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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1) 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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2) 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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Self-declared to be a “mashup of Pere Ubu & Kleenex [or] The Static meets Mania D.”which certainly makes our job easier (thanks y’all!) 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-and-or-girl-and-or-everything-in-between NYC band but also a little more playful and a little less self-serious (more Wombo than Wet Leg tho’ arguably some of both) half of whom are Prada punks anyway (no disrespect intended; NYC = fashion) whereas on Eraser’s debut LP Hideout (Siltbreeze Records) the young humans of Eraser are all about keeping it 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 only mid 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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6) 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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8) 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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9) 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
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…
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 dropping mescaline in the Mojave desert guitar lick soon joined by the seeming ghost of Ray Manzarek on duel organ parts (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 drifting down a lazy river in a reverie about marmalade skies and tangerine trees and tho’ the mood isn’t broken by the first guitar solo which goes off like a firework tracing light trails in the sky (“silhouettes dance on the wall / the beginning of my fall”)…
..with sinuous keyboard counter-melodies suddenly 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 which is a real thing (!) but in the form of reverb-soaked, cawing electric guitar possibly recorded in the Holland Tunnel (that amazing sense of ambient space) or so it sounds like which only augments the lysergic swirl of “psyched out garage rock, soulful funky rhythms, and jazzy/proggy explorations” in the band’s own words, to which we’ll add Krautrock another seeming influence with Düül evoking OG founders of the genre like German art-commune-turned-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” meaning if riders of the storm meets ghost riders in the sky vibes are your cup of psilocybin tea then give this one a try…
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…
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…
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…
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..
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 about control 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…
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…
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…
21) THE PALE HAND — “Reign in Hell”
Why in blue blazes would anyone would wanna stage a mutiny in Heaven when Heaven is, well, you know, heaven, innit? Or is it?
We’re not tryin’ 2b sacrilegious here cuz we believe religion is a highly personal choice between you and your Goddess and as long as yr not killin’ and maimin’, spreadin’ hate or denying the basic rights of others it’s all good but let’s talk Bible Stories cuz for starters you gotta a pushy patriarch in the OT (Old Testament) meddling in everyone’s business—planting Trees of Knowledge with tasty apples (straight-up sabotage!), pitting brother against brother to the tune of murder and lifelong exile, telling people to saw their babies in half (!)—to the point where people must’ve been pretty jazzed when He pulled a disappearing act and referred all messages to his Only Son by the time the NT (New Testament) rolled around which went swimmingly for a while that is ’til it didn’t, and then it went very wrong indeed, tho’ a religion was birthed that’s all about “do unto other” in principle if not in practice (more like “do what thou wilt until others” with a nod to Mr. Crowley) seemingly able to justify pretty much anything in His Name from the Crusades to America going full-on Nazi-schatze…
…thus leading some to suggest the Almighty may be an undiagnosed sufferer of Borderline Personality Syndrome what with the millennia-long mood swings alternating between extreme helicopter-parenting and long periods of absence if not total abandonment— all of which is summed up perfectly by NYC’s preeminent flirt-doom metal band, The Pale Hand, in two lines from their debut single, “Reign in Hell”…
“Father, where have you been?
Oh my father, your son, Prince of Sin”
…meaning it’s not crazy under the circumstances to ask if it may be “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”—just as Satan famously stated it in Milton’s Paradise Lost before leading a rebellion in Heaven and getting banished to Hell as a consolation prize to which he reportedly said “this’ll do quite nicely, thank you!” before hiring an image consultant and getting His whole look together with the pitchfork and horns and —a question taken up anew by genderless vampire-pastor Kelsea Beck (who herself had a strict religious upbringing or so we hear) as the front-heathen of The Pale Hand who helpfully explains in the song’s PR kit that “Lyrically, the song is a lapsed theologian’s wet dream. Christian doctrine asserts that free will is humankind’s unique gift, something not even angels possess. Therefore, the logical conclusion follows that in his so-called rebellion, Lucifer only played the role his creator intended for him, and was doomed to be cast into hell before he was ever made.”…
