Album Review: TrndyTrndy - Virtua

About a decade and a half ago, Vektroid raised it as a beacon and magnet for recognition of the existential ennui gripping those carried out to sea in the first wave of America's lost decade (still ongoing) in the wake of a major financial crash, and then Fire-Toolz optimized it to supercharge her caustic, rainbow-stained death spiral, leading to a badly realized and spotty cottage industry of extreme metal and punk bands trying to sound like the prime reference for their riffs were modernist watercolor prints found on the walls of dental offices nationwide (imitation is flattery, but it's also facile), and now it comes to this... all the hip, audacious, and circuitous routes have been trodden to the point that they have carved bleak, cavernous trenches and lightless, fallow gouges of no-man's-land into the culture; yet, it remains! So what to do with it? The only remaining ingress to the bounty of this small, fertile pasture is to step over the gate and waltz in like Big Chungus Bugs Bunny waddling into a vegan bakery with a hankering for a slice of cruelty-free carrot cake. The only thing in stock, though, is jazz- sweet, blithesome, impossibly pearlescent new-age fusion jazz, that's it! As the stars would have it, the kind of jazz that Rochester's TrndyTrndy curates and composes on Virtua was always the Fiddler's Green you pined to chart-wheel, thrown barefooted in your less guarded and honest moments of reflection- a plateau of fountainous mirth and charismatic intrigue, where knowledge is abundant and the future is as wide open as the horizon at dawn. TrndyTrndy is able to be the architect of this sonic encarta of bright, flawless forms, malleable flesh-marble, and dazzlingly synthesized auditory-tactile synesthesia despite being in their early twenties, and therefore likely never directly experiencing the era of Eyewitness CD-ROM guided tours of natural phenomena and archaeological investigations which serve as the aesthetic womb and inspiration for the project. They've dauntlessly condensed, extracted, and purified its primary essence, meaning that through the internet, all time is flat and abstract. You are 12, you've just hopped off the bus and are returning from school, your parents aren't home so you blow off your assigned school work and boot up the family computer, run a DOS executable from a digital encyclopedia, and spend the next two hours exploring a Smithsonian-sized archive of facts and photos about large jungle cats. You are 78, the young woman who brings you your pills in the afternoon has a playlist streaming on her phone and it is feeding music into the wireless headset in her ears, you accept the paper cup she hands you when she stops at your room, you pause and examine the contents of the cup, "Do I get the red pill today?" you inquire, she takes one of the earbuds of the headset out of her ear and asks you to repeat your question, the music pulsing out of the soft nub of the headphone is loud enough that you can hear it ring through the doorway without adjusting your cochlear implant, the sounds are sweet and comforting, familiar even, your memory is jogged but the recollection is so buried and long-forgotten you doubt its veracity as it has the clingy fuzziness of a hallucination... something... something about tigers? These worlds coexist, yours and everyone else's timelines have folded, and Virtua is the seam of the hinge where time and space collapse on their premises. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it? 

2025 Year-End Invitational

Ah, another year, another year older, another year closer to kissing dirt. I should be less glib in my introduction for this year's list because this year was not so bad on my ears. Many artists of note, prestige, and accreditation that I've managed to keep a bead on had releases. Melody's Echo loaded a hot one into the Chamber, and Stereolab made themselves heard again with a fresh sonic assay. Billy Woods dropped an album in the same year that he and Elucid ignited a heater with The Alchemist, and then The Alchemist daisy-chained that dish with a second serving of Alfredo along with Freddie Gibbs. La Dispute crashed back into view with No One Was Driving the Car, White Reaper showed they still have something left in the tank with Only Slightly Empty, and Deftones shared some Private Music with the public. Also, Turnstile released Glow On again for some reason. It's all fantastic, and you won't hear a disparaging word from these lips as far as the quality of any of it, but...  why do I still feel underwhelmed? Am I just spoiled for choice? Spiritually sick? I can't say for sure, but I just can't muster the will to commentate on any of it. 

"Saying thing is your job! You have one job! Why you no do job good?!?" I hear you shrieking at me (hypothetically). Firstly, no, my actual job is much less interesting than writing about music (and incidentally pays much better too [emphasis for exaggeration]), and secondly, none of the "big" releases this year are of the kind that I even entertain for coverage here, normally. They're all either on major labels (or on labels that are large enough that they can run in the same pack as the majors on occasion), and they all have large enough audiences that my throwing 2 cents into the coffee can doesn't do much for either of us (emotionally, commercially, artistically, etc...)  

Then there is the fact that they're all huge la discourse artists, aka music makers that you have to have an opinion on (mandatorily sanguine btw unless you're carving a niche brand as a "discerning" contrarian [ie a fussy little bitch]) in order to build a reputation as a take-haver, taste-contriver, and cultural instigator (read: gatekeeper). None of that interests me. I'm not looking to become a marketable personality, one who imposes a canon on people, enforces a listening regimen, or gives people anxiety about what they are or aren't committing brainpower to enjoying (however low voltage). My goal here is to share what I find interesting/invigorating with you as a supplement to your other habits of listening and engagement, as a personal labor of love and expressive outlet, and hopefully in a way that is enough off the beaten path that you escape the dehumanizing torrent of algorithmic optimization- at least for the one minute to an hour or so it takes to read/listen one of my reviews/interviews (hey, a minute of fresh air in the prison yard a day helps reduce stress and illness in inmates according to leading studies on the subject, so you can think of me as providing a similar benefit). 

The other thing about all these big, crucial names in music (really any flagship standard-bearers in the moment) is that even when what they're doing is good, worthy, and platinum standard (which, in my estimation, it mostly is), emotionally, for me, it just lands like more "content." Like, I like what they do, but keeping up with them kind of feels like being on a treadmill long after the buildup of lactic acid in my system has caused my organs to begin humming with a concerning arrhythmia. As in, "Oh, so-and-so has a drop on the way, I should probably know what that's about," instead of IDK, giving my brain a break, or whatever... Continuing as before, it often feels like running an extra mile after I've already completed a 5k. I have to ask myself, am I doing this for my own health, or am I doing it because other people are going to run that extra mile, so I should too...? It's a paradox I've wrestled with for a while without a clear or satisfying resolution. 

