The 100 Best Albums of 2025
…According to some guy in Chicago. Plus, every album and more I recommended in No Expectations this year.
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Thanks for being here. This is the last No Expectations of the year. With the massive Best of 2025 list finally published below, I’m taking a needed break to relax and recharge. These month-long vacations allow me to chill out a bit. I can catch up on movies, older albums, and reading without feeling like I need to blog about it every Thursday. Writing this newsletter is still my favorite thing to do, but it’s never a bad idea to cash in on time off during a slow month. I’ll be on hiatus until mid-January, but I’ve featured 215 albums in this post—100 blurbed and, at the bottom of this post, another 115 that made my personal longlist of favorites. Even the most diligent subscriber likely hasn’t heard it all, so I hope you’ll have more than enough to check out over the holidays.
Here’s the spiel for new subscribers: Each week, you get a wildcard main essay (often new album recommendations), a 15-song playlist, as well as updates on what I’m listening to, watching, and reading. Sometimes you’ll get an interview with an artist I love, and other times it’ll be a deep dive into one band’s discography or 7,000 words on the Grateful Dead. Since I’m a Chicago-based writer, this newsletter is very Midwest-focused. So, if you live in this city too, you’ll also receive a curated roundup of upcoming local shows to check out at the bottom of every regular newsletter.
Here’s where I politely ask for money: I write this thing in my spare time after work. It’s unpaywalled and remains that way due to the generosity of my readers. I am not in the business of gatekeeping. If you have the means and like what you read, I’d encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription. If your budget is tight, please don’t pay for this. Telling a friend that you heard about a band here is just as good. It’s still $5 a month—the cost of one Old Style plus tip at Rainbo Club. Every bit helps, keeps this project going, and allows it to stay paywall-free. It’s rough out there, so it means the world you’re reading and supporting this writing project.
The 100 Best Albums of 2025
Ever since I started No Expectations in 2022, I’ve usually approached compiling Best Of roundups with a “first thought, best thought” mindset. I try not to overthink it because after all, it’s just a list. Going with your gut keeps you from splitting hairs, but things inevitably fall through the cracks, and you’ll forget about some major favorites. This year, I decided to keep a running tally of every new album I loved. It included the 170+ LPs I recommended in the newsletter this year, alongside several dozen I didn’t have time to write about. Over the past month and a half, I revisited everything, which admittedly was a little nutty but super rewarding. I remembered why I dug each full-length I covered over 2025, and this unhinged listening experiment added some welcome surprises to the Top 100 you’ll read below. (While there are about a dozen new blurbs, most have been copied, pasted, and tweaked from older newsletters this year.)
There are a few ways to look at list season. It’s great for consensus-building, where publications like Pitchfork, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, and Paste compile albums by a committee of staffers and critics to make a record of what mattered in music in 2025. That’s cool, but I’m always more interested in how these roundups serve as a vehicle for discovery. No Expectations is just me—a writer in Chicago who’s worked as a music journalist for places like VICE, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Tribune, and others since 2012. It’s really just a reflection of one 34-year-old dude’s taste. This blog is focused on independent, under-the-radar artists. Instead of covering everything a mainstream publication would, I started this writing project to champion new and lesser-known musicians for listeners sick of algorithmic suggestions and seeing the same acts get the dwindling amount of available press. If you don’t recognize a lot of names featured, that’s the point. You should think of this post as an opportunity to find your new favorite band, rather than having your own opinions validated.
I normally publish a little later than other outlets because every year, there’s an album released in December that shoots up my year-end rankings. If you’re wondering whether Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal features, it’s not here because I included it in my Best Of 2024 roundup. Had I sent out this list a week or two earlier, I would’ve missed the phenomenal Dove Ellis debut and a handful of others listed throughout. No Expectations survives due to the generosity of its paid subscribers, not from chasing clicks, so I’m grateful I can leisurely compile these albums at my own pace. I think it’s better this way. Also, once you make your way to the bottom of the post, you’ll find playlists compiling everything featured alongside 115 other excellent LPs that made my longlist for EOY consideration. If your favorite LP still isn’t on there, I probably either haven’t heard it, or it just isn’t very good. If, after trawling through all 215 full-lengths here, you still feel compelled to say, “No Panda Bear?” I’ll pray for you.
2025 was a weird year. With so much uncertainty, I tried to grasp onto what reminded me of my own humanity. I spent less time online, read more books, and made a better effort to nurture my friendships. Reading headlines like “AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads” and “A third of daily music uploads are AI-generated and 97% of people can’t tell the difference,” I’ve realized that loving independent, human-made music is not just a hobby but a necessary corrective to dehumanizing, disruptive, and dangerous technology. Today, you’re incentivized to stay home, prioritize convenience over curiosity, and treat art as an ephemeral background vibe instead of an endlessly rewarding medium that requires effort and openness. It’s good to rebel against this impulse, even when it’s something as small as supporting a local music community.
This newsletter has been a bright spot thanks to the kind and thoughtful people who read it. Every time someone told me they found a band they loved, bought a record, or said something nice to me about No Expectations at a show, it made me realize I might be on the right track with this writing project. While I didn’t post every week on No Expectations this year, I did cover more music than ever. And yes, a Top 100 is a bit ridiculous, but I think it’s a comprehensive listening diary of my year, if not a solid introduction to new subscribers on what to expect from this blog in 2026. I hope the albums below, which were all made by hardworking and talented artists, compel you to buy a physical LP, some merch, and a ticket to one of their shows. Thanks for everything.
Ale Hop, Titi Bakorta
Mapambazuko
The Kampala, Uganda-based record label Nyege Nyege Tapes has consistently released some of the most thrilling and cutting-edge music that I always return to when I get sick of indie rock. Its electronic, danceable, and experimental catalog fuses genres and borders with equal ebullience. Mapambazuko is the product of Peruvian electronic musician Alejandra Cárdenas (Ale Hop) and Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta collaborating for a blitzing and unpredictable collection of instrumental tunes that persuasively blends their sensibilities. Its six originals are indispensable doses of absorbing rhythms and electronic twists—the three remixes aren’t as exciting, but your mileage may vary.
Arbor Labor Union
Out to Pasture
With circuitous and skittering riffs, easygoing ambling melodies, and jams that feel casual yet colossal, Georgia’s Arbor Labor Union are premier purveyors of heady guitar rock. Out to Pasture is the Bandcamp-only follow-up to their 2023 standout LP Yonder, and it excels in winding, left-field grooves and crunchy chords. Swirling guitarmonies pockmark “Hidden in a Drop of Dew,” while the laid-back psychedelia of “Clear View” is nearly vertigo-inducing. Released via Ryan Davis’ excellent Sophomore Lounge label, this seven-song effort could be a “mini album” or an “EP,” but whatever you want to call it, it’s a streamlined and sublime dose of Southern-tinged, Dead-indebted rock music.
Awning
Awning
Truth Club’s Running From the Chase was one of my favorite albums of 2023: a nervy and knotty dose of indie rock that excelled on tense arrangements and a commanding performance from a charismatic frontman. Few albums since have scratched the same itch until Awning’s self-titled debut. Where Truth Club is from North Carolina, this band hails from across the world in Wellington, New Zealand. Led by musician and visual artist Christian Dimick, his band conjures up eight tracks of efficient, punchy, and airtight songwriting. While less brooding and heavy than Running From the Chase, Awning still exudes intensity. Take Dimick’s mesmerizing delivery on “Moth & Fly,” which whips from in-your-face volume to a near-imperceptible whisper, or the goosebump-inducing crescendo on “The Gun.” Though there are no massive swings, Awning’s no-frills approach makes every song take flight.
Ben Hackett
Songs for Sleeping Dogs
This Athens, Georgia-based musician has collaborated with folk-rock acts like Rose Hotel and more. His debut solo full-length, Songs for Sleeping Dogs, is full of organic and intentional ambient music. He creates a haunting and sublime world across 12 instrumental compositions and nearly an hour runtime. There’s an invigorating arc to the LP’s sequencing: songs undulate, simmer, and patiently build from the airy opener “Between Sleep,” the dreamy “18pp,” and the jazzy, winding “Loose Changes 2.” It’s uniformly beautiful and is so clearly made by someone who lives and breathes for the genre.
Big Thief
Double Infinity
Since their 2016 debut, Masterpiece, folk rockers Big Thief have yet to put out a less-than-great album. Double Infinity, the band’s sixth album, is their breeziest, loosest, and most cosmic yet. Within minutes of a first listen, you’ll get chills thanks to Adrianne Lenker’s humanistic, awe-inspiring lyrics. On opener “Incomprehensible,” she sings, “My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too / Wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew / And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue / How can beauty that is livin’ be anything but true?” Much has been made of the fact that this album is their first without founding bassist Max Oleartchik, who left the group in 2024. For a band that’s thrived on palpable chemistry, it’s a blow, but they make do with a rotating cast of guest musicians. The most notable addition is ambient maestro Laraaji, who lends idyllic textures throughout and a guest feature on the life-affirming highlight “Grandmother.” Relationships change, bands evolve, and sometimes a great record that may not reach an artist’s previous stratospheric height is still a great record.
Billie Marten
Dog Eared
I’ve been hearing about Billie Marten for about a decade, which is wild because she’s only 26. Though I enjoyed the U.K. singer-songwriter’s earlier solo acoustic records, her latest and fifth LP, Dog Eared, is a full-band effort that’s most firmly in my wheelhouse. But even if I hated music that sounds like this, I would still be moved by the undeniable craft and artistry displayed in these 10 songs. This is commanding, astounding, and confident writing: no detail is excessive, everything is considered, and any song could be the best one on her peers’ records. With winsome and warm melodies, Marten’s voice is always welcoming and rich, but it’s her earthy arrangements that really stand out. The twangy “Swing” is what hooked me, but the sparkling opener “Feeling,” the moody “Goodnight Moon,” and the smoky “No Sudden Changes” are what kept me revisiting this record for months.
Bleary Eyed
Easy
No contemporary shoegaze band has felt more playful, inventive, and vital than Philadelphia’s Bleary Eyed. Equally adept at glitchy and volatile studio experimentation as well as pleasant pop songwriting, their latest album, Easy, is the most exciting thing the genre has to offer in 2025. Pops of squiggly and wailing synth envelop songs like the explosive “Susan,” while “Special” is turbocharged by a booming guitar riff. For all the gleeful and skittish studio flourishes that make these songs singular, it never overloads the palate with excessive randomness. Just listen to how flashes of samples, tottering guitars, and sparkling synths slowly coalesce into pop perfection on a song like “Jersey Shore.” With so many other bands content to retread what bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine accomplished before they were born, it’s refreshing to hear something so wholly original.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy
The Purple Bird
For the past 32 years, Kentucky songwriter Will Oldham has amassed a staggering catalog exploring the transcendent fringes of American folk traditions. Whether he’s performing under his own name, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, or Palace Music, it’s all great. The Purple Bird is this 30th studio LP and finds the mercurial Oldham at his most approachable and amiable. Written and recorded with a murderer’s row of Nashville session veterans, he sings timeless, relaxed, and majestic originals over an Americana canvas. On songs like “Downstream,” he gets a duet assist from country icon John Anderson, but elsewhere, it’s Oldham’s warbling croon and grizzled, weathered, and still optimistic lyrics that take center stage. Standout “Our Home” sums up his mindset decades into his astounding career, with lines like “You’re only as good as the people you know / Harvest the honey and string up the beans / That’s how we make it our home.” His discography is vast and intimidating, but there are worse places to dive in than this one.
Brown Horse
All The Right Weaknesses
Brown Horse are from Norwich, England, but that didn’t stop them from making an unequivocally awesome country-rock record. It’s urgent, galvanizing, and chock-full of memorable hooks. On All The Right Weaknesses, the wildly collaborative sextet (five out of its six members penned songs on the LP) combines energetic and piercing guitars with blissful pedal steel and earnest vocals from Patrick Turner and Phoebe Troup. It’s a winning formula that the band calls “slacker twang.” Across the 11 songs here, which elicit comparisons to Greg Freeman, Wednesday, and Neil Young. Despite their UK roots, there’s no put-upon affectation or cowboy cosplay—just undeniable and raw songs played with enthusiasm and an unselfconscious love for American musical traditions. “Dog Rose” is a masterclass in releasing tension with a cathartic guitar solo, while “Corduroy Couch” splits the difference between lyrical vulnerability and pop infectiousness. There’s not a single dud on the record. Once they tour stateside, I’ll be the first to buy a ticket to their Chicago show.
