DEAR 2025, WE AIN’T DONE WITHCHU YET!!!
Words (lots of words) by Jason Lee…
The way we figure it, any good list (even a belated one, but hey it’s still January at least!) should start with a list of caveats…
CAVEAT 01: While this list was originally intended to have 25 entries (which would’ve been terribly clever seeing as it’s about music in 2025!) eagle-eyed readers may notice there’s more than 25 records discussed here or so we’ve been told cuz admittedly we have a little problem with counting into double-digits (most music only demands you can count to four!) but anyway the list ballooned from 25 all the way to 33 (or so we’ve been told!) cuz we just couldn’t help ourselves plus now the title sounds similar to the ESPN series “30 for 30” which ok, maybe we’ll get some accidental hits that way even tho’ we hate sports but it’s just a stupid title so fine…
CAVEAT 02: There’s nothing on this list we already covered on the blog this year. So no Skorts. No Freda Kill. You get the idea. So it’s less a “best-of list” than a “here’s some stuff we dug this past year but didn’t get around to writing about” and even then this list could be much longer cuz there was tons of great underground NYC music in 2025 but we ran out of numbers (that we actually know).
Also, fyi, there’s no intended ordering to this list, which is to say, we may use numbers but it’s not a ranked list. #1 ain’t no better than #33, just different is all, fuck hierarchy. Also, fuck the patriarchy. Also, fuck monarchy too. In fact, fuck all the “archy’s” (!) but not the actual Archies…
CAVEAT 03: For this list we didn’t differentiate between formats: singles, EPs, LPs, laserdiscs, livestreams, 8-tracks, MP3s, DVD bonus features, thumb drives, minidiscs, stems, remixes, re-releases, compilations, or band merch—any of these could technically be included in our list but admittedly we stuck mostly to singles, EPs, and full-length albums a/k/a/ LP’s but between these we don’t differentiate (maybe a list just for best band merch next time, hmm). And now with no further ado…
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01) HANG HIM TO THE SCALES — HHTTS <— CLICK HERE TO LISTEN, DITTO FOR ENTIRE LIST
Released a full year-and-change ago now, back on January 17th, 2025 (we were all so innocent then!) right from its opening track (“Dive” which is not a Nirvana cover) the debut album by the tri-state’s most authentic Chinese-American shoegaze band, Hang Him To The Scales—a band self-described as being “run by five Asian nerds [who] aim to explore the sonic possibilities of alternative rock and [are] heavily influenced by many indie and dream-pop bands”—is pithily entitled HHTTS…
…which we assume stands for “Hottest Hits That’re Truly Shoegaze,” cuz ethnic stereotypes be damned, shoegaze belongs to ALL OF US, plus, if you really think about it, what’s more “shoegazy” (a/k/a “dreampoppy” if you’re nasty) than a dreamy, droney sheng solo rooted in music played hundreds if not thousands of years ago or the soundtrack to an ancient shadow puppet play for that matter (see “Mouse & Cat” below) which is actually where the Hangers got their name from but we digress; not to mention the Slowdive-like bright, chiming tones of the pipa—-the traditional four-string, pear-shaped lute heard in much Chinese traditional music, with a timbral range from epic grandeur to serene reverie—-with HHTTS having a full-time pipa-ist in their lineup that blends in perfectly with the overall shoegazyness—-so yeah, you heard us right, the Chinese invented shoegaze and not a bunch of weedy Limeys so get over it…
…with HHTTS being only the latest link in the chain of millennia-long cultural practices of staring at one’s shoes as you play yr guitar or yr pipa through 22 pedals at once, gifting us with nine songs that float by like sunken cathedrals slowly surfacing before sinking back down into the abyss of translucent, shimmering, swirling textures that the band create—provoking moods such as drifting detachment, lingering ennui, bottomless longing, drowsy reverie, and celestial beauty, much like a five-course meal at Wo-Hop which we’re always up for—with a timbral palate ranging from early Cocteau Twins to late Ming Dynasty so no big surprise modern shoegaze isn’t only “big in Japan” but also in in Taiwan and Shanghai…
…and as a bonus you may wanna check out their latest single “Cruel” which came out in September and deals with feelings of “uncertainty, the solitude of being far from home, the fatigue and despair of everyday life, and the fragile moments of light that still break through” but which “isn’t about anger” so much as “about staring into life’s cruel truths,” which is a good skill for anyone to pick up these days (immigrants and non-immigrants alike!) cuz the world or at least this country’s seemingly going to hell in a handbasket so why not throw on some Hang Him To The Scales and stare deep into the abyss…
See also Hang Him To The Scale’s sister-by-another-mister “sibling-band”: the likewise Chinese-American, NYC-based “silk-punk” powerhouse, P.H.0 which features a bowed erhu versus a pipa, and lotsa dive-bombing guitar…
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02) KARABAS BARABAS — 99¢ Store
Named for the villainous owner of a puppet theater (aren’t they all!) in a well-known Russian folk tale (editor’s note: two out of two in this list so far have band names inspired by Far Eastern puppet theater traditions and how often can you say that?!), Karabas Barabas make music that certainly sounds like it should be the soundtrack to some kinda koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs crazy surrealist puppet theater presentation with lots of Russki-style oompah beats yet K.B. are entirely inappropriate for children which, fun fact, a couple members of Karabas Barabas moonlight in a children’s music combo called Rolie Polie Guacamole who blew the f*** up in 2024 (editor’s note: that’s enuf naughty language, think of the children!) when they got name-checked on TikTok by an adorable gingersnap tyke as being just above the Beatles and Tom Petty in his estimation cuz no doubt this kid (also a budding songwriter!) loves stuff that sounds as if it was written for a Punch & Judy puppet punch-up and also strongly influenced by Jan Svankmajer’s Faust if that makes any sense at all which if you listen to 99¢ Store it should cuz the album’s that mind-warping…
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…so anyway once you get tuned-in to their skewered wavelength of IDGAF iconoclastic yet virtuosic, tongue-in-cheek cheekiness favored over the ages by pioneering artists such as Frank “Phranque” (?!) Zappa, Primus, Ween, King Gizzard and the Gizzard Blizzards, The Osees etc. you’ll be golden and all the more receptive to inspirational couplets scattered across the album like “Jesus was a Gay, Black man / eating peanut butter on the can” not uncommon, so it’s only fitting their latest album be a concept record telling the story of a disgruntled clerk at a 99-cent store who’s driven to arson, burning down the store just as any rational, disgruntled clerk at a 99-cent store is wont to do, with the LP serving as a “hilarious, raucous, cathartic celebration of the demise of late stage capitalism” as declared by none other than Broadway World (?!) cuz what better authority on the demise of late-stage capitalism could there possibly be [insert *shrug* emoji]…
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…but that said here’s lots of side-quests along the way to keep things engaging, strewn across the LP’s ten tracks (and who is this mysterious “Regina Blatz”??) with the key plot-points laid out pretty much clearly (it’ll help if u been puffin’ on that sweet leaf, that dank kush, ammirite boys?!) any way all you really need to know is it’s got something to do with CBD, killer bees, rising seas submerging Epstein Island and El Chapo plus locusts, Rod Blagojevich, and “Donnie J.’s toupees” on the nearly six-minute-long “The Tale of Lahojevich” (with nearly 2 minutes of straight-up stompin’ riffage b4 the song proper starts!) and as a final enticement 99¢ Store was among the last records recorded tho’ not produced (!) by the legendary Steve Albini soon before his untimely demise and if you don’t know the works and lore of S. Albini then you better repeat Indie Rock 101 cuz that’s an AUTOMATIC FAIL…
…even if the notoriously curmudgeonly gent hated most so-called indie rock music alongside 99% of everything with the music industry on the receiving end of his most withering invective but damn if he wasn’t right most of the time, with Karabas Barabas being just the sort of anti-pretentious, sacred-cow-skewering type of band that’d put out a children’s album (two of ’em anyway) then some weird, demented shiz like this, that the Big Black/Rapeman/Shellac frontman no doubt loved (having already worked with ’em before) so pour one out for ol’ Steve-O or piss on his grave and play 99¢ Store or another of his instant classic recordings while you’re doing it cuz he’d no doubt be equally honored by either…
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Described on their Bandcamp page as being like a “mashup of Pere Ubu & Kleenex [or] The Static meets Mania D.” which certainly makes our job easier (thanks to Gundred Klette from Siltbreeze Records for the similes!) Eraser hail from the City of Brotherly Shove and boy do they sounds like it—a little grittier, rougher ‘round the edges than your average pretty-boy/girl/everything-in-between NYC band tho’ they’re plenty pretty themselves, but also perhaps a bit more playful and a little less self-serious (Wombo meets Wet Leg?) and on their debut LP Hideout they’re are all about keeping it Philly real, devoting an entire track to Cracker Barrel for instance which granted it’s only 28 seconds long and mostly the sound of whistling wind and a quick ear-splitting crescendo before a brief snippet of (presumably) one of the Erasers leaving their bandmate a poignant voice message: “BITCH, ARE YOU INSIDE CRACKER BARREL!?! I’M HERE!!” (“Parking Lot Interlude”) tho’ to be fair they’re proficient at namedropping not onlymid chain-restaurants-cum-cultural-lightning-rods but also hipster record labels too like Rough Trade and ZE Records (editor’s note: Rough Trade, you must sign this band now!!) but hey at least they know their stuff…
…next segueing into “Dinner Roll” which sounds like an 8-bit Yar’s Revenge cartridge having a meltdown in an old Atari console as a warped vinyl of B-52s “Rock Lobster” plays in the background but still we’re not about to call it “angular” or “discordant” or “twitchy” cuz we ain’t no hack but still it’s tempting, as the song’s narrator peppers a young parent with a string of invasive questions and statements (“nine is such a nice age / what does your baby weigh? / this is such a nice face / shame to see it age!”) with the next track “Trans Air Force 2” managing somehow to be both more dissonant and more danceable like head music for OCD sufferers and there’s something about those whinging single-note discordant keyboard lines set atop twitchy dot-dash riddims and angular guitar freak-outs (whoops!) that makes us wanna do the mashed potato, the frug, the pogo, and the crumbly scone (we just made that one up) all at once even as we contemplate how everybody dies alone…
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Singer-songwriter-guitarist-showbooker-and-all-round-mover-and-shaker Sienna “Sie” (pronounced “see”) Canela is NYC’s newest indie-sleaze boho fairy queen (don’t come at us bro, it’s her own description, tho’ we did add the “queen” part!) which all the cool kids shorten to ISBFQ and on Halloween she dropped her second single which is not only about cruising around town with the top down and making out in the backs of dark dive bars (indie sleaze) but also about “doin’ shroom in my car / while I take you for a ride” (boho) all of which delivered with a flirty-fun light touch (fairy queen) complete with tinkling keyboards and tasty guitar licks which actually ends up sounding less like Sky Ferreira, Bloc Party, or Junglepussy (the height of indie-sleaze circa 2025 in our book!) than it does like She & Him, Feist, or if you listen real hard Future Islands (!) and hey we think it’s progress you don’t gotta sound like any of those canonical indie-sleazers of yesteryear to be either “indie” or “sleazy” or both today…
Says Sie re: her single “Penis Envy”: “Just a silly little tune about magic mushrooms…. Funny enough I never intended on making this a single, but so many people came up to me after shows saying this was their favorite that I had to give the people what they wanted 🙂↕️”
…and what’s more, Sie carries this ISBFQ energy over to her quite entertaining TikTok page, addressing topics such as the pros and cons of coconut water, the perils of being skinny with a big chest, the Cardi vs. Nikki beef and drops some serious wisdom on her fellow Gen Zers (at left!) that in our opinion should be required viewing in our nation’s schools, churches, civic centers, and most especially by all aspiring musicians or self-described “creatives” with Sie starting with an incisive takedown of cringe culture and ending up somewhere inspirational (kinda reminds us of a certain speech by David Foster Wallace, just shorter) so not to oversell it and not to act like we known a damn thing about Gen Z cuz we’re “hella” aged out (as the kids don’t say) but the whole notion of getting weird and getting real and even getting real weird as Sie puts it sounds like solid advice for any generation but perhaps especially the Zoomers it seems, plus Sie puts in into practice herself at regular live appearances at local dive bars ‘n’ DIY spaces, often on bills assembled by Sie herself with other up-and-coming local yoots of the city and here’s a “pro tip” for the underground- and indie-curious, namely, if ya wanna go thru an “experimental phase” and stretch yr musical boundaries by seeing lotsa vital, creative, thrillingly raw artists pouring their guts out in grungy basement grottos and the like that look like Freddie Kreuger’s rec room and to suddently have yr finger on the pulse so to speak then just start hitting some of Sie’s shows and work yr way out in concentric circles (editors note: this is an unpaid endorsement!) and before long the only thing you’ll be “cringing at” is the bland pablum of the mainstream and too much of the “alternative” even all about tryin’ to fit into a pre-existing, pre-processed mold, with the immediate elimination of all “reality”-based music competition shows being a good place to start...