Something that Danny Brown (whose LP, Stardust, was an essential release for me this year) said in an interview recently that resonated with me is that there are "too many artists, and not enough fans." This was in response to a general question about why it's harder than ever to find fresh-sounding music, and it's a sentiment I understand deeply. Everyone is trying to sell you something and no one is happy with what they've got. Too many proclaimers, and not enough people to hear their pronouncements. Too many profits, and not enough disciples. Too much butter and not enough popcorn. Especially as someone who considers themselves both an artist (don't laugh) and an avid listener (ok, fine, laugh), I think I have to get better at being the latter and be more comfortable with modest ambitions towards the former. In other words, I need to focus on listening more deeply and thoughtfully, and being more selective about what I hear, while having fewer expectations as to my status as an indie/DIY/punk/emo/blowhard/etc...etc... blogger. After all, appreciation is the point, and if something doesn't call out to me, it's alright to leave it unexamined, resting, at peace where it lies. I've already started to do just that, filtering more of what I hear and not chasing things down if they don't immediately grab my attention. But as far as content here, I'm definitely looking to make a notable pivot in coverage- after I clean out the current backlog of albums angling for my assessment (said list is about 900 albums long btw). 

It might be a minute, but where I'd like to direct my focus in the future is at more international artists, specifically those coming out of Africa and South and Central America. For various reasons, these parts of the world are on the rise and rapidly more self-sustaining, and these trends are going to result in a cultural output in the coming years that I'm excited to see blossom into maturity. I've already received two emails in the last week of this year from publicists promoting amapiano artists, so the shift might be easier than I realized, as the universe may be pulling me in that direction with or without my conscious assent. 

In sum, my goals for 2026, for this blog and my life, are to be more chill towards myself and music, and to be a better listener, appreciating what I have and looking towards a brighter future (even if the brightest stars are not shining nearest to my home). As for 2025, below is a list of 25 albums I thought were rad as hell and/or touched my soul but didn't get around to writing about in the preceding 12 months. Have at them and have a Happy New Year!

Weatherday - Hornet Disaster (Topshelf Records)

2025 really was off to a good start when Hornet Disaster dropped in March. I had no idea it was on its way until Top Shelf emailed me about it, and it's been at the top of my mind since. There are some top-notch emo elegies here (naturally, again, issued on Top Shelf), and some that will affirm and ensure Weatherday's status as a seminally influential underground artist for decades to come, tracks such as "Hug" with its dreary sense of yearning and crawling, as well as the anguish-sickened passages, biting blizzard-y feedback swells of "Blood Online" and the wired-warp and seething surge of alienated implosion that is "Nostalgia Drive Avatar." Funnily, even though its predecessor Come In was only released in 2019, Hornet Disaster has the feeling of a revival album for the artist, which is understandable, as the impact that Weatherday has had on the modern underground music scene at an international level is almost incalculable, and frankly, that meant that they had a lot to prove with this release. It's not as overtly reclusive or peculiarly scratchy and experimental as what we've come to know Weatherday for, but it's just as daringly sentimental and compelling in its wounded gait, maintaining its shadowy eminence without sacrificing its emotional core. Despite everything, Weatherday is still themself. Forever.

 

MJ Noble - Songs From My Castle Tower (Doom Trip)

The immediate and insistent impression that I was seeded with upon beholding the cover of MJ Nobel's third album, Songs From My Castle Tower, was that it was the vessel of a cybernetic current and celestially radiant flow of ethereal inspiration, cascading over and between the battlements of an Avalonian spire, pouring down on the teeming mass of mortals below like cool, molten starlight... Now, it may be somewhat anticlimactic to acknowledge, but these initial impressions, gleaned from appearances alone, were impeccably precise. An elfin excursion into a vespertine grove of dark illumination is exactly what this album is- emancipation in a fantastical world of blissfully incarnate passion, rendered in arresting fidelity at the nexus of wondering daydreams and fiber-optic fanned eudaimonia. Folk music for a digital dynast with root privileges to your heart.

Citric Dummies - Split With Turnstile (Feel It Records)

My esteem for Feel It Records grows by the day. Sam's work with the label became a gold standard in my personal punk headcanon after splunking into Why Bother?'s catalog; now it's going platinum with this Citric Dummies LP, Split With Turnstile (which, ironically, is more vital than the album that the actual Turnstile released this year). A bio that I read of them alludes to their sound jumbling and interlocking odds and stray crumbs from Barely Legal era Hives, the Dwarves, and the buzz-bomb of contemporaries Dark Thoughts, and while that's all enough to stake your life on when it comes to this record, in essence, it's a vindication of that classic early hardcore style as a means of liberating your crown clean off your dome- fast, irreverent, catchy, and uncontainably hostile- they're like a dog that bites your leg and, via a metastatic psychic mutation, is able to inject a scathing and scandalous rejection of the human condition in its current-year craven state, directly into the mainline of your arteries like snake venom. This record is the good kind of sick!