Father, you made me for this
Oh my father, there’s fear in your kiss
…or in the immortal words of Bon Scott, “If you want blood, you got it!”, a commandment heeded by The Pale Hand whenever and wherever they play live at shows that’re like French Grand Guignol Guignol crossed with Hammer Horror’s Twins of Evil (1971) with the blood in question not in the form of a boiling river as you may expect but instead drained from living human bodies in the form of the Dark One transformed into a 19th-century Edwardian fop (editor’s note: as they often do!) with retractible fangs prone to inviting fair young maidens on stage who are themselves prone to being seduced by some hardcore eye-flirting and devilishly clever reparté and right when it’s looking like a full on bodice-ripper that is until our genderless vampire-pastor plunges their fangs into the delicate white stem of the comely lass’s neck, its pale coloration standing in stark contrast to the deep crimson liquid now spurting from two freshly installed spigots on said appendage…
Father, you made me for this
Oh my father, there’s fear in your kiss
…and one can only hope that when the time inevitably comes where The Pale Hand of Death taps upon yr shoulder and ferries you down the River Stix or the River Acheron (depending on what direction yr coming from!) that the Grim Reaper brought along some good tuneage to play on the boombox that He keeps in His boat at all times and not God help us something like Imagine Dragon’s “Eyes Closed” or Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” (which would be the real Hell) cuz you need proper tunage to capture the strange, eerie euphoria of floating down to Hell where you’ll soon be cooked alive in boiling Mazola oil as mosquitoes, lice, worms, and flies swarm around your head and crawl inside your every orifice slowing eating you alive from the inside for 100,000 years…
…or not (!!!) cuz some people claim Hell’s a pretty fun place to hang with its kick-ass music scene (every good musician ends up in Hell due to that whole Faustian bargain thing) with its bad rep mostly coming from fake Yelp reviews left by some of Hell’s residents hoping to keep the gentrifiers out, but either way “Reign In Hell” wax expressly written for this very journey, moving thru a sprightly Maiden-ish groove, then to an almost Dio-ish part with Kelsea really reaching for the rafters with notes high enough to pierce to Heavens, and then on to a more Sabby slow section and then back again which is nice cuz it makes the song feels like a real journey across the waters of Heavy Metal Madness, and as fellow worshipers (we assuming if you’re read this far!)at the Alter of Meh-tall \m/ \m/ or music of any genre really cuz all music is EVE-HILL (a useless waste of time whose adherents like to stand around in dank basements getting their faces blasted off by bands of cretins with no other discernible skill besides leading the hopeless and the helpless down a pathway of bad sex and bad drugs and bad rock ‘n’ roll) and with it being a given that we’re all on the Highway To Hell together better get some good tunage together for the journey and pack a towel…
22) Claire Shutters — BARFIGHT!
Pop music is alive and well in New York City or haven’t you heard with a pop renaissance taking place right outside your window with separate camps ranging from more traditional cutting-edge guitar-pop to more traditional cutting-edge electronic-pop with other highly-active-in-their-own-right sub-scenes being country-pop and hyper-pop still going strong among other hyphenate forms with Claire Shutters pleasingly blurring the lines between some of these categories tho’ a specimen of cutting-edge guitar-pop definitely a specimen for sure, one of many artists seemingly coming out of nowhere and staking their flags in the local pop firmament…
…which Ms. Shutters very much does on her sophomore EP, “pulling from a plethora of musical influences like ‘60s pop, surf rock, and Y2K alt nostalgia all tied together with her sweet and sour lyricism” which we quote from her official bio here cuz it nails the landing with BARFIGHT! opening with a song called “Cigarettes & Conversation” deftly weaving a tale of romantic intrigue that kicks off in the unofficial smoking area outside a random club standing on the sidewalk in-between sets (“outside the venue / playing with faux hesitation / didn’t know I would see you” but now the bar’s empty and before long Claire’s dropping subtle hints like “cut me to pieces / your love is such a beautiful knife” with deceptive apple-cheeked innocence helped in no small part by the buoyant music with bonus points for quoting from Meet Me In Bathroom with the line, um, “meet me in the bathroom / so I can hear what you’re saying”…
…and did we mention the last song’s called “Indie Sleaze Jesus” which yes we’re burying the lede here cuz it’s Claire’s spikiest tune yet with two hard-panned distorted, grunge-encrusted guitars holding the pop diva aloft 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” and how we can possibly follow that (?!) so Praise the Void and Pass the Contrition…
23) RH0DA — “VBABY”
Vampires! People love ‘em! As demonstrated in many decades worth of popular films and centuries of classic literature. Nosfertu, Dracula, Carmila, Lestat. And what about Blacula, Blade, Spike & Angel, Barnabas Collins, Edward Cullin, Count Floyd, Count Duckula, and muthalovin’ Laszlo Cracensworth for Count Chocula’s sake!
