room Is and Escape Room here.
“Pleasant Obstacle”, Vulture Feather From Craving and Aversion (2025, Felte)
The vocals don’t kick in on Vulture Feather’s latest EP, Craving and Aversion, until nearly three minutes into the first track. Colin McCann, Brian Gossman, and Eric Fiscus take their time in setting up “Pleasant Obstacle”, giving the opening instrumental a lackadaisical undercurrent that nonetheless oddly retains a bit of the power trio’s trademark quiet intensity. At around the two-minute-thirty mark, though, Vulture Feather get serious, lock into a groove, and McCann’s intonation begins not long afterwards. They’ve done this for four records since June 2023, and it hasn’t gotten old a bit. Read more about Craving and Aversion here.
“Last Night on Planet Earth”, Pigeon Pit From Leash Aggression (2025, Ernest Jenning)
Last January, Olympia folk punk group Pigeon Pit released Crazy Arms, a triumphant culmination of all that Lomes Oleander and her band had been working towards that was one of my favorite albums of 2025. Leash Aggression, surprise-released in November and featuring a more stripped-down sound, seems designed to comparatively fly under the radar, but these ten songs are ten more examples of Oleander’s songwriting strengths and Pigeon Pit’s exuberant skills (even in a more barebones package, sure). “Last Night on Planet Earth” kicks off Leash Aggression with a pretty undeniable, infectious folk punk anthem–it may be a more subdued experience than Crazy Arms overall, but that’s a very relative descriptor.
“Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane”, Baby Grand From Check’er Lee (2025, PorchDog)
The Virginia-originating sibling folk duo Baby Grand (Haley and Colby Ellis) welcome drummer Cody Wade to the group for their fourth album, Check’er Lee, and the three of them have put together a charming fourteen-song collection of laid-back but clever banjo-led folk-country music. Haley, who wrote and sings the majority of Check’er Lee, gives us a folk-y whirlwind to start the album with “Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane” (first lines: “I bought a coffee for an arm and a leg / And now I’m alright because I don’t have the left”). Read more about Check’er Lee here.
“Miss Sweet Missives”, Friends of Cesar Romero From Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth (2025, Fluorescent Brown/Doomed Babe)
One-man South Dakota power pop machine J. Waylon Porcupine has stayed busy into the close of 2025, putting out a solid three-song EP called Cars, Guitars, Girls, but the selection for this playlist comes from an earlier Friends of Cesar Romero release: Spider Dreamer Sweet Tooth, which came out back in April. I overlooked it at the time, but there’s some classic garage-power-punk-pop Friends of Cesar Romero material on this record, not the least of which is the sub-two-minute piano-banging “Miss Sweet Missives”.
“Butchery”, Wave Generators From Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One (2025, Fused Arrow)
I stole Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One from Zachary Lipez’s year-end list, which I always make a point to inspect sometime in late December or early January. Here we have a new punk-rap duo from New York comprised of Nosaj New Kingdom and Height Keech; they put out an album in 2024 called After the End, and they’re on their sophomore one already. There are a lot of these quick really crunchy, punk-pummeled rap tracks on Run Away with a Wild and a Rare One (“Bonjour” and “Beyond Beyond” are a couple other good ones), but the sub-two-minute rush of “Butchery” is probably my favorite here.
“Take It to the Night”, Rocket Bureau From Party Armz (2025)
Rocket Bureau is a band from Madison, Wisconsin, although the recorded version of Rocket Bureau is the one-man project of one Kyle Urban. The latest Rocket Bureau record is a five-song EP recorded entirely on an “analog tape machine from the early 1970s” called Party Armz, and it is a seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll. My favorite song on the EP is the closing track, “Take It to the Night”, which sends us out with surging, windows-down retro summertime power pop. Read more about Party Armz here.
“50s Song”, Dorothy From Sea Songs (2025, Fire Talk/Angel Tapes)
Dorothy are a new trio from London whose members are all pretty accomplished artists running the gamut from folk to ambient to slowcore to electronic music; Jude Woodhead, Marco Pini, and Francesca Brierley do their best to make a coherent five-song pop EP out of that spectrum. I suppose you could loosely call Sea Songs “dream pop”, although it’s on the more scattershot side of Dreamland, if that. The glitzy, (relatively) maximalist retro-pop of “50s Song” is a highlight, evoking acts like Flotation Toy Warning in its distorted but intense pursuit of pop music. Read more about Sea Songs here.
“Coast”, Snocaps From Snocaps (2025, Anti-)
Rosy Overdrive readers really liked the Snocaps album, ranking it in their collective top five; while it wasn’t quite that high up for me, I still did enjoy Katie Crutchfield’s long-overdue return to making music with her sister, Alison (Swearin’), as well as a return to making actual rock music again instead of perfectly fine Americana. Snocaps doesn’t meet the impossibly high bar of P.S. Eliot and those early Waxahatchee albums, but as a casual collaboration between two talented siblings (and also MJ Lenderman is there); well, I’d rather it exist than not exist, I can say that. Snocaps peaks with its opening song, “Coast”; it has the somehow-dramatic-but-barebones flourishes of the best Crutchfield material (like Swearin’’s “Big Change”, another classic opening track), but it’s a more low-key take on that kind of thing.
“That Was Yesterday”, Silk Daisys From Silk Daisys (2025)
Silk Daisys are the Atlanta-based duo of Karla Jean Davis and James Abercrombie, who made the jump from “occasional Soundcloud project” to “full-fledged rock band” in 2025 with their self-titled debut album. Pick your favorite dream pop/shoegaze-straddling band to compare them to–Silk Daisys is a nice, even-keeled survey of a wide array of fuzzed-out, poppy indie rock. Some of Silk Daisys is effectively just straight-up jangle/power pop, including “That Was Yesterday”, a gorgeous jangly guitar pop song hidden away in the second half of the album. Read more about Silk Daisys here.
“One Weird Trick”, DANA From Clean Living (2025, Budget Living)
The Columbus group DANA appeared on a few year-end lists by people whose taste I respect; maybe they were already on my list to check out, maybe not, but I think it was settled when I saw that they’re a post-punk/“egg punk”/self-described “avant-garage” group from Ohio. Apparently they’ve been around for a while: Clean Living, which came out back in June, was their first album in six years. And, yes, if you like weird, garage-y, offbeat, “Devo-core” rock and roll, Clean Living provides–“One Weird Trick” sums it up pretty well, marrying dark, rhythmic, muttering verses with a new chorus yelp.
“Forget the Tradeoffs”, Daddy Fell Through From Daddy Fell Through (2025, Olly Olly)
As one-half of Higher Selves Playdate, Fairfax, Virginia musician Steve Fitzpatrick enthusiastically melds “Athens, Georgia sound”, new wave, psychedelia, and synthpop together in glitzy pop songs; Fitzpatrick now has a new project called Daddy Fell Through, and it’s just about as far away from Higher Selves Playdate as he could get, stylistically at least. The self-titled Daddy Fell Through EP is five songs and eight minutes of Fitzpatrick strumming pop songs alone on an acoustic guitar. It’s acoustic, yes, but it’s not really “folk”–I can hear Fitzpatrick writing pop music for Higher Selves Playdate here, reaching for ideas that he and Jessica Kallista can tinker around with eventually. At the same time, though, I like the simplicity of songs like “Forget the Tradeoffs”, which can certainly stand on their own. Read more about Daddy Fell Through here.
“Malagradecido”, CuVa Bimö From Malagradecido (2025, Cuva Groove)
It’s been about a year since I first heard of Oakland punk group CuVa Bimö; the trio dropped their debut album, CB Radio, back on January 3rd of 2025. The “Bay Area garage punk”, “dark and distorted post-punk”, and “trashy noise rock” band decided to end the year with Malagradecido, a new EP (well, a new song and some live versions) that picks up where their first LP left off. Aside from being in Spanish, “Malagradecido” fits well with the leaner, more punk end of CB Radio; whether CuVa Bimö’s sophomore album (supposedly coming this year sometime) leans harder into this sound or if it’s similarly a grab bag remains to be seen, but it’s a pretty strong start.
