Well well well, if it isn't my old blog. Sorry about the false start the other day, turns out I wasn't quite ready to bring this thing back full time. I did kick around changing formats and even got as far as discussing things with another person, and that was enough to derail me. But enough of the Jim Anchower routine, I have business to get to! It's time to look at 2025 releases and absolutely fail to rank them. Massive respect for all the writers out there who do produce a list, that shit seems really hard. No, I'm going to cop out, put some half-assed "awards" here, and mostly just write a little about the albums that have really stuck with me for this year.
This year, I added 229 releases to my library, although there are a few more that I am picking up from other year-end roundups, and those haven't made it in here. That's 5 days and 6 hours of music, and honestly, I'm absolutely forgetting about some great stuff in there. As always, the lesson is: I'm an idiot.
Almost Certainly The Album I Listened To The Most, Probably, And Also The Album Most In Dire Need of a Hug
It's the latest PUP album, Who Will Look After the Dogs?:
When I last wrote one of these roundups, in 2022, the latest (at the time) PUP album got an award. So I suppose I'm on the same cadence as those guys are. At any rate, they're five albums in, five bangers in the books, and they're high up on my list of favorite punk bands ever. If you haven't listened to them, this album is as good a place to start as any, and you'll understand why I say they're in dire need of a hug. Stefan Babcock's lyrics are so forlorn, so crushed by life that it reliably gets a little dusty when I'm listening. He's unflinching in recounting how everything in his life is his own fault. This is an album written in the aftermath of a terrible breakup, and it shows. PUP has a very fun mailing list where Babcock has written about the songs on this record, shared demos, and provided a lot of backstory, and it's helped my appreciation of the record. And reinforced wanting to give him a hug.
But beyond the pain everywhere, there are just some really great, catchy, interesting songs. As I say above, I've listened to this album a ton, and I'm very much not tired of it. I think this is probably their second best record, after Morbid Stuff, but it's close, and it might end up being my overall favorite. I haven't seen this record pop up on other people's lists, but it's so squarely to my tastes that I had to lead off with it.
Honorable Mentions: What does that even mean for this category? Well, there's a "probably" up there, and it's because I've listened to another record an awful lot and it's possible I've listened to it more. I'll say that I listen to things through Bandcamp, from my Plex, and from streaming, depending on where I'm at and what I'm doing, so it's basically impossible for me to know what I've actually listened to the most. Not that I care. Anyway! The other record I've spun an absolute ton is Highway To The End from Dark Thoughts:
I dunno, man, this record is basically perfect. Like, it breaks zero new ground, but it's thoroughly charming and it's just 18 minutes of pure fun. Is it basically a Ramones record? Yeah, sure. But it's a really, really good Ramones record. Three chords and a cloud of dust remains undefeated.
The Billy Woods Award
Another 2022 observation is that I awarded a billy woods release, Aethiopes, which I stand behind as a recommendation. Shit is really good. Well, here we are, and again, a high-profile billy woods release knocked everybody's socks off, and at this point, the hip-hop award in this thing is just going to be named after him. Anyway, GOLLIWOG has been written about in a zillion places, it rules:
What is there to say about it? It's a surreal horror journey, and there's nothing really like it, and he's the best out there right now.
Honorable Mentions: Armand Hammer is a duo of ELUCID and billy woods, and they put out a record in 2025 with the Alchemist, and yeah, Mercy also rocks:
I'm saying, the guy is in a league of his own.
The Baker's EP
This one goes out to my favorite album that's a little too beefy to be an EP in my head, but still doesn't feel like an LP. And, sure, people used to call these mini LPs in the past, but screw that. Anyway, there were quite a few of my favorite records that fell into this range (you could make an argument that that Dark Thoughts record qualifies), and getting a great twenty-ish minute experience from a record is really wonderful. My favorite from this year is Vermillion Pyre from Lucerne Hammer:
When I saw the name of this band, I knew I had to pick it up, what with appendix T (polearms) being burned into my brain. And it smokes - just pure, raw black metal. It's majestic and atmospheric, furious and forlorn. It's so good that I usually just listen to it twice in a row (thanks to the tracking on the Bandcamp release, where you get individual tracks followed by the whole thing as a single track, and I just usually let it play). I had never heard of this artist before, but I was really blown away. What a find.
Honorable mentions: Dans La Fournaise by Bombardment is 18 minutes of French hardcore mayhem. It just gallops the whole time, and it's a great brain cleanser. It also has the hilarious tag of "adult oriented d-beat", which is just incredible.
Clang Clang by Molly Horses is mostly noise rock, some post-punk DNA here, lots of bullhorn-ish vocals, there's something familiar about the presentation but I haven't put my finger on exactly what it sounds like. It sounds good! I like it! The mode of music criticism of "band + other band" is inevitable and useful, but I'm just going to let this one slide past. It sounds like Molly Horses. I'll be keeping a watch on this band for sure.
ZHVK by TDK is an actual EP, so it doesn't belong in this category, but I want to mention it somewhere. Do you want some Bulgarian noise rock? What if I told you it had horns? If you were me, you'd actually be salivating in a pathetic Pavlovian response to your favorite musical things being mashed together. The good news is that your programmed response would be entirely justified.