And now “Vbaby” can be added to this list which is a song and character to match released a week before Halloween by NYC rocker Briana [last name withheld] turned electronic-pop artist Rh0da with “Vbaby” the song and the persona being something like if Baby Doll went from vamp to vampire by which we mean the notorious 1946 Southern gothic play by Tennessee Williams and the even more notorious 1956 cinematic adaptation of Baby Doll directed by Elia Kazan starring a sultry yet troublesomely thumb-sucking Carroll Baker as the titular coquettish yet lethal woman-child Baby Doll Meighan prone to seducing middle-aged drunken cotton-gin owners for who knows what nefarious purposes so yeah basically a succubus which is itself basically a feminine vampire figure…
…or is Baby Doll a/k/a VBABY more the victim than the perpetrator which is just the sort of moral ambiguity very much at the heart of the horror-pop/Southern Gothic vibe itself at the heart of Briana’s transformation into Rh0da which you can read more about in our review of RH0DA’s debut single “Loved” dropped back in February which just to spell it out more explicitly and more literally the song (after a Black Mass-invocation intro) opens by spelling out “V-A-M-P” which after a pregnant pause finishes with “I – R – RAWR – E” like Harmony Kendall working up a new cheer routine for Sunnydale High’s next pep rally with the final result being like a Grimm’s nursery-rhyme banger that puts the vamp back in vampire if you know what we mean to which RH0DA can only but reply, “if you want me / bite me in the night / so I’ll die free” which seems pretty generous actually with “Baby” having come about as part of a “Spooky Sessions” series of collabs initated by producer P3CKY who wrote songs for his handpicked singers…
24) A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE (AVSE) — “Def Bones”
And while we’re into dark theatrics and into singles, it only makes sense we should turn to AVSE’s “Def Bones’ next which one might reasonably assume was also released around Halloween but instead it was dead in the middle of summer when spooky stuff is in disturbingly short supply but is it ever really in these times with the Devil loosed near daily to wreck havoc and that’s the reigning vibe on this (arguably!) the band’s most scorching song thus far (and that’s really saying sumpin’!) tho’ with this being A Very Special Episode they manage to have some fun with the all the fire and brimstone with Patrick, Casey, and Chayse raining a savage riff down on to your head starting about 10 seconds in with the trio hitting all the AVSE hallmarks, i.e. 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 equally the ravishing pre-chorus into the chorus (“Nooooo / I don’t wanna die / but these visions in my head / want me to DROP DEAD!“) and a neat-o interlude comprised of waves of pummeling noise and savage skin-beating which all totally fits the general tenor of life these days and yes we keep saying that but that’s what happens when civil society breaks down with the voices in your head telling you to drop dead but you won’t wanna do that just yet when ya got a very special invitation to hang out under AVSE’s traveling circus canopy to hang out with the other freaks…
Ok let’s address the elephant in the room (on shrooms?!), yes, it’s true TV Moms bear some passing resemblance to Foo Fighters musically and and visually, but don’t hold it against TV Mom’s frontperson/evil mastermind/prolific visual artist and yet Lucas has turned this affliction into an asset (we keed! we keed!) by facing it head-on and delivering a set of songs that take the Foo’s legacy in subtle, yet bracing new directions like on the opening track “Stolen Mouth,” it’s slurred first verse making the title feel apropos (“TIRED PLAYING / STOLEN MOUTH / DUST OF / CELEBRITY”) with some neat start-stop dynamics and then a catchy record-skipping hook (“they call you in / they call you in”) with the next verse adding a 2nd background guitar part that sounds like it’s trying to claw it’s way out of it’s own skin which is all the more impressive given guitars don’t have skin…
…tho’ they sound like they do on Celebrity Dust—a collection of songs that bleed, sweat and gob up phlegm, secreting who-knows-what while blowing the occasional snot rockets when hey can get away with it—which makes sense cuz Lucas is also a visual artist as seen in the video above so treating music as a tangible, physical medium must seem natural—and btw just disregard the whole Foo Fighters thing, we just wanted to show how easy it is to do a Mad Libs type thing and compare any one emerging band to a bigger, better known band and throw out some titles and adjectives and voilá, the algorithmic ease of which being why AI writes 90% of music blogs at present but not this one (net yet) and likely also why a band like TV Moms feels driven to make their music so vivid and visceral, and even sloppy or chaotic at times, keeping those human imperfections and bodily processes foregrounded…
…cuz we agree with Lucas’s line of thinking where he writes on Bandcamp that on Celebrity Dust there’s “no auto-tune used. No artificial intelligence used. Recording tools used are digital versions of analog effects that existed before the year 1986” which makes sense cuz that’s the year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum inducted its first class and also the year ‘60s TV holdovers the Monkees became one of the biggest live acts in the world, the point being rock was getting more self-conscious about itself and its own past (also in 1986, compact disc were getting big with the big labels making a mint on selling their back catalogue to eager consumers and many even repurchasing big chunks of their old LP/8-tracks/cassette collections on the new format which was pretty remarkable at the time tho’ totally commonplace today, with the past flattened to one expanseless list of search results…
…whereas when a band like TV Moms comes along they’re so clearly situated in a certain time and place and really inhabits it so completely and skillfully that it can snap you out of yr stupor for a minute and maybe even make you sweat or bleed, a reminder that history is real and not just an endless series of frictionless mixes, mashups, and memes (not to mention the LP’s Harp Nips cover so they’re keeping those local lineages alive too!) but then we don’t mean to put to much pressure on TV Moms to save the world and everything while putting their own spin roots-grunge on songs like “Sonic Doof” which has one of the very best guitar solos of 2025 towards the end of “Sonic Doof,” and anyway music’s an orally transmitted art form by necessity you copy the things you like, shuffle those elements around in a new way and add yr own spice like seriously listen to the first 10 seconds of the Banana Splits’ forgotten classic “I’m Gonna Find A Cave” (1969) and tell us that Mudhoney invented grunge with a straight face….