“2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, The Michael Character From The Impermanent Coffee Can (2025)
The Impermanent Coffee Can speedruns the set-up to the breakup at the album’s emotional core–we aren’t given a chance to breathe until the middle of the album. As it turns out, slowing down there is a pretty uncomfortable place to be for James Ikeda, and he subsequently takes The Michael Character through the three “Anecdote” songs that flash away from the present. The jolt of the moody “2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, however, leads us right back to the current status of The Impermanent Coffee Can. “Feeling sentimental / Everything was ten years ago / People who I don’t see anymore / Show up in the way I play guitar / Show up in the way I say most words / Show up in the strangest places,” Ikeda sings, enjoying the gift of hindsight one last time. Read more about The Impermanent Coffee Can here.
“Press Coverage”, Laika Songs From I Can Feel an Ending (2025, Two Worlds/Galaxy Train)
This Laika Songs album is growing on me. I liked last year’s Slowly Spiraling Towards the Light, and I Can Feel an Ending felt like its equal as I was initially listening to and writing about it, but here in January I’m pretty sure now that it’s Evan Brock’s best work yet. “Press Coverage” was my first favorite song, and while it may have gotten outpaced by “Optimism Shame”, I still really like it; specifically, I like how it goes from a laid-back guitar pop strummer in its first half to a fuzz-pop Sparklehorse-type soaring number in its second half, and that it does so casually in just over two minutes. Read more about I Can Feel an Ending here.
“Stelissi”, Capsuna From Can’t Versus Can’t (2025)
I first wrote about Capsuna at the beginning of 2024–the Brussels-based quintet had just released their self-titled debut album of “charmingly fuzzy and lo-fi” indie pop rock. They’ve experienced some lineup changes since then, but their sophomore album Can’t Versus Can’t more or less picks up where Capsuna left off. It’s perhaps a bit more subdued, but Capsuna still pull out effortless-sounding jangly indie pop with stuff like closing track “Stelissi”, which is as bright and sparkly as anything on their first LP. Read more about Can’t Versus Can’t here.
“Tonight’s the Night – Live”, Neil Young & Crazy Horse From Neil Young Archives Vol. III (1976-1987) (2024, The Other Shoe/Reprise)
I’ve had Neil Young’s Archives Vol. III on ambiently over the holidays a lot this year; there were times where I thought about switching away from it permanently (I think I’m full-up on live versions of “Cortez the Killer” for this life and the next by now), but I’m glad I pressed on long enough to get absolutely rocked by this live version of “Tonight’s the Night”. Apparently this is the one from Live Rust, which I know I’ve heard before, but it really shines here, on Disc Number 10 (Sedan Delivery, which is mostly made up of live recordings from 1978). I made it through all 17 discs eventually.
“Pigeon Shot”, Moviola From Glen Echo Autoharp (1998, Spirit of Orr)
A second song from this Moviola album, because I’m really enjoying it and I can do weird things like this in the December and January playlists. “Pigeon Shot” is a little clearer than “Telling You Nothing”; it could very nearly be called an “alt-country ballad” if you were so inclined. It’s got a bit of “slacker” energy to it; imagine a more Midwestern, rusted-through version of Grandaddy’s shiny defeatism.
“Round These Walls”, Tall Dwarfs From Fifty Flavours of Glue (1998, Flying Nun)
I’m pretty sure I called this song the greatest song of all-time at one point recently, and I’ve never put it on a playlist, so I guess I have to make room for it here. This is one of these Tall Dwarfs songs that comes out of nowhere with simplicity and beauty and timelessness and a discipline for which the New Zealand duo aren’t typically known. Chris Knox has moments of this in his solo work too, and there are a couple other Flying Nun-associated acts that can pull it off, but this is still a rare thing. Appreciate it!
“Whistle and I’ll Come to You”, Soft on Crime From Noz Mat (2025, Eats It)
Dublin trio Soft on Crime have been one of the most reliable purveyors of power, jangle, and psychedelic pop ever since their debut album, 2023’s New Suite. The five-song Noz Mat cassette EP is slighter than the last couple of Soft on Crime records, sure, but that doesn’t lessen the thrill of hearing a handful more bursts of guitar pop straight from the garage. Noz Mat actually seems to get stronger and more solid as it goes on, right up to closing track “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”. It’s the only thing on the EP that could even be partially described as a “ballad”; it’s “pastoral’’, but only because that’s what makes sense for that hook. Read more about Noz Mat here.
The third annual Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll has now been summed, tallied, and assembled! We asked you about your favorite albums, songs, EPs and label of the year, and we got sixty-four different responses (which is a new record)! These ballots included 448 different albums, 386 different songs, 70 different EPs, and 29 different record labels. There is a lot of great music on this list (big surprise, I know), and, just like I did last year, I look forward to checking out the records on here I missed when they came out.
Your top choices are revealed below; for more detailed and complete results, here’s a spreadsheet with everything that got at least one vote on it. For albums, your top choice got ten points, second place got nine, et cetera (for songs, it was twelve points for first place); ties were broken via number of ballots something appeared on and number of first-place votes received.
Here’s a playlist of every song that either A) appeared on multiple ballots and/or B) got a first-place vote (Spotify, Tidal).
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. To anyone who participated in this poll, or even if you didn’t, if you shared the blog or even just regularly read it in 2025: thank you very much. Time for 2026!
Your Top 50 Albums of the Year:
50. The New Eves – The New Eve Is Rising (Transgressive)
49. Nourished by Time – Passionate Ones (XL)
48. Water from Your Eyes – It’s a Beautiful Place (Matador)
It’s New Year’s Eve, and that means it’s time for the final Pressing Concerns of 2025! To wrap up this year, we’re looking at new EPs from Space Jaguar, Steatopygous, and Barpinson, and a new album from Save My Skin. Be sure to check out Monday and Tuesday’s blog posts (featuring Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls, Humbug, Capsuna, and Super Pattern and Constant Greetings, Pelted, Baby Grand, and Blood Cannery, respectively), if you haven’t yet, and check back soon for the results of the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Space Jaguar – Every Room Is an Escape Room
Release date: December 14th Record label: Subjangle Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop, power pop, folk rock, college rock Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Go Home
This July, Irish musician Mark Grassick debuted his new power pop project Space Jaguar with its debut album, If You Play Expect to Pay, receiving help from producer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Taylor (The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness, Dropkick) and bassist Michael Wood (Whoa Melodic). If You Play Expect to Pay nailed the 90s-inspired jangly-power pop sweet spot, earning its place next to records by Taylor’s bands and Hurry (whose Matt Scottoline also guested on the album). We didn’t have to wait too long for the second Space Jaguar record, thankfully, as Grassnick (once again backed by Taylor and Wood) put out a surprise seven-song EP called Every Room Is an Escape Room in the middle of December.
It’s a little more like a “grab-bag” than the LP–see opening track “Red Rain” (which transforms from a minimal acoustic folk rock tune to signature Space Jaguar guitar pop in under two minutes), “Question” (another acoustic one, this one stubbornly sticking to its stripped-down setup), and the closing track (a cover of Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation”, which admittedly sounds a lot like a “Space Jaguar song”). On the whole, though, Every Room Is an Escape Room is every bit as capable at throwing out perfect power pop as its predecessor was–the breezy, effortlessly-simple-sounding “She Goes” just might be their best song yet, and “A Bright Future” and “Go Home” can’t be far behind. It’s a nice appendix to a promising debut, and it has more than enough to stand on its own, too. (Bandcamp link)
Steatopygous – Songs of Salome
Release date: November 7th Record label: Sketch Book Genre: Post-hardcore, riot grrl, garage punk, screamo Formats: Cassette (forthcoming), digital Pull Track: Wallplug Slug
Hailing from Trowbridge, Wiltshire, Steatopygous are a quartet of teenagers (Poppy, Eliza, Ewan and Rufus) who got their start not so long ago live playing Bikini Kill covers and riot grrl-inspired original material, eventually opening for bands like Other Half, Perennial, and Teenage Tom Petties. Their first release, a three-song demo cassette, came out on local label Sketch Book last December (the imprint’s debut release, in fact), showcasing the band’s explosive punk rock inception. All three of those songs are on Steatopygous’s first proper EP, the six-song Songs of Salome, alongside three new tracks suggesting that the group have grown and evolved quite a bit over the past eleven months.