Shallowater - God's Gonna Give You A Million Dollars (Self-Released)

With one of the most Coen brothers-esque titles I may have bonafided with these tired eyes, Houston "dust-gaze" bowlers Shallowater grant a sip of succor to the people lost in the godless desert of 2025 with their second LP God's Gonna Give You a Million Dollars. Much has been made of the "country" side of this record, and while it does have quite a bit of twang tucked in around the trim, it's really only "country" in the way that an old windmill left in a fallow wheatfield to oxidize into an indigestible cereal of sharp, coarse particulates could be considered "country," or an old barn cat caught in a snare laid for a fox outside the henhouse- a dark reflection and a fateful and justly cruel metaphor for the silent, progressive decay and barrenness of spirit and soil that has exhausted the heartland. That kind of "country."

life - we won't say a word until tomorrow (Self-Released)

It's been a banner year for Damián Ojeda. Ok, every year is a big year for Damián, but between his various black metal, shoegaze, emo, and skramz marquees, he's dropped something like 40 separate albums- the majority of which I have not heard because I have a job and a wife—but more than life simply getting in the way of bingeing on his output, I'm frequently stricken with an awe-induced paralysis by his work, wherein I feel compelled to spend long stretches of time simply wallowing in and soaking up the vibe and nuances of each release, incapable of moving on until I've wrung all the serotonin I can out of it. Case in point: I haven't been able to step past his summer release, we won't say a word until tomorrow, under the life honorific, to get a taste of the other three or four other life titles he's dropped since. It's just a beautifully painful listen. Conscious and cathartic, patient and devoted, bleak and blissful. Most bands are lucky to come within spitting distance of something this compelling in their entire career, and yet, this probably just felt like another Friday to Damián when he unveiled it to the world. Now, this is a fantastic record; I've already said as much, and the semi-final track "allusion to summer distance" was literally my song of the summer, but what really wins it a bushel of roses from me is the locket-shaped snippet on the cover of this album which encloses Nana Osaki and Nana Komatsu in an eternal embrace and whirl of intractable kismet. Ai Yazawa is a genius, an inimitable talent, and her manga about tragically fated love and diehard friendship vibes so hard with this album that it almost feels like they were made with each other in mind. It's all the heartbreak you can handle- sealed with a kiss.

Menace4Hire - With All That I Know Now (Self-Released)

On With All That I Know Now, Chicago MC Menace4Hire invokes a nostalgic and contemplative frame of mind, weaving observations and hard-wrung conclusions together like a colorful ribbon that connects the sun-faded images of a life in reflection as they lie static in a heavy photo album. Dust-tripping skips and loops rotate under Menace's studious reels of commentary, and lissome yet graceful flow like the treadmill of his mind, propelling him forward and sparing him from stagnant complacency, as the wheels turn and epiphanies emerge like daylight pouring over the horizon. There will be plenty more for Menace to come to know, as he is still young and the world has yet to put its full weight on his shoulders, but he's already got sure footing, clear eyes, and wisdom to bank, and that counts for a lot.

Flora Hibberd - Swirl (22Twenty)

Lucky you that you get to share a planet with Flora Hibberd. And what good fortune that she has an album out this year, called Swirl. And while we're counting our blessings, there is a song on that album titled "Lucky You," a peppy and sardonic twist on Americana and a tender take on garage-pop that sizzles with impulsive fluorescence- kind of like the record on the whole. Swirl was recorded by the London-born, Paris-palisaded guitarist/singer/songwriter in the Northwestern city of Eau Claire, which since at least For Emma, Forever Ago has garnered a reputation for sublating the traditions and trappings of standard American playing styles- in other words, Flora Hibberd, who on this LP exhibits intersecting qualities of Haley Fohr and Cat Power, happens to find herself at ease and in good company in her circuitous yet delicate evasion and amendment of orthodoxy

Superdestroyer / Leave (Nelson) B - NCTV Vol. 2: Negative thoughts about myself and people I love dearly (Lonely Ghost Records)

Superdestroyer and LNB are moots irl. That's pretty much it. That's why this album happened. You can learn more about its precursor in this interview I did with the guys last year. Ok, bye! *shoving noises, muffled commotion* Alright, fine! So my editor (ie my conscience) is telling me that I need to say more about this record, because it's made by good people, who happen to be two of my favorite emo/DIY personalities, and it's a very fun and edifying listen... which is exactly why it's hard to come up with things to say about it... Like, have you ever looked at that panel of Dr.Manhattan sitting ponderously on the surface of Mars, gazing longingly starward, and thought to yourself, "yeah, same." Alright, now imagine there are two Dr. Ms, and they both just lost someone irreplaceable to them. That's the vibe of this LP, only less forlorn and crowned with a finish of stardust and cosmic dynamism.

they are gutting a body of water - LOTTO (ATO Records)

They Are Gutting a Body of Water... what, do they live near a data center or something? You think I'm just being funny, but there is something somewhat prophetic about this Philly group (who everyone insists are shoegaze, though to my ears they're doing a grunged-up version of Sunny Day Real Estate, but WHAT DO I KNOW? I'm only an expert when it comes to these sorts of things) and their album LOTTO, a distorted, weathered tome and sonic manuscript, depicting a world drained of vitality and its sense-making structures, where people filter in and out like flames in the dark, choked to a snuff by a high wind. Apparitions glide around the periphery of a séance circle, a distant zone blighted by a spiritual fugue of amnesia. It's bleak enough of a setting that it could almost be mistaken for our own broken system of sinking pirate-ocracy. Don't you feel fortunate to have lived long enough to witness a fanatical state of parasitism, once only imaginable in fiction, become grounded reality? Maybe fortunate isn't the right word. But only the depths of irony can do justice to the inheritance of such a wretched windfall.

Cola Boyy - Quit to Play Chess (Record Makers)

Look at this photo of Matthew Urango, aka Cola Boyy. Look at this little pimp! Bro looks like he's got the world at the end of a yo-yo string- give it a flick and let it ride like a platinum disco record at a late-night house party. Quit to Play Chess is the gold-hearted, neo-disco-funk auteur's final record, unfortunately, as he passed away earlier this year, but it contains his best realized efforts to date. "Abundant" is a term I would use liberally to describe the passionate and distinctive confluences of crunchy Caribbean rhythms, surfy chop chords, drum and bass rattle, equitable yacht rock, and big hairy disco grooves that generously extend over the whole of this album and breathe a technicolor authenticity into its plentiful vision of the world's potential. You'd have to have a piece missing from your heart not to vibe with the pure mood manifest on this record. RIP Matthew. Thank you for this solid gold send-off.