26) 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, something like a post-“Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” Rupert Holmes playing the side-stage at your local state fair armed with nothing but 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,” as usual our writer’s taking some liberties here while getting the general vibe across] with “Theme Song” being the best match of theme (the world of the rogue, the rake, and the roué) and theme song at least since Blossom graced this great nation’s TV screens and sang the hell outta her own theme song, just as Dave sings about how “dinner starts at 5 but there’s cocktails all the time” which sounds suspiciously like “you can check out anytime you like / but you can never leave” except that it takes place on the Lido Deck…
…and we’re not sure why the cruise ship industry hasn’t fully latched on to Pleasure Island yet but they will soon enough seeing as boat-bound concerts (many with bottomless salad bar!) have become a real thing in recent years like the Headbanger’s Boat or Rock the Bells Cruise and Flower Power Cruise, the latter designed for boomers hoping to die at sea while listening to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” played by “Iron Butterfly” despite their being no surviving original members (welcome, new Iron Butterflies!) which brings up the related point, namely, the ever-growing number of aging and aged stars of yesteryear getting booked for these shows and exerting themselves at multiple shows which presents a real threat to our musical heritage like what happened a couple years ago when Mojo Nixon bit it while playing on a cruise ship and what a bizarre way to go for the man who brought us, “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and “Don Henley Must Die” (callback!) and we can’t afford to lose any more musical legends in this manner and esp. those w/songs about “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin”…
…whereas by contrast, Pleasure Island’s silky smooth ’n’ smoothly schmoozy music is scientifically designed to be played on cruise ships and could end up saving the lives of many cherished legacy artists in the process as a result of stealing their gigs but totally for their own good cuz they don’t have the sea legs nor the salt-water heart for Tiki-cocktail drinking binges on board which all but demands songs like “Pool Boi” and “Late Shift,” “Strange Lady” and the LP-closing “Babes” with our current fave being “Successful”, the best sounding smooth-funk song with both a marimba and braggadocio about stock portfolios while noting that “everybody clocks me as a Scorpio” to be heard since, um, “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)” I guess, so sell off some stocks, check your astral charts, and climb aboard…
Short Porch are hot n’ ready and waiting for your call at 1-900-SHORTPO so call now to meet other active, underemployed singles in your area and while you’re waiting on hold to speak with other freaks like Freddie Freaker for instance you’ll be treated to the newest “full length” by “Short Porch” with track #1, “Bar’s Closed” pulling no punches in outlining the very reason you need to be calling a 1-900 party line at 4AM in the last place and then there’s track #2 “Final Human” where Short Porch fantasizes about being just that while buying guns off Craigslist just to be safe alongside gold bricks and candles and two tons of matchsticks (that’s a lot!) even tho’ people are laughing and calling him crazy with some crazy guitar skronk-ery bolstering the peoples’ case but otherwise with the slick sounding keyboard and locked-in rhythm section and stentorian singing (is that Freddie Freaker?!?) it’s like punk meets AOR, half Loverboy and half MC5/Stooges which we quite like, with the fist-pumping “Panic City” being another good specimen of this musical fusion and the mellower “Horse” to help with coming down…
28) 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 untidy tumble of verbiage dedicated to the subject, Mars Ray really, really, really wants to see your skeletons, baby, and there’s nothing wrong with that which given the plural voicing we assume to mean our deepest, darkest secrets (the ones you always assumed you’d take to the grave—and not merely your bone structure and *phew* for that cuz we though Mars was about to whip out her chainsaw and go Leatherface on our face there for a second, on a song that serves as a serious-yet-sardonic plea for openness as in stark honesty and no bullshitery (“if you want a simple life / you better go out / and find yourself / a simple wife”) with one of this society’s many dirty little secrets being “we’re all just children play at being grown / and there are consequences for saying so” which really if ya think about if is totally a form of social control but we don’t get the sense anyone’s gonna be controlling Mars Ray or her Raptures anytime soon with rapturous, swooning music fitting the lyrics to a “T” with a trumpet-and-guitar-led almost Dixieland-landish attack that’ll have anyone in earshot forming a conga line and sharing their maracas in no time…
Nobody, but nobody, is doing hand claps these days like the band Marvelle Oaks—a band made up the husband & wife team of Alex and Tess Demir holding down guitar & bass respectively, and vocal harmonies together, with Tom Marsh on drums and while credits for “hand claps” aren’t to be found on Bandcamp 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 hand-claps prominently, like on the charming LP-opener which follows our subject from being a little kid “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” at a “parents’ party” to being the parent with “my pinky in a little hand / feeling things I don’t understand” with handclaps in the chorus with falsetto harmonies (“suddenly…it’s tomorrow, it’s tomorrow”) communicating a sense of childlike innocence and wonder as heard in children’s playground hand-clapping games and the like…
…whereas on “Shiny Things” the handclaps, also coming in the chorus (and also with falsetto voice, there’s just something great about seem to ring with the hollow ambition of seeking applause and applauding for the shiny things we all look to as beacons leading us out of the darkness but just as often leading further into the darkness (“rats off to the races / the state of my statements”) as a remedy that ultimately tears asunder to paraphrase more of the lyrics set against a strutting beat and crunchy guitar chords whereas “Flying Dream”’s handclaps are the sound of a child again but this time one’s been told by their mother that if they’re having another nightmare about “forever falling” the solution is to “just start flying” which is something we’re gonna try and remember and with clapping being the closest equivalent to flapping one’s arms that makes a sound to be justifiable and with the song audibly taking flight in its coda/outro it seems the hand-claps worked…
…anyway we figure hand caps work so well musically for M.O. cuz their songs are already so lean and angular that so crisply recorded that each of the three instruments and the two voices always have a lot of lift and separation between them—somehow, even when there’s multiple highly active parts in play there’s at the same time lost of empty space which is big part of Marvelle Oaks’ sonic charm with hand-claps slotting perfectly into those empty spaces and giving a very human, open and welcoming energy to their songs and their slice-of-life lyrics with everyone encouraged to clap along…
30) CITY ICE — “Like You Do” / “Light Sleeper”
“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.”