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We don’t really known for sure but we’re 99% certain Arklight got their name from that scene at the end of Raiders of the Last Ark (ehh!) where the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant and all these demon ghosts come flying out darting between the Nazis and a bound Harrison Ford ‘n’ Karen Allen with their eyes tightly closed when one of the Nazis cries out, “It’s beeyootiful!!!” all blissed out when one of the demon-ghosts takes on the visage of a angel but just as quickly her face crumbles into a ghastly skull just as great bolts of fire shoot out of the ark incinerating the Nazis in their tracks except for the main antagonists who have their heads graphically melted, imploded, and blown apart in quick succession (ahhh the joy of practical effects but how the hell was this PG-rated, sheesh!)…
which we’d like to think is the same effect the band’s newest single “Dirt People” would have on actual Nazis seeing as how those inbred, incel f*ckfaces are somehow not just on the ascendent but kinda running the show and we need to find new forms of kryptonite to fight ’em off which is not to say this song has anything explicitly to say on the subject but more cuz Arklight clearly make what fascists once called “degenerate music” by turns sweaty, visceral, chaotic, excessive, gloomy, wanton, lascivious, licentious, etc. etc. tho’ seldom all at once and perhaps cuz the fashie’s are the true moral perverts and degenerates and don’t like being reminded of this fact in their music…
…and if any kind of fashy wannabe a Nazi ever laid eyes on this oft-shirtless and sweating, feather-boa wearing band of pirates they’d be scared un-straight almost for sure much less hearing their actual music cuz we’re pretty sure their heads would explode cuz of their music which is pretty face-melting to begin with even for yr more average listener—-textural noise with pounding, sludgy riffs (think Jesus Lizard!) and manic, minimalist grooves (think Talking Heads binging on Adderall)…
…with the band’s low-key funkiness at times being their secret weapon in our informed opinion whereas years before they started off more straight-up noise-based, avant-garde before steadily expanded their sound, culminating in 2023’s aptly titled Exorcisms and the aforementioned “Dirt People,” which is the first advance single off an upcoming 2026 record, a song with vocalist/guitarist Daniel Kolm setting the scene of “living in the tunnels / produc[ing] the bombs” which sounds like an underground resistance movement to us whilst laying down skittering guitar lines over a wind-tunnel, Hadron Collider of a groove thanks to Gregory Kolm’s eruptive drumming and Jonathan Mastrojohn’s slithering, sliding bass line and let’s just say by the end “there were no survivors” so shield your eyes and give it a close listen…
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06) KIRA METCALF — Lessons In Majestic Humiliation
For those who like their singer-songwriters adept at weaving “emotional intimacy” & “musical intricacy” more tightly wound than a double-helixed strand of DNA then Kira Metcalf is most definitely ya gal and this is gonna be yr album too we’re guessingn cuz just check out “Must Be Nice” for starters which starts off with our scarlet chanteuse wondering aloud melismatically, “Is it better to live a lie with you / for the time we have left / I could never seem to hide the truth / you’d so conveniently forget” but just the words alone hardly scratch the surface with Kira’s voice alternating between dulcet tones, feathery wispiness, and more harshly-delivered syllables…
…w/the emotional temperature going from gently insistent to sternly indignant to self-lacerating wit to smoldering outward-directed fury and back again or at least that’s our read with the vocal & emotional twisty-ness of “Must Be Nice” matched if not amplified by the musical setting which twists itself into knots of jagged, serrated chord changes and choppy, propulsive rhythms—the latter starting off with one measure of 6/4, then two measures of 4/4, then one more a-piece of 6/4, 4/4, and 6/4 (they’re called time signatures—take a music class!) so like we said twistiness with emotional & musical complexity going hand-in-hand so no wonder the song gives off a certain off-kilter energy but rocks hard at the same time cuz when you’ve been knocked for a loop and don’t have yr bearings back yet it sounds like this with the attendant rush of endorphins a nice consolation prize as your body enters fight-of-flight mode in response…
…with the next track “All Good Things” serving as more of a waltz-time balm in comparison tho’ it’s got some of the same perambulatory tendencies and emotional resonance as “Must Be Nice” but in a different setting, different story, plus a lovely cello-driven middle-eight section and that’s how it goes on Lessons In Majestic Humiliation with Kira blending confessional folk, goth, and grunge to stately, even majestic, effect, even when or maybe especially when riven by guilt, regret, lust, rage, and other fun emotions– as heard on “On Instinct” which starts off as a delicate acoustic number but soon morphs into a lurching, overdriven monsta about being “a contortionist / coiled around your fist” and “slid[ing] my flower down / the barrel of your gun” which, um am I blushing now (!) but not Ms. Metcalf cuz she doesn’t adhere to stereotypes of demure femininity unless the mood truly strikes her…
…like in the song’s lilting second stanza that shifts it’s focus to the male gaze in our estimation and being “steeped in shame” and “conditioned to crave punishment and pain” with a sense of being torturously conflicted coming across quite strongly in the music video too (see above) in which Ms. Metcalf does an egg-smashingly impressive take-off of the most famous scene from Andrzej Żuławski‘s equally nerve-jangling and thought-provoking Possession (1981) with its standout performance by Isabelle Adjani so put it on and start working thru some of your own unprocessed trauma without have to break any of yr own eggs (equally good for doing CrossFit or Pilates to we’ve been told) just be forewarned it’s not background music but if yr able to fully engage the album’s a banquet…
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Death Totem’s “Grave Mistake” was by many accounts (well, our own!) the most vibey, chills-inducing single of 2024—like a sped-up, shimmy-inducing reboot of Massive Attack’s “Angel” with the underlying sense of menace kept intact via a snarling, sawtooth sub-bass drone seething underneath the song’s prowling groove, as co-vocalists Tiberius Saint and Lvv Gvn float overhead in parallel intervals surveying the wreckage below but then a chorus enters sounding like the first rays of morning sun piercing the inky gloom of an opium den (where *does* one find a good opium den these days..must investigate!) with quivering, gelatinous synth chords and then the song only gets weirder from there, turning into a smeared, impressionistic painting of itself in its last half which only bolsters the underlying theme of a planet and its inhabitants slowly dismantling if not outright destroying all its habitable environements..
…whereas Death Totem’s follow-up single “Beatman,” released this past June, is more a summer beach-party bamboo banga kinda vibe with the addition of MC Niyamani spittin’ sing-song-y bars over a new-wavey indie-sleaze groove (still with that gritty low-end tho’) while managing to rhyme ‘gal’ with ‘around’ with ‘sound’ with ‘pen pal’ with ‘fatal’ and ‘bagel’ and makes it sound slick somehow (“don’t wanna cut ‘chu / my tongue is fa-tal / I’m smoother than cream cheese / on a ba-gal”) as descending synth-squiggles map out a pointillistic melody wedded in the chorus to a catchy vocal hook by Lvv Gvn or so we’re presuming (“I got this feelin’ that you just might, might, might”) with Tiberius adding some backing vocal texture then taking over in the bridge (“baby let’s start all over”) and again the song kinda unravels itself towards the end which we could get used to cuz most pop songs do well to come up with even one decent outro part but Death Totem give you like 3 or 4, while still managing to stick the landing on the “I swear to you!” refrain so catch ‘em when you can cuz Death Totem’s so far underground (by design it would seem) you my get vertigo when you try to come back up…
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08) ACTIVITY — A Thousand Years In Another Way
There’s been a trend this past year of the youth of America turning en masse to music from the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Sabrina Beer, SABRINABLUD, K-Pop Sabrina Hunters, and Sabrina Swift singing about Travis Kelce’s peen (widely claimed to be his “chief” redeeming quality) and other escapist fare as coping mechanisms in the midst of dark, even traumatizing times, and while there ain’t shame in consuming well-crafted “poptimism” during such times (part of a long tradition!) cuz after all it’s hard out here for a simp what with new wars both abroad and at home (just in the past week or two!) and a shaky economy, etc. etc. still there’s such a thing as getting burned out on escapism cuz what are you even escaping from if you’re living in a totally imaginary world in which case we humbly suggest a little more roughage in your musical diet…
…so for those looking to come back down to Earth by engaging w/music that just as absorbing as anything by Sabrina X, Y, or Z (again, respect) but more likely to help you reengage with gnawing uncertainty within and being the process of healing we’d like to recommend A Thousand Years In Another Way by a group called ACTIVITY which to be fair may sound a little deceptively mellow at first—but more like the kind of mellow you get by flying into the eye of a hurricane with all sorts of swirling, turbulent undercurrents pulling yr rudderless ship slowly, inevitable to its center, which ironically is the stillest, calmest spot but one with a front-row seat to all the chaos and destruction brought to bear by human ambition and folly or as Activity puts it, “if I was untethered / I would die […] your dream is as stupid as mine,” with Jeff Berner (producer, collaborator, compatriot) from Greenpoint’s storied Studio G drawing out every nuance of the band’s alternately greyscale and pastel-shaded textures…
…and even if Activity only go full-on‘90s-style trip-hop on occasion, they nail the genre’s mix of emotional intensity crossed with dissociative drifting—harsh and vaporous at once with its skittering beats, electronic pulses, and insistent dissonances twisting your guts up into pretzels and soothing them at the same time (not to mention the ghostly male ‘n’ female harmonizing) which is the very dynamic driving this LP where you don’t so much listen to it as let it enfold you—-like the feelies in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, i.e. cinema as pure sensation, or The Feelies themselves—heard in the uncanny, whispery “Your Dream,” and “I Came Here To Harm You” with its constellations of weird fishes and buzzing fridges or the plodding beat, icy synths drifting like glaciers. and the periodic micro-tonal intervals of “Scissors” (0:30) resembling nothing so much as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System…
…but if you can learn to stop worrying (“Who will marry me now? All the good husbands are drowned“) and love the bomb there’s near endless little flashes of stark beauty on the record live a swarm of fireflies in the darkness with the band’s official band bio pointing out how others have pointed out how their songs tend to ”capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now [whereas] the album doesn’t try to explain this time we’re living in [but] simply feels like it—a mix of violence, alienations and tenderness—reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life” so just sit back, set the controls for the heart of the sun and get ready to immerse yourself in A Thousand Years In Another Way as a sort of musical fallout shelter…
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09) Weekend Lovers —In Your Dreams
“Soaring” is probably the best single word one could use to describe an album like In Your Dreams, chock full of wide-open sonic landscapes and moments of uplift where a sudden shift in melody or register or instrumental texture or some other ineffable quality makes it feel like the song is literally taking flight to the point where Scott Snapp called and asked for his arms-aloft Jesus pose back (With Awms Wahhhhd O-pawnnn…we keed, we keed!) except with 90% less Velveeta (Creed rules!) with Weekend Lovers’ fearless leader, Marta DeLeon, not being much of a yarl-er so we don’t think Scott has a leg to stand on lawsuit-wise cuz just listen to “Legs”, which follows up the highly vibey LP-opening “Red Rad” with a burst of “sunshine-pop grunge” (a real thing! at least now!) which itself is followed by Marta’s personal reckoning with inter-generational trauma on “Not Chill” and even it’s got a pretty high lift-to-drag quotient with airborne vocal tones gliding over the chorus’s churning rhythms and chiming guitars and ooh-oohing-aaahing backup vocals pausing only for the odd marimba solo or whatever that instrument is before the next wave of elevation…