Lealani - Beep Bop Boop (Self-Released)

It's a tale as old as... well, AOL chat rooms. Girl goes online. Girl falls in love... with a machine. What, you think she was going to get a boyfriend? Well, sure, ok, but what can a man do for you that an optimized hard drive and fiber optics connection can't? Ok... I'm hearing something about... jars? Jar opening can be automated. What can't be automated is girls (well, a girl in this case) leveraging their love of technology to approximate sonic encounters with extraterrestrial travelers party-crashing from digital destinations unknown. Beep Bop Boop is Lealani's second solo LP, a neon-aura glam bath of leisurely gratifying and marginally disquieting, petite pop-epigrams and escapist codas that function like little trap doors in the floor of a stuffed animal factory, which drop into recesses of dayglo laughter and pots of harmonizing amphibians. AI could never match what Beep Bop Boop is rolling out, and if it tried, Lealani would likely glitch-prompt it into oblivion with the chaos seed of her psyche.

Faetooth - Labyrinthine (The Flenser)

Personally, I'm psyched that bands are starting to describe their music as distinct and definite genres of their own making more and more often. It shows a real clarity of vision and a desire to control one's own narrative. Take Faetooth: they're calling their style "Fairy Doom." There are a number of ways that you could interpret said designation, but it gets the point of their sound- a combination of the earthen whimsy of Chelsea Wolfe, the witchy desperation of Ragana, the avant-chaos of Thou, and the ambient fury of Show Me the Body- across to you like a flaming bolt to the breastplate. The cold majesty of their latest LP, Labyrinthine, feels best appreciated in the absolute, most dismal spans of winter, the periods during which it genuinely seems sane to ponder whether a thaw will ever grace the land again. We haven't hit that point quite yet in the Midwest as of this writing, but when we do, I'll be thankful to have the frigid solace of this album to keep me company.

Johnny Football Hero - Contingency Plan (Lonely Ghost Records)

Johnny Football Hero sounds completely pissed off on their LP, Contingency Plan. Their outrage and the outpour of grievance is at such an extraordinary, heated degree of fervency that it's transformed them into an entirely different band. The thing that makes them somewhat recognizable on this release, when compared to their '21 EP, Complacency, is the subject matter of their songs, which remains a reflection of the near-ubiquitous batter-thick spread of suffering that blankets the swelter of our modern hell world. It's all post-hardcore, incoming like a cloud of Nerf-footballs strapped with c4- whistling, blazing, and hot with intent, striking with precision and spreading the fever of their indignant fervor like a plague of premeditated epiphany and motivated malcontent. Emergencies call for action, and action is what Johnny Football Hero aims to inspire.  

84 Tigers - Nothing Ends (Spartan Records)

I'm presuming that the Reed brothers zeroed in on the name for their band because '85 Bears would have been too traitorous and '83 Lions would have been too obvious for the proud Motor City denizens, and for a project birthed to examine themes of nostalgia, loss, and maturation, you don't want a nom de plume that distracts too much from the subject matter, or the music for that matter. 84 Tigers’s second LP, the affirmatively titled Nothing Ends, offers a tightfisted, sober strain of melocore that raises the gut-plunging introspection of Chuck Ragan's repertoire, with a deservedly grungy afterburn to its headstrong chord crunch, and possesses a bitter acidity in the absorbing plateaus of its marrow that stings in nettling distinction with the pragmatic yet replenishing assurances of its lyrical content. A tyrant and a confidant, folded into one.

Samba Touré - Baarakelaw (Glitterbeat Records)

Literally the last time I wrote about a blues artist was when I interviewed Deludium Skies back in February. So, for this next pick I'm going to be discussing a tribute to the Rolling Stones' Sticky Finge—NAHHHHHH, psych! Screw that Boomer-slop impostor Americana- listen to Samba Touré's Baarakelaw. It's better for you, it's more soulful, it's got more heart, it's real; it's about the sweat and scratch required to dust up the dough to make a loaf of bread, and the blood and clay that build the foundations of communities. Transcendent, rhythmic guitars woven in poetic patterns, pulling threads and mosaic imprints into a tapestry of contemporary life in conversation with the traditions upon which it is founded. It's not technically the blues, but it's how you can best translate what Samba is up to if you're not Malian.

Liaam - Dancing With My Clothes On (Self-Released)

There is something about Liaam that makes me think he'd thrive in a standard-cable package slot where he's allowed to make surrealist skits with sock puppets... but maybe that's entirely because he reminds me of another twiggy, wiggly man with a similar-sounding name. It has nothing to do with his music, which sounds like he's afflicted with an itchy case of Half Japanese, with a far more terminal secondary diagnosis of Swell Maps... I'm afraid it's inoperable, ma'am. The best thing we can do for him is let him dance with his favorite collegiate blazer and tapered slacks until the friction starts to spark and he goes out in a puff of pyrrhic glory. I think it's what he would want, ma'am... that and his own TV show...

Sallow Moth - Mossbane Lantern (Lilang Isla)

The Sallow Moth saga continues with Mossbane Lantern, named for a vegetated artifact of either profoundly magical or obscure technical origins that rests discreetly hidden in an icy inlet and grants its possessor the ability to teleport long distances, or even interdimensionally... It would probably be helpful if I mentioned that Sallow Moth is a conceptual sci-fi sound project by super-industrious metal master Garry Brents, in which he explores a universe set into chaos by mutant celestial moths who have degenerated from their positions as cosmic gardeners and naturalist stewards into a force that threatens the fabric of reality itself. Mossbane Lantern is Garry's only LP with this project in 2025 (the other releases under the Sallow Moth banner being a demo and a pair of EPs) and is technically a continuation of the Vial EP from 2024. This all might sound crazy, but it really pales in comparison to the actual music on this beast, which sounds like Cynic performing some manner of manic, fungus-flavored jungle-jazz to appease a disturbed Quetzalcoatl-like apparition. It's the farthest thing you can imagine from normal and restrained, and that's why it rules!