Notice to aspiring bands: when yr manager or yr publicist or yr Rick Rubin-style band guru says yr “band bio” needs punching up THIS IS WHAT THEY MEAN cuz this band bio’s concise and direct (there’s something to be said for concision, ammirite?!) describes the band’s music in five words or less (good good) but at the same time it covers a lot of ground while at the same time leaving some intriguing details to the imagination and best of all in four relatively pithy sentences (!!!) you got sex, the streets, violence, crime, homelessness, addiction, and oh yeah rock ’n’ roll which let us be clear we’re not making light cuz this is all serious stuff and we’re glad MDP came out of it mostly unscathed but if you do have these kind of life experiences you gotta put ‘em in your band bio cuz it’s no place to be demure and what’s more peeps are gonna listen to your music a little bit closer for “clues” when they know you’ve got a compelling backstory even in which case it’s smart to withhold certain key details just to keep the intrigue going a little longer like how in the bio above the actual crimes commented aren’t revealed (our money’s on illegal puppet show!) or for that matter the name of the band that got signed by Geffen…
…but we can tell you all about the two singles City Ice put out this year and first thing you’ll notice about the cover image to City Ice’s “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 Matt Devin Patrick’s head thrown back in a supine position as if the mic that’s just in frame just shocked the f*** out of his kisser which is certainly plausible given the decrepit, decaying state of the stage gear at many live venues today (times are tuff!) with the more salient point being that both these albums were very much about transforming from one state of being to another, I mean, it’s the literal title to Lou’s album with “The Bends” along similar lines being a thing that happens when you come up to the surface too quickly from deep-sea diving thus causing a rapid, extreme change in air pressure which can lead to dizziness and shooting joint pain that makes you wanna double-over ergo the name or much worse paralysis (!) or even death (!!!)…
…and while Lou was going thru a major transition from the Velvet Underground to a solo career circa 1972 with Transformer being his second album but first breakthrough plus he was famously hangin’ with a whole crew of gender-bending “transformers” at the time like David and Iggy, Candy Darling and Warhol’s Superstars; 23 years later Radiohead was going thru a major transition too what with having a major, unexpected hit with “Creep” from their debut Pablo Honey and reasonably feared they’d be pigeonholed as “one hit wonders” by a novelty song they soon came to hate anyway with The Bends being essentially their first and last shot to prove themselves real artists and to be critically respected as such which seems to have panned out pretty well for the boys from Oxford tho’ the question of another album every appearing has tended to overshadow everything else of late what with the ten-year anniversary of A Moon Shaped Pool arriving in May but we digress…
…but that’s all comfy, white-boy rock-star problems innit (no shade intended! please send money!) whereas the types of transformation City Ice trades in are much more identifiable like struggling to overcome a difficult upbringing, career and economic setbacks, getting screwed by people you thought you could trust, drugs and alcohol of course and other garden-variety “trying to muddle thru this latest bad patch” and come out the other side a better, happier, not necessarily more productive person but one who’s been transformed in some meaningful way like on “Like You Do” which is a song about the power of love (awww!) as a life-changing force with Patrick bringing some twisted wit to the recovering addict narrative : “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 that’s half the Knack, half maximum R&B with hand claps no less (yea!) complete with raspy vocalizing and maracas no less (maracas!) but most of all it’s got one of those eternal-sounding riffs/hooks/whatevs that feels like it’s just always been there to that point I was led to double-check if it’s a cover song or not and thank Ganesh it’s not the REO Speedwagon song (we keed! we keed!)…
…and finally “Light Sleeper” is the newer one, released just over a month ago which is about how long since we got a decent, solid night’s sleep so we’re reception to its message whatever it may be plus it’s a fitting opposites attract flip-side to “LYD” with a brooding vibe driven by an underlying live-wire fervor with throbbing bass and cyclical guitar turning and turning in the widening gyre of sleeplessness complete with ambient cityscape sounds like waling sirens and a ghostly MTA “stand clear of the closing doors please” alert and now it’s hitting us this may be a song about being homeless given all the subway and street sounds and mention of having one’s sleeping bag stolen plus the fact “rough sleeper” is slang for unhoused (more so in the UK but still) which makes its melancholy yet steadfast vibe echo all the deeper with solace taken in hanging on to “dreams projected on a movie screen / melodies and faded scenes / sad songs from the 1970s” and in a present where the blood-dimmed tide of that other City ICE is loosed and where too often the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, the last half of this song is damn near therapeutic with its rousing guitar solo and repeated assurance that “it’s gonna be alright…we’re gonna get thru tonight” so better keep yr head up…