…with a more fitting, less yarly point of reference for Weekend Lovers’ sound being a band like Rainer Marie who’s 90s ’n’ early ’00s by-turns-dreamy-and-dramatic indie-pop-edged-with-punk-rock emotional intensity perhaps setting a template for what the WL’s do on this album and here it behooves us to mention how Marta’s spent a significant number of years in the same Brooklyn indie rock ’n’ pop petri-dish as Rainer Marie (and The Deli—full disclosure!) with In Your Dreams seemingly a real full-circle kind of rekkid with the band having formed after DeLeon returned to her native Tucson circa 2020 after extended stays in Seattle and then the aforementioned Brooklyn with no shortage of music made/bands formed in each locale so no wonder the album’s got such a soaring bird’s-eye vibe at times bathed in the warm, fuzzy glow of nostalgia on one hand (“Here’s a Story” is a melodically yearning paean to “playing music all of your life, dedicated to my NY fam” while a song like “Greasy Diamond” looks just as intensively into the horizon of what’s to come and what the future may hold (“you bought the ticket / another mission”) so hold on tight for a journey in whatever direction…
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10) FIRST PRESIDENT OF JAPAN — You Can’t Have Your first president of japan And Eat It Too
The newest release by NYC’s most deadly serious clown-punk band—“YCHYfpojAEIT” for short (catchy!)—is what’s known in the industry as a placeholder album where you throw together some live recordings and/or remixes of pre-existing tunes and/or deleted tracks and/or new musical doodlings and maybe some B-sides (not really a thing anymore!) or demos or a band interview or why not that one-off collab you did with the New York Philharmonic (whatever!) in hopes all those odds ‘n’ sods will add up to more than the sum of their parts which in certain cases has actually happened…
…and while in this day and age fewer and fewer artists mess with these kinds of releases and rather just put out random non-single, non-album tracks on Patreon or Bandcamp or some other platform where they can be (barely) monetized and collected together, First President of Japan has gone the more traditionalist route by following up their debut studio EP with a live album that’s more than just a typical live album tho’ (may Raijin bless ’em!) that’s nearly twice as long as the debut EP with YCHYfpojAEIT actually made up a great proportion of new, yet-to-be-recorded stuff than old stuff (highly unusual for a live album!) and plenty of spoken-work tracks too in the form of between-song banter from lead singer and jibber-jabberer Non Kuramoto and we gotta say she’s better at the latter than Elvis (potential pull-quote: “better than…Elvis!)…
…featuring six count ‘em six new songs versus three from their debut EP including “4AM” (always a banger) plus six tracks worth of Non’s stage patter like the one bit where she tells about how her calligraphy sensei is 102 years old (impressive!) on the track “Talky-Talk 4: My calligraphy sensei is 102 years old” and while it’s not exactly Paul Stanley wailing “WAAAAHHLLLLRRIIIIIIGT TOROOOONTO, DO YA FEEEEEL GEEEEWWWD?!?!” it’s still preferable to The King slurring non-sequiturs like “You ain’t nuthin’ but…an aardvark” for 30 minutes and plus it makes good sense for FPOJ to make such an unconditional move cuz they energy they bring to live shows is pretty redonkulus and couldn’t be replicated inna studio…
…plus the FPOJ show was recorded on Non’s 30th birthday so you can indulge her a little banter can’t you, but best of all are the live previews of the new stuff, including a couple scorchers in the form of “Protein Shake” and “KAYUI” which even in these possibly still-being-worked-out versions make us psyched to hear the band’s next studio album as do the other inclusions and that’s just good marketing plus, ya never know, it could be this very “placeholder” album that breaks FPOJ big-time cuz hey it worked some five decades ago for those other New York City-based clown-faced punks (well, OK metalheads) back in 1975…
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11) KILYNN LUNSFORD — PROMISCUOUS GENES
Like a Yoko Ono record played at the wrong speed. Like ‘70s Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin on blotter acid and promethazine. Like Lene Lovich covering Tricky’s Maxinquaye. Thanks for indulging our free-associative “simile challenge” of what this record sounds like with Kilynn Lunsford being a Philly-raised, Jersey City-based singer-songwriter who holds a master’s degree in social work and has worked as a labor advocate and on behalf of the disabled and the unhoused–all of which being beyond admirable, obviously, with a stated goal of “creating spaces of hope, even if just a little bit”—something we should all be striving for especially now, talking very much to ourselves here–which sounds like the kinda work where you must truly see the best and worst of humanity which very much comes across in Kilynn’s music not only cuz it’s full of nervy and at times nerve-jangling “pagan & primitive rhythm [designed] to stymie the development of neoliberal libertarian hegemonic forces” (sign us up!)…
….but also cuz whoever made this record has clearly seen some shiz and appears to purge that dark energy thru songs ideally suited for achieving a state of uneasy tension-without-release stasis (editor’s note: highly speculative, but with that pointed out, we’ll let it stand) something like a Sufi mystic plunging knives into his eyes in a ritualistic rite of mortification for which Kilynn’s music would serve as the perfect soundtrack—anyway we don’t recall a record giving us this level of unnerving yet thrilling musical chills since Portishead’s Third in how it inhabits and lives insides a state of dread but draws energy from it, refashioned into sheer musical vitality and satirical humor and trance-inducing beauty like a nice, not-so-quiet horror show…
…like on the title track which is something like a chopped ’n’ screwed remix of a collaboration between Kate Tempest and Mercedes McCambridge (poetic, caustic, feral, horror-showish) and with Lunsford once having aspired to “sound like Alan Lomax recording Betty Boop near the Delaware water gap” then we’d say she’s met, perhaps even surpassed this goal; suffice to say this album isn’t for everyone (what is?!) but when it comes to the people this album’s for it’s really for ’em as in it’s urgent that they find it which may apply to you and fret not you’ll know almost right away cuz there’s not a lotta middle-ground on this record (not to mention we’re living in the “age of polarization”, even Wikipedia think so!) and given songs with refrains like “modern day/fairy tales/sex films/Roger Ailes” you’re not hearing this shiz on the radio anytime soon…
…not with all the New-Wave-meets-No-Wave clickity-clattering percussion and dizzying, dubby production—the likes of which perhaps not heard since Suzanne Vega’s 99.9 F° or more recently Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters and we could totally see a new trend of femme-centric ritual incantations expressed thru glitchy electronics, warped acoustics, and the banging of pots and pans becoming the next big thing with tracks like “My Amphibian Face” leading the way with its mantra-rock, locked-groove of droney, disco Krautrock with Kilynn repeating “slither on the ground” over and over with each repetition growing more sinister and more seductive and generally snake-like overall and finally there’s a couple wild cover versions back-to-back reclaiming two classic rock tracks from masculine-dominated contexts and that’s the Beach Boys’ “Disney Girls” which sounds like the version Captain & Tennille might’ve made after a massive cocaine binge whereas K.L.’s version of “You Never Give Me Your Money” is how it sounded in Paul McCartney’s head after the Maharishi slipped him some bad hashish…
FFO: Diamanda Galas, The Fall, Taiwan Housing Project
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12) EITHERMORE — NEW FRIENDS, OLD LOVES
Coming on the heels of the above 1-2 punch of sonic madness we figure it’s time to dial it back down a bit which brings us to Eithermore’s EP release from this past Halloween which despite its spooky release date serves a nice balm and if you dig folksy acoustic guitar strummin’ and wistful waltz-time weepers turned cathartic anthems with some nice twists ‘n’ turns and lyrical ruminations along the way then you should be all over this EP cuz that description applies to track #3 “Portrait” in particular…
…with “Sleep Song” getting the EP off to a meditative, folksy start and track two “Stranger Things” jazzing things up a bit with its prretty, twisty little guitar melody (hammer-ons! pull-offs!) over a droning pedal point as Long Island-based singer/songwriter/guitarist Jordanna Felice takes us on a story-song journey, “you cut your hair so short / the days are getting longer / I was swimming strong / now I’m sinking faster” and nowhere else in Brooklyn will you hear a Hill Country style country-blues ballad (we’re the authority..not!) with tasteful piano plinking done this right…
…but hey what more should we expect from a self-declared “genre-bending alt-rock group here to queer up your local scene…writ[ing] songs to make you feel all the feelings and then some” with New Friends, Old Loves’ final track “Plant With An E” appearing to end with a rolled tympani but then crescendo-ing into a Neutral Milk Hotel-ish lo-fi yet lush shuffling coda that sounds downright pastoral which let’s face it is largely down to the tintabulating xylophone (isn’t it always!) and the softly chirping birds in he background as Jordanna takes on the role of a blooming flow dialoguing with a full-grown tree as they both wither and bloom as the seasons cycle…
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Düül Suns describe their music as “lysergic” (not at all “lethargic” tho’ chill in places!) which reefers to any substance or expressive medium (including sound) which dramatically alters one’s perception, mood, and/or inclination for being entertained by candy-colored blobs projected onto a film screen like wriggling paramecium so no wonder it’s what puts the “L” in LSD, and as most people know by now, hippies the world over from Wavy Gravy to Michael Beard are highly discerning when it comes to choosing the right musical soundtrack for their trip down the rabbit hole or the portal into John Malkovich’s mind which if yr you’ve seen that movie we feel like yr gonna dig this music too…
…with the band and EP fully earning their four combined ümlaüts (!) cuz from the moment the needle drops on track one, “Jealousy,” with its I-just-dropping-mescaline-in-the-Mojave-desert guitar lick soon joined by the seeming ghost of Ray Manzarek on the dual organ parts helped out by the ghost of Richard Wright and maybe Manfred Mann we’re not actually sure if he’s still alive but we hope so (sounds like a Hammond and a Rhodes but what’ta we know!) topped off with warm drizzle of floaty vocal harmonies singing lyrics like “the silk it drapes / it moves so well / constant ringing / of my bell” as if yr laying in a big, empty field with tall grass and and a single farm off in the distance sin yr pink gingham dress staring up at the marmalade skies and tangerine trees and tho’ the mood isn’t full broken by the first guitar solo which goes off like a lone firework tracing light trails in the sky (“silhouettes dance on the wall / the beginning of my fall”) but just wait cuz this song really literally traces out what jealousy feels like in sound, moody and muted at first, suspicious but a little intrigued too…
..with sinuous keyboard counter-melodies standing out more vividly in the second verse (dramatically altered perception indeed!) until, near the end, the whole damn egg is broken wide open by a dive-bombing murder of crows (a real thing!) in the form of reverb-soaked, cawing electric guitar possibly recorded in the Holland Tunnel (great sense of ambient space) so this is obviously the jealousy bomb goes off in the our “narrators” head exploding into rage when that terrible thing you suspected your lover or friend or great aunt of doing or thing turned out to be true or if it’s a type of jealousy where you covet not a person but rather certain material assets or goods or social privileges or whatever it may be it’s like that moment where you found out your asshole, creepy colleague got that promotion instead of you or they won the lottery or whatever and anyhow the song really captures that transition for Jealousy Mach 1 and Jealousy Mach 2 really well…