The Bug Club
Very Human Features
Welsh duo the Bug Club have been churning out raucous and hook-laden oddball rock tunes at a breathless pace over the past few years. Each release has combined deceptively simple pop melodies with straight-out-of-the-garage ramshackle energy (I included their 47-track LP Rare Birds: Hour of Songs in the 2023 No Expectations best-of list and dug their 2024 Sub Pop debut, On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System). Their latest, Very Human Features, finds the group streamlining what makes them such a charming and fascinating band: the choruses are catchier, their jokes are funnier without relying on filler skits, and their songs are tightly wound and well-constructed. The magic of this band is how, underneath the facade of low-stakes slacker-pop, they’re songwriting savants who can write tunes so infectious they burrow into your consciousness. Just take the wistful “Jealous Boy,” the self-lacerating humor of “Full Grown Man,” or the jubilant vocal interplay between Sam Willmett and Tilly Harris, and you’ll find artists jumping leaps and bounds over their peers without seeming to try hard at all.
Cash Langdon
Dogs
If you like your rock music loud and relentlessly catchy, there’s no better place to look than Dogs, the new LP from Birmingham, Alabama’s Cash Langdon. Here, he channels the anthemic choruses of Summerteeth-era Wilco, the frantic energy of Ty Segall, and the melodic prowess of the late Adam Schlesinger across 10 explosive earworms. I’ve included a few of the singles in No Expectations playlists like the crunchy “Magic Again” and the countrified “Lilac Whiskey Nose,” and the rest of the LP matches those tunes’ high caliber. It’s just a damn good rock record. I’d also recommend his other project, Caution, which just put out a stellar album called Peripheral Vision.
CMAT
EURO-COUNTRY
Just when you thought the cross-pollination of country textures into marquee pop music was getting stale, Ireland’s Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson releases an unequestionable exception to the played-out trend. EURO-COUNTRY is Thompson’s third album as CMAT and the best introduction to her witty, sardonic, and charming lyrical prowess yet. Her humor stands out on songs like the simmering and standoffish “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station,” and the gorgeous “Iceberg,” which playfully takes Titanic to task with lines like, “I really think Rose could’ve made room on that floating door.” Her authentic and unapologetic personality is only matched by her superlative knack for crafting arena-filling choruses. A deserved pop breakthrough.
The Convenience
Like Cartoon Vampires
Over the past five years, I’ve been writing about a cluster of New Orleans indie rock bands like Lawn and Video Age. It’s a cool little scene: the former expertly melds jangle-pop and post-punk while the latter incorporates disco, yacht rock, and psychedelia into sleek and clever pop-rock tunes. The Convenience, the duo of Nick Corson and Duncan Troast, are both in Video Age, while Corson also plays in Lawn. On Like Cartoon Vampires, the band’s sophomore effort, they incorporate the interlocking guitars of Wire, the strutting swagger of Spoon, and the menacing, off-kilter energy of the Fall. The LP opens up on a tear with three unassailable rippers in the alt-rock anthem “I Got Exactly What I Wanted,” the screeching, unpredictable guitar squalls in “Dub Vultures,” and how “Target Offer” dissolves into an explosive crescendo. This trio is everything I love about indie rock: surprising, gripping, and smart. From there, the record gets weirder but no less exciting. There’s shuffling twang on “Western Pepsi Cola Town” and uneasy, dirgelike bassline on “Pray’r” and a slow-burning, 10-plus minute closer in “Fake the Feeling.” I could not have been more stoked to see Friends of the Substack Stereogum give this one Album of the Week: Chris DeVille’s review is great.
Credit Electric
Salvation
After three years of running this newsletter, it’s now at the point that if I check out a recommendation from a longtime reader, chances are we’ll totally agree. This happened when Friend of the Newsletter Nate sent a note about Los Angeles band Credit Electric, writing, “it’s driving me a little crazy that they aren’t getting any attention lol. They’re like ethereal psychedelic alt-country? And have slide guitar and sax.” What especially felt like kismet was that I had just listened to Salvation, the latest LP from Credit Electric, and already planned on writing about it. Nate’s pitch is as good as I could muster, but after absorbing the full-length, I’m so happy to hear bands taking more loungy, amorphously ambient approaches to indie rock. This is an album that you can live in, and I’d recommend it for fans of both the Blue Nile and Greg Freeman. “STUPID” picks up the pace with moody jangle while “WHAT I HAVE IS MAKE BELIEVE” boasts ample twang, but each song is mesmeric, gloomy, and electric.
Cusp
What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back
There’s a great newfound tradition of bands that combine anthemic, ‘90s-inspired rock with emo and twang who found their footing in Chicago. Like Madison, Wisconsin’s Slow Pulp and Indiana’s Ratboys, who both are now essential pillars of this city’s music communities, Rochester, New York’s Cusp have already made waves since moving here a few years ago. 2023’s You Can Do It All was a newsletter favorite that year, and when they followed it up with an EP last year, the opening atmospheric track “The Alternative” was one of my most-revisited songs of 2024. Now with an expanded and solidified lineup, their latest full-length, What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back, is their most confident and fully-fledged release yet. Highlights like “Oh Man” are peppered with squiggly synths and sugary backing vocals, while “The Upper Hand” detours into golden country thanks to palatial pedal steel from Chicago’s Red PK. Singer Jen Bender has a fondness for effortless melodies that float over arrangements that span indie rock’s multiple flavors. On “In a Box,” over interlocking guitars and a propulsive rhythm, Bender claustrophobically sings, “With all of the love on the planet / You’d have me sit in a box / Lock it up tightly, just me and my thoughts / So safe and comfortable, gnawing my nails off.“ Throughout, lyrics of anxiety, insecurity, and yearning are imbued with grace, wit, and heart. This LP will give you a new Chicago band to adore.
cutouts
Snakeskin
Alex MacKay is the bassist for the Brooklyn synth-pop trio Nation of Language, but this year, he released a debut solo album as cutouts called Snakeskin. It’s a kinetic and propulsive full-length, boasting a sharper edge and heavier bounce than his main project. From the New Order-esque bassline that propels “Paw of the Monkey” and the pummeling low end of “Firstborn,” there are so many menacing club-ready grooves here. Over the past year, I’ve gravitated more to electronic music than I usually do, but this splits the difference between that and indie rock. If you’re looking for something more like Harry Nilsson and David Bowie, start with the highlight “Bloodsucker.” Want psych-rock? Go for “Zeke.” The whole thing’s great, though.
Dead Gowns
It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow
One of the best albums of 2025 has been tinkered with since it was first recorded in 2020. That’s a long time to work on a record. I can’t claim to know what industry bullshit, album cycle purgatory, or exercises in patience Maine songwriter Geneviève Beaudoin had to endure before putting out her debut as Dead Gowns, but I’m so happy it’s out. Not since Angel Olsen’s 2014 Burn Your Fire No Witness has an indie rock voice floored me so palpably. While both LPs tread similar sonic territory, It’s Summer, I Love You… is much more animated and energetic. Beaudoin’s croon can oscillate from a warble to a coo and a violent scream, but her deft and observant songwriting anchors each track. If this is what she was capable of a half-decade ago, it’s bewildering to imagine the high-caliber material she must have ready to go now.
Dove Ellis
Blizzard
From Van Morrison to Bono, Glen Hansard to Damien Rice and Mic Christopher, Ireland is responsible for producing some of the most remarkable, impassioned, and expressive male vocalists in rock and folk music. Dove Ellis, the Manchester-based singer who just released his breathtaking debut album Blizzard, might have the most dynamic and impressive voice of any talent to burst on the scene in 2025. Beyond his Emerald Isle comrades mentioned above, you’ll undoubtedly hear shades of Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke. What makes Ellis so compelling is how he draws from a well of 2000s indie (Beirut, Grizzly Bear, and Fleet Foxes), imbuing the material with his virtuosic range as well as his poignant and haunting lyrics. On “Jaundice,” he transforms a peppy Irish jig into feverish emotional intensity, singing, “Yeah, threw my bottle in the bush on the night of thе noose / In a flash, I was ablaze, like a kitе on the moon.” His delivery throughout the LP suggests palpable, nearly Biblical stakes in these tunes like “To The Sandles,” where he does his best Astral Weeks impression, wailing, “So take the words of your tragic fight / And dance them down to that new club / All the feet going in and out and in and out and in and out.” Released the first week of December, Ellis has crafted such a luxurious and elegant collection that I expect it to have a similar life in 2026 as Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal had in 2025.
Dutch Interior
Moneyball
Los Angeles sextet Dutch Interior inserts golden hour twang into angsty, brooding indie rock with a freewheeling collaborative approach. On Moneyball, the band’s third album, five of the group’s six members share lead vocal and lyrical duties throughout the tracklist. “We bring songs in, and when they’re released to the band, it’s no longer your baby: It’s the band’s,” says guitarist Jack Nugent, who sings on and wrote the ghostly ramshackle folk tune “Christ on the Mast,” in an interview with Paste. For all the different singers and distinct sensibilities, this is a surprisingly cohesive full-length that can oscillate between sunny to spooky songs while never losing what the band calls its “Freak Americana” heart. The soft fingerpicking of “Sweet Time,” the vigorous countrygaze of “Fourth Street,” and the shuffling percussion anchoring single “Sandcastle Molds” all make their case as standouts.
Echolalia
Echolalia
Echolalia is a group of Nashville musicians who decamped to a studio in an ancient abbey on the U.K.’s Isle of Wight to record a wonderfully collective and exploratory album. “[Band founder] Jordan [Lehring] had this idea - the four songwriters would have three songs, and we’d work together to make a record of it,” said Echolalia member Spencer Cullum (Rich Ruth, Miranda Lambert, Shrunken Elvis) in the press release. Songwriters Lehring, alongside Cullum, Andrew Combs, and Dominic Billett, all provide eclectic but harmonious songs that make Echolalia a sleeper album of the year contender. There are shades of Radiohead-inspired bombast, Nilsson pop-psychedelia, woozy Americana, and boisterous pub rock across these 12 tracks, and there’s not a dull moment throughout.
Eiko Ishibashi
Antigone
Over the past few years, the Japanese polymath Eiko Ishibashi has made mesmerizing and exquisite film soundtracks with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi in Drive My Car and Evil Does Not Exist. Antigone is her first pop-oriented LP since 2018’s The Dream My Bones Dream, and while it’s a song-based release, it’s just as captivating as her cinematic score work. Here, she enlists a band of her partner Jim O’Rourke on Bass VI and synths, drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, bassist Marty Holoubek, accordionist Kalle Moberg, vocalist ermhoi on backing vocals, and percussionist Joe Talia. Samples, strings, and glitchy electronics weave in and out of these simultaneously stunning and chilly tunes, which often deal with present-day dystopias and digital malaise. “Trial” boasts an uplifting groove while the eight-minute penultimate track “The Model” earns its runtime with an immersive arrangement and a warped, unsettling voiceover. This is the platonic ideal of a 2025 headphones record.
Eliza Niemi
Progress Bakery
When Eliza Niemi started writing her sophomore album, she was subletting an apartment down the street from a cafe called Progress Bakery. The sign outside was half-fallen off, reading as ‘Gress Bakery,’ which delighted the Toronto songwriter and cellist so much she named the LP after it. Over 15 tracks that cover a lean 35 minutes, Niemi packs in wry jokes, meticulously detailed lyrical descriptions (“Put on my Tampax-pearl-blue shirt (iridescent),” she sings on “DM BF”), and relaxed yet abundant arrangements. While there are standout songs like the groovy and patient “Dusty” as well as the acoustic opener “Do U FM?,” this is a transportive LP that’s best experienced as a whole. It’s remarkably eclectic: there are cello-led interludes like “PM Basement,” and DIY-punk detours like “Wildcat.” Few new songwriters are as clever and full of heart as Niemi, who on Progress Bakery captures the feeling of thinking up something profound and funny over a morning coffee.
Far Caspian
Autofiction
I’ve long loved how Leeds-based, Irish songwriter Joel Johnston’s vivid production style merges bouncy and heavenly electronic textures with shimmering indie rock, especially on his 2023 LP The Last Remaining Light. This year’s follow-up, Autofiction, is 11 songs of hazy, intimate, and sprawling indie rock that shows off Johnston’s keen ear as a producer as well as his penchant for writing a transportive and introspective song. His palette is effervescent, full of sparkling guitars, enveloping synths, and layered parts that eventually morph into gauzy bliss. “Lough” is a langourous stunner, “Here Is Now” enters shoegaze-indebted hypnotism, and “Whim” excels in unbridled jangle. This is a record to chew on and find a flourish in an arrangement that’ll live with you for weeks.
Fib
Heavy Lifting
Philly via Portland band Fib’s erratic and ecstatic guitar rock never ends up quite where you expect it. Heavy Lifting is a refreshing and unrelenting thrill, showcasing the four-piece’s inventive and playful arrangements. Guitars zag and zig, songs expand and dissolve, withstanding whatever complex time changes and chaotic shifts the band throws at them. From the mesmerizing clang of “Right Out the Window” to the kinetic post-punk of “Dotted Line” and the squealing guitarmonies of “PS,” there’s a lot to love here. If you ever hear someone complain that indie rock is out of ideas, show them this record.