31) MZZTR — “Kimberly” / “Fill My Holes”
Ok so we already gave y’all our unabridged thoughts on MZZTR back in 2024 complete with interview and tho’ we seen them live numerous times by then and heard some song demo it was actually before they had any official recordings at all (we’re still waiting on that killer “I Cum Blood” Cannibal Corpse cover/role-reversed reworking!) but this past year they put out two count ‘em two singles with the first one being “Kimberly” and let us just say (cuz I’m pretty sure we didn’t mention it before) that whatever you think of MZZTR as NYC’s most theatrical, most ritualistic, most likely to somehow persuade an audience member to drink backwash outta a doggie bowl on their hands and knees and let’s face it most flat-out bizarre metal band in the greater Tri-State Area, they must certainly be the first to cross the animalistic growling vocal style of death metal with the kind of Valley Girl vocal-fry “ewww maaah GAWWWWD!”type voice not heard since Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (1995) or before that Moon Unit Zappa’s left-field novelty hit, “Valley Girl” (1982) and then feed it thru some weird octave-dropping vocoder effect alongside Daddy Adam’s suitably brutal guitar and a thrashing rhythm section…
…with “Kimberly” being the Goddess of Rot apparently as confirmed by the song’s literally face-ripping music video so don’t let it be said we didn’t warn you—and we’ll let you figure out the rest—whereas the video for “Fill My Holes” (release a few months later in August) gives you an endoscopic POV view of various holes being penetrated and filled, from the aperture of a camera lens to hollow, ribbed tubes of penne paste to a fishnet-clad young lady’s bellybutton (if it wasn’t an “innie” before, it is now?!) which is a pretty teasingly literal way of interpreting the song but MZZTR’s not foolin’ us cuz we known they mean it metaphorically too, with an emphasis on “whorically” cuz Mzztr Man’s got needs, what with the purple robes and Adam’s hole-filled fishnet shirt and those disturbing masks they wear on stage and in videos and probably to bed too that’re totally “uncanny valley” in how they look like “real” faces at first glance but then there’s a blankness, an absence, an ambiguity that makes ‘em difficult for your puny little minds to process (sorry, just getting into the spirit of MZZTR’s whole BDSM thing!)…
…and if we really felt like making a grandiose claim for the song we’d claim it’s the “Whole Lotta Love” for a whole new generation (and maybe it is!) ‘cept instead of being a phallocentric wank-fest (not meant pejoratively!) all about how Bob’s gonna “give you every inch of [his] love” (but how many, Jimmy?) and where live they famously (*ahem*) extended the orgasmic breakdown part of the song with Sir Page brandishing his guitar-as-technophallus like a 2-year-old boy who just went wee-wee by himself for the first time with Page then drifting sidestage to jack off a theremin for a few more minutes (seriously, watch the clip below!) in a display of pure onanistic glee…
…whereas “Fill My Holes” is all about having a whole lotta holes that need filling, or what a Lacanian psychoanalyst would refer to as lack as in bphysical, mental, emotional, sexual, social, and/or spiritual lack of fulfillment if not total lack of agency thus causing severe anxiety that somehow gets all tangled up with the phallus-as-symbol and Electra Complexes and of course castration anxiety cuz Lacan was a descendent of Freud and Freud was obsessed with dicks but which really seems to have more to do with a pervasive sense of powerlessness and impotence both literally and figuratively and let’s not forget the neurosis that follows like repression and projection and transference and displacement and regression and identification with emotions like rage and humiliation and grievance coming to the fore and while we’re not tryin’ to get political here it all sounds like the personal profile of your average (hypothetical!) tyrannical, megalomaniacal autocrat or authoritarian we’re just sayin’ with a special emphasis on the grievance part of it and a perceived inability to please Daddy that can last a lifetime…
…and when a big enough chunk of a given population or society comes to be overtaken by just such pervasive feelings of feeling empty and absent (I.e., disassociated) and inadequate and in the absence of any consideration given to how they themselves and/or the larger macro-structural foundations of the society (including the economy) may be to blame and choose to instead project blame for their own state of abjection and humiliation onto a given scapegoat which is often an entire category of their own fellow citizens who occupying a lower station in life with grievance naturally leading to a desire for vengeance which is then easily galvanized further by a charismatic (very loosely speaking) leader or aspiring leader who if a big enough chunk of the populace comes to identify with ‘em—no matter how baldly they’re being manipulated, but it hardly matters if the leader in question is mainly being used as a symbol anyway and a symbol of lack rather than for any practical abilities or experience then we’re talkin’ about a dangerous situation indeed…