…which only augments the lysergic swirl of Düül Suns‘s “psyched out garage rock, soulful funky rhythms, and jazzy/proggy explorations” in their band bio’s own words, to which we’ll add Krautrock as another seeming influence with Düül strongly evoking at times OG founders of the genre like German (obviously!) art-commune-turned-weird-hippy-psychedelia-proggy-avant-acid-rock-band Amon Düül II (note the coincidental overlap in band names!) esp. on tracks such as “Palace of Glass,” “Post Drugs” (more Floydy, but close enuf) and the extended coda to “Serpentine” so in other words if you suspect that riders on the storm meets ghost riders in the sky meets Lucy with diamonds in the sky vibes are your cup of psilocybin tea then give this one a try…
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14) Razor Braids — bb wave
On this Taylor’s Versions-inspired EP (we keed!) Hollye Bynum a/k/a the “not dead, not yet girl” gives us the “Hollye’s Versions” reboot (alongside musical partner Jilly Karande) of three tracks from the Razor Braids’ 2024 sophomore LP, Big Wave, itself a worthy follow-up to 2021’s searing I Could Cry Right Now If You Wanted Me Too (go and listen now and thank us later) with bbwave featuring three newly stripped-down renditions of songs first heard on Big Wave rearranged by the aforementioned duo of Hollye and Jilly (they first met in an acting class at Stella Adler!) in renditions that cut even closer to the emotional bone than before (saying something!)with every subtle musical nuance and vocal inflection magnified…
…like on “bberate me” which takes the album version of “Berate Me” and surgically removes some of its subcutaneous layers with the whole thing condensed down to a whisper, which only amplifies the ethereal ache at its core, alongside subtle lyrical changes with the song’s protagonist no longer self-describing as “soft, squishy and pink but I’ll eat the meek” but instead rather more starkly “too afraid to leave” the relationship or situationship in question, and whereas before lines like “call out my flaws / condescend to me / I’m used to these kinds of things / berate me” were delivered with enough bravado to come off as a coy do your worst buddy taunt, backed by stop-stop power chords and charging rhythms, but once “unplugged” the vibe is more resigned but inna way more powerful too, or at least powerful in a different way, more exposed and vulnerable, with dead-of–night listening especially recommended…
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Like the Alan Parsons Project meets the Blair Witch Project (!) or in other words wedding lush production, cathartic arrangements, and catchy hooks to a raw-boned, found footage-like DIY intensity; Dead Pop is the second full-length by Project Diem—itself the project of Dominic Dellaquila (guitars & synths) and Meghan Seeberg (vocals/lyrics/guitar when playing live), here recorded, mixed, and co-produced with the band by Brian DeMeglio and while Project Diem may technically be a two-piece (a running theme here!) their sound on record is much more Animal Collective than White Stripes, a maximalist studio project on a minimalist scale overflowing with wall-of-sound sonics, big melodic ideas, and personal intimacy…
…like check out the title track which starts off with a spacey bleep-bloop-bleeping intro that builds to an engine ignition and take off! crescendo morphing into a pristine phantasmagoria of sonic cotton candy using real tube amps and dry, close-miked drums (haha sounds good anyway but we’re just guessing based on the sound) and a stomping hook that’s like METRIC meets T.Rex (talk about “dead pop” references, ammirite!?) with Blacklisted/Fox Confessor Brings the Flood-era Niko Case-ish vocals from Seeberg (as we hear it anyway: “dooown with tha beeeeat of yuuur heart“) but that’s probably just us projecting…
…with some nice snare work in the second verse (always acknowledge yr drummer!) which after three-plus minutes of soaring over a majestic landscape of undulating verses and soaring choruses after one last booster-rocket of uplift the whole thing comes crashing back down to earth, landing right where it started with burbling electronic arpeggios and peals of guitar feedback and while the song’s lyrics may be a bit opaque it certainly feels like they’re highly meaningful diary entries that only its author can fully comprehend, shot in extreme close-up…
…elsewhere, “Glow” glows, “Stillness” is hardly still, and “Faye,” well it’ll get a hook in yr grey matter starting off at a full-gallop (the exception to the rule, every other song on Dead Pop emerges gradually from a gauzy layer of aural mist) and for its first half it ascends, chord-by-chord, no end in sight, like a dorm-room Escher, walking up, up, and up into the ether or, alternately, deeper and deeper into the interior (“he sits alone / and writes at night / better off alone!” hits home for this late-nite writer!) until at last “Faye” hits escape velocity at about 1:30 and drifts for a bit before resuming the climb into the upper stratosphere lifted by booster-rocket fueled rhythms and propulsive drum fills and heat-shield bass and keyboard safely guiding the vehicle (“I don’t wanna wait / I don’t wanna fight / I don’t wanna care!”) and all it takes is a good “whooooa-aaahhh-oooohhhh!” until “she grins and screams / ‘I don’t care!’” followed by a sonic boom…
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16) WATER FROM YOUR EYES —It’s A Beautiful Place
New Wavey and No Wavey in equal measure [editor’s note: you used this phrase earlier but this thing’s so long no one’ll even notice], dreamy and discordant, chaotic, narcotic, minimalist, experimentalist—a bit maddening at times and unrepentantly pretty at others as befits its title, Water From Your Eyes may be 10 years and 7 albums in, but on It’s A Beautiful Place they keep upping their game and widening their musical boundaries as the hardest working slacker-rock band in Brooklyn (where the competition is fierce!) on an album not at all designed for passive listening but that’s good seeing as now’s hardly the time for being passive about anything, such as the self-complacent mediocrity of far too much indie rock (!!) which ok it’s pretty far down the list of current crises (!!!) but ya gotta start somewhere and Water From Your Eyes clearly have…
…like on the album-opening “One Small Step” which spends 26 seconds (feels longer, but that’s the point!) scraping the inside of your brainpan with whirly tubes so that all the mental cobwebs are cleared before taking in the most brainstem-melting track on the album (arguably!) and the 2025 song of the year (see #29) as far as we’re concerned, namely, “Life Signs”, with it’s slithering main riff played in an unidentifiable time-signature (and hey I used to play drums) festooned with all manner of sonic frippery and frappery, wowing listeners not only with the frenzied intricacies of its Chinese box structure but also in the song’s many gradations of dynamics ranging from muted & mysterious to a bulldozing rendition of the main riff played in monolithic, Big Muffed-out unison (semi-educated guess on the pedal there) with “Life Signs” being perhaps the band’s most amusement-park worthy, endorphin-releasing sonic rollercoaster rides to date…
…then ya got “Nights in Armor”which sounds like a snake eating it’s own tail in 7/4 time with yet another insane arrangement pivoting between two-dozen or so distinct sections (we lost count!) and next is “Born 2” (“born to know
/ the world is so cold / […] born to the hate / killing them, it’s killing me“) which feels like it modulates keys every other measure thus making it one of the wooziest songs this side of My Bloody Valentine which builds to impressive wall-of-noise climax like a choir of buzzsaws set to different speeds that in the end collapses into sawed-off shards of the seething mass glitching arhythmically (just listen it’ll make sense!) and then one of the album’s quartet of short, instrumental palate cleansers which far from being filler are much-needed rest stops for regaining your bearings from the onslaught of densely-packed songs with “You Don’t Believe In God?” being the most tranquil relatively speaking and the first- and last-track palate cleansers near identical so if you loop this sucker you’ll never even notice the LP having a beginning or an end…
…with plenty more weirdness to come (visits to an alien discotheque, warped Casio keyboard workouts with actual vocoders) and what’a’ya wanna bet WFYE are big fans of King Crimson cuz if “Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (Part I)” were to birth an entire genre of music WFYE would be it’s Elvis and last thing ya oughta know is that WFYE released a sister EP to IABP in December, simply titled It’s Beautiful with three tracks from Beautiful Place reworked just as radically as you’d expect with “Nights in Armor” turned into a song from Led Zeppelin III and “Born 4” re-rendering “Born 2” from formerly avant-noise pop to a track that could be off Björk’s next album complete with skittering electronic harp and bowed, fretless Indian sarangi (our best guess, anyway!) all of which makes us wonder what these mischievous musical imps will come up with next in 2026…
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17) Public Circuit — Modern Church
We may not be the foremost authority but to our ears and eyes Public Circuit are one of New York City’s most exciting electronic music combo to emerge since the turn of the last century when electroclash forebears Fischerspooner (Pitchfork hated ‘em!) bestrode the boards at NYC’s “chapel of goth” Pyramid Club (most recently reborn as Nightclub 101) and while there may not be many bands competing for the “next Fischerspooner” tag these days seeing as they were the quintessential media darlings turned major-label signees turned whipping-boy “sellouts” (even if they made a point of pissing on “authenticity” from the beginning) to retro-ready throwback campy compilation playlist fodder but hey all’s well that ends well…
…anyway if you look at how many people Fischerspooner pissed off and/or won over as passionate adherents along the way they must have been doing something right and listening back to their glitchy, pulsating sequencers and abrasive, distorted synths, and at how they treated live shows more as absurdist performance art than anything, we can now see they were more than a mere flash-in-the-pan but also a vital link in the long chain of NYC synth-punk and dance-punk innovators who’ve pushed the boulder forward for all these years, stretching from Suicide (fully deified now, RIP Alan Vega, but when they played a chaotic show in 1977 London the punks in attendance pelted them w/bottles and other projectiles) to Afrika Bambaataa, ESG, Liquid Liquid, Bush Tetras, etc. who made music that often sounded like it came out of a computer circuit even when it didn’t but with their circuit being the grey, grimy, shiny streets of the city which if shrunk way down look like a blown-up CPU…
…with one of the takeaway being how strongly Public Circuit evoke this lore and are adding to it in real time which we became even more convinced of after seeming ‘em live recently which only made it more clear how prominent the synth-punk and dance-punk lineages are in their music with their latest record Modern Church doing an admirable job translating their vivid, spontaneous performances to wax (makes sense after seeing how many of the sounds heard on the record are cued and played live versus just hitting “playback” with Ethan Biamont and Sean Holloway playing synths, triggering sequencers and drumpads in real time) and with the addition of a full-kit drummer in the live setting it’s like watching a finely-tuned machine lock into sync (ironic?!) playing off one another in real time…
….and while some commentators may gloss them as an “‘80s band” I think we’ve shown the longer historical arc in play but will concede that with PC’s fascination with subjects like faith, idolatry, spirituality, sacrilege, ritual, and ceremony on Modern Church, it aligns neatly with several pillars of “‘80s music” like Depeche Mode, the Cure, and Prince each having dedicated entire songs and albums to these themes in the Eighties but hey let’s not get too hung up on the religious angle here seeing as all that churchy iconography is largely a metaphor for human beings’ inclination to blindly place faith in pretty much anything so long as its confirms the validity of one’s biases and desires and fears whether in politics, technology, money, celebrity, sexuality, personal vanity (yea!) which on a deeper level gets at the very nature of control itself with parallels drawn between religion and how power works in the bedroom, the boardroom, the listed above and where it’s easy to conclude in the words of the one and only Robert Smith that there’s nothing left but faith..