The older Steatopygous songs are fun, violent blasts of classic riot grrl and I’m glad they’re included here, although they’re a world away from “Wallplug Slug”, the new song that opens the EP. A meandering, sludgy trip into screamo and post-hardcore, “Wallplug Slug” doesn’t quite herald an entirely new direction for Steatopygous (one of the new songs, “Female CD”, is every bit the punk whirlwind that older tracks “Cassowary” and “Maries Wedding Song” are), but there’s something tougher and heavier about them now (“Septic”, the final new song, is the other really off-the-rails moment in this regard). I wouldn’t have been disappointed if Steatopygous had held more firmly to their original sound, but it bodes well for them that they weren’t content to stay there for long. (Bandcamp link)
Save My Skin – Different Bubble
Release date: November 15th Record label: Chrüsimüsi Genre: Garage rock, post-punk, fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, psychedelia Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Different Times
The Swiss band Save My Skin was formed in Biel about a decade ago by guitarist/vocalists Chri Frautschi and Nicolas Raufaste, and, after putting out a bunch of self-released digital albums on Bandcamp from 2018 to 2023, they’ve linked up with Chrüsimüsi Records (Dom Sensitive, Spllit, Leopardo) to release their newest album, Different Bubble, on vinyl. Now a quartet featuring bassist/vocalist Marie Rebmann and drummer/vocalist Vera Trachsel, Save My Skin recorded Different Bubble live last year with prolific Swiss producer Louis Jucker, and the four of them came up with eight songs of garage-y, post-punk-y, ultimately difficult-to-classify indie rock. If they were from the States, we’d probably call Save My Skin “Americana” of some sort; it’s a European version of the blustery, wandering barebones-country-rock practiced by David Nance and other distorted Neil Young disciples overseas. Nonetheless, the listlessness of Different Bubble also feels very continental Europe, from the aimless, nearly psychedelic six-minute mid-tempo opening track “Different Times” to the Sonic Youth-esque chug of “Bubbles” to the vaguely toe-tapping political statement of some kind “The Candidate”. The second half of Different Bubble continues to be a strong, belated bid to open the tour that produced Arc and Weld, halfheartedly pushing on their four-piece limits up to similarly sighing closing track “The Beauty of Life”. It’s a perfect album-length retreat for the dead of late December. (Bandcamp link)
Barpinson – Population
Release date: December 12th Record label: Lisdia Genre: Power pop, garage rock, pop punk, new wave, jangle pop Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Dance Off!
Indonesian musician Prabu Pramayougha is new to me, but not to making music–he’s been the vocalist and guitarist of the Bandung-based punk group Saturday Night Karaoke since 2008. With Saturday Night Karaoke, Pramayougha has pursued speedy, hooky, Ramones-inspired pop punk, and his new solo project, Barpinson, reflects this, too. The first-ever Barpison release is a four-song EP called Population that keeps up the infectious energy of Pramayougha’s past but seeks to inject an even more prominent new wave/power pop sound (influenced by names like Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, and Nick Lowe) into his songwriting. Quick-paced, punk-infused power pop is what indeed greets us with opening track “Freaky Adoration”, a topsy-turvy motor-mouth performance but one in which Pramayougha sticks the landing. The appropriately-titled “Dance Off!” throws some Attractions-style keyboards into Barpinson’s power pop rock and roll, but it’s the second half of Population where Pramayougha reveals there’s a life for his music after “punk rock” after all. A cover of British new wave act The Tours’ “Foreign Girls” is light on its feet, and the EP ends with a song called “Mid 30s” that surprisingly veers into mid-tempo, jangly pop rock; in terms of 90s alt-rock bands, it’s closer to the Gin Blossoms than Green Day for the first time in Barpinson’s history. I’m guessing it won’t be the last, though. (Bandcamp link)
I said yesterday that I had a big week planned for Rosy Overdrive, and I was not kidding around! Today, we’ve got new albums from Constant Greetings, Baby Grand, and Blood Cannery, plus a new EP from Pelted. Oh, and if you missed yesterday’s post (featuring Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls, Humbug, Capsuna, and Super Pattern), check that out too. And guess what: we’ll be back tomorrow, too!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Constant Greetings – Good Sports
Release date: December 19th Record label: Retriever Genre: 90s indie rock, garage rock, alt-country Formats: Digital Pull Track: Friendly Competition
I first heard the Rothesay, New Brunswick indie rock band Constant Greetings in early 2024, when they’d just released their sophomore album Showpony. I called that record an “intriguing collection of somewhat hazy, somewhat dark, yet fairly catchy 90s-indebted indie rock” at the time, and I’m pleased to report that Good Sports, the third Constant Greetings LP, lives up to and even expands upon that record’s foundation. It really came down to the wire, but Constant Greetings completed the “three albums in three years” benchmark with Good Sports; they’ve “pared down” from a sextet to quintet for this one, with vocalist/guitarist JP Lewis backed by guitarist/lap steel player Stephen Robinson, bassist Jeff Melanson, keyboardist/guitarist James Lea, and drummer Peter Wallace now, and, like all their records so far, Good Sports was recorded and produced by Corey Bonnevie.
Good Sports has an excellent sound–it’s not cleanly “college rock” or “noise rock”, just guitar-driven indie rock with an understanding of everything from the Paisley Underground to Eleventh Dream Day to Silkworm and the Touch & Go Records catalog (it fits in well with modern bands drawing from similar sources like Stomatopod, Outro, and Deep Tunnel Project). Constant Greetings favor a relatively unadorned setup but their songs are sneakily quite layered, and there’s a throughline from garage-y indie-punk-rock stuff like opening track “Little R&R” to hook-y, melodic, punched-up pop rock (“Company Line”, the title track, “Friendly Competition”) to more sprawling, atmospheric pieces (“False Spring”, “Shining Waters”). It’s easy to miss new albums that drop in the “dead zone” of late December, but if any of the abovementioned acts are up your alley (and if you’re reading Rosy Overdrive, they probably are), then this is one to find some time for in between holiday festivities and the year-end-list deluge. (Bandcamp link)
Pelted – Effort
Release date: December 5th Record label: Broken Cycle Genre: Fuzzy indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Sydd
Do you have any idea how many bands in Philadelphia are currently making music that features some degree of shoegaze and alt-country influence? Well, me neither, but it’s probably a lot. One of these bands is called Pelted, a quartet co-led by guitarist/vocalists Dan Hanna and Katie Hanford and rounded out by drummer Jimmy McKenney and bassist Roya Weidman. They’ve even got their own name for this recognizable kind of music they make: they call it “horse rock”. They’ve just put out their debut EP, Effort, on cassette via Broken Cycle Records (My Wife’s an Angel, Tlooth, Pale Fang), and there’s just something to these five songs that keeps me returning to them as 2025 winds to a close.