…which all just goes to show how not having one’s holes filled with SOME regularity and some degree of gratification can be a dangerous thang if not a broader disruptive, destabilizing force with potentially dire consequences such as societal collapse, civilizational collapse, or best-case scenario, what Devo called “de-volution” which we can maybe bounce back from which is precisely why we feel it’s urgent that people listen to “Fill My Holes” and most especially the children so they can start o learn self-care in form of hole-filling and start to realize how doomed we truly are, not to mention how it’d make for an excellent campaign song too for Whigs and Torres alike and if that happens in 2026 or 2028 we’re sure as hell gonna be expecting some consultant fees or else we’re talkin’ major grievance, so to sum up these guys are out there but if yr a sick puppy as well you may wanna drink from their dog-bowl full of drool…
I 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
Just by reading the words above, we’re guessing you have a pretty good idea what the music should sound like that would go with these lyrics and we’re here to tell you, you nailed it, cuz there’s really only one sound that could possibly work with these lyrics above and it doesn’t sound anything like Ke$ha, Kylie, or Katy (all due respect to this fine triumvirate!) even if all their names start with a similar plosive sound, but more like something along the lines of oh we dunno Joni (folky jazz!), Rickie (jazzy folk!), Myra (jazzy jazz!) or even Fiona circa Idler’s Wheel (freaky folk!) or heck even Tom Waits hisself minus the Louis Armstrong meets Ethel Merman in Hell vocal affection as he herself has described it it but yeah when it comes to the piano plinking bits we’re hearing blue notes, extended chords, and complex harmonic progressions across the LP which hardly suggests “here’s three chords, go start a band!” but rather “here’s a second inversion G7#5b9 chord now go take a music theory course!” (Most just some 7 and 9 extensions tho’) but yet it sounds right as rain for what KALEN’S singing about here…
…on the title-track opener to KALEN’S surprise LP release in November (it was announced, but still surprising!) with lyrics about twisting oneself into new shapes and configurations, diving deep within to discover hidden layers and unknown pleasure as part of a journey of self-exploration and -actualization (“On a velvet night in Brooklyn / I am sad but new / as I move toward myself / and away from you”), a Bandcamp-only (for now!) full-on in which sees Kalen Lister (government name!) cleaving her music in two—with six out of the dozen songs on Velvet Night being reconfigured, piano reductions of previously-released songs originally put out under one of her eponymous band projects or under her synthy dark-wave project known as Death By Piano, and the other half being brand new compositions (such as “Velvet Night”) which are likewise minimalist piano-and-voice-driven arrangements that might include one additional voice or instrument tops (continuing her long-term collaborations with saxman Johnny Butler and co-vocalist No Surrender) so in other words it’s either KALEN finding additional layers of emotional nuance and meaning by stripping them naked while laying out the skeleton outlines of her future self and songs…
Death: https://thedelimag.com/interview-and-video-debut-death-by-piano-talks-new-ep-and-dazzling-new-stage-show-4-3-24-at-sultan-room/
By: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VygvJS3UtI4
Piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pWuFv_NSMs
Johnny Buter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyrrAQfgq6c
No Surrender: https://thedelimag.com/231941-2/
Change starts within 00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSiOPl9MPgw
Change starts within 01: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DQlqjZJkhOQ/
…which sounds like a brave bid for proactive personal growth from where we sit (we could learn a thing or two!) which isn’t to say Kalen’s been working on this in isolation (hardly!) cuz for one thing the very concept was inspired by Ms. Lister’s love of hosting “personal salons” (no, not that kind (!) so don’t go expected to get yr hair done) in various types of intimate spaces for a hand-picked or sometimes self-selecting audiences with minimal accompaniment (maybe just her and her piano, in her living room if yr lucky) at events that’re strongly communal see as it’s basically different sets of friends and acquaintances coming together and mingling in well-lit settings not yr average dark, subterranean NYC venue where it’s perfectly natural to go and not speak to anyone or at least no one outside yr peer group cuz news flash New Yorkers love their existential isolation and/or self-enclosed cliquishness with this album and its associated events inspired in part by revolting against these norms it would appear…