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18) Navel Grazr — “Self-Control Freak”
This one follows almost too perfectly from the entry above cuz not only does Navel Grazr open this track (released on May 2nd) with a squelchy synth tone that could be the start of a Public Circuit song but it’s also a song aboutcontrol even if it’s just “control of the self” tho’ “the self” can admittedly be the most unwieldy, formidable adversary of all and with one last callback, this one to Prince, there’s elements in this song that remind us of the Purple One circa Around The World In A Day (like the trippy fade-in and backwards keys of “Pop Life” and “Paisley Park,” and the title track for that matter) but we digress tho’ also shared in common this is Navel Grazr’s most trippy sounding song to date not only in the expansive sonic palette but also the way the song unfolds in a non-intuitive but organic fashion—after what sounds like the “first verse” there’s never a full-on second one, instead following its own winding path–with “Self-Control Freak” seemingly exhibiting little of said titular quality, no less so than the “blood running through me” in the song’s opening lines…
…and with self-control portrayed (in our mind, rightly) as “a charming illusion” in the unexpectedly majestic main hook, up to this point it does appear as if the music’s reached the same conclusion about illusion of its own accord, flitting across a kaleidoscopic array of tone colors, textures, and melodic ideas which is maybe what “livin’ in my head / so I can leave my body in seconds” sounds like, but taken on its own merits, it’s simply an intriguing sounding song sonically true to its lyrical theme as singer/guitarist Anjali weaves between zig-zagging steam of consciousness, suddenly converted to a torch-singer belting out the clarion call of the self-confessed self-control freak to a girl-group beat (“we don’t get bored”) with synthesist guitarist/drummer Dom filling the canvas around Anjali’s voice with impressionistic watercolor swirls and melodic scribbles and dubby depth of field with a final “vision of a world in which we could kick the habit of selling our future selves” and that’d put this society’s ruling control-freaks out of business so here’s hoping…
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And here’s another single from 2025 featuring Anjali from Navel Grazr tho’ only on guitar this time alongside her partners in Endearments, front-guy Kevin and drum-guy Will, who as a tightly aligned threesome excel at uncompromising self-expression, hummable melodies, and cathartic live performances, brought us their single “Cannon” a couple months ago (presumably to be included on their upcoming March 2026 LP, An Always Open Door) and it’s another song of struggle over control cuz it’s a war song ergo the title however metaphorically intended tho’ you wouldn’t know it if you ignored the words and only attended to the music which maybe sounds like a war between Perfume Genius and Devonté Hynes which would be one heck of a dramatic, moody, atmospheric war with this being one of Endearment’s more poppy tunes but fused to a moody undercurrent (“like the flash of a barrel / like the sound of a gun /I feel my fate falling down / like man that has nowhere to run”) which dude I feel you but it gets jaunty too so that’s good with its fusion of “China Girl” plucky keyboard and “Heroes” droning guitar…aaasdfasdf
…while asking some pertinent questions such as, “What’s a war if the war doesn’t pull you in?” (like didn’t we go to war with Venezuela a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago, everything’s such a f***ing blur lately (!) but no one’s even talking about it anymore so maybe it’s a similar deal) and “Is there a minute of peace for a pauper to spare?” (also relevant) with a couple mentions of a “lonely war” thrown in elsewhere but you have to really listen for the distant backing vocal (maybe our fave part of the song, it’s so very) as Kevin wonders aloud, “I don’t know how I begin it. How did I get here again?” which is maybe why the music flips between nervous hesitancy and swooning forward motion but where uncertainty and wariness offset by a hint of hopeful anticipation and ever more nervous energy is what’s coming across most strongly for us so we’re gonna add this onto the slag heap of songs that feel “reflective of this socio-historical moment” tho’ to sound as pleasant as it does while doing so is an impressive feat indeed and btw Endearments put out their latest single on 1/7/26 and it’s called “Real Deal” so go see if it is…
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20) Lookout Honeys — Aguacatero
Apologies for telling you what you may already know but Aguacatero is Salvadoran slang for a stray mutt, mixed breed doggie which Lookout Honeys says conveys their overall vibe (and does it!) on their debut full length named after the lovable mutts that permeate the Salvadorian landscape put out back in March of 2025 on Harriet Records and recorded at Brooklyn’s The Creamery Studio (no wonder the thick creamy sound!) and we couldn’t agree more cuz there’s one common denominator between songs like “Off the Radar,” “In the Wild,” “Different Waters,” and “Perro” and that’s the sense of limitless freedom that permeates these songs cuz they convey such a pervasive sense of constant forward motion and wide openness of the frontier even if there seems to be a real mania lately for turning frontiers into borders but not for the Lookout Honeys who on “The Challenge” describe “running towards you…like animals do…no distance will do” which again is the whole Aguacatero vibe and with lead singer Mexi Cohen, a native of Mexico City and El Salvador and a dancer too, frequently code-switching between Spanish and English which again we’re back to the whole mixed breed and natural scavengers thing so yeah a well-chosen album title indeed…
…while code-switching too musically between blasts of primitive garage rock, dancey surf-rock energy, Ronettes-style badass girl-banditry, and finally punk thrust and vintage rock ‘n’ roll bop self-describedly “inspired by the Stooges, riot girl, and Latinx rock and roll”, three breeds known for their street-smarts and scrappiness with all these elements brought together on “Perro”, a Spanish-language scavenged cover of Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and, fun fact (!) the Lookout Honeys started existence as the Tri-State’s finest all-female Iggy and the Stooges coverband we shit you not so no wonder they rock they living shiz outta “Be Your Dog” and just peep Mexi rolling those R’s in “Perro” like a savage [maybe a couple J’s too? not to speculate!) which I bet makes Iggy jealous to hear…
…and btw Lookout Honeys are this list’s one representative of NYC’s highly active Latinx punk and hard rock scene so pour one out and keep an eye out for all the badass Latinx bands coming out of the woodwork lately, with solidarity never needed more than today so be sure to support yr local Hispanic and Latin-American musicians cuz we’re all in this together and sometimes you need a good motivational “let’s party” anthem just to get everyone re-motivated which to our ears is “Juvenile City” (“we’re out every night…we make sure you do it right!), the one other cover on the LP but much more obscure and if that’s not the perfect name for a juvenile delinquency girl-gang exploitation movie along the lines of Switchblade Sisters, Truck Stop Woman, or Ebony, Ivory & Jade then I don’t know what is so let’s get that going with the Blondie-esque “Different Waters” as the closing-credits song with its uplifting, mantra-like hook, “we’re swimming in different waters now / we’re swimming in different waters now”…
FFO: Pleasure Seekers, The Donnas, L7, Margaritas Podridas, Hole, Edora Y Sus Vicios, Ultrasonicas, Jessy Bulbo, Los Ratapunks, Rata Negra, Ratos En Zelo (the Latinas sure love their rats!), and Vulpees and to catch the Honeys on Mexican TV skip to a little after 1:40:00 below…
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21) THE PALE HAND — “Reign in Hell”
Why would anyone would wanna stage a mutiny in Heaven when Heaven is, well, you know, “heaven,” innit? Or is it?
Look, we’re not tryin’ 2b sacrilegious by asking (and please bear with us but writing about G*d and religion makes us want 2 write like Prince 4 he was likewise obsessed w/the sacred and the profane) and 2b clear we believe religion is a highly personal choice between a person and their talking Vegetabes so long as it’s not used to denigrate, exterminate, spread hate or to deny basic human rights which, ok, not always the best track record there but otherwise heck go ahead and worship Cthulhu, Furbies, burning bushes 4 all we care, it’s all good…..
…like take local doom metal-ers The Pale Hand, for instance, a rather motley crew to be sure (its members’ lineages spanning across the globe!) but with a sound that’s far from the glammy pop-metal of that other Crüe as made clear on the Pale Hand’s pulverizing debut single from last year (“Reign in Hell”) that doesn’t so much SHOUT AT the Devil as it SHOUTS OUT the Devil tho’ not in the stereotypical sense of looka me, I’m an edgy edgelord with horns but rather more psychologically, identifying with Lucifer’s daddy issues and his determination not to sit at the left hand of God the Father and ultimately take over the family business (which didn’t really work out so well for older sibling J.C. not to mention how so-called paradise can get boring pretty quickly, even David Byrne said so) but rather to strike out on his own even if it means moving into an abandoned subterranean basement space but at least it means he can cultivate his own circle of minions as per the opening lyric:
Departed, discarded
Your lap dog, welcome no more
Devoted, demoted
Your shadow, beneath you no more
…all declaimed over a stompin’ yet swangin’ bedrock metal riff that sounds like it seeped directly out of the earth’s molten core like some primordial ooze, bottled directly at the source (the Lake of Fire, duh!) by The Pale Handers in its purest and least-contaminated form, ultimately climaxing with Keslea echoing the words of the Dark One hisself as told to John Milton, “better 2 reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” whilst vocally scaling the heights of heaven (metal falsetto, check!) followed by soulful yet shedding gee-tar solo before briefly cooling things down with a much slower, plodding, more prayerful section that actually tugs at the heartstrings more than a little bit and actually humanizes ol’ Scratch versus the usual image of a Anton LeVey-like figure (goatee, arched brows, red cape, etc.) he’s usually depicted to be…
Father, where have you been?
Oh my father, your son prince of sin
Father, you made me for this
Oh my father, there’s fear in your kiss
…and then after that rather unsettling last line there’s a pause for some whistling wind in what sounds like the vast chasm of Purgatory with the bass guitar then taking up the main riff and one last trip to pounding-riff town as Chelsea beseeches “Father, whyyyy? Why have you forsaken me…” which brings the whole saga of Heaven & Hell back to its roots as a domestic drama with a Father at it’s center who’s alternately overbearing and withholding, a pacifist lamb won’t hesitate to smite U when called for, blessing U with free will tho’ only so long as you submit and serve tho’ if we’re being generous here it could be tough love with a “teachable lesson” type deal where Yahweh/Jehovah/Shiva/Allah/George Burns cleverly goads His Son into seeking independence and self-actualization (“you made me for this“) thru revolt and thru learning to cope w/the banishment that follows, perhaps even flourishing in its wake, but it’s a risky strategy to be sure so no wonder the taste of fear…
..tho’ either way we must say g*d may wanna think about hiring a new PR firm cuz while everyone thinks of the Devil when it comes to cool stuff and general badassery like Devil’s Food Cake, Devils with a Blue Dress On, and heavy metal or heck rock ‘n’ roll itself plus the Devil’s got “advocates” who’re always mindful of “the details” whereas the Great One himself and His Only Begotten Son got a bunch of bozo televangelists and Westboro Baptist Church etc. as they watch their highly progressive credo “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” not so subtly switched to “do what thou wilt until others cuz yr a Christian dammit” which is almost a direct quote from the Satanic Bible, and with The Prince of Peace used 2 justify everything from the Crusades to America going full-on Christian Nationalist and Nazi-schatze and it’s just these kind of extreme schisms that The Pale Hand addresses in this single…
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..tho’ either way G*d may wanna think about hiring a new PR firm cuz while everyone thinks of (even namechecks!) the Devil when it comes to cool shit and badassery in general like Devil’s Food Cake (which, let’s be frank, pisses all over Angel’s Food Cake), the Devil’s Lettuce, Devil with a Blue Dress On, and heck rock ‘n’ roll itself plus the Devil’s got “advocates” who always heed “the details” whereas the Great One himself and His Only Begotten Son got a bunch of televangelists and Westboro Baptist Church on their side as they watch their admirably progressive credo “do unto others” changed to “do what thou wilt until others” cuz yr a Christian, dammit (!) which is almost a direct quote from the Satanic Bible, and with The Prince of Peace used 2 justify everything from the Crusades to America going full-on Christian Nationalist and Nazi-schatze and it’s just these kind of extreme schisms that The Pale Hand addresses in this single…
…but just to be clear The Pale Hand’s cosmology isn’t exclusively about Fire and Brimstone cuz their cosmology also makes room for ancient vampires and Edwardian poets and audience participation with Kelsea nailing the foppish New Romanic look, cutting a striking figure on stage with a wide, flat coiffure that’s half Prince Valiant, half hesher-style mullet complete with pirate shirt/poet’s blouse complete with a taste for both bodily fluids (blood, to be clear!) and fluid sexuality and gender roles, cuz let’s face it this is exactly the role rock stars are supposed to play and Pale Hand plays it to the hilt—ably straddling the line between vamp and vampire, menace 2 society and a healthy social outlet—but either way if you want blood you got it, not to mention hickeys administered to comely lasses/groupies who happen to be in attendance and lots of worshipful posing and proselytizing like French Grand Guignol theater crossed with Hammer Horror…
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22) Claire Shutters — BARFIGHT!