Flock of Dimes
The Life You Save
Jenn Wasner’s music has been a regular presence in my life for the past 15 years. I loved Wye Oak’s The Knot in college, and when the A.V. Club made its follow-up Civilian the site’s Best Album of 2011, it made me dream of writing for that publication. (Funnily enough, my first-ever byline was a three-sentence news item in 2012 for the A.V. Club about a new song from her solo project, Flock of Dimes). The Life You Save is Wasner’s first record under the moniker since 2021 (she’s been a guitarist and touring member of Bon Iver for the past six years), and it’s by far her most luxuriant release yet. Self-produced with an assist from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn, the whole thing is jaw-dropping, from the romantic Americana arrangement of “Theo” to the enveloping drone anchoring the cathartic “The Enemy.” The pastoral penultimate track “River In My Arms” showcases Wasner’s powerful, soothing voice as she sings, “And I can’t tell you it’s alright / But it’s alright with me / I can only hold you / Like a tree holds to its leaves.” This is a record that proves why Wasner’s longevity is not only earned but essential.
Florry
Sounds Like…
I like bands that feel like bands, where the unit is greater than the sum of its parts. Where every member feels distinct, and there’s no obvious star. Watching Florry perform last year at Hideout crystallized this observation: each musician has an exuberant and unmistakable personality, but it somehow all coheres into something electric in any given show. The Burlington and Philadelphia-based band captures this lightning in a bottle on their sophomore effort, Sounds Like…, which is a spirited collection of rambunctious, barroom twang. It opens with a torpedo-like intensity with “First it was a movie, then it was a book.” It teems with guitarmonies, kinetic energy, and frontwoman Francie Medosch yelping, “Well, last night I watched a movie / movie made me sad / ‘cause I saw myself in everyone / how’d they make a movie like that?” While Florry thrive on raucousness, Sounds Like… is chock-full of understated moments of beauty and bliss, too. “Sexy” is slurry while “Big Something” is plucky and plaintive. While I know Medosch is a fan of Bob Dylan, you can really hear the Rolling Thunder Revue spark exude throughout this full-length.
Folk Bitch Trio
Now Would Be a Good Time
I’m not sure why singer-songwriters from Australia are so adept at writing gorgeous melodies, but artists like Julia Jacklin, Maple Glider, and Stella Donnelly are masters at this. So too are Melbourne’s Folk Bitch Trio, who blend jaw-dropping harmonies and flawless hooks into their debut album Now Would Be a Good Time. Their songs are searching, with perceptive and evocative lyrics peppering each of the 10 songs here. The real star is he palpable chemistry between musicians Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington, and Heide Peverelle. You’ll pick up on this unbelievable alchemy within the first few seconds of opener “God’s a Different Sword.” Elsewhere, “Sarah” boasts an intro that hits like the warmest blanket, while the tunefulness exuding from “Cathode Ray” is near-overwhelming. If you like your folk music goosebump-inducing, Now Would Be a Good Time to get on board the FBT train.
Foxwarren
2
While I consider Andy Shauf’s The Party and The Neon Skyline as two of the finest LPs of the past decade, the one from his catalog that I’ve returned to most regularly is Foxwarren’s self-titled debut from 2018. That was Shauf’s early band, formed years before his solo efforts with childhood friends. Where his songwriting under his name had been intricate, interconnected, and tightly packed, these songs felt loose, spacious, and comfortable. Where both projects are unassailably stellar, this band always felt more digestible and sunny. Foxwarren’s follow-up, 2, is a radical reinvention of the live-on-the-floor palette they mined for their first one. Here, thanks to remote sessions, warped musical ideas, and deconstructing their own process, a multitude of samples pepper the songs. It’s glitchy, occasionally unmooring, but always fascinating. It’s somehow as warmhearted and breezy as their first one, too. When you listen to a songwriter as perfectionist as Shauf, it’s a blast to hear him clearly have so much fun on record.
Friendship
Caveman Wakes Up
Friendship have been a band for over a decade. Named after a town in Maine (three of its members grew up in the state), the now-Philly-based outfit has thrived on kindhearted indie rock anchored by the evocative lyricism and warbling baritone of singer Dan Wriggins. With their fifth full-length, Caveman Wakes Up, they’ve bested themselves. It’s 11 songs of understated catharsis, wry humor, and devastating one-liners. While every single is excellent, some of the true standouts come with album cuts, like the thunderous clang of a guitar riff that drives “Tree of Heaven,” and the vulnerable “Love Vape.” The tender “Betty Ford” is the best of the bunch, though. Sure, it opens with a “Mission in the Rain” Jerry Garcia reference, but Wriggins sings a line that’s stuck with me more than anything else this year: “I have been everyone / I’ve been so alone.”
Geese
Getting Killed
New York’s Geese thrive on viscerally subverting expectations to the point where your conception of what a rock group can be is constantly recalibrating. Like its predecessors in the band’s catalog, Getting Killed opens with a disorienting and potent left turn. “Trinidad” is undergirded by a swaggering blues riff and frontman Cameron Winter’s voice jolting between a falsetto coo and anguished screams. It’s all violence and volcanic energy with lines like, “There’s a bomb in my car,” which he delivers with maniacal intensity. Then, “Cobra” enters the mix: a gorgeous dose of twinkling guitars and Winter’s charismatic vulnerability. He sings, “Lеt me dance away forevеr, baby.” Since 3D Country, Winter has emerged as a dynamic and enthralling frontman. His level of control is staggering in the way he can morph from a warbling croak, a raspy yell, to an upper-register wail. No matter what, it’s always a thrill.
Recorded with Kenneth Blume, a hip-hop producer who’s made several successful forays into rock with acts like Idles, Getting Killed excels on intricate grooves and outre percussion. This rhythmic backbone allows the rest of the band to show off, especially on the title track, which boasts a sample of a Ukrainian choir. Frenetic drums and pops of chopped-up vocals whirl around crunchy riffs and Winter’s aching voice. Elsewhere, on the heartwrenching ballad “Au Pays Du Cocaine,” Winter sings gut-shattering lyrics like, “Baby, you can change and still choose me.” The raw emotion in his voice is chilling there. When I first heard this record, I started joking to friends that Getting Killed was Gen Z’s answer to Radiohead’s In Rainbows. While I initially meant it in jest, I’m realizing that they’re both percussion-first, wildly unpredictable, and seamlessly sequenced LPs that radically refocused the sound of an already innovative band.
Gelli Haha
Switcheroo
Great pop music thrives on escapist fun, but the cream of the crop always has ample edge, humor, and inventiveness, too. No record this year has checked all those boxes more than Switcheroo, Angel Abaya’s debut LP as Gelli Haha (which is pronounced “jelly”). Persistently playful and unpredictable throughout, the Filipino-American Los Angeles artist excels at immediately transportative world-building. Here, it’s called the “Gelliverse.” She combines the cloudlike atmospherics of Cocteau Twins with electroclash’s punky attitude, along with dance music’s most cerebral rhythms, and colorful melodies that are sugary but never cloying. On the raucous “Tiramisu,” she wails, “What the hell is going on?” over plinks of classic house piano chords. You might ask the same thing (in a positive way). The gorgeous opener “Funny People” abruptly ends with a cartoonish “bonk!” sound, while “Bounce House” is anchored by a bubbly synth groove and a chipper “chugga-chugga-chugga” backing vocal. Even songs that would be a throwaway track in the hands of a lesser artist, like the hilariously bawdy “Piss Artist,” shine. It’s a zany pop masterpiece.
Golden Apples
Shooting Star
Russell Edling is an indie rock lifer who led the Philadelphia outfit Kite Party a little over a decade ago. Since that band’s 2014 demise, he started Cherry, which eventually became Golden Apples. Over five albums (or four, if you don’t count the one released under the old moniker), the band has thrived on a recent shift to hooky, Elephant 6-indebted power-pop. 2023’s Bananasugarfire, their last LP, was a No Expectations favorite that year, thanks to impeccably crafted tunes like “Waiting For a Cloud” and the title track. Where the band’s latest Shooting Star continues the joyful jangle of its predecessor, it’s not a retread. The 12 songs here are more spacious, nervy, and extraordinary. “Ditto” immediately launches into alt-rock swagger, and underneath the noisy gossamer of the single “Noonday Demon” is pop bliss. While it all sounds effortless, recent interviews suggest Edling had a hell of a time making it. While you can guess that on “Mind,” with lines like, “If this love is an event in my mind, and all this evil is an event in my mind / I must be out of mind / You must be out of your mind too”), it channels neuroses into a delirious sing-along chorus.
Golomb
The Beat Goes On
About a year and a half ago, Greg Freeman told me to check out a trio from Columbus, Ohio called Golomb. He described them as the sickest live band, composed of husband and wife Mickey and Xenia Shuman alongside Xenia’s little brother Hawken Holm, who “set their amps at 10 and just rip.” A few months later, Golomb dropped a stellar EP in Love, which included the kinetic and unflinching rocker “Take My Life” that hinted at the raw power of their live show. When I finally saw them open for Freeman at Subterranean Downstairs, I was blown away. Though in person, their unrelenting blasts of sound were physically tangible and ribcage-shaking, it was their flabbergasting earworm songs that stole the show. The Beat Goes On, Golomb’s debut LP, is an adventurous, exciting, and dynamic indie rock record. No track sounds quite alike, yet it manages to be a coherent listen front-to-back. While the band has since told me they’ve never really listened to Built to Spill or Pavement, their sensibility invokes the spirit of ‘90s alternative in the zipping leads of “Staring,” the reggae thump in “Other Side of the Earth,” and in the earnest “Play Music.” This is obviously a band writing and making music on their own idiosyncratic terms.
Good Flying Birds
Talulah’s Tape
At the beginning of the year, Indianapolis indie rockers Good Flying Birds released a cassette called Talulah’s Tape featuring “scattered demos … recorded at home between 2021-2024.” Those who heard it early realized it was a stellar collection of jangle-pop, which is why it’s already reissued via the great indie label Carpark. While you’d expect efficient, scrappy, and well-written tunes from a band named after a Guided By Voices song, these songs’ muscular and impeccable core transcends their four-track-recorded presentation. At 16 tracks, Talulah’s Tape is breathlessly paced: a constant onslaught of quality hooks, delirious riffs, and surging punk energy. “Wallace” is anchored by a squall of guitar noise, “Golfball” is wistful slacker rock, while the standout “Every Day Is Another” winds things down with cascading acoustic chords and delicate falsetto. Fronted by Kellen Baker, the Midwesterner has few peers when it comes to irrefutable and timeless songwriting.
Goon
Dream 3
Two years ago, I visited Los Angeles and met up with my friend Braden Lawrence, who told me he was about to fill in as the touring drummer for a local band called Goon (he’s now focusing on his sick new band Beaming). I had somehow never heard of them, but quickly dove into the warped psych-pop from bandleader Kenny Becker. Dream 3 is the latest and best full-length from this Becker-led collective. It’s dense, chock-full of ideas and studio experiments, but it coheres into something both plaintive and thrilling over its 51-minute runtime. The patient and gorgeous opener “Begin Here” as well as the surprisingly cacophonous and caustic “Patsy’s Twin” (both feature drums from Lawrence) are both clear standouts, but this is an LP that’s best experienced in a single sitting. Think Yo La Tengo at their most glitchy or a blissed-out Built to Spill.
Goose
Chain Yer Dragon
I imagine it must suck to be a jam band releasing a proper album. The loyal audience they cultivated through sprawling shows would probably prefer to hear those songs live, while someone new to the band likely won’t listen because, well, it’s a studio album from a jam band. More than any of their peers (except maybe their Connecticut comrades, Eggy, whose ‘24 LP Waiting Game was excellent), Goose have gone to great lengths to successfully cross over with less wook-y audiences with each LP since 2022’s Dripfield. While the band is a newsletter favorite, one of America’s best live acts, and a thoughtful and fun Taste Profile interview, I’ve found their studio fare to be a mixed bag. On this year’s Everything Must Go, their understandable impulse to differentiate themselves on record from their bread-and-butter live performances has led them to overindulge in maximalist studio ornamentation. Whenever it feels overproduced, it obscures what makes their songs so effective. They’re a great band, but they’re at their best when they’re not overthinking it, leaning into their tangible chemistry and letting their songs speak for themselves. Chain Yer Dragon, their no-frills fifth LP and second of 2025, is their best yet. It captures the grit of their live show and refuses to sand down the loose magic of their improvisations. It rules. Featuring repertoire staples that date back over a decade as well as new tunes, it’s the best primer on Goose so far. I can without qualification recommend the record to the still-skeptical, especially if you’re a fan of Jackson Browne and the Band.