…not that it’s anything new given KL’s musical history in NYC which stretches back to peak-era Williamsburg (so does ours to be fair!) where an average night out might’ve mean bouncing from a full-band residency gig at Alligator Lounge or Spike Hill then popping across the street for a brew and a free slice at the Charleston (est. 1933) then maybe doing an after-hours for hire backup-singer gig at an underground loft party with Kalen quickly “becom[ing] a neighborhood mainstay, performing high-kicks and jumping off amps in kinetic kinship with the audience” when not hauling her keyboard and amp up and down Bedford Avenue (buildin’ up those biceps!) then maybe ending the night at Pies & Thighs (merely a counter in the back of Rockstar Bar) or Secret Project Robot or Death By Audio (!) or the secret taco place in the back of the bodega you know the one but most those places are long-gone history by now, plus Kalen lives in the much more domestic environs of Central Brooklyn currently, raising a couple rugrats and educating some other ones as an in-demand test-prep tutor as her day gig and hey we all gotta reinvent how we reinvent ourselves as time passes esp. here what with NYC’s official motto being “remake/remodel” or at least it should be and KL’s clearly got the knack for it so you may wanna take notes…
Pies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky_4cgW5JTI
& Thighs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzW5Wld1-wQ
Reddit on Williamsburg: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNYC/comments/1962ab9/early_2000s_williamsburgles_hipster_types_what/
Ancient history now: https://www.bkmag.com/2014/12/31/all-the-great-places-in-brooklyn-that-closed-in-2014/
Kalen bio: https://www.kalenmusic.com/bio
Test-prep: https://inspirica.com/tutor/kalen-lister/
Remake/remodel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWhzG9cQGgc
…and speaking of reinventions there’s some good ones on this rekkid like how like “Seduction” in the original version is a “cool seduction,” all slinky and slow-build and come-hither, whereas it’s 2025 LP retweaked version is more of a “hot seduction” with K’s voice and piano intertwining so intimately with Johnny’s sax that we feel almost a bit sheepish even listening with others like “Disappearing” adhering pretty close to the original version (already minimalistic) versus “Sirens” which honestly I can’t even recognize as being the same song—whereas the Death By Piano version sung from the perspective of a classical siren, breathily intoning, “I can tease you / I can tempt you…”, with a male voice responding, “they’re chasin’ me but I know what’s underneath” over a watery, percolating keyboard loop and entrancing hook that could easily carry your mind away versus the Velvet Night “version” or more like total remake that’s way mellower at first but more melancholy too and ultimately more agitated as Kalen calls out “come back to bed” but “only darkness comes to call” and if we quote any more of the lyrics we’re gonna start sobbing so yeah a totally different vibe [editor’s note: maybe the “sirens” are the warning kind, hmm) which only goes to show what tangled and intriguing webs we weave 2 get thru this thing called life…
Tangled webs we weave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m65XoQbeiQ
2 get thru this thing called life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXJhDltzYVQ&list=RDaXJhDltzYVQ&start_radio=1
The word chanteuse was invented for someone like Katja which, sure, it literally just means ‘singer’ or more to the point ‘a female singer of popular songs, especially in a nightclub setting,” but it implies so much more than that—such as elegant, poised but passionate, belting out weepers in a sexy-sad-but-a-little-detached voice w/o breaking a sweat or shedding a tear cuz glamorous that’s why, in the manner of Marlene Dietrich or Édith “Rice Pilaf” Piaf; or better in the yé-yé girl manner of France Gall, Françoise Hardy,or heck even April March—which hey tbh it doesn’t hurt being a statuesque brunette with Bettie Page bangs either (real talk!) cuz image is part of it (like, ahh shwayer, Franch pay-pul can be so shallahhhow!) with Katja checking off all of these boxes and quite likely a few more we didn’t even think of yet, and does it all with seeming ease which is key to “chanteuse cool” totally…
Marlene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iIMiPOuWF4
Dietrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTUgLgAsD0&list=RDKgTUgLgAsD0&start_radio=1
Marlene curtain call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHDBhGo60w
Yeye girls: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/oct/07/hail-hail-rock-n-roll
Hardy writeup: https://bestsong.substack.com/p/tous-les-garcons-et-les-filles-by
Hardy video tribute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXbYXXvDFWs
France Gall “Lollipop”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-iysdFu_TQ&list=RDq-iysdFu_TQ
April March “Chick Happy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-NRUG_Lu48
…as she does on her latest original song and single, “Curtain Call,” released in early 2025, a song which totally nails the dark, smoky nightclub vibe with its swelling strings, wanly wailing sax and 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, yet we have a feeling it will be soon (i.e., “I’m taking center stage…I’m willing to engage” sung over quite the lovely melody) so keep your eyes peeled this coming spring for Katja’s reemergence, seeing as the Dead of Winter is hardly the time for slinky-yet-stately black cocktail dresses, when she’ll again be doing her best bourbon-soaked, torch-song slow-burn 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!