Bones Shredder - Morbid Little Thing (Sunken Teeth)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! What the actual fuck?!? This record makes me feel like it’s 2002 again! Dark, bruisingly catchy and beguilingly haunting pop-punk is not something I ever thought I'd hear with fresh ears posterior to the Bush-era implosion of everything charmingly irreverent about punk in the daunting umbra of perpetual imperialism and economic disarray. I guess things just had to get bad enough for people to stop worrying and embrace the terminal glissade enough to welcome morbid make-out anthems like the sanguinely pining "Let Me In" and tuneful tug of "Pulling Teeth" into the crypt of their heart chamber. It helps that there is as much Pinkerton as From Here to Infirmary in this venomous brew, helping to balance out the persistent allusions to tragedy with an obliging antivenin of hope.

YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds (AD 93)

The last time I encountered NYC quartet YHWH Nailgun was when I stumbled across their 2022 EP while killing time in an Airbnb in Louisville. I have such a vivid memory of that place, as well as the way YHWH's ricochet and recoil contrasted with its pseudo-Victorian decor, dark-shrouded interior, and sturdy but ancient furniture, shattering the idle calm of that place as if it were a radiation-laden satellite tumbling back in time to Deep Impact the house Wuthering Heights was based on. Their LP 45 Pounds eternalizes the freak energy that captivated me initially, while continuing to be just as incongruously alien within the modern setting of my home as they appeared to me while I was hibernating between the folds of an Emily Brontë novel. On this album, YHWH articulates something sonically akin to a lobotomized David Byrne, whose frontal lobe has been partially replaced with an outdated TV antenna that only picks up scrambled broadcasts of West African variety shows and rejected episodes of Later... with Jools Holland from an alternative dimension where Xiu Xiu had pivoted to become a particularly bizarre and brazen, hemp and barbed-wire necklace-hawking jam band. It's called 45 Pounds, but to me it's as dense and massive as a black hole caving in God's forehead.

Summer 2000 - Blue Meringue (Self-Released)

What is a Blue Meringue? According to Summer 2000, it's something along the lines of a wake pool filled with tar- an undulating state of paralysis where you're somehow always propelled forward while simultaneously sinking deeper into place- like trying to use a bungee cord to escape a whirlpool, or a Toyota pinned in place by a block of cement gouging into its undercarriage while it spins its wheels. It's a good metaphor for the necessity of growing through one's experiences while still feeling inadequate with the results. In the end, you can't really ever escape yourself due to the inertia of your flaws; you can only ever learn to live with and accept yourself and make the best of the consequences, even if you're perpetually aggrieved by how far you have fallen short of expectations. You're only human after all, and even when you've run over the median barrier and bent up your axle, as long as you're alive, you can always call a tow and get back on the road... eventually. Your insurance agent and/or SO might not be too happy with you, but as long as you're trying your best, you run a good chance of being forgiven for your roadside mishaps... probably. That's what I'm getting from Summer 2K's Blue Meringue, at least. A simple reminder of your inescapable humanness from a deeply thoughtful album.

Bug Moment - The Lazer Collection (Self-Released)

The first (and actually only) time I've seen Milwaukee's Bug Moment was when I caught them opening at a show at the Cactus Club where Blind Equation, Hey, ily, and Heccra were also playing... It was one of the most stacked lineups I can recall seeing outside of Chicago this year, and it's still one of my 2025 highlights. Being in that kind of company should give you a good idea of what to expect on their EP, The Lazer Collection, but then again, they're their own breed of shimmering, polychromatic anomaly, separate from their peers. Bug Moment certainly favors twinkly guitar antics, extreme metal vocals, and micromusic-esque infusions of electronics, but they also have this huge, whirlwind quality to their music, as well as perfectly calibrated pop-punk and alternative songwriting instincts that make comparisons to Paramore and Flyleaf unforced and positively apt. I like this album a lot. You could even say I've got the Bug Moment bug! ...at least for the time being.

La Rat - La Rat (South of North)

Sometimes to find the good stuff you have to dig deep... or look in the gutter. That's where I presume La Rat spends most of their time (although I found them via my Bandcamp feed, which, seeing as it mainly consists of solo noise and ambient projects at the moment, could be considered part of the internet's sanitation drainage system and digital superfund site, and might require government intervention to regulate accordingly). The Amsterdam-based duo's self-titled LP is a strange and vibey hip-hop volume detailing accounts of urban scavengery, that pack-rats together sooty soul samples and rough-cut R'n'B grooves into clumpy tangles of dirty delights, which vocalist Goya van der Heijden burrows into and gnaws to pulp with the scissors-like incisors of her squeaky but breathy, hushed but boldly furtive flow. This one is all cheddar, hold the cheese.

El Michels Affair - 24 Hr Sports (Big Crown Records)

I don't have to shout it out every time Leon Michels releases an album, but then again, it feels like I do, as I find them so compelling. To me, Leon is re-engineering the soul album one effort at a time, understanding the influence that soul had on hip-hop, and then working backward from hip-hop back to soul while conserving the marrow of each: the cool swelter and richness of sentiment from soul, and the scrappy, pioneering drive of hip-hop, and forging something unique and unpredictable in their fusion. For his 24 Hr Sports LP, Leon drops the Ghanaian hand-painted movie poster shtick in favor of '80s-uncle's-parlor nostalgia, with a soft-focus photo of a giant trophy adorning the cover. He certainly earned the reward pictured here for past efforts as much as for present ones. We should really give the man a medal every year in an Olympic-style ceremony. Maybe if we start saving our change in a coffee can, we'll have enough to put on that kind of production in time for his next LP in '27-'28 or so.