I like the two greyscale, slowcore-y indie rock songs that open the EP (“Dog”, which starts with a delicate f-bomb, and “Hash”, which slowly but surely lets the fuzz take over), but I think the third track, “Sydd”, is my favorite. It’s (I believe) the only song that Hanna sings; the vocals remind me a lot of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, and the lyrics–an offbeat character study of the titular unsavory figure–enhance the comparison in my mind. Effort wraps up with two more really solid ones–the recursive “Sulk” is the band at their spaciest and subtlest, and roaring closing track “Apology Tour” lets the guitars speak in a way they hadn’t done up until that point. Everything on Effort is good, and it’s just odd enough that I can see Pelted getting even better and more interesting from here. (Bandcamp link)
Baby Grand – Check’er Lee
Release date: December 13th Record label: PorchDog Genre: Country-folk, folk-country, folky country, country-y folk, honky-tonk Formats: Digital Pull Track: Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane
The Virginia-originating sibling folk duo Baby Grand released their first album, 50¢ Songs All About Death and Other Life Lessons, back in 2018; seven years later, they’re on their fourth one, Check’er Lee. For this LP, co-leaders Haley Ellis (keys, banjo, and bass) and Colby Ellis (guitar, lap steel, and keys) welcome drummer Cody Wade to the group, and the three of them have put together a charming fourteen-song collection of laid-back but clever banjo-led folk-country music (I’m not really an expert on this kind of music, but it reminds me of Kym Register’s old band Midtown Dickens, if anyone remembers them). Haley, who wrote and sings the majority of Check’er Lee, gives us two folk-y whirlwinds to start the album between “Thank God for Keepin’ Me Sane” (first lines: “I bought a coffee for an arm and a leg / And now I’m alright because I don’t have the left”) and “Lapse of Luxury” (an old-timey tour through Baby Grand’s interpretation of “high society”). In the second half of the album, the barroom piano of “Lower Management” is an equal match for the opening duo, as is Colby’s most impressive moment in “The Fisherman’s Wife” (who doesn’t love a good fishing metaphor delivered via honky tonk piano?). There are ample surprising and funny moments strewn about Check’er Lee, and just about all of it is a treat to listen to. (Bandcamp link)
Blood Cannery – Olympic Blood
Release date: October 4th Record label: Knuckles on Stun Genre: Garage punk, noise rock Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Virginia
Here’s some batshit noisy garage-punk out of Idaho for you. Blood Cannery is the project of an Idaho Falls-based musician named Cole Foster, who appears to have been feverishly making records under this name since the beginning of the decade. The first Blood Cannery album I heard was this April’s Cannery Not Canary, a chaotic, distorted hardcore-verging-on-grindcore assault; it was fascinating but maybe not my thing, so I’m really enjoying Olympic Blood, where Blood Cannery have “turned things down” to “merely” Lightning Bolt-esque pummeling noise-punk. Foster and MVP drummer Eli Andersen tackle a dozen songs in a gargantuan thirty-two minutes on this one; after thirty seconds of feedback, Anderson crashes into focus in opening track “Virginia” and we don’t get a reprieve until another feedback break four songs later in “Blackout”. Heavy distortion and distantly-shouted vocals color all of Olympic Blood, although there are layers underneath the torrent, like the post-punk rhythms holding together “Get In” or the metallic rumble of “Stir Your Spurs”. I suspect Blood Cannery will keep moving, and the next album is unlikely to sound much like Olympic Blood (in fact, as of this writing, Foster has already followed it up with a twenty-minute ambient-guitar post-rock piece called “China Blue”). Thankfully, Blood Canary were able to capture this craziness for a half-hour on tape. (Bandcamp link)
This between-holiday week is actually shaping up to be a large one on Rosy Overdrive; I’m doing my best to clear out the 2025 coffers so we can start fresh next year. To that end, today we’re hitting up new albums from Humbug, Capsuna, and Super Pattern, plus a collaborative EP between The Bird Calls and Izzy Oram Brown. Check back tomorrow for more!
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.
Izzy Oram Brown & The Bird Calls – Little Act
Release date: December 12th Record label: Rock for Sale Genre: Folk rock, folk-pop, alt-country, singer-songwriter, indie folk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Little Act
Back in February, the New York singer-songwriters Nico Hedley and Léna Bartels co-launched a new label called Rock for Sale Records with It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, a split/collaborative EP between the two musicians. As it turns out, It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year was also the launch of a series called “Splits for Sale”, in which Rock for Sale “pair[s] artists who have previously never worked together and invite[s] them to collaborate”. The second Splits for Sale EP links together two more New York City folk acts: The Bird Calls, aka the solo project of Sam Sodomsky, and Izzy Oram Brown, a Brooklyn guitarist and songwriter who also played on Bartels’ most recent solo album.
Not only had Sodomsky and Brown never collaborated with each other previously, but, as Bartels writes on Little Act’s Bandcamp page, neither of them “had ever written music with another person” before this record. Little Act is enjoyable and impressive even without this context, to be clear: the title track, in which Brown and Sodomsky share lead vocals, is a late entry for the best pop song I’ve heard this year, for one. “Little Act”, the best of “lo-fi, drum machine indie pop” and “folk rock” in one, is a lot more immediately attention-grabbing than the rest of Little Act, but the duo continue to excel in the realms of (relatively) subtle folk-pop, too. The brisk melancholy of “Rose Petals in a Lava Pit” (great title) sounds like a Bird Calls song with extra lead vocal power, the quiet “I Know You Gotta Go (But I Want You to Stay)” is a lovely folk-country ballad, and “Rock Bottom (Is Just a Phone Call Away)” caps the EP with one last timeless-sounding composition. As I was already a fan of The Bird Calls, I’m not surprised that Little Act is a solid record, but Brown’s voice and writing undoubtedly add something to Sodomsky’s work–the best-case scenario for a collaboration like this. (Bandcamp link)
Humbug – Open Season
Release date: September 17th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, power pop, alt-rock, jangle pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Quit with Suzy (75K)
Pasadena’s Humbug bill themselves as a “new power pop band”, but they don’t really slot into the jangly, wistful version of the genre happening upstate in San Francisco, nor are they necessarily really loud Weezer-worshipping alt-rockers, either. On their debut album, the quartet (bassist Ryan Bouimad, vocalist/guitarist Aidan Cole, guitarist Alex Cubillos, and drummer Ardem Gourdikian) really sound like a band out of time, landing closer than anything to offbeat, catchy turn-of-the-century indie rock. I have to pull out obscure names like early Barsuk band MK Ultra and the underrated Fox Japan for soundalikes here–they were a departure from the dominant indie rock strains of the 1990s, they weren’t dogmatic enough for the 2000s “post-punk revival”, they’re aware of like, XTC and The Beach Boys, but they aren’t trying to sound like either of them overtly, either. These are fun little wrinkles that add some dimension to Open Season (how many other bands would write about middle-class angst so directly and melodically as “Quit with Suzy (75K)”?), but the most important thing about this album is that it’s full of strong pop music. Produced by Ryan Slegr (Ozma), there’s occasionally more recognizably West Coast power pop moments (“Can’t Read Velvet”, “Nina”), but Humbug are just as catchy and even more memorable when they embrace the dread at the heart of songs like the title track and “Quit with Suzy”. It seems unusual for a band to start where Humbug have with their debut album, so I’ll be interested to see where they go from here. (Bandcamp link)
Capsuna – Can’t Versus Can’t
Release date: October 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, lo-fi pop, power pop, jangle pop, dream pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Stelissi
I first wrote about Capsuna at the beginning of last year–the Brussels-based indie pop quintet (formed by Cincinnati transplant David Enright on guitar and vocals and joined by lead vocalist Louise Crosby and bassist Pierre Meremans, among others) had just released their self-titled debut album of “charmingly fuzzy and lo-fi” indie pop rock. Over the course of 2024, Capsuna put out a two-song single and an EP called One Hit for Trainwreck, and 2025 saw the release of their sophomore LP, Can’t Versus Can’t. They’ve experienced some lineup changes (welcoming Petros Makris on drums and Ben Leclerc on guitars, while former member Damien Rixhon still appears on keyboards on a couple of songs), but Can’t Versus Can’t more or less picks up where Capsuna left off. It’s perhaps a bit more subdued, but the quintet’s mixture of Flying Nun-esque guitar pop, melancholic French indie pop, and Subsonic Eye-esque dream pop (aided in large part by Crosby’s strong vocals) is completely intact. Opening track “Headstand”, “Ventilator”, and “Red Flag” are a little more refined or “high-concept”, but Capsuna still pull out effortless-sounding jangly indie pop with stuff like “Stoker”, “Celluloid Saturday”, and “Stelissi”, all of which are as bright and sparkly as anything on their first LP. It’s nice to close out 2025 with the knowledge that Belgian indie pop is alive and well as long as Capsuna are still at it. (Bandcamp link)
Super Pattern – SPII
Release date: December 5th Record label: Self-released Genre: Indie pop, synthpop, psychedelic pop, prog-pop, kraut-pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Unusual Power
Who are Super Pattern? They’re a trio from Edinburgh and London, for one. They call themselves “nu-croon” on their Bandcamp page, and when they emailed me about their latest record, they labeled it “FFO Stereolab / The Who” (which is, I believe, a completely novel combination). That record is SPII, which–despite its name–appears to be Super Pattern’s first album. Quietly self-released by the band in early December, SPII nonetheless does a good job of introducing a new group with grand indie pop ambitions: organs, synths, and saxophones (provided partially by guest musician Euan Hinshelwood) feature prominently throughout this LP of at-times-motorik, at-times-gentle pop music. I guess if there really is a midpoint between The Who and Stereolab, it’s probably the punchy analog synth opening to “Unusual Power” (“Laundry Pops” isn’t a bad approximation of this either), and “Vigilante” deftly nails the motorik-pop side of their sound, but the more delicate synth-heavy soft rock of the album’s mid-section is more like Switched-On Belle and Sebastian (which I guess is sort of Peel Dream Magazine, but Super Pattern feels a little more…muscular, comparatively speaking). SPII doesn’t flag in the home stretch between the adventurous synth-rock landscapes “Forever” and “Winner”, unsurprisingly; it’s a smooth, blissful journey for the entirety of its ten songs and thirty-two minutes. (Bandcamp link)
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 Alloralast 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.