Grace Rogers
Mad Dogs
Louisville’s Grace Rogers spent the early part of her career as a traditional picker and roots performer, but her debut Mad Dogs finds her leaning into conversational and inviting indie rock. There’s still a healthy dose of western and Americana signifiers, buoyed by Rogers’ friendly voice and perceptive lyricism. Released via the Ryan Davis-run label Sophomore Lounge, these eight tracks are charming and delightful: “Downstream” boasts menacing guitars that eventually let loose in its final minute, while “Smoke Em’” is countrified jangle at its finest. Rogers saves the best for last with the resplendent, haunting “Westport.”
Greg Freeman
Burnover
Hearing Greg Freeman’s 2022 LP, I Looked Out, for the first time was a jarring experience. What some twenty-something from Burlington made with his friends turned into an arresting, electric, and memorable debut. Recent artists have melded country and indie rock so frequently it’s become a meme, but Freeman’s always been different. His voice was creaky and emotive, his arrangements had near apocalyptic urgency, and his lyrics were evocative, painting illuminating portraits of rapture and despair rather than deadpan, conversational observations. I’ve written about him a ton in this newsletter and gotten to know him because of it, but seeing these songs grow into what would become Burnover has been unbelievably rewarding. His second LP channels the explosiveness of his first effort into something more purposeful and cohesive. Across the 10 exemplary tracks here, there’s a tangible arc: the bombast of opener “Point and Shoot,” the timelessness of the lowkey “Gallic Shrug,” and the desolate moodiness of closer “Wolf Pine.” On the frantic, Elvis Costello-channeling “Gulch,” Freeman yelps, “And the highway is bright whеn the speed’s just right / and it’s hitting like a million bucks tonight / I love the world, but I think it’s too fucked up to drive.” From how the piano-led “Curtain” dissolves into New Orleans jazz to the scorching guitars that anchor “Gone (Can Mean a Lot of Things), each song stuns. I’m so proud of the guy. It’s an obvious AOTY contender, and I’m not just saying that because my writing is on the vinyl’s sticker.
Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover
What of Our Nature
The protest song is a lost art, and the most popular recent practitioners engage in either Instagram-lite sloganeering or misplaced culture war nonsense. Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover’s collaborative LP What of Our Nature serves as a necessary corrective, providing nuance, grace, and empathy in these songs of resistance and solidarity. Steeping themselves in the writing and recordings of Woody Guthrie, the Portland-based Heynderickx and the New York-based García Conover shared songs and ideas from coast to coast, trading off lead vocal duties throughout the LP. What separates these two songwriters from their contemporaries is their diligent study of not just American folk traditions, but radical history. Opener “Song For Alicia” finds García Conover, who is Puerto Rican, singing about the plight of Alicia Rodríguez, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for her affiliation with Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (she was pardoned in 1999). He movingly sings, “So it’s ride, Alicia, ride / Move, Alicia, move / I would be Boricua even if I was born on the moon.” Elsewhere, Heynderickx exquisitely tackles atomization on “To each their dot” and consumerism on “Fluorescent Lights.” These are beautiful songs that might make you learn something.
Hand Habits
Blue Reminder
Blue Reminder, Meg Duffy’s fourth album as Hand Habits, is triumphantly self-possessed and calming. Even when its lyrics are at their most unflichingly self-excavating, there’s an ease and a generosity to it. On opener “More Today,” they sing powerful lines like “I know the love we lose / Informs who we become,” as well as “Honey, I think I love you / more today.” Each track comes fully-formed, with hooks so rock-solid they’re immediate sing-alongs. “Wheel of Change” is nestled at the intersection of timeless and tasteful, feeling like a song I’ve heard my entire life, while “Bluebird of Happiness” sets sail with ebullient guitarmonies. If you’ve ever seen them live in any context, it’s obvious that Duffy’s a shredder, but with their songwriting, their focus has been on finding the powerful emotional resonance in quiet, sparse moments.
Hannah Cohen
Earthstar Mountain
The Castskills-based Flying Cloud Recordings, which is run by Cohen and her partner Sam Evian, has been the studio behind so many phenomenal ‘70s-indebted indie rock records from Liam Kazar’s Due North and Pilot Light, Kate Bollinger’s Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind, and a section of Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (not to mention Cohen and Evian’s recent oeuvre). There’s a distinct sensibility and a kindred, inviting spirit to each LP that comes out of there, and Cohen’s latest, Earthstar Mountain, encapsulates it perfectly. Produced by Evian, Cohen enlists collaborators like Sufjan Stevens, Clairo, Liam Kazar, Oliver Hill, and Sean Mullins for songs that split the difference between Dusty Springfield, Gal Costa, and Carole King. There’s a funky bass thump to the single “Draggin’” while “Summer Sweat” deals in hazy psychedelia and sumptuous soul. It’s a total treat throughout.
Hannah Frances
Nested in Tangles
Hannah Frances’ last album, Keeper of the Shepherd, was a mystifying and dazzling collection of knotty folk that solidified her as a rare, uncompromising artist. When you have an artistic breakthrough like that, some songwriters choose to lean into crowdpleasing pop or try and fail to recreate the magic of that long-past moment. But Frances decided to burrow even further into her meticulously crafted and intricate worldbuilding for a far more challenging but equally rewarding follow-up in Nested in Tangles. It’s a record that demands a front-to-back listen, one with clear standout tracks that truly come to life in the context of the whole. As a bandleader, Frances makes elegant and complex arrangements feel fluid and airy: her rich voice looming over a cornucopia of acoustic guitars, horns, strings, and jazz drums. Single “Falling From and Further” comes the closest to the propulsiveness of Shepherd, but Frances and her ensemble of collaborators feel more confident and free to subvert the formula. Throughout a few of the songs, Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen provides guitar, proving his unorthodox style simpatico with Frances. Some of the most jaw-dropping moments are when Frances slows things down, like on “Steady in the Hand,” or interstitial, largely instrumental tracks like “Beholden To” and “A Body, A Map.” There’s a cinematic level of drama and grandeur throughout the sequencing. While many have tried to pull something similar off, only Frances has had the visionary talent to nail it.
Holden & Zimpel
The Universe Will Take Care of You
If there’s a 2025 LP that’s suited for solitary headphone listening or blasting loud on quality speakers, it’s this one. James Holden is an English electronic musician who’s been releasing forward-thinking and aqueous instrumental albums over the past two decades, while Waclaw Zimpel is a Polish clarinetist. On The Universe Will Take Care of You, the two combine a deep love of krautrock-inspired drone, looping synths, and patient grooves for an endlessly gratifying LP. The duo first teamed up in 2018 for an EP, but this 51-minute full-length is wholly enveloping electronic music that shows these artists at the peak of their collaborative powers. Opener “You Are Gods” is anchored by swirling arpeggios that bubble and crackle over the course of its eight-and-a-half-minute runtime. Melodies appear and dissipate into the mix as the loping chord progression evolves. “Time Ring Rattles” is percussive and frenetic, while “Incredible Bliss” remains true to its title with a soothing and pulsating anchor beat. This is tactile and hypnotizing music that not only demands a curious ear but grabs it easily.
Horsegirl
Phonetics On and On
The Chicago-formed, New York-based trio Horsegirl burst out of the pandemic with a record deal with Matador and a debut album recorded at Electrical Audio with the legendary producer John Agnello. They were still in high school then, but the songs were searching and massive, and I wrote in 2022, “The artists who make up Chicago’s Horsegirl are at least 11 years younger than I am and have the best taste I’ve ever seen in a young band.” Where that palette took from crate-digging sensibilities of indie rock’s fringes, their follow-up is more straightforward, more accessible, and full of heart and fun. On paper, it’s a paring back of what made them so exciting starting out, but Phonetics On and On is a document of a band discovering that they’re better at writing perfect, ramshackle pop songs. Recorded with Cate Le Bon at Chicago’s The Loft, these strong songs speak for themselves without being drowned in fuzzy guitars and reverb. The “da-da-das” elevate “I Can’t Stand To See You,” the subtle, shooting star guitars on “Julie” rule, and the single “2468” features the best counting motif since Feist. It’s full of grooves, glowing harmonies, and perfectly mixed drums. I wrote about Horsegirl in the first No Expectations newsletter, saying, “I bet their next album is a classic.” While it’s still too soon, at least I didn’t totally embarrass myself with that.
Jeff Tweedy
Twilight Override
While I don’t believe there’s one particular blueprint for a long and rewarding career, Jeff Tweedy, now in his fifth decade of touring, recording, and releasing music, is probably the best model. He’s proof that some combo of discipline, openness, and kindness will pan out. All three of these winning qualities are on display throughout Twilight Override. He recorded it at his Chicago studio, the Loft, with his sons Spencer and Sammy, alongside a cast of younger musicians in Liam Kazar, Sima Cunningham, and Macie Stewart. (The acclaimed guitarist Jim Elkington also guests on several tracks). This cross-generational collaboration clearly energizes Tweedy through its 30 songs, which miraculously never lag over a 111-minute runtime. A document of gleeful creative freedom, it’s a remarkably varied and dynamic record. The achy, erratic thump of “No One’s Moving On” could’ve been on A Ghost Is Born, while the single “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” is rock’n’roll catharsis. The winsome, dreamy “Stray Cats in Spain” wobbles with woozy optimism, while the overcast, spoken-word “Parking Lots” anxiously grapples with his parallel futures. It’s a testament to Tweedy’s craft and curiosity, for he’s been able to evolve, keep things interesting, and try new things, not just since Uncle Tupelo, but in this past decade of nonstop creative reinvention.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
Different Rooms
The best instrumental LPs feel like self-contained worlds. No matter how many diversions or expeditions are embarked throughout the tracklist, it always finds its core theme. Different Rooms, the latest collaborative LP from synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer, is an absolute clinic of the form. The two flourish at the juxtaposition of digital and man-made sounds, incorporating disparate sonic worlds with finesse and fervor. Imaginative and meditative throughout its 10 tracks, you’ll hear shadows of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s grandiose soundscapes and Squarepusher’s computerized blips. The bookend renditions of “Mean Solar Time” are mournful and spellbinding, while the Josh Johnson-assisted title track is tranquil and rapt. It’s a serene listen throughout.
Junk Drawer
Days of Heaven
After the first few songs of Days of Heaven, you’ll think that the Belfast band Junk Drawer has one of the best post-punk albums of 2025. But the more you listen, you’ll realize the LP dissolves into something more heady, cosmic, and interesting in its second half. It’s not post-punk at all, but it’s totally sick. “Where Goes the Time” features dirge-like synth and vocals that conjure a resemblance to Neil Young, while “Black Ball 85” is hazy psychedelia that occasionally feels like a haunted house. However, you might worry that the band stuffs all the propulsive rockers on the A-side, but “Ghosts of Leisure” is the headiest track of the bunch. No matter the tempo or zone, it’s all splendid. I knew from the first seconds of this LP that I was going to write about it, but I didn’t know the shocking directions it’d take.
Ken Pomeroy
Cruel Joke
Ken Pomeroy, a 23-year-old Cherokee songwriter based in Tulsa, is a preternaturally gifted storyteller on her debut album, Cruel Joke. These stripped-back autobiographical country tunes are positively radiant through their lean 38-minute runtime, packing in a life’s work of perceptive emotional revelations. Standout tracks like “Grey Skies” were written when she was 13—a shocking fact once you hear its sophisticated harmonies and sagacious lyrics. This keen songcraft propels this LP to be a cut above its peers, from the John Moreland-assisted “Coyote” to the sweeping momentum of opener “Pareidoila.” Whether she traverses folk, Americana, or traditional country on her next effort, Pomeroy’s a clear star in the making. (For the college basketball heads subscribed, I hope you’ve realized by now that this is clearly not the renowned hoops statistician.)
Laurie Torres
Après coup
Philip Sherburne, the great music critic and writer behind the essential newsletter Futurism Restated, wrote of Laurie Torres’ splendid new piano LP Après coup that it “offers precisely the kind of respite that’s needed when you just can’t stand doomscrolling anymore.” He’s absolutely right: the 11 tracks from Canadian-Haitian composer are dreamlike blankets that you’ll want to burrow in as much as possible. These patient and vibrant improvisational pieces will gently rewire your brain and allow you to take a step back and unclench. Complete with subtle synths and captivating field recording samples, it’s just beautiful stuff here.
Lawn
God Made the Highway
Lawn is a New Orleans band composed of two stellar and distinct co-lead singers and songwriters. Bassist Rui De Magalhães is a Venezuela-born Nicaragua-raised artist whose songs are searing, propulsive, and often political post-punk. (His excellent solo project, Rui Gabriel, finds him exploring much more laid-back fare). Guitarist Mac Folger is from Nashville and writes observational, funny, and personal tunes with a clear-cut power-pop edge. While that sounds disparate on paper, it’s been a winning and durable combo since their 2018 debut, Blood on the Tracks. I became a fan in 2020 with the excellent sophomore effort Johnny, which I raved about at VICE. When De Magalhães moved to Chicago in 2022, we became close friends. While Rui’s back in New Orleans, the band, which also includes drummer Mark Edlin (Hovvdy, Mini Trees) and guitarist Nicholas Corson (The Convenience, Video Age, Hovvdy), recorded their best album yet, God Made the Highway, in Chicago. The 10 songs mostly alternate between tunes sung by Folger and De Magalhães, with each trade-off highlighting how unexpectedly compatible and complementary their voices are. “Lonely River Blues” is anchored by a dizzying bass thrum, and De Magalhães is practically spitting in his biting lyrical delivery. The next song, “Davie,” is sunny jangle and insistent pop, which then morphs into “Pressure,” a herky-jerky dose of Devo-inflected punk. This whirlwind unfolds throughout the tracklist. It’s thrilling, scrappy, and astounding stuff.
