By Duane Davis, Supreme Arbiter of Taste
As is usual, 2025 has been a busy year for music makers. Luminate, the entertainment industry’s official counter of Everything All the Time, estimates that well over 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to streaming services every single day. That’s not a scene, that’s a flood. A biblical one. Forty days and forty nights of algorithmic rain, except instead of animals two by two it’s playlists called Late Night Chill Vibes Vol. 9 breeding in the dark.
And of course, in my self-appointed role as Supreme Arbiter of Taste for the Known Universe, I can assure you that I personally listened to and carefully evaluated every single one of those tracks. Yes, all of them. Even the ones by Rectal Smegma, Pissgrave, and Cock and Ball Torture: bands who sound exactly like their names and still somehow get booked before your band that you excitedly claim, “sounds like Pavement only heavier.”
I have stared into the abyss of Bandcamp Friday and the abyss stared back wearing corpse paint and a Bluetooth speaker.
This list is not a ranking, a canon, or a TED Talk about the Future of Sound™. It’s a field report from the listening trenches: the stuff that cut through the static, the noise, the dopamine sludge, the AI-generated wallpaper pretending to have feelings. These are the recordings that made my ears perk up, my spine straighten, or my coffee go cold because I forgot it existed while a riff, a voice, or a beat grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Hey. Pay attention.”
Some of this music is loud. Some of it’s not. Some of it sounds like it probably had some money behind it and some of it sounds like it was recorded inside a malfunctioning toaster during a thunderstorm. All of it earned its place here by refusing to dissolve into the content slurry. In a year where everything demanded to be heard, these were the sounds that stayed with me.
*****
WHAT I LISTENED TO IN 2025: A BAKER’S DOZEN
1. Blawan – SickElixir (XL Recordings)
A fungal techno fever dream: sweaty, mutating, maybe contagious. Blawan brews a potion that tastes like rust and kicks like a mule on ketamine. (Available at Wax Trax soon)
2. Wednesday – Bleeds (Dead Oceans)
This one howls like a wounded jukebox left out in a Carolina storm, coughing up static, blood, and country ghosts. Wednesday weaponizes tenderness until it cuts bone.
3. Geese – Getting Killed (Partisan Records)
A death-rattle dance party where every guitar riff sounds like it’s trying to mug you. Geese finally embrace their inner chaos gremlin and turn collapse into choreography.
4. Kilynn Lunsford – Promiscuous Genes (Feel It Records)
A rigorously constructed record that treats darkwave and synth-pop not as aesthetic poses but as diagnostic tools, probing how desire, identity, and power circulate through damaged systems. A darkwave confession from a future where bodies glitch and desire metastasizes. (Available at Wax Trax soon)
5. Ada Rook – 59 Nights (True Portal)
A cyberpunk exorcism where rage becomes data and beats behave like shrapnel. Ada Rook scorches the circuitry with feeling.
6. Ethel Cain – Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You (Daughter of Cain / Secretly)
A haunted American lullaby sung from the wrong side of the cornfield. Ethel Cain makes longing feel radioactive.
7. Sharp Pins – Balloon Balloon Balloon (K/Perennial Records)
Jittery, unhinged power pop that sounds like someone trapped a nervous breakdown inside a pinball machine. Sharp Pins never sit still long enough to apologize.
8. Rocket – R Is For Rocket (Transgressive / Canvasback)
Garage-pop sugar blown up with feedback and delinquent charm. Rocket writes breakup songs that sound like they’re breaking into your house. (Available at Wax Trax soon)
9. YHWH Nailgun – 45 Pounds (AD 93)
Industrial gospel for the end of the world, like a sermon written with a malfunctioning nail gun. Every track feels like repentance by blunt force. (Vinyl comes out Jan. 30, 2026)
10. They Are Gutting a Body of Water – Lotto (ATO Records)
A shoegaze depth charge exploding underwater, all pressure waves and dream-fragments dissolving into silt. TAGABOW make music that feels like drowning in a beautiful aquarium someone forgot to clean.
11. Aya – Hexed (Hyperdub)
Aya turns club music into a cursed dollhouse where every beat has teeth. It slithers, it giggles, it rewires your spine—witchcraft in 4D.
12. Lambrini Girls – Who Let The Dogs Out (City Slang)
Punk as a bar fight in a photo booth—fast, feral, snotty. These songs bite, scratch, and then hit you up for another drink.
13. Ekko Astral – Pink Balloons: Popped (Reissue w/ Extras) (Topshelf Records)
A glitter-smeared riot of queer punk adrenaline, now expanded like a balloon filled with fireworks instead of air. Ekko Astral turn every jagged hook into a confetti cannon aimed straight at the face of normalcy.
Thought it was over? Think again.
HONORABLE MENTION, 2025: ANOTHER BAKER’S DOZEN
1. Brutalismus 3000 – Goodbye Salo (Universal / NEO)
A gabber-electro goodbye kiss from a pair of Berlin cyborgs who definitely know where the bodies are buried.
2. Tropical Fuck Storm – Fairyland Codex (Fire Records)
The band continues their reign as the court jesters of apocalypse rock, juggling conspiracy, paranoia, and deranged genius. Every riff feels like reality glitching in real time.
3. Viagra Boys – viagr aboys (Shrimptech Enterprises / YEAR0001)
Swedish sleaze-punk as performance art: grotesque, absolutely feral. Imagine Iggy Pop locked in a sauna with a malfunctioning drum machine.
4. Fust – Big Ugly (Dear Life Records)
A beautifully shambling country-rock beast that wanders into your living room and refuses to leave. Fust turn awkward humanity into an art form.
5. HotWax – Hot Shock (Marathon Artists)
A scalding blast of teenage fury and glam-punk venom—like The Runaways mugging 2025. Every track stomps around demanding you fight it.
6. Cameron Winter – Heavy Metal (Partisan Records) (Not technically 2025 but I’m squeezing it in!)
Cameron warbles and wobbles his way through these songs like Bryan Ferry on ’ludes trying to explain Deleuze & Guattari’s Body Without Organs to his cat.
7. Kathryn Mohr – Waiting Room (The Flenser)
Slowcore carved from winter breath and disappearing light. Mohr turns silence into a weapon and melancholy into a luxury.
8. Florry – Sounds Like… (Dear Life Records)
Philly freak-country joy with enough twang to lasso the moon. Florry sound like they’re having the time of their lives, and the mess only makes it sweeter.
9. Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon (Third Man Records)
Shoegaze for people who think shoegaze should occasionally commit arson. Fuzzed-out heartbreak blooming like a bruise.
10. Caroline – Caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
Pastoral post-rock for people who’ve forgotten how to breathe normally. The band builds cathedrals out of sighs, raindrops, and unresolved feelings—and then leaves you alone inside.
11. Cleo Reed – Cuntry (Dirty Hit)
A neon-lit rodeo of identity, lust, and perfectly sharpened hooks. Cleo Reed storms the genre gates with a grin that says, “I dare you to look away.”
12. Ethel Cain – Perverts (Daughter of Cain / Secretly)
A gothic fever dream steeped in desire, shame, and Southern ruin. It’s the sound of a hymnal catching fire.
13. Hayley Williams – Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party (Atlantic)
A glitter-stained meltdown disguised as pop perfection. Hayley skewers the rituals of adulthood with a smile sharpened to a weapon. And it’s such a great album title!
That’s it for this year.
You’ve got to be kidding me with Geese on your list Duane. Everytime I hear them on 102.3, I want to gouge out my eardrums with a dull pencil. What am I missing?