Merry “week of Christmas”, but Rosy Overdrive isn’t taking Monday off (or Tuesday, so stay tuned). We’ve got new albums from The Michael Character, Dan Darrah, and Boreen, plus (I guess) an EP from United Stare below.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
The Michael Character – The Impermanent Coffee Can
Release date: November 7th Record label: Self-released Genre: Folk rock, indie pop, singer-songwriter, folk punk Formats: Digital Pull Track: The Impermanent Coffee Can
Boston musician James Ikeda has led The Michael Character for a decade and a half now, with the project on its eighteenth album of folk rock/folk punk/somewhat jittery singer-songwriter material. Over this journey, Ikeda has amassed a substantial list of regular contributors to his albums, including Miss Bones’ June Isenhart and Lonesome Joan’s Amanda Lozada–and that’s a good thing, because it sounds like The Michael Character needed all hands on deck for their most recent album, The Impermanent Coffee Can. In this case, the vibrant, sweeping Michael Character sound is used to tackle the “divorce album”: Ikeda takes us to some understandably difficult places in his writing, but the wings of his band–Isenhart and Lozada on guitar, Mattie Hamer on drums, Eugene Umlor on keys, Addison Waco Michalowski on bass, and several of them providing arrangements–aren’t clipped, allowing them to ride their typically freewheeling sound across the tough terrain.
The Impermanent Coffee Can speedruns the set-up–we aren’t given a chance to breathe as the prelude of “The Artist Retreat (January 2025)” (arranged by Ulmor) collapses quickly into “35 (May 2025)” and “Remembering Gasquet” (both by Isenhart); it’s not until “Stay pt. 2 (February 2025)” that The Michael Character slow down a bit. As it turns out, slowing down there is a pretty uncomfortable place to be, and the three “Anecdote” songs subsequently take us on a diversion from the present right afterwards. The jolt of “2024 Anecdote (The Strangest Places)”, however, leads us right back to the current status of The Impermanent Coffee Can and its particularly tricky final stretch. The title track is the most beautiful song on the album, an unflinching and subtle account of what it’s like to have permanency blink out in front of one’s self along with all its taken-for-granted mundanity. The penultimate track, “The Cotton Anniversary (April 2025)”, is beautiful too, in three or four different ways, but The Impermanent Coffee Can ends on “July 2025 Forever”, a truly bleak note. Choosing to end The Impermanent Coffee Can in any less strong terms than “I see decades of the present / And not in a good way” wouldn’t be true to the events depicted herein, one surmises. Perhaps the inevitable impermanence illustrated by this record is the very thing to break the never-ending cycle depicted in “July 2025 Forever”…but that’s not what The Impermanent Coffee Can is about. (Bandcamp link)
United Stare – United Stare
Release date: June 20th Record label: Kill Enemy Genre:Garage punk, noise punk, lo-fi punk Formats: Cassette, digital Pull Track: Liftoff Jam (White Boys in E)
United Stare are a new band from Pittsburgh–they’ve “4 unremarkable gigs under their belt”, boasts their label, Kill Enemy Records. I don’t know who all’s in this band, but Eli Kasan of The Gotobeds and The Sewerheads designed the layout of their self-titled debut cassette, so that’s kind of cool. Kill Enemy has been chronicling Pittsburgh hardcore for a few years now, and The Gotobeds have been operating as a chaotic garage punk band as of late, which gives us at least something to go off of in terms of expectations for United Stare. To once again lean on the Bandcamp description, Kill Enemy deems it “essentially just Punk but not Hardcore”–which, sure, but United Stare’s fast-paced, knuckleheaded, and noisy take on punk rock will, at the very least, appeal to “adventurous” hardcore fans, too. United Stare start their first release by calling in the cavalry with “Liftoff Jam (White Boys in E)”, a nearly six-minute noise-punk land speed record, and while the rest of United Stare doesn’t even try to top that, there’s still plenty of good rock and roll moments to follow. Tracks like “Burn Down Spirit”, “The Stare”, and “I Follow You Everywhere You Go” are just great garage rock, “Violet Cleanse” asserts the group’s ability to rip through 60-second punk bangers, and “Goin Against the Extreme” is a mid-tempo garage punk excursion that doesn’t drag. A pretty good start overall! (Bandcamp link)
Dan Darrah – Vacationland
Release date: December 12th Record label: Sunday Drive Genre: Jangle pop, folk rock, singer-songwriter, indie pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: A Little a Lot
Toronto singer-songwriter Dan Darrah put out his fifth album, There’s a Place, in June of this year–aided by his backing band The Rain (who also played on the Darrah album before that, 2023’s Rivers Bridges Trains), that LP was nearly fifty minutes of “sprawling, unhurried, melancholic guitar pop” (as I said at the time). Surprisingly, Darrah ended 2025 by quietly dropping another album, Vacationland; unlike his last couple of LPs, this one is digital-only, and it doesn’t appear that The Rain play on this one (drums from Leigh Fisk and pedal steel from Doug Mcbrien are the only other instrumental credits on the record). Maybe Vacationland is subsequently supposed to be a more casual or lower-stakes Dan Darrah record, but there isn’t a drop-off in quality compared to his last few albums here. Darrah still finds plenty of inspiration in his frequent stomping grounds of “halfway between folk rock and jangle pop”, evoking The Byrds and the more wistful side of Teenage Fanclub across these eleven songs. Even by Darrah standards, Vacationland is pretty laid-back and meandering–aside from the drum-machine-propelled opening track “A Little a Lot”, these are pretty slow-paced folk/pop songs. Many are acoustic-led, but the more electric moments in highlights like “Supercontinental” and “Four” aren’t really out of place. And Vacationland as a whole fits comfortably next to the rest of Darrah’s sturdy recent records. (Bandcamp link)
Boreen – Heartbreak Hill
Release date: November 21st Record label: Bud Tapes Genre: Folk rock, art rock, psychedelic pop, indie pop, experimental pop, power pop Formats: CD, cassette, digital Pull Track: Lace
I’m introducing Boreen to the blog on the occasion of their fifth and final album, Heartbreak Hill. The Portland, Oregon project had an impressive ten-year history leading up to this point, starting as the mid-2010s-style bedroom pop project of Morgan O’Sullivan and eventually becoming a real-deal indie rock band with a rotating lineup of notable Portland musicians like Emmet Martin (Jack Habegger’s Celebrity Telethon, Bud Tapes), Harrison Smith (Turtlenecked, The Dare), and Steven Driscoll (A Fish in the River, Holloway). I don’t know why O’Sullivan’s decided to end Boreen now, but I do know that the fourteen-song, fifty-minute Heartbreak Hill is an impressive send-off of adventurous and wide-ranging indie rock, folk, and pop music. There are lovely, sweet indie/jangle/power pop songs hidden in the midst of this tape, if you’re a fan of the diamond-in-the-rough experience (check “Lace”, “I Can Almost Taste It”, and “Remind Me”), just-as-pleasing rockers (the title track, “Don’t Die!”, “Right by You”), restrained indie folk (“Highway of Love”, “Angel in My Mouth”), and an eight-minute prog-kraut-bedroom rocker called “Plumsucker”. Boreen seem to have put everything they had left into this final release; they’re not precisely an overly “showy” project, but this is how a band like this “goes out with a bang”. (Bandcamp link)
It’s been a surprisingly busy week in mid-to-late December here on Rosy Overdrive, and we’re capping it off with a new Pressing Concerns featuring a compilation from Wishes on a Plane, a new album from Endless Mike and the Beagle Club, and new EPs from Tongue Scraper and Rocket Bureau. Rosy Overdrive’s Top 25 EPs of 2025 went up earlier this week, and we also had a Monday Pressing Concerns (featuring The Kyle Sowashes, Daddy Fell Through, Tercel, and Silk Daisys), so check those out too.