Pop music is alive and well in New York City or haven’t U heard with a pop renaissance taking place as we speak right practically outside yr window with separate camps ranging from yr more traditional guitar-pop to yr more traditional indie-pop and don’t forget country-pop or dream-pop among other hyphenates and dang if Claire Shutters doesn’t blur the line between all these hyphenates and more on her 2025 sophomore EP like on the opening track “Cigarettes & Conversation” that starts off almost folk-poppy with pristine acoustic strummings but then builds layer by layer, a little twangy here, a little dream-poppy there, and by the end it’s these ebbs and flows and “lack of clear fit” that keeps the song engaging as Claire weaves a tale of romantic intrigue taking place smoking on the sidewalk outside a random club in-between sets (“outside the venue / playing with faux hesitation / didn’t know I would see U”) with a lovely cotton-candy level airy hook in which she breaks down and submits an entreaty: “just give me yr heart babe / and I’ll love U the rest of my life” whose sweetness is somewhat assuaged by lines like “cut me to pieces / your love is such a beautiful knife“…
…but any lingering sweetness/masochistic streak is immediately turned inside-out on the next track, “P.O.S.” which stands for exactly what you think it does and is sung much more forcefully tho’ backed by a trancey guitar patterns that repeats over and over building tension with slight sonic tweaks throughout, some handclap here (foreshadowing!), some subtle keyboard here, until finally the tension is split open near the end as Ms. Shutters spits out lines like:
I wanna be the spark U lit
The button U hit
Intentionally ruining my life
I wanna be the one U want
The cavalier cunt
Who’s only good at fucking up the nice guys
…and did we mention the last song’s called “Indie Sleaze Jesus” which yes we’re burying the lede cuz it’s Claire’s spikiest tune yet with two hard-panned distorted guitars adding a crunchy grunge coating to its inner pop sweetness as she surveys Golgotha’s hilly terrain and declaims: “Sleazy Jesus / You’re so divine / cutting communion into fat lines / and coming back after you flatline” so Praise the Void and Pass the Ammunition cuz this is pop how we like it, stripped down to its most basic instincts…
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23) RH0DA — “Not Gonna” & “VBABY”
Shitty dudes beware! Cuz RH0DA’s got yr number and she ain’t buying your bullcrap anymore and in fact she’s got a whole gurl gang at the ready for exacting payback—not through violence cuz that’s a dudes’ way of coping, plus just the kinda toxic masculinity she’s fighting against—but through art instead, with various “gurl gang” members employed as dancers, makeup artists, choreographers, and music video directors helping to bring her vision to fruition (plus a couple of male co-songwriter/producer collaborators in the form of TJ Rosenthal and P3CKY cuz there’s still a few good apples to be found in the bunch) which means now yr really in trouble (speaking to shitty dudes here!) cuz while a fist can bruise and a knife can cut what’s even more piercing are the musical and verbal daggers RH0DA tosses out like candy cuz they’re able to pierce the psyche or even the soul…
…and versus a bruise or a mere flesh wound, mental and psychological wounds can take a lifetime to heal esp. if not treated properly and of course shitty dudes are less likely to seek therapy with both singles listed above having come out in October 2025 and fittingly they’re both quite haunting; whereas her first single “LOVED” from early ’25 was a brash goth-rock statement of intent rooted in the first two stages of grief (denial and especially anger!) that saw RH0DA assembling her gurl gang for the first time (peep our our writeup here which digs into the whole RH0DA mythos and its backstory) by the time of the more vampy “VBABY”, RH0DA has moved on to the third and fourth stages of grief (bargaining, depression), imploring the “vampire baby” in question to “make it rain / blood in my veins / you know my love / will heal your pain” but then by the time of “Not Gonna” we’re talkin’ full on fifth-stage (acceptance) in a full on gurl-empowerment power-electro-ballad (“you don’t hear what I’m sayin’ / keep walkin’!”)…
…with the latter song having quite the eye-popping music video as a follow up to the equally resplendent short film for “LOVED”, both of which directed by RH0DA bestie Séyla Hossaini (bassist/vocalist for Richmond, Virginia rock combo Towards Space) with impressively cray-cray special-effects makeup by Rachel Austin Boxley and Benny Perkinson in depicting a gang of seductive daemon dancers entrancing patrons at a so-called gentleman’s club (must be a male model convention in town cuz these aren’t exactly yr average titty bar trolls!) but beware of treating yrself to a private dance cuz these dancers excel at turning the male gaze in on itself and if you think their stares are piercing you better protect ya neck cuz you may be leaving da club down a couple hundred bucks and a couple quarts of blood…
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24) A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE (AVSE) — “Def Bones”
And while we’re talkin’ ’bout songs that swing for the fences with fever-pitched emotionality wedded to to dark theatrics and kewl morbidly-minded videos with scary stuff like monsters (not always the ones you think tho’) and stop-motion skeletons and miniature graveyards, it only makes sense to pivot here to AVSE’s “Def Bones’ which one might reasonably assume came out around Halloween too but instead it came out in the Dead of Summer (the most miserable season for goth-rockers!) cuz clearly AVSE are adherents to the notion that Everyday Is Halloween and indeed that’s the reigning vibe on this (arguably!) the band’s most scorched-earth, shoulder-breaking, bone-pulverizing song thus far (really saying sumpin’ 4 these guys!)* tho’ with this being A Very Special Episode they manage to have some fun with the concept and all the fire and brimstone with Patrick, Casey, and Chayse raining down a savage riff upon yr head within second w/the trio hitting all the AVSE hallmarks…
…and not just thunderous riffage in the doomy, paranoid verses (“friends give and take in kind / know they can’t read my mind / and I won’t let those freaks inside“) but then a ravishing pre-chorus/chorus/whatever you wanna call it (“Nooooo / I don’t wanna die / but these visions in my head / want me to DROP DEAD!“) that sees Casey looking all po-faced and praying to whatever heathen god she happens to worship (like we said, the Deli is agnostic!) but which only seems to inflame the skeletons further that is until KC rips them apart literally limb by limb and clavicle by clavicle…
…then towards then end besides yr standard verses and choruses there’s a neat little interlude comprised of waves of pummeling noise (if anyone can do waves of pummeling noise it’s AVSE!) and savage skin-beating (bones too) and a quick little which all totally fits the general tenor of things these days and yes we keep saying that but that’s what happens when civil civic society breaks down with peaceful protestors shot dead in the streets and journalists arrested and jailed and with all the voices in your head telling you to drop dead but you refuse to and fight the demons instead cuz that’s how we roll plus you won’t wanna do that just yet when the traveling sideshow known as AVSE is kind enuf to invite you under their big-top canopy to hang out with the other freaks…
- “Def Bones” was recorded by Zach Rescignano at the East Williamsburg Econolodge (if you know, you know) with additional recording by Jeff Berner at Palace of Sports, produced and mixed by one of the same, and mastered by Jennica Best which really makes for an all-stars cast of “scene regulars” all whom play in their own projects and with other collaborators which granted there’s endless #’s of scenes in NYC obviously but we’re talking specifically ’bout the one that used to gravitate around OWL and still around EWEL and other places besides and speaking of skeletons…
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25) Mars Ray & The Raptures — “I Wanna See Your Skeletons, Baby!”
Look, we’re not here to kink-shame cuz given her urgent tone and the unruly tumble of verbiage dedicated to the subject, Mars Ray really and genuinely very badly wants to see your skeletons, baby, that is if yr okay with it and what’s more given the plural voicing we presume she means yr deepest, darkest secret or secrets—so at least we can presume Mars Ray and Her Raptures aren’t looking to dismember you (phew!) but they’d really like to know the real you which let’s face it could be scarier than getting romantic w/a rotting corpse (haha, jk) and especially those parts you tend to withhold for whatever reason but c’mon being a Furry addicted to collecting Furbies isn’t so shameful these days but 4 the more privately inclined U can see why they’d be nervous given how easy it is to disseminate information (plus opinions, so many freakin’ opinions!) on personal digital devices (PDD’s) these days and btw MR&TR’s self-declared genre is “anxiety pop”…
…which in a sense makes it even more subversive to live one’s in a state of radical openness even in the midst of the digital panopticon and the military-industrial surveillance state (we ain’t about to, but we salute those who do!) cuz maybe flooding the zone with truth is one of the only ways we have left for fighting the tsunami of lies on offer at all times and while maybe bringing down some powerful regimes in the process (historically speaking, of course!)…
…which seems to be Mars Ray’s general line of thinking on “Skeletons” with her serious-yet-humor-filled plea for openness being seemingly more based in interpersonal attraction, flirtation, and forming a meaningful connection with another human being, and less based in socio-historical considerations but hey one informs the other cuz if we all got used to telling the naked truth about smaller stuff we might start expecting the same from our elected leaders and economic overseers but thank goodness either way we can depend on Man Ray & The Raptors to fess up and give it to us queer as perhaps the best Brechtian cabaret-punk combo (trumpet inclusive!) to wash up on these shores (we hear they’re limeys by birth?!) since the early-to-mid-aughts glory days of Dresden Dolls, Katzenjammer Kabarett, and World/Inferno Friendship Society (RIP Jack Terricloth)…
…plus as Mars Ray (sorry for the previous missepling!) makes abundantly clear telling the truth is kinda hawt which hey if yr the “vanilla” type you might be just fine with everyday bullshittery just to keep things on an even keel (“if you want a simple life / you better go out / and find yourself / a simple wife”) but if yr brave enuf to “peel back your skin and let me in,” it may reveal for instance that “inside U wanna tie me up” and if yr partner’s down for a little light BDSM+ play why not with the point being that radical honesty is totally radical so PULL OUT THOSE SKELETONS BABY except, wait, um maybe not that one (yikes!) with MR & the Raptures providing the perfect soundtrack for your Unholy Kinkfest with a musical spazzfest by turns rapturous, panicked, swooning, and stumbling over itself plus you could probly form a drunken conga line to it…
Ok let’s address the pink elephant in the room on shrooms first cuz, yes, it’s true TV Moms bear a passing resemblance to Foo Fighters but only superficially and not like that’s even a bad thing anyway cuz The Color and the Shape is a damn near-masterpiece (Gil Norton‘s production is aces!) and there’s nothing wrong with wearing your influences on yr sleeve cuz if anything it’s more authentic to simply acknowledge them than trying to deny them (music is an oral/aural art form and the only way to learn is by imitating) just so long as you feed them thru your own idiosyncratic filters and mash ’em up with other ideas and influences until they’re an indistinguishable grey vomitous pulp anyway tho’ giving off even a whiff of the Foos these days is tough cuz of the whole “everyone suddenly hates Dave Grohl” thing (even GWAR!) due the cheating and the love child and just being kinda douchy sometimes or so it seems (plus the terrible disservice Dave did to US ladies’ snowboarding!) to which older oldsters like Robert Plant & Jimmy Page say “hold my beer” cuz ’70s rock stars could get away with practically anything but we digress…
…with the point that none of this could possibly apply less to TV Mom’s frontperson/singer/songwriter/guitarist and prolific visual artist “TV Mom’s Lucas” cuz despite their live shows being like full-on Melvins-meets-TAD in terms of go-for-broke intensity and self-sacrificing delivery (someone buy this band a chainsaw!) to the point we wouldn’t be surprised to see Lucas smashing a guitar over his own head, once you actually meet TV Mom’s Lucas he couldn’t possibly be a nicer guy (ditto for Dave and gal Yoko), soft spoken and generous, whereas only minutes ago he was screaming and moaning lines of fractured, furious poetry like “TIRED PLAYING STOLEN MOUTH DUST OF CELEBRITY LIST OF HER OLD SCARS HARD WHEN EXPECT TO WIN!!!!” in a gravely, raspy voice whilst writhing on the ground in his cardigan that suggests TV’s Lucas foregoes any lemon ginger-tea pre-show rituals cuz they’re for wimps…
..but that’s a flattering complement given TV Mom’s chosen genre (peak-era grunge) and u better believe they’ve not only got peak grunge’s core fundamentals down cold, but manage to do some cool new things with the fundamentals as well, like the guitar solo on “Sonic Doof” for instance like WTF even is that but whatever it is it’s glorious, or the three song stretch from “You Were Mine” where it sounds like TV Mom’s Lucas is maybe singing into a broken AutoTune as Dave (drums, not that Dave tho!) and Yoko (bass guitar, well, live at least!) ride a relentless riff, grinding its gears harder and harder until it sounds like they’re gonna jump the rails whereas “Uncommon Animal” sounds something like “Big Bang Baby”-era Stone Temple Pilots (at least in first part up to the woo-woo’s) which at the time freaked out much of Generation X out at how poppy it was (times were simpler then!) ooh-ooh’ing straight into “Get Sunk” which appropriately given it’s title is way more dirgy than anything that’s come before which is but a Whitman’s sampler (grunge-filled bonbons!) of what’s to be savored on the rest of the album…
…so anyway you could call Celebrity Dust a Whitman’s sampler of songs that bleed, sweat, expectorate, and blow the occasional snot rocket (snot bonbons!) and no wonder the songs on this record sound so physically tangible with TV’s Lucas revealing on Bandcamp that on Celebrity Dust “no auto-tune [was] used. No artificial intelligence used. Recording tools used are digital versions of analog effects that existed before the year 1986” which inna world increasingly dominated by screens and ChatCBD giving you dating advice and constant Bing searches performed on yr Nokia 7600 (technology!) we’d say that even digital skins of pre-1986 analogue devices are pretty damn authentic these days a.k.a. keepin’ it real…real for ’90s grunge-era kids cuz admit it we all need some goddam keepin’ it realness in light of everything that’s happening lately plus to snap us out of our collective daze of living inside digital circuits of frictionless mixes, mashups, and memes which totally needs some sand, grit, and grunge thrown in it and oh, side note, go listen to the Banana Splits’ forgotten classic “I’m Gonna Find A Cave” (1969) and tghen tell us Mudhoney invented grunge with a straight face….