Mildred - Pt. 1 (Dead Mothers Collective)

Does the apocalypse need a prequel? I guess every disaster has its stages. LA's Milred jumped right to the conclusion of their conceptual drama in a hymn to a tragedy of errors and eras with Pt. 2, and now follows up with this year's Pt. 1, a significantly more involved piece of work spanning more than two hours in run time and incorporating the talents of more than 23 musicians. Still, even at the length of a Golden-Age Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, this noisy eruption of Birthday Party-esque provocation and Kakotheos-oriented post-hardcore will likely feel shorter and less dyspepsia-inducing than your average Sunday sermon- especially if you have the misfortune of being dragged to one of those houses of "worship" that have incorporated bespoke addresses from a Kirkified-AI prompt into their liturgy- an accepted state of affairs in this country, despite it being outwardly more blasphemous (and unintentionally surreal) than the band Liturgy's entire catalog- not for lack of trying, of course.

Dikembe - King (Skeletal Lightning)

If there was any doubt that I'd save the best for last, fear not, for "best" is a subjective concept, but actually, the King EP from Dikembe is an unexpected delight this year. Not because Dikembe isn't in the habit of delivering catchy, heartfelt, and momentously urgent melodic hardcore, but because it's so effortlessly straightforward and on-point. They really do make it look easy, and that's really what you need after a long year: something that can throw the emergency brake on during the spin-out and give you about 20 minutes or so of breathing room. If that doesn't earn them the right to unilaterally appoint themselves "king" for the moment, then they should stop handing out crowns because they're passing them out to all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. Long live the squatchy sonic sovereign!

That's it! You made it to the end. Congratulations! Now get out and seize the night! Good luck out there bud. Onward to 2026!

Pictured: Me trying to enjoy my evening.

Interview: Why Bother?

In this episode of the I Thought I Heard A Sound Podcast, Terry of Mason City's Why Bother? explains to me over the phone why he and his band don't play live and why he doesn't care what you think of their music. Also, he talks a little about the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack, which is a rad film, and I was happy to hear him give it some love. I'm not going to try to sell you too hard on this one. It's either you get Why Bother?, or you don't. This conversation was recorded via my cellphone, so the audio quality isn't as good as I'd prefer it to be, but you can still hear Terry pretty clearly, and I kind of like all the muffled, scratchy sounds that come through over the receiver. It is what it is. Interview is below: 

Why Bother?'s most recent album Case Studies is out on Feel It Records.

Album Review: Post Heaven - The Space That's In Between

 
I doubt this was the actual initiation point for their EP's title, but the line "The space that's in between insane and insecure," from Green Day's monument to mallpunk entropy, "Jesus of Suburbia," is not a bad place to start a discussion of a band that does their darnedest to alloy Deftones with Thursday at a time when "mall culture" is still alive and well, but only on the internet- thriving in the form of image macro moodboard / "starter packs" and in the dreams of goth girls once they've tucked their wings in for the night. It's insane that a group like Post Heaven out of Melbourne can sound so spiritually akin to so many alt. chart climbers from an era where tracking charts and finding a band's t-shirt on the wall at Hot Topic meant that they had really "made it," and it makes me feel a little insecure reaching that far back into the vault of my recollection to retrieve ancient cultural context to make sense of their music from an epoch when I was seriously considering lifestyle choices such as acquiring a lip ring and wearing eyeliner to family functions to prove my iNDiVIdUALitY (thankfully, wisdom prevailed on both fronts). I don't know for certain how people younger than me (or anyone really) are discovering music these days (the algo is really serving up hot dog crap to me as of late, and I'm sure it's the same for others), but I'd like to think that if they had been around back in the day, that I would have seen Post Heaven's name on a flyer next to the register at a Spencer's Gifts, and had the clarity of mind to encode their name into my memory long enough to check their Myspace page when I got home. I also like to imagine that I'd have the wherewithal at that tender age to appreciate that they essentially start their EP, The Space That's In Between, with what should be the final song, "End Alone," a slow-burning, melancholic sonnet, where lamentations twirl atop a delicately paced piano melody like a flower petal on the surface of a still pond, allowing tension to build until it tumbles over into a tempest's pot of dissonant distortion and soul-rattling echoes of inner carnage and the rancor of requiem. This opener, while seemingly a purpose-built farewell, permits you to bid adieu to your inhibitions in preparation for the following track, "Basic Fault," an iron-clawed little wolverine that treats your head like a soft hill of alpine earth, cracking the seal on your dome as if it were a rotten log and burrowing into the pink peat of your insides with a martyr-making, slash-and-claw combo of interlocking grooves which make way to fill the space they've opened up with the fog of scorched bridges and a resigned, red-wet trickle of heartache. "Exit Wound" follows, and as the EP's most immediately impactful track, it punches through the thin membrane of the ledge that the previous two songs had walked you out onto, pushing you to plunge into a perilous free fall, like Alice in pursuit of the White Rabbit, only the portal you find yourself gliding down is lined with sharp protrusions of shattered memories and portraits of the happy life you never managed to attain, painful reminders of what could never be as you drift down a well of sorrow. Finally, "Hesitation Love" grants you a soft landing in a quickly emptying hourglass of quicksand that pulls you down into a confluence of claustrophobic regret and the devourment of unappeased desire. Somewhere between here and a boulevard of broken dreams, lies the hope that Post Heaven's message and sound will reach you in time to remind you of better days before the delirium of your circumstances and consumption of your contritions swallow you whole.

Greyscale Records, gifting a rosy hue to DIY since 2012. 