If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. And last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
Wishes on a Plane – Lost Songs
Release date: November 7th Record label: Time As a Color Genre: Emo, 90s indie rock, acoustic Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: What’s Left of What Is…
Daniel Becker is a musician from Munich, Germany, and he currently makes music under the name Amid the Old Wounds (recently seen releasing a split record with Michigan emo act Mt. Oriander last year). Before that, however, Becker led a band called Wishes on a Plane from 2002 to 2009; it’s been quite a while since Wishes on a Plane have been an active band, but Becker has kept the spotlight on them thanks to a few posthumous releases on his own label, Time As a Color. Lost Songs follows a 2021 LP called Unreleased; while the earlier archival Wishes on a Plane release was centered around recordings made by the band’s initial (pre-2006) lineup, Lost Songs seems to be more of a grab bag. The seven tracks are made up of three songs that initially appeared on “local compilations that are mostly unknown”, an alternate recording of a song from their self-titled EP, and three acoustic demos.
The context doesn’t mean all that much to me, because Lost Songs is the first Wishes on a Plane record I’ve ever heard, but it’s a very good, chilly emo album in its own right. All three of the compilation songs deserved rescuing from obscurity–the soaring “Untitled” and the punchy, punk-influenced “Tide” show two intriguing sides to Wishes on a Plane, and “What’s Left of What Is…” tries its hardest to fuse the two. The torch-bearing mid-tempo emo power ballad of “Anywhere (Goldfish Version)” closes out the electric part of Lost Songs with one last bang, and we’re left to sit with the three acoustic emo-folk songs that close the LP out. These recordings weren’t made with the thought they’d be on an album together, and it’s kind of an odd experience, but my taste in “emo music” is fairly odd anyway, so I don’t think it’s all that strange I enjoy Lost Songs as much as I do. (Bandcamp link)
Endless Mike and the Beagle Club – The Forest Is the Trees
Release date: October 17th Record label: Sidewalk Chalk Genre: Alt-country, country punk, country rock, Americana, roots rock, folk rock, you get the point Formats: Vinyl, digital Pull Track: Days of the Atom Bomb
Endless Mike and the Beagle Club are new to me, but I feel like I immediately understood the Johnstown, Pennsylvania act’s whole deal after just one listen to their latest album, The Forest Is the Trees. A Rust Belt troubadour (Endless Mike, aka Mike Miller) making alt-country, cowpunk, folk rock, “Americana”, “heartland rock” (whatever you want to call it), touring the underground circuit for two decades, shaken but ultimately undeterred by their homeland’s rightward political lurch–Two Cow Garage and Micah Schnabel come to mind, as well as everyone from Mike Adams at His Honest Weight (a couple of states over) to Fishboy (down in Texas). The Forest Is the Trees boldly starts with its best song, a bottle rocket cowpunk/country punk rocker called “Days of the Atomic Bomb” that burns brighter than anything on the LP (with the possible exception of the fiddle-aided maximalist mid-record highlight “Flight Behavior”). It’d be easy enough to stop there, but then you’d miss Endless Mike and the Beagle Club’s continued attempts to leave it all out there time and time again. “The Pearly Gates of Grandview Cemetery”, “Flight Behavior”, and “Mr. Miller’s Dream” are all centerpiece-worthy in their own ways; every one of these eleven tracks swings for the fences, and if there are a couple of lines here and there that don’t land quite as strongly, it’s easy to forgive when The Forest Is the Trees does so much right. (Bandcamp link)
Tongue Scraper – Tongue Scraper
Release date: December 5th Record label: Self-released Genre: Noise rock, post-hardcore, noise punk, metal Formats: CD, digital Pull Track: Burning Up
What’s that? A new noise rock-infused punk band from the DMV? And they recorded their debut EP at J. Robbins’ recording studio? Alright, let’s hear this Tongue Scraper. This five-song EP was indeed produced by Matt Redenbo (Two Inch Astronaut, War on Women, Jawbox) at Magpie Cage, and we’re introduced to this Baltimore quartet with a collection of heavy, seething post-hardcore riffs and fury. Vocalist Zo Ubaldo brings to the table a time-honored tradition of lyrics about “the alienation of hating a job”, and the rest of Tongue Scraper–guitarist Graham Twibell, bassist Jarrod Brennet (also of Big Cry Country), and drummer Andrew Barnes–back them up with music that really does sound like Sisyphus rolling a big old bowling ball-shaped skull up a hill (shout-out to Glenn Kelly for that very evocative cover art). In both the disgust of “One or None” and the resignation of “Scam Humanity”, Tongue Scraper confront head-on the fact that everything is kind of, like, bullshit, you know? Of course, a band like this is going to be good for an old-fashioned hardcore punk callout song, and that’s what we get with “Virtue Signals”, but this is also a band that can pull off real-deal heaviness–see “Burning Up”. In that one, Ubaldo proclaims “Individualism is actually Hell, and we’re burning up”; they’ve done a very good diagnostic job, but that’s small comfort when it’s just you and the boulder. (Bandcamp link)
Rocket Bureau – Party Armz
Release date: October 1st Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop Formats: Digital Pull Track: Take It to the Night
Rocket Bureau is a band from Madison, Wisconsin, although the recorded version of Rocket Bureau is the one-man project of one Kyle Urban. The latest Rocket Bureau record is a five-song EP recorded entirely on an “analog tape machine from the early 1970s” called Party Armz. Urban has been at this with Rocket Bureau for over a decade now, and Party Armz is a seasoned, expertly-wielded collection of classic power pop touched with bits of early punk rock, garage rock, and straight-up rock and roll. I know for a fact that it’s pretty dreary in Wisconsin at the time I’m writing this, but Party Armz is a portal straight to the heat of summer; EP bookends “Hotlips” and “Take It to the Night” are surging, windows-down retro power pop that hits the same highs of bands like Romero and Sheer Mag (quite impressive for a solo project!). The middle of Party Armz has plenty to recommend as well, as there’s no filler between the Tony Molina-esque wall-of-guitars/classic pop melding of the title track, the breezy “Louise”, and the two-minute jolt of “I Don’t Wanna Go Back Home”. Some of the best power pop has come out of basements deep in the American Midwest, and it’s heartening to hear the lineage continue like this. (Bandcamp link)
EPs! My 25 favorites from this year, to be precise! A week after Rosy Overdrive wrapped its Top 100 Albums of 2025, the blog is sharing this smaller, (on average) more obscure, and all-around fun list. There’s a bunch of records in here that deserved way more attention this year than they ended up getting, and now’s the perfect time to start fixing that.
Here are links to the EPs on this list that are on streaming services: Spotify, Tidal. Look for a Best Compilations/Reissues of 2025 list and a couple more Pressing Concerns before the year’s out. 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. Thank you for reading, and, last but not least: don’t forget to vote in the 2025 Rosy Overdrive Reader’s Poll!
25. The Cindys – The Cindys
Release date: November 7th Record label: Ruination/Breakfast Genre: Indie pop, jangle pop, power pop Formats: Cassette, digital
The Cindys are a band from Bristol, England founded by Jack Ogborne, an art rocker who wanted a project for making music inspired by 80s guitar pop (touchstones like C86 and Flying Nun have been thrown around). The Cindys is a pretty unimpeachable debut, a twenty-one-minute, seven-song record that’s nonetheless stocked with fully-fleshed-out ideas and confident pop performances. The majority of The Cindys may have been recorded on 8-track cassette in a basement, but it’s on the more polished, stately side of the “indie pop spectrum”. (Read more)
24. Marni – fml era
Release date: October 10th Record label: Self-released Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, alt-rock, slowcore, 90s indie rock Formats: Digital
When I wrote about the band Marni briefly in 2023, they were the solo project of Palm Springs vocalist/guitarist Nicolas Lara, but they’re now a full Los Angeles-based band, settling in nicely with West Coast groups playing some mixture of slowcore, shoegaze, and fuzz-punk (they opened for Idaho last year, if that helps). Marni’s latest EP, fml era, is the best that they’ve sounded yet, even if (perhaps because) they’re still kind of hard to get a handle on: expect heavy alt-rock rippers and slowcore/alt-country meanderers both in these five songs. (Read more)
23. Left Tracks – LT2
Release date: September 26th Record label: Self-released Genre: Art pop, indie pop, psychedelic pop, synthpop Formats: Digital
Kabir Kumar (Sun Kin) and Phil Di Leo (DI LEO, Seemway) co-founded Left Tracks as a way to stay musically connected after the latter’s departure to SoCal from Oakland; the project’s second release, the appropriately-titled LT2, contains plenty of the vibrant, colorful indie pop that I’ve enjoyed via Sun Kin. LT2 is both more streamlined and weirder than Kumar’s solo project, somehow–I’m not sure how else to describe a record that quickly darts between minimal spoken word experimentation, bright, sunny pop-rock, and deconstructed dream folk (among other diversions). (Read more)
22. Lozenge – EP1
Release date: April 25th Record label: Candlepin Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, shoegaze, fuzz pop Formats: Cassette, digital
After putting out a demo cassette on Pleasure Tapes last year, Los Angeles shoegaze group Lozenge linked up with blog favorite Candlepin Records to release their debut EP. EP1 is five songs of lo-fi melodies and fuzz, an impressively strong bid to enter the pantheon of modern “Guided by Voices-gaze” bands like Gaadge and Ex Pilots. Walls of amplifiers and distorted, tinny guitars course through EP1’s veins, but it’s not too hard to make out shimmery, jangly guitar pop music shining amidst the noise.