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27) Pleasure Island — Cassingles
Lush & luxe & louche & mildly ludicrous, the bedraggled-yet-bedazzled Pleasure Island are a band who invite alliteration as a fittingly cost-effective means of capturing the band’s dedication to dollar-store aesthetics and stylistic flair on their sophomore and only occasionally sophomoric LP, Cassingles, which is something like a post-“Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” Rupert Holmes playing the side-stage at your local state fair armed with a Casio, a pair of timbales, and a Kmart guitar [editor’s note: for all we know Pleasure Island own the 1954 Gibson archtop Scotty Moore used on Elvis’s “Hound Dog”] and damned if it’s not the perfect album for rounding out one’s night after working a late shift and pouring a snifter of brandy…
…as the opening “Theme Song” welcomes you into the world of the rogue, the rake, and the roué, not to mention the good time girl, the femme fatale, the bombshell and the cougar (rrrawr!) and its arguably the most fitting theme song for what’s to follow since Will Smith told us about how he became the prince of a town called Bel-Air with joie de vivre and conviction to spare just as frontman Dave does in with his similarly self-narrating welcome their own theme song whilst informing us that “dinner starts at 5 / but there’s cocktails all the time” which, even if it sounds suspiciously like “you can check out anytime you like / but you can never leave,” at least it means you’ll be trapped on the Lido Deck forever which wouldn’t be so bad, always exciting and new and not at all like that other very, very, very, very bad and horrifying island much in the news lately (it’s impossible not to go there right now! yikes!) cuz this is a theme song for an adults-only adult island of pleasures (not like that) meant for Lido Deck lifetime membership card holders (you know who you are!) looking to live an active lifestyle of alcoholism, line dancing, and shuffleboard…
…and honestly we’re not sure why the cruise ship industry hasn’t latched on to Pleasure Island seeing as boat-bound concerts have become a real thing in recent years (many with bottomless salad bar!) like the Headbanger’s Boat and Rock the Bells Cruise and Flower Power Cruise, the latter designed expressly for boomers wanting to die at sea whilst listening to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” played by a group named Iron Butterfly despite there being no surviving original members (welcome, new Butterflies!) which brings us to a related point, namely, the ever-growing number of aging stars of yesteryear getting booked for these shows, sometimes exerting themselves with several concerts a day which let’s be real represents a real threat to our musical heritage like happened a couple years ago when Mojo Nixon bit the big one while playing on a cruise and what a bizarre way to go for the man who brought us, “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin”, and “Don Henley Must Die” and we can’t afford to lose any more musical legends in this manner…
…whereas by contrast, Pleasure Island’s silky smooth ’n’ smoothly schmoozy music is scientifically designed to be played on none other than cruise ships and could end up saving the lives of many cherished musical artists in the process all while exposing passengers to future Lido Deck classics before they’re known “classics” like “Pool Boi,” “Strange Lady” and the LP-closing “Babes” with our current fave being “Successful”, the best sounding smooth-funk song with both marimba and braggadocio about stock portfolios (while noting that “everybody clocks me as a Scorpio”) since, um, “Pink Pony Club”, so sell off some stocks before the crash comes, check your astral charts and climb aboard…
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Short Porch are hot & ready (!!) and waiting for your call (!!) at 1-900-SHORTPO so be sure call now (!!) to meet other exciting, underemployed singles in your area (!!) and while you’re waiting on hold to speak with the other freaks you’ll be treated to the newest full length by the Short Porchers which sounds surprising good coming out of a little phone speaker with track #1, “Bar’s Closed” pulling no punches in outlining the very reason you’re calling a 1-900 party line number at 4AM in the first place…
…and then there’s track #2 “Final Human” on which Short Porch fantasize about being just that (“when the world’s on fire / I’ll be underground / cruuuuising“) all the while buying guns off Craigslist alongside gold bricks and candles and two tons of matchsticks just in case (if Short Porch aren’t being satirical here then we’re all in trouble!) with a crazy sounding guitar freakout a little over halfway thru bolstering the case for being a little wary at least but yet at its core this is a slick-sounding, Album-Oriented Rock song like you’d expect to hear on The Morning Zoo with some slick keyboard (FFOL Loverboy, The Cars!) and a tight, locked-in rhythm section and stentorian, warbling singing mashed up with the chugging rhythm guitar and the aforementioned wild soloing and Stan Ridgeway-style singing, which taken together it’s like punk meets AOR (we approve!) with the fist-pumping “Panic City” being another good specimen of this musical fusion, but with a mellower song like “Horse” and the album-closing “Steeplechase” there to help with the eventual come down…
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Nobody, but nobody, is doing hand claps these days like the band Marvelle Oaks—a band comprised of the husband & wife team of Alex and Tess holding down guitar & bass respectively and vocal harmonies together, with Tom on drums and while credits for “hand claps” aren’t to be found on their Bandcamp LP page we’re willing to bet the whole band chipped in at those hand-clapping overdub sessions with three of the first four tracks on the album featuring handclaps prominently, like on the highly charming (and we’re not even “high”!) LP-opener “It’s Tomorrow” which follows our protagonist from being a mere tyke allowed to stay up late for a parents’ party, “running thru a maze of legs / made my way to the guest room bed / hid myself in the fake fur coats / with aromas of perfume and smoke”, to being the actual parent in the song’s back half with “my pinky in a little hand / feeling things I don’t understand” complete with handclaps in the chorus (“suddenly…it’s tomorrow, it’s tomorrow”) with falsetto harmonies which is basically like the peanut-butter-and-chocolate of music, putting across a sense of childlike wonder associated with children’s playground hand-clapping games and the like…
…whereas on “Shiny Things” the handclaps, which likewise happen in the chorus and also with falsetto voice (!) rather than standing for the innocence of childhood are maybe meant to echo with the hollow ambition of seeking applause for, and applauding, the shiny baubles and other things we look to as indicators of self-worth but not without taking their toll (“rats off to the races / the state of my statements”) set to a strutting beat and a spike-y guitar riff whereas the handclaps on “Flying Dream” return us again to childhood and parenthood, with a kid being told by their mother if they’re having nightmares about “forever falling”, the obvious solution is to “just start flying” which is something we’re gonna try actually, literalized in the song when it audibly takes flight in the extended coda/outro so it seems the hand-clapping and arm-flapping worked…
…anyway we figure handclaps work so well musically for Marvelle Oaks cuz their songs are already so lean and angular (and so crisply recorded) that each of the three instruments and the two voices already have plenty of lift and separation between them and plenty of space in the sonic spectrum to add clappy-clappy (not to mention their songs often combining childlike whimsey with the realities of the adult world—which is big part of Marvelle Oaks’ charm, sonically and otherwise, at one with the open-hearted nature of the trio’s music (tho’ don’t get us wrong cuz M.O.’s M.O. includes totally rocking out when called for inna Television-y kinda way, e.g., “All-Star Games”) and their slice-of-life lyrics with everyone in the audience encouraged to clap along when the band plays live but of course non-clappers (whether due to injury or disinclination) are welcome too…
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30) CITY ICE — “Like You Do” / “Rough Sleeper”
Biographical info straight from the source: “City Ice is a post-punk/psych rock trio from Brooklyn formed in 2024. Growing up in the projects of the Lower East Side of New York City, Matt Devin Patrick was fascinated by the streets. But after his first band signed a contract with David Geffen, he took a detour into a life of crime, homelessness, and addiction. In 2023 after putting his life back together he would mine his experiences into songs and enlist childhood friends Andrew Oakley and Max Currier to form post punk indie trio, City Ice.”
Advice to aspiring musical stars of the future: when yr manager, publicist or even yr Rick Rubin-style band guru tells u yr band bio needs punching up THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN with City Ice’s bio being concise (we could learn something!) and intriguing where in just four pithy sentences (see last parenthetical) you got everything from music industry intrigue to life on the mean streets of NYC (violence, crime, addiction, homelessness!) and oh yeah rock ’n’ roll too, which let us be clear, we’re not making light of any of this cuz it’s serious stuff and we’re glad MDP came out of it relatively unscathed and started a cool band to boot, but if you do have these kind of life experiences you gotta at least put ‘em in your band bio cuz it’s no place to be a shrinking violet tho’ always hold a little bit back too cuz, again using Matt as our case study, he alludes to a “life of crime” but what crimes exactly were committed or was he exaggerating for effect plus what was the name of that band he used to be in hmmm we wonder (⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️ ) with the ambiguity only adding additional mystique…
…but despite whatever mystique they possess (and here’s another case where their name may have taken on a new and unintended significance esp. as of lately but hey if their music hits just right you’ll forget all about the random, unintended linkages anyway), we can tell you about the two singles City Ice put out this year and if you’re like us (!) the first thing you’ll notice is how the cover image to “Like You Do” is that it looks like a cross between the cover for Lou Reed’sTransformer (1972) and the cover for Radiohead’s The Bends (1995) with the stark, high-contrast black-an-white of the former but with a pose on the cover more like the latter w/Matt’s head thrown back in a supine position…
…the more salient point being how both albums are very much about the act of/art of transformation with the newly gender-bending/Warhol-befriending (plus Iggy & Davey) Lou explaining, “There was this whole glam thing going on so I just put myself in that head. Its not like I had to go very far to do it. I have about a thousand selves running around. Its easy,” whereas “The Bends” saw Radiohead transforming from potential has-been flash-in-the-pan to one of the most impactful and “serious” bands of the late ’90s into the next century with “the bends” serving as metaphor for the dizzy vertigo caused from a drastic change of air pressure/social pressures after rising so rapidly to the surface from the murky depths…
…but that’s all rich rock-star problems innit (editor’s note: No shade! Rock stars, please send money!) whereas the transformation City Ice trades is more familiar and identifiable like struggling to overcome one’s past, navigating a new career path, or starting a new exercise regimen whilst moonlighting, driving a cab at night and deciding to assassinate a presidential candidate (unsuccessfully!) to win the love of a stunning campaign volunteer who got grossed out when you took her to a porno in Times Square recently so yeah just yr average night out in NYC but coming out the other side a better, happier, not necessarily more productive person changed in some meaningful way with “Like You Do” being a song about the power of love as a life-altering force (awww!) but it ain’t cloying with lines like: “I don’t care if your friends swear you’re on crack / as long as you give me a little taste…of your love” over a nuevo-wavo, herky-jerky bounce with raspily soulful vocals and (callback!) handclaps plus maracas (!) and one of those elemental type hooks that always been there just waiting to be discovered…
…with “Rough Sleeper” being the newer of the two singles (December 2025) and a fitting flip-side to “Like You Do”’s pop shimmer with a more brooding vibe but an underlying live-wire fervor heard in the throbbing bass and circling guitar which what sleeplessness sounds like pretty much complete with waling sirens and ghostly “stand clear of the closing doors” MTA alert (living right across from an elevated train platform, we’re quite used to this!) and now it’s hitting us this is likely a song about being unhoused given all the ambient city sounds and the lyrical mention of having one’s sleeping bag stolen—plus “rough sleeper” is slang for a homeless person tho’ more so in the UK—-which makes the moody yet stalwart vibe reverberate all the deeper, hanging on to “dreams projected on a movie screen / melodies and faded scenes / sad songs from the 1970s,” with the last half of the song esp. being damn near therapeutic w/a rousing yet muffled guitar solo perhaps played in that sleeping bag and with repeated assurances, “it’s gonna be alright / we’re gonna get thru tonight”…
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31) MZZTR — “Kimberly” / “Fill My Holes”
Ok so we already gave y’all our unabridged thoughts on MZZTR back in 2024 complete with interview but it was actually before they had any official recordings out (we’re still waiting on that killer cover/reworking of Cannibal Corpse’s ”I Cum Blood“) but at least in 2025 they did put out two count ‘em two singles with the first one being “Kimberly” and let us just say it’s the first time we’re ever heard a band cross death metal’s constipated growl with Valley Girl-style vocal fry as in Moon Unit Zappa, as in Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, as in “ewww maaah GAWWWWD!”, but they again we’re never seen a band persuade an audience member to drink backwash-infused, half-drunken beers from multiple sources out of a doggie bowl, face-down off the floor on their hands and knees either and then feed it thru some weird octave-dropping vocoder effect alongside Daddy Adam’s suitably brutal guitar and a thrashing rhythm section so if you’re looking for the flat-out strangest metal band working today in the Tri-State area then you’ve found ‘em…
…with “Kimberly“ being the Queen of Rot as confirmed by the song’s literally face-ripping music video (self-directed by Mzztr, with FX by Emmy, Saturn, and two-time Guild award-nominated prosthetic TV & film makeup artist Jeremy Selenfriend, so don’t say we didn’t warn you) and as further explained by the band:
The music video stars Zoe Ligon, aka @Thongria, as an influencer turned surrealist anti-heroine. Kimberly is a glammed up, grotesque descent into the contradictions of modern beauty. It’s a scathing feminist anthem of disgust, aimed at the cult of influence shaped by the ultra rich: bodyweight, status, nips and tucks, curated lifestyles, all sold as aspirational standards and used to justify the objectification of our peers. Zoe becomes the self crowned “Queen of Rot”, exposing the hypocrisy behind a dream of perfection pushed by people who are already dead inside.