Album Review: Recovery Girl - Nausea Rave

Would you drop in on a rave where you ran the risk of being fried by a shot of skyfire juice? Do you want 50k volts of pure white energy shot through you like an express train to Shinjuku, coursing through the soft, jiggly mold that is the organ bank of your body cavity, delivered express from the local municipal power grid? I mean, OSHA violations aside, would you take the chance? For Galen Tipton, aka Recovery Girl, the answer is conspicuously clear from the album art of her EP Nausea Rave. Plug her in and let her ride the lightning! Evidently a by-product of her effort to produce a full LP for the Recovery Girl project, Nausea Rave is a gooey and galvanized, punk-infused exhibition of breakbeat soul and fluid, self-reorganizing digital-pulp that is as fretfully human as a first kiss and as coolly programmatic as a machine arm soldering hardware components in a dark factory, steered only by infrared sensors. The fleshwheel platter of your grey, goopy h(e)a(r)d drive will no doubt be spinning once the needle drops on explosive sequences like the hard-bodied, drum and bass pucker up and blow out of "Gasoline," the wryly smitten, flicker and flirt flare-up in collaboration with Diana Starshine suitably dubbed "Spark It Up," the digi-hardcore smoke and smolder Lazarus-beat spin-out "Revenant," the acid-washed shooting gallery of "Smoke Mid No Gas," and the witchy, jungle-brush shaded, warp-zone farewell of "Ghost 2 Me." Nausea Rave has enough of Thor's tequila in the ballast to defibrillate an autonomic two-step out of a partially embalmed cadaver- there is no telling what havoc prolonged exposure could inflict on a healthy human subject, but I doubt any of us will be grousing about our test-subject status as long as the beats keep poppin'- yours truly, least of all.

Album Review: California X - Nights In The Dark

For a LONG minute there in the late '00s and early '10s, it seemed like every band wanted to be Dinosaur Jr. Now no one does. Ironically, at the start of the '90s nostalgia boom that crested in the early part of this decade, anyone worth their salt stopped wanting to sound like a band Michael Azerrad might have profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life and moved on to greener pastures (or got an actual job, something). Maybe folks got the picture that he wasn't going to be writing an update/sequel and figured they might as well do something with the degree they spent the equivalent of a mortgage on a medium-sized family home.  I learned about Amherst's California X at the tail end of the '80s-aping garage glut, because, well, that's when people were talking about them. Most critics at the time liked to treat California X as more derivative than they actually were, when in fact they were just very apt at capturing a classic sort of rock'n big hair vibe and didn't seem to put much currenty into cultivating clout in the shadows of their idols. They were a band that played, earnest to a fault, retro-sounding fuzz-imbued punk as if it had never occurred to anyone to crank your amps to 11 while spirit spear-fishing through Neil Young's back catalog before- And it worked!. As you might have guessed, the band had been dogged early on by comparisons to Dinosaur Jr., which the band often pushed back against as a superficial assessment of their sound. On their second album, Nights in the Dark (2015), California X made a conscious effort to shatter the impression that they were simply braiding chords from their indie rock forefathers' hair by adopting elements of progressive rock, Americana, and ballsy '70s arena anthems. That being said, that scuzzy SST-era, post-hardcore stomp that defined the best of J Mascis's early career can still be heard lumbering around in the background. Not surprisingly, seeing as the album was produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (who, yes, has produced records for Dino Jr., and Lou Barlow, as well as Speedy Ortiz, who were unfairly maligned at one point as the GIRL DINOSAUR JR.... critics were REALLY thoughtful and creative back in the day, I tell ya). If you're up to checking out this dusty old pick-me-up from my giddy garage rock phase, then I hope you get a kick out of the summer speedway anthem “Nights in the Dark,” with its Phil Lynott-worshipping leads, as well as the vigorous, charged and fluttery guitar sweeps of “Red Planet,” the bluesy, chops-busting guitars and naïve, indie rock charm of “Blackrazor (Pt. 2),” and the felty, distortion-wrapped, razor-toothed dirge “Summer Wall (Pt. 2).” Nights in the Dark might be California X's last album, but it was a real light at the end of the tunnel for me in the era in which it was released.

Don don don! ...alright, that's enough suspense. Don Giovanni Records

Album Review: Ratstallion - Sisyphus Happy

I do appreciate it when a shoegaze band gets it right. And when I say that they get it right, I mean that they actually inaugurate a sense of place and dimensional presence in their music. It's so easy, x ∞, to just lean into an effects pedal and let the distension of distortion that expands out from a struck chord do the set dressing for your music for you, but Denver's Ratstallion are not leaving such essential details to mechanical happenstance. Their debut EP Sisyphus Happy sounds like it's risen from the depths of Erebus, seeping up like steam through the cracks in the Earth, and greeting you like a mirage in the forest- a trick of the eye piercing the senses in the dusky shade of an evening's gloom. The six-song release teeters in a balancing act between bright apparitions and scorched floodplains that snare you in a gale of riveting corporal catharsis. Angelic vocals skim with fluid grace over the icy contours of palpably dense distortion, which maps the refined tissue of the chord progressions like a suit of armor around the corpus of a knight- these lithe vocals playfully preserving themselves against the imposing mass of an unfeeling exterior until the tension builds into a rapturous outburst of purgative convulsions, one where all sensitive follicles have hardened to quills and the nausea brought on by the dance of its existence has achingly roiled to its angsty pinnacle, like froth dripping over the brim of a boiling pot. Some specters you see, others you hear, still others creep through your bones, gripping your frame and persuasively conducting you to a realm of dark illumination, where you can discover happiness in release from the ambient torment of the quotidian.