The Broken Bottle Trophy
I'm giving this one out for outstanding achievements in the field of noise rock. Ask me to define noise rock, and I will fail. I can name plenty of bands that I think define it, but honestly, there isn't always that much in common between them. It's just a matter of pointing at it and going yeah, that's noise rock. Anyway! It was a good year for it! It's always a good year for it, somehow.
Here's Hateful Abandon's Threat:
They don't list noise rock in the tags, and that's fair. But that's what it comes across as to me, and it's just ugly as hell. There's a category down below for metal, and yeah, that's also ugly. But there's something about this that's just nastier. Maybe it sounds more human? I dunno.
Honorable Mentions: Twenty years after ceasing to be a band, Mclusky are back and haven't missed a stitch:
Now, it's not like Andy Falkous hasn't been busy in the meantime, with all the stuff he's released with Future of the Left and Christian Fitness. Hell, Future of the Left featured Jack Egglestone on drums, and he's also a third of Mclusky. So, you know, there's some continuity here. But still! It sounds like a Mclusky album, and that's a great thing.
Is FACS noise rock? Given what I wrote above, about knowing it when I hear it, I think the answer is...no, not really. It's more post-punk? At least this record. Anyway, it's really good:
The Golden Stank Face
I mentioned above that I love horns. Put horns in your music and I'm there. Every additional horn moves me down the Vince McMahon faces scale. You get an ensemble in there and I'm full-on laser eyes. And friends, my favorite truly horny record this year was easily the most recent from Polyrhythmics, Life From Below:
What can I say about this record? It's a real jump forward to my ears. I've always liked the band, but they really nailed it here. The first time I put it on, the faces I pulled during "Chophouse" were just obscene. While I think I listened to the PUP record more, that's more a consequence of release date, and I suspect going forward from now, this record is going to see more time. What a spin.
Honorable Mention: As with Polyrhythmics, I have liked the previous Sorcerers records, but their release this year is a serious banger:
The say this is Ethio-inspired jazz, and sure man. All I know is that I make a stupid face when I listen to it. I put it on just now and immediately started frowning and bobbing my head. It's magic.
Josh, Turn That Shit Off!
My usual tastes in obnoxious metal run either to crazily dissonant unpredictable nonsense or nuts-and-bolts recorded-in-a-basement gutter pounding. A lot of the stuff in-between leaves me cold. While I want ambition and inventiveness, I mostly want that deployed in the service of confusing me, rather than anything else. That said, there are a couple records from this year that are hard to separate in my head and are similar in being ambitious, interesting, and also surprisingly musical. In other words, not my usual tastes. The chalk pick among a lot of writers for best metal record this year is Convalescence Agonies from Weeping Sores, and the people are right:
Featuring Doug Moore and Steve Schwegler from Pyrrhon, who would have appeared in this blog multiple times over the years if I wrote them with any consistency, the record is hard to describe. If you have any interest in metal, give this a try - it's Moore's meditation on recovering from a serious injury, one that left him unable to play guitar, and it's really something special.
The other record, which I'll have as a joint-winner in this category, is РЛБ30011922 from 夢遊病者 (sleepwalker):
If it's heard to describe the previous record, I really can't do this thing justice. Is it really that metal? Yeah? It's also post-rock? And kind of psychedelic at times, and there's some prog there, and...look, it's really good. Honestly, probably should go in a different category, but whatever, it's here now.
Honorable Mentions: Yellow Eyes' Confusion Gate is probably their best record:
Fuck yeah, black metal. It's a genre where 95% of it puts me to sleep or makes me roll my eyes, but when it hits, man, nothing like it.
And, on the knuckle-dragging side of the ledger, I really loved Glorious Depravity's Death Never Sleeps:
Hey, it's Doug Moore again! Anyway, just pummeling death metal, a bit of thrash, it's good for your soul (?), or something.
The Citric Dummies Award for Excellence In Album Names
...goes to the Citric Dummies for Split with Turnstile:
The record rips, too.
The Out of Nowhere Award
See/saw was one of my favorite places to find music this year, and I found a bunch of records that I really loved through it. A couple, though, really stuck with me through the year and had me coming back over and over. Most notably, the self-titled debut album from the Boojums:
Hailing from Port Hawksbury, Nova Scotia, they play music that immediately sounds familiar. There's a lot of midwestern punk here, some Hold Steady, some Replacements, just a whole bunch of influences going past. And, impressively, they sound like several bands across the length of the record. But despite all that familiarity, it also manages to sound fresh. It's just a joy to listen to, the sort of record that I only stumble across occasionally that I know is going to be part of my rotation for years and years.
Honorable Mention: Greg, the first record from Visual Learner:
Visual Learner are from the midwest, from Minneapolis, but to my ears they sound more like California. Specifically, I listen to them and always think about Samiam. And maybe a little Farside. But again, as with the Boojums, it transcends just being comfort food by being catchy as hell. And I can say, it's held up plenty to repeat listening. Another record that's going to stick with me for a long time.
There are absolutely albums I should be mentioning here, and I'm sure that some of the records that I'm picking up from year-end lists should end up here also. But I also have to finish this thing and get it out. And I see I wrote the same thing last time. I am, if nothing else, consistent.