21. Cast of Thousands – Useful People
Release date: January 9th Record label: Self-released Genre: Power pop, garage rock, college rock Formats: Cassette, digital
Hot on the heels of their 2024 debut album, Third House, Austin power pop insurgents Cast of Thousands kicked off 2025 with a rock-solid four-song EP called Useful People back in January. The chugging alt-rock/power pop/“heartland” rock anthem “Heads or Tails” (featuring, in a surprising twist, heavy AutoTune on bandleader Max Vandever’s vocals) is Cast of Thousands’ best song yet, but Useful People makes it onto this list thanks to a solid supporting cast too, from the breezy jangly college rock of the title track to the mid-tempo, measured “Serpo”.
20. Patches – A Three Legged Chair
Release date: February 3rd Record label: Self-released Genre: Dream pop, post-punk, jangle pop, college rock Formats: Digital
The bad news is that the remote-collaborating college rock/post-punk/jangle pop trio Patches broke up this year, but the good news is that Evan Seurkamp, Aaron Griffin, and Robin KC left us with one final release, a five-song EP of material that was “scrapped, passed over, or shared elsewhere”. There’s a Guided by Voices cover from a compilation I wrote about in 2023, an alternate version of a track from their 2022 debut album Tales We Heard from the Fields, and three previously-unheard tracks, two of which feature Robin’s sister (credited as “KRMT”) on lead vocals. It wasn’t really meant to, but A Three Legged Chair does hold its own against a couple of underrated but brilliant albums. (Read more)
19. Midwestern Medicine – Ripped Headline
Release date: February 21st Record label: Website Genre: Garage rock, garage punk, 90s indie rock, post-punk Formats: Digital
New England indie rock fixture Brock Ginther has honed a distinct style over the years (in his current band Midwestern Medicine as well as older bands like Lemon Pitch and King Pedestrian), marked by an ability to veer between polished, humble-sounding poppy 90s indie rock evoking Jason Lytle, Mark Linkous, and Stephen Malkmus to off-the-wall careening rockabilly rave-ups at the drop of a pin. The five-song Ripped Headlines EP finds Ginther and the rest of Midwestern Medicine hewing toward the more slapdash side of the spectrum–it’s a noisy, garage-y indie rock EP, but one that unmistakably bears the mark of its frontperson. (Read more)
18. Disaster Kid – Rare Bird
Release date: March 21st Record label: Semicircle Genre: Alt-country, power pop, folk rock Formats: Digital
Let it not be said that Seamus Kreitzer doesn’t put himself out there as a writer. Rare Bird is clearly a record in which its frontperson put a lot of thought into the lyrics and isn’t afraid to show it–any EP prominently featuring the line “Don’t apologize so much for nurturing an unknown beauty,” has to fall into this category to some degree. On the whole, Disaster Kid fits in well with Chicago’s modern folk rock/alt-country scene, but there’s a delicate side to Kreitzer’s writing that gives the EP a unique spin (and, on the flipside, Rare Bird as a whole is as good as it is because of the strong reading the rest of the band give to Kreitzer’s words and melodies). (Read more)
17. Sting Pain Index – The Revolution Somewhere Else
Release date: September 29th Record label: Self-released Genre: Post-punk, noise rock, post-hardcore, garage punk, new wave, art rock Formats: Digital
Sting Pain Index are a self-proclaimed “punk rock supergroup” with connections to Texas, Tennessee, and Maryland, and I suppose that their newest EP, The Revolution Somewhere Else, is punk rock–sometimes of a noisy, abrasive, and “post-” variety, and sometimes not like that at all. The first half of The Revolution Somewhere Else gives us garage-y noise punk and prowling post-punk, but things get pretty weird on Side B with a seven-minute 80s-style power ballad called “I Could Have Been Queen” and a shockingly faithful cover of Tears for Fears’ “Break It Down Again”. It all makes sense if you try to see it from Sting Pain Index’s perspective. (Read more)
16. Blue Zero – Confusion
Release date: October 29th Record label: Self-released Genre: Fuzz rock, 90s indie rock, shoegaze, noise pop, post-punk Formats: Cassette, digital
If there’s one thing about Oakland musician Chris Natividad I know, it’s that he loves playing in bands (see Marbled Eye, Public Interest, Aluminum, and Tanukichan)–so it’s not so surprising that his onetime solo project Blue Zero are a solid quartet on their newest record, Confusion. Blue Zero’s self-released cassette EP is a big step forward for the group, with the shoegaze-y fuzz pop of their debut album Colder Shade Blue exploding into an intense, focused, but still quite catchy brand of Sonic Youth-style indie rock. It’s a welcome check-in from a band on an upward trajectory. (Read more)
15. The Pennys – The Pennys
Release date: May 1st Record label: Mt.St.Mtn. Genre: Jangle pop, indie pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
The Bay Area indie pop team-up that we didn’t know we needed, The Pennys are co-led by Michael Ramos (who makes slow-moving, unmoored, dreamy indie pop as Tony Jay) and Ray Seraphin (who embraces fuller and more grounded power pop/college rock as R.E. Seraphin). Busier than Tony Jay but more subdued than R.E. Seraphin, The Pennys hit the jangle pop sweet spot for six songs and sixteen minutes on their self-titled debut. Seraphin and Ramos roam in tandem from electric power pop to Velvets-y dream pop across The Pennys, spotlighting both the former’s lost-in-time power pop and the latter’s “prehistorical pop music slowed down and reverb-ed all up”. (Read more)
14. Time Thief – Time Thief
Release date: September 12th Record label: Musical Fanzine/Lost Sound Tapes Genre: Lo-fi indie rock, indie pop, 90s indie rock, post-punk Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital
Time Thief are a new band from Providence, Rhode Island made up of two familiar faces in Zoë Wyner (Halfsour, Zowy) and James Walsh (Dump Him, Musical Fanzine Records). The first Time Thief release is a self-titled 10” record and cassette tape that introduces an even-keeled duo with a clear, wide-ranging love of lo-fi indie rock and pop music. Time Thief has a nice, full-band sound, but the instrumentals are hardly overly polished or showy. Over the course of fourteen minutes, Time Thief masters melancholic Pacific Northwestern indie rock, jangly indie pop, 60s-ish folk-rock, and choppy, bass-led, post-punk-influenced material. (Read more)
13. Bliss? – Keep Your Joy to Yourself
Release date: November 21st Record label: Psychic Spice Genre: Garage rock, power pop, college rock, punk rock Formats: Cassette, digital
Bliss?’s Pass Yr Pain Along was one of my favorite albums of this year: a punk band making a record of Elvis Costello-inspired college rock, power pop, and rough-around-the-edges mod-revival. As one might guess from the thematically similar title, Keep Your Joy to Yourself’s songs were written at the same time as those on Bliss?’s debut album, but they “weren’t ready to be recorded” until now. Bliss? dropped down from trio to duo in between the two records, but Keep Your Joy to Yourself isn’t any kind of major departure from what they’ve done so well so far –it certainly does sound like three songs that could’ve been on Pass Yr Pain Along. (Read more)
12. Perennial – Perennial ‘65
Release date: April 4th Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co. Genre: Art punk, garage rock, post-hardcore, experimental Formats: Digital
Perennial ‘65 (named as a nod to the mid-career Beatles ‘65 compilation) gives the New England “modernist punk” trio a chance to try some things that they perhaps didn’t have time for in last year’s tight, twenty-one minute Art Historywhile still sounding very much like the Perennial we’ve all come to know and love. We get one brand-new original Perennial rock and roll song (the title track), a ferocious garage rock cover of The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night”, two remixes from Cody Votolato and Chris Walla, and a track that continues the band’s exploration into experimental noise and electronic terrain (“C is for Cubism”). (Read more)
11. The Croaks – Menagerie
Release date: July 11th Record label: Cretin Genre: Folk rock, prog-folk, traditional folk Formats: CD, digital
The Croaks are a prog-folk “wench rock” band from Boston who got on my radar with 2023’s Croakus Pocus; their follow-up release, Menagerie, is a bit shorter, but there’s still plenty of that increasingly-recognizable “Croaks sound” in these four songs and twelve minutes. Now a solid quartet, Anna Reidister, Haley Wood, Alli Fuchs, and Denver Nuckolls come armed with mandolins and violins through a brief whirlwind of frequently darkly humorous folk rock. All of Menagrie is informed by traditional folk music, but between the electric moments on “The Ballad of Tenderblood” and “Poppy” and an overall streamlined sound, The Croaks remain far removed from being “reenactors”.