Liam Kazar
Pilot Light
I’ve known Chicago-raised, New York-based songwriter Liam Kazar for the past decade, and I wrote the bio for his debut LP, Due North. For a good stretch when I lived in Roscoe Village, he was my regular bartender at Hungry Brain. While I don’t see him as much as I used to, he’s doing exactly what he’d dream about then: touring full time with bands like Tweedy, Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby, Sam Evian, and his own. A couple of years back, he came over and played me some danceable demos that were clearly inspired by Prince and Bowie. They were cool, but he changed course after debuting a few songs at a solo show in Chicago when he debuted songs like “Didn’t I” and “Next Time Around.” He’s best at soulful and observational songwriting, which both those tunes encapsulate perfectly. I’m happy he made the switch and recorded it with Friend of the Newsletter Sam Evian at Flying Cloud Recordings. From the Cass McCombs-evoking title track opener to the joyfully catchy “Mission,” that’s my personal favorite of the bunch, Pilot Light is a cozy and smooth dose of folk-rock. It’s naturally conservational, and you can tell it was an absolute blast to make.
Lifeguard
Ripped and Torn
Alongside acts like Friko, Horsegirl, and Free Range, Lifeguard has led the charge of Chicago’s youth indie rock scene. The trio of Kai Slater (whose other band is Sharp Pins), Asher Case, and Isaac Lowenstein formed as freshmen in high school (in 2019) and make raucous, squall-heavy art-rock that boasts clanging riffs and dual-lead vocals from Slater and Case. After a string of EPs released on Chicago label Born Yesterday Records and now Matador, their full-length debut keeps the band’s edge while leaning into anthemic and approachable melodies. It’s a winning combo throughout Ripped and Torn, which was produced by No Age’s Randy Randall and features a crate-diggers’ worth of references ranging from This Heat to Rites of Spring and Swell Maps. There’s a palpable griminess to songs like “How to Say Deisar,” while “It Will Get Worse” threads the needle between power-pop and punk with ample urgency. Though the LP is a wild ride from start to finish, it’s just as commendable how the members of Lifeguard have built a thriving local community of zines, house shows, and tangible excitement for outre music.
Lily Seabird
Trash Mountain
Soon after I started No Expectations in 2022, I wrote about several Burlington, Vermont-based artists like Greg Freeman, Lily Seabird, Dari Bay, and Robber Robber. Alongside North Carolina and Chicago, that city is home to what I believe is the country’s most exciting indie rock scene (next to Chicago). I’ve gotten to know these musicians through this newsletter and through hosting them when they play shows in Chicago. They’re great people, and witnessing their artistic growth has been such a joy. They’ve exposed me to so much great music written by their Burlington peers and tourmates (which I’ve written about extensively here) that it’s funny I’ve never stepped foot in Vermont. Since my first blurb on Lily Seabird, she’s released two phenomenal LPs 2024’s Alas, and Trash Mountain, her most self-assured effort to date. The title of the LP refers to a compound of apartments near a decommissioned landfill where she lives with other musicians and creatives. Written mostly while on tour or coming home from extensive time on the road, the songs have a big-hearted warmth and deal with finding home, connection, and belonging amid life’s chaos. Sung with conviction by one of indie rock’s most peerless and evocative voices, Seabird’s aching folk songs are a force to be reckoned with.
Lucky Cloud
Foreground
Chicago’s Chet Zenor has spent years as a sideman, playing guitar or bass for newsletter favorite acts like Minor Moon, Squirrel Flower, Whitney, and Hannah Frances. But with Lucky Cloud, he lends his nimble and serpentine leads to impressionistic singer-songwriter fare. Foreground is his debut, and it showcases Zenor’s wonderfully unorthodox melodic sensibility. Named after an Arthur Russell song, Lucky Cloud features its namesake’s playfulness as well as a Thom Yorke-like proclivity for moody scene-setting and falsetto (“Vacant Eyes” sounds like an OK Computer b-side). There are jazz-inflected chords, muted alt-country, and even songs that evoke Jeff Buckley without the theatricality (opener “Undertow” could have been on Grace). I’ve been lucky enough to hear these songs in different contexts live—with a full band and with Zenor totally solo—and it’s clear these confounding and exemplary tunes broadcast a unique talent.
Macie Stewart
When the Distance Is Blue
Macie Stewart might be Chicago’s most multifaceted artist. As one-half of Finom, she’s local art rock royalty, but she’s also an adventurous improviser, treading the waters of jazz, classical contemporary, and experimental ambient throughout her career. Where her first solo effort, 2021’s Mouth Full of Glass, highlighted her expansive singer-songwriter fare, When The Distance Is Blue is an eight-track song cycle that mines her versatility as a composer and bandleader. Released via the great label International Anthem, it’s a delicious mixture of field recordings, collage-like piano compositions, and fully improvised jam sessions. In the press materials, Stewart calls it “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between.” Few musicians I know are more protean, and few are more adept at finding evocative moments of tenderness in open musical space.
Mae Powell
Making Room for the Light
Bay Area songwriter Mae Powell has a voice that can stop anyone in their tracks. It warbles, coos, and floats throughout the jazz-inflected folk rock of her sophomore LP, Making Room for the Light. Recorded in Vancouver with multi-instrumentalist and producer David Parry, who plays in the excellent band Loving, the 11 succulent tracks here are densely packed with immaculate instrumental textures, ornate arrangements, and Powell’s timeless approach to melody. “Tangerine” excels in golden hour twang, while “It Comes in Waves” is as affecting as it is dazzling. This is open-hearted pop music from a writer who’s clearly done her homework on American musical traditions but inventive enough to make them fully her own.
Maia Friedman
Goodbye Long Winter Shadow
Maia Friedman is a touring member of Dirty Projectors and Coco, who leans on orchestral and timeless folk on her solo albums. Her latest, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow, is luscious and layered with strings and woodwinds that lend Friedman’s knockout voice some gravitas. Singles like “New Flowers” and “Russian Blue” are stunning, but some of the truly transcendent moments come in the realized interstitial tracks. Produced by Philip Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker), everything is in its right place. Friedman packs 15 songs into an efficient 31 minutes here, and not a second is wasted.
Magic Fig
Valerian Tea
Magic Fig is a supergroup of Bay Area psychrockers hailing from bands like the Umbrellas, Whitney’s Playland, Healing Potpourri, and more. On their debut album, Valerian Tea, these coruscating pop songs unfold like Broadcast or Stereolab attending a Ren Faire. “Walking Shoes” opens with cascading synths and airy pockpacks of vocals from frontwoman Inna Showalter before eventually unveiling zipping and fuzzy lead guitars. This is a band that thrives on euphoric swirls of sound, hurtling from forest-ready folk to spritely pop. There’s a level of Pink Floyd-inspired grandeur, too, that sails on closer “Sleep of Reason,” a reverb-laden tune that dissipates into a foreboding outro. While it’s a played-out adjective, it’s very easy to call these songs “kaleidoscopic.”
Mamalarky
Hex Key
Whether they’ve been based in Austin, Atlanta, or now Los Angeles, Mamalarky are one of the most exciting indie rock bands of the decade. I first heard them in early 2020, when Fire Talk put out their single “How To Say.” Everything they’ve put out since has been excellent, like 2022’s Pocket Fantasy, which I raved about in the first-ever No Expectations writing, “Livvy Bennett, who fronts Atlanta’s Mamalarky, is, in my opinion, the most inventive and interesting guitarist in indie rock right now.” The quartet’s latest full-length, Hex Key, might be less reliant on Bennett’s dexterous and mathy riffing, but it levels up the band’s songwriting with their most immediate and pop-forward collection yet. Here, they lean into hazy psychedelia and subtly sticky grooves like on the synth-heavy “Won’t Give Up” and lead single “Feels So Wrong.” It truly shines when the band gets loud like on “Anhedonia,” “#1 Best of All Time,” “MF,” and “Blow Up,” while never losing their playfully experimental ethos. Before the release of this LP, Bennett and bandmate Michael Hunter wrote and produced “Soft,” a single on R&B star Lucky Daye’s The Algorithm. It’s clear their winning chemistry and ease at setting a hypnotizing aura can translate to any setting.
Maneka
bathes and listens
Devin McKnight is an indisputably talented guitarist best suited at exploring extremes: head-splitting blasts of deafening noise and glimmering moments of muted bliss. He’s been in bands like Speedy Ortiz and Grass Is Green, but his solo project, Maneka, is the most comprehensive glimpse at both his shredding and his heterodox songwriting. His latest LP, bathes and listens, is a more combustible follow-up to his outstanding 2022 effort Dark Matters, occupying the intersection of slowcore and shoegaze. Beneath the tightly-knit coating of distortion and noise on “dimelo” is an endearing ode to Carmelo Anthony, while opener “shallowing” highlights his pop-minded verve with a chiming battering ram of guitars. Elsewhere, when McKnight flaunts his fingerpicking prowess on “pony,” he proves how his dexterous musicianship cuts above his peers.
McKinley Dixon
Magic, Alive!
Friend of the Newsletter McKinley Dixon, the Chicago-based and Richmond-raised rapper, has done things his way through his unassailable career so far. From his early self-released full-lengths to his 2021 studio debut, For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her (released via Spacebomb Records), he’s preferred full, live band arrangements, ambitious thematic concepts, and doggedly introspective lyrics that cover the totality of lived experience. He tackles grief with unfaltering clarity, joy with unbridled euphoria, and even named his last LP Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? after a trilogy of Toni Morrison novels. His latest, Magic Alive!, is a dense, concept-forward full-length centered around three young friends who try to use magic to summon the spirit of a dead peer. With production from Sam Yamaha and Sam Koff, who augment beats with a cavalry of live instrumentation and features ranging from Pink Siifu, Quelle Chris, Blu, Shamir, and more, it’s maximalist, rapturous, and adroit rap music. Every song shines, but the title track especially soars.
Mei Semones
Animaru
I doubt you’ll find a more delightful blend of genres and influences than Mei Semones’ excellent new LP Animaru. It gleefully combines bossa nova with jazz, indie rock, and ample breathtaking strings with lyrics in Japanese and English. These are exuberant, frantic, and dazzling songs. Semones is a dynamic vocalist who can wrap herself around her opulent arrangements. “Dumb Feeling” explodes with feeling, while “Zarigani” moves at a breathless pace. The musical ideas are abundant but never overbearing. She deftly weaves multiple threads without losing the mighty core of the writing. A superlative, distinct talent who excels at songs that are so refreshing it’s almost disorienting.
Monde UFO
Flamingo Tower
Flamingo Tower, the latest full-length from the Los Angeles experimental outfit Monde UFO, is an album that’s better experienced than explained. It’s so chock-full of seemingly disparate ideas that any attempt to transcribe what’s going on in a particular track probably sounds insane. Simultaneously mellow and chaotic, euphoric and menacing, ambitious and casual, avant-garde and agreeable, bandleader Ray Monde delicately guides his collaborators through what would be fraught territory with lesser musicians. Somehow, it all coheres into something psychedelic, beguiling, and thrilling. It’s bookmarked by a haunting organ motif on the ghostly opener “Gambled House We’re Wiping Fire” and the slightly less eerie closer “Psalm 3.” After the dirgelike first tune, it unfurls into propulsive pop that careens from sunny motifs to intrusive jolts of saxophone and percussion into the mix. More welcome surprises ensue across its 11 songs. When it gets too bubbly (highlights “Samba 9” and “119” are great entry points), the band finds a way to add wonkiness and menace. Bewitching and innovative, no recent record has felt more like a rollercoaster and more of a hopeful glimpse into the future of indie rock.
Monte Booker
noise (meaning)
Close to a decade ago, when I was the music reporter for RedEye Chicago, I was introduced to an ingenious and introverted 20-year-old producer named Monte Booker who provided beats for the rapper Smino and the neo-soul innovator Ravyn Lenae. He’d craft rhythms and grooves from sampled household objects, distorting and morphing these mundane sounds into something otherworldly. Now living in Los Angeles, Booker continued his collaborations with Smino and Lenae, alongside Saba and Noname, and won a Grammy this year for his production work on Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal. He finally strikes out on his own with noise (meaning), his debut full-length, an impeccably sequenced and wonderfully collaborative odyssey of future-forward beats and marquee guest vocals from Smino, clothegod, Mereba, Nami, Lenae, and more. It’s a startlingly immersive body of work that not only flaunts Booker’s beatmaking prowess but also provides a freestanding mission statement for his community-building talents.