Album Review: Like Rats - Death Monolith

Harm's Way is literally why I'm into hardcore... at all, as in completely, as in no Harm's Way and I'm stuck in a painful, decades-long limbo, grinning and bearing it and putting on a brave face to acquaintances while I pretend to enjoy and appreciate Wilco. It's a long story as to how this happened, and I'm not going to get into it here, but it's essential context for why this review of Like Rats's Death Monolith has come into existence. In the very early part of this decade, I was skimming music discourse, trying to pick up on new hardcore bands that might tickle my fancy, and Like Rats came up in a back-and-forth about Harm's Way and Xibalba (...on Facebook, I think? This was prior to it serving primarily as the internet's trailer park and/or content landfill). I checked out Like Rats's then-latest album Death Monolith (2020), but since I was expecting them to be a hardcore band, I didn't spend much time with the album... until recently. I've been somewhat nostalgic lately for the high-brow, misery-mired sludge era of Chicago's cross-pollination with Indianapolis and the metal scene it produced, roughly running the gamut of the mid to late '10s and begetting such legendary monstrosities as Indian and Lord Mantis- you know, smart guy, bad attitude type stuff- the kinds of music that Jordan Reyes likely started American Decline Records in order to sign, only to have every viable candidate snatched up by Southern Lord or Profound Lore. A Chicago band, Like Rats, emerged out of this milieu, and while they did not reach the lofty conceptual heights of groups like Coffinworm, they demonstrated a strain of intelligence that is all too rare amongst metal acts, even in boom times- they can really write a song. Sonically obtaining succor somewhere between Atlas Moth and Bones, the group wrings all the tarry goop out of tried-and-true death-sludge dynamics, leaving its tendons and muscles spry and springy, lethal and ready to hone in for the kill, whether it be by a frontal bombardment or an evasive ricochet. As if they were a Souls-like adversary, they give glints and tells of their movements, subtly, but mockingly concealed, warning you of their intended course of action, with a feint or flourish, before driving their point to a fatal conclusion with bloody intent. If you're quick-witted and agile enough in your faculties, you can catch wind of the strike and dodge well enough to afford yourself a fleeting moment of appreciation before a succeeding thrust angles for your breastplate, or maybe you'll only be granted the opportunity to appreciate their artful, deathly flow posthumously- Death Monolith is intelligently crafted to delivery you into a prone position, whether this is merely a temporary resting place before a permanent dirt-nap, or a repose before reprisal in proportion to the aggression you've been dealt is a matter of ingrained determination- something Like Rats has in spades, and as I suspect, something they mean to test the mettle of in their audience.

Winter is coming... Hibernation Release.

Album Review: Crypt Sermon - The Stygian Rose

Crypt Sermon is epic doom metal as it was always meant to be. The Stygian Rose is their third album and follow-up to the somewhat lackluster The Ruins of Fading Light, which dropped back in 2019. Their 2015 release, Out of the Garden, descended like a lightning strike on the US metal scene, compelling many to credit Crypt Sermon with single-handedly resurrecting interest in epic doom metal as a viable sub-genre once again. Crypt Sermon's sound is heavily influenced by Candlemass for sure, but also American compatriots, Solitude Aeturnus, so you can expect lots of eastern guitar scales, dancing rhythms, and mountain-shaking, battle-cry vocals. The Stygian Rose puts to bed many of the black metal influences that the band had previously leaned into on The Ruins of Fading Light, which is really for the best. Their love for this style was sufficiently demonstrated on the 2017 flexi single tribute to Mayhem titled De Mysteriis Doom Sathanas, and it is a warranted act of redress that this most recent album sees them consciously clawing their way back to the killing fields where they earned their darkly noble knighthood with a sagacious play towards the brawnier details of swords & sorcery. Like most of their best songs, "Glimmers In The Underworld" tells the tale of bravery and corruption in relief before hubris, exhibiting the fatalistic charm of the group's bleakly heroic baptism of blood and vice with razor-sharp, cut-to-the-bone grooves and cyclonic vocal harmonies that resemble a tempest of grand mal-inducing psychic fulguration, "Down in the Hollow" takes you on a twisting slump into a warped and forbidden romance with an illicit chthonic seraphim of benighted allure, while "Scrying Orb" adds campy elements of occulted arena rock, and the closing title track (it's very common for the band to put the song that bears the album's name as the closer) is amongst the slower and more psychedelic dirges on offer while functioning admirably as both a ballad and a banger. Clasp The Stygian Rose tightly and feel the cathartic cut of its thorns as it rewards your devotion with punitive instruction and cruel cupidity in proportion to the inglorious valor with which it is coveted.

As above so below (Dark Descent Records).

Album Review: Chase USA - Child Rebel Soldier

Somehow Chase USA's Honey Baby: I Love When You Call Me hit last year and bounced clean over my head in an arching leap like a superball tossed off a high school gym room- it made its impact on Earth and then completely cleared my field of vision while I'm left blindly staring at the sun, frying my retinas and wondering what the hell all the commotion is about. Luckily, their most recent EP Child Rebel Soldier came at me like a warning shot, hissing and shaving my eyebrows, imposing its presence with searing intensity. Perhaps the reason why CRS has arrived in my purview with such stinging clarity is due to its focused nature. CRS, as opposed to Honey Baby, is a more explicitly coded hip hop album, while Honey Baby, beneath all its layers of burnish and ambition, was a pop-punk project at heart. On CRS, Chase USA continues to display a sharp eye for production and an incredible instinct for dynamics and catch-and-release rhythms, carried over form his previous efforts, while thematically and stylistically, it's less a mash-up of the past twenty years of punk and emo canon with an experiential twist, and more Chase's version of good kid, m.A.A.d city, a hyper-real panoramic sound exhibition that examines the author's adolescence being reared in the junkyard of decay rotting below the pretenses of the American dream, and drawing out how such circumstances have necessitated the extremity of growing up fast, hungry, and ready to stand on business, as if every day was a fresh battlefield in a war of attrition that plays out over a lifetime. If you can't dodge the hard knocks, it's obligatory that you knock back twice as hard, ideally with the punching cycle of a Thompson submachine gun.