10. Living Dream – Absolute Devotion
Release date: April 18th Record label: Inscrutable Genre: Psychedelic pop, jangle pop, lo-fi pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
Living Dream are keeping the dream of hazy, dreamy guitar pop alive in none other than Indianapolis, Indiana. While their peers in Good Flying Birds got a bit of attention this year, Living Dream seems determined to continue to fly under the radar with their psychedelic, murky take on jangle pop, as heard on the very good Absolute Devotion EP. It’s perhaps a little more accessible than their 2023 self-titled debut album–regardless, no amount of fog and disorientation can stop “Mist (Surrounds Me)” and “Lift a Feather” from being excellent jangle pop tunes.
9. Whitney’s Playland – Long Rehearsal
Release date: June 20th Record label: Meritorio/Dandy Boy Genre: Jangle pop, power pop, psych pop Formats: Vinyl, digital
One of my favorite debuts of 2023 was Sunset Sea Breezeby Whitney’s Playland, which delivered several records’ worth of lo-fi power pop hooks. Their first new music since then, Long Rehearsal, is only three songs in about ten minutes, but this still gives the San Francisco quartet plenty of time to revisit and reaffirm their ability to hit all the high points they did on their last album: jangly, bubblegum-flavored guitar pop, electric and fuzzy power pop, and rainy, dreary, dreamy indie pop. A “brief hiatus” and the doubling of their membership from the founding duo haven’t caused Whitney’s Playland to deviate from their established talents for even a moment. (Read more)
8. Dazy – Bad Penny
Release date: October 21st Record label: Lame-O Genre: Power pop, Madchester, alt-dance, fuzz pop, pop punk Formats: Digital
Dazy’s James Goodson releases music on his own timeline, largely in the realms of surprise-releases, EPs, and outtake collections, so I don’t take for granted Bad Penny, a seven-song, twenty-two minute EP that’s the fuzz pop act’s most substantial release in over two years. Every time Dazy puts out something that sounds like Dazy, I’m once again forced to marvel at how obvious Goodson makes mixing power pop, pop punk, Madchester/alt-dance, Britpop, and fuzzed-out garage rock together seem. Who knew there was a huge vacancy right at the midpoint of Green Day and Primal Scream? (Read more)
7. Sam Woodring – Mechanical Bull
Release date: October 17th Record label: Pretzle Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk Formats: CD, digital
From 2018 to 2024, the artist formerly known as Sam Goblin made a unique mixture of post-hardcore, folk rock, and guitar pop under the “Mister Goblin” moniker, including two ofmy favorite albums of this decade so far. Mechanical Bull is the first record Sam Woodring has ever put out under his own name (well, first and middle name, apparently), and it’s certainly the furthest he’s wandered yet from his punk/math rock/Exploding in Sound-core roots. It’s five stark songs featuring nothing but Woodring’s voice and acoustic guitar, but gentle folk playing aside, Woodring is still the same remarkable songwriter in his “solo troubadour” era. (Read more)
6. Idle Ray – Airport
Release date: November 7th Record label: Salinas Genre: Lo-fi pop, power pop, indie pop, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
It wasn’t enough for Idle Ray to put out a new album this year (June’s Even in the Spring, which appeared on Rosy Overdrive’s Top Albums of 2025); the Michigan trio had to get another four-song EP out before 2025 was over, too. The four songs on Airport were recorded for Even in the Spring but were deemed by the band to work better as a small unit; they’re louder and livelier than most of that album, and it’s probably no coincidence that these all feature Jayson Gerycz (Cloud Nothings, Knowso) on drums. From the explosive guitars that introduce “Eternal Fade” to the brisk tempos of “Allison, Walking Away Yet Again” and the title track, Idle Ray are riding a strong power pop wave on Airport.
5. Retirement Party – Nothing to Hear Without a Sound
Release date: August 28th Record label: Rat Poison Genre: Power pop, pop punk Formats: Digital
The “original lineup” of Chicago pop punk/power pop band Retirement Party may have broken up in 2022, but bandleader Avery Springer has kept the project alive with a four-song EP called Nothing to Hear Without a Sound. Springer plays everything other than drums on these songs, but that doesn’t stop Nothing to Hear Without a Sound from pursuing and acquiring a muscular, full band-evoking power pop sound. The combination of big melodic guitar lines and Springer’s earnest Midwestern vocals both help keep this iteration of Retirement Party among the best of punk/indie rock underground “guitar pop”. (Read more)
4. Outro – Broken Promise
Release date: February 14th Record label: Repeating Cloud Genre: Art rock, post-punk, garage rock, psychedelic rock, Paisley Underground, 90s indie rock Formats: Vinyl (“Villages” and “New Home” only), digital
Northampton, Massachusetts quartet Outro put out an album of Paisley Underground-reminiscent indie rock in 2023 called The Current, and the band don’t stray too far from that sound on their latest record and first for Repeating Cloud. In addition to classic college rock, the band mentions Steve Albini as a recording influence for Broken Promise, and while the five-songEP isn’t precisely a “noise rock” record, it does capture the same energy of Electrical Audio-associated bands who make or made unflappable, unbothered indie rock (with shimmering, swirling guitarplay, careening post-punk tempos, and a peaceful electricity). (Read more)
3. Pohgoh / Samuel S.C. – Split
Release date: October 8th Record label: New Granada/Waterslide Genre: Emo, punk rock, pop punk, 90s indie rock, twee-punk Formats: Vinyl, digital
State College, Pennsylvania-originating emo band Samuel S.C. released three EPs and singles in the mid-90s, reunited in 2021, and put out an LP featuring new and “reimagined” old material in 2023. Tampa, Florida’s Pohgoh also made music combining Superchunk-esque indie-punk-rock with emo in the mid-1990s, and they also reunited over the past decade, putting out new albums in 2018 and 2022. A four-song split EP makes plenty of sense for the two bands, and both of them brought very good material (some of their best yet!) to the table for this one. Bands hiding their best songs on stopgap between-album split singles? It feels like the mid-90s all over again. (Read more)
2. Chronophage – Musical Attack: Communist + Anarchist Friendship
Release date: July 11th Record label: Post Present Medium Genre: Power pop, garage rock Formats: Vinyl, digital
Austin group Chronophage are undersung pop merchants of the greater garage/punk/whatever underground, and it’s good to see them still going strong after their underrated 2022 self-titled album. Musical Attack: Communist + Anarchist Friendship is four songs of slapdash garage-y power pop, over too soon but not too soon for “We Must Be Evil” and “Anti-Miracle” (and the other two tracks, let’s be real) to sink their teeth in. Chronophage don’t have anything to prove to me in terms of guitar pop skill, but, nonetheless, I remain impressed that they’ve made their best work when backed into a corner (and by “corner”, I mean “the 7” format”).
1. Pacing – Songs
Release date: January 7th 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 put out a big, exciting sophomore album called PL*NET F*TNESS this year, but that’s not what their first new music on their new label of Asian Man Records ended up being. That “new music” was Songs. Songs is twelve minutes long. It’s a “mini-album” if it has to be called anything, or maybe it’s just “songs” (for the purposes of this list, it’s now an EP). 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. Maybe Songs was a hot dog-esque byproduct of the sessions for Pacing LP2, an album that did indeed live up to the high bar set here. It’s a throwaway release that’s too good to be a throwaway release, and instead just ends up being another reminder that McTigue is still one of the sharpest and most unique songwriters operating in the present. (Read more)
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