Moontype
I Let The Wind Push Down On Me
Back in late 2020, I was sent an early download of a record by a Chicago band called Moontype. Pre-pandemic, I didn’t know much about them except for the fact that I had a few mutual friends with their members, but after listening to their debut album, Bodies of Water, it was clear this was the LP I needed to hear that year. Bandleader Margaret McCarthy’s voice is ethereal and pointed, her melodies so unorthodox it’s shocking, and the livewire arrangements were fascinating. I was working for VICE at the time and wrote a long Noisey Next profile on the band when the record came out in spring 2021. It’s funny that then, I wrote that chemistry was the thing that bound this band together, but in 2025, the group has a brand new lineup and is even more locked in. Adding on guitarists Joe Suihkonen (The Deals, Patter) and Andrew Clinkman (Spirits Having Fun, Krill 2)—both absolute shredders in the local scene—has allowed McCarthy to find new textures for her vivid, uncommon writing on sophomore effort I Let The Wind Push Down On Me. Where all of her songs are written on bass with her voice serving as a counter, the melodies here especially bang on “Long Country” and the hazy “Anymore.” It’s a record where any track could be a single, and I’m so happy I get to live in a city where bands like this can sprout organically.
Neu Blume
Let It Win
Detroit is home to an excellent indie rock scene that can oscillate from commanding post-punk like Protomartyr to krautrock-and-jam-adjacent experimentation like Winged Wheel or conversational folk-rock like Bonny Doon (to name just three). Neu Blume operate in the latter camp. Back in 2022, the group led by Mo Neuharth and Colson Miller (who both used to be in the great Arizona band Nanami Ozone) released a “mini-album” called Softer Vessel, seven songs of stellar, ramshackle, and midtempo jangle. Let It Win, their debut full-length, sounds like a truly confident band staking out their own lane. The songs feel warmer, crisper, and more open, like on the first tune, “Cold Strange,” which is buoyed by delicate harmonies. There’s a casual, gentle folksiness throughout. Even when the songs get brooding, like on “Mitsubishi (II),” Neuharth and Miller perform it with such an inviting grace. Elsewhere, the ambling rhythm of “Car to Go” and the breathy opening to “Wood Pile” make this a perfect road trip record. It also proves the Midwest is best (even if these guys are from Phoenix).
No Joy
Bugland
No Joy started as a gleefully shapeshifting shoegaze band from Montreal that has since evolved into the solo project of main member Jasamine White-Gluz, which still boasts a fierce experimental streak on new LP Bugland. Here, White-Gluz teams up with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid for a thrilling LP of ecstatic, explosive, and glitchy indie rock. But for all the blasts of synths, samples, and other sonic left turns that pepper these songs, this LP is not a challenging listen. It’s strikingly mature with a plush atmosphere and a poppy center. It sounds analog, even with the assemblage of electronics shaping each arrangement. This is the kind of record where transcribing what’s going on in a particular track (“Closer “Jelly Meadow Bright” combines palm-muted riffage, black metal shrieks, smooth jazz, and ambient soundscapes”) sounds insane, but I promise you it all works perfectly.
Oldstar
Of the Highway
I recently pitched the Florida band Oldstar to a friend and said that their raucous country rock was “as if MJ Lenderman listened to Steve Earle instead of the Drive-By Truckers.” While those alt-country icons are kindred spirits, the sonic distinction between them is subtle but significant: Earle’s voice has more of a throaty swagger, and his songs are more straightforward. Where Lenderman threads the needle between humor and heart or wit and winsomeness, Oldstar is far more earnest, plainspoken, and unselfconsciously Americana. Though Of the Highway is not the first album from the Panama City Beach-based outfit, it is their studio debut. The overdriven guitars have a meaty crunch, and the fiddle and acoustic instruments pair perfectly with 21-year-old singer Zane Mclaughlin’s outlaw warble. Songs like “California” evoke Being There-era Wilco while “Plate Numbers” channels their state forebears Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The youngsters in Oldstar are firmly in a solid tradition, but it’s clear they are one of the genre’s finest and most immediately resonant practitioners.
Open Head
What Is Success
On Open Head’s utterly original What Is Success, there are guitars that sound like drums and drums that sound like guitars. The kinetic and adventurous post-punk of the Kingston, New York quartet is some of the most inventive heavy music I’ve heard in a long time. There’s palpable danger and edge in these songs that somehow never lose their tunefulness. Equal parts alienating and hypnotizing, to compare it to bands I love like Meat Wave and Squid feels insufficient. Just an exhilarating and pummeling listen from front to back.
Orbital Ensemble
Orbital
Toronto has become home to a community of forward-thinking jazz collectives and artists like Badge Époque Ensemble, Joseph Shabason, The Cosmic Range, The Titillators, and now Orbital Ensemble. Led by the Brazilian expat and composer Felipe Sena, the eight-piece band’s debut combines Bossa Nova rhythms with psychedelic skronk and immensely verdant, full-bodied arrangements that call up Azymuth as well as Orbital Ensemble’s Great Lakes peers in Chicago’s Resavoir. While this is a very accessible LP, it never veers into “chill vibes” territory. More often than not, it shocks with musical left-turns, shifting melodies, and locked-in chemistry. “Daydreams” morphs from a tropical sunset to a scorching squall of guitars and horns while opener “Abertura” is a masterclass in slow-and-steady momentum. Transportive and mesmerizing, this is an exceedingly confident and surprising jazz debut.
pôt-pot
Warsaw 480km
Cavernous drones, relentless grooves, sprawling arrangements, and Velvet Underground charisma exude throughout the 10-song debut from the Portuguese-Irish outfit pôt-pot. Warsaw 480km is psychedelia at its most swirling, krautrock at its most infectious, and post-punk at its most danceable, all undergirded with a tangible pop core. Throughout, lead singer Mark Waldron-Hyden harmonizes with bandmates Sara Leslie and Elaine Malone, adding icy mystique to songs like the chiming “Sextape” and the chugging rhythmic stabs of “22° Halo.” This is a record to get lost in. One listen, and you’ll realize you’ll have to see it live.
Prewn
System
Izzy Hagerup, the Los Angeles via Western Massachusetts songwriter behind the cello-rock project Prewn, performed and recorded everything on her nervy, gorgeous, and cathartic LP System. I’ve listened to this album dozens of times, not knowing this fact, and upon finding it out, I am even more enthralled by the nine tense but vibrant tracks here. So much here has the emotional valence of an open wound. Songs like “Dirty Dog” and “Cavity” are volatile and ferocious, with gnarled guitars and distorted vocals. The title track swirls with strings, and Hagerup’s dynamically frayed delivery conveys each feeling with gusto. Elsewhere, the woozy “It’s Only You” serves as a showcase for Hagerup’s massive, idiosyncratic voice. She has few peers for her range, command, and personality, except for maybe Lily Seabird and Dead Gowns’ Geneviève Beaudoin.
Qur’an Shaheed
Pulse
On Pulse, the multi-talented Los Angeles artist Qur’an Shaheed seems to meld every genre but indie rock on the hypnotic, staggering, and ambitious Pulse. Its 11 tracks are a melting pot of jazz, R&B, classical, electronic, and ambient textures that can oscillate from accessible pop to improvisational interludes and side quests. Opener “Dreams” is the most straightforward of the bunch, thanks to her commanding voice, but the real thrill of Pulse is going on the ride. Here, songs like “Variation 2” boast startling samples and gorgeous soundscapes, while “Doo Doo Doo” is a slinky dose of forward-thinking soul. This is a record that sounds like the future, with ample chops and flawless production. She’s ahead of the curve here.
Raisa K
Affectionately
Since 2008, the U.K. songwriter Raisa Khan has collaborated with Mica Levi as a founding member of Good Sad Happy Bad (fka Micachu and the Shapes). Considering how confident and enchanting Affectionately is, I was shocked to find out that this is Khan’s debut solo effort as Raisa K. Released on the great Danish label 15love (ML Buch’s Suntub, CTM’s Vind), these 12 tracks are exemplary doses of airy and enveloping left-field pop. Gusts of organs and drum machine blasts pepper each tune as Khan’s soothing alto floats above the mix. Fans of Suntub will find a lot to love here, but Khan’s sensibility is more off-kilter. Khan’s Good Sad Happy Bad bandmates join her on several tunes: Levi provides looped guitars on “Stay” and background vocals on “Hello,” while drummer Marc Pell (Mount Kimbie) provides percussion on a third of the tracklist. From the wonky yet fascinating bass groove on “Tall Enough” to the mechanical whirr that elevates “Come Down,” Raisa K’s world is warped, illuminating, and riveting.
Rose City Band
Sol Y Sombra
Buttery lead guitars, ample twang, and easygoing vocals are Oregon’s Rose City Band’s calling card. They’ve excelled at stretching the bounds of Dead-indebted guitar rock and West Coast breeziness for the past half-decade. Founded by Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo guitarist/vocalist Ripley Johnson in 2019, the group has put out five summery and cosmic LPs via Chicago label Thrill Jockey. While each is excellent, the just-released Sol Y Sombra might be the most agreeable of the bunch. From the pastoral bliss of “Radio Song,” the flawless transition between “Seeds of Light” and “La Mesa,” and the Jerry Garcia-covering-Lou Reed-evoking “Wheels,” there’s so much heady goodness to dig into here.
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band
New Threats From the Soul
It sounds like a cliche, but one thing that is generally true is that if you do good work, keep at it, strive to get better, and do things the right way, eventually people will catch on. Louisville’s Ryan Davis might agree with that. He has been making music for a long time: he formed his old band State Champions in Chicago in 2007 and released four excellent but underrated records before disbanding in 2018. He’s also spent almost two decades releasing albums by incredible independent artists with his Sophomore Lounge label (like the excellent Mad Dogs by Grace Rogers). His recent LP, New Threats From the Soul, feels like a long-overdue breakthrough moment. What first strikes anyone about Davis is his jaw-dropping writing. He pens dazzling, barfly lyrics about underdogs, lost loves, and characters finding and flailing their way through America. The other thing you notice is his friendly, expressive, and warbly baritone as he delivers these sparkling words. His songs can spiral over 10 minutes, but never overstay their welcome. He’ll excavate his soul and past on songs like the title track while referencing Jessica Rabbit, Peggy Bundy, and Helen of Troy in one breath. You’ll hear the touchstones of Americana with pedal steel, violin, and ample twang, but also pops of synth, programmed beats, and samples. It’s a vividly rendered LP that matches the grandeur of one of the best songwriting talents who’s finally getting his due.
Saba & No I.D.
From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.
A decade ago, I was the music critic for RedEye Chicago, the now-defunct free culture daily from the Chicago Tribune. It was an incredible time for local music, especially for hip-hop and indie rock, and I got to document these burgeoning scenes as a 23-year-old reporter. Of the many artists I wrote cover stories on during that two-and-a-half-year run, there are few I listen to more than Saba. Though many of his peers had fast ascents and fizzled, the West Side-raised rapper has had a more patient and painstaking approach. He takes time between albums, doesn’t tour as much as he could, and slowly tinkers on new material that, when released, is always an AOTY contender. A thoughtful lyricist and an unconventional producer, he’s firmly at the sweet spot of my tastes. For his latest full-length, he’s teamed up with the legendary Chicago beatmaker No I.D. for From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D. Here, each track is eclectic and singular, a cross-generational collaboration that melds soul, hip-hop, new sounds, and old. Saba sounds especially comfortable rapping, displaying a staggering confidence that allows him to broadcast his lyrical dexterity by ceding the primary production duties to his elder. There are collabs from Ibeyi, Kelly Rowland, Raphael Saadiq, as well as No Expectations favorites Joseph Chilliams and Eryn Allen Kane. The perfect album for walking around Chicago on a summer day.
Sam Moss
Swimming
My most essential resource for music discovery is still and has always been Aquarium Drunkard, which is how I heard about Sam Moss’ gorgeous folk LP Swimming. Moss is a Virginia-based musician and woodworker whose raspy yet soothing voice anchors the earthy and pastoral songs on his fourth full-length. He also enlisted an excellent band of percussionist Joe Westerlund (Califone, Megafaun), multi-instrumentalist Isa Burke (Mountain Goats), bassist Sinclair Palmer (The Muslims, Tallest Man On Earth), along with guests like Molly Sarlé (Mountain Man) and Jake Xerxes Fussell, who flesh out these songs with grace.