…whereas the video for “(Fill My) Holes” (released a few months after “Kimberly”; directed by Will Rahilly who must be a very tiny person) gives you an endoscopic-style POV view of various holes being penetrated and filled (again, true to its titular title) from the POV of a shrunk-down submarine á la Fantastic Voyage penetrating gastrointestinal tractsand metal pipes and tubes of penne pasta and a fishnet-clad lady’s bellybutton (if it wasn’t an “innie” before, it is now!)…
…which is a pretty literal way of depicting the song in visual form but they ain’t foolin’ us cuz we known the hole-filling in question is also meant as a metaphor for the gnawing desire felt by practically everyone in our current gnarly times (bad meaning not good) to fill the yawning chasm within, the internal void looming just under the surface, where the noise of thought, emotion, and purpose is replaced by an expansive, silent darkness, and a vast emptiness, where all one can “feel” anymore is hollow (like the penne!), apathetic and detached so, you know, Monday (ammirite!) like an old, stale cannoli shell bereft of sweet, velvety cream (that penne shot led us here)…
…so if you’re wondering if “Holes” is the “Whole Lotta Love” of today’s generation we say yes ‘cept instead of a phallocentric wankfest (not meant pejoratively cuz, I mean, we’re talking cock rock here and MZZTR is all about that Big Dick Energy!) that sees Robert P. promising to “give ya every inch of [his] love” (clearly this was before the UK adopted the metric system!) with Sir Jimmy Page notoriously wielding his ax as an all-conquering technophallus in the band’s famously extended (*ahem*) live renditions of the song with gloriously onanistic brio, not to mention jacking off a theremin for a few minutes in some renditions (see below!) just in case the whole/hole my instrument is an extension of my great big donkey doink thing wasn’t entirely clear already, whereas MZZTR politely request to have every inch of their holes filled instead…
…and as we’re learned lately when a big enough percentage of a given population comes to be overtaken by just such a pervasive sense of feeling null and voided (disassociated, inadequate, plagued by grievances) then it’s time to break out the tactical gear cuz chaos is on its way as if it even needs to be “predicted” at this point, thus seeding a rootless, floating rage that the most cynical, powerful, and/or psychotic can use to their advantage, acting a funhouse mirror to the abjection of the no-longer-silent majority, encouraging the populace at large to blame [fill-in-the-blank political scapegoat here, ,with plenty to chose from among marginalized, already suspect minority groups] instead of, oh we dunno, maybe historical levels of economic inequality and exploitation for starters…
…which all just goes to show how not having one’s holes filled with at least with SOME regularity and gratification can be a dangerous thang indeed, potentially leading to civilizational collapse (terror sex hasn’t been this hot since late 2001!) or best-case scenario what Devo calls “de-volution”, which maybe can be bounced back from but that’s feeling less and less likely so put “Holes” on repeat and join the Zeitgeist cuz once it’s made so undeniably clear that holes rule the nation then maybe people will “WAKE UP” as the expression goes (“Wake up, Sheeple!”) and demand that the powers that be cease shooting us up with even more holes…
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II found myself at a bar turned church / looking for some guarantee
The reverend here is like Tom Waits / he’s sippin’ on cheap whiskey
The band spills it’s healing / hands dance over 88 keys
As I sit here on my bar stool perch / And wrestle to set myself free
These lyrics alone should give you a pretty good idea what Kalen’s album Velvet Night released late in 2025 sounds like and it’s nothing like Ke$ha, Kylie, or Katy (all due respect!) none of whom would survive for too long on the hotel lounge circuit we’re guessing but that’s precisely the vibe here right from the opening vamp of the title song and lead-off track “Velvet Night” as she introduces a coy, slinky piano intro rife with jazzy blue notes, extended harmonies, and a descending chord progression topped off with vocals that sound at once world-weary and unbowed, like a hotel lounge-bar lifer bathed in moody chiaroscuro lightingplaying the role of the femme fatale in a classic noir with shades of Joni, Rickie, Myra, Fiona circa Idler’s Wheel, or heck even Tom Waits hisself…
…and FYI Velvet Night is a Bandcamp-only release (for now!) with six out of its dozen songs being re-arranged, piano reductions of songs first put out by Kalen under her own single-monikered project or with the synthy dark-wave combo known as Death By Piano; and the other half being new to newerish compositions again reduced to minimalist piano-and-voice-driven arrangements, accompanied by one additional voice or instrument tops (supplied by long-time collaborator and saxman Johnny Butler, or long-time collaborator and vocalist/songwriter/music journalist/actor/music industry professional No Surrender aka Darius VanSluytman) with Kalen, somewhat ironically, uncovering additional layers of emotional resonance and nuance in her songs by stripping away their outer layers until they’re nearly naked, the skeleton outlines of past and future…
…and whether this self-deconstruction is a bid for proactive personal growth or merely the fun lark of a remix project, the format seems to have been at least partially inspired by Ms. Lister’s love of hosting personal salons (don’t go expecting to get yr hair done!) in intimate spaces for hand-picked audiences, featuring stripped-down musical performances, poetry, dance, and who knows what else as community-building events which even when re-located to more private, domestic spaces is very much in keeping with Kalen Lister’s musical past…
…which stretches back to peak-era Williamsburg (so does ours to be fair!) where an average night out might’ve mean bouncing from a band residency at Alligator Lounge or Spike Hill to grabbing a brew and a free slice across the street at the Charleston (est. 1933) to maybe doing an after-hours for-hire-backup-singer gig at an underground loft party at Secret Project Robot or Death By Audio with Kalen hauling her keyboard and amp up and down Bedford Avenue (building up those biceps!) and before long “becom[ing] a neighborhood mainstay, performing high-kicks and jumping off amps in kinetic kinship with the audience” but given that Kalen now lives in the much more family-oriented environs of Central Brooklyn, fittingly given that she’s raising a couple rugrats of her own while working as an in-demand academic and test-prep tutor, it just goes to show how we all gotta reinvent sooner or later while (hopefully!) staying true to the authentic core of our being which is exactly what Kalen does with these songs so you may wanna take notes…
…and speaking of reinventions there’s some good ones on this rekkid like how “Seducer” in the original version is a “cool seduction,” all slow-build slinky and come-hither, whereas the new re-tweaked version is more of a “hot seduction” with K’s voice and piano intertwining so intimately with Johnny’s sax (or the drumming of Dan Capaldi as seen above) that we feel a bit sheepish even listening to such an intimate couplings (musically!) but with others like “Disappearing” adhering much more closely to the original (already minimalistic) version versus “Sirens” which honestly we can’t even recognize as being the same song—with the Death By Piano version sung from the perspective of a classical siren, breathily intoning, “I can tease you / I can tempt you…”
…over a watery, percolating keyboard loop that could easily carry your mind away versus the Velvet Night version (or more like total remake) that’s mellower and more melancholy at first, but ultimately more agitated as Kalen calls out to an absent fiture, “come back to bed,” whereas “only darkness comes to call”, with the song now seemingly about a relationship that’s ended vs. its seductive beginnings and if we quote any more of the new lyrics we’re gonna start sobbing [editor’s note: maybe the “sirens” here are the kind that warn of approaching calamity, hmm] which only goes to show (hopefully!) how endings eventually lead to new beginnings…
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The word chanteuse was seemingly invented for a performing & recording artist like Katja which, sure, the word literally just means ‘singer’ or more specifically ‘a female singer of popular songs, especially in a nightclub setting’ but it implies so much more than that—an elegant figure, poised but passionate, belting out weepers in an impassioned-but-at-the-same-time-slightly-detached voice w/o breaking a sweat, shedding a tear, or breaking a heel (always elegant high heels) cuz glamorous that’s why in the manner of Marlene Dietrich or Édith Piaf or better yet in the yé-yé girl manner of France Gall, Françoise Hardy, or heck April March—and it doesn’t hurt if you’re a icy blonde or a statuesque brunette with Bettie Page bangs cuz let’s be real the music is paramount of course but image is crucial too…
…with the French being the first to combine haute couture fashion with hip indie music (they invented the freakin’ nightclub after all) way back when Marie Antoinette picked out shoes, poured champagne, sampled fine pastries and threw herself down on her big fancy bed in a huff—blurring the line between the innocence of youth and moral turpitude—as the Strokes played on her nearby boombox centuries before they even existed (if Julian Casablancas isn’t the male version of the chanteuse, causing the girls and gays to lose their composure the more he keeps his, the very picture of effortless cool and hotitude then we’re not sure who is!—with Katja checking off most of these boxes herself and quite likely a few more we didn’t even think of yet, all with the seeming ease that’s key to chanteuse cool…
…as she does on her latest single, “Curtain Call”, released in early 2025, a song which totally nails the dark, smoky nightclub vibe with its swelling strings, wantonly wailing sax and wanly forlorn-but-resigned-to-it vocals noting in a suitably smoldering, cabaret-ready, three-and-a-half-minute long musical-sigh, “Life feels disconcerting / until I start diverting / to another way” and even if it’s not quite time for Katja’s curtain call yet, we have a feeling it will be soon (“I’m taking center stage…I’m willing to engage” sung over quite a lovely melody) so keep your eyes peeled this coming spring for Katja’s reemergence, seeing as the Dead of Winter and record-setting sub-arctic temps are hardly the ideal conditions for slinky black cocktail dresses, but soon no doubt she’ll again be doing her best top-shelf bourbon swishing, torch-song slow-burning at your local discothèque, boîte de nuit, ou brasserie en “La Ville de Nouveau Yorke” et, peut être, on ne sait jamais, “gay Paree”…
…and with that we take our curtain call. And bid you adieu!!!
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33-1/3) MOTHERMARY — Non-Duality
…or not, seeing as we gotta tack on one more entry here cuz how could we sleep on MOTHERMARY in 2025 [Editor’s note: or My Son The Doctor for that matter or etc. etc. but we gotta cut you off at some point!] especially seeing as it’s been a very long seeming 3-year long dry-spell between 2022 and 2025 with no new music (well, closer to 2 years but still) but Prais-uh the Luh-ord this past year MOTHERMARY were dry no more (!) gifting true believers with their Second Coming in the form of a couple bangin’ singles and an EP in November tacking on two additional, equally bangin’ songs all of which we have gratefully received like grape soda and soda crackers (jk, only real wine can signify the Blood of Christ) in a communion handed down from on high by the resurrected saviors of making religion sexy again at a level not seen since Renaissance painters came up with Ostentatio Genitaliuma.k.a. “freaky Jesus”(Madone a Mia!) and no you can’t make this stuff up—with their darkwavey electro-ritualistic pulsations and ululations…
…with identical twins Elyse and Larena Winn proving themselves to be Unitarians on the EP Non-Duality, and blessed be, just so one may better bear witness to their crucifix-licking charms, MOTHERMARY has blessed us with not one, not two, but three new music videos to their new tunes and with that let us set fire to 2025 cuz as we enter 2026 [editor’s note: we’re already a month in now and you’re not gonna like it] we strongly feel this year will require more, and more extreme forms, of musical sustenance than ever before in hopes, however remote, of preserving some last shred of sanity with MOTHERMARY ably and admirably setting the ideal tone as a fitting transition out of a f***ed up 2025 and into a possibly more f***ed up 2026…🎉