Sam Prekop
Open Close
In 2008, I picked up a CD copy of the Sea and Cake’s Car Alarm from a Barnes and Noble and discovered one of my alltimer bands. With their sinuous and expansive arrangements and unorthodox rhythms, I truly believe they’re one of the most underrated and influential acts Chicago has produced in my lifetime. When frontman Sam Prekop pivoted to intricate modular compositions with a 2010 solo LP called Old Punch Card, that record unlocked new ways I could think about and appreciate music. He’s been tweaking and refining this palette ever since. In January, I saw him perform a solo synth set, opening up for Ryley Walker at the Empty Bottle, and it remains one of the most captivating concert experiences I’ve witnessed in 2025. It turns out, some of those recent immaculately layered live compositions served as the basis for his new studio effort Open Close. The six songs here float and undulate patiently across 40 rich minutes. Where certain moments and textures interlock to a shimmering crescendo, the real joy of the record is in the slowest, sparsest moments. A meditative stunner throughout, be sure to listen with good headphones.
Saya Gray
Saya
The adventurous and idiosyncratic pop that Saya Gray pulls off on her new LP, Saya, marks the Japanese-Canadian songwriter as one of the year’s most exciting genre collagists. She molds glitchy trip-hop into infectious alt-rock and contemplative folk into hooky alt-pop throughout its 10 immaculate songs. My favorite moments include the explosive final third of “Exhaust the Topic” and the acoustic guitar riff that opens “Shell (of a Man).” It’s a genuinely delightful release that deserves the significant hype it’s already received. Full of charm, surprises, and observant lyrics that match Gray’s polymathic composing talent.
Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears
Head in the Sand
Sean Thompson is my favorite guitarist right now. I first met the Nashville-based songwriter when he was on tour playing in Chicago with Friend of the Newsletter Erin Rae’s band. Naturally, we bonded over the Grateful Dead and kept in touch following that 2023 show. His new LP Head in the Sand is a first-rate showcase of how he excels at left-of-center solos, communal bandleading, and nonchalant lyricism. Some of its best songs tackle heavy topics like the 2020 tornado that wreaked havoc on his east side neighborhood on “Storm’s Comin’ Tonight” and the death of his dog with “Roll on Buddy.” While his earlier material leaned into “cosmic country,” this LP highlights his love for Frank Zappa and Herbie Hancock. It’s for the heads and everyone. See him live if you can—he’s now the touring guitarist for Margo Price too.
Seth Beck
Soft Heaven
Like me, Seth Beck is from West Michigan and made Chicago his second home. While that already makes me like him, his new LP, Soft Heaven, is so good that I’d sing its praises here no matter where he’s from. He’s been a DIY lifer in bands like The Fever Haze (which features members of Greet Death) and Bargain World, and his solo stuff has consistently been in my taste wheelhouse. Where his last LP, 2023’s Entertainment Center, was synthy and snappy indie rock, his new one takes it into a much more celestial direction. Beneath the dreamlike arrangements are sturdy songs that instantly latch on to you. “Passenger Seat” is spacey heartland rock, while “I’ll Be Looking Out For You” adds crunchy, shoegazy distortion. It’s the kind of record where you listen and think, “Wow, that’s a good song” with each consecutive track.
Shallowater
God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars
On their sophomore effort, God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars, Texas indie rockers Shallowater stretch out six tracks across 41 minutes. Throughout, they meld ear-splitting guitar riffs with delicate and glacially paced melodies. Recorded with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in North Carolina (a producer who’s a master at the quiet/loud dichotomy), the band’s violent explosiveness sears through the mix. The sprawling “Ativan” combusts into a dizzying, frenzied squall that’s goosebump-inducing, while lead single “Highway” is a masterclass of West Texas twang and bittersweet malaise. But for all the dynamism and shake-ups in the arrangements, it’s frontman Blake Skipper’s lyrics that stand out. Just take the Hayden Pedigo-assisted closer “All My Love,” which documents stumbling upon a dilapidated house on a road trip. Skipper croons, “For now it’s a picture of what it’s like to get old / Twenty-five miles from town / Time will cave the floorboards and wind will bend the frame.”
Shrunken Elvis
Shrunken Elvis
Nashville’s Shrunken Elvis is the instrumental project of three No Expectations favorites: Sean Thompson, Michael Ruth, and Spencer Cullum. Thompson plays guitar with Margo Price and is behind the excellent Dead-inspired rock project Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears. Ruth has toured in S.G. Goodman’s band but conjures up cosmic ambient as Rich Ruth, while the U.K.-born Cullum is Miranda Lambert’s pedal steel player and makes collaborative and psychedelic folk and pop as Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection. (He’s also part of the excellent band Echolalia). While all three have occupied their home city’s country music milieu, they’ve each consistently stretched its limits or ditched it entirely in their solo careers. Shrunken Elvis is an example of the latter. Born out of a 2022 European tour for Cullum’s music, where the three artists magnified their friendship and unlocked a deeper chemistry for outre music, their debut LP luxuriates in enveloping synths, patient steel guitar, and rhythms that saunter, crackle, and bubble up. While best experienced in a full, headphones-based listen, individual moments soar like twinkling guitar arpeggios that anchor “Marina Pt. 2,” the chiming percussion of “K-House,” and the twilight lounge excess of “Faint Rustle.” Uniformly gorgeous and interesting, if you dig instrumental music, start here.
Silver Synthetic
Rosalie
Hearing Rosalie, the sophomore album from New Orleans’ Silver Synthetic, for the first time was such a needed jolt that it made me get more excited about music than I have in months. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a release from a new-to-me band that felt almost comically in my wheelhouse. The LP scraps some of the Americana of the band’s 2021 debut for something more playful and cosmic. Across nine consistently memorable songs, the band hits the sweet spot between ‘70s California rock like New Riders of the Purple Sage and 2000s indie like the Clientele. When every track is this locked in, it’s tough to choose a highlight from the bittersweet melody of “Red Light,” the smooth AOR grooves of “Cool Blue Night,” to the Being There swagger of “Choose a Life.” Released on the always excellent Curation Records (Beachwood Sparks, Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears, Pacific Range), this is an album I revisited all year.
Sleeper’s Bell
Clover
Chicago folk band Sleeper’s Bell is the duo of songwriter Blaine Teppema (who is also a local librarian) and guitarist Evan Green. Together, alongside drummer Jack Henry (who produced the LP) and multi-instrumentalists Max Subar, Gabe Bostick, and Leo Paterniti, they make nine ruminative, conversational, and surprisingly potent tracks. Teppema’s a comforting yet commanding singer whose direct lyrics find transcendence in the smaller moments. She opens standout “Room” with a banger of a line in: “The closest to God I ever felt / When we held each other on the bed / You weren’t even my lover then / Just a friend and still a friend.” Throughout, they take these pinpoint observations and make something profoundly moving and impeccably crafted.
SML
How You Been
Like Hungry Brain and Constellation in Chicago, Los Angeles cocktail bar ETA once served as the nexus for its city’s cutting-edge jazz community. The spot, which is now closed, became the namesake for Jeff Parker’s magnificent ETA IVtet quartet and as the genesis for supergroup SML. The experimental and electronic jazz group formed when guitarist Gregory Uhlmann played the venue in 2022, eventually recruiting bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, and percussionist Booker Stardrum for the performances. They spliced and edited these shows into their gloriously avant-garde debut, Small Medium Large (a No Expectations favorite from 2024), and now, their follow-up, How You Been, braids and interweaves passages from a different series of concerts recorded in four cities. What makes SML special is its members’ voracious tastes and divergent backgrounds: They’ve all toured and recorded with everyone from Tortoise to Jason Isbell, Leon Bridges, Weyes Blood, and more. The result is something extraterrestrial and soul-stirring. This is instrumental music that sounds like the future, all done by a band that’s never been in a recording studio together.
Snõõper
Worldwide
The truly great rock bands usually have a transportive visual component to pair with their impeccable songs. The Grateful Dead have the Stealie and the Dancing Bears. The Rolling Stones have their Hot Lips logo, but Nashville’s art-punk collective Snõõper have a zany cast of papier-mâché puppets courtesy of frontwoman Blair Tramel. But beyond their colorful, off-kilter aesthetics, Snõõper have been consistently churning out funny, raucous, and searing rippers since they formed in 2020. Worldwide, their sophomore LP, skitters with sneering abandon throughout its dozen synthy tracks. Produced by John Congleton, a wizard at allowing distinctive artists to focus their sound, it marks the first time the band recorded with outside help. Here, instead of softening the edges of their blitzing, deriliously melodic punk, they double down on what makes them thrive: frenetic rhythms (courtesy of drummer Brad Barteau), pogo-ing vocals from Tramel, and scorching riffs. Dizzying feedback kicks off “Company Car” as Tramel tears through her lines at a breathless pace, while the title track rattles with bass as Tramel sings, “Left / Right / Miss / Worldwide / Pressure! / Both Sides / This way that way / Wild ride.” Think DEVO meets Guerilla Toss but played at 1.5x speed.
Spencer Radcliffe
Ohio Vision
Back in 2017, Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe was living in Chicago, and I interviewed him at his house for VICE about his new album, Enjoy the Great Outdoors. That record, his first full band affair, was such a special addition to my life: expansive, ramshackle, and subtly twangy arrangements paired with Radcliffe’s deft, dark, and evocative lyrics. A couple of years later, I chatted with him again for VICE, this time premiering his 2019 album Hot Spring. While he’s put out a few releases under Blithe Field, his moniker for ambient and instrumental music, it’d been a six-year break until he surprise-dropped Ohio Vision last month. It’s 10 songs of guitar-driven indie rock that excels both when it’s propulsive, like the jam-minded ripper “Took a Hit,” and relaxed, like on the buoyant love song “Constantly.” That tune features Radcliffe effusively singing lyrics like, “She’s sweeter to me than gas station iced tea / It’s only challenging not getting lost in her world constantly.” I don’t know if I’ve heard a track this lighthearted from him, but it’s really moving. Where “The Menance” detours into bluesy grunge and swaggering riffs, “Dumbfounded” finds his band channeling years of live chemistry into what might be his best song yet. Getting a full, excellent new record from him this year might be my favorite musical surprise of 2025.
Sword II
Electric Hour
From the band’s genesis in 2020, Atlanta trio Sword II’s music has thrived on an abundance of musical ideas. With an almost anarchic enthusiasm, they stuffed shoegaze squalls, glitchy, spliced-in beats and samples, and ebullient harmonies into their early oeuvre. While their wild studio experimentation still exists on their masterful sophomore LP Electric Hour, they’ve trimmed back any excess and focused on their pop sensibilities for their most fully-formed, collaborative, and alive full-length yet. Still avowed DIY mainstays and part of a radical community that fought their city’s Cop City development, their lyrics tackle tech-induced alienation and loneliness, surveillance capitalism, and state repression. On standout “Sentry,” bassist Mari González sings lines like, “I feel around for a wire / You just won’t leave me alone/ Do you wanna go through my phone? / I know that I’m not alone” over steady, foreboding guitars. With all the dread permeating throughout the record, it’s a surprisingly airy and infectious listen. The scathing and vulnerable González-sung “Sugarcane” is wistful, undeniable pop. “Who’s Giving You Love,” which finds guitarist Certain Zuko on lead vocals, is searing punk. These songs morph with each member adding delectable, idiosyncratic vocal melodies, especially on the single “Halogen.” It’s no surprise to read that the studio vibe had each bandmate gleefully trading instruments, song ideas, and hooks. The only way a record this vibrant, playful, and righteous could be made is through a palpably tight-knit bond between three talented musicians.
Tobacco City
Horses
Chicago’s Tobacco City make gorgeous, neon-lit country songs for long nights and rough mornings. Led by singers and songwriters Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard, no two voices in this city sound better together (besides maybe Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of Finom). The band has excelled in quiet, achy twang since 2018 (their singles “Blue Raspberry” and “Never on My Mind” from 2021’s Tobacco City, USA are good entry points), but Horses, their sophomore effort, adds energy and catharsis to their winning Americana blueprint. Singles “Autumn” and “Bougainvillea” reach shimmering heights, especially as Coleslaw and Goddard’s voices merge, but the real joys of the album are when they pare it back, like on the breathtaking Goddard-led tune “Fruit From the Vine.” These songs are so easy to fall in love with.
Ty Segall
Possession
I’ve argued before in this newsletter that Ty Segall has the ideal career. Last year, I wrote, “For the past 15 years, Segall, the rock’n’roll auteur, has had what I consider a dream career. He’s been relentlessly prolific, jumping between genres, side projects, various bands, and solo records. It’s so clear he’s having more fun than anything else. He’s achieved just the amount of critical and commercial success where he can tour a little bit, selling out mid-sized rooms, and spend his free time making cool records that follow his every whim.” Lately, Segall’s been making career-best LPs like last year’s Three Bells, and he continues the trend with Possession, a collaboration with lyricist and music video director Matt Yoka. Here, he mines his bread and butter: blistering power pop, Abbey Road maximalism, and sunny California psych (the closer is even called “Another California Song”). While this could play as a retread, this collection feels invigorated, tight, and totally rousing. Though he might not be releasing as much music as he did in his early 20s, everything lately has been top-notch.
Uwade
Florilegium
When Fleet Foxes’ Shore came out in September 2020, it was a welcome balm for a tough year, in no small part due to Uwade’s powerful voice being the first thing you hear on opener “Wading in Waist-High Water.” The Nigeria-born, North Carolina-raised artist was studying at Oxford when she collaborated with the influential indie folk band, and five years later, she’s released her debut album, Florilegium. Throughout the nine tracks here, Uwade’s voice is as soothing and evocative as ever as she glides through simmering pop tunes like “Call It a Draw” and “Harmattan,” which bubbles with bright hooks and a plucky rhythm. It’s an LP concerned with family histories, grief, and her cross-continental life path. Its title comes from the Latin florilegus, which means a “gathering of flowers,” while florigelium can also mean an anthology of writing. It’s a perfect title for something so verdant and attentively autobiographical.
Water From Your Eyes
It’s a Beautiful Place
There’s so much talent in Brooklyn’s Water From Eyes that it’s almost overwhelming. Touring members Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz make up the excellent art pop duo Fantasy of a Broken Heart, while main songwriters Nate Amos and Rachel Brown have fabulous respective solo projects in This Is Lorelei and Thanks For Coming. I wrote that the band’s intoxicating 2023 LP, Everyone’s Crushed, boasted songs that “seamlessly and unexpectedly bounce from gnarly guitars to club-ready beats, inside jokes, and droney experiments.” That winning alchemy remains on their follow-up, It’s a Beautiful Place, but it adds an exclamation point to each ingredient. It rocks harder, it’s more danceable, it’s funnier, and more self-contained. The glitchy “Playing Classics” is wholly enveloping, thanks to its bold samples and Brown’s mesmerizing, relaxed vocal delivery. “Nights in Armor” masks a delicate hook underneath volatile guitars, while the most straightforward song, “Blood on the Dollar,” wows in its simplicity. They’re leading New York’s musical renaissance right now.
Way Dynamic
Massive Shoe
Few songwriters are as adept at making classic ‘70s-inspired songs sound fresh as Naarm/Melbourne’s Dylan Young. I included his last effort Duck in the No Expectations 2024 Best of List, where I mentioned Carole King, Jackson Browne, Todd Rundgren, and Harry Nilsson as reference points. Here, he sounds more confident and energetic, drawing from a well of different influences from the same decade. The folksy “Miffed It” does Nick Drake better than any imitator I’ve heard, “Ibiza” is irresistible oddball funk, while “People Settle Down” is danceable folk-rock bliss. Every song is written with such painstaking care to get the small things write: the precise harmonies, the crisp drum sounds, and Young’s compelling love for a sturdy tune. It’s quiet but never slight. It lovingly wears its influences but is never a retread.
Wednesday
Bleeds
The North Carolina rock group led by Karly Hartzman has melded explosive shoegaze and grunge, piercingly sharp lyrics, golden twang, and a reverence for classic country songwriting into one of the most compelling new bands of the past half-decade. Of the countless stellar groups emerging from that state, Wednesday is right at the center. Bleeds is a record that transcends the massive hype they’ve received (I can only imagine how simultaneously suffocating and validating getting that kind of praise feels for an artist). It’s astoundingly diverse: “Elderberry Wine” is timeless, sparkling country, “Wasp” is sweltering hardcore aggression, and “Wound Up Here (By Holding On)” is as pummeling as it is anthemic. But for all the skillful eclectism here, it’s Hartzman’s lyrics that truly ascend. Closer “Gary’s II,” a sequel to the Twin Plagues highlight, is a tribute to the owner of the famed Haw Creek property, where so many Asheville musicians congregated and lived. Equal parts funny and affecting, Hartzman’s humanity shines in both the aching delivery and her winsome words. For all the buzz and noise, Hartzman clearly remembers who she is and where she’s from.
Whitney
Small Talk
For nearly the past decade, the guys who make up Chicago folk-rock outfit Whitney have been some of my best friends. It’s a level of closeness that makes it nearly impossible to write about them, and I haven’t done so in a professional publication since before their 2016 debut LP Light Upon the Lake came out. But omitting Small Talk, their fourth album, from this roundup would be bogus since I’ve listened to it and cherished it more than most of the offerings featured here. This is their most meticulously intentional and seamless effort yet. It’s the culmination of Ehrlich and his songwriting partner, guitarist Max Kakacek, betting on themselves. They left their longstanding label of Secretly Canadian to self-release, and for the first time, chose to self-produce with their bandmate Ziyad Asrar. These risky career swings resulted in 11 tremendous folk songs that nix the sonic detours they took on 2022’s SPARK. Strings spiral throughout “The Thread,” Madison Cunningham guests on the domestic squabble duet of “Evangeline,” while Ehrlich’s proficient drumming accentuates the title track. I’m certainly biased, but great bands boast an easily identifiable signature sound. I don’t know of anyone with a voice quite like Ehrlich’s and a guitar tone as feathery and piercing as Kakacek’s.
Will Johnson
Diamond City
Will Johnson is a songwriter’s songwriter who’s spent decades melding indie rock and Americana with the influential southern rock band Centro-Matic and through his own solo recordings. (Not to omit his many other projects, including South San Gabriel, a joint LP with the late Jason Molina, bands with Friend of the Newsletter David Bazan, and his current work touring with Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit). His catalog is diverse but consistently contemplative and excellent, but his 10th solo effort, Diamond City, marks a late-career renaissance. These nine laid-back and gorgeous tunes were repurposed from four-track demos recorded at Johnson’s home studio that mixing engineer Britton Beisenherz brought to life at his Ramble Creek studio. The palette here is simultaneously lived-in and extravagant, with Johnson’s evocative lyrics and weary voice taking center stage above subtly fuzzy guitars and steady drum machine clicks. “All Dragged Out” and “Sylvarena” highlight Johnson’s ability to write a fluid and substantial hook, while the stirring title track and the churchly instrumental closer are documents of his engrossing arrangements. This is patient music from a songwriter at his best. While immediately impressive, it demands close listening and repeated plays.
Will Stratton
Points of Origin
I’ve loved Will Stratton’s music for almost two decades now. Not to date myself, but I discovered his first album, What the Night Said, via the iTunes Store in 2007 (he was a “related artist” for Sufjan Stevens, who guested on that LP on oboe). The upstate New York-based folk songwriter has released seven more albums since then, and each one feels like a subtle but striking evolution (at some point over the years, we became social media mutuals, and I wrote the bio for his previous effort, 2021’s The Changing Wilderness). His latest and eighth full-length, Points of Origin, is his most ambitious in scope. It takes a birds-eye view of California, the state where he was born. His clear-eyed and tasteful songs are populated by a wide cast of characters: CIA operatives, duplicitous real estate agents, barroom regulars, and the undeniable West Coast landscape. “Higher and Drier” is as righteous as it is hair-raisingly beautiful, while opener “I Found You” might be his most immaculately arranged tune yet. Even after all these years, I’m still floored by his inviting voice, his openhearted lyricism, and his dexterous fingerpicking. The best of his class.
Zook
Evaporating
I first came across Nashville musician Zach Tittel in 2021 when he was involved with the recording of Katy Kirby’s alltimer debut record Cool Dry Place. Evaporating, Tittel’s third album under the moniker Zook, makes me wish I’d kept closer tabs on his solo music over the years, as it’s a rewarding, knotty, and jolting indie rock record. One of my favorite genres is becoming “Nashville artists who don’t sound like they live in Nashville,” and Tittel’s brand of chameleonic guitar rock shot near the top of that surprisingly long list. There’s ample jangle here on songs like opener “Absolute Misery,” but bubbly synths and drum machines on tracks like “Disappear.” While each arrangement has a sense of propulsion, it’s Tittel’s clever melodies that soar. “Sequence” feels like the best Pavement never written, while closer “So Blue,” an eight-minute jam, has a hook so delectable it wouldn’t feel out of place on Merriweather Post Pavilion. This is a gem of an album.
The No Expectations Best 100 Albums of 2025 Playlist
Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
*Note: a few of these bands have left Spotify.’
*Another note: I usually ask readers to listen to playlists in the curated order, but this one’s alphabetical. Feel free to skip around and shuffle.
The No Expectations 2025 Longlist: 115 More Excellent Albums
Abel, How to Get Away with Nothing // Ada Lea, when i paint my masterpiece // Aïda Mekonnen Caby, Mais Uma // Alex G, Headlights // Alta Vista, Won’t Believe in Dust // Astrachan, Signs // The Belair Lip Bombs, Again // Bitchin Bajas, Inland See // Blue Earth Sound, Cicero Nights // Blue Lake, Weft // Carmen Perry, Eyes Like a Mirror // Case Oats, Last Missouri Exit // Casper Skulls, Kit-Cat // Cass McCombs, Interior Live Oak // Cate Le Bon, Michelangelo Dying // Cici Arthur, Way Through // cistern, Rhizome // Clifford, Golden Caravan // Chico States, I Saw A Galloping Horse Cover No Ground // Colin Miller, Losin’ // Cory Hanson, I Love People // The Crime Family, The Shape of Chilling to Come // Daughter of Swords, Alex // Discus, To Relate To // Djrum, Under Tangled Silence // Dylan Day, The Unanswered Prayer // Eli Winter, A Trick of the Light // Emily Hines, These Days // Esther Rose, Want // Field Medic, surrender instead // Finnish Postcard, Body // Forth Wanderers, The Longer This Goes On // Free Range, Lost & Found // Frog, 1000 Variations On the Same Song // Fust, Big Ugly // Ganser, Animal Hospital // Ghais Guevara, Goyard Ibn Said // Glyders, Forever // Graham Hunt, Timeless World Forever // Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, and Sam Wilkes, Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes // Guerilla Toss, You’re Weird Now // Gummy Fang, Gummy Fang // h. pruz, Red sky at morning // Half Gringa, Cosmovisión // Hataałii, I’ll Be Around // Hut, Hut // Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) // Jessica Risker, Calendar Year // Joan Shelley, Real Warmth // Jonathan Personne, Nouveau Monde // Josh Halper, Schlemiel // Joyer, On the Other End of the Line… // Justice Hill, Cooler By the Lake // Kassi Valazza, From Newman Street // klark sound, This Is Music // Lampland, Get Serene // Les Duck, Love Is The Dirt // Lipsticism, Wanted To Show You // Little Mazarn, Mustang Island // Los Thuthanaka, Los Thuthanaka // lots of hands, into a pretty room // Madeline Kenney, Kiss From the Balcony // Maria Somerville, Luster // Margo Price, Hard Headed Woman // Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World // Mess Esque, Jay Marie, Comfort Me // Michael Robert Chadwick, Illusion of Touch // Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas, Totality // Natalie Bergman, My Home Is Not In This World // The New Eves, The New Eve is Rising // Orillia, FIRE-WEED // Osees, ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST // Paper Castles, I’m Sad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Fake It Anymore // Patrick Shiroishi, Forgetting Is Violent // Perren, The Spot // Pictoria Vark, Nothing Sticks // Pond 1000, daffodiL // Post Animal, Iron // Pry, Wrapped in Plastic // PUP, Who Will Look After The Dogs? // Racing Mount Pleasant, Racing Mount Pleasant // Rebecca Schiffman, Before the Future // Renny Conti, Renny Conti // Resavoir, Matt Gold, Horizon // Rubber Band Gun, Record Deal With God // Saintseneca, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs // Sam and Louise Sullivan, Sweet Enough // Sam Blasucci, ALL BLUE // Samia, Bloodless // S.G. Goodman, Planting By The Signs // Sharon Van Etten, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory // Sharp Pins, Balloon Balloon Balloon // Shoulderbird, Neighbors // Shutaro Noguchi & the Roadhouse Band, On the Run // Sister., Two Birds // Smerz, Big city life // Smushie, Cicero Pizza Anthology // Snocaps, Snocaps // Squid, Cowards // Star Moles, Snack Monster // Stella Donnelly, Love and Fortune // Stereolab, Instant Holograms on Metal Film // SUMAC & Moor Mother, The Film // Sunny War, Armageddon In A Summer Dress // Taxidermists, 20247 // Teethe, Magic of the Sale // This Is Lorelei, Holo Boy // Tops, Bury the Key // The Tubs, Cotton Crown // Tyler Childers, Snipe Hunter // The Weather Station, Humanhood // Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl, For Translucence // Will Lawrence, Rooftops in the Centerfold // William Tyler, Time Indefinite // Wombo, Danger in Fives // Zastava, Buildings
Merry Christmas to me.. I didn't want to work today anyways..
Unsure what I can say here that I haven't said before, like: this subscription is the absolute best value for cost-to-content ratio. Josh is a treasure and makes Substack and the world a better place. I am a better music appreciator because of him. If anything, I hope commenting will impact the substack algo and provide more visibility to